The Night's Dawn Trilogy

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Thank you, sir.” Ralph sat down next to Diana Tiernan. She managed a quick grin for him. “We’ve been checking up on the night shift at Moyce’s,” she said. “There were forty-five on duty this evening. As of now, the AT Squads have accounted for twenty-nine during the assault, killed and captured.”

  “Shit. Sixteen of the bastards loose,” Bernard Gibson said.

  “No,” Diana said firmly. “We think we may have got lucky. I’ve hooked the AIs into the fire department’s mechanoids; their sensors are profiled for exploring high temperature environments. So far they’ve located a further five bodies in the building, and there’s still thirty per cent which hasn’t been covered. That accounts for all but eleven of the night shift.”

  “Still too many,” Landon said.

  “I know. But we’re certain that six of the lorries zapped so far contained a shift member. Their processors and ancillary circuits were suffering random failures. It matched the kind of interference which Adkinson’s plane suffered.”

  “And then there were five,” Warren Aspinal said quietly.

  “Yes, sir,” Diana said. “I’m pretty sure they’re in the remaining lorries.”

  “Well I’m afraid ‘pretty sure’ isn’t good enough when we’re facing a threat which could wipe us out in less than a week, Chief Tiernan,” said Leonard DeVille.

  “Sir.” Diana didn’t bother to look at him. “I wasn’t making wild assumptions. Firstly, the AIs have confirmed that there was no other traffic logged as using Moyce’s since Jacob Tremarco’s taxi arrived.”

  “So they left on foot.”

  “Again, I really don’t think that is the case, sir. That whole area around Moyce’s is fully covered by security sensors, both ours and the private systems owned by the companies in neighbouring buildings. We accessed all the relevant memories. Nobody came out of Moyce’s. Just the lorries.”

  “What we’ve seen tonight is a continuing pattern of attempted widespread dispersal,” Landon McCullock said. “The embassy trio have been constant in their attempt to distribute the energy virus as broadly as possible. It’s a very logical move. The wider it is spread, the longer it takes for us to contain it, and the more people can be infected, in turn making it more difficult for us to contain. A nasty spiral.”

  “They only have a limited amount of time in the city,” Ralph chipped in. “And the city is where we have the greatest advantage when it comes to finding and eliminating them. So they’ll know it’s a waste of effort trying to spread the contamination here, at least initially. Whereas the countryside tilts the balance in their favour. If they win out there, then Xingu’s main urban areas will eventually become cities under siege. Again a situation which we would probably lose in the long run. That’s what happened on Lalonde. I imagine that Durringham has fallen by now.”

  Leonard DeVille nodded curtly.

  “The second point,” said Diana, “is that those infected don’t seem able to halt the lorries. Short of them using their white fire weapon to physically destroy the motors or power systems the lorries aren’t stopping before their first scheduled delivery point. And if they do use violence against a lorry the motorway processors will spot it straightaway. From the evidence we’ve accumulated so far it seems as though they can’t use their electronic warfare field to alter a lorry’s destination. It’s powerful, but not sophisticated, not enough to get down into the actual drive control processors and tamper with on line programs.”

  “You mean they’re trapped inside the lorries?” Warren Aspinal asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And none of the lorries have reached their destination yet,” Vicky Keogh said, with a smile for the Home Office minister. “As Diana said, it looks like we got lucky.”

  “Well thank God they’re not omnipotent,” the Prime Minister said.

  “They’re not far short,” Ralph observed. Even listening to Diana outline the current situation hadn’t lifted his spirits. The crisis was too hot, too now. Emotions hadn’t had time to catch up with events; pursuing the embassy trio was like space warfare, everything happening too quick for anything other than simplistic responses, there was no opportunity to take stock and think. “What about Angeline Gallagher?” he inquired. “Have the AIs got any further leads?”

  “No. Just the two taxis and the Longhound bus,” Diana said. “The AT Squads are on their way.”

  * * *

  It took another twelve minutes to clear the taxis. Ralph stayed at Hub One while the interception operations were running, receiving datavises from the two Squad commanders.

