Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The brothers had gone on into the seventh-floor lounge to continue talk about deals and companies and finance. Bartram had told Suski to go with them, allowing her to showcase her pianist skills and the range of her voice. Angela didn’t think she was anything like as good as Olivia-Jay, but acknowledged that was a biased opinion.

  So it was Angela, Mariangela, and Coi who went back down to the sixth floor to be costumed up by Loanna and Marc-Anthony, ready for a night in Bartram’s bedroom. Mariangela was in a long lace and silk robe, imperious and spectacular with her hair flowing free; while Coi was in simple white PJs, all innocent and eager. Angela, they put in the white shorts and a gauzy black halter, congratulating themselves on their choice – except it was what she suggested. And that was the essential part.

  At two o’clock in the morning, with the rainclouds sliding in from the sea to obscure St Libra’s glowing rings, she wore those shorts as she walked confidently along the seventh floor’s gallery. The lights were on low, and some of the brothers were still up in the lounge. Suski was playing the piano, singing with a throaty gusto.

  Angela slipped into the retro-Egyptian study. At least nobody had been using oil in bed tonight, she didn’t have to worry about smears and towels. The waistband of the shorts concealed the little interceptor needles. She plucked them out, and wiggled beneath the desk.

  It was all ready. The money for the Delgardo Valley contract had been transferred to Abellia’s main civic account yesterday. GiulioTrans-stellar’s bid was still logged and pending, along with all the rival bids. Once again she used Barclay’s codes, awarding the bid to GiulioTrans-stellar. One hundred and eight million Eurofrancs vanished into the transnet banking sector.

  Angela let out a little whimper of relief. For once not angry at herself for the display of emotion, the way her eyes watered up. It was done. Over. Nothing else mattered.

  But it would be nice to get out of here.

  She withdrew methodically, forcing herself not to rush. Fold the civic account back up using Barclay’s authorization. Close down the infiltration, extract the interceptor needles and slip them back into her shorts. Shut down the console.

  Heart pounding, she opened the study door a fraction to peer out. The brothers must have finally gone to bed. The lights were out all along the gallery. It was perfectly silent, and unusually dark. With the rings veiled by thickening cloud, there was very little light filtering through the big windows at the far end of the gallery.

  Angela shut the study door, and started creeping back to Bartram’s bedroom. Halfway there, she put her foot into some kind of puddle. She was directly outside the lounge, and she realized that one of the big double doors was open. It was completely black inside.

  The liquid wasn’t water. She knew that: too thick, too sticky. And curiously, too warm. She frowned, not understanding what she’d trodden in. It was irritating, because she’d have to clean it off before she sneaked back into bed.

  She went into the lounge, and there was liquid all over the floor. Her feet slipped, and she went flailing down onto her knees, landing hard. ‘Ow! Son-of-a-bitch. House: lounge lights on minimum.’

  The mansion’s AI didn’t respond. ‘Oh come on!’ Angela struggled upright. The smell in the lounge was strange, unpleasant. She couldn’t quite place it, though there was a definite scent of mint mixed in there. Somehow it triggered a deep unease. This was getting ridiculous, she could feel the liquid all over her skin now. Some kind of pipe must have burst. Air-con coolant? But at least she now had a reason to be walking about at this time of the morning: I heard something.

  The manual switches were behind the door. She slithered about like a sugared-up toddler on an ice rink, trying to get to them. Five tiny green LEDs glowed on the panel, guiding her. One more slip, and she reached them, slapping her hand against the buttons.

  The lounge lights came on. For a moment her mind rejected the sight of her own body. The liquid coating her was bright scarlet. The colour slammed a warning straight into the most primitive section of her brain. Blood!

  Angela gasped in shock. It was everywhere, pooling all over the marble floor. And her feet were still in it. She cried out again, louder this time, her fear and disgust echoing round the big room. Spun round, a motion which sent her flailing about as yet again she lost her balance. Crashing down painfully on all fours. And looking directly at Barclay’s corpse, two metres away.

