Elvin must have ordered it to accelerate. It began to speed up.
“Don’t be obvious,” Paula muttered to the observation team as the taxi took a sharp right. It was a good hundred fifty meters ahead of the first pursuit car now. Their standard boxing tactic had put the lead vehicle out of the picture. She watched the grid map with its bright dots, seeing how they rearranged themselves to surround the taxi.
Elvin turned right again, then quickly left, taking off down a small alleyway. “Don’t follow,” she instructed. “It’s only got one exit.”
Pursuit car three hurried to reach the street where the alleyway finished. The taxi emerged smoothly, and took a left. It was heading in the opposite direction to car three. They passed within a couple of meters.
Don Mares’s car resumed its tag position. The taxi began to speed up again. Screens along Paula’s console showed the blurred lines of car lights on either side of it, stretching away through the tall buildings of the city center. The taxi turned onto Twelfth Street, one of the broadest in the city, with six lanes of traffic and all of them full. It began to switch lanes at random. Then it slowed. An overhead camera followed it as it passed under one of the hulking bridges that carried the rail tracks into the CST planetary station.
“Damnit, where did he go?” Paula demanded. “Don, can you see him?”
“I think so. Second lane.”
Two cameras were focused on the other side of the bridge, covering every lane. A constant flow of vehicles zipped past. Then the cameras were zooming in on the taxi. It had changed to the outside lane again.
“All right,” Paula said. “All cars, reduce separation distance. Stay within eighty meters. We can’t risk loss of visual contact again. Car three, get under the bridge, check it out. See if he dropped something off.”
The taxi carried on with its evasive maneuvers for another kilometer, then abruptly turned onto Forty-fifth Street and stayed in one lane. Its speed wound back to a steady seventy kilometers per hour.
“He’s heading right for us,” Maggie said.
“Looks that way,” Paula agreed. “Okay, all pursuit cars, back off again.”
Eight minutes later the taxi pulled up outside Rachael Lancier’s car dealership. The gates opened and it went in, driving right through the open door of a warehouse. It stopped beside an empty repair bay.
Paula squinted at the portal image. The warehouse door had been left open, allowing the team’s sensors and cameras a perfect view. Nothing moved.
“What’s happening?” Tarlo asked.
“I’m not sure,” Paula said. “Rachael is still in the warehouse with the trucks. No wait…”
Simon Kavanagh was walking across the brightly lit concrete of the open warehouse floor. His bank tattoo paid the taxi charge. The rear luggage platform opened, and Elvin’s suitcase rolled out. It started to follow the slim bodyguard as he walked away. The taxi drove out of the warehouse.
“Oh, hell,” Paula grunted. “All teams, you have a go code for stage three. I repeat, we are at stage three. Interdict and arrest. Don, stop that taxi.” The city traffic routing array fired an emergency halt order into the taxi’s drive array. All four pursuit cars surged forward, forming a physical blockade around the vehicle.
Maggie was already moving as the taxi emerged from the warehouse. The sun had finally sunk from the sky ten minutes earlier, leaving a gloomy twilight in its wake. Behind her, the towers of the city center cut sharp gleaming lines into the shady sky. Ahead, there were only a few murky polyphoto strips fixed on the warehouse eves to cast a weak yellow glow across the dealership with its rows and rows of parked cars. On the far side of the compound, an elevated rail line blocked the horizon, a thick black concrete barrier separating the city roofline from the darkening ginger sky. A single cargo train hissed and clanked its way along, a badly adjusted power wheel intermittently throwing up a fantail of sparks that marked out its progress as it slid deeper into the city.
Her fellow officers were advancing beside her, scuttling between the silent, stationary cars as they closed on the locked and screened warehouse. She activated her armor. The system, which looked like a chrome-blue skeleton worn outside her uniform, started to buzz softly. Its force field expanded, thickening the air around her. She prayed the power rating was good enough. Heaven only knew what caliber weapons they’d be facing.
