by Guy Haley
He sat back. “You would stand there all day, were I to continue to ramble on, but I will not waste your time. I will tell you what I want you to do.” He sighed. “You are to accompany my sons Leonid and Yuri as a member of the Project Gateway Interstellar Colony effort, head of security for the ESS Adam Mickiewicz and the Heracles V colony.” A pair of flimsies on the coffee table by Ilya activated, bearing animate files detailing the lives of his sons.
“Sir?”
“You will not have heard of Gateway. It is not wide knowledge, yet. The Pointers’ great vanity project, or the venture that will save mankind. The Earth is dying. Some of the others don’t believe this; they see an expansion beyond the Solar System as a way of spreading their genetic heritage, or increasing the wealth of their family. Others think it will re-energise the Market. They all have their reasons. Not me, no. For me, it is a matter of survival. I feel it in my bones, we have taken too much. It is time to move on and take from somewhere else. I am sending my offspring because I want something of the Petrovitch family to persist. Leonid is a good boy – confused, yes, but there is the potential for greatness in him that is lacking in my other feckless children.”
Anderson slid his eyes sideways. “And Yuri, sir?”
Ilya nodded approvingly. “You are not mindless, not mindless at all. A wastrel, yes, like too many of the others, but there is a core of steel in him that is easy to miss. It is there nevertheless. You are to protect them, to aid them in their efforts in founding a new world. God alone knows what they’ll find out there – rocks, most likely, but I will not rule out spear-waving savages or octopods with muskets. I would be a fool to do so, and I am not a fool.” He paused. “Do you think me a fool, Anderson?”
“I have no opinion, sir.” He looked at the man who owned him for the first time since he’d come into the office. “But no, you are not a fool.”
“So I am sending you. I cannot send an army. They’ll need soldiers of your rare quality.”
Anderson nodded. “They will, sir. I am the logical choice.” He said this without conceit.
“You are to leave your current posting immediately, and begin preparation. Choose ninety of your best operatives, a mix of Alt and human, not all of one or the other, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Here are my preliminary plans.” Ilya blinked over a large file into Anderson’s inChip. “The restrictions on the total mass you may carry can be revised upwards for you and your men, and there will be space set aside for military equipment, but this is limited. We’re not sending an army, just insurance. However, the fabrication units and auto-factories being sent with the mission will possess a full complement of military patterning. We will build what we cannot take with us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“At this stage, you are not to share this information, nor make any announcement of the venture to anyone, do you understand? Early days, yet. Early days.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I called you here to give you one additional order. I am the head of this family, am I not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And so your loyalty is to me and, ultimately, me alone.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
“Confirm loyalty code: Alpha. Geronimo. House of Cards. Ambivalence. Quadrilateral.”
Anderson stiffened imperceptibly. His mind shifted in a way that was designed to be pleasant to him.
“Loyalty code confirmed.”
“Then listen very carefully to this. I will not have my family reduced in circumstance. You are to protect them, but you are also to protect the station of the Petrovitch family. Do you understand? If my sons propose anything that will diminish the Petrovitches’ position, you are to prevent it, even if it goes against their orders. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
“Be subtle. Leonid will doubtless try to abdicate responsibility. Guide him to see his errors, do not force it or you will lose him. Yuri is a back-up. He might surprise us both, in the right circumstances.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s a good dog.” Ilya may have wanted to provoke him, but Anderson did not care.
“Yes, sir.”
Ilya ran his fingers over the flimsies of his sons. “Yes. There’s a good dog,” he said absently.
“Yes, sir.”
