Adam smiled grimly at that. Not only a train owner now, using CST’s tracks, but he’d also bought himself a fission reactor. His other pet hate. Fission should have been abandoned back in the twenty-first century when fusion stations finally came on-line. But, oh no, the capitalist market wanted cheaper energy, no matter the cost in radioactive waste.
He and Kieran took up Mr. Hoyto’s invitation to inspect their new purchase before the bots and engineers began the refurbishment project. They walked out into the harsh yellow glare of the hot lights, blinking against the welding flares and smelling the oil being drained from hundreds of mechanical systems.
Kieran put on his hard hat. “Is this safe?” he asked. “It’s very similar to what we did with the Alamo Avengers.”
“It’s nothing like the same,” Adam countered. He stood at the base of the ND47’s forward coolant intake grille, and looked up. The front of the vehicle was as tall as a two-story house, and equally blunt; its original chrome finish was now almost invisible beneath a scabby coat of rust flakes. “They were weapons systems. We took a risk refurbishing them to operational standard, and navy intelligence will no doubt be keeping a watch for any similar scenario. But this is a straightforward commercial project.”
“All right then,” Kieran said. “I’m making good progress on acquiring the kind of standard defense systems we’ll equip it with. Buying armaments these days is a lot easier. Everyone wants some personal protection from the next Prime attack.”
“I know, that’s why the cost of military hardware has gone through the roof, bloody profiteering companies.”
Kieran slapped one of the engine’s massive steel wheels. “I’m not even sure we need a force field on this. A tactical nuke would probably only slow it down a little.”
“Don’t you believe it. One shot in the right place and we come to a very sudden and badly radioactive halt. We have to protect the track ahead of us; that means a decent amount of firepower. That’s all got to be installed and tested before we can even think about running the Boongate wormhole.”
“I thought I’d get the wagon conversion done on Wuyam. There’s a couple of promising supply companies I’ve contacted, and it has a bunch of empty warehouses around the CST station we can use for assembly. I’m looking into hiring one.”
“Good enough.” Adam started to walk down the length of the ND47. The bodywork with its old E&W paintwork was bleached to a pale sulphur and plum-purple; various exhaust vents were picked out by vertical sprays of black soot engrained into the pitted composite surface. Halfway down, the micropile access hatch looked like the kind of circular door a bank vault would employ.
“Do you think we’ll be ready in time?”
“What time is that?” Adam was surprised by the note of uncertainty in the younger man’s voice. The Guardians Johansson normally supplied were full of a disturbing confidence.
Kieran smiled nervously. “Who knows. Dreaming heavens, if the Primes attack again tomorrow we’ll be screwed.”
“So we work on the assumption that we’ll be ready before they do attack. There’s nothing else we can do. A lot of the planet’s revenge components are ready to be crated up.”
“Apart from the data Kazimir was carrying,” Kieran said bitterly.
“Well now, we might have a new angle on that. Someone has been in touch with me who has a possible connection to Paula Myo. She might be able to find out where the data is.”
“Who?”
“Someone who isn’t a Guardian, yet believes in the Starflyer, or says she does. She has a very plausible story.”
“Really?”
“Either that or the Starflyer is closer to us than I want to consider. Normally I have a lot of trouble believing anything that useful gets handed to me on a plate.”
“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
“Precisely.”
“So you don’t trust her.”
“No. Not yet, anyway. Of course, she is cautious about us, as well. Which I have to respect. I’m going to have to work out some seriously foolproof method of establishing if she’s a bona fide ally. Having a new friend, even this late in the game, would be very helpful.”
“How are you going to prove she’s on our side?”
“Delivering Kazimir’s missing data to us would be a big plus in her favor. Apart from that, I haven’t got a clue.”
With the casework on the Lambeth Interplanetary Association finally slowing up, Renne managed to haul out the files on the Trisha Marina Halgarth shotgun investigation for a review. Forensics had sent their results to the Paris office over a week ago. Vic Russell had scanned them, and attached a summary. Nothing unexpected or unusual had turned up, which maintained the case’s low-priority coding. They’d been sitting in Renne’s e-butler hold store ever since.
She went through the perfectly laid out tables and holographic graphs and columns of text. Vic was right, everything was as it should be. The data analyst had confirmed that Howard Liang’s background details were all proficient forgeries. Biomedical forensics had found some samples of skin and hair in his apartment, and analyzed the DNA, which they confirmed came from a McSobel. His finances were tracked to a single cash deposit of fifty thousand Earth dollars in a Velaines bank.
“Damnit,” she muttered at the desktop portals. All the exemplary, predictable details were a direct follow-on from the perfect crime scene.
Am I really this paranoid?
She gave the data another read-through, but there was nothing she could find fault with. The Guardians had done it. It was a conclusion anybody would come to. So why can’t I believe that?
Thinking back, it wasn’t the crime scene, the victims, nor even the Guardians’ method of operation. She could accept that those would all be the same or similar to the other shotgun setups she’d witnessed before. What bothered her was the responses the girls had made. They’d been upset, angry, and, in Trisha’s case, burdened by guilt, everything the investigating authorities would expect; but none of them had been surprised. Trisha had never asked: Why me?
