Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The Jaguar zoomed out of the tunnel and she let go of the joystick, switching back to auto. Driving was just too much now. Amid the shock and fright, her mind was trying to grapple with what had happened, to be rational. It was difficult. Death on such a scale and with such visceral ferocity wasn’t something she’d ever considered. But now it had happened, and had to be dealt with. Had to.

  The contract had been awarded. She’d managed that, actually pulled off the heist. The money transfer had gone through. Abellia’s Civic Administration finance office had paid Giulio-Trans-stellar one hundred and eight million Eurofrancs as a deposit for the infrastructure contract. Right now all that binary code money would be percolating along the route they’d devised, twisting and changing at every bank and finance house; identity and currency would morph a dozen times before vanishing into the digital event horizon at the end of the route, the void of which she knew nothing.

  Full completion would take a couple of hours. Anything involving that many exchanges and owner switches was by necessity complex. She couldn’t afford to be caught, not until she was sure it was complete. That single notion cooled her thoughts to an icy calm. Nothing else mattered. She was still on mission; no matter how ludicrously fucked it was now.

  Ringlight shrank away, smothered behind a wall of thick cloud that frothed across the sky. Drizzle turned to a torrent of rain which splattered down across the tarmac, forcing the auto to slow.

  Angela slammed the brake on, making the car fishtail as the wheels fought for grip. She opened the door and scrambled out to stand under the monsoon. Tipped her head back to let the heavy drops sluice her clean. Hands scraped urgently at the disgusting drying blood that caked her skin, and red rivulets began to trickle down her legs. She stripped the shorts off, and flung them away across the verge. Obsession to be rid of the gruesome contaminate consumed her now, she scraped and scraped at her skin until she was scratching and grazing herself. Completely naked, saturated in the swirl of water, she was shaking again, from the cold this time. When she looked back at the car, with its orange interior lights glowing, the driver’s seat was tarnished with blood. She opened the boot and pulled out a blanket to sit on. Only then did she set off again, ordering the auto to take her into town, all the way down to Velasco Beach.

  The monsoon was lifting by the time the Jag arrived at the car park behind the beach. It was half past three in the morning. She knew there’d be no one about, she didn’t even bother checking.

  Down to the beach itself, fifteen paces from the bottom of the promenade steps, one pace out from the wall. And dig. Don’t think what you’d look like to some accidental observer, naked, in the rain, clawing desperately, trying not to cry any more. It took a minute, burrowing into the sand like some mad dog, before her fingers scrabbled against the emergency package.

  Just lifting it out of the hole sent a jolt of relief through her, like a bump from a sanity tox. She got back into the Jag, passenger side this time, wiping sand off her legs and arms with the blanket, then ripping open the polythene-wrapped package. Everything she needed for a quick exit was there.

  First, the sac, bumped hard against her jugular so the deactivants would circulate fast. She held her hands up, looking at the small, still-oozing scabs on her fingertips where the tips had retracted into her flesh again. The dark weapons would take a few days to dissolve back to their basic nuclei threads; and she’d feel like crap while they did it, so the New Tokyo specialist had warned her. Irrelevant.

  There were three interface sets, all preloaded with identities. She picked up the first, and took a steadying breath as she called the emergency transnet address.

  ‘It’s me,’ she told the voice-message function. ‘The transfer has gone through. Okay? Really, it’s through. There was enough money, more than enough. A hundred and eight million. And Christ, darling, it was so easy. Everything we planned, everything we wanted; we did it, we really did, we pulled it off. But, oh shit, I found . . . afterwards . . . Shit, Goddamnit, they’re all dead. Dead. Bartram, the girls, others . . . Dead. Just wiped out, like animals. Torn to pieces. It was monstrous . . . yeah, that’s what, a monster. A monster is loose. I know that sounds . . . crazy, but I’m telling you the truth. There was nothing I could do. Really. Nothing. I swear, really swear: nothing. When all this nukes the transnet, when you see for yourself, believe me I didn’t have anything to do with it. You will do that, won’t you, my darling, you’ll believe me? I know no one else will. I’m going to run for it now, try and make it back to Newcastle. They’ll come after me, so this next bit is really hard. I can take it, all right? If they catch me, well that’ll be the price, I’ll owe it and I’ll pay it. I don’t mind. It’s worth it. The money’s safe, beyond them, completely beyond them, beyond the bastard Norths, beyond the police, beyond the judges and the lawyers and the agents. Now you have to make sure that’s how it stays. You have to be safe, too. You have to stay hidden. Don’t break cover, don’t risk anything for me, not ever. If you love me, promise me this one thing. Promise me, please, I’m begging. There’s so much I want to say, to tell you. I know I’m a bitch, that I forced you to do this, that I screwed up your life. But . . . and shit I know this is going to sound wrong, I’d do it again, all of it. We never had time, you see, not the time I wanted, so yeah, I’d do it again because that would be some more moments we’d have together. One thing, one thing always: I love you.’

