greatest advantage when it comes to finding and eliminating them. So they’ll know it’s a waste of effort trying to spread the contamination here, at least initially. Whereas the countryside tilts the balance in their favour. If they win out there, then Xingu’s main urban areas will eventually become cities under siege. Again a situation which we would probably lose in the long run. That’s what happened on Lalonde. I imagine that Durringham has fallen by now.”
Leonard DeVille nodded curtly.
“The second point,” said Diana, “is that those infected don’t seem able to halt the lorries. Short of them using their white fire weapon to physically destroy the motors or power systems the lorries aren’t stopping before their first scheduled delivery point. And if they do use violence against a lorry the motorway processors will spot it straightaway. From the evidence we’ve accumulated so far it seems as though they can’t use their electronic warfare field to alter a lorry’s destination. It’s powerful, but not sophisticated, not enough to get down into the actual drive control processors and tamper with on line programs.”
“You mean they’re trapped inside the lorries?” Warren Aspinal asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And none of the lorries have reached their destination yet,” Vicky Keogh said, with a smile for the Home Office minister. “As Diana said, it looks like we got lucky.”
“Well thank God they’re not omnipotent,” the Prime Minister said.
“They’re not far short,” Ralph observed. Even listening to Diana outline the current situation hadn’t lifted his spirits. The crisis was too hot, too now. Emotions hadn’t had time to catch up with events; pursuing the embassy trio was like space warfare, everything happening too quick for anything other than simplistic responses, there was no opportunity to take stock and think. “What about Angeline Gallagher?” he inquired. “Have the AIs got any further leads?”
“No. Just the two taxis and the Longhound bus,” Diana said. “The AT Squads are on their way.”
It took another twelve minutes to clear the taxis. Ralph stayed at Hub One while the interception operations were running, receiving datavises from the two Squad commanders.
The first taxi was laid up beside one of the rivers which meandered through Pasto. It had stopped interfacing with the route and flow processors as it drew up next to a boathouse. Road monitor cameras had been trained on the grey vehicle for eleven minutes, seeing no movement from it or the boathouse.
The AT Squad members closed in on it, using standard leapfrog advancement tactics. Its lights were off, doors frozen half-open, no one inside. A technical officer opened a systems access panel and plugged his processor block into it. The police AI probed the vehicle’s circuitry and memory cells.
“All clear,” Diana reported. “A short circuit turned the chassis live, blew most of the processors, and screwed the rest. No wonder it showed up like one of our hostiles.”
The second taxi had been abandoned in an underground garage below a residential mews. The AT Squad arrived just as the taxi company’s service crew turned up to take it away on their breakdown hauler. Everyone at Hub One witnessed the scenes of hysterics and anger as the AT Squad took no chances with the three service crew.
After running an on-the-spot diagnostic, the crew discovered the taxi’s electron matrix was faulty, sending huge power spikes through the on-board circuitry.
“Gallagher has to be on the bus,” Landon McCullock said as he cancelled his datavise to the AT Squad, the service crew’s inventive obscenities fading from his borrowed perception.
“I can confirm that,” Diana said. “The damn thing won’t respond to the halt orders we’re issuing via the motorway route and flow processors.”
“I thought you said they couldn’t alter programs with their electronic warfare technique,” Leonard DeVille said.
“It hasn’t altered its route, it just won’t respond,” she shot back. An almost uninterrupted three-hour stint spent interfacing with, and directing, the AIs, was beginning to fatigue her nerves.
Warren Aspinal gave his political colleague a warning frown.
“The AT Squad teams will be over the bus in ninety seconds,” Bernard Gibson said. “We’ll see exactly what’s going on then.”
Ralph datavised a tactical situation request into the hub’s processor array. His neural nanonics visualized a map of Xingu, a rough diamond with a downward curling cat’s tail. Forty-one of Moyce’s delivery lorries had been located and annihilated now, green and purple symbols displaying their movements, the locations when they were targeted. The bus was a virulent amber, proceeding down the M6 motorway which ran the length of Mortonridge, the long spit of mountainous land which poked southwards across the equator.
He switched to accessing the sensor suite on the lead hypersonic. The plane was just decelerating into subsonic flight. There was nothing any discrimination filter program could do about the vibration as it aerobraked. Ralph had to wait it out, impatience heating his blood feverishly. If Angeline Gallagher wasn’t on the bus, then they’d probably lost the continent.
The M6 was laid out below him in the clear tropical air. The hypersonic’s shaking damped out, and he could see hundreds of stationary cars, vans, buses, and lorries parked on the motorway’s service lanes. Headlights illuminated the lush verges, hundreds of people were milling around, some even settling down for midnight picnics by their vehicles.
The static pageant made the bus easy to spot, the one moving light source on the motorway, heading south at about two hundred kilometres an hour. It roared on past the riveted spectators lining the lane barrier, immune to the priority codes being fired into its circuitry from the motorway’s route and flow processors.
“What the hell is that thing?” Vicky Keogh voiced the unspoken question of everyone accessing the hypersonic’s sensor suite.
The Longhound Bus Company had a standardized fleet of sixty-seaters made on the Esparta continent, with a distinct green and purple livery. They were used all over Ombey, stitching together every continent’s cities and towns with an extensive, fast, and frequent service. The principality didn’t yet have the economy or population to justify vac train tubes linking its urban areas like Earth and Kulu. So the Longhound buses were a familiar sight on the motorways; more or less everyone on the planet had ridden on one at some time in their lives.
But the runaway vehicle speeding down the M6 looked nothing like a normal Longhound. Where the Longhound’s body was reasonably smooth and trim, this had the kind of sleek profile associated with the aerospace industry. A curved, wedge-shaped nose blending back into an oval cross-section body, with sharp triangular fin spoilers sprouting out of the rear quarter. It had a dull silver finish, with gloss-black windows. Greasy grey smoke belched out of a circular vent just behind the rear wheel set.
“Is it on fire?” a disconcerted Warren Aspinal asked.
“No, sir.” Diana sounded ridiculously happy. “What you’re seeing there is its diesel exhaust.”
“A what exhaust?”
“Diesel. This is a Ford Nissan omnirover; it burns diesel in a combustion engine.”
The Prime Minister had been running his own neural nanonics encyclopedia search. “An engine which burns hydrocarbon fuel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s ridiculous, not to mention illegal.”
“Not when this was built, sir. According to my files, the last one rolled off the Turin production line in 2043 AD. That’s the city of Turin on Earth.”
“Have you a record of any being imported by a museum or a private vehicle collector?” Landon McCullock asked patiently.
“The AIs can’t find one.”
“Jenny Harris reported a phenomenon similar to this back on Lalonde,” Ralph said. “She saw a fanciful riverboat when I sent her on that last mission. They’d altered its appearance so it seemed old-fashioned, something from Earth’s pre-technology times.”
“Christ,” Landon McCullock muttered.
“Makes sense,” Diana said. “We’re still getting a correct identification code from its processors. They must have thrown this illusion around the Longhound.”
The hypersonic closed on the bus, sliding in over the motorway, barely a hundred metres up. Below it, the
