Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Javid-Lee gave a tiny shake of his head. The agents surrounded his table and activated a solnet restriction on his altme, leaving him dark. Lead agent Marley Gardner asked—politely but firmly—that he accompany them to the downtown federal building. Javid-Lee agreed. In the spirit of reciprocity, Gardner agreed he could call his lawyer after they reached the federal building, but before he was processed.

  He was discreetly cuffed and led out to the Black Mariah. The NYPD and the Bureau still used them in preference to escorting suspects more than a couple of hubs through the public metrohub network; way too many tiresome attempts to run. Procedure was to send the Black Mariah through the Commercial and Government Services network, with the suspect safely contained. The nearest of those hubs was off the northeast corner of Central Park in Harlem. The Black Mariah drove in the opposite direction. Eight minutes later it drew up close to Gorgiano’s Pizzeria.

  Rayner was sitting in a booth by himself, with seven of his lieutenants divided between the bar and a nearby table, watching the pizzeria patrons coming in, alert for anyone who might have been sent by Javid-Lee. He was by himself because Delphine Farron hadn’t yet shown up.

  As before, the five guys in FBI jackets got out of the Black Mariah and walked confidently into the pizzeria. The lieutenants sat up. Hands went to their holsters. They looked at the boss, not knowing what to do.

  Rayner held up a hand—a diminutive gesture preventing them from any unwise action. The agents surrounded Rayner’s booth and activated a solnet restriction on his altme, leaving him dark. He invited lead agent Marley Gardner to join him, an invitation that was refused, and a counter-invitation was given that he accompany them to the federal building. Rayner agreed. In the spirit of reciprocity, Gardner agreed he could call his lawyer when they reached the federal building, but before he was processed.

  He was discreetly cuffed and led out to the Black Mariah. The inside of the aging van was divided into six cages. Rayner stiffened when he saw the only other occupant sitting on a narrow bench, but he allowed himself to be placed into a separate cage opposite. Marley Gardner withdrew, and Alik stepped into the Black Mariah.

  “What the fuck is this?” Javid-Lee asked when the back door slid shut and locked.

  “Rendition,” Alik said as the Black Mariah drove away.

  “Fuck you, asshole!” Javid-Lee shouted. “You can’t do that.”

  “Really? Who are you going to complain to? The Justice Department? Hey, maybe you could call the FBI, complain to my boss? Oh, wait, there is no solnet on Zagreus.”

  “I’m gonna make you watch your whore mother die slowly before I kill you! That’s a promise.”

  “How are you going to do that from Zagreus?” Alik inquired lightly. “See, I was at the Lorenzo portalhome that night. I gotta tell you, that was impressive. That many people dead because of a motherfucking virtual game matrix? Shit, you two have taken dumbass feuds to a whole new level. So as a thank-you, my boss and I have decided not to waste taxpayer money on a trial.”

  “What do you want?” Rayner asked quietly.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, you do. If this was a straight rendition, you wouldn’t be in here with us.”

  “Darwin, huh?”

  Rayner smiled magnanimously. “I’m on the wrong side of the bars here, pal. Whatever it takes.”

  “Cancer,” Alik said.

  “Aww, shit.”

  “Why did you choose her?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Rayner jabbed a finger at his rival. “This asshole doesn’t know when he’s lost.”

  “Fuck you!” Javid-Lee screamed.

  “I sent Koushick to deliver a message so loud that someone even this dumb could recognize.”

  “You were going to whack the Lorenzos,” Alik said in understanding.

  “Fucking A I was; the whole fucking family. That way it’s ended. Clean and over. No more loser paybacks.”

  “Like fuck it would have been,” Javid-Lee snarled. “I can take you down anytime I want.”

  Rayner gestured around mockingly. “Sure you could.”

  “Get on with it,” a weary Alik told Rayner.

  “Okay, so Koushick and his crew are getting ready to take out the Lorenzos. Next thing I know, Cancer comes to me. I don’t know how she knew; Koushick shouting his dumb mouth off around the clubs, most like.”

