Judas Unchained cs-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Adam, please, I’m not that good a pilot. Hell, the only time I’ve actually flown in the last ten years is on the Carbon Goose.”

  “The insert memories will help. You’ll make it, Oscar, you always do.”

  Four Land Rover Cruisers were parked across Highway One. Ion shots raked the sky above them, punching into buildings where Institute troopers were shooting at the approaching line of Guardians’ vehicles. The kinetic rapid-fire gun mounted on the bonnet of the Cruiser blocking the nearside lane began firing at the cab of the big eighteen-wheel Loko truck that was bearing down on it at a hundred kilometers an hour. An answering hyper-rifle shot from the truck’s cab struck the Cruiser head-on, slicing clean through its force field. It exploded violently, lifting its broken-backed chassis off the ground to somersault in midair.

  “Going airborne,” the Cat’s voice called out blithely on the general band. Her armored shape jumped from the Loko’s cab, surrounded by a sparkling amber force field. She hit the worn enzyme-bonded concrete and bounced, slamming into the wall of an animal feed store amid a shimmering crimson aurora. The wall shattered and the roof sagged alarmingly.

  The flaming corpse of the Cruiser landed on its roof, collapsing under the impact. A second later the Loko truck struck it head-on, shunting it back into the rest of the blockade.

  Two hundred meters behind, sitting at the wheel of the armored car, Stig winced at the impact. The Loko truck rampaged onward. Two more crumpled Cruisers lurched into the air as it struck them, their force fields flaring dangerous scarlet. Scraps of wreckage tumbled fast across Highway One beneath a huge fireball flooding up into the empty sapphire sky. Tiger Pansy squealed in Stig’s ear. It was like a fingernail scrape plugged into a rock band’s amp stack. “Holy shit,” she sighed in exhilaration. “You’re not going to…?”

  He kept the accelerator floored as the blazing chassis of the truck performed a slow jackknife across the two southbound lanes. The buildings on the side of the road were getting perilously close, blocking the narrow slit of side window with a high-speed smear of fanciful colored paint. In front, the Loko’s chassis was slowly coming to a halt, leaving a very small gap that continued to shrink. Stig’s arms gripped the steering wheel like bands of steel. He refused to brake. Flames were fanning out across the enzyme-bonded concrete as the tank on the fourth Cruiser burst open, spilling out a wave of fuel that was already alight.

  “Dreaming heavens,” Bradley gasped from the front passenger bench; his hands clawed at the cushioning. A lavish sheet of flame roared upward, covering both lanes.

  They flashed through the gap, their slipstream pulling some of the flame with them. In the air above, fire and smoke swirled in micro-cyclone patterns.

  “Fucking-A,” Tiger Pansy agreed loudly.

  The road ahead was clear. Stig steered them back into the outside lane. The Mazda jeeps and the other armored cars following him drove through the gap, keeping their set fifty-meter separation distance. Then came the last three Loko trucks.

  “Cat?” Stig called. “Cat, are you okay?”

  Bradley was pressed against the slit window, staring back along the road. “Can’t see anybody. Still a lot of flame.”

  “Cat?” Morton asked; for once he sounded concerned.

  “Boys. You care. How sweet.”

  Cheers rang out from all the vehicles.

  In the rearview camera image Stig saw the Cat’s armored shape walk out of the ruined feed store. A Mazda jeep braked hard, tires leaving black rubber streaks on the enzyme-bonded concrete. The front door opened, and the Cat climbed in as if she were hitching a lift.

  “Any bad guys survive?” Alic asked.

  “I’m monitoring local net traffic,” Keely said. “The residents haven’t seen any yet. Mind you, they’re still keeping their heads down.”

  “Tell them not to approach any survivors,” Bradley said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now that was fun,” the Cat said. “How long till the next one?”

  “Half an hour,” Olwen muttered in a piqued tone.

