Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  ‘They’re not real,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ She didn’t stop staring.

  ‘Don’t get soft on me now, Keldra.’ He tried to mimic the tone of voice she had used in her rants back on the Remembrance. ‘This is what they took from us, remember?’ He walked further into the assembly room.

  Looking back, they seemed to have emerged from the doors of a grand house, its stone walls stained orange by the light of the sunset. The illusion placed a gentle breeze on Jonas’s face and even made the ground seem springy under his feet. Now that the shock had worn off, the effect of the room’s illusions was much like that of Wendell Glass’s ornamental garden on the Haze. It was much more realistic, but no less self-indulgently artificial.

  Keldra managed to tear herself away from staring at the clouds and walked up beside him. As she stepped further into the illusion she seemed to shimmer, and her yellow vacuum suit became brighter. It wasn’t just the light, Jonas realized, after a moment. The belt dust and ship oil had vanished from her suit, edited out by the illusion. Her face also seemed cleaner, the illusion smoothing over her facial scar and even subtly applying make-up. He looked down at himself and saw similar changes to his own suit. The grime was gone, as if it was brand new, and on his suit the illusion had also placed Earth Authority captain’s stripes on his sleeves.

  He didn’t know if there were real objects beneath the illusory trees, but his instincts wouldn’t let him walk through them when there was a path around them. The trees hid the door from view from the other end of the room, tastefully removing even that reminder that the scene was taking place on a spaceship. On the other side, just in front of the sharp downward slope that he guessed marked the edge of the real room, were a wide wooden archway and a white gazebo.

  The archway was filled with stars and darkness, a window out into space tastefully integrated into the scene. The gazebo was full of dead bodies.

  Jonas stopped short when he saw them, and then advanced slowly. They looked perfectly preserved; if he had expected to find anyone alive on the Aurelian, he could almost have believed they were asleep. There were maybe two dozen bodies lying curled on the floor, half in and half out of the gazebo. They were immaculately turned out, hair as neat as a waxwork’s, make-up un-smudged, wearing dark blue dress uniforms that were visibly the ancestors of the Solar Authority uniforms of Jonas’s age. Each of them had a wine glass in their hand or one lying on the floor nearby. Their faces were utterly expressionless. The closer he got, the more they looked like dolls.

  Keldra peered down at the bodies, glancing up at the walls every couple of seconds as if she couldn’t bear to look away from the clouds. She poked one of the wine glasses with her foot, sending it rolling in an arc across the floor. ‘Poison,’ she said with disgust. ‘Someone killed them.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It could be. I’d like to know what happened here.’

  ‘There might be logs,’ she said.

  ‘Aurelian!’ he said. ‘Do you have a log of what happened in this room, when…when these people drank from these glasses?’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’ The computer’s voice seemed to come from the empty air.

  ‘Play it to both of us, please.’

  Captain Marszalek strode into the garden scene that someone had conjured in the assembly room. This was a blatant fantasy scene: there was nowhere on modern Earth that you could look out across so much unblemished natural beauty. She could hear subdued voices from the other end of the room. She waved the trees temporarily aside and headed for them.

  People crowded around a white gazebo at the far side of the room. The Aurelian had only carried a small crew when it left Earth on its science mission, an age ago, and it looked as if the entire surviving crew was here. Only a few of them were talking: most were looking out of an arch window that showed an external view. Illuminated by the artificial sunset, their faces ran a gamut of emotions, none of them pleasant: tear-filled grief, anger, shell-shocked blankness, a couple of sick ironic smiles. They each held a glass of red wine, but none of them were drinking. There were more glasses and bottles on the grass nearby.

  At the heart of the crowd was Commander Khoroushi, with a manic, faintly messianic smile. Some of the gathered officers and crew were glancing at him nervously, as if waiting for him to speak. This would all be his doing, Marszalek knew; this nostalgic garden fantasy would be exactly the sort of thing he would invent. The Aurelian had superimposed full dress uniforms on top of everyone’s ship fatigues, as if this was a formal gathering. The civilian scientist, Doctor Rasmussen, it had dressed in a cream-coloured ball gown.

