FALLEN DRAGON (83 page)

"Yes." Stick to the mission, she told herself. "So now what? Do you think you can get hold of a key?"

"I'll have to wait and see. I need to know where they caught him, and if they have any idea what he was doing at the spaceport. That's what I don't understand, Denise, how the hell did they catch him? We know their security, there was nothing left to chance when we planned this out."

"Another Dudley Tivon," she said. "A random event. Someone caught him red-handed."

"Then why wasn't there any kind of alert? If anyone does anything against Z-B's interests they send up a barrage of red rockets. This time, without Prime intercepting their communications I would never even know they'd taken anyone prisoner."

"So what do you think?"

"The way it was done, the fact he never managed to load a warning into the datapool, I'd say they were waiting for him."

"They
can't
have been, Ray! That would mean they know about us."

"Yeah. Not a nice thought, is it?'

"I don't believe it. There has to be another explanation. There has to."

"I don't want to believe it, either. But we can't afford to ignore it, not now."

"Ray, we have to get a key for one of the Xianti flights. Without that, we've failed."

"Not yet we haven't, not by a long way."

"If you can't get him out..."

"I know. He'll never let them discover what he's become, nor what he was doing. At least we have that option."

"Do you want me to come to Durrell?"

"No. If I can salvage this I need you to be ready where you are. I'm going to have to consider my next move very carefully. I think we underestimated Z-B from the start. If that's the case we may even have to abandon the mission altogether."

"No!"

"Face it, Denise. We're not looking good right now. In any case, Z-B will be back in another decade or so. We can try again then."

"All right."

"It's not over yet. I'll keep monitoring the situation here and review my options. I'm trying to establish a link to the spaceport. We should know within twenty-four hours."

Denise managed a sad little smile. "That's when we were supposed to be on our way."

"Yeah. I'll call you as soon as I have anything new."

After that, Denise didn't go to the school. She left a message for Mrs. Potchansky, claiming a stomach bug, then told the house's Prime-augmented AS to filter calls. She knew she wouldn't be able to face the dear old woman, not even over a visual link.

It was the first time the rented bungalow had felt truly empty without Ray and Josep. Her head slowly filled with strange notions as she wandered along the hall. That she should go back to Arnoon Province where she'd be safe. Or fly to Durrell anyway, and rescue Josep. That this whole mission had been a mistake.

None of these thoughts are relevant,
she told herself crossly. That didn't stop them from breeding.

Denise looked at the door to Josep's room, not quite sure why she was standing outside it. He hadn't gone in for much in the way of personal decoration—a desk, a couple of dark green leather chairs, which she thought were pretty awful. The bed was a double. Naturally. He'd hung a big sheet screen over half of the opposite wall, so he could lounge around on the mattress and watch the shows. In its inactive mode the screen showed a picture of Mount Kenzi taken on a cloudless, sunny day, rugged snowcap shining bold against the pale turquoise sky. She turned the handle and went in. When he'd taken off for Durrell he'd left the room in a shambles—the quilt crumpled up at the bottom of the bed, sheet rucked; several pairs of swimming trunks were shoved under the bed. T-shirts that he'd worn when teaching his tourists were thrown into a heap on one of the chairs, still smelling of seawater. Towels had been dropped on the floor. A set of his gills were slung over the back of the desk chair.

Despite everything else Denise had to do over the weeks following the invasion, she'd tidied up both the boys' rooms. Clothes and towels were gradually put into the washing cabinet. The mess sorted out. She'd even found two pairs of panties and a bra under Josep's bed—they had also been washed. The quilt had been folded neatly on the foot of the bed. Their little domestic robot had vacuumed the carpet, dusted round and polished the broad window that looked out over the back garden.

Even spruced up like this, the room belonged to Josep. There were tears in her eyes, which she wiped away savagely with her knuckles. She sat down on the edge of the bed, a hand stroking the mattress. When she closed her eyes it was easy to see him. Memories of him as a stupid little boy up at Arnoon. Growing taller and more serious as the years wound on. Emerging from the d-writing, mature and confident, his dedication to the mission easily as strong as hers. Then down here in Memu Bay. Devilish and happy, growing into a decent, attractive young man. All those fabulous girls he'd brought back to the bungalow, ending up here on this bed.

She'd never slept with him or Ray. Instead they'd shared what amounted to a brother-sister relationship, caring and respectful, with plenty of teasing thrown in, housemate pranks.

Was I being stupid? Should I have just leaped at him? Stolen the precious time we had? Or were we both scared of how deep and serious it would become if we started?

Irrelevant now. Just an exercise in
what if,
and painful self-recrimination as the prospect of total failure dawned. She hated herself for thinking such things. But the memories wouldn't let her stop.

The message package from the underground cell arrived late in the morning. Prime programs installed in various data-pool nodes ensured it stayed below the horizon of Z-B's monitors. Not even dataflow logs recorded its routing.

Denise was curled up on Josep's bed when the bungalow's AS accepted the message and delivered it direct to her d-written neuron cells. The pillow was damp around her cheek. She'd been crying.

Misery became plain annoyance as she reviewed the message. It was from a cell group in Harkness, one of the smaller suburbs almost on the edge of Memu Bay's moat of terrestrial vegetation. They'd barely been active since the occupation. Scrawling a few slogans on walls. Storing equipment and crude weapons for the more active units in Memu Bay itself. But Harkness was stretched along the eastbound wing of the Great Loop Highway—a very strategic location given their mission. The main purpose in recruiting the cell was so that they could keep the road under observation. And they'd just fulfilled their principal function.

The package was a report that two Z-B jeeps had passed through town, heading down the Great Loop Highway out toward the hinterlands.

