by Paul McAuley
Cash was back in the catbird seat of combat, but he was painfully aware that he was operating at only ordinary human speed, that he wasn’t merged with the shuttle’s systems and senses, inhabiting every corner of them, but was locked in the bone box of his skull, peering at displays painted with virtual light in front of his eyes, fumbling and jerking at a control yoke that introduced annoying lags and imprecisions. It was like trying to perform a delicate surgical procedure using a marionette equipped with forks and spoons. A singleship flown by a goddamn rookie could pop up and take him out before he knew it was there.
But nothing challenged the convoy as it slid eastwards through the lunar night. Cash felt a throb of nostalgia as he passed above landmarks familiar from the many exercises he’d flown while testing J-1 and J-2 singleships. Everything softened by Earthlight and drenched in shadow. The sooty plain of Oceanus Procellarum. The great ray system radiating from Copernicus Crater like a snowball spattered on a black windshield. Rumpled highland terrain around the dark lava seas of Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Fecunditas . . .
As they passed over Mare Tranquillitatis, Avernus said, ‘That’s where it all began.’ The only time she spoke during the entire flight.
High above Mare Smythii, at the eastern edge of the nearside, Cash fired up the shuttle’s motor to put it in lunar orbit. The other ships followed in close formation, travelling with a velocity of 0.8 kilometres per second and an altitude of two hundred kilometres amidst a cloud of proxies that broadcast bogus IDs and electronic chatter to confuse any potential attackers. Earth set behind them and the sun shot up above the curved horizon, starkly illuminating the ancient battlefield of the farside. There were no dark seas here, no highland plains. Just the unmodified remnant of an inhumanly vast and unyielding bombardment that had left the surface smashed and riven with craters of every size. Strings and chains of craters, craters overlapping craters, smaller craters punched into the floors of larger craters or lancing their lips. A pitiless and trackless waste lacking any human scale and failing every definition of beauty.
Alder talked briefly with someone in the prison facility, then told Cash that it was safe to make his approach. Cash sent several proxies speeding ahead, just in case. They glittered like fugitive stars as they diminished into the black sky, and after they had passed directly above the facility without being challenged or attacked, Cash’s shuttle and the other ships briefly fired their motors and committed themselves to descent trajectories.
As the slumped and battered rim of Korolev Crater drifted beneath the shuttle’s keel, Cash assumed manual control, ready to punch out if the defence system so much as squinted at him. He was falling in a long arc, passing over terraced slumping and lobate sheets of mass-wasted material on the inner side of the wall and sliding out across the floor of the crater, which was as pockmarked and riven as everywhere else on the farside. He used attitude jets to bump above over contours, concentrating fiercely, trying to compensate for the annoying lag between thought and action. The navigation system lit up with flight-guidance arrows and lines as it synchronised with the facility’s traffic control, and then he saw a gleam like ice at the horizon, the facility’s tent like a faceted insect eye socketed in a small and perfectly circular crater.
Alder was talking to someone on the ground again. Cash and the other pilots waited for go/no-go, balancing their ships on attitude jets, letting them drift as sideways, until Alder said that it was safe to land. Cash told the other pilots he’d go in first, notched up his velocity, overshot the dome of the tent, spun his bird around, and stooped towards the landing field in a flare of retrojets that blew long windrows of dust from the ground.
Forty minutes later, wearing paper coveralls over their suit-liners, Cash Baker, Alder Hong-Owen and Avernus were sitting at a table in a conference room in the administration blockhouse, facing the European governor of the facility, Ella Lindeberg, and the acting head of security, Colonel Carlos Hondo-Ibargüen. Ella Lindeberg, a pale, slim, austere woman, did most of the talking. Explaining that the prison had been set up as an experiment in self-government: trusties overseen by guards employed by the Brazilian and European administration had policed the prisoners, who’d grown their own food and maintained facilities within the prison’s tent. Shortly after the revolution had begun in Greater Brazil, the governors from the Peixoto and Nabuco families and other senior Brazilian officials had taken off for Athena. The prisoners had subdued the trusties, seized control of the airlocks, shut down the surveillance system and the system that controlled their security implants, and locked the administration out of the controls for the prison’s fission pile and the life-support systems of both the prison tent and the administration blockhouse. Threatened with loss of power and air, and with more than twenty guards held hostage inside the prison, the administration had come to an agreement with the prisoners. The prisoners would be allowed to control everything inside the tent, and the administration would not attempt to regain it by main force. The stand-off had lasted for almost two weeks now. The prisoners couldn’t escape because they lacked pressure suits; Ella Lindeberg had been instructed by her superiors to maintain order until a peaceful transition could be negotiated.
