by Paul McAuley
The Brazilian ships were strung in a line a hundred thousand kilometres long that ran parallel to the projected path of the Ghost ships, and clouds of kinetic weapons and laser-cannon platforms and proxies and nuclear and EMP mines had been sown across the volume of space through which they would pass. The four ships were switching their mass drivers on and off at unpredictable intervals, altering their delta vee so that their trajectory couldn’t be precisely plotted, travelling one after the other in a sharply curved arc at a velocity of almost three thousand kilometres a second, about 0.1% the speed of light. Even though their arc stretched for some ten thousand kilometres end to end, it traversed the Brazilian picket line in a little over thirty-six seconds, smashing through a gauntlet of kinetic weapons and X-ray lasers and conventional and hydrogen-bomb explosions whose ragged flowers were still expanding and fading as the Ghost ships ploughed on.
The outer layers of the ice-shields of the first and second ships, which had been closest to the Brazilian picket line, were breaking up in large chunks. But the shields of the others, although cratered by the impacts of numerous kinetic weapons, were largely intact. One instant replay of a magnified section of the general view showed a trio of singleships targeting a Ghost ship as it swept past, firing X-ray lasers into the maw of its exhaust; another showed a swarm of proxies striking the Getûlio Dornelles Vargas, flares bursting across the big ship’s prow, fountains of debris expanding above rents in its hull; a third showed a kinetic weapon piercing the Flower of the Forest from stem to stern, exiting between the vent nozzles of its fusion-motor cluster in a massive plume of flame as glittering sprays of debris expanded from the shattered hull.
Attempts to raise anyone aboard the two Brazilian ships came to nothing. Beyond their shattered hulks, surviving singleships were frantically decelerating, attempting to kill their delta vee so that they could turn around and return to the Saturn System. The Ghost fleet ploughed on, less than nine hours from an encounter with Titan, and then with Saturn.
The first round of the battle for the Saturn System was over. The second would soon begin. Pacific Community ships accelerated outward, preparing to mount a last-ditch attack. Tugs and scows hastily converted to weapons platforms and piloted by remote control hung in synchronous orbits above the cities of the inhabited moons, and in and around the cities crews worked to make ground-based weaponry ready. On the top floor of the TPA administration building in Paris, strategy teams elaborated responses to every kind of scenario. There was still no general consensus about what the Ghosts planned to do. It still seemed most likely that they would slingshot around Titan and Saturn and pass straight through the system, heading inward to Jupiter or Mars or Earth, but as they passed they could aim kinetic weapons at TPA installations and the Outer cities, or release drones and proxies able to decelerate by ploughing deep into Saturn’s atmosphere and so achieve a variety of orbits amongst the rings and moons, waging war long after the Ghost fleet had passed on.
People kept coming up to Macy with questions. She couldn’t answer most of them; was amazed that she could answer any at all. She’d had already sent video of the Ghost ships running Euclides Peixoto’s picket line to Newt, and between interruptions she sent messages describing the ongoing discussions and speculations. He sent back that his surveillance satellites had spotted the H-bomb explosions, said that the Free Outers had held a debate and voted overwhelmingly to recognise the new government of Paris and to begin a dialogue with the TPA administration.
- Too little, too late if you ask me. But we can’t do much else. Even if we had the fuel it would take us nine weeks to get there.
- Stay in contact, Macy sent. And you might want to get ready to welcome a bunch of refugees if this goes bad.
She discovered that she was hungry, wolfed down a pouch of CHON yoghurt that tasted faintly of burnt rubber. The holo clock had been reset and was counting backwards towards the Ghost fleet’s encounter with Titan, less than an hour away. Arguments were breaking out across the crowded room. The Brazilian ambassador and Abbie Jones were standing in front of a memo space, talking to Tommy Tabagee and other members of the security council on Iapetus. Raphael, Sri Hong-Owen’s representative, had been discussing something with Pete Bakaleinikoff, and now they picked their way through the knots of people to Macy.
