Erebus (6 page)

Fair point. Anyone who wanted to damage the Linked had far better targets to go for than Io.

“That being said, we are not writing off that possibility. Bottom line: War Crimes has the skill if it’s an act of war, a terrorist act, or a criminal act. You are going to be our on-scene representative on the international and intersystem task force that’s being put together.”

I leaned back in my chair, lightly drumming my fingers on the tabletop. A thought occurred to me. “How many casualties are we looking at? The media has kept it pretty vague.”

“Eighty-seven on the moon itself. Forty-two unrecoverable deaths on Earth between two skyliners that crashed as they came in to land and hospital system shutdowns due to the EM pulse. Maybe a few more through the system, but nothing confirmed yet.”

“And Dev,” I said.

“And Dev,” she agreed.

With all my effort, I bottled down my feelings on Dev. I had to admit, as high and as horrific a number as 130 people was, it still seemed pretty low for the destruction of an entire world, and I said as much.

“Fewer than a thousand people were on the surface of Io. From what I’m told, it was a hellhole: random volcano eruptions, earthquakes, and generally what can best be described as a pretty shitty environment. It is…it was an awful place, and the only people on the surface were engineers, scientists, and technicians to service the mostly automated power-generation systems. That was Io’s main export, apparently something to do with the way it interacts with Jupiter’s magnetosphere.” I got the impression Giselle was simply reeling off something she had been told. “Means that the moon can, or at least could, be used as a major source of power generation in the Jupiter system. Anyway, part of the operating protocol was that the crews had to be near evacuation shuttles at all times. The ones that died, well, looks like they breached protocol.”

“So this could be a strike against the Jupiter system’s power infrastructure rather than the goal of mass casualties?”

Giselle shrugged. “At the moment, we only know how whoever’s done it has done it; we don’t know why or who. That’s what we have to find out.”

“And you said ‘on scene’?” I asked, though I thought I knew what was coming.

“That’s right, I did. You’re leaving tomorrow.”

“I’m…not entirely sure what value I can add to this investigation,” I said. With fifteen years of being a cop, I was used to new situations—the bizarre, nasty, and just plain strange—being thrust upon me. And with War Crimes? This job had taken me all over the world, often on short notice, but never had I thought it would take me into space. But then, whatever had happened out there was a massive part of why Dev wasn’t going to ever go home to his family again.

“Layton, I don’t have a cloning facility for team leaders hidden in the basement,” she replied. It was strange for Giselle to be so short. She was normally unflappable. But then, it wasn’t just me that had lost a colleague and friend. “My orders have been cut. War Crimes is to provide an investigator for the task force, and you’re it. You’ll have some transit time to get the handover done.”

I glanced again at the image of the roiling wreckage of Io, back-dropped by the huge gas giant. I doubt whoever had destroyed the moon knew about Dev, and they wouldn’t have cared if they did. But I cared. If I went, I could bring them to justice for my friend’s death.

“I’ll get packing, then.”

My little apartment was small, modern, near the coast, and suited me. It was about as minimalist as it was possible to get—all magnolia, glass, and chrome. Most importantly, it was close to the bars and town center. It was the kind of place that was the bachelor’s lot since my father was a twinkle in his father’s eye. As soon as I entered, I emptied my duffel bag of clothes into the washer and began my homework.

I was still old-fashioned enough to actually like reading about stuff rather than just downloading information straight to my implants, but I simply didn’t have the time. I would have to direct-download as much useful information as I could.

The trick these days wasn’t filling up your memory with random, and probably contradicting, texts from the vast beast that was the Hypernet; you had to know where to get the good stuff. Some of what was on the Net was on-the-button accurate. The majority could best be described as the ramblings of buffoons.

Flopping down on my black leather sofa, I switched my retinal implants to desktop mode. The HUD opened up fully in my vision, creating a virtual office suite. I ran enquiries through the search engines, dragging and dropping Hypernet page icons that seemed useful around the room. Hovering in the air to the left were things that I would definitely download, to the right were maybes, and in the center I was working. Basically, I was looking for an idiot’s guide to Alcubierre drives and ships, getting a bit of political awareness about the Jupiter system and trying to figure out just why anyone would want to target Io.

