>alienPrime involvement/ explain<
Never heard of them. Never heard of you before the barrier came down. We were an exploratory flight. Science only.
>message from MorningLightMountain17,735 / explain<
You’re wrong, there was no alien on board the Second Chance.
>paradox / explain<
There was no alien on board. Our hysradar scan showed the barrier was still intact around their star.
>barrier construction / memory<
None. The barriers were in place before humans knew how to cross space. Humans did not build the barrier.
>human commonwealth / memory<
Hundreds of worlds linked together by wormhole. Worlds of land and water and atmosphere, warm worlds with clear empty skies. Worlds that would support Prime life. So many worlds that the terrible pressure and conflict between immotile territories would end immediately if they were to become available to Primes.
>wormholes / memory<
Distortions of spacetime that could reduce distance to no length at all. They could be made large or small. The ultimate method of transport. The ultimate method of communication; with immotile units across interplanetary and interstellar space linked through wormholes there would never be divergence. With wormholes, MorningLightMountain could extend itself across the galaxy, with units occupying every star system. It would never die, never be challenged from such supremacy.
>wormhole construction / explain<
I don’t know the technical details of creating exotic matter, but the equations are fundamental.
>commonwealth location / memory<
Right in the core of knowledge that was the remnants of the Gralmond University astronomer Dudley Bose, the name, spectral type and stellar coordinate of every Commonwealth star glimmered like a precious jewel.
19
With its uncomfortably close G1 sun blazing down through a heat-bleached sky, the temperature along the entire ninety-five-mile length of Venice Coast rose uncompromisingly during the day. It didn’t help that the beautiful island city was only just outside what was technically Anacona’s northern polar region, and the planet was also approaching the middle of summer. This mix of geography and calendar was currently giving the city over sixteen hours of intense sunlight every day. In deep winter, of course, the pattern would be reversed, and the sun would only be visible for about six hours a day. Even then the climate would cool down to something like Earth’s Mediterranean temperatures. Anacona’s proximity to its primary star made the planet uninhabitable from the equator out to fifty degrees latitude north and south, most of which was a rocky desert.
From space, Anacona had the same kind of symmetrical banded appearance as a gas-giant, with its broad expanse of coffee-coloured sands wrapped round the centre, and skirted with black and auburn mountain ranges. The planet had kicked off a large, and ongoing, debate among Commonwealth planetologists about how climate could affect topography, or if the symmetry was just a transient tectonic fluke. For it wasn’t just the central regions that were regular. Beyond the peaks, which bounded each side of the desert, the cornflower-blue waters of annular seas sparkled in the strong sun to the north and the south. Both the polar zones boasted continents, although the southern one was smaller, and their coastlines were completely dissimilar. They did share an abundance of emerald vegetation, with rainforests and grass-lands nurtured by the heat and daily rains. Both seas shunted long trails of swan-white cloud across the continents where they formed permanent slow-spinning spiral whirls over the actual poles.
The sea gave Venice Coast an indecent humidity. By midafternoon, the siesta was well under way, hustling tourists and inhabitants alike off the streets. Shops shut for four or five hours at a time, waiting until evening and a low golden sun before they opened their doors again. People took long rests in the shaded courtyard gardens to be found at the centre of every block. The only service which seemed to carry on regardless was the monorail, which linked every district along the narrow city’s ninety-five-mile length. Even most of the gondolas, water taxis, and little supply boats which swarmed the canals, tied up at some quay or other, bobbing about empty while their skippers lounged around in the bars.
It was these long people-less interludes every day which gave Paula Myo her greatest cause for concern. The surveillance operation would be much better served by crowds and activity providing cover for the Agency’s operatives. As it was they had to linger over long meals and drinks as they sat on the verandas of neighbouring cafés and restaurants. It was proving a popular duty. Paula disapproved. They were likely to grow lax during such leisurely episodes.