‘This one wants me to point the telescope cloud at the rings,’ Pete said. ‘Says something’s about to happen there that everyone needs to see.’
‘You must do it now, or you will miss it,’ Raphael said. Yo’s disturbingly beautiful, androgynous face was impossible to read. ‘And please, Macy, don’t ask me about what is going to happen. It is much easier to show it than to explain.’
The neuter had volunteered to come to Dione to help supervise the evacuation. Macy had wondered about yo’s motivation then, and now she felt a strong pang of unease. A cold snake uncoiling in her guts.
She said to Pete, ‘Will it take long to swing those telescopes around?’
The old man ran a hand over his pale freckled scalp. ‘Not long, no. But we’ll lose our best view of the Ghost fleet.’
‘At the moment, what is about to happen in the rings is more important,’ Raphael said. ‘There are other telescopes, of course. But yours is the most useful because it is above the plane of the rings.’
‘I guess it can’t do any harm to take a quick look,’ Macy said to Pete.
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘But you’re the one in charge.’
She laughed: a nervous bark. ‘The hell I am.’
‘Of course you are,’ Pete said, and hooked on his spex and began to cut and caress the air with his hands.
The big memo space in the centre of the room turned black and then displayed a view of Saturn’s butterscotch globe and the sunlit side of the rings curved around it: a broad bow intricately grooved with threads and bands of varying brightness and colour, tans and creams and spectral greys incised by thin black gaps and the wide sooty stripe of the Cassini Division.
Raphael laughed, stepped towards the memo space with slinky grace, and pointed to a cluster of tiny bright lights near the Keeler Gap, at the outer edge of the A Ring. Five, ten, twenty point sources that were clearly moving outward.
‘Ships!’ several people said, and someone else said it wasn’t possible, there were too many of them and besides, they were accelerating too quickly to be ships.
‘Whatever they are, they’re on an interception course,’ Pete said.
He opened a window that showed a schematic of the inner system, drew an arc that curved away from Saturn and swept out to connect with the track of the Ghosts’ fleet just before it encountered Titan.
Everyone in the room was watching the memo space now. Raphael turned to look at them all, yo’s smile broad and happy, yo’s hands raised as if to bestow a blessing. ‘This is a gift from Sri Hong-Owen,’ the neuter said. ‘She has chosen to sacrifice these seeds for the immediate good.’
‘Seeds? They’re propeller moonlets,’ a woman said. ‘I’m picking up changes in ring-particle streaming right now.’
Macy asked Pete what the woman meant; Pete explained that there were thousands of irregular bodies between thirty and a hundred metres in diameter orbiting in a thin belt in the A Ring, remnants of a small moon shattered by collision with an asteroid or comet. Their gravity caused characteristic patterns of turbulence in the ring plane, like the wakes of so many speedboats.
Raphael waited out a clamour of questions, then lifted yo’s hands again and said that Sri Hong-Owen’s people had not had time to turn all the propeller moonlets in the A Ring into seeds, but they had transformed a significant proportion.
‘If the first wave does not overwhelm the Ghosts’ defences, then we have more than enough to try again.’
People started to ask more questions, and Raphael told them that everything would soon become clear. Meanwhile they should get back to work. ‘We don’t yet know the Ghosts’ intentions, so our best hope is to prepare for eve
ry conceivable possibility.’
‘I don’t know whether to punch you or kiss you,’ Macy told the neuter.
‘Sri asked me to not to reveal this unless it was necessary,’ Raphael said.
‘And you always obey your mistress’s whims.’
‘They may sometimes seem strange or inappropriate, but they are never whims.’
Pete Bakaleinikoff put up a blurred video grab of one of the moonlets powering away from the rings. An irregular potato-shaped chunk of pitted ice wrapped with a helical band of fullerene composite, some kind of sheath or cap at one end, a cluster of mass drivers at the other. A scale bar put it at around eighty metres along its main axis, roughly forty metres across. Calculations by various hands started to scroll up beside it. The seed was accelerating at more than 20 g and would consume a significant proportion of its mass as it powered out to Titan, but it would still mass some 60,000 tonnes when it intercepted the Ghost fleet, and would be travelling at a relative velocity in excess of thirty-five kilometres per second.
