Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Once he settled behind his desk he called up the forensics results for the magnetic pulse assault on the junctions’ smartdust, then linked to the city’s traffic management AI and requested approach road logs, letting them download into the secure police network. Once that was underway he used his authority code to activate the Kenny Ansetal case file on his console. Nothing had been done, of course, it was currently classed as neutral. In another week, if there hadn’t been any entries or follow-on activity, the station AI would automatically downgrade it to inactive status.

  The results materialized in the console zone, and he called up the profiles of Gail Stratton and Kayleen Edenson, the two witnesses he’d chatted to. He had to use his authority code again, but a minute later their financial records were on the screens in front of him. He noted on the official log that he was looking for a payment transfer indicating one of them had sold the i-3800. He also opened the finance records to full data display for a month before the incident, which quadrupled the information on the screens, showing outgoing payments, their purchases, as well as income. It began to scroll down, and he scanned it methodically for the kind of entry he wanted. Bar accounts were easy to spot, he knew the names of Newcastle’s clubland well enough. Pattern analysis was instinctive, part of his detective’s training, aided by years of experience. Heavy spending early in the evening, soon tailing off. The girls bought their own drinks to start with, the kind of spending which usually expired mid-evening. Someone else stepped in to buy the drinks: QED, they didn’t have regular boyfriends.

  He was equally adept at recognizing the supplementary data points. Clothes store accounts dropped through the zone display, and he quickly read along the line, seeing what they’d bought with a well-practised eye. He found everything he needed within five minutes, but let the scroll continue so no one could really determine what he’d looked at. Their basic profiles also showed their ages, which decided it for him.

  With their profiles and finances closed back into the case file, he used a patch program to monitor Gail’s e-i location through the city communication routers. The patch allowed him to piggyback the tracer request on the North case authority. There was so much data flowing into that sub-network it was unlikely anyone would spot it without a full forensics audit. Even so, it wasn’t logged as his request – good old Ari had that honour. A phishing tap had caught his codes yesterday.

  That done, Ian spent the remaining forty minutes trying to spot any vehicle that kept turning up at the same time that junction smartdust was scorched in a magnetic flash. Abner had been right, whoever was doing it were very professional, they were switching licence codes.

  He signed out of the station at seven thirty, and took his car home for a quick shower and a change. By eight fifteen he was back out on the street, and calling a taxi, ready and eager for everything the glorious city could offer a single man on a Saturday night.

  ‘Where to?’ the driver asked.

  Ian consulted Gail’s location icon flashing away in his iris smartcell grid. ‘The Indigo Parrot,’ he said, a reasonable enough club in Newgate Street.

  She’d be surprised to see him. They normally were, but that was always a good opening line of the Lanagin bullshit charm offensive. Information ruled all in this century, the ultimate currency; and his edge – drinking a whole lot deeper than most from the eternal datastream – made him very wealthy indeed. He knew her age, height, bra size, weight, that she was on the market, and as a nice little bonus, her medical record which showed she was clean of any STDs; all knowledge to be manipulated to his advantage.

  Ian closed the secure link to the station and settled back to enjoy the ride.

  Sunday 20th January 2143

  It was another cloudless winter morning, clear cold air allowing the sun to shine hard and bright on the winter-bound city. There was no heat in the radiance, so the sunlight made little impression on the banks of snow other than sending a few trickles of slush leaking across the roads and pavements.

  Traffic in the centre of Newcastle was sluggish. The ring road was closed to all non-HDA traffic for the day. Sometime just after midnight a pair of Airbus C-121T-FC SuperRocs had flown in to Newcastle airport, their massive Rolls-Royce Thames engines waking up half of the city as they flew low overhead. Deliberately, Vance Elston felt; making their presence known, emphasizing the HDA’s authority and purpose. The Norths might own the city, but even they had to acknowledge it was the HDA who ultimately called the shots. It was the expedition which dominated everyone’s thoughts now, and the procession of planes and vehicles around the city was turning the day into a carnival. Thousands of residents were ignoring the cold, and lining the route to enjoy the spectacle of heavy military-style machinery heading through the gateway. Short of a full Zanthswarm deployment, it was the greatest action the St Libra gateway would probably ever see. Who wanted to miss that?

