It was midday between Pleuron-conjunction and Leda-conjunction (eighteen hours of light) when Yuri stepped out of the hub on Esola Street in the middle of town. He exhaled sharply. Compared to this humidity, London had been practically arctic. The monotonous carbon and glass buildings stretched out along the street with geometrical precision. Palm trees provided some shade along the cracked concrete pavements, but not much; they were swaying about from the surprisingly fast gusts of wind sweeping along the street. Few people were walking in the sweltering daylight, and even fewer cycled; the road itself was mainly occupied with single-occupant cabez and larger taxez humming along the shimmering asphalt, along with commercial vehicles rumbling between them. It was like a scene from the mid-twenty-first century, Yuri thought.
Boris connected to the local net, and twenty seconds later a three-wheeled cabez pulled up in the broad strip of empty concrete to one side of the hub. Yuri climbed in and sat down on the narrow seat, thankful for the AC vents blasting cool air into the tiny transparent bubble. He always agreed with the saying that you wore a cabez rather than rode one.
It drove forward, taking him quickly through the town’s depressing grid of near-identical buildings, their panel walls mass-fabricated in an industrial estate on the outskirts. There was nothing else to see on the ground, no vista of the vast marshlands stretching out beyond the town’s docks. That didn’t bother him; on Althaea, the view was all about the sky.
Pleuron’s orbit had already dropped it below Althaea’s horizon, while Leda was now rising to the zenith—an airless cratered world with its vast silver-gray mares laced with glowing lava streams. Massive tectonic activity was constantly rearranging its geography, rendering mapping an irrelevance. And beyond that, dominating the apex of the bright azure sky, was the awesome globe of Thestias itself: a circle of darkness crowned by a blazing halo of golden light created by its perpetual eclipse of Pollux. The glowing edges illuminated fast-moving white and carmine clouds, their swirling kinesis producing the bizarre optical illusion that they were somehow spilling over the edge of a hole in space to flow down into its black heart. An optical illusion that made it seem as if Althaea was also falling toward the gas supergiant’s eternal nightside. Locals called it the Eye of God.
Yuri shivered, shaking off the giddiness the sight conjured up. The cabez took him to a commercial block on Nightingale Avenue. He walked into the reception, and Boris directed him along one wing to the office suite Jessika had rented forty minutes earlier. The rooms backed onto a small warehouse where the tactical team had parked their farm truck. The team’s captain, Lucius Soćko, had brought a thirty-centimeter portal inside a briefcase, which they’d threaded up in the warehouse. The rest of his team was coming through the two-meter portal door, along with equipment and specialist mission support operators.
Lucius was in the main office standing behind Jessika, who had taken her pink jacket off to sit at a desk with several new electronic modules. Yuri hadn’t encountered the captain before, but the file Boris was spraying across his tarsus lenses spoke of good work. You didn’t get to his level in Connexion Security without being competent. One thing the file hadn’t prepared him for was seeing Lucius’s arm around Jessika’s shoulders.
“What have you got for me?” Yuri asked.
Jessika looked around, smiling as Lucius quickly stood up straight. “I still haven’t managed to trace the Tarazzi van in the docks,” she said. “However, we have no record of it driving away again through the commercial transport hub after it delivered Horatio. It’s probably still there.”
“They will have reregistered it,” Yuri said bluntly. “Probably within ten minutes of it arriving.”
“There have only been seven similar vans departing Bronkal since then,” she countered. “All of them legitimate.”
“These guys are professional,” Yuri said uncertainly.
“I think we have two options,” Lucius said. “One: The gang has enough money to scrap the van straight away—break it up, take it to a vapor recycler plant, drive it out of town and dump it in the swamps, whatever. In which case we’ve lost it permanently.”
“Or?” Yuri queried.
“They’re not going to be snatching people every day. The van will be parked up in a shed somewhere, waiting until they get another job. Then it’ll be reregistered and given a bodywork makeover.”
“Good call,” Yuri said.
“The dock area’s a whole industrial district supporting the bioreactor site, as well as the barge maintenance companies,” Jessika said. “Plenty of big buildings. I want to send in a microdrone flock, scan the whole place for the van. Lucius has already brought them through the portal.”
Yuri nodded. “Do it.”
“Who are these people?” Lucius asked. “Any idea?”