More supplies and apparatus came through the interstellar wormhole from its home system. It resumed its preparations for the next stage of its expansion into the human Commonwealth.
Barry and Sandy were so excited they barely ate a thing at breakfast, not even the scrambled eggs with crusted cheesefish that the chefbot had produced. Panda picked up on their mood and barked happily, wagging her tail as she went around the table, pleading for scraps.
“Can you take us up to the starships, Dad?” Barry asked as Liz put his plate in front of him. Sandy gasped, and paid very close attention.
“Oh, sorry, son, not today. The orbital platforms aren’t open to visitors.”
“I’m not a visitor,” he said indignantly. “You’re my dad, I’d be with you.”
There were times when Barry’s simple, absolute devotion brought a lump to Mark’s throat. “I’ll have another word with the boss,” he promised.
“Maybe we’ll smuggle you up one day.”
“And me!” Sandy insisted.
“Of course.”
Liz gave him an accusing glance across the table. He knew exactly what she was thinking: How are you going to keep that promise?
“Don’t do that,” Liz admonished Barry.
“What?” the boy protested, putting on his hurt innocence face. It was a very familiar expression.
“I saw you give Panda toast.”
“Aw, Mom, I dropped it, that’s all.”
“It had butter on it,” Sandy said primly. “And you fed it to her.”
“Snitch!”
“Both of you, shush,” Mark said. He tried to stop grinning as he read the news flowing across the paperscreen that was balanced on his coffee cup. It was difficult; this was a proper family breakfast, the kind he’d loved back in the Ulon Valley, and an increasingly rare event these days. It wasn’t that life here was hard—quite the opposite. The two-story house they lived in was built from shiny carbonsteel composite sections, assembled by construction-bots. But even though it looked low-cost from the outside, the interior was spacious, with luxurious fittings. Its kitchen alone probably cost more than the old Ables pickup he’d driven in Randtown, with every automated gadget known to the Commonwealth, work surfaces of Ebbadan marble, and cupboard doors made from brown-gold French oak. All the other rooms were equally well appointed; and if you lacked any furniture you could order whatever you wanted from a unisphere catalogue site and the project personnel office would arrange for it to be delivered. The same with clothes or food.
No, home life was easy. It was the work that devoured all his time, and kept him away from the children. Except today. This was his day off, the first one in a long time. They’d arranged for the children to skip school so they could all spend it together.
“Can we go now?” Barry implored. “Dad, please, we’re all finished.”
Mark stopped reading the article about the political battle to lead the African caucus in the Senate. He glanced over at Liz for permission. She was holding her big teacup in both hands. Most of her French toast was still on her plate. “Okay,” she said.
The kids whooped and raced out of the room.
“Make sure you use your toothgel,” she shouted after them. “And don’t forget your swimsuits.”
Panda barked happily.
Mark and Liz grinned at each other. “Do we get some time together tonight?” he asked, trying to be casual.
“Yes, I’d like to have sex, too, baby. If we’re not tired after today, that’s a definite.”
They shared a more intimate, playful smile.
Liz wolfed down the last portion of her French toast. “Humm, too much pepper. I’ll have to alter the bot’s recipe.”
He glanced at the broad picture window behind her, checking the weather. Liz always sat with her back to the window, no matter what room of the house they were using. “I hate this landscape,” she’d announced on their third day in the town. “It’s a corpse of a world, a vampire planet.”
“Looks like a good day,” Mark said cheerfully as the sunlight shone on the rock and sandy regolith outside. “The tarn should be warm enough to swim in.”
“Whatever.”
“Something wrong?”
“No. Yes. This place. It really is driving me crazy, baby.”
He held up the paperscreen. News articles were still flowing down it. “We won’t be here for much longer, one way or another. The navy fleet should be hitting Hell’s Gateway any day now.”
Liz glanced at the open door, and lowered her voice. “And if that’s not enough?”
“It will be.”
“Then why is Sheldon building this fleet?”
“Because he had a healthy paranoia back when all this kicked off. In any case, he’ll probably use the starships even if we beat the Primes back to their homeworld.”
“Say again?”
“The Commonwealth is all humans have; we’re all bunched up in one big group. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to set up another human civilization on the other side of the galaxy? It’d probably be completely different to this one. We know how to avoid our mistakes now, to build something new. You’d have enough volunteers to make it viable; look how many people settle weird places like Far Away and Silvergalde.”
“Uh huh.” She sat back and gave him a calculating stare. “And would that include us?”
Mark’s enthusiasm went into an unpleasant nosedive. “I don’t know. How do you feel about it?”
“I feel very strongly that the children are brought up in the safety and security of the Commonwealth, providing it survives. Once they’re grown up, and responsible enough to make their own choices, they can start thinking if they want to go gallivanting off into the wild.”
“Er, right, Sure. But it appeals to me.”
“I can see that, baby. And I’ll be happy to talk about it later, say, in about fifteen years.”
