Hogan looked around the security office again, seeing his people glaring in frustration at their useless consoles. All they could do was wait until the RI purged the station network. Down on the ground, teams were calling out coordinates to each other. His inserts were assigning them places on the map. It was a wide circle surrounding the western track of platform 12A, a very loose circle. Renne was issuing a stream of orders, trying to close the gaps.
“I’m going down there,” Hogan announced.
“Sir?” Renne broke off from the tactical situation to give him a surprised glance.
“Take over here,” he told her. “I might be able to help down there.” He saw the brief flicker of doubt on her face before she said, “Yes, sir.” Hogan was all too aware of how widespread that uncertainty had become among the officers under his command; the Paris office he’d inherited from Paula Myo had never considered him anything other than Admiral Columbia’s placeman, a political appointee who wasn’t really up to the job. At the start of this observation operation he’d hoped he might finally gain their respect. Now that hope, too, seemed to be vanishing along with the assassin.
The kaos that was wreaking electronic havoc on LA Galactic was starting to be felt on a physical level. Hogan had to use the stairs at the end of the Carralvo office block to get down to the concourse. The safety system on every elevator in the building had tripped, halting them wherever they were in the shafts. He dashed down the four flights of stairs from the security office, arriving on the ground floor only mildly out of breath. Out on the concourse, a tide of panicked people was buzzing around in disarray. Frightened by the murder and the chase, confused by the collapse of the local network, they didn’t know which way to flee. It didn’t help that almost every alarm was now sounding, and scarlet holographic arrows indicating the emergency exits were sliding through the air above them in contradictory directions.
Hogan pushed through them, oblivious to the curses they hurled at him. He was listening to the squads on the secure communications channels. It wasn’t sounding good. There were too many queries, too many of them shouting, “Which way?” They were all too reliant on the officers up in the security office coordinating the operation, arranging them into neat sweep patterns, watching the situation through the station’s primary sensors. Have to change training procedures, he thought absently. His map showed the ragged circle of his officers and the SCT teams closing slowly on the assassin’s supposed position.
He pulled out his own ion pistol as he charged up the ramp to platform 12A. The few passengers left were all curled up next to walls and pillars; they flinched as he sprinted past and dropped down onto the track. Bold amber holograms at the edge of the platform warned him not to proceed any farther. He ignored them and raced toward the end of the terminal where the sunlight streamed down past the high arching roof. Renne’s voice was still calm and level in his ears as she told people where to turn, what direction to take. Despite that, there were still big gaps in the noose contracting around the assassin. Hogan clenched his jaw and said nothing, but he was furious with their ragged deployment. It was only when he emerged into the flood of California sunlight that he saw the reason. The whole junction area represented on his virtual map, so neatly laced with various tracks, was in reality a harsh environment of concrete and steel sprawling for kilometers in every direction. Along one side were the bulky warehouses and loading gantries of the cargo yard, where machines and bots were in constant motion. But ahead of him, dozens of trains were winding their way across the junction: from ponderous kilometer-long freighters pulled along by huge GH9 engines to trans-Earth loop trains; twenty-wagon intrastation goods shunters as well as the sleek white express trains chasing past at frighteningly high speed. They filled the air with metallic screeching and a thunderous rattling, a constant racket that was overlaid by the clunks and clangs of what must have been small ships colliding. It was a noise he had always been oblivious to as he rode in the conditioned comfort of the first-class passenger carriages.
The kaos attack made no impact on the station’s traffic control. CST, ever anxious about sabotage or even natural catastrophe, used independent ultra-hardened encryption to maintain full communications with and control of the trains at all times and under any circumstances; they’d even prevailed during the alien assault on the Lost23.
Hogan almost skidded to a halt as a fast cargo train sped past fifty meters to his left. He could feel the wind of its slipstream on his face. Several squad members were visible spread out in the distance ahead of him, all of them holding their weapons ready, trying to look in every direction at once.
