FALLEN DRAGON (3 page)

"He frightened you, didn't he?"

"Too damn right."

"That's understandable. As you saw, he could cause you a great deal of physical discomfort. I, on the other hand, can destroy your entire life with a single call. But I won't stop there. I will obliterate your family as well. No jobs for any of them. Ever. Just welfare and junk for generations. And if you annoy me any more, I'll see you disqualified from welfare, too. Do you want you and your mother to be whores for Z-B squaddies, Sharlene? Because that's all I'll leave you with. The pair of you will be fucked into an early diseased death down on the Cairns Strip."

Sharlene's jaw dropped.

"Now, you tell me what I want to know. Focus that pathetic mush of flesh you call a brain, and I might even see you get a reward. Which way do you want to go, Sharlene? Annoyance or cooperation?"

"I want to help," she stammered fearfully.

Simon smiled wide. "Splendid. Now, was he wearing a Skin suit?"

"No. Not really. It was his arm. I saw it when he bought his beer. It was all fat, and a funny color."

"As if he had a suntan?"

"Yeah. That's it. Dark, but not as dark as an Aboriginal."

"Just his arm?"

"Yeah. But he had the valves on his neck, too. You know, like Frankenstein bolts, but made from flesh. I could see them just above his collar."

"You're sure about that?"

"Yes. I'm not making this up. He was a Zantiu-Braun squaddie."

"So what happened: he walked in and shot everyone?"

"No. He was talking to some bloke. Then Jack and a couple of the others went over. I guess they were looking for trouble. Jack's like that; a good bloke really, though. That's when it happened."

"The man fired darts that knocked everyone out?"

"Yes. I saw him hold his hand up high, and someone shouted that he was in Skin. I got down behind the counter. Then I heard everyone screaming and falling. When I got up, they were all just lying there. I thought... thought they were all dead."

"And you called the police."

"Yes."

"Had you ever seen this man before?"

"I don't think so. But he might have been in. We get a
lot
of people in here, you know."

Simon glanced round the bar, and just avoided wrinkling his nose in disgust. "I'm sure you do. What about the person he was talking to—have you seen him before?"

"No. But—"

"Yes?"

"He was Zantiu-Braun as well."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I've worked in bars all around Cairns. You get to recognize the squaddies, not just from their valves."

"Very well. So the shooter came in and bought a beer, then went straight over to the other squaddie, is that right?"

"Yes. That's about it."

"Try to remember, did either of them seem surprised that the other was there?"

"No. The one who was here first was drinking by himself, like he was waiting for the other."

"Thank you. You've been most helpful."

Captain Finemore gave Simon a surprised look when he emerged from the bar. "What happened?"

"Nothing," he said. "It wasn't a Skin suit He was using some kind of scatter pistol. I expect the dart toxin was produced in an underground lab. Shame the chemist wasn't a bit more attentive to the actual molecular structure when he attempted to retrosynth it."

"A shame?" The line of Captain Finemore's lips was set hard. "We've got one dead, and Christ alone knows if the rest of them will recover."

"Then you'll be glad we're getting out of your hair." Simon gestured along the clutter and confusion of Kuranda's main street. "It's all yours. But if you do need any help rounding the shooter up, then don't hesitate to ask. Our boys can always do with a bit of live training."

"I'll keep it in mind," Finemore said.

As before, police and civilians parted for him with sullen, silent resentment. He ran quickly through the TVL77D's start-up procedure and lifted from the baked mud. His personal AS reported there was no unauthorized removal of a Skin suit from the Cairns base armory.

"Check this out for me," he told Adul. "I want to know who it was walking round in Skin."

"Some squaddie got jumped in a bar. Do you really think it's that important?"

"The incident isn't. The fact that there's no reference to Skin missing is. And I'm curious why two of our people should choose to meet in such a godforsaken place."

"Yes, sir."

Zantiu-Braun's Third Fleet base centered on the old Cairns International Airport just to the north of the town. There were no commercial flights there anymore; the main transport link was the TranzAus magrail train, bringing cargo and people northward with smooth efficiency at five hundred kilometers an hour. Now the parking aprons held squadrons of Third Fleet helicopters along with scramjet-powered spaceplanes and a few dark, missilelike executive supersonic jets; eight old lumbering turboprop craft maintained by Z-B provided a civil coastwatch and rescue service all the way out to New Guinea. As a result, the airspace over Cairns was the busiest section in Australia apart from Sydney, where the remaining airlines had their hub. Synthetic hihydrogen fuels had replaced natural petroleum products, ecologically sounder but relatively expensive to produce, the cost pushing air travel right back where it started in the twentieth century, the preserve of governments, corporations and the rich.

With mass tourism dying and agriculture effectively eliminated by vat-grown food and worsening ultraviolet infall, Queensland was fast becoming an economic wasteland in 2265 when Zantiu-Braun was offered zero-tax start-up incentives to site a new wave of Earth-to-orbit operations there.

In those days, the operation was purely commercial. Freight spaceplanes boosted factory station modules to low
o
rbit stations and returned with valuable microgee products, while the passenger variants ferried colonists up to starships. After 2307 that all began to change. Asset realization became the new priority, and the nature of the cargoes that the space-planes hauled up to low orbit switched accordingly. The number of colonists flying from Cairns fell to zero inside of a decade, replaced by strategic security personnel. Third Fleet support systems took over from industrial shipments.

