Coldbrook (Hammer)(112)

‘Why?’

And he told Holly everything. About what he’d been forced to do down here, and about Vic, and the Inquisitor, though he had trouble explaining what he could not comprehend.

‘But what happened to you?’ he asked. ‘What’s through there?’

‘There’s nothing through there,’ she said. ‘Gaia . . .’ She barked a bitter laugh. ‘Great name Melinda came up with there. Gaia had its apocalypse forty years ago.’

‘Forty years . . .’ Jonah said, and the shock was profound. This has all happened before.

‘There are survivors,’ Holly said. ‘I emerged close to their Coldbrook and met Drake. He told me a little.’

‘But the thing that came through,’ Jonah said. ‘All those things in Control. Forty years old?’

‘They call them furies.’

‘Furies. Good name.’

‘But there’s hope!’ Holly said.

‘Hope?’ he blurted, feeling the attention of something unknowable focused on the back of his neck. He glanced around, but there was nothing to see. When he looked back Holly had her eyes closed.

‘There’s hope hidden in the deep basements of their Coldbrook,’ she said. ‘His name’s Mannan, and he’s immune to the furies’ bite.’

‘Immune,’ Jonah said. He breathed in the word and let it settle. In his mind’s eye he saw that Inquisitor monster watching him, waiting.





6


Jonah poured a drink while Holly fired up a laptop. As she accessed the CCTV log to see what had happened moments before the power outage, she recalled the Gaia survivors projecting images of her own world’s destruction onto fluid screens. Her own technology suddenly seemed inferior; the program froze for a few seconds, screen flickering. She felt disassociated from what she was doing, as if she had left a part of herself back through the breach, and she realised that no one knew what effect passing through might have.

‘Maybe I’ve doomed myself,’ she muttered.

‘I think we’ve all done that,’ Jonah said. He placed a glass containing warm orange juice beside her.

‘I always said you should have let me show you how to use these things,’ Holly said.

‘I can use computers.’

‘Sure. But you don’t understand them.’ She sat back and viewed the screen, tapping the mouse button to advance the log instant by instant.

‘That’s what you’re paid for.’ Jonah sipped his own juice and stared at his glass, and she knew that he was thinking the same as her.

‘So, the Inquisitor,’ she said, failing to sound casual.

‘What did your Drake tell you?’ Jonah asked.

She shrugged. ‘Not much. Just that it was there too.’

‘He haunts me,’ Jonah said, and then he stretched back in his chair and closed his eyes. Holly glanced sidelong at him and saw an old man made older by this disaster. Then she concentrated on scanning systems until she found what she was looking for.

‘Well, seems I’m owed overtime. And a bonus. Because I can tell you why the power went off.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘Maybe.’ She froze the screen and turned the laptop to him.

Jonah leaned on her shoulder and glanced at the screen. ‘What am I looking at?’

‘Schematic. Look.’ Holly pointed at the routings indicated, and the red-boxed area that showed where the problem was. ‘There’s a duct around the core. Carries cables from the ancillary generator to feed Coldbrook’s life-supports and energy requirements. And it’s f*cked.’

‘So what f*cked it?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Can you unf*ck it?’

Holly laughed, unused to hearing Jonah swearing so harshly.

‘What?’

‘You. Trying to sound American. “Unf*ck.” Would they know that word in your Welsh valleys?’

‘Unf*ck the problem, Miss Wright. That’s an order.’

‘It’s Ms I’m a modern American lady.’ She tapped a few more keys and memorised the location of the fault, trying pointlessly to access some of the webcams that had been set up in the duct. Their playback logs had been damaged. Power surge, she guessed. She tried some other routes, working hard, concentrating, and if it hadn’t been for the darkness that was all she could access she might have believed for a moment that nothing was wrong.