Great North Road (34 page)

“That is one hell of an impressive setup,” Paresh murmured behind Angela. “It’s like it goes on forever.”

She turned back to him. “Several hundred kilometers, yeah. But think how many people it supplies with bioil on how many worlds; how much of trans-stellar life as we know it is dependent on St. Libra.”

“Those Norths, huh, smart people.”

“Ruthless people if you want to be honest and accurate.”

“That sounds bitter.”

“You know why I was there at Bartram’s mansion, right?”

“Uh, sure.”

Angela smiled to herself at how self-conscious he seemed to be about that. “The original three brothers—it’s like they had their brains scooped out and replaced by silicon. They don’t connect to anything human. They understand emotion and feelings, but only so they can manipulate it. Their freak kids, the 2s, they’re a little more human; I suppose it’s because they’re all flawed—at least in relation to the three bad dads. But they still contribute to the collective. In fact, the collective wouldn’t be possible without them.”

“Collective?”

“Northumberland Interstellar, which basically is St. Libra.”

“So it’s lucky for the human race we’ve actually got them?”

“If it hadn’t been the Norths and St. Libra, it would’ve been someone and something else. Like thousands before them, they saw an opportunity and they went for it. Smart, ambitious people have been doing that, bending the universe around them, for most of our history. The majority of them share the same characteristics as the Norths.”

“You sound like you hate the rich because they are rich.”

“Money buys you a decent life, I don’t begrudge anyone that. How they get it can be a problem, depending on your beliefs.”

“What are yours?”

“I believe in personal survival, and I’ll do whatever it takes to maintain that belief.”

“That’s kind of bleak.”

Angela grinned at him. “That doesn’t mean I can’t have some fun along the way. I just haven’t had much for … oh yeah: twenty years.”

“A genuine miscarriage of justice. That’s got to be the toughest break I ever heard of.”

“Yeah. But when we all trip over the monster out there in the jungle and load its pic on the transnet, I’ll be in line for some serious financial compensation. Hopefully I’ll be able to trash some senior government careers as well. Nice bonus.”

“So that’s what this is about, revenge?”

“Look, right now I’m not locked in a prison cell, I get food given to me every day—well, HDA rations, anyway—I have clothes, I’ve got you guys to talk to instead of the psychopaths I was banged up with and the sadists who guarded us, I have a view from my window, and I can access the transnet. And if I believed in Disney endings I’d even keep an eye open for Mr. Right. My life is on the up right now.”

“Except you think we’re all going to die out in the jungle.”

“You. I think
you
are all going to die. Because you don’t believe in what I’ve seen; to you this is just another deployment exercise.”

“I believe.”

“I hope you do, Paresh. Seriously.”

“When the crunch comes, I’m going to prove to you that you’ve been underestimating us.”

“Yeah. Look, sorry if I keep coming over like a bitch; it’s just that I’m used to taking care of myself.”

“Not much rak, huh?”

“Excuse me?” She gave him a suspicious look, rather liking the playful mock-innocent expression she saw on his face, but then Paresh was still a kid in so many ways.

“Random acts of kindness,” he said. “You need some in your life. Everybody does.”

“No, I don’t have much of a rak, but hey, this is the twenty-second century, you can get anything fixed if you have enough money.”

They grinned at each other.

“We’re back to money again,” he said.

“Always,” Angela said. “So do you like a girl with lots of rak?”

Paresh smirked. “I’m not fussy either way.”

She smiled and went back to her files on the Blue Kama democracy rebellion that had swept through the Arab countries in the early twenty-second century.

People were just starting to doze off when the SuperRoc began its descent into the Fall Zone. They’d left the port town of Eastshields a thousand kilometers behind, and were now out over the Marsden Sea, five hundred kilometers short of the equator. Below them the sea came close to steaming. Evaporation was constant, producing a thick band of hot mist that circled the whole of St. Libra’s oceanic equator, surging up to the very top of the troposphere to power the endless rainstorms that roiled through the planet’s atmosphere.

The SuperRoc’s radar was on, scanning the unbroken fog and cloud it was slicing through at a cautious 650 kph. Not that the pilots would have much warning if any rocks did plummet toward them. They were flying at seven hundred meters above the sea now, the lowest safe altitude at which the turbofans could maintain their efficiency in such humidity.

