by Gary Gibson
‘Nope.’ Lee shook his head. ‘Pykrete’s hard as steel, makes the pharms extremely resistant to a direct assault. Now, the guns have cooled chambers that—’
Just then a waitress deposited a tall green bottle and three glasses on the table between them. Hsingyun quickly poured them each a shot.
‘A celebration,’ he said, pushing a glass each in front of Saul and Jacob. ‘Tonight we sleep as rich men.’
Saul recognized the brand as one containing a variety of powerful synthetic psycho-actives native to Kepler. He caught Jacob’s eye and nodded at him to come closer.
Jacob leaned over the table towards him and, for once, Saul was glad of the pounding music. ‘Why are we drinking this shit?’ he demanded.
‘It’s not that strong,’ Jacob yelled in his ear. ‘Read the label; it’s a mild derivative at best. You’ll get a bigger hit from the alcohol, I swear.’
‘Mr Lassen,’ Hsingyun raised his glass towards Saul with a smile that sent shivers down his back, ‘if you will.’
Saul picked up his glass, unable to resist a certain fascination at the way the sudden movement made the gene-engineered bioluminescent bacteria within the liquid glow more brightly. He knew the consequences if he failed to drink it.
He shot a quick, angry look at Jacob, when he was sure Hsingyun wouldn’t notice, and swallowed the contents in one go.
‘So this ice-pharm we’re going to,’ Saul asked a little while later, ‘what does it research?’
‘They collect samples of sea-life, mostly microbial,’ said Hsingyun. ‘As I’m sure you’re aware,’ he tapped the rim of his glass with a fingernail, ‘the rewards for finding commercially exploitable gene-sequences are enormous.’
‘And how many of the pharms are doing actual legitimate research, as opposed to just synthesizing illicit drugs?’ asked Saul.
Hsingyun smiled enigmatically. ‘We all need to make a profit to survive, Mr Lassen, whatever rules the Coalition may impose on us.’
Playing his part, Saul patted the briefcase next to his knee and grinned. ‘Couldn’t agree more.’
Hsingyun nodded. ‘Money is the only thing that matters, whatever world you’re on. If you don’t know that, you’re just one of the sheep. Which reminds me.’
He dipped one hand into a pocket.
Saul tensed, but Hsingyun withdrew only a slim roll of pale yellow paper, pulling it open to reveal several tiny powder-blue balls individually wrapped in cellophane, each one stamped with a minuscule portrait of a wolf howling under a full moon. Hsingyun next reached into another pocket and withdrew an inhaler-like device, loading three of the balls of loup-garou into its chamber.
Saul felt as if a yawning chasm had opened up inside his gut.
‘A little confidence boost always helps, yes?’ Hsingyun enquired, glancing between his two companions.
Saul watched dry-mouthed as Jacob took the first hit. The stuff was favoured by street gangs back home, and by Mexical hijacking crews in particular. There were stories that it had achieved near-religious significance amongst the death squads roaming the Russian wastelands. Loup-garou wildly boosted aggressiveness, while reducing the controlling influence of the super ego. It didn’t exactly make you grow fur or sprout fangs, but the feeling it gave you was close enough.
Jacob’s head jerked back as he fired the sweet-smelling smoke down his throat, then laughed as the drug punched its way through the soft tissues of his lungs and into his bloodstream. A thin wisp of smoke curled out of one nostril.
Hsingyun was next, inhaling sharply. Saul knew that, when his own turn came, he had a perfectly good excuse for not indulging. He could tell Hsingyun he wanted to keep his head clear, particularly if they were expecting to engage in serious business. But, as Jacob’s new friend passed him the inhaler, Saul found that all he could really think about was just how good it had felt the last time he’d taken a hit, and wasn’t it a damn shame he’d left it for so long.
He pressed the inhaler against his lips and clicked the igniter button. The acrid smell of burning plastic filled his nostrils, and a moment later smoke tasting faintly of peppermint and ash plunged its way through his lungs.
