‘If you go to the enclave now and lose, the humans who are safe here will be hunted down,’ Kenelm said. ‘This is not your decision.’
‘Of course not. That is why I propose that the entire fleet should finish this voyage and go to the neutron star. Only then will we have all the facts. I have opened a route to the last opportunity we will have for at least a millennium. This is it, our peak. If the neutron star humans have gone away to their own version of Sanctuary, our choice is simple: we must follow the Neána option and leave the Olyix for future generations – once again. If there are people at the neutron star, however, and they wish to confront the enclave with whatever weapons they have created, then our choice opens up again. Those who want to join with them can do so; those who no longer have an appetite for conflict – for the FinalStrike – can fly into the night and be safe.’
Dellian heard Cinrea mutter, ‘Smart,’ under hir breath.
Alexandre conferred briefly with Napar and Illathan, then stood and faced the audience. ‘The captains are not in favour of dispatching a single ship to the neutron star,’ sie said. ‘After all we have gone through, this fleet should face our destination together. Therefore, we have a clear choice. Either this fleet diverts from our current vector and settles for a quiet life between the stars, or we travel on to the neutron star and see what awaits us there. Please consider these points, discuss it with your friends; Yirella and Kenelm will both be available if you wish to ask them more questions, as am I and the other captains. We will hold an advisory vote in five days. And may the Saints grant us wisdom.’
London
12th February 2231
The bicycle was a compromise for Horatio. He had to physically visit the various community exchange centres he helped manage, and without the old portal hubs distance was a problem. His flat was in Bermondsey, which put three of them close enough for him to walk to, but another was in Kennington, and he was currently helping out at two in Lambeth. He refused to use a cabez – not that he could afford one. So bike it was.
His flat was on the second floor in a block on the corner of Grange Road, giving him a view out over Bermondsey Spa Gardens. Over the last four years, a group of volunteers had progressively reseeded the park with grass. It didn’t have an irrigation system when they began, so they’d installed tanks and slowly laid out a network of old drainpipes scavenged from nearby buildings. Dead and desiccated London plane trees and sycamores still stood silent sentry duty around the perimeter, but now the grass provided a welcome emerald blanket in the midst of the urban desert. It was a popular venue at all times of the day.
As soon as the call with Gwendoline ended, he got two cases out of the cupboard. The first contained all the essentials he’d packed three years ago – which on reflection were now either utterly worthless or embarrassingly stupid, and too many were both. The second contained the portal, a simple twenty-centimetre circle with a grey pseudosurface. His altme confirmed it was still operational – not that he doubted Gwendoline, but it was becoming critical now. He set it up vertically, ready to thread up as soon as he got back. Probably the last portal left that you have to thread up; the settled worlds all use expansion rim models now.
When he started pedalling along Bacon Grove, a jazz band was playing to an appreciative audience on the old basketball court; they’d settled in for the evening with picnics and wine. Even now, London had few working streetlights, and none at all down Bacon Grove, which was so narrow it didn’t even have a clear path. He had to rely on the bike’s dynamo-powered headlight and his own memory. Bacon Grove narrowed to a short bollarded path that quickly opened out onto Curtis Street. A couple of hundred metres later he was at the back of the old business park.
The big brick and carbon-panel warehouses had been an ideal place to site the community exchange centre. Horatio looked up at the walls with their brown cladding of dead ivy, so old now the leaves were brittle and crumbling from entropy. He felt both elated and depressed. Exchanges like this had achieved so much, helped so many. Now he was going to abandon it, fleeing to the safety of the settled worlds and exodus. So what was the point?
For a long moment he stood there immersed in self-pity. Then, angry at himself for such weakness, he pushed the small rear door open. As soon as he was inside, embraced by the noise and smell of the recycling systems, those treacherous doubts vanished. He knew it had all been worthwhile.
