The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The latecomers all pulled their helmets off.

  “Everyone here?” Valentine asked. Without waiting, he raised a handheld array, and entered the activation sequence. Samantha brought up her own handheld array, juggling Lennox onto one arm as she tried to watch the power supply symbols.

  The air around the clearing sparkled as the pyramid generated its base force field eight hundred meters wide, stabilizing the whole structure. She could feel the ground trembling slightly as the force field permeated the rock beneath them, anchoring itself solidly into place. It was that single function that had made construction of the generators so difficult, almost half of the components had to be custom built for them inside the Commonwealth. Standard force fields couldn’t permeate solid matter for more than a few meters at best. Nothing moved inside the bubble of energy, the leaves on every tree were stilled as the now-lustrous air solidified.

  “Stage two,” Valentine shouted.

  Samantha tilted her head back, and pointed for Lennox. The little boy stared up curiously into the sky.

  Five long blades of air shimmered above the existing force field. Their shape was tenuous at first, but as the initial energy surge was absorbed, the air calmed as its molecules were rearranged and locked into new shapes. There was only the faintest of diffraction layers left to reveal the contours, slight pressure fissures cutting through the clear sapphire sky, but it was sufficient for the naked eye to make out. From Samantha’s angle, it was as though the blade shapes were made from high-quality glass. They curved away gently from each other, expanding until they were half a kilometer wide and separated by three kilometers; then they began the long curve back to a single point eight kilometers above the fresh clearing in the forest.

  “The universe’s biggest egg-whisk,” Harvey growled.

  As Samantha watched, grinning at his description, thin streamers of cloud hit a couple of the unyielding blades and twisted sharply away. Gentle gusts were washing against her as the breeze that blew constantly along Trevathan’s Gulf was deflected by the blades.

  “Stage three,” Valentine warned.

  The blades began to move, rotating clockwise, very slowly. After five minutes they’d finished a complete circle, and stopped. Samantha felt the wind they’d stirred race across the road in a giant slothful pressure wave, causing the trees to sway. Her protective suit flapped about, while her sweaty hair swirled around her head. Lennox laughed delightedly.

  “We did it,” Harvey said. “Again. What was the power use?”

  Samantha consulted her handheld array. “Four percent.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  Above them, the blades vanished. Then the base force field released its grip on the surrounding rock and air. A zephyr swept along the road as the air currents churned back into their original patterns.

  “Initialization uses a disproportionate amount of power,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’ll be enough for the planet’s revenge.”

  Four identical black Cadillac limousines drew up outside the big old converted warehouse in Darklake City’s Thurnby district. Mellanie stepped out of the first one, her expensive Fomar pumps just missing the soggy mass of leaves and paper that clogged the gutter. She’d chosen the most sober clothes from her own range to wear, a neat black jacket with slim white lines marking out a square pattern. Matching pants and a cream blouse finished off the image. This way she had a whole Paula Myo authority figure thing going for her. It felt funny coming back here as a take-no-shit professional troubleshooter, backed up by six very tough wetwired CST security operatives.

  There was nobody about on the street, so they all trooped over to the door. Nothing had changed; the purple Wayside Production plaque was still on the wall outside, the couches in the tiny reception area were still snowing flakes of chrome on the floor, the scent of ozone and disinfectant hanging in the air. Mellanie went straight through reception into the narrow corridors that separated the stages. Up above her, the ancient solar collector roof creaked incessantly. Voices from one of the stages echoed around the cavernous overhead space. A stagehand came around a corner, pulling a trolley with a circular bed balanced precariously on top. He stared in astonishment at Mellanie and her escort.

  “Where’s Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Tiger Pansy, where is she?”

  His hand waved limply back down the corridor. “Dressing room, I think.”

