Great North Road (125 page)

“I want you and Atyeo to take Tropic-1 and follow MTJ’s route east. See if you can find any trace of them.”

“Sir. They set off last night. The snow will have completely covered their tracks.”

“I know. I just need to confirm that they stuck to the plan, and they didn’t encounter the alien. Drive for a couple of hours, then come back.”

“Yes, sir.”

It started snowing again before the Tropic left. Thick gentle flakes drifting slowly out of the dark vermillion sky. People saw the snow, and watched the Tropic roll steadily away along the top of the canyon, and grumbled among themselves. The morning’s news about finding a way down to the canyon floor was offset by the latest development. Searching for the missing MTJ meant yet more delay, and they were parked where they knew the monster lurked.

Angela watched the Tropic vanish across the rumpled snowscape as she stood behind biolab-2’s sledge. It seemed to be her drudge-work destiny to distribute meal packets from the dwindling stocks they were towing along. Off to her right, Olrg and Chris Fiadeiro and Raddon were clambering all over the bladder framework on the truck’s sledge. There was some kind of fuel problem, which was where the monster had caught Ravi and Bastian last night. Judging by the swearing that carried on the still air, it was a major hitch.

She piled twelve meal packets into the bag Omar was holding open. They were due for biolab-1, their allocation until the convoy was down on the canyon floor.

“See you in a bit,” he said, and headed off to the mobile biolab.

Angela picked up her own equally heavy bag and started walking over to the tanker. Her e-i told her Ravi was questing her on a secure link. She stood perfectly still, a chill that was never part of the atmosphere creeping along her arms and shoulders. “Open the link,” she told her e-i.

“Angela?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Angela, it’s me, Ravi, I swear.”

“Where are you? What the hell’s going on? We thought the monster got you.” Her e-i couldn’t get a lock on where the link was originating from; whoever established it knew a lot about how to subvert the net management routines.

“It tried. I got away. I can’t move, Angela. I’m stuck over the edge of the canyon. It thought I’d fallen over, but there’s a ledge ten meters down on the waterfall. For pity’s sake get me out.”

“All right. I’ll call Elston, we’ll get you back.”

“No! No one else. You come alone. Please.”

She checked around to see if anyone was watching her. Snow fell softly onto the vehicles, adding to the twenty-centimeter layer that had accumulated last night. Warm vapor spewed silently out of the fuel cell vents, and the remote guns maintained their mechanical vigil.

“No fucking way,” she said. “I don’t know who you are. That thing took out the net again last night. We’re compromised. You could be it. I’m calling Elston.”

“No! I can’t trust anyone else. Angela, you’re the only one who survived it before. Nobody else has. I know I can trust you. And we both know someone is sabotaging the convoy, they’re helping the alien for fuck’s sake. Damnit, I’m scared, and I’m cold, so cold nothing even hurts anymore. I don’t think I can last much longer.”

“No.”

“Angela. The trees are alive. That’s what Mark Chitty meant. It’s the bullwhips. They went for me last night. The goddamn branches lashed out and smacked me about like I was a hockey puck. It knows that, the monster knows. The jungle is helping it, the jungle is killing us, Angela.”

It was crazy; his delusion was doing the talking, she knew it was. And yet—the MTJ on the ravine. Something striking Mark. A dozen little mishaps. All explained, if you believed.

Angela had seen the monster. Had struck at it with her own hands. Felt it was real, solid beneath her skin; something the rest of the human race had sneeringly insisted was wrong for twenty years. She had been punished for that, for not giving in and doubting herself. “The bullwhips?” she whispered. If they were part of the creature’s evolution, part of its hatred, connected to it, then the whole world was against them. She tipped her head back, looking for the enfeebled red star buried behind the darkling clouds.
Sirius, too?
She could believe it. She could believe anything of that devil. In her mind was the image of it waving its arms wildly, urging something on to attack Mark.

“Yes,” Ravi said. “One of them caught me on the back. Angela, help me. But steer clear of the trees.”

“All right. Give me ten minutes. I’ve got to work out how to do this.”

She dropped her bag of food off at the tanker, chatting briefly to Forster and Roarke who shared the driving. Then went back to Tropic-2, taking a long curving walk around the circle of vehicles. There was a big gap where MTJ-2 and the newly departed Tropic-1 had been parked next to each other. And the snowfall was growing heavier, reducing the remote guns’ sensor coverage. She told her e-i to access the solid memory cache she kept in her pocket. Scanning down the list of Zarleene’s dark software she found a program that would do the job she needed, and sent it into the convoy’s net.