Hogan touched the virtual icon that put him in direct contact with Tulloch. “For Christ’s sake, shut down the traffic out here! We’re going to get pulped into the landscape.”
“Sorry, Alic, I’ve already tried; transport control won’t do it without executive-level authority.”
“Shit!” As Hogan watched, one of his people suddenly sprinted sideways. A two-hundred-meter-long snake of tanker trucks hauled by a GH4 engine trundled along the line he’d been standing on. “Renne, get Admiral Columbia to set off a nuke under CST. I want these goddamn trains shut down. Now!”
“Working on it, sir. The kaos is being flushed. Should have full sensor coverage back in a few minutes.”
“Christ.” He spat under his breath. Just how many disasters can you pile up in one day? He hurriedly sidestepped off the actual track itself, and began jogging toward the erratic line of squad members up ahead. “Okay, people, let’s get more organized. Who was the last person to actually see our target?”
“Couple of minutes ago, he was two hundred meters ahead of me, heading northwest.”
Hogan’s virtual vision identified the speaker as John King, and tagged his position on the map.
“Positive sighting, sir. I’ve got him on the other side of this flatbed shunter,” Gwyneth Russell said. Her location was nearly a half of a kilometer away from John’s.
“When?” Hogan demanded.
“He jumped behind it maybe a minute ago, sir.”
“I can confirm that,” Tarlo said. “My squad is due north of Gwyneth. The flatbed shunter has just reached us. He’s on the other side of it.”
Hogan scanned the direction his map indicated Tarlo’s squad was deployed. A fast-moving train of cylindrical containers was zipping along a rail between him and the squad. He thought he could see another train moving on the other side of it, through the gaps between the containers. Might have been the flatbed shunter. It was a confusing flicker of motion.
There was a brief ebb to the background clamor, and he heard a high-pitched humming from the concave gully on his right-hand side, the sound of high-voltage cables. Hogan looked down at it, frowning. He’d assumed it was a long enzyme-bonded concrete storm drain of some kind, about three meters wide and one deep. The gray surface was rippling slightly, and the entire gully behind him moved across the ground, linking up to another gully running parallel to it twenty meters away.
Maglev track!
Hogan flung himself down onto the hard granite chippings, and put his hands over his head. An express train hurtled past, its slipstream howling. His uniform jacket flapped around like a sail in a tornado. For an instant he thought the air pressure was going to be strong enough to lift him off the ground. He shouted wordlessly into the bone-shaker yowl as animal fear surged through him. Then the express was gone, its rear strobe light blinking into the distance.
It took a minute for his legs to stop shaking enough to carry his weight. He clambered slowly to his feet, looking nervously along the innocuous gully for any sign of another express.
“He’s not here,” Tarlo called. “Sir, we missed him.”
Hogan’s map showed him a big concentration of squad members along a section of track, with Tarlo in the middle.
“We can’t have,” Gwyneth insisted. “For God’s sake, I saw him behind the train.”
“Well, he didn’t come this way
.”
“Then where, for fuck’s sake?”
“Can anyone see him?” Hogan asked. “Somebody?”
He received a chorus of “Not here,” “No, sir.”
As he walked unsteadily away from the maglev track, his virtual vision showed him the station network slowly reestablishing itself. Renne had pulled a junction routing schedule from traffic control, and was using it to warn everybody of approaching trains.
“Keep everyone in their positions,” he told her. “I want a perimeter around this junction. He can’t have reached the edges yet. We keep it sealed until we have full electronic coverage again.”
“Yes, sir,” she answered. “Oh, we just got some additional help.”
A couple of black helicopters swooped low over the junction, with LAPD written in white on their underbelly. Hogan glared at them. Oh, great, just like the marina fiasco. The cops will be laughing their asses off at us.
