Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  As he watched the monochrome image, someone walked out of the main building and over to an outhouse.

  ‘Hostile three,’ someone announced. ‘Hair pattern confirmed.’

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Ralph said.

  ‘Sure. How are you getting these images?’ He pointed at the black and white picture. ‘I thought you were worried about them picking up emissions from airborne systems.’

  ‘We are. That’s a satellite feed. We’re altering the low-orbit sensor flotilla orbital tracks to provide constant coverage. A satellite passes overhead every three minutes now.’

  ‘Aye, crap on it. That must cost a fortune, man. I didn’t know there were that many of them up there.’

  ‘Classified.’

  ‘So what the hell do you need me for?’

  ‘Something happened. I want you to advise agent Linsell, who is about to start running a team for me out of the HDA’s Shipcote base. We need to put Sherman, Aldred, and all known associates under constant observation. You’re familiar with them, so you can draw up the protocols, provide her some tactical intelligence.’

  ‘Aye, but Sherman’s a canny bugger, mind. And Aldred has his own corporate security department shielding him.’

  ‘You’re smarter than them, you’ve shown that. And you don’t even have to consider a budget. Linsell will requisition whatever you tell her she needs. We must have constant real-time data on all of them. And I need it starting by this afternoon.’

  Sid gave the panes another look, becoming alarmed by the intensity of the operation. ‘Okay, I can help advise. So why are you doing it? What changed?’

  Ralph turned to one of the screens running through faces. It froze to display a man Sid thought he knew, maybe late thirties, a long face, receding hairline, and wearing old-fashioned glasses. Couldn’t put a name to him.

  ‘We deployed some remote insects last night,’ Ralph said. ‘They sneaked through the woods and established some meshes, then positioned a couple of long-range lenses in the treetops. They all have fibre-optic links to us, so there’s no giveaway signature.’

  ‘Insects? Really?’

  ‘Better versions of the ones I loaned you. Yes. We got good coverage of the farm and its surrounding buildings. Then two hours ago, we saw this man. He came out of the farmhouse and went to the largest barn. Hasn’t come back out, yet.’

  Sid stared at the face on the screen. ‘Who is it? I think I know him.’

  ‘You do,’ Ralph said flatly. ‘Professor Sebastian Umbreit – there’s a planet-wide alert out for him.’

  ‘You are crapping on me,’ Sid gasped. ‘He’s the D-bomb designer that went missing.’

  ‘Kidnapped, along with his family. Yes. And whoever brought him here has now supplied him with defence-grade microfacture equipment capable of producing active-state matter. That’s what they took from Trigval last night, and it’s a major component in D-bombs.’

  ‘Fuck it, man. What do they want with a D-bomb?’

  Ralph shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I’ve no idea. But we seriously need to find out.’

  Tuesday 30th April 2143

  The clouds had been thinning out all morning before abandoning the sky completely for the afternoon. It was the first time in weeks Angela had seen the rings in their full majesty, though Red Sirius and iridescence from the aurora borealis was now daubing them a sickly mauve as they curved above the southern horizon. Below it, three kilometres away at the bottom of a gentle slope, was the Lan tributary. Angela kept looking at it, mainly for reassurance that something on this wretched journey was finally going right. As Leif had predicted, it was flat, solid, and relatively straight, a proper highway through the unforgiving landscape with its jungles and valleys. Three kilometres away. So close now.

  As she trudged along the line of the stalled convoy vehicles the freezing air was clear enough for her to see the crests of the aurora streamers tens of kilometres overhead. Above that she caught the occasional glimpse of a hazy mauve phosphorescence capping the atmosphere. The ionosphere, overwhelmed with the particle storm from Red Sirius, was glowing like a faint neon sign, radiating the planet’s distress back out into space. Flickers of thin lightning played through the upper atmosphere as the layers sought to equalize their energy levels.

  For all its strange beauty the sight was depressing. The climate wasn’t going to change in the short term, and short term was what they now operated in. Even that seemed to be running out on them. She passed the small orange garage balloon that contained MTJ-1, which was now looking flaccid as the maintenance team prepared to open it up again and drive the vehicle out.

