Pandora's Star cs-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He stepped onto the loop train just before the doors closed and watched to see who else got on after him. Procedure, once again. Except this once he was uncertain. Some itchy little feeling nudged at his subconscious. Something made him uneasy.

  Nobody he could see was the cause of it. Had it been a pattern? If he was being boxed, then at least two of the team would have stayed on the platform. Turning casually he scanned through the window to see who was left outside. But there were just the late arrivals, wearing expressions of disgust or resignation as they saw the doors closing in front of them.

  He sent his message to a onetime unisphere address. Back in the Lemule’s Max Transit office they would know he was on the last leg. They would be scanning the electronic activity in the train to see if any kind of covert operation was under way. If there was, he’d know about it at LA Galactic. Just like Stig coming back from Oaktier.

  Satisfied he’d done all he could, he walked down several carriages before taking a seat—close to an exit. The next stop was Mexico City, then he’d be back at LA Galactic. Elvin had emphasized again and again how important this data was to the whole Guardian movement, how he absolutely must not fail. The invasion added its own emphasis. He debated if that was making him paranoid in his desperation to make sure he delivered.

  As the train pulled away from the platform he wondered how Stig would look when he got back. The cellular reprofiling should be almost finished, giving him a whole new face, allowing him to resume front-line duties. Stig wasn’t good at sitting around doing nothing all day in the safe house.

  Justine sat at the back of the security office in LA Galactic, quietly watching the navy intelligence team coordinate the box operation on the loop train. They had been running the observation operation from here as soon as they confirmed that Kazimir was staying at a hotel in Santa Monica. She’d checked in with them several times a day for a personal briefing, even at the height of the invasion. Each day was the same: Kazimir was killing time, acting like a tourist. Waiting.

  It was so strange, being able to see the observation team’s real-time images of him, while not being able to touch him or talk to him herself. She felt as if she’d been cast in the role of some obscure guardian angel, watching over her beloved from a lofty height, making sure his youthfulness and naivety didn’t bring him into harm. The guilt she felt at the same time was excruciating, but she kept telling herself that afterward he’d understand. When he finally realized how utterly wrong he’d been, how he’d been taken in and used by others, they could begin afresh. Justine hadn’t even thought what kind of life they’d have together afterward. Which made her as dizzy-headed as Kazimir.

  Then yesterday the call had come through from Commander Alic Hogan. Kazimir had received instructions from a onetime address, and taken the loop train to Rio. What followed then had been strange. Kazimir had visited an ancient observatory in the Andes, then set off back almost immediately. Given how isolated the observatory was, the navy team couldn’t get inside to see what it was Kazimir had picked up. In fact, it was very difficult for them to remain unseen on the track through the Andes as they followed his four-by-four.

  Low-level cybersphere investigation revealed the observatory was run by a consortium of universities, with funding coming from a great many sources, corporate, government, and educational. It was now surrounded by a navy team, who were waiting for the order to go in. That would only come after Kazimir delivered whatever he was carrying to his controller.

  The scale and obvious importance of the whole operation was easy justification for her to travel to LA Galactic in person, along with two bodyguards from Senate Security. Hogan was running the operation himself, as well he might considering the pressure she’d been putting on him.

  “The loop train has left Rio, Senator,” Hogan reported. “Shouldn’t be much longer now.”

  “Good.”

  “He called a onetime address once he egressed. The Guardian operative returning from Oaktier did the same thing. It would seem to be their standard operating procedure.”

  “Do you expect Kazimir McFoster to get off here?”

  “It’s highly probable. But I’ve got enough people to box him no matter where he goes. Don’t worry, Senator, this one won’t be getting away from us.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” She gave him a slight nod, dismissing him. Hogan’s smile was forced as he went back to join his team. All of them were hunched over their desks, studying the screens and muttering to the field operatives.