The first was pretty easy. The Hypernet contained plenty of popular science books about A-drives, and I downloaded a couple of them. I felt my consciousness gain that knowledge, a wealth of information becoming available to me. I gained some understanding of how and why they operated. Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t be able to build an A-drive from scratch—but then, I didn’t need to. I just needed to know the general principles.

The political awareness thing was more of a problem. Most of the sources on the Net went through the filter of Earth’s political prejudices. A lot of people planet-side viewed the Linked, the main power out in Jupiter space, as a bit on the creepy side.

Linking was a technology that nearly everyone used. It followed a natural progression from Morse code through mobile telephones to the modern day. A link was a computer implanted in your brain that gave you access to the Hypernet, allowed you to talk with friends, and provided a wealth of apps. My link was chock-a-block with law enforcement tools, tactical overlays, and things to manage the other implants throughout my body, not to mention a few games, which helped me pass the time.

The Linked were different, though. They had taken the technology to the next level. They kept their links constantly open to each other. Each member of the community had free access to everyone else. Now that they were several generations down the line, they had more and more evolved a kind of hive mind. Inner-system dwellers had many slang terms for them, ranging from the mildly insulting
hivers
to the full-on slur,
the bugs.

Until the Io incident, I hadn’t devoted much head space to them. I just considered them a bunch of peaceful space hippies that lived pretty damn far away and didn’t affect me in the slightest.

Not everyone was as ambivalent or egalitarian as me, though. Numerous organizations were deeply suspicious of them. They suggested they had motives ranging from kidnapping inner-system children to forcibly link to them to plotting a full-scale invasion of Earth. As far as I was aware, the Linked were about as antiviolent as it was possible to get—something which we Enhanced and Naturals sadly were not.

I continued my surfing and downloading into the small hours, filling my brain with all kinds of information that I might find useful on my assignment.

Eventually, I closed down my HUD and stretched out. I could hear birdsong through the open windows of my apartment, and I could see the first hints of dawn starting to stain the sky red.

Giving a yawn, I thought of my bed. There was only one thing preventing me from escaping into blissful sleep…

I still had to pack.

I was still bleary-eyed from getting some shut-eye on the flight from Rotterdam. The custom’s security station scanned the passport implant on my right forearm, and the light on the arrivals gateway turned green. I walked through into the bright sunlit mall of the Mediterranean Anchorage. Everything had that fresh and airy feel of a well-maintained airport.

I wasn’t due to board my elevator car for an hour and had some time to kill. I walked over the marble floor of the mall, past tinkling fountains and beautiful plant beds to the deli. I pinged my payment across, picked up a plate, and moved down the counter. I loaded up on overpriced food. Pastas, sliced meat—all of it looked good. I took a bit of most things, creating a delicious, strange mix for myself. I turned to go find a table, sat down, and began tucking in.

A shadow fell across my table. I looked up to see an athletically built Asian male standing over me.

“Hi. Are you Layton?”

I swallowed my mouthful and said wearily, “Yeah, and you?”

“May I?” He indicated the chair opposite and, without waiting for a response, lowered himself into it, pulling off his sunglasses as he did. “Cheng Zao, MSS,” he said in a friendly tone, a smile on his face. The MSS, Ministry of State Security, Chinese intelligence. I leaned back in my chair as he continued. “I’m guessing we’ll be travel buddies up to Jupiter space. You catching the 1600 hour?”

“Do I need to bother to answer that?” I asked with a wry smile.

“Nah, just being polite. Got to keep up appearances that I happened across you is all.” His English was perfect, probably better than mine to be fair. “Personally, I think there’s a time and place to spin the bullshit, but I don’t think that’s now, especially with all that’s going on up there.”

I’m not an overly paranoid man, but I suspect the companionable approach was just that—an approach and a way to ingratiate himself with me. I’d dealt with a few intelligence types before and had long since ceased viewing their shadowy trade as having any kind of mystique. They were just guys, albeit usually with motives for speaking to you that they kept close to their chests. It was pretty obvious what was going on with Cheng, though. He’d been sent by Beijing for the same reason I’d been sent by The Hague to find out what the hell was going on in Jupiter space.

