Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Saturday 19th January 2143

  Bright winter sunlight shining out of a cloudless sky gleamed across the city’s mantle of snow, producing a powerful white glare along every street. Traffic in the monochrome haze was slow that morning, with every city road clogged. The Newcastle ring road had been closed at five am, allowing the HDA logistics corps to tow a Boeing C-8000 Daedalus strategic airlifter from the local airport where it had landed last night all the way round to the St Libra gateway. It had gone through an hour before, but the civic management AI was still struggling to route vehicles back to a normal pattern.

  Rebka had to put her sunglasses on against the intrusive shine of brilliant white snow as she sat in the back of the NECatering Services staff bus while it crawled along the heavily congested A167. Her new employers were a company who had a lot of government officials as senior non-executive directors; contacts which made landing a support contract for the expedition inevitable. NECatering Services existed purely as a revenue generator for private shareholders, a typical modern operation, subcontracting most of its operation and squeezing its suppliers. Junior staff turnover was huge, they were all employed on temporary contracts with legal minimum benefits, record-keeping was poor, and corporate accounting even worse – not that the GE Tax Bureau ever investigated them.

  That made it ridiculously easy for Rebka and her support team to insert a suitable legend into various official databases, creating a background for twenty-year-old ‘Madeleine Hoque’, who flitted around Newcastle’s temporary jobs, never staying with one employer for more than two months, which NECatering Services would never scrutinize with any efficiency anyway. Madeleine submitted her job application online, and was accepted within ten minutes. It took the team’s byteheads a little longer to transfer her to the expedition personnel, but again the task was accomplished with minimum fuss – NECatering Services didn’t exactly hi-fund on digital security. All that left was a couple of days’ training for her basic GE grade five hygiene permit. She did that for real in a rundown commercial training kitchen over in Winlaton, so that when she arrived at the HDA base with other NECatering Services employees she knew a whole bunch of them who’d been on the same course, and she wasn’t the new girl, the odd one out.

  The fifteen-seater bus pulled up to the base entrance at ten thirty on the Saturday morning. They all disembarked outside one of the stern concrete buildings while big HDA transports and lorries trundled past. Containers had been arriving for days now, leaving the storage yard behind the base fast approaching capacity. But young Madeleine Hoque and her new friends huddled together watching a convoy of seventy-tonne juggernauts, their flatbed trailers loaded to the maximum, heading out of the base and down to the St Libra gateway at the end of First Mile.

  ‘Blimey,’ Lulu MacNamara grunted as the slipstream from one juggernaut sent her scarf fluttering. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

  ‘We’re making history, okay,’ Rebka agreed.

  ‘What’s so bloody urgent over there? Some radicals peeing in the algaepaddies?’

  ‘Got to be something to do with the dead 3North,’ Fuller Owusu announced confidently.

  ‘That was a carjacking,’ Lulu said.

  ‘So the police say,’ Fuller countered. ‘You don’t really believe that bollocks, do you?’

  Lulu shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

  Luther Katzen, their team supervisor, had been talking to the guards. He waved thanks and came back to the NECatering Services group. ‘Come on. I’ve got our billet assignments for tonight. We’ll get a briefing in an hour when everyone else is here.’

  Grumbling and exchanging bemused glances, the little team picked up their overnight bags and trooped after Luther.

  ‘Share a room?’ Lulu asked her new pal Madeleine.

  ‘Sure,’ Rebka said. ‘But I’ll bet it’s more than two to a room.’ She stared up at the gloomy concrete front of the building with its narrow dark windows. ‘This place isn’t exactly a hotel.’

  Lulu giggled. ‘I’ve stayed in worse places, pet. Besides, we get to go to St Libra; and in winter, too. How sweet is that? It’ll be like a paid holiday, this. All tropical and hot, like, while everyone back here is bloody freezing.’ She patted her cylindrical bag happily. ‘I bought a new bikini. Going to get me a good tan. Me friends’ll be right jealous.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Rebka said. It was tempting to try and talk some sense into the girl – Lulu was in her early twenties and perennially cheerful – but that would be out of character for Madeleine, who was also fresh to everything and without any real focus in life. So she held back. Maybe she could take Lulu on a quick shopping trip through Last Mile before they got shipped out, persuade the girl to fill her bag with something more survivalist-orientated.

