Great North Road (49 page)

It was seven o’clock when he’d finished loading parameters and safeguards, making sure there would be no comeback even if some bytehead did uncover the operation. Feeling better than he had all day, Ian went for a shower. He’d have a meal with a couple of the lads from the station as arranged, and watch where the night took her.

S
UNDAY,
F
EBRUARY 24, 2143

Angela had spent a couple of evenings in the Edzell mess tent listening to a pilot called Ravi Hendrik simultaneously bitching and bragging about bridgeheading Camp Sarvar. He’d recounted every minute of the helicopter flight’s hazardous progress through the Eclipse Mountains, dodging wicked razor ridges and towering peaks and violent microburst squalls and zero-visibility cloud swarms. It had been entertaining stuff; the old pilot had a way of making it sound like the most difficult flying any human had ever done across the trans-stellar worlds. All good entertainment before she and Paresh sneaked off into the ringlit bush outside the camp perimeter.

Entertaining in a dusky camp, sure. Unnerving now that she herself was flying over the Eclipse pinnacles. She spent most of the two-and-a-half-hour flight with her bodymesh linked to the Daedalus fuselage meshes, watching the colossal mountain range beneath. First it was a forward view, because they were visible ahead almost from the moment the big strategic airlifter took off from Edzell. Then for a good half hour she was looking down directly as they passed overhead. Just. Their Daedalus had a cruise ceiling of fourteen kilometers, which put the white glitter of the Eclipse’s major peaks disturbingly close as they traversed the range. The e-Rays that had been sent out scouting ahead from Edzell pinpointed a dozen mountains soaring up over ten kilometers high. Finding them had triggered a whole surge of macho rhetoric among the expedition members, particularly the Legionnaires. There had been a lot of talk about climbing the tallest peak and planting the HDA flag on top. So much so that Vice Commissioner Passam had officially requested clarification from General Khurram Shaikh—the predictable answer being wait and see what else the expedition finds, then we’ll think about it.

The tallest peaks weren’t even the worst of the flightpath problems. There were hundreds of peaks over five kilometers high. Given that the Berlin helicopters had a maximum ceiling of forty-three hundred meters—reduced considerably when carrying an external load—their route through the range had to be plotted with extreme care. Ravi had flown the pathfinder mission, verifying the crazy zigzag course determined from e-Ray optical and radar data, flitting along fifteen-kilometer canyons barely wider than a New York avenue, occluded in a permanent twilight unusual on St. Libra, then swooping over the fortress ridges, battling the uprush of thermals that came shrieking like a banshee out of deep crevasses without warning; testing the relatively safe areas earmarked for refueling.

Naturally the section of the range directly between Edzell and Sarvar was the widest part, where it bulged around the split. The Eclipse Mountains had erupted out of the planetary crust as a vast Y shape, stretching over two and a half thousand kilometers from east to west, forking halfway along. The northern spur carried on the main range, stretching it due east, while the slightly shorter and lower spur, now named the Umbra range, curved away southward.

For most of the time as the Daedalus flew over them, the image of the mountains seemed to be etched in monochrome. All Angela could see was white snow and dark rock. For once St. Libra’s ubiquitous zebra vegetation had been banished. The range was as barren as the Ambrose continent’s Long Dead Desert. Watching the deep-blue, kilometer-plus-wide glaciers curve around the hulking prominences, she could only smile at the Legionnaires’ ridiculous dreams of setting up any kind of camp to challenge a ten-kilometer peak. They were lucky their aircraft allowed them to surmount the range. Talk among the xenobiologists was that this might be the dividing range, the one that separated branches of planetary evolution. She supposed it was possible. After all, the monster had to come from somewhere. But for the life of her she couldn’t imagine it trekking through the mountains. It would have to go around. If there was an around.