  The first taxi was laid up beside one of the rivers which meandered through Pasto. It had stopped interfacing with the route and flow processors as it drew up next to a boathouse. Road monitor cameras had been trained on the grey vehicle for eleven minutes, seeing no movement from it or the boathouse.

  The AT Squad members closed in on it, using standard leapfrog advancement tactics. Its lights were off, doors frozen half-open, no one inside. A technical officer opened a systems access panel and plugged his processor block into it. The police AI probed the vehicle’s circuitry and memory cells.

  “All clear,” Diana reported. “A short circuit turned the chassis live, blew most of the processors, and screwed the rest. No wonder it showed up like one of our hostiles.”

  The second taxi had been abandoned in an underground garage below a residential mews. The AT Squad arrived just as the taxi company’s service crew turned up to take it away on their breakdown hauler. Everyone at Hub One witnessed the scenes of hysterics and anger as the AT Squad took no chances with the three service crew.

  After running an on-the-spot diagnostic, the crew discovered the taxi’s electron matrix was faulty, sending huge power spikes through the on-board circuitry.

  “Gallagher has to be on the bus,” Landon McCullock said as he cancelled his datavise to the AT Squad, the service crew’s inventive obscenities fading from his borrowed perception.

  “I can confirm that,” Diana said. “The damn thing won’t respond to the halt orders we’re issuing via the motorway route and flow processors.”

  “I thought you said they couldn’t alter programs with their electronic warfare technique,” Leonard DeVille said.

  “It hasn’t altered its route, it just won’t respond,” she shot back. An almost uninterrupted three-hour stint spent interfacing with, and directing, the AIs, was beginning to fatigue her nerves.

  Warren Aspinal gave his political colleague a warning frown.

  “The AT Squad teams will be over the bus in ninety seconds,” Bernard Gibson said. “We’ll see exactly what’s going on then.”

  Ralph datavised a tactical situation request into the hub’s processor array. His neural nanonics visualized a map of Xingu, a rough diamond with a downward curling cat’s tail. Forty-one of Moyce’s delivery lorries had been located and annihilated now, green and purple symbols displaying their movements, the locations when they were targeted. The bus was a virulent amber, proceeding down the M6 motorway which ran the length of Mortonridge, the long spit of mountainous land which poked southwards across the equator.

  He switched to accessing the sensor suite on the lead hypersonic. The plane was just decelerating into subsonic flight. There was nothing any discrimination filter program could do about the vibration as it aerobraked. Ralph had to wait it out, impatience heating his blood feverishly. If Angeline Gallagher wasn’t on the bus, then they’d probably lost the continent.

  The M6 was laid out below him in the clear tropical air. The hypersonic’s shaking damped out, and he could see hundreds of stationary cars, vans, buses, and lorries parked on the motorway’s service lanes. Headlights illuminated the lush verges, hundreds of people were milling around, some even settling down for midnight picnics by their vehicles.

  The static pageant made the bus easy to spot, the one moving light source on the motorway, heading south at about two hundred kilometres an hour. It roared on past the riveted spectator
s lining the lane barrier, immune to the priority codes being fired into its circuitry from the motorway’s route and flow processors.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Vicky Keogh voiced the unspoken question of everyone accessing the hypersonic’s sensor suite.

  The Longhound Bus Company had a standardized fleet of sixty-seaters made on the Esparta continent, with a distinct green and purple livery. They were used all over Ombey, stitching together every continent’s cities and towns with an extensive, fast, and frequent service. The principality didn’t yet have the economy or population to justify vac train tubes linking its urban areas like Earth and Kulu. So the Longhound buses were a familiar sight on the motorways; more or less everyone on the planet had ridden on one at some time in their lives.

  But the runaway vehicle speeding down the M6 looked nothing like a normal Longhound. Where the Longhound’s body was reasonably smooth and trim, this had the kind of sleek profile associated with the aerospace industry. A curved, wedge-shaped nose blending back into an oval cross-section body, with sharp triangular fin spoilers sprouting out of the rear quarter. It had a dull silver finish, with gloss-black windows. Greasy grey smoke belched out of a circular vent just behind the rear wheel set.

