So once again he found himself cycling into Docklands, this time with the Nightstar rattling along in the trailer behind him. He’d never had weapons peripherals, like some in the Legion. Instead he put on the jacket with the systems from his stealth suit, ran diagnostics on the darkware Tye was loaded with, and finally stashed the nerve-block pistol and synth slugs into the Nightstar’s hangar deck. A twenty-centimetre ceramic blade was strapped to his forearm, under the jacket.
The Icona entrance had an old-style intercom, with an actual physical button for every apartment. When Ollie pressed for the third-floor penthouse, Tye used the passive sensors stitched into his jacket to see if he was being scanned. But the only electrical activity it could detect was a small current in the intercom panel, powering a camera.
Larson’s voice came out of the intercom. ‘Come on up, and bring the model.’ The door lock buzzed.
Ollie hadn’t anticipated having to carry the model, and definitely not up three flights of stairs. It wasn’t excessively heavy, but getting it up the twisting stairwell without knocking it against the wall was a bastard of a trip.
He was sweating heavily by the time he reached the third floor and came out onto a long corridor with half a dozen doors. There were no windows, but one of the doors was open, providing some light. As he passed it, he saw the apartment had been ransacked. Tye detected an active local network using sensors lining the corridor to scan him, so it infiltrated the node and launched a series of darkware packages into the system.
The door at the end of the corridor didn’t have a handle; instead there was a single red LED glowing in the centre. Ollie stood in front of it, looking twitchy, as any chancer would.
There was a soft click, and the door swung inwards a couple of centimetres.
‘Come in,’ a voice said from inside. ‘The power hinges don’t work, so you’ll have to push.’
The door was as heavy as a bank vault’s. Hard to get moving, but once he’d applied enough pressure it swung back as smoothly as if it was floating on oil. Ollie staggered in with the Nightstar clutched in front of him. Tye splashed the progress of the darkware as it slipped undetected through the penthouse systems. Larson clearly took his security a lot more seriously than Schumder did. There were five concealed guns in the walls and ceiling, as well as a panic room. Tye disabled the weapons.
Ollie peered around the purple-and-black mosaic that was the Nightstar’s curving wings. The penthouse was open plan, presenting a single split-level reception room with a high ceiling, and a window wall looking out across the Royal Dock outside. Once upon a time it must have been a swish place to live, but now . . . Tall glass display cabinets cluttered the floor, the only furniture left – esoteric tombstones turning the big space into a mausoleum of extinct trash-culture. Every centimetre of their shelf space was full of figurines and toys and show-branded games and badges, but that still wasn’t enough space for the collection. Ollie managed to walk six paces into the room and then couldn’t go any further. Plastic crates were piled up in the aisles, overflowing with more junk. Models of vehicles combined with furry alien creatures to form long, unruly dunes, onto which tides of actual paper books had fallen, their bizarre, colourful covers slowly fading as entropy brittled them. Signed posters of ancient blockbuster movies in fanciful gothic frames covered two walls, while the final wall was made up of screens stacked like oversized glass bricks. Most of them were dead, leaving the few live rectangles playing drama shows that had peaked over a century ago. To Ollie, they were windows into odd alternative pasts that – given Blitz2 – actually now seemed quite enticing. The central screen was playing a Nightstar episode.
He looked down at his feet in puzzlement. There really was no way further into the room without wading through and over this hoard of valueless treasure. ‘Hello?’
‘Welcome, welcome,’ said a voice overhead.
Ollie assumed it was a speaker, but glanced up anyway just as a peculiar motion caught his eye. The room’s ceiling had exposed metal beams, painted as black as the concrete they supported. They now served as rails for an industrial hoist mechanism. Ollie’s jaw dropped. Karno Larson was hanging from the hoist on metal cables. He was obscenely large, his torso a flaccid globe covered in a shiny green toga that was more like a wrap of bandages, ensuring no skin was visible. Limbs were equally gross – thick appendages that were so bloated they seemed incapable of movement. His corpulent head rose out of the toga without any sign of a neck, rolls of skin glistening under a film of perspiration. Straggly grey hair was tied back in a ponytail, woven with strips of orange leather.
The harness that held him also sported various modules that Tye was telling Ollie were medical support machines. Tubes snaked out of them, disappearing into the toga between the bands of cloth, swaying about as fluids pumped through them.
Staring up as Larson slid towards him like a dirigible Peter Pan, Ollie could easily believe the man was the victim of a cocooning gone horribly wrong. The hoist came to a halt, and motors made a loud whirring sound, lowering Larson down towards the jumble of ancient merchandise. Globular feet touched a batch of coffee-table books featuring science fiction artwork, and they started to bend beneath him.
‘What an excellent –’ Larson paused and his head bowed forwards, allowing him to suck air from a tube – ‘specimen.’
‘Are you all right?’ Ollie blurted, which was probably dumber than anything even Lars had ever said.
‘Absolutely fine, my dear fellow. You don’t get live this long without making a few compromises.’
Yes,
