Read Online Kraken by China Miéville - Free Book Online Page A

“I’m just saying that if we wanted to, we could approach this a whole other way. Where were you on the night of, et cetera and so on. But you and us can scratch each other’s backs. We want insight and you want protection. Win-win, mate.”
    “So why are you threatening me?” Billy said. “And I told you, I don’t have any insight …”
    “You going to tell me,” Baron interrupted, tilting his chin in a come now look, “you’ve got no sense of the bloody awesomeness of that thing?”
    “… The squid?”
    “The Archi-bloody-teuthis , Billy Harrow, yes. The giant squid. That thing in the jar. That. That got took. And is been and gone. Are you really surprised someone might worship it? Don’t you want a better idea why? What the stakes are? You know stuff’s going on, now. Don’t you want to know more?”
    “There’s new life and new civilisations,” Collingswood said. She did her face in a hand mirror.
    Billy shook his head and said, “Bloody hell.”
    “Nah,” Collingswood said. “That’s a different unit.”
    Billy closed his eyes, opened them at the sound of the glasses vibrating on the table. Collingswood and Baron looked at each other. “Did he just …?” Collingswood said. She looked at Billy again, with interest.
    “We know you’ve been unsettled,” Baron said carefully. “Makes you a great candidate …”
    “ Unsettled?” Billy thought of the jarred man. “That’s one way to put it. And now you want me to, to go looking stuff up for you? That’s it?”
    “For a starter.”
    “I do not think so,” Billy said. “I’d rather go home and forget all about whatever’s going on.”
    “Right,” said Collingswood. She took a drag. The low light glimmered on her gold trimmings. “Like you can forget about it. Like you can forget about all this.” She swayed in her chair. “Good luck with that, bruv.”
    “No one doubts you’d rather,” Baron said. “But choice, alas, is not given to all of us. Even if you’re not interested in it, it’s interested in you. Let me just let that stand for a tick.
    “Thing is, Billy, we should be outdated. FSRC got set up a little bit before 2000. Cobbled together from a couple of older outfits. Supposed to be temporary. It was the millennium: we were waiting for some devout nutters to set fire to the Houses of Parliament. Sacrifice Cherie Blair to their goat overlords, something.”
    “No luck there,” Collingswood said. She did the French breathing thing with her smoke. Disgusting as it was, Billy couldn’t take his eyes off it.
    “Sweet FA,” said Baron. “A little bit of silly buggery, but the big Y2K explosion of … well, millennialism , that we’d been expecting … didn’t happen.”
    “Not then,” said Collingswood.
    “Do you even remember the millennium?” Billy said. “Weren’t you watching Teletubbies?” She smirked.
    “She’s right,” Baron said. “Stuff was delayed. It came after. Eventually we ended up busier than ever. Look, I don’t care what these groups want to do, so long as they keep to themselves. Paint yourself blue and boff cactuses, just do it indoors and don’t involve civilians. Live and let live. But that’s not what causes the trouble.” He tapped the table with each word that followed. “All these groups are all about revelations, apocrypha …”
    “Always boils down to the same thing,” Collingswood said.
    “It does a bit,” said Baron. “Any holy book, it’s the last chapter that gets us interested.”
    “John the fucking Divine,” Collingswood said. “Bish bash fucking bosh.”
    “What my colleague is getting at,” Baron said, “is we’re facing a wave of St. Johns. A bit of an epidemic of eschatologies. We live,” he said, too flatly for any humour to be audible, “in the epoch of competing ends.”
    Collingswood said, “Ragnarok versus Ghost Dance versus Kali Yuga versus Qiyamah yadda yadda.”
    “That’s what gets converts these days,” Baron said. “It’s a