Great North Road (33 page)

The Norths had established a sovereign state with its own constitution in the middle of the massive Ambrose continent, whose legitimacy was officially recognized by every Earth and trans-stellar government. Its border was a circle roughly two thousand kilometers in diameter encompassing the algaepaddies and farms—that was all they took responsibility for. Eastshields, the tiny port town on Ambrose’s northern coast where Motorway A finally ended, was the only other place where the primary constitution applied; and that town only existed to load and maintain the five cargo ships that sailed over to Abellia.

Way beyond the Great Jarrow Plain, and spread out along three thousand kilometers of Ambrose’s southeast coast, were the Independencies: St. Libra’s great attraction for the politically disaffected of Earth and the rest of the trans-stellar worlds. They comprised a plethora of tiny nation-states, each one proud and protective of its unique constitution. The first ones to be founded existed side by side on the mainland with clearly defined boundaries, while the more recently established communities were extending themselves out across the myriad islands of the vast Tyne Archipelago, colonizing a section that they’d named the Isles of Liberty. Just about every political and economic ideology humans had ever dreamed up, along with the full range of theocracies, could be found within the Independencies, providing a sanctuary for every type of dissident.

Everybody who traveled to that region of St. Libra, which was where all the emigrants of the last eighty years headed, did so along Motorway B, which wasn’t even tarmacked for most of its length. None of the Independency states owned a runway—they all treasured their isolation too much for quick contact with the trans-stellar society they’d rejected.

Angela’s mini bus pulled up beside one of the giant open-sided hangars, whose curving solar panel roof was big enough to shield both of the SuperRocs side by side had they ever been permitted a rest. A quarter of the concrete floor was taken up with HDA 350DL pallets and GL56 pods. Trestle tables had been set up near the row of portable toilet cabins, with chilled water dispensers and coolboxes of snack food.

“We’re here until the flight,” Paresh announced to his squad. “You are responsible for your own kitbag until we embark. Do not let it out of your sight.”

A wash of hot air gusted into the mini bus when Atyeo opened the doors. Angela hoisted her personal bag onto her shoulders, shoved a cotton sun hat down on her head, and went to collect her HDA-issue kitbag from the locker at the side of the mini bus.

Several hundred people were milling about in the hangar—a big contingent of Legionnaires, along with science staff and HDA technical support specialists. They all formed their own groups, with little cross-contact. Angela found the instinctive tribalism amusing.

She collected a flask of chilled water and a pack of sandwiches from the bored catering people, then joined Paresh’s squad, sitting on her kitbag and watching the unchanging landscape outside. Ground heat shimmer turned the air to a haze, making the distant buildings waver. Apart from a few HDA trucks and flatloaders rolling past in some weird dance between container stacks, nothing moved.

Transport corps staff arrived in a bus and drove the mini bus convoy away. Lieutenant Pablo Botin came over and announced that the SuperRoc was “slightly behind schedule,” which was greeted with typical Legionnaire scorn.

Angela settled in to watch the sun slide down the sky, making sure she had a view of the incredible rings. The lazy atmosphere, cloying bioil-fumed air, bright light, and perpetual flat terrain triggered a feeling of true freedom for the first time since she’d walked out of Holloway. Here, she really could give everyone the slip and walk over the horizon never to return.

Not yet, though
. There were a few things she had to check out first, and the expedition was flying her directly to the first one.

About an hour after they arrived, a convoy of six mobile biolabs pulled up just inside the hangar, so that the roof’s shadow covered them. They were big vehicles, with six individually powered wheel hubs under a chassis that supported a high driver’s cab, a small living section, and the windowless lab itself, which stretched for two-thirds of the length. Looking at the meter-and-a-half-diameter tires and their thick hub suspension pistons, Angela reckoned there was very little terrain they wouldn’t be able to cope with.

Vance Elston and a couple of other officers went over and started talking to the xenobiology teams who’d emerged. It was clear they all knew one another well. She made a mental note of that, curious why a spook like Elston would bother with science nerds.