“I don’t see why we need to be this low,” Josh Justic complained.

Angela glanced over, seeing the way his hands were gripping the end of the armrests. Josh wasn’t a good flier, and this was about the worst flight on any of the trans-stellar worlds.

“We’re a lot better off down here,” she promised him. “We’re flying under the rings right now, and the A-ring grazes the top of the atmosphere. The drag aerobrakes a million particles a day below orbital velocity. It’s mostly just dust we’re talking about, specks not even as big as a grain of sand, but there’s a few bigger rocks jumbled up in there, too. They generally disintegrate when they reach the mesosphere and plume like a cascade of shooting stars. So if any do survive their own shock wave and get down to the troposphere, the radar will pick up the ionization trail easily enough, and the pilots will have time to fly us away from the fallpath.”
In theory,
she added silently. This low-and-safe maneuver was mainly for the benefit of the passengers. In the fifty-four years since Bartram established Abellia, no plane had been hit by a ring particle—of course, there had been a lot of reports of engine failure due to excessive humidity in the combustion chamber.

A bright flash outside illuminated the whole row of startled faces.

“What was that?” Josh demanded.

“Ring particle disintegrating. Don’t worry, it’s thirty kilometers overhead, and smaller chunks are good news—they burn up a lot faster. Basically, if you see the flash it means you won’t get hit by the debris it exploded into. It’s the dark ones you have to fear.”

Josh didn’t look convinced. Angela shrugged and went back to her reading. The flight crew started serving the “evening” meal: a plastic box with a baked potato, cheese, and tuna. There was only water to drink, and pudding was a small Cadbury’s chocolate bar.

Angela suspected the crew passed it out to distract everyone from the near-constant purple and scarlet flashes that burst through the darkness above them.

She dozed off about the time they cleared the thousand-kilometer-wide Fall Zone corridor and the huge plane climbed back to its normal cruise altitude for the remaining fifteen hundred kilometers to Abellia. The cabin lights came back up to full intensity twenty minutes out from the airport.

“Morning, sleepy,” Paresh said.

Angela grimaced at him, rubbing at her eyes and yawning widely. They were already descending, with the cabin crew walking down the aisles, making sure everyone was using their seat belt. A gentle dawn light was shining through the windows.

“It’s the middle of the night,” she protested. “I hate transplanet timelag. It takes me days to adjust.”

“The Legion always toughs it out,” Audrie informed her.

Angela gave her the finger and brought her chair upright for landing. The undercarriage lowered with a lot of
clunks
. Only now did Angela regret giving up the window seat to Leora. She peered intently at the vista beyond the window. They were just approaching the shoreline along the western side of Abellia.

“Holy crap,” Angela muttered.

“What?” Paresh asked. “I thought you knew this town.”

“I used to,” she said, staring down at the coastal city that Bartram North had so clearly modeled on Human Idyll 101.

Abellia was built on a forty-kilometer-wide pear-shaped peninsula, an errant eruption of rock jutting out from Brogal’s rugged coastline. It was mountainous terrain, with the tight-packed slopes falling straight down into the water around the whole peninsula, and in doing so creating hundreds of coves with broad sandy beaches. Bartram had built the original cargo ship harbor at the southernmost point, allowing civil engineering plants to sprawl back into the two closest valleys. They’d long since been uprooted and booted out into the hinterlands, allowing the old town area around the expanded harbor to develop into a gleaming civic center, with theaters and arenas and schools; even a college campus jostled for space with malls and galleries. Outside that central cluster of long public beaches and marinas, the coves had been claimed by individuals or belonged to the elaborate condos that ran along the back of the sands.

White Californian-Spanish villa-mansions had colonized the mountains inland, where artificial terracing halted soil erosion and allowed terrestrial green to spread up the valleys, forming parks and golf courses that were irrigated from the whitewater rivers that drained away the daily monsoons. Slim roads switchbacked up the rugged gradients and arched between hills on narrow, architecturally adventurous bridges. Highways cut rigid lines across the antagonistic topography, tunneling through any inconvenient mountain to carry the traffic directly between districts with minimum fuss. Native vegetation with its darker colors still persisted on the steeper inclines, dominating the heights above the city. None of the peaks had snowcaps—that just didn’t happen on St. Libra; instead the apex of most mountains had been claimed by clubs and spas, or really big private mansions. The blue blobs of infinity pools were everywhere.