  “Then what?”

  “Hey, I wasn’t going to turn down that offer. Cancer! She would make fucking sure there wasn’t a Lorenzo left alive in this universe. Koushick, he’s good, okay. Loyal. But there were kids…That wouldn’t mean shit to her. And she lived her rep, you know. The way she maneuvered people; getting the yacht trip canceled, putting the Lorenzos exactly where we wanted them to be. Shit, like Koushick could ever pull off a stunt like that!”

  “Did she say why she took this contract?”

  “Said it was a good fit, and we’d both come out ahead. Told me there was some files Kravis had at his firm that she’d like to bust. I figured what the hell, you know? She’s Cancer, and she’s working a job with me. Doesn’t hurt to be tight with someone like that.”

  “Why did she want those files?”

  “Seriously, man? You think I’d ask her a question like that? I just told Otto and Koushick she was going with them, and do what she said.” He glowered at Javid-Lee, stabbing a finger through the bars. “And then that ratfuck ambushed them.”

  “We didn’t know they were there,” Javid-Lee yelled. “Your butt-ugly bitch cousin Delphine ran there after you warned her. Perigine was on his way to hit her kid. What? You think I was going to ignore you whacking Riek and firebombing my fucking club? You took it up to this level, you fuck, because you have no respect for me. So your ratfuck nephew—the little shit that started all this—his ass is mine, and you know that; you know that’s the price you gotta pay. Only you’re too chickenshit to stand up like a man. Your whole family hides and runs like pussies. That’s what you are, gaping fucking pussies.”

  Rayner yelled wordlessly and spat at Javid-Lee through the mesh.

  “Enough,” Alik said. His finger lined up on Javid-Lee. “You were hunting Alphonse?”

  “ ’Course we fucking were. Perigine’s good. He tracked the kid and Delphine to the Lorenzo place, and that’s when it all went to shit.” Javid-Lee glared at Rayner. “Which is your fault because you’re a fucking coward. Now look where you’ve put us.”

  “You?” Rayner smirked back. “Put you, pal! Me, I’m cooperating with the feds. I’m outta here.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Okay, then,” Alik said. “I believe I got everything I need.” Shango opened the back door for him.

  “Hey,” Rayner said. “Hey, wait! What about me?”

  Alik paused. “You have my personal thanks for your cooperation.”

  “No! No, that’s not the deal. You get your ass back in here and you unlock this motherfucking cage! You hear me?”

  The door closed, and Alik stepped down onto the muddy ground of the Lewis County environmental processing site in upstate New York—a patch of rural ground covering six square kilometers, dominated by an impressive atmospheric cleansing plant. Five massive concrete hyperboloid air tunnels stood together in a line, each one sporting a necklace of molecular extractor filters. Three pulled carbon monoxide out of the air, while the remaining pair collected carbon dioxide. Both gases were stored in big high-pressure tanks, ready for disposal.

  As reduction efforts went, the Lewis County site alone wouldn’t have much effect on the global greenhouse gas legacy that was still uncomfortably high even after a hundred years of scrubbing the excess out of Earth’s atmosphere. But there were more than five hundred similar plants dotted all over the planet, and between them they did make a difference. So much that in another
hundred years the experts claimed the world would be down to pre-twentieth-century levels.

  Alik could hear Javid-Lee and Rayner yelling obscenities at each other inside the Black Mariah. It was parked in line with six other equally ancient, identical vehicles.

  Marley Gardner and his team were waiting in a four-by-four to one side. Alik climbed in.

  “Nice job, thanks,” he told them. Alik liked working with Marley on the occasions he needed to go off book. Marley ran an efficient team and knew never to ask questions. “Your money will be in the designated accounts by morning.”

  “Always a pleasure,” Marley said. His altme instructed the four-by-four, and it started driving toward the hub portal.

  Behind them, the line of Black Mariahs was facing a huge metal cylinder, fifty meters long, fifteen high. Alik watched in the mirror as the big circular door at the end slowly swung open. The first Black Mariah’s autodrive carefully maneuvered it inside, followed by the second.

