The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “So I see. That’s interesting. I know Ozzie likes to think they have a special relationship, but there’s more to it, in this case, I think.” He looked at Nelson.

  “You don’t seem to have much on Mellanie Rescorai.”

  “What we have is a reasonable rundown,” Perdita said. “She was a corporate director’s squeeze until he got caught up in a rather sensational bodyloss case. After that, she starred in some soft-porn TSI drama, then moved into reporting. Alessandra Baron snapped her up, now they’ve fallen out; gossip in the industry says Alessandra was whoring her around to political contacts as a reward for information. Er …” She cleared her throat, amused. “You might want to ask Campbell if that’s true. Anyway … Mellanie finally refused, and they parted on very bad terms—also the talk of the industry. Michelangelo took her on straightaway. Standard media career.”

  “Not the timescale,” Nigel said. A picture of Mellanie slipped into his virtual vision, some publicity shot for a TSI called Murderous Seduction; she was dressed in lacy gold lingerie that showed off a terrific body. He paused midsip. Her chin was rather prominent and her nose squat; but that didn’t stop her image from giving him the devil’s own smile. Just for a moment he really wanted to access that TSI. “Your file says her boyfriend is Dudley Bose. Is that right?”

  “I think he was the last person Baron sent her to sleep with,” Perdita said.

  “They’ve been together ever since.”

  Nigel frowned. He didn’t even have to access any files to remember the disastrous welcome-home ceremony the navy had set up for Bose and Verbeke. Bose hadn’t been the most impressive of people in either of his incarnations, before or after the Second Chance flight. “Strange choice, for her and him.”

  “Maybe he made her see the error of her ways?” Perdita suggested. “They’ll settle down and have ten kids together.”

  “So she went and signed up with Michelangelo?” Nigel grunted. “No. There’s something wrong with all of this. We don’t have a record of her even meeting Ozzie, so there’s no reason why she should have access to the asteroid. None of his other exes do. And judging by the reports from Randtown she took on the Primes single-handed. That makes me very suspicious.” He gave Nelson a sharp stare. “Is she another one?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Another what?” Perdita asked.

  “An observer for the SI,” Nelson said. “Or spy, depending what you think about it. We know it isn’t quite as passive as it always claims. It has several people like Mellanie prying into areas of human activity it would otherwise be excluded from.”

  “I had no idea. What does it want?”

  “We don’t know,” Nigel said. “But that’s why I keep Cressat out of the unisphere; it gives us a proper refuge. And now we’ve seen what it did with Ozzie’s wormhole I finally feel justified.”

  “It wasn’t a malign act,” Nelson said. “It actually saved Mellanie and the other humans in Randtown.”

  “I know. That’s why I don’t worry unduly about it. However, it remains an enigma, and given our current war situation that means we cannot fully trust it.”

  “So what do you want to do about Mellanie?” Nelson asked.

  Nigel canceled her image before he gave an inappropriate reply—but she would be a wonderful addition to his harem. “Discreet observation. And put a good team on it. The SI will be watching out for her.”

  “We’ll have her covered in an hour.”

  “Good. There’s something else, which I really hate doing. I cannot believe Ozzie wouldn’t get back in touch after the Prime attack. Find out where he is, Nelson. I need to know if he’s alive or dead.”

  It was Donald Bell Homesecure that had the contract for 1800 Briggins. A private company with a Darklake City police authority license, they were authorized to apprehend and detain anyone believed to be breaking and entering their clients’ property, and even permitted to discharge firearms if threatened with lethal force.

  The alarm that went off in their control center reported that the bungalow’s door had been opened without the correct code. One of the operators called it up, and saw the owner, Mr. Cramley, was listed as currently being out of town. They dispatched a nearby patrol car and alerted the Olika police precinct that their staff was investigating a suspect incident.

  Barely a minute later, the alarm changed to a fire alert, with the bungalow’s internal sensors reporting several dangerous hot spots growing. The control center operator immediately called the fire department. Two tenders were dispatched.

