The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (259 page)

“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 eaves. 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.”