The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (106 page)

Without looking back or running any more checks he went straight to the taxi stand. As the revolving door offered him up to the warm Californian sunlight, Stig smiled; despite the seriousness of being burned, he was going to enjoy the next few hours.

The warehouses didn’t annoy Adam as much as the districts of office towers that nestled along the southern side of LA Galactic. He hated the multitude of handling and transport companies that survived in parasitic bondage with the CST rail network. They were true capitalist entities, producing nothing, charging people to supply products, adding to the cost of living on a hundred worlds, living off those who worked in production. Not, he had to concede, that those who worked in production these days were the old working classes in a true Marxist definition; they were all engineers who went around troubleshooting cybernetics. But for all the changes and undeniable improvements automation and consumerism had brought to the proletariat’s standard of living, it hadn’t changed the financial power structure that ruled the human race. A tiny minority controlled the wealth of hundreds of worlds, bypassing, buying, or corrupting governments to maintain their dominance. And here he was, living among them, a keen consumer of their products, daunted by their size, his life’s purpose almost lost as he sold more and more of himself to Johansson’s cause. A cause that was now giving him a great deal of concern. It wasn’t something he’d told anyone—after all, who could he tell?—but he was having to face up to the daunting, and terrifying, prospect that Bradley Johansson might just be right about the Starflyer. The whole Prime situation was too odd; there were too many coincidences piling up: the
Second Chance
mission, the barrier disappearing, Hell’s Gateway, the attack on Venice Coast. Adam was certain there was going to be a war, and he wasn’t sure which side the Commonwealth government was going to be on.

So he went about the meticulous job of assembling Johansson’s equipment without his usual cynicism. The Party had been avoided for a long time now, he didn’t provide any chapter on any planet with support. It was the Guardians who received his full attention. Crazy, enthusiastic, devoted youngsters from Far Away, who were riding gleefully off on their crusade and didn’t have a single clue how the Commonwealth worked. They were the ones he was protecting, guiding like some old mystic promising nirvana at the end of the road. Except today it looked like Stig wasn’t going to make it.

The station car drove him carefully along the internal highways into the Arlee district, two hundred fifty square kilometers of warehouses on the east side of LA Galactic. The blank-faced composite buildings were laid out in a perfect grid. Some were so large they took up an entire block, while some blocks had as many as twenty separate units. They all had light composite walls and black solar cell roofs, cumbersome air-conditioning units sprouted from walls and edges like mechanical cancers, their radiant fans shining a dull orange under the hot sunlight. There were no sidewalks, and cars were a rarity on these roads. Vans and large trucks trundled along everywhere, their driver arrays navigating the simple path between their loading bay and a rail cargo handling yard on a twenty-four/seven basis. But at least this district involved the physical movement of goods, it wasn’t the dealing and moneymaking of the offices. That normally made it bearable for him.

He drove into the loading bay park at Lemule’s Max Transit warehouse, a medium-sized building, enclosing four acres of floor space. Bjou McSobel and Jenny McNowak were working inside. Lemule’s had a big order for sourcing and supplying packager modules for a supermarket chain on five phase two worlds, and their crates were stacked up across half of the cavernous interior awaiting shipment orders. Flatbed loaders and forklifts slid up and down the lanes between the high metal ledges, shuffling farm equipment, carpentry tools, GPbots, domestic hologram portals, and a hundred other items that formed the company’s legitimate business, packaging them for their train ride out across the planets. By itself, Lemule’s Max Transit was a viable operation. Every morning when he left his hotel on the coast and drove into LA Galactic, Adam felt the irony that after so many years spent running identical concerns he could manage a transit company far better than the entrepreneurs and opportunist chancers who were desperate for their own company to succeed.

Bjou closed the heavy roll door at the end of the loading bay as Adam got out of the car. “How are we doing?” Adam asked.

“Jenny has opened the access hatch. The S&Ibot should be here in another forty minutes.”

“It definitely retrieved the case, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some good news, then.”

