Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Another bullwhip branch came hurtling down, smashing him ten metres across the snow, breaking both legs. He had barely come to rest when he was struck again, each blow shunting him deeper into the cluster of trees. After the third impact his consciousness began to dwindle. He could feel no part of his ruined body now. And still the creature stood where he’d first seen it. Long blade fingers swept out in exuberant triumph, their gloss-black surfaces refracting Sirius’s enfeebled red light through the swirling snow, as they puppeted the bullwhips.

  Mark’s inert body was pummelled further and further into the big trunks. Again and again the bullwhips struck, pulping him to a flaccid sack of broken flesh with tattered limbs flopping about. Blood soaked into his layered clothing, pouring out of skin punctures where shattered bones had ripped through. Droplets left dark stains on the pristine snow, the only evidence of his passing. Most of his smartcells were wrecked and all that was left of his bodymesh broadcast a feeble signal.

  The final swipe sent him thudding down beside a huge bullwhip, out of sight of the convoy vehicles. Half of its coiled branches began to judder, shaking off their crisp ice coating. Snow cascaded down, burying Mark’s corpse and blocking the last of his bodymesh’s emissions. More of the bullwhips started shaking snow loose, covering all traces of blood and the impressions Mark had left along his brutal route to oblivion.

  *

  Vance forced himself to take part in the search, even though his body was on the point of collapse from whatever poison he’d been blighted with. Only eight of the convoy’s personnel were unaffected, including Paresh Evitts and Dean Creshaun. That was the giveaway – neither of the two injured men had been given composition meals. Luther, on the other hand, had insisted he be treated the same as everyone else, and proudly spooned down some broth churned out by the biolab’s mealmaker machine. The remaining six – Lorelei, Lulu MacNamara, Leora Fawkes, Antrinell, Karizma Wadhai, and Leif Davdia – had all avoided the composition meal that lunchtime.

  Vance ordered all of them out into the glimmering twilight, except for Lulu. The catering girl would have been a complete liability traipsing round the countryside, even if she had done as he asked.

  Twice in the last thirty minutes Vance had dropped to his knees and vomited weakly onto the snow. He was shaking continually, while his skin flushed and soaked his clothing layers with sweat. His headache ebbed and flowed, often forcing him to stand still and suck down air when the pain spikes became too much to endure. Raddon and Mohammed had insisted on taking part, claiming their symptoms weren’t too bad. Dr Coniff had monitored their medical smartcells and disagreed. Vance had overruled her.

  So now the eight of them were strung out in a loose line, searching through the edge of the trees as the wind sent zephyrs of snow twisting about the trunks, and the aurora borealis cast its eerie glow, throwing the huge trees looming above them in unnerving black silhouette. Behind them, every vehicle in the convoy had turned to face the broad clump of trees and switched on their headlights. The scatter of white light created a multitude of confusing shadows washing across the ground. Vance was also monitoring the remote machine guns on the vehicles, which were tracking the search party, alert for any unexplained movement around them.

  Every possible precaution taken, and still Vance felt as if he was walking along a precipice. The creature was out here. He knew it. Somehow it had caught up with them.

  The vehicle meshes had provided a rough coordinate for Chitty’s last position. They’d found nothing there of course. There had been a series of sharp degradations in the link strength and bandwidth during the attack. Whatever the creature had done to him, it had been in stages. Dr Coniff had said the last readings effectively confirmed his death. So the search party were out in the murky arctic conditions searching for a corpse. And with his body failing him, Vance couldn’t even remember if the Lord had a reason for him to be doing that any more.

  Mohammed let out a low moan and stumbled onto all fours. He swayed back and forth a couple of times. Vance thought the Legionnaire was going to be sick again. But instead Mohammed keeled over next to a massive ice-encrusted metacoya trunk, still groaning. Leora and Antrinell hurried over to him. Vance would have liked to help, but simply didn’t have the energy. In fact, glancing back at the headlights, he wasn’t sure if he could make it back to the convoy unaided. The white light inflamed his headache.

  ‘Come on,’ Antrinell said over the ringlink. ‘Let’s get you back.’

