The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Oh, good evening, Investigator Myo. Fancy seeing you here.” It was bravado; she was trying not to sulk at how swiftly Paula had seen past her dark hair and freckles.

  “We found the chief janitor downstairs,” Paula said. “He was tied to a bench in the locker room; not that there was any need—he’s got so much narcotic in his blood he doesn’t know which universe he’s in.”

  “Really? And they let people like that work here? I’m astonished.”

  “I’m more interested why you’re here, Mellanie.”

  “Reporting was getting kind of hectic. I fancied a change of profession.”

  “Mellanie, people’s lives are at stake here tonight. A lot of lives. I will ask once more, why are you here?”

  Mellanie sighed. There really was no way out. “I’ve tracked down the lawyers. All right? It’s not a crime. They’re the criminals, and we both know what they did wrong.”

  “You mean Seaton, Daltra, and Pomanskie?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re here?”

  “Duh. Yes. I just said.”

  “When did they arrive?”

  “Didn’t you know?” Mellanie said smugly. “They’ve been here receiving treatments more or less since they went on the lam from New York.”

  “What sort of treatments? Have they received weapons wetwiring?”

  “I’m not sure, you interrupted me. The new DNA thing, I suppose. It wasn’t cheap, whatever they got.”

  “Which rooms are they in?”

  “One’s in the Nicholas suite, on this floor; the other two are sharing the Fenay suite on the fifth floor.”

  “Okay, thank you, we’ll take it from here, Mellanie.”

  “What! You can’t just—”

  “Grogan, take her down to Renne.”

  Gauntlets grabbed her upper arm, metal fingers closing painfully. “Yow! Hey, I found them, you could at least let me cover the arrest for my report.”

  “I’d advise against it. This is not a safe environment.”

  “I was doing fine until you blundered in.” She paused. If Myo hadn’t known the lawyers were in the clinic, what …?

  Grogan pulled her toward the stairs. The suit was too strong for Mellanie to resist. “You’ve got to give me something, Myo.”

  “We’ll talk later. A long talk.”

  Mellanie didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Tactical update,” Paula informed the arrest teams. “We now have three more confirmed hostiles on site in addition to Bernadette. Possible locations: one in the Nicholas suite, two in the Fenay. Be advised, there could be more. This appears to be where Starflyer agents receive their wetwiring.”

  The map in her virtual vision displayed the positions of the armor suits. She quickly adapted their interdiction roles, assigning three members to each lawyer.

  “Hoshe, can you review the arrays we’ve sequestered? I’d like to confirm what Mellanie told us.”

  “We’re working on it now. I didn’t know she was that good.”

  “Mellanie is starting to interest me greatly. But we’ll have to deal with the clinic first.”

  “Third-floor net shut down,” Hoshe said. “We’re establishing our programs on four and five, preparing to insert on six.”

  “That’s good.” Paula examined the map. “Warren, move out into the fourth floor.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Renne, when Mellanie reaches your team I want you to hold her in custody but separate from the rest of the clinic staff; do not let her call anyone. That’s important.”

  “Understood.”

  “How’s the perimeter?”

  “Solid and holding. It looks like half the city police are here.”

  “Damn, that’s what I was worried about. Someone up here is going to notice what we’re doing.”

  “Confirm the three admissions matching the lawyers,” Hoshe said. “Mellanie was telling the truth.”

  “We’ve been exposed,” Warren Halgarth called. “Four staff members, one client walked out in front of us. Can’t contain them all.”

  Paula cursed, though they’d got a lot further with their dark incursion than she’d expected. “Everyone, go hot. They know we’re here. Arrest teams move in immediately. And find me Bernadette.” She stood to one side, allowing the rest of the third-floor team to deploy out of the stairwell.

  “Shit,” Warren exclaimed. “The client is weapons wetwired. Challenging us.”

  “Is it one of the lawyers?” Paula’s map was updating. Teams were deploying along each floor. Matthew Oldfield was leading five officers to the Fenay suite, while John King was closing on the Nicholas. Barely a third of the clinic staff had been taken down to Renne’s team, where they’d be safe.

