Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  There was a moment’s hesitation, enough to show Evitts was worried about the direction and implication of the question. ‘Yes, sir, she was.’

  ‘You were awake then, watching her?’

  ‘No, sir. I was asleep.’

  ‘Then you don’t know. Please ask everyone in your tent if any of them saw her there during the night.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Vance wondered if he was taking paranoia too far. But there were too many unknowns here. And he was still furious about the last report from Ralph Stevens, that Scrupsis was trying to sabotage the Newcastle police investigation and divert it to his own wretched office – Vermekia should have squashed that the instant the issue arose. Perhaps he was just taking his anger out on Evitts, but the corporal needed a serious reality check. Vance wanted a dependable squad when they went forward to the next camp and the mission began in earnest.

  ‘Sir,’ Evitts said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everyone who woke at some point last night confirms Tramelo was in the tent. That’s about five or six sightings between twenty-three hundred hours and six this morning, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Corporal.’ He cancelled the link. In all probability, Tramelo wasn’t involved, but Vance just had to be sure. The accident bothered him. He couldn’t help questioning the timing, why here and now? Everyone else seemed to be ignoring the true purpose of the expedition. That there was a high probability of hostile aliens out here somewhere, intent and capability unknown.

  Vance called up Chet Mullain’s log from the administration network, reviewing his work record, the files which the man had worked on yesterday in a cubicle not five metres from where Vance now sat. The log was blank. Goosebumps returned along Vance’s arms. A quick extended check showed it was only yesterday’s log that was missing. He called two of the camp’s administration staff, asking if Mullain had spent the day working as normal. He had, they confirmed; they were buddies, they’d been in the cubicles on either side, and the three of them ate in the mess tent together. It was a perfectly normal day.

  Which ended in Mullain’s death, Vance filled in silently.

  He went across to Mullain’s cubicle, and started examining it. The tiny space was empty of anything personal – if it hadn’t been for the number stencilled on the door he wouldn’t have even known who’d been assigned it. A further review of Mullain’s work log for Friday and Saturday didn’t produce anything useful. Boring days spent on rotas, trying to juggle available skills to requests coming in from officers and NCOs, adding notes as to real abilities, grading people according to what they actually achieved rather than what their file claimed they could do.

  Vance called Antrinell, arranging to meet him on cargo row, where Mullain had his accident. Standing orders for the HDA were that fatal accident sites had to be left intact until cleared by the investigating officer. When Vance arrived, a logistics corps squad was waiting beside a couple of self-loading pallet trucks, surveying the clutter of fallen pallets. Vance actually recognized the corporal in charge: Corfes Sandresh, a small, wiry Egyptian who had little appreciation for the expedition or the wild wonder of the jungle surrounding them. Corporal Sandresh lived simply for the job, for loading, moving, stacking, and reloading packages wherever and whenever they were required. That was probably why he looked so miserable.

  ‘Talk me through it,’ Vance told him.

  In its entirety, the row of airload 350DL pallets was a hundred and twenty metres long; stacked four high and mostly two deep. It was the front rank of what would soon be a regimented field of similar rows flown in by Daedalus. The stack on the end of the row had toppled on top of Mullain. That was when his bodymesh yelled for help.

  Each stack of pallets was tethered by cables, attached to the highest pallet, making sure they would remain stable – after all, Sandresh pointed out, the ground wasn’t perfectly level. Some of the stacks leaned over, not much, but they were definitely veering away from the vertical. They were designed to withstand a fifteen-degree tilt before tethers were necessary as opposed to a precaution. In Sarvar, no stack was tilting over four degrees.

  ‘So what happened to the tethers?’ Vance asked.

  Corporal Sandresh looked desperately unhappy. ‘They weren’t correctly secured to the anchor posts, sir,’ he said.

  Vance examined the tethers, slim carbon cables with a huge breaking strain, wrapped in a high-visibility red and yellow sheath. They should have been threaded through the end of the anchor pins, which were driven half a metre into the ground, then looped and clipped. Someone hadn’t checked the clips.

