Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Will they catch the download?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Hopefully not, but that’s part of the risk.’

  ‘O’Rouke will crap on us from on high if he finds out what we’ve done, going behind his back and all,’ Ian said.

  ‘Screw him,’ Sid said. ‘We’ve got the HDA behind us if we get a result. Besides, O’Rouke is on his way out.’

  ‘Really?’ Eva asked. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Ralph turned him down flat when he asked if Ernie and the others could just be shipped out to a penal colony; said they’re here to defend all humans, not act like his private Gestapo.’

  ‘So?’ Ian asked.

  ‘So I had to send our files to legal. The lawyers O’Rouke retained say we’ve certainly got a case against the five suspects, but there’s a problem using evidence supplied by the HDA.’

  ‘It’s a government agency operating inside its remit,’ Eva said. ‘Even if we don’t like its methods.’

  ‘Yes, but to prove it was a legitimate involvement, we’ll have to explain to the court how our first suspect was an alien monster. Market Street is going to look ridiculous. Worse, it could be played that we’re protecting the Norths.’

  ‘That’s bollocks, man.’

  ‘Aye, but it’s going to be said. The unlicensed sites are going to have a field day, not to mention conspiracy theorists. The whole Bartram North case will get reopened. It’ll be a high-order crapfest.’

  ‘How long before the files go up to the Prosecution Bureau?’ Eva asked.

  Sid grinned. ‘With O’Rouke calling in markers, Legal can delay it for a week or so. Statutory limit for internal review is nine days.’

  ‘You’re evil,’ she laughed. ‘The same time we pull in all Sherman’s calls.’

  ‘Aye, if there’s anything there we might just be able to throw O’Rouke a lifeline. How grateful do you think he’d be?’

  ‘Sod gratitude,’ Ian said. ‘How much will he pay for it? Crap on it man, you could be the next Commissioner.’

  ‘I’m just back off suspension.’

  ‘Aye, but we’d really get those promotions. Probably a couple of grades.’

  Sid downed the rest of his Brennivin in one. Pulled a face. ‘Let’s see what Sherman’s up to before we make any plans.’

  *

  After the other two had left, Ian sat on the bed and put on his netlens glasses. The case’s secure network was still open, Sid had made sure of that. On a technicality, they didn’t have to close it down completely before Legal sent the files up to Prosecution. Until then it was still registered as open. He used Vance Elston’s authorization codes to worm back into the station network, and begin harvesting.

  Tallulah Packer was twenty-five years old, though her face was so sweet she could pass for a good three years younger. She was living a little too high, like every other executive in Newcastle. Her bank accounts showed she earned a good salary – more than him – but each month she spent more than she earned. Clothes, shoes, evenings out, trips, rent on the St James apartment; her main account had run up quite a deficit, which the bank didn’t complain about because of the magic Northumberland Interstellar account code on the monthly income payments – and the interest it charged her.

  There were no medical bills, he saw delightedly – that amazing figure and beauty was all one hundred per cent natural. She did have membership at Finely Toned, a spa in the St James single-town, but that was all.

  His e-i slotted a priority news icon into his grid, which he reluctantly opened. Tallulah was far more interesting than anything else in the world.

  Eighteen major GE news sites were covering Commissioner Charmonique Passam returning through the Newcastle gateway. Unlicensed sites factored in their information, that she’d flown back from Abellia on a private HyperLear and that every one of her staff had been left behind. Reports of snow from Abellia were confirmed with video shots of white flakes drifting to ground, kissing the lush tropical plants and turning to slush on the roads.

  ‘Aye, you complete cow,’ Ian murmured as Passam stood up at a podium which had the GE Alien Bureau seal on the front. Her smile was as brittle as antique porcelain. ‘I’m happy to announce that the St Libra geogenetic expedition has been a complete success. Through the diligent, dedicated work of the forward camp science teams we have confirmed that there is no genetic variance on St Libra. No insects or animals ever evolved there. It is what we always thought, a world of beautiful and dynamic zebra botany. And I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the expedition for helping to make it the tremendous feat of accomplishment that we can all be proud of.’