One of the Boeing C-8000 Daedalus airlifters came in to land, touching down with a squeal of brakes and squirts of dirty smoke from the undercarriage bogies. It taxied over to a cargo terminal and opened its rear ramp doors. The nose also swung up slowly, allowing the logistics corps crews to load pallets from both ends as quickly as the flatbed trucks could deliver them. Engineers ran their flightworthiness checks, inspecting the turbofans. At the same time, a couple of fat bowsers drove up and began pumping in JB5 biav fuel. The flight crew disembarked, handing over to a fresh crew.

As the loading progressed, the sky started to darken quickly. Angela watched the cloud front sweep in from the west, a churning slate-gray mass that appeared implausibly low over the ground given the magnitude of the sky. The wind picked up, sending cooler gusts through the open hangar. She delved into her bag, zipped a thin fleece over her T-shirt, and folded the sunglasses away. Most of the Legionnaires were standing at the edge of the hangar, watching the rainstorm approach. She knew better.

The Daedalus was turned around in an impressively efficient forty-five minutes. It trundled back out to the runway and raced up into the sky, just beating the arrival of the clouds. The deluge of rain they brought with them was as thick and heavy as she remembered. That was the thing with a world whose landmass was mostly tropical or subtropical. It rained every day, often more than once. And in keeping with St. Libra’s size, at nearly twice Earth’s diameter, the rain was on an equally overwhelming scale.

The noise it made striking the panels of the hangar roof made conversation all but impossible. Everyone standing near the edge stepped back smartly as the cascade splattered across the concrete. Angela’s view of the airport shrank rapidly; so dense was the fall, she could barely see the neighboring hangar. Outside, the landscape she could make out was reduced to blurred monochrome outlines. Nonetheless she could see the buildup of water in the ground’s gentle undulations—what she’d taken to be long natural dips were actually broad drainage channels, taking the water away from the runways and buildings.

“To hell with this,” Gillian Kowalski grunted; she was sitting with Omar Mihambo on a kitbag close to Angela.

“It won’t last long,” Angela told them.

“They didn’t tell us we’d need fucking scuba gear,” Omar said.

Lightning flared, making everyone jump.

DiRito was grinning out at the wall of water curtaining off the edge of the hangar. “Everything really is bigger and better here, isn’t it.”

“Even the monsters,” Angela said.

Paresh gave her a disapproving glance, which she deflected with a rueful grin as the thundercrack rolled around the hanger.

After forty minutes the rain finished as fast as it began. The clouds tumbled away into the east, not that their retreat brought back much daylight. Clean air gusted through the hangar in the wake of the clouds, taking away the last hint of bioil fumes. Over to the west, the dazzle-point that was Sirius sank quickly into the horizon, promptly followed by the high-magnitude star that was Sirius B, which was now almost in opposing conjunction with St. Libra. The primary seemed to be shining right through the edge of the ring system, making the curving shroud of particles glow merrily.

“Hey, there you go, guys,” Angela said, pointing up at the rings. “That’s an omen for your first day. The G-spot’s come out for you.”

The squad clustered around her, trying to see what she was pointing at. Almost halfway across the span of the rings, a tiny swirl of darkness was creeping along one of the thicker bands.

“What is that?” Mohammed Anwar asked.

“One of the shepherds. An asteroid-sized moon that helps keep the rings stable. Technically, it’s on the outer edge of the F-ring. But … everyone calls it the G-spot.”

“Hard to find, huh?” Hanrahan said as he squinted up.

“Only for you boys,” Angela shot back at him.

The squad laughed as the sun finally slipped below the horizon and the full spectacle of the rings glimmered wide across the twilight sky.

Their SuperRoc landed fifteen minutes later. Paresh’s squad joined one of the two queues snaking back across the apron from the twin sets of airstairs that the ground crew wheeled up to the fuselage. Angela guessed there must be close to four hundred of them embarking, though the plane could actually hold more than eight hundred when fully configured for passengers. But this was a combi version, with the lower deck currently converted to cargo.

Flatbed trucks delivered pallets to the forward fuselage hatchways, while the clamshell doors at the back hinged wide and a ramp slid down. The biolabs were driven carefully up into the belly of the SuperRoc. Angela saw Elston standing at the bottom of the ramp, watching keenly as the vehicles went in. After the fourth one was secured he and another officer left and walked around to the airstairs at the front, cutting into the queue so they could go straight up.

