by Alex Lamb
‘If you were looking for a way to help, throwing your time at a bunch of simulations was a funny way of showing it,’ said Will. ‘Models don’t save lives.’
‘I beg to differ,’ Ann snapped. ‘After you’ve spent years trying to break a model like that and keep seeing the same answer, you eventually get the message. We both know what’s coming, and it’s very simple. The colonies can’t afford to give up control of the New Frontier, and Earth can’t stand by and let them take it. And if war comes, the first consequence will be a massacre of Flags everywhere. It’ll be worse than the anti-Muslim horrors in the twenty-first century. This time, though, it won’t be one world shamed by violence, it’ll be all of them. Then will come the retaliation—’
‘I get it,’ said Will.
‘Do you?’ said Ann. ‘I presented my findings to the Fleet but they didn’t like what I had to say. Nobody paid any attention except the League. I was tearing my hair out before Senator Voss approached me. What would you have done?’
‘For starters I wouldn’t have fucked about with alien technology I didn’t understand,’ said Will. ‘You people should have come to me the moment you found this place.’
Will felt guilty for throwing accusations at her even as he did so but couldn’t stop himself. Pari had made it very clear why the League existed. He still felt the wound of Ann’s betrayal. She deserved to hear it.
‘And said what?’ said Ann. ‘Weren’t you already trying to avert a war? How were you going to help, exactly? Earth’s sects hate you. They always have. That’s despite you handing them limitless energy, new technologies and the rights to unfettered planetary habitation on the worlds of their choice. They kept hating you because if they’d won the war, they’d have gained those things anyway without having to say thank you or share them. Short of simply killing their entire leadership, what exactly were you going to do? In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a lot easier to end a war with a big stick than it is to stop one starting in the first place. You proved that with the Ariel Two. We didn’t come to you because you had nothing we could use except a talent for political optimism that had already screwed things up.’
Will glared through the camera and hated that she was right.
‘I could have warned you what you were getting into,’ he said at last. ‘I could have helped you do a better fucking job.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ said Ann. ‘You’ve changed, Will. Everything I said to you at Triton was true. I did watch you on that mission to the Transcended. You did shape my career. I remember you back then, trying to make contact over and over again. You never noticed me, but I felt your despair. You were a different man then, Will Monet. Somewhere between then and now, you gave up being flexible. Maybe that’s what being superhuman does to a person. It makes you expect to get your way by force. That’s why the League didn’t want to touch you. Because you were wedded to your agenda and they knew they’d never change your mind. They’d have lost all control the moment they opened their mouths.’
Will put his face in his hands. He shouldn’t have started baiting her. She’d only reaffirmed what Pari had already spelled out. Apparently his political irrelevance had been obvious to everyone but himself.
‘Just because I was pushing didn’t mean I wouldn’t listen,’ he said. ‘I watched Gustav die. I held my friend while the blood ran out of him. I thought the whole government was going to come apart. Someone had to hold it together. And the people I was dealing with didn’t respect you unless you pushed, so I’ve been pushing ever since. I had to.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Ann. ‘There’s always a choice. You believed that once. Maybe you should try it again.’
Her words stung him. ‘If there’s always a choice, why did you screw me over when I trusted you?’
Ann looked away from the camera. ‘Touché,’ she said quietly.
They lapsed back into silence. Will sullenly busied himself prepping the shuttle’s failing systems for the inevitable crash-landing.
When they finally hit atmosphere, Will used what thruster control they had left to level out their spin. They still plummeted through the sky like a rock. Over the course of a few short minutes, the silence of space gave way to the roaring judder of re-entry. Will automatically compensated for the hammering the shuttle was taking as the atmosphere bludgeoned them. He watched Ann struggle. Their descent would have inflicted a concussion on any normal person but Ann’s Fleet augs gave her the strength to hold on. She lay white-faced in her couch as pieces rattled off the shuttle into the screaming air. To Will’s mind, she would have been better off unconscious.
