Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Bastard,” Adnan screamed.

  Two cats pounced, and the armor suit lit up with zinging static webs as their taser claws scrabbled for purchase against the smooth surface. The suited figure juddered savagely and slowly pitched forward, the armor still coursing with electricity.

  “Keep going,” Tronde demanded.

  Ollie had reached the boundary of the allotments. The frenzied storm of light crashing out of the failing synth pigeons was slipping away. Now he could just make out Tronde and Adnan following him. Lars was a diffuse gray blob limping along after them.

  “Their drones will see our tracks in the vegetation,” Adnan said as they kicked their way through stubborn brambles and weeds, wriggling past the massive buddleias.

  “I got it,” Ollie said. He had no plans for this. Like always, he’d built some flexibility into the raid should anything get out of kilter, giving them the ability to react to unforeseen circumstances. Not this, though. Not an end-of-the-fucking-world shitstorm. But he was the Legion’s master tactician, the one they relied on to work out the mechanics of a raid. He usually spent weeks putting everything together, running simulations and refining it until he’d achieved perfection. Now he probably had thirty seconds before some bastard wyst bullet punctured his skull.

  Map, situation, resources, possibilities, and utter despair blurred into a single burning notion. Getaway run. But it can’t be straightforward.

  Still plotting it out, he got Tye’s darkware to snatch a taxez that was driving along Beddington Lane.

  Ollie changed direction. His tactical display was still recovering from whatever glitchware the ambush team had launched against them. Sirens were starting to sound. Behind them, the power relay station lights came back on like a sunrise, making him crouch lower. He’d never been so glad of buddleias before. The tall, brittle flower clumps towered over him, providing some coverage from airborne drones.

  Their tactical link allowed Tronde, Adnan, and Lars to follow him.

  “A taxez?” Tronde said. “You’re fucking kidding me. They’ll have it in seconds.”

  “Trust me,” Ollie shot back. The route was coming together fast. It had to; the alternative was dying. And it was good enough to bring the buzz back with it. A purer buzz than before. Darker. His initial panic was gone. His mind was flying, focusing like he was a Turing, a G-one-million. The way out was there.

  The snatched taxez braked by the rickety wooden fence as Tronde and Ollie scrambled over it. Tye killed the streetlights for a kilometer either way along Beddington Lane. More Legion darkware was drilling into the local civic network, denying the ambush team sensor imagery. The two of them piled into the taxez as Adnan vaulted the fence.

  “Come on,” Tronde shouted at Lars.

  Tye reported it was losing the darkware; one by one the lights along Beddington Lane were coming back on.

  “Oh, shit,” Ollie whispered. It was a G8Turing rooting out and wiping the darkware—it had to be; nothing else was as fast and smooth.

  Lars burst through the fence and jumped into the taxez. It set off fast, heading south. Tye loaded a remote steering package into the drive systems.

  “Take your explosives out,” Ollie said. “All of them, everything we’ve got.” He pulled the five explosives he was carrying from the stealth suit pockets. Jade had supplied them, palm-sized disks that could stick to the relay station’s equipment, ready for remote detonation.

  “What?” Tronde demanded.

  “Just do it!”

  The disks tumbled down onto the taxi floor. An unnerving number when put together in a pile and confined in such a tiny space. Ollie looked through the taxez’s curving windows. Five hundred meters ahead, the streetlights were switching back on, illumination racing toward them. The road’s invisible civic sensors were also recovering.

  Tye opened the taxez door without slowing the little vehicle.

  “Out,” Ollie snapped, and jumped. He hit the road badly, and rolled, banging knees and elbows. The suit fabric ripped. Bursts of pain thrashed down his nerves. He did his best to ignore it and surged to his feet. Right in front of him was a low fence. He flipped over it and fell two meters into the river Wandle. He never checked to see if the others had jumped, if they were following.

  Cries of discomfort and cursing above. Bodies came raining down, splashing heavily into the shallow water with more protests. The Wandle wasn’t a big river, no more than a wide stream, really, and quite a shallow one at that. The bed was mostly stone.

