Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘What’s happening?’ Sid asked his e-i. ‘Why is there a code red?’

  ‘HDA’s North Europe early warning radar network is detecting spaceships entering Earth’s atmosphere.’

  ‘What?’

  *

  Two hundred and eighty-three lightwave ships fell from the zenith of the glorious cerulean sky above Newcastle. They fell silently, discarding their stealth effect as they came swooping down on the unsuspecting city so they blossomed as dark aquamarine shapes in the eyes of the frantic residents staring upwards. Though there were many sizes and profiles, from squat teardrops to giant spheres with stumpy twisted fins protruding from their equator, none of them was small.

  A teardrop with fluted contours led the formation, arrowing down towards Last Mile. Similar, people noted, to the mysterious craft that had been glimpsed there exactly a week ago when the D-bomb plot was thwarted by their very own Ian Lanagin. For the final kilometre of its descent, thin trails of vapour sprouted from the tips of the malformed rings extending from its midsection. While its brethren began to slow languidly, this one moved with fast purpose, unwinding five spiralling snow-white contrails as it plummeted down.

  The idle workforce of Last Mile’s struggling businesses spilled onto the Kingsway to watch the strange armada sink towards them. Images from iris smartcells and the meshes of Last Mile detonated across the transnet, projecting the sight across every trans-space world.

  The lead spaceship finally decelerated hard, coming to a halt just above the metal bridge ramp that led into the silver phosphorescence of the gateway itself. With an ease belying its size and mass, it pitched over ninety degrees, presenting its nose to the trans-spacial connection. A moment later it flashed forward, flying through to St Libra.

  The rest of the spaceships continued their descent in a more measured, ominous fashion. They came down in a shoal, moving in graceful union, adjusting their position until they engulfed the gateway along with the vast concrete burrow which housed the machinery generating it.

  Hundreds of figures sprinted away from the hovering ships, pouring out of the Border Directorate terminal, the cargo-processing halls, the pipeline-control room, the administration offices, and the gateway-engineering centre. They looked back fearfully over their shoulders as they went, seeing fuselage hatches curtain open. Out tumbled an army of cybernetic termites: metre-long machines with spindly flexible legs and a chittering array of mandible tools. They swarmed the gateway, flooding through the open doors along the side and scampering over the concrete roof of the burrow to find vents which they wormed their way into.

  Within ten minutes the gateway’s remarkable shimmering oval of interdimensional radiance cooled and dimmed, evaporating like a wizard’s curtain to reveal a wall of densely packed, high-voltage physics machinery behind. The army of metallic scavengers were already crawling over it, jabbing their tools into the fissures between modules, prising open conduits, tugging out bundles of cabling. Lasers sparkled dazzling red as they sought to cut through the framework girders, sending sparks fountaining down to bounce along the bridge ramp like dying fireworks.

  Slowly, and with single machine-purpose intent, they gnawed their way deeper and deeper into the bulk of the generator systems. Liberated sections were lifted out and carried away by the teeming victorious termites, flowing upwards into the waiting spaceships.

  With the dismantling process successfully instigated, one teardrop-shaped spaceship rose silently, and streaked away to the north.

  *

  It had been fifty-five years since Constantine North had seen the truncated pyramid of rainbow prism glass which he and his two siblings had lived in for over forty years while they built their commercial empire. His spaceship came down on the lawn in front of the main doors, and he stepped out to breathe down the air of his birthworld. The smell of mown grass and the last fading cherry blossom summoned up memories and emotional resonances from the older, unreformed sections of his brain. He rather enjoyed the nostalgia, stopping to admire the grounds with their thick fence of trees and two long lakes. The trees had matured nicely over the intervening decades, giving the vista a shaggier, more natural appearance.

  Constantine walked up the stone steps to the heavy glass doors of the main entrance, the Aldred-avatar at his side. Augustine was waiting in the cavernous central atrium, where the St Libra vegetation reached almost to the ceiling. Several of his sons were standing beside him, forming an exemplary praetorian guard. Only when his visitors were inside did he start walking, the Rex exoskeleton legs humming quietly. He spared the hulking monster only the briefest of glances, proving to everybody how irrelevant he considered it.

