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  Simon's personal AS informed him the officer in charge was Captain Jane Finemore. A script page containing her service record expanded out of the grid. He scanned it briefly and dismissed it.

  All the police fell silent as Simon and Adul made their way forward. The captain turned; there was a flash of contempt as she took in Adul's mauve Z-B fleet tunic; then her face went protectively blank as she saw Simon in his conservative business suit, jacket slung casually over his shoulder.

  "Can I help you fellas?" she asked.

  "I rather fear it's the other way round, Captain... ah, Finemore," Simon said, smiling as he made a show of reading her discreet lapel name badge. "We intercepted a report that indicates someone in a Skin suit was engaged in hostile action here."

  She was about to answer when the bar's doors slammed open and a paramedic team carrying a stretcher hurried out. Simon flattened himself against the veranda railing, allowing them past. Various medical bracelets had been applied to the patient's neck and arms, small indicator lights winking urgently. He was unconscious, but twitching strongly.

  "I haven't confirmed that yet," an irritated Captain Finemore said when the paramedics were clear.

  "But that was the initial report," Simon said. "I'd like to establish its validity as a matter of urgency. If someone in Skin is running loose, he needs to be dealt with immediately, before the situation deteriorates any further."

  "I am aware of that," Captain Finemore said. "I've put our Armed Tactical Response Team on standby."

  "With all respect, Captain, I feel this would be best dealt with by a counter-insurgency squad from our own internal security division. A Skin suit would give the wearer an enormous advantage over your ATR team."

  "Are you saying you don't think we can handle this?"

  "I'm offering every facility to ensure that you do."

  "Well, gee, thanks. I don't know what we would do without you."

  Simon's smile remained in place as various police officers snickered around him. "If I could ask, where did that original report come from?"

  Captain Finemore jerked her head toward the bar. "The waitress. She was hiding behind the bar when your man opened fire. None of the darts hit her."

  "I'd like to talk to her, please."

  "She's still in a lot of shock. I've got some specially trained officers talking to her."

  Simon used his DNI to route a message through his personal AS. The captain wouldn't have a DNI herself— Queensland State Police budget didn't run to that—but he could see her irises had a purple tint; she was fitted with standard commercial optronic membranes for fast data access. "Did nobody else witness this man in a Skin suit? He would hardly be unobtrusive."

  "No." The captain stiffened as the script scrolled down across her membranes. "There was just the one sighting." She was talking slowly now, measuring every word. "That's why I haven't ordered a general containment area around the town yet."

  "Then finding out is your first priority. The longer you wait, the wider the containment area, and the less likely it will succeed."

  "I've already got cars patrolling along the main road to Cairns, and officers are covering the skycable terminus and the train station."

  "Excellent. May I sit in on the waitress's interview now?"

  Captain Finemore stared at him. His warning message had been very clear and backed by the state governor's office. But it had been private, enabling her to save face in front of her officers—unless she chose to make it public and destroy her career in a flare of glory. "Yeah, she'll probably be over the worst by now." Said as if she were granting a favor.

  "Thank you. That's most kind." Simon pushed the bar's door open and went inside.

  Over a dozen paramedics were in the bar, kneeling beside the toxin victims. Orders and queries were shouted among them. They rummaged desperately through their bags to try to find relevant counteragents; medical equipment was strewn about carelessly. Their optronic membranes were thick with script on possible treatments.

  The victims shuddered and juddered, heels drumming on the floorboards. They sweated profusely, whimpering at painful nightmares. One was sealed in a black bodybag.

  It was nothing Simon hadn't seen before during asset-realization campaigns. Usually on a much larger scale. A single Skin carried enough ammunition to stop an entire mob dead in the street. He stepped gingerly around the bodies, trying not to disturb the paramedics. Police officers and forensic crews were examining walls and tables, adding to the general melee.

