Rob Grant - Colony_玖贝云文库

Synopsis:

Lifetimes ago, the generation ship Willflower set out, manned by the cream of

humanity, on a mission to colonize the stars. But by the 10th generation, things are

starting to go badly wrong. The only man who can save the ship is astrophysical Dr

Piers Morton. Only he's not an astrophysical engineer, he's not a doctor, he's not

even Piers Morgan, and all that remains of his body is his head, his spinal column

and absolutely nothing else. Better yet, somebody on board is trying to kill what's

left of him…

Colony

By

ROB GRANT

To my Lily and my Rose

PART ONE

Lucky Town

'Who would true valour see,

Let him come hither.

One, here, will constant be,

Come wind, come weather'

(John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's

Progress)

1

Eddie O'Hare considers himself to be the unluckiest man in the entire cosmos. And,

bluntly, he's got a damned fine point.

He's standing at the smoked glass window that takes up an entire wall of a top

floor room in a hastily built hotel, staring down at the fickle crowds thronging the

neon splattered street below. His stomach is gurgling like a freshly skewered rat

dying slowly in a stinking sewer. Tomorrow, the streets will be empty. The town will

die. There'll be no reason for it any more. And unless his luck changes, unless the

universe stops throwing snake eyes with Eddie's dice, Eddie's going to die along

with it.

In his sweating fist, he's clutching his one last hope. A single gaming chip. A fifty.

He's trying hard to think of the number he should place it on. That's all he has to do:

pick the right number. A thirty-six to one shot.

If he can just do this one thing right: one right thing right, then all he has to do is

pick another right number. That can be done. That's do-able.

And then, the last and final thing he has to do is let all those winnings ride on just

one more right number.

He has to pick three right numbers. That's all. If he can just do that. Beat those

odds.

But the thought stops as abruptly as a marathon runner with a stitch just a few

seconds after the starting gun, jerks around in agony on the side of the track, and

expires.

Maybe a hardcore gambler could convince himself he could ride that tide. But

Eddie's not even a softcore gambler. In the pornographic scale gamblers seem to

measure each other by, Eddie's not even the swimwear edition of Sports Illustrated.

He's an accountant. He can work out the odds. He can't help himself.

Forty-six thousand, six hundred and fifty-six to one…

That's what it will take to turn this sweaty gaming chip into the two and a quarter

million he owes to people who would break all of his ribs one at a time with a toffee

hammer for a handful of change.

Face it, Eddie: it's not going to happen.

Who's he trying to kid with this positivity nonsense? Good things like that hardly

ever happen to truly lucky people. And Eddie? Eddie isn't even partially lucky. The

only time Fate gives Eddie anything good is so Luck has something juicy to whisk

away from under his nose just as he's reaching out to grab it.

He opens his mouth to sigh, and his tongue actually makes a Velcro ripping

sound as it tears clear of the roof of his arid mouth. He tastes his own blood. He

imagines he'll be tasting a lot more of it before the morning. Plenty of that particular

delicacy coming his way. A few pints he'll quaff. Well, on the bright side, it should

help to ease the passage of his smashed teeth down his stomped gullet, and take

away the taste of leather toecap.

He's startled by a long creaking noise that sounds like a deck shrinking in

equatorial heat on a doldrums-bound ship. It's his stomach.

He looks down at the doomed street again. He starts to count people who are

laughing. He gives up when it starts to become clear that absolutely everyone is

laughing. Every single member of the crowd below is giggling, chuckling or

guffawing with that unbridled delight normally only enjoyed by children, the freshly

in love, and undeserving movie award winners.

It seems everyone, everywhere is relishing life and having fun, except for Eddie

O'Hare, who will never smile again.

Because he owes two and a quarter million to…

To…

His reflection looks back at him from the blue smoked glass. A sad ghost full of

pity for a soon to be sad ghost. The spectre shakes its head in sympathetic disbelief.

The cruel twist is: it's not Eddie's fault that he's living this nightmare. He didn't

actually do anything wrong. He didn't actually steal from the people he can't bring

himself to name in his thoughts.

The money was stolen by a computer. Not a hacker. Not a living-flesh human

trickster using superior technical skills to break through firewalls within firewalls,

hack through uncrackable chains of encrypted passwords, and bypass the most

sophisticated alarm system in security history. It was stolen from Eddie's computer

by Eddie's computer.

Eddie doesn't have any idea where the money went. One nanosecond it was there,

the next it wasn't. No sign the system had been accessed from the outside. The

computer just up and disappeared the money. And for reasons currently

unfathomable to Eddie, it left behind an electronic trail that led to him.