  When the Homesecure patrol car pulled up outside 1800 Briggins the officers inside were expecting to deal with a simple break-in with petty vandalism. It wasn’t the usual kind of crime in Olika, but then these were troubled times. They slid the visors down on their flexarmor suits and hurried in through the gate to see if the perpetrators were still on the premises.

  Flames were already flowing against the lounge’s broad arching windows, casting fans of orange light out across the lawn. The officers went in through the front door, their 10mm semiautomatic pistols already drawn, ready for trouble. When they reached the lounge, they were greeted by a confusing scene. Several items of furniture were blazing fiercely, and the parquet flooring and rugs were beginning to catch fire. Long flames licked up the curving walls to play against the ceiling. On the floor were two clusters of large furry balls. They moved slightly, jostling against each other. The parquet around them was covered in black glistening liquid that bubbled like tar as it steamed from the intense heat.

  One of the nostats flattened out slightly, raising its front half sluggishly up toward the two stupefied officers. They stared in horror at the section of corpse the movement revealed. Whoever the victim was, it had been reduced to shreds of gore tangled around bloody bones. The underside bristles of the nostat were soggy with blood.

  Both officers froze for a moment, then started shooting. The bloated nostats exploded, splattering blood across the flexarmor suits.

  It took a quarter of an hour to bring the fire under control. Firebots worked their way in through the flames, spraying foam as they went. Over a third of the bungalow was wrecked, with the rest suffering considerable smoke damage. The drycoral structure itself didn’t burn, but most of it had been killed by the heat. It meant the owner would have to tear the whole thing down and regrow it.

  Police and Homesecure staff surrounded the bungalow while the flames were brought under control, their weapons active, ready for any nostats that might flee the conflagration. Afterward, they swept through the ruined rooms in case any of the creatures had survived.

  A Darklake City coroner’s van arrived at dawn, and the remains of the intruders were bagged up and removed for forensic examination. Scene of Crime staff wandered around, making a recording of the area, and taking a few samples. It seemed like a relatively clear-cut case: an opportunist break-in that went horribly wrong. The police issued a request for Paul Cramley to return for questioning, and filed a preliminary penalty notice for keeping illegal dangerous nonsentient aliens within the city boundary. Mr. Cramley did not respond to any calls made to his unisphere address.

  At midday the site was handed back to Homesecure. It was part of the contract to guard the property until the owner returned and assumed responsibility.

  A lawyer representing Mr. Cramley arrived at the Olika police precinct at two o’clock that afternoon and paid the steep fine for violating the dangerous aliens law, and gave an undertaking the crime would not be repeated, paying a five-year bond to guarantee compliance. The lawyer then went on to the Homesecure control center, and signed off on 1800 Briggins, assuming full responsibility for the property. The guards went home.

  Mellanie’s cab drew up outside the bungalow just after four in the afternoon, responding to a message that Paul had left in her e-butler’s hold file. The lock on the gate had already been repaired. It buzzed and opened for her just like before.

  She picked her way through the blackened inte
rior of the bungalow, wrinkling her nose up at the smell of burnt plastic and other fumes that still hadn’t completely dissipated. Cinders and scorched parquet crunched under her fancy red and gold pumps. It was probably a mistake to have worn heels.

  The little circular swimming pool at the center of the bungalow was undisturbed, though several of the patio doors leading out to it were smashed, their metal edges warped by the heat. Leaves floated on water that hadn’t been filtered for a month. She looked around curiously. “Paul?”

  The water started gurgling. As she stared at the pool, a whirl appeared at the center, deepening into a cone. Within a minute the water had emptied away, leaving the marble walls dripping. On the side opposite the steps, a doorway irised open.

  Mellanie arched her eyebrow at it. “Neat,” she commented. She took her pumps off, and walked down the slick steps. The door was plyplastic disguised to look like marble; there was a narrow concrete corridor beyond it with polyphoto strips along the ceiling. It angled down quite steeply.

