Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Brilliant white light flooded into the minibus. Atyeo twitched the wheel slightly in reaction.

  ‘Wow.’ Paresh fumbled for the sunglasses in his top pocket. ‘Didn’t think it was gonna be that bright.’

  Angela was already searching the sky. ‘There,’ she said simply.

  Paresh followed her gaze. St Libra’s sky was a clean deep turquoise, which somehow seemed to be a whole lot higher than Earth’s. He barely noticed that. Slicing right across the northern sky like some kind of magical veil was the planet’s phenomenal ring system. From the tightly braided A-ring skimming along at the top of the atmosphere, it stretched out for half a million kilometres to the outermost T-ring with its eight little shepherd moonlets. The main bands were noticeably denser, producing distinct ribs clotted with gravel-sized specks of rock, though the space between them was still suffused with ice granules and dust forming a magnificent sparkling mantle that spanned the heavens from east to west.

  ‘Holy mother,’ Paresh whispered in reverence.

  Angela looked out on St Libra’s glory, feeling a strange sense of relief that it was there; that there was natural beauty in the universe still. Holloway had denied her such things for so long, she’d half-believed she might have simply imagined it along with the rest of her previous existence.

  On the seats behind her, the rest of the squad was registering its amazement at the spectacle.

  ‘You weren’t joking, were you,’ Paresh said.

  ‘Not about this,’ she told him. ‘You can’t joke about this.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me . . . us.’

  She grinned and put her wraparound sunglasses on. ‘To be fair, it’s not something you were likely to miss, now is it?’

  ‘No.’ He peered up into the sky again, as if it might be some sort of trickery.

  ‘If you think it’s grand now, wait till night time. Sirius makes it gleam twice as bright as Earth’s moonlight.’

  ‘That I can believe.’

  ‘Very romantic,’ she said.

  He gave her a slightly wary, tentative grin. For two weeks she’d never given him the slightest intimation that their friendship might grow into anything more. Good pals was the limit, given she was his official charge. Until this morning. When the squad was packing kit and getting dressed she’d stood beside her bunk bed, where she had the top mattress and Paresh the bottom. Wearing just bra and briefs she’d slathered on high-factor sunblock oil until her skin was slick and glistening, taking her time, an exhibition like some zone babe on a raunchy location shoot. Paresh was sharing the same space beside the bunks, pulling on his own cream-coloured TE uniform. It had been a tough struggle for him not to gawp. The few times their eyes had met, she’d given him the neutral smile of someone oblivious to the testosterone storm she was kindling.

  The balance had shifted now. He was the uncertain one, the one who would risk his dignity to come after her. The one easier for her to control.

  ‘Kind of a pain, too,’ she said. ‘The rings are why St Libra can never have comsats, or any other kind of satellite for that matter. You might be able to see the stars twinkling through them, but for all intents and purposes they’re solid. No satellite could ever pass through them intact.’

  ‘We’ve got the e-Rays,’ Paresh said. ‘They’ll provide all our coms cover out in the jungle. It won’t be anything worse than we’ve trained for.’

  ‘Yes it will be,’ she taunted.

  ‘Come on, have a little faith. You’ve seen that we’re tight, that we can take care of ourselves and our objective.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Another grid ramp led down from the oval gateway, mirroring the Newcastle side. At the bottom, a semicircle of mirror-glass offices and dark engineering units curved away to the right, boasting company names in high colourful letters; with the surrounding ground lost beneath fat swathes of tarmac where hundreds of cars and pick-ups were parked without any order. To the left of the ramp were the warehouses and processing sheds, far larger than anything in Last Mile, which handled St Libra’s imports. Closest to the ramp was a bus station, with each embarkation pier empty. For the last couple of weeks, emigration to St Libra had been down to a few hundred people per day, with everyone marshalled together and scurrying through when HDA wasn’t using the gateway. Angela couldn’t see any people outside anywhere.