He's been framed for a non-existent crime by a mass of wires and hot electrical

circuits.

Now, you try explaining that to the… to those kind of people.

No. Eddie was left with just two alternatives: somehow replace the money before

it was missed, or spend the rest of eternity as a small portion of the foundations of

some unfinished hotel no one would ever check into, with ice picks lodged in his

decomposing testicles.

He liquidified as much of his assets as possible in the time — what a meagre haul

that had seemed, set against his ludicrous debt — and headed for what he

considered to be the fairest casino in town.

It had taken him seventeen years of virtuous thrift and parsimonious self-denial to

amass his pitiful savings. It took considerably less than seventeen minutes to lose it

all.

So now, here is Eddie O'Hare, in a free hotel suite the casino reserves for its

biggest high-rollers, for the people who lose the most money the quickest, clutching

a fifty chip some big-time winner has tossed him in pity. And that chip is the last

thing between Eddie and a very brutal…

Eddie sees the big hole appear in the door before he hears the sound of the

gunshot. The huge smoked window he's gazing through cracks across the middle

and the top half seems to sigh, then collapses without protest down towards the thrill

below.

The door has already been kicked down and two men are standing in the

doorway, silhouettes against the corridor's glow. Tight-fitting grey suits, ties as thin

as stiletto blades, trousers slightly too short, exposing fluorescent pink socks above

black suede loafers.

The uniform.

How did they find out so fast? How did they find him so fast? Eddie doesn't

really have time to think, as the men start to cross the room briskly and businesslike

in his direction. Just doing a job. Dum de dum.

Eddie briefly contemplates hurling himself after the window. Then he realizes that

would be fairly silly, since that's probably what the men are going to do to him, if

he's lucky.

The first man reaches him. Eddie sees his features. He has startlingly red hair.

He's not smiling, but he's not looking angry, either. For some reason, Eddie finds

this reassuring.

Wrongly.

The man grabs him firmly but not violently under his arms as the second man

arrives, his gun freshly holstered. He's bald, this other one. Shiny bald. He grabs

Eddie behind the knees, and swings him up. Hammocked between the two men,

Eddie feels strangely guilty that he didn't put up some kind of a fight. Some sort of

struggle at least. A verbal protest, even.

They swing him back, ready to pitch him through the window. Eddie's aware of

the aftershave of the man holding his arms. He thinks it's quite nice. In other

circumstances, he might have asked for the brand name.

One of the men speaks. The redhead.

'Mr Bevadino would really like to know where his money is.'

Eddie looks out of the window at what has suddenly become a beautiful night

sky. The moon really does look blue, just like in the song. He thinks about the long

fall he's about to undertake.

He's not looking forward to it.

It's not the prospect of the crushing, mangling impact that fills him with dread —

he believes that he'll be dead before he's splattered over the pavement like so much

regurgitated Saturday night kebab. No, what he's really dreading is having his life

flash before him. It was bad enough going through it once. Such a nothing of a life.

Such a safe, riskless, funless excuse for a life.

'Last chance, pilgrim. It's a busy night.'

A thought strikes Eddie, and he voices it. 'Who's Mr Bevadino?'

The two men make eye contact over Eddie's horizontal body.

'Ahmed Bevadino? Ring any bells?'

Even though he knows the name means nothing to him, Eddie genuinely tries to

remember. He makes a real effort. That's Eddie for you. He doesn't want these men

angry with him. He shakes his head. 'I… sorry. No. Don't think I recall a Mr

Bevadino.'

'You don't?'

'Sorry.' And then, feeling this isn't enough, Eddie adds: 'I know a Mr Beverley.'

What is he thinking of? Is he hoping they'll shrug, say 'That'll do', and launch him

out of the window anyway? Bevadino? Beverley? That's close enough? Get a grip,

Eddie.

The bald man with the holstered gun lowers Eddie's legs. 'You'd better not be

wasting my time.'

Or what? Eddie thinks. But he doesn't say it.

Baldy walks to the door, which is prone. He looks down, then looks over at his

colleague. 'This is 888.'

The man with an arm lock on Eddie says: 'You sure? It looked like 886.'

'Yeah. There's a little nick out of the last 8.'

'A little nick?'

'Yeah. Tiny chip in the number. Makes it look like a 6.'

Redhead releases Eddie and steps back to what Eddie thinks is probably perfect

karate kick distance. Eddie hopes he never gets to find out. 'What's your name,

pilgrim?'

Baldy takes some folded sheets of paper out of his back pocket.

'My name?' Eddie's mind is galloping now. Should he give them his real name?

