“Did you see the fall?”
“No.” Antrinell pointed at the broken undergrowth below the trees twenty meters away where the vehicles had cut a path. “We were back there. We keep a minimum forty-meter distance between each vehicle now. That was something we learned on day one. If the MTJ comes up against something it can’t get past, you have to back up and start over along another route. Can’t do that easily if we’re all clumped up nose-to-tail.” His breath whistled out between clenched teeth. “We had a ringlink between all the vehicles. The screams …”
“I want to look where they went over.”
“Sure.”
Vance walked to the edge. The mud was drying rapidly now. The ground was a mess of footprints, skid marks, and trampled vegetation. Smara Jacka, from the xenobiology team, and Gillian Kowalski were sitting on the rocks, belaying the safety ropes attached to Josh Justic and Omar Mihambo, who were down at the MTJ helping Sworowski attach carrier hooks to the machine. They were tethered to a big bullwhip tree that leaned toward the edge. Vance glanced up at the tree, with its horizontal coil branches overhead, the smooth light-brown bark furred by short, silky white hair. The way the bullwhip’s branches held themselves parallel to the ground put him in mind of a terrestrial cedar.
Despite the amount of foot traffic, it was easy enough to see exactly where the MTJ had gone over. The wheels had skidded through the soft mud of the slope, tearing out smaller plants as they went. Vance walked down the track on top of the ridge, then closed his eyes and told his e-i to play the recording. DiRito’s visual record began to play and Vance was in the MTJ’s cabin as it jounced about over the rough ground. Hands up in front, struggling with the steering wheel. Even with power steering and traction control, the MTJ was a brute to hold steady on this kind of terrain. DiRito seemed to have some kind of stupid pride thing going, maintaining a speed that Vance considered foolhardy. Hub motors in each of the four wheels kept it crunching forward over everything but the biggest obstructions. And if those were tree trunks, the lethal-looking mandible-like buzz saws on the front chopped them back.
DiRito had emerged from the jungle, into the relatively clear strip of land along the edge of the gorge. He turned and began to drive parallel to the edge. There were some rocks—
—Vance opened his eyes, matching the clump of thigh-high boulders in front of him with DiRito’s visual record—
—DiRito turned right. Vance could understand that. Left would take him back toward the jungle, right was clearer, even though the MTJ was closer to the top of the ridge now. The MTJ turned fine, went around the rocks. Carried on up the hill.
Everything was normal; then there was a lurch and the windshield was suddenly facing the open sky above the gorge. DiRito was fighting the steering wheel, and the back wheels lost traction in the mud. Watching it, Vance could sense the momentum as the rear of the vehicle swung around. Amid a shaking image, DiRito’s arms were a frantic jumble of motion on the steering wheel. The MTJ was just starting to respond when the horizon began to tilt.
“Stop,” Vance told his e-i. He’d run the recording eight times since DiRito arrived at Wukang’s clinic. Trying to understand what had happened.
“So?” Antrinell asked.
Vance stood on the spot and examined the ground. Mashed-up honeyberry bushes and vine fronds. Mud starting to dry. Same as the rest of the jungle. He turned a full circle. The team members lounging around the Tropics were all watching him. The Berlin was circling slowly overhead.
“DiRito hasn’t stopped shouting that something hit the MTJ,” Vance said.
“Well, he’s bound to claim it wasn’t his fault.”
“Hmm,” Vance said. He could still see the stricken Legionnaire in Wukang’s little clinic, fighting against the pain, desperate to tell anyone who came close. “We were hit. Something pushed us. It wasn’t me! It wasn’t my fault! I swear.” Pleading. Insistent. Distraught. Vance had seen enough interrogations, witnessed enough people in shock, in denial, furtive, hostile. He was pretty sure DiRito was telling the truth. But truth was a subjective thing. Then again, something had definitely happened to the MTJ to send it sliding like that.
But now, hours later, and in that same exact position, Vance couldn’t see a single thing that might have caused it to swerve so sharply. He poked his boot toe into the soft ground. Even the mud was consistent, no hidden deep puddles or small sinkholes. Power surge in a hub motor? Traction control was all software-balanced, after all. But incredibly safe. And the chances of a glitch at the exact moment that would cause this …
Vance moved a short distance away from the forlorn survivors. “Lucky it wasn’t the biolab that went over.”
