The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  Jack and Mark picked themselves up, and ran.

  On the boat ride back, Mark vented his anger and fear and shame by making all kinds of plans and boastful threats. He promised vengeance. He promised to find out the truth. He promised to bring the man to justice. He told Jack that if he said so much as one word about this, he’d get into so much trouble he’d never find his way out again.

  Jack, with the cold clarity that fear sometimes brings, told Mark that he was being a fool. Even if Algren Rees was a spy, there was nothing they could do about it because they were outside the law, too. If they went to the police, how were they going to explain that they’d broken into his apartment, stolen his gun, and threatened him with it?

  “If he’s a spy?” Mark said. “The gun proves he’s a spy!”

  “Does it? The gun is a Navy sidearm—you showed me the sigil yourself. And he said that he was in the Navy.”

  Mark sneered. “I suppose you believe him.”

  “And if he really was a spy, he would have shot us after he took it back.”

  “Yes, and he used some kind of wild talent to take it back. He speeded up. Which also proves that he’s a spy.”

  “He took his own gun back, Mark. The gun you stole from his apartment. And we can’t do anything about it because he threatened to go to our parents.”

  “It’s an empty threat,” Mark said stubbornly. “He can’t go to our parents, or to the police, either, because if he did, it would blow his cover. It’s a deadlock, don’t you see? And we have to figure out how to turn it to our advantage.”

  Jack couldn’t get Mark to promise that this was an end to it, and spent the next few days in a misery of fear and guilty anticipation. He avoided his parents as much as he could, either hiding away in his room, halfheartedly fiddling with his virtual model of the invasion of Paris, Dione (but after his adventure had gone so badly wrong, playing at soldiers no longer had the appeal it once did), or mooching around the apartment complex’s mall.

  That was where he met Sky Bolofo. Sky wanted to know what had made Mark so terminally pissed off with Algren Rees, and eventually got Jack to confess everything.

  “Wow. You’re lucky the guy didn’t report you,” Sky said when Jack was finished.

  “I know,” Jack said. “The problem is, Mark still thinks he’s some kind of spy. I think he’s going to do something stupid.”

  They were sitting in the mall’s food court. The chatter of the people around them rose through the fronds of tall palms toward the glass dome. Sky studied Jack through his red-framed spex and said, “I think so, too.”

  “You do? What’s Mark been saying?”

  That was when Jack learned that their friend had told Sky that he was going to settle things once and for all, and had asked for Sky’s help.

  Sky told Jack, “I said good luck, but it was nothing to do with me.” And then, “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I have to settle something, too,” Jack said.

  He tried to phone Mark, but Mark was screening his calls and wouldn’t answer his door when Jack went to his apartment. But by then Jack had more or less worked out what Mark was planning to do. Each and every Monday, Algren Rees had a mysterious appointment. And Jack and Mark had confronted him at the entrance to an airlock, which meant that it was probably somewhere outside the city, on the surface . . .

  Jack knew that he couldn’t tell either his parents or Mark’s parents about what had happened, and what he believed Mark was planning. He was just as guilty as Mark, and would get into just as much trouble. He’d have to sort it out himself, and because Mark was refusing to talk to him, he’d have to catch him in the act, stop him before he did something really dumb.

  When he asked Sky to help him out, Sky naturally refused at first, just as he’d refused to help Mark, but quickly changed his mind when Jack reminded him that if Mark was caught, everything would come out, including the police card that Sky had cloned. After Jack explained what he thought Mark was planning to do, Sky said that in the three years he’d been living in New Xamba, he’d never once stepped outside and didn’t intend to break that record now, but he could download a hack into Jack’s spex that would give him full access to the city’s CCTV system so that Jack could use it to follow Mark wherever he went.

  “I’ll patch in a demon with a face-recognition program. It’ll alert you if Mark gets anywhere near an airlock. And that’s all I’m doing. And if anyone asks you where you got this stuff, tell them it’s freeware.”