THE SHIPS
THE FLEET WAS begun long before the initial announcement. Rumours got out, as rumours do, spacers’ tales of shipments heading to nowhere, of personnel and equipment that went someplace that was no-place. Who listens to spacers? Best not to. The rumours stuck, did the rounds, tall tales took root in the fertile grounds of the popular imagination and grew into myths, took their place next to secret alien labs and asteroids made of iridium, next to space whales and ghostships, and phantoms in spacesuits – skull faces grinning through dirty visors – tap-tap-tapping on the windows in the long dark of interplanetary transit. Folktales, foaftales, nonsense. The truth is far more astounding. The Pointers have the money to fund the leap beyond, and the Pointers have the money to have it kept quiet.
Now the truth is revealed to the world. Shuttles carry cameras, shuttles carry newsmen and dignitaries who knew all along, flying them between berths of gossamer threads that glint in starlight. Encased by the webs are long needles of composites – the spines of ships yet to be. Each is five kilometres long, naked yet and ugly with it. Limbed machines, as angular as any nightmare, clamber over the spires, mechanical spiders weaving carbon compounds into hull plates, bulkheads, drive housings, and airlocks. Seven cradles for seven ships. Seven hulls are complete, away, undergoing main drive tests that loop them out in majestic arcs towards Saturn and back. Once done, final fitting awaits: hibernation decks, cargo grapples, life support. All those things that frail humanity needs to survive. For now the ships are the sole province of machines.
A further seven spines are being born, forged in automatic factories 0.1 AU distant from the cradles. Specks in the night betray their location, further specks – the catch of sunlight on a hull, the flare of an ion drive – reveal the streams of tugs and haulers bringing materials in from all over the system: ice from Europa, iron from the belt, carbon dioxide from Venus, hydrocarbons from Titan, people from Earth. In a fortnight, tugs will ease the spines from the factories and shepherd them to the webs, and another seven ships will be begun.
This is Sand’s job, this hauling of parts. Eighteen months of it now, and the wonder has worn off. She is bored and lonely. She heard of Karl’s death only four months after the fact. She is mostly saddened by it, but she remembers what he said, and what she said, and in the dark watches before sleep she suffers the attentions of paranoia.
In the distance (how far is impossible to say; space is not easily confined by the measurements of the human eye), albedo smudges show the edge of the belt. Past that the bright lights of the giants. Past that, the edge of the system, the place no living human has yet been. Here, halfway out, are the arks that will bear men and women away and change that fact forever.
Stocks rise, the Market trades. Rich men grow richer.
CHAPTER THREE
Dariusz in Szczecin
DARIUSZ SZCZECIŃSKI ROLLED his coffee cup in his hand, watching the grains swirl. The coffee was bad: weak, brown rather than black. Rain battered relentlessly against the glass walls that stoppered the ends of the Brama Portowa and made of it the Bramkowa Bar. He was tired, groggy with it. Worry can do that to a man.
It was hot outside. The passive air con panels set in the roof whispered urgently. The thick brick of the old city gateway kept out the worst of the heat, and the coffee was cheap, the two reasons Dariusz was there.
The bar’s holo was mute, the images it projected in the air eerie. A news piece on food riots in Mesopotamia gave way to yet another Gateway press conference. The billionaires, the corporate heads, the scientists behind the scheme, they’d all become as familiar as his family. At first, everyone assumed they we
re insane, or that it was a stunt of some kind, and that the story would disappear from the news.
Apparently not.
The press conference faded out. The Zheng He swung around in the air, the largest of the ships, the gateway ship itself. Dariusz read the subtitles spinning around the base of the picture: English, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish. No Polish. Colonise the stars, they said; take mankind from his failing home. Dariusz had heard it many times before. His interview for the effort was the day after tomorrow.
And, of course, they would reject him.
He wanted another coffee, but couldn’t afford it. His balance blinked nothing but red numbers when he called it up on his inChip. It would be another three days before his social security payment came in. He had at least one hungry day ahead of him. The city owed him nothing, and he depended on it for everything. There was no work, nowhere to go for handouts but the city, and it was parsimony personified. There was no pleading with a city, no matter that he carried its name.
