The Credulity Nexus (3 page)

They all moved
along the corridor to the lab doors, and Rik risked a quick peep
through a window in the heavy door. As soon as he did, the glass
exploded outward and a bullet slammed into the wall opposite. He
flinched away, feeling the sting of tiny shards hitting his
forehead. Whoever was in there was either extremely fast or had
sensors set up at the door – or both.

At the sound
of the shot, two more of Peth's men appeared at the end of the
corridor and came running to join their fellows. They took up
positions around the door, calling to one another over the comm net
and priming their weapons, ready for an assault.

Rik kept low
and kept his back pressed against the wall. Any assault on that lab
would be suicide now they no longer had surprise on their side. A
negotiation was the best they could do; try to get whoever was
inside to surrender. But Peth's men were not listening when he
attempted to explain. They had orders to get what they had come for
and they had big bonuses riding on doing it fast, before the woman
in the lab could destroy it or escape with it.

Two more men
were covering the outside of the lab, in case the intruder tried to
get out through the high windows at the back. That left one
guarding Peth.

The head
bodyguard was doing a silent three-two-one before they charged the
doors, when an explosion blew both doors off their hinges. A
hand-grenade. Rik rolled away, blinded, singed and deafened by the
wall of flame that barged past him. The bodyguards were all caught
in the blast, and were scattered. The two caught between the doors
and the opposite wall were smashed to a bloody pulp. One went
flying past Rik, his arms and legs flailing and his chest on
fire.

Through the
smoke and flying debris, an astonishing figure leapt out of the
lab. It was a woman, bald and naked and jet black from head to toe.
She was small and trim and moved with blinding speed. In each hand
she held a nine millimetre, semi-automatic handgun.

One of Peth's
men, a vague outline to Rik on the other side of the smoke, opened
fire on her with his own semi-automatic, but the man must have been
off balance or stunned, because his shots went wild, making Rik
cringe against the wall for fear of being hit.

The woman
turned a gun towards the man with barely a backward glance as she
set off down the corridor, and fired a rapid burst of shots. She
took out the bodyguard with the first bullet, but what really
impressed Rik was the fact that she ran up and along the wall of
the corridor, and then onto the ceiling. When she reached the
atrium she flipped back to the ground and sprinted towards the
exit. There was another brief exchange of gunshots when she reached
the foyer, and then there was silence.

Rik got to his
feet and stumbled into the lab. His ears were ringing and his
vision was full of dark after-images. The room was still full of
stinking smoke. He could see that the grenade had shattered
glassware and other equipment right across the large room, but that
was the least of the damage. Cupboards and fridges had been opened,
locks snapped and hinges torn off, and their contents strewn across
the tiled floors. The woman had been searching for something, and
it hadn't been easy to find.

There was a
body in one corner of the room, a middle-aged man in a lab coat. He
looked like a life-sized doll that had been tossed aside by the
intruder. A blood-soaked mess glistened where his stomach should
have been.

Rik went over
and touched his neck to feel for a pulse. The man's eyes
opened.

“Did she get
it?” the man asked through his cogplus. His voice in Rik's head
sounded distant and weak.

“I don't think
so. I'm here with Elspeth Cordell, Newton Cordell's wife. Where is
it?”

The man's hand
moved feebly. For a moment Rik thought he was trying to point to
something, but the man was reaching for his pocket. Rik patted him
down and found a small, flat box in an inside pocket of his lab
coat. It was about the size of a book reader and as fat as a
finger. He flipped open the lid and saw half-a-dozen small glass
phials neatly laid out inside. He snapped it shut again.

“I'll bring
help,” he said, rising to leave.

The man opened
his eyes again with a start, as if he'd dozed off. For an instant
he looked alarmed and confused. Then he saw the case in Rik's hand
and sighed with relief. He looked earnestly into Rik's eyes,
managing to raise his head a little. “For we must needs die,” he
gasped, and slumped back, unconscious or dead; it was hard to
tell.

