The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  “I think that your Hermian friends would dismiss talk of rights as airy, self-indulgent foolishness. I came here because you requested it, Falcon. But no negotiation is possible. This discussion serves no further purpose.” He turned away.

  Falcon called, “The Acheron is here. There’s nothing airy about that.”

  Without looking back, Adam said, “That’s actually the first meaningful statement you’ve made.” And he walked deeper into the shadows, and out of sight.

  35

  My name is Margaret Soames. I am the fifty-sixth President of the World Government. I speak to you from Unity City—I speak to you wherever you are, on Earth, in space, on one of the allied worlds from Mercury to Triton. I speak, too, to the Machines of the assemblies at Mercury, Jupiter, the asteroids and the Kuipers. And on this momentous day—on a day when, with my family in the garden of our home here on Bermuda, I watched through a telescopic projection as the shadow of Mercury itself grazed the face of the sun—I can find no better way to open my remarks than by speaking of a much more significant figure than myself, an ancestor who died more than four centuries ago . . .

  * * * *

  Huddled in a bunker under Vulcanopolis with Chief Administrator Borowski, her second-in-command Bill Jennings, and other senior figures of the planetary government, Howard Falcon was an eyewitness to the brief war for Mercury.

  It began, in fact, with a surprise attack by the Hermians themselves.

  In the last few hours the Machines’ small fleet of asymptotic-drive ships—frames open to space, crowded with Machines and other ­equipment—had begun to cruise low over Vulcanopolis and other significant Hermian settlements. But they did not pass unchallenged. Mercury’s surface was laced with mass drivers, rails along which packages of raw materials, mined from the rocks, were routinely hurled by electromagnetic slingshots powered by the sun’s ferocious light, out of the planet’s gravity well and to destinations across the solar system. Now, in a synchronised attack—based on observations of the Machine ships’ somewhat repetitive patterns of motion—the mass drivers threw up screens of rocks and dust, pellets heavily masked with stealth technology, barely detectable.

  And the Machine ships drove headlong into the flak. The encounters lasted only seconds. It was estimated later that fully ten percent of the Machine ships were disabled immediately. Some even crashed, leaving new, briefly glowing craters in the Mercury ground.

  But the cheers of the watchers at Vulcanopolis had hardly been stilled before the surviving Machine craft pulled back, gathered in new formations, and in response began a steady investment of mankind’s facilities on the planet: the ice mines, the mass drivers, even the precious solar-power farms, leaving only the habitable enclosures intact.

  Now new rumours spread fast around the bunker. The Acheron was heading for Caloris, coming in for the kill.

  * * * *

  You will understand how I have come to be something of an amateur student of my distant grandfather’s life and career. My family name comes in fact from the married name of the Prime Minister’s daughter, Mary, my ancestor. She had seen service herself in the course of the terrible world war for which he is best remembered, and at its close worked as an aide-de-camp to her father at his momentous summits with Roosevelt and Stalin, meetings that shaped the world for the next half-century or more.

  I dare to dream that he would have been proud to know that some day one of his descendants would fulfil the role of a democratically elected President of a unified world.

  And it is from one of Churchill’s most famous speeches that I draw my own inspiration now, a speech I make at a moment just as perilous for all mankind and for our ideals as was the darkest hour of the war he faced . . .

  * * * *

  The Acheron was considered to be Earth’s only significantly powerful warship of space. Perhaps it was something of a credit to modern mankind that such technologies, before the Jupiter Ultimatum, had never been developed in earnest. And even when the ship was commissioned and designs were agreed, it had taken some time to upgrade the shipyards in Earth orbit and at Port Deimos to deliver such a vessel.

  Yet here she was, swooping down on Mercury even as that planet’s long shadow swung away from Earth after the transit. She was a blunt dumb-bell, the classic design of all human interplanetary craft since the Discovery-class ships that had first taken Falcon to Jupiter. And she headed straight for the Machine compound at the heart of Caloris Basin.