  “This way,” he told them, and started wading, his back to the power relay station and the faint sounds of commotion behind. The three other surviving Legion members said nothing. They followed, trusting him. His tarsus lenses were splashing him the taxez sensors, using a lownet channel he thought was completely untraceable. At least, he’d thought that before tonight.

  Safety overrides were loaded in, allowing him to accelerate it along Hilliars Lane past its standard forty-five kilometers per hour limit. The vehicle wasn’t really built for speed. It hit fifty kilometers per hour, and Ollie was having trouble taking the clear path’s curves, which was bad news; he had a critical sharp-left turn coming up. Eight-year-old Ollie was an avid Garth Track player, king of the course; he could do this. But the taxez didn’t have magturbo, nor splatter missiles and zolt guns. Then again, Croydon didn’t have rampant Malzuli the size of dinosaurs to dodge. Just one left turn. One. Come on!

  Ollie froze midstream, teeth gritted as the taxez hit the turn, living it so hard and real his body swayed, fighting the roll as one of the taxez wheels left the ground. It made the turn onto the A232 and rocked about on its suspension, bodywork dinting as it struck a couple of bollards, making it the world’s biggest pinball shot. Then he was back out dead center of the clear path, rocketing up the acceleration to a giddy seventy kilometers per hour, with red motor warning icons splashing bright and a weird vibration constantly pushing the taxez to the left, which he then had to fight.

  Drones were swooping down out of the strange shield-roofed sky. Blue and red strobes were ahead of the taxez now, big police four-by-fours charging toward him.

  “Now,” he told Tye.

  The explosive disks skittering around on the taxez floor detonated in unity.

  Ollie opened his eyes and breathed in deeply. The buzz was lifting him so high he must be walking on the water, not wading through.

  “We’ve bought maybe ten minutes,” he said. “They’ll figure it out fast enough when the drone sensors can’t find any body parts.”

  They hurried along, kicking their way through the water. Here the Wandle had prim stonewall banks that wound along the back of nondescript houses, then it made some sharp turns through playing fields before cutting across Grange Garden parkland. Finally, it opened out into a long lake that straddled the middle of the park. By the time they got there, Lars was in trouble, struggling to stay upright. Adnan waited on the reed-clogged bank until he caught up, then helped the hulking man up onto the mown grass above. Ollie led them through the shaggy old willow trees overhanging the water, grateful for the cover they provided. Their rustling whip-branches heavy with leaves would be hard for a drone to scan through.

  They reached a narrow footbridge over the lake, illuminated by dainty blue-and-green floor lights. Adnan stopped and opened the front of his hood. Shadows seemed to flood into the gap, obscuring his face. Twin points of creepy pale light glimmered in the darkness where his artificial eyes reflected the weird light shimmering off the shield. “What were you thinking?” he demanded angrily. “Attacking that cop could have got you killed.”

  “Fuck that,” Lars grunted. He coughed, wincing as the jerky motion shifted his damaged ribs; Ollie thought he saw blood specks coming out of Lars’s mouth when he coughed.

  “They shot Piotr. You never let that lie. Not ever. They take one of us, we take ten of them.”
<
br />   “Gareth was coming to help you. That’s when they shot him. Your fault, you moronic arsehole. Yours! He was my friend, and now he’s dead.”

  “I’m going to kill them,” Lars insisted. “You and Ollie know how to find out who done it on the solnet, who was on the team, like. Get their names and I’ll find the bastards. I don’t care how long it takes. I’ll make them pay. I’m gonna make their world fill up with blood and pain.”

  “For fuck’s sake!” Tronde yelled. He spun around, fists rising. For a moment Ollie thought he was going to strike Lars. “Get it through your stone-solid head: We’re the bad guys. We’re breaking the law. We’re the criminals. They’re the police. And you’ll get to meet them soon enough, because they are going to be the ones hunting us down. You either killed that cop or messed him up bad. They will not forget, and they will not forgive. If we’re lucky, it’ll be Zagreus for us. Understand? Zagreus if we’re lucky. It’s called hell for a reason.”

