Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Once she was in, she called up a list of pending civil-engineering projects. A quick review showed her several that were suitable, but she chose the Delgado Valley development purely for the timing, which was excellent; the project was due to move into phase one in another five months. Once a road tunnel had been drilled through the base of the surrounding mountains from the Rue de Grenelle, five miles of valley all the way down to the sea would be open for development. There were over fifty contractors bidding for the basic infrastructure project, starting with the tunnel.

  Angela established a link to the Vietnamese legal office she’d set up before arriving at Imperial College, and Barclay’s all-important authorization certificate confirmed the legitimacy of one last bid. This was from GiulioTrans-stellar, whose profile as an established construction and management company was included in the bid datawork, along with financial guarantees from the HKFD bank. GiulioTrans-stellar was one of twenty-seven fake companies they’d fabricated in readiness, whose specialities covered a whole range of products and services that Abellia was always issuing contracts for.

  Extricating herself from the finance office systems took as long as getting in. She went carefully, checking each stage to make sure she’d left no trace, that no monitors were raising queries. With the bid secure, she dived back under the desk, and cautiously extricated the interceptors from the console’s physical systems, leaving no trace of the violation.

  A final wipe of the floor to make certain there was no trace of oil to betray she’d ever been there, the choker fastened back on, and she slipped back out into the long gallery as silent as the fluttering shadows thrown by the drapes. The Delgado Valley contract wasn’t due to be issued for another month, coinciding with the end of her contract. The money for the winning company would be transferred to Abellia’s main civic account four days prior to the award, ensuring sufficient funds were available. That would be her window, which was cutting things fine, but establishing a legitimate-seeming contract was the procedure they’d agreed to. It was sophisticated and took time, but it had a much greater chance of success. The finance office network and North security was always watching for crash and burn raids. All she had to do now was pull off another intrusion like this one, and use Barclay’s certificate to nominate Giulio-Trans-stellar as the winner. The money would transfer in microseconds, and then nothing else mattered, nothing at all. If they caught her it would be bad. Realistically, a brutal interrogation and possibly execution – the Norths were not known for forgiveness and charity. Hopefully, she’d be able to get out of the mansion and back to Earth while the finance office was still trying to figure out what had happened, and their security division did their best to trace the money. They never would find it, of course; there were too many cut-offs and anonymous accounts built in to the route through over a dozen banks and four planets that’d been designed to deliver the prize where it was so desperately needed. And then there was the definitive safeguard: she didn’t know the final segment of the trail, so it didn’t matter what they did to her. Would they be surprised she was prepared to make that ultimate sacrifice to ensure the theft’s success? Yes. But then they were used to dealing with organized criminal gangs and sophisticated con artists and quiet sneaky byteheads. Not people like her.

  Bartram and Olivia-Jay were on the big bed where Angela had left them, lying close enough to appear a normal couple. She dropped the towel in the en suite, and slid gently onto the gel mattress beside Olivia-Jay. The girl let out a sigh suspiciously like a whimper, her thick mop of raven hair stirring.

  ‘Shush,’ Angela whispered. ‘I’m here, darling, I’m here.’ She kissed the back of Olivia-Jay’s neck tenderly, closing her arms around the disturbed girl. Olivia-Jay snuggled back into the embrace, and relaxed once more, falling back into a deeper sleep pattern.

  Angela grinned for everything she’d achieved, and listened to her racing heart begin to calm. One more month. One, that’s all.

  Friday 1st March 2143

  Ian went home during his lunch break. It was becoming routine. He didn’t speak to anyone as he went down to Market Street’s underground car park; but he did curse the overcautious auto as it crawled through the rain-slushed roads and delivered him back to Falconar Street; he almost cursed Sid and Eva for including him in their mad, doomed scheme. There was no real reason for him to be doing this. It was only another murder, a police case. He didn’t give a shit, not outside the station and overtime hours. Except, this one, the North slaying, had tweaked that little demon of curiosity that lurked and whispered and goaded every genuine detective. Ian had to admit, he was intrigued by the complexities and politics.

