Judas Unchained

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Highway One was the first major civil engineering project to be attempted on Far Away, and the last on such a grand scale. At the time construction began Armstrong City was little more than a camp of mobile homes and prefab buildings squatting in a giant mud lake around the newly constructed gateway. There had been talk about moving the gateway directly to the recently discovered Marie Celeste, but as they had on Half Way the Commonwealth Council demanded a safe separation distance. In any case, during those early years they were still hoping that other alien artifacts would be discovered, equal or greater than the crashed arkship. The gateway stayed where it was above the shores of the North Sea, and the Council shipped in a pair of massive micropile-powered JCB roadbuilders.

They took twenty-seven months to chew their way southeast over the equator, extruding a wide ribbon of enzyme-bonded concrete onto the flat strip they’d cut through the sandy flare-sterilized soil. Seven main rivers were bridged, and three broad flood plain valleys traversed with long switchbacks on either side.

As well as leading to the starship, Highway One was originally intended as the major access route to the southern hemisphere. As it curved back west around the Dessault Mountains to the Marie Celeste’s valley, another road branched off to head eastward for the shore of the Oak Sea. After that, the intention was to carry on south until it eventually reached the Deep Sea. By then the JCBs were in need of heavy-duty maintenance, which couldn’t be done in the field. The rough stony terrain and constant lack of spare parts had taken their toll on the massive machines. Once they left the Marie Celeste behind they never made it to the Deep Sea. The Black Desert proved too inhospitable; its fierce heat and constant sandwinds abrading too many already degraded components. With more than five hundred kilometers of desert left to traverse the team finally turned around and drove back along the length of their creation. The JCBs were refurbished as best Far Away’s embryonic engineering industry could manage and spent the next few years laying smaller roads across the Aldrin Plains and Iril Steppes where the farmlands were taking hold before they finally decayed beyond economic repair. No more were ever imported.

A road that began in the capital and stretched thousands of kilometers away across the planet until it ended abruptly in the middle of a desert was always going to be a romantic road. People drove along it because it was there, especially the younger generations of Far Away natives who would take off on bikes and spend months moving along from community to community. As with all roads through virgin territory, it was the starting point for pioneers setting up their farmsteads. Villages sprang up along its sides, especially along the first thousand kilometers outside Armstrong City where the temperate climate was suited to farming. Each small settlement evolved into a junction for the empty land beyond as the revitalization team gradually expanded the area that could be successfully planted. Farmers set out to the east and west, bringing their own vegetation to a gritty soil now ripening with bacteria. The Barsoomians traveled along Highway One until the equator when they turned eastward to establish themselves around the northern shores of the Oak Sea and the remoter regions of the Great Iril Steppes. According to some their domain even extended out to the westernmost shore of the Hondu Ocean.

This great conduit of humanity helped expand the new vegetation across an elongated stretch of the ruined planet far quicker than the revitalization teams could with their fleet of blimpbots. From space, life’s progress could be seen as a verdant stain that spread out eagerly from the road, covering the barren ground with fields and forests. Eventually, the planet began to revert to an overall green tinge that had been missing ever since the flare saturated it with radiation. Even amid that patina the road’s borders were still a prominent slash of bright emerald.

Beyond that first main stretch of population reaching out from Armstrong City the travelers scattered their own biological detritus. Some were deliberate, like the hundred-sixty-kilometer length straddling the equator where an ancient hermitlike émigré from Earth called Rob Lacy devoted thirty years to hand-planting giant GMredwoods on either side of the concrete, turning it into a mighty greenway. There was the infamous Jidule Valley where somebody with a bad sense of humor had illicitly reprogrammed the revitalization project’s agribots to plant silk oaks in the pattern of a copulating couple five kilometers across, a forest whose shape could be seen in its entirety from the top of the valley. And the Doyle swamp, famous the Commonwealth over for its profusion of Jupiter cat trap plants, an example of early Barsoomian handiwork, plants modified from Venus flytraps until they were big enough to capture small rodents. It became something of a ritual for anyone riding down the wide concrete lanes to bring seeds of their favorite plant with them, to be scattered at random, producing a weird mishmash of vegetation that was now among the most established on the planet.

Stig had traveled along Highway One enough times to be familiar with most of its diverse sections. A couple of hours after they’d left rendezvous point four, the Guardians’ vehicles reached the first built-up section. The countryside directly outside Armstrong City was predominantly fields and sweeping grasslands split up into estates owned by some of the richest people on the planet. Beyond the estates the land rose into the Devpile hills that were the province of sheep and goat farmers. It was only after Highway One swept down out of the hills on the other side and crossed the Clowine River that the buildings started to bunch up close around it. The houses and commercial blocks were only three or four deep, but this particular urban segment ran for over eighty kilometers. Along its entire length, slender composite arches curved high over the four lanes of ancient enzyme-bonded concrete, alive with lights and commercial signs. There were more garish fluorescent signs along the edge of the road, enticing drivers to stop off and buy everything from farm supplies to motel rooms to dental work. In places the building fronts actually bordered the cracked concrete road. Vans and pickups trundled along between all the side streets and turnoffs; they’d even seen a couple of people riding horses.

“Another one,” Stig remarked as he slowed the armored car a fraction. Up ahead, a car had been smashed off the road to embed itself in the front of a clothing store. Long scorch marks up the wall showed where it had caught fire. Two police cars were parked beside it, their hazard strobes flashing red and amber. A big recovery truck was hitched up to the wreck, ready to pull it free.

Stig steered around the police cars, one hand resting close to the armored car’s weapons control panel. Even though they were local police, he still didn’t quite trust them. The burned-out car had its side buckled in, the type of impact that a Land Rover Cruiser would leave.

“It’s in a hurry,” Bradley remarked from the forward passenger bench. “We’ve frightened it, as much as anything like that can feel fright.”

One of the police officers was gesturing angrily at Stig as he sped past at a hundred thirty kilometers an hour. The rest of the Guardians’ vehicles followed him, keeping close.

“It rammed emergency vehicles, even knocked over injured people when it was getting out of the city,” Stig told him. “A slow car in the way isn’t going to get any consideration.”

“Are the police trying to do anything?” Bradley asked Keely.

“Plenty of people are complaining,” she said. “The road net is full of them. But the local highway cops don’t want to get involved. They know the Cruisers are all Institute vehicles.”

“Good,” Bradley said. “They’d be slaughtered out of hand if they tried to stop them.”

“Anything from Ledro’s group?” Stig asked. Ledro was leading a demolitions team to take out the bridge over the river Taran, six hundred kilometers farther south.

“He says ten minutes,” Keely reported.

“Good.” Stig shifted his grip on the steering wheel, easing the armored car away from the central lane barrier. After the joy of discovering Adam had made it through, he was wound up again. The idea of having Bradley Johansson himself sitting next to him during the chase was simply not something he’d allowed for. This was the climax of a plan the man had begun a hundred thirty years ago. Stig could barely organize three days ahead. He couldn’t rid himself of the notion that every ancestor he had would be looking down from the dreaming heavens this night. It wasn’t the kind of responsibility he handled easily.

“You did the right thing,” Bradley said softly.

“Sir?”

“Sending in the fuel air bomb, detonating it inside the city. I know it must have been a hard choice.”

“There was so much damage,” Stig confessed. “More than I thought.”

“Millions have died on the Commonwealth worlds over the last weeks, and millions more during the first invasion. The navy has developed weapons which are strong enough to damage a star; the radiation emission alone can wipe out the biosphere of an H-congruous planet a hundred million kilometers away. The unisphere is alive with rumors that Nigel Sheldon has something even more powerful than that; something which destroyed Hell’s Gateway where the navy’s finest failed completely. Judged against that scale, a single fuel air bomb that generated a few hundred casualties is insignificant. Yet at the same time you accomplished so much.”

“I don’t see it that way. I walked through the ruins; there were so many people with shattered lives. Dreaming heavens, I could smell burnt flesh.”

“You stalled the Starflyer on the other side of the gateway. That was crucial. Vital. Without that interruption to its plans, I would be dying on a world three hundred light-years away, it would already be closer to its starship, and the planet would be unable to extract its revenge. Look at the whole picture, Stig, focusing on individual actions is only going to cause you doubt and worry. Your thoughts should embrace a collective strategy. The Guardians of Selfhood are back on target again, in no small part thanks to you.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Ask the Paris team or Cat’s Claws if you doubt me. We were the ones who had almost given up hope until you wrecked its plans. You allowed us to get so close, Stig, I could actually feel it again, all that arrogance and malice spilling out into the ether. If we’d had a few minutes longer we could have exterminated it there and then. As it is, we forced it back onto our schedule. So don’t ever allow your resolve to desert you.”

“Thank you, sir.” Stig focused hard on the road, a tight smile curling his lips up. The ancient concrete surface was cracked and worn here, covered with an intricate lacework of black tar where bots and laborers had filled in the holes. The armored car’s wheels thrummed over the ridges as it raced under the bright arches; they were spaced so close together now they’d transformed Highway One into a psychedelic tunnel.

“Contact with Adam,” Keely reported. “He’s asking for you, sir. Heavy interference, we’ve got a badly behaved ionosphere tonight.”

“Let’s hear it,” Bradley said.

Static wailed through the low interior of the armored car. “Bradley?” Adam called.

“I’m here, Adam.”

“I’ve got a problem.”

“How bad?”

“The worst. Your signal is breaking…”

“What. Is. Your. Problem?”

“Found four crates that were sabotaged. We lost a Volvo as well.”

Something like a small electric charge fired down Stig’s spine. Adam’s trouble could mean only one thing. Stig automatically checked his wing mirror. The truck carrying the big Raiel alien was five vehicles back, while the armored car carrying Cat’s Claws and the Paris team was the second in line. He started working out which of his people would have the easiest shot.

“Are you sure?” Bradley asked. The signal whistled sharply. “Are you sure?” Bradley repeated urgently.

“Definite. It was done on the Carbon Goose…Only opportunity.”

“Is there enough equipment intact to complete the planet’s revenge?”

“Yeah. If we get there. Paula and I convinced it…one of the navy people with us. Has to be…it out, no other…Any information about them from your people…work it out. Paula seriously ill…medical kit should cope…can’t help me much.”

“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley muttered quietly. “I never expected it to get this close to us. Not now.”

“We can’t go back and help them,” Stig said. “We don’t have time.” He thumped the wheel with one hand.

“Adam is asking for information,” Bradley said. “We’ll give him as much as we can.”

“What if there’s more than one of them? What if there’s a Starflyer agent with us as well?”

“That’s not good,” Olwen said from the back of the armored car. “These machines are well protected. We’d have to put them in front of our heavy-caliber weapons. Then there’s their suits to break.”

