Adam struck him across the cheek. The blow was almost powerful enough to knock him off the couch.
‘Shit.’ Oscar dabbed at his mouth, blinking back tears from the stinging pain. A trickle of blood was oozing out from the corner of his lips. He gave Adam a wild look. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? I said I’d do it. What more do you want?’
‘There is no forged file, you motherfucker. This is as real as it gets. And I said there was an influence on board, not a bug-eyed monster. The Starflyer works through humans. Somebody on board the Second Chance turned the barrier off – don’t even try telling me that was coincidence. The same somebody who fixed it for Bose and Verbeke to be left behind. You don’t think it was remotely suspicious that, of all the supertechnology, multiple-redundant, failsoft gadgets you had on board, a simple communicator failed at exactly that critical time? Because I fucking do.’
‘Somebody?’ Oscar asked, cynically. ‘A crew member?’
‘Yes. One of your precious crew. One of your friends. Or maybe more than one. Who knows? But that’s what you’ve got to find out.’
‘That’s even worse than an alien stowaway. Do you know how much training and back-history investigation we went through to get on board? Nobody remotely suspect ever got close to the ship.’
‘You mean like you and Dudley Bose?’
Oscar stared at him for a long, chilling moment. ‘Look, Adam, what you’re asking, it can’t happen. Physically, it’s not possible for me to do it. Do you realize how much raw data is in those logs?’
‘I know. That’s why we could never steal it and analyse it ourselves. You don’t have to go through every byte yourself. You know the critical segments of the flight; that’s where you look. Not at the main events, what happened on the bridge or in engineering, they’ll be clean. It’s what went on in the background that’s important. Who was haunting deck thirteen when the barrier came down? Find them, not just for us, for yourself, for everyone. We need to know what really happened out there.’
‘This is . . . I can’t . . .’
‘The alien is becoming more active now. You have to admit, there’s some weird shit going down these days. That explosion on Venice Coast which took out our arms supplier, the murdered senator.’
‘Bullshit. That was some covert operative from the government, or an Intersolar Dynasty. Everybody knows that.’
Adam smiled maliciously. ‘Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.’
‘You are so wrong. Why can you never admit that?’
‘Then prove it. Exactly who are you betraying by looking at the data? If we’re wrong you lose nothing. If, God forbid, we’re right, we need to know. And you’ll be a hero. That’s big enough to absolve all your past sins.’
‘I don’t need absolution.’
Adam stood. ‘You know I’m right. And I know you can never admit that to my face. So we’ll stop all this macho posturing now, and I’ll contact you every fortnight or so to check on your progress.’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘Yeah, I said that very same thing when Johansson told me to get in touch with you. But it’s not like either of us has a choice, is it? Not after Abadan station. Take care, Oscar, there’s a lot of people depending on you.’
24
Carys Panther took the metallic-grey MG metrosport into New Costa Junction, then drove it straight onto the car-carry train to Elan. The carriage was completely enclosed, a tube of aluminium with a bright polyphoto strip along the ceiling and a couple of narrow windows along each side. Her MG was so low-slung they were above her eye level. The car’s drive array edged her right up to a big BMW 6089 4x4 before engaging the full brake lock; a Ford Yicon saloon pulled up behind her.
She ordered the seat to recline and settled back for the trip. Her e-butler brought up a whole raft of story ideas and plot sequences into her virtual vision, which she started to fill in, joining them together in complicated loops. At the moment there was a big demand for the long, slightly fantastical sagas which were her preferred genre. Ant, her agent, was keen to exploit the market. He said that it was the uncertainty of the Prime situation which was putting people off gritty realism at the moment; they wanted escapism. He should know. Ant was actually older than Nigel Sheldon, and he’d been doing the same job for century after century. He’d seen every creative fad there was, living through the fashion cycle as it spun the genres around and around.
