Great North Road (9 page)

All the data they’d accumulated so far was extracted from the station network and dumped inside the globe. Once the files were transferred, the techs set about eliminating any ghost copies left in the network’s redundancy caches. Diode filter programs were loaded, preventing any data from leaving the core’s dedicated zone consoles in Office3.

“Best we’ve got,” Sid was told. “The only way anyone gets a look at those files now is if they come in here and physically tear the core out.”

An hour later Sid was standing in the office’s largest zone booth, a translucent cylinder three meters in diameter, with ring projectors on the floor and ceiling. Eva was outside, running the synchronized image. The hologram that materialized around Sid was poor quality compared with the professional shows he was used to immersing in at home. It was to be expected. This was a composite from the multitude of smartdust meshes along the river, which were different brands, different ages, different resolution levels, and downloading into different memory formats. Despite the weird color static, which skipped about him like iridescent rain, and the blurred outlines of anything that moved, he stood on the south shore below the curving glass façade of the Sage. Magnification was level one. “Take the falling snow out, please,” he asked Eva.

Oddly, the image degraded slightly as the snow cleared away, leaving air that had somehow lost its full transparency. “Best I can do,” Eva said.

“That’s good, it’s what I need,” he assured her. Now he could see directly across the Tyne to the Court of Justice. A single digital display hovering in midair told him it was fifteen hundred hours on Sunday. “Take me up to twenty-one hundred hours and pause.”

Color drained out of the zone as the digits accelerated, leaving the snow-cloaked buildings illuminated by weak, green-tinged streetlighting. Cars on the main roads were stationary, their headlight beams fixed.

Sid turned until he was facing straight along the southern road. Directly ahead of him streetlights produced pools of light that stretched away into the distance, each one separate from its neighbors. He brought both arms up and beckoned with closed fingers. The image began to slide past, taking him toward the Tyne Bridge. There was an empty slice just before he reached the support, as if a wedge of interplanetary space had fallen from the sky to lie across the road. He held his hands out, palms flat. The image halted. He circled an upraised finger, and everything rotated around him. “Tag this: gap one. It’s about a meter and a half wide. Extends across the road and to the embankment wall.” He looked up at the concrete, which was topped by a railed footpath before the ground continued to rise as a steep terracing of grass and overgrown ornamental trees.

“If anyone’s trying to drag our North along that, they’re going to have to be very accurate,” Ian’s voice announced.

“Something happened to the smartdust on the bridge support,” Eva said. “Probably pigeon crap—they do like our bridges. There’s been no mesh there since last winter—city hasn’t gotten around to replacing the motes. This gap wasn’t set up for the murder.”

“They’d have to get the body to the gap,” Ian said. “If we’re looking for a ten o’clock disposal, there were only eight cars went along that stretch of road between nine thirty and ten past ten. None of them stopped.”

“Show me,” Sid told them. Eva moved the simulation ahead half an hour. The cars swept along the road, flowing over and around him as he stood and watched. They were all moving slowly—the compacted snow was eight centimeters thick, after all—but not slowly enough to dump a body into the gap. “Okay,” he told them. “Take it back to twenty-one hundred hours. Let’s find the next gap.”

*

Traffic management assigned the car an emergency vehicle priority, and cars and lorries parted smoothly to allow Colonel (HDA, Alien Intelligence Agency) Vance Elston direct access to the autobahn’s central reserved lane. This close to the gateway the commercial and private traffic was slowing up anyway, forming an orderly crawl-queue along the three lanes that led back to Earth. Now that he had a clear route, he floored the accelerator until he was doing a steady 160 kph. Beside the near-stationary cars, the sense of speed was exaggerated; it was almost thrilling, the kind of rush a boy racer sought in a boosted car. Vance smiled at the idea. At forty-seven he was a long way beyond that kind of behavior, though even with his service and doctrinal instilled discipline something about pure speed never failed to do it for the male psyche.

