Great North Road (85 page)

“I’ll be fine.”

F
RIDAY,
M
ARCH 22, 2143

It was Ernie Reinert’s lack of defiance that Sid found most unnerving. They were back in interview room seven, with Reinert wearing a standard light gray prisoner overall with Velcro fastenings. After sitting at the same table for year after year being subject to defiance, abuse, threats, and getting spat at more times than he could count, it was almost like he was on the defensive now.

Ralph Stevens hadn’t objected to the interview, though he had been curious. “Trust me, he told us every useful piece of information he could.”

“Yeah, but I read the transcripts,” Sid said. “You concentrated on the disposal operation and Kirk Corzone.” The transcripts had been extensive, heavy with information, though they only amounted to about three hours. It was more like a statement confirming an earlier confession, all very formal Q&As. It made Sid wonder about what had happened for the rest of the week Reinert had been with the HDA, which wasn’t an area he was comfortable with at all.

“Of course we did, those are the key issues,” Ralph said.

“I’d like to try a different approach.”

“He’s yours now. We don’t want him back. Ask him whatever you like, but I’ll need to be in the observation office.”

Reinert refused a solicitor, claiming he didn’t want one. Sid could appreciate that, they had enough on the HDA transcript to have him relocated to Minisa’s polar colony—assuming the courts accepted the transcript. Most of Newcastle’s judges were way too liberal in Sid’s opinion.

“I’m interested in your anonymous friend who sent you to the St. James,” Sid began. “The instructions you receive from him always come from the same address code, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Reinert said, polite and respectful. “That’s how I know the call is genuine.”

“That’s good e-craft,” Sid said. “Elementary, but good. Three AIs tried to trace where the call originated from, but it was random dispersal routed, listed as interfaced with fifty-seven public cells around Newcastle. So your friend clearly knows his transnet security.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I’d like to help you catch him, really I would.”

“Thank you, Ernie. So there was never any address for you to call?”

“No, sir.”

“What happened if something went wrong, if you couldn’t do a job.”

Ernie looked confused. “I could do all the jobs.”

“Was anything ever said about what would happen to you if you couldn’t do one?”

“No, sir. I just knew not to screw up. Old Kirk, he made that clear when he gave me the address code. Said if anyone used it to call me then there was no going back. I accepted that, sir, I know the score.”

“So you never tried calling that address code yourself?”

“No, sir, no point. Kirk said it was never interfaced until I was being called.”

“Did Kirk ever indicate if it was a man or a woman on the other end?”

“No, sir. I tried to remember those kind of details. I tried really hard for the others, but I couldn’t.” He started shaking as a thin layer of sweat beads erupted from his brow. “Please don’t send me back there, sir, not to them. I’m trying to help, really I am. I’ll try so hard for you, sir.”

Sid and Ian exchanged an awkward glance. “I know you’re trying, Ernie,” Sid assured him. “So let’s try a different line, shall we? Can you tell me about the previous jobs you did for the untraceable address? How many have there been?”

“Just the four, sir.”

“Okay then, tell me about the first three.”

By themselves they weren’t particularly remarkable. The first two, both in the first year after the arrangement began, were targeted muggings. Ernie had been given images of his victims, told what hotels they were staying in, and told what to retrieve from them. In both cases it was a personal transnet cell. Ernie had to leave the first gadget in a CoCoMore franchise café toilet, and the second in the gents’ at Newcastle station. The third job had been last year, and was a whole different level. He’d organized a break-in team for the offices of D’Amato & Livie, a law firm specializing in corporate tax affairs. They had to gain entry without raising any alarm, and replace one of the network cores with an identical make and marque that Ernie collected from a waiter at the Olive Branch Bar on Grey Street, opposite the Theater Royal. Ernie believed the man was wearing an identity mask; his face had that slightly too stiff look to it. After swapping the gadget the team was to exit the office, also without incident. A feat they’d accomplished, much to Ernie’s satisfaction. He’d expected more jobs to come his way after proving himself like that. Then he got the St. James disposal.

Sid and Ian went into the observation office where Ralph had been watching. Lorelle Burdett joined them.

“The mugging victims were easy to find,” she told them. “Vladimar Orwell and Gus Malley.”

