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The obedient novices never moved when Quinn rose to his feet and turned to face them. There was an amused sneer on his snow-white face. He jabbed a finger at Luca Comar. “Wait here, all of you,” he said, and stalked down the aisle. Dark magenta and woad moire patterns skipped across the black fabric of his robe, reflections of his newfound determination. A click of his fingers, and Lawrence Dillon scurried after him.
They passed quickly through the ransacked manor, and down the portico’s stone steps to the farm rangers parked on the gravel. A smudge of smoke on the horizon betrayed Colsterworth’s position.
“Get in,” Quinn said. He was on the verge of laughter.
Lawrence clambered into the front passenger seat as Quinn switched the motor on. The vehicle sped down the drive, sending pebbles skidding onto the grass verge.
“I wonder how long they’ll stay in there like that?” Quinn mused.
“Aren’t we coming back?”
“No. This crappy little world is a dead end, Lawrence. There’s nothing left for us here, no purpose. We have to get off; and there aren’t many navy starships in orbit. We’ve got to reach one before they all leave. The Confederation will be waking to the threat soon. They’ll recall their fleets to protect the important worlds.”
“So where are we going if we do get a frigate?”
“Back to Earth. We have allies there. There are sects in every major arcology. We can gnaw at the Confederation from within, corrupt it completely.”
“Do you think the sects will help us?” Lawrence asked, curious.
“Eventually. They might need a little persuading first. I’ll enjoy that.”
The AT Squad had the exclusive shop completely surrounded. Moyce’s of Pasto occupied a more hospitable section of the city than the Mahalia warehouse. The building’s design was an indulgent neo-Napoleonic, overlooking one of the main parks. It catered to the aristocracy and the wealthy, trading mainly on snob value. The shop itself was only a fifth of the business; Moyce’s main income came from supplying goods and delicacies to estates and the upwardly mobile clear across the continent. There were eight separate loading bay doors at the back of the building to accommodate the fleet of lorries which were dispatched every night. Their feed roads merged into a single trunk road which led down into a tunnel where it joined one of the city’s three major underground ring motorways.
At ten past midnight its distribution centre was normally busy loading lorries with the day’s orders. Nothing had emerged in the four minutes it had taken the AT Squad to deploy. However, there was one vehicle parked outside the end loading bay, obstructing the road: the taxi which the AI cores had traced from the spaceport. All its electrical circuits had been switched off.
Fifteen assault mechanoids dashed up the slope to the loading bay doors, their movements coordinated by the Squad’s seven technical officers. Three of the doors were to be broken down, while the others were to be blocked and guarded. One had been assigned to the taxi.
Six of the assault mechanoids lashed out with their electron explosive whips. Squad members were already running up the feed roads behind them.
Not all of the whips landed on target. Several detonations chopped into support pillars and door joists. Brick-sized lumps of stone came flying back down the feed roads. Two of the assault mechanoids were hit by the chunks, sending them cartwheeling backwards. The entire central loading bay collapsed, bringing with it a large section of the first-storey floor. An avalanche of crates and cylindrical storage pods tumbled down onto the road, burying a further three assault mechanoids. They started to fire their sense-overload ordnance at random; flares and sonic shells punching out from the wreckage amid huge fountains of white packaging chips. Crumpled kitchen units and patio furniture skittered down the mound.
The AT Squad members dived for cover as another two mechanoids started to gyrate in a wild dance. Their ordnance sprayed out, slamming into walls and arching away over the park. Only three of the remaining assault mechanoids were actually firing ordnance into the two loading bays which had been broken open.
“Pull them back!” Ralph datavised to the technical officers. “Get those bloody mechanoids out of there.”
Nothing happened. Sense-overload ordnance was squirting out everywhere. The assault mechanoids continued their lunatic dance. One pirouetted, twining its seven legs together, and promptly fell over. Ralph watched a dozen flares shoot straight upwards, illuminating the whole area. Black figures were lying prone on the feed roads, horribly exposed. A sense-overload flare speared straight into one of them; then it expanded strangely, creating a web of rippling white light. The suited figure thrashed about.
“Shit,” Ralph grunted. It wasn’t a flare, it was the white fire. They were in the distribution centre! “Shut down those mechanoids now,” he datavised. His neural nanonics reported that several of his suit systems were degrading.
“No response, sir,” a technical officer replied. “We’ve lost them completely, even their fallback routine has failed. How did they do that? The mechanoids are equipped with military-grade electronics, a megaton emp couldn’t glitch their processors.”
Ralph could imagine the officer’s surprise. He’d undergone it himself back on Lalonde as the awful realization struck. He stood up from behind the parapet on top of the tunnel entrance, and lifted the heavy-calibre recoilless rifle. Targeting graphics flipped up over his helmet’s sensor image. He fired at an assault mechanoid.
It exploded energetically, its power cells and ordnance detonating as soon as the armour-piercing round penetrated its flexing body. The blast wave shifted half of the precariously tangled wreckage in front of the collapsed loading bay. More crates thumped down from the sagging first-storey floor. Three assault mechanoids were sent lurching back down the feed roads, plasmatic legs juddering in fast undulations. Ralph shifted his aim and took out another one just as it started to lumber upright.
“Squad, shoot out the mechanoids,” he ordered. His communications block informed him that half of the command channels had shut down. He switched on the block’s external speaker and repeated the order, bellowing it out across the feed roads at a volume which could be heard above the detonating mechanoids.
A streak of white fire lanced down from one of Moyce’s upper windows. The threat response program in Ralph’s neural nanonics bullied his leg muscles with nerve impulse overrides. He was flinging himself aside before his conscious mind had registered the attack.
Two more mechanoids exploded as he hit the concrete behind the parapet. He thought he recognized the heavy-calibre gaussrifle which the G66 troops used. Then an insidious serpent of white fire was coiling around his knee. His neural nanonics instantly erected analgesic blocks across his nerves, blanking out the pain. A medical display showed him skin and bone being eaten away by the white fire. The whole knee joint would be ruined in a matter of seconds if he couldn’t extinguish it. Yet both Dean and Will said smothering it like natural flames made hardly any difference.
Ralph assigned his neural nanonics full control of his musculature, and simply designated the window which the white fire had emerged from. With detached interest he observed his body swivelling, the rifle barrel swinging round. His retinal target graphics locked over a window. Thirty-five rounds pummelled the black rectangle, a mixed barrage of high explosive (chemical), shrapnel, and incendiary.
Within two seconds the room had ceased to exist, its carved stone frontage disintegrating behind a vast gout of flame and showering down on the melee below.
The white fire around Ralph’s knee vanished. He pulled a medical nanonic package from his belt and slapped it on the charred wound.
Down on the feed roads most of the AT Squad had switched to their communications block speakers. Orders, warnings, and cries for help reverberated over the sound of multiple explosions. A vast fusillade of heavy-calibre rifle fire was pounding into the loading bays. Comets of white fire poured out in retaliation.
“Nelson,” Ralph datavised. “For Christ’s sake, make sure the troops out front don’t let anyone escape. They’re to hold position and shoot to kill now. Forget the capture mission; we’ll try it back here, but nobody else is to attempt anything fancy.”
“Yes, sir,” Nelson Akroid answered.
Ralph went back to the speaker. “Cathal, let’s try and get in there. Isolation procedure. Separate them, and nuke them.”
“Sir.” The cry came back over the parapet.
At least he’s still alive, Ralph thought.
“Do you want stage two yet?” Admiral Farquar datavised.
“No, sir. They’re still contained. Our perimeter is holding.”
“Okay, Ralph. But the second there’s a status change, I need to know.”
“Sir.”
His neural nanonics reported the medical package had finished knitting to his knee. The weight load it could take was down forty percent. It would have to do. Ralph tucked the heavy-calibre rifle under his arm, then bending low, he ran for the end of the parapet and the steps down to the trunk road.
Dean Folan signalled his team members forward, scurrying around the side of the big mound of crates and into the loading bay area. Flames had taken hold amid the fragments piled outside.
It was dark inside the loading bays. Projectile impacts had etched deep pocks into the bare carbon-concrete walls. Rattail tangles of wire and fibre-optic cable hung down from the fissured ceiling, swaying gently. Through the helmet’s goggle lenses he could see very little, even with enhanced retinas on full sensitivity. He switched his shell helmet sensors to low light and infrared. Green and red images merged to form a pallid picture of the rear of the loading bay. Annoying glare spots flickered as small flames licked at the storage frames which lined the walls. Discrimination programs worked at eliminating them.
There were three corridors leading off straight back from the rear of the bay, formed by the storage frames. Metal grids containing crates and pods ready for the lorries, they looked like solid walls of huge bricks. Cargo-handling mechanoids had stalled on their rails which ran along the side of the frames, plasmatic arms dangling inertly. Water was pouring out of five or six broken ceiling pipes, spilling down the crates to pool on the floor.
Nothing moved in the corridors.
Dean left his gaussrifle at the head of the middle corridor, knowing it would be useless at close range, the electronic warfare field would simply switch it off. Instead, he drew a semi-automatic rifle; it had a feed loop connected to his backpack, but the rounds were all chemical. The AT Squad had grumbled about that at the start, questioning the wisdom of abandoning their power weapons. Nobody had complained much after the mechanoids went berserk, and their suit systems suffered innumerable dropouts.
