Peter Hamilton - Fallen Fragon

"Do you want me to come to Durrell?"

"No. If I can salvage this I need you to be ready where you are. I'm going to have to consider my next move very carefully. I think we underestimated Z-B from the start. If that's the case we may even have to abandon the mission altogether."

"No!"

"Face it, Denise. We're not looking good right now. In any case, Z-B will be back in another decade or so. We can try again then."

"All right."

"It's not over yet. I'll keep monitoring the situation here and review my options. I'm trying to establish a link to the spaceport. We should know within twenty-four hours."

Denise managed a sad little smile. "That's when we were supposed to be on our way."

"Yeah. I'll call you as soon as I have anything new."

After that, Denise didn't go to the school. She left a message for Mrs. Potchansky, claiming a stomach bug, then told the house's Prime-augmented AS to filter calls. She knew she wouldn't be able to face the dear old woman, not even over a visual link.

It was the first time the rented bungalow had felt truly empty without Ray and Josep. Her head slowly filled with strange notions as she wandered along the hall. That she should go back to Arnoon Province where she'd be safe. Or fly to Durrell anyway, and rescue Josep. That this whole mission had been a mistake.

None of these thoughts are relevant, she told herself crossly. That didn't stop them from breeding.

Denise looked at the door to Josep's room, not quite sure why she was standing outside it. He hadn't gone in for much in the way of personal decoration—a desk, a couple of dark green leather chairs, which she thought were pretty awful. The bed was a double. Naturally. He'd hung a big sheet screen over half of the opposite wall, so he could lounge around on the mattress and watch the shows. In its inactive mode the screen showed a picture of Mount Kenzi taken on a cloudless, sunny day, rugged snowcap shining bold against the pale turquoise sky. She turned the handle and went in. When he'd taken off for Durrell he'd left the room in a shambles—the quilt crumpled up at the bottom of the bed, sheet rucked; several pairs of swimming trunks were shoved under the bed. T-shirts that he'd worn when teaching his tourists were thrown into a heap on one of the chairs, still smelling of seawater. Towels had been dropped on the floor. A set of his gills were slung over the back of the desk chair.

Despite everything else Denise had to do over the weeks following the invasion, she'd tidied up both the boys' rooms. Clothes and towels were gradually put into the washing cabinet. The mess sorted out. She'd even found two pairs of panties and a bra under Josep's bed—they had also been washed. The quilt had been folded neatly on the foot of the bed. Their little domestic robot had vacuumed the carpet, dusted round and polished the broad window that looked out over the back garden.

Even spruced up like this, the room belonged to Josep. There were tears in her eyes, which she wiped away savagely with her knuckles. She sat down on the edge of the bed, a hand stroking the mattress. When she closed her eyes it was easy to see him. Memories of him as a stupid little boy up at Arnoon. Growing taller and more serious as the years wound on. Emerging from the d-writing, mature and confident, his dedication to the mission easily as strong as hers. Then down here in Memu Bay. Devilish and happy, growing into a decent, attractive young man. All those fabulous girls he'd brought back to the bungalow, ending up here on this bed.

She'd never slept with him or Ray. Instead they'd shared what amounted to a brother-sister relationship, caring and respectful, with plenty of teasing thrown in, housemate pranks.

Was I being stupid? Should I have just leaped at him? Stolen the precious time we had? Or were we both scared of how deep and serious it would become if we started?

Irrelevant now. Just an exercise in what if, and painful self-recrimination as the prospect of total failure dawned. She hated herself for thinking such things. But the memories wouldn't let her stop.

The message package from the underground cell arrived late in the morning. Prime programs installed in various data-pool nodes ensured it stayed below the horizon of Z-B's monitors. Not even dataflow logs recorded its routing.

Denise was curled up on Josep's bed when the bungalow's AS accepted the message and delivered it direct to her d-written neuron cells. The pillow was damp around her cheek. She'd been crying.

Misery became plain annoyance as she reviewed the message. It was from a cell group in Harkness, one of the smaller suburbs almost on the edge of Memu Bay's moat of terrestrial vegetation. They'd barely been active since the occupation. Scrawling a few slogans on walls. Storing equipment and crude weapons for the more active units in Memu Bay itself. But Harkness was stretched along the eastbound wing of the Great Loop Highway—a very strategic location given their mission. The main purpose in recruiting the cell was so that they could keep the road under observation. And they'd just fulfilled their principal function.

The package was a report that two Z-B jeeps had passed through town, heading down the Great Loop Highway out toward the hinterlands.

Denise felt a flash of resentful anger that the imbeciles in the cell had screwed up and bothered her. Especially right now. Another emotion surge she could do without.

There were no jeeps. The Prime she'd inserted into Z-B's headquarters network reviewed their deployment schedules. And something like a convoy of Skins on their way out to the hinterlands would have been tagged as immediate priority. She would have known within seconds of Ebrey Zhang's office posting the duty.

The Prime operating within the bungalow automatically correlated the new information. There was a patrol scheduled to travel round the hinterlands today.

Reflex muscle action made Denise sit up fast She queried the patrol assignment.

Prime confirmed it.

She loaded another query, asking why Prime hadn't warned her about the assignment.

For software as powerful as Prime, the answer was a long time coming. Several milliseconds. Her Prime hadn't been aware of the patrol before because the assignment hadn't come through Zhang's office. Something else had inserted it into the schedule, and done so in a way that shielded it from registering on any monitor routine. The Prime was sending out thousands of subtle trawlers through the surrounding architecture, trying to locate the origin. One of the probes encountered another Prime lurking inside Z-B's AS.

Within the electronic universe the two quasi-sentient software systems regarded each other passively. Attempts at infiltration and subversion were impossible. They were equals.

"Another Prime?" Denise squawked in shock.

It simply could not be.

Yet there it was.

She withdrew her own Prime.

There had been no alert issued in the Z-B network; nobody knew she'd been sniffing around. The other Prime hadn't informed them. She tried to think the situation through logically. There was only one place a Prime came from, and that was Arnoon. Somebody else from back home must be in Memu Bay. Somebody with a mission contrary to hers. Which again wasn't possible. No Prime would act against the dragon; it had written Prime specifically for them.

None of this made any sense. Then she finally paid attention to the platoon that had been assigned the patrol: 435NK9. Lawrence Newton!

"He can't know," she whispered. But he was heading down the Great Loop Highway on a patrol that Z-B had never authorized, and didn't know about.

Denise closed her eyes and considered her options. There weren't many. She had to know how a Prime was helping Newton. That was paramount: it might even reveal how Josep had been captured. The answer had to be in Arnoon. And Newton himself could not be allowed to reach the province.