TEN

 
 

"Here" was a suite on the thirty-eighth floor of the Hyatt Shaverton.

  "Why not the GEO mast?" Falk asked Apfel when he came to meet him at the elevator.

  "Plausible deniability," said Apfel with a smile that suggested he thought the concept actually carried some currency.

  "So it's not the chicken-effect parmigiana?"

  "That's just an added bonus," said Apfel. They walked down a carpeted hall with high, backlit glass brick walls. Piped musak was being used in some insane effort to counteract the smell of Insect-Aside, like the mutually annihilating collision of shit and anti-shit.

  Apfel ushered him into the first big room of the suite. Double-height ceiling. Falk could smell machines, the scent of warm plastic and electricals. There was also a dash of pine disinfectant and salt. He could hear the hum of fans venting warm air. Outside, through the one-way windows, floor-to-ceiling deep, Shaverton lay under cover of an amber night, studded with lights and striped with the luminous needles of other glass masts.

  The carpets had been removed, and replaced with the rubberised matting that Falk had seen in SOMD field hospitals. The walls had been spray-lined with matt-white rubber like the inside of the truck in the park. The configuration of the internal walls and the light fitments had been altered. One side of the suite was a raised platform facing a wall of boxes and high-end informatic consoles. The screens of all the boxes were busy, flickering, scrolling: text, data spreads, multi-views. Cleesh was sitting in a specially adapted roller chair, sliding up and down the consoles, making adjustments. She looked over her shoulder at him, but said nothing and allowed her face no expression. She adjusted her headset and turned back to her job.

  Behind the platform was a large medical space, some big floor-mounted modules that looked like repurposed military hardware, and a set of shutters into the next part of the area. The nondescript man from SO Logistics was standing near the modules, talking to two people Falk didn't know. Underwood was working in the medical area.

  "You look like death warmed up," she said.

  "I'm wealthy, thanks," Falk said. "Entirely wealthy."

  Underwood shot a raised eyebrow at Apfel. She was wearing a surgical smock so box-fresh it smelled of clean.

  "If we could just–" she started to say, but Falk walked past her towards the shutter.

  "Falk?" Apfel called.

  "Tell me all about it," Falk replied, over his shoulder.

  "I will," said Apfel, coming after him. "Just sit down and we can catch up."

  Falk slid the shutter open. Over-warm air flooded out. It felt like a steam room. The levels of light were much lower. Falk was reminded of a deep-sea aquarium. Four large metal pods sat in a scaffolding frame. They were dull grey and shaped like eggs. Cables and feeder tubes spooled off them like hair matting from coconuts and connected to overhead arrays. Ayoob was halfway up one on a walkway, checking a side panel.

  "He's here?" Ayoob called down to Apfel. "Is he ready?"

  "Not yet," Apfel replied. "Mr Falk is showing himself around. Falk?"

  "That's a Jung tank, is it?" Falk asked.

  "Yes," said Apfel. "Can we get you back to the med area? Time is tight."

  "Why is time tight, Bari? You told me the Letts incident had moved the timing up, but you implied there were still a few days to play with."

  "It's got to be tonight."

  "I'm not ready. I've got things to put in place, and–"

  "Explain them to Cleesh," said Apfel. For the first time in Falk's experience, he sounded impatient. "She can handle whatever you need. The whole Letts thing has escalated everything. We have to move while our Jung Guns are still accessible."

  "Your what?"

  "That was me," said Ayoob. He had come down from the tank side to join them. He shrugged apologetically. "I kind of came up with it. A joke. It sounds pretty stupid now everything's so serious."

  "Ayoob's referring to the subjects selected for the embed process," said Bari. He looked over a data display that had just been sent to his celf. "They're all SOMD, of course. We recruited carefully, quietly approached a few suitable candidates who seemed prepared to make a little extra money on the side. We have contracts, agreements to provide in the event of injury or dismissal."

  "How many candidates?" asked Falk.

  "Nine," said the SO Logistics man. His role in the whole thing was becoming clearer.

