Inescapable (7 page)

‘I have
received a message for you from Mister Eaves at Palladium HQ,’ the
AI said. ‘I took the liberty of doing a brief scan. We are needed
in East Africa.’

Fox frowned as
a globe was projected into her vision field showing the spot in
Africa they were expected to go to. It was just south of the
Saharan Super-arid Region, near the Gulf of Aden, but well inland.
‘What the Hell’s there?’ she asked as she bounced out of bed and
headed for the shower.

‘MarTech East
Africa. It’s a research facility built on the shore of Lake Abaya.
Or on what was the shore when the lake was more than a pool. They
research atmospheric water extraction and arid condition
agriculture, and they are part of the desertification monitoring
programme.’

‘And Eaves
wants me there?’ Fox stepped under the water with a sigh; if she
was going to East Africa, it seemed quite likely she would have to
cut down on her showers. ‘Why?’

‘Because
someone tried to break in, and tried very hard to make sure no one
knew about it.’

‘What’ve they
got that’s worth stealing?’

‘According to
Mister Eaves, nothing.’

‘And
that’s
why he wants me to go investigate it. Well, send a
message saying we’ll be there, and another one to yourself saying
we’ll be late home, and then another one to Terri saying she won’t
get her diagnostics as soon as she expected.’

Kit’s voice had
a sigh in it as she replied. ‘Already done.’

New York Metro.

Marie Shaftsbury was
showing Sam around his new property. She was being quite
conscientious about it, making sure he saw every room and knew
everything she knew about things which needed fixing. Sam took all
of that in, but he also watched Marie.

She was worth
watching from a male point of view. Slim, reasonably toned body,
moderately full breasts, and though he was not an expert, he had
seen enough body sculpting to be fairly sure it was all natural.
She had dark, red-auburn hair which fell to her pointed chin in
unruly curls, arched eyebrows matched her hair, and green eyes
suggested it was all natural. She had quite a strong face, hard but
sensuous, with full lips and a small dent in her chin which added
to the feeling of strength. A consultant might have trimmed her
nose, made it a little smaller at the tip and cuter, but Sam
thought it looked quite attractive enough as it was.

For working,
she wore a grey, straight-collared, short-sleeved blouse, dark grey
skirt that came to mid-thigh, and a pale blue apron. Sam had not
failed to notice that, while she normally wore flat shoes, today
she was in five-inch heels and hold-up stockings. The lace band on
her stockings was not quite hidden by the hem of her skirt. On the
odd occasion they had met previously, as now, he had caught her
looking his way with a look in her eyes he knew well: Marie was not
dressing up for him because he owned the house; she was doing it
because she thought she might have a chance now he did.

‘The master
bedroom,’ Marie said, sweeping an arm out to indicate the large,
quite open room with its big bed. Sam had never actually been in it
before and, more than any other room in the house, this one was a
problem for him.

‘We never used
this room,’ he said. Marie’s cheeks coloured a little, but she had
cleaned up after Felix’s guests before and seemed fairly happy
about his sexuality, and Sam’s. ‘We always used one of the guest
rooms when I was visiting. He told me that he couldn’t bring
himself to share
this
bed with another man. I respected
that. I’m not sure I can bring myself to use it.’

‘Well, the
mattress needs replacing for sure and the frame needs repairing or
replacing. He knew, but he wouldn’t change it.’

Sam grinned.
‘Yeah. He was a sentimental old fool. Have you done anything about
your acting?’

Marie blinked
at the change of subject. ‘I’ve looked into some coaching. I’m not
sure whether a full course would be a good idea and I wouldn’t be
able to start until after the summer if I took one.’ She gave a
little shrug. ‘I’m not really sure what to do. I’ve been wanting to
do something like this for years, but now I could actually do it…
I’m not sure where to start.’

‘There’s an
agent I know,’ Sam said, brow furrowing. ‘I mean, she’s a client,
but we get on fairly well. I think she’d be willing to give you
some advice. I’ll sound her out about it.’

‘That’d be
great!’

