Morton was away for a week at Talansee on the other side of the planet, attending a conference with a housing developer group he was trying to negotiate a deal with. AquaState, the company they’d set up together, manufactured semiorganic moisture extractor leaves that provided water for remote buildings, and was finally starting to take off. Morton was eager to capitalize on their growing success, moving the company towards a public flotation which would bring in a huge amount of money for further expansion. But his devotion to his work meant that for seven whole days she didn’t have to produce any excuses about where she’d been or what she’d been doing. She could spend the whole time with Wyobie Cotal, the rather delectable young man she’d snagged for herself. It was mainly for what he did to her in bed, but they also travelled round the city and enjoyed its places and events as well. That’s what made this affair so special. Wyobie paid attention to all those areas which Morton either ignored, or had simply forgotten in his eternal obsession to advance their company. These seven days were going to be a truly wonderful break, she was determined about that. Then maybe afterwards . . . After all, they’d been married for thirteen years. What more did Morton want? Marriages always went stale in the end. You just shook hands and moved on.
Her killer walked across the ground floor lobby, and his e-butler requested an elevator to take him up to the twenty-fifth floor. He stood underneath the discreet security sensor above the doors as he waited. He didn’t care. After all, it wasn’t his face he was wearing.
Tara was still deliberating about what to wear that evening when the hauntingly powerful orchestral chorus vanished abruptly. The bathroom lights died. The spar jets shut down. Tara opened her eyes resentfully. A power failure was so boring. She thought the apartment was supposed to be immune from such things. It had certainly never happened before.
After a few seconds, the lights still hadn’t come back on. She told her e-butler to ask the household array what was happening. It told her it couldn’t get a reply, nothing seemed to be working. Now she frowned in annoyance. This simply couldn’t happen, that’s what back-ups and duplicated systems were for.
She waited for a little while longer. The bath was such a tranquil place, and she wanted her skin to be just perfect for her lover that night. But no matter how hard she wished and cursed, the power stayed off. Eventually, she struggled to her feet and stepped out. That was when she realized just how dark the apartment was. She really couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Using irritation to cover any bud of genuine concern, she decided not to feel round for a towel. Instead she cautiously made her way out into the corridor. There was a glimmer of light available there, at least. It came from the broad archway leading into the lounge.
Tara hurried through into the big room, only mildly concerned what her soaking wet feet would do to the wooden floor. Light from the illuminated city washed in through the balcony windows. It gave the room a dark monochrome perspective. Her lips hardened in annoyance as she looked out at the twinkling lights. This was the only apartment which seemed to be suffering.
Something moved in the hallway. Large. Silent. She turned. ‘What—’
The killer fired a nervejam pulse from his customized pistol. Every muscle in Tara’s body locked solid for a second. The pulse overloaded most of the neural connections in her brain, making death instantaneous. She never felt a thing. Her muscles unlocked, and the corpse crumpled to the floor.
He walked over to her, and spent a moment looking down. Then he pulled out an em pulser and placed it on the back of her head, where the memorycell insert was. The gadget discharged. He triggered it another three times, making absolutely sure the insert would be scrambled beyond recovery. No matter how good a clone body the re-life procedure produced for her, the last section of Tara Jennifer Shaheef ’s life was now lost for ever.
The killer’s e-butler sent an instruction to the apartment’s array, which turned the lights back on. He sat in the big sofa, facing the door, and waited.
Wyobie Cotal arrived forty-six minutes later. There was a somewhat smug and anticipatory smile on the young first-lifer’s face as he walked into the lounge. It turned to an expression of total shock as he saw the naked corpse on the floor. He’d barely registered the man sitting on the sofa opposite before the nervejam pistol fired again.
The killer repeated the procedure with the em pulser, erasing the carefully stored duplicate memories of the last few months of Wyobie Cotal’s life from his memorycell insert. After that, he moved into the spare bedroom, pulling three large suitcases and a big trunk out from their storage closet. By the time he’d got them into the master bedroom, three robot trolleys had arrived from the tower’s delivery bay, carrying several plastic packing crates.
