The Night's Dawn Trilogy (169 page)

“There was an awful lot of traffic using the city roads when I flew over,” Ralph said. “I’d like to see that shut down now.
I can’t emphasise enough that we must restrict the population’s movement.”

“It’s only ten o’clock in Pasto,” Leonard DeVille said. “People are still on their way home, others are out for the evening
and will want to return later. If you shut down the city’s ground traffic now you will cause an astounding level of confusion,
one which would be beyond the police force’s ability to resolve for hours. And we must have the police in reserve to deal
with the embassy people when we detect them. We thought it made more sense to allow everyone to go home as normal, then introduce
the curfew. That way, the vast majority will be confined to their houses come tomorrow morning. And if Tremarco and Gallagher
have started infecting them, any outbreak will be localized, which means we should be able to isolate it relatively easily.”

Sit down and make an impact, why not? Ralph thought sourly. I’m supposed to listen and advise, not barge in and act like a
loudmouth arsehole. Damn, but Kerwin and the plane has me hyped too hot.

Trying to hide how foolish he felt, he asked: “What time will you introduce the curfew?”

“One o’clock,” the Prime Minister said. “Only die-hard nightbirds will still be out and about then. Thank heavens it’s not
Saturday night. We really would have been in trouble then.”

“Okay, I can live with that,” Ralph said. There was a quick victory smile on DeVille’s face, which Ralph chose to ignore.
“What about the other cities and towns; and more importantly the motorways?”

“All Xingu’s urban areas are having their curfew enacted at one o’clock,” McCullock said. “The continent’s got three time
zones, so it’ll be phased in from the east. As for the motorways, we’re already shutting down their traffic; so cities and
major towns are going to be segregated. That wasn’t a problem, all motorway vehicles are supervised by the Transport Department
route and flow management computers. It’s the vehicles on the minor roads which are giving us a headache; they’re all switched
to autonomous control processors. And even worse are the farm vehicles out there in the countryside, half of those bloody
things have manual steering.”

“We estimate it will take another three hours to completely shut down all ground traffic movement,” Diana said. “At the moment
we’re setting up an interface between Strategic Defence Command and our police traffic division. That way when the low-orbit
SD sensor satellites locate a vehicle moving on a minor road they’ll perform an identification sweep and catalogue it. Traffic
division will then datavise the control processor to halt. For manually operated vehicles we’ll have to dispatch a patrol
car.” A hand waved lamely in the air. “That’s the theory, anyway. A continent-wide detection and identification operation
is going to tie up an awful lot of processing power, which we really can’t spare right now. If we’re not very careful we’ll
wind up with a capacity shortfall.”

“I thought that was impossible in this day and age,” Warren Aspinal interjected mildly.

Diana’s humour became stern. “Under normal circumstances, yes. But what we’re attempting to do has no precedent.” She offered
the others sitting at Hub One a reluctant shrug. “My team has got three AIs in the basement and two at the university which
are attempting to access and analyse every single processor in the city simultaneously. It’s a refinement of Admiral Farquar’s
idea of tracking the energy virus through the electronic distortion it generates. We’ve seen it demonstrated on Adkinson’s
plane, so we know the approximate nature of the beast. All we have to do is perform the most massive correlation exercise
ever mounted. We find out which processors have suffered glitches during the last eight hours, and cross-reference the time
and geographical location. If it happened to several unrelated processors in the same area at the same time, then it’s a good
chance the glitch was caused by someone who has the virus.”

“Every processor?” Vicky Keogh queried.

“Every single one.” Just for a moment, Diana’s dried-up face wore an adolescent’s smile. “From public net processors to streetlight
timers, AV adverts, automatic doors, vending machines, mechanoids, personal communications blocks, household supervisor arrays.
The lot.”

“Will it work?” Ralph asked.

“No reason why not. As I said, there’s a possible capacity problem, and the AIs might not manage to format the correlation
program within the time frame we need. But when the program comes on-line it should provide us with the electronic equivalent
of seeing footprints in snow.”

