Fallen Fragon Read online

  Fallen Fragon

  Peter F. Hamilton

  Fallen Dragon

  by Peter F. Hamilton

  ASPECT®

  WARNER BOOKS

  An AOL Time Warner Company This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 2002 by Peter F. Hamilton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover design by Don Puckey

  Cover illustration by Jim Burns

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  An AOL Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America Originally published in hardcover by Warner Books.

  First Paperback Printing: March 2003

  10987654321

  For Kate, who said yes

  CHAPTER ONE

  Time was when the bar would have welcomed a man from Zantiu-Braun's strategic security division, given him his first beer on the house and listened with keen admiration to his stories of life as it was lived oh so differently out among the new colony planets. But then that could be said of anywhere on Earth halfway through the twenty-fourth century. In the public conscience, the glamour of interstellar expansion was fading like the enchantment of an aging actress.

  As with most things in the universe, it was all the fault of money.

  The bar lacked money. Lawrence Newton could see that as soon as he walked in. It hadn't been refurbished in decades. A long wooden room with thick rafters holding up the corrugated carbon-sheet roof, a counter running its length, dull neon adverts for extinct brands of beers and ice creams on the wall behind. Big rotary fans that had survived a couple of centuries past their warranty date turned above him, primitive electric motors buzzing as they stirred the muggy air.

  This was the way of things in Kuranda. Sitting high in the rocky tablelands above Cairns, it had enjoyed long profitable years as one of Queensland's top tourist-trap towns. Sweating, sunburned Europeans and Japanese had made their way up over the rain forest on the skycable, marveling at the lush vegetation before traipsing round the curio shops and restaurant bars that made up the main street Then they'd take the ancient railway down along Barron Valley Gorge to marvel once again, this time at the jagged rock cliffs and white foaming waterfalls along the route.

  Although tourists did still come to admire northern Queensland's natural beauty, they were mostly corporate families that Z-B had rotated to its sprawling spaceport base that now dominated Cairns physically and economically. They didn't have much spare cash for authentic Aboriginal print T-shirts and didgeridoos and hand-carved charms representing the spirit of the land, so the shops along Kuranda's main street declined until only the hardiest and cheapest were left—themselves a strong disincentive to visit and stay awhile. Nowadays people got off the skycable terminus and walked straight across to the pretty 1920s-era train station a couple of hundred meters away, ignoring the town altogether.

  It left the surviving bars free for the local men to use. They were good at that. There was nothing else for them. Z-B brought in its own technicians to run the base, skilled overseas staff with degrees and spaceware engineering experience. Statutory local employment initiatives were for the crappiest manual jobs. No Kuranda man would sign up. Wrong culture.

  That made the bar just about perfect for Lawrence. He paused in the doorway to scan its interior as a formation of TVL88 tactical support helicopters thundered overhead on their way to the Port Douglas practice range away in the north. A dozen or so blokes were inside, sheltering from the evil midday sun. Big fellas, all of them, with fleshy faces red from the first round of the day's beers. A couple were playing pool, one solitary, dedicated drinker up at the bar, the rest huddled in small groups at tables along the rear wall. His brain in full tactical mode, Lawrence immediately picked out potential exit points.

  The men watched silently as he walked over to the counter and took off his straw hat with its ridiculously wide brim. He ordered a tin of beer from the middle-aged barmaid. Even though he was in civilian clothes, a pair of blue knee-length shorts and a baggy Great Barrier Reef T-shirt, his straight back and rigid crew-cut marked him out as a Z-B squaddie. They knew it; he knew they knew.

  He paid for the weak beer in cash, slapping the dirty Pacific Dollar notes down on the wood. If the barmaid noticed his right hand and forearm were larger than they should be, she kept quiet about it. He mumbled at her to keep the change.

  The man Lawrence wanted was sitting by himself, only one table away from the back door. His hat, crumpled on the table next to his beer, had a rim as broad as Lawrence's.

  "Couldn't you have chosen somewhere more out of the way?" Staff Lieutenant Colin Schmidt asked. The guttural Germanic tone made several of the local men look around, eyes narrowing with instinctive suspicion.

  "This place suits," Lawrence told him. He'd known Colin for all of the full twenty years he'd spent in Z-B's strategic security division. The two of them had been in basic training together back in Toulouse. Green nineteen-year-old kids jumping the fence at nights to get to the town with its clubs and girls. Colin had applied for officer training several years later, after the Quation campaign: a careerist move that had never really worked out. He didn't have the kind of drive the company wanted, nor the level of share ownership that most other young officers had to put them ahead. In fifteen years he'd moved steadily sideward until he wound up in Strategic Planning, a glorified errand boy for artificial sentience programs running resource-allocation software.

