“Then we really have to solve it?”
“Yeah.”
“So why waste time on bollocks like the suit list?” Ian said. “Everyone knows you use a secondary to buy clothes. None of the 2Norths will be registered as owning that suit and shirt.”
“I know,” Sid said. “But like I said, we have to get official procedure out of the way so we can focus on finding the real culprit. And the genetic test they made the 2Norths undergo was a big help.”
“How?” a puzzled Eva asked.
“It showed that all the A 2Norths really are 2Norths.”
“Aye.” An animated Ian clapped his hands together. “I’m with you, boss. We’ve got an imposter.”
“Very probably. It was a North dead in the Tyne, simple fact—so one way or another the Norths are in it up to their necks. Either it was a B or C who got discovered working whatever scam is going down, and they got eliminated. That’s unlikely, because Augustine and Aldred are pushing hard for us to find out what did happen. So my guess is that it’s Brinkelle or Constantine behind this, and the body is one of Augustine’s sons. Which means Ian is right, a B or a C has replaced him, they’ve taken over his life.”
“If that’s right,” Eva said slowly. “Then our victim has to be a 2North who was quite senior in Northumberland Interstellar, someone who has access to top-level codes or data … whatever they’re after.”
“Which ties in nicely with the socks thing,” Sid said. “Aldred said senior management is always traveling through the gateway to St. Libra.”
“It has to be Brinkelle behind it,” Eva said. “The murder method was used against her father.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Ian said. “Bartram and his people were killed by that mad psycho girl, Tramelo.”
“Misdirection, probably,” Sid said. “Who knows. We have to focus on what we’re solid with. It’s a corporate covert op, made worse because it’s undoubtedly tied in with their old family split. Blood feuds are always the worst kind.”
“But what kind of corporate scam?” Ian asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Eva said. “We can forget about the stupid alien theory and work the case properly now.” She glanced over to Sid. “How’s it going with your gang contact?”
He pulled a face. “I asked the question. We’ve just got to wait for the answer.”
T
HURSDAY,
J
ANUARY 31, 2143
“Remember, guys, when you go through: look up.” It was Angela’s best advice, sincere, too. And they took it. Of course they did, she’d invested a lot of time becoming a part of Paresh’s squad. She was virtually one of them now the big day had arrived.
Oh seven hundred hours—full GE Legion detachment of the St. Libra Northern Geogenetic Expedition to report to base transport pool with full TE (Tropical Environment) kit. Oh seven twenty-five—convoy vehicle start and systems check. Oh seven thirty—convoy roll out under escort. Transit gateway to St. Libra, and proceed to Highcastle airport. Airlift to commence seventeen hundred hours local time.
They did like their precision orders did the HDA. So Angela wound up sitting in the same old black mini bus that was up near the front of their convoy of ten identical mini buses at just after seven thirty as it trundled out of the base and down to the gateway. Corporal Paresh Evitts sat beside her with Private Atyeo in front driving down the slope and through the Kingsway running down the center of Last Mile, just like last time sixteen days ago. It was her version of the good old days. Except, that is, for the black sedan at the front of their convoy, the one carrying Colonel Vance Elston.
He’d been in his cream-colored TE uniform that morning as they all climbed into their vehicles. The first time she’d seen him in a dress uniform since she’d left Holloway. She didn’t like it—too many bad memories.
The HDA police car escort that was leading the convoy peeled away onto the off-road just before the bridge-like ramp that led up to the gateway. She gave Paresh a playful nudge and pointed up through the window. He grinned back and obediently looked up.
Two weeks of platonic friendship, two weeks of constantly being at her side, two weeks of gym exercise, chugging beer, bitching about HDA brass, about the wait, about the piss-poor briefings, about the inadequate TE kit (“Told you so”), not being allowed off base at night, crap food in the canteen, cramped conditions, badly run drills. For her, another prison routine, but with decent transnet access. For Paresh, a strange life that mutated him into a cross between ultra-protective big brother and chaste Victorian suitor. As far as the rest of the squad was concerned, she’d elevated herself to mascot status—one of the team, with the only exception she wasn’t allowed a weapon. Otherwise she could keep up with all their training routines, join in the banter, share the dirty jokes. Trust was the key, and she’d captured it.
