Read Online Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) by Niall Teasdale - Free Book Online

January.
    It was well into the afternoon of the following day before Fox managed to get all the paperwork finalised, the body and evidence prepared for transport, and her own body shuttled down to the surface. Thankfully the maglev system between Newark Spaceport and Long Island, the LI-line, was fast and efficient, and it was maybe another thirty minutes before she was looking out of the carriage at the kilometre-high, gleaming spire that was the headquarters of MarTech Group.
    It was one of three arcologies in the immediate area owned by the company, though the third was new and still under construction. Each was structurally similar, a streamlined tower, aerodynamically designed to handle both normal wind and the raging storms that came up the Atlantic coast in the wake of the massive hurricanes which had made the Gulf of Mexico largely uninhabitable. You could basically live in one of those towers your entire life: they could produce their own food, recycle water, provide power, and they had every convenience you could ever want. True, the main MarTech building was heavily devoted to the labs and research facilities of the company, but the secondary tower and, as far as Fox knew, the new one were residential. The two completed buildings had over half a million inhabitants, and that was not counting the smaller apartment blocks which littered the space between them, housing an average of fourteen thousand people each.
    The train slowed as it climbed to the entry point on the side of the tower. Looking south out of the window she could make out the ocean and a couple of larger structures. The Hamptons still boasted a few single-occupancy houses owned by the very-and-conspicuously rich, the ones who had yet to cotton on to the fact that showing off wealth like that had really gone out of fashion. Then she was looking at the walls of the tower’s station and she got up to leave the train.
    Of course, she still had quite a way to go before she was at her destination. It was just that the rest of the journey was going to be vertical for the most part. Security passed her through to the nearest elevator block without comment, though she knew her arrival was being flagged upstairs as she walked through and, sure enough, a message appeared in-vision. Please take tube sixteen, Inspector. Mister Martins is expecting you. Of course he was. She followed a virtual trail of lights along the corridor, pasted there for only her to see, leading to a door amid the bank of elevators, walked into the waiting car, and turned to see the doors closing. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
    ‘When I said “your earliest opportunity,”’ Jackson Martins said as Fox stepped out of the car and into his private apartments, ‘I didn’t mean straight from orbit. You could’ve stopped off and changed. Had a nap. Eaten.’
    ‘Food and sleep are for wimps,’ Fox replied, ‘and you said “office.” This is your home.’
    ‘There’s no difference, as you well know. Order some food and come out to the solarium.’
    Fox watched his retreating back as he wandered out of the lobby through a door at the back which led into the deeper recesses of the suite. He was tall, over one-eighty-five centimetres, and aging very gracefully into his sixth decade with little grey in his mop of black hair. Jackson Martins had always been something of a geek, far more of a technician than a salesman, and probably more of a scientist than a technician. Certainly he was a genius, a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, likeable genius with a striking ability to put two and two together and produce five when it came to technology. He kept himself fit, mostly for his daughter, claiming he had no intention of putting her through the loss of another parent. His rather odd attachment to Fox was because of his daughter too, but that was a longer story.
    She accessed the apartment’s computer, having been given guest access soon after moving to the area, and ordered up sandwiches and