“Christ fuck a duck,” Ozzie mouthed.
What he could see was a halo of gas that went right around the star. Which meant the planet they were standing on was orbiting right inside it.
“I know this place,” he said in astonishment.
“What?” Orion blurted. “How could you?”
Ozzie gave a very twitchy laugh. “I was told about it by someone else who walked the Silfen paths. He said he visited artifacts called tree reefs. They floated in a nebula of atmospheric gas. Wow, whatta you know, and I always thought his story was mostly bullshit. Guess I owe him an apology.”
“Who was it, Ozzie? Who’s been here?”
“Some dude called Bradley Johansson.”
…
After a five-minute trip, the train from Oaktier pulled up to platform twenty-nine in the Seattle CST station’s third passenger terminal. Stig McSobel stepped out and asked his e-butler to find the platform where he could catch a standard-class loop train to Los Angeles, which was the next stop on the trans-Earth line. It told him the loop trains all left from terminal two, so he hopped on the little monorail car that carried people between the terminals. He slid smoothly along the elevated rail as it took him out over the vast marshaling yard that had spread out over the land to the east of Seattle, while two-kilometer-long goods trains pulled by hulking great Damzung T5V6B electric engine units passed underneath him as they rolled out of the bulk-freight gateway to Bayovar, the Big15 connected directly to Seattle. While trans-Commonwealth express trains flashed along on their magrails like aircraft flying at zero altitude. Down to the south he could see a long line of gateway arches throwing off a pale blue light that produced long shadows across the weed-colonized concrete ground. The Seattle CST station was a junction for over twenty-seven phase one space worlds in addition to Bayovar, routing all of the freight and passengers that flowed among them. Thousands of trains a day trundled across the station, providing the huge web of commercial links that helped maintain Seattle’s high-tech research and industry base.
Stig sat at one end of the tubular monorail car, quickly scanning his fellow travelers and transferring the images into files. His wrist array ran comparisons with the thousands of visual files he’d accumulated since he began working in the Commonwealth itself. Seven of the people in the monorail had been on the train from Oaktier, which was only normal. If one of them was following him, they had reprofiled their face since the last time they’d shared a train together.
Terminal two was a huge metal and concrete dome, half of which was underground. Its multitude of platforms were arranged in a radial fashion on two levels, lower level for incoming, upper for departures. Stig paid cash for his standard-class ticket that would take him all the way around the loop to Calcutta, and took a moving walkway out to platform A-seventeen, where one of the twenty-carriage loop trains was just pulling in. He stood waiting casually by an open door on the second carriage, watching latecomers hurry across the platform. Nobody from the monorail car got onto the loop train. Satisfied, he went on board and walked down the carriages to the fifth. Only then did he take a seat.
Hoshe Finn stood in the queue for the Bean Here franchise stall at the end of platform A-seventeen and watched his target get onto the local train. “Have your people got him?” he asked Paula, who was standing beside him.
“Yes, thank you. Team B is boxing him. He just sat down in the fifth carriage.”
He bought a coffee for himself and a tea for Paula. “So do you suspect any of team B?”
“I don’t have any real suspects, sadly,” she said, and blew across the top of her cup. “That means I have to treat everyone as the possible leak.”
“Does that include me?”
She sipped her tea, and gave him a thoughtful look. “If you are working for an executive security service, or some corporate black ops division, then whoever planted you has resources and foresight beyond even my ability to counter.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Thank you for doing this, Hoshe.”
“My pleasure. I just hope it gets you what you need.”
“Me, too.”
He stood beside the Bean Here stall and watched the train pull out of the station. All in all, it was a strange business, and whatever the outcome, he knew he wouldn’t like it. Either the President was killing off citizens with impunity, or that lunatic Bradley Johansson had been right all along. He wasn’t sure which was worse.
It took ten minutes for the loop train to reach LA Galactic. Most of that was spent crawling slowly through the Seattle station as they waited for their slot amid the goods trains at the trans-Earth loop gateway. Centuries ago, when it was starting out, not even CST could afford a chunk of real estate in LA the size it needed to house a planetary station. So it moved south of San Clemente and leased some of Camp Pendelton from the U.S. government, in an agreement that provided the Pentagon with direct access to wormholes, giving them the ability to deploy troops anywhere on the planet (or off it). The military requirement had slowly ebbed as more and more of Earth’s population left to find their own particular brands of freedom and nationalism out among the stars, leaving fewer and fewer warlords and fanatics behind until finally the Unified Federal Nations came into existence. While the old armies were dying off, CST had continued its inexorable expansion. Over half of phase one space’s H-congruous planets had been discovered and explored from LA Galactic; and when the CST finally moved its exploratory division out to the Big15, the commercial division quickly stepped in to take up the slack. LA Galactic rivaled the stations on any of the Big15 for size and complexity.
Stig got off the loop train on platform three in the Carralvo terminal, a giant multisegment modernistic building of white concrete bled even whiter by California’s unforgiving sunlight. Despite the sheer size of the structure, it thrummed and vibrated from the passage of trains that wound in and out of it along elegant curving viaducts, that were sometimes stacked three high thanks to elaborate twisting buttresses. He could have found his way around the Carralvo in complete darkness, and not just the public areas; the utility corridors, management offices, and staff facilities were all loaded in his insert files. Not that he really needed the reference. The other seven passenger terminals were equally familiar.
He had spent years working here. If the Guardians could be said to havea regular base of operations in the Commonwealth it was at LA Galactic. It was the perfect, and essential, place for them. Hundreds of thousands of tons of industrial and consumer products were routed between its gateways every day. Food imports came to over a million tons, while raw materials in transit accounted for an even bigger market. Thousands of import-export companies, from the Intersolar giants to virtuals that were no more than a coded array space and a numbered bank account, had their offices and warehouses and transport depots within the city-sized station compound. Each one was plugged into the giant network of rails and CST cargo-handling facilities, both physically and electronically. Each one with multiple accounts in the finance network. Each one with links to the Regulated Goods Directorate. Each one with offices, from entire skyscrapers to suites of leased rooms. They grew, shrank, went bankrupt, floated and went Intersolar, moved headquarters from one block to another, changed personnel, merged, fought each other bitterly for contracts. It was supercapitalism in a confined pressure-cooker environment that was merciless to any weakness.