“They’d have to take care of their own,” Stig said. “Any kind of firefight at that level would destroy the rest of our vehicles.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bradley said. “For the Starflyer to plant one agent among us would require considerable effort. The people who joined us at Narrabri station were essentially thrown together by accident. For the Starflyer to infiltrate two agents among us under these circumstances is beyond possibility.”

“You think they’re in Adam’s team?” Stig asked. “He said the sabotage happened on your Carbon Goose flight.”

“If that’s what Adam believes, we must trust him.”

“Absolutely.” Stig didn’t even have to think about it. A communications icon popped up into his virtual vision, a group link from Alic Hogan. He allowed the call through.

“We all picked up that transmission,” Alic said. “I expect you’re debating if you can trust us.”

“Actually, we’re putting our trust in Adam,” Bradley said. “He believes the Starflyer agent is with him, not here.”

“He’s wrong about that, damnit, you’re talking about the Admiral and Paula Myo.”

“Ex-Admiral,” Bradley said levelly. “The navy did rather badly under his command. And the alternative is that it’s one of you.”

“Damnit. All right. But Paula? Come on!”

“She’s been trying to stop me for a hundred thirty years. That makes her a highly plausible candidate.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Deal with facts,” Bradley said. “Paula does.”

“What about Anna?” Stig asked.

“The Admiral’s wife?” Morton said. “If she is, he must be, too.”

“That’s not impossible, I suppose,” Bradley said; there was a strong undercurrent of reluctance in his voice.

“Unlikely, though,” Alic said.

“What about Oscar?” Morton asked.

“I may be able to help there,” Qatux said. “Ms. Tiger Pansy was present when Captain Monroe had a heated confrontation with Dudley Bose.”

“What was it about?” Alic asked.

“Bose accused Monroe of deliberately allowing himself and Emmanuelle Verbeke to continue exploring the Watchtower after it was safe to do so, thus ensuring they were captured by MorningLightMountain. An allegation Monroe refuted. Dr. Bose was most insistent, though.”

“We know there was a Starflyer agent on the Second Chance,” Stig said hurriedly; he was trying to make connections. I don’t know enough about them.

“Does Dudley stand to profit in any way from making those kinds of allegations?” Rob asked.

“No,” Alic said. “His reputation with the navy is dirt anyway after that Welcome Back ceremony. This kind of thing will only make it worse for him. In any case, he only started claiming Oscar screwed up after he got his memories back.”

“If you believe the source of those memories,” Bradley said.

“We were with the Bose motile for weeks,” Morton said. “For what it’s worth, I believe it was a genuine copy of Dudley Bose’s memories and personality.”

“But you don’t know that for certain.”

“If it’s not a copy of Bose, then what the hell is it?”

“Boys, boys,” the Cat said. “Please, the smell of testosterone is getting foul back here. This is all sounding like a very dull lecture on complexity theory to me. You don’t have anything like enough real evidence to point the finger at any of them. If it was obvious who the Starflyer agent was, then we’d have realized it by now.”

Despite his irritation at her tone, Stig had to admit she’d got a point. There was some memory about the Cat worrying away at the back of his brain, something he’d heard back in the Commonwealth. Her crimes had given her widespread notoriety; she’d committed them a long time ago, long enough for them to have passed into urban lore. Then he remembered. Dreaming heavens, and she’s supposed to be on our side? And in a top-of-the-line armor suit? “Adam asked for our help,” he said, determined not to be cowed by her reputation. “We’re doing the best we can for him.”

Her answering laugh made him wince.

“Poor old Adam,” she chortled. “I’d better switch on my short-wave set. Run, Adam! Run for the hills now, and don’t look back.”

“She didn’t, did she?” an alarmed Stig asked Keely.

“No.”

“What is your solution, Ms. Stewart?” an unperturbed Bradley asked.

“Gosh, the boss man. It’s really simple. Adam asked for information. The best we can do is tell him we suspect Monroe and Myo. After that, it’s up to him how he uses the information. He’s a grown-up.”

“Very well. Unless anyone else has any relevant information on the people traveling with Adam, we’ll relay our suspicions.”

Stig willed someone to say something, to recall just one extra fact, but there was only silence.

“I’ll tell him that, then,” Bradley said.

By midmorning the Volvos had reached the end of the farmlands; they petered out amid insipid swathes of wet meadows and vigorous scrub that were gradually being encroached by the equatorial grasslands. Anguilla grass scattered by blimpbots across the southernmost zone of the Aldrin Plains had blossomed to produce a great deluge of uniform light green vegetation resembling a quiescent sea that was slowly progressing northward. There were no settlements out there, no trees, no bushes, and few reports of any animals.

Their tanks were half empty by then, so Adam wanted to get them topped off before they drove the last section. They stopped in a town called Wolfstail, which comprised about twenty single-story buildings clumped around a T-junction. There were more cats than humans, and most of them wild. Given its position right on the edge of the advancing grasslands, it had the feel of a coastal town out of season. The road that had brought them down from Armstrong City was the stalk of the junction, with the two branches heading east and west, running parallel to the Dessault Mountains that were hidden hundreds of kilometers on the other side of the southern horizon.

Adam climbed down out of the cab and stretched elaborately, not enjoying the sounds his old body made after having been cramped up in a chair for a seven-hour stretch. It didn’t matter how adaptive the plyplastic cushioning was; his limbs were numbed and joints sore from inactivity. Outside the cab’s air-conditioning the heat was oppressive. He began sweating at once, and hurriedly put his wraparound shades on.

A ten-year-old girl in dungarees and a grubby Manchester United cap came out of the garage to fill the Volvos up from its single diesel pump.

“Quick as you can, please,” he told her, and flashed an Earth ten-dollar bill. She grinned brightly, showing a missing tooth, and hurried to the hose.

Everyone except Paula had clambered out of the cabs. The Guardians were giving the navy personnel mistrustful stares. Adam sighed, but he was too tired to play diplomat now. “I need to get some things,” he told the others, and nodded to the store opposite the garage. “Oscar, you’re with me. Kieran, you’re paired with the Investigator. The rest of you.” He shrugged. “We leave as soon as the tanks are full.”

“Do you need anything in particular?” Oscar asked as they crossed the dusty road.

“Some medical supplies for the Investigator. The diagnostic array keeps telling me to use drugs and biogenics we don’t have in the kit.”

Oscar looked at the ramshackle composite panel building with its weathered solar panel roof, and big heart-shaped emerald precipitator leaves flapping lazily from the eves. The windows were grimed up, and the air-conditioning unit a coverless box of rusty junk. “Are you sure they’ll have them here?”

“What they won’t have in here is any sabotaged supplies.”

“Christ, you really are paranoid.”

Oscar pushed the single door open. The dimly lit room inside was like someone’s living room, with threadbare rugs over the carbon plank floor and tall metal shelving racks instead of furniture. Half of the shelves were empty; the rest carried the usual merchandise essential for any small community, mostly domestic products, with food packets supplied by Armstrong City companies. A good stock of booze took up an entire rack.

“Can I help you boys?” an elderly woman asked. She was sitting in a rocking chair at the far end, knitting in the yellow glow of a polyphoto globe hanging from the rafters.

“I’m looking for first aid products,” Adam said.

“Some bandages and aspirin on the third shelf in from the door,” she told him. “Few other odds and ends. Mind you check the expiry dates, now. They’ve been around awhile.”

“Thanks.” Adam pulled Oscar along. “You heard Johansson’s answer last night.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, along with half of this world who’re listening in to the Highway One chase on their radios. Thank you for that. It went down particularly well with Rosamund, I thought. She certainly gave her guns a big polish afterward. You know it’s only going to be a matter of time before one of your street thugs decides the Guardians’ cause is best served by slitting our throats.”

“They’re not street thugs, I trained them.”

“The way Grayva trained us?”

Adam grunted dismissively, and rummaged through the section boldly labeled MEDICAL PROVISIONS. The shopkeeper hadn’t been joking about the lack of variety. “Don’t worry about my team, they’re well structured and disciplined.”

“Whatever you say, Adam.”

“So how do you explain Dudley’s claim that you deliberately ordered him to carry on through the Watchtower so he’d be left behind?” Adam was quite surprised by the involuntary spasm of anger on Oscar’s face when Dudley’s name was mentioned.

“That little shit!”

Both of them gave a guilty glance in the direction of the old woman.

“Sorry, Dudley just manages to rile me every time.”

“So?” Adam invited.

“It must have been the Starflyer agent. Whoever it was hacked into the Second Chance’s communications systems.”

“I figured that, too.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you yanking my plank?”

“I know it’s not you.” Adam grinned at Oscar’s astonishment, the thick skin on his cheeks crinkling stiffly.

“You do?”

“Let’s say that after our long association I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Oscar rolled his eyes. “If this is the tradecraft you trained your kids in, we’re in deeper shit than I thought. But thanks, anyway.”

“Don’t mention it. Your innocence reduces my problem by one.”

“Yeah.” Oscar scratched at the back of his head. “And then there were three.”

“Two of whom were on the Second Chance; and Myo has been persecuting the Guardians since their inception.”

“It can’t be Wilson and Anna.”

“Is that emotion or logic talking to me?”

“Emotion, I guess. Hell! I’ve been part of their lives for years now, we virtually live in each other’s pockets. They’re friends. Real friends. If it is one of them, then they have truly run rings around me.”

“I told you before, you manage to cover up your earlier activities with a perfect shell of respectability. To be honest, I never quite expected you to have so much success in your current life.”

“Thanks a whole bunch. But my crime was in the past. The Starflyer agent is active now.”

“All right. Is their any indication, anything that might tell you one of them might not be genuine?”

“I don’t know.” Oscar picked up a tube of dental biogenic cream intended to treat abscesses, not looking at it.

“What?” Adam persisted. “Come on. We’re still fighting to stop this war, and more, stop it from happening again.”

“Someone tampered with the official logs stored in Pentagon II after I found the evidence that the Starflyer agent was on board the Second Chance. That little cover-up blocked us from using it to expose the Starflyer. Only Wilson and I knew about it.”

“Are you sure?”

Oscar closed his eyes. “No,” he said in a pained sigh. “A lot of people knew we had a private meeting, which is very unusual, especially as there was no official record of the topic. And then we invited Myo for an equally secret conference. But I swear that office is sealed up tighter than Sheldon’s harem.”

“You’re looking for a get-out clause. It sounds like a locked room to me.”

“It can’t be Wilson.” Oscar sounded deeply troubled.

“What about his wife?”

“Anna? No way. Nobody’s worked harder to defeat both the Prime invasions. She was the liaison between the tactical staff and Fleet Command; if she was the agent that would be the moment to ensure we were totally screwed.”

