Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The crowd in the car park was cheering and whistling enthusiastically as the pods passed across to St Libra, then it was just the tapering rear fuselage left.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ Sid told Jacinta. She gave him a disapproving look, but nodded.

  ‘Daddy, where are you going?’ Zara asked in dismay. ‘The next airplanes are just arriving.’

  ‘I’ve seen an old friend,’ he said, and started worming through the tightly packed throng of people pressing up along the fence. He ignored the irritated looks flashed his way as he pushed and shoved. Eventually he wound up at the back of the crowd, standing beside what first impressions marked as a rounded hump of traditional camelhair topped by another, smaller hump, this one of red and yellow wool. Sid could just make out a face in the small gap between coat and hat. Detective (retired) Kaneesha Saeed had dark Asian skin, mottled by a shoal of ebony blemishes, oily tips of curly black hair peeked out from the constricted rim of the hand-knitted hat, and her glasses had bulging lenses which distorted her hazel eyes. It had been nearly four years since Sid had seen her last, and in the intervening time he guessed she’d doubled her weight – at least. On someone who barely came up to his shoulder, it made her appear almost spherical.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said.

  Kaneesha took a drink from her Costa espresso cup. ‘Sure. I heard you got suspended.’

  ‘I’m back on duty now.’

  ‘Good for you, pet.’

  Sid guessed that suspension was a kind of final approval stamp for Kaneesha. She’d applied for early retirement six years ago, accepting a heavily reduced pension for getting out ahead of at least three internal audits. Not that she’d needed to worry about money: she now lived in a penthouse apartment on Quayside, just east of Ouseburn; then there was a second home on Sao Jeroni, the Brazilian world. Word around Market Street Station was that she could afford the life because of gang payoffs, which was pretty much a standard reaction; though Sid had heard senior officers like O’Rouke were worried she’d been a full-on gang member since the day she walked into the city recruitment office and began her constable cadet training – which was the true reason they allowed her to take retirement and quietly get the hell out of the service. Because if it ever got out that the police had been infiltrated . . . Sid didn’t know, and wasn’t about to judge. They’d worked together a couple of times. Got a decent result.

  ‘Quite a sight, huh.’ He indicated the second SuperRoc which was now starting up the gateway ramp.

  ‘Why is it a sight, Sid? Why are they bothering?’

  ‘I can’t say, man. I got me a gravity case right now.’

  Kaneesha grinned around the cup’s plastic lid. ‘Can’t escape, huh? I remember those.’

  ‘The North carjacking. It might be connected to all this, you never know.’

  Kaneesha finally paid him some real attention, her glasses’ lenses giving her pupils a weird magnification as they focused on him. ‘You playing with the big boys, Sid?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Aye, well you be careful, pet. They don’t play nice.’

  ‘I will be, thanks.’

  ‘How’s the family?’

  ‘Growing fast. I need to know a few things that aren’t on file, Kaneesha.’

  She looked away, sipping more coffee. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Where do the gangs touch the corporates?’

  Kaneesha spluttered on her espresso. ‘Fuck, Sid, you can’t ask me that.’

  He smirked at the classic reaction, maybe feeling some satisfaction. ‘Why not?’ The second case they’d worked on produced a bad moment. Kaneesha had been trailing a suspect, and got jumped by a group of street punks. It wasn’t a planned ambush, she just hit the wrong place at the wrong time – standard police nightmare. Sid had broken off his end of the tail and waded into the fight, using a multi-fire taser and some non-regulation high-strength teargas he just happened to be carrying in a non-standard extended-range dispenser. ‘We don’t have any secrets, you and me.’

  ‘Sure we do, pet.’

  ‘I have this problem, see. They gave me the North case, and I don’t think I can solve it with standard procedures. I need another way in. And it looks like the North might have been caught up in some kind of corporate crap.’

  ‘Aye, I thought that bullshit about a carjacking was pretty lame.’

  ‘Bought me some time,’ Sid said.

