Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘All right. But, you’re forgetting, there’s one St Libra lifeform that’s still very much alive and active,’ Antrinell urged. ‘We might not get the planet’s jungles, but we can take down the bastard that’s murdering us. Come on, you have to let us try. We have a right to life, too.’

  Vance considered the idea. He turned to Tamisha. ‘Is it possible to build a localized dispenser, a gun or spray we can use against the creature?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I should be able to design something that’ll fit into our hollow-point rounds. We’ve got a couple of micro-precision printers here in the lab for spares production, they should be adequate.’

  ‘Start working on it. I’ll consider deactivating a warhead and extracting the metavirus for you to redeploy.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘If,’ and he held up a cautionary finger to Antrinell, ‘this system can be made to work, then I will be the one who carries the pistol.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who fires the shot, just that it hits the target.’

  ‘Good.’ Vance drained his coffee. ‘I have a comm rocket launch to attend. We’re finished here now. The subject is closed.’

  Wednesday 8th May 2143

  Angela’s e-i said it was eight forty-two in the morning. Red Sirius had risen nearly two hours ago. Apart from the purple clock figures on the edge of her iris smartcell grid she wouldn’t have known that. A blizzard was sweeping along the canyon. Confined and compressed by the towering rock walls, the wind and snow was roaring against Tropic-2’s bodywork, making them shake every inch of the way as they crawled forward. Tropic-1 was ten metres ahead, its rear lights barely visible through the driving snow. According to the windscreen display, its bodywork barely reflected a radar pulse. Apart from the lightning bolts searing overhead every few seconds, the canyon was a confined world of darkness. Their headlight beams dissolved into the snow a few metres ahead.

  Forster, who was in the driving seat beside her, was steering them on net data alone, coordinating the position of the other vehicles and inertial navigation read-outs. Somewhere up ahead, Elston was driving MTJ-1. Angela knew why he wanted to keep going, but frankly trying to carry on in these conditions was ridiculous bordering on foolhardy.

  ‘We should stop,’ Paresh said from the rear passenger seat. ‘We’re going to hit the canyon wall at this rate.’

  ‘Then we bump and back off,’ Angela said. ‘That’s got to be better than vanishing over a waterfall like I almost did.’

  ‘Can’t afford the fuel for a stop,’ Ken said. He’d been assigned the final seat in their Tropic after the comm rocket launch the previous evening, when Elston handed out their new travel assignments.

  Angela didn’t comment on the fuel situation. She’d started to worry about the convoy getting anywhere close to the Zell tributary neighbouring Sarvar, let alone the camp itself. Right up until she accessed Ravi’s visual log of his fight with the monster she’d been contemplating taking a Tropic with Rebka and heading back to Wukang like Karizma. But the bullwhips had now ruled that out. Then the comm rocket had launched amid a blast of flame and smoke, vanishing into the clouds and snow within a second. Ken had lost contact with it after thirty seconds. The final burst of data the convoy’s net received before it vanished behind the canyon wall had revealed how thick and dense and chaotic the cloud strata were above the canyon. Not heavy enough to damage the rocket, Ken claimed, it would be able to complete its ballistic arc above the atmosphere. But now they didn’t know if the messages had been received at Abellia or not. All they could do was hope that if the signal had got through then the images Ravi had captured were enough to kick HDA into launching a rescue mission, or at the very least a supply drop.

  There were too many possibles in that chain of events for Angela. She’d spent most of the night lying awake in the seat next to Paresh, trying to come up with a plan that guaranteed her and Rebka a way through this. Short of dumping everyone else in the canyon and leaving with their food and fuel, nothing she could do now was going to make much difference. So she was just left with having to go along with Elston’s plan to get as close as they could to Sarvar and hope the camp’s skeleton crew could still fly a Berlin to pick them up. It wasn’t much to hang her life on. That, she could almost tolerate, but to have Rebka in the same hopeless situation was almost too much to endure. She was desperate for some kind of action, something she could do which would make a difference. What that might be was proving disturbingly elusive.

