Inescapable (5 page)

The lawyer, a
human because companies generally thought a human touch was
important for this kind of occasion, was tall, thin, and had a pale
face reminiscent of an axe. Sam liked that and wondered whether
Felix had picked his legal representative simply for the look of
the thing.

‘Gentlemen, and
lady,’ the man intoned, his voice suitably dolorous, ‘perhaps we
could begin?’ No one really needed to settle themselves. No one had
a reason to be there other than the reading. ‘This should not take
an excessive amount of time. The provisions of Mister Kenan’s will
are quite simple.’

Well, that was
good. Sam sat through the preliminary boilerplate without really
taking it in. He had never been to a reading like this before, but
he imagined that they followed a rote which had been going on since
mankind developed an urge to write down the disposition of property
after death. He could certainly see Victorians following the same
process, and given the amount of old furniture in the room, they
might have done it in similar surroundings.

‘To my most
loyal, patient, and persevering maid, Marie Shaftsbury’ – the
lawyer’s eyes lifted to look at the girl, who bit her lips, eyes
widening – ‘I leave the sum of fifty thousand dollars and the hope
that she finally takes a chance on the career she really wants to
pursue.’

Marie let out a
little whimper, her fists clenching around her handkerchief and the
look on her face suggesting that she was determined not to start
blubbing.

‘To Brian
Melville, my old friend and manager, I leave my collection of film
memorabilia and the sum of five thousand dollars in the hope that
he can find a good home for it all. He was always as much of a
lover of theatre as I was, even if he couldn’t act worth a
damn.’

The older man
on Sam’s right gave a snort of a laugh and muttered, ‘That sounds
like old Felix.’ Sam was surprised, mainly because he had not known
that Felix had ever acted.

‘The remainder
of my worldly goods,’ the lawyer went on, ‘my home and whatever I
have left in my bank accounts, I leave to Samuel Peter Clarion.’
Sam felt his throat closing and knew his eyes were trying to burst
out of their sockets. ‘I have no family remaining so I choose to
give what I have to someone who will appreciate it and who has
given me long hours when I could forget my solitude. You’ll need
the money. This place needs some work. I hope I haven’t spent it
all.’ The lawyer took in a breath. ‘That ends the disbursements.
Mister Clarion, if you would contact my office in the morning, we
can arrange the transfer of ownership and payment of funds. Mister
Kenan’s accounts are not overwhelming, but they are substantial.
There will, of course, be tax considerations. Do you have an
accountant?’

Sam opened his
mouth, found his throat dry, and swallowed. ‘Uh, yes. I have an
accountant. I… I’ll be in touch. Uh… Thank you.’

Marie was
smiling, her eyes brimming. ‘He always said you made him happy.
Congratulations.’

‘Thanks. I’ve
got no idea what I’m going to do with… Uh, are you going to take up
this change of career thing he suggested?’

‘Well, yes, but
I need to learn. I always wanted to act, you see? Felix said I
should do it and I said I couldn’t afford to be out of work to go
back to school.’

Sam nodded. ‘I
don’t suppose you could keep cleaning this place, at least for a
while? At least until I figure out what the Hell I’m going to do
with it.’

Marie’s eyes
scanned over him. ‘Well, you’re good for the money and, uh, well,
you know I live in the basement apartment, right?’

Sam blinked and
pulled in a long breath. So he had also inherited a tenant. ‘I did
not, but that works fine. We’ll keep that arrangement. I assume
your rent was covered in your pay?’ That got a nod and then Marie’s
eyes narrowed as she shifted to look over Sam’s shoulder.

Turning, Sam
found himself looking at the two corporate types. Neither had been
named during the reading and he had no idea who they were, so why
were they here at all? They did seem to be waiting to speak to him,
however. ‘Can I help you gentlemen at all?’

‘Mister
Clarion,’ the nearest said, ‘we represent parties in the area who
would be interested in purchasing this property from you. Mister
Kenan’s untimely death interrupted our negotiations.’

Sam felt Marie
stirring behind him, and he was moderately sure what she wanted to
say. ‘Felix told me he had rejected offers to buy this place
recently,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t even own it yet and it’s hardly
appropriate to discuss selling it at this time. Perhaps you could
leave me a card…?’

