Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

“I know. That’s why we could never steal it and analyze it ourselves. You don’t have to go through every byte yourself. You know the critical segments of the flight; that’s where you look. Not at the main events, what happened on the bridge or in engineering, they’ll be clean. It’s what went on in the background that’s important. Who was haunting deck thirteen when the barrier came down? Find them, not just for us, for yourself, for everyone. We need to know what really happened out there.”

“This is… I can’t…”

“The alien is becoming more active now. You have to admit, there’s some weird shit going down these days. That explosion on Venice Coast which took out our arms supplier; the murdered Senator.”

“Bullshit. That was some covert operative from the government, or an Intersolar Dynasty. Everybody knows that.”

Adam smiled maliciously. “Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.”

“You are so wrong. Why can you never admit that?”

“Then prove it. Exactly who are you betraying by looking at the data? If we’re wrong you lose nothing. If God forbid, we’re right, we need to know. And you’ll be a hero. That’s big enough to absolve all your past sins.”

“I don’t need absolution.”

Adam stood. “You know I’m right. And I know you can never admit that to my face. So we’ll stop macho posturing now, and I’ll contact you every fortnight or so to check on your progress.”

“I won’t do it.”

“Yeah, I said that very same thing when Johansson told me to get in touch with you. But it’s not like either of us have a choice, is it? Not after Abadan station. Take care, Oscar, there’s a lot of people depending on you.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Carys Panther took the metallic gray MG metrosport into New Costa Junction, then drove it straight onto the car-carry train to Elan. The carriage was completely enclosed, a tube of aluminum with a bright polyphoto strip along the ceiling and a couple of narrow windows along each side. Her MG was so low-slung they were above her eye level. The car’s drive array edged her right up to a big BMW 6089 four-by-four before engaging the full brake lock; a Ford Yicon saloon pulled up behind her.

She ordered the seat to recline and settled back for the trip. Her e-butler brought up a whole raft of story ideas and plot sequences into her virtual vision, which she started to fill in, joining them together in complicated loops. At the moment there was a big demand for the long slightly fantastical sagas that were her preferred genre. Ant, her agent, was keen to exploit the market. He said that it was the uncertainty of the Prime situation that was putting people off gritty realism at the moment; they wanted escapism. He should know; Ant was actually older than Nigel Sheldon, and he’d been doing the same job for century after century, he’d seen every creative fad there was, living through the fashion cycle as it spun the genres around and around.

It was twenty minutes before the train started to move forward, pulled by an electric Fantom T5460 engine. Augusta led straight to New York; from there the trans-Earth link took them to Tallahassee, Edmonton, Seattle, LA Galactic, Mexico City, Rio, and Buenos Aires, before finally crossing the Pacific to Sydney, which routed the train out to Wessex. Earth took about an hour; they stopped at five of the stations so more vehicles could roll onto the car-carry. Once they reached Wessex, there was a longer stop as six extra carriages were added, then it took five minutes to cross the planetary station’s yard to the Elan gateway. A minute later and they were pulling up alongside the long road-platform at Runwich, the planet’s capital.

The MG’s drive array connected itself to the city’s road routing manager, paid the local car tax, and drove through the outskirts to the airport. For once the connection timing worked out in practice the way it was listed on the timetable. A Siddley-Lockheed CP-505 was waiting for her on the apron, a big six-duct fan plane. She drove up the rear ramp into the gaping cargo hold, where electromuscle clamps gripped the car’s tires. There were another fifteen cars in there, along with two coaches. The plane could carry sixty-five tons of cargo in total, in addition to a hundred twenty passengers on the upper deck.

Carys spent the next three hours sitting in a comfy first-class seat being served champagne by a nice first-life steward as they cruised across the equator at point nine five Mach. Ant called twice for script conferences and permission to crank up her contract negotiations. It was sort of flattering that he dealt with her personally; his client list had been closed for over a century now. If all went well her latest saga should hit the unisphere in another six months.

They landed at Kingsclere airport on Ryceel and she climbed back into the MG. As she drove out of the southern continent’s capital she could see the Dau’sings rising out of the horizon.

The toll booth at the start of the Randtown highway had a big new sign across the front, reading: No Military Vehicles Permitted. Someone had spray-paintedDEATH TO ANTIHUMAN FUCKHEAD TRAITORS over the top of it in glowing orange.

“This should be fun,” she muttered as she drew up outside the booth and put her thumb credit tattoo on the pad. The reinforced barrier slid up, and she drove onto the start of the highway. The broad strip of enzyme-bonded concrete seemed completely deserted as it stretched out ahead. Carys thought it looked like the start grid of some giant racetrack, which was an interesting challenge. She brought the full range of drive array program tools up into her virtual vision, and supervised its integration with the highway’s simple traffic management system. The speed regulator was a small old program that was easily susceptible to the fix that came as standard in the MG’s modern aggressor routines. She removed the offending software’s inconvenient monitoring of the car, and pressed her foot down hard on the manual accelerator.

There was a surge of power into the axle engines that pushed her deep into the seat. She locked the speed, tied the radar and navigation functions into the steering program, and assigned full control to the drive array. Electromuscle bands in the tire walls responded to the buildup of speed by changing their profile, expanding the tread width to provide an even greater degree of traction. There was a wicked smile on her face as the car charged up the first slope into the foothills at three hundred kph.

“I stayed loyal,” Dudley Bose said. “I was stupid. Did you hear what I said? Did you ever see the recording? I warned them, I told them to flee. Then my voice ended. The aliens must have silenced me, punished me for spoiling their plans. And all the while it was Wilson Fucking Kime I was risking my neck for. The bastard who left me there to rot, to die under an alien sun. Who sacrificed me so he could be safe.”

“You are very much alive, my love,” Mellanie told him. They were lying together on the double bed in what the hotel, with a sharp eye for satire, called its bridal suite. The curtains were open, allowing Dudley to see his precious stars. It was an effort for Mellanie not to yawn, she desperately wanted to go to sleep. Something this new Dudley Bose apparently never did without the help of strong drugs. She wondered if she should slip another of the pills into his drink; it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. But the champagne they’d so eagerly guzzled down earlier was flat now, and not even the Pine Heart Gardens, Randtown’s finest, would offer room service at such a time. Damn this wretched backward place.

There had been few choices other than returning to Randtown to file her follow-up report on the blockade. Alessandra wanted to know if the residents had renounced their antihuman stance now the wormhole detector station had been forcibly installed in the Regent mountains above the town. The angle they were going for was a remorseful population who were turning their backs on redneck buffoons like Mark Vernon. Finding appropriate interviews would be easy enough for Mellanie, the more colorful the better.