Legacy

  Darren J Hale

  Legacy

  © 2020, Darren J. Hale. All rights reserved.

  The right of Darren J. Hale to be identified as the author of this work is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Except as provided by the Copyright Act 1988 no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any

  resemblance to actual persons living or dead

  is purely coincidental.

  Cover: © 2020 bookcoversart.com

  To my Father, Emma, And Sue

  For their much-appreciated contributions

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  Also by this Author:

  Prologue

  18/07/2007:

  ‘Goodbye Daddy.’

  ‘Goodbye Veronica – for now. I’ll find a way to make this right – I promise.’ His eyes filled with tears.

  She tried to raise a hand…

  To frame his face with her palm…

  A last memory to take into her sleep.

  But she couldn’t. The cloud-like membranes had tightened around her, freezing her in place.

  Goodbye Daddy…

  …

  ‘Veronica – don’t swing so high. You’ll have another accident!’

  ‘It’s okay – I won’t.’

  …

  ‘Ouch Daddy - it hurts!’

 

  ‘You have to be careful Veronica – you’re becoming so clumsy these days. Only last week, you bumped your head so badly I had to take you to Doctor Kline. He’s going to start thinking we’re bad parents.’

  ‘Mummy – it’s bleeding – make it stop please.’

  Sob…

  There was a strange tingling as the fluid poured into her body; in through the needles in her wrists and groin; pumping through her heart and leaking through the blood in her veins. Catharsis washing away the troubles of a lifetime.

  ‘I’m sorry Doctor Kline but it’s getting worse. She tripped over the rope while she was skipping and broke her wrist.’

 

  She was always so cold…

  So detached…

  Mummy and Daddy had not been getting on so well these days.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll run some tests. Then, I think I might be able to reassure you better.’

  The crystalline blue cryogens percolated her body, washing out the scarlet until it ran clear as the life was wrung from her veins.

  ‘I’m afraid it isn’t good news. I have the results of the muscle biopsies, and it looks like she is suffering from the early stages of a condition called motor neurone disease.’

  ‘Is it bad?’ Mummy asks. Daddy’s face is stark. He knows…

  The worst…

  ‘Yes – I’m afraid it is. It’s a condition that affects the nerves that work her muscles – and they’re beginning to fail. As time goes on, she’ll gradually get weaker and weaker until her muscles no longer work at all.’

  ‘But there’s a cure?’

  Mummy has to face reality.

  ‘No – there’s no cure.’

  Mummy walks out of the doctor’s office.

  She can’t cope with the news.

  She walks out of Veronica’s life completely.

  ‘It’s okay, I’ll find a way,’ Daddy promises. She’s thirty-two years old, but still thinks of him as Daddy. She can feel his words despite the lassitude.

  ‘How’s she doing?’ he asks.

  ‘She’s stable. We’re completing the cryogen conversion now. She’ll be ready for cold sleep in about another ten minutes.’

  ‘You can’t do it – the drug’s still only in phase one testing. Anything could happen,’ someone protests. A medic she thinks. The memory grows hazy.

  ‘I have to,’ her father asserts. ‘If we have to wait another two years for it to go through testing it will be too late. She’s getting weaker by the day.’

  ‘But even now all we can hope for, is to arrest the development of the disease. Those damaged neurones won’t regenerate.’

  ‘I know – which is why we have to do it now – while she still has some life to look forward to.’

  ‘We’re using a mutated strain of the HIV virus. What happens if it reverts to form – becomes contagious again?’

  ‘We’ve removed the encapsulations sequences. Once inside the host cell, the virus is trapped.’

  ‘Unless another infection reintroduces those sequences…’ the man protests.

  ‘The risks of that happening are one in millions.’

  ‘But it could happen!’

  ‘Daddy – is he right. Is it dangerous?’ she asks meekly.

  ‘No dear – of course not…’

  The hood of the cryotube swings down. She’s barely aware as it settles as gently as a leaf on the breeze.

  A pain in my belly.

  I bleed…

  ‘Honey – are you okay?’

  ‘I’m okay Daddy – lady problems…’

  Antoine didn’t know – she hadn’t told him. She’d had fertility problems before and didn’t want to tell him. Didn’t want to break his heart. But it was over now. Six weeks and it was all over. A pain… a clot… a bleed…

  She was beginning to feel numb. They’d promised her she wouldn’t feel the cold.

  ‘There have been complications…’ the doctor advises.

  ‘What do you mean? Surely it was just another miscarriage. I’ll beat it won’t I? Just like I beat the motor neurone disease?’

  ‘Yes - that was a miracle. I still have no idea how such a thing could be possible.’

  Doctor Kline is looking older now. He’s been their family doctor for so many years. But he wasn’t to know about the gene-therapy. She’d been forbidden from telling anyone. If the FDA were to find out what he’d done…

  ‘Your blood tests showed something unexpected… Your immune system is failing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know... But the abnormalities seem to be predominantly a subgroup of cells called T4 lymphocytes.’

