Eden Burning Read online

  Eden Burning

  A Fox Meridian Novel

  By Niall Teasdale

  Copyright 2017 Niall Teasdale

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Contents

  Part One: Eve of a New Age

  Part Two: The Death of the Old World

  Part Three: The Falling Sky

  Part Four: Everything Ends

  Epilogue: To Begin Anew

  Part One: Eve of a New Age

  Portland, New England Administrative Region, 5th July 2061.

  July in Portland, on a cloudless night with an almost-full moon. The temperature was up around seventeen Celsius, but at least the humidity was not too high and there was a breeze coming in off the ocean which was stirring Fox Meridian’s mop of copper-and-blonde hair as she crouched atop a five-high stack of containers in the docks that had taken over most of Portland’s Downtown.

  The city had changed since the start of the century, becoming the distribution centre for cargo from all over the world into the northern part of the New England Administrative Region. Revitalising the old port and turning Downtown into a holding area for containers had not been entirely popular, but it had guaranteed the prosperity of the city when tourism had begun to fail thanks to the broad uptake in internet vacations.

  Trade and commerce were a wonderful thing when everyone shipped through your town, but then everyone shipped through your town. Some of those organisations shipped things which any port authority with an eye on public opinion tended to view as inappropriate. Smugglers of various kinds moved goods through Portland, hidden under false paperwork, false labelling, and the payment of bribes to the right people, and Palladium Security Solutions had been contracted to secure the port so Fox was quite determined to reduce the amount of smuggling in general. In this specific case, however, because of the source and nature of the ‘goods,’ Fox was taking a personal hand.

  ‘Vehicles designated Hostile A through C approaching Avenue West Sixteen.’

  ‘Team Gamma, close off approach to Avenue West Sixteen when hostiles have passed.’

  ‘Team Gamma confirming interdiction order.’

  Fox scanned over her TacNet feeds and rolled her eyes. She was going to have to have a word with Ryan about squad training. All this chatter was basically unnecessary with the military-grade tactical software Palladium supplied to its officers. Still, she could not fault the precision of the op itself: everyone was in the right place with the right weapons and the right information. She had sat through the briefing, after giving her overview of the situation, and had found no fault in the plan. The men and women, and the various support cyberframes, were working together flawlessly so far.

  ‘Team Gamma reporting interdiction in place.’

  ‘Hostiles A through C at target site.’

  ‘Teams Alpha and Beta, prepare to close the net.’

  Fox pulled forward one of the cyberframe views of the scene. Three vehicles, two SUVs and a truck, were pulling up close to a container which had been brought ashore the previous afternoon and had been sitting there under four other containers for over twelve hours. If the information Fox had was accurate, and she was quite sure it was, then getting that box open had to be getting urgent.

  Through the camera view of the armed-response frame, Fox watched eight men exit from the SUVs while a ninth went to the rear of the truck to open it up. They would want to move fast, she figured, once they got the container open. It was also notable that all the men were wearing filter masks. That was probably a matter of experience: the inside of that container was probably not going to smell good.

  ‘They’re opening it now.’

  ‘Confirm contents before we go in.’

  The container’s doors were hauled open and lights were shone in. Fifteen pairs of eyes looked back and Fox’s jaw tightened. The surge of disgust was welcome: it reminded her that she was still human.

  ‘Contents confirmed,’ Fox said over her connection to the assault team. She flicked the go-code indicator in her TacNet software to green and, because she was fairly sure that half of the team would not notice that, added, ‘You have a go. Repeat, go when ready.’

  ‘Teams Alpha and Beta, close the net. Teams Gamma and Delta, close in behind Alpha and Beta. Go, go, go.’

  Someone on the smuggling team was sharp. As the two squads of armed Palladium security people rushed in, one of the SUVs took off toward the nearest team, Team Beta, and they were having to throw themselves aside before they could really realise what was happening.

  The SUV sped off down the alleyway between the two walls of containers, no doubt counting on the need to contain those gathering around the people in the container to keep everyone occupied. They had not counted on Team Delta advancing up the alley, but Delta was running slightly slower than they should have, and it gave the SUV driver the opportunity to turn right into a narrower lane.