  Two of the axle hub motors on MTJ-1 had failed within three hours of each other on Monday afternoon. Everyone started muttering about sabotage. Except Leif and Darwin, who’d been half-expecting it. As they told Elston, a vehicle that had fallen down a gorge was always going to have reliability problems on a two-thousand-kilometre trek. A diagnostic review showed that nothing other than a complete replacement would do. So out came the fabric garage for the vehicle team to work in. They’d spent eleven hours solid stripping out the old bearings and replacing them from the spares stock.

  Angela arrived at biolab-2, and her e-i ordered the sliding door open. She waited until the small door compartment had cycled before taking her balaclava and gloves off. As always, the light and warmth seemed unusual to her. The air somehow managed to make her feel queasy, but then there were nine people sharing the biolab along with the strong smell of medical antiseptic, all of which put quite a strain on the air-con filters.

  Paresh was awake and propped up on pillows, which allowed her to ignore the sensation. His cheeks were partially flushed, like a school kid at play. She supposed that was good.

  ‘Hi,’ she said as she slithered between his gurney and the one where Luther was resting. Luther still looked in a bad way, with grey skin and a whole load of tubes connected beneath his sheet. She didn’t like looking at the fluids in the bags on the end of them, the colours were just wrong.

  ‘Hey, you,’ Paresh replied.

  Angela gave him a quick kiss, very aware of everyone else crammed into the cabin and driver’s cab. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Pretty good. The doc’s giving me the good drugs.’

  ‘Lucky you. We’ve started on the composition gel.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ He gestured over at the tiny galley alcove, which had one of the mealmaker machines sitting on a shelf, with thick engineering tape helping secure it to the stainless steel surface.

  Angela wrinkled her nose up at it. They looked like a budget version of the coffee machines franchise cafés used, just without the steam and whooshing sounds. Operation was simple enough: you slotted the gel pack on top, and chose your meal, which came in a tiny silver carton, coloured according to food type: beef stew, apple crumble, mashed potato, soup, chicken curry – over twenty varieties. The machine blended the flavour into the gel along with a gelatine-type powder to alter texture, giving a reasonable approximation of a proper meal – so claimed the manufacturer’s extravagant brochure file. As Angela and everyone else discovered that lunchtime, what actually farted out of the nozzle was a blubbery cream with grains of food dye and bitter artificial flavouring mixed unevenly.

  ‘I can’t believe I put that stuff on the stores list,’ she told him. ‘If I was trying to save weight I should have just left Karizma behind.’ Just thinking about food sent a shiver down her body. She was strangely cold despite the biolab’s heat.

  Paresh grinned. ‘I wouldn’t know, the doc is keeping me on real food.’

  ‘Hell, I wish I was injured.’

  ‘Don’t be, there’s only so much chicken soup a man can take.’

  Angela turned to where Dr Coniff was sitting close to Luther’s gurney. ‘How long before he’s up again?’

  ‘Give it a few more days,’ the doctor said. ‘This stopover is probably the best thing that could have happened. It gives the nuflesh a chance to stabilize his rib
fractures; it’s binding them together nicely.’

  Angela squeezed his hand. ‘See, you’re doing fine.’

  ‘Yeah. So how long before we can get going again?’

  ‘Darwin is taking MTJ-1 out for a test drive. They were deflating the garage when I came over. If the bearings are working okay we’ll drive down to the tributary first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I heard the colonel has already checked it out.’

  ‘Sure. MTJ-2 and Tropic-1 drove down there this morning. The water’s frozen solid, and there’s only a metre or so of snow on top. We’ll be able to make up for a lot of lost time, and it won’t punish the vehicles anything like the jungle has been.’

  ‘Finally, some good news.’

  She held up the bag she’d carried over. ‘New sweater for you when you get up. I rushed it a bit, so the lines aren’t perfect.’ Another involuntary shiver ran along her muscles, making her arm shake as she handed the thick red and blue sweater over.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The doctor was giving her a pointed look. ‘I’d better get back,’ Angela said. ‘I’ve got a whole load more balaclavas to knit. Looks like I’ve finally found my true talent.’