“Except the Starflyer wanted the Commonwealth intact to strike back at MorningLightMountain. According to Bradley it sees us as a couple of old prizefighters battering the crap out of each other until we’re both dead.”

“Christ Almighty. I don’t know.”

“Then give me your take on Myo.”

“Definite candidate.” For once Oscar sounded confident. “And what is up with her anyway? How sick is she?”

“She claims her body is reacting to her decision to let me go free. Think of it as neurotoxic shock, and you won’t be far wrong.”

“Jesus. She is one weird woman. That damn Hive!”

“It’s an illness which mitigates in her favor. If she’s having that reaction, then her genuine personality is intact.”

Oscar dropped the tube back on the rack. “Come on. Like she couldn’t fake the shakes.”

“The diagnostic array confirms it. She’s seriously ill, Oscar. I’m not quite sure…” He looked at the meager display of medicines, and shook his head sadly.

“Or she’s taken a compound to produce that effect.”

“I believe you mentioned paranoia?”

“Face it,” Oscar said, “you haven’t got a clue which one of them it could be.”

“Not yet. I fear I must rouse Paula to work this out for me. This is her field of excellence. Her only field, come to that. We need her…if it isn’t her.” He quickly picked a few packets off the shelf, mild sedatives and some biogenics designed to counter viral infections. They might help. Probably not.

“In the state she’s in?” Oscar said as they walked over to the shopkeeper. “Not a chance. She’s barely rational.”

“I’m aware of that. If it’s genuine.”

“What are you going to do?” Oscar asked with brittle humor. “Fall on your sword? If it is a genuine illness, it’s the only way to cure her.”

“Would that be so dishonorable?”

“Hey, come on, don’t joke about this.”

“After the Guardians win, where will I go? What will I do? There’s no one left to shelter me. No one that I’d accept help from, anyway.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“No, I’m not.” But he didn’t like the fact that he’d actually thought of it. True desperation.

“Good! We’ll work it out; you and me, the old team. Damnit, there’s only three possibles. How difficult can it be?”

Adam gave that a lot of thought as the interminable afternoon rolled ever onward. They’d left the sparse road behind at Wolfstail, heading directly south from the town’s T-junction along a stony farm track that vanished a couple of kilometers later beneath the advancing Anguilla grass. Once they reached its outlying fringes, it quickly grew taller and thicker, reinforcing Adam’s earlier comparison to a sea. A heavily modified variety of terrestrial Bermuda grass, the Anguilla’s individual stalks were as thick as wheat; they clustered so densely the entire mass supported itself, swaying in giant slow waves as the winds gusted over the surface. No other plant could gain any kind of niche amid its indomitable all-pervasive root mat. It had been tailored by the revitalization project office to thrive on the area’s prevalent heat and moisture, and succeeded to a degree its creators never expected.

Feathery tips reached up to the Volvo’s windows. Kieran, who was driving again, had to use the truck’s radar to see the shape of the land below the tide of grass. There had been a road here, decades ago, back when Wolfstail had been built around a crossroads, linking the Dessault Mountains to the inhabited northern lands. It was completely smothered under the Anguilla grass now, its disintegrating surface long since sealed over by the root mat. The Guardians still used the route. McMixons and McKratzes mostly; riding or driving down out of the mountains to trade with Far Away’s normal population, and transporting back the illicit weapons technology Adam and his predecessors had smuggled through the gateway in First Foot Fall Plaza. They’d placed tuned trisilicon markers along the hidden road, stiff meter-high poles invisible within the grass but shining like beacons if they were illuminated by the correctly coded radar pulse. Their unmistakable gleaming points marching across the display screen, and an accurate inertial navigation system allowed the Volvos to race on at close to a hundred kilometers an hour, a speed impossible through the grasslands without the certainty of a solid surface beneath the root map. Adam likened it to running along a precipice. God help them if they wavered from the exact line laid out by the inertial guidance. He would have been happier if control of the trucks had been switched over to the drive arrays, but their programs would have taken into account the dreadful local conditions, and crawled their way forward. Besides, the Guardians took a perverse delight in showing how ballsy they were; each of them claiming to have driven the route many times previously. Adam didn’t believe a word of it.

He tended to Paula as they plowed onward through the grass. She was in a dreadful state, her clothes and blankets damp from a fever sweat, drifting in and out of consciousness. When she was alert she was in a lot of pain. The sedatives and biogenics he’d administered did seem to have improved her blood pressure, and her heart rate had dropped a little, though it still remained too high for comfort.

“No way can this be fake,” Adam muttered as he put the diagnostic array back in its bag. Paula shivered under her blanket; her breathing was shallow, and she frowned in REM sleep, whimpering as if something horrible was closing in on her. That it must be him she was dreaming of didn’t exactly help ease his anxiety. Not guilt though, this is not my fault.

In the pleasant climate of the cab, all everyone did was follow the chase down Highway One. They’d drifted out of range from the small road net within a quarter of an hour of leaving Highway One the previous night. As Far Away had no satellites, all that kept the countryside communities connected was radio, and its range was limited. The old-fashioned analogue short-wave units they carried could broadcast far enough to reach Johansson, but as he’d discovered last night they were erratic at best. He didn’t ask for an update directly; his own transmission would pinpoint him for the Starflyer. Last night’s request for any information on a possible traitor had been a calculated risk. Instead of a direct connection they followed the news as relayed from household to household, trying to decide what was exaggerated and what was plain fiction.

The chase had become a spectator sport, with people lining Highway One to watch the two convoys race past. At first there had been some spontaneous attempts to interrupt the Starflyer’s vehicles. Youths threw Molotovs. Hunting rifles were fired at the Cruisers. All of it completely ineffective. The Institute troops responded with overwhelming firepower, flattening entire swathes of buildings as they flashed past. After the first few times, news of the retaliation spread down Highway One and nobody attempted to interfere again. The Starflyer’s MANN truck was watched from darkened windows, or behind walls a safe distance away from the road.

Bradley Johansson’s pursuit was cheered on by a few hardy souls who ventured out to look at the man who throughout their lives had been more myth than real person.

The airways gossip allowed everyone in the Volvo to keep track of events. To start with, the distance between Bradley and the Starflyer was holding steady at just over five hundred sixty kilometers. Both were traveling about as fast as Highway One would permit, with the smaller vehicles of the Guardians having a slight edge, and closing by nearly sixteen kilometers each hour. It was the bridges that would make the difference. There were cheers in the cab each time excited shouts burst out over the radio proclaiming another bridge had been brought down.

By dawn it was confirmed: the Guardians had blown up all five major river crossings along Highway One. Adam wasn’t entirely surprised when people who’d gathered around the rubble of the Taran bridge, the most northerly crossing, started reporting that the Starflyer convoy had some kind of amphibious capability. The MANN truck and its escort of Cruisers turned off Highway One and made their way down to the river, crossing it directly. It hadn’t been easy; they had to travel for several kilometers along rough tracks before there was a place to get down to the water. When they did, that was where the Guardian ambush team struck. According to the breathless descriptions that filtered back across the Aldrin Plains, the firefight was ferocious. It was a story repeated at each broken bridge. The Guardians never managed to destroy the MANN truck, but the Cruisers took heavy casualties each time.

Adam started paying very close attention to the delay times. At one point, just after they’d left Wolfstail, Bradley was barely a hundred ten minutes behind the Starflyer. Then the Institute finally began to respond to the situation. Several groups of three or four Land Rover Cruisers were spotted along Highway One heading north. Bradley and Stig knew about them, but there was nothing they could do to avoid a clash; there simply wasn’t an alternative route. It was their turn to be shot at.

In the Volvo’s cab, they even knew the first collision point, a small Highway One town calling itself Philadelphia FA. The wait was tense as the radio grapevine spat out the occasional testimony and counterclaim. As they listened to the crackling static, thick gray clouds scudded in across the dazzling sapphire sky, drawing a veil of drizzle below them. The water turned the Anguilla grass slippery and treacherous. Even the gung-ho Guardians had to slow as the Volvo’s wheels began to slide about over the stalks they’d crushed beneath them. It wasn’t until an hour and a half after the Philadelphia incident must have happened that they were certain a convoy of armored cars and Mazda jeeps along with their companion vehicles were still racing in pursuit of the Starflyer. Checking the waystations as best he could, Adam reckoned they’d lost a good forty minutes lead time. For some obscure sentimental reason he was glad that Bradley’s group still appeared to have the truck Qatux was traveling in.

“They’ll make it up again after the Anculan tomorrow,” Rosamund said with conviction.

The Anculan River was where the biggest Guardian ambush was planned. If the Starflyer kept its speed, they should reach it by midday tomorrow. Adam hoped she was right. There were reports coming in of more Institute Cruisers on the road far south of the equator. Reinforcements. Nothing was secret anymore. The new troops knew now that there were Guardian ambush squads at each river. They could engage them before the Starflyer arrived, clearing away any threat. Bradley and Stig were also going to have to take on at least two more Cruiser patrols before they reached the Anculan.

Adam just hoped that the preparations for the Final Raid had gone unnoticed. Away in the eastern province of the Dessault Mountains, the clans were assembling every remaining warrior into an army that was going to sweep down on the Starflyer and the Research Institute and the arkship. There were no civilians living anywhere near the deep forts of the clans, no remote farms or wandering prospector to shout excited claims about an army on the march.

The Guardians he’d encountered at that brief meeting at rendezvous point four had also talked breathlessly about the Barsoomians, who were supposedly traveling in from their territory on the other side of the Oak Sea to help with the Final Raid. Together they would destroy the Starflyer before it ever reached its starship.

Although he never said it out loud, Adam hoped that was one battle that would never happen. The Institute itself would have heavy-duty weaponry to defend its valley. The loss of life would be dreadful. Now he was actually on Far Away, reviewing things on the ground, his confidence had taken an abrupt nosedive. The planet was so backward. He’d always thought his shipments were received by well-organized fighting units. In reality the clans were little advanced from Earth’s pre-Commonwealth guerrilla bands who waged war on oppressive governments from their mountain hideaway camps. The clans, bluntly, were turning out to be a serious disappointment.

His main hope now was that they would be on time delivering the components carried by the Volvos. If the planet’s revenge could be made to work, and wreck the Marie Celeste before the Starflyer reached it, they would have a breathing space. Bradley wouldn’t have to launch the Final Raid. Sheldon had promised to send a starship; it would have the weapons to exterminate the alien from orbit. A clean precise blast of energy would eradicate the problem once and for all.

So Adam Elvin, lapsed socialist activist, kept his own silent counsel as the Volvo drove on and on through the interminable grasslands, praying that the greatest capitalist the human race had ever produced would keep his word. If it wouldn’t have required so much explaining, he would have laughed out loud at the monstrous irony.

“Something up ahead,” Rosamund called out.

