Angel Stations

by Gary Gibson

  The ship was rotating even as he clambered. He reeled, dizzy, then remembered the tricks they’d taught him the first time he went space-walking. That had seemed like an outing, at first, in near-Earth orbit, the kind of bold thing you did after you’d surfed in Hawaii or climbed the Andes.

  Vincent had indeed surfed once, badly, while spending a couple of weeks at Mauna Loa. He’d never climbed the Andes, though he had spent a weekend in the foothills at a resort when he was still barely into his twenties. After that, he’d undergone more serious near-orbit training in vacuum when he’d thought he had a real chance of working directly, hands-on with the Lunar Array. That opportunity had never materialized.

  He’d always meant to go space-walking again. He’d just never quite envisaged it being under circumstances like these.

  Aside from the limited time they had, he didn’t foresee any real problems. He just focused on the issue at hand, and allowed himself a brief moment of wonder at what people were capable of, given the right circumstances. A few weeks before he’d have laughed at the notion of being caught up in such a foolhardy situation, as if such things were avoidable. But nobody could have predicted this particular sequence of events. And when you needed a solution to your problems, you didn’t seek it out of a sense of bravado, or a desire to appear brave; you did it because you had no choice, because somebody had to do it, and that happened to be you. He let that simple truth occupy his mind while he pulled himself around the bulge of the Goblin’s cockpit section.

  The Goblin comprised three separate sections: the cockpit at the front, the living quarters in the middle, the cargo hold and engine core in the rear. Each bulbous section was roughly circular in shape. The craft’s surface had a series of rungs embedded into the hull. He guessed these were to assist pressure-suited miners from the airlock to the cargo section at the rear. While clinging to one of these, he looked automatically for the planet below. As he saw it, he realized his mistake. Cold terror gripped him as his perspective shifted suddenly. The Goblin had oriented itself so that its nose was pointing outwards, away from the planet’s atmosphere. Its ablation shield was already inflated for atmospheric re-entry, blossoming out from aft of the cargo bay.

  The surface of Kasper now seemed to fill half of the universe. Vincent could clearly see mountain ranges spread out below him, and the great sea separating two massive continents. Much of the land surface was still white with ice and snow.

  His guts clenched, and he froze. It seemed like he was falling, falling through an ocean of air. Like he was squatting on the top of a tower thousands of miles high.

  This had happened last time, too, he reminded himself, during that first space-walk, seeing the Pacific Ocean spread out like a great blue diamond far below his feet.

  Get it done, he urged himself. His throat feeling dry as parchment, he somehow managed to slowly work his way along the length of the craft. He reminded himself over and over again, that he was not going to fall . . . at least no faster than the craft. He kept the fear in its place.

  As he got to the shield, the cable that spun out from the airlock floated behind him like a thick silvery rope. He’d run out of rungs now, but he still needed to get underneath the ship, and onto the ablation shield itself.

  He forced himself to let go of the last handhold, and floated free. It was the hardest thing he had done in his entire life.

  He gently pushed himself along until he could see the bugs, about two dozen of them, which had barely started working on the shield. He touched gloved hands to the ablation shield until he stopped sliding forward. He managed to brush at one of them and it simply floated off into space, its tiny metallic legs waving helplessly. Like all the others he had seen over the past few days, it had a haphazard, home-made look to it, as if assembled from entirely random pieces of junk found lying around. Which of course, he suspected, was exactly what they did when they reproduced.

  He gradually pulled himself around the surface of the ablation shield. He couldn’t see any clear sign of damage, so perhaps they’d been lucky after all. There were signs of destruction on the hull itself, particularly around the cargo-bay section. But as long as the ablation shield held out, it should protect the ship.

  He was floating directly underneath the Goblin now. They were close, so very close . . .

  He then noticed a tiny red light blinking rapidly, to one side of his mouth, inside his helmet. He stared at it for a few short moments, then ignored it long enough to brush several more bugs away from the metal ring that connected the base of the shield to the hull. He pushed himself further around the shield’s circumference, finding more bugs. He pushed them away from the shield, watching as they spun lazily away, like tiny metal partners in a zero-gravity waltz. Meanwhile, he tried to ignore the vast onrushing landscape below him.

