Great North Road (119 page)

Abner jumped into the gap between them. The monster lunged forward, blades extended horizontally, aiming for the North’s heart as its arm pistoned out with inhuman power.

Sid never did quite make out what happened—the gas mask’s nightsight and infrared image were badly overloaded by everyone’s garish helmet lights. It simply showed Abner’s outline shiver as if he was looking at him through a wash of overheated air. Then Abner was in a dark, slick, one-piece armor suit of some kind. There was no sign of all the clothes he’d been wearing a moment before.

The strangest
clunk
filled the confined space. And the monster’s blades were rebounding, sending it juddering backward.

“Surrrprise,”
Abner warbled in a cheerful taunt.

The monster twirled with incredible speed, a perfect pirouette, arm extended. Blade fingers chopping furiously against Abner’s arm.

This time the
clunk
was as loud as a church bell, reverberating across the room. The monster staggered back from the deflected blow.

“My turn,” Abner announced calmly. He tugged a very squat, cylindrical pistol from his waist. Pointed and fired.

The air boiled with thin lashing sounds. And the monster was fighting a tangle of netting that responded to its every frantic scrabble and twist by expanding and seething as if it were alive. Within seconds it was toppling to the ground, completely swaddled in rippling cords.

“What the
fuck
?” Sid managed to babble, choking back on a hysterical wail.

“I need extraction,” Abner was shouting. “Now!”

Eva was lying where she’d fallen, weeping uncontrollably as she swatted feebly at the heavy corpse on top of her. Ralph thrashed about, clutching his ruined hand, unable to stop the blood pumping out.

“Abner?” Sid pleaded. “What—”

“Sorry, boss. The name’s Clayton, actually. Abner took a little holiday a while back. He’s fine, don’t worry.”

Sid gawped incredulously at the C North. Even now, even amid all the butchery and with bone-chilling fear flaring in his mind, he felt a little tweak of interest at the revelation. “It was Jupiter behind this.”

The ceiling creaked as weird ripples flexed the solar panels and support girders. An unseen force ruptured it. Dazzling white light shone down through the widening breach, revealing fragments of paneling tumbling upward in defiance of gravity. Sid slowly shoved his gas mask up and held a hand over his brow, shielding himself from the glare. Raw night air rushed across the decimated room. Now even the monster had stopped fighting the net to stare up at its fate.

Behind the lights, a massive vehicle was lowering itself sedately onto the overstressed roof of the Mountain High building. Sid couldn’t help himself. He started laughing. A spaceship. He was looking at an actual spaceship floating down out of the star-smeared night sky. A thirty-meter cone of smooth dark-gray metal, with five wide rings curling out halfway along the fuselage like deformed wings. There was no sound, no rocket roar, no hushed hissing of stealthed fan ducts. Sid just knew it didn’t work on any principles he would ever understand. But it was a thing of wonder nonetheless, so much so he nearly asked,
Take me with you.

“No, Sid,” Clayton said, suddenly serious. “It wasn’t Jupiter. This was never a North-on-North battle. We don’t know what this thing is, or where it came from. But we’ll find out.”

The monster was tugged off the floor. It spun up through the air toward a hatch Sid could see opening in the side of the fuselage.

Ralph made an incoherent snarling sound, pain and outrage crushed into one pitiful cry. Clayton bent over him, spraying something over his finger stumps.

“Take care, Sid,” Clayton said. “It was a privilege being part of your team.” He started to rise off the floor, vanishing into the glare. The fallen angel reclaimed by his own.

Then the lights went out. The shape of the spaceship was briefly visible against the backdrop of delicate twinkling stars. It blurred, elongating upward. Sid cheered it on wildly. Then the boom burst around him, the kind of thunderclap that only an object weighing hundreds of tons shredding the atmosphere could create. After that there was only the US-22’s buzzing about in total confusion in its wake; and armored interdiction troopers spilling through the door, ruby laser target beams chasing around as they sought something they understood amid the carnage and debris.

The HDA mobile field clinic was a fifty-ton twenty-wheel lorry with five triage centers and two emergency surgery theaters. It was parked outside the Mountain High building, the triage modules extending out from its sides, and standing secure on telescoping legs, ready for all injuries the assault might result in.

