“Not good.”
“Oh.” The smile faded. “We’ve just started to turn into Stakeout Canyon.”
“Right.”
Paula woke up when the jeep braked to a halt. She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep again.
“This is it,” Rosamund announced. “Midway between Zeus and Titan. We tether them here.” She twisted around in the seat to give Paula an entreating look. “I know you didn’t leave the cab to kill Adam. Have you got any idea which of them it was?”
Paula could barely remember their names. “No. Sorry, not yet.”
Rosamund gave a disgruntled sigh, and opened the door. “Let’s go.”
Oscar looked at her for a long moment, then pulled a penitent face and followed Rosamund out into the calm night.
Paula stayed in the back of the jeep for a while. It rocked about as the hyperglider trailer was unhooked; there was a lot of loud talk outside punctuated by the occasional curse as they prepared the drill for the tether cable anchor. She drank some more water, mildly pleased that she no longer felt cold. Warm humid air was gusting in through the open door, but that wasn’t it. The icy claws gripping her bones had relinquished their grip. She still coughed from time to time, but she really didn’t feel as though death was so close. Best yet, her headache was easing. There was a medical kit lying on the backseat next to her. She recognized it as the one Adam had been using in the Volvo. There were plenty of pills and applicator refills that would deal with her headache, but she chose a packet of rehydration salts and mixed them into a bottle of plain water, taking her time to swirl the powder around until it was all dissolved. It tasted foul, but she forced it down.
That simple action just about exhausted her. When she heard the loud grinding whine of the drill she shuffled up into the driver’s seat and took a look out into Stakeout Canyon. The ubiquitous sand and gravel of the wet desert had been scoured away here, revealing the solid lava foundation. Their three unique wind-resistant jeeps had parked in a simple triangle, their headlights shining on the hyperglider that had been rolled out of its trailer. Its cockpit canopy was open, and a faint glow shone up from its small console. Oscar was standing at the side of it, peering in as he ran the last set of diagnostics. Wilson, Jamas, and Rosamund were all clustered around the big harmonicblade drill as it sank another five-meter-long segment of carbon-reinforced titanium into the ground; the fourth of ten. The anchor pole sprouted slim horizontal malmetal blades of its own; once all the segments were locked together they’d telescope outward, helping to embed it farther. It was the second of three anchor struts that together would secure the tether cables against the phenomenal force exerted by the storm. In theory, they could hold the hyperglider on the ground in case the pilot underwent any last-minute surge of doubts. A common enough occurrence, apparently. Watching the three men trying to be civil to each other as the pole was spun down into the dark lava, she was very glad she wasn’t going to be flying in the morning. Anna and Rosamund were securing the tether drum into its recess in the nose of the glider.
They could all see each other. Paula almost laughed at the way each of them looked around to check everyone else’s whereabouts on a regular basis. The comedy police were in town, and in force.
Leaning hard against the jeep’s door frame she told her e-butler to link her with the jeep’s array. One of its files contained a map of Stonewave’s layout. She began to feed in routes from the Grand Triad Adventures hangar, Jamas and Kieran to the garage, Anna to the store, Wilson out to the generator. Average times were easy to fill in. She then began to work out which of them could have run back to murder Adam and still completed their own job. It would be very tight, especially for Kieran and Jamas, who were only separated for a few minutes. On practicality alone, that made Oscar the main suspect.
“We’re done here,” Rosamund said.
Paula shunted the virtual vision map aside and looked up at the Guardian woman. Oscar was standing behind her, wearing a silver-blue flight suit that doubled as an emergency pressure suit. There was an understandably anxious expression on his face as he held the helmet under his arm. “Good luck,” Paula said, and held her hand out. It wasn’t the kind of garment she’d want to wear anywhere near a vacuum, but the armor suits they’d brought with them were far too heavy and bulky for the hypergliders.
“Thanks,” Oscar said. His grip was warm and firm, making her conscious of how clammy her own skin remained.
