Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

People on the pavement hurried past. Many of them gave Paula a surreptitious glance as they went, which she found amusing. It wasn’t fame that earned her the looks, nobody knew about her here; it was her plain business suit that marked her out as an offworlder. Contrary to Commonwealth comedians, whose routine had everyone on the planet dressed in identical boiler suits, people were wearing just about every fashion the human race had ever devised. The only thing they didn’t have was artificial fiber.

She crossed the square and went into the main tram station. There was no cybersphere for her e-butler to consult, no useful stored information about routes and stops. Instead, she had to stand in front of a big colored map with the tram lines overlaid in primary colors, and work out for herself which one she needed.

Ten minutes later she was sitting in a tram heading out on its loop that she hoped was going to take in the Earlsfield district. It was very similar to a vehicle she’d used last time when she left Huxley’s Haven, though she couldn’t remember the route number. As they moved away from the center the number of large shops and warehouses decreased, and the streets became more residential, with blocks of factories clumped together. Watching them go past she was still convinced she had done the right thing by leaving all those decades ago. After an upbringing in the Commonwealth this world would have been too quiet.

Not for the first time, she reviewed her nuclear option: go for a rejuvenation and erase all her memories of life in the Commonwealth. Without that experience, the rich cultural contamination so beloved of her stepparents, she would be able to fit in here. It wasn’t something she could bring herself to do, not yet, anyway. There was still her first real case left to solve, though it had become inordinately difficult and complex now.

It had begun in 2243, a fortnight after Paula had passed her Directorate exams to qualify as a Senior Investigator. That was nine months after Bradley Johansson claimed he returned to the Commonwealth after traveling the Silfen paths, and set about founding the Guardians of Selfhood. As with any leader of a new political movement, especially one that waged armed conflict, he needed money to support his cause. As he no longer had direct access to the Halgarth family money, he hatched a simple plan to steal what he wanted.

On a warm April night, Johansson and four colleagues broke into the California Technological Heritage Museum. They ignored the marbled halls filled with giant aircraft and even larger spaceplanes, crept past the display cases full of twentieth-century computers, never even glanced at the first G5 PCglasses, avoided the original motility robots, the SD lasers, a stealth microsub, the prototype superconductor battery cell, and went straight for the dome at the heart of the buildings. Right at the center was the wormhole generator that Ozzie Fernandez Isaac and Nigel Sheldon had built and used to visit Mars. It had taken a lot of negotiation and political maneuvering, but the museum had finally acquired the display rights.

When Johansson and his little team blew open the main door into the central dome, alarms went off and force fields came on. The duty guards responded swiftly, and had the dome surrounded in under a minute.

In order to prevent theft, the museum had laudably installed various force fields to isolate sections of the interior as soon as any form of criminal behavior was detected. As the central dome contained what was arguably the most important, and therefore valuable, machine the human race had ever built, its force field enclosed it completely. When it came on, it trapped the intruders inside. So far, so good.

With over fifty armed guards outside the dome, the chief used the public address system to give those inside the time-honored recital to throw down any weapons and come out with their hands up and their inserts deactivated. The chief then tried to switch off the force field. That was when they found that on his way in Johansson had burned through the force field generator’s main power cable and the command links. The force field had come on automatically with the alarm, powered by its emergency backup supply, but for now the guards couldn’t switch it off.

No real problem. They just had to wait five hours until the emergency backup supply was exhausted. However, what no one in the museum had really thought through was the nature of the machine that the dome’s force field protected. Peering through the small gap provided by the wrecked door, the guards could see the intruders working frantically on the historical device inside. Johansson plugged in the niling d-sink his team had carried in with them, and slowly powered up the old wormhole generator. It might have been nearly two hundred years old, but its components were essentially solid state, and Nigel and Ozzie had built it with a large fail-soft redundancy factor. After an hour, Johansson managed to open a wormhole. It didn’t reach over any real distance, not compared to its huge commercial descendants used by CST. That didn’t bother him, he didn’t want to go to Mars, or even the moon. All he wanted was to be four hundred kilometers away from the museum, in Las Vegas. To be precise, in the maximum security vault that served the eight largest casinos on Earth.

With the wormhole established inside the vault, the team walked through. Once again a barrage of alarms went off, triggered by their presence, and once again force fields came on around the outside, designed to confine any thief who had managed to get this far until the guards arrived. One of Johansson’s team used microthermal charges around the vault door to seal it from the inside. They then spent forty-nine minutes transferring bags full of banknotes back through the wormhole and into the museum. The casinos welcomed currency from every planet in the Commonwealth, and each bag contained notes to the value of five million Earth dollars. It took a team member on average one minute to grab a bag, take it through the wormhole, and go back for the next one.

Paula Myo arrived ninety minutes after the California Technological Heritage Museum alarm was triggered. For the last week she had been working on the strange case of a stolen niling d-sink from a factory outside Portland. Nobody at the Serious Crimes Directorate could work out what anybody would want with such a thing; any company that had a requirement for one could afford one. Now they knew. She struggled through the hyped-up crowd of reporters, then had to get past the small army of LAPD and museum guards that had the criminals encircled. She pressed herself right up to the ruined door, which gave her a narrow awkward view into the dome where one side of the venerable wormhole generator was just visible. Squinting against the sheet of air hazed by the force field she could make out figures moving around.

Two weeks qualified, and she was actually watching the largest robbery in human history in progress.

Once the last bag was dropped into the dome chamber, Johansson moved the wormhole exit again, this time to an unknown destination. The team labored for another fifty minutes taking the bags through. Then they left, and a simple software timer function powered down the wormhole generator behind them.

Two hours later the force field shut down. Paula was among the first people into the dome, supervising the forensics team she’d called in. The Directorate wouldn’t give her the case, of course, she was still a first-lifer and way too junior (her abnormal heritage was never mentioned). Senior Investigators with twenty years’ experience were brought in to head the case, and she was given a secondary role on the task force.

By morning the casinos had confirmed that one point one seven billion dollars had been taken. The media called it the Great Wormhole Heist. Senior Directorate officials assured their contacts that the Investigators would soon be making arrests. It simply wasn’t possible to get rid of that much money unnoticed.