“And then what?” Warren Aspinal asked quietly. “That’s what you were really brought down here for, Ralph. What do we do with
these people if we find them? There is something of a political dimension involved in using the SD systems every time we locate
one of the afflicted. I don’t dispute the necessity of eliminating Adkinson’s plane. And people will certainly agree to us
using force to obliterate the threat to start with. But ultimately we have to find a method of eradicating the energy virus
itself, and without damaging the victim. Not even the Princess can go on authorizing such destruction for ever, not when it’s
aimed against the Kingdom’s own subjects.”

“We’re working on it,” said Admiral Farquar. “Gerald Skibbow is going into personality debrief right now. If we can find out
how he was infected, and how he was purged, then we ought to be able to come up with a solution, some kind of countermeasure.”

“How long will that take?” Leonard DeVille asked.

“Insufficient information,” the admiral answered. “Skibbow isn’t very strong. They’re going to have to go easy on him.”

“Yet if our preparations are to mean anything,” Landon McCullock said, “we have to catch the embassy duo tonight, or tomorrow
morning at the latest. And not just them, but anyone they’ve come into contact with. This situation could escalate beyond
our ability to contain. We must have a policy ready for dealing with them. So far the only thing we know that works is overwhelming
firepower.”

“I’ve got two things to offer,” Ralph said. He looked at Bernard Gibson, and gave him a penitent smile. “Your squads are going
to have to take the brunt of this, especially to start with.”

The police AT Squad commander grinned. “What we get paid for.”

“Okay, here it is then. First off, contact with someone who is carrying the energy virus doesn’t necessarily mean you contract
it yourself. Will and Dean are excellent proof of that. They captured Skibbow, they manhandled him, they were in very close
proximity to him for hours, and they’re both fine. Also, I was on the
Ekwan
with the embassy trio for a week, and I wasn’t infected.

“Secondly, despite their power they can be intimidated into submission. But you have to be prepared to use ultraviolence against
them, and they have to know that. One hint of weakness, one hesitation, and they’ll hit you with everything they’ve got. So
when we do find the first one, it’ll be me and my team which heads the actual assault. Okay?” “I’m not arguing so far,” Bernard
Gibson said.

“Good. What I envisage is spreading the experience of an assault in the same fashion the virus is spread. Everyone who is
with me on the first assault will be able to familiarise themselves with what has to be done. After that you assign them to
head their own squads for the next round of captures, and so on. That way we have your whole division brought up to speed
as swiftly as possible.”

“Fine. And what do we do with them once we’ve subdued them?”

“Shove them into zero-tau.”

“You think that’s what got rid of Skibbow’s virus?” Admiral Farquar asked sharply.

“I believe it’s a good possibility, sir. He was extremely reluctant to enter the pod in
Ekwan
. Right up until then he was quite docile. When he found out we were going to put him in the pod, he became almost hysterical.
I think he was frightened. And certainly when he came out of the pod at this end the virus was gone.”

“Excellent.” Warren Aspinal smiled at Ralph. “That course of action is certainly more palatable than lining them all up against
a wall and shooting them.”

“Even if zero-tau isn’t responsible for erasing the virus, we know it can contain them the same way it holds ordinary people,”
Ralph said. “We can keep them in stasis until we do find a permanent solution.”

“How many zero-tau pods have we got available?” Landon asked Diana.

The technology division chief had a long blink while her neural nanonics chased down the relevant files. “Here in the building
there are three. Probably another ten or fifteen in the city in total. They tend to be used almost exclusively by the space
industry.”

“There’s five thousand unused pods in the
Ekwan
right now,” Ralph pointed out. “That ought to be enough if this AI correlation program works. Frankly, if we need more than
that, we’ve lost.”

“I’ll get some maintenance crews to start disconnecting them straight away,” Admiral Farquar said. “We can send them down
to you in cargo flyers on automatic pilot.” “That just leaves us with forcing infected people into them,” Ralph said. He caught
Bernard’s gaze. “Which is going to be even worse than capturing them.”

