Читать книгу 2089 - Группа авторов - Страница 16

Despite Jane arriving last, at just before nine, they were loaded up and ready to go within another hour. Darren and Terry each had a small trailer attached to the back of their bike. Jane and Halthrop rode unencumbered.

Usually, they would use electric all-terrain vehicles but Major Halthrop had decided that on this occasion, there was no certainty as to when they would be able to reconnect them to a solar panel battery array. The ATVs could generally last for about fifty kilometres between charges, and the distance to Cheltenham alone was more than that. Halthrop was against reliance on them anyway. He often quoted the ancient Indian strategist Chanayaka, who said that ‘Willpower is more important than material power,’ on the perils of failing to be self-sufficient in all aspects of any military operation.

Terry commented, ‘Everywhere we go, people will want to help us catch this guy. We’ll be able to plug in whenever we need to. We’ll be so much slower if we insist on being self-sufficient.’ The last word was scornful.

Halthrop listened, stroked his moustache, and explained, ‘Preparations should always be made for a worst-case scenario. Whilst we’re not fighting a straightforward military campaign, the situation is perhaps worse; the degree of violence we can expect is not known.’ The major was then equally sardonic. ‘If you’re not up to it, I’m sure we can relieve you of the weight of the trailer.’

Terry shook his head and started slowly towards the compound’s gate.

‘Wait, wait, you don’t even know where to go yet,’ Jane called to him.

Only two GPS satellites remained functional, too few for any navigation system to operate using their data. Navigation features on the armulet worked by triangulation from the radio masts that made up their network. With the network down, the posse would have to navigate using paper maps. Halthrop smiled broadly as he issued each of them with different formats of map for the region. One emphasised the old road network, one was better for topography, and to Jane he gave half a dozen smaller ones showing old street plans of the towns he anticipated they might possibly find themselves traversing.

Halthrop emphasised, ‘We need to record the details of all the legs of the route. Remember, your armulets aren’t recording anything for you at the moment. Jane, you’re responsible for reminding us all to make these records at every stop.’

The posse set off along the Gloucester Road until they got to the M5 motorway, known locally since the Times of Malthus as the Big Road, which was the quickest route until they were very close to Cheltenham. The going was pretty easy as there was a continuous, generally smooth surface for the first long stretch.

The entire width of the road had been washed away by flooding in two sections, the first after the nearby old Cam and Dursley railway station, and then another four kilometres north at the River Frome. Walking their bikes past these obstacles added some time. The first one in particular took more than half an hour to bypass. A fifty-metre section of the entire embanked roadway was missing, so they had to descend, cross the rough gap and climb back up on the other side of the fissure. In twenty-eight degree heat, and with their legs tired from the cycling, the climbing back up went particularly slowly.

Beyond the second flood destruction, the road again proceeded with a continuously navigable route to the point where it met the smaller road leading into Cheltenham.

This was only two kilometres from Jack’s home, and Jane navigated them with aplomb using the small street map. They parked up the bicycles in front of the house a little before 3pm.

‘Wait here,’ Halthrop instructed.

‘What if he’s in there?’ asked Terry, still breathing hard from his exertions. ‘What if… ’

The major shot him a look and Terry fell silent. ‘Wait for my order,’ he told them all, then turned to Jane. ‘Jane, make sure no one enters until I tell you.’

As with most places, the door was unlocked, so the major slipped through silently. Frank Halthrop had only ever read about booby traps and was not experienced at searching for them. When he was convinced that the place was empty, he called for the other three to join him. They boisterously entered, pushing and shoving through the doorway, vying to be the first to find a clue.

‘He’s a messy one, isn’t he?’ said Jane, pointing towards open drawers and objects scattered all around.

After a quick look through three doorways, Halthrop responded. ‘This isn’t how he lives, another posse has been here already.’

She picked up a photo of an older woman with a strong smile. ‘Why doesn’t he just have this on his armulet?’

‘Good point.’ Halthrop nodded, looking at the old woman’s framed picture. ‘She must be pretty important to him. Probably the grandmother with the farm in Highnam.’

‘There’s no writing to identify her.’

Darren appeared from a bedroom with a pair of boots, encased in dried mud. Terry and Jane looked at him and the boots. Frank held up his palms in a questioning gesture but said nothing. Darren looked at each of them in turn, and then to the boots. He turned and threw them back in the room. ‘Nothing of use in there,’ he said.