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘I think it might mean that you have AIDS – but I’m going to need to do another blood test to be sure.’

  In a moment, her world had turned upside down. She’d had numerous miscarriages, though she had never presumed there might be a reason why. The gene-therapy had mutated to its wild type. She was infertile… Nevertheless, she had giv
en birth to something terrible.

  ‘I can save you. But I have to have more time. Until then my dear – you must sleep.’

  To sleep…

  Subject # 2007-131-66CL

  Veronica Erqhuart

  Interred 18/07/2007

  Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome type II exotic strain: Pre-terminal

  1

  You didn’t dream in cryo’ sleep. Tammy knew this. Chilled to almost absolute temperatures, every thought, every breath, and every chemical process, from the firing of a synapse to the twitching of a muscle, failed to exist. And yet her mind perceived things she would not have thought possible. Perhaps they were her final visions crystallised at the moment of her death there on the table; visions of Ezra Caine – a saddened look on his face.

  Kyle had pointed his gun right at her.

  There’d been a flash…

  And then – nothing…

  She’d felt – nothing…

  How could she have survived without pain?

  Ezra was standing over her, grim concern chiselled in the deep furrows of his face. His features were tinged in blue and wobbled as if seen from the bottom of a deep pool.

  Two men were standing next to him. She recognised them – somehow. The first of them was wearing a suit. She knew it to be white, though her vision was a corruption in blue. He wore the suit as if it was a part of him; something as comfortable to him as skin.

  And standing next to him was a sick-looking man, stubble sprouting from his chin like broken blades of grass. His eyes were dark, and his cheeks were hollow, as if excavated by some illness. He did not look well.

  ‘She’s awake.’ The man in the suit seemed relieved.

  Ezra leaned over and took her face between his hands. Her skin burned at his touch; a feeling not unlike the thawing of frostbitten skin. He kissed her forehead. The touch of his lips kindled feelings that set every nerve aflame.

  Her vision began to clear…

  Azure warmed through rose.

  What happened?

  Where am I?

  She wanted to say the words, but her tongue had forgotten how. She managed a few indistinct syllables that passed for nothing more than a groan.

  ‘Take it easy. You’ve been through a lot.’ Ezra’s voice was softly reassuring.

  The sick-looking man grunted and turned to leave.

  Further hours had passed before she’d recovered the strength to articulate words and was able to coax movements from her tired muscles

  She was in a room. Its walls were white and sterile – a hospital room perhaps, though it lacked the attentions of white-coated doctors and nurses in prissy blue dresses that would have given it away?

  She tried to sit.

  Ezra placed a hand on her shoulder. She was being fed blood and fluids through needles in her arms and he didn’t want her to dislodge them. ‘Don’t try to move,’ he said soothingly. ‘You don’t have the strength yet.’

  He was right of course. It took the greatest of efforts just to flex her lips into a smile, and even more to twitch her little finger.

  ‘What happened to me? I remember being in a car with you and then...’

  ‘We had an accident… The car crashed and you were injured. Your spine was broken, and you almost died...’

  Perhaps it was not a dream?

  ‘I remember a gun.’

  Ezra quivered. History was repeating itself. Not so long ago, he’d awoken in a hospital, his memories fractured and incomplete – memories of a man with a scorpion tattoo – the man who’d murdered him and his family. And all he’d remembered at first, was the smoking barrel of a gun – a final image indelibly imprinted on his dying brain. ‘Kyle shot you. The bullets narrowly missed your heart,’ he explained.

  ‘But I survived?’

  ‘Yes.’ She could feel him taking her hand in his. ‘We were able to get you into a cryosuspension tube before your body could fail. Antoine was then able to repair the damage using biomimetic grafts.’

  ‘Antoine?’

  ‘A friend,’ he assured.

  ‘How long have I been under?’

  ‘Seven weeks, three days, and eleven hours – give or take.’

  ‘You’ve been counting,’ she observed.

  ‘Yes…’

  Seven weeks?

  Ezra had been in a coma for a year…

  2

  The gyrojet flashed through the sky. It was one of the two newer NovaGen FT201F’s currently in service with the WMC. Commissioned just over six months ago, the 201F was a little roomier than the “D” series model. It was a bit wider around the waist and a little longer in the body, though it had retained that familiar shark-like profile. The tail was gracefully menacing, and it had high-power turbofans that projected from its belly like a pair of pectoral fins.

  And in the mind of its single nervous passenger, it was no less intimidating than its ocean-faring counterpart...

  Jacob Conway hated heights.