The centre of their attention was the Nystol Gallery, a big three-storey canal-side building in the Cesena district, specializing in EK art, electrokinetic machines with hundreds or even thousands of moving parts. Paula had reviewed the gallery’s catalogue, going virtual through the TSI construct, where she marvelled as every non-art-lover did at the striking, pointless fusion of art and machine; some were like working sculptures of animals, aliens, and mythical creatures, their micro-gears and pistons running through biological functions with cheeky mimicry, while others were random collections of mechanical components assembled in bizarre asymmetric patterns, that shouldn’t work, yet somehow managed to buzz, whirr, rotate, and wobble about with jerky elegance; still others were variants on the old domino relay, with modules of fire, water, air, rubber, protoplasm, and ordinary misapplied components from domestic or industrial machines, all of them reacting against each other, activating the next piece, then somehow resetting themselves in an impossible perpetual motion.
The Nystol was a good cover for its owner, a Mr Valtare Rigin, whose other specialist enterprise was black market armaments. For a start, Venice Coast was not the kind of city where such activities took place. It had no industry other than art and fishing and boats and tourism. There was no grand civic cultural plan back when it started in 2200, no desire to rival the illustrious ancient urban areas of Earth, or the dynamic wealth-hungry new cities vying for funds and entrepreneurs that were springing up across phase two space. This was built on a dream and a prayer. It started on a sandy spit called Prato near the centre of a five-hundred-mile stretch of swampy coastline on the Calitri continent that was protected to seaward by meandering lines of small marshy islands. Local marine life attracted several families who’d arrived from Italy and were already tiring of the new planet’s capital, San Marino. The waters were thriving with a variety of edible fish eminently suitable to Italian cuisine. Several of the families who settled on the spit were from old Venice, so that boating culture was there right from the start.
Huge dredgers imported from the mega shipyards on Verona scooped out big channels for the fishing boats, then began clearing smaller channels round Prato. More substantial houses started getting built on the higher, reclaimed land, with little canals dug directly to them so the boats could have easy access. That was when the growing town’s inhabitants realized the potential of what they had. The original spit began to expand as the newly dredged swamp silt was piled up on the east and west sides. After a couple of years, Prato had become an elongated island with a wide clear lagoon separating it from the main coast where the swamp had once been; with a single causeway for the railway lines. It set the pattern for the future.
For a hundred and eighty years the dredgers and constructionbots just kept on going. The long island twisted sinuously many times to keep more or less parallel to the contours of the coast, with districts continually added to both ends. Architects, artisans, and designers collaborated with City Hall to keep their new commissions Italianate in nature, preserving and amplifying the waterbound city’s character. It became fashionable for Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties and the individual super-wealthy to own a villa somewhere along Venice Coast. The offshore islands, of which there were thousands, proved an even more lucrative real estate.
The Cesena district where the Nystol Gallery was situated lay twe
nty miles east of Prato, three stops on the express monorail. After four days, Paula knew it intimately, every street, canal, bridge, covered alleyway and square. Her hotel was a seven-and-a-half-minute walk from the local monorail station, with five bridges over the canals; three of carved stone, one wood, and one metal. The Nystol was four and a half minutes, and three bridges, away; while the local police station was a mere two minutes away, with four bridges in the way. She’d arrived at Venice Coast with a team of eight from her office, supplemented by a further five from technical support, and thirty officers from the tactical assault division. Twelve of Anacona’s senior detectives had been loaned to her by the planet’s eager Interior Minister, providing invaluable assistance down on the narrow waterways and maze of streets where it was really needed. Their presence was an indicator of how much importance governments placed on the new Commonwealth Planetary Security Agency, the quiet twin of the Commonwealth Starflight Agency.
