by Mel Keegan
Warning: engine temperature critical. Shutdown in thirty seconds.
“Not bad,” Vidal said quietly. “They made 24 minutes.” He looked up at Travers. “Not as good as you guys. Told you.”
And they were about to crash the simulator. Hubler was still fighting with every trick he knew, but it was no use. The gravity well had them, and both he and Rodman would be punchy, disoriented, queasy with middle ears in revolt.
Even now Roark Hubler would not quit until the engines actually scrammed before they melted down. He was still fighting with every trick in the unwritten book when a chime cut across the comm and Etienne’s voice said,
“Colonel Travers, Colonel Marin, to Hangar 4.”
“We’re on.” Travers dropped a hand on Vidal’s shoulder. “You’re sure you don’t want to come on down? The ride’s waiting for you.”
They were on call to fly Shapiro and Kim to the surface, and their scheduled destination was as good as a secure facility: Chesterfield House, the former residence of the Colonial Governor in the city of Westminster. There, they would liaise with the President’s own security detail and elements of the Jagreth Secret Service. As of 3:30am, Westminster time, it was the residence of the President of the new federal republic, though the official proclamation of sovereignty had not yet been made.
According to Shapiro’s information, the handover was so subtle, even the flags had not yet been changed. Personnel rosters had been adjusted so that a handful of Confederate loyalists would be in custody this afternoon. Ten hours had passed since the handover, and by midnight all of Jagreth would know about it. The proclamation of sovereignty was a mere formality and the excuse for a party which would span the globe as the Commonwealth flags were raised for the first time.
The details were labyrinthine, but they had been hammered out over the space of months. It was not in Shapiro’s nature to leave any element to chance. He would settle into private conference with Rob Prendergast and his assembly, meetings consuming most of a day, which left Travers and Marin with a little precious time on their hands.
But the planet and the layover were not Vidal’s concern. Chesterfield House was the residence of the President and First Lady. Elaine Osman would certainly be there, and his mouth had compressed. “I’m sure. I’m in enough trouble as it is, Neil – you think I want to be arrested for matricide? I imagine they have laws about things like that, even this far out in the sticks … and especially when it’s the President’s new wife who’d be on ice, waiting for the state funeral.”
“Out in the sticks?” Marin echoed.
“Hey, it’s your call,” Travers said cynically as he and Marin headed out of the hangar. “But damnit, she’s your mother. Last chance to change your mind.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.” Vidal was intent on the combug, the sim, and gave them a wave. “Catch you later, guys. I’m busy here.”
Hangar 4 was on the same deck level, fifty meters aft. As Marin and Travers stepped out of the pocket-sized compartment Vidal had commandeered for the work, they saw Shapiro and Kim in the passage, still making their way to the Capricorn. Over the loop, Gillian Perlman was talking to Ops, reporting the plane as flight ready, and Westminster ATC had just sent the flightpath.
“The local airspace is so congested,” Marin warned, “they actually tell you where to fly, and when, and how fast. It’s worse than Velcastra.”
“Why?” Travers wanted to know. “Westminster’s nowhere near as big as Elstrom.”
“But like Mick said, it’s a little way out in the sticks.” Marin greeted Jon Kim with a soft word while Shapiro was intent on his combug. “The surface to orbit shuttle service is lousy – too small, too infrequent, and unless they’ve improved their game lately, way too prone to delays and accidents. Most people prefer to fly themselves, so there’s a lot of commuter traffic, commercial as well as private.”
“Sanmarco,” Travers observed. “The orbital city.”
“It’s the other half of Westminster. Population of almost two million, last time I checked.” Marin paused as Perlman appeared from the hangar.
She slapped palms in passing. “You’re good to go. Your flightpath’s already logged and you got a military escort coming over from the Commonwealth docks ... was the Fleet dock yesterday. Damn, they just changed the signs tacked up beside the doors! It was quick, like Velcastra.”