Three of the team followed him as he advanced down the corridor, also carrying semi-automatics. The rest of them spread out around the bay and edged down the other two corridors.
A figure zipped across the end of the corridor. Dean fired, the roar of the semi-automatic impressively loud in the confined space. Plastic splinters from the crates ricocheted through the air as the bullets chiselled into them.
Dean started running forwards. There was no corpse on the floor.
“Radford, did you see him?” Dean demanded. “He was heading towards your corridor.”
“No, Chief.”
“Anybody?”
All he got was a series of negatives, some shouted, some datavised. No doubt the hostiles were about, his suit blocks were still badly affected by the electronic warfare field. His injured arm was itchy, too.
He reached the end of the corridor. It was a junction to another three. “Hell, it’s a sodding maze back here.”
Radford arrived at the end of his corridor, semi-automatic sweeping the storage frames.
“Okay, we fan out here,” Dean announced. “All of you: keep two other squad members in visual range at all times. If you lose sight of your partners, then stop immediately and reestablish contact.”
He picked one of the corridors leading deeper into the shop and beckoned a couple of the Squad to follow him.
A creature landed on top of Radford; half man, half black lion, features merged grotesquely. Its weight carried him effortlessly to the floor. Dagger claws scraped at Radford’s armour suit. But the integral valency generators had stiffened the fabric right from the moment of impact, protecting the vulnerable human skin inside. The creature howled in fury, thwarted at the very moment of triumph.
Radford’s suit systems as well as his neural nanonics began to fail. Even his shocked yell was cut off as the communications block speaker died. The suit’s fabric started to give way, slowly softening. One of the claw tips screwed inwards, hungry for flesh.
Even amid his frantic twisting and bucking to throw off the creature Radford was aware of a whisper which bordered on the subliminal. It had surely been there all his life, but only now with the prospect of death sharpening his perception was he fully conscious of it. It began to expand, not in volume, but in harmony. A whole chorus of whispers. Promising love. Promising sympathy. Promising to help, if he would just—
Bullets smashed into the flanks of the creature, mauling the fur and long muscle bands. Dean kept his semi-automatic steady as the thing clung to Radford’s body. He could see the armour suit fabric hardening again, the claws slipping and skidding.
“Stop!” one of the team was shouting. “You’ll kill Radford.”
“He’ll be worse than dead if we don’t,” Dean snarled back. Spent casings were hurtling out of the rifle at an astounding rate. Still the beast wouldn’t let go, its great head shaking from side to side, emitting a continual wail of pain.
The team was rushing en masse towards Dean down the narrow corridors between the storage frames. Two more were shouting at him to stop.
“Get back!” he ordered. “Keep watching for the rest of the bastards.” His magazine was down to eighty per cent. The rifle didn’t have the power to beat the creature, all the thing had to do was hang on. Blood was running down its hind legs, the fur where the bullets struck a pulped mass of raw flesh. Not enough damage, not nearly enough.
“Someone else fire at it for Christ’s sake,” Dean yelled frantically.
Another rifle opened up; the second stream of bullets catching the creature on the side of its lycanthrope head. It let go of Radford, to be flung against the storage frame. The rampant wail from its gaping fangs redoubled.
Dean boosted the communications block’s volume to its highest level. “Surrender or die,” he told it.
It might have had a beast’s form, but the look of absolute hatred came from an all-too-human eye.
“Grenade,” Dean ordered.
A small grey cylinder thumped into the bloody body.
Dean’s armour suit froze for a second. His collar sensors picked up the detonation: explosion followed by implosion. The outline of the beast collapsed into a middle-aged man, colour draining away. For a millisecond the man’s frame was captured perfectly, sprawled against the storage frame. Then the bullets resumed their attack. This time, he had no defence.
Dean had seen worse carnage, though the limited space between the storage frames made it appear terrible. Several of the AT Squad obviously didn’t have his experience, or phlegmatism.
Radford was helped to his feet and mumbled a subdued thanks. The sound of other teams from the AT Squad shooting somewhere in the building echoed tinnily down the corridors.
Dean gave them another minute to gather their composure, then resumed the sweep. Ninety seconds after they started, Alexandria Noakes was calling for him.
She’d discovered a man hunched up in a gap between two crates. Dean rushed up to find her prodding the captive out of his hiding place with nervous thrusts of her rifle. He levelled his own rifle squarely on the man’s head. “Surrender or die,” he said.
The man gave a frail little laugh. “But I am dead, señor.”
Eight police department hypersonics had landed in the park outside Moyce’s of Pasto. Ralph limped wearily towards the one which doubled as a mobile command centre for the AT Squad. There wasn’t that much difference from the rest, except it had more sensors and communications gear.
It could have been worse, he told himself. At least Admiral Farquar and Deborah Unwin had stood down the SD platforms, for now.
Stretchers with injured AT Squad members were arranged in a row below a couple of the hypersonics. Medics were moving among them, applying nanonic packages. One woman had been shoved into a zero-tau capsule, her wounds requiring immediate hospital treatment.
A big crowd of curious citizens had materialized, milling about in the park and spilling out across the roads. Police officers had thrown up barricades, keeping them well away.
Nine bulky fire department vehicles were parked outside Moyce’s of Pasto. Mechanoids trailing hoses had clambered up the walls with spiderlike tenacity, pumping foam and chemical inhibitors into smashed windows. A quarter of the roof was missing. Long flames were soaring up into the night sky out of the gap. Heat from the inferno was shattering the few remaining panes, creating more oxygen inflows.
It was going to be a long time before Moyce’s would be open for business again.
Nelson Akroid was waiting for him at the foot of the command hypersonic’s airstairs. His shell helmet was off, revealing a haggard face; a man who has seen the ungodly at play. “Seventeen wounded, three fatalities, sir,” he said in a voice close to breaking. His right hand was covered by a medical nanonic package. Scorch marks were visible on his armour suit.
“And the hostiles?”
“Twenty-three killed, six captured.” He twisted his head around to stare at the blazing building. “My teams, they did all right. We train to cope with nutters. But they beat those things. Christ—”
“They did good,” Ralph said quickly. “But, Nelson, this was only round one.”
“Yes, sir.” He straightened up. “The final sweep through the building was negative. I had to pull them out when the fire took hold. I’ve still got three teams covering it in case there are any hostiles still in there. They’ll do another sweep when the fire’s out.”
“Good man. Let’s go see the prisoners.”
The AT Squad was taking no chances; they were holding the six captives out on the park, keeping them a hundred metres apart. Each one stood in the centre of five squad members, five rifles trained on them.
Ralph walked over to the one Dean Folan and Cathal Fitzgerald were guarding. He datavised his communications block to open a channel to Roche Skark. “You might like to see this, sir.”
“I accessed the sensors around Moyce’s when the AT Squad went in,” the ESA director datavised. “They put up a lot of resistance.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If that happens each time we locate a nest of them, you’ll wind up razing half the city.”
“The prospects for decontaminating them aren’t too good, either. They fight like mechanoids. Subduing them is tricky. These six are the exception.”
“I’ll bring the rest of the committee in on the questioning. Can we have a visual please.”
Ralph’s neural nanonics informed him that other people were coming on-line to observe the interview: the Privy Council security committee over in Atherstone, and the civil authorities in Pasto’s police headquarters. He instructed his communications block to widen the channel’s bandwidth to a full sensevise, allowing them to access what he could see and hear.
Cathal Fitzgerald acknowledged him with the briefest nod as he approached. The man he was guarding was sitting on the grass, pointedly ignoring the semi-automatics directed at him. There was a slim white tube in his mouth. Its end was alight, glowing dully. As Ralph watched, the man sucked his cheeks in, and the coal glow brightened. He removed the tube from his mouth and exhaled a thin jet of smoke.
Ralph exchanged a puzzled frown with Cathal, who merely shrugged.
“Don’t ask me, boss,” Cathal said.
Ralph ran a search program through his neural nanonics memory cells. The general encyclopedia section produced a file headed: Nicotine Inhalation.
“Hey, you,” he said.
The man looked up and took another drag. “Sí, señor.”
“That’s a bad habit, which is why no one has done it for five centuries. Govcentral even refused an export licence for nicotine DNA.”
A sly, sulky smile. “After my time, señor.”
“What’s your name?”
“Santiago Vargas.”
“Lying little bastard,” Cathal Fitzgerald said. “We ran an ident check. He’s Hank Doyle, distribution supervisor for Moyce’s.”
“Interesting,” Ralph said. “Skibbow claimed to be someone else when he was caught: Kingsford Garrigan. Is that what the virus is programmed to do?”
“Don’t know, señor. Don’t know any virus.”
“Where does it come from? Where do you come from?”
“Me, señor? I come from Barcelona. A beautiful city. I show you around sometime. I lived there many years. Some happy years, and some with my wife. I died there.”
The cigarette glow lit up watery eyes which watched Ralph shrewdly.
“You died there?”
“Sí, señor.”
