Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume (31 page)

Chapter 16

O
peration Polaris had
been partly my idea. We’d come up with it in the final year of the war, an infiltration plan to take the struggle down the well. I fully admit it was something of a desperate measure. Finding a way to transport hostile operatives onto the surface of a planet where every square inch of airspace is covered by a wide variety of military sensors required imaginative thinking and an acceptance of some major risk factors. Our intel people calculated the probability of success at 34 percent. So it came as a relief when Riviera liberated Freak from that experimental hab and we decided on the Langley Raid instead: success rating a whopping 39 percent. But that had been wartime. Now that peace reigned over the skies once more, the risk factors could be adjusted to a lower setting, or at least that’s what I hoped.

“This is fucking crazy,” Lucy told me, reading the mission parameters on her console.

“Basic misdirection, Newtonian physics and a little meteorology,” I said. “It’ll work.”

Riviera had used his influence to procure an aged but serviceable shuttle from the small council of senior veterans that formed the quasi-government for Cerberus. The ship was a small maintenance runabout used by the graffiti crews and its hull was a chaotic echo of Cerberus’ outer skin, all malformed cartoon characters and satanic symbols. The interior was cramped, barely capable of holding a be-suited Mr Mac and myself. Climbing into the escape pods had been an exercise in strained muscles and a reminder that I wasn’t getting any younger. The pods were yet more war surplus, Kruger seemed to have an endless supply of the stuff, and had been installed on an extension to the shuttle’s airlock, giving it the appearance of a wasp carrying a dumb-bell.

“Earth orbit achieved,” Lucy said in my headphones. “Two minutes to curtain up. Just to be clear, you’re absolutely sure you want to do this?”

“Indubitably, my dear,” Mr Mac assured her.

“Wasn’t asking you,” she snapped. “Alex?”

“Compared to Ceres, it’ll be a warm cup of cocoa,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”

“Guess that job with Astravista’s screwed now, huh?”

“I wouldn’t give much for their share price when this is over. Guess you’ll have to find another route to the stars.”

“Yeah, I’ll build my own from spares. Stand-by for eject in sixty seconds.”

There was a pause then a shudder as Lucy detonated the plasma cannister fixed to the upper hull before making a suitably panicked mayday call on the universal emergency channel. “Oh god! This… this is Delta-One-Five in high orbit, polar quadrant three. We have an emergency situation. Repeat emergency!”

A pause before a calmly professional voice came over the comms, male with a South American accent. “Delta-One-Five, this is Emergency Control and Response. State the nature of your distress.”

“Explosion… I mean we have an explosion on board. Something just blew in the crew compartment.”

“Are you injured?”

“Negative. The flight-deck is sealed but I’m reading extensive damage… Shit! Cameras show the compartment is open to vacuum. There’s a gaping hole in the hull. We’re losing atmo.”

“How many crew are on board?”

“Me and two others… I can’t see them on the cams. Oh fuck!”

“Please remain calm, Delta-One-Five. Is your craft responsive to control?”

“Uh, yeah. Trim’s kinda weird, but she’ll shift alright.”

“We have you on scope. You need to kill your primary engines and burn to a stable orbit. Can you do that?”

“Yeah. Burn to stable orbit. Got it.”

“Rescue craft have been scrambled to intercept you. ETA twelve minutes…”

That was our cue. I gripped the pod’s internal hand-holds and braced myself for what came next. A hard jolt and the pod was free of the shuttle, thrusters firing a pre-programmed sequence to angle it for an atmospheric entry.

“No!” Lucy yelled over the comms. “They ejected. Oh shit no!”

“We’re tracking them,” the emergency guy said in a soothing tone. “Rescue crews will be there within an hour of landing…”

“You don’t understand,” she sobbed. “This tub is ancient. Those pods haven’t been serviced in years. They don’t even have suits on. There’s no way…”

The comms crackled and died as the first wave of turbulence hit the pod, indicating I was now skimming the atmosphere. My eyes roamed over the pod interior, searching for any sign of smoke that might indicate a heat shield failure, though at this stage there really wasn’t much I could do about it. After checking them over Kruger had pronounced the pods to be in full working order but Lucy hadn’t been exaggerating their age. The buffeting grew worse by the second, eventually getting so bad that I had to close my eyes against the jumbled confusion.

It stopped abruptly after a full minute, by which time I’d come close to cracking some teeth as my jaw clamped tight against an involuntary shout. The pod took on only a slight tremble as it fell through the mesosphere and I did some mental arithmetic to try and pinpoint the exact second the carefully placed explosives would blow. I was out by a good five seconds.