  Something had punctured his chest, slicing through his blue and grey striped silk shirt, and skin and ribcage to rip his heart apart. Blood had gushed out of the ragged multiple wound, spilling across the floor. Angela stared helplessly into his face with its strangely endearing death-mask expression of peaceful surprise. She knew it was him. He was wearing her banana cufflinks. But there was too much blood to have come from just one person. She raised her head.

  Suski was lying beside the piano, her throat slashed so brutally she’d almost been decapitated. Two more Norths were sprawled on the floor. One with the same bizarre heart wound as Barclay; the other had been split open from crotch to thorax, his organs and intestines slopping out amid the blood.

  Angela fought against the hysterical scream that was trying to force itself up her windpipe. Self-preservation alone kept her silent, one tiny spark of remaining rationality knew the maniac had to be close by – she mustn’t alert him. She glanced up at the ribbon-like lightstrips curling artistically round the ceiling, knowing that switching them on had been a terrible mistake – that and the noise she’d made earlier.

  She scrambled to her feet again. Nausea at the blood coating her skin threatened to burst out of her stomach in a spasm of uncontainable heaving. Ignore that. Focus.

  Angela gripped the door for support, and peered out into the long central gallery, ready to make a fast sprint for the stairs. Light from the lounge had fanned out into the darkness beyond. Five metres away, the door to Bartram’s bedroom was opening silently. The sight was enough to banish all emotion, clearing her mind. She held her breath, and activated the dark weapon implants in her arms.

  *

  After Angela left his minuscule office in the Qwik-Kabin, Vance sat behind his desk for over an hour, thinking things over. What she’d claimed couldn’t be right. And yet . . . for the first time since they’d first encountered each other twenty years ago, Vance was certain he’d finally got something truthful out of Angela Tramelo. Barclay 2North was dead, her rage and confusion was unfeigned, he knew that; she really had seen the body – and if anyone could identify Barclay it was Angela. But everyone knew Barclay survived the slaughter to become Zebediah. So if Angela was right then somewhere, somehow, an unknown North had appeared in Barclay’s place and become Zebediah. Now, twenty years later, another unknown North had come through the gateway from St Libra to walk upon the Good Earth.

  That the two events were connected was incontrovertible. But proving it was going to be a sore test of his abilities. And as for convincing HDA command . . .

  His e-i pulled all of Angela Tramelo’s original statements, and ran a search for any reference to Barclay 2North. Sure enough, there in the third day after she’d been arrested she described the scene she’d found in the mansion’s lounge to a Newcastle police detective. Vance cancelled the transcript, and lifted the ancient AV file from storage. The console screen curved round his face, delivering him into the zone, and he looked back across twenty years’ time into the secure interview room, where an Angela Tramelo with badly cut short red hair sat handcuffed behind a table with a bewildered defence solicitor beside her, while the senior of a pair of detectives asked question after question.

  ‘Oh my Lord,’ Vance muttered softly. ‘How about that.’ He’d almost missed it, but the younger, more junior detective sitting in the room was Royce O’Rouke. No mistaking the puffy features of that face, even though it wasn’t as red and angry as it was all the time these days.

  The senior detective, Garry Ravis, was taking her back through her discovery of the bodies.

>   ‘I heard a noise,’ Angela said in a dull voice. She looked in a bad way, quite ill, wearing dark-green police-issue overalls, and wrapped in a blanket. Her shoulders shivered constantly, and she was drinking a lot of water. ‘When I went out into the gallery, it was dark, every light was off. I stood in a puddle outside the lounge and went in. When I turned the light on I saw them, Barclay and the others. Suski had only been with us a couple of weeks. Someone had . . . Oh sweet fucking heaven, they’d been torn apart.’

  ‘So then what?’ Ravis asked uncompromisingly.

  ‘I heard something in the gallery. When I went back out it was there waiting for me.’

  ‘The monster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Uh huh. You see this is where I get confused. You said in your first statement that you saw it coming out of Bartram’s bedroom. But that was the room you were in, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I said it was close to Bartram’s room. I’d gone out for a break.’