“This is bullshit. We need information, and fast. What’s the maximum range of that white fire weapon?”
“Don’t know, señor.”
“Then I suggest you run a quick memory check,” Ralph said coldly. “Because you’re no use to me otherwise. It’ll be straight into zero-tau with you.”
Santiago Vargas stubbed his cigarette out on the grass. “You want me to see how far I can throw it for you?”
“Sure.”
“Okay.” He climbed to his feet with indolent slowness.
Ralph gestured out over the deserted reaches of the park. Santiago Vargas closed his eyes and extended his arm. His hand blazed with light, and a bolt of white fire sizzled away. It streaked over the grass flinging out a multitude of tiny sparks as it went. At a hundred metres it started to expand and dim, slowing down. At a hundred and twenty metres it was a tenuous luminescent haze. It never reached a hundred and thirty metres, evaporating in midair.
Santiago Vargas wore a happy smile. “All right! Pretty good, eh, señor? I practice, I maybe get better.”
“Believe me, you won’t have the opportunity,” Ralph told him.
“Okay.” He seemed unconcerned.
“How do you generate it?”
“Don’t know, señor. I just think about it, and it happens.”
“Then let’s try another tack. Why do you fire it?”
“I don’t. That was the first time.”
“Your friends didn’t have any of your inhibitions.”
“No.”
“So why didn’t you join them? Why didn’t you fight us?”
“I have no quarrel with you, señor. It is the ones with passion , they fight your soldiers. They bring back many more souls so they can be strong together.”
“They’ve infected others?”
“Sí.”
“How many?”
Santiago Vargas offered up his hands, palms upwards. “I don’t think anyone in the shop escaped possession. Sorry, señor.”
“Shit.” Ralph glanced back at the burning building, just in time to see another section of roof collapse. “Landon?” he datavised. “We’ll need a full list of staff on the nighttime shift. How many there were. Where they live.”
“Coming up,” the commissioner replied.
“How many of the infected left before we arrived?” he asked Santiago Vargas.
“Not sure, señor. There were many trucks.”
“They left on the delivery lorries?”
“Sí. They sit in the back. You don’t have no driver’s seat these days. All mechanical. Very clever.”
Ralph stared in dismay at the sullen man.
“We’ve been concentrating on stopping passenger vehicles,” Diana Tiernan datavised. “Cargo traffic was only a secondary concern.”
“Oh, Christ, if they got on to the motorways they could be halfway across the continent by now,” Ralph said.
“I’ll reassign the AI vehicle search priority now.”
“If you find any of Moyce’s lorries that are still moving, target them with the SD platforms. We don’t have any other choice.”
“I agree,” Admiral Farquar datavised.
“Ralph, ask him which of the embassy pair was in Moyce’s, please,” Roche Skark datavised.
Ralph pulled a processor block from his belt, and ordered it to display pictures of Jacob Tremarco and Angeline Gallagher. He thrust it towards Vargas. “Did you see either of these people in the shop?”
The man took his time. “Him. I think.”
“So we’ve still got to find Angeline Gallagher,” Ralph said. “Any more city traffic with glitched processors?”
“Three possibles,” Diana datavised. “We’ve already got two of them located. Both taxis from the spaceport.”
“Okay, assign an AT Squad to each taxi. And make sure there are experienced personnel in both of them. What was the third trace?”
“A Longhound bus which left the airport ten minutes after the embassy trio landed; it was a scheduled southern route, right down to the tip of Mortonridge. We’re working on its current location.”
“Right, I’m coming back to the police headquarters. We’re finished here.”
“What about him?” Nelson Akroid asked, jerking a thumb at the captive.
Ralph glanced back. Santiago Vargas had found another cigarette from somewhere and was smoking it quietly. He smiled. “Can I go now, señor?” he asked hopefully.
Ralph returned the smile with equal honesty. “Have the zero-tau pods from Ekwan arrived yet?” he datavised.
“The first batch are due to arrive at Pasto spaceport in twelve minutes,” Vicky Keogh replied.
“Cathal,” Ralph said out loud. “See if Mr Vargas here will cooperate with us for just a little longer. I’d like to know the limits of the electronic warfare field, and that illusion effect of theirs.”
“Yes, boss.”
“After that, take him and the others on a sightseeing trip to the spaceport. No exceptions.”
“My pleasure.”
The Loyola Hall was one of San Angeles’s more prestigious live-event venues. It seated twenty-five thousand under a domed roof which could be retracted when the weather was balmy, as it so frequently was in that city. There were excellent access routes to the nearby elevated autoway; the subway station was a nexus for six of the lines which ran beneath the city; it even had seven landing pads for VIP aircraft. There were five-star restaurants and snack bars, hundreds of rest rooms. Stewards were experienced and friendly. Police and promoters handled over two hundred events a year.
The whole site was an operation which functioned with silicon efficiency. Until today.
Eager kids had been arriving since six o’clock in the morning. It was now half past seven in the evening. Around the walls they were thronging twenty deep; scrums outside the various public doors needed police mechanoids to maintain a loose kind of order, and even they were in danger of being overwhelmed. The kids had a lot of fun spraying them with soft drinks and smearing ice creams over the sensors.
Inside the hall every seat was taken, the tickets bought months ago. The aisles were filled with people, too, though how they had got in past the processor-regulated turnstiles was anyone’s guess. Touts were becoming overnight millionaires, those that weren’t being arrested or mugged by gangs of motivated fourteen-year-olds.
It was the last night of Jezzibella’s Moral Bankruptcy tour. The New California system had endured five weeks of relentless media saturation as she swept across the asteroid settlements and down to the planetary surface. Rumour, of AV projectors broadcasting illegal activent patterns during her concerts to stimulate orgasms in the audience (not true, said the official press release, Jezzibella has abundant sexuality of her own, she doesn’t need artificial aids to boost the Mood Fantasy she emotes). Hyperbole, about the President’s youngest daughter being completely infatuated after meeting her, then sneaking out of the Blue Palace to go backstage at her concert (Jezzibella was delighted and deeply honoured to meet all members of the First Family, and we are not aware of any unauthorized entry to a concert). Scandal, when two of the band, Bruno and Busch, were arrested for violating public decency laws in front of a senior citizens holiday group, their bail posted at one million New California dollars (Bruno and Busch were engaged in a very wonderful, sensitive, and private act of love; and that bunch of filthy old perverts used enhanced retinas to spy on them). Straight hype, when Jezzibella visited (as a private citizen—so no sensevises, please) a children’s ward in a poor district of town, and donated half a million fuseodollars to the hospital’s germ-line treatment fund. Editorial shock at the way she flaunted her thirteen-year-old male companion, Emmerson (Mr Emmerson is Jezzibella’s second cousin, and his passport clearly states he is sixteen). A lot of spectator fun, and official police cautions, derived from the extraordinarily violent fights between her entourage’s security team and rover reporters. The storm of libel writs issued by Leroy Octavius, her manager, every time anyone suggested she was older than twenty-eight.
And in all those five weeks she never gave an interview, never made a single public utterance outside of her stage routine. She didn’t have to. In that time, the regional office of Warner Castle Entertainment datavised out thirty-seven million copies of her new MF album Life Kinetic across the planet’s communications net to worshipful fans; her back catalogue sold equally well.
The starship crews who normally made a tidy profit from selling a copy of an MF album to a distributor in star systems where they hadn’t been officially released yet cursed their luck when they arrived on planets where Jezzibella had passed through in the last eighteen months. But then that was the point of being a touring artist. A new album every nine months, and visit ten star systems each year; it was the only way you could beat the bootleggers. If you weren’t prepared to do that, the only money you ever got was from your home star system. Few made the transition from local wonder to galactic mega-star. It took a lot of money to travel, and entertainment companies were reluctant to invest. The artist had to demonstrate a colossal degree of professionalism and determination before they were worth the multimillion-fuseodollar risk. Once they’d breached the threshold, of course, the old adage of money making more money had never been truer.
High above the costly props and powerful AV stacks onstage, an optical-band sensor was scanning the crowd. Faces merged into a monotonous procession as it swept along the tiers and balconies. Fans came in distinct categories: the eager exhilarated ones, mostly young; boisterous and expectant, late teens; impatient, already stimmed-out, nervous, fearfully worshipful, even a few who obviously wanted to be somewhere else but had come along to please their partner. Every costume Jezzibella had ever worn in an MF track was out there somewhere, from the simple to the peacock bizarre.
The sensor focused on a couple in matching leathers. The boy was nineteen or twenty, the girl at his side a bit younger. They had their arms around each other, very much in love. Both tall, healthy, vital.
Jezzibella cancelled the datavise from the sensor. “Those two,” she told Leroy Octavius. “I like them.”
The unpleasantly overweight manager glanced at the short AV pillar sticking out of his processor block, checking the two blithesome faces. “Roger dodger. I’ll get on it.”
