Pandora's Star

When he went back out into the mall, the blond-haired man in the blue shirt was window shopping twenty meters away.

Stig went into the nearest sports shop and bought himself a new pair of trainers, paying cash. The box team would have to check that out. Next was a department store for a pair of sunglasses. He went back up to the main concourse, and stopped at one of the small stalls that sold tourist T-shirts and chose a fairly decent sun hat. Then he went along to the left luggage lockers and put his credit tattoo on the locker he’d taken three days before. It opened, and he removed the black shoulder bag that contained the emergency kit.

Without looking back or ru

The warehouses didn’t a

So he went about the meticulous job of assembling Johansson’s equipment without his usual cynicism. The Party had been avoided for a long time now, he didn’t provide any chapter on any planet with support. It was the Guardians who received his full attention. Crazy, enthusiastic, devoted youngsters from Far Away, who were riding gleefully off on their crusade and didn’t have a single clue how the Commonwealth worked. They were the ones he was protecting, guiding like some old mystic promising nirvana at the end of the road. Except today it looked like Stig wasn’t going to make it.

The station car drove him carefully along the internal highways into the Arlee district, two hundred fifty square kilometers of warehouses on the east side of LA Galactic. The blank-faced composite buildings were laid out in a perfect grid. Some were so large they took up an entire block, while some blocks had as many as twenty separate units. They all had light composite walls and black solar cell roofs, cumbersome air-conditioning units sprouted from walls and edges like mechanical cancers, their radiant fans shining a dull orange under the hot sunlight. There were no sidewalks, and cars were a rarity on these roads. Vans and large trucks trundled along everywhere, their driver arrays navigating the simple path between their loading bay and a rail cargo handling yard on a twenty-four/seven basis. But at least this district involved the physical movement of goods, it wasn’t the dealing and moneymaking of the offices. That normally made it bearable for him.

He drove into the loading bay park at Lemule’s Max Transit warehouse, a medium-sized building, enclosing four acres of floor space. Bjou McSobel and Je

Bjou closed the heavy roll door at the end of the loading bay as Adam got out of the car. “How are we doing?” Adam asked.

“Je

“It definitely retrieved the case, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Some good news, then.”

They went down to the far end of the warehouse where the Guardians had set up a secure area. Bjou and Je

“No problems, sir,” she said. “Our monitors haven’t picked up anything tracking the bot.”

“Okay, Je

Bjou pulled over a couple of chairs, and Adam sat down gratefully. His e-butler reported an encrypted call from Kieran.

“Sir, we thought you should know. Paula Myo just arrived on a loop train from Seattle. She’s being escorted by CST security perso

A little shiver of cold ran down Adam’s spine. If she was giving Stig’s operation her personal attention then she knew he was important.

“Do you want us to hack into their internal network?” Kieran asked. “We might be able to see what she’s doing.”

“No,” Adam said immediately. “We can’t guarantee a clean hack, not into CST security. I don’t want them tipped off we know about them, that’s Stig’s only advantage right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Adam resisted putting his head in his hands. He sat on the hard plastic seat, staring at the secret hole in the floor, while he called up files and displayed them across his virtual vision. Somewhere there had to be a weak link, a way Paula had found to infiltrate his couriers. When the faint amber information floated in front of him he cursed himself for making such an elementary mistake. Stig was collecting software from an insider at the Shansorel Partnership, the same insider who had supplied regulator software for a set of microphase modulators that Valtare Rigin had acquired. It would have had the partnership’s signature embedded in the subroutines. Easy to trace. “Damnit,” he grunted. I’m getting old. And stupid.