  Once he was sure they were all gone, he remembered the blinking light, but ignored it and with both hands took hold of the cable tying him to the Goblin like an umbilicus, and started to haul himself back around the surface of the ablation shield.

  As he glanced towards Kasper, the planet looked a lot closer than only a few moments before. Spread out below him he could see great rivers, and what might be forests. The sight of it sucked him in, rich with terrible beauty, and for the briefest of moments he was lost to the world.

  He tongued the switch next to his mouth and the red light changed to green. Kim’s panicking voice came over the intercom. ‘What’s happening there? You have to get back inside, Vincent! Right now!’

  Shit! He glanced at the information constantly scrolling across the bottom-right corner of his helmet’s visor. He saw that he had about forty-five seconds to get himself back inside.

  ‘We’re going to make it, Kim,’ he yelled, pulling himself away from the ablation shield until he grabbed on to a rung on the hull of the Goblin. ‘We’re going to be fine.’

  ‘Okay. Just get yourself back inside in one piece, Vincent.’

  His momentum as he launched himself away from the ablation shield had caused him to skid sideways across the hull, losing a valuable few seconds. He happened to glance down and saw a red tinge to the edge of the shield, and realized his suit was heating up, becoming uncomfortably warm in only a few seconds. Then he pushed himself back up along the length of the Goblin towards the airlock.

  I should be dead by now, he thought; the Goblin was entering the upper limits of the Kaspian atmosphere at tremendous speed, fast enough that he should have been burned up by atmospheric friction. It took him a moment to understand why he hadn’t. Once the ablation shield had inflated, its diameter was somewhat greater than the diameter of the Goblin itself. As it plummeted downwards, the shield acted almost like an umbrella, sheltering Vincent from the unimaginable heat of re-entry so long as he remained no more than a few inches from the Goblin’s hull.

  Nonetheless, the heat inside his suit continued to increase dramatically, dangerously so. His visor display gave him ten seconds, nine. Vincent hauled himself up over the curve of the cockpit section, while the ship fell rear-end first towards Kasper. Then something happened, a curious sensation of weight pulling at him . . .

  He hauled himself on top of the cockpit section and looked around. In those few precious moments, he saw the vast geography of Kasper spread out below and around him, the Goblin’s ablation shield white with heat.

  Swiftly he pulled himself down into the airlock hatch and hit the control panel, feeling every second, every fraction of a second moving slowly, too slowly . . .

  The tug he had just felt became almost imperceptibly greater, the slowly increasing pull of a gravitational mass. The door he had just entered was no longer a door, but a ceiling hatch. He tumbled down onto the inner airlock door, watched the outer one slam shut.

  The inner door opened, and he fell inside, yelling. He hit the wall nearest the cabin crawlspace.

  Kim

  She made to unbuckle her webbing, but Elias reached out to restrain her. The ship began suffering terrible
vibrations, enough to make the teeth rattle in their jaws. An enormous bass rumbling filled their ears. The cockpit had become a vertical tube, their seats fixed high up on one side. Kim could see Vincent lying in a motionless crumpled heap below her. His head seemed bent at a strange angle.

  ‘I need to help him.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Elias said firmly. ‘I don’t know exactly how this is going to go.’ The Goblin had begun to shudder extremely violently now. First one screen and then the next was filled with hissing static. ‘Stay in your seat. If we’re going to get through this at all, it’ll be because he went out there.’

  She pulled her arm away from him. Elias reached out and touched the console. A screen of static was replaced by an outline image of the Goblin, one end more distended with the ablation shield. She hated Elias for knowing about that when she herself hadn’t. It made her feel stupid, ignorant. He had stolen her ship from her, but it didn’t give him the right to outguess her, outmanoeuvre her. Lines showed the angle of the Goblin as it rammed through the upper reaches of the Kaspian atmosphere.

