Read Online Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton - Free Book Online Page A

carrying on down the abdomen to the root of the penis. Sid looked around as the flesh was peeled away; he’d seen this enough times. A camera recorded the punctures and cuts to the rib bones above the heart. Then a small powerblade was used to cut cleanly through the clavicles and ribs, allowing the coroner and his assistants to remove the breastplate, exposing the organs below.
    Both the coroner and Dr. Fransun were silent as they surveyed the damage. Sid peered over their shoulders.
    “What the hell did that?” he asked in dismay. The North’s heart was in tatters, reduced to a purple-red mush surrounded by a jelly of clotted blood.
    “The blades moved once they were inside,” the coroner said in shock. “Praise be to Allah, blades like fingers stabbed into him then closed around the heart, completely shredding it.”
    *
    The transparent globe was made out of a carbon silicon compound whose particular superstrength molecular structure could only be produced in zero g. It measured three meters across and had a small access air lock where it was attached to the mountain-sized space habitat’s external axle spindle. Even with the material’s impressive qualities, it was eight centimeters thick to ensure that anyone inside would be well protected. Jupiter orbit was a notoriously hostile radiation environment.
    But beautiful, Constantine North thought as he watched the black speck that was Ganymede’s shadow traverse the gas giant’s eternal storm bands. That was why he’d built the observation bubble, so he could float in a cross-legged yoga position like some kind of Buddha gyroscope and stare out at his bizarre yet wondrous chosen home. Some days he would gaze out at Jupiter’s fantastic racing clouds and whirling moons for hours at a time.
    As always he watched the vast bands of variegated whites and pastel browns and gentle blues gyrate against one another without any enhancements, content with everything his raw eyes could show him. From his vantage point, half a million kilometers above those frenetic clouds, the gas giant was a two-thirds crescent, big enough and bright enough to cast a spectral light across him. But cold. There was no heat in the pearl radiance that fell across his newly youthful face, no substance. Out here, beyond the sun’s habitable zone, light by itself wasn’t strong enough to support planetary life.
    Out there in the blackness, little flares of blue flame flickered briefly around a dazzling silver flower. The Minantha was returning from Earth, maneuvering on its final approach to the habitat amalgamation. A slim cylinder a hundred thirty meters long, it contained the fusion reactor for its high-density ion drive—along with the crew section and several hundred tons of cargo—all surrounded by the vast curving petals of the mirror-silver coolant radiators. Jupiter possessed three of the ferry craft, all of them flying twenty-seven-month loops between the gas giant and Earth.
    Opening the Newcastle gateway to Jupiter orbit back in 2088 had been a onetime operation, allowing Constantine to deliver all the industrial machinery and initial wheel-hostel he needed to start his small empire in magnificent isolation. It had taken a day and a half to shunt everything through, a process that left the modules tumbling all around Jupiter space. Without an anchor mechanism turning it to a stable gateway, the open end of a trans-spatial connection would oscillate through spacetime around its exit coordinate like the tip of a tree in a hurricane. It had taken Constantine, his sons, and their followers a month to gather all the modules and factories and tanks and generators together into a stable constellation around their chosen carbonaceous chondritic asteroid so that they could begin mining and processing the minerals into raw. Only then could they begin construction of their new home.
    Now Constantine’s only known contact with Earth was through the ferry ships, which brought cargo from