Galactic North

by Alastair Reynolds

  But the Wall was dead.

  It had stopped growing during the war, hit by some sort of viral weapon that crippled its replicating subsystems, and now even the ecosystem within it was failing; the atmosphere cooling, oxygen bleeding into space, pressure declining inevitably towards the Martian norm of one seven-thousandth of an atmosphere.

  He wondered how it must look to Voi; whether in any sense she saw it as her murdered child.

  “I’m sorry we had to kill it,” Clavain said. He was about to add that it had been the kind of act that war normalised, but decided the statement would have sounded hopelessly defensive.

  “You needn’t apologise,” Voi said. “It was only machinery. I’m surprised it’s lasted as long as it has, frankly. There must still be some residual damage-repair capability. We Demarchists build for posterity, you know.”

  Yes, and it worried Clavain’s own side. There was talk of challenging the Demarchist supremacy in the outer solar system; perhaps even an attempt to gain a Coalition foothold around Jupiter.

  They skimmed the top of the Wall and punched through the thickening layers of atmosphere within it, the shuttle’s hull morphing to an arrowhead shape. The ground had an arid, bleached look to it, dotted here and there with ruined shacks, broken domes, gutted vehicles and shot-down shuttles. There were patches of shallow-rooted, mainly dark-red tundra vegetation: cotton grass, saxifrage, arctic poppies and lichen. Clavain knew each species by its distinct infrared signature, but many of the plants were in recession now that the imported bird species had died. Ice lay in great silver swathes, and what few expanses of open water remained were warmed by buried thermopiles. Elsewhere whole zones had reverted to almost sterile permafrost. It could have been a kind of paradise, Clavain thought, had the war not ruined everything. Yet what had happened here could only be a foretaste of the devastation that would follow across the system, on Earth as well as Mars, if another war was allowed to happen.

  “Do you see the nest yet?” Voi said.

  “Wait a second,” Clavain said, requesting a head-up display that boxed the nest. “That’s it. A nice fat thermal signature, too. Nothing else for kilometres around—nothing inhabited, anyway.”

  “Yes. I see it now.”

  The Conjoiner nest lay a third of the way from the Wall’s edge, not far from the footslopes of Arsia Mons. The entire encampment was only a kilometre across, circled by a dyke piled high with regolith dust on one side. The area within the Great Wall was large enough to have an appreciable weather system: spanning enough Martian latitude for significant Coriolis effects; enough longitude for diurnal warming and cooling to cause thermal currents.

  He could see the nest much more clearly now, details leaping out of the haze.

  Its external layout was crushingly familiar. Clavain’s side had been studying the nest from the vantage point of Deimos ever since the ceasefire. Phobos with its lower orbit would have been even better, of course—but there was no helping that, and perhaps the Phobos problem might actually prove useful in his negotiations with Galiana. She was somewhere in the nest, he knew: somewhere beneath the twenty varyingly sized domes emplaced within the rim, linked together by pressurised tunnels or merged at their boundaries like soap bubbles. The nest extended several tens of levels beneath the Martian surface; maybe deeper.

  “How many people do you think are inside?” Voi said.

  “Nine hundred or so,” said Clavain. “That’s an estimate based on my experiences as a prisoner, and the hundred or so who’ve died trying to escape since. The rest, I have to say, is pretty much guesswork.”

  “Our estimates aren’t dissimilar. A thousand or less here, and perhaps another three or four spread across the system in smaller nests. I know your side thinks we have better intelligence than that, but it happens not to be the case.”

  “Actually, I believe you.” The shuttle’s airframe was flexing around them, morphing to a low-altitude profile with wide, bat-like wings. “I was just hoping you might have some clue as to why Galiana keeps wasting valuable lives on pointless escape attempts.”

  Voi shrugged. “Maybe to her the lives aren’t anywhere near as valuable as you’d like to think.”

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  “I’m not sure we can even begin to guess the thinking of a true hive-mind society, Clavain. Even from a Demarchist standpoint.”