“Who do they work for?” Sid asked.

“Orwell is employed by Longthorpe-AI—he’s a software expert.”

“Okay, can you find out what contracts Longthorpe had at that time?”

Lorelle gave him a smart grin. “That’ll be tough without a warrant, but they work just about exclusively for the bioil industry. Their AIs specialize in pipe flow dynamics.”

“And Malley?”

“Michtral Engineering.”

“Ah.” Even Sid had heard of them, a massive German heavy industry group that built bioil refineries. “I don’t suppose we’ll find out who D’Amato and Livie’s clients are.”

“Again, we’ll need a warrant. But in this town, any law firm worth over a eurofranc is going to have bioil companies on its client list.”

“Thanks, Lorelle.”

“So?” Ralph asked as she left.

“So,” Sid said, “each of those jobs was bioil-industry-related. Reinert’s controller is corporate.”

“Yeah, that’s something we’re strongly considering. However, the reason we haven’t abandoned your investigation is because someone on the expedition has just been murdered by a five-bladed claw.”

“Aye, crap on it, man,” Ian exclaimed. “You sure, like?”

“Oh yes. Coombes was a xenobiology specialist. She was at Wukang, that’s Elston’s camp.”

Sid didn’t know how to respond. He’d been so sure he’d just made his case perfectly. “There can’t be an alien,” he said. “There just can’t. It’s North against North.”

Ralph shrugged. “Sorry, but we’re not quite there yet. So where do you want to go next?”

“Forensics,” Sid said. “That’s all we’ve got left on the murder scene.”

“Is that going to turn up anything?” Ralph asked.

It was Sid’s turn to shrug. “We’ll know when we know.”

Ralph Stevens left Market Street station at six thirty that evening, walking toward Grey Street. Sid was standing on the corner, drinking a boXsnaX tea from a cardboard cup. “Nice evening. I’ll walk with you.”

Ralph showed a brief flicker of surprise. “Sure.”

They crossed Grey Street outside the theater and turned up toward the monument. Ralph stopped outside the Central Arcade’s big stone arch. Inside, the glass-roofed hallway was lined with small exclusive stores; the upper levels had been refurbished as a boutique hotel just as its architects had originally envisioned over two centuries earlier.

“You know this is me, right?” Ralph said.

“Yeah. I’ve never been inside the hotel. What’s it like?”

“Nice. Why don’t you come up and take a look.”

“That’d be grand, thanks, man.”

Ralph’s room was decorated in lush brown, gold, and red colors, with a big bed and a small zone cubicle. The windows gave him a view down across Grey’s Monument. Sid looked at the pedestrians for a while, then the curtains swished shut.

“I don’t often ask strange men back to my room,” Ralph said.

“The hotel doesn’t have meshes inside the rooms,” Sid told him.

“Lip-reading software, huh?”

“It’s admissible in court.”

“I’m interested.”

“You want this solved, don’t you, one way or another, alien or corporate.”

“HDA is focused entirely on proving or disproving the alien theory. That comes before anything, including court evidence and police log procedures.”

“All right then. There’s a possibility we may have a lead that isn’t on the police logs.”

“What?” Ralph demanded. “Don’t fuck around with us on this, Sid. That’s a world you do not want to inhabit.”

“There’s a hint from the gangs that something big is going down. I genuinely don’t know what, but you don’t get much bigger than murdering a North.”

“Did this come from the gang task force?”

“No. This is a private non-police source, which is why it’s not on any log. Remember what happened to Jolwel Kavane?”

It took a moment, but Ralph’s expression gave him away. “Ah. Fair enough. So what do you want me to do?”

“I can carry on chasing down the lead on my own, but I need some help.”

“Sure. What sort of help?”

“Surveillance. The best you can get for me. Keep it off-log so if it all goes arse-over-tit there’ll be no comeback for you. I want something I can tag three or four individuals with, something that they can’t detect or rip or burn, and they’ll never know about until we come crashing through the wall.”

“Are you sure that’s the way you want to play it?”

“It’s got me this far.”

“All right, Sid, I’ll see what I can do for you.”

