Chapter 9

To the South the Islands of the East became a maze of small islets, drowned valleys, sheer cliffs interspersed with a sodden, marshy landscape deeply cut into by the fingers of the Gulf of Memphis. With the limited resources available to Schecter and Rasida it would take many months to properly search for all the mine sites that could possibly be back into production. A small team had to be left at each discovery, thus limiting still further the manpower available. The Varyag was the sole airship available, and that had to both service the teams on operations in the Cityplex underground, as well as maintain the base at the Good Hope. The Arks had never envisioned military operations involving such a logistic effort in wildly separate locations before and the strain was beginning to tell.

Heather Sion was exhausted and the Varyag was in urgent need of a dockyard. First and foremost, the airship's gas cells need recharging with hydrogen. The RIM motors, having been scavenged off the Normandie, weren't in the best of condition anyway and needed overhauling. Navigation, flight control and gas management systems needed urgent maintenance and that wasn't likely to happen unless the airship was taken out of service for at least a fortnight.

Although, by instinct, unwilling to take a step back until a resolution was found, Suetonius and Roger - acknowledged co-leaders - accepted that operations had to be curtailed, suspended or re-prioritized.

Rasida and Schecter would now be supplied by floeg, and their limited carrying capacity meant the size and scope of the Good Hope's operations had to be reduced. Similarly, a way had to be found to maintain operations beneath Cityplex. Floegs were far too noisy for covert operations so de la Perriere's team was given the choice of to either abandon the tunnels or maintain some kind of permanent presence by supplying themselves. Also unwilling to take a step back, de la Perriere chose the latter.

The Medusa gang maintained stores of looted goods - or 'malls' - in a dozen locations within the 'hood' they controlled. A wide variety of stuff was available, albeit, much of it of doubtful use. Food was problematic, and most of the vags lived off the raw stuff called 'dehydralized protein base', a kind of synthetic mushy brick that was processed into whatever the residents in the plexes ordered. Lacking any food processors, this stuff was eaten raw with a little water tapped from the reticulation plants. Of course, water straight from the Floral was a recipe for dysentery. Nevertheless, this tasteless gruel hit all food groups, but there was never sufficient to go around. Lacking any worthwhile texture, the gunge wasn't great for healthy teeth and most of the vags had dental problems.

Arms and ammunition were an additional burden, and the Varyag brought in as much as it could on its last mission. Extra autorifles and banshee rounds were hauled to the Primo's 'office.' De la Perriere also received a crate of shredder mines and his Bakhunin team were kept busy teaching the use of these to their Medusa students.

De la Perriere was determined not to unintentionally spark a turf war by arming one side to the teeth. He knew that, historically, old grievances and new ambitions can quickly overtake their best of intentions in these crude, tribal, societies. A young thug better armed quickly becomes a better thug. Ignoring the finely balanced social dynamics of the Medusas, de la Perriere began grooming the more reliable and impressionable into his personal army. Clearly, this was bound to put the Primo's nose out of joint but he hadn't the time for a more sophisticated scheme. De la Perriere was an Inkubis clone - a Q-Plasma - with both superior fighting qualities and breadth of intelligence. He was an imposing figure - built like a Greek God - and well over six feet in height. None of the Medusa lads came close to matching his strength and physique and that in a society where such things were important. De la Perriere soon had his team of two dozen Medusas willing to walk over hot coals at his say so. The Primo wasn't happy to see his power seep away, but there was little he could do about it. He wasn't foolish enough to challenge de la Perriere to a fight and the Ark's uncanny senses made surreptitious assassination too difficult.

Out in the hood lived knots of 'civilians' who provided both a market and prey to the Medusa gang. Generally, the civilians were young with a sprinkling of older people. Family groups were rare, but, often, random youngsters would form a kind of family bond for self protection and social interaction. These civilians looted the goods while the gangs provided protection - following the familiar pattern of a typical, age old extortion racket. Most gangs monopolized the food supply and exchanged this for a bewildering variety of often useless merchandise. What they actually did with this merchandise was one of those open secrets those-in-the-know knew never to speak of.