“Not him then, huh?” Rosamund said as she closed the door.
“I still don’t know,” Paula said. She’d shuffled over into the passenger seat. In front of her, the headlights swept across Oscar as he walked back to the ghostly white fuselage of the hyperglider.
“You’re looking better, you know. Not good, mind, but I can see you’re recovering. Some bug, huh?”
“Yeah, some bug.”
They drove south for five kilometers, then began tethering Anna’s hyperglider. Paula sat in the open doorway again. Visible. Dawn was another three hours away.
Wilson and Jamas eased the hyperglider down out of its trailer while Kieran wheeled the drill rig out. It turned out they’d chosen a patch of lava that had a high metallic content. The drill had a lot of trouble cutting through.
Paula ran the digital model of Stonewave a further two times, trying to draw up an order of probability. It couldn’t determine one effectively, there were far too many variables, especially if Wilson or Anna had run the whole time.
When the third anchor pole was finally sunk, Wilson and Anna embraced in front of the hyperglider. He checked over her silver-blue flight suit one last time. A final kiss and she climbed into the cockpit.
“I don’t know what the odds are of them all getting up there,” Rosamund said as they drove away south.
“Not good,” Paula said. She took another drink of rehydration mix and reviewed what she knew. She still stood by what she and Adam had decided earlier. Just thinking back to the time they’d spent together made her light-headed again. The whole time since she joined the train at Narrabri station she’d wanted to clamp his arms together behind his back and cuff his wrists. It was the kind of reflex that came easier than breathing. She supposed other people would feel some kind of guilt at Adam’s death; she didn’t. The closest right now to any real feeling was regretting he couldn’t give her any input on her current problem. He’d been her only true source of information on the three remaining Guardians.
No, she told herself. That’s not right. I need to prioritize. The most important thing now was to ensure the flight to the top of Mount Herculaneum was a success. She had to concentrate on Wilson, Oscar, and Anna.
Rosamund braked again. “Let’s hope this is a better rock than that shit we were on last time,” she said as she jumped out of the jeep to help tether the last hyperglider.
Paula didn’t move from the passenger seat. She found a bar of chocolate and toffee, and started chewing it very slowly, giving her stomach time to get used to solids again. It was no use trying to figure out which of the three had the opportunity to sabotage equipment in the Carbon Goose; that would be even worse than Stonewave. She had to concentrate on evidence from before, from their behavior prior to Far Away, and hope that could narrow it down. The most damning she could think of was Wilson’s relative failure in commanding the navy. If he’d just been a bit tougher…but that was so easily ascribed to politics. Circumstantial.
She thought back to the meeting she’d had with him and Oscar in Pentagon II. Both of them had been startled and deeply worried that the records had been tampered with and the implication of the Starflyer’s reach. Nothing abnormal there. There had been something else at that meeting, though, not relevant at the time. Oscar had claimed he had been contacted by the Guardians, quickly clarified as someone who claimed to be a Guardian. Why Oscar? Why did the Guardians think he would be sympathetic to their cause?
“Investigator,” Wilson said.
Paula turned gradually. Movement was still difficult; her muscles
ached. He was standing in the jeep’s doorway, dressed in the same silver-blue flight suit as the others. The three Guardians stood around him. Their anger seemed to have toned down to something close to embarrassment. Working hard as a team would do that; it wasn’t an adjustment she could allow herself.
“I’m afraid I haven’t worked it out yet,” she said.
“Yes, well, we’ll stay in touch via normal communications bands now. Until the storm takes them out, anyway.”
“Very well.”
“I hope…Ah well.” His lips compressed in something like disappointment.
“Bon voyage, Admiral.”
Wilson turned and walked over toward his hyperglider.
