cheap.
“There is an increasing amount of electronic activity in and around the courthouse,” the SIsubroutine told her. “I believe you are under observation.”
Mellanie rubbed her eyes and switched off the desktop array that was displaying the cases. It ejected the memory crystal that the clerk of the court had supplied her. “Police?” she asked.
“No. The systems they are using are more advanced than the police have on this world. Some of the signal traffic is strange. It appears there are two separate groups operating independently.”
“Two?” Mellanie rubbed at her bare arms where goose bumps had suddenly appeared. It wasn’t cold in the little office that the clerk had let her use. Midday sun was streaming in through the double-glazed window, stirring the air-conditioning unit into desultory life, while outside the season’s warm humid air hung over the city like a possessive spirit. If there were two groups interested in her, she knew one of them had to be from the Starflyer. Had Alessandra found out she’d traveled here? Or am I being too paranoid?
Dudley was curled up in a chair on the other side of the desk, his youth and pose giving him a strong resemblance to some sulky schoolboy. His eyes were closed, and moving like someone in REM sleep as he accessed a file from his inserts.
For an instant, she was tempted to creep out and leave him there. Except he’d panic when he realized she’d gone, and cause a big scene. And he was completely incapable of looking after himself if a Starflyer agent did want to abduct him.
Maybe bringing him along wasn’t so smart after all.
“Come on, Dudley.” She shook his shoulder. “We’re leaving.”
Mellanie put on her sunglasses as soon as they went outside. Dudley seemed to shrink away from the warm light. He was sweating and shivering as they walked away from the big old courthouse onto Cheyne Street.
Silver lines appeared just below Mellanie’s skin, like deep-sea creatures rising tentatively to the surface. They began to spread and multiply along her arms and up her neck to envelop her cheeks in a delicate filigree. Some of them she activated herself; the simple systems that she understood, sensors that amplified her perception of the surrounding area. The SIsubroutine was tapping into others.
Cheyne Street was busy. It was close to the center of town, a boundary line between the sector that housed the main government buildings and the start of the commercial district. Traffic was constant along the road, vehicle exhausts releasing dark fumes into Far Away’s crisp air. Cyclists wore filter masks as they weaved through the slow-moving cars and vans. Mellanie pushed her way along the crowded pavements, trying not to think what the fumes were doing to her lungs.
“We need to keep this simple,” she told the SIsubroutine. “Find me a car here that can take us back to the hotel.”
A long list of vehicles slid down Mellanie’s virtual vision, everything the SIsubroutine could find on Cheyne Street, either moving or parked. None of them were less than ten years old. As they’d all been imported from the Commonwealth, they all had drive arrays, not that they were used much in Armstrong City, which lacked even a basic traffic management system.
“Two Land Rover Cruisers registered with the Institute office have just turned onto Cheyne Street,” the SIsubroutine said. “They are heading toward you.”
Mellanie’s inserts and OCtattoos revealed a multitude of signals flashing through the city’s ether. She saw the Cruisers establish links to several people on the pavement. Two of them were very close, twenty meters behind, and walking quickly toward her. She turned her head to see a couple of men dressed in the dark tunics worn by the Institute troopers. Her virtual vision superimposed iridescent data pixels over the image. The two figures were separated from the rest of Cheyne Street’s pedestrians by haloes of tangerine and scarlet grids.
“I don’t feel too good,” Dudley said. His face was white, slicked with cold sweat.
Mellanie wanted to slap him. She couldn’t believe he was doing this to her, not now. Didn’t he understand how much trouble they were in? “We have to hurry, Dudley, they’re coming.”
“Who?” Any further questioning was postponed by a violent judder that started in the middle of his chest. He squashed a hand to his mouth. People were staring at him as his cheeks bulged out, moving away with their faces wrinkled up in disgust.
Mellanie’s boosted senses showed her the SIsubroutine establishing itself in the drive arrays of vehicles along Cheyne Street. Both of the Institute troopers had reached the front of the courthouse building. One of them drew his ion pistol. “Hey, you,” he called out.
Dudley started to throw up. People backed away fast as watery vomit splattered onto the paving slabs. Now there was no one between Mellanie and the Institute troopers.
“Stay right there,” the first trooper shouted. He raised the ion pistol, leveling it. Mellanie blinked against a powerful green dazzle as the weapon’s targeting laser found her face.
A car horn sounded loudly. People turned in curiosity, then yelled in panic. There was a sudden rush of movement as an old Ford Maury saloon veered across Cheyne Street, heading straight for the troopers. The green laser vanished, swinging around toward the Maury. Mellanie caught sight of the driver, a middle-aged woman who was tugging desperately at the steering wheel, her face frozen into an expression of disbelief and horror as the car refused to obey. A fusillade of horn blasts from the road around the wayward car drowned out all other sound. The troopers tried to race clear, but the car followed their movements. Its front wheels hit the pavement curb, and the whole chassis jumped half a meter in the air as it lurched forward. The trooper with the pistol got off one wild air shot before the Maury’s front grill hit him full-on just above his hips. Mellanie winced as his body folded around the car, arms and upper torso slamming down across the hood. Then the car crashed into the stone wall of the courthouse. Its collision absorber frame crumpled at the front, reducing the deceleration force on the passengers. Plyplastic sponge bags sprang out of the seats, wrapping protectively around the driver. Outside the car there was no protection. The impact burst the trooper apart as if an explosive charge had gone off inside him. For a second the shocked screams of everyone watching rose above the cacophony of horns.
