disappointed.’
‘There
‘Maybe you’re right with the first one, and his pals in the Free Merioneth Forces are planning on springing him out of suspension just before CST shuts the wormhole.’
‘Not going to happen. Nothing and nobody can break into the Justice Directorate suspension facility.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
Paula saw a nervous-looking Aidan appear at the top of the stairs. She smiled. ‘What I always do; keep the file open, solve the case properly.’
Christabel followed her gaze. ‘Of course, you always get your man.’
‘Yes. Always.’
WHAT PAULA FOUND OUT
Nelson Sheldon was right about the timing. Twenty-one months after Fiech’s court case, and three weeks after a planetary referendum officially denounced as a shambolic farce by Intersolar observers, the Senator from Merioneth stood up in the Commonwealth Senate to declare that her planet was regretfully withdrawing from the Intersolar Commonwealth to ‘pursue our future independently’. The Speaker wished her well, and there was a chilly silence as the Merioneth delegation dramatically walked out of the full chamber. CST immediately announced that the wormhole link to Merioneth would be withdrawn in three months, leaving enough time for anyone on the planet who didn’t wish to be Isolated to return to the Commonwealth.
Out of a population of seventeen million, the number wanting to remain part of the Commonwealth was just over nine million. It took an awful lot of trains running round the clock to bring them out. Which made travel to Merioneth extremely easy, with an inbound train arriving every ten minutes. When Paula caught a train to Baransly, the capital, three weeks before the wormhole was due to be shut she was the only passenger in first class. Most of the carriages were vehicle carriers. Emigres favoured big trucks crammed full with their possessions. Local shipping companies were charging a fortune to transport containers of larger items. And the emergent national government was getting difficult about letting industrial machinery leave. The latest batch of restrictions covered all types of agribots; a lot of farmers were heading back to the Commonwealth.
Paula stared out of the long window as they emerged through the wormhole’s pressure curtain. It was winter outside, with flecks of snow drifting through an iron-grey sky. The landscape here outside the capital was arranged into neat fields given over entirely to row after row of some vine equivalent; with brown leafless stems stretched along wire frames. Hundreds of small agribots rolled slowly down the lines, their plyplastic tentacles pruning the vines back to their regulation two-metre length.
Baransly itself was a sprawl of housing estates and industrial zones clustered round a commercial centre that had already started to put up skyscrapers. The architecture was a little bleak and functional perhaps, but the city’s size was an excellent example of successful development for a world that had only been open to settlement for eighty years.
By the time the train reached the marshalling yard outside the station, there were signs of law and order beginning to break down. Streets were clogged with abandoned cars and vans. The crates and boxes that they’d carried were now strewn everywhere, broken open to spill their contents onto the icy enzyme-bonded concrete. It was as if the goods of a hundred department stores had been scattered across the district by a real live cargo-cult god. Gangs of kids and some adults were foraging the bounty. Then the train drew into the marshalling yard itself, and Paula’s view of the city vanished behind walls of metal containers stacked taller than the surrounding buildings, all waiting shipment out. Men in thick jackets with the Merioneth Nationalist Party logo on their sleeves patrolled the aisles.
The train drew in at one of the ten platforms under the cover of a sweeping green crystal canopy. Every square metre of the platforms and concourse was occupied by a bad-tempered crowd. Armour-clad CST security guards patrolled along narrow clearways, their jangler guns carried prominently.
Paula slipped off the carriage to be greeted by Byron Lacrosh, chief aide to the Prime Minister, Svein Moalem, who was also leader of the Merioneth Nationalist Party. Byron and an armed police escort guided her down one of the clearways. A large limousine took them from the CST station to the Parliament building along roads that were still being cleared of discarded vehicles. Every few minutes they passed crews of men and bots lifting cars onto big tow-trucks.
‘You won’t need to worry about mining any new metal for a few years,’ Paula observed.
‘Material resources aren’t our prime concern,’ Byron Lacrosh said. ‘We hope to establish a culture which isn’t as technology-based as the Commonwealth.’
‘You’re going to go the agrarian route?’
‘We favour divorcing ourselves from the consumerist monoculture that dominates the Dynasty-ruled worlds, yes. We don’t shun technology, we just don’t see the necessity to incorporate it in every aspect of life.’
‘Appropriate sustainability, then?’
Byron gave her an interested look. ‘You understand the philosophy?’
‘It’s hardly new. My birthworld is based on it.’
‘Oh yes, of course. I’d forgotten where you came from, Investigator Myo.’
The Parliament building was a concrete and glass monstrosity, intended as a vigorous statement of a new planet’s identity and prosperity. The result was the kind of design-by-bureaucrat-committee that Paula always found depressing, representing the exact opposite of the ethos it had originally been commissioned to promote.
Svein Moalem’s office was on the fifth floor, with a curving glass wall that opened onto the hanging rose garden — famous locally for its cost overruns and leaky troughs. He sat behind a dark desk made from native kajawood, a broad-shouldered man ten years out of rejuvenation, with a neatly trimmed beard — following current local tradition. His light-blue eyes were strongly contrasted with dark skin and mousy hair. Paula saw tiny luminescent green lines flickering along his cheeks to curve round the back of his neck. More OCtattoos shone on his hands. When she ordered her inserts to scan the office she found a considerable amount of encrypted electromagnetic traffic emanating from him. To be exact, from the necklace of flat opals he wore. It was the kind of emission level she usually associated with sensory drama actors, allowing the unisphere audience to experience their body’s sensations. The two people, a man and a woman, sitting in front of his desk were also broadcasting an unusually large amount of data, from similar necklace arrays. Paula suspected every aspect of her interview was to be recorded and analysed. A high-capacity cybersphere node was discreetly incorporated into the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind the desk, but apart from that and several security sensors she couldn’t detect any other active hardware. Not that she expected any weapons to be active.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me, Prime Minister,’ she said.
Svein Moalem nodded graciously, but didn’t get up. He gestured to an empty chair directly in front of his desk. ‘I asked for two representatives from the Attorney General’s office to be present.’
Paula glanced at the two lawyers flanking her as she sat down. ‘I’m not here to arrest you. In fact, nobody really knows if the Intersolar Commonwealth has jurisdiction here at the moment. You’ve declared independence, and we’ve agreed to recognize it in three weeks’ time. Anything between those dates is a very grey legal area.’
‘Yes, but nonetheless they will ensure my reputation is protected from unfair allegations.’
