Great North Road (57 page)

Vance sighed and tried to push his growing concerns to one side. At least for tonight. Tonight there were burgers and sausages, lettuce that had been chilled for too long, and toasted rolls with not enough ketchup. Just like all barbecues should be, a celebration of being human. He shut down his console and went out to join in.

Angela enjoyed the Sunday-night barbecues. Everyone seemed to relax a little—to forget the reason why they were here and kick back. The food wasn’t bad, even though she was never sure the burgers were cooked properly in the middle. It didn’t matter, because for a few precious hours the smell of charcoal repelled the jungle scents, music held back the planet’s innate oppressive silence, and people banished HDA uniforms to dress in civilian clothes.

They didn’t use the mess tent. The grills had been set up in the area behind it, their charcoal glow a bright orange, contrasting with the silver ringlight. Smoke plumed up, accompanied by meat juice sizzling. The first batch of food was ready when she arrived with the squad. They lined up with plates, scooping up salad and waiting for the catering staff to dole out the meat.

“These sausages are always too spicy,” Mohammed Anwar complained.

“You are such a wimp fart,” Gillian Kowalski told him.

“Why can’t we have two types? It’s not gateway science.”

“Oh sure,” Dave Guzman said. “Let’s just order out.”

Angela was laughing with the rest of them. She looked around at Paresh, who was grinning.

“I’m just saying,” Mohammed claimed with dwindling dignity.

Angela held her plate out, and thanked Lulu MacNamara for the sausages and burger the red-cheeked girl slapped down.

“It’s always where you are,” a voice said, clear and loud. “Mullain at Sarvar, now Iyel here.”

Angela looked around. Five people down the line, Davinia Beirne was staring belligerently at her. She was one of the AAV team, an Owl technician.

“You talking to me?” Angela said.

“No other camps have a serial killer in their team,” Davinia said. “No other camps are having people murdered.”

“Hey!” DiRito stepped forward, his face all anger and outrage.

Angela put her arm out, stopping him from going any farther. “It’s okay.” She sensed other squad members closing around her. “You got a problem?” she asked Davinia.

“How many more of us are going to disappear like Iyel?”

“I don’t want anyone to die. And I’ve never killed anyone. Not here now, not twenty years ago. I’m here in this shithole to help you, to stop the aliens from killing anyone else. I don’t have to be here, remember that, I could be safe back on Earth. All I am is a dumb volunteer. But when
they
start to come out of the jungle for you, you’re going to need me.”

Chris Fiadeiro and Mackay, from the AAV team, came up beside a sneering Davinia. Angela stared at her, watching closely for telltale muscle movement, ready for a sudden lunge forward. Fully expecting the squad members and the AAV team to stop Davinia from reaching her. But there had been too many prison fights for her to rely on other people.

That was when Bastian 2North arrived at the barbecue to witness the standoff scene, with everyone silent while the chirpy steel guitar music played on. The North cocked his head to one side to look at Angela, his face impassive. She was proud she didn’t back down, didn’t turn away. The moment was painful, stretching out way too long. Then Madeleine Hoque slapped a burger down on Davinia’s plate; Davinia appeared irritated by the action, which broke her aggressive concentration. Mackay pushed her slightly, and she grunted in contempt and walked away. It was over, finished. Bastian moved on to join the end of the queue.

A hand closed tightly around Angela’s forearm.

“Let’s get you the fuck out of here,” Leora Fawkes said.

Angela nearly tripped she was pushed along so forcefully. She didn’t complain, she went with it, her friends forming a neat circle around her.

“You all right?” Paresh asked as the squad sat on the grass together.

“I don’t like being a party pooper,” she said.

“You’re not,” Marty O’Riley said. “We know you were with us both times.”

“Davinia’s always toxing up,” Josh Justic said in a low voice. “She’s got a real problem there.”

“You’re only saying that because she turned you down,” Atyeo said, grinning as he munched a sausage down.

“Oi! She did not turn me down.”

The squad laughed. They’d settled into their usual routine. Comfort and camaraderie. Angela started eating her own food, and saw Paresh was still giving her a concerned look. She mouthed: “I’m okay.” And saw his relief.