His first job was shoving the bodies into the two largest crates, and sealing them tight. He then spent the next two and a half hours collecting every item of Tara’s in the apartment, gradually filling the remaining crates with them. Her clothes went into the cases and trunk.
When he was finished, the trolleys loaded up the crates again, and took them back down the service elevator to the delivery bay where two hired trucks were waiting. The crates containing the bodies went into one truck, while everything else went into the second.
Upstairs the killer drained the bath, then ordered the maidbots to give the apartment a class-one cleaning. He left the little machines busy at work scouring the floors and walls for dust and dirt, conscientiously switching off the lights as he went.
4
So here she was, in the bleak small hours of the morning, strapped tightly into the confined cockpit of a hyperglider which was tethered to the barren rock floor of Stakeout Canyon waiting for the storm to arrive with its hundred and twenty mile per hour winds. At her age, and with her family heritage behind her, there were probably a great many better things for Justine Burnelli to be doing. Most of the ones she could think of right now involved beds with silk sheets (preferably shared with a man), or spa baths, or extremely expensive restaurants, or plush nightclubs. But the only luxuries within about a thousand miles were currently racing away from her as fast as the support crews could drive the convoy’s mobile homes over this godawful terrain. And it was all thanks to her newest best friend: Estella Fenton.
They’d met in the day lounge of the exclusive Washington rejuvenation clinic she always used, both of them just out of the tank and undergoing physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, massage, and herbal aromatherapy, among other remedies to bring some life back to limbs and muscles which hadn’t been used for fourteen months. They moved like old-time geriatrics, an irony made worse by their apparently adolescent bodies.
All anyone did in the lounge was sit in the deep jellcushion chairs and stare out at the wooded parkland beyond the picture windows. A hardy few used handheld arrays to do some work, reading the screens and talking to the programs. None of them had retained the ability to interface directly with the cybersphere. Their bodies had all been purged of most of their inserts, like processors and OCtattoos, during the rejuvenation process, and they hadn’t received their new ones yet. Estella had been led into the airy lounge by two nurses, one holding each arm as the gorgeous young redhead wobbled unsteadily between them. She sank into the chair with a graceful sigh.
‘We’ll be back for your hydro session at three o’clock,’ the senior nurse said.
‘Thank you so much,’ Estella said, with a forced smile. It blanked out as soon as the nurses left the lounge. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Just out?’ Justine asked.
‘Two days.’
‘Three, myself.’
‘God! Another ten days of this.’
‘Worth it, though.’ Justine held up the paperscreen she’d been reading; it was still running through the articles and pictures of the fashion magazine she’d accessed. ‘I haven’t been able to wear anything this good for the last ten years.’ Although plenty of her female friends underwent rejuvenation religiously every twenty years (or less), Justine tend
ed to wait until her body-age was around fifty before going through the whole process again. You could carry vanity too far.
‘I’m not even at the stage where I’m thinking of clothes yet,’ Estella said. She ran a hand through her dishevelled hair, which was an all-over bonnet five centimetres long. ‘I need to get styled first. And I hate having hair this short, I normally wear it down to my waist, and that always takes a couple of years to grow,’ she grouched.
‘That must look lovely.’
‘I don’t have any trouble catching men.’ She glanced round the lounge. ‘God, I don’t even feel like that right now.’ The clinic was strictly single sex, although that didn’t always stop clients who were nearing the end of their physical therapy period from indulging in a bit of illicit hanky panky in their rooms. It wasn’t just youth’s appearance they reclaimed after rejuve, their newly adolescent bodies were flush with hormones and vitality. Sex was at the top of just about everybody’s agenda when they left a rejuvenation clinic, and tended to stay there for quite a while.