Cars skidded behind her with tires squealing like wounded animals. Up ahead, the point members of the police tactical assault squad had reached the warehouse door. They barely stopped to fire an ion bolt at the bonded composite paneling. A dazzling flash threw the compound into monochrome relief, accompanied by a thunderbolt crack. Splinters of smoldering composite hurtled through the air, revealing two large holes in the building. Squad members raced through.
“FREEZE, POLICE.”
“DO NOT EVEN THINK OF MOVING, MOTHERFUCKER.”
“YOU, HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM. NOW.”
Adrenaline was singing in Maggie’s veins as she rushed through the gap. She cleared the little layer of smoke on the other side, her ion pistol held ready, retinal inserts on full resolution. Surprise at the scene before her almost made her stumble.
Rachael Lancier was standing casually at the front of a truck. The ten employees who had stayed behind were clustered around her. Heavyliftbots had removed several crates from the truck, stacking them neatly on the floor. A bottle and ten glasses were standing on top of one, clearly waiting for a toast to be drunk.
“Ah, good evening, Detective,” Rachael Lancier said as she saw Maggie’s insignia. Her mocking grin was pure evil. “I know I offer a good deal on my cars, but there’s no need to rush. I have something to suit every bank tattoo.”
Maggie cursed under her breath, and slowly engaged her pistol’s safety catch. “We’ve been had,” she said.
“Don?” Paula was asking. “Don, is he in the taxi? Report, Don.”
“Nothing!” Don Mares spat. “It’s fucking empty. He’s not in it.”
“Goddamnit,” Paula shouted.
“This is a stitch up,” Maggie said. “The bitch is laughing at us. I’m standing five meters away from her, and she’s still bloody laughing. We’re not going to find anything here.”
“We have to,” Tarlo cried furiously. “We’ve been watching them for three goddamn weeks. I saw those arms go in there with my own eyes.”
Now it was over, now the hype had cooled, the adrenaline cold turkey kicked in, Maggie felt dreadfully weary. She looked directly into Rachael Lancier’s triumphant gleaming eyes. “I’m telling you, we’ve been royally fucked.”
The one make-or-break moment came when he rolled out of the still-moving taxi under the rail bridge. Adam hit the ground hard, yelling at the sharp pain slamming into his leg, shoulder, and ribs. Then he twisted again, and surged to his feet. The second, empty taxi was parked ready not five meters away. He dived in through the open door, and his Quentin Kelleher e-butler told it to take him directly to the A+A.
The vehicle slid smoothly out into the busy traffic flow. As he looked around, he could see a car brake hard under the bridge. Two people jumped out, and began scanning around. He grinned as the distance built behind him. Not bad for a fat seventy-five-year-old.
Room 421 was just as he’d left it, and the scanning array gave him an all-clear. He limped in. The bruises were starting to hurt badly now. When he sat on the edge of the jellmattress and stripped off his clothes he found a lot of grazed skin that was oozing blood. He applied some healskin patches, and flopped down to let the shakes run their course. Sometime later, he began to laugh.
For two weeks he never left the room. The dispenser mechanism delivered three meals a day. He drank a lot of fluid. His e-butler filtered the output of the local and Intersolar news shows, with a special search order for items concerning Dyson Alpha.
He lay on the bed for twenty hours a day, feeding on cheap packet food and crappy unisphere entertainment shows. Standard commercial cellular reprofiling
kits cocooned his torso and limbs, slowly siphoning the fat out of him, adjusting the folds of skin to fit his new, slimmer figure, and ruining most of his OCtattoos in the process. A pair of thick bands with a leathery texture were attached to each leg, on either side of his knees. They were the deep pervasion kits that extended slender tendrils through his flesh until they reached bone. Slowly and quite painfully, they reduced the length of his femur and tibia by half a centimeter each, altering his height to a measurement that was absent from any criminal database.
