Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  For a moment the memories were sharp enough to be almost painful. Inside Marin, disturbingly close beneath the skin, was the callow, confused youth, longing for adventure, dreading his five-year hitch yet relishing the challenge of opting for officer selection at the end of the rookie year, studying for an eventual place in the command corps. Perhaps even a command of his own. He might have done it, if he had not watched the murder of a friend. One night changed everything, and there was no way back.

  He shook the memories away with an enormous effort and focused on Travers, who was just watching him, waiting for him to return to the present. Loving him a great deal just then, Marin stooped and kissed him soundly before he said against Neil’s lips, “You getting hungry?”

  “Starving,” Travers confessed. “I was starting to wonder if you wanted to duck into the woods for a quickie –”

  “If we were seventeen, I’d take you up on the offer,” Marin said, amused. “I’m old enough to want a firm mattress and a tube of something cool and sweet, if I’m going to get humped!” He traced the lines of Travers’s brow, nose, jaw. “Beside which, you’re hungry.”

  “You know any good restaurants?” Travers pressed a last kiss to his palm and let him go.

  “A few, but we don’t have a booking.” Marin stepped away, though he held onto Travers’s hands and pulled him to his feet. “How fancy do you want to get?”

  “I don’t care about ‘fancy’ – feed me,” Neil said plaintively.

  “In that case, let me drive now.”

  Sunset flooded east through the sky in shades of blood, purple, gold, green, as the car lifted. Lights danced across the rooftops of Westminster and for a moment Marin held the car on a static hover while he cast around for his bearings, not quite ready to take the easy way out and opt for the GPS.

  Travers snorted with ribald humor. “You do know where you’re going?”

  “Hey, it’s been a long time,” Marin protested.

  And then the car spun, dove down the forest-dark face of the Wichita Hills and entered the city traffic lines over the Bremen sector. Downtown was already bright, glittering with animated signage and a million lights, crisscrossed by the traffic lanes while the flaretails of orbital shuttles arced high above, heading up from the spaceport to Sanmarco and the clipper terminal at Westminster High Dock.

  He threaded into ‘Watsonia Street,’ the busy east-west express lane at 700 meters altitude, and followed it to a familiar pair of red and white banners dancing in laser light over the apex of the South Cambrai parking garage. When he saw the green ‘space available’ sign, he handed the car over to the building’s AI pilot.

  The Grassetto touched down like a feather, and as the canopies lifted he took a breath of the city night air – sharp, metallic with the reek of hot engines, rich with the smells of plum pork, lemon chicken, frying onions, sizzling fish, issuing from the stalls on the north parapet. Forty levels up, they heard only a faint growl of street traffic, but the air overhead was thick with cars, jangling with music from the food vendors’ stands, and Marin shouted to hear his own voice.

  “This way – stay with me.”

  The parking AI issued a chit for the car, and as they headed for the elevators the massive red lobster claws picked up the Grassetto, swung it vertically in an Arago cradle and shunted it into the first available slot in the building’s cubic-concentration storage.

  Two minutes later they were on the street and Marin was the first to admit, downtown Westminster was almost indistinguishable from Sark or Elstrom or even Santorini. He had never visited Venice, on Darwin’s World, but it could be little different. Travers was impartial, content to follow as Marin took him a hundred meters north, thirty east; and then he whistled as he saw the illuminated fountains outside the Jagreth Colonial Museum.

  The fountains were the one unique feature the city possessed, and they appeared in every brochure. Even now a gaggle of tourists posed in front of the leaping-dolphin arcs of spun lexan about which the water performed an intricate ballet of rainbow-hued jets. The display was lit from below the surface by animated lights in complex patterns of color. Travers watched, impressed, and then gave Marin a hopeful look.

  “You said something about food?”