  ‘Team Delta,’ the commander of the assault op began, but Fox cut him off as she got to her feet.

  ‘He’s coming my way. Leave him to me.’

  ‘Confirmed, Mother Hen.’

  Fox shook her head. She was going to murder Jarvis for that call sign. Then, pushing her TacNet display aside to give her a clear view of her surroundings, she walked a few paces to the edge of the container she was on and stepped off. It was a twelve-metre drop, her telemetry told her so, but she hit the ground and rolled, regaining her feet with her pistol in her hand, aimed at the front of the oncoming SUV. Two rounds through the plastic fairing over the left front wheel destroyed the tyre and the drive motor under it, and the driver lost control as one corner of the car dropped onto the tarmac. The car slewed left and smashed into the side of a container, and Fox temporarily lost sight of the man in the car as airbags deployed around him. Fox started toward the vehicle at a leisurely pace.

  She was twenty-one metres away when the passenger door was pushed open and the driver of the car staggered out holding a shotgun. He spotted Fox and raised it to his shoulder, aiming. ‘Back off, cop!’

  Fox rolled her eyes. ‘Original. Is that really the best you can do or did you hit your head too hard?’

  ‘I said–’

  ‘And inaccurate. No cops around here now, remember? Last Friday was the official last day of joint policing coverage. So, anyway, you put the gun down, carefully, and then put your hands on the car. You’re under arrest for being a sorry excuse for a human.’

  He fired, the heavy slug missing entirely. Fox understood the principle of the thing: he was a big, strong criminal with a big gun, and she was an admittedly tall woman dressed in a light jacket, a plazkin teddy, and jeans, carrying a pistol. It should be no contest, right?

  ‘I feel like I should point out that I’ll return fire if you do that again, and you’re going to come off a lot worse than I am,’ Fox said. She was fairly sure he was not going to take the advice, but you had to give a warning.

  Two more shots rang out, going wide. Shotguns were not the most effective weapons at range and he was shooting at… Fox switched into battle telemetry as she swung her pistol up and the laser rangefinder gave her the distance down to the millimetre. She would have accepted ‘about seventeen metres.’ She fired and the man let out a shriek as the heavy slug, trailing white vapour behind it, blew his right forearm into mangled flesh and bone fragments.

  ‘I did warn you,’ Fox said as the man fell to his knees, the shotgun falling at his side. ‘If you ever get out of Rikers, remember not to pick a fight with a combat gynoid.’ The smuggler was not listening; he fell face first onto the tarmac, and by the time Fox got to him, he was unconscious. ‘Kit,’ Fox began.

  ‘I have an EMT frame coming in,’ Kit said, appearing beside Fox in avatar form. The sound of vectored-thrust engines was alre
ady audible. ‘Only one of the girls in the container required immediate medical attention and the other smugglers were not as foolish as this one.’ The cute, white-clad fox-girl looked out of place in the container yard, but Kit was at home anywhere.

  ‘Huh. What time is it in Berlin and Tokyo?’

  ‘Eight twenty in Berlin, fifteen twenty in Tokyo.’

  Fox watched as the bulky flying robot, which was basically a combination of paramedic and ambulance, settled down beside the gunman. ‘Sedate him if you’re going to evac,’ Fox said. ‘He may wake up a little unhappy.’

  ‘Of course, Miss Meridian,’ the frame responded.

  ‘Right. Probably standard policy.’

  ‘It is, Miss Meridian.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Kit, give it an hour and then sort out a conference call to Yuriko and Johann. I’m sure Johann’s awake already, but let’s give him time to do it properly before he has to talk to his boss.’

  ‘You do need to sleep at some point, Fox,’ Kit reminded her.

  ‘I know. You know, they should’ve given you the “Mother Hen” call sign.’

