Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Right now Kings Cross was in complete lockdown. The boundary fence was electrified and patrolled by sentry drones with nerve-block emitters, while guardian drones circled overhead, medium-power lasers firing at any bird that ventured too close in case they were creeperdrones. Down on the ground, the two large Government and Commercial Services portals were inactive, preventing any cargo from even entering the old station. The pedestrian portal to the national hub was also inactive. Even the ground-level glass entrance doors onto the plaza outside were closed and locked. Nobody in, nobody out.

  “So what’s the situation?” Yuri asked.

  “The lockdown followed procedure,” Kohei said. “As soon as the portals went inactive and the hub was sealed, our people cleared the staff out. There’s only a skeleton technical crew, which in reality is two people.”

  “Names?”

  “Jakil Hanova and Francis Frost.”

  Yuri studied their files; both of them had been with Connexion for over thirty years. “Okay, if they’re the ones tapping the reserve power cell, then they’re now quint brains wearing human bodies. What sort of security team did you send in at the start of the lockdown?”

  “It was a twelve-strong security squad under Anette Courte; three of them are drone and digital techs, the rest are straight paramilitary.”

  “When was the last time you heard from them?”

  “Courte reported in four hours ago, confirming everything was all right, and the perimeter was secure. We’re still getting basic suit telemetry from them, but that’s it.”

  “Damn. Assume they’ve been taken out.”

  “But…”

  “Kohei, if there are Olyix agents in Kings Cross hijacking an interstellar portal, you can guarantee our team’s been neutralized.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Do you know which of the portal doors is still open, and where it leads?”

  “No, we’ve no way of telling. All we can see is the power flow in.”

  “Okay. Contact our security chiefs in each of the star systems Kings Cross has portal links to. I want a quiet review of those trans-stellar hubs. Assume they are under hostile control unless proved otherwise.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Can you shut the power off?” Loi asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t,” Yuri said. “It’ll alert them.”

  “We can’t leave an open portal for the Olyix to reach a terraformed world,” Loi declared. “They’ll take one of their own portals through and thread up. For all we know, they have them big enough for a Deliverance ship to fly through.”

  “Then they’ve probably done it already,” Yuri told him.

  “No, sir, they have not.”

  Even the flash of anger at being publically contradicted by a junior was muted. Yuri put it down to a side effect of agnophet, or maybe he was actually starting to appreciate Loi. “How come?”

  “If they’d taken one of their own portal doors through, they wouldn’t still be using power from the reserve cell to keep our portal open.”

  “Shit. Good point. Kohei?”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Prep for an immediate takedown. I want you inside Kings Cross within fifteen minutes, full military-grade armor and weapons. The instant we have boots on the ground, cut that bastard emergency power feed—with a smart missile if you have to. I don’t know how many of Anette Courte’s team are left alive, but everyone you encounter in there is now designated as an enemy alien. Capture where possible, especially Jakil Hanova and Francis Frost. I have people who are very keen to examine a living quint subject. If the firefight gets too extreme, or it looks like Olyix agents are breaking out, you have my authority to exterminate them with maximum force.”

  “You got it. Er…Boss?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a buildup of civilians outside Kings Cross. They’re looking for a way offworld.”

  “Queuing to pick up their Darwin Award,” Yuri muttered. “They’ve been told the interstellar hubs are shut, haven’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad martial law won’t come in for another couple of hours. Okay, repeat the stay away instruction over solnet, but make it part of Connexion’s rolling advice on the hub network shutdowns. Let’s see if any of these morons acts in their own interest.”

  “And if they’re still there when we go in?”

  “We find out how fast they can duck.” From the corner of his eye he saw Loi stiffening, but for once the young man didn’t object. Yuri was obscurely sad about that. When someone like Loi ignored his moral compass to favor desperate necessity, you knew you were living in dark times indeed.

  “Got it, boss.”

  “And, Kohei—”

  “Yes?”

  “Be prepared for the worst-case situation. I was in a firefight with a covert Olyix operation once.” He gave Loi a bleak smile. “They use heavy-duty hardware like it’s going out of fashion. Have your people take care.”

  “I’ll supervise it myself.”

  There were a couple of hundred people milling around on the Kings Cross plaza. Kohei Yamada looked at them through twenty different viewpoints as bagez and taxez rolled smoothly along the tree-edged, clear route down the center of Euston Road. Their multiple perspectives were stitched into an imperial panorama by the security division’s G8Turing, allowing him to see the strained desperation clouding each of their faces. Families with kids, singles, couples were all unified by their slumped shoulders, swapping fear-magnified gossip as if it was real news, bagez gamely following them like bewildered puppies. Enterprising owners of fast food stalls had set up at the York Way end of the plaza, charging extortionate prices for burgers and noodles that inflated hourly—cryptoken payment only. Underfoot, the marble slabs were littered with ketchup-smeared wrappers spilling mushy fried onion rings for pigeons that hadn’t been scorched by lasers from the overhead drones.