It was twenty minutes before the train started to move forwards, pulled by an electric Fantom T5460 engine. Augusta led straight to New York. From there the trans-Earth link took them to Tallahassee, Edmonton, Seattle, LA Galactic, Mexico City, Rio, and Buenos Aires, before finally crossing the Pacific to Sydney, which routed the train out to Wessex. Earth took about an hour and they stopped at five of the stations so more vehicles could roll onto the car-carry. Once they reached Wessex, there was a longer stop as six extra carriages were added, then it took five minutes to cross the planetary station’s yard to the Elan gateway. A minute later and they were pulling up alongside the long road-platform at Runwich, the planet’s capital.
The MG’s drive array connected itself to the city’s roadrouting manager, paid the local car tax, and drove through the outskirts to the airport. For once the connection timing worked out in practice the way it was listed on the timetable. A Siddley-Lockheed CP-505, a big six-duct-fan plane, was waiting for her on the apron. She drove up the rear ramp into the gaping cargo hold, where electromuscle clamps gripped the car’s tyres. There were another fifteen cars in there, along with two coaches. The plane could carry sixty-five tonnes of cargo in total, in addition to a hundred and twenty passengers on the upper deck.
Carys spent the next three hours sitting in a comfy first-class seat being served champagne by a nice first-life steward as they cruised across the equator at .95 Mach. Ant called twice for script conferences, and permission to crank up her contract negotiations. It was sort of flattering that he dealt with her personally; his client list had been closed for over a century now. If all went well her latest saga should hit the unisphere in another six months.
They landed at Kingsclere airport, on Ryceel, and she climbed back into the MG. As she drove out of the southern continent’s capital she could see the Dau’sings rising out of the horizon.
The toll booth at the start of the Randtown highway had a big new sign across the front, reading: No Military Vehicles Permitted. Someone had spraypainted Death To Anti-Human Fuckhead Traitors over the top of it in glowing orange.
‘This should be fun,’ she muttered as she drew up outside the booth and put her thumb credit tattoo on the pad. The reinforced barrier slid up, and she drove onto the start of the highway. The broad strip of enzyme-bonded concrete seemed completely deserted as it stretched out ahead. Carys though it looked like the start grid of some giant race track, which was an interesting challenge. She brought the full range of drive-array program tools up into her virtual vision, and supervised its integration with the highway’s simple traffic management system. The speed regulator was a small old program that was easily susceptible to the fix that came as standard in the MG’s modern aggressor routines. She removed the offending soft-ware’s inconvenient monitoring of the car, and pressed her foot down hard on the manual accelerator.
There was a surge of power into the axle engines which pushed her deep into the seat. She locked the speed, tied the radar and navigation functions into the steering program, and assigned full control to the drive array. Electromuscle bands in the tyre walls responded to the build-up of speed by changing their profile, expanding the tread width to provide an even greater degree of traction. There was a wicked smile on her face as the car charged up the first slope into the foothills at three hundred kph.
*
‘I stayed loyal,’ Dudley Bose said. ‘I was stupid. Did you hear what I said? Did you ever see the recording? I warned them, I told them to flee. Then my voice ended. The aliens must have silenced me, punished me for spoiling their plans.
And all the while it was Wilson Fucking Kime I was risking my neck for. The bastard who left me there to rot, to die under an alien sun. Who sacrificed me so he could be safe.’
‘You are very much alive, my love,’ Mellanie told him. They were lying together on the double bed in what the hotel, with a sharp eye for satire, called its bridal suite. The curtains were open, allowing Dudley to see his precious stars. It was an effort for Mellanie not to yawn. She desperately wanted to go to sleep. Something this new Dudley Bose apparently never did without the help of strong drugs. She wondered if she should slip another of the pills into his drink; it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. But the champagne they’d so eagerly guzzled down earlier was flat now, and not even the Pine Heart Gardens, Randtown’s finest, would offer room service at such a time. Damn this wretched backward place.
