Manhattan in Reverse (21 page)

Nine months later, Erik is grinning in an altogether different fashion as he is present at the birth of his daughter. The little girl is perfect and beautiful, born at the Kuhmo General Hospital with an ease that only modern Commonwealth medical technology can provide. Afterwards, Imelda lies back on the bed in the airy delivery room, and cuddles the newborn, lost in devotion.

‘We have got to decide on a name,’ she says dreamily.

Erik idly brushes her mane of auburn hair away from her shoulders. ‘How about Kerry?’ he suggests tentatively. It is the name he knew the angel as; he often wonders where she is now.

‘No,’ Imelda says. There is still some association about Kerry and his abrupt disappearance that she can’t shake off.

‘Okay, well there’s no rush. I’d better go out and see everyone.’

The respective families are waiting outside. Imelda’s parents are polite; happy that the birth has gone without a hitch, and of course delighted they have another grandchild. However there is a certain degree of strain showing in their outwardly civil attitude towards Erik. His own parents are less formal, and hug him with warm excitement. He goes over to Sabine and kisses her.

‘Congratulations,’ she says.

Erik tenderly brushes Sabine’s thick auburn hair. ‘This doesn’t change anything,’ he says sincerely. Sabine smiles back, grateful for the reassurance, especially right now. She is Imelda’s younger sister by forty minutes, and so genuinely doesn’t want their special sibling bond soured by any jealousy.

As Erik confessed to Kerry, bedding the sisters was his fantasy since the first moment he saw them. Identical twins is a common enough desire in a hormonally active teenager; and Kerry of course made that particular wish come true readily enough. Even today Erik still has trouble telling his lovers apart, and his memories of them during those wonderful long erotic nights in that apartment on the arcology’s fifteenth floor are completely indistinguishable.

Now Inigo wakes up and loudly starts to demand his afternoon feed. Sabine is immediately busy with their infant son who was born in the very same hospital two weeks earlier. She too rejected the name Kerry.

The Demon Trap

WHAT HAPPENED

Nova Zealand was the world chosen for the massacre for exactly the same reason the party of youthful Dynasty members had chosen it as their fun-time holiday destination. It barely qualified as H-congruous, capable of supporting human habitation; but that bad geophysics gave it some astonishing scenery which simply begged to be exploited by extreme sports enthusiasts. There was a small population without any real industrial base; its commerce was the leisure industry. Yet in case of a genuine emergency the Intersolar Commonwealth with all its fabulous medical and technical resources was only a single fast train ride away.

The trains came in at Compression Space Transport’s planetary station on the north side of the capital, Ridgeview (pop 43,000). They arrived through a wormhole which provided a direct link back to EdenBurg, an industrial planet, owned by the Halgarth Dynasty, and one of the major junctions in CSTs interstellar transport monopoly. None of the trains went any further than the station: Nova Zealand didn’t have the kind of road and rail network common to most Commonwealth worlds. All medium- and long-distance travel was by plane.

It was mid-morning when the train from Hifornia pulled in at the station. The first three carriages were for passengers, while the last two were vehicle carriers. Once it drew to a halt, large malmetal doors on the vehicle carriages retracted and ramps extended out from the platform. The sound of highly-tuned engines firing up was unusual enough to turn the heads of the ordinary passengers as they disembarked. Five customized cars growled their way out onto the ramp. The first a glowing orange Jaguar roadster, with faint blue flames stuttering out of its exhaust pipes as the engine revved. With a final roar of power it sped off the bottom of the ramp with a showy wheel spin. Second was a silver Cadillac that was half bonnet, with front scimitar fins and a rear variable-camber spoiler; then came an eight-wheeled stretched limo; followed by a hundred-year-old V-class Mercedes; and finally a brutish Lexus AT PowerSport, hydroskis retracted against its burnished gold sides.

The convoy raced off out of the station, a show of casual affluence and arrogance which brought grimaces of contempt from those watching. After a discreet minute, the rest of the party’s vehicles slid quietly out of the carriage; seven long luxury vans which carried the necessary domestic staff and assistants, along with luggage and sports equipment. The Dynasty members never travelled without their home comforts close by.

Ridgeview’s airport was five miles from the planetary station; a disappointingly short journey for the owners of the custom cars, hardly far enough for them to jostle and race along the road. They drove over to the waiting Siddley-Lockheed CP-450, a subsonic cargo/passenger combi plane operated by a local tour company. Inside the vast cargo hold, electromuscle clamps curved out of the floor to secure the fancy cars. Doors opened, and the brash young things sauntered out, filling the air with overloud taunts and calls to each other. Their girlfriends accompanied them, tall slender beauties, terribly young to be dressed in such sensual couture. Stewardesses smiled impassively at the braying sexual harassment they were casually subjected to, and showed their haughty passengers to the upper deck’s Imperial Cabin.

The vans purred smoothly into the plane. Staff found their seats in the mid-deck lounge. Within ten minutes, the big rear doors swung shut and the plane taxied onto the runway.

Ridgeview air traffic control cleared them for takeoff to Nova Zealand’s arctic continent. It was a nine-hour flight that would take them to the notorious Fire Plain, a hundred-kilometre circle of wet swamps just short of the pole itself, whose abnormal climate was created by a ring wall of active volcanoes. Visitors to the resort could watch glowing lava flowing into the constricting cliff of the polar glacier, spurting out phenomenal jets of superheated steam all the way up to the ionosphere. While down in the weird wetlands of giant ferns, huge dangerous creatures left over from an earlier geological era wallowed in the mud and ate anything which moved.

The Siddley-Lockheed CP-450 rose into the air, folding its undercarriage away neatly. It curved towards the north through a clear azure sky, bright blue-white sunlight shining on its green fuselage. Below it, the harsh scrub desert fell away to the sea in long rumpled folds and sharp ravines.