  “Is it on fire?” a disconcerted Warren Aspinal asked. “No, sir.” Diana sounded ridiculously happy. “What you’re seeing there is its diesel exhaust.”

  “A what exhaust?”

  “Diesel. This is a Ford Nissan omnirover; it burns diesel in a combustion engine.”

  The Prime Minister had been running his own neural nanonics encyclopedia search. “An engine which burns hydrocarbon fuel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s ridiculous, not to mention illegal.”

  “Not when this was built, sir. According to my files, the last one rolled off the Turin production line in 2043 AD. That’s the city of Turin on Earth.”

  “Have you a record of any being imported by a museum or a private vehicle collector?” Landon McCullock asked patiently.

  “The AIs can’t find one.”

  “Jenny Harris reported a phenomenon similar to this back on Lalonde,” Ralph said. “She saw a fanciful riverboat when I sent her on that last mission. They’d altered its appearance so it seemed old-fashioned, something from Earth’s pre-technology times.”

  “Christ,” Landon McCullock muttered.

  “Makes sense,” Diana said. “We’re still getting a correct identification code from its processors. They must have thrown this illusion around the Longhound.”

  The hypersonic closed on the bus, sliding in over the motorway, barely a hundred metres up. Below it, the omnirover was weaving from side to side with complete disregard for the lane markings. The ceaseless and random movement made it difficult for the pilot to stay matched directly overhead.

  Ralph realized what had been bothering his subconscious, and requested a visual sensor to zoom in. “That’s more than just a holographic illusion,” he said after studying the image. “Look at the bus’s shadow under those lights, it matches the outline.”

  “How do they do that?” Diana asked. Her voice was full of curiosity, with a hint of excitement bleeding in.

  “Try asking Santiago Vargas,” Vicky Keogh told her sharply.

  “I can’t even think of a theory that would allow us to manipulate solid surfaces like that,” Diana said defensively.

  Ralph grunted churlishly. He’d had a similar conversation back on Lalonde when they were trying to figure out how the LDC’s observation satellite was being jammed. No known principle. The whole concept of an energy virus was a radical one.

  “Possession,” Santiago Vargas called it.

  Ralph shivered. His Christian belief had never been that strongly rooted, but like a good Kingdom subject, it was always there. “Our immediate concern is what do we do about the bus. You might manage to land AT Squad teams on the thing if they were equipped with airpack flight suits, but they can hardly jump down from the hypersonic.”

  “Use the SD platforms to chop up the motorway ahead of it,” Admiral Farquar suggested. “Force it to stop that way.”

  “Do we know how many people were on board?” Landon McCullock asked.

  “Full complement when it left Pasto spaceport, I’m afraid,” Diana reported.

  “Damn. Sixty people. We have to make at least an effort to halt it.”

  “We’d have to reinforce the AT Squads first,” Ralph said. “Three hypersonics isn’t enough. And you’d have to stop the bus precisely in the centre of a cordon. With sixty possible hostiles riding on it, we’d have to be very certain no one broke through. That’s wild-looking countryside out there.”

  “We can have reinforcements there in another seven minutes,” Bernard Gibson said.

  “Shit—” It was a datavise from the pilot. A big javelin of white fire streaked up from the bus, punching the hypersonic’s belly. The plane quaked, then peeled away rapidly, almost rolling through ninety degrees. Bright sparkling droplets of molten ceramic sprayed out from the gaping hole in its fuselage to splash and burn on the motorway’s surface. Its aerodynamics wounded, it started juddering continuously, losing height. The pilot tried desperately to right it, but he was already too low. He came to the same conclusion as the flight computer and activated the crash protection system.

  Foam under enormous pressure fired into the cabin, swamping the AT Squad members. Valency generators turned it solid within a second.

