“Whereas you had the Princess appoint me as chief advisor . . .”
“Exactly. I’ll have a word with Jannike about him. It’s probably heretical of me, but I think the problem the possessed present us might be slightly more important than our little internal rivalries.”
“Thank you, sir. It’d be nice to have him off my back.”
“I doubt he’d be much more of a problem anyway. You’ve done some sterling work tonight, Ralph. Don’t think it’s gone unnoticed. You’ve condemned yourself to a divisional chief’s desk for the rest of eternity now. I can assure you the boredom is quite otherworldly.”
Ralph managed a contemplative smile in the half-light of the hypersonic’s cabin. “Sounds attractive right now.”
Roche Skark cancelled the channel.
With his mind free, Ralph datavised a situation update request to Hub One. The squadron of Royal Marine troop flyers were already halfway down from Guyana. Twenty-five police hypersonics carrying AT Squads were arrowing across the continent, converging on Mortonridge. All motorway traffic had now been shut down. An estimated eighty-five per cent of non-motorway vehicles had been located and halted. Curfew orders were going out to every general household processor in Xingu. Police in the four Mortonridge towns were preparing to enforce the martial law declaration.
It looked good. In the computer, it looked good. Secure. But there must be something we missed. Some rogue element. There always is. Someone like Mixi Penrice.
Someone . . . who abandoned the Confederation marines in Lalonde’s jungle. Who left Kelven Solanki and his tiny, doomed command to struggle against the wave of possessed all alone.
All actions which were fully justifiable in the defence of the realm. Maybe I’m not so dissimilar to DeVille after all.
* * *
Twenty minutes after Neville Latham had issued his assignment orders, the station situation management room had settled down into a comfortable pattern. Sergeant Walsh and Detective Feroze were monitoring the movement of the patrol cars, while Manby was maintaining a direct link to the SD centre. Any sign of human movement along the streets should bring a patrol car response within ninety seconds.
Neville himself had taken part in issuing dispatch orders to the patrol officers. It felt good to be involved, to show his people the boss wasn’t afraid of rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in there. He’d quietly accepted the fact that for someone his age and rank Exnall was a dead end posting. Not that he was particularly bitter; he’d realized twenty-five years ago he wasn’t cut out for higher office. And he fitted in well here with these people, the town was his kind of community. He understood it. When he retired he knew he would be staying on.
Or so he’d thought until today. Judging from some of the latest briefing updates he’d received from Pasto, after tomorrow there might not be much of Exnall left standing for him to retire to.
However, Neville was determined about one thing. Nonentity he might be, but Exnall was going to be protected to the best of his ability. The curfew would be carried out to the letter with a competence which any big city police commander would envy.
“Sir.” Sergeant Walsh was looking up from the fence of stumpy AV pillars lining his console.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Sir, I’ve just had three people datavise the station, wanting to know what’s going on, and is the curfew some kind of joke.”
Feroze turned around, frowning. “I’ve had five asking me the same thing. They all said they’d received a personal datavise telling them a curfew was being effected. I told them they should check their household processor for information.”
“Eight people?” Neville queried. “All receiving personal messages at this time of night?”
Feroze glanced back at one of his displays. “Make that fifteen, I’ve got another seven incoming datavises stacked up.”
“This is absurd,” Neville said. “The whole point of my universal order was to explain what’s happening.”
“They’re not bothering to access it,” Feroze said. “They’re calling us direct instead.”
“Eighteen new datavises coming in,” Walsh said. “It’s going to hit fifty any minute.”
“They can’t be datavising warnings to each other this fast,” Neville murmured, half to himself.
“Chief,” Manby was waving urgently. “SD control reports that house lights are coming on all over town.”
“What?”
“Hundred and twelve datavises, sir,” Walsh said.
“Did we mess up the universal order?” Neville asked. At the back of his mind was the awful notion that the electronic warfare capability Landon McCullock warned him about had glitched the order.
“It was straight out of the file,” Feroze protested.
“Sir, we’re going to run out of net access channels at this rate,” Walsh said. “Over three hundred datavises coming in now. Do you want to reprioritize the net management routines? You have the authority. We’d be able to re-establish our principle command channels if we shut down civilian data traffic.”
“I can’t—”
The door of the situation management room slid open.
Neville twisted around at the unexpected motion (the damn door was supposed to be codelocked!), only to gasp in surprise at the sight of a young woman pushing her way past a red-faced Thorpe Hartshorn. A characteristics recognition program in his neural nanonics supplied her name: Finnuala O’Meara, one of the news agency reporters.
Neville caught sight of a slender, suspicious-looking processor block which she was shoving back into her bag. A codebuster? he wondered. And if she has the nerve to use one inside a police station, what else has she got?
“Ms O’Meara, you are intruding on a very important official operation. If you leave now, I won’t file charges.”
“Recording and relaying, Chief,” Finnuala said with a hint of triumph. Her eyes with their retinal implants were unblinking as they tracked him. “And I don’t need to tell you this is a public building. Knowing what happens here is a public right under the fourth coronation proclamation.”