A whole group of friends like this was rare, people you knew you could rely on, who were perfectly comfortable with each other, who were all equals. Angela had known that once before. In a strange way it had been the polar opposite of this barbecue. But the memory association was strong; sitting out like this, with oh-so-different people, under very different stars, sent a sudden chill along her arms. She was surprised those times could still resurrect themselves so clearly in her mind; that was a past life now, belonging to a different person so very long ago.

The last in a long
long
list of exuberant parties the young Angela DeVoyal had attended was at Prince Matiff’s mansion on January seventeenth, 2111, a date everybody in the trans-stellar finance industry would always remember. She’d gone with Shasta Nolif, of course. They were virtually inseparable on the New Monaco social scene. Best friends since forever.

The DeVoyal family fortune was originally derived from Wall Street and the global finance markets before progressing smoothly to take advantage of new business during the trans-stellar expansion. They were old East Coast money, complete with aristocratic airs and cold-equation dealings with other people.

As the heir, Angela DeVoyal was as beautiful as only the germline-modified could be, along with other traits her father, Raymond, desired: tall, healthy, strong, fast, smart, a memory that resembled silicon in its perfect recall. Luci Tramelo, who gave birth to Angela, was under a simple surrogate contract, and left a week after delivery, as soon as the DeVoyal estate clinic had conducted appropriate tests on the infant Angela to confirm her DNA was everything Raymond had paid for. The other required traits—those that couldn’t be sequenced in, like the ancestral ruthlessness, cunning, and near-megalomaniac ambition—were instilled by an upbringing and education that made sure the family’s business and revenue stream would carry on in safe hands.

Shasta’s family money came from an industrial barony in India, one that her great-grandfather had astutely and ruthlessly expanded into a global giant at the start of the twenty-first century, employing more than quarter million people across thirty-seven countries. Her grandfather had deployed that same ruthlessness to diversify into production of raw, enabling him to ride the microfacture revolution out among the new trans-stellar worlds.

For Prince Matiff’s party Angela had chosen a deceptively simple white dress with a mermaid skirt as her arrival attire. Two seamstresses from the Italian couture house she was currently patronizing had been included in her entourage so they could finish the creation—it was so snug fitting, and the Jajescal spider silk fabric with its micro-diamond glitter grains so delicate, that they had to sew her into the dress just before she alighted. To complement it, more than a hundred ruby and emerald pins were woven into her big blond hair; her necklace, earrings, and web-bracelet were a matching vintage Roicoutte set, costing slightly more than eight million dollars.

Angela was mildly upset that her father hadn’t accompanied her to the party, but the family AI had identified an unusual surge of bioil running though the vast European supply pipe network that ran from Newcastle to the Balkans. He suspected the source was the French world Orleans. But he didn’t know the buyer—and with the quantity involved, he should have known all about the deal. So he told her he was staying behind to watch the market. The DeVoyal finance house controlled nearly 40 percent of the GE bioil futures market, and he didn’t want to be outsmarted by a rogue deal.

Angela and Shasta had timed their departures so their hypersonic VTOL executive jets touched down on the mansion’s landing field at the same time, mid afternoon of the first day. That way they could share one of the gold plated horse-drawn carriages up the greenway to the white and silver splendor of the mansion, with its twin spire turrets stabbing 150 meters into the clear violet-tinged New Monaco sky.

The prince greeted them, standing in a line with his eight wives, all selected from good Arab families from Riyadh and New Persia, who knew their place and performed their duties correctly. “I hope you’re going to come to bed with me before this is over,” he purred in Angela’s ear as she was announced to the vaulting gold-and-marble ballroom by the scarlet-uniformed officer of the house. As a direct descendant of Arabian royalty, Matiff affected head-of-state rituals complete with ornate military-style guards as if he were still ruling a desert kingdom back on Earth.

“We’ll see,” Angela murmured back with a demure smile that gave nothing away. There’d been parties where they’d both retired to a private suite, enjoying each other’s uninhibited sexuality. Sometimes it was just the two of them; sometimes Shasta or another girlfriend joined them; sometimes Matiff enlisted his male relatives to carousel her. The wickedness and pleasure were always excellent.

