Gritting her teeth in determination, she dropped her thick fleece and wormed her head and shoulders into the hole. She still had to stretch to apply the power socket against the grille’s locking bolts. They were stiff from disuse, and she was scared of making too much noise with the power socket; but after several minutes cursing and blinking sweat from her eyes, the grille came loose. Then it took another five minutes pushing and shoving before the grass and soil gave way. The tool belt had to be discarded before she could claw her way through the uncomfortably claustrophobic gap.
Araminta crawled out onto the narrow strip of grass between the apartment wall and the wooden fence. Blouse torn on snags, skin scratched and bleeding, trouser knees muddy, hair a tangled mess, hot, flushed, and sweaty. She glared back at the little hole. I can’t have put on that much weight!
The noise of the crowd was a lot louder. Amplified voices were constantly warning them to back off. A capsule slid over the band of sky above her. She quickly pulled her tool belt out of the hole, and started using the screwdriver on the fence boards. With three of them unfastened she could slip through the triangular opening and into an almost identical strip of ground on the other side. The neighbouring building was a combination of retail and office units; half of which were unoccupied and available for a low rent. She crept along the side of the building to the waste casket bay at the back. The gates beyond opened on to a thin alley of badly cracked concrete. Someone had left an old jacket on the ledge running along the bay. She pulled it on over her torn blouse, and slung the tool belt over her shoulder. Then taking a breath she sauntered out into the alley.
Two of Ellezelin’s armour-suited paramilitaries were standing on cordon duty outside the back gate to the apartment block. Araminta ignored them, and walked off down the alley. Every second she expected a challenge, but it never came. After twenty metres she made a sharp left turn down another alley, taking her out of their view. Then she just kept walking.
*
After forever he strode through a white jungle. Trees of translucent crystal towered above him, refracting a soft shimmer of pure sunlight, sprouting long white leaves. The undergrowth was thick, creepers and bushes mangled into dense tangles of silver hues that were impossible to push through. White clouds scudded overhead. A cloying mist wove long swirling streamers round the shiny tree trunks, reducing visibility. White birds darted about, triangles of feathers fluttering fast. White rodents scampered round his booted feet. His boots were clotted with white mud from the steaming loam.
‘I know it’s difficult,’ said the voice behind the trees. ‘But you have to choose.’
He longed for colour. Darkness, even. But all the jungle offered was faint shadows. Shapes were starting to blur together. Losing cohesion. The blazing universe was absorbing him. When he lifted up his hands they were hard to see. White on white. Just looking at them was dizzying.
‘You can lose yourself. Lose what is. Lose what you have done. Your life will never have existed. Sometimes I wish I could offer that to myself.’
Then the enemy started to close in. He saw them all around, little flickers of motion darting through the undergrowth. They were waiting for him. He knew it. It was an ambush.
He yelled defiance at them. His biononics unleashed a terrible burst of energy. Clumps of undergrowth disintegrated into kinetic maelstroms. He was thrown from side to side by the sharp leaf and stone fragments swatting against him. Vision reduced, but still it was all white: in front, on both sides, above, below. White. White. White.
Through it all crept the enemy – malicious, determined, lethal. He blasted away at them. Seeing them burn. Powerful white flame consumed them, sending torrents of white smoke into the sky.
Shot after shot was fired into the suffocating uniform whiteness. It began to constrict about him. No matter how violent his energy discharges they couldn’t penetrate it.
‘Help me,’ he cried out to the voice. ‘Take me out of this. I choose. I choose! I remember I chose. I wanted not to happen.’
He could no longer tell which way was up, and tumbled through the whiteness. His own screams were loud in his ears as the whiteness slipped and banged against his suit visor. Then he hit something which stopped his headlong rush with a suddenness that knocked the wind from him. There at last was another colour, red sparkles of pain danced across his vision as he drew a desperate breath. He closed his eyes, squeezing the lids shut then blinking them open.
Shards of grey-black rock lay sizzling against the ice, slowly sinking in through the puddles they were creating.
