Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "Hey!"

  "Face it, kid, you just haven't got the staying power us mature guys have."

  "That's a bunch of crap. You old farts can't even get it up, never mind keep it there. The girls know what they like, and tonight they're going to overdose on me."

  "Let's keep this formation tighter," Amersy said before the bull got any worse. "Come on, Jones, you're falling behind. And, Dennis, close in; give Odel some support."

  "You got it, Corp."

  The platoon checked their relative positions and improved their formation.

  Up ahead of Lawrence, the street opened out into a small square where a tiny central lawn was surrounded by neat flowerbeds. Clunky old gardening robots crawled along the edge of the white-and-scarlet salvias, rusty implements prodding at the soil. The constables slowed their pace, dropping behind. They did it every time there was a major junction, in case there was some kind of ambush around the corner.

  Edmond and Lewis went wide, getting close to the shop fronts and covering the opposite sides of the square as they moved forward. There was no ambush. No KillBoy. The platoon crossed over the square with the constables ambling along behind.

  "Do you reckon we should buy some clothes from around here first?" Hal asked. "I mean, to blend in with the fashions, and such. We don't want to come over as total dumbass aliens. You've got to look sharp in any bar."

  "Hal," Lawrence said, "let's stay focused on current affairs, shall we?"

  "Sure thing. Sorry, Sarge."

  Lawrence walked off the grass and crossed the road. He didn't like to intervene with the normal platoon bull. But the kid was too boneheaded to take Amersy's hints. With a bit of luck, tonight he would actually find some silly tart who fancied screwing an alien invader. The kid needed some way of letting off tension. He was starting to irritate everyone.

  Red icons flashed up over Lawrence's sensor grid. The suit AS spliced his communications into the link that Oakley's platoon was using. A 2D indigo city map expanded out of its grid, featuring deployment symbols blossoming with script orders as the headquarters tactical AS analyzed the incident.

  The incident: one of Oakley's platoon was down, a squaddie named Foran. A stone wall had collapsed on top of him. Civilian datapool overlap showed some kind of traffic malfunction in the same location, a thirty-ton robot truck had gone offline. Foran's medical telemetry was intermittent from underneath the pile of rock, but the information so far showed that his Skin carapace had been breached in several places by the fall. Internal organ damage, broken bones and blood loss were showing.

  Oakley's platoon was patrolling the sector adjoining Lawrence's.

  "Dispersal pattern one," Lawrence told his platoon. It could be a classic diversionary tactic, in which case it was unlikely that the true assault would come quite so close by. But he wasn't taking chances, not in this environment.

  The platoon exited the street with smart professionalism, going into the nearest buildings through doors and larger open windows. Lawrence himself darted into a small hairdresser's. The row of women sitting under tentacle-armed IR drying units went rigid with alarm. Both the constables were left alone outside, staring around in astonishment. Video telemetry grids showed Lawrence several outraged homeowners yelling at his troopers.

  Lawrence switched to the command channel. "Oakley, do you need help?"

  "Shit, dunno—! Get it, get it That one! Come on, lift."

  "Oakley, what's your status? Is this a prelim diversion?"

  "No, it's fucking not! A goddamn wall has fallen on him. Shit, it's the size of a mountain. We're never going to shift it."

  Lawrence saw the deployment icons representing Oakley's platoon all clustering in one spot. "You're getting dense. If that sniper's around, you're going to get punished. Suggest you pull some of your team back."

  "Fuck you, neurotronic-brain Newton! That's one of mine under there."

  "Newton," Captain Bryant said, "take some of your platoon and help the dig. We need to get Foran out of there."

  "Sir, I don't think that's—"

  "He's alive, Sergeant. I'm not allowing one of my men to die here. This was a traffic accident, not a setup for a sniper. Understand?"

  "Yes, sir." Lawrence took a moment to compose himself, knowing full well what his own medical telemetry would be showing Bryant. Not that the captain would be looking. "Hal, Dennis, you're with me. Amersy, finish our sweep."

