A gong’s low chime, the call to prayer, filled the cabin of the little flitter. The men had their solar amulets fixed outside their suits to their wrists, and they consulted these now, shifting in their seats so they could face towards Sol itself. Soon the murmured prayers began.
Stillich turned too. He knew where Sol was, actually; he could find it from the constellations, even distorted by this translation to the Tau Ceti system. But nearly twelve light years from Earth it was tricky to pick out the home star, so dim had it become. That, of course, had always been proclaimed by the Shiras as the natural limit to the human dominion: the Empire of Sol was to be that bubble of space close enough that you could see the home star with the naked eye, and so be able to pray to its munificence.
But Stillich knew that the Shiras’ control depended on more practical considerations. The Facula was a GUTdrive starship. More than a thousand years after the pioneering journey of Michael Poole, this was still the peak of mankind’s interstellar technology; no means of faster-than-light travel had been discovered, save fixed wormholes, tunnels in the sky. Like all its sisters in the fleet, the Facula was a sublight ship, and a Navy manned by humans and forever contained by light-speed had a certain natural reach.
The Facula was capable of sustaining a one-gravity acceleration for years, indeed decades. Including time for acceleration and deceleration she could reach Alpha Centauri in a mere forty-three months as measured aboard ship, and Tau Ceti in a little more than five years. But in flight, thanks to relativistic time dilation, the crew’s heartbeats were slowed, their lives extended, and the voyages as measured by the external world were longer – it was fourteen years to Tau Ceti, as recorded on Earth.
And it was this rigidity of relativistic time that set the true limits on the Shiras’ interstellar grasp. The young crew of the Facula were soldiers of the Empress; they would fight for Shira XXXII if there was a reasonable promise that they would be brought home. But it had been discovered that any longer than a generation elapsed back home and that promise was inevitably broken, loyalty always dissipated by an excess of culture shock; any longer and a flight became an emigration. AS anti-ageing technology made no difference, for this limit was a function of human consciousness, not significantly altered by extended lifespans – and besides, all soldiers were young, as they had always been. Even using sleeper pods would not help; that could only cut down the subjective flight time, not the objective interval.
Thus, given the fundamental limits of light-speed and human capability, Tau Ceti was about as far as the Shiras could ever extend their Empire. But it was enough, for no less than nineteen star systems, plus Sol, lay within that limit of loyalty. And this mission was proof that the Shiras would enforce their rule right to the boundaries. If this colony was illegal, it would be broken up.
The time for prayer was over. The marines folded away their amulets and closed their faceplates.
And the flitter ducked into the murky air of Tau Ceti’s second world.
They landed briskly on the perimeter of the largest human settlement, close to the shore of an island-continent. The hull cracked open, and the marines in their environment suits spilled out to set up a secure perimeter around the flitter. Glowing drones flooded the air, and bots began digging trenches.
Amid all this activity, Stillich peered about curiously.
A lid of cloud turned the pale light of Tau Ceti a dull grey. They had apparently come down in a field, where Earth vegetation drew sustenance from the nutrients of an alien soil, no doubt heavily nano-worked. But plants of a more exotic sort, with leaves of purple and silver-grey, clustered among the green. There were structures on the low horizon, unprepossessing, just shacks, really. People stood before the shacks, adults with hands on hips, a couple of children. They watched the marines with apparent curiosity but no sign of fear or deference.
Although Tau Ceti was actually the most sun-like of all the stars within the Empire of Sol, such were the distracting riches of Alpha System that only one serious colonising expedition from Earth had been mounted here – and that ship had been reassigned to a more urgent mission and had never been heard of again. Officially this colony did not exist – and yet here it was. Stillich found it deeply disturbing to have discovered this blind spot of the Empire, for where there was one, there could be many.
‘Walk with me,’ Stillich said to Pella.
He set off towards the shacks, and Pella followed. Marines shadowed them, weapons in hand.
