The Naked God - Flight nd-5

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Her only acknowledgement of the sisters’ entry was to ask: “Have you accessed it?” in a hoarse voice.

  “What?” Genevieve asked.

  The receptionist gestured at the pillar. “The news.”

  Both sisters stared straight into the pillar’s haze of light. They were looking out across a broad park under a typical arcology dome. Right across the centre of their view, a big tapering tower of metal girders had collapsed to lie in a lengthy sprawl of contorted wreckage across the immaculate emerald grass. Several of the tall, cheerfully shaggy trees that surrounded it had been smashed and buried beneath the splinters of rusty metal. A vast crowd encircled the wreckage, with thousands more making their way along the paths to swell their numbers. They were people in profound mourning, as if the tower had been some precious relative. Louise could see they all had their heads bowed, most were weeping. Thin cries of grief wove together through the air.

  “Bastards,” the receptionist said. “Those utter bastards.”

  “What is that thing?” Genevieve asked. The receptionist gave her a startled look.

  “We’re from Norfolk,” Louise explained.

  “That’s the Eiffel Tower,” the receptionist said. “In Paris. And the Nightfall anarchists blew it up. They’re a bunch of crazies who’re going round wrecking things over there. It’s their mission, they say, preparing the world for the fall of Night. But everyone knows they’re just a front for the possessed. Bastards.”

  “Was the tower really important?” Genevieve asked.

  “The Eiffel Tower was over seven hundred years old. What do you think?”

  The little girl looked back into the projection. “How horrid of them.”

  “Yes. I think that’s why there is a beyond. So that people who do things like that can suffer in it until the end of time.”

  A glassed-in spiral stair took Louise up to the first floor. Ivanov Robson was waiting for the sisters on the landing. Travelling in the Far Realm had accustomed Louise to people who didn’t share the bodyform template she’d grown up with. And of course, London had an astonishing variety of people. Even so, she nearly jumped when she first saw Robson. He was the biggest man she’d ever seen. Easily over seven feet tall, and a body that seemed bulky even for that height. Not that any of it was fat, she noticed. He was frighteningly powerful, with arms thicker than her legs. His skin was the deepest ebony, glossy from a health club’s spar treatment. With thick gold-tinted auburn hair twirled into a tiny pony tail, and wearing a stylish yellow silk business suit, he looked amazingly dapper.

  “Miss Kavanagh, welcome.” From the confident humour in his smooth voice, it was obvious he knew the effect he had on people.

  Floorboards creaked under his feet as showed them into his office. The bookcases reminded Louise of her father’s study, although there were very few leather-bound volumes here. Ivanov Robson eased himself into a wide chair behind a smoked-glass desk. The surface was empty apart from a slimline processor block and a peculiar chrome-topped glass tube, eighteen inches high, that was full of clear liquid and illuminated from underneath. Orange blobs glided slowly up and down inside it, oscillating as they went.

  “Are they xenoc fish?” Genevieve asked. It was the first time she’d spoken. The huge man had even managed to quash her usual bravado. She’d kept well behind Louise the whole time.

  “Nothing as spectacular,” Ivanov said. “It’s an antique, a genuine Twentieth Century lava lamp. Cost me a fortune, but I love it. Now, what can I do for you?” he tented his fingers, and looked directly at Louise.

  “I have to find somebody,” she said. “Um, if you don’t want to take the case when I’ve told you who, I’ll understand. I think she’s called Banneth.” Louise launched into a recital of her journey since leaving Cricklade, not quite as heavily edited as usual.

  “I’m impressed,” Ivanov said softly when she’d finished. “You’ve come face to face with the possessed, and survived. That’s quite a feat. If you ever need money, I know a few people in the news media.”

  “I don’t want money, Mr Robson. I just want to find Banneth. None of the questors seem to be able to do that for me.”

