Stig got off the loop train on platform three in the Carralvo terminal, a giant multi-segment modernistic building of white concrete bled even whiter in California’s unforgiving sunlight. Despite the sheer size of the structure, it thrummed and vibrated from the passage of trains which wound in and out of it along elegant curving viaducts, that were sometimes stacked three high thanks to elaborate twisting buttresses. He could have found his way around the Carralvo in complete darkness, and not just the public areas; the utility corridors, management offices, and staff facilities were all loaded in his insert files. Not that he really needed the reference. The other seven passenger terminals were equally familiar.
He had spent years working here. If the Guardians could be said to have a regular base of operations in the Commonwealth it was at LA Galactic. It was the perfect, and essential, place for them. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of industrial and consumer products were routed between its gateways every day: food imports came to over a million tonnes, while raw materials in transit accounted for an even bigger market. Thousands of import-export companies, from the Intersolar giants to virtuals that were no more than a coded array space and a numbered bank account, had their offices and warehouses and transport depots within the city-sized station compound. Each one plugged into the giant network of rails and CST cargo-handling facilities, both physically and electronically. Each one with multiple accounts in the finance network. Each one with links to the Regulated Goods Directorate. Each one with offices, from entire skyscrapers to suites of leased rooms. They grew, shrank, went bankrupt, floated and went Intersolar, moved headquarters from one block to another, changed personnel, merged, fought each other bitterly for contracts. It was super-capitalism in a confined pressure-cooker environment that was merciless to any weakness.
Over the decades, Adam Elvin had formed and folded dozens of companies at LA Galactic. He wasn’t alone. The number of companies that came and went within a single month could often be measured in hundreds. His were hidden amid the flow, no different to all the other chancers who set themselves up to supply markets they either knew about or believed in. He would create identities for himself, along with all the associated datawork, and use the name to register a company which wouldn’t be used for years. When he did start it up, it would be as a legitimate business competing for trade along with all the others.
It was a process which had served the Guardians well. Every operation to deliver armaments and equipment to Far Away involved a front at LA Galactic. It allowed him to track the shipments passively. And at some time all the items would pass though for checking, or switching, or to be disguised. As far as Paula Myo and the Serious Crimes Directorate knew, they were just another rented warehouse in the chain.
This time, with Johansson embarking upon his planet’s revenge project, and the navy becoming perilously efficient in pursuing them, the scale of the operation was larger than ever before, and its focus expanded. After Venice Coast, Adam was developing his paranoia to new heights.
Lemule’s Max Transit had leased an entire floor of the Henley Tower, an unimaginative thirty-five-storey glass and carbon and concrete building on the San Diego side of LA Galactic, standing in the forest of similar office towers which made up one of the station’s commercial administration parks. Twenty Guardians worked in its offices. Four of them were occupied by the shipments of illicit goods to Far Away, while the rest devoted themselves to security.
As soon as Stig bought his ticket for the loop train he sent a message to a one-time unisphere address. Kieran McSobel, who was on duty at the Lemule office, received it, and as procedure required, launched a battery of onlook software into the planetary cybersphere. The programs installed themselves in the nodes which served the loop train Stig was using. They began analysing the data flowing through the nodes.
The results flipped up across Kieran’s virtual vision. ‘Damnit. Marisa, we’ve got internal encrypted traffic in Stig’s train. Five sources, one in his carriage.’
On the other side of the open plan office, Marisa McFoster accessed the onlook information. ‘That doesn’t look good. It’s a standard box formation. The navy’s burned him. Shit!’ She called Adam.
‘We need the software he’s carrying,’ Adam said. ‘Can we go for a dead recovery?’
‘The bots are in place,’ Marisa said. She ran diagnostics on the little machines, bringing them up to operational status. ‘We’ve got time. Gareth is covering the Carralvo. He can walkby.’
‘Do it.’
‘What about Stig?’
Adam kept his face composed, not showing the youngsters how worried he was. How the hell did the navy find him? ‘We can’t break the box – that’ll alert the navy and betray our own capability. He’ll have to do it himself. Send him a discontinue and break order when we’ve confirmed recovery. And activate the Venice safe house. He’ll have to undergo reprofiling if he makes it there.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Marisa said.
‘Don’t worry. He’s good, he’ll make it.’
*
Stig walked down the long curving ramp at the end of the platform. It was one of ten which connected platforms to the central concourse where the flood of people had reached the density of a baseball stadium crowd rushing for their seats. High overhead, the concrete dome ceiling was supported by giant spider-leg pillars, their sharp bends making it seem as if they might just be able to lower the whole mass at any time. It was his theory that was why people were always in such a rush here, subconsciously they were trying to get out before the collapse happened.
He counted off the emergency exits as he moved along the ramp. When he reached the concourse it would take another three and a half minutes to get to the taxi rank. From there to the office would take another ten minutes at least, depending on how heavy traffic was on the station compound’s internal highways.
Ahead of him, Gareth stepped onto the ramp, and began walking up. He was wearing a smart grey jacket over a yellow shirt.
