Angel Stations

by Gary Gibson

  Ernst retreated, his face crimson with effort . . . and reappeared right beside Sam. Kim heard a movement behind her. She reached back and gripped Elias’s upper arm.

  ‘Don’t try,’ she said. ‘You’d never get there.’

  Sam reached out and almost seemed to embrace Ernst. Ernst started struggling in desperation, as Sam locked his arms around his opponent’s neck. It was almost as if he was welcoming home a long-lost lover. When Sam leaned backwards, Kim moved forward a fraction despite herself. That was just enough for her to see the edge of the precipice, a space between spaces, yawning open just beyond her toes. She could see the panic grow on Ernst Vaughn’s face, his expression now almost comical, like a clown losing his balance on the tightrope.

  They fell backwards together, Sam still clasping Vaughn in a tight embrace, the momentum dragging them back until they fell into nowhere. Into a chasm the size of eternity . . .

  Kim stepped quickly away from her position, wanting to get as far away as possible from that awful void. Her knees buckled beneath her, but Elias caught her as she stumbled.

  ‘What happened to them?’ asked Elias, puzzled.

  ‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘I don’t think they’re coming back.’

  Ursu

  Ursu was relieved to find Roke still alive, though injured by some force Ursu could not begin to understand. The older alien kept clutching at his innards, as Ursu helped him back towards the entrance of the dais room.

  ‘So this is the legendary city of Baul,’ wheezed Roke. Beams of torchlight flickered around them, as more of the Shai appeared, halted at the entrance by one of their own, lest they suffered the same fate as the two Shai who had vanished. ‘This is a place of evil. May it be swallowed up by the earth for ever.’

  Roke flicked his ears, and continued. ‘I heard the Shai explain how absolute power resides in that dais. That any one of us could . . . Ursu, do you realize what this means?’

  ‘The Prophecy of the Fidhe,’ agreed Ursu. ‘Yes, I do.’ The prophecy that one of their race might rise to rule the world like a god. ‘You think Emperor Xan is meant to occupy that thing?’

  Roke was silent in thought for a while as the Shai chattered around them. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed at last.

  Trencher

  It had occurred to David Trencher Vaughn, as he dreamed forgotten dreams during that long sojourn within his narrow coffin, that life was nothing more than the prelude to one final moment of existence, that only during that last second of living could you truly appreciate and understand the meaning and purpose of all that had gone before. Trencher himself had been in the unenviable position of always knowing how that last moment would feel. Even Sam had never comprehended just how complete Trencher’s understanding of future events was.

  Well, here I am, Trencher thought. I’ve known this moment for so long it feels like I’ve always been here. The shield had now been activated, but the Citadel itself remained a deadly weapon. He realized he’d always known about this moment, first as an infant’s foreboding, then as nightmares of a great and dark place full of mystery and secrets. Now he understood what it meant. Now he was here, he understood why he had never been able to see anything beyond this point.

  In his mind, Trencher always liked to think that the Angels had been compassionate beings outpaced by their own technology. Something terrible had been created when they had learned to touch the future: a kind of temporal devastation still wreaking its effects, untold aeons after they themselves were gone.

  It was time to give free will back to the universe, he realized.

  Spotting Elias, he went over to him. Trencher could see how the man’s hands were shaking, noticed the greyness of his skin. The Slow Blight was eating away at him, and if Trencher had been able to see beyond one important point only moments away, he would have guessed that Elias Murray didn’t have long to live.

  ‘Elias, listen to me. You have to get all these people out of here, soon. Do you understand me?’

  For a moment Elias stared at him as if he didn’t recognize him. ‘I – no, I don’t. Where’s Sam? Did you see what happened to him? And Vaughn?’

  ‘Elias, I need you to do exactly what I tell you. Sam and Ernst Vaughn are gone. You’ll never see them again. But this isn’t finished. I need to destroy this section of the Citadel.’

