Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘And take months, if not years,’ the General said. ‘Yes, point taken. Even if they do capture an alien, it will have to be flown out. So Sarvar and Edzell need to retain their skeleton crews to facilitate that.’

  ‘Our people are going to be fairly isolated anyway while the storms last. They can handle that. I’d be inclined to wait for the Newcastle result before we attempt to drop a Daedalus through a gateway into Wukang’s airspace. The reports I’ve had from the other forward base xenobiology teams out there are confidently saying no animals have evolved on St Libra. There is no genetic variance.’

  ‘Smart plants?’

  ‘Anything is possible, of course. But all the geneticists are saying the plants have a sophistication that would have taken a long time to evolve naturally, certainly longer than Sirius has been in existence. It looks like the planet was definitely bioformed a couple of million years ago.’

  ‘Then we’re looking at the aliens who created the biosphere.’

  ‘And given what we’ve done to the place since we arrived, they’d be justified in being very angry with us.’

  ‘Then why don’t they just come out and say so?’

  Vermekia shrugged. ‘The big question.’

  ‘No.’ Shaikh jabbed a finger at the mottled photosphere. ‘That’s the question. Did they do that? An alien species which can switch off a star is possibly more frightening than the Zanth. We’re wasting time scrabbling round in jungles and chasing gang lords in Newcastle. It’s pitiful. What we should be doing is establishing gateways to a dozen unexplored star systems to see if we can find this species, damn the cost of it.’

  ‘Elston knows there’s something out there threatening Wukang. If anyone can catch it, he will.’

  ‘And our contact with him is reliant on some e-Rays being beaten up by storms. That’s unacceptable. Order the camps at Edzell and Sarvar to deploy their reserve e-Rays – I want the link firmed up. And I think Elston should be given the full activation codes as a precaution.’

  ‘I’ll get them sent to him.’

  ‘Good. But make sure he understands it’s a last resort. Only to be used if aliens are based on St Libra and pose a clear and verifiable threat to the human race.’

  ‘He knows why this particular weapon was created, and the circumstances for deploying it. You can rely on him.’

  *

  Sid wasn’t worried he’d screw up using the applicator tube. He was also confident he could get into the locker where Boz had left his clothes while he went for his regular evening work-out on the gym’s machines. It was being in a gym in the first place that was the whole flaw in the plan. Any gym member or regular who looked at him would instantly know he didn’t belong, that he was an interloper. Patrons of Regency Fitness would wonder what he was doing. Query why he was opening a locker – slobs like him didn’t need to change clothes because they didn’t do sessions. They’d raise a fuss, maybe call security or even the police. It would all go catastrophically wrong because like every middle-aged man with a real job he didn’t watch his diet like he should, or exercise properly. That lapse was going to come back and bite him hard.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ian asked over the secure link.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘There’s no one in the locker room. I’m monitoring the whole gym.’

  ‘I know.’ Sid was cursing the whole arrangement and the paranoia it had kicked off inside him. Gyms were Ian’s natural habitat. He should be in here while Sid stayed back in the flat and provided electronic coverage. But no – Sid wanted to show that he was prepared to take as much risk as anyone. So he went first.

  Regency Fitness was a gym and fitness lifestyle business buried in the heart of the Fortin singletown. The men’s locker room was large and brightly lit, with wood-fronted lockers and a pigeonhole wall full of fluffy fresh towels for the marble-tiled shower room. He’d been inside for thirty seconds now, and Ian was right, he was the only person in there. Seven men were currently registered with the gym’s network as using the facilities. So seven of the fifty lockers would be in use.

  Sid hurried along the row, and found the first closed door. The lockers had simple coded lock pads. He told his e-i to quest the pad with the subber patch he’d copied from a bytehead’s cache a couple of years ago when they arrested her. It popped open. He looked at the clothes piled up inside.

  ‘Not his,’ Ian said; who was riding the image from Sid’s iris smartcells.

