Crash

by Guy Haley

“I was within my rights. Who needs a happy engineer anyway? Do you know what that stuff can do to you?”

  “If you’re unlucky,” said the man. “They assumed you would not be unlucky, or rather they did not care if you were. There are other engineers.”

  “Why should I take the chance on their say? Refusing the enhancers did not affect my ability to work.”

  “That’s not the way they think, Darek! For them, it is better that you fit in. That you are obedient. That you feel how they want you to feel.They want obedience on the Gateway Project too, they need it. The brightest and the best are going, yes, because the Pointers will need all man’s cunning to tame their new kingdoms, but also only the most loyal. Your refusal is a black mark against you. What would you say if I could make that mark go away, scrub it clean, get you a berth on the voyage? You’re more than qualified. You’d be going, were it not for that.”

  “How are you going to achieve that?” said Dariusz. He did not sit down again, but he wanted to hear what the man had to say. He needed hope, he needed a way out.

  “You’re being careful, saying nothing to incriminate yourself, but I’m sorry to say simply associating with me is a crime.” He held up his palms. “Don’t worry! They check the surveillance for this place, they’ll see nothing, because there won’t be anything to see. Don’t you think it funny that there’s no one else in here, Darek? You come here often. Usually full at this time of day, isn’t it?”

  Dariusz looked around the bar. “What have you done to me?”

  “Nothing permanent. Let’s just say neither of us is really here. If you walk away now, you’ll leave by that door and find yourself sitting at this table and staring at the TV display, not out in the rain.”

  “You’ve virt-jacked me?” said Dariusz incredulously. “How? Most of my inChip’s functions aren’t operational; I can’t afford to unlock them.”

  “You’re an engineer. You know these things aren’t foolproof.” The man shrugged. “It is safe.”

  Dariusz grunted. “Nothing’s safe.”

  “This is. I’m going to give you an address. You won’t forget it. If you are interested in learning more, come. Trust me, this is a genuine offer. Think about the gate, Dariusz, think about the transience of power. Ask yourself, what would you do to change the world for the better? Or would you rather let the inequality of the Earth be transplanted to flourish in alien soil, and oppress mankind forever?”

  “You said yourself, nothing is forever.” Dariusz pulled up the collar of his coat and strode through the deserted bar to the door. His hand hit the thick glass. November warmth seeped through its invisible lattices of carbon insulation.

  “Pan Szczeciński!” shouted the man. “What if I were to say you could take your boy with you? Get out of this dying world forever? I’m talking about a new world, Darek! A new world!”

  The door swung open, letting in a blast of damp heat. Dariusz stepped out into the blood-warm rain.

  He blinked. He was back in the bar. Several of the tables were occupied, and a low buzz of conversation filled the place. The lenses in his eyes palpitated, like they’d been open and staring for minutes. The in-mind overlays of his chip fizzed and jumped, before resuming their usual hopeless displays of debt and locked functions.

  He looked around himself cautiously. No one was paying him any attention.

  An address blinked on his inner-eye display. ‘The Dąbie Sailing Club.’ The road was out in the suburbs to the southeast, by the lake.

  His hand tightened on the coffee cup. It had gone cold.

  “Falling asleep, hey?” said a waiter as he approached the table and wiped it down. “Tough times. Makes me feel like going sailing, yes, sir. Water’s still free, isn’t it?”

  Dariusz looked at him as if stung. The waiter bent down and gently extricated the cup from Dariusz’s hand. “Let me take that, get you a fresh one, compliments of Bar Bramkowa. You look like you need it. Or would you rather have a beer?”

  Dariusz scrabbled to his feet, knocking his chair back noisily. A couple two tables over stopped talking, looked up at him disinterestedly for a moment and returned to their conversation.

  “Are you okay, friend?” said the waiter.

  “I’m fine.” Dariusz swallowed. “I need some air.” He shunted some of his last remaining credit from his inChip to the bar. The waiter’s pad chimed. He glanced down at it, and when he looked up again, Dariusz was on his way out.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” the waiter called after him.

