‘Look, I’m sorry, Yirella. All I know is that they need to consult you. It’s very urgent.’
‘Seems about right.’ She gestured at the oily fluid still beading her skin. ‘But first, the shower.’
Rafa was about to say something, but Matías said: ‘Of course.’
She took her time in the washroom and used her databud to order chicken soup from the food printer. As the water sluiced the oil off her skin, she used her interface to check on her cyborg. It was sitting in standby mode where she’d left it seven years ago, in one of the many empty compartments on a lower deck, not far from where the squads used to have their idiot bare-knuckle fights. According to the log, none of the crew had noticed it – not that they patrolled the Morgan looking for intruders. For a moment she was tempted to bring it up out of standby mode, just in case. But that was silly, because there was no physical threat. Having it accompany her to the council would be the equivalent of comfort food. And as soon as she stepped out of the shower, a remote rolled up carrying her chicken soup. So . . .
The cup the soup came in seemed inordinately heavy as she carried it with her on the interminable walk around to the captain’s quarters. They had to stop five times for her to sit and rest. She obstinately refused Matías’s offer to summon a remote medical chair for her.
Kenelm was sitting at the head of the table in hir reception room. The stern expression sie wore would have been intimidating at any other time. Today, Yirella found it hard not to smirk right back at hir. Alexandre was sitting halfway along the table, and hir gesture invited Yirella to sit. She accepted gratefully and drank some more of the soup. Every limb was shaking from the exertion of the walk. Directly opposite her, Tilliana gave her an anxious glance.
Cinrea and Wim occupied the seats on either side of Kenelm. Then there was Napar, captain of the Collesia; and Illathan, who commanded the Kinzalor. They directed troubled expressions her way.
‘I apologize for bringing you here right out of suspension,’ Kenelm said, ‘but we’ve encountered an unexpected development.’
Yirella turned her head to look at Matías and Rafa, who were standing behind her. ‘Is this to be an expanded council, Captain? If so, shouldn’t squad leader Matías be sitting with the rest of us?’
‘Matías is here to ensure order,’ Kenelm said levelly.
‘Order?’
‘Yirella, we’ve detected something odd at the neutron star,’ Alexandre said in a weary voice. ‘Actually, disturbing is more like it. We’re hoping you can help us understand what’s going on.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘I came out of suspension nine months ago to assist Wim’s approach protocol team,’ Tilliana said. ‘Five fleet ships assembled remote sensor satellites to perform the observation.’
‘I remember the specifications,’ Yirella said. ‘The sensors were good, taken from the original Actaeon array design.’
‘Yeah. The sats decelerated at fifty gees, until they matched velocity with the neutron star. Then they stuck out their probes and sent the data back to us through portals.’
‘And?’
‘The neutron star’s rotation speed has changed.’
Yirella took a moment to absorb that monumental fact. ‘Well, that’s good. It should help call attention to the Olyix.’
‘Good?’ Wim said frostily. ‘That’s your take? Good? We have absolutely no idea how to do that.’
‘We do,’ Yirella countered. ‘There are several theories on how to accomplish it.’ She drank some more soup.
‘Yes, but we don’t have the technology actually to do it.’
‘Ainsley probably has. He was carrying some amazing systems.’
‘Ainsley didn’t know how they worked.’
‘No, but the team you led back at the habitats made astonishing progress on Ainsley’s neutronic functions, didn’t you? That was impressive. Put enough effort into a retro-engineering project, and you should ultimately be successful.’
Wim shot Kenelm an agitated glance.
‘You’re suggesting that Ainsley analysed his own composition?’ sie asked.
‘I don’t know. What are you asking me?’
‘We’re asking you about this,’ Kenelm said.
The screen at the end of the table came on, showing a starfield. Right at the centre was a small ring of faint red speckles.
‘And that is?’ Yirella asked, but she knew. She knew because it was beautiful and perfect. Everything she hoped it would be. Yet she still wanted – needed – confirmation.