He watched the subtitles scroll round and round the base of the cone of ghosts. He stopped reading them and stared through them, until they became abstract and meaningless, until his eyes hurt. That small act of nihilism satisfied him.
“These televisions have translation settings for Polish too. All of them. What does it tell you when even the Poles do not turn it on? The world is becoming homogenised, my friend, more and more every year.”
Dariusz started. A man sat at the table uninvited, putting his coffee cup carelessly onto the wood. The watery brown liquid sloshed over the rim.
“Good day, Pan Szczeciński,” the man said. He was well dressed; late fifties, maybe. It was nearly impossible to tell how old anyone was anymore. The poor aged quickly, the rich not at all. The man wore a long light raincoat, ankle boots, formal jeans. His eyes were large, curious, and searching. He was balding, which made him out to be poor, or possessed of the intellectual vanity of the deliberately badly groomed. He spoke Polish with an accent Dariusz didn’t recognise – he wasn’t using translation software. “There’s no one sitting here, so I’m sure you don’t mind.”
Dariusz looked around incredulously. The bar was completely empty apart from himself, the barman and this man.
“Look, I’m having a bad day. I’m not in the mood for...”
The man cut him short. “I am sorry. This will take only five minutes of your time. I am aware of the kind of day you are having, and why. Don’t ask if you know me. You don’t. I know you, let’s leave it at that. And I know you’re looking to join them.” He inclined his head toward the holo. “I know also that they will reject you, as no doubt do you. Perhaps I can help.” The man smiled. There was something hidden behind it, but it was otherwise sincere, not like the smiles he’d had at the Office of Employment in the morning. Get a job, they’d said. He’d told them about his interview for the Gateway Project and it had made no difference. He had two months of basic security payments left. Then...
Dariusz checked his surroundings. No one was listening, no one that he could see. He was feeling reckless, angry at the morning’s disappointments. Why not?
“You have five minutes. Pan...?”
The man gave a flurry of smiles in succession, each one different to the one before, as if he would rather communicate this way, without words. “I’d rather leave my name out of it for now, if it’s all the same to you.’
“Sure,” Dariusz said. He dropped his gaze from the stranger’s face, back to his coffee.
“Your interview is tomorrow.”
Dariusz nodded. “What of it?”
“You have no hope.”
Dariusz stared into his drink and shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”
“It is how it will be. They will not take you because you do not conform.”
Dariusz looked up sharply. “You know a lot about me.”
The man smiled again, fleetingly, slightly sorry. “Dariusz Szczeciński, 37, one child, wife Lydia, geoengineer, or should I say ex-geoengineer. Born Kraków, September 14th, 2120.”
“All public; I am supposed to be impressed?”
“Very well. You are afraid of wasps and other stinging insects, you insist it is a rational fear, yet it is listed on your medical file as a true phobia. You are not talkative, a private man, you are classed as a INTJO3 on the revised Myers-Briggs scale.”
“Also impressive, if it weren’t all on my company records,” said Dariusz.
“How about this, then?” continued the man. “Your first girlfriend was Barbara Kosinska. When you kissed her, the very first time you kissed anyone, you were twelve, she eleven. She cried, and you ran and hid in the forest for hours, terrified you had hurt her. Your parents called the police. You never told them where you had been or why. For some, this might be an amusing anecdote, but for you it has been a source of shame. Hardly the crime of the century, my friend. I don’t know why you let it bother you so much.”
Dariusz studied the man unguardedly. Had he told anyone? A friend? An old lover? He could not recall. He doubted it; he was a fundamentally private man. “What the – ?”
“You see, I know everything about you. I apologise if it feels as if I am intruding... But...” He smiled again. “How can I apologise? I am intruding, in every way.” He took a sip from his cup and sucked air through his teeth. “Bad coffee.” He placed the cup down, became businesslike. “You will be rejected because those in power do not like to be defied.”
“I’ve worked hard all my life,” said Dariusz. “I have done nothing wrong. I am qualified for the job. I have a chance.”
