Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  She nodded at Tarli, trying to reign in her nerves. “Thank you.” It was always bad just before she hit the street, heart pumping away, anxiety making her jumpy. Once she was out there and the assignment was underway, she’d smooth out fine.

  “Hey, I’m going to be in the active ops center myself when this one hits the fan,” Tarli said. “Don’t worry, I’ve got your back.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Come on, I’ll walk you through to Brisbane.”

  They went through four hubs to a Connexion subsidiary building in Brisbane. Outside, the sun was starting to rise. The Brisbane Security office was a locked room that had a single portal inside.

  “Good luck,” Tarli said. “You’re on truck eight-five-one. Pete’s driving it.”

  “Got it.”

  “Go get ’em.”

  The portal came out in a toilet cubicle. She unbolted the door and looked around. It was inside a metal cargo container, one of six identical cubicles. Nobody about. When she closed it, the bolt slid back, locking it. There was an “Out of Order” sign pinned to the door.

  She went outside into a swirl of warm dusty air. The old portable toilet container had been dropped next to a high chain fence that enclosed an area almost eight kilometers across: the North Brisbane Commercial and Government Services Transport Hub (C & GST). She thought it looked like a protective pen for endangered vehicles. There was hardly any greenery, just an expanse of tracks worn into rust-red earth that had spent a decade being compacted beneath big pounding tires until it reached the consistency of concrete. Various civil engineering companies had their own compounds staked out in the area, where big earthmovers and civil construction machinery were parked. Container stacks were laid out in grids like small towns, with G4Turing-managed gantries lifting them on and off flatbed trucks.

  Right in the middle of the transport hub was a broad ring of tarmac, as if a land reclamation team had forgotten to break up a chunk of old highway. Around the outside of the ring, its off-ramps were just tongues of concrete leading to the tangle of dirt tracks snaking across the C & GST. The inner rim, however, hosted a circle of six-meter portals laid out like some modern homage to Neolithic standing stones. Even this early in the morning, trucks were rumbling around the tarmac, their powerful electric motors whining loudly in the still dawn air as they drove in and out of the portals. Only a few had human drivers in their cabs; the rest were truckez.

  Savi left the toilet container behind, walking across the hard, rutted ground to the nearest container zone. She saw only a couple of other people wandering about, both in hi-viz jackets stained with the ruddy dust. If they saw her they didn’t pay any attention.

  Misra threw a nav guide across her screen sunglasses, and she wound up at the end of a container row where a truck was parked on the loading pad. It had “851” painted on the side of its cab. Someone (presumably Pete) sat inside, not looking down at her. She stood in the shade of the containers as the gantry slid along the row and carefully lowered a battered blue container onto the truck. Once the gantry moved away, Savi clambered up the couplings and found herself a ledge in the broad gap between cab and trailer. She jammed her feet against some cable, bracing herself, when the axle motors began buzzing, and 851 moved off.

  They drove along one of the tracks, heading for the big loop of tarmac. She breathed in the grubby air, relishing the role she was now immersing herself in.

  If Callum could see me now.

  He’d be having kittens, she knew. Maybe one day she’d tell him. When they were home and cozy. In twenty years’ time. After he’d had a lot of beer.

  She daydreamed about what they were going to do next. No way did she want to leave fabulous Rome, certainly not for freezing Edinburgh. The Scottish capital was pretty enough, but even in summer it was bloody cold. And she certainly wasn’t going to move into Cal’s slob-out bachelor pad. He was going to need some serious house training once they got a place together.

  Savi nearly asked Misra for the agenzie immobiliari who’d found the Tufell flat for her, before she realized Misra wasn’t the mInet storing that file, and Osha certainly wouldn’t have had any reason to access it. The mistake chilled her mood. Yuri was right; it was the simple things that betrayed you.

