Great North Road (43 page)

“Uh?” was all he could manage. He was starting to wonder where Zebediah was. Nowhere near anything too dangerous. Leaders never were.

She gave him a small folded piece of paper. When he started to open it, her hand closed around his.

“Nothing urgent. I’ll call you in a few days.” Her bodymesh quested a link to his e-i, and a money transfer to his account flipped up into his grid. “Here’s some cash, that’ll be enough to cover it. No need to show me any receipts. I trust you to do a good job for us.” She took her sunglasses off and peered at him closely. Judging, always judging. “You won’t let us down, will you?”

Saul shook his head, swallowing pitifully. “No.”

“I’ll call you in a few days. Store it in the Hawaiian Moon for me until then. Don’t want to impose on your family home.”

Saul couldn’t see anything but the Transfer Pending icon.

“Take it,” Zulah said.

Instinctively he told his e-i to open one of his ancient secondary accounts, one he hadn’t used for twenty years. Nobody in Abellia had secondaries—they didn’t need to because there was no income tax. He reached up and flipped the transfer icon, and the money twisted away into a Vietnamese bank.

Zulah gave him a satisfied nod. “Be seeing you.”

Saul turned sharply and walked away, not looking back. They thought they’d hooked him in with the payment, but it wasn’t that easy. There were things about Saul Howard they could never guess at. Whatever else happened from now on, he wasn’t going to be the placid obedient victim they were anticipating.

*

Corporal Paresh Evitts regained consciousness by slow, painful degrees. First he was only aware of how much his head hurt. Every beat of his heart brought another hammer thud on the inside of an aching skull. Vision was gray, except for the terrible electric red sparkles that bloomed with every thud. Mouth was dry and tasted of what he imagined must be camel dung. Skin cold and damp: fever flesh. Right leg: dead—nothing at all, no sensation. He tried to move it from the odd bent-up position, and promptly groaned at the stab of pain that motion brought. Blood was flowing into oxygen-starved muscles again, bringing life back in a wave of fire. Which made him very aware of how his stomach was feeling.

“Oh fuck.” He rolled onto his back, and his cheeks bulged. He couldn’t actually lift his head, he was too frightened that the migraine-pulse would split his forehead open and spill his brains out across the sheets.

Sheets?

He blinked back tears and self-pity to try to focus on his environment. Some kind of hotel room: yellow walls, gray carpet, white ceiling. Windows with shutters on the inside, leaking St. Libra sunlight around the bands. Door to an en suite that someone was using. He could hear the hiss and splatter of the shower.

“What?” Paresh finally managed to raise himself onto an elbow, which was pretty unpleasant. Okay, so he was on a big bed. There were no pillows, though he could see a couple scattered on the floor. No duvet. And he was naked. Really, completely naked. Some kind of dark wet stain on the sheets.
Shit, is that blood? No. Okay.
Actually, make that several stains. A bottle of Champagne on its side on the nightstand. Another bottle of red wine on the floor, and a smaller raspberry vodka liqueur. Some suspicious empty silver-gray tox sacs lying beside them. And clothes. His uniform had been thrown around the room, along with … Paresh squinted. The white blouse Angela had been wearing was hanging over the back of a chair. Blue skirt on the carpet next to his pants.

“Oh holy crap!” Paresh moaned and flopped back on the bed. He didn’t remember. That was terrible. In his life, there had been a few—actually only a couple—one-night stands when he’d woken up the next morning and genuinely couldn’t recall the girl’s name. That was mortifying enough. But this …

They’d been to some bars last night, he remembered that clear enough. A beer or two as they talked, like a real date. Then the restaurant. The Rufus! Yeah, he remembered that, and the milliseeds. No way could he forget that course. Angela had insisted on ordering that dish. The things really looked like terrestrial millipedes only with fur, but they were seeds from the cochowa tree; when they were ripe they dropped off and crawled away to germinate nearby, their movement slow and graceful. Until you dipped them in chili sauce, which made them wriggle frantically. You were supposed to pop them into your mouth and swallow whole. Angela had wolfed down a bowlful. He’d tried two before giving up, and she’d laughed at how he wasn’t the big tough soldier after all.

Then they’d hit the club. No—clubs, plural. Multiple! A few more memories were creeping out sheepishly.