The man smiled
with his mouth, not with his eyes. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ Then he
turned and headed for the door, his compatriot following quickly
behind him.

‘Felix did not
like them very much,’ Marie murmured from behind Sam’s back.

‘No. I know,’
Sam replied, though he had been more concerned about the gun he had
seen under the jacket of the second of their corporate
visitors.

Jenner Research
Station, 17
^th
March.

You arrived at Jenner
Research Station by landing on one of two platforms set into the
basalt lake which filled the seventy-four-kilometre
-
wide crater, and then the whole platform dropped into
the shuttle bay beneath while a pair of huge doors slid over the
hole. The entire facility was underground, buried in the solid,
radiation-resistant rock which, long ago, had flooded out of the
Moon’s surface.

‘How the Hell
did Hunt manage to get anything out of this place?’ Fox asked as
Terri escorted her off the shuttle and into the reception area at
the side of the bay.

‘Money. He paid
someone a whole lot of money, and even then he got old data.’ She
snapped a grin at Fox, but her expression and body language had
been getting more and more tense the closer she got to the
facility. ‘He didn’t bribe the right technician.’

Even though Fox
had been given the highest security rating MarTech had in every
facility they had, Terri had to take her through a registration
process with the station’s AI, confirming her identity and stating
the access privileges she was allowed on site.

‘Totally
separate security system?’ Fox asked.

‘No exterior
communications are allowed automatic transmission into the base’s
computer systems,’ Terri replied. ‘Jenner really
is
our most
secure facility. Well, the station we have on Venus has better
physical isolation and
some
isolated computing facilities,
but Jenner is designed to be off the grid. I’ll need to register
Kit too; otherwise, she’ll run into all sorts of problems.’

Kit appeared
beside them, looking up and around with the expression of someone
expecting doom to rain down from on high at any moment. ‘The
network security here is… scary,’ she said.

‘And this is
all to protect Yliaster?’ Fox asked.

‘Oh, not
just
Yliaster,’ Terri replied. ‘That’s the biggest project
we have going on here at the moment, but there are a few other
things happening here which we really don’t want anyone knowing
about. Nothing illegal, obviously.’ The last was added quickly.

Fox smiled. ‘I
didn’t think there would be.’

‘That suit you
used when you rescued me last month, the invisibility surface was
invented here. The development work to make that Gauss pistol of
yours into a viable, mass-produced weapon was done here and, uh,
you should see the latest development.’ Terri gave her a grin. ‘I
think you’ll get a kick out of that. But we’ll get you settled in
first. All the accommodation is right at the bottom.’

‘How far down?’
They were headed for a bank of elevators, and one of those was
actually marked as ‘Accommodation Only.’

‘About a
hundred and fifty metres.’

