“But you don’t know that for certain.”
“If it’s not a copy of Bose, then what the hell is it?”
“Boys, boys,” the Cat said. “Please, the smell of testosterone is getting foul back here. This is all sounding like a very dull lecture on complexity theory to me. You don’t have anything like enough real evidence to point the finger at any of them. If it was obvious who the Starflyer agent was, then we’d have realized it by now.”
Despite his irritation at her tone, Stig had to admit she’d got a point. There was some memory about the Cat worrying away at the back of his brain, something he’d heard back in the Commonwealth. Her crimes had given her widespread notoriety; she’d committed them a long time ago, long enough for them to have passed into urban lore. Then he remembered. Dreaming heavens, and she’s supposed to be on our side? And in a top-of-the-line armor suit? “Adam asked for our help,” he said, determined not to be cowed by her reputation. “We’re doing the best we can for him.”
Her answering laugh made him wince.
“Poor old Adam,” she chortled. “I’d better switch on my short-wave set. Run, Adam! Run for the hills now, and don’t look back.”
“She didn’t, did she?” an alarmed Stig asked Keely.
“No.”
“What is your solution, Ms. Stewart?” an unperturbed Bradley asked.
“Gosh, the boss man. It’s really simple. Adam asked for information. The best we can do is tell him we suspect Monroe and Myo. After that, it’s up to him how he uses the information. He’s a grown-up.”
“Very well. Unless anyone else has any relevant information on the people traveling with Adam, we’ll relay our suspicions.”
Stig willed someone to say something, to recall just one extra fact, but there was only silence.
“I’ll tell him that, then,” Bradley said.
By midmorning the Volvos had reached the end of the farmlands; they petered out amid insipid swathes of wet meadows and vigorous scrub that were gradually being encroached by the equatorial grasslands. Anguilla grass scattered by blimpbots across the southernmost zone of the Aldrin Plains had blossomed to produce a great deluge of uniform light green vegetation resembling a quiescent sea that was slowly progressing northward. There were no settlements out there, no trees, no bushes, and few reports of any animals.
Their tanks were half empty by then, so Adam wanted to get them topped off before they drove the last section. They stopped in a town called Wolfstail, which comprised about twenty single-story buildings clumped around a T-junction. There were more cats than humans, and most of them wild. Given its position right on the edge of the advancing grasslands, it had the feel of a coastal town out of season. The road that had brought them down from Armstrong City was the stalk of the junction, with the two branches heading east and west, running parallel to the Dessault Mountains that were hidden hundreds of kilometers on the other side of the southern horizon.
Adam climbed down out of the cab and stretched elaborately, not enjoying the sounds his old body made after having been cramped up in a chair for a seven-hour stretch. It didn’t matter how adaptive the plyplastic cushioning was; his limbs were numbed and joints sore from inactivity. Outside the cab’s air-conditioning the heat was oppressive. He began sweating at once, and hurriedly put his wraparound shades on.
A ten-year-old girl in dungarees and a grubby Manchester United cap came out of the garage to fill the Volvos up from its single diesel pump.
“Quick as you can, please,” he told her, and flashed an Earth ten-dollar bill. She grinned brightly, showing a missing tooth, and hurried to the hose.
Everyone except Paula had clambered out of the cabs. The Guardians were giving the navy personnel mistrustful stares. Adam sighed, but he was too tired to play diplomat now. “I need to get some things,” he told the others, and nodded to the store opposite the garage. “Oscar, you’re with me. Kieran, you’re paired with the Investigator. The rest of you.” He shrugged. “We leave as soon as the tanks are full.”
“Do you need anything in particular?” Oscar asked as they crossed the dusty road.
“Some medical supplies for the Investigator. The diagnostic array keeps telling me to use drugs and biogenics we don’t have in the kit.”
