Harry nodded. ‘Fair enough. So what now?’
‘Well, you need to clear your diary for a few days. The General Assembly wants to speak to you all about the whole background to the wormhole project, the incidents that led up to the alien emergence, how you responded . . . Looks like they’re ready for you. I’ll take you in.’
As the others moved off, talking quietly, Nicola grabbed Poole’s arm, holding him back. ‘Let’s get out of here. Don’t argue. Just walk.’
His heart beat faster as he followed. ‘What? But—’
‘Look, don’t give me a lecture about responsibility. Do you want to spend days being grilled by a bunch of empty suits who know even less than we do? At least by coming here we’re halfway to where the action is.’
‘Which is where?’
‘Mercury. The Sun. Where in Lethe do you think? Where the alien invaders have gone. You need to be there, Michael.’
‘But we can’t—’
‘You said there were Poole facilities at Mercury. Building some other kind of experimental wormhole.’
‘The Sun Probe, yes.’
‘Fine. So you’ve an excuse to go out there.’
‘I said I’d see my mother. That’s why we came to Earth. I sent her the Wormhole Ghost amulet.’
‘Well, then, give her time to think that over. For sure you didn’t come all this way for this.’
He had to grin. ‘I don’t know whether you’re good for me or bad.’
‘But it’s fun finding out, isn’t it?’ Now she took his hand, and said more seriously, ‘Listen. All this hot air – it’s futile, and missing the point. That Wormhole Ghost spoke your name. This is, somehow, all about you. And you have to face up to that.’
He took a breath and glanced around. Harry and Jack Grantt were a few paces ahead – and if Gea was aware of what they were planning she showed no signs of it.
He squeezed Nicola’s hand. ‘Follow me.’
13
The Poole Industries orbital base at Mercury was called Larunda. Poole and Nicola debarked from the Hermit Crab in the flitter, and crossed space to the habitat.
From this carefully selected location, the lowering Sun was hidden by the shadowed bulk of the planet itself, a perfect and permanent eclipse, with the face of Mercury itself in total shadow. Beyond the planet, the Sun’s outer atmosphere was a gaudy sprawl across the sky. Whatever it was that had come through the Jupiter wormhole had gone down to Mercury, to the surface, and had done something there. Poole longed to go down and see for himself.
In this exotic setting, the Larunda base was an old-fashioned design, a spindly wheel a couple of kilometres across, rotating at a leisurely single revolution per minute for spin gravity. A hub with docking facilities was circled by concentric torus-shaped living areas, giving spin gravity of various strengths depending how far you climbed down from the centre. The wheel itself was surrounded by a cloud of solar sails and mirrors which almost shyly sailed out of Mercury’s shadow and into direct sunlight.
In an arena of such huge energies the station had an oddly delicate look, Poole thought.
Inside, Mitch Gibson was waiting for them.
Gibson was Poole Industries’ operations manager here; bluff, efficient, single-minded, and, at forty, with a bulk that he was failing to shed despite his beginning a long lifetime’s course of AS treatment. ‘Welcome to Larunda!’
Nicola wrinkled her nose. ‘As Poole architecture goes, at least it doesn’t stink so bad as that Mound in England.’
Gibson grinned, good-natured. ‘Hey, it’s just a work shack but we’re proud of it. Look, I know you want to get down to business, but first I need to give you the novices’ tour, so you’ll know where to run in case of emergency. Company rules – well, you’re the boss, Michael. Your rules. So let’s get that done. Let me show you the way. Here we are at the hub. Our solar-storm shelter, among other functions . . .’
So they clambered down ladders through white-walled access tubes, moving away from the hub, and Poole soon felt a faint tug of spin gravity. The shaft walls were decorated with portraits, smiling faces, generations of previous staff members who had been rotated through the station.
‘You understand we’re at a Lagrangian point here,’ Gibson said. ‘L2. Equilibrium, the gravity of Mercury and the Sun balanced, holding us in place – though we have to apply a little thrust to control our position, a delta-V of a few metres per second per year. This is a uniquely hazardous environment, but we have got some breaks – such as the eclipsing of the Sun by Mercury. It’s just a lucky chance that in the Sun–Mercury system L2 happens to lie just here, where the planet’s cone of shadow reaches out, which reduces our need for shielding . . .’