A rapid series of concussions and the pod split apart, the constituent parts flying away to leave me tumbling through the stratosphere. We had immersion-simmed the crap out of this scenario and it turned out my muscle memory hadn’t deserted me: arms tight against the body, legs together, head pointed at the surface, maintaining a vertical spin as the smoke cannisters and flares Kruger had welded onto the suit left a dirty stain in the sky. I regulated my breathing to a steady rhythm to slow the flow of judgement impairing adrenaline and did my best not to get distracted by the view…

Blue… It’s all so blue.
My only previous trip down the well had been a pretty frenzied affair that hadn’t left much room for sightseeing, what with all the explosions and dismemberment. Now I found myself falling through an infinity of blue, the sky, the ocean far below. For someone raised in enclosed environments it made for an experience that was equal parts exhilarating and alarming.
There’s so much
sky.

The pods had been launched close to the northern hemisphere at a trajectory that would take us above the Arctic Circle. The scanning stations were less numerous at this latitude and the atmospherics made for lousy maintenance, or at least they had back when I came up with this plan. The further I fell the more of the polar ice-cap I could see creeping over the blue of the ocean. A thin vertical smoke-trail half a mile away told me Mr Mac’s pod had also performed as expected. With any luck the surface monitoring stations would read us as just more debris. Lucy would be burning clear by now, all comms deactivated and giving every appearance of an independent haulage contractor who didn’t want to stick around for the official accident enquiry. Orbital Security might chase after her but I had every confidence in her evasion skills.

The next twenty seconds were crucial, the decision-making window for whoever had eyes on us just now. They could decide the falling debris from two unfortunate escape pods didn’t pose a threat this far from populated areas. On the other hand, they might conclude it was better to be safe than sorry and blast us into small pieces with a missile salvo. I guessed the duty officer of the day must have been worried about his budget allocation because twenty very long seconds of free-fall passed without incident.

The ice filled my entire field of vision now, a great white sheet, dotted here and there with the dark nodes of civilisation. An ever-growing population meant people were now looking farther afield for lebensraum, using tech developed for off-world colonisation to establish settlements in places once considered too hostile for human habitation. The Arctic population had officially topped the ten-million mark a year ago, but it was still 97 percent empty and not a place to linger out-of-doors for any length of time.

My headphones issued a loud insistent beep at five thousand feet and I levelled out into the classic skydiver pose, arms and legs spread to maximise atmospheric resistance, the smoke and flares still streaming in my wake. I needed to slow the descent for a chute deployment but not enough to spoil the illusion of a tumbling piece of debris in the event I was still a speck on someone’s scanner. The chute auto-deployed at five hundred feet. The sims had got this part wrong. What should have been a jarring but manageable transition from free-fall to controlled descent felt more like a chest-first collision with a sledgehammer. The force of it left me with greying vision and a deep pain in my chest as I fought to refill suddenly empty lungs. My chute was a warpable, semi-rigid canopy that should have enabled a partly piloted descent, but the stunning effects of the deceleration meant all I could do was hang there gasping, oxygen starved arms like lead and my vision growing ever dimmer as the ice loomed closer.

Fortunately, I blacked out before I hit.

Chapter 17

The faint tapping
of gloved fingers on glass, a barely audible voice, insistent shoves. I groaned, wanting badly to slip back into what had been a blessedly absolute slumber. A hard snick then an icy blast on my face as my suit helmet was none-too-gently pulled off.

“Alex!” More shoving and groaning, the air like a million tiny needles on my skin as I felt the blood streaming from my nose begin to freeze. “We have to move! Come…” Mr Mac grunted as he hauled me into a sitting position, “…on!”

I let out a shout of pain as my eyes finally opened to be greeted by a world of blinding white. “Just keep blinking,” he told me. “It’ll fade. Can you walk?”

I tried to move my legs, finding to my surprise that they actually worked. “Yeah.” I shook my head to try and clear the ache, eyes stinging with the chill as they slowly adjusted and the unbroken sphere of white surrounding us gradually resolved into snow-covered ice beneath a pale blue sky. “Fuck, it’s cold.”

“Welcome to Earth.” He hooked his arms under mine and heaved me up, holding me steady as my legs did their best to fail me.

“What’s our position?” I asked.

“Over three klicks from the intended drop zone. Gives us a tight window to make the rendezvous.”

“Will your guy wait?”

