“Good. Let’s go.”
They went out into the subbasement garage where the holding areas had been set up. A single pen of wire mesh was left, with twenty guardbots surrounding it, weapons out of their recesses. Two local police officers stood on either side of the gate. There was only one person left inside.
Mellanie waited in the middle of the pen, still in her nurse’s uniform, arms folded huffily across her chest, an incensed expression welded into place.
Paula told the police to open the gate. Mellanie remained resolutely in place.
“I thought we could talk on the way back,” Paula said. Somehow she didn’t have any scruples about setting the girl up. Mellanie, she guessed, had involved herself in a great deal of illicit activity to get into the Saffron Clinic.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting here?”
“To the second, actually. Why?”
Mellanie glared at her.
“If you prefer, you can stay here,” Hoshe said generously. “The police will process you in due course. They are quite busy after tonight.”
Mellanie let out a dangerous growl. “I can’t access the unisphere.”
“We have blocker systems active down here,” Hoshe said. “They’re quite effective, aren’t they?”
Mellanie switched her stare to Paula. “Where?”
“Where what?” Paula asked.
“You said we’d talk on the way back. Back where?”
“Earth. We have tickets for the next express. First class.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Mellanie stomped out through the open gate. “Where’s the car?”
Hoshe gestured politely to the ramp. “Outside.”
Mellanie flounced in disgust at their incompetence. She headed for the ramp with long impatient strides. Paula and Hoshe exchanged a bemused glance behind her back, and set off after her. Hoshe’s four black cases trundled along behind him.
The ramp came out directly on the street beyond the Greenford Tower’s plaza. Mellanie paused in confusion at the scene outside. Paula and Hoshe stood on either side of her. The remaining reporters flocked toward the nearest section of the barricades, and started shouting questions.
Paula’s virtual vision showed her several heavily encrypted messages arriving in Mellanie’s address port as they emerged from the blocking field. The girl sent two.
Tridelta police still had Allwyn Street sealed off for six blocks around the skyscraper. All the ambulances had departed, leaving the fire department crews and bots to clear up the aftermath of the explosion. The eight cars closest to Renne’s taxi were burnt-out wrecks, shunted across the road to smash into the buildings; a further twenty vehicles were buckled and broken. A big crane was lifting them onto waiting trailers. Civic cleaning bots were washing the blood off the pavement. There had been a lot of people in the open-air bars nearby. GPbots were moving along the façades, sweeping up the piles of broken glass.
“Oh, God,” Mellanie mumbled. She stared at the devastation, then twisted around to look back at the Greenford Tower.
“I told you it was an unsafe environment,” Paula said.
A big police van pulled up beside them. The door slid open, and they climbed in. The cases rolled into the luggage compartment.
“I remember Randtown,” Mellanie said in a quiet voice as the van drove off. “I hoped I’d forgotten, but that just made it all come back. It was awful.”
Paula decided the girl was genuinely upset. “Death on this scale is never easy.”
Hoshe was looking out of the window, his face expressionless.
“Did your people get hurt?” Mellanie asked.
“Some of them, yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They knew the risks, just like you did. They’ll all be re-lifed.”
“If there’s anything left to be re-lifed into.”
“We’ll make sure there is.”
***
The police van got them to the CST station in plenty of time before the express was due to depart. A cool breeze blew through the cavernous structure, coming straight off the Logrosan, which ran along the side of the smallest marshaling yard Paula had seen in the Commonwealth. Illuminatus didn’t export any bulk products, it only manufactured small high-technology items. The marshaling yard was set up primarily for receiving food imports; without any arable land on the planet, every meal had to be brought in on the goods trains. She wondered what would happen if the Primes struck here. Or worse, on Piura, the Big15 world to which it was connected. If Illuminatus was cut off from the Commonwealth, it would go bad very quickly for the population of the trapped city.