  The waitress was sitting up at the counter at the far end of the bar, one hand closed tightly round a tumbler of whiskey. She was a middle-aged woman with a fleshy face and permed hair in an out-of-date fashion. Not really seeing or hearing anything going on around her.

  Clearly there wasn't a single viral-written chromosome in her DNA, Simon decided with considerable distaste. Given her background, the absence of such v-writing inevitably meant she had low intelligence, bad physiology and zero aspirations. She was one of life's perpetual underdogs.

  A female police officer sat on a barstool beside the waitress, a sympathetic expression on her face. If she'd taken in any of her specialist training, Simon thought, the first thing she would have done was move the woman outside, away from the scene.

  His AS was unable to find the waitress's name. Apparently, the bar didn't have any kind of accountancy and management programs. The AS couldn't even find a registered link to the datapool; all it had was a phone line.

  Simon sat down on the empty barstool next to the waitress. "Hello there. How are you feeling now, er...?"

  Weepy eyes focused on him. "Sharlene," she whispered.

  "Sharlene. A nasty thing to happen to anyone." He smiled at the police officer. "I'd like to talk to Sharlene alone for a moment, please."

  She gave him a resentful look, but got up and walked off. No doubt going to complain to Finemore.

  Adul stood behind Sharlene, surveying the bar. People tended to take a wide detour around him.

  "I need to know what happened," Simon said. "And I do need to know rather quickly. I'm sorry."

  "Jesus," Sharlene shivered. "I just want to forget about it, y'know." She tried to lift the whiskey to her lips. Blinked in surprise when she found Simon's hand on top of hers, preventing the tumbler from moving off the countertop.

  "He frightened you, didn't he?"

  "Too damn right."

  "That's understandable. As you saw, he could cause you a great deal of physical discomfort. I, on the other hand, can destroy your entire life with a single call. But I won't stop there. I will obliterate your family as well. No jobs for any of them. Ever. Just welfare and junk for generations. And if you annoy me any more, I'll see you disqualified from welfare, too. Do you want you and your mother to be whores for Z-B squaddies, Sharlene? Because that's all I'll leave you with. The pair of you will be fucked into an early diseased death down on the Cairns Strip."

  Sharlene's jaw dropped.

  "Now, you tell me what I want to know. Focus that pathetic mush of flesh you call a brain, and I might even see you get a reward. Which way do you want to go, Sharlene? Annoyance or cooperation?"

  "I want to help," she stammered fearfully.

  Simon smiled wide. "Splendid. Now, was he wearing a Skin suit?"

  "No. Not really. It was his arm. I saw it when he bought his beer. It was all fat, and a funny color."

  "As if he had a suntan?"

  "Yeah. That's it. Dark, but not as dark as an Aboriginal."

  "Just his arm?"

  "Yeah. But he had the valves on his neck, too. You know, like Frankenstein bolts, but made from flesh. I could see them just above his collar."

  "You're sure about that?"

  "Yes. I'm not making this up. He was a Zantiu-Braun squaddie."

  "So what happened: he walked in and shot everyone?"

  "No. He was talking to some bloke. Then Jack and a couple of the others went over. I guess they were looking for trouble. Jack's like t
hat; a good bloke really, though. That's when it happened."

  "The man fired darts that knocked everyone out?"

  "Yes. I saw him hold his hand up high, and someone shouted that he was in Skin. I got down behind the counter. Then I heard everyone screaming and falling. When I got up, they were all just lying there. I thought... thought they were all dead."

  "And you called the police."

  "Yes."

  "Had you ever seen this man before?"

  "I don't think so. But he might have been in. We get a lot of people in here, you know."

  Simon glanced round the bar, and just avoided wrinkling his nose in disgust. "I'm sure you do. What about the person he was talking to—have you seen him before?"

  "No. But—"

  "Yes?"

  "He was Zantiu-Braun as well."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yeah. I've worked in bars all around Cairns. You get to recognize the squaddies, not just from their valves."