Rik looked
down at him and then at the destruction all about them, and shook
his head. “So it seems,” he said, and went in search of Peth.

He found her
out in the car park, alone. She looked angry and maybe a little
scared. Apart from that, she hardly had a hair out of place.

“You took your
time coming to find me,” she snapped.

“Figured you
were OK, or you were dead. Either way there was no rush. Where are
the boys?”

She glared at
him. “Tidying up, what's left of them. Making sure there are no
records of our visit for when the police arrive.”

“The cops are
going to love this one. I'm fine, by the way. A couple of bruises,
a few scratches. Nothing for you to worry about. Who was the
upload?”

“The
what?”

“You know, the
black-skinned cutie who almost stole your package. You must
remember her; walks on ceilings, shoots people, bald head, bad
attitude. Ring any bells?”

Peth was
suddenly interested. “Almost stole my package? You mean, it's still
here?”

Rik ignored
her. “I've met quite a few uploads over the past couple of years.
lunar cities like Heinlein are full of them. Not so popular down
here, though. Android bodies with uploaded, human brains. Of
course, they usually mass about ten times what she did, so they can
do the heavy lifting work on hard vacuum construction sites, but
for those guys, size is just a matter of adding or subtracting a
few litres of nanite paste.”

“Where is it,
Rik?”

“It's safe.
Now, you tell me why an upload would care about whatever you guys
have been cooking up in this gene lab.”

She shook her
head. “No. Just get me the package and do your job.”

Rik heard a
footfall behind him and turned to see two of Peth's bodyguards
standing there, weapons drawn. One of them was white-faced and had
blood dripping from his arm.

“You know, I
just saved your ass and got you your precious package.” He took it
out of his pocket and handed it over. She grabbed it and opened it,
relaxing when she saw the phials inside were intact. “I think the
least you could do is tell me what I'm up against.”

She handed the case back to Rik. “I have
no idea what we're up against. I certainly didn't expect...
that
. This was
supposed to be very low-key. That's why we chose you – a nobody
from nowhere. We thought if we hired a small army to move the
package, it would draw too much attention.” She looked away. “I
wish we had, now. No-one was supposed to know it was here. This
whole operation was secret.”

Rik shrugged.
None of this was his problem. “Look, if you want to pay out my
contract and call in an army, be my guest. Just do it quickly,
'cause I don't feel safe standing around here. That upload is
likely out there somewhere, watching us.”

She glared at
him again. “No. We stick to the plan. We all go our separate ways
from here. You disappear. It's a big planet. Go lose yourself. Just
make sure the package gets to my husband.”

Rik thought
about arguing until he remembered his fee had been tripled. Getting
lost was something he could do.

“I'm taking
one of the cars,” he said, nodding towards one of the big, black
security vehicles.

“Sure,” said
Peth, and without another word, she got into her Mercedes.

One of the
bodyguards reached out to touch Rik and passed him the car's
security code. Then another emerged from the building, carrying a
wounded colleague, and deposited him in the other vehicle. Peth
drove away as if none of it was her concern.

Rik hit the
Autobahn and headed west towards the English Channel. It was
raining that light, persistent rain he always associated with
northern Europe. Visibility was low, and the car's rain-speckled
windows turned the dim afternoon murk into a multi-coloured
light-show of headlamps and tail-lights.

He'd already
driven hundreds of kilometres out of his way and changed cars twice
in the hope that he could confuse anyone trying to track his
movements. Now he was in a little rental and thrashing it at its
top speed. He was heading for CT2, the new Channel Tunnel, and
should emerge at Southend on the UK side in – he glanced at the
car's virtual dashboard – in six hours. From the number of vehicles
hissing past him, he reckoned he'd go faster if he got out and
walked.

Still, it gave
him time to take stock.

