The man was on the ground, his back propped up against an oak tree. Middle aged, with a dark complexion and thick ebony hair tied into a waist-long tail by a glittering scarlet band. His chin was resting on his chest, a line of drool leaking out of the corner of his mouth. Sometimes his eyes would open at the same time he shook his head, as if fighting sleep.
One of Crina’s drones kept watch a meter above him. She sent three more to scour the area while she kept looking up into the branches overhead.
“Hey there, fella,” Horatio said, kneeling beside him. “Can you hear me?” He reached out.
“No,” Gwendoline said instinctively. “Don’t touch him. He might be contagious. God knows what state the hospitals are in. I don’t want you catching anything odd. Not today.”
Horatio gave her a mildly annoyed stare, but nodded and withdrew his hand.
“His altme isn’t replying to my ping,” Crina said. “Not even a basic confirmation response. It must have been hit by darkware.” The drone descended and landed on the man’s neck. “High temperature,” she reported, “but heart rate low. That’s odd.”
Gwendoline told Theano to call for a medevac. She’d seen it in action enough times. A fast drone would swoop down on an accident zone and drop a one-meter-diameter portal, with its twin in an emergency department; victims usually received professional trauma treatment within three minutes.
“National medevac service has been suspended,” the altme replied.
“You’re kidding.”
“Negative.”
“Options?”
“I have a channel open to the London Civic Health Agency. Its management network is providing paramedic assistance for medical emergencies.”
“Okay, go with that.”
“The request has been logged with the agency.”
“Wait? Logged? When will they be here?”
“They are trying to respond to each case within an hour.”
“For fuck’s sake,” she muttered. “Well, see if you can prioritize it.”
“Acknowledged.”
“So what do we do?”
“Not a lot,” Horatio said. “Given we don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“There’re some more,” Crina announced.
“More what?”
“More casualties ahead. Two of them, a hundred and twenty meters.”
“The same as this?” Gwendoline asked.
“Looks like it.”
“What is this, an epidemic?”
The bodyguard shrugged.
“Horatio? Do we help them?”
“I want to,” he said guardedly, “but we’re not doctors. I don’t understand what’s wrong.”
“Nark?” she suggested. It was that kind of neighborhood, where the busy and important relaxed with friends at the end of a long day, where a drink was never quite enough…“They don’t want to face the Deliverance ships?”
“I dunno…”
“We should look at the others, at least.”
Crina glanced around again. “Okay. But not too close, please.”
A man and a woman were lying on the grass. From their positions, Gwendoline thought the man might have collapsed first, and the woman went to help him before losing consciousness. The way she lay practically across him was almost romantic, lovers asleep. They were definitely dressed like locals; stylish fitness gear produced in high-end printers, his t-shirt short to show off the perfect abs; while she wore spray-on leggings and a halter that was mostly straps across flawless ebony skin.
“Executive power couple,” Gwendoline decided. There were certainly enough of them living in Chelsea. Though she’d rarely seen any quite so devoted to this level of physical perfection. They must have spent plenty of time and money in clinics to get features that would shame the old Greek gods; she couldn’t really judge which of them was prettiest.
“Their clothes are soaking,” Horatio said. “They must have been lying here when the sprinklers came on this morning.”
“Hell, how long have they been here?”
One of Crina’s small drones landed on the woman’s bare arm.
“It’s the same,” she announced. “High temperature, low heart rate.”
“What’s wrong with her feet?” Horatio asked.
Gwendoline looked at the new lime-green-and-black trainers the woman had on. “Not what I’d choose, but…”
“Look again,” he said.
The trainers were too big, Gwendoline realized. Actually, now she was giving it her full attention, the bottoms of the leggings were also badly fitting, hanging loose around very bony ankles—which should have been impossible in this age of customized printing. “It’s like she’s got anorexia. But I don’t see how she could have run in those in the first place. It’d be like wearing slippers.”
Without a word, Horatio bent down and pulled at one of the trainers.
“Careful!” Gwendoline said.
“I’m not touching the skin,” he said and gave a final tug. The trainer came off quite easily. Gwendoline could see why: the woman’s foot had been reduced to a knobby lump, as if all the muscle and tendons had been removed, and the skin had shrunk around the bones, compressing them into a jumbled lump.
“What the fuck?” She stared in dismay for a long moment, then glanced over at the man. His running trainers were too big as well. Then she saw the hand that was half hidden by the woman’s body on top of him. “Shit! Horatio, his hand!”
It was badly withered. But that wasn’t what had startled her. The skin on the underside of the fingers had sprouted a silky white fur that was tethering the hand to the ground.
“Jesus wept,” he grunted. “Are those roots?”
“Bioweapon!” Crina exclaimed. “Step away. Now.”
Gwendoline stumbled back, more from shock than the bodyguard’s alarm. She and Horatio shared a frightened look. “Not a bioweapon,” she whispered. “Kcells. They’ve started cocooning.”
Horatio put his arm around her and urged her farther away. “We need to get home.”
She nodded, too alarmed to speak. As they hurried away, always glancing over their shoulders, she was sure she saw some of the Fellnike Troop starting to appear at the far end of Beaufort Street.