“
I
wouldn’t.” He reached down to retrieve my helmet. “Hypothermia in ten minutes without this.” He tossed it to me before checking the readout on his wrist. “No beacons or pings. Nothing in the air for twenty klicks in all directions.” He grinned at me. “It worked. You’re a military genius after all.”

“Wasting time,” I said, slotting my helmet into place and taking the first unsteady steps south. “Let’s go.”

At first glance, the extractor rig looked like a giant recreation of an ancient kitsch television, a curving, hollowed-out rectangle rising from the white mist to a height of well over two hundred metres. There were more to the east and west, stretching away to the horizon like sentinels from a bygone age, which is pretty much what they were.

“So this is how they were going to save the world,” Mr Mac commented as we trudged closer, voice a little ragged in my ‘phones. The two hour forced march to get here hadn’t been made any easier by his constant need to chat. “Still, I guess they were desperate,” he went on. “Needed to do something to get the carbon out of the atmosphere before the planet turned into another Venus. The largest geo-engineering project in human history, bankrupted the North American economies over the course of a decade, only for fusion to come along and make it all irrelevant. Some historians theorise the economic impact, coupled with the destabilising effects of such an abrupt shift away from fossil fuels, were a direct cause of the Rapture Wars and the dissolution of the United States.”

“Guess you’ve had plenty of time for reading,” I muttered. “In between all the murders, I mean.”

“Benefits of an expensive education. But I guess Oksana told you all that. How is she, by the way?”

“Worried. Thought I was there to tell her I’d killed you.”

“Little sis was always of a nervous disposition. Was it at her place that Dr Vaughn caught the scent, I wonder?” I gave no reply and he glanced over his shoulder, teeth gleaming behind the visor as he laughed. “I’ll figure it out eventually, y’know.”

We stopped three hundred metres short of the extractor and I used the suit’s optics to scan the huge supporting base, icons blinking as they detected a tracked vehicle parked outside an access port. “That him?” I asked.

“It better be.” Mr Mac cracked open his suit’s leg compartment and extracted a military-spec Berretta 10mm.

“So he’s a trustworthy type?” I enquired, drawing the Colt from my own suit.

“He’s a professional criminal with a dozen or more international warrants on his head.” Mr Mac started forward at a steady plod. “So, yes I trust him. Not sure what he’ll make of you, though, so please try to put a muzzle on the judgemental, hard-nosed Demon crap. I’m not keen on killing a prized asset if I can help it.”

We moved to within twenty feet of the vehicle, a squat snow-tractor with faded white and blue camouflage, the windscreen dark and all power off. Mr Mac voice-activated his smart and sent a short message: “Spare me the paranoia, Simon. I told you I’d be bringing a friend.”

A soft crunch of snow had me whirling, Colt snapping round to aim at a dark shape to our rear. For a moment, I thought I was about to commit a heinous bio-crime by taking down a polar bear, the shape having reared up to an impressive height, snow cascading from furry flanks.
Not a bear,
I realised as the long barrel of a sniper rifle appeared, the fur falling away to reveal a man in thermal combat gear, face hidden behind an insectoid mask of optics. He was tall and lean with that rangy look long-serving military types always seemed to have. I noted he had to fight an instinctive impulse to bring his rifle to bear on me as the optics swept over my face.

“Simon, say hello to Alex,” Mr Mac said. “Alex, Simon.”

I said nothing and neither did Simon. It was evident we were engaged in a moment of mutual recognition. The gear and the look made it obvious. “Fed Sec SF,” I said. “I guess you’re not choosy about who you employ.”

“He’s very much retired,” Mr Mac told me. “And will be permanently if they ever find him. Right, Simon?”

Simon’s optics lingered on me. “Face changed, retinas haven’t,” he said finally, voice gravelly but otherwise accentless. The erosion of identity was a principal facet of their training; vocal characteristics, personal history, even their original names, all conditioned out to leave the perfect covert operative. I’d killed a few during the war, and none had been easy.

“Enemy operative, Codename Fenrir,” Simon went on. “Pursue and eliminate with extreme prejudice, regardless of risk.”

We stared at each other in silence until he shouldered his rifle and strode towards the base of the extractor. “Too late to start out now,” he told Mr Mac. “Food and supplies inside.”

“Fenrir, huh?” Despite the smallness of the smart screen I could detect a certain amusement on Janet’s face. I sat huddled against the wall of the extractor’s maintenance bay, arms folded tight and the smart propped against my drawn up thighs. I’d been cold before but this was a whole new world, literally.

