Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  There was a quiet whine as the elevator descended. The door opened to show a large hemispherical chamber with wall segments of dark copper-colored composite. Lawrence staggered out, not caring that he'd be seen. He just had to know what he'd been chasing. That was all. Nothing else mattered anymore.

  In the middle of the chamber was a broad pedestal of milky glass, almost like an altar. A long ash-gray rock was resting on top, its surface pitted and blackened. The central section was draped in a gold mesh. The end pointing at the elevator had been cut and polished; clumps of small aquamarine crystal were sticking out of it, glowing lambently.

  Lawrence squinted at the scene, not understanding any of it Two young women were standing in front of the pedestal. The older one gave him a sad smile, and said: "Welcome to the temple of the fallen dragon, Lawrence. Remember me?"

  Lawrence grinned at her, and lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Josep's thoughts came together quickly as he woke. For a second he kept his eyes closed while he assessed his position. He was lying on some kind of plastic cushioning. No clothes; his skin was pressed against the fabric. Slight pressure round his hips. A pair of boxer shorts, then. Cold metallic bands around his wrists, which were being held in place fifteen centimeters apart. Manacles of some kind. His legs were free. Artificial light on his eyelids. The distant clatter and murmur of a busy building.

  When his d-written neurons tried to locate either his bracelet pearl or a local datapool node, all he could sense was some disjointed background signals that were almost below his threshold. It was as if the electromagnetic spectrum had been muted somehow. He put the odd perception down to the gas that they'd used to knock him out. Some of it must still be in his system, affecting his neural cells.

  He opened his eyes. The room was a cell, four meters by four, no window, just a conditioning grille. He was lying on a bench opposite a heavy metal door. A small camera on the ceiling was angled down to look at him.

  Cells in the spaceport security division were very similar. They might not have moved him yet. In which case he stood a chance. He knew the entire spaceport layout.

  That thought made him pause. He hadn't known about the elevator. And there must have been at least one alarm that wasn't on any file they'd accessed when they were planning the break-in. Most likely it was something that Z-B had discreetly installed after they took control of the administration block. Even so, his Prime should have caught it going off.

  Making a show of being slow and confused, he sat up, rubbing at his hair. The manacles made the movement difficult, He frowned at them. "What the hell..."

  Nobody came in to explain. He padded over to the door. The tile floor was cold under his bare feet. "Hey!" He banged on the door. "Hey, what's going on here?" There were grazes on his knuckles where he'd hit the elevator doors. That could have been a mistake. If they measured the dent he'd made they could work out the force behind the blow. That would make them very interested in him. Not that they wouldn't be anyway. But he couldn't allow them to examine his body too closely. The patternform sequencers must be protected at all costs.

  He padded back to the bench and sat down. It was standard procedure to let prisoners sweat for a while after they'd been captured, allow them to build up some anxiety. Not that such crudities would affect him. But he had to decide what to do next. The d-written cells in his cheeks and jaw had held their shape while he was unconscious. He still had Sket Magersan's face. Z-B would have checked with the real pilot. They'd know this was a serious sabotage attempt by a resistance group.

  Interrogation by Z-B would inevitably involve medical diagnostics, probably including a full brain scan. The d-writing modifications were subtle, but with that sort of scan there was a high risk of exposure. And he wasn't entirely certain he could hold out against the drugs. His d-written neurons were hardly omnipotent and Z-B had been dealing with resistance movements across decades and dozens of planets. By now, their techniques and technology for extracting information would be formidable.

  The choice was simple. The longer he remained captive, the lower his chances would be of escaping. If he was going to get out it would have to be before they fully realized what he was physically capable of.

  That brought him back full circle to how they'd caught him in the first place. He started to go over the break-in right from the start.

  It was another two hours before the cell door opened. Josep still hadn't worked out what he'd done to set off an alarm. Two guards came in, their navy-blue uniforms sporting a small Z-B insignia on the collar. Both of them wore helmets with tinted visors; they held long truncheons with shock prongs on the end.

  A simple white one-piece suit was slung at him.

  "Put that on," one of the guards said.

  Josep picked it up and let it unroll. He held his arms up, shaking the manacles at them. "You'll need to take these off."

  "Nice try. Just put it on."

  The suit sleeves had a seam down the sides, fastened with studs. He struggled into the lower part of the garment, and one of the guards fastened the studs for him.

  They marched him out into a short, curving corridor. Josep checked the length and height, and knew exactly where he was: administration block, third floor. The security division had a long section all to itself in the five-sided building. Floor blueprints rushed through his mind. The only ways in or out of this section were two elevators and an emergency fire exit. He couldn't use the elevators, they were code-guarded—not forgetting what happened last time he used an elevator in this building. The fire exit was the obvious route, but there were strong safeguards there as well.

  "Where are we going?" he asked.

  "You'll see soon enough."