  The plane hit the ground, ploughing a huge gash through the vegetation and soft black loam. Nose, wings, and tailplane crumpled and tore, barbed fragments spinning off into the night. The bulky cylinder which was the cabin carried on for another seventy metres, flinging off structural spars and smashed ancillary modules. It came to a jarring halt, thudding into a steep earthen bluff.

  The valency generators cut off, and foam sluiced out of the wreckage, mingling with the mud. Figures stirred weakly inside.

  Bernard Gibson let out a painful breath. “I think they’re all okay.”

  One of the other two hypersonics was circling back towards the crash. The second took up position a respectful kilometre behind the bus.

  “Oh, Christ,” Vicky Keogh groaned. “The bus is slowing. They’re going to get off.”

  “Now what?” the Prime Minister demanded. He sounded frightened and angry.

  “One AT Squad can’t possibly contain them,” Ralph said. It was like speaking treason. I betrayed those people. My failure.

  “There are sixty people on that bus,” an aghast Warren Aspinal exclaimed. “We might be able to cure them.”

  “Yes, sir, I know that.” Ralph hardened his expression, disguising how worthless he felt, and looked at Landon McCullock. The police chief obviously wanted to argue; he glanced at his deputy, who shrugged helplessly.

  “Admiral Farquar?” Landon McCullock datavised.

  “Yes.”

  “Eliminate the bus.”

  Ralph watched through the hypersonic’s sensor suite as the laser blast from low orbit struck the fantasm vehicle. Just for an instant he saw the silhouette of the real Longhound inside the illusory cloak, as if the purpose of the weapon was really to expose truths. Then the energy barrage incinerated the bus along with a thirty-metre-diameter circle of road.

  When he looked around the faces of everyone sitting at Hub One, he saw his own dismay and horror bounced right back at him.

  It was Diana Tiernan who held his gaze, her kindly old face crumpled up with tragic sympathy. “I’m sorry, Ralph,” she said. “We weren’t quick enough. The AIs have just told me the bus stopped at the first four towns on its scheduled route.”

  3

  Al Capone dressed as Al Capone had always dressed: with style. He wore a double-breasted blue serge suit, a paisley pattern silk tie, black patent leather shoes, and a pearl-grey fedora, rakishly aslant. Gold rings set with a rainbow array of deep precious stones glinted on every finger, a duck-egg diamond on his pinkie.

  It ha
dn’t taken him long to decide that the people in this future world didn’t have much in the way of fashion sense. The suits he could see all followed the same loose silk design, although their colourful slimline patterns made them appear more like flappy Japanese pyjamas. Those not in suits wore variants on vests and sports shirts. Tight-fitting, too, at least for people under thirty-five. Al had stared at the dolls to start with, convinced they were all hookers. What kind of decent gal would dress like that, with so much showing? Skirts which almost didn’t cover their ass, shorts that weren’t much better. But no. They were just ordinary, smiling, happy, everyday girls. The people living in this city weren’t so strung up on morality and decency. What would have given a Catholic priest apoplexy back home didn’t raise an eyebrow here.

  “I think I’m gonna like this life,” Al declared.

  Strange life that it was. He seemed to have been reincarnated as a magician: a real magician, not like the fancy tricksters he’d booked for his clubs back in Chicago. Here, whatever he wanted appeared out of nowhere.

  That had taken a long while to get used to. Think and . . . pow. There it was, everything from a working Thompson to a silver dollar glinting in the hot sun. Goddamn useful for clothes, though. Brad Lovegrove had worn overalls of shiny dark red fabric like some kind of pissant garbage collector.

  Al could hear Lovegrove whimpering away inside him, like having a leprechaun nesting at the centre of his brain. He was bawling like a complete bozo, and making about as much sense. But there was some gold among the dross, twenty-four-karat nuggets. Like—when he first got his marbles together Al had thought this world was maybe Mars or Venus. Not so. New California didn’t even orbit the same sun as Earth. And it wasn’t the twentieth century no more.

  Je-zus, but a guy needed a drink to help keep that from blowing his head apart.

  And where to get a drink? Al imagined the little leprechaun being squeezed, as if his brain were one giant muscle. Slowly contracting.