  Kohei cursed the would-be refugees for their bovine stupidity. Every one of them—rich or poor, young or old—had fixated on the idea that the terraformed worlds offered sanctuary from the approaching Deliverance ships. No official announcement could shake that faith. They’d tried Yuri’s idea, reissuing Connexion’s statement about the interstellar hub shutdown, but no one had left.

  “In position,” Charlie Volk confirmed.

  Kohei’s tactical splash confirmed Volk’s thirty-strong assault force had reached their forward deploy locations: twenty of them spread out along St. Martin’s Park, using the big trees as cover, while the remaining ten were up on the rooftops of Euston Road and York Way. And for once Kohei was grateful the solnet was so badly glitched today, making it much harder for anyone inside Kings Cross to obtain coherent data feeds. The preparation phase, with everyone sliding unobtrusively into place, should have gone unnoticed.

  He hoped the same was true for the Liberty hub. The Connexion Security office on the terraformed plant orbiting 82 Eridani hadn’t taken long to establish that Olyix agents had seized the interstellar hub at their end. Now a tactical team was quietly moving into place around the main arrivals hall at the heart of the new world’s capital city. The recovery attacks would be launched simultaneously.

  “We’re ready,” he told Yuri.

  “The team on Liberty is in place,” Yuri replied. “They’ll go active simultaneously with you.”

  “Okay. I’m giving the go code for thirty seconds.” If there was one thing Kohei had learned when he was Yuri’s assistant back in Australia, it was don’t hesitate. Not in active missions. Hesitation gave the opposition time. And in combat situations, time was the greatest currency of all.

  Thirty seconds was long enough to review the full tactical splash, confirm the systems were all online, the drones were functional, the support crew in the Greenwich command center was prepared, the specialist
tech enforcement operators were embedded along the buildings in York Way, and that Volk’s people were powered up. So Kohei just let the tactical display timer run down. There was no advantage to him yelling go at everyone over the comms. He’d always hated that in the long-distant days when he was serving his time on the sharp edge. That kind of hands-on authority was nothing but a concession to the mission commander’s ego.

  Two seconds left on the countdown. The assault force powered up the microjets of their combat armor.

  The countdown reached zero. Greenwich cut the power from the emergency backup cell feeding the portal door out to Liberty. Denial drones hovering below the rooftops on Pentonville Road and Albion Yard went vertical and started to accelerate hard. The enforcement teams had installed masers along the street’s roofline that targeted the Kings Cross guard drones, puncturing their casings and incinerating their engineering guts in single blasts of energy.

  Assault mission plus one second: The denial drones crossed the established threshold and metapulsed the entire Kings Cross ground footprint—an electromagnetic overload that fried any unprotected electronics and created massive eddy surges in the interstellar hub’s power cables, blowing every chunk of equipment they were connected to. Even the metal girders supporting the ancient platform roofs and the newer western concourse suffered a huge current induction, spitting out slivers of static that clawed at the glass.

  Assault mission plus two seconds: A squadron of urban counter-insurgency drones rose from the fake taxez and deliverez rolling along the roads outside the hub. Their railgun scatter-kinetics punched into the pair of massive arched windows above the plaza, shattering the glass into a cascade of crystalline shards that poured down onto the plaza.

  Forty of them streaked through the jagged openings, aggressor software scanning urgently for targets.

  The twenty armor-suited figures of Volk’s assault force deployed in St. Martin’s Park soared into the air with a protective escort of thirty fighter drones. They streaked over the hub’s Commercial and Government Services yard before swooping low to fly in under the twin canopies of the roof.

  Assault mission plus three seconds: The despondent, stressed refugees occupying the plaza cowered from the railgun assault on the windows above, arms raised in Neanderthal instinct to ward off a threat. Cowering turned into full-scale fright as the deluge of perilous glass fragments plummeted out of the air, accompanied by the smoking wreckage of guardian drones that crashed down amid them. They sprinted away fast, doubled over and frantic. The youngest children were picked up, while older kids had their hands half crushed so they could be best dragged along, screaming and terrified, fighting to stay upright and keep up with taller, faster parents.

  It was Kohei who winced at their pitiful rout. Right by the entrance doors where glass shards formed treacherous mounds of crystalline spoil, he counted five bodies lying inert on the marble, trickles of blood leaking away. In the middle of the plaza, one guardian drone had fallen directly on top of a woman, crushing her into pulped meat, no longer recognizably human. A man was on his knees beside her, hands ripping at his hair, mouth opening for a scream that was never going to end.

  Kohei did nothing, because to micromanage the paramedic response would be to take his concentration off the assault. And as a proper commander trained by Yuri, he’d already designated one of his staff as civilian medical aide.

  No, focus back on the interstellar hub and the Olyix operatives who had subverted it. The place where he could do the greater good. And is that going to be our gospel from now on?

  Assault mission plus ten seconds: Surprisingly, the only resistance Charlie Volk’s force had encountered was from guard drones that had survived the metapulse. But they were no match for the invading team, whose fighter drones took them out with short hyperkinetic barrages from railguns. The armor suits flew fast down the length of the old platforms as Kohei asked: “What the hell is that?”