What if these men also work for the people Eddie's angered, as well as Mr

Bevadino? What if his name's down on their list, only later on? Maybe next, even.

They could be working their way along the corridor. They said it was a busy night,

didn't they? On the other hand, what if Eddie's not on the list, gives them a false

name, and it turns out to be the name of someone who is on the list? Perhaps even

the name of the wretched unfortunate they thought they were about to defenestrate.

For Eddie, that's not far fetched, it's a real possibility. Eddie believes he really might

be that unlucky.

'Edward.' Eddie hopes that might be enough. It isn't.

Red reaches into Eddie's pocket and tugs out a pathetically slim wallet, with an

unnecessary 'Excuse me.' He flips through the maxed-out credit cards and finds

some ID. 'Edward O'Hare?'

Eddie nods.

'Like in the airport?'

Eddie nods. He's about to launch into his well-polished story about O'Hare

airport, but decides, just in time, that this isn't a terrific platform. Out of the corner

of his eye, he tries not to notice Baldy thumbing through his lists for Eddie's name.

Lots of sheets of paper. Lots of limbs to twist, digits to break and bodies to hurl.

The pavements are going to get plenty messy tonight.

'You're not Harrison Dopple?' Red's comparing Eddie with the photograph on the

ID. It's probably a very old picture. The only photo identification in Eddie's wallet is

his sexual activity clearance card. It expired about a decade ago.

Eddie tries as hard as he can not to look anything like anything any Harrison

Dopple might possibly look like. Hard to pull off, given he's never even heard of the

guy. Still, he tries. He straightens his stance, in case Dopple is short, and tilts his

head to one side, trying to offer an un-Dopplelike profile. 'Not me.'

Red hands him back his wallet. 'What can I say? You're not our next

appointment. This is uncustomarily unprofessional.'

'Don't mention it.'

'I'd hate you to think we go around throwing people out of windows willy-nilly.'

Willy-nilly? Eddie snorts playfully, trying to suggest the very thought is

preposterous.

Baldy is standing impatiently in the corridor now. Keen to make up for lost time.

Keen to keep the next 'appointment'. Red looks over, nods, and crosses towards

him. Eddie realizes that, for some reason, he's waiting until the men have gone to

breathe properly.

'Like I said: it's a busy night.' Red pauses in Eddie's shattered doorway. 'And if I

were you, pilgrim, I'd renew that sex clearance card.'

Eddie smiles and nods. 'I'll do that.'

Red winks. 'You never know when you might get lucky.'

2

It's a strange night in a strange town. A town with just one night to live.

In the record books, it's Afortunado City. To the people who use it, it's simply

Lucky Town.

Its one, long street is a chaos of humanity. Thousands of people who will have no

need of money tomorrow, eager to spend what they've got, and the rest of the

population just as eager to relieve them of it. There are just a few short hours for the

dealers to deal, the grifters to grift and the hookers to hook. Prices are inflating by

the second.

Stepping out of the hotel on the very perimeter of town, Charles Perry Gordon

experiences a bolt of heat in his stomach. The closest he's ever come to a sense of

completeness. Fulfilment. He imagined this town. It sprang out of his mind's eye.

He conjured it up, reclining in his big leather chair, at his desk in his office in Rio.

And here it is.

He had nothing to do with the architecture, or the technical nuts and bolts side of

constructing Afortunado. He merely predicted it. It was a place that, to Gordon's

mind, simply had to exist. The Project is the biggest operation ever undertaken by

the human race, with a budget to match. It employs tens of thousands of people and

pays them extravagantly well. Naturally, they need somewhere to dispose of their

income and blow off steam. And Afortunado was born to give them somewhere to

do just that. A pleasure city, carved out of the unforgiving desert of snow. An

'O-ice-is' it's been called. And though Gordon's seen it many times in his head, this

is his first brush with the wonderful reality of it.

Standing at the top of the steps, he looks right into the human tumult thronging the

main street like a vast, slow-motion particle explosion. He listens to the complex yet

primitive music of human voices clamouring for attention.

To his left, he squints at the shimmering heat haze of the hotwall, the thermal

barrier that separates the town from the lethal wilderness of the Antarctic peaks that

surround it. Across the street, a group of youths in Bermuda shorts, fledgling

goatees and brightly coloured shirts are tossing empty beer cans through the barrier,

just to watch them flare and vanish. Curious to see them, in their casual summery

gang uniforms, just metres away from a hostile desert of snow. Without the hotwall,

their life expectancy would be measured in minutes.

