‘You can’t be serious. Even if they exist, how would the St Libra aliens know what we’re carrying? There are only twenty-eight people in the whole HDA that know about our fall-back precaution.’
Vance nodded slowly, wanting to believe Antrinell was right, that he was just being paranoid. ‘Tell me again where Angela Tramelo was at the moment of the accident,’ he said quietly.
Antrinell couldn’t disguise his shock. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
Vance said nothing, just looked at him.
‘Oh Lord, you’re not. Okay, she was in the Tropic behind me. Corporal Evitts was driving it. Passengers were Tramelo, Kowalski and Justic. Dean Creshaun was driving the last Tropic, with Bastian 2North, Melia, and Dorchev in with him. Every one of them can confirm she was there. We had her surrounded, Vance. There’s no way she could have caused this.’
‘All right, I’ll accept that for the moment.’
‘You really think she’s involved?’
‘I don’t know what the hell is happening on St Libra, that’s the problem. There’s too much happening to us to just write it off as bad luck and coincidence. But I do have an idea about Angela, which I’m going to share with you. In case.’
‘In case . . . Really?’
‘We’re accumulating fatalities at an alarming rate don’t you think?’
Antrinell had to nod agreement at that. ‘Yeah. Even my people have been talking about it.’
‘And she’s always near.’
‘To be fair, so were all of us.’
‘But none of us were here when Bartram North and his household were slaughtered.’
‘I thought her interrogation showed us a high probability that the monster does exist.’
‘Yet the more the Newcastle investigation continues, the more it seems that the North’s murder was connected to some kind of illegal corporate operation.’
‘But we have Ernie Reinert in custody now. The team on Frontline will get the truth out of him.’
‘Ralph Stevens will uncover who employed him, yes. If he knows.’
‘What is this?’ Antrinell asked. ‘Are you having doubts about the expedition?’
‘I don’t know. An alien species certainly fits everything that’s happened. But what about Angela?’
‘What about her?’
‘She’s a one-in-ten,’ Vance said. It was something which had bothered him right from the moment back in January when Vermekia had given him her file. Seeing her at Holloway Prison, exactly the same as she’d been all those years ago, as if she’d time-jumped from then to today, had bothered him badly. It wasn’t jealousy – not exactly, though he’d started to be a lot more critical of himself in the bathroom mirror every morning. He simply didn’t understand where she’d come from, and that went against everything he stood for. AIA was about getting answers. ‘She was arrested twenty years ago. I’m not that good at judging age, but she looked like she was about nineteen then. I’ve done some digging on the one-in-ten treatment. It kicks in during late teens, once you’re near physical maturity, so back then she could have been anything between eighteen and thirty.’
‘I get that,’ Antrinell said. ‘So?’
‘It’s hugely expensive now. And even assuming she’s forty-five, which I have my suspicions about, she was conceived around 2098.’
‘Yeah, those figures check out.’
‘The figures, yeah. But who is she? One-in-ten treatments are hugely expensive and rare today, though they’re not as exceptional as they used to be. But forty-five years ago? That’s the very early pioneering days, when it would have been phenomenally expensive.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay, so who, forty-five years ago, was rich enough to spend that kind of money on a daughter? And we’re talking tens of millions, here. It’s hard to find reliable estimates. On top of that most American states have strong anti-germline laws.’
‘A billionaire, obviously. We’re not short of them on the trans-space worlds, now or then.’
‘No. We’re not. But I’ve asked Vermekia to dig up what he could. It’s interesting. We found a possible family DNA match to a Luci Tramelo, who’s on file with the GE Citizenship Bureau. She was a French citizen who emigrated to Orleans forty-seven years ago, age thirty-five. When she arrived in Pantin, she bought a large vineyard on the edge of town and lived there comfortably, marrying a year later. There are three children of record, and they still run the vineyard. But Luci herself died two years ago. There’s no record of her parents’ family having enough money to buy that estate for her, and there aren’t any French state employment records for her prior to emigration. So the assumption I’ve made is that she bought it with her surrogacy payment. The DNA comparison gives us a second-generation connection, so genetically speaking Angela is the equivalent of her grandchild. That also makes sense given the alterations made to a one-in-ten’s DNA. The interesting thing is, Vermekia couldn’t get a match on any other of her familial traits. We don’t have any records for her probable father.’
