gaian consortium 03 - the gaia gambit

by Pope, Christine

  Nothing had changed, of course; the odd distorted colors of subspace streaked past the viewscreen at velocities the human mind simply couldn’t comprehend in any rational fashion. Lights glowed on the instrument panel, all in reassuring shades of green and blue. Rast was right; it was a good ship, far better than Gared Tomas deserved. She thought she could get used to this, racketing around the galaxy in this elegant little vessel…if only her reasons for being on it weren’t so dire.

  Down the hall the coffee maker beeped, so she went back and poured herself a cup before returning once more to the cockpit. Numbers in a blue to rival Gaia’s lost skies counted down their time to the end of the subspace jump. Seven hours, twenty-two minutes. Plenty of time to meditate on her sins.

  If only that didn’t require thinking of Rast…

  Maybe that stray pulse bolt had given her more of shock than she’d thought. Because she shouldn’t be spending her time right now thinking about the deep, smooth timbre of his voice, of the elegant architecture of his cheekbones and chin, the strength in those golden-skinned hands and how they had felt as they moved down her body…

  No, she shouldn’t be thinking about any of that. She should be thinking of their angle of approach to the Gaian system, and whether this unknown woman would be able to help them…if she even existed at all. For a split-second Lira wondered if Jackson had made her up, simply as a way of getting back at her for some imagined slight, but she dismissed that notion as foolish and more than a little paranoid. Jackson Wyler was many things, but vindictive wasn’t one of them.

  So, they would come out of subspace in the dark at the outer edges of the solar system, then drop below the plane of the ecliptic, coming up at Gaia from underneath. Lira wasn’t foolish enough to think they would escape detection that way, but it was a route many passenger and private ships took, avoiding the commercial traffic among the middle worlds and the base on Luna. It was the world’s southern hemisphere that flourished now, with the enormous spaceports at Buenos Aires and Capetown handling a good deal of the off-world traffic. No one would think it odd that a ship like the Chinook would be coming in along such a trajectory.

  And so she planned, and stared out the viewscreen, and…once or twice, though she would never admit it to Rast…dozed off, then came to with a start. After the second time she grimly rose from the captain’s seat and went to make another pot of coffee.

  It was in there that Rast approached her. He looked in better shape than she, rested, changed into more of the civilian attire of a high-necked tunic and straight pants, this suit in a dark brown that suited his warm-toned coloring. He must have been carrying a change of clothing and other necessities in the satchel he’d brought on board.

  She wasn’t entirely lacking, since she kept a small bag with some toiletries and clean underthings in the closet of the second, smaller cabin, but she hadn’t had much of a chance to use them yet.

  “I would have come to wake you,” she said, handing him a cup of coffee.

  He took it from her, held the cup under his nose so he could inhale the fragrant steam. “No need. I just told myself that I needed to wake up in six standard hours.”

  Lira blinked. “You can do that?”

  “Of course. Can’t you?”

  “No. I have to sleep with the alarm right next to my head, or I’ll never wake up.”

  “Ah. Yes, as I recall, you do sleep rather soundly.”

  That remark brought a flush to her cheeks, but she managed to say steadily enough, “We’re about to drop out of subspace.”

  He nodded, and said nothing else as she went back to the cockpit and settled into her seat. Apparently he could tell that he had discomfited her, because he remained silent, sipping his coffee, as she took a last reading of their location, then began the sequence that would allow them to safely reenter realspace.

  At once the universe dropped in around them, velvet black with a faint sprinkling of stars. As always, the skies of her home system felt sparse, empty, compared to the glory that blazed in the heavens of planets nearer to the galaxy’s core. She pulled out her handheld, brought up the sequence of numbers Jackson had given her, and fed them into the comm system, all the while wondering whether they were just some cruel pie in the sky, nothing more than a meaningless combination of numerals.

  Rast finally spoke. “That was the signal?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now what?”

  “We wait.”

  “For how long?”

  She could only shrug. Jackson hadn’t said how long it would take for this woman, this unknown hacker, to respond. It could be dead of night in her part of the world, and she could be safely asleep in her own bed, which meant they still might have many hours to wait.

  “I’m going to start bringing us in,” Lira said, as she engaged the sublight engines and sent the ship on the route she’d already plotted, flying below the space that contained the heavy ore freighters and the passenger liners and all the other traffic a highly populated system would accumulate. “It’ll get us that much closer, and even at max sublight, it’ll still take about an hour, hour and a half. And then I have to hope that we’ll get an answer by then.”

  He nodded, although his mouth looked a little grim. Not surprising; she knew she wouldn’t be overly thrilled if their situations had been reversed, and they were instead flying into the heart of Stacian space.

  To her surprise, the comm came to life only about fifteen minutes later. A woman’s voice, low-toned, with rounded Gaian accents that somehow sounded a bit off, as if she hadn’t spent her whole life on that world. “I suppose Jackson sent you.”

  “Yes,” Lira replied, leaning closer to the comm for some reason, even though she knew perfectly well it would pick up what she said no matter where she was in the cockpit. “He said I should tell you that our cause is just.”