As jobs went,
this one was shaping up to be one of the strangest – and scariest.
Certainly the body count was already higher than his last twenty
jobs added together. He still couldn't quite accept Peth's
explanation as to why she had been waiting for him in Berlin. She
and Cordell must have known how dangerous that would be. And then,
having risked her life to get him the package – unnecessarily, as
it turned out – she had simply walked away and left him to deliver
it. Surely it would have been more secure to put it in her
armour-plated Mercedes, whistle up another convoy of security
guards, and drive it to the nearest airport?

But then
what?

He peered into
the murky distance and imagined her taking a private hopper to –
where was the nearest space bridge? – Saudi Arabia, probably. But
if she was going that far, why not go all the way to Florida, or to
the high-speed Clarke Bridge in Sri Lanka? Then she could have
taken a gondola up to the orbital station and a Titan Engineering
corporate space buggy on to her husband's asteroid.

The most
dangerous segment in Peth's whole journey would have been the
gondola ride up the space bridge. Everywhere else, she would have
been in private vehicles with plenty of security. But even Newton
Cordell couldn't afford his own private space bridge. On the
gondola, even in first class, she would have been too exposed. Her
security couldn't have protected her. That's why she didn't do it
herself, then. Her safety couldn't have been guaranteed all the
way.

But why not
send a small army of Titan Engineering security instead? They could
have used a good old-fashioned rocket, or a rocket-assisted
scramjet, to get into orbit. It would have been expensive, and not
even tough-guy mercenaries like to sit on top of a ballistic
missile having their bones rattled and their internal organs
crushed just to get into space, but it would have worked. Was
Cordell really so paranoid about security leaks, as Peth had
said?

It didn't add
up and that made Rik nervous.

He poked at
the heating controls. The little car was like a fridge. The cold,
wet greyness outside seemed to be seeping right through the
bodywork.

The fact that
an upload – of all things! – had appeared at the labs and tried to
steal the package suggested that Cordell was right to be paranoid.
Somehow his organisation had sprung a leak – one that had almost
cost his wife her life.

Yet the upload
was maybe the most worrying aspect of this whole affair. He'd seen
quite a few of them on the Moon and elsewhere in space – Hell,
probably the best friend he had these days was an upload – but they
were rare down on Earth. Here in the Deep Well, plenty of people
saw uploading your mind into a computer as a symbol of all the
things they would never have – wealth, privilege, and immortality
being high on the list. They called them zombies. The undead. And
although having your mind put in a big computer instead was less
ostentatious, even that upload colony – Rik struggled to remember
its name; Something Point? – had been forced to abandon the
Earth-based computer farm that hosted all its minds and build
itself a satellite. There was a real risk that religious groups
would have bombed it. Having hugely expensive, nanite-based robots
walking around the streets with uploaded human minds, flaunting
their transhumanity, was just asking for trouble. Yet now Rik had
one stalking him across Europe.

The big
Dortmund-Essen-Duisberg conurbation was coming up, and the traffic
was already thickening and slowing. He sighed in frustration as the
signs for a Mandatory Override Zone appeared out of the gloom. The
car gave him a warning and he pulled his hands off the steering
wheel. The local traffic control systems would take him through the
next eighty kilometres of urban sprawl at whatever speeds local
ordnances demanded. He kicked back from the driving position and
reclined his seat, figuring that he might as well get some sleep
while he could.

At least he'd
got rid of the package before he left Berlin. As he closed his
eyes, he smiled to think of his friend receiving the bulky courier
pouch. The scribbled note inside said, “Don't panic. Just hide it
somewhere and don't mention it to anyone. I'll be there to pick it
up in a couple of days.” It felt good not to have the thing with
him. At the very least, it meant that anyone who might be tracking
him couldn't kill him till he told them where it was. It wasn't
much insurance, but it was better than nothing.

-oOo-

The London
borough of East Ham stank. It wasn’t far from the flood plains of
Beckton and Canning Town, and the reek of the marshland that had
swallowed East London pervaded the suburb. From the Blackwall
Tunnel to the sea, low, foetid waters stagnated in the streets of
what used to be thriving communities. It wasn't the catastrophe
that had hit New York, but rising sea levels had dramatically
reshaped Britain's capital, too.