  Like all of them, Olwen had been keen to join battle when they finally caught up with the Starflyer. It was an event Stig and Bradley had soon realized was never going to happen if they kept getting delayed by the Institute patrols. Bradley had made the decision to adopt the head-on collision tactic. Only the state-of-the-art armor suits worn by the Paris team and Cat’s Claws could perform that duty, which left the rest of the Guardians more than a little envious.

  Another of the big Loko trucks they’d liberated from the depot growled past Stig’s armored car. Jim Nwan was driving; his gauntlet waved as he maneuvered the truck into point position.

  The beezees Stig had taken to keep alert during the second full day of driving made it hard for him to slacken his grip on the steering wheel. They narrowed the brain’s focus onto one task and kept the neurons zinging with the precision of a processor; people had kept doing the same thing for up to a week when they were dosed up. You didn’t need sleep, but it became difficult for the mind to nudge its way out of the thought-loop that bestowed so much attention.

  “Anybody else between us and the Anculan?” he asked.

  “No reported sightings,” Keely said. “I’m still not getting anything close to the bridge. The road net ends a hundred sixty kilometers this side of it. Even the redundant systems have failed after that. Nobody’s picking up any radio coming from the south, either. I’m still getting check signals from Rock Dee on the short wave but that’s all.”

  “Okay.”

  At their current speed, and assuming no further clashes with the Institute, they’d reach the Anculan bridge in another two and a half hours. Best guess put the Starflyer there an hour ago. They didn’t know exactly; communications had fallen off dramatically when the Starflyer convoy passed that magic sixty-kilometer marker. What the Institute had done to kill the road’s net was subject to a lot of debate among the Guardians.

  Stig was desperate for some news. Anculan was where the clans were making their biggest effort to intercept the Starflyer on Highway One. If that didn’t slow it down, then the whole pursuit would be for nothing, and they’d have to depend on the planet’s revenge and the Final Raid. Not that he would ever criticize Bradley Johansson, but for plans that had been a hundred years in the making, their time frame was starting to look pretty shitty. Besides, the bombing run on 3F Plaza made this personal; he wanted to take down the Starflyer himself. The beezees was loose enough to second-track that thought.

  Bradley bent over and gave his short-wave array a hard look. “That sounds like Samantha.”

  Stig’s eyes never left the road. He’d isolated his inserts from any external communication to help his concentration. Up in front Jim Nwan’s truck was belching out a lot of exhaust fumes. The hard blue of the sky splashed strong waves along its elaborate chrome finish. He tried to lock down any repetitive pattern in the reflections. “What does she say?”

  “They’re at the last manipulator station. I guess that means Adam got through with their equipment.”

  “Good man, Adam, no traitor is going to derail him.”

  “Hang on…” A grin flicked over his lips. “She keeps saying she’s ready to surf the next wave.” He switched the short-wave array to transmit. “Message acknowledged. Have a good day at the beach.” His reply was automatically repeated ten times.

  Olwen dropped her arms onto the back of Bradley’s seat, her head resting in her hands, and grinning in satisfaction. “Tomorrow! Dreaming heavens, can you believe this. It’s going to happen tomorrow!”

  “Not if I catch it first,” Stig grunted.

  Olwen and Bradley shared a glance.

  “So, Bradley, how do you feel about this?” Tiger Pansy asked. She was oblivious to the way Olwen’s mouth wrinkled with disapproval. “You’ve waited a long time for it to happen.”

  “I’m not sure I feel anything,” Bradley said. “I just keep focused on the events happening around us. I kn
ow I set them all in motion but I don’t think I’d ever tried to visualize them for myself before. It’s quite something, like looking out on an avalanche as it thunders down a mountain and knowing you threw the first pebble.”

  “It’s an avalanche that’ll bury that bastard Starflyer,” Olwen said. “We’ll see to it.”

  “Thank you, my dear. It is your clans that have gifted me a great deal of strength over the decades. You have no idea what it is like to be surrounded by contempt and hatred and yet still have somebody believe in you.”

  “Commonwealth’s going to owe us, huh?”

  “They always have, they just never knew it. So do you know yet, dear Olwen, what you’re going to do afterward?”