They raced over continents of tangled bio-tubing to a dark, flat ocean splattered with scarlet algal mats. Will used the shuttle’s remaining thrust to flatten out their dive and give them a shallow enough approach to survive. For a few brief minutes, the shuttle hit eight gees. Ann groaned.
Then, with a smack like a prizefighter’s fist, they hit water and bounced. Then again. And another five times in a row.
The shuttle finally skidded across the ocean in gouts of steam, its emergency floats kicking in like crash-bags in a transit pod. Will and Ann lay back in their couches and sucked air while the ocean undulated wildly around them. The shuttle creaked and groaned like a collapsing building.
‘Nice landing,’ Ann croaked.
Will wasn’t sure whether she was being ironic or not.
He checked the exterior cameras. Ocean surrounded them to the horizon in every direction. A deep blue sky hung overhead carrying weird, angry-looking bands of icy cloud – a testament to the atmospheric havoc the Nems had wreaked in some other part of the globe.
That was another thing they had going for them, Will thought. They might be trapped inside a dead shuttle in the middle of an ocean on a toxic world, but at least they hadn’t landed in a radioactive hurricane.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry I went for the Ariel Two. And sorry I shouted at you back there. Discovering that your entire life is a lie is … upsetting.’
Ann wiped her brow with a trembling hand. ‘Me too. If we’d told you sooner, we wouldn’t be in this mess. For what it’s worth, I hated every minute of it. It’s the worst thing I ever had to do. The League baited you, you know. They deliberately kept you angry to make you easier to control. That was unforgivable. I’m ashamed I was a part of it. We should have put all that effort into talking to you instead.’ She looked up into his camera with a weak smile.
Will was glad she couldn’t see his face properly. He was still processing some of his emotions.
‘Emergency crash beacon activated,’ said the shuttle calmly.
Will jerked out of his reverie. ‘Deactivate beacon.’
‘Cannot comply. Emergency beacon activation is irreversible.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Will shouted. ‘Cut the power.’
At the same time, he reached for the beacon circuit’s blueprint. As he scanned it, his hopes sank. The device ran on a sealed circuit, feeding off its own isotope store.
‘Shit!’
‘Can’t you stop it manually?’ said Ann.
‘It’s between the nuclear engine mountings. I’m strong, but not that strong. I’d have to rip through half the shuttle without blowing us up.’
‘That’s bad,’ said Ann. ‘If the League doesn’t spot that thing, the Nems will. Any chance you could subvert the Ariel Two and send us some help?’
‘From down here and with their power cut, not a chance.’
‘In that case we need to get out of here. As fast as we can.’
Will regarded her incredulously. ‘What, we swim to safety?’
‘We can’t,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to try swimming in this ocean. Believe me. But we need to get out of this shuttle. Do we have any thrusters left?’
‘A few. Nowhere near enough power for a take-off, though.’
‘We don’t need to do that,’ said Ann. ‘We can use the juice to cross the water to land. We’ll have to chance it that far.’
She tapped the screen in front of her, bringing up a map of the ocean, and pointed to a marked point about a hundred and fifty klicks away.
‘That’s the nearest science station. They’ll have craft there we can borrow. We make for the coast here,’ she said, moving her finger. ‘There’s an access port we can use. That’s less than a hundred klicks north-east. Then we head inland on foot and put as much distance between us and the beacon as we can. If we can get off this crate, we have a chance.’
‘You’re suggesting we go overland?’ said Will. ‘Is that safe?’
‘It’s safer than sitting in here, if that’s what you mean,’ said Ann. ‘I’ve hiked the surface as well as the tunnel system and we’re nowhere near a defensive node. The biome around here is designed to support life, not attack it.’
‘Okay, land it is,’ he said. ‘Does that continent have a name?’
‘Three,’ said Ann.
‘Love that League imagination.’
He fired up the shuttle’s thrusters.
The craft dipped forward abruptly, swung upward, and finally started off in the right direction. Will slowly piled on what power he had until they were sliding through the waves at an acceptable clip.