Nicola was staring at him as if he was some exotic animal. ‘Is this guy always like this?’
Poole grinned. ‘Pretty much.’
Gibson himself smiled back. ‘Sorry. But you can understand we don’t get too many visitors here.’
They did pass a few people, laden with data slates or food, clad in company coveralls that had all been customised to some degree. They nodded to Poole as they passed. He knew them all pretty well; the station had a permanent staff of less than twenty. They stared curiously at Nicola, though. Poole knew the feeling; confinement made any novelty fascinating. They got glares back in response.
They reached the exits to the first habitable torus, where the hatches were marked with a smiling-face Man on the Moon, and there was a faint whiff of antiseptic. Poole knew that at this level the spin gravity was up to lunar, one-sixth of Earth, and the torus contained the base’s surgery and rest areas. Low gravity was easy on conditions such as traumas, burns.
‘If you overdo the sun tan, this is where you get the emollient cream,’ Gibson said.
‘Ha,’ said Nicola, deadpan. ‘Who was Larunda?’
Gibson seemed flummoxed. ‘You know, I never got asked that before. Help me out here, Michael.’
‘Consort of Mercury. Roman myth.’
Nicola said, ‘We might be outgrowing religion if those pompous windbags in the World Senate are right about the moral development of mankind. But if not for all that junk from the past, what would we call stuff?’
As if in response to that, the second torus exit bore a strip-cartoon-god Mercury, complete with winged boots. Gibson stopped here. Poole climbed off the ladder gingerly; the gravity was substantial but light.
‘OK,’ Gibson said. ‘Here we’re at one-third G, which is Mercury’s gravity – twice the Moon’s. The outer ring down below, at Earth gravity, is mostly uncrewed. We use it for science observation posts, and for acclimatisation for anybody who needs to go back to Earth. This middle level is where we do most of our living, so we get used to surface conditions. You’ve got the accommodation areas, the games rooms, most of the work areas. The bar. Oh, and the restaurant. How could I forget that?’
‘They have a dedicated chef,’ Poole said to Nicola. ‘Fully trained.’
‘Actually she’s the only full-time specialist,’ Mitch said. ‘The chef. We’re a small staff here; we cross-train, keeps us busy. But we leave the chef alone.’
Poole said, ‘Bases like these, with small staff numbers, long duration tours – Harry calls them the orphans of the Poole empire. We have a duty to keep our people comfortable. Indeed, healthy and sane. Good food is a prerequisite.’
Mitch Gibson faced them. ‘Last page of the lecture. Look, I know you’re itching to get down to the surface. To see – well, to see what you came all this way for. But this is pioneer country. The rule is, twenty-four hours at least at this one-third-G torus, so you adapt, and then and only then—’
‘Fine,’ Nicola said. ‘You want to show me to my room? If it’s got a shower and a food bar you can leave me be, and get back to explaining stuff to each other.’
‘You know me so well,’ Poole said.
‘That’s the trouble,’ she said. ‘I do.’
Mitch Gibson pointed along a corridor whose carpeted floor and unadorned walls curved upwards, distinctly. ‘Fourth door down. But you just might want to see the view first . . .’ He tapped one wall, and a section of panelling slid out of sight, revealing a dark rectangle.
Nicola walked to the window, and Poole, following, looked over her shoulder.
The background was only blackness, no stars; evidently this was a slice of the shadowed face of Mercury. But in the foreground was a sculpture of light, of electric-blue struts.
It was a wormhole portal.
‘That’s the Sun Probe,’ said Poole.
Nicola shrugged. ‘Look what you made.’ She walked away to her room.
Gibson murmured, ‘Why in Lethe did you bring that person?’
‘It’s more that she brought me,’ Poole admitted. ‘Everything’s changed, Mitch. So what about the aliens? In transit we’ve been out of touch for a couple of days.’
