Great North Road (104 page)

She gave him a reluctant nod.

“You know I’m committed,” Ian said in a dull tone. “I have to look out for her.”

Sid didn’t comment on that. He’d never seen Ian infatuated like this before. Tallulah was clearly the greatest femme fatale in town. Strange what love—or obsession—blinded you to.

“All right, then,” Sid said. “Let’s get it done.”

The three of them put on netlens glasses. The ancient, obsolete police observation routines were still faithfully hounding after Sherman and his people as best they could. Sid checked on Aldred’s position, which was in his St. James singletown apartment. Eva confirmed that Sherman himself was in a car heading for Dunston Marina. Ian chased down Jede. Boz was in the Regency Fitness gym pumping iron. Ruckby was approaching Quayside to collect Valentina.

Vehicle locations popped up into a map of Newcastle. Cells next to all Sherman’s known residencies were readied.

“Everyone ready?” Sid asked.

“Go for it,” Ian hissed.

Their instruction flashed out across Newcastle’s transnet. Every public cell in the region of their targets broadcasted a code. In response, the smartmicrobe bugs fired off their cache, everything they’d recorded from their quarry’s bodymesh links to the transnet. The download only lasted a few milliseconds, but Eva was monitoring Ruckby intently. He was the bytehead among them; if anyone was going to detect the security breach it would be him.

Sid’s grid displayed the results. Out of the five cars and eleven shoes on which they’d managed to plant a smartmicrobe, four cars and nine shoes responded—including Aldred’s.

“Good percentage,” Eva muttered.

“Has Ruckby detected anything?” Sid asked. He was still following Marcus Sherman, who wasn’t making any frantic calls from the car as it turned into Colliery Road.

“I think we got away with it,” she said.

Sid told his e-i to access the call files now sitting in the Apple console. It ran a correlation, seeing if any of them matched. The results slipped down Sid’s grid in a glowing neon-green matrix.

“Gotcha,” he murmured in satisfaction. Aldred 2North had called Marcus Sherman three times in the last week.

T
HURSDAY,
A
PRIL 18, 2143

Saul Howard led the scavenger group along the Rue Balzac that meandered gently along the west side of the Pinsappo valley. The snow was several meters thick on the tight slopes, burying the scrub vegetation and swaddling the palm trees that villa owners fenced their properties with. He only knew he was still following the road thanks to the tops of the signs, which stuck up out of the snow like tumor-stricken ice gravestones.

It had been years—decades, actually—since Saul had skied. The old skills had come back eventually, after a few days of skids and falls, and now he was rather pleased with his reawakened knack. For someone twenty-five years out of practice, he was still one of the better cross-country skiers from the Camilo Village community.

Today there were five of them in the little group sliding cautiously through the imposing mountains. Otto and Lewis were flanking him, with Ayanna and Markos bringing up the rear. All of them were bundled up in thick layers of clothing against the gentle swirls of snow that fell from the high clouds. Saul had too much on, which meant he was sweating profusely from the effort of slogging up the mild incline. It had taken them a couple of hours to get to this point, three or four hundred meters above sea level. The climb had been relentless, hindered by the winds that swept along the valleys, always blowing against them no matter what direction they took. Ever since the climate altered, the sweet sea winds that used to blow against the Abellia peninsula had grown harsh and unrelenting.

Goggles protected his face from the minute ice grains that were constantly airborne, scouring any unprotected human skin. The winds were forever reshaping the surface of the snow, sculpting strange wave shapes and curving ridges in completely random arrangements, transforming the sturdy mountain slopes into weird slow-motion seas. Out on these ventures, he was permanently alert for loose snow and the dangerous fissures that could twist legs and send unwary skiers tumbling down pristine inclines. There were also avalanches to be aware of, great slides of snow that came rushing down out of nowhere for no reason. All of them scanned the jagged skyline above as they followed the road, trying to see where the snow had piled too high. More than once he’d abandoned excursions and turned back because of the towering mounds above.