  They were walking in the direction opposite the elevators. The only rooms ahead were the offices. They must have set up their interrogation equipment in one of them. He still couldn't sense a signal from a datapool node.

  They turned a corner. The walls of this corridor were lined with doors. He named them silently as they went past: departmental management, briefing one, two, and three, investigator lieutenant, finance. Josep swayed slightly to shift his balance and kicked at the guard on his left. It was a perfect aim, heel smashing into the man's kneecap. He yelled in pain and went down. The second guard slammed his truncheon into Josep's back, and the shock prongs flared, pumping a charge into him. His d-written cells resisted the blast of electricity—just keeping his nerve channels open. He turned and wrenched the truncheon from the guard's grip. The man grunted in surprise at the force. Then Josep stabbed the truncheon into his stomach. The guard staggered backward, doubling up before finally keeling over.

  Josep jabbed the truncheon into the first guard's neck as he was trying to rise. He collapsed back onto the carpet. At the other end of the corridor two men in Z-B uniforms were shouting as they ran toward him. A shrill alarm went off, terribly loud in the confined space. The security AS must have seen the whole thing through the surveillance cameras.

  Josep threw the truncheon at the two running men, then charged at the door to the finance office. It wasn't even locked. As he expected, Z-B didn't have any use for financial staff; the office was empty, abandoned for the duration. There were three desks lined up down the middle of the floor, cluttered with old memory chips and piles of hard copy. Desktop pearls were inactive. The wall opposite the door was tinted glass from floor to ceiling, facing out across the spaceport hangars. He rushed over to the last desk and heaved it into the air, then flung it at the glass wall. The toughened glass shattered, sending a blizzard of shards swirling outward. More alarms started up. The desk crashed down on the edge of the hole it had created, half of it still in the office. It wobbled unsteadily. Josep kicked it, sending it sliding out over the edge to smash into the flowerbeds three floors below.

  The office door burst open. Z-B staff rushed in. Josep jumped after the desk.

  Three stories in Thallspring's standard gravity. The fall was enough t
o shatter most of a man's lower skeleton when he hit. Damage to the organs from the massive impact deceleration would probably be fatal. Josep thrust his manacled arms above his head, desperate to keep his balance. It was surprisingly quiet as the warm late-afternoon air rushed round him. He bent his legs fractionally as the flowerbeds hurtled up.

  His feet crashed into the hard soil, and his knees bent, absorbing as much of the terrible impact as they could. Suddenly his shoulder was smacking into the ground, knocking the breath from him. His bones held, though his ankle and knee joints sent pulses of pure agony into his spine. He blinked away the tears of pain. Rosebushes had torn at his legs. A glass splinter was embedded in his foot. Astonished Z-B personnel were leaning out through the broken glass of the finance office, peering down at him.

  Josep ordered his deadened limbs to move, rolling onto all fours, then standing. Shouts from above mingled with the persistent howl of the alarm. He took a few excruciating steps until he bumped into the base of the building's glass wall. After that he could use it for support as he moved along. Somewhere up ahead was a door used by the maintenance staff. On the other side of the glass, people were standing up at their desks, pointing at him as he slid past.

  He reached the door, put his shoulder against it and shoved. It bowed slightly, but held. He took a step back and launched himself at it again. This time the lock broke, and he was through into a narrow concrete utility tunnel. He hurried along it to the first intersection. The walls of the wider central tunnel were thick with conduits and pipes. Lightcones on the ceiling threw out a raw purple-white radiance every five meters. He turned left and started to run, wincing every time the glass splinter hit the ground, jabbing deeper into his flesh. Blood dripped out of the cut, but he knew the flow would be worse if he took the glass out.

  Another left turn. Then right, right again. A locker room. Nobody inside. He went over to the row of gray-blue metal lockers, grabbed the handle of the first and tugged. It jerked open, the metal bending around the bolt, then tearing. Dirty overalls hung inside, and a pair of boots. He went to the next locker and tore that open. The next. The fifth had what he was looking for, a tool belt with every loop full. He pulled a power blade out, switched it on, then put the handle in his mouth, biting down hard to hold it steady. The blade cut through the manacles with an appallingly loud shriek and a shower of sparks.

  Josep held his breath. There were shouts reverberating along the concrete tunnel outside. He went back to the first locker and shoved his feet into the boots, then pulled out the overalls. D-written organelles began to sculpt his flesh, returning his facial characteristics to those of Andyl Pyne again. With the alteration under way he snatched up the tool belt and a bracelet pearl that he found on the locker's top shelf.

  Fifty meters on from the locker room there was an inspection hatch that led into the wall cavity. A power screwdriver from the tool belt opened it, and he eased himself in. It was a narrow, confined world, completely black. Even his infrared vision was cloudy. The walls were 110 centimeters apart, forming an interstice that was filled with structural girders, conditioning ducts and plumbing. He could see as far down as he could up. His feet were resting on an I-beam barely ten centimeters across.

