“It’s called the Missing Man formation. Those planes, you know, Toby. They were T-38s. The first astronauts used them to train on. They’re over a hundred years old, imagine that.”
“I like the little horses,” said Candida.
Their uncle put his hands on their shoulders. “Come away now.”
With some relief, Bella straightened up.
Drinks arrived, sherry, whiskey, coffee, tea, served by a subdued young aunt. Bella accepted a coffee and stood with Phillippa.
“It was kind of you to speak to them like that,” Phillippa said.
“It’s my job, I guess,” Bella said, embarrassed.
“Yes, but there are ways of doing it well, or badly. You’re new to it, aren’t you?”
Bella smiled. “Six months in. Does it show?”
“Not at all.”
“Deaths in space are rare.”
“Yes, thank God,” Phillippa said. “But that’s why it’s been so hard to take. I had hoped this new generation would be protected from—well, from what we went through. I read about you. You were actually on the shield.”
Bella smiled. “I was a lowly comms tech.”
Phillippa shook her head. “Don’t do yourself down. You ended up with a battlefield promotion to mission commander, didn’t you?”
“Only because there was nobody else left to do it by the end of that day.”
“Even so, you did your job. You deserve the recognition you’ve enjoyed.”
Bella wasn’t sure about that. Her subsequent career, as an executive in various telecommunications corporations and regulatory bodies, had no doubt been given a healthy boost by her notoriety, and usefulness as a PR tool. But she’d always tried to pull her weight, until her retirement, aged fifty-five—a short one as it turned out, until she was offered this new role, a position she couldn’t turn down.
Phillippa said, “As for me I was based in London during the build-up to the storm. Worked in the mayor’s office, on emergency planning and the like. But before the storm itself broke, my parents took me out to the shelter at L2.”
The shield had been poised above the Earth at the point of perpetual noon, at L1, the first Lagrangian point of gravitational stability directly between Earth and sun. The Earth’s second Lagrangian point was on the same Earth-sun line, but on the planet’s far side, at the midnight point. So while the workers at L1 labored to shelter the world from the storm, at L2 an offworld refuge hid safe in Earth’s shadow, stuffed full of trillionaires, dictators, and other rich and powerful types—including, rumor had it, half of Britain’s royals. The story of L2 had subsequently become a scandal.
“It wasn’t a pleasant place to be,” Phillippa murmured. “I tried to work. We were ostensibly a monitoring station. I kept up the comms links to the ground stations. But some of the rich types were throwing parties.”
“It sounds as if you didn’t have a choice,” Bella said. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“It’s kind of you to say that. Still, one must move on.”
James Duflot’s widow, Cassie, approached them tentatively. “Thank you for coming,” she said awkwardly. She looked tired.
“You don’t need—”
“You were kind to the children. You’ve given them a day to remember.” She smiled. “They’ve seen your picture on the news. I think I’ll put away that hologram, though.”
“Perhaps that’s best.” Bella hesitated. “I can’t tell you much about what James was working on. But I want you to know that your husband gave his life in the best of causes.”
Cassie nodded. “In a way I was prepared for this, you know. People ask me how it feels to have your husband fly into space. I tell them, you should try staying on Earth.”
Bella forced a smile.
“To tell you the truth we were going through a difficult time. We’re Earth-bound, Doctor Fingal. James just went up to space to work, not to live. This is home. London. And I went into town every day to work at Thule.” Bella had done her research; Thule, Inc., was a big multinational eco-recovery agency. “We’d talked vaguely of separating for a bit.” Cassie laughed with faint bitterness. “Well, I’ll never know how that particular story would have turned out, will I?”
“I’m sorry—”
“You know what I miss? His mails. His softscreen calls. I didn’t have him, you see, but I had the mails. And so in a way I don’t miss him, but I miss the mails.” She looked sharply at Bella. “It was worth it, wasn’t it?”
Bella couldn’t bear to repeat the platitudes she knew were expected of her. “I’m new to this. But it’s my job to make sure it was.”
That wasn’t enough. Nothing ever could be. She was relieved when she was able to use the excuse of another appointment to get out of the pillboxlike house.
8: EURO-NEEDLE
For her appointment with Bob Paxton, Bella was driven to the Livingstone Tower—or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner still called it. The local administrative headquarters of the Eurasian Union, and sometime seat of the Union’s prime minister, it was a tower of airy offices with broad windows of toughened glass offering superb views of London. During the sunstorm the Needle had been within the Dome’s shelter, and on its roof, which had interfaced with the Dome’s structure itself, was a small museum to those perilous days.
Paxton was waiting for her in a conference room on the forty-first floor. Pacing, he was drinking coffee in great gulps. He greeted Bella with a stiff military bow. “Chair Fingal.”
“Thanks for coming all the way to London to meet me—”
He waved that away. “I had other business here. We need to talk.”
She took a seat. Still shaken by her encounter with the Duflots, she felt this was turning into a very long day.
Paxton didn’t sit. He seemed too restless for that. He poured Bella a coffee from a big jug in the corner of the room; he poured for Bella’s security people too, and they sat at the far end of the table.
“Tell me what’s on your mind, Admiral.”