  “No. Never even thought about it. It’s still kind of hard to accept this is happening. I always expected it would be the next generation who helped the planet have its revenge, or the one after. Never mine.”

  “Ah well, the day after tomorrow we will all have to sit down and think about what is to become of us. The clans will have to transform themselves. Into what, who knows.”

  “If I’m still alive the day after tomorrow, I’ll be at the biggest party Far Away’s ever had.”

  “Fair enough, my dear; we’ll wait until after the hangover before we make any important decisions.”

  They saw the smoke from a few kilometers away. Thin smears of gray vapor wafted up into the hazy equatorial sky, the kind of smoke that only comes from embers.

  Haville wasn’t a big town; it ran for a couple of kilometers beside the road before tailing off into orange groves. The Starflyer convoy had started a firestorm at one end and ripped it down the entire length. Shacks assembled from carbon panels had been reduced to piles of slag sprawling over their concrete foundations. Black horizontal scorch marks produced by lasers and masers were visible on all the surviving concrete block walls, running right across the gutted buildings. People were visible amid the debris, desolated and wandering around aimlessly, their shocked eyes following the Guardians’ convoy as they charged past. One large open yard had a line of corpses, wrapped up in cloth.

  “They hit every node junction,” Keely reported. “It’s not like the net was armored or anything.”

  “I don’t think they were that precise,” Bradley said as they reached the end of Haville. Trees along the edge of the orange grove were still burning. “This is a deliberate scorched earth operation to kill any long-range communications along the road.”

  “Do you think they’ve done this to every town?” Olwen asked.

  “Undoubtedly.”

  Nothing else moved along Highway One now. South of Rob Lacey’s great avenue of redwoods the land rose steadily to be capped by low hills whose valleys interlocked in gentle curves. Bradley could remember traveling along a newly laid Highway One when this tableland had been barren territory. Today, nearly two centuries later, the rolling slopes were carpeted by rich emerald vegetation of shaggy grass and small verdant trees. Midday sun turned the crown of the sapphire sky to a white blaze-patch too bright to look at directly. Visibility was perfect. Looking over Stig’s shoulder through the thick glass of the armored car’s windshield he could see the mud-gray strip of enzyme-bonded concrete wind onward through the meandering vales for kilometers in front of them. There was nowhere for a Cruiser patrol to hide. Stig and the other drivers were piling on the speed.

  Since Haville, they’d passed through four more small towns that the Starflyer had razed to the ground, ending with Zeefield, the southernmost settlement along Highway One. Word had obviously spread southward in time. The last three had been deserted; they’d seen no distraught victims nor lines of corpses amid the smoldering ruins. Wherever the residents had fled to, they were staying quiet. Keely had been unable to raise anyone on the local bands.

  Right across the rolling tablelands, the fiber-optic cable that linked the Institute to Armstrong City supported a series of nodes to provide communications to anyone using the road. They were spaced five kilometers apart, protected from the elements inside meter-wide domes that sprouted from the ground beside the road like composite mushrooms. Every one had been masered, the high-density carbon turning to a slate-gray sludge surrounded by singed grass.

  “I came up here for my first act against the Starflyer,” Stig said as Highway One began to dip down into one of the deeper vales toward the end of the tablelands. “We were always cutting the cable up here. It was easy.”

  “Now they’re using that isolation against us,” Bradley said. “Though attacking every single node speaks of deep insecurity. A couple of simple cuts would be sufficient.”

  “Why bother?” Olwen asked. “It knows we’re using short wave; it can’t block our critical communications.”

  “In some respects it is remarkably unimaginative,” Bradley said. “If destroying the road net has caused us inconvenience before, it simply continues to perform the disruption.”

  “That sounds more like an array program than a sentient creature.”

  “In some respects its neurological functions are strikingly similar to those of a processor. What tactics it possesses it either determines by trial and error, or absorbs from other more intuitive sources. A fast-flowing situation like this chase will be difficult for it. There is no time for it to work through options to see which is the most effective.”

  “You mean it gets its ideas from humans?”

  “Yes, a lot of the time; though the longer they are under its control, the more their ability to think in an original or inventive fashion is reduced.”

