Peter Hamilton: Fallen Fragon

"Shit, Lawrence, I thought you were a straighter arrow than me. What happened to getting a big enough stake to qualify for starship officer?"

"Nearly twenty years, and I've made sergeant. I got that because Ntoko never made it back from Santa Chico."

"Christ, Santa fucking Chico. I forgot you were on that one." Colin shook his head at the memory. Modern historians were comparing Santa Chico to Napoleon's invasion of Russia. "Okay, I get you posted to Memu Bay. What do I see?"

"Ten percent."

"A good figure. Of what?"

"Of whatever's there."

"Don't tell me you've found the final episode of Fleas on the Horizon?"

"That's Flight: Horizon. But no; no such luck." Lawrence's face remained impassive.

"I got to trust you, huh?"

"You got to trust me."

"I think I can manage that."

"There's more. I need you at Durrell, the capital, in the Logistics Division. You'll have to arrange secure transport for us afterward, probably a medevac—but I'll leave that to you. Find a pilot who won't ask questions about lifting our cargo into orbit."

"Find one who would." Colin grinned. "Bent bastards."

"He has to be on the level with me. I will not be ripped off. Understand? Not with this."

Colin's humor faded as he saw how much dark anger there was in his old friend's expression. "Sure, Lawrence, you can rely on me. What sort of mass are we talking about?"

"I don't know for certain. But if I'm right, about a backpack per man. It'll be enough to buy a management stake for each of us."

"Hot damn! Easy meat."

They touched the rims of their tins and drank to that. Lawrence saw three of the locals nod in agreement, and stand up.

"You got a car?" he asked Colin.

"Sure: you said not to use the train."

"Get to it. Get clear. I'll take care of this."

Colin looked at the approaching men, making the calculation. He wasn't frontline, hadn't been for years. "See you on Thallspring." He jammed on his stupid hat and took the three steps to the back door.

Lawrence stood up and faced the men, sighing heavily. It was the wrong day for them to go around pissing on trees to mark their territory. This bar had been carefully chosen so the meeting would go unnoticed by anyone at Z-B. And Thallspring was going to be the last shot he'd ever get at any kind of a decent future. That didn't leave him with a lot of choice.

The one at the front, the biggest, naturally, had the tight smile of a man who knew he was about to score the winning goal. His two compadres were sidling up behind, one barely out of his teens, swigging from a tin, the other in a slim denim waistcoat that showed off glowmote tattoos distorted by old knife scars. An invincible trio.

It would start with one of them making some comment: Thought you company people were too good to drink with us. Not that it mattered what was actually said. The act of speaking was a way of ego pumping until one of them was hot enough to throw the first punch. Same dumb-ass ritual in every low-life bar on every human planet.

"Don't," Lawrence said flatly, before they got started. "Just shut up and go sit down. I'm leaving, okay."

The big fella gave his friends a knowing I-told-you-he-was-chickenshit grin and snorted contempt for Lawrence's bravado. "You ain't going nowhere, company boy." He drew his huge fist back.

Lawrence tilted from the waist, automatic and fast. His leg kicked out, boot heel smashing into the big fella's knee. The one in the denim waistcoat picked up a chair and swung it at Lawrence's head. Lawrence's thick right arm came up to block the unwieldy club. One leg of the chair hit full on, just above his elbow, and stopped dead. Its impact didn't even make Lawrence blink, let alone grunt in pain. The man staggered back as his balance was slung all to hell. It was like he'd hit solid stone. He stared at Lawrence's arm, eyes widening as realization hammered through the drink.

All around the bar, men were pushing back chairs and rising. Coming to help their mates.

"No!" the man in the waistcoat shouted. "He's in Skin!"

It made no difference. The youngster was going for the big bowie knife in his belt scabbard, and nobody was paying any attention to warnings as they closed in.

Lawrence raised his right arm high, punching the air. He could feel a gentle rippling against his wrists as peristaltic muscles brought the darts forward out of their magazine sacs into launch tubules. A ring of small dry slits peeled open above his carpals, black nozzles poking out. The dart swarm erupted.

As he left the bar, Lawrence turned the cardboard sign on the door so it said closed and shut it behind him. He made sure his hat was on square, a fussy action, covering his anger. God damn the Armory Division. Those bastards never erred on the side of caution, always on the side of overkill. He'd seen two of the men lying on the floor start to convulse, the dart toxin levels set way too high for a simple incapacitation sting. The bar was going to get very noisy with police, very quickly.

A South American couple was sitting at one of the tables on the bar's veranda, studying the laminated menu. Lawrence smiled politely at them and walked off down the main street back to the skycable terminus.

* * *

Ambulances and police vehicles were parked down the length of Kuranda's main street when Simon Roderick's TVL77D executive liaison helicopter whispered over the town. They were at all sorts of angles to each other, completely blocking the road for thirty meters on either side of the bar. There were obviously no traffic regulator nodes to guide anybody through Kuranda's streets. Thoroughly in keeping with the town's doughty throwback nature. He shook his head in bemusement at the chaos. Emergency service drivers could never resist the dramatic slam-halt arrival. Tough luck if one of the injured needed a paramedic crew urgently; the closest vehicles were all police. Paramedics clad in green boilersuits were maneuvering stretchers around awkward angles, sweaty faces straining from the effort.

"God, what a bunch of no-brainers," Adul Quan complained from the seat behind Simon. The Third Fleet intelligence operative had pressed his face against the helicopter's side window so he could view the town directly. He never liked utilizing sensor feeds through his direct neural interface, claiming the viewpoint switch made him giddy. "We should bid to manage the state's civil operations. At least offer them AS coordination, bring them into this century."

"We have the urban area franchise," Simon replied. "And all our people have some kind of medical monitor fitted in case there's a problem. We can retrieve them wherever they are. That's what matters."

"Good PR, though. Devoting resources to helping civilians."

"If they want our help they should take a stake in us, contribute and participate."

"Yes, sir."

Simon heard the skepticism in the other's voice and made no comment. To get where he was, Adul had built up a large stake in Z-B, but even that couldn't make him understand what true belonging meant. In truth, Simon thought, no one except himself did. That would change eventually.

Simon used his DNI to feed a series of commands to the autopilot, and the helicopter swung round over the little circular park at the top end of the main street. As he came back to the scrubland truck lot he'd identified as a landing zone, he saw that some kids had spray painted an open eye on the corrugated roof of a derelict shop. The fading green and blue symbol was big enough to stare up at all the strategic security division helicopters that zipped through the tropical skies above the town. Like a perfect portrait painting, its gaze followed Simon as the TVL77D extended its undercarriage and sank down on the baked-mud surface. Rotor downwash sent a flurry of crushed tins and junk-food wrappers tumbling away from them as the fuselage lost its gray sky-blur integument, reverting to ominous matte black.