  Sid closed the locker and went on to the next one. The fourth one he opened belonged to Boz, those outsize clothes were instantly recognizable. He pulled the applicator tube from his pocket; the size of a matchstick made of buffed stainless steel. When he touched it to the heel of Boz’s shoe, his e-i triggered the launch system. A smartmicrobe was released, its sticky molecule surface adhering to the dark rubbery polymer of the heel. It would sit there passively recording the emissions from Boz’s links, ready to download on command. Small enough and new enough with its quantum junction structure to be impervious to ordinary detection systems, even those of Beijing’s dark tech barons should prove ineffective against it, Ralph had said.

  Sid closed the locker door, and left the macrobuilding.

  Wednesday 27th March 2143

  It was two o’clock in the morning, and this was absolutely the last application of the night. Ian was tired after an evening of chasing the streets for the known cars of all Sherman’s crew. A casual brush past, and quick tap with an applicator tube without breaking stride. Changing identity masks and wriggling in and out of clothes in the privacy of his own car, so none of Sherman’s visual analysis routines could watch through security meshes and identify a pattern as he and Sid and Eva collided with the target vehicles.

  As far as they could tell, no alert had gone out. So at half past eleven, Ian had cracked an empty flat in the same Heaton tower block where Marcus Sherman rented on the nineteenth floor. He’d worn an identity mask modelled on the absent owner’s face, keeping the building security net mollified. Now he was lying on his belly in the cloakroom, studying his grid to monitor the progress the specialist drill in front of him was making as it slowly bored through the wall. The little machine made no sound as it slowly spun the half-millimetre diameter bit through the cavity between the two flats, creeping forward with achingly slow precision. Developed specifically for hostage tactical teams, it could cut through almost any kind of wall material without giving itself away. With a millimetre to go through the final plaster panel, Ian ordered it to stop. His e-i accessed a monitor program he’d infiltrated into the tower’s network, and he tightened his grip on a nine-millimetre Tunce pistol he’d liberated from the Market Street evidence vault.

  Ian had waited until Sherman was back in the flat before beginning. It was their optimum time, he and Sid reasoned. With Sherman in residence the flat’s perimeter security would be operating on reduced sensitivity, watching for human-sized trouble; a lone assassin, or a hit team, or a snatch squad. There were a couple of hardmen in the flat on the other side of the hall, ready to respond in seconds should anything hostile begin a stealthy approach to their master’s lair.

  After Sherman arrived home at one o’clock, the delectable Valentina had been delivered to him, wafting in on the scent of Parisian perfume and trailing gossamer ribbons from the arms and hem of her diaphanous black jacket. Ian had given them forty minutes to relax, maybe tox up and move into the bedroom, then he started the drill.

  He ordered it to recommence. Ninety seconds later the diamond-edged tip gently penetrated the plaster. Diminutive holes around the bit’s point sucked up any dust, pulling them back so not even the tiniest evidence of the puncture was left scattered on the carpet of the master bedroom’s built-in wardrobe. With the hole complete the drill bit withdrew.

  Ian held his breath. There was nothing, no alert flashing through the tower’s network, no goons bursting out of their flat with firearms waving round. Air escaped slowly through his squeezed-up lips as he felt the tension in
his spine throttling back. He slipped the pistol’s safety back on and let go of the grip.

  Normally, this was the point where the hostage team would send a cloud of smartdust puffing through, try and gain valuable data on the local environment, position of bad guys and victims. Not tonight. Ian held up the small, clear plastic case and looked at the tiny ant-shape inside. It was one of the toys Ralph had supplied. Ian still wasn’t sure why the spook had cooperated, but knowing they had some kind of approval from on high had given their off-log observation a legitimacy that was comforting. Not that the spook wouldn’t dump them the second anything went wrong, he acknowledged stoically.

  The tiny cybernetic ant crawled through the drill hole, unspooling a gossamer fibre as it went. It was a simple remote control, eliminating the need for any link emissions that might be detected. A weird monochrome fish-eye view expanded into Ian’s grid. Carpet strands loomed around him like a thick stumpy jungle. He directed the ant towards the first pair of shoes.

