She faced rows of faces glaring with suspicion, fear, self-interest, even contempt. This wasn’t going to be easy. But she recognized, here in the main governing council, one of the women from the Triton transports, which had at last been allowed to land. These people were prickly, awkward, superstitious, fearful. But, even in this dire strait, they welcomed refugees, and even gave them a place at the top table.
It made her obscurely proud. This is what the Gaijin should have studied, she thought. Not wrinkles in our genome. This: even in this last refuge, we refuse to give up, and we still welcome strangers.
She launched into her presentation. She stayed on her feet a good hour as speaker after speaker assailed her. She didn’t always have answers, but she weathered the storm, trying to persuade by her steady faith, her unwavering determination.
Not everybody was convinced. That was never going to be possible. But in the end, factions representing a good sixty per cent of the planet’s population agreed to concur with Nemoto’s advice.
Immensely relieved, Madeleine went back to her room, and slept twelve hours.
The final evacuation was swift.
The remnants of humanity had fled inwards, to Mercury. And now they were converging even more tightly, flowing over the surface of Mercury in monorails or tractors or short-hop sub-orbit shuttles, gathering in the great basin of Caloris Planitia: the shattered ground where, under a high and unforgiving sun, humans had burrowed in search of water.
And, meanwhile, the last of the giant interstellar fleet of Cracker sailing craft were settling into dense, complex orbits around Mercury: wasps around honey, just as Nemoto had said. Data flowed between the Cracker craft, easily visible, even tapped by the cowering humans. These Eeties clearly had no fear of interference, now the Gaijin had withdrawn.
Maybe it would take the Crackers a thousand years to make ready for their great star-bursting project. Maybe it would take a thousand days, a thousand hours. Nobody knew.
Madeleine spent some time with Carl ap Przibram, the nearest thing to a friend she had here.
They had a very stiff dinner, in his apartment. The recycling loops were tight; illogical as it might be, she found it difficult to eat food that must have been through Carl’s body several times at least. On the way, she’d decided to invite him to have sex. But it was an offer made more in politeness than lust; and his refusal was entirely polite, too, leaving them both – she suspected – secretly relieved.
Madeleine spent her last day on Mercury inside the Paulis mine in Caloris. This was a tube a half-kilometre wide, the walls clear, the rocks beyond glowing orange-hot. It was the big brother of Frank Paulis’s first ancient well on the Moon. This mine had never been completed, and perhaps never would be; but now it served a new purpose as a deep shelter for the remnants of humanity.
Giant temporary floors of spider-silk and aluminium had been spun out over the shaft, cut through by supply ducts and cabling and a giant fireman’s-pole of open elevators. Here – safe from radiation and the sun’s heat and the shadow’s cold – half Mercury’s population, a million strong, was being housed in flimsy bubbles of spider-silk and aluminium. The Paulis tunnel wasn’t pressurized, of course, and so big flexible walkways ran between the bubbles. The floors were misty and translucent, as were the hab bubbles; and, looking down into the glowing pit of humanity, Madeleine could see people scattered over floor after floor, moving around their habs like microbes in droplets of water, receding into a misty, light-filled infinity.
It was well known she was planning to leave today. In the upper levels many faces were turned up to her – she could see them, just pale dots. She had always been isolated, especially in this latest of her parachute-drops back into human history. Perhaps she was getting too old, too detached from the times. In fact she suspected the displaced Triton colonists rather resented her – as if she, who had guided them here, had somehow been responsible for the disaster that had befallen their home.
Anyhow, it was done. She turned her back on the glimmering interior of the Paulis mine, its cache of humans, and returned to the surface.
She flew up from Mercury, up through a cloud of Cracker ships.
Great sails were all around her. Even partly furled, they were huge, spanning tens of kilometres, like pieces of filmy landscapes torn loose and thrown into the sky. Some of them had been made transparent rather than furled, so that the bright light of the sun shone through skeletal structures of shining threads. And the wings had a complex morphology, each warping and twisting and curling, presumably in response to the density of the light falling on it, and the thin shadows cast by its neighbours.
