The next twenty seconds were crucial, the decision-making window for whoever had eyes on us just now. They could decide the falling debris from two unfortunate escape pods didn’t pose a threat this far from populated areas. On the other hand, they might conclude it was better to be safe than sorry and blast us into small pieces with a missile salvo. I guessed the duty officer of the day must have been worried about his budget allocation because twenty very long seconds of free-fall passed without incident.
The ice filled my entire field of vision now, a great white sheet, dotted here and there with the dark nodes of civilisation. An ever-growing population meant people were now looking farther afield for lebensraum, using tech developed for off-world colonisation to establish settlements in places once considered too hostile for human habitation. The Arctic population had officially topped the ten-million mark a year ago, but it was still 97 percent empty and not a place to linger out-of-doors for any length of time.
My headphones issued a loud insistent beep at five thousand feet and I levelled out into the classic skydiver pose, arms and legs spread to maximise atmospheric resistance, the smoke and flares still streaming in my wake. I needed to slow the descent for a chute deployment but not enough to spoil the illusion of a tumbling piece of debris in the event I was still a speck on someone’s scanner. The chute auto-deployed at five hundred feet. The sims had got this part wrong. What should have been a jarring but manageable transition from free-fall to controlled descent felt more like a chest-first collision with a sledgehammer. The force of it left me with greying vision and a deep pain in my chest as I fought to refill suddenly empty lungs. My chute was a warpable, semi-rigid canopy that should have enabled a partly piloted descent, but the stunning effects of the deceleration meant all I could do was hang there gasping, oxygen starved arms like lead and my vision growing ever dimmer as the ice loomed closer.
Fortunately, I blacked out before I hit.
Chapter 17
The faint tapping of gloved fingers on glass, a barely audible voice, insistent shoves. I groaned, wanting badly to slip back into what had been a blessedly absolute slumber. A hard snick then an icy blast on my face as my suit helmet was none-too-gently pulled off.
“Alex!” More shoving and groaning, the air like a million tiny needles on my skin as I felt the blood streaming from my nose begin to freeze. “We have to move! Come…” Mr Mac grunted as he hauled me into a sitting position, “…on!”
I let out a shout of pain as my eyes finally opened to be greeted by a world of blinding white. “Just keep blinking,” he told me. “It’ll fade. Can you walk?”
I tried to move my legs, finding to my surprise that they actually worked. “Yeah.” I shook my head to try and clear the ache, eyes stinging with the chill as they slowly adjusted and the unbroken sphere of white surrounding us gradually resolved into snow-covered ice beneath a pale blue sky. “Fuck, it’s cold.”
“Welcome to Earth.” He hooked his arms under mine and heaved me up, holding me steady as my legs did their best to fail me.
“What’s our position?” I asked.
“Over three klicks from the intended drop zone. Gives us a tight window to make the rendezvous.”
“Will your guy wait?”
“I wouldn’t.” He reached down to retrieve my helmet. “Hypothermia in ten minutes without this.” He tossed it to me before checking the readout on his wrist. “No beacons or pings. Nothing in the air for twenty klicks in all directions.” He grinned at me. “It worked. You’re a military genius after all.”
“Wasting time,” I said, slotting my helmet into place and taking the first unsteady steps south. “Let’s go.”
At first glance, the extractor rig looked like a giant recreation of an ancient kitsch television, a curving, hollowed-out rectangle rising from the white mist to a height of well over two hundred metres. There were more to the east and west, stretching away to the horizon like sentinels from a bygone age, which is pretty much what they were.
“So this is how they were going to save the world,” Mr Mac commented as we trudged closer, voice a little ragged in my ‘phones. The two hour forced march to get here hadn’t been made any easier by his constant need to chat. “Still, I guess they were desperate,” he went on. “Needed to do something to get the carbon out of the atmosphere before the planet turned into another Venus. The largest geo-engineering project in human history, bankrupted the North American economies over the course of a decade, only for fusion to come along and make it all irrelevant. Some historians theorise the economic impact, coupled with the destabilising effects of such an abrupt shift away from fossil fuels, were a direct cause of the Rapture Wars and the dissolution of the United States.”