The light didn’t help. Red Sirius distorted by the shifting aurora borealis made the shadows twist and the scale mislead. This was not a landscape for the fainthearted. Too many people had been lost in the first few weeks for Saul to ever relax and take the whole experience as something rewarding, no matter how much food they gathered.

“That one looks good,” Otto called above the vacant whistling gusts.

Saul saw where he was pointing; up ahead maybe three hundred meters, a big three-story Roman-style villa sitting in its long terrace garden, with whitewashed walls, broad balconies, and jet-black windows. Its mantle of snow softened the rigorous angles, overhanging the balconies and sweeping up the colonnade pillars to press against the first-floor windows. The roof had collapsed in places; he could see the apex had buckled, producing long depressions in the shallow slope of the solar panels. There was no sign that anybody else had scouted the villa.

“Sure,” Saul said, and changed direction.

The villa had big iron gates attached to stone columns, and a three-meter hedge reinforced with a carbon security mesh. Saul could just see the frost-blackened tips of the dead hedge bushes protruding from the top of the snow as he skied over the boundary.

They took their skis off just outside the balcony, then piled up their backpacks. Markos smashed one of the big windows with a clay plant pot, and they went inside. It was a bedroom, which they ignored and carried on to the broad gallery landing that surrounded the central atrium. It was so dark, they had to use their torches. Strong white beams splashed around, revealing that amazingly the glass cupola had survived, though no light could ever penetrate the meters of snow smothering it. Instead, the roof had broken and buckled in half a dozen other places, the rents allowing snow into the top-floor rooms. Once inside, it had come slithering out of every open door to spread along the upper landing. Long, steel-hard icicles wreathed the edge of the banisters, even extending down the stairs. The carpet under Saul’s heavy boots had succumbed to a glittering centimeter-thick frost, completing the transformation from villa to wintertime crypt. Nothing responded to the quests his e-i was sending out. The villa’s systems were completely dead. He flicked a switch on the wall, with no result. Even the light circuits had blown.

Nobody said anything as they made their way downstairs. The routine was familiar by now: They were here for food, and that was always stored in the kitchen or pantry, sometimes the basement, and plenty of these houses had wine cellars. Big houses like this one were only ever used as occasional homes for their wealthy owners. Gourmet foods were delivered a day before they arrived to ensure freshness; everything else was in packets or freezers. The quantity some of the larger houses had stashed away was phenomenal. Saul was sure that a couple of them they’d scavenged were owned by some kind of survivalists. It wasn’t just food in those houses. There were 3-D printers, big tanks of raw, and underground reservoirs of bioil. Of course, their ideology had them fleeing a Zanthswarmed Earth; even they hadn’t built roofs to withstand tons of snow.

It was the smaller houses and bungalows such as those of Camilo Village that had been the easiest to reinforce. After the first massive snowfall, more than fifty residents had gone into the small forest of native sparpine on the other side of the Rue du Ranelagh and started felling timber. The village was home to local workers and business owners, the type of people who worked hard and possessed practical skills. Saul had taken two days to bring his printers and tanks of raw back from the Hawaiian Moon store on Velasco Beach before the roads were abandoned. One of the first things he’d designed and microfactured was a wood-burning stove from a tough thermal resin. It now sat in the middle of their big open-plan lounge, a perfect medieval kettle, throwing out a lot of heat from the scraps of wood the kids continued to retrieve from the now diminished forest.

A bulldozer from a resort construction site ten kilometers inland just off the Rue du Ranelagh had been commandeered right after the first blizzards started, and now performed daily communal snow clearance, keeping the drifts away from the bungalows, and shoving the snow across the beach into the sea. Most days the kids would be outside with brooms on very long poles, scraping the latest fall off the PV roof panels. They still had electricity, although the bungalow net had to prioritize systems.

