Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “Oh, for the love of …” Vaurien turned his back on the threedee and scrubbed his face with both hands. He pulled the combug out of his ear while Midani and Emil began to squabble in earnest. “Etienne, dump the data into however many cubes –”

  “The transfer will take over 300 cubes, Captain,” the AI warned.

  “And are you short of cubes?” Vaurien growled with exaggerated patience.

  “No, Captain.”

  “Then proceed,” Richard told it crisply. “Tully!”

  “Yo!” Ingersol was on the engine deck with Fujioka, but he had been listening in, and was still chuckling. “Lemme guess. You want the tractor loaded, muy pronto.”

  “I do,” Richard agreed. “There’s a moon just rising over the horizon right now. The third moon – smallest, lightest, no atmosphere, no nothing, according to the scans. Jim, is the installation ready to ship?”

  The five Zunshu stasis chambers would be stored in a science camp not unlike the one on Kjorin, though this camp would need no long-term habitation facilities. Three basic labs, life support, a crew lounge, two simple apartments, a generator and backup, a rudimentary AI. Anything else would be specified by the Resalq scientists from the city of Raishenne, and shipped from the planet or from the Freyana.

  “It was ready to ship yesterday, boss,” Fujioka assured him. “All we needed to know was when and where.”

  “Small moon, any flat, rocky space, right now,” Vaurien said sharply. “Etienne, how long to transfer the data?”

  “Five minutes remaining,” the AI said calmly, unaffected by Richard’s abrasive mood. “Please collect datacubes from Tech 3.”

  “Got ’em,” Jazinsky volunteered. “Neil, do me a favor. Stick your head into my lab, bring me one of the big equipment cases. The big ones with the black and red tape and the blue smart-foam inside.”

  “Will do.” Travers gave Marin a lopsided grin and stepped out.

  Curtis was a pace behind him, and as they left Ops he clicked out of the loop. “Damn, Emil hasn’t improved by one iota. I thought he’d sweeten up once he got out here – nothing to prove, nobody to impress.”

  “No sibling to fight with,” Travers added. “You don’t know how lucky you were, being an only child.”

  “You?” Marin hazarded.

  “I’d say I still had the scars,” Travers admitted, “but they were all psychological. The kids were kids when I didn’t have much growing left to do. We didn’t fight physically, but you can believe me, it was bloody.”

  The lab was half lit, with machines running, cooling fans droning. A stack of equipment cases stood under the air vents, and the only challenge was finding an empty one. Travers unpacked old tools and dead power cells onto the end of one of the benches, and closed up the likeliest case. He almost expected the connection with Raishenne to have closed as they stepped back into Ops, but Emil Kulich continued to glare out of the threedee, flanked now by two other Resalq, one older, one younger than himself, and both of them much closer to the ancestral form than any of the Sherratts or Sereccio.

  “I do understand that, Mad’ue,” Mark was saying to the elder, “and I’ll say again, there’s no time constraint. If you want to undertake the project, it’s yours. At this point I have no time for it … and the Zunshu hardware is much too delicate, too unpredictable, for it to be stored on this ship, or any ship. It must be placed somewhere safe, stable, where an accident will cause no great hardship, such as happened at El Khouri on Ulrand. Your third moon is ideal, and an engineer’s tractor is transferring the stasis chambers at this time.”

  Mad’ue was the Resalq with the long, somber face and too-wide eyes. He regarded Sherratt thoughtfully and at length shook his head, which Travers remembered was an affirmative gesture among the ancestrals. “A good choice, M’hak. You’re quite right, of course. Oh, how I envy you the expedition! I imagine your mission logs will read like a novel!” He licked his lips in anticipation. “You have the Zunshu data and the Veldn…?”

  “It’s all copying at this moment.” Mark glanced over at Jazinsky, who had taken the case from Travers and was loading it. “We’ll bring it down immediately … if we have permission to land.” He gave Emil Kulich a glance like a dagger.

  “Oh, copious aromatic defecations upon ancestral superciliousness,” Etienne translated, struggling with the colloquialism, the casual crudity, as Mad’ue overrode Kulich. “You’re most welcome in my house, M’hak. How long since you and your offspring ate real Resalq food?”