  Angela cried again. There in the Jag, naked and wet at four in the morning; alone with the drizzle pattering softly on the roof, knowing she would never see anyone she loved ever again, no matter what happened next. Cried for several minutes, until she reminded herself that loitering like this was going to screw things up even more, that she had to get going, had to face down the universe and all the crap it had dumped on her.

  So—

  Take the two clean interface sets. Dump the one you’ve just used down a drain in the car park along with the spent sac. Clothes: there’s a pashmina in the bag, wrap it round your torso so tits and ass don’t show, and that’ll have to do for now. Cash, that’s okay, there’s a coded account that one of the interface sets can link with. Car? They’ll trace the Jag fast, so, drive it round the back of a nearby warehouse, then order a complete power-down; follow that with ripping the main power cables from the buffer batteries. A little spray can squirting onto hands, and the molecules of the mimic gloves disassociate – wipe the residue away on the wet grass. Walk out onto the street, and use the interface set to call a cab. It arrives ninety seconds later.

  ‘Airport,’ she told the auto.

  *

  There was no way Angela should have got as far as she did. Anywhere apart from Abellia and she probably wouldn’t have. Chaos helped her. Chaos and severe emotional distress. The bodies were found eventually as the rest of the mansion awoke. Staff who had rooms on the fifth floor never went up to the sixth or seventh unless summoned or the daily schedule required it. It was half past seven in the morning before one of Bartram’s aides finally went upstairs and promptly threw up as he saw the congealing pool of blood that had spread out of the lounge. Security personnel started arriving minutes later. The sight that greeted them in the lounge and Bartram’s bedroom, and senior staff bedrooms on the sixth floor stopped them cold. Training just didn’t cover this.

  Angela booked her plane ticket as the taxi sped out along the Rue Turbigo towards the airport. A standard AirBrogal commercial flight scheduled to take off at eight that morning. The taxi pulled up outside the airport’s solitary terminal just after five. Angela walked straight along the concourse, loosely clad in the pashmina, carrying her small bag, looking unwaveringly ahead with complete disregard for any startled glances thrown her way. That, at least, was something she could do with perfect ease; the haughty aristocratic indifference to anyone else’s opinion. She had a right to be wherever she wanted to be, doing whatever she wanted to do. Those people who did look at her saw just one more appalling trusteenie in a town full of them, reco
vering from another wild night.

  She paused only for a few moments at a cyberserve clothes stall and a chemist’s before heading into the women’s washroom.

  Angela Tramelo never did come out of that washroom. The girl who did emerge fifty minutes later had the identity of Helin Anisio, and she had short rust-red hair, not long blonde, and she wore jeans and a black T-shirt with red sneakers.

  At Bartram’s mansion, five B 2Norths had arrived. The brothers were distraught at the carnage, the pain of loss. Everyone was looking to them to take charge. Orders were slow in coming. It didn’t help that Abellia had no real police force. Corporate security handled most problems, and their priority was contacting the surviving Norths, establishing they were alive and warning them a maniac was on the loose. By eight forty-five a proper headcount was taken at the mansion. Brinkelle arrived at nine o’clock, anguished and furious, shouting at her brothers that she was in charge. By then, security was getting its act together. She was informed that Angela Tramelo was missing, and shown poor-quality sensor recordings of a Jag tearing off into the night.

