by Gary Gibson
Saul rubbed his wrists carefully, squinting under the harsh light. ‘I just spent most of two days in a prison cell with twelve other men, and a trough in the floor for a toilet,’ he said. ‘They were out of toilet paper.’
‘There’s a pay-shower somewhere in the terminal,’ Donohue replied. ‘But I’m afraid there probably won’t be time for you to use it before you ve.’
‘Leave?’ Saul echoed.
‘You’re going home,’ Donohue explained. ‘You have a flight to catch in less than an hour. I’m sure you’re glad to hear that.’
Saul nodded, and lowered himself on to a second chair with infinite weariness. ‘Where’s Sanders?’
‘He couldn’t make it,’ Donohue replied, his expression suddenly sour. He sighed and got up, stepping over to a cabinet, where he poured the dregs from a cafetière into another paper cup before placing it in front of Saul. A faint wisp of steam rose up from its tarry black contents, as Saul curled one hand around the cup, feeling the heat work its way through his skin.
Donohue sat down again. ‘I’ve just spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to find ways to extricate you before the Taiwanese decided you were trying to overthrow their government, and locked you up for the next hundred years. Care to tell me your side of things?’
Saul lifted the coffee to his lips and took a tentative sip. It tasted better than he’d expected.
‘Hanover’s your man,’ he said. ‘He was on to you from the start. Have you got him back yet?’
Donohue shook his head. ‘No, we haven’t, but that little excursion is costing us dearly. There are videos and photos of dead ASI troopers all over the nets.’
‘I found him destroying hard copies – evidence of some kind, I’m guessing. He didn’t even try to hide what he was up to, because he knew he was going to get caught, and made plans to save himself. He did, however, tell me he wanted me to deliver a message.’
‘Go on.’
‘He said that if you don’t guarantee his family safe passage to the colonies, he’ll tell the Sphere everything he knows.’ Saul shrugged. ‘I can’t make any sense of what he told me, but I assume you can.’
‘That’s all he said?’
‘He mentioned some other stuff that didn’t make any more sense to me either. Tau Ceti, and something called a Pacific growth?’ Saul shook his head in puzzlement. ‘I had no idea what he was talking about.’
‘You didn’t ask him to explain?’
Saul gulped more coffee, and winced as it burned its way down his throat. ‘He had a gun to my head, after nearly burning me to death. It didn’t feel like a priority under the circumstances.’
‘I’ll need a full and detailed report.’
Saul shruggeo;There’s not much more to tell, except that Hanover sacrificed his entire squad rather than give himself up to me. Whoever was using that compound must have cleared out just before we arrived, so they’d obviously received plenty of advance warning. It doesn’t take a major leap of intuition to guess that Hanover’s the one who tipped them off.’
He watched Donohue withdraw a narrow, rectangular slip of paper from inside his jacket, then lay it on the table between them. Donohue drew the tip of one finger across it, and, in response, the logo of a major airline appeared on the sheet of paper, as if by magic, along with lines of text rendered in a fine-serif font.
He scooted the live-sheet towards Saul, who stopped it with his fingertips.
‘Diplomatic clearance and your ticket home,’ explained Donohue. ‘All appearances to the contrary, you’ve done good, Saul.’
‘That’s funny, because I could have sworn it was a total fuck-up.’
‘It was,’ Donohue replied. ‘But we already had a pretty good idea that Hanover was our man. We couldn’t prove it, however, unless we found some way to draw him out and catch him in the act.’
‘So I was just bait,’ said Saul, glowering.
Donohue merely smiled, without humour.
‘He sabotaged my A/V uplink,’ Saul continued, leaning forward. ‘That means there’s no proof any of this actually happened. You must know that?’
‘Corporal Helena Bryant’s A/V systems were working just fine,’ Donohue replied. ‘You’ll remember she interrupted your conversation at a particularly crucial juncture. Her contacts had a heavily encrypted satellite uplink, so we’ve got more than enough solid evidence of what took place.’