Terry had pulled a paper map from the wall of the other bedroom, which appeared more used as a study. It covered a region about fifty kilometres on each side, centred on Cheltenham. There was nothing marked on the map beyond what had been printed by the cartographers years before – no escape routes or hideouts annotated. Terry commented, ‘How many people have paper maps? You’d kind of have to be expecting the armulet connections to go down.’

Jane replied, ‘My mum and dad have got two maps on the wall in our hallway. One’s around Bristol, and the other’s London, and they’re quite a bit older than that one.’ The map Terry held was likely to have predated the Times of Malthus. He shrugged and turned to follow Darren’s lead in throwing it back in the study room.

Halthrop interrupted, ‘But Jane, I bet your parents’ maps are framed and mounted with pride, aren’t they? How did you find that one, Terry?’

‘Yeah, it was just pinned up on the wall. No frame; and I don’t think it was even straight.’

The major continued by showing his search evidence: he took two textstories at random from a narrow but tall bookcase in the main living room they were standing in. He held the paperbacks aloft. ‘I’m sure you all know what these are, but have any of you ever seen a real one?’

Darren jumped in first. ‘They’re books, and you’re usually carrying one.’

Halthrop nodded, looking at the floor with a smile. ‘Well spotted, Darren. Anybody seen any other than the ones I have?’

Jane and Terry looked at each other briefly, his eyes wide. She turned back to the boss and replied, ‘My parents have maybe ten on a shelf at home. I don’t think they’ve ever taken any of them down, but my mum’s very proud of them.’

‘These have been well read, the page corners are all worn and creased.’ Halthrop flicked the pages, showing them to other three, and then replaced the books. ‘And yet this is the home of a sifter who is, by trade, an electronic researcher. The man obviously likes to make connections with the old days. Anybody got anything else?’

There was a shaking of heads and mumbled negative answers. Terry piped up, ‘Actually, look at this place. I know it’s an old house, but everything’s old. All this furniture must be antique. It’s like it was frozen when the Times started.’ Each of them stared around, absorbing the history. Terry was quite correct, it was as if they had stepped into a museum exhibit, ‘Life in 2025’. Any recent objects remained hidden in cupboards, and the posse left the house quite sure that it even smelt old and musty.

They mounted their bikes, intent on making Highnam before dark.

It was a small detour to travel to the Doughnut, before turning due west out of Cheltenham for Highnam. An infotech was at what remained of the entrance to the building nearest the main route from the town.

‘Good to see you, Major. There’s half a dozen more infotechs down in the basement working full steam to bring the network back into action.’

‘How long do you think it will take?’

The man shook his head. ‘Given that all the Kangaroos work separately, we’ve never really had to deal with the entire network together. We’re not even sure we actually know how to make the whole lot work together.’

He showed them along a ground floor corridor and into a small office. Halthrop quivered when the man produced conclusive evidence that Jack Smith was the bomber they wanted. The infotech handed over a printed greyscale picture of a man: light skin, dark hair, and wearing a black blindfold.

‘How did you get this?’ Halthrop asked. ‘Is some part of the infonetwork working?’

‘No. Quite bizarre, actually. Although we don’t monitor them, the Doughnut has always been protected by closed circuit cameras. As with everything on the site, they’re powered by solar panels cladding the upper surfaces of the circular building. With the audiopts online, nobody ever considered watching the camera feeds. This is the first security incident here since it was reconfigured for use by the sifters. I’ve never even been in the CCTV monitoring room in my whole life, until yesterday.’

There were more photos showing the bombs being placed in the basement. However, as they ran entirely separately from the main infonetwork, the servers for the camera system were in this upstairs office. He leant against the chest-high computer and said, ‘These beauties have been overwriting their own data on a seven-day rolling recording, unwatched, for fifty years.’

The footage showed Jack installing the bombs during a four-hour period after his last shift. The infotechs had watched the tapes over and over again, astounded that he had managed the task silently, and blindfolded. ‘So the audiopts didn’t pick up anything,’ the major mused out loud.

‘Thank Malthus he put the explosive materials in sections of the underground server rooms that were unmanned. Gotta be grateful for small mercies,’ the man concluded.

‘I’d say that was a pretty big mercy,’ Halthrop concluded in return. Frank held up the picture for all to commit to memory, and inwardly mulled over how bandits, historically, had often swathed the lower and upper parts of their faces so only the eyes were visible. This picture was the inverse — Smith’s full face showing, with only the eyes covered.