  ‘You need to bring him to me,’ Coniff said. ‘I’m accessing his medical smartcells. His heart rhythm is becoming erratic. Colonel, you and Raddon need to come in as well.’

  ‘Okay,’ Vance rasped. A powerful spasm ran down his body. He couldn’t even lift his arms any more. There was no sign of Chitty, no clue what had happened to him.

  ‘Time to go, Colonel,’ Lorelei was saying to him. ‘The search is over, now.’

  He hadn’t even noticed her coming over to him, but her icon was there in his grid, and her arm was slipping under his shoulder. Another identity icon appeared in close proximity to his own. Leif was holding him on the other side.

  ‘You need to lie down.’

  Vance wanted to nod in profound agreement. Instead, he fainted.

  *

  After the uncontrollable bouts of vomiting. After the humiliating diarrhoea. After the hot and cold flushes. After the sweats and shaking. After inhaling the stench of everyone else’s suffering in Topic-2. After drinking water thick with rehydration salts, and bumping sacs of taraxophan, Angela finally started to take notice of her surroundings again. She must have been dozing, she thought, it was the middle of the night.

  The Tropic’s cabin was dark, but the headlights were on, fluorescing the condensation which coated the windscreen. She was sitting in the front passenger seat. She vaguely remembered getting there after ducking outside when her sphincter started to send urgent warning signals along her spine yet again.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Forster croaked from the back seat.

  ‘Like crap,’ she blinked, trying to get some proper focus. ‘Actually, about how you look.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, and immediately closed his eyes. His skin was a sickly shade of grey, and damp with sweat. Both arms were twitching under the blanket he’d draped over himself. A thin stream of damp vomit stained the front of it. That was the mildest thing she could smell.

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’ she asked.

  ‘Raddon’s in biolab-2,’ he said without opening his eyes. ‘They took him there after the search. Stupid pillock, trying to be a macho hero. Juanitar is treating him as best he can; he’s suffering, too. Most of us still are. Madeleine recovered quickly, but that’s youth for you. She’s over in Tropic-3 helping Garrick, Winn, and Darwin; they’ve got it pretty bad.’

  ‘Right.’ Angela looked round for something to drink. Her flask was in its usual place in the door holder. Thankfully it was just pure water; she remembered gagging on the rehydration salt solution someone had made her drink, it was so foul. She took a few cautious sips, fearful they’d trigger another bout of nausea. After waiting a couple of minutes, she took a proper drink.

  Forster had drifted back into a troubled sleep, quaking occasionally below his filthy blanket.

  ‘Show me everyone’s location,’ she told her e-i. Her grid materialized, along with a constellation of identity icons. That was when she noticed the whirr of servos above her. The remote gun was armed and slowly sweeping from side to side, ready to blast anything approaching the convoy.

  ‘Everyone is accounted for,’ her e-i said.

  ‘Good.’ She expanded Elston’s icon, viewing the readings from his medical smartcells with some alarm. ‘Who’s running the show?’

  With Elston out of the game, Antrinell had taken charge. He’d organized efficiently, dispatching those who weren’t affected to care for everyone else. Not that much could be done. The food poisoning, if that’s what it was, left its victims utterly debilitated.r />
  Before she succumbed to a raging fever which sent her drifting in and out of lucidity, Dr Coniff had instructed that rehydration was the priority. She also issued the maximum dose of taraxophan; the drug boosted the human immune system, which should help the body fight off the sickness, but it was known to put a lot of strain on organs.

  Other than that, Antrinell had ordered the remote guns to full armed status, and had someone on constant monitor duty, accessing the few remaining sensors available to the convoy. His policy was shoot first and go see what they’d hit after.

  Angela’s e-i quested a link to him. ‘I’m feeling a little better,’ she said. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Really?’ Antrinell asked. ‘You’re okay?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that. I feel like I’ve been kicked about like a football for the whole game and extra time. But it’s definitely starting to wear off.’

  ‘Thank the Lord. That’s the best news all week – you’re the second one to beat it. Several of us are still getting worse. I was worried some wouldn’t make it.’