Sometime tomorrow, when the last of the temporary town's inhabitants have

straggled on to the last of the transports, the wall will be powered down. Within a

week, Afortunado City will be buried under tons of compacted ice and snow,

reclaimed by the wasteland from which it was carved. Gordon predicted that, too.

'Hey, pilgrim! Need a lift?'

Gordon looks down the steps, where an ancient oriental man is looking up at him

hopefully. There is a lighted sign on his headband, flashing the promise: Taxi. 'A lift?'

There are no passenger vehicles in Afortunado. No need, Gordon predicted. The

entire strip is less than a kilometre long. No journey longer than fifteen minutes on

foot.

The taximan turns around and hikes a thumb over his shoulder. He's offering

Gordon a piggyback. The old guy is eighty if he's a day. His tattooed limbs look like

flimsy bulrushes loosely wrapped in a pirate's treasure map. A good gust of wind

would snap him at the knees. Gordon shakes his head. 'I'll walk, thanks.'

Without dropping his smile, the taximan makes a strange but clearly sexually

insulting gesture, barks a bizarre exclamation, clearly an expletive, and jogs off

towards the next hotel, disappearing into the blast of people.

Gordon sighs. People disgust Gordon, on the whole. Especially people who are

inferior to him. Which is, in fact, most people. He strolls down the steps after the

taximan.

Technically, he should go straight to the Project, but he can't resist at least one

short inspection of the town that sprang from his mind. Who would blame him?

Besides, he still has some money left over from the trip, for emergencies that never

happened. Might as well spend it. Tomorrow, it will be so much waste paper for

him.

He's pictured this scene a thousand times, but in his imagination he didn't hear the

sounds: the cacophony of uncomplementary music duelling painfully out of

neighbouring bars, restaurants and casinos — the techno throb invading the

Dixieland, which in turn is polluted by the string quartet, which yields to the rock

anthem; the indistinguishable jabber of hawkers, beggars and pleasure seekers,

melding into a pulsating discord of voices. And he never imagined the smells: the hot

rasp of frying oils, animal fats, spices and aromatics from all the world's cultures

streaming out of the gutter cooks' food wagons; the colognes and perfumes

assaulting the nostrils, but failing to mask the all too human fragrances of sweat,

vomit and excrement. Disgusting, yet strangely thrilling.

Gordon strolls on. A woman leans out of a darkened doorway and offers him a

hand job. He looks down at her proffered palm which sports a genetically grafted

vagina. He smiles and thanks her, politely turning her down.

Even in the midst of all the melee, Gordon feels perfectly safe. There are no

police in Afortunado. The rule of law is preserved by an extremely efficient

consortium of organized-crime groups. Gordon had foreseen this would be the best

system, and the franchise had been put out to tender to the top contenders. An

alliance of Las Vegas mafiosi, Russian mafyia, and Hong Kong triads had secured

the job, portions of which were sub-contracted to smaller groups. It all works

terribly well. Violent crime is nonexistent, except for the odd over-enthusiastic debt

collection incident. The streets are safe.

Just as this thought flits through Gordon's mind, a savage blow to his kidneys

drops him heavily to the ground. He looks up to see his assailant: it's the old taximan

hurtling along at an unlikely pace, with a fat business-suited man on his back. It

could have been an accident that the passenger's briefcase poleaxed Gordon, but he

doubts it. As a curse forms on his lips there is a dull explosion overhead.

Gordon looks up. A large sheet of blue smoked glass is tumbling from the top

floor of the Hotel Felicity. The crowd below it does its best to scatter, but the

bodies are packed pretty tightly on Easy Street tonight, and a few are too close to

the impact as the window shatters on the pavement, sending dozens of large,

potentially lethal projectiles towards the terrified stragglers.

If the taximan hadn't knocked him down, Gordon would have been among them.

Lucky man.

He picks himself up and looks around. There are ten, maybe a dozen injured.

Some quite seriously. The town's one hospital is a small, flimsy affair: no traffic, no

violent crime, why would any other provision be necessary? A small emergency

room, a burns unit and a cardiac ward, that's all. Anything more chronic would have

to be shipped out.

Gordon dusts himself down and steps over a screaming woman. The screeching

is annoying him. He wants to get away from it.

He sees the sign for the Felicity Casino, and decides he might as well spend his

money in there.

He kicks away the injured hand that's clawing at him and skips down the steps.

3

Eddie is looking out of the wall-to-ceiling void that used to be his window. He's

staring down at the street he almost became a part of. Another man might be thinking

what a lucky escape he's just had. Another man might take a glorious lungful of

sweetly processed air and bless the entire concept of existence, might take a moment

to wonder at the bizarrely sturdy fragility of life.

