Erebus

by Ralph Kern

  “And you said ‘on scene’?” I asked, though I thought I knew what was coming.

  “That’s right, I did. You’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “I’m…not entirely sure what value I can add to this investigation,” I said. With fifteen years of being a cop, I was used to new situations—the bizarre, nasty, and just plain strange—being thrust upon me. And with War Crimes? This job had taken me all over the world, often on short notice, but never had I thought it would take me into space. But then, whatever had happened out there was a massive part of why Dev wasn’t going to ever go home to his family again.

  “Layton, I don’t have a cloning facility for team leaders hidden in the basement,” she replied. It was strange for Giselle to be so short. She was normally unflappable. But then, it wasn’t just me that had lost a colleague and friend. “My orders have been cut. War Crimes is to provide an investigator for the task force, and you’re it. You’ll have some transit time to get the handover done.”

  I glanced again at the image of the roiling wreckage of Io, back-dropped by the huge gas giant. I doubt whoever had destroyed the moon knew about Dev, and they wouldn’t have cared if they did. But I cared. If I went, I could bring them to justice for my friend’s death.

  “I’ll get packing, then.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE HAGUE

  My little apartment was small, modern, near the coast, and suited me. It was about as minimalist as it was possible to get—all magnolia, glass, and chrome. Most importantly, it was close to the bars and town center. It was the kind of place that was the bachelor’s lot since my father was a twinkle in his father’s eye. As soon as I entered, I emptied my duffel bag of clothes into the washer and began my homework.

  I was still old-fashioned enough to actually like reading about stuff rather than just downloading information straight to my implants, but I simply didn’t have the time. I would have to direct-download as much useful information as I could.

  The trick these days wasn’t filling up your memory with random, and probably contradicting, texts from the vast beast that was the Hypernet; you had to know where to get the good stuff. Some of what was on the Net was on-the-button accurate. The majority could best be described as the ramblings of buffoons.

  Flopping down on my black leather sofa, I switched my retinal implants to desktop mode. The HUD opened up fully in my vision, creating a virtual office suite. I ran enquiries through the search engines, dragging and dropping Hypernet page icons that seemed useful around the room. Hovering in the air to the left were things that I would definitely download, to the right were maybes, and in the center I was working. Basically, I was looking for an idiot’s guide to Alcubierre drives and ships, getting a bit of political awareness about the Jupiter system and trying to figure out just why anyone would want to target Io.

  The first was pretty easy. The Hypernet contained plenty of popular science books about A-drives, and I downloaded a couple of them. I felt my consciousness gain that knowledge, a wealth of information becoming available to me. I gained some understanding of how and why they operated. Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t be able to build an A-drive from scratch—but then, I didn’t need to. I just needed to know the general principles.

  The political awareness thing was more of a problem. Most of the sources on the Net went through the filter of Earth’s political prejudices. A lot of people planet-side viewed the Linked, the main power out in Jupiter space, as a bit on the creepy side.

  Linking was a technology that nearly everyone used. It followed a natural progression from Morse code through mobile telephones to the modern day. A link was a computer implanted in your brain that gave you access to the Hypernet, allowed you to talk with friends, and provided a wealth of apps. My link was chock-a-block with law enforcement tools, tactical overlays, and things to manage the other implants throughout my body, not to mention a few games, which helped me pass the time.

  The Linked were different, though. They had taken the technology to the next level. They kept their links constantly open to each other. Each member of the community had free access to everyone else. Now that they were several generations down the line, they had more and more evolved a kind of hive mind. Inner-system dwellers had many slang terms for them, ranging from the mildly insulting hivers to the full-on slur, the bugs.

  Until the Io incident, I hadn’t devoted much head space to them. I just considered them a bunch of peaceful space hippies that lived pretty damn far away and didn’t affect me in the slightest.

