The Hive Construct Read online

  About the Book

  Situated deep in the Sahara Desert, New Cairo is a city built on technology – from the huge, life-giving solar panels that keep it functioning in a radically changed, resource-scarce world to the artificial implants that seem to have resolved all of mankind’s medical problems.

  But New Cairo is also a divided city – a vast metropolis dominated by a handful of omnipotent corporate dynasties. And when a powerful new computer virus begins to spread through the poorer districts, shutting down the implants that enable so many to survive, the city begins to turn on itself – to slide into the anarchy of violent class struggle.

  Hiding out in the chaos is Zala Ulora, a gifted hacker and fugitive from justice. Her fervent hope is that she can earn her life back by tracing the virus and destroying it before it destroys the city. Or before the city destroys itself.

  With its vivid characters, bold ideas and explosive action, this award-winning debut signals the arrival of a bright young talent.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Hive Construct

  Alexander Maskill

  To my parents, for their tireless support

  Prologue

  ONE OF THE few visible abnormalities upon a horizon lined with glistening sand, the massive red-brown obelisk could be seen for miles.

  Even so, it was only from maybe half a mile away that a traveller would comprehend how large it was, growing larger with each step as if still rising from the desert. Closer still, and what at first appeared just streaks of grey and light brown – perhaps some old stain or sandstorm erosion – revealed itself to be a network of windows, concrete doors and walkways: the first signs of the small human settlement embedded within the colossal concrete tower. This was Waytower Seven. It was an outpost constructed for a purpose: to provide an intermediate step between the harsh, desolate Sahara stretching in front of it and the metropolis that lay in the immense crater behind.

  This purpose required that most of the floor space and utility availability was given over to shops, services and hotels. As a result the permanent residential areas were cramped, dingy and worn. Tarou Wakahisa, the tower’s head mechanic, preferred to spend his time in the garage, among vehicles that the desert terrain had buffeted and baked. It was dark and the concrete walls lined with tools and spare parts kept the heat out admirably. Tarou would read or play his old guitar as his computer ran diagnostics of the vehicles’ engines and propulsion systems. He’d relax in climate-controlled peace and quiet, occasionally getting up to fix something or gaze out into the desert looking for the flow of approaching customers, which the outbreak of the virus and the impending quarantine in the city below had reduced to a trickle.

  As the sun began to sink over the horizon, a rarer sight appeared.

  Tarou put down his book and grabbed his binoculars. He stood up from his seat and walked over slowly to the open garage door. A heads-up display fed information back from the binoculars into his field of vision. Three hundred yards away, a person was emerging from behind a massive sand dune, trudging slowly but surely, straight towards him.

  Save for a large reflective visor, the figure was entirely hidden beneath a heavy black shawl. The shapeless mass gave away the probable presence of the same kind of climate-proof equipment they sold in the Waytower’s stores – reserves of water, a personal cooling system and a steady influx of food. It also made it impossible to tell whether the incomer was armed. The Waytower was several hours’ walk from the nearest settlement, compared to a half-hour drive. This was someone determined to fly under the radar. It was not a sign of good things to come.

  Tarou lowered his binoculars and ran over to his work-desk. In a heavy drawer underneath a rack of different-sized SVL converters lay a gleaming metal box, never opened before. Tarou lifted it out, snapped a seal on one side and pulled the lid open before reaching inside. He scooped up the gun, loaded it with a fresh cartridge and jammed it into the waist of his trousers, then moved over to the garage door, pressed his back to the frame and poked his head out. The figure was closer now, maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards away. Whoever it was would be weary, Tarou decided, and wouldn’t know he was armed. They wouldn’t put up much of a fight. These thoughts almost comforted him. His hands shook slightly as he removed the pistol from his waistband and wrapped his fingers around its handle. It was heavier than he had expected.

  The figure was getting closer. He could feel its gaze upon him.

  Something shifted under the shawl.

  His portable terminal let out a shrill beeping sound. Someone was calling him.

  Not taking his eyes off the stranger, he clicked the answer button with his thumb.

  A voice he hadn’t heard in a long time sputtered out of the speaker.

  ‘Tarou, you dick, it’s me.’

  It took him a moment to place the voice and further time to process the surprise. He let out a sigh of relief. ‘Damn, Zala, is that really you? I was worried there. I was thinking raiders, or a crash. Something like that.’

  ‘I can see that. That was a pistol in your waistband, right?’

  ‘Ugh,’ Tarou grunted. She’d noticed the gun. So much for the element of surprise.

  ‘I’ll be there in a minute. Make sure the coast is clear, and maybe put that thing away.’

  The call ended. Tarou slid down the wall and sat there, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down. He felt a sense of relief as he placed the pistol on the ground. Only now that he didn’t have to use it did he realize how little he wanted to.

  And Tarou Wakahisa watched as, a few minutes later, someone he’d never expected to see again entered through the door of the garage. Zala Ulora, after all, was an exile from the city below.

