Great North Road (116 page)

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 overtime. 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; 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 non-specific 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 around 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 reestablished 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 meters 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 around 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 that 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 around nervously and set off toward MTJ-2.

Who to trust? Who?

T
HURSDAY,
M
AY 2, 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 farther; 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. Clayton 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 center 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 subteam whose job it was to know their location and activity at all time. 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 that 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 harboring. 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.

Not that he had a lot to update anybody with. Since Sunday when Sid had unexpectedly called them all up to the HDA base, Linsell had run an exemplary operation. The subteams had acquired their targets with precision and minimum fuss. With the truly unlimited resources they’d brought to bear, nobody had skipped out of sight for a moment.

Unfortunately, Sherman’s crew had turned out to be model citizens ever since that point. Jede had returned to Newcastle midmorning and dumped the van in a GSW. Five minutes after he walked away it had burst into flame, much to the delight of the local feral youths. After that, there’d been no contact between Sherman and Aldred. Sherman had gone about his usual dark business with care. The file Linsell assembled, containing calls about secondary money transfers, tox procurement, corporate data acquisition, and two blackmail scams being set up, would have been enough for the city prosecutor to obtain a twenty-year sentence. Linsell wanted something else. Sherman had to be holding Umbreit’s family somewhere. It was their hold over him, the leverage to force him to build whatever it was they had him doing in the farmhouse barn. Ralph and Linsell were desperate to find them.

Neither Clayton nor anyone at Jupiter could even guess what was being constructed at that remote location, nor why Aldred was apparently going rogue. Nothing in their analysis of bioil markets or general corporate maneuvering could provide a reason for his behavior. All they were left with was the connection to the strange slaying of the unknown North, itself linked to Bartram’s death twenty years ago. If for no other reason, Clayton was taking this more seriously than even Linsell appeared to be.

It was six o’clock in the evening when the call was placed. All around the big, vaulted underground room, agents looked up at the central wallscreen. It showed a map of the city, with all the target icons in bright purple. Aldred had just received a call from the farmhouse, linking through multiple cells right across the planetary network, and switching two hundred times a second to a fresh random route.

“He’s finished the machine,” a voice boomed out of the speakers.

“Excellent news,” Aldred replied. “Have you run the diagnostics?”

“Yes, sir. It’s got the parameters you gave us. Everything checks out.”

“Right. Inform Sherman we’ll be moving to placement. I will see you all at the assembly point.”

Both Linsell and Sid were immediately responding to calls. Clayton knew it had to be Ralph Stevens: They were nodding curtly and in unison to whatever points were being made. He exchanged a knowing look with Ian, who was helping out with the subteam monitoring Boz.

Up on the big map, icons were showing that Sherman was now receiving a call from the farmhouse. Eva walked over to him.

“We haven’t found the family yet,” she murmured.

“I think that just became irrelevant.”

“Abner, come on, if whatever the hell that machine is actually works then nobody has any use for the family anymore.”

“Aye, I know that, man, but we haven’t got a single lead. For all we know Sherman doesn’t know, either. Suppose Aldred used someone else to kidnap the Umbreits?”

“We have to try,” she hissed.

Up on the screen, Sherman was calling Jede, who in turn called all the others.

“Everybody’s moving,” Ian announced in satisfaction. All Sherman’s crew were heading for their cars.

Sid joined them. “She’s agreed to let us accompany the assault team,” he said, looking very pleased with himself.

“What are we doing about the professor’s family?” Eva asked.

“Everyone holds back until Aldred and the machine are in the same place; then the armed interdiction team storms in. Once the survivors are in custody they will be offered a cooperation deal. They tell us where the family is, and in return they get that taken into consideration by the judge at sentencing. If they all tough it out, Ralph will take them away for interrogation. We saw what that did to dear old Ernie. We’ll find them.”

“That could take days,” Eva protested, with blood starting to heat her pale skin.

“Best we can do. The subteams will remain here and try and spot any communication to the people holding the family. There’s a dedicated rescue team waiting on that.”

“All right,” she grumbled.

Sid smiled and put his hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to come along. You can stay here and make sure they’re doing what they can for the family.”