‘Shit,’ Aaron groaned gloomily. He forced himself on to all fours, then slowly staggered upright.
The whiteout had got to him, providing an insidious outlet for the demons churning around his subconscious.
What the hell is inside me? What did I try and cast away?
He shook his head, running a full status check through his biononic systems, and reviewed the routines in his macrocellular clusters as well. Cooler air blew into his helmet, allowing him to take some sobering breaths. Looking around he saw he’d left the field of ice boulders behind. The wind had dropped, leaving just a few flurries of snow skipping through the air. Steam was pushing up out of a dozen craters where his energy shots had vaporized the ice. He could see the serrated crystalline boulders lining the horizon behind him. Exovision superimposed his route, sketching it with simple lines of glowing orange. The ground crawler had been easy to follow through the field, scraping past boulders to leave crumbled shards on the ground, or where Inigo had simply carved his way through the smaller gaps. Now they were out on the open top of the glacier it was hard to tell.
Aaron trotted away from the area he’d devastated, circling round. There was no indication of the ground crawler at all. The thin dusting of ice shifted continually, completely eradicating any sign of the tracks. As he stood and watched, his own footprints were smeared away behind him almost as soon as he made them. There was no residual heat signature. It had been at least six hours since Inigo and Corrie-Lyn had driven out of the boulder field. On this frozen world, their infrared traces would have vanished within twenty minutes.
He had absolutely no way of telling which way they’d gone.
‘Fuck it.’ There were no options left. His inertial guidance mapped a route back to Jajaani, via the Olhava camp, the only route he was sure didn’t have glacier cliffs or other obstacles. Not that he’d ever get there before the planet imploded, he reflected; but if any rescue attempt was going to happen, that would be where the starship landed. It was all he had left. Simply lying down and waiting for the end wasn’t him. Whoever me is.
He started to run again. His biononic energy currents reconfigured to scream a distress signal into the eternal storm.
*
The local star’s azure spectrum shone brightly on the hull of Mellanie’s Redemption as it dropped out of hyperspace five hundred kilometres above Orakum. Troblum accessed the external sensors, seeing a planet that was essentially the same as every human-settled world in the Greater Commonwealth. Blue oceans swathed in puffy white cloud, brown land masses with a fuzz of green. Its electromagnetic emissions were a lot lower than a Central world, reflecting the relatively small population of Advancers and naturals. The kind of world that provided an ideal quiet life. Knowing what he did about Oscar Monroe, Troblum wasn’t at all surprised that the old War hero had chosen this place to settle.
He ordered the starship’s smartcore to enter the atmosphere in full stealth mode. His muscles ached from the crouch position he’d been compressed into for the last ten hours. Even now that he’d finally made some headway into cataloguing and arranging the components into distinct piles, the starboard midsection hold was still badly cramped. He was beginning to worry about the assembly process, which was going to require a decent volume to work in. Not that he was anywhere close to starting that yet.
When Mellanie’s Redemption passed through the ionosphere he went back into the cabin and took a
quick spore shower. There were still sore patches on his skin where the medical module had repaired the damage he’d received at Florac’s villa.
‘You should put some cream on those,’ Catriona told him. The beautiful girl’s curly hair bobbed about as she tilted her head to one side, registering deep concern.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he grunted back.
‘It matters to us,’ Trisha cooed.
Troblum pulled his shabby purple toga suit on, somehow strangely concerned about his dignity in front of the two girls. Having them see him naked was oddly disquieting. Back at the Arevalo apartment they never did, the daily routines were all perfectly established. He was comfortable with those. But here in the starship’s cabin there was little privacy, and the projectors could throw the images just about everywhere. ‘Thank you,’ he said, hoping it would shut them up – he didn’t want to load in program restrictions, not now he’d constructed their personalities so perfectly. ‘I’m all right.’ The last seam on the suit fastened up, and he straightened himself without wincing.