For the next hour, the sea had nothing much to offer them except sluggish waves, rafts of algal scum and pockets of weirdly effervescent water where streams of bubbles surfaced. No bombs dropped. No lances of energy appeared from the sky to vaporise them. And for those little things, Will felt grateful.
Eventually, a black sliver of land appeared on the horizon. During the minutes that followed it grew into a coastline made entirely of overlapping tubes. It looked like a cross between a chemical works and a mangrove swamp, all the colour of soot. The tubes were as wide around as the twenty-lane mass-transit pipes on Mars – larger than Will had expected from a distance. Where they sloped down to meet the water they reminded him of rippled lava fields. Their arched backs were lined with stiff ash-coloured grass. The gaps between them had been filled with pockets of brightly coloured fungi like something out of a fever-dream, interspersed with charcoal-grey ferns.
As they nosed up to the shore, Ann scrambled out of her couch and clambered down the tube to the airlock. Will followed, noting as he went that the airlock interface was a mess of red warning lights.
‘Be careful,’ he warned her. ‘The exterior hatch is breached.’
She shot him an anxious look. ‘You’re kidding,’ she said.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Will. ‘I thought you said the biome is safe.’
‘It is,’ said Ann. ‘For me.’
Will opened the inner hatch. Ann climbed through and paused to take in the smashed, waterlogged remains of the emergency suit locker. She groaned.
‘There goes our best defence against an immune-response bomb,’ she said.
‘An immune what?’ said Will.
‘Like the bioblocker release up on the station, only a thousand times less pleasant,’ said Ann. ‘The Will-Monet-themed nuclear option. You don’t want to meet one.’
She hit the manual release on the scarred remains of the outer hatch and stepped out onto the slightly submerged wing, surrounded by slowly deflating airbags.
Will followed nervously. The air on the other side felt thin but surprisingly fresh, with a gentle bite of mould. He carefully sampled the air for microorganisms, prepping his lungs for another assault. None came. The life carried on the breeze was even more complex than the kind he’d seen aboard Pari’s station but appeared to hold no antagonistic intent.
Ann peered up at the sky and scowled. ‘I’ll never get used to the open sky,’ she said. ‘It’s not natural.’ She turned to scrutinise him. ‘You feeling okay? The air all right?’
Will nodded. ‘This place is weird,’ he said, glancing around. ‘Not like anywhere I’ve been before.’
‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’ said Ann.
She sloshed out to the tip of the wing and leapt gingerly onto the back of the nearest tube, grabbing the grass as she landed. Will leapt, flea-like, arriving beside her with dry feet. The rumpled surface felt surprisingly warm under Will’s boots given the chill of the air. Up close, the grass looked coarse and artificial with an iridescent sheen.
‘I wouldn’t leap about like that,’ she said, frowning. ‘Save your strength.’
Will gave her a long stare. Ann knew something she wasn’t saying.
She led the way carefully up the pipe to a ceramic Fleet-issue boarding-lock sunk into the ground and glued in place with some kind of resin. She stood beside it, a grim look in her eye.
‘Okay, here’s the bad news,’ she said. ‘Without suits, there are two ways we can do this and you’re not going to like either of them. Option one, we cover the terrain on the surface. We’ll move faster that way but the League will probably be able to get a visual fix on us. If they do that, we’re dead. I assure you that they’ll fire at us the moment they think it’s safe to do so.’
He eyed her uncertainly. ‘I find it hard to believe Pari would do that,’ he said. ‘Even now.’
‘Pari might not, but Jaco Brinsen definitely will, even if he has to go around her to achieve it. And he has command of the Chiyome, remember. If necessary, he’ll resort to a boser.’
Will wrinkled his nose. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘The League have two kinds of model for you, Will. Those where you get on board with their plan and those where you don’t. If you don’t, then you and the Ariel Two remain a one-man interstellar superpower and it’s you or them. The way they see it, they have to take you out. The only reason we’