  A broad apron of tarmac expanded out from the end of the ramp, with feed roads curving off to the various nearby buildings. Directly ahead was a three-lane carriageway, with a giant sign beside it: WELCOME TO MOTORWAY A. It led directly away from the gateway, out into the harsh bioil industrial sector which dominated the landscape, where giant tank farms, coated in silver heat-resistant blankets, stretched across the raw rust-red soil to the horizon. Between the tanks were forests of elaborate refinery columns swathed in a tangle of tubes and conduits, and puffing out jets of steam which soon dispersed in the hot, cloudless atmosphere. The ground itself was mostly obscured by a snake’s nest of thick pipes, interconnecting at the stumpy cylinders of turbine pumps, all sheltered from the elements by simple roofs of corrugated composite.

  ‘Has it changed much?’ Paresh asked.

  ‘Not really. The buildings are bigger, and there’s a lot more tanks; otherwise it’s the same.’

  ‘So where’s the city?’

  ‘Highcastle? I’ve no idea, but it’s about ten miles away I think. I never visited. It’s a bit of a dump by all accounts. Company town.’

  ‘Maybe that’s grown as well, improved some.’

  Angela eyed the raw industrial panorama in all its functional ugliness. ‘Somehow, I doubt that.’

  The convoy picked up speed, chasing down Motorway A. As they drove, the air-con fans grew louder as they struggled to accommodate the sudden impact of St Libra’s hot, humid atmosphere. The air in the minibus became cold, clammy, and laced with a faint smell of bioil. Narrow tracks branched off Motorway A every couple of hundred metres or so on either side, signposted with enigmatic alphanumerics. They meandered away through the tanks, little more than twinned tyre ruts worn into the stony soil, host to long puddles shimmering in the low sunlight. Then after five miles, when the tanks finally ended and some kind of local purple-green grass reclaimed the soil, the road forked, and they took the left-hand lane. Angela caught sight of the sign for the airport, another twenty miles away.

  Slowly, the native vegetation started to reassert itself across the exposed soil, though the whiff of bioil coming off the refineries was a constant. Dark grass with subtle hues of purple and aquamarine, shining like diffraction patterns, spread out from the tarmac, interrupted by hemispherical scrub bushes with strange white branches poking out of the uniformity of blue-green leaves. Then there were the wire trees, which she remembered, like silver sculptures of leafless terrestrial trees.

  ‘I thought it was all jungle,’ Leora Fawkes complained.

  ‘We’re on the Great Jarrow Plain,’ Angela told her. ‘The centre of Ambrose, which is pure algaepaddy territory. When we get across the ocean to Brogal you’ll see real jungle.’

  ‘So where are the algaepaddies?’

  ‘Wait till we get airborne, you can’t miss them.’

  Highcastle Airport sprawled across twenty-five square miles. There was room for that kind of sluggish extravagance on St Libra; the flat land was mostly mown grass, with buildings dispersed around the two long runways and their attendant maze of taxiways and link roads. The control tower stood at one end, a spire of bleached white concrete topped with a band of blue-green glass. Even after ninety-two years of human occupation, it remained the tallest structure on the planet. Because they were all divorced from each other, there was no sense of scale to the rest of the airport buildings; not until you got up close and realized how big they were.

  The airport was the first time Angela saw any sign of human activity. HDA’s logistics corps was working hard with their task of supplying the Primary Staging Area at Abellia Airport, seven and a half thousand kilo
metres away. All the bulky equipment containers, standard airload 350DL cargo pallets, GL56 pods filled with raw, the fleet of ground vehicles, the helicopters, and flat-fold Qwik-Kabins that HDA had sent on ahead through the gateway – it was all spread grid-fashion across the airport tarmac or sheltered in the open-sided hangars, awaiting its flight out.

  As well as the SuperRocs and Daedalus strategic airlifters, HDA had requisitioned all seven planes belonging to the planet’s one airline: AirBrogal. Four of those were commercial Boeing 2757s, modified to a single first-class cabin that could carry a hundred and fifty passengers to Abellia in contemporary luxury, along with express cargo packages. Three Antonov An-445s made up the remainder of the fleet, long-range cargo planes with a payload similar to the Daedalus, which were used to haul medium-weight high-priority items out to Abellia’s wealthy fashion-conscious, must-have consumers. Everything else, the real heavy items, were trucked along Motorway A in huge lorry-trains then shipped across the sea.