When she looked along the platform, the other waiting passengers scrupulously avoided eye contact. The station wasn’t exactly busy, but there were more people than usual for this time in the morning. Several families stood huddled together, complete with drowsy children. After the news of the starships, they’d obviously been thinking hard about the consequences of a Prime attack.
Mellanie rubbed at her arms; the cool air was raising goose bumps. “I feel stupid in this,” she muttered. Her nurse’s uniform had short sleeves.
“Here.” Hoshe took off his sweater and held it out to her.
She flashed him a grateful smile. “Thank you.” It was baggy on her, but she stopped shivering.
The express slid silently into the station along its maglev track. They boarded the first-class carriage, where they had a reserved compartment.
“Which Earth station are we going to?” Mellanie asked.
“London,” Hoshe said.
“I thought you were based in Paris.”
Paula gave her an enigmatic smile. “It depends.” She told her e-butler to open one of the pouches in her belt. A Bratation spindlefly dropped out and began to scuttle up the wall. Its gossamer thread extruded behind it as Paula walked along the carriage’s narrow corridor, maintaining the secure connection. The compartment contained thick leather couches on either side of a walnut-veneered table. Mellanie flopped down into one with a hefty sigh, curling her legs up and pulling the sweater down over her knees. She had her face up close to the window, like a child peering into a shop display. Paula and Hoshe sat opposite her. The black cases arranged themselves on either side of the door.
After a couple of minutes, the express eased out of the station and began to pick up speed as it headed for the gateway.
“What happened to the lawyers?” Mellanie asked.
“Bodyloss,” Paula told her. “Our medical forensic teams will try to recover their memorycells, but given the damage level it doesn’t look good.” She checked the image she was getting from the spindlefly, which showed her a black and white fish-eye-lens view of the corridor from the ceiling. Her skin tingled as they passed through the pressure curtain. A warm salmon-pink light shone in through the compartment’s window, and the express accelerated hard across Piura’s massive station yard.
“They were the one lead I had back to the Cox,” Mellanie said.
“Yes, me, too.”
Mellanie looked surprised. “You did believe me!”
“I do now. We uncovered a Starflyer agent in my old Paris office. He’d been manipulating information for quite some time. The Cox case was one of them.”
“Did you catch him?”
“No,” Paula said. It was a heavy admission, but she’d talked to Alic Hogan before the paramedics put him under. Treetops had been worse than the Greenford Tower.
“So we still don’t have any proof that the Starflyer exists,” Mellanie said.
“The case against it is building.” Paula’s virtual vision flashed a small square of text. The management routines in the carriage arrays were shutting down all their communications functions. The spindlefly showed her the door that led through to the next first-class carriage being opened. She exchanged a glance with Hoshe, who nodded subtly.
“But not conclusive,” Mellanie said sullenly. “That’s what you’re going to say.”
“N
o. And we’re running out of time.”
“How do you figure that?”
“The war is not going well for the Commonwealth. Our starships were defeated at Hell’s Gateway.” A girl was walking along the carriage’s corridor toward their compartment. Paula’s heart began to speed up. A tactical grid flipped up into her virtual vision; she prepped several icons for immediate activation.
“Yeah. I guess the rich will be taking off in their lifeboats pretty soon.”
“I expect they will. More importantly, according to the Guardians, the Starflyer will leave once it has arranged for our destruction. Unless we can move against it soon, it will have gone.”
“So just stop it going back to Far Away,” Mellanie said. “Put a guard on the Boongate gateway to Half Way.”
“I would have to convince my political allies such a move was justified.” Through the spindlefly’s artificial senses, Paula saw the girl standing outside their compartment.
Mellanie took a deep breath. “I know about some more Starflyer agents, if you’ll believe me this time.”
“You are very well informed.”
A focused disruptor field hit the compartment door, which instantly shattered. Mellanie screamed in shock, flinging herself down. Paula and Hoshe activated their force field skeletons. Isabella Halgarth stepped in through the dagger shards of the door frame. A force field sparkled around her.
