Inside was a cathedral-sized hall filled with three rows of high voltage electrical transformers. Great loops of thick black cabling emerged from holes high up in the walls, stretching over the aisles in a complicated weave that linked them to the fat grey ribbed cylinders. There was a strong tang of ozone in the air.
A flight of metal stairs pinned against the rear wall led up to a small maintenance manager’s office cut into the rock. Two narrow windows looked down on the central aisle as they walked towards it, the outline of a man just visible inside. Fletcher’s alarm at the power humming savagely all around them was clear in the sweat on his forehead and hands, his small, precisely controlled steps.
The office had a large desk with a computer terminal nearly as primitive as the models Louise used on Norfolk. A large screen took up most of the back wall, its lucidly coloured symbols displaying the settlement’s power grid.
There was a Martian waiting for them inside; a man with very long snow-white hair brushed back neatly and a bright orange silk suit worn in conjunction with a midnight-black shirt. He carried a slim, featureless grey case in his left hand.
Faurax didn’t know what to make of his three new clients at all; if they hadn’t been with Endron he wouldn’t even have let them into the office. These were not the times to dabble in his usual sidelines. Thanks to the current Confederation crisis, the Phobos police were becoming quite unreasonable about security procedures.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” he said after Endron had introduced everybody. “Why haven’t you got your own passports?”
“We had to leave Norfolk very quickly,” Louise said. “The possessed were sweeping through the city. There was no time to apply to the Foreign Office for passports. Although there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have been issued with them, we don’t have criminal records or anything like that.”
It even sounded reasonable. And Faurax could guess the kind of financial package which the Far Realm ’s crew would engineer concerning their passage. Nobody wanted questions at this stage.
“You must understand,” he said, “I had to undertake a considerable amount of research to obtain the Norfolk government’s authentication codes.”
“How much?” Louise asked.
“Five thousand fuseodollars. Each.”
“Very well.”
She didn’t even sound surprised, let alone shocked. Which tweaked Faurax’s curiosity; he would have dearly liked to ask Endron who she was. The call he’d got from Tilia setting up the meeting had been very sparse on detail.
“Good,” he said, and put his case on the desk, datavising a code at it. The upper surface flowed apart, revealing a couple of processor blocks and several fleks. He picked up one of the fleks, which was embossed with a gold lion: Norfolk’s national symbol. “Here we are. I loaded in all the information Tilia gave me; name, where you live, age, that kind of thing. All we need now is an image and a full body biolectric scan.”
“What do we have to do?” Louise asked.
“First, I’m afraid, is the money.”
She gave a hollow laugh and took a Jovian Bank credit disk from her small shoulder bag. Once the money had been shunted over to Faurax’s disk, he said: “Remember not to wear these clothes when you go through the Halo’s immigration. These images were supposedly taken on Norfolk before you left, and the clothes are new. In fact, I’d advise dumping them altogether.”
“We’ll do that,” Louise said.
“Okay.” He slotted the first flek into his processor block and read the screen. “Genevieve Kavanagh?”
The little girl smiled brightly.
“Stand over there, dear, away from the door.”
She did as he asked, giving the sensor lens a solemn stare. After he’d got the visual image filed, he used the second processor block to sweep her so he could record her biolectric pattern. Both files were loaded into her passport, encrypted with Norfolk’s authentication code. “Don’t lose it,” he said and dropped the flek into her hand.
Louise was next. Faurax found himself wishing she were a Martian girl. She had a beautiful face, it was just her body which was so alien.
Fletcher’s image went straight into his passport flek. Then Faurax ran the biolectric sensor over him. Frowned at the display. Ran a second scan. It took a long time for his chilly disquiet to give way into full blown consternation. He gagged, head jerking up from the block to stare at Fletcher. “You’re a—” His neural nanonics crashed, preventing him from datavising any alarm. The air solidified in front of his eyes; he actually saw it flowing like a dense heat shiver, contracting into a ten centimetre sphere. It hit him full in the face. He heard the bone in his nose break before he lost consciousness.
Genevieve squealed in shock as Faurax went crashing to the floor, blood flowing swiftly from his nose.
Endron looked at Fletcher in total shock, too numb to move. His neural nanonics had shut down, and the office light panel was flickering in an epileptic rhythm. “Oh, my God. No! Not you.” He glanced at the door, gauging his chances.
“Do not try to run, sir,” Fletcher said sternly. “I will do whatever I must to protect these ladies.”
“Oh, Fletcher,” Louise groaned in dismay. “We were almost there.”
“His device exposed my nature, my lady. I could do naught else.”
Genevieve ran over to Fletcher and hugged him tightly around his waist. He patted her head lightly.
“Now what are we going to do?” Louise asked.
“Not you as well?” Endron bewailed.
“I’m not possessed,” she said with indignant heat.
“Then what . . . ?”
“Fletcher has been protecting us from the possessed. You don’t think I could stand against them by myself, do you?”
“But, he’s one of them.”
“One of whom, sir? Many men are murderers and brigands, does that make all of us so?”
“You can’t apply that argument. You’re a possessed. You’re the enemy.”
“Yet, sir, I do not consider myself to be your enemy. My only crime, so it sounds, is that I have died.”
“And come back! You have stolen that man’s body. Your kind want to do the same to mine and everyone else’s.”
“What would you have us do? I am not so valiant that I can resist this release from the torture of the beyond. Perhaps, sir, you see such weakness as my true crime. If so, I plead guilty to that ignominy. Yet, know you this, I would grasp at such an escape every time it is offered, though I know it to be the most immoral of thefts.”
“He saved us,” Genevieve protested hotly. “Quinn Dexter was going to do truly beastly things to me and Louise. Fletcher stopped him. No one else could. He’s not a bad man; you shouldn’t say he is. And I won’t let you do anything horrid to him. I don’t want him to have to go back there into the beyond.” She hugged Fletcher tighter.
“All right,” Endron said. “Maybe you’re not like the Capone Organization, or the ones on Lalonde. But I can’t let you walk around here. This is my home, damn it. Maybe it is unfair, and unkind that you suffered in the beyond. You’re still a possessor, nothing changes that. We are opposed, it’s fundamental to what we are.”
“Then you, sir, have a very pressing problem. For I am sworn to see these ladies to their destination in safety.”
“Wait,” Louise said. She turned to Endron. “Nothing has changed. We still wish to leave Phobos, and you know Fletcher is not a danger to you or your people. You said so.”
Endron gestured at the crumpled form of Faurax. “I can’t,” he said desperately.
“If Fletcher opens your bodies to the souls in the beyond, who knows what the people who come through will be like,” Louise said. “I don’t think they will be as restrained as Fletcher, not if the ones I’ve encountered are anything to judge by. You would be the cause of Phobos falling to the possessed. Is that what you want?”
“What the hell do you think? You’ve backed me into a corner.”
“No we haven’t, there’s an easy way out of this, for all of us.”