  Smiling, Kit swished her foxy tail. ‘Wrong kind of animal,’ she said.

  ~~~

  ‘We got them all,’ Fox said. ‘Security are sweeping the addresses we have and hunting for more. We’ll have the entire gang rounded up inside of twenty-four hours. Well done, both of you.’

  Yuriko Fukui, in Tokyo, executed a short bow. ‘Thank you, Fox-san, but I merely provided the routing information. Mister Baum tracked the shipment through Europe.’

  Johann Baum, in Berlin, smiled. ‘I would not have known where to start looking without your information, Miss Fukui.’

  Fox, currently hanging in a cradle in the back of her personal Pythia vertol which was parked in a hangar at Portland Jetport, grinned. ‘Let’s just agree that we’re all brilliant. You both did excellent work. Yuriko, it was your idea to dig deeper into the data we got from Busan. Johann, I know it wasn’t easy getting the NU authorities to cooperate on this.’

  ‘It was not, I admit,’ Baum said. ‘However, they will be very pleased with the opportunity to shut down this ring from one end to the other. Police are raiding various locations around Rotterdam as we speak.’

  ‘Good. The Fukui-kai aren’t going to be pleased about this, I’d imagine.’

  ‘No,’ Yuriko agreed with a hint of rather icy pleasure in her voice. ‘They will be very displeased. My brother will be livid. However, this is not an unexpected turn of events. Such activities are bound to be uncovered from time to time. The organisation will recover and, probably, begin setting up a new route.’

  ‘And Taro?’ It was well known that Taro Fukui, Yuriko’s older brother, was the head of the Fukui-kai yakuza organisation, and that the siblings did not get on well. Fox had made it known to all her people that Yuriko could be trusted when it came to matters of the yakuza, but there were fewer people around who knew why Yuriko could be trusted.

  ‘Taro will engage in some futile ranting. He will connect this to me, as will others. But when his subordinates suggest that he should do something in retaliation, he will order that no such action is taken. Among some of the older members, largely now removed under Taro’s rule, this may be seen as loyalty, but to the younger people he has brought in, it will be seen as weakness. Taro treads a fine line at the moment, one which requires subtlety to navigate.’

  ‘And he’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face.’

  Yuriko nodded. ‘With your permission, I should like to begin running some probability analyses on what will happen when the Fukui-kai collapses. I believe it could be sooner rather than later and the result could be quite chaotic.’

  Fox nodded in turn. ‘Do it. Get some AI resource in from Technologies if you need to. Okay, I’ve given you both the wrap-up speech and now I’m going to get some sleep.’

  ‘You must be tired,’ Baum said. ‘What time is it there? Around three thirty?’

  ‘Uh-huh, but I don’t get tired any more, Johann, I just get slower. And I haven’t got to the point of noticing that yet. Night, folks.’

  As the virtual images of her colleagues vanished, Fox took one quick scan around the rear bay of Pythia’s vertol. She had had a cradle put in, connected to a recharge and backup unit, so that she could use the vertol as a sort of flying camper van when she needed it. It had been a good move and, having run through a sleep cycle, she could just take off first thing in the morning and fly back to New York.

  ‘And you know what’s waiting there, of course?’ Kit asked.

  ‘Oh, I know… Night, Kit. Night, Pythia.’

  Not waiting for the replies, Fox lowered her head to her chest and closed her eyes. Oblivion claimed her in an instant.

  New York Metro, 8th July.

  ‘So far,’ Dia Barrera said, ‘the metro resolution is looking a lot like the first policing proposal.’ Barrera was MarTech’s top political analyst, an attractive woman who was underestimated at great peril to the observer. ‘All the rhetoric about the freedom of the individual to ensure the quality of their own policing is there, but now they have “following the success of private policing in the non-metro areas” to add weight. We were a little surprised that the proposal was put forward immediately following NAPA’s exit from the protectorates. It’s risky. It may be seen as too soon.’

  Fox shook her head. Sitting in the meeting viron the Palladium board used on these occasions, what everyone else saw was her virtual image shaking its head, but Fox had discovered that her new state as an infomorph had come with something of a different experience under these conditions. The first time she had tried it, she had said that it felt the same, just without the barely noticeable communications lag, but it was more than that. The others were in VR communication, aware of their own bodies as well as the viron. To Fox, executing on the same server as the viron, the virtual world was her reality and it did make more of a difference than she had first thought.