Clear sensor images were flipping up into a grid in his virtual vision as the kaos cleared. He heard the first of the trains braking, a teeth-jangling screech that cut clean across the junction. It was joined by another, then another, until every train was slowing to a halt.
Finally the junction was silent, the trains motionless. “All right, people,” Hogan announced grimly, “let’s sweep this area sector by sector.”
Two hours later Alic had to admit defeat. They’d searched every inch of the junction, visually and with sensors. The assassin was nowhere to be found. The perimeter of his own squads and CST security teams remained unbreeched. Yet the target had somehow eluded them.
From his makeshift field command post on platform 12A, Hogan watched the tired, despondent squads trekking in from all across the junction. It was a wretched blow to everyone’s morale. He could see it in their expressions, the way they wouldn’t meet his eyes as they passed.
Tarlo stopped in front of him, looking more angry than disappointed. “I don’t get it. We were right behind him. The others were all around. There’s no way he could have got past us, I don’t care what he was wetwired with.”
“He had help,” Hogan told his lieutenant. “A lot of help. The kaos alone proves that.”
“Yeah, I guess. You coming back to Paris? Some of us are going to hit the bars; they’ll still be open. The good ones anyway.”
At any other time Hogan would have appreciated the offer. “Thanks, but no. I’ve got to tell the Admiral what happened.”
Tarlo winced in sympathy. “Ouch. Well … that’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
“Not enough for this,” Hogan muttered as the tall Californian headed off down the platform to his squad mates. He took a breath, and told his e-butler to place the call to Columbia’s office.
Senator Justine Burnelli stayed with the body as the official from the city morgue directed the robotic stretcher toward one of the Carralvo’s many basement service exits. There had been quite a delay while LA Galactic recovered from its kaos attack, time she simply spent staring at Kazimir’s figure on the white marble floor of the concourse. The sheet that the subdued CST staff had produced wasn’t quite big enough to cover the pool of blood spreading around him.
Now her love was sealed in a black body bag, and a small squadron of cleaningbots was already at work on the blood, scouring the marble surface, eradicating any sign of staining with sharp effective chemicals. In a week’s time, nobody would ever know what happened on that spot.
The robotic stretcher slid itself into the back of the morgue ambulance.
“I’ll ride with him,” Justine announced.
Nobody argued, not even Paula Myo. Justine clambered into the vehicle and sat on the cramped bench beside the stretcher as the doors closed. Myo and the two Senate Security bodyguards she had detailed to accompany Justine got into a waiting car behind the ambulance. Alone in the gloomy light from a single polyphoto strip on the ceiling, Justine thought she was going to start crying again.
I won’t! Kazimir wouldn’t want that, him and his old-world notions.
A lone tear leaked down her cheek as she slowly unzipped the body bag, allowing herself to see him one last time before the inevitable forensic autopsy. His young body would be examined and analyzed very thoroughly, which would mean the pathologists cutting him open to complement the deep scan. He wouldn’t be Kazimir after that.
She gazed down at him, still surprised by the passive expression on his face.
“Oh, my love, I’ll carry on your cause,” she promised him. “I’ll fight your fight, and we’ll win. We’ll beat it. We’ll destroy the Starflyer.”
Kazimir’s dead face stared up blindly. She flinched as she looked down at his ruined chest, the tattered, burnt hole that the ion pulse had left in his jacket and shirt. Slowly, she forced her hand into his pockets, feeling around for anything. He’d been sent to the observatory in Peru to collect something, and she knew she couldn’t trust the navy. She wasn’t sure about Myo, either; and the Investigator certainly didn’t trust her.
There was nothing in his pockets. She moved down his body, patting the fabric of his clothes, trying to ignore the smears of blood building up on her fingers and palms. It took a while, but she eventually found the memory crystal in his belt. A faint, fond smile touched her lips at that: Kazimir on his secret mission used a belt secure pocket like some tourist afraid of being mugged. There and then, she hated the Guardians for using him. Their cause might be right, but that didn’t mean they could recruit children.