  There was a chirp from the console: Galiana signalling them. Clavain opened the channel allocated for Coalition-Conjoiner diplomacy.

  “Nevil Clavain?” he heard.

  “Yes.” He tried to sound as calm as possible. “I’m with Sandra Voi. We’re ready to land as soon as you show us where.”

  “Okay,” Galiana said. “Vector your ship towards the westerly rim wall. And please, be careful.”

  “Thank you. Any particular reason for the caution?”

  “Just be quick about it, Nevil.”

  They banked over the nest, shedding height until they were skimming only a few tens of metres above the weatherworn Martian surface. A wide rectangular door had opened in the concrete dyke revealing a hangar bay aglow with yellow lights.

  “That must be where Galiana launches her shuttles from,” Clavain whispered. “We always thought there had to be some kind of opening on the western side of the rim, but we never had a good view of it before.”

  “Which still doesn’t tell us why she does it,” Voi said.

  The console chirped again—the link poor even though they were so close. “Nose up,” Galiana said. “You’re too low and slow. Get some altitude or the worms will lock on to you.”

  “You’re telling me there are worms here?” Clavain said.

  “I thought you were the worm expert, Nevil.”

  He nosed the shuttle up, but fractionally too late. Ahead of them something coiled out of the ground with lightning speed, metallic jaws opening in its blunt, armoured head. He recognised the type immediately: Ouroborus class. Worms of this form still infested a hundred niches across the system. Not quite as smart as the type infesting Phobos, but still adequately dangerous.

  “Shit,” Voi said, her veneer of Demarchist cool cracking for an instant.

  “You said it,” Clavain answered.

  The Ouroborus passed underneath them and then there was a spine-jarring series of bumps as the jaws tore into the shuttle’s belly. Clavain felt the shuttle lurch down sickeningly; no longer a flying thing but an exercise in ballistics. The cool, minimalist turquoise interior shifted liquidly into an emergency configuration, damage read-outs competing for attention with weapons-status options. Their seats ballooned around them.

  “Hold on,” he said. “We’re going down.”

  Voi’s calm returned. “Do you think we can reach the rim in time?”

  “Not a cat in hell’s chance.” He wrestled with the controls all the same, but it was no good. The ground was coming up fast and hard. “I wish Galiana had warned us a bit sooner—”

  “I think she thought we already knew.”

  They hit. The impact was harder than Clavain had been expecting, but the shuttle stayed in one piece and the seat cushioned him from the worst of it. They skidded for a few metres and then nosed up against a sandbank. Through the window Clavain saw the white worm racing towards them with undulating waves of its segmented robot body.

  “I think we’re finished,” Voi said.

  “Not quite,” Clavain said. “You’re not going to like this, but . . .” Biting his tongue, he brought the shuttle’s hidden weapons online. An aiming scope plunged down from the ceiling; he brought his eyes to it and locked crosshairs onto the Ouroborus. Just like old times . . .

  “Damn you,” Voi said. “This was meant to be an unarmed mission!”

  “You’re welcome to lodge a formal complaint.”

  Clavain fired, the hull shaking from the recoil. Through the side window they watched the white worm blow apart into stubby segments. The parts wriggled beneath the dust.

  “Good shoot
ing,” Voi said, almost grudgingly. “Is it dead?”

  “For now,” Clavain said. “It’ll take several hours for the segments to fuse back into a functional worm.”

  “Good,” Voi said, pushing herself out of her seat. “But there will be a formal complaint, take my word.”

  “Maybe you’d rather the worm had eaten us?”

  “I just hate duplicity, Clavain.”

  He tried the radio again. “Galiana? We’re down—the ship’s history, but we’re both unharmed.”

  “Thank God.” Old verbal mannerisms died hard, even amongst the Conjoined. “But you can’t stay where you are. There are more worms in the area. Do you think you can make it overland to the nest?”