  Truckez adjusted their speed, allowing 851 to slot into the stream of traffic going around the tarmac ring. A minute later they drove through the portal to Kintore. The town was half a continent away from Brisbane, so it was still the middle of the night there. Darkness closed around her, and the temperature took a big leap upward. Even growing up in India didn’t acclimatize Savi for the scorching desert air. It was the lack of humidity, she’d realized the first time she came to Kintore. Desert air was dead air.

  Originally Kintore was a remote Northern Territory town, founded in the early 1980s by the Pintupi people, who resented the white Western culture that was slowly constricting them. After that it kept going in its quiet way for a century until the newly formed Water Desert consortium signed its deal with the investment-hungry Australian government.

  Once again the Pintupi suffered a massively disruptive invasion. For the last five years Kintore had expanded exponentially as Connexion set up the C & GST portal linking it to Brisbane, turning the town’s abandoned airstrip into a huge cargo and civil engineering facility. Along with the heavy-duty earthmoving equipment pouring through the C & GST portal, truckez brought prefab cabins for the hardy site workers who didn’t commute in every day from the coastal areas. Bars and clubs and stores followed the money trail, along with other services—some legitimate, some otherwise, all bringing in their own prefabs. With such a population bump, the government started to expand its own infrastructure. And if Icefall was successful in transforming the desert, Kintore would double in size again within two years.

  Truck 851 slowed down near the edge of the old airfield, and Savi jumped down. The walk into town wasn’t far, for which she was grateful. Kintore even had a tiny portal network of its own, but she didn’t want to use it. Everyone knew Connexion had sensors around each of its hubs, scanning for illegal substances such as drugs and weapons. The plastic explosives would have brought a whole platoon of urban suppression forces down on her, probably with drone support. Most of Kintore’s illegal drugs were brought in through the C & GST route by truck drivers. If she’d come through any other way, Akkar would have been suspicious.

  She reached her digs—a new boardinghouse of silvered composite panels that’d been dropped down on the west side of town, identical to every other building on the street. There were still several hours until dawn, so she flopped down on her bed and turned the air-con up. Five minutes later she was asleep.

  * * *

  —

  Breakfast was a croissant in the Granite Shelf, one of the new cafés on what was now a long Main Street. A limp oblong of pastry that’d been microwaved for too long. The little cube of butter that came with it was as cold as ice. But the orange juice wasn’t too bad. The waitress put it down with a semi-apologetic expression and hurried off to take an order from a group of digger drivers who’d just come off shift.

  Savi gazed out of the window. The desert soil surrounding Kintore was rust-red, broken only by wispy tufts of petrified grass, bleached to a cream-white by the relentless sun. Today, like every day for the last two years, the air was stained with dust. Somewhere out across the desert, massive irrigation canals were being dug. Hundreds of kilometers long, they were destined to channel water across the parched lands, allowing the desert to bloom again. If Icefall worked, it would ultimately become an oasis more than a thousand kilometers across. Theoretically that would create its own new microclimate, changing wind patterns and luring in rain clouds from the coast.

  But in the meantime, the powerful diggers working twenty-four/seven were kicking up dust that lingered for days in the tranquil air. A lot of people had taken to wearing plast
ic surgical masks when they were outside. What with the empty canals, the locals had started to call the whole enterprise Barsoom. The Mars reference wasn’t pleasantly ironic.

  After she finished eating, Savi put on her own mask and tramped down Main Street for a kilometer before turning off onto Rosewalk. Akkar had a tiny store repairing air-conditioning units—possibly the greatest boom business in Kintore. The dust was forever clogging motors and filters across town, giving Akkar as much work as he chose to accept.

  She knocked on the bugez garage door at the back, giving the camera on the frame above a mildly pissed look. It opened, and she walked through into the gloomy composite cave. First glance revealed a typical printer store operation with metal shelving holding cartons of liquid crudes, plastics, and metals, ready to feed the printers. One cabinet down the far end held vials of the more expensive crudes, those used to produce electronics or pharma. Medium-size printers were lined up along the back wall, their central glass hatches making them look for all the world like a line of washing machines. Eye-twisting violet light shone out through the glass as they chittered away, building up components molecule by molecule in their extrusion cores. A couple of long benches held broken down air conditioners and impressive racks of electronics.

