Engineman - Eric Brown [51]
She slumped, held her head in her hands and wept.
They'd used her, of course. The bastards had used her to gain their ends - and then deserted her.
Ella sat in the root system of the tree for a long time, considering her options. After perhaps an hour she cuffed the tears from her cheeks, stood and limped with the effects of cramp towards the concealed bike.
She dragged the bike from the undergrowth and, leaving the smouldering ruin of the interface in her wake, headed north towards the Falls.
Chapter Nine
Hirst Hunter stood before the arched floor-to-ceiling window and stared out at the darkness stealing over the dying city. For the most part, the advance of night went unopposed: only the occasional district put up a fight in the form of street-lights and neon advertisements. The sight of the moribund city depressed him. It brought to mind the dream he'd been having of late, in which a vast area of light was falling to the gradual encroachment of a black malignancy.
The interface at Orly hung in the air to the south of the city, the blue sky of a colony world contrasting surreally with the Paris night. The portal dominated the skyline, and the pang of guilt it caused him was as sour as heartburn.
He poured himself another brandy and walked across the room to a north-facing window. Here the portal could not be seen, and night held sway totally; the only lights were high in the sky, the industrial orbitals whose profligate illumination mocked the barren land below.
He'd arrived in Paris three days ago and moved his retinue into the top floor of the old Victorian building which had once housed the city morgue. It was situated in a district so derelict and overgrown that the street gangs had been and gone long ago. The building stood squat and solid within its mantle of alien creeper, and the top floor provided the perfect retreat. Hunter had furnished the cavernous chambers of the mortuary with thick carpets, wall-hangings and chaises-longues - the polished wood and velvet antiques softening the rather harsh brass and marble fittings of the dissection room and cold storage area.
Hunter stood in his own room, a Spartan chamber furnished with a foam-form on which he slept and a crude bar consisting of half a dozen bottles of Thai brandy. Through the open door he could see the main room with its banks of computers and wall-screens. His bodyguards and advisers sat about smoking or watching vid-screen with a collective air of patient boredom. They had shown surprise at his choice of base, but had known better than to demur. They took it as just another indication of his morbid sense of humour.
Hunter sipped his brandy and considered his meeting with Mirren that morning. It had gone, all things considered, rather well. He had been concerned at first by intelligence reports which stated that Mirren was not a Disciple; he had feared that the Engineman might not crave the flux with the same degree of desperation as some of his believing colleagues. Their meeting had soon dispelled that fear. Mirren might be an atheist, but he desired union just as much as the next Engineman. In Hunter's opinion it was these two factors which were tearing Ralph Mirren apart. He craved the flux, and yet he could not bring himself to believe that it was anything more than an extreme psychological effect. If only he would believe that the wonder of the union had its source in the nada-continuum, and not in his own head - and that union awaited everyone in the end - then Mirren might be a more content individual than he was. Hunter wondered whether the only thing that prevented Mirren taking his own life was the perceived oblivion to which he mistakenly believed he would be committing