“You’re telling me,” Antrinell said. “We’ve got some decent body-impact protection built into our seating, but that would have given it a sore testing.”
“Yes. I was thinking more of what you’re carrying.”
“Ah. Well there’s even less to worry about on that score. The warheads can impact bare rock at terminal velocity and they won’t even graze, let alone break. They have to be armed to begin their release sequence.”
“And the solid rockets?”
“They’re not going to detonate just because the biolab rolled over a few times. There’s a lot of protection designed into the system.”
“Good. We might be needing it.”
“Excuse me?” Antrinell said.
“I’m not convinced this was an accident.”
“I don’t see how it could be sabotage.”
“Me neither, but this one is definitely poised between the two. So we need to be sure our payload is safe.”
“You can’t be serious. Even if they exist, how would the St. Libra aliens know what we’re carrying? There are only twenty-eight people in the whole HDA who know about our fallback precaution.”
Vance nodded slowly, wanting to believe Antrinell was right, that he was just being paranoid. “Tell me again where Angela Tramelo was at the moment of the accident,” he said quietly.
Antrinell couldn’t disguise his shock. “You’re kidding, right?”
Vance said nothing, just looked at him.
“Oh Lord, you’re not. Okay, she was in the Tropic behind me. Corporal Evitts was driving it. Passengers were Tramelo, Kowalski, and Justic. Dean Creshaun was driving the last Tropic, with Bastian 2North, Melia, and Dorchev in with him. Every one of them can confirm she was there. We had her surrounded, Vance. There’s no way she could have caused this.”
“All right, I’ll accept that for the moment.”
“You really think she’s involved?”
“I don’t know what the hell is happening on St. Libra, that’s the problem. There’s too much happening to us to just write it off as bad luck and coincidence. But I do have an idea about Angela, which I’m going to share with you. In case.”
“In case … Really?”
“We’re accumulating fatalities at an alarming rate, don’t you think?”
Antrinell had to nod agreement at that. “Yeah. Even my people have been talking about it.”
“And she’s always near.”
“To be fair, so were all of us.”
“But none of us were here when Bartram North and his household were slaughtered.”
“I thought her interrogation showed us a high probability that the monster does exist.”
“Yet the more the Newcastle investigation continues, the more it seems that the North’s murder was connected to some kind of illegal corporate operation.”
“But we have Ernie Reinert in custody now. The team on Frontline will get the truth out of him.”
“Ralph Stevens will uncover who employed him, yes. If he knows.”
“What is this?” Antrinell asked. “Are you having doubts about the expedition?”
“I don’t know. An alien species certainly fits everything that’s happened. But what about Angela?”
“What about her?”
“She’s a one-in-ten,” Vance said. It was something that had bothered him right from the moment back in January when Vermekia had given him her file. Seeing her at Holloway Prison, exactly the same as she’d been all those years ago, as if she’d time-jumped from then to today, had bothered him badly. It wasn’t jealousy—not exactly, though he’d started to be a lot more critical of himself in the bathroom mirror every morning. He simply didn’t understand where she’d come from, and that went against everything he stood for. AIA was about getting answers. “She was arrested twenty years ago. I’m not that good at judging age, but she looked like she was about nineteen then. I’ve done some digging on the one-in-ten treatment. It kicks in during the late teens, once you’re near physical maturity, so back then she could have been anything between eighteen and thirty.”
“I get that,” Antrinell said. “So?”
“It’s hugely expensive now. And even assuming she’s forty-five, which I have my suspicions about, she was conceived around 2098.”
“Yeah, those figures check out.”
“The figures, yeah. But who is she? One-in-ten treatments are hugely expensive and rare today, though they’re not as exceptional as they used to be. But forty-five years ago? That’s the very early pioneering days, when it would have been phenomenally expensive.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so who, forty-five years ago, was rich enough to spend that kind of money on a daughter? And we’re talking tens of millions, here. It’s hard to find reliable estimates. On top of that, most American states have strong anti-germline laws.”
“A billionaire, obviously. We’re not short of them on the trans-space worlds, now or then.”