There had been few choices other than returning to Rand-town to file her follow-up report on the blockade. Alessandra wanted to know if the residents had renounced their anti-human stance now the wormhole detector station had been forcibly installed in the Regent Mountains above the town. The angle they were going for was a remorseful population who were turning their backs on redneck buffoons like Mark Vernon. Finding appropriate interviews would be easy enough for Mellanie, the more colourful the better.
She didn’t want to do it, not just because she despised Randtown and its smug small-town mentality. The Myo case was far more important to her. If she could crack that she wouldn’t even need Alessandra as a patron any more. But it was proving difficult. After the glorious fiasco of the navy’s welcome back ceremony, she’d spent a day and a half locked in her hotel room with Dudley Bose, providing him with the kind of sexual marathon that most men only knew of from pornoTSIs or their own mid-life-crisis dreams. He’d told her nothing. He’d talked continuously – between the physical feats she performed for him – but it was the same topic every time: himself and whether he was still alive out there at Dyson Alpha. The occasional respite came in the form of diatribes against Wilson Kime, his ex-wife, and the navy in general. His memories were still too chaotic to provide her with anything useful.
She’d almost left him back there in the Nadsis hotel on Augusta when it came time for her to catch the train to Elan. Almost. Some nagging doubt, which she hoped was her burgeoning reporter’s intuition, was all for perseverance. She was sure he knew something that could help; though she had started to wonder if she was being too clever in her interpretation of Myo’s remark.
So she’d finally called Alessandra to admit to making no progress on Myo, and had to endure her mentor’s stinging superiority. Mellanie promptly told Dudley they were going to spend a weekend at a secluded resort town she knew of where she was going to make his hottest dirtiest Silent World fantasies come alive. It would be her last chance to try and sort out what he knew that Myo wasn’t telling her. He’d followed like a docile child.
‘But am I alive back there?’ Dudley pointed weakly to the bridal suite’s open window.
‘No. There’s only you. You are unique. You must learn that, and to stop worrying about your old life. It ended. This is a fresh start for you. And I’m here to make it as pleasurable as I can.’
‘Goodness, that’s the Zemplar cross formation.’ Dudley rolled off the bed and padded over to the window. He pushed it open and stuck his head out. The fresh breeze coming in off the Trine’ba made Mellanie shiver on top of the bed.
‘You never told me we were here,’ Dudley said.
‘Where? Randtown? Yes I did.’
‘No, Elan. This has to be Elan. I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, my love, this is Elan.’ She was impressed; the memory transfer had obviously worked flawlessly. It was just his personality which hadn’t survived the procedure intact. ‘Now please close the window. It’s freezing.’
‘This is about as close as you can get to Dyson Alpha, apart from Far Away.’ His head was still outside, muffling his voice.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s where the Guardians come from, you know.’
‘I know.’ She searched round for the quilt, then stopped. ‘Do you know about the Guardians?’
‘A bit. It was only the once.’
‘What was?’
He turned from the window and looked down bashfully. ‘We were burgled. Eventually, we found out it could have been the Guardians. The Chief Investigator reckoned the whore I was married to had met Bradley Johansson himself.’
‘Which Chief Investigator?’ Mellanie asked, trying to sup-press her trepidation.
‘The strange one from the Hive, Paula Myo.’
Mellanie flopped down onto her back, and raised both fists triumphantly in the air. ‘Yes!’
‘What is it?’ he asked nervously.
‘Come here.’
She fucked him. As always he was supremely easy for her to control. If she let him he would climax in seconds, so she was strict, drawing him out, provoking and denying in equal amounts so that it would last as long as she wanted. This time it was different for one thing, this time she allowed herself to come as well. There was no faking it, no sound effects. It became her selfish celebration, he was there for her pleasure.
He must have known something had altered, sensed some change in her. His gaze as he lay there on the bed afterwards was worshipful. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he pleaded. ‘Please, don’t ever leave me. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t.’