‘Yes, well,
she’ll probably tell you not to start, it’s all a waste of time,
it’s not as glamorous as you think…’

‘Yes, but–’

‘But that’s
because she’s seen any number of young people screwed over by media
channels of one sort or another. She can tell you what to look at
and where the pitfalls are.’

‘I’d be
really
grateful,’ Marie said, her voice dropping half an
octave into the ‘sultry’ range.

Sam gave her a
smile and turned away from the troubling room. ‘No problem. I was
hoping to bring a friend of mine here to look this place over.
She’s an ex-cop, my next-door neighbour. And I thought… Well,
anyway, she’s not going to make it home for a few days, so I guess
it’ll have to be next week.’

‘Well… I’m here
most nights. Bring her over any time. I’m sure I’ll enjoy meeting
her.’

MarTech East Africa,
26
^th
March.

‘It’s a pleasure to
meet you, Miss Meridian.’ Fox’s personnel database identified the
speaker as Ronaldo Duncan, Palladium’s lead security officer at the
facility. He had just boarded the transport Fox had flown in on and
pulled off a filter mask, and she had a feeling his meeting her on
the aircraft was not down to politeness.

‘Mister
Duncan,’ Fox said, taking his offered hand and shaking it, ‘I admit
that I’ve had little in the way of a briefing on this place.’

Duncan nodded.
‘Not much to brief you on, but someone decided to breach the
facility for no reason we can gather, and they did it in a way that
suggests… Well, let’s get you inside before we go over the details.
You’ll need to wear this.’ He plucked a mask from a rack beside the
transport’s doorway, which was an airlock. Fox had noticed that on
the way in, knew what it meant, and hated it.

‘Yeah, I
figured I might. I did survival training in the Southern
Protectorate when I was in the Army.’

‘You’ll be
fairly used to the conditions then.’ He started to pull his own
mask back on and then paused. ‘North of here it gets a lot worse,
but we’re not expecting anything major to sweep down in the next
week.’

Fox winced.
‘Peachy.’

The wind
outside was not enough to be nasty, but it did make her glad of the
mask. Environmental changes in the last five decades had hit the
northern part of Africa and southern Europe hard. Oh, Americans
liked to bitch about the near total destruction of the southern
states and their conversion into the Southern Protectorate, and the
rise of the dustbowl with its tornadoes and dust storms, but the
Saharan Super-arid Region was something else again.
No one
could live in what had been the desert now, though there were
rumours of secret aquifers supplying settlements out there. Out on
the edge, places like this one were constantly monitoring the
spread of the desert. It was not long after dawn, but the air
temperature outside the air-conditioned plane was pushing toward
twenty Celsius and would be over thirty by midday.

Grey-beige
dust, the remains of useless topsoil, swirled about them as they
crossed the concrete landing strip to a concrete slab of a building
with a heavy, metal door mounted in one side. Fox could just about
make out a fence about a hundred metres away. The entire facility
reminded her of another MarTech research bunker and she paused just
outside the door as Duncan preceded her in.

‘Miss
Meridian?’ His voice sounded in her head over her implant
communicator. Deciding not to reply to the implicit question, she
just shook her head and followed him. The door closed behind her
with a very solid sound.

Duncan pulled
his mask off as soon as they were through the airlock, which was
obviously more of a dust lock, and shook his head. ‘Hate having to
wear these things. Your equipment arrived late last night.’

Fox blinked at
him after removing her own mask. ‘My equipment?’

‘Yeah. You’ve
got a couple of frames, some sort of server array, a
load
of
microbot hives… You weren’t expecting it?’

Fox considered
for a second. ‘I didn’t know about it, but I should have expected
it. Let’s get a briefing on the situation sorted out and then we’ll
find out what Jackson’s sent me.’

‘Well, the
briefing is pretty simple. I can take care of that on the way down
to your room. Might as well show you where you’re sleeping.’

‘Sure.’ Fox
followed him through corridors with bare, concrete walls and heavy
doors. The surface level was built to keep unwanted visitors out,
which made you wonder how someone had managed to get in.

