Great North Road (115 page)

“Got some delivery duties for you,” Dr. Coniff said when he was halfway back to biolab-2. “Five confirmed cases of stomach flu, and a lot more reporting early symptoms. They’re going to need taraxophan to bring it down.”

“Okay, I’ll be back with you in a minute.”

“Take the three Tropics; Juanitar will visit the trucks and MTJs.”

“What about the biolabs? Nobody in 2 seemed to be suffering. Why haven’t we caught it?”

“We have,” Coniff replied. “Miya and Zhao have got it. I don’t feel too good myself.”

“Damn, what the hell caused this?”

“Got to be food poisoning. Too many of us got it simultaneously for it to be contagion.”

“It’s that bloody composition food,” Mark said immediately. “There’s got to be something wrong with the mealmakers.”

“Probably. We’ll isolate the cause later. Right now I want to get everyone dosed up and hydrating.”

“Sure.” Mark looked ahead to see where biolab-2 was. The weather was starting to worsen, and Sirius had nearly left the sky. It was going to be a long, very unpleasant night. He didn’t like to think what conditions were going to get like in the vehicles—after all, there weren’t that many panseats. It would probably be best if people just went outside, dropped their trousers, and squatted. Except that wasn’t so easy with all the layers. And the monster, he acknowledged sagely.

As he passed truck 1 he saw a silvered cylinder away on the snow over by the towering trees. It must have fallen off MTJ-1 during the test drive. He knew the cylinders contained spares; each vehicle carried its own inventory, even the biolabs. And with the way the snow was fluttering about, it could well be covered by morning. Those spares were important.

“Hell,” he muttered under his breath. It wouldn’t take more than a minute to walk over there, and he could even see the wheel tracks the MTJ had left, a path leading directly to the cylinder.

Mark started off toward the forsaken cylinder. It turned out to be farther away than he’d estimated. Judging distance in the blank snow was always tricky. The MTJ tracks were curving now, skirting the bullwhips and metacoyas. The trees had helped mislead him, too, they were bigger than he’d thought, distorting scale as much as the interminable white land.

He was a couple of meters from the cylinder when he saw the footprint. It was to the side of the lines of compressed snow left by the broad low-pressure tires, out where the snow was untouched. Its shape confused him at some deep instinctual level. Never mind someone had been out here with the MTJ; there was something else wrong with it. He stopped and bent over, shoving his goggles up so he could examine the profile properly. It took a moment, but eventually he realized just what it was that caught his attention. “Toes?” he exclaimed. A foot had made the imprint, not a boot. Someone was walking around without anything on their feet. And how unbelievably stupid was that?

Snow fell, making a loud pattering sound.

“What?” Mark turned around, staring at the source of the noise. A thick cataract of snow was tumbling from the nearest bullwhip, a huge specimen reaching over sixty meters up into the iridescent sky. That became an irrelevance to Mark as he caught sight of the figure standing amid the trees. So he never noticed the snow had fallen from one of the bullwhip’s coiled branches as it quivered and shook, sloughing off the frozen casing. The figure standing fifty meters away was a dark outline, humanoid, but in no way human.

“Craponit!” Mark yelled. He ordered his e-i to quest an emergency link to the convoy net. The creature wasn’t moving, wasn’t charging toward him. “Help,” Mark pleaded down the link. “Oh, help.” In front of him the creature raised its arms, hands with long blade fingers moved elegantly through the air.

“What’s happening?” Elston demanded.

Mark watched in silent amazement as the creature’s arms wove around in fast elaborate motions. All he could think of was conductor leading an orchestra in some wild discordant aria.

The low bullwhip branch liberated from its shawl of snow uncoiled with a rapid serpentine motion. At the trunk it was as broad as a human torso, a width that tapered down to a few centimeters at the tip. It slashed out like a loosened hurricane whorl, releasing all the pent-up compression energy that the constriction fibers had built up in the months since it had flung its last load of spores across the countryside. Instead of extending itself horizontally to give the spores their greatest dispersal trajectory, the constriction fibers along the branch twisted, sending the branch lashing downward.

Mark Chitty never saw or heard it coming. The section of the branch that struck him was thicker than his thigh, and it caught him on his side, just above his pelvis.