A second car thudded into the curb with a loud crunch, smacking into the remaining trooper, who was staring numbly at his colleague’s atrocious death. He was bulldozed into the courthouse wall not five meters from the first smash.
It broke the spell. People started to stampede away from the horrific scene. Vehicles and cyclists swerved to avoid the rush.
“Move!” Mellanie yelled at Dudley. She pulled him along, nearly lifting him off the ground in the planet’s low gravity. Somewhere farther down Cheyne Street there was yet another violent vehicle crash. Reviewing the flood of data her insert-boosted senses were delivering, she saw the SIsubroutine had taken over a delivery van and rammed it into one of the Institute Cruisers. The resulting snarl-up had blocked that half of Cheyne Street completely.
A small Ables four-seater Cowper pulled up beside Mellanie. Its doors popped open and she shoved Dudley in. “Let’s go,” she cried.
The Ables pulled out into what was left of the traffic. Everything else on the road seemed to move neatly out of its way, allowing it to accelerate smoothly away from the bedlam. Mellanie turned around to gape at the scene behind her. People had stopped running now. Some hardy souls were gathered around the cars that had killed the troopers, trying to help free the people inside.
She sank back into the seat with a shaky gasp of air. Her virtual vision relayed the excited pulses of encrypted communications weaving through the city net.
“Can you track the people in the second watcher team?” she asked the SIsubroutine.
“Yes.”
The chain of data traffic flipped up into her virtual vision, turquoise globes linked by jumping sine waves of neon orange. Ten people were sharing the same channel. Three of them were heading toward Cheyne Street in a vehicle of some kind. The rest were on the ground close to the courthouse.
“Any idea who’s in charge?” she asked.
“One of the people in the vehicle is issuing more messages than the others, which would indicate they are in charge. However, I do not have the capacity to break their encryption, so I cannot offer any guarantee of this analysis.”
“Doesn’t matter. If the other guys were from the Institute, this lot have to be Guardians. Find an access code for the leader’s interface.”
A city net personal address flipped up into her virtual vision. The rest of the imagery was shutting down. When she held up her arm, the lacework of silvery OCtattoos was fading from her skin. “Are you all right?” she asked Dudley.
He was curled up in the passenger seat, shivering badly. “Do you think they had memorycells?” he asked in a faint voice.
“I imagine re-lifing is part of their contract with the Institute, yes.”
“I want to go home.”
“That’s not a bad idea, Dudley. We’ll do that.” The wormhole opened again in two hours. She suspected their hotel would be under observation. If they left right away they might just manage to stay ahead of the Institute. “See if you can get us on the passenger manifest for the next flight back to Boongate,” she told the SIsubroutine. “And cancel the route back to the hotel. Take us toward 3F Plaza, but not actually into it, not yet.”
Mellanie took another minute to compose herself. The car crashes had been deplorable. But then, if the SIsubroutine hadn’t intervened, she and Dudley would be in the back of a Cruiser heading for a very unpleasant, and short, future.
She told her e-butler to call the Guardian member’s code.
Stig stopped the car at the end of Kyrie Street, just before it opened out into 3F Plaza. Franico’s, the Italian restaurant, was twenty meters ahead of him.
“You want to do this?” Murdo McPeierls asked.
“It’s not as if we’ve got the element of surprise,” Stig said. He tried to stop it sounding grouchy, but Murdo had been in the car when he’d got Mellanie’s call.
“I’ll scout around,” Murdo said. “Shout if you need me.”
“Sure.” Stig gave the traffic a slightly apprehensive glance. Kyrie Street looked perfectly normal. But then Olwen said there’d been nothing out of place on Cheyne Street until the cars started going berserk.
Stig squared his shoulders and went into Franico’s. Mellanie hadn’t chosen it for its decor or its menu. Gray curving walls and archways of dead drycoral divided up the restaurant into low segments modeled on some insect hive floor plan. The food was pasta and pizzas, with the house speciality of fresh fish from the North Sea.
It took Stig a moment to find Mellanie. She and Dudley were sitting at a table close to the door, half-hidden by one of the crumbling archways, which gave her a good view of anyone coming in while remaining out of direct sight. He went over and sat down. Dudley scowled at him; the young re-life astronomer was nursing a glass of water. Mellanie had a beer and a plate of garlic bread.
“Thank you for coming,” Mellanie said.
“Your call surprised me. I was interested.”