‘What a dump,’ Stillich said. ‘This world, this dismal farm, those shacks. To come all this way to live like this.’
Pella, characteristically, was peering into her data desk, rather than studying the world around her. ‘They will be grateful we have come to save them, sir—’ She stopped suddenly, a hundred paces short of the shacks. ‘Look.’ She pointed to a kind of earthwork, circular, little more than a system of ditches and low ramparts cut into the ground. ‘This is what I saw from the drones. Can you see the way the ground has been flattened within the perimeter, as if something has been set down here? And over there—’ She pointed. ‘Residual traces of radioactivity.’
‘They came here in a GUTship,’ Stillich said.
‘Yes, sir. They brought it down and dismantled it. They lived in the lifedome, just here, and used the GUTdrive for power.’
‘And now it’s all gone.’
‘And quite recently too – I mean, a few decades . . .’
A woman approached them. Short, squat, she had the heavy shoulders and big hands of a farmer. She looked perhaps forty, though with AS tech she could be any age. She wore a facemask and a small air pack, but no other environmental protection. She grinned, showing good teeth, and said something in a liquid dialect that Stillich’s systems began to translate for him.
He waved that away. ‘Speak Earthish,’ he snapped.
The woman eyed him, perhaps deciding whether to obey him or not. ‘I said, “Welcome to Home.”’
‘What an original name,’ sneered Pella.
‘You don’t need to wear those fancy suits. An air mask will do. We long since nanoed out any nasties. A couple more generations and—’
‘You should not be here,’ Stillich said. ‘This colony is unauthorised.’
‘Well, you’ll have to take that up with my grandfather, who came here from Alpha System when Footprint got a bit too full for his liking.’
‘You are secondary colonists from Alpha, then. As I said – unauthorised.’
Pella looked around. ‘Where is your grandfather?’
‘Dead these forty years. Don’t you want to know my name?’
Pella snapped, ‘Your name is irrelevant. The GUTships you used to get here were the property of the Empire of Sol.’
The farmer laughed again.
Pella, her temper quick, her ego strong, raised her arm.
Stillich touched her shoulder to restrain her. He said, ‘Woman – you, or your grandparents, broke up your transport ship to build your first colony here.’ He gestured. ‘You lived in the lifedome. You used the GUTengine for power. And yet now these things are gone.’
‘You reassembled the ship, that’s obvious,’ Pella said. ‘And other vessels. But why? Where have you sent them?’
The woman responded with another grin, surly.
This time Pella did strike her, using her elbow to dash the woman to the ground. Marines rushed in, weapons raised. ‘Take her,’ Pella said. ‘And her children. Torch this place. We will have five years to empty her of all she knows, before we reach the Solar System once more.’
As the marines closed on the shack-like farm buildings, Stillich considered intervening. This was no way to run an empire, this use of brute force. But he didn’t want to contradict his First Officer in front of the marines; the fate of this farmer wasn’t important enough for that.
Pella stood with him, breathing hard, still angry. ‘Ac
tually, I’m not sure how concerned we should be, sir. Now I stand here, amid the rubble of these colonists’ petty dreams – if some of them have taken their GUTships off into the dark, so what? There’s no G-class star until you get to Delta Pavonis, eight more light years out from Sol. Too far away to bother us. Why should we care?’
But it wasn’t obvious to Stillich that this new jaunt had been outwards at all.
Human space was sparsely settled, save for the Solar System itself, and Alpha System. And if you weren’t to travel outwards, a return journey to Alpha was by far the most likely destination. Stillich had visited Alpha himself, on the two previous interstellar missions of his career. It was a big, sprawling, increasingly crowded system – richer in resources than even the Solar System itself. And as a junior officer he had detected signs of rebelliousness there, hints that the Alphans were chafing under the yoke of the taxes and political control of the light-years-distant Shiras, signs he had dutifully reported to his superiors.
It might be harmless. Maybe the GUTships had gone back to Alpha, to pick up another cadre of colonists for Tau Ceti. But if they had returned covertly, for some other reason . . .
