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

Gibraltar—mainly seeds and genetic samples to expand the habitat’s extensive genebank, but also specialist microfacture systems, and even sometimes a few people whom they’d recruited to add to their modest number of indigenous residents.
    A bell rang in an old familiar tone, stirring Constantine from his reverie. Strange what his mind prioritized, but that particular 110-year-old memory of a telephone ringing in a marbled hallway had always drawn his attention. Every time it used to ring, Kane North would hurry to answer it and nothing else mattered, even if he was spending a rare moment with his three brother-sons.
    Constantine closed his eyes against the icy splendor of the stormscape and the much closer glittering constellation of industrial systems that were his own creation. Still the ancient telephone bell rang, an impulse seeping into his brain at a deeper level than any auditory nerve could reach. He let his consciousness rise through several levels of autonomous thoughts, which now formed the strata of his resequenced brain, until he reached the artificial layer, the one that stretched beyond his skull. His attention slipped across the multitude of connections until it reached the junction with the simplest nerve bundle that handled communications to the habitat AI. It opened like some third eye revealing a topology that could never exist in a Newtonian universe. The ethereal call of the telephone vanished.
    “Yes?” he asked.
    “Dad,” Coby replied. “You have a message.”
    “From whom?” There was no question of why he’d been disturbed. Coby, or indeed anyone at Jupiter, knew not to interrupt him when he was contemplating the universe. Whatever event occurred, it would have to be supremely important to warrant breaking his ruminations. The AI alone didn’t have the authority unless they’d suffered a catastrophe, like a full-on asteroid impact. Therefore only a very limited number of people could send a message that got bumped up the nominal chain of command to this exalted altitude. Two, in total, out of all humanity. He made a guess which it was.
    “Augustine,” Coby said.
    Right. Constantine breathed in, scenting the faintest tang of atmospheric filter purity, an air really too clean for humans. At the moment, time delay on a radio signal from Earth was forty minutes. This was not a conversation. And there were a limited number of things the brothers had left to say to each other. He made another guess as to the topic—and it wasn’t good. After all, Augustine’s medical and genetic technology wasn’t as advanced as anything available at Jupiter. “What does he want?”
    “It’s encrypted. A very heavy encryption. I’m assuming you have the key.”
    “Let us hope so. Route it to me.”
    The message began to play. Constantine’s eyes snapped open. His shocked consciousness viewed the autopsy images superimposed across supersonic cyclone spots the size of oceans charging along the storm bands to clash with counterswirls in neighboring bands amid explosion blooms of frozen ammonia and grubby ultraviolet-charged smog. An eerie backdrop indeed for the sharp functional graphics detailing cellular decay, blood chemistry composition, and hard-focus pictures of the sad butchered heart of a dead nephew-brother.
    The message ended, leaving him trying to blink away the tears that would never otherwise flow free in zero-g. And how arrogantly wrong he’d been about the topic. Not that it was a bad thing, but the fright he was experiencing was akin to the sight of his own grave opening up. He was aware of his heart rate increasing, of adrenaline rushing through his blood, flushing the skin that radiated the new heat back out toward the lonely, majestic gas giant beyond the bubble. No, he told himself, this is not fright. This is excitement that the challenge has finally come. It has been long enough.
    “Dad?” Coby asked. “Is there a reply?”
    “No. Just an acknowledgment that the message