Peter Hamilton: Manhattan in Reverse

‘That it is.’

Paula skirted the lake, walking parallel to the shore until she found the outflow stream. The ground on either side of the gurgling water was sodden, more sludge than mud, sludge that bubbled with the most noxious gases imaginable, farts from as-yet unclassified microbes. All of which made it ideal for a tall reed-equivalent plant to flourish. Her chest and trousers were painted thick with the sludge as she slithered forward through the prickly strands. Then she was right up to the edge of the lake, elbows in the water, parting the last of the reeds. She hadn’t activated her force field skeleton yet, if the riders had even a modest sensor system on the raft they’d spot it.

Her retinal inserts zoomed in to give her a clear image. It was actually two rafts. The main one, with the hemispherical tent on top, was firmly anchored with four thick ropes leading down into the water, one at each corner. Docked to it was a smaller raft, with a high railing around it. Four horses stood on its rough planks, placidly munching through the contents of their nosebags. A ferry rope stretched away from the main raft to a tree above the shore; it ran through a couple of iron hoops secured to the planks on the smaller raft.

Not a bad hideaway , Paula acknowledged. The Onid couldn’t swim, that was very clear in the original report; and the thick woods shielded the gang from any casual human observation. One of the men walked out of the tent, dressed in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. He carried a bucket in one hand. A belt holster held a rapid-fire automatic pistol. It would probably decimate the Onid herd, but didn’t pose any danger to her, not in a force field.

The man went down to the other end of the raft, where some badly made wire cages were strapped to the decking. Paula was surprised to see each cage contained a baby Onid; squatting miserably in their own excrement, fledgling upper limbs squashed against the galvanized wire. The man opened the top of the first cage, and scooped a flaccid olive-brown marak root out of the bucket. He dropped it into the cage, where the little Onid grabbed it eagerly, gnawing at the mushy pulp with bad immature teeth.

‘Why oh why?’ Paula mumbled to herself. It was almost rhetorical. Everything she’d seen, all the factors of the investigation were coming together in her hyperactive subconscious as they always did.

She drew a small kinetic gun from her belt, wrinkling her nose up as the movement burst yet more bubbles in the sludge. Her e-butler reprogrammed the enhanced explosive tips in the bullets, dialling them down to their absolute minimum. She took aim carefully on the ferry rope where it was secured to the tree. Her e-butler fired the gun — avoiding the minute motion of her finger squeezing a physical trigger, which might throw the aim off a fraction. She needed accuracy for this. A maser or X-ray laser would have worked, and been completely silent, but again she didn’t want to risk sensors picking up the shots.

The bullet hit the trunk and detonated with a tiny thuck sound. Her amplified hearing could just make it out, but only because she was listening for it. The man feeding the captive Onids certainly didn’t. The rope fell into the water with barely a ripple.

Paula shifted her aim, the targeting grid centring on an anchor cable where it went into the water. Thuck. A small plume of water burped up, and the cable went slack.

She got two more anchor cables before the man raised his head, glancing round with a puzzled frown. Refusing to rush, Paula lined up on the last cable, slicing it cleanly.

The man was peering over the side of the raft now, trying to work out what was wrong. Eventually he let out a grunt and bent down to haul up one of the anchor cables. The frayed end was held up in front of his face. Paula couldn’t help chuckling at his classic expression: ape examines pretty colours of hologram projection.

He started shouting in alarm. Three more men and two women came out of the tent. More shouts reverberated over the still lake as they discovered all the anchor cables were cut. Surprise turned to anger. Paula started wriggling backwards, retreating into the trees. The next stage was going to be the slowest snare in history. They’d realize that eventually, and when they did that anger would turn to fright. That was when they’d get desperate.

She waited patiently, with a single eyebird hovering in the cover of a tree at the opposite end of the lake, revealing the raft’s painful progress to her. It wasn’t exactly a large amount of water which the streams brought into and out of the lake, but the current was steady.

Sure enough, when they were forty metres away from the mouth of the stream, the gang on the raft brought out their weapons. Paula catalogued two old military-grade maser carbines, a hunting rifle, the automatic pistol, and a couple of pump-action shotguns. She began to walk along the stony stream bed towards the lake. Her force field skeleton activated, cloaking her in the dimmest of purple shimmers.

‘There!’ one of the men bellowed as she emerged from the darkness of the overhanging trees. She stood at the mouth of the stream, dripping slime into the water like the original swamp monster. Every gun they had fired simultaneously. They weren’t very good shots. Those beams and bullets which did strike her were easily deflected by her force field. It rarely even flared blue.

The horses on the smaller raft began to whinny, tossing their long necks in panic, jostling against each other. The raft wobbled alarmingly.

Amid the barrage, Paula calmly drew her janglepulse, and shot the flank of a horse with a low-level pulse. It shrieked and reared up, front hoofs cycling in the air before crashing down, tipping one side of the barge below the surface. Then the poor frenzied animal jumped through the rail into the water, and began swimming. The other horses charged after it. Mud and water churned up around them in a filthy slush as they made their way towards the lakeside, angling away from the glimmering purple figure at the head of the stream.

The raft drifted onward, dragged inexorably by the current. When it was twenty metres away Paula shouted: ‘I am Investigator Paula Myo. You’re under arrest, please throw your weapons into the water.’

‘Fuck you, bitch!’

‘Uh huh,’ she grunted as the masers opened fire again. Phosphorescent sparkles shivered through the air about her as the shotgun blasts reached her. She raised the kinetic gun, cranked up the explosive tip to full, and fired straight into the tent.

She’d been completely wrong. A plyplastic tent was exactly like a balloon; when the bullet detonated, the whole thing burst apart with a bright violet flash. Fluttering strips of shrinking plastic whipped savagely at the gang, ripping clothes and lacerating exposed skin. The yells were more from shock than pain, the damage was mostly superficial. Paula used the janglepulse on maximum power to shoot the man who’d fed the Onid. The raft was only fifteen metres from the stream mouth now. He spasmed, and collapsed unconscious onto the decking.

‘Throw down your weapons,’ she repeated. ‘I won’t ask again.’

They hesitated, then one by they let their weapons drop into the lake.

Paula launched a comdrone, which shot up to a two-kilometre altitude. From there it established a link to Lydian’s diminutive cybersphere, allowing her to make the call. Twenty minutes later, the Farndale executive hypersonic was landing beside the woods in a downblast of air that sent a wild cyclone of grass and leaves swirling about. Greg Wise hurried down the airstairs to stare at the sullen captives standing beside Paula and Dino.

‘What happened?’ he asked.