‘The impact of just one of those things should punch right through their shields,’ a woman said.
‘They could retaliate before they’re hit,’ another woman said. ‘We can’t rule out some kind of suicidal spasm.’
‘We’re expecting that anyway,’ the first woman said.
Everyone went back to calculating impact parameters and working up defence scenarios. Macy studied the image of the transformed moonlet, wondering what the sheath at the forward end contained. It looked a little like the acrosome that capped the head of a human sperm. Seeds. Packages that contained new life, everything it needed to get started.
She asked Pete what the propeller moonlets were made of.
‘Dirty ice, mostly.’
‘Any carbonaceous material?’ Macy said.
‘Some, sure.’ Pete squinted at her. ‘You think it was spun into fullerene, used to weave the wrappings and make the mass drivers?’
‘Among other things,’ Macy said, thinking of the lovely little habitat circling Nephele.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Someone patched into a feed from a drone more or less directly behind the little cluster of moonlets: chips of shadow in a vast haze of icy exhaust. And now Titan’s orange disc rose beyond Saturn, and within two minutes the fusion motors and mass drivers of the Ghosts started up. Clearly, they had spotted the moonlets and realised that they would pass through the volume of space their ships would occupy just before their encounter with Titan. They couldn’t change course but they could try to increase their velocity and cross ahead of the trajectories of the moonlets.
Everyone in the room was standing, watching the big memo space, as the arc of Ghost ships powered in towards Titan.
‘They aren’t going to make it,’ Abbie Jones said, with grim satisfaction.
Thirty seconds later, the leading Ghost ship was struck by a moonlet. Ice flashed into an expanding ring of white-hot gas brighter than the sun, devouring half the mass of the enshelled ship, flaring even more brightly as the pinch field of its fusion generator let go, this avid star dimming and beginning to collapse on itself as it plunged around Titan and headed on towards Saturn. And now the second ship flared, and the third. Macy and everyone else watched in sombre silence as the fourth and last ship ploughed on untouched. It skimmed a deep chord through Titan’s smoggy atmosphere, and its ice shield, heavily degraded by passage through the picket line, broke up. Some of the chunks of debris scored bright parabolas of plasma trails through Titan’s smog and impacted along the moon’s northern hemisphere, creating a string of raw new craters; others emerged more or less intact, a broken comet tumbling in a line towards Saturn, hurrying after the cooling shells of plasma that were all that was left of the other three ships.
Now at last the tension snapped and everyone in the room fell into each other’s arms. Macy hugged Pete Bakaleinikoff; strangers hugged her. And then she was standing in front of Raphael, who pulled her close and said in her ear, ‘I need your help. Will you help me?’
‘Sure.’
‘Good. I need to go home,’ Raphael said. ‘I would very much like you to take me.’
‘Now?’
‘Please. If we don’t leave soon, we’ll miss the rest of the fun.’
Macy took a moment to talk to Abbie Jones. Telling her that she had to leave, asking her if she wanted to come to Nephele to visit her son and grandchildren, to see what they had done and hear all about what they planned to do. Abbie told her that she would come as soon as she could, but there was still much to do right here around Saturn.
‘Set up a proper city government. Make links with the other cities,’ she said, ticking off each point on her fingers. She was perched on a beanbag with a slate in her lap, glazed with exhaustion but determined and coolly focused. ‘Get ships working again. Make peace with the people of Camelot, and with everyone else who tried to save their own skins by choosing neutrality . . .’
Macy, cross-legged on the floor in front of her, added a couple of her own. ‘Deal with the Ghosts. Make sure that the Europeans and the Pacific Community don’t renege on their agreement.’