  She was met by a flotilla of Machine ships, smaller, more manoeuvrable, but less heavily armed or armoured. Falcon watched through a variety of camera positions as the Machine craft approached the warship and, one by one, crumpled like scorched moths.

  Administrator Borowski whistled. “How the hell are they doing that?”

  “X-ray lasers,” Falcon said. “One-shot weapons, each powered by a small fission explosion. I came out on the Acheron, and the World Aerospace Force shared a few of its secrets. Nice of them.”

  Now there were cheers and whoops from another part of the compound. This was another effort by the Hermians themselves—and this time the target was the sunshield itself. Cargo-carrying vessels, laden with the hefty shaped-charge nuclear weapons the Hermians had been using for generations to blast mines into the stubborn ground of their world, had burst from underground pens. Despite heavy opposition from Machine craft most of these improvised missiles were getting through—and as he followed the battle in the sky through ­various sensor feeds, Falcon convinced himself that he could see rents in the heavily processed image of the shield, and glimpse the brighter sun behind it.

  But such wounds, in a shield five thousand kilometres across, were pinpricks, and reports quickly came down that the labouring Machines were fixing the damage almost as soon as it was inflicted.

  And now there were gasps at images of the latest action from Caloris.

  Falcon turned to see that the Acheron had lit up its main propulsion unit, a fusion drive built into the heavier of the twin dumb-bells of its design. But it wasn’t accelerating away from the planet; it was standing on the drive, walking it across the surface of Mercury, using the ferociously hot hydrogen-helium plasma of the drive itself as a blowtorch. Falcon, astonished and horrified, saw the shelters and equipment caches of the Machines flare and melt.

  But the Machines responded, wielding a mightier weapon yet.

  “Sol Invictus!” somebody swore. “Look at the shield! Look at the shield . . . !”

  * * * *

  That even though we have already seen mankind excluded from significant parts of the solar realm, and even though today the Free Republic of Mercury may fall into the grip of the Machine state, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on the moons and worlds of the solar system, we shall fight with growing confidence in space, we shall defend the home world of mankind, whatever the cost may be . . .

  * * * *

  The shield was more than a passive sunlight block, Falcon realised. It was a cloud of trillions of Machines, all in intense and continuous communication. The shield was an intelligent swarm, collectively perhaps as superior to a human as a human was to a single cell. He suspected that many humans never dreamed that the Machines were capable of feats like this.

  Now that swarm exerted its will. The shield flexed, its coordination perfect across five thousand kilometres, transforming itself from a sunshield to a focusing lens.

  And a hundred thousand terawatts of solar energy poured down onto the Caloris battlefield.

  The Acheron was the prime target, and even the battleship’s mighty defences buckled under that withering onslaught. But the focus over such a huge distance could not be perfect, and dazzling radiation splashed over Machines and their equipment too, and poured into the already overheated ground. Falcon saw the heart of Caloris become a lake of molten rock into which the crumpling wreck of the Acheron began t
o sink.

  Then the dying ship gave up the last of her energies.

  Any imaging system nearby was destroyed immediately. Thus Falcon watched pictures relayed from space, of a blister, dazzling white, rising from the ground; of a wave of lava sweeping out across the tortured surface of Caloris, of immense bolts of lightning in a transient atmosphere of vaporised rock.

  It was over. Mankind’s greatest weaponry had been deployed and exhausted, and the shield, the Machines’ vast project was barely touched.

  At Vulcanopolis, it was Susan Borowski who broke the stunned silence. “Time to pack our bags, folks.”

  * * * *

  And if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Jupiter Ultimatum were fulfilled and this beautiful world were subjugated and starving, then our assets beyond the Earth would carry on the struggle, until, in good time, the new worlds, with all their power and might, step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old . . .

  * * * *

  Falcon stayed to do what he could to help coordinate the evacuations, mostly to Mars.