His bodymesh fired off a frantic medical alert, sending the gruesome damage details into the convoy net.

Elston: “Chitty!”

Coniff: “What’s happening? What—”

Juanitar: “Mark!”

Mark hit the ground hard, rolling over a couple of times. He wheezed down a shaky breath as his blurred vision started to regain focus. The incredible pain started to drift away as if he’d been toxed. A dark red mist was compressing his returning sight; his grid churned into nonsense then blanked out. High above him he saw the bullwhip branch curling itself back into a neat horizontal coil, the furry white strands on its bark rippling like the hackles on some agitated animal.

His head sagged to one side, and he was looking at the creature again. It continued its mad conductor’s dance, arms urging the unheard symphony up to its crescendo.

“It’s alive,” a dazed, fascinated Mark told his frantic colleagues. “All of it.”

Another bullwhip branch came hurtling down, smashing him ten meters across the snow, breaking both legs. He had barely come to rest when he was struck again, each blow shunting him deeper into the cluster of trees. After the third impact his consciousness began to dwindle. He could feel no part of his ruined body now. And still the creature stood where he’d first seen it. Long blade fingers swept out in exuberant triumph, their gloss-black surfaces refracting Sirius’s enfeebled red light through the swirling snow, as they puppeted the bullwhips.

Mark’s inert body was pummeled farther and farther into the big trunks. Again and again the bullwhips struck, pulping him to a flaccid sack of broken flesh with tattered limbs flopping about. Blood soaked into his layered clothing, pouring out of skin punctures where shattered bones had ripped through. Droplets left dark stains on the pristine snow, the only evidence of his passing. Most of his smartcells were wrecked, and all that was left of his bodymesh broadcast a feeble signal.

The final swipe sent him thudding down beside a huge bullwhip, out of sight from the convoy vehicles. Half of its coiled branches began to judder, shaking off their crisp ice coating. Snow cascaded down, burying Mark’s corpse and blocking the last of his bodymesh’s emissions. More of the bullwhips started shaking snow loose, covering all traces of blood and the impressions Mark had left along his brutal route to oblivion.

Vance forced himself to take part in the search, even though his body was on the point of collapse from whatever poison he’d been blighted with. Only eight of the convoy’s personnel were unaffected, including Paresh Evitts and Dean Creshaun. That was the giveaway—neither of the two injured men had been given composition meals. Luther, on the other hand, had insisted he be treated the same as everyone else, and proudly spooned down some broth churned out by the biolab’s mealmaker machine. The remaining six—Lorelei, Lulu MacNamara, Leora Fawkes, Antrinell, Karizma Wadhai, and Leif Davdia—had all avoided the composition meal that lunchtime.

Vance ordered all of them out into the glimmering twilight, except for Lulu. The catering girl would have been a complete liability traipsing around the countryside, even if she had done as he asked.

Twice in the last thirty minutes Vance had dropped to his knees and vomited weakly onto the snow. He was shaking continually, while his skin flushed and soaked his clothing layers with sweat. His headache ebbed and flowed, often forcing him to stand still and suck down air when the pain spikes became too much to endure. Raddon and Mohammed had insisted on taking part, claiming their symptoms weren’t too bad. Dr. Coniff had monitored their medical smartcells and disagreed. Vance had overruled her.

So now the eight of them were strung out in a loose line, searching through the edge of the trees as the wind sent zephyrs of snow twisting about the trunks and the aurora borealis cast its eerie glow, throwing the huge trees looming above them in unnerving black silhouette. Behind them, every vehicle in the convoy had turned to face the broad clump of trees and switched on their headlights. The scatter of white light created a multitude of confusing shadows washing across the ground. Vance was also monitoring the remote machine guns on the vehicles, which were tracking the search party, alert for any unexplained movement around them.

Every possible precaution taken, and still Vance felt as if he were walking along a precipice. The creature was out here. He knew it. Somehow it had caught up with them.

The vehicle meshes had provided a rough coordinate for Chitty’s last position. They’d found nothing there, of course. There had been a series of sharp degradations in the link strength and bandwidth during the attack. Whatever the creature had done to him, it had been in stages. Dr. Coniff had said the last readings effectively confirmed his death. So the search party members were out in the murky arctic conditions searching for a corpse. And with his body failing him, Vance couldn’t even remember if the Lord had a reason for him to be doing that anymore.