She could dance, could that Angela. Ho boy! And each lithe movement made him stare bewitched at a body that was downright fantastic. He’d been getting hotter and hotter all night long despite the beer and wine they’d drunk. She knew how to party, too: But he matched her bottle for bottle, glass for glass, tox for tox. The nanny smartcells in his mouth flashing all sorts of warnings across his grid until he shut them down. Then she folded her arms around his neck and whispered: “Please Paresh, it’s been twenty years. Can you imagine twenty years without sex? I need you so badly.”

They must have teleported to the hotel, because that was the next thing he remembered. The two of them standing at the end of the bed, his tongue down her throat, hands pushing up inside the blouse, groping her fantastic tits.

“Give me one minute,” she’d said, and scuttled off into the en suite. “And Paresh.”

“Yeah?”

“You’d better be naked when I come back in here.”

That was it. That was the last thing he remembered. Which was unbelievable. You don’t fuck the night away and remember
nothing
. But they must have. He stared around the room again, the bottles, the stains; even his arm had raspberry vodka lick-marks on it.

Paresh Evitts wanted to cry.

The door to the en suite opened and Angela stepped out, damp hair combed back, wrapped in a red hotel towel.

More than anything Paresh felt relief that it was Angela, and not some other girl. Which was just pathetic.

She was giving him a wicked smile. “How are you feeling?”

“Er … you know.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She looked amazing. Everything a man could ever dream of: smart, beautiful, sexy.

Angela licked her lips provocatively and slowly opened the towel. Her skin was still glistening wet. “So is it?”

“What?” Paresh croaked.

She walked around the bed until she stood over him, and let the towel drop completely. “You remember.”

No! No I fucking don’t!

“Last night,” she said, and drew down a deep breath, showing off perfect abdominal muscle tone.

Paresh thought dying right now was about his best option. “Uh—”

“You said you thought I’d look even better in daylight.” Her hands began to move sensually down her sides as she swayed her shoulders. “So do I?”

“Yes.”

She smiled again, and she was so happy it was like a flash of Sirius sunlight. Happiness he’d given her. Then she was on the bed, on all fours, on top of him. A teasing tongue licked at his cheek, his ear. Her hand curled around his cock. “We made up for one day last night,” she murmured hungrily. “So now you need to start taking care of the other nineteen years three hundred and sixty-four days.”

He’d never known humiliation like it. This incredible woman had her sensational naked body on top of him, eager face centimeters from his, hand around his flaccid dick, begging him for sex. And his hung-over, overtoxed body couldn’t even produce a twitch of arousal.

“Sorry.” He struggled out from underneath her. “Sorry.” He couldn’t look at her. The shame was far worse than the physical pain. “Hangover. Feel sick. It’s not you. Not you. Really.” He blundered into the en suite and slapped the bolt across the door. Looked at the waiting toilet and promptly threw up into it.

F
RIDAY,
F
EBRUARY 8, 2143

A wide blanket of unbroken cirrus had sealed off the sky, producing an odd omnidirectional light across the jungle. It had been there when Angela walked up the rear ramp into the dark cylindrical fuselage of the Daedalus, reducing shadows to small gray specters flitting across the ground. There was no wind, not even Abellia’s usual sea breeze; of course the cloud did nothing to kill the heat, and with the humidity building, physical activity had been difficult. Half the time she felt she was sucking down spray rather than simply breathing.

It had taken the squad more than an hour to pack up their tent that morning, and they were all sweating and cursing by the time they’d finished. Orders to forward-deploy had come down without warning from Lieutenant Pablo Botin as they were eating their breakfast. They’d bagged their kit, voices filling the wet air with taunts and bullish jokes, eager at the prospect of moving upcountry at last. Their tents were folded down into neat, shiny black bundles on top of their respective modules. And there the squad sat in the mud, surrounded by their bags, everything and everybody waiting for a logistics corps loader truck to come and collect them, starting them on the route out of here.