  Through the arch window, the crescent Earth hung in the void like a blue-white marble. Tiny shapes slowly moved in front of it: the ships and bodies in the Earth’s orbit. They were little more than dots, but the fact that they were visible at all at that scale meant that the image was subtly enhancing them. The ring of satellites and debris around the Earth’s equator was also visible, and in a higher orbit was a much larger cluster of dark shapes, slowly converging on itself as it approached. Marszalek’s implant couldn’t identify them automatically, but she knew what they were. This was the Dodec fleet, 100,000 strong, moving in for the kill, just as they had at Mars. A hundred differently coloured dots swarmed around and through them. These were the couple of dozen remaining Earth Authority peacekeeping ships, supplemented by civilian ships that had been hastily pressed into service and retrofitted with weapons.

  The battle was already in progress. There were sporadic silent explosions as the Earth ships’ missiles took individual Worldbreakers out, but the dark mass wasn’t significantly diminishing.

  Marszalek cut through the crowd and strode straight up to Khoroushi. She signalled the Aurelian to amplify her voice for him and edit it out for the others. ‘What are you doing?’ she hissed. ‘Why is no one at their posts?’

  ‘I’ve relieved everyone of duty, Captain,’ Commander Khoroushi said, not bothering to reply privately. He waved his hand around at the gathering. ‘I thought we should go out in style.’

  Marszalek grabbed Khoroushi’s arm and walked him away from the crowd. ‘We should be ready to respond to orders.’

  ‘There won’t be any more orders, Captain. We were too late to take part in the battle.’

  ‘It’s not a battle.’ Doctor Rasmussen had followed Marszalek and Khoroushi away from the crowd. The last few weeks had taken their toll on the scientist until she looked every one of her 120 years; her face was a mass of wrinkles like crumpled brown paper. Despite that, her voice was surprisingly powerful, laced with bitterness. ‘The Authority fired off the entire strategic nuclear reserve an hour ago. It destroyed 5 per cent of the Dodec machine.’

  ‘I know that,’ Marszalek said. ‘We could turn the tide. We have the Sphere.’

  ‘We could have, if we were close enough,’ Khoroushi said wearily, as if explaining something to a stubborn child. ‘Our drive burned out. It’s over.’

  Doctor Rasmussen was pointing at the window. ‘It’s starting. They’re forming the gun, like they did at Jupiter and Mars.’

  Khoroushi raised his glass, peering over its lip at the blue planet in the window. ‘We might as well watch.’

  The Dodecs had clustered together in a fuzzy cone, its rounded apex pointing away from the Earth. Tiny green lights were appearing throughout the Dodec mass, as if 100,000 green eyes had opened. Individual Dodecs continued to burst in flashes of light, and the others continued to ignore the Earth fleet’s attempts. Many of the Earth ships were drifting now, their crews giving up hope. A last few continued to fire their remaining missiles, surely knowing that they could do no good. Marszalek wished the Aurelian was one of those ships, rather than out in deep space, too far away even to die heroically.

  There was a flash of green light from near the apex of the cone, momentarily blinding, until the Aurelian’s image filters readjusted. Another flash followed, then another, then another. The explosions lit up the Earth’s shad
ow side, and, for a moment, Marszalek could make out the shapes of its clouds and coastlines. She had an impression of small objects shooting very quickly through the mass of Dodecs and towards the Earth. She stopped breathing. Any second now.

  An explosion blossomed from the middle of the Earth’s disc. The clouds and coastlines shattered as a shock wave rippled across the surface, the ground fracturing, the sea and atmosphere churning in chaos. The scene seemed to play out in slow motion; the scale involved was too large for Marszalek to intuitively comprehend. A geyser of bright red molten rock spurted into space where the missile had punched through the crust, like blood from a bullet wound.