  “I’m almost embarrassed to take your money, but I will, of course.” He grinned broadly, revealing teeth that had been plated entirely in gold. “My retainer will be two thousand fuseodollars, payable in advance. If I locate Banneth, that will be another five thousand. Plus any expenses. I will provide receipts where possible.”

  “Very well.” Louise held out her Jovian Bank credit disk.

  “A couple of questions first,” Ivanov said after the money had been transferred. He tilted his chair back, and closed his eyes in thought. “The only thing you know for certain about Banneth is that she hurt Quinn Dexter. Correct?”

  “Yes. He said so.”

  “And Banneth definitely lives on Earth? Interesting. Whatever happened between the two of them sounds very ugly, which implies they were involved in some kind of criminal activity. I think that should provide my investigation with an adequate starting point.”

  “Oh.” Louise didn’t quite look at him. It was so obvious, laid out like that. She should have sent a questor into criminal archives.

  “I am a professional, Louise,” he said kindly. “You do know the possessed have reached Earth, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I accessed the news from New York. The mayor said they’d been eliminated, though.”

  “He would. But Govcentral still hasn’t opened the vac-train lines to New York. That should tell you something. And now we’ve had the Eiffel Tower blown up for no reason other than to demoralize and anger people. That probably means they’re in Paris as well. A feat like that is beyond the ability of some stimbrained street gang. What I’m trying to say, Louise, in my dear bumbling way, is that if Quinn Dexter is here, then he’ll be heading for Banneth as well. Now do you really want to bump into him again?”

  “No!” Genevieve squeaked.

  “Then bear in mind that’s where your current path is taking you.”

  “All I need is Banneth’s eddress,” Louise said. “Nothing else.”

  “Then I will do my best to ensure you receive it. I’ll be in touch.”

  Ivanov waited until the sisters were circling down the spiral stair before asking: Do you want me to give her Banneth’s eddress?

  I’m afraid it’s a bit pointless right now,western europe answered. Edmonton has been sealed up, with Quinn inside. I can’t get her in to meet him; so she’ll just have to sit this out on the substitute’s bench for a while.

  Chapter 13

  The prospect of interstellar flight had been real to certain sections of the human race for a long time before Sputnik One thundered into orbit. A notion which began with visionaries like Tsiolkovskii, Goddard, and somewhat more whimsical science fiction writers of that age, was quickly taken up and promoted by obsessive space activists when the first micro-gee factories came on line, proving that orbital manufacturing was a profitable venture. With the development of the O’Neill Halo and the Jupiter mining operation in the Twenty-first Century the concept finally began to seem practical. Asteroids were already being hollowed out and made habitable. Now it was only an engineering and finance problem to propel them out of Earth orbit and across the gulf to Proxima Centauri. There were no theoretical show stoppers; fusion or antimatter engines could be built to accelerate the giant rocks up to speeds of anything between five and twenty per cent of lightspeed, depending on which physicist you asked. Generations of crew would live, tend their machinery, and die within the rock as they crawled across the emptiness, with the anticipation that their descendants would inherit a fresh world.

  Sadly, human nature being what it is, century-duration flights were just too long, the ideal of colonization too abstract to motivate the governments and large institutions of the time into building these proposed space arks. The real clincher, inevitably, was cost. There could never be any return on the investment. So it seemed as though
the fresh start idealists would just have to go on dreaming.

  One such thwarted dreamer was Julian Wan, who, more resourceful than his colleagues, persuaded the board of the New Kong corporation to research faster than light travel. His pitch was that it would be a small, cheap project testing the more dubious equations of Quantum Unification Theory, essentially a few wild theoretical physicists with plenty of computer time. But if it could be made to work, the commercial opportunities would be phenomenal. Noble concern for human destiny and the search for pure knowledge never got a look in.

