Great North Road (97 page)

Out of sight at the other end of the corridor, Ian waited for one minute then walked to the door and told his e-i to call Tallulah. The timing was perfect: He could hear muffled voices, angry and wretched. They both stopped.

“Yes?” Tallulah asked.

“It’s Detective Lanagin. I’m returning some of the items forensics took away. The lab has finished with them now.”

“Oh … right.”

The door opened. Tallulah looked so miserable, eyes red-rimmed from crying, hair lank, shoulders slumped, it was as if she’d just come back from a funeral. Ian just wanted to put his arms around her there and then.

Boris was standing at her shoulder, a toxfiend in bad need of a fix. Desperate to push his case, yet irate at the unexpected interruption. He glared at Ian.

“I thought you’d want these as soon as possible,” Ian said, handing the big plastic envelope over to Tallulah. He hadn’t even bothered to read the full contents list; there was clearly clothing in there, along with some small hard items.

Tallulah gave the envelope a blank glance as she accepted it. “Uh, thank you.”

“Everything has been cleared. And cleaned, too.” He smiled.

“Look, Officer, this really isn’t the time,” Boris said shortly.

Ian appeared to notice him for the first time. “The time, sir?”

“Yes. We’re busy. It’s a private matter; you understand.”

“I see.” He peered at Tallulah, who wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Are you all right, Ms. Packer?”

“She’s fine!”

“Ma’am?”

“My fiancée is fine,” Boris snapped. “Would you leave now, please. Don’t make me file a harassment report.”

“You’re not my fiancé,” Tallulah whispered. She started pulling at her diamond-and-ruby engagement ring, juggling with the forensic envelope.

“Don’t do that,” Boris protested. “Darling, please, let me explain. The police were—” He grimaced and glared at Ian.

“No,” Tallulah sobbed. “Just go! I don’t want you here, Boris. I don’t. Please!”

“I’m not leaving until you listen to me.”

“I think that’s enough,” Ian said. “Sir, the homeowner has asked you to leave. Please do that.”

A finger was thrust toward Ian’s face. Boris was turning red. “Stay out of this. This is all your lot’s fault in the first place.”

Ian frowned his lack of understanding. His head tilted to one side as if he was pausing to read data from his grid. “Aye, the Metropolitan Police held you on a disturbance and identity theft charge this morning. I see the magistrate bound you over to keep the peace. Do you think you’re obeying your bail conditions right now, sir?”

There was a long moment with the two staring at each other that Boris might have taken a swing at Ian; he was certainly enraged enough to be that stupid. Some deeper instinct must have cut in. Ian was younger, taller, and by the way his shirt was stretched over a hard-muscled chest a great deal fitter; and he was also a policeman.

“We need to talk,” Boris said bitterly.

Tallulah turned away, close to tears again.

Boris reached out with one hand, but never quite had the courage to touch her. He walked out of the apartment.

Ian hurriedly shut the door. “I’m really sorry, Ms. Packer. That was probably the worst timing of my career.”

“No. No it wasn’t. Actually, thank you for coming. I’m really glad you arrived. I don’t know what I would have done. I was stupid to let him in.”

“I, er, accessed the police report. I can understand why you don’t want to see him right now.”

“Ever,” she said. “I don’t want to ever see him again.”

“Aye, I know that feeling myself.”

Tallulah gave him a mildly puzzled look. He shrugged. “I was engaged myself, two years ago,” Ian said. “She broke it off. Not like this, mind. Well, I suppose it was a bit. She found someone else. Better prospects, so she said.”

“Why do people do that?” Tallulah asked bitterly. “You let someone in until they become your whole life, then they turn around and stab you through the heart.”

Ian hated seeing her so despondent, and knowing he was the real reason made that worse. He could almost feel guilty, except exposing Boris was an act of kindness for her in the long run. “Down to timing, pet. We were always going to find out eventually. Best it happens early. Mind, there never is a good time, that’s the problem.”

“It just hurts. Why does it hurt so much?”

“Is there someone you can visit, or call over? A girlfriend, like? Have an evening telling each other all men are useless.”

Tallulah almost managed a grin. “You’re not all like Boris.”

“I just don’t want to leave you like this, pet. Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll survive.”

