“Are you sure?” Bradley asked. The signal whistled sharply. “Are you sure?” Bradley repeated urgently.
“Definite. It was done on the Carbon Goose…Only opportunity.”
“Is there enough equipment intact to complete the planet’s revenge?”
“Yeah. If we get there. Paula and I convinced it…one of the navy people with us. Has to be…it out, no other…Any information about them from your people…work it out. Paula seriously ill…medical kit should cope…can’t help me much.”
“Dreaming heavens,” Bradley muttered quietly. “I never expected it to get this close to us. Not now.”
“We can’t go back and help them,” Stig said. “We don’t have time.” He thumped the wheel with one hand.
“Adam is asking for information,” Bradley said. “We’ll give him as much as we can.”
“What if there’s more than one of them? What if there’s a Starflyer agent with us as well?”
“That’s not good,” Olwen said from the back of the armored car. “These machines are well protected. We’d have to put them in front of our heavy-caliber weapons. Then there’s their suits to break.”
“They’d have to take care of their own,” Stig said. “Any kind of firefight at that level would destroy the rest of our vehicles.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bradley said. “For the Starflyer to plant one agent among us would require considerable effort. The people who joined us at Narrabri station were essentially thrown together by accident. For the Starflyer to infiltrate two agents among us under these circumstances is beyond possibility.”
“You think they’re in Adam’s team?” Stig asked. “He said the sabotage happened on your Carbon Goose flight.”
“If that’s what Adam believes, we must trust him.”
“Absolutely.” Stig didn’t even have to think about it. A communications icon popped up into his virtual vision, a group link from Alic Hogan. He allowed the call through.
“We all picked up that transmission,” Alic said. “I expect you’re debating if you can trust us.”
“Actually, we’re putting our trust in Adam,” Bradley said. “He believes the Starflyer agent is with him, not here.”
“He’s wrong about that, damnit, you’re talking about the Admiral and Paula Myo.”
“Ex-Admiral,” Bradley said levelly. “The navy did rather badly under his command. And the alternative is that it’s one of you.”
“Damnit. All right. But Paula? Come on!”
“She’s been trying to stop me for a hundred thirty years. That makes her a highly plausible candidate.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Deal with facts,” Bradley said. “Paula does.”
“What about Anna?” Stig asked.
“The Admiral’s wife?” Morton said. “If she is, he must be, too.”
“That’s not impossible, I suppose,” Bradley said; there was a strong undercurrent of reluctance in his voice.
“Unlikely, though,” Alic said.
“What about Oscar?” Morton asked.
“I may be able to help there,” Qatux said. “Ms. Tiger Pansy was present when Captain Monroe had a heated confrontation with Dudley Bose.”
“What was it about?” Alic asked.
“Bose accused Monroe of deliberately allowing himself and Emmanuelle Verbeke to continue exploring the Watchtower after it was safe to do so, thus ensuring they were captured by MorningLightMountain. An allegation Monroe refuted. Dr. Bose was most insistent, though.”
“We know there was a Starflyer agent on the Second Chance,” Stig said hurriedly; he was trying to make connections. I don’t know enough about them.
“Does Dudley stand to profit in any way from making those kinds of allegations?” Rob asked.
“No,” Alic said. “His reputation with the navy is dirt anyway after that Welcome Back ceremony. This kind of thing will only make it worse for him. In any case, he only started claiming Oscar screwed up after he got his memories back.”
“If you believe the source of those memories,” Bradley said.
“We were with the Bose motile for weeks,” Morton said. “For what it’s worth, I believe it was a genuine copy of Dudley Bose’s memories and personality.”
“But you don’t know that for certain.”
“If it’s not a copy of Bose, then what the hell is it?”
“Boys, boys,” the Cat said. “Please, the smell of testosterone is getting foul back here. This is all sounding like a very dull lecture on complexity theory to me. You don’t have anything like enough real evidence to point the finger at any of them. If it was obvious who the Starflyer agent was, then we’d have realized it by now.”
Despite his irritation at her tone, Stig had to admit she’d got a point. There was some memory about the Cat worrying away at the back of his brain, something he’d heard back in the Commonwealth. Her crimes had given her widespread notoriety; she’d committed them a long time ago, long enough for them to have passed into urban lore. Then he remembered. Dreaming heavens, and she’s supposed to be on our side? And in a top-of-the-line armor suit? “Adam asked for our help,” he said, determined not to be cowed by her reputation. “We’re doing the best we can for him.”
Her answering laugh made him wince.
“Poor old Adam,” she chortled. “I’d better switch on my short-wave set. Run, Adam! Run for the hills now, and don’t look back.”
“She didn’t, did she?” an alarmed Stig asked Keely.
“No.”
“What is your solution, Ms. Stewart?” an unperturbed Bradley asked.
“Gosh, the boss man. It’s really simple. Adam asked for information. The best we can do is tell him we suspect Monroe and Myo. After that, it’s up to him how he uses the information. He’s a grown-up.”
“Very well. Unless anyone else has any relevant information on the people traveling with Adam, we’ll relay our suspicions.”
Stig willed someone to say something, to recall just one extra fact, but there was only silence.
“I’ll tell him that, then,” Bradley said.
By midmorning the Volvos had reached the end of the farmlands; they petered out amid insipid swathes of wet meadows and vigorous scrub that were gradually being encroached by the equatorial grasslands. Anguilla grass scattered by blimpbots across the southernmost zone of the Aldrin Plains had blossomed to produce a great deluge of uniform light green vegetation resembling a quiescent sea that was slowly progressing northward. There were no settlements out there, no trees, no bushes, and few reports of any animals.
Their tanks were half empty by then, so Adam wanted to get them topped off before they drove the last section. They stopped in a town called Wolfstail, which comprised about twenty single-story buildings clumped around a T-junction. There were more cats than humans, and most of them wild. Given its position right on the edge of the advancing grasslands, it had the feel of a coastal town out of season. The road that had brought them down from Armstrong City was the stalk of the junction, with the two branches heading east and west, running parallel to the Dessault Mountains that were hidden hundreds of kilometers on the other side of the southern horizon.
Adam climbed down out of the cab and stretched elaborately, not enjoying the sounds his old body made after having been cramped up in a chair for a seven-hour stretch. It didn’t matter how adaptive the plyplastic cushioning was; his limbs were numbed and joints sore from inactivity. Outside the cab’s air-conditioning the heat was oppressive. He began sweating at once, and hurriedly put his wraparound shades on.
A ten-year-old girl in dungarees and a grubby Manchester United cap came out of the garage to fill the Volvos up from its single diesel pump.