They hadn’t counted on the sniffers.
Kruger almost wished that the melded hyenas had torn the intruders to bits instead of just putting them down and holding them for pickup. It would have simplified his paperwork. But no, the loping patrol had complied fully with their training, merely incapacitating the poachers and broadcasting their location. A lifter had gone out and picked up the trio. There was no hurry. It was not as if the intruders were going to make a break for it, even if they had been so inclined following their takedown.
Demonstrating the meticulousness of their training the hyenas had neatly bitten through all six of the poachers’ Achilles’ tendons. The intruders weren’t going to run anywhere.
And now they weren’t going to do anything else. Their bodies had been cremated and poured into the recycler with the rest of the facility’s combustible trash. Anyone foolish enough to come looking for them would meet the same fate. Anyone making inquiries would find themselves up against a bureaucratic void as vast and unforgiving as the Namib itself.
Kruger shook his head at the appalling stupidity of the intruders and their predecessors as he stepped into the lift and thumbed one of several illuminated squares. Not being a button, it did not depress. Instead, the internal electronics read both his fingerprint and individual heat signature. Thus appeased, the lift’s computer permitted more prosaic mechanics to engage and the elevator commenced its nearly silent ascent.
He had not been present for the execution so he did not know if the three men, one Natural and two desert Melds, had begged for leniency. Having infiltrated the Restricted zone they presumably knew better. Illegal entry to the non-park section of the Sperrgebeit had been punishable by death ever since the world’s best gem-quality diamonds had been discovered there long ago. Thanks to marketing as clever as it was zealous, natural diamonds continued to hold their value even in a day and time when good synthetics were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. So most of the Sperrgebeit Diamond Area I was still as much of a no-man’s-land as it had been in the nineteenth century.
For SAEC’s purposes this was very useful.
Diamonds continued to be mined in the vast southern portion of the Namib desert. Massive dredges worked around the clock in huge rectangular pits that had been scooped out below sea level, shoveling the diamondiferous earth into clunky sauropodian loaders. The gem-bearing soil was sorted and re-sorted at multiple locations before the final product was flown out on armed, escorted aircraft. The miserable excuse for a road that led more than a hundred kilometers south to Orangemund was suitable only for properly equipped tracked or multidrive vehicles and authorized tourist vehicles. The diamonds could have been sent by floater, but such small craft were too easy to shoot down or even capture intact. Armed aircraft were more expensive but safer.
In addition to more than paying for itself the ancient diamond mining operation and its enforced isolation provided excellent cover for one of SAEC’s most important research facilities. The fact that as Chief of Security Kruger hadn’t the slightest idea what the facility he was charged with protecting was researching troubled him not one whit. He knew a number of the scientists and engineers and their subordinates by name and could recognize a great many more on sight. Despite their wildly different specialties he chatted easily with them on many subjects, from food to football. But when they started talking about their business, to the limited degree that such general conversation was allowed, as far as he was concerned they might as well be from Mars.
No, that description was not quite apt, he told himself. He could understand the lilting patois favored by the Martian colonists quite well. The Titanites, of course, were quite another matter. Anyone who thought a bug-eyed top-heavy Martian was an extreme example of human melding had never set eyes on a Titanite. That included Kruger, who felt no need of such contact. He knew all about extreme melds because he had undergone the most radical of all.
The willing subject of one meld after another since the age of sixteen, he had been melded and remelded until he looked like—a Natural.
Gone were the forearm guns of which he had been so proud. Gone too the integrated vision and listening devices that had for years made his skull look more robotic than human. Gone the all-terrain lower limbs. To all intents and purposes he now looked like any other Natural, albeit one taller and more muscular than the average. As the quiet-voiced company interrogator who had conducted the final interview that had led to him being promoted to his present position had told him, “The SAEC prefers to cow those who might threaten it with integers that are at least outwardly unthreatening.”
Though to all appearances now wholly Natural, he walked with a stiffness of gait that was the unavoidable consequence of so many surgeries. Of all his former manips he had retained only a single meld, pleading with his new employers that it was undetectable to all but the most expert onlookers. Some discussion had ensued, the upshot of which was that the concession of his right eye had been granted.
Immensely intricate and quite expensive, a unique system of flexible organic lenses combined with highly miniaturized internal optics to allow him to see well into the infrared. At maximum focal length he had the long-range spatial acuity of an eagle. Muscle-driven compression allowed him close-up vision that verged on the microscopic. Not only could Het Kruger see to the heart of a matter, given a portable flexscope he could see well into the heart itself.
Soon after the last operation he found he did not miss the more macho melds, the guns and their accessories. He had matured beyond such tawdry displays of firepower. “Testostermelds” they were referred to as in some quarters—often with derision. Now in his midforties, after more than a quarter of a century in the security business, Kruger did not need to flaunt instruments of destruction to do his job or persuade the wayward. Looking into their eyes was sufficient.