“Okay.” It was hard, making himself walk away. But this had to be played perfectly. Tonight was about contrasts, showing her that good guys did exist, that he was one of them. “Listen. This is my address code. If he comes back, or causes any more trouble, I want you to call me. Anytime, day or night. I mean it.”

“I don’t think he will. He knows it’s over, he just doesn’t want to admit it.”

“Aye, but if you do need help use my code. Please? Promise you will. I need to know you’re going to be safe and careful.”

“All right.” She smiled weakly. “If he turns up again, I’ll call you.”

“Take care then, pet.” Ian gave her his serious smile, and left apartment 576B. It was all he could do not to dance down the corridor.

M
ONDAY
A
PRIL 8, 2143

The Raytheon 6E-B Owl measured nine meters in length, with a seventeen-meter wingspan giving it a glider-like planform, albeit one that was a lot more maneuverable than the average glider. Weighing in at just over three and a half thousand kilograms at takeoff, it was designed to cruise at a modest 315 kmh for a maximum endurance of forty-seven hours. However, its primary function was low-level survey. The one that had been rocket-launched that afternoon flew upward through St. Libra’s freezing aurora-dominated atmosphere, curving around and around Wukang in a long leisurely spiral, was now struggling to break through its 8,340-meter service ceiling. Ken Schmitt and his team had done their best, loading patches into the vehicle’s smartware pilot, stripping out several sensor systems, bypassing power limiters in the eDyne fuel cells and the Passau motors driving the tail-mounted coaxial fans so it produced an extra 8 percent thrust, allowing it to push on up to a greater altitude.

But once it reached ninety-three hundred meters the wings couldn’t generate any greater lift, nor could the fan blades bite any deeper into the thin air. Yet that still wasn’t high enough. The communication bay was sending out ping after ping without getting any transponder reply from the e-Rays. Radar couldn’t find anything solid in the sky, though it was at its extreme range limit. The smartdust mesh that covered most of the fuselage couldn’t detect any artificial electromagnetic emission points across the whole southern sky—though the aurora borealis and the hypercharged ionosphere made that a particularly difficult spectrum to scan.

“It’s not the altitude,” Ken Schmitt acknowledged after the Owl had circled at ninety-three hundred meters for ninety minutes. “If there was anything up there, we would have found it. The e-Rays are down.”

“Not surprising in that blizzard,” Vance said.

“We have the emergency rockets,” Davinia Beirne said from the other desk in the AAV shack where she was monitoring the Owl’s telemetry. “They should be able to punch a signal all the way over the Abellia from their apex.”

“I hope so,” Vance said. “But frankly, we don’t have anything to say to them yet.”

“How about Norman Sliwinska was murdered?” Davinia said scathingly. “Someone else other than God needs to know, surely?”

Vance chose to ignore the barb. Norman Sliwinska had been outside during a small lull in the snowstorm on Saturday afternoon. A team had been sent out to clear snow away from the AAV shack, which was in danger of collapsing from the weight of the drifts. The wind had eased off, allowing people out, but the snow was still falling heavily and the air was overloaded with static from the tremendous lightning storm, making bodymesh links close to impossible.

An intermittent medical alarm from Sliwinska had been picked up by the camp’s hopelessly degraded network. Too little and too late to produce an accurate fix. The Legionnaires outside, ostensibly protecting the clearance team from exactly this ambush, had eventually found blood on the snow. In the three circuits they made of the domes and vehicles, the Legionnaires never found Norman Sliwinska’s body. The clearance team abandoned their efforts and returned to their domes, allowing the AAV shack to take its chances. Unlike poor Norman, it had survived the rest of the blizzard.

There was one good aspect of the murder that Vance hadn’t shared with anyone: The smartmicrobe bug they’d tagged Angela with confirmed she had been in her dome with Paresh and the two catering staff when the monster struck. It definitely wasn’t her. Important though that was to Vance, it still didn’t rate expending a comm rocket for. He knew the knowledge wouldn’t sway Vermekia.

“I don’t like that weather front,” Ken announced.

Vance glanced at the pane showing the Owl’s weather radar imagery. The thicker false-color waves of yellow and purple were heading in toward Wukang at a steady rate.