  A purple icon shone comfortingly in her grid. Rebka’s location icon, showing everyone that the sheepish yet surprisingly resilient Madeleine Hoque was riding along in Tropic-3, with Garrick, Darwin, and poor old weepy Lulu MacNamara. It was Angela’s private beacon of hope.

  A bright amber light flared outside the Tropic. Angela knew immediately it wasn’t lightning, for it wasn’t fading away. Then the sound hit them, a blast that actually shunted the Tropic several metres across the snow. Three of the side windows cracked, one shattering completely. Crystalline shards of tempered glass cascaded over Paresh. Icy air howled through the vehicle, sucking the heat out in seconds. Forster shoved his foot down hard on the brake, and they rocked to a stop.

  Angela didn’t react for several seconds, she was too stunned to do anything. Her initial burst of fright was swiftly replaced by feverish worry. That had been an explosion. And the bright yellow light was still shining somewhere behind them, filtering through the blizzard.

  She studied her grid frantically. The icons for the truck had gone, as had the bodymesh emissions for Josh Justic, who had been driving. Rebka was still there, still okay.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Paresh exclaimed.

  Another explosion ripped the snow apart behind them.

  ‘Crap on it, the bioil!’ Ken shouted. ‘It’s the truck. The monster’s blown the truck.’

  Individual icons began to flash amber medical warnings in Angela’s grid. Leora Fawkes, Winn Melia, Chris Fiadeiro, and Juan-Fernando, all of them riding in Tropic-1, were showing a plethora of injuries, with lacerated skin, impact bruising and several broken bones. Tropic-1’s own sensors revealed the vehicle was now lying on its side, with badly damaged bodywork.

  Paresh opened the door and jumped out into the blizzard, pulling his Heckler carbine out of its holster with his good arm.

  ‘Wait!’ Angela shouted, but he was gone, running towards the blazing wreckage of the truck. ‘Shit!’ She grabbed her balaclava and parka and lurched out after him into the punishing wind and snow.

  There wasn’t much left of the truck, its carcass reduced to crumpled panels and twisted-up chassis struts in the centre of a steaming crater. But it was burning furiously as the bladder framework slowly sagged, hissing and bubbling as it collapsed in on itself. The heat stopped anyone getting within twenty metres of the mangled cab.

  One glance at the blackened, windowless lump of seething composite, and Angela knew there was no point trying to get close. Josh was dead.

  There was another blast behind the truck as a bladder on the sledge exploded. Everyone who’d run over to help immediately ducked as fragments came twirling out of the discharge spitting sparks and flame as they scythed through the frigid air. Angela dropped to her knees as the fireball swelled up into the bleak snow, its swirl bloom slowly dwindling to a puff of filthy smoke that was sucked away.

  ‘Keep back, keep back,’ Elston was shouting. ‘Botin, get a guard round the tanker, now!’

  Angela took a dazed glance over at where the tanker ought to be, seeing little through the fast wash of sub-zero snow. Tropic-1, which had been following the truck, had rolled over, dark bodywork glimmering in the flames. She crouched beside biolab-2, using its bulk as a shield should anything else detonate on the truck. The big vehicle had obviously been shunted about, its wheels gouging sideways furrows through the snow. Then she realized its sledge had absorbed a lot of the blast. It was a battered ruin embedded in the snow, surrounded by a vast circ
le of debris; torn boxes and flapping foil packages were being rolled and blown by the savage wind.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ she groaned. Struggling to shove her rapidly chilling arms into the parka she told her e-i to quest Elston. ‘Biolab-2’s sledge has been busted wide open,’ she said.

  ‘Angela, we’ve got to get our injured people out of the Tropic. Unless the sledge hit someone I don’t care.’

  She finally got her goggles on, and focused on the battered Tropic-1. Several people were gathered round, some in parkas, some not. A couple were on top, pulling a dazed Leora out through a broken window. ‘Elston, it’s our food.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Biolab-2’s sledge was carrying most of our food.’ She finally succeeded in zipping up the front of the parka, and pulled the hood over her head. Her ears were completely numb – she missed the balaclava and scarf. Right in front of her, hundreds of food packets were being slowly propelled across the canyon’s ice floor as the wind blew relentlessly.