  ‘Then you fought it off, and ran?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But everyone in Bartram’s room was also massacred. So how do you explain where the monster was when you walked the, what? Ten metres from the bedroom to the lounge? In the time it took you to get that distance, it had gone into the bedroom behind you, silently ripped apart Bartram and two more girls, then came out to fight you – and lose.’

  Angela’s head lolled back, it looked like she was about to pass out. The recording even showed the sweat soaking her forehead. Vance began to wonder what had been done to her in the station.

  ‘I don’t know the order that fucker killed everyone in. All I know is, I ran while it was on the ground.’

  ‘And you knocked the monster over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A monster strong enough to rip fourteen other humans apart?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bollocks. You’re a lying little bitch. You were wearing a power amp suit, weren’t you? You killed them.’

  ‘No.’

  Vance halted the file. Angela had no motive to say Barclay was dead, no reason at all. She’d only mentioned it a couple of times, and twenty years ago nobody had picked up on it. Her testimony was regarded as unreliable at best, with alien monsters added to turn it into a ludicrous work of fiction. Looking at the state of her in the recording, he could almost believe the whole alibi was a work of fever hallucination.

  His e-i found a medical report from the station doctor. They’d run a standard blood screen for toxins, and found minute traces of some weird biochemicals in her. They weren’t in the GE narcotic database, though that didn’t mean much, there was always experimental stuff coming on the market; and she had just been on St Libra. Angela denied she was a toxhead, like she denied every other allegation Ravis threw at her. The doctor had written the fever off as a flu variant induced by St Libra’s spores; it had passed after five days.

  ‘What were you doing there?’ Vance asked the silent, still image hovering in the zone. It hurt that the reason she’d never confide in him now was a totally reasonable hatred of him thanks to the time they’d spent together on Frontline.

  It was raining again when his e-i put a secure call through to Ralph and Vermekia. Big droplets drumming hard on the Qwik-Kabin roof, smothering all other sound.

  ‘Something new has come to light,’ Vance opened with. ‘Angela just told me that Barclay North was killed by the monster.’

  ‘You got me out of bed for this?’ Vermekia asked.

  ‘I’ve been over her old police interview files. She claimed it back then, too. Nobody paid any attention.’

  ‘But if Barclay’s dead, who is Zebediah?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘Good question. An unknown North. And who came through the gateway back in January?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Vermekia said.

  ‘You don’t think that’s a coincidence too far? Two of these odd five-blade slayings, and both times we have an unidentified North close to the scene?’

  ‘So? There’s a little coterie of 2Norths that the family keeps quiet about,’ Ralph said. ‘That just reinforces the whole incestuous family fight scenario.’

  ‘Can we at least check through the forensics reports from the mansion?’ Vance asked. ‘See if there’s any evidence of a fifteenth body.’

  ‘There aren’t any forensics reports,’ Vermekia said. ‘At least, nothing decent. Some photos of the sixth and seventh floors after the bodies had been taken away. Basically, just a lot of dried blood on the floor. Nothing more detailed was ever released, not even for the trial. The Norths didn’t want images of their father or their brothers’ bodies hitting the transnet. I can’t say I blame them. Someone in the police or court would have leaked them. They’d be valuable.’

  ‘HDA has the pathology reports on the weapon,’ Vance said.

  ‘Again, released to us by the North Institute on Abellia, because at the time they were worried about the possibility that it really might have been an alien. A few files remain under heavy access restriction even now.’

  ‘We could run a hack into the North Biomedical Institute.’

  ‘No, Vance,’ Vermekia said. ‘I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you need to think about winding up operations at Wukang.’

  ‘We’ve sent out one sampling mission so far. One.’

  ‘And you’re preparing to send out another tomorrow. See, I do read the reports you load into the expedition network. The other camps have also started sampling, with identical results. There’s nothing out there. Zebra botany is the only living thing on St Libra. It’s weird, and interesting, and generates a whole load of wacky theories among evolutionists who don’t appreciate the complexity of the Lord’s work, but that’s all it is.’