  There was another flash, and this time a huge circle of the Earth’s crust was blasted away, the magma beneath spraying out in billions of glistening droplets. Another, this time coming from noticeably inside the sphere of the planet, the flying debris standing out darkly like dust in front of a lamp. More flashes, at regular intervals like the beat of a silent funereal drum. Each explosion threw more material off the Earth, in larger and larger pieces. Eventually, the last vestiges of the surface were gone, the entire planet reduced to fragmenting globules of molten rock, thrown apart by the hammering explosions, and dispersing into the void.

  At last, the flashes ceased. There had been twenty in total. Marszalek couldn’t tell how long the process had taken; time had seemed to stand still. The debris was still glowing, a dull pink haze, spreading out around the Earth’s orbit. The Moon was gone, destroyed by a similar set of explosions, its blood mingling with that of its parent planet. The Earth’s ring of satellites had been swept away by the explosions. A few of the Dodecs had been taken out by direct hits from fragments of the Earth; the rest were dispersing, mirroring the dispersal of the Earth’s debris. If Rasmussen’s theory was right, they would be beginning a slow process of debris collection that could last hundreds of years.

  Commander Khoroushi stepped forward and turned around to address the crowd. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, a toast,’ he said. ‘We were there at the end, and it was glorious. To the human race!’

  Khoroushi drained his glass. One by one, some at once, some hesitantly, the crowd drank theirs. Quietly, without any sign of pain, they lay down on the grass. ‘There’s more wine, Captain, if you want it,’ Khoroushi said, voice slurring, as he lowered himself down. He closed his eyes. Through the arch window, the fragments of the Earth faded as they dispersed.

  Marszalek stood frozen. It felt as if her mind was firing randomly; all her years of training were unable to find a solution. For the first time in her adult life there was absolutely nothing she could do. Her eyes moved between the dead or dying people on the ground, and the dispersing debris cloud that had been Earth, staring, as if she could bring them back to life by sheer willpower.

  The illusory sun hadn’t moved since she had entered the room, a last sick sunset frozen at the end of time. There were a couple of poison wine bottles still half-full on the ground. They were the only way out now…

  Something snapped inside her. Suddenly, she couldn’t bear to be in the room. She ran back to the corridor, eyes half-blind with tears, not bothering to push aside the trees, stumbling and nearly falling headlong onto the illusory grass.

  At last, she was in the corridor, the horrible sunset and bodies and wine out of view. She collapsed against the wall, face hidden in her hands, and wept.

  The human race was dead. She had heard rumours of plans to preserve a small population on asteroid bases, along with gene-banks – plans kept secret to avoid mass panicked rushes for the tiny number of evacuation ships – but they were wishful thinking conspiracy theories. Even if they were true, she didn’t see how they could have been properly prepared in such a short space of time. Any survivors on other ships would be faced with the same dilemma as her; a choice between a fast or a slow death. ‘I could be the last human being left alive,’ she whispered aloud.

  All she wanted now was to get away. She couldn’t bear to stay here with the remains of Commander Khoroushi’s smug self-funeral, entombed inside the symbol of her ultimate failure: the ship that came back too late.

  She stood up. She felt strangely calm, as if she had used up her last store of emotion and now had no way to replenish it. ‘Aurelian,’ she said, ‘prep a spaceplane. I’m leaving.’

  ‘Certainly, Captain,’ said the cheerful voice of the computer. ‘Where will you be going?’

  ‘I’m going out, Aurelian. I can’t stay here any longer.’

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  Marszalek looked up at the security camera with a look of pity. ‘I don’t know, Aurelian,’ she said bitterly. ‘I imagine I’ll be gone for some time.’

  The transit module door opened. Marszalek stepped into it, and was carried away towards the Seagull’s hangar.

  The memory ended smoothly, easing Jonas back into the present. The crew members were still around him, exactly where he had seen them lie down in the memory, 300 years ago. Now, he recognized Commander Khoroushi and Doctor Rasmussen. They looked exactly as they had when they drank the poison, preserved like waxworks.

  ‘This is sick,’ he said. He pulled off the arcap.