Yachts and smaller pleasure boats carved long white wakes through the clear sea. There were even some big pontoons anchored offshore, with stores and restaurants and bars, served by water taxis.

“It’s grown,” Angela said in a subdued voice. She should have expected it, but even so …

“Five minutes to landing,” the pilot announced.

She took a deep breath as her heart began to race. An adrenaline tingle swept through her body, bringing a sudden chill. Everything came into hard focus as primeval instincts sharpened up protectively, alert for danger.

“You okay?” a concerned Paresh asked.

“Sure.” They were memories, that was all; triggered by the sight of the city, they came slithering out of dark places. Too many of them.

F
RIDAY,
F
EBRUARY 1, 2143

Most of the expedition pilots were toxed up with HiMod to keep them sharp and push them through their natural sleep cycle without the chem-buzz of a street stim. Ravi Hendrik didn’t bother with analeptics. No need, not even now he was pushing fifty. And as to why his fellow pilots had turned users, he didn’t understand at all.

How could you not stay fresh and focused on this world, with this mission? Ravi’s European Aircraft Corporation CT-606D Berlin heavylift helicopter was the latest model to roll off the production line, shiny-new and ridiculously expensive—like most of the expedition’s equipment. Even with such top-of-the-range systems, he didn’t bother with the autopilot, preferring to fly on manual, even during the refueling, when they suckled up to the tanker-variant Daedalus, which they’d had to do twice on the two-thousand-kilometer trip. He preferred it because of the bright yellow JCB compactor hanging on cables beneath the Berlin, looking utterly surreal as it zoomed over the St. Libra jungle at close on250 hundred kph. Loads like this did hellacious things to their flight stability.

He lived for shit like this. A man in tune with his machine, flying with a purpose.

After eight stressful hours the ferry flight of four Berlins was now only about fifty kilometers out from Edzell, the first advance base that was being carved out of the jungle 2,070 kilometers straight north of Abellia. Another ten minutes would see Ravi lowering the compactor into the clearing. An overnight stay and then tomorrow a fast flight back to Abellia to pick up more outsized equipment.

First priority for the HDA engineering corps at Edzell was to use the dozers and compactors that the Berlins delivered to carve a runway out of the wild ground for the Daedalus planes, whose design allowed them to land on some pretty rough surfaces. Once that strip was established the big planes would take over supplying the base and expanding it up to full operational status; but until then it was all dependent on the Berlins. Ravi and the helicopter pilots were the pioneers everyone else was depending on to pull off this truly wild schedule. The whole expedition, from Vice Commissioner Passam down to the catering staff, was following this flight in real time, admiring their ballsy skill. Right now his neurons were pumping him a high no tox could match. Oh yes.

The weather radar display shining across the cockpit canopy showed the afternoon storm as a giant red wave sweeping in from the southeast. If nothing went wrong they should just be able to outrun it. Any kind of weather forecast on St. Libra was a boon. Without satellites they were as close Ravi had ever been to flying blind. Thankfully the e-Rays provided some coverage along the flight path to Edzell, but this zooming into the unknown was all part of the great game.

“Cloud coming,” Tork Ericson called above the turbine whine and gearbox growl that saturated the cabin—military birds weren’t big on soundproofing. He was an aviation engineer, sitting in the copilot’s seat today to help with the abnormal load.

“We’ll beat it,” Ravi called back. “This is one smooth gig.”

“But not as cool as a Thunderthorn,” Tork supplied.

“You got it.” In his glorious youth Ravi Hendrik had flown SF-100 Thunderthorns, the HDA’s first line of defense against Zanthswarms. And Ravi had been a newly qualified pilot, eighteen months out of HDA flight school, when the New Florida Zanthswarm began. He’d flown mission after mission above that doomed world. Nothing in his professional or private life since had come close to matching the sheer terror and exhilaration of that all-too-brief time.