‘I’m glad I’m
not claustrophobic.’

~~~

‘Uh, yes… Uh, the
pistol that Mister Martins built for, uh, you, uh, Miss Meridian
provided us with, uh, a considerable amount of, uh, practical
data.’

Fox looked at
the man speaking, letting her mind work over the sentence to make
sure she had actually got what he was saying. His name was
Whittaker Whitwallace and that had probably been enough to provide
a degree of isolation as a child, but his brain had probably done
everything it could to make that worse. He was tall, very thin,
with watery blue eyes, and thinning blonde hair. He wore a tatty
lab coat over a counterpressure vacuum suit which made him look
even thinner. His workshop was cluttered with various dismantled
weapons; Fox actually recognised some of the parts.

‘Jackson said
he’d got useful data from it,’ Fox said.

‘Uh, yes and he
passed that data and the basic, uh, mechanism to us and, uh, we got
on with making of it what we, uh, could.’

‘I think
Jackson mentioned a rifle.’

‘Uh, indeed. We
will have a, uh, rifle variant available for use soon. Uh,
primarily for Special Forces units. We have standardised on a, uh,
four-millimetre projectile for military consumption. Uh, an assault
rifle with underslung electromagnetic grenade launcher.’

‘Twenty-five
mil?’

‘Indeed. You
know your ordnance, Miss Meridian.’

‘I have
something of an interest.’

He nodded,
seeming to become rather more interested himself. Fox noted that
Terri was smirking. ‘We also have a squad support variant of the
rifle with a heavier barrel, uprated cooling and a large,
three-hundred-round, box magazine… and a
six-thousand-round-per-minute cyclic rate of fire. Uh, we believe
that should make a difference in fire suppression situations.’

‘It may do,
yeah,’ Fox replied, wincing.

‘But you will
want to see its big brother.’

Fox blinked at
him. ‘You built something bigger?’

‘Well… bigger
and
, uh, smaller. We have had railguns on tanks and ships
for a couple of decades, railguns and coilguns in space, but these
are all high-calibre weapons. We decided to uh… Perhaps you should
just see it.’ He was grinning, not an entirely pleasant sight.

‘Sure. Let’s
see it.’

It was set up
in a firing range next door, a large gun, shaped somewhat like a
Gatling machine gun, but bigger, with a hopper-style ammo magazine
mounted over it. It was set up on a mounting pole, facing down a
fifty-metre expanse of open space which ended in moon rock.

‘It’s loaded,
if you would, uh, like to give it a test fire,’ Whitwallace
said.

Fox walked over
to the weapon and took the ear defenders which were hanging off one
of the twin pistol grips at the back, slipping them on. There were
goggles too, so she added them before checking over the controls.
There was a toggle switch with a molly-guard, so she flicked up the
red cover and flicked the switch over, and there was a hum as the
cooling system engaged. A second later, a green light appeared
beside the switch. Fox looked back to check that Whitwallace and
Terri were wearing protective gear, and then took hold of the
pistol grips.

Sighting
information, current ammo availability, and all the usual data
appeared in Fox’s vision field. She had no target to aim for, so
she picked the centre of an area which looked as though it had been
drilled into by a few thousand DIY enthusiasts, placed her thumbs
over the trigger buttons, and pressed down. It had no more recoil
than her pistol, but the rate of fire was horrific. Cryogenically
cooled electromagnetic coils accelerated thin slivers of hardened
metal down the range at hypersonic velocities and the rock
crumbled.

Fox let up on
the triggers after a second or two. ‘Holy shit. What is that? Ten
thousand a minute? In a point-defence semi-portable? What’s the
range on this thing?’

‘Uh, right on
all counts. Effective range is, uh, two kilometres. She’ll do
damage to eight.’

Fox deactivated
the gun and turned around. ‘Terri, I need one of these at home.
For… security reasons.’

‘Sure you do.
Come on, we’ll go see Yliaster now.’

‘Ah, now that
project,’ Whitwallace said, ‘has some, uh, very interesting
applications. The, uh, materials we can, uh, manufacture…’ He
smiled. ‘We have suit designs which might let you use that gun as a
sidearm.’

‘It is kind of
weird,’ Terri said as they walked from the weapons development area
back to the core, ‘that it always seems easier to find applications
for science that involve killing people.’

Fox shrugged.
‘Humans have been killing each other for millennia. Started with
Cain if you believe that sort of thing.’

‘I don’t.’

‘No, neither do
I, but no one ever lost money building better weapons.’

‘Yliaster can
be so much more.’

‘Show me.’

Terri grinned.
‘Okay, I will.’

The Yliaster
research area was up a level and then out from the main core, and
it was not especially impressive at first sight. There were a load
of virtual control panels around a fairly bare room, and a large,
black tank mounted behind screens behind that room. Off on the
right was a bank of server cabinets which had to provide the
computing necessary for the system, except that Terri and Jackson
had explained that Yliaster used a new, swarm-based, cluster
intelligence and standard server racks did not seem like they would
host that kind of system. Fox’s eyes lifted to the tank.

‘Yeah, that’s
where it all goes on,’ Terri said. ‘Basically, that tank is full of
nanomachines, all kept in
very
carefully controlled
conditions. We can feed in materials for them to work on, radio in
the pattern we want them to use, and we can get the result out the
bottom. And those things can manufacture materials we can’t make
any other way.’ Her attention shifted to a display. ‘How are things
coming along?’ The question did not seem to have a particular
target; there were four people in the room besides Terri and Fox,
all of them attending to their own virtual console.