  It was a narrow alley in an old commercial district. Vertical stone-and-concrete walls with white paint badly faded and peeling, scraggly weeds sprouting all along the base. The only windows were high up and covered with bars, glass too dirty to see through; doors were sturdy metal, welded up or sealed with thick riveted plates. Dust was still rolling out of the entrance when Lawrence arrived, thick gray clouds of dry carcinogenic particles that latched on tenaciously to his Skin carapace. Crowds of civilians were gathered around on the main street, several with handkerchiefs over their faces. They all peered into the gloomy alley. Two TVL88 helicopters were circling just above the rooftops, magnetic Gatling cannon extended from the noses like squat insect mandibles. Their rotors were exacerbating the dust problem.

  Lawrence checked around quickly. There was no obvious high building providing a firepoint nest down the alley. His suit AS increased the infrared sensor percentage as he made his way into the dust; his visual picture lost all color apart from gray, black and pink—though the general outlines maintained their integrity. He saw rubbish piled up against the walls on either side of the alley: boxes, bags and drums all printed with the town's civic emblem, denoting it ready for collection. There couldn't have been a pickup truck down here for a month. In some places the piles were so big they actually sprawled right across the cracked tarmac. Lawrence had to clamber over them.

  There was a kink in the alley, and he was abruptly facing the collapsed wall. He grunted in dismay. "Shit, this is a mess." A huge section had collapsed, leaving tattered shreds of tigercotton reinforcement mesh flapping along the jagged upright edges. The building behind had been some kind of warehouse, or disused factory, a big empty cube with aging metal beams and ducts running up the walls, now bent and twisted, whole strands torn free and dangling precariously. Its flat concrete panel ceiling had collapsed along with the wall, crashing down and shattering over the floor and a big crumpled truck. On the opposite wall at the front of the building, a roll-up door had been torn apart, showing a wide street outside that was clogged with stationary traffic.

  Lawrence took only a second to work out that the truck had gone runaway, bursting through the door to ram into the wall. Exactly when Foran was standing in the alley on the other side.

  That was quite extraordinary bad timing.

  He didn't believe any of it. Instinct hardened and sharpened by the last twenty years was flashing up warning icons of a kind more potent than any AS symbology.

  Skins swarmed over the massive pile of debris. They flung body-sized lumps of concrete and stone through the air as if they were made of feathers, digging out a wide crater above their fallen comrade. They possessed the desperate stop-go motions of hive insects synchronized for maximum productivity.

  "Let's get to it," Lawrence told Hal and Dennis curtly. They joined the other Skins, prizing big chunks of masonry free. Grit and powdery fragments spewed off each piece like a dry liquid. The filthy deluge of dust made visibility difficult even with Skin sensors. Infrared helmet beams were turned up to full intensity, creating swirling crimson auras as if vanquished stars were expiring in the cloud.

  It took nearly fifty minutes to excavate the rubble. At the end there was only enough room for two Skins to work in the bottom, carefully picking up lumps of stone and handing them to a chain of Skins to be carried clear. The crater walls were so unsteady it would take very little to trigger a further collapse. Foran's Skin was slowly exposed. Dust around him was clotted into mud with glistening scarlet blood. Bloodpak reserves and stored oxygen had kept him alive, though nearly half of his
medical telemetry was in the amber, with several organ functions flatlined red. He was unconscious, too, when he was finally lifted clear.

  All the paramedics did was hook his Skin umbilicals up to fresh bloodpaks. The Skin was providing the most stable physiological environment possible until they could get him into trauma surgery. They rushed him away to the medevac helicopter that had landed in the middle of the street at the end of the alley.

  "I didn't think anything could get through our Skin," Hal said lamely as they milled around at the foot of the rubble.

  The dust was settling now that the digging had stopped, cloaking the immediate vicinity in pallid gray.

  "Believe it," Dennis said. "A hundred tons of sharp rock falling on top of you is going to puncture your Skin."

  "Poor bastard. Is he going to be okay?"