  ‘Who is responsible for this stack?’ Vance asked.

  ‘I am, sir. It’s my responsibility. I’m sorry, I really thought they’d been clipped properly.’

  And Vance knew that a man like Sandresh wouldn’t make that kind of mistake, no matter how big a hurry he was in. ‘Which other stacks are you responsible for?’

  ‘Most of them, sir. Corporal Wertheimer is also authorized to certify the cargo – they’re split between us depending who’s on duty at the time.’

  ‘Show me. I want to see five stacks that you personally signed off.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You heard.’

  So they followed Sandresh along the row, stopping to peer at the anchor pins whenever they came to a stack which his log confirmed he’d examined and cleared. Vance wasn’t in any way surprised to see all the tethers were correctly looped and clipped.

  Halfway along the row, he stopped and looked back. The camp’s ground vehicle park was fifty metres beyond the end of the row, with three of the self-loading pallet trucks, and the dozers and compactors which had carved out the runway, along with the mobile biolabs and a couple of MTJs (Multi Terrain Jeeps), the entire complement of Sarvar’s ground vehicles. It wasn’t laid out anything like as neatly as the pallet row, with the vehicles parked in roughly the same area. Vance looked from the cluster of vehicles to the two self-loading trucks which the logistics corps personnel had used to lift pallets off the fatally injured Mullain.

  ‘What’s the theory, Corporal? How could the stack have toppled?’ Vance asked.

  ‘He must have tripped on a tether cable, sir. It was just coming up on dawn, and they’re not that visible in ringlight.’

  ‘He tripped and pulled the whole stack down? That’s some trip.’

  The corporal shrugged. ‘No other way it could have gone, sir. Something had to act as a trigger.’

  ‘Can a man pull a tether cable that hard?’

  ‘He was probably jogging, sir. Mullain liked to keep himself in shape.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Vance said slowly. ‘Hit it at speed. That would most likely do it. Thank you, Corporal; you can tell your people to clean up now.’

  ‘Sir.’ The corporal saluted and headed back to his squad.

  ‘So?’ Antrinell asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking there’s no way tripping on a tether cable is going to bring a stack of pallets down on top of you.’

  ‘You’ve got the same problem with someone pushing the stack,’ Antrinell said. ‘Those 350DLs can weigh up to a couple of tonnes. An elephant might be able to shove one, but I’ll bet whatever you like a man couldn’t.’

  ‘No,’ Vance said. ‘They used a self-loading truck. The damn things are parked right next to the row, and they’re fuel-cell powered; in other words: silent. Mullain wouldn’t have known it was on; he certainly couldn’t hear it, probably didn’t even see it parked right up behind the stack. So when he walks up to the designated meeting point our murderer just tipped the throttle, and the whole thing comes crashing down on top of him. Ten seconds later the truck is parked back with the others, and nobody can ever prove different.’

  ‘A murder?’ Antrinell said.

  Vance was pleased with his deputy, there was no hint of scepticism in his voice. ‘Mullain discovered something yesterday, something in the files. His log has been wiped.’

  ‘And that got
him killed?’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidence,’ Vance said. ‘Mullain deals with personnel, so whatever he found must relate to the information HDA has compiled on them. Presumably he was on his way to meet the person with the discrepancy.’

  ‘So it was a blackmail threat which went wrong,’ Antrinell said. ‘After all, he didn’t report the anomaly, whatever it was. Instead he arranged to meet his intended victim out here to load up his secondary.’

  ‘And didn’t realize how big a deal it was for someone,’ Vance mused. He looked round the camp as the glare-point of Sirius began to rise into the sky. People were making their way over to the mess tent, with plenty of curious glances being aimed at the cargo row. The local net seethed with microlinks. Everybody knew. ‘And we’re stuck out here with them.’

  ‘Do you think it’s related to the alien?’ Antrinell asked.