  New Kong successfully tested the ZTT drive in 2115, and the arkship concept was quickly and quietly discarded. Beautifully detailed plans and proposals drawn up by a multitude of starflight societies and associations were downloaded into university library memories to join the ranks of other never-made-it technologies like the nuclear powered bomber, the English Channel bridge, geostationary solar power stations, and continent birthing (the so-called Raising Atlantis project, where fusion bombs were proposed to modify tectonic activity). Then the Tyrathca world of Hesperi-LN was discovered in 2395, along with the news that it was actually a colony founded by an arkship. The old human plans were briefly revisited by history of engineering students, interested to see how they stood up to comparison with a proven arkship. That academic interest faded away inside of a decade.

  Joshua, who fancied himself as something of a spaceflight buff, was fascinated by the dull blip of light which Lady Mac ’s sensors were focused on. It was in a wildly elliptical orbit around Hesperi-LN, with a twelve thousand kilometre perigee and four hundred thousand kilometre apogee. Fortunately for their mission, it was just under three hundred thousand kilometres away from the Tyrathca planet, and climbing.

  They’d emerged two million kilometres out from Hesperi-LN; a distance which put them safely beyond the planet’s known SD sensor coverage. The Tyrathca world was not a cradle for the kind of space activity found above industrialized human worlds. There were a few low-orbit docking stations, industrial module clusters, communication and sensor satellite networks, and twenty-five SD platforms supplied and operated by the Confederation Navy. Not that there was a lot of worry about pirate activity, the Tyrathca simply didn’t manufacture the kind of goods which could be sold on any human market let alone the underground one. The Confederation was far more concerned by the prospect of blackmail by a rogue starship captain armed with ground-assault weapons. Although they didn’t have consumer products, the Tyrathca did mine gold, platinum, and diamonds among other precious commodities for their indigenous industries. And the colony had been established in AD 1300; rumours of vast stockpiles accumulated over millennia persisted on every human world. Any bar or dinner party would have someone who knew somebody else who had been told of a first-hand witness who’d walked through the endless underground caverns filled with their glittering dragon hoards.

  So the Navy maintained a small cost-ineffective outpost to guard against the possibility of any inter-species incident. It had been abandoned, along with all the other human-maintained systems, when the Tyrathca broke off contact. According to the briefing Monica and Samuel had given to the Lady Mac ’s crew, the Tyrathca would find it difficult to keep the SD systems functional for very long.

  “But we have to expect them to try,” Monica said. “Their ambassador was pretty damn insistent that we don’t intrude on them again.”

  Joshua and Syrinx assumed the SD network was on-line and fully functional, and planned their tactics accordingly. The goal was to land an explorer team on Tanjuntic-RI, who would attempt to locate a reference to the Sleeping God in the arkship’s ancient electronics. Getting them inside unnoticed was the big problem.

  Both craft were in full stealth mode when they emerged. Jumping into the system, Joshua had aligned Lady Mac so that her vector would carry her in a rough trajectory from the emergence coordinate towards the arkship. As long as he didn’t have to use either the fusion or antimatter drives, the starship would probably remain undetected. At this stage, they were back up; there to rush in and provide covering fire in case things got noisy and Oenone had to rescue their team. They were using passive sensors only, with just the chemical verniers firing occasionally to hold them stable; every nonessential system was in stand-by mode, reducing the power consumption and with it their thermal emission. Internal heat stores were soaking up the fusion generator output, although they could only last for a couple of days before the thermodump panels would have to be extended to dissipate the heat. Even that wasn’t too much of a problem, the radiation could be directed away from the SD network sensors. They’d have to be extremely unlucky to be discovered by anything that guarded Hesperi-LN.

  “Picking up some radar pulses from the SD network,” Beaulieu reported. “But it’s very weak. They’re not scanning for us. Our hull coating can absorb this level easily.”

  “Good,” Joshua said. “Liol, what about spacecraft activity?”

  “Infrared’s showing twenty-three ships using their drives above the planet. The majority are travelling between low orbit and the SD platforms. Four seem to be heading up for high polar orbits. I’d say they’re complementing the platforms. But none of them are moving very fast, half a gee maximum. They are big ships, though.”