  Lars hung his head. “I got him, though. Everyone will know; they’ll remember that. They’ll remember the Legion.”

  “But they won’t fucking care, will they?” Adnan spat. His free arm shot up, pointing at the shield above, giving Lars no choice but to follow his accusing finger. “I’ve been tracking what’s going on out there. We’re being invaded. The Olyix are coming, and they’re going to wipe us all out.”

  “What?” Lars frowned in confusion.

  Tronde faced Ollie. “Dump him. Leave him here. That way we’ll stand a chance. We’ll get to live to see whatever war is coming, maybe even fight in it. But not if we stick with him.”

  “Ollie!” Lars pleaded desperately. “No, mate. Don’t leave me!”

  Ollie wondered how the hell he’d suddenly taken Piotr’s place as leader. “We’re the Southwark Legion; we get out together. Nothing gets decided in heat. After…”

  Tronde let out an exasperated sigh and kicked the side of the bridge. “Shit! I still think you’re a fucking moron.”

  “Come on,” Ollie said. “I’ve got our taxez online. It’s coming for us.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Tronde asked.

  “It’s all I’ve got left. If they can track that, after all the coding Gareth and I put in to safeguard it, then it’s all over anyway.”

  “True,” Adnan said stoically.

  Ollie started walking again, shoving the dense willow fronds aside so Adnan and Lars could push through. Even in the deep gloom cast by the trees he could see how much difficulty Lars was in. Tronde wound up helping, with Lars putting his arms around both of them. When they got past the end of the lake, they were practically dragging him along.

  The A237 along the south of the park was a residential road, and almost deserted; no pedestrians, and only a few taxez humming along. Ollie couldn’t even see any bagez or deliverez rolling past. The lack of people unnerved him as much as the knowledge that they were the center of a powerful police hunt. Maybe the police have cleared everyone off the road? Make sure there’s no civilians in their kill zone when we walk into it?

  More likely everyone was watching the same frightening feed that was splashed on the edge of his tarsus lenses, the one showing Salvation of Life separating into two unequal sections. But they’d all hurried home to be with family and loved ones, while he was pretty sure the Legion had no home left anymore.

  The taxez rolled smoothly into view a couple of hundred meters away, and Ollie got Adnan to tackle the A237’s civic sensors, using fresh darkware that he prayed the police G8Turings wouldn’t detect. They waited for the vehicle in the umbra of a big cherry tree whose broad leaves blocked the full glare of the streetlights. Their battered and torn stealth suits still managed to gather a degree of protective obscurity around them.

  “Where are we going?” Lars asked.

  “Haven’t got a clue,” Ollie admitted.

  The taxez braked beside them, and they hurried in. The door slid shut, and it accelerated away. Ollie just hoped the darkware had disguised the vehicle’s hiatus; if not, the G8Turings would be all over them.

  The taxez windows turned opaque, and the interior lights came on. They stared at one another.

  “Holy shit,” Tronde said. “You look terrible.”

  “Who?” Ollie asked.

  “All of you.”

  “Yeah, and you’re just a fucking vision, you are.”

  Now that he was sitting, Ollie was aware of the pain throbbing away in most of his limbs from cuts and bruises. Ears ringing from the exploding squirrel creeperdrones. Bad taste in his mouth, which he was pretty sure was blood. And he must have twisted an ankle jumping into the Wandle. He checked around for the taxez’s medic kit beneath the seat. It was a mandatory emergency pack whose contents hadn’t been refreshed in years, but the antiseptic pac would be okay for cuts, because sure as fuck the river water was thick with venomous germs.

  “Seriously?” Adnan asked. “You haven’t got anywhere for us to go?”

  “No. I don’t know what’s safe.” Ollie unsealed the front of his stealth suit and started to wriggle his arms out. His elbow protested with a surge of hot pain; blood was dripping from a nasty-looking gash. “Adnan, you need to quiet-access sensors, see what’s happening back home.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Ollie continued taking his suit off. The legs were soaking wet and covered in a mud that stank like sewage. They squelched down onto the floor, and he realized he couldn’t throw them out of the taxez onto the road. Civic sensors would see—exactly the kind of thing the G8Turings would be searching for. The classy real-cotton jeans he wore underneath were ruined, stained rancid brown halfway up the thighs. On top of everything else, it was almost too much. The buzz was gone now, lost in a swamp of misery.