  ‘I don’t see how. The only person who has even a tenuous connection is Tramelo, and she was tucked up with a squad of Legionnaires. Probably in a very literal sense.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  Vance gave the mobile biolabs a long look. ‘I want you to check our primary cargo, see if anyone tried to tamper with it. Also, see what you can do to increase security on the biolabs; maybe some extra smartdust applied to the vehicles. Don’t use anyone apart from your own team. We don’t know who we can trust out of the rest of the camp.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’m going to round up the first people to reach Mullain. We’ll interview them together. I want to construct a timeline.’

  *

  Vance had to borrow Commander Ni’s office in the Qwik-Kabins block. It was the only one which could hold more than two people. As it was, with himself behind the desk and Antrinell along with the interviewee crammed in on the other side, space was severely limited.

  The first to shuffle into the airless cubicle was Mark Chitty. His file said he was twenty-eight, but his short beard made that hard to determine visually. He wore the shapeless grey-green half-sleeve scrubs of all medical personnel; as a uniform it suited him, bestowing a degree of assurance. You’d be glad to see him arrive at an emergency. The worn-down attitude possessing him in the hospital that morning had now turned to a more resentful air.

  ‘You were first on scene?’ Vance asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Vance frowned. Chitty had already decided this was an us-and-them interview, which was a big mistake. Curious, too; he must have undergone enough inquests since he qualified as a paramedic. ‘Did you see anybody else around the body? I don’t mean someone running away from the cargo row, just someone up at that time of the morning? Or maybe a shadow or movement you couldn’t identify, and didn’t waste time on?’

  ‘No sir, there wasn’t anybody else.’

  ‘All right, so you got there first with Juanitar Sakur, yes?’

  ‘Juanitar is my partner. He’s still training for his full paramedic qualification.’

  ‘Fine. What did you see?’

  ‘Mullain; or at least the top half of his torso. The rest of him was crushed under the pallet.’

  ‘Did you think he would survive?’

  ‘Not really, but that doesn’t matter. You always do your best. I couldn’t be certain how bad the damage was until we got the pallet off him.’

  ‘So you called for help.’

  ‘Yeah, Corporal Sandresh. I know him, and he’s in charge of the camp’s cargo.’

  ‘Quite, the logical choice. How long before he arrived?’

  ‘Maybe five or six minutes.’

  ‘So did Mullain say anything in that time?’

  ‘No, sir, we rigged him up to the resuscitator – it’s important to keep the brain oxygenated. The neck was easily accessible, so we could pump artificial blood into his brain through the carotid artery.’

  ‘All right. Who turned up?’

  ‘Sandresh and two of his squad; er, Kaysing and Piszkiewicz I think. They made good time.’

  ‘And they got the loader trucks?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who turned up next?’

  ‘Lori, Bernstein, and that North who’s with us. They heard the noise, and they helped get Mullain free. Piszkiewicz and Lori helped me and Juanitar carry him back to the hospital.’

  Vance glanced over at Antrinell. ‘Bastian North was there?’

  *

  ‘Yes, it was me,’ Bastian 2North said as soon as he sat down. ‘I did what I could for the poor man. Is that a problem?’

  ‘And you were there this morning because . . . ?’

  ‘There was a lot of shouting. The kind that says there’s a big problem.’

  ‘Yes. Can we go back one. What were you doing near the cargo row that early in the morning?’

  ‘Taking a walk. It’s so damn hot I find it hard to sleep.’

  ‘And you went over to help?’

  ‘Of course. Is there a reason I shouldn’t?’

  ‘Not at all, no. And thank you for that. So what was going on?’

  ‘Your guy, Mullain, was trapped under some pallets. It wasn’t pretty, there was a lot of blood on the ground. Some paramedics were working on him, and a couple of squaddies were using the trucks to try and get the pallets off. Everyone was frantic. But they got him out. Maybe they shouldn’t have, I don’t know, if it’d been me under there, with that much damage, man the pain must have been incredible.’

  ‘Mullain was conscious?’

  ‘Pardon me: no. All I’m saying is, they weren’t doing the bloke any favours, you know.’

  ‘Yeah. I saw the body in the hospital. So, did you see anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like someone heading away from the scene.’