  Rebka was right, they didn’t have rooms. Everyone from NECatering Services was assigned a dormitory.

  Lulu nudged Rebka. ‘Sharing with the fellas,’ she smirked. ‘At least we can cop an eyeful of what’s worth having.’

  Rebka locked her bag in the bedside cabinet, and waited, gossiping along with the rest of them while the next two busloads of their fellow employees arrived. It was midday when an HDA lieutenant came in and clapped his hands for attention. ‘Okay people, this is the way it is; I’m here to tell you that you’re here because HDA is mounting an expedition to St Libra’s Brogal continent to measure genetic variance. We’re trying to find out if there’s any truth to the rumour of an as-yet unclassified sentient alien species living in the deep jungles. To do this we will be establishing a number of forward camps from which the science teams will operate. As this is a joint military and scientific mission, you will be on the civilian side providing food and general domestic support. Environment-suitable clothing will be issued to you at sixteen hundred hours. You will be transporting through the gateway tomorrow, and will immediately forward to Abellia. Please do not leave the base, that will screw up our schedule, and will result in a heavy financial penalty for you and your company. Any questions, please use your e-i to access the base AI which will have an expedition FAQ function operating within the hour. Company supervisors, you will be issued with specific organizational requirement details at nineteen hundred hours at the NCO briefing, block D, room 629. Do not be late. Thank you.’

  He walked out. The dormitory was silent for several seconds after he vanished. Then everyone started talking at once.

  ‘Crap on that,’ Lulu exclaimed. ‘What’s Brogal, anyhow?’

  ‘St Libra’s northern continent,’ Rebka said.

  ‘Aye, pet, isn’t that where Brinkelle North lives?’

  ‘Yeah. I think it might be.’ And cover or not, Rebka couldn’t help a slow smile of satisfaction.

  *

  The hectic activity right across the base allowed Rebka to wander around unchallenged as long as she didn’t try to walk into any of the high-security areas. Everyone she passed wore the slightly dazed expression of people roused from a decent sleep to perform an unexpectedly urgent task. There was smartdust smeared everywhere, of course, with secure meshes linked to AIs with powerful facial characteristics recognition software, who would build a file of her movements. She didn’t care – she had nothing to hide at this juncture, so all the file would show if anyone ever bothered to access it was an excited, curious young civilian girl taking an awed look round the base, jumping out of the way of uniformed staff and cargo lorries.

  Standing beside a big maintenance garage where engineers were running checks on several lorries she told her e-i to call Clayton, using one of their disposable routing addresses; that way no one could ever trace the call recipient. The call itself was core-encrypted, with an overlay of false data that was a preloaded conversation between Madeleine and her boyfriend.

  ‘I’m in,’ Rebka told him. ‘We’re all getting shipped out to St Libra tomorrow.’

  ‘Well done. The expedition has hit the news, it’s getting blanket coverage.’

  ‘Figures. Any leads on the murder?
’

  ‘We’re still running down the taxi route to the GSW area. It’s taking a while – someone knocked out a lot of sensors across town. That implies the killer has either a team or a lot of friends in low places. Trouble is, no one wants to accept that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, Hurst knows the score, and most of his old team are with him, I think, but the HDA isn’t accepting anything that might run counter to the official explanation.’

  ‘Figures.’

  ‘On which front, Elston has requested that all the A 2Norths are genetically tested to confirm there’s no imposter in their ranks.’

  ‘Wow, how did that go down?’

  ‘Hang around the front gate. Aldred is on his way to the base for a face to face with Elston.’

  Rebka chuckled. ‘Should be fun.’

  ‘There’s someone else arriving in about eight minutes if the traffic doesn’t get any worse.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pizza delivery boy.’

  ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Angela paid for it. I’m tracking her Social bank account to get a handle on her.’

  ‘Smart move,’ Rebka conceded.

