Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Very well,’ Vance said. ‘How many have you filled?’ he asked Roarke.

  ‘Seven, so far, sir.’

  ‘Give me ten. If I can’t get a body puncture shot in it by then, I’ll be dead anyway.’

  Roarke gave him a tight nod. ‘Understood.’

  ‘I’ve decided we’re going to stay here,’ Vance announced. ‘It’s basic math. If we don’t move, the vehicle fuel cells use up a lot less bioil just supplying electricity and warmth than they will powering the motors. We cannot reach Sarvar on the bioil remaining, so I see no point travelling any further.’

  ‘And the food?’ Antrinell asked softly.

  ‘As of now, we’re on survival rations. That ought to give us ten to fifteen days with what we have left. Once the blizzard clears properly, we’ll launch another comm rocket and let them know we’re under attack and low on supplies. The HDA will have to launch a rescue mission. The Berlins are perfectly capable of reaching us from Sarvar, even without a Daedalus tanker refuelling them. It might take a few days, but they just have to establish fuel dumps along the route.’

  Antrinell nodded reluctantly. ‘So it all depends on the comm rocket punching a signal through to Abellia.’

  ‘Abellia or Sarvar, yes,’ Vance said. ‘We’ll program it to aim at both, of course. They’ve had Ravi’s visual log for a day now. They’ll know the guardian is real, and here with us. Rescue is frankly the minimum we should be expecting as soon as the blizzard is over. Vermekia has already arranged for a ski-equipped Daedalus to be put on stand-by to come through the gateway. Ravi’s log should give him what he needs to get the General to open a war gateway above us, and drop a whole squadron of ski-equipped Daedaluses into the canyon with enough reinforcements to finish this once and for all.’

  ‘They didn’t care about us before,’ Tamisha said.

  ‘Because we didn’t have the evidence we do now,’ Vance replied. ‘We’ll be out of here soon.’

  ‘If we’re going to be staying, we should consider our defensive strategy,’ Antrinell said. ‘You’ve got us spread out in two Tropics, the MTJ, both biolabs and the tanker –which only has two people in it. For a static position that leaves us exposed, especially as there are only six Legionnaires left, and only two remote guns working.’

  ‘Okay, what do you suggest?’ Vance asked, content with the level of support his decision was being given.

  ‘The biolabs are the most secure vehicles we have,’ Antrinell said. ‘We know the monster can’t get in, it tried before. Once we’ve finished this procedure, bring people in; we hardly have to maintain the lab’s integrity after this. If it’s too crowded we can use the MTJ as well, its heater is a lot better than anything the Tropics have. We also need to see if the remote guns can be reactivated. From what Olrg was saying it’s probably just ice screwing up the actuators.’

  ‘We’d also get people to bring in what food they gathered,’ Camm said. ‘That way we’ll get a better idea of how much there is left.’

  ‘All right,’ Vance said. ‘I’ll talk with the doctor to see how many we can accommodate in biolab-2 without compromising her patients, then we’ll start to dig in for the duration.’

  *

  The electrical storm raging inside the blizzard began to fire lightning balls down into the canyon around midday. Angela saw the first one streak overhead to strike the canyon wall a couple of hundred metres away. The convoy’s minuscule net glitched in response to the EM pulse. A nest of seething lightning braids erupted from the impact point, scrabbling away at the frozen river for several seconds. The serpentine gouge marks they left hissed and steamed before the blizzard quickly obscured them, and the net re-established itself.

  ‘Great, that’s all we need,’ Angela muttered from the front passenger seat of the Tropic. Ken was up on the roof, trying to fix the remote gun actuators, or at least scrape the ice off them, while Paresh stood guard outside. She didn’t like him being out there with his one working arm, everyone knew their firearms had no effect on the monster, but Elston’s instructions about withdrawing into the biolabs and MTJ were probably the only good order he’d issued since the convoy began. And she was going to be in the same biolab as Rebka, which was a huge plus point.