“General environmental macro-engineer? A skilled role, and one that will be much in demand on a new world,” said the man. “You have experience, too.”
Dariusz made another noncommittal movement with his arms, and hunched lower to the table. “The Western Union, USA, New Jericho, North African Federation, and Russia. A few other places, on and off world. I’m over-qualified. I should get it.”
“But you do not sound confident.”
Dariusz shrugged.
“In your eyes, maybe you are over-qualified, and definitely in mine. But not in theirs. You know what I say to be true.” The man sighed and looked around the clean brick arch of the bar. The building was in essence a tunnel, where carts in earlier centuries had rumbled through walls long ago demolished. It was twenty five metres long and six high at the apex of the arch. A long bar ran down the left, and glass and brushed steel partitioned it. “This gate was built by Frederick Wilhelm I after he bought the city from the Swedes in 1720,” he said, with another brief smile. “It is a grand statement, a flash of Prussian power. Where you sit was once a thoroughfare, a way into the city. Now what?” The man shrugged. “The walls it pierced have gone, and Poles, not Germans, come here to drink coffee. It has been a backdrop for a statue, a guard post, bar, a shop, an art studio, a house and now it is a bar again. Were it not for the name of this bar and the plaque on the outside, you would never guess what this place once was. The name of Frederick Wilhelm adorns the exterior, as do sculptures of Mars and Hercules. This place was a statement; artistic, yes, but undeniably a statement of wealth and military might. The question is, what does it say now?” The man sat back and smiled again.
“Your point is?”
“My point is, Pan Dariusz...”
“Oh, please,” said Dariusz drily. “You know more about me than my own mother does. Call me Darek.”
The man exhaled hard through his nose. “Very well, Darek,” said the man, switching without embarrassment to the familiar form of his name. “My point is, where is the kingdom of the man that commissioned this gate? Absorbed by Germany, which was smashed in two world wars, then absorbed in its turn into the old European Union. The language that adorns the Brama Portowa – its fourth name, by the by – the Latin, it was once a mark of permanence, of continuance of knowledge. And now...? This edifice, once a marker of power, is a historical footnote, where Poles drink coffee.”
“What
of it?”
The man drummed the fingers of both hands on the table abruptly. His smile evaporated. “You are not a fool, Pan Szczeciński, do not play at one. Let me spell it out for you; no matter what the rulers of one age might believe, their rule is fleeting. Things change, no matter how concrete they may seem.” He laughed. “Why, only the concrete remains, and even that will crumble, given time.”
“This bar is made of brick and stone, not concrete. Both are more durable.” Dariusz placed his cup down and made to go. “Now, if you will excuse me...”
The man grabbed his wrist, and yet his friendly, curious expression did not change. “You have no job, no prospects. Your son is seven.” He jerked his head toward the window. Rain was pouring, steam hovering over the hot pavements. “It is autumn now; one hundred years ago, snow would be coming in a month or so. Not now. Tell me, when did you last see snow? The world is changing too fast. Do you know what kind of world Danieł will live in? Don’t you want something better for yourself? For him? You fear it will all come undone. That is why you have applied for the Gateway Project.”
Dariusz paused. “Go to hell. How do I know you’re not a corp agent, tricking me into sedition?”
“You don’t, you don’t. Although you will soon know I am not.” The man released his grip and held out his hands. “I come with an offer. One that will appeal to you. Frederick Wilhelm, Darek, he didn’t see change coming. Our rulers do not either. The nought-point-nought-one per cent don’t see it, because although they know that their actions can change the world, they forget that the actions of the likes of us can too.”
Dariusz glanced about, suddenly concerned.
“This is dangerous talk.”
“No one can hear us, I assure you.” He picked up his cup, and looked at it as if it confused him. “Five years ago, you were fired for refusing to take mood enhancers while working for Dai-tan in the Congo.”