Adam broke his reverie to look at the radar display. There was a very broad shallow river a kilometer ahead. The radar return showed a horse on the far side, with someone standing beside it. Given their relative sizes, he thought it must be a child.

“That’s got to be someone from Samantha’s team,” Kieran said. “I bet it’s Judson McKratz.”

“What makes you say that?” Adam asked.

“I know him. They’ll want to confirm we’re genuine, and Judson knows this road better than anyone.”

“Good point.” Adam rubbed at his temples. It had been a long trip, and he hadn’t had much sleep since…probably the Carbon Goose. He was sure he had an hour on the flight. “Even so…force fields on, people.”

The river was wider than Adam realized from the radar. Grass hid it until they were only a couple of hundred meters from the bank. They dipped down a short incline, and he could finally see it was almost four hundred meters across. He whistled softly. Even with a depth that was never greater than half a meter, that was a lot of water. The gentle U-shape course it had carved for itself spoke of much higher levels rushing down from the mountains. On his map, the river stretched back to the Dessault range, where it was fed by dozens of tributaries worming their way out through the foothills.

“One at a time,” he ordered. “Ayub, stay here and get ready to give us covering fire.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rosamund inched their Volvo down onto the stony riverbed. Its suspension lowered the wheels below the chassis, and they moved forward in a series of lurches that rocked the cab about. Even in Far Away’s gravity, Adam had to strap himself in tight.

The rider standing beside the dark gray horse was an adult human male, wearing a long walnut-colored oilskin greatcoat and broad-rimmed hat that deflected the drizzle like a force field. As they drew near to the bank, Adam gawped in astonishment. The Guardians he’d met always talked about their Charlemagnes with a sense of pride; now he could see why. The beast was big and hellishly intimidating. He eyed its short metal-tipped horn, and vowed not to venture within twenty meters of the brute.

The Volvo wobbled up out of the river.

“That’s Judson all right,” Kieran said with a wide smile. He jumped down out of the cab to greet his old colleague. The two of them embraced warmly, and Kieran brought him over to the truck. Adam climbed out. The Charlemagne had tusks, he saw. It probably wasn’t a herbivore.

“Mr. Elvin,” Judson said. “Welcome. I have heard your name many times. Those who return from the Commonwealth speak well of you.”

“Thank you.” Adam waved the other truck over. “We’ve brought the remainder of the equipment you need.”

“In the nick of time again, eh?” Judson put his arm around Kieran’s shoulder, shaking him fondly.

“We’re here,” Kieran said. “Don’t complain.”

“Me?” He gave a deep rumbling laugh. “Seriously, you should be able to reach Samantha by nightfall. She’s waiting for you in Reithstone Valley, with additional transport ready to ferry the components out to the remaining stations. And after that! You are lucky I know the deepest caves in this region.” He pulled an array out of his coat pocket. “I’ll let them know you’re here.”

Adam’s array picked up a song being played on the short-wave frequency they’d been given. He suspected not many people would know it without an e-butler search of library files. Somebody here had a strange sense of humor. The sound of “Hey, Jude” washed across the eternal grasslands.

A few minutes later, his array found the salsa hit “Morgan” being played, drifting in and out of reception as the ionosphere undulated far above them. He remembered dancing to that in his own youth.

“That’s the acknowledgment,” Judson said.

“I’m curious,” Adam said. “What if it hadn’t been us?”

Judson gave him a broad smile. “ ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ ”

Making contact with Judson had provided all of them with a definite morale boost. After the shock of discovering the sabotage, they needed to know they weren’t isolated. A state the grassland had emphasized for hour after hour.

The Volvos drove off down the buried road again, leaving Judson behind. For all the size and power of the Charlemagne, it couldn’t keep up with the trucks’ unceasing pace. The dark clouds began to break up in the late afternoon, allowing huge sunbeams to play down past their frayed edges, like searchlights strafing the grassland. As the beams slowly angled up toward the horizontal there was finally a break in the numbingly tedious landscape. Up ahead, the foothills of the Dessault range were beginning to rise above the glistening stalks of Anguilla grass.

An hour later they were driving up the foothills. The grass had finally fallen behind them, unable to rise far up the slopes where the air cooled quickly. Ordinary grass reasserted itself, along with trees and bushes. Their road became clear again, two lines of hard-packed stone winding up the banks and following the contour lines cut into valley walls. It wasn’t long before they were level with the first true mountains. On either side of them, sharp rocky peaks smeared with snow protruded into the ice-clear sapphire sky, casting huge shadows down into the valleys as the sun fell.

Twice, Adam saw riders on Charlemagnes high above the road, watching them as they crawled on toward Reithstone Valley. It was becoming difficult to receive radio transmissions amid the mountains. The last they heard of Highway One was a Guardian ambush team engaging a Cruiser patrol at the Kantrian bridge a couple of hours before the Starflyer reached it. After a couple more engagements with Institute troops Bradley had fallen back again and was now trailing the Starflyer by nearly four hours.

Twilight brought them into yet another high valley where the alpine grass was still struggling to establish itself. Trees and bushes were confined to thickets along the side of the fast-flowing stream that cut along the bottom. Kieran was spelling Rosamund behind the wheel. As they started to climb again, he turned the headlights on. Long beams of blue-tinged light exposed the shelf that was now their road. There was no compacted stone here; the soil was a hard grit bound together with tough short grass and ragged moss. Occasional rockfall mounds had been carved away by machines decades ago, but apart from that the track appeared to be natural. Adam wondered if it had originally been formed by the local equivalent of mountain goats in the millennia before the flare. It was a little too convenient to be completely geological. He was also slightly discomforted by how narrow it was in sections. The width fluctuated constantly. There were no crash barriers; and the slope below was steep getting on for vertical. Thankfully, it was getting harder to see the valley floor as the light shrank away out of the sky. Stars began to appear overhead.

Adam went to check on Paula again. The cab’s air-conditioning unit was now blowing warm air through the vents, compensating for the chill of altitude. She moaned when he slid the composite door open, instinctively turning away from the pink twilight that shone in through the windshield.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

A skeletal face peered up at him from a nest of blankets.

Adam sniffed the air, and tried not to grimace in disgust. Paula had been sick; sticky brown fluid stained the blankets she was clutching. He thought there might be specks of blood in it.

“Here.” He handed her a bottle of water. “You’ve got to drink more.”

Just looking at it made her shudder. “Can’t.”

“You’re dehydrating, that just makes this worse.” He began to tug his dark red sweater off over his head. “Give me the top blanket and put this on.”

She said nothing, but released her grip on the blanket. He bundled it away in a polythene bag, then adjusted the vent controls for a quick blast of clear air to rid the little compartment of the rancid smell. Paula took a long time to pull the sweater on. The one time he tried to help, she pushed his hands away, determined to do it herself. He didn’t offer again; if she still had pride there was hope for her personality yet.

“I’ve got some sedatives left,” he said when she fell back down onto the cot, completely exhausted.

“No.” She beckoned at the bottle he was holding. “I’ll try and drink.”

“You need more than that.”

“I’ll try and remember.”

“The Guardians will have a doctor.”

“We’ll stick to the diagnostic array, thank you. I trust that more than any doctor on this world.”

“That’s prejudice.”

“It’s my life.”

“Look, we both know—”

“We’ve got company,” Rosamund sang out. “Trucks up ahead, coming our way.”

Adam gave Paula a long look. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“It’s hard for me to avoid you.”

He went back into the cab, glancing at the radar display. “What have you got?”

Kieran pointed out through the windshield. Several points of light were moving along the side of the mountain ahead of them, shining bright in the deep shadow.

“See if you can contact them,” Adam told Rosamund. He wasn’t particularly worried. If the Institute had by some miracle tracked them down, they wouldn’t be so blatant.

“Answering signal,” Rosamund said. “It’s Samantha all right, she says they need to get started with the equipment straightaway.”

They drove on for another kilometer before finding a broad section of the road shelf where they could all park. Samantha’s vehicles roared in ten minutes later as the sapphire sky finally faded to black, and the stars shone with an intensity Adam rarely got to see on any Commonwealth world. Seven medium-sized trucks and five old Vauxhall jeeps parked around the Volvos, all with tough primitive-looking AS suspension; their engines thundered in the thin air, exhaust pipes blowing out mucky vapor. Twenty Guardians climbed out, giving the new Volvos an inquisitive examination.

Samantha was younger than Adam was expecting, certainly still in her twenties, with an enormous cloud of dark red hair that was wound back into a boisterous tail which hung a long way down her broad back. A face that was eighty percent freckles smiled curiously at him when they met in front of the Volvos, illuminated by the bright blue-tinted headlight.

Adam took out the crystal holding the Martian data and handed it over to her with a flourish.

“Adam Elvin.” She shook his hand. “Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard your name a lot from people who come back.”

There was something in the way she said that, almost like an accusation. “Thanks. We weren’t expecting to see you for a while yet.”

“Yeah, I know. Change of plan. Have you been following the Highway One reports?”

“Yes.”

“The Starflyer’s making better progress than we expected. We really need to get those last manipulator stations up and running. I figured it would be quicker to offload the equipment to my people now, and they’ll disperse from here.”

“Sure, hey this is your field. We’re just the delivery team.”

“You’ve done a good job. With this.”

Again, there was that tone. “Anything the matter?”

“Hey, sorry, pal.” She gripped his arm tightly. “No offense, but I’m Lennox’s mother. I was good friends with Kazimir, too. Real good friends.”

Adam didn’t understand the Lennox reference. “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry. Kazimir was a good man, one of the best.”

Rosamund gave a discreet cough behind him. “Bruce was Lennox’s father.”

Adam looked from Rosamund to Samantha, completely flummoxed. “Christ. Uh, did you know he’s dead, too?”

“Been dead a long time, pal. Just his body been walking around out there.” Another firm squeeze on Adam’s arm. “After this, if you’ve got time, I’d like to hear about it. Be good coming from the horse’s mouth.”

“Of course.”

“For now we need to shift our asses into gear, and sharpish. How much did you bring?”

“Just about everything we said we would. There’s twenty-five tons in each truck. Some got damaged en route, not much.”

“Yeah, heard you had some trouble.” Samantha eyed the navy people. “How’s that going?”

“It’s under control.”

Samantha mulled that over for a while. “You’re our top man in the Commonwealth; Bradley Johansson trusts you, so I will, too. But I don’t need any surprises, pal. Out here we have a very easy solution for Starflyer agents.”

“Understood. You won’t get any surprises.”

Samantha produced a handheld array that was old enough to have been on Far Away right from the start. “I’ll need the inventory, but that kind of tonnage! Dreaming heavens, sounds like we’ve got more than enough. Thanks again; this planet might just get its revenge after all. That must have been some ride to get here.”