‘I find that hard to believe. The AIA can access every government identity database.’
‘No, actually, we can’t.’ Vance grinned. ‘There’s the distant planets for a start. As they don’t officially exist as far as the trans-space worlds are concerned, we’ve never been able to get to their networks. Then there’s New Monaco.’
‘Ah. Yes, I like it. A world of multi-billionaires that we’re not allowed to visit. That would fit.’
‘Indeed it would. In fact, it’s about a perfect fit. Except for one small point.’
‘Yeah?’
‘What in the good Lord’s name is a New Monaco heiress doing as Bartram North’s whore?’
‘Ah.’ Antrinell’s humour visibly withered. ‘Yeah, that is a good point.’
‘The only possible explanation for her being in that mansion would be as an undercover agent. And that’s a real long-shot. But it still doesn’t explain her motivation – someone with that kind of money and upbringing simply wouldn’t do such a thing. Though if she did, it opens up the whole corporate dark ops question.’
‘So you’re saying the Newcastle murder was the latest phase of some twenty-year corporate battle, and there is no monster?’
‘No. I was there when we interrogated Angela. I sat and watched the brainscan pull that picture from her thoughts. She has a memory of something unnatural in Bartram’s mansion that night. And given the rest of that interrogation, it’s hard for me to ignore that.’ Although there was one thing he was never going to confide to Antrinell, and that was Angela’s resistance. He’d seen the toughest men crack in that most unholy suite of rooms, left weeping on the floor, toxed-up crazy, begging to be asked any question, desperate to satisfy their interrogators. Pathetic in their addled eagerness.
Whereas they’d got everything they wanted from Angela, but they’d never broken her. Reduced her to a miserable distraught self-pitying state, yes. But that inner fury of hers was still burning fiercely at the end – you just had to ask the technician who’d lost an eye to her rage. She never submitted. And it took a very special person, one with total self-conviction, to go through everything Frontline could throw at them and survive with their psyche relatively unscathed. A someone who possessed the utter arrogance and self-belief of a born and bred New Monaco resident.
‘Hell.’
‘Yes, quite,’ Vance said. ‘We’re right back where we started, with a lot of unexplained deaths on St Libra. If we’re going to work this one out we’ll need hard scientific evidence. So what have you got for me?’
‘Nothing helpful,’ Antrinell admitted. ‘We’ve taken over eight thousand samples since the convoy left Wukang. The guys were getting good with the collectors we issued. We’ve already processed seventy per cent. There are a phenomenal amount of plant species here, but no real variance from the main St Libra genetic sequence.’
‘Right.’
‘That’s not just here, Vance. We took samples at Abellia, Edzell, and S
arvar. There’s no variance anywhere.’
‘But they weren’t large area samples.’
‘No. However, they are stretched over six thousand kilometres. Total stability over that kind of distance is a pretty conclusive indicator. And we haven’t included the equal lack of variance that exists all the way down to the Independencies.’
‘You’re saying we’re wasting our time?’
Antrinell shrugged his shoulders. ‘If it was up to me, then yes. My vote is for packing up and going home. This world is odd, certainly, and the more I see of it the more I’m coming round to the bioforming theory.’
‘Really?’ Vance asked in surprise. Antrinell had always been adamant that all life in the cosmos was God’s own mystery, a perfectly natural one. And the Lord had blessed many planets with life. Except in all the decades of exploration, humans had never found another sentient species. Which tended to support the Good Book’s tenet of God making man in his own image. So far all the universe had revealed was man and Zanth. And every Gospel Warrior knew the Zanth was an incarnation of the devil.