  This time nothing was left to chance, as it had been when Paula Myo was in charge. Over a hundred naval intelligence officers were on duty in and around LA Galactic, ready to trail Kazimir to whatever destination the handover was scheduled to take place. They’d been quietly deployed over the last two days, avoiding any possibility of virtual observation. Tarlo was convinced their last failure was due to the Guardians infiltrating at least some of LA Galactic’s network. Consequentially, they were using dedicated communications systems, with ultra-modern obscured traffic software. If the Guardians had the technical capability to detect that, then they’d probably be running the whole Commonwealth before the end of the year.

  She used her interface to call up images from the CST internal network, and watched on a desk screen as the loop train slid through the gateway between Rio and Mexico City.

  Kazimir got off the loop train at LA Galactic’s Carralvo terminal. It was midday. Undiluted sunlight poured through the huge crescent windows high overhead, making the angular support pillars gleam. He walked off the platform and down the curving ramp at the end, feeling the familiar tremble through the soles of his boots as trains rolled through the giant building. Traffic at the station was almost back up to its pre-invasion levels, though noticeably fewer passengers crowded the central concourse.

  As he stepped off the end of the ramp he glanced about casually, as if unsure which way he should be going. Nobody paid him any attention. There had been no warning from the Guardian team, either visually or through the cybersphere.

  Maybe I am paranoid.

  Kazimir started walking along the concourse, heading for exit eight where there was a taxi stand outside. Another quarter of an hour would see him return in triumph to the office of Lemule’s Max Transit, and hand over the memory crystal with its Martian data. He almost patted the little disk in its secure belt pocket, but that would have been pathetically amateurish. A confident smile tweaked his lips as he made his way through the thousands of travelers bustling along the central concourse. The Guardians would be another significant step toward bringing about Far Away’s revenge because of him. And once this mission was complete he would try to find time to visit Justine again. That venture out to the Tulip Mansion was the only thing he’d done since leaving Far Away that transgressed their operational doctrine. But he didn’t care. Bruce would understand that, if none of the others did. Justine was a part of him. Without her, there was no point to existence. She was worth risking everything for. And when he’d seen her again that fateful night, it was as if no time had passed. That she felt the same way about him was the kind of miracle he wouldn’t even expect the dreaming heavens to grant.

  But she did. That was the true wonder he’d known. She felt for him as he did for her. Her delight alone made him more determined to rid the universe of the Starflyer. He wanted a universe where nothing could come between them ever again. What a world that would be. What an incredible, blissful future.

  He was two hundred meters away from exit eight when he saw the man standing at the bottom of the ramp that curved up to platform six. Something about him… Neatly cropped hair, tall, young, early twenties just like Kazimir, wearing a simple blue jacket over a cream shirt. The way he was standing, holding a small array in his hand, reading a document on the unrolled screen. His position and angle against the ramp’s railing—so relaxed and natural—allowed him to see everyone walking along the concourse whenever he happened to glance up from the screen. It could so e
asily have been an ordinary civilian. But his profile made Kazimir slow as he approached. That profile was oddly familiar. A profile that was searing connections deep into Kazimir’s brain. Old memories tumbled out, delivering a physical jolt to the body.

  Kazimir halted. Tears smudged his vision. “No,” he said soundlessly. He wanted to move, but his knees were threatening to give way.

  The man glanced up from the array screen, looking straight at Kazimir.

  “Bruce,” Kazimir gasped. “It’s you.” He took a step forward, heedless of the people flowing between them. It was him, really him. Bruce McFoster, standing on the concourse on LA Galactic as if it were the most normal thing in the universe. Bruce McFoster who had fallen in battle right in front of him. Every day Kazimir saw the giant warhorse rolling across Bruce’s defenseless body. Bruce McFoster: alive. “Bruce!” Kazimir took another couple of steps. “Oh, my God. Bruce, it’s me, it’s Kaz.”

  Bruce hadn’t stopped looking at him. He put the array in his pocket with a calm unhurried motion.

  Kazimir started running. “Bruce!” He opened his arms wide in rapturous welcome. A path opened for him through the crowd as he rushed forward.