‘The man is a piece of shit,’ Saul observed. ‘You’re not seriously going to give him what he wants, are you?’
‘That decision’s not up to anyone in this room,’ Donohue replied, standing.
‘You have to give me some idea what’s going on here.’ Saul stared up at him. ‘What the hell was all that stuff he mentioned about the colonies being on their own?’
Donohue gazed down at him with an expression halfway between scorn and pity. ‘I’ve no idea what you mean, Saul. Maybe you need to cut back on some of that loup-garou you love so much.’
‘What about the hijacked shipment? What’s in it that everyone wants so badly?’
Donohue shook his head without answering that, then stepped over to the door and pulled it open. The distant tones of an automated announcement echoed along the corridor. ‘You’ve got just over halfere&rsqur to catch your flight,’ he said.
‘Wait.’ Saul could hear the blood pounding in his head. ‘What did Hanover mean when he said the colonies were going to be all on their own? And what the hell about finding out who destroyed the Galileo wormhole?’ he yelled, anger welling up inside him. ‘Does Hanover know something about it, or was that just some bullshit you concocted?’
Donohue shook his head as if in pity. Saul watched as he stepped towards him, pulling a plastic inhaler out of a pocket and dropping it on the table.
Saul stared down at it. ‘What the hell’s that for?’ he asked.
‘A little pick-me-up,’ Donohue sneered. ‘Had the feeling you might need it.’
‘Fuck you,’ Saul snapped, sweeping the inhaler on to the floor with one hand.
‘You used to be a good agent, Saul,’ said Donohue, stepping back to the door. ‘Maybe you should take Hanover’s advice and have a vacation somewhere off-world. And, when you get there, I’d strongly advise you to stay there.’
Saul stared at the closed door, once Donohue had departed, a hundred more questions remaining stillborn in the back of his throat.
THIRTEEN
Lakeside, Montana, 30 January 2235
Jeff woke up in the back of the car he’d stolen, now parked behind a bar and grill in Lakeside with his down jacket pulled up over his shoulders. He sneezed loudly, though he’d left the heating turned up full all night. The recycled air tasted stale, humid and disgusting.
Pushing himself upright, he found to his relief that the clothes he’d left draped over the backs of the two front seats had mostly dried out. Wincing at the smell, he dragged on his shirt and trousers, then fumbled to open a door before dragging himself out into painfully bright morning sunlight. The car had expanded to allow him the room he needed to sleep, but upon sensing his exit it hummed and creaked as it reassumed its default configuration. A room in a local motel would have been a lot more comfortable, but it had occurred to Jeff that it might well be the first place the surviving assassin would think of looking for him.
He stepped around to the front of the bar, and glanced up and down the single highway running through the small town. He could see two- and three-storey buildings stretching off in either direction, while bull pines spread up the steep slopes rising immediately beyond the rooftops, reaching towards the wisps of cloud streaking an azure sky. Jeff activated his contacts, and a breakfast menu appeared next to the bar’s entrance.
Jeff listened to his stomach grumble, then noted with some misery that the bar wouldn’t open for another couple of hours.
serace="Times New Roman">Something flashed in the corner of his vision and he saw that he’d finally got a reply from Mitchell Stone. He’d tried to get hold o
f him a dozen times as he fled in the stolen car, before finally giving up, so he opened the message without hesitation. Through his contacts, Stone’s words were projected as thick black letters floating against the brilliant sky.
Need to talk with you urgently, the message read. Bring Dan to these coordinates, and meet me there.
The coordinates were tagged on to the end of the message, which turned out to be someplace in Sioux Falls, the better part of two thousand kilometres to the east.
Sioux Falls, wondered Jeff. What the hell was in Sioux Falls?
He swallowed, his throat dry, and wondered again if looking to Mitchell for help was the right decision. But there were so many questions Jeff wanted to ask him – so many! How on Earth could he have survived, where Vogel hadn’t? And where had Eliza actually had him taken after he was rushed back home?