“It had its moments.”

“Let’s hope it wasn’t for nothing. Time really is being a bitch to us right now. Can we start unloading?”

“Sure.” He got Rosamund and Jamas to open the trailers while he handed Samantha a spare handheld array and showed her how to use it. She whistled appreciatively at its adaptive-logic voice recognition, and started searching the inventory list. A minute later she was bellowing instructions to her people. Guardians and trolleybots were soon beavering away unloading the crates.

“Just how time-critical are things?” Adam asked. He was beginning to feel redundant, standing with the navy people in a little cluster while Jamas and the others were smiling away as they greeted friends they hadn’t seen in years.

Samantha sucked on her lower lip and lowered her voice. “My teams should pull through. The drivers will dose up on beezees and run the mountains like a bat out of hell tonight, each of the stations will get their load tomorrow; Zuggenhim Ridge is the farthest away, and that should be done by midday, which is cutting it fine for assembly, but I’ll take that one myself. We’re going to start the planet’s revenge the day after tomorrow no matter how many stations are ready. No choice, pal.”

Adam did some quick mental arithmetic. “That is going to be tight.” He reckoned the Starflyer would reach the Institute sometime after midday.

“Very,” she said. “But that’s not the real problem.”

“What is?”

“Our observation team is badly behind schedule. As soon as we heard the Starflyer was through the gateway we tried to tell them to start. They were camped in the Nalosyle Vales, and there was a bad weather front around there. We didn’t get through until early this morning, bastard short wave is good for crap all. If they have nothing but good luck, it’ll take them three days to get up to Aphrodite’s Seat.”

“What does the observation team do?” Wilson asked.

“We have to know the topology of the weather patterns,” Samantha said. “We need to plot the morning stormfronts exactly as they come around Mount Herculaneum, then we need to see what effect our manipulators are having so we can direct the damn thing properly. It’s going to be tricky enough for the control group without working half blind.”

“Satellite imagery?” Anna said.

“No satellites here,” Wilson said. “I remember talking to the Institute director a while back. Got a personal update on infrastructure.” He grinned distantly.

Samantha gave him a very interested look. “Right. Which is why we need someone on Aphrodite’s Seat. From there you can see right to the eastern end of the Dessault range. It’s also a perfect com relay point; no more crapping short wave.”

“But they’re not going to get there in time,” Adam said. That arithmetic wasn’t difficult at all.

“Trust me, we’re kicking their asses as much as we can over the radio. Not that we can say much without drawing too much attention. If anyone can do it, they will.”

“Isn’t there any other way up there?” Wilson asked. “What about flying? There must be some aircraft on Far Away.”

“Aphrodite’s Seat is above the atmosphere. In any case, nobody goes flying planes around the Grand Triad, not with the winds that hit them from the ocean.”

“I thought tourists flew over it,” Oscar said.

“Sure do,” Samantha said. “Rich morons try and catch the winds so they can glide over it. The lucky ones make it to the far side. Not onto the peak.”

“The right parabola could get you there,” Wilson said thoughtfully.

“And you know how to do that?” Samantha asked scornfully.

Wilson leaned forward with a menacing smile that shut down her attitude. Adam could see what an unfair contest it was: a young Samantha who cheerfully bossed around a team of freedom fighters and the Admiral, an exfighter pilot who had captained the Second Chance, then went on to command the navy.

“I’m the only human being ever to have flown on Mars,” he told her equitably. “I aerobraked a spaceplane from a two-hundred-kilometer orbit and landed on a designated site the size of a tennis court. How about you?”

“Shit! You’re dicking with me, pal.”

“Wilson.” Oscar was tugging at his arm. “Come on, man, that was over three hundred years ago. And that plane had rocket engines to help you steer, these gliders don’t.”

“That kind of flying is not something you forget or erase,” Wilson said. “Besides, the tour companies here must have skill memory implants.”

“Well, yeah,” an astounded Samantha said. “But, come on! Landing on the summit of Mount Herculaneum? Are you serious?”

“Yes, are you?” Adam asked. As soon as Wilson suggested it, Adam had begun sketching out consequences and opportunities. Even if there was only the slightest chance of success they had to make the effort. It wasn’t going well on Highway One, and the superstorm wouldn’t happen unless the control group was fully functional. After everything they’d gone through, the sacrifices they’d endured to get the Martian data here, he couldn’t bear the idea of it not having its chance.

“You’ll need a lot of electrical gear,” Samantha said. “We need high resolution panoramic vision and clear relay channels. I haven’t got anything like that here.”

Wilson tapped her ancient array. “The electronics we’re carrying are a lot better than anything of yours I’ve seen so far, no offense.”

“First things first,” Adam said. “Can we reach the gliders which the tourists use in time to get up there before the Starflyer arrives at the Institute?”

Samantha sucked in a long breath. “It’ll be tight, pal. You’ll need to get the hyperglider tethered down in Stakeout Canyon tomorrow night to catch the morning storm. The travel companies hangar them at Stonewave, that’s on the wet desert west of the Aldrin Plains. You’ll have to burn some gas to get there in time, tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”

Adam pulled the map out of his virtual vision grid, tracing the northern edge of the Dessault range to the west until he found the town. She was right, it was a long way, much farther than Wolfstail. “Can it be done?” he asked.

“Yeah, maybe. There’s a track wedged in between the foothills and the top of the grasslands. You use that and you don’t have to drive through the crapping Anguilla grass. It’ll take you around Herculaneum and out on the north side of Mount Zeus. Stonewave is a straight line north from there.”

Adam turned his attention back to the trucks. “We’ll unhitch the trailers from the cabs. We’ll make much better time without them.”

“You’ll need to, pal. Believe me when I say you do not want to be caught anywhere near Herculaneum tomorrow morning after the storm comes in from the ocean. If you’re going to live, never mind fly, you have to get into the lee of Zeus before sunrise.”

“Thanks.”

She gazed at Wilson. “You really going to do this?”

“We’re really going to do this,” Oscar said.

“Huh?” Wilson gave him a startled look.

“You heard,” Anna said. “We all know how to fly; that’s one up on most of the tourists crazy enough to try this. And with three of us, there’ll be a better chance that someone will survive to smash down on the top of the mountain.”

“You mean glide gently to a soft halt,” Oscar said.

“I know what I mean.”

Wilson put his arm around her. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” She stroked his cheek tenderly. “You still owe me a honeymoon.”

“This trip isn’t good enough?”

She kissed him, her eyes shining. “Not yet.”

“Dreaming heavens,” Samantha said. “I don’t doubt you could do this, but…the sabotage. I can’t risk it.”

“Yes, you can,” Wilson said. “Assume the worst, if the saboteur is the only one of us who makes it to the top and doesn’t relay the observation data you need, how will that make it worse than it is right now?”

Samantha gave him a desperate look; her gaze slipped over to Adam. It was obvious she didn’t want the decision. “All right,” she said grudgingly. “I guess there’s not much to lose.”

Wilson gave her a curt nod, still in command. “We’ll need your exact observation requirements, and the communications specs so we can modify our equipment. Do Rosamund and the rest know the route to Stonewave?”

“Pretty much. The tourist companies use the route along the side of the foothills to chase after their hypergliders, so it’s pretty well marked out.”

Adam caught up with Oscar as the trailers were being unhitched from the Volvo cabs. Almost all of the crates had been unloaded. The truck to Zuggenhim Ridge had already left. Samantha was going to take a jeep and follow it, once she and another Guardian called Valentine had finished briefing Wilson and Jamas on the technical details of the observation. They were going to spend the trip to Stonewave modifying their arrays to duplicate the performance of the equipment that the original observation team carried.

“I’m glad you volunteered,” Adam said.

“I wasn’t about to let Wilson go and—” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”

“Because I’m only going to allow you to fly.”

“What!” Oscar hunched down instinctively, checking to see if anyone was looking. “What are you talking about?” he asked in a low voice.

“You think Wilson and Anna are suddenly in the clear because they offered to do this?”

“Well…” Oscar rubbed a hand hard across his forehead. “Oh, Christ.”

“Assume one of them is the traitor, and they make it to the top. The whole planet’s revenge project is dependent on that observation.” Adam slapped his hands together vigorously. “They’ve fucked us. Bang, it’s over. Starflyer makes it back to the Marie Celeste and leaves.”

“When are you going to tell them?”

“After we’ve got to Stonewave and prepared the hypergliders. That’s the other thing, this trip will keep all of us away from these manipulator stations Samantha is building; I don’t want any sudden freak accidents to happen to them, either. Once we’ve found a working hyperglider and set it up ready to fly, I’ll tell them they’re grounded. My Guardian team will back me up.”

“Adam, please, I’m not that good a pilot. Hell, the only time I’ve actually flown in the last ten years is on the Carbon Goose.”

“The insert memories will help. You’ll make it, Oscar, you always do.”

Four Land Rover Cruisers were parked across Highway One. Ion shots raked the sky above them, punching into buildings where Institute troopers were shooting at the approaching line of Guardians’ vehicles. The kinetic rapid-fire gun mounted on the bonnet of the Cruiser blocking the nearside lane began firing at the cab of the big eighteen-wheel Loko truck that was bearing down on it at a hundred kilometers an hour. An answering hyper-rifle shot from the truck’s cab struck the Cruiser head-on, slicing clean through its force field. It exploded violently, lifting its broken-backed chassis off the ground to somersault in midair.

“Going airborne,” the Cat’s voice called out blithely on the general band. Her armored shape jumped from the Loko’s cab, surrounded by a sparkling amber force field. She hit the worn enzyme-bonded concrete and bounced, slamming into the wall of an animal feed store amid a shimmering crimson aurora. The wall shattered and the roof sagged alarmingly.

The flaming corpse of the Cruiser landed on its roof, collapsing under the impact. A second later the Loko truck struck it head-on, shunting it back into the rest of the blockade.

Two hundred meters behind, sitting at the wheel of the armored car, Stig winced at the impact. The Loko truck rampaged onward. Two more crumpled Cruisers lurched into the air as it struck them, their force fields flaring dangerous scarlet. Scraps of wreckage tumbled fast across Highway One beneath a huge fireball flooding up into the empty sapphire sky. Tiger Pansy squealed in Stig’s ear. It was like a fingernail scrape plugged into a rock band’s amp stack. “Holy shit,” she sighed in exhilaration. “You’re not going to…?”

He kept the accelerator floored as the blazing chassis of the truck performed a slow jackknife across the two southbound lanes. The buildings on the side of the road were getting perilously close, blocking the narrow slit of side window with a high-speed smear of fanciful colored paint. In front, the Loko’s chassis was slowly coming to a halt, leaving a very small gap that continued to shrink. Stig’s arms gripped the steering wheel like bands of steel. He refused to brake. Flames were fanning out across the enzyme-bonded concrete as the tank on the fourth Cruiser burst open, spilling out a wave of fuel that was already alight.

