Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [13]
Sam raised the binoculars a little, and a bunch of tiny pink hieroglyphs materialised before her eyes, the imaging systems telling her how many human targets – yup, these were military issue, all right – were in visual range. The symbols also told her that many of them were armed.
Which was true, of course. There were men on the balconies of the exhibition centre, big men in big suits. Like Sam, they were tooled up with binoculars; unlike Sam, they also had guns. You could tell. It was the way they kept slipping their bands into their jackets, making sure the firearms were still there, tucked away under the cloth.
Private security. Sam had been told that most of the men were paratroopers, on hire from the British military. Visitors to COPEX were the kind of people who demanded top‐level security. She’d heard there were British Aerospace people trying to hock machine guns inside the exhibition hall (for defensive purposes, natch), and she wondered how long it’d be before they put a few emplacements up on the roof (for defensive purposes, natch). There were already a couple of helicopters buzzing over the area, and Sam had no idea what kind of armaments they may be carrying.
Army‐trained aerial forces, thought Sam. Not really the kind of thing you expect to see, twenty minutes from London.
Suddenly, one of the security men looked up, and pointed his binoculars right at her. Just for a moment, Sam panicked. Then she remembered.
‘Can’t see me,’ she muttered. ‘Nyah nyah nyah‐nyah nyah.’
The man looked away after that, scanning the ground below him instead. Sam followed his lead. There was a barbed‐wire fence around the whole of Sandown Park, the kind you almost expected to be plugged into a mains socket. The setup was pretty secure anyway, but just to be on the safe side the COPEX organisers had called in the police, and the police had formed a human cordon near one of the entrances in the fence, to push back the protestors whenever they got too close.
Oh yes. The protestors. There were probably about a hundred of them, and they looked exactly as Sam would have expected them to look. Most of them were young, a lot of them had anoraks, and a frightening number were wearing their hair in dreadlocks. There were a handful of old people on the fringes of the crowd, and they were generally the ones wielding the placards. stop the trade in death, the protestors were saying, in big black felt‐tip letters. say no to the torture business.
Now, there was a funny thing. The demonstrators were, by Sam’s usual ethical standards, Good People. They were more or less the same people she’d marched with in the ANL rallies, back in the early nineties, when she’d been twelve years old and the only demonstrator in town wearing wellington boots, Paddington‐bear style. The Good People were the ones who noticed the injustices in the world, who wanted to change the status quo, who tried to turn everybody else into a Good Person with nothing more than the power of free speech and the spirit of public unity…
So why did the protestors suddenly look so ridiculous?
Because the ANL marches hadn’t achieved a thing, maybe?
Because Sam had held in her hands, in her very own nonmetaphorical hands, the power to affect the destinies of entire solar systems? Because she knew full well that it was possible for one person to create a revolution, but that it had nothing at all to do with mass rallies in Trafalgar Square?
Because, after all she’d been through, people who carried placards and shouted at passing cars seemed so weak by comparison?
From a certain height, people tend to look like ants.
The binoculars told her that several new targets were emerging from the building, coming into range through the main entrance. Sam guided the imaging systems across the police cordon, then across the car park. There. There, walking out through the doors, nodding to each other. Two men.