Bastian North ran a finger across his brow as he pondered the statement. “All right, you know why I’m actually here?”
“Officially you’re Brinkelle’s observer. That means politics. “
“You say it like that’s a bad thing.”
“I’ve never met a good politician.”
“Ah, man, standard cynic response, and very appropriate in this day and age. But there’s a difference between the incompetent, corrupt zealots who run government, and the interactions and accommodations that soothe and control human dynamics—which is what we have in Abellia. Brinkelle sent me along because we have a stake in this expedition, a far more personal one than anybody else.”
“That, and she controls the bioil on Brogal.”
“Politics. But you do acknowledge our concern?”
“Yeah, you have that interest.”
“So what I need to know at this juncture, Colonel Elston, is if you have any suspicion that the alien that murdered my father and brothers is in any way connected to Mullain’s unfortunate death?”
“And let’s not forget your father’s staff, as well, I believe?” Vance didn’t know why he was pushing; just that something about the North’s attitude rubbed him wrong. If allowed, Bastian would talk and talk, taking control of the conversation, denying anyone else a say. A common enough practice among politicians, though according to his file he was mainly involved in civil engineering management back in Abellia.
“My father’s staff as well,” Bastian conceded. “Though obviously I don’t have the personal connection with them. However, I am concerned with the instrument of their destruction. So I ask again, was the alien involved in this?”
“I don’t see how it could be,” Vance said. “If Mullain’s death was deliberate, the only clue we have points toward a very mundane human motive.”
“Sex?”
“Money.”
“Would have been my next guess. Thank you, Colonel. If there are any developments, I’d like to be kept informed.”
“Of course.”
“I see Angela Tramelo is here at Sarvar.”
“She is. She’s here under my supervision as a technical adviser. Is that a problem?”
It took Bastian a while to say anything. “No. I don’t suppose it can be, given what has subsequently happened to my cousin back in Newcastle. She should be given the benefit of the doubt, despite what Brinkelle believes. After all, it was always a stretch to think a girl could have physically slaughtered all those people.”
Once again, Vance’s thoughts returned to the insubstantial image the brainscanner had extracted from Angela’s thoughts. It had featured in his mind a lot recently. “That doubt is one of the major reasons the expedition was approved.”
“Yes. And it would seem she is a one-in-ten. We didn’t know that at the time.”
“Nobody did.”
“Did you ask her about it? I find it curious such a person would be recruited as one of my late father’s girlfriends. Actually, that’s not true. I find it highly improbable. In fact, unbelievable.”
“And yet she was.”
“Do you have any theories why?”
“No. Obviously it wasn’t for the money.”
“Information, then? She was some kind of spy perhaps? No, that doesn’t make much sense; the techniques developed by our clinic in Abellia were always made freely available. And that was all my father had an interest in.”
Vance could see how troubled the North was by Angela. “I have to ask you not to confront her. She’s not the most … stable of people right now. Twenty years in jail for a crime you didn’t commit is quite a burden for anyone.”
“You believe her to be innocent? You believe in the alien?”
“I believe it’s possible, yes.”
“A politician’s answer, Colonel,” Bastian smiled. “Bravo. I will restrain myself from any encounters with Ms. Tramelo.”
Antrinell waited until Bastian 2North had left the block of Qwik-Kabins before speaking. “Damn, they are weird.”
“The North clones? That’s kind of inevitable.”
“I wish we didn’t have him with us.”
“That also is inevitable,” Vance said. “They have a right to be with us—somebody killed Bartram and the rest. It was either Tramelo or something out there in the jungle.”
“Marvin and I didn’t find any genetic variance at Edzell.”
“Edzell is close to Abellia as far as this planet is concerned. Besides, we’re on the other side of the Eclipse Mountains now. If there is variance, it might begin to show up here. The biolabs are scheduled to start local sampling in a few days, once the tanker Daedalus has built up our fuel stocks.”
“All right. So who do you want to interview next?”
“Send Omar Mihambo in. I’m curious what he was doing so close to cargo row at that time of the morning.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Private Omar Mihambo said. “That’s all.”