‘Twenty-three
sixteen on the twenty-fourth,’ Duncan said once they were riding
down in an elevator, ‘we detected a breach on the southern
boundary, the inner fence. We have two layers of defences out
there. There’s an inner, chain-link fence which you might have
seen, and an outer wall. The fence is rigged with sensor cables and
something broke one. We had a cambot out there inside of a minute,
but the best we got was a couple of blurred stills of something
heading for the wall. They had some sort of high-end camouflage
gear. We still haven’t figured out how they got past the defences
on the wall.’

‘Do you know
which way they were going when they tripped the sensor?’

‘No. We’re
assuming
they were on their way in, but we don’t
know
.’

‘No sign of
anything disturbed in the facility?’

‘Again, no. And
no one can figure out what they would have wanted in here anyway.
We’d have put it down as a failed attempt to get in if it wasn’t
for the camouflage gear.’

‘Too high-tech
for the local bandits?’

‘Just a little.
Most of them are still using old early-century assault rifles.
Things that still have brass cases on their ammo. They’re a
nuisance at best. We get a few extremist units attacking from the
Caliphate and they’ve got better weapons.’

‘This area’s
contested, isn’t it?’

‘Well, sort of.
The Caliphate claims it, but they don’t really have the control. No
one
really
wants it. The topsoil is eroded to just about
nothing and the climate’s shitty. In America, there are some
transhumanists trying to repopulate the dustbowls with transgenic
humans.’

‘The xerocole
settlements? I read about those.’

‘Yeah. If the
Caliphate could use that kind of technology, they might be able to
do something around here, but they won’t modify the standard human
genome.’

Fox gave a nod.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened. The corridors below
ground were just as grey and hard as the ones above. ‘Would they
have access to camo-tech like the stuff you saw?’

‘It’s not
impossible, but not really likely either. Uh, the rooms here have
v-tags built in and pretty good entertainment systems. You can
change the look and you won’t die of boredom.’

Looking around
at the grey walls, Fox gave a nod. ‘Good to know. So far this place
is less exciting than Luna City.’

~~~

There were, in fact, a
squad of robots waiting in the surface hangar beside the vertol
transport they had flown in on, and the aircraft looked as though
it was a customised design. Fox peered around at a large,
spider-like ground bot, a pair of vectored-thrust air units, and a
half-dozen wheeled boxes which were designed to transport and
deliver microbot swarms. Inside the vertol were a couple of banks
of what looked like the processors Kit ran on at home, but there
were more of them.

‘Okay,’ Fox
said as she stood in the transport’s rear bay wondering what to do
next, ‘he sent me this stuff, but how does it work?’

‘Voice print
and implant code verified,’ said a soft, female voice. ‘Good
morning, Miss Meridian. I am Pythia, your forensic systems
technician and analyst. I am fully capable of handling any work you
may direct my cyberframes to carry out.’

Kit appeared
beside Fox, looking at the bank of processors. ‘A class three AI,
but quite an intelligent one. She will perform her work precisely
and with little or no error, but you need to provide the
imagination.’

‘Yes,’ Pythia
agreed. ‘That was viewed as the best method of operation by Mister
Martins. Consider me to be a trained forensics technician, not a
detective.’

‘Right,’ Fox
said. ‘Uh, I assume you’ve a connection to the station’s
computers?’

‘Yes, Miss
Meridian.’

‘Then I need a
full surface schematic of–’ She stopped as a virtual display opened
up in the loading bay, a 3D, wireframe map of the facility on the
surface. She could see the underground structure fading away
beneath it; obviously the system was capable of projecting the
entire structure into her vision field if she wanted it. ‘Great. Do
you have the location on the security fence where the sensor
tripped?’ The position, on the south-west side, was highlighted.
‘Great. Can you take the stills they snapped and mark the
approximate positions of the insurgents they spotted?’ Three red
cones appeared near the outer wall, marking the interpolated
locations. Pythia was fast and efficient. ‘I want full forensic
sweeps performed on the fence at that point and the locations
you’ve identified.’

Almost
immediately, there was the sound of electric motors humming into
life outside. ‘I am dispatching my forensic swarms to those
locations. Estimated time to complete full analysis is three
hours.’