  “Absolutely,” Jack said. “I know all of this is my fault. If I hadn’t taken him to the market, and agreed that there was something funny about the guy selling herbs—”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Sky said. “Mark would have got into trouble all by himself sooner or later. He’s bored, he hates living here, and he doesn’t exactly get on with his parents. It’s quite obvious that this whole thing is some kind of silly rebellion.”

  “You hate living here, too,” Jack said. “But you didn’t break into someone’s apartment and steal a gun.”

  “I don’t much care for the place,” Sky said, “but as long as I’m left alone to get on with my own thing, it doesn’t matter where I live. Mark, though, he’s like a tiger in a cage. Be careful, Jack. Don’t let him get you into any more trouble.”

  The demon woke Jack in the early hours of Monday morning. He fumbled for his spex, shut off the alarm, stared dazedly at a skewed video picture of Mark sitting in a dressing frame that was assembling a pressure suit around him, then realized with a surge of adrenaline that this was it. That Mark really was going through with it.

  The main airlocks of the apartment complex were in an ancillary structure reached by a long, slanting tunnel. Mark was long gone by the time Jack reached it, but despite his bladder-burning need to follow his friend, Jack remembered his training. When you went out onto the airless surface, even the slightest oversight or equipment malfunction could be deadly. Once the dressing frame had fitted him with a pressure suit, he carefully checked the suit’s power systems and lifesystem, and because he didn’t know how long he was going to be outside, took time to hook up a spare air pack before making his way through the three sets of doors.

  The outer door of the airlock opened onto a flat, dusty apron trodden everywhere with cleated bootprints, reminding Jack of the snow around the ski lifts at the mountain resort where he and his parents had several times gone on holiday. Inside the city, which kept Earth time, it was six in the morning; outside, it was the middle of Rhea’s 108-hour-long day. Saturn’s slender crescent was cocked overhead, lassoed by the slender ellipse of his rings. The sun was a brilliant diamond whose cold light gleamed on the towers and domes of the new city and the great curve of the rimwall behind them. Although the rimwall was more than three miles away, the sculpted folds of its cliffs and its gently undulating crest stood sharp and clear against the black, airless sky.

  Jack tried and failed to pick up the radio transponder of Mark’s pressure suit—Mark must have switched it off, but that didn’t matter, because Jack knew exactly where his friend was going. He walked around the side of the airlock to the racks where the cycles were charging, and found to his surprise that every rack was occupied. Then he realized that Mark, like most incomers, had never taken a pressure-suit training course (he must have used the cloned police card to force the dressing frame to fit him with a suit) and had never before taken a single step outside the city, so there was no reason why he should know about the cycles.

  They were three-wheeled, with fat, diamond-mesh tires, a low-slung seat, and a simple control yoke. Jack pulled one from the rack, clambered onto it, and, feeling a blithe optimism, set off toward the cemetery chamber at the eastern end of the old city. He was on a cycle, and Mark was on foot. It was no contest.

  He followed a polymer-sealed track that, throwing wide loops around cone-shaped rockfalls, cut through the fields of boulders that stretched out from the base of the rimwall’s steep cliffs. He drove slowly
, scanning the jumbled wilderness, and after ten minutes spotted a twinkle of movement amongst the tan boulders and ink-black shadows. He stopped the cycle, used the magnification feature of his visor, and saw a figure in a white pressure suit moving in a kind of slow-motion kangaroo hop. Jack plotted a course and drove half a mile along the track before turning toward the cliffs, intending to intercept Mark when he reached the cemetery chamber’s airlock.