“Guess you’ve had plenty of time for reading,” I muttered. “In between all the murders, I mean.”
“Benefits of an expensive education. But I guess Oksana told you all that. How is she, by the way?”
“Worried. Thought I was there to tell her I’d killed you.”
“Little sis was always of a nervous disposition. Was it at her place that Dr Vaughn caught the scent, I wonder?” I gave no reply and he glanced over his shoulder, teeth gleaming behind the visor as he laughed. “I’ll figure it out eventually, y’know.”
We stopped three hundred metres short of the extractor and I used the suit’s optics to scan the huge supporting base, icons blinking as they detected a tracked vehicle parked outside an access port. “That him?” I asked.
“It better be.” Mr Mac cracked open his suit’s leg compartment and extracted a military-spec Berretta 10mm.
“So he’s a trustworthy type?” I enquired, drawing the Colt from my own suit.
“He’s a professional criminal with a dozen or more international warrants on his head.” Mr Mac started forward at a steady plod. “So, yes I trust him. Not sure what he’ll make of you, though, so please try to put a muzzle on the judgemental, hard-nosed Demon crap. I’m not keen on killing a prized asset if I can help it.”
We moved to within twenty feet of the vehicle, a squat snow-tractor with faded white and blue camouflage, the windscreen dark and all power off. Mr Mac voice-activated his smart and sent a short message: “Spare me the paranoia, Simon. I told you I’d be bringing a friend.”
A soft crunch of snow had me whirling, Colt snapping round to aim at a dark shape to our rear. For a moment, I thought I was about to commit a heinous bio-crime by taking down a polar bear, the shape having reared up to an impressive height, snow cascading from furry flanks. Not a bear, I realised as the long barrel of a sniper rifle appeared, the fur falling away to reveal a man in thermal combat gear, face hidden behind an insectoid mask of optics. He was tall and lean with that rangy look long-serving military types always seemed to have. I noted he had to fight an instinctive impulse to bring his rifle to bear on me as the optics swept over my face.
“Simon, say hello to Alex,” Mr Mac said. “Alex, Simon.”
I said nothing and neither did Simon. It was evident we were engaged in a moment of mutual recognition. The gear and the look made it obvious. “Fed Sec SF,” I said. “I guess you’re not choosy about who you employ.”
“He’s very much retired,” Mr Mac told me. “And will be permanently if they ever find him. Right, Simon?”
Simon’s optics lingered on me. “Face changed, retinas haven’t,” he said finally, voice gravelly but otherwise accentless. The erosion of identity was a principal facet of their training; vocal characteristics, personal history, even their original names, all conditioned out to leave the perfect covert operative. I’d killed a few during the war, and none had been easy.
“Enemy operative, Codename Fenrir,” Simon went on. “Pursue and eliminate with extreme prejudice, regardless of risk.”
We stared at each other in silence until he shouldered his rifle and strode towards the base of the extractor. “Too late to start out now,” he told Mr Mac. “Food and supplies inside.”
“Fenrir, huh?” De
spite the smallness of the smart screen I could detect a certain amusement on Janet’s face. I sat huddled against the wall of the extractor’s maintenance bay, arms folded tight and the smart propped against my drawn up thighs. I’d been cold before but this was a whole new world, literally.
“You know what it means?” I asked, steam billowing from my mouth.
“Old Norse mythology,” she said. “Fenrir is the monstrous wolf who eats Odin during the great battle that heralds the coming of Ragnarok. Viking Armageddon.” Her smile broadened. “I think it suits you quite well, actually.”
I sniffed and stifled a shudder. “You get anything yet?”
