Звезда Пандоры

They landed at Kingsclere airport on Ryceel and she climbed back into the MG. As she drove out of the southern continent’s capital she could see the Dau’sings rising out of the horizon.

The toll booth at the start of the Randtown highway had a big new sign across the front, reading: No Military Vehicles Permitted. Someone had spray-paintedDEATH TO ANTIHUMAN FUCKHEAD TRAITORS over the top of it in glowing orange.

“This should be fun,” she muttered as she drew up outside the booth and put her thumb credit tattoo on the pad. The reinforced barrier slid up, and she drove onto the start of the highway. The broad strip of enzyme-bonded concrete seemed completely deserted as it stretched out ahead. Carys thought it looked like the start grid of some giant racetrack, which was an interesting challenge. She brought the full range of drive array program tools up into her virtual vision, and supervised its integration with the highway’s simple traffic management system. The speed regulator was a small old program that was easily susceptible to the fix that came as standard in the MG’s modern aggressor routines. She removed the offending software’s inconvenient monitoring of the car, and pressed her foot down hard on the manual accelerator.

There was a surge of power into the axle engines that pushed her deep into the seat. She locked the speed, tied the radar and navigation functions into the steering program, and assigned full control to the drive array. Electromuscle bands in the tire walls responded to the buildup of speed by changing their profile, expanding the tread width to provide an even greater degree of traction. There was a wicked smile on her face as the car charged up the first slope into the foothills at three hundred kph.

“I stayed loyal,” Dudley Bose said. “I was stupid. Did you hear what I said? Did you ever see the recording? I warned them, I told them to flee. Then my voice ended. The aliens must have silenced me, punished me for spoiling their plans. And all the while it was Wilson Fucking Kime I was risking my neck for. The bastard who left me there to rot, to die under an alien sun. Who sacrificed me so he could be safe.”

“You are very much alive, my love,” Mellanie told him. They were lying together on the double bed in what the hotel, with a sharp eye for satire, called its bridal suite. The curtains were open, allowing Dudley to see his precious stars. It was an effort for Mellanie not to yawn, she desperately wanted to go to sleep. Something this new Dudley Bose apparently never did without the help of strong drugs. She wondered if she should slip another of the pills into his drink; it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. But the champagne they’d so eagerly guzzled down earlier was flat now, and not even the Pine Heart Gardens, Randtown’s finest, would offer room service at such a time. Damn this wretched backward place.

There had been few choices other than returning to Randtown to file her follow-up report on the blockade. Alessandra wanted to know if the residents had renounced their antihuman stance now the wormhole detector station had been forcibly installed in the Regent mountains above the town. The angle they were going for was a remorseful population who were turning their backs on redneck buffoons like Mark Vernon. Finding appropriate interviews would be easy enough for Mellanie, the more colorful the better.

She didn’t want to do it, not just because she despised Randtown and its smug small-town mentality. The Myo case was far more important to her: if she could crack that she wouldn’t even need Alessandra as a patron anymore. But it was proving difficult. After the glorious fiasco of the navy’s welcome-back ceremony, she’d spent a day and a half locked in her hotel room with Dudley Bose, providing him with the kind of sexual marathon that most men knew of only from pornoTSIs or their own midlife-crisis dreams. He’d told her nothing. He’d talked continuously, between the physical feats she performed for him, but it was the same topic every time: himself and whether he was still alive out there at Dyson Alpha. The occasional respite came in the form of diatribes against Wilson Kime, his ex-wife, and the navy in general. His memories were still too chaotic to provide her with anything useful.

She’d almost left him in the hotel on Augusta when it came time for her to catch the train to Elan. Almost. Some nagging doubt, which she hoped was her burgeoning reporter’s intuition, told her to persevere. She was sure he knew something that could help; though she had started to wonder if she was being too clever in her interpretation of Myo’s remark.