A People's War (The Oligarchy Book 2)

by Stewart Hotston

  ‘I’m prepared to help,’ said Helena. A look of desperate relief broke out on the women’s faces. ‘However, I need a way to contact you and I will need your assurances that, should I need your help in this matter, you will render to me whatever I require.’

  A look passed between Penelope and Sarah and she knew she had them on her terms. ‘Not a problem,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m sending you our communications protocol now. Should you need us, I can be reached directly.’

  Helena’s tertiary AI indicated it had received a universal resource location.

  ‘I’ve got it.’

  Sarah smiled, but Helena put her hand up. ‘I’m sorry but, as you know, I’ve got to head out in just a couple of hours and I haven’t eaten all day.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Penelope.

  ‘No problem,’ said Sarah. With that, Helena ushered them from her flat and got on with ordering something in for dinner.

  Helena arrived early at the departure lounge. She was banking on time alone before the others arrived. There was no sign of their departure when she checked the manifests for flights leaving the City. That David had been able to organise, let alone gain sanction for, an unlisted flight in the midst of the conflict was a testament to his political clout. It surprised her that in the time they had spent together he had done nothing to reveal the power he wielded.

  David’s hidden depths irked her more than she was happy to admit and she was determined to find out who he really was. Whatever he was, he was no ordinary police officer.

  Helena left the idea alone. Even if no one else would likely be arriving for another couple of hours she had a list of items she wanted to sort out.

  She set about plundering Euros’ resources for anything she felt could conceivably help in Jutland. Her AIs were capable of storing and integrating into her mind large numbers of skill patterns and warehouses of factual knowledge. Whatever she acquired before leaving London would not make her an instant expert, but every scrap of relevant information could help her, even if she had to sift through it laboriously.

  Helena reflected on the likely breakdown of the trip. For the first time she seriously considered the possibility that David really had traced members of Denholme’s conspiracists to Northern Europe, that he had a legitimate reason for going there. If so, Helena wanted to be at that party. Yet, because of her, he also knew her mother, Edith, was in North Jutland, north of Aalborg at the northern most tip of the peninsula. This neatly coincided with Helena’s own first priority: to find Edith and determine where her father was.

  So they had at least two distinct tasks while they were there: David’s public goal and her own, which she presumed was why he’d organised the entire web of lies in the first place. Jane and the rogue agents were an approaching herd of elephants for which she had yet to formulate a plan. She couldn’t hide why they were going to her mother from Jane. Both women, her mother and Jane, were unstoppable gossips. One of them would wheedle out what Helena wanted to know regardless of, or possibly because of, any pleas for discretion.

  Helena had to assume her actions were being monitored, if not by her own side then by her Uncle and definitely by Indexiv. She couldn’t call David despite her urge to plot with him before Jane arrived. Her primary AI was there, but distracted, committed to providing her with a basic service but little more until it had completed its survey of the Cloud for information on independent AIs.

  Helena wondered what would happen to them if she were to fall in love or be bereaved. Would her AI fall into her own emotional states or would it bar her from feeling such chemically driven sensations? So far, if her nightmarish dreams of bursting limbs and skinless, charred faces were anything to go by, it would sit silently on the side-lines with nothing to say. Its presence had a weight, like someone sitting shoulder to shoulder with her in the dark, so its silence was of a different quality than being alone with her personal horrors. Its muteness in the face of such careless gore wasn’t helping her to deal with the aftermath any better.

  The Euros complex had two spaceports as well as numerous atmospheric runways. Helena was met by a Normal concierge with a message for her when she arrived.

  The man, if he could still be called that, was altered almost beyond humanity, having four arms, two on each side of his torso. His lower left arm held a message pod for her. He had only one functioning eye. Where the other had been, there was a sapphire-hued Cloud lens, which he would use for online immersion without having to use a rig.

  Expensive gear, thought Helena. He most probably used it to offer premium levels of service to clients, such as booking hotels and transport or acting as a personal assistant. He wore an expensive neatly tailored suit, provided by the Company, which artfully made his two extra arms look less abnormal. The uniform matched Euros’ colours: Royal Blue and Pigment Green. She considered him lucky; good taste had prevailed so that the suit was blue with only two thin strips of narrow green trim running along the seams of his arms.

  Once he had given her the message he silently backed away, returning to his post to stand motionless by the entrance to the lobby, like a Company-sponsored Persian demigod. Helena found a sofa in a secluded spot, where rays of hard morning sunlight cut sharp silhouettes across the recess. She hoped the message consisted of joining instructions as well as the access codes for the Euros inventory that Andreas had promised them the day before.

  The pod checked her DNA through a thumbprint then cheerfully opened itself to her scrutiny. She noted quickly that they were assigned to one of the most secluded runways at the centre of the complex, nearly five hundred floors up. Executives only.

  The plane itself was very new: a fusion jet. It wouldn’t wait for them at the other end. Contained in her joining instructions was the URL for requesting the jet return to collect them once they were finished. They would be landing in Aalborg, a small commercial centre in the north of the Jutland peninsula. She skipped over the information on the town, allowing her tertiary AI to upload the attached data pack for examination later.