  Even the licensed reporters weren’t going to let her get away with that. What about the sunspots, they demanded, what about the weather, the snow – what about the people you abandoned in the jungle?

  Passam’s formidable smile never faltered. ‘The sunspot outbreak was a simply astonishing coincidence. A natural phenomenon of the star which has only just revealed itself to us, but one that has historical validity. And my colleagues at the forward camps have not been abandoned, as you disgracefully put it. The forward camps have adequate supplies and emergency rations to continue operations for months without resupply. The personnel will of course be airlifted out as soon as there is a break in the weather. As you know, criminal elements on St Libra severely restricted our Daedalus flights, killing the flight crew in an atrocious act of terrorism unprecedented in modern times. If any hardship falls upon the forward bases, these fanatics must take sole responsibility. Thank you.’ Passam walked away from the podium, to be shielded from any further questions by a herd of assistants and press officers.

  ‘Arseholing bitch,’ Ian concluded. He put a block on transnet news, and returned to his harvesting.

  Boris Attenson was actually thirty-four according to government records, not the thirty-one his public profile claimed. A significant monthly payment went to a private and discreet clinic for follicle regeneration. Ian grinned at that. His expenses were also interesting. Plenty of money spent late at night in the restaurants and clubs of London, Brussels, Berlin, and Paris – signed off by his bosses as legitimate client entertainment costs.

  The next part was tougher, cross-indexing bodymesh emissions with local cell records, with e-i coding. It took an hour, but Ian was in his element. By the end he had Boris’s secondary accounts in a Venezuelan bank. The amount of money was impressive. Every month Boris spent the equivalent of Ian’s salary on vices and luxuries for himself. Ian wasn’t envious about the money; there were always rich pricks like Boris pissing their life away, and always would be, that was simply how the universe worked. What was intolerable was him taking Tallulah down that route with him. Tallulah who would be so much better off in Ian’s arms. In his bed.

  Ian checked through the payments, and linked them with Boris’s location. Experience again gave him an edge, knowing the signs that no AI could correlate. It was eight days ago, the week before Tallulah was questioned; Boris was staying in a London hotel on the South Bank, and there was one last late-night purchase. Ian immediately pulled the hotel security files, knowing what he was going to find even before it materialized in the netglasses. As he expected, there was Boris climbing out of a taxi at quarter to one in the morning. And there was the girl who wasn’t Tallulah, smartly dressed, young and pretty, with the neutral-face boredom of everybody whose self-esteem was nonexistent, waiting for this interminable night to be over, the same as every other night, waiting for the john to spend himself, bracing herself to listen to the I-love-my-girlfriend speech afterwards, delivered with guilt and shame, the hunger for sympathy and understanding. She’d give Boris that, he’d paid a lot for it.

  Ian froze the image of Boris disappearing into his hotel room, toxed up, almost indifferent to the hooker. The end of another day in the wonderful world of high finance, closing the deal, screwing your rivals.

  ‘Not any more, pal,’ Ian told the image.

  Tuesday 2nd April 2143
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br />   It was the screams which brought everyone running as fast as their armour and multi-layered clothing would let them, not the bodymesh’s medical alert. Screams of panic and pain always cut clean to the centre of a human brain, demanding attention and response. This was no exception, its siren call amplified by the nervy atmosphere that gripped Wukang, the fear the monster was among them once again.

  At the time, Angela was helping carry a load of food packets from one of the 350DL pallets over to the mess tent. She and Roarke Kulwinder from the xenobiology team had spent quite a lot of the last three days bringing food in out of the snow. He was a cheery man in his late thirties, who was always linking to send her pictures of his wife and two small children; they were about his only topic of conversation. Once again he was telling her about the woodland den he’d built for the kids last summer when the screams began, hysterical, rising and falling as the victim desperately sucked down breath. Angela got a fix on the origin, which was immediately backed up by her e-i; a medical alert was coming from Luther Katzen’s bodymesh, about seventy metres away on the other side of the mess tent. She and Roarke stared at each other for a moment, then they both dropped the packages and started running as best they could in their bulging clothes.