“It’s slow going, I’m afraid. Vargold has been very careful in managing his public image, all biographical profiles are basically a variation of the same story: born in Sweden forty-six years ago to a North American refugee family, came up the well aged eighteen with minimal education. Worked basic ore processing whilst he studied technology and design spare time, eventually won a full scholarship to Lorenzo Uni where he met Rybak. Two years later, they drop out of school and self-fund a start-up: Astravista. Their first few millions came from communications software, they wrote much of the code that runs the smart network. Astravista begins a rapid expansion, becomes the third largest corporate entity in orbit within seven years, then the war starts. All corporations are quick to declare their allegiance to the UN, except Astravista. Vargold and Rybak establish Hephaestus Station beyond Lunar orbit, the principal CAOS weapons manufactory. It’s pretty clear from my own research that CAOS would’ve lost without it. The war ends, Hephaestus Station is formally ceded to Central Governance though Astravista still holds the bulk of the contracts. Six years ago, Vargold proposes using it as the main construction site for the Ad Astra Project and humanity’s journey to the stars begins. All pretty inspiring really, if you don’t know he’s a mass murderer.”
“Family? Relationships?”
“No wife, no kids. Gossip-mills have linked him to a few models slash actresses over the years, but nothing seems to have lasted more than a few months. One starlet did a tell-all interview for a Downside celeb-rag a few years ago, called him an emotionless monster. But that could all have been post-dump venting. Failing to latch onto a billionaire has to sting a bit.”
“There’s got to be more, a reason for all this.”
“Open sources can only tell you so much. We really need access to Pol-net and security databases if we’re going to make any progress.”
“Not easy when you’re dead.”
“Kruger says he has a few contacts from the old days, military people who might be sympathetic. As for Pol-net, I thought Chief Mordecai…”
“No. I don’t want her involved, not yet anyway. She’s way too exposed.” I glanced over at Mr Mac. He sat close to the portable heater Simon had set up earlier, eyes intent on his smart. “How’s Leyla?”
“On the mend.” Janet gave a rueful grin. “Hates me more than ever.”
“Lucy?”
“Made it back safe and well. She asked me to tutor her for her GEC exams so I guess we’re bonding.”
“Good to know. When Kruger gets you access, concentrate on the war years and check for links to Haunai Genetics.” I forced a smile and managed to stop my teeth chattering. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d’ve liked it down here. Expect a call in twenty-four hours. If not, assume I’m dead and get yourself and the others on a shuttle to the Belt. Lucy knows plenty of places to hide.”
I shut down the smart before she could object and got up, moving close to the heater with hands extended. Simon sat opposite cleaning his disassembled rifle. Sans optics his features were revealed as Caucasian, lean and generically handsome, but not enough to be especially memorable. I wondered if he even remembered what his original face looked like.
“How many Upside deployments for you?” I asked, expecting a vague and non-committal answer but he replied without hesitation, blue eyes lacking emotion as he raised them to meet mine.
“Five.”
“Confirmed kills?”
“Forty-eight.”
“Anyone I knew?”
“Play nice kids,” Mr Mac murmured, glancing up from his smart. “Bygones etcetera.”
“How much longer in this dump?” I asked him, but it was Simon who answered.
“Six hours. You arrived just ahead of a weather front. We need to sit it out before heading south.”
“And then?”
“There’s a mag-lev hub on Ellesmere Island,” Mr Mac said. “Gateway to the world. Just depends where we go first.”
“Salacia,” I said. “And me, not we. You’re overwatch on this, just like the war.”
He frowned a little. “You always did have a serious hero complex problem, Alex.”
“I need to interact with local law-enforcement, something you can’t do. Besides, sooner or later I’m going to start raising flags on Vargold’s map. You and your pet ninja here are going to keep me alive when his people come looking.”
Simon slotted the barrel of his rifle into the stock with a loud clack. The pet ninja jibe had been a gambit, a test to see if he had any skin to get under. If so, he was expert at concealing it. “Better get some sleep,” he said, settling back and pulling the hood of his combat smock over his head. “Long haul tomorrow.”
