Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  She gave him a reluctant nod.

  ‘You know I’m committed,’ Ian said in a dull tone. ‘I have to look out for her.’

  Sid didn’t comment on that. He’d never seen Ian infatuated like this before. Tallulah was clearly the greatest femme fatale in town. Strange what love – or obsession – blinded you to.

  ‘All right, then,’ Sid said. ‘Let’s get it done.’

  The three of them put on netlens glasses. The ancient, obsolete police observation routines were still faithfully hounding after Sherman and his people as best they could. Sid checked on Aldred’s position, which was in his St James singletown apartment. Eva confirmed Sherman himself was in a car heading for Dunston Marina. Ian chased down Jede. Boz was in the Regency Fitness gym pumping iron. Ruckby was approaching Quayside to collect Valentina.

  Vehicle locations popped up into a map of Newcastle. Cells next to all Sherman’s known residencies were readied.

  ‘Everyone ready?’ Sid asked.

  ‘Go for it,’ Ian hissed.

  Their instruction flashed out across Newcastle’s transnet. Every public cell in the region of their targets broadcast a code. In response, the smartmicrobe bugs fired off their cache, everything they’d recorded from their quarry’s bodymesh links to the trans-net. The download only lasted a few milliseconds, but Eva was monitoring Ruckby intently. He was the bytehead among them, if anyone was going to detect the security breach it would be him.

  Sid’s grid displayed the results. Out of the five cars and eleven shoes on which they’d managed to plant a smartmicrobe, four cars and nine shoes responded – including Aldred’s.

  ‘Good percentage,’ Eva muttered.

  ‘Has Ruckby detected anything?’ Sid asked. He was still following Marcus Sherman, who wasn’t making any frantic calls from the car as it turned into Colliery Road.

  ‘I think we got away with it,’ she said.

  Sid told his e-i to access the call files now sitting in the Apple console. It ran a correlation, seeing if any of them matched. The results slipped down Sid’s grid in a glowing neon-green matrix.

  ‘Gotcha,’ he murmured in satisfaction. Aldred 2North had called Marcus Sherman three times in the last week.

  Thursday 18th April 2143

  Saul Howard led the scavenger group along the Rue Balzac that meandered gently along the west side of the Pinsappo valley. The snow was several metres thick on the tight slopes, burying the scrub vegetation and swaddling the palm trees that villa owners fenced their properties with. He only knew he was still following the road thanks to the tops of the signs, which stuck up out of the snow like tumour-stricken ice gravestones.

  It had been years – decades, actually – since Saul had skied. The old skills had come back eventually, after a few days of skids and falls; and now he was rather pleased with his reawakened knack. For someone twenty-five years out of practice, he was still one of the better cross-country skiers from the Camilo Village community.

  Today there were five of them in the little group sliding cautiously through the imposing mountains. Otto and Lewis were flanking him, with Ayanna and Markos bringing up the rear. All of them were bundled up in thick layers of clothing against the gentle swirls of snow that fell from the high clouds. Saul had too much on, which meant he was sweating profusely from the effort of slogging up the mild incline. It had taken them a couple of hours to get to this point, three or four hundred metres above sea level. The climb had been relentless, hindered by the winds that swept along the valleys, always blowing against them no matter what direction they took. Ever since the climate altered, the sweet sea winds that used to blow against the Abellia peninsula had grown harsh and unrelenting.

  Goggles protected his face from the minute ice grains that were constantly airborne, scouring any unprotected human skin. The winds were forever reshaping the surface of the snow, sculpting strange wave-shapes and curving ridges in completely random arrangements, transforming the sturdy mountain slopes into weird slow-motion seas. Out on these ventures, he was permanently alert for loose snow and the dangerous fissures that could twist legs and send unwary skiers tumbling down pristine inclines. There were also avalanches to be aware of, great slides of snow that came rushing down out of nowhere for no reason. All of them scanned the jagged skyline above as they followed the road, trying to see where the snow had piled too high. More than once he’d abandoned excursions and turned back because of the towering mounds above.