“Ah. All right, I don’t suppose this will be the only intergalactic colonization attempt. I think we’re shaping up to live in a real golden age. The Prime attack might well be the best thing that ever happened to us; it’s shaken us out of our complacency. Just think of it, fleets flying off into the unknown. I bet we even go trans-galactic one day. That would be the ultimate, wouldn’t it?”
Liz gave him a tolerant smile. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”
“You mean you wouldn’t go?” Mark asked, surprised, and not a little upset.
“I hadn’t thought about it, baby, is the honest answer. But do me a favor, don’t mention this to the kids; their world is turbulent enough as it is right now without introducing wild ideas like this.”
“Like what?” Barry asked. He was standing in the door, his coat trailing from one hand.
“Tell you about it later,” Mark said automatically. He winked. “When your mom’s not about.”
“Don’t you dare,” Liz growled.
Barry giggled happily. “Sure thing, Dad.” He pelted off back into the house. “Hey, Sis, I know something you don’t!”
“What?” Sandy squeaked.
“Not telling you.”
“Pig!”
Liz grinned and rolled her eyes. “Gonna be a long day.”
Mark had arranged to borrow a Ford Trailmaster7 from the garage. They all piled in, with Panda in the back, and he headed out of their big housing estate for the perimeter ring road. All the civil construction work had finished now. The town was as large as it was ever going to be, supporting twelve thousand technicians, scientists, and engineers who were busy assembling the starships in their orbital docks, and the crews who would fly them.
A bright sun shone down out of the light purple sky, glinting strongly off the town’s composite buildings. The ground between them was gritty sand scattered with flaking rocks; there wasn’t even a single weed growing anywhere. Nobody had gardens. H-congruous plant life wasn’t permitted here. Hundreds of modified gardenbots were on constant patrol in the town, spraying the sand with biological inhibi
ters that would prevent any kind of growth. Sewage from every building was simply tanked to Cressat, and from there back to Augusta, as was all the garbage. Nothing was allowed to contaminate the pristine environment.
Liz wrinkled her nose up at the town as they sped along the ring road. “This place is like Gaczyna,” she said as they passed a Bab’s Kebabs franchise at the end of a strip mall.
“Where?”
“A place in Russia that they used to train spies during the Cold War. It supposedly had a perfect replica of an American town, so the agents could familiarize themselves with life in the West. That’s what this is, a replica of the Commonwealth. Everything we associate with everyday life is here, but it’s not actually real.”
“The Dynasty’s doing its best to make things comfortable for us.”
“Yeah, baby, I know. It wasn’t a complaint, just an observation.”
Mark nodded, and concentrated on driving. He was getting quite worried about Liz; the whole lifeboat venture had brought out a despondency in her that he found difficult to deal with. She was normally the sunny one, the one he relied on for common sense and optimism. Given what he had to tell her at some point today, her criticisms and moodiness weren’t good omens. He could see what she meant about Gaczyna, though. He’d never been anywhere with so many bots. The only people the Dynasty allowed here were those involved in building the lifeboats. There was no service economy; bots performed every domestic function; even Bab’s Kebabs along with all the other stores in the strip mall were automated. When a bot malfunctioned, it wasn’t repaired here; that would require a secondary industry, people not connected to the lifeboat project. He’d seen whole trucks full of faulty bots being shipped back to Augusta for maintenance. It was an expensive way of doing things, but it was the only way of sustaining the level of security that Nigel Sheldon insisted on.
They turned off the ring road onto a dirt track that led away into the hills above the town beyond the fusion stations. He actually enjoyed sitting behind the wheel, driving manually. There were no real roads on the planet outside the town and its sprawling grid of industrial buildings. All the tracks out here had been made by residents taking off to explore. Mark turned left at the first fork, then right, following a route he’d been told about. The Ford’s tires churned up a lot of dust, deepening the wheel ruts.
After an hour they came to the tarn. The sand had given way to naked rock kilometers earlier. All around them were the steep rolling slopes of the interlocking mountaintops. There were no streambeds, or erosion gullies; the planet hadn’t had an atmosphere long enough to begin features like that, although rain was busy washing regolith sand down into the lowlands. From there it was creeping steadily into the shallow oceans. Up here, water trickled over the undulations in unbroken sheets until it found basins and nooks to collect in. The tarn was a long oval shape, with water up to its brim. When the rains came it overflowed into a sharp cleft of black granite at the eastern end.
“It’s so clear,” Barry exclaimed as they stood at the edge. Apart from small ripples reflecting the velvet sky there was no movement. They could see the rough rock bottom sloping away toward the center. “Just like the Trine’ba,” he said with a smile.
“Almost,” Liz agreed. “Come on, let’s go get changed.”
The four of them waded in, gasping at how cold the tarn was. Their voices echoed cleanly through the mountain air, bouncing off the high rumpled inclines around them.
“I miss the fish,” Sandy confessed as she swam cautiously farther out from the shore. Mark had insisted she wear inflatable wings on the back of her suit. For once she didn’t argue.
“No fish, no algae,” he said to Liz. It was strange; he normally associated water with life, while this was the complete opposite.
“It’ll come,” she said. “Every time someone comes swimming up here they leave bacteria behind. In a hundred years this tarn will be a proper little vat, the planet’s biggest natural petri dish, leaking its new bugs out across the landscape every time it rains.”
