Justine snorted. “Emotional scar tissue, you mean.”
“Resilience would be closer to the mark. If anything, I’d say today has shown you just how human you are. In that at least you can be content.”
Justine finished polishing her nails with the tissue. Now there was no evidence she had ever touched him—it was a miserable thought. “You really believe that?”
“I do. I’m assuming the body is actually being taken to your family clinic so you can clone him?”
“No. I won’t do that to him. Replicating him physically is hardly going to purge my guilt. A person is more than just a body. I’m going to give Kazimir the one gift I still can. I can do no less.”
“I see. Then I wish you happiness in your choice, Senator.”
“Thank you.”
“But I would still like to know if you found anything.”
“A memory crystal.”
“May I see it?”
“Yes, I suppose you can. It’s your experience I’ll need to help bring down the Starflyer. But there are limits to my cooperation; I won’t give the navy anything that will help them stop the Guardians. I don’t care how committed you are to arresting Johansson.”
“I understand.”
Adam had personally given Kieran McSobel the support assignment for Kazimir’s run. Kieran had been making good progress since arriving on Earth a few years earlier, absorbing their tradecraft with ease, staying cool under pressure—qualities that marked him down as highly suitable for the kind of operations the Guardians were performing these days. This assignment should be a walk in the park for him.
When Kazimir’s loop train pulled in, Kieran was in place on the Carralvo’s concourse, mingling with the perpetual flood of passengers. Indistinguishable in the crowd like any good operative, ready for any number of contingencies.
Away on the other side of the station complex, the Guardians monitored his progress from the offices of Lemule’s Max Transit company. Adam himself lounged against the back wall, watching them in turn. He didn’t interfere with the procedures—after all, they were the ones he’d taught them, but he wanted his presence to supply them with a degree of reassurance. A comfortable father figure. It took a lot of effort not to pull a dismayed face every time he thought that. But this was a crucial operation; he had to be here to keep an eye on it. Bradley Johansson was desperate for the Martian data. The alien attack on the edge of phase two space had played hell with their carefully plotted timetable.
Marisa McFoster was running electronic scans through the Carralvo’s network, searching for any sign of observation activity around Kazimir. “It’s clean,” she announced. A secure link connected her to Kieran. “Proceed,” she told him.
A map on one of her console screens showed Kieran’s icon moving slowly along the concourse toward the main exit. He ought to be thirty meters behind Kazimir, monitoring the throng of passengers for possible tails.
“He’s stopped,” Kieran said suddenly.
“What do you mean, stopped?” Marisa asked.
Adam immediately straightened up. Please, not again.
“He’s shouting at someone,” Kieran’s puzzled voice said. “What in the dreaming heavens …?”
“Give me a visual,” Marisa told him.
Adam hurried over to stand behind her chair, bending to look at her console portal. The link from Kieran’s retinal inserts delivered an unsteady picture, a poor view through a crowd of people. A cluster of dark out-of-focus heads bobbed around directly in front of him. On the other side of them a figure was running. The image flared white as an ion pulse discharged.
“Fuck!” Kieran yelled. Smeared strands of darkness slashed across the glare of light as he whipped his head about. For a second there was a blurry black and white image of a man flying backward through the air, arms and legs flung wide. Then Kieran zoomed in on the man with the gun who was now turning to run.
“Bruce!” Marisa cried out.
“Who the hell’s Bruce?” Adam demanded.
“Bruce McFoster. Kazimir’s friend.”
“Shit. You mean the one that was killed?”
“Yeah.”
Adam slapped a fist against his forehead. “Only he wasn’t. The Starflyer’s done this to your prisoners before. Goddamnit!”
The screen showing the feed from Kieran flashed white. “He’s shooting again,” Kieran said. All the portal showed now was a pair of shoes, their wearer lying flat on a white marble floor. Kieran lifted his head and the shoes sank off the bottom of the portal; beyond them, Bruce McFoster was racing down the concourse, people ducking for cover on either side of him as he kept on firing. Two men and one woman were chasing after him, holding pistols and yelling at him to stop. They were dressed in ordinary clothes.