Oscar looked at the ramshackle composite panel building with its weathered solar panel roof, and big heart-shaped emerald precipitator leaves flapping lazily from the eaves. The windows were grimed up, and the air-conditioning unit a coverless box of rusty junk. “Are you sure they’ll have them here?”
“What they won’t have in here is any sabotaged supplies.”
“Christ, you really are paranoid.”
Oscar pushed the single door open. The dimly lit room inside was like someone’s living room, with threadbare rugs over the carbon plank floor and tall metal shelving racks instead of furniture. Half of the shelves were empty; the rest carried the usual merchandise essential for any small community, mostly domestic products, with food packets supplied by Armstrong City companies. A good stock of booze took up an entire rack.
“Can I help you boys?” an elderly woman asked. She was sitting in a rocking chair at the far end, knitting in the yellow glow of a polyphoto globe hanging from the rafters.
“I’m looking for first aid products,” Adam said.
“Some bandages and aspirin on the third shelf in from the door,” she told him. “Few other odds and ends. Mind you check the expiry dates, now. They’ve been around awhile.”
“Thanks.” Adam pulled Oscar along. “You heard Johansson’s answer last night.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, along with half of this world who’re listening in to the Highway One chase on their radios. Thank you for that. It went down particularly well with Rosamund, I thought. She certainly gave her guns a big polish afterward. You know it’s only going to be a matter of time before one of your street thugs decides the Guardians’ cause is best served by slitting our throats.”
“They’re not street thugs, I trained them.”
“The way Grayva trained us?”
Adam grunted dismissively, and rummaged through the section boldly labeled MEDICAL PROVISIONS. The shopkeeper hadn’t been joking about the lack of variety. “Don’t worry about my team, they’re well structured and disciplined.”
“Whatever you say, Adam.”
“So how do you explain Dudley’s claim that you deliberately ordered him to carry on through the Watchtower so he’d be left behind?” Adam was quite surprised by the involuntary spasm of anger on Oscar’s face when Dudley’s name was mentioned.
“That little shit!”
Both of them gave a guilty glance in the direction of the old woman.
“Sorry, Dudley just manages to rile me every time.”
“So?” Adam invited.
“It must have been the Starflyer agent. Whoever it was hacked into the Second Chance’s communications systems.”
“I figured that, too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you yanking my plank?”
“I know it’s not you.” Adam grinned at Oscar’s astonishment, the thick skin on his cheeks crinkling stiffly.
“You do?”
“Let’s say that after our long association I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Oscar rolled his eyes. “If this is the tradecraft you trained your kids in, we’re in deeper shit than I thought. But thanks, anyway.”
“Don’t mention it. Your innocence reduces my problem by one.”
“Yeah.” Oscar scratched at the back of his head. “And then there were three.”
“Two of whom were on the Second Chance; and Myo has been persecuting the Guardians since their inception.”
“It can’t be Wilson and Anna.”
“Is that emotion or logic talking to me?”
“Emotion, I guess. Hell! I’ve been part of their lives for years now, we virtually live in each other’s pockets. They’re friends. Real f
riends. If it is one of them, then they have truly run rings around me.”
“I told you before, you manage to cover up your earlier activities with a perfect shell of respectability. To be honest, I never quite expected you to have so much success in your current life.”
“Thanks a whole bunch. But my crime was in the past. The Starflyer agent is active now.”
“All right. Is their any indication, anything that might tell you one of them might not be genuine?”
“I don’t know.” Oscar picked up a tube of dental biogenic cream intended to treat abscesses, not looking at it.
“What?” Adam persisted. “Come on. We’re still fighting to stop this war, and more, stop it from happening again.”
“Someone tampered with the official logs stored in Pentagon II after I found the evidence that the Starflyer agent was on board the Second Chance. That little cover-up blocked us from using it to expose the Starflyer. Only Wilson and I knew about it.”
“Are you sure?”
Oscar closed his eyes. “No,” he said in a pained sigh. “A lot of people knew we had a private meeting, which is very unusual, especially as there was no official record of the topic. And then we invited Myo for an equally secret conference. But I swear that office is sealed up tighter than Sheldon’s harem.”