  There were eight pairs in all, from traditional black handmade leather evening shoes, to tough ankle boots, to some worn trainers. The ant took eleven minutes to get to them all and stick a smartmicrobe bug to the heel of each one. Ian eventually walked it back to the hole, spooling up the gossamer fibre as it went. When it was back in the case, a different probe was sent into the hole. Original plaster fragments were mixed with a clear epoxy, and extruded, filling the hole so no suggestion of the breach remained. When Marcus Sherman opened the wardrobe tomorrow morning everything would be as before. Ian could only hope he’d put the shoes he’d worn that night into the wardrobe, rather than fling them across the room as he and Valentina tore his clothes off. Somehow, he couldn’t envisage Sherman doing anything that spontaneous. From what he’d seen over the last few weeks, the man’s control freakery extended to every facet of his life.

  *

  Angela woke to find the silvery thermal blanket had slipped off the tropical sleeping bag some time during the night. Her feet were cold, and her nose was sniffly from the chilly air. Ringlight and the borealis phantasms shivered around the inside of the mess tent where the cots had been set up, generating a perpetual unstable twilight. It seemed as though half of the camp’s personnel were snoring, or coughing, or squirming round. Nobody was at ease.

  Without her grid clock telling her it was only 5 am she wouldn’t have known what the time was. She sat up to pull the foil blanket back, and saw Paresh on the cot next to her. He’d been out on patrol until a couple of hours ago, and he was due out again in another three. That was all he and the Legionnaires did these days, tramp round and round Wukang with their helmet sensors straining through the rain and mist and weird light and electrical storms.

  She gave him a wistful look. His strong young face was ageing by the day, with dark bruise skin round the eyes, stubble, a tautness pulling at the flesh beneath his chin. And dirt. All of them were filthy now; jungle soil lodging in their pores, encrusting nails, matting hair. No one took time in the showers. Alone, naked, unseen. Too much of a risk with the monster creeping round.

  Paresh twitched and let out a slight moan. Somehow he’d twisted the one-tog sleeping bag around himself. Angela went over to him and slowly unzipped his bag, careful not to wake him. Then she snuggled into the little gap on the cot, draping her own open bag over the two of them like a narrow quilt, and tucked the foil blanket on top of that. Paresh shuddered again. She stroked her silly, troubled puppy boy as she would any child with night terrors and he nuzzled up to her. His breathing calmed and he fell into a deeper sleep. Satisfied, she put her arms protectively round him. That was when she saw Madeleine on the other side of the mess tent, who was wide awake and watching her. They looked at each other for a long moment as Angela gave the girl a lopsided grin. Madeleine eventually gave an identical grin and rested her head back down, closing her eyes.

  Angela stayed perfectly still, blood pounding round her body as the wonder alone warmed her. She knows. That smile, she’s telling me she knows. Some part of her wanted to jump out of the cot and run over to the girl. The temptation was instinctive and almost overwhelming. But if she did that, then the last twenty years would have been for nothing. Elston, just a few cots away, would know, would work out what had happened because he was a tenacious little shit. With that information, he might even go on to figure out that her body with its genetically improved organs had dealt with the drugs they’d pumped into her faster and more efficiently than they had known. That she’d never completely lost control as they believed. Not that she’d lied, but she’d held back from volunteering as many truths as others undoubtedly had in that diabolical room. Shielding the one truth that gave her the will to live, to fight, to retain her sanity.

  Amid the flickering light of the besieged atmosphere she tightened her arms around the puppy boy and forced herself to calm. Surprisingly, the contentment sent her back off to sleep soon after.

  *

  Breakfast preparations woke her an hour later. Paresh was now thoroughly entangled round her. Legionnaires around them were sitting up and grinning knowingly at her. She shrugged back at them, and nudged him awake.