  “‘Our’?” the woman repeated. “Is he there with you? I didn’t think anything could shake him loose from that penthouse of his.”

  “No — it’s not Jackson. I was talking about my travel companion.”

  “Who is…?” The woman’s words trailed off before she continued, “I can tell from your voice that you’re Gaian — off-world colony, though, probably Ganymede or Luna. Is your companion the same?”

  “Um…no.” Lira hesitated, then realized she would have to tell the truth sooner or later. “He’s, well, actually, he’s a Stacian.”

  A long silence then, one so long Lira feared the woman might have cut off the transmission. Not an entirely unexpected reaction, given the perpetual state of not-war that existed between the two governments.

  At last the woman spoke again. “Well, that puts an interesting wrinkle in it. A Gaian and a Stacian traveling together. Guess I’ll have to hear more about it…and this ‘just cause’ of yours. Transmitting course coordinates now. Do not deviate from these in the slightest. Understood?”

  “Yes,” Lira said quickly, not wanting to risk their chances.

  “All right. Here goes. We’ll see you in a few hours.”

  And the comm went silent, even as the nav-computer began to show long streams of numbers that traced their path through the Gaian system and their final destination, whatever that was. Of course, she didn’t have to sit here idly and let the ship fly on autopilot. A few extra keystrokes, and she could see exactly where they were being guided.

  Their destination popped up on the screen, and she frowned down at it. Really? She’d heard it was a wild area, remote, underpopulated. And that was where the galaxy’s best hacker was holed up.

  Rast sent her a questioning look, then asked, “So where are we going?”

  She sat back in her seat, mystified. “New Zealand.”

  * * *

  He’d never heard of the place, of course. Gaian geography was not something he’d studied, thinking he would never need an intimate knowledge of his enemies’ home world. “What is New Zealand?”

  “An island in the southern hemisphere. One o
f the places that escaped the Cloud.”

  “The Cloud?” The capital letters were clear in her voice, but he’d never heard of such a thing before.

  “What, they didn’t teach you Gaian history?”

  “Some. Not in any great detail. It was not considered essential.”

  No reply at first. She appeared less annoyed than preoccupied, perhaps a little sad. He couldn’t think why.

  Then she said, “Well, we’ve got some time to kill. The Cloud hit in 2112. North America had been pushing for years for more sustainable energy — solar, wind, even nuclear, once they had interplanetary flight pretty much settled and figured out they could dump all those spent rods on Mercury’s dark side. Anyway, that was fine and good, but it didn’t keep people from wanting to consume — computers, vehicles, electronic equipment…everything, really.”

  “So you didn’t have fusion yet.”

  “No. That came around in 2150 — better late than never, but it didn’t help the billions who died in the Cloud.” Her expression darkened as she continued, “The factories in China just kept increasing output to keep up with demand, and they hadn’t put in the same environmental controls that the governments in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and the EU had. The air was so bad you couldn’t go outside without a breathing unit. And then it just…coalesced. Like a perfect storm of atmospheric conditions and factory pollution. The air turned toxic, burned right through the filters on their breathing units, was swept for thousands of miles across mainland China, on into Korea and Japan and parts of Vietnam and Thailand. Some went up into Russia, too. Billions died. Billions.”

  Rast didn’t speak. He knew that Gaia had undergone some horrific ecological disasters, but he’d never really considered their ramifications, except for a brief dismissive thought that the Gaians had brought such things upon themselves. Now, though, as he gazed at the haunted expression on Lira’s face, he understood what a toll it had taken. Billions. He could barely grasp the enormity of that number. Even now, in a time of unparalleled prosperity for his people, the population on his home world barely numbered one billion.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “although the damage was concentrated in Asia, it still hit other parts of the world — the west coast of North America, for one thing, and the northern coast of Australia. But New Zealand, it was protected, more or less, though never densely populated. A lot of people fled, wrongly thinking the Cloud would hit them there, too. And they just never came back.”

  “And so it is this place to which we are headed?” he asked, trying to guide the conversation back to the present, back to something that might erase the bleak expression from her lovely face.

  “Yes.” She stared out the viewscreen for a few seconds, then added, “I suppose it makes sense. If you want to be on Gaia, but be someplace where you don’t have to worry about having a bunch of people in your lap, New Zealand is a pretty smart choice.”

  “What is it like?”

  “New Zealand? I have no idea. I’ve never been there. Actually, I’ve only set foot on Gaia twice in my entire life. The first time was for my graduation ceremony — they always have it here. Silly tradition, if you ask me. And the second time was to visit my brother Liam. He’s a climatologist, helping with the rehabilitation of the Asian continent.”

  “So it’s still uninhabitable?”

  “Large parts of it. They’re working on cleaning up the air, utilizing equipment similar to what we use in our terraforming processes, but it’s slow going. And it takes a long time to dispose of billions of dead bodies. Hundreds of years, even.”

  Her tone was too brittle, too careless. Rast didn’t dare to inquire whether she’d visited this brother of hers in the region where he was working, whether she had seen the devastation for herself. And did it really matter? She obviously still felt the pain of those deaths, even if they had occurred almost four hundred years ago.