“We’ve got an hour until the storm hits,” Rosamund said tightly as she clambered into the driver’s seat. “The tourist company crews don’t normally leave it this late to set up. According to the emergency file in the jeep’s array there’s a shelter spot at the base of Mount Zeus which we can reach in time.” She was already gunning the engine, racing around the tethered hyperglider in a fast curve. Its cockpit canopy was lowering. They roared away across the barren lava of the canyon floor. Paula leaned sideways, watching the hyperglider and the three abandoned trailers dwindle away quickly.
“We did it,” Rosamund said in a relieved voice.
“What do you mean?”
“I was talking to Kieran and Jamas. We reckon the odds are in our favor now. If two of them make it to Aphrodite’s Seat, and one of them is the Starflyer agent, what can they actually do? None of them have any weapons. And if all three of them make it, then the problem’s solved.”
“Tell that to Adam,” Paula said harshly.
Rosamund glowered at her, but said nothing.
Paula tried to review the background to the navy three again. She’d done that once before with Adam. There had been something then, some little flash of knowledge that he’d tried to hide from her. As if anyone could do that. She’d seen it quite plainly on his face.
He knew one of them was innocent. So why not tell me? It must have implicated them in another crime? What? What could possibly make him shield them at a time like this?
“Do we have all the short-wave transmitters?” Paula asked.
“Yes.”
“So the hypergliders can’t pick up anything we transmit on them?”
“No.”
“I need to ask Johansson something.”
Rosamund kept one hand on the wheel, and pulled out the array with the short-wave function built in. “Here you go. It’s a hell of a distance. Don’t count on them picking it up.”
“It’s night, that’ll help.” She switched on the set, and set it to infinite repeat. “Johansson, this is Paula Myo. Adam was murdered at Stonewave. I need to know who contacted Oscar to ask him to review the Second Chance logs, and why you picked him. Please reply with a guarantee identity information from Alic Hogan.” She listened to it start its first cycle.
“How’s that going to reveal the traitor?” Rosamund asked.
“I’ll tell you if we get an answer.” She glanced at the horizon, not sure if it was lighter or if she was just imagining it.
***
Sunrise was drawing a gray hue across the eastern sky above the veldt. When Bradley looked out of the armored car’s narrow side window he could see the peaks of the Dessault Mountains away to the west, cold, sharp pinnacles jutting up amid the vanishing stars. He imagined the superstorm billowing around them to descend on the veldt like some apocalyptic force, scouring the land clear of all its new terrestrial life.
It wouldn’t happen for hours yet, if it did at all. They’d heard nothing from Samantha’s group since that last message yesterday about her being ready to surf. If she was keeping to schedule then the storm might be on time. They were still several hundred kilometers from the Institute, but making better time than they’d expected. So was the Starflyer convoy.
All of them had spent a long anguished night as the road rolled onward. Once they left the fringes of the rainforest behind the landscape reverted to featureless expanses of veldt with the occasional tree and bush poking up. It was as though their vision was locked in to some long loop of scenery that kept playing over and over. At night, with nothing to see outside of the headlight beams, the sense that they were making no progress at all was even worse.
After midnight they’d finally made contact with the Guardians who’d massed for the Final Raid. Watchers had been stationed along the last few hundred kilometers of Highway One to monitor the Starflyer’s movement. Their arrays and secure tight-beam links circumvented the wrecked nodes along the side of the road to put them back in contact with the main body of the Guardians, in itself a nice boost for morale among their little group as well as giving them a decent overview of the situation. When the reliable information started coming in they found they’d closed to within forty minutes of the Starflyer, but that still put it a hundred kilometers in front of them, and there were no more major bridges left to demolish. Highway One ran on across the veldt in an unbroken strip of concrete that was Roman in its brashness. At their current rate, they’d catch the alien just as it reached the Institute and before the storm hit. That was too close, Johansson knew. He was going to have to attack the Starflyer head-on. The warriors of the Final Raid would have their moment, sweeping down to block Highway One. The thought of how much blood would be spilled was chilling. The planet’s revenge would have been so much more effective. Isolation and exposure followed by death; but now that careful strategic plan was all but ruined. The fact that it was he who in the end had underestimated the Starflyer gave his situation its wretched poignancy. His one small grasp at salvation was the Paris team and Cat’s Claws; their armor might yet prove the winning hand.