‘Don’t worry, my love,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet. Now be good, and take one of your sleeping pills.’
He nodded, anxious to please, and washed one down with the remnants of the champagne. Mellanie plumped up the pillows and sank back, smiling at the ceiling. For the first time in four days she fell into a deep contented sleep.
*
Mark was out in the vineyard with one of the autopickers which was stalled. Barry and Sandy were with him, keen to help the repair operation. Their assistance came in the form of charging up and down the rows, with the dog barking excitedly as it dodged between them. The big gangling machine had come to a halt halfway down its third row when its control software realized that the grencham berries weren’t sliding through the central hopper. Its octopus-like picking arms had frozen in various stages of removing clusters from the vines.
This was only the third day of picking the crop. Already he’d had two breakdowns in his own vineyard. Calls from neighbours to help out with mechanical problems were coming in with increasing frequency and desperation. He slithered into the gap between the leafy vines and the side of the machine, unclipping the loader mechanism inspection panel. Just like before, lengths of the vine had gone down the hopper to wind themselves around various cogs and rollers. It was the clippers on the end of the picker arms that were hauling them in. Same as everything in life when you got down to it: a software problem. He’d have to write a discrimination fix in time for next year. In the meantime, it was a simple pair of secateurs that had to chop at the stringy vines, then human hands which pulled them out. Mashed grencham berries made the whole process slow and gooey.
‘Look at that, Dad,’ Barry called.
Mark pulled the last few shreds of vine from the feeder mechanism, and looked up. Someone was driving along the valley’s packed stone road at a ridiculous speed. A low grey vehicle producing a long swirling contrail of dust behind it.
‘Idiot,’ he grunted. The inspection panel clipped back into place; he gave the locking pins a few thumps with the top of his medium pliers to secure them. His e-butler gave the autopicker array a resume operations order, and the arms slowly stretched out again. Clippers snicked at the top of clusters. The movements began to speed up. Mark nodded in satisfaction, and pulled his sunglasses out of his overalls pocket.
‘They’re coming here, Dada,’ Sandy yelled out.
The car had slowed to turn up the drive into the Vernons’ vineyard. It didn’t look like anything a Randtown inhabitant would own.
‘Come on then,�
�� he told his kids. ‘Let’s go meet them.’
They ducked between vines as they ran towards the drive, calling for Panda, who was off chasing wobes, the local fieldmice-equivalents. Mark reached the end of the row, where he got a good look at the fancy car as it neared the house. Its sleek shape clued him in on who was visiting.
The MG came to a halt beside the Ables pick-up; and the suspension lowered itself back down from the extended rough-ride position so that the wheels fitted back into the chassis again. A gull-wing door opened in the side, and Carys Panther got out. She was wearing a chic panelled suede skirt and expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots, with a simple white blouse. Her dove-grey Stetson was carried in one hand.
Barry gave a welcoming whoop and rushed forwards. Sandy was smiling happily, it was always exciting when Aunty Carys visited.
‘Nice metalware,’ Mark said sardonically.
‘Oh that?’ Carys gave a dismissive wave towards the MG. ‘It’s my boyfriend’s wife’s car.’
Mark made an exaggerated appeal to the heavens. She always had to make an entrance.
*
Neither of the two housemaids who brought breakfast to the room at eleven o’clock would meet Mellanie’s gaze. They put the big trays down on the table and walked out.
‘Screw you,’ Mellanie told them after the door had shut behind them.
She started lifting the silver lids off the plates. Room service might be crap, but the kitchen was certainly four star. ‘Tuck in,’ she told Dudley.
He sat opposite her, as nervous as a schoolkid facing the principal. She could remember that sensation well enough.
‘What do you want from me?’ he asked.
‘Your story.’
‘Is that all I am, a story?’
‘We are all stories, ultimately. I want to help you, Dudley, I really do. If you can come to terms with what’s happened, you’ll be so much happier. I think I can do that for you. I really do.’
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