  “It’s only two hundred metres,” Voi said. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Two hundred metres, yes, Clavain thought—but two hundred metres across treacherous, potholed ground riddled with enough soft depressions to hide a dozen worms. And then they would have to climb up the rim’s side to reach the entrance to the hangar bay—ten or fifteen metres above the soil, at least.

  “Let’s hope it isn’t,” Clavain said.

  He unbuckled, feeling light-headed as he stood for the first time in Martian gravity. He had adapted entirely too well to the one gee of the Deimos ring, constructed for the comfort of Earthside tacticians. He went to the emergency locker and found a mask, which slithered eagerly across his face; another for Voi. They plugged in air-tanks and went to the shuttle’s door. This time when it sphinctered open there was a glistening membrane stretched across the doorway, a recently licensed item of Demarchist technology. Clavain pushed through the membrane and the stuff enveloped him with a wet, sucking sound. By the time he hit the dirt, the membrane had hardened itself around his soles and had begun to contour itself around his body, forming ribs and accordioned joints while remaining transparent.

  Voi exited behind him, gaining her own m-suit.

  They loped away from the crashed shuttle, towards the dyke. The worms would be locking on to their seismic patterns already, if there were any nearby. They might be more interested in the shuttle for now, but they couldn’t count on it. Clavain knew the behaviour of worms intimately, knew the major routines that drove them; but that expertise did not guarantee his survival. It had almost failed him in Phobos.

  The mask felt clammy against his face. The air at the base of the Great Wall was technically breathable even now, but there was no point in taking chances when speed was of the essence. His feet scuffed through the topsoil, and while he felt as if he was crossing ground, the dyke obstinately refused to come any closer. It was larger than it had looked from the crash site; the distance further.

  “Another worm,” Voi said.

  White coils erupted through sand to the west. The Ouroborus was making undulating progress towards them, zigzagging with predatory calm, knowing that it could afford to take its time. In the tunnels of Phobos, they had never had the luxury of knowing when a worm was close. They struck from ambush, quick as pythons.

  “Run,” Clavain said.

  Dark figures appeared in the opening high in the rim wall. A rope ladder unfurled down the side of the structure. Clavain, making for the base of it, made no effort to quieten his footfalls. He knew that the worm almost certainly had a lock on him by now.

  He looked back.

  The worm paused by the downed shuttle, then smashed its diamond-jawed head into the ship, impaling the hull on its body. The worm reared up, wearing the ship like a garland. Then it shivered and the ship flew apart like a rotten carcass. The worm returned its attention to Clavain and Voi. Like a sidewinder, it pulled its thirty-metre-long body from the sand and rolled towards them on wheeling coils.

  Clavain reached the base of the ladder.

  Once, he could have ascended the ladder with his arms alone, in one gee, but now the ladder felt alive beneath his feet. He began to climb, then realised that the ground was dropping away much faster than he was passing rungs. The Conjoiners were hauling him aloft.

  He looked back in time to see Voi stumble.

  “Sandra! No!”

  She made to stand up, but it was too late by then. As the worm descended on her, Clavain could do nothing but turn his gaze away and pray for her death to be quick. If it had to be meaningless, he thought, at least let it be swift.

  Then he started thinking about his own survival. “Faster!” he shouted, but the mask reduced his voice to a panicked muffle. He had forgotten to assign the ship’s radio frequency to the suit.

  The worm thrashed against the base of the wall, then began to rear up, its maw opening beneath him: a diamond-ringed orifice like the drill of a tunnelling machine. Then something eye-hurtingly bright cut into the worm’s hide. Craning his neck, Clavain saw a group of Conjoiners leaning over the lip of the opening, aiming guns downward. The worm writhed in intense robotic irritation. Across the sand, he could see the coils of other worms coming closer. There must have been dozens ringing the nest. No wonder Galiana’s people had made so few attempts to leave by land.

