Paresh watched in admiration as the two women stared at each other. There was only ever going to be one result. The governor didn’t even last a minute.
“All right! I’ll authorize payment.”
“You can issue me with a European Social Bank account,” Angela said calmly. “The standard for paroled criminals, I believe. Your office has the authority to do that. You see, allowing us access to education is a benefit.”
“Get it done,” the governor hissed at her assistant.
“But—”
“Do it!”
It had taken another thirty minutes for the process to be completed. Angela never moved from the spot the whole time. Paresh had to complain twice to the furious governor to try to speed things along.
“Not your concern,” Angela said without even turning to him. “I either go back to my cell, or I leave with my money.”
Paresh didn’t know how the hell to break the impasse—ordering his detail to physically lift her out was about the only option. He was nervous about that; his corporal stripe was only two months old. Screw the lieutenant for not making things clear.
Eventually the assistant scuttled back into the room and handed Angela a biometric card. She checked that it registered her thumb, then they had to go over to a zone console and activate the account. Codes were assigned.
“Can we go now?” Paresh asked witheringly.
Angela grinned cheerfully at him. “Of course we can. You didn’t think I was going to stay in this shithole, did you?”
Paresh was sure he could hear the governor’s teeth grinding together. “Your bag,” he said, gesturing helpfully at the small carryall Angela was walking away from.
“My butler always organizes delivery of my couture collection.”
Paresh and the detail had to hurry to catch up with Angela as buzzers sounded and big solid prison doors obediently opened for her.
“Nothing to figure out,” Angela said as they drove into the white wilderness of the Middlesex countryside. “I was wrongly imprisoned, now I’m volunteering to help you guys out. I’m coming with you on the expedition.”
“What expedition?” DiRito asked from two seats down.
“Didn’t they tell you? We’re going alien hunting on St. Libra.”
The squad exchanged a whole load of shocked glances. “No shit?” Mohammed Anwar blurted.
“I’m sure you’ll get your briefing when we arrive at Newcastle.”
“Hey,” Marty O’Riley said. “What were you in there for?”
Angela turned so she was facing all the curious faces, and hooked her arm over the top of the chair. “They convicted me of slaughtering fourteen people in one go. Oh, that’s more than all of you, isn’t it.” Her lips parted at the startled silence that greeted her statement. “Lucky for you, I didn’t do it. Which is why your very embarrassed government has recruited me as a consultant on this trip.”
“What do you consult on?”
“I was the only one who survived. I saw the alien. I know what it looks like, I know what it sounds like, I know what it smells like. You don’t forget that smell, not even after twenty years. When I smell it again, I’ll know.”
Paresh couldn’t resist. “So what does a killer alien smell like?”
“Mint.”
Which was a complete load of bollocks, Paresh knew. She was just enjoying herself yanking their chains. But he knew who she was now. “Bartram North,” he said quietly.
Those deadly green eyes stared at him. Then she grinned again. “Smart boy.”
“Do my best.”
“Not good enough, though, is it?”
“How you reckon that?”
“You’re on a trip to poke a stick into a monster’s nest. It will kill you.” She raised her voice. “It will kill all of you. You won’t stand a chance.”
“You haven’t seen what we can do,” Ramon Beaken asserted. “No fucking alien gets on top of this squad, lady. We can handle ourselves.”
“Let’s hope so. But if I do ever scent it, take me seriously. Your life depends on it.”
“You got out last time,” Paresh pointed out.
“That’s because I’m tougher than you.”
No doubt about it, Paresh thought, she was a class-A bullshitter. That just made her more interesting. He wondered if he did stand a chance with her.
Angela didn’t say much as the convoy rode along through the English midlands and into the north. The squad didn’t know what the hell to make of her, so they by and large ignored her. Paresh didn’t give up so easy. He saw the way she stared at the countryside, even though it was just drab frozen fields and denuded ice-gripped trees. She was entranced by it. The kind of delight anyone would have if they’d been denied that sight for twenty years. So if that part of the file was correct …
The convoy stopped at the Scotch Corner services so the vehicles could fill up with bioil. Everyone needed to take a pee, and after that they piled in to the Little Chef café franchise for a coffee and a donut, surprising the two waitresses who were suddenly rushed off their feet.