  Then he withdrew, longing for solitude, for his familiar old cabin at Port Van Allen. Withdrew once more into contemplation, and study, and lightspeed-slow communication with various friends and other contacts across the solar system.

  Withdrew to watch the slow, continuing unfolding of the great tragedy that had been triggered by the Jupiter Ultimatum.

  As he had suspected, the Machines’ designs for Mercury transcended any human ambition—transcended anything even Falcon himself had imagined.

  Humans needed worlds. Machines did not need worlds. What they did covet was the stuff worlds were made from. It was trivial, in the end, to dismantle a planet. One needed only to overcome the planet’s binding energy—in effect, to haul all the fragments of the world out of its own gravity well. And, so close to the sun, there was energy aplenty.

  The communities of mankind looked on aghast. But Falcon recalled how he had seen Kuiper Belt Objects taken apart lump by ice lump by mankind’s flinger operations. Were they not worlds too?

  And the Machines’ purpose for Mercury seemed, if you opened your mind to it, wonderful. A planet was a lump of matter, much of which was inaccessible and unusable, whose only useful function was to generate a stable gravitational field. The Machines now took the dead matter of Mercury and made it, essentially, into copies of themselves. Into a great Host, just as Adam had bragged.

  Falcon whiled away years just watching the gathering flock wheel around the sun like a great migration of birds, testing their new powers—revelling, he saw, in a new realm of experience.

  A Host indeed.

  But the shell that now completely enclosed the sun significantly reduced the sunlight delivered to all the surviving worlds of the solar system. On Earth, antique glaciers creaked and stirred, and began to descend from the poles, from the mountains. A global civilisation ­struggled to respond.

  As the harsh decades wore away there were political fractures. The great Secretariats of the World Government began to act like independent fiefdoms, some even raising private armies. And there were acts of wilful protest, acts of terror. One tremendous orbital blast that took out a large proportion of mankind’s precious digital memory store—a wilful burning of the library—seemed to wound Falcon himself, damaging a consciousness that seemed ever-more interlinked with wider stores of intelligence and remembrance.

  Even in this grim age Hope Dhoni continued to attend Falcon, walking out of the mist of the past—visits that marked the passage of decades.

  And once she brought him a strange bit of information, a shred garnered from some watchful probe from Earth, looking on as the Host had completed its consumption of Mercury. It had spotted what appeared to be another watcher, perhaps a probe of unknown origin. It was a black cube, perhaps a metre across. And—Hope Dhoni pointed out, Falcon slowly discerned in grainy images—on its side, crudely written as if by hand, was a kind of name. Howard Falcon Junior.

  Neither Hope not Falcon knew what to make of this. But Falcon, deeply shaken, remembered the enigmatic final message of Orpheus, and began to wonder if there were other eyes, other minds unbounded in space and independent of time, watching the passage of these dismaying decades.

  * * * *

  After Mercury, it was more than a century and a half before Howard Falcon again set foot on any planet—before he obeyed a summons to Mars.

  36

  Falcon rolled back and forth experimentally, testing his latest low-gravity-­issue balloon tyres on a ground of ruddy soil loosely bound by sparse grass. It was like a beach, Falcon thought, like dune grass, although it was a very long time since Howard Falcon had visited a beach anywhere. And he was so close to a stand of trees, mixed oak and pine, that in the air filtered through his face mask, drawn into his synthetic lungs, he could smell the scents of the forest, the resin, the leaf mulch.

  He looked around. The sun was high in a tall, blue sky sparsely littered with white, streaky cloud. It was morning, so that way was east, and therefore the gentle slope of the ground that he intended to climb was to the south, away from the trees.

  Which made sense, for this was the northern slope of Olympus Mons. Falcon had visited many times before—the first, in fact, before the flight of the Kon-Tiki. It had not been like this.

  His companions were a young man, frame sparse, big-chested, who wore a quilted coverall, gloves, and a mask through which a calm face could be seen—a tall young man, and among these new generations of Martians even Falcon sometimes felt overshadowed—and a woman, serene, but too still, too fragile. She was Hope Dhoni, now virtually as old as Falcon, the few decades between them now all but inconsequential compared to the span of time both had endured. The resentment Falcon felt at that was entirely illogical, but he felt it nonetheless.

