Great North Road (38 page)

Brice looked like she had a strong Japanese ethnicity in her makeup. Shorter than most people in the room, she held her wide shoulders perfectly square, while her long face appeared inexplicably sad. It was distracting to the men in the room; someone that young, beautiful, and apparently vulnerable was earning a lot of glances to the detriment of the full mission focus. All their wistful smiles would be for nothing, Vance knew; she wouldn’t be interested in some HDA trooper, whatever the rank. Wouldn’t lower herself. That intense way she regarded the big screens was the real giveaway of her age and North-heritage intelligence. It even seemed to be unsettling Passam. He wondered if he should try to arrange an encounter with Angela. Both of them had the same level of drive and intensity. It would be like looking in a mirror, with just skin color distinguishing them.

Vance sidled over to Griffin Toyne, who was also making sure he kept below the VIPs’ radar.

“You should stop looking at people like you want to fight them,” Toyne said quietly. “Especially female people.”

“I assess every situation for its potential. It’s what I’m trained for.”

“She’s not going to fuck you, either. Not even for novelty value.”

“Yeah, I already assessed that.”

Toyne grinned. “Have the xenobiology teams made any progress?”

“Yes, but all negative,” Vance said. “Antrinell and Marvin have been out into the hinterlands as far as the roads take them, which isn’t far, maybe a hundred klicks past the airport. Every sample they’ve taken shows a typical St. Libra genetic composition. There’s nothing abnormal growing out there.”

“That’s good news.”

“Not for the taxpayer. It means we have to go ahead with the forward bases.”

Toyne gave him a curious glance. “You didn’t strike me as the Taxpayer Union type.”

“I’m not—I’m the fast efficiency type. I want this confirmed, one way or the other.”

“Then you should know we may have to slow our schedule slightly; we’re slightly concerned about JB5 biav stocks.”

“On St. Libra? You’re kidding me.”

“This isn’t Highcastle. The local refinery is only set up to produce biav for maybe ten commercial aircraft, and some executive jets.”

“Then switch refinery production for more biav. They certainly have enough bioil for all their Rolls-Royces and Mercedes here.”

Toyne lowered his voice. “That would require Brinkelle’s cooperation, and she’s not happy about any of this. She didn’t quite appreciate the scale this expedition was going to be mounted at.”

“Who did?”

One of the center’s officers gave Passam a quick nod. Up on the main wallscreen the Daedalus was coming around to line up on Edzell’s runway.

“That is one small streak of mud,” Vance muttered. Even as he watched he could see ribbons of water shimmering on the newly created runway.

“Big enough,” Toyne said. “I’ve been on missions where they landed on a strip half that size. Besides, they’ve already shipped out an approach guidance system; they could land at night in a thunderstorm if necessary.”

Vance didn’t believe a word of it. But the pilot held the approach steady, clearly satisfied with what the camp team had cut out for him.

He held his breath, offering up a small prayer as the Daedalus touched down. The pilot made a perfect landing, though the big plane did come to a halt with only about thirty meters of runway left. Everyone in the center applauded. Passam spoke a few words of congratulations to the pilot, then turned to her press acolytes.

“It is with the greatest delight that I am now declaring the Edzell base formally open. I would like to take this moment to commend the efforts of the HDA personnel who have worked so hard to make this possible. As always I am impressed by their dedication and professionalism. It is precisely this kind of proficiency that will see us successfully push back the frontiers of knowledge amid the unexplored and unknown regions of this splendid world.”

Vance and Toyne looked at each other, sharing their private contempt for the politician.

“Let’s go get lunch,” Toyne said.

“Amen to that.”

*

Saul was bizarrely pleased with himself when he did finally plug an unrestricted link into the expedition’s secure network. Unrestricted, that is, if you didn’t want to access any of the level-ten files. A quick scan of the register didn’t show any level-ten files, but why would the security protocols be included in the closed network if there weren’t any?
Standard package?
he wondered. Except that would be a little too neat. It was probably that someone of his inexperience simply couldn’t find them. And with his dire lack of current ability, merely trying to discover their coding tags would probably trigger all sorts of alarms. So he flicked through the files that he could access, basically the kind a one-month probationary HDA company clerk was allowed to retrieve, and downloaded a copy of the expedition personnel, through random routing pathways in Abellia’s net.