  Angela refrained from telling him that her genetically improved organs gave her better odds than anyone else to break the fever, that her liver and kidneys were designed to deal with toxin levels that would fell the healthiest twenty-year-old. At this point false hope was probably for the best. ‘Do we know what it is, yet?’

  ‘No. I’ve got Camm running tests on the gel. But unless he can identify what hit us we’ll just have to carry on with the nonspecific treatments Coniff ordered.’

  ‘All right. What needs doing? And mind I won’t be up to much.’

  ‘MTJ-2 has some pretty sick people in it. Leif could do with some assistance.’

  ‘Ten minutes. And just be careful what you point those remote guns at while I’m walking over there.’

  ‘Thank you, Angela, I’m glad you’re back.’

  She found a packet of buttered toast slices and put the silver plastic rectangle into the microwave. No jam, she didn’t want to tax her stomach just yet. The sachet of hot chocolate was given a forlorn look, but she left it alone to swig plain water from the thermos like a good little fitness guru.

  ‘Show me Chitty’s visual for the minute leading up to the attack,’ she told her e-i. The image slid up into her grid, and she watched him tramp along the track MTJ-1 had left during its quick test drive. His goal was obvious, a cylinder of spare parts that’d dropped off the back. It was a poor image, made worse by the goggles and windswept flurries on snow, but she held back on running enhancement patches, she wanted to see exactly what poor old Mark had seen.

  He stopped and bent over, pushing his goggles up. Just like Mark, Angela frowned in bewilderment at the human footprint. His muffled ‘O-es,’ was just audible, voice distorted by the cloth wrapped round his face. Then he was turning, staring into the trees. The monster was there, a lot clearer that it’d been the night it killed Tork Ericson, a dark human shape with wicked blade fingers glinting in the pallid aurora light. It waved its arms in bizarre gyrations. Then the recording abruptly ended as Chitty’s link dropped out. When it re-established a few seconds later the bandwidth was tiny and only the core data was available.

  Angela peeled open the packet, and nibbled on the first slice of toast. Something had made Chitty look up into the trees. And the monster had to be fifty metres away, so something else had hit the paramedic.

  Then there were his last enigmatic words: ‘It’s alive. All of it.’ She simply couldn’t conceive what he was trying to describe.

  ‘Show me the map of the convoy at that time,’ she told her e-i. ‘Overlay everyone’s position.’

  There were thirteen people outside when Chitty was attacked. Angela was one of them, tumbling frantically out of the Tropic to drop her pants – she still had the coldburns on her ass to prove it. Or maybe that had been later, she wasn’t sure. The others . . . Chitty’s icon was easy enough to see, alone some distance away from the convoy vehicles. Everyone else was clustered along the line; the engineering teams were packing up, and several people were out on the snow throwing up or worse.

  She counted the icons. Nobody was missing. Nobody was near Chitty. That had to be wrong, because someone had made that naked foot imprint.

  ‘Give me visual confirmation of everyone’s location,’ she told her e-i. ‘Confirm they’re where they seem to be.’

  ‘The records are incomplete,’ it replied. ‘Only the MTJs and Tropics have internal meshes I can access. The biolab meshes are restricted, and the truck and tanker cabs do not have any meshes.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for personal visual caches. They should all have been downloaded into the net.’

  They weren’t. People had been switching off when they were in their vehicles, where they were together and safe. Even Angela was guilty of that, her personal visual record ended just after she got back to the Tropic from visiting Paresh. There were no images of her running outside several times to vomit and defecate onto the snow. When she accessed the Tropic’s meshes, they’d only caught two brief snatches of her stumbling through the door, and she’d been out in the night at least four times that she could recall.

  Angela started to get changed, considering the available data and what it didn’t show her. It had been chaos at the time Chitty was killed. People still walking round on legitimate errands, packing up after the MTJ repair. The sickness was beginning to take hold, stirring everyone like ants from a disturbed nest. She considered how she could have sneaked away in such circumstances. It would have been easy enough, a small scattering of smartdust on a seat emitting the correct personal identification code, and everyone would think she was in a vehicle when in fact she was silently running up behind Chitty with her bodymesh turned off.