But de la Perriere became aware of it fairly quickly. The merchandise was traded to the very Guardian Force who launched raids to round up the inhabitants of the tunnels. A wide variety of deals were done with these crooked cops. The most common involved 'taxes' of certain 'civilians' to make up their quotas. Other deals were simply another layer of extortion whereby the Guardians were paid off to look the other way. De la Perriere's personal force were only too willing to discuss these matters with their mentor.

A teenager, Taran, volunteered to take de la Perriere on a looting expedition. It was said Taran's group was one of the best there was. They set out early evening - there was 12 in the group, predominantly kids in their middle to late teens. They embarked through a maze of tunnels and shafts until they came to the railway.

The railway tunnel was dark and confined, with barely a metre free space either side of the trains. These trains travelled very fast - accelerating and braking so rapidly the g-force would more than likely severely injure a human body. It ran on a top rail, linear induction method - cargo was discharged into side bays via containers and automatically consigned via lift shafts up into the plexes.

To stop one of these trains was insanely easy. One lad threw a chain weighted at both ends, called a 'strop', over the induction rail. The approaching train - perhaps over a kilometer away - detected the obstruction and brought itself to a stop. A robot 'dolly' then issued from a compartment on top of the train's nose cone with a range of automatic tools to deal with the problem. This gave the looters a window of about a minute - too short. The lad then slung another strop, then another, until the kids had busted open a container and grabbed as much as they could practically handle in the confined space. A miscalculation would obviously cost someone their life and the exercise wasn't for the faint hearted.

In Taran's gang, two boys handled the 'stropping.' The lad who threw the chain was called 'the marksman' or 'mark'. His mate was the 'spotter' or 'spot' and Taran's 'mark and spot' team were known to be the smartest in all of the southern hood. The rest of the team were the 'grabs', the most numerous, and this group was subdivided into specialists who could break into the sealed containers in a blink of an eye. Even the process of looting was a skilled occupation requiring impeccable teamwork. De la Perriere could only marvel at their professionalism.

Whatever the lads stole was only a mere fraction of the cargo on these trains. To take more would require the permanent disabling of the line and that would bring the patrols. It was an unwritten rule never to take too much and invite retribution. De la Perriere, however, wanted the system as well sabotaged as their small force could manage. To bring down a whole sector was certain to start a lethal fight with the Guardians. He had, though, a force inured to subterranean warfare in the form of the Medusas. With a deal more weapons training and equipment, de la Perriere was sure he could create mayhem.

This would all take time and preparation, however, and, lacking constant communication with the outside, de la Perriere was unaware of the fast changing political situation.

Roger and Seutonius held their meeting with the Board of Cityplex. The holo-multicube was installed in the Council room of Novgorod and all twelve of the Board, plus a team of advisors, resolved itself. The press of images in the relatively confined space created mildly unsettling spatial distortions and Roger was certain it was meant to be intimidating. 'Advisers', or even the full Board itself, were unnecessary as a single image could have access to the entire Board's memory and processor banks.

The Chairman was a greying, bespectacled man in his sixties. Roger had to remind himself these were not real people but totally computer generated. The images and personalities were designed to perform certain roles within a meeting and finely tuned to create an impression. The Chairman spoke first.

"Roger of the Duretti? Suetonius of the famous Black Guard?" he said, smiling. "We don't confer often enough. On behalf of the entire Board of Cityplex, we'd like to extend our thanks..."

"Can we cut to the chase?" Roger interrupted. "Our position is, we want the mines removed from the Preserve and George returned to us. That is our bottom line and, as such, non-negotiable."

"Very direct!" the Chairman smiled, he thought, winningly. "I would like to introduce you to the Director of Material Resources, Gordon Thanet. Gordon?"

Thanet was thickset, overweight, with an impressive five o'clock shadow. Clearly he was meant to be the tough guy. "I'll be brief," he said, in a terse voice. "Cityplex is in the process of a vast renewal program to both use energy more efficiently and to provide the citizens with improved accommodation. For this, we need, perhaps, up to 1000 tonnes of reprocessed steel per day. Other building methods and materials are available, of course, but steel is still the cheapest. To process this steel we need coking coal. Again, there are more expensive, alternative sources of carbonizing material, but our financial resources are not limitless. In short, we require a constant supply of good quality coal."