  "Very well. So the shooter came in and bought a beer, then went straight over to the other squaddie, is that right?"

  "Yes. That's about it."

  "Try to remember, did either of them seem surprised that the other was there?"

  "No. The one who was here first was drinking by himself, like he was waiting for the other."

  "Thank you. You've been most helpful."

  Captain Finemore gave Simon a surprised look when he emerged from the bar. "What happened?"

  "Nothing," he said. "It wasn't a Skin suit He was using some kind of scatter pistol. I expect the dart toxin was produced in an underground lab. Shame the chemist wasn't a bit more attentive to the actual molecular structure when he attempted to retrosynth it."

  "A shame?" The line of Captain Finemore's lips was set hard. "We've got one dead, and Christ alone knows if the rest of them will recover."

  "Then you'll be glad we're getting out of your hair." Simon gestured along the clutter and confusion of Kuranda's main street. "It's all yours. But if you do need any help rounding the shooter up, then don't hesitate to ask. Our boys can always do with a bit of live training."

  "I'll keep it in mind," Finemore said.

  As before, police and civilians parted for him with sullen, silent resentment. He ran quickly through the TVL77D's start-up procedure and lifted from the baked mud. His personal AS reported there was no unauthorized removal of a Skin suit from the Cairns base armory.

  "Check this out for me," he told Adul. "I want to know who it was walking round in Skin."

  "Some squaddie got jumped in a bar. Do you really think it's that important?"

  "The incident isn't. The fact that there's no reference to Skin missing is. And I'm curious why two of our people should choose to meet in such a godforsaken place."

  "Yes, sir."

  Zantiu-Braun's Third Fleet base centered on the old Cairns International Airport just to the north of the town. There were no commercial flights there anymore; the main transport link was the TranzAus magrail train, bringing cargo and people northward with smooth efficiency at five hundred kilometers an hour. Now the parking aprons held squadrons of Third Fleet helicopters along with scramjet-powered spaceplanes and a few dark, missilelike executive supersonic jets; eight old lumbering turboprop craft maintained by Z-B provided a civil coastwatch and rescue service all the way out to New Guinea. As a result, the airspace over Cairns was the busiest section in Australia apart from Sydney, where the remaining airlines had their hub. Synthetic hihydrogen fuels had replaced natural petroleum products, ecologically sounder but relatively expensive to produce, the cost pushing air travel right back where it started in the twentieth century, the preserve of governments, corporations and the rich.

  With mass tourism dying and agriculture effectively eliminated by vat-grown food and worsening ultraviolet infall, Queensland was fast becoming an economic wasteland in 2265 when Zantiu-Braun was offered zero-tax start-up incentives to site a new wave of Earth-to-orbit operations there.

  In those days, the operation was purely commercial. Freight spaceplanes boosted factory station modules to loworbit stations and returned with valuable microgee products, while the passenger variants ferried colonists up to starships. After 2307 that all began to change. Asset realization became the new priority, and the nature of the cargoes that the space-planes hauled up to low orbit switched accordingly. The number of colonists flying from Cairns fell to zero inside of a decade, replaced by strategic security personnel. Third Fleet support systems took over from industrial shipments.

  The base expanded, throwing up barracks and married quarters for the strategic security division squaddies. Engineering and technical support constructed themselves ranks of blank warehouselike buildings. New hangars and maintenance shops sprang up to house and service the helicopters. Huge swaths of government land were rented for training grounds. And, essentially, all of the new arrivals required administration. Glass and marble office towers rose up in the foothills, overlooking the base and the ocean beyond.

  Simon Roderick had an office that occupied half of the top floor of the Quadrill block, the newest and plushest of Z-B's little managerial division enclaves. As soon as he landed the helicopter on the rooftop pad he was plunged into yet another round of planning committees and tactical meetings. Senior staff came in and went out of his office as if it were some kind of transit lounge, each with his own proposal or complaint or report. For an age that relied so heavily on artificial sentience, it always astounded Simon that so little could be achieved without human intervention and supervision. People, basically, needed a damn good kick up the ass to get them motivated and acting like adults. Something not even quantum-switch neurotronic pearls could provide.