The adjustments left him weak and irritable, as if he were recovering from a bout of flu. He consoled himself with the mission’s success. It had cost them another hundred thousand dollars, but Rachael Lancier had cooperated enthusiastically. Over the last ten days of the mission, every car leaving the dealership compound had been carrying a part of the order. They’d been dropped off all over town at buildings he’d paid her to rent. Rachael’s workers had parceled them up in the crates he’d shipped in months before. The entire list was on its way to Far Away via a multitude of circuitous routes. They’d arrive over the next few months.
His only regret was not being able to see Paula Myo’s face as the extent of the deception became apparent. That would almost be worth the feel of restraints clasping his wrists.
Seventeen days after the fateful night, Adam dressed himself in a loose-fitting sweatshirt and trousers, and left the A+A. A twenty-minute taxi ride took him to the CST planetary station. He wandered through the concourse without setting off any alarms. Content with that, he caught the express train to LA Galactic.
THREE
Few people outside government circles had ever heard of the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council. It had been formed in the early days of the Intersolar Commonwealth, one of those contingency groups beloved of bureaucrats. Back then, people were still justifiably worried about encountering hostile aliens as CST wormholes were continually opened on new planets farther and farther away from Earth. It was the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council that had the task of reviewing each sentient alien species discovered by CST, and evaluating the threat level it posed to human society. Given the potential seriousness should the worst-case scenario ever happen, its members were all extremely powerful in political terms. However, with the extremely rare probability that such an encounter would ever occur, the Council members invariably delegated the duty to staff members. In this diluted form, the Council continued to meet on a regular annual basis. Every year it solemnly confirmed the galactic status quo. Every year its delegates went off and had a decent lunch on expenses. As the Commonwealth was discovering, sentient aliens were a rare commodity, at least in this section of the galaxy.
Now though, the Dyson Alpha event had changed everything. Nigel Sheldon couldn’t recall ever attending a Council meeting before, although he supposed he must have when the Silfen and the High Angel had been discovered. Such recollections weren’t currently part of his memories. He’d obviously retired them to secure storage several rejuvenations ago.
His lack of direct recall experience had been capably rectified by the briefings his staff had given him on the trip from Cressat, where he and the rest of the senior Sheldon family members lived. CST had routed his private train direct through Augusta to the New York CST station over in Newark; from there it was a quick journey over to Grand Central.
He always enjoyed Manhattan in the spring. The snow had gone and the trees were starting to put out fresh leaves, a vibrant green that no artist ever quite managed to capture. A convoy of limousines had been waiting at Grand Central station to drive him and his entourage the short distance to the Commonwealth Exploration and Development Office on Fifth Avenue. The skyscraper was over a hundred fifty years old, and at two hundred seventy-eight stories no longer the highest on the ancient metropolis island, but still close.
He’d arrived early, ahead of the other Council members. The anxious regular staff had shown him into the main conference room on the two hundred twenty-fifth floor. They weren’t used to such high-powered delegations, and it showed in their hectic preparations to have everything in the room just perfect for the start of the meeting. So he waved away their queries, and told them to get on with it, he’d just wait quietly for the other members to turn up. At which point his entourage closed smoothly and protectively around him.
From the conference room, he could just see over the neighboring buildings to Central Park. The patina of terrestrial-green life was reassuringly bright under the afternoon sun. There were almost no alien trees in the park these days. For the last eight decades, Earth’s native species protection laws had been enforced with increasing severity by the Environment Commissioners of the Unified Federal Nations. He could just see the brilliant ma-hon tree glimmering dominantly at the center of the park, every spiral leaf reflecting prismatic light from its polished-silver surface. It had been there for over three hundred years now, one of only eight ever to be successfully transferred from their strange native planet. For the last hundred years it had been reclassified as a city monument—a concept that Nigel rather enjoyed. When New Yorkers were determined about something, not even the UFN environmental bloc could shift them, and there was no way they were going to give up their precious, unique ma-hon.
