FALLEN DRAGON (49 page)

Odel was almost past the derelict shops when he stopped and spun around. Nearby civilians stared at him fearfully, wondering what they'd done. The Skin helmet's visual sensors zoomed in, the T-shirt filling his vision.

"Sergeant!" he called. "Sergeant, I've found something. Sergeant, come and see this. Sergeant!"

"What is it?"

"You've got to see this." Odel untied the T-shirt. The white lettering on the chest read
Silverqueen Reef Tours Cairns.

Inside his hot Skin, Odel started shivering. He switched his sensors back onto the bottle. The liquid inside...

Lawrence waited in the anteroom as various aides scurried in and out of the mayor's study. Every time one of them slipped in he wanted to barge past, to demand Ebrey Zhang's attention. Forty-five frustrating minutes so far.

Captain Bryant had finally lost patience with him after a fruitless hour in the barracks, which they'd spent arguing. "You've had my answer, Sergeant," he snapped. "I cannot authorize any further action at this point."

"Then who can?" Lawrence asked. Given the way Z-B's strategic security force was structured, you simply couldn't be more insulting to your senior officer. Both of them knew it.

Captain Bryant took a moment to compose himself. "You have my authority to raise this with Commander Zhang. Dismissed, Sergeant."

No matter how the meeting with Zhang went, Lawrence had blown it with Bryant. He found himself smiling on the walk over to Memu Bay's town hall. He couldn't give a flying fuck about Bryant and the report he would now be getting from the captain at the end of the campaign. He'd just gone and committed himself. Up until that moment his own private little asset-realization mission had been theoretical. The pieces were in place, but still he had held back from initiating anything. Then that one heated question had relieved him of any conscious decision-making.

Typical,
he told himself wryly.
Every major turning point in my life is decided by flashes of temper.

Thirty minutes into his wait, the City Hall lights flickered and went out. They were getting used to cuts in the hotel that the platoon had adopted as its barracks. The power supply failed most evenings when someone burned the cable, or lobbed a Molotov at a substation. But the fusion plant itself was always left intact: after all, the town would need that after Z-B left. It wasn't just the barracks that suffered; power to the factories was interrupted. Internal rumor had it that they were over 20 percent behind on their asset-realization schedule.

Lawrence smiled to himself as shouts of alarm and annoyance echoed around the spacious cloisters. The overhead lights glowed like dim embers for a minute; then about a third of them slowly returned to full brightness as the emergency power supply came online, leaving the rest dark. Shadows swelled up out of the ornate arches and alcoves. If City Hall was anything like the hotel, the cells wouldn't have managed to fully recharge since the last time. Their swimming pool had been emptied a week ago because of the power drain that the filtration and heating element placed on the hotel's reserves.

One of Ebrey Zhang's aides called him in. Lawrence pulled down the bottom of his dress tunic and went through the open doors. He halted in front of the big desk and saluted. All of the study lights were on.

"Sergeant," Ebrey Zhang acknowledged with a wearied tone. A hand waved the aide out of the room, leaving the two of them alone. Ebrey moved back in his seat, picking up a desktop pearl to play with. He smiled. "You've been giving Captain Bryant a hard time, Newton."

Lawrence had been hoping for the easy routine. He remembered Ebrey Zhang from a couple of campaigns ago, when he'd been a captain. The man was a good enough officer, a realist, who understood the principles of command. Knowing when to be a ballbuster and when to listen.

"Sir. It's one of my men, sir."

"Yes, I know that. But leave off Bryant. He's new, and young, and still finding his feet. I'll have a word with him this time, but that's all."

"Thank you, sir. And Johnson?"

"I know." Ebrey sighed reluctantly. "But be realistic, Newton, what can I do that Bryant hasn't done already? If you can give me any hint where to search, I'll chopper ten platoons there immediately."

"He's dead, sir. There's no point in searching. We have to show them they can't get away with that. None of us will be safe unless you do something."