There was no quibbling, not the faintest hint of disapproval. Jezzibella liked that; it was what made him such a good manager. He understood how it was for her, the things she required in order to function. She needed kids like those two. Needed what they’d got, the naivete, the uncertainty, the delight at life. She had none of that left, now, not the sweet side of human nature. The eternal tour had drained it all away, somewhere out among the stars; one energy which could leak out of a zero-tau field. Everything became secondary to the tour, feelings weren’t allowed to interfere. And feelings suppressed long enough simply vanished. But she couldn’t have that, because she needed an understanding of feelings in order to work. Circles. Her life was all circles.
So instead of her own emotions, she familiarised herself with this alien quality which others owned, examining it as if she were performing a doctoral thesis. Absorbed what she could, the brief taste allowing her to perform again, to fake it through yet one more show.
“I don’t like them,” Emmerson said petulantly.
Jezzibella tried to smile at him, but the whole charade of pandering to him bored her now. She was standing, stark naked, in the middle of the green room while Libby Robosky, her personal image consultant, worked on her dermal scales. The bitek covering was a lot more subtle than a chameleon layer, allowing her to modify her body’s whole external texture rather than simply changing colour. For some numbers she needed to have soft, sensitive skin, a young girl who quivered at her first lover’s touch; then there was the untainted look, a body which was naturally graceful without workouts and fad diets (like the girl she’d seen through the hall’s sensor); and of course the athlete/ballerina body, supple, hard, and muscular—big favourite with the boys. It was the feel of her which everyone out there in the hall wanted to experience; Jezzibella in the flesh.
But the tiny scales had a short lifetime, and each one had to be annealed to her skin separately. Libby Robosky was an undoubted wizard when it came to applying them, using a modified medical nanonic package.
“You don’t have to meet them,” Jezzibella told the boy patiently. “I can take care of them by myself.”
“I don’t want to be left alone all night. How come I can’t pick someone out of the audience for myself?”
As the reporters had been allowed to discover, he really was only thirteen. She’d brought him into the entourage back on Borroloola, an interesting plaything. Now after two months of daily tantrums and broodiness the novelty value had been exhausted. “Because this is the way it has to be. I need them for a reason. I’ve told you a hundred times.”
“Okay. So why don’t we do it now, then?”
“I have a show in a quarter of an hour. Remember?”
“So what?” Emmerson challenged. “Skip it. That’ll cause a real publicity storm. And there won’t be any backlash ’cos we’re leaving.”
“Leroy,” she datavised. “Take this fucking brat away before I split his skull open to find out where his brain went.”
Leroy Octavius waddled back over to where she stood. His bulky frame was clad in a light snakeskin jacket that was an optimistic size and a half too small. The tough, thin leather squeaked at every motion. “Come on, son,” he said in a gruff voice. “We’re supposed to leave the artists to it this close to a show. You know how spaced out they get about performing. How about you and I have a look at the food they’re laying on next door?”
The boy allowed himself to be led away, Leroy’s huge hand draped over his shoulder, casually forceful.
Jezzibella groaned. “Shit. Why did I ever think his age made him exciting?”
Libby’s indigo eyes fluttered open, giving her a quizzical look. Out of all the sycophants, hangers-on, outright parasites, and essential crew, Jezzibella enjoyed Libby the most. A grandmotherly type who always dressed to emphasise her age, she had the stoicism and patience to absorb any tantrum or crisis with only the vaguest disinterested shrug.
“It was your hormones which went a-frolicking at the sight of his baby dick, poppet,” Libby said.
Jezzibella grunted, she knew the rest of the entourage hated Emmerson. “Leroy,” she datavised. “I paid that hospital we visited enough fucking money; have they got a secure wing we could leave the juvenile shit in?”
Leroy gave a backwards wave as he left the green room. “We’ll talk about what we’re going to do with him later,” he replied.
“You fucking finished yet?” Jezzibella asked Libby.
“Absolutely, poppet.”
Jezzibella composed herself, and ordered her neural nanonics to send a sequence of encoded impulses down her nerves. There was an eerie sensation of wet leather slithering on the top of her rib cage, all four limbs shivered. Her shoulders straightened of their own accord, belly muscles tightened, sinuous lines hardened under skin that was turning a deeper shade of bronze.
She dug deep into her memory, finding the right sensation of pride and confidence. Combined with the physique it was synergistic. She was adorable, and knew it.
“Merrill!” she yelled. “Merrill, where the fuck’s my first-act costume?”
The flunky hurried over to the big travelling trunks lined up along a wall and began extracting the requisite items.
“And why haven’t you shitheads started warming up yet,” she shouted at the musicians.
The green room abruptly became a whirlwind of activity as everyone found legitimate employment. Private, silent datavises flashed through the air as they all discussed the impending frailty of Emmerson’s future. It diverted them from how precarious their own tenures were.
Ralph Hiltch accessed various reports as he flew back over the city. The priority search which Diana Tiernan’s department had initiated was producing good results. According to the city’s route and flow road processor network, fifty-three lorries had left Moyce’s that evening. The AIs were now chasing after them.
Within seven minutes of Diana assigning the lorries full priority, twelve had been located, all outside the city. The coordinates were datavised into the Strategic Defence Command up in Guyana, and sensor satellites triangulated the targets for low-orbit weapons platforms. A dozen short-lived violet starbursts blossomed across Xingu’s southern quarter.
By the time Ralph’s hypersonic landed another eight had been added to the total. He’d stripped off his damaged lightweight armour suit in the plane, borrowing a dark blue police fatigue one-piece. It was baggy enough to fit over his medical nanonic package without restriction. But for all the package’s support, he was still limping as he made his way over to Hub One.
“Welcome back,” Landon McCullock said. “You did a good job, Ralph. I’m grateful.”
“We all are,” Warren Aspinal said. “And that’s not just a politician speaking. I have a family in the city, three kids.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ralph sat down next to Diana Tiernan. She managed a quick grin for him. “We’ve been checking up on the night shift at Moyce’s,” she said. “There were forty-five on duty this evening. As of now, the AT Squads have accounted for twenty-nine during the assault, killed and captured.”
“Shit. Sixteen of the bastards loose,” Bernard Gibson said.
“No,” Diana said firmly. “We think we may have got lucky. I’ve hooked the AIs into the fire department’s mechanoids; their sensors are profiled for exploring high temperature environments. So far they’ve located a further five bodies in the building, and there’s still thirty per cent which hasn’t been covered. That accounts for all but eleven of the night shift.”
“Still too many,” Landon said.
“I know. But we’re certain that six of the lorries zapped so far contained a shift member. Their processors and ancillary circuits were suffering random failures. It matched the kind of interference which Adkinson’s plane suffered.”
“And then there were five,” Warren Aspinal said quietly.
“Yes, sir,” Diana said. “I’m pretty sure they’re in the remaining lorries.”
“Well I’m afraid ‘pretty sure’ isn’t good enough when we’re facing a threat which could wipe us out in less than a week, Chief Tiernan,” said Leonard DeVille.
“Sir.” Diana didn’t bother to look at him. “I wasn’t making wild assumptions. Firstly, the AIs have confirmed that there was no other traffic logged as using Moyce’s since Jacob Tremarco’s taxi arrived.”
“So they left on foot.”
“Again, I really don’t think that is the case, sir. That whole area around Moyce’s is fully covered by security sensors, both ours and the private systems owned by the companies in neighbouring buildings. We accessed all the relevant memories. Nobody came out of Moyce’s. Just the lorries.”
“What we’ve seen tonight is a continuing pattern of attempted widespread dispersal,” Landon McCullock said. “The embassy trio have been constant in their attempt to distribute the energy virus as broadly as possible. It’s a very logical move. The wider it is spread, the longer it takes for us to contain it, and the more people can be infected, in turn making it more difficult for us to contain. A nasty spiral.”
“They only have a limited amount of time in the city,” Ralph chipped in. “And the city is where we have the greatest advantage when it comes to finding and eliminating them. So they’ll know it’s a waste of effort trying to spread the contamination here, at least initially. Whereas the countryside tilts the balance in their favour. If they win out there, then Xingu’s main urban areas will eventually become cities under siege. Again a situation which we would probably lose in the long run. That’s what happened on Lalonde. I imagine that Durringham has fallen by now.”
Leonard DeVille nodded curtly.
“The second point,” said Diana, “is that those infected don’t seem able to halt the lorries. Short of them using their white fire weapon to physically destroy the motors or power systems the lorries aren’t stopping before their first scheduled delivery point. And if they do use violence against a lorry the motorway processors will spot it straightaway. From the evidence we’ve accumulated so far it seems as though they can’t use their electronic warfare field to alter a lorry’s destination. It’s powerful, but not sophisticated, not enough to get down into the actual drive control processors and tamper with on line programs.”
“You mean they’re trapped inside the lorries?” Warren Aspinal asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And none of the lorries have reached their destination yet,” Vicky Keogh said, with a smile for the Home Office minister. “As Diana said, it looks like we got lucky.”
“Well thank God they’re not omnipotent,” the Prime Minister said.
“They’re not far short,” Ralph observed. Even listening to Diana outline the current situation hadn’t lifted his spirits. The crisis was too hot, too now. Emotions hadn’t had time to catch up with events; pursuing the embassy trio was like space warfare, everything happening too quick for anything other than simplistic responses, there was no opportunity to take stock and think. “What about Angeline Gallagher?” he inquired. “Have the AIs got any further leads?”
