by Mel Keegan
“Damn.” Marin thrust both hands into his pockets, looking out over the park, with its manicured lawns, astonishing topiary, marble and bronze statuary. “Well, you’re welcome, Lieutenant. We just jumped the gun –”
“Because we don’t have to answer to your bosses,” Travers finished. “We didn’t know there was fighting on Jagreth.”
“There isn’t.” Yip gave a cynical chuckle. “Officially. It’s just a bunch of Terran agents. We’ve always known we had a corps of them in the colony – every colony has ’em. They’ve been trying to get out, since we made the first moves in the changeover of power.”
Marin lifted his face to the sky, with its fleece of clouds and the brazen blue of late afternoon. The smell of the world was so familiar, a thousand memories he had not recalled since his teens came rushing back. “The handover to the colonial government hasn’t been as smooth here as it was on Velcastra.”
The lieutenant fell into step with them, toward the blind side of the mansion on the other side of lawns vast enough for a tournament. “It’s been smooth enough, but the fact is … we blew it right at the start. Governor Pasco took his staff out peacefully – right now there’s twenty of them, secretaries, aides, valets, at the Santorini Hotel, just waiting for a shuttle back to Lithgow or Haven, and a clipper from there back to the homeworlds. It was absolutely covert, in the wee, small hours of the morning, all smiles and handshakes. But somebody, somewhere tipped off the Confederate agents and suddenly we were blanketing the whole system with so much comm jamming, you can barely hear yourself think. The Earthers have been scrambling to get out – we’ve stopped the bastards at the spaceport and almost all the private fields in the colony. Every single time it explodes into a fucking shooting party. People,” he finished bleakly, “are getting killed, not just the Earthers, but us.”
“You said you blew it at the start,” Marin mused.
The young man’s shoulders lifted in an expressive shrug. “Somebody on Pasco’s staff called out, and damned if we know how. Maybe they just told a friend, or posted something dumb to CityNet. But even if they hadn’t, the Confederate agents were always going to give us grief. We thought we had the buggers pegged, but we missed a bunch of them right here in Westminster. We’ve been playing tag ever since, and they don’t hesitate to shoot, no matter who or what’s in the way. I think you just took ’em down.”
They had crossed the lawn into the shade of century-old trees. Travers opened his jacket in the afternoon warmth. “Nobody’s made it out of the system, right? You’re sure?”
Now Yip hesitated. “As sure as you can be. We think the Confederates are covered down to the last four, and the last time I was briefed we had them tracked to an industrial zone in the south. They’re under tight surveillance – they’re not going anywhere. We’ll give ’em the chance to quit and walk away with their lives. They can accept arrest and repatriation after the war, if they’re smart. If they’re not, they’re headed for the crematorium up in Juanliu.”
“Good enough,” Marin judged.
“Hey, you want coffee?” Yip offered.
But Travers was looking out across the hills to the south, where the forest had just begun to change color with the onset of fall. “Later, maybe. Any chance we can take a car?”
“You want to do the tourist thing?” The lieutenant made a face. “This is the most boring ball of mud in the universe.”
“I could name some worse,” Marin said, amused. “I was born here. I know a few places, if you want sand between your toes and the wind in your hair.”
The suggestion inspired a pained look, as if Yip could imagine nothing more tedious, but he pointed them to the garages at the rear of the mansion. “Sign out the Grassetto. It’s bulletproof … just in case.” He looked them up and down. “You, uh, armed?”
“Always.” Travers regarded the mansion with a deep frown. “I’m assuming your security is tight?”
“As a hustler’s corsets,” Yip assured him. “Nothing gets past this squad, not on our home turf. We laid on full security protocols, soon as the Confederate agents started sniping.”
“Targets?”
“Anything headed into or out of the mansion,” Yip said grimly, “especially an executive plane like your Capricorn, and especially if it’s under escort, meaning it has to have somebody high up aboard, with any luck General Shapiro himself. The Earthers’d just love to put him in a bodybag.”
“So Shapiro was the target,” Marin mused.