‘Yes. I can just about buy the zebra botany evolving naturally. There’s a symmetry to it that we don’t normally get in nature. However, it’s quite elegant, and we’ve seen weirder things on the non human-compatible planets we’ve surveyed and left alone. But, every day I look at the autoradiography bands we’ve obtained from the processed samples, and I see a genome that’s extremely sophisticated. Exactly what you get from several billion years of evolution. This is the endpoint of these plants’ evolution, their pinnacle. The world is in harmony, a balance which is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Yet there’s no fossil layer.’
‘That anyone’s found. And face it, Northumberland Interstellar hasn’t been looking hard.’
‘There’s not a single ammonite on a planet this size? One! Come on.’ He gestured round at the hills. ‘Besides, Sirius hasn’t been around for billions of years. It’s four hundred million years old at best. No. All this was planted. Recently, in geological terms. But it was put here.’
‘Why?’
‘Why does the Zanth exist? Our Lord works in very mysterious ways. One of His elder children chose this world as a garden, perhaps? We do not get to question why, at least not in this life.’
‘And the unexplained deaths we’ve had? DiRito was right, something hit the MTJ, some force that knocked it towards the gorge.’
‘Those deaths only happen to our camp.’ Antrinell tipped his head back towards the Tropics. ‘And there’s one person connecting both times.’
‘Not Newcastle, she doesn’t.’
Antrinell grimaced. ‘Yeah.’
‘Ralph should have completed Ernie Reinert’s interrogation in a couple of days. Once we know for sure if the Newcastle murder was corporate-linked we’ll have a better idea how to proceed here.’
‘Fair enough. But my guess is on the corporate option. Damned moneylenders never change, there’s nothing they won’t do to make a buck.’
*
Her back slumped against the hot black tyre of the Tropic, Angela watched Elston and Antrinell in deep discussion close to the edge of the gorge. There was a lot of animation in their gestures. Plenty of passion and belief in the words. They deliberately kept their voices low so no one else could hear them.
Right now she didn’t much care what they were talking about, though she could guess she was featuring heavily in there. There were a couple of times when Antrinell had used his head to gesture at the Tropics, deliberately not glancing at her and the others.
The accident had left her as shocked and drained as every convoy member. It had been a frantic time. Antrinell and Paresh had agreed to her abseiling down to the MTJ because of her weight. Everyone was scared the vehicle would slip again and carry on falling to the bottom of the gulley. So she and Leora had been first down, using tough carbon-filament ropes to secure upturned wheel hubs to the rocks. That had been the hardest quarter of an hour she’d spent, ignoring the cries of her injured friends inside while they secured the vehicle. And always, she’d been alert for the treacherous smell of mint amid the jungle’s pervasive melange. Only when the MTJ was anchored to the rocks did they go inside with the emergency medical field packs and start to do what they could.
After that, after she’d crawled in through the shattered window and recoiled in dismay at the blood and suffering, she shifted into some kind of auto-function state. See what needed doing, assess how to do it, and just get on with the job. Pull the vicious honeyberry branch out of O’Riley’s thigh, ignore his agonized screaming, seal up the ripped artery with the clever gadgets in the field pack. Emotions didn’t come into it. Angela was good at that, good at isolating and ignoring her feelings. Everyone had been thankful and full of praise for what she’d done, especially when they saw the extent of the injuries she’d dealt with. She smiled thinly at the memory of their surprise, even Paresh had been alarmed at how much blood was soaked into her clothes when she’d finally hauled herself back up to the top of the ridge.
You could take the girl away from New Monaco, but you could never take New Monaco away from the girl.
Last time she’d suffered what to most people would be a debilitating emotional shock, she’d managed to quickly disassociate herself from any foolish animal state of mind and function logically. It was a pure survival instinct. And had she ever needed that straight afterwards . . .