“When we get to the penthouse, we stay there,” she said.
Horatio gave her a grim smile. “Not arguing.”
“And I’m using the secure channel to Greenwich. The family needs to know cocooning has started.”
“Yeah. But…roots?”
“I suppose the Kcells need nutrients from somewhere. They can’t sustain the brain for long just consuming a body’s limbs.”
“That is some very powerful biotechnology.”
“Yes. We’ve always known the Olyix are ahead of us in that field. This is when we find out just how far ahead.”
They reached the Thames embankment and turned right to hurry along the pathway high above the exposed mud of the riverbed. Gwendoline was surprised how much it smelled.
Every time they passed someone, she gave them a keen look, judging them via their appearance. She hated herself for being so shallow. But a stern voice in her head was telling her this was the way it was going to be from now on.
Some irrational part of her had been convinced the penthouse would refuse to let them in. So many of the things she took for granted had failed in the last few days. But the black door swung open, and she stepped over the threshold, feeling ridiculously relieved. All her emotions were so heightened right now it was like being a teenager again.
“I don’t know if I should call Loi direct,” she told Horatio. “I want Ainsley III to know about the cocooning, but I don’t want to be a pain to Loi.”
“You must know someone else with direct access to Ainsley III?”
�
��Well, yes.” She stood to one side to let the bagez roll past.
In the vestibule, Crina slumped against the wall and slowly slid down onto the floor. Her eyes were fluttering as she tried to focus.
“Bloody hell.” Horatio knelt beside her, putting his hand on her sweat-soaked forehead. “She’s burning up.” He stopped and gave Gwendoline a frantic look. “Do you think…?”
“Oh, shit, no. Please!” Gwendoline knelt beside him. “Crina? Crina, can you hear me?” There was no response. She gave the bodyguard’s legs a guilty look. “She was walking funny out there.”
“I saw.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then together they started to undo one of Crina’s sturdy boots. When they pried it off, they saw the woman’s foot had crumpled up into a bulbous vestige.
“Crap. Now what?”
When asteroid 2077UB was discovered, it chased a mildly irregular trans-Saturn orbit and measured three and a half kilometers in diameter. Its icy composition gave it a nebulous coma from the gradual outflow of volatiles from its nucleus. That made it a valuable commodity to the Fletcher-Wilson corporation, which landed a probe on its craggy surface in 2096. The probe threaded up a two-meter portal that allowed three corporate lawyer-astronauts through, along with a basic inflatable life-support pod. After a full day’s residence, they claimed it as an independent nation and installed a G3Turing as its interim governor. It assigned Fletcher-Wilson full mineral extraction rights.
Two years passed, and a batch of heavy-duty mining equipment was delivered to 2077UB from an archipelago of industrial stations barnacled to the surface of Ismene—a big rock in the main asteroid belt. They were owned by a consortium of Australian and New Zealand billionaires who had turned Ismene into a habitat construction center. The crushed ice from 2077UB was processed in a refinery, removing the dust and other contaminants to produce water purer than an Antarctic glacier. It was pumped through a portal to pour out of the axis sprinklers of the newly completed McDivitt habitat—a cylinder thirty-five kilometers long and eight in diameter. The desert-dry soil covering the rumpled landscape soaked it up until it was saturated, after which it flowed along the carefully sculpted valleys into empty stream beds, which in turn trickled into rivers that ran the length of the habitat to empty into a broad circumfluent lake. From there, pumps sent the water back up to the axis shaft to repeat the cycle on a daily basis.
With the first week’s rains came aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, finding a welcome home amid the pristine soil granules. For months after, automated agronomy tractors roamed the land drilling grass seeds and scattering worms atop the moist surface, while aquatic plants took hold along the streams and rivers and lake. Once the grass was established, the tractors returned with larger plants. Later still, a sophisticated genealogy of insects were released into the air to take advantage of the first flowers that bloomed amid the previously uniform emerald interior, kicking off pollination. A mere seven years after the first rain fell, small animals were released into a biosphere capable of supporting them without further human intervention.
* * *
—
Now brightly colored birds flashed through the treetops, while big flying fox bats hung from the palms and branches, leaving armadillos, tuataras, and frogs to scuttle through the undergrowth. Every footstep Kandara took was accompanied by a ripple of animal movement and their sharp cries of alarm. None of the habitat’s native creatures were being evacuated to Eta Cassiopeiae’s billionaire belt where McDivitt’s human population had fled; there were just too many. The ecologists who had crafted the habitat’s rich flora and fauna had been altogether too successful; the giant cylindrical landscape was teeming with life. And right now that triumph was a big problem.
The tropical plants were so vigorous they’d grown into a single giant tangle. Kandara’s armor suit could shove her through the vines and fronds and low branches, but nothing like as quickly as she wanted. And the four bioborgs following after her were having an even worse time of it.
She stopped and looked around the thick wall of vegetation surrounding them.
“Mother Mary! This isn’t going to work,” she announced.
“What’s wrong?” Yuri asked. He was back in Connexion’s security operation center deep under Manhattan, personally supervising the capture mission.