  Atyeo and Bastian and Garrick had been tasked with filling up the biolab fuel tanks from the tanker’s sledge bladders. If she wiped the condensation from the Tropic’s windows and squinted, she could sometimes catch a glimpse of their heavy, snow-shrouded figures lumbering round like mythical yetis. Omar and Botin were keeping guard over them.

  Rebka, Lulu, and Garrick had just abandoned Tropic-3, their stooped shapes battling the wind as they plodded over to biolab-1. Leora was escorting them. Angela could track their identity icons on her grid, seeing them approaching the safety of the biolab.

  She began pulling on her own parka in preparation. They’d be going over there themselves, soon. Their food packets were already in bags ready to carry. Everything else that she couldn’t stuff into pockets, all the personal kit, would be abandoned in the Tropic while they waited for some kind of rescue.

  The balaclava went on next, then she started jamming her fingers into her gloves. It had taken an age for her to dry them out on the vent, but she couldn’t risk them freezing like they had last time when she went chasing food packets. With the inner layer on, she pushed her fingers into the thicker mid-layer, following with the waterproof outer layer. The bag’s strap was about the smallest thing she could pick up now, but at least her hands would stay dry and reasonably warm.

  Rebka’s icon showed her inside biolab-1. Another lightning ball zoomed down from the thick churning sky, erupting like a coronal sunrise on the other side of the parked vehicles. Angela wiped at the condensation and peered out again.

  Somebody was walking round the back of the tanker’s sledge with its framework of bladders. A dark bulky figure, like everyone in a parka. But her net connection had glitched again, and the identity icons had vanished from the grid. ‘Show all last known positions,’ she told her e-i.

  There was no one near the tanker’s sledge. The refuelling crew was over by biolab-2.

  ‘It’s back,’ Angela yelled.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, his parka half on, Forster turned to gape at her. ‘What?’

  ‘The monster. It’s going after the rest of the bioil.’ Angela yanked at the door handle and jumped down onto the hard-packed snow covering the river. ‘Paresh!’ she screamed. The blizzard buffeted her; high-velocity snow smacked into her face, half-blinding her. She hunched down and began to run as best she could towards the sledge. Another lightning ball zipped across the top of the canyon, bursting against the northern cliff. A plasma rainbow inflated, flaring into lightning tendrils that slithered down the cliff like an incandescent waterfall to ground out among the jagged black rocks at the base.

  Angela tugged her outer gloves off and switched her dark weapons to semi-active status. Foreign cells that for the last two months had flourished along her ulna and grown their fronds out along her fingers stirred themselves. The tingling sensation they gave off was exactly as she remembered from twenty years ago. They worked! She hadn’t been sure if the old cy-tech would retain its integrity over two decades, but the specialist on New Tokyo had been the very best. All she’d needed was the right activants to resurrect them.

  *

  Poor old puppy boy Paresh had been ecstatic when they made it back to the hotel that night back in February, just after they’d arrived at Abellia. Angela had been impressed by his stamina. Four clubs, bottle after bottle of beer, several sacs of tox, more beer, dancing hard to get all that alcohol and narcotic pumping fast round his bloodstream – wine followed, then some shots.

  In the taxi he’d been pawing at her like the school jock taking the prom queen home. Nothing seemed to have any damping effect on his appallingly fit young body.

  They were locked together as they stumbled through the hotel room’s door. His tongue was in her mouth and trying to g
et down into her lungs. Back in the second club, her e-i had used some of Zarleene’s dark software to monitor his bodymesh, and reported he’d switched off the medical smartcell routines. So she replicated the passion, and clamped her hands tight on the back of his neck to return the kiss. As she did it, she bumped a sac against his carotid, the sedative she’d extracted from the clinic just after her embarrassing collapse in the mess tent earlier in the week – that day she saw Rebka for the first time.

  Paresh was having a grand time with his hand up her blouse. She broke away with a lustful smile. ‘Give me one minute,’ she told him huskily, and backed towards the en suite. ‘And Paresh.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he blinked hazily.

  ‘You’d better be naked when I come back in here.’

  She closed the door, and started counting. At nine there was the unmistakable thud made by an unconscious Legionnaire corporal hitting the carpet.

