Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

Angela grinned cheerfully at him. ‘Of course we can. You didn’t think I was going to stay in this shithole did you?’

  Paresh was sure he could hear the governor’s teeth grinding together. ‘Your bag,’ he said, gesturing helpfully at the small carryall Angela was walking away from.

  ‘My butler always organizes delivery of my couture collection.’

  Paresh and the detail had to hurry to catch up with Angela as buzzers sounded and big solid prison doors obediently opened for her.

  *

  ‘Nothing to figure out,’ Angela said as they drove into the white wilderness of the Middlesex countryside. ‘I was wrongly imprisoned, now I’m volunteering to help you guys out. I’m coming with you on the expedition.’

  ‘What expedition?’ DiRito asked from two seats down.

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? We’re going alien hunting on St Libra.’

  The squad exchanged a whole load of shocked glances. ‘No shit?’ Mohammed Anwar blurted.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll get your briefing when we arrive at Newcastle.’

  ‘Hey,’ Marty O’Riley said. ‘What were you in there for?’

  Angela turned round so she was facing all the curious faces, and hooked her arm over the top of the chair. ‘They convicted me of slaughtering fourteen people in one go. Oh, that’s more than all of you, isn’t it?’ Her lips parted at the startled silence which greeted that statement. ‘Lucky for you, I didn’t do it. Which is why your very embarrassed government has recruited me as a consultant on this trip.’

  ‘What do you consult on?’

  ‘I was the only one who survived. I saw the alien. I know what it looks like, I know what it sounds like, I know what it smells like. You don’t forget that smell, not even after twenty years. When I smell it again, I’ll know.’

  Paresh couldn’t resist. ‘So what does a killer alien smell like?’

  ‘Mint.’

  Which was a complete load of bollocks, Paresh knew. She was just enjoying herself yanking their chains. But he knew who she was now. ‘Bartram North,’ he said quietly.

  Those deadly green eyes stared at him. Then she grinned again. ‘Smart boy.’

  ‘Do my best.’

  ‘Not good enough, though, is it?’

  ‘How you reckon that?’

  ‘You’re on a trip to poke a stick into a monster’s nest. It will kill you.’ She raised her voice. ‘It will kill all of you. You won’t stand a chance.’

  ‘You haven’t seen what we can do,’ Ramon Beaken asserted. ‘No fucking alien gets on top of this squad, lady. We can handle ourselves.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. But if I do ever scent it, take me seriously. Your life depends on it.’

  ‘You got out last time,’ Paresh pointed out.

  ‘That’s because I’m tougher than you.’

  No doubt about it, Paresh thought, she was a class-A bullshitter. That just made her more interesting. He wondered if he did stand a chance with her.

  Angela didn’t say much as the convoy rode along through the English midlands and into the north. The squad didn’t know what the hell to make of her, so they by and large ignored her. Paresh didn’t give up so easy. He saw the way she stared at the countryside, even though it was just drab frozen fields and denuded ice-gripped trees. She was entranced by it. The kind of delight anyone would have if they’d been denied that sight for twenty years. So if that part of the file was correct . . .

  The convoy stopped at the Scotch Corner services so the vehicles could fill up with bioil. Everyone needed to take a pee, and after that they piled in to the Little Chef café franchise for a coffee and a donut, surprising the two waitresses who were suddenly rushed off their feet.

  Angela climbed out of the HDA minibus and inhaled deeply. On the other side of the garage forecourt low sedans and twenty-four-wheel tankers carrying their cargo of raw were purring smoothly along the six lanes of the A1 in both directions, their thick winter tyres spraying the banks of snow which lined the road with a constant rain of filthy slush.

  Paresh was entranced by the far-away expression on her face as she watched the continual stream of traffic. It made her appear vulnerable yet content at the same time, which he found quite bizarre. ‘You’re not going to try and run, are you?’ he asked, not quite joking.

  Her expression hardened, and that unnerving stare locked on to him again. ‘No. I know exactly where I’m going, and that’s back to Abellia.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The town where it happened on St Libra. I’m going to find that motherfucker, and when I do, it is going to burn – and I don’t mean in hell. I’m not going to be that kind to it.’

