He settled into his chair and reviewed the log. Nothing outstanding. A small-time nethead crew from Balham was trying to access files from Connexion’s Waterloo transtellar hub. They’d given up trying to use solnet a week ago and were now scouting the streets outside the cordoned-off station to see if they could physically splice into the data cables. It’d been sold to them as a power heist – which made a kind of sense, as Waterloo was where a power feed from 82 Eridani was coming in, and electricity was wealth in Blitz2 London. But in reality, it was a malware infiltration mission for the Paynors, put together and run through a convoluted route of lieutenants and in-the-dark underworld soldiers, giving the major family distance from the sharp end. Except it wasn’t the family; Alpha Defence wasn’t even sure if any of them were still alive. Nikolaj remained in their Kensington house, maintaining a front for the family’s criminal activities while she organized an ongoing barrage of sabotage.
What Kohei didn’t get was how Yuri always seemed to know about the sabotage plans before anyone in London did. But he just wrote that off as being part of the Yuri Alster legend. Who else would have some kind of spy in the Olyix arkship?
He sipped his tea slowly. Real loose-leaf tea from India, which he’d carefully scavenged from the kitchenettes on the tower’s abandoned executive floors in the weeks after he’d moved in. There was enough left for maybe another seven months. In the meantime, he enjoyed the last taste of civilization as a self-awarded bonus for keeping London safe. He smiled as he drank, watching the Balham crew hanging around the barren Jubilee Gardens, trying to sneak their synth mice into a sealed manhole cover. Special Branch had them completely surrounded with plainclothes officers, while five military ground drones waited in the utilities duct below the manhole.
A notification splashed across his tarsus lens. The department’s G8Turing was registering an abnormal activity pattern in the Royal Victoria Docks area. Frowning, Kohei used his altme to call up supplementary files. Special Branch had set up a secondary observation there, centred on the Icona apartment block. Without the dedicated sensors and a secure hardline, that whole area would have been unobserved. Solnet coverage was poor and the civic sensors trashed. More associated files: The surveillance existed because Karno Larson lived there. When Kohei queried that, he saw the man was classed as a person of interest – a financier with ties to several of the major families, including the Paynors.
‘Give me a visual,’ he ordered.
Sensors showed him a young white man with a longish nose cycling slowly eastwards along Western Gateway’s clear path. When he reached the low green zone barrier around the huge exhibition building, he wobbled off across a dirt square that used to be grass, then started back along the wide path down the side of the dock, steering around the ancient cranes preserved as monuments to the original port. The Icona apartment block was one of the buildings he passed, overlooking the big dock.
There was almost no one else around. The exhibition centre played a strong role in deterring residents and visitors alike. A month into the siege, it had been designated an official green zone refuge for cocoons. To begin with, mobs had attacked and killed any cocoons they could find – those out in the open or unprotected by families. Then, when it slowly dawned that cocoons weren’t contagious and that the victims were still alive, in a twisted, bizarre fashion – that the alien cells were preserving them – the government created green zones where they could be brought and kept safe. Kohei knew there were more than eighty thousand cocoons in the Docklands exhibition hall; sensors were showing him the dark, glossy guard drones patrolling the perimeter. Thick blue plastic pipes pumped water out of the dock to supply the cocoons inside. After two years, they’d reduced the water level a couple of metres. And like the residue of the Thames outside, the surface had been smothered in a ragged mat of dark green algae – about the only vegetation that had survived in the whole city.
The cyclist avoided the few pedestrians who were heading towards the angular glass crystal building at the west end of the dock, where the civic nutrition agency had set up a public kitchen. When he reached the end of the riverfront path, he turned back onto the Western Gateway and repeated the circuit. It was the third time he’d been around that morning. Kohei watched as he dismounted just before reaching the bulky Icona block again and wheeled his bike along. There were times when the man bent over – to pick something off the bicycle’s tyres, to lean against the wall for a moment to take in the sight, standing beside a crane, holding the thick iron struts. So casually, so naturally. The sensors watched him place a button-sized bug each time, all of them aligned on the Icona building.
‘He’s scouting for something,’ Kohei announced to the other three operatives sitting around the display bubble. The G8Turing had already run facial recognition, with no result. ‘Deep analysis,’ he ordered.
The observation sensors weren’t quite top-of-the-line, but with several of them focused simultaneously they began to work through a detailed investigation. The first anomaly was the difference in skin colour between his dark hands and white face. The cyclist was wearing a fleshmask. Which was when Kohei started to take a serious interest.
The G8Turing captured every feature and movement of the fleshmask, then carefully started a virtual deconstruction. Kohei watched, fascinated as always by the process, as layers of lies were peeled away to leave a very different reality beneath.
‘Ho boy,’ he muttered as Ollie Heslop’s file splashed across his lens. He knew the name anyway – the one member of the Southwark Legion they suspected of escaping