  “A long time,” Mark admitted, studiously ignoring Kulich now.

  “Then you’re invited,” Mad’ue said firmly, and when Kulich opened his mouth to protest, the senior scientist silenced him with a hand gesture Travers had never seen before. “Come at once, bring your offspring. Bring the human partner of Leon. Dine with us, spend an evening listening to the old language, the old music … being Resalq for the joy of being Resalq before the work takes you away again, as it will. I know you too well, M’hak. I recall who you were when you were so young, stars still shone in your eyes.”

  Mark made a soft sound of amused exasperation. “Was I ever so young? An hour, Mad’ue.”

  “An hour, my old friend.” Mad’ue made another unfamiliar hand gesture and stepped out of the vid pickup angle.

  “We’ll see you shortly,” Mark said stiffly to Kulich. “If you’d rather not be present at the evening’s festivities, I’ll overlook your absence in the interests of mental health.” He paused. “Midani will be with us, so it’s probably wise if you find some pressing duty to occupy you elsewhere. And have an inventory of what the Freyana needs for the highband to be back online at once. We can fabricate it, and test the transmitters before we leave. You understand, it is entirely unacceptable for the colony ship to be offline at any time.”

  The speech was deliberately provoking but Kulich was visibly restrained by the presence of the younger Resalq, who had a hauteur, a bearing, which belied his apparent youth. Kulich’s mouth compressed, his eyes glittered with fury, but the other took a step forward and held up a hand to stop the fight before it could escalate.

  His face was smooth with youth, his eyes unlined, but he was old enough, close enough to the ancestrals to have no hair, and to have kept the double thumbs which made the Resalq hands so different. He set the left on Kulich’s shoulder and said in a light, pleasant voice,

  “Enough of this rancor – surely we’ve heard more than was necessary. You’re right of course, M’hak, about the Freyana; many council members, myself included, have been eager to attend to the work in a much more timely fashion … forgive us the unfortunate oversight.” He was in the business of making peace, and he seemed to have a knack for it. Kulich heard him out as he went on, “As to the issue of cultural and perhaps even genetic integrity, in fact both sides of this old, old argument are correct.

  “Many of our young people did trade their racial heritage for survival; but they did indeed survive, and their achievements in the human worlds made it possible for a few of us to preserve our ancestral racial type. Without those who sacrificed, none of us would have survived, and most of us –” he glanced sidelong at Kulich “– are fully aware of this. The hybrids have always been our benefactors … however, it’s equally true that the ancestrals hold the keys to the future of a race that can, and should, return to its own identity.”

  Travers dropped his voice. “So shake hands and play nice, guys.”

  Even Emil Kulich could not argue, though he had probably been compelled to cede authority to the younger Resalq. Marin whispered to Midani, “Who is this?”

  “Is being Kel-juns’yn, is being very good representing person, voted for by all citizen, city peoples.”

  “The mayor of Raishenne?” Travers brows rose. “An ancestral type with a grasp on fair play and tolerance of the hybrids. There’s hope for us yet.”

  “Mongrels,” Midani growled. “Not being liking disgust-words, me.”

  “Me neither,” Travers agree
d, “but what can you do about it? This is Carahne. They can be as superior as they like at home.”

  “Not all Resalq being bastardish,” Midani said darkly. “Not all.”

  Perhaps not even most, Travers thought as he took charge of the loaded case and followed Marin back to the service elevators. Minutes later they were in Hangar 4, killing time with music and the techs’ loop, listening as the tractor launched. Ingersol and Fujioka took it out on a wide arc, rising away from the ship and heading fast for the small rocky moon, not much larger than an asteroid, which orbited Carahne in captured rotation.

  They would drop the installation, wait while twenty drones raised the storage bay, and then gently, gently pilot the three Arago sleds in, on remote. Ingersol estimated four hours, and the tractor would be back in its own hangar, just forward of the engine deck.