  Ten meters in, she turned a sharp corner. The floor leveled out, and the corridor ended at a wide brightly illuminated room. It had the same clean green-tinted walls and floor she associated with an operating theater; similar cool dry air, too. Several tall stacks of electronic equipment stood in a loose circle around what appeared to be a transparent coffin. Paul Cramley lay in it, floating in a translucent pink liquid. He was naked, his face covered by a conical mask of blank flesh, the apex of which fused into a thick plastic air tube that snaked away into a socket in the top corner of the coffin. Hundreds of filaments no thicker than hair sprouted from the skin along his spine; every few centimeters clusters of them were braided together and plugged into thick bundles of fiber-optic cable.

  Mellanie walked over to the coffin and peered down. The gooey pink fluid magnified Paul’s scrawny ancient body in a way she could have done without; but she could see he was still alive, his chest rising and falling in a slow regular rhythm.

  A portal on one of the cabinets lit up with an image of a young man’s face. It had a lot of Paul’s features. “Hello, young Mellanie, welcome to my lair.”

  She glanced from the body to the portal. “Cool setup. Paranoid, but cool.”

  “I’m alive, aren’t I?” The image smiled.

  It was actually quite a handsome face, she thought, which disturbed her more than she wanted to acknowledge. “Have you been hurt? Is this a rejuvenation tank?”

  “Not at all. This is a maximum interface unit. My nervous system is fully wetwired into the large array here in the crypt. Every sensation I now feel is actually an artificial impulse. You have a virtual vision; I have virtual smell, taste, temperature, tactile reception, hearing, everything. What my brain interprets as walking is in reality a directional instruction to access sections of the unisphere and the arrays connected to it. My hands can manipulate programs and files to an amazing degree, and all at accelerant speed.”

  “Morty always said you were a complete webhead.”

  “How right he was.”

  “What happened here last night, Paul?”

  “It wasn’t a break-in; they were sent to kill me. I used a focused EMP on their inserts, and … nature took its course. Not to mention stupidity.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Good question. Would you like to start trading?”

  Mellanie suddenly felt as though she was slipping away from her earlier position of confidence. Her initial judgment of Paul was a woeful underestimation; and all the clues had been there if she’d bothered to think about them. An impoverished, seedy four-hundred-year-old? Come on! “You already owe me Alessandra Baron for telling you about the Starflyer.”

  “Very well. Baron was receiving and sending a great deal of encrypted traffic across the unisphere.”

  “Aha!”

  “Unfortunately, the protective monitors she uses are excellent. The person using them actually managed to backtrack my own operation. That’s quite an achievement. Outside the SI, I know of only a dozen or so webheads in the Commonwealth boasting that kind of ability. This unknown person has a level of skill equal to my own, a development which I find more disturbing than the SI’s protection of Paula Myo. Clearly Baron has something very serious to hide.”

  “I told you that. And it was probably the Starflyer who tracked you down. I need to know who else is involved.”

  “For a start: Marlon Simmonds and Roderick Deakins, the two who broke into my bungalow last night.”

  “Big help, Paul, your creepy alien pets took care of them.”

  “Show some patience, Mellanie. It is the connection which is interesting. Once I discovered their identity, I accessed their bank accounts. Both of them received a payment of five thousand Oaktier dollars yesterday. The money was transferred from a onetime account opened approximately three hours after Baron became aware of my interest.”

  “Damn!”

  “Which I backtracked to a corporate account on Earth, in the Denman Manhattan bank.”

  Mellanie gave the youthful face in the portal a startled look. “You backtracked a onetime account? I thought that was impossible.”

  “So the banks would like you to believe. It is very difficult, but it can be done. There are certain small flaws in the onetime establishment procedure which can be exploited, that even the Intersolar security services don’t know about. I know because I used to know someone who knew someone who was involved with writing the original program. Does the name Vaughan Rescorai mean anything to you?”

  “Grandpa!”

  “Your great-great-grandfather, I believe.”