“They aren’t CST security,” Adam said grimly.
A shot from somewhere above and behind Kieran struck Bruce McFoster. His force field flared briefly, but he never slowed.
“Dear God, how many people knew Kazimir was on this run?”
Red icons started to flash up across Marisa’s console. “Someone’s attacked the local network with kaos,” she said. “Bad strike; this is high-grade software. The RI can barely contain the contamination.”
“That’ll be Bruce, or his controllers,” Adam said. “It’ll help him get clear. They must have known the navy was watching Kazimir.” Which is more than we did, he thought miserably.
The link to Kieran’s inserts was dissolving; all that remained was his secure audio channel.
“What do we do?” Marisa asked.
“Kieran, can you reach Kazimir?” Adam demanded. “Can you retrieve the memory crystal?”
“I don’t … oh, what … there’s someone … armed … standing beside … that’s no way, I can’t get … more people … alarms triggered …”
“All right, stay put and see what happens. See where they take him.”
“I’m on … okay.”
“Can you see where Bruce has gone?”
“… shooting still … chase … platform twelve-A … pursuit … repeat, platform twelve-A …”
Adam didn’t even need to consult a console map. After twenty-five years working in LA Galactic, he knew the massive station’s layout better than Nigel Sheldon. He sat at the console beside Marisa and opened the dedicated landlines he’d carefully installed over the last few years using bots to spool out optical cable through ducts and along pipes, spreading their invisible web across the massive station’s landscape. Each one was connected to a tiny stealthed sensor; they’d been placed on walls high above the ground, lamp-posts, bridges, anywhere that provided a good field of view.
Two of them covered the large junction area west of the Carralvo. The images came up just in time for Adam to see Bruce sprinting out from under the huge arching concrete roof that covered the platform. The Starflyer agent turned sharply and began leaping over tracks. Adam actually drew in a sharp breath at one point as a train hurtled toward the speeding figure. But Bruce cut clean in front of it with perfect timing. He ran past a second train that was traveling more slowly and in the opposite direction. It completely threw the navy personnel following him.
CST security staff were drifting into the images, jogging along dangerously close to trains as they tried to look past the flashing wheels. Adam suddenly realized that none of them had any contact with traffic control. Bruce jumped over a maglev track, and changed direction yet again. His pursuers were slowing now. They’d become wary of the trains rushing through the junction, switching tracks without warning. Despite their caution, they were deployed in a simple circle that was slowly contracting. Adam knew they must have access to some kind of communications.
He ordered a sensor to focus on one of the navy personnel. Sure enough, the woman was emitting a faint electromagnetic micropulse, well outside the standard civil cybersphere node spectrum. They were using a dedicated high-order encryption system to keep in contact. “Damnit,” Adam whispered to himself. No w
onder his team’s scrutineer programs, so carefully infiltrated into LA Galactic’s network nodes, hadn’t spotted any surveillance around Kazimir. Which meant navy intelligence suspected their countersurveillance capabilities; that or Alic Hogan was being seriously paranoid.
One of the navy people was closing on Bruce along a narrow corridor formed by two moving trains. They were only a couple of hundred meters apart. Bruce seemed oblivious to his pursuer.
“… Paula Myo …” Kieran said.
“Repeat please,” Adam told him quickly.
“I … see Myo … concourse … charge … talking … the Senator.”
Paula Myo! Not off the case after all. Damnit!
It was a tiny distraction, but enough for Adam to lose sight of Bruce down amid the tracks and speeding trains. “Where the hell did he go?” It looked like the pursuers didn’t have a clue, either. A whole line of them were now walking along the track where he’d been moments ago, shouting at each other and waving their hands about. The trains were coming to a halt all around them.
It took three replays of the sensor recordings before Adam was really certain. He watched the enhanced image of Bruce in slow motion: a collection of blurred gray pixels that made a crazy jump straight at a freight train as it slid alongside. A dark square on the side of a freight container swallowed up the smudged figure. Seconds later the square had vanished, closing up into an ordinary sheet of metal.
