Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "Before we go any further, I'm afraid there is the question of money. Which also has to be compatible." She told him a figure that made him hesitate. Goddamn locals, they knew he was desperate—but then everyone who came here was. Under her level gaze he pulled out a thick wad of bills and handed over most of them.

  "Are there to be any unusual requests placed upon the lady in question?" the madam asked. "Understand, we can provide almost anything you ask for. But I have to be informed in advance. It will avoid any alarm and subsequent unpleasantness."

  "No, I just like it kinda straight, you know. Nothing too weird."

  "I see. And you are a young man. A virile man."

  "Hey. You know. I keep in shape."

  She arched an eyebrow suggestively. "I can see that. There are several of my ladies who probably have the stamina to keep up with you. Though certainly not all."

  Hal knew he was grinning like a baboon. Didn't care. He was getting hard already.

  "Micha, perhaps," the madam pondered. "Although she is very experienced. Perhaps that is off-putting to you?"

  "Anyone who knows what they're doing in the sack is okay by me."

  "Perhaps." The madam tapped a manicured finger to her lips, as if Hal were an exceptionally vexing problem. "Yes. I think Avril for you. She is very young, which is exciting, no?"

  "Oh yeah." It took a lot of control not to yell.

  "Very well. This way." The madam beckoned and started up the stairs. Hal followed hot on her heels. Both of the girls at the top of the stairs pouted at him as he went past.

  The madam opened one of the doors around the landing. When he saw what was waiting for him, Hal almost shoved her out of the way. He couldn't believe the girl standing by the big bed inside. Back home she probably wouldn't even have been legal. Avril was lean and tanned, with fine shoulder-length chestnut hair framing a coy smile. She was wearing sports gear, very short running shorts and a Lycra halter top that was tight enough to hold up her pert little breasts and outline their nipples.

  "Jesus H. Christ," Hal growled between his teeth.

  The madam bowed slightly. "Until later." She closed the door.

  Hal spent a long moment staring at Avril as his breath grew hotter, then moved purposefully across the room.

  * * *

  To start with, it was a standard missing-person report. Gemma Tivon waited for three hours past the time her husband usually arrived home from the night shift before trying to open a link to his bracelet pearl to ask where he'd gotten to. There was no reply; the datapool communications management AS reported there wasn't even a standby link to his bracelet. It was switched off. He never did that Gemma called the spaceport and asked if Dudley was working some unexpected overtime. The department supervisor told her no, then got the security people to check the parking lot and the gate log. Dudley Tivon's car wasn't in the lot. The gate log showed he'd signed out at seven minutes to six that morning, slightly earlier than usual.

  Because they were conscientious employees, the spaceport immediately called the police and sent someone around to Gemma Tivon. The police accessed the local traffic regulation AS and used its log to track Dudley's car after it left the spaceport. As usual, he'd driven along the main highway back to the city; then his routine changed. He'd turned onto Durrell's outer beltway and continued on eastbound for another three junctions. After that he'd taken a minor road, then turned off that for an unmonitored track leading through a forest. There was no record of the car coming out of the forest on any of the approach roads.

  As the spaceport was pressing hard, the police sent a couple of patrol cars into the forest and dispatched a spotter helicopter. It took them two hours, but they eventually found Dudley's car under a big pine tree. The interior had been soaked with some inflammable liquid and set alight. A forensic team was immediately sent to the scene, along with three more cars.

  The Zantiu-Braun AS that monitored all capital zone police activity tagged the case for attention anyway because of the strange circumstances. The Third Fleet intelligence agency AS also tagged it, but for a slightly different reason: Dudley Tivon was connected with spaceflight, and Gemma was collateral.

  Five minutes after the patrol car officer informed her dispatcher they'd found the car and it had been deliberately set alight, the relevant case datapackage was delivered to Simon Roderick's DNI from his personal AS.

  "A cold trail, unfortunately," he said as Quan and Raines arrived in his office. "Over four hours now since the car was abandoned and torched."

  "We can divert some of our helicopters to the forest to help with the search," Quan suggested.

  "No," Simon told him firmly. "We don't initiate anything. I don't want us to draw attention to our interest If the police want our assistance they can apply for it through the appropriate channels. In any case, simply finding poor old Tivon's body will prove little."

  "Forensics might give us something."

  "I doubt it. In fact I doubt we'll ever find the body. If our opponents have any sense, and as far as I'm concerned, they have plenty, the body won't even be in that forest. Besides, I'm not interested in how he died, only why."

  "He'd delivered something to them and wasn't necessary anymore," Raines said. "Or he'd delivered something to the spaceport for them—a bomb, perhaps—and thought he was collecting his payoff."