  “That’s how the Tyrathca like them,” Ashly said. “Plenty of room to move round in the life support sections. It’s like being inside a bloody cathedral.”

  “Offensive potential?”

  “If they’re armed with human-made combat wasps, considerable,” Liol said. “With that drive signature I’m assuming they’re Tyrathca inter-planetary ships; they have a dozen asteroid settlements to provide the planetary industries with several kinds of bulk microgee compounds. Which means their payload is considerably larger than ours. They’re like highly manoeuvrable weapons platforms.”

  “Wonderful.” Joshua datavised the new bitek processor array they’d installed during the last refit. “Oenone , what’s your situation?”

  “I remain on schedule, Joshua. We should be rendezvousing with Tanjuntic-RI in another forty-two minutes. The exploration team is suiting up now.”

  Unlike the Lady Macbeth, Oenone had been able to accelerate and manoeuvre after emerging above the planet. By reducing its distortion field to a minimum, the voidhawk could accelerate at half a gee towards the arkship. Given the distance involved, the network satellites were unable to pick up such a small ripple in space-time. The disadvantage was, with such a reduced field the voidhawk couldn’t perceive a fraction of the local environment it usually did. If for some unaccountable reason, the Tyrathca had surrounded Tanjuntic-RI with proximity mines, they wouldn’t know until they were very close indeed.

  Syrinx always hated being dependent on just the sensor blisters and passive electronic arrays. The voidhawks’ ability to pervade a huge spherical volume of space around the hull was intrinsic to their flight.

  We managed like this in our Navy days, Oenone said, unperturbed.

  Syrinx grinned in the half-light of the bridge. The crew toroid’s internal power consumption was minimal as well. You mean back when we were young and foolish?

  This is not a foolish venture,the voidhawk chided. Wing-Tsit Chong considers it of the utmost importance.

  Me too. But this part just brings back memories.of Thetis, though she didn’t mention him. Lately she’d started to wonder if her brother had managed to elude the beyond as that ever-damned Laton had promised. Mild feelings of guilt had kept her away from his strange stunted existence within the Romulus multiplicity before they left. Really, what was the point in preserving him when his soul was free?

  What is our best landing point, do you think? Oenone asked.

  As always, the voidhawk knew when she needed distracting. I’m not sure. Show me what we can see.she accessed the all-too scant files on Tanjuntic-RI stored in the on-board processors, and attempted to match them up with the image the voidhawk was seeing.

  Tanjuntic-RI had been complet
ely abandoned less than fifty years after it arrived in the Hesperi-LN star system. An unduly harsh treatment by human standards, but it had fulfilled every duty its long-dead builders had required of it, and the Tyrathca were not a sentimental species. Fifteen thousand years old, it had travelled one thousand six hundred light-years to ensure the Tyrathca race didn’t die along with their exploding home star. Five separate, successful colonies had been established along its route. Each time the arkship had stopped inside a star system to create a new colony, the Tyrathca had virtually rebuilt it, refuelled it, then carried on with their crusade of racial survival. Even so, there are limits to the most sturdy machinery. After Hesperi-LN was founded, Tanjuntic-RI was left to circle ceaselessly above the planet.

  Borrowing Oenone ’s sensor blisters, Syrinx could see the details becoming clear as they glided in for a rendezvous. Tanjuntic-RI was a dark cylindrical rock six kilometres long, two and a half in diameter. Its surface was a gentle mottle of flattened craters, resembling a wind-sculpted ice field. Remnants of vast machines sketched out a random topology of tarnished metal lines along the floors of the meandering valleys. These appurtenances had succumbed to millennia of particle impacts and vacuum ablation. What had once been a surface bristling with elaborate towers and radiator panels the size of lakes was left with little more than their stubby mounting fixtures as a reminder of past grandeur. The forward end was the most heavily speckled, due mainly to the extensive remnants of a coppery hexagonal grid.