  Elias stared at him now. ‘Destroy it? How the hell do you do that?’

  ‘Get them out of here, Elias. What Sam wanted from the Kaspians is too much to ask. I can only give you so much time.’

  For himself, time seemed to slow down, so that he saw Elias’s mouth begin to gape open in a question even as he turned and ran into the dais chamber.

  Apart from Elias, whose precognitive skills were extremely weak, he was the only one left possessing the precog ability that had been so disastrously gifted to the human race. It was now necessary to remove himself from the universe. Trencher ran towards the dais, and towards the void that now opened at its centre.

  Darkness glittered beyond the opening. Secrets lay beyond it, secrets beyond his imagining. He fell into it . . . and fell forever.

  Kim

  She watched from nearby as Trencher ran into the dais chamber, moving almost too quickly for her eye to follow. He had leapt up onto the dais itself, and was gone. She saw Elias blink in confusion; one moment Trencher was there, the next he had vanished. She could see the questions on his lips, a look of utter loss twisting his features.

  A distant rumble rolled through the ground beneath their feet. She looked up, a sudden sense of déjà vu instantly drenching her in cold sweat – in time to see Elias himself start towards the dais.

  ‘Okay, stop right there,’ she yelled, running after him before he’d taken more than a few steps. ‘Nobody’s going back in there. I said stop.’

  She knew he could have shrugged her off in a moment, but instead he did stop and look at her. ‘I need to know where he’s gone,’ he explained, just as the ground trembled a second time.

  She managed to drag him out of the huge chamber and back to where a few of the Primalist rebels stood muttering nervously. Kim really didn’t want to think about whether history was going to repeat itself, but if it was, this time she was determined the outcome was going to be different. There was a lifetime, no, a thousand years’ worth of secrets and research lying only a few feet away from her, but now she found she wanted no part of it.

  She saw that a strange light was now emanating from the whole of the dais. It hurt the eyes even to look at it.

  ‘Elias, we’re going to have to get the hell out of here, quick. Please tell me it’s safe now to go back outside.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Just believe me,’ her voice was shaking, ‘when I say we really need to get out of here. I heard what Trencher asked you to do, and you don’t even know what could happen now Trencher is in there.’

  ‘He said to get everyone out of here.’

  ‘Yes, well, get them out. I . . . I have an idea what’s happening here. The Facilitator, it’s still translating, barely, but I think I understand. Trencher’s taken control of the Citadel so he can destroy it. And then he’s going to . . . going to . . .’ She moaned in pain. She’d seen where he was going to go. Someplace beyond death, beyond anything she could understand.

  Removing himself.

  She urged and harried them all on, running ahead with the torch to light their path. Somehow it seemed much easier to find their way back out than when coming in. It helped that they were heading back towards the light. More alarming rumbles travelled through the ground beneath them, and although the path wasn’t steep, she felt fatigue driving shards of pain through her legs. Only the Kaspians seemed able to keep up a steady pace. But how to tell their thoughts, since the Facilitator lay far behind them now? At least she still had the smartsheet tucked away in a pocket.

  And then they were out into a dim grey twilight. She could see bodies n
earby. The rumbling behind her had grown to a terrifying roar, like some great caged animal provoked. The ground tremble grew apace until it seemed the whole planet was shaking apart. Great clouds of dust and smoke swirled around them, cloaking the little group that had gathered, coughing, in the open.

  Twenty-one

  Eddie

  ‘Would you like me to go over it again?’ asked Eddie, looking around at the others in the reception suite. He had run through the computer records already. They were on board the Num Chai, a military frigate that had been turned into a temporary headquarters for the administrative government previously housed on the Angel Station. The Num Chai, like almost every ship in the Kaspian System, was parked in stationary orbit around a large enough mass to act as a shield against the gamma radiation still blasting through the System in a steady but now, apparently, decreasing wave. Another week, thought Eddie, and all that anybody human in this System will have to worry about is accidental asphyxiation.