“No. Just the two taxis and the Longhound bus,” Diana said. “The AT Squads are on their way.”
They passed quickly through the ransacked manor, and down the portico’s stone steps to the farm rangers parked on the gravel. A smudge of smoke on the horizon betrayed Colsterworth’s position.
“Get in,” Quinn said. He was on the verge of laughter.
Lawrence clambered into the front passenger seat as Quinn switched the motor on. The vehicle sped down the drive, sending pebbles skidding onto the grass verge.
“I wonder how long they’ll stay in there like that?” Quinn mused.
“Aren’t we coming back?”
“No. This crappy little world is a dead end, Lawrence. There’s nothing left for us here, no purpose. We have to get off; and there aren’t many navy starships in orbit. We’ve got to reach one before they all leave. The Confederation will be waking to the threat soon. They’ll recall their fleets to protect the important worlds.”
“So where are we going if we do get a frigate?”
“Back to Earth. We have allies there. There are sects in every major arcology. We can gnaw at the Confederation from within, corrupt it completely.”
“Do you think the sects will help us?” Lawrence asked, curious.
“Eventually. They might need a little persuading first. I’ll enjoy that.”
The AT Squad had the exclusive shop completely surrounded. Moyce’s of Pasto occupied a more hospitable section of the city than the Mahalia warehouse. The building’s design was an indulgent neo-Napoleonic, overlooking one of the main parks. It catered to the aristocracy and the wealthy, trading mainly on snob value. The shop itself was only a fifth of the business; Moyce’s main income came from supplying goods and delicacies to estates and the upwardly mobile clear across the continent. There were eight separate loading bay doors at the back of the building to accommodate the fleet of lorries which were dispatched every night. Their feed roads merged into a single trunk road which led down into a tunnel where it joined one of the city’s three major underground ring motorways.
At ten past midnight its distribution centre was normally busy loading lorries with the day’s orders. Nothing had emerged in the four minutes it had taken the AT Squad to deploy. However, there was one vehicle parked outside the end loading bay, obstructing the road: the taxi which the AI cores had traced from the spaceport. All its electrical circuits had been switched off.
Fifteen assault mechanoids dashed up the slope to the loading bay doors, their movements coordinated by the Squad’s seven technical officers. Three of the doors were to be broken down, while the others were to be blocked and guarded. One had been assigned to the taxi.
Six of the assault mechanoids lashed out with their electron explosive whips. Squad members were already running up the feed roads behind them.
Not all of the whips landed on target. Several detonations chopped into support pillars and door joists. Brick-sized lumps of stone came flying back down the feed roads. Two of the assault mechanoids were hit by the chunks, sending them cartwheeling backwards. The entire central loading bay collapsed, bringing with it a large section of the first-storey floor. An avalanche of crates and cylindrical storage pods tumbled down onto the road, burying a further three assault mechanoids. They started to fire their sense-overload ordnance at random; flares and sonic shells punching out from the wreckage amid huge fountains of white packaging chips. Crumpled kitchen units and patio furniture skittered down the mound.
The AT Squad members dived for cover as another two mechanoids started to gyrate in a wild dance. Their ordnance sprayed out, slamming into walls and arching away over the park. Only three of the remaining assault mechanoids were actually firing ordnance into the two loading bays which had been broken open.
“Pull them back!” Ralph datavised to the technical officers. “Get those bloody mechanoids out of there.”
Nothing happened. Sense-overload ordnance was squirting out everywhere. The assault mechanoids continued their lunatic dance. One pirouetted, twining its seven legs together, and promptly fell over. Ralph watched a dozen flares shoot straight upwards, illuminating the whole area. Black figures were lying prone on the feed roads, horribly exposed. A sense-overload flare speared straight into one of them; then it expanded strangely, creating a web of rippling white light. The suited figure thrashed about.
“Shit,” Ralph grunted. It wasn’t a flare, it was the white fire. They were in the distribution centre! “Shut down those mechanoids now,” he datavised. His neural nanonics reported that several of his suit systems were degrading.
“No response, sir,” a technical officer replied. “We’ve lost them completely, even their fallback routine has failed. How did they do that? The mechanoids are equipped with military-grade electronics, a megaton emp couldn’t glitch their processors.”
Ralph could imagine the officer’s surprise. He’d undergone it himself back on Lalonde as the awful realization struck. He stood up from behind the parapet on top of the tunnel entrance, and lifted the heavy-calibre recoilless rifle. Targeting graphics flipped up over his helmet’s sensor image. He fired at an assault mechanoid.
It exploded energetically, its power cells and ordnance detonating as soon as the armour-piercing round penetrated its flexing body. The blast wave shifted half of the precariously tangled wreckage in front of the collapsed loading bay. More crates thumped down from the sagging first-storey floor. Three assault mechanoids were sent lurching back down the feed roads, plasmatic legs juddering in fast undulations. Ralph shifted his aim and took out another one just as it started to lumber upright.
“Squad, shoot out the mechanoids,” he ordered. His communications block informed him that half of the command channels had shut down. He switched on the block’s external speaker and repeated the order, bellowing it out across the feed roads at a volume which could be heard above the detonating mechanoids.
A streak of white fire lanced down from one of Moyce’s upper windows. The threat response program in Ralph’s neural nanonics bullied his leg muscles with nerve impulse overrides. He was flinging himself aside before his conscious mind had registered the attack.
Two more mechanoids exploded as he hit the concrete behind the parapet. He thought he recognized the heavy-calibre gaussrifle which the G66 troops used. Then an insidious serpent of white fire was coiling around his knee. His neural nanonics instantly erected analgesic blocks across his nerves, blanking out the pain. A medical display showed him skin and bone being eaten away by the white fire. The whole knee joint would be ruined in a matter of seconds if he couldn’t extinguish it. Yet both Dean and Will said smothering it like natural flames made hardly any difference.
Ralph assigned his neural nanonics full control of his musculature, and simply designated the window which the white fire had emerged from. With detached interest he observed his body swivelling, the rifle barrel swinging round. His retinal target graphics locked over a window. Thirty-five rounds pummelled the black rectangle, a mixed barrage of high explosive (chemical), shrapnel, and incendiary.
Within two seconds the room had ceased to exist, its carved stone frontage disintegrating behind a vast gout of flame and showering down on the melee below.
The white fire around Ralph’s knee vanished. He pulled a medical nanonic package from his belt and slapped it on the charred wound.
Down on the feed roads most of the AT Squad had switched to their communications block speakers. Orders, warnings, and cries for help reverberated over the sound of multiple explosions. A vast fusillade of heavy-calibre rifle fire was pounding into the loading bays. Comets of white fire poured out in retaliation.
“Nelson,” Ralph datavised. “For Christ’s sake, make sure the troops out front don’t let anyone escape. They’re to hold position and shoot to kill now. Forget the capture mission; we’ll try it back here, but nobody else is to attempt anything fancy.”
“Yes, sir,” Nelson Akroid answered.
Ralph went back to the speaker. “Cathal, let’s try and get in there. Isolation procedure. Separate them, and nuke them.”
“Sir.” The cry came back over the parapet.
At least he’s still alive, Ralph thought.
“Do you want stage two yet?” Admiral Farquar datavised.
“No, sir. They’re still contained. Our perimeter is holding.”
“Okay, Ralph. But the second there’s a status change, I need to know.”
“Sir.”
His neural nanonics reported the medical package had finished knitting to his knee. The weight load it could take was down forty percent. It would have to do. Ralph tucked the heavy-calibre rifle under his arm, then bending low, he ran for the end of the parapet and the steps down to the trunk road.
Dean Folan signalled his team members forward, scurrying around the side of the big mound of crates and into the loading bay area. Flames had taken hold amid the fragments piled outside.
It was dark inside the loading bays. Projectile impacts had etched deep pocks into the bare carbon-concrete walls. Rattail tangles of wire and fibre-optic cable hung down from the fissured ceiling, swaying gently. Through the helmet’s goggle lenses he could see very little, even with enhanced retinas on full sensitivity. He switched his shell helmet sensors to low light and infrared. Green and red images merged to form a pallid picture of the rear of the loading bay. Annoying glare spots flickered as small flames licked at the storage frames which lined the walls. Discrimination programs worked at eliminating them.
There were three corridors leading off straight back from the rear of the bay, formed by the storage frames. Metal grids containing crates and pods ready for the lorries, they looked like solid walls of huge bricks. Cargo-handling mechanoids had stalled on their rails which ran along the side of the frames, plasmatic arms dangling inertly. Water was pouring out of five or six broken ceiling pipes, spilling down the crates to pool on the floor.
Nothing moved in the corridors.
Dean left his gaussrifle at the head of the middle corridor, knowing it would be useless at close range, the electronic warfare field would simply switch it off. Instead, he drew a semi-automatic rifle; it had a feed loop connected to his backpack, but the rounds were all chemical. The AT Squad had grumbled about that at the start, questioning the wisdom of abandoning their power weapons. Nobody had complained much after the mechanoids went berserk, and their suit systems suffered innumerable dropouts.