Nobody knew what lay to the east. Even the e-Rays from their precarious eighteen-kilometer operational loiters couldn’t see past the distant sentinel summits. But when the Daedalus finally cleared the northern extremity, and the land sank back to a jumble of sharp valleys and rumpled plateaus smothered in tortuously thick jungle, she saw the beginnings of the massive River Dolce tributary network. All the frozen water that was eventually pressure-goaded out of the Eclipse range, the slow march of the glaciers, the avalanche spills of the mountainsides, the icy rivulet trickles and leaky lakes that oozed out into the rock clefts, finally combined into irresistible torrents that came thundering out of the foothills, gathering speed and warmth as they surged northward where every fold in the land was bisected by a river that merged then merged again and again until the raging tributary river eventually spilled into the Dolce itself, which swept down to the coast, merging with other rivers as it went, until it became the Jaslin estuary—which had been visible on the original survey pictures.

The humidity of the Dolce tributary basin was incredible. It was permanently shrouded in vapor; only fragments of the land could be glimpsed through brief tatters in the boiling white blanket that capped the entire area. After the Eclipse range this was the next hindrance St. Libra had thrown at them.

Angela gave up watching when the mountains were behind them. The bland bright homogeneity of the churning mist was boring and depressing. She knew if she allowed herself to watch it, she would begin to overanalyze its sameness and size, think where she was, how far from civilization, how utterly dependent on the HDA and people like Ravi she was to get back. That would make her brood. Best not think about anything, to be a simple tourist content with travel alone.

Two and a half hours of nerves and forced ignorance, then the landing gear clunked down with alarming abruptness.

“Thank crap for that,” Paresh murmured from the seat next to her.

“You okay?” she asked quietly. The flight seemed to have drained the usual snappy verve out of the entire squad. Nobody looked relieved the flight was ending; nobody was eager to see what awaited at Camp Sarvar.

“Those mountains were big,” he said. Which was quite expressive for Paresh, a man who liked to keep his world simple and easy.

It wasn’t the mountains, she knew, it was the distance they’d accumulated, and the knowledge that before long they’d be flying northward again, to one of the front-line camps that were the designated next phase. The third batch of e-Rays were already being deployed to hunt down suitable locations. Paresh was experiencing the dependence she’d done her best to suppress, the knowledge of just how tenuous their link back to civilization had become. How nobody was going to come to their help out here if they did find the great St. Libra monster.

“We’re over them now,” she told him reassuringly.

Once again the Daedalus landed on a strip of raw compacted ground that looked way too short to be attempting anything so foolhardy. Once again Angela gave quick silent thanks to the pilot’s skill. The rear loading ramp hinged down, and the passengers disembarked ahead of the mobile biolabs that had accompanied them. Angela looked around; apart from a different skyline, with higher mountains surrounding them, there was practically no difference between Sarvar and Edzell the day she arrived there. Similarity even extended to layout.

“Tents,” she announced.

Paresh gave her a curious look. “What?”

She smiled a superior smile.

Lieutenant Botin came over to Paresh. “Corporal, your squad is on tent duty. I want them up by seventeen hundred hours. Consult the quartermaster on location.”

“Yes, sir.” Paresh gave the lieutenant a fast salute. He turned to Angela and gave her a rueful grin. “Tents,” he agreed.

M
ONDAY,
F
EBRUARY 25, 2143

The alarm that his e-i allowed through established nighttime information filters was both audio and visual, sending smartcells buzzing in his ears and flashing a subdued blue light into his retinas. Vance Elston lurched upright on the cot in his tent, adrenaline firing his thoughts. His body was on some kind of small timelag, lacking coordination.

“What?” he asked his e-i.

“The field hospital has logged time of death for Chet Mullain: oh six eleven hours today.”

“Damnit.” Vance struggled with the zip on the sleeping bag, trying to extract himself from the thin sock of lightweight material. While he untangled himself, his e-i was calling up Mullain’s file: Chet Mullain was one of the Sarvar command staff, a low-rank HDA soldier assigned to administration. Not critical, not even outstanding; background information didn’t reveal any important family. Just another grunt from Dublin signed up to serve and save the human race, escaping from his no-future city estate.

The AAV team was filling another e-Ray with helium in the quiet air that accompanied dawn as Vance hurried across the dew-damp camp to the compact block of three Qwik-Kabins containing the field hospital. A strong citrus tang permeated the air as he half jogged, the scent the result of jungle spores that drifted over the camp whenever it wasn’t raining.
At least it isn’t mint,
he thought. He went inside the air-conditioned building, wiping the sweat from his forehead as the chill atmosphere inside made goose bumps rise. It might have been daybreak, but St. Libra’s heat had barely abated overnight.