“We always leave our mark, don’t we?”
“Just about. I guess it’s evolution on a galactic scale. A planet that produces life smart enough to figure out star travel will spread its DNA across the stars. And evolution is one tough battleground.”
“That sounds like the Gaia hypothesis.”
“Taken to the extreme, I suppose it is. I wonder if the Primes recognize it at an instinctive level. They were certainly keen to alienform Elan. Remember those images Morton recorded of the biorefinery they built on the edge of Randtown?”
“So whoever built the barriers knew that, too?”
“Yeah. A stellar-sized rabbit-proof fence, like the one they built in Australia once the immigration started. And along we came with the bolt cutters. Damn, we’re dumb. Maybe this is evolution’s way of telling us we’re obsolete.”
Mark stood on the slippery rock, and started to wade out. “We’re not dumb, we’re principled. I’m proud of that, of what we are collectively.”
“Hope you’re right, baby.” Liz waded out beside him, and hurriedly wrapped a big towel around herself. “Five minutes, you two,” she called out to the children. They were several meters offshore now, splashing about with Panda. Barry waved back.
“Here.” Mark twisted the tabs on a couple of hot chocolate cans, and handed her one as it began to steam.
“Thanks.” She gave him a quick kiss.
“They’re moving me,” he said tersely.
“Moving you where?”
“To a different part of the project.” He looked up. One of the spaceflower moons was gliding up over the horizon. Even now, the massive gigalife gave him a thrill. To think that there was a society out there that could afford to produce such things just for the sheer fun of it. That was inspiring. The kind of endeavor that a new human civilization should strive for, rather than the constant commercial rat race the Commonwealth pursued and worshiped.
“What do you mean?” There was a hint of steel in her voice.
“It’s not just lifeboats the Dynasty is building up there. A fleet that big traveling through space we know nothing about … it needs protection, Liz.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Liz spat in contempt. “I might have known: they’re building warships.”
“Frigates, yeah. It’s a new design, smaller and faster than the Moscow-class. There’s something different about the drive, as well. I don’t know what. And nobody will talk about the weapons it carries.”
“No kidding. So what did you tell them?”
Mark took a long drink of the hot chocolate, marshaling his thoughts. He always hated it when they had an argument. For a start she was so much better at it than he was. “This isn’t the kind of job you get to choose assignments. We both knew that.”
“All right,” she said. “I guess not. I just don’t like the idea of you working on weapons.”
“I’m not. It’s the assembly system they want to get up and running. They’re using a different method than on the lifeboats, with their preassembled sections. The frigate assembly bays are combined with the station dockyard. Individual components are shipped in directly and integrated up in orbit.”
“Whoopee, another great technological step forward.”
“Liz,” he said accusingly. “We’re at war. From what I hear, we might not win. We really might not.”
She sat on a big boulder, and looked forlornly at the can in her hands. “I know. I’m sorry I’m being a bitch. I just … I feel so helpless.”
“Hey.” He went over and put his arm around her shoulder. “I’m the one who needs you to support me, remember, that was the deal.”
She grinned weakly up at him, squeezing his hand. “That was never the deal, baby.”
“So, are you cool with this?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Thanks, that means everything, you know that.”
Liz pulled him closer. “I’m so glad I’ve got you. I wouldn’t want to be
with anyone else right now.”
“Well, I couldn’t face this without you.” He gestured at the kids. “And them. But the frigates are as far as we can go. We’ve been running ever since we got back from Elan. No farther. There won’t be any more surprises for us.”
“I hope you’re right, baby. I really do.”
The shower nozzles pumped water out at a velocity that pummeled Mellanie’s skin almost to the point of being painful. She didn’t even have to turn around; the water came at her from all sides, the nozzles sweeping up and down. Foam ran down her body as scented soap was mixed in by the management array. Cooler water flushed it away, its temperature invigorating her after the luxuriant heat. The water turned off, and warm dry air gushed out of vents all around the big marbled cubical, snatching the moisture away from her skin and blowing her hair about.
She wrapped a huge purple and cream towel around herself and went back out into the office suite’s bedroom. Michelangelo was still lying on the big bed. He watched her lazily as she began getting dressed.
“Damn, I’m glad you defected from Baron,” he said. “You’d be wasted on her, she’s a cold bitch.”
Mellanie flashed him a naughty grin. “Whereas we have a deep and meaningful relationship.”
“You’re good in bed. We both know that. A real turn-on.”
“You’re a good teacher.”
“Yeah?”
It was almost as if he were the bashful one, seeking reassurance. “I keep coming back, don’t I?” she said. “And we both know I’m doing well enough for the show that I don’t actually have to anymore. But I like it, I like it a lot.”
There was a growling sound from the bed. He rolled off the mattress and pushed his long highlighted hair back. Mellanie couldn’t help the way her eyes lingered on his body. It was like a youthful Apollo had returned to walk among the mortals once more.
“Hell … I don’t understand you,” he complained. “What is it you really want?”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 163