  She heard the dull rumble of an explosion. Small flecks of dust shook free from the pipes running up the concrete stairwell. More explosions began. There were screams. Hoshe used aggressive infiltrators and took complete control of the clinic’s net.

  Paula drew her plasma carbines, and moved out into the corridor. People were opening doors, peering out, yelling. Doors were slammed shut. The armor suits kicked them down again, hauling out the terrified staff and clients. John King and his two teammates blew the door to the Nicholas suite. A plasma bolt flew out. The screaming in the corridor reached a crescendo.

  “Deactivate your weapons and come out,” John’s suit speaker boomed.

  There was a big explosion inside the Nicholas suite. Debris and smoke billowed out into the corridor.

  “He blew a hole in the floor,” John called. “Jumped down to the second level.”

  “Acknowledged,” Marina called. “We’re deploying.”

  John’s team charged through into the suite. Paula was waving the other members of the third-floor team along the corridor as they half carried staff and clients through the miasma. “Do not leave any of them unaccompanied,” she warned. “Medical forensics must clear them first.”

  “Visual on Bernadette,” Warren called. “We’re engaging.”

  Paula turned and raced back for the stairwell. Another explosion cut the lights. She was seeing the clinic through microradar and infrared. Sprinklers went off, and the fire alarm shrilled. The ceiling bulged down just in front of her, long cracks multiplying down the walls on either side.

  “She won’t surrender,” Warren said. “Joined by another hostile. Both wetwired.”

  “Can you disable her?” Paula asked.

  “Not a chance.”

  Paula reached the stairwell as a volley of explosions reverberated around the concrete shaft. Emergency lighting came on, an intense yellow slicing through the cloying gray smog that was swirling down the broad shaft. A long convoy of armor-suited figures was escorting cowering prisoners down the stairs. She pushed past them.

  “Two hostiles engaged,” Matthew said. “They were in the Fenay suite.”

  “Capture alive if you can,” Paula said.

  “Do my best.”

  “Got some debris down here,” Renne said. “Glass falling all over the plaza.”

  “Any bodies?” Paula asked. “If their force fields are good enough they might try to jump clear.”

  “None yet.”

  “Watch for it.”

  The explosions and sound of plasma shots had ended by the time Paula rushed out onto the clinic’s fourth floor. There were no elegant treatment rooms anymore; half of the walls were gone, opening up the entire level. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, some smoking, the rest saturated with water and blue suppression foam. Most of the ceiling was down as well, exposing the Greenford’s main structural beams. Fortunately, they seemed to be intact. Water was gushing out of several thick pipes to form large filthy pools across the floor. The glass windows had all been blown out.

  Several bodies were lying amid the destruction.

  “Hellfire,” Paula exclaimed.

  “Sorry,” Warren said. “We had to terminate them.”

  “Okay. Where are the corpses? We need
to run a DNA confirmation.”

  “Over here.” He scrambled over the piles of rubble, leading her around the tower’s core. Several armor suits were busy digging injured survivors out.

  “We think these two.”

  Inside the helmet, Paula wrinkled up her nose at the sight. The two bodies had been badly burned, then crushed by steel beams and concrete sections. Filthy water lapped around their scorched extremities. The remnants of their clothing were wrapped around them, scraps of blackened cloth. Paula recognized a fragment of the deep blue trousers that Bernadette had been wearing as they pursued her across Tridelta for most of the day. Parts of her body were untouched, corresponding to the bands of an insert force field skeleton. Her arms had the ruptures Paula knew came from internal power cells igniting, the kind used to power weapons. She pulled out a small DNA reader unit, and touched the stubby sampler prong against an unblemished segment of skin.

  “It’s her,” she said as the data ran down her virtual vision.