“Yeah, tell me about it. Well, pleased to meet you, Zao.” I reached out my hand, and he shook it, his grip cool and a little too firm. Heavily enhanced? Possibly, or just one of those people that liked to try and exert their authority by trying to crush your hand when shaking it.

“Sorry, excuse me,” he said. My implants registered a strange signal coming from him. “Just putting up a privacy field so we can talk a bit more freely. Old habits and all that.” Whatever field he had established was pretty sophisticated. The noise of the busy mall was subtly distorted. Everyone’s chatter away from the table was reduced to a garble. I could tell they were speaking but not what they were saying. I presumed that was all anyone would hear of our conversation, too, if they attempted to listen in. I tried to establish a link, more out of curiosity than anything else, and was rewarded by a
network down
error message.

“No problem,” I said, closing down the Link. “I take it you’re on this task force that’s being set up?”

“Yeah. I’m guessing half the folks heading space-side at the moment are governments or corporations doing the same thing,” Cheng replied.

“So, I presume you want a game of I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours?” I asked.

“Definitely. It’s why I came to say hello, after all. I’ll start if you want?” I nodded; very magnanimous of him. “We have nothing, nada, zip. At best we have a few working theories, and that’s it.”

Well, that was short. “Pretty much the same,” I said. “All we know is someone decided to slam the
Magellan
into Io but at least had the common courtesy to give a bit of warning to allow most people to get off the rock first. You got any lead contenders?”

“With the means to take over an A-liner and motive to do what they did? No, we’re struggling. We’ve got eyes on a few domestic and international pressure and terrorist groups: Terra Prime, the Unlinked, folks like that. We’re watching them like hawks, and we’ve called in every bit of HUMINT we have embedded with them. Our operatives and handlers report that while these groups seem pretty happy about what’s gone on, they’re just as confused as we are.”

That pretty much tallied with the last update package I’d been sent. These groups, by and large, were formed of Hypernet warriors. They were more than happy to smack talk and issue all kinds of threats on the Net, but direct action, beyond the occasional lone-wolf bomb from their more militant members, was virtually unknown. In terms of capability, it was like them going from slingshots to nuclear weapons in one fell swoop. The intelligence agents all over the world had been having a lot of shady meetings on park benches with assets they had inside these organizations. As far as I was aware, they had come up with a big fat zero. Most of the major powers were signed up to War Crimes anyway, China included. What he was saying was nothing new to me. The problem was, while every nation had a legal obligation to share intelligence with us, I wasn’t naive enough to believe that they actually
did
. Cheng here was a case in point; for all of his friendly, approachable banter, so far he’d told me nothing. He was just not-so-subtly pumping me for information that other nations might have told us.

“So I’m taking it you still think the target was the Linked?” I asked.

He shrugged in response and grinned. “You capitalist pig dogs hate all good socialists, and you don’t get much more socialist than the Linked.”

“Zao, don’t you be getting all precious on me. One square mile of London has more socialists in it than all of China combined. I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

“Fair point.” Cheng gave a knowing smile. “But they are still the most…contentious faction up there.”

I heard the distorted sound of an announcement being made, and Cheng cocked his head. “They’re calling us to the gate to board. We had better get going.”

I was glad he had told me since I couldn’t make out a word through the distorted sound of his privacy field. I looked down at my overpriced meal, barely touched. You could be damn sure I was still going to file an expenses claim for it.

***

Together we walked through the mall exit toward the gate of our elevator car, chatting about nothing in particular. He was going on about having a kid that had just started school, good restaurants in Beijing, how I simply must visit. I listened, bemused. The guy was probably on commission to recruit a mole. First chance I got, I’d have to submit a report saying he’d made the approach, or it’d bite me on the arse. I made a half-hearted attempt to do the same thing to him. While War Crimes had no mandate for spying, on the miniscule chance he actually took me up on the offer, MI5, CIS, Federation Intel, or whoever the report ended up with would probably want a crack at recruiting him.