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?” Travers turned away toward the garages. “Signal lag between Omaru and here means the Confederate agents on Jagreth couldn’t have any firm intel, but it’s a safe bet the master puppeteer would show up here right ahead of the proclamation. They had location and approximate time, they just had to stake out a shoothole and wait.” He looked at his chrono, and then up at Marin. “We probably don’t have a lot of time.”
“We’ll catch up with you, Lieutenant,” Marin promised. “The Grassetto, you said?”
“Yeah. The big black Rand.” Yip waved and went on toward the mansion, where white umbrellas nodded over bistro tables in a red-paved courtyard under a display of prolific glory vines just beginning to redden as autumn came on.
The garages were cool, dim, a mass of silver-gray plascrete with a green and white boomgate and full AI surveillance. Marin saw two blue-uniformed guards and three youths apparently whiling away the afternoon hand-polishing several ranks of luxury cars for politicians and celebrities. He regarded the vehicles impartially, but Travers was scathing about wealth, privilege and ‘seat polishers,’ albeit in a growl even Marin barely heard.
A polite security drone ID’d and palm-printed them before it released the Grassetto, and Marin was not very surprised when the AI knew them. Chesterfield Control had already logged them in, along with Shapiro and Kim.
The senior guard was an older woman, thickset, with gnarled hands and too much makeup, who looked entirely comfortable in the uniform. “You guys come down groundside wi’ the General’s party?” The accent was provincial, even for Jagreth, which was far from the bright lights of Velcastra, Borushek, Omaru. She looked up at them through the haze of the threedee. “You gotta be feelin’ like a coupla spare wheels wi’ flat tires.”
“The boss gave us a few hours,” Travers said easily as he accepted the keycoder. “Downtime. Don’t knock it.”
“Enjoy.” The woman gave the threedee a cursory wave, and the boom rose.
Chapter Eight
Westminster region, Jagreth
Local time ticked over to 17:30 as the car buoyed up on a storm of repulsion. Travers took it out to the broad rear courtyard in a well of blue shadow before hitting the igniters. Well-tuned lifters roared to life and he ran them up to full thrust in test. Marin took the opportunity to sit back and relish the moment of idleness as the Rand rose high over the comm arrays on the mansion’s red shingled roof and angled away into the south.
“So.” Travers spun the car slowly in its own length to take in the full three-sixty. “Where?”
Most cities were much alike, and Marin had little desire to revisit parks and monuments which were variations on the themes of those in Sark, Elstrom, Hydralis, before the war reduced it to rubble – even Marak City on Ulrand. The fastest way out of town was south, down the coast. He pointed Travers in the general direction and lounged in the passenger’s seat, taking as much pleasure in watching Neil handle the car as in the view.
The Samaral Ocean was bright as the sun westered. Jagreth’s warm yellow star had begun to settle into a bed of cumulus and stratocumulus, and the forecast would not be so good for Westminster tomorrow. Marin smiled, remembering how the region’s weather always changed from the northwest. When one had grown up here, murk on the horizon, a subtle rise in humidity, a welcome fall in the heat of a summer or autumn afternoon, gave the subliminal warnings of squalls before dawn, perhaps a rumble of thunder in the small hours of the morning. The Cailenne Current cut a long r
ip, north-south and three shades darker than the rest of the ocean, almost on the horizon as the car headed south down the coast, following the antlines of the traffic lanes.
Below, Westminster was a mass of golden stone and armorglass reflecting the lowering sun, and the dancing colors of the myriad flickering commercials which competed for attention along the rooftops. Marin spared it one long glance, saw little different from Sark and Elstrom, and turned his attention back to the ocean.
Minutes later Travers dropped out of the traffic lines and the car settled toward a small gravel parking lot. The area was deserted at this time of day, and mid-week. The signage read ‘Beluga Cove,’ and he was surprised. “You have belugas here? The Earth species, or something local that just reminded some xenobiologist of a beluga?”