Once power had returned to the city’s grid, and domestic printers came online again, people were left with the problem of finding supplies of processed compounds needed for fabrication – of anything. London’s economy now was so very different from the one he’d grown up with. That had been the one outcome of Blitz2 that delighted him. The Universal culture’s hyper-capitalist consumerism that worshipped product and status was gone, replaced by a kinder, more thoughtful system – and best of all, one completely community oriented.
Horatio had been one of the pioneers in setting up an exchange. His time with the Benjamin agency meant he knew kids who recycled stuff a long way outside any corporate licensing or monitoring by the Dangerous Substance Inspectorate. They built their semi-legal products for untraceable cryptoken payments – mainly for London’s major crime families or local flea stalls. It was an underground market that he knew he could bring out into the open and adapt to help people regain a reasonable standard of living.
Over the years he’d helped expand the concept, and now it was fundamental to London’s post-Blitz2 way of life. Nothing was imported any more, outside of essential organic fluids and pellets for food. So people would bring their old and defunct printed items to the exchange, receiving local recrypt-tokens in payment. The exchange would recycle the products in huge Clemson vats or metal-eating geobactor silos, which the community teams had built and maintained. Then the various raw sludges would be processed in more conventional refineries to produce valuable compounds that could be bought for recrypt-tokens and used in the printers again.
At first, the newly refurbished printers turned out simple household components that had failed due to long disuse – primarily water pumps and filters. Horatio was always amazed what a difference restoring drinking water had made to everyone’s standard of living. Then, with fundamentals available again, new clothes started to appear, along with a plethora of solar cells coating walls and roofs.
Most districts had exchanges, each with their own tokens. That was one of the hardest parts of the enterprise to ratify, so these days Horatio had become a kind of local treasury official, overseeing the various recrypt-tokens and ensuring they were regulated sensibly, setting costs and making sure those same innovative kids didn’t forge or abuse the system. He knew he’d been reasonably successful by how much he was in demand.
‘A proper corporate financier,’ Gwendoline would tease him during their calls. But she advised how the trade could be structured and secured against mishandling. Good advice, he admitted, as she explained how it was derived from her original designs for Corbyzan’s economy – her project to build a society that mirrored Utopial post-scarcity society but one based on Universal policy. It remained a source of mild shame that he’d never quite realized just how knowledgeable his wife was in her field.
He wheeled the bike past the tall cylindrical vats that churned with genetically modified microbes, nesting amid a chaotic jumble of mismatched pipes. Everything was scavenged, everything was repurposed. But it worked. He waved at the duty crew who clambered amid the valves and regulators, armed with signal tracers and pliers and hammers, making sure the whole thing ran smoothly. Even at this hour, the exchange still had a few customers. The vats and silos ran twenty-four/seven, and people kept odd hours under the shield.
Horatio had insisted on setting up a cafe in the warehouse’s old management offices, maintaining its importance as social centre for the community as well as a vital resource. The staff were finally starting to close the counter down when he arrived. Maria O’Rourke was there, as he’d known she would be,
putting the day’s unsold cupcakes into a fridge. His altme didn’t even have to splash the shift schedules; he knew them by heart. He and Maria had been together for three years now. She used to manage a pub in Walworth before Blitz2, then drifted through various volunteer jobs until she wound up helping in the exchange cafe. They’d argued a lot at first, because she had her own way of doing things and wasn’t his type at all. But love under the shield was a strange thing, and oh so welcome in such an abnormal existence.
Maria caught sight of him and smiled, a smile that soon faded as she puzzled what he was doing here now, when she was due to walk back to his flat in another twenty minutes. Then she saw his drawn expression, the worry he knew he couldn’t hide.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked.
That was when he caught sight of Niastus and Jazmin sitting at one of the tables, where Jaz was nursing their four-month-old baby. Horatio wanted to close his eyes and weep. Along with Martin, it was Niastus who managed the recycling machinery in the exchange; he and Jaz had contributed so much to the community. Horatio looked up at the heavens in dismay.
