The Telemass Quartet

by Eric Brown

  Despite the freezing conditions, the Acolytes sharing the pod with him and Miller were still dressed in their summer best. He wondered how soon they intended to sacrifice themselves to the ice. Staring through the transparent wall of the pod as it plummeted towards the city, he made out a dour, monolithic metropolis shot through with silver-grey ice canals. Trains plied the frozen canals, their engines equipped with snowploughs like great iron arrowheads.

  Though it was midday, the sky was dark. A scattering of stars provided scant illumination. The city was laid out in a wheel pattern, with the Telemass Station at the hub and the ice canals radiating outwards like spokes. The buildings that lined the avenues were squat and square, like something from the nightmarish drawing board of an architect obsessed with symmetry and uniformity.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a city as ugly,” Hendrick said, his voice muffled.

  Miller grunted his agreement. “Welcome to Ostergaart, the capital city. It was founded over a century ago by Exxon-Shell. They entered into some kind of arrangement with the alien inhabitants. They’d mine the planet for ores and in return provide medical aid for the natives, the Marl.”

  Hendrick glanced at Miller as the pod descended. “Medical aid?”

  “The Marl are unsophisticated by Terran standards. They’re hunter-gatherers, roughly analogous to humankind about twenty thousand years ago. When we arrived here, their population was ravaged by diseases and in danger of becoming extinct. Exxon-Shell saved them.”

  Hendrick smiled. “And I always thought those vast pan-colonial outfits were out for themselves.”

  “In return, they can strip the planet to its core,” Miller said. “It was never meant to be a permanent colony, but as is the way of things people moved here, set up home, and never moved away.” He shrugged. “Strange, but some folk actually like living here.”

  “And the aliens? I take it they don’t live in the cities?”

  Miller shook his head. “The Marl are burrowers. They live in vast mossy hives a few metres underground during the clement seasons and hunt great shelled creatures that live permanently on the planet’s surface. They descend to the deep caverns during the height of winter and summer.”

  The pod came to a halt and the double doors slid open. The Acolytes gave a collective gasp. Hendrick wondered if it were less exultation at arriving at their holy destination than a reaction to the incredible cold that swept into the pod. He stared at the scantily dressed men and women as they stepped from the pod and crossed the platform to a waiting snowtrain.

  “I’ve booked into a hotel a block away,” Miller said. “You?”

  “I was told I’d find somewhere when I arrived. It isn’t as if tourists are flocking to the planet.”

  “Might as well see if there’s room at the Metropol,” Miller said, glancing at the screen of his wrist-com which showed a map of central Ostergaart. “This way.”

  They left the shadow of the Telemass Station and hurried along a sidewalk covered by a heated metal grid, with dark, blocky buildings on either side. The snowtrain started up and skimmed past, its snowplough sending up a jewelled spray of scintillating ice.

  The Metropol, despite being a dour foursquare block on the outside, was luxuriously appointed and warm. It had rooms to spare and Hendrick booked in for five days, then arranged to meet Miller in the bar in an hour.

  His third-floor room overlooked an ice canal. He stripped off his thermal suit, showered, and changed into something more comfortable. For a long while, he stood before the window and stared out over the unprepossessing city.

  He’d once been to Bucharest on a case, and the brutalist architecture of the buildings of Ostergaart reminded him of that aesthetically challenged city; Bucharest at midnight, he thought, covered in black ice.

  Somewhere out there, Maatje, her lover, and Samantha would be hiding away in an anonymous hotel much like this one. He felt relieved that it wasn’t incumbent upon him to track them down; as he’d told Miller, he’d sit tight and wait, checking the Telemass Station in six days and again in twelve if they hadn’t already shown themselves. He tried to imagine his ex-wife’s reaction when he rode with them back to Earth.

  Of course, there was always the outside chance that they would attempt to confound him by staying for the duration of the long winter.

  He left his room and descended to the ground-floor bar, curious to find out what had brought Ed Miller to Kallithea.