  ‘It means you can get a visual if you want.’

  ‘This is a bit early. I’ll think about it.’ The call ended, and Rebka hovered outside the big garage undecided. ‘Oh what the hell,’ she muttered eventually. ‘Got to happen sometime.’

  The traffic must have been okay. It was almost exactly eight minutes later when the pizza boy turned up at the main gate on a three-wheel franchise scooter. The guards made him park it to one side, and he pulled a stack of big pizza boxes out of the rear thermal pannier before walking through the side gate.

  Rebka followed unobtrusively as he headed over to block C. It was an unrestricted area, so her e-i pulled up a floorplan for her. The delivery boy didn’t have far to go, heading straight for the large gym on the first floor. Rebka watched him push through the swing doors without hesitation, and she sidled up to them as they closed. There was a long window set into them, and she peered through.

  A squad of GE Legionnaires were running through their exercises: pushing weights, running on treadmills, two of them were hammering the hell out of punchbags. Angela Tramelo was with them, dressed in an orange vest top and loose tracksuit trousers to show a body that was almost as fit as the soldiers around her, running on a treadmill with an expression of quiet determination set on her sharp-featured face. That determination was quite something, Madeleine thought; Angela was a woman who could carry focus to the ultimate extreme. But then that was just confirmation of a trait Jupiter had suspected for a very long time.

  For some reason, Rebka found herself gripping the little glass phial she carried round her neck on a silver chain. Grounding herself. It eased away any anxiety that had been brewing. She watched the exercise session come to an end as the Legion squad descended on the pizza boy with cheerful whoops and shouted thanks. Angela switched the treadmill off and joined them, snatching up a big slice of Hawaiian pizza, with cheese strings stretching out. She chatted easily with her companions, with just a hint of flirtatiousness when it came to a couple of the men. If she hadn’t known otherwise, Rebka would’ve assumed she was just another member of the squad, so tight was the camaraderie. And who could fail to appreciate that strategy? Angela was integrating herself perfectly. When it came down to that crucial moment the squad would be reluctant to act against her.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Rebka whispered, and backed away from the gym. She’d been expecting a swirl of emotional turmoil at the first glimpse, but instead all she could feel was a surprisingly strong sense of admiration.

  Even now, even being the professional friend with Lulu, Rebka could never be as easy with people as Angela clearly was (and that after twenty years locked up in the hellhole of prison). Rebka was sure her own underdeveloped social skills came from her early life. She still couldn’t remember anything prior to her fifth birthday. Her parents, Monique and Carvell, told her that was because she’d been very ill from birth. It was only due to the excellent geneticists at Jupiter that she had survived at all. The essential gene therapy that had resequenced her DNA had taken years.

  She’d been discharged from hospital a day before her fifth birthday, allowing her to go home and have her very first party. That was the day her proper memories began, the moment her life truly started.

  *

  Sid and his team identified twenty-nine taxis entering into the zone around the Fawdon GSW area on the Sunday night. Mesh coverage around the actual boundary was about the worst in the city, with only the other three GSW areas attempting to rival it. So they had no idea which one actually wound up as the burn-out. They ran the simulation forward until morning, but only two were recorded as emerging by midday on the Monday morning; although plenty of taxis had driven away from the district, none of them had licences or codes which matched any of the twenty-seven which had gone in.

  Sid called a halt then. ‘Half of the morning shift is going to be operating on false registrations,’ he told Ralph Stevens. ‘The fare money will go into secondary accounts registered in Vietnam or Dubai or Chechnya so the Tax Bureau doesn’t show an interest.’

  ‘I thought Nigeria was favourite for secondaries,’ Ralph muttered.

  ‘Our gangs like to spread the load.’

  ‘Huh! So now . . . ?’

  ‘So now we backtrack the twenty-seven taxis which wound up around Fawdon that night, and see which of them came from Elswick Wharf.’

  It was meticulous work, sometimes requiring the simulation to be shifted in two-second intervals when a taxi hit a particularly bad junction. By six thirty that evening they’d followed eight of them on various routes picking up and dropping off various fares. A task made even more difficult in two cases by the taxis switching registration codes while they were cruising between fares. But in the end all eight had been cleared – they hadn’t been anywhere near Elswick Wharf.