  ‘There really is a monster, isn’t there?’

  ‘Absolutely. So if you really are smart, Sergeant—’

  ‘That’s only corporal, and it’s Paresh.’

  ‘Paresh,’ she acknowledged. ‘If you’re smart you’ll be the one who runs.’

  ‘Guess I’m stupid then.’

  ‘We all are, in our own special ways.’

  Which was the closest she’d come to making real conversation, even if it was kind of creepy. ‘I know you’ve not been outside for a while,’ he said. ‘But it is bloody freezing standing here. Can I buy you a coffee?’

  Angela glanced at the café franchise on the side of the station’s large TravelMart store. The Legionnaires from the convoy were crowding every table, laughing as they joshed the harassed waitresses. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

  ‘Every one of them.’

  ‘You know, this isn’t quite the fantastic first meal I was planning on when I was free.’

  ‘Best I can do.’

  ‘Then I accept. Do you think they’d do hot chocolate with marshmallows?’

  ‘Let’s go find out.’

  *

  During the rest of the drive up to Newcastle, Angela did her best to behave as normally as she could. It wasn’t easy, she had so few reference points left other than hazy memories, and those didn’t exactly belong to a standard life. Acclimatizing herself to being out was proving more difficult than she had imagined. It was all so sudden – less than twenty-four hours ago she’d been brooding in the same cell she’d always been in, robotically performing the same tasks, eating the same food, not thinking about anything because that was how you survived each day. Now here she was, on the way back to St Libra, which was actually the last place in the galaxy she wanted to go.

  The hot chocolate in the Little Chef had been surprisingly good. Good because it wasn’t prison hot chocolate. The Danish pastry Paresh had bought her to go with it was also the best she’d tasted in twenty years. And then there was the laughter. For the last twenty years, laughter for her had been the twin of cruelty, the sound of vicious triumph which accompanied whimpering screams, not this carefree joy. That was something she knew would take a long time to get used to. All those young, confident Legionnaires crammed into the restaurant and misting up the windows with their boisterous joking, like a football team after the match. Watching their stupid schoolkid antics she couldn’t feel anything but sorry for them. If the expedition was successful, they’d all be dead.

  Once the minibuses filled their tanks with bioil the Legionnaires barged out of the Little Chef and hurried back to their vehicles. Angela nipped into the TravelMart and got the assistant manager to unlock the most expensive Spectrum basic smart-cell interface packet from the secure cabinet behind the counter. Not that there was a huge choice of brands. She hadn’t had a direct meat-to-wi connection for over twenty years, not since she took out her cy-chips before Melyne Aslo recruited her. Smart-cells were a whole lot better than the old cy-chips, so the newer arrivals at Holloway told her.

  She used the Social Bank card to buy the packet, and was moderately pleased when the transaction went through without any glitch, and even happier that the teen assistant manager girl didn’t say anything when she waved the SBcard through the till’s keyspace. It was like hearing the prison gates clanging shut be
hind her, but for real this time. She was out. She was free.

  The HDA minibus’s auto pulled out of the forecourt and slotted them into the northbound traffic. Angela watched the snowy landscape with a strangely neutral attitude. For years she’d been planning what to do on all the million possible variants of this day, but now it was here and she had to make some tough decisions. First one, the obvious one, she would go back to St Libra. It was where she could pick up the loose ends she’d abandoned twenty years ago. Besides, making a break for it now would be ridiculously tough. But in the meantime there were certain things to be done, preparations made as best she could.