The forensic data remained in her portals, a glowing script awaiting allocation and certification. Logically, it should be classified under ongoing low priority, keeping the information available for immediate cross-referencing to all other Guardian cases. There were no leads to follow, no way to pursue the individual perpetrators of the crime. Realistically, the only way an arrest would ever happen was if navy intelligence rounded up the whole Guardian organization.
Laughter drifted over the office. Renne didn’t have to look up to know who it came from: Tarlo’s immediate team. She knew they were making good progress on tracking Kazimir McFoster’s finances. Morale was high over in that nest of desks; they produced results. Commander Hogan was supportive and encouraging.
She wasn’t that bothered, careerwise; right now the threat that the Commonwealth was facing meant she should put such personal considerations firmly to one side. Work in a team for the greater good.
Ah, bollocks to that.
Renne asked her e-butler to access the current files on all three of the girls. They came up right away on her screens. Trisha Halgarth had gone back to Solidade, which wasn’t surprising. Catriona Saleeb was still in the apartment, which she was now sharing with two others. Isabella had moved out of the apartment, but hadn’t told navy intelligence where she’d gone as she was required to do. That wouldn’t be so unusual, but at the same time she’d put a block on her unisphere address code, and remained out of contact ever since.
Renne felt a small grin spread over her face. Finally, an abnormality. “Get me Christabel Agatha Halgarth,” she told her e-butler.
Alic Hogan was studying the information flowing over several desktop display screens when Renne knocked on the door. He just beckoned and indicated a seat in front of his desk.
“There really is nothing weird on Mars, is there?” he said in a distracted voice.
“ ’Fraid not, Chief. We’ve had experts go through the
whole data profile. If there’s any hidden encryption in there, it’s beyond the best we’ve got to find it.”
“Damnit, I hate leaving files like that open-ended.” He shook his head, and looked up from the screens. “What can I do for you?”
“I’d like a warrant issued for Isabella Halgarth.”
“Who’s she, and why?”
“She was one of Trisha Halgarth’s apartment mates. She seems to have vanished.”
Alic Hogan sat back in his chair, looking unhappy. “All right, what’s going on?”
“I’ve just reviewed the forensic data we got back from the shotgun case, the one where the Guardians claimed our President was an alien agent.”
Alic managed a slight smile. “Oh, yeah, I remember that one. The President’s aides were knocking down the Admiral’s door inside thirty seconds of that one hitting the unisphere. So what’s the problem?”
“No direct problem. I was concerned about our total lack of progress on the whole shotgun issue.”
“Okay, commendable enough,” Alic said, with only mild suspicion. “Although I’m not sure about your priorities here.”
“Any approach which can get us into the Guardians is viable as far as I’m concerned.”
He held his hands up in defeat. “Good point. Go on.”
“I wanted to reinterview the shotgun victims, see if there was anything they remembered now that they didn’t directly after the event. A lot of crime victims do, after the initial shock and confusion has been overcome, and they have time to think about what happened.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m familiar with the procedure.”
“Trisha Halgarth has gone back to Solidade, the Halgarth Dynasty’s private planet. I need permission to go there. It’s never been legally accepted that the Dynasty planets are part of the Commonwealth, and they certainly won’t let me through if I turn up at the gateway unannounced and wave my navy ID around. So I called Christabel Agatha Halgarth, the head of the Halgarth family security.”
Alic winced. “You should clear anything like that with me first.”
“I know, Chief, and I apologize. I didn’t think it was a big deal. Anyway, Christabel gave me permission to travel to Solidade.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
“You must be the first government official for some time.”
“Whatever. I also wanted to talk to Catriona Saleeb; she’s still on Arevalo, in the same apartment, so that’s not a problem. But Isabella discontinued her unisphere address code a week after the shotgun. We don’t know where she is. I asked Christabel, and she didn’t know either. They’re looking into it for me.”
“And you want to arrest her for that?”
“A warrant is the best way to make planetary police forces pay attention. A simple alert for a missing girl isn’t going to get any attention, not right now.”
“Renne, I’m really not sure I can issue a warrant on this basis.”
“I checked on Isabella, not just the official files, but the unisphere gossip show records as well. You know they love reporting on Dynasty members. Before she moved to Arevalo and set up house with the other girls, Isabella used to be Patricia Kantil’s girlfriend.”
Alic Hogan gave her a startled look. “Doi’s chief of staff?”
Renne smiled waspishly and nodded. “She never told us. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“How can Kantil be involved in this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s not. But you have to admit, this is worth a warrant. I need to ask Isabella some serious questions.”
Alic let out a long breath, clearly reluctant. “I can really do without complications like this.”
“Trust me, Chief. I’ll be discreet. If she’s just shacked up with someone she shouldn’t be, some senator or a three-hundred-year-old Grand Family heir, whatever, I’m not going to cause a fuss. I don’t want to get the Dynasties or the Executive pissed with this office. I’ll just ask her the questions, and leave quietly.”
