by Gary Gibson
They both relaxed as soon as the elevator doors closed. Amanda stepped in close to him, her hands taking hold of his lapels and tugging him down towards her, so that he had to bend over, in order to kiss. Fowler reached out and touched a button that halted the elevator between floors.
She pulled back and looked up at him. ‘I think it’s long past the time we started making plans, don’t you?’
He lifted her hands away from his jacket and faked his best smile. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’
‘And Marcie?’
‘I already told her lawyer that Marcie’s welcome to the house in New England, if she wants it. She can enjoy it while she has the chance.’
He cleared his throat, suddenly business like once more. ‘Listen, there’s something I need to tell you before we go into this meeting. There’s been a major breakdown in security. We’re working to plug it right now, before it has a chance to go public.’
He saw her eyes widen. ‘What happened?’
He started the elevator moving again, and it jerked slightly before continuing on its way. ‘One of your shipments of Founder artefacts has gone AWOL, grabbed off the road well inside the security perimeter, back in Florida,’ he explained, sending a copy of the latest report to her contacts. ‘We’re still trying to figure out how they managed to fly in a VTOL without us even knowing. That means a very high level of technical access to the er,ter systems.’
She nodded, her eyes becoming unfocused for a moment as she received the report. ‘Inez is in charge of local security there,’ she said. ‘Has he got an explanation?’
Fowler cleared his throat. ‘He realizes his neck is on the line over this, but it’s starting to look very much like an inside job, which takes a little of the pressure off him personally. And even if he has been negligent in some way, we’re still going to need him to protect the Arrays as soon as things start to turn bad. Right now we’re following up some possible leads, but it’s going to take time.’
She nodded, and he could see how the weight of what they were doing oppressed her. They would, after all, be abandoning billions to die; a large enough number to be little more than a comfortable abstraction for some, but not perhaps for Amanda.
She shook her head wearily. ‘It just doesn’t get any better, does it?’
Fowler shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. But we’ve managed to track down most of your remaining civilian staff.’
He watched her throat bob as she swallowed. ‘And the ones you haven’t found yet?’
He smiled grimly. ‘They’ll be taken care of soon enough.’
‘Please tell me that’s all the bad news you have.’
‘It’s not, I’m sorry to say.’
She sighed and nodded. ‘Can it wait until after the meeting? I’m not sure how much I can take right now.’
She glanced at her own reflection in the elevator’s mirrored wall, reaching up to touch one perfectly shaped eyebrow as if it were somehow out of alignment. He was forced to recall how Amanda had herself been deemed too great a potential security risk to be allowed to seek refuge in the colonies, and that knowledge still left him desolate. It was only meant to be a brief affair, following his divorce, and instead he had developed such complicated feelings for her – feelings that had already compromised his own chances of survival, given one single devastating discovery he had yet to share with her.
But, as she had said herself, there would be time for all that later.
The elevator doors slid open with a faint hiss, and Amanda flashed him a quick, tight smile before stepping out.
Every time he kissed her or felt her smooth milky skin moving against his own, a part of him wanted to shout out his confession to her, and that she knew too much for their masters to ever allow her to live.
And yet, whenever he summoned up the courage to tell her the truth, his tongue turned to lead and the words refused to emerge from his throat.
Tonight, he thought, after the meeting. It had to be then.
‘All right, first of all, let me bring you up to date on the current state of affairs,’ Fowler began, leaning back in his chair and regarding the various faces arranged around the table. ‘I’d like you all to make sure your contacts are live.’
The only visible decoration in the room was a framed photograph of the Copernicus CTC Array, taken from the vantage of a nearby ridge. It showed a sprawling complex that extended for kilometres around part of the crater wall.
Dana Paxton represented the Coalition Space Command Authority, while Hendrik Lagerlöf fulfilled the same role for the Board of Extraterrestrial Affairs. The current border situation with Mexical meant that Jimenez couldn’t be present. Coalition Navy Captain Anton Inez was also there, of course, taking time out from organizing the evacuation of essential personnel via the Florida Array.