  So back home he went to keep a check on their surveillance operation. Sid and Eva both acknowledged that they really needed to run the whole thing with a real person monitoring and controlling the software. The police routines Ian had acquired were intended to keep an eye out for thugs, hookers, street scum, and known snatchers working the city’s stores. Trying to follow a vanilla criminal trained by corporate security and alert for any law enforcement activity was always going to be a stretch.

  None of them could spare the time for that. Even if they did, their absence would bolster Market Street’s thriving gossip culture. Questions would murmur on rumour-greedy lips. They couldn’t afford questions.

  But . . . The original code had been cutting-edge back when it was written. Newer, more expensive, versions had undergone multiple improvements until they’d risen beyond the budget of ordinary police forces – now they were mainly used by agencies on contract. However, the core functionality remained sound.

  So, slowly, hour by painful hour, the software began to harvest a profile on Marcus Sherman, unofficial main suspect for the North murder. Ian had launched the operation on Saturday; the surveillance quietly riding Dunston Marina’s meshes didn’t even spot and confirm Sherman until Tuesday evening. Since then it had followed Sherman as he was picked up in a black Mercedes every morning, using Elston’s HDA authorization to slip through the traffic macromesh, examining transnet cell records for his e-i access, learning codes and compiling a list of contacts.

  Marcus Sherman kept some interesting company. Firstly, there was Jede, who seemed to be his lieutenant, always there shadowing the man, always the one you had to speak to before you could talk to Sherman himself. Boz, who was straight muscle; and took that job definition way too seriously. Illegal steroids and obsessive gym sessions had produced a caricature of a bodybuilder physique. Ian completely disapproved. Fitness was about gym work, healthy eating, and body-awareness; factors which combined to sculpt and maintain a toned athlete physique. Boz was just a loser grotesque. Not that Ian ever wanted to go one-on-one with the freak.

  Ruckby was Sherman’s second bodyguard and enforcer. A man who took a more normal approach to achieving an intimidating presence by bulking up on bad food and possessing a nasty temper.

  The only other regular was Valentina, a seventeen-year-old beauty from Canada who was chauffeured to Sherman every night, and took a cab back to her flat just behind Quayside the next morning.

  So far Ian had established that Sherman slept at the Maybury Moon, a flat in Heaton, and a house in Benwell. Details where he went during the day were difficult. Twice he’d changed cars after stopping at a café. But the profile was growing.

  Ian put on the netlens glasses, and examined the morning’s information. So far Sherman had driven into town from the Ben-well house and gone to an office block in the centre, not far from The Gate. He’d stayed there less than half an hour.

  That didn’t matter, it was another location to watch. Ian’s e-i supervised a whole string of searchbots running in the new Apple console, tracing ownership of the office, monitoring links in and out, capturing images of everyone who visited the office, harvesting basic profiles for them.

  After he left the office, Sherman had gone straight to the city’s ring road, and driven north up the A1. He’d turned off just before Alnwick. That was w
here coverage ended. Ian knew the area well enough, a maze of little country roads with an invisible maintenance priority level as far as the Country Highways Bureau was concerned. What there was of any macromesh would be covered by ice and snow that wouldn’t see more than one snowplough a month. Tracking Sherman’s Merc by remote was a lost cause. Ian loaded a search and notification order into the road traffic management network, which would alert the observation software as soon as the Merc ventured back onto a main road with a functioning macromesh.

  Even though Ian was enjoying the feeling of superiority their whole covert operation provided, he had to admit it hadn’t turned up any kind of overlap with the North murder investigation. He knew what Sid would reply if he ever voiced that particular doubt: ‘Aye, man, give it time.’

  Ian was starting to wonder how much time he could afford. But he couldn’t help the interest developing in the elusive Mr Sherman. The man was a true player, the kind that had never featured in any of Ian’s normal investigations.