‘The neutron star civilization,’ Wim said tightly. ‘The infrared emission of close on a quarter of a million individual objects orbiting three hundred and eighty-four thousand four hundred kilometres from the star. Best our sensors can measure from here is that they vary from one kilometre to twenty-five in diameter. There are a small number that are even larger, though their infrared signature is lower.’
‘Wow!’
‘Three hundred and eighty-four thousand four hundred kilometres is a very specific distance.’
‘The distance the moon orbited our lost Earth,’ Yirella said. ‘So Ainsley has a sense of humour, after all. Who knew?’
‘You’re saying Ainsley did this?’ Wim challenged.
‘I’m saying he enabled it.’ She sipped some more soup, keeping her gaze on Kenelm over the rim of the cup.
‘How did that happen?’ Kenelm asked. ‘The lure civilization you designed was supposed to consist of ten habitats and some neutronic weapons platforms. They were going to announce their existence to the Olyix by targeting the neutron star with chunks of mass to create an artificial pattern of super-high-energy X-ray emissions. Now we see this. How? How could this possibly happen?’
Yirella put the cup down. ‘It happened because I gave the humans full control of the seedship initiators.’
‘You did what?’
‘What humans?’ Wim asked. ‘The lure population was androids.’
‘No, that was the original idea. I changed it.’
‘On whose authority?’ Alexandre asked.
‘Mine. What you’re seeing around the neutron star is a natural space-based human civilization – one that has developed without limits or restrictions so that it can advance a long way beyond us.’
Kenelm closed hir eyes, hir body frozen. ‘Oh, sweet Saints; you didn’t.’
‘Oh, but I did – with Ainsley’s help. I did what I know we have to do to end this. I gave humans the most sophisticated technology we had, and set them free to build whatever they wanted.’
‘Those are real humans?’ sie demanded. ‘Do you even understand the danger you’ve exposed them to?’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic. They’re not in any danger, precisely because I took away your restrictions. All those over-cautious, play-by-the-rules Utopial orthodoxy limits your kind have been imposing on us for millennia. The limits that have stunted us and reduced us to helpless victims; limits that have condemned billions to imprisonment by the Olyix. The blind subservience that means I wouldn’t be far wrong to call you a traitor to our species.’
‘Enough!’ Kenelm shouted, hir fist slamming down on the table. ‘Matías, she is to be placed under cabin arrest until we can convene a full council.’
‘No,’ Yirella shouted, equally loud. ‘You don’t have that authority. Your captaincy is a lie.’
‘Yi,’ Tilliana said desperately. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I have a question for our captain,’ Yirella said. ‘One question, that’s all. You’re not afraid of that, Captain, are you?’
‘Get her out of here,’ Kenelm ordered Matías.
Yirella smiled viciously. ‘How old are you?’
‘What?’
Her neural interface ordered the screen to display a single image, one she’d copied from volume five of the Falkon terraforming books. Five tall omnia smiling at the camera as they stood on a large expanse of windswept marshland, with a grey sea in the background. Equipment cases
were open around their feet.
‘Oh, shit,’ Kenelm whispered.
‘What is this?’ a confused Alexandre asked.
‘That,’ Yirella said, ‘is expedition team eighteen B-three of the Falkon Terraforming Office biosphere establishment division. They’re taking samples in a coastal marsh to measure the propagule density in the sediment. Important work, given Falkon was only just ending phase three of its terraforming process at the time, two thousand and twenty-eight years ago.’
Tilliana looked at the image, turned to look at Kenelm, turned back to the screen. ‘Fuck the Saints! It’s you.’
London
12th February 2231
‘I saw the sky yesterday afternoon,’ Horatio said wistfully. ‘We had a break in the clouds for about five minutes. I’d forgotten how strange that blue is – so light but with a depth to it, as if it’s not really there. It was quite a revelation looking at it, even if it was only for a short time.’
