Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Okay. I’ll get to it.’

  ‘Are you anywhere near a suspect?’

  ‘Chief, we don’t even know who he was yet. And that can’t be right, not for a North.’

  ‘You’ve no idea? None?’

  ‘No. But . . .’

  ‘What? Give me something, man.’

  ‘Autopsy said he was murdered on Friday.’

  O’Rouke gave him a blank look. ‘So?’

  ‘Friday was when they announced the fusion stations contract.’

  ‘Corporate crap,’ O’Rouke hissed.

  ‘I don’t know. But that’s a lot of money even for Northumberland Interstellar. And that much money becomes political. Now we’ve got Brussels interested. I’m joining dots, here.’

  ‘Shit. All right, this prick will be here late afternoon, apparently. Keep the team at it until he arrives. And Hurst.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Be nice to have a name for the dead North when he gets here. Show the arsehole we don’t need him for anything.’

  ‘You got it.’

  Sid went back down to the third floor, and found the team still busy at their zone consoles. ‘A new brief for you,’ he told them once the secure seal was on. ‘This is bigger than we originally thought. So big that Brussels has decided to piss off O’Rouke and send an expert over here to take over from me.’

  ‘What have they got that we haven’t?’ Eva asked indignantly. ‘The Norths have given us an unlimited case budget. We can have this solved by tomorrow.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Sid said. ‘Ari, Abner, have you got a name for me?’

  Abner shook his head diffidently. ‘Sorry boss. Not yet.’

  ‘According to the autopsy prelims, the victim was killed on Friday late morning,’ Sid told them. ‘In other words a North has been missing since then and nobody noticed. Come on, people! This was never a normal case to begin with. Now this. So . . . we carry on correlating our data, open up some fresh lines of enquiry ready to show our new super-detective when he arrives. Get to it, please.’

  Sid went over to the consoles where Ari and Abner were working. ‘Really?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘Nothing? Not even a brother who hasn’t been seen for a while?’

  Abner and Ari shared a troubled glance. It was eerie seeing the same features registering identical expressions. ‘Not even a possibility,’ Ari admitted.

  ‘Okay. How far are you through the list? I assume you have a list; that you do know how many of you there are.’

  ‘We know. There are three hundred and thirty two of us As. We’ve already covered sixty per cent with personal calls to each of them to make completely sure.’

  ‘As?’ Sid asked warily.

  ‘You know the original three brothers split up back in 2087?’ Abner said. ‘Well, all the 2s and 3s, even the 4s stuck by their tribal father – not that you heard me put it like that. All us As – Augustine’s offspring – stayed here in Newcastle or Highcastle on St Libra, either to support Northumberland Interstellar or, like me and Ari, to build a life close by. The Bs and Cs went with their respective fathers to Abellia and Jupiter. One of them may have been visiting Newcastle on Friday; we don’t know yet. It’s not like they’re forbidden ever to return, the split wasn’t a divorce, and we do have plenty of contact with the family on Abellia. There’s even the occasional visit from a Jupiter cousin when a ferry ship orbits.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Sid muttered. ‘How many total?’

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Abner admitted. ‘I’ve been putting in some calls all morning. Brinkelle’s people have been helpful to a degree. But Jupiter . . . Augustine himself will have to ask that question for us.’

  ‘Crap on it!’ Sid had never considered that it could be anyone other than one of Augustine’s descendants. No wonder the Security Commission was interested. ‘The coroner took some samples to run a genetic scan with. It was Aldred’s idea, he said they’d be able to tell if it was a 2 or 3 or 4.’

  ‘According to the level of transcription breaks in the genome, yes,’ Ari said. ‘Good call. Especially if he was a 2. We tend to be more connected than our offspring.’

  ‘Will the genetic read be able to tell if he was an A or B or C?’ Sid asked.

  ‘No. It only shows how far removed from Kane he is, not which branch of the family he was born to.’

  ‘Okay. The Beijing Geonomics Institute is running it now, so the sequencing results should be in by mid-afternoon.’