“Actually, Miss O’Meara, if you bothered to fully access your legal file, you’d know that under martial law all proclamations are suspended. Leave now, please, and stop relaying at once.”
“Does that same suspension give you the right to warn your friends about the danger of xenoc sequestration technology before the general public, Chief Inspector?”
Latham blushed. How the hell did the little bitch know that? Then he realized what someone with that kind of command access to the net could do. His finger lined up accusingly on her. “Have you datavised personal warnings to people in this town?”
“Are you denying you warned your friends first, Chief Inspector?”
“Shut up, you stupid cow, and answer me. Did you send out those personal alarm calls?”
Finnuala smirked indolently. “I might have done. Want to answer my question now?”
“God in Heaven! Sergeant Walsh, how many calls now?”
“One thousand recorded, sir, but that’s all our channels blocked. It may be a lot more. I can’t tell.”
“How many did you send, O’Meara?” Neville demanded furiously.
She paled slightly, but stood her ground. “I’m just doing my job, Chief Inspector. What about you?”
“How many?”
She arched an eyebrow, aspiring to hauteur. “Everybody.”
“You stupid—The curfew is supposed to be averting a panic; and it would have done just that if you hadn’t interfered. The only way we’re going to get out of this with our minds still our own is if people stay calm and follow orders.”
“Which people?” she spat back. “Yours? The mayor’s family?”
“Officer Hartshorn, get her out of here. Use whatever force is necessary, and some which isn’t if you want. Then book her.”
“Sir.” A grinning Hartshorn caught Finnuala’s arm. “Come along, miss.” He held up a small ner
vejam stick in his free hand. “You wouldn’t want me to use this.”
Finnuala let Hartshorn tug her out of the situation management room. The door slid shut behind them.
“Walsh,” Neville said. “Shut down the town’s communications net. Do it now. Leave the police architecture functional, but all civil data traffic is to cease immediately. They mustn’t be allowed to spread this damn panic any further.”
“Yes, sir!”
* * *
The police hypersonic carrying Ralph had already started to descend over the town of Rainton when Landon McCullock datavised him.
“Some bloody journalist woman started a panic in Exnall, Ralph. The chief inspector is doing his best to damp it down, but I’m not expecting miracles at this point.”
Ralph abandoned the hypersonic’s sensor suite. The image he’d received of Rainton was all in the infrared spectrum, rectangles of luminous pink glass laid out over the black land. Glowing dots converged in the air above it, marine troop flyers and police hypersonics ready to implement the isolation. Given they were the forces of salvation, their approach formation looked strangely like the circling of giant carrion birds.
“I suggest you or the Prime Minister broadcasts to them directly, sir. Appeal to them to follow the curfew order. Your word should carry more weight than some local dignitary. Tell them about the marines arriving; that way they’ll also see that you’re acting positively to help them.”
“Good theory, Ralph. Unfortunately Exnall’s chief inspector has shut down the town’s net. Only the police architecture is functional right now. The only people we can broadcast to are the ones sitting in the patrol cars.”
“You have to get the net back on-line.”
“I know. But now it seems there’s a problem with some of the local management processors.”
Ralph squeezed his fists, not wanting to hear. “Glitches?”
“Looks like it. Diana is redirecting the AIs to interrogate Exnall’s electronics. But there aren’t nearly enough channels open for them to be as effective as they were in Pasto.”
“Hellfire! Okay, sir, we’re on our way.” He datavised a quick instruction to the pilot, and the hypersonic rose above its spiralling siblings before streaking away to the south.
* * *
Two hundred and fifty kilometres above Mortonridge, the SD sensor satellite made its fourth pass over Exnall since the network had been raised to a code three alert status. Deborah Unwin directed its high-resolution sensors to scan the town. Several specialist teams of security council analysts and tactical advisors were desperate for information about the town’s on-the-ground situation.
But they weren’t getting the full picture. In several places the satellite images were fuzzy, edges poorly defined. Switching to infrared didn’t help; red ripples swayed to and fro, never still.
“Just like the Quallheim Counties,” Ralph concluded morosely when he accessed the data. “They’re down there, all right. And in force.”
“It gets worse,” Deborah datavised. “Even in the areas relatively unaffected we still can’t get a clear picture of what’s going on below those damn harandrid trees. Not at night. All I can tell you is that there are a lot of people out on the streets.”
“On foot?” Ralph queried.
“Yes. The AIs loaded travel proscription orders into all the processor controlled vehicles in the town. Some people will be able to break the order’s code, of course. But basically the only mechanical transport left in Exnall right now are the bicycles.”
“So where are all the pedestrians going?”
“Some are taking the main link road to the M6, but it looks like the majority are heading for the town centre. I’d say they’re probably converging on the police station.”
“Damn it, that’s all we need. If they congregate in a crowd there’s no way we’ll be able to stop the possession from spreading. It’ll be like a plague.”