  The light didn’t help. Red Sirius distorted by the shifting aurora borealis made the shadows twist and the scale mislead. This was not a landscape for the fainthearted. Too many people had been lost in the first few weeks for Saul to ever relax and take the whole experience as something rewarding, no matter how much food they gathered.

  ‘That one looks good,’ Otto called above the vacant whistling gusts.

  Saul saw where he was pointing; up ahead maybe three hundred metres, a big three-storey Roman-style villa sitting in its long terrace garden, with whitewashed walls, broad balconies and jet-black windows. Its mantle of snow softened the rigorous angles, overhanging the balconies and sweeping up the colonnade pillars to press against the first-floor windows. The roof had collapsed in places. He could see the apex had buckled, producing long depressions in the shallow slope of the solar panels. There was no sign that anybody else had scouted the villa.

  ‘Sure,’ Saul said, and changed direction.

  The villa had big iron gates attached to stone columns, and a three-metre hedge reinforced with a carbon security mesh. Saul could just see the frost-blackened tips of the dead hedge bushes protruding from the top of the snow as he skied over the boundary.

  They took their skis off just outside the balcony, then piled up their backpacks. Markos smashed one of the big windows with a clay plant pot, and they went inside. It was a bedroom, which they ignored and carried on to the broad gallery landing which surrounded the central atrium. It was so dark, they had to use their torches. Strong white beams splashed round, revealing that, amazingly, the glass cupola had survived, though no light could ever penetrate the metres of snow smothering it. Instead, the roof had broken and buckled in half a dozen other places, the rents allowing snow into the top-floor rooms. Once inside, it had come slithering out of every open door to spread along the upper landing. Long, steel-hard icicles wreathed the edge of the banisters, even extending down the stairs. The carpet under Saul’s heavy boots had succumbed to a glittering centimetre-thick frost, completing the transformation from villa to winter-time crypt. Nothing responded to the quests his e-i was sending out. The villa’s systems were completely dead. He flicked a switch on the wall, with no result. Even the light circuits had blown.

  Nobody said anything as they made their way downstairs. The routine was familiar by now, they were here for food, and that was always stored in the kitchen or pantry, sometimes the basement, and plenty of these houses had wine cellars. Big houses like this one were only ever used as occasional homes for their wealthy owners. Gourmet foods were delivered a day before they arrived to ensure freshness; everything else was in packets or freezers. The quantity some of the larger houses had stashed away was phenomenal. Saul was sure that a couple of them they’d scavenged were owned by some kind of survivalists. It wasn’t just food in those houses. There were 3D printers, big tanks of raw, and underground reservoirs of bioil. Of course, their ideology had them fleeing a Zanthswarmed Earth, even they hadn’t built roofs to withstand tons of snow.

  It was the smaller houses and bungalows such as those of Camilo Village which had been the easiest to reinforce. After the first massive snowfall, over fifty residents had gone into the small forest of native sparpine on the other side of the Rue du Ranelagh and started felling timber. The village was home to local workers and business owners, the type of people who worked hard and possessed practical skills. Saul had taken two days to bring his printers and tanks of raw back from the Hawaiian Moon store on Velasco Beach before the roads were abandoned. One of t
he first things he’d designed and microfactured was a wood-burning stove from a tough thermal resin. It now sat in the middle of their big open plan lounge, a perfect medieval kettle, throwing out a lot of heat from the scraps of wood the kids continued to retrieve from the now-diminished forest.

  A bulldozer from a resort construction site ten kilometres inland just off the Rue du Ranelagh had been commandeered right after the first blizzards started, and now performed daily communal snow-clearance, keeping the drifts away from the bungalows, and shoving the snow across the beach into the sea. Most days the kids would be outside with brooms on very long poles, scraping the latest fall off the PV roof panels. They still had electricity, although the bungalow net had to prioritize systems.