Across the table from Amanda, and the two field investigators reporting directly to Fowler, were Mahindra Kaur and Marcus Fairhurst, representing the European Office of Security and the Three Republics Intelligence Office respectively. Fowler had met these last two only briefly in his capacity as the ASI’s Director of Operations, but they were also the reason this meeting was taking place.
A map of the local and interstellar wormhole networks appeared, floating above the table. A single wormhole gate connected the Florida and Lunar Arrays to each other, but the latter facility housed many further wormhole links connecting Earth’s moon to a dozen other star systems, some up to a hundred light-years distant. Galileo’s collapsed and soon-to-be-re-established gate was represented simply by a dotted line.
‘Part of the reason we’re here today,’ continued Fowler, ‘is to do with the consequences of the unique physics existing within the wormholes, and you’re going to have to forgive me if I go over some points you may already be very familiar with. Mr Kaur, Mr Fairhurst, this being your first time here, would you say you’re reasonably au fait with wormhole physics?’
‘In the very broadest details,’ Kaur replied.
Fairhurst laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘If I’d known there’d be a test, I’d have done some homework.’
Fowler nodded. ‘I’ll try and keep it simple, then. As you know,’ he glanced quickly around the table, ‘the colonies were founded by starships travelling at close to the speed of light, each carrying inside it one end of a wormhole linking it back here to the Moon. However, the way time flows within the wormholes means we can step through to a new star system within months of launching a starship – even though, within our own time-frame back here at home, that starship hasn’t yet arrived at its destination.’
‘I’ll have to admit I’ve never exactly been clear on just how that works,’ said Fairhurst, leaning forward.
‘The ce is in the name we use to describe the wormholes,’ said Amanda. ‘CTC means “closed timelike curve”, right?’
Fairhurst nodded.
‘Well,’ Amanda continued, ‘CTC is just a fancy word for time travel. When we send one end of a wormhole to another star, time on board the ship carrying it moves extremely slowly, relative to the outside universe. But, because of the wormhole link on board, we can walk through the wormhole and on to the deck of that ship any time we like, throughout the journey, since the flow of time within the wormhole remains contiguous with its point of origin.’
She tapped a finger on the table in front of her. ‘It essentially allows you to step decades into the future, since the time-frame on board the starship is such that anyone who remains on board throughout its journey is going to experience a transit time of only a few months. So long as the far end of the wormhole is moving at relativistic speeds, it’s a time machine as well as a shortcut across the universe.’
Fairhurst nodded uncertainly. ‘I never understood why we can’t see the wormholes from the outside. I mean, if they go all that way across space, we should be able to see them, shouldn’t we?’
Fowler barely managed to suppress a grin at the look on Amanda’s face.
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‘That’s because the wormholes don’t pass through the intervening space at all,’ she explained patiently. ‘They tunnel through hyperspace instead, outside of the physical constraints of our universe.’
Fairhurst looked none the wiser. ‘Please tell me all of this has something to do with why we’re here.’
Fowler nodded to Inez. ‘If you would, Anton.’
Inez cleared his throat and leaned forward. They’d already decided the bad news was best coming from him.
‘What I’m about to tell you,’ he began, addressing Kaur and Fairhurst in particular, ‘was known to only a very select group until a few days ago. About fifteen years ago, a standard unmanned reconnaissance of the outer Kepler system stumbled across the first evidence of advanced alien intelligence.’
Fowler watched for any signs betraying that either man might know more than he should. Fairhurst simply looked stunned, but Kaur, before reacting, hesitated just a moment too long to be quite convincing.
The CTC network map was replaced by an image of an irregularly shaped lump of rock, the swirling atmosphere of a gas giant visible behind it. The only thing that suggested it was anything other than a typical fragment of stellar detritus was the gleam of burnished metal dotted about its cratered surface.