  Akkar was sitting in a battered office chair, using a small vacuum nozzle to clear a filter grid. He was a tall North African in his late thirties, with a shaved scalp and plenty of tattoos chasing up his neck from a muscular torso that was always wearing vintage t-shirts with the logos of long-departed gamer companies. The tails of those tattoos snaked out of his sleeves to coil around his arms. When he spoke, light would sparkle on the rubies embedded in his teeth. He was one of the few people who could make Savi nervous just by him looking at her. Like Yuri, he was perpetually judging everyone.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “I heard you got in early this morning.”

  Savi glanced at the two other people in the garage. Dimon was a lot larger and even more menacing than Akkar, filling the role of lieutenant and enforcer. He never spoke much, and when he did it was in a whisper that emphasized his words more than any shout. Unlike most of Kintore’s residents, he always wore a smart suit, which made him look like an ex–sports star.

  Julisa sat in a chair next to Akkar, a twenty-two-year-old from Cairns, whose family used to run a crocodile farm just outside the town. Its bankruptcy and subsequent sale by the banks to developers hungry for such a prime chunk of land kicked her environmentalism into something approaching religious devotion, drawing her deeper into the movement until she reached the status of Akkar’s cyber queen. She was painfully thin, surviving off caffeine and nose candy, as far as Savi could tell. Bleached blond hair was cut to an all-over centimeter bristle, giving her the face of an angry, strung-out pixie.

  “I didn’t tell anyone that,” Savi said. She was impressed as always by Akkar’s intel. Given he refused to use the internet or any kind of mobile network to communicate with his radical friends, he had to have a pack of real people watching Kintore’s barren streets. At four o’clock in the morning?

  “I know.” He smiled. Violet printer light twinkled off his teeth jewels. “Did you get it?”

  Savi nodded, giving herself a long moment of satisfaction, showing them how pleased she was with herself, how committed. “Sure.” She unslung her backpack, and brought out the two plastic food boxes. “Don’t drop it,” she warned as Julisa picked one up eagerly.

  “You have interesting friends,” Dimon said.

  “Who said they were friends?” she shot back.

  Akkar held up a hand. “You’ve done well, Osha. Thank you for bringing us this.”

  “Does this get me in on the action?” she asked.

  “Do you want to get into the action?”

  “I want to do something, make people take notice of what’s really going on here. Posting rants on MyLife don’t do shit.”

  He glanced over at Julisa, who had carefully opened one of the food boxes. She stuck a small sensor on it, and glanced at the readout on a screen.

  “Real,” she said.

  “Okay,” Akkar said slowly. “Three days’ time.”

  “First fall,” she said approvingly.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Turn up here at eight. We’ll give you something to do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  She returned his gaze steadily. “Yes, but I get how security works. If you don’t know, you can’t tell.”

  “Smart girl. But I’ll be asking you to plant some of this fine explosive you’ve brought us. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Just tell me, will I have to put it near people?”

  “No. People are not the target. Life is sacred.”

  “Okay.” She slung her backpack on again. “Be seeing you.”

  Savi walked home slowly and used Misra to message active ops.

  I’ve been told the operation will happen on first fall. 90% certain that’s for real. They’re being cautious. I will be taking part. Details as soon as I find out what they’re doing.

  Misra sent it in a microsecond pulse while she was still on Main Street. Savi wouldn’t have put it past Julisa to put e-surveillance around her digs.

  An answering pulse came thirty seconds later.

  Stay safe.

  Yuri.

  * * *

  —

  The gigantic earthmoving equipment digging canals across the desert stopped work at midnight before first fall day. Desert Water’s PR agency hoped that would at least reduce the quantity of infernal red dust in the air by the time the great event began midmorning, allowing cameras a decent view. All the big vehicles began driving across the desert for Kintore’s airstrip field, where the contractors had scheduled them for maintenance.