They’d carried Sid into it on a stretcher, which he thought was degrading. But by then shock was starting to kick in, and he’d lost the power of speech. His skin was hot or cold, he couldn’t decide. All he could see was the dark, glossy blades slashing. Ian’s head flipping back. Blood exploding into the beams of the helmet lights. His friend, his partner, was dead. Killed by an alien monster, who had been stalking the streets of Newcastle all along.

Keen, efficient young medical staff in green gowns and white masks had clustered around, eager to have a patient. His armor had been removed, clothes cut away from his torso. He didn’t get to go to the theater, since his cracked rib and bruising wasn’t bad enough. Instead the doctor treated him in the triage center, sliding some shiny flexible tube into his chest through a tiny incision and wrapping the rib fractures with nuflesh.

Physically he was fine. They bumped a lot of tox into him.

“It’ll help,” the doctor said reassuringly.

It was a lie. Tox took the edge off, calming his body and giving his face the expression of a happy idiot. But it never took the internal pain away, never stopped the memory of Ian’s terrible death. He lived in a loop of time, where they burst into the hexagonal room, the five of them, hyped up on the thrill of their hunt coming to an end. They’d caught the scent of victory. It wasn’t just the satisfaction of closing the case, they had anger powering them, anger that Aldred had been the bad guy all along, anger that he’d wormed his way into their confidence, anger that they’d been fooled, that they’d opened themselves to him.

Except it wasn’t the five of them. It was only four. Abner wasn’t Abner, not the detective that Sid had known and quite respected. Clayton, whoever he was, had wormed his way into their lives as much as Aldred.

Clayton had lied. It was North against North. It always had been. And just as he’d suspected right from the start, he’d never know why, never be told exactly what had happened.

“How are you feeling?” a nurse asked.

Sid focused on the smiling young face above him. Without her mask she was beautiful. He wondered if all Jacinta’s patients fell in love with her, too.

“My friend is dead,” he said.

“I know. I’m sorry, but your other friends are okay.”

“I want to see them.”

“All right. But not for long.”

“I know. My wife’s a nurse, you know.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Can you walk? I can get a wheelchair.”

“I can walk.”

Eva was in the next triage center. Blood-soaked clothes from the top of the Mountain High building had been removed, and her hair washed. Getting her clean was important, the nurse told Sid, because blood was a strong psychological trigger. Now she sat on the gurney, wrapped in two blankets, staring at nothing. Her Nordic-pale skin was so white that even the freckles had blanched away.

Sid sat beside her. “It’s over,” he said.

“He’s dead, Sid. Dead.”

“I know.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. But we got the machine.”

“Umbreit is dead, too.”

“Yeah, and Boz, and Ruckby.”

Tears started to roll down her cheeks. “I’ve got to get out. No more police. I can’t do this anymore.”

“That makes sense.” He sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. There was nothing more to say. Eva leaned in against him, thankful for the contact, the understanding.

They stayed together for a long time before Sid said: “I’m going to check on Ralph.”

Sarah Linsell was already in the surgical theater with Ralph, standing beside the bed, her armor jacket open down the front, holding her helmet. Sid looked at Ralph’s hand, which was enveloped by a ball of translucent gray-green gel. Various wires and cables snaked out to a stack of equipment.

“Good to see you, Sid,” Ralph said in an exuberant voice that was louder and happier than it should have been.

“Aye, man, how’s it going?”

“Pretty good, but then they’ve bumped me full of tox.”

“Sorry about your hand.”

“That’s okay,” Ralph grinned. “They can fix it.”

Sid raised an eyebrow.

“We recovered all the fingers from the scene,” Sarah Linsell said. “He’ll be transferred back up to the base hospital in a little while. A surgical regraft team is flying in from France. They’ll operate as soon as they arrive. With luck he shouldn’t need any bionetic substitutions.”

“Good. So what did Umbreit build?”

“Classified.”

“What did he build?” Sid asked in a quieter, more assertive voice.

“Some kind of modified D-bomb,” Ralph said jauntily. “As far as the tech crew can make out, it would’ve ripped up the quantum fields inside the gateway. That way it would be difficult to open another gateway to Sirius for about a century while the quantum fields stabilized.”

“And that’s where they were going to set it off, in the gateway?”