  Kaneesha gave the massive plane edging through the gateway a more thoughtful look. ‘And this is the result. What the fuck are they scared of, Sid?’

  ‘It’s not the first time a North’s been killed. Remember Bartram?’

  ‘Aye, just about, me e-i would have to pull the files to be sure.’

  ‘Whatever the reason that North died last week, the killer had a lot of help dumping the body – and I’m short of leads. Come on, there must be something; you led the city’s Gang Task Force. There must be some contact between them and the corporations.’ He studied what was visible of Kaneesha’s face, seeing how the multitude of tiny dark blemishes were dry and cracked. Some had even been bleeding – they looked sore. And she had gloves on, he couldn’t check her hands.

  ‘Not as much as you’d think, nor the transnet dramas make out,’ Kaneesha said reluctantly. ‘The corporate lads have their own dark teams to handle any dirty work for their security departments. Completely deniable, of course. You’d never find a connection that would stand up in court.’

  ‘Aye man, come on, help me out here. I’ve got to produce something for O’Rouke and the Norths, something solid, else I’m right down the crapper.’

  ‘The corporates do have some contact, but it’s usually all small scale. They need pimps to provide some decent-looking girls and boys for visiting execs, on top of that you can throw in some hardcore tox, but that’s the kind of level I’m talking.’

  ‘Come on!’ She was stringing him out like a pusher, and enjoying it too if he was any judge.

  ‘Maybe. Hypothetical, like, pet; if there’s a dirty breaker op going down, they might just use some street troops for the sharp end, put another level between them and it.’

  ‘A breaker? What’s one of them, then?’

  Kaneesha sighed. ‘What do they teach at the academy these days? All the St Libra bioil producers, the big ones led by Northumberland Interstellar, they like to keep a hard lid on any oil futures market. They don’t like anyone but themselves making profits from the fruit of their labours. So they break anything that threatens to change the price as they set it, which is enough to make a healthy profit but not enough to strangle the trans-stellar economy. You know they have whole office blocks of economists working out what that price should be? It’s quite a delicate balancing act between growth and recession. After all, nobody wants to turn back the clock to the depression which followed the 2092 Zanthswarm – that took two decades for us to climb out of. See, pet, nowadays, the price of bioil actually has nothing to do with production costs and quantity, it’s meticulously calculated to the last percentage point so as not to cause any dip in the trans-stellar finance markets. When the 2111 cartel stepped in and stabilized the market, they wound up controlling a big slice of the entire bioil market process, and they aren’t going to give that up without a very nasty fight. So if anybody was trying to mess with that, to reintroduce a futures market in some backdoor fashion, then I’m not surprised they wound up floating along the Tyne.’

  ‘Why would a North want to mess with the current arrangement?’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t, that’s the point you’re getting at, pet, isn’t it? The other guys are going to be just as tough. Think what’s at stake here.’ She waved her coffee cup towards the gateway. ‘See those pipes down there under the ramp? Ever think just how big they are, how much bioil they can pump through per second? Everyone lies about St Libra production only providing GE and its affiliate planets with eighteen per cent of our bioil. True figure is more – a lot more. No one else wants those bloody great algaepaddies
leaking all across their nice new clean worlds; and Earth’s soil is too valuable for anything other than food crops – that battle was won a century ago. But nobody’s going to admit how dependent we are, because St Libra is this niggling little embarrassment to Brussels, in that it’s the one gateway they don’t have political control over. It belongs to the Norths, and they aren’t about to hand it over to any Euro Bureau.’

  ‘Crap on it,’ Sid murmured. ‘I’d heard it was fifteen per cent. Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yeah, at least. So if you want to try and go up against that monolith monopoly with its vested interest and unlimited funds and hardcore political support, people on the sharp end are going to get hurt. Then of course you’ve got plenty of bioil subsidiary markets to choose from; you could target emission bonds, carbon-exchange certificates, clean-burn validates, double-back users, post-spot delivery leverages – they’re all open to manipulation if you’ve got the balls. So if you’re mad and ballsy enough to run with a market sting along those lines then at the very minimum you’re going to need some serious hardcases, people who know how to corrupt your rival’s staff and smooth over problems fast. That’ll be those dark teams, they’re the ones who’ll have contacts with the street-level lowlifes that are going to be paid to run the truly shitty jobs. No way you’re going to crack that nut, pet, it is way too tough. Even if you reel someone in on suspicion, they’ll take an exile to Minisa or a twenty-year sentence over doing any kind of plea bargain with you. They’re not stupid.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that. I’ve got the HDA backing me up, and they can be persuasive.’