  In fact, Marin could already smell it and followed his nose. The museum fronted onto Shackleton Strand with a broad, red-paved forecourt and vast armorglass windows displaying an original terraformer drone – forty meters long, fifteen high, twenty wide, painted the garish red and yellow that made these machines instantly visible in the forest. This one had its handler arms extended as if it were taking apart a hillside, and was surrounded by a regiment of its worker bots. Opposite the windows, a line of kiosks marched away toward the art gallery, the opera house, the Santorini Hotel. Between the kiosks and the monstrous, dormant terraformer machine, a bevy of blue and white parasols perched over numerous café tables.

  Most tables were occupied, but one in the back was free. Marin claimed it by sitting there while Travers strolled off to explore the kiosks and indulge himself. Curtis was content to watch, enjoying the opportunity to sit and be still, until the big threedee on the south side of the courtyard flickered to life. Moments later the CNS feed began.

  His nerves prickled. If CNS was back on the air, it could only mean the system-wide comm jamming had stopped. On a whim he took the combug from his pocket, slipped it in and gave it a tap. At once he heard Wastrel Ops, and he said quietly,

  “This is Wastrel 101 … no more jamming?”

  The voice answering belonged to Tully Ingersol. “Hey, Curtis, you notice that. They just quit the comm blanket,” he affirmed, “and you gotta know what that means.”

  “It means it doesn’t matter any longer if the news of the takeover gets out,” Marin mused. “They’re ready to proclaim sovereignty, right now – ready for the London battle group. It can happen any time.”

  “And it will,” Ingersol said darkly. “Uh, where are you guys?”

  “Downtown Westminster,” Marin told him. “Shackleton Strand, ten minutes from transportation. Where do you want us?”

  “You’re fine where you are, just don’t go far.” Ingersol paused, more than likely to monitor another channel. “Chesterfield Control just buzzed the whole system with the news … the official proclamation’s going to be broadcast to the cosmos at midnight, your time, from the … the Madeleine Chen Theater. You got any idea what that is?”

  “The opera house – about four hundred meters south of where I’m sitting. I can almost see it from here.” Marin was watching Travers threading his way back between the tables. “Gives us a shade under two hours to kill. Where’s Shapiro?”

  “Still at Chesterfield House with the President. According to the security feed, they’re moving to the theater soon. If you’re looking to hook up with them there, you better let Jon Kim know you’re coming in, so he can liaise with their goon squad. They’re artillery right up to the eyeballs, with a rep for being bloody trigger happy – mind you, full marks to Prendergast’s people. They’ve had this whole thing buckled down tight.”

  “Except for the small fact we ran into Terran agents with missiles before we even saw the LZ,” Marin added tartly. “Good thing we were in the right place at the right time.”

  “You and Neil,” Ingersol said dryly, “always were the two luckiest pups I ever knew.”

  Travers had just set down an armful of food and drink, and Marin said to the combug, “I’ll talk to you later, Tully. 101 out.” He gestured at the threedee, off to his left. “CNS just came back up. The big statement’s being made from the opera house – that Greco-Roman monstrosity on the other side of the art gallery – midnight. Speaking of which – hang on.” He clicked the combug down to the Chesterfield Security band. “Wastrel 101 looking for Jon Kim.”

  He called three times before Kim answered in a bored tone. “Curtis, where are you? You’re coming back to the house?”

  “We’re downtown.” Marin took a cup of
almond chicken and noodles from Travers, and dug in a fork. “We just heard the news –”

  “Opera house, midnight, they’re making a big production number of it.” Kim heaved a sigh. “The whole security caravan picks up and moves in an hour. Less. They’ve been sweeping the theater all day for any sign of Confederate agents. We’re on pace … and then, please gods, we can get out of here.”

  “Bored?” Travers was listening in.

  “Out of my tiny gourd,” Kim said acidly. “Aides are not permitted in the hallowed presence. It’s just been Harrison and President Prendergast, since we got here. My eyeballs are floating in tea. Still, I just sent for food and I’m going to kill some time with CityNet, now it’s back online.”

  “We’ll join you at the theater,” Marin told him. “Give Chesterfield Security a heads up, or we’ll be bounced before we even get close to the door.”

  “They’ll be looking for you,” Kim promised. “I’ll see you there, Curtis.”

