Wormhole, p.1
Wormhole, page 1
ANGRY ROBOT
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11, Shepperton House
89 Shepperton Road
London N1 3DF
UK
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They want it all
An Angry Robot paperback original, 2022
Copyright © Keith Brooke & Eric Brown 2022
Cover by Kate Cromwell
Edited by Simon Spanton and Claire Rushbrook
Set in Meridien
All rights reserved. Keith Brooke & Eric Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.
ISBN 978 0 85766 996 4
Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 998 8
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Ltd.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Alex Cannon,
with thanks
Contents
1 Cold Case
2 Chromosomal Dysfunction
3 Quantum Lattice
4 First Woman
5 Upgrade
6 We’ve Only Gone and Done it, Darling
7 Outside
8 Faraday Cage
9 Green Rain
10 Mismatch
11 Into the Jungle
12 Read My Lips
13 Transit
14 Beneath the Canopy
15 An Older Man
16 In With the New
17 Cold Witness
18 Footprints in the Snow
19 Captive
20 Locating Vahota
21 Breakout
22 Fellow Traveller
23 Outside, Looking In
24 Last Days on Earth
25 The Line of Descent
26 Base West One
27 The Amphitheatre of Life and Death
28 Betrayal
29 Deadly Passenger
30 Selma’s Isle
31 Bearing Witness
32 Negotiations
33 Return Trip
34 Carstairs Hall
35 Welcome Home
Epilogue
Adem
1
Cold Case
Kemp swivelled his recliner and stared through the narrow window of his office. Somewhere outside, he knew, the sun had come up over London. Snow had fallen during the night. On the rooftops it would be crisp and white, but down here in the shady alleyway to the rear of Homicide HQ all was grey slush and windblown litter. As Kemp peered up at the sliver of dawn sky, he caught the glare of a sub-orb rising like a slow firework from the Thames estuary hub fifty kilometres away, heading east to China.
Around Kemp, images of the dead shimmered in the unlighted office. He knew he owed it to these people – or rather to their loved ones and relatives – to turn his seat back to the console and engage with the database, but he was struck by a soul-sapping inertia that kept him staring through the window.
His imp bleeped and, reluctantly, he turned and signalled to take the call. He expected it to be Danni, telling him to shift himself and join her in the car. Either her or Commander Tsang with yet another case to add to the workload.
It was neither. The image of an overweight man in a crumpled suit resolved itself over his desk: Edouard Bryce. Kemp sat up. “Ed. It’s been months.”
A case had thrown Kemp and the lawyer together five years ago, and much to Kemp’s surprise, the working liaison had developed into a friendship. They had a lot in common. They were both widowers – both in their late fifties – overweight and overworked, and they both liked dark, old-fashioned pubs where they could drink away their worries and gripe about their respective jobs.
“I’m sorry,” Bryce said, “but Ma Holding died yesterday.”
Kemp’s automatic response was to glance immediately at the ghost image of Sophie Holding. “I knew she was ill.”
“I saw her just before… She wanted to thank you for everything you’d done.”
Kemp swore. “That was fuck all, Ed.”
Bryce shrugged. “You could say that. Or you could say that you gave her hope. That was all she had to cling to. I saw her before those meetings you had with her, and I saw her afterwards. You were incredible. You gave her something to live for.”
“For all the good it did.”
“Nevertheless.”
Kemp sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s just…” He signalled, swung his hand around his head and the images of the dead processed around the room and lined up behind him so that Bryce could see the gallery.
“Look, Ed. Fifty-five of them. They’re from nine years back to… to around twenty-five years ago. You know what they say on this job? The law of diminishing returns: the older a case is, the less chance there is of solving it. I worked my balls off on the Holding case and got nowhere. Dead end after dead end after…”
Bryce nodded, conciliatory. “I know, Gordon. But, you know, you do tend to dwell on the cases that remain unsolved. Don’t forget all the ones you do resolve. Every time you do that, you allow entire families to move on, and you’re damned good at what you do.”
“When I crack the fuckers.”
He waved again, killed the images – all but one. He dragged it before him, so that the 3D portrait of the eighteen year-old Afro-Caribbean girl hung between him and Bryce, smiling out at him. He gestured, and the image started to cycle through a short recording of the girl laughing and talking to camera. He didn’t have to unmute her to hear the soft tones of her voice in his head.
“Look at her, Bryce.” Kemp shook his head. “You went to Ma Holding’s place. You saw all the pix she had of Sophie. They were her way of coping, of keeping her only daughter alive and with her. And she trusted me to find her killer.”
“As I said, you gave her hope.”
“And there are fifty-four others. And their families and loved ones who haven’t been able to move on. You know something?”
“Go on.”
“Days like today, I feel like retiring.”
Bryce smiled. “A little way to go yet, Gordon.”
