The entranced crowd waited for the final aspect of the promised miracle: to be enveloped by freezing mist in the middle of a desert. As the brilliant cloud rolled toward them, angry shouts began to rise above the background buzz of chanting and laughter. Placards were raised. Fireworks rockets zoomed unnervingly low over heads. Smoke bombs were thrown. Cheers turned to screams. Lines of riot-shield-equipped police and corporate security officers snaked through the throng. Stones began to rise in short arcs. The screams grew louder. Images playing across the big screens that had been set up across the zone to show everyone dramatic close-up shots of the harvesters and airships broke up into a mash of static.
The crowd surged in random directions as people struggled to get away from the protestors. Police strove to get past them. Just as the chaos on the ground reached its peak, a colossal wall of fog rolled across the observation zone, blotting out the sun in a blast of cold so profound it seemed to suck oxygen from the very air. Then the panic frenzy really struck.
—
Whoever named it Fountain Street clearly had a very misplaced sense of irony. Savi looked along the depressing track, with drab single-story prefab cabins on both sides, that led away from the intersection ahead of her. The compacted soil here probably hadn’t seen any free-flowing water this side of Earth’s last ice age. A double irony, she thought, considering what was visiting the desert today.
It was definitely the poorer side of town, home to the laborers who sweated through the endless, changeless desert days performing Water Desert’s dirty, low-paid jobs. Their kids were left behind to find what fun they could amid the tired silvered boxes where they lived. One gang was playing basketball in an open area that passed for a park, trying to slam-dunk their ball into hoops on poles that were now leaning badly.
Savi had her white paper mask on again, like Ketchell and Larik, who walked along with her. Nobody could see their faces. But that didn’t matter; all the kids and the few adults sitting outside their homes knew they didn’t belong. Not that they cared.
What do you want me to do?
When are you going to intercept?
We are working on isolating the main target group. Continue with your mission.
Confirmed,
Her apprehension was growing, and with it the thrill. What she was doing was going to take a lot of these people out of circulation. It was all that mattered to her. Talish would be proud. It was eight years now since her little cousin had been caught in the crossfire between the police and a radical group called Path of Light, as the militants stormed a government building in Noida. He had his cyber legs now, and an artificial kidney, but for three months the whole family had been immersed in an agony of waiting and praying around his hospital bed. Now Savi was playing her part in making sure no other innocents got hurt by psychotic ideologues who believed they had an absolute right to use force to achieve their goal.
Arrest team moving into your area,
They’re going to have to hurry. Only six minutes left.
These are our own real special forces. You’re getting the red carpet treatment. Told you I’ve got your back.
She smiled beneath her mask.
They reached the end of Fountain Street. The substation was twenty meters ahead of them, a small square compound with a high gray metal fence around it, the base clotted with fast food wrappers and loose clumps of desert grass. She could hear the hum of the transformers as they fed power across the town and out to the airfield, keeping the air-con going and the civil engineering machines moving. Kintore’s consumption was phenomenal.
It was twenty-three years since the China National Sunpower Corporation had dropped the first solarwell into the sun, a simple spherical portal that plasma poured into, whose twin was sitting at the bottom of a giant MHD chamber on a trans-Neptune asteroid. The solar plasma flared out of the chamber like rocket exhaust, its powerful magnetic field generating a phenomenal current in the chamber’s induction coils. In one masterful stroke of ingenuity, the Chinese had solved Earth’s energy drought. Now the entire planet’s power came from a multitude of solarwells, producing vast amounts of cheap energy at zero environmental cost.
Ten fifty-two. Five minutes left to go, and they started loitering around the last houses. Three other roads ended in the same area. There was nothing on the other side of the substation other than the desert. Kids laughed and shouted behind them.
Savi turned to Ketchell. “Have your people seen anything?” As he swung around she caught a glimpse of the shoulder holster he was wearing under his white cotton jacket, weighed down by a large automatic pistol.
“No. We’re clear. Let’s do this.”
Some of the group with me are armed. Warn the arrest team.
Will do.