he muttered. ‘They’ve done a security reset. It was probably when they kitted out the lab for your succubus this morning. If you want to go to ground, I can get the new code from Nathan.’
‘No time,’ I said. ‘And the longer we hang around here, the more likely I am to be spotted. Looks like that weapons locker may be the lesser of two evils.’
We jog-trotted back to the security post, and I was looking around for something to prise open the door of the locker when I spotted something even better: a fire axe in a glass-fronted cabinet high up on the wall next to the door.
I looked at Gil. ‘Ready?’ I asked.
‘Go for it,’ he said.
I smashed the front of the cabinet with my elbow, and the shrieking jangle of the fire alarm broke the silence like an auditory smack in the face.
We ran with that clamour in our ears. Halfway down the corridor, Gil stopped dead and held out his hand for the axe. I handed it over before I even saw what he was looking at. There was a fuse box on the wall. It was locked, but only with a piddling little Ajax padlock. The first blow of the axe snapped the hasp clean off, and it was the work of a moment to flick the main switch off, plunging the corridor into darkness. Maybe this was over- finessing slightly, but when I took the axe back I used the blunt end to hammer the switch flat. Anyone trying to turn the lights back on was going to have a mountain to climb.
The darkness wasn’t absolute. Dull red emergency lights low down on the walls had come on when we triggered the fire alarm, but had only become visible now that the main lights had been extinguished. With their help we found our way back to Rosie’s door.
I hefted the axe and swung it at the lock again and again, smashing the jamb around it into jagged splinters until the door finally sagged open.
Rosie was already on her feet as I went in, and backing away from the door, but she seemed to know me even in the dark. She relaxed and came towards me, then just as suddenly tensed again and stopped dead as Gil entered behind me. She was wearing a female body today – blonde and petite and barely out of her teens – so there must have been at least one changing of the guard since I’d last seen her.
‘It’s all right, Rosie,’ I said, half-shouting to be heard over the siren. ‘He’s with me.’
‘Felix!’ she exclaimed, ‘What’s happening?’
‘We are, sweetheart,’ I told her. ‘Listen, how would you like to see the back of this place?’
Her eyes widened. ‘More than anything,’ she said. ‘More than anything I’ve wanted since I died.’
‘How tired are you feeling?’
Rosie smiled wickedly. ‘Less than you’d ever imagine, my sweeting. And a lot less than I’ve been seeming.’
I nodded. I’d always half-suspected that she was piling on the agony for her own nefarious reasons, but I’d never asked because any answer she gave would be bound to be picked up by Jenna-Jane’s ubiquitous spy-mikes. ‘I’m going to set you free, but I need you to stick around and watch my back for a few minutes,’ I told her. ‘Just until this racket dies down. Deal?’
Rosie gave a single, forceful nod. I turned to Gil. ‘Take out the wards,’ I said. ‘You know where they are.’
They were everywhere, of course, just as they had been in Rosie’s old quarters. Jenna-Jane had wanted to make absolutely certain that the errant spirit stayed in this room, no matter how many of her flesh-and-blood vehicles came and went through the door. The frame of the door itself was stiff with pass-nots of every shape, size and variety, but there were more of them painted on the walls, mixed into the plaster, set into the tiles of the false ceiling, and probably set in the cement floor. The aim of the exercise was to block every exit.
Gil didn’t waste time with niceties. The sound of the fire alarm covered all sins, so he just took the top hinge off the door with a few more strokes of the axe, dodging it as its own weight tore it free from the bottom hinge and it toppled sideways into the room. Then he started in on the wood of the jamb.
‘There’s a demon in the building,’ I said. ‘A succubus. I’m going to find her and set her free. Be my angel, Rosie. Ride shotgun for me.’
‘Thank you, Felix,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m yours until you’re done, I promise. And I won’t leave without saying goodbye.’
She leaned forward suddenly, the tips of her fingers caressing my cheeks, and kissed me lightly on the lips. Then she went limp, slumping against me. I lowered the insensate body gently to the ground. Rosie had left the room, though not, I fervently hoped, the building.
‘Good enough?’ McClennan demanded, standing back from his work and lowering the axe. I just pointed to the unconscious student on the floor: she was all the answer that was necessary. Gil frowned. ‘Is she going to be all right in here? She’s an innocent bystander.’
‘There isn’t really a fire, McClennan,’ I reminded him. ‘She’ll be fine.’
‘Then let’s go get them.’
In the dark, with the shrilling of the alarm in our ears, the MOU had turned into a daunting assault course. It was almost like meeting the fear-beast again. As we threaded the maze of corridors, I had to fight down a sense of urgency that was threatening to ramp its way all the way up to pure panic. The dim floor-level lighting meant that the only thing I could see clearly were my own feet. At head height, slabs and wedges and sheets of shadow slid over each other, disguising intersections and turning blank walls into doorways.
Gil knew his way better than I did, and I let him take the lead. It felt like we were heading in the right direction, and then I knew we were, because my death-sense woke and stirred at the prickly feel of the things ahead of us and below us. For me it was a noise that rode under and over and through the alarm’s cacophony, untouched by it, the sound of an orchestra tuning up in a key that didn’t have a name. It was good news, in a way. The massive steel door had to be open, otherwise the wards imprinted onto it would have acted like psychic soundproofing, and I wouldn’t be getting such a clear fix.
But we met the first of Jenna’s rent-a-cops before we got to the door. There were three of them, and we just turned a corner and came face-to-face with them. They had their sidewinder batons ready in their hands, and they were big in the same way that Dicks and adult male silverback gorillas are big. Gil flashed his ID again, but they didn’t as much as glance at it. They grabbed us and slammed us against the wall of the corridor, two of the three holding their truncheons across our throats.
‘Call it in,’ rasped the man holding onto me. He was an ugly bastard, with squared-off hair in a US Marine Corps style which probably conferred high status in the circles in which he moved. To me it had haunting echoes of Kryten from
The third man – the one who had his hands free – took out his radio and put it to his ear. ‘We’ve got two men,’ he shouted. ‘Ground floor. Yeah, exactly. West side. They’re the ones we saw on the cameras.’
He ducked his head, covering his ear as he listened to the reply. Then without warning he dropped the radio and staggered slightly as though he he’d been about to lose his footing and had to shift his balance to stay upright.
‘What did she say?’ the square-headed guy demanded.
The third man bent, very deliberately, and picked up the fallen radio. He straightened, still without saying a word, and brought his hand round in a sweeping arc. The radio impacted on the left temple of Gil’s captor with enough force to break the casing wide open. The guy dropped like a stone.
‘What the fuck are you . . . ?’ Squarehead spluttered.
The radio man went for his throat, massive hands clamping to his windpipe, and he forgot all about me as he was forced to defend himself. He brought his truncheon up and back, aiming to drive it into the other man’s face, but I jumped forward and wrapped myself around his forearm, twisting it further and further back until the baton dropped from his hand. Then the radio man finished the job, driving the back of Squarehead’s skull against the wall repeatedly until his eyes rolled back in their orbits and he crumpled, sliding down the wall to the ground.
Gil stared at the last man standing, frightened awe showing on his face.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him. ‘You’ve never seen a five-hundred-year-old woman wearing a man’s body before?’
‘He’s coarse, but he’s strong,’ Rosie said, examining the radio man’s hairy, muscular hands and flexing his fingers slightly. The cadences of her voice were instantly recognisable despite the harsh basso burr of her vehicle’s vocal apparatus. ‘I like him.’