  What they – along with the rest of Abellia’s remaining residents – were short of was bioil. Like a true baron, Brinkelle distributed her city-state’s reserves of fuel in accordance to need – as she saw it. Medical services were also rationed. Those resources, rather than money, allowed her rule of law to continue. Not that anyone protested – survival in such hostile conditions precluded political dissent. Besides, as Saul admitted to himself, she did a reasonable job. Some of the city net was still functioning; Camilo Village had a connection to what was left of the civic administration. They got a tank of bioil delivered every ten days or so for the bulldozer, because what it did – protecting everyone’s bungalow – was deemed to be an essential. And when Nerys had gone into labour, a search and rescue helicopter had flown through the snow to airlift her to the Institute. She had a baby boy. So there was a loose form of organization and community cooperation rather than direct government riding to the rescue, but then Bartram and Brinkelle had always practised a somewhat laissez-faire doctrine when it came to their domain.

  Saul was quite surprised she and her family hadn’t abandoned them altogether. It would have been easy enough for them all to fly back to Highcastle and through the gateway. But, for whatever reason, Brinkelle had remained. He suspected it was to maintain absolute control over the Institute, which her branch of the family had devoted themselves to. Without that, she’d be just one more transworld billionairess amid countless others – nothing special at all.

  By staying and ensuring the Institute with its seventeen thousand personnel survived, she would maintain her more exalted status. Exactly how she could keep things at Abellia going for more than a couple of months was subject to a lot of late-night talk in the village. Energy could be stretched and conserved to keep things going for a while yet. Food, though, was a very different commodity.

  Brinkelle had been very clear that individual communities wouldn’t receive any help from her administration when it came to feeding themselves. That had been the toughest part. There had been times when no one could venture outside for a week, the blizzards had been so fierce. Recently, though, the weather had been more restrained. Camilo Village took advantage of those lulls, sending out four or five scavenger teams to scout the big houses abandoned by their off-world owners.

  At the bottom of the villa’s stairs, Saul headed across the atrium floor. After a week of visiting strange houses he’d developed an instinct about the layout, especially when it came to where the kitchen was. The darkness seemed to act like a muffler, consuming sound. Light beams swung round, exploring the doors and archways. The rooms glimpsed beyond were glazed in ice, their windows completely black underneath the drifts.

  The villa’s kitchen was larger than Saul’s living room. It had two bulky range cookers, and a central island with a bread oven, and a steam oven, and a pizza oven. An array of excellent copper pans hung from an overhead square-rack.

  Saul swept his beam around the twinkling frost-coated surfaces. It stopped briefly on a bristly grey lump on the floor beneath one of the range cookers, then he forced it onwards. The cats had probably been huddling in the place they knew was sometimes warmer. Nobody was quite reduced to eating that kind of meat. Yet.

  Five bright beams came to rest on the huge double-door fridge. Lewis forced it open, revealing eight shelves crammed full. There were good-quality packaged meals, cartons of milk and juice, a lot of meat and fish, yogurts, jams, butter.

  ‘Let’s start,’ Saul said.

  Markos unzipped a big canvas bag, and started to sweep everything off the shelves. All the food had frozen solid. It didn’t matter what the use-by date was any more, they could cook it.

  Ayanna and Saul went into the utility room off the kitchen.

  ‘Bingo,’ she exclaimed. There were two huge chest freezers at the far end of the room. When they smashed the locks off, they found them laden with every kind of food.

  ‘This is a week’s worth for the whole village, easily,’ Saul said. He opened up his own bag, and started filling it. It would take several trips up the stairs. Then they’d assemble the sledges they’d carried with them in the backpacks. Another of Saul’s designs, printed with the last of the raw he’d brought back from the Hawaiian Moon. They weren’t that easy to steer, but the scavenger teams always made sure the route back from the foraged houses was downhill. As such, the sledges had proved invaluable when it came to bringing medium-sized loads back to Camilo Village.

