anymore; half of the walls were gone, opening up the entire level. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, some smoking, the rest saturated with water and blue suppression foam. Most of the ceiling was down as well, exposing the Greenford’s main structural beams. Fortunately, they seemed to be intact. Water was gushing out of several thick pipes to form large filthy pools across the floor. The glass windows had all been blown out.
Several bodies were lying amid the destruction.
“Hellfire,” Paula exclaimed.
“Sorry,” Warren said. “We had to terminate them.”
“Okay. Where are the corpses? We need to run a DNA confirmation.”
“Over here.” He scrambled over the piles of rubble, leading her around the tower’s core. Several armor suits were busy digging injured survivors out.
“We think these two.”
Inside the helmet, Paula wrinkled up her nose at the sight. The two bodies had been badly burned, then crushed by steel beams and concrete sections. Filthy water lapped around their scorched extremities. The remnants of their clothing were wrapped around them, scraps of blackened cloth. Paula recognized a fragment of the deep blue trousers that Bernadette had been wearing as they pursued her across Tridelta for most of the day. Parts of her body were untouched, corresponding to the bands of an insert force field skeleton. Her arms had the ruptures Paula knew came from internal power cells igniting, the kind used to power weapons. She pulled out a small DNA reader unit, and touched the stubby sampler prong against an unblemished segment of skin.
“It’s her,” she said as the data ran down her virtual vision.
The other corpse was slightly larger. Probably male. Paula examined him. Damage to his limbs had all been caused by external force. He certainly hadn’t been using a force field. His burned outer layers were no use to her DNA reader; she had to clench her jaw and push the stubby prong through the damage so it could reach internal organs. “Doesn’t look like he was wetwired.” Then she noticed the shreds of his clothes, the fabric the same dark red of the Saffron Clinic uniform. The DNA wasn’t registered in the Senate Security database. She told her e-butler to access Tridelta police and civic files.
“Are you sure this is the second one?” she asked.
“Not really,” Warren said. “This is the location where all the resistance came from.”
“But you’re sure two people were firing at you?”
“That’s a definite.”
“John, have you got your target?”
“Yes. The DNA is weird. I’ve got variants across the body, but some of it matches Daltra.”
“Thank you. Matthew, what about you?”
“Two hostiles taken out. One positive ID: Pomanskie. We’re trying to salvage the second body. There’s not a lot of it left intact.”
Paula stared down at the unidentified corpse. “Bernadette was making contact with four hostiles. So who was he?” She started to turn a circle, but stopped almost at once. There was a wide rent in the tower’s core, five meters away. Two eyebirds flipped out of their holder on her suit, and darted into the dark gap. “Damnit, that’s an elevator shaft.” The eyebirds’ sensors were showing her the shaft running up for another sixty floors, with every door shut. Twenty floors below, it was blocked by the top of an elevator. She sent both eyebirds plummeting down. The hatch on the top of the elevator had been ripped open. The eyebirds forced their way past the bent metal and into the elevator. There was a hole in the bottom, revealing the rest of the shaft leading down into the Greenford’s subbasements.
“Everyone, we have a breach. One person, maybe more. Time frame, up to seven minutes. That’s enough to exit. Renne, harden that perimeter.”
Renne had fumed at being given the perimeter duty. After all that the Paris office had been through lately she wanted to get into an armor suit and kick some serious ass. But the duty wasn’t just putting up barricades and liaising with the local police. Everyone brought down from the clinic had to be examined and confirmed. A lot of them would be criminals of some kind, it was that sort of clinic, which meant there was a good probability they would be weapons wetwired. Paula kept emphasizing how the perimeter was to be maintained. It was good to be working with the boss again. Renne just wished she were on the sharp edge of the operation. She couldn’t decide if she’d been given the perimeter duty because of Paula’s earlier suspicions. That she’d ever been on the suspect list in the first place had shocked her. But that was the boss for you, logical to the last. Renne was still reeling from hearing about Tarlo’s treachery. They’d known each other for nearly fifteen years.
The holding chambers they’d set up in the subbasement were starting to fill up with the Saffron Clinic people. All the fighting was over. There was no more debris falling onto the plaza, though water was still dribbling down the face of the Greenford Tower from the gaping windows.