  Vance’s limousine slowed as it approached the western end of Mosley Street, and the auto negotiated the snow piles blocking the gutter to pull up close to the pavement. He stepped out and stared up at the ancient stone steeple of the St Nicholas Cathedral, frowning at its odd little gold and scarlet wooden box halfway up which housed the clock. The bells were ringing cheerfully, and a reasonable number of people were answering the call for the holy day’s communion service – mostly elderly, Vance noticed with some disapproval. Didn’t young people have time for the Lord these days? Major Vermekia and Antrinell Viana were waiting outside the ornate age-darkened wooden doors set back into the entrance archway.

  Vance greeted Vermekia warmly. ‘Busy time?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m so jetlagged right now I’m gonna loop round on myself and bite my own ass,’ Vermekia grumbled. ‘The General sends his personal greetings, and wishes you bon voyage.’

  ‘Tell him: thank you. Much appreciated,’ Vance said.

  The three of them moved to one side, away from the mildly curious gaze of well-dressed parishioners entering the cathedral.

  ‘Jupiter called back,’ Vermekia said. ‘Constantine in person answered the General’s questions. He completely denied that they were in any way involved in the murder.’

  ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ Antrinell said.

  ‘Maybe. And while we’re on deniability, Constantine also said they never found a sentient on St Libra, but admitted that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Fair enough, it’s a big planet.’

  ‘Any word on when we’re shipping out?’ Vance asked.

  ‘Nah, the General wants to see where the investigation leads. He’s going to give it a few more days to allow the logistics corps to get their act together, but realistically it’s impossible to issue a recall order now.’

  ‘Detective Hurst’s team is working quite hard, actually,’ Vance admitted. ‘They’ve put together an impressive virtual of the city so they can attempt to trace the murderer’s movements last week.’

  ‘Is it an alien?’ Vermekia asked directly.

  ‘If it is, it had local help.’

  ‘Huh. Well we’ve got enough nut-jobs worshipping the Zanth. If there’s another species lurking about on St Libra it’s probably got its followers, too.’

  ‘What worries me most about this is if the sentients have found a way though the gateway undetected. It isn’t a pleasant thought, but it would explain a lot.’

  ‘True. How’s Tramelo working out?’

  ‘Freedom-happy the first day,’ Vance said. ‘Testing her boundaries, which was only to be expected. But she’s quiet for now. She’s definitely one person who firmly believes the alien exists.’

  ‘You want to interrogate her again?’

  ‘Not necessary. Not yet. I am concerned about her past, whatever it is; but I can see how troubled she is by the alien. She thinks it’s going to kill us all if we give it a chance.’ He gave Vermekia a significant look.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘There are too many inconsistencies for this to be an ordinary murder, even as part of a covert corporate
operation,’ Vance admitted.

  ‘And the kill methodology is one giant consistency,’ Vermekia concluded. ‘What about Jay Chomik’s detector systems?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Antrinell sighed. ‘The city is ringed tight with them now. If a Zanth molecule sneezes, we’ll know about it.’

  Vance grinned. ‘I like the metaphor, but this isn’t Zanth. Not its style.’

  ‘I’m glad you know so much about it,’ Vermekia said. ‘But something is killing Norths; and for all they’re a bunch of weird clones, they’re valuable to trans-stellar civilization as a whole.’

  ‘I’ve reviewed Tramelo’s testimony and the autopsy on the 2North,’ Antrinell said. ‘I’ve got to say, to me it looks like a guy in some kind of weird power suit or with dark cyborg implants.’

  ‘If it’s a lone psycho, why wait twenty years between killings?’ Vermekia asked.

  ‘That’s one question on psychology, one query. And we’re putting together a multi-billion-dollar expedition because of it? That’s too extreme.’