  Angela split the chic circular Spectrum packet open. Like the packet, the instruction booklet was simple, with monochrome diagrams just to make sure. She removed the little medical-style applicator tube, which had a short fat needle and a compressed gas cartridge, which she snapped together easily. Next out came a trim magazine of fourteen clearly marked pea-sized shells which clicked neatly into the back of the tube. The first shell contained an aural smartcell. She tucked the C-shaped plastic mould behind her left ear, which positioned the tube correctly, and pressed the trigger. ‘Ow,’ it was like getting stung by an infant bee. But the tube had inserted the smartcell close to her inner ear, where its vibrations would manifest as ordinary sounds. The sting turned cold as the tube released a drop of antiseptic gel. She ejected the empty shell, and shifted the mould to her right ear. The vocal smartcells followed, inside the back of the mouth, beside the lower rear molars. Hands: one in the palm, then each fingertip.

  Finally she took out the contact lens case. Breaking the seal initiated them, so she dabbed the small thick transparent circles onto her eyes quickly, blinking against the sensation, and checking they were centred correctly with the little mirror provided in the case. Once she was satisfied, she triggered the pad which contained the unique bodymesh activation code. The contact lenses were the expensive part of the package, each containing a dozen iris smartcells, the smallest produced. Once they received the code, the lenses extended nanofilaments into her eyeball and injected the smartcells in a ring around the iris. They meshed together and orientated themselves, then fired off test pulses down her optic nerves.

  The clarity was astonishing, she wasn’t prepared for anything so sharp. For a second she was scared the smartcells would burn her retinas, they were so powerful. It was a bad déjà vu. But a basic grid of green lines appeared which reassured her. She closed her eyes like the booklet recommended, and her bodymesh began the full calibration sequence. Tones sounded in her ear. She muttered the words the grid display told her to so the interface could learn her speech patterns. It took a minute for the body-mesh software to build her personal configuration into a minimal e-i. With her voiceprint locked she worked with the e-i to define the colours and positioning of the grid, selecting icons. At the end she opened her eyes again to see the keyspace virtual the grid displayed, a red-edged cube above the empty seat beside her, with icons floating inside it. As her hands moved through it the bodymesh tracked their position so she could flick at the icons’ cog-surface. Another couple of minutes’ final calibration and familiarization, and she was done, a complete digital citizen again. The empty contact lenses peeled off, and she dropped them back into the packet along with the spent application tube and empty shells.

  She told her e-i to quest a link to the minibus’s net cell. And for the first time in twenty years Angela had an unmonitored, unrestricted channel into the transnet. The shoal of multicoloured access route symbols which sprang up in her grid were familiar from her refresher lessons at Holloway, but now all of them were active. She used her SBcard account to buy her e-i an access code and a secure cache from a German service company, and launched herself into the virtual universe.

  Her old Tramelo e-i was out there, of course, inactive in an eternity cache. But she’d given HDA those access codes long ago; they would have run the entire store through AI analysis routines and planted monitors. There was nothing there for her now. Digitally there was very little she could do to reconnect with the one person she needed to, especially while using an HDA vehicle’s cell as her transnet access point. She would have to wait until she had an independent, unmonitored connection. She’d already waited twenty years, a few more days were irrelevant.

  Her e-i sent out half a dozen searches, harvesting exactly the kind of information the HDA would expect her to: tracers on the surviving girls from the mansion, summary of herself in news shows and sites, a list of decent Newcastle clothes shops and restaurants, a rundown on the city’s HDA base, current news of St Libra with reference to any HDA activity, police reports on the murdered North, and, of course, the transnet address codes for the best GE civil liberties lawyers. But nothing about her mother from Nantes, no search to see if she was still alive, no access code listing. That particular farce didn’t matter any more, Elston now knew the past on her file was a lie and he’d screwed up, missing his one chance to interrogate her about it. No matter what, she wouldn’t be going back to Frontline again. Not alive.

  ‘You know I can’t quite place that accent of yours,’ Paresh said, all boy-puppy smiles when she crumpled up the packet and tossed it into the waste bin below her seat.

  ‘Really?’ It was funny how this one game remained utterly constant down the decades, in jail or out. And nobody had ever had to teach her how to play to perfection. ‘So what’s your best guess?’

  ‘Okay then. I’d say it’s not quite pure UK region, so I’m going for: you lived in the States at some time.’

