The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  As the court recessed for the day the talking heads in media studios across the Commonwealth were nearly unanimous that Howard Madoc had done a good demolition job on Hoshe Finn. A great deal of the prosecution case was subjecture. It should be enough for a good defense lawyer to swing the jury in his favor. Public sympathy was definitely moving toward Morton according to the constant interactive polls monitoring opinion on the case. It acted like a feedback loop, giving even more people the impression he was going to get off. Which implied an even bigger revelation was waiting to be accessed: Paula Myo was actually going to lose a case.

  After such momentous events, day three brought an unsurprising increase in the unisphere audience, close to three billion people were on-line and waiting to see what would happen. They watched as Mellanie arrived early and took her usual seat. This morning she was wearing a long coat of some shiny ice-blue fabric with matching trousers. The vest underneath was a translucent mesh, though the coat lapels remained very close together, hinting at rather than revealing any flesh. With her hair given a sophisticated wave and combed back neatly she was radiating raw sex appeal.

  After yesterday’s roasting, Hoshe Finn was wearing a lighter suit, for once allowing his oiled hair to fall loose over his shoulders. Next to him, Paula was in a somber dark green suit, her hair scraped back severely.

  When the court officer brought Morton in, he’d put on a navy blue suit appropriate for any boardroom meeting, emphasizing his authority and integrity. His face was sober and intent, betraying no hint of contentment at what had happened yesterday. He was restrained as he shook hands with Howard Madoc, then they both stood as Judge Carmichael entered.

  With the prosecution case over, defense called its first witness: Morton himself.

  Howard Madoc faced the shielded jury as he asked his opening question. “For the record, do you believe yourself capable of committing such a dreadful act as this murder undoubtedly is?”

  “I do not believe I could kill in cold blood. And I did not kill my wife and her lover.”

  “Thank you.”

  Madoc went through a long series of questions designed to show his client in the best possible light to the jury. How Morton was ambitious but not so ruthless as to use murder to his corporate advantage. How he had shown sympathy and support for his ex-wife after her re-life procedure. How he would have risen to the top no matter what trivial little financial problems beset him forty years ago.

  “The prosecution has made much of how cold and ruthless you are,” Madoc finished. “Are you a cold man?”

  Morton looked up to the public gallery where Mellanie was sitting, gazing down with a soft devoted smile on her beautiful young face. “You’d have to ask those who know me properly, but I don’t think so.”

  Howard Madoc bowed slightly to the judge and sat down.

  “Your witness,” Judge Carmichael told the prosecution table.

  Everyone in the courtroom fell silent as Paula Myo slowly stood up. Then a round of excited whispering broke out as she bowed to the judge and walked over to the witness stand. If she was having to take charge herself, the prosecution must be desperate.

  “Murder ain’t what it used to be,” she said to Morton in a pleasant conversational tone. “It’s no longer death. Not final. Today it’s bodyloss, memory erasure, lots of euphemisms that describe what is essentially a discontinuity in consciousness. Your body can be killed, but the clinics on every Commonwealth planet can bring you back to life with a simple cloning procedure. There’s a blank decade or two, but eventually you’re walking around again as if nothing ever happened. It’s a wonderful psychological crutch to have. A lot of psychiatrists argue that it helps make our society a lot more stable and calm than before. They bandy the word ‘mature’ around quite a lot.

  “So you see, murdering somebody is nothing like as serious as it used to be. All you’re actually doing is removing them from the universe for a few years. You’re not really killing them. Especially when you know their insurance will cover a re-life procedure. It would probably be an acceptable risk to remove someone who was going to ruin your plans.”

  “No,” Morton said. “It is completely unacceptable. It is not a done thing, something that can be performed for convenience. Murder is barbarism. I wouldn’t do it. Not now, not forty years ago.”

  “But we are agreed that your wife and Wyobie Cotal were murdered?”

  “Of course.” He frowned, puzzled by the question. “I told you, remember?”

  “No, you originally said you were suspicious about her disappearance, especially when it coincided with that of her lover. Feelings of unease aren’t entirely memory-based, they can’t be erased by legal or black-market editing. They are derived from the subconscious. You knew something was wrong about their disappearance.”