‘My government was always a minor partner in this enterprise,’ she said. ‘It is happy to cede authority to you so long as you guarantee safe passage for all personnel.’
‘I don’t have any kind of authority,’ Alder said, ‘but you’re certainly welcome to leave.’
‘I thought you represented the Brazilian government,’ Ella Lindeberg said.
Alder laughed. ‘There isn’t any government at present. But I suppose I can put you in contact with someone senior to the colonel. Will that do?’
‘There is one problem,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. A burly man with dark brown skin and black hair trimmed in a square topknot of the kind favoured by marines. Clasping his big hands tightly on the table in front of him, clearly embarrassed. ‘It concerns the OSS detachment and a modification to the prison’s air plant that the prisoners uncovered. If activated, it would have increased the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the air of their living quarters to a lethal level. The OSS had sealed orders instructing them to use it if they lost control of the prison. The prisoners introduced a work-around, and informed us about it after the negotiations were successfully concluded.’
‘I want you to know that I knew nothing about this,’ Ella Lindeberg said. ‘Nor did the colonel, or any of the people under his direct command.’
‘I arrested all the members of the OSS detachment,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. ‘Confined them to quarters. The problem is this: what do you want to do with them?’
Alder said, ‘Did they try to use this modification against the prisoners? ’
‘The logs show that they didn’t,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. ‘Although logs can of course be altered.’
‘But you have no evidence that they were altered?’
‘No, sir. We lack the necessary forensic expertise.’
‘And no one in the OSS has confessed.’
‘Every one of them claims to know nothing about it.’
‘The orders were still sealed?’
‘They seemed to be.’
‘Then they are free to go,’ Alder said. ‘It isn’t for us to judge what people may or may not have done under orders from the old regime. Before we’re through, we’re going to have to forgive many things. Either that, or turn a large portion of the country into a prison camp.’
‘Things have changed, of course,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. ‘I’m happy to accept that.’
‘Things have changed and will continue to change for some time yet,’ Alder said.
Alder, Avernus, Cash Baker and the crews of the other shuttles walked in through the main airlock of the prison tent unescorted, dressed in pressure suits and carrying their fishbowl helmets, stepping out into a loading area with a small crowd waiting in front of flimsy-looking storage sheds. Cash had gone
toe-to-toe against the Outers in the Quiet War, but this was the first time he’d met any of them. Tall, seriously skinny men and women dressed in grey coveralls with numbers stencilled across chests and backs, dignified and calm and polite, moving forward and shaking hands with their rescuers. Avernus and Alder went off with a dozen of them to negotiate terms of surrender.
By now, the crews had begun to bring in sleds carrying pressure suits and other supplies. Cash was helping to unload them when Avernus returned and told him that she needed his assistance. ‘A man is gravely ill. He must be evacuated as soon as possible.’
‘Someone you know?’
‘My daughter and I once encountered him. Please. If I am to have any chance of saving him we must do this now.’
In among the racks of pressure suits and other supplies were several of the fat clamshells used for moving injured people: coffins with lifepacks. Cash wheeled one alongside Avernus as she led him to Trusty Town’s clinic. She asked him if he knew anything of spies disguised as Outers and planted by the Brazilians in Outer cities before the war.
‘I don’t remember everything that happened around then,’ Cash said. ‘I have holes in my memory. I guess I always will.’
‘They were creations of Alder’s mother. Trained to infiltrate and sabotage our cities.’
