Without looking back or running any more checks he went straight to the taxi stand. As the revolving door offered him up to the warm Californian sunlight, Stig smiled; despite the seriousness of being burned, he was going to enjoy the next few hours.
The warehouses didn’t annoy Adam as much as the districts of office towers that nestled along the southern side of LA Galactic. He hated the multitude of handling and transport companies that survived in parasitic bondage with the CST rail network. They were true capitalist entities, producing nothing, charging people to supply products, adding to the cost of living on a hundred worlds, living off those who worked in production. Not, he had to concede, that those who worked in production these days were the old working classes in a true Marxist definition; they were all engineers who went around troubleshooting cybernetics. But for all the changes and undeniable improvements automation and consumerism had brought to the proletariat’s standard of living, it hadn’t changed the financial power structure that ruled the human race. A tiny minority controlled the wealth of hundreds of worlds, bypassing, buying, or corrupting governments to maintain their dominance. And here he was, living among them, a keen consumer of their products, daunted by their size, his life’s purpose almost lost as he sold more and more of himself to Johansson’s cause. A cause that was now giving him a great deal of concern. It wasn’t something he’d told anyone—after all, who could he tell?—but he was having to face up to the daunting, and terrifying, prospect that Bradley Johansson might just be right about the Starflyer. The whole Prime situation was too odd; there were too many coincidences piling up: theSecond Chance mission, the barrier disappearing, Hell’s Gateway, the attack on Venice Coast. Adam was certain there was going to be a war, and he wasn’t sure which side the Commonwealth government was going to be on.
So he went about the meticulous job of assembling Johansson’s equipment without his usual cynicism. The Party had been avoided for a long time now, he didn’t provide any chapter on any planet with support. It was the Guardians who received his full attention. Crazy, enthusiastic, devoted youngsters from Far Away, who were riding gleefully off on their crusade and didn’t have a single clue how the Commonwealth worked. They were the ones he was protecting, guiding like some old mystic promising nirvana at the end of the road. Except today it looked like Stig wasn’t going to make it.
The station car drove him carefully along the internal highways into the Arlee district, two hundred fifty square kilometers of warehouses on the east side of LA Galactic. The blank-faced composite buildings were laid out in a perfect grid. Some were so large they took up an entire block, while some blocks had as many as twenty separate units. They all had light composite walls and black solar cell roofs, cumbersome air-conditioning units sprouted from walls and edges like mechanical cancers, their radiant fans shining a dull orange under the hot sunlight. There were no sidewalks, and cars were a rarity on these roads. Vans and large trucks trundled along everywhere, their driver arrays navigating the simple path between their loading bay and a rail cargo handling yard on a twenty-four/seven basis. But at least this district involved the physical movement of goods, it wasn’t the dealing and moneymaking of the offices. That normally made it bearable for him.
He drove into the loading bay park at Lemule’s Max Transit warehouse, a medium-sized building, enclosing four acres of floor space. Bjou McSobel and Jenny McNowak were working inside. Lemule’s had a big order for sourcing and supplying packager modules for a supermarket chain on five phase two worlds, and their crates were stacked up across half of the cavernous interior awaiting shipment orders. Flatbed loaders and forklifts slid up and down the lanes between the high metal ledges, shuffling farm equipment, carpentry tools, GPbots, domestic hologram portals, and a hundred other items that formed the company’s legitimate business, packaging them for their train ride out across the planets. By itself, Lemule’s Max Transit was a viable operation. Every morning when he left his hotel on the coast and drove into LA Galactic, Adam felt the irony that after so many years spent running identical concerns he could manage a transit company far better than the entrepreneurs and opportunist chancers who were desperate for their own company to succeed.
Bjou closed the heavy roll door at the end of the loading bay as Adam got out of the car. “How are we doing?” Adam asked.
“Jenny has opened the access hatch. The S&Ibot should be here in another forty minutes.”
“It definitely retrieved the case, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Some good news, then.”
They went down to the far end of the warehouse where the Guardians had set up a secure area. Bjou and Jenny had been preparing a shipment of equipment for Far Away, disguising the components in basic industrial tools and consumer electronics due for shipment to Armstrong City. On the other side of the open crates and disassembled machines a concealed manhole cover had been opened in the enzyme-bonded concrete floor. Below it was a small circular shaft leading down five meters to one of the sewer pipes that served LA Galactic. That, too, had been breached, the hole sealed up again with a flush-fitting hatch. Jenny was sitting on the rim of the shaft, an anxious expression on her face as she followed the progress of their S&Ibot through the maze of sewer pipes that lay underneath LA Galactic.
“No problems, sir,” she said. “Our monitors haven’t picked up anything tracking the bot.”
“Okay, Jenny, keep on it.”
Bjou pulled over a couple of chairs, and Adam sat down gratefully. His e-butler reported an encrypted call from Kieran.
“Sir, we thought you should know. Paula Myo just arrived on a loop train from Seattle. She’s being escorted by CST security personnel, looks like they’re going to the operational center.”
A little shiver of cold ran down Adam’s spine. If she was giving Stig’s operation her personal attention then she knew he was important.
“Do you want us to hack into their internal network?” Kieran asked. “We might be able to see what she’s doing.”
“No,” Adam said immediately. “We can’t guarantee a clean hack, not into CST security. I don’t want them tipped off we know about them, that’s Stig’s only advantage right now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Adam resisted putting his head in his hands. He sat on the hard plastic seat, staring at the secret hole in the floor, while he called up files and displayed them across his virtual vision. Somewhere there had to be a weak link, a way Paula had found to infiltrate his couriers. When the faint amber information floated in front of him he cursed himself for making such an elementary mistake. Stig was collecting software from an insider at the Shansorel Partnership, the same insider who had supplied regulator software for a set of microphase modulators that Valtare Rigin had acquired. It would have had the partnership’s signature embedded in the subroutines. Easy to trace. “Damnit,” he grunted. I’m getting old. And stupid.
“Is everything all right, sir?” Bjou asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
Tarlo was waiting in the operations room of LA Galactic’s CST security department when Paula Myo came in.
“Sorry, Chief,” he said. “I think he made me when he came out of the can.”
She nodded. “Don’t worry about it.”
He glanced at the CST security officer who’d escorted Paula. The whole department had rolled over and given full cooperation at the mere mention of her name. “We should have gone for a virtual observation.”
“I have my suspicions about their electronic support capability. They certainly found your box fast enough. If they’re that good they would have been aware of a virtual as soon as we began it.” She turned to the security officer. “I’d like a clean office we can use as our field headquarters, please.”