  A lot of people started arriving through Kintore’s portals as dawn began to break, coming in not just from Australia’s cities but from across the globe. Icefall promised to be quite a spectacle.

  From Kintore, they went through a newly installed portal to a viewing area that had been prepared ninety kilometers from the town. Long tents serving iced drinks and snacks had been set up, along with air-conditioned medical marquees ready for the inevitable heatstrokes. One of the dry canals ran close by, its three-hundred-meter width giving everyone a sense of the project’s scale.

  A temporary VIP stadium had been built inside a high security fence, its overhanging roof protecting the dignitaries from the severe sunlight, but nothing could be done to keep the desert heat at bay. The forecast had it rising to thirty-three degrees Celsius by mid-morning.

  Savi had never seen so many people in the desert town before. A month ago, Cal had taken her to a football match in Manchester. The crowds of boisterous supporters pouring into the stadium gates had been easier to push through than this. Everyone was heading along Main Street to the portal that would take them to the viewing area.

  She made it to Akkar’s store and went into the bugez garage. There were a dozen people inside, most of whom she recognized from the anti-Icefall meetings that Akkar had used to recruit them. These were his senior cell leaders, each of them in charge of around fifteen activists as far as she’d been able to determine. So, over 150 mobilized for today, then.

  Julisa saw her and came over. “You ready for this?”

  “Sure.”

  She was led to the back of the garage, where two young men were waiting beside the silent printers. They were introduced as Ketchell and Larik. “We’re relying on you three,” Julisa said in a low voice. “You’ve got the second most critical role today.”

  Which Savi didn’t believe for a second. She knew she still wasn’t fully trusted, that it would take several events like today to prove herself to them. Events that are never going to happen, t
hanks to what I’m doing now.

  The lanky girl handed Savi a leather shoulder bag. The men were given small backpacks.

  “Your target is the substation at the end of Fountain Street,” Julisa went on. “That’s where the whole town’s electricity comes in via portal from the national grid. It’s a huge amount of power; the damn thing supplies every piece of equipment Water Desert uses. So, this is how it happens. There’s a three-meter-high fence around the transformers and switching gear, which is topped by razor wire. There’s one super secure gate, which they’ve rigged with all sorts of scans and codes. We’re not going in or over. You’re going to blow a hole in the fence. The charge in your bag is armed by a dual-action switch. Look.”

  Savi peered into the bag, seeing the neat cube of plastic explosive with a small rectangle of electronics on the end. The only feature was a red hexagonal switch that seemed disproportionally large.

  “Turn clockwise one eighty, and press,” Julisa said. “Okay? Simple; twist and press.”

  “Got it.”

  “Once it’s armed it cannot be disarmed. I’ve set the timer to detonate at exactly ten fifty-seven local time. So at about ten fifty-five you stroll past the fence, arm the charge, and drop the bag beside a post. Then you get away fast.”

  “Okay.”

  “Once the fence is breached, Ketchell and Larik, you’re in there right away. Your targets are the two main transformers. Here.” She showed them a crude map of the substation, with the transformers marked. “It’s easy enough. Arm your backpacks. Drop your backpacks. They will detonate at eleven oh-three. Now they’re bigger charges than Osha’s, but we’ve built in enough time for you to get in and out. Any questions?”

  “That’s it?” Savi asked.

  “That’s it. Look, this is all about distraction. The ice starts to fall at ten thirty. We’ve got a lot of supporters crowded into the viewing area. They’ll start a protest demonstration at ten forty-five outside the VIP enclosure. Smoke bombs, netruptors, throw some stones at security—fuck knows there’s enough rocks lying around. That’s where Water Desert will be looking to protect their precious guests—all the celebrities, corporate fat cats, and public pig parasites. So you get in and cut the power to the whole fucking town.”