The Return of the Angel (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 2)

by mikel evins

  The Return of the Angel

  © 2015 by mikel evins

  http://evins.net/the_return_of_the_angel/

  The Return of the Angel

  The Kestrel Chronicles, Book 2

  mikel evins

  1.

  Doctor Yaug stood a little too close to me in one of my examining rooms. It made me nervous that he would bump me and upset my adjustments.

  He was a billowing figure something like a child’s idea of a ghost, except black and velvety instead of white and diaphanous. The black cloak had started out as a joke gift from one of our crew, meant to conceal Yaug’s unnerving appearance. Yaug had shown what a good sport he was—and what a shrewd individual—by cheerfully adopting the thing and wearing it all the time.

  The cloak had the happy effect of abating the phobia that many Rayleigh employees had about people with ball-shaped bodies and too many legs, but it also covered whatever might have passed for Yaug’s face and hands, making nonverbal communication something of a challenge. It’s hard to read the facial expressions of a black velvet ghost.

  I had proposed a solution. We were looking it over.

  A human face made of gold floated in front of us, against the back wall of the examining room. It was smiling with delight, an expression that reflected Yaug’s state of mind. I had slaved the display to his emotions.

  Below it, two velvet-black hands floated, disembodied, like the face. They looked human, but longer and more slender than proper human hands, and each one had two thumbs, one on each side.

  “You delight me,” said Yaug. “You’ve outdone yourself.”

  The golden face, reminiscent of an Ionian’s, beamed.

  I shrugged.

  “I just proposed the prostheses,” I said. “The design is all yours.”

  “Nonsense,” said Yaug. “I offered a few suggestions, matters of style and detail. You did the actual design work. I love the look of the face, and the black hood. It’ll make me look like a wizard, I think.”

  “Or a monk,” I said.

  “Or a monk,” he said. “How soon can I test the real thing?”

  “I can have them out of the fab early tomorrow, if you’re happy with everything. You haven’t picked colors for your eyes.”

  “Why don’t we leave them as they are?” he said.

  “Uncolored?” I said. “Just the same gold as the face?”

  “Yes, I quite like them that way.”

  I hesitated.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea? The colorless eyes and hands with extra thumbs will tend to stand out in a crowd.”

  He laughed, and the golden face floating in front of us laughed with him.

  “And the huge hooded cloak won’t? No, I think I’d like to stand out. I spent too many years hiding in the shadows.”

  I cocked my head at him.

  “From secret agent to flamboyant fashion adventurer in one step?” I said.

  The golden face smiled.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “Very well,” I said. “If there are no more changes you want to discuss, I’ll send the data to the fab for construction.”

  “Send it,” he said. “I think our work is done here. Again, Lev, I’m delighted with your work.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Shall we be going?”

  “Yes, I think so. I have a meeting with Esgar and Jaemon coming up.”

  I nodded and gestured to the floating face and hands. They vanished. I followed Yaug to the door of the examining room and out into the corridor. The lights faded behind me and the door of the room closed itself.

  We passed the infirmary’s receptionist and stepped out into the main enclosure of the Sciences building. The Infirmary was one of a dozen buildings all arranged around the interior of Sciences, like an industrial park with a vast shell laid over it. Yaug’s open workshop dominated the center of the park. A life-sized image of a blue whale standing on its tail floated over the center of his workspace, turning slowly. I had learned to my surprise that the implausible creature was a real animal native to Earth’s oceans.

  I followed Yaug down the block to the building’s main entrance and out onto the grounds of Rayleigh Field. Half a kilometer away, Rayleigh’s last active jumpship sat like a half-melted candle on a maglifter pad. Callisto’s simulated sun descended the western side of the environment dome, dimming and reddening the sky.

  “You like Callisto, don’t you?” said Yaug. “I’ve seen how you stop to watch the sunsets, and how you gaze at the skyline of Avalon City.”

  “Yes I do,” I said.

  “Different from Mars?”

  “Very.” I looked at Yaug. “Oh, Mars is majestic. Huge mountains. Canyons so big you can’t see them. The Elevator.”

  I looked at the skydome again. The horizon had colored a deeper red, shading into rose. The rose shaded into something purplish, then turquoise, and then a deep blue that somewhere higher up became black.

  “That’s just it,” I said. “Mars is famous for its natural majesty, but it’s so big you can’t see it properly. Olympus Mons is completely invisible if you’re on its slopes. It just becomes the horizon. From farther away it looks like a storm system. Valles Marineris is so big that in most places you can’t even see the other rim because it’s too far away.”

  “You like Callisto’s scale,” said Yaug.

  He turned and we began to walk slowly toward the gothic gray eminence of Rayleigh’s admin building.