  Travers was eating an eccentric mix of Chinese, Italian and Moroccan over a bed of flashed sweet potatoes. With his back to the street he was studying the ancient terraformer machine, behind its armorglass. As he patted his lips with a napkin he said,

  “You know, I never saw one of these before. I mean, actually saw one in reality. The terraforming at home was so long ago, the hardware was all shipped off-planet centuries ago. They’re bigger than they look on the vids.”

  “Bigger and nastier.” Marin twisted in the white wrought kevlex chair to frown at the exhibit. “These things have torn entire ecologies to pieces – not here, but on other worlds – razed them down to bare dirt and then rebuilt them with engineered species that suit us. Humans.”

  “You don’t have much regard for terraforming,” Travers observed.

  But Marin only shrugged. “There was a need for it, centuries ago. These days we just keep on surveying till we find better-suited planets, but back then the engine technology wasn’t up to it. It was easier to take a planet with potential and rework it.”

  “Thirty or forty billion humans,” Travers said thoughtfully, “where are you going to put them?”

  “Exactly.” Marin frowned critically at the machine. “So you find a world with the right gravity, the right star, good atmosphere, geologically stable, enough liquid water, nothing nasty in the local stellar neighbourhood, no sign of intelligent life, and what are you going to do?”

  “Stake a claim, survey it, modify it.” Travers chewed methodically, still focused on the terraformer drone. “Darwin’s was one of the lucky ones. It didn’t take much terraforming. Less than twenty years, to change the nature of the soil in areas that were designated agricultural, change the paths of a couple of rivers, eradicate some lethal species of swarming bugs. They chucked in a bunch of ice asteroids to raise sea level by a few meters – nothing too big and bad. Some engineered forests, like Jupiter spruce and a lot of acacias and eucalypts that’ll grow anywhere, desert or snow, they don’t care. Two decades to cook while the sleeper ships chugged their way out there on the earliest Auriga engines – today we wouldn’t trust ’em as far as you could throw one – and she was done.” He patted his lips with a paper napkin. “At the last census there were four billion people living on Darwin’s.”

  “And immigration out to the Middle Heavens and the Deep Sky has been a major industry for about a century and a half.” Marin glanced sidelong at the museum. “You already know we were settled from the homeworlds and Darwin’s. Terraforming was quick, they didn’t have to do much, so the environment is still fairly liveable for the native species.”

  “I noticed.” Travers gestured with a loaded fork. “Rabbits in the woods back there – until you take a close look. ‘Rabbits’ with frill necks, not ears, long tails and three claws as long as your thumb on every foot.”

  “You noticed.” Marin half-drained a cup of iced green tea with lime and mint. “They’re harmless. Good pets, if you keep the claws trimmed. I had one myself when I was a kid. The frill necks angle around, collecting sound for six tiny little audio channels in the base of the skull, and they’re also like snake tongues, chemical receptors, tasting the air. These rabbits are enough like rabbits to be warm, soft; they make thrumming noises when they’re fed, content.” He smiled at the memory. “I haven’t remembered him in ten years. Longer. Not that him is the right word. They’re single gender, marsupial.”

  “There’s a few native species left on Darwin’s,” Travers said thoughtfully, “but they’ve been driven way out by the cities and the domestic stock from Earth. You’re more likely to see horses, cattle, sheep, than any of the wild deer and goats. The indigenous wolves and big cats are virtually extinct in the wild, just a few left in the high mountains in the south.”

  “It’s the same here.” Marin nodded vaguely into the south. “There’s a preserve, about a million square kilometers of native environment and a thousand drones creeping about, keeping it pristine perfect. Nothing’s actually extinct … but nothing’s wild anymore.” He frowned at the street, the throngs of people moving back and forth between the malls and civic buildings. “Too many people. That’s always been the problem.”

  “Crowding and hunger are what brought humans out from the homeworlds in the first place.” Travers was in a philosophical mood. “If we’d been like the Resalq, never let overpopulation get into gear, we’d have taken another thousand years to escape the solar system.”