In that same moment, Jeff became aware of someone watching him from across the road. It was a middle-aged man, in scuffed trousers and work-shirt, leaning against the wall alongside a fabricator kiosk.
Jeff shut down his UP and focused his gaze on the window of the restaurant, as if still consulting its vanished menu. When he turned back to view the street half a minute later, he saw the man was gone, but a light had come on inside the store adjoining the kiosk.
Glancing down the highway to the east, he felt his heart skip a beat when a police car emerged, low and black and shark-like, from a side road and turned in his direction. Jeff ducked back into the alleyway and pulled open his car door, grabbing up his rucksack before hightailing it around the far end of the building that stood across the alley from the bar. After a minute he heard the sound of wheels crunching over gravel as the police car entered the alley.
Jeff peered cautiously around the corner, in time to see the police car pull up next to his own. A uniformed officer stepped out and walked once around the stolen car, before glancing all about. Jeff ducked back out of sight, praying that he hadn’t been spotted.
Long seconds passed, then he heard the sound of a car door opening and closing, followed again by the sound of tyres rolling over gravel. Jeff stepped back out from hiding in time to see his stolen vehicle, now slaved to the police car, following it back out on to the highway, like a new-born calf trailing its mother.
Jeff let out a long groan and wondered what the hell he was going to do next.
He waited another minute before venturing back out on to the highway, glancing warily in both directions. The shops still seemed mostly deserted, though he could hear tinny music from behind one window as he headed a couple of blocks west, keeping an eye out for the cop car. He recollected seeing a bus station a little further along, and before long found himself standing before a parking area containing a half-dozen unmanned buses gathered around a towering stack ofbiomass bales.
Jeff glanced back towards the highway, wondering about using the car-jacker to steal himself another car, but that carried its own risks. If a cop could track down a stolen ride that easily, they’d have no trouble catching him driving on the interstate once the theft had been reported. Carjacking might seem a viable option down Mexical way, but the roads were much better protected this far north.
Really, he knew that the best thing for him to do would be to ditch his current pair of contacts. Except almost anything he might need to do – make a purchase, call Mitchell, anything that might require money – couldn’t be achieved without access to the funds stored in his Ubiquitous Profile, stored in his contacts; his UP was his bank, ID and means of communication all rolled into one. And even if he did buy and register a new pair, he’d still have to transfer his UP to them before he could use them, and then he’d be right back where he started. Dan’s notion of bootleg contacts, complete with their own fake Ubiquitous Profiles, was starting to make a great deal of sense.
Right now, he either risked using his UP or he walked all the way to Sioux Falls.
Sighing heavily, Jeff stepped towards the nearest bus. Its door rattled open at his approach, the hydraulics wheezing slightly. He sat near the back, hunching himself down low in the seat, and purchased a one-way ticket that would take him all the way. He pictured alarms already strobing red in some secret government facility populated by sober-looking men and women dedicated to his immediate demise.
The vehicle was freezing cold, and he wrapped himself tighter in his down jacket. He entertained a brief fantasy of jumping back off, then making his way back to the cabin and the tool-shed to retrieve the contacts containing the stolen database, but a saner part of him knew it would be the best way to wind up dead. And, besides, they’d almost certainly have discovered the safe where he’d hidden them by now.
He pulled the hood of his jacket over his face and rested his head against the cold glass. He then only realized he’d fallen asleep when the bus rumbled into life, bouncing gently as it pulled out on to the highway to follow its pre-programmed route. He coughed and sneezed, and looked around, noticing that he was still the only passenger.
Jeff rode the same bus all the way back to Missoula, passing through several small towns along the way. By now it was picking up and dropping off an endless succession of passengers. A couple of hours later, he disembarked and grabbed a seat on an interstate hopper that flew him over lakes, hills and towns before depositing him on a landing pad just outside the Sioux Falls city limits. It was now nearly seven hours since he’d woken up in the back of the stolen car, and he felt tired, scared and dirty. However, at least he had managed to grab some breakfast from an autocafé during a scheduled stopover.