Gibson said seriously, ‘Michael, it’s all been happening. I’ve sent some scrambled reports back to the corporate HQ on Earth, but the Crab wasn’t seen as secure—’
‘You did the right thing. Just tell me.’
‘The sycamore seed. I’ll show you what it did here, at Mercury. But then it went into the Sun. No deceleration, no deorbit—’ He mimed a plunge, with a swoop of his hand.
Poole felt bewildered, then shrugged. ‘OK. That’s what I came to see, I guess.’
‘You want to go find your room?’
Poole glanced at a chronometer on the wall. ‘Shall we try the bar? Just so I can get used to the gravity, of course.’
Gibson grinned. ‘You’ll get pestered there. We don’t get a lot of visitors, I told you. Especially not the boss. And a boss who’s going to have a two-kilometre-high statue at—’
‘Skip it.’
‘I have a bottle of single malt in my own room.’
‘Just one?’
‘Just one you’re going to know about.’
‘OK.’ They walked down the carpeted corridor, their footsteps silent. ‘And you can fill me in on the Sun Probe project. Two weeks behind schedule, so I read on the way in. I suppose you’ll use the excuse of an alien invasion to explain that away . . .’
14
The flitter was called Lar III, named like the rest of the station’s shuttles after the Lares, mythical children of Mercury and Larunda. The little ship was piloted to the planet’s surface by Mitch Gibson, somewhat roughly, with squirts of the main drive and bumps and bangs of the attitude control system. Nicola glowered in silent disapproval at his clumsy handling.
But she made no comment about the slowness of the descent, or the caution with which Gibson guided the flitter through invisible gravitational complexities.
Poole had never landed on Mercury before. He peered down curiously at a ground pocked with craters, around many of which distinct black splashes could be seen: a relic of a primordial ocean of liquid rock, he’d learned, magma topped by a thin crust of complex carbon compounds. During its formation Mercury had been extensively battered by planetesimals, fragments of more would-be planets, and the scars were still visible. Indeed, it was believed that one mighty collision with another young world had stripped off much of the rocky mantle of a once-larger Mercury, leaving the iron core exposed, and bequeathing the planet an unusually high density and a relatively strong gravity. But the overall mass concentration had been left uneven by that rough moulding; the irregular gravity field was a hazard for pilots.
They flew across a ragged terminator into night.
An inky darkness, marked here and there by beacons and navigation aids. In a way, the glow of the lights gave a better picture of the sparseness of the human works down there than the blasting daylight. Much of the material which had been used to construct the Sun Probe wormhole had been mined from Mercury. But even so the presence of mankind was a mere scrape. It was twelve centuries since the first tentative landings on Mercury – a hasty scuttle to the shadows of the polar craters, and back home with a handful of samples – but even now there was no permanent human station on the planet’s surface.
Lar III emerged once more into sunlight, a ferocious, sudden dawn. Then the flitter dropped towards a plain, shadowed by crater walls, scarred by sinuous ridges. Poole made out more signs of humanity: a temporary camp dwarfed in the immensity, a golden rectangle that was a landing pad target, a cluster of domes, what looked like earthworks, banks and ditches dug out of the lunar-like ground. Artificial lights broke the shadows, but they were pale gleams compared to the excluded sunlight.
Mitch pointed ahead. ‘And that’s what we’re here to see.’
Poole leaned forward. A dark rectangle had been cut into the ancient surface, sharp-edged, huge, like a giant mineshaft, surrounded by marker lights and vehicle tracks. Evidently artificial, but created by no human hand.
Waiting silently for them.
Mitch Gibson brought the flitter down without any fuss, not far from the edge of the rectangular shaft. ‘Welcome to Caloris Planitia.’
The three of them suited up, and Gibson evacuated the cabin’s air. They climbed down a short ladder to the surface.
Morning on Mercury: the Sun was just below the broken horizon, and only a few rays of its light touched the dusty plain. It was a dawn that would only slowly unfold, Poole knew: Mercury’s tidally locked ‘day’ and ‘year’ combined to give a cycle of sunrises and sunsets that lasted, at any point on the surface, a heroic one hundred and seventy-six Earth days.
