Raddon had struggled out of his parka and gloves, but kept a small dark-grey woollen hat on. They all watched the Tropic carrying Lieutenant Botin, Dean Creshaun, Fuller Owusu, and Chris Fiadeiro roll past the windscreen, its sledge slithering along behind.
‘Here we go,’ Raddon said, and engaged the axle motors. The Tropic nudged forward. Angela accessed the mesh smeared across the rear of the vehicle, watching in her grid as the tow cable stretched and finally tugged the sledge along. Then Raddon was shifting up the torque differential, and the big tyres seemed to be gripping the snow. Certainly the wheels weren’t spinning.
Angela exchanged a nervous glance with Madeleine, then smiled as they gradually picked up speed. For once she actually felt mildly optimistic. The modified vehicles worked, her colleagues were tired but they were smart and determined, they had enough fuel, probably enough food. Sarvar was achievable. After that, well . . . she wasn’t heading back to Holloway, that was for sure.
Tuesday 23rd April 2143
The buildings remaining amid the piles of rubble in the West Chirton GSW area were mostly ruins. Those that weren’t complete burn-outs had long since had their windows smashed and roofs reduced to skeletal timbers. Even the graffiti were vanishing beneath blooms of moss and algae and the ever-spreading ivy creepers. The old road layout slowly melded into the decay beneath dunes of brambles and rampant buddleias.
Daylight saw kids scrabbling over the piles of smashed bricks and chunks of concrete, scavenging for the tiniest scraps of metal or playing violent games of chase. At night, even the delinquent youths made themselves scarce. People a lot more dangerous than juvenile gang-idolizers made their purposeful way along the streets under the cover of darkness.
Ian and Abner had a section of the GSW under observation using Ian’s covert access with the Market Street network. On the previous Saturday, one of the micro-copters had flown a low, silent pass over the GSW area. Any sensor or mesh belonging to a gang protecting their territory would see a profile similar to a bat – it even followed the same fast, slightly erratic trajectory common to all the Chiroptera genus. It hadn’t landed, but a cloud of smartdust had come scudding out of its fuselage to coat one of the rubble piles directly opposite an old shop. A purely visual observation would reveal no activity in the decrepit structure. However, its broken windows had been covered with corrugated iron sheets. The sliding doors at the side were unbroken. Vagrants who roamed the GSW knew not to approach.
When Ian accessed the mesh at nine o’clock that evening, it showed heat leaking out of the covered-up windows and secure doors. Ruckby had arrived an hour ago, along with a couple of mechanics whom the Gang Task Force database listed as being involved with vehicle theft operations.
‘Here it comes,’ Abner told him.
Ian saw it in his grid: a van driving carefully along the remnants of the road. The big sliding door was opened, and the van nosed in, parking up next to an almost identical vehicle waiting inside. ‘That one’s changed colour since yesterday,’ Ian commented.
Boz and Jede were having the vans boosted to order, then driving them out to the GSW where the mechanics could ghost them; changing licence and colour.
The big door was hurriedly closed again.
‘Whatever they’re targeting in the raid, it’s going to be big if they need vans to carry it away in,’ Abner said.
Ian told his e-i to shunt the mesh image to the side of his grid and compress it. He looked over at Abner, who was sitting against the wall of the flat’s lounge, the place Eva normally claimed. Something about that was just wrong. For all his help, Abner didn’t belong in their fellowship. There wasn’t enough history between them. And Ian still didn’t understand his motive. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said out loud.
‘Get what?’
‘Why you’re helping us.’
‘Really? I’d have thought it was obvious. Somebody is killing my brothers. They started twenty years ago, and we still haven’t found them. That bothers me, it bothers me a lot.’
‘But, now you know it’s all been a fight inside your family.’
‘No I don’t. Not yet. I admit it doesn’t look good, not for Aldred, but I really do need to find out exactly what’s going on and who is involved. That’s the policeman part of me, the reason I chucked the usual corporate route and joined the force.’
Ian gave a small snort. ‘Everyone thinks you’re in Market Street to make sure we toe the corporate line.’