  Things I know about Kasper, thought Kim. It’s like Earth. Uncannily so. There were people who claimed the habitable worlds found through the Angel Station network had been specifically re-engineered by the Angels to be similar to each other. It was accepted by the scientific community that the Angels had interfered with human DNA somewhere in humanity’s dim ancestral past, and the same seemed to be true of the Kaspian species. So, on some level, we’re related.

  The Goblin chose that moment to shake so violently that she let out a cry, thinking, This is it, this is it, but they were still alive, still falling, and Kim thought, After this is over, because it will be over, I’ll never be scared of anything again, because I think I’ve used up three lifetimes of scared so far, and they’re not going to let me have any more.

  What could they eat, she wondered. The last time she’d been here on Kasper, her team had been far from any flora or fauna. They’d brought their own food with them. Yes, the Goblin had supplies, too, but they were finite.

  What would be poisonous? Would the local diseases kill them? And then there were the natives – they were everywhere. They weren’t an advanced species, true, but wobbling on the edge of an industrial revolution. If they had landed the Goblin on sixteenth-century Earth, they would have been burned at the stake, no questions asked, she thought. Unfortunately she didn’t know enough about Kaspian society . . .

  And then she realized who did, and hope flared up within her – bright, incandescent hope, even as they hurtled downwards.

  ‘Now.’

  Kim looked to Elias. Had he said something? She saw his hand on the console next to a control panel. A smaller viewscreen situated between them now carried one phrase: burn initiated.

  The Goblin slammed about as the ablation shield was jettisoned and the engines fired at full capacity, counteracting the craft’s rapid descent, preventing them from slamming into the ground at several thousand miles per hour. ‘We should aim for water,’ Kim yelled at Elias, but he didn’t respond. He was doing something else at the console.

  She leaned over as far as the webbing of her seat would allow and realized he was trying to control the Goblin’s descent. Lines of vector pointed away from a body of water towards a mountain range. The same mountain range the shuttle had aimed for.

  ‘Elias, no, head for water.’

  ‘Either we drown or we crash,’ he yelled back. ‘Might as well try and get closer to our target.’

  Your target, she thought. We’re flying blind, and our pilot is a madman. Everything would have been different if he hadn’t come to her with money that was worse than useless now. She held on grimly, and waited.

  The Goblin tore through the upper reaches of the Kaspian atmosphere, trailing a line of incandescent fire. It had automatically adjusted its angle of entry so as to come in at a slant. Because the Goblin hadn’t been designed with aerodynamic properties in mind, outside of any emergency landing algorithms designed to compensate for this, it needed to burn up all its fuel in one long blast in order to slow its speed and prepare for some kind of landing.

  When the Goblin’s protocols had first been designed, the engineers had programmed in a contingency for emergency crash-landing. After consultation with military psychologists and public-relations firms, this nomenclature had been changed to controlled re-entry procedure.

  And as the Goblin fell, and as the natives of Kasper – and a lost colony of humans hidden in the high Teive Mountains – looked up and saw a second trail of smoke and fire across their sky, without their knowing it, their world was changing irrevocably, forever.

  Emergency lights were beginning to flash at different points around the console. The ship was taking too much strain, she could see. She tried not to think about Vincent lying crumpled near them. He could be dead, and it seemed wrong for him to die only a few feet away, while they sat strapped into chairs and waited.

  ‘We just lost two propulsion jets,’ said Elias. ‘I think this is going to be rough.’

  Fifteen

  Sam Roy

  His skin looked smoother, less blemished from wounds he had received than it had done in over a century. Ernst was paying remarkably little attention to him, and Sam could understand that. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like for almost every human alive: not knowing what would happen this day or the next, or the week after. For Sam it was all a foregone conclusion.

  He waited a few moments more for Matthew to appear at the top of the path. The boy glanced behind him with a grim expression. Sam knew exactly what he was going to say – as if he had already said it.

  Which, in a sense, he had.

  Sam looked up, hoping to catch a glint of the shuttle in descent. Trencher, my old friend, he thought, it’s been such a long time. Perhaps it would have been better if we hadn’t known, even then, and under just what circumstances . . .

  Sam was back at the bottom of the slope. If he wanted to eat or drink, he would again have to force the ball back up the path leading to where the food and water was. He had forced himself to rest, even as his belly ached and his throat cried out for moisture, for sustenance. There had been little snow in the past several days, and he could not rely on what little he could find to assuage his overpowering thirst.

  What would happen, he wondered, if he merely dragged himself to the cliff’s edge, and threw himself off? Would he finally be free, with his head caved in and his brains scattered across that alien mountainside?

  He would recover, unfortunately, as happened the last time he had tried that. Vaughn had punished him, of course, once he had recovered well enough to receive the punishment.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ warned Sam, as Matthew got closer. ‘You’ve been down this way a lot recently. Someone might notice.’

  Matthew shook his head emphatically. ‘He won’t know. The others will alert me the instant he deviates from his schedule.’

  ‘I’ve known your father for a long time, Matthew – since long before you came into the world. He’s capable of many things. It takes a special man to engineer’ – he raised one manacled hand and encompassed the valleys to the east with a sweep of his arm – ‘all of this. His plan.’

  Matthew stared at him with an expression bordering on the contemptuous. ‘Sometimes you sound too much like you admire him for me to really be sure we can trust you.’

  Sam raised his eyebrows. ‘Take a close look, kid. See the manacles? Know how long I’ve been confined here on this mountainside? Know the one thing that’s kept me sane all this time?’

  Matthew scowled. ‘Yes, yes, I know. But the way you talk about him sometimes—’

  ‘In some ways, Matthew, your father is a great man. But history is littered to the gills with great men doing bad things. We were born into – created by – the Primalist religion whether we liked it or not. Try and imagine what it’s like, Matthew, to be told that you or one of your brothers was born specifically to lea
d some tiny portion of humanity to salvation. When you seem to have powers normally attributed to gods and legends. To be told that you and your brothers are the progenitors of a new age.’ Sam listened to himself, thinking, What a bore you used to be, so given to grand speeches and cheap philosophy. You never quite got out of the habit, did you? ‘All your father has done is fulfil the expectations of those who brought him into this world. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to try our damnedest to stop him.’

  ‘You said something big is going to happen soon,’ said Matthew. ‘The shuttle is already on its way, everyone is in place. This is no time to be mysterious, we need to know.’

  Sam chuckled. He almost felt free, as if these chains were now made of paper and he could shrug them off easily. It was strange to think it was almost over. This mountainside was all he had known for a multitude of lifetimes. He couldn’t imagine what it might be like not to live in searing pain, every second of every day, not to suffer unquenchable hunger without the blissful release of death.

  ‘I couldn’t be absolutely sure Elias was going to make it here along with the others,’ said Sam. ‘That’s what I was waiting for. The probability he’d survive this far was extremely high, and the fact of my observing his arrival in the future will have tipped the balance. But I’ve been surprised before. Remember, Matthew, some of the things your father and I foresee are still only probabilities, not inevitabilities. It’s up to us to work together to choose the outcome we want.’

  ‘What do we do with Trencher?’

  Sam sighed. ‘You do what you’re supposed to do. Just get him out of there, and away from Ernst.’

  Matthew stared at him, his face full of uncertainty and anger.

  Matthew was becoming like his father. ‘Maybe we should just leave you here on the mountainside when this is all over,’ said Matthew. ‘We need certainties, not maybes. We need to know this is going to work.’

  Sam squatted in the freezing dirt, flexing his knees. What Matthew had said was exactly the kind of thing Ernst might have said. ‘Trencher, your father and me – remember what I said about us. We can tap into something which the Angel DNA put inside us before we were born.’ Matthew’s irritated glance indicated that he knew all this. But it was important, now more so than ever before, to repeat it. Again, and again if necessary. Sam continued: ‘There are things that are going to concern us greatly when all this is over. The Angels were ready to bring dangerous predestination into the universe, but did you ever wonder why?’