They went down to the far end of the warehouse where the Guardians had set up a secure area. Bjou and Jenny had been preparing a shipment of equipment for Far Away, disguising the components in basic industrial tools and consumer electronics due for shipment to Armstrong City. On the other side of the open crates and disassembled machines a concealed manhole cover had been opened in the enzyme-bonded concrete floor. Below it was a small circular shaft leading down five meters to one of the sewer pipes that served LA Galactic. That, too, had been breached, the hole sealed up again with a flush-fitting hatch. Jenny was sitting on the rim of the shaft, an anxious expression on her face as she followed the progress of their S&Ibot through the maze of sewer pipes that lay underneath LA Galactic.

“No problems, sir,” she said. “Our monitors haven’t picked up anything tracking the bot.”

“Okay, Jenny, keep on it.”

Bjou pulled over a couple of chairs, and Adam sat down gratefully. His e-butler reported an encrypted call from Kieran.

“Sir, we thought you should know. Paula Myo just arrived on a loop train from Seattle. She’s being escorted by CST security personnel, looks like they’re going to the operational center.”

A little shiver of cold ran down Adam’s spine. If she was giving Stig’s operation her personal attention then she knew he was important.

“Do you want us to hack into their internal network?” Kieran asked. “We might be able to see what she’s doing.”

“No,” Adam said immediately. “We can’t guarantee a clean hack, not into CST security. I don’t want them tipped off we know about them, that’s Stig’s only advantage right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Adam resisted putting his head in his hands. He sat on the hard plastic seat, staring at the secret hole in the floor, while he called up files and displayed them across his virtual vision. Somewhere there had to be a weak link, a way Paula had found to infiltrate his couriers. When the faint amber information floated in front of him he cursed himself for making such an elementary mistake. Stig was collecting software from an insider at the Shansorel Partnership, the same insider who had supplied regulator software for a set of microphase modulators that Valtare Rigin had acquired. It would have had the partnership’s signature embedded in the subroutines. Easy to trace. “Damnit,” he grunted.
I’m getting old. And stupid.

“Is everything all right, sir?” Bjou asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Tarlo was waiting in the operations room of LA Galactic’s CST security department when Paula Myo came in.

“Sorry, Chief,” he said. “I think he made me when he came out of the can.”

She nodded. “Don’t worry about it.”

He glanced at the CST security officer who’d escorted Paula. The whole department had rolled over and given full cooperation at the mere mention of her name. “We should have gone for a virtual observation.”

“I have my suspicions about their electronic support capability. They certainly found your box fast enough. If they’re that good they would have been aware of a virtual as soon as we began it.” She turned to the security officer. “I’d like a clean office we can use as our field headquarters, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He showed them down a corridor to an empty office, and activated the systems, giving them full access.

“There’s a support team en route from Paris; they’ll be here in half an hour,” Paula told Tarlo when they were alone again. “They’ll be able to back up the rest of your crew.”

“It should have been a bigger op from the start.”

“I know. It was very short notice.” Paula surprised herself by how easy it was to tell the lie; it wasn’t something she was practiced in. But the support team was inevitable now. What she had to concentrate on was the people who knew before the target had started to rabbit. That was where the leak must have originated.

“Are you sure he discovered the box?” she asked Tarlo, uncomfortably aware that he’d been on the Venice Coast operation.

“He’s on a courier run, right?” Tarlo said. “That’s what you told us. But he went through his little spotter routine, then went and retrieved something else from the locker. That is not what happens. You run the route as quickly as possible, you don’t pick up a second item, that doubles the risk. Besides, I was watching him, he knows he’s been made.” He gave a lame shrug. “My opinion, for what it’s worth.”

“Don’t worry, I still value it. Which leaves us guessing what he’s going to do next.”

“Only one thing he can do, try and shake us.”

“How are we doing on that?”

“Carol and the others are in four taxis, ahead and behind him. They’ve overridden the driver array software, and the LA traffic police have been informed this is a navy operation. We have full route authority. He’s not going to get away from us in a taxi.”

