Aethernet Magazine #2 by Ed. Barbara Ballantyne

Author:Ed. Barbara Ballantyne [Ballantyne, Ed. Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-05-01T06:51:42+00:00

Paul lives in a terraced house in the north London suburbs, a couple of minutes’ walk from the nearest tube station. We were there within the half hour he’d stipulated, as was he. No one pretended this was a social call and we didn’t hang around, staying just long enough to deliver the blood sample and impress upon him once again how urgent this was. It was apparent that Paul’s patience with me was wearing thin; I would have to call upon his skills sparingly in the future, if at all.

The side trip to Paul’s hadn’t taken us much out of our way and we were soon on the train home. Claire nodded off before we reached our stop, her head sinking down to rest on my shoulder. I didn’t attempt to move her until it was time to get off; in fact, I quite enjoyed the experience – a reaction I shied away from analysing. It was hardly a surprise that events had begun to catch up with her. She’d been running on adrenaline for much of the day and, by her own admission, hadn’t really eaten anything. So I insisted we stop at a Chinese takeaway – a place that’s just round the corner from my house and where they know me well. I was determined to ensure that Claire at least ate something before hitting the sack, but she was clearly exhausted and did little more than pick at the food, soon making her excuses and heading for bed.

In many ways I am shamefully disorganised, but experience has taught me that the worst time to go hunting round for clean sheets and spare pillow cases is late at night after you’ve been down the pub and had a few, especially if you happen to arrive home with an inebriated friend who isn’t in any fit state to drive. Therefore, I always keep a bed made up in the spare room, ready for unexpected visitors.

Claire’s crashing out early suited me just fine; it meant that I could get to work without distraction. I have a custom designed search engine on the computer, very useful for identification purposes. It can map the specifics of an image and scour the web for a match. The photos I’d taken of our friend Brown Coat were as mundane as I’d feared. Yes, his complexion was a little pale – grey, even – but that didn’t come through all that clearly in the photos and offered nothing distinctive enough to base a search on. The gun, on the other hand, seemed more promising. I selected and uploaded the best picture and then let the programme do its thing. I wasn’t especially surprised, though, when the closest matches it produced were a couple of plastic ‘ray gun’ toys, a prop from an old sci-fi ‘B’ movie, and a weapon brandished by a chisel-jawed spaceman on the cover of a pulp SF magazine from the 1950s.

Strike one.

I took a prawn ball – lightly battered, succulent,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.