  Bruce McFoster brought his right arm up. There was something in his hand. It flashed—

  Kazimir felt no pain. He felt nothing. There had been a moment of blackness. Then he was looking straight up at the Carralvo terminal’s white concrete ceiling far overhead. His body wasn’t moving. Silence closed in on him. “Bruce?”

  Faces swam over him, but it was hard to see any of them. The light was dimming. Kazimir tried to smile. He finally realized he was dying. Not that it mattered, because his life had included—“Justine.” Ghostly fingers reached up to touch her icon. “Justine, I’m so sorry.” But her smile was there comforting him, forgiving as the light slipped away.

  Justine screamed as the security camera swung around on the man Kazimir was staring at in such wondrous disbelief. Her brother’s murderer was standing in the middle of LA Galactic. She watched as he coolly raised his arm and fired a pistol. The ion stream blew Kazimir’s chest open in a horrific plume of blood and charred gore. He was flung back five meters through the air to sprawl on the concourse. Justine’s scream choked off. She almost dropped out of the chair as her body spasmed in shock.

  The navy team filled the office with frenzied shouting. A furious, scared Alic Hogan was almost sobbing as he ordered the officers on the concourse to give chase. His fists were clenched above the main screens, ready to punch straight through the images. Every picture turned to a confused, fast-moving blur. More shots were fired. A chorus of yelling and panicked shrieks burst out of the speakers.

  Justine breathed again. A long juddering breath that burned its way down her throat. One screen had remained centered on Kazimir’s broken body.

  “Take me down there,” she whispered painfully.

  “Senator?” one of the bodyguards asked.

  “We’re going down there.”

  “Yes, Senator.”

  Her e-butler told her a single message had arrived via a onetime address. Its author was verified as Kazimir McFoster. “Nobody’s to touch him,” she yelled abruptly as she got to her feet.

  The navy personnel turned around from their desks, looking at her with startled expressions. “Keep everyone away from him,” she told them. “I don’t want him touched.”

  As she left the office she ordered her e-butler to open the message. It contained a unisphere address code, and a line of text. MY DARLING JUSTINE, YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON I HAVE EVER LOVED. I THANK YOU FOR LIVING. KAZIMIR.

  The bodyguard had to hold her as she started crying.

  CST station security staff cleared a path for Justine through the tense, worried crowd on the concourse. They’d been kept well back from the body, leaving her with a long lonely walk at the end. The last few steps as the true damage that had been done to him became visible were almost impossible for her. Yet she forced herself forward, punishing herself because she knew she deserved far, far worse.

  It was every bit as bad as she knew it would be. The blood pooling over the white marble. The smell. His face perfectly intact, holding the expression of someone whose prayer had been answered.

  Justine knelt beside him, though in truth her legs could barely hold her weight anymore. The wide puddle of his cold blood soaked into her expensive skirt. She reached out and touched his cheek with her fingers, fearful of what she would feel. Lifeless bodies she had seen countless times, including her brother’s. But Kazimir was a Guardian, he didn’t have a memorycell insert. This was genuine death, a life that had ended. She thought she’d left this barbarity behind centuries ago.

  Later there would be anger. Fury. And a bitter, bitter remorse. For now she was just numb. Not understanding how this could have happened despite all her power and authority; all the orders and thinly veiled threats that nothing, nothing was to harm him. Now here he was, her beautiful young love: dead. Forever.

  Justine heard a pair of heels clicking on the marble. Someone walking purposefully along the concourse toward her. No doubt who that would be. She smiled forlornly down at Kazimir one last time, then rose to her feet and turned around.

  “Senator,” Paula Myo said. “My sympathies.”

  Justine’s smile turned cruel as she glanced down at the dark blood staining her skirt. “I told them. I made it very clear to the navy. Kazimir was not to be hurt.”

  “The navy didn’t do this.”