  He was at one end of a large white room. He could see the door clearly: there had been nothing under the trees. There was no gazebo. At his feet were skeletons, surrounded by dust and fragments of rotted clothes. Commander Khoroushi’s skull grinned up at him. He seemed to be holding his wine glass to his rib cage, as if he were still proposing the toast in death.

  Keldra broke the silence. ‘They were Earth people,’ she said with disgust, as if the idea of an Earth person committing suicide was unthinkable. She was staring down at the bodies, still wearing her arcap, looking the commander in the eye. She touched the glass with her toe again, and then suddenly stamped on it, crushing it beneath her heel. ‘They should have fought.’ She glanced around and then began walking away, stepping along an invisible path. ‘Fucking cowards.’

  ‘What the hell, Keldra?’ Jonas shouted after her. ‘They’d just seen their planet blown up. They burned out their engines trying to get back here, and they were too late. They tried as hard as they could. They’d just lost everything. Sometimes suicide…’ The image of Gabriel boarding his shuttle came unbidden to his mind. ‘Sometimes suicide is understandable. It’s a tragedy, but it doesn’t make you a coward.’

  Keldra had stopped, but she wasn’t listening. She hadn’t taken off the arcap but she was looking at the floor now, not glancing at the sky. She pounded a clenched fist into a vacuum-gloved palm. ‘They still should have fought.’

  ‘They’d lost, Keldra!’ he shouted. ‘They had nothing left to fight for.’

  She powered back towards him. He raised his arms to defend himself, but rather than hit him she leaned in and shouted in his face. ‘They should have fought! If you can’t win, you do as much damage as you can, and if you’re going to die you go down fighting. Anything less and you’re a coward.’

  He pushed her away, biting down his anger. ‘I’ve had enough of your crap, Keldra. We came here to get that artefact and find out how we could use it. Let’s find it.’

  She snorted. ‘Yes. Let’s finish what they started.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, absorbing the location of the science lab from the arcap. ‘Come on.’

  She strode towards the door. She walked straight to it, still wearing the arcap: from her point of view she was walking through the trees. The clouds would still be above her but she didn’t look up again.

  The transit module was still waiting for them. Wordlessly, Keldra looped her arms through the straps and then waited for Jonas to strap in beside her.

  ‘Aurelian,’ she said sternly. ‘Take us to the science lab.’

  ‘Captain? Do you confirm this order?’ the computer asked.

  Keldra muttered something under her breath.

  ‘Take us to the science lab please, Aurelian,’ Jonas said.

  ‘Certainly, Captain.’

  Chap
ter Sixteen

  The science lab was a converted storage bay, divided in half by a reinforced glass partition. The side into which the transit module opened was cluttered with banks of scientific equipment, all a sterile white. Jonas couldn’t identify most of the machines, and he had a feeling that his own era didn’t have anything as advanced as these. A multi-armed robot stood patiently at one end of the room, next to a closed door. On the other side of the partition was a nest of supports, attached to the floor and ceiling, looking as though it was braced to stay stable under harsh acceleration. Another robot stood amid the supports, instrument-tipped arms frozen, reaching towards the thing in the centre.

  The supports held a black sphere, about two metres across. Jonas had no doubt when he saw it that this was the Worldbreaker artefact. Its surface was multifaceted, an enormously more complex counterpart of the dodecahedral form of the Worldbreaker. Under the harsh lights he could see that the faces weren’t quite flat, but were ridged and knotted in a way that suggested an organism as much as a machine. The grooves between the ridges glowed faintly with a greenish light from within. Even without the glow, something about the artefact made him feel certain that it was still active. The impression was of a seedpod, ready to sprout into horrible life.

  Keldra had stopped looking at the sphere and was squinting at a patch of air on their side of the partition. She prodded at it, mouth tensed in frustration. ‘Jonas, look at this,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Put your arcap on, Jonas.’

  Reluctantly, he put the cap back on. There were no gaudy background effects in this room, just flat planes of text or diagrams hanging in the air at eye level like ghostly datapads. The one Keldra was staring at showed a list with titles and timestamps.