The base expanded, throwing up barracks and married quarters for the strategic security division squaddies. Engineering and technical support constructed themselves ranks of blank warehouselike buildings. New hangars and maintenance shops sprang up to house and service the helicopters. Huge swaths of government land were rented for training grounds. And, essentially, all of the new arrivals required administration. Glass and marble office towers rose up in the foothills, overlooking the base and the ocean beyond.

Simon Roderick had an office that occupied half of the top floor of the Quadrill block, the newest and plushest of Z-B's little managerial division enclaves. As soon as he landed the helicopter on the rooftop pad he was plunged into yet another round of planning committees and tactical meetings. Senior staff came in and went out of his office as if it were some kind of transit lounge, each with his own proposal or complaint or report. For an age that relied so heavily on artificial sentience, it always astounded Simon that so little could be achieved without human intervention and supervision. People, basically, needed a damn good kick up the ass to get them motivated and acting like adults. Something not even quantum-switch neurotronic pearls could provide.

After three years on-site Simon knew he was going to have to make a drastic recommendation to the Zantiu-Braun Board after the Thallspring campaign. Forty-five years' constant expansion had made the Third Fleet strategic security division so top-heavy with officers and management special
i
sts it was in danger of grinding to a halt from datalock. Everybody's office generated reports and requests on a continual daily basis; coordinating them even with AS routing management was becoming progressively more difficult. Loop involvement, which was the preparatory-stage management strategy, was a grand forward-looking idea, but after four decades of accumulated optimization the Third Fleet software had become classic bloatware, total deadweight. The theory behind loop involvement was excellent. Experience from the last campaign was inserted at base level. Last campaign, these specific platoons ran out of Skin bloodpaks ten days before the usage programs projected; this time therefore they added a special requirements appendant to the logistics profile of those same platoons. Who could argue against providing first-rate support on the front line? But the additional bloodpaks had to be lifted into orbit, which meant more spaceplane flights, which needed maintenance and flight crew time allocation, and fuel, all of which had to be meshed with the existing schedule. A domino effect that triggered an avalanche every time. Simon was convinced the entire Third Fleet structure needed simplifying to such an extent it would actually have to be decommissioned and a new organization formed to replace it One that had modern management procedures incorporated from the start.

For the last four months, since the Thallspring campaign planning had begun in earnest, he had concentrated on personally supervising the practical essentials, such as starship refit schedules, Skin numbers, helicopter availability, and basic equipment readiness. But then his total priority requests and orders had to be integrated into the already saturated command structure, creating another authority layer that the base management AS struggled to accommodate. He liked to think his intervention had speeded up the overall process, but there was no way of telling. Vanity of the ruling classes.
We make a difference.

Adul Quan reappeared as the sun sank below the hills behind the base. Simon stood by the wall-window watching the thick gold sunbeams probe around the curved peaks as the last of the starship commanders filed out. In front of him the runway lights were becoming more pronounced, the street grid of some imaginary city, calling the helicopters home for the night. Away to the south, the neon corona of Cairns's Strip was already rising into the darkening sky. Down along the waterside, the clubs and casinos and bars were opening for trade, trashy games and girls smiling with bright come-on calculation at the squaddies.

There were times when Simon almost envied that kind of simple existence: fight, fuck and tune out, even though it was the antithesis of all he believed in. They didn't have to endure the same kind of pressure he experienced on a daily basis. It was one of the reasons he'd given the Kuranda shooter a higher priority than he probably should have. An excuse to get out of the office.

The office door swung shut after the last commander. "Have you got a name for me?" Simon asked.

"I'm afraid not, sir," Adul said. "It's a bit puzzling."

"Really?" Simon went back to his desk and sat down. He cleared the holographic panes of their script and graphs, giving the intelligence operative an expectant glance through the transparent glass. "Proceed."

"I checked the armory first. Skins that are being repaired seemed an obvious choice. Our man could have taken an arm while the computer log registered the suit as being worked on. I got every technician to report to me personally. They all swore their suits were fully integrated. No missing arms."

"One of them was the shooter?" Simon queried.

"Not a chance. You could slip out for maybe half an hour without anyone noticing, but not a trip to Kuranda. I had my personal AS review the internal security cameras, as well. They were all there."

"Okay. Go on."

"Next obvious source was a squaddie on training who slipped away. It can happen in the field easily enough. There were eighteen platoons undergoing training in Skin suits today. The nearest training ground to Kuranda was sixty-five kilometers. All the Skins arrived there this morning, and my AS queried every platoon leader to do an immediate head count this afternoon when I started investigating."

"Nobody missing?"

"Not one. I even got a list of squaddies who weren't actually on the training ground this afternoon. Three of them were injured; the hospital confirms where they were. Two had suit faults and got sent back to base; the armory confirms their location."

"Interesting."

"So I checked with skyscan." He nodded at the holographic panes. His DNI routed the file images for him.

Simon watched the picture form in front of him. Kuranda's main street from directly above, reproduced in a slightly washed-out color. He recognized the roof with the graffito open eye. From there it was easy to work out which building was the bar. A couple of pickup trucks were using the street; a few people were scattered about. A white cursor ring began flashing around one man.

"That's our man," Adul said. "And God knows what he looks like."

Simon ordered an image expansion and smiled, rather enjoying the way this was turning out. Worthy opponent, and all that. The image quality left a lot to be desired. The little spy sats that Z-B used to monitor the entire Earth's surface were intended to provide only a general review cover. Their designated function was real-time coverage, where they could be programmed for full-focus resolution. But even so, the memory capacity was adequate for this; he couldn't mistake what he was seeing. "A big hat."