“Picking up a short-wave signal,” Keely said from her seat at the back of the armored car. “Sounds like Paula Myo…” Her voice trailed off.
When Bradley looked around her face was ashen. “Put it through,” he told her gently. Interference generated by the sun as it rose in the east was now so bad it took nearly four minutes of the repeated message before they had a full version. There was silence in the armored car for some time as Paula’s voice cycled through its grim message again and again.
“Turn that fucker off,” Stig snarled. He was sitting in the back alongside Keely, where he was supposed to be resting after finally relinquishing the wheel to Olwen just before midnight. “He can’t be dead. She’s lying. I knew that bitch was trouble the moment I saw her.”
Bradley was still in shock from the news; otherwise he would have told Stig to calm down and keep quiet. That Adam might not survive had never occurred to him in the wildest worst-case scenario.
“After we kill the Starflyer I’m going to track her down and sort her lying mouth out once and for all.”
“Stig, pack it in,” Olwen said from the driver’s seat. Her attention hadn’t wavered from the road. She’d popped several beezees, but nowhere near as many as Stig. “We need to deal with this calmly and professionally.”
A communications icon flipped up into Bradley’s virtual vision. He opened it without thinking.
“This isn’t good,” Alic said. “The Starflyer agent is getting bolder.”
“But it’s not relevant,” Morton said. “I’m sorry, I know Adam was a big help to the Guardians, but their part is over. You said so yourself, the planet’s revenge team has finished setting up.”
Bradley frowned. Morton was right, and Paula would know that. She also knew that short-wave communications were completely open. Her message was still repeating, so she obviously considered it important. Why? “They must be doing something else,” he decided. “Paula’s many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. She’s telling us why this is so important. What’s at Stonewave?”
“Nothing right now,” Olwen said. “The travel companies mothballed it when the tourists stopped coming.”
“So what did it do?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of i
t.”
“It’s a town out in the wet desert, they use it as a base for the hypergliders. There’s nothing else there.”
“Oh, dreaming heavens,” Bradley murmured in consternation close to panic.
“What is it?” Alic asked.
“They met Samantha and then they went hypergliding,” Bradley said. “Do you see?”
“Not a clue,” the navy commander admitted.
“The observation,” Olwen said. “Samantha needed them on Aphrodite’s Seat.”
“The navy people can all fly,” Bradley said. He stared at his watch. “And the morning storm’s about to hit the Grand Triad. One of them is the Starflyer agent, and they’re going to do the observation. Commander Hogan?”
“Yes?”
“Give me the guarantee she needs, some bit of trivia the Starflyer couldn’t possibly know.”
“In the Almada hotel lobby she told Renne she’d been running an elimination entrapment operation on her as well as Tarlo. There was only John King and myself there, and John and Renne are both dead now.”
“Good enough. Keely, we need to be absolutely sure this gets through. Link every short-wave transmitter we have, and crank them up to full power. Then put our message on constant repeat, no limit.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bradley grinned contritely. Having to tell the Investigator the reason behind the contact would effectively condemn Oscar, but he couldn’t afford not to, not anymore.
“Ready,” Keely said.
“Paula, this is Bradley. You told Renne you were running an entrapment against her in the Almada hotel lobby. It was Adam who contacted Oscar because they were at Abadan station together.” And I wonder what the Starflyer makes of that? He settled back into the seat and closed his eyes, suddenly very weary.
“Are you sure about that?” Alic asked.
“I’m afraid so, yes.”
“But…Oscar Monroe was a senior manager in CST. He’s a navy captain. He couldn’t be involved in Abadan.”
“People change,” Bradley said. “What did you do in all your earlier lives, Commander?”
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