“I’ll tell you simply. The new sightings confirm it. We have a bogey.”
“A bogey?”
“An anomaly. Something sailing through our solar system that doesn’t belong there…”
Paxton was tall, wiry. He had the face of an astronaut, she thought, very pale, and pocked by the scars of radiation tumors. His cheek tattoo was a proud wet-navy emblem, and his hair was a drizzle of crew-cut gray.
He was in his seventies, she supposed. He had been around forty when he had led Aurora 1, the first manned mission to Mars, and had become the first person to set foot on that world—and then he had led his stranded crew through the greater trial of the sunstorm. Evidently he had taken the experience personally. Now a Rear Admiral in the new space navy, he had become a power in the paranoiac post-sunstorm years, and had thrown himself into efforts to counter the threat that had once stranded him on Mars.
Watching him pace, caffeine-pumped, his face set and urgent, Bella had an absurd impulse to ask him for his autograph. And then a second impulse to order him to retire. She filed that reflection away.
In his clipped Midwestern accent, he amplified the hints Edna had already given her. “We actually got three sightings of this thing.”
The first had been fortuitous.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, having made mankind’s first reconnaissance of the outer planets, had sped on out of the solar system. By the fifth decade of a new century Voyager had traveled more than a hundred and fifty times Earth’s distance from the sun.
And then its onboard cosmic ray detector, designed to seek out particles from distant supernovae, picked up a wash of energetic particles.
Something had been born, out there in the dark.
“Nobody made much of it at the time. Because it showed up on April 20, 2042.” Paxton smiled. “Sunstorm day. We were kind of busy with other things.”
Voyager’s later observations showed how the anomaly, tugged by the sun’s gravity, began a long fall into the hea
rt of the solar system. The first significant object the newborn would encounter on its way toward the sun would be Saturn and its system of moons, on a date in 2064. Plans were drawn up accordingly.
“And that was the second encounter,” Paxton said. “We have readings made by Deep Space Monitor X7-6102-016—and then a record of that probe’s destruction. And third, the latest sighting by a cluster of probes of some damn thing coming down on the J-line. The orbit of Jupiter.” He brought up a softscreen map on the table. “Three points on the chart, see—three points on a plausible orbital trajectory. Three sightings of what has to be the same object, wandering in where it don’t belong.” He stared at her, his cold blue eyes rheumy but unblinking, as if challenging her to put it together.
“And you’re certain it’s not a comet, something natural?”
“Comets don’t give off sprays of cosmic rays,” he said. “And it’s kind of a coincidence this thing just popped up out of nowhere on sunstorm day, don’t you think?”
“And this trajectory, if it continues—where is it going, Admiral?”
“We can be pretty accurate about that. It deflected off Saturn, but it won’t pass another mass significant enough for a slingshot. Assuming it just falls under gravity—”
She took the bait. “It’s heading for Earth, isn’t it?”
His face was like granite. “If it continues on its merry course it will get here December of next year. Maybe it’s Santa’s sleigh.”
She frowned. “Twenty-one months. That’s not much time.”
“That it ain’t.”
“If the alert had been raised when this thing passed Saturn, and, you say, it actually destroyed a probe, we’d have had years warning.”
He shrugged. “You have to set your threat levels somewhere. I always argued we weren’t suspicious enough. I had this out with your predecessor on a number of occasions. Looks like I was right, don’t it? If we survive this we can review protocol.”
If we survive this. His language chilled her. “You think this is some kind of artifact, Admiral?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“But you do believe it’s a threat?”
“Have to assume so. Wouldn’t you say?”
She could hardly gainsay that. The question was what to do about it.
The World Space Council had only a tenuous relationship with the old UN, which since the sunstorm had focused its efforts on recovery on Earth. The Council’s brief was to coordinate the world’s preparedness for any more threats from the unseen enemy behind the sunstorm, an enemy whose very existence had not in fact yet been officially admitted. Its principal asset was the navy, which nominally reported to the Council. But the Council itself was funded by and ultimately controlled by an uneasy alliance of the world’s four great powers—especially the United States, Eurasia, and China, who hoped to use space to gain some political ground back from the fourth, Africa.
And at the apex of this rickety structure of power and control was Bella, a compromise candidate in a compromised position.
In the short term, she thought, the three spacegoing powers might try to leverage the sudden irruption of an actual threat into some kind of advantage over Africa, which had become prominent since being relatively spared by the sunstorm. The tectonic plates that underpinned the Council might start to shift, she thought uneasily, just at the very moment it was being called upon to act.
“You’re thinking politics,” Paxton growled.
“Yes,” she admitted. As if this anomaly, whatever it was, was just a new item on the agenda of the world’s business. But if this was another threat like the sunstorm, it could render all that business irrelevant at a stroke.
Suddenly she felt weary. Old, worn-out. She found she resented that this crisis should be landed on her plate so soon into her chairmanship.
And, looking at Paxton’s intent face, she wondered how much control she would have over events.
“All right, Admiral, you have my attention. What do you recommend?”
He stepped back. “I’ll gather more data, and set up a briefing on options. Best to do that back in Washington, I guess. Soon as we can manage.”
