“Good,” Bradley said. “They’d be slaughtered out of hand if they tried to stop them.”
“Anything from Ledro’s group?” Stig asked. Ledro was leading a demolitions team to take out the bridge over the river Taran, six hundred kilometers farther south.
“He says ten minutes,” Keely reported.
“Good.” Stig shifted his grip on the steering wheel, easing the armored car away from the central lane barrier. After the joy of discovering Adam had made it through, he was wound up again. The idea of having Bradley Johansson himself sitting next to him during the chase was simply not something he’d allowed for. This was the climax of a plan the man had begun a hundred thirty years ago. Stig could barely organize three days ahead. He couldn’t rid himself of the notion that every ancestor he had would be looking down from the dreaming heavens this night. It wasn’t the kind of responsibility he handled easily.
“You did the right thing,” Bradley said softly.
“Sir?”
“Sending in the fuel air bomb, detonating it inside the city. I know it must have been a hard choice.”
“There was so much damage,” Stig confessed. “More than I thought.”
“Millions have died on the Commonwealth worlds over the last weeks, and millions more during the first invasion. The navy has developed weapons which are strong enough to damage a star; the radiation emission alone can wipe out the biosphere of an H-congruous planet a hundred million kilometers away. The unisphere is alive with rumors that Nigel Sheldon has something even more powerful than that; something which destroyed Hell’s Gateway where the navy’s finest failed completely. Judged against that scale, a single fuel air bomb that generated a few hundred casualties is insignificant. Yet at the same time you accomplished so much.”
“I don’t see it that way. I walked through the ruins; there were so many people with shattered lives. Dreaming heavens, I could smell burnt flesh.”
“You stalled the Starflyer on the other side of the gateway. That was crucial. Vital. Without that interruption to its plans, I would be dying on a world three hundred light-years away, it would already be closer to its starship, and the planet would be unable to extract its revenge. Look at the whole picture, Stig, focusing on individual actions is only going to cause you doubt and worry. Your thoughts should embrace a collective strategy. The Guardians of Selfhood are back on target again, in no small part thanks to you.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Ask the Paris team or Cat’s Claws if you doubt me. We were the ones who had almost given up hope until you wrecked its plans. You allowed us to get so close, Stig, I could actually feel it again, all that arrogance and malice spilling out into the ether. If we’d had a few minutes longer we could have exterminated it there and then. As it is, we forced it back onto our schedule. So don’t ever allow your resolve to desert you.”
“Thank you, sir.” Stig focused hard on the road, a tight smile curling his lips up. The ancient concrete surface was cracked and worn here, covered with an intricate lacework of black tar where bots and laborers had filled in the holes. The armored car’s wheels thrummed over the ridges as it raced under the bright arches; they were spaced so close together now they’d transformed Highway One into a psychedelic tunnel.
“Contact with Adam,” Keely reported. “He’s asking for you, sir. Heavy interference, we’ve got a badly behaved ionosphere tonight.”
“Let’s hear it,” Bradley said.
Static wailed through the low interior of the armored car. “Bradley?” Adam called.
“I’m here, Adam.”
“I’ve got a problem.”
“How bad?”
“The worst. Your signal is breaking…”
“What. Is. Your. Problem?”
“Found four crates that were sabotaged. We lost a Volvo as well.”
Something like a small electric charge fired down Stig’s spine. Adam’s trouble could mean only one thing. Stig automatically checked his wing mirror. The truck carrying the big Raiel alien was five vehicles back, while the armored car carrying Cat’s Claws and the Paris team was the second in line. He started working out which of his people would have the easiest shot.
“Are you sure?” Bradley asked. The signal whistled sharply. “Are you sure?” Bradley repeated urgently.
“Definite. It was done on the Carbon Goose…Only opportunity.”
“Is there enough equipment intact to complete the planet’s revenge?”
“Yeah. If we get there. Paula and I convinced it…one of the navy people with us. Has to be…it out, no other…Any information about them from your people…work it out. Paula seriously ill…medical kit should cope…can’t help me much.”
“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley muttered quietly. “I never expected it to get this close to us. Not now.”
“We can’t go back and help them,” Stig said. “We don’t have time.” He thumped the wheel with one hand.
“Adam is asking for information,” Bradley said. “We’ll give him as much as we can.”
“What if there’s more than one of them? What if there’s a Starflyer agent with us as well?”
“That’s not good,” Olwen said from the back of the armored car. “These machines are well protected. We’d have to put them in front of our heavy-caliber weapons. Then there’s their suits to break.”
“They’d have to take care of their own,” Stig said. “Any kind of firefight at that level would destroy the rest of our vehicles.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bradley said. “For the Starflyer to plant one agent among us would require considerable effort. The people who joined us at Narrabri station were essentially thrown together by accident. For the Starflyer to infiltrate two agents among us under these circumstances is beyond possibility.”
“You think they’re in Adam’s team?” Stig asked. “He said the sabotage happened on your Carbon Goose flight.”
“If that’s what Adam believes, we must trust him.”
“Absolutely.” Stig didn’t even have to think about it. A communications icon popped up into his virtual vision, a group link from Alic Hogan. He allowed the call through.