  The cloaked figure plucked at the clips holding cooling systems together and took the shawl off. The eight years had made a complete stranger of Zala. He’d heard she was a junk salvager now, among other things, and it showed. The sun had brought a rich brown to her skin, and there was a wiry, defined musculature to her that had never been there before. She still held herself in a way which made her seem small, though. And she wasn’t small; though Tarou was a large man, he did not dwarf her by any measure. She still wore her black hair fairly short, though not nearly so tightly cropped as it had been. Her clothes had changed little too: a blue undershirt and a dark, thin jacket with a large hood, black trousers and walking shoes, as well as a large backpack.

  ‘So what’re you doing here?’ Tarou asked. ‘I mean, it’s good to see you and all, but I’d have stayed far away.’

  ‘I heard about what happened to Chloe Kim. I came to pay my respects.’
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br />   Tarou shifted and looked away, uncomfortable. ‘Yeah … terrible business, that. She was unlucky. You know how it happened, right?’ Zala shook her head. ‘Soucouyant virus,’ Tarou said gently.

  ‘I thought so. What, it shut down her pacemaker or something?’

  ‘It shuts down everything. Neural implants, bionic organs, optical enhancements, any tech you’ve got in you. God knows who she caught it from.’ Tarou shook his head. ‘So many people have all those machine parts, those bio-augmentations now? They’re still trying to figure out whether it’s a computer virus or an actual disease.’

  ‘You get anything put in?’

  Tarou pulled up the right sleeve of his T-shirt. There was a heavy scar all around his biceps, dipping under his armpit, and a bar code imprinted just below it, along with a tiny tattooed logo that read NDLT. ‘Artificial muscle, all regulated by a little chip in my shoulder. I’ve got to eat about three thousand calories a day, but lifting’s a breeze. Of course, now I’m terrified of getting too near someone coming out of the city and having my arm die on me. What about you?’

  Zala shook her head, with a slight shudder that surprised neither of them. Zala knew technology better than anyone Tarou had ever met, but she still had her old phobias. Tarou pulled his sleeve back down – to be honest, the join that proved his arm wasn’t entirely his still creeped him out when he thought about it too hard. ‘So how’re you getting in? They’ll still have your charges on record. You won’t get past the biometric scanners. Security Force will scoop you right up.’

  Zala had taken a seat on a large metal crate and was making typing motions in thin air. The portable terminal strapped to her wrist sent images of a projected keyboard and monitor to digitized contact lenses, forming a computer visible only to her. Her fingers moved at incredible speed. ‘I’ve got a plan. The less you know, the better for you and everything. I mean, there’s a pretty good chance of it not working.’

  ‘So why go?’

  Zala sighed, then looked up at him, the glow in her pupils dimming as the contact lenses went into standby. ‘I’ve been away too long. I’ve been salvaging junk in the desert, thieving and hacking in Khartoum. Dad died in a shack in Addis Ababa. He’s the one they wanted. I was just his skinny little nerd daughter they wanted to use for leverage.’

  Tarou had heard about Zala’s father dying – a positive identification on the body of a respected local engineer turned criminal had earned some short-lived attention from the New Cairo news outlets – but the dismissive tone in her voice unnerved him. ‘You miss the city that much?’ Tarou said. ‘And what if you get caught?’

  ‘If I get caught? It’s been eight years, and the charges were fabricated, they know that.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Zala, they said you killed three people.’

  Zala’s discomfort showed. There was a silence.

  After a while, she said, ‘Look, can we just go?’

  Tarou softened, unable to maintain his annoyance. This was not just the first time he had seen her in years. It might also end up being the last. ‘Sorry, it’s just … I’ve worried about you ever since you left, and now you show up again heading out of the frying pan and into the fire you jumped into the frying pan to get out of, because apparently you missed the fire.’

  Zala laughed guiltily, and Tarou continued, ‘Anyway, you’re just in time. Any day now the city’s going to be in quarantine, so sooner is better. We’ll get something to eat in the food court, and then you can head in.’

  They wove between the chassis of various large vehicles, including huge, boxy Lerasha Karkadanns which brought supplies to the Waytower and a sleek Faltach K-series left by one of the tower’s landlords for a service, which Tarou had spent the last few days fawning over. Through a security door on the far side of the garage bay, they emerged into a long, curved room, the far end lined with panels of glass all the way up to a high, arched ceiling. The walls were given over to gleaming, angular boutiques and places to get a quick meal, all designed to part those passing through from as much of their money as possible.

  The two of them walked over to a café selling sandwiches – the meat of which was, at best, dubiously sourced – and took a seat to discuss the intervening years. How Tarou had quit the cybercrime game and studied engineering at university, before squandering his education as a mechanic at the Waytower. How Zala and her father had fled to Addis Ababa, where, their combined technological abilities similarly squandered, they worked as technicians or freelance software coders, staying under the radar and not using their real identities, or real qualifications. How, when Zala’s father died, she almost attempted to move back into New Cairo, but lost her nerve and wound up in Khartoum, where she scraped out a living as a low-level hacker, using only the most basic of her abilities so as not to attract attention. How she’d heard of the virus sweeping her old city.