  • • •

  A lattice of crosshatched scar tissue showed on every centimetre of Miller’s exposed flesh. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open, revealing the extent of the surgery his blasted body had undergone a dozen years ago. Here and there, the flesh was puckered and pink, stark against his black skin, as if bits of him had been turned inside out.

  Miller noticed Hendrick’s gaze as they fetched drinks from the bar and settled in a window booth. “I was in a pretty bad way,” he said. “It was in a room about this size. A boobytrap. I was tracking a suspected terrorist and I’d gone there on a tip-off—a set-up, as it turned out. And when I stepped inside . . . All I remember is a very loud noise and white light, and then nothing. No pain. I woke up a month later and thought a few hours had passed. Nothing was ever the same again.”

  “I heard,” Hendrick said. “I was shocked, Ed. As I said, I tried to see you.”

  “They wouldn’t let anyone near me. It was touch and go for a few weeks, not surprisingly. The medics who scraped me up needed counselling for a year.” He laughed. “Bits of me were all over the place. A leg over there, another one there.” He pointed across the room. “One arm near the bar and another on the sidewalk outside.”

  “It’s a miracle you survived.”

  Miller nodded as he sipped his beer. “Not a lot of me did, Matt. They reckon only about forty per cent of me is the man I was before the blast. The rest is prosthetics. They spent a lot to put me back together again, and you can imagine the superintendent’s reaction when I quit the force a year later.”

  Hendrick took a mouthful of beer. Surprisingly it was excellent. “Why did you quit?”

  “I’d had enough,”Miller sighed. “And also I met someone—someone who meant a lot to me. He didn’t like what I did, the danger I faced daily. I didn’t want to lose him, so I got out and we retired to Accra.”

  “And yet, years later?”

  Hendrick looked around the bar. It was quiet. The only other drinkers were a man and a woman sitting at a table in the far corner, an anonymous couple in their fifties he thought he’d seen back at the station at Élysées.

  “Marcus passed away a couple of years ago,” Miller was explaining. “Cancer. They can cure so many types of the disease these days, but not what he had. Mesothelioma. I’ve never felt anything like the pain, the grief, at watching him go.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Miller smiled. “Well, you must know what it’s like. Your daughter . . .”

  Hendrick said, “You never thought of suspension?”

  “I did, yes. But Marcus didn’t want that. I still don’t know if I resent him for that. At least, there might have been hope.”

  “Why did you rejoin the force?”

  “Because I was at a loose end. I had all the time in the world to grieve, regret the loss of Marcus, and what might have been. I was slowly going mad. And then I got a call from Behrens.”

  Hendrick pulled a face. “That bastard?”

  Miller paused, his glass before his lips. “You never liked him, did you?”

  “He’s corrupt and scheming and . . .” He stopped himself, shrugging. “Anyway, what did he want?”

  “He asked me to rejoin the team, specifically to track down a killer. And it took me about five seconds to consider the offer and say yes.”

  “And did you catch the killer?”

  Miller shook his head. “Still on the case a year down the line. That’s why I’m here. I’m still trying to trace her.”

  Hend
rick looked up. “Her?”

  Miller tapped his wrist-com. “What’s your code? I’ll route the pix through to your com.”

  Hendrick gave him the code, and a picture flared on his wrist-com. He sat back, breathless. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.

  He was twenty-five again, young and naïve and very much in love with the elfin installation artist, with startling blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, who just happened to be unhappily married to his boss.

  The intervening twenty years had been kind to Katerina Nordstrom; time had accentuated her beauty, turned her from merely pretty to beautiful.

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe it,” he said at last.

  “Believe it, Matt. That’s Katerina Nordstrom, Behrens’ ex-wife.”

  Hendrick stared at the African. “Ex?”

  “They had a nasty bust-up eighteen months ago. Word is he regularly beat her. She was having an affair, and it wasn’t the first. He found out about it and they separated.”

  “But who did she kill?” Hendrick asked, still finding it impossible to believe that the quiet, introverted woman he’d loved for six months would be capable of murder.