  The dinner group was late enough for Marin to be restless before they began to arrive. The Sherratts, Tor and even Roy had dressed in the colourful, exotic style of the Resalq. Jazinsky, Rusch and Shapiro, Rabelais and Queneau were elegant in subdued fashion which would have taken them into any hotel in uptown Sark; Vaurien and Vidal were in black silk and platinum jewelry, deliberately understated. Travers was surprised to see the humans, but Jazinsky said brashly,

  “We’re invited. The news raced through Raishenne that we’re back from transspace. From Zunshu space. Nobody thought we’d make it – apparently they were laying bets. But here we are. We were there, and people want to know what happened, and how. Where the future lies,” she added thoughtfully. “Emil Kulich is only one voice.”

  “He doesn’t speak for the community,” Mark said pointedly.

  “But I’ll just bet he wishes he did,” Tor muttered. “Two words, Dar, and I swear he’ll be picking his teeth out of the carpet.” He paused and gave Dario a grin. “Me being the mongrel bastard with bad manners, nobody’ll even blink.”

  “Except maybe to arrest you,” Dario said too loudly. “You think Raishenne doesn’t have a security force? You reckon you can whang the captain of the Freyana and just walk away?”

  “Worth a try,” Tor snorted.

  “Worth thirty days cooling your heels in their lockup!” Dario gave him a beseeching look. “Don’t embarrass me.”

  “What you got to bribe me with?” Tor challenged as the Capricorn’s engines fired.

  Chuckling, Travers touched his combug. “Wastrel Flight, this is Wastrel 101. Raishenne is sending us a landing beam … locked in and we’re on our way.”

  “Have a good flight, 101,” Judith Fargo said from Ops. “Take pictures, Neil … it looks like one hell of a nice place.”

  “We should be so lucky, and find another just like it,” Vidal breathed.

  The Capricorn was out seconds later and Travers turned the nose down, following the acquisition signal, though he could have homed on the comm noise from Raishenne. The planet was a blue-green crescent, fleeced with cloud, noticeably larger than Velcastra or Borushek, and much larger than Jagreth. Raishenne sat just short of the terminator, in late afternoon, while the yellow sun cast long, inky shadows from mountain ranges to the west. The city was built on the east coast of a major continent, 32o south, and from what Neil could see, they had chosen the perfect location.

  A landing field ambled away from the town and the early signs of a spaceport had begun to grow there. An apron of four square kilometers of plascrete glared in the afternoon sun, flanked on two sides by enough warehousing to support a city ten times the size of the current Raishenne, which meant the city equeros intended it to grow. Permanent gantry cranes stood guard between a rank of comm arrays almost a kilometer long – the colony transmitters – and the deep bunkers of docking bays designed around small ships. Engine signatures showed half the bays occupied.

  Late afternoon light shone gold across an arboreal forest, virgin territory where ancient trees reared massively against the sky as the Capricorn dropped in over a range of low hills. The ocean stretched far beyond the horizon, not a vessel or an installation to be seen yet. The colony was too new.

  Travers checked coordinates, wondering if ATC had vectored the Capricorn to Raishenne Field, but the acquisition beam took them five thousand meters north, where a deep bay curved inland, with a steeply-raked beach and a complex system of dunes. Raishenne stood just above the tidal zone.

  He had been fascinated to see their work, and he was impressed. Marin leaned over for a better view as the Capricorn approached, and murmured in approval. Raishenne was the work of standard constructor drones shipped off an assembly line in the Deep Sky, but the drones would build whatever they were programmed to build; and here, they had conjured architecture that had not been seen outside a museum in almost ten centuries.

  He recognized the palisades, courtyards and roofs from Saraine’s ruined, buried Eternal City, and from the museum in Westminster, on Jagreth. But these structures were living, busy with people, bright with gardens, and the banners of a new colony streamed on the sea wind as he took the Capricorn in. The plane rotated around and dropped neatly into the side of a property where a house sprawled in an eccentric pattern, as Resalq buildings often did.

  It fronted onto a street twice as wide as any street in Riga or Sark; the colony had space to spare. On approach, Travers estimated no more than a thousand houses, each in its own vast garden which would have made any property developer in the Deep Sky salivate. Many indigenous trees shaded the avenues, with the city designed around them, so Raishenne already had an established look and feel, as if it had been here much longer than a scant half year.