  “Thank you.” Mellanie marched past him. She hadn’t actually made it as far as the dressing room before. It wasn’t hard to find, a big open area lined with lockers on one side, makeup tables along the other. The far end was a jumble of clothes racks. Several girls dressed in feathers and gold-crusted Hindu sarongs were sitting around waiting for their turn with the makeup lady, a large elderly woman in a black mourning dress. One of the girls was having her OCtattoos tuned by a sensorium technician; she was very young, an easy forty centimeters taller than Mellanie, thin bordering on malnourished, with lustrous black skin. She had a nervous yet resigned expression on her face as she watched the technician sticking modifier patches over the OCtattoos that webbed her thighs and genitalia. Something must have registered as she caught sight of Mellanie. The technician looked up from his sophisticated handheld array. Across the dressing room, the babble of conversation cut off.

  “Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie called.

  Someone stood up in the middle of the girls waiting to be made up. Mellanie barely recognized her; the peroxide blond hair was now orange verging on tangerine, and seemed to be all straw, standing up as if it’d been electrocuted. Reprofiling had taken the chubbiness out of her cheeks, but the thick crust of skin it’d left produced deep creases as her jaw worked away at her gum. Even before the makeup session, she still had way too much mascara around her eyes. The turquoise and topaz feathers around her chest were under a lot of strain holding her vast breasts up.

  “Oh, hi, Mellanie,” she squeaked. “Watcha doin’ back here?”

  “Came to see you.”

  “Yeah?” Tiger Pansy giggled, a high-pitched sound drilling through Mellanie’s eardrums. “You wanna interview me? Jaycee won’t like that.”

  “I’m here to offer you a job. And nobody cares what Jaycee likes, least of all me.”

  “Oh, really?” a man’s voice asked.

  Mellanie turned to face him. Like his studio, Jaycee hadn’t changed either, head still shaved, black clothes with the crow’s-foot wrinkles that only cheap cloth produced. “Get lost,” Mellanie said curtly.

  Jaycee’s pale skin started to flush. He gave her bodyguards a quick appraisal. “Fucking say that without your friends here.”

  She smiled with predatory malice. “They’re not here for my benefit; they’re here to keep you safe from me.”

  “Fuck off, bitch. I mean it. You don’t come in here like you rule the universe and try to steal my fucking girls away. Tiger Pansy’s mine. You fucking got that?”

  Mellanie cocked her head to one side, pursing her lips as if she were mulling over what he’d said. “No.”

  “I don’t care who the fuck you think you are, fuck off now!” Jaycee yelled. “And you”—he jabbed a finger at Tiger Pansy—“you don’t go fucking anywhere. Understand?”

  “Yes, Jaycee,” Tiger Pansy said meekly. Her chin quivered as she fought back tears.

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” Mellanie said. She took a step toward Jaycee.

  “Or what? You’ll give me a blow job?” He smiled around at the bodyguards. “Did Alessandra pass her around you guys? I hear that’s what she does: the Baron show’s whore.” His sneer turned triumphant. “Isn’t that right?” he asked Mellanie. “You’re just a fucking cheap media whore. What? You think I don’t fucking know that? Every fucker in the business knows what you are.”

  Mellanie knew she should just grab Tiger Pansy and get out. Had it been anyone else but Jaycee she would have done just that. “I am not for sale,” she growled out as she took another step
, putting her nose to nose. “I told you that before.” She brought her knee up.

  Jaycee twisted with fast competence, bringing his own leg around protectively. Her knee skidded off the back of his thigh. His grin was mocking. “And we’ve done this befor—”

  Mellanie slammed her forehead into his nose. Jaycee screamed as his cartilage made a horrible crunch. His hand came up automatically to cup his nose and stanch the blood. That was when Mellanie brought her knee up again, properly this time.

  “Yeah, you’re right, this is a real déjà vu session,” she said amiably as tears flooded Jaycee’s eyes. His mouth opened in a silent screech as he fell to his knees, one hand clamped over his nose, the other over his crotch. Blood made the front of his black shirt glisten disgustingly.