  “The guy she left Behrens for—a fellow artist, a pretty famous sculptor called Karl Jurgens. They’d been together a few months when, according to mutual friends of the couple, she found he’d been having an affair and she attacked him.”

  Hendrick gazed at Katerina’s pale Nordic features as she looked up from the screen, a slight smile playing on her thin lips. He felt sadness welling in his chest.

  “Jurgens was a laser sculptor,” Miller said. “That is, he carved material with lasers. Nordstrom took one of his tools from his studio when she found out about his affair, and decapitated him.”

  Hendrick killed the pix and closed his eyes.

  Katerina had been the first woman he had really, truly loved. He’d fallen in a big way, was sick with love. Time spent away from Kat was time that meant nothing, merely a negative interval until the next time he’d see her. They had to be careful, of course. had to keep the fact of their affair from his colleagues lest word got back to her husband, Hendrick’s boss Superintendent Gregor Behrens. Hendrick had been less worried about the consequences to himself if Behrens learned of their affair, and more worried what retribution the sadist would exact upon Katerina. They’d been married five years and for most of that time Behrens had physically abused her. Hendrick had pleaded with Kat to leave her husband. He said he’d quit the force; they’d leave Earth and start life on some colony world.

  Katerina had refused, which had mystified and hurt Hendrick at the time. She said that as much as she often hated her husband, a part of her loved him and could not leave him. It would, she said, destroy him. Hendrick had pleaded with her, asking her again and again how she could feel anything for someone who treated her with so little respect. Six months into their relationship, Hendrick’s continual questioning of her aberrant decision to remain with Behrens had finally driven Kat to break off their affair.

  Over the years Hendrick, older and wiser in the ways of the world and the wiles of the human heart, had come to realise that Kat had lied about her relationship with her husband. She had been either reliant upon the domineering Behrens or dependent on his wealth. Whichever, Hendrick had often looked back and realised that their separation had been for the best—especially when, a year later, he’d met and fallen in love with Maatje.

  And look, he thought bitterly as he stared through the thick glass window at the ice canal and the snow whipping down outside, how that had ended.

  Miller ordered two more beers. “Did you ever meet Nordstrom?”

  Hendrick sipped his beer and glanced at the African. He wondered whether, in his investigations so far, Miller had unearthed word of Hendrick’s affair with Kat. “Me and Kat, we had an affair. You didn’t know?”

  Miller opened his eyes wide. “You kept that damned quiet.”

  “We had to. If Behrens had found out . . .” He shrugged. “Anyway, it was nothing serious. A fling,” he went on, avoiding Miller’s probing gaze. “I just find it hard to believe that the woman I knew could murder anyone.”

  “Well, you’d better believe it. It was an open-and-shut case. Neighbours heard them arguing, heard his screams.”

  “And Katerina got away?”

  “She vanished as if she’d never existed. I think the killing wasn’t a spur of the moment thing, but carefully planned—which would explain how she managed to get away and cover her traces.”

  “That was a year ago, you said?”

  Miller nodded. “Just over. The Amsterdam cops drew a blank, which is why Behrens called me and a few others in. I traced her from Amsterdam to Paris. She Telemassed to Cantor’s World, Groombridge III, under an assumed name with perfectly forged biometrics, which is more evidence for the theory that it was all carefully planned.”

  “And now you think she’s here?”

  “From Cantor’s World, she travelled to Addenbrooke, where she disappeared, switched identities again. After a lot of footwork I found she’d had facial surgery and bought new false biometrics. I traced her out to a colony world orbiting Delta Pavonis, and from there to here. Apparently she arrived a couple of weeks ago. I have a team waiting at the station here in case she tries to get away, but it’s my guess that she’s here for the long haul. She means to stay here for five years.”

  “And if you don’t find her before the final transmission back to Earth in twelve days?”

  Miller smiled without humour. “Then, Matt, I’ll be in for the long haul too. I’ll search until I find the bitch, arrange for her to be sentenced and incarcerated here.”

  “And once you’ve found her, what then?”