“You’re looking for a get-out clause. It sounds like a locked room to me.”
“It can’t be Wilson.” Oscar sounded deeply troubled.
“What about his wife?”
“Anna? No way. Nobody’s worked harder to defeat both the Prime invasions. She was the liaison between the tactical staff and Fleet Command; if she was the agent that would be the moment to ensure we were totally screwed.”
“Except the Starflyer wanted the Commonwealth intact to strike back at MorningLightMountain. According to Bradley it sees us as a couple of old prizefighters battering the crap out of each other until we’re both dead.”
“Christ Almighty. I don’t know.”
“Then give me your take on Myo.”
“Definite candidate.” For once Oscar sounded confident. “And what is up with her anyway? How sick is she?”
“She claims her body is reacting to her decision to let me go free. Think of it as neurotoxic shock, and you won’t be far wrong.”
“Jesus. She is one weird woman. That damn Hive!”
“It’s an illness which mitigates in her favor. If she’s having that reaction, then her genuine personality is intact.”
Oscar dropped the tube back on the rack. “Come on. Like she couldn’t fake the shakes.”
“The diagnostic array confirms it. She’s seriously ill, Oscar. I’m not quite sure …” He looked at the meager display of medicines, and shook his head sadly.
“Or she’s taken a compound to produce that effect.”
“I believe you mentioned paranoia?”
“Face it,” Oscar said, “you haven’t got a clue which one of them it could be.”
“Not yet. I fear I must rouse Paula to work this out for me. This is her field of excellence. Her only field, come to that. We need her … if it isn’t her.” He quickly picked a few packets off the shelf, mild sedatives and some biogenics designed to counter viral infections. They might help. Probably not.
“In the state she’s in?” Oscar said as they walked over to the shopkeeper. “Not a chance. She’s barely rational.”
“I’m aware of that. If it’s genuine.”
“What are you going to do?” Oscar asked with brittle humor. “Fall on your sword? If it is a genuine illness, it’s the only way to cure her.”
“Would that be so dishonorable?”
“Hey, come on, don’t joke about this.”
“After the Guardians win, where will I go? What will I do? There’s no one left to shelter me. No one that I’d accept help from, anyway.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“No, I’m not.” But he didn’t like the fact that he’d actually thought of it. True desperation.
“Good! We’ll work it out; you and me, the old team. Damnit, there’s only three possibles. How difficult can it be?”
Adam gave that a lot of thought as the interminable afternoon rolled ever onward. They’d left the sparse road behind at Wolfstail, heading directly south from the town’s T-junction along a stony farm track that vanished a couple of kilometers later beneath the advancing Anguilla grass. Once they reached its outlying fringes, it quickly grew taller and thicker, reinforcing Adam’s earlier comparison to a sea. A heavily modified variety of terrestrial Bermuda grass, the Anguilla’s individual stalks were as thick as wheat; they clustered so densely the entire mass supported itself, swaying in giant slow waves as the winds gusted over the surface. No other plant could gain any kind of niche amid its indomitable all-pervasive root mat. It had been tailored by the revitalization project office to thrive on the area’s prevalent heat and moisture, and succeeded to a degree its creators never expected.