Three of the team followed him as he advanced down the corridor, also carrying semi-automatics. The rest of them spread out around the bay and edged down the other two corridors.
A figure zipped across the end of the corridor. Dean fired, the roar of the semi-automatic impressively loud in the confined space. Plastic splinters from the crates ricocheted through the air as the bullets chiselled into them.
Dean started running forwards. There was no corpse on the floor.
“Radford, did you see him?” Dean demanded. “He was heading towards your corridor.”
“No, Chief.”
“Anybody?”
All he got was a series of negatives, some shouted, some datavised. No doubt the hostiles were about, his suit blocks were still badly affected by the electronic warfare field. His injured arm was itchy, too.
He reached the end of the corridor. It was a junction to another three. “Hell, it’s a sodding maze back here.”
Radford arrived at the end of his corridor, semi-automatic sweeping the storage frames.
“Okay, we fan out here,” Dean announced. “All of you: keep two other squad members in visual range at all times. If you lose sight of your partners, then stop immediately and reestablish contact.”
He picked one of the corridors leading deeper into the shop and beckoned a couple of the Squad to follow him.
A creature landed on top of Radford; half man, half black lion, features merged grotesquely. Its weight carried him effortlessly to the floor. Dagger claws scraped at Radford’s armour suit. But the integral valency generators had stiffened the fabric right from the moment of impact, protecting the vulnerable human skin inside. The creature howled in fury, thwarted at the very moment of triumph.
Radford’s suit systems as well as his neural nanonics began to fail. Even his shocked yell was cut off as the communications block speaker died. The suit’s fabric started to give way, slowly softening. One of the claw tips screwed inwards, hungry for flesh.
Even amid his frantic twisting and bucking to throw off the creature Radford was aware of a whisper which bordered on the subliminal. It had surely been there all his life, but only now with the prospect of death sharpening his perception was he fully conscious of it. It began to expand, not in volume, but in harmony. A whole chorus of whispers. Promising love. Promising sympathy. Promising to help, if he would just—
Bullets smashed into the flanks of the creature, mauling the fur and long muscle bands. Dean kept his semi-automatic steady as the thing clung to Radford’s body. He could see the armour suit fabric hardening again, the claws slipping and skidding.
“Stop!” one of the team was shouting. “You’ll kill Radford.”
“He’ll be worse than dead if we don’t,” Dean snarled back. Spent casings were hurtling out of the rifle at an astounding rate. Still the beast wouldn’t let go, its great head shaking from side to side, emitting a continual wail of pain.
The team was rushing en masse towards Dean down the narrow corridors between the storage frames. Two more were shouting at him to stop.
“Get back!” he ordered. “Keep watching for the rest of the bastards.” His magazine was down to eighty per cent. The rifle didn’t have the power to beat the creature, all the thing had to do was hang on. Blood was running down its hind legs, the fur where the bullets struck a pulped mass of raw flesh. Not enough damage, not nearly enough.
“Someone else fire at it for Christ’s sake,” Dean yelled frantically.
Another rifle opened up; the second stream of bullets catching the creature on the side of its lycanthrope head. It let go of Radford, to be flung against the storage frame. The rampant wail from its gaping fangs redoubled.
Dean boosted the communications block’s volume to its highest level. “Surrender or die,” he told it.
It might have had a beast’s form, but the look of absolute hatred came from an all-too-human eye.
“Grenade,” Dean ordered.
A small grey cylinder thumped into the bloody body.
Dean’s armour suit froze for a second. His collar sensors picked up the detonation: explosion followed by implosion. The outline of the beast collapsed into a middle-aged man, colour draining away. For a millisecond the man’s frame was captured perfectly, sprawled against the storage frame. Then the bullets resumed their attack. This time, he had no defence.
Dean had seen worse carnage, though the limited space between the storage frames made it appear terrible. Several of the AT Squad obviously didn’t have his experience, or phlegmatism.
Radford was helped to his feet and mumbled a subdued thanks. The sound of other teams from the AT Squad shooting somewhere in the building echoed tinnily down the corridors.
Dean gave them another minute to gather their composure, then resumed the sweep. Ninety seconds after they started, Alexandria Noakes was calling for him.
She’d discovered a man hunched up in a gap between two crates. Dean rushed up to find her prodding the captive out of his hiding place with nervous thrusts of her rifle. He levelled his own rifle squarely on the man’s head. “Surrender or die,” he said.
The man gave a frail little laugh. “But I am dead, señor.”
Eight police department hypersonics had landed in the park outside Moyce’s of Pasto. Ralph limped wearily towards the one which doubled as a mobile command centre for the AT Squad. There wasn’t that much difference from the rest, except it had more sensors and communications gear.
It could have been worse, he told himself. At least Admiral Farquar and Deborah Unwin had stood down the SD platforms, for now.
Stretchers with injured AT Squad members were arranged in a row below a couple of the hypersonics. Medics were moving among them, applying nanonic packages. One woman had been shoved into a zero-tau capsule, her wounds requiring immediate hospital treatment.
A big crowd of curious citizens had materialized, milling about in the park and spilling out across the roads. Police officers had thrown up barricades, keeping them well away.
Nine bulky fire department vehicles were parked outside Moyce’s of Pasto. Mechanoids trailing hoses had clambered up the walls with spiderlike tenacity, pumping foam and chemical inhibitors into smashed windows. A quarter of the roof was missing. Long flames were soaring up into the night sky out of the gap. Heat from the inferno was shattering the few remaining panes, creating more oxygen inflows.
It was going to be a long time before Moyce’s would be open for business again.
Nelson Akroid was waiting for him at the foot of the command hypersonic’s airstairs. His shell helmet was off, revealing a haggard face; a man who has seen the ungodly at play. “Seventeen wounded, three fatalities, sir,” he said in a voice close to breaking. His right hand was covered by a medical nanonic package. Scorch marks were visible on his armour suit.
“And the hostiles?”
“Twenty-three killed, six captured.” He twisted his head around to stare at the blazing building. “My teams, they did all right. We train to cope with nutters. But they beat those things. Christ—”
“They did good,” Ralph said quickly. “But, Nelson, this was only round one.”
“Yes, sir.” He straightened up. “The final sweep through the building was negative. I had to pull them out when the fire took hold. I’ve still got three teams covering it in case there are any hostiles still in there. They’ll do another sweep when the fire’s out.”
“Good man. Let’s go see the prisoners.”
The AT Squad was taking no chances; they were holding the six captives out on the park, keeping them a hundred metres apart. Each one stood in the centre of five squad members, five rifles trained on them.
Ralph walked over to the one Dean Folan and Cathal Fitzgerald were guarding. He datavised his communications block to open a channel to Roche Skark. “You might like to see this, sir.”
“I accessed the sensors around Moyce’s when the AT Squad went in,” the ESA director datavised. “They put up a lot of resistance.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If that happens each time we locate a nest of them, you’ll wind up razing half the city.”
“The prospects for decontaminating them aren’t too good, either. They fight like mechanoids. Subduing them is tricky. These six are the exception.”
“I’ll bring the rest of the committee in on the questioning. Can we have a visual please.”
Ralph’s neural nanonics informed him that other people were coming on-line to observe the interview: the Privy Council security committee over in Atherstone, and the civil authorities in Pasto’s police headquarters. He instructed his communications block to widen the channel’s bandwidth to a full sensevise, allowing them to access what he could see and hear.
Cathal Fitzgerald acknowledged him with the briefest nod as he approached. The man he was guarding was sitting on the grass, pointedly ignoring the semi-automatics directed at him. There was a slim white tube in his mouth. Its end was alight, glowing dully. As Ralph watched, the man sucked his cheeks in, and the coal glow brightened. He removed the tube from his mouth and exhaled a thin jet of smoke.
Ralph exchanged a puzzled frown with Cathal, who merely shrugged.
“Don’t ask me, boss,” Cathal said.
Ralph ran a search program through his neural nanonics memory cells. The general encyclopedia section produced a file headed: Nicotine Inhalation.
“Hey, you,” he said.
The man looked up and took another drag. “Sí, señor.”
“That’s a bad habit, which is why no one has done it for five centuries. Govcentral even refused an export licence for nicotine DNA.”
A sly, sulky smile. “After my time, señor.”
“What’s your name?”
“Santiago Vargas.”
“Lying little bastard,” Cathal Fitzgerald said. “We ran an ident check. He’s Hank Doyle, distribution supervisor for Moyce’s.”
“Interesting,” Ralph said. “Skibbow claimed to be someone else when he was caught: Kingsford Garrigan. Is that what the virus is programmed to do?”
“Don’t know, señor. Don’t know any virus.”
“Where does it come from? Where do you come from?”
“Me, señor? I come from Barcelona. A beautiful city. I show you around sometime. I lived there many years. Some happy years, and some with my wife. I died there.”
The cigarette glow lit up watery eyes which watched Ralph shrewdly.
“You died there?”
“Sí, señor.”
“This is bullshit. We need information, and fast. What’s the maximum range of that white fire weapon?”
“Don’t know, señor.”