  “Uh-oh,” Adnan muttered.

  Ollie pretty much knew what he was about to see, but he accessed Adnan’s feed anyway. Splashed across his tarsus lenses was a stream from civic sensors on Consort Road that weren’t even close to the railway arches. The road’s clear path was clogged with more than a dozen hefty police vehicles, their strobes painting the walls of the houses in metallic pastels. Armored figures carrying long-barreled magrifles advanced under the shaggy trees, closing on the arches, while oblate drones ruled the air above.

  “They know who we are,” Tronde said in dismay.

  “How do they know?” Lars asked. “Did Jade rat us out?”

  “Piotr and Gareth,” Adnan said sadly. “They’ll have sampled the bodies and run their DNA. It’d give them a straight identification. The Legion’s in the Metropolitan Police network; the Gang Office will have files on us.”

  “It’s so quick, though,” Lars said. “What? Ten minutes.”

  “Eleven,” Ollie said. “That’s fast, sure. We stung them hard.” He couldn’t help glancing at Lars, who was slumped in the seat opposite, hood open to show a gray face slick with cold sweat.

  “You mean the one I took down?” Lars said with a dark grin.

  “Probably. But this Olyix thing has made everyone crazy tonight. Everyone’s freaking out. They’re overreacting to farts.”

  “You don’t think…” Tronde said.

  “Think what?”

  “I dunno. The Olyix, they’re invading, right? Government and allcomments are both saying that now, so they probably are. And we were taking down a power relay station. Same time.”

  “That’s mad,” Ollie said hotly. “Jade’s been jerking us around for months over this raid.”

  “You don’t plan an invasion overnight,” Tronde said thoughtfully. “And we’ve never met who Jade works for.”

  “Nikolaj,” Adnan said quickly.

  “Jade works with Nikolaj. We don’t know who they work for.”

  “It’s a major North London family,” Ollie said, fighting the new worry maggot stirring inside his brain. “Gotta be. The fucking O
lyix aren’t going to bother with crap like racket scams, and that’s what we’ve been doing for Jade.”

  Tronde pulled a face. “Yeah. I suppose.”

  “Oh, shit,” Adnan gasped. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  “What?” Ollie barked in alarm as Adnan’s sensor feed cut out abruptly. He knew how pathetic his voice sounded, but tonight he had every right.

  “A backtrack,” Adnan said. “They were backtracking my feed from Consort Road.”

  “Fuck, man, why didn’t you use the lownet to snatch the sensor feeds?” Ollie shouted.

  Adnan gave him a frantic look. “I did.”

  “What?”

  “I did.”

  “But…Turings can’t get into the lownet.”

  “Well, apparently they can!”

  “Oh, Jesus fucking wept. This isn’t happening!”

  “Did they get us?” Tronde asked. “Adnan! Do they have the taxez?”

  “I don’t think so. My cutouts are good.”

  Ollie dropped his head into his hands. “Fuck. Oh, fuck, this cannot be happening.” He realized he hadn’t even thought of Piotr and Gareth, he’d been too focused on simply surviving. Now his vision was nothing but exploding skulls and Gareth’s body convulsing into a crucifixion pose as it crashed down.

  “Where do we go?” Lars moaned, rocking back and forth. “Where do we go? Where do we go? Where do we—”

  “Shut up!” Adnan screamed.

  “Richmond,” Tronde said. “Yeah, Richmond,” he repeated firmly.

  “What?” Ollie asked.

  “They’ll have every file we ever accessed by now, right?” Tronde said bitterly. “The G8s will be all over our data. Friends, family, where we hang out, who we deal with. Jade, too, probably. Everything we ever accessed in the solnet. But we never used the solnet for Claudette. A matcher gave her to us. It was verbal. She’s safe. There’s no digital connection.”