  ‘Brother,’ Constantine said. ‘You look good. The rejuve treatment is working, yes?’

  Augustine stood in front of him not offering any greeting, any acknowledgement of what was happening. ‘Aye, but not as well as yours, I see.’

  ‘We refined Bartram’s methods, that’s all.’

  Augustine smiled without humour, and looked at the monster again. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ he bellowed, his self-control lost, spittle flying from his mouth. ‘You bring this, this . . . thing to my house. Our house!’

  ‘Our lives are changing, Augustine. I need you to understand that. What better way . . . ?’

  ‘Your life was nearly over, you stupid shit. I’ve spent the last ten minutes pleading with General Shaikh not to blow your spaceships to hell.’

  ‘He can’t actually do that, but thank you for your intervention. I’ll call him myself soon, and offer him the lightwave drive by way of compensation for today. The military do so love shiny new technology, there’s always so many ways to abuse it.’

  ‘And the gateway?’ Augustine asked dangerously. ‘You’re destroying it.’

  ‘I’m relocating it. This life is over, Augustine. Northumberland Interstellar, the bioil, the money, let it go. I have a life so much better waiting for both of us.’

  ‘I have spent my life building that company; you spent more than half of yours as well. You can’t do this! Give me my gateway back. I’ll get the bioil flowing again if I have to nuke Sirius back into life myself.’

  ‘It’s our gateway, brother, and I need it to save the life of everyone left on St Libra, all the millions of humans cowering in the Independencies as they starve to death. Isn’t that a more noble goal to devote yourself to?’

  ‘Save them? How? They can come back the same bloody way they went to their medieval squalor nations if you’d just leave the bloody thing alone.’

  Constantine sighed and turned to the Aldred-avatar. ‘Show him.’

  Behind Augustine, the bullwhip tree growing in the centre of the atrium quivered. One of its lower coiled branches came lashing out, slamming into a marble bench, splitting it in two. Both halves skidded apart over the polished tile flooring, broken pebbles scattering wide. The branch slowly withdrew, coiling itself back up like a serpent returning to slumber.

  Two targeting lasers were now shining out of the mansion’s pillars, tracking up and down the bullwhip’s trunk, trying to find the hidden hostile.

  ‘My son,’ Augustine spat at the monster. ‘You killed my son. You killed my brother.’

  ‘We’re lucky it didn’t commit genocide on us,’ Constantine said. ‘After the crimes we’ve committed against it.’

  Augustine’s glare was animated by hatred, never leaving the monster. It was strange, Constantine mused, that so much of human emotion was personalized. To think wide was to dissipate all strength of feeling. But he knew his brother could accomplish the intellectual leap – after all, he had, even though the process had taken fifty years.

  ‘Give us some time,’ Constantine said to the hulking Aldred-avatar. ‘I have so much to explain to my brother.’

  *

  By morning the blizzard had subsided. Sirius was shining bright pink across the canyon, darkening its massive walls to a midnight black. Lighter rosy ringlight was washed away behind the most
aggressive display of shifting colours the St Libra aurora had ever produced. The vast rivers of ethereal light twirled and looped over the snow-clad roofs of the convoy vehicles, on occasion even reaching down into the canyon itself, a giant’s fingers stroking the jumbled white land.

  Antrinell led what was left of the convoy personnel out into the clean, calm dawn. Angela followed him out, wishing she wasn’t so tired. Maybe it was just the blues after having achieved so much, but she felt she should be in higher spirits.

  There was too much sorrow to overcome, she decided. They’d lost so many people that the accord they’d come to with St Libra didn’t settle well, not on the human psyche.

  It had taken half of the night to open up the remaining warheads and remove the metavirus containers. One by one their contents had been vaporized under the steady gaze of the hulking Barclay-avatar. All of them knew that something altogether more massive, and possibly quite magical, was looking out at the process through the monster’s eyes. Understanding the abstract and acknowledging the fact were quite different things.

