Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

Her fellow officers were advancing beside her, scuttling between the silent, stationary cars as they closed on the locked and screened warehouse. She activated her armor. The system, which looked like a chrome-blue skeleton worn outside her uniform, started to buzz softly. Its force field expanded, thickening the air around her. She prayed the power rating was good enough. Heaven only knew what caliber weapons they’d be facing.

Cars skidded behind her with tires squealing like wounded animals. Up ahead, the point members of the police tactical assault squad had reached the warehouse door. They barely stopped to fire an ion bolt at the bonded composite paneling. A dazzling flash threw the compound into monochrome relief, accompanied by a thunderbolt crack. Splinters of smoldering composite hurtled through the air, revealing two large holes in the building. Squad members raced through.

“FREEZE, POLICE.”

“DO NOT EVEN THINK OF MOVING, MOTHERFUCKER.”

“YOU, HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM. NOW.”

Adrenaline was singing in Maggie’s veins as she rushed through the gap. She cleared the little layer of smoke on the other side, her ion pistol held ready, retinal inserts on full resolution. Surprise at the scene before her almost made her stumble.

Rachael Lancier was standing casually at the front of a truck. The ten employees who had stayed behind were clustered around her. Heavyliftbots had removed several crates from the truck, stacking them neatly on the floor. A bottle and ten glasses were standing on top of one, clearly waiting for a toast to be drunk.

“Ah, good evening, Detective,” Rachael Lancier said as she saw Maggie’s insignia. Her mocking grin was pure evil. “I know I offer a good deal on my cars, but there’s no need to rush. I have something to suit every bank tattoo.”

Maggie cursed under her breath, and slowly engaged her pistol’s safety catch. “We’ve been had,” she said.

“Don?” Paula was asking. “Don, is he in the taxi? Report, Don.”

“Nothing!” Don Mares spat. “It’s fucking empty. He’s not in it.”

“Goddamnit,” Paula shouted.

“This is a stitch up,” Maggie said. “The bitch is laughing at us. I’m standing five meters away from her, and she’s still bloody laughing. We’re not going to find anything here.”

“We have to,” Tarlo cried furiously. “We’ve been watching them for three goddamn weeks. I saw those arms go in there with my own eyes.”

Now it was over, now the hype had cooled, the adrenaline cold turkey kicked in, Maggie felt dreadfully weary. She looked directly into Rachael Lancier’s triumphant gleaming eyes. “I’m telling you, we’ve been royally fucked.”

The one make-or-break moment came when he rolled out of the still-moving taxi under the rail bridge. Adam hit the ground hard, yelling at the sharp pain slamming into his leg, shoulder, and ribs. Then he twisted again, and surged to his feet. The second, empty taxi was parked ready not five meters away. He dived in through the open door, and his Quentin Kelleher e-butler told it to take him directly to the A+A.

The vehicle slid smoothly out into the busy traffic flow. As he looked around, he could see a car brake hard under the bridge. Two people jumped out, and began scanning around. He grinned as the distance built behind him. Not bad for a fat seventy-five-year-old.

Room 421 was just as he’d left it, and the scanning array gave him an all-clear. He limped in. The bruises were starting to hurt badly now. When he sat on the edge of the jellmattress and stripped off his clothes he found a lot of grazed skin that was oozing blood. He applied some healskin patches, and flopped down to let the shakes run their course. Sometime later, he began to laugh.

For two weeks he never left the room. The dispenser mechanism delivered three meals a day. He drank a lot of fluid. His e-butler filtered the output of the local and Intersolar news shows, with a special search order for items concerning Dyson Alpha.

He lay on the bed for twenty hours a day, feeding on cheap packet food and crappy unisphere entertainment shows. Standard commercial cellular reprofiling kits cocooned his torso and limbs, slowly siphoning the fat out of him, adjusting the folds of skin to fit his new, slimmer figure, and ruining most of his OCtattoos in the process. A pair of thick bands with a leathery texture were attached to each leg, on either side of his knees. They were the deep pervasion kits that extended slender tendrils through his flesh until they reached bone. Slowly and quite painfully, they reduced the length of his femur and tibia by half a centimeter each, altering his height to a measurement that was absent from any criminal database.

The adjustments left him weak and irritable, as if he were recovering from a bout of flu. He consoled himself with the mission’s success. It had cost them another hundred thousand dollars, but Rachael Lancier had cooperated enthusiastically. Over the last ten days of the mission, every car leaving the dealership compound had been carrying a part of the order. They’d been dropped off all over town at buildings he’d paid her to rent. Rachael’s workers had parceled them up in the crates he’d shipped in months before. The entire list was on its way to Far Away via a multitude of circuitous routes. They’d arrive over the next few months.

His only regret was not being able to see Paula Myo’s face as the extent of the deception became apparent. That would almost be worth the feel of restraints clasping his wrists.

Seventeen days after the fateful night, Adam dressed himself in a loose-fitting sweatshirt and trousers, and left the A+A. A twenty-minute taxi ride took him to the CST planetary station. He wandered through the concourse without setting off any alarms. Content with that, he caught the express train to LA Galactic.

THREE

Few people outside government circles had ever heard of the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council. It had been formed in the early days of the Intersolar Commonwealth, one of those contingency groups beloved of bureaucrats. Back then, people were still justifiably worried about encountering hostile aliens as CST wormholes were continually opened on new planets farther and farther away from Earth. It was the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council that had the task of reviewing each sentient alien species discovered by CST, and evaluating the threat level it posed to human society. Given the potential seriousness should the worst-case scenario ever happen, its members were all extremely powerful in political terms. However, with the extremely rare probability that such an encounter would ever occur, the Council members invariably delegated the duty to staff members. In this diluted form, the Council continued to meet on a regular annual basis. Every year it solemnly confirmed the galactic status quo. Every year its delegates went off and had a decent lunch on expenses. As the Commonwealth was discovering, sentient aliens were a rare commodity, at least in this section of the galaxy.

Now though, the Dyson Alpha event had changed everything. Nigel Sheldon couldn’t recall ever attending a Council meeting before, although he supposed he must have when the Silfen and the High Angel had been discovered. Such recollections weren’t currently part of his memories. He’d obviously retired them to secure storage several rejuvenations ago.

His lack of direct recall experience had been capably rectified by the briefings his staff had given him on the trip from Cressat, where he and the rest of the senior Sheldon family members lived. CST had routed his private train direct through Augusta to the New York CST station over in Newark; from there it was a quick journey over to Grand Central.

He always enjoyed Manhattan in the spring. The snow had gone and the trees were starting to put out fresh leaves, a vibrant green that no artist ever quite managed to capture. A convoy of limousines had been waiting at Grand Central station to drive him and his entourage the short distance to the Commonwealth Exploration and Development Office on Fifth Avenue. The skyscraper was over a hundred fifty years old, and at two hundred seventy-eight stories no longer the highest on the ancient metropolis island, but still close.