Elston’s car slid through the rigid iridescent wall of gray fog that was the trans-spatial connection. Angela tensed up, and even remembered her own advice. They passed through the gateway.
Brilliant white light flooded into the mini bus. Atyeo twitched the wheel slightly in reaction.
“Wow.” Paresh fumbled for the sunglasses in his top pocket. “Didn’t think it was gonna be that bright.”
Angela was already searching the sky. “There,” she said simply.
Paresh followed her gaze. St. Libra’s sky was a clean deep turquoise, and somehow seemed to be a whole lot higher than Earth’s. He barely noticed that. Slicing right across the northern sky like some kind of magical veil was the planet’s phenomenal ring system. From the tightly braided A-ring skimming along at the top of the atmosphere, it stretched out for half a million kilometers to the outermost T-ring with its eight little shepherd moonlets. The main bands were noticeably denser, producing distinct ribs clotted with gravel-sized specks of rock, though the space between them was still suffused with ice granules and dust forming a magnificent sparkling mantle that spanned the heavens from east to west.
“Holy Mother,” Paresh whispered in reverence.
Angela looked out on St. Libra’s glory, feeling a strange sense of relief that it was there; that there was natural beauty in the universe still. Holloway had denied her such things for so long, she’d half believed she might have simply imagined it along with the rest of her previous existence.
On the seats behind her, the rest of the squad was registering its amazement at the spectacle.
“You weren’t joking, were you,” Paresh said.
“Not about this,” she told him. “You can’t joke about this.”
“Thank you for telling me … us.”
She grinned and put her wraparound sunglasses on. “To be fair, it’s not something you were likely to miss, now is it?”
“No.” He peered up into the sky again, as if it might be some sort of trickery.
“If you think it’s grand now, wait till nighttime. Sirius makes it gleam twice as bright as Earth’s moonlight.”
“That I can believe.”
“Very romantic,” she said.
He gave her a slightly wary, tentative grin. For two weeks she’d never given him the slightest intimation that their friendship might grow into anything more. Good pals was the limit, given she was his official charge. Until this morning. When the squad was packing kit and getting dressed she’d stood beside her bunk bed, where she had the top mattress and Paresh the bottom. Wearing just bra and briefs she’d slathered on high-factor sunblock oil until her skin was slick and glistening, taking her time, an exhibition like some zone babe on a raunchy location shoot. Paresh was sharing the same space beside the bunks, pulling on his own cream-colored TE uniform. It had been a tough struggle for him not to gawp. The few times their eyes had met, she’d given him the neutral smile of someone oblivious to the testosterone storm she was kindling.
The balance had shifted now. He was the uncertain one, the one who would risk his dignity to come after her. The one easier for her to control.
“Kind of a pain, too,” she said. “The rings are why St. Libra can never have comsats, or any other kind of satellite for that matter. You might be able to see the stars twinkling through them, but for all intents and purposes they’re solid. No satellite could ever pass through them intact.”
“We’ve got the e-Rays,” Paresh said. “They’ll provide all our comms cover out in the jungle. It won’t be anything worse than we’ve trained for.”
“Yes it will be,” she taunted.
“Come on, have a little faith. You’ve seen that we’re tight, that we can take care of ourselves and our objective.”
“I hope so.”
Another grid ramp led down from the oval gateway, mirroring the Newcastle side. At the bottom, a semicircle of mirror-glass offices and dark engineering units curved away to the right, boasting company names in high colorful letters; the surrounding ground was lost beneath fat swaths of tarmac where hundreds of cars and pickups were parked without any order. To the left of the ramp were the warehouses and processing sheds, far larger than anything in Last Mile, which handled St. Libra’s imports. Closest to the ramp was a bus station, with each embarkation pier empty. For the last couple of weeks, emigration to St. Libra had been down to a few hundred people per day, with everyone marshaled together and scurrying through when HDA wasn’t using the gateway. Angela couldn’t see any people outside anywhere.