‘No. We enjoy a challenge, us Norths. It just manifests in different ways. Me, I’m mildly obsessional about solving the puzzle.’
‘Like Sid.’
‘Not that obsessive. He’s good, and politically smart with it. He really could make it as the next Chief Constable.’
‘Aye. Probably. That’d be the best thing that happened in Market Street in a long while.’
‘If he does I hope he cuts back on the bureaucracy. Man, that’s the downside I wasn’t expecting when I joined.’
‘There’s always a way round.’
‘Yes. So why did you watch Sherman off-log? The investigation could have done it – we were given the clout to do anything.’
‘Something about where the information came from. Sid needed to keep his source quiet.’
‘Ah, I see. Honourable with it. Maybe he won’t make Chief Constable after all.’
‘What about you?’ Ian asked. ‘What are you going to do if we harvest proof that Aldred’s involved?’
‘Depends what he’s involved in, doesn’t it?’
‘What about me and Eva? Are we covered if it goes bad? Do we get the blame for digging too deep?’
‘No, Ian; I’ve got a direct line to Augustine, I’ll make sure he understands. You’re doing the right thing, too. This has to be solved.’
‘What if it is Augustine behind everything?’
‘It isn’t.’
‘You sound very sure.’
‘I am, trust me. This is something different altogether. Did you see the news from St Libra? Something has killed four people at camp Wukang.’
‘Aye, man! Not that bloody alien thing again.’
‘What is killing them, then?’
Ian shook his head. ‘Well not Sherman, that’s for sure. Maybe the two aren’t connected?’
‘I’d like to think that. We’ll know before long, won’t we?’
‘Aye.’ Ian gave the 2North a long look, still unable to gauge how much trust there was between them. ‘Did you really not know there was a 2North that wasn’t on anyone’s official register? You know, the one we fished out of the Tyne.’
‘No, nobody knew about him. And that’s the most worrying part of this for my brothers and me. I still find it hard to believe one of us could be implicated in his death. We’re not saints, none of us, but that is beyond me no matter how big the disagreement, so it should be beyond any of us.’
‘You said you were all a little different.’
‘Yeah, a little. But not this. This is too much.’
‘Okay.’ An icon popped into Ian’s grid, and he expanded the mesh feed again. ‘Oh aye, another van’s arriving, look.’
*
Ralph had taken the same room in the Central Arcade hotel so he could be in town for the end of the trial. Sid claimed a chair while the agent took a bottle of Newcastle Brown from the fridge.
‘This stuff any good?’ he asked, holding up the chubby bottle.
‘Let me give you some free survival advice,’ Sid told him. ‘Don’t ever ask that in Newcastle again.’
Ralph grinned and twisted the cap off as he sat down. ‘So we got a conviction, then. You must be pleased.’
‘Ernie Reinert. A guilty plea which got him twenty years followed by permanent relocation. It’s nothing and you know it.’
‘Yes. So where are you?’
‘I wasn’t as smart as I thought. Abner found out what we’re doing. He’s joined up with us.’
Ralph paused with the bottle tipped back to his lips. ‘Did
he tell Aldred?’
‘No, and that’s where this gets really interesting.’ Sid was impressed that Ralph let him tell the whole story without interruption, but then this was doubtless going straight into the agent’s cache like some self-obsessed celebrity gush.
Only at the end did Ralph give a start. ‘Trigval?’ he asked sharply. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Sherman’s people are putting the raid together right now. They’re ghosting the vehicles, and putting together some equipment in the GSW, so we’re assuming it won’t be long.’
‘What’s your gameplan?’
‘I want the raid to go ahead,’ Sid said, trying to guess Ralph’s responses. ‘Sending in a tactical squad to catch them red-handed would be easy, and it’ll get Market Street to the front of every news show, but in essence it’s the same as arresting Reinert. It’s premature. If we’re ever going to resolve this, we have to follow the vans to the handover; that way we can see what the hell is going on. Aldred is too smart to take part himself, but if we get far enough along the line we should be able to harvest enough proof.’