Just as Angela finally got to the bottom of the airstairs, one of the An-445s landed, to be greeted by a swarm of logistics corps personnel. They began their loading in tandem with their colleagues attending the SuperRoc. If this afternoon was standard, that made it a planeload of personnel or matériel flying out to Abellia every two or three hours. She whistled silently—the expedition must be costing billions. Somebody other than herself was very serious about finding the monster.

Despite Angela’s misgivings, the SuperRoc’s seats weren’t too bad. The cushioning was firm, and there was a reasonable amount of leg room. They were arranged in rows five abreast. She let Leora Fawkes take the window seat; Paresh sat on her other side, with Ramon Beaken, Josh Justic, and Audrie Sleath filling the rest of the row.

Her e-i quested a link to the plane’s smartnet, which offered her a limited connection to the transnet, warning her to download anything she needed for entertainment on the flight to a personal cache, as the connection would end as soon as they took off. She selected the files, most of which came from unlicensed sites, on recent Grande Europe history and Middle Eastern politics in the trans-stellar age, a collection she’d been skimming back in the HDA base, and settled down to read them on her grid, ignoring the plane’s safety briefing.

She roused herself briefly as the SuperRoc accelerated down the runway, pushing her back in the cushioning as it reared up. The flight was due to last nine and a half hours thanks to their Fall Zone transit, which would see them flying low and slow for a thousand kilometers over the Marsden Sea. It would take them through the night to land at Abellia early morning local time, which was completely contrary to her body clock, which was telling her she was just coming up on lunchtime. At least it would give her time to read up on the files, though as always she told herself to pay equal attention to both topics, knowing that Elston would be reviewing her access.

As she expanded the files back into her grid, she wondered how much he’d managed to find out about her past now that he suspected her Tramelo background was bogus. Not as much as he would’ve liked, she guessed; the database, which held the most vital details of her origin and life, was off limits even to Elston’s beloved Alien Intelligence Agency. That would bother him, she knew, him with his desperate little-man superiority and right-to-know job arrogance—though ironically that exclusive data didn’t have the slightest relevance to the expedition or the alien monster. In fact, the only thing he might find, if he was super-efficient with DNA analysis, was her true mother. Angela smiled secretively at the prospect:
Now, that would be an interesting meeting
.

The SuperRoc climbed steadily, banking gently to line up on a northeastern course. Silver-gray ringlight shone in through the windows.

“Oh wow, will you take a look at this,” Leora gasped, pressing her face against the window.

Angela craned her neck to look over the Legionnaire’s shoulder. The land below was perfectly illuminated by the bright ringlight, revealing the algaepaddies. Each one was a perfect circle a thousand meters in diameter, its rim made from a low earthen bank bulldozed out from the center to create a shallow crater. Once they were filled with water from the daily rains, the genetically modified algae were introduced, quickly blooming and multiplying in the planet’s ideal combination of warmth and moisture, turning the surface into a thick glistening sludge. It was harvested by a boom arm, which was fastened to a central pillar and rotated around and around, taking two days to complete a full circuit, siphoning off a high percentage of the crud yet leaving enough so that when the arm came around once more there was a full blanket of algae grown back over the surface again.

The harvested sludge was pumped over to a refinery where its water content was removed, leaving the raw algae to have its hydrocarbon-rich corpus processed into any of the half-dozen biopetroleum products utterly essential to the trans-stellar economy. Demand was massive, and expanding in line with the current steady economic growth of the human worlds. That was the reason why the glistening circles stretched out as far as Leora could see from the vantage point of a plane already six kilometers high. They were packed together in a precise lattice, which surrendered only to the rare small hills on the plain. The distance between them was calculated to allow narrow spine roads and the pipe network to coexist. There were also the overspill channels, draining away the excess rainwater, a regimented tributary network that merged into larger waterways before combining into motorway-sized channels that finally disgorged into the region’s natural rivers, flushing surplus algae away to contaminate the native riverside ecology all the way down to the sea. Ringlight shone on them, too, creating a herringbone array of steady silver lambency threading around the algaepaddies.