  "His brain's still alive, and oxygenated. So they'll be able to bring him up to full consciousness without any trouble. The rest of him... I don't know. He'll need a lot of replacement work."

  "But we bring prosthetics with us, right?"

  "Yeah, kid, we've got a whole bunch of biomech spares. I guess at least he'll be independently mobile at any rate. Whether he'll ever rejoin the platoon is another matter. You know how top-rate we have to be."

  Even with Skin muscles augmenting every move, Lawrence felt distinctly non-top-rate right now. His own muscles ached from the effort of digging. For a moment, the mantle of cloying dust brought up an image of Amethi during the Wakening, when the slush stuck to everything, imprisoning the world in a decrepit winter. He looked around the narrow alley. The piles of rubbish were as wide here as they were at the end. Foran would have had to walk right next to the wall.

  Lawrence slowly moved across the lower part of the rubble until he could see back into the ruined building. The traffic on the main road in front was moving again. Skins stood guard beside the wrecked door. A couple of techs were examining the truck, shifting the concrete slabs so they could get into the engine compartment. Captain Bryant was standing behind them.

  "What happened to it, sir?" Lawrence asked over the secure command link.

  "They don't know yet," Bryant replied. He sounded annoyed. "Damn, I really don't need accidents like this messing up my command."

  "This wasn't an accident, sir."

  "Of course it was, Sergeant The track went out of control and crashed."

  "It crashed into one of us."

  "Your concern for our personnel is commendable, but in this case it's misplaced. This is a traffic accident. A tragic one, I accept, but an accident."

  "What did the traffic regulator AS log as the fault?"

  "It didn't log anything, Sergeant. That's the problem. The track's electronics crashed."

  "The software or hardware?"

  "Sergeant, you'll be able to read the report for yourself as soon as it's been made. We haven't even accessed the track's memory block yet."

  "But what about the fail-safes?"

  "Newton, what the hell are you doing? What's the matter with you? He will recover, you know, he'll get the best possible treatment."

  "Sir, I just don't see how this could be an accident."

  "That's enough, Sergeant. It's unfortunate, but it happened."

  "Not one fail-safe cuts in when the electronics crash. Sir, not even Thallspring technology is that shoddy. Then it veers off the road to hit a door square in the center."

  "Sergeant!"

  "And after that it demolishes a wall while one of our men is standing directly behind it. One of the few things that can damage a Skin suit. I don't buy it, sir. That's not one coincidence, that's about a thousand falling into line."

  "Enough, Sergeant. It was an accident for exactly those reasons. Nobody could organize anything like this, nobody knew when Foran was about to walk down this alley. That is, nobody else knew. Of course, I was supervising this morning's deployment. Are you saying I was at fault in some way?"

  "No, sir."

  "I'm glad to hear that. The matter is closed." The command link went dead. Lawrence shook his head. A fairly pointless gesture in Skin. The trouble was, he could understand why Bryant was reacting in this way. The captain was too weak to acknowledge an opponent who could organize such a beautifully elaborate trap. Accepting the fact that someone did have the knowledge and skill to bring it off was massively unnerving.

  * * *

  "If the Wilfrien were alive today, you'd think you were looking at an angel. They were the golden ones; to be in their presence was to adore them. At its height, the kingdom of the Wilfrien was among the most powerful members of the Ring Empire. Indeed it was one of the founders. Its people helped to explore the thick wreath of stars around the galactic core. They made contact with hundreds of different races, and brought them together. Their technology was among the best in existence. Wilfrien scientists developed fast stardrives that everyone else copied; they worked out how to create patternform sequencers that could reshape raw matter into machines or buildings or even living organisms. And they gave all this knowledge freely to the peoples they encountered, helping them to incorporate it into their societies, extinguishing poverty and the conflict that such disparity always brings with it. They were a wise and gentle race that were admired and respected by everyone else in the Ring Empire. They set a standard of civilization to which most aspired and that few ever really achieved. Every story of the Ring Empire includes them, for they were the shining example of what it's possible for sentient life to become. Whenever we say Ring Empire, more often than not we're thinking of the Wilfrien society." Denise smiled round at the children. They were out in the school's garden, relaxing on the lawn with glasses of cool orange juice and lemonade. Big white canvas parasols had been opened, throwing wide shadows across the grass. The children all sat in the shade, out of the burning morning sun. As always, they watched Denise with worshipful eyes as she invoked their sense of wonder.