  “I do,” I said. “And I like that it’s a made thing.”

  “A made thing,” said Yaug.

  “Yes. Someone made it. Not the moon, obviously, but everything on it. The skydomes. The trunk lines. The towns and cities and lakes and even the forests. Someone deliberately made all of that, intentionally turned all of Callisto into a pleasant place for people to live. To be comfortable and safe and happy.”

  Yaug nodded.

  “I think I see. You like the artificiality of it.”

  “Well, not exactly. I like the intention. That every good thing on Callisto is here because someone intentionally put it here, for us and for everyone. Every time you see something beautiful, it’s because someone took the time to make it. You know each sunset is different, and all of them are designed by artists?”

  “I did know that,” said Yaug. “There are contests. Ambitious artists compete to design the best sunsets. If I had my new face, I’d turn and smile at you. Maybe you should submit a sunset. Your work on my new face and hands certainly impressed me.”

  I said, “I think I’ll stick to what I’m good at.”

  “Fair enough. Now I think I’d better be getting along. I have that new contract to discuss with Esgar and Jaemon.”

  “Another one?” I said. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Actually, this one came to me,” he said. “Someone I worked with a long time ago.”

  I looked at him.

  “It’s not a military intelligence job, is it?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. We’re being hired to go meet Angel of Cygnus.”

  “Meet an angel?” I said. “Should be an easy sell. I think half the people in the company would do that for free.”

  Yaug chuckled.

  “Angel of Cygnus is a starship,” he said.

  “A starship?” I said. “You don’t see one of those every day.”

  I wondered about Angel of Cygnus and the Fabric filled in my memory.

  “Good heavens,” I said. “Angel of Cygnus was launched four thousand years ago! What is this, an archaeological mission?”

  “No, no,” said Yaug. “Reference �
��time dilation.’”

  “‘Time dilation,’” I said. “Oh, I see. How interesting. Objects traveling at very high speeds experience time more slowly. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  Yaug said, “I suppose I assumed you would know about it.”

  “Outside my field,” I said. “It’s interesting though. How much was time slowed for this starship?”

  “Well,” Yaug said, “It launched four thousand years ago. Considering its destination and its acceleration profile…its crew would have experienced the passage of about thirty years.”

  “Thirty years!” I said. “That’s a big difference.”

  “That’s time dilation.”

  “Where is this starship now?” I said.

  “On the outer edge of the Dark, in the direction of Cygnus.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So I should pack for a long trip.”

  “A few weeks, at least,” said Yaug.

  “What’s the mission? If you can tell me.”

  “Sure I can,” said Yaug. “We’re being asked to rescue the survivor.”

  “The survivor?” I stared at him. “Doctor, the Fabric says Angel of Cygnus launched with more than twelve hundred people.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Something went wrong.”

  “I’d say so! That sounds ominous. An ancient starship, its crew lost to unknown causes…do we know what killed the crew?”

  “If they were killed,” said Yaug. “We don’t know.”

  “What else could have happened to them?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Well, that sounds even more ominous. Are you sure we can’t just go meet an angel?”

  Yaug laughed.

  “Perhaps another time. I know an angel, as it happens.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” he said. “Perfectly serious. I did some work with him, oh, a long time ago. Still have his call glyph. I assume he would answer if I used it.”

  “Just when I think I’ve heard everything,” I said.

  “Well,” said Yaug, “Maybe I’ll have occasion to use the call glyph some time. I don’t want to squander it.”

  “I guess not.”

  “You’re a wealth of surprises, Doctor Yaug.”

  He said, “Wait ’til you find out who wants to hire us.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I said.

  “The Cold Ones.”

  2.

  The flagship of Rayleigh Scientific was Kestrel, a beautiful and intelligent torch ship who had a long and congenial relationship with the Rayleigh family. Technically, Kestrel was an arbeiter rather than a mech—that is, she was a thing, not a person—but her intelligence, winning personality, and stature in the eyes of her crew meant that no one ever treated her as a thing.

  Kestrel was fast. That’s a characteristic common to torches, which are ships that use various types of fusion engines to tear around the Solar System at unreasonable speeds, accelerating the whole time.

  Torches have several advantages beside speed. The fact that they accelerate all the time gives them a convincing simulation of gravity, which means that they can be conveniently laid out as if they were tall buildings. Kestrel was laid out in just that fashion, as a dozen circular floors stacked atop one another.

  Torches also tend to be fairly luxurious, and Kestrel was no exception. Working aboard Kestrel was a bit like living in a compact luxury hotel, with corridors paneled in mahogany and decks made of granite-textured ceramic.