  ‘That doesn’t scare these people. But it does worry me. I’m out and clean, pet; I don’t need my name bobbing up in official circles again.’

  ‘Crap on it! Kaneesha, I don’t even know you. I need some names, man, for me not for them. You’re killing me out here. Someone in the gangs who gets to talk with a corporate. Come on.’

  She shook her head, and poured the dregs of her espresso onto the packed snow of the car park, watching the dirty brown liquid melt the crust. ‘I know dozens. All dead since I got out. Does that tell you anything?’

  ‘Kaneesha!’

  ‘Why don’t you ask your friend Aldred? Work this from the other side.’

  He glared at her. ‘You’re still in.’

  ‘No.’ She jabbed a gloved finger at her face. ‘I watched your brain making notes when you saw my face. This shit I’ve got, this has to be dealt with. I have to go away, a long way away, pet, to find the kind of gene therapy that will get me through this. And that’s expensive. I’m not taking any risks. I’ve lived risk for too long now. That part of my life is over.’

  ‘One fucking name, Kaneesha. One! You owe me that. There’s no risk in that.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ She turned and started off across the car park towards the rusting exit barriers.

  ‘Kaneesha!’

  ‘Don’t call me again, not ever. I’ll call you. Maybe.’

  Sid watched her waddling away, his jaw clenched hard; he wanted to run after her, to swing her round and shout some more, make her understand how he needed this. It would be useless, he knew. Besides, she’d said maybe. In the kind of world she lived in that was like a gold-plated promise.

  *

  After the second Daedalus went through the gateway, Sid drove Jacinta and the kids back into the city centre, and parked in the Market Street Station. It was convenient for the shops, and he didn’t have to pay a charge.

  ‘And don’t even think about “just popping up” to check on your case,’ Jacinta warned as they got out of the car.

  ‘I never did,’ he protested. ‘This is a family day, I told you that.’ He ignored the look she gave him; it’d taken a lot of argument before she’d even agreed to him meeting Kaneesha. Besides, his iris smartcell grid had a small real-time display showing him the progress the team was making up in the zone theatre. They’d backtracked eighteen taxis now. None of them had been the one at Elswick Wharf.

  They made sure Zara and Will were wrapped up, coats buttoned, scarves tight, gloves on. Then Jacinta led the way to Grey’s Monument. With everyone drawn to the spectacle of the planes going through the gateway, the shops were slightly less crowded than usual for a Sunday lunchtime. Sid went into Stanatons, the schools outfitters, in Central Arcade. With its glazed brown tile façade and palm trees beside the door, the shop looked like it belonged to the time when the Arcade was built, two hundred and forty years ago. It was resolutely old-fashioned, with child-sized mannequins wearing the uniforms of a dozen private schools. The sports equipment was modern, though. Sid never did like the idea of kids wearing those big protective helmets with bars across the front. Along with all the padding incorporated in the rest of their field kit it symbolized the official paranoiac anti-risk culture which he so relished sneering at. In his day football had been proper football, none of this tag-tackle rubbish they played at school nowadays. If you got hurt you were more careful next time, it was the only proper way to learn. He always lost that argument with Jacinta, who couldn’t bear the idea of her babies being exposed to ‘needless harm’. Fortunately Stanatons’ mirror was twenty-third century, so Will could rotate the image to see what he looked like from all angles in his new blazer. That led to an argument with his mum about the style and fit. Sid and Zara kept well out of it, browsing the girls’ section for things she claimed she couldn’t live without. She was right, her school scarf was worn, and the gloves too small. By the time they left they were carrying three bags, and Sid’s secondary account was down five hundred Eurofrancs. Half of Europe’s population had secondaries, funded by moonlighting jobs or off-book bonuses.