“Humm, I’m concerned what was in the black shoulder bag he retrieved.”

“Has to be stuffed full of weapons for when he makes his break.”

“You might be right. Either way, we can’t take any chances. Get in touch with the LAPD, tell them I need a tactical armaments squad on standby.”

“You got it.”

It was over thirteen kilometers as the crow flies from the Carralvo terminal to the Lemule’s Max Transit warehouse in the Arlee district. By sewer pipeline, it was a lot farther. Nor was it a direct route. The Service & Inspection bot had to pass through several junctions, opening and closing flow valves like airlocks so that it could switch pipes. Forty-three minutes after Adam arrived at the warehouse, it finally crawled up under the hatch. Jenny scurried down the open shaft and popped the hatch at the bottom. Bjou and Adam stood above her, shining powerful flashlights down so she could see what she was doing.

Adam pulled a face as the hatch opened and the smell hit him. Jenny was reaching down to the filthy S&Ibot they’d cloned from the LA Galactic utility service company. She took the little plastic case from its electromuscle limb and hurriedly shut the hatch.

Once she was out, Bjou shut the manhole cover and started to seal it against casual inspection. Jenny handed the case to Adam, who opened it and slipped the memory crystal into his handheld array.

“Checks out,” he said as the program menu scrolled down the unit’s screen. Jenny let out a happy sigh.

Adam put a call straight through to Kieran. “Give Stig the go code for discontinue and break.”

The CST security division office was filling up. As well as the backup team from Paris, there was now a detective lieutenant from the LAPD who was acting as liaison. In the two hours since leaving LA Galactic, all the target had done was drive into LA and stop on Walgrove Avenue, then start walking. He’d slowly made his way toward the shoreline, walking up and down the streets, and was currently on Washington Boulevard, close to the Del Rey Marina.

Tarlo got the city RI to access several public cameras in the area. Their images were coming up on screens in the office. Paula wouldn’t let them focus on the target in case the Guardians were monitoring the dataflow, so they continued their slow sweeps, occasionally catching him as he walked past.

“Heading for the marina,” Tarlo said. “Do you think he’s got a boat waiting?”

“Who knows,” she said. “But get a list of everything moored there from the harbormaster.”

“I’m on that,” Renne said.

Paula’s e-butler told her that Senator Burnelli was placing an encrypted call to her. She went to the back of the office and authorized the link.

“Paula, how are you?”

One of the street cameras caught the target walking into the Del Rey Marina. Two of the box team had gone in ahead of him. “Busy,” she said. The LAPD liaison was ordering the tactical armaments squad to a new position.

“I won’t take up too much of your time, but I rather thought you’d want to hear this. I’ve got good news and not so good.”

“Tell me the good,” she said.

“I took it kind of personal that my request about Far Away had been blocked, so I confronted Doi directly. Nice to know I still have some clout. A century of public service hasn’t been entirely wasted. As of next week, all cargo being shipped to Far Away will be examined at Boongate. No exceptions. She’s going to order Columbia to form a specialist division to take care of it.”

“Thank you very much, Senator.” A camera above one of the wharfs showed the target walking along the wooden planks to the end, looking at the beautiful, expensive boats moored on either side. She frowned. “Have we got a pursuit boat available?” she asked the liaison officer.

“I can find you one.”

“Please do.” She flipped the link to the Senator back on. “What was the other news?”

“I’m not sure how you’re going to take this,” Thompson said. “I was kind of surprised myself. I’ve been asking questions in a few dark places since we talked last. The people lobbying the executive against examining cargo for Far Away work for Nigel Sheldon.”

“Repeat, please.”

“Nigel Sheldon has been blocking your request.”

“Are you sure?”

“One hundred percent, Paula.”

“I need to see you.”

“I agree. As soon as possible. I think we might want to bring my father in on this as well.”

The target reached the end of the wharf, hopped over the chain railing, and dropped into the water.

“Holy shit,” Tarlo cried. “Did you see that?”

“Has the tactical armaments squad got divers?” Renne asked the liaison officer.