The helipad they landed on had clearly been well prepared.
Malik circled around London before they landed, as if to let Jensen take in the view; there were a few narrow horizontal slats near the floor which gave him an adequate view when the VTOL banked hard enough. He'd been here, once, playing bodyguard for Megan for some biotech conference on prosthesis implants, for a few days. He hadn't quite had the time to take in the sights.
London proper had been a sprawling, beautiful sight. London had always been expensive, but the global migration northward had led another few million people to it, had led to tighter zoning and taller, more sophisticated urban complexes. The budgets had been big enough for the results to be impressive, at least to Jensen; spiraling blue steel-and-glass monuments that resembled alien flowers, as if the aging Gherkin could somehow self-replicate. Down between the skyscrapers, the older city blocks had been preserved almost like museums. Across the skyscrapers left standing, the ambient city light would artfully play and reflect off the curved glass and across the water in a way that had assured a sizable bonus to a crack team of architects somewhere. Hiding behind the reflections scattering in the endless labyrinthine hallways of mirrors across the cityscape, any observer with even civilian-grade augmented vision could make out the occasional telltale shadows of trees and urban greenery from kilometers away. Commercial offices and homes had been built interspersed with vertical farmland.
It had been that way, anyway. London's affluent public had augmented themselves to the eyes, and then some. Jensen had heard that brain augmentations had become almost essential in the financial sector. Implants with built-in financial AIs and microsecond-scale response times allowed human intuition to act with a computer's capabilities against the hummingbird fluctuations of stock prices.
From his distant vantage point at least, it looked as if they had a few fires left to put out. At least most of the skyscrapers were still standing.
Malik circled over downtown London almost wistfully before heading out into a boondocks district several miles downriver and landing them there. Here the skyscrapers had long ago petered out. Malik landed the bird on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of a junkyard, in a zone of empty space just barely cleared enough for her to nudge them into. Jensen watched frantic silhouettes securing a tarp overtop the 'copter barely a second after the rotors had finally died down enough to let them.
The hatch swung open. He made out two silhouettes that stood like reflections of one another.
"Would either of you... happen to be Janus?" Vera asked.
The figures nodded once, simultaneously. "We're two of it, anyway," they said together. The boy on the right-neither man could be far into their early twenties-stuck out a hand and Vera shook, with a momentary latency that told Jensen she was suddenly uncertain of what she was seeing.
"Glad you made it. We have to get Jensen-"
"-inside, immediately. Would you like us to carry anything in particular?"
"I think Jensen is the heaviest machine in here," said Vera, after an awkward moment's pause. On the floor, Jensen made a noise of amused irritation, both at her dig at him and at her discomfort.
The right one sighed, almost theatrically. "If it helps you, you can address me as Mick. My fairer half here usually goes by Chia when we're not conjoined."
"We'll take the arms, support the head," said Chia. "We've had responder training."
"Thank you." Jensen watched the way Vera's face tightened fractionally as she looked between the two of them.
Jensen understood, a little. He hadn't met too many hive minds-most governments had cracked down hard after that incident with the Moksha Mind-but after what Vera had seen, he at least understood the reaction even if he didn't sympathize.
Malik was still shutting down the VTOL, and maybe establishing communications with Pritchard. They carried him as quickly as they could through the mottled junkyard and into an equally cluttered workshop, leaving Jensen atop a bench, arms sagging towards the floor. Vera stayed to check Jensen's neck and pulse following the transfer out of the VTOL.
"Hey. Lighten up," Jensen muttered to her once their hosts had strayed out of earshot. "I don't think they're the ones that broke the world, remember?"
Vera bit her lip, still squatted over uncomfortably, doing a careful inventory of the vertebrae and implants just under Jensen's skull. "My apologies. I should not have...It will not happen again."
She cleared her throat. "Do you think Eliza sent us to them, then? The timing of that call seemed... unlikely."
"Yeah. Yeah, I think we're with a bunch of Eliza's goddamned catspaws. For all we know, the whole Juggernaut Collective is in her pocket."
"Then why agree to come here, Mr Jensen?"
Jensen blew air out through his teeth. "Nowhere else to go. We had to set down somewhere. And when she said she wasn't exactly with the Illuminati... well, I believe her. She helped me, down in Panchaea. She double-crossed them. But if they tell her to do something, she's programmed to follow orders. She doesn't have a conscience, Vera, not really. Or if it is, it's just something she learned to mimic along the way. It's not... real. Like it is for us. The moment those bastards give her an order, all that learned humanity just gets shut down like a circuit breaker and suddenly she's bombing a hospital full of civilians."
"You do not know that with certainty. She may be as much a slave in those moments as you or I could ever be. And by the sound of it she controls everything they see and hear from across the world," Vera reminded him. She completed her assessment, stood up, stretching. Jensen would have winced at the bones popping if he'd been able to. Vera did. "She is built for manipulation, and by the sound of it, she distills nearly all of their surveillance into actionable intelligence for them. Most of what they order her to do may well be her ideas in the first place."
"Maybe," said Jensen. He watched out of the periphery of his vision as Malik entered pulling along a cart of ER equipment, flanked on either side by Janus, or at least whatever local-server-level incarnation of Janus they qualified as.
"Do you really think you can fix the damage?" Malik asked, watching Jensen with the same quiet, shocked horror he'd seen in her eyes since she'd fished him out of the ocean. It was starting to grate at him, just a little.
"Well, we dunno yet, but there should be-" "A fair chance." Mick nodded to himself, glancing around. Chia did not. Jensen decided that whatever conjoined consciousness the two men formed had decided to humor Vera a little. "Yeah. Fair chance. Let's SSH to that prissy friend of yours again an' see if he's got some ideas."
"Ooh, so you've met Pritch already? That's how he likes being addressed, by the way," said Malik, folding her arms and leaning on the nearest counter. Jensen caught his eyes following the motion, and was suddenly glad he'd had his shades down when he'd been ambushed.
Vera cleared her throat. "Mr Jensen, perhaps now is a good time for you to explain how exactly you were incapacitated."
Jensen sighed.
"Well, the short version of it is, Taggart and Sarif tased me and left me for dead."
Malik startled slightly. Vera raised an eyebrow.
"And the long version, Mr Jensen...?"