Carmitha glanced down the road. “Bytham’s about a seven hour journey from here. Assuming we don’t run into any more problems.”
“We won’t,” Genevieve said. She took hold of Titreano’s hand. “Not with you with us.”
He grinned halfheartedly. “I…”
“You’re not going to leave us alone,” a suddenly stricken Genevieve asked.
“Of course not, little one.”
“That’s that, then.”
Carmitha shook her head. “I must be bloody mad even thinking of doing this. Louise, tether your horse to the caravan.”
Louise did as she was told. Carmitha climbed back up on the caravan, regarding it suspiciously as she put her weight on the
driver’s seat. “How long is that repair going to last for?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Titreano said apologetically. He helped Genevieve up beside Carmitha, then hoisted himself up.
When Louise clambered up, the narrow seat was cramped. She was pressed against Titreano, and not quite sure how she should
react to such proximity. If only it were Joshua, she thought wistfully.
Carmitha flicked the reins, and Olivier started forwards at an easy trot.
Genevieve folded her arms in satisfaction and cocked her head to look up at Titreano. “Did you help us at Cricklade as well?”
“How’s that, little one?”
“One of the possessed was trying to stop us from riding away,” Louise said. “She was hit by white fire. We wouldn’t be here
otherwise.”
“No, Lady Louise. It was not I.”
Louise settled back into the hard seat, unhappy the mystery hadn’t been solved. But then by today’s standards it was one of
the lesser problems confronting her.
Olivier trotted on down the road as Duke finally disappeared below the wolds. Behind the caravan, more of Colsterworth’s buildings
had started to burn.
• • •
Guyana’s navy spaceport was a standard hollow sphere of girders, almost two kilometres in diameter. Like a globular silver-white
mushroom on a very thin stalk, it stuck out of the asteroid’s rotation axis; the massive magnetic bearings on the end of the
connecting spindle allowed it to remain stationary while the colossal rock rolled along its orbital track. The surface was
built up from circular docking bays linked together by a filigree of struts and transit tubes. Tanks, generators, crew stations,
environmental maintenance machinery, and shark-fin thermo dump panels were jumbled together in the gaps between bays, apparently
without reference to any overall design logic.
Narrow rivers of twinkling star-specks looped around it all, twining in elaborate, interlocked figure-eights. The rivers had
a current, their points of light drifting in the same direction at the same speed; cargo tugs, personnel commuters, and MSVs,
firing their reaction drives to maintain the precise vectors fed to them by traffic control. Ombey’s code three defence alert
had stirred the spaceport into frantic activity for the second time in twenty-four hours. But this time instead of preparing
to receive a single craft, frigates and battle cruisers were departing. Every few minutes one of the big spherical Royal Kulu
Navy ships would launch from its docking bay, rising through the traffic lanes of smaller support craft with an arcbright
glare of secondary fusion drives. They were racing for higher orbits, each with a different inclination; Strategic Defence
Command positioned them so they englobed the entire planet, giving full interception coverage out to a million kilometres.
If any unidentified ship emerged from a ZTT jump within that region, it would be engaged within a maximum of fifteen seconds.
Amid the departing warships a lone navy flyer rose from the spaceport. It was a flattened egg-shape fuselage of dark blue-grey
silicolithium composite, fifty metres long, fifteen wide. Coherent magnetic fields wrapped it in a warm golden glow of captured
solar wind particles. Ion thrusters fired, manoeuvring it away from the big frigates. Then the fusion tube in the tail ignited,
pushing it down towards the planet seventy-five thousand kilometres below.
The one-gee acceleration sucked Ralph Hiltch gently back into his seat, making the floor stand to the vertical. On the seat
next to him, his flight bag rolled over once to lie in the crook of the cushioning.
“This vector will get us to Pasto spaceport in sixty-three minutes,” Cathal Fitzgerald datavised from the pilot’s seat.
“Thanks,” Ralph replied. He widened the channel to include the two G66 troopers. “I’d like you all to access the briefing
that Skark gave me. This kind of information could be critical, and we need all the breaks we can get around here.”