  And he hated the person responsible for choosing this particular mode of transport almost as much as he hated the one who’d posted him to New Chicago in the first place – the most highly situated city state in all of the Americas. What could he possibly have done to upset them? He hadn’t applied for the job. Quite the contrary. His preference had been for the Gemini Domes in New Mexico, or Mainframe Dynamics in California. Both of these cities lay on well-established land train routes and neither one of them poked their heads any more than a few metres above ground level. Perhaps he should have turned the job down? He knew of at least three other colleagues who’d been desperate for the posting. And they were all more senior than he was.

  Did the world hate him so much?

  Alice then this!

  But you couldn’t just turn down what was one of the most prestigious and sought-after postings – not unless you were considering professional suicide.

  In fairness he’d never actually revealed his fear of heights to anyone. He’d never given the matter that much thought. He’d never had to. But now, with mushroom-like clouds whipping past on both sides, and the jaw-dropping plunge into the ruins of pre-purge cities below, his fear had become so much more palpable, and he’d been forced to endure the flight with his head between his knees.

  ‘You all right skipper?’ the pilot asked, cocking his head to one side as he gave Jacob a quick once-over.

  ‘Fine…’ Jacob replied queasily. ‘Don’t suppose you’d mind keeping your eyes on the road would you…’

  The pilot might have laughed as he turned his head away. It was hard to tell when one’s eyes were fixed firmly on the floor and you had the jet’s engines echoing in your ears.

  To any other observer, the sight of New Chicago broaching the field of clouds, would have been magnificent. A single central spire rising four kilometres from the centre of a disc, itself balanced upon a central pedestal that was as elegant as a champagne glass, its fluted mouth splayed in spokes that swept out beyond the rim before falling back to the ground one thousand metres below. It was remarkable to think that such a feat of engineering was even possible.

  God – what if it fell down…

  ‘You’d better buckle up,’ the pilot advised. ‘The approach to the disc can get a bit dicey. The convection currents can be unpredictable. Not to mention the bloody thing moves…’ With a light touch of the controls, he turned the gyrojet onto its final bearing, its nose pitching gently forwards as the airflow canopies in its wings withdrew to reveal the vehicle’s vertical lift turbofans, its engines muting to an impotent growl as they came up to speed.

  ‘Moves?’ Jacob found the notion to be more than a little disconcerting. Yes – somebody hated him!

  ‘Sure, the damn thing rocks in the wind, sometimes by a good few hundred feet or more. Those struts might look rigid, but they’re designed to allow for some play in the disc. From what I understand it’s how they get their power. Or at least, some of it...’

  Jacob felt queasy. ‘No shit…’ He chec
ked his seatbelt. He hadn’t dared take the thing off all flight. But he checked it anyway.

  The gyrojet bucked as it crossed the turbulent winds at the rim of the disc. ‘Don’t get too comfortable – there’s more to come,’ the pilot warned.

  For a moment, his comments appeared to have been nothing more than a malicious jest. The aircraft had entered in a shallow glide that brought it in high over the summits of the rimward buildings. But as it neared The Capitol, that clearance diminished by frightening degrees, and it was soon crossing the towering spires with no more than a few scant metres beneath its wings.

  And then it plunged downwards: a stomach swallowing manoeuvre that dropped them hundreds of metres in the space of a few strangled breaths.

  Jacob swallowed the bile in his throat. ‘Was that really necessary,’ he asked peevishly.

  ‘Sorry...’ The pilot sounded genuinely sympathetic. ‘The disc isn’t the only thing that moves. These towers also have a tendency to wobble. The bigger ones are the worst. Especially when you’re up near the summit. One sudden gust of wind and they’ll swat you from the sky. But you’ll be pleased to know it’s much safer down here.’

  ‘What about the walkways and the aircars?’ Jacob had been briefed on the city’s usual forms of locomotion, even if they had somehow neglected to mention the city’s propensity to move! ‘Why don’t we hear of any aircars flying into buildings. Given that they move and all?’

  ‘The aircars are flown by Artificial Intelligences that can read fluctuations in the disc’s electromagnetic aura – or some such thing. They use fusion-powered repulsors that levitate them above the disc’s electromagnetic envelope. When the disc moves, the envelope is deformed. The A.I.s read the changes and compensate accordingly, so they don’t crash…’

  ‘Good to know…’

  Jacob felt strangely unreassured. ‘And that’s why the aircars can’t operate away from the disc?’ They had thought to include that particular gem in his orientation!

  ‘Most of them at any rate… I gather a few vehicles belonging to council members are powered by turbojets that allow them to operate beyond the rim. But those might just be rumours.’

  ‘FT201 flight Bravo – October – Mike – seven zero one. You are cleared for final approach to landing bay seven-niner. I repeat…’ A voice crackled through the radio, just part of an on-going banter that had been passing between the co-pilot and New Chicago’s air traffic control throughout their approach. Jacob had been mentally tuning it out.