Gwendoline’s image on the screen gave him a mournful smile. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’
‘They say that’s the third time the clouds have parted this year. I missed the first two. They were only for a few seconds.’ He sat back on his flat’s settee, enjoying the memory. Outside, the sky above the shield was darkening to twilight. But inside, the ceiling lights shone brightly. He was still mildly surprised every time he switched them on and they actually worked. In the twenty-five years since Blitz2 had ended, London had only been without a public supply of power for four years while the settled worlds gradually improved their support to Earth. He suspected he shared the same impressed perplexity Londoners of the 1920s had experienced when they changed from gas lighting to electric bulbs. Will such a marvel last? Those early years had been a profound lesson in how so many privileges had been taken for granted.
With the power back on, printers worked again (after a great deal of maintenance), and eventually they even got community recycling systems organized. The only real production issue was food. Organic base fluids were rationed for another five years until a host of new offworld factories were completed. Now you could print most dishes again, though some flavourings were still hard to come by. In the last ten years, London had undergone a re-greening, with the long-dead gardens being revived and vegetables planted. Parks that had irrigation systems had even seen grass shoots rising again – all because water was now available in quantity. The Thames was flushed clean every fortnight when they opened a section of the shield and allowed the ominously warm river water to flow through the city once more. He’d even seen some banana trees flourishing along the banks recently.
Heat under the curving shield remained tropical. Even without the Deliverance ships firing their energy beams at every city shield, pumping terawatts of raw energy into the atmosphere every day, global temperatures hadn’t dropped by more than a couple of degrees since the Salvation of Life had been forced to retreat. There was nothing anyone could do about that except turn up the aircon, pumping their home’s thermal load out into the city’s humid atmosphere. When the environmental technicians expanded a high-altitude aperture in the shield to let in some fresh air, it was as if a portal was opening into a pre-invasion desert.
‘Small steps,’ Gwendoline said.
She seemed oddly anxious – a strange mood for her. He didn’t quite understand it.
*
The last surprise she’d given him was three years ago, when she moved from Nashua to Pasobla in the Delta Pavonis system. But that at least was understandable; Loi had just announced that Eldlund was pregnant, and Gwendoline wasn’t going to miss out on being a part of her grandchild’s life. Besides, as she’d pointed out, ‘I can do the same job in Pasobla as I can here; their industrial systems have the same screw-ups as ours. I’ve already spoken to the Utopial exodus project committee, and they’ll accept me as a level-two citizen.’
‘Level two, huh?’ he’d teased. ‘That low?’
‘Shouldn’t take me more than a month to work my way up to level one. And they’ll accept you, too.’
That had soured the mood. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he’d said, as he always did. Keep kicking the can down the road long enough . . .
‘I’ve already got authorization to bring the portal with me.’
‘Dear God, how did you work that?’
Her lips had twitched in a taunting grin. ‘Level two, remember. It’s part of my golden handshake package.’
‘There are no corporate executives any more.’
‘Yeah, keep telling yourself that.’
He’d never been so tempted to join her and Loi and Eldlund. That night, he’d even packed a suitcase. A pathetically small one. But then he got a call from one of the community centres. Sorry to call late, but we’ve got some scheduling problems that need sorting. You always handle this kind of thing so well, Horatio. People depended on him.
The suitcase remained packed. It sat right there in the cupboard next to the case with the portal. Ready. Because one day he would join his family in their safe haven. One day soon . . .
‘Not so much steps as wading,’ he now countered. ‘The sea level has risen another ten centimetres since November. It came over the Thurrock rampart last week. Even if the air ever does stabilize enough for us to turn the shield off, half the city would vanish underwater.’
‘Yes,’ Gwendoline said. ‘I saw the projections. They’re worried about New York – enough that they’ve increased the city’s evacuation rate to New Washington.’
‘I’m sure they’re loving that in the Billionaire Belt.’ Again, he was picking up on how distracted she was. I don’t get this. What isn’t she saying?