The Cracker ships sailed close to each other: in great layers, one over the other, sometimes barely half a kilometre apart, a tiny separation compared to the huge expanse of the wings. Sometimes they were so close that a curl in one wing would cause a rippling response in others, great stacks of the wings turning like the pages of an immense book. But Madeleine never once saw those great wings touch; the coordination was stunning.
Madeleine rose up through all this, just bulling her way through in her squat little Gaijin lander. The wonderful wings just curled out of her way.
At ten Mercury diameters, she looked back.
Mercury was a ball of rock, maybe the size of her palm held at arm’s length. It looked as if it was wrapped in silvery paper, shifting layers of it, as if it were some huge Christmas present – or perhaps as if immense silvery wasps were crawling all over it. Quite remarkably beautiful, she thought. But, she reflected bitterly, if there was one thing she had learned in her long and dubious career, it was that beauty clung as closely to objects of killing and pain and horror as to the good; and so it was here.
She stretched, weightless. She felt deeply – if shamefully – relieved to be alone once more, in control of her own destiny, without the complication of other people around her.
Nemoto called her from the surface.
‘I’m surprised they let you through like that. The Crackers. You’re in a Gaijin ship, after all.’
‘But the Gaijin are gone. The Crackers clearly don’t believe the Gaijin are a threat any more. And they don’t even seem to have noticed us humans.’ The Crackers are just kicking over the ant hill, she thought, without even looking to see what was there, what we were.
‘Meacher, how far out are you?’
‘Ten diameters.’
‘That should be sufficient,’ hissed Nemoto.
‘Sufficient for what? … Never mind. Nemoto, how can you choose death? You’ve lived so long, seen so much.’
‘I’ve seen enough.’
‘And now you want to rest?’
‘No. What rest is there in death? I only want to act.’
‘To save the species one more time?’
‘Perhaps. But the battle is never over, Meacher. The longer we live, the deeper we look, the more layers of deception and manipulation and destruction we will find … Consider Mercury, for example, which may be doomed to become a resource mine for the sun-breaking Crackers. Why, if I was a suspicious type, a conspiracy theorist, I might think it was a little odd that there should be a giant ball of crust-free nickel-iron placed so conveniently right here where the Crackers need it. What do you think? Could some predecessors of the Crackers – even their ancestors – have arranged the giant impact that stripped off Mercury’s crust and mantle, left behind this rust ball?’
Madeleine was stunned by this deepening of the great violation of the solar system. But, deliberately, she shook her head. ‘Even if that’s true, what difference does it make?’
Nemoto barked laughter. ‘None at all. You’re right. One thing at a time. You always were practical, Meacher. And what next for you? Will you stay with the others, huddled in the caves of Mercury?’
Madeleine frowned. ‘I’m not a good huddler, Nemoto. And besides, these are not my people.’
‘The likes of us have no “people” –’
‘Malenfant,’ Madel
eine said. ‘Wherever he is, whatever he faces, he is alone. I’m going to try to find him.’
‘Ah,’ Nemoto whispered. ‘Malenfant, yes. He may be the most important of us all. Goodbye, Meacher.’
‘Nemoto? –’
Mercury exploded.
She had to go over it again, rerun the recordings, over and over, before she understood.
It had happened in an instant. It was as if the top couple of metres of Mercury’s surface had just lifted off and hailed into the sky.
All over Mercury – from the depths of Caloris Planitia to the crumpled lands at the antipode, from Chao City at the south pole to the abandoned settlements of the north – miniature cannon snouts had poked their way out of the regolith, and fired into the sky. The bullets weren’t smart: just bits of rock and dust, dug out of the deeper regolith. But they were moving fast, far faster than Mercury’s escape velocity.
