FALLEN DRAGON (6 page)

The four of them were having such a good time together that Denise almost felt guilty for butting in. She cleared her throat to attract their attention. The two girls instantly looked her up and down with hostile eyes, working out if she was competition or not. They decided not. Denise was the same age group as their catches, with the kind of slim healthy build that could mean she was a fellow gill instructor, and her impatient expression clearly marked her down as a no-fun person.

"Hello?" one of the girls said, her voice rising an octave with mild derision. "Were we friends in a former life?"

Any decent comeback escaped Denise. The girl's breasts were so large that for the first time Denise got an inkling of that most infuriating male reflex; she just couldn't help glancing at her cleavage. Surely she was too young to have undergone v-writing enlargement?

"Hi, Denise." Ray got up and gave her a demure peck on the cheek. "Girls, this is our housemate, Denise."

They consulted each other silently, and said a resentful, "Oh hi," to Denise.

"We just need a quick chat with Denise," Josep said. He gave his girl a quick pat on her bum. "Won't be a minute, and then we'll see where we can go to eat out tonight."

The girl licked some salt off the rim of her margarita glass. "I'd like that." She walked off with her friend, the pair of them whispering in sultry amusement. There were several coy glances thrown back at the boys.

"Working hard, I see," Denise said. Every time she found them with new girls she told herself it didn't bother her. Every time, her disapproval just spilled out.

Ray grinned. "Just following orders."

Denise steeled herself and sat on one of the vacated stools. There was nobody near them, and a melodic guitar tune was playing through the tavern's sound system. Not that Memu Bay's police were surveilling them—or even knew about them, but basic precautions now would save a lot of trouble later on. "We're clear today," she said quietly. "Prime didn't pick up any encrypted signals on the spacecom network."

"They'll come," Josep said.

His tone was understanding, more like the old Josep. He must have picked up on her frustration—he'd always been the more emotionally sensitive one. She flicked a modest grin of thanks at him. His face was broad, with high cheekbones and lovely wide brown eyes. A thick mop of floppy blond hair was held back from his forehead by a thin leather band—a gift from some girl ages ago. Raymond, by contrast, had round features and a narrow nose, his brown hair cut short. Other than that... She looked from one to the other. The only garment Raymond had on was a pair of old green shorts, while Josep's denim shirt was open down the front. Twin bodies. Did the girls they shared in bed ever comment on that? she wondered.

"I know." She got a grip on her free-flying thoughts. "Anything new from your side?"

"Actually yes," Ray said. He indicated the girls. "Sally lives in Durrell. She's at college there, a geology student."

"Okay, that's promising."

"And there's a possible contact we think should be checked out," Josep said. "His name's Gerard Parry. He started on my six-day diving proficiency course today. We got chatting. Turns out he's local. Works up at Teterton Synthetics, a distribution manager."

A cluster of neural cells in Denise's brain had undergone a d-written modification for direct communication with the local datasphere, an enhancement that human v-writing couldn't yet match. The cluster linked her directly to the pearl ring on her index finger. Her Prime program produced a brief summary of Teterton, scrolling an indigo script across her vision that detailed a small chemical processing company that supplied local food producers with specialist vitamin and protein concoctions. "Did he sound sympathetic?"

"That's for you to find out. But a contact there could be very useful. There's some compounds we still haven't acquired."

"Okay, sounds good. How do I meet him?"

"We promised him a blind date. Tonight."

"Oh God," she groaned. There would barely be time to go home and change.

"He's a nice bloke," Josep protested. "I like him. Sensitive, caring, all that bull chicks go for."

"Just as long as he's not like you," Denise snapped back.

"Ouch." He smiled. "Well, here's your chance to find out Here he comes."

"What!"

Ray stood up and waved happily. Denise turned to see the man approaching. In his thirties, overweight, with thinning hair. The restrained smile of a professional bachelor, desperate to hide how desperate he was. A broad black-glass PSA bracelet was worn on his right wrist Several girls around the tavern checked their directional displays, and hurriedly looked away.

Denise stood up to greet him, the heel of her right foot making solid contact on Josep's toes.

She didn't get home until well after eleven o'clock that night. By that time the weary anger had become a kind of numb indifference to life. All she wanted to do was go to bed and forget the entire evening.

Despite his appearance, Gerard Parry wasn't a bad man. He could hold a conversation, on local issues at least, and was willing to listen up to a point. He even had a few jokes, though he lacked the nonchalance to tell them properly. She could imagine him working hard to memorize them when he heard them around the office.

They had started off having a couple of drinks with Ray and Josep, much to the obvious disgust of the girls. Then dinner was mentioned, and Josep managed to split them up. Gerard took her to a fairly decent restaurant, which left her free to establish his political sympathies. That was when it all fell apart.

Denise never knew how much blame she should take for personal catastrophes like this. It was strange, considering how she almost unfailingly managed to befriend potential recruits who weren't single and male. She asked Gerard the questions she needed to, and tried to ask others, to show an interest in his personal life. But he figured out pretty early on that she wasn't interested in any kind of long-term relationship, or even a brief passionate affair. Men invariably figured that out about her at some time. Always, at the end of such evenings, it finished with her being told she was too intense, or cool, or aloof. Twice she'd been sneeringly accused of being a lesbian.

She didn't even mind the fact that she never made the connection. What she hated was that she could never tell them why. The fact that she'd committed herself to something more important than them, or her. It justified the way she was. But they'd never know. To all of them, she was just another wasted evening.

