Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)
Dave Hutchinson
1.
THEY ALMOST MISSED the train. They had always planned to arrive close to departure time, so that Amanda had to spend as little time as possible on her feet, but there was a flash mob on the Place de la Concorde and all the streets leading into it were blocked.
“What the hell is this?” muttered William, who was driving.
“Anti-Union protesters,” Kenneth said, reading the placards being carried by the crowds boiling between the traffic.
“Well, God has a sense of irony, anyway,” muttered Amanda, shifting uncomfortably on the back seat.
William looked back at her. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. Can we go another way?”
They were in a make of vehicle nicknamed La Rage by the French, basically a looming black mediaeval fortress festooned with bullbars and lights and antitheft devices. Kenneth had wanted something more anonymous, but William said the only thing Parisian drivers understood was force. It had one obvious drawback; although its defensive systems could cause epileptic fits and rectal bleeding in anyone stupid enough to try to steal or attack it, it was too large to go down many of Paris’s lesser thoroughfares.
“We’re stuck,” William said, twisting left and right to look out of the windows and hovering his finger over the icon on the dash display which triggered a 10,000 volt charge through the skin of the car, as protesters bumped and pushed by between the line of vehicles.
“Don’t hurt anybody,” Kenneth said. “We’ll be all right.” He looked at his watch, then at Amanda. “We’ll be all right,” he told her.
“Fucking stupid car,” she said with a little smile.
He shrugged helplessly and turned back in his seat to look out through the windscreen. From this vantage point, he could see a street filled with the roofs of lesser vehicles, the spaces in between them choked with protesters blowing whistles and waving animated banners. Most of the protesters were wearing gas masks or scarves around their faces, the traditional garb of the political mob; some were more self-consciously retro, sporting Guy Fawkes masks.
“Well,” he said, to nobody in particular.
Unable to use the car’s more proactive weaponry – the horn had a mode which, when activated, produced a note that could shatter shop windows – William had to amuse himself by depressing the throttle pedal every now and again; the low, rumbling throb of the engine was enough to make protesters shy away momentarily. But even that palled after a while; William really wanted to electrocute or nerve gas or incinerate or just simply drive up and over the wall of cars and people standing between them and their destination, and none of these options were available to him, so he just settled into a long loop of swearwords in French and English.
Eventually, the gendarmerie arrived. Kenneth, William and Amanda were treated to brief views of large grey vehicles driving back and forth across the Place, spraying the crowds of protesters, journalists and rubbernecking tourists with riot foam, at which point many people fell down fast asleep and were subsequently scooped up by other vehicles and deposited none-too-gently on the edges of the open space. There would be broken bones and damaged camera equipment and probably some deaths, and later many lawsuits and insurance claims and scandals uncovered by the news organisations, but for the moment the traffic could move again. Which pleased William.
“Now we’re late,” Kenneth observed.
“We’ll be fine.” William touched an icon on the dash and the car did his favourite trick apart from killing people – filling the windscreen with a head-up display which showed a GPS map of the surrounding streets, directions to their destination, and the location of anything the vehicle’s expert system judged to be a possible threat. A green carpet seemed to appear before them, stretching away into the distance, curving around the obelisk in the centre of the Place and fading out of sight. William depressed the car’s accelerator and it moved smoothly forward with the stream of traffic, passing police vehicles and straggling protesters alike.
The early part of their route had been something of a bone of contention. Kenneth had maintained that it would have been preferable to head directly north from the flat in the 8th and pick up the ring road. William had pooh-poohed that idea, saying it added miles to their journey and that it would be best to head almost directly south towards Savigny. In the end, the thing which decided the matter was the fact that William was the only one of them who could drive and could, basically, do whatever he wanted once he was behind the wheel of La Rage.
Once they were out of the traffic in the centre of town, William set the car into cruise mode and the note of the engine dropped to an almost subliminal vibration that pushed them gently back into the upholstery. Beyond the windscreen, the green carpet unrolled before them.
Kenneth looked at his watch, and from the back seat Amanda said, “We can always take another train.”
He shook his head. Travel on the Line was not like any other kind of rail travel. One did not, for example, normally have to take out temporary citizenship in the company which ran the Channel Tunnel rail route. If they missed this train, they might not be able to travel again until the Spring, and he couldn’t put her through all this again. He glanced across at William, who nodded at the little numbers at the bottom of the windscreen to indicate that they were already at the speed limit for this road. The French had a particularly bloody-minded band of traffic policemen, known as guêpes after their black and yellow ballistic armour, who rode ferocious 3,000 cc BMW motorcycles and carried assault rifles. Nobody in their right mind wanted to tangle with them. Kenneth shrugged.