Saul breathed in deeply. Already he felt sharper, more alert, more in control. His tongue and the back of his throat tingled as he passed the inhaler back over, feeling now like he could handle anything the night could throw at him. He watched with detached amusement as Jacob tipped his head back and howled at the ceiling. Hsingyun laughed in response.
An indeterminate number of drinks later, they stumbled out of the bar and into a taxi that sported an actual human driver. Ten minutes later they found themselves standing on the edge of a bleak-looking airstrip running parallel to a long stretch of shore. A single unmanned drone-copter waited for them on the flat concrete, its blades already slowly rotating in anticipation of their arrival.
While Hsingyun and Jacob argued over who got to pay for their flight, Saul stepped over to the edge of the airstrip nearest the ocean and stared out at the slate-grey sea. His wife and daughter came, unbidden, to mind as a frozen wind pulled at the hood of his heavy parka, and he found himself remembering Deanna and Gwen the way they’d been before they’d left for Galileo, almost a dee before. A feeling of bottomless despair fought its way past the haze of alcohol and narcotics, and gripped his heart in a vice.
A lot could happen in ten years, and Galileo had been caught up in the middle of an uprising when the wormhole gate had collapsed. A starship carrying a new wormhole link was now only months away from achieving orbit around Galileo, but instead of feeling elated, all Saul felt was a numb apprehension. He hoped and prayed they were still alive, but beneath that lay the guilt. If it hadn’t been for him, Deanna would never have taken up that administrative post on Galileo, and never taken their daughter there with her.
He sighted several dark shapes moving against the tide, sinuous, writhing things swimming in parallel. But by the time Jacob yelled over to him to hurry the fuck up and get on board, the black-skinned creatures had slipped back beneath the waves.
The three of them fell into silence once they climbed inside the aircraft’s cramped fuselage. The pitch of its blades rose to a whine as it lifted into the air and headed out over the ocean, dipping occasionally to fight its way past a strong headwind.
Hsingyun dug out his inhaler once more, and offered them another hit. Saul very nearly put his hand out to restrain Jacob as he pressed the device to his lips but, instead, waited until his own turn came, before accepting the device with gratitude.
We’re fucking this up, he thought, pressing the inhaler to his lips. The smoke tasted sweet and sharp in his lungs, and immediately he felt like he’d grown taller and stronger.
Barely twenty minutes after setting out, the ’copter began to drop lower once more. Saul leaned his head against the window, and found himself staring down at a flat white plain that appeared to extend to the horizon on all sides. For a moment he thought they must be back over land, until he caught sight of a line of black water foaming against the expanse of ice.
He knew how big some of the pharms could get, but this had to be one of the largest. He could make out a few dozen pre-fab buildings clustered below, off-white domes and warehouses that nearly merged into the ice itself, distinguishable only by the corporate logos on their roofs and the faint shadows they cast under the moonlight.
Once they had landed, they disembarked into a bitingly cold wind. There was no sense of motion, however, no way to tell that they were standing on a chunk of floating pykrete rather than on solid ground. Saul peered into the distance, but was unable to discern where the ice ended and the water began.
‘What’s to stop the Sphere authorities or anyone else just landing here and storming the place?’ Saul yelled over the sound of the wind.
‘You mean if we weren’t already paying them not to?’ Hsingyun yelled back, withdrawing a small antenna-like device and holding it out in the direction of the nearest dome. ‘Well, since yo
u ask, there are mines buried in the ice all around us. I can find the safe path through the minefield, so just follow behind me and stay close, unless you want to blow yourselves the fuck up.’
The pre-fab buildings proved to be much larger than they had appeared from the air. Many were several storeys in height, and he spotted a few automated vehicles traversing the narrow roads linking buildings and warehouses.
‘Nobody here to greet us?’ Saul asked.
‘Trust me, they know we’re here,’ Hsingyun replied, over his shoulder, before stepping forward cautiously. The antennae device he clutched in his gloved hand gave a beep, and he began to walk more quickly.
