‘No, you won’t get off this Lethe-spawned line.’
Miriam’s head imploded in a cloud of pixels, to be replaced by the snarling visage of a man, apparently much older, his face deep-space pale, his white hair a tangle tied up at the back of his head. In his background, Poole glimpsed green leaves, like trees.
Nicola laughed. ‘Now that is the look I want when I get AS-preserved.’
The man glared. ‘Which one of you is the Poole?’
Poole leaned forward. ‘I’m Michael Poole. Who in Lethe are you, and how did you crash my private comms links?’
‘I’ll crash a lot more than that before we’re done, you foetus. You called me.’
‘Strictly speaking, it was me,’ said Nicola. She tapped Poole’s shoulder and pointed to an alert from the onboard intelligence. The caller was identified: Highsmith Marsden, calling from Gallia Three. ‘I told you I was looking for places to put your people.’
‘I’ve heard of him,’ Poole murmured. ‘And the Gallias. Though I don’t know much more than is scrolling before me . . . Highsmith Marsden. Over two hundred years old. A scientist, no present academic affiliation, specialises in bioinformatics, quantum nonlinearity, experiments in superluminal communications. Oh, now I know why I remember him. He consulted with Jack Grantt on the Mars Lattices. And Gallia Three’s a cycler. Earth–Jupiter. A hollowed-out comet nucleus—’
‘I know the idea. In the days before high-speed technologies like the GUTdrive, right? Elliptical orbit, dipping to Earth at perihelion, Jupiter at aphelion. You’d just climb on board and live in the thing as it carried you out to the gas giants – how long was the trip?’
‘Over two years,’ Marsden snarled. ‘But the system has worked like clockwork for centuries. Which is more than can be said for your steam rockets today, isn’t it, flyboy? Let alone your wormholes. Lethe, man, what have you done to us? Rapid transport system my eye. You ought to paint your wretched wormholes red so we know to avoid them.’
Poole said, ‘Professor Marsden, you can see we have a situation—’
‘Oh, I’m well aware of your situation. And I have my own priorities. You can consult the academic press to find out what I’m doing here. This is a space habitat already over a thousand years old, which shelters a biosphere of similar antiquity, and all of it relying on nothing more than comet ice and sunlight. Studying such an object is exactly the sort of project one should be pursuing, given the benefit of AS longevity, wouldn’t you think? Not that those fools at Oxford who cut my funding decades ago would have agreed. And I would have thought, Michael Poole, that today of all days, when it appears that some sort of alien entity has erupted into the Solar System thanks to your infantile tinkering, you ought to applaud a transport mode that is all but powerless, invisible, silent.’
Poole made to answer.
Nicola waved him silent. ‘Shut up, Michael. This old fossil is thinking more clearly than anybody else I’ve heard today. Professor, you’re right. Gallia Three is about as safe a refuge as we could have found. Which is why I thought of calling on you. And – shut up, Michael – how big is the habitat? This report says it was designed to hold five hundred, at peak capacity . . . Where are you just now?’
‘I’m near aphelion. Obviously, or I wouldn’t be wasting my time trying to communicate with the likes of you.’
‘Near Jovian orbit, then,’ Poole said. ‘And given the time delays, he’s no more than light-seconds away.’
Nicola said, ‘So we found a place to take your precious workers from Io, and their bot buddies. Your first lucky break of the day.’
‘Not that lucky. There were three Gallias; the idea was that there would be one at Jupiter three times in every twelve-year Jovian orbit. So it’s not that unlikely that—’
‘Shut up. Thank you for responding, Professor. Michael. Contact the Crab. Speak to my mother. She’s a UN Oversight Co-ordinator, remember; she has a lot of leverage. Tell her this old fart will open his door to your refugees.’
Poole, feeling dazed, resolved never to make an enemy of Nicola Emry. He turned back to the monitor. ‘Professor Marsden – since we’ve got you on the line – what do you make of it?’
Marsden frowned. ‘Of what?’
‘The intruders. You’ve obviously been following events. We’ve been calling them the sycamore seed, the raindrops, the phantoms.’