Jeff let his contacts guide him towards Mitchell’s coordinates, which ominously enough indicated somewhere inside a huge cemetery sprawling across the grassy lower slopes on the far side of town. As he walked along neatly mown paths laid out between the rows of headstones, his contacts identified the coordinates by means of a giant cartoon arrow hovering straightad and pointing downwards. Before long Jeff came to a small fountain, ringed by wooden benches. The arrow remained directly overhead, but there was no sign of anyone else around.
Nearly twenty minutes had passed before he spotted a lone figure making straight towards him down an alternative path, the newcomer’s face largely obscured under the broad hood of a hunting jacket. As he came closer, one grizzled hand reached up to pull the hood back, and Jeff saw that it was Mitchell – looking just as bruised and battered as he himself felt. He swallowed hard, more relieved to recognize the man than he was prepared to admit even to himself.
‘I’ve got to be honest,’ Jeff began, ‘there’s a part of me that’s not sure if you’ve really come here to help me or . . . or to kill me.’
Mitchell regarded him with unwavering pale-blue eyes. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘I’ve learned to become paranoid over the past couple of days.’ Jeff glanced around. ‘Why here? Why a cemetery, for God’s sake?’
Mitchell shrugged. ‘There’s good all-round visibility, and not much in the way of public surveillance. If anyone comes looking for us, we’ll easily see them first.’ He looked around. ‘Where’s Dan?’
‘He . . . Dan’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ Mitchell’s gaze became suspicious. ‘How?’
‘There were people trying to kill us.’
The frown on Mitchell’s face deepened. ‘I don’t understand.’
Jeff quickly explained the events of the last few days. When he got to Lucy’s death, Mitchell closed his eyes and inhaled loudly.
‘And all of this made you think I might want to kill you?’ he asked, opening his eyes again.
‘You’re still part of ASI. And we stole those files.’
‘Jesus!’ Mitchell clasped his head in a gesture of despair. ‘Who the hell do you think got Lucy access to the security deck in the first place?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I assumed she and Farad found some way of hacking it remotely.’
‘We had a thing together,’ Mitchell replied. ‘Me and Lucy. I guess you didn’t know.’
At fi
rst, Jeff couldn’t think what to say. ‘I . . . didn’t,’ he finally stammered.
‘She knew I was sympathetic, and I helped her out. She took a big chance through confiding in me, but I knew how badly things were being run. So I gave her my access privileges – it seemed the right thing to do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jeff, his face flushing with embarrassment. ‘You didn’t say anything when I told you Lucy had . . .’ He paused as he remembered the look on Mitchell’s face when he had told him.
‘It’s not the first time I’ve lost someone close to me.’ Mitchell put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder. ‘Look, you’re not the only one on the run. They were planning to take me apart just so they could figure out what happened to me in that pit, and they were very clear about me not being expected to survive the experience. That’s why I contacted you. I badly need your help.’
‘Of course. But you still haven’t told me what exactly happened to you.’
‘When was the last time we spoke to each other, Jeff?’
‘You mean before I met you here?’ Mitchell nodded. ‘I guess . . . back at Tau Ceti, just before we set off for Site 17.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Several weeks ago now.’
‘What would you say if I told you it’s been a lot longer than that for me? More like the better part of a decade?’
Jeff stared at him, clearly perplexed. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I’ve got a lot to explain once we have the chance.’ Mitchell glanced around. ‘But first we have to do something about your contacts.’ He pulled a foil blister-pack out of a pocket. ‘These are fresh ones, registered with false UPs.’
Jeff stared at the blister-pack. ‘How did you get hold of them?’
‘I worked in security for fifteen years, Jeff, so I know a lot of things you don’t. Now take out your own contacts, before your friends with the guns catch up with us.’
Jeff hesitated, then reached up and delicately pinched the contact out of one eye, dropping it into the palm of his right hand before repeating the operation with his other eye. He then fished out a plastic case with his other hand, and carefully placed the devices inside.