  ‘So you’re just here to go to Chloe’s funeral?’ Tarou asked. She didn’t answer. ‘Christ, Zala, you’re walking into the lion’s den as it is, you’re planning on staying there?’

  ‘You can’t say you’re not curious.’

  Tarou didn’t know what to make of that. ‘Curious about what?’

  ‘About the virus. Where did it come from? Did someone make it? Why did they make it?’

  Of course, Tarou thought to himself bitterly. He’d hoped she’d just be here to grieve, but this was Zala Ulora, who used to spend weeks slowly working away at the most secure of New Cairo’s computer systems until they revealed their secrets to her, then shut it all down and delete all the spoils without making any attempt to profit. It was never about that. Not even this, not even with a childhood friend among the thousands dead or maimed. ‘Tell me … tell me that this dangerous, potentially deadly virus isn’t just another one of your puzzles to you.’

  ‘It’s a puzzle that needs solving,’ Zala said.

  ‘Oh yeah, because only the great Zala Ulora, master cybercriminal, can save the day?’ he proclaimed theatrically. ‘And, lest we forget, perhaps even redeeming yourself in the eyes of the city that turned against you?’

  The next thing he knew, Zala’s palm had caught his face. He grunted and leaned back, arms up to stop any more blows finding their mark. Her glare still caught him. ‘Our friend is dead,’ she hissed, ‘and if, in dying, she brought me back, the person who might possibly be able to stop the deaths, she won’t have died for nothing.’

  ‘I just don’t want to see anything bad happen to you. Can’t you go somewhere else?’

  He watched as Zala stood up from the table and swung her backpack over her shoulder. She strode over to the glass side of the Waytower and placed her hands on the rail, gazing out of the window. In front of her, just intersecting with the edge of the Waytower itself, was a vast bowl in the desert. A perfect circle, many miles across. The twenty other Waytowers positioned around the rest of the circumference seemed so small from where she stood. The stone drop swept down until it met the angular black surface below. Tens of thousands of huge sheets of obsidian solar panels moved slowly over the top of the city as they adjusted to take in as much of the desert sun as possible. A massive white complex in the side of the bowl brought in water from the great New Nile Sea to the northeast. Beneath the silently shifting sheets of black, an amorphous surface over the city like an unquiet ocean, a metropolis awaited.

  ‘No I can’t,’ she said. ‘This is still my city. It needs me. Hell, I need it.’

  Tarou got up to join her. She brought her eyes away from the view, up to his. There was fear and there was sadness, but behind that, a small, almost imperceptible sparkle of excitement. The two of them walked across to a small glass staff elevator, open to the public since the huge shuttle elevator had been put out of commission to stop people below emigrating too quickly following the viral outbreak. The elevator itself was plastered with signs and warning labels. YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO ACCEPT A BIOMETRIC SCAN. YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO NEW CAIRO LAWS WHILE IN NEW CAIRO. GENISEC WELCOMES YOU TO NEW CAIRO.
Zala paused halfway through the door and looked back at Tarou. ‘It was great seeing you again,’ she said.

  ‘If you ever wind up coming back through here, come say hi, and maybe don’t slap me so much next time,’ Tarou said, both of them knowing this was probably their last meeting. She nodded anyway, out of courtesy, then stepped inside. The doors closed, and Tarou watched as his childhood friend disappeared down into the city below.

  Chapter 1

  THE ELEVATOR FLUNG itself downwards and, through the glass, Zala watched the pelagic surface of the solar panels rise up to meet her, the inky exterior gleaming. She caught a glimpse of the wildly thrashing array of mechanisms moving the vast panels, then the elevator dropped through to the other side and the city below unfurled. Zala’s breath caught in her throat as she took in the sight. She’d forgotten how beautiful the city was from this high up.

  The Sol Lamp, an arrangement of powerful lights meant to simulate the sun, had drawn low along its arching track and evening loomed. The huge spires of the three main corporate buildings, lit up a cold grey-white, jutted like trident prongs from the city centre. Whatever the often vicious rivalry between the corporations was like behind closed doors, they were on good enough terms that their towers shared height and aesthetic sensibilities to an extent that could only have been coordinated. Around them, skyscrapers from more modest companies were dwarfed. The New Cairo Democratic Council building stood next to the soaring corporate towers, as round as a small stadium. On the sides of the huge crater which contained the city lay massive power cables, with offshoots winding down to the neighbourhoods and businesses below or snaking up to the power plant above. Roads, illuminated by heavy streetlamps, seemed bright ribbons weaving through the mass of buildings. Lights burned through the night air, each pinprick marking a streetlamp, a window or, as Zala got closer to the ground, an individual car sweeping around. Elevator Station Seven sat in the affluent Alexandria district and even after dark the illumination lent the area an air of frenetic energy. New Cairo might be a diseased city, even a dying one, but its vitality had not been taken from it yet.