  ‘The expedition was launched because of the uncertainty. We have to know. We have to.’

  Antrinell gave a reluctant sigh. ‘I get that. But didn’t anyone in the general staff science team mention just how unlikely it is for bipedal life to evolve anywhere else? There’s no evidence for it on all the planets we’ve visited. Hell, Guanimaro animals don’t even have limbs, and they get along fine.’

  ‘The general science staff did a very lengthy review,’ Vermekia said. ‘First off, Sirius is close, and that opens up astrogenic theory, that basic life in this galaxy is spread between stars by microbes.’

  ‘No way. It used to be called panspermia theory, and it was finally disproved a century ago. Nothing complex enough to reproduce itself, even a monobacterium hitching a lift on an interstellar comet, can maintain its molecular integrity for that kind of timeframe in a vacuum at absolute zero.’

  ‘It wasn’t disproved because it can’t be. You can’t run an experiment to check it. All that happened was one bunch of scientists with a counter-theory carried the day over its proponents back then. That’s all. It’s an argument over statistics and probability. In other words, nobody has a clue.’

  Antrinell threw his hands in the air, shaking his head. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Secondly, and more relevantly, is St Libra’s biosphere itself,’ Vermekia said. ‘It’s a real anomaly; this no animals or insects environment is unique. Suspiciously unique. No other world we’ve found has just plants. Now, there’s never been a lot of research into St Libra’s fossil record. Highcastle only has one university, and that concentrates on turning out bioil engineers for the algaepaddies and refineries rather than archaeobotanists. But there are a couple of teams working on St Libra, and the results that have trickled in over the last thirty years give us cause for concern. As far as they’ve found, there was no life on St Libra prior to about one and a half million years ago.’

  Vance frowned at the information. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It’s all buried in obscure academic journals. And again, they’ve not conducted many digs, and you can’t judge a planet St Libra’s size from eight sample points close together on one continent. There’s also the problem that St Libra’s zebra botany is simply too sophisticated even if you disregard the lack of a fossil record. That’s a young star, don’t forget. Plants that complex shouldn’t have had time to evolve. All of which has the general science staff postulating that what we have on St Libra is an artificial bioforming event instead of natural evolution. In other words, someone manufactured St Libra’s biosphere. A couple of million years ago, a whole batch of bacteria and seeds were dumped on that planet and left to get on with it.’

  ‘Creation time,’ Vance grinned.

  The others chuckled appreciatively.

  ‘The only reason you do that is if you’re developing real estate for your own species,’ Antrinell concluded.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Vance said. ‘Nobody thinks in those kinds of timescales.’

  ‘Nobody human,’ Vermekia countered.

  ‘If it had been bioformed ready for species expansion, then they would’ve been able to take possession after a few thousand years.’

  ‘Maybe. Nobody is asking why they haven’t turned up yet. But it’s another huge question mark hanging over St Libra. Imagine what the formers would think if they came back to check on their project and they find our algaepaddies leaking terrestrial biocrap all across their landscape. Maybe it’s a freaking art project – if you have the technology to bioform on an interstellar level, you certainly don’t have economics as we know it. Or it’s an emperor’s nature park. We don’t know, and that’s the point. That’s why the expedition is going ahead.’

  ‘If there’s a sentient on St Libra, we’ll find it,’ Vance said.

  ‘I’m sure you will.’ Vermekia gestured at the cathedral entrance as the bells fell silent. ‘Shall we go in, gentlemen. Your mission could do with every blessing our good Lord can bestow, and who knows when you’ll get a chance to pray properly again.’

  *

  Crowds lined Newcastle’s western A1 ring road more or less its whole length, from the junction with the A696 airport link road to Last Mile and the gateway itself. The banks beside the bridge over the Tyne at Lemington provided a great place to watch from. Everyone on the slopes stared across the gulf in awed fascination as the first double-deck SuperRoc approached the crossing. The carriageways were barely wide enough to take the main undercarriage bogies, and then people started to wonder if the bridge would actually hold the weight. A fully loaded SuperRoc weighed in at over 600,000kg, but operational empty weight was barely 300,000kg, which the bridge would be able to handle.