  The only other planes parked in the shade of their hangars were the supersonic executive jets of the ultra-rich who had homes in Abellia. There was nowhere else to fly on the planet.

  The Norths had established a sovereign state with its own constitution in the middle of the massive Ambrose continent, whose legitimacy was officially recognized by every Earth and trans-stellar government. Its border was a circle roughly two thousand kilometres in diameter encompassing the algaepaddies and farms – that was all they took responsibility for. Eastshields, the tiny port town on Ambrose’s northern coast where Motorway A finally ended, was the only other place where the primary constitution applied; and that town only existed to load and maintain the five cargo ships which sailed over to Abellia.

  Way beyond the Great Jarrow Plain, and spread out along three thousand kilometres of Ambrose’s south-east coast, were the Independencies; St Libra’s great attraction for the politically disaffected of Earth and the rest of the trans-stellar worlds. They comprised a plethora of tiny nation states, each one proud and protective of its unique constitution. The first ones to be founded existed side by side on the mainland with clearly defined boundaries, while the more recently established communities were extending themselves out across the myriad islands of the vast Tyne Archipelago, colonizing a section which they’d named the Isles of Liberty. Just about every political and economic ideology humans had ever dreamed up, along with the full range of theocracies, could be found within the Independencies, providing a sanctuary for every type of dissident.

  Everybody who travelled to that region of St Libra, which was where all the emigrants of the last eighty years headed, did so along Motorway B, which wasn’t even tarmacked for most of its length. None of the Independency states owned a runway – they all treasured their isolation too much for quick contact with the trans-stellar society they’d rejected.

  *

  Angela’s minibus pulled up beside one of the giant open-side hangars, whose curving solar panel roof was big enough to shield both of the SuperRocs side by side had they ever been permitted a rest. A quarter of the concrete floor was taken up with HDA 350DL pallets and GL56 pods. Trestle tables had been set up near the row of portable toilet cabins, with chilled water dispensers, and coolboxes of snack food.

  ‘We’re here until the flight,’ Paresh announced to his squad. ‘You are responsible for your own kitbag until we embark. Do not let it out of your sight.’

  A wash of hot air gusted into the minibus when Atyeo opened the doors. Angela hoisted her personal bag onto her shoulders, shoved a cotton sunhat down on her head and went to collect her HDA issue kitbag from the locker at the side of the minibus.

  Several hundred people were milling about in the hangar; a big contingent of Legionnaires, along with science staff and HDA technical support specialists. They all formed their own groups, with little cross-contact. Angela found the instinctive tribalism amusing.

  She collected a flask of chilled water and a pack of sandwiches from the bored catering people, then joined Paresh’s squad, sitting on her kitbag and watching the unchanging landscape outside. Ground-heat shimmer turned the air to a haze, making the distant buildings waver. Apart from a few HDA trucks and flatloaders rolling past in some weird dance between container stacks, nothing moved.

  Transport corps staff arrived in a bus, and drove the minibus convoy away. Lieutenant Pablo Botin came over and announced the SuperRoc was ‘slightly behind schedule’, which was greeted with typical Legionary scorn.

  Angela settled in to watch the sun slide down the sky, making sure she had a view of the incredible rings. The lazy atmosphere, cloying bioil-fumed air, bright light, and perpetual flat terrain triggered a feeling of true freedom for the first time since she’d walked out of Holloway. Here, she really could give everyone the slip and walk over the horizon never to return.

  Not yet, though. There were a few things she had to check out first, and the expedition was flying her direct to the first one.

  About an hour after they arrived, a convoy of six mobile biolabs pulled up just inside the hangar, so that the roof’s shadow covered them. They were big vehicles, with six individually powered wheel hubs under a chassis that supported a high driver’s cab, a small living section, and the windowless lab itself, which stretched for two-thirds of the length. Looking at the one-and-a-half-metre-diameter tyres and their thick hub suspension pistons, Angela reckoned there was very little terrain they wouldn’t be able to cope with.

  Vance Elston and a couple of other officers went over and started talking to the xenobiology teams who’d emerged. It was clear they all knew each other well. She made a mental note of that, curious why a spook like Elston would bother with science nerds.