“No. We’re not. But I’ve asked Vermekia to dig up what he could. It’s interesting. We found a possible family DNA match to a Luci Tramelo, who’s on file with the GE Citizenship Bureau. She was French citizen who emigrated to Orleans forty-seven years ago, age thirty-five. When she arrived in Pantin, she bought a large vineyard on the edge of town and lived there comfortably, marrying a year later. There are three children of record, and they still run the vineyard. But Luci herself died two years ago. There’s no record of her parents’ family having enough money to buy that estate for her, and there aren’t any French state employment records for her prior to emigration. So the assumption I’ve made is that she bought it with her surrogacy payment. The DNA comparison gives us a second-generation connection, so genetically speaking Angela is the equivalent of her grandchild. That also makes sense given the alterations made to a one-in-ten’s DNA. The interesting thing is, Vermekia couldn’t get a match on any other of her familial traits. We don’t have any records for her probable father.”
“I find that hard to believe. The AIA can access every government identity database.”
“No, actually, we can’t.” Vance grinned. “There’s the distant planets for a start. As they don’t officially exist as far as the trans-space worlds are concerned, we’ve never been able to get to their networks. Then there’s New Monaco.”
“Ah. Yes, I like it. A world of multibillionaires that we’re not allowed to visit. That would fit.”
“Indeed it would. In fact, it’s about a perfect fit. Except for one small point.”
“Yeah?”
“What in the Good Lord’s name is a New Monaco heiress doing as Bartram North’s whore?”
“Ah.” Antrinell’s humor visibly withered. “Yeah, that is a good point.”
“The only possible explanation for her being in that mansion would be as an undercover agent. And that’s a real long shot. But it still doesn’t explain her motivation—someone with that kind of money and upbringing simply wouldn’t do such a thing. Though if she did, it opens up the whole corporate dark ops question.”
“So you’re saying the Newcastle murder was the latest phase of some twenty-year corporate battle, and there is no monster?”
“No. I was there when we interrogated Angela. I sat and watched the brainscan pull that picture from her thoughts. She has a memory of something unnatural in Bartram’s mansion that night. And given the rest of that interrogation, it’s hard for me to ignore that.” Although there was one thing he was never going to confide to Antrinell, and that was Angela’s resistance. He’d seen the toughest men crack in that most unholy suite of rooms, left weeping on the floor, toxed-up crazy, begging to be asked any question, desperate to satisfy their interrogators. Pathetic in their addled eagerness.
Whereas they’d gotten everything they wanted from Angela, but they’d never broken her. Reduced her to a miserable distraught self-pitying state, yes. But that inner fury of hers was still burning fiercely at the end—you just had to ask the technician who’d lost an eye to her rage. She never submitted. And it took a very special person, one with total self-conviction, to go through everything Frontline could throw at them and survive with their psyche relatively unscathed. A someone who possessed the utter arrogance and self-belief of a born-and-bred New Monaco resident.
“Hell.”
“Yes, quite,” Vance said. “We’re right back where we started, with a lot of unexplained deaths on St. Libra. If we’re going to work this one out we’ll need hard scientific evidence. So what have you got for me?”
“Nothing helpful,” Antrinell admitted. “We’ve taken over eight thousand samples since the convoy left Wukang. The guys were getting good with the collectors we issued. We’ve already processed seventy percent. There are a phenomenal amount of plant species here, but no real variance from the main St. Libra genetic sequence.”
“Right.”
“That’s not just here, Vance. We took samples at Abellia, Edzell, and Sarvar. There’s no variance anywhere.”
“But they weren’t large-area samples.”
“No. However, they are stretched over six thousand kilometers. Total stability over that kind of distance is a pretty conclusive indicator. And we haven’t included the equal lack of variance that exists all the way down to the Independencies.”
“You’re saying we’re wasting our time?”
Antrinell shrugged. “If it was up to me, then yes. My vote is for packing up and going home. This world is odd, certainly, and the more I see of it the more I’m coming around to the bioforming theory.”
“Really?” Vance asked in surprise. Antrinell had always been adamant that all life in the cosmos was God’s own mystery, a perfectly natural one. And the Lord had blessed many planets with life. Except in all the decades of exploration, humans had never found another sentient species. Which tended to support the Good Book’s tenet of God making man in His own image. So far all the universe had revealed was man and Zanth. And every Gospel Warrior knew the Zanth was an incarnation of the devil.