  The girls got out of the way fast as Mellanie walked over to Tiger Pansy. “This job, it pays so much you’ll never have to come back here. There’s a rejuvenation treatment thrown in as well. You can start over again.”

  “Yeah?” Tiger Pansy asked. Her jaw worked hard on the gum as she looked at Jaycee. “Is he gonna be all right, d’ya think?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. I don’t want to rush you, but I do need an answer.”

  “He wasn’t last time you did that, y’know. He couldn’t get it hard for a week.”

  “For which the human gene pool was very grateful. Tiger”—she put her hand on the porn starlet’s arm—“I need your help. I really do. A lot of people are depending on you.”

  Tiger Pansy gave the bodyguards a resigned look. “Who do I got to fuck?”

  “Nobody. It’s not like that. We’re going to link you up one-to-one for a special client. That way this client gets to find out what you feel. I came to you because you’re the best sensorium artiste there is.”

  “Yeah?” Tiger Pansy grinned sheepishly. “You’re an all right girl, Mellanie, I knew it when you came in here that first day. Straightaway, I said to myself, I said, she’s class, Tiger, you should try and be more like her. I’m not, though.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “Mellanie.” Tiger Pansy put her head down and whispered, “there’s this, like, medicine I need to get through the day. Special medicine. Jaycee used to get it for me. I can’t go nowhere without it.”

  For some reason, Mellanie’s throat tightened to an almost-painful degree. She couldn’t remember feeling so much sympathy for anyone before. “We can get it for you, I promise. Better quality than Jaycee ever supplied. You can go anywhere, Tiger. And when you’re rejuvenated you won’t need it anymore.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Tiger Pansy produced a lottery-winner smile. “Okay then.”

  The look on Nigel Sheldon’s face wasn’t exactly engineered to make Oscar feel welcome. Daniel Alster, who’d met him from the train, had been polite and upbeat. Oscar had thought that attitude would reflect from his boss. Now, in the senior management suite at Narrabri station, he realized what a mistake that had been.

  “So what does Columbia want?” Nigel asked. “It has to be important and delicate to send you.”

  “The navy intelligence Paris office has found a rogue officer called Tarlo, and needs to arrest him. However, there’s a problem. Tarlo is on Boongate.” Oscar braced himself for the outburst.

  Amazingly, Nigel leaned back in his chair and gave a bemused little smile. “Tarlo was one of the people on Illuminatus, wasn’t he?”

  Oscar had to think back quickly over the briefing he’d absorbed on the train journey over from the High Angel. “Yes, sir.” All he could think was how amazingly well briefed Nigel Sheldon was. Then again, he is the head of the largest Dynasty.

  “What sort of rogue?” Nigel asked maliciously.

  “Sir, we need to arrest him and read his memories to confirm who he’s working for.”

  “So Columbia is finally starting to believe in the Starflyer, is he?”

  “Uh,” Oscar managed to rumble.

  “Don’t worry, Oscar, I know it’s real.”

  “You do?”

  “Me and several others, so you can relax now.”

  Somehow, that just wasn’t possible. “Thank you, sir. The Paris office has put together an arrest team. We’d like to send them through to Boongate.”

  “The War Cabinet decided to keep all the Second47 wormholes closed.”

  “I know, but it’s only a team of five. The time the wormhole would be open for isn’t long enough to permit any kind of mass exodus from the Boongate side, especially if the planet is unaware the wormhole is open.”

  Nigel drummed his fingers on the desk. “What is the plan should they capture Tarlo intact?”

  “Direct memory read.”

  “That’s what we’re doing here with Starflyer agents; if Columbia is coming around to our views we can share our information with him.” He screwed up his face, undecided. “If they get Tarlo, the arrest team will want to come back. That’ll mean opening the wormhole again. People on Boongate will know; damnit, my people there will know, and I’ve already forced them to stay. I don’t think so, Oscar, I’m sorry.”