Gerard Parry got drunk very quickly, especially for a man of his bulk. His conversation turned into a bitter monologue; there were morbid complaints about how he missed out be
c
ause girls never looked behind his size for the real him, and rhetorical questions about what did she and the rest of the female universe want from a bloke anyway. During his ramblings, he managed to spill half a glass of red wine over the table, which splashed across her skirt. She got up and didn't look back. The headwaiter called a cab for her.

She sat in the back of the AS-driven vehicle, refusing to cry as the lively town slid by beyond the windows. Inner strength was something that could never be installed, unlike her physical ability. That, she had to supply by herself.

The Prime program in her pearl had recorded the encrypted emissions from Gerard's PSA bracelet. A gross breech of etiquette; PSAs were supposed to be exchanged. As she reviewed the data she gained a degree of satisfaction knowing what a pig he was. It made her feel a hell of a lot more justified leaving him weeping into his wine.

The bungalow she shared with Ray and Josep was in a small, prim housing estate spread along the Nium River estuary, outside the center of town. It meant a twenty-minute commute to work in the morning on the tram, but the rent was relatively cheap. At night there was just enough of a breeze coming up the estuary to keep it cool once the big archway windows were folded back. Jasmine grew up the external walls, a mass of scarlet flowers giving off a sweet scent.

Denise came through the front door and dropped her little shoulder bag on the hall table. She pressed her back to the cool plaster, arching her spine and inhaling deeply. All in all, a really shitty day.

The lights were on in the lounge, turned down low. When she peered in, one of the girls from the Junk Buoy was lying facedown on the sofa, snoring with the erratic snorts of the comatose drunk. There were muffled voices and giggles coming from Josep's bedroom, along with familiar rhythmic sounds. Josep, Ray and the huge-breasted girl energetically straining seams on the jelfoam mattress together.

It would be all right, Denise thought, once she was in her own room with the door shut. From past experience she knew the soundproofing was good enough to give her complete silence to sleep in. When she looked down at her skirt, she could see it needed spraying right away to get the wine stain out. Once she'd put it in the washing cabinet and programmed the cycle, she remembered the pile of clean laundry hurriedly dumped in the linen basket this morning, including all her other work clothes. She'd intended to do them when she got back from playschool in the afternoon. So there she was at quarter past midnight, tired and utterly miserable, standing in the kitchen in her robe, ironing her blouse for tomorrow while the shrill whoops of other people's orgasms echoed along the hall.

If there was such a thing as karma, somebody somewhere in this universe was going to get hurt
bad
to level this out.

CHAPTER THREE

Lawrence Newton never saw a cloud until he was twelve
years old. Until then, Amethi's light-time skies had been an unblemished azure from horizon to horizon. When the planet's orbit around its gas-giant primary, Nizana, eventually propelled it into dark-time and the stars came out, they would burn with a steadiness unnatural for any atmosphere, so clear was the frigid air. And with Templeton, the capital where young Lawrence lived, on the hemisphere that permanently faced away from Nizana, he never realized it was possible for anything exciting to exist overhead. In terms of landscape and environment, Amethi was crushingly boring. Nothing moved above, nothing grew on the icy tundra.

To the McArthur Corporation, whose exploratory starship the
Renfrew
discovered it in 2098, such conditions were perfect In the late twenty-first century, interstellar expansion was at its height, with the big companies and financial consortia funding dozens of colonies. Any planet with an oxygen/ nitrogen atmosphere was being claimed and settled. But these ventures were expensive. The alien biospheres that had produced that precious blend of breathable gases were inevitably hostile and poisonous to terrestrial organisms, some immediately fatal. Establishing human communities amid such conditions was extremely costly. Not so Amethi.

For all it was technically a moon, Amethi's evolution had been fairly standard for a world of its size. It started normally, with a reducing atmosphere that slowly changed as life began to emerge from primordial seas. Primitive organisms that could photosynthesize released oxygen. Carbon was consumed by new lichens and amoebas. An unremarkable cycle that was repeated across the universe wherever such conditions occurred.

Evolution was progressing along standard lines until the asteroid was drawn in by Nizana's immense gravity field. Two hundred million years after the first primitive amoebas began fissioning, the seas were full of fish; plants had established themselves across the land. There were big insects with thistledown wings, and even small creatures not far removed from terrestrial amphibian genealogy. They all died in the aftermath.

The impact explosion threw up enough dust and steam to obscure the entire surface. In doing so, it triggered the ultimate ice age. The glaciers that thrust out from the polar caps in the aftermath encroached farther and farther through the temperate zone until they actually merged at the equator. Seas, oceans and lakes surrendered their water to the single megaglacier as it continued to expand. Temperature plummeted right across the planet, combining with the water loss and darkened atmosphere to eliminate all forms of life except the most resilient bacteria. Amethi returned to an almost primordial state. But now with a fifth of the surface covered in ice to a depth of several kilometers, and the remainder a desert that was Mars-like in its desolation, there was no potential catalyst left to precipitate change. It had become a world trapped in stasis. The isolock.

For the McArthur board members Amethi was perfection, an existing breathable atmosphere and no indigenous life. All that was needed was a slight rise in global temperature to end the isolock and restart a normal meteorological cycle.

Templeton was founded in 2115. At first it was nothing more than a collection of prefabricated igloos with a single track linking it to a runway bulldozed into the frozen dunes. The engineers and administrators who lived there were tasked with establishing a manufacturing base that would be self-sustaining, the idea being that once the initial investment was made, all you needed to do was shovel in local raw materials at one end and ultimately any product you wanted would pop out the other. After that, the only imports would be people and new designs to upgrade and expand the first few factories. Information cost nothing to transport between stars, while people would buy their own tickets to a new land with immense opportunities.