‘Tidy up here,’ he said to Pella. ‘But do it fast; the sooner we get out of here the better. I’m going back to the Facula to send a message to Earth.’ Which itself would take twelve years to get there. He turned and stalked back to the flitter.
Pella called, ‘Sir, the colonists – are they to be permitted to stay?’
He considered. ‘No.’ That was the tidiest solution. ‘We have sleeper pods enough to transport these ragged villagers back to Sol. We should remove any trace of the colony. Expunge the records – hide the existence of a habitable planet here, so nobody tries again. We must have control. Get on with it, Pella. And avoid excessive violence.’
‘Sir.’
Stillich heard screaming from the farmer’s children. He did not look back.
AD 4814. Starfall minus 6 years. Armonktown, Footprint, Alpha System.
Suber’s youngest son, little Suber, Su-su, called him out of the house. ‘Dad, come see. I think there’s another one up there, another GUTship!’
Suber had been helping Fay prepare the evening meal. Fay – Suber’s second wife – was, at thirty, nearly seventy years Suber’s junior, though thanks to his AS treatment she actually looked a little older. She grinned across at him. ‘Go. A GUTship is a GUTship, but Su-su will only be seven years old once. Go!’
So he grabbed his jacket and let his son drag him out of the house, down the darkened street towards the park, where, away from the streetlights of Armonktown, you got the best view of the sky. But Suber was soon winded as he tried to keep up with Su-su. He had been born on Earth – though Su-su did not know that, and nor did Fay, and they never would – and even after seven decades here and extensive nano treatments, Footprint’s stronger gravity still hung on Suber as heavy as a lead coat.
They came to the park. It was a fall evening, and the dew lay on the grass and on the roses’ thorns, and glistened on the blisters of the rope-trees, a native species allowed to prosper in their own little bubbles of Footprint air inside the town dome. And there on the grass, little Su-su turned his button face up to the sky. ‘See, Father?’
Suber looked up.
The sky was crowded and complex. From Footprint, a world of Alpha A, sun B was a brilliant star in the sky, closer to Alpha A than planet Neptune was to Sol, and bright enough to cast sharp shadows; on this world there were double sunrises, double sunsets, strange eclipses of one star by the other. And there was a line of light drawn across the sky: dazzling, alluring, that zodiacal gleam was the sparkle of trillions of asteroids. The mutual influence of A and B had prevented the formation of large planets; all the volatile material that in the home system had been absorbed into Sol’s great gas giants was here left unconsolidated, asteroids drifting in huge lanes around the twin stars. Footprint’s sky was full of flying mines.
But what interested Su-su wasn’t the natural wonders of the sky but the signs of human activity. He pointed with his small finger, to a cloud of light slivers not far from the zenith. ‘Can you see, Father? I can count them. One two three four five seven twelve! And there’s a new one since they passed over yesterday.’
‘Your eyes are better than mine,’ Suber said. ‘But, you know, I think you’re right . . .’
The splinters of light were indeed ships: GUTships, a veritable fleet of them in a medium-altitude orbit over Footprint. Under magnification they showed the classic Poole-era design, lifedome and GUTdrive pod connected by a spine kilometres long. Somebody was assembling an orbital armada – and presumably even bringing in the ships from other star systems, for there was no facility to construct GUTships anywhere save the Solar System itself.
Suber had heard no announcement about this mustering, seen no news source refer to it, even though it was clearly visible to everybody. He wondered why no imperial official had been out to inspect it. He had even considered trying to get some message to the Empress’s court himself. But it was unlikely in the extreme he’d be able to do that without blowing his personal cover.
It was while he was thinking of Earth, oddly, in that quiet moment with his son, that his life on Footprint ended.
The voice behind him was soft. ‘Densel Bel?’
He turned, unthinking. ‘Yes?’ And then, ‘Ah.’ He had responded to a name he hadn’t heard spoken since he left Earth.