‘Horatio?’ Maria asked, more insistent now.
Horatio made a decision. She’ll kill me, but what else can I do . . .?
‘Come with me,’ he told the three of them. ‘No questions. I won’t ask again.’ He leant the bike against a table and turned around, walking for the door he’d just come in through. This way it was all down to them.
All he could see was Gwendoline’s face, lips shrinking towards disapproval. ‘The universe is a neutral canvas,’ she’d told him once. ‘It has no intrinsic good, only that which you paint onto it.’
Surely this counts as doing something good.
Maria caught up with him as he opened the door, grabbing his arm. ‘What is going on?’
‘We’re leaving. Please, don’t ask questions. Just trust me, okay.’
‘Leaving?’ Jaz said. ‘Leaving where?’
Niastus took her arm, his gaze never leaving Horatio. ‘Just go with it,’ he told her.
‘But . . .’
‘Come on,’ Horatio said insistently.
They made it to the old warehouse’s rear door. Horatio waved to the crew busy with a leaking manifold, feeling like shit. The one thing he couldn’t work out would be Gwendoline’s reaction to him bringing these people with him. The kids and their baby, okay, she’d deride him for being a sentimental old fool. True enough. But Maria? What would happen after they got offplanet? Would he have to shake hands and wish her well on her way? More likely Gwendoline will throw me out of the nearest airlock. But she said I could bring somebody. Was she kidding? Fuck! It was done now.
The door shut behind them, leaving them by themselves on the crumbling tarmac of a neglected street, without any lights. Horatio realized he’d relied on the bike headlight to get here. And he’d left the bike because it wasn’t practical, and – ‘Shit.’ He was normally so good at thinking things through. His altme activated the light amplifier function in his tarsus lenses, and the road became a little clearer, its surfaces speckled in indigo static.
‘Hey,’ Maria said calmly. She slid her arm around him. ‘Want to tell us what’s going on?’
‘We have to go,’ he said. ‘To my flat. First.’
‘Why?’ Jaz asked.
‘There’s a way out. And I think we’re going to—’ Gwendoline’s icon splashed into his tarsus lens, emergency coded. Horatio’s skin chilled down at the sight of it. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘Oh, God, Horatio,’ Gwendoline said. ‘They’re in orbit!’
‘What?’
‘The Olyix. Their wormholes just opened above Earth; they’re only five thousand kilometres up. The orbital sensors didn’t even detect the carrier ships coming through the Sol system. Resolution ships are flying out like a bloody locust plague. The first ones are already in the upper atmosphere.’
‘No fucking way!’ he gasped, and looked up in shock. The murky shield curved above the city, as mundane and eternal as always. Its unnaturally solid air made the crescent moon an insubstantial shimmer in the east, above Dartford.
‘They’re coming for all of us,’ Gwendoline said, her voice weak with fright. ‘Wormholes have opened at Delta Pavonis and 82 Eridani, the shield over the capital on Eta Cassiopeiae has already failed. And – oh Christ – Rangvlad has gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yes, we’ve lost all the interstellar portal links to Beta Hydri. We have to go, Horatio. Now. Pasobla is starting its countdown. I can’t stop it. Not even Ainsley can.’
‘Ainsley?’
‘Yes, he was here for some ultra-level security conference with Emilja. Now he’s going to have to come with us; there’s no way back to Nashua. For the love of God, Horatio, open the portal!’
‘I’m coming. I’ll be there in five minutes.’
‘Shit, 82 Eridani just went. Hurry!’
He looked at the others. ‘The Olyix are here. I have a way offworld. I can take the four of you, but it’s now or never. You coming?’
‘Yes.’ Niastus took the baby from a trembling Jaz. ‘Do we run?’