He sniffed. ‘Labels are irrelevant.’
‘Of course they are. What do you think?’
‘That they’re dangerous. Almost bound to be hostile. And your irresponsibility in allowing them into the System—’
‘Why dangerous? What’s your logic?’
‘It is that these are forms of life – and I do think they show the characteristics of life rather than technology; one of your “phantoms” even appears to have budded, to have reproduced already – these forms are quite inimical to our carbon-chemistry forms. Surely this is obvious.
‘The “phantoms” – you must have identified this for yourself – are essentially knots of quagma, centred on a GUT-density core. Quagma: the stuff of the very early universe, created less than a millionth of a second after the first singularity – just after the GUT era itself and the age of cosmic inflation . . . The universe was filled with a kind of ultra-hot liquid, a soup of particles like neutrinos and photons, and electrons – and photinos, dark matter particles – and quarks; it was too hot yet for the quarks to combine in nucleons, protons and neutrons. A quark soup, a quagma. And yet there was life – oh, the theoretical modelling and relic anomalies prove it. Beasts of quagma, who fought and lived and died in their mayfly generations, and who fed, probably, on remnant islands of GUT matter, super-hot, super-energetic. Just a second after the singularity and it was all over. Most of the quark soup had congealed into nucleons, and the whole universe was no more exotic than the heart of a star. But—’
‘But some of these quark creatures may have survived.’
‘Indeed.’ Marsden was almost whispering, eyes wide, voice hoarse, grey hair haloing his head; to Poole he was like a vision of some pre-Discovery-era prophet. ‘To these quagma phantoms our universe would be a vast, cold, empty place, its days of glory long gone. But in pockets, here and there—’
Nicola nodded. ‘There would still be delicious knots of left-over high-density energy, on which they feed. Such as the engine cores of Michael’s GUTships.’
‘Exactly. Life – but not our kind of life. They do not belong here,’ he said with sudden, almost savage vigour. ‘They do not belong now. As soon as they arrived, they started to spread destruction and chaos and misery. And you brought them here, you Pooles, with your hubristic meddling.’
Nicola grinned. ‘I think we’ve got the first draft of your gravestone inscription, Michael.’
Poole’s face burned. ‘We have people in danger. I’m going down to Io. Crab Junior out.’ He cut the line, peremptorily took control of the little craft, and threw it across space.
5
After a fusion-powered limp through Jovian space, the Crab Junior had to make a slow, cautious final approach to Io, such was the volume of traffic around the little moon. With the big GUTships abandoned for now, there were only small craft available for the evacuation, flitters and yachts and other special-purpose vessels, all of them fusion-propelled – and each capable of lifting only a handful of refugees.
But the slow descent gave the Junior’s crew a chance for a good look at Io, and Poole was grimly gratified to see Nicola Emry’s cynical eyes widen with wonder.
Io, innermost major moon of Jupiter, mangled by tidal squeezing and battered by the giant planet’s magnetosphere – and no larger than Earth’s Moon – had more active volcanoes than all of Earth’s landmasses. The great calderas were pits in the surface, black as night and stained with orange fire. There were lakes of lava too, of liquid sulphur dioxide, banded red and orange at their c
ooler perimeters. Meanwhile curtains of crimson lava reached hundreds of metres above the surface, gas plumes towered, and persistent, eerie aurorae haunted the poles.
It was the colours that got you, Poole always thought. Violent colours you would never have expected on such a minor body, vivid against a background of wan five-astronomical-units sunlight, and the pale glow of Jupiter, huge in the sky. Red and orange and black, and a lurid green.
And, only hours before, there had been a droplet of Earth blue too, the dome over Inachus Base.
The Poole Industries company town at Babbar Patera had been built on a kind of platform, standing on vast foundations pile-driven into the unreliable surface, with active stabilisation to cope with rock tides that amounted to fifty metres every forty-two-hour Io ‘day’. But once the GUTengine-fuelled magnetic shields had gone, the dome had quickly collapsed, exposing buildings, bunkers, equipment stacks – and humans in their hardened suits, scurrying for shelter. Away from that centre, the roadways and monorails and mass-driver slingshots, infrastructure constructed to extract Io’s mineral treasures, were deserted and exposed, looking from above like the ribbing of an autumn leaf about to be thrown on the fire.