  ‘Or I grew up in the States and then spent twenty years having UK English alone spoken to me in jail.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ He didn’t quite blush. ‘So which part of the States, Earth or trans-stellar?’

  ‘I didn’t grow up in the States. My mother is French.’

  He laughed. ‘Damn, you’re a tough nut.’

  ‘Now you’re just dreaming.’

  ‘Your file says you’re forty-two.’

  ‘Never argue with a government file, they are wise.’

  ‘If it’s true that means you’re a one-in-ten.’

  ‘And that bothers you?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘How very liberal of you.’ Angela caught sight of the sign on the side of the A1; the turn-off for the A167 was just ahead. That meant they were only a few minutes out from the HDA base, and once she was in there she’d be confined inside its perimeter. Elston would make sure of that. She peered through the minibus’s windscreen. ‘Isn’t that Last Mile up ahead?’

  ‘Yeah, but we’re going straight to the HDA base,’ Paresh said.

  ‘I’d like to make a quick detour, first. If you don’t mind.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, sometime soon after we get to the base, we’re going to get shipped out to St Libra. You do know what the Last Mile is, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure. It sells you everything you need to live on St Libra. Why, you figure buying a farm there?’

  ‘I’m not staying there – once we’ve found the alien I’m back to civilization.’

  ‘So what do you want to visit Last Mile for?’

  Angela raised her voice so everyone in the minibus could hear, insurrection targeting those precious hearts and minds. ‘I’ve been to St Libra before.’ She plucked at the coarse grey fatigues she was wearing. ‘Trust me, you do not want to go there with just government-issue kit covering your ass.’

  Paresh gaped incredulously. ‘You want to go on a shopping trip?’

  ‘Have you looked out of the window in the last fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Scope the traffic. Half of everything heading north with us right now is an HDA vehicle of some type. This is real, guys, the expedition is happening even if they haven’t bothered to let you all in on it.’

  She watched everyone suddenly start scanning the road.

  ‘Okay,’ Paresh admitted. ‘We knew we were headed for St Libra.
I’m not arguing that.’

  ‘Good. Because visiting the Last Mile isn’t some girlie mall blitz for pretty dresses. I want to survive the next month, thank you. And that means I want boots that aren’t going to rot away in the humidity and swamp mud; more than one pair. Are you sure yours will last against everything St Libra’s jungles can throw at them? And trust me, you need double-layer breathable socks no matter where you are on the planet. Are they HDA standard? Have you guys ever seen footrot fungus? I did while I was there before, plenty of times. Does HDA medic service provide enough nuflesh to cover the chunks they’ll need to chop off you? And what about UV-resistant shirts and trousers; and factor 80 sunscreen? Without all of those in combination your skin’s going to fry. Sirius is a white A-star, remember? Twenty-six times brighter than Earth’s sun. You don’t need a microwave to cook your frozen dinner, just hold the pack up to the sky for thirty seconds. Now name me the times when HDA gave you the right equipment for your exercise mission, then out of that big list, name one that’s been rammed together faster than this expedition. So tell me the logistics corps in their air-conditioned offices back here on Earth are going to get it right for us poor front line sods eight and a half lightyears away. It’s not just me that needs to take a visit to Last Mile. If you truly care for your squad, Paresh, you’ll give them the chance to stock up with the most elementary kit they need for St Libra. And it’s all lying there on the shelves at the cheapest prices anywhere across the trans-stellar worlds.’

  Paresh held his hands up. ‘Okay. Jesus, I get it.’ He glanced along the aisle to see a bunch of expectant faces, silently demanding just one thing. ‘All right, we don’t have a scheduled arrival time, we just have to be there for a briefing at fifteen hundred hours, so we can spare an hour maybe. No more.’

  ‘I’ll only need thirty minutes. And I’ll be happy to advise you guys on what works and what’s a rip-off.’

  ‘All right, Atyeo, cancel the auto and take us to Last Mile.’

  Up at the front of the minibus, Private Atyeo grinned in relief. ‘Yes, Corporal.’

  ‘Happy now?’ Paresh was feigning exasperation.