  Miller shrugged. “I looked into the possibility of being seconded to the law enforcement agency here, once I’d tracked her down. But relations between Kallithea and Earth are pretty strained, and the last thing they wanted was a potential spy embedded with them over winter. So . . . I don’t know what I’d do, Matt. I just pray we find her before the last transmission.”

  Hendrick stared at his friend. “I don’t envy you having to winter here. Twelve days on this snowball will be enough for me.”

  Miller laughed. “But I don’t intend to stay, Matt. I have twelve days to find Nordstrom, and I swear I’m going to succeed or die trying.”

  Hendrick took a mouthful of beer and regarded the last inch in his glass. “You have any leads?”

  “A couple. The planet’s not a big place—a dozen cities the size of Ostergaart and twice the number of smaller settlements scattered around the globe. A population of around three million. There are not a lot of places Nordstrom can hide.”

  “Even so, twelve days doesn’t give you much time.”

  “I have a couple of contacts, someone who knew Nordstrom back in Amsterdam and a doctor who treated her ten years ago. They’re both here on Kallithea. Of course, that might be no more than a coincidence. But it’s a start.”

  Hendrick stared through the window. A great snowtrain slid past in absolute silence, spraying a spindrift of crushed ice against the glass. It melted and slid, and the scene outside was utterly still and frozen once again.

  “Do you have any other pix of Katerina?”

  “Sure.” Miller routed them through to Hendrick’s wrist-com, six hi-res pictures showing Katerina Nordstrom over the years. The images tugged at his heart, evoking memories and feelings he thought he’d buried long ago.

  “And this one is a computer enhancement showing how she might look now, according to witnesses.”

  The pix showed Kat with a wider face, fuller lips, auburn hair and brown eyes—but still, to Hendrick, recognisably Kat Nordstrom.

  He killed the pix and looked at Miller.

  “What?” the African asked.

  “Look, I’ll be kicking my heels around here for six days, until the next transmission when I need to be at the station. What I’m saying is that if you need s
ome help, we could work together on this.”

  Miller regarded him, calculating. “But you loved this woman,

  Matt.”

  “That was years ago. And like I said, it wasn’t that serious.” He paused, hoping Miller wouldn’t detect the lie. “We made a good team, you and me, years ago. Trust me, Ed. I won’t get too involved.”

  Miller thought it over for a while, then nodded. “Very well.” He regarded his wrist-com. “According to Paris time it’s almost two in the morning. What say we get some sleep and start work at ten?”

  Hendrick drained his beer and made to leave the bar. As he did so, he glanced over at the couple nursing their drinks at the corner table. They looked up and stared at him as he made for the door and followed Miller into the elevator.

  THREE

  THE SNOWTRAIN PLOUGHED THROUGH THE ICE TOWARDS the coast and the planet’s second city of Kepplenberg.

  From his window seat Hendrick looked out over a petrified landscape. They had left Ostergaart far behind and were crossing the vast wilderness of the northern continent, where only the occasional tree highlighted the absolute desolation. Not that Hendrick recognised the growths as trees. Miller, who’d had more time to study the planet, pointed out a tall mast-like column protruding vertically from the icefield. Only near its summit did the growth belie its essence as something natural: the iron-grey needle erupted into dozens of angular stems forming a sphere like a dandelion seed head.

  “Felvänd trees,” Miller said. “And would you believe that what you see there is its root system? Felvänd in Swedish means ‘back-to-front’ or ‘upsidedown’. They grow down through the permafrost and bloom in the subterranean caverns. These roots take sustenance from the light and air during the summer years and feed the foliage underground during winter, providing the natives, and humans, with a limited supply of fruit.”

  A dozen further trees came into sight, looking more like an array of radio antennae than a forest. “Are we likely to come across any of the Marl?”

  “According to what I’ve read, most of them will have gone into hibernation. They have sacred underground cells—each tribe or family based at a different location—and hibernate en masse. But I’ve heard that some individuals choose to remain awake well into winter, so we might be lucky and catch sight of one.”