“Neither, actually.” The engine whined down, the gullwings lifted, and Marin took a deep breath of fresh salt air. The sun was low now and he used a hand to shield his eyes. “The Beluga was a research vessel, scouting locations for the mid-ocean fish farms. She went down 20 K’s offshore in a monster storm about 150 years ago. You can still dive on the wreck – another touristy thing to do, but you need the noonday light. She’s in about 30 meters, and it quickly gets dark, down deep. You can carry lights, but they’re a nuisance.”
“You’ve dived it.” Travers was watching the gulls squabbling along a pebble beach where someone had recently cleaned a catch.
They were indigenous, very different from the gulls of Earth – silver-green, with wax-glossy scales and double-folded wings; but they filled the same niche and sounded exactly like the gulls that had been introduced to Velcastra and Borushek from Earth. Jagreth’s biosphere was close enough to Earth’s to be almost liveable without modification, yet different enough for Earth-native species to struggle without some reengineering. Domestic animals were tweaked for the colony, and few wild species were dangerous enough to be culled. Indigenous forms continued to flourish and three generations on, no one noticed how ‘gulls,’ ‘crows’ and ‘pigeons’ shone with gorgeous iridescent scales rather then feathers, and folded their wings in two places.
Marin had grown up with these, and was transfixed by the feathered birds brought out from Earth. Genuine birds were common in colonies where terraforming was so comprehensive, native species were obliterated in the wild to make space for burgeoning human populations. Terraforming usually resulted in worlds where native creatures perished and were replaced by reengineered types from Earth and from environmentally compatible colonies. Indigenous life hung on only in vast, domed ‘parks’ where the virgin environment was carefully preserved as a scientific record. Marin had always mourned the near-annihilation of native life to accommodate humans.
“I dove on the Beluga three or four times when I was about fifteen,” he told Travers. “I had a skiff, used to tie up at the mooring on the point there. Don’t know what happened to the boat. It was still in the shed when my conscription notice was posted, but my parents were long gone from this planet by the time I was free to walk away from Fleet.” He heard the dark, introspective tone in his own voice. “I suppose they sold it along with the furniture.”
The ocean glittered as the northwest wind wafted coolness through the car, sharp with the tang of the incoming tide. He forced himself back to the present, discovered Travers frowning at him and hunted for a smile. “You want to get sand between your toes?”
But Travers’s dark head shook. “We can do that anywhere. It’s pretty, but a beach is a beach. We’ll come back when we have a few days, and maybe rent a boat, dive that wreck.” He dropped the gullwings and hit the igniters again. The hot engines lifted the car swiftly, and he turned the nose on south, leaving the city behind and heading into ‘clear air’ – traffic zones where the load was too sparse for antlines to form up, and drivers could cut their own paths.
Fifty kilometers over Westminster’s horizon lay the delta of the Murchison River, and there Travers turned inland, east, following the course of the river from the broad, swampy meander close to the coast to the jagged depths of Glen Rowan Gorge, where ancient glacial torrents had carved a chasm hundreds of meters deep. The southbound Kanagawa Highway soared over the gorge on the great wings of a road- and rail-bridge, a structure woven of seemingly gossamer filaments, spun kevlex-titanium riding grav-resist fields.
“Now, that’s pretty.” Impressed, Neil braked the car to a hover, five hundred meters westward.
“Three monster generators are buried in the bedrock below, there’s a permanent gang of drones maintaining it,” Marin told him. “It has its own AI – and you’re seeing it at the best time of the day, with the sun low in the west.”
The structure gleamed, with the northbound freight express headed like a bullet for Westminster on the maglev rail and flights of snow-white condors wheeling below on the early evening thermals, fanning out in search of carrion – supper. In the distance the landscape darkened with the endless carpet of the Itaruma Forest, dense, original old-growth tracts of native hardwoods – big enough, old and tough enough to withstand an environment skewed by the modest terraforming.
“Swing around, follow the highway.” Marin pointed ahead to the arrow-straight line of plascrete cutting an arc into the northeast, where the hills rose steadily toward mountains still over the horizon. “It’s only early autumn here, so there’s enough daylight.”
“Enough light for what?” Travers took the car under the bridge rather than over, where the upward press of the grav-resist field gave a rollercoaster sensation for a moment.
