It was waiting for her when she burst out of the stairwell. She hopped in, and the doors closed. “Lobby,” she told the SI. “There will be people there, I should be safe.”
“What is the problem, Mellanie?”
She pressed her head against the cool metal walls of the lift, waiting for her racing heart to slow. “I never told Alessandra the name of the charity.”
“It would not be hard for her to discover it.”
“Run a check on it for me again, please.”
“The public records have been amended since last week.”
“Goddamn!” She glanced up, as if expecting Alessandra to be ripping her way through the top of the lift like some psycho in a bad TSIdrama.
“They now show the Cox Educational has been in continual operation since its formation, and is still making donations to various science departments,” the SI said.
“But that’s all forgeries, you know that.”
“We do, but the official records are complete.”
“How did they do that?”
“It is not impossible to subvert public records, especially in the finance sector. Although the effort involved is considerable.”
“She tipped them off,” Mellanie said out loud. “Alessandra told them I was on to them. Onto it, the Starflyer. It had to be her. There’s no one else. It’s her. Oh, God.” Her legs were trembling the way they had when she was facing the soldier motiles in Randtown.
“That is a strong accusation,” the SI said.
“Are you testing me? If Alessandra had run a genuine check, she would have found what I told her. The Starflyer would never have had time to cover its alien ass; a fraud this elaborate would take time. It had to have been given a direct warning so that the cover-up would be in place in case I survived and started yelling allegations. The only person I told was Alessandra. It is her! She’s working for it, isn’t she? Alessandra is one of the people Johansson warns us about, like the President.”
“We don’t know for certain. However, given the sequence of events, it is highly likely.”
The lift doors opened. Mellanie peered out into the lobby. There didn’t seem to be anybody waiting for her. She hurried over to the main entrance, where there were some taxis waiting. “I’ve got to get back to Dudley,” she said.
“An excellent notion. Then what?”
“Tell Paula Myo what I’ve discovered. Do you know where she is?”
“Yes.”
…
Kazimir stood close to the end of platform 34 in Rio’s planetary station, with people swarming around him as they waited for the next train. The trans-Earth loop trains had carried on running almost continually during the invasion crisis—though even that service had stopped when Nigel Sheldon diverted the lunar power to Wessex. But they were up and running again within hours, unlike CST passenger trains to other planets.
Kazimir had been reassured by the way Earth’s infrastructure underwent only the minimum of disruption. What outraged him was the population’s attitude. The residents of Santa Monica seemed more upset by the temporary power loss than they did that twenty-three planets had been lost to alien monsters. And the Mayor certainly hadn’t allocated any civic buildings to the refugees riding around the Intersolar train network looking for accommodation, unlike civic and regional leaders on the other worlds. Earthlings appeared to regard the invasion as just another news event that happened to someone else a long way off. He wasn’t sure if that was ignorance or arrogance. Whatever, it was certainly a chilling example of how different their shared mindset was to his own.
The last few days had seen at least a degree of awareness creeping in. Kazimir had hung around the waterfront in Santa Monica, watching the news in bars, or accessing in his little hotel room while he waited for things to calm down so he could resume his mission. Local media shows reflected a lot of anxiety that a second wave of planets would suffer invasion, a progression that would one day lead to Earth itself being on the front line.
So far there had been no sign of any alien activity anywhere other than on the original invaded worlds. Now the evacuation of civilian populations was effectively complete, available data was in short supply as the Primes continued their inexorable advance. The navy was maintaining small fighting forces on Anshun, Balkash, and Martaban; aerobots and professional combat-wetwired troops conducted a guerrilla harassment campaign against the new installations the aliens were constructing. Everyone knew it was a token gesture. The buildup of Prime forces was increasing at a disturbing rate as they managed to open gateways on the planetary surfaces. Admiral Kime was expected to order a withdrawal soon, and the final wormholes would be shut down. Analysts on most of the news shows were predicting that the deserted capital cities would then be destroyed by fusion bombs.
The navy’s remaining scoutships had returned, and were now performing regular flyby patrols of the invaded worlds, supplementing the degraded detector network. So far, the aliens hadn’t opened any new wormholes to replace those destroyed by the Desperado’s last flight. Some of the technical experts and tacticians on the news shows were hinting that the remaining starships might well be automated, for use in similar relativistic assaults on other Prime wormholes. The navy had publicly refused to comment on the possibility. Commentators were saying that as the biospheres of the invaded worlds were so badly damaged, the Commonwealth had effectively written them off. It wasn’t worth sacrificing their last starships to destroy something humanity would never regain. They were being held in reserve in case of any new assault.
Whatever the official reason, that one substantial human victory on the invasion day had already reached an almost legendary status, its crew subject to intense praise on every current affairs and news show. That contrasted sharply with the vitriol and vilification that the rest of the navy was receiving, along with President Doi’s administration.
Kazimir thought it strange how little mention the wormhole battle above Wessex was getting. It was surely more strategically important than a suicide flight. But then CST’s profile in the week that followed was remarkably low. Even under these circumstances, everyone seemed to take their efficiency for granted; the way they moved the refugees around, and repaired Narrabri station’s gateways was standard stuff for that company.
Amber lights flashed above platform 34, and the loop train slid into the station, twenty double-decker carriages pulled by a Bennor AC767 mag-grip engine. It had been only five minutes since the last one pulled out, but there were already over three hundred people waiting. The doors opened, and passengers poured out. Kazimir held back while everyone else on the platform surged forward impatiently. His eyes moved constantly, checking to see who else loitered. Visual interpretation programs reviewed everything he saw, identifying possibles, tagging them with probability percentages. When he rechecked them, they all turned out to be harmless.
It was a wearying process. But he’d stuck with it the whole time on the way back from the ancient observatory in the Andes. The journey had involved eight vehicle changes, from his hired four-by-four that he’d driven up into the mountains, to taxis, various local trains, bus, the plane back over to Rio. Every time he’d followed procedure, no matter how foolish it felt, knowing what Stig would say if he lapsed even once. The courier job was vital, as Elvin had never stopped reminding him; the Martian data was essential to the whole Guardian movement. Moving it from South America to the safety of LA would probably have gone to Stig, if his reprofiling had been completed. As such, Kazimir was determined there would be no hitch or glitch, he was going to prove to all of them that he was capable of such an important assignment.