"Ah.
They.
I take it you mean this KillBoy character?"

"Yes, sir, it seems likely. It's his group that is organizing all this. You have to turn the citizens against them. Make everyone understand that he's going to get them killed if he doesn't stop. Without their support he's nothing."

"KillBoy, the conveniently phantom enemy."

"Sir, we've been shot at, booby-trapped, maimed, injured, put in the hospital. We're almost clocking up as many casualties as we did on Santa Chico. Half the platoons are scared to set foot outside the barracks. He's no phantom, sir."

"You really think it's that bad?"

"Yes, sir, I do."

"I know it's tough on the street right now, Newton. But we've faced tougher. I have a lot of confidence in people like you to get the squaddies through this and lift intact at the end of it."

"Do my best, sir. But we need help to keep people in order."

Ebrey turned the rectangular desktop pearl over a couple of times, staring morosely at the furled pane. "I do understand what you're saying, Newton. However, I have a problem right now. It's going to be very difficult to use collateral when this TB threat is still ongoing. Thallspring's population sees us killing them anyway with the disease. I have to be totally convinced that they have murdered Jones Johnson before I can activate a necklace."

"Sir. It's his blood. Four liters of it DNA checks out one hundred percent."

"And that's my problem. Where's the rest? You see, he can survive that loss easily enough. Infusing artificial blood isn't even a difficult medical procedure. Any teenager with a first-aid proficiency certificate could manage it. So what happens after I flood the datapool telling Memu Bay that we're retal
i
ating for them murdering one of my squaddies, and then he turns up alive after the necklace is activated? Have you thought of that? Because that's the situation here. This KillBoy can organize snipers and mysterious accidents. He can certainly hold on to a captive for a couple of weeks until we screw up. I simply cannot allow that to happen."

"He won't turn up, sir. They killed him." There were other things Lawrence wanted to mention. Like how the killers knew where to leave the bottle of blood in the first place. No one outside of Z-B knew the patrol route that the platoon would take, not even the local police. It was planned out in the operations center ten hours before they went out. Even he didn't get briefed until an hour beforehand. To his mind, e-alpha was totally compromised. Yet for all Ebrey Zhang's apparent reasonableness, he could imagine the commander's reaction if he blurted that out. Right now, it would be one conspiracy too many.

"You're probably right," Ebrey Zhang said. "And I've had personal experience on what it's like to lose a platoon member. More than one, in fact. So I know how you all feel right now. But I simply cannot take the risk. I'm sorry, Newton, genuinely sorry, but my hands are tied."

"Yes, sir. Thank you for seeing me, anyway."

"Listen, your platoon's had two casualties now. That will be making the rest edgy. Am I right?"

"They're not happy, sir, no."

"I'll speak with Bryant, have him assign you some extra relief time."

"Sir. Appreciate that."

"And you can tell your men from me: one more incident like this, and I won't hesitate in using collateral. They'll be safe on the streets from now on."

*
 
*
 
*

If he felt any irony at the time that he'd chosen, Josep Raichura didn't show it. One o'clock in the morning, and Durrell's spaceport was illuminated by hundreds of electric lights, making it seem as though a small patch of the galaxy had drifted down to the ground. White-pink light shone out from deserted office windows. Stark white light, with a bleed-in of violet, drenched the giant arboretum at the center of the terminal building. Vivid sodium-orange cast wide pools along the loops of road that webbed the entire field. Blue-star halogen fans burned out from the headlights of the very few vehicles driving along those roads. Dazzling solar cones were embedded within the tall monotanium arches that curved above the parking aprons like the supports of some missing bridge, illuminating -huge swaths of tarmac where the delta-shape spaceplanes waited silently.