That earned him a grin and a wave from Dean Folan, a noncommittal grimace from Will Danza. They were both sitting on the other
side of the aisle. The sixty-seater cabin seemed deserted with just the four of them using it.
None of his little team had complained or refused to go. Privately he’d made it quite clear they could pull out without any
indiscipline action being entered on their file. But they’d all agreed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Even Dean who
had the best excuse of all. He’d been in surgery for seven hours last night; the asteroid’s navy clinic had to rebuild sixty
percent of his arm. The boosted musculature, ruined by the hit he’d taken in Lalonde’s jungle, had to be completely replaced
with fresh artificial tissue, along with various blood vessels, skin, and nerves. The repair was still wrapped in a green
sheath of medical nanonic packaging. But he was looking forward to levelling the score, he’d said cheerfully.
Ralph closed his eyes and let the briefing invade his mind, neural nanonics tabulating it into a sharply defined iconographic
matrix. Details of the Xingu continent: a sprawl of four and a half million square kilometres in the northern hemisphere,
roughly diamond-shaped, with a long mountainous ridge of land extending out from its southern corner. The ridge crossed the
equator; and Ombey’s broad tropical zones meant the entire continent was an ideal farming region, with the one exception of
the semi-desert occupying the centre. So far only two-fifths of it was inhabited, but with a population of seventy million,
it was the second-most prosperous continent after Esparta, where the capital Atherstone was situated.
After Xingu came the embassy trio, Jacob Tremarco, Savion Kerwin, and Angeline Gallagher. Their career files contained nothing
exceptional, they were all regular Kulu Foreign Office staffers: loyal, boring bureaucrats. Visuals, family histories, medical
reports. It was all there, and none of it particularly useful apart from the images. Ralph stored them in a neural nanonics
memory cell, and spliced them with a general characteristics recognition program. He hadn’t forgotten that strange image-shifting
ability the sequestrated had demonstrated back on Lalonde. The recognition program might give him a slight edge if one of
them attempted a disguise, though he didn’t hold out much hope.
The most promising part of the datapackage was the series of measures Admiral Farquar and Leonard DeVille, Xingu’s Home Office
minister, had implemented to quarantine the continent and trace the embassy trio. All civil traffic was being systematically
shut down. Search programs were being loaded into the continent’s data cores, watching for a trail of unexplained temporary
glitches in processors and power circuits. Public-area security monitor cameras had been given the visual pattern of the trio,
and police patrols were also being briefed. Maybe they’d get lucky, Ralph thought. Lalonde was a backwards colony on the arse
edge of nowhere, without any modern communications or much in the way of civil authority. But Ombey was part of the Kingdom,
the society he’d sworn to defend with his life if need be. Years ago at university, when he’d discreetly been offered a commission
in the agency, he’d considered Kulu a worthwhile society. The richest in the Confederation outside Edenism, it was strong
economically, militarily; a technology leader. It had a judicial system which kept the average citizen safe on the streets,
and was even reasonably fair by modern standards. Medical care was socialized. Most people had jobs. Admittedly, ruled by
the Saldanas, it was hardly the most democratic of systems, but then short of the Edenist Consensus few democratic societies
were truly representative. And there were a lot of planets which didn’t even pretend to be egalitarian. So he’d swallowed
any niggling self-suspicion of radicalism, and agreed to serve his King until his death.
What he’d seen of the galaxy had only served to strengthen his conviction that he’d done the right thing in taking the oath.
The Kingdom was a
civilized
place compared to most; its citizens were entitled to lead their lives without interference. And if that meant the ESA occasionally
having to get its hands dirty, then so be it, as far as Ralph was concerned. A society worth having is worth protecting.
And thanks to its own nature, Ombey should definitely be able to cope better than Lalonde. Although the very systems which
made it more able also gave the enemy a greater opportunity to spread its subversion. The virus carriers had been slow to
travel on Lalonde. Here they would suffer no such restrictions.
Cathal Fitzgerald cut the flyer’s fusion drive when they were two hundred kilometres above Xingu. Gravity took over, pulling
the flyer down. Its magnetic field expanded, applying subtle pressures to the tenuous gases pushing against the fuselage.