He flashed through the gateway leaving the German world of Odessa behind, emerging into a freezing Berlin winter afternoon, and immediately braked, taking the service off-ramp. An agency helicopter was waiting for him on the pad at the top of the embankment, its blades turning slowly. He abandoned the car and climbed aboard. It took him swiftly over the snow-clad capital to Schonefeld airport, where a ten-seater passenger jet was waiting. From there he flew directly to London Docklands airport. A black limousine drove right up to the airstairs to collect him. Major Vermekia was waiting in the back, wearing full dress uniform as everyone on the Human Defense Alliance general staff was required to do.

“You look impressive,” Vance told him as he settled back into the thick cushioning. Amid all the rows of decorations arrayed on the tunic like colored bar codes was a single diamond-and-bronze pin with its tiny inlaid purple crucifix. It matched the one on Vance’s suit collar. He’d long since stopped wearing a uniform on a day-to-day basis, instead favoring dark expensive suits in the tradition of spooks for centuries.

“Goes with the job,” Vermekia said simply. “And you?”

“Busy, of course. Wish I wasn’t, but that’s human nature for you. You know five Zanth-worshipping cults have sprung up on Odessa in the last three years. All of them have leaders who claim to be attuned to the Zanth.”

“Morons.”

“Yes, but they need investigating. One was actually building a signaling device, claiming it could call the Zanth.”

Vermekia’s eyebrows shot up. “For real?”

“Sadly, yes. The techs at Frontline are examining the gadget. Something to do with setting up oscillations in a trans-spatial connection.”

“Oldest bunch of crap in the file. Everyone thinks it’s the gateways that attract the Zanth.”

“Age gives credibility, which leads to belief. They had a lot of followers.”

Vermekia shook his head in bewilderment. “Unbelievable.”

“Yeah. Unlike this.”

“Speak to me. I’ve never seen an alert like it. Some detective loaded a weapons identification request into the government network, and it’s like a frigging fire alarm going off in the office. I was expecting special forces guys to blow out the wall and snatch us to safety. Even the supreme commander himself is showing an interest.” He gave Vance a shrewd look over the top of his glasses. “Lots of related files that even I couldn’t get access to. But your name kept coming up.”

“It would.” Vance tried not to recall too many of those memories. Her screams and sobbing still flittered through his dreams, even now, twenty years later.
What’s done is done. No regrets. The Lord knows the price of failure, of vigilance faltering, is too horrific to contemplate
. “I was involved in the original case.”

“We’ll have a beer one night, and you can tell me the gruesome details.”

“Right.”

The car was heading west through London, its auto steering them along the A13, taking them toward the Barbican and the start of the A1. As before, Vance had been given an Emergency Vehicle status by London’s traffic management AI. They were traveling as fast as practical. Thin snow was drifting out of a leaden sky, but the roads had been kept clear by the city’s winter weather crews.

When they reached Commercial Road another black sedan pulled in directly behind them.

“Who’s on the visiting team?” Vance asked.

“Quite a little meet-and-greet committee, actually. There’s you and me, two experts from the Brussels Interstellar Commission, three commanders from Human Defense Alliance GroundForce, and an English cabinet office lawyer, along with a rep from the Justice Department. Now, that is one department that is seriously worried—after all, she’s been locked up for twenty years.”

Vance shook his head in dismay. The levels of bureaucracy propping up the Human Defense Alliance dismayed him as much as it astonished:

How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats does it take to change a light panel?

We’ll have a subcommittee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.

“Let me have their files,” he said as they finally turned onto Aldersgate Street, the bottom of the A1—which was the modern designation of the original Great North Road, built by the Romans two thousand years ago to march garrisons to the very edge of the empire five hundred kilometers to the north. Their duty was to reinforce Hadrian’s Wall, keeping the outer darkness at bay and the empire safe. Today was likely to take him on that same journey, with a not-too-dissimilar duty.

Another two black government cars fell in behind them.

“They are good people,” Vermekia said. “We’ve spent the last two hours sorting out the protocols. Everyone coming with us has the authority to make decisions.”