  When she peeped cautiously back into the bedroom it was difficult not to feel a burst of sympathy. Her lovely puppy boy was sprawled on the floor, his trousers round his ankles.

  ‘Sorry, sweets,’ Angela apologized to his snoring form. She took a moment to straighten her own clothes and comb her hair back to something more respectable. Her e-i called a taxi using a trace-avoidance patch from Zarleene’s cache. By the time she was striding through the hotel lobby it was pulling up outside.

  The taxi’s auto management wanted a deposit. Angela accessed one of the small emergency fund accounts Saul had set up in Abellia twenty years ago, pleased she could still remember the code. There was only a couple of hundred Eurofrancs in it, but that was more than enough for the ride to Camilo Beach.

  She ordered the taxi to wait at the top of the little village, just off the Rue du Ranelagh, then walked down the sandy road, past the neat whitewashed bungalows that glowed a spectral grey under the bright ringlight, smelling the fresh sea air. The community was typical Saul, a nice place, no doubt filled with decent folk bringing up their families as best they could.

  Then she arrived at his bungalow, with its tiny rear kitchen patio opening directly onto the beach. Poor old Saul, he’d be so flummoxed by her appearance. The files she’d harvested said he had a wife and children, so she prayed he wouldn’t be so stupid as to confess her appearance to them. But knowing Saul there was a good chance he’d do exactly that.

  She sat on the low wall surrounding the patio while her e-i called their emergency address code.

  ‘Who is this?’ Saul asked thirty seconds later.

  At least no light had come on in the house, he wasn’t in full freak-out mode. Yet. ‘It’s me, Saul. It’s Angela.’

  ‘But, you’re . . . It can’t be.’

  ‘They let me out to advise the expedition, darling. I’m officially on probation. Which I’ve just broken in a spectacular way to come here to see you.’

  ‘Here? Here, where?’

  ‘I’m outside standing on your patio. I didn’t want to wake your family up.’

  ‘Ho crap – wait—’

  She had to smile fondly, visualizing his panicked face as he tried to slip off the bed without waking Emily. Angela had harvested an image of Mrs Howard number two – she was a real looker. Young, too. That sweet charm of Saul’s was still clearly fully charged.

  The big glass door slid aside, and he came stumbling out into the night, trying to shove his arms into a baggy old cricket sweater. The sight of him shocked her, causing her smile to diminish. Her husband had aged so. Back in Holloway, when she saw Elston again, she’d been quietly smug at his chubby face and frosting of grey on a receding hairline, the heavier build. Now the same illness of entropy had infected her Saul, and there was no triumph in that, only sadness as she finally realized how she was destined to spend her life leaving others behind. Except Rebka.

  ‘Oh God, it’s really you,’ Saul croaked. ‘You haven’t aged. Not a day. You are a one-in-ten aren’t you? It’s all true.’

  Angela summoned up some degree of dignity, and gave him a warm smile as she held out her arms in welcome. ‘Hello, babe.’

  He stepped into the embrace, but there was so much missing. It was a hug from a long-lost brother, not a lover, not the father of her child. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,’ he said in a muffled voice.

  She could feel him quivering, and knew he’d be crying. ‘It’s all right,’ she said soothingly. ‘And before you say anything; I know.’

  ‘You do?’ He wiped a hand over his eyes. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Your Abellia Civic Administration files are open, I harvested them as soon as I arrived. Emily looks lovely, well done you. And three children, isn’t it?’

  His face crumpled in dismay, he was on the verge of tears again. ‘No. No . . . That’s not – Angela, it’s Rebka . . . she didn’t make it. My sister called me a year after they caught you. The doctors did their very best, but . . . I’m so sorry.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I couldn’t even tell you; there’d been the trial, you were in prison. I followed it all on the transnet news. It was awful. I nearly . . . I didn’t know how I survived.’

  ‘Saul, Rebka is very much alive. That’s why I broke probation to visit you. She’s here on the expedition. I don’t know how or why, but she’s here. Your daughter is alive and staying at Abellia Airport HDA camp. I’ve seen her with my own eyes. I damn near had a heart attack. She’s beautiful, Saul; she’s got my crazy hair, poor thing, but she’s got your smile to make up for it.’