  “The arrest team have volunteered to go into the future along with the rest of the planet. They’re not asking for a return trip, sir, they just want the chance to get their man.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tarlo is a critical Starflyer agent; his position in the Paris office allowed him to cover up any number of its operations. His memories would be invaluable in exposing the whole Starflyer network. I cannot overemphasize how important he is.”

  “Damnit.” Nigel let out a long breath. “All right, but we keep this very quiet. If and when Tarlo is hooked up to a neural download the data extracted from his brain is to be routed through to the operation we’re putting together here. Columbia can have full access, but we direct the procedure.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Nigel nodded acknowledgment. “You’d better hook up with Wilson. He can brief you on our operation.”

  “Wilson’s here?”

  “Yes,” Nigel said wryly. “Along with some others you may recognize. But that’s not to be shared with Columbia until we’re convinced he’s acknowledged the Starflyer. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. Daniel, organize some transport for the arrest team.”

  “I’ll get right onto it. What do you want to do about opening the gateway?”

  “The Paris team goes through, and that’s it. If it’s open for more than a minute I’ll want to know why. Who’s on duty over there?”

  “Ward Smith. I’ll get over to the gateway control center and liaise with him myself.”

  There were eight Guardians working on the big engine. The old Ables ND47 sat on the single track that ran through the huge Foster Transport shed, its new ultramarine paintwork gleaming under the bright overhead lights. A cluster of mobile gantries surrounded it, giving the engineeringbots access to the entire superstructure. Under the supervision of the Guardian team they were installing force field generators and medium-caliber weapons in casings that looked like they were integral segments of the bodywork. Forty meters behind the engine, two long enclosed wagons sat on the shiny rails.

  Bradley Johansson stood beside the big coupling on the first wagon, looking up at its dusty yellow and maroon shell. A single connector cable dangled from beneath the coupling, its end almost reaching the ground; it was as thick as his torso.

  “We’re basically ready to go,” Adam said. “All the equipment and vehicles are loaded. The old brute is so heavily armored even it will have trouble carrying the weight.”

  “And if it does get hit?”

  Adam grinned, and patted the cool metal chassis of the front wagon. “The armored cars make the final dash through to Half Way. I’ve got it all covered, Bradley, stop worrying. We will make it.”

  “All of us?” Bradley asked quietly. He glanced at the Guardians swarming like acrobats over the gantries around the nuclear-powered engine. Ther
e wasn’t one of them over thirty-five.

  “Most of us,” Adam said.

  “I fear the dreaming heavens will be welcoming a lot of friends this coming week.”

  “You know, I never did get that part of your philosophy. Why give the Guardians their own religion? That makes it look even more like a cult.”

  “I didn’t. I’ve been to the dreaming heavens, Adam. It’s at the far end of the Silfen paths, a place where noble demons fly through an endless sky. I was cured there.”

  Adam gave him a judgmental look.

  Bradley’s e-butler told him Senator Burnelli was calling.

  “I’ve been in a meeting,” she told him.

  “Forgive my lack of surprise, Senator, but that’s what politicians do.”

  “Not meetings like this one, we don’t. You’ll be happy to hear you’re almost legitimate now. We want to bring you in, Bradley, you and the Guardians.”

  Bradley opened the call to Adam as Justine explained what had been decided at Nigel Sheldon’s mansion.

  “The Starflyer is the same family as the Primes,” Bradley said. “Well, in all the dreaming heavens, I never knew that. It does make sense, though. I remember its interest in the Dyson Pair right from the start.”

  “Do you know where the Starflyer is?” she asked.

  “No, but like you, we believe it will try and get through to Boongate.”

  “It can’t. However, we are going to let it think it can. If its train approaches the gateway, our squad will bag it.”

  “A honey trap. Good idea.”

  “You’re at the Narrabri station already, aren’t you?”

  “Now, Senator, you know that’s not a question I’ll answer for you.”