“It’s her,” Mellanie yelled. “It’s Isabella! She’s one of them.”
Isabella raised her right arm. The flesh on her forearm flowed, parting in several places like lipless mouths.
Paula triggered the cage. Curving force field petals sprang out of the cases on each side of Isabella, closing around her and squeezing tight. She grimaced, as if mildly puzzled. Then she tried to move, squirming inside the constricting petals. Her movements were mechanical as each boosted muscle tried to push her body free. A series of apertures opened in her skin along both arms, allowing dark stubby muzzles to protrude. She started firing ion bolts and masers.
Streamers of energy lashed across the cage, grounding out in the floor of the compartment. Smoke began to leak upward. The shimmering petals slowly brightened to a threatening azure.
“Ready?” Paula shouted above the screech of the wild discharges. She held up a dump-web, and as Hoshe nodded she slapped it against Isabella’s back. The cage petals rearranged themselves to let it through. Her face was centimeters from the girl’s, and that was when she knew with absolute certainty they were confronting some kind of alien. Isabella’s eyes looked at her with malignant fury. Whatever intelligence stared through them was studying her, and judging.
Isabella’s force field failed.
Hoshe rammed a nervejam stick against her. It slipped easily through the cage petals to press against her chest. Her imprisoned body began to shake violently. She slowly peeled her lips back to reveal a furious snarl. All of her embedded weapons fired simultaneously. Sparks burst out of the gleaming cage petals as they began to whine dangerously.
“Jesus!” Hoshe exclaimed. He twisted the nervejam stick’s trigger to full power.
Isabella suddenly looked surprised, her eyes opening wide. Her weapons stopped firing.
The cage petals held her immobile, pressing tight against the skin, freezing her posture and expression. Paula looked at the girl’s feet. They were suspended a couple of centimeters off the smoldering carpet. “Is she out?”
“I don’t know,” a sweating Hoshe said. “But I’m not taking any chances.” He continued to push the nervejam stick hard against her.
“Okay.” Paula called the rest of the team in. Vic Russell, in full armor, clumped along the corridor, leading Matthew and John King.
“You get all the fun,” Vic complained.
“Next time, it’s all yours,” Hoshe said sincerely as Vic took over the nervejam stick.
With Isabella surrounded by the three armor suits, Hoshe switched the cage petals off. The girl crumpled into John’s arms.
“Is she alive?” Paula asked.
“Heart slightly erratic, but calming,” John assured her. “She’s breathing unaided.”
“Good, get her into the suspension shell.” Paula switched off her force field skeleton and ran a hand over her brow. She wasn’t surprised to find her fingers damp with perspiration.
“Just what the fuck is going on?” Mellanie yelled.
Paula turned to face the furious, frightened girl, and blinked in surprise. Mellanie’s skin had turned almost completely silver.
“It was an entrapment,” Paula said, trying to stay calm; she had no idea what Mellanie’s inserts were capable of. The only reassurance she had was that if Mellanie had been working for the Starflyer she would have pitched in with Isabella. “You and I have both been causing a considerable amount of trouble for the Starflyer. Together we presented what I hoped would be an irresistible target. I was correct. Although I was hoping it would be Tarlo they sent.”
“You!” Mellanie gasped the word out, a trembling finger pointed at Paula. “You. We. I. The police van. Everyone saw.”
“That is correct. Everyone saw us leaving the Greenford Tower together, and the event was released into the unisphere. This compartment was booked in my name. It gave them a perfect assassination opportunity.”
“I haven’t got a force field suit,” Mellanie wailed. The silver was fading from her skin, withdrawing in complex curling patterns.
“You were relatively safe. The cage is capable of absorbing high-level weapons fire from its captive.”
Mellanie sat down hard, staring at nothing. “You piece of shit. You could have told me.”
“I wasn’t completely sure of your loyalties. And I wanted you to behave in a natural fashion. I apologize for any alarm.”
