Peter Hamilton - Judas Unchained

A car horn sounded loudly. People turned in curiosity, then yelled in panic. There was a sudden rush of movement as an old Ford Maury saloon veered across Cheyne Street, heading straight for the troopers. The green laser vanished, swinging around toward the Maury. Mellanie caught sight of the driver, a middle-aged woman who was tugging desperately at the steering wheel, her face frozen into an expression of disbelief and horror as the car refused to obey. A fusillade of horn blasts from the road around the wayward car drowned out all other sound. The troopers tried to race clear, but the car followed their movements. Its front wheels hit the pavement curb, and the whole chassis jumped half a meter in the air as it lurched forward. The trooper with the pistol got off one wild air shot before the Maury’s front grill hit him full-on just above his hips. Mellanie winced as his body folded around the car, arms and upper torso slamming down across the hood. Then the car crashed into the stone wall of the courthouse. Its collision absorber frame crumpled at the front, reducing the deceleration force on the passengers. Plyplastic sponge bags sprang out of the seats, wrapping protectively around the driver. Outside the car there was no protection. The impact burst the trooper apart as if an explosive charge had gone off inside him. For a second the shocked screams of everyone watching rose above the cacophony of horns.

A second car thudded into the curb with a loud crunch, smacking into the remaining trooper, who was staring numbly at his colleague’s atrocious death. He was bulldozed into the courthouse wall not five meters from the first smash.

It broke the spell. People started to stampede away from the horrific scene. Vehicles and cyclists swerved to avoid the rush.

“Move!” Mellanie yelled at Dudley. She pulled him along, nearly lifting him off the ground in the planet’s low gravity. Somewhere farther down Cheyne Street there was yet another violent vehicle crash. Reviewing the flood of data her insert-boosted senses were delivering, she saw the SIsubroutine had taken over a delivery van and rammed it into one of the Institute Cruisers. The resulting snarl-up had blocked that half of Cheyne Street completely.

A small Ables four-seater Cowper pulled up beside Mellanie. Its doors popped open and she shoved Dudley in. “Let’s go,” she cried.

The Ables pulled out into what was left of the traffic. Everything else on the road seemed to move neatly out of its way, allowing it to accelerate smoothly away from the bedlam. Mellanie turned around to gape at the scene behind her. People had stopped running now. Some hardy souls were gathered around the cars that had killed the troopers, trying to help free the people inside.

She sank back into the seat with a shaky gasp of air. Her virtual vision relayed the excited pulses of encrypted communications weaving through the city net.

“Can you track the people in the second watcher team?” she asked the SIsubroutine.

“Yes.”

The chain of data traffic flipped up into her virtual vision, turquoise globes linked by jumping sine waves of neon orange. Ten people were sharing the same channel. Three of them were heading toward Cheyne Street in a vehicle of some kind. The rest were on the ground close to the courthouse.

“Any idea who’s in charge?” she asked.

“One of the people in the vehicle is issuing more messages than the others, which would indicate they are in charge. However, I do not have the capacity to break their encryption, so I cannot offer any guarantee of this analysis.”

“Doesn’t matter. If the other guys were from the Institute, this lot have to be Guardians. Find an access code for the leader’s interface.”

A city net personal address flipped up into her virtual vision. The rest of the imagery was shutting down. When she held up her arm, the lacework of silvery OCtattoos was fading from her skin. “Are you all right?” she asked Dudley.

He was curled up in the passenger seat, shivering badly. “Do you think they had memorycells?” he asked in a faint voice.

“I imagine re-lifing is part of their contract with the Institute, yes.”

“I want to go home.”

“That’s not a bad idea, Dudley. We’ll do that.” The wormhole opened again in two hours. She suspected their hotel would be under observation. If they left right away they might just manage to stay ahead of the Institute. “See if you can get us on the passenger manifest for the next flight back to Boongate,” she told the SIsubroutine. “And cancel the route back to the hotel. Take us toward 3F Plaza, but not actually into it, not yet.”

Mellanie took another minute to compose herself. The car crashes had been deplorable. But then, if the SIsubroutine hadn’t intervened, she and Dudley would be in the back of a Cruiser heading for a very unpleasant, and short, future.

She told her e-butler to call the Guardian member’s code.

Stig stopped the car at the end of Kyrie Street, just before it opened out into 3F Plaza. Franico’s, the Italian restaurant, was twenty meters ahead of him.

“You want to do this?” Murdo McPeierls asked.

“It’s not as if we’ve got the element of surprise,” Stig said. He tried to stop it sounding grouchy, but Murdo had been in the car when he’d got Mellanie’s call.

“I’ll scout around,” Murdo said. “Shout if you need me.”

“Sure.” Stig gave the traffic a slightly apprehensive glance. Kyrie Street looked perfectly normal. But then Olwen said there’d been nothing out of place on Cheyne Street until the cars started going berserk.

Stig squared his shoulders and went into Franico’s. Mellanie hadn’t chosen it for its décor or its menu. Gray curving walls and archways of dead drycoral divided up the restaurant into low segments modeled on some insect hive floor plan. The food was pasta and pizzas, with the house speciality of fresh fish from the North Sea.

It took Stig a moment to find Mellanie. She and Dudley were sitting at a table close to the door, half-hidden by one of the crumbling archways, which gave her a good view of anyone coming in while remaining out of direct sight. He went over and sat down. Dudley scowled at him; the young re-life astronomer was nursing a glass of water. Mellanie had a beer and a plate of garlic bread.

“Thank you for coming,” Mellanie said.

“Your call surprised me. I was interested.”

“I need to talk to the Guardians.”

“I see.”

She grinned and bit into a slice of the bread. Melted butter dribbled down her chin. “Thank you for not denying it.”

Stig nearly protested, but that would have been churlish. “How did you find me? More importantly, how did you get my address code?”

“I have a good monitor program. A very good one.”

“Ah. It was you who released it into the city net.”

Mellanie stopped chewing to give him a surprised look. “You knew it was there?” She dabbed a paper napkin to her chin.

“We knew something was there. It’s very elusive.”

“Okay, well, don’t worry. It’s not hostile.”

“I doubt the Institute would agree with you.”

“Their troopers had drawn weapons. They were going to take me and Dudley for interrogation. We’d probably be turned into Starflyer agents.”

Stig was silent for a moment while he reviewed what she said. “Very likely. Do you mind telling me what you know about such things? Frankly, I’ve never met anyone other than a Guardian who believed in the Starflyer.”

“I discovered my old boss was one, Alessandra Baron. She sabotaged an investigation I…” Mellanie stiffened, turning abruptly. Stig saw a dense, intricate pattern of silver lines flicker into existence on her cheeks and around her eyes. “What the hell are you?” she blurted.