  Not everyone was as ambivalent or egalitarian as me, though. Numerous organizations were deeply suspicious of them. They suggested they had motives ranging from kidnapping inner-system children to forcibly link to them to plotting a full-scale invasion of Earth. As far as I was aware, the Linked were about as antiviolent as it was possible to get—something which we Enhanced and Naturals sadly were not.

  I continued my surfing and downloading into the small hours, filling my brain with all kinds of information that I might find useful on my assignment.

  Eventually, I closed down my HUD and stretched out. I could hear birdsong through the open windows of my apartment, and I could see the first hints of dawn starting to stain the sky red.

  Giving a yawn, I thought of my bed. There was only one thing preventing me from escaping into blissful sleep…

  I still had to pack.

  CHAPTER 7

  MEDITERRANEAN ANCHORAGE

  I was still bleary-eyed from getting some shut-eye on the flight from Rotterdam. The custom’s security station scanned the passport implant on my right forearm, and the light on the arrivals gateway turned green. I walked through into the bright sunlit mall of the Mediterranean Anchorage. Everything had that fresh and airy feel of a well-maintained airport.

  I wasn’t due to board my elevator car for an hour and had some time to kill. I walked over the marble floor of the mall, past tinkling fountains and beautiful plant beds to the deli. I pinged my payment across, picked up a plate, and moved down the counter. I loaded up on overpriced food. Pastas, sliced meat—all of it looked good. I took a bit of most things, creating a delicious, strange mix for myself. I turned to go find a table, sat down, and began tucking in.

  A shadow fell across my table. I looked up to see an athletically built Asian male standing over me.

  “Hi. Are you Layton?”

  I swallowed my mouthful and said wearily, “Yeah, and you?”

  “May I?” He indicated the chair opposite and, without waiting for a response, lowered himself into it, pulling off his sunglasses as he did. “Cheng Zao, MSS,” he said in a friendly tone, a smile on his face. The MSS, Ministry of State Security, Chinese intelligence. I leaned back in my chair as he continued. “I’m guessing we’ll be travel buddies up to Jupiter space. You catching the 1600 hour?”

  “Do I need to bother to answer that?” I asked with a wry smile.

  “Nah, just being polite. Got to keep up appearances that I happened across you is all.” His English was perfect, probably better than mine to be fair. “Personally, I think there’s a time and place to spin the bullshit, but I don’t think that’s now, especially with all that’s going on up there.”

  I’m not an overly paranoid man, but I suspect the companionable approach was just that—an approach and a way to ingratiate himself with me. I’d dealt with a few intelligence types before and had long since ceased viewing their shadowy trade as having any kind of mystique. They were just guys, albeit usually with motives for speaking to you that they kept close to their chests. It was pretty obvious what was going on with Cheng, though. He’d been sent by Beijing for the same reason I’d been sent by The Hague to find out what the hell was going on in Jupiter space.

  “Yeah, tell me about it. Well, pleased to meet you, Zao.” I reached out my hand, and he shook it, his grip cool and a little too firm. Heavily enhanced? Possibly, or just one of those people that liked to try and exert their authority by trying to crush your hand w
hen shaking it.

  “Sorry, excuse me,” he said. My implants registered a strange signal coming from him. “Just putting up a privacy field so we can talk a bit more freely. Old habits and all that.” Whatever field he had established was pretty sophisticated. The noise of the busy mall was subtly distorted. Everyone’s chatter away from the table was reduced to a garble. I could tell they were speaking but not what they were saying. I presumed that was all anyone would hear of our conversation, too, if they attempted to listen in. I tried to establish a link, more out of curiosity than anything else, and was rewarded by a network down error message.

  “No problem,” I said, closing down the Link. “I take it you’re on this task force that’s being set up?”

  “Yeah. I’m guessing half the folks heading space-side at the moment are governments or corporations doing the same thing,” Cheng replied.

  “So, I presume you want a game of I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours?” I asked.