With the launch of the scoutships back to Dyson Alpha, public interest was focused solely on the Starflight Agency; while it was now the Planetary Security Agency which was receiving fifty-five per cent of the overall budget. For someone who’d scraped in on a pitiful fifty-eight per cent of the Intersolar vote, President Doi was strangely forceful when it came to providing funds for the new Agency. There was talk on the unisphere news shows that income tax was going to have to be raised to pay for the vastly expanded facilities.
Greater resources should have helped ease the transition for Paula. She didn’t like it at all; the Agency wasn’t the Directorate she’d joined, even if reorganization had brought her more money and a bigger staff. That staff now unfortunately included Alic Hogan, her new deputy, who Columbia had appointed from his own legal department. If ever there was a political placeman, it was Hogan. His constant requests for full briefings from all the investigators, and insistence that all procedures were conducted by the book, was causing a lot of resentment in the Paris office. He knew very little about running a case, and everything about watching over people’s shoulders.
Over the last few months she’d begun to wonder if she was becoming conservative in her old age, hating change simply because it was change; refusing to acknowledge that society was altering around her. It surprised her, because if nothing else she considered herself a realist. Police forces always adapted to keep pace with the civilization in which they maintained order. Although more likely it was the increasing degree of political control exerted over Agency operatives which made her uncomfortable. She resented the notion that limits might be imposed over her own work; after so many years served to reach a virtually semi-autonomous position it would be awful to be hauled back into the general accounting system.
‘Like everyone else.’
‘Excuse me?’ Tarlo asked.
Paula gave her deputy a mildly irritated smile; she hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. ‘Nothing. Thinking aloud.’
‘Sure,’ Tarlo said, and returned to the menu.
That California attitude was something Paula could finally appreciate here. Tarlo merged perfectly into Venice Coast’s laid-back lifestyle. The two of them were sitting at a café table, under a broad parasol by the side of the Clade Canal. Two hundred yards away, on the opposite side, was the back of the Nystol Gallery. Its sheer red-brick wall rose vertically out of the placid water, with only a single loading door on the lower floor, a yard or so above the black tide line; a couple of wooden mooring posts stood on either side of it, their white and blue stripes sun-scorched to near invisibility. Wide, stone-rimmed windows marked out the second and third floors, below an overhanging roof of red clay tiles. A row of thick semi-organic precipitator leaves were draped just below the guttering, as if some giant vine was growing out of the rafters. Fresh water was an expensive commodity in Venice Coast, by themselves the sieve wells drilled through the basement of most blocks couldn’t support the huge demand of the residents.
Paula’s seat was positioned so she faced the target building, while Tarlo was at right angles to her, giving him a view along the canal. In his white cap and loose orange and black linen shirt he seemed immune to the heat. Paula took off her suit jacket and hung it on the back of the chair before sitting down; her white blouse was clinging to her skin. Her wig was hot, she could feel the sweat pricking her brow, but she resisted the impulse to shift it round. A waiter from the café scowled at them from his seat just inside the doorway. When it was clear they weren’t going to go away, he sauntered over.
‘Ah, uno, aqua, minerale, er natu—’ Paula began.
The waiter gave her a pitying sigh. ‘Still or sparkling?’
‘Oh. Still, please, chilled and with ice.’ The Venice Coast waiters were normally contemptuous of anyone who couldn’t speak even a smattering of Italian.
Tarlo asked for a non-alcoholic beer and a bowl of smoked rasol nuts.
Both of them received a further look of utter derision before the waiter slumped his shoulders and walked back inside.
‘Always feels good to blend right on in there,’ Tarlo said. He put his sandalled feet up on the rusting iron railing which guarded the edge of the granite-cobbled pavement from the canal.
Paula checked her timer. ‘We’ll order more drinks in half an hour, then a snack after that. I’d like to have at least two hours here.’
‘Boss, we have got the whole place covered by sensors, you know. You can’t get a carrier pigeon in there without us zapping it.’
‘I know. Target review is important to me. I need to get a feel for the op.’
‘Yeah.’ Tarlo grinned. ‘So you keep telling me.’
