She swung in her chair to face Vardy. Her digital figure continued its adventures. “Would you be scared?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m scared of all sorts of things.”
“Would you?”
“There’s no shortage of assassin-sects out there.”
“Exactly.” Collingswood had nicked members of a few herself. Sisters of the Noose, Nu-Thugees, theologies of Nietzschean kitsch. They were like the cruder readers of Colin Wilson and de Sade, aficionados of Sotos and a certain genre of trite “transgression,” an inverted BBC moralism. They glorified what they quaintly thought the will, slandered humanity as sheep, maundered murder. Their banality did not mean they were never dangerous, did not perform atrocities for the glory of themselves, whatever Lovecraftian deity they illiterately decided wanted their offerings, their orientalist’s Kali, or whomever. Even as they killed you, you’d hold them in contempt.
“Well, they aren’t like that lot,” Vardy said. “They’re only mercenaries sort of contingently. The point of a gun isn’t the killing but the gun. At first it was more generally pagan as it were.”
“Care to fill an old man in?” said Baron. “Sorry to intrude on this.” Vardy and Collingswood glanced at each other, until she smirked.
“Did you ever meet any?” she said to Vardy.
“Do you mind?” Baron said.
“They got sick, boss, back in the day,” she said. “But I could never work out what it was about the guns.”
An arcane disease had taken their ur-tribe and made their life infectious. What they touched would jostle, tables would tap, chairs would tap, books dance, the inanimate as boisterous and alarmed as any newborns. Midas couldn’t eat a sandwich made of gold, but no more could one of these vectors, Life-oid Marys, eat the bread and cheese slices all abruptly eager to run around.
“It was a mutation,” Vardy said. He said it carefully and with neutral distaste. “An adaptive mutation.”
“Is that bad?” Collingswood said, at the sight of his face.
“Bad for whom? Mutation saves, apparently.” Perhaps it was because of the careful grooming husbandry necessary for a flintlock, that fussy lead-barking animal; perhaps repressed resentment at life: whatever, it became only their firearms they made alive, in quieter, less motile ways—what weapons they wielded became selfish-gene machines. “The bullets are gun-eggs,” Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched. “What I never got’s why all that makes them all badass.”
“Because they look after their flocks,” Vardy said. “And find them nests.” He looked at his watch.
“If you say so. So someone’s getting totally killed,” Collingswood said. “So who the fuck’s paying their way? I’m not getting much. And what that means bollock knows.” If her attempts at projection, remote viewing, sensory tickling, nightwalk sniffery, drift-jamming and a codewar flutter were not yielding any information, then a cowl was for certain draped over her quarries.
“Vardy,” said Baron, “where d’you think you’re going? Oy.”
“Leave it, boss,” Collingswood said. “Let Mystic Pizza do his thing. I want to sort out this gunfarmer stuff. We don’t need Doc Vision for a money-trail, surely?”
PETE DWIGHT WONDERED IF HE HAD CHOSEN THE RIGHT CAREER. IT was not that he was a particularly bad police officer: there had been no complaints, no dressings-down. But he was never relaxed. He spent his uniformed days queasy with low-level anxiety, gnawed by the sense that he must be doing things wrong. It was going to give him an ulcer or something.
“Alright?” The man who greeted him was a plainclothes officer Pete recognised, though he could not remember his name.
“Alright, mate?”
“Seen Baron around?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Pete said. “But Kath’s in the back. What do you want with them nutters?” Pete laughed collegially and was suddenly terrified that the man was part of the very cult task force he was mocking. But, no, that was not where he knew him from, and anyway the bloke was laughing in turn, and heading for the rear of the station.
In the main room, among the clatter of keyboards, Simone Ball was leafing through her paperwork. She was in her midthirties, loved classic animated films, and was an enjoyer of, though not a frequent participator in, European travel. She had been a support worker for the police for seven years. She suspected her husband was cheating on her, and was bewildered that she did not mind very much.
“Where’s Kath?” a man asked her. She recognised him, and she waved him