Well, you didn’t go pop straight away.
But their own mothers wouldn’t have recognised the corpses.
Dana Lawrence looked up as Lynn came into the control room. She glanced at the clock. There were a few minutes yet before feeding time, and she had to go down to the basement for a routine check. Normally Ashwini Anand would take over in the control room while she was away, but she was just now looking into why the robot had failed to change the sheets in the Nairs’ suite.
‘Everything all right?’ Lynn asked.
‘So far, yes. There’s been a tech failure up on level twenty-seven, nothing important.’
Lynn’s eyes flickered. It was enough to trigger Dana’s analytical turn of mind. She wondered what was wrong with Julian’s daughter. More and more, she was showing signs of uncertainty, irritability. Why had she so vehemently refused to show Julian the footage two days ago? She looked at Lynn searchingly, but the woman had pulled herself together by now.
‘Can you manage, Dana?’
‘No problem. Look, since you happen to be here, could I ask you for a favour? I have to go downstairs for ten minutes. There’ll be nobody in the control room during that time, and—’
‘Just route it all through your phone.’
‘I do, usually. It’s just I’d like to keep an eye on everything when it all gets going in the restaurant. Could you take over for a while?’
‘Of course.’ Lynn smiled. ‘Go on then, never fear.’
You’re acting, Dana thought. What are you hiding? What’s your problem?
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘See you soon.’
The control room. Little Olympus.
There were so many buttons you could press here, systems you could reprogram, settings and parameters you could shift. Increase the oxygen level until everything burst into flame. Mix in a lethal level of carbon dioxide. Shut all the bulkheads and lock away the restaurant party until they all went mad, one after another. Pump the sludge into the drinking water so that everyone fell ill. Stop the lifts. Unplug the reactor. Increase the internal air pressure and then shunt it all out in one. All kinds of fun you could have. There were no limits to creativity here.
I am dangerous.
Lynn’s eyes drifted across the wall of monitors, all the areas under surveillance.
No. You are not your thoughts!‘
I am what I am,’ she sang softly.
Another tune joined in. A call from London, Orley headquarters, Central Security. Lynn frowned. Her hand hovered indecisively over the touchscreen, then she took the call, feeling queasy. Edda Hoff’s face appeared on the screen, with her pageboy cut. Her mask-like features gave no clue as to whether she had good news or bad to report.
‘Hello, Lynn,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘How are you?’
‘Couldn’t be better! The trip’s a complete success. And down there? Body count? Armageddon?’
Hoff took worryingly long to reply.
‘To be honest, I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘A few hours ago someone got in touch with us. A certain Tu Tian, a Chinese businessman, currently in Berlin. He had a rather convoluted story to tell us. Apparently he and some friends of his have ended up in possession of restricted information, and since then they’ve been on somebody’s hit list.’
‘And what does that have to do with us?’
‘The text that caused all this kerfuffle is very broken up. There are only fragments, but from the little that they’ve been able to send us it doesn’t read much like a bedtime story.’
‘What is it, exactly?’
‘I’ll send it over to you.’
A few lines of text appeared on a separate screen. Lynn read the text, read it again, then once more, hoping that the name Orley might perhaps vanish, but it just seemed to grow bigger every time she read it. She stared at the document, paralysed, and felt a black wave of panic roll towards her as though the conversation with ISLAND-II had never taken place.
Nobody there suspects everything.
And?’ Hoff urged her. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s a fragment, as you say.’ Just don’t show any uncertainty! ‘A puzzle. As long as we don’t have the full text, we may perhaps be reading more into it than is really there.’
‘Tu is worried that there will be an attack on Gaia.’
‘That’s going a bit far, don’t you think?’
‘Depends how you look at it.’
‘There’s nothing here to tell us when this operation is even going to take place.’
‘That’s what I told him. On the other hand, we can’t simply ignore what’s going on.’
‘What is going on though, Edda? To decide whether or not you’re going to ignore something, you need to know what it is, don’t you? But we just don’t know. Orley has interests worldwide: if there really is something planned against us, it doesn’t necessarily have to be aimed at Gaia. How did this Chinese gentleman get that idea?’
‘Because the reports are in all the newspapers.’
‘I see.’ Her thoughts raced. The edges of the room seemed to be blurring and fading. ‘Well, that’s true, the hotel is certainly most in the news, but that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s most at risk. At any rate, we really can’t afford any upset up here at the moment – you do understand that, don’t you, Edda? Not with these guests! There’s no way we can risk scaring away potential investors with this sort of thing.’
‘I don’t want to scare anyone away,’ Hoff said, somewhat indignantly. ‘I’m doing my job.’
‘Of course.’
‘Apart from which, I didn’t want to bother you about it, I thought I would speak to Dana Lawrence, but you just happened to pick up. And I’m not daft, Lynn. I know that you’ve got a crowd of investors up there, all very important people, ultra-rich, famous faces. But isn’t that exactly what might suggest that the hotel is in some sort of danger?’
Lynn kept quiet.
‘Be all that as it may,’ she said in the end, ‘you did the right thing telling us so quickly. We’ll keep our eyes open up here, and you should do the same. Stay alert. Have you already talked to Norrington and Jennifer Shaw?’
‘No. First of all I checked out this character Tu.’
‘And?’
‘A self-made millionaire from the first wave. Extremely successful. He runs a high-tech holography and virtual environments outfit in Shanghai. I found a few interviews and articles about him. Definitely not a nutcase.’
‘Good. Stick with it. Tell me if there are any developments, and – Edda?’
‘Yes?’
‘Speak to me first if anything happens.’
‘I’ll have to tell Norrington and Jennifer as well of course—’
‘Certainly you shall. Until then, Edda.’
Lynn ended the call and stared dead ahead. A few minutes later Dana came up from the basement levels. She got up, smiled and wished the director good evening, without breathing a word about the call. She left the control room at a steady pace, took the lift up to Gaia’s curved bosom, squirmed into her suite as soon as the door slid open and dashed into the bathroom. She tore open the packet of green tablets and gulped down three of them, and even as she choked them down she was wrestling with a dark glass jar full of little capsules the size and shape of maggots.