  After three years on-site Simon knew he was going to have to make a drastic recommendation to the Zantiu-Braun Board after the Thallspring campaign. Forty-five years' constant expansion had made the Third Fleet strategic security division so top-heavy with officers and management specialists it was in danger of grinding to a halt from datalock. Everybody's office generated reports and requests on a continual daily basis; coordinating them even with AS routing management was becoming progressively more difficult. Loop involvement, which was the preparatory-stage management strategy, was a grand forward-looking idea, but after four decades of accumulated optimization the Third Fleet software had become classic bloatware, total deadweight. The theory behind loop involvement was excellent. Experience from the last campaign was inserted at base level. Last campaign, these specific platoons ran out of Skin bloodpaks ten days before the usage programs projected; this time therefore they added a special requirements appendant to the logistics profile of those same platoons. Who could argue against providing first-rate support on the front line? But the additional bloodpaks had to be lifted into orbit, which meant more spaceplane flights, which needed maintenance and flight crew time allocation, and fuel, all of which had to be meshed with the existing schedule. A domino effect that triggered an avalanche every time. Simon was convinced the entire Third Fleet structure needed simplifying to such an extent it would actually have to be decommissioned and a new organization formed to replace it One that had modern management procedures incorporated from the start.

  For the last four months, since the Thallspring campaign planning had begun in earnest, he had concentrated on personally supervising the practical essentials, such as starship refit schedules, Skin numbers, helicopter availability, and basic equipment readiness. But then his total priority requests and orders had to be integrated into the already saturated command structure, creating another authority layer that the base management AS struggled to accommodate. He liked to think his intervention had speeded up the overall process, but there was no way of telling. Vanity of the ruling classes. We make a difference.

  Adul Quan reappeared as the sun sank below the hills behind the base. Simon stood by the wall-window watching the thick gold sunbeams probe around the curved peaks as the last of the starship commanders filed out. In fron
t of him the runway lights were becoming more pronounced, the street grid of some imaginary city, calling the helicopters home for the night. Away to the south, the neon corona of Cairns's Strip was already rising into the darkening sky. Down along the waterside, the clubs and casinos and bars were opening for trade, trashy games and girls smiling with bright come-on calculation at the squaddies.

  There were times when Simon almost envied that kind of simple existence: fight, fuck and tune out, even though it was the antithesis of all he believed in. They didn't have to endure the same kind of pressure he experienced on a daily basis. It was one of the reasons he'd given the Kuranda shooter a higher priority than he probably should have. An excuse to get out of the office.

  The office door swung shut after the last commander. "Have you got a name for me?" Simon asked.

  "I'm afraid not, sir," Adul said. "It's a bit puzzling."

  "Really?" Simon went back to his desk and sat down. He cleared the holographic panes of their script and graphs, giving the intelligence operative an expectant glance through the transparent glass. "Proceed."

  "I checked the armory first. Skins that are being repaired seemed an obvious choice. Our man could have taken an arm while the computer log registered the suit as being worked on. I got every technician to report to me personally. They all swore their suits were fully integrated. No missing arms."

  "One of them was the shooter?" Simon queried.

  "Not a chance. You could slip out for maybe half an hour without anyone noticing, but not a trip to Kuranda. I had my personal AS review the internal security cameras, as well. They were all there."

  "Okay. Go on."

  "Next obvious source was a squaddie on training who slipped away. It can happen in the field easily enough. There were eighteen platoons undergoing training in Skin suits today. The nearest training ground to Kuranda was sixty-five kilometers. All the Skins arrived there this morning, and my AS queried every platoon leader to do an immediate head count this afternoon when I started investigating."