“We all picked up that transmission,” Alic said. “I expect you’re debating if you can trust us.”
“Actually, we’re putting our trust in Adam,” Bradley said. “He believes the Starflyer agent is with him, not here.”
“He’s wrong about that, damnit, you’re talking about the Admiral and Paula Myo.”
“Ex-Admiral,” Bradley said levelly. “The navy did rather badly under his command. And the alternative is that it’s one of you.”
“Damnit. All right. But Paula? Come on!”
“She’s been trying to stop me for a hundred thirty years. That makes her a highly plausible candidate.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Deal with facts,” Bradley said. “Paula does.”
“What about Anna?” Stig asked.
“The Admiral’s wife?” Morton said. “If she is, he must be, too.”
“That’s not impossible, I suppose,” Bradley said; there was a strong undercurrent of reluctance in his voice.
“Unlikely, though,” Alic said.
“What about Oscar?” Morton asked.
“I may be able to help there,” Qatux said. “Ms. Tiger Pansy was present when Captain Monroe had a heated confrontation with Dudley Bose.”
“What was it about?” Alic asked.
“Bose accused Monroe of deliberately allowing himself and Emmanuelle Verbeke to continue exploring the Watchtower after it was safe to do so, thus ensuring they were captured by MorningLightMountain. An allegation Monroe refuted. Dr. Bose was most insistent, though.”
“We know there was a Starflyer agent on the Second Chance,” Stig said hurriedly; he was trying to make connections. I don’t know enough about them.
“Does Dudley stand to profit in any way from making those kinds of allegations?” Rob asked
.
“No,” Alic said. “His reputation with the navy is dirt anyway after that Welcome Back ceremony. This kind of thing will only make it worse for him. In any case, he only started claiming Oscar screwed up after he got his memories back.”
“If you believe the source of those memories,” Bradley said.
“We were with the Bose motile for weeks,” Morton said. “For what it’s worth, I believe it was a genuine copy of Dudley Bose’s memories and personality.”
“But you don’t know that for certain.”
“If it’s not a copy of Bose, then what the hell is it?”
“Boys, boys,” the Cat said. “Please, the smell of testosterone is getting foul back here. This is all sounding like a very dull lecture on complexity theory to me. You don’t have anything like enough real evidence to point the finger at any of them. If it was obvious who the Starflyer agent was, then we’d have realized it by now.”
Despite his irritation at her tone, Stig had to admit she’d got a point. There was some memory about the Cat worrying away at the back of his brain, something he’d heard back in the Commonwealth. Her crimes had given her widespread notoriety; she’d committed them a long time ago, long enough for them to have passed into urban lore. Then he remembered. Dreaming heavens, and she’s supposed to be on our side? And in a top-of-the-line armor suit? “Adam asked for our help,” he said, determined not to be cowed by her reputation. “We’re doing the best we can for him.”
Her answering laugh made him wince.
“Poor old Adam,” she chortled. “I’d better switch on my short-wave set. Run, Adam! Run for the hills now, and don’t look back.”
“She didn’t, did she?” an alarmed Stig asked Keely.
“No.”
“What is your solution, Ms. Stewart?” an unperturbed Bradley asked.
“Gosh, the boss man. It’s really simple. Adam asked for information. The best we can do is tell him we suspect Monroe and Myo. After that, it’s up to him how he uses the information. He’s a grown-up.”
“Very well. Unless anyone else has any relevant information on the people traveling with Adam, we’ll relay our suspicions.”
Stig willed someone to say something, to recall just one extra fact, but there was only silence.
“I’ll tell him that, then,” Bradley said.
By midmorning the Volvos had reached the end of the farmlands; they petered out amid insipid swathes of wet meadows and vigorous scrub that were gradually being encroached by the equatorial grasslands. Anguilla grass scattered by blimpbots across the southernmost zone of the Aldrin Plains had blossomed to produce a great deluge of uniform light green vegetation resembling a quiescent sea that was slowly progressing northward. There were no settlements out there, no trees, no bushes, and few reports of any animals.
Their tanks were half empty by then, so Adam wanted to get them topped off before they drove the last section. They stopped in a town called Wolfstail, which comprised about twenty single-story buildings clumped around a T-junction. There were more cats than humans, and most of them wild. Given its position right on the edge of the advancing grasslands, it had the feel of a coastal town out of season. The road that had brought them down from Armstrong City was the stalk of the junction, with the two branches heading east and west, running parallel to the Dessault Mountains that were hidden hundreds of kilometers on the other side of the southern horizon.
Adam climbed down out of the cab and stretched elaborately, not enjoying the sounds his old body made after having been cramped up in a chair for a seven-hour stretch. It didn’t matter how adaptive the plyplastic cushioning was; his limbs were numbed and joints sore from inactivity. Outside the cab’s air-conditioning the heat was oppressive. He began sweating at once, and hurriedly put his wraparound shades on.
A ten-year-old girl in dungarees and a grubby Manchester United cap came out of the garage to fill the Volvos up from its single diesel pump.
“Quick as you can, please,” he told her, and flashed an Earth ten-dollar bill. She grinned brightly, showing a missing tooth, and hurried to the hose.