“A military escort?” Marin shot a frown at Travers. “Well, now. This means they expect trouble. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Travers’s mouth tightened. “Same as Velcastra – they’ve got a problem with Confederate agents. Unlike Velcastra they know about it, so we’re not going to get jumped halfway down. You know anything about this, Gill?”
But she was making negative noises as she left them. “Don’t know nuthin’ about the deal. All they told me was, you’re assigned an armed escort. And if it was me, I’d be bloody glad to have it. You don’t want a replay of last time!”
“Because we,” Marin muttered as she walked back toward the lifts, “are starting to stretch our luck.”
As he spoke, Shapiro clicked off the combug and indulged himself in a grimace of frustration. “Petty bureaucracy.”
“Is a pain in the ass,” Kim finished.
“They’re still counting beans?” Marin wondered. “I’m sad to say it’s typical of Jagreth. There isn’t much of a local economy, but the colony was designed around extravagance. They like to behave as if they’re equal to Velcastra or Borushek – they put on a good show but it’s done on a budget so tight, those beans have got to be counted.”
“You seem to know the place,” Kim began, and then, “yes, I remember. You were born here.”
“And this is the first time I’ve been back,” Marin confessed.
“Since –?” Kim’s brows arched.
“Since he got his conscription notice,” Travers said acerbically. “Nothing to come back for, I guess.”
“Right. What’s this about an armed escort?” Marin was looking at Shapiro. “Trouble?”
“There’s always trouble.” Shapiro turned into the hangar with Kim on his heels. “I was conferring with President Prendergast’s security … in the last four days they’ve been arresting Terran agents by the bushel. They have seventeen in custody and a number have been killed. Give them any warning, and these agents either fight or run, and it’s come to violence several times. There’s a security cordon around Westminster, and especially around Chesterfield House, but they’re sure no agents have made it out.”
“How sure?” Travers asked shrewdly. “If the news of the handover gets out of this system ahead of time, the London can be on us like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Halfway to the Capricorn, in the hot, slightly acrid draft from the engines, Shapiro turned back. “They know it as surely as we do.” His expression was dark, but not bleak. “Since midnight last they’ve had the system’s highband jammed so comprehensively, even CNS has gone intermittent. CityNet is picking up the slack with stories of solar prominences crippling any comm above certain frequencies. According to Prendergast’s security captain, they’ve known for years who the Terran agents are, and where they’ve been. They only had to round them up, or else run them down if they were spooked.”
“You trust Prendergast’s people?” Marin stepped away toward the Capricorn’s ramp.
“To a point,” Shapiro said cautiously. “Still, I’d like you two to verify their logs.”
Travers gave Marin a wry, crooked smile. “They won’t like that.”
“They don’t have to like it.” Shapiro headed up the ramp. “They do have to comply with a clear directive to share data.”
At the bottom of the ramp Marin touched his combug to bring up the Wastrel’s loop. Voices whispered from Ops, the flightdeck, the engine deck, and Etienne said smoothly,
“Military flight JS-10 is holding off the port bow. Lieutenant Cameron Yip commanding.”
“Go.” Shapiro was running up the
harness, in the seat right behind the pilot seats.
The engines were still hot and Marin had only to flick the igniters to bring them to life. Every flight system was online, and as Travers took the seat beside him he called,
“Ops, this is Wastrel 101, ready to depart.”
The spinners and sirens had begun to wail across the hangar as Vaurien’s voice said, so close that he might have been standing at Marin’s shoulder, “We just took a major data transfer from Westminster. They know where the London is, down to the last few hours’ e-space time.”
“So they told me,” Shapiro agreed. “The last time they took a reliable fix on her, she was only about twelve hours, Weimann time, from here, holding position between Jagreth and Borushek.”
The hangar doors grumbled open in the deck as Vaurien said acidly, “Close enough to give you a shiver, if you didn’t know the minefields were in place.”
Marin glanced over his left shoulder at Shapiro. “And we do know that, don’t we?”
