Another of the board members, Tarek Hajjar, flanked by two elite female bodyguards and dressed in long white Arabic robes, was waiting for Nathan. Tarek was a short, portly fellow, and his round face was dominated by a noticeably skew nose, cauliflower ears and heavily scarred eye-rims; in the days of his youth he had been a champion boxer, and the scars that remained bore testament to many hard rounds in the ring. He had won most of his matches by KO, and was as ruthless a negotiator and businessman as he had been as a boxer. Nonetheless, he conducted himself with an air of quiet dignity, and in his soft-spoken manner of speech, with his understated hand gestures, he came across as genteel, trustworthy and compassionate – a façade that rather effectively masked his true nature.
When Nathan’s chauffeur opened the door and guided the old man out, Tarek bowed stiffly and smiled.
‘Nathan, it is good to see you, despite the circumstances of our meeting.’
Nathan subtly puffed out his chest, tightened his shoulders and stiffened his back, making sure that his posture was ramrod-straight; no sign of weakness could be shown here. He strode up to Tarek, doing his best to mask the limp in his left leg. His A-grader protector followed at a respectful distance, as did his other two bodyguards, two burly men dressed in black who had been riding motorcycles.
‘Tarek. Always a pleasure. Now, shall we?’
‘We shall. Come, the subject has just regained consciousness. He is still groggy from the anaesthetic, but he is presently capable of something resembling coherence.’
The rich Oxford accent in which Tarek spoke English – his fourth language out of twelve in which he boasted fluency, yet one in which he communicated as smoothly as any native speaker – annoyed the hell out of Nathan. All manner of British accents seemed to get on his nerves, especially the ones he perceived to be emblematic of Old-World pompousness and colonial snobbery. Tarek’s accent was definitely one of these; every inflection and mispronounced vowel made his skin crawl with a very particular kind of loathing. He shuddered at the thought that he would have to deal with yet another British accent, this one from an actual Englishwoman, Duchess Emily Younghusband, another board member who was waiting for them downstairs. Nathan found her accent, a cultured northern English one, to be a few degrees more tolerable than Tarek’s though. Well, perhaps one degree, maybe one point five.
With this barely concealed contempt bristling just below the surface of his tanned skin, Nathan straightened his tie – gunmetal grey, to match his dark grey suit, under which he wore a stylish black shirt – and limped after Tarek and his female bodyguards, with his own protectors bringing up the rear. One of the black-suited soldiers led them to an elevator and opened the doors to it with a triple scan: retina, thumbprint and forehead-implanted chip.
‘Livin’ in, the land down under,’ Nathan sang under his breath; his own little joke whenever he journeyed to the lower section of the base, located a mile and a half under the ground.
All of them stood in silence in the elevator as it whisked them along a silky-smooth passage through the crust of the earth. Nathan continued to hum the Men At Work tune the whole way down. He knew the others could just discern the notes, and he hoped that the song irritated Tarek as much as Tarek’s accent and lazy, thick-lidded eyes annoyed him.
A blue button flashed, indicating that they had reached their destination. The doors opened without fanfare, and they entered another hall filled with technological wonders and busy workers. The Duchess was there to greet them, dressed in a subdued green business suit that complemented her dazzling emerald eyes and crown of red hair, which retained the richness of its natural auburn hue despite her fifty-nine years on this planet. She cut an imposing figure; at six foot two she was taller than most men, and she was heavy of bone structure and broad-shouldered to boot. Her oblong face was dominated, structurally, by a strong, jutting chin, and although her hands were adorned with an array of feminine jewellery and decorations, there was a distinctly masculine cast to the length and thickness of her fingers.
‘Honourable fellow board members,’ she said with a slight bow, ‘you have arrived just in time. The thing has awoken, and it is ready to communicate with us.’
The Duchess never referred to beastwalkers using human personal pronouns – she only used ‘it’ or ‘they’.
‘Excellent, Duchess,’ Tarek replied in his soft voice, beaming a smile at her. ‘Shall we go and speak to the creature, then?’
‘Aye, we shall. After me, gentlemen.’
‘I’ll take the lead, as we discussed,’ Nathan said. ‘I know it’s not ideal to keep a beastwalker alive, not while—’
‘Well the only other option would have been termination—’ Tarek began.
‘A solution that I cannot recommend strongly enough,’ the Duchess interrupted, speaking harshly. ‘You know how much of a farce, nay, an outright failure I believe the Alliance project to be. It served our predecessors well enough, but over the last half century it has become increasingly irrelevant. Termination of every one of these … things … should be our policy once again, as it