  Paresh coughed, wincing badly. ‘Everyone likes what you do.’

  ‘Sure. You take care now. I’ll come back next refuel stop.’ He looked disturbingly weak lying there, so much so she found it upsetting. Coping with illness – either her own or in someone else – wasn’t something she had ever done well; an inability that was close to shaming her. She deliberately avoided glancing at Luther as she wriggled out between the gurneys. Shifting him into the driver’s cab to make room for the emergency clearly hadn’t done him any favours. She’d overheard Juanitar Sakur saying how much internal damage Luther was suffering, and how the convoy journey wasn’t helping.

  ‘I’ll come out with you,’ Mark Chitty said. ‘I have to check on Dean Creshaun.’

  Angela waited politely while the paramedic pulled on his layers and parka. They both went through the door compartment together. Outside, MTJ-1 was being driven cautiously on a big loop round the convoy vehicles, just skirting the swathe of trees to the east. The garage formed a strange puddle of fabric on the ground, more gentian than orange in the unstable light.

  Chitty waved goodbye, and tramped off to biolab-1 where Dean was recuperating from his injuries. Mild concussion and bruised ribs didn’t require the kind of intensive monitoring and attention Luther needed, so the doctor had assigned him a berth over in the other biolab where he’d be comfortable for a few days.

  As Angela walked back to Tropic-2 she felt her stomach churn again. And a headache was building now, as well. Her mouth was filling with saliva, and she was worried she was going to be sick. Something was making her oddly sensitive to the changes of air. Then she felt an altogether different urge from her body. ‘Oh, son of a bitch,’ she moaned and started running as best she could for the Tropic. She was going to need the panseat fast as soon as she got inside. Her e-i established a link to Madeleine, and she pleaded with her to get everything ready. Screw dignity, she was desperate. Sweat was breaking out all over her body.

  ‘Not you, too?’ Madeleine replied.

  Angela didn’t even care who else was suffering, all she could focus on was getting to the Tropic.

  *

  Mark Chitty left biolab-1 as Sirius sank down towards the horizon. There was basically nothing wrong with Dean any more, the check-up had been a formality. He could rejoin Tropic-1 in the morning when they all set off.

  Thin flakes of snow swirled round him as the wind picked up, stirring the surface. He watched the vehicle engineering team carrying the rolled-up garage to the sledge behind biolab-1, and waved to them as they passed. MTJ-1was now back in the convoy line, with a couple of people at the rear, fixing boxes back into the pannier. Several people were heading back to their own vehicles. Two of them seemed to be running, flailing legs kicking up short plumes of snow. With all the wind-down activity, Mark could allow himself the belief that they really would start off down the tributary tomorrow morning. A route that would carry them clear through to Sarvar. Another week and they’d be safe.

  ‘Got some delivery duties for you,’ Dr Coniff said when he was halfway back to biolab-2. ‘Five confirmed cases of stomach flu, and a lot more reporting early symptoms. They’re going to need taraxophan to bring it down.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll be back with you in a minute.’

  ‘Take the three Tropics; Juanitar will visit the trucks and MTJs.’

  ‘What about the biolabs? Nobody in two seemed to be suffering. Why haven’t we caught it?’

  ‘We have,’ Coniff replied. ‘Miya and Zhao have got it. I don’t feel too good myself.’

  ‘Damn, what the hell caused this?’

  ‘Got to be food poisoning. Too many of us got it simultaneously for it to be contagion.’

  ‘It’s that bloody composition food,’ Mark said immediately. ‘There’s got to be something wrong with the mealmakers.’

  ‘Probably. We’ll isolate the cause later. Right now I want to get everyone dosed up and hydrating.’

  ‘Sure.’ Mark looked ahead to see where biolab-2 was. The weather was starting to worsen, and Sirius had nearly left the sky. It was going to be a long, very unpleasant night. He didn’t like to think what conditions were going to get like in the vehicles – after all there weren’t that many panseats. It would probably be best if people just went outside, dropped their trousers and squatted. Except that wasn’t so easy with all the layers. And the monster, he acknowledged sagely.