“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley gasped from the front passenger bench; his hands clawed at the cushioning. A lavish sheet of flame roared upward, covering both lanes.

They flashed through the gap, their slipstream pulling some of the flame with them. In the air above, fire and smoke swirled in micro-cyclone patterns.

“Fucking-A,” Tiger Pansy agreed loudly.

The road ahead was clear. Stig steered them back into the outside lane. The Mazda jeeps and the other armored cars following him drove through the gap, keeping their set fifty-meter separation distance. Then came the last three Loko trucks.

“Cat?” Stig called. “Cat, are you okay?”

Bradley was pressed against the slit window, staring back along the road. “Can’t see anybody. Still a lot of flame.”

“Cat?” Morton asked; for once he sounded concerned.

“Boys. You care. How sweet.”

Cheers rang out from all the vehicles.

In the rearview camera image Stig saw the Cat’s armored shape walk out of the ruined feed store. A Mazda jeep braked hard, tires leaving black rubber streaks on the enzyme-bonded concrete. The front door opened, and the Cat climbed in as if she were hitching a lift.

“Any bad guys survive?” Alic asked.

“I’m monitoring local net traffic,” Keely said. “The residents haven’t seen any yet. Mind you, they’re still keeping their heads down.”

“Tell them not to approach any survivors,” Bradley said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now that was fun,” the Cat said. “How long till the next one?”

“Half an hour,” Olwen muttered in a piqued tone.

Like all of them, Olwen had been keen to join battle when they finally caught up with the Starflyer. It was an event Stig and Bradley had soon realized was never going to happen if they kept getting delayed by the Institute patrols. Bradley had made the decision to adopt the head-on collision tactic. Only the state-of-the-art armor suits worn by the Paris team and Cat’s Claws could perform that duty, which left the rest of the Guardians more than a little envious.

Another of the big Loko trucks they’d liberated from the depot growled past Stig’s armored car. Jim Nwan was driving; his gauntlet waved as he maneuvered the truck into point position.

The beezees Stig had taken to keep alert during the second full day of driving made it hard for him to slacken his grip on the steering wheel. They narrowed the brain’s focus onto one task and kept the neurons zinging with the precision of a processor; people had kept doing the same thing for up to a week when they were dosed up. You didn’t need sleep, but it became difficult for the mind to nudge its way out of the thought-loop that bestowed so much attention.

“Anybody else between us and the Anculan?” he asked.

“No reported sightings,” Keely said. “I’m still not getting anything close to the bridge. The road net ends a hundred sixty kilometers this side of it. Even the redundant systems have failed after that. Nobody’s picking up any radio coming from the south, either. I’m still getting check signals from Rock Dee on the short wave but that’s all.”

“Okay.”

At their current speed, and assuming no further clashes with the Institute, they’d reach the Anculan bridge in another two and a half hours. Best guess put the Starflyer there an hour ago. They didn’t know exactly; communications had fallen off dramatically when the Starflyer convoy passed that magic sixty-kilometer marker. What the Institute had done to kill the road’s net was subject to a lot of debate among the Guardians.

Stig was desperate for some news. Anculan was where the clans were making their biggest effort to intercept the Starflyer on Highway One. If that didn’t slow it down, then the whole pursuit would be for nothing, and they’d have to depend on the planet’s revenge and the Final Raid. Not that he would ever criticize Bradley Johansson, but for plans that had been a hundred years in the making, their time frame was starting to look pretty shitty. Besides, the bombing run on 3F Plaza made this personal; he wanted to take down the Starflyer himself. The beezees was loose enough to second-track that thought.

Bradley bent over and gave his short-wave array a hard look. “That sounds like Samantha.”

Stig’s eyes never left the road. He’d isolated his inserts from any external communication to help his concentration. Up in front Jim Nwan’s truck was belching out a lot of exhaust fumes. The hard blue of the sky splashed strong waves along its elaborate chrome finish. He tried to lock down any repetitive pattern in the reflections. “What does she say?”

“They’re at the last manipulator station. I guess that means Adam got through with their equipment.”

“Good man, Adam, no traitor is going to derail him.”

“Hang on…” A grin flicked over his lips. “She keeps saying she’s ready to surf the next wave.” He switched the short-wave array to transmit. “Message acknowledged. Have a good day at the beach.” His reply was automatically repeated ten times.

Olwen dropped her arms onto the back of Bradley’s seat, her head resting in her hands, and grinning in satisfaction. “Tomorrow! Dreaming heavens, can you believe this. It’s going to happen tomorrow!”

“Not if I catch it first,” Stig grunted.

Olwen and Bradley shared a glance.

“So, Bradley, how do you feel about this?” Tiger Pansy asked. She was oblivious to the way Olwen’s mouth wrinkled with disapproval. “You’ve waited a long time for it to happen.”

“I’m not sure I feel anything,” Bradley said. “I just keep focused on the events happening around us. I know I set them all in motion but I don’t think I’d ever tried to visualize them for myself before. It’s quite something, like looking out on an avalanche as it thunders down a mountain and knowing you threw the first pebble.”

“It’s an avalanche that’ll bury that bastard Starflyer,” Olwen said. “We’ll see to it.”

“Thank you, my dear. It is your clans that have gifted me a great deal of strength over the decades. You have no idea what it is like to be surrounded by contempt and hatred and yet still have somebody believe in you.”

“Commonwealth’s going to owe us, huh?”

“They always have, they just never knew it. So do you know yet, dear Olwen, what you’re going to do afterward?”

“No. Never even thought about it. It’s still kind of hard to accept this is happening. I always expected it would be the next generation who helped the planet have its revenge, or the one after. Never mine.”

“Ah well, the day after tomorrow we will all have to sit down and think about what is to become of us. The clans will have to transform themselves. Into what, who knows.”

“If I’m still alive the day after tomorrow, I’ll be at the biggest party Far Away’s ever had.”

“Fair enough, my dear; we’ll wait until after the hangover before we make any important decisions.”

They saw the smoke from a few kilometers away. Thin smears of gray vapor wafted up into the hazy equatorial sky, the kind of smoke that only comes from embers.

Haville wasn’t a big town; it ran for a couple of kilometers beside the road before tailing off into orange groves. The Starflyer convoy had started a firestorm at one end and ripped it down the entire length. Shacks assembled from carbon panels had been reduced to piles of slag sprawling over their concrete foundations. Black horizontal scorch marks produced by lasers and masers were visible on all the surviving concrete block walls, running right across the gutted buildings. People were visible amid the debris, desolated and wandering around aimlessly, their shocked eyes following the Guardians’ convoy as they charged past. One large open yard had a line of corpses, wrapped up in cloth.

“They hit every node junction,” Keely reported. “It’s not like the net was armored or anything.”

“I don’t think they were that precise,” Bradley said as they reached the end of Haville. Trees along the edge of the orange grove were still burning. “This is a deliberate scorched earth operation to kill any long-range communications along the road.”

“Do you think they’ve done this to every town?” Olwen asked.

“Undoubtedly.”

Nothing else moved along Highway One now. South of Rob Lacey’s great avenue of redwoods the land rose steadily to be capped by low hills whose valleys interlocked in gentle curves. Bradley could remember traveling along a newly laid Highway One when this tableland had been barren territory. Today, nearly two centuries later, the rolling slopes were carpeted by rich emerald vegetation of shaggy grass and small verdant trees. Midday sun turned the crown of the sapphire sky to a white blaze-patch too bright to look at directly. Visibility was perfect. Looking over Stig’s shoulder through the thick glass of the armored car’s windshield he could see the mud-gray strip of enzyme-bonded concrete wind onward through the meandering vales for kilometers in front of them. There was nowhere for a Cruiser patrol to hide. Stig and the other drivers were piling on the speed.

Since Haville, they’d passed through four more small towns that the Starflyer had razed to the ground, ending with Zeefield, the southernmost settlement along Highway One. Word had obviously spread southward in time. The last three had been deserted; they’d seen no distraught victims nor lines of corpses amid the smoldering ruins. Wherever the residents had fled to, they were staying quiet. Keely had been unable to raise anyone on the local bands.

Right across the rolling tablelands, the fiber-optic cable that linked the Institute to Armstrong City supported a series of nodes to provide communications to anyone using the road. They were spaced five kilometers apart, protected from the elements inside meter-wide domes that sprouted from the ground beside the road like composite mushrooms. Every one had been masered, the high-density carbon turning to a slate-gray sludge surrounded by singed grass.

“I came up here for my first act against the Starflyer,” Stig said as Highway One began to dip down into one of the deeper vales toward the end of the tablelands. “We were always cutting the cable up here. It was easy.”

“Now they’re using that isolation against us,” Bradley said. “Though attacking every single node speaks of deep insecurity. A couple of simple cuts would be sufficient.”

“Why bother?” Olwen asked. “It knows we’re using short wave; it can’t block our critical communications.”

“In some respects it is remarkably unimaginative,” Bradley said. “If destroying the road net has caused us inconvenience before, it simply continues to perform the disruption.”

“That sounds more like an array program than a sentient creature.”

“In some respects its neurological functions are strikingly similar to those of a processor. What tactics it possesses it either determines by trial and error, or absorbs from other more intuitive sources. A fast-flowing situation like this chase will be difficult for it. There is no time for it to work through options to see which is the most effective.”

“You mean it gets its ideas from humans?”

“Yes, a lot of the time; though the longer they are under its control, the more their ability to think in an original or inventive fashion is reduced.”

“No wonder it wants to get rid of us. It can’t compete.”

“Not on our terms, no. But nonetheless it has brought us to the brink of destruction. Don’t underestimate it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bradley was moved by the level of determination in her voice. Returning to Far Away after so long he’d even been slightly disturbed by the unquestioning respect he kindled among the clans. It was almost as if the Commonwealth authorities were right to brand him a cult leader.

Highway One began its long descent out of the tablelands, tracking around the steeper gorges, then bending in great switchback loops down the final escarpment to deliver them onto the sweltering veldt. This was where Far Away’s first true rainforest was busy establishing itself, sweeping out from Mount StOmer at the northwestern corner of the Dessault Mountains away to the southern shoreline of the Oak Sea. The grasses had come first, seeded by the blimpbots, refreshing the soil before the trees and vines were introduced over a fifty-year period. The central core of rainforest was now thriving and expanding without any further human encouragement.