“Relax.” Vaurien sounded unconcerned. “Sergei van Donne checked in, as soon as we got insystem. The Mako is docked at Sanmarco, as you’d expect. They finished with the minefields about twenty hours ago – van Donne and Byrne and Ramon are drinking champagne, eating sushi and playing a little folgen at the casino.”
“And they know their business.” Marin lifted the Capricorn and nosed out into the bright, noisy space between the Wastrel, the docks and the vast disc shape of the Sanmarco SpaceCity itself.
From this vantage point they were seeing it from slightly below, and it resembled a glittering crown of thorns, a million lights of every hue, thousands of docking booms of every size and, below, the spines and hackles of the comm arrays. It drifted like a fantasy against the cloud-fleeced face of Jagreth, but if one looked closer the intense traffic congestion became apparent, while the radio sky was noisy with so many competing civilian comm bands, it was difficult to find space to punch a message through.
“Damn,” Marin murmured, “I’d forgotten how obnoxious this place can be.”
The face of the planet was blue-green, brilliant – as beautiful as he remembered. Jagreth might not be his home, but Travers was right, a profusion of childhood and adolescent memories rushed around him as he took the spaceplane up and around the shoulder of the Wastrel to meet their escort. He had no family here since his parents had left, more than a decade before, but he knew Mark Sherratt kept an apartment in the city; and any bank in Westminster would have recognized his ID, given him access to his accounts. With a small frisson of pleasure he remembered the same banks would recognize Travers too, and grant him access without question.
A gunship was holding position two thousand meters off the tug’s blunt nose, and Neil had already hailed it. “Lieutenant Yip, this is Wastrel 101, destination Chesterfield secure landing zone.”
A hailstorm of interference cut across the comms, and then: “Wastrel 101, this is JS-10. We will escort you groundside.” Yip’s voice was light, young. “Please stay on the flightpath and follow us in.”
“Will do, JS-10,” Travers assured him. “Wastrel Ops, we’re on our way. Anything we ought to know?”
And Vaurien: “Nothing we’re aware of.” The interference was wicked. “Westminster is calm, no sign of civil unrest … and you can hear the comm distortion. They’ve got the whole system blanketed with jamming. We’re pumping power into this signal, or you wouldn’t get word one. If you can feel your brain starting to sizzle, you know why.”
“Copy that,” Travers acknowledged. “Save it, Richard. Keep a track on us if you can … Wastrel 101 out.”
The gunship was refurbished Fleet salvage. Marin would have recognized it anywhere, and could have flown it in his sleep. This unit was probably smuggled, blackmarket, from a retrieval job in the Drift, and it was far from impossible the Wastrel itself had supplied it. The Bronowski reef claimed victims every year. This ship was ghost gray with fresh markings, its flanks displaying the blue and white Nine Worlds Commonwealth flag and the familiar crest of the colony of Jagreth, the star, three crescent moons and laurel wreath, in silver and gold.
The flightpath was a long spiral and Marin went hands-off at once though, on a whim, he flicked on the air search lidar. He saw the gunship, an outbound shuttle, eight passenger aircraft making their way to cities across the planet, and flocks of civilian craft smaller then the Capricorn, many of which were making their way up to Sanmarco.
A landing signal had been transmitting for some time, and since the AI was holding the same course as the gunship, the human pilot was a mere formality. He sat back, listened to the noisy, distorted comm, and as the Capricorn began to buck slightly through an easy re-entry he swiveled the seat around toward Travers.
Neil had slid green glasses onto his nose and was gazing through the long side canopy, taking in the vista. Jagreth’s sphere-in-the void expanded swiftly into a broad horizon with the misty fluff of the atmospheric blanket and the russet, ochre and dark green of continental masses. High clouds looked like wind-whipped frosting and cast purple shadows over the ocean.
“It’s a lot like Darwin’s,” Travers said easily. “Gentler than Borushek.”