Angela climbed out of the HDA mini bus and inhaled deeply. On the other side of the garage forecourt low sedans and twenty-four-wheel tankers carrying their cargo of raw were purring smoothly along the six lanes of the A1 in both directions, their thick winter tires spraying the banks of snow that lined the road with a constant rain of filthy slush.
Paresh was entranced by the faraway expression on her face as she watched the continual stream of traffic. It made her appear vulnerable yet content at the same time, which he found quite bizarre. “You’re not going to try and run, are you?” he asked, not quite joking.
Her expression hardened, and that unnerving stare locked on to him again. “No. I know exactly where I’m going, and that’s back to Abellia.”
“Where?”
“The town where it happened on St. Libra. I’m going to find that motherfucker, and when I do, it is going to
burn
—and I don’t mean in hell. I’m not going to be that kind to it.”
“There really is a monster, isn’t there?”
“Absolutely. So if you really are smart, Sergeant—”
“That’s only corporal, and it’s Paresh.”
“Paresh,” she acknowledged. “If you’re smart you’ll be the one who runs.”
“Guess I’m stupid then.”
“We all are, in our own special ways.”
Which was the closest she’d come to making real conversation, even if it was kind of creepy. “I know you’ve not been outside for a while,” he said. “But it is bloody freezing standing here. Can I buy you a coffee?”
Angela glanced at the café franchise on the side of the station’s large TravelMart store. The Legionnaires from the convoy were crowding every table, laughing as they joshed the harassed waitresses. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Every one of them.”
“You know, this isn’t quite the fantastic first meal I was planning on when I was free.”
“Best I can do.”
“Then I accept. Do you think they’d do hot chocolate with marshmallows?”
“Let’s go find out.”
During the rest of the drive up to Newcastle, Angela did her best to behave as normally as she could. It wasn’t easy; she had so few reference points left other than hazy memories, and those didn’t exactly belong to a standard life. Acclimatizing herself to being out was proving more difficult than she imagined. It was all so sudden—less than twenty-four hours ago she’s been brooding in the same cell she’d always been in, robotically performing the same tasks, eating the same food, not thinking about anything because that was how you survived each day. Now here she was, on the way back to St. Libra, which was actually the last place in the galaxy she wanted to go.
The hot chocolate in the Little Chef had been surprisingly good. Good because it wasn’t prison hot chocolate. The Danish pastry Paresh had bought her to go with it was also the best she’d tasted in twenty years. And then there was the laughter. For the last twenty years, laughter for her had been the twin of cruelty, the sound of vicious triumph that accompanied whimpering screams, not this carefree joy. That was something she knew would take a long time to get used to. All those young, confident Legionnaires crammed into the restaurant and misting up the windows with their boisterous joking, like a football team after the match. Watching their stupid schoolkid antics, she couldn’t feel anything but sorry for them. If the expedition was successful, they’d all be dead.
Once the mini buses filled their tanks with bioil the Legionnaires barged out of the Little Chef and hurried back to their vehicles. Angela nipped into the TravelMart and got the assistant manager to unlock the most expensive Spectrum basic smartcell interface packet from the secure cabinet behind the counter. Not that there was a huge choice of brands. She hadn’t had a direct meat-to-wi connection for over twenty years, not since she took out her cy-chips before Melyne Aslo recruited her. Smartcells were a whole lot better than the old cy-chips—so the newer arrivals at Holloway told her.
She used the Social Bank card to buy the packet, and was moderately pleased when the transaction went through without any glitch, and even happier that the teen assistant manager girl didn’t say anything when she waved the SBcard through the till’s keyspace. It was like hearing the prison gates clanging shut behind her, but for real this time. She was out. She was free.
The HDA mini bus’s auto pulled out of the forecourt and slotted them into the northbound traffic. Angela watched the snowy landscape with a strangely neutral attitude. For years she’d been planning what to do on all the million possible variants of this day, but now it was here and she had to make some tough decisions. First one, the obvious one, she would go back to St. Libra. It was where she could pick up the loose ends she’d abandoned twenty years ago. Besides, making a break for it now would be ridiculously tough. But in the meantime there were certain things to be done, preparations made as best she could.