  Sid’s police force salary went through valid channels, but his job provided a whole range of opportunity for enhancing cash flow. Keeping the balance was the tricky aspect; too many police reacted like kids in a gamer store, overreaching themselves the moment they cleared probation. They made themselves easy targets for extortion by gangs and investigation from Tax Bureau inspectors. Sid had steered clear for the first couple of years until he got his promotion; even then he made sure he was never ostentatious enough to warrant investigation, and he never had bothered with the petty stuff: the local defence lawyers who needed evidence to glitch or disappear, club owners, tox kings locked into boundary wars, small businesses venturing into areas without permits. He was in Newcastle for heaven’s sake, the town where the bioil money, the truly astronomical numbers, bubbled through every corporate core, enriching everyone it passed.

  After six months of quiet good-boy behaviour as a junior detective, he’d extracted a Northumberland Interstellar middle-manager from a potentially nasty situation at a club. It never appeared on any police file, he never asked for anything – which interested people as he knew it would. A couple of days later Aldred himself had sat down with him in a Jamaica Blue coffee franchise to say thank you in person.

  Ever since, his secondary had received a monthly retainer from an untraceable account on New Monaco. Occasionally, Aldred would get in touch, and ask some question or other. A question that could only be answered by someone with access to secure government databases. They could get it through a dozen routes, of course, but he was a useful route, a reliable route, a route who understood the etiquette. Right up until last September when he’d made a mistake going through the UK treasury, downloading data on a company which was green tagged for review. Apart from that, his career had gone smoothly, promotions were regular. Even the New Monaco payments had risen, mirroring his police grades.

  After the arcade they went to Livie’s, halfway along Grey Street, for Sunday lunch. The wide windows in the front of the grand old stone building allowed the kids to watch people and traffic as they drank banana milkshakes from a straw.

  ‘Did you like the house?’ Sid asked when the food arrived. They’d all run through the virtual the estate agent had downloaded, taking turns in the zone so they could see as much or as little as
they wanted.

  Zara grinned round her straw. ‘I know which room I’m having.’

  ‘Oh, do you?’

  ‘The one at the back. You know, when you turn left at the top of the stairs.’

  ‘It’s on the right,’ Will said with a sneer. ‘Don’t you know your left from your right?’

  Jacinta gave her son a cautionary glance.

  ‘It looks onto the garden,’ Zara said, deliberately ignoring her brother. ‘I’ve only ever seen the road from my window before, which is boring. I really like the garden, Daddy. I ran the virtual’s season-reveal function, there are so many flowers in the summer.’

  ‘Can we have a squidgoline in it?’ Will asked hopefully. ‘A really big one, like Eric’s got?’

  ‘Not that big,’ Sid said, remembering the enormous bouncer-slab Will’s friend had in his garden. ‘But possibly we can get you one, yes.’

  ‘There’s got to be some astonishingly good behaviour from both of you before that ever happens,’ Jacinta warned quickly.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Sid confirmed. ‘And it won’t be until summer at the earliest.’

  ‘Aye man, that’s extortion,’ Will complained.

  ‘Less of that, thank you.’ Sid pointed a warning finger.

  Will pulled a perfect teenage-sulk face, and poured some gravy over his Yorkshire puddings.

  He must have been practising, Sid thought. Just what is he going to be like when he finally is a teen? Damn, it’s not so long away.

  ‘So you did like the house, then?’ Jacinta asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Will and Zara chorused.

  She gave Sid a significant look as she rolled her spaghetti onto a fork. ‘So?’

  A red high-priority icon popped up into Sid’s grid. He grinned broadly. It was all he could do not to punch the air in triumph. ‘Go for it,’ he said. ‘Book us a real-world viewing.’

  She gave him a surprised look. ‘I didn’t realize you were that keen.’