  ‘I think they can point at the results so far and show good figures for reduced crime and higher clean-up percentages,’ Fox said. ‘I think that, if they wait a year and let the first set of audits go through, you’ll start to see a bounce-back in crime, some areas failing their audits, and some drop in clean-up rates as the crime rate comes back up. All the statistics so far look great. They would be stupid not to try to get the metro vote through as early as possible.’

  ‘Yes,’ Barrera agreed, ‘that is a factor, but we will be pushing the fact that private policing is not really a tried-and-tested concept. This vote will be tighter than the last one, I have no doubt, but it is likely to pass, as best we can tell this early in the game.’

  ‘Do we have the NIX audit amendment filed?’ Garth Eaves asked.

  ‘We put it back on the table as soon as the proposal was made.’

  Eaves nodded. He was Palladium’s CEO and mostly took care of the business end of things, but his wife, Camille, was a memetics expert in the PR department and he had picked up a fair bit of her analytical mind. ‘One thing which concerns me is the near-total lack of detail on antiterrorism activities. There’s legislation governing the interaction between NAPA and NIX on the subject, but it will become defunct if this vote passes.’

  ‘And NAPA controls all the heavy weaponry in the metro regions,’ Ryan Jarvis added. ‘Someone will use this as an excuse to get military-grade weapons back on the list for policing.’

  ‘I’ve got some ideas for that,’ Fox said. ‘I’ll write up some proposals and send them around for review. I’ve got all this extra time on my hands so I may as well use it for something.’

  ‘Well, we do have something else for you to use it on,’ Eaves said. ‘Technically, this is Ryan’s job, but we talked it through and we both felt it might be better handled by you.’

  Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘I am not liking this so far. First Ryan sticks me with lousy call signs and now he’s passing me dubious jobs.’

  Jarvis grimaced. ‘I’m never going
to hear the end of that call sign thing, am I?’

  ‘No, Father Goose, you’re not. What’s this job?’

  Eaves cleared his throat, and that was not a good sign either. ‘BioTek are going to be announcing that they’ve successfully produced a bioroid on the twelfth.’

  ‘Tuesday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And today is Friday. They’ve had the thing for months and they let us know they’re going to announce it at the last minute. Again.’

  ‘I already did this dance,’ Jarvis said. ‘They actually sent us notice last night. We’re just lucky Garth only considers himself off duty when he’s actually asleep. The announcement is going to be first thing Tuesday, but they won’t be bringing her down until Thursday. I’ve got increased security for the various towers sorted out, or I will have by Tuesday. We’d like you to handle security for Eve. I put together a basic plan for you to look over and amend if you want. You’ll have whatever resources you need.’

  ‘BioTek are paying whatever costs we need to handle this,’ Eaves said. ‘There are already plans in place to get talk-show slots and other security nightmares, and… Well, we figured the shows would probably be okay with you being on stage with the bioroid.’

  Sighing, Fox nodded. ‘Ryan, I am going to get you for this. You won’t know when, or how, or where, but I’ll be coming for you.’

  ‘That seems fair.’

  ‘Okay.’ Fox turned to Barrera again. ‘Can you get me permission to tell Naomi Lind about this? The Sisters are pushing a bioroid rights agenda for their own purposes. If they know when the announcement’s going to be, they can maybe give things a push toward getting the kind of legislation we want on the table.’

  ‘Do it,’ Barrera replied, apparently without a second’s thought. ‘I know their work and their policies.’ Barrera’s lips curled into a slight smile. ‘And give Naomi my regards.’

  ~~~

  Fox walked into the sister superior’s apartment in the New York Chapter House of the Church of Saint Nicholas and paused. As always, the room seemed like an odd mix of comfortable and austere. The lounge furniture was comfortable and cream, and the decoration was simple and, for the most part, made by the Sisters themselves. Almost in counterpoint, Naomi Lind had risen to her feet to greet Fox, and she was standing there in six-inch pumps wearing what could be charitably called a homage to a nun’s habit, if the nun belonged to some sort of fetish sect. Naomi had said it once, ‘with us, it’s all about the T and A,’ and it was true that the uniform showed off quite enough of both. But then, every official member of the Sisters of Corruption was a practising prostitute.