  ‘Dearest Angela . . .’

  ‘No!’ She swatted away the tentative hand that was reaching out. That sympathy wasn’t something she was going to put up with. ‘Don’t even start down that route. I know what I saw.’

  ‘All right, Angela.’

  She gave him a look that was pure contemptuous hatred. He didn’t believe her. His life had moved on – no doubt with a great deal of guilt – away from his lost daughter and suspected serial-killer wife. ‘Son of a bitch!’ She hadn’t expected a triumphant ‘welcome back’ party, but this kind of greeting was pretty shabby. ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to get out of your life, Saul, for good this time. I just need something first.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got some money. It’s not much, but you’re welcome to it.’

  ‘I don’t need money,’ she spat. ‘I’ve got to make sure Rebka stays safe. That monster is real, Saul, and it’s here on St Libra. Do you even believe that?’

  ‘I know you couldn’t have done what they said you did. Not you. I know you better than you think I do.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that. You were smart not going back through the gateway. But then I remember my last message to you. I was being pretty forceful again, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Always the bitch. But I’m glad you were safe, that you found yourself a life again. You deserve that after everything we went through.’

  ‘Angela,’ he said gently. ‘If it’s not money, what do you want?’

  ‘I came for the activants, Saul.’

  ‘What?’ He blurted it out so loud his immediate reaction was to turn and give the bungalow a guilty glance.

  ‘The activants. We had four batches made up in New Tokyo. And I know you. You’ll have kept everything from those days. I made you get rid of everything else, everything you were – so you kept whatever relics you had, no matter how small or painful.’

  ‘You can’t bump them. Angela, they’re twenty years old. They’re probably poison now. And the weapons are the same . . .’

  ‘The nuclei threads will still be there in my ulnas. No reason for them not to be. They just need a growth trigger again.’

  ‘Angela, please, don’t do this.’

  ‘Saul. You’re going to get them for me, and we both know that. So why don’t we just cut out the shouting and the threats and move straight to the endgame. Come on, go inside and get them from whatever little secret stash of the past you have. Then I’ll be gone.’

 
; ‘Angela . . .’

  ‘They haven’t announced it, of course, but the reason this expedition is being put together is because there was another North murdered by the monster. It’s real, Saul, and it took a trip to Earth back in January. The HDA is worried, enough that they busted me out of jail to help them.’

  Saul let out a broken sigh. ‘Wait here.’

  He was gone over ten minutes. Wherever he’d hidden the memorabilia of his earlier life, it was in a deep and difficult to reach place, which was smart of him. But when he returned he was carrying a small plastic box.

  ‘Thank you, Saul,’ she said with genuine gratitude. The box had a cradle for four sacs. There were only three left. She picked one out and bumped it against her neck.

  Saul winced.

  ‘Still alive,’ Angela said brightly.

  ‘Please, Angela—’

  ‘Yeah, I know. When I get back from the jungle I’ll go and get me some therapy. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m pleased you’re considering it. Angela, they locked you up for twenty years.’

  ‘Does it show?’ Which was a low blow, especially against him.

  ‘Just be careful out there. Okay?’

  ‘Promise.’ She hugged him again. They even kissed – platonically. Then she was walking back up the sand-scattered road to the taxi. She didn’t look back. Just like the last time.

  *

  The blizzard punching down the Dolce canyon sent a compact wave of snow slapping against Angela as she tried to hurry towards the tanker’s sledge. It almost sent her sprawling on her front. The heavy layers of clothes were conspiring with the wind to make every step an effort. She’d left her goggles behind in the Tropic, forcing her to squint against the whirling ice flecks that filled the air.

  Not twenty metres away, the monster swung its arm. Blades hacked into the bladder framework, cutting clean through composite struts and puncturing the rubbery containers themselves. Bioil gushed out, a viscous black liquid splattering down onto the rumpled crust of snow to form a rapidly expanding puddle. Rivulets trickled away across the frozen river.