  Morton sat back and gave her a suspicious stare.

  “The Tampico alibi was a good one, wasn’t it?” Paula said.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. Assuming you no longer had the memory of murdering her, neither you nor her other friends ever questioned the story that she’d left you to go there.”

  “I didn’t kill her. But you’re right, it was a watertight cover-up. I had no reason to question her disappearance, especially after Broher Associates contacted me and said they were acting as intermediaries.”

  “Let’s examine this again. You came back from your conference in Talansee, and found your apartment had been stripped of all your wife’s things, her clothes and possessions, and there was a message telling you she had left for good.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that was enough to convince you at the time that there was nothing unusual about her leaving.”

  “It was unusual, and unexpected, and quite shocking. But it didn’t make me suspicious.”

  “So you knew of her affairs?”

  “Yes, there had been several by then. Our marriage allowed for them. I’d had a couple myself. I’m only human, not some cold machine.”

  “Did you argue the terms of the divorce?”

  “No. They were all set out in the marriage contract. I knew what I was getting into.”

  “What about the items removed from your apartment, did you ask for any of them to be returned?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Morton gave Madoc a quick glance. “Tara only took her own stuff.”

  “You knew what was hers, did you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did anybody else?”

  This time the glance Morton shot at his lawyer was a puzzled one. “Excuse me?”

  “I read the transcripts of all your calls and messages to Broher Associates,” Paula said. “There was never any dispute over what was removed. So tell me this: In a home where two people have lived together for twelve years, where only those two people could possibly know whose item was whose, how is it that the killer removed only her property?”

  Morton’s expression turned to one of stricken incomprehension. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out.

  “No criminal gang would ever know what to take to set up the alibi,” Paula said. “It would take someone intimate with the house and its contents. There were only two of you with the exact knowledge. One of them is your ex-wife, and we know she didn’t do it.”

  Morton slowly lowered his head into his hands, covering his grief and confusion. “Oh, holy shit,” he moaned. “I didn’t. Did I?”

  “Yes.” Paula regarded him with the kind of sympathy normally extended to the bereaved. “You did.”

  The jury took three hours to deliberate their verdict. Comment on the unisphere was that they took so long in order to enjoy a decent lunch at the taxpayers’ expense. When they filed back into the courtroom and delivered their verdict nobody was surprised that it was unanimous. The electronically disguised voice from behind the curving silver glass announced, “Guilty.”

  The outbreak of chatter was swiftly silenced by the judge, wh
o then told Morton to stand. There were, the judge said, very firm guidelines laid down for such appalling crimes: the minimum was usually twice the period of life loss.

  “Given that you committed this crime purely for your own advancement, I have to agree with the prosecution’s assessment that you are a cold immoral individual who sees other people’s lives as an inconvenience to your own ambition and has no qualm in eradicating such problems. Due to your evil, Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal have suffered the loss of decades without a body, I therefore have no reluctance to imposing a punishment of one hundred and twenty years of life suspension. Sentence to begin immediately.” His gavel banged down loudly.

  Tara Jennifer Shaheef leaped to her feet and screeched, “You bastard!” at her ex.

  On the other side of the public gallery a hysterical Mellanie screamed incoherently, struggling against the court officials holding her back from jumping the railings to be with her guilty lover. Some members of the public around her were cheering merrily at the commotion. Morton shook his head in bewilderment as he was led out of the dock, a study in tragicomic defeat. The reporters turned en masse to the prosecution table. Hoshe Finn and Ivor Chessel were clearly delighted, smiling wildly as they shook hands. Paula Myo seemed oblivious to the commotion all around her; she was picking up loose sheets of hard copy and slotting them neatly into her briefcase. The table cleared, she walked out of the courtroom without looking around.