  Physically – technologically – it could be done, and quite easily, too. But the why of it was profoundly disturbing. That would mean the monster was getting help from someone on the convoy. But then the sabotage of the tow rope had already shown that one of her erstwhile colleagues was inimical to the expedition. It had to be the same person, because that was beyond coincidence.

  She glanced at Forster, who was still juddering from the fever, his hair slicked down with sweat. It looked like he was seriously ill, but now her paranoia had been kindled she couldn’t be completely certain.

  You’re being stupid, she told herself. If Forster wanted to kill her he’d had ample chance while the two of them were alone. Who to trust, though?

  She made herself concentrate on stripping off her revoltingly damp, stained layers, stuffing them into a plastic bag, where hopefully they’d stay until Sarvar and working washing machines. She managed a quick wipe down with hand-sanitizer soap and a towel, followed by the usual Tropic limbo act to get into her last full set of clean clothes.

  Forster’s carbine was on the seat next to him. She checked it and slung it over her shoulder. The automatic pistol Raddon always kept in the glove compartment was stuffed into her parka pocket. Then she unlocked the door.

  ‘Going over to the MTJ now,’ she told Antrinell.

  ‘I’ll watch your back,’ he replied.

  Angela stepped out into the vicious St Libra night. Wind whipped at the fur lining her hood, while snow zipped through the headlight beams. Above her, the vast fluctuating folds of the aurora burned across the stars with cold blue phosphorescence. She checked round nervously and set off towards MTJ-2.

  Who to trust? Who?

  Thursday 2nd May 2143

  Clayton North was careful around agent Sarah Linsell. The HDA officer was smart and extremely professional. On the job she never smiled, her thick auburn hair was cut to stay level with her shoulders as if it hadn’t been authorized to fall any further; and the perfectly tailored navy-blue suit worn with a white blouse could have been a uniform it was so cliché. She was also hugely suspicious of everyone Sid Hurst had brought in to help with her surveillance operation. Or perhaps she simply resented their presence. Clayto
n had to admit he and Ian and Eva were almost superfluous.

  The operation was run out of the HDA base sprawling on the slope above Last Mile. Not that they could see the gateway and its massive conglomeration of commercial enterprises. The long room Linsell had taken over was in the centre of the base’s concrete fortress structures, and two levels underground.

  Clayton was merely a tolerated appendage to the thirty-seven-strong team flown in to surveil Sherman and his crew. Each of them – Sherman, Aldred, Boz, Jede, Ruckby – had their own dedicated observation sub-team whose job it was to know their location and activity at all times. Even Valentina had been assigned a pair of observers, just in case she had a more active role than Sid’s investigation had uncovered.

  Micro-drones flittered silently above the city, following their prey. Cars which were swapped every hour also slid silently along the roads, following the crew on every inconsequential journey. Another pool of on-the-ground agents slipped in and out of stores, clubs, hotels, offices, and gyms frequented by the targets, chameleon-like in their ability to merge with the background. The marina berth three down from the Mayberry Moon had a new resident. One of the HDA’s larger AIs had sunk monitor programs deep into the city’s transnet cells, monitoring every bodymesh emission.

  So either Agent Linsell was paranoid, or very capable. Either way, Clayton kept a low profile. His own quantum molecular systems kept alert for any smartmicrobes Linsell might have used to bug him. So far she hadn’t, but he wouldn’t put it past her. Ivan’s team had spotted the sophisticated monitor routines she’d deployed in Newcastle’s network to keep him and Sid and Ian and Eva under quiet scrutiny. They’d gone active within an hour of her arriving in the city. Ralph had obviously briefed her that they ran things off-log.

  It meant he really had to live Abner’s life on a permanent basis to avoid triggering any suspicions Agent Linsell might be harbouring. That made communications with Ivan difficult. He was resorting to dead downloads in public transport and on the street at designated coordinates. Jupiter was kept up to date on Professor Umbreit and the possible D-bomb assembly project, as was the lightwave ship waiting at the Lagrange point on the other side of the moon.