Renne walked around the edge of the police barricades, looking up into the dark sky. The clinic’s floors were easy to see; without their glass the shattered windows gleamed a harsh amber against the rest of the tower’s black bulk—the only illumination above ten meters in the whole city.
Police officers and patrolbots stood guard along the barricades, keeping the curious citizens well back. She was pleased to see how vigilant they were being despite the news about the starships.
“Nobody down here, Boss,” she told Paula. “Do you want the police teams to start sweeping the lower floors?”
“Not yet. Hoshe is locking down every floor. We’re going to have to seal up the entire tower and scan everyone as they emerge.”
“Long night.”
“Looks that way.”
“Have you heard the starships are back? The attack was a failure.”
“That’s not good.”
“So was the Starflyer part of that?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Admiral Kime.”
“You know the Admiral?”
“Yes.”
Renne knew she shouldn’t be surprised. But if the boss knew Kime, how come Columbia had fired her? Or had he? Was it a setup to make the traitor relax his guard? With the boss, anything was possible. She never let go of a suspect.
Renne turned to go back into the Greenford Tower where Hoshe had set up the operation’s command post. Somebody moving away from the crowd outside the barricades caught her eye. She frowned. A girl with a mane of blond hair stepped off the pavement and crossed over Allwyn Street. It wasn’t the hair that made Renne peer after her, it was the walk. The girl almost strutted, holding her head high, hardly bothering to check that traffic had stopped for her. That kind of arrogance belonged to a Dynasty brat, or a Grand Family trustafarian. The kind of integral arrogance Isabella Halgarth possessed in abundance.
Renne swung her legs over the barricade and pushed through the line of spectators. The girl was walking away down the other side of the street. She was the right height. Her clothes were expensively casual, a red sweater and short amethyst wrap skirt with slim metal clips, long black boots.
“I might need some backup here.”
“What have you got?” Hoshe asked.
“I’m not sure. I think I’ve just seen Isabella Halgarth.”
“Where?”
“Allwyn Street, near the Lanvia Avenue turn.”
“Hold please, I’m accessing the civic sensors.”
Renne kept an eye on traffic, and hurried out into the road. Horns tooted furiously at her as cars braked. A cyclist screamed obscenities as he wobbled past. “She’s getting into a taxi.” The girl vanished in a blue and green vehicle, and the door shut.
“Number?” Hoshe demanded.
“I can’t see, damnit. The logo is an orange trumpet, it’s on the doors.” She flagged down a taxi. “She’s heading west.” The maroon Ables Puma drew up beside her. “Just drive west,” she told the drive array.
“All right, I’m filtering traffic control arrays for a match,” Hoshe said. “Murray cabs have that trumpet logo.”
“Renne, you need backup,” Paula said. “Don’t go near her. She’s extremely dangerous.”
“I won’t.” She switched on her force field skeleton suit. “Just observing.”
“Okay, I’ve got a police team in their car,” Hoshe said. “Leaving the Green-field garage now.”
Renne was pressed up against the taxi’s front windshield, retinal inserts searching through the traffic ahead for the blue and green Ables. Her OCtattoos reported a sophisticated scan washing across her, immediately pinpointing the source. She turned quickly to see Isabella Halgarth standing on the pavement, looking straight at her. The girl’s right arm was raised, pointing at the taxi.
“Oh, shit.” Renne closed her eyes.
The maser struck the taxi’s power cells, which exploded with enough fury to lift the disintegrating car three meters off the ground. Renne’s force field was overwhelmed in the first second. But it did provide enough protection that when the paramedics started to pick up the sections of her body that had been flung over a wide radius they found her memorycell was intact. After re-life procedure, Renne would be able to remember her death.
CHAPTER TEN
The assembly platform brought back memories of the Second Chance being constructed above Anshun. To Nigel that whole period seemed like centuries ago now, a time when life was a great deal quieter and more leisurely. Giselle Swinsol and Nigel’s own son, Otis, were leading him through the platform’s gridwork maze inside a huge cylinder of malmetal, where the Speedwell was under construction. The Dynasty’s colony ship was much bigger than the Second Chance, a lengthy cluster of spherical hull sections arranged along a central spine. So far, Nigel had authorized eleven of the vast ships, with initial component acquisition consent for another four. In theory, just one ship could carry enough equipment and genetic material to establish a successful high-technology human society from scratch. But Nigel had
