Nevers said, ‘Perhaps I should give you a moment to consult with your employers, sir. I’m sure they’ll advise you to do the right thing.’
‘I’m in charge here.’
‘But you answer to Dr Morange.’ Nevers pronounced it the right way, with a hard g. ‘Tell her people why I’m here, and what I’m looking for. We’ll wait outside.’
Inside the office, Jen and Daniel had a brief intense exchange, Daniel spreading his hands in a gesture of surrender, pulling out his phone. Outside, Chief Inspector Adam Nevers said to Chloe, ‘I saw what you did. Pretty cool, stepping up like that.’
He was an imposing guy in his early forties, dressed in a light brown summer-weight suit and a crisp white shirt and a gold tie with an impeccable Windsor knot. He nodded to his partner, a younger man with a mop of blond hair, who started to amble slowly around the big room. No doubt scanning everything in it with his spex and, Chloe was pretty sure, giving Nevers time to try to dig something useful from her.
She said, thinking of the best form of defence and all that, ‘Is it true that you lot report directly to the Human Decency League?’
‘As a matter of fact we came here to retrieve property that belongs to the Jackaroo. It isn’t a good idea to piss them off. They aren’t always as friendly as they like to make out. As I’m sure you know.’
The other policeman was standing in a corner of the workroom, spex glinting as he looked around.
Chloe said, ‘I thought the HDL set up the Hazard Police because they’re against all things alien. But you’re here to help the Jackaroo?’
‘We’re helping to protect people from meddling in things they’re not meant to know,’ Nevers said, with a nice little smile.
‘Like q-phones, construction coral, biomachines that clean up the sea and the air, easy travel to other planets…’
The two of them were sparring, having fun.
He said, ‘Do you enjoy your work, Ms Millar?’
‘If I didn’t, I’d be doing something else.’
‘And you get on with your colleagues.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘What about Dr Morange? Have you ever met her?’
‘Just once, for about thirty seconds.’
It had been a couple of years ago, soon after Chloe had joined Disruption Theory. They’d all been Eurostarred to Paris, a party held in a section of the catacombs. Vaults and passages done up with swags of blue material, video screens, big tropical plants, three different bars, a seafood buffet, fairground rides. It was impressive, but not a patch, apparently, on the Wagnerian debauches of the company’s heyday. Disruption Theory’s crew had huddled together, outnumbered by Karyotech Pharma’s teams of scientists and philosophers, lawyers and administrators, but Daniel had seemed completely at ease, glad-handing a group of investment managers, taking the arm of one of the chief scientists and walking away through a stand of tree ferns, deep in conversation. Later, he’d taken Chloe to meet their host. Ada Morange, who had suffered from an exotic variant of lymphoma for twenty years and required a hospital’s worth of advanced medical technology to keep her alive, sat in a carbon-fibre wheelchair within a bower of ferns and orchids. Chloe, slightly tipsy from three glasses of vintage champagne, wondered if she should curtsy when Daniel introduced her. The thin ravaged old woman, with her fierce gaze and cap of synthetic hair white as snow, had a queenly presence.
One of her assistants bent to explain who Chloe was; the entrepreneur fixed Chloe with her dark gaze, saying, ‘Daniel tells me that you have a talent for finding the strange and new.’
‘I spend a lot of time on the streets.’
‘One day something will come through that will amaze us all. Perhaps you will be the first to see it.’
‘Please enjoy our party,’ one of the assistants had said, before Chloe could think of a reply, and that was that, for the interview.
Nevers said, ‘She’s one of those people who think they can change history. I’d like to ask her what makes her think she has the right. By the way, how did you enjoy that little display in Dagenham?’
There it was.
Chloe thought of the two policewomen and the BAT officer, of Eddie Ackroyd. It wouldn’t surprise her in the least to discover that Eddie was feeding information to the feds.
She said, ‘I thought that the Hazard Police are trying to close down people who deal in illegal imports. Why would you be interested in a silly little breakout?’
‘Was that what it was?’
Chloe, with a sharp uptick of unease, saw the other policeman go into Ram’s tech suite. She said, ‘Sure. Just another snake cult.’
‘Conan the Barbarian,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘Great little film. Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Earl Jones. Arnie is searching for the man who killed his mother, finds what he thinks is a harmless cult. Except, as it turns out, it’s a lot more than that. You never know what a silly little cult might grow into, never know when one of their so-called breakouts might become a problem. Start infecting innocent people, spreading…The trouble with this Elder Culture stuff is that we don’t know what any of it really does. It’s completely outside our experience. We’re like a bunch of toddlers hitting an atom bomb with hammers.
‘I used to work in the drug squad. I saw some sights then I can’t forget. Shine isn’t too bad at first. Users become comatose, have vivid dreams. But those heavenly visions turn into terrible nightmares, real heart-stoppers, unless users up the dose. Soon, they have to take massive amounts just to maintain, and the residue destroys their circulatory systems. People lose arms, legs, they have strokes…And meq is much worse. Repetitive behaviour, full-blown psychotic attacks, self-harm, what users call wilding.
‘The first dead meqhead I saw had killed herself by banging her head against the floor until she fractured her skull, turned her brain to jelly. Her kid was in the next room. A four-year-old girl, watching TV. Too frightened to talk for more than six months afterwards. Some people say, well, that’s what happens if you use illegal drugs. But meq and shine are far worse than anything we had before the Jackaroo came. We can’t handle them. And what does it say about us,’ Nevers said, in a level, serious voice, holding Chloe’s gaze, ‘when just about the first thing we do when we reach other worlds is look for stuff to get us high? That when we find things that are a cross between animals and machines, all we can think to do with them is squirt extracts of their blood into our veins. That’s some sorry shit, right there.’
‘And that’s an impressive speech.’
Chloe was wondering if she was supposed to agree with him, to renounce her work right there and then.
‘You and I know it isn’t all shiny new toys, don’t we?’ Nevers said.
‘But the difference is, maybe, you see the worst in people, and I hope for something better.’
‘That we’ll find enlightenment, make the Jackaroo worlds into utopias, that kind of thing?’
‘Why not? Why measure us by the worst we do?’
‘Like the New Galactic Navy, for instance?’
‘That didn’t have anything to do with Elder Culture tech,’ Chloe said.
‘They killed themselves right after you talked to them. Can’t have been a nice feeling.’
‘It was six weeks later.’ She knew that it sounded defensive, knew that he knew it too, and felt a hot twist of anger. She’d been through talking therapy, afterwards, she’d put it behind her, and now Nevers and the select committee wanted to dig up the bodies and use them against her.
Nevers said, ‘You get involved with people who do something stupid, it isn’t your fault, but it stays with you. I’ve been there myself.’
‘I can’t really discuss it,’ Chloe said. ‘Not until after I’m called back to the select committee, anyway.’