FALLEN DRAGON (50 page)

It was these newcomers that interested Josep. He ate lunch in the maintenance staff canteen, sitting beside one of the picture windows that overlooked a parking apron. Only two cargo-variant Xiantis were parked there, with Z-B's own crews and robots working on them. The rest were flying. He chewed his food slowly, taking the time to examine the area, note where crates had been stacked, the shortest distance from spaceplanes to a building, location of doors.

After lunch he kept moving, either walking through the terminal or riding between sections on his scooter. People who look like they have a purpose can go unnoticed in the most security-conscious environments. All the time, he was correlating the physical reality of the parking apron layout with the electronic architecture that his Prime had trawled out of the datapool. He even risked sending it into the Z-B AS that had been installed in the spaceport command center to run their groundside operations, including security. Details of the alarms and sensors installed themselves in Josep's vision, a ghost diagram of cables and detectors locking into his visual perception, threading their way in and out of buildings and underground conduits. Schedules, timetables and personnel lists followed. He began to work through them all, slowly reducing options, finding the best-placed spaceplane, best route to it, optimum time, multiple escape routes. Afternoon faded into evening, and the spaceport lights came on as the gold sun sank below the hills fencing Durrell. There were fewer takeoffs now and more landings as the big machines returned home for the night.

By one o'clock all flights had ceased. Josep walked along the rear of a vast maintenance hangar, whose arched roof covered five Xiantis and three Galaxycruisers, and still had four empty bays. Inside, there was less illumination than there was outside; the lightcones fixed to the metal rafters were bright, but their beams were well focused, splashing the concrete floor with intense white circles. Beyond them, shadow embraced over a quarter of the hangar's volume. His path kept him on the fringe of the lighted areas, and well clear of the bays where crews were working. A couple of Skins were inside the hangar, wandering about at random, so he had to be careful there was nothing suspicious about his movements. Keeping out of the lights altogether would have drawn their attention.

Josep reached one of the unoccupied bays and moved forward. Just to the side of the massive sliding doors at the front was a smaller door. He reached it and put his palm on the sensor plate. The lock buzzed, and he pushed it open.

Twenty meters away, the sculpted nose of a Xianti pointed at the maintenance hangar. Solar cones shone far overhead, glinting off the pearl-white carbon-lithium composite fuselage. There was a service truck parked on either side of the spaceplane, with hoses plugged into various umbilical sockets along the underbelly. An airstair led up to the forward airlock.

Josep walked over the tarmac, concentrating more on the icons being relayed from the spaceport network than his eyesight. Four cameras covered the spaceplane. His Prime had infiltrated each one, eliminating his image from the feed to Z-B's AS. Three rings of sensors were arranged concentrically around the sleek machine. None of them registered his presence as he walked across them. No Skins were within five hundred meters.

The airstairs were protected by both a voiceprint codeword and a biosensor that registered his blood vessel and bone patterns. It was an effective security device, but only ever as good as the patterns that were loaded into the system's e-alpha fortress. Josep's codeword and body map corresponded to one of those on file, and the airstair door slid open. He took the steps two at a time. The airlock at the top had a simple manual latch. Pull and turn.

Secondary lighting came on, illuminating the small cabin with an emerald glow. This Xianti was one of the cargo variants. Its cabin was cramped, with minimum facilities and room for up to five seats for the systems officer and payload managers. At the moment there were only two bolted to the floor, with the brackets for the others covered in plastic sleeves. Josep went forward and sat in the pilot's seat. The curved console in front of him was surprisingly compact, with three holographic panes angling up out of it. The two narrow windshields allowed him to see down the length of the nose, but showed very little else. He could understand that. Technically there was no need for any controls or windshields at all. The human pilot would always be fitted with a DNI. And that was only used for efficient communication with the AS pilot, which really controlled the spaceplane. The console and its displays were emergency fallbacks, although many people preferred pane graphics to the indigo icons of DNI. Windshields were there purely for the psychology.

Josep took a standard powered Allen key out of his belt pouch and hunched down in the seat to examine the base of the console. There were several inspection panels underneath. He opened two of them and found what he was looking for. The neurotronic pearls that housed the AS were sealed units buried deep in a service module, but they still had to be connected to the spaceplane systems. He wormed his dragon-extruded desktop pearl into the narrow gap toward the fiberoptic junction, and waited while the little unit morphed itself, extending needle probes into the unit. Prime flooded in.

They might have managed to infiltrate a spaceplane AS pilot through a satellite relay, but the risk of detection was too great. It was a single channel, easily monitored for ab
n
ormalities by secure AS's on the starships. Either they attempted to take over every Z-B AS, or they established a direct physical link. The first option wasn't even considered.

The dataflow reversed, dumping the entire AS pilot program into the desktop pearl. They would examine it later, learning the minutiae of ground-to-orbit flight in the strange vehicle. Its communications traffic. Docking procedures. When the time came, Zantiu-Braun would never know that someone and something else was on board until it was far too late.

The desktop pearl card informed Josep that it had copied the entire AS. Prime began to withdraw from the space-plane's pearls, erasing all evidence of its invasion. Needle probes slid out of the fiberoptic junction and melted back into the casing. Josep replaced the panel and tightened it up.

Despite all his preparation, planning and caution, the one thing they all accepted was that there could be no protection against chance.

Josep had already opened the secure door at the bottom of the airstair when his relay from the cameras around the parking apron showed him a man emerging from the maintenance hangar. He was dressed in the loose navy-blue coveralls worn by all the spaceport's engineering maintenance staff. Prime immediately ran identification routines. Dudley Tivon, aged thirty-seven, married, one child, employed by the spaceport for eight years, promoted last year to assistant supervisor, fully qualified on Galaxycruiser hydraulics. He didn't have DNI, but his bracelet pearl was on standby, connected into the spaceport network. Prime moved into the communication circuit, blocking his contact with the data-pool.