Buoyant at the centre of a sparkling cushion of ions, the flyer banked to starboard and began a gentle glidespiral down towards
the spaceport below.
They were a hundred and fifty kilometres high when the flight computer datavised a priority secure signal from Roche Skark
into Ralph’s neural nanonics.
“We might have a problem developing,” the ESA director told him. “A civil passenger flight from Pasto to Atherstone is having
trouble with its electronic systems, nothing critical but the glitches are constant. I’d like to bring you in on the Privy
Council security committee to advise.”
“Yes, sir,” Ralph acknowledged. The datavise broadened to a security level one sensenviron conference. Ralph appeared to be
sitting at an oval table in a plain white bubble room with walls at an indeterminate distance.
Admiral Farquar was sitting at the head of the table, with Roche Skark and the ISA director Jannike Dermot flanking him. Ralph’s
neural nanonics identified the other three people present. Next to the ISA director was Commander Deborah Unwin, head of Ombey’s
Strategic Defence network; Ryle Thorne, Ombey’s national Home Office minister, was placed next to her. Ralph found himself
with Roche Skark on one side, and Leonard DeVille on the other.
“The plane is seven minutes from Atherstone,” Deborah Unwin said. “We have to make a decision.”
“What is the plane’s current status?” Ralph asked.
“The pilot was instructed to turn back to Pasto by my flight controllers as part of the quarantine procedures. And that’s
when he reported his difficulties. He says he’ll be endangering the passengers if he has to fly all the way back to Pasto.
And if it’s a genuine malfunction he will be.”
“We can hardly go around using our SD platforms on civil aircraft just because they have a dodgy processor,” Ryle Thorne said.
“On the contrary, sir,” Ralph said. “In this situation we have to maintain a policy of guilty until proven innocent. You cannot
allow that plane to land in the capital, not under any circumstances. Not now.”
“If he has to fly back to Xingu he may well kill everyone on board,” the minister protested. “The plane could be downed in
the ocean.”
“Atherstone has a high proportion of military bases in the surrounding district,” Admiral Farquar said. “If necessary the
plane can simply sit on a landing pad surrounded by marines until we work out a satisfactory method of detecting if the virus
is present.”
“Is the pilot using his neural nanonics to communicate with flight control?” Ralph asked.
“Yes,” Deborah said.
“Okay, then it’s a reasonable assumption that he’s not been sequestrated. If you can guarantee a landing pad can be guarded
securely, I say use it. But the plane must remain sealed until we find out what’s happened to the embassy trio.”
“Good enough,” Admiral Farquar said.
“I’ll put the marines at Sapcoat base on active status as of now,” Deborah said. “That’s over a hundred kilometres from Atherstone.
The plane can reach it easily enough.”
“A hundred kilometres is a safe enough distance,” Ryle Thorne said smoothly.
Ralph didn’t like the minister’s attitude; he seemed to be treating this as if it were a minor natural incident, like a hurricane
or earthquake. But then the minister had to go back to his constituents every five years and convince them he was acting in
their best interests. Ordering SD platforms to fire on their fellow citizens might be hard to explain away in public relations
terms. That was one of the reasons the royal Saldanas had a parliament to advise them. An insulating layer around the blame.
Elected politicians were always culpable and replaceable.
“I’d also suggest that once the plane’s landed you use an orbital sensor satellite to mount a permanent observation on it,”
Ralph said. “Just in case there’s any attempt to break out. That way we can use the SD platforms as a last resort; sterilize
the entire area.”
“That strikes me as somewhat excessive,” Ryle Thorne said with elaborate politeness.
“Again, no, sir. On Lalonde the enemy were able to use their electronic warfare capability to interfere with the LDC’s observation
satellite from the ground; they fuzzed the images to quite a degree. I’d say this fallback option is the least we should be
doing.”
“Ralph was brought in because of his experience in combating the virus,” Roche Skark said, smiling at the minister. “He got
off Lalonde precisely because he instigated these kinds of protective measures.”
Ryle Thorne gave a short nod.
“Pity he didn’t protect
us
from the virus,” Jannike muttered. Except in a sensenviron context nothing was really sotto voce; all utterances were deliberate.