Justine grinned. ‘Won’t be long. You’ll be heading for the nearest Silent World full speed ahead.’
‘Been there, done that, a hundred times over. Not to say that I won’t make a stop off on the way, but I’ve got something more exhilarating planned for this time.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
*
That had turned out to be a two-month-long safari across Far Away. Justine had almost outright rejected the notion of joining her. But the more Estella talked about it – and she talked about very little else – the more it began to lodge in her mind.
After all, Far Away was the only true ‘wild world’ within the Commonwealth, where civilization’s grip on the inhabitants was a loose one. It was difficult and expensive to reach, the climate and environment were odd, the enigmatic alien ship Marie Celeste was still there puzzling researchers as much as it had on the day of discovery. And then there was the ultimate geological challenge, the Grand Triad, the three largest volcanoes in the known galaxy, arranged in a tight triangle.
Justine’s hyperglider had been tethered just inside the wide opening of Stakeout Canyon, so the nose was pointing east, which put Mount Zeus to her left. In the daytime when the ground crew were rigging the hyperglider, all she could see of that colossus was its rocky lower slope, which formed one side of the huge funnel-shaped canyon. The crater peak could never be seen from the base, it was seventeen kilometres high.
To her right was Mount Titan, the only currently active volcano of the three, its crater rim standing outside the atmosphere at twenty-three kilometres high. Sometimes, at night, and if the eruption was particularly violent, the rose-gold corona shimmering above the glowing lava could be seen from the pampas lands away to the south, as if a red dwarf had just set behind the horizon. While directly ahead of her, forming the impossibly blunt and massive end of the canyon, was Mount Herculaneum. Measuring seven hundred and eleven kilometres wide across its base, the volcano was roughly conical, with its twin-caldera summit levelling out at thirty-two kilometres above sea level, putting it a long way above Far Away’s troposphere. Thankfully, the geologists had classed it as semi-active; it had never erupted in the hundred and eighty-odd years since human settlement had begun, though it had produced a few spectacular shudders in that time.
That vulcanism could produce such huge features on a small planet like Far Away was a wonderful enigma to her. Of course, she’d studied articles on the science of it all; the fact that only a forty per cent standard gravity allowed something as gigantic as Mount Herculaneum to exist – on a world with normal Earth-like gravity it would collapse under its own weight. And the lack of tectonic plates meant that lava simply continued to pile up in the same spot, aeon after aeon.
But none of that cool reasoning could detract from the actuality of the monstrous landscape she’d come to experience. The power and forces amassing around her were elemental, a planet’s strength readily visible as nowhere else. And she was sitting in her pathetic little machine, in a lunatic attempt to tame that power, to make it do her bidding.
Her hands were shaking slightly inside her flight suit as the first hint of dawn emerged, with an outline of slate-grey sky materializing high above the end of the canyon. She cursed Estella bloody Fenton for the sight. It didn’t help calm her nerves knowing that Estella was in a similar hyperglider fastened to the rock a couple of kilometres away, staring out at the same inhospitable jags of rock.
‘It’s starting,’ someone said over the radio.
There was no cybersphere on Far Away; in fact, no modern communication at all outside Armstrong City and the larger towns. A hundred years earlier, there had been a few satellites providing some coverage for the countryside and ocean, but the Guardians of Selfhood had shot down the last of them long ago. Now all anybody had out here was simple radio, and Far Away’s turbulent ionosphere didn’t offer a lot of assistance to that.
‘There’s some movement out here. Wind’s picking up.’
Justine peered through the tough transparent hood of the cockpit. But she couldn’t see anything moving on the bare rock below her. There was nothing to move. The storms which swept in from the Hondu Ocean to the west were channelled and squeezed by Zeus and Titan to roar along this one canyon between them. It had been scoured clean of any loose soil or pebbles geological ages ago.
‘Derrick?’ Justine called. ‘Can you hear me?’
Her only answer was a fluctuating buzz of static as the dawn slowly poured a wan light down into the canyon.