  He was right, but Marin was far from convinced it would have been a bad thing. Scores of planets would have survived in their natural forms, rather than being hammered into pseudo-Earths. Done eating, he piled the debris into a bag. “You want to take a look at the museum? We don’t need to be at the opera house for an hour and a half.”

  “Sure.” Travers was still eating. “They have anything Resalq here? I know the whole colony was named for the hero in a story – Jagreth.”

  “They keep several standing displays.” Marin was watching the threedee. “Even before the terraforming, the surveyor ships found the ruins of a Resalq city. It’d been abandoned so long before, it was decayed, half buried, like the Eternal City on Saraine, but…”

  He stopped there to listen as the CNS display turned to grainy longshots of Fleet ships and graphical representations of worlds like Haven, Lithgow, Louverne, even Pakrenne. He had been deliberately tuning out the voiceover, but now gave it his full attention.

  “Hijackings, mutinies, mass desertions,” a woman’s voice was saying in the slow, measured paces of the news narrator. “The story is the same across the Middle Heavens and on into the Deep Sky, where shocking scenes of violence have been reported on Borushek. The city of Sark, always one of the most peaceful centers in the colonies, exploded in riot and armed protest last week when the news from Velcastra and Ulrand was published to CityNet, following the defeat of suppression orders from Confederate news agencies.

  “Widely referred to as the ‘Colonial Wars,’ the recent uprisings on both the civilian street and the decks of lesser Fleet vessels have prompted a clamp-down by military and civil authorities. For the first time, a dusk to dawn curfew has been enforced in Sark. Citizens abroad after 9:00pm and before 5:00am without valid passes and permits are being arrested, charged and shipped out to penal facilities on Borushek’s third moon, where they face sentences of up to six months.

  “On Louverne, public, Tactical and Fleet security personnel clashed in Herschel Mall, in Colombo. A battle ensued, with more than two hundred people killed or injured, and more than three thousand arrested. These arrestees, along with eight thousand others taken into custody in similar confrontations across Louverne, have been detained in a makeshift camp in the Elizabeth Islands. Primitive conditions, inadequate sewerage and poor medical facilities raise grave concerns for the health of detainees, none of whom have yet been formally charged.

  “Aboard the Fleet cruiser Eugene and the frigates Ajax and Europa, violence turned to bloody mayhem when the crewdecks mutinied and the command
corps made the mistake of taking up arms in an attempt to quell the insurrection.” Stock shots of ships of the same class flashed up into the threedee; they were all too familiar from the action on the Omaru blockade.

  “The death toll across the three ships, which were seized at the Fleet dockyards in the Haven system, has officially been set at 22, with 60 more officers and personnel wounded, some tanked in cryogen, waiting for cloned body parts without which they would surely die. Confederate loyalists were set down at the bauxite mines on Hephaestus, in Haven’s asteroid belt, where inadequate life support facilities caused panic. A rescue flight was made by the tender Strauss, and all hands were recovered, but the cruiser and frigates were long gone. Transmissions received before they quit the system reported them headed for Velcastra, where the stated intention of the mutineers is to pledge the vessels to the service of the Nine Worlds Commonwealth.”

  Now, wide shots of the mines and dockyards were replaced by an animation of the Commonwealth flag – blue-white and beautiful, with the nine stars representing the nine sovereign territories signatory to the fledgling alliance. “Fleet vessels,” the newsreader went on in the same deliberately paced tones, “are regrouping at Haven, and though neither Quadrant Command nor Fleet itself has responded to media petitions for information, it is believed they are waiting for support from the Near Sky.

  “The newly-launched super-carrier Avenger is believed to be cruising a route in the Middle Heavens, and military analysts speculate she will be held in reserve, for the defense of the homeworlds themselves. Meanwhile, the super-carrier London and her battle group were last recorded heading into the space between Borushek and Jagreth. Nothing further is known about their position or assignment, but with the Nine Worlds Commonwealth flag flying this morning over the sovereign state of Velcastra, it can only be a matter of time before independence is declared on Jagreth and Borushek.