“Please,” Matiff said. “There’s plenty of time. You know how much I appreciate you physically.”

“I know, sweetheart,” she said. It was the same for most men. The one-in-ten modification to her DNA had become active when she reached her full height and the initial onrush of puberty hormones had subsided. Right now she still looked a perky seventeen; a faux adolescence it might have been, but the sexual lure was still very real.

“Housden will be here,” Angela said. “He’s arriving this evening.”

“Are you two serious?”

“Might be,” she said enigmatically.

“Ah, he is so lucky. Once again, I beg you to marry me.”

“One day, maybe, Matiff. But not right now.”

“Until that day.” He bowed, holding her hand a little too tight as he kissed it.

The ballroom had an orchestra up on the balcony, playing stately dance music. A dozen couples were already on the floor, twirling elegantly. Waiters in white tailcoats offered flutes of champagne on silver trays as the girls walked the length of the room, toward the Orchard Hall where there was a rock band playing. Together they quietly scanned the dresses on show—fabulous, elaborate couture from across the trans-stellar worlds, with every designer trying to attract attention and gain more commissions from the ludicrous wealth of New Monaco. Angela was surprised at the number of prosthetics, especially wings and peacock-style tails—that fad had surely passed? It turn, rival female eyes performed radar-efficient scans of their own garments, intuitively comparing cost and aesthetics. Through it all, the smiles were unbroken, air kiss swarms flying free.

“Housden?” Shasta asked. “Really, sweets?”

“Cute, big dick, sense of humor, right age. Kind of rare to have all those in combination, don’t you think?”

“And one of us.”

“And one of us,” Angela conceded. Housden was from a Chinese family whose mining conglomerate had made it big in Africa before trans-spatial connection technology opened up the stars, and rare earth minerals stopped being so quite rare. As with a lot of similar corporations, they successfully shifted their core business from mining to refining raw and continued to flourish.

“There’s always the prince.”

Angela frowned. “That’s not an option.” For all his charm, Prince Matiff was a little too old-school for Angela; his wives were required to be obedient. Then there was the business rivalry.

The final decades of indigenous Gulf oil wealth had seen tens of billions of petrodollars channeled into bioil refineries and vast tracts of land on new worlds for algaepaddies. Those new refineries had kept the original families of Gulf princes at the forefront of trans-stellar energy production. They didn’t appreciate the kind of manipulation of the bioil futures market led by the DeVoyal house, and always made life difficult for traders by refusing to cooperate on production figures and market shares and investment leverage.

Consequently, sleeping with the enemy, in a very literal sense, was a dark pleasure for Angela (and, she suspected, for the Prince, too), but that was all.

Angela and Shasta started dancing amid the dry ice waterfalls and rippling lasers. They split up when Shasta found herself dancing suggestively with a group she knew vaguely. Angela went on to the dining hall, where tables were laid with an extraordinary variety of food. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave a panoramic view out across the grounds. At the bottom of the slope at the front of the mansion was the kilometer-wide fountain lake. Huge geysers of water sprayed their way high into the twilight sky: straight power columns, twirling arcs, splayed spumes, airborne wave curls, all of them illuminated from below, changing color as they gyrated.

On her way outside into the twilight, Angela passed a group of S&M fiends in their tailored leather costumes adorned with gold chains and diamond-tipped spikes. They were on their way down to the Roman Slave Dungeon where Matiff had hired a dozen of California’s finest porn stars to man the manacles. Their excitement at their prisoner was palpable. They’d captured an angel, a beautiful adolescent male with a perfectly muscled torso who had wings of snow-white feathers surgically grafted onto his back. He was being tugged by a dwarf who was dressed in bandoliers of tox sacs. Angela couldn’t help grinning at the outrageous sight as they went past.

There was camel racing in the grass-walled amphitheater Matiff had dug in one of his gardens—an amusing homage to his cultural roots. Housden arrived in time for the second race, all tall and hunky, his shaved head decorated with silver tattoos, looking very dashing in his Nanru suit. They joined a group of friends in one of the stadium suites to watch and cheer on their chosen steeds. Placing quarter-million-dollar bets on each race, Angela lost two and a half million in total; Housden did better, coming out half a million in profit.