Based on the assessment test results, Mindstar expected Greg to develop an eldritch sixth sense, a continent-spanning X-ray sight which could locate enemy installations, no matter how well concealed. Instead he became empathic. It was a useful trait for interrogating captured prisoners, but hardly warranted the million and a half pounds invested in his gland and his training.
He wasn't alone in disappointing the Mindstar brass. The assessment tests only indicated the general area of a recruit's ability; how a brain's actual psychic faculties would develop after a gland was implanted was beyond prediction. The results were extremely mediocre: very few Mindstar recruits produced anything like the performance expected. The brigade had been reluctantly disbanded a few months before the PSP took its ideological knife to the defence budget.
Greg's claims that his intuition had also been enhanced by the gland were discounted by the sounder minds of the general staff as typical squaddie superstition. He shrugged and kept quiet: never volunteer for anything. But intuition had saved him and his tactical raider squad on more than one occasion when he saw action in Turkey.
So why hadn't it given him any forewarning about Ray Collister?
"Nobody expects you to be perfect," Eleanor said quietly.
He nodded shortly. She could plug into his emotions with the same efficiency as his espersense rooted around in other people's minds. "I'll bet Douglas Kellam is leading the pack," he said. Douglas Kellam, who fancied himself in the role of local squire, the village's loudest anti-PSP Momus. Now it was safe to speak out.
"From the rear, yes," she agreed.
He grunted wryly. "Who would have thought it, you and I rushing to rescue an apparatchik."
"But we are though, aren't we? Instinctively. It's not so much what Collister was, but what Kellam's mob will do. There'll be hell to pay the morning after, there always is."
"Yeah."
"But?"
"What if he turns out to be one of the high grades?"
"He won't," she said firmly. "You would have known if he was anything important."
"Now there's confidence." He hoped to God she was right. The EMC Ranger lurched out on to the road. Eleanor gunned the accelerator, wheels tearing gashes in the tarmac's thin moss covering. Fans of white spray fountained up as they shot through the long puddles which lay along the ruts.
Greg looked out of the window. On the other side of the reservoir's broad southern prong he could see the Berrybut Spinney time-share estate sitting on the slope directly opposite the farmhouse. It was set in a rectangular clearing above the shoreline, a horseshoe of wooden chalets with a big stone clubhouse and hotel at the apex. The spinney was a mix of dead trunks festooned with creepers and new trees, tanbark oaks, Californian laurels, Chinese yews, and other varieties imported from tropical and sub-tropical zones as the year-round heat killed off native vegetation. Their shapes and colours were strange in comparison to the glorious old deciduous forests which occupied so many of his childhood memories.
The hurriedly enacted One Home Law had enabled the local council to commandeer the chalets and hotel to provide emergency accommodation for people displaced from lowlying coastal lands by rising seas. He had spent the PSP decade living in one of the chalets, telling people he was a private detective, a perfect cover occupation for someone with his ability. He even managed to attract a few paying cases to add authenticity. Then a couple of years after the PSP's demise Eleanor came into his life, and at the same time the gigantic Event Horizon company hired him to clear up a security violation problem. The case had turned out to be far more complex and involved than anyone had realized at the start, and the bonuses and favours he and Eleanor were given by its extremely grateful owner, Julia Evans, were enough to retire on—enough for their grandchildren to retire on, come to that. Multi-billionairesses, especially teenage ones, he reflected, had no concept of gracious restraint, certainly not when it came to money.
It left him and Eleanor with the problem of what to do next. Lotus eating was fine, they both agreed, providing it was in the context of a break from real life. They had sunk some (a fraction) of their money into the run-down farmhouse with its neglected fields, and moved in after their honeymoon, both of them eager for the kind of quiet yet busy life the citrus groves would give them.
He could see a pile of ash just below the chalets, a pink glow still visible. The residents lit a bonfire each night, using it to bake food, and as a focal point for company. An undemanding style of life; not quite the archetypical poor but happy existence, but damn close. Geography wasn't all the move across the water entailed.
A horse-drawn cart, piled high with bales of hay, was clumping slowly down Hambleton's main street as they drove in. Eleanor swerved round it smoothly, drawing a frightened whinny from the mud-caked shire horse and a shaken fist from the driver. If it wasn't for the glossy black solar panels clipped over the slate roofs and a clump of well-established coconut trees in the churchyard the hamlet could have passed as a rural scene from the nineteen-hundreds. Gardens seemed to merge lazily into the verges. Tall stumps of copper beech and sycamore trees lined the road, festooned in vines which dangled colourful flower clusters; a frost of greenery which brought a semblance of life to the dead trunks. But only from a distance; wind, entropy, and vigorous insects had already pruned away the twigs and smaller branches, leaving frayed ends of pale-grey sun-bleached wood jutting out of the shaggy hide.
Roy Collister's home was one of the smaller cottages a couple of hundred metres from the Finch's Arms. It personified the retirement-cottage dream; gentrified during the end of the last century, yellow-grey stonework pointed up, windows double-glazed, brick chimney-stacks repaired. More recently it had acquired a row of solar panels above the guttering to provide power after the gas and electricity grids were shut down at the start of the PSP years. Three bulky air conditioners had been mounted on the side wall to cope with the stifling air which invariably saturated the interior of pre-Warming buildings. The front garden was given over to vegetable plots, and the fence had disappeared under a long mound of gene-tailored brambles, with clumps of ripe blackberries as large as crab-apples hanging loosely.
Greg was already opening his door as Eleanor drew up outside. He was vaguely aware of pale faces in the windows of the houses opposite, interested and no doubt appalled by what was going on, but not doing anything about it. The English way, Greg reflected. People had learned to keep their heads down during the PSP decade, avoiding attention was a healthy survival trait while the Constables were on the prowl. A habit like that was hard to snuff.
The wooden gate through the dune of brambles was swinging slowly to and fro on its hinges, and two of the ground-floor bay windows had been smashed. When he reached the front door he saw the wood around the lock was splintered; judging by the marks on the paintwork someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. There was the sound of angry voices inside.
Greg walked into the hall and ordered a low-level secretion from his gland. As always, he pictured a lozenge of liver-like flesh nestled tumour-fashion at the heart of his brain, squirting out cold milky liquids into surrounding synapses. In fact, neither gland nor neurohormones looked anything like the mental mirage, but he'd never quite managed to throw off the idiosyncrasy—Mindstar psychologists had told him not to worry, a lot of psychics developed quirks of a much higher order. His perception shifted subtly, making the universe just that fraction lighter, more translucent. Auras seemed to prevail, even in inert matter, their misty planes corresponding to the physical structures around him. Living creatures glowed. A world comprising coloured shadows.