  The going was easy at first, with only a few outlying boulders to steer around, but then the ground began to rise up and down in concentric ridges like frozen waves, and the rubble fallen from the cliffs grew denser, tumbled blocks of dirty ice of every size, some as big as houses, all frozen harder than granite. Jack kept losing sight of Mark, and piled on the speed in the broad dips between the ridges, anxious that he’d lose sight of him completely. To his left, the rumpled plain of the crater floor stretched away toward the central peak; to his right, the lighted circles of the endwalls of the old city’s buried chambers glowed with green light in the face of the rimwall cliffs, like the portholes of a huge ocean liner or the windows of a giant’s aquarium. He was driving toward the crest of the fifth or sixth ridge when the razor-sharp, jet black shadow between two shattered blocks turned out to be a narrow but deep crevice that neatly trapped the cycle’s front wheel. The cycle slewed, Jack hit the brakes, everything tipped sideways with a bone-rattling shock, and then he was hanging by his safety harness, looking up at the black sky and Saturn’s ringed crescent. He managed to undo the harness’s four-way clasp and scramble free, and checked the integrity of his pressure suit before he heaved the cycle’s front tire out of the crevice. Its mesh was badly flattened along one side, and the front fork was crumpled beyond easy repair. There was no way the machine was going to take him any farther.

  Well, his suit was fine, he wasn’t injured, he had plenty of air and power, and if he got into trouble, he could always phone for help. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to follow Mark on foot.

  It took two hours to slog four miles across the rough terrain, skirting around huge chunks and blocks, crabbing down uneven slopes into the dips between ridges and climbing back out again, finding a way around jagged crevices. Sometimes Jack glimpsed Mark’s pressure-suited figure plodding no more than four or five hundred yards ahead of him, but for most of the time he had only his suit’s navigation system to guide him. He was drenched with sweat, his ankles and knees were aching, and he had just switched to his reserve air pack when at last he reached the track that led to the airlock of the cemetery chamber. Jack went slowly through the rubble at the edge of the track, creeping from shadow to shadow, imagining Mark crouched behind a boulder with a gun he’d stolen from his mother or father, waiting for Algren Rees . . .

  But there was no need for caution. Mark’s white pressure suit was sprawled on the track just two hundred yards from the airlock, a red light flashing on its backpack. Adrenaline kicked in: Jack reached Mark in three bounds, managed to roll him onto his side. Behind the visor of the suit’s helmet, Mark’s face was tinged blue, and although his eyes were open, their pupils were fixed and unseeing.

  Jack switched on his distress beacon and began to drag Mark’s pressure-suited body toward the yellow-painted steel door of the airlock. He was halfway there when the door slid open and a figure in a pressure suit stepped out.

  “You kids again,” Algren Rees’s voice said over the phone link. “I swear you’ll be the death of me.”

  Two days later, after the medivac crew had whisked Mark away to the hospital (when its oxygen supply had run dangerously low, his pressure suit had put him in a coma and cooled him down to keep him alive for as long as possible, but it had been a close thing), after Jack had confessed everything to his parents, Algren Rees took him to see the place he visited each and every week.

  There was a kind of ski lift that carried them half a mile up a sheer face of rock-hard black ice to the top of the rimwall, and a diamond-mesh path that climbed a frozen ridge to a viewpoint that looked across slopes of ejecta toward a flat, cratered plain. Jack had been there before. He had seen the yard-high steel pillar before, had read the three simple, moving sentences on the plaque set into its angled top, had listened to the brief story its induction loop had played on his pressure suit’s phone, the story of how the freighter pilot Rosa Lux had saved Xamba in the last seconds of her life. But even if he hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have needed to read the plaque or listen to the looped message; the story was part of the reason why Algren Rees came here every week.

  “She was flying one of those little freelance freighters that are mostly engine, with a tiny internal hold and a cabin not much bigger than a coffin,” Algren Rees said. “She was hauling a special cargo— the mayor of the city of Camelot, Mimas. He had been one of the leaders of the rebellion that started the Quiet War. When Camelot fell, he managed to escape, and if he had reached Xamba, he would have been granted political asylum and could have caused all kinds of trouble.