“You know what it means?” I asked, steam billowing from my mouth.

“Old Norse mythology,” she said. “Fenrir is the monstrous wolf who eats Odin during the great battle that heralds the coming of Ragnarok. Viking Armageddon.” Her smile broadened. “I think it suits you quite well, actually.”

I sniffed and stifled a shudder. “You get anything yet?”

“It’s slow going, I’m afraid. Vargold has been very careful in managing his public image, all biographical profiles are basically a variation of the same story: born in Sweden forty-six years ago to a North American refugee family, came up the well aged eighteen with minimal education. Worked basic ore processing whilst he studied technology and design spare time, eventually won a full scholarship to Lorenzo Uni where he met Rybak. Two years later, they drop out of school and self-fund a start-up: Astravista. Their first few millions came from communications software, they wrote much of the code that runs the smart network. Astravista begins a rapid expansion, becomes the third largest corporate entity in orbit within seven years, then the war starts. All corporations are quick to declare their allegiance to the UN, except Astravista. Vargold and Rybak establish Hephaestus Station beyond Lunar orbit, the principal CAOS weapons manufactory. It’s pretty clear from my own research that CAOS would’ve lost without it. The war ends, Hephaestus Station is formally ceded to Central Governance though Astravista still holds the bulk of the contracts. Six years ago, Vargold proposes using it as the main construction site for the Ad Astra Project and humanity’s journey to the stars begins. All pretty inspiring really, if you don’t know he’s a mass murderer.”

“Family? Relationships?”

“No wife, no kids. Gossip-mills have linked him to a few models slash actresses over the years, but nothing seems to have lasted more than a few months. One starlet did a tell-all interview for a Downside celeb-rag a few years ago, called him an emotionless monster. But that could all have been post-dump venting. Failing to latch onto a billionaire has to sting a bit.”

“There’s got to be more, a reason for all this.”

“Open sources can only tell you so much. We really need access to Pol-net and security databases if we’re going to make any progress.”

“Not easy when you’re dead.”

“Kruger says he has a few contacts from the old days, military people who might be sympathetic. As for Pol-net, I thought Chief Mordecai…”

“No. I don’t want her involved, not yet anyway. She’s way too exposed.” I glanced over at Mr Mac. He sat close to the portable heater Simon had set up earlier, eyes intent on his smart. “How’s Leyla?”

“On the mend.” Janet gave a rueful grin. “Hates me more than ever.”

“Lucy?”

“Made it back safe and well. She asked me to tutor her for her GEC exams so I guess we’re bonding.”

“Good to know. When Kruger gets you access, concentrate on the war years and check for links to Haunai Genetics.” I forced a smile and managed to stop my teeth chattering. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d’ve liked it down here. Expect a call in twenty-four hours. If not, assume I’m dead and get yourself and the others on a shuttle to the Belt. Lucy knows plenty of places to hide.”

I shut down the smart before she could object and got up, moving close to the heater with hands extended. Simon sat opposite cleaning his disassembled rifle. Sans optics his features were revealed as Caucasian, lean and generically handsome, but not enough to be especially memorable. I wondered if he even remembered what his original face looked like.

“How many Upside deployments for you?” I asked, expecting a vague and non-committal answer but he replied without hesitation, blue eyes lacking emotion as he raised them to meet mine.

“Five.”

“Confirmed kills?”

“Forty-eight.”

“Anyone I knew?”

“Play nice kids,” Mr Mac murmured, glancing up from his smart. “Bygones etcetera.”

“How much longer in this dump?” I asked him, but it was Simon who answered.

“Six hours. You arrived just ahead of a weather front. We need to sit it out before heading south.”

“And then?”

“There’s a mag-lev hub on Ellesmere Island,” Mr Mac said. “Gateway to the world. Just depends where we go first.”

“Salacia,” I said. “And me, not we. You’re overwatch on this, just like the war.”

He frowned a little. “You always did have a serious hero complex problem, Alex.”

“I need to interact with local law-enforcement, something you can’t do. Besides, sooner or later I’m going to start raising flags on Vargold’s map. You and your pet ninja here are going to keep me alive when his people come looking.”

Simon slotted the barrel of his rifle into the stock with a loud clack. The pet ninja jibe had been a gambit, a test to see if he had any skin to get under. If so, he was expert at concealing it. “Better get some sleep,” he said, settling back and pulling the hood of his combat smock over his head. “Long haul tomorrow.”