Training made sure Stig didn’t turn his head as the two of them passed. But it was hard. Grey on yellow. A dead recovery order. There could only be one reason for that, he was under observation.
They were good, he had to admit that. For the whole trip back from Oaktier he’d been checking, and hadn’t seen any-one. Of course, it could be a virtual surveillance; a team with an RI hacking onto him through public cameras and sensors. Even harder to shake.
As he stepped off the ramp, the concourse layout was looming large in his mind. He headed left for the even-numbered platforms, then took one of the triple escalators down to the lower-level mall. All the while he was watching. It was difficult now. He was conscious of looking up when he reached the mid-level and took the next set of escalators. The sure sign of someone hunting for a box. Would it tip them off? Yet if they’d been following him, they would have seen him going through the check routine. Not looking might be worse. He settled for a brief, casual, glance upwards, locking the image in an insert file.
As the escalator slipped smoothly downwards he studied the ghostly image in his virtual vision. There was one person up there, a typical west-coast surfer standing close to the balcony rail, who had also got off the loop train from Seattle. He hadn’t been in the same carriage, though. Stig expanded the image and studied the man. Thick blond hair in a ponytail, sharp nose, square jaw, casual plain blue shirt and jeans. He couldn’t tell. But the image was on instant recall now.
The escalator delivered him to the marble and neon mall, and he walked over to the public washroom. Most of the stalls were empty. A couple of guys were using the urinals. Father and young son at the washbasins.
Stig took the second empty stall, locked the door, and dropped his pants. If the box had covered the washroom ahead of him, there was nothing for them to be suspicious about yet. On his hand-held array he transferred the software he’d collected from Kareem into a memory crystal, and ejected the little black disk from the unit. He put it into a standard-looking plast
ic case, wrapped that in toilet tissue, and dropped it into the pan. It flushed away easily enough, and he left the stall to wash his hands.
When he went back out into the mall, the blond-haired man in the blue shirt was window shopping twenty metres away.
Stig went into the nearest sports shop and bought himself a new pair of trainers, paying cash. The box team would have to check that out. Next was a department store for a pair of sunglasses. He went back up to the main concourse, and stopped at one of the small stalls that sold tourist T-shirts and chose a fairly decent sun hat. Then he went along to the left luggage lockers and put his credit tattoo on the locker he’d taken three days before. It opened, and he removed the black shoulder bag which contained the emergency kit.
Without looking back or running any more checks he went straight to the taxi rank. As the revolving door offered him up to the warm Californian sunlight, Stig smiled. Despite the seriousness of being burned, he was going to enjoy the next few hours.
*
The warehouses didn’t annoy Adam as much as the districts of office towers which nestled along the southern side of LA Galactic. He hated the multitude of handling and transport companies that survived in parasitic bondage with the CST rail network. They were true capitalist entities, producing nothing, charging people to supply products, adding to the cost of living on a hundred worlds, living off those who worked in production. Not, he had to concede, that those who worked in production these days were the old working classes in a true Marxist definition; they were all engineers who went around troubleshooting cybernetics. But for all the changes and undeniable improvements automation and consumerism had brought to the proletariat’s standard of living, it hadn’t changed the financial power structure which ruled the human race. A tiny minority controlled the wealth of hundreds of worlds, bypassing, buying, or corrupting governments to maintain their dominance. And here he was, living among them, a keen consumer of their products, daunted by their size, his life’s purpose almost lost as he sold more and more of himself to Johansson’s cause. A cause which was now giving him a great deal of concern. It wasn’t something he’d told anyone – after all, who could he tell? – but he was having to face up to the daunting, and terrifying, prospect that Bradley Johansson might just be right about the Starflyer. The whole Prime situation was too odd, there were too many coincidences piling up: the Second Chance mission, the barrier disappearing, Hell’s Gateway, the attack on Venice Coast. Adam was certain there was going to be a war, and he wasn’t sure which side the Commonwealth government was going to be on.
So he went about the meticulous job of assembling Johans-son’s equipment without his usual cynicism. The party had been avoided for a long time now, he didn’t provide any chapter on any planet with support. It was the Guardians who received his full attention. Crazy, enthusiastic, devoted youngsters from Far Away, who were riding gleefully off on their crusade and didn’t have a single clue how the Confederation worked. They were the ones he was protecting, guiding like some old mystic promising nirvana at the end of the road. Except today it looked like Stig wasn’t going to make it.
The station car drove him carefully along the internal highways into the Arlee district, a hundred square miles of warehouses on the east side of LA Galactic. The blank-faced composite buildings were laid out in a perfect grid. Some were so large they took up an entire block, while some blocks had as many as twenty separate units. They all had light composite walls and black solar cell roofs, cumbersome air conditioning units sprouted from walls and edges like mechanical cancers, their radiant fans shining a dull orange under the hot sunlight. There were no sidewalks, and cars were a rarity on these roads. Vans and large trucks trundled along everywhere, their driver arrays navigating the simple path between their loading bay and a rail cargo handling yard on a 24/7 basis. But at least this district involved the physical movement of goods, it wasn’t the dealing and moneymaking of the offices. That normally made it bearable for him.