  Satisfied that the surveillance software and the searchbots he’d added were going to contribute a reasonable-sized file to the growing profile they were building, he left the flat and headed back to Market Street.

  Tuesday 5th March 2143

  The flight from Sarvar to Wukang didn’t bother Angela anything like the previous Edzell-to-Sarvar flight had. Perhaps it was a level of fatalism creeping into her mind, induced by the dark monotony of St Libra’s rampant zebra vegetation. Or more likely, she admitted to herself, simply the lack of any meta-feature like the Eclipse Mountains to fly over this time. Their flight took them two thousand kilometres north-west from Sarvar to another of those now-familiar strips of compacted naked soil with a little cluster of tents and Qwik-Kabins and vehicles at one end. Wukang was the first of the three projected forward camps, arranged almost like compass points, north-west, due north, and north-east from Sarvar, which was now being relegated to supply-base status. Varese, the camp due north, was already having its landing strip bulldozed; while Oamaru, away to the east, had just received its first successful Berlin landing yesterday. No more forward camps were scheduled – this was as far as the expedition was going to venture, as far as the budget would take them.

  Reasonable enough, Angela thought as the Daedalus rear-loading ramp lowered itself amid a chorus of high-pitched whining from electrohydraulic actuators. If the xenobiologists couldn’t find any sign of animal life this far away from Abellia, then they weren’t going to find any – period.

  She half-expected Elston to be waiting for her at the bottom of the ramp, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Antrinell had been doing a discreet but competent job of watching her at Sarvar.

  As she stepped out onto the muddy, compacted soil she settled her sunhat with a quick flourish. The morning rain had left the air muggy. Mist was rising from the jungle vegetation which lay a couple of kilometres away from the flattish ground around Wukang. Away to the north, where the land rose sharply again, stationary clouds lurked amid the steep hills.

  ‘End of the line,’ she said.

  ‘You make that sound kind of sinister,’ DiRito said.

  ‘It’s not meant to be. This is simply as far as we go. The next time we get on a Daedalus, it’ll be for the flight home.’

  ‘You don’t think we’ll go any further?’

  Angela indicated the mobile biolabs filling the centre of the fuselage, which the plane’s flight crew were now uncoupling from their lock-down latches. ‘They’ll travel out from here, maybe even forty, fifty klicks. But that’s it.’

  ‘The owls didn’t see anything round here,’ Omar said.

  ‘Do they know what to look for?’ Angela countered. ‘That thing I encountered was intelligent. And they’ve had ninety-two years since humans arrived on St Libra to prepare for us. No, for once the HDA is right, genetic-variance testing is the way to go.’

  She watched as Antrinell climbed into the cab of the first biolab. His attitude towards the machine was almost protective. The fuel cells fired up with a mild gust of white vapour from their exhaust vents on the side of the big vehicle.

  ‘Uh oh,’ Paresh murmured. ‘Tents.’

  Angela followed his gaze. Lieutenant Pablo Botin was heading their way.

  ‘Tents,’ she agreed. High up in the sky, another Daedalus was circling round to line up on the runway. More equipment, more personnel. Each of the big airlifters was flying three times a day out from Sarvar. Passam and the command staff were throwing everything at establishing the forward camps as fast as possible.

  Wukang and its two cousins were the HDA’s statement of intent to the vast planet. They challenged the eternal jungle, making it very clear that humans were going to uncover its secrets one way or another.

  Angela couldn’t help wonder what would happen if they succeeded. For some reason that scenario had been missing from every general briefing HDA officers had made. She knew they’d have one, she could only hope that it was going to be good enough. All she’d had was a single blind survivalist impulse: run like hell.

  *

  They were tight white shorts. Hot and sexy on a blonde babe with a fit body. Clingy, quality fabric with a sparkly sheen, designer label, cheeky cut to emphasize taut buttocks. Marc-Anthony and Loanna had stood back and admired their choice, especially when those shorts were matched by a low-slung, ebony mesh halter top.