Although legs were tired, the ten-kilometre journey to Highnam took much less than an hour. As Frank had anticipated, the railway line was an easy and level route. If anything, it went slightly downhill. They went straight to the Kangaroo Spokesperson’s house. Some forty red bricks were piled randomly in a little heap at the gable end of the house. Other than the bricks, the place was very neatly kept, a tidy garden and the building in very good order.

Lloyd Lloyd opened the door to the visitors before they had all dismounted. He walked out into the bright afternoon sun and welcomed them with a booming, ‘So good to see you again, Major Halthrop. And posse.’

The major stepped forward and shook Lloyd Lloyd’s outstretched hand. The other three troops nodded a greeting in unison. The Spokesperson wore no sunglasses and held his other hand to shade his eyes. ‘Thanks again for your work with Derek Jones. I trust that all went off according to plan? Actually, sorry, more important matter.’ Highnam’s representative wrung his hands. ‘We’re all in a bit of a tizz as I’m sure you can imagine. I’ve already sent the Cirencester posse to Ellie Smith’s old farmhouse. The late Ellie Smith, that is — been dead more than a year. Place has been empty since then. Jack came back for the funeral but only stayed a couple of days. And he disappeared the next day. Without a word of goodbye. Been shut up since then.’

Major Halthrop held up a hand to halt Lloyd Lloyd. ‘Just tell us the way, and we’ll go and have a look for ourselves.’ He looked over his shoulder, but Jane already had the plan of the village open and resting across the top of the trailer behind Darren’s bike.

‘I remember this place,’ Darren almost shouted.

Halthrop’s hand of silence swung round to hush his charges.

Jane nodded at each instruction and, when he was finished, she looked up to the major and nodded several times quickly, without speaking. Halthrop’s reply nod was barely perceptible, but she caught it and folded the map away.

He proffered his hand to Lloyd Lloyd. The man shook it strongly but still sounded nervy. ‘Please catch him. The last thing we want is to go back to the dangers of the Times of Malthus.’

Major Halthrop nodded, and said, ‘I think the security of your village is beyond the catching of Jack Smith. It’s the infotechs at the Doughnut that we’re all relying on now.’

The bicycle convoy was a strange sight for the villagers in Highnam. Bikes were common; it was the uniforms that were unusual. The Fifth Covenant of Jerusalem disallowed mass influence. The upshot was that uniformed groupings of people had all but disappeared. The few militiamen across the country that remained ready for activation for posse purposes were all part-timers. Only about half the militias still used any sort of uniform at all.

Boots were highly coveted in 2089. The remainder stocks in warehouses around the country were being depleted. Common sizes were extinct and had to be handmade or repaired. Military boots were less popular than work boots, but one of Frank’s forward-thinking predecessors commanding the Bristol Brigade had taken a large collection into store at HQ for future use.

Ellie Smith’s farmhouse had been built halfway up a slope that descended from the centre of Highnam. The land met the River Leadon as it completed a large meander before turning east to join the Severn a little over a kilometre away. From her house, the grassy fields continued down a slope for about 200 metres before flattening out for another 200 metres to the river. She had only ever worked about half the land, and the property was not assiduously protected. The vegetation had not run wild, as the lack of fencing encouraged the animals of other Highnam residents to graze there freely.

The evening remained hot and humid. The Bristol Brigade parked up their bikes on the large patio, which was enclosed on two sides by the L-shaped farmhouse.

Darren sniffed the air and commented, ‘It’s gonna rain, Frank. I’d say a lot of rain.’ The party stood by their bicycles and, at Darren’s forecast, looked up at the moody clouds.

The house itself was old, more than a hundred years, of brick and wood construction, with red roof tiling.

Inside, the rooms were darkening quickly as the sun had just set. The main solar panel array had been disconnected — some of the panels had been removed. The posse all had rechargeable lantern torches, and the three younger members were eager to use some of the equipment they had brought along. Even just using the lanterns was exciting.

Again, another posse had been through the place already, although they had treated this house with rather more respect. Major Halthrop wondered if it was even the same team that had ransacked Jack’s house.

Jane pointed to a spot on a table at the end of the main living room where, amongst pictures and ornaments, there was a gap. ‘Look, Frank. I’d guess that the other posse took a photo of the fugitive.’

The boss nodded and they continued looking around. There was nothing of obvious interest; it all looked just as one might expect for an old house whose only occupant had died a year previously. A layer of dust covered most surfaces, albeit disturbed in places. If there had been any clues, they were no longer there.