Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He regarded the shotgun blast in the ceiling. The impact looked like it was a vertical shot, fired from the bed when Hacked Off was on his back, under attack from Viking Berserker. A last, desperate act, or maybe reflex? That suggested they were creeping around the bedroom, Viking Berserker stalking Hacked Off, while the others were duking it out in the rest of the portalhome.

  Alik pulled the sheet back over what was left of Hacked Off’s face. “So this killer got out?”

  “Of the bedroom? Sure.”

  “How many rooms left?”

  “We’re over halfway.”

  “Fucking wonderful.”

  Beijing was the kids’ bedrooms. He hesitated in front of the portal door. Kravis and Rose Lorenzo had two kids: Bailey, age nine, and Suki, age twelve. After everything else, Alik wasn’t entirely sure he could face dead children.

  “It’s clean,” Salovitz said, guessing the source of the hesitation.

  The view through the Beijing window was tremendously imposing. Skyscrapers—every shape, every style, every direction as far as the eye could see. And all of them illuminated—some artistically, some nothing more than 150-story neon and laser ads. Even with four of Trappist 1’s exoplanets terraformed by the Chinese state, and immigration at damburst levels, Beijing’s population still topped twenty-five million.

  Beijing wasn’t quite what Alik would give children as their waking view every morning. But as his sister always told him on his infrequent visits to his young nephew, he was a piss-poor uncle, so he reserved judgment.

  “Beds are made,” he said after looking in both rooms. The duvets were newly pressed and straight. “The kids weren’t here.”

  “We’re accessing Kravis and Rose’s diaries,” Salovitz said. “It’s taking more time than it should. They’re stored on an independent rock squatter G7Turing. It’s not cooperating.”

  “Get on it,” Alik ordered Shango.

  The Antarctic room was the least impressive Alik saw that evening. It was full night outside, and snow was drifting slowly past the curving window. Two forensic officers were on their knees in front of the glass. Sensor drones were infesting the floor like termites spilling from a kicked-over nest.

  “What have you got?” he asked the lead tech.

  “There’s water here, sir,” she said.

  “Water?”

  Her gloved finger tapped the glass. “This was opened. The room’s climate control logged a sudden fall in temperature fifty-three minutes ago.”

  “So did someone come in, or go out?”

  She gestured to the clutter of red tags on the floor. “Blood drops. Preliminary match with the victim in the San Francisco room.”

  “Good work,” Alik said approvingly. “Our Viking Berserker would have been covered in the victim’s blood. So he left San Francisco and escaped through here, dripping a trail as he went.”

  “Escaped?” Salovitz protested. “There’s nowhere to go out there. It’s the fucking Antarctic.”

  “You think he slung another body out there?”

  “Why hide a dead body? Nobody cared about us finding the others.”

  “Okay, good point. And a blood trail isn’t proof Viking Berserker actually went outside, just that he was in here.”

  “Chasing someone else?”

  Alik contemplated the bleak nighttime snowscape outside. “A survivor? Maybe even the Lorenzos making a break for it?”

  “Out there?” Salovitz sneered.

  “Bigger survival chance than Mars, or Ganymede. All they have to do is make it to the next portalhome room. There’s got to be some close by; developers build them in batches.”

  “Shit. Okay.”

  “Your people have coats, don’t they?” Alik challenged. “Send them outside. We have to know who went out.”

  “We’ve got coats for New York, not the fucking Antarctic!”

  “Okay.” He turned to the lead tech. “Send a bunch of drones out. See what they can find. There have to be other portalhome rooms around here.”

  She gave the ice vista a dubious look. “Conditions aren’t good, sir.”

  “Like I give a shit! I want some kind of camera looking around, even if you have to carry it yourself. I’m going to get some decent cold-weather gear priority-delivered from my office. When it arrives, we can follow up. Meantime, let’s take a look at the last body.”

  Paris, dawn over the Seine, Notre Dame silhouetted on the cool rose-gold horizon. Very romantic, just right for a guest bedroom. Too bad the man on the floor at the end of the bed no longer appreciated the sight. The shotgun blast had taken most of his head off, sending brain and skull fragments slopping over the thick cream carpet like a rivulet of cold lava.

  “So either Mr. Shotgun or Hacked Off did this,” Alik said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And this is the last body?”

  “That we’ve found. I ain’t promising you anything under oath.”

  “Which means we’re missing whoever was using the axe and the buzz gun.” Alik took a breath, trying to think. “One person, or two?”

  “Once forensic has finished mapping DNA residuals, we’ll have a better picture.”

  “Right. Let’s see the last couple of rooms.”

  Alik had been expecting another gas-giant moon, or maybe a comet station, something exotic. Instead the portal door opened into a cabin on the Jörmungand Celeste. The huge ocean liner was the most famous on Earth—not hard considering it was about the only one left. All it did was sail around the oceans on the most leisurely course possible without ever making landfall, but taking in the coastlines of every continent.