“Or requesting a transfer. Not that anywhere else would have me.”
“Surely, with all your experience…”
“You know me, Ed. I don’t fit anywhere else, and I can’t take authority. Too bolshy by half – Tsang’s own words.”
Which wasn’t the whole truth. Even Ed Bryce, who Kemp considered his best friend, didn’t know why he’d been put out to pasture in the ‘morgue’ after twenty years in homicide.
“I called you about something else, other than Ma Holding,” Bryce said.
“More bad news?”
“It’s been a while since I had Martin look over your imp.”
Kemp didn’t trust his superiors – he wouldn’t have been surprised if Commander Tsang turned out to be a Chinese mole – and his mistrust extended to the content of his annual implant upgrades. He didn’t like the idea that every year Tsang had his techs download who-knew-what into his running system.
He’d once grumbled about this to Bryce over a beer, and the lawyer had said he knew just the man to run a few tests on Kemp’s implant and ensure it was clean. Bryce knew a lot of people from every walk of life – and one of them was Martin Khalsa, a cyber-wizard whose definition of legality was elastic. The upshot was that after every department upgrade, Martin scanned Kemp’s implant for spyware and whatever other nasties Tsang’s team might have planted.
Now Kemp waved. “No need. Still running on the same program as last year. I’ll be in touch when they call me in for an upgrade, okay?”
“In the meantime,” Bryce said, “let’s meet. You look like you could use a drink.”
“I’m busy today, but maybe tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow it is, then.”
They chatted for another five minutes before Bryce was called away and cut the connection.
Kemp reinstated the gallery of the dead, pushed it back to the darkened walls, and once again turned to stare out at what passed for a view.
A month ago he’d gone to see Ma Holding in her bedsit by Hackney Lakes to give her what he euphemistically called a progress report. He visited her every once in a while, like a dutiful son, although it became harder on each occasion. This time he’d even considered lying about a new lead – anything to stoke her hope, particularly when her health was clearly failing. She’d gripped his hand and stared at him with her massive, yellowing eyes. “You’ll find him for me, won’t you, Gordon?”
He’d prised her fingers from his and promised that he’d find Sophie’s killer if it were the last thing he did.
He willed himself to turn the seat, access the database and go through the Holding case yet again. He knew that for the next few days he’d be fired up, until frustration at not getting anywhere overcame him and he took up the freshest case on file, leaving Sophie’s murder unsolved and Ma Holding’s hope to die with her.
He looked up, seeing Danni in the doorway, leaning slantwise against the frame, and wondered how long she’d been there.
“You look, if you don’t mind my saying, as if you’ve slept all night in that seat.” Her voice was Home Counties, primly correct. Anyone less like a DI he’d never met. She wore a dark trouser suit like a uniform, with its side-fastening tunic and high collar, and her jet hair was long and straight. She looked like a high-flying executive up for an interview with a pan-global consortium.
“‘My saying’,” he mocked.
She was twenty-five years his junior, and even though they shared the same rank, she was his superior in charge of this unit. When she was instated over him in the morgue, he’d come in for relentless flak from colleagues. Kemp had shrugged and told them, truthfully, that he couldn’t give a damn. In fact, he was glad of the company, and Danni Bellini turned out to be a decent kid who didn’t rub his nose in the fact that she was a fast-tracked Cambridge graduate and he an ill-educated slob who’d risen, slowly, through the ranks.
“But no, I haven’t been here all night. No more than an hour. Oh – I just had a call from Bryce. Ma Holding passed away yesterday.”
“I heard.” She entered the room, picked her way round discarded curry cartons and beer bulbs biodegrading on the floor, and sat down.
“So I’m setting a couple of things aside and going through the files again,” he said.
She stared at him through the shadows, then shook her head. “Not today, Gordon.”
“What?”
“I’ve just seen Tsang. You’re not going to like this.”
“Like what?”
She gestured around the office at the fifty-five dead people staring at them. “Tsang has just ordered us to put everything aside for a while.”
“Everything? You’re joking?”
“He wants us to look into something else. Priority. A single case. We’ve to give it our full attention.”
Kemp grunted, “Fuck him.”
“That’s what I nearly said.”
Kemp smiled at that. For all her middle-class primness, Danni could swear with the best of them. “So what’s this case? Must be important.” He had to admit, if only to himself, that his curiosity had been piqued.
“It is. A top research scientist, working at the cutting edge of suspension technology. Well-connected. A very high-profile case.”
“Why haven’t I heard of this before now? And since when has suspension technology been cutting edge?”
She combed a long strand of dark hair from her cheek and smiled at him. “Because this cold case is really cold,” she said. “The victim was Sebastian White, and he was murdered eighty years ago.”