The remote gun on Tropic-2 kept on sliding from side to side, but now its sensors saw nothing. Angela walked up beside the battered snow-caked Land Rover and dropped the cache behind the fat rear wheel. Above the wheel arch were a couple of heavy printed bags that were strapped to the side of the Tropic. She opened one and pulled out a mini winch—the so-called wall walker—a powered spool of superstrength tape. According to the inventory she had made back in Wukang, the bag also had some self-anchoring pitons. She found them eventually, and stuffed them in her big trouser pockets.

Disembodied voices from the team trying to sort out the fuel sledge drifted through the snow. She took one last look around; no one was visible. “Turn off my bodymesh link to the net,” she told her e-i. “And activate the cache.” The cache’s link started using her identity code, so the monitor routines saw her as being in the Tropic.

Confident the heavy snow would conceal her from any casual human glance, she hurried out through the middle of the broad gap in sensor coverage.

Beyond the vehicles where snow ruled the air, the landscape of the snow-covered river was disconcertingly similar no matter where she looked. Her bodymesh kept a link open to the inertial guidance module she’d bought in the Birk-Unwin store in some life long ago. It was her compass now as the flakes swam around her and the sinister jungle mist oozed past her legs.

Angela had only gone about a hundred meters along the river when she realized someone was following her. She wasn’t surprised. The whole Ravi-being-safe thing was a big stretch. Two options: This was either the monster or the saboteur. Either way, she was ready to settle this.

In a swift motion she pulled the carbine out of its chest holster and flicked off the safety catch. Footsteps crunched on the loose snow, coming closer. Angela tensed, ordering her e-i to link to the carbine’s target sensors. This time she had the codes—Elston had assigned them to her himself. Green and purple graphics slid into her iris smartcell grid, smooth as neon fish.

A dark figure emerged from the curtain of snow. “Son-of-a-bitch,” Angela grunted. It had been a trap! The thing was humanoid, with an all-over featureless, shiny skin like crude oil that the snow slithered off. Which wasn’t quite how she remembered it. The hands were ordinary, too, without any sign of the terrible blades. “What are you?” she yelled defiantly as she brought the carbine around.

It was the strangest thing, the figure held up a hand, finger extended in a universal gesture asking for a moment. The slick skin shivered, flowing in narrow currents, draining away from the head, and congealing into the same parka and waterproof trousers everyone wore on the convoy. Then a gloved hand reached up and unwound the long blue knitted scarf, exposing the face.

Angel let out a startled cry.

“Hello, Angela,” Madeleine said. “Whatever are you doing out here?”

Angela pointed the carbine at the sky as if she were performing a military salute. After the anxiety of creeping away from the convoy, the anticipation of treachery, it was almost too much for her to be confronting this girl. She felt the moisture build behind her eyes, a symptom of her profound longing. And she just couldn’t keep the farce going any longer, not here, not now. “Hello, Rebka,” she blurted. “That’s … if you know your name is Rebka.”

“Of course I know my own name, Mother.”

*

Angela was out jogging that fateful morning back in 2119. She liked to go out early, before the sun got too high and the clammy humidity from Oakland’s bayous crawled across the flatlands to starve her lungs of oxygen. Before baby Rebka woke and the first of the day’s inevitable mini crises began. It was a time when she felt like she was far from her troubles. A false time, then, but one she needed.

She ran along the laser straight stony dirt tracks the compactors had cut out. Over the last couple of years the hulking Massachusetts Agrimech machines had laid out a massive grid, linking the farm’s vast fields for the tractors and drillers and harvesters. For those two years they’d enjoyed good harvests, the sweltering sun and abundant water allowing them to plant four crops a year. Saul had already filed the viability assessment with the governor’s office, and they were waiting to be able to claim another eight thousand acres that lay to the north. The land there was wetter than the acres they already farmed; there would have to be some elaborate drainage dikes. Saul, of course, had already planned them out—pumps, levels, ditches. Work was the poor dear’s way of escaping from their worry over Rebka. She didn’t begrudge him that; their life was tough enough now.