‘Fuck, yeah,’ Horatio said. As he said it, the city’s sparse aurora of light died. Streetlights went off, along with all the house lights that didn’t have battery reserves. Behind them, the community exchange fell silent apart from a loud metallic buzzing of unbalanced pumps spinning erratically into shutdown.
‘Christ on a crutch,’ Maria exclaimed. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’
‘No. Come on.’ He started jogging towards Curtis Street. The others kept up with him, so he increased the pace. Voices emerged up ahead, questions shouted between rooms in the terraced houses. Curtains were opened, revealing lights that still had battery power; people pressed themselves against the glass to see what was happening.
Then London’s always-precarious network crashed.
It was stupid, but Horatio responded by looking upwards again, as if appealing to ancient gods. Vast lightning webs seethed far overhead, cracking the sky open. He squinted into the frenzied glare. Something was moving at its heart – a dark-grey elongated oval shape that just kept growing. The lightning forks stabbing out of it were permanent now, clawing at the shield and expanding to create a single jagged sheet. It was if daylight had returned; the whole gleamed under the terrible forces emitted by the huge alien ship.
‘Is that . . .?’ Maria gasped.
‘Yeah.’ He’d slowed to take in the shocking manifestation; now he surged forwards again, crossing into Curtis Street. It’s only a few hundred metres. Please!
The light changed abruptly, shading to a disturbingly intense violet. Horatio had hoped he’d never see that light ever again: devil-sky. Huge patches of the shield were fluorescing from whatever beams the ship was firing down. It was much brighter than during Blitz2, and getting brighter.
The shield would never hold against that, he knew.
Jaz was whimpering as she and Niastus stumbled along together, shielding their eyes from the lightstorm above. She was young, only nineteen, Horatio remembered; Blitz2 had ended before she was even born. So she would’ve listened to her parents’ stories with healthy teenage scepticism and boredom. It was tough when we were young, you kids today have it so easy. Now reality was crashing against her senses with a brutality she’d never known.
He veered over towards her. ‘It’s okay. Five minutes and we’ll be out of here. Just hang on, yes?’
She nodded frantically, clutching at Niastus – her only dependable rock in the storm erupting around her.
The devil-sky light vanished. Horatio felt a stab of pure panic, like boiling adrenalin flooding his brain. There was only one reason for that. He almost didn’t dare look upwards yet again, but . . .
The air provided a foretaste of what was about to come. There was still no wind, not even a breeze, but it seemed to squeeze him. Then he saw it, something moving in the sky – a dark column like a twister, but broken into segments. And moving
fast, like planes used to, already several kilometres high. He stared in amazement. The apex of it was a crumpled building, bigger than the community exchange behind him, spinning its way upwards, shedding hunks of wall, its panel roof twisting and disintegrating. Below it was a tail of debris: smaller buildings, inverted cascades of earth, even tree trunks. Something had reached down from the sky and pulled them up.
Instinctively he knew what that building had been: shield generator. The Resolution ship had somehow reversed gravity and pulled the city’s only defence out by its roots. He spun around, seeing a couple of similar columns, already peaking, the debris starting to curve groundward.
‘The wind’s going to hit,’ Horatio shouted. ‘Find something to hold on to.’ He looked along the street. There wasn’t much. A few dead trees, some iron bollards at the far end, where the road narrowed to feed into Bacon Grove. ‘Those!’ He sprinted off towards the bollards. Above him the furious barrage of sheet lightning began to calm. With the glare reducing he could see there were two Resolution ships hovering over London. Crap, they’re huge. Clouds began to boil around their edges, slamming down towards the city.
Wind was already blowing fast down Bacon Grove when they reached the bollards. Horatio and Maria clung to each other around one of the posts, while Niastus and Jaz hugged tight, with their baby between them. Horatio braced himself as the noise of the storm’s leading edge impacting the ground struck. It was bone-shaking, riding a pressure wave that was almost strong enough to pull them apart. The heat was something else he hadn’t anticipated, making it hard to inhale.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 22