As he and Jacob fell in behind him, Saul was not entirely unfamiliar with the technology Hsingyun was using. He knew they were, in fact, stepping directly on top of mines as they approached the dome. The mines communicated with each other by radio frequency, activating or deactivating according to pre-set patterns, meaning that the ‘safe’ path through them could change as often as you programmed it to. You therefore needed something hooked into the same encrypted network in order to find your way through the minefield without getting killed.
Saul caught Jacob’s eye and flashed him a dark look. If this turned out to be a trap and they needed to get out, it was going to be almost impossible to negotiate the minefield without Hsingyun’s device.
We should have said the warehouse, or no deal, Saul wanted to yell.
THREE
Kepler Colony, Sphere Administered Development Zone, 15 January 2235
Hsingyun paused and suddenly changed direction a couple of times as they moved towards the dome, stopping and walking off briefly to the side before moving forward again. Saul and Jacob took care to follow very closely in his footsteps.
The snow crunched beneath Saul’s boots, the cold quickly finding its way through the soles and numbing his toes. His testicles appeared intent on crawling back inside his body every time he saw a dark shape lodged in the ice directly underfoot, and he shuddered with relief when they finally passed through a door leading into the dome’s interior. The air inside felt so warm and thick by comparison that, for a moment, Saul almost couldn’t breathe.
A railing in the centre of the otherwise empty dome surrounded a spiral staircase leading down through a wide shaft cut into the ice. Saul took a firm grip on his briefcase and followed the other two downwards, the steel treads clanging noisily underfoot as they descended.
The interior of the ice-pharm proved to be almost as enormous as the exterior. Saul saw room after room filled with industrial machinery, tended by workers wearing masks and protective gear. The air was filled with the constant thunder of production. To one side, thick sheets of semi-translucent plastic hung to the floor from ceiling-mounted railings, shielding the dim silhouettes of laboratory equipment. This, then, Saul guessed, was where the analysis and gene-splicing took place. Enormous vats, concealed behind a tangle of pipework, wistsed for the mass synthesis of the pharm’s products, prior to shipping to markets in the Sphere and Coalition territories back home.
Not for the first time, Saul felt the weight of knowing just how staggeringly inadequate the ASI was in the face of such mass industry. This was just one single black pharm, but it was filled with more contraband than Array Security and Immigration might hope to seize in any single year. And there were hundreds of pharms just like it, spread out across Kepler’s vast oceans.
Two heavily armed Tian Di Hui street soldiers, identifiable by their nondescript baggy street clothes – perfect for concealing weapons – were waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Your contact lenses,’ one of them said to Saul in Mandarin. ‘Take them out.’
Saul glanced at Jacob. ‘I won’t be able to understand one damn word they’re saying if I don’t have my contacts,’ he complained.
‘Just do what they say,’ Jacob muttered under his breath, already pinching his own contacts out. ‘They’re obviously not taking any chances on us recording anything. I can translate for you if I have to; my Mandarin’s pretty good.’
Saul muttered under his breath, then tipped his head back and carefully pinched both of his own contacts out. Their embedded circuitry sparkled silver and gold as he placed them into a silver-plated case he kept for the purpose, tucking it into a pocket. Hsingyun did the same, then the second soldier swiped each of them in turn with a wand before finally patting them down.
As Hsingyun addressed the two soldiers in rapid Mandarin, Saul listened to the up-and-down cadences of their dialogue, unable to understand a word without the benefit of auto-translation. He noticed that the walls were sprayed with some kind of insulating plastic presumably intended to keep the pykrete from melting. Indeed, the factory floor was swelteringly hot, and Saul was already starting to sweat by the time he’d pulled his heavy parka off and clasped it under one arm.
‘They want to see inside your briefcase as well,’ Jacob told him.
One of the soldiers waved Saul towards a series of low trestle tables arranged next to a shoulder-high partition that stood to one side of the metal staircase. Saul kept his expression carefully blank as he placed the briefcase flat on a table and lifted the lid, spinning it around so the soldier could see it contained thick bundles of crisp new black-market currency. A small wooden box, painted matte black, sat on top of these bundles.
The street soldier placed the box to one side and riffled through the notes, bundle by bundle, pushing his hands deep inside the case before pointing at the little box and barking something at Saul.