  The other corpse was slightly larger. Probably male. Paula examined him. Damage to his limbs had all been caused by external force. He certainly hadn’t been using a force field. His burned outer layers were no use to her DNA reader; she had to clench her jaw and push the stubby prong through the damage so it could reach internal organs. “Doesn’t look like he was wetwired.” Then she noticed the shreds of his clothes, the fabric the same dark red of the Saffron Clinic uniform. The DNA wasn’t registered in the Senate Security database. She told her e-butler to access Tridelta police and civic files.

  “Are you sure this is the second one?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Warren said. “This is the location where all the resistance came from.”

  “But you’re sure two people were firing at you?”

  “That’s a definite.”

  “John, have you got your target?”

  “Yes. The DNA is weird. I’ve got variants across the body, but some of it matches Daltra.”

  “Thank you. Matthew, what about you?”

  “Two hostiles taken out. One positive ID: Pomanskie. We’re trying to salvage the second body. There’s not a lot of it left intact.”

  Paula stared down at the unidentified corpse. “Bernadette was making contact with four hostiles. So who was he?” She started to turn a circle, but stopped almost at once. There was a wide rent in the tower’s core, five meters away. Two eyebirds flipped out of their holder on her suit, and darted into the dark gap. “Damnit, that’s an elevator shaft.” The eyebirds’ sensors were showing her the shaft running up for another sixty floors, with every door shut. Twenty floors below, it was blocked by the top of an elevator. She sent both eyebirds plummeting down. The hatch on the top of the elevator had been ripped open. The eyebirds forced their way past the bent metal and into the elevator. There was a hole in the bottom, revealing the rest of the shaft leading down into the Greenford’s subbasements.

  “Everyone, we have a breach. One person, maybe more. Time frame, up to seven minutes. That’s enough to exit. Renne, harden that perimeter.”

  Renne had fumed at being given the perimeter duty. After all that the Paris office had been through lately she wanted to get into an armor suit and kick some serious ass. But the duty wasn’t just putting up barricades and liaising with the local police. Everyone brought down from the clinic had to be examined and confirmed. A lot of them would be criminals of some kind, it was that sort of clinic, which meant there was a good probability they would be weapons wetwired. Paula kept emphasizing how the perimeter was to be maintained. It was good to be working with the boss again. Renne just wished she were on the sharp edge of the operation. She couldn’t decide if she’d been given the perimeter duty because of Paula’s earlier suspicions. That she’d ever been on the suspect list in the first place had shocked her. But that was the boss for you, logical to the last. Renne was still reeling from hearing about Tarlo’s treachery. They’d known each other for nearly fifteen years.

  The holding chambers they’d set up in the subbasement were starting to fill up with the Saffron Clinic people. All the fighting was over. There was no more debris falling onto the plaza, though water was still dribbling down the face of the Greenford Tower from the gaping windows.

  Renne walked around the edge of the police barricades, looking up into the dark sky. The clinic’s floors were easy to see; without their glass the shattered windows gleamed a harsh amber against the rest of the tower’s black bulk—the only illumination above ten meters in the whole city.

  Police officers and patrolbots stood guard along the barricades, keeping the curious citizens well back. She was pleased to see how vigilant they were being despite the news about the starships.

  “Nobody down here, Boss,” she told Paula. “Do you want the police teams to start sweeping the lower floors?”

  “Not yet. Hoshe is locking down every floor. We’re going to have to seal up the entire tower and scan everyone as they emerge.”

  “Long night.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Have you heard the starships are back? The attack was a failure.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “So was the Starflyer part of that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Admiral Kime.”

  “You know the Admiral?”

  “Yes.”

  Renne knew she shouldn’t be surprised. But if the boss knew Kime, how come Columbia had fired her? Or had he? Was it a setup to make the traitor relax his guard? With the boss, anything was possible. She never let go of a suspect.

  Renne turned to go back into the Greenford Tower where Hoshe had set up the operation’s command post. Somebody moving away from the crowd outside the barricades caught her eye. She frowned. A girl with a mane of blond hair stepped off the pavement and crossed over Allwyn Street. It wasn’t the hair that made Renne peer after her, it was the walk. The girl almost strutted, holding her head high, hardly bothering to check that traffic had stopped for her. That kind of arrogance belonged to a Dynasty brat, or a Grand Family trustafarian. The kind of integral arrogance Isabella Halgarth possessed in abundance.