“Why, thank you, Saul, this is excellent information,” Zebediah North said.

Saul leaned back in his desk chair and watched the zone console screen curve away from him. The icons that’d been blazing along his optic nerves vanished, icons for programs he hadn’t used in a while. They’d been stored in a hidden cache on the back room’s console, the one usually employed for operating the printers. Old habits die hard, thankfully.

Zebediah and his two disciples—no other way of describing them—were busy studying the list flowing down their grids. Their lips fluttered as they talked via their linked bodymeshes, excluding him from the conversation. Fingers flicked idly through keyspace, twisting the invisible icons. Saul’s e-i reported that the ringlink connecting them employed medium-grade encryption. They were quite serious about keeping their discussion private.

Saul was tempted to run through the personnel list himself, but that would mean second-guessing them, and he just didn’t want to get involved. He’d already had to call Emily and tell her he was going to be late home. She’d been upset, but not angry. Now he just had to decide what to tell her; his past life was something he’d never gone into in real detail. She knew the same story he’d told Duren, that he’d been a contractor for Abellia TeleNet before striking out on his own in a variety of crappy jobs. He’d told her that he’d left Earth because of a failed marriage and a personal tragedy, which wasn’t quite a lie—but context was king, and he’d never corrected her interpretation of that. She’d never asked for details, not in seventeen years of marriage. It was probably shame at first—after all
her
reason for being in Abellia wasn’t particularly pleasant—and when topics get sealed off they tended to stay that way. Once their new life together had gotten under way he certainly didn’t have a reason to dredge up the past; there was too much that had to remain safeguarded. Admitting why he knew Duren, though, wasn’t catastrophic; his involvement with Abellia’s ridiculous political movements was believable justification. And his time with Abellia TeleNet made him a logical choice for Duren. So she’d probably wind up being concerned for him, and no deeper questions would be asked, which was vital.

“We have someone of interest here,” Zebediah said.

“Really?” Saul didn’t want to know.

“Bastian 2North,” Zulah said. “He’s perfect.”

Which didn’t make any sense to Saul, which really wasn’t good. His instincts were fired up now, thoughts racing to find a way out. He just couldn’t afford to get involved any deeper. This wasn’t going to end well, not for anybody, he knew that now. Zebediah was too wrapped up in his own importance, he didn’t see outside his own shallow obsession-derived interpretation of the world, didn’t see that you don’t fuck with the HDA, not when they were on a mission like this one.

“Can you harvest a profile for us, please?” Zebediah asked.

“You’re kidding, right?” Saul blurted. “He’s your brother.” Yet a stupid part of him was actually curious why a B North was being included on the expedition. It had to be politics.

“It’s been a while,” Zebediah said equitably. “I lost touch with my family. I know so little of them now.”

“But …”

“It would be a big help. And a search like this is hardly illegal.”

Then why don’t you run it,
Saul thought bitterly. It was such an obvious question he didn’t bother: So there’s no connection, of course, you use a patsy. He didn’t dare look at Zulah or Duren. “Okay, fine,” he said with a burst of indignation. “But this is it, after this I’m going home. I have a family, as you keep pointing out.”

“I understand,” Zebediah said.

That placid, reasonable tone was starting to get to Saul. He told his e-i to immerse him back in Abellia’s net. They might well be trying to set him up, but he still knew a thing or two about avoiding access traces. He started loading in one-off relays and fake net address routes, using some back doors he’d established in Abellia TeleNet all those years ago. No way would anyone ever be able to tell he’d been compiling data on Bastian 2North, legitimately or otherwise.