  Nobody really trusted it. Not the monster who had slain so many of them. So the Barclay-avatar stood to one side while narrow-blade axes were used to chisel the rock-hard bodies of Atyeo and Garrick from the wind-compacted ice that locked them fast against the frozen river. While Angela was taking her turn, on her knees, hammering rhythmically at the ground, she glanced over at the motionless figure standing in front of the overturned Tropic-1. Despite its solidified features, she could tell it was unmoved by the human ritual. Reverence to the dead was clearly not a part of it. But then, would it mourn every leaf that fell from its myriad trees, exhibit sorrow for every spore which didn’t germinate? Short individual lives were a forgotten history for it now.

  When she’d had enough, she stood up and handed her axe to Ken Schmitt. It was so much easier to move without having to wear the armour, though she noticed not everyone had abandoned it. Paresh was one of them.

  ‘They’re on their way,’ the Barclay-avatar announced abruptly.

  ‘Who are?’ Tamisha asked.

  ‘The Jupiter humans. They have arrived at Newcastle. Constantine has kept his word, and the gateway has been deactivated.’

  ‘Just keeps getting better and better,’ Antrinell said bitterly. ‘No way home even if we do ever get out of here.’

  Rebka put her head close to Angela. ‘If a lightwave ship is here, it’ll be overhead in less than an hour.’

  ‘What’s a lightwave ship?’

  ‘UFO, basically.’

  ‘Cool,’ Angela said.

  Whatever the avatar’s promise, Antrinell insisted they keep working. They refilled the bioil tanks of both biolabs. Atyeo and Garrick were freed from the ice, and wrapped in sleeping bags.

  ‘Take a break for lunch,’ Antrinell said when the bodies were put on Tropic-2’s sledge, next to Elston and the others. ‘When we get back out here we’ll launch a comm rocket. This weather’s as good as it’ll get.’

  His voice was swamped by what sounded like a terrific airburst explosion. The canyon walls reverberated, kicking loose several micro-avalanches along the rim. Ice groaned and cracked under Angela’s boots. A thin halo of snow puffed off the vehicles.

  ‘What the hell?’

  Everyone was cowering, glancing fearfully up at the shimmering curtains of moiré light that danced through the air above. Even the Barclay-avatar had flinched, Angela saw.

  ‘Ya-hey!’ Rebka shrieked. She was dancing about like a ten-year-old, waving her arms wide at the sky. ‘They’re here. Oh wow! Raul’s piloting.’ She jumped up again, her arms still wind-milling excitedly.

  Angela stared in astonishment at the dark teardrop shape that was ripping through the aurora’s placid streamers along the canyon. Like all castaways devoid of hope, rescue, when it finally came, was hard to believe.

  The spaceship slowed and tipped up, presenting its broad base to the ground, then touched down fifty metres away. Tiny emerald sparks skipped along the malformed rings sticking out of its centre, as if it was squeezing the aurora into concentrated droplets. Rebka grabbed Angela’s arm, tugging her along. ‘Come on, you’ve got to meet Raul.’

  ‘Who’s Raul?’

  ‘My brother. Well . . . he’ll probably deny it. To be honest, I was a bit of a pain growing up.’ Her face, framed by the wrapped scarf and woolly hat, was so girlishly vibrant that Angela had to smile back, that happiness was like a force of nature.

  A hatchway opened and two men stepped out, wearing the same protective oil-slick layer that Rebka’s metamolecule cloak could form. They’d left an oval open to show their faces. Rebka squealed and flung her arms round the taller, younger one.

  ‘Mother, this is Raul.’

  ‘Angela DeVoyal,’ he said in trepidation. ‘The Angela DeVoyal. Excuse me, but we’ve all been waiting a very long time to meet you.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ Angela told him, and burst out laughing at how ludicrous that statement was.

  Nobody had much to take with them. Most didn’t even bother delving back into the vehicles to collect their personal kitbags. Angela was one who did. Her bag with the items she’d bought at the Birk-Unwin store were the only possessions she had in the universe, the first she’d owned in twenty years, each one paid for by the money earned in Holloway. Money didn’t come harder than that. Which made them important.