Vance regarded the hulking young man squeezed uncomfortably into the chair opposite, and relaxed. The poor private was clearly unhappy at being called in, didn’t know why he was here, suspected nothing. An innocent. The smartdust Vance had spread on the arms of the chair confirmed that his heart rate and perspiration levels were those of someone close to panic. He had no control over his impulses; even his youthful face was open, a veritable playground of emotion.
Unless of course he was a one-in-ten like Angela, a trained agent making a mockery of Vance’s improvised lie detector. A corporate black ops infiltrator, part of the same operation that murdered the Newcastle North, and Sid’s suspicions were right.
Vance shook his head in annoyance. Focused. “And you heard the commotion?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who was there when you arrived?”
Omar Mihambo stared at the ceiling, brow furrowed with the effort of recall, the need to satisfy. “The paramedics. Some of the logistics corps boys, but they were going for the trucks.”
“Where were the trucks?”
“Really close. It didn’t take them long to get them over. Trouble was lifting without making the damage worse.” His lips pressed together. “Mullain’s ribs were pulped. You could tell as soon as they got the pallet off he wasn’t going to make it, he was just mashed-up meat from the chest down.”
“So who arrived next?”
“I’m not sure. The North was there, I know that. And Dorchev. Some of the catering people, I don’t know their names. It was a crowd by the time they took him away.”
“What about before? When you ran over did you see anyone else in the area?”
“Not really. There were a few of us heading for the paramedics. We all got there more or less together.”
“Nothing odd?”
“The monster? No. It wasn’t there.”
Vance almost envied Mihambo’s simplistic version of the universe. “Tell me about Angela Tramelo.”
“What about her? She wasn’t there.”
“You mean you didn’t see her there?”
“No, sir,” Mihambo said defensively. “I did not see Ms. Tramelo there.”
“All right, Private, calm down. Corporal Evitts asked people if they could confirm she was in the tent that night. Were you one of those who confirmed that?”
“Yes, sir. I told you, I couldn’t get to sleep. I just dozed. It’s the heat. Quartermaster should never have given us black tents, it’s stupid. She was on her cot each time I looked around.”
“All right; what about the rest of the time? Are you getting on all right with her?”
“Yes, sir. She’s one of the good guys. What they did to her in prison was plain wrong.”
“You do know what she was accused of, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, first thing she told us. She didn’t do it. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it, to find the alien that did.”
“Yeah, that’s why we’re all here.”
“I wondered when you’d call me in,” Angela said as she sat in the chair. Her eyes narrowed and she frowned down at the armrests. “That’s a strange place for a mesh. Oh, unless you want to monitor the body signs of anyone who sat here. Now, why would you want to do that, Elston?”
Vance resisted a groan. For someone who’d come out of prison without any smartcells or e-i, she’d managed to upgrade remarkably well. “People lie. About many things. About their age.”
“You didn’t ask a lady how old she was, did you? I’m shocked.”
“Where were you when Mullain was killed?”
“Killed?” She gave him an accusing stare. “So it wasn’t an accident?”
“
Accident
stretches credibility. Not that I can prove anything. So where were you?”
“In the shower where I was getting fucked by Paresh. He enjoys what you can do with a little bit of soap and water.”
“Clever. A gangbang is always a good alibi, especially for the star of the show.”
“I’m strictly a one-man woman, Elston. If I did it, so did he.” She choked down a laugh. “Oh my, you actually considered that for a moment didn’t you?”
“Not really.”
“Lucky for you there aren’t any meshes on your seat. Right?”
“Had you ever met Mullain? Talked to him?”
“Christ no. Some HDA nonentity—why would I bother?”
“Quite.”
“Why am I here? You don’t really think I was involved?”
“No. I need a different angle on this, something outside the usual command structure. You’ve bedded down nicely with your squad.”
“Ouch. Elston, that was quite sophisticated for you.”
“So is there anything going down that I should know about? Black market for kit. Tox?”
Angela shook her head slowly. “No. Nothing like that. Not yet. We’ve only just arrived. It’ll happen, though.”
“I know it will. I need to know if it already has.”
“No. Sorry. I can’t give you a motive.”
“Rumor? A fight over a woman? A man?”
“Hell, you’re desperate to explain this. No. No rumors.”
“All right. Thanks.” He gave her a dismissive hand gesture. She remained seated.