  Just inside the open end of the station, several logistics company vanez were parked in a semicircle, their cargo doors open. They formed a picket around some kind of machine that was under construction—a weird cluster of dark metal struts, the cybernetic ribs of some fantastical creature more than three meters tall, surrounded by spherical robots of various sizes. The metapulse had obviously killed it. Tendrils of smoke were rising up from the structure, while several of the robots were rolling aimlessly across the ground after falling off its top.

  “Good question,” Yuri said. “But at least it looks like they hadn’t finished building it.”

  Six of the assault team landed in front of the five-meter-diameter portal door used to transfer commercial cargo to Liberty, now a black inert slab. A couple of techdrones landed beside them and clamped themselves to the sensor pods covering the portal.

  “Should extract some data for you in a minute,” Kohei told Yuri. “Those sensors have an internal power backup, good for five weeks. If something went through to Liberty, they’ll have recorded it.”

  “Good work, but it looks like you were in time. I’m sending over a forensic team to look at that machine they were building.”

  “I hope they know their physics. I don’t think it’s going to be anything as simple as a good old-fashioned bomb.”

  “Found one,” Charlie Volk called. He landed farther down the platform, next to a figure in a Connexion light armor suit, who was lying on the ground. The visor was open. Charlie leaned in, scanning the exposed face. “Ozil Reus,” he said. “I know him.” The armor’s transponder tag wasn’t responding to Volk’s interrogation.

  “Is he alive?” Kohei asked.

  “Not getting any medical telemetry from the suit, but he’s definitely breathing.”

  Scarlet icons splashed up, grade-one toxicity alerts. “Shit,” Kohei grunted. “Charlie, the drone sensors are picking up an aerosol organophosphate in there. Nerve agent of some kind. We don’t have the specific molecular structure on record, but it’s a complex one.”

  “Great,” Volk said. “Alien nerve gas.”

  “Keep reviewing your suit integrity, people.”

  “You got a definite roger on that.”

  Fighter drones reached the row of pedestrian portals and began to fan out. They smashed the office windows along the eastern side of the building and glided in through the holes. Sensors detected a much higher concentration of the aerosol inside the rooms and corridors, so Volk kept his team back, hovering in the air outside, while the drones ran sweeps for the rest of Anette Courte’s missing squad.

  Their positions started to appear across Kohei’s tactical map, dispersed throughout the huge hub building. All of them were unconscious, sprawled where they’d succumbed to the nerve agent, armor suits inactive. That worried him; the suits should have been resistant to any kind of aerosol.

  Volk himself flew into the hub’s management center. Emergency lighting bleached the whole place in a stark green-white hue, revealing a line of old desks with worn screens and consoles. Jakil Hanova and Francis Frost were slumped in their seats, comatose and unresponsive. Volk landed beside them, with two of his team on guard and five fighter drones slowly patrolling around the room, watching the three entrances.

  Kohei squinted at the image splash from Volk’s suit. It was singularly useless, so he got his altme to zoom in. “Is that actually Frost?” he asked uncertainly. The facial features were similar, but…enlarged? Kohei couldn’t quite make out what was wrong. Maybe the cheeks were swollen; they certainly seemed to have some kind of curving ridge around the bottom of the eye sockets. Both eyes were closed, though Frost had been crying. Kohei could make out thick fluid trails. He frowned. “No eyelashes. Is that a fashion thing?”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy, chief,” Volk told him.

  Kohei watched Volk’s gauntlet reach out and lift an eyelid. “Holy fuck!”

  Frost had no eyeball.

&n
bsp; Kohei’s abdominal muscles clenched, fighting the gag reflex. “Check the other one,” he said.

  Volk gingerly did as requested. Both Frost’s eye sockets were empty.

  “That is one bastard of a nerve agent,” Kohei said. “Why the hell would you want one that melts eyes?”

  “If you can’t see, you can’t fight back?” Volk suggested.

  “I don’t think the nerve agent did that,” Yuri said. “Volk, would you check Frost’s chest and legs, please?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kohei watched keenly as Volk opened the shirt, which was when he realized how taut the fabric was over the man’s flesh. Again, like the face, there was something subtly wrong with the torso. It was the proportions that weren’t quite right, Kohei decided; Frost’s waist was as broad as his shoulders, yet there was no middle-aged flab.

  Then Volk extended a small activeblade from his gauntlet and cut the trouser fabric.

  “How the hell did he walk on those?” Kohei asked in surprise. Frost’s legs were anorexic, all skin and bone with no real flesh.

  “Let’s see the arms,” Yuri said.

  They were the same. Withered limbs whose skin had contracted to wrap tight around the bone, leaving a lacework of veins bulging along the surface.

  “I was very clear,” Yuri said. “No one with any Kcell implants was to be allowed into a Connexion facility! Why was Frost assigned to Kings Cross for an active deployment?”

  “There is no record of him having any Kcell procedures,” Kohei said. “And he was deep-scanned before he was sent out with Courte.” Part of him wanted to kick back against Yuri’s accusation of incompetence, while part of him was worried. “Is this why you issued the warning about Kcells?”

  “Yes. According to my source, they’re an integral part of the Olyix elevation program. They’re a specific cancer, formatted to transform a human body into a biological life support for the brain.”