  "The Wilfrien inhabited over three hundred star systems. With their patternform sequencers they had constructed fabulous cities and orbital stations. They grew themselves castles in the depths of space; they had metropolises that soared among the storm bands of gas giants, more delicate and intricate in appearance than the twirls of the clouds through which they meandered; they even encased starburst towers inside lenticular force fields and sailed them across the furious surface of their suns as if they were nothing more than coracles on a woodland lake. Oh, they were impressive, the Wilfrien. They lived in such bizarre places almost for fun, to laugh and enjoy everything the universe had to offer, for they could be as wild and exuberant as they were thoughtful and dignified."

  Her narrative never faltered as Prime monitored the progress of the Z-B platoons going about their morning patrols. Information gathered from the platoons' own communication links was insinuated into her mind by d-written neurons. She regarded their busy little icons and whirring scripts with mild contempt. So crude, when simply knowing the raw data was easy. Several Skins were approaching the alley. "Given their nature, not to mention their reputation, Mozark knew he would be visiting the Wilfrien even before he took off on his quest. Strangely, the closer he got to the kingdom of the Wilfrien, the less impressed the local people were by the magnificent race adjoining them. Eventually, when he arrived at their home planet, he found out why."

  Simple time velocity equations provided a list of three possible trucks. Prime programs installed themselves in their electronics, erasing their own datapool traces as they went.

  "The Wilfrien were old as a species; even as individuals their lives extended for hundreds of millennia. They had traveled further and faster than anyone else in the Ring Empire. Their peerless technology had plateaued. Every race around them was content and wealthy thanks to their largesse. There was nowhere outward left for them to go, neither physically nor mentally. If they could be said to have a flaw, it was their impetuosity and interest in all that surrounded them. Yet now, there was no strangeness in their universe, no mystery. In old
en times, men would write Here be Dragons around the edge of their maps, when what it really meant was: we don't know what's there. None of the Wilfrien starcharts had dragons; they were sharp and detailed all the way out to the end of the galaxy. The only journey left to them now was the journey back to where they came from. They turned inward.

  "Mozark landed on the edge of a city whose towers put those of The City to shame. Some of them had tops that pierced the atmosphere; several were alive, like reefs of coral that had thrust up out of the ground; others were composed entirely from planes of energy fields. He even saw one that was made up of blobs of translucent sapphire, as if they were cells ten meters wide; they all slithered and slipped around each other at random, though they always maintained the same overall shape. But they were all empty, those dizzying spires and paradise palaces. The Wilfrien had abandoned them to live on the ground below, leaving them open for wild animals and creeping plants to claim them back."

  One of the Skins was entering the alley. Mounds of rubbish that the cell members had carefully dumped over the last week forced him to walk close to the wall. Denise gave her final orders to the Prime that had taken complete control of the truck. It cut its link to the traffic regulator AS with a last emergency declaration call—broken as it hit the safety barrier. The empty warehouse doors were dead ahead. Inertia took over as the Prime erased itself, propelling thirty tons of truck through the door and onward toward the rear wall at fifty kilometers an hour. "Of course it would take thousands of centuries for any kind of decay to assault the fabulously strong materials that the Wilfrien buildings were made out of. For now they stood as tall and proud as always. But the signs of their inevitable future were already beginning to show. Leaves and twigs were accumulating around the base, mulching into a rich compost from which ever more vigorous plants grew; colors were losing their sheen below spores and grime. Hundreds of years of winds had blown soil and sand in through the lower floors, allowing the rot to begin around all the artifacts that were fabricated from simpler compounds.