“This jungle is too dense. The tree huggers who built this place clearly don’t get the concept of plant maintenance.”
“Oh, they get it. McDivitt’s biosphere is a case study of success because it needs very little modification to sustain it.”
“Yeah? Well, it’s going to kill us. Look, the plan relies on the Olyix chasing the bioborgs down an irrigation maintenance tunnel where we can spring our trap, right?”
“Yeah, so? No jungle down the tunnel.”
“So, the bioborgs have got to be seen, and seen quickly as soon as the Olyix break into McDivitt, because it’s going to be pretty obvious pretty quickly that the evacuation hasn’t stalled, and this is just a con. Well, okay, no problem with getting spotted because we’re creating a very visible path smashing through the bush here. But that’s the whole point, nobody comes out here. Then when the bioborgs ‘notice’ the Olyix are after them, they run for the tunnel entrance. First off, you can’t run through this stuff. Secondly, I’m betting the entrance has the same amount of growth all over it. If I clear it in advance, the Olyix will know something’s up. We cannot afford them being suspicious; we only get one shot at this. I’ve done renditions where you lure a gullible target in. The scenario has to play out as real right up to the point we snatch one of the bastards.”
“You may have a point.”
“Damn right I do.”
“Plan B then, huh?” Alik’s cheerful voice asked.
Kandara stopped walking and turned around. She could just make out the habitat’s vast endcap through the oppressive tangle of greenery. The base was a single circular cliff of angled balconies, with every floor rich in trees and creepers; they were separated into distinct sections by large, crystalline, shell-shaped canopies jutting out like the prows of ships. “We’ll have to snatch one inside the residential section.”
“That works,” Yuri said.
“Yeah, you’ll still have a good advantage,” Alik said. “The residential sector is a maze they don’t know. You’ll be able to channel the Olyix along a specific route. Maybe place demolition charges to isolate one of them.”
* * *
—
Kandara smiled, imagining the glares and shrugs the pair of them would be trading back in New York. The drones that were circling overhead wheeled around as she started back down the little track, followed by the bioborgs. Five trollez made up the last part of her little convoy. The wild jungle was similar to the one back in Nebesa when she met Jaru Niyom—and remembering that made her wonder if sie would evacuate with the rest of the habitat. It’d be like hir to greet the Olyix invaders with a mystic smile and some profound maxim.
“Why do so many habitats go for a tropical biosphere?” she asked peevishly as her armor’s gauntlets slapped away yet another errant clump of bamboo that was crowding out the path.
“Says the person who lives in Rio.” Alik laughed.
“Thirty-five percent of Sol’s habitats are temperate,” Loi told her, “but the tropical ones have a fecund environment that is easier to maintain, thanks to their growth rate.”
“So no subarctic habitats, then, huh?”
“There are five, though all of them are small, under ten kilometers long. They were set up as biodiversity reserves to safeguard endangered species after the anthrochange.”
“We’re going to lose those, too, I suppose?” she said.
“Possibly,” Yuri said. “There were no Deliverance ships on course for them. Which we took to mean they were low on the Olyix priority list. I expect they’ll get around to
them eventually.”
“If we adopt the exodus habitat objective, we can carry every terrestrial DNA sequence with us,” Loi said. “They’ve all been catalogued, so we won’t lose any of Earth’s species.”
Kandara marveled at just how ideologically committed Loi was, given his Zangari heritage; it was almost as if he had a Utopial outlook. “Speaking of being on course, how are my Deliverance ships doing?”
“All three of them are holding steady,” Yuri told her. “Eight minutes until deceleration is complete.”
“Mother Mary!” Kandara eyed the endcap wall that loomed above the residential section, tracing the flat alp-like surface of rock and trees right up to the midpoint, where the axis spindle emerged. Even with her sensors on full magnification she couldn’t see the modifications Yuri’s people had made. “Are the power systems technicians out?”
“Finished and clear. Everything’s set.”
“And the long con?”
“We’re still running it. As far as everyone knows, McDivitt’s evacuation is screwed up. The con’s line is that there’re still five thousand people left inside McDivitt, and Connexion is working its ass off to get them to Eta Cassiopeiae in time. We even got allcomments to pick up on the governor’s rant to Alpha Defense, demanding they get him and his family out. It’s just a shame the Olyix have screwed up so much of solnet, but their operatives must be picking it up.”
“Nicely done.” She liked the elegance of the deception even as she resented its necessity. McDivitt was the fourth habitat they had planned the snatch operation around. From a selfish cynic’s view, Callum’s defense of the MHD asteroids had worked too well. She couldn’t really blame him for his success, but that success had turned into a major headache for her. Alpha Defense had been surprised—and delighted—when the Deliverance ships had started to change course from the habitats and head out to the trans-Neptune MHD asteroids. Evacuation of the habitats had proved so effective that the Olyix had been left with practically no humans to capture and cocoon by the time they broke a shield and their troops swooped in. So it must have been an easy calculation for the Salvation of Life onemind. Invading the habitats was now just a waste of time for them. Unless of course something went seriously wrong with an evacuation.
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