‘Good call. There’s just one alteration you need to make.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ll be joining you.’
*
The estimate Darwin and Leif had come up with was a hundred and fifty kilometres a day. Back in the inflated orange fabric of the garage at Wukang, as they changed tyres and adjusted drive systems, such a figure seemed both reasonable and achievable, derived as it was from extensive flow charts and graphs.
So far they had covered a hundred and two kilometres since they set off two days ago. Vance would have wept if he thought the Lord would help because of it. But He helped those who helped themselves, and right now Vance had delivered himself to this place. Nobody in biolab-1 was saying anything, of course, but he could well guess the dissent brewing in MTJ-2, where Karizma and her admirers were doing all of the difficult trail-blazing work. And it was tough, especially in the jungle. No one could have realized just how arduous it was going to prove. Four or five metres of snow on the ground meant that the vehicles would sink down nearly a metre before the snow started to provide some stability. In those circumstances the snowplough blade was effectively useless. The MTJ driver only lowered it when they reached a drift, pushing it aside rather than attempt to ride over.
By itself, the snow could have been overcome. But in the jungle, the height of it elevated the vehicles almost into the canopy. A canopy that was encased in ice and holding up even more snow. The tangle of interwoven branches was so dense they could barely see five metres ahead. It was as if they were inside a snow crystal with all its sparkling three-dimensional complexity, and no section was the same.
There were clear sections where the convoy could proceed relatively smoothly, patches of savannah without any trees. If anything they just added to everyone’s frustration when they reached the next swathe of jungle and had to slow again.
When they did hit yet another dense cliff of knotted trees, MTJ-2 had to deploy its buzz saws continually, cutting and slashing. The snow crust surrounding the branches detonated under the blade impact, splatting violently across the windscreen; then the blades hit the rock-solid frozen wood, and the screeching vibration shook the whole vehicle. The windscreen wipers laboured to clear the mash of ice and sawdust, allowing those in the cab to see the next layer of branches or vine snarl to chop at. With a metre of path cleared, the driver would throttle the MTJ forward, pushing into the snow, the big front wheels rising up only to sink down again as the white powder compressed under the weight. Then it would stop, and they’d use the buzz saws again, although the blades were never designed to deal with frozen wood. Leif was apprehensive about the strain they were putting on them. He was repeatedly forced outside to check and adjust the chain tension.
The constant stop-start progress was excruciating. All the other vehicles would sit and wait until the MTJ had cleared a few hundred metres, then move forward together in an attempt to catch up.
Their second difficulty was just as acute, wasting almost as much time. The weight of the biolabs would often send them sinking into the track which the MTJ had made. Every time they had to dig round the wheels to lay matting, then use MTJ-1 to tow them out. That was a quick learning process, getting a feel for the vehicle as the tow rope began to take the strain, with both drivers linked to try and synchronize the pull.
Inside the jungle, the problem was made much worse; with the track being so narrow, if the second biolab got stuck the MTJ couldn’t come back for it, so they had to use the winch on the front, attaching the cable to the back of the first biolab and hoping it was a good enough anchor.
After the first three times that happened, Vance reorganized the convoy so the trucks and tankers followed the two MTJs. They were heavy, but unlike the biolabs they’d been fitted with the wide snow tyres. Their traverse helped compact the snow a little better. But the mobile biolabs still sank in with monotonous frequency.
As Sirius dipped below the horizon, Vance ringlinked a conference with his department heads.
The first priority was to free up MTJ-1 so that it could take point duty and give MTJ-2 some relief. Dr Coniff, the paramedics and Luther would transfer over to biolab-2, swapping with Antrinell, Camm Montoto, Omar, and Vance himself.
‘We have to get out of the jungle,’ Leif said once they’d agreed to that.
‘Don’t start suggesting we just turn back,’ Vance warned him.
‘No, sir. I wasn’t going to do that. But we do need a clearer route. If we carry on like this, we’re going to run out of fuel in another ten days. We won’t have travelled five hundred kilometres.’