All that sweaty, busy activity made it easy for Paresh to not talk to her, continuing the theme of yesterday. When they got to the Daedalus it was configured to carry cargo, with passengers strictly subsidiary, cheap meat fitting in around the important pallets and equipment. Its cavernous interior was a whale’s gullet sculpted from metal and composite; seats were simple strut-frames that folded down from the side of the fuselage, with a nylon mesh to sit on. Even Vance Elston had to make do with one, stuffing audio-null foam into his ears and grimacing at the smell, engine roar, poor lighting, vibration, and two toilets shared by sixty people. Angela suspected he rather enjoyed the hardship; it was all very macho. She couldn’t see what Paresh thought of the plane; he’d chosen to sit on the other side, with the mobile biolabs taking up the bulk of the interior between them.

Her poor puppy boy was suffering deeply, for which she felt a mild amount of guilt. She’d actually been looking forward to some decent sex in the hotel that morning. After that didn’t happen, they’d both sneaked back to Abellia airport in a subdued mood. The rest of the squad was dying to know if they’d made out, but neither was saying anything.

On the two-and-a-half-hour flight she read more of her history and politics files. Not just to maintain her cover anymore, but to gain a real understanding of what the hell had happened on Ramla during the last twenty years. Ten minutes from landing she canceled the files and used her grid to look out through the plane’s external meshes as they started to descend toward Edzell.

The runway had been extended since the first successful Daedalus flight, the dozers and compactors working around the clock … not that Angela could really see much difference. It still looked like a tiny streak of mud from the air, although there were definitely turning circles at both ends now.

Their undercarriage clunked down. Angela saw Josh trying to crush his seat’s metal struts, and grinned. Then they were on the ground and bouncing about wildly, decelerating hard. Everyone winced as the pallets and biolabs strained at their hold-down straps. The straps held, though, and soon the plane had taxied off the runway.

The ramp lowered, letting the bright St. Libran sunlight flood in, making them all blink and scramble for their sunglasses. A wash of hot humid air replaced the conditioned atmosphere they’d been breathing, bringing with it a strange musty spice scent. Spores from a billion native plants, Angela recognized warily, the sentinels of the jungle, a clear warning to humans that this was alien territory. Milliseeds she liked; the smaller reproductive microorganisms from the planet’s astonishing zebra botany she could do without. Human tissue was an attractive nutrient source to some of it.

She trooped down the ramp, several obedient paces behind Vance Elston. Today’s odd cirrus cover was still above her, motionless in the becalmed air. Despite the brightness, it was a gloomy way to arrive, another portent in collusion with the vegetation odor, adding to her mistrust of the forward base. She took a tube of sunscreen from her pocket and applied it to her arms. Her T-shirt was an HDA-issue scoop-neck. One minute in the jungle and she’d already weakened. The long-sleeved T-shirts she’d bought from Birk-Unwin were somewhere near the bottom of her bag; they were just to damn hot to wear. She proudly stuck with the gaiters, though.

Edzell was a miniature version of the HDA compound at Abellia airport. A cluster of Qwik-Kabins formed the center of the camp, housing the new observation center, alongside the logistics corps offices and a field hospital. Rows of the black tents were lined up behind, along with another big mess tent. Engineering shops had been set up, big open-ended hemispheres of plastic where mechanics checked over ground vehicles. But mainly, Edzell was an equipment staging post. Rows and rows of pallets were already starting to build up, along with helicopters and vehicles scheduled to fly on to the next forward camp as soon as the e-Rays found a suitable site beyond the Eclipse Mountains. However, the biggest single cargo Edzell stored was bioil. Huge bladder tanks had been laid out on the other side of the runway, thick rubbery cubes that were pumped full by the expedition’s single Daedalus tanker every time it touched down. That was all it did now: fly continual circuits night and day, bringing biav and bioil to the thirsty vehicles and helicopters and fuel cells.

Once the mobile biolabs had lumbered down the ramp, a self-loading pallet truck went inside the Daedalus to extract the remaining cargo. Paresh’s squad were detailed to put up everyone’s tents.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Gillian Kowalski grumbled. “Fucking servant for the science prats.”

“We’re security,” Paresh told them as they tramped along after the self-loader truck. “But while we’re here, we’re also general aides to whoever beckons. You’ll soon be doing a lot worse than putting up a tent. Get used to it.”

Atyeo moved up beside Angela. “What did you do to him?” he asked in a low voice. “He’s been like this since the two of you got back.”