“Jede turned,” Sarah Linsell said. “Smart of him, given everyone else apart from Sherman is dead. The plan was for Aldred to get them to the gateway. After all, who was going to question the head of Northumberland Interstellar security? He told them he’d drive on by himself, with the bomb in his boot.”

“So even if he made it through alive somehow, he’d be trapped on the other side for a hundred years?” Sid mused. “That’s if anyone ever bothered to open a gateway there again. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Nothing does,” Ralph said.

“So what about Aldred? Have the troopers found him?”

“No,” Sarah Linsell said angrily. “They haven’t. We’ve searched that building thoroughly, brought in more agents, covered it in so much smartdust it’s now one giant mesh. We can scan every section of it simultaneously. He’s not in there. We’re working on the assumption that he used the confusion over the spaceship arrival to slip through the perimeter. He must have had help, some team we didn’t know about. There’s an alert out for him, he won’t get far.”

“Ha!” Sid grunted. “He’s a North. He looks like every other North. I couldn’t even tell when Clayton replaced Abner, and I’ve worked with him for years.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to,” Linsell said.

“Aye, that’s what I told myself when I was given this case,” Sid said. “Much good it did me. I didn’t even believe in the alien. But it’s real all right, hiding out in the Mountain High building ever since January. Aldred must have known, he was the one covering for it, arranging for the body to be disposed; the Norths must have some kind of deal with it.”

She shrugged. “So it would seem.”

“We’ll need to check if Mountain High imported anything from St. Libra,” Sid said. “Crap on it, we were on the right track back in January, following up on crates that came through the gateway from St. Libra. Why didn’t we catch this?”

“Who cares?” Ralph said. “You’ve got yourself a huge first. You caught an alien murderer, Sid. Nobody’s ever done that before in all human history. You’re famous.”

“Aye, but I didn’t catch it. Clayton did. And are you going to tell me about that spaceship? I didn’t know anything like that existed.”

“Neither did we,” Sarah Linsell said crisply. “I believe General Shaikh is going to be asking Jupiter some very pointed questions.”

“And we still don’t know what this whole thing was all about,” Sid said.

“We know the goal now,” Ralph said. “Shutting down the St. Libra gateway.”

“Aye, but why? The only possible beneficiary from that would be Zebediah North.”

“Maybe he had more support among his brothers than they were letting on,” Sarah Linsell said.

“Aye, maybe,” Sid said. The tox must have been wearing off, because he was now too tired to care. “I’m going to go home now. Can you sort out a car for me and Eva?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Sid told Ralph. “After your surgery, like. I’ll come and make sure it went okay.”

“Thanks, Sid. And I am sorry about Ian.”

“Sure.” Sid managed a grimace of a smile and ducked out of the theater.

Chloe Healey was standing in the narrow corridor outside. Even though it was gone eleven o’clock she was as immaculately dressed as always. She was carrying a long protective plastic bag, the type Sid’s laundry service delivered his suits in.

“Aye, bollocks to this,” he groaned. “Go away, pet.” Part of him wanted to know how she’d gotten past the secure cordon, but then that was a part of what she was.

“O’Rouke sent me,” she said.

“Tell him to piss off.”

“He said you’d say that.”

“Did he tell you how to answer?”

“No. I have my own reply.”

“I’m not even going to hear it. Ian’s dead, you know.”

“I do know. Every news site on the planet is alive with the story, licensed and unlicensed. Sid, they’ve got visuals of a spaceship hovering above Last Mile. They’re talking about a plot to set off a fusion bomb.”

“It was a D-bomb. Look, pet, really, just leave me alone.”

“My reply is this: When have I ever been disloyal to whomever I’m representing?”

Sid’s shoulder’s slumped. He really didn’t need this, not on top of everything else. “I thought you’d gotten an agency job?”

“I have. NorthernMetroServices. That’s why I’m assigned to you.”

“No thanks, pet. Go home, that’s what I’m doing.”

“This isn’t going to go away. It’s too big, the biggest story of the decade. The Norths tried to nuke Newcastle!”

“No they didn’t.”

“Then you need to tell people that. You’re the one they’ll listen to and believe. Sid, there are five hundred reporters pressing up against the cordon HDA have thrown around this place. This is just going to grow and grow. It’s your chance, Sid, your opportunity.”