  Madeleine and the other general staff had been up a while. Breakfast was already under way as Angela and Paresh shambled over to the counter. Dawn’s pink light was shining through the mess tent windows, exposing the sorry sight of another morning. The cots had all been crammed at one end of the mess tent, with the tables at the other, and the counters in the middle. Overhead, the roof sheet was patched and webbed, reinforcing it against any further hailstone deluges.

  Good hindsight, Angela thought. She collected a big mug of tea, and picked up a package of bacon and scrambled egg on toast, adding a smaller package of grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. She and Paresh sat together, him rubbing sleep from his eyes while she opened the package seals and piled food on her plate.

  ‘You always eat like this,’ he said.

  ‘Most important meal of the day,’ she told him. ‘Didn’t your mom tell you?’

  ‘Most girls I know are concerned about their weight. It never seems to bother you.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  He grinned and sipped some of his coffee. ‘Sure.’

  ‘I have a fast metabolism. I just need to exercise and the calories burn off quick.’ Angela gave the mess tent door a dejected glance. ‘Not that I’m getting any exercise at all right now.’

  ‘Angela?’

  ‘This doesn’t sound good. Sure you want to ask?’

  The puppy boy almost backed down, but the question was clearly chewing him up inside. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You knew there’s an alien here, right? So you knew we’d find it eventually.’

  ‘I’d say it found us, actually.’

  ‘Whatever. It’s here. It’s real. There was no need for you to accept Elston’s offer to come back here. You could have waited a few months. Then when the expedition gets back you would have been exonerated. You knew that. You could have got a lawyer, or something.’

  Angela pushed the bacon round with her fork: she was watching Madeleine behind the counter as the girl smiled bravely and handed out packages and found extra sachets of ketchup and added milk to tea and poured coffee and fended off the flirts. The girl’s personnel file didn’t have much detail, just the basics: where she was born, parents, school, address, credit rating, a couple of references from past employers. One of millions of GE twenty-year-olds going nowhere. Except of course she wasn’t.

  ‘So why?’ Paresh persisted.

  ‘Huh? Oh. Have you ever been to jail, Paresh?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head emphatically.

  ‘Then you’ve no idea what it’s like. I was there for twenty years, Paresh. Locked up like a beast for seven thousand three hundred days. And that was for something I didn’t do.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, I could have sat it out for another six months. But why the fuck shoul
d I? I’ve spent twenty years knowing the truth, that I’m innocent. Twenty years of being called a liar. Twenty years of being some piece of sub-human filth without rights, without a voice. Twenty years of abuse for something I didn’t do. Twenty years because the government and the Norths are corrupt. Twenty fucking years I was locked up. And the alien put me there. That monster did this to me. It took everything away from me. Everything. All I’d known. All that I loved. Every night when I was sealed away in that tomb they called a cell, all I truly possessed was the knowledge that it was real. That it was out here laughing at me. That’s what kept me sane, even though it’s a very shaky kind of sane. So, yeah, I came on the expedition that’s hunting it down. Because I’m going to find it, Paresh, with or without anyone else’s help. And when I do, it will pay for what it’s done to me. And, Paresh, don’t you stand in my way when that happens, because nothing in this universe will be able to protect you if you do.’ With that she got up and strode out of the mess tent.

  Outside, the air was cool. Clean, too, empty of spores, which she relished, taking down deep breaths to try and calm herself. It had rained overnight, of course, leaving the plants and the ground glistening. But the shine was sullied; leaves on the bushes and vines were brown round the extremities now, frostbitten by hailstones. Over in the distance she saw Atyeo and Gillian in their armour, walking along the row of ruined tents. Gillian raised an arm in greeting.

  Footsteps squelched in the mud behind her. For one blissful second she thought it might be Madeleine. But no, they were too heavy for that.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She turned to look at Elston’s concerned expression. His protective armour vest emphasized how broad-shouldered he was. For most people his presence would have been intimidating.

  ‘Do you care?’ she asked.

  ‘That was some speech back there. I didn’t hear all of it, but enough to worry me.’