  “I was a singleship pilot, part of the picket which orbited Rhea to prevent ships leaving or arriving. When Rosa Lux’s freighter was detected, mine was the only ship able to intercept her, and even then I had to burn almost all my fuel to do it. She was a daring pilot and had come in fast and low, skimming the surface of Rhea just a mile up and using its gravity to slow her so that she could enter into a long orbit and come in to land when she made her second pass. That was what she was doing when my orbit intercepted hers. I had only one chance to stop her, and I made a mess of it.

  “I fired two missiles, and both were confused by her counter-measures. One hit the surface; the other missed her ship by a few hundred yards but managed to blow itself up as it zoomed past. It damaged her main drive and changed her vector—her course. She was no longer heading for Xamba’s spaceport, but for the rimwall, and the city. I saw her fire her maneuvering thrusters. I saw her dump fuel from her main tank. I saw her sacrifice herself so that she would miss the city. Everything happened in less than five seconds, and she barely missed the top of the rimwall, but miss it she did. And crashed here, and died.”

  It was early in the morning. The brilliant star of the sun was low in the black sky, throwing long, tangled shadows across the moonscape, but the long scar left by Rosa Lux’s ship was clearly visible, a gleaming sword aimed at the eastern horizon.

  Algren Rees said, “Rosa Lux had only five seconds to live, and she used that little time to save the lives of a hundred thousand people. The funny thing was, the mayor of Camelot survived. He was riding in a coffin filled with impact gel, cooled down much the same way your friend was cooled down. When the ship crashed, his coffin was blasted free and pinwheeled across the landscape, but it survived more or less intact. The mayor was revived and successfully claimed asylum. He still lives in Xamba—he married a local woman, and runs the city’s library. The memorial doesn’t tell you that, and there’s something else it doesn’t tell you, either.”

  There was silence. Jack watched the scar shine in the new sunlight, waited for Algren Rees to finish his story. He was certain that there would be a moral; it was the kind of story that always had a moral. But the silence stretched, and at last Jack asked the man why he’d come to Rhea.

  “After the war, I left the Navy and went back to Greater Brazil, trained as a paramedic, and got on with my life. Then my wife was killed in a train crash. It was more life-changing than the war. I decided to make a last visit to the place where the most intense and most important thing in my life had happened. And soon after I arrived, I fell in love with someone. You have met her, actually.”

  “The woman who owns the cafe!”

  There was another silence. Then Algren Rees said, “You’ve been here before.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I bet it was your idea to visit the produce market.”

  “I guess,” Jack said cautiously, wondering where this was going.

  “You’re an unusual boy, Jack. Unusual for an incomer, that is
. Most of them don’t set foot outside the new city. The Three Powers Alliance won the war, but it doesn’t know what to do with what it won. That’s why it will lose control of it, by and by. And when the Outers realize that, there could be another war. Unless there are more people like you, Jack. Incomers who reach out. Who try to understand the strange moons and habitats of the Outer System. People like you and me. People like Rosa Lux.”

  “She was an incomer, too?”

  “She was born on Earth and moved to Saturn five years before the Quiet War began. The memorial doesn’t tell you that because as far as the Outers are concerned, Rosa Lux was one of them. But she was an incomer, just like us.

  “I fell in love when I returned to Dione, Jack, and even though it didn’t last, I decided to make a home here. But what brought me here to begin with was a chance encounter with another woman— the bravest person I know about. A chance encounter, an instant’s decision, can change a single life, or even change history. Perhaps you’re too young to know it, but I think something like that has already happened to you.”

  Jack thought about this, thought about all that had happened in the past week, and realized that his new friend might be right. Time would tell.

  PAUL McAULEY was born in England in 1955 and currently lives in London. He worked as a researcher in biology at various universities and then lectured in botany at University of St Andrews for six years, before becoming a full-time writer.

  McAuley’s first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published in 1988 and was followed by a string of cutting-edge science fiction novels, including Red Dust, Pasquale’s Angel, the Confluence Trilogy, and Fairyland. In the past few years he’s focused more on sophisticated science thrillers like The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, and Mind’s Eye. He has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Little Machines. His most recent novel is Cowboy Angels.