Her smile chided him gently. ‘The last of the Belt’s original habitants portalled out seven years ago.’
‘How many have you dispatched now?’
‘Classified. But all the settled systems are building exodus habitats at a phenomenal rate.’
‘Really?’
‘Relatively, yes. Consider the size of a habitat, and the ancillary systems we have to send with them. And they have got to work, Horatio. At heart, they’re starships – beyond help if anything goes wrong.’
‘I don’t doubt you.’
Gwendoline leant in closer to the camera, giving him a better view of her face. It was remarkably unchanged, but then she’d never looked her age even back when the invasion happened. Zangari money had seen to that. And her anti-ageing regimen had continued without a break when she went to live on Nashua, which was set up to allow Zangaris to carry on their sumptuous lifestyle with very little change. Then after that, Pasobla had excellent medical facilities, especially for level-two citizens. Just looking at those fine mid-twenties features made him so aware of how many decades he was showing now. Thinning, greying hair, the gradually expanding waistline, the old-man grunt every time he heaved himself up from a chair. His memory not as sharp as it used to be, and now he was having his altme monitor his diet carefully, keeping the carb intake down to avoid full-blown type-two diabetes and the insulin gland that would entail – assuming he could even get on the implant list. If it wasn’t for his bicycle trips keeping him relatively fit, he knew he would have piled on weight and related problems. Visits to the gym had become more and more of an effort, and he didn’t know when he’d last been for a jog along London’s streets; he kept telling himself it was too difficult now everyone was on boardez and bikes and resurrected taxez and modified trollez. It was like the roads of the early twenty-first century out there, for heaven’s sake. No portals, of course; there never would be again. There wasn’t that much power to spare from the settled worlds. The hubs, loops and radials of Connexion’s London transport network were a legend of time past that they told the children about.
‘Utopials are good people,’ Gwendoline said. ‘I like it here. You will, too.’
‘Gwen—’
‘Horatio,’ she said firmly, ‘it really is time for you to leave London now.’
‘I can’t just a
bandon people. They depend on me.’
‘I depend on you.’
‘No. We have the memory of us. A beautiful memory – and a memory I’m so profoundly grateful I possess.’
‘Lacasta needs you.’
It was a blow so low, Horatio couldn’t speak for a moment. ‘Don’t.’
‘Sie’s nearly three now, and sie wants to meet hir grandfather, not just see him on a screen. Sie needs your arms around hir, for you to hug hir and love hir. Don’t deny hir that.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked, aghast. ‘I can’t leave. It wouldn’t be fair.’
‘You “checking your birth benefit” isn’t fair to us, your family. All it’s going to do is get you cocooned.’
‘I’m not virtue-sacrificing. I can see what’s happening.’
‘You can’t, Horatio. Trust me, you don’t know anything.’
‘Yeah? The Londoners who are leaving? They’re chosen carefully.’
‘It’s random. A lottery.’
‘A lottery by area. It’s always evenly distributed, sure – always someone from the next street, someone either you know or a friend’s friend knows and talks about. It’s deliberate, tunnelling down into the personal, to give the illusion that you’re going to be leaving real soon now. To keep the hope alive.’
‘Without hope, Earth would have fallen into anarchy. You can’t afford that, not living under shields.’
‘I know. But you can’t save us all.’
‘I can save you.’
‘And if everyone like me leaves?’
‘Sorry, Horatio, my darling, but you’re not that unique.’
He hunched forwards, hating that their talks had come to this. At the start of Blitz2 he’d felt so empowered, staying and helping those who needed it – which was just about everyone. He had a purpose that would never have existed if he’d followed Gwendoline to Nashua. But that had faded as first years, then eventually decades, flowed past. People were coping now; the city was working again. It was a very different type of economics from what had come before – the ultimate closed-cycle manufacturing. If a printer needed raw material, it had to come from disassembling something – especially if you needed specialist compounds. That took organization and cooperation at a local level, which was the area Horatio excelled in. It had kept him busy for years.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 20