Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

“We’d also get people to bring in what food they gathered,” Camm said. “That way we’ll get a better idea of how much there is left.”

“All right,” Vance said. “I’ll talk with the doctor to see how many we can accommodate in biolab-2 without compromising her patients, then we’ll start to dig in for the duration.”

The electrical storm raging inside the blizzard began to fire lightning balls down into the canyon around midday. Angela saw the first one streak overhead to strike the canyon wall a couple of hundred meters away. The convoy’s minuscule net glitched in response to the EM pulse. A nest of seething lightning braids erupted from the impact point, scrabbling away at the frozen river for several seconds. The serpentine gouge marks they left hissed and steamed before the blizzard quickly obscured them, and the net reestablished itself.

“Great, that’s all we need,” Angela muttered from the front passenger seat of the Tropic. Ken was up on the roof, trying to fix the remote gun actuators, or at least scrape the ice off them, while Paresh stood guard outside. She didn’t like him being out there with his one working arm—everyone knew their firearms had no effect on the monster—but Elston’s instructions about withdrawing into the biolabs and MTJ was probably the only good order he’d issued since the convoy began. And she was going to be in the same biolab as Rebka, which was a huge plus point.

Atyeo and Bastian and Garrick had been tasked with filling up the biolab fuel tanks from the tanker’s sledge bladders. If she wiped the condensation from the Tropic’s windows and squinted, she could sometimes catch a glimpse of their heavy, snow-shrouded figures lumbering around like mythical yetis. Omar and Botin were keeping guard over them.

Rebka, Lulu, and Garrick had just abandoned Tropic-3, their stooped shapes battling the wind as they plodded over to biolab-1. Leora was escorting them. Angela could track their identity icons on her grid, seeing them approaching the safety of the biolab.

She began pulling on her own parka in preparation. They’d be going over there themselves soon. Their food packets were already in bags ready to carry. Everything else that she couldn’t stuff into pockets, all the personal kit, would be abandoned in the Tropic while they waited for some kind of rescue.

The balaclava went on next; then she started jamming her fingers into her gloves. It had taken an age for her to dry them out on the vent, but she couldn’t risk them freezing like they had last time when she went chasing food packets. With the inner layer on, she pushed her fingers into the thicker midlayer, following with the waterproof outer layer. The bag’s strap was about the smallest thing she could pick up now, but at least her hands would stay dry and reasonably warm.

Rebka’s icon showed her inside biolab-1. Another lightning ball zoomed down from the thick churning sky, erupting like a coronal sunrise on the other side of the parked vehicles. Angela wiped at the condensation and peered out again.

Somebody was walking around the back of the tanker’s sledge with its framework of bladders. A dark bulky figure, like everyone in a parka. But her net connection had glitched again, and the identity icons had vanished from the grid. “Show all last known positions,” she told her e-i.

There was no one near the tanker’s sledge. The refueling crew was over by biolab-2.

“It’s back!” Angela yelled.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, his parka half on, Forster turned to gape at her. “What?”

“The monster. It’s going after the rest of the bioil.” Angela yanked at the door handle and jumped down onto the hard-packed snow covering the river. “Paresh!” she screamed. The blizzard buffeted her; high-velocity snow smacked into her face, half blinding her. She hunched down and began to run as best she could toward the sledge. Another lightning ball zipped across the top of the canyon, bursting against the northern cliff. A plasma rainbow inflated, flaring into lightning tendrils that slithered down the cliff like an incandescent waterfall to ground out among the jagged black rocks at the base.

Angela tugged her outer gloves off and switched her dark weapons to semi-active status. Foreign cells that for the last two months had flourished along her ulnae and grown their fronds out along her fingers stirred themselves. The tingling sensation they gave off was exactly as she remembered from twenty years ago. They worked! She hadn’t been sure if the old cy-tech would retain its integrity over two decades, but the specialist on New Tokyo had been the very best. All she’d needed was the right activants to resurrect them.

Poor old puppy boy Paresh had been ecstatic when they made it back to the hotel that night back in February, just after they’d arrived at Abellia. Angela had been impressed by his stamina. Four clubs, bottle after bottle of beer, several sacs of tox, more beer, dancing hard to get all that alcohol and narcotic pumping fast around his bloodstream—wine followed, then some shots.

In the taxi he’d been pawing at her like the school jock taking the prom queen home. Nothing seemed to have any damping effect on his appallingly fit young body.

They were locked together as they stumbled through the hotel room’s door. His tongue was in her mouth and trying to get down into her lungs. Back in the second club, her e-i had used some of Zarleene’s dark software to monitor his bodymesh, and reported he’d switched off the medical smartcell routines. So she replicated the passion, and clamped her hands tight on the back of his neck to return the kiss. As she did it, she bumped a sac against his carotid, the sedative she’d extracted from the clinic just after her embarrassing collapse in the mess tent earlier in the week—that day she saw Rebka for the first time.

Paresh was having a grand time with his hand up her blouse. She broke away with a lustful smile. “Give me one minute,” she told him huskily, and backed toward the en suite. “And Paresh.”

“Yeah?” he blinked hazily.

“You’d better be naked when I come back in here.”

She closed the door, and started counting. At nine there was the unmistakable thud made by an unconscious Legionnaire corporal hitting the carpet.

When she peeped cautiously back into the bedroom it was difficult not to feel a burst of sympathy. Her lovely puppy boy was sprawled on the floor, his trousers around his ankles.

“Sorry, sweets,” Angela apologized to his snoring form. She took a moment to straighten her own clothes and comb her hair back to something more respectable. Her e-i called a taxi using a trace-avoidance patch from Zarleene’s cache. By the time she was striding through the hotel lobby it was pulling up outside.

The taxi’s auto management wanted a deposit. Angela accessed one of the small emergency fund accounts Saul had set up in Abellia twenty years ago, pleased she could still remember the code. There were only a couple of hundred eurofrancs in it, but that was more than enough for the ride to Camilo Beach.

She ordered the taxi to wait at the top of the little village, just off the Rue du Ranelagh, then walked down the sandy road, past the neat whitewashed bungalows that glowed a spectral gray under the bright ringlight, smelling the fresh sea air. The community was typical Saul, a nice place, no doubt filled with decent folk bringing up their families as best they could.

Then she arrived at his bungalow, with its tiny rear kitchen patio opening directly onto the beach. Poor old Saul, he’d be so flummoxed by her appearance. The files she’d harvested said he had a wife and children, so she prayed he wouldn’t be so stupid as to confess her appearance to them. But knowing Saul, there was a good chance he’d do exactly that.