  Renne swung her legs over the barricade and pushed through the line of spectators. The girl was walking away down the other side of the street. She was the right height. Her clothes were expensively casual, a red sweater and short amethyst wrap skirt with slim metal clips, long black boots.

  “I might need some backup here.”

  “What have you got?” Hoshe asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think I’ve just seen Isabella Halgarth.”

  “Where?”

  “Allwyn Street, near the Lanvia Avenue turn.”

  “Hold please, I’m accessing the civic sensors.”

  Renne kept an eye on traffic, and hurried out into the road. Horns tooted furiously at her as cars braked. A cyclist screamed obscenities as he wobbled past. “She’s getting into a taxi.” The girl vanished in a blue and green vehicle, and the door shut.

  “Number?” Hoshe demanded.

  “I can’t see, damnit. The logo is an orange trumpet, it’s on the doors.” She flagged down a taxi. “She’s heading west.” The maroon Ables Puma drew up beside her. “Just drive west,” she told the drive array.

  “All right, I’m filtering traffic control arrays for a match,” Hoshe said. “Murray cabs have that trumpet logo.”

  “Renne, you need backup,” Paula said. “Don’t go near her. She’s extremely dangerous.”

  “I won’t.” She switched on her force field skeleton suit. “Just observing.”

  “Okay, I’ve got a police team in their car,” Hoshe said. “Leaving the Green-field garage now.”

  Renne was pressed up against the taxi’s front windshield, retinal inserts searching through the traffic ahead for the blue and green Ables. Her OCtattoos reported a sophisticated scan washing across her, immediately pinpointing the source. She turned quickly to see Isabella Halgarth standing on the pavement, looking straight at her. Th
e girl’s right arm was raised, pointing at the taxi.

  “Oh, shit.” Renne closed her eyes.

  The maser struck the taxi’s power cells, which exploded with enough fury to lift the disintegrating car three meters off the ground. Renne’s force field was overwhelmed in the first second. But it did provide enough protection that when the paramedics started to pick up the sections of her body that had been flung over a wide radius they found her memorycell was intact. After re-life procedure, Renne would be able to remember her death.

  The assembly platform brought back memories of the Second Chance being constructed above Anshun. To Nigel that whole period seemed like centuries ago now, a time when life was a great deal quieter and more leisurely. Giselle Swinsol and Nigel’s own son, Otis, were leading him through the platform’s gridwork maze inside a huge cylinder of malmetal, where the Speedwell was under construction. The Dynasty’s colony ship was much bigger than the Second Chance, a lengthy cluster of spherical hull sections arranged along a central spine. So far, Nigel had authorized eleven of the vast ships, with initial component acquisition consent for another four. In theory, just one ship could carry enough equipment and genetic material to establish a successful high-technology human society from scratch. But Nigel had wanted to begin with more than the basics, and his Dynasty was the largest in the Commonwealth. A fleet would make absolutely sure any new human civilization they founded would succeed. Now, though, he wasn’t sure if that second batch would ever be built. Like everyone else, he’d expected the navy warships to have some success against Hell’s Gateway. The moment when the navy detector network saw the Prime wormholes come back to the Lost23 had come as a savage surprise to him. He really hadn’t been prepared for a defeat of that magnitude.

  “We’ve commissioned four now,” Otis was saying. “The Aeolus and the Saumarez should be ready for their preliminary trials in the next ten days.”

  “Don’t quote me, but we might not have ten days,” Nigel said. “Giselle, I want you to review our emergency protocols for evacuating as much of the Dynasty as possible onto the lifeboats during an invasion. Coordinate with Campbell. We’ll need to establish hardened wormhole connections to our parties. The exploratory division wormholes will be our principal method, but we’ll need backup procedures ready.”