Not Eddie.

Eddie's frozen in the glaring truck headlights of fear. Eddie's thinking he's just had

a little taster of his immediate future. An amuse-gueule to whet his appetite for the

bone-grinding bloody terror of the slasher movie fate inexorably awaiting him. In his

right hand, he's turning the sweaty betting chip over and over.

This is wrong.

Eddie has to do something. He has to try something, or the awful terrors of his

imaginings will most certainly come to pass. But this is precisely Eddie's problem.

Eddie's a do-nothing guy. He unconsciously subscribes to the theory that the best

way to tackle a terrible twist of events is the old, dismal, double-pronged non-attack:

first and foremost, do nothing, absolutely nothing at all, because doing something,

anything, might very well make the terrible thing worse, and second, the even more

pathetic strategy: hope against all the laws of logic and reason that the terrible thing

will go away and never happen. It doesn't matter to Eddie that this approach almost

never works. It doesn't matter to him that this lifelong passion for uneventfulness has

left him with a dry, unenviable past; a life not worth remembering even in the

drastically truncated flashback form supposedly induced by a lethal plunge from a

high building.

The most peculiar aspect of this non-living approach to life is that Eddie thinks

himself 'sensible'. And if you could poll any of Eddie's acquaintances, they would

concur that Eddie is indeed a sensible guy. Sensible is the word that comes to mind.

So here's old Eddie, sensibly waiting to have the life smashed out of him, when

there's another muffled explosion and another shattering of glass, and he sees

another window lazily tumbling down the side of the Hotel Felicity's hasty façade.

For a terrible moment Eddie's terror finds a new, higher gear. He thinks it's the …

men, coming back for him. Then he realizes he has no more window left to shatter.

The… fellows are paying a visit next door.

Eddie listens with a peculiarly interested detachment. It's as if the scene that had

just been rehearsed in his life is now being replayed in room 886, only properly, for

real. Eddie was just a stand-in. Now his part is being played by the real star, the real

Harrison Dopple, and Eddie's curious to hear how he might have performed his role

better.

There are angry shouts, Dopple's voice, presumably, and loud, dangerous threats,

again Dopple's. There are crude expletives and loud violent curses, counterpointed

by quiet, dangerous mumbles. There is smashing furniture and scuffling — major

scuffling — and the strangely flat, unmovielike sound of fists impacting on flesh and

bone. There is, in short, a big kerfuffle.

Eddie shakes his head. He wishes he could have done that. He wishes he could

have kerfuffled more. Or a little, at least. That's what a real man does. Eddie didn't

kerfuffle at all, not a bit of it. He minded his manners. Harrison's not minding his

manners. He's not trying to ingratiate himself with a couple of cold-blooded

murdering bastards intent on his demise. He's fighting for his life. Eddie imagines,

rather romantically, that the unseen Mr Dopple must live one heck of a life, to make it

worth all the kerfuffling. A thrilling life, full of promise, excitement and gusto. A big,

exhilarating roller coaster of a life. A life to kerfuffle for.

Eddie is actually beginning to feel envious of the man who is being murdered next

door.

And worse, much worse than that, Eddie will very soon come to wish he really

had been Harrison Dopple. He'll come to consider being splattered all over the

pavement as preferable to his own fate.

There is a dreadful silence next door, now.

It's broken by the start of a count.

'One…'

Suddenly, Dopple's voice changes tenor and volume, and now he's speaking very

fast, very low. Pleas, not threats.

But the grim count continues.

'Two…'

And all the while, Dopple is gibbering his soft entreaties.

And from the cadence of the count, Eddie realizes that it's never going to reach

four. But they're just threatening Harrison, surely. Surely Eddie can't be about to see

a human being murdered before his eyes. Surely they're not going to count out…

'Three.'

The entreaties stop, and there's a double grunt. Eddie correctly estimates it to be

precisely the double grunt generated by the effort it takes two men to launch a third

man to his death out of a top-floor hotel window void.

Eddie looks away, but too late. Too late to avoid registering the look on Harrison

Dopple's suddenly silent face as gravity grabs him at the top of his upward arc, and

he starts his inexorably fatal acceleration downwards. That look will be burned into

Eddie's brain for ever. What's more, Eddie is brutally aware that his mind will file it,

as it always files his most horrific recollections, in exactly the same image library it

stores all his erotic memories, so it can crop up randomly as he approaches the peak

of his solo passion and deflate him instantly, and without hope of resuscitation.

Rob Grant - Colony

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