  They had hauled him within ten metres of safety. The injured worm showed cybernetic workings where its hide had been flensed away by weapons impacts. Enraged, it flung itself against the rim wall, chipping off scabs of concrete the size of boulders. Clavain felt the vibration of each impact through the wall as he was dragged upwards.

  The worm hit again and the wall shook more violently than before. To his horror, Clavain watched one of the Conjoiners lose his footing and tumble over the edge of the rim towards him. Time oozed to a crawl. The falling man was almost upon him. Without thinking, Clavain hugged closer to the wall, locking his limbs around the ladder. Suddenly, he had seized the man by the arm. Even in Martian gravity, even allowing for the Conjoiner’s willowy build, the impact almost sent both of them careering towards the Ouroborus. Clavain felt his bones pop out of location, tearing at gristle, but he managed to keep his grip on both the Conjoiner and the ladder.

  Conjoiners breathed the air at the base of the Wall without difficulty. The man wore only lightweight clothes, grey silk pyjamas belted at the waist. With his sunken cheeks and bald skull, the man’s Martian physique lent him a cadaverous look. Yet somehow he had managed not to drop his gun, still holding it in his other hand.

  “Let me go,” the man said.

  Below, the worm inched higher despite the harm the Conjoiners had inflicted on it. “No,” Clavain said, through clenched teeth and the distorting membrane of his mask. “I’m not letting you go.”

  “You’ve no option.” The man’s voice was placid. “They can’t haul both of us up fast enough, Clavain.”

  Clavain looked into the Conjoiner’s face, trying to judge the man’s age. Thirty, perhaps—maybe not even that, since his cadaverous visage probably made him appear older than he really was. Clavain was easily twice his age; had surely lived a richer life; had comfortably cheated death on three or four previous occasions.

  “I’m the one who should die, not you.”

  “No,” the Conjoiner said. “They’d find a way to blame your death on us. They’d make it a pretext for war.” Without any fuss, the man pointed the gun at his own head and blew his brains out.

  As much in shock as recognition that the man’s life was no longer his to save, Clavain released his grip. The dead man tumbled down the rim wall, into the mouth of the worm that had just killed Sandra Voi.

  Numb, Clavain allowed himself to be pulled to safety.

  When the armoured door to the hangar was shut, the Conjoiners attacked his m-suit with enzymic sprays. The sprays digested the fabric of the m-suit in seconds, leaving Clavain wheezing in a pool of slime. Then a pair of Conjoiners helped him unsteadily to his feet and waited patiently while he caught his breath through the mask. Through tears of exhaustion he saw that the hangar was racked full of half-assembled spacecraft: skeletal geodesic shark-shapes designed to punch out of an atmosphere, fast.

  “Sandra Voi is dead,” he said, removing
the mask to speak.

  There was no way the Conjoiners could not have seen that for themselves, but it felt inhuman not to acknowledge what had happened.

  “I know,” Galiana said. “But at least you survived.”

  He thought of the man falling into the Ouroborus. “I’m sorry about your . . .” But then he trailed off, because for all his depth of knowledge concerning the Conjoiners, he had no idea what the appropriate term was.

  “You placed your life in danger trying to save him.”

  “He didn’t have to die.”

  Galiana nodded sagely. “No; in all likelihood he didn’t. But the risk to you was too great. You heard what he said— your death would be made to appear our fault; justification for a pre-emptive strike against our nest. Even the Demarchists would turn against us if we were seen to murder a diplomat.”

  Taking another suck from the mask, he looked into her face. He had spoken to her over low-bandwidth video-links, but only in person was it obvious that Galiana had hardly aged in fifteen years. A decade and a half of habitual expression should have engraved existing lines deeper into her face—but Conjoiners were not known for their facial expression. Galiana had seen little sunlight in the intervening time, cooped up there in the nest, and Martian gravity was much kinder to bone structure than the one gee of Deimos. She still had the cruel beauty he remembered from his time as a prisoner. The only real evidence of ageing lay in the filaments of grey threading her hair; raven-black when she had been his captor.