But that fire, the awesome energies focused on Io, was the reason the Pooles had come here. Io was so close to its parent that it orbited well within Jupiter’s radiation-filled magnetosphere, twenty thousand times as strong as Earth’s. Indeed, the moon’s volcanic plumes injected electrons and oxygen and sulphur ions into the magnetosphere, so that Io orbited inside a wheel-shaped, highly energetic flow of charged particles: the ‘Io torus’. More tubes of magnetic force connected Io’s field to the poles of Jupiter itself: flux tubes, along which currents measured in millions of amperes routinely flowed. As a result, Io-Jupiter was like a single vast engine, Poole always thought, with linkages of electromagnetism and particle streams and tides, and spanning three million kilometres.
And it was this engine which industrialists had tapped for a thousand years or more, all the way back to the days when Poole Industries, Con-Am and others had first dug into the tortured crust for exotic sulphur compounds and other treasures. Those pioneers had simply draped superconducting tethers across the landscape to allow the shifting magnetosphere to drive useful currents. Now this world-engine was trying to kill the humans and machines that had dared to come here.
It was all his fault, came the nagging from a corner of Poole’s mind. His ambition, or at any rate his family’s, that had brought so many into a position of such peril. His lack of care, his headlong rush to complete the latest project, his hubris that had opened up the wormhole gate to the eerie, out-of-time peril that had caused all this. Nicola was right, and Marsden. All he could do now was try to put it right.
As soon as he could, he joined the evacuation operation, and went to work.
The operation was slow, a trickle. The collapse of the surface facilities saw to that, as airlocks and power plants failed, making transfers dangerous and slow.
As the long hours of the emergency went by, in between their own descents and take-offs – in a flitter that started to smell of the fear and exhaustion of the refugees who had passed through it – Poole and Nicola Emry took it in turns to grab some rest. Nicola slept a lot better than Poole did. But then, he suspected, she was not troubled by a conscience, and probably never would be.
It was after one of his non-sleeps that Nicola woke him, cautiously, to tell him that she had some news. ‘From Mars.’
Poole felt groggy, baffled. It was already two days since the wormhole invasion. He was strapped into a sleeping bag at the rear of the flitter cabin. He saw that they were on their way back down to Io once more, for another refugee pickup. He grabbed his flask of water from a bracket, drained it, and let it drift off in the microgravity. ‘Mars? What has Mars got to do with it?’
‘It’s the sycamore seed, and its accompanying flock of raindrops. It still seems to be making for the Sun, or Mercury. But Mars happens to be close to that track.’
‘I remember.’
‘There’s no indication that it’s going to call in. But conversely the Martians have been calling it. Take a look . . .’
She set up a Virtual that played out on the floor beside his pallet. He saw a small figure, doll-like – a male – standing in what looked like a huge, glass-roofed hall. The man was looking out of the image, talking to the universe. Poole saw a crowd of people behind him, behind a rope barrier, patrolled by Federal Police in their pale blue uniforms.
She pointed. ‘That is the Cydonia dome. And the show-off in the foreground—’
‘I know him. Jack Grantt. He led the team that claims to have discovered intelligence on Mars. Vast bacterial networks—’
‘Vast guesswork, more like. My mother has been to his funding pitches.’
‘He’s an old family friend. He was “Uncle Jack” when I was a kid. My father sent me for a season’s study with his team, on Mars. Harry wanted us, Poole Industries, to develop an open mind about encountering exotic life. After all, we’ve been leading the way into many of the more unusual environments, like Io, that humans have yet explored. If anybody’s likely to contact new life, it’s us.’
Nicola pulled a face. ‘People like you always know each other, don’t you? Well, now Grantt thinks there’s life, and maybe mind, coming at us through your wormhole. So he’s been trying to signal to it.’