*

The tents that made up Abellia airport’s new city were made from jet-black photovoltaic sheets. Another logistics corps screwup given the quantity of intense sunlight beating down on them during the day. But the electricity they produced was more than enough to power all the ancillary systems included in the basic tent module, like the net cell, compactor toilet, internal lighting, kettle, and microwave oven. Too bad there wasn’t any aircon. Angela had just shaken her head in disbelief at the sight of their accommodation as they disembarked the SuperRoc. The logistics corps had laid out the expedition camp in a perfect square along the airport’s southern perimeter, with a cliff of containers and pallets down the northern side—closest to the runway. The arrangement, while logical, tended to channel all the foot traffic along the east–west tracks between the tents. With the rains coming at least once a day, the ground was getting badly chewed up by all the heavy HDA boots tramping along; the local grass had long since been mashed, and now each day saw the mud getting deeper and wider.

Angela was getting fed up with it. So far the mud hadn’t gotten inside the gaiters she wore, but that additional layer of protection was hot in this weather, making her legs sweat. And she walked about the airport a lot.

“I need some time alone,” she told Elston. “I’ve been locked up for twenty years, and crammed into the Newcastle base for another fortnight. Just be a decent human for once. It’s not like I can escape to anywhere from here.”

So he’d reluctantly agreed to let her have an hour a day to herself without Paresh or any of the squad beside her.

“But you’re not to leave the airport perimeter,” he warned, and had her clothes smart-tagged to emphasize the lack of trust.

Angela walked away from the tent streets, making a complete circuit of the airport. There were few buildings: the main terminal, a cargo terminal, the engineering hangars, fuel depot. She walked around the tarmac aprons and taxi lanes and connecting roads, watching vehicles drive past at ridiculous speeds. Stood and stared at each plane landing and taking off. Talked to logistics corps personnel as they shuttled pallets and tanks about.

Each day she either waited until it had rained, or scoured the sky to make sure it would be clear of clouds for a while. On the third day she set out in the middle of the morning, taking her solid memory cache with her. It was half the size of her palm, and slipped into her pocket easily. She didn’t need it for the memory capacity; it had its own cell built in, with a much greater range than her own bodymesh.

When she was walking down the side of a taxiway, it detected the airport’s net and connected her via a cell in the main terminal. She might not have had transnet access for twenty years, but there were certain aspects of digital security she’d learned in Holloway—and it hadn’t been from the official educational sessions, either. It was a simple fact of life that her fellow inmates had a knowledge of criminality that was at least equal to any law enforcement specialist.

Angela’s hands started flicking icons around, navigating away from Abellia, then St. Libra itself, out into the true transnet. The dark cache was there, just as Zarleene Autrass (found guilty of killing two people, unfortunately for her undercover cops) had confessed, shifting between transnet trunks, a purely random pattern unless you knew the key. Once opened, it contained a repository of many powerful hacking tools and secure link systems. But then Zarleene had been a top-flight AI creative until she fell for the wrong man, one who was charmingly persuasive, attentive, devoted, and excitingly wicked in bed. Zarleene: a petite twenty-five-year-old with poor social skills, who wouldn’t have lasted a week in Holloway’s brutal environment. Sweet hopeless Zarleene, who’d been all teary grateful for the protection Angela offered against more predatory inmates, and even more thankful for the snatched moments of passion, the vital human contact.

Angela immediately upgraded her e-i, equipping it with high-grade quantum encryption. Once the key had been sent back to her via multiple random routes, she incorporated layers of AI-level predictive behaviorals, constructing a real personality within the transnet that she designated the authority to handle her credit account and monitor her in real time in case she ever needed help fast—a big sister e-i. Content she was now reasonably secure, she had a nose around the rest of the cache’s menu to see what else Zarleene had left behind. Mostly it was software for route ghosting, key grabs, and firewall crash and snatch; everything you needed for the kind of financial raids her suave man had groomed her for. But there were other software packages as well. Angela started familiarizing herself with their functions. Before long searchbots with registry immunity dispersed into the transnet, heavy with the requests Angela had loaded in. She withdrew from the dark cache, using the stealth access routines she’d found inside to cover her tracks. “Thanks, Zarleene,” she said silently. It wasn’t even betrayal, not really—they’d both come away with what they wanted. Besides, there had been a lot worse things in Holloway over the years.