  He went outside to stand on the private deck belonging to the Lorenzo cabin and instantly regretted it as he was ambushed by tropical humidity. “Sonofabitch.” The ocean was a deep gray-blue nearly twelve meters below, with vivacious whitecaps cresting the larger waves. Alik was dressed for New York winter in a nice real wool suit. The Bureau still hadn’t let go of J. Edgar’s dress code, and he stuck with it because of the peripherals that could be discreetly incorporated into the suit fabric. But a cooling circuit wasn’t one of them. Every centimeter of his skin was immediately layered in sweat. “Where the hell are we?” he asked Shango.

  “Approaching Cape Town from the east,” it said. “The coast will be visible tonight, local time.”

  Salovitz was fanning his face with his hand, looking at the swell with disapproval. Neither of them could feel any motion; the Jörmungand Celeste was way too big for the waves to affect it.

  “If you were going to dump a body, this is the room I’d use, not the Antarctic,” Salovitz said.

  “Good point. What’s left?”

  The tropical island. Alik rolled his eyes as another gust of heat and humidity sluiced over him. He took his suit jacket off as soon as they went through the portal door. It was against Bureau protocol; as well as peripherals, the fabric was lined with a decent armor weave. It made him a sitting duck to a sniper, but he decided to risk it.

  The island was where the Maldives used to be—a beautiful coral archipelago in the Indian Ocean whose only industry was tourism. They were beautiful because they were so low-lying, a few meters at best, giving them broad, pristine beaches and secluded lagoons. That didn’t go well for the indigenous population in the late twenty-first century when the ocean level started rising. The rest of the world built sea defenses and tidal barriers to protect their crumbling shorelines and inundated coastal cities. The Maldives didn’t have that kind of money, not even with the microfacture revolution brought about by home fabricators and printers, which liberated so many from absolute poverty.

  The archipelago claimed the crown of Atlantis and slowly sank beneath the waves. A true tragedy for a UN World Heritage Site.

  Then along came astute developers in massive airships with portals fixed
underneath. Torrents of desert sand poured down out of the sky, mixed with genetically modified coral seeds. New islands rose up and stabilized.

  It was a bitch of a lawsuit. The ex-Maldives population claimed the artificial islands were squatting on their ancestral seabed and should be given to them. But the World Court declared against them—a decision helped by the Chinese, who had long experience with enforcing ownership claims over artificial island territories.

  The contemporary islands weren’t as big as the old originals. The new owners divided them up like the slices of an exceptionally rich cake, with wooden shacks on stilts at the back of the beaches.

  Stylish mock-antique patio doors slid open in front of Alik, letting him out onto a raised veranda where steps sank into the oven-hot sands. Thirty meters farther on, the clear wavelets of the Indian Ocean lapped against the exquisite coral reefs that were still expanding out into the deeper waters.

  “Beats the Hamptons,” he muttered in reluctant approval as he walked across the nautical-themed designer-minimalist lounge. A forensic tech was working on the patio door.

  “It was forced,” the tech told Salovitz. “Alarms disabled, and the lock physically cut out.”

  “From the outside?” Alik guessed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any blood in here?” Salovitz asked.

  “The preliminary scan didn’t show any.”

  “One team comes in via crazy gymnastics seventeen stories up in a nighttime snowfall, the other saunters across a beach,” Alik said. “No prizes here for which team has the brains.”

  He and Salovitz walked down the steps to the beach, where he reluctantly put his jacket back on, which earned several curious looks. But he figured that if this was a route in, the team might have a hot backup waiting to provide cover. So if they’d been waiting with growing anxiety for their buddies to return, and the first out of the boutique shack is a bunch of cops heading toward them…

  Three of New York’s finest were making their way back across the beach. They’d all taken their winter jackets off, and sweat was soaking their thick shirts.

  “Found the way the intruder team got onto the island,” the sergeant told Salovitz. “The shack two down. Its patio door was open. We went in. There’s a body in the hubhall.”

  “Where is the hubhall?” Alik asked.

  The sergeant pushed his cap back and gave him a rueful look. “My altme said Berlin.”

  “Aw, crap,” Salovitz groaned, raising his eyes to the bright, cloudless sky. “This just keeps getting better. I fucking hate portalhomes.”

  “I’ll put an official call through the Bureau to the Berlin police,” Alik reassured him. “I know a guy in the city. They can run forensics at their end, and I’ll send you the results.”

  “Okay,” Salovitz said. “Set up a cordon around the shack, and don’t go inside again.”

  “You got it, Detective,” the sergeant said.

  The forensic tech in the Antarctic room called over the police scene link. “We found something, Detective. Another portalhouse room, close to the Lorenzo property, with a broken window. I tried sending a drone through, but something killed it.”

  Alik and Salovitz looked at each other and headed back up the beach fast. As they went inside the shack, Shango checked with Alik’s office. The Antarctic gear courier was en route, estimated three minutes from Central Park West.

  “Run,” Alik ordered them.

  The tech in the Antarctic room was standing beside the window; her eyes closed as she controlled the drones through her altme. Snow was melting on the floor around her feet.