“Alarm!” Mellanie appealed to Hoshe, who gave her a sorrowful little smile.
“And now,” Paula said, “would you please explain to me how you knew Isabella was a Starflyer agent?”
***
Justine arrived back in New York just after midnight eastern standard time. It was later than she expected; the War Cabinet session had overrun by an hour as they discussed the briefing from Wilson Kime. Seattle Project quantumbusters were now being carried on twenty-seven Moscow-class starships. The seventeen surviving ships in the Hell’s Gateway fleet were on their way back to the High Angel, where they’d also be equipped with quantumbusters once they were recharged.
Nobody knew if it would be sufficient to ward off any further Prime attacks. Even Dimitri Leopoldovich was being guarded with evaluations.
The War Cabinet was also undecided on carrying the fight back to the Primes. Sheldon, Hutchinson, and Columbia wanted to dispatch several ships to Dyson Alpha while the Primes remained ignorant of quantumbusters. Columbia believed they could inflict an incredible amount of destruction on the alien star system, hopefully weakening the Prime civilization catastrophically. A second wave of ships could then go in and finish the job, he said.
The genocide option again. Justine had taken their side, which had clearly surprised the remainder of the cabinet, including Toniea Gall, its newest member. She’d done it because of the Starflyer. Bradley Johansson had told her it wanted to destroy both species, that it was carefully playing them both off against each other so that it could rise victoriously in the ruins. Genocide was the only way she could see the Commonwealth surviving.
By contrast, Wilson hadn’t been keen, pointing out the sheer size of the Dyson Alpha civilization, the undoubted fact it had now spread to other star systems besides the Lost23 and Hell’s Gateway. The remnants could strike the Commonwealth equally hard, he claimed; we might trigger a double genocide.
“They’re trying to exterminate us anyway,” was Columbia’s reply.
If the genocide option was out for the immediate future, Alan Hutchinson said, then why not launch a second raid against Hell’s Gateway, this time using quantumbusters?
“You’ll be giving away our advantage,” K
ime replied. “Quantumbusters are the only weapon we have that they don’t know about.”
“But if they work, we can stop the Prime advance completely, and push them off the Lost23,” the bluff Dynasty leader said. “They can’t launch a second wave against us without Hell’s Gateway. With that knocked out, we can go right ahead and take out their home system.”
“I don’t think we can afford to divert starships from defense right now,” Kime said. “When we have more in service, then such a course becomes viable.”
Hutchinson clearly wasn’t happy. The rest of the War Cabinet was conscious of the growing rift between Kime and Columbia. President Doi closed the session by instituting an ongoing review. They would reconvene at any time the strategic situation changed.
As soon as they rose, Justine had taken an express straight back to New York with three aides and her Senate Security bodyguard team. The next morning had her scheduled to meet an informal group of Wall Street executives to discuss the worsening financial conditions brought on by increased taxes, the exodus, and the latest navy failure; the markets were in freefall, and they needed reassurance that the Executive was firmly in control with policies that would ultimately resolve the problem. As if I can convince them of that. At least Crispin would be with her at the working breakfast; she could rely on him for general support.
When the express pulled into Grand Central Station, her aides took a taxi to their hotel, while Justine was ferried to her Park Avenue apartment by a family limousine. As she got into the big car, her e-butler was tagging news reports from Illuminatus for her attention. She let some of them through her filters, and immediately sat up in the limo’s deep leather seating. Images of the Greenford Tower filled her virtual vision, with reporters covering the Tridelta fire department’s efforts to cope with the taxi that had exploded just outside. The civilian casualties were appalling.
“Call Paula Myo,” she told her e-butler.
“Senator?” Paula said.
“Are you all right?”
“So far, yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have failed to capture any of the Starflyer agents we discovered in Tridelta. However, we have exposed one of its agents working in the navy intelligence Paris office. It will give you some valuable leverage to use with Admiral Columbia, and the Halgarths.”
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