  “You knew him?” she asked in surprise.

  “We mega webheads are a small, close community. Vaughan was a good man.”

  “Yes. Yes, he was.”

  “He was your way into the SI, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Thought so. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “Thanks, Paul. What was the company?”

  “Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. They are a legal firm—”

  “From New York on Earth.”

  “You know of them?”

  “Yeah. Some of their associates were involved with a scam involving Dudley Bose. I think the Starflyer used them to fund the observation of the Dyson Alpha enclosure.”

  “Which resulted in the Second Chance flight, and the collapse of the barrier, and ultimately the Lost23. I see. It certainly ties in with your theory. I managed to track some of Baron’s communications before her countermeasures forced me to withdraw. Two of them were addressed to a Mr. Pomanskie at Bromley, Waterford, and Granku.”

  “Hell. He was on the board of the Cox Educational charity.”

  “I suspect Pomanskie, or some junior lieutenant, hired Simmonds and Deakins to put a stop to my electronic spying.”

  “Yeah, most likely. Can you get into Bromley, Waterford, and Granku’s accounts, see what other payments they’ve been making?”

  “I can. I would need an incentive.”

  Mellanie sighed, and tipped her head to one side. “What do you want?”

  “Information. Baron hasn’t occupied my time exclusively. There are a number of other interesting things occurring within the Commonwealth right now.”

  “Such as?”

  “Did you know several ‘lifeboat’ consortiums are being put together?”

  “No. What lifeboats?”

  “There are some Intersolar Dynasties, Grand Families, and mere ordinary billionaires who are uncertain that our shiny new Commonwealth navy can defeat the Prime aliens. They are quietly channeling funds into very large colonizer starships that have a trans-galactic range. Seventeen such vessels have already been put into production, and at least another twelve are being planned that I am aware of. Each of the Big15 is hosting at least one of the projects. The lifeboats can hold several tens of thousands of people in suspension, along with all the manufacturing cybernetics necessary to establish an advanced technolog
ical human society from scratch on a new world.”

  “Those sons of bitches,” Mellanie exclaimed. Even after all the time she’d been exposed to the ultra-rich and their political flunkies, the idea that they’d turn tail and run caught her by surprise. “They’re going to leave us to do their dirty fighting for them?”

  “Now then, Mellanie, don’t whine like some Bolshevik class warrior; it’s a perfectly sensible precaution. Exactly what I expect from that class. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t hop on board if you were presented with a berth?”

  She scowled down at Paul’s coffin. “Michelangelo offered me a gig reporting on all the people emigrating to the High Angel. They all think it’ll fly them clear if the worst happens.”

  “High Angel is a good bet, especially if you don’t have any real money, although they’ll hardly be in charge of their own destiny. Who knows where that machinecreature will take them, or what its ultimate purpose is.”

  “So what’s all this got to do with me?”

  “I want to know which lifeboat stands the highest chance of success.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Let’s just say I’ll be buying a ticket. I have a degree of confidence in our military ability, and I’ve certainly seen what kind of technological atrocities our species’ weapons scientists can produce when the need arises. But the Primes do have a phenomenal amount of resources available to use against us. Like I said: sensible precaution.”

  Mellanie shook her head; she wasn’t sure if it was in dismay or disgust. “So where do I come in?”

  “There is one rather glaring omission in the lifeboat projects. I can’t find any information that the Sheldons are building one. And I have looked, very hard.”

  “Maybe they’re not cowards. Ever thought of that?”

  “Cowardice is not part of this equation. Nigel Sheldon is not stupid. He will be taking every precaution to safeguard himself and his Dynasty. The amount of financial resources required for such a starship is negligible in macroeconomic terms, especially for him. He will be building one, presumably away from curious eyes and inconvenient monitor programs. That means there’s only one place it can be: his private world, Cressat. In fact, I expect there will be more than one ship; after all, he does have a very large Dynasty. A fleet would guarantee success whatever part of the galaxy they wind up in.”