Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [72]
Francine lifted them on thrusters to ground plus twenty metres, tilted the nose back and pulled three Gs straight up. Blondie's eyeballs were showing a lot of white by the time they levelled off. A sudden tremor shook the airframe and the ride became unnaturally smooth. On a short hop like this they didn't need to go supersonic. Kadiatu figured that Francine just liked to break windows.
The widescreen monitor at the front of the section showed them a forward view and avionics data. At one thousand metres the lights of southern England moved deceptively slowly.
'I hope there's a film,' said the Doctor.
'It'll have to be a short one,' said Kadiatu.
'Is she really blind?' asked Blondie.
'As a bat,' said the Doctor.
The jet tilted forward and the lights of central London rushed up to meet them.
STS Central - Olympus Mons
The conference had been going on for over an hour and Ming was running hard to sustain her position. If she'd been dealing with politicians it would have been easier; politicians were sensitive to public opinion and Ming had a whole section of the KGB working on that.
Instead the holographic figures spaced around the table wen of the regional mandarins, non-elected and difficult to touch Each of them was sitting at identical tables around the system Washington, Brazilia, Harare, Beijing, Tehran, Jacksonville-Zagreb, all the power centres. Hologram eyes reading hologram body language and looking for weakness.
Most of them were old, old enough to remember the decade that followed the war. They could feel the same thing now, the crust shifting beneath their feet, the sharp smell of sudden political death. They were old, these mandarins, old and scared and dangerous.
Damage limitation was the name of the game and they wen making Ming work hard. The regional bureaucracies wanted to shift responsibility for the evacuation of the Lowell Projects on to the STS and the relief NGOs. Budget bar graphs in primary colours on the table top went up and down like steam pistons Zagreb had got the notion from somewhere that the crisis on Pluto had its roots in the Stunnel accident.
Only Jacksonville wasn't hitching; they'd been getting disaster grants for decades for the project in Achebe Gorge and saw the refugees as an opportunity to grab a bigger share of the cake.
A hologram of a man Ming didn't recognize had appeared in one of the vacant chairs. He was short with thinning hair under a straw boater and pale disturbing eyes. His gaze mack it hard for her to concentrate. While she fended off a typically asinine attempt by Washington to shift the refugee-counselling costs on to her R&D budget she tried to work out who he could be.
There was no identification tag on the table in front of him. They were optional but officials generally used them to impress their importance on the viewer. Not a bureaucrat then, and not a politician either: they usually smiled and the man wasn't smiling. A troubleshooter then, some slick know-it-all from the private sector put in place by the bastard Rodriguez to keep an eye on her.
Without looking down Ming ran her fingers across he console, lapping in the code for a signal trace. She waited for half a minute and glanced down. The trace report stated that no signal was being broadcast to the conference seat indicated.
'This meeting is over,' Ming told the mandarins and terminated the conference link. The hologram mandarins derezzed before they could protest.
If only I could do that for real, thought Ming.
He of course didn't vanish; he stayed real and solid in his chair. How could she have mistaken him for a hologram?
'Are you the manager?' asked the man.
'What's it to you?'
'Your transit system would like to have a word with you,' said the man. 'It has some complaints.'
Olympus Mons West
Lambada's MIG espresso machine was still warm but otherwise the crew room was deserted. The cards from an interrupted game of damage were scattered on the table. Blondie wondered if they were from the same game that Dogface and Old Sam had argued about - what, two, three days ago?