Chapter 18
I got off the mag-lev in Havana just under forty-eight hours later, emerging from the vast terminus to once again suffer a wave of disorientation as the sky unfolded above in all its bluey vastness. The ID Mr Mac had supplied named me as David Cross, International Security Consultant for Dynamic Protection GLC, a genuine multi-national he’d purchased an interest in a few years before. The company’s business included several government contracts which required select employees to carry concealed weapons on public transit. The ID got me through terminus security without a blip, then it was a short taxi ride through the archaically surreal streets of Havana to the airport and onto a flight to Barbados. Modern materials meant aircraft windows formed about thirty percent of the fuselage, affording spectacular views all around. The mag-lev had offered a relief from the endless sky, and an opportunity to plan my approach on reaching Salacia, but now there was nowhere to hide from all the space.
“Nervous flyer, huh?” the woman seated next to me asked, presumably noting the sheen of sweat on my forehead.
“Something I ate,” I muttered back, voice deliberately gruff to conceal my accent and forestall further conversation.
“They’ll get you a sedative if you need it,” she went on.
There’s no pill to cure agoraphobia, I didn’t say, grunting, “I’m fine, thanks,” before pretending to sleep.
By the time I stepped onto the tarmac at Barbados I was pretty much a wreck. The Caribbean heat was proving as hard to bear as the Arctic cold. I shambled to the airport hotel and checked in, the Dynamic Protection company credit card entitling me to a suite complete with hot-tub and a well stocked bar. I collapsed onto the bed fully clothed and slept for nine hours straight wondering how a species that called itself civilised could live like this.
Salacia Hab was moored two hundred klicks off the Barbadian coast, a three hundred metre tall by one hundred and fifty metre wide tube tethered to the sea floor by carbon-sixty cables and powered by an on-board fusion reactor. The total population stood at just over five thousand, mostly wealthy retirees who had chosen to remove themselves from the increasing crush on land and opted for a life beneath the waves. Getting there required a three hour sub-ride from Bridgetown, an experience I found infinitely preferable to flying. Instead of portholes the sub had external cameras, the feeds combined to project an image of the ocean on the inside of the hull. I felt the anxiety recede as we glided through shoals of fish, catching the occasional glimpse of a shark or a ray. It was as alien an environment as I’d ever experienced, but weirdly soothing in its serenity, and familiar in its comparative lack of gravity.
Salacia’
s immigration control was entirely automated, the scanner accepted my ID and features without demur before the inner airlock door opened and I stepped out onto the main concourse. Perhaps unsurprisingly the atmosphere was fairly muted. There were a few dozen people about, but most of the shops were closed. I noted a carpet of flowers surrounding the base of an abstract sculpture in the centre of the concourse, ritual offerings to the recently departed. If this massacre had happened on the Yang-side level where I grew up, it would probably have been forgotten a few hours after the blood had been hosed away.
I took out my smart and sent an interview request to Phaedra Diallo marked ‘Re. Current Investigation’, then found a vending machine which dispensed a hot but uncertainly flavoured beverage. I found a bench and waited, sipping what may have been coffee and looking up at the ascending rings of Salacia’s levels, all balconies and hanging gardens, even some birds fluttering about. It reminded me of Yin-side but was more elegant somehow, less ostentatious.
“Mr Cross?”
I lowered my gaze to find a small but athletic young woman standing a few feet away. I was momentarily distracted both by her attire, a black lycra one-piece bathing suit with a gold police shield pinned to one of the straps, and the fact that she was a splice. Her skin was silver-grey and sparkled a little in the light from the UVs above, and her eyes consisted of white pupils set in black orbs. Her hair was cropped short and spiky and she carried a sidearm in a holster slung over her shoulder. From the beads still shining in her hair, it was clear she wasn’t long out of the water.
“Chief Diallo?” I said.
“That’s me.” She angled her head, eyelids narrowing so her ivory pupils resembled two slits. “Saw your face on a news feed a couple of days ago,” she said. “It belonged to a dead man.”
I smiled and rose, extending my hand. “Y’know, I think we’re going to get along just fine.”
Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume Page 32