  It had snowed every day at Wukang since the first flakes appeared last Wednesday. The ground temperature was too high for snow to settle, though, and the flakes had turned to slush. Shallow streams of icy water had meandered across Wukang, soaking the detritus embedded in the mud following the hailstone tumult. There were tide rings of rubbish twirling sluggishly round the vehicles and domes and engineering shacks as the filthy water shunted lighter items about. Inventory became close to impossible. Angela and Forster faced a constant struggle to find items for the microfacture team.

  Thursday was spent struggling to assemble the final pair of accommodation domes as snow swarmed through the camp. With six in total, the forty-eight remaining members of camp Wukang were crammed in eight to a dome. Cots salvaged from the tents were squashed up tight, leaving very little free floor-space. Hooks and bands were fixed to the highest hexagonal panels, and kitbags hung up like massive, dowdy larval sacks. With light coming from lanterns wired up to the salvaged tent pv sheets and boosted by cables from the camp’s main fuel cells, the interior of each one was as gloomy as it was foetid. There was some warmth in there at night with so many bodies sharing such a confined volume, but that just simmered the smell of unwashed skin.

  Once the domes were complete, the microfacture team set about producing thicker, warmer clothes for the camp personnel. Long parkas were the preference, big enough to be worn outside the armour vests; most people matched them up with quilted, waterproof trousers. Hats were also ejected from 3D printers, along with scarves and gloves. They weren’t the best cold weather clothing ever made, but they did give people a degree of protection from the bewildering winter.

  By Saturday the relentless fall of snow and constantly dropping air temperature had finally sucked the last residual heat from the soil and plants; ground temperature fell below zero. The snow no longer melted; instead it started to build up. Puddles and rivulets that had formed their own flat marshy tributary network across Wukang solidified to precarious slicks of ice. Leaves on the smaller ferns and vines turned to mush as their cells froze to death, and they began to fall amid the flakes, adding a dangerously slippery layer of organic slime to the snow. Since Sunday, over half a metre of snow had descended on Wukang. It had to be scraped regularly from the mess tent roof and the engineering shacks, lest the weight rip the straining sheets open. Paths were tramped down. Vehicles were started daily and driven around so they didn’t get snowed in. The kind of snow dumped on them varied; most nights it came as sand-like granules, getting everywhere, by day it was big sticky flakes that adhered to every part of the jungle’s trees and bushes, turning them into an alpine frost-forest. That same clingy snow smothered the surface of the camp’s equipment, buildings, and vehicles alike, cloaking the smartdust meshes with equal severity, so their reception was blocked across most spectra including visible light which powered them, eliminating their sensor function, wrecking links, degrading the camp’s net further.

  Paths had been tramped down, but compacted snow was slippery, especially when it was mixed with the organic mucus of disintegrating leaves. Angela had to be careful as she closed in on Luther. There’d been enough falls over the last few days, people winding up in the camp’s clinic with gashed hands and badly bruised legs. She rounded the side of the mess tent, and saw over a dozen people running across the rumpled white landscape. Her grid tagged Paresh, Sergeant Raddon, and Omar among them, holding their Heckler carbines high, shouting at everyone else to stay back.

  Everyone was converging on a Land Rover Tropic which was skewed across the churned-up sludge track outside the administration Qwik-Kabin, its headlight beams illuminating the moderate fall of snow with clear white light. The driver’s door was open. A figure she recognized as Olrg Dorchev from the camp systems team was scurrying towards the back of the Tropic, stomping his way through a high mound of unblemished snow. Luther Katzen was lying there, still screaming, clutching at his leg as he rocked back and forth.

  Then people closed in round him, Paresh and Omar waving frantically at them to slow down and back off. By the time Angela arrived, Luther had quietened down; now he was groaning in pain. She could see blood staining his dark-green trousers, splattering onto the snow. The blood showing as near-black in the pacified pink light of Sirius. The leg didn’t look right at all. Something about the angle, the way the knee and foot were twisted.

  ‘I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry,’ Olrg was moaning. ‘You just came out at me.’