“How long till it hits us?” Vance asked.

“About an hour until the strongest part of the storm arrives,” Ken said. “But we’re already on the edge, it’s just going to get worse. Sir, we need to think about recovery. It’ll take a good fifty minutes to get the Owl back down.”

“I second that,” Davinia said. “We’re going to burn out half the power train unless we ease off soon. There’s nothing out there for it to contact.”

“Okay,” Vance said. “Bring it down. But I want you to land it as close as possible to the camp. And take three Legionnaires with you to collect it.”

“Yes, sir,” Ken said.

While the Owl spiraled down, Karizma Wadhai was supervising the team tasked with lifting the domes again. This time the snow had drifted almost a meter up against the panels. The bulldozers pushed it out of the way, leaving room for the self-loading trucks to slide their lift forks underneath. Josh Justic’s dome was the first they attempted to move. The trucks had barely gotten it half a meter off the snow when they heard a tremendous
crack
. It lurched as a split opened up, cutting neatly across panels. The trucks hurriedly lowered it again as the uneven sections shifted about.

Inspection showed that seven of the panels had fractured and split. “It’s the cold,” Ophelia explained to Elston as they walked around the broken dome. “We weren’t expecting it to be this cold.”

Vance examined the jagged gash in the panels. The sagging dome put him in mind of an egg that had defeated the hatchling inside. “Are all the domes going to split?”

“If we try and move them, then yes. They’re just too brittle to lift now.”

“And if we leave them in place, the weight of snow will also fracture the panels, yes?”

“Probably, sir, it depends on how much snow builds up.”

Both of them turned to face the northeast where the Owl had shown the next storm was approaching. Already snow was starting to fall, thin hard specks forming a grainy layer on the existing mantle. Pink sunlight was fading as evening drew in, abandoning the sky to the restless borealis waves.

“How do we protect them?” Vance asked.

“We thought the bulldozers could shunt the existing snow into a wall around each dome. That might act as a snow break, at least for this next blizzard. It’s the best proposal we have.”

“Okay, we’ll give that a go. What about this dome, is this repairable?”

“No, sir. We can’t patch the panels, we just need to make new ones and reassemble. And we can’t do that in the time frame we’ve got left today.”

Vance took a look around the camp. It was a depressing sight, he admitted to himself. Six people and a Land Rover Tropic were just visible out on the snowfield half a kilometer away, waiting for the Owl to finish its descent. The bulldozers and self-loading pallet trucks moved around slowly, crushing deep ruts into the snow in a random pattern that people had to straddle while they walked about. Snow almost covering the other vehicles, turning them into idiosyncratic lumps. A well-worn path to the clinic, which had snow piled up to the Qwik-Kabin roof where the drift just rounded off. A ramp had been dug down through it to the entrance, held in place by a flimsy makeshift fence of posts and packing straps. But then, he acknowledged, everything in Wukang had a makeshift feel to it right now. The microfacture shack had what amounted to a road leading to its entrance, so many vehicles had driven up to it. Camp personnel, always in pairs or more, moving around slowly in their parkas and quilted trousers, collecting fresh stores from the pallets, which first had to be dug out with spades the microfacture team had printed. The general systems crew was working on the fuel cells, making sure they’d keep working through the storms.

It was all wrong, he thought, they were struggling to keep up with current conditions while trying to be vigilant for the alien’s return. Day-to-day existence was taking up all their time and effort. They had to lift themselves out of this deadly hiatus. And they would never do that by staying here.

Vance came to his decision, and quested a link to Antrinell and Jay. “We’re going to leave, travel in convoy to Sarvar.”

“Are you sure?” Jay asked.

“Yes. Our situation here is unsustainable. We’re sitting around accomplishing nothing and presenting ourselves as a target for the creature. Heating the domes is consuming a huge amount of fuel. Right now we have a decent bioil reserve that can power the vehicles all the way to Sarvar. If we wait here for another week or ten days, that reserve becomes marginal. We need to prepare and move out as soon as we can. The schedule Vermekia sent is a good place to start, but we’ll need to modify it considerably.”

“You made the right choice,” Antrinell said. “I can’t see them resupplying us inside of a month. There was way too much politics crapping on us from the top of the expedition.”