“Damnit, all right. But if she’s found, I want to know immediately. We keep this as quiet as we can.”
Renne got out of the chair. “You got it.”
“Are you off to Solidade?”
“Yeah. The express to EdenBurg leaves in forty minutes.”
“Okay, good luck. And I want to know what the planet looks like when you get back.”
There was a limousine waiting for Renne when she arrived at EdenBurg’s CST station in Rialto, the planet’s megacity. A young man dressed in a smart dark gray business suit introduced himself as Warren Yves Halgarth, a member of the Halgarth family security force, and her assigned escort. They drove out of the station and into the midday sunlight.
Renne had visited all of the Big15 at one time or another. She was always hard-pressed to tell the megacities apart. Rialto was a slight exception in that it was sited in a temperate zone, while most of the others favored tropical locations. Apparently it was an accounting thing. A city that had summers and winters needed different types of civic services to cope with the individual seasons, and Rialto had an impressive snowfall in winter, averaging out at two meters each four-hundred-day year. Keeping the citywide grid of five-lane expressways open and the all-embracing network of rail tracks clear and functional for those three icy months of the year required thousands of snowplows and ancillary fleets of GPbots. The cost of all that bad weather machinery was considerable, and the city council had to charge the companies and residents to cover the expense.
It was a factor that was countered by the cost of power on EdenBurg, which was among the lowest in the Commonwealth. One of the principal reasons Heather Antonia Halgarth had chosen EdenBurg as her family’s Big15 world was the planet’s massive oceans. None of the three continents had deserts—precipitation was too high for that; instead, they were covered in rivers, with vast coastal plains subject to continual flooding. Instead of the fission plants the other Big15 used, Heather went in for hydropower on a colossal scale, damming two-thirds of the watercourses on the Sybraska continent where Rialto was situated. Electricity was delivered to the megacity via superconductor, and Sybraska’s plains drained, then irrigated to provide nation-sized tracts of highly productive farmland.
Because of the cold months, Rialto favored monolith apartment blocks rather than the vast sprawls of individual homes and strip malls found on worlds like StLincoln, Wessex, and Augusta. Each district had its core of Manhattan-like skyscrapers and bulky concrete tenements, which were encircled by huge swathes of factories and refineries.
The CST station was on the edge of the Saratov district, which was the megacity’s financial and administrative heart, giving it the largest nest of skyscrapers, and also the tallest. The industrial estates radiating outward tended toward the smaller, more sophisticated manufacturing facilities. Accommodation blocks were gigantic, fifty to seventy stories of sturdy stone facades, with large apartments overlooking broad well-maintained public parks. There were fewer rail lines and more elevated roads, reflecting the population density and its relative wealth.
Renne couldn’t help staring at Saratov’s central area as they swept toward it along the expressway. Some of the skyscrapers were so high she thought they must touch cloud level; they couldn’t be economical to build, even with today’s materials and robotics. It was all about corporate prestige.
Right in the middle were five tapering towers housing the Halgarth Dynasty’s headquarters. They were all identical in size and architecture with crown spires producing a bristling apex. But the reflective glass windows on each one had a different color.
Renne’s car drove down into the basement of the green tower, and into a secure parking zone. The Halgarth family security force occupied several floors halfway up the tower. Renne wasn’t told how many. The elevator they used didn’t have an indicator. She was ushered into Christabel Agatha Halgarth’s office. Curving walls of tinted glass looked out toward the ocean, thirty kilometers away. Three more skyscraper distri
cts stood between Saratov and the coast, brief pinnacles of color and style with their moats of parkland. The terrain between them was a dark synthetic desert of rectangular factories and warehouse cubes with black solar collector roofs. Thousands of spindly metal chimneys squirted gray-blue vapors up into the iron sky, misting the whole scene with a thin dreary smog.
Sitting at her plain steel desk, Christabel Halgarth was silhouetted by the remorseless industrial backdrop. Newly rejuvenated, she was a small brunette, with a face that indicated a strong Asian ancestry. Renne expected someone this senior in the Dynasty to be wearing a business suit, one costing a good ten or fifteen times more than her own. But Christabel was dressed in a worn blue sweatshirt and baggy track pants with muddy stains on their knees, as if she’d just come in from gardening. Appearance obviously didn’t matter to her.
Or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t count.
Christabel followed Renne’s glance at her legs and smiled. “I cut my morning jog short to meet you. Haven’t had time for a shower yet.”
“I appreciate you taking the time,” Renne said as they shook hands. “It wasn’t quite that urgent.” She hadn’t told Alic Hogan that she’d requested an interview with Christabel. It wasn’t lying, exactly, but the Commander was antsy enough about her just getting permission to go to Solidade. Something like this request should probably have gone through the Admiral’s office, with any number of administrative staff reviewing it, and most of them unwilling to send it forward for fear of rocking the boat. Better, Renne thought, just to fire off the question and see if she could circumvent the bureaucracy and politics. Paula would have done the same.
“We’re both here now,” Christabel said graciously. “What can I do for you?”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 136