“Then I suggest you run a quick memory check,” Ralph said coldly. “Because you’re no use to me otherwise. It’ll be straight into zero-tau with you.”
Santiago Vargas stubbed his cigarette out on the grass. “You want me to see how far I can throw it for you?”
“Sure.”
“Okay.” He climbed to his feet with indolent slowness.
Ralph gestured out over the deserted reaches of the park. Santiago Vargas closed his eyes and extended his arm. His hand blazed with light, and a bolt of white fire sizzled away. It streaked over the grass flinging out a multitude of tiny sparks as it went. At a hundred metres it started to expand and dim, slowing down. At a hundred and twenty metres it was a tenuous luminescent haze. It never reached a hundred and thirty metres, evaporating in midair.
Santiago Vargas wore a happy smile. “All right! Pretty good, eh, señor? I practice, I maybe get better.”
“Believe me, you won’t have the opportunity,” Ralph told him.
“Okay.” He seemed unconcerned.
“How do you generate it?”
“Don’t know, señor. I just think about it, and it happens.”
“Then let’s try another tack. Why do you fire it?”
“I don’t. That was the first time.”
“Your friends didn’t have any of your inhibitions.”
“No.”
“So why didn’t you join them? Why didn’t you fight us?”
“I have no quarrel with you, señor. It is the ones with passion , they fight your soldiers. They bring back many more souls so they can be strong together.”
“They’ve infected others?”
“Sí.”
“How many?”
Santiago Vargas offered up his hands, palms upwards. “I don’t think anyone in the shop escaped possession. Sorry, señor.”
“Shit.” Ralph glanced back at the burning building, just in time to see another section of roof collapse. “Landon?” he datavised. “We’ll need a full list of staff on the nighttime shift. How many there were. Where they live.”
“Coming up,” the commissioner replied.
“How many of the infected left before we arrived?” he asked Santiago Vargas.
“Not sure, señor. There were many trucks.”
“They left on the delivery lorries?”
“Sí. They sit in the back. You don’t have no driver’s seat these days. All mechanical. Very clever.”
Ralph stared in dismay at the sullen man.
“We’ve been concentrating on stopping passenger vehicles,” Diana Tiernan datavised. “Cargo traffic was only a secondary concern.”
“Oh, Christ, if they got on to the motorways they could be halfway across the continent by now,” Ralph said.
“I’ll reassign the AI vehicle search priority now.”
“If you find any of Moyce’s lorries that are still moving, target them with the SD platforms. We don’t have any other choice.”
“I agree,” Admiral Farquar datavised.
“Ralph, ask him which of the embassy pair was in Moyce’s, please,” Roche Skark datavised.
Ralph pulled a processor block from his belt, and ordered it to display pictures of Jacob Tremarco and Angeline Gallagher. He thrust it towards Vargas. “Did you see either of these people in the shop?”
The man took his time. “Him. I think.”
“So we’ve still got to find Angeline Gallagher,” Ralph said. “Any more city traffic with glitched processors?”
“Three possibles,” Diana datavised. “We’ve already got two of them located. Both taxis from the spaceport.”
“Okay, assign an AT Squad to each taxi. And make sure there are experienced personnel in both of them. What was the third trace?”
“A Longhound bus which left the airport ten minutes after the embassy trio landed; it was a scheduled southern route, right down to the tip of Mortonridge. We’re working on its current location.”
“Right, I’m coming back to the police headquarters. We’re finished here.”
“What about him?” Nelson Akroid asked, jerking a thumb at the captive.
Ralph glanced back. Santiago Vargas had found another cigarette from somewhere and was smoking it quietly. He smiled. “Can I go now, señor?” he asked hopefully.
Ralph returned the smile with equal honesty. “Have the zero-tau pods from Ekwan arrived yet?” he datavised.
“The first batch are due to arrive at Pasto spaceport in twelve minutes,” Vicky Keogh replied.
“Cathal,” Ralph said out loud. “See if Mr Vargas here will cooperate with us for just a little longer. I’d like to know the limits of the electronic warfare field, and that illusion effect of theirs.”
“Yes, boss.”
“After that, take him and the others on a sightseeing trip to the spaceport. No exceptions.”
“My pleasure.”
The Loyola Hall was one of San Angeles’s more prestigious live-event venues. It seated twenty-five thousand under a domed roof which could be retracted when the weather was balmy, as it so frequently was in that city. There were excellent access routes to the nearby elevated autoway; the subway station was a nexus for six of the lines which ran beneath the city; it even had seven landing pads for VIP aircraft. There were five-star restaurants and snack bars, hundreds of rest rooms. Stewards were experienced and friendly. Police and promoters handled over two hundred events a year.
The whole site was an operation which functioned with silicon efficiency. Until today.
Eager kids had been arriving since six o’clock in the morning. It was now half past seven in the evening. Around the walls they were thronging twenty deep; scrums outside the various public doors needed police mechanoids to maintain a loose kind of order, and even they were in danger of being overwhelmed. The kids had a lot of fun spraying them with soft drinks and smearing ice creams over the sensors.
Inside the hall every seat was taken, the tickets bought months ago. The aisles were filled with people, too, though how they had got in past the processor-regulated turnstiles was anyone’s guess. Touts were becoming overnight millionaires, those that weren’t being arrested or mugged by gangs of motivated fourteen-year-olds.
It was the last night of Jezzibella’s Moral Bankruptcy tour. The New California system had endured five weeks of relentless media saturation as she swept across the asteroid settlements and down to the planetary surface. Rumour, of AV projectors broadcasting illegal activent patterns during her concerts to stimulate orgasms in the audience (not true, said the official press release, Jezzibella has abundant sexuality of her own, she doesn’t need artificial aids to boost the Mood Fantasy she emotes). Hyperbole, about the President’s youngest daughter being completely infatuated after meeting her, then sneaking out of the Blue Palace to go backstage at her concert (Jezzibella was delighted and deeply honoured to meet all members of the First Family, and we are not aware of any unauthorized entry to a concert). Scandal, when two of the band, Bruno and Busch, were arrested for violating public decency laws in front of a senior citizens holiday group, their bail posted at one million New California dollars (Bruno and Busch were engaged in a very wonderful, sensitive, and private act of love; and that bunch of filthy old perverts used enhanced retinas to spy on them). Straight hype, when Jezzibella visited (as a private citizen—so no sensevises, please) a children’s ward in a poor district of town, and donated half a million fuseodollars to the hospital’s germ-line treatment fund. Editorial shock at the way she flaunted her thirteen-year-old male companion, Emmerson (Mr Emmerson is Jezzibella’s second cousin, and his passport clearly states he is sixteen). A lot of spectator fun, and official police cautions, derived from the extraordinarily violent fights between her entourage’s security team and rover reporters. The storm of libel writs issued by Leroy Octavius, her manager, every time anyone suggested she was older than twenty-eight.
And in all those five weeks she never gave an interview, never made a single public utterance outside of her stage routine. She didn’t have to. In that time, the regional office of Warner Castle Entertainment datavised out thirty-seven million copies of her new MF album Life Kinetic across the planet’s communications net to worshipful fans; her back catalogue sold equally well.
The starship crews who normally made a tidy profit from selling a copy of an MF album to a distributor in star systems where they hadn’t been officially released yet cursed their luck when they arrived on planets where Jezzibella had passed through in the last eighteen months. But then that was the point of being a touring artist. A new album every nine months, and visit ten star systems each year; it was the only way you could beat the bootleggers. If you weren’t prepared to do that, the only money you ever got was from your home star system. Few made the transition from local wonder to galactic mega-star. It took a lot of money to travel, and entertainment companies were reluctant to invest. The artist had to demonstrate a colossal degree of professionalism and determination before they were worth the multimillion-fuseodollar risk. Once they’d breached the threshold, of course, the old adage of money making more money had never been truer.
High above the costly props and powerful AV stacks onstage, an optical-band sensor was scanning the crowd. Faces merged into a monotonous procession as it swept along the tiers and balconies. Fans came in distinct categories: the eager exhilarated ones, mostly young; boisterous and expectant, late teens; impatient, already stimmed-out, nervous, fearfully worshipful, even a few who obviously wanted to be somewhere else but had come along to please their partner. Every costume Jezzibella had ever worn in an MF track was out there somewhere, from the simple to the peacock bizarre.
The sensor focused on a couple in matching leathers. The boy was nineteen or twenty, the girl at his side a bit younger. They had their arms around each other, very much in love. Both tall, healthy, vital.
Jezzibella cancelled the datavise from the sensor. “Those two,” she told Leroy Octavius. “I like them.”
The unpleasantly overweight manager glanced at the short AV pillar sticking out of his processor block, checking the two blithesome faces. “Roger dodger. I’ll get on it.”
There was no quibbling, not the faintest hint of disapproval. Jezzibella liked that; it was what made him such a good manager. He understood how it was for her, the things she required in order to function. She needed kids like those two. Needed what they’d got, the naivete, the uncertainty, the delight at life. She had none of that left, now, not the sweet side of human nature. The eternal tour had drained it all away, somewhere out among the stars; one energy which could leak out of a zero-tau field. Everything became secondary to the tour, feelings weren’t allowed to interfere. And feelings suppressed long enough simply vanished. But she couldn’t have that, because she needed an understanding of feelings in order to work. Circles. Her life was all circles.