“Possible trace,” Diana announced without warning as she received a datavise from one of the AIs. Everyone sitting at Hub
One turned their attention on her. “It’s a taxi which left the spaceport twenty minutes after the embassy trio’s spaceplane
arrived. The vehicle’s processor array started suffering some strange glitches five minutes later. Contact was lost after
a further two minutes. But it can’t have been a total shutdown, because traffic control has no record of a breakdown in that
sector this afternoon. It simply dropped out of the route and flow control loop.”

•  •  •

The warehouse which housed Mahalia Engineering Supplies was sealed up tight, one of twenty identical buildings lined up along
the southern perimeter of the industrial park, separated from its neighbour by strips of ancient concrete and ranks of spindly
trees planted to break the area’s harshness. It was seventy metres long by twenty-five wide, fifteen high; dark grey composite
panels without a single window. From outside it looked inert; innocuous if somewhat spurned of late. Furry tufts of Ombey’s
aboriginal vegetation were rooting in the gutters. Denuded chassis of ancient farm vehicles were stacked three or four deep
along one wall, sleeting rust onto the concrete.

Ralph focused his shell helmet’s sensors on the broad rollup door in the centre of the end-wall fifty meters in front of him.
It had taken him and his team four minutes to get here from police headquarters in one of the force’s hypersonics, following
the city-wide trail of route and flow processor dropouts located by Diana and the AIs. Three police Armed Tactical Squads
had also been dispatched to the industrial park, under orders from Bernard Gibson. In total, eight of the little planes had
landed, encircling the warehouse at a five-hundred-metre distance.

There wasn’t a single crack of light leaking around the door. No sign of life. Infrared didn’t reveal much, either. He scanned
along the side of the building again.

“The conditioning unit is on,” Ralph observed. “I can see the motor’s heat, and the grille’s venting. Someone’s in there.”

“Do you want us to infiltrate a nanonic sensor?” Nelson Akroid asked. He was the AT Squad’s captain, a stocky man in his late
thirties, barely coming up to Ralph’s shoulder. Not quite the image one expected from someone in his profession, but then
Ralph was used to the more bulky G66 troops. Ralph suspected Nelson Akroid would be a healthy opponent in any hand-to-hand
fighting, though; he had the right kind of subdued competence.

“It’s a big building, plenty of opportunities for ambush,” Nelson Akroid said. “We’d benefit from positioning them exactly.
And my technical operators are good. The hostiles would never know they’d been infiltrated.” He sounded eager, which could
be a flaw given this situation. Ralph couldn’t imagine him and his squad seeing much active duty on Ombey. Their lot was more
likely endless drills and exercises, the curse of any specialist field.

“No nanonics,” Ralph said. “We could never depend on them anyway. I want the penetration team to deploy using standard search
and seizure procedures. We can’t believe any information from a sensor, so I want them going in fully alert.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Diana?” he datavised. “What can the AIs tell me?”

“No change. There are no detectable glitches in the warehouse processors it can access. But there’s very little electronic
activity in there anyway, the office and administration systems are all switched off, so that doesn’t mean much.”

“What’s the taxi’s maximum capacity?”

“Six. And the Industry Department says Mahalia employs fifteen staff. They service and distribute parts for agricultural machinery
right across the continent.”

“Okay, we’ll assume the worst case. A minimum of twenty-one possible hostiles. Thanks, Diana.”

“Ralph, the AIs have discovered another two possible glitch traces in the city’s route and flow network. I instructed them
to concentrate on vehicle traffic around the spaceport in the period after the embassy trio arrived. Another taxi suffered
a lot of problems, and the other’s a freight vehicle.” “Shit! Where are they now?”

“The AIs are running search routines; but these two are proving harder to find than the first taxi. I’ll keep you updated.”

The channel closed. Ralph reviewed the AT Squad as they closed in on the warehouse, black figures who seemed more mobile shadows
than solid people. They know their job, he admitted grudgingly.

“Everyone’s in place, sir,” Nelson Akroid datavised. “And the AIs have taken command of the security cameras. The hostiles
don’t know we’re here.”

“Fine.” Ralph didn’t tell him that if Tremarco or Gallagher were in there they’d know for sure that the AT Squad was outside.
He wanted the squad charged up and professional, not shooting at phantoms.