  As he passed truck-1 he saw a silvered cylinder away on the snow over by the towering trees. It must have fallen off MTJ-1 during the test drive. He knew the cylinders contained spares, each vehicle carried their own inventory, even the biolabs. And with the way the snow was fluttering about, it could well be covered by morning. Those spares were important.

  ‘Hell,’ he muttered under his breath. It wouldn’t take more than a minute to walk over there, and he could even see the wheel tracks the MTJ had left, a path leading directly to the cylinder.

  Mark started off towards the forsaken cylinder. It turned out to be further away than he’d estimated. Judging distance in the blank snow was always tricky. The MTJ tracks were curving now, skirting the bullwhips and metacoyas. The trees had helped mislead him too, they were bigger than he’d thought, distorting scale as much as the interminable white land.

  He was a couple of metres from the cylinder when he saw the footprint. It was to the side of the lines of compressed snow left by the broad low-pressure tyres, out where the snow was untouched. Its shape confused him at some deep instinctual level. Never mind someone had been out here with the MTJ, there was something else wrong with it. He stopped and bent over, shoving his goggles up so he could examine the profile properly. It took a moment, but eventually he realized just what it was that caught his attention. ‘Toes?’ he exclaimed. A foot had made the imprint, not a boot. Someone was walking round without anything on their feet. And how unbelievably stupid was that?

  Snow fell, making a loud pattering sound.

  ‘What?’ Mark turned round, staring at the source of the noise. A thick cataract of snow was tumbling from the nearest bull-whip, a huge specimen reaching over sixty metres up into the iridescent sky. That became an irrelevance to Mark as he caught sight of the figure standing amid the trees. So he never noticed the snow had fallen from one of the bullwhip’s coiled branches as it quivered and shook, sloughing off the frozen casing. The figure standing fifty metres away was a dark outline, humanoid, but in no way human.

  ‘Crap on it!’ Mark yelled. He ordered his e-i to quest an emergency link to the convoy net. The creature wasn’t moving, wasn’t charging towards him. ‘Help,’ Mark pleaded down the link. ‘Oh, help.’ In front of him the creature raised its arms, hands with long blade fingers moved elegantly through the air.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Elston demanded.

  Mark w
atched in silent amazement as the creature’s arms wove around in fast elaborate motions. All he could think of was a conductor leading an orchestra in some wild discordant melody.

  The low bullwhip branch liberated from its shawl of snow uncoiled with a rapid serpentine motion. At the trunk it was as broad as a human torso, a width which tapered down to a few centimetres at the tip. It slashed out like a loosened hurricane whorl, releasing all the pent-up compression energy that the constriction fibres had built up in the months since it had flung its last load of spores across the countryside. Instead of extending itself horizontally to give the spores their greatest dispersal trajectory, the constriction fibres along the branch twisted, sending the branch lashing downwards.

  Mark Chitty never saw or heard it coming. The section of the branch which struck him was thicker than his thigh, and it caught him on his side, just above his pelvis.

  His bodymesh fired off a frantic medical alert, sending the gruesome damage details into the convoy net.

  Elston: ‘Chitty!’

  Coniff: ‘What’s happening? What—’

  Juanitar: ‘Mark!’

  Mark hit the ground hard, rolling over a couple of times. He wheezed down a shaky breath as his blurred vision started to regain focus. The incredible pain started to drift away as if he’d been toxed. A dark-red mist was compressing his returning sight; his grid churned into nonsense then blanked out. High above him he saw the bullwhip branch curling itself back into a neat horizontal coil, the furry white strands on its bark rippling like the hackles on some agitated animal.

  His head sagged to one side, and he was looking at the creature again. It continued its mad conductor’s dance, arms urging the unheard symphony up in its crescendo.

  ‘It’s alive,’ a dazed, fascinated Mark told his frantic colleagues. ‘All of it.’