‘Derrick?’
The caravan of trucks, 4x4s, and mobile homes must be clear now, she acknowledged grimly; over Zeus’s foothills and sheltered in some deep gully from the morning storm. All the mad hyperglider pilots were on their own now. No escape.
Somehow this part of it had been missed off the slick advertising and intensive, reassuring briefing sessions. Even the pilot skill training memory implementation hadn’t included it. Waiting helplessly as the wind from the ocean built from a gentle breeze to a deranged hurricane. Waiting, unable to do anything. Waiting, watching. Waiting and worrying. Waiting as fright emerged from some primal place deep in the brain, growing and growing.
‘How’s it going, darling?’ Estella asked.
‘Fine,’ you bitch. ‘Actually, I’m getting a bit nervous.’
‘Nervous? Lucky cow. I’m scared shitless.’
Justine instructed her e-butler to run through the cockpit procedures again, checking the hyperglider’s systems. Even with the limited capacity of the on-board array, the e-butler produced a perfect control interface. Its review was instantaneous; translucent icons blinked up inside her virtual vision, everything was on line and fully functional. ‘Remind me again why I want to do this.’
‘Because it beats the hell out of breakfast in bed,’ Estella told her.
‘In a five star hotel.’
‘On a Caribbean island, with a veranda overlooking the beach.’
‘Where dolphins are playing in the water.’
It was getting a lot lighter outside. Justine could finally see some thin streamers of sand drifting past the hyperglider. They must have blown in from the coast, she thought. She switched the weather radar to the main console screen, studying the blobs of vivid colour as they surged and squabbled against each other. The storm was definitely on its way, scarlet ribbons representing dense high-velocity air were seeping across the screen like some kind of fresh wound, always expanding.
In a way she was glad the storm was heading in from the west, creeping up on her from behind. It meant she couldn’t watch the hammerhead clouds as they devoured the sky. She was quite frightened enough as it was. Even now she wasn’t sure she was going to make the flight. There was an option to just stay here; the hyperglider was currently configured into a smooth, fat cigar shape, the wing buds confined below the main fuselage; she could simply keep the tethers wound in, and let the winds roar round her until it was all over. Many
had, so she’d been told, bottling out at the last moment. Right now, in the middle of the annual storm season, it was an average five-hour wait for the gales to sweep over.
Within twenty minutes, the wind was strong enough to start shaking the hyperglider. If there was sand out there, she couldn’t see it any more. Red waves washed continually across the weather radar screen.
‘Still there?’ Estella asked.
‘Still here.’
‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Yeah. Are you getting the same readings from your radar? Some of those airstreams are over a hundred miles an hour already.’ The digital figures for wind speed were blurring they were mounting so fast. At this rate the storm’s central power-house would be overhead in another forty to fifty minutes, and those were the winds she wanted. If she took off now, the hyperglider would simply be driven into the base of Mount Herculaneum.
The radio band seemed to be full of bad jokes and nervy bravado. Justine didn’t join in with any of it, although listening was a strange kind of comfort. It helped keep away the sense of isolation.
Clouds were rampaging across the sky now, gradually becoming lower. They blocked the rising sun, cutting the illumination to a gloomy twilight, although she could still see the swollen tatters of rain charging off into the distance. The rock around the hyperglider began to glisten with a thin sheen of water.
‘Wind’s reaching a hundred,’ Estella called out. There was dread mingling with anticipation in her voice. ‘I’m about to release. See you on the other side, darling.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Justine yelled. The fuselage was shaking violently now, producing a steady high-volume thrumming; even the howl of the wind was penetrating the heavily insulated cockpit. The screen displays on the console in front of her were jumbled thanks to the quivering, jittering lines of colour, completely out of focus. She had to rely almost completely on the more basic information inside her virtual vision. Grey mist was a constant blur outside, eliminating any sight of the sky or canyon walls.
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