  “You see, I always thought that I was right, that he was just a naive provincial lad with a head full of nonsense. I have to be right because I’m nearly four centuries old, and I live in mansions and penthouses and I have enough money to buy his world. I had to protect him from himself, from others who were using him.”

  “You did everything you could.”

  “Then why is he dead, Investigator?”

  “There is a leak in the navy, probably more than one.”

  “It is real, isn’t it,” she said with a kind of detached amusement. “Kazimir was right all along.”

  “Yes, Senator, the Starflyer is real.”

  …

  Wind and current were acting in happy conjunction, pushing the Pathfinder along at a steady clip. In other circumstances, Ozzie would have been quite pleased about that. But not today.

  “Isn’t there anything ahead?” Orion asked with a petulant whine.

  Ozzie switched off his retinal insert’s zoom function, which he’d been using to scan that uncomfortably distant horizon. “No,” he said. Even he thought he sounded defensive.

  Fifteen miles to starboard, and now slightly behind, the last island rose up out of the tranquil blue-gray water. The simple dark green cone was the fourth one they’d tried to reach. Once they’d left their original island behind, the sea’s current had picked up considerably. So much so that they had very little ability to steer. Even with Tochee angling the rudder hard over, they couldn’t vary their course by more than a few degrees.

  They had missed the first island by over ten miles, standing on the raft’s creaking deck to watch despondently as it sank away behind them. It had been larger than the one they’d set sail from, with wide coves and extensive forests. Ozzie hadn’t seen any signs of habitation, even with his retinal inserts on full magnification, but it had looked very promising.

  After the shock of missing landfall, they had swung around straightaway for the next island, thirty miles farther on. This time with near-constant rowing and the tiller jammed over, they’d got to within a couple of miles as the current swept them onward. Neither of the two exhausted humans had said anything, but they both knew that Tochee could have swum ashore if it wanted to. Their big alien companion had chosen to stay with them.

  From then on there were fewer islands they could aim for, and the current strength had increased noticeably. And now, what might have been their last chance was receding at a respectable speed.

  Ozzie sat down with his back to the mast
, looking back trying not to appear too disappointed. The stiff square of sail was curved tautly as the breeze pushed against it. There wasn’t a lot of point having it up anymore. The surface of the sea was flowing as fast as a plains river. He couldn’t work out why it was doing that, either. Seas simply didn’t rush about, there was no hydrological mechanism he could think of that would produce such an effect. It was just one more anomaly that the planet had thrown at them. Ozzie worried that it might prove a fatal one.

  “I might be able to tow us back over to the last island,” Tochee’s array translated.

  Ozzie gave the big creature a dubious look. “You’re more likely to just wear yourself out. Let’s save acts like that until we get desperate.”

  “And we’re not now?” Orion muttered.

  “As long as we’re moving, we’re okay,” Ozzie said firmly. “There will be more islands over the horizon, or even the mainland. It’s when we stop moving that we’re in trouble.”

  Orion’s expression was very skeptical, but he didn’t argue. Tochee pulled the rudder up, then simply shuffled around until it was facing forward.

  So far they’d eaten about a third of their fresh supplies, Ozzie calculated. If they were a little more careful from now on, the fruit should last them another four or five days. Technically, food wasn’t a problem. Tochee could catch fish for them indefinitely, and the filter pump could produce fresh water. From that point of view they could sail over the entire ocean. However, he was under no illusion about how long the raft would last. The palm frond ropes were already showing signs of swelling and fraying where they bound the log bundles together. When they started to go, their future would be measurable in hours. There were no lifebelts on board. He was now wondering how useful the inflatable tent walls would be in an emergency.

  Ozzie woke with Orion shaking his shoulder.

  “Ozzie, I can hear something.” The boy’s voice was low, as if he was afraid.

  “Okay.” Ozzie pushed his sunglasses up, blinking around. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. When he looked behind them, there was a small trail of bubbles emerging from the stern of the raft. “Jeeze, we’re leaving a wake. How fast are we going?”