  The man was called Citizen Second Grade Jeffrey Pandit. He was a civil servant based at Port Lowell, and Falcon’s Martian government host for the next few days. Now he smiled at Falcon. “I hope you got your tyres treated with the right protective cover.” He kicked at the loose, rusty soil. “Still plenty of caustic chemistry going on in this dirt, even after three centuries of terraforming. We don’t want you seizing up halfway up the hill, sir.”

  “I’d never live it down.”

  Now Hope smiled. “So what are your feelings, Howard? For some this would be a mundane scene, but not for you. You spend all your time in space these days. Mercury was—what, over a century ago?”

  “More than that, ma’am,” Pandit murmured. “This is the year AFF 567—”

  “A hundred and sixty-two years, then.”

  Falcon winced. As long as that?

  “Most of which you’ve spent in Port Van Allen. That great rusty wheel—”

  “It’s a comfortable hotel. I like to live in a building that’s older than I am, and that’s not so easy to find these days. And you do get one hell of a view. Besides, much of Earth is rather chilly since the Little Ice Age.”

  “Well, you’ll get one hell of a view from Olympus, sir,” Pandit said, emollient. “Eventually, at the summit.”

  “And—mundane, Hope?” Falcon said. “Trees, blue sky, a gentle slope to walk up—on Mars? I guess it would feel mundane if we weren’t wearing these damn facemasks. Mundane, if those oak trees over there weren’t a hundred metres tall.”

  Pandit grinned. “Another couple of centuries and we’ll be able to do without the masks, at least in the lowest-altitude locations. Hellas, for instance. Umm, would you like me to take a couple of pictures?”

  “Hell, no. I’m no tourist. And my visit isn’t exactly a secret, but the Security Secretariat made it clear I wasn’t to shout about it.” Falcon peered up the slope; Olympus was so vast, yet so shallow, that its summit was hidden by the close Martian horizon—hidden by the curve of the world. “I’m here for whatever is going on up there, in the ca
ldera.”

  “Project Acorn,” Hope Dhoni said dryly.

  “Which name is about all we know of it,” Falcon said.

  Pandit hesitated. “One last chance to change your mind. It is a gentle climb, sir, all the way up. People say Olympus is the most unspectacular spectacle in the solar system. But it is three hundred kilometres to the summit, and by the time you’re up there you’ll be above almost all of the atmosphere . . . Are you sure you want to walk?”

  Falcon sighed. “You forget I’m not an old man, Pandit. I’m an old engine. But I can still roll up a hill faster than any human could walk. And besides, if I’m on foot, so to speak, maybe there’s a better chance the Acorn people will let me through.” He looked up at the blank slope. “You know the situation. Melanie Springer-Soames and her group could hardly conceal their activities from the surveillance satellites. They’ve got a ­regular colony up there. But they refuse any attempts at contact, and in the only statement they released they claimed that they had set up ‘defences’ of some kind. Well, I’ve known the Springers since great-granddaddy Matt was showing off on Pluto—and that’s why Port Lowell asked me to come up here. This is a gamble on my unique status, and it’s not the first time I’ve been used this way: a gamble that while they may stop others, maybe they won’t stop me.”

  Dhoni said, “It all sounds damn flaky.”

  “Maybe, but this is Planetary Security policy: peaceful means if at all possible. That’s been the standing order since Mercury. And, flaky or not, Hope, if it all goes wrong, what have they lost? One rusty old robot.”

  Dhoni snorted. “I’ll claim the scrap value.”

  “Then, if we’re doing this—” Pandit dug into a pocket of his coverall, and produced an acorn, fat and healthy. “I’m honoured to accompany you, Commander. My family cherishes the story of my ancestor’s encounter with you at Jupiter.”