  The reason for the luxury was down to one of the disadvantages of torches. They’re expensive. Really expensive. They rip around the Solar System by flinging prodigal amounts of matter out the back at startling velocities. Everything about operating them costs a fortune. Fuel and propellant must be bought in breathtaking quantities. Engine service technicians must have advanced training. All structural members must be designed to razor’s edge tolerances, and composed of extraordinarily light and sturdy materials.

  Given the costs, no one operates or even hires a torch unless they’re comfortable writing checks for amounts that look like gross domestic products.

  That’s why Kestrel was luxurious. People who pay that kind of money for transport expect a certain level of accommodation.

  Since Doctor Yaug had dumped his not inconsiderable fortune into Rayleigh Shipping with the intention of turning the company into Rayleigh Scientific, Kestrel had mostly stopped making charter flights and packet deliveries. Her new profession was carrying out commissioned scientific survey, exploration, and delivery missions at the behest of agencies like the Jovian Institutes of Research and the Golden Way Academy. She no longer needed to be appointed like a resort, but it disappointed no one that she was.

  Even with all her remarkable speed, it took Kestrel several weeks to reach the rendezvous with Angel of Cygnus. Space is big. The Dark, on whose outer edge Angel was found, is the torus of space outside the orbit of Neptune and inside the Kuiper Belt. That was a circular band of space some twenty eight billion kilometers around at the inner edge, and fifty-five million kilometers across. A trip across the Dark was a hundred fifty times longer than the legendary ancient voyage from Earth to its moon that marked the first footsteps of humanity into space.

  The point is, I had some time on my hands. I meant to use it to learn all I could about our new employers, the Cold Ones. I had the time. I didn’t have much luck.

  As everyone knows, the Fabric knows everything. More precisely, it knows everything that any civilized person has discovered in the past five thousand years or so of Solarian civilization. We take for granted that if we want to know something, we have only to wonder about it and then presently the Fabric will deliver and unpack the relevant memories. Voilà! We know what we wanted to know.

  Of course, there are nuances. You can’t for instance, learn what your neighbor is thinking by wondering about it. There are considerations of privacy and propriety. You can’t hoover up knowledge that belongs to someone else without their permission.

  You also can’t collect information that no one has found out, so, in fact, the Fabric doesn’t really know everything, after all.

  I discovered the hard way that it was impossible to find much information about the Cold Ones. Most authoritative information about them seemed to be either hidden behind a veil of privacy or completely undiscovered.

  Everyone knew, of course, that they lived on Pluto. If they lived at all, that is. Everyone knew that they were cold. Or maybe that they liked the cold. Or both. Or something.

  Everyone knew that there was more than one of them. Probably. Exactly how many was a matter for speculation.

  Everyone knew they had been around since ancient times. It was widely mooted about that they were some sort of collective consciousness composed of machine intelligences. Maybe.

  And that was about all anyone knew for sure about them. I had naïvely assumed that if they were so well known then there must be a great deal of knowledge about them.

  Nope.

  Oh, you could find reams of stuff about their lives and life cycles, their political entanglements, their history and philosophy and language and all sorts of other matters. The trouble with that stuff was that it was all made up. The vast majority of recorded data about the Cold Ones was pure fiction.

  There was one more important fact, and it surprised me: the Cold Ones had the highest credit rating in the Solar System. In fact, it was the highest credit rating I had ever heard of; the highest in all of history. Benchmark currencies of the Solar System were less reliable than the Cold Ones. You could take a promise from the Cold Ones to the bank. Literally.

  That was a puzzle in itself. How could any group of persons (if they were persons) have such an anomalously high credit rating when nobody knew anything about them? The answer seemed to be that they had done business under the same authenticated identity for thousands of years without a single unresolved grievance lodged against them.

  I frankly had a hard time believing any of this, and wa
sted a few days trying to disprove it. I failed utterly.

  In the end, all I really knew about the Cold Ones was that they were somebody, that they inhabited Pluto and its moons, and that everyone in all the worlds would much rather do business with them than with anyone else in history.

  So it seemed that our contract was solid. That was something.

  A little over a week into our journey, Captain Esgar Rayleigh announced that we were to have an all-hands meeting with the Cold Ones themselves. I wasn’t the only one aboard who was excited to finally meet our mysterious employers. There was an electric buzz going around the decks as the appointed time approached. I went to sit with Captain Rayleigh in his mess to await the meeting, and found him with Ordinary Spacer Mai Greenhill and his younger brother (and my good friend) Jaemon Rayleigh.

  “Come in, Lev,” said the Captain as I approached the hatch. “We’re having a little game.”

  He glanced over at me warily.

  “You’re not going to tell me something that makes me unhappy, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “I just thought I’d like to sit with someone for the meeting.”

  “Ah,” he said, and nodded, returning his attention to the Go board in front of him.