  ‘Find her!’ Brinkelle screamed.

  At ten o’clock two black helicopters landed on Velasco Beach. Security guards fanned out; it took another twelve minutes for them to locate the inert Jag. The Abellia Civic Authority officially announced Angela Tramelo was a fugitive, and alerted both the airport and the dock. Two passenger planes and five private jets had already departed that morning. Airport security reviewed images of all passengers embarking. None of them matched Angela. All further outgoing flights were cancelled. Coast guard helicopters began searching the sea for any boats that might be carrying Angela away from Abellia.

  Back at the manor, it was clear to the security officers with a police background that the murders were seriously weird, the result of a very disturbed mind. The best guess they could come up with to explain method was someone wearing a muscle-amp suit with powered blade fingers. That meant it was pre-planned. Given the only vehicle leaving the mansion that night was the Jag carrying Angela, the suit had to be close by. A thorough search of the grounds began.

  Midday saw the Jag delivered to the Institute, the nearest laboratory the Norths had that could run any kind of forensic analysis. Genetic samples were taken from all the blood caked onto the blanket and driver’s seat. By one o’clock it was confirmed Angela had been in the Jag.

  Security, with Brinkelle goading them on, turned to how a muscle-amp suit could get past the mansion’s security perimeter – in and out. Gironella Beach’s protection protocols were focused on preventing anything or anyone dangerous from breaching the perimeter. The sensors had seen nothing coming in or out, including the comprehensive scanner system spread across the seabed beyond the sands. The only anomaly was the Jag speeding out, and it wasn’t queried by the AI running security because it was being driven by . . .

  ‘Not possible,’ an astonished Barclay said to an audience of Brinkelle and three other 2Norths. ‘I was sleeping on the sixth floor. I was fucking lucky I wasn’t a victim, too.’ Then he broke down and started crying.

  ‘How did she get your biometrics?’ Benjamin asked; as the eldest 2North he was the calmest head in the mansion that whole frantic day. ‘You can only grab the readings from sustained physical contact.’

  It came out then, in gulps and stammers and self-recrimination. The affair which had started just a few weeks after Angela had arrived at the mansion as Bartram’s new sports girlfriend.

  ‘She used you,’ Brinkelle snapped. ‘You went behind Father’s back, and she used your weakness.’

  ‘Like I’m the only one who’s ever done that,’ he shouted back.

  ‘You brought a psychopath into our home!’ Brinkelle yelled relentlessly, never giving up her fury and contempt.

  ‘I didn’t bring her here. And she’s not a psycho. She couldn’t be. I know her, what she’s like,’ Barclay insisted. ‘She couldn’t have done this. Could she? I didn’t know she was grabbing my bio-metric. Why would she do that?’

  ‘If she didn’t do this, and right now I do find that hard to believe,’ Benjamin said, ‘she was certainly an accomplice.’

  ‘Oh dear God.’ Barclay dropped his head into his hands and whimpered. That moment, his brothers decided later, was the start of the monumental breakdown. It was also the last time any of them ever saw him. He ran out of the room back to his guest suite on the sixth floor, and stayed there for two days, refusing to open the door or talk to anyone. The next they knew he’d taken a Jag in the middle of the night, and driven off into town. Three months later, he appeared again in the Independencies, calling himself Zebediah and denouncing his entire family.

  Angela’s flight landed at Highcastle airport at five o’clock. For the last three hours she’d been sweating and shivering in her seat, wrapping herself in a quilt. The fever was caused by fragments of the dark weapons infecting her blood as they broke up. As she’d been warned, it made her feel like crap, but she managed to walk unaided out of the plane.

  She couldn’t quite believe there wasn’t a whole regiment of armed and armoured security hardcases waiting for her to disembark. But there wasn’t.

  An outbreak of good fortune was the last thing she was going to question; so she took a taxi from the front of the terminal, and headed off down Motorway A. It was a straight, clean drive. She only stopped the car once, when it arrived at the junction with Motorway B.