‘What are you going to ask him?’ Tricia asked as the star-ship sank down through the clouds. Far below the fuselage the sensors had already picked out the white circle of the house set in its rambling grounds on the edge of a vast prairie of native vegetation.
‘I just want five minutes of his time, that’s all. Then this will all be over.’
Troblum switched the stealth effect off when they were below five hundred metres. The starship settled on the big patch of level grass where two capsules were already parked in the shade of tall reddish-brown trees. He walked down the airlock stairs, sniffing the faint alien pollen in the air. Two figures were already hurrying down the spiral stair that was wrapped round the house’s central pillar. Although he normally hated the countryside, Troblum had to admit the raised house in this bucolic setting was fabulous.
His u-shadow reported pings being aimed at him by the men walking towards him. He responded courteously enough with his identity certificate, praying they wouldn’t send too many queries about him into the unisphere. The Accelerators would be waiting for any giveaway, though even if they confirmed his location he should be relatively safe from Marius here.
‘I’m Dushiku,’ the first man said. ‘Can we help you?’
‘Is that really your starship?’ the second one asked. He was younger, definitely a first lifer, everything about him leaked eagerness and an endearing naivety, not just his gaiafield presence. ‘It looks fantastic.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are those wings?’
‘Heat radiators.’
‘Oh.’
‘Jesaral, enough,’ Dushiku chided.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’d like to speak to Oscar, please,’ Troblum said.
Their attitude changed immediately. Dushiku chopped off his gaiafield emissions as his face hardened. While Jesaral pouted and allowed a wave of upset and worry to spill out of his mind.
‘Oscar is not here,’ Dushiku said stiffly.
‘Have I said something wrong?’
‘No,’ Jesaral said, his handsome face frowned in misery. ‘It’s just that Oscar isn’t very popular round here right now. He left us in a hurry a few days ago. Apparently we don’t mean nearly as much to him as he does to us. That’s always good to know, isn’t it? Poor old Anja is still crying her eyes out.’
Dushiku’s arm went round the younger man’s shoulder, squeezing in comfort. ‘It’s okay, he’ll be back.’
‘Who cares?’ Jesaral said with sudden contempt.
‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’ Troblum asked.
‘No.’ Dushiku gave him a sharp look. ‘Do you know him?’
‘We have a mutual friend. It is rather important I contact him.’
‘His u-shadow is blocking our calls,’ Jesaral said. ‘But don’t let that put you off, you might have better luck.’
‘I’ll try that, thank you.’
‘Really?’ Dushiku said. ‘Why didn’t you do that originally instead of coming here?’
‘I, er . . .’ Troblum’s social program reported that Dushiku was becoming irate and curious, and he should say something soothing. It didn’t say what. ‘It’s complicated. Where’s he gone?’
‘Ask her,’ Jesaral said with a effusive glower.
‘Who?’
‘That Paula Myo character. She was the last of his old friends to turn up here unannounced. I didn’t know there were so many of you.’
Troblum stood perfectly still, staring at the now-wary men. That’s a big coincidence. Very big. Why would Paula visit Oscar? And what is he doing now? Could they be working together? I didn’t see him at Florac’s villa.
‘Do you know her?’ Dushiku asked.
‘I know of her. I have to go now.’ Troblum turned, and made for the airlock ramp.
‘Hey!’
‘Sorry to have bothered you.’
‘What the hell did you want from him?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘Who in Ozzie’s universe are you people?’
With the ramp under his feet, Troblum felt a lot safer. He was already ordering the smartcore to power up the drive.
‘Give him back to us,’ Jesaral yelled. ‘I want Oscar back. I want my Oscar. You bastard.’
The airlock closed. Mellanie’s Redemption lifted immediately, accelerating hard, only just keeping subsonic. Troblum knew that was ridiculous, Oscar’s lovers didn’t present the remotest threat. Yet he wanted to get away from them fast. The stealth effect shrouded the fuselage in a refractive smear as they reached the cloud level. Troblum checked, but there were no sensors probing the sky hunting for him.