  Dariusz pulled up his collar, the sense of déjà vu overwhelming. He hit the glass door and was out onto the plaza and into the warm November rain. A bicyclist rang his bell angrily as Dariusz stepped in front of him.

  The square was full of bikes, crisscrossing the pavement between its lawns. Advertising drones whisked overhead, shells hidden within their projections, soundtracks blaring.

  “Apply today!” one shouted. “Skilled citizens needed. Freedom, prosperity, self-determination!” The accompanying holographs showed the men from the television in the bar, then shots of the dockyards where the Gateway fleet was being assembled.

  The projector detected Dariusz’s interest and swooped closer to him, dazzling him with light-woven models of spaceships in dock, gridded superstructures being extruded by dozens of insectile machines. It looked artificially slowed. The more Dariusz watched, the more the construction resembled the feeding activity of a swarm of ants played backward, creating an animal in a slow frenzy of regurgitation.

  The association made his skin crawl.

  The advertisement’s tailored pseudo-personality engaged Dariusz, its too-perfect face rippling as the rain passed through it. The rain intensified, and the pedestrians and cyclists hurried as they crossed the square. A few cars shushed through standing water along the plaza’s edge, following their prescribed tracks. Dariusz stood stock still, as unconcerned by the rain as the machine.

  Images of finished vessels – although their real counterparts were years away from completion – appeared in the air. The vessels resembled delicate mushrooms laid on their sides – thin stalks, five kilometres long, leading to a dome-shaped cap of ice – the ship’s particle shielding. Beneath the cap were the rings of the hibernation decks, where thousands of men and women would spend the voyage asleep. Containers clustered all the way down the spine below the rings, ahead of the three space-to-surface shuttlecraft clamped onto it like remoras on a shark behind the boxes holding the starship’s solar sails. Toward the stern, the secondary cap, much smaller than the first, shielding tanks holding the fuels necessary to initiate the antimatter reaction, and finally the drive units, twenty-eight of them, each as big as a tower block.

  “Pan! Are you a man of skill? Do you crave a new start?” the face of light said. It smiled. There was a chirrup from Dariusz’s inChip and an icon blink in his mind, informing him of authorised data access. The machine found what it sought. It logged his pending application and abruptly turned away from him, seeking someone else. Had he already been tested and found wanting?

  Dariusz stood in the rain. The address for the Dąbie Sailing Club blinked in his mind’s eye.

  He would like to say he had nothing to lose, but he had: Lydia, and Danieł. They would be punished for his transgressions; not openly, that was not the way of the plutocracy, but they would be punished. Like he had been disbarred from the future because he had exercised the rights he supposedly enjoyed. He had fallen for society’s propaganda. Nobody had rights, nobody but the 0.01 per cent. His father had hauled himself from the bottom by sheer effort, and Dariusz had tried hard all his life to climb the money ladder a little further. He did not complain as he did so, submitting his skills and considerable talent to the yokes of the Pointers. As he saw it, you could either get your head down and work hard, hoping for some scraps off the high tables of the rich, or you could complain and get dead. He’d always told himself that it wasn’t a difficult choice to make.

  And now he w
as heading back down, back into the sump of the starving and the hopeless, the teeming masses with nothing to do. That little bit of latitude the Pointers gave was an illusion. He should have taken his pills like a good boy.

  Indecision rooted him, as rain ran into his collar. Should he go to Dąbie? He flipped the question around in his head. What had he to gain, what had he to lose?

  Thunder rumbled. The weather became more extreme with every passing year. He thought of what he’d seen, those sights that woke him in the night, that made him fret: the crumbling megacities that could barely feed themselves, the crowds, the failed landscapes, the grinding poverty. Europeans thought they had it bad; they had no idea. He’d seen what few of them saw, and what had he done? He’d applied sticking plasters to fatal wounds, helped build fences for the rich to hide behind.

  His own city was threadbare, its people worn out. There’d been talk of a population crash for a long time now. As he looked around the world he lived in, Darisuz could hear the clashing steel jaws of the Malthusian trap. The Pointers said the Market and mankind must expand together or fail. He had always suspected it might be simpler than that, a matter only of survival. Earth was all used up.