  She stared along the ribbon of tarmac stretching away to the south-east. The Independencies would mean staying on St Libra for the rest of her life, and that was destined to be a real long time given her expensive pre-birth genetic workover. None of the micro state governments would ever hand her over to the Norths, even if they did know she’d taken up citizenship inside their border. And with most of them there was no requirement to prove and register your identity. But that would be it, she’d remain on St Libra, living a backwoods existence. Today, she might manage to get through the gateway and back on to Earth. Even if they didn’t want to question her already, by tomorrow the Norths would definitely want her in their custody. The gateway border officers would be watching out for her.

  As soon as the plane came in range of Highcastle’s transnet, Angela had been accessing the news. The slaughter at the mansion was the only story. So far her name hadn’t been mentioned. Either they didn’t want to warn her she was being hunted, or they hadn’t even realized she was missing yet. And if they were hunting her, she would have been arrested as soon as she stepped off the plane – unless her crude identity switch had fooled them. If it had, it wouldn’t for ever.

  Motorway A it was then.

  Ten minutes later she was in the gateway transit terminal. Helin Anisio’s i-e certified her identity as a Libyan-Italian citizen; the scanner she put her hand on confirmed the biometric matched Ms Anisio’s GE citizen file, and she told the bored agency staff she was coming back from a two-week holiday in Abellia. When they asked if she was okay, she assured them her shivers were from the cold she’d come down with after getting caught in a downpour the previous night.

  Angela walked through the gateway. That put her in the GE Border Directorate reception hall. The only thing Helin Anisio didn’t have (as she didn’t actually exist) was a GE visa chip. That was the one item it had proved impossible to get hold of to bolster the legend’s identity. Angela didn’t care, she was on the right planet now, she just had to swap identities back again. She put her Angela Tramelo visa chip in the slot – and all hell broke loose.

  *

  ‘Why did you run?’ It was the question repeated endlessly over the next three months. More than once Angela woke up shouting the phrase: ‘If you’re innocent, why did you run?’

  ‘Because I was scared’ just didn’t cut it. And of course she couldn’t really tell them why she ran, why she was really there in the mansion. The whole ‘alien monster’ claim was simply laughed at as a pathetic, transparent defence counsel lie.

  For three months the GE Jus
tice Directorate was subject to formal requests, even mild threats, that Angela Tramelo be extradited to Abellia to stand trial. But Abellia’s national status wasn’t legally defined. Technically the GE had no treaties with it. And then there was the GE’s core constitutional issue: the right to life. No prisoner or suspect could be handed over to a state which had the death penalty.

  Abellia’s legal team argued the city state didn’t have the death penalty. The GE Directorate counter argued the Norths’ fiefdom domain didn’t have a legal precedent against the death penalty.

  It was the only argument that went Angela’s way. She was tried in London’s Old Bailey. She had a good defence counsel paid for by the state – who desperately wanted to be seen as impartial. The prosecution had seven senior barristers, six of whom were paid for by Northumberland Interstellar.

  Contrary to everyone else’s expectations, Angela grew progressively more angry and resolute during her incarceration awaiting trial. This was usually the period when the guilty broke down and confessed. Not her. Shock, fear, loneliness, and uncertainty weren’t the best psychological traits to share a solitary cell with for so long, and she was becoming more and more incensed that no one would listen, no one would believe that she’d seen a monster. Even her defence lawyer advised her not to make it part of her alibi. But that was the anger which fuelled her, so naturally she shouted it loud and defiantly, which the prosecution delightedly used to make her seem even more unstable – the kind of deranged personality that fitted the psychological profile of a serial killer.

  The jury agreed, and the question of where she’d spend the rest of her life was resolved.

  Thursday 7th March 2143

  The monsoon had started an hour before dawn, blotting out the ringlight, drumming hard on the tents so no one could sleep, turning the moist ground to a quagmire. It was still going strong at eleven o’clock local time. The closest e-Ray to Wukang, orbiting six hundred kilometres away, revealed a vast swarm of clouds pushing slowly southwards, inland from the polar sea. Huddled inside their Qwik-Kabin on the edge of the forward camp, the AAV flight team studied the radar images and estimated the storm would clear by mid-afternoon.