  Several thousand automated tracking and observation devices, whose purpose and attention was directly focused on the only known living civilization outside of mankind, watched as the radiation wave poured towards Kasper at the speed of light. The computer modelling sequence Eddie had just run showed that something invisible – a force field, for want of a better term – had deflected the radiation around the planet, leaving its surface unharmed.

  To very little surprise on Eddie’s part, Kasper very quickly became the focus for the attention of every physical scientist in the system.

  Eddie Gabarra watched it all with mounting fascination.

  ‘So far, Commander Holmes, it looks like you’ve come out of this with your nose clean,’ he said. So many of the human constructions on the Station were ruined; would have to be rebuilt from scratch. The cost would, of course, be enormous, but the potential payoff from what had been seen, observed by a dozen different and independent sources, would make that seem a minor consideration.

  Holmes’s eyes slid away from the astronomer towards a view of the stars that had replaced the computer modelling sequence behind Eddie’s shoulder. Oh, but you were in so deep, thought Gabarra. Not that we can prove it, unfortunately.

  ‘So there really are people down there?’ said a voice from behind him. Gabarra turned, to see Bill Lyndon. Beside Lyndon, standing at the rear of the suite, were Mayor Pierce and a woman called Teresa DeLinz, convener of the board of investigation assembled by the Earthside organization to whom the Station authorities answered.

  ‘Yes, Bill, there really are people down there.’ Lyndon had agreed to testify against a variety of key Station personnel in return for not being prosecuted on the basis of his own illegal activities. Indeed, Lyndon had managed to put himself across so adroitly as a concerned citizen during the past week’s discussions that Gabarra suspected the man’s true calling might have been in politics.

  Gabarra was familiar with DeLinz from other meetings, other places. She had a thin, lined face that spoke of a lifetime of hard experience. The meeting was now over; an official statement had been decided upon. Holmes kept a tight-lipped silence, but DeLinz stepped over to Gabarra, and guided him to a corner of the suite well away from the others.

  ‘I understand you believe a friend of yours may have come into contact with the illegal colonists,’ said DeLinz quietly.

  ‘Vincent, yes, he came here on my behalf, before the Station was attacked. The logs show he was on board a Goblin ship that surveillance satellites reveal crash-landing on the planet.’

  ‘You think he knew something?’

  Gabarra shrugged noncommittally. ‘Maybe, but I don’t know. I’ve seen long-range shots of wreckage down there, so I don’t know the chances he even survived. If he did know something—’

  ‘You should know,’ interrupted DeLinz, ‘that certain matters are being discussed on a higher level, unofficially.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Whether to make public our recovery of the descendants of the original crew,’ said DeLinz. ‘It might throw up too many questions.’

  ‘Like why didn’t we know about their existence there before,’ said Gabarra. ‘But did we?’

  DeLinz’s face remained impassive. I’ll bet you did, thought Gabarra. I’ll bet you knew all along.

  Eddie Gabarra had been forced into hiding while he made his way to the Kasper system. His worst moment had come with the false news of his death. Not that they hadn’t tried to effect it; there had been that time at the Oort Angel Station when someone had followed him down a darkened corridor and tried to kill him . . . That had been an unpleasant experience, and he knew he had been very lucky to escape with his life.

  ‘Did we know?’ he repeated. ‘You understand I have a very personal interest in what’s been going on.’ A conspiracy stretching from Earth to Kasper? To keep knowledge about the wave of radiation spreading through the galaxy from the public, from anyone who needed to know it?

  Gabarra knew now how bad things were getting on Earth. And as awareness of the coming catastrophe grew, the importance of Kasper came more and more to the fore – a world that, if it weren’t for the native sentients living there, would be ripe for the taking as the homeworld crumbled into eco-catastrophe. Now something else had happened that nobody could even begin to find an explanation for, and a race that might otherwise have become extinct within days was still thriving, though none the wiser.

  Perhaps another way could be found? Perhaps.

