Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [107]
‘Get out of the truck,’ said a barely raised voice.
They clambered down. Kohn wondered how they were supposed to identify themselves.
‘Who are you?’
They gave their names.
‘Fine, fine,’ said the voice. ‘The machines told us tae expect you.’
The boat pulled in and a rope was thrown on to the jetty. Kohn, rather awkwardly, wrapped it around a bollard. A dozen people swarmed out of the boat and all over the truck, turning load into cargo. Whenever either Janis or Moh started forward to help they were politely told to get out of the way, and after the third time they did. The truck was backed along the pier and driven off to be returned to the Edinburgh branch of the hire company, with paperwork to show that it had been somewhere else entirely. Janis and Moh were escorted aboard and the boat cast off and headed across the water to the dark coastline of Fife.
‘Funny thing,’ Janis remarked as they stood in the wheelhouse, sipping black tea, ‘you can’t smell the fish.’
Kohn made a smothered, snorting noise, and the helmsman guffawed.
‘There hasna been a smell of fish here for years!’
This comment was borne out when they landed at the harbour of what, to Janis’s enhanced vision, looked even more like a ghost town than it was. It had obviously once been a fishing port, then a tourist/leisure marina. The few people who lived here now were ANR. It wasn’t exactly a front-line place – there was no front line – but it was on a tacitly acknowledged border of one of the patches of territory that made up the Republic. A controlled zone.
Two vehicles waited on the quay. One was a truck, to take the cargo. The other was a low-profile version of a jeep, a humvee. Janis and Moh stood uncertainly on the quay with their bags and weapons. A tall man and a short man got out of the humvee and walked up to them.
The tall man was wearing a dark jumpsuit with a row of tiny badges – national and party – on the breast pocket. Kohn recognized it as the closest the ANR had to a uniform, and, judging by the large number and small size of the badges, this guy had to be of very high rank. Face fleshy – more with muscle than fat – relaxed mouth, broken veins on the cheeks. The small man was almost hidden in a bulky overcoat and a homburg hat, in the shade of which his fine-boned face was lit by the glow of a cigarette. Only one people had features quite like that.
The tall man smiled and shook hands with Janis, then Moh. He knew their names.
‘Welcome to the Republic,’ he said. ‘My name’s Colin MacLennan. I’d like you to meet a man who’s very keen to meet you.’ He turned to the small man with a flourish.
‘Our scientific adviser, Doctor Nguyen Thanh Van.’
‘We have to look very closely at the influence of Gnosticism, right, because there we can see a major opposition to Paul’s misogyny, OK, which was later on to manifest itself in the so-called heresies of the Middle Ages—’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre slithered sideways, made a frantic grab for a handhold, caught a bunch of something like hair, and got heaved off the animal’s back for the fifth time. He ran after the beast and remounted, while four anarcho-barbarist terrorists looked politely away. He almost wished he were lying forward strapped to the horse’s neck, like Aghostino-Clarke. On the other hand, if they’d both been as helpless he wouldn’t have put it past this lot to butcher them and black-market the bionics.
The horses were picking their way down a slope along a barely visible path between birch trees. Water dripped on him and added irritation to discomfort. As soon as he was more or less settled on the horse, the leader of the gang, Dilly Foyle, continued her enthusiastic explanation of her political ideas. She was NF: National Feminist. Patriarchy, she’d already told him at some length (five kilometres, so far),