The Crackers didn’t stand a chance. Mercury rocks tore through filmy wings, overwhelming self-repair facilities. The Cracker ships, like butterflies in a reverse hailstorm, were shredded. Ships collided, or plunged to Mercury’s surface, or drifted into space, powerless, beyond the reach of help.
The Moon flowers, of course: they were the key, or rather their dumb, gen-enged descendants, transplanted to Mercury by Nemoto, a wizened, interplanetary Johnny Appleseed. The Moon flowers could make explosive, of aluminium and oxygen, extracted from Moon rock – or Mercury rock – a serviceable chemical-rocket propellant to propel their seed pores. Nemoto had engineered the flowers’ descendants to make weapons.
The Crackers had nobody even to fire back at, no way to avoid the rising storm of rock and dust. Even one survivor might have been sufficient to resume the Crackers’ mission, for all anybody knew. But there were no survivors. The Crackers had taken a thousand years to reach Mercury, to fly from Procyon and battle through a shell of Gaijin ships. It had taken humans – rock world vermin, contemptuously ignored – a thousand seconds to destroy them.
As she watched that cloud of peppery rock rise from the ground and rip through the gauzy ships – overwhelming them one by one, at last erupting into clear space – Madeleine whooped and howled.
The debris cloud continued to expand, now beginning to tail after Mercury in its slow orbit around the sun. It caught the brilliant light, like rain in sunshine. Maybe Mercury is going to have rings, she thought, rings that will shine like roadways in the sky. Nice memorial. The major features of the surface beneath had survived, of course; no backyard rocket was going to obliterate Caloris Planitia. But every square metre of the surface had been raked over.
She contacted the Coalition.
Every human on Mercury had survived – even those who hadn’t taken Nemoto’s advice about deep shelter. Already they were emerging, blinking, under a dusty, starry sky.
Every human but Nemoto, of course.
At least we have breathing space: time to rebuild, maybe breed a little, spread out, before the next bunch of Eetie assholes come chomping their way through the solar system. Good for you, Nemoto. You did the best you could. Good job.
As for me – story’s over here, Madeleine. Time to face the universe again.
And so Madeleine fled before the hail of rubble from Mercury – still expanding, a dark and looming cloud that glittered with fragments of Cracker craft – fled in search of Gaijin, and Reid Malenfant.
V
THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
AD 8800, and Later
Near the neutron star there were multiple lobes of light. They looked like solar flares to Malenfant: giant, unending storms rising from the neutron star’s surface. Further out still, the founts of gas lost their structure, becoming dim, diffuse. They merged into a wider cloud of debris which seemed to be fleeing from the neutron star, a vigorous solar wind. And beyond that there were only the Galaxy core stars, watchful, silent, still, peering down as if in disapproval at this noisy, spitting monster.
This was a pulsar. You could detect those radio beams from Earth.
Malenfant had grown up with the story of the first detection of a pulsar. Pre-Gaijin astronomers had detected an unusual radio signal: a regular, ticking pulse, accurate to within a millionth of a second. Staring at such traces, the scientists had at first toyed with the idea it might be the signature of intelligence, calling from the stars.
In fact, when envoys from the stars began to make their presence known, it was not as a gentle tick of radio noise but as a wave of destructive exploitation that scattered mankind and all but overwhelmed the entire solar system – and the same thing had occurred many times before.
We put up a hell of a fight, though, he thought. We even won some victories, in our tiny, scattershot way. But in the end it was going to count for nothing.
It was ironic, he thought grimly. Those old pre-Gaijin star gazers had thought that first pulsar was a signal from Little Green Men.
In fact it was a killer of Little Green Men.
Chapter 32
SAVANNAH
She woke to the movement of air: the rustle of wind in trees, perhaps the hiss of grass, a gentle breeze on her face, the scent of dew, of wood smoke. Eyes closed, she was lying on her back. She could feel something tickling at her neck, the slippery texture of leaves under the palms of her hand. Somewhere crickets were calling.