That amused Poole. ‘Signal to it? How? Flashing lights, radio beams? With big triangles dug into Hellas Planitia?’
‘Oh, there’s more comedy value in it than that. He’s sending a broadcast – of himself, standing there spouting – via gravity waves.’
‘Gravity waves? How? Oh – Phobos. He would have got the co-operation of the local representatives of Poole Industries . . .’ In advance of the day when exotic matter might need to be manufactured in the Martian system for local wormhole-network links, the Pooles had established a trial black hole facility on Mars’s moon, a cut-down version of the Jovian Hub. And it was by manipulating that black hole, Poole quickly confirmed, that Jack Grantt had attempted to catch the attention of the sycamore seed. ‘Harry will have made sure the company got the appropriate credit. But as for the sycamore seed—’
‘It just sailed by,’ Nicola said with mock sadness. ‘Grantt did succeed in signalling to his own species, I suppose – after all here he is, on all the news feeds – which will probably do his next funding application no harm. Of course the sycamore seed and its entourage are a sensation, across the inner worlds. Everybody’s watching the various feeds. But there’s controversy – well, you can see that.’
‘You mean that crowd in the background? What is it, a demonstration?’
‘Some commentators are calling it a riot.’
That word, redolent of the global disorders of the Bottleneck age, took Poole aback. ‘A riot? Seriously?’
‘Feelings are running high, Michael. Look, there’s already been damage from this – alien incursion. People have seen the drifting GUTships, the chaos on Io. Not every Martian thinks it’s a good idea to draw the attention of this ambiguous visitor to their world with gravity-wave look-at-me signals. Certainly Grantt has got no kind of public endorsement to do what he’s doing. Who is he to speak for Mars? Let alone mankind.
‘And counter to that there are others who think it’s mankind’s cosmic duty to welcome this visitor.’ She sighed. ‘Half of humanity seems to wants to adopt this visitor, the other half to blow it up. It’s barely arrived, yet already it’s disrupting our society. Makes you think, doesn’t it? And—’ She pressed a finger to her ear. Then, without hesitating, she hurled herself towards the pilot’s couch.
Poole, confused, struggled out of his sleeping bag. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Inachus is breaking up. I mean, the stabilising platform under the base. The evac is nearly done, but three survivors are still to be picked up. My mothe
r – she’s the in situ UN coordinator of the operation – has banned making any more rescue attempts.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘Making a rescue attempt. Wash your face and get up here.’
Even from high above Io, on their closing trajectory, Poole could see the problem. The raft on which Inachus had been built was itself tipping now, as if wrecked by the stormy sea of rock beneath it. The base facilities were slipping from the raft’s surface, like crockery from a tilted tray, and lava from below lapped up and over the lower rim of the platform, which was beginning to dissolve into that ferociously hot pool.
Nicola, piloting the Crab Junior, hovered above the tilting surface.
‘You looking for somewhere safe to land?’
‘No. I’m looking for people. That’s where I’ll land, safe or not – there.’
A human figure had dashed out onto the open deck of the platform, in a brilliant green armoured suit, waving vigorously.
Nicola immediately brought the Junior down, a crash dive.
‘Just her,’ Poole said. ‘She must have seen us.’
‘Her?’
‘That’s Miriam. Miriam Berg. I bought her that suit. Three survivors, your mother said. Where are the others?’
A building collapsed, shuddering apart into panels and struts that hailed down across the tipped deck in low-gravity slow motion. The fleeing figure, already unsteady on her feet, had to scramble out of the way of the debris.
‘Lethe. I’ll be in the airlock.’
The Crab touched down, and was at rest for bare seconds before Poole, having sealed up his own suit, opened the small airlock, hauled Miriam aboard, and helped her brace for take-off.
As the flitter soared up and away from the collapsing base, they helped each other out of their suits. Miriam went to clean herself up. Poole heard her throwing up.
Then they made their way to the flight deck. Poole led Miriam to the co-pilot couch, beside Nicola. The command couches were the most comfortable seating in the ship; Miriam, seeming groggy, didn’t object.
Xeelee: Vengeance Page 3