Bradley could see the Anculan Valley from a long way off, an intrusive furrow running west to east across the veldt, emptying into the Oak Sea. Its vegetation was noticeably darker than the luxuriant jade of the rainforest, shading down to olive-green as if the gully was permanently in shadow. The river was fed by dozens of tributaries emerging from the Dessault range, giving it a lavish forceful flow that had cut deep into the landscape, creating a gully over two hundred meters wide and up to thirty deep with near-sheer sides. Dense bushes filled the base of the gully on either side of the water, their half-exposed root balls scrabbling for purchase on the glutinous mud. Water pumpkins had colonized the shallows, their brimstone-colored fruit bobbing about, ranging from buds no bigger than oranges up to the full-grown football-size globes with mushy wrinkled skin. Their wreath of slim black tendrils swished around them in the current as if eels were nesting in the stem. This close to the mountains the Anculan’s water was loaded with so much sediment it was the color of milky coffee.

Given the difficulty and expense of ferrying steel girders to Far Away, the most cost-effective method of bridging a gulf of this size was with a single span arch of concrete supporting the road above, which narrowed from its usual four lanes down to two.

The Guardian demolition team had made a good job of bringing it down. All that remained of the arch were thick broken tusks of concrete curving up from either side of the river. The central hundred-meter section of the road was gone, its remnants a cluster of submerged boulders creating a furious surge of white water.

Alic and Morton stood on the edge of the broken road, using their active sensors to scan the thick wall of the rainforest on the opposite side. There was no sign of hostiles hidden among the wall of vegetation. “Looks clear,” Alic reported.

Stig and the others stood on the lip of the gorge next to the road, looking down into the surging water twenty meters below. Bodies were snagged on the new boulders, three of them wearing the dark impact armor of the Institute troops, a couple in camouflage fatigues. They all had terrible wounds. A Charlemagne had been snagged by the bushes just below the river, its body starting to bloat. When Stig started to scan upstream, he saw more bodies jammed into the mud and vegetation.

“Pretty clear which way they went,” Bradley said. A swathe of open ground bordered the top of the gorge, where grass creepers and bushes formed a buffer between the rainforest and the precipice. Its moist soil had been torn up by the wheels of the Starflyer convoy.

“Commander Hogan, Morton, could your people take point along here please,” Bradley said. “We need to find where they forded the river.”

“Sure thing,” Alic said. He and Morton left the bridge.

Cat’s Claws and the Paris team began jogging along the track, with the armored cars and jeeps following. They drove along the top of the gorge for another two kilometers. In some places the walls rose up to forty meters high. Below them, scattered along the river, dead bodies lay in the mud with water flowing around and over them. After the first thirty, everyone stopped counting.

The Starflyer convoy had made its crossing two and a quarter kilometers upriver from the bridge. A dip in the gorge wall on both sides reduced the height to a little over ten meters. Explosives had been used to rip the bottom out of the dip and pulverize the remainder of the wall, creating a sloping heap that the vehicles could drive down. It was a crude ramp that was mirrored on the other side of the Anculan.

Three wrecked Cruisers were just visible in the middle of the river, with the water churning over them; two more were burnt out on the northern ramp. One had been caught by kinetic and ion fire on the other side, then bulldozed out of the way by a heavier vehicle. Big patches of vegetation were blackened and smoldering. Twenty dead Charlemagnes were lying among the sodden bushes; some still had their riders strapped into the saddle. There were more bodies in the edges of the rainforest.

Bradley gazed out on the battlefield and lowered his head in grief. “Dreaming heavens, please let this end swiftly.”

“One of them’s moving!” Morton called out. “Cover me, please.” He started down the rough slope, his boots slipping and sliding on the muddy shale. Rob and the Cat followed at a slower rate.

“Commander, can you get over to the other side, please,” Bradley said. “Make sure there are no surprises for us over there.”

“You got it,” Alic acknowledged.

The Paris team started down the ramp.

“Stig, we’ll go over as soon as they’ve given us the go-ahead.”

“Yes, sir.” Stig eyed the turbulent river. “Uh, our jeeps will get through that kind of current okay. I’m not sure about some of the trucks on a river this strong. We could rig up winches, perhaps.”

“No. We have to keep moving. Anything that can’t make it under its own power is left here.”

“Bradley,” Morton called. “He’s one of yours. Keeps asking for you.”

Bradley went down the ramp along one of the tire tracks, thinking the soil and shingle would be firmer there; even so his feet slipped several times on loose patches. Stig followed him a couple of paces behind, their biggest medical kit bag hanging off his shoulder.

Cat’s Claws were standing some way off the bottom of the ramp in the middle of the bushes. One of the Charlemagnes had fallen nearby, its bulk skidding for several meters through the undergrowth before it finally stopped. Just behind it, lying in the muddy wake of crushed vegetation, its rider had come to rest in a gouge that was slowly filling with water. His scarf was the emerald and copper check of the McFoster clan, though the proud colors were now hard to distinguish below all the blood that the cloth had soaked up. A very old-fashioned force field skeleton worn over his dark fatigues had burned through in several places. By far the worst of his wounds was a rent along the side of his torso, which was coated in bloody mud.

Bradley narrowed his eyes at the sight of the man’s thick ruddy skin with its subsurface lacework of broken veins. “Harvey? Harvey, is that you?”

“Dreaming heavens, it is you,” Harvey’s ruined voice croaked feebly. “They said you were here. I didn’t believe it, not really. I’m sorry. I knew in my heart you wouldn’t leave us to face that monster alone.”

Bradley dropped to his knees in the blood puddles beside the old warrior. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to fight anymore.”

“One last battle, Bradley. That’s all. I grew so tired of training the youngsters, sending them out while I waited behind. I always needed one last battle for myself. And thank the dreaming heavens it was a glorious fight. Our ancestors are proud of us this day.”

“I’m proud of you, Harvey, I always have been. Now lie back, Stig’s got a medical kit, he’ll get you stable.”

“Bradley.” Harvey’s hand came up and gripped the front of Bradley’s shirt.

“Yes?”

“Bradley…you should see the other fella.” Breath rasped out of his mouth in the best laughter he could produce.

Bradley closed his hand over Harvey’s. “Don’t talk.”

Stig almost fell to the ground, staring aghast at his old combat instructor. “You’ll be all right, Harvey. I’ve got a medical kit that’s come direct from the Commonwealth. There’s healskin in it, and biogenics, the whole works.”

“Save it, lad,” Harvey whispered. “You’ll need it for real after the planet’s revenge.”

Stig bowed his head, tears running freely down his cheeks.

“Harvey?” Bradley asked. “How long ago did this happen? Can you remember?”

“I’ve got it for you,” Harvey said. “I watched when the monster’s truck went up the slope and noted the time. I knew you’d need it. The others, all kids, they never listen to me when I tell them what’s important.” He glanced at the ancient black chrome digital watch on his wrist. “Eighty-seven minutes, Bradley. That’s all it’s got on you now. I told you we put up a good fight.”

“You did. And we will finish the job now, I promise that.”

Harvey’s eyes closed. He let out a wheezing breath.

“Give him something for the pain,” Bradley told Stig. “Then get him into one of our jeeps.” He gently detached Harvey’s hand from his shirt, and looked at the scarlet mud stain it had left there as though trying to remember how it got there.

“Sir,” Stig said with an edgy voice. “We can’t move him. These injuries…”

“Harvey is going to the dreaming heavens, and nothing you carry in your bag will prevent that,” Bradley said. “We cannot wait here for that to happen, and I will not allow him to be left alone to die. Even if he only lasts a few minutes he will be with us, his comrades, as we chase our nemesis to its doom. Would you deny him that?”

Harvey laughed again, a weak burbling sound. His eyes were still closed. “You tell him, Bradley. Kids today, may the dreaming heavens preserve us from them.”

Stig nodded humbly, and opened the medical kit.

Bradley climbed to his feet. “Eighty-seven minutes,” he told Cat’s Claws. “We can catch it.”

Adam had considered the name wet desert to be a near perfect oxymoron, right up until the moment they started driving across it. Every day the storm that came in from the Hondu Ocean at dawn brought clouds that dumped between four and five centimeters of rain on the region before they finally blew out in the late morning. The wet desert was a wide shelf of land dropping steadily over hundreds of kilometers from the Aldrin Plains down to the shore of the ocean, a flat expanse that was made up from sand and shingle. Essentially it was the biggest beach in the known galaxy, although the last tide had gone out about a quarter of a million years ago. Geologists on early survey expeditions determined it used to be covered by the Hondu Ocean, which would have put the Grand Triad right on the coastline. It must have been quite something to see the lava from such enormous volcanoes pouring into the ocean.

When the rains fell on the wet desert they flowed across the saturated surface into hundreds of shallow, kilometers-wide channels that drained right back into the ocean. An hour after the clouds were banished into the east the ground was exposed again, the runoff was so quick. Noon equatorial sunlight shone down through empty skies, baking the waterlogged surface and producing a layer of warm viscous fog that clung to the ground for most of the rest of the day.

In the early days of the planet’s human settlement, the revitalization team spread some lichen spores about over the wet desert, then went away scratching their heads unsure what to do next. That was a hundred fifty years ago. They still hadn’t been back.

There was no sign of lichen from the cab of the lead Volvo. There was no sign of any life. No high-order organism could survive the strange cycle of water, heat, vapor, and scouring winds.

Adam himself was taking a turn at the wheel. It had been an exhausting trip, especially for the Guardians who’d shared the driving so the three navy people could rest before the flight. They’d only just made it past Mount Herculaneum in the small hours of the morning. After that they were halfway around the rocky base of Mount Zeus as the dawn broke and the winds rose, forcing them to park behind a rock outcrop and secure the Volvo cabs with carbicon ropes. Even then Adam had been frightened that the heavy vehicles would be blown away. Samantha was right, if they’d been caught at the base of Herculaneum in the full blast of the storm as it churned around the giant mountain’s flanks they would never have survived.

Once the winds subsided enough for them to walk around without being blown away, they’d untied the ropes and set off again. A couple of hours later they reached the northernmost boundary of Zeus’s base, and powered down onto the wet desert. Almost immediately they’d been engulfed by the fog.

The radar was on, sweeping ahead for obstacles or ravines. So far there hadn’t been any. Adam didn’t have the headlights on, there was no point. The sun fluoresced the fog to a uniform white glow surrounding the cab as it sped onward; visibility was rarely more than fifteen meters. Even so, he could push the speed up to a good hundred thirty kilometers an hour.

There was no problem with erosion on the wet desert; total saturation bestowed the sand with a fantastic degree of cohesion, locking every grain and grit particle into place like an epoxy. It provided a remarkably stable base to drive on, albeit one with very poor traction had they needed to brake sharply. The wide drainage channels were at most fifteen centimeters deep, allowing them to speed across unhindered. Huge fantails of spray unfolded from the Volvo’s wheels as if they were sprouting wings.