‘I’m aware of that, thank you. Do you have a suggestion?’
‘Right now we’re heading south-east, straight for Sarvar. But if we head directly south from here we’ll hit a tributary of the River Lan in a couple of days. We can use the rivers like a highway network, travel straight through the jungle without having to clear every metre of the way with the buzz saws.’
‘But the Lan just feeds down into the Jaslin,’ Jay said. ‘It goes south-west.’
‘Yes, but the Dolce feeds into the Jaslin north of the Lan, and that can take us back almost to Sarvar.’
Vance called the map up into his grid. It was rudimentary, composed from the e-Ray images and ancient survey pictures taken when the first gateway had been opened in the Sirius system. He could see the route Leif was talking about, and if you thought of the rivers as roads it almost made sense – but it was hardly direct. ‘How far is that?’
‘Over three thousand kilometres, sir.’
‘And what about our fuel reserves?’
‘We can make it; providing the rivers give us an open path and we can travel at a decent speed. I’ve been reviewing the figures. We can leave the trucks behind once the bladders run dry, and the tanker too for the last section.’
‘Give me those fuel-consumption files, please,’ Vance said.
‘If we keep going this way then we fail,’ Leif said. ‘We all know that – we’ll have to turn back in another five days. But this way we can at least see what the river is like. If it’s clear, and the convoy can travel on it, we can push on. If it doesn’t, we turn back again and we’ve lost nothing.’
The problem with turning back, Vance thought as Leif’s files appeared in his grid, was that the quantity of fuel they’d left behind at Wukang wasn’t enough to see them through more than another six weeks. Not if the convoy returned with empty tanks. If they turned round right now, though, there’d be enough to take them possibly into July. ‘I’ll review your data,’ he told Leif. ‘And give you a decision by the time we’ve finished swapping personnel between the vehicles.’ Which wasn’t entirely true; the hiatus was purely to show that he was in charge, and deliberating carefully before issuing their orders. But Leif had been right, there was no point carrying on through the jungle as they had been. They had to find out if they could use the
rivers.
Sunday 28th April 2143
Déjà vu had wrapped itself around Sid tighter than a heavy winter coat. Three minutes past midnight, and here he was sitting in a privately registered police car on the north-east corner of Campbell Park, with Ralph sitting beside him as they waited to see what Sherman’s people were up to. A light rain was washing in from the south, chilling down the streets after five days of cloudless skies. Despite the lateness of the hour, his e-i was still bouncing off calls from agency executives. It had been a frantic week – agencies had been employed by the city, which was desperate for their civil relief divisions to help with the flood of Highcastle refugees coming through the gateway. The Mayor’s senior staff had routed a lot of those arrangements through Sid’s office, as it had plenty of expertise in dealing with agency contracts, and everything needed finalizing fast.
Even now, the dedicated trains provided by Brussels were still running from Newcastle’s central railway station, taking the exiles down to the channel tunnel, then fanning out across the GE to designated dispersal cities. Buses ran on a constant loop between Last Mile and the station’s grandiose stone entrance on Neville Street, with the city’s traffic management network providing a clear route, and squad cars riding escort ostensibly to keep those particular streets clear, but in reality to make sure no one jumped off to make themselves a life in Newcastle. The city simply couldn’t afford any more migrants right now. It was struggling to cope with the bioil workers who’d returned earlier, and they all at least had company money behind them.
Away from the hustle and bustle of the Highcastle relief operation, Sherman’s team was coming together under Jede’s careful management. Three vans had been ghosted in the West Chirton GSW hideaway; now they were driving eastwards along the A149, keeping well within the speed limit, doing nothing which could attract the attention of any officialdom.
One of the three micro-copters was keeping pace with the lead van, the one containing Ruckby and a couple of byteheads they’d drafted in to help with the raid. The second van was driven by Boz, and had a pair of street soldiers riding with him, tough guys armed and ready to deal with any trouble. Jede drove the third van by himself.
Great North Road Page 86