  “Speak to me,” Salovitz said.

  “I sent five drones out,” she said. “Their flight’s not good in the snow, and the visual imagery is poor. I’m relying a lot on the millimeter wave radar. But they found another portalhome room a hundred and fifty meters away. The window is programmable glass, but it’s not open; there’s just a hole in it, roughly a meter across. I’ve tried sending two drones through now, but each one died. It’s like an explosion. They fall apart, but there’s no heat or energy flash.”

  “Buzz shot,” Alik said. “The hole could be tangled with filament.”

  “What use is making a hole in the glass you can’t get through?” Salovitz asked.

  “If you take a buzz gun on a job, you wear the right protective armor,” Alik told him. “Those filaments aren’t the most reliable when it comes to traveling in the right direction after expansion.”

  “So they could have gotten through the hole?”

  “Most likely.”

  The courier arrived with their Antarctic gear—five suits with “FBI” printed in bold yellow across the back. They were one-piece units, with boots and a hood that had a sealable visor, fully heated. Practically space suits. Alik and Salovitz started putting them on, as did the forensic tech and two cops.

  “Try and avoid shooting your pistols,” Alik told them. “The cold will affect them.”

  They gave him uncertain glances but agreed they’d hold off unless they were taking fire.

  Alik took an electron pistol out of his underarm holster and clipped it onto the Antarctic suit’s belt. The cold would make it brittle, but he thought the components would still work. Probably.

  Shango confirmed the suit’s integrity and ordered the glass to open. Snow swirled in.

  Alik’s feet sank a good ten centimeters into the loose snow as he started to tramp across to the next portalhome. He kept the drone sensor imagery on sharp resolution across his tarsus lenses, merging the bright scarlet grid of the millimeter radar with his own eyesight. The lens had a low-light amplification program that kicked in as soon as he got outside. He’d never liked the sparkly-green shading the two-tone image always produced. It wasn’t much use in the Antarctic, either; a snowfield at night had as much contrast as a franchise coffee shop.

  At least the suit worked okay, keeping him decently warm.

  They all lined up facing the room. Most of the structure was covered in a layer of snow, making it look like a futurist’s igloo, with the curving glass panorama window a jarring black bulge along the front. The three remaining disc-shaped drones hovered outside, constantly swooping about like alcoholic sparrows as they tried to hold position in the sharp squalls of freezing air.

  Alik studied the hole carefully, but not even his tarsus lens enhancements could see if there was a hash of filaments clinging to it.

  “If someone in a protective suit went through, wouldn’t it clear the filaments away?” Salovitz asked.

  “The bulk of them, yeah,” Alik agreed. “But there will be plenty of strands left behind. You need a proper hazard disposal team to clear the area before it’s rated human-safe again. The worse the environment you fire a buzz shot in, the bigger the dispersal problem. We just need to clear the hole enough to send one of those drones through.”

  “Your e-pistol?”

  “Let’s find out.” He knelt down, knees compacting the snow, and angled the electron pistol up at the hole. That way, the beam would only strike the ceiling beyond. Shango selected a defocused beam on high power. He fired ten pulses.

  Snowflakes inside the electron stream vaporized into steam puffs, shrouded in their own fizz of St. Elmo’s fire. The hole itself scintillated with bright elongated sparks as the filaments broke down from the energy barrage.

  “Send a drone through now,” he said once the mini-fireworks had finished popping.

  One of the drones flashed forward, passing unharmed through the hole. Its visual images improved immediately in the calmer air of the room. There were two bodies lying on the floor, a man and a woman in late middle age, both shot through the head. The sensors couldn’t pick up any active power circuits, and that included the portal on the back wall.

  “The escape route,” Salovitz declared.

  �
��Yeah. So now we just have to work out if Buzz Gun is also Viking Berserker, or if two of them go out afterwards. I also want to know where this room’s hubhall is situated.”

  “The DNA profiles will be in within an hour. We can get a better timeline map from that.”

  “Okay, then, let’s get back to the precinct.”

  * * *

  —

  New York’s twentieth precinct house was situated on West 82nd Street, only two metrohubs from the apartment block on Central Park West. Even in the snow, it was less than three minutes to walk door to door.

  Alik and Salovitz got in just before one in the morning. The precinct commander, Brandy “The Deacon” Duncan, was in her office on the second floor. She was courteous enough to Alik, but he knew he was about as welcome as a stripper in a cathedral.

  Salovitz gave her a decent enough summary of the case. Seven bodies, the Lorenzo family’s whereabouts unknown and not responding to any calls, their altmes off grid.

  “Why would these crews target Lorenzo? What’s he involved in?” the Deacon asked, staring at Alik. She was in her late fifties, streetwise, and with enough clout in City Hall to hang on to the twentieth for eight years now. Her face was etched with the entropy of a lifetime of prizefights on both sides of the desk—the ones that had got her where she was. Alik respected that; she was actually quite a good cop.