  ‘Dear Lord.’ Elston switched to a ringlink. ‘Anyone not involved with Tropic-1 recovery, start picking up the food packets. Legionnaires, take perimeter duty now. No one venture outside line of sight.’

  Angela started picking up the food packets closest to her. It was the most pathetic thing she’d done in years. At best she could hold maybe a dozen of the silvery oblongs, then she had to hurry over to Tropic-2 with its open doors and dump them onto the seat. Her bag was inside, the one she normally used to distribute the packets round the convoy. She pulled it out and began stuffing packets inside. All around her, people were bending over, bobbing about to pick up tumbling packets like impoverished shellfishers in shallow water.

  Her e-i ran columns of figures through her grid as she snatched and snatched at the wretched fluttering foil. She screamed curses at the ones that eluded her stiffening fingers. It was like watching a wound pump her own lifeblood away; each packet skittering off into the inimical snow-thickened darkness was a day fewer that they’d be able to live.

  Her attitude seemed to have got through to the others. Everybody was straining against the wind, grasping after the animated packets, shoving them into their open parkas or tipping them into a vehicle. Their own vehicle, she noticed.

  The time of sharing was over, she knew – a lot of those packets they’d saved wouldn’t be going back on any inventory Elston might order.

  Angela spent another fifteen minutes outside, scuttling about after the food before Paresh told her to stop. The last of the individual packets was slipping beyond the simple perimeter the six remaining Legionnaires had set up. It was just as well, her hands in only a single set of gloves were now so cold she couldn’t move her fingers any more. She leaned against the wind to walk back in silent misery to Tropic-2. Ken was already taping a panel over the shattered window. Forster was inside brushing snow off the dash and seats, while Paresh was still out on perimeter duty.

  Angela shut the door behind her, and spilled her bag’s contents onto the pile of packets already wedged between the front and rear seats.

  ‘We’ve got a good week’s worth there, haven’t we?’ Ken said dubiously from the front passenger seat.

  ‘Probably,’ she said. She held her hands over the vent, watching the clinging strings of snow start to melt and drip as Forster switched it to blow hot air into the Tropic. Her parka had a crust of ice nearly a centimetre thick, which was also dribbling down onto the packets, the floor, and the seat. She couldn’t take it off because her hands wouldn’t work. The gloves had so much ice attached they’d become her own personal mini-freezers. She was worried she might have to chip them off, and her fingers would go with them. ‘Son of a bitch, I’m cold.’

  ‘Let me get your gloves off,’ Ken said. ‘I’ve got a bit of feeling back in my fingers.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  A minute later the other back door opened and a cloud of snow puffed in as Paresh lumbered up into the seat. Then the door slammed shut again, and the interior calmed apart from the wheezing air-con vents.

  ‘Elston is ordering us to drive into a defensive circle,’ Forster said. ‘Looks like we’re stopping for a while.’

  ‘We’ll just have to stay here,’ Ken said. ‘There’s not enough fuel to get us even halfway to Sarvar now. And food’s blowing away down the glacier. And the monster’s throwing grenades at us.’

  ‘We don’t know what happened to the truck,’ Paresh said.

  ‘Maybe Karizma isn’t the saboteur,’ Forster said. ‘Maybe they’re still with us.’

  ‘No,’ Angela said. ‘That was the monster.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because if it was the saboteur, they’ve just killed themselves as well. Karizma wanted to force us to turn back. Taking out the truck is a whole different ball game.’

  Forster started the Tropic, and drove them round in a short curve, avoiding the overturned cadaver of Tropic-1, to take their position in the circle. The remaining six vehicles shone their headlights out across the rucked ice surface of the canyon floor while the lightning burst sporadically amid the massive cloudbank overhead. Only two of the remote guns were functioning, sweeping vigilantly from side to side; snow had clogged the actuators on the other four, although they could still fire if they ever acquired a target.