  ‘Are we squealing on them to the Tax Bureau?’ Ian asked.

  Sid shrugged. Both of them were in the theatre’s control centre, taking a break from wading through the simulation while Ari and Reannha took a turn scratching their heads over what turn the ninth taxi was taking when it vanished into a dead space. ‘We’ve got enough on right now,’ he said, which wasn’t a flat-out ‘no’. The internal sensors could always be reviewed – unlikely . . . but. Besides who didn’t have a secondary these days? Grande Europe taxes were so high they were a joke – his official city police salary was taxed at over fifty per cent, and that was before pension contributions. He might be police, but he was people, too.

  Ian just nodded.

  Abner came into the control room. He seemed to be a permanent fixture in Office3 right now, Sid thought. His brother’s murder must have affected him more than he showed. Constant devoted work was clearly his way of dealing with it.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Tilly Lewis over at Northern Forensics,’ Abner said. ‘They’ve finished their review of the road metamesh.’

  Ian turned away from the simulation. ‘And?’

  Abner grinned. ‘Twenty per cent natural glitches and breakdown. But the other eighty per cent, between the GSW and Elswick, were deliberately taken out. The gang ripped most of the wall meshes. But the smartdust in the tarmac was zapped with a magnetic pulse. It’s completely dead, you can’t reactivate it. This was all done on Saturday night. They started at about seventeen hundred hours. The last failure is logged at one thirty-seven next morning. We think they must have used three to five cars with a mag pulse generator on the bottom.’

  ‘Crap on it,’ Ian grinned happily. ‘That’s going to take a lot of additional people to correlate.’

  ‘Did the surviving meshes catch anything?’ Sid asked.

  ‘I pulled the logs for the approach roads of ten junctions they zapped,’ Abner said. ‘When I ran a correlation there was no overlap. They’ll be switching licence codes on the vehicles between each
strike.’ He nodded through the window at the sparkling simulation. ‘If you want them, you’ll have to run a correlation exercise on your great big virtual.’

  ‘Aye, man, no way can we take the time out for an operation like that,’ Sid said. ‘It’d be a step backwards, not cost effective for the case. It took days to work up a simulation for Sunday night, we can’t take another couple of days to work up Saturday as well.’

  ‘Thought so,’ Abner said in a resigned tone.

  ‘What about the mesh rips?’ Sid asked.

  ‘They’ve got good byteheads, is about the best I can tell you,’ Abner said grudgingly. ‘I couldn’t spot where the attacks got into the monitor network, let alone where they originated from. But the rip they used is powerful, the same as the one that caused the surge around Elswick. The city’s not going to like it, but they’ll have to strengthen the whole countermeasures suite. Frankly we were lucky they didn’t fry every mote of public smartdust in Newcastle. The rip is certainly powerful enough.’

  ‘These guys are more precise,’ Sid said. ‘They’re not flash, not showy. Face it, the only stroke of bad luck they’ve had so far was the body getting snagged at Millennium Bridge.’

  ‘I’ve got an hour before I’m off shift,’ Ian said. ‘Let me run another quick review of the junctions. I’ve done positional correlations enough bloody times before.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sid said. ‘I’ll give Trose Secure a call, they’re good, but the city can’t normally afford them; stick them on analysing the rip attack. Abner, you stay here and help Dedra run the simulation. I want everyone familiar with the theatre procedures anyway. It’s starting to look like we’ll be pulling an all-nighter.’

  ‘Sure thing, boss.’

  *

  As Sid’s nominal deputy, Ian Lanagin just qualified for one of the little private offices along the side of Office3. He greeted the eight officers and constables working the zone consoles in the main section, all of them busy processing forensics data from the taxi, which was slowly coming in, along with results from the dump site; three were still checking cargo deliveries; while one poor junior constable was tasked with calling local restaurants and finding out what meals they were serving last Thursday evening – a long shot based on the autopsy results of the victim’s stomach contents.