  “Definitely. It’s why I came to say hello, after all. I’ll start if you want?” I nodded; very magnanimous of him. “We have nothing, nada, zip. At best we have a few working theories, and that’s it.”

  Well, that was short. “Pretty much the same,” I said. “All we know is someone decided to slam the Magellan into Io but at least had the common courtesy to give a bit of warning to allow most people to get off the rock first. You got any lead contenders?”

  “With the means to take over an A-liner and motive to do what they did? No, we’re struggling. We’ve got eyes on a few domestic and international pressure and terrorist groups: Terra Prime, the Unlinked, folks like that. We’re watching them like hawks, and we’ve called in every bit of HUMINT we have embedded with them. Our operatives and handlers report that while these groups seem pretty happy about what’s gone on, they’re just as confused as we are.”

  That pretty much tallied with the last update package I’d been sent. These groups, by and large, were formed of Hypernet warriors. They were more than happy to smack talk and issue all kinds of threats on the Net, but direct action, beyond the occasional lone-wolf bomb from their more militant members, was virtually unknown. In terms of capability, it was like them going from slingshots to nuclear weapons in one fell swoop. The intelligence agents all over the world had been having a lot of shady meetings on park benches with assets they had inside these organizations. As far as I was aware, they had come up with a big fat zero. Most of the major powers were signed up to War Crimes anyway, China included. What he was saying was nothing new to me. The problem was, while every nation had a legal obligation to share intelligence with us, I wasn’t naive enough to believe that they actually did. Cheng here was a case in point; for all of his friendly, approachable banter, so far he’d told me nothing. He was just not-so-subtly pumping me for information that other nations might have told us.

  “So I’m taking it you still think the target was the Linked?” I asked.

  He shrugged in response and grinned. “You capitalist pig dogs hate all good socialists, and you don’t get much more socialist than the Linked.”

  “Zao, don’t you be getting all precious on me. One square mile of London has more socialists in it than all of China combined. I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

  “Fair point.” Cheng gave a knowing smile. “But they are still the most…contentious faction up there.”

  I heard the distorted sound of an announcement being made, and Cheng cocked his head. “They’re calling us to the gate to board. We had better get going.”

  I was glad he had told me since I couldn’t make out a word through the distorted sound of his privacy field. I looked down at my overpriced meal, barely touched. You could be damn sure I was still going to file an expenses claim for it.

  ***

  Together we walked through the mall exit toward the gate of our elevator car, chatting about nothing in particular. He was going on about having a kid that had just started school, good restaurants in Beijing, how I simply must visit. I listened, bemused. The guy was probably on commission to recruit a mole. First chance I got, I’d have to submit a report saying he’d made the approach, or it’d bite me on the arse. I made a half-hearted attempt to do the same thing to him. While War Crimes had no mandate for spying, on the miniscule chance he actually took me up on the offer, MI5, CIS, Federation Intel, or whoever the report ended up with would probably want a crack at recruiting him.

  We passed through the gate and stepped onto the tram that would take us to the center of the anchorage island. As the tram swept soundlessly into the sea air, I could see the elevator cables through the clear roof canopy, stretching upward to infinity in the sky above us.

  The space elevators were considered the new wonders of the world. They ferried people and cargo far into orbit, opening up space travel for everyone who wanted it. It was actually cheaper to get into space than it was to hop on a flight to America these days.

  It would be the second time I’d gone up in one. Me and an ex had gone on a holiday to Haven, the counterweight station for the Mediterranean elevator, a few years back. It didn’t end up being quite as romantic as we’d hoped. Three days stuck in an elevator car going up, five days on Haven, and three days back down again was enough to test any relationship to the breaking point. And break it did. This time, however, we wouldn’t be taking three days to get up into space. I’d already been forewarned about that.