  The resources she’d been given access to were housed in a large warehouse on the four hundred and ninety fifth floor, near enough to the jet’s hanger to be convenient but not too close to be obvious.

  Her heart burned as she saw that Hal Lanais and Johannes De Magdeburg had authorised the trip.

  There was nothing else, no message from either man, no note from Johannes for his niece.

  Helena didn’t even know where her damned uncle was. As for Hal, he was a distant figure, possibly more powerful than Johannes, possibly not. Helena felt like the mark at a poker table; she had no concept of what games were being played or why. A month ago she would have described her uncle as a maverick, an influential player without real power. Now she was becoming convinced he lay at the centre of a number of webs. She had once known Hal fairly well, having worked for him for a number of years, during which time he had mentored her directly for four of them. But that was decades ago. Unlike Johannes, she respected Hal and trusted his integrity. Quite how these two men, who she didn’t even realise knew each other, had come to the point of jointly authorising this trip frightened her. For a moment she felt way out of her depth. Euros did not seem positioned to fend off Indexiv, regardless of the military status of the two corporations. The power of Euros was publicly fractured and broken, the hints of infighting more damaging to their long-term survival prospects than any takeover bid that Indexiv might mount. If the Company couldn’t present a united front, Indexiv wouldn’t have to fight them; it could just wait for them to collapse.

  The pressure being brought to bear is what causes the infighting and collapse to occur, said her AI.

  The knowledge that Johannes was involved somewhere made Helena reconsider her own position; it was as if she’d bitten into an apple to discover a razor blade buried within it.

  She headed up to the executive levels to which she’d been given access via the communication pod. The doors and security points had already been keyed with her
DNA. Emerging onto the four hundred and ninety fifth floor, she was greeted by a haze of warm oranges and reds as the sun came over the horizon. The clouds of the previous day had drifted away overnight, leaving a dawn sky threaded with wisps of trailing fluff.

  As the last of the stars disappeared, drowned by the sun’s glory, Helena tore herself away and, using one of the many navigation panels lining the walls, found an augmentation booth.

  The process was entirely automated, so Helena was alone as she searched for information she felt could be useful during the trip.

  It was only then that she noted the glaring absence of a crucial piece of information: their return date. She hadn’t twigged, even when she’d seen that their return transport would have to be signalled in. There had been no mention of a deadline, no indication of how long they’d be in North Jutland. She didn’t envisage it taking long to find her mother and obtain what they needed. It made sense, if they were trying to obscure their movements, not to reveal an expected return date, but even so she thought that on the balance of probabilities, it provoked just as much suspicion.

  Regardless of her worries, Helena refused to be distracted by the creeping shadow of her uncle. She had no choice. Besides which, her gut was to trust David.

  You barely know him, retorted her AI.

  It’s something instinctual, replied Helena.

  Something basic? asked her AI. She let the remark pass, giving her AI the benefit of the doubt. She did like David; her feelings at not having seen him for the last few days made that much clear. He filled a space she hadn’t explored in a number of years. She found him intriguing, his principles that came from another era combined with a power that respected no corporation, no Family.

  Mentally turning away from the distraction, Helena logged herself into the booth. It was a small room, just two metres square, lined by a matrix of golden wires crossing each other to form a mesh whose interstices were a centimetre square. The door shut behind her and the light was cut off, leaving her in complete darkness.

  Seconds later everything was blinding white as the Cloud came to life and Helena was immersed into a localised Euros lobby. Accessing the Cloud this way was less intrusive than full body immersion, but also less responsive than some of the more complete surrogate sensory technologies that were available. It didn’t matter; she had no need to travel the Cloud. Research was the objective.

  The augmentation interfaces were crude, designed for functionality rather than form. Unlike personalised interfaces, luxury and comfort were not part of the design parameters.

  Augmentation systems like these were totally isolated from the rest of the public communications network, even from large parts of Euros’ own internal net. They existed for the dissemination of technology and, as such, access was only permitted on a strictly monitored basis.

  Finding her feet, Helena dealt directly with the system and declined an offer of aid from a low-level AI butler. She worked through plainly designed menu lobbies until she found the options she was after. Her wishes dropped down before her as possible locations within the server she could either visit or from which the data could be brought to her location. Waving her hands across the menus, Helena selected a number of history files on Jutland, learning, as she did so, that it had once been part of a state called Denmark.

  Examining maps of the northernmost tip, she settled on a small roundhouse at the meeting point of the North and the Baltic seas. It was isolated, undeveloped and still, somehow, at the centre of the landscape. The location had all the characteristics her mother would find compelling.

  Apart from local knowledge, she brushed up on her technical capacity, downloading a number of vehicle specs and command programs as well as the details of Indexiv’s military hardware. Just in case.

  She skipped over a strategic thinking routine after deliberating for a couple of moments. If it came to it, she would flee. Their escape flight was less than seventy minutes away in an emergency.