  "What the hell did you want to ask me you couldn't say it down at the base?"

  "I want an assignment for my platoon," Lawrence said. "You can get it for me."

  "What kind of assignment?"

  "One on Thallspring."

  Colin swigged from his beer tin. When he spoke his voice was low, guilty. "Who said anything about Thallspring?"

  "It's where we're going for our next asset realization." On cue, another flight of TVL88s swept low over the town; with their rotors running out of stealth mode the noise was enough to rattle the corrugated roof. All eyes flicked upward as they drowned conversation. "Come on, Colin, you're not going to pull the bullshit need-to-know routine on me, are you? Who the hell can warn the poor bastards we're invading them? They're twenty-three light-years away. Everybody on the base knows where we're going—most of Cairns, too."

  "Okay, okay. What do you want?"

  "A posting to the Memu Bay task force."

  "Never heard of it."

  "Not surprised. Crappy little marine and bioindustry zone, about four and a half thousand kilometers from the capital. I was stationed there last time."

  "Ah." Colin relaxed his grip on the beer tin as he started to work out angles. "What's there?"

  "Z-B will take the biochemicals and engineering products; that's all that's on the asset list. Anything else... well, it leaves scope for some private realization. If you're an enterprising kind of guy."

  "Shit, Lawrence, I thought you were a straighter arrow than me. What happened to getting a big enough stake to qualify for starship officer?"

  "Nearly twenty years, and I've made sergeant. I got that because Ntoko never made it back from Santa Chico."

  "Ch
rist, Santa fucking Chico. I forgot you were on that one." Colin shook his head at the memory. Modern historians were comparing Santa Chico to Napoleon's invasion of Russia. "Okay, I get you posted to Memu Bay. What do I see?"

  "Ten percent."

  "A good figure. Of what?"

  "Of whatever's there."

  "Don't tell me you've found the final episode of Fleas on the Horizon?"

  "That's Flight: Horizon. But no; no such luck." Lawrence's face remained impassive.

  "I got to trust you, huh?"

  "You got to trust me."

  "I think I can manage that."

  "There's more. I need you at Durrell, the capital, in the Logistics Division. You'll have to arrange secure transport for us afterward, probably a medevac—but I'll leave that to you. Find a pilot who won't ask questions about lifting our cargo into orbit."

  "Find one who would." Colin grinned. "Bent bastards."

  "He has to be on the level with me. I will not be ripped off. Understand? Not with this."

  Colin's humor faded as he saw how much dark anger there was in his old friend's expression. "Sure, Lawrence, you can rely on me. What sort of mass are we talking about?"

  "I don't know for certain. But if I'm right, about a backpack per man. It'll be enough to buy a management stake for each of us."

  "Hot damn! Easy meat."

  They touched the rims of their tins and drank to that. Lawrence saw three of the locals nod in agreement, and stand up.

  "You got a car?" he asked Colin.

  "Sure: you said not to use the train."

  "Get to it. Get clear. I'll take care of this."

  Colin looked at the approaching men, making the calculation. He wasn't frontline, hadn't been for years. "See you on Thallspring." He jammed on his stupid hat and took the three steps to the back door.

  Lawrence stood up and faced the men, sighing heavily. It was the wrong day for them to go around pissing on trees to mark their territory. This bar had been carefully chosen so the meeting would go unnoticed by anyone at Z-B. And Thallspring was going to be the last shot he'd ever get at any kind of a decent future. That didn't leave him with a lot of choice.

  The one at the front, the biggest, naturally, had the tight smile of a man who knew he was about to score the winning goal. His two compadres were sidling up behind, one barely out of his teens, swigging from a tin, the other in a slim denim waistcoat that showed off glowmote tattoos distorted by old knife scars. An invincible trio.

  It would start with one of them making some comment: Thought you company people were too good to drink with us. Not that it mattered what was actually said. The act of speaking was a way of ego pumping until one of them was hot enough to throw the first punch. Same dumb-ass ritual in every low-life bar on every human planet.

  "Don't," Lawrence said flatly, before they got started. "Just shut up and go sit down. I'm leaving, okay."

  The big fella gave his friends a knowing I-told-you-he-was-chickenshit grin and snorted contempt for Lawrence's bravado. "You ain't going nowhere, company boy." He drew his huge fist back.

  Lawrence tilted from the waist, automatic and fast. His leg kicked out, boot heel smashing into the big fella's knee. The one in the denim waistcoat picked up a chair and swung it at Lawrence's head. Lawrence's thick right arm came up to block the unwieldy club. One leg of the chair hit full on, just above his elbow, and stopped dead. Its impact didn't even make Lawrence blink, let alone grunt in pain. The man staggered back as his balance was slung all to hell. It was like he'd hit solid stone. He stared at Lawrence's arm, eyes widening as realization hammered through the drink.