Vance began to skim their files as his e-i picked them up and fed them to his grid. They were only three hours into the alert, and already an organization was coming together. “General Shaikh has made the decision already, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah. His staff is establishing lines of command with Grande Europe’s alien affairs office and the Pentagon. Unless this murder turns out to be very mundane in the next twenty-four hours, I’d suggest packing some tropical travel clothes.”

Vance let himself sink back farther into the car seat. “Okay, so give me her file. What kind of prisoner has she been?”

“For a lifer, reasonably well behaved.”

Vance watched as his e-i flipped various prison records into his grid, where micro laserlight fired them directly into his brain. The life Angela Tramelo had lived for the last twenty years summarized in official evaluations and reports. Her fights with other inmates—inevitable, given the time spent incarcerated—punished by solitary confinement, which prison psychologists said never seemed to bother her as much as it was supposed to. No recorded tox usage—which was interesting, but then her determination was always fearsome. Education—she kept current on network systems and economics. Work record—competent. Health record—excellent. “Hold,” he instructed his e-i, squeezing his eyelids shut. Angela’s image steadied in front of him. He regarded it with mild exasperation. Fifty bureaucrats already getting with the program and they still couldn’t correlate files for shit. “Can you get me a current image, please? This one is twenty years old.”

Vermekia’s grin had a hint of malice. “No it’s not.”

“I met Angela twenty years ago. Trust me, this was taken back then.”

“That was taken six weeks ago. Check the prison date code, it’s authentic.”

“This can’t be right.” Vance closed his eyes again to regard the beautiful face with its harsh, aggressive stare. The hair was different now, shorter and unstyled. But those features: the cute little button nose, cheekbones sharp enough to cut diamond, a chin that was perfectly flat, wide flared lips, and green eyes with so much anger—even in the very heart of her anguish she held on to that anger—it was a decent resolution, the skin was as clear and lustrous as only the truly youthful possess. A face he would take to his grave given what he’d seen it endure. She’d been eighteen, and that was back in 2121. He’d only been twenty-fivehimself. Equally youthful, well built, a body he’d worked hard on to qualify for the college football team; 186 centimeters tall, or six-one as they still called it back in Texas where he grew up, with black skin scarred from several game injuries and some best-forgotten adolescent rumbles. So diametrically opposite to her unblemished honey-gold, gym-toned flesh and white-blond hair. The difference was fundamental: color, wealth, class, upbringing, and culture—back then they’d taken one look at each other and knew the enmity that sparked immediately would last forever, and that was before everything she’d undergone at Frontline. Now his flesh was showing wrinkles despite a good diet and all the usual middle-aged exercise tropes—gym, jogging, squash; the cheeks were rounding out, reflexes not quite the exultant lightning they had been on the football field, the hair obviously receding no matter how artfully he gelled it. But her, she looked barely twenty even now.

“It is,” Vermekia said cheerfully.

“But … that would mean she’s a one-in-ten.”

“Yep. It would mean that.”

“We didn’t know,” Vance said. One-in-ten germline treatment—in which the DNA of a fertilized human egg was manipulated so that you aged one year biologically for every ten years that passed—was rare even today, never mind back in … well, in 2103 according to her birth certificate—which they’d never thought to verify because that wasn’t the line of inquiry and obviously she looked eighteen. He gave Vermekia an aghast stare. “How could we not know that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters. That was part of the calibration.”

“You mean for the interrogation?”

“Her file said she was eighteen, and she confirmed it. It was wrong. We asked her to confirm everything on her background file—”

“But you never bothered to check the file?”

“It came straight from the Justice Department. We assumed it was good.”

“Ah well. There’s your first mistake right there. A government file. They reckon that up to twenty-five percent of everything in an official database is crud. Personally I’d be one happy bunny if it ever gets that low.”

“Damnit! She could have lied about anything. No, actually, not in the final interview. That’s still sound. Unless she was completely delusional.”

“Okay. I’ll accept that the last technique you went at her with produced valid data. But why was she lying about her age and everything else on her background file in the first place?”

“I have no idea. Damnit, the implications … Sweet Lord, what else did we overlook?”