“Omar said he was a mess when they found him,” Angela said.
“Yeah.”
“So what did the postmortem say?”
“There won’t be one, not here,” Vance explained. “The body bag’s on the next Daedalus flight out. They’ll take him back to Earth. I expect there will be an inquest in Newcastle.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“What’s wrong?”
She let out an exasperated hiss. “I’m a … scrap that. You’re an alien monster with blades for fingers. You’ve just stabbed Mullain through the stomach, eviscerated him. How do you cover that up? Perhaps you’d consider pulverizing the corpse?”
“Shit!” Vance glanced up, to see Antrinell was looking as shocked as him.
Angela got to her feet. “You really are crap at your job, aren’t you?”
T
HURSDAY,
F
EBRUARY 28, 2143
As the night’s mellow ringlight was supplanted by the sharper glare of Sirius rising, the hillside teeming with venichi vines began to change color, the air itself turning thick, smearing the slope of glossy olive-green leaves with an oily orange haze. As the stronger light struck the vine, the underside of every leaf shook and shivered, casting loose the minute spores that clotted the surface. Venichi vines always released their spores at dawn so the day’s turbulent thermals would carry them as far as possible before the stiller night air permitted them to drift down.
The cloud expanded quickly, oozing down the gradient to sweep out over the flat land beyond, thinning and spreading as it went. By the time it enveloped Camp Sarvar it was more tenuous than smoke, but still cohesive enough to contaminate the sunlight.
Angela was oddly entranced by the uneven orange stain swirling through the sky, though she detested the constant urge to sneeze that the granules inflicted upon her. So she steeled herself against the discomfort as she stood at the edge of the expanse of battered grass that was which was Camp Sarvar’s helicopter landing field. Fifty meters away the Berlin’s turbines started up, sending a shimmering haze out of the NOTAR exhaust grids at the end of its tail. There was a moment when she wondered if the spores would affect the turbines, reducing their efficiency, and cancel the takeoff. But Ravi Hendrik fed power to the big coaxial blades, and both sets began to spin up to a blur.
She could just see Elston’s head through the curving cockpit transparency, disguised in a sturdy helmet with a broad dark visor. Her hand raised in a mocking salute as the Berlin lifted and moved slowly across toward the end of the cargo rows, where a bulldozer was waiting. It took several minutes for the logistics corps team to fasten and check tethers, but eventually the helicopter rose again. There was a slight pause as the tether took the strain, then the yellow bulldozer was tugged off the ground, wobbling about in the powerful downdraft. The five squad members who’d gathered around to watch with her cheered halfheartedly.
“Four days without him,” Paresh said with a sense of satisfaction.
Angela didn’t share the relief. There were times when she thought she and Elston were the only people on the expedition who took the alien seriously. Now Elston was flying up to Wukang, the first of the three forward exploratory camps, two thousand kilometers to the northwest, assuming his post as camp commander. If they kept to the kind of high-pressure schedule used to establish the existing camps, then it would be three days before the dozers and compactors would have finished preparing a runway. Angela and the squad would then fly out in a Daedalus; a simple civilian adviser didn’t rate a helicopter flight. In the meantime, Elston had told her, Antrinell would be supervising her.
She’d seen the tiny lapel pin that was always on Antrinell’s fatigues. Another Gospel Warrior. Another religious fanatic to whom facts and reality took second place to dogma. He’d been keen enough to have the autopsy on Mullain. And they’d all been relieved when Doc Coniff had found no signs of a five-bladed stab wound among his tattered entrails.
Despite that, Elston had pushed Commander Ni into increasing the camp’s security. Smartdust meshes were smeared everywhere, watching over the whole area inside and out. Legionnaires patrolled the perimeter at all times. That hadn’t gone down well with Paresh’s squad, nor any of the other Legionnaires. They were used as a general workforce by the rest of the camp, and now they had additional duties. Paresh himself was particularly upset; the opportunities to be alone with her were reduced still further. For two nights she’d been virtually alone in the oppressively hot tent; a shower together was a rare event, and there was no leaving the camp on foot for a little privacy. Still, at least it made him more appreciative when they did manage to snatch a secluded moment to couple.