  *

  Vance sat in the driver’s cab of biolab-1, watching the wipers struggle to keep the curving windscreen clear. Their blue-white headlights, and the additional spots on the roof of the cab penetrated no more then ten metres into the maelstrom of snow hurtling along the canyon. The wind was now so fierce it was scouring the snow directly off the frozen river, carving elegant curving forms out of the harder drifts only to pulverize them again in seconds, liberating them into thick cataracts that raced along parallel to the ground. Away with those fast horizontal streamers went any last hope of recovering their food.

  Every few seconds the biolab would shudder and growl as a band of denser snow was hammered into it. Vance was waiting for the monster. He almost expected it to walk out of the blizzard to stand in front of the biolab to gloat. Losing half their fuel had been bad, but then to have their food swept away almost as an incidental act of malice was a brutal twist of the knife. For the first time he was considering the prospect of the monster winning, that his command, the people he was responsible for, would not survive. It was a terrible knowledge, corroding his very soul. He knew he mustn’t let it show, mustn’t be anything less than bullishly confident. The twenty-eight people left alive were his responsibility, they would look to him for that leadership, they’d expect him to find them a way out, some way of delivering them from the cold lingering death so far from home which otherwise awaited them.

  He searched round the frenzy of snow again, but saw nothing. Perhaps even the Lord had limits? Certainly Vance could understand if He could no longer find them here. After all, nobody in the convoy knew where here was any more. They were lost in so many ways.

  Such self-pity offended him. Anger helped him push the sorrow and insecurity to one side. Anger that was mostly directed inward. He was here for a reason. The end was close now, they were drawing towards a final confrontation, the monster was making sure of that. This was the moment Vance Elston was needed the most, the reason his Lord had delivered him to this time and place. The time he would find out if he was truly worthy.

  He made his way back into the main cabin, where Smara Jacka was inventorying the meagre collection of silvery packets she and Tamisha and Antrinell had managed to scavenge out of the blizzard. ‘Leave that,’ he told her. His e-i gave the biolab’s net a code, and the door to the little decontam airlock opened.

  Antrinell, Tamisha, Roarke, and Camm were inside, sitting together at the bench which ran the length of the lab. Tamisha had spent most of yesterday evening designing the dispersal mechanism which would fit into a hollow-point bullet. The lab’s 3D precision printer had churned out the tiny components, which she’d spent hours painstakingly assembling into a smal
l smartpellet that could withstand the pistol’s chamber explosion, but would itself detonate a couple of milliseconds after impact. They knew hitting the monster’s strangely solid skin would be useless. Instead the mouth slit or eyes would have to provide a route inside its body to the cells. That meant a supremely accurate shot from a distance, or one from point-blank range like Ravi had managed.

  Once Tamisha had started producing the bullet dispenser, Vance had authorized access to the snug launch tubes built into the biolab’s bulkhead. Antrinell and Camm had removed one of the rockets, and carefully detached the warhead. It had taken hours to extract the phials of zero metavirus from the jetstream release mechanism. There were a lot of very dangerous explosives involved, and it was the middle of the night: nobody wanted to make a mistake.

  Now they had one of the phials in a small clean-A chamber, along with the bullet dispensers. Roarke was transferring a tiny droplet of the green-tinted suspension liquid from the phial into each smartpellet.

  ‘I pressure-tested three at random,’ Antrinell said as Vance peered over Roarke’s shoulder at the small manipulator arms moving about with micrometre precision inside the clean-A chamber. ‘They all checked out. There won’t be any leakage.’

  ‘Good job,’ Vance told Tamisha.

  ‘Thank you, sir. The smartpellet will withstand any ordinary impact, in case you drop the pistol or anything; and they also need an arm code before they’ll work.’

  ‘What about cold-exposure?’ Vance asked. ‘Do we know what temperature renders the metavirus inoperable?’

  ‘Most virus weapons cease to be effective below ten degrees Celsius, and they start dying below fifteen,’ Antrinell said. He held up a translucent pistol-shaped rubbery sheath. ‘We printed a warmer for your pistol, the battery lasts fifteen hours. It should keep the bullets warm enough outside.’