  "He's your finder? Your talent scout?"

  "Yeah," said Apfel.

  "Nine ground troopers?" Falk mused.

  "Yes."

  "How will mine be selected? When do I meet him?"

  "The match is based on a number of variables," Underwood began. "There's a bunch of biological issues, synaptic patterning being the–"

  Apfel cut her off.

  "Actually, right now, it's about availability. And you don't get to meet him."

  "Now wait–"

  "Thanks to Letts, the SOMD is mobilising a major taskforce response. Just about everything's shipping out. Every single one of our nine possibles will be in the field by lunchtime tomorrow, and embedding will be impossible. It would take us weeks to presearch and shortlist replacements. Unless we move right now, we can forget being operational for at least six months."

  Falk walked over to one of the medical couches and sat down. He leant his elbows on his knees and rubbed his face with the flats of his hands, eyes and mouth wide. His head was rushing so much, he barely felt the pain in his hip.

  "What's his name?" he asked.

  Apfel looked at Underwood and nodded. She took up a folder from the cart beside her, opened the cover and searched for the answer.

  "Bloom," she said. "Nestor Bloom, private first class. Age twenty-six."

  "Is he ready?" asked Falk.

  "We've got him prepped in a mobile just outside Camp Lasky," said Ayoob. "Another forty-five minutes, and he's expected to report for mobilisation. That's all that's left of our window. We miss this, we miss him."

  "Okay, okay," whispered Falk.

  He sat for a moment, as Underwood began to strip the plastic and paper sleeves off various sterile tools and clips, and lay them out on a tray. He suddenly became aware that Cleesh was standing over him.

  "It'll be all right," she said. "It'll be freeking^® amazing."

  "What happens once I'm in?"

  "Not sure really."

  "You've beta-tested this, right? Cleesh, you have betatested this?"

  "Not as much as we'd like," she replied. She patted his arm. "It'll be great."

  "But I want to know what happens once I'm in," he said. He felt a slight seam of panic in his core, a sense of sliding past a point of control. A sense of being unable to stop himself making a bad decision.

  "I want to know too," Cleesh said. "We'll find out together. We'll improvise. We'll figure it out as we go along."

  "I don't know, Cleesh."

  "I'll be with you every step of the way," she promised.

 

The Jung tank was heated. The metal shell of it was warm, almost like skin. He thought it was metal, but when he came to touch it, he realised it was some kind of ceramic. He could hear Ayoob and Apfel talking nearby, and he knew he ought to feel odd just standing there, buck-naked apart from the external plumbing of the intravenous tubes and sensor wires Underwood had fixed all over his body.

  But he didn't. His head was swimming. She'd shot him with several doses of stuff, including some premed-type anaesthetic and muscle relaxants.

  Ayoob and Underwood helped him up onto the step plate beside the tank's open top hatch. The smell of disinfectant and salt was stronger. There was steam heat coming out of the hatch. He peered inside. It was full of dark water, or dark fluid at least, barely rippling, carrying enough warmth to waft steam from its surface in the dank chamber.

  He murmured something.

  "Sensory deprivation," said Ayoob, as though Falk had asked him a question. Perhaps he had. "Pretty old-school tech, basically, but that's just the medium to suspend you in. We find it gives the best results for the embeddee in terms of feedback and response. It helps to sustain the reposition too."

  Underwood was clipping lines and tubes from the tank array to some of the drains and introducers she had connected to Falk's skin. He winced slightly as she pushed a trocar into a cannula.

  "Let's go," said Apfel, steadying his arm. There was a sort of cage frame to hold on to. An electric motor started. Falk felt himself beginning to sink into the tank, felt the pleasant warmth of the fluid swallow his legs. The motor stopped when he was waist-deep, and Ayoob fitted him with ear plugs, a face mask and, last of all, blackout goggles.

  The final thing he saw was Ayoob grinning and giving him a thumbs-up.

  The final thing he heard, after the muffled noise of the motor restarting, and the lap of the warm tank water climbing up his chest, was the clunk of the hatch closing overhead.