Mohammed let out a low moan and stumbled onto all fours. He swayed back and forth a couple of times. Vance thought the Legionnaire was going to be sick again. But instead Mohammed keeled over next to a massive ice-encrusted metacoya trunk, still groaning. Leora and Antrinell hurried over to him. Vance would have liked to help, but simply didn’t have the energy. In fact, glancing back at the headlights, he wasn’t sure if he could make it back to the convoy unaided. The white light inflamed his headache.

“Come on,” Antrinell said over the ringlink. “Let’s get you back.”

“You need to bring him to me,” Coniff said. “I’m accessing his medical smartcells. His heart rhythm is becoming erratic. Colonel, you and Raddon need to come in as well.”

“Okay,” Vance rasped. A powerful spasm ran down his body. He couldn’t even lift his arms anymore. There was no sign of Chitty, no clue what had happened to him.

“Time to go, Colonel,” Lorelei was saying to him. “The search is over now.”

He hadn’t even noticed her coming over to him, but her icon was there in his grid, and her arm was slipping under his shoulder. Another identity icon appeared in close proximity to his own. Leif was holding him on the other side.

“You need to lie down.”

Vance wanted to nod in profound agreement. Instead, he fainted.

After the uncontrollable bouts of vomiting. After the humiliating diarrhea. After the hot and cold flushes. After the sweats and shaking. After inhaling the stench of everyone else’s suffering in Tropic-2. After drinking water thick with rehydration salts, and bumping sacs of taraxophan, Angela finally started to take notice of her surroundings again. She must have been dozing, she thought; it was the middle of the night.

The Tropic’s cabin was dark, but the headlights were on, fluorescing the condensation that coated the windshield. She was sitting in the front passenger seat. She vaguely remembered getting there after ducking outside when her sphincter started to send urgent warning signals along her spine yet again.

“How are you feeling?” Forster croaked from the backseat.

“Like crap.” She blinked, trying to get some proper focus. “Actually, about how you look.”

“Yeah,” he said, and immediately closed his eyes. His skin was a sickly shade of gray, and damp with sweat. Both arms were twitching under the blanket he’d draped over himself. A thin stream of damp vomit stained the front of it. That was the mildest thing she could smell.

“Where’s everyone else?” she asked.

“Raddon’s in biolab-2,” he said without opening his eyes. “They took him there after the search. Stupid pillock, trying to be a macho hero. Juanitar is treating him as best he can; he’s suffering, too. Most of us still are. Madeleine recovered quickly, but that’s youth for you. She’s over in Tropic-3 helping Garrick, Winn, and Darwin; they’ve got it pretty bad.”

“Right.” Angela looked around for something to drink. Her flask was in its usual place in the door holder. Thankfully it was just pure water; she remembered gagging on the rehydration salt solution someone had made her drink, it was so foul. She took a few cautious sips, fearful they’d trigger another bout of nausea. After waiting a couple of minutes, she took a proper drink.

Forster had drifted back into a troubled sleep, quaking occasionally below his filthy blanket.

“Show me everyone’s location,” she told her e-i. Her grid materialized, along with a constellation of identity icons. That was when she noticed the whir of servos above her. The remote gun was armed and slowly sweeping from side to side, ready to blast anything approaching the convoy.

“Everyone is accounted for,” her e-i said.

“Good.” She expanded Elston’s icon, viewing the readings from his medical smartcells with some alarm. “Who’s running the show?”

With Elston out of the game, Antrinell had taken charge. He’d organized efficiently, dispatching those who weren’t affected to care for everyone else. Not that much could be done. The food poisoning, if that’s what it was, left its victims utterly debilitated.

Before she succumbed to a raging fever that sent her drifting in and out of lucidity, Dr. Coniff had instructed that rehydration was the priority. She also issued the maximum dose of taraxophan; the drug boosted the human immune system, which should help the body fight off the sickness, but it was known to put a lot of strain on organs.

Other than that, Antrinell had ordered the remote guns to full armed status, and had someone on constant monitor duty, accessing the few remaining sensors available to the convoy. His policy was shoot first and go see what they’d hit after.