  Direct disposal was a part of the Lewis County environmental processing site made possible by modern economics. With energy as the Sol system’s currency, everything was costed in wattdollars; and with abundant super-cheap energy delivered from the solarwells, the value of most services and material was inexpensive.

  A hundred years previously, people on Earth carefully recycled the last generation’s garbage, breaking down matter into its component atoms, refining their castoffs and sludge into useful compounds, ready to supply manufacturing and microfacturing industries. But now, with so much raw asteroid matériel streaming in at minimal cost, that energy-intensive processing of recycling old things was no longer financially viable.

  Those fiscal conditions meant that obsolete items—for example, the Bureau’s fifteen-year-old Black Mariahs—were simply disposed of in the most economic fashion possible.

  Just before the four-by-four carrying Alik went through the hub, the last Black Mariah drove into the giant cylindrical airlock and the door swung shut. The heavy-duty rim seal engaged. Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from the big extractor towers flooded in.

  After all the nitrogen and oxygen had been expelled from the airlock, the door at the other end of the big metal cylinder opened, exposing the portal behind it, which twinned to Haumea station. The pressurized toxic gases acted like a shotgun cartridge, blasting the Black Mariahs out into trans-Neptune space.

  JULOSS

  YEAR 591 AA

  The fifteen boys and five girls that made up the Immerle clan’s current senior year were clumped together in a big old plaza, in the shade of a dilapidated seventy-story skyscraper. They had spent six days exploring the ancient abandoned city as part of their training, investigating and analyzing unfamiliar environments. The trip had been scheduled to end nineteen hours ago.

  Their flyer hadn’t arrived. Their personal databuds had been glitchy for the whole expedition and had now dropped out of the planetary network. They were isolated, hundreds of kilometers away from the clan estate. Their supplies were low. They had no weapons. They were completely alone.

  The meeting was generating a lot of nervous chatter and some outbreaks of near-panicked shouting as they tried to work out what to do. Suggestions were dismissed or endorsed abruptly. A plan began to emerge; they were to set up camp in a more sheltered spot. Weapons were to be improvised, signal fires to be lit—

  Dellian smiled at that, remembering his own insistence about signal fires on the arid hillside where his yeargroup had been marooned. From his vantage point, perched unseen a hundred meters up the side of a nearby skyscraper, he could make out the worry and uncertainty on several faces, while a few of the boys had started to assume a more determined posture.

  Time to stir things up.

  His biologic pterodactyl’s talons let go, and he fell for thirty meters, building velocity. Then his wings opened wide, producing a leathery rushing sound. The avian beast had undergone a few artistic modifications from the original predator that had roamed Earth’s skies millions of years ago, specialist designers accentuating a more dangerous aesthetic. Dellian thought they might have been a little too enthusiastic; the big creature was practically a dragon.

  He leveled out and powered between the tall empty buildings. The positioning had been selected with a hunter’s instinct, keeping the sun behind him, its glare making him invisible to his prey. Genuine birds took flight, squawking in alarm as the huge marauder raced past, a giant flock flowing in a colorful super-geometry murmuration in the clear air.

  On the ancient plaza floor below, the clanmates looked up at the sudden airborne commotion, squinting against the sun. Shouts of alarm burst out. Dellian swooped lower, crying out in a long, aggressive ululation. The clanmates began to scatter, sprinting for cover. His huge shadow flashed over them. It was all he could do to prevent himself from turning the ominous cry to laughter.

  He pitched left, rolling the big body, swooping around the corner of a pyramid-shaped building, seeing the reflection of his fearsome shape fluctuate as it slid across a thousand silvered windows. Then the plaza was behind him and he banked again, wings slowly pumping to gain altitude, terrorizing yet more birds as he rose up and up. The original pterodactyl had been more glider than hawk, but now muscles had been enhanced to pump the big sail-like wings, adding range and speed to its already formidable abilities.