“I think we’re coming up on the town,” Adam announced. The radar was showing a protuberance rising out of the flat ground eight kilometers ahead of them, the first real interruption to the wet desert’s monotony.

Rosamund crowded over his shoulder, staring at the screen. “Yeah that’s got to be it. Coordinates match.”

Adam squinted, his retinal inserts on maximum resolution. Beyond the dreary sweep of the windshield wipers the radiant fog remained resolutely impenetrable. He checked the radar again. “Is that size right?” His foot instinctively eased off the accelerator.

“I guess so.” Rosamund sounded perturbed now.

Calling this region the wet desert should have warned Adam; Far Away’s inhabitants were a literal lot. The stone wave was a ridge of red sedimentary rock almost two kilometers long, and rising up to three hundred meters along its smooth crest. Erosion had eviscerated one side, sculpting a gigantic overhanging cavity that ran for two-thirds of the length and extending up to three hundred meters deep. Looking at it as they approached from the southern end, Adam saw it really did have the shape of a huge wave, frozen as it started to curve over. According to his files, geologists were still arguing if it had eroded before or after the ocean withdrew.

Stonewave’s buildings were laid out in the center of the giant overhang where the arching roof was at its highest, a hundred fifty meters to the crest. Although they varied in size they all followed the same simple oblong box design, standing on short stilts to keep them perfectly level. Their walls, floors, and roofs were made from identical blank carbon squares fixed to a sturdy frame. Tucked into the hollow of the wave they were protected from the worst of the elements; the rain never touched them, though the morning wind was still formidable as it eddied over the sheltering rock.

The little town existed only to support the hypergliders. Two of the buildings were fitted out as luxury hotels with fifteen beds each for the ultra-rich tourists who came here to test their luck and nerves in the morning storms. The tourist company staff shared three dormitory blocks; there was a diesel generator, a waste recycling plant, garages, and hangars.

Adam drove the cab up onto the rock floor and braked outside one of the hangars with a sign above the sliding doors that read GRAND TRIAD ADVENTURES. His e-butler had been trying to establish a link to the building management arrays with no result. When he scanned around with his retinal insets on infrared the geometric buildings were a uniform temperature.

“Looks like it’s deserted,” he said.

“The companies would have shut it down once the tourists stopped coming,” Rosamund said.

“Christ, I hope they left the hypergliders.”

“No reason not to.”

Adam went back to check on Paula. The Investigator was asleep on her little cot, knees drawn up toward her chest. Her forehead was slick with sweat and her breathing was now very shallow. Every now and then she would make a gulping sound as if she were drowning. Adam stared down at her in dismay. He simply didn’t know what to do about her. The sedatives had their limits, and none of the drugs or biogenics had made the slightest difference to her overall condition. He was scared to apply the diagnostic array for fear of what it would tell him.

“Stay here and watch her,” he told Rosamund.

She started to protest but he waved her down. “We don’t know this illness is for real,” Adam said, feeling a complete hypocrite. “And if she wakes up you must get her to drink. Force her if necessary.” In addition to all his other concerns was how long it’d been since she’d eaten anything. The medical kit did contain equipment for intravenous feeding, but he didn’t want to go down that route until he had no choice.

He left the cab quickly, shamed at his own relief to be leaving the problem behind. The other Volvo cab had parked just behind his. Wilson was already climbing down when Kieran turned the engine off. It was as if the sound had been sucked away. Between them the stone and fog did weird things to acoustics. Adam glanced up at the curving overhang feeling unnerved for no reason he could pin down.

“How’s Paula?” Wilson asked.

“No change,” Adam replied curtly. “Did you get your arrays modified to handle the comrelay function Samantha needs?”

“We think so, yes; the range is a problem. We took some of the Volvo’s modules apart and realigned them. The new unit should do the trick, but we only got one. I want to take the modules from your cab, and I’m hoping that the vehicles here should have similar electronics.”

“They ought to,” Jamas said. He’d climbed down from the cab along with Anna and Oscar. “The vehicles which the tourist companies use have to keep in contact over long distances. They’ve probably got better transmitters than the Volvos.”

“Okay, you and Kieran search around for them. We’ll need them to tow the hypergliders anyway. And be careful; we don’t know this place is deserted. The four of us will take the hangars.”

There was a small door on the side of the Grand Triad Adventures hangar. Adam had to shoot the lock out with a low-power ion pulse. It was so dark inside that even his retinal inserts were struggling to produce an image. He fumbled around and found the light switch. There must have been some kind of reserve power supply; long polyphoto strips came on, strangely yellow after the unending monochrome glow of the fog. Eight hypergliders rested on their transport cradles. They were in their primary configuration, a fat cigar shape with wings and tailplane buds retracted into flat triangles against the fuselage.

Oscar whistled in admiration. “Nice machinery.”

“You guys had better check them over,” Adam said. “This is your scene.”

“Sure,” Wilson said. “See if you can find the hangar’s arrays, please; we’ll need the maintenance records.”

“And their performance specs,” Anna added. Her extensive pattern of OCtattoos was emerging to gleam with a gold luster under the hangar lights. “This is one difficult trajectory we’re going to have to fly. The arc has got to terminate just right.”

“We’ll have to perform a standard overflight trajectory to begin with,” Wilson said. “Once you’re out of the twister you’ll be able to adapt the flight profile; kill the velocity and alter the angle to give a touchdown behind Aphrodite’s Seat. You can always lose speed, you won’t be able to gain it. It’ll be tricky, but one of us should manage to get close enough.”

Oscar shot Adam a fast accusing look.

“They must have some sort of summit landing capacity built in,” Anna was saying. “They can’t all hop over the top successfully.”

“If you haven’t got the velocity high enough you’re supposed to veer off and go around,” Wilson said. He found the manual release for the cockpit canopy on the first hyperglider, and twisted it. The transparent bubble hinged up smoothly. Wilson bent over the rim. “Here we go.”

Adam’s e-butler reported the hyperglider’s pilot array had just come on-line. He held Oscar’s gaze uncompromisingly for a moment, then ducked into the office at the back of the hangar. The air inside was musty after being sealed up for so long; every surface had a damp chill to it. Some of the metal items even had a slight coating of condensation.

The desktop array came on as soon as he touched the power stud. Even better, its programs and files didn’t have encrypted access. He started to pull up the general information.

“Adam,” Kieran called on an encrypted link, “we’ve found the jeeps they use for towing the hypergliders over to Stakeout Canyon. Talk about wind resistant, they look like bubbles. I think they’ve got anchors, too.”

“Good. See if they’ve got a service log. We’ll take the two with the best record.”

“Will do. Uh, aren’t we taking three hypergliders?”

“I’ll talk to you guys about that in a minute.”

“Okay. They all need fueling up anyway. Jamas is going to track down the main diesel tank.”

Adam found a file containing the Grand Triad Adventures introduction to hypergliding, and gave his e-butler a list of the specific information he wanted extracted. “What about the drilling equipment they use to tether the gliders?” he asked Kieran.

“Not here. I’ll scout around when I’ve sorted out the jeeps.”

“Right.” A standard itinerary popped up into Adam’s virtual vision. “Damn, we’re going to have to be quick. They normally leave for Stakeout Canyon at noon. That gives the crews time to position the hypergliders in the evening and get clear while it’s still light.”

“We’ll manage it.”

Adam’s e-butler had pulled out several sections from the introduction now. He skimmed through them until he found the files on skill memory. The implant was done in a room off the side of the office. He opened the door and found what looked like the kind of waiting area you’d get in a modestly successful legal firm. The exception was the five comfortable leather couches arranged along the back wall, each with its own sophisticated array. A dark mold was starting to spread out of the edges of the slightly damp leather; the first living organism they’d seen since they arrived on the wet desert. He checked the power reserves on the arrays.

“I’ve found the skill memory implanters,” he told the others as he came back into the hangar.

Five of the hypergliders had been opened. Wilson was sitting in the cockpit of one, his hands resting on the console i-spots. Below and behind him the wing buds flexed as if something inside them wanted to be birthed.

“Well done,” Wilson said.

“Not quite. There’s a slight problem. The humidity back there is even worse than in here. It’s screwed up some of the array connections. I’m really only happy with one of the systems. You’ll have to go one at a time. I’ll settle Oscar in first.”

“Okay,” Wilson said.

Oscar’s stony expression was unreadable.

“How’s it going out here?” Adam asked.

“We’re running through the preflight checklists,” Oscar told Adam quietly. “So far all five seem operational.”

Anna walked past, hauling a thick superconductor cable that she plugged into a socket on the second hyperglider. “They’re going to need charging before we take them out. The secondary power supply is okay, but they can’t fly on that. We need the main cells charged; the electromuscle and plyplastic have a lot of work to do.”

“I think the town generator was in the first building we came past,” Adam said. “Oh, and we need to leave soonest. The drive to Stakeout Canyon from here normally takes a good six hours. Then we have to plant the tether anchors.”

Wilson stood up in the cockpit. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

“We need tether cables for the hypergliders as well,” Anna said. “They must be around here somewhere.”

“You two sort that out,” Adam said. “I’ll get Oscar up to speed on the joys of hypergliding.”

“There’s plenty to go around,” Anna said. She was grinning as she gestured around the hangar. “Fancy joining us?”

“Not at my age and weight, thank you.”

Wilson clambered down out of the cockpit. He zipped up the front of his fleece. “Keep an eye on the checklists for me, please.”

“Will do,” Adam promised.

Oscar looked along the row of couches in the rear room. One of them had its array activated; green LEDs were shining on the front of the unit. He gave a snort of disgust. “Water damage my ass!”

“We still need them to get the hyperglider ready for you.”

“This is wrong. The odds are completely against me getting up there intact.”

“So tell me which one of them is the Starflyer agent?”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Exactly. Lie back on the couch.”

Oscar did as he was told. He rested his wrists on the i-spots. “Interfaced,” he said.

Adam’s virtual vision confirmed the connection. He told his e-butler to initiate the program. Plyplastic cushioning flowed over Oscar’s wrists.

“The induction prep phase will last about a minute,” he said, reading from the menu. “Implantation is eight minutes.”

“And integrity review is another minute,” Oscar said. “Yes, thank you. I went through this enough times when I was with the CST exploratory division. The junk we needed to know for that…”

“Relax please,” Adam said dryly. He moved his virtual hands across the icons, initiating the induction preparation phase.

Oscar’s eyes were already closed. Now his face began a series of minute twitches to accompany the REM.

Adam went back into the hangar. Two of the hypergliders were still running through their checklists. No problems had been red-flagged.

He was peering into the cockpit of one when he heard a sound behind him. Lifted his head to see who it was. “Oh, couldn’t you—”

The slim harmonic blade was rammed into the base of his skull, angled perfectly to slice up into his brain.