Everyone except Paula had clambered out of the cabs. The Guardians were giving the navy personnel mistrustful stares. Adam sighed, but he was too tired to play diplomat now. “I need to get some things,” he told the others, and nodded to the store opposite the garage. “Oscar, you’re with me. Kieran, you’re paired with the Investigator. The rest of you.” He shrugged. “We leave as soon as the tanks are full.”
“Do you need anything in particular?” Oscar asked as they crossed the dusty road.
“Some medical supplies for the Investigator. The diagnostic array keeps telling me to use drugs and biogenics we don’t have in the kit.”
Oscar looked at the ramshackle composite panel building with its weathered solar panel roof, and big heart-shaped emerald precipitator leaves flapping lazily from the eves. The windows were grimed up, and the air-conditioning unit a coverless box of rusty junk. “Are you sure they’ll have them here?”
“What they won’t have in here is any sabotaged supplies.”
“Christ, you really are paranoid.”
Oscar pushed the single door open. The dimly lit room inside was like someone’s living room, with threadbare rugs over the carbon plank floor and tall metal shelving racks instead of furniture. Half of the shelves were empty; the rest carried the usual merchandise essential for any small community, mostly domestic products, with food packets supplied by Armstrong City companies. A good stock of booze took up an entire rack.
“Can I help you boys?” an elderly woman asked. She was sitting in a rocking chair at the far end, knitting in the yellow glow of a polyphoto globe hanging from the rafters.
“I’m looking for first aid products,” Adam said.
“Some bandages and aspirin on the third shelf in from the door,” she told him. “Few other odds and ends. Mind you check the expiry dates, now. They’ve been around awhile.”
“Thanks.” Adam pulled Oscar along. “You heard Johansson’s answer last night.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, along with half of this world who’re listening in to the Highway One chase on their radios. Thank you for that. It went down particularly well with Rosamund, I thought. She certainly gave her guns a big polish afterward. You know it’s only going to be a matter of time before one of your street thugs decides the Guardians’ cause is best served by slitting our throats.”
“They’re not street thugs, I trained them.”
“The way Grayva trained us?”
Adam grunted dismissively, and rummaged through the section boldly labeled MEDICAL PROVISIONS. The shopkeeper hadn’t been joking about the lack of variety. “Don’t worry about my team, they’re well structured and disciplined.”
“Whatever you say, Adam.”
“So how do you explain Dudley’s claim that you deliberately ordered him to carry on through the Watchtower so he’d be left behind?” Adam was quite surprised by the involuntary spasm of anger on Oscar’s face when Dudley’s name was mentioned.
“That little shit!”
Both of them gave a guilty glance in the direction of the old woman.
“Sorry, Dudley just manages to rile me every time.”
“So?” Adam invited.
“It must have been the Starflyer agent. Whoever it was hacked into the Second Chance’s communications systems.”
“I figured that, too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you yanking my plank?”
“I know it’s not you.” Adam grinned at Oscar’s astonishment, the thick skin on his cheeks crinkling stiffly.
“You do?”
“Let’s say that after our long association I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Oscar rolled his eyes. “If this is the tradecraft you trained your kids in, we’re in deeper shit than I thought. But thanks, anyway.”
“Don’t mention it. Your innocenc
e reduces my problem by one.”
“Yeah.” Oscar scratched at the back of his head. “And then there were three.”
“Two of whom were on the Second Chance; and Myo has been persecuting the Guardians since their inception.”
“It can’t be Wilson and Anna.”
“Is that emotion or logic talking to me?”
“Emotion, I guess. Hell! I’ve been part of their lives for years now, we virtually live in each other’s pockets. They’re friends. Real friends. If it is one of them, then they have truly run rings around me.”
“I told you before, you manage to cover up your earlier activities with a perfect shell of respectability. To be honest, I never quite expected you to have so much success in your current life.”
“Thanks a whole bunch. But my crime was in the past. The Starflyer agent is active now.”
“All right. Is their any indication, anything that might tell you one of them might not be genuine?”
“I don’t know.” Oscar picked up a tube of dental biogenic cream intended to treat abscesses, not looking at it.
“What?” Adam persisted. “Come on. We’re still fighting to stop this war, and more, stop it from happening again.”
“Someone tampered with the official logs stored in Pentagon II after I found the evidence that the Starflyer agent was on board the Second Chance. That little cover-up blocked us from using it to expose the Starflyer. Only Wilson and I knew about it.”
“Are you sure?”
Oscar closed his eyes. “No,” he said in a pained sigh. “A lot of people knew we had a private meeting, which is very unusual, especially as there was no official record of the topic. And then we invited Myo for an equally secret conference. But I swear that office is sealed up tighter than Sheldon’s harem.”
“You’re looking for a get-out clause. It sounds like a locked room to me.”
“It can’t be Wilson.” Oscar sounded deeply troubled.
“What about his wife?”
“Anna? No way. Nobody’s worked harder to defeat both the Prime invasions. She was the liaison between the tactical staff and Fleet Command; if she was the agent that would be the moment to ensure we were totally screwed.”