The Forgotten City Read Free Page A

beliefs .” The hologram face of the self-esteem attendant, glowing in the darkness, paused to smile at Eli, and the absolute serenity of her conviction made it completely impossible for him to continue believing that she was a real person who could actually see him – unless she happened to be an attractive, perceptive woman who was also visually impaired or mildly to acutely insane. That way it was possibly conceivable that she could mistake the person she saw before her – the pale, shaking imp-breed with sweat damp spreading across his shirt – with someone to whom the words in control and strong were applicable.
    Even to Eli, it didn’t seem likely. “Sorry,” Eli whispered to the hologram. “It’s not you, it’s … well, actually, it is you. I’m very sorry.”
    He reached out and triggered the shut-down sequence, and the attendant’s certainty slipped into a wistful kind of disappointment before her image faltered and vanished. That look was all too familiar to Eli. Usually it followed failing someone’s expectations and came before an unavoidably bumpy guilt trip. And while disappointing a computer program might have been an all-time personal low, he really didn’t have time to dwell on it. Getting underground with all his body parts attached and intact needed to be his all-consuming thought at present. A tech-neutralizing ebomb, set off by gangsters still hunting Androt rebels, had paralysed the external security of his bunker workshop, so he’d brought along the esteem-machine to use its neural circuits in rebooting the system. At first he’d been all about focus and speed, but then the attendant’s voluptuous encouragements had distracted him.
    “ Stupid ,” Eli whispered, prising up the esteem-machine’s hard cover. “ Focus. Focus .”
    Behind him, the twisted pitch-black silence of the transflyer graveyard exploded into a metallic crash and reverberating screech. Eli fumbled the machine and dropped it with a thud. He spun around, his night-vision glasses picking up heat shadows moving through the darkness. The specs framed and reframed the figures, feeding back their stats into Eli’s new front-core implant. Gangsters. Members of the Crook’d Town Pride – in a hunting formation and closing in fast.
    Eli fell to his knees and dug frantically into the dirt with both hands, unearthing his security’s access box. He fused the esteem-machine’s CPU with the disarm function and waited for the connection. His breath steamed out in front of him, coming fast and ragged. At first nothing happened, then a distant mechanical whir started up beneath his boots. He jumped back as the dirt caved in to reveal a hidden spiral stairwell. Shielding his eyes, he ran through the rising dust cloud, heavy with the scents of must and old metal. He crashed down the stairs, triggering the re-close when he was halfway down, only just rolling clear of the vaulted doors as they slammed shut with a shuddering boom to seal the entrance.
    Eli sat in the dark gulping back his gasps, listening for intruders, but the only sounds, apart from his breathing, were the re-settling metal and the usual laboratory beep-clattery. The relief left him lightheaded and he silently counted back to stop the faint. When the feeling passed, he clutched the wall and stood.
    “Lights up,” he whispered.
    From above, the glow of high-power fluoros flickered then flared, shunting on all the way down the length of an enormous bunker warehouse. It had been a transflyer crusher bay and recommissioning workshop in its former life, but Eli had converted it into his secret laboratory, and had been busy filling it with experiments and inventions. The tracker team had transferred most of its equipment and possessions here from its room in Moris-Isles, though they really hadn’t had that much. He, Silho and Jude had lost virtually everything in the bomb raids, Copernicus had managed to recover some of his weapons collection and Diega had brought