“A place called Taylor’s Creek ... since we’re in the area, at this time of year.” Marin leaned forward, bringing the GPS online and scrolling till he found what he wanted.
A wood of maple, aspen and birch, built from reengineered trees. The result was a designer landscape – nothing about it was natural to Jagreth, but it had the look and feel and smell of the Hudson River area of Darwin’s World, and several parts of the northern latitudes of Earth’s Americas. For more than a century Jagreth had celebrated the First Fleet’s origins in the Near Sky, and specifically Darwin’s, Mars and Earth itself. Many landscapes around Westminster were built by the terraformer fleet to make the first generations comfortable. They were as artificial as their trees and wildlife were real and alive; and they were as beautiful as any place in the homeworlds.
The colors of the season were already beginning to show, and the low sun cast a golden blaze across a birch hillside. Westminster sprawled away to the sea, busy, self-possessed, handsome with a certain quaintness which had been cast off decades before by more affluent and populous cities of other worlds.
Travers set the car down on the cracked old plascrete of a lookout, and as the canopies whirred up Marin swung out, stretched his back and took a long breath. The air was quite still here, two thousand meters above the coast, cooler, and rich with the scents of soil, decay, humus. The year was swinging quickly toward winter; fall here was short and damp after the extended summer months. Drifted fallen leaves crackled underfoot as he made his way to the half-strange, half-familiar gazebo-style shelter, thirty yards back from the lookout.
The wood was the same; the knife-carved graffiti had worn with time but the table was very new. Birch and aspen clustered around and the undergrowth grew much more thickly than he remembered, but nothing could change the smell of the place, and it triggered a thousand memories. The view over Westminster to the sea was dramatic with the harsh shadows of early evening; smoke from the few fires still smoldering cast a haze over the city, but if Marin closed his eyes, seventeen years seemed to fall away from his bones like a snakeskin.
“Nice place,” Travers said cautiously. “I know a few like it on Darwin’s and Velcastra.”
Every world had them – scores of them. Hundreds. Marin chuckled softly. “It’s not a place. It’s the place.”
Travers hopped up to sit on the table, feet on the bench, listening, perhaps guessing.
“I was sixteen,” Marin tol
d him. “He was about a year older, but his conscription notice hadn’t been posted yet. It was about this time of year … still warm, humid. Clear skies, great stars except in the east where the spaceport lights always make it too bright for stars … about an hour off midnight, which is not as late as it sounds. The day’s a tad shorter here, remember?”
A smile had ambushed Travers. “I remember. You lost your virginity here.”
“Yes, I did.” Marin indulged himself in a rich chuckle. “He had a car, he’d already graduated … Chris. Nice kid, all long limbs and yellow hair and brown skin. Smooth as a girl, at that age. Ready for plucking and desperate to be plucked, if only the right partner would come along. You know the type.”
“I’ve met a few.” Travers beckoned and when Marin went to him, laced his fingers at Curtis’s nape. “You’d have fallen into the same category yourself … damn, I’ll just bet you were a beauty. It was good?”
“It was interesting,” Marin allowed. “Not a complete disaster.” He leaned his forehead on Neil’s and closed his eyes, the better to perceive the sprit of the place. “Nothing really changes here except the people. They come and go, but Jagreth seems to drowse, so far from the bright lights of Velcastra, Omaru, Borushek – and if you ask the people who’ve spent a lifetime here they’ll tell you, they like it that way.”
“So do it. It’s nice.” Travers feathered a kiss around his cheek, flicked his lips with a warm tonguetip. “The Three Rivers region of Darwin’s is a lot like this. The pace of life is slow enough that you can actually see the seasons changing around you instead of running, running, the way we’ve spent the last couple of years.”
“I’ve been running for a lot longer.” Marin leaned back to look into his face. “Dendra Shemiji. One day I’ll tell you a few of those stories.” Then he looked over Travers’s head into the woodland shadows, where rabbits and deer would soon be creeping out to forage in the twilight. Not the same animals Earth knew as rabbits and deer, but creatures that filled the same niches in the environment, and were close enough to be called by the same names.