One of the big green-and-blue tractors rumbled toward her down the track, and she skipped up onto the stickgrass verge, not wanting to give the auto a moving obstruction to cope with. She was proud of the job all the Massachusetts Agrimech machines had done, but some of the software was definitely due an update. As Noah was constantly reminding her. The machine passed her, huge tires splashing through the puddles in the ruts, and she smelled bioil in the warm fumes shimmering out of the vents. The fuel cells weren’t burning cleanly. They’d have to pull the tractor in for maintenance before the end of the month.

Angela ran along field seventeen, which was just stubble now the combines had finished harvesting the Syntel breadmaize. It was due to be deep-plowed, then they’d plant it with Ni-hi barley. The checkerboard of their other fields stretched out beyond the kilometer-plus-wide expanse of stubble. That was one thing she couldn’t get used to: The gentle rolling lands of Oakland weren’t
landscape
. She longed for mountains, some cliffs, a few valleys—something other than the interminable everglades and sluggish rivers and the oh-so-flat, flat ground baking beneath its vast brilliant sapphire sky.

She came to the corner of field seventeen and turned left. The track here was overgrown, leading to one of the storm pump stations at the end of the dikes. Half a kilometer away and parallel to the track was Route 565, the freeway that cut clean through the county all the way back to Yantwich, the state capital, eighty klicks away. She could see the farmhouse now, three hundred meters away from the barns and Qwik-Kabin stack where they’d been living for the last two years. The house was half completed rooms, half black scaffolding sticking up into the sky, with automata clinging to it. They were still waiting for the tanker of flooring raw the contractor had promised ten days ago. Not that Angela had the energy to chase him like she should be doing. Not these days; tending Rebka absorbed every moment.

Sweat was trickling down her face, soaking the light gray vest as she turned onto the final stretch leading back to the yard. When she’d started exercising again it’d been hell for the first few weeks; every muscle had been stiff, she got headaches, her body kept demanding the mass of food she’d consumed first during pregnancy, then when breast-feeding. But she’d pushed herself, ignoring her aches. Now she was almost back to the kind of shape she’d been in before falling pregnant, flat stomach, flabby thighs just a horrific memory, puffy face deflated so that great bone structure returned to prominence. She and Saul had even been having some sex again, on nights when they weren’t holding some worried vigil over Rebka’s cot. Nights when she didn’t just burst into helpless tears of pity and rage at the fate the universe had dealt her.

Blue strobes caught her eye. An ambulance was racing along the freeway. Her heart jumped, and she stared intently at the Qwik-Kabin stack. Her netlenses were back in the bedroom. Jogging was a refuge from the pain of Rebka. She’d only left the house for forty-five minutes. Even Saul could cope for forty-five minutes. Surely?

Angela picked up the pace, flying along the track.

Sure enough the ambulance turned off the freeway at their drive and started bumping down the long ribbon of crushed stone to the yard. She almost beat it to the Qwik-Kabin stack. The paramedics were already going through the door when she rounded the corner of the grain-drying shed and pounded through the puddles.

Half of the ground-floor lounge was given over to medical equipment, effectively turning it into a pediatric care ward. There was only one cot bed, made of stern metal with big retractable wheels. One of the paramedics was bent over it. Angela couldn’t help the fast intake of breath at the sight. Saul was hovering beside the paramedic, looking all grief-stricken and pathetic.

“What happened?” Angela shouted.

And Saul was walking toward her, his arms held up in placation. “It’s all right. She was having trouble breathing, the monitor fibers said her oxygen intake was falling. I called them before it could get critical.”

She pushed her husband aside without bothering to reply or censure—as she’d been doing far too often of late. She knew that was wrong, that this wasn’t his fault, but he was all she had to vent her anger on.

“It’s okay, baby,” she cooed at the little shape lying on the cot bed’s mattress. Far too little for an eight-month old, wearing a onesie with pretty cartoon flowers. Rebka had tubes and data fibers snaking in through the onesie’s collar, and sleeve cuffs, and ankle bands. A gray-silver dialyses module sat on the mattress beside the infant, relieving her beleaguered kidneys. Frail, sickly Rebka’s wrinkled face was screwed up as she wiggled in discomfort, a thin gurgling emerged from her mouth. She was too weak to cry properly. The oxygen line in her nose hissed lightly.