“Son of a bitch,” Adam grunted. “We’re up against a real bunch of Boy Scouts here.”
“Sir?” Marisa asked.
“They came very well prepared.”
Four centuries of experience and objectivity counted for absolutely nothing as the Pathfinder began its terrifying plummet; Ozzie started screaming as loudly as Orion, both of them audible even over the thunder of the falling sea. Spray whirled around the rickety raft with brutal force, wiping out all sight of the sky in a gray haze. Ozzie clung to the mast as if that alone could save him from certain death as he fell and fell and fell without end. The spume soaked his clothes in seconds, stinging his naked skin.
He drew a breath and screamed again. When he ran out of air he sucked down more, half of which was fizzing water. He coughed and spluttered, an automatic action that overrode the wild impulse to keep on screaming. As soon as his throat was clear and his lungs full again, he started to open his mouth for the scream that would surely end in an awful explosion of pain. Right at the back of his brain, an insecure, puzzled thought began to register.
As they went over the edge of the waterfall he’d glimpsed the impossible length of the cascade, and there hadn’t been a bottom. No jagged rocks below upon which to smash apart. No abrupt end. Nothing, in fact.
This whole setup is artificial, you asshole!
Ozzie took another breath, exhaled through flared nostrils, then forced himself to inhale deeply. His body insisted he was falling, and had been doing so for several seconds now. Animal instinct knew they must have hurtled down an incredible distance, that his velocity was way past terminal already. The steady breathing routine helped slow his frantic heart rate.
Think! You’re not falling, you’re in zero gee. Freefall! You’re safe … for the moment anyway.
The roar of the waterfall somewhere beyond the lashing froth was still overwhelming. He could hear Orion’s cries that had become gulping whimpers. Wiping the droplets from his eyes he peered around. The boy was clinging to the deck of the raft a couple of meters away. The naked terror on his face was horrible to see; nobody should have to suffer like that.
“It’s okay,” Ozzie bellowed. “We’re not falling; it just looks like it. We’re in freefall, like astronauts.” That should reassure the boy.
Orion’s horror took on a bamboozled aspect. “Whatnauts?”
Oh, for Christ’s sake! “We’re safe. Okay? It’s not as bad as it looks.”
The boy nodded his head, totally unconvinced. He was still bracing himself for the certain killer impact.
Ozzie took a good look around, constantly having to wipe the spray from his face. He could just pick out the sun, a smear of brightness creating a whorl of refraction rainbows within the spray. Call that direction up then. Half of the saturated universe surrounding them was distinctly darker than the other half. That must be the waterfall. Which was wrong, because if they were truly in zero gee the water wouldn’t fall anywhere. Yet he’d seen it. He tightened his grip on the mast with an involuntary lurch.
Okay, so what can cause water to flow in zero gee? Fuck knows. So what geometry is this screwball worldlet? It can’t be a planet …
He remembered the water specks drifting through the hazy eternal sky of the gas halo. This colossal worldlet must be one of them. As always in this place, scale had thrown him.
A flat ocean on one side, then. With the water falling off the edge. If it pours away constantly, then it will have to be replaced. Or more likely it just cycles around and around. The underside collects the overspill somehow, and sends it back to the ocean side again. Crazy! But then if you can create gravity and apply it how you want, it isn’t actually so weird.
With controllable gravity as a baseline, Ozzie tried to picture the geometry of the worldlet. If it was truly like the other water specks, then it was completely covered in water. Gravity projectors just pulled the fluid around in unexpected directions. He didn’t like the shapes his mind was coming up with. None of them had undersides where the raft could float along serenely.
When he looked around again, he thought they were drifting closer toward the waterfall. The spray around them was noticeably thinner, yet the gloom was no darker. They must be moving into the underside shadow.
There is gravity here, at right angles to the ocean on the topside. Maybe even less than ninety degrees, because the water has to be pulled around and under. Which is really not good. We cannot afford to get caught up in the flow.