If one good thing had come out of the Directorate becoming the Security Agency, it was the expanded intelligence base. For once, the news of Valtare Rigin purchasing a number of sophisticated and very restricted items of technology hadn’t come from any of Paula’s deep assets. Instead, Anacona’s special criminal bureau had been running a monitoring operation with local manufacturers who made dual-use products. They ran financial checks on an industrial supply company that pur-chased some molecular resonance stabilizers with a very high power rating, the kind that could be used in large force field generators. It turned out the supply company was a shell, with its credit supplied from a one-time bank account on StLincoln.
The bureau tracked the shipment, which was routed through a number of blind drops, until a courier picked it up and delivered it to the gallery. That was when they called the Agency in.
Observation, backtracking, and communication monitors had shown them Rigin was acquiring a lot of dual-use components. There were no actual weapons, but the pattern fitted one of Adam Elvin’s shipment operations exactly.
‘He picked a good cover,’ Paula said as she sipped her mineral water. ‘I’ll bet you Rigin’s lawyer claims that the components make up one of his EK works.’
‘So why did he need to acquire them like this?’
Paula smiled in the shade of the parasol as a light breeze washed off the canal. ‘Radical art, I expect.’
‘You reckon he’s going to ship it out in one go?’
‘Most likely. The risk was in putting the items together. Now he’s exporting, it’ll be a couple of big crates to a legitimate destination.’
‘Right out the back door, huh?’
‘Yes.’ From behind her big sunglasses, Paula gazed at the solid grey-painted wood of the gallery’s loading door, visualizing the cargo boat tying up beside it, the containers being lowered onto the deck. They’d do it in the middle of the day, of course. A simple honest shipment; nothing to hide. Wherever it went, out to the docks that fronted the Acri district where the big sea-going ships put in, or the cargo yard at the Prato monorail station, she’d follow it. Somewhere down the line, Bradley Johansson would be waiting.
*
Adam Elvin leaned back against the purple cord cushions in the back of the gondola as it slid gracefully along the narrow canal. It was one of the little waterways that zigzagged round large bloc
ks, connecting and crossing the larger canals. The side walls were high here, slimed with weed and dirt. Water slapped against the cracked brickwork, slowly eroding the mortar – there were entire sections that had been repaired with new bricks and hard cement, looking totally out of place. Bridges curved overhead like miniature tunnels. Each block had a row of near-identical blank wooden doors a yard above the tide line, fastened by heavy iron bolts. They passed several that were open, with little cargo boats tied up outside, their crew manhandling crates and boxes into the dark interiors.
Every delivery in Venice Coast was by boat, adding to the cost of living here. Adam hadn’t appreciated that before he came. The only transport in each district was either walking or boat. The monorail took you between districts, but that was all.
They turned out onto the famous Rovigo Canal, one of the major channels through the Cesena district. The venturi trees lined both sides. Planted a century ago, their trunks resembled gnarled copper pillars reaching over twenty-five metres high, with arched boughs that trailed long strands of yellow-gold leaves as thin as tissue. Each one had its own sieve well that had been drilled under the pavement into the boggy subsoil, allowing the roots to suck up fresh water. Adam was lucky enough to be visiting during the fortnight they were in bloom. Each branch ended in a triune of brilliant amethyst ruff flowers as big as footballs. Already, though, petals were beginning to fade and fall, snowing onto the heads of delighted gondola tourists like scented confetti.
Adam smiled appreciatively as the gondolier slowed down, allowing him to soak up the sight and smell of the wonderful native trees. The boutiques and galleries on either side of the Rovigo were among the more exclusive in Venice Coast, with dark glass windows illustrating single examples of their expensive prestige products on displays that could qualify as high art themselves. Not far away, the strange and wonderful twisted neo-gothic spire of StPeter’s cathedral towered above the city’s red tile roofs like a pre-Commonwealth silver space rocket.
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