A broad apron of tarmac expanded out from the end of the ramp, with feed roads curving off to the various nearby buildings. Directly ahead was a three-lane carriageway, with a giant sign beside it: WELCOME TO MOTORWAY A. It led directly away from the gateway, out into the harsh bioil industrial sector that dominated the landscape, where giant tank farms, coated in silver heat-resistant blankets, stretched across the raw rust-red soil to the horizon. Between the tanks were forests of elaborate refinery columns swathed in a tangle of tubes and conduits, and puffing out jets of steam that soon dispersed in the hot, cloudless atmosphere. The ground itself was mostly obscured by a snake’s nest of thick pipes, interconnecting at the stumpy cylinders of turbine pumps, all sheltered from the elements by simple roofs of corrugated composite.
“Has it changed much?” Paresh asked.
“Not really. The buildings are bigger, and there’s a lot more tanks; otherwise it’s the same.”
“So where’s the city?”
“Highcastle? I’ve no idea, but it’s about sixteen kilometers away, I think. I never visited. It’s a bit of a dump by all accounts. Company town.”
“Maybe that’s grown as well, improved some.”
Angela eyed the raw industrial panorama in all its functional ugliness. “Somehow, I doubt that.”
The convoy picked up speed, chasing down Motorway A. As they drove the aircon fans grew louder, struggling to accommodate the sudden impact of St. Libra’s hot, humid atmosphere. The air in the mini bus became cold, clammy, and laced with a faint smell of bioil. Narrow tracks branched off Motorway A every couple hundred meters or so on either side, signposted with enigmatic alphanumerics. They meandered away through the tanks, little more than twinned tire ruts worn into the stony soil, host to long puddles shimmering in the low sunlight. Then after eight kilometers, when the tanks finally ended and some kind of local purple-green grass reclaimed the soil, the road forked, and they took the left-hand lane. Angela caught sight of the sign for the airport, another thirty kilometers away.
Slowly the native vegetation started to reassert itself across the exposed soil, though the whiff of bioil coming off the refineries was a constant. Dark grass with subtle hues of purple and aquamarine shining like diffraction patterns spread out from the tarmac, interrupted by hemispherical scrub bushes with strange white branches poking out of the uniformity of blue-green leaves. Then there were the wire trees, which she remembered, like silver sculptures of leafless terrestrial trees.
“I thought it was all jungle,” Leora Fawkes complained.
“We’re on the Great Jarrow Plain,” Angela told her. “The center of Ambrose, which is pure algaepaddy territory. When we get across the ocean to Brogal you’ll see real jungle.”
“So where are the algaepaddies?”
“Wait till we get airborne, you can’t miss them.”
Highcastle airport sprawled across sixty-five square kilometers. There was room for that kind of sluggish extravagance on St. Libra; the flat land was mostly mown grass, with buildings dispersed around the two long runways and their attendant maze of taxiways and link roads. The control tower stood at one end, a spire of bleached white concrete topped with a band of blue-green glass. Even after ninety-two years of human occupation, it remained the tallest structure on the planet. Because they were all divorced from one another, there was no sense of scale to the rest of the airport buildings—not until you got up close and realized how big they were.
The airport was the first time Angela saw any sign of human activity. HDA’s logistics corps was working hard with their task of supplying the Primary Staging Area at Abellia airport, seven and a half thousand kilometers away. All the bulky equipment containers, standard airload 350DL cargo pallets, GL56 pods filled with raw, the fleet of ground vehicles, the helicopters, and the flat-fold Qwik-Kabins that HDA had sent on ahead through the gateway—it was all spread grid-fashion across the airport tarmac or sheltered in the open-sided hangars, awaiting its flight out.
As well as the SuperRocs and Daedalus strategic airlifters, HDA had requisitioned all seven planes belonging to the planet’s one airline: AirBrogal. Four of those were commercial Boeing 2757s, modified to a single first-class cabin that could carry 150 passengers to Abellia in contemporary luxury, along with express cargo packages. Three Antonov An-445s made up the remainder of the fleet, long-range cargo planes with a payload similar to the Daedalus, which were used to haul medium-weight high-priority items out to Abellia’s wealthy fashion-conscious, must-have consumers. Everything else, the real heavy items, was trucked along Motorway A in huge lorry-trains then shipped across the sea.
The only other planes parked in the shade of their hangars were the supersonic executive jets of the ultra-rich who had homes in Abellia. There was nowhere else to fly on the planet.