  Saul lifted the bag up, blowing his cheeks out at the weight. He carried on regardless; this expedition, like all those he’d been on and those yet to come, were about one thing, making sure his family had enough to live on until this terrible winter was over. He knew that would only happen in a community, with everyone pulling together and helping each other until the sunspot outbreak finally declined and the world returned to normal. That belief and insistence was what kept him going, what made him one of the people the rest of Camilo Village looked to. His quiet determination had surprised Emily, who’d never witnessed that side of him before.

  But then, she didn’t know what he’d gone through before they’d met. These circumstances were nothing like those; but the goal was identical: survival. He knew he could keep going no matter what, because he’d endured all the misery and hardship and hopelessness once before. Saul and adversity were not strangers.

  Out in the villa’s kitchen, Markos and Otto had just about cleared the fridge of its bounty. Saul’s torch beam bobbed round the extravagantly equipped room, marvelling at how fast it had lost its value and relevance.

  ‘Almost finished,’ Otto said.

  ‘We’ll need a couple more trips to empty the freezer,’ Saul said. ‘It’s a good-sized haul.’

  Otto nodded, watching Saul’s torch illuminate the swanky kitchen. He was clearly thinking along similar lines. ‘Then what?’ he asked. ‘What happens when there’s no more houses left to scavenge from?’

  ‘The sunspots have to end some time,’ Saul replied. His standard reply every time the children asked that same question. ‘Even if it takes a year.’

  ‘We won’t last a year,’ Otto said.

  ‘There’s always the Institute.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘They have clone vats. I imagine there’s all sorts of single-cell proteins they can grow to feed us.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Markos said. ‘Brinkelle has a fusion plant out there as well. They can keep us going for as long as it takes.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t Brinkelle said anything?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Saul said, tiring of the way everyone turned to him. ‘Maybe she doesn’t want us to develop a dependency mentality.’ I could certainly do without it.

  ‘But you think they can grow food?’ Otto said.

  ‘There’s seventeen thousand biogenetic researchers who will starve if they don’t find a way. That’s got to be a big incentive.’

  ‘Sure,’ Otto said, convincing himself. ‘Yeah, of course they will.’

  Markos and Saul exchanged a glance, then Saul picked up his heavy bag of frozen food, and headed for the stairs.

  *

  It was gone eight o’clock in the evening before Sid finally finished his conference links and meetings with the legal depart
ment and planning sessions with Market Street’s Operations chief; then there was just his own datawork to finish off. A day of arguments and deals and agreements and discussion, with everything checked and scrutinized by Milligan and his cronies who delighted in manufacturing problems and pushing them Sid’s way. He’d promised Jacinta he’d be back home by six, ‘seven at the latest, pet, honest’. But that was before the GE’s announcement of a settlement to the St Libra residents’ negotiations. He was starting to form the opinion that Kressley might have earned his money after all.

  All day long the transnet had been cluttered with news about the agreement. The GE negotiators had finally agreed to permit a limited return of non-bioil workers from Highcastle. They were to be issued with temporary humanitarian resident permits, and pay a significant Return Bond. The permit would automatically expire one month after the sunspot outbreak was officially declared to have ended.

  In reality, that meant two hundred thousand people were going to come pouring through the gateway, starting on Saturday. That left Newcastle with three days to prepare for them.

  Dispersal was the Mayor’s strategy, tying in to the main GE policy. Every hotel room in the city was taken by the bioil company workers who had already been allowed through the gateway. There was no room for anyone else, so they were to be bussed out, put on trains and sent across the continent. The Southern states weren’t happy about that; Highcastle’s population was mostly drawn from the Northern states and France, who all had massive bioil production facilities on the giant world. Further concessions had to be made, such as assisting the refugees out to the GE trans-space worlds where there was plenty of room for fresh settlers. Anything that stopped them from settling on the old continent. And Newcastle was the test. Additional anti-vagrancy by-laws were being rushed through the council, giving police and their contracted agencies fresh, stronger powers to move people on. Humanitarian funds were also sought from various charities, government bureaux, and aid agencies to help the flow of people onwards and outwards.