He drove into the loading bay park at the Lemule’s Max Transit warehouse, a medium-sized building, enclosing four acres of floor space. Bjou McSobel and Jenny McNowak were working inside. Lemule’s had a big order for sourcing and supplying packager modules for a supermarket chain on five phase two worlds, and their crates were stacked up across half of the cavernous interior awaiting shipment orders. Flat-bed loaders and fork-lifts slid up and down the lanes between the high metal ledges, shuffling farm equipment, carpentry tools, GPbots, domestic hologram portals, and a hundred other items which formed the company’s legitimate business, pack-aging them for their train ride out across the planets. By itself, Lemule’s Max Transit was a viable operation. Every morning when he left his hotel on the coast and drove into LA Galactic, Adam felt the irony that after so many years spent running identical concerns he could manage a transit company far better than the entrepreneurs and opportunist chancers who were desperate for their own company to succeed.
Bjou closed the heavy roll door at the end of the loading bay as Adam got out of the car. ‘How are we doing?’ Adam asked.
‘Jenny has opened the access hatch. The S&Ibot should be here in another forty minutes.’
‘It definitely retrieved the case?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Some good news, then.’
They went down to the far end of the warehouse where the Guardians had set up a secure area. Bjou and Jenny had been preparing a shipment of equipment for Far Away, disguising the components in basic industrial tools and consumer electronics due for shipment to Armstrong City. On the other side of the open crates and disassembled machines a concealed manhole cover had been opened in the enzyme-bonded concrete floor. Below it was a small circular shaft leading down five metres to one of the sewer pipes which served LA Galactic. That too had been breached, the hole sealed up again with a flush-fitting hatch. Jenny was sitting on the rim of the shaft, an anxious expression on her face as she followed the progress of their S&Ibot through the maze of sewer pipes which lay underneath LA Galactic.
‘No problems, sir,’ she said. ‘Our monitors haven’t picked up anything tracking the bot.’
‘Okay, Jenny, keep on it.’
Bjou pulled over a couple of chairs, and Adam sat down gratefully. His e-butler reported an encrypted call from Kieran.
‘Sir, we thought you should know. Paula Myo just arrived on a loop train from Seattle. She’s being escorted by CST security personnel. Looks like they’re going to the operational centre.’
A little shiver of cold ran down Adam’s spine. If she was giving Stig’s operation her personal attention then she knew he was important.
‘Do you want us to hack into their internal network?’ Kieran asked. ‘We might be able to see what she’s doing.’
‘No,’ Adam said immediately. ‘We can’t guarantee a clean hack, not into CST security. I don’t want them tipped off we know about them. That’s Stig’s only advantage right now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Adam resisted putting his head in his hands. He sat on the hard plastic seat, staring at the secret hole in the floor, while he called up files and displayed them across his virtual vision. Somewhere there had to be a weak link, a way Paula had found to infiltrate his couriers. When the faint amber information floated in front of him he cursed himself for making such an elementary mistake. Stig was collecting soft-ware from an insider at the Shansorel Partnership, the same insider who had supplied regulator software for a set of microphase modulators which Valtare Rigin had acquired. It would have had the partnership’s signature embedded in the sub-routines. Easy to trace. ‘Damnit,’ he grunted. ‘I’m getting old. And stupid.’
‘Is everything all right, sir?’ Bjou asked.
‘Yeah, I think so.’
*
Tarlo was waiting in the operations room of LA Galactic’s CST security department when Paula Myo came in.
‘Sorry chief,’ he said. ‘I think he made me when he came out of the can.’
She
nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
He glanced at the CST security officer who’d escorted Paula. The whole department had rolled over and given full cooperation at the mere mention of her name. ‘We should have gone for a virtual observation.’
‘I have my suspicions about their electronic support capability. They certainly found your box fast enough. If they’re that good they would have been aware of a virtual as soon as we began it.’ She turned to the security officer. ‘I’d like a clean office we can use as our field headquarters, please.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He showed them down a corridor to an empty office, and activated the systems, giving them full access.
‘There’s a support team en route from Paris, they’ll be here in half an hour,’ Paula told Tarlo when they were alone again. ‘They’ll be able to back up the rest of your crew.’
‘It should have been a bigger op from the start.’
‘I know. It was very short notice.’ Paula surprised herself by how easy it was to tell the lie. It wasn’t something she was practised in. But the support team was inevitable now. What she had to concentrate on was the people who knew before the target had started to rabbit. That was where the leak must have originated.
‘Are you sure he discovered the box?’ she asked Tarlo, uncomfortably aware that he’d been on the Venice Coast operation.
‘He’s on a courier run, right?’ Tarlo said. ‘That’s what you told us. But he went through his little spotter routine, then went and retrieved something else from the locker. That is not what happens. You run the route as quickly as possible, you don’t pick up a second item, that doubles the risk. Besides, I was watching him, he knows he’s been made.’ He gave a lame shrug. ‘My opinion, for what it’s worth.’