  As I looked at the elevator cables getting closer, that long-ago breakup receded from my mind. It looked amazing: the black cables stretching into the blue sky out of view, clean white capsules darting up and down them, shipping vast amounts of people into orbit. Around the towering structure, sea gulls squawked and circled. It was a far more civilized way to get into space than the big, loud rockets that used to do all the heavy lifting.

  The tram finally slid to a halt inside the entry gate, and again we presented our arm implants, now uploaded with our boarding cards. We had to go through another security checkpoint. One of the guards gestured over to us, and we went into a side room where we filled out some paperwork. I had a lockbox in my luggage, which I’d checked on arrival, containing a sidearm and some ammunition, as did Cheng. I sorely doubted I would be using my weapon, but better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Once we’d got past that bureaucracy, we walked through the entry corridor and into the elevator car proper.

  To call it an elevator car was misleading; it had more the feel of an ocean liner but built vertically.

  An avatar appeared in the form of a black-and-white-suited butler who even sported a waxed moustache.

  “Welcome to the Mediterranean Space Elevator. We have received special dispensation for a high-speed ascent to Haven for which you are required to be seated at certain times. If you would kindly follow me.”

  Cheng and I looked at each other before following the hologram of the host down the spiral staircase to a lower lounge.

  The room was shaped like a doughnut, as all five decks were, with the elevator cable running through the center of the whole capsule. On this floor, all the windows were slanted downward. It was filled with people sitting in chairs, all strapped in. I was beginning to have the feeling this was going to be quite a ride.

  I seated myself in the chair, and a harness wormed its way disconcertingly around me, pulling me back into the seat.

  Over the next few minutes, the final stragglers took their seats and settled in. I idly flicked through the safety briefing and videos on my HUD display. I could feel that same feeling of anticipation as when I was waiting for a passenger aircraft to begin accelerating to take off.

  “Please stand by for high-speed ascent. Five, four, three, two…” a voice rang out over the PA system, “…one.”

  I was thrust down into my seat as the elevator car surged upward. It slid out of the anchorage, and sunlight washed through the windows. This was nothing like the sedate journey of my first trip on the elevators. They wanted to get us up int
o space quickly. I felt like I was on an amusement park drop tower in reverse.

  As we accelerated, the anchorage’s true shape took form below us. An artificial island shaped like a starfish was lined with runways on its arms, loading decks for cargo ships lying between them. As I watched, it struck me as strangely sedate, yet bustling—contradictory, I know.

  We climbed higher and higher, the anchorage shrinking below us into the clear blue Mediterranean Sea. Distant land masses came into view, all looking pure and clean, far removed from some of the places I’d ended up in. All in all, I could have picked a hell of a lot of a worse way to travel.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SPACE ELEVATOR

  The elevator cable was thirty-six thousand kilometers long. Cars normally climbed it at an average of five hundred kilometers per hour into geostationary orbit, meaning it took around three days to get up to Haven. The cars going up and coming down would speed up and slow down, which helped control the oscillation of the cable, basically letting it swing back and forth to avoid hitting all the stuff that was flying around in orbit.

  One little mistake in the AI controlling the swinging of the elevator cable and it would smash into one of the big space cities that orbited near it. It was a scary thought for a police officer who had cut his teeth on the Bohemian streets of London, Islington. It had never happened in the fifteen years the elevator had been running, but still, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the equator if the cable was cut—or, for that matter, in a car ascending or coming down.

  I was no rocket scientist, but even I knew that the elevator hadn’t yet made it out far enough from Earth to reach what was effectively zero gravity. There was a hell of a difference between zero-g and being in free fall. The stuff maintaining orbit below us was subject to free fall because of Earth’s gravity but maintained enough velocity to not crash into it. Basically, anything in orbit was falling around the curve of the Earth. If we were to somehow fall out of the car, we wouldn’t have any horizontal velocity and gravity would carry us straight down—a long drop to a very messy end. The only consolation was that the vacuum outside would kill us in seconds. All in all, a pretty morbid thought.