  One of the Boeing C-8000 Daedalus airlifters came in to land, touching down with a squeal of brakes and squirts of dirty smoke from the undercarriage bogies. It taxied over to a cargo terminal, and opened its rear ramp doors. The nose also swung up slowly, allowing the logistics corp crews to load pallets from both ends as quickly as the flatbed trucks could deliver them. Engineers ran their flightworthiness checks, inspecting the turbofans. At the same time, a couple of fat bowsers drove up and began pumping in JB5 biav fuel. The flight crew disembarked, handing over to a fresh crew.

  As the loading progressed the sky started to darken quickly. Angela watched the cloud front sweep in from the west, a churning slate-grey mass that appeared implausibly low over the ground given the magnitude of the sky. The wind picked up, sending cooler gusts through the open hangar. She delved into her bag, and zipped a thin fleece over her T-shirt, then folded the sunglasses away. Most of the Legionnaires were standing at the edge of the hangar, watching the rainstorm approach. She knew better.

  The Daedalus was turned around in an impressively efficient forty-five minutes. It trundled back out to the runway, and raced up into the sky, just beating the arrival of the clouds. The deluge of rain they brought with them was as thick and heavy as she remembered. That was the thing with a world with a landmass that was mostly tropical or sub-tropical. It rained every day, often more than once. And in keeping with St Libra’s size, at nearly twice Earth’s diameter, the rain was on an equally overwhelming scale.

  The noise it made striking the panels of the hangar roof made conversation all but impossible. Everyone standing near the edge stepped back smartly as the cascade splattered across the concrete. Angela’s view of the airport shrank rapidly; so dense was the fall, she could barely see the neighbouring hangar. Outside, the landscape she could make out was reduced to blurred monochrome outlines. Nonetheless she could see the build-up of water in the ground’s gentle undulations – what she’d taken to be long natural dips were actually broad drainage channels, taking the water away from the runways and buildings.

  ‘To hell with this,’ Gillian Kowalski grunted; she was sitting with Omar Mihambo on a kitbag close to Angela.

  ‘It won’t last long,’ Angela told them.

  ‘They didn’t tell us we’d need fucking scub
a gear,’ Omar said.

  Lightning flared, making everyone jump.

  DiRito was grinning out at the wall of water curtaining off the edge of the hangar. ‘Everything really is bigger and better here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Even the monsters,’ Angela said.

  Paresh gave her a disapproving glance, which she deflected with a rueful grin as the thundercrack rolled round the hangar.

  After forty minutes the rain finished as fast as it began. The clouds tumbled away into the east, not that their retreat brought back much daylight. Clean air gusted through the hangar in the wake of the clouds, taking away the last hint of bioil fumes. Over to the west, the dazzle-point which was Sirius sank quickly into the horizon, promptly followed by the high-magnitude star that was Sirius B, which was now almost in opposing conjunction with St Libra. The primary seemed to be shining right through the edge of the ring system, making the curving shroud of particles glow merrily.

  ‘Hey, there you go, guys,’ Angela said, pointing up at the rings. ‘That’s an omen for your first day. The G-spot’s come out for you.’

  The squad clustered round her, trying to see what she was pointing at. Almost halfway across the span of the rings, a tiny swirl of darkness was creeping along one of the thicker bands.

  ‘What is that?’ Mohammed Anwar asked.

  ‘One of the shepherds. An asteroid-sized moon which helps keep the rings stable. Technically, it’s on the outer edge of the F-ring. But . . . everyone calls it the G-spot.’

  ‘Hard to find, huh?’ Hanrahan said as he squinted up.

  ‘Only for you boys,’ Angela shot back at him.

  The squad laughed as the sun finally slipped below the horizon, and the full spectacle of the rings glimmered wide across the twilight sky.

  Their SuperRoc landed fifteen minutes later. Paresh’s squad joined one of the two queues snaking back across the apron from the twin sets of airstairs which the ground crew wheeled up to the fuselage. Angela guessed there must be close to four hundred of them embarking, though the plane could actually hold over eight hundred when fully configured for passengers. But this was a combi version, with the lower deck currently converted to cargo.