Denise felt a flash of resentful anger that the imbeciles in the cell had screwed up and bothered her. Especially right now. Another emotion surge she could do without.

There were no jeeps. The Prime she'd inserted into Z-B's headquarters network reviewed their deployment schedules. And something like a convoy of Skins on their way out to the hinterlands would have been tagged as immediate priority. She would have known within seconds of Ebrey Zhang's office posting the duty.

The Prime operating within the bungalow automatically correlated the new information. There was a patrol scheduled to travel round the hinterlands today.

Reflex muscle action made Denise sit up fast She queried the patrol assignment.

Prime confirmed it.

She loaded another query, asking why Prime hadn't warned her about the assignment.

For software as powerful as Prime, the answer was a long time coming. Several milliseconds. Her Prime hadn't been aware of the patrol before because the assignment hadn't come through Zhang's office. Something else had inserted it into the schedule, and done so in a way that shielded it from registering on any monitor routine. The Prime was sending out thousands of subtle trawlers through the surrounding architecture, trying to locate the origin. One of the probes encountered another Prime lurking inside Z-B's AS.

Within the electronic universe the two quasi-sentient software systems regarded each other passively. Attempts at infiltration and subversion were impossible. They were equals.

"Another Prime?" Denise squawked in shock.

It simply could not be.

Yet there it was.

She withdrew her own Prime.

There had been no alert issued in the Z-B network; nobody knew she'd been sniffing around. The other Prime hadn't informed them. She tried to think the situation through logically. There was only one place a Prime came from, and that was Arnoon. Somebody else from back home must be in Memu Bay. Somebody with a mission contrary to hers. Which again wasn't possible. No Prime would act against the dragon; it had written Prime specifically for them.

None of this made any sense. Then she finally paid attention to the platoon that had been assigned the patrol: 435NK9. Lawrence Newton!

"He can't know," she whispered. But he was heading down the Great Loop Highway on a patrol that Z-B had never authorized, and didn't know about.

Denise closed her eyes and considered her options. There weren't many. She had to know how a Prime was helping Newton. That was paramount: it might even reveal how Josep had been captured. The answer had to be in Arnoon. And Newton himself could not be allowed to reach the province.

Denise ran to her own room and began to change clothes. Jeans, a T-shirt, leather jacket, a small bag with the two weapons she kept in the bungalow. As she was putting them on she issued commands to various cells, requiring them to take direct action against the patrol. Her Prime also scoured the local traffic regulation AS to find a suitable vehicle for her. It gave her a list of possibilities, and she selected the one she wanted. A flurry of emergency route commands were shot into the vehicle's AS.

She pulled some heavy boots on and hurried out Lee Brack had been surprised when his bike AS suddenly flashed up emergency symbols on his optronic membranes and the bike immediately turned off down a side road. He always hated engaging the AS anyway. This bike was meant to be ridden properly, by humans, not goddamn software. The big green-and-gold Scarret had a three-core converter cell for power, with superconductor cabling and multi-ring direct axle motors with inbuilt turning angle compensators. Top speed of 250 kilometers per hour on a decent stretch of road. His wives referred to it as his midlife crisis machine. And here it was being remote-controlled into some damned housing estate. The alignment power coupling turned the front wheel again, taking him in to the curb as he slowed. Parking legs slid out.

Lee Brack took his helmet off and stared around in confusion. "What bloody emergency?" He was in the middle of Stereotype Street suburbia. On the other side of the road an old couple were walking their chocolate Labrador. In front of him an attractive girl was out jogging. Actually she was sprinting damn fast. She came to a halt beside the Scarret "Thanks," she said.

"For wh—"

Her hands grabbed the front of his one-piece bikesuit. Lee Brack was lifted off the Scarret's saddle as if he were made from lightweight foam rather than his actual weight of ninety-five kilos. He chased a short arc through the air to land badly on his left arm, with the shoulder taking most of the weight. Something amid his bones and tendons made a nasty crunch. Only then did he manage to yell.

The girl snatched up his helmet and straddled the Scarret. Lee's cry of pain turned to outrage as the dashboard display lit up. What about his fucking security codes? "You bitch!"

Denise's Prime simply erased the Scarret's AS and installed itself in the neurotronic pearls that governed the bike's systems. With her d-written neural structure integrating her directly into the software, it was as if she'd become part of the bike. Power burned into the axle motors, and she turned the handlebars in smooth unison with the alignment power coupling. The U-turn was sharp enough to scrape a parking leg on the tarmac. Sparks fantailed before it finished retracting. Denise accelerated hard, losing Lee Brack's barrage of obscenities within seconds.

The jeeps were approaching the edge of Memu Bay's original gamma soak. Strands of darker, bluish vegetation were mingling with the terrestrial grass on either side of the Great Loop Highway. Up ahead the jungle of native vegetation was steaming gently after the early morning rains. In the passenger seat of the first jeep, Lawrence had a good view of the wide strip of tarmac cutting straight across the land until it disappeared into the trees.

Finally they were leaving the villages behind. They were dotted every few kilometers along the highway, clusters of small buildings that lined the road, almost identical each time—a couple of general stores, always a bar, and some kind of low-tech industry. Truck garages were fairly common, with rows of corroding hulks parked out on the grass. Road maintenance robot stations, also with broken-down chassis strewn around. A semiautomated steel mill churning out I-beams. A reclamation furnace with tall twin stacks blowing out thick, greasy smoke into the clear air, a huge stinking pile of rubbish sprawled over the land behind. The houses that accompanied them were a lot cruder than the fine whitewashed apartment blocks in Memu Bay. These were little more than one-story shacks with walls of cinder block and a roof of composite sheeting and solar collectors. Adults sat outside, watching the road and its traffic. Kids ran about on the dirt paths, chasing after one another, playing soccer.