  After she’d tugged the frost-covered bag out of Tropic-2, she switched the vehicle’s power cells off. They’d been on standby since last night. Given the high temperature they operated at, restarting them in sub-zero conditions would probably shatter them. Elston hadn’t wanted to risk that. The lights on the dashboard went out. For the first time in eighteen days she didn’t have the whiney buzz of machinery in her ears.

  Eighteen days?

  She found herself trembling. The convoy’s journey was too intense, too visceral to be a mere eighteen days. Even the joy of being reunited with Rebka could not compensate for the enormity of everything she’d endured.

  Angela backed out of the Tropic, seeing the Barclay-avatar waiting on the frozen river as Ken, Sakur, and Tamisha carried Botin’s stretcher to the waiting spaceship. The non-human thing was as impassive as it ever was, standing perfectly still as fat strands of the aurora caressed it as though it communed with the lightstorm. In her mind she saw into the humanoid shell it wore, saw through it, saw how it could be the spirit living in the plants, a fabulously complex life-force swathed round a planet as a corona clung to a star. Immense, immortal, the triumph of an evolution billions of years beyond anything terrestrial biology could aspire to. Rich with abilities that humans couldn’t even imagine for their gods. She was standing on it, amid it. Irrelevant, infinitesimal, her time fleeting.

  The perspective was draining. Really . . . what was the point to a life as small as hers in a galaxy which held St Libra and the Zanth?

  The sound of sobbing broke her miserable reverie. Lulu MacNamara was leaning on the side of Tropic-3, crying her little heart out as she clutched her cheap copy designer bag, not caring the tears froze on her cracked, scabbed cheeks.

  Angela walked over. ‘What’s up, sweets? We’re saved. We’re out of here.’

  ‘I know,’ Lulu whimpered. ‘But the gateway’s gone, like. I heard the monster say it. I’ll never get home now, I’ll never see me nan again. She’ll be so worried.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as never,’ Angela told her. ‘Look at me, it took twenty years, but I found Rebka again. Your nan, she’ll be there waiting for you when you get home.’

  ‘How?’ the girl pleaded.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Angela said breezily. ‘That’s the thing about the future: you just take a running jump at it, and see what you can find there. Isn’t that kind of wonderful? You want to go home, back to Newcastle: then when we get back to Abellia, stand up and shout out the question as loud as you can: who else wants to come with me? If there’s enough of you, then you build that gateway for yourselv
es.’

  ‘Aye, like I can do that. I’m just a waitress.’

  ‘Lulu, you’ve come through something that not one of us had any real expectation of surviving. It’s been the most remarkable, terrifying, brutal time of my life, and trust me I’ve been places and done things you wouldn’t believe. That makes you one of the greats, Lulu. Just living is a victory in this universe. Now we’re all going to get on the spaceship, and fly back to a city that’s going to thaw out nicely. After that, we’ll decide where we’re going next. Okay? And nobody will decide that for us.’

  ‘Aye, I suppose.’

  Angela put an arm round the girl’s shoulder and gave a quick squeeze. ‘Come on. I’ve never been in a spaceship before. I want to know what it’s like. For one thing, it’s going to be warm. Who knows, there might even be a shower.’

  The interior didn’t seem anything special. The airlock opened into a simple circular compartment with a slightly concave ceiling. Curving couches were arranged in a circle, their grey tough-foam substance blending seamlessly with the floor. The convoy personnel were stripping off their parkas and thick trousers, dripping a small stream of foul slushy ice onto the floor. Advanced spaceship it might be, but the life support was struggling with the smell of so many unwashed people.

  ‘I have a question,’ Angela said to the Barclay-avatar.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you killed the MTJ mutineers?’

  ‘No, Angela. They didn’t stand between me and the weapon.’

  ‘Can you feel where they are?’

  ‘Yes. They were hit quite badly by the blizzard. They’re still digging themselves out.’

  Angela turned to Raul. ‘We know the route they took. Let’s go get them.’

  ‘They don’t deserve it,’ Antrinell grunted sourly.

  Angela gave him an evil smile. ‘I know. But enough people have died on St Libra, so now let’s show this planet what being human really means, shall we? Let’s go collect them, and give them a hot meal, and take them back to Abellia where they’ll be safe and warm, just like us.’