* * *
Frank Kitson was angry in a way he hadn’t been for years. Angry, and just a bit alarmed, too. First, woken up in the dead of night by a priority message from some O’Meara woman he’d never heard of. Which turned out to be a paranoid fantasy about xenoc takeovers and martial law. Then when he tried to datavise the police station about it he couldn’t get through to the duty officer. So he’d seen the lights on next door, and datavised old man Yardly to see if he knew what was going on. Yardly had received the same priority datavise, as had some of his family, and he couldn’t get through to the police either.
Frank didn’t want to make a fool of himself by appearing panicky, but something odd was definitely going down. Then the communications net crashed. When he accessed the general household processor for an emergency channel to the police station there was an official message in the processor’s memory from Chief Inspector Latham announcing the curfew, setting out its rules, and assuring all the citizens they would be evacuated in the morning. Genuinely worried now, Frank told his little family to get ready, they were leaving right away.
The car processor refused to acknowledge his datavise. When he switched the car to manual override, it still wouldn’t function. That was when he set off to find a police officer and demand to be told just what the hell was going on. It was a few minutes short of one o’clock when the curfew was officially due to start. And in any case, he was an upstanding subject of the King, he had every right to be on the street. The curfew couldn’t possibly apply to him.
A lot of other people seemed to have the same idea. Quite a group of them marched down the wide road out of their tranquil residential suburb heading for the town centre, shoulders set squarely against the night air. Some people had brought their kids, the children sleepy, their voices piping and full of queries. Comments were shouted back and forth, but no one had any answers to what was actually going on.
Frank heard someone call his name, and saw Hanly Nowell making his way towards him.
“Hell of a thing,” he told Hanly. They worked for the same agrichemical company; different divisions, but they drank together some nights, and their two families went on joint outings occasionally.
“Sure.” Hanly looked distracted. “Did your car pack up?”
Frank nodded, puzzled by how low Hanly was keeping his voice, almost as if he didn’t want to be overheard. “Yes, some kind of official traffic division override in the processor. I didn’t even know they could do that.”
“Me neither. But I’ve got my four-wheeler. I can bypass the processor in that, go straight to manual drive.”
They both stopped walking. Frank threw cautious glances at the rest of the loose group as they passed by.
“Room in it for you and the family,” Hanly said when the stragglers had moved away.
“You serious?” Maybe it was the thick grey tree shadows which flapped across the street creating confusing movements of half-light, but Frank was sure Hanly’s face was different somehow. Hanly always smiled, or grinned, forever happy with life. Not tonight, though.
Guess it’s getting to him, too.
“Wouldn’t have offered otherwise,” Hanly said generously.
“God, thanks, man. It’s not for me. I’m scared for the wife and Tom, you know?”
“I know.”
“I’ll go back and get them. We’ll come around to your place.”
“No need.” And now Hanly was smiling. He put an arm around Frank’s shoulders. “I’m parked just around the corner. Come on, we’ll drive back to your house. Much quicker.”
Hanly’s big offroad camper was sitting behind a thick clump of ancient harandrids in a small park. Invisible from the street.
“You thought about where we can go to get clear?” Frank asked. He was keeping his own voice low now. There were still little groups of people walking about through the suburb, all making their way to the town centre. Most of them would probably appreciate a ride out, and wouldn’t be too fussy how they got it. He was bothered by how furtive and uncharitable he’d become. Focusing on
survival must do that to a man.
“Not really.” Hanly opened the rear door and gestured Frank forwards. “But I expect we’ll get there anyway.”
Frank gave him a slightly stiff smile and climbed in. Then the door banged shut behind him, making him jump. It was pitch black inside. “Hey, Hanly.” No answer. He pushed at the door, pumping the handle, but it wouldn’t open. “Hanly, what the hell you doing, man?”
Frank had the sudden, awful realization that he wasn’t alone inside the camper. He froze, spread-eagle against the door. “Who’s there?” he whispered.
“Just us chickens, boss.”
Frank whirled around as a fearsome green-white light bloomed inside the camper. Its intensity made him squeeze his eyes tight shut, fearing for his retinas. But not before he’d seen the sleek wolverine creatures launching themselves at him, their huge fangs dripping blood.
* * *
From his seat in the situation management room, Neville Latham could hear the crowd outside the police station. They produced an unpleasant ebb and flow of sound which lapped at the building, its angry tone plain for all to hear.
The final impossibility: a mob in Exnall! And while he was supposed to be enforcing a curfew. Dear Lord.
“You must disperse them,” Landon McCullock datavised. “They cannot be allowed to group together for any length of time, it would be a disaster.”
“Yes, sir.” How? he wanted to shout at his superior. I’ve only got five officers left in the station. “How long before the marines land?”
“Approximately four minutes. But, Neville, I’m not allowing them in to the town itself. Their priority is to establish a secure perimeter. I have to think of the whole continent. What’s loose in Exnall cannot be allowed out.”
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 140