  The top had been left behind when Angela sneaked back to Bartram’s seventh-floor study. And now the shorts were ruined. Blood was to blame, blood soaking into that expensive, absorbent fabric. Mariangela’s blood, Coi’s blood, Bartram’s blood, Benson 2North’s blood, Blake 2North’s blood . . . Blood that had come teeming out of ripped flesh and shredded hearts. Enough blood to turn the mansion’s marble flooring into a slippery lake of the stuff.

  Angela had slithered and skidded in the lounge, falling over repeatedly. Her bare flesh was covered in blood. Hair matted with the stuff. And the funky shorts had turned to a glistening scarlet belt, becoming sticky and restrictive as they were heated. And her skin was very hot by now.

  She’d run. Of course she’d run. But there was method to it. She still possessed just enough presence of mind to snatch a small bag from her room on the sixth floor. A bag that was always casually ready for a quick departure, with those truly important items she’d need if things went wrong and she needed to make a fast exit. Not that they’d ever considered it would be like this horror.

  The bag was now gripped by fingers with white-stressed knuckles as she fled down the rest of the stairs, trapped within the mansion’s silent gloom. The silence frightened her more than the treacherous glimmers of ringlight that seeped across the stairs, distorting their size, stretching out deep shadows to fool her. Again she’d fallen, tumbling hard down the unforgiving marble, leaving long smears of blood in her wake. Her grunts and muted cries absorbed and killed by the silence.

  But she was the only one making any noise. There should have been alarms blaring out across the night, waking everyone, summoning guards with weapons. Alarms that banished the silence. Comforting alarms. Instead, the silence engulfed her, followed her as she fled in terror down the stairs to the huge ground-floor atrium. More silence was waiting as she took the next flight of stairs down to the basement garage. Not even ringlight ventured down here, it was pitch dark. Within the sensory absence she stretched her arms wide, fumbling against the walls to give some illustration of where she was. Blind, running for her life, hoping – praying! – there was nothing sharing the darkness.

  Below and in front: a hint of light. Four slim lines. A rectangle. Door!

  Angela burst through it into the garage. Here at last was light. Ceiling strips shining a bright, universal green-tinged light. She blinked in the comfortless glare, hyperventilating wildly. Looked down at herself in numb dread. The blood that painted every part of her was congealing, darkening, flaking, moulting off her own skin like some obscene scab membrane.

  Her wretched wail echoed round th
e garage.

  Two long rows of silver-blue Jaguar JX-7 coupés were lined up on either side of her. She thought she heard something in the stairwell behind, and jumped, whimpering.

  ‘Get a grip!’ Angela screamed at herself. She ran for the first Jag and vaulted over the door into the driver’s seat. Her hand slammed down on the dashboard, and she winced at the sharp flash of pain from the dark weapons in her fingertips as they hit the walnut veneer. The tips had come sliding up out of her flesh just behind the nails, tearing her own flesh as they rose – the little gashes were still raw. Despite the presence of those extraneous tips, the Jag’s auto read the biometric as Barclay 2North. The joystick telescoped out of the dashboard and the seat’s fat shoulder harnesses hinged round to hold her comfortably. She flicked the car to manual, and twisted the joystick hard, demanding full acceleration. Wheels spun fast, sending up tyre smoke, and the machine leapt forward. Auto override kicked in, assisting her steering as she turned to avoid the other row of Jaguars and the concrete stanchions. Then she was aiming the car at the ramp, racing up into the night. Headlights came on, cutting through the drizzle outside. The coupé’s roof started to slide up.

  Angela hit a hundred and seventy kph by the time she reached the short tunnel connecting Gironella Beach with the Rue de Provence on the other side of the hills. There was some skid as the traction control fought with the rain-slicked road, but Angela refused to ease up.

  In the tunnel, shock finally caught up with her, and she started shaking uncontrollably. Tears flowed then as the numbness and focus of instinctive self-preservation ebbed. Breath was taken down in convulsive gulps. They were dead, all of them, slaughtered. Everyone she knew in the mansion: butchered mercilessly.