That had been the case with the three diamond poachers, whose resolve had been broken and who had confessed quickly. Their abject pleas for sympathy did not save them. In the non-park portion of the Sperrgebeit the SAEC was judge, jury, and executioner. SICK justice, some would have called it. But such on-site jurisprudence and sentencing had been perfectly legal for a very long time indeed; first under the Germans, then the South Africans, the Namibians, and finally the SAEC. To Kruger’s knowledge it was the only part of the world where such summary justice could be handed down. Legally, anyway.
The lift halted two levels below the surface. As a security measure, none of the lifts in the research complex extended all the way from top to bottom. A vertical traveler always had to transfer between at least two to get back to the surface. As Kruger headed down the well-lit, comfortably air-conditioned corridor he exchanged brief glances or nods with those he knew. He never smiled. He would have blanched at the artificiality of it and those on whom such an expression might have been bestowed would have recognized it for the falsehood it represented. Within the facility he had many acquaintances and no friends. None of them objected to the seriousness of his mien. His task was to provide them with security and privacy, not amusement.
Coming toward him was a researcher he knew only as Changl. The scientist was conversing with a strange Meld. This in itself was not unusual. The SAEC facility played host to the strangest Melds Kruger, who knew something about strange Melds, had ever seen. He had often suspected that the purpose of the installation was to conduct research into new, ever more extreme, and therefore freshly profitable melds. A cosmetic or medical meld that hit it big could generate tremendous profits for any multinational, the SAEC among them. Given the level of sophistication that had been achieved by contemporary industrial espionage it was no wonder that the SAEC would choose to situate such an important research facility in an isolated, inaccessible, and heavily defended place like the Sperrgebeit, whose diamond-mining operations provided excellent cover for the comings and goings of scientific personnel and equipment.
Changl’s companion was a bloated, fat-faced creature who walk
ed with a rolling side-to-side gait, as if struggling to negotiate the deck of a ship in a heavy storm. The individual’s eyes were so dark as to render the pupils indistinct and wide enough to admit just enough light to satisfy a troglodyte. Though tempted to look around and examine the visitor’s backside Kruger maintained his stolid forward gaze. He was religiously indifferent to that which did not directly concern him—another trait of which his employers approved. But he could not help but wonder at the existence of such excess avoirdupois. In a world where the most complex variations on cosmetic melds were readily available, what kind of person deliberately sought obesity?
The majority of technicians, scientists, machinists, craftsmen, programmers, and other employees at the desert facility worked two months on and one off. Given his senior position Kruger could have done the same. He chose not to. His idea of a vacation was examining personnel files and researching the latest in sophisticated security gear. His employers were very happy with their choice of security chief.
But he did occasionally feel the need to get away from the installation’s subterranean confines. To stretch his legs on real ground and feel the sun flush on his face. He was not a termite, destined to spend all his waking hours underground. This time of year, when temperatures in the Namib were less than hellish, was his favorite. Stepping into a surface-access lift he acknowledged the four-armed Meld guard on duty, allowed the internal security system to read his biometrics, and waited patiently as it ascended the last two levels.
Emerging into the crowded surface warehouse, which had been carefully bedecked from the outside to look like an old metal storage building, he made his way among the stacks of crates and shipping cylinders and smaller packages to a side pedestrian exit. A visitor standing outside would see only an ordinary, weather-beaten door. To get to the ordinary door from the inside Kruger had to pass through a transparent domed tunnel sealed at either end and guarded by a large lod shouldering a massive automatic weapon.
As he walked the length of the short transparent passageway he drew a pair of automatically adjusting photosensitive shades from a pocket and slipped them over his eyes. Reaching the end he waited for clearance to sound. A moment later he was allowed to push open the door. With nothing left to impede his progress he stepped outside and into the Namib.
Sand. Sand and rock and sun. Not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass disturbed the sere serenity that assaulted his gaze. Leaving the warehouse and the rest of the deceptively ordinary-looking aboveground portion of the installation behind, he strode deliberately toward the nearest dune. Glistening like a lump of polished obsidian, a fat tok-tok beetle scurried to get out of his way. As he started up the dune he startled a burrowing lizard. It promptly vanished into the sand, surviving by sucking the air trapped between the grains.
Once at the top he turned and sat down. The panorama that greeted him would have appalled most people. As always, Kruger found it restful.
At his feet the visible portion of the research facility appeared to consist of nothing more than a cluster of dilapidated mining buildings, squarish structures of utilitarian gray metal zebra-striped with rust. Like so many other denizens of the Namib the ultramodern hospital-clean bulk of the complex lay hidden beneath the sand. Beyond the deceptively primitive upper layer of the facility, sand and dunes reached in all directions, the yellow-and-ochre surface of the earth broken only by folds of tormented rock or upthrusts of rust-red stone.