Justine was wiping her hands down on some tissues when the vehicle started braking to a halt. She shoved the tissues into her bag along with the memory crystal and hurriedly zipped the body bag up. The doors opened. Justine stepped out, worried she would look as guilty as she felt.
They were in a small warehouse, parked on a platform beside a waiting train that had only two carriages. She’d had to call Campbell Sheldon to summon up a private train so quickly; fortunately, he’d been sympathetic. Even though they were friends, she knew there would be a price to pay later. There always was, some support for a policy, a returned favor. It was the way of the game. She didn’t care.
Paula stood beside her as the stretcher trundled into the cargo compartment on the second carriage. “You realize that Admiral Columbia will not approve of this, Senator?”
“I know,” Justine said. She didn’t care about that, either. “But I want to be very sure of the autopsy. Senate Security can supervise the procedure, but I want it performed at our family clinic in New York. It’s the only place I can be sure there will be no discrepancies or problems.”
“I understand.”
The train took twenty minutes to traverse the distance between Seattle and the Newark station, which served New York. An unmarked ambulance from the clinic was waiting for the body, along with two limousines. This time Justine couldn’t avoid riding with Paula as the little convoy sped off to the exclusive facility just outside the city.
“Do you trust me?” Paula asked.
Justine pretended to look out of the darkened window at the outlying districts. Despite the profound shock of the murder and all its associated emotional turmoil, she was still rational enough to consider the implications of the question. And she knew damn well the Investigator never, ever eased off.
“I believe we now share several common goals. We both want that assassin caught. We both believe the Starflyer exists. We both certainly know the navy is compromised.”
“That will do to begin with,” Paula said. “You still have blood under your fingernails, Senator. I presume it got there when you searched the body.”
Justine knew her cheeks would be reddening. So much for slick maneuvering. She gave the Investigator a long, calculating look, then reached down into her bag for another tissue.
“Did you find anything?” Paula asked.
“Do you still think the Starflyer got to me when I was on Far Away?”
“Nothing in this case can be certain. The Starflyer has had a very long time to est
ablish its connections within the Commonwealth unopposed and unseen. But I do assign that a very low probability.”
“I’m on probation, then.” Justine worked the tissue edge at a fleck of blood on her left index finger.
“An astute summary.”
“It must be very lonely for you up there on top of Olympus, judging the rest of us.”
“I hadn’t realized how badly you’ve been affected by McFoster’s death. I wouldn’t normally expect a Burnelli to give away any edge in a deal.”
“Are we making a deal?”
“You know we are.”
“Kazimir and I were lovers.” She said it simply, as if it were a stock market report, trying to keep her distance. Inside, the numbness was giving way to pain. She knew once the body was delivered safely to the clinic she’d have to flee back to the Tulip Mansion, a place where she could grieve properly, without anyone seeing.
“I had determined that much. Did you meet on Far Away?”
“Yes. He was only seventeen then. I’d never have guessed I could love someone like that. But then you never get to choose when it comes to real love, do you?”
“No.” Paula turned away.
“Have you been in love like that, Investigator? Love that makes you completely crazy?”
“Not for several lives, no.”
“I could cope with a bodyloss. I have with my brother. I could even cope with him losing several days of memory. But this, this is death, Investigator. Kazimir is gone forever, and I am the cause of that, I am the one who betrayed him. I’m not equipped for that, not mentally. True death is not something that happens today. Mistakes of this magnitude cannot be buried.”
“The Prime attack resulted in several tens of millions of humans being killed on the Lost23. People that will never be re-lifed. Your grief is not unique. Not anymore.”
“I’m just another rich bitch who has lost a trinket. Is that it?”
“No, Senator. Your suffering is very real, and for that I am genuinely sympathetic. However, I do believe you will get through this. You have the determination and clarity of thought that is only afforded to people of your age and experience.”
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