She opened her eyes. She was looking up at the branches of a tree, silhouetted against a blue-black sky.
And the sky was full of stars. A great river of light flowed from horizon to horizon. It was littered with pink-white glowing clouds, crowded, beautiful.
She remembered.
Io. She had been on Io.
Her Gaijin guides had taken her to a grave: Reid Malenfant’s grave, they said, dug by strong Neandertal hands. She had, briefly, despaired; she had been too late in her self-appointed mission; he had died alone after all, a long way from home.
The Gaijin hadn’t seemed to understand.
Then had come a blue flash, a moment of pain –
And now, this. Where the hell was she? She sat up, suddenly afraid.
She saw a flickering fire, a figure squatting beside it. A man. He was holding something on a stick, she saw, perhaps a fish. He stood straight now, and came walking easily towards her.
She felt herself tense up further.
His head was silhouetted against the crowded stars; he was bald, his skin smooth as leather. It was Reid Malenfant.
She whimpered, cowered back. ‘You are dead.’
He crouched before her, reached out and held her hand. He felt warm, real, calm. ‘Take it easy, Madeleine.’
‘They put you in a hole in the ground, on Io. Jesus Christ –’
‘Don’t ask questions,’ he said evenly. ‘Not yet. Concentrate on the here and now. How do you feel? Are you sick, hot, cold? …’
She thought about that. ‘I’m okay. I guess.’ She wiggled her fingers and toes, turned her head this way and that. Everything intact and mobile; nothing aching; not so much as a cricked neck. Her trembling subsided, soothed by a relentless blizzard of detail, of normality. The here and now, yes.
It was Reid Malenfant. He was wearing a pale blue coverall, white slip-on shoes. When she glanced down, she found she was wearing the same bland outfit.
He was studying her. ‘You were out cold. I thought I’d better leave you be. We don’t seem to have any medic equipment here.’
The smell of the fish reached her. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said, surprised. ‘You’ve been fishing?’
‘Why not? I mined my old spacesuit. Not for the first time. A thread, a hook made from a zipper. I felt like Tom Sawyer.’
… Never mind the fish. This guy is dead. ‘Malenfant, they buried you. Your burns …’ But she was starting to remember more. The Neandertals had opened the grave. It was empty.
‘Just look at me now.’ Emulating her, he clenched his fists, twisted his head. ‘I haven’t felt so good since the Bad Hair Day twins had a hold of me.’
�
�Who?’
‘Long story. Look, you want some fish or not?’ And he loped back to the fire, picked up another twig skewered through a second fish, and held it over his fire of brush wood.
She got to her feet and followed him.
The sky provided a soft light, as bright as a quarter-Moon, perhaps. Even away from that Galactic stripe the stars were crowded. There was a pattern of bright stars near the zenith that looked like a box, or maybe a kite; there was another easy pattern further over, six stars arranged in a rough, squashed ellipse. She recognized no constellations, though.
The grassy plain rolled to the distance, dotted with sparse trees, the vegetation black and silver in the starlight. But where Malenfant’s fire cast a stronger light she could see the grass was an authentic green.
Gravity about Earth normal, she noted absently.
She thought she saw movement, a shadow flitting past a stand of trees. She waited for a moment, holding still. There was no sound, not so much as a crackle of undergrowth under a footstep.
She hunkered down beside Malenfant, accepted half a fish and bit into it. It was succulent but tasteless. ‘I never much liked fish,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’
‘Where’s the stream?’
He nodded, beyond the fire. ‘Thataway. I took a walk.’
‘During the daylight?’
‘No.’ He tilted back his head. ‘When I woke up it was night, as deep as this.’ He glanced up at the sky, picking out a complex of glowing clouds. ‘What do you think of the view?’
The larger of the clouds was a rose of pink light. Its heart was speckled by bright splashes of light – stars? – and it was bordered by a band of deeper darkness, velvet blackness, where no stars shone. It was beautiful, strange.
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