  Angela winced at that, looking back at the Tropic. Luther must have slipped on the ice. Judging from the angle of the vehicle, Olrg had tried to turn away – too late. Bound to happen in these conditions, if people—

  Then she smelt it. Mint. The air was cold, her nose had chilled down, but she still knew that smell. Her eyes watered up. ‘Shit, oh shit.’

  Mark Chitty and Doc Coniff had arrived, lugging their field kit. They knelt beside Luther, pushing Olrg out of the way. A circle had formed round them, people looking on grimly, thanking their deity it wasn’t them lying there in the blood and vomit, willing the medics on to work a standard twenty-second-century first aid miracle.

  Angela’s e-i quested a link to Paresh. ‘Stay alert,’ she told him. ‘This wasn’t an accident.’

  A frown creased up his face. ‘What?’

  ‘Keep a look out,’ she insisted, pushing her way through the passive onlookers. ‘Don’t let your guard down.’ She got annoyed looks, irate looks. Ignored them all as she barged up to Elston. ‘Breathe in,’ she told him.

  His concerned expression turned to ire. ‘What?’

  ‘Breathe in through your nose, right now! Tell me what you smell.’

  Further admonishment died as he realized what she was saying. He stood very still and drew down a long breath, sniffing. She saw the moment he smelt it, saw the shock appear on his face. ‘Nobody move,’ he ordered. ‘Legionnaires, assume a guard position around us. Scan the camp, please. This is a combat lockdown situation. Everybody not at the accident remain where you are, link your position to Lieutenant Botin immediately.’

  Luther’s whimpering was the only sound as the Legionnaires on patrol moved in, circling the group. More armour-suited figures moved in the distance, heading for the mess tent and the shacks; weapons active, small ruby laser fans sweeping through the silent snowfall.

  ‘Sample it,’ Angela said. ‘Fast.’ Already the scent was fading, scattered by soft drifting snowflakes and icy gusts.

  Elston nodded, and opened a microlink to Marvin. A minute later the door on mobile biolab-1 unlocked and slid back. Marvin hurried over. When he arrived he went into a huddle with Elston, and the two of them walked over to the patch of snow where the Tropic struck Luther. Marvin started waving a long plastic sampling wand roun
d. Elston was studying the ground.

  ‘I want everyone back into the mess tent,’ Lieutenant Botin announced. ‘Corporal, you and Leora will accompany the medic team back to the clinic.’

  Angela started walking back to Elston.

  ‘That includes you, Tramelo,’ Botin said sharply.

  ‘You need me out here,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ Elston said reluctantly. ‘But you do as you’re told.’

  ‘Sure. But hurry, it can’t be far away.’

  Elston bent down to talk to Luther. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Easy on him,’ Dr Coniff said sharply.

  ‘That can wait,’ Elston snapped back. ‘Luther, what happened? Concentrate. Did you slip?’

  Luther’s face was shining with perspiration. Through the pain he tried to focus, to remember. ‘I . . . I don’t know. I thought there was someone there. Perhaps. Oh shit it hurts.’

  ‘Did they push you?’

  Mark Chitty cut away the last of the trousers, revealing mangled flesh and exposed bone of the shattered hip. Luther howled as a couple of instruments were applied.

  ‘Try and stay still,’ the doc urged. ‘I know it hurts, but we’ve got to sheathe it now to get you back to the clinic.’

  ‘How bad?’ Luther grunted between clenched teeth.

  ‘Don’t worry, I can set the bone and realign the muscle tissue. Now keep quiet.’ At that she glared at Elston.

  ‘Olrg?’ Elston demanded. ‘Did you see anyone with him? Any thing?’

  ‘I didn’t even see him, not really, not until he stumbled in front of the Tropic. He was on the side of the track. I braked, but the wheels didn’t grip properly. I wasn’t going fast, really, Colonel. I wasn’t.’

  ‘I know, but think, you must have noticed Luther, even if you weren’t concentrating on him directly. Was he alone?’

  ‘Oh dear God . . .’ Olrg was looking down at Luther, frantic at the suffering he’d caused. ‘Maybe. I thought – there might have been someone beside him. It was snowing. I was focused on the track.’