‘Persuade them to go home,’ Abbie said. ‘And find a way of starting negotiations with the Brazilians in the Jupiter System. The people of Callisto and Ganymede and Europa deserve their freedom too. We have planned and talked and discussed what to do when this day came. And now it is here and everything needs to be done at once. Take care, Macy. Get home safely and make sure that my son doesn’t go charging off on some wild mission. Make sure he waits for me to come visit.’
It was past midnight, but no one in the city was asleep. People sat outside cafés and in parks, wandered the avenues in groups large and small. Laughing and singing as they ankled along arm in arm. In one park a drumming circle had started up and people pranced and leaped like a demented ballet corps.
Fireworks were bursting in the black air above the flat roofs of the old apartment blocks as, dressed in pressure suits, Macy and Raphael rode on a trike to the industrial zone. They hitched a ride to the spaceport on one of the rolligons that had been ferrying stockpiles of arms and ammunition into the city. Macy had flown from Iapetus to Dione in Elephant, and the tug had been powered up and refuelled and a dropshell had been loaded into the cargo bay. Macy strapped into the acceleration couch in the control blister, started to run a systems check, and asked Raphael where yo wanted to go.
‘Into orbit around Saturn, about a hundred and seventy thousand kilometres out.’
‘The edge of the F Ring?’
‘You might want to make it a little way beyond the edge. And you might also want to incline your orbit above the equatorial plane by ten degrees or so.’
‘You aren’t going to tell me why, are you?’
‘I can tell you that something is going to happen. Something wonderful. ’
Macy spent some time interrogating the navigation AI, then took Elephant up, her first real solo flight, powering straight out of Dione’s shallow gravity well and accelerating inwards towards Tethys; after Elephant curved around the icy moon, it would be at the correct velocity and angle to achieve orbit outside the rings at the inclination Raphael had suggested.
She was intensely nervous. The AI had calculated and implemented flight parameters tailored to her requirements, but she knew that she didn’t have the experience to figure out her best option if she encountered something unexpected. So when the comms lit up just after Elephant’s brief burn at orbital insertion, panic speared her heart. Jesus. It seemed that everyone in the system wanted to talk to her, all at once. Macy bounced the stack of messages to Raphael, asked the neuter if yo wanted to answer any of them.
‘They already have their answer,’ Raphael said. ‘Look out across the rings, Macy.’
The broad arc of the rings fell away beyond and below Elephant’s orbit, curving out around Saturn into the planet’s vast black shadow. Tiny stars were lighting up inside that shadow, a host or cloud of little lights strung
out in an arc. Macy checked the bearings and aimed Elephant’s spectrometer at one of them. No doubt about it, they were moonlets lit up by mass drivers, beginning to move away from the plane of the rings. Heading out from Saturn, towards the sun.
‘Seeds,’ she said.
‘Precisely so.’
‘The packages on them, they’re components for bubble habitats, aren’t they? We built one ourselves. Found the design in the Library of the Commons.’
‘As did we, although we have considerably modified it,’ Raphael said. ‘When the moonlets reach their final orbits, construction robots will use the remaining mass to spin bubble habitats. And inside those habitats, other robots will create gardens from DNA libraries and carbonaceous material. A thousand gardens, all different, all orbiting just inside the snow line, at the outer edge of the asteroid belt.’
‘Who are they for?’
‘Anyone who wants to live there. Sri is a great person, Macy. Isolated by her genius, yes, but the finest gene wizard who ever lived. Finer even than Avernus. This is her last gift to humanity. Now it’s time to take me home. To Janus. We still have much work to do there.’
Macy consulted the navigation AI again, and at last Elephant’s motor lit up and the tug curved inward, towards Janus. She told Raphael that she could match the moon’s orbital speed but because of the inclination of Elephant’s orbit she’d have to swing around Saturn a couple of times to bring them into the ring plane.
Raphael, fastening up yo’s pressure suit, said that it didn’t matter. ‘The dropshell will take me where I need to go. Forgive me, Macy, but at present Sri does not welcome visitors. One day, perhaps. Not yet. But if I may ask a final favour?’