  A praetorian guard of technicians in their uniform grey-green HDA parkas scurried around the massive plane as it crept forwards. The tow-tractor had its auto firmly disengaged as the driver steered it down the exact centre of the bridge. A vanguard of the parka figures checked the ice and snow had been properly cleared from the tarmac as the nose undercarriage reached the bridge – nobody wanted a loss of traction now. More parka people swarmed around the main undercarriage, verifying clearance.

  The SuperRoc made it over the bridge just after nine in the morning, and everyone cheered as it rolled onward around the ring road. The second SuperRoc and three more Daedalus strategic airlifters followed sedately.

  Sid had brought Jacinta and the kids to a vantage point at the end of the car park that used to serve Bensham Hospital, just above the train line that bordered the eastern side of Last Mile. The hospital was half-demolished, with the developers awaiting various city permits to redevelop the area with a trio of lavish thirty-storey office towers. Its proximity to the gateway itself, which was just a few hundred metres away, made it one of the most valuable chunks of real estate currently available in Newcastle. Quite how that particular section of city-owned land came to be sold off had caused five councillors to be placed under investigation by the regional budget scrutiny office.

  But pressed up against the car park’s tall galvanized metal fence, the Hurst family did have a splendid view across the lumpy solar roofs of Last Mile buildings to the gateway itself. The metal road ramp which led into the trans-spacial connection was empty. It had been lowered, settling down on the exit route below, so freeing up more of the gateway to take the bulk of the planes. All other traffic to St Libra, commercial and personal, had been suspended; even the constant stream of emigrants on foot had to wait for once. Today they had to mill around at the entrance to Last Mile until the HDA transit was complete.

  ‘Why are they all going to St Libra?’ Zara asked, as the towing tractor hauling the first SuperRoc turned off the A1 at the Lobley junction, and crawled slowly into Last Mile, curving round to line up on the grey haze of the oval gateway.

  ‘It’s an expedition, stupid,’ Will taunted his sister.

  ‘Yes but why?’

  ‘They’re exploring Brogal,’ Jacinta said. �
��We don’t know very much about that continent, and the HDA is checking to make sure it’s safe.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be safe?’

  ‘There have been reports of possible alien sightings,’ Sid said, repeating the official explanation and hating himself for doing it.

  ‘The Zanth?’ Zara asked anxiously.

  ‘No, not Zanth, darling. Something else. They don’t know what, that’s why they’re looking. It’s probably nothing, but they have to make sure, that’s their job.’ He exchanged a glance with Jacinta, who was struggling to hold in her contempt.

  ‘It’s on the ramp, look,’ Will said, pointing eagerly through the fence.

  Directly ahead of them, the tow-tractor’s fat front tyres trundled up the slight incline. Sid wasn’t sure if it could pull the giant plane up a slope, even one as gentle as this one had been reduced to. He put his arm round Zara, giving her an affectionate squeeze.

  ‘Is it going to fit, Daddy?’ she asked.

  ‘It should do,’ Sid said doubtfully. It would certainly be close. The SuperRoc’s wings were folded back flat along its fuselage. It was a feature designed into every plane the HDA ordered, since they all had to pass through gateways and be mission-ready as soon as they were on the other side. The tall twin tailfins were also hinged down.

  Will grimaced as the tractor crawled into the gateway’s distortion haze. Then the SuperRoc’s nose slipped in. The parka people congregating around and underneath the plane were becoming more animated. Green laser fans swept out from the oval portal, measuring the plane’s position and clearances. It inched onwards.

  Sid almost winced as the engine pods reached the gateway. The plane was going really slowly now, with measurements being taken constantly. Technicians clustered under the jet pods, arms gesticulating wildly. He was sure there could have been only a few centimetres clearance. But slowly and surely the plane carried on.