  “No wonder it wants to get rid of us. It can’t compete.”

  “Not on our terms, no. But nonetheless it has brought us to the brink of destruction. Don’t underestimate it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bradley was moved by the level of determination in her voice. Returning to Far Away after so long he’d even been slightly disturbed by the unquestioning respect he kindled among the clans. It was almost as if the Commonwealth authorities were right to brand him a cult leader.

  Highway One began its long descent out of the tablelands, tracking around the steeper gorges, then bending in great switchback loops down the final escarpment to deliver them onto the sweltering veldt. This was where Far Away’s first true rainforest was busy establishing itself, sweeping out from Mount StOmer at the northwestern corner of the Dessault Mountains away to the southern shoreline of the Oak Sea. The grasses had come first, seeded by the blimpbots, refreshing the soil before the trees and vines were introduced over a fifty-year period. The central core of rainforest was now thriving and expanding without any further human encouragement.

  Bradley could see the Anculan Valley from a long way off, an intrusive furrow running west to east across the veldt, emptying into the Oak Sea. Its vegetation was noticeably darker than the luxuriant jade of the rainforest, shading down to olive-green as if the gully was permanently in shadow. The river was fed by dozens of tributaries emerging from the Dessault range, giving it a lavish forceful flow that had cut deep into the landscape, creating a gully over two hundred meters wide and up to thirty deep with near-sheer sides. Dense bushes filled the base of the gully on either side of the water, their half-exposed root balls scrabbling for purchase on the glutinous mud. Water pumpkins had colonized the shallows, their brimstone-colored fruit bobbing about, ranging from buds no bigger than oranges up to the full-grown football-size globes with mushy wrinkled skin. Their wreath of slim black tendrils swished around them in the current as if eels were nesting in the stem. This close to the mountains the Anculan’s water was loaded with so much sediment it was the color of milky coffee.

  Given the difficulty and expense of ferrying steel girders to Far Away, the most cost-effective method of bridging a gulf of this size was with a single span arch of concrete supporting the road above, which narrowed from its usual four lanes down to two.

  The Guardian demolition team had made a good job of bringing it down. All that remained of the arch were
thick broken tusks of concrete curving up from either side of the river. The central hundred-meter section of the road was gone, its remnants a cluster of submerged boulders creating a furious surge of white water.

  Alic and Morton stood on the edge of the broken road, using their active sensors to scan the thick wall of the rainforest on the opposite side. There was no sign of hostiles hidden among the wall of vegetation. “Looks clear,” Alic reported.

  Stig and the others stood on the lip of the gorge next to the road, looking down into the surging water twenty meters below. Bodies were snagged on the new boulders, three of them wearing the dark impact armor of the Institute troops, a couple in camouflage fatigues. They all had terrible wounds. A Charlemagne had been snagged by the bushes just below the river, its body starting to bloat. When Stig started to scan upstream, he saw more bodies jammed into the mud and vegetation.

  “Pretty clear which way they went,” Bradley said. A swathe of open ground bordered the top of the gorge, where grass creepers and bushes formed a buffer between the rainforest and the precipice. Its moist soil had been torn up by the wheels of the Starflyer convoy.

  “Commander Hogan, Morton, could your people take point along here please,” Bradley said. “We need to find where they forded the river.”

  “Sure thing,” Alic said. He and Morton left the bridge.

  Cat’s Claws and the Paris team began jogging along the track, with the armored cars and jeeps following. They drove along the top of the gorge for another two kilometers. In some places the walls rose up to forty meters high. Below them, scattered along the river, dead bodies lay in the mud with water flowing around and over them. After the first thirty, everyone stopped counting.

  The Starflyer convoy had made its crossing two and a quarter kilometers upriver from the bridge. A dip in the gorge wall on both sides reduced the height to a little over ten meters. Explosives had been used to rip the bottom out of the dip and pulverize the remainder of the wall, creating a sloping heap that the vehicles could drive down. It was a crude ramp that was mirrored on the other side of the Anculan.