  FOURTEEN

  Wilson was now a hundred twenty-nine days into the mission, and counting. In the same way everyone else on board the Second Chance was counting. Days, hours, minutes: every little unit was being ticked off with a combination of irritation and relief. Their problem, strangely enough, was just how well the starship had worked since they departed Oaktier. He supposed it was inevitable, enough money had been poured into the design, making sure every component had multiple redundancy along with at least a two hundred percent tolerance rating. In his NASA days they’d called it goldplating. Everything on Ulysses had to work, and if some bizarre mishap did knock out a unit then three backup systems jumped up to replace it. And that was when you could still see Earth through the viewing port, while communications with Houston took a few minutes at the most. It provided a tenuous feeling of connection to the rest of the human race that had always given him a degree of security. If something had gone badly wrong, he’d always believed that NASA would ultimately do something to salvage the situation.

  Today, though, the sense of isolation was stronger by orders of magnitude. Even he, with his previous experience, found their flight daunting. Should anything go wrong here in hyperspace, nobody was ever going to find them. It made him grateful for the way the starship had been constructed. This mission, he realized, had an altogether more mature feel to it than the Ulysses flight ever had.

  It was a civilized voyage. First of all there was the gravity. It might only be an eighth of a gee around the rim of the life-support wheel, but it made sure everything flowed in the right direction. His body was so much more comfortable with that. Then there was the food. Instead of neat, efficient, rehydratable packets of precooked meals, the Second Chance canteen served dishes like pan-fried diver scallops with herb risotto, or loin of lamb with tarte Tatin of vegetables drizzled with a thyme and tomato sauce; and the dessert selection was dangerously broad. For recreation there were a number of gyms, which everyone dutifully attended. But most of the crew spent their spare time accessing TSI dramas. They had a huge library on board, with sexsoaps inevitably the most popular, though first-life first romances were equally fashionable, and there were numerous adaptations of classic fiction and biographies of historical characters. Wilson spent several days immersed in a sumptuous production of Mansfield Park. He’d read the novel in his first life, and was interested in the societal structure of the era that it conjured up (intriguing parallel with present-day Earth, he felt), though he was fairly sure there hadn’t been quite so many lesbian love scenes in the original book.

  Between fitness sessions, meals, TSIs, and ship’s duty, he spent most of his hours with Anna. Even after all this time, he still preferred a one-woman-at-a-time lifestyle. The kind of arrangements many of the Commonwealth’s wealthy, and not-so-wealthy, favored had never really appealed to him, not like Nigel Sheldon with his thousand children and dozen-strong harem, or the Kandavu multi-families, or any other of the hundreds of variants on relationships. At heart, he knew he was as old-fashioned as the era he’d come from.

  Anna, though, was good company; never demanding, happy to keep things comfortably casual. It was almost the same as before the launch, the difference this time being that everyone onboard knew about them. It didn’t cause any resentment or whispering; they were all grown-ups. Although it had never been a firm policy, one you could find written down or in a program, Wilson had rejected all applications from first-lifers.

  He was convinced they didn’t have the temperament he wanted from his crew. The voyage so far had confirmed that in his own mind. There had been so little trouble, so few “personality clashes,” that he’d begun to regard the ship’s psychologist as superfluous. Even now, as he waited on the bridge for the hyperspace flight to end, there was no sign of any tension among those around him.

  “No significant mass within a hundred AUs,” Oscar reported.

  “Thank you,” Wilson said. He glanced around at the portals himself, seeing the gravitonic spectrum displays almost blank, like the eye of the storm. They’d obtained their last accurate navigational fix flying within three hundred AUs of a red dwarf, now ten light-years distant. That put them close to twenty-five light-years from Dyson Alpha, in clear interstellar space. “Okay, stand by to take us out of hyperspace. Anna, let’s have the main sensor suite on-line please.”

  “Aye, sir,” She didn’t even grin at him. On the bridge, she took her duties very seriously indeed. Two seats away, OCtattoos on her hands and forearm began to shimmer like pulsing silver veins as her palms rested on the console i-spots, readying the equipment up at the bow of the starship.

  “Astrophysics?” Wilson asked.