  ‘That’ll really help us narrow the search,’ Abner assured him. ‘Once we know that for certain, it won’t take much longer.’

  ‘And if he was a C?’ Sid asked.

  ‘I’m not aware of any Cs on Earth right now.’

  ‘As soon as you know . . .’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  Sid sat at the spare zone console next to Ian. ‘Any progress?’ he enquired.

  ‘Aye, man; I ran the party-boat memories myself. Facial feature recognition software picked three with a North going into them in the last week. It also counted them out again. He wasn’t dumped over the side.’

  ‘You reviewed a whole week? That’s devotion to duty. Well done.’

  ‘Aye, well, none of us can afford to bollox up this, now, can we?’

  ‘Nice theory,’ Sid agreed. ‘Come on, let’s find the possible dump points into the Tyne. Show that specialist tit how useless he is at doing our job.’

  Two network technicians arrived, and began installing a dedicated memory core into Office3’s network. ‘Brand-new,’ the lead tech announced as he plugged the football-sized device into the office cells. ‘You guys must have a budget and a half for this case.’

  All the data they’d accumulated so far was extracted from the station network and dumped inside the globe. Once the files were transferred, the techs set about eliminating any ghost copies left in the network’s redundancy caches. Diode filter programs were loaded, preventing any data from leaving the core’s dedicated zone consoles in Office3.

  ‘Best we’ve got,’ Sid was told. ‘The only way anyone gets a look at those files now is if they come in here and physically tear the core out.’

  An hour later Sid was standing in the office’s largest zone booth, a translucent cylinder three metres in diameter, with ring projectors on the floor and ceiling. Eva was outside, running the synchronized image. The hologram which materialized around Sid was poor quality compared to the professional shows he was used to immersing in at home. It was to be expected. This was a composite from the multitude of smartdust meshes along the river, which were different brands, different ages, different resolution levels, and downloading into different memory formats. Despite the weird colour static, which skipped about him like iridescent rain, and the blurred outlines of anything which moved, he stood on the south shore below the curving glass façade of the Sage. Magnification was level one. ‘Take the falling snow out, please,’ he asked Eva.

  Oddly, the image degraded slightly as the snow cleared away, leaving air that had somehow lost its full transparency. ‘Best I can do,’ Eva said.

  ‘That’s good, it’s what I need,’ he assured her. Now he could see directly across the Tyne to the Court of Justice. A single digital display hovering in mid-air told him it was fifteen hundred hours on Sunday. ‘Take me up to twenty-one hundred hours and pause.’

  Colour drained out of the zone as the digits accelerated, leaving the snow-cloaked buildings illuminated by weak, green-tinged streetlighting. Cars on the main roads were stationary, their headlight beams fixed.

  Sid turned until he was facing straight along the southern road. Directly ahead of him streetlights produced pools of light that stretched away into the distance, each one separate from its neighbours. He brought both arms up and beckoned with closed fingers. The image began to slide past, taking him towards the Tyne Bridge. There was an empty slice just before he reached the support, as if a wedge of interplanetary space had fallen from the sky to lie across the road. He held his hands out, palms flat. The image halted
. He circled an upraised finger, and everything rotated round him. ‘Tag this: Gap one. It’s about a metre and a half wide. Extends across the road and to the embankment wall.’ He looked up at the concrete which was topped by a railed footpath before the ground continued to rise as a steep terracing of grass and overgrown ornamental trees.

  ‘If anyone’s trying to drag our North along that they’re going to have to be very accurate,’ Ian’s voice announced.

  ‘Something happened to the smartdust on the bridge support,’ Eva said. ‘Probably pigeon crap – they do like our bridges. There’s been no mesh there since last winter – city hasn’t got round to replacing the motes. This gap wasn’t set up for the murder.’

  ‘They’d have to get the body to the gap,’ Ian said. ‘If we’re looking for a ten o’clock disposal, there were only eight cars went along that stretch of road between nine thirty and ten past ten. None of them stopped.’