  All around the bar, men were pushing back chairs and rising. Coming to help their mates.

  "No!" the man in the waistcoat shouted. "He's in Skin!"

  It made no difference. The youngster was going for the big bowie knife in his belt scabbard, and nobody was paying any attention to warnings as they closed in.

  Lawrence raised his right arm high, punching the air. He could feel a gentle rippling against his wrists as peristaltic muscles brought the darts forward out of their magazine sacs into launch tubules. A ring of small dry slits peeled open above his carpals, black nozzles poking out. The dart swarm erupted.

  As he left the bar, Lawrence turned the cardboard sign on the door so it said closed and shut it behind him. He made sure his hat was on square, a fussy action, covering his anger. God damn the Armory Division. Those bastards never erred on the side of caution, always on the side of overkill. He'd seen two of the men lying on the floor start to convulse, the dart toxin levels set way too high for a simple incapacitation sting. The bar was going to get very noisy with police, very quickly.

  A South American couple was sitting at one of the tables on the bar's veranda, studying the laminated menu. Lawrence smiled politely at them and walked off down the main street back to the skycable terminus.

  * * *

  Ambulances and police vehicles were parked down the length of Kuranda's main street when Simon Roderick's TVL77D executive liaison helicopter whispered over the town. They were at all sorts of angles to each other, completely blocking the road for thirty meters on either side of the bar. There were obviously no traffic regulator nodes to guide anybody through Kuranda's streets. Thoroughly in keeping with the town's doughty throwback nature. He shook his head in bemusement at the chaos. Emergency service drivers could never resist the dramatic slam-halt arrival. Tough luck if one of the injured needed a paramedic crew urgently; the closest vehicles were all police. Paramedics clad in green boilersuits were maneuvering stretchers around awkward angles, sweaty faces straining from the effort.

  "God, what a bunch of no-brainers," Adul Quan complained from the seat behind Simon. The Third Fleet intelligence operative had pressed his face against the helicopter's side window so he could view the town directly. He never liked utilizing sensor feeds through his direct neural interface, claiming the viewpoint switch made him giddy. "We should bid to manage the state's civil operations. At least offer them AS coordination, bring them into this century."

  "We have the urban area franchise," Simon replied. "And all our people have some kind of medical monitor fitted in case there's a problem. We can retrieve them wherever they are. That's what matters."

  "Good PR, though. Devoting resources to helping civilians."

  "If they want our help they should take a stake in us, contribute and participate."

  "Yes, sir."

  Simon heard the skepticism in the other's voice and made no comment. To get where he was, Adul had built up a large stake in Z-B, but even that couldn't make him understand what true belonging meant. In truth, Simon thought, no one except himself did. That would change eventually.

  Simon used his DNI to feed a series of commands to the autopilot, and the helicopter swung round over the little circular park at the top end of the main street. As he came back to the scrubland truck lot he'd identified as a landing zone, he saw that some kids had spray painted an open eye on the corrugated roof of a derelict shop. The fading green and blue symbol was big enough to stare up at all the strategic security division helicopters that zipped through the tropical skies above the town. Like a perfect portrait painting, its gaze followed Simon as the TVL77D extended its undercarriage and sank down on the baked-mud surface. Rotor downwash sent a flurry of crushed tins and junk-food wrappers tumbling away from them as the fuselage lost its gray sky-blur integument, reverting to ominous matte black.

  He paused for a moment as the turbines wound down. His personal AS had extended trawlers to retrieve all the emergency service e-traffic within the local datapool. The relevant messages were relayed straight through his DNI. A display grid snapped up within his apparent field of vision, its indigo color, invisible to the human eye, ensuring it didn't obscure anything in his actual physical sight. But for all the torrent of information presented to him, he was still left lamentably short of hard facts. Nobody on the scene had yet established what had actually happened. So f
ar they just had the one unconfirmed report of a suited Skin running amok.

  His attention flicked to one of the medical grids. He called it up, and five high-resolution graphs expanded for him as he stepped from the helicopter cabin. The handheld blood analyzers that the paramedic teams were applying to the victims were establishing links to the Cairns General Hospital's databank, working through chemical profiles to identify the agent involved in the poisoning.

  Simon put on a pair of old-fashioned wraparound sunglasses. "Interesting," he murmured. "Do you see this?" He had sent copies of the analyzer results to Z-B's bioweapons division AS, which gave him a positive match on the agent His DNI relayed the secure package to Adul.

  "Skin toxin," Adul observed. "An updosed incapacitation shot." He shook his head in disapproval before unfolding his own sunshade membranes across his nose. "One definite fatality. And those two with allergic reactions are going to wind up with nerve damage."