of the man’s uniform. ‘What’s your name, officer?’
The enforcer let go of his arm as if it had suddenly heated up, seemed about to say something further, then abruptly stepped past and headed towards the foyer, his companion pausing only for a moment before trailing after.
‘I just saved their lives, didn’t I?’ Hannah said.
‘Yes,’ Saul acknowledged. ‘Yes, you did.’
More staff appeared in the corridor further along, some heading towards the foyer and others moving away. Two teams clad in fluorescent hazmat suits were pushing wheeled stretchers towards the incident. Moving beyond these, Hannah and Saul got far enough away to just be part of the crowd, and entered a lift to take them down a floor to one of the train stations. Once inside the lift, Saul pressed his hands against his head.
‘No, not now.’ He looked up. ‘Did Malden suffer this pain?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, he did.’ The lie tasted sour on her lips.
The sliding doors drew aside and he forced himself into motion again. They crossed a short platform to board a waiting train. Five other people were already inside, deep in nervous conversation.
‘Our flight has to be cancelled,’ said a woman wearing the same grey flight suit as the rest of them. ‘For Christ’s sake, that plane just dropped out of the sky!’
‘Don’t bet on it,’ replied her nearest male companion.
‘No, don’t,’ said one of the other men. ‘We’d have been notified of a blanket grounding, and been recalled by now.’
The woman looked at her watch. ‘There’s still time. I’ll bet the orders’ll catch up just when we’re strapping in.’
‘Ever the optimist, Eva,’ said another woman.
‘They’ll need to know why it happened,’ Eva insisted. She then noticed Saul and gazed at him disbelievingly for a moment, before abruptly looking away. She glanced queryingly towards one of her companions, who shrugged. Always better not to ask.
After a moment, the train moved out of the Embarkation complex, following its rails out towards the hectares of carbocrete comprising the spaceport runways.
The front end of the space plane reared up out of the surrounding support vehicles, fuel silos and tangles of umbilici like some monstrous Gulliver trying to escape its Lilliputian captors. It rested on the specially formulated carbocrete like a prehistoric beast reformatted for a new cybernetic age: all hard angles and black solidity.
The train drew to a halt at the end of its line, directly opposite a large mobile building poised on enormous caterpillar tracks, from which an entrance tunnel rose towards the belly of the plane itself. The five on board with them exited the train first, carrying an assortment of laptops and short cylindrical flight bags containing their personal effects. Saul and Hannah were certainly the odd ones out, and because of that would come under scrutiny. Time for him to once again penetrate local computers to ensure that they got safely aboard. He did not relish the prospect and wondered if he had been foolish to push so far so quickly. A mental crash now and it would all be over for them both.
Saul linked into Govnet, found it still disrupted, then into the subnets of the spaceport and brought his focus down on to everything concerning this plane, and it didn’t take him long to find problems. The woman called Eva was right: a general order had been issued to cancel all further missions, and the concert of groaning and swearing from the five ahead confirmed that they had now received this instruction through their fones. Orders specific to space-plane crew and passengers were that they must return to quarters whilst an investigation was put in place. All space planes were to undergo a thorough inspection.
These were the orders on the surface, but there seemed a great deal more activity going on below this. The spaceport authority was aware that the plane had been brought down by computer penetration, the same sort of penetration that resulted in the aeros turning on each other and wreaking destruction elsewhere about the port. Saul discovered that the missile firing, having wiped out an Inspectorate security squad sent to apprehend suspects at Embarkation, was under heavy suspicion, and further squads had been dispatched. It seemed likely to him that he and Hannah had been detected, but so far that the Inspectorate just had a general location.
Deeper penetration now, the thumping in his head growing, and some invisible tormentor trying to drill him another eye socket.
He sent orders to whatever crew was aboard the plane, and in its surrounding infrastructure, to expect an investigator plus his assistant. By way of a cam within the train he made visual files of both their faces and sent them through, with no more than the name Agent Green, and which gave him complete authority here. After the five crew had climbed back aboard the train, ready to return to their quarters, Hannah and he disembarked.
‘We are now investigators,’ he told Hannah as they stepped from the vehicle.
‘Very good,’ she replied. ‘But how does that help us get the plane off the ground?’
‘We’ll see when we get there.’
She stared at him. ‘Nothing planned here? Nothing prepared?’
‘No, but I know how to fly this thing now and, once I have it isolated up in the air, there’s nothing they can do. I don’t see them quickly making a decision to shoot twenty billion Euros worth of their own hardware out of the sky, and once the scramjets fire up they won’t be able to.’
She flinched and shook her head. ‘I wish I could trust your superior intelligence, but obviously I can’t. Even a space plane travelling at Mach 15 can’t outrun a laser.’
‘You’re talking about the Argus Network?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you