Angela split the chic circular Spectrum packet open. There wasn’t much for her money, and she’d bought the most basic set. Like the packet, the instruction booklet was simple, with monochrome diagrams just to make sure. She removed the little medical-style applicator tube, which had a short fat needle and a compressed gas cartridge, which she snapped together easily. Next out came a trim magazine of fourteen clearly marked pea-sized shells, which clicked neatly into the back of the tube. The first shell contained an aural smartcell. She tucked the C-shaped plastic mold behind her left ear, which positioned the tube correctly, and pressed the trigger. “Ow”—it was like getting stung by an infant bee. But the tube had inserted the smartcell close to her inner ear, where its vibrations would manifest as ordinary sounds. The sting turned cold as the tube released a drop of antiseptic gel. She ejected the empty shell and shifted the mold to her right ear. The vocal smartcells followed, inside the back of the mouth, beside the lower rear molars. Hands: one in the palm, then each fingertip.
Finally she took out the contact lens case. Breaking the seal initiated them, so she dabbed the small, thick, transparent circles onto her eyes quickly, blinking against the sensation, and checking they were centered correctly with the little mirror provided in the case. Once she was satisfied, she triggered the pad that contained the unique bodymesh activation code. The contact lenses were the expensive part of the package, each containing a dozen iris smartcells, the smallest produced. Once they received the code, the lenses extended nanofilaments into her eyeball and injected the smartcells in a ring around the iris. They meshed together and oriented themselves, then fired off test pulses down her optic nerves.
The clarity was astonishing; she wasn’t prepared for anything so sharp. For a second she was scared the smartcells would burn her retinas, they were so powerful. It was a bad déjà vu. But a basic grid of green lines appeared, which reassured her. She closed her eyes as the booklet recommended, and her bodymesh began the full calibration sequence. Tones sounded in her ear. She muttered the words the grid display told her to so the interface could learn her speech patterns. It took a minute for the bodymesh software to build her personal configuration into a minimal e-i. With her voiceprint locked she worked with the e-i to define the colors and positioning of the grid, selecting icons. At the end she opened her eyes again to see the keyspace virtual the grid displayed, a red-edged cube above the empty seat beside her, with icons floating inside it. As her hands moved through it, the bodymesh tracked their position so she could flick at the icons’ cog-surface. Another couple of minutes final calibration and familiarization, and she was done, a complete digital citizen again. The empty contact lenses peeled off, and she dropped them back into the packet along with the spent application tube and empty shells.
She told her e-i to quest a link to the mini bus’s net cell. And for the first time in twenty years Angela had an unmonitored, unrestricted channel into the transnet. The shoal of multicolored access route symbols that sprang up in her grid were familiar from her refresher lessons at Holloway, but now all of them were active. She used her SBcard account to buy her e-i an access code and a secure cache from a German service company, and launched herself into the virtual universe.
Her old Tramelo e-i was out there, of course, inactive in an eternity cache. But she’d given HDA those access codes long ago; they would have run the entire store through AI analysis routines and planted monitors. There was nothing there for her now. Digitally there was very little she could do to reconnect with the one person she needed to, especially while using an HDA vehicle’s cell as her transnet access point. She would have to wait until she had an independent, unmonitored connection. She’d already waited twenty years; a few more days were irrelevant.
Her e-i sent out half a dozen searches, harvesting exactly the kind of information the HDA would expect her to: tracers on the surviving girls from the mansion, summary of herself in news shows and sites, a list of decent Newcastle clothes shops and restaurants, a rundown on the city’s HDA base, current news of St. Libra with reference to any HDA activity, police reports on the murdered North, and, of course, the transnet address codes for the best GE civil liberties lawyers. But nothing about her mother from Nantes, no search to see if she was still alive, no access code listing. That particular farce didn’t matter anymore; Elston now knew that the past on her file was a lie and he’d screwed up, missing his one chance to interrogate her about it. No matter what, she wouldn’t be going back to Frontline again. Not alive.