  She paused over a number of political profiles and bios, finally downloading her uncle’s and Hal Lanais’. She was too rushed to go over them then but was sure she’d find a moment in the next few days to examine them for a link. She toyed with the idea of downloading Jane’s and David’s, but when she searched she discovered that David had no entry. Just who is he?

  Jane’s bio read more like a CV than a true profile of personal connections and alliances. Helena wasn’t surprised; the profile only cemented her view of a woman from a minor Family with few connections and even less influence.

  Is this not theft of their privacy? asked her AI dryly.

  It might make a difference to me if I have this information, she muttered and got on with retrieving what she wanted.

  She acquired knowledge of living away from regular sources of food and fresh water, of basic first aid routines. Finally, she requisitioned a number of physical supplies, including a one-man tent, a nanoscale communications device and a global positioning link to her AIs. No more being lost in La Mancha.

  Hurrying, as time had passed more quickly than she’d wanted it to, Helena made sure to order a small Duplick pistol along with thirty plasma rounds and two bowie knives.

  They weren’t real plasma rounds, just superheated bullets which exploded on impact, less penetrating than the real thing but with much more bang. If it came down to it, she wasn’t going to give any opponent a second chance.

  Helena finished up and emerged into a bright morning. The local maintenance AI informed her of David and Jane’s arrival. Jane was still on her way up while David had already boarded the plane. Helena requested the departure time only to find that they had an open window. Airspace had been cleared for them until nine. Given it was only seven, the huge envelope seemed designed to hide their take off from prying eyes as much as it permitted them a significant amount of latitude.

  Helena decided that rather than heading for the plane she’d wait for Jane to arrive. She used to time to stand at the window and watch the City below her. Jane wouldn’t be long; Helena figured she’d not be able to catch David for any in-depth discussion before she walked in. Helena felt like a naughty student trying to pass notes in class; there was no legitimacy in her drive to solve the mystery. It was more like peering over a fence into the neighbour’s garden after having already opened their mail.

  Besides, the involvement of her Uncle made her hesitant about asking David what his connection was; she was afraid of the possible answer.

  Helena heard Jane arriving, but she kept her gaze on the sky, pale blue in the morning light with the sun, still in the east, casting long shadows across the City. It seemed the negative of Indexiv’s presence right then.

  The previous night, Helena had managed to catch a number of news reports about the war. None mentioned Northern Europe as a conflict zone, but she knew absence of news meant little in such situations. She remembered a war between two of the smaller corporations several years before when she had been an assistant in the diplomatic core. Her team had been due to meet with representatives from a small subsidiary of one of the two sides. All the reports reaching Paris had excluded the location for which they were destined, yet the first intelligence report from Euros on the region indicated that they were heading straight into a firefight. There had been no way to avoid the trip, because the purpose of the mission was exploratory, to see if Euros should throw its weight behind one or other of the corporations. The silence of the news channels on the subject had originated from three sources: Euros’ desire to keep its possible alliance with one of the combatants secret, the fact that the Families were uninterested in anything that did not directly concern their own lives and the two corporations trying their best to keep news of their engagement quiet for fear of upsetting the market and their own share prices.

  That there was no news about Jutland meant little more than whatever was happening there wasn’t going to make it into the public arena. When Helena had searched for local news all she’d found were the usual d
ead-donkey stories and little of any significance: new research investment, a continuing location for artists, the success of the program to reintroduce sea eagles to the northern half of the peninsula.

  ‘Hi Hels,’ said Jane lightly. ‘How’re you feeling?’

  Helena watched the sky. ‘Nervous,’ she admitted.

  She felt Jane relax. ‘Me too.’

  Helena turned around. ‘There’s no need to worry; we’re not going to be there for long.’

  Jane frowned. ‘We’d better board the plane. I’m being told the police commander is already on board.’ Helena nodded in agreement.

  The two women made their way to the boarding gate. A woman, whose sole vestige of humanity appeared to be her mouth, welcomed them, gave them each a small knapsack and waved them on board. Helena stared at the usher in morbid fascination; almost every part of her was covered in cloth that obscured her shape. She looked like a blue, felt pyramid with a fleshy pair of red lips near the apex, topped off with a green wrap covering her nose, eyes and scalp.

  Jane looked at Helena. ‘What’re you looking at darling?’

  Helena shook her head. Jane followed her gaze to the Normal. Her eyes tightened slightly as if in thought but she said nothing more.

  THE JET was small, with six seats including the pilot’s. David was sitting with the flyboy, chatting something through. Hearing them step into the cabin, he halted and, turning around, smiled at them both. He got out from the cockpit and introduced himself. To Helena’s surprise, he named himself a ‘National Commander’ and finished with the words ‘Strategic Forces’. She held her composure, but the list of questions grew. Gone now was the slightly warm feeling about him as a man and potential partner, which could have been deployed to dismiss the vague worries she’d come to associate with him over the past day. It was replaced by a sharp need to know exactly who he was and what he wanted from her. Helena didn’t feel foolish just yet about coming to trust him so readily, perhaps even to the point of letting his handsomeness distract her, but she regretted having come to accept him at face value so soon.