  ‘Show me,’ Sid told them. Eva moved the simulation ahead half an hour. The cars swept along the road, flowing over and around him as he stood and watched. They were all moving slowly, the compacted snow was eight centimetres thick after all, but not slow enough to dump a body into the gap. ‘Okay,’ he told them. ‘Take it back to twenty-one hundred hours. Let’s find the next gap.’

  *

  Traffic Management assigned the car an Emergency Vehicle priority, and cars and lorries parted smoothly to allow Colonel Vance Elston of the HDA’s Alien Intelligence Agency direct access to the autobahn’s central reserved lane. This close to the gateway, the commercial and private traffic was slowing up anyway, forming an orderly crawl-queue along the three lanes which led back to Earth. Now that he had a clear route, he floored the accelerator until he was doing a steady hundred and sixty kph. Beside the near-stationary cars, the sense of speed was exaggerated; it was almost thrilling, the kind of rush a boy racer sought in a boosted car. Vance smiled at the idea. At forty-seven he was a long way beyond that kind of behaviour, though even with his service and doctrinal instilled discipline something about pure speed never failed to do it for the male psyche.

  He flashed through the gateway leaving the German world of Odessa behind, emerging into a freezing Berlin winter afternoon; and immediately braked, taking the service off-ramp. An agency helicopter was waiting for him on the pad at the top of the embankment, its blades turning slowly. He abandoned the car and climbed aboard. It took him swiftly over the snow-clad capital to Schonefeld airport, where a ten-seater passenger jet was waiting. From there he flew directly to London Docklands airport. A black limousine drove right up to the airstairs to collect him. Major Vermekia was waiting in the back, wearing full dress uniform as everyone on the Human Defence Alliance general staff was required to do.

  ‘You look impressive,’ Vance told him as he settled back into the thick cushioning. Amid all the rows of decorations arrayed on the tunic like coloured bar codes was a single diamond and bronze pin with its tiny inlaid purple crucifix. It matched the one on Vance’s suit collar. He’d long since stopped wearing a uniform on a day-to-day basis, instead favouring dark expensive suits in the tradition of spooks for centuries.

  ‘Goes with the job,’ Vermekia said simply. ‘And you?’

  ‘Busy, of course. Wish I wasn’t, but that’s human nature for you. You know five Zanth-worshipping cults have sprung up on Odessa in the last three years. All of them have leaders who claim to be attuned to the Zanth.’

  ‘Morons.’

  ‘Yes, but they need investigating. One was actually building a signalling device, claiming it could call the Zanth.’

  Vermekia’s eyebrows shot up. ‘For real?’

  ‘Sadly, yes. The techs at Frontline are examining the gadget. Something to do with setting up oscillations in a trans-spacial connection.’

  ‘Oldest bunch of crap in the file. Everyone thinks it’s the gateways that attract the Zanth.’

  ‘Age gives credibility, which leads to belief. They had a lot of followers.’

  Vermekia shook his head in bewilderment. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Yeah. Unlike this.’

  ‘Speak to me. I’ve never seen an alert like it. Some detective loaded a weapons identification request into the government network, and it’s like a frigging fire alarm going off in the office. I was expecting special forces guys to blow out the wall and snatch us to safety. Even the Supreme Commander himself is showing an interest.’ He gave Vance a shrewd look over the top of his glasses. ‘Lots of related files that even I couldn’t get access to. But your name kept coming up.’

  ‘It would.’ Vance tried not to recall too many of those memories. Her screams and sobbing still flittered through his dreams, even now, twenty years later. What’s done is done. No regrets. The Lord knows the price of failure, of vigilance faltering, is too horrific to contemplate. ‘I was involved in the original case.’

  ‘We’ll have a beer one night, and you can tell me the gruesome details.’

  ‘Right.’

  The car was heading west through London, its auto steering them along the A13, taking them towards the Barbican and the start of the A1. As before, Vance had been given an Emergency Vehicle status by London’s Traffic Management AI. They were travelling as fast as practical. Thin snow was drifting out of a leaden sky, but the roads had been kept clear by the city’s winter weather crews.

  When they reached Commercial Road another black sedan pulled in directly behind them.