Against the edge of this isolated African coast smashed frigid white-crested waves tossed up by the Benguela Current, its dark green waters stretching to the western horizon and beyond; a sheet of uninterrupted ocean that ran flat and uninhabited all the way to the coast of South America. To the north and south the view was equally desolate. Save for the SAEC facility there was no sign of human habitation in all that silent, treeless wilderness. At once tortured and serene, it was a landscape only a geologist could love.
Sitting on the high dune, Kruger was content. Solitude was his friend, newcomers a potential problem. Propelled by the incoming breeze off the sea and utilizing the first thermals for lift, a seabird came soaring past on wings of dirty ivory. Perhaps it knew from experience that where humans resided, edible garbage was usually not far behind.
Mildly disconcerted at having his meditation disturbed, Kruger shot it in the middle of its querulous cry. Not for the research facility’s chief of security a weapon as irresolute as a neuralizer. The small but powerful explosive shell his sidearm fired atomized all but a few feathers of the luckless visitor. Spiraling slowly downward they made little white sketches in the atmosphere where the unknowing avian intruder had only a second earlier gracefully displaced the air.
As he holstered his sleek, compact weapon Kruger tracked their forlorn descent to the sand. They barely had time enough to touch the earth before the wind swept them over the crest of the dune and out of sight. He was almost disappointed that it had been a real bird and not an espionage simulacrum or some other clever variation on an intruding spy meld. Putting the incident out of his mind he returned his full attention to contemplation of the vast expanse of empty sea. Oblivious to the brief, loud crack of his gun, the dark green rollers continued their remorseless, patient assault on the ancient shore.
He felt no remorse. Having shot people for unauthorized intrusion he saw no reason why a bird should be exempt. In today’s world one could never be sure whether a nonhuman intruder was real, synthetic, or manip-compromised. One of the guiding tenets of his profession was never to take chances. As a consequence he trusted nothing that smacked of the living. Even a tok-tok beetle might conceal a clever tick-tock mechanism. He took great care and considerable pride in seeing to the security of he knew not what.
That was the greatest irony of his job: he had no idea what he was guarding. He knew no more about the purpose of the facility or the nature of the research that was carried out on its gleaming multiple subterranean levels than did those company workers who provided food for the scientists and engineers, kept the toilets clean, polished the floors, or serviced the air-conditioning. He was simply another employee, one rather more heavily armed than most. His staff consisted of armed Naturals and Melds as well as technical experts who monitored and maintained the elaborate layers of electronics that guarded the facility’s interior and kept watch on its perimeter. The latter included maniped animals like the spotted hyena patrols as well as people.
Having been in the security business for some time now he occasionally found it difficult to tell the latter from the former. On the whole, he found that he preferred the company of quadrupedal hyenas to the two-legged kind.
It was not that he was uncurious about what went on at the facility. Surely an installation so expensive to staff and sustain, set in such an isolated location, must generate some kind of income for the company. But no product that he could discern ever left on the company helicopters. No direct mining that he could perceive occurred in its vicinity, the substantial diamond mining operation being entirely and completely a separate facility. As near as he could tell, those who worked at the research facility had zero contact with those at the nearby mining complex.
He never expressed such interest to the very few men and women who ranked as his superiors. Intellectual curiosity in a security chief was not a quality that was welcomed. Though cordial to fellow employees, he and his underlings stood slightly apart from them. This separation was not by choice but out of necessity. It was hard to become close to those on whom one was consistently spying. Sometimes it could be painful. For his part Kruger remained affable but reserved. It was a characteristic he strove to inculcate in all of his subordinates.
And now this alert. He didn’t like surprises.
It had arrived a week ago in the form of a morning memo.
Nothing overly excited, nothing suggesting that someone corporate in Cape Town or Joburg was suffering from a panic attack. Merely a suggestion that for a little while security should be tightened, that the u
sual level of watchfulness should be raised a degree or two. There was no explanation for the request. Perhaps it was nothing more than a test, Kruger thought—though he took quiet umbrage at the notion that the security put in place and maintained by his team was ever anything less than optimal. Still, he went through the motions of complying. Called a meeting of his assistants and advised them of the contents of the memo. Laid on a few extra outlying patrols. Had all equipment checked for updates and reliability. Made sure all of the electronics were in working order.
Nothing happened. No armed assault took place on the facility. No maniped creatures attempted an intrusion. The usual comings and goings of unusual melded visitors and their Natural guides continued as they always had. Nothing in the nature of a threatening or even atypical activity manifested itself.
He had almost forgotten all about it when the call came in.
That in itself was not normal. Usually all incoming calls intended for or directed to specific personnel were routed through the facility’s central communications center. There they were screened for content, traced to origin, and decrypted before being passed along to their intended recipient. This one rang his personal phone and when he acknowledged it, provided an image to accompany the audio.
He frowned as he studied the caller’s portrait. It evinced no sign of encryption, almost as if the individual on the other end had been able to contact him directly. That was impossible, of course. Such a person-to-person exchange of information, however harmless, would constitute a grave breach of installation security.