Five minutes after takeoff the plane was climbing through ten thousand feet as the pilot watched the flight management array throttle the duct fans back to cruise power. At which point one of the Dynasty heirs decided it was time to renew his membership of the mile high club. It wasn’t in his nature to retire discreetly to the washroom. The rest of the party gathered round his reclining couch to cheer as his obedient girlfriend stripped off. Scandalized stewardesses peeked from the galley, trying not to giggle.

A red star alert flared in the pilot’s virtual vision. The plane’s array was issuing a proximity alarm. It took the pilot a shocked couple of seconds to analyse the data which the radar was presenting him with. An object barely a metre long was streaking towards them at mach five. Disbelief froze him for another second as he struggled to admit he was seeing a missile. He managed to yell: ‘Mayday!’ into the open channel as he slammed his hands down onto the manual control pads. For someone who hadn’t physically flown a plane for over two decades he managed his evasion manoeuvre remarkably well, ramming on the power and initiating a steep dive. It delayed impact by a good three seconds, long enough for everyone on board to realize something was disastrously wrong.

The missile struck the fuselage just below the port wing root. Not even modern super-strength materials could withstand the blast. The wing was ripped off, sending the fuselage into a fast spin. It began to disintegrate immediately, scattering fragments and bodies as it plummeted out of the sky.

Before the first pieces even hit the ground, a shotgun message entered the unisphere, attempting to infiltrate the address stores of every person who had an access code – about ninety-five per cent of the human race. The carrier format was new enough to avoid the majority of commercial sentinels, though the unisphere’s node-management programs soon adapted to the intruder and blocked its progress. Before that happened, it managed to reach several billion people who were annoyed to find the small file slipping into their stores. Most were unisphere-savvy enough to have their e-butlers delete the pest. Those that did open it were shown a simple text.

*

Senior Investigator Paula Myo’s e-butler deleted the shotgun as soon as it reached her unisphere interface; it was the newest adaptive version with a real-time update facility to the Serious Crimes Directorate RI, so it knew what it was dealing with. At the time she was trying to be polite with the decorator who was gazing round the lounge of her new apartment, shaking his head as if he’d been confronted with restoring the Sistine Chapel.

‘Next month?’ he suggested with a typical Gallic shrug.

Paula was only surprised he wasn’t wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette; he’d certainly polished the rest of the Parisian indifference routine to stereotype perfection. ‘That’s fine.’ She’d been in the apartment a week, and even she acknowledged it needed sprucing up. It wasn’t much: bathroom, bedroom, and a lounge with a tiny kitchen alcove. The building was a typical Paris block, centuries-old with a pleasant central courtyard. She really didn’t care about the aesthetics, all that counted was its proximity to the office.

‘What colour scheme?’ he enquired.

‘Oh . . . whatever: white.’

‘White?’ From his blatant dismay she must have deliberately insulted his French ancestry all the way back to the royal era.

‘Yes.’ A priority communication icon popped up into her virtual vision. She touched it with a virtual hand she’d customized to a red skeletal outline; her physical fingers twitched in mimicry as parallel nerve impulses ran along the organic circuitry tattoos on her wrist.

‘Grade one case coming in,’ Christabel Agatha Halgarth said. ‘The Director wants us on it immediately.’

‘On my way in,’ Paula replied.

‘No don’t. I’m going for a car now; I’ll pick you up. Three minutes.’

‘All right, transfer the case files over.’ Paula dismissed the decorator. Perhaps it was because of her carefully controlled mix of Filipino and European genes which had given her such a delightful face he assumed he could bluster and intimidate as he usually did with single female clients. The stare she gave him froze the protest after just a couple of words. He nodded compliance and retreated, counting himself lucky she hadn’t actually said anything.

Paula pulled on a grey suit jacket and picked up her small shoulder bag, moving instinctively as the files from the Directorate slipped into her virtual vision. She read the scant details on the plane crash as she hurried down the worn stone stairs to the courtyard below.

One of the Directorate’s dark sedans pulled up outside the block’s main entrance. The gull-wing door pivoted forward, and Paula got in. Christabel was sitting on the rear bench, a brunette with an Asian ancestry a lot stronger than Paula’s clinic-manufactured heritage. She was Paula’s deputy; they’d known each other since their training academy days.

‘Wow, you look great,’ Christabel enthused. ‘Positively jailbait. I’d forgotten how pretty you are when you’re young. You shouldn’t wait so long between rejuvenations.’

‘I can’t spare the time,’ Paula said automatically. Her hand went up to sweep her raven hair away from her face. With rejuvenation returning her biological age to late-adolescence her hair had grown very thick again. Every time she was tempted to have it trimmed to a shorter style. But this fitted her, along with the simple-cut business suit and plain black shoes she always wore to work, defining what she was. It was as much her identity as her modified genes.

‘Welcome back,’ Christabel said with a knowing smile. ‘How are your inserts settling in?’

Paula held up a hand, flexing the fingers. The OCtattoos were invisible against her skin. It was still a relatively new technology, with development houses finding new applications each year. The ones she’d had before rejuvenation were a lot cruder; they’d been eradicated by her treatment, so the last week had been spent at a Directorate facility augmenting her body with the new generation of insert gadgets.

‘A couple of glitches left. I’m due a final formatting session on Saturday. Things have come on a long way since I had my last installation.’

Christabel held up her own hand. Threads of intense blue light appeared, pulsing along her fingers. ‘You didn’t fancy the latest versions then? Function and fashion combined. Not bad, huh? I paid for the customization myself. I can get you a good deal if you like, I’ve still got contacts in my Dynasty.’