  Low on the horizon, the sun gilded the red and white rooftops as the Capricorn settled. The engines were still cycling down as Travers opened up. Several Resalq had gathered on the back porch of the house as the plane came in, and from the cockpit he and Marin watched as Mark greeted people he knew well. These Resalq represented every part of the community; two were ancestrals but three more were probably younger than Dario and Tor, and so nearly human in appearance, only their height and the slightly broader hips betrayed them, if one chose to notice. Vivid caftans in the traditional hues made the different body morphology almost impossible to see.

  “You want to go with?” Travers wondered as instrumentation shut down and the Capricorn’s rudimentary AI took over surveillance.

  Marin hesitated, watching the others at the back of the house, and then shook his head. “I don’t need to hear the story told … we were there. I don’t need to pretend to enjoy wine that would pickle onions!” He stood, flexing his back, working his shoulders. “I’d rather walk, see the town, watch the sun set. If you’re hungry –” He gestured over his shoulder with one thumb. “I remembered to set up the ’chef in the back. We won’t starve.”

  “Deal,” Travers decided. “Besides, give them an hour and they’ll be talking politics.”

  The air was sweet, heavy with the scents of flowering shrubs native to Saraine and yet thriving here. He wondered if they had been engineered for the soil, the climate, or if the Resalq had simply been blessed with a world where the biochemistry was close enough for a few minor tweaks to make it perfect. The gardens had already grown in, and he saw vegetables, herbs, fruit, as well as shrubs and trees a human might have called hibiscus, oleander, rhododendron, magnolia.

  “Ten years,” Marin guessed as they walked down toward the sea, “and this is going to be beautiful. Give it long enough for the rough edges to be worn smooth. The older Resalq will be coming in from sanctuaries like Riga, right across the Deep Sky. This is a lot like their old worlds used to be. Just add people.”

  “And what about the younger Resalq?” Travers mused. “Tor was bred in Riga and born in Sark. Borushek’s his homeworld, Sark’s his hometown, he even talks like a kid from a military town.”

  “I don’t know,” Marin said honestly. “The decision’ll come down to the individual, it always does. People who want peace and quiet and the old ways will come here. The younger ones will have to decide, do the
y want to be traditional Resalq, play a part in the rebirth of the culture … or not.”

  “Luckily, they’re going to get the choice.” Travers strolled to a halt at the top of the beach.

  Fishing nets flapped in the breeze, hung over a frame to dry, and several boats were pulled up onto the dry sand. The ocean smelt of salt, life, death, mystery, like oceans on any world Travers knew. At this hour the tide was low, small waves frothing onto dark gold sand with a soft shushing, almost like a sigh. Indigenous gulls – a meter across the wings, emerald green, with crested heads, fanned tails and oily feathers – squabbled there, where ‘trash fish’ had been dumped after the nets were brought in.

  “Looks like you can eat the local fish,” Travers observed with a gesture at the nets.

  “You can. I took a look at the Aenestra data.” Marin thrust hands into pockets and gazed into the bloated orb of the sun, which had sunk into a mass of cloud on the horizon. “The forests are distant cousins of acacia or eucalypt, even though they look a lot more like cedar or spruce; the native grasses won’t bother the Resalq – humans might have a few major allergy problems. But the local fruit is perfectly edible, just short of a couple of nutrients Resalq need, so they’ll either engineer the indigenous forms or plant their own; and the seafood is supposed to be pretty good.”

  The colours of sunset had begun to flush across the sky and two of the world’s three moons were up, white, gibbous, pretty, in the northeast. The last time Travers had breathed open air, felt the sun on his face, was on Jagreth, a lifetime ago. He savored the sunset, watched the brightest stars begin to show. Strange stars, he thought. Astronomers would name new constellations describing the Mare Aenestra, and in a century Raishenne would be just one of many populated worlds stretching back like pearls on a necklace into the Deep Sky.

  “I like this,” Marin said as they walked back up from the beach. “I could live here.”

  “Twelve days back to Borushek,” Travers said doubtfully.