*
Angela’s jewellery was kept in a walk-in closet, one of the rooms which made up her bedroom suite in the family’s New Monaco mansion. She stood in the middle of the floor, and looked round at the hundreds of small drawers. It was like standing in a safe deposit vault, except there were no locks. And now there was no security. Theft from the staff was always a minor worry, so the mansion’s AI maintained a constant watch over the jewellery closet. The only people who could override it were her and Raymond. Angela had overridden it, switching it off.
She walked over to the console. The inventory was kept there, along with a useful style-match program which helped her coordinate with her wardrobe, suggesting appropriate items. She slipped her hand into the keyspace and her e-i loaded her code in. It wasn’t the big, high-value items she was interested in. Of all the exquisite pieces she’d amassed or been given over the years, there were plenty of smaller bracelets and rings and tiaras and necklaces. Hundreds of them, so many she didn’t actually know the full extent.
Drawers slid open silently. Flecks of light materialized all across the room, as if someone had lowered a glitterball. It was simply the refraction glimmer cast by all the superbly cut diamonds now exposed to the closet’s sharp monochrome lighting panels. While she walked round examining the display, her e-i began to worm its way deep into the AI registry levels, wiping specific data as it went.
A green and purple icon popped up in her netlens projection – Marlak was calling her. ‘Let it through,’ she told her e-i.
‘I’m sorry, Angela,’ Marlak said. ‘But the Council Agents are arriving.’
‘Of course they are,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in a moment. I’m getting changed. After all, I can hardly meet them in my party frock, now can I?’
‘Of course not. I’ll inform them.’
When she walked back out into her bedroom, Daniellia, her maid, was waiting. Angela immediately noticed the change in the woman. She ignored the new lack of civility and began undoing the straps of her mauve ballgown.
‘I’m sorry about your father,’ Daniellia said.
‘Thank you. Where’s Lizzine?’ Her dermatologist, who should be here ready and attentive to get the platinum scales off her skin. Greeting the Council Agents while shining in tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of precious metal probably wasn’t the best strategy.
‘Back at Prince Matiff’s, ma’am.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Well, you’ll have to help instead.’ Angela stepped out of her ballgown. ‘Find the skin eluents will you please, there’s a dear.’
Daniellia didn’t move. Angela raised an eyebrow. Normally that would be enough to turn the girl into a quivering mouse creature. Not now.
‘I’m sorry to bring this up tonight,’ said Daniellia. ‘But we’ve been wondering if our contract payment will be honoured?’
‘I see.’ Angela slid a ring off her finger. The diamond set in the band probably wasn’t over three carats. ‘Here.’ She tossed the ring to Daniellia, who caught it neatly. ‘Payment plus bonus. Now find me the eluent. Please.’
Daniellia stared at the ring for a long moment, then tucked it into her blouse pocket. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
Angela was wearing a simple pair of tailored trousers along with a black Rivanne top and Moffont jacket when she finally came down the curving stairs of the private wing. Her netlenses were dark except for one figure glowing at the corner of her vision. A long number, one which spelled the end of her world.
Marlak was waiting for her on the first-floor landing. ‘They’re here,’ he said in a disapproving tone. The lawyer was over sixty years old. He’d been with the DeVoyal family for the last forty, and was devoted to Raymond. He could have retired years ago from the money he’d earned, living a pleasant life on Sao Jeroni, where his grandchildren had settled. Instead he chose to stay on, relishing the challenge of modern finance legality. It was the only way he knew, the way to keep his brain active.
‘Thank you,’ Angela said.
‘I think it’s wrong of them to arrive so quickly. I can lodge that complaint with the Council.’
‘I don’t believe the Council would give a flying crap about anything a DeVoyal says at this point. So let’s not make this any more humiliating than necessary.’
‘I understand. But please know they do have to follow the law. I will note any abuses.’
‘You’re a darling.’
There were three of them waiting on the polished wooden flooring of the hallway. Two men and a woman, all dressed in black suits. Expensive designer suits, Angela noted, as was fitting, but grouped together they managed to make them look like a uniform.
‘Ms DeVoyal,’ said Matthews, the agent in charge. ‘Our sympathies for your loss.’