  “Do you think it odd that this woman is trusting us?”

  Lira smiled then, but she didn’t appear all that amused. “I doubt she is. You’ll note that she said ‘we’ll see you.’ That could have just been for show, but I sort of doubt it. I’m sure the welcoming party will be quite interesting.”

  He should have guessed as much. If their roles had been reversed, he knew he’d be awaiting any visitors with a gun in either hand and some reinforcements, especially if he were the type of person who was trying to make sure his whereabouts weren’t discovered by anyone in authority.

  “But,” Lira continued, studying the readouts on the instrument panel, “I’m guessing if she didn’t mean to help us, she wouldn’t have given us the coordinates at all. So our best course of action is just to stay cool and see what happens. After all, we’re not interested in her story — we just want to get in there, give her the pertinent details, see if she can hack her way into Admiral sen Trannick’s files, gather the results, and get the hell out of there. We have no reason to betray her to the Gaian authorities. I think she’ll see that.”

  That made sense, but even so, he could feel himself tensing as they moved inexorably closer to Gaia, to a world where such as he certainly weren’t welcome. Lira seemed to note his unease, but she said nothing to dispel it, only continued to guide the Chinook ever closer, until at last the blue-green sphere of the planet filled the viewscreen. He started a little when the comm came to life once again, but it was only a bored-sounding official inquiring as to their registration and destination.

  Lira answered that they were headed toward Adelaide, which he guessed was a lie, but not one that would arouse a good deal of suspicion. And that turned out to be the case, because the official only said, “We have you recorded, Chinook. Enjoy your stay on Gaia, and remember to declare any goods purchased here when you leave the planet.”

  “Will do.” Lira turned slightly and even smiled, possibly noting his mystified expression. “Oh, come on, Rast — I know you Stacians just love to mock us mercenary Gaians. So why should you be surprised at the planetary government making sure it squeezes every unit it can out of us unsuspecting tourists?”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t,” he admitted, watching as they dropped out of the black of space and into wreaths of moisture-laden air, flowing over and around the viewscreen. Although he’d been on Gaian-class worlds before, breathed the heavy richness of their atmospheres, something about this one felt different. Perhaps it was only because he was now in the heart of enemy territory, spawning ground of the hated humans.

  Not that he hated all of them. He would not allow himself to stare, but he was intensely aware of Lira’s presence, of the way her loose hair slipped over the dark fabric of her jacket as she worked the controls, the delicate perfection of her profile as cool white light bathed the ship once they pierced the cloud cover.

  But then he found his gaze drawn away from her, on to a shimmering expanse of blue water as they flew low over the ocean, approaching a green island that seemed to rise up from nowhere, somehow insubstantial as a dream, with the clouds that crowned its mountaintops and the mist that hugged its dark forests. The ship banked, dropping even lower, barely skimming the treetops, negotiating a narrow canyon that opened up into a sheltered valley, with lowering mountains on either side.

  In the center of this valley stood a sprawling white structure Rast belatedly realized must be a residence of some sort, although it bore no resemblance to the high-rise buildings he’d seen on New Chicago and many other worlds of the Consortium, or the graceful villas of stucco and stone his own people favored when imitating the Eridani style. Incongruously, he noted the outline of an arrowhead-shaped Eridani Vector-class ship parked behind the house.

  And then they were dropping straight down, Lira guiding the Chinook so that it landed approximately ten meters away from the other spaceship. A minute or so more, as she finalized the landing sequence and put the ship in standby mode, and then she unbuckled her safety harness and stood, gazing down at him with an unreadable expression on her face.

  �
��Let’s go meet our hosts, shall we?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rast did not seem particularly over-eager to follow her, but after a brief hesitation he undid his own seatbelts and stood, trailing a few feet behind her as she cycled the door lock and extended the gangplank. And then the door opened, and a fresh cool breeze, smelling of water and something else, something green and growing, flooded in over them.

  At least she didn’t have to leave Rast behind this time; the mystery woman already knew that one of the people seeking her help was a Stacian. And really, you couldn’t get much more remote than this, unless you set down in the middle of the Gobi Desert somewhere. The mountains created an effective barrier, and all around the valley tall trees reached up to the sky. The house did not appear occupied, although that didn’t mean much. Its residents could just be waiting for their off-world visitors to make the first move.

  “Stop there,” said a harsh male voice.

  She couldn’t even tell where he had come from, because her quick scan of the surroundings had shown no other signs of life. Maybe from the other ship, then passing under the still-steaming belly of the Chinook.

  Hands held in the air, she said, “We’re unarmed.”

  He moved in front of her then, a swarthy Gaian man of average height. Something about the way he moved, though, the way he scanned her quickly without having to pat her down for weapons, told her he knew exactly what he was doing…and that he was very, very dangerous.

  Next he moved to Rast, and although the Stacian towered over him by almost a foot, Lira wasn’t sure whether or not her travel companion would be able to best the stranger in a confrontation. She decided she really didn’t want to find out.

  “They’re clean,” the man said, and a door on the back of the house opened, and a woman stepped out.