  He made his way across the plaza, away from the former gate. He used some of his last little money to release a paybike from its stand. He turned left onto the Trasa Zamkowa, the wide road that ran to the bridge over the river Odra, undecided where he would go.

  He waited for a gap in the flow of cyclists, and pushed off.

  The city’s heart fell away behind him. Szczecin wore its history lightly. Most of it was less than one hundred and ninety years old, and those parts that appeared older were not always so. It had been a fulcrum of nations for centuries. It was the battlefront of cultures, a stage set for dynastic ambition, a cruel ethnocentricity always beneath the surface, and had been levelled for it. Reconstructed Renaissance buildings stood side by side with Prussian-era apartment blocks, broad 19th-century boulevards led to communist-built parks. For a brief time of hope, this city had been the face of a brave new world. That dream had long died, and the new worlds of today were light years distant.

  He went over the bridge, weaving his way through the flocks of bikes. The bridge was a 20th-century relic, constructed for automobiles. Of its eight original lanes, two car tracks remained for those few who could afford personal vehicles, and the rest had been set aside for cyclists and horse traffic. The bridge arced high over the Odra, then came down again in the city’s port lands. It was overgrown and dangerous now, most of the docks overflowed with water even with the Swine Mouth barrage shut. On the far side of the river, the road had been raised up on a levee.

  Polluted marsh stretched either side of him, the boundaries of the river blurring into the land. Dariusz passed through the landscape of decayed buildings and collapsed warehouses. Trees grew freely in the streets, vigorous away from the water, blanched and skeletal where they had been overwhelmed by it. The ancients had sited Szczecin well; the old city was unchallenged up on its hill. Down here was another matter.

  Dariusz passed the turn for Nowa Metalowa, the road that would take him home to the woods and sandy hills of Podjuchy.

  He headed southeast, toward Dąbie.

  THE SHIPS

  TWENTY-ONE SHIPS HAVE completed or are near to completing their secondary construction phase. Their decks are in place, their basic systems active and undergoing tests. A further thirteen keel-spines have been laid. Three of those nearest completion are side by side, tethered by high tension cables to the construction site hub. The number of installations has grown, the construction site rivalling the largest of the Lagrange manufactory clusters.

  For the last fourteen days, the spider-machines have been weaving a lattice to the fore of each vessel. Before, the ships somewhat resembled artless candlesticks – blocky drive units at the tip of a long, bare scaffold. A kilometre from the drives come the cargo section and auxiliary craft sections, the clamps still empty. Next, a prickly array of comms gear behind the boxes housing the sails, then a gentle flaring, where the ships take on a measure of elegance. Round hibernation decks, segmented one from each other, fill out the top third of the vessel, growing in diameter until the prow, where they stop. Ugliness reasserts itself in a round plateau studded with boxes, catches and spikes.

  The spider-machines work around this rough end, puffing out clouds of high tensile carbon wires, a framework for what will come next. When they are done, a hazy cap, shaped like a mushroom, blurs the stars. A smaller, second framework is just discernible forward of the antimatter flasks. Next comes the water; the ships are moved to a new berth for this procedure.

  In a space thick with stolen comets, machines bearing heated tanks crawl along the lattice. Nozzles swivel, spray water in minute amounts, which freezes instantly. So they build, a half millimetre at a time, the great shielding caps of the spacecraft.

  It takes months to lay down the water. Many methods were debated for their construction, as all aspects of the ship’s construction were debated. A single, seamless block, reinforced by a carbon lattice, was the final decision.

  When these three are ready, they move away, pulled by tugs. In their final form the long mushrooms have square roots and round shields, long, warted stems, flaring gills and wide, brimming caps, four hundred metres thick. Enough to snag the highest energy particle, and stop it from wounding crew and machine. Essential; the ships will travel fast.