Once out of the flitter Nicola moved cautiously; she tried jumping, running, bending. Her suit was silvered, and reflected dazzling highlights whenever the low sunlight caught her. ‘Yes, gravity’s about like Mars. Running is easier than walking . . . Glad I spent that day in the habitat’s one-third G.’
‘Orientation,’ Gibson said. He pointed towards the Sun. ‘That way, it gets hot enough to melt lead. And thataway,’ he jerked his thumb back towards the shadows of night, ‘cold enough to freeze nitrogen. If there were any. You’re wearing twilight suits.’
‘Twilight?’ Poole asked.
‘That’s what we call ’em. Designed for when the Sun is low, like it is now. If we ever have to operate in full daylight we have suits like tanks, with parasols and big radiator fins. If you were to stay out in these suits in full daylight—’
Nicola snapped, ‘Before the sunlight broiled me, you’d bore me to death talking about it. Shall we get on with it? So, Caloris Planitia – I think I heard of that.’
‘You should have,’ Poole said. ‘It was famous even before our sycamore seed came calling.’
‘Follow me.’ Gibson walked off, towards the sunlight, heading for a shadow in the ground, like the lip of a canyon: the edge of that big feature they’d seen during the descent.
Poole followed, more clumsily.
‘In some ways this is typical Mercury terrain,’ Gibson said. ‘Basaltic rock pulverised by ancient impacts and ground to dust by more recent infalls. No air to protect it . . . Like the Moon you have craters everywhere, and old areas of congealed lava. But we have a few attractions you won’t see on the Moon.’
He pointed to a ridge, perhaps a kilometre away. It looked like a huge worm-cast, Poole thought, sinuous, worn, meandering.
‘They call those features rupes. Ridges and folds, kilometres long some of ’em, caused when the planet cooled, and shrank.’ He clenched a gloved fist.
‘Like the skin of a dried-out apple,’ Nicola said.
‘Exactly that. But even for Mercury this place is kind of unusual. Caloris is a big, circular plain. We’re close to the centre here. And there are oddities. Radial cracks in the ground, I mean these are major canyons, lined up like wheel spokes. Old volcanic vents. Rim mountains kilometres high, but so far away they’re over the
horizon . . .
‘You know what Caloris is, right? One vast impact crater. Fifteen hundred kilometres wide. Bear in mind that’s about a third of the planet’s diameter: just one crater. Even beyond the walls there are splashes of debris, rings of heaped-up ejecta, going out hundreds of kilometres. One of the biggest impact craters in the Solar System – and there’s a feature almost as striking at the antipode, where the shock waves from the impact washed around the planet and collided, crumpling everything up. Mercury’s biggest whack aside from the mantle-stripper itself.’
Nicola smiled. ‘You’re proud of this big hole in the ground, aren’t you?’
‘Shouldn’t we be?’
Poole, not for the first time in this encounter with the alien, felt a deep, growing dread. ‘So this is the site of one of the largest natural disasters in the history of the Solar System. Why do I get the feeling that it’s not a coincidence that we’ve been drawn here?’
‘Come take a look,’ Gibson said softly. ‘You know me, Michael. I’m no showman. Lousy at sales conferences, and pitches to the UN Oversight people, and so on. I don’t mean to spring this on you like a conjurer’s reveal. It’s just that you don’t get a sense of it, even from a low-flying flitter. You have to be down here to understand . . .’
He stopped a respectful few metres back from that apparent cliff edge, a sharp break in the ground, like the edge of some canyon. They joined him.
Gibson said, ‘Basic safety stuff.’ He wore a light pack; from this he drew self-fixing pitons and cable, strong carbon-fibre, on spools. The pitons, once triggered, lodged themselves in the ground, burrowing down through the dust, trailing cable, until they hit bedrock. Gibson quickly fixed the cable ends to loops in his own suit, and the others’. ‘So we can’t fall, come what may. Now – go ahead and look.’
Xeelee: Vengeance Page 8