  ‘Who’s on the visiting team?’ Vance asked.

  ‘Quite a little meet and greet committee, actually. There’s you and me, two experts from the Brussels Interstellar Commission, three commanders from Human Defence Alliance GroundForce, an English cabinet office lawyer along with a rep from the Justice department. Now that is one department that is seriously worried – after all she’s been locked up for twenty years.’

  Vance shook his head in dismay. The levels of bureaucracy propping up the Human Defence Alliance dismayed him as much as it astonished.

  How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel?

  We’ll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.

  ‘Let me have their files,’ he said as they finally turned onto Aldersgate Street, the bottom of the A1 – which was the modern designation of the original Great North Road, built by the Romans two thousand years ago to march its garrisons to the very edge of the empire three hundred miles to the north. Their duty was to reinforce Hadrian’s Wall, keeping the outer darkness at bay and the empire safe. Today was likely to take him on that same journey, with a not too dissimilar duty.

  Another two black government cars fell in behind them.

  ‘They are good people,’ Vermekia said. ‘We’ve spent the last two hours sorting out the protocols. Everyone coming with us has the authority to make decisions.’

  Vance began to skim their files as his e-i picked them up and fed them to his grid. They were only three hours into the alert, and already an organization was coming together. ‘General Shaikh has made the decision already, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. His staff is establishing lines of command with Grande Europe’s alien evaluation office and the Pentagon. Unless this murder turns out to be very mundane in the next twenty-four hours, I’d suggest packing some tropical travel clothes.’

  Vance let himself sink back further into the car seat. ‘Okay, so give me her file. What kind of prisoner has she been?’

  ‘For a lifer, reasonably well behaved.’

  Vance watched as his e-i flipped various prison records into his grid, where micro laserlight fired them directly into his brain. The life Angela Tramelo had lived for the last twenty years summarized in official evaluations and reports. Her fights with other inmates – inevitable, given the time spent incarcerated – punished by solitary confinement, which prison psychologists said never seemed to bother her as much as it was supposed to. No recorded tox usage – which was interesting, but then her determination was alw
ays fearsome. Education – she kept current on network systems and economics. Work record – competent. Health record – excellent. ‘Hold,’ he instructed his e-i, squeezing his eyelids shut. Angela’s image steadied in front of him. He regarded it with mild exasperation. Fifty bureaucrats already getting with the programme and they still couldn’t correlate files for shit. ‘Can you get me a current image, please? This one is twenty years old.’

  Vermekia’s grin had a hint of malice. ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘I met Angela twenty years ago. Trust me, this was taken back then.’

  ‘That was taken six weeks ago. Check the prison date code, it’s authentic.’

  ‘This can’t be right.’ Vance closed his eyes again to regard the beautiful face with its harsh, aggressive stare. The hair was different now, shorter and unstyled. But those features: the cute little button nose, cheekbones sharp enough to cut diamond, a chin that was perfectly flat, wide flared lips, and green eyes with so much anger – even in the very heart of her anguish she held on to that anger – it was a decent resolution, the skin was as clear and lustrous as only the truly youthful possess. A face he would take to his grave given what he’d seen it endure. She’d been eighteen, and that was back in 2121. He’d only been twenty-five himself. Equally youthful, well built, a body he’d worked hard on to qualify for the college football team; a hundred and eighty-six centimetres tall, or six-one as they still called it back in Texas where he grew up, with black skin scarred from several game injuries and some best-forgotten adolescent rumbles. So diametrically opposite to her unblemished honey-gold, gym-toned flesh and white-blonde hair. The difference was fundamental: colour, wealth, class, upbringing, and culture – back then they’d taken one look at each other and knew the enmity which sparked immediately would last for ever, and that was before everything she’d undergone at Frontline. Now his flesh was showing wrinkles despite a good diet and all the usual middle-aged exercise tropes – gym, jogging, squash; the cheeks were rounding out, reflexes not quite the exultant lightning they had been on the football field, the hair obviously receding no matter how artfully he gelled it. But her, she looked barely twenty even now.