Feathery tips reached up to the Volvo’s windows. Kieran, who was driving again, had to use the truck’s radar to see the shape of the land below the tide of grass. There had been a road here, decades ago, back when Wolfstail had been built around a crossroads, linking the Dessault Mountains to the inhabited northern lands. It was completely smothered under the Anguilla grass now, its disintegrating surface long since sealed over by the root mat. The Guardians still used the route. McMixons and McKratzes mostly; riding or driving down out of the mountains to trade with Far Away’s normal population, and transporting back the illicit weapons technology Adam and his predecessors had smuggled through the gateway in First Foot Fall Plaza. They’d placed tuned trisilicon markers along the hidden road, stiff meter-high poles invisible within the grass but shining like beacons if they were illuminated by the correctly coded radar pulse. Their unmistakable gleaming points marching across the display screen, and an accurate inertial navigation system allowed the Volvos to race on at close to a hundred kilometers an hour, a speed impossible through the grasslands without the certainty of a solid surface beneath the root map. Adam likened it to running along a precipice. God help them if they wavered from the exact line laid out by the inertial guidance. He would have been happier if control of the trucks had been switched over to the drive arrays, but their programs would have taken into account the dreadful local conditions, and crawled their way forward. Besides, the Guardians took a perverse delight in showing how ballsy they were; each of them claiming to have driven the route many times previously. Adam didn’t believe a word of it.
He tended to Paula as they plowed onward through the grass. She was in a dreadful state, her clothes and blankets damp from a fever sweat, drifting in and out of consciousness. When she was alert she was in a lot of pain. The sedatives and biogenics he’d administered did seem to have improved her blood pressure, and her heart rate had dropped a little, though it still remained too high for comfort.
“No way can this be fake,” Adam muttered as he put the diagnostic array back in its bag. Paula shivered under her blanket; her breathing was shallow, and she frowned in REM sleep, whimpering as if something horrible was closing in on her. That it must be him she was dreaming of didn’t exactly help ease his anxiety. Not guilt though, this is not my fault.
In the pleasant climate of the cab, all everyone did was follow the chase down Highway One. They’d drifted out of range from the small road net within a quarter of an hour of leaving Highway One the previous night. As Far Away had no satellites, all that kept the countryside communities connected was radio, and its range was limited. The old-fashioned analogue short-wave units they carried could broadcast far enough to reach Johansson, but as he’d discovered last night they were erratic at best. He didn’t ask for an update directly; his own transmission would pinpoint him for the Starflyer. Last night’s request for any information on a possible traitor had been a calculated risk. Instead of a direct connection they followed the news as relayed from household to household, trying to decide
what was exaggerated and what was plain fiction.
The chase had become a spectator sport, with people lining Highway One to watch the two convoys race past. At first there had been some spontaneous attempts to interrupt the Starflyer’s vehicles. Youths threw Molotovs. Hunting rifles were fired at the Cruisers. All of it completely ineffective. The Institute troops responded with overwhelming firepower, flattening entire swathes of buildings as they flashed past. After the first few times, news of the retaliation spread down Highway One and nobody attempted to interfere again. The Starflyer’s MANN truck was watched from darkened windows, or behind walls a safe distance away from the road.
Bradley Johansson’s pursuit was cheered on by a few hardy souls who ventured out to look at the man who throughout their lives had been more myth than real person.
The airways gossip allowed everyone in the Volvo to keep track of events. To start with, the distance between Bradley and the Starflyer was holding steady at just over five hundred sixty kilometers. Both were traveling about as fast as Highway One would permit, with the smaller vehicles of the Guardians having a slight edge, and closing by nearly sixteen kilometers each hour. It was the bridges that would make the difference. There were cheers in the cab each time excited shouts burst out over the radio proclaiming another bridge had been brought down.
By dawn it was confirmed: the Guardians had blown up all five major river crossings along Highway One. Adam wasn’t entirely surprised when people who’d gathered around the rubble of the Taran bridge, the most northerly crossing, started reporting that the Starflyer convoy had some kind of amphibious capability. The MANN truck and its escort of Cruisers turned off Highway One and made their way down to the river, crossing it directly. It hadn’t been easy; they had to travel for several kilometers along rough tracks before there was a place to get down to the water. When they did, that was where the Guardian ambush team struck. According to the breathless descriptions that filtered back across the Aldrin Plains, the firefight was ferocious. It was a story repeated at each broken bridge. The Guardians never managed to destroy the MANN truck, but the Cruisers took heavy casualties each time.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 217