  The Skins and guards hunting him would know he had switched clothes back in the locker room, but the boots were cold when he put them on. It would take a while for his body heat to soak through into the soles. In theory they wouldn't be able to track him to the hatchway. The cramped interstice made it difficult to move, but he slowly worked his prison one-piece off, always keeping one hand clamped on a girder. He dropped the bundle of fabric into the darkness and began to struggle into the overalls. Twice he had to stop as someone ran past the hatch. When he finished dressing, and with the tool belt fastened around his waist, he began to climb. As he ascended he tried to integrate his d-written neuron structure with the bracelet from the locker room. He still couldn't establish any kind of link. The knockout chemical must have done more damage than he first realized.

  Once he was up level with the second floor he followed the phosphorescent coral line that was the hot-water pipe until he reached the toilets. The panels in the wall here were a lot smaller than the hatch back down in the utility tunnel, intended principally to provide access to the tanks and pipes that served the cubicles and basins. He found the largest and put his ear against it, listening to the movements inside. Two people were using the urinals—at least it was the men's room, he thought. One paused to wash his hands, the other left straightaway.

  Josep used the power blade to saw around the rim of the panel. He squeezed and wriggled his way into the cubicle, frantic at the noise he was making. Then when he was most of the way through, he had to push his body into a gymnast's contortion that even his d-written limbs had trouble achieving, all to make sure he didn't stick his head out past the partly open door. Every toilet had a security camera, and the security AS would be devoting a large percentage of its processing capacity to spotting visual abnormalities inside the administration building.

  "Resourceful," Simon observed.

  "I think we were too slack on the chase," Adul said. "We should have given him more grief in the utility tunnels."

  "We've reinforced his feeling of superiority. Look at his deep thalamus activity. He's confident."

  "As long as his easy ride doesn't make him suspicious."

  "I'd hardly call that jump easy. I thought he was suiciding until I remembered his bone structure composition," Simon said. "Give him a reasonable body match," he instructed the AS.

  * * *

  The toilet door opened. Josep tensed, waiting to see what the man would do. Footsteps made their way to the first cubicle. Josep tapped his knuckles on the partition. There was a slight hesitation in the footsteps.

  "Hey," Josep hissed.

  "Some kind of problem, there?"

  "Yes."

  The man peered around the cubicle door to find Josep sitting on the toilet bowel, head bowed. "What's up?" He moved a little closer.

  Josep's left arm shot out and grabbed the front of the man's suit jacket, tugging him hard into the cubicle. At the same time his right hand chopped across the man's neck. He closed the cubicle door. If he'd got it right, the security camera should have seen the man pause by the first cubicle, then choose the second.

  According to the man's identity card he was Davis Fenaroli-Reece. Josep began to strip him out of his suit. Changing clothes in the cubicle was almost as bad as putting on the overalls in the wall interstice. Once Josep had the suit on he propped Davis Fenaroli-Reece's body on the toilet bowl and studied his face hard. His own features began to shift again. Without a mirror he wouldn't be able to get the likeness as accurate as he wanted, but his real worry was the hair. Davis Fenaroli-Reece had very dark hair, whereas Andyl Pyne and Sket Magersan were both fair. In the end he settled for splashing water from the toilet bowl over his head and slicking his hair back, hoping that would darken it enough to fool the AS. He was content the camera didn't have sufficient resolution to spot the change in texture.

  Another minute was spent with the tools, fixing the cubicle lock. When he closed the door behind him the bolt clicked into the latch and read engaged. Josep washed his hands and left.

  He started walking around the corridor to the main stairwell. The second floor was a mix of Z-B personnel and local spaceport staff. Most of them were standing pressed up against the window wall, looking down at the Skins circling the building.

  It was growing dark outside, with the sun already hidden behind the high ground of the horizon. That meant he couldn't have been unconscious for more than forty or fifty minutes. He felt hungry, though, as if he hadn't eaten for a day.

  The stairwell took him up to the fourth floor, where there was a bridge leading directly into the main terminal building. A couple of Skins were standing at the far end, checking everybody coming out of the administration block, as if the AS wouldn't be able to spot Sket Magersan walking away. The
y never moved as he passed them.

  Forty minutes later he was out in parking lot 4B, walking casually along the rows of vehicles. A group of staff that had come out of the terminal building said good night to each other and split up. Josep followed one of them as he went to his car.

  "Excuse me?"

  The man stopped just as he'd gotten the door open. "Yeah?"

  "My car's dead. Axle motor cable, I think. Are you going into Durrell?"

  "Sure." The man nodded. "I can take you."

  "Thanks."

  There were Skins standing around the exit barrier.

  "Big flap on," the man remarked as he slowed the car level with the twin security posts.

  "Wonder what it's about," Josep said as he swiped Davis Fenaroli-Reece's card over the scanner on the car's passenger side and looked at the camera.

  The barrier pole swung up.

  "Someone tried to steal some bullion out of the vault this afternoon," the man said. "He got away."