  Finally he circled the Bedial tower on the southern edge of the city and slipped down to a sedate landing on its flat roof, dodging the slender air-con heat-pump panels.

  Reluctantly he pulled in his wings with a haphazard shake. His databud gave him visuals from the city’s sensors, showing him the dispersal pattern on the plaza floor. The boys hadn’t kept together, splitting into three main groups, with a couple of stragglers. The girls had stayed together and remained with one of the boy groups. Tactically advantageous, but he felt it had been a random dispersal. Their combat game training hadn’t kicked in yet.

  “Great Saints, that was pitiful,” Xante sent.

  “Yeah. They haven’t adapted to the situation; they’re still in soft mode.”

  “We should change that.”

  Dellian had to smile at the eagerness in Xante’s voice. “We will, but gradually. If we suddenly confront them with a tsunami of threats, they might start wondering how come none of the predators were around while they were carrying out their training mission.”

  “I guess. That’s the kind of thing that clued Yirella in back when we were stranded, wasn’t it?”

  Dellian’s humor deflated. “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Give them a couple of hours, see how they react now they know the area isn’t as passive as they thought. Then buzz them again. Both of us.”

  “Okay.”

  Dellian released the big pterodactyl from his command bond, keeping his attention on the databud’s display to make sure it settled quiescently. Subsentient biologics had been known to get quirky when released from human control.

  He opened his eyes and stretched on the long couch. Phantom sensations tingled along his limbs as the boost sheaths abandoned the biologic’s wing nerves. After riding the pterodactyl’s neurology for three hours, he felt faintly resentful his human body couldn’t actually soar through the sky. His subconscious was busy convincing him he was made out of lead.

  The training mission control room was a wide circle, with two tiered levels surrounding a central hologram stage. The couches were on the topmost level, where operatives commanded the various artificial creatures that would soon be stalking the poor innocent clanmates—a threat scenario designed to trigger the instinctive teamwork they’d trained for all their lives.

  The graduation exercise had been refined considerably in the four years since Dellian had crash-landed after his island resort holiday. The introduction phase was more gradual to avoid suspicion; the period the exercise w
as conducted over had been lengthened, allowing a broad range of talents to be brought out and utilized. And the area itself was given a much greater level of scrutiny beforehand, eliminating unforeseen problems like cougars suddenly cropping up and wrecking everything.

  Dellian sat up and looked over at the next couch where Xante was lying. His friend was still riding his own pterodactyl, eyes closed, limb muscles twitching at random. Most of the twenty couches were currently unoccupied. The threat action wasn’t due to be ramped up until later that evening, when darkness closed over the deserted city.

  On the tier below, the training masters were busy monitoring their pupils, listening and watching. Dellian’s overflight had certainly stirred things up, bestowing a sense of urgency lacking until now. He watched the watchers for a while. Tilliana was a section leader now, although the majority of the instructors were the clan’s tutors, evaluating their protégés, with Fareana, this yeargroup’s mentor, directing the overall setup. Over the years since Dellian’s graduation, the boys who’d been boosted were gradually taking over the animal rider duties. This was his third graduation exercise, allowing him to put his combat training to practical use.

  It was strange. He felt like he was looking into the past, seeing Alexandre in Fareana’s place, with himself and his yearmates performing on the visual stage, while the training masters made sarcastic and amusing comments among themselves at the antics of the hapless trainees. And now he was one of the puppeteers. It was a sensation he could feel his cohort picking up on and puzzling—mainly because he wasn’t entirely sure of his own emotions at the development.

  “Taking a break,” Dellian told Fareana, and received a quick nod of permission. He left the control room and went through a portal out into Eastmal’s riverside park.

  The city was now the capital of Juloss, mainly by default; it was the only inhabited city left on the planet. Located 4,000 kilometers north of the Immerle estate, it had a temperate climate Dellian rather enjoyed after growing up exclusively in the tropics. Living there gave him a somewhat melancholy glimpse into what life on the world had been like before the traveler generation ships portaled out, taking everyone else with them. Not that he was resentful, he told himself every day he walked through the busy streets.