The body on the emergency room gurney was covered in a tough blue sheet. A couple of paramedics were slumped against the wall, despondent with their lost battle for life, their disposable plastic coveralls slick with blood. Dr. Tamika Coniff stood at the foot of the gurney, methodically checking bits of equipment; some kind of auto running her body, it was non-work to mitigate the failure.

“What happened?” Vance asked. And even his discipline couldn’t prevent him from crossing himself.

Coniff didn’t seem to notice it. “I couldn’t save him,” she replied. “Half his torso was crushed. It was only the resuscitator that made him technically alive when they brought him in.”

“Brought him in from where?” Vance turned on the paramedics as his e-i quested a link to them, running down their files. “Where did you find him?”

“Cargo row,” Mark Chitty, the chief paramedic, said. “Some of the pallets fell on him. We had to get the logistics corps guys to lift them.”

“When did this happen?”

“About half an hour ago. His bodymesh was firing off medical emergency pings the second it happened.”

“Right.” An accident, then. There’d been several on the expedition—broken limbs, nasty gashes, burns, a crushed foot—nothing remarkable in that, everyone was in a hurry, everybody was tired, especially logistics corps personnel. It was really only luck nobody had been killed until now.

Commander Ni strode into the hospital, his face grim. A fatality in his camp wasn’t something he wanted on his record.

“I’d like to review this,” Vance told him.

Ni’s face registered shock, then annoyance. He gave the doctor a quick guilty glance. “You think it’s suspicious?”

“No,” she said. “He suffered massive blunt-force trauma. He could not have survived.”

“I don’t doubt his injuries,” Vance said. “We just need to be sure of the circumstances.”

“All right,” Ni agreed. “But discreetly.”

“Understood,” Vance said. While the commander talked to Dr. Coniff, Vance went over to the corpse and held his hand over the head. He told his e-i to recover Mullain’s visual memory. The dead man’s smartcells responded poorly; the visual data was a series of color smears, revealing nothing.

“Doctor?”

Coniff turned to him, her eyebrows raised impatiently. “Yes?”

“His smartcells seem to be glitched. The bodymesh log has been corrupted.”

“Fairly typical. We hit him with the defibrillator half a dozen times. That kind of charge tends to scramble smartcells.”

“Surely smartcells are designed to withstand that level of punishment? One of their major functions is to relay medical information during an emergency.”

“They complement our sensors, yes. You’ll find the smartcells themselves are functional, you just need to reboot them. It’s their software that the electric current disrupts.”

“And if I reboot, I’ll lose any existing data.”

She shrugged at the lack of how that concerned her, and returned to her conversation with Commander Ni.

Vance made his way over to the other block of Qwik-Kabins that made up Sarvar’s official headquarters. They were split into tiny cubicle offices; his position entitled him to one that had a bench for a desk and could fit one extra chair. The walls were thin composite, making genuine privacy a joke. Once he’d squeezed himself around to his seat, the console screen curved around his face and produced a perfectly focused wraparound image. His e-i quested a secure link to the camp’s primitive network. “Get me Tramelo’s tag log,” he told the software. As well as the crude network, the camp’s sensors were minimal, but sufficient to keep watch on the woman. Back at Edzell he’d noted all the regular nocturnal excursions. Most nights she walked half a klick outside the perimeter, stayed in one spot for about an hour, then came back. The third time he’d used a copterbug, half the size of his hand, that whirred off silently into the night, tracking her. What the little spy gadget’s excellent sensors revealed in infrared didn’t surprise him—after all, she still looked hot, that’s why she was in Bartram’s mansion in the first place. Nor was he particularly surprised to see it was Corporal Evitts fornicating with her, but he was disappointed. The corporal had been specifically warned she was a threat to discipline, yet he’d allowed his animal lust to take precedence. They were too far into the mission for a formal reprimand and demotion, since that would disrupt the squad’s efficiency; Evitts was a popular leader. But when they got back to Earth the corporal was going to have some serious demerits loaded on his record.