  The first completed are laden with dummy cargo, their hibernation pods filled with dummy passengers and dummy fluids. Each gathers three shuttles to it, which are real, as are their pilots; Sand among them, tasked with evacuating her ship’s skeleton crew should the space trials go amiss. The engines were tested some time ago, but the sails must now be calibrated. The ship’s tertiary drives emit excited ions to push them slowly to a point some seven thousand kilometres distant from the facility, where the sails are deployed with puffs of gas, circles of monomolecular super-fabrics unfurling against the black. They deploy as gracefully and unhurriedly as flower petals. Within a day the three mushroom-ships have sprouted wings, so thin as to be barely visible. They confuse the eye, refracting the ships’ images.

  Three clusters of boosting laser stations have been laid out along the ships’ route; one outside the asteroid belt, the next past icy Neptune, the last at the very edge of the system, the most distant outpost of mankind. One station for every four ships, three lasers per station. There have been problems here: cost overruns, breakdowns, a major disaster, hushed up but fatal nonetheless for the men and women engulfed by it. Stocks drop, then recover. One Pointer family is reduced to penury. Unheard of, but these are unprecedented times.

  The ships edge out past the belt, gathering the solar wind. Their acceleration is minimal, and Sand chafes under the long days aboard the empty, echoing vessel. She wanders the ship but is disturbed by the faceless mannequins in the hibernation pods and crew facilities. She is tense, as all the crew are tense.

  Past the belt, the first laser array is activated, and their speed climbs as the ships’ wings catch beams of focused light. Sand is put in mind of surfers waiting an age for a wave, then the heady rush of speed and power when it comes... but there is no exhilaration. A slight change in redshift, barely discernible; an uncomfortable push that interferes miserably with the ships’ centrifuged illusion of gravity. Otherwise, nothing aboard the vessels alters. Sand is bored.

  They coast to Neptune, a journey of many weeks, accelerating all the while. The timing of the second relay is tested, adding its power to the first, and then all the lasers are cut dead. The ships reel in their sails and flip laboriously end over end. Precious antimatter is annihilated in their main drive units to bring them to a halt, a deceleration measured in fortunes burned per second. The ships stop short of the edge of the orbit of Pluto. Sand looks back. The sun is a big star. She has never been this far out. Further on, armies of robotic drones patrol their passage through the Kuiper belt, clearing
away the few objects that might pose a threat to the fleet. A kindness, here; the fleet will have to brave the Oort cloud alone.

  Twice as far from the sun again as the outer belt is the frontier, the place where Sol’s heliosheath tails to nothing, and interstellar space begins.

  For the first time in her career as a spacer, Sand feels uneasy. She will not be returning, the next time she comes this way. Her comrades notice the change in her demeanour, but none comment upon it. They feel the same.

  Under ponderous ion drive, the ships head back toward the light.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Dąbie Sailing Club

  THE SIGN WAS a battered, rotting piece of wood. In a crazed mess of paint flakes, the corpses of words read ‘Klub Zeglarski Dąbia’ – The Dąbie Sailing Club.

  Dariusz stood astride his bike, feet planted on the muddy track leading through the reeds to the lake.

  The lakeside was silent. The rain had stopped and fog rose from the warm earth, clinging to the bulrushes and leaching the scene of colour. Dariusz was a soul lost on the shores of Elysium.

  A tram rattled by on the levee behind him, a clatter of mechanical noise swallowed by the mist.

  Dariusz was nervous. He was not a coward, although he believed himself to be. He was precisely the opposite: he feared a great deal, and it was a trait that he despised, so he would often take risks that others would not. His loathing of his fear imbued him with a reckless bravery.

  It was this that placed his foot on the pedal of his bicycle and pushed him off, even as his misgivings beset him.

  His bike squelched down the muddy track. Everything here was permanently waterlogged. The skeletal arms of drowned trees loomed abruptly out of the mist and disappeared as quickly, growing sparser as he drew closer to the lake.

  He heard the boats before he saw them: the slap of water on hull, the jingle of metal fittings against mast and board. A copse of rod-straight lines describing precise, metronomic arcs suddenly resolved themselves, the masts of the boats rocking in time to the ripples of the Lesser Lake Dąbie.