‘Specifically, we found an abandoned space station,’ Inez continued. ‘Inside was a wormhole gate connecting to a network of thousands of other wormhole gates that may have been in existence for .well, billions of years. The network also appears to extend across what might be billions of light-years. We’ve been exploring it for some time, and we’ve made some interesting discoveries.’
Understatement of the century, reckoned Fowler.
‘We’ve had research and exploration teams investigating the network ever since,’ continued Inez. ‘We call the hypothetical aliens who built the network “Founders”, for want of a better name. We don’t know what they looked like, where they came from, or whether they even constituted a single species or more than one. If they left any written records – or records of any kind – we haven’t found them yet. All we have are the wormhole gates they left behind and a few recovered artefacts.’
Fairhurst uttered a strangled sound, glancing between Inez and Fowler. ‘Captain Inez,’ he finally managed to say, ‘with all due respect, assuming any of this is true – and I’m not convinced you aren’t pulling my leg – I’m struggling to understand why something like this wasn’t already known to me.’
Inez started to reply, but Fowler cut in, instead.
‘Marcus, we both report to the same people, but not to each other. We’ve managed to keep a very tight lid on this for a long time, and we did it by not sharing information unless it was absolutely necessary. It’s not like there haven’t been rumours for years.’
Fairhurst pursed his lips, clearly unsatisfied. ‘Crackpot rumours, you mean. Are you suggesting that, with our involvement, this information would have been less secure?’ he demanded, his tone noticeably sharp.
‘That decision wasn’t made lightly,’ Fowler replied, ‘nor was it made in isolation. It was deemed strictly need-to-know, all the way to the top.’
‘You mentioned artefacts,’ said Kaur. ‘Are these samples of alien technology?’
‘Yes,’ said Inez. ‘In fact, based on our analyses of some artefacts, we managed to develop a form of faster-than-light quantum-communications device.’
‘I’m not sure I quite understand,’ said Kaur.
Inez spread his hands. ‘Communications instantaneously, without limitations – even across light-years.’
‘So you’ve tested this technology,’ Kaur asked.
‘We did.’ Inez nodded. ‘In fact, we attempted to contact our future selves.’
‘Excuse me?’ said Fairhurst, his expression transforming into outright incredulity.
Fowler realized he had been right to pick Inez for the job. He had an air of authority that made it hard for others to challengeeven the most lunatic-sounding ideas, when they came from him.
‘Specifically,’ Inez continued, his face set like granite, ‘we transported a prototype quantum transceiver to Ptolemy, fifty-five light-years from here. The intention was to communicate with identical transceivers located both here on Luna and on Earth.’
He spread his hands, then clasped them again. ‘Keep in mind that time dilation means Ptolemy, as accessed through the CTC gates, is about sixty years in our future. So when that message was sent from Ptolemy to here, without passing through the gate, it arrived – or, rather, it will arrive – sixty years from now. That means any reply from back here can’t be sent until then.’
‘And?’ asked Kaur, his skin taking on a grey tinge.
‘The only reply we got from our future selves was a montage of video fragments,’ Inez explained. ‘What it showed made us very worried indeed. Once you’ve seen it, it’ll be clear why we need your help.’
Fairhurst made a sound of disgust and leaned back, arms folded, but Inez continued unfazed. ‘Based solely on these video fragments, we made the decision to send a starship carrying a secret wormhole gate back to Earth, from a star system much closer to our own, in order to try and understand what happened.’
‘And this gate arrived back here . . . when?’ asked Kaur.
‘A little over a decade in our future.’ Inez brought up a new set of images that segued from one to the other every few seconds. ‘Before we get to that, you’d better take a look at the video sequence.’
The image of the mottled grey rock changed abruptly to a view from the deck of a ship somewhere on Earth, sailing close to the base of a clearly alien structure rising out of the deep ocean. It looked, at first glance, like some abstract sculpture of a flower rendered in sheet metal and plastic, and painted in gold and silver. Compensation software, built into the contacts of whoever had recorded the footage, reduced natural eyeball jitter.