So instead of her own emotions, she familiarised herself with this alien quality which others owned, examining it as if she were performing a doctoral thesis. Absorbed what she could, the brief taste allowing her to perform again, to fake it through yet one more show.
“I don’t like them,” Emmerson said petulantly.
Jezzibella tried to smile at him, but the whole charade of pandering to him bored her now. She was standing, stark naked, in the middle of the green room while Libby Robosky, her personal image consultant, worked on her dermal scales. The bitek covering was a lot more subtle than a chameleon layer, allowing her to modify her body’s whole external texture rather than simply changing colour. For some numbers she needed to have soft, sensitive skin, a young girl who quivered at her first lover’s touch; then there was the untainted look, a body which was naturally graceful without workouts and fad diets (like the girl she’d seen through the hall’s sensor); and of course the athlete/ballerina body, supple, hard, and muscular—big favourite with the boys. It was the feel of her which everyone out there in the hall wanted to experience; Jezzibella in the flesh.
But the tiny scales had a short lifetime, and each one had to be annealed to her skin separately. Libby Robosky was an undoubted wizard when it came to applying them, using a modified medical nanonic package.
“You don’t have to meet them,” Jezzibella told the boy patiently. “I can take care of them by myself.”
“I don’t want to be left alone all night. How come I can’t pick someone out of the audience for myself?”
As the reporters had been allowed to discover, he really was only thirteen. She’d brought him into the entourage back on Borroloola, an interesting plaything. Now after two months of daily tantrums and broodiness the novelty value had been exhausted. “Because this is the way it has to be. I need them for a reason. I’ve told you a hundred times.”
“Okay. So why don’t we do it now, then?”
“I have a show in a quarter of an hour. Remember?”
“So what?” Emmerson challenged. “Skip it. That’ll cause a real publicity storm. And there won’t be any backlash ’cos we’re leaving.”
“Leroy,” she datavised. “Take this fucking brat away before I split his skull open to find out where his brain went.”
Leroy Octavius waddled back over to where she stood. His bulky frame was clad in a light snakeskin jacket that was an optimistic size and a half too small. The tough, thin leather squeaked at every motion. “Come on, son,” he said in a gruff voice. “We’re supposed to leave the artists to it this close to a show. You know how spaced out they get about performing. How about you and I have a look at the food they’re laying on next door?”
The boy allowed himself to be led away, Leroy’s huge hand draped over his shoulder, casually forceful.
Jezzibella groaned. “Shit. Why did I ever think his age made him exciting?”
Libby’s indigo eyes fluttered open, giving her a quizzical look. Out of all the sycophants, hangers-on, outright parasites, and essential crew, Jezzibella enjoyed Libby the most. A grandmotherly type who always dressed to emphasise her age, she had the stoicism and patience to absorb any tantrum or crisis with only the vaguest disinterested shrug.
“It was your hormones which went a-frolicking at the sight of his baby dick, poppet,” Libby said.
Jezzibella grunted, she knew the rest of the entourage hated Emmerson. “Leroy,” she datavised. “I paid that hospital we visited enough fucking money; have they got a secure wing we could leave the juvenile shit in?”
Leroy gave a backwards wave as he left the green room. “We’ll talk about what we’re going to do with him later,” he replied.
“You fucking finished yet?” Jezzibella asked Libby.
“Absolutely, poppet.”
Jezzibella composed herself, and ordered her neural nanonics to send a sequence of encoded impulses down her nerves. There was an eerie sensation of wet leather slithering on the top of her rib cage, all four limbs shivered. Her shoulders straightened of their own accord, belly muscles tightened, sinuous lines hardened under skin that was turning a deeper shade of bronze.
She dug deep into her memory, finding the right sensation of pride and confidence. Combined with the physique it was synergistic. She was adorable, and knew it.
“Merrill!” she yelled. “Merrill, where the fuck’s my first-act costume?”
The flunky hurried over to the big travelling trunks lined up along a wall and began extracting the requisite items.
“And why haven’t you shitheads started warming up yet,” she shouted at the musicians.
The green room abruptly became a whirlwind of activity as everyone found legitimate employment. Private, silent datavises flashed through the air as they all discussed the impending frailty of Emmerson’s future. It diverted them from how precarious their own tenures were.
Ralph Hiltch accessed various reports as he flew back over the city. The priority search which Diana Tiernan’s department had initiated was producing good results. According to the city’s route and flow road processor network, fifty-three lorries had left Moyce’s that evening. The AIs were now chasing after them.
Within seven minutes of Diana assigning the lorries full priority, twelve had been located, all outside the city. The coordinates were datavised into the Strategic Defence Command up in Guyana, and sensor satellites triangulated the targets for low-orbit weapons platforms. A dozen short-lived violet starbursts blossomed across Xingu’s southern quarter.
By the time Ralph’s hypersonic landed another eight had been added to the total. He’d stripped off his damaged lightweight armour suit in the plane, borrowing a dark blue police fatigue one-piece. It was baggy enough to fit over his medical nanonic package without restriction. But for all the package’s support, he was still limping as he made his way over to Hub One.
“Welcome back,” Landon McCullock said. “You did a good job, Ralph. I’m grateful.”
“We all are,” Warren Aspinal said. “And that’s not just a politician speaking. I have a family in the city, three kids.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ralph sat down next to Diana Tiernan. She managed a quick grin for him. “We’ve been checking up on the night shift at Moyce’s,” she said. “There were forty-five on duty this evening. As of now, the AT Squads have accounted for twenty-nine during the assault, killed and captured.”
“Shit. Sixteen of the bastards loose,” Bernard Gibson said.
“No,” Diana said firmly. “We think we may have got lucky. I’ve hooked the AIs into the fire department’s mechanoids; their sensors are profiled for exploring high temperature environments. So far they’ve located a further five bodies in the building, and there’s still thirty per cent which hasn’t been covered. That accounts for all but eleven of the night shift.”
“Still too many,” Landon said.
“I know. But we’re certain that six of the lorries zapped so far contained a shift member. Their processors and ancillary circuits were suffering random failures. It matched the kind of interference which Adkinson’s plane suffered.”
“And then there were five,” Warren Aspinal said quietly.
“Yes, sir,” Diana said. “I’m pretty sure they’re in the remaining lorries.”
“Well I’m afraid ‘pretty sure’ isn’t good enough when we’re facing a threat which could wipe us out in less than a week, Chief Tiernan,” said Leonard DeVille.
“Sir.” Diana didn’t bother to look at him. “I wasn’t making wild assumptions. Firstly, the AIs have confirmed that there was no other traffic logged as using Moyce’s since Jacob Tremarco’s taxi arrived.”
“So they left on foot.”
“Again, I really don’t think that is the case, sir. That whole area around Moyce’s is fully covered by security sensors, both ours and the private systems owned by the companies in neighbouring buildings. We accessed all the relevant memories. Nobody came out of Moyce’s. Just the lorries.”
“What we’ve seen tonight is a continuing pattern of attempted widespread dispersal,” Landon McCullock said. “The embassy trio have been constant in their attempt to distribute the energy virus as broadly as possible. It’s a very logical move. The wider it is spread, the longer it takes for us to contain it, and the more people can be infected, in turn making it more difficult for us to contain. A nasty spiral.”
“They only have a limited amount of time in the city,” Ralph chipped in. “And the city is where we have the greatest advantage when it comes to finding and eliminating them. So they’ll know it’s a waste of effort trying to spread the contamination here, at least initially. Whereas the countryside tilts the balance in their favour. If they win out there, then Xingu’s main urban areas will eventually become cities under siege. Again a situation which we would probably lose in the long run. That’s what happened on Lalonde. I imagine that Durringham has fallen by now.”
Leonard DeVille nodded curtly.
“The second point,” said Diana, “is that those infected don’t seem able to halt the lorries. Short of them using their white fire weapon to physically destroy the motors or power systems the lorries aren’t stopping before their first scheduled delivery point. And if they do use violence against a lorry the motorway processors will spot it straightaway. From the evidence we’ve accumulated so far it seems as though they can’t use their electronic warfare field to alter a lorry’s destination. It’s powerful, but not sophisticated, not enough to get down into the actual drive control processors and tamper with on line programs.”
“You mean they’re trapped inside the lorries?” Warren Aspinal asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And none of the lorries have reached their destination yet,” Vicky Keogh said, with a smile for the Home Office minister. “As Diana said, it looks like we got lucky.”
“Well thank God they’re not omnipotent,” the Prime Minister said.
“They’re not far short,” Ralph observed. Even listening to Diana outline the current situation hadn’t lifted his spirits. The crisis was too hot, too now. Emotions hadn’t had time to catch up with events; pursuing the embassy trio was like space warfare, everything happening too quick for anything other than simplistic responses, there was no opportunity to take stock and think. “What about Angeline Gallagher?” he inquired. “Have the AIs got any further leads?”
“No. Just the two taxis and the Longhound bus,” Diana said. “The AT Squads are on their way.”