  ‘No.’ Bastian drew the word out, giving Vance a hard stare. ‘Why would somebody be doing that?’

  ‘It’s hard to topple those pallet stacks over.’

  ‘All right, let me rephrase: why would they topple onto Mullain? I’ve never met the man, but he’s just an admin guy, right?’

  ‘Yes. He deals with personnel, so if anyone isn’t who they claim, he’d be the one to find out.’

  Bastian North ran a finger across his brow as he pondered the statement. ‘All right, you know why I’m actually here?’

  ‘Officially you’re Brinkelle’s observer. That means politics.’

  ‘You say it like that’s a bad thing.’

  ‘I’ve never met a good politician.’

  ‘Ah, man, standard cynic response, and very appropriate in this day and age. But there’s a difference between the incompetent, corrupt zealots who run government, and the interactions and accommodations which soothe and control human dynamics – which is what we have in Abellia. Brinkelle sent me along because we have a stake in this expedition, a far more personal one than anybody else.’

  ‘That and she controls the bioil on Brogal.’

  ‘Politics. But you do acknowledge our concern?’

  ‘Yeah, you have that interest.’

  ‘So what I need to know at this juncture, Colonel Elston, is if you have any suspicion that the alien which murdered my father and brothers is in any way connected to Mullain’s unfortunate death?’

  ‘And let’s not forget your father’s staff, as well, I believe?’ Vance didn’t know why he was pushing, just that something about the North’s attitude rubbed him wrong. If allowed, Bastian would talk and talk, taking control of the conversation, denying anyone else a say. A common enough practice among politicians, though according to his file he was mainly involved in civil engineering management back in Abellia.

  ‘My father’s staff as well,’ Bastian conceded. ‘Though obviously I don’t have the personal connection with them. However, I am concerned with the instrument of their destruction. So I ask again, was the alien involved in this?’

  ‘I don’t see how it could be,’ Vance said. ‘If Mullain’s death was deliberate, the only clue we have points towards a very mundane human motive.’
>
  ‘Sex?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Would have been my next guess. Thank you, Colonel. If there are any developments, I’d like to be kept informed.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I see Angela Tramelo is here at Sarvar.’

  ‘She is. She’s here under my supervision as a technical adviser. Is that a problem?’

  It took Bastian a while to say anything. ‘No. I don’t suppose it can be, given what has subsequently happened to my cousin back in Newcastle. She should be given the benefit of the doubt, despite what Brinkelle believes. After all, it was always a stretch to think a girl could have physically slaughtered all those people.’

  Once again, Vance’s thoughts went back to the insubstantial image the brain scanner had extracted from Angela’s thoughts. It had featured in his mind a lot recently. ‘That doubt is one of the major reasons the expedition was approved.’

  ‘Yes. And it would seem she is a one-in-ten. We didn’t know that at the time.’

  ‘Nobody did.’

  ‘Did you ask her about it? I find it curious such a person would be recruited as one of my late father’s girlfriends. Actually, that’s not true. I find it highly improbable. In fact, unbelievable.’

  ‘And yet she was.’

  ‘Do you have any theories why?’

  ‘No. Obviously it wasn’t for the money.’

  ‘Information, then? She was some kind of spy perhaps? No, that doesn’t make much sense, the techniques developed by our clinic in Abellia were always made freely available. And that was all my father had an interest in.’

  Vance could see how troubled the North was by Angela. ‘I have to ask you not to confront her. She’s not the most . . . stable of people right now. Twenty years in jail for a crime you didn’t commit is quite a burden for anyone.’

  ‘You believe her to be innocent? You believe in the alien?’

  ‘I believe it’s possible, yes.’

  ‘A politician’s answer, Colonel.’ Bastian smiled. ‘Bravo. I will restrain myself from any encounters with Ms Tramelo.’

  Antrinell waited until Bastian 2North had left the block of Qwik-Kabins before speaking. ‘Damn, they are weird.’

  ‘The North clones? That’s kind of inevitable.’