S
ATURDAY,
M
ARCH 23, 2143

It had rained overnight for the first time in a couple of days. Angela’s boots squelched on reassuringly familiar mud as she walked over to the long row of 350DL cargo pallets containing the camp’s stores. The jungle lapping against Wukang sparkled outlandishly in the borealis scintillations, with a billion droplets scattering the citron and cerise lightblooms in a prismatic miasma. Overhead, the ruby glare of their malaised star was hidden by thickening clouds that were powering in from the north, buffeted along by a fast wind. She wasn’t accustomed to so much background noise on St. Libra; as well as the wind, she could often hear the crash of distant thunder rolling in across the hills.

Those sharp cracks had become a constant reminder of the fragile relay of e-Rays that connected her to the greater civilization of the trans-space worlds. A reminder reinforced by one file in the camp’s net that everyone kept accessing, as if that would somehow lessen the blow. The e-Ray that had circled valiantly above the Eclipse Mountains for close on two months had been subject to the greatest barrage of lightning strikes. It had withstood them far beyond any redundancy measures its design anticipated, with component after component blowing. The AAV team had compensated with work-arounds and software patches until yesterday afternoon. The one remaining motor that drove the propeller had taken a direct hit, burning out. Without the stability it provided, the e-Ray began to pitch and yaw in the storm-accelerated jetstreams—gyrations that quickly sent it tumbling in a wild dive. Its weakened stress structure began to buckle; struts snapped, puncturing the helium bubbles; and it began the long fall to the savage peaks below. A fall that was broadcast in hi-rez clarity from avionics that resolutely continued to function until the moment it struck naked rock.

The gap it left in the relay chain was significant. The two e-Rays on either side of the Eclipse Mountains could just lock on to each other and maintain the relay; but that link had come at a massive cost in bandwidth, increasing the perception of isolation.

It was stupid, she kept telling herself. After all, they were less than eight hours’ flying time from Abellia.
If we had a plane.

Angela reached the row of pallets and told her e-i to ping the first. The smartdust tags on the boxes and packages stowed inside the casing responded, and content lists rolled down her grid. She and Forster Wardele had been reviewing the state of Wukang’s supplies ever since the night Coombes had been murdered. The attack on the camp’s net had done more damage than they realized at first, wiping or corrupting thousands of files. And the general inventory hadn’t been heavily protected.

Paresh appeared at the end of the pallet row, leading Atyeo and Josh, all three of them in light body armor, gray carbon segments flexing as they moved. Their Heckler carbines were held with deceptive lightness, short barrels supporting several sighting sensors. Angela grinned and waved.

“Hi,” she said when they came over. She didn’t try to kiss Paresh. No fair in front of the others when they were all on duty. Beside, his helmet would have made that difficult.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Angela gestured at the long row of pallets. “I didn’t realize we had so much stuff. I suppose it’s lucky.”

“Yeah,” Paresh spat. “Shit on Passam.”

The real triumph of seclusion had come when they heard about the Daedalus at Sarvar evacuating seventy of the base’s eighty personnel first thing Friday morning. As soon as the small maintenance crew at Sarvar had finished their physical inspection for bombs, it had flown them all directly to Abellia.

“A strategic withdrawal,” Passam had told Elston. A Daedalus would return to Sarvar, refuel from the plentiful stocks there, and evacuate everyone from Wukang, Varese, and Omaru. When everyone from the three forward camps was back at Sarvar, they’d be brought home in a last evacuation flight by two Daedaluses.

“That’s bullshit,” Ravi Hendrik shouted in the mess tent Friday evening as the news filtered around. “Nobody is going to fly over the Eclipse range in these conditions. It’s practically suicide. The last flight was lucky to get through with the lightning only knocking one engine out. Eighteen times they got hit on the way back. Eighteen! One of the pilots at Abellia told me.”

Angela had spent the time since telling herself she wasn’t bothered by the isolation, that it was temporary, that if they really needed help the HDA would order a Daedalus to fly in. “Once we find out what we’ve got stored here we’ll be better off,” Angela said. “But there’s certainly enough food for a couple of months. Especially if you include nutrient jelly.”

“Oh hell, girl.” Atyeo pulled a face. “Have you ever eaten that crap?”

“No. Is it bad?”