The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (110 page)

Paula experienced the usual tingle over her skin as they passed through the gateway’s pressure curtain. Then they were on another world and in full daylight, picking up speed across a rolling countryside that was made up from verdant checkerboard fields. Dense, neatly layered hedges were used to separate out the land, with the occasional drystone wall acting as a more substantial barrier. Native trees with reddish leaves were interspaced with terrestrial oak, ash, sycamore, and beech. All of them had been pollarded, their thick main trunks sprouting long vertical branches. The farms used the cut wood for fuel during the winter months, reducing dependence on fossil reserves. One of the benefits of using such simple mechanical technology was the low energy requirements; all of the planet’s electricity was easily supplied from hydro dams.

She could see farmhouses sitting amid the folds of land, big brick buildings with blue slate roofs nestled at the center of Dutch barns and pigsties and stables and store sheds. Some of them had grain silos, tall clapboard structures painted dove-gray, which she knew were among the tallest buildings on the whole planet. Single railway tracks branched off from the main line, snaking out to the silo yards through narrow cuttings and along embankments. The rails were rusty now, in early summer when the grains were still green in the fields; but later in the year when the harvest was gathered the grain wagons would make daily collections; the lines would be shiny again and the weeds coming up between the wooden sleepers would shrivel and die from the heat of the engines and blasts of steam. Paula had to admit, it looked every bit the bucolic idyll. She accepted now what she had so strongly rejected as a confused uprooted teenager, that the whole point of this society was that it didn’t change, that was what its people were designed for. The Human Structure Foundation had chosen a level of technology equal to the early twentieth century, prior to the electronic revolution; the kind of engineering and mechanics that was easily maintained. Nothing here needed computer diagnostics when it broke down; engineers could see what was wrong amid a machine’s cogs and cables. It was the same with information, there were no arrays, databases, or networks; offices of clerks and accountants kept books and files and Rolodexes. The Foundation had designed people to work at specific jobs, and those jobs wouldn’t metamorphose with progress—there was no progress. Huxley’s Haven provided its inhabitants with the most secure stable society it was possible to have. She still couldn’t decide if the Foundation had been morally right to begin the whole project, but looking out at the trim neat fields and the picture-perfect farms, she had to admit now that it worked.

The train started to move through the outskirts of Fordsville, the capital. They were climbing up on a wide embankment now, giving her a view down on the streets of the outlying districts. Long rows of neat terrace houses stretched away in regular lines, their bricks all a rust-red, with broad windows painted in every color of the rainbow. Larger civic buildings stood high among them, sometimes as much as four or five stories tall, made from a dark gray stone. There were no churches of any kind, but then they didn’t have any religion here, this was a world where everyone knew they had been created by man, not God.

Even when the train moved through the center of the city, the buildings were all the same uniform size; neat houses interspaced by the commercial buildings, and plenty of large parks to break up the urban sprawl. It was unlike other cities in the Commonwealth, where money and political power collected at the center, and the architecture reflected that concentration. Here, equality reigned supreme.

Alphaway, the main station, was probably the biggest single structure in the city after the original Foundation clinic, with three long arched roofs of iron and glass, tall enough that the clouds of smoke from the steam engines dissipated upward through the ridge vents. She walked down the platform and went out onto Richmond Square outside. The roads were busy with three-carriage electric trams riding down their rails in the central lanes; more numerous were buses, whose methane engines produced a high growl as they raced past; taxis and goods vans struggled for space among them. The only personal transport were the bicycles, which had two lanes to themselves on every street.

People on the pavement hurried past. Many of them gave Paula a surreptitious glance as they went, which she found amusing. It wasn’t fame that earned her the looks, nobody knew about her here; it was her plain business suit that marked her out as an offworlder. Contrary to Commonwealth comedians, whose routine had everyone on the planet dressed in identical boiler suits, people were wearing just about every fashion the human race had ever devised. The only thing they didn’t have was artificial fiber.

She crossed the square and went into the main tram station. There was no cybersphere for her e-butler to consult, no useful stored information about routes and stops. Instead, she had to stand in front of a big colored map with the tram lines overlaid in primary colors, and work out for herself which one she needed.

Ten minutes later she was sitting in a tram heading out on its loop that she hoped was going to take in the Earlsfield district. It was very similar to a vehicle she’d used last time when she left Huxley’s Haven, though she couldn’t remember the route number. As they moved away from the center the number of large shops and warehouses decreased, and the streets became more residential, with blocks of factories clumped together. Watching them go past she was still convinced she had done the right thing by leaving all those decades ago. After an upbringing in the Commonwealth this world would have been too quiet.

Not for the first time, she reviewed her nuclear option: go for a rejuvenation and erase all her memories of life in the Commonwealth. Without that experience, the rich cultural contamination so beloved of her stepparents, she would be able to fit in here. It wasn’t something she could bring herself to do, not yet, anyway. There was still her first real case left to solve, though it had become inordinately difficult and complex now.

It had begun in 2243, a fortnight after Paula had passed her Directorate exams to qualify as a Senior Investigator. That was nine months after Bradley Johansson claimed he returned to the Commonwealth after traveling the Silfen paths, and set about founding the Guardians of Selfhood. As with any leader of a new political movement, especially one that waged armed conflict, he needed money to support his cause. As he no longer had direct access to the Halgarth family money, he hatched a simple plan to steal what he wanted.

On a warm April night, Johansson and four colleagues broke into the California Technological Heritage Museum. They ignored the marbled halls filled with giant aircraft and even larger spaceplanes, crept past the display cases full of twentieth-century computers, never even glanced at the first G5 PCglasses, avoided the original motility robots, the SD lasers, a stealth microsub, the prototype superconductor battery cell, and went straight for the dome at the heart of the buildings. Right at the center was the wormhole generator that Ozzie Fernandez Isaac and Nigel Sheldon had built and used to visit Mars. It had taken a lot of negotiation and political maneuvering, but the museum had finally acquired the display rights.