‘If this guy is one of them, what’s he doing here?’
‘He told me that he was working for the Brazilians, but he defected. He also told me that he planted some kind of spyware in the place where my daughter and I lived,’ Avernus said. ‘And that later on he tried to kidnap us. This was in Paris, Dione, just before the war. The city’s mayor had arrested us, and many others involved in the peace and reconciliation movement. We were being held in a prison outside the city. When the war began and Paris was attacked, someone broke in and knocked out the guards. My daughter overpowered him, and we freed the rest of the prisoners and left him there. This man says that he remembers her. That she was very quick and strong, and stabbed him with a tranquilliser dart. That’s certainly what happened, and only a few people saw it, and most of them are dead . . .
‘Well, he meant us harm, once upon a time. Myself and my daughter. And now I am going to do my best to save his life. What would you call that?’
‘Mercy, I guess.’
‘Mercy. Yes. Why not?’
The guy was in a bad way. Feverish and barely conscious, deep bruises mottling the pale skin of his torso, his left leg encased from ankle to thigh in an inflatable cast. The woman who’d been caring for him, Bel Glise, helped Cash load him into the clamshell, and trotted alongside it as Cash and Avernus wheeled it back to the airlock, telling a long and complicated story about the murder of two mathematicians who had created a back door into the security system as part of an escape plot, the death of a trusty (‘The beast Jealott’), and the murder of Trusty Town’s medical technician, the sick man’s only friend. It seemed that the sick man had been badly injured when he’d confronted the killer, who had been one of the guards and also some kind of spy.
Cash didn’t know what to believe. While he was waiting for transportation to his shuttle, he told Alder Hong-Owen that the injured man, Felice Gottschalk, could just as easily be the killer. ‘He could have murdered those two guys because he wanted to use their escape plan. And then he murdered the trusty and the guard because they got in his way.’
Alder grew thoughtful, saying, ‘My mother was involved with at least two secret projects before the war. Both were located on the Moon, and both had something to do with ectogenic breeding programmes. She grew babies in artificial wombs, and tweaked them. She didn’t give me many details, but I know that one led to the development of the fusion motor that gave us such an advantage.’
‘I flew her here once,’ Cash said, startled by the memory. ‘A long, long time ago. Picked her up from some place in the Antarctic.’
Alder gave him a strange look. ‘About a year before the war?’
‘Something like that. Yeah, just before I went out to the Saturn System. Funny how I can remember some things and not others.’
‘There was some kind of crisis with one of her projects on the Moon,’ Alder said. ‘She returned in a foul temper. Something had badly frightened her, but she never talked about it.’
‘So this guy, he really could be some kind of monster?’
‘He could be my brother,’ Alder said. ‘My mother is a brilliant woman, but she has a monstrous ego. She would have found it amusing to use her own eggs or somatic cells to produce her ectogenes . . . In any case, we can’t let him fall into the hands of the Europeans, can we? Take him, and take Avernus too. She’s too preoccupied at present to be of much help.’
‘I think all this reminds her of what happened to her daughter,’ Cash said.
‘I think so, too. I’ll stay behind and deal with the evacuation of the guards and the prison administrators. It’s going to involve much delicate negotiation, but fortunately my mother gifted me with the ability to charm people into doing the right thing. Strange, isn’t it, how things work out?’
‘It’s a small world,’ Cash said, ‘but I wouldn’t like to be the guy who had to paint it.’
He flew east and north, crossing the northern edge of Hertzsprung Crater. Earth, half-full, rising ahead of him as he came around the near side. Above the western margin of Oceanus Procellarum he fired up the fusion motor, a brief hard burn to take the shuttle out of lunar orbit, then throttled back to a steady 0.2 g.
A few minutes later there was a commotion in the passenger compartment. Cash switched to internal video and saw Felice Gottschalk hauling himself along the ladder strung along what was usually the ceiling of the compartment but was presently, because of the axis established by the thrust of acceleration, one of its walls. Felice Gottschalk moved quickly, dragging the stiff post of his injured leg, and Avernus was climbing after him, above the heads of the first batch of Outer evacuees, who were sitting upright in two short rows of acceleration couches.