  ‘There’s something going on here. Something strange.’

  ‘I’m not denying that. But it’s not strange enough to justify another billion Eurofrancs supporting the expedition. Don’t worry, you’re covered. It was Commissioner Passam who drove it all forward. She can explain to Brussels and the HDA funding committee when she gets back. Your name won’t be mentioned.’

  ‘What a relief,’ Vance said. It was a shame that much irony didn’t carry through a secure call.

  ‘I’ll bring it up with Aldred North at this end,’ Ralph said. ‘Whatever else this is, it’s the Norths that are getting murdered. They genuinely want answers.’

  ‘Do we know yet if Zebediah is still in the Independencies?’ Vance asked.

  ‘No. It’s quite hard to ascertain. The micro nations are all very proud of their lack of connection to the transnet. The Norths are sending someone down there to investigate.’

  ‘No offence, but shouldn’t we run that check ourselves?’

  ‘Good point,’ Vermekia said. ‘I’ll authorize that. We have deep assets in the Independencies. I can put—’

  The camp network received an emergency medical alert. Vance’s e-i threw a torrent of data into his iris smartcell grid. It was Esther Coombes’ bodymesh that was calling for help. Her suite of medical monitor smartcells were reporting catastrophic heart failure and chest tissue damage, her blood pressure hit zero, brainwave function in terminal decline. Location was on the edge of camp, a couple of hundred metres from the mobile biolabs.

  ‘Botin,’ Vance ordered his e-i. ‘Lieutenant, initiate camp security protocol red-one. We have a breach. All personnel secure the perimeter.’

  ‘Sir. Activating now,’ the lieutenant answered.

  ‘Keep all non-essentials in their tents. Assume active hostile. Search and capture, full force authorization.’

  Vance opened the weapons cabinet on the wall above his desk, and pulled the Folkling carbine out. Checked the safety. Slotted a magazine in, and jammed another two into his pocket. Then ran for the door.

  The rain was dense and warm, reducing visibility to a few metres. Lights had come on all across the camp. Showing as white smears lost in the filthy night. Vance started to jog towards Coombes, his bodymesh emitting
identity pings in case a squad of jumpy Legionnaires collided with him.

  Then the camp network dropped out. He wasn’t sure, because he was still running, slipping and skidding on the mud, but several lights seemed to vanish at the same time. ‘Hellfire,’ he grunted. His bodymesh was strong enough to establish a direct link with Botin. ‘We have to get our network back up – we’re wide open without it. Have some of your people escort Wardele and whoever he needs to the Qwik-Kabin.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Despite the warm water drenching his clothes, Vance felt a shiver run down his back. I was in the Qwik-Kabin a minute ago. The camp’s network didn’t depend on one cell, of course, it should have carried on regardless; but Wukang was small, a lot of traffic was routed through the big processor in the Qwik-Kabin. It was the logical sabotage point.

  He saw torch beams wavering about through the sodden darkness ahead of him, and changed direction towards them. His e-i sent out a ping, and found Justic and Kowalski clustered with Montoto from the xenobiology team and Mark Chitty the paramedic. The emissions from Coombes’ bodymesh were delivering the bad news even as Vance jogged to a halt. The Legionnaires and Montoto were standing over her, shining their torches down for a kneeling Chitty to work by. But Chitty was leaning back, slumping in dismay.

  Vance looked down at Coombes, teeth gritted against his fear and anger. There was never any question she was beyond every revival technique Chitty could apply with his field pack of clever medical gadgets. The cleanly sliced flesh above her heart where five blades had penetrated her ribcage left that in no doubt.

  Tuesday 19th March 2143

  Eva froze the theatre zone image as Adrian 2North walked into the lobby of his Quayside apartment block. It was snowing outside, with the taxi pulling away from the building, wheels struggling for traction on the compacted ice that covered the cobbles of the private loop road to the front door.