An embroidery of dapples, overlapping in some areas, leaving others in somber darkness, and none of them revealing any activity. The universal indication of human installations dozing through the night shift. It was home only to the basic maintenance crews closeted in the big hangars, tending the myriad machines in readiness for the dawn and its surge of activity. Moving among the inert structures, and even fewer in number, were the Skins—the ones who'd drawn the bad duty—surly inside their private, invulnerable cocoons, resenting the tedium that came from walking the empty perimeter, the boredom of checking with the crews hunched over diagnostic instruments, the frustration of knowing that even when their duty did end they'd be too tired to enjoy the day (as much as any of them could in the hostile capital). Sticking with it nonetheless, because they knew this was the one place that had to remain secure if any of them were ever to get off this godforsaken planet and return home.

The spaceport at this time, then, was a little enclave of doleful and miserable people, serving their designated hours with an efficiency well below par. A time when human body
c
ycles were at their lowest; the classic time for nefarious raids and excursions. A time of vulnerability recognized as such by every guard commander since before the fall of Troy. And still they remained unable to install any sense of urgency and heightened alert among the men they led.

So Josep, armed though he was with his d-written body and Prime software, kept with tradition and history and used the small hours to make his exploratory foray. The perimeter was easy enough to breach. There was a fence, and lights, and electronic alarms that certainly never suffered from the human malaise during the night, and sentry Skins. Had he wanted to, he could have wriggled through it all like a special forces commando, with even the nocturnal animals unaware of his passing. But, frankly, when there's a huge front gate, why bother?

At noon, he rode his scooter up to one of the eight main road barriers, his little machine jammed between a juggernaut full of biochemicals and a convoy of cars belonging to afternoon-shift workers. He swiped his security card through the barricade's slot and took his crash helmet off for the AS to run a visual identity check. Every received byte tallied to the profile that his Prime had loaded into the spaceport network the previous day, and the red-and-white-striped barrier post whisked upward, allowing him through.

He drove carefully around the small roads linking hangars, warehouses and offices on the northern side of the sprawling glass and metal starfish that was the terminal building. Thallspring didn't possess a huge space program, but the respectable number of projects and commercial ventures it did have were all supported by Durrell's spaceport. Fifteen standard low-orbit (six hundred kilometers) stations circled above the equator. Twelve were industrial concerns, churning out valuable crystals, fibers and exotic chemicals for the planet's biggest commercial consortiums; the three others were resorts, catering to very rich tourists who endured the rigors of surface-to-orbit flight to marvel at the view and enjoy zero-gee swimming and freefall sex (occasionally combined) in heavily shielded stations. A small flotilla of interplanetary craft were maintained, principally to support the scientific research bases that the government had established on several planets. And orbiting a hundred thousand kilometers above the equator was the asteroid, Auley, which had been captured eighty years ago, to which clusters of refinery modules were now attached. Thousands of tons of superpure steel were produced there each month, then formed into giant aerodynamic bodies that were flown down through the atmosphere to feed Thallspring's metallurgical industry. In addition hundreds of other, more sophisticated, compounds that could be formed only in microgee conditions were extruded from the asteroid's raw ores and minerals and shipped down by more conventional means. In total, all this activity had developed to a stage where a fleet of over fifty spaceplanes were required to sustain it.

The Galaxycruisers were an indigenous design, so claimed the Thallspring National Astronautical Corporation, a consortium of local aerospace companies that built them— though anyone with full access to Earth's datapool would have noticed a striking similarity with the Boeing-Honda Stratostar 303 that had first flown in 2120, of which eight had been shipped to Thallspring. Whatever the origin, the scram-jet-powered spaceplanes were a success, boosting forty-five tons to low orbit, and capable of bringing down sixty tons.

Zantiu-Braun had diverted several of them from normal operational duties to lift its plundered assets up to the waiting starships. Given that most of the spaceplanes were already used to support the industry that provided the most high-value manufactured products of all, in the orbital stations, the number that could be taken out of scheduled flights was sorely limited. In any case, there were not enough passenger spaceplanes to lift the entire invasion force back up to the starships at the end of the campaign. So Z-B had brought forty-two of their own Xianti 5005 spaceplanes to augment the indigenous capacity.