Kemp blinked, processing her words. “That’s not a cold case, Danni. That’s an archaeological dig.”
“I said something not dissimilar to Tsang.”
“If we can’t find Sophie’s killer – and that happened fifteen years ago – then how the hell can we be expected to solve a case eighty years old?” He shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense. The killer will be dead, any witnesses likewise. I mean, what the hell does it even matter after so long?”
“I know.” She bit her lip. “There’s something strange going on. Tsang was insistent. He wants us to devote everything to this. The odd thing is, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me who authorised the case.”
“It’s come down a long way?”
“From the very top,” she said.
His first reaction was one of anger – anger that a pen-pusher like Tsang had ordered them to set aside more than fifty ongoing cases. Then he considered what Danni had told him, and his anger tempered into curiosity again.
“I’m intrigued. Look, I’ll just grab a tea and we’ll access the file.”
“I squirted it to your desk as soon as I left Tsang,” Danni said. “But let’s go up to mine.” She looked around the mess of his room.
They took the elevator to Danni’s spacious office four floors up, with a view of snow-bound London on two sides. She made him a mug of English Breakfast tea while he accessed the file and brought a still image of the murder victim into the air before him.
They sat side by side, sipping tea, and Danni talked him through the case.
“Sebastian White,” she said, indicating the floating image. “A British Euro national, fifty-four. He and his wife were two of the continent’s leading scientists in the field of suspended animation.”
The pix showed a thin-faced, hawk-nosed, balding man with a severe expression. “He graduated from Oxford in 2075,” Danni said. “Spent ten years at MIT in the States, then was lured back by the European Space Organisation, who offered him a fabulous salary and a lab staffed by the best scientists and technicians from across Europe. For the last twenty-four years of his life, he worked in the ESO labs in Geneva.”
“The name’s familiar,” he said. “Wasn’t he related to Randolph White?”
Danni nodded. She moved a hand over the virtual keyboard and a second pix shimmered into life beside the first. This one showed a familiar head-and-shoulders image of Randolph White, the patrician statesman and the founding father of the United States of Europe. He was thin-faced and aquiline, with distinguished greying hair and smiling eyes.
“Randolph White was sixty when his younger brother was murdered, and he took it badly, by all accounts. They were close. Randolph retired from public life soon after – some said he spiralled into depression after the murder. He died five years later, in 2114.”
She waved a hand again and the image of Randolph vanished, to be replaced with a dozen scene-of-crime pix.
Kemp frowned. “These all we’ve got?”
“It’s all Tsang came up with. He assumes interactives were shot, but if so, they were lost.”
“Lost?”
“This was eighty years ago, Gordon. Officially, the case was closed five years later.”
“What about interactives with the suspects?”
“Tsang has requested them from Geneva,” she said.
Kemp studied the scene-of-crime pix.
Twenty years in Homicide had accustomed him to grisly images. By comparison with some, though, these were tame. There was a lot of blood, but the victim had suffered just a single stab wound.
Half a dozen images showed Sebastian White from different angles. He was lying on his back in a big, pristine kitchen, sunlight illuminating a face as pale as his old-fashioned white suit. The hilt of a knife emerged from the centre of his chest and the front of his suit was stained red.
“He died within seconds. Forensics have drawn up a profile of the killer. They think the culprit was taller than the victim, weighing between 70 and 90 kilos, either a man or a woman.”
Kemp grunted. “That narrows it down. DNA?”
Danni shook her head. “None.”
“What?”
“Not a trace.”
“So it was a pro. An assassin. No one else could have got away without leaving some biological trace.”
“Or it was someone with sufficient scientific know-how to be able to wipe the place clean.”
“What about motive?”
“None apparent. He was, by all accounts, happily married to a fellow scientist, was well-liked and had plenty of friends. There was a rumour at the time that it might have been the Russians, attempting to slow down ESO’s Mu Arae programme. But if that were so, they left it late in the day. I think we can discard that line of enquiry.”
A government-backed assassin certainly fit the profile of someone who could cover their tracks so well, but Kemp knew the security services would have been all over that angle at the time and had clearly come up with nothing.
Danni waved again. The scene-of-crime images shrank to the periphery and the pix of a vast, bulky starship hovered above the desk. “The Strasbourg. You know what happened?”
“My father was obsessed,” Kemp said. “He followed the mission when he was a kid, and while I was growing up, he watched the holos obsessively. It must have been a hell of a shock to those who’d lived through the mission at the time.”
“You can say that again. The hope of Europe, if not the world, rested on the success of the Strasbourg.”
Ninety years ago, ESO had discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting the star Mu Arae, fifty lightyears from Earth. Travelling at top speed, a ship would take almost eighty years to reach the planet – which pretty much ruled out a crewed expedition… until ESO announced a breakthrough in their research into suspended animation.