When Johansson and his little team blew open the main door into the central dome, alarms went off and force fields came on. The duty guards responded swiftly, and had the dome surrounded in under a minute.

In order to prevent theft, the museum had laudably installed various force fields to isolate sections of the interior as soon as any form of criminal behavior was detected. As the central dome contained what was arguably the most important, and therefore valuable, machine the human race had ever built, its force field enclosed it completely. When it came on, it trapped the intruders inside. So far, so good.

With over fifty armed guards outside the dome, the chief used the public address system to give those inside the time-honored recital to throw down any weapons and come out with their hands up and their inserts deactivated. The chief then tried to switch off the force field. That was when they found that on his way in Johansson had burned through the force field generator’s main power cable and the command links. The force field had come on automatically with the alarm, powered by its emergency backup supply, but for now the guards couldn’t switch it off.

No real problem. They just had to wait five hours until the emergency backup supply was exhausted. However, what no one in the museum had really thought through was the nature of the machine that the dome’s force field protected. Peering through the small gap provided by the wrecked door, the guards could see the intruders working frantically on the historical device inside. Johansson plugged in the niling d-sink his team had carried in with them, and slowly powered up the old wormhole generator. It might have been nearly two hundred years old, but its components were essentially solid state, and Nigel and Ozzie had built it with a large fail-soft redundancy factor. After an hour, Johansson managed to open a wormhole. It didn’t reach over any real distance, not compared to its huge commercial descendants used by CST. That didn’t bother him, he didn’t want to go to Mars, or even the moon. All he wanted was to be four hundred kilometers away from the museum, in Las Vegas. To be precise, in the maximum security vault that served the eight largest casinos on Earth.

With the wormhole established inside the vault, the team walked through. Once again a barrage of alarms went off, triggered by their presence, and once again force fields came on around the outside, designed to confine any thief who had managed to get this far until the guards arrived. One of Johansson’s team used microthermal charges around the vault door to seal it from the inside. They then spent forty-nine minutes transferring bags full of banknotes back through the wormhole and into the museum. The casinos welcomed currency from every planet in the Commonwealth, and each bag contained notes to the value of five million Earth dollars. It took a team member on average one minute to grab a bag, take it through the wormhole, and go back for the next one.

Paula Myo arrived ninety minutes after the California Technological Heritage Museum alarm was triggered. For the last week she had been working on the strange case of a stolen niling d-sink from a factory outside Portland. Nobody at the Serious Crimes Directorate could work out what anybody would want with such a thing; any company that had a requirement for one could afford one. Now they knew. She struggled through the hyped-up crowd of reporters, then had to get past the small army of LAPD and museum guards that had the criminals encircled. She pressed herself right up to the ruined door, which gave her a narrow awkward view into the dome where one side of the venerable wormhole generator was just visible. Squinting against the sheet of air hazed by the force field she could make out figures moving around.

Two weeks qualified, and she was actually watching the largest robbery in human history in progress.

Once the last bag was dropped into the dome chamber, Johansson moved the wormhole exit again, this time to an unknown destination. The team labored for another fifty minutes taking the bags through. Then they left, and a simple software timer function powered down the wormhole generator behind them.

Two hours later the force field shut down. Paula was among the first people into the dome, supervising the forensics team she’d called in. The Directorate wouldn’t give her the case, of course, she was still a first-lifer and way too junior (her abnormal heritage was never mentioned). Senior Investigators with twenty years’ experience were brought in to head the case, and she was given a secondary role on the task force.

By morning the casinos had confirmed that one point one seven billion dollars had been taken. The media called it the Great Wormhole Heist. Senior Directorate officials assured their contacts that the Investigators would soon be making arrests. It simply wasn’t possible to get rid of that much money unnoticed.

Johansson, though, had planned well. He spent his cash with the kind of people who asked no questions, and certainly didn’t make large unexplained deposits with banks. On Far Away the Guardians began to expand their numbers and activities, starting their campaign against the Starflyer in the form of its principal agents, the Research Institute, with the Halgarth family as occasional secondary targets.

The Directorate task force did manage to identify Johansson’s DNA from samples of hair left in the dome. It meant nothing at first; with a multitude of people walking through the museum every week, he was just one name in two and a half thousand confirmed samples. He did have a query in his file, given the circumstances of his earlier disappearance from his family and job five years earlier. It was only when the acts of sabotage began on Far Away and the Guardians shotgunned the unisphere with their propaganda that the Directorate Investigators finally put it all together. Catching Johansson was an altogether more difficult task. He only ever used front men to make his arms purchases, and Guardian members to release his propaganda messages. All the arrests they made were peripheral. They never got close to him.

Over the years, then decades, Investigators left the task force or were reassigned, or simply retired from the Directorate. Paula moved up the hierarchy until she commanded the task force. Finally, however, even the task force was quietly dissolved and the Great Wormhole Heist case was downgraded. Even then, she kept the case active as part of the overall Guardians investigation. For a hundred thirty-nine years she had not quit. She couldn’t.

The tram stopped at the end of Montagu High Street, and Paula stepped out. The town hadn’t changed, at least not from her vague first-life recollection of it. When she looked along the street with its small stores and hotels she could see it dipping down toward the cove at the bottom. There was a stone harbor on one side, she remembered, with fishing boats drawn up on the rocky bluff, and nets stretched out to dry. Flocks of big scarlet birds swirled overhead, tetragulls, whose oily feathers allowed them to swim almost as well as fish.