“All right. But we’ll have to look at the wider implications. What to tell the people, or not. How to prepare for the incoming anomaly, whatever it is.”
“We’ll need more data before we can do that.”
“And what do we tell those we report to?”
Paxton said, “As far as the politics go it’s essential we make sure our mandate and capability aren’t diluted by politico bull. And, Chair, if you’re agreeable, for the briefing I’ll incorporate material gathered by the Committee.”
She felt the hairs on her neck prickle a warning; after most of a lifetime at the upper levels of large organizations she knew when a trap was being set. “You mean your Committee of Patriots.”
He smiled, sharklike. “You should come visit us sometime, Madam Chair. We work out of the old Navy Special Projects Office in DC; a lot of us are old navy fliers of one stripe or another. Our mission, grant you it’s self-appointed, is to monitor the responses of our governments and super-government agencies to the alien intervention that led to the sunstorm, and the ongoing emergency since. Once again your predecessor didn’t want to know about this. I believe he thought dabbling with the wacko fringe would damage his fine career. But now we really do have something out there, Madam Chair, a genuine anomaly. Now’s the time to listen to us, if you’re ever going to.”
Again it was hard to gainsay that. “I feel you’re drawing me into an argument, Bob. Okay, subject to my veto.”
“Thank you. There’s one specific.”
“Go on.”
“One beef the Committee has always had has been with the almost willful way the authorities have never followed up the hints of the alien. Developing our own weaponry and armor is one thing, but to ignore the enemy’s capability is criminal. However we do know of someone who might be our way in to that whole murky business.”
“Who?”
“A woman called Bisesa Dutt. Ex British Army. Long story. She’s the reason why I came to London today; she has a base here. But she’s not around, or her daughter. Since arriving here I got word she may have booked herself into a Hibernaculum in the States, under an assumed name. Of course she may have moved on from there by now.” He eyed Bella. “With your permission I’ll track her down.”
She took a breath. “I have the authority for that?”
“If you want it.” He left it hanging.
“All right. Find her. Send me your file on her. But stay legal, Admiral. And be nice.”
He grinned. “All part of the service.”
Paxton was happy, she saw suddenly. He had been waiting for this moment, waiting out the whole of his anticlimactic life since his heroic days on Mars during the sunstorm. Waiting for the sky to fall again.
Bella suppressed a shudder. As for herself, she only hoped she could avoid creating any more James Duflots.
9: FLORIDA
Myra got Bisesa out of the Hibernaculum and took her to Florida.
They flew in a fat-bodied, stub-winged plane. It was driven by a kind of air-breathing rocket called a scramjet. Bisesa still felt frail, but she used to ride helicopters in the army, and she studied this new generation of craft—new to a sleeper like her, anyhow—with curiosity. A jaunt across the continent, from Arizona to Florida, was nothing; this sturdy vessel really came into its own on very long-haul flights when it had the chance to leap up out of the atmosphere altogether, like a metallic salmon.
But the security was ferocious. They even had to submit to searches and scans in flight. This paranoia was a legacy not just of the sunstorm but of incidents when planes and spaceplanes had been used as missiles, including the destruction of Rome a couple of years before the storm.
Security was in fact an issue from the beginning. Bisesa had come out of her Hibernaculum pod without the latest ident tattoos. There was an office of the FBI m
aintained on site at the Hibernaculum to process patients like her, refugees from slightly more innocent days—and to make sure no fugitives from justice had tried to flee through time. But Myra had come to Bisesa’s room with a boxy piece of equipment that stamped a tattoo onto Bisesa’s face, and she gave her an injection she described as “gene therapy.” Then they had slipped out of the Hibernaculum through a goods entrance without going anywhere near that FBI office.
Since then they had passed every check.
Bisesa felt faintly disturbed. Whoever Myra had hooked up with evidently had significant resources. But she trusted Myra implicitly, even though this was a strange new Myra, suddenly aged and embittered, a new person with whom she was, tentatively, building a new relationship. Really, she had no choice.
They deplaned at Orlando and spent a night at a cheap tourist hotel downtown.
Bisesa was faintly surprised that people still shuttled around the world to destinations like this. Myra said it was mostly nostalgic. The latest virtual reality systems, by interfacing directly with the central nervous system, were capable even of simulating the sensation of motion, acceleration. You could ride a roller coaster around the moons of Jupiter, if you wanted. What theme park could compete with that? When the last of the pre-sunstorm generations gave up chasing their childhood dreams and died off, it seemed likely that most people would rarely venture far from the safety of their bunker-like homes.
They ate room service food and drank minibar wine, and slept badly.
The next morning, a driverless car was waiting outside the hotel for them. It was of an odd, chunky design that Bisesa didn’t recognize.
Cocooned, they were driven off at what felt like a terrific speed to Bisesa, with the traffic a hairsbreadth close. She wasn’t sorry when the windows silvered over, and she and Myra sat in a humming near-silence, with only the faintest of surges to tell them that they were speeding out of the city.
When they drew to a halt the doors slid back, allowing bright sunlight to flood into the car, and Bisesa heard the cries of gulls, and smelled the unmistakable tang of salt.
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