  “Ready, sir.” Tunde Sutton was waiting at the rear of the bridge, along with two of the science officers, Bruno Seymore and Russell Sall. Their consoles all had double the number of portals and screens than the others, capable of displaying a vast amount of data. In addition, all three men had upgraded retinal inserts, giving them a high-quality virtual vision field. If there was any anomaly out there in real space, they’d have it located and analyzed almost instantaneously. They were also sharing the data with the astrophysics office, on the deck above, where the majority of specialists were waiting, including Dudley Bose.

  “Oscar, bring the force fields on-line, please, and take tactical control.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Part of Wilson’s virtual vision display showed him the power being routed into their force fields and atom lasers. Sensor data was also fed directly into the targeting control, with Oscar assuming executive authority for their missile arsenal. Wilson moved his virtual fingers to activate a general channel throughout the ship. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s see what’s out there. Tu Lee, take us out of the wormhole. But keep the hyperdrive on-line. We may need a fast exit.”

  Tu Lee grinned broadly. “Yes, sir.”

  The blue mist filling the two big high-rez portals at the front of the bridge began to darken. A ripple of black broke out from the center, expanding rapidly. Clear pinpoints of light speckled the deep night outside the ship as the starfield appeared around them once more.

  “Tunde?” Wilson demanded.

  “Nothing obvious, sir. Electromagnetic spectrum clean. Gravitonic empty. Standard particle density. Immediate quantum state stable. Zero radar return. Neutrino flux normal. Cosmic radiation high but not excessive.”

  “Sensors, show me Dyson Alpha,” Wilson said.

  Anna centered the main telescope, feeding the image to the left-hand portal. Slim red bracke
ts indicated the position of the shielded star. She bled in the infrared emission, and it appeared as a pale pink dot. Dyson Beta materialized slightly to one side. “Doesn’t look like there’s any change to either of the barriers,” she said. “They were both still intact twenty-five years ago.”

  “Any activity in the surrounding area?”

  “Not that I can locate. Do you want an hysradar sweep?”

  “Not yet. Expand our baseline for the current sensors. I want a clearer picture of the area. Astrophysics, keep monitoring. Pilot, hold us stable here.”

  “Aye, sir.” Anna began to manipulate virtual icons. “Prepping for sensor module launches.”

  Wilson let out a quick breath of relief. His virtual finger was tapping icons almost unconsciously. On the console in front of him, one of the small screens flicked between camera images. Each one had a small portion of the starship superstructure: the forward sensor array, a slice of the life-support wheel, the plasma rockets. But no matter which camera he chose, there was never anything other than the ship and the very distant stars. Nothing. The emptiness was awesome. Frightening.

  When he was a boy, Wilson had enjoyed swimming. His parents had a small pool in their yard, and he’d used it every day. That didn’t stop him from continually nagging his parents to take him to the larger pool at the county sports center. He’d been nine on the day of that visit, he and a whole group of friends ferried out there by some harassed mother. With his skill and confidence he’d not been intimidated by the size or depth of the big pool, and was soon leading the others through the water. When he was in the deep end he dived to the bottom, sure he could touch the tiles. He made it easily enough, his strong strokes hauling him down away from the surface, popping his ears against the pressure twice on the way down before slapping his fingertips on the smooth blue tiles. Sound from the rest of the pool was curiously muted so far below, the thrashing feet above, dull, like the filtered blue light. Pressure squeezed him gently. So he started to swim up. And only then did he realize his mistake. He’d taken enough breath to get him down, but now his lungs were burning. Muscles twitched as the need to suck down fresh air swelled desperately. He began to claw frantically at the water, which did nothing to increase his terrible slow speed. The need for air became overwhelming. And his chest began to expand, lungs working to pull in that sweet oxygen. Wilson felt the water sliding up his nostrils like some unstoppable burrowing creature. Right that second he knew if it got any farther he would drown. It was enough to send his body into a frenzy, kicking and struggling. At the same time he found the discipline to stop his lungs from trying to inhale. Somehow he managed to break the surface without the water spilling any farther inside him. Only then did he suck down a huge breath of beautiful clean air, almost sobbing as the shock of what’d happened struck him. For a long time he’d clung to the side of the pool as big shivers ran up and down his body. Finally, he regained enough control to swim back out to his friends.