‘He wants to see inside the box,’ explained Jacob.
Saul nodded and opened it up to show the soldier the arbitration unit nestling within, on a bed of foam plastic. Tiny, silver and featureless, it mit easily have been mistaken for a cigarette lighter. The soldier nodded, and Saul placed the box back inside his briefcase, snapping it shut.
Apparently satisfied, the two street soldiers led the way. Hsingyun chatted with them as they proceeded, their words echoing throughout the station’s interior.
They didn’t have far to go. One of the street soldiers opened a door to one side, and Hsingyun led them through. Saul found himself standing just inside a conference room such as one might find in any of New Kaiohsung’s commercial skyscrapers, except that it had no windows. The walls were panelled with strips of accelerated-growth wood, probably grown in another of the ice-pharms.
The two soldiers followed the three of them inside. The room was long and narrow, and had a table, surrounded by several chairs, standing immediately to the right and dominating the nearer half of the room. Further in, two men – one white, one Asian – sat on a couch facing a TriView screen in the far left-hand corner. Beer and wine bottles, in varying stages of emptiness, were piled on a small coffee table to one side of the couch. The room reeked of loup-garou and other substances.
Saul glanced over at the TriView, and saw images of a man in a leather mask torturing a half-naked woman who was chained to a concrete post. She screamed and begged for mercy as her assailant grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head backwards, bringing a live power drill close to her throat. Even from across the room, Saul could see that her movements were a little too stiff to be real. He guessed she was a Japanese torture doll, one of the high-end models marketed to jaded business executives wherever they weren’t banned.
A third man stood immediately to the right of the couch, watching the TriView with a look of weary indifference, his hands pushed into the pockets of a very expensive-looking suit: Shih Hsiu-Chuan himself.
Saul felt a thrill of anticipation. Hsiu-Chuan glanced slowly in his direction, then back at the screen.
Meanwhile, Saul’s pulse rate began to build, riding on a tide of loup-garou as he followed Jacob and Hsingyun further into the room. The insouciant way in which Hsiu-Chuan held himself, together with that distant, mildly bored expression, suggested that their own presence here was a burden he only barely tolerated.
‘Hey!’ s
aid the white man, leaping up from the couch and stepping around behind it to face them. He wore a long woollen jacket over a stained shirt and overalls, a cloth cap pulled down over his ears. ‘I see we have company.’
Hsingyun moved towards him and they exchanged a few words in Mandarin. ‘This is Ben Tanner,’ Hsingyun explained, looking back towards Saul and Jacob. ‘He runs this station.’
Tanner’s oriental TriView buddy now stood up and eyed Saul critically. ‘Nobody told me he was a hei-gui-zi,’ he remarked in guttural English, also stepping away from the couch.
Even though Saul spoke next to no Mandarin, he knew just enough to recognize the insult.
‘Is that a problem?’ he asked mildly.
‘No problem,’ said Tanner, waving an irritated hand at his companion. Judging by his accent he hailed from the East Coast Republic, maybe New York. He glanced at Saul’s briefcase, still gripped tightly in one hand. ‘And that’s the goods?’
Saul nodded and stepped closer, shaking Tanner’s hand. Hsiu-Chuan gave every impression of ignoring them all, his attention apparently still fixed on the TriView, but Saul wasn’t fooled.
Tanner snapped his fingers at the man who’d been sitting with him on the couch. ‘Kwan here would like to apologize for his racial slur,’ said Tanner, a broad grin on his face. ‘If it makes you feel any better, he calls his dick worse names, when he can find it. Isn’t that right, Kwan?’
Kwan just laughed, and nodded them towards the conference table, before addressing Saul in rapid-fire Mandarin and gesturing at his briefcase.
‘I already opened it,’ said Saul.
‘That was to check for weapons or surveillance devices,’ Tanner replied. ‘This time is for business.’
Saul glanced towards Jacob, who favoured him with an encouraging nod. Feeling the rush of confidence from the loup-garou beginning to slip, he became acutely aware that the two street soldiers who had escorted them were now standing between him and the only exit.