“Smaller than Velcastra,” Marin added, “with a sun that’s a little brighter and hotter – more like Omaru’s star, in fact. It orbits a fraction further out, which gives it the 388 day year, and the planet spins a tad faster, so it has a slightly shorter day. They tell me, if you spend more than a few years here, you stop even noticing the differences. You’ll find the gravity comparable – about five percent light, which puts a spring in your step till your body compensates by losing a bunch of muscle strength. Smaller planet, less-dense core, lighter gravity, right? The seasons are a shade different from Velcastra … summer’s longer and inclined to be dryer, but nothing like Ulrand. There’s plenty of liquid water here, just not as much as on Velcastra.”
“And this shorter day of yours?”
“Theirs,” Marin corrected ruefully. “The day’s about fifteen minutes under 23 hours, but they’ve fudged it –”
“Fudged it?” Travers echoed.
“Morning is twelve full hours long; you might notice the sun enough to see how clock-noon is actually 37 minutes after noon proper, but it doesn’t make any more difference to your perceptions than daylight saving systems. They still do that on Darwin’s? Here, the day tapers off toward midnight, clicks over to tomorrow 75 minutes early. Unless you just got here from a world with a longer day, and you were awake, maybe out on the town, it isn’t even noticeable.” Marin gave the view a nostalgic smile. “The First Fleet colonists organized it this way – most of them were just out from Earth, so I guess it made them comfortable. Ten generations later, the people born here wouldn’t have bothered jiggling the clock to suit another world, but when you’ve got a whole population of Earthers …” He chuckled softly.
“I read the brochure,” Travers admitted. “It’s 194 years since the terraformer fleet, and 182 years since the First Fleet arrived. Sleeper ships – they did it the hard way.”
But Marin only shrugged. “It was the way things were done, way back when. People accepted it – they’d head out into the boonies in a ship with the Auriga drive. The technology was so delicate, if you built one as a science project today, you’d never get a license to light it up.”
“Spirit of the pioneers,” Travers said with acid humor. “When did we turn into a bunch of wusses?” He was looking out over a landscape of forested hills and high mountains now, as the Capricorn spiraled in toward Westminster, which had been built on a western seaboard at 43o north. “So, how much terraforming did she take?”
“Not so much.” Marin glanced over the instruments and left the AI pilot to its business. “It was mostly about eliminating a few species of flying bugs that were way beyond lethal, engineering some staple food crops, bringing in familiar trees and plants.” He watched the surface features gradually begin to take shape with proximity, and began to recognize the
lie of the land. “You know what humans are like. We take home with us. Wherever we go, we plant pine and spruce, oak and aspen. Give ’em fifty years, they look the same as the forests of Earth, but they’re different enough to be called Quercus Jagrethi and so on. Darwin’s?”
“The same.” Travers wore an introverted look, and Marin knew he was thinking back on his childhood.
Just being here was enough to bring Marin’s own youth back so close to the surface, he could almost taste it. “Some work was done on the soil structure of the big continent before the colony fleet arrived,” he said to divert himself from the flood of memories. “Survey ships came out, and the drone terraformer fleet was here twenty years before the colony ships arrived … something about planting a compatible species that decomposed into the soil and bumped up the levels of vitamins and minerals humans need.” He stretched his shoulders. “They taught it in grade school history, but I don’t remember the details. You get your heritage drilled into you, in school, but who was paying that much attention?”
“Not me,” Travers confessed with a self-mocking chuckle. “Every time Barb and Mark say something about science, I start to wonder how many classes I actually cut. It’s got to be more than I remember ducking.” But now he had begun to listen to the comm, and a frown tugged his brows.
The jamming was dense, and growing worse as they approached the city of Westminster. His brow creased and he began to fiddle, trying to cut through it. He shunted power to the signal and called loudly,
“Wastrel, do you read?”
The AI responded at once: “Strength 6. Boost your transmission.”
“We’re already maxed right out,” Travers murmured to Marin.
“Leave it.” Marin was watching the gunship. “We’re not coming in naked, the way we did on Velcastra.”