What they—along with the rest of Abellia’s remaining residents—were short of was bioil. Like a true baron, Brinkelle distributed her city-state’s reserves of fuel in accordance to need—as she saw it. Medical services were also rationed. Those resources rather than money allowed her rule of law to continue. Not that anyone protested—survival in such hostile conditions precluded political dissent. Besides, as Saul admitted to himself, she did a reasonable job. Some of the city net was still functioning; Camilo Village had a connection to what was left of the Civic Administration. They got a tank of bioil delivered every ten days or so for the bulldozer, because what it did—protecting everyone’s bungalow—was deemed to be an essential. And when Nerys had gone into labor, a search and rescue helicopter had flown through the snow to airlift her to the Institute—she had a baby boy. So there was a loose form of organization and community cooperation rather than direct government riding to the rescue, but then Bartram and Brinkelle had always practiced a somewhat laissez-faire doctrine when it came to their domain.

Saul was quite surprised she and her family hadn’t abandoned them altogether. It would have been easy enough for them all to fly back to Highcastle and through the gateway. But for whatever reason Brinkelle had remained. He suspected it was to maintain absolute control over the Institute, to which her branch of the family had devoted themselves. Without that, she’d be just one more transworld billionairess amid countless others—nothing special at all.

By staying and ensuring that the Institute with its seventeen thousand personnel survived, she would maintain her more exalted status. Exactly how she could keep things at Abellia going for more than a couple of months was subject to a lot of late-night talk in the village. Energy could be stretched and conserved to keep things going for a while yet. Food, though, was a very different commodity.

Brinkelle had been very clear that individual communities wouldn’t receive any help from her administration when it came to feeding themselves. That had been the toughest part. There had been times when no one could venture outside for a week, the blizzards had been so fierce. Recently, though, the weather had been more restrained. Camilo Village took advantage of those lulls, sending out four or five scavenger teams to scout the big houses abandoned by their offworld owners.

At the bottom of the villa’s stairs, Saul headed across the atrium floor. After a week of visiting strange houses he’d developed an instinct about the layout, especially when it came to where the kitchen was. The darkness seemed to act like a muffler, consuming sound. Light beams swung around, exploring the doors and archways. The rooms glimpsed beyond were glazed in ice, their windows completely black underneath the drifts.

The villa’s kitchen was larger than Saul’s living room. It had two bulky range cookers, and a central island with a bread oven, a steam oven, and a pizza oven. An array of excellent copper pans hung from an overhead square rack.

Saul swept his beam around the twinkling frost-coated surfaces. It stopped briefly on a bristly gray lump on the floor beneath one of the range cookers, then he forced it onward. The cats had probably been huddling in the place they knew was sometimes warmer. Nobody was quite reduced to eating that kind of meat. Yet.

Five bright beams came to rest on the huge double-door fridge. Lewis forced it open, revealing eight shelves crammed full. There were good-quality packaged meals, cartons of milk and juice, a lot of meat and fish, yogurts, jams, butter.

“Let’s start,” Saul said.

Markos unzipped a big canvas bag and started to sweep everything off the shelves. All the food had frozen solid. It didn’t matter what the use-by date was anymore, they could cook it.

Ayanna and Saul went into the utility room off the kitchen.

“Bingo,” she exclaimed. There were two huge chest freezers at the far end of the room. When they smashed the locks off, they found them laden with of every kind of food.

“This is a week’s worth for the whole village, easily,” Saul said. He opened up his own bag and started filling it. It would take several trips up the stairs. Then they’d assemble the sledges they’d carried with them in the backpacks. Another of Saul’s designs, printed with the last of the raw he’d brought back from the Hawaiian Moon. They weren’t that easy to steer, but the scavenger teams always made sure the route back from the foraged houses was downhill. As such, the sledges had proved invaluable when it came to bringing medium-sized loads back to Camilo Village.

Saul lifted the bag up, blowing his cheeks out at the weight. He carried on regardless; this expedition, like all those he’d been on and those yet to come, was about one thing: making sure his family had enough to live on until this terrible winter was over. He knew that would only happen in a community, with everyone pulling together and helping one another until the sunspot outbreak finally declined and the world returned to normal. That belief and insistence was what kept him going, what made him one of the people the rest of Camilo Village looked to. His quiet determination had surprised Emily, who’d never witnessed that side of him before.