They watched as the view panned first across and then upwards, thus giving a sense of the staggering scale of the thing. Clouds drifted around its uppermost petals. The view suddenly blurred as whoever was recording it shifted himself to cope with the ship’s rolling motion.
Fowler found his attention drawn to clouds of dark steam shrouding the structure at the point where it rose out of the waters. From what his analysts had been able to tell him, its apparent rate of growth was so great that it might have attained this enormous size within days. There was even reason to believe it had spread roots deep into the Earth’s crust, which might account for the overwhelmingly violent seismic activity that would shortly be contributing to the near-extinction of the human race.
‘There’s nothing like that thing in the oceans anywhere on Earth,’ said Fairhurst, his voice rising.
‘Not yet, no,’ Fowler agreed. ‘Here’s more, recorded by our own sci-eval teams, after they’d passed through the CTC gate leading back to our near future.’
Images now appeared of the airless ruins of Copernicus City, and these were followed by high-definition orbital images of the Earth’s scarred and lifeless surface. Photographs, taken under high magnification from orbit, showed dozens more flower-like structures pushing through the cloud cover over land and sea. Much of the land was wreathed in smoke like ash, and what little remained visible had clearly been scorched empty of life. All in all, it looked like a vision of hell.
‘I still don’t understand,’ said Fairhurst, squinting as if in pain. ‘You’re saying this has already happened?’
‘Is going to happen,’ Inez corrected. The images continued to cycle through, like the holiday snapshots of a dark and vengeful god.
Inez sat back then, and Fowler picked up where he’d left off. ‘Once we’d established the wormhole link back to our own near future, we found no signs of life anywhere on Luna or Earth. Whoever uploaded that montage to the transceivers did it as a warning.’
‘But . . . what could possibly have caused this?’ Fairhurst blurted.
‘To be frank,’ Fowler replied, �
��we have no idea. It seems obvious the growths and the devastation are linked, although we can’t say for certain one caused the other. But it does seem likely.’
‘But how?’ Fairhurst demanded. ‘Was it a meteor, something like that?’
Fowler shook his head. ‘There’s no impact crater, so no. There’s no trace of radioactivity in the near-future atmosphere that might suggest some kind of nuclear bombardment; nothing but the growths, and a lot of ash. Apart from those few slivers of information, we’re as much in the dark as you are. All we know is that the end is coming, far, far sooner than anyone realizes.’
Kaur stared at him, his face pale. ‘So just how long do we have?’ he finally managed to ask.
‘Less than three weeks, possibly only two. Ever since we made these discoveries, we’ve been working on an emergency evacuation programme for essential personnel. If you can help us with certain matters, I can guarantee safe passage for yourselves and your immediate families, at the very least.’
‘I know this is hard for you to take in,’ Dana Paxton spoke up for the first time, ‘but I’ve been through the CTC gate to our future, myself. So has Mr Lagerlöf. There were hundreds of these flower-like growths scattered all across the globe. We dropped a number of winged drones into the atmosphere from orbit, but they always slipped out of contact after just a few minutes.’
‘So whatever did this,’ mumbled Kaur, ‘whatever force brought this about, it’s still down there?’
‘That’s the only reasonable assumption,’ Paxton agreed. ‘We had some of the same problems when it came to exploring the near-future Moon, but we were at least able to investigate the remains of Copernicus City with remote probes. Given the circumstances, you can understand how we were ready to shut down the gate leading back to Tau Ceti the instant we came under attack. Luckily, we never had to. But if you do decide you want to see all this for yourselves first-hand, I’ll be responsible for your safety.’
‘We’re facing an extinction event,’ added Fowler, ‘and if it wasn’t for the existence of the interstellar colonies, the human race would be finished. We can save some of the people back home, and here on the Moon, but not all. Our responsibility from here on is to make sure the colonies survive.’