  "That's very crude for these people," Simon said. "In any case, you're overlooking his wife, Gemma. He isn't going to get involved in any venture that could jeopardize her. No, I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He glanced at the two intelligence operatives. "Run up a week's timeline profile for me. Access every sensor log in the data-pool, starting with last night and working backward from there. When you come back to me, I want to be able to watch his whole day, every single minute of it. And once you've done that, set up a secure link to the Koribu and correlate as much as you can from last night with skyscan."

  It took them another five hours, but they were smiling when they returned to Simon's office. "We found it," Quan announced. He had the confident tone of every underling bringing good news to his boss. "Dudley was murdered, and that's only the start of it." His DNI routed the first set of files to the big wall-mounted pane opposite Simon's desk. A time-synchronized split image appeared. On the left was the recording from a camera overlooking the spaceplane parking apron. On the right was a skyscan picture of the same location.

  Simon sat back in his seat watching as a man emerged from the bottom of the Xianti 5OO5's airstairs at the same time Dudley Tivon walked out of the maintenance hangar. On the left Dudley continued across the apron into another hangar. On the right, the two men confronted each other, and a second later Dudley was dead.

  "I don't know how they did it," Braddock Raines said in admiration. "But there isn't a trace of software subversion anywhere in the spaceport's network. I even had one of our people go out there and physically pull the memory circuits for the cameras around the parking apron so we could go over them here. Nothing. So we know they can play that network like a maestro. Whatever they've got, it's damn impressive."

  "Is that camera memory e-alpha protected?" Simon asked sharply.

  "No, although it is protected by some excellent encryption. However, the backup memory in the AS is inside an e-alpha fortress," Raines said. "But we think that the subversion occurred at the camera itself, or at least its connection to the network. They had to have their own AS online to generate the false image in real-time. In itself, that's interesting. They subverted four cameras that we know of, and that takes up a lot of bandwidth. Our AS should have picked up that quantity of subversive dataflow within the spaceport network. The fact that it didn't is highly suggestive."

  "You mean e-alpha is compromised?"

  Raines screwed his face up, unwilling to make a commitment. "It is possible to do what they did without breaking through e-alpha forts. But it's difficult. Of course, so is subverting e-alpha. If they can't actually do that, their capability is cl
ose enough to make very little difference to us. The fact that their man got into the spaceplane is proof of that." He ran an earlier skyscan file, showing the intruder walking across the apron and straight into the airstair. "No record of any entry during the night," Raines commented as the figure approached the big delta-shaped spaceplane. "And there, see, when he arrives at the airstair he doesn't need to physically tamper with the security lock. The software's already been configured to admit him."

  "You drew up a timeline for the intruder, of course," Simon said.

  The two intelligence operatives swapped a mildly worried glance. "We tried. We couldn't even establish when he entered the maintenance hangar, let alone when he arrived at the spaceport. The only sensor data we can trust is from sky-scan, and that's too limited to build up any kind of detailed profile."

  Simon cursed quietly. There had been many times down the years that he'd suggested a greater satellite surveillance capacity during asset-realization campaigns. It had never moved past the proposal stage. If he was honest with himself, even he couldn't justify the expense of such coverage. He was just used to having that resource available. But Earth with its swarms of low-orbit satellites was unique. Out here, the best Z-B could offer its strategic security forces was enough satellites to provide constant coverage of the most strategic sites. Inevitably that meant the spaceport and the headquarters in the capital. The ground footprint did allow some overlap around each zone as the satellites orbited overhead, but not much. Looking at the fuzzy image of the intrader's head, he was thankful that the small skyscan flotilla had gone unnoticed by the resistance group. So far, it was turning into Simon's sole advantage.

  "You must have tracked Tivon's car leaving the spaceport."

  "Yes," Raines said, happy to appear positive again. He directed the requisite files onto the pane. Skyscan showed a small cargo robot trundle along the deserted parking lot at five o'clock. The intruder was walking toward Tivon's car from a completely different direction. They arrived at it simultaneously. The intruder opened the trunk and the robot deposited a sealed crate into it before rolling off along its route. Elapsed time was five seconds. The robot had barely halted.

  Simon watched the intruder close the trunk and get into the car.

  "He sat in there for forty minutes before he left," Raines said with respect. "Driving out at five might have drawn attention to the car. So he waited and left a few minutes ahead of Tivon's usual time. How's that for keeping your head?"

  Simon kept staring at the pane. "Car profile?"

  "It left the skyscan footprint twelve kilometers beyond the spaceport. He just kept driving along the main highway without stopping."

  "Do you have an image of his face?"

  "Not really. He tended not to look up; I'd guess he's quite surveillance-smart." A picture appeared on the pane, looking down on the intruder in the parking lot. He had tipped his head back slightly to study something a little higher than he was. It expanded into a collage of blurred pixels the size of golf balls. "And that's with AS enhancement. It drew us several possibles from that." Five high-resolution faces appeared on the pane, each time a man under thirty, and all with the same general bland features.