The shuttle was flying itself. Cash retracted the restraint webbing of his couch and reached up and swung around, bracing himself on the bulkhead beside the hatchway. Felice Gottschalk looked straight up at him. His face was the colour of paper and beaded with sweat, and he held himself awkwardly against the ladder because the thumb and two fingers of his left hand were dislocated; he must have hurt himself when he’d pulled free from his restraints.
‘I mean no harm,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to see Earth.’
Below him, Avernus told Cash that it was all right.
Felice Gottschalk, staring past Cash at the narrow window on the left-hand side of the cabin, said, ‘I didn’t know she was so beautiful. I wanted to see her one time before I died.’
‘So did I,’ Avernus said, her voice soft and strange.
She persuaded Cash to help Felice Gottschalk settle in the spare acceleration couch. He sat awkwardly because of his broken leg, but seemed immune or oblivious to any discomfort as he gazed with rapt and mute wonder at Earth’s half-globe. He was smiling. Earthshine set sparks in his eyes.
Avernus told him that everything would be all right. ‘I don’t care who you are or what you did on Dione. The past is the past. All that matters to me is that you saved the prisoners from someone who meant them harm. You did the right thing by them, and I’ll try to do the right thing by you.’
Cash saw that Felice Gottschalk’s head had tilted towards his chest. ‘There isn’t anything you can do for him now,’ he said, and reached over and gently closed the dead man’s eyes.
9
As far as most of the Free Outers were concerned, the revolution in Greater Brazil changed nothing. The Jupiter and Saturn systems were still controlled by the TPA, and both General Nabuco at Jupiter and Euclides Peixoto at Saturn had refused to acknowledge the authority of the revolutionary government. Then the Free Outers received a message from Tommy Tabagee, inviting them to send representatives to Iapetus, guaranteeing free passage and a voice in a de
bate on the future of the Outer System organised by the PacCom government.
At the meeting held to discuss this news, Loc Ifrahim argued eloquently and with great force in favour of sending representatives. He said that this was a hinge point in history. The chains of power had been broken and reforged in Greater Brazil, and her people had gladly taken up the burden of their own destiny. For it was a burden. Freedom was a burden. It was not something that could be taken for granted. It had to be fought for, and protected with unsleeping vigilance. The Free Outers had been presented with the opportunity to take part in that great struggle. They could agree to accept the Pacific Community’s invitation, take part in the great task of making history, help the people of Earth and the people of the Outer System reconcile their differences and forge a common future. Or they could refuse it, and relegate themselves and their children to the margins of human civilisation and human history.
This was greeted with a hostile silence. After a few moments, Idriss Barr said that fine talk about forging the future was all very well, but the future meant nothing if they did not survive to see it; before plunging headlong into the unknown, they should wait and see whether or not this revolution was permanent, and what it meant for Greater Brazil and for the Jupiter and Saturn Systems. Mary Jeanrenaud vigorously agreed. They had come out here to make new worlds and new ways of living, she said. They should not be dragged back into the old ways, and they should certainly not be influenced by outsiders. More than a dozen other people expressed similar views, and by a simple show of hands it was decided that the Free Outers would wait to see how things fell out on Earth and whether it had any effect on the occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems before they committed to any kind of negotiations or discussions with outsiders.
Two days later Newt’s surveillance satellites picked up activity around Neptune: the Ghosts had launched four ships towards the Saturn System. A message sent from Triton, aimed at the Jupiter and Saturn Systems and relayed to the Free Outers by the PacCom settlement on Iapetus, made it clear that the Ghosts hadn’t accepted the invitation to talk. A long lecture about history and destiny laced with vicious diatribes against the sins of the TPA and the corruption and weakness of Earth and its peoples, it boiled down to a single warning: Quit our worlds or suffer the consequences. Either the Ghosts believed that the TPA was in disarray and might be defeated by a swift and bold attack, or this was some kind of suicide mission by fanatic martyrs, the first shot in a long war of attrition.