Nigel’s chief executive aide, Daniel Alster, brought him a cup of coffee, which he drank as he looked out over the city. In his mind he tried to sketch in the other changes he’d seen to the skyline over the centuries. Manhattan’s buildings looked a lot more slender now, though that was mainly because they were so much taller. There was also a trend toward architecture with a more elaborate or artistic profile. Sometimes it worked splendidly, as with the contemporary crystal Gothic of the Stoet Building; or else it looked downright mundane like the twisting Illeva. He didn’t actually mind the failures too much; they added to the personality of the place, so different from most of the flat urban sprawls on most of the settled worlds.
Rafael Columbia was the second committee member to arrive, the chief of the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate. Nigel knew of him, of course, although the two had never met in the flesh.
“Pleasure to meet you at last,” Nigel said as they shook hands. “Your name keeps cropping up on reports from our security division.”
Rafael Columbia chuckled. “In a good context, I trust?” He was just over two hundred years old, with a physical appearance in his late fifties. In contrast to Nigel, who rejuvenated every fifteen years, Rafael Columbia had apparently decided that a more mature appearance was appropriate to his position. His apparent age gave him broad shoulders and a barrel torso that needed a lot of exercise to keep in shape. Thick silver hair was cut short and stylish, accentuating the slightly sour expression that was fixed on his flat face. Bushy eyebrows and bright gray-green eyes marked him down as a Halgarth family member. Without that connection he would never have qualified for his current job within the Commonwealth administration. The Halgarths had founded EdenBurg, one of the Big15 industrial planets, and as a result had become a major Intersolar Dynasty, which gave them almost as much influence inside the Commonwealth as Nigel’s family.
“Oh, yes,” Nigel said. “Major crime incidents seem to be down lately, certainly those against CST anyway. Thank you for that.”
“I do what I can,” Rafael said. “It’s these new nationalist groups that keep springing up to harass planetary governments, they’re the main source of trouble; the more we frustrate them, the more aggressive their core supporters become. If we’re not careful, we’re going to see a nasty wave of anti-Commonwealth terrorist assaults again, just like 2222.”
“You really think it will come to that?”
“I hope not. Internal Diplomacy believes these current groups simply claim political status as a justification for their activities; they’re actually more criminal-based than anything else. If so, they should run a natural cycle and die out.”
“Thank Christ for that. I don’t want to withdraw gateways from any more planets,
there are enough isolated worlds as it is. I thought the only planet left with any real trouble was Far Away. And it’s not as if that can ever be cured.”
Rafael Columbia nodded gravely. “I believe that in time even Far Away can be civilized. When CST begins opening phase four space it will become fully incorporated into the Commonwealth.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Nigel said dubiously. “But it’s going to be a long while before we start thinking about phase four.”
Commonwealth Vice President Elaine Doi walked into the conference room, talking to Thompson Burnelli, the Commonwealth Senator who chaired the science commission. Their respective aides trailed along behind, murmuring quietly among themselves. Elaine Doi greeted Nigel with polite neutrality, careful to maintain her professionalism. He returned the compliment, keeping an impassive face. She was a career politician, having devoted a hundred eighty years to clawing her way up to her present position. Even her rejuvenations were geared around promoting herself; her skin had progressively deepened its shading until it was the darkest ebony to emphasize her ethnicity. Over the same period, her face had actually abandoned her more attractive feminine traits in favor of a more handsome, sterner appearance. Nigel had to deal with her kind of politician on a near-constant basis, and he despised every one of them. In his distant idealistic youth when he’d built the first wormhole generator he had dreamed of leaving them all behind on Earth, allowing the new planets to develop in complete freedom, becoming havens of personal liberty. These days he accepted their dominance of all human government as the price of a civilized society—after all, someone had to maintain order. But that didn’t mean he had to like their endlessly self-serving narcissistic behavior. And he considered Doi to be one of the more reprehensible specimens, always ready to advance herself at the cost of others. With the next presidential selection due in three years’ time, she had begun the final stage of her century-long campaign. His support would ensure she reached the Presidential Palace on New Rio. As yet he hadn’t given it.
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