Read Online Skypoint by Phil Ford - Free Book Online Page B

and so far the graphics were still. No activity.
    As she moved across the basement she swept the flashlight from side to side, and occasionally above her, lighting up the channels of steel ducting that ran across the roof. She had been in places like this before – dark, empty warehouses, derelict hospitals – and, after five years, they were places she knew she would never get used to. The darkness pressed close to you like a living thing and the tiniest sound was magnified inside your head by nervous tension into the most sinister portent of bloody destruction. She had learned to cope with such things, but it was dangerous to ignore them. If nothing else was down here, she knew that Weevils got everywhere. They reckoned that in the city you were never more than a couple of metres from a rat – you could probably say the same about Weevils. Somewhere down here in the vast darkness there would be a manhole cover and under that (and only under that, if she was lucky) somewhere there would be a Weevil.
    So Toshiko moved through the darkness, following the tunnel of light ahead of her, every sense testing for danger.
    The torch beam settled on a half-open door. What lay beyond it was cast into a darkness that seemed even deeper than that which pressed in around her. Curious, Toshiko moved towards the door. Subliminally, her mind noted the weight of the gun that nestled in the small of her back beneath her leather jacket. A part of her brain rehearsed the motion of dropping the hand-held computer module and yanking the gun from her belt if she needed it.
    Gently, she pushed the door open with the toe of her shoe, and she spread the flashlight beam across the room beyond.
    The first thing she saw was a half-naked woman.
    The brunette wore skin-tight leather trousers that shone like spilled oil, and they were unbuttoned at the waist – like she’d forgotten to do them up, the same way she had forgotten to put anything over her silicon-pumped boobs. She was spread over the bonnet of a sports car and at her feet it said SEPTEMBER . Someone – the janitor who used the office – was marking off each day of the month. There was a crude circle drawn around the last Friday of the month. Maybe that was pay day.
    Toshiko took in the rest of the room: there was an old table covered in paperwork and old newspapers; there was a kettle and a stained mug. There was a box of tools. And in one corner of the room there was a big, scratched metal cupboard. Toshiko opened the cupboard and saw bottles of what she took to be cleaning chemicals. She closed it again and got down on her hands and knees. The cupboard stood on four metal feet that raised it a little way off the concrete floor. This was what Toshiko was looking for.
    From the messenger bag over her shoulder she took a wafer-thin device that was about the size of a cigarette packet. She brought up another screen on the hand-held module and a couple of small diodes flashed into life on the device. She hid it under the cupboard. From there it would relay foundation-level readings to Toshiko’s hand-held. There might be no evidence of the Rift down there right now; it didn’t mean that was the way things were going to stay.
    As she got back to her feet, she heard the noise in the ducting.
    Nerves stretched to tripwires, she stood absolutely still, listening to the noise and trying to rationalise it. She found it hard to come up with something that it even sounded like .
    A little like wind rushing. A little like water spraying. And yet, unmistakeably and somehow horribly, solid.
    Something was moving through the ducting overhead.
    She glanced at her hand-held module: still no indication of Rift energies.
    But whatever was up there was no rat.
    And it wasn’t human.
    Toshiko moved out of the office, her torchlight following the ducting as she traced the progress of whatever was up there.
    And then it stopped.
    Toshiko stopped with it, her eyes on the metal ducting directly above her.