There was a moment when Josep could have ducked down behind the airstair, out of Dudley Tivon's sight. But that was an unknown risk. He didn't know what direction Dudley Tivon would walk, or how long he would be milling round outside. Every second spent crouched down was a second of exposure to anyone else who came along from a different direction. There were three Skins currently in the vicinity.

Instead he walked straight for Dudley Tivon. That reduced the outcome to two possibles. Either Dudley Tivon would assume he was just another night-shift worker going about his business, and do nothing. Being seen didn't concern Josep. So far his visitation had left no traces. Z-B didn't even know they had to look for evidence of anyone penetrating their security. Or Dudley Tivon would question what he was doing. In which case...

For a few seconds, as he drew close, Josep thought he'd got away with it. Then Dudley Tivon's pace slowed to a halt. He frowned, looking first at Josep, then back to the foreign spaceplane.

Prime in the surrounding cameras immediately began generating a false image, showing four different viewpoints of Dudley Tivon walking on uninterrupted across the parking apron.

"What are you doing?" Dudley Tivon asked as Josep drew level.

Josep smiled, nodding at the hangar. "Gotta get over to bay seven, Chief."

"You came out of that spaceplane."

"What?"

"How the hell did you get in it? You're not from Z-B. Those things are wired up eight ways from Sunday. What were you doing in there?" Dudley Tivon began to raise the arm on which he wore his bracelet pearl.

Information trawled from the datapool came into Josep's mind. Dudley Tivon's wife had been fitted with a collateral collar.

The assistant supervisor was making an issue of seeing where Josep had emerged, and he could never allow acts of sabotage or dissent against Z-B. It might well be his wife's collar that was activated in retaliation.

"I was just—" Josep's right arm shot out, stiffened fingers slamming into Dudley Tivon's Adam's apple. The man's neck snapped from the force of the blow. His body lurched back, but Josep was already following it. He caught the limp figure as it collapsed and lifted it effortlessly over his shoulder.

The Skins were still out of sight. Nobody else was outside the maintenance hangar. Josep jogged quickly to the door he'd used on his approach to the spaceplane and slipped through.

There was an office fifteen meters away from the door, shut for the night. He reached it in five seconds, bundled the corpse inside, then checked to see if anyone had noticed. Neither the maintenance crews nor Skins had reacted, and no alarms were screaming into the datapool.

They even had a contingency for an incident like this. Priority had to be given to getting the body out of the spaceport for disposal. No suspicion must be attached to the area.

Josep called up a menu for cargo robots currently in the maintenance hangar.

Camera feeds outside continued to show Dudley Tivon walking across the parking apron. He opened a door into the neighboring hangar and disappeared inside.

* * *

"After eight years of flight, Mozark had traveled halfway around the Ring Empire, stopping at over a hundred star systems to explore and learn what he could in the hope of inspiration. He could no longer see his own kingdom; that little cluster of stars was lost from sight behind the massive blaze of gold, scarlet and dawn-purple light that was the core. Few of his kind had ever ventured into this part of the Ring Em
p
ire, yet he felt comfortable amid the races and cultures inhabiting this section of the galaxy.

"Mozark might not have seen any of these species before, but everywhere he traveled he was able to communicate with his new hosts and eventually able to learn their separate philosophies and interests and goals and dreams. In many ways this heartened him, that he had so many ideas at his disposal, all of which he was eventually able to understand. Some he regarded as magnificent, and he looked forward to introducing them to the kingdom when he returned home. Some were simply so alien that they could never be adopted or used by his own kind, although they remained interesting on a purely intellectual level. While some were too hideous or frightening even to speak of."

Edmund immediately stuck his hand up, as Denise knew he would.

"Yes, Edmund?" she asked.

"Please, miss, what were they?"

"The hideous and frightening ideas?"

"Yes!"

"I don't know, Edmund. Why do you want to know?"

"Coz he's horrible!" Melanie shouted. The other children laughed, giggling and pointing at the beleaguered boy. Edmund stuck his tongue out at Melanie.

"Enough," Denise told them, waiting until they'd quietened down again. "Today's story is all about the time when Mozark meets the Outbounds. Now this wasn't a single race: like the Last Church, the Outbounds attracted a great many people to their cause. In many ways they were the opposite of the Last Church. The Outbounds were building starships. Not just the ordinary ones that the Ring Empire used for trade and travel and exploration. These were intergalactic starships." She gave the children a knowing look as they
ooohed
with wonder. "The greatest machines the technology of the Ring Empire could devise. They were the largest, fastest, most powerful and sophisticated ships that this galaxy has ever known. The effort to build them was immense; the Outbounds had taken over an entire solar system to serve as a construction center. Only a star with all of its circling planets could provide them with the resources necessary. Mozark spent a month there, flying his own small ship around all the facilities, playing tourist amid these tremendous cathedrals of engineering. The Outbounds proudly told him of the ocean-sized converter disks that they'd dropped into the star, where they'd sunk down to the inner layers to settle amid the most intense fusion process to be found within the interior. That was the only place to generate sufficient energy to power the tens of thousands of industrial bases operating through the system. Behemoths in their own right, these bases were partially mobile, allowing them to swallow medium-sized asteroids in their entirety. The rocks were digested and separated into their constituent minerals, which were then fed into refinery towers. Biomechanical freighters that only operated in-system would collect the finished products and ferry them to manufacturing facilities where they would be fabricated into components for the starships.