‘Well they were terrifying,’ Tricia said contemptuously. She and Catriona were snuggled up together on the cabin’s long couch.
‘Worse than the Cat.’
‘You were lucky to get out of there alive.’
‘Shut up,’ Troblum snapped.
Both girls pouted, then turned to each other, pawing and stroking like kittens. Troblum ignored them and slumped into a big chair. He was still shocked by the revelation. Paula Myo had visited Oscar! It was the last thing he’d expected. He let out a small grunt of admiration. That was it. Of course, those two working together would be the last thing anyone would expect. So what’s he doing for her?
The starship reached four hundred kilometres altitude. Troblum told it to go ftl, and fly ten lightyears clear from Orakum.
Oscar’s unisphere code hung in his storage cluster. Immensely tempting. But since Sholapur he simply didn’t trust the unisphere. Knowing Oscar and Paula were in contact surely gave him some kind of advantage. He just couldn’t think what.
Catriona raised her head and gave him an affectionate look. ‘So where are we going?’
‘Nowhere,’ he said, coming to a decision. ‘I’m going to assemble the ultradrive. After that I’ll do what I can to warn Paula and ANA. At least if it all goes wrong then, I can run.’
*
Paula hadn’t visited Paris for decades. The city had reduced considerably since its heyday of the First Commonwealth era. ANA had been as ruthless here as it had everywhere on Earth, pruning away buildings it considered irrelevant. Residual national nostalgia didn’t carry much weight in its hard-nosed analysis. However, the truly historic remained. The Eiffel Tower, of course. Arc de Triomphe. Notre Dame. The Palais de la Concorde. Most of the original buildings along the Seine.
She teleported in from Sky Pier station above Bordeaux, materializing outside the ancient five-storey building where she’d spent so many centuries working before the days of ANA and Higher culture. Beside the door, the original brass sign still gleamed against the dull stonework.
INTERSOLAR COMMONWEALTH
SERIOUS CRIMES DIRECTORATE
Paula gave it a melancholy smile, and walked into the marbled entrance hall. So many memories haunted this place. Embedded in the structure, they sprang to life everywhere she looked. Images and sounds st
ronger than the gaiafield could ever produce, and far more meaningful. All those colleagues she’d worked with over the centuries, the cases they’d solved, the battles against innumerable chiefs and political appointees and lawyers. They all echoed round her, welcoming her back.
An ANAdroid was waiting for her at the lift door, a human simulacrum with featureless gold-brown skin. It wore a simple blue and green suit uniform identical to all its kind. There were tens of thousands of them in the city, performing the maintenance and support functions which the antique buildings and their priceless contents needed. Stabilizer generators alone couldn’t preserve the city’s fabric, not when it was still in use by nearly eighty thousand humans.
‘Welcome back, Investigator Myo,’ it said as the lift doors opened. The voice was as genderless as the body.
‘Thank you.’ Paula put her hand on the security pad, allowing the management system to confirm her DNA. Her u-shadow then had to go through a further lengthy authorization procedure before the lift would descend. They passed through at least two force fields on their way down to the vault. There was also an exotic energy scrambler field around the three sub-levels, preventing anyone from teleporting in, or opening a wormhole inside.
The lift opened into a long hall. It reminded Paula of the ANA reception facilities, where thousands of recently downloaded bodies waited to see if their minds would adapt to the expansion and freedom inside ANA itself. Only here, instead of the glowing violet spheres, the floor supported long rows of dark sarcophagi.
‘This way,’ the ANAdroid said, and gestured politely.
Paula accompanied it, their footsteps echoing round the vault. ‘How many are stored here?’ she asked.
‘We currently provide suspension for eighteen hundred and forty-three people.’
She wondered how many she was responsible for entombing down here. A good percentage, I’ll guess.
‘Most still have several hundred years to serve on their sentence,’ the ANAdroid said. ‘Some exceptional cases will remain down here a great deal longer. A few are even scheduled to remain for longer than the city has already existed.’