For now they were safe, as long as the underside gravity was still tenuous. The ocean current had shot them horizontally past the edge of the worldlet, which had given them a hiatus, but the underside’s artificial gravity would pull them in eventually. It was already attracting the spray droplets, drawing them back into the flow.
They had to get clear while the gravity remained weak. And he could only think of one propulsive force left to them.
Ozzie checked that the rope around his waist was tied very securely to the base of the mast, and let go. Orion squealed in shock; his wide eyes following Ozzie’s every move. It had been a long time since Ozzie had been in freefall; even then he’d never been particularly good at maneuvering around. He pushed lightly against the mast, remembering the cardinal rule that you must never move quickly. There were objects gliding through the spray around him, mostly the globes of fruit they’d brought with them, which had escaped from their wicker baskets. His little shaving pack tumbled past him, and he cursed, unreasonably annoyed at the utterly trivial loss. Thankfully, the handheld array was still clipped to his rucksack, which was lashed firmly to the deck. He pulled the glistening gadget free, and hauled his way across the Pathfinder until he reached Tochee.
The wooden decking where the big alien was clinging on with its locomotion flesh ridges was bent upward, its grip was so fierce. Some of the crudely shaped branches were actually starting to fracture. Ozzie held on to a single branch of decking, and pushed the array in front of Tochee’s protuberant eye.
“We have to get out of here,” Ozzie cried. The array translated his voice into dancing violet starbursts on its screen.
“We fall to our death,” Tochee replied through the array. “I regret this. I wish for more life.”
“I don’t have time to explain,” Ozzie replied. He was aware the waterfall’s rumble was reducing as the cascade slowly calmed. “Trust me, please. You have to fly us out of here.”
“Friend Ozzie. I cannot fly. I am sorry.”
“Yes you can. Swim, Tochee, swim in the air. That should pull us free. We must not touch the water
again.”
“I do not understand.”
“No time. Trust me. I’ll hold you. You swim. Away from the waterfall. As hard as you can.” Ozzie clambered clumsily along Tochee’s body. The alien’s natural cloak of colorful featherlike fronds was saturated, sticking to its leathery hide. They felt soggy under his skin, and he didn’t dare pull too hard on one in case it ripped off. Finally, he was behind Tochee’s rump, and put his arms out to grip the alien’s locomotion flesh ridges. He felt the rubbery tissue slither under his fingers as buds swelled over his hands, forming an unbreakable hold.
Tochee tensed for a long moment, then abruptly let go of the Pathfinder. It spread all four of its flesh ridges onto wide fins, which began to ripple tentatively. Ozzie felt the rope tighten around his waist. Then as Tochee began to beat his fins with larger, more positive sweeps, the tension in the rope increased. If he’d thought about just how much the raft massed, Ozzie might have come up with a slightly different method of Tochee pulling them free. As it was, he was the critical link in the chain. With Tochee’s vigorous forward motion towing them away from the underside’s diminutive gravity field, the entire raft was very literally dangling from Ozzie’s waist. He gritted his teeth as the force on his arms increased. Now that Tochee could see the effect it was having, its enthusiasm had grown. There was actually a sodden wind gusting back from its fins. The big creature began to change them further, thinning its flesh out so they became more winglike. Ozzie just knew his arms were going to pull clean out of their shoulder sockets any minute now.
He never knew exactly how long it took, but eventually the spray reduced down to an insipid mist. That too cleared. They left the waterfall’s cloak of mist behind, emerging out into direct sunlight. Bright blue sky materialized around them, its warmth sinking into his skin. The noise of the waterfall had become a background growling. It didn’t threaten anymore.
Tochee stopped flapping, and pulled its sinuous flesh back down into the usual ridges along its flanks. Ozzie felt a slow tremor run the length of his friend’s big body. When he looked down between his legs, he could see they were drifting in toward the raft. Orion’s bewildered, hopeful face looked up at them. The rope was already slack, bending into supple loops that snaked around through the air. They just missed being impaled on the top of the mast, and sank down to the decking. Tochee extended a slim tentacle, and coiled its tip around a branch.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 116