  "They won't be any use." There were disappointingly few distinguishing features in the extrapolations, Simon thought, even the characters in AS-generated i-soaps were more real than this. "And he's not even wearing a hat," Simon said thoughtfully. He gave Adul Quan a pointed look. "Remember the last time we had an incident like this?"

  "The bar in Kuranda," Quan said. "Just before we left Earth. Do you think they're related?"

  "Difficult to see how. Anyone who wants to keep below our horizon must invariably use the same tradecraft." He grimaced at the row of five impassive faces, impressed at the audacity and resourcefulness of the intruder. In all the campaigns he'd been on, Simon had never encountered a threat quite like this one. He couldn't help wondering why Thallspring of all places should produce this style of quietly lethal resistance movement. "No, I'm not quite ready to believe in interstellar conspiracies. We need to focus on the immediate threat. How long was he in the Xianti for?"

  "Seventeen minutes," Quan said.

  "Long enough for anything. Has it flown today?"

  "Yes, sir. It took a cargo up to the Norvelle this morning. Landed at thirteen-thirty-five. No problems filed with flight control. It's undergoing standard preflight checks and refueling ready for another cargo run, scheduled for eighteen-twenty." Quan looked directly at Simon. "Do you want us to stop it?"

  "No. Which starship is it scheduled to dock with this time?"

  "The Chion, sir."

  "Change it to the Norvelle again. If it has taken anything hostile up there, I want any possible contamination to be as restricted as possible."

  "Yes, sir."

  "After it's unloaded its cargo I want a mechanical fault declared, something that entails its docking in the Norvelle's maintenance bay. Braddock, I want you to get up to the Norvelle on the following flight. You are to carry instructions from me directly to the captain. Once you're up there, I want you heading a small army of the best technicians we've got. You're to rip that damn spaceplane apart, take it down to its individual molecular strings if you have to. But I want to know exactly what our friend was doing in there, and what he's left behind. Understand?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Very well. And from now on we're to operate under the assumption that e-alpha has been compromised—that includes our communications. The one thing we cannot afford now is to tip our hand to them."

  * * *

  The police on Thallspring, as with police forces on all the human worlds, had very precise regulations on how to deal with every situation and crime their individual officers encountered. This body of knowledge had been painstakingly assembled over decades and was in a constant state of revision thanks to several factors such as legislation, failed court cases, successful court cases, devious lawyers, advances in forensics, pressure groups, previously botched procedures, human rights and human failings. Each officer had been trained to follow these procedures to the letter, especially for serious crimes. Cutting corners invariably jeopardized court proceedings.

  So when the young girl came staggering into Memu Bay's marina police station at twenty-five minutes past two in the morning, weeping and screeching hysterically that she'd been raped, the desk sergeant knew exactly what had to be done. Detectives with specialist training were summoned, along with a female doctor. The victim was gently led to an interview suite by a female constable, and the whole event recorded.

  Procedure insisted that a preliminary statement be taken as soon as possible. Ordinarily this was to ensure that if the alleged perpetrator(s) could be identified a patrol car could be dispatched immediately to the crime scene. A forensic team would also be dispatched to gather evidence.

  This time, something unexpected occurred. The girl kept shouting: "He was an alien. I saw the things on his neck."

  The detectives who had arrived to take the statement immediately called the precinct commissioner, who promptly called the mayor's office. That was where the second aberration slipped into the smooth running of the system, creating a great deal of anger and shock among the people dealing with it.

  A lot of very senior staff from both Zantiu-Braun and the civil administration were woken up and advised what was happening down at the marina precinct station. From there another set of calls went out. The two lawyers regarded as Memu Bay's best were quickly retained by the victim's family (although they offered to waive their fee) and hurried to the precinct station. Inevitably, given the number of people involved at this stage, the media were alerted. All of the news companies respectfully withheld even the slightest rumor concerning the victim's identity from the datapool, though they did give her age as fifteen. What they made extremely clear was that an alien was the chief, and only, suspect.

  Once the principal officials and the girl's distraught father had arrived, she was taken to a
small examination room. In the presence of a lawyer, the detective in charge of the case and the Z-B legal representative, the doctor took samples of what the media referred to as "genetic evidence" of intercourse. Cameras also recorded her superficial bruising, grazes, torn clothing and swollen cheek. With that ordeal over, the nurse was finally allowed to treat her physical injuries.

  The girl was sent home and assigned a social worker trained in victim counseling. The precinct detectives would interview her in more detail once she'd had some time to recover.

  Meanwhile the genetic samples were sent to Memu Bay's Medical Forensic Laboratory for immediate analysis, accompanied by the senior detective, the victim's lawyer, the police magistrate, the Z-B legal officer and a Z-B medical technician. The head of department herself had been called in to handle the analysis to make absolutely sure it went correctly. Even she was nervous as she placed a sample of the genetic evidence onto the scan array. It took the AS eight minutes to acquire the full DNA signature.