The man facing him was dressed entirely in black, in some fabric so dark it seemed to absorb the light from the sky; he was a shadow, even his face concealed.
Densel/Suber did not dare glance around for Su-su. ‘May I say goodbye to my son?’
‘No.’ The man pointed a finger.
There was a shock, not of pain, but of cold. He felt his heart stop before he hit the ground.
And when he could see again, he was enclosed by walls, in a room, bathed in bright light.
He winced, and lifted a hand to shield his eyes. And he staggered, for he was standing, held by a mesh web.
Somebody handed him a beaker of liquid. He drank, and felt warmth course through his system.
A man stood before him. A broad face, aged – no apparent recourse to AS – stocky build, crop of grey hair. Densel thought he recognised him. A young woman stood at the man’s side, perhaps a daughter. Densel wondered if they were armed.
The room had a single window, which opened on blackness. The smart webbing filled the room, holding the people unobtrusively. He was in microgravity then, in orbit perhaps.
The man studied him. ‘Are you all right, Densel Bel? You were injected with a nano anaesthetic. I hope it didn’t hurt; you were obviously unprepared.’
‘I’m fine.’ He drew a breath. His chest ached vaguely; he wondered if he had suffered some minor heart attack. ‘You know who I am.’
‘Obviously. And you know me, don’t you?’
‘You are Flood. Ambassador to the Empress’s court.’ Flood’s was one of the more famous faces in the small pool of Alpha cultural life.
‘Former ambassador. I retired some years ago. Now I am engaged on other projects.’
‘I want to speak to my family—’
‘You mean the two families you raised on Footprint, to whom you lied all their lives? Forget them, Densel Bel. You are dead to them. They are dead to you. That part of your life is over.’
The shock of this abduction seemed to be hitting Densel; if not for the webbing he might have fallen. ‘For seventy years I have prepared for this moment. Still it is hard.’
‘You chose your own path. This always lay at the end of it.’
‘Who are you? An underground? A resistance movement against the Empire?’
There was no reply.
‘How long have you known about me?’
‘Ever since you came tumbling out of the wreckage
of the last Poole wormhole.’
Once, Alpha and the other colonised star systems had been linked by faster-than-light wormholes, assembled in Jovian orbit, their interfaces laboriously hauled across interstellar distances by GUTships. Seventy years ago Shira XXXII, on ascending to the Construction Material Throne, had ordered the links to be cut. And Densel and others had been sent to do the cutting.
‘I was trained since I was a boy for the task,’ Densel said. ‘I knew nothing else but the purpose. I suppose you would say I was conditioned. I should have died when the wormhole collapsed. I was an agent of the Empire, sent to cut the wormhole—’
‘You are a suicide bomber who failed – in that you did not die.’
‘Yes. I should have been killed when we destroyed the wormhole. My survival was an accident. I was stranded on Footprint. Unexpectedly alive, it was as if I awoke. I have been cut off from my world for seven decades—’
‘Your world? Isn’t this your world now, a world you have helped build with your skills in exotic-matter engineering, skills developed for destruction put to better use?’
Densel shrugged. ‘I found myself alive. Earth thought I was dead. Nobody knew me here. I decided to develop an identity, to build a life. Why not? I sought meaning—’
‘We knew who you were. We always have.’
‘Why did you not deal with me before?’
‘Because we always thought you might be useful. You were doing no harm in the meantime.’
Densel frowned. ‘Who is “we”?’
‘We are a loosely bound, loosely defined group, but with a single clear goal.’
‘Which is?’
‘The liberation of the starborn from the tyranny of the Shiras. You were involved in the strengthening of the Empresses’ grip. The wormholes were cut so that Earth might be protected from us by a blanket of spacetime, while possessing a near-monopoly in GUTship construction technology. So we could be controlled, for ever.’
Densel took a breath. ‘Is the rule of the Shiras so bad? The Empire’s touch is light—’
Xeelee: Endurance Page 10