The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle by Peter F. Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

chapter
    His e-butler gave the door his Huw North Party membership code, and the lock buzzed. Inside was pretty much what he expected, a flight of bare wooden stairs leading up to a couple of rooms with high windows, long since boarded up. There was a bar in one, serving cheap beer from microbreweries and lethal-looking liquors from ceramic bottles. A games portal took up most of the second room, with observer chairs packed around the walls.
    Several men were sitting on stools at the bar. They fell silent as Adam walked over. Nobody wearing a suit, even as cheap as his, belonged in that room.
    “Beer, please,” Adam told the barman. He put a couple of Earth dollar bills on the counter; the currency was accepted without question on most worlds.
    The bottle was placed in front of him. Everybody watched as he took a sip. “Not bad.” Adam even managed to keep a straight face. He could appreciate a Socialist club not buying from a big corporate brewery, but surely they could find a smaller one that actually produced drinkable beer.
    “New in town, comrade?” the barman asked.
    “Got in today.”
    “Staying long?”
    “A little while, yeah. I’m looking for a comrade called Murphy, Nigel Murphy.”
    The man at the far end of the bar stood up. “That’ll be me then.” He was slim, taller than Adam, with a narrow face that carried suspicion easily. Adam guessed he was a first-lifer; his head was almost bald, with just a thin monk’s ring of graying hair. His clothes were those of an ordinary workingman: jeans, and a checked shirt, with a fleece jacket worn open, a woolly hat stuffed into one pocket. They were all streaked with dirt, as if he’d come straight from the factory or yard. But the way he looked at Adam—the assessment he carried out in a glance—marked him out as a leader.
    “Huw North,” Adam said as they shook hands. “One of my colleagues was here last week.”
    “Not sure if I remember,” Nigel Murphy said.
    “He said you were the man to talk to.”
    “Depends what you want to talk about … comrade.”
    Adam held in a sigh. He’d been through this same ritual so many times over the years. By now he really ought to have worked out how to circumvent the bullshit and get right down to business. But as always, it had to be played out. The local man had to be proved top dog in front of his friends.
    “I have a few issues,” Adam said. “Can I buy you a drink?”
    “You’re very free with your money there, comrade,” said one of the others sitting behind Nigel Murphy. “Got a lot of it, have you? Thinking you can buy our friendship?”
    Adam smiled thinly at the barfly. “I don’t want your friendship, and you certainly don’t want to be a friend of mine.”
    The man grinned around at his colleagues. His appearance was mid-thirties, and he had the kind of brashness that suggested that was his genuine age, a first-lifer. “Why’s that?”
    “Who are you?”
    “Sabbah. What’s it to you?”
    “Well, Sabbah. If you were my friend, you’d be stalked across the Commonwealth, and when they caught you, you’d die. Permanently.”
    Nobody in the bar was smiling anymore. Adam was glad of the small heavy bulge in his jacket produced by the ion pistol.
    “Any of you remember November 21, 2344?” Adam looked around challengingly.
    “Abadan station,” Nigel Murphy said quietly.
    “That was you?” Sabbah asked.
    “Let’s just say I was in the region at the time.”
    “Four hundred and eighty people killed,” Murphy said. “A third of them total deaths. Children who were too young to have memorycell inserts.”
    “The train was late,” Adam said. His throat was dry as he remembered the events. They were still terribly clear. He’d never had a memory edit, never taken the easy way out.
Live with the consequences of your actions.
So every night he dreamed of the explosion and derailment just in front of the gateway, carriages plunging across junctions and parallel rails in the