  ‘You understand that keeping such matters quiet would imply a certain complicity,’ continued DeLinz, ignoring Eddie’s question.

  Eddie smiled tightly. ‘I’ve been the victim of that kind of complicity before,’ he said. ‘So you can understand why I wouldn’t feel inclined to consider becoming a co-conspirator myself.’

  ‘Mr Gabarra, you’re correct in referring to what has happened here as a conspiracy. Conspiracies fail when they become unearthed, and you’ve played no small part in that unearthing. But there is much more going on here than that.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow you.’

  ‘We’ve witnessed something that we can’t explain,’ said DeLinz. ‘That protective field that appeared around Kasper before the radiation struck, you can’t seriously say that was a natural phenomenon.’ DeLinz regarded Eddie with curious eyes. ‘Or could you? Please, I’d be interested in your scientific opinion.’

  Eddie remained quiet for a few seconds, then finally spoke. ‘It wasn’t natural, no. That it should just appear at . . . at the right time, right place, then begin to fade away again. The most obvious candidate for producing this level of interference with the radiation is the Citadel itself. Not even a hundredth of that place has been explored.’

  ‘Almost certainly, yes. And now that this matter seems to have been cleared up, what next?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Earth is dying, Mr Gabarra. I’ve seen some reports that you haven’t. Well, perhaps not dying, but certainly close to becoming a terminal patient. The only alternative to billions of deaths, over the next several decades, is almost certainly some form of relocation.’

  Eddie was silent for a moment. ‘Miss DeLinz, I understand what you’re saying. The Kaspians may already be aware of our existence anyway. It’s reasonable to assume that the Primalists who abandoned this Station early in the duration of the Hiatus may also have had some kind of contact meanwhile with the aliens. The footage we’ve seen of shuttle craft in the Kaspian atmosphere, along with the Goblin wreckage down there, does strongly imply a level of human interference which may well now be irreversible. I know some will call for colonization of Kasper. But there are other possibilities, too.’ Such slim possibilities, of course, but real ones.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The bugs,’ he said. ‘They exited through the singularity, but they did not emerge anywhere along the known network. That means there are nodes in the Angel Station chain which we haven’t yet found. They too may have habitable worlds. And then there are the
probes we sent to the galactic core.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware you possessed clearance for that kind of information,’ said DeLinz sharply.

  ‘Please rest assured that I do.’

  ‘The faster-than-light technology that made the Core missions possible only allows for the transportation of the tiniest probes across the galaxy,’ said DeLinz. ‘Hardly sufficient for the transportation of human beings in any numbers.’

  ‘You forgot the important word, yet. We can’t do it yet, but I think we will.’

  ‘But not in time.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Remember what the Core missions discovered: several stellar-sized artefacts close to the galactic hub.’

  ‘There’s no proof they’re artificial in origin.’

  ‘I’d be prepared to bet my professional career on it. I suspect they were emitting signals, talking to each other.’ Starships of some kind, he assumed, not that he was prepared to suggest that to anyone else just yet. In other words, something very, very advanced, possibly originating from the galactic core. Maybe something that could trigger thousands of stars to detonate within a few years of each other. They would never have known, if some expedition into the Citadel itself hadn’t revealed the secret of ftl technology.

  But what it all meant, Eddie Gabarra couldn’t begin to guess.

  Kim

  A dozen people had died on either side of the struggle. It had been over in minutes, a truce yelled out between ancient boulders. Elias had taken the opportunity to head into the depths of the Citadel, following after Trencher. Now Trencher was gone, and she could see he still couldn’t understand the reason why.

  When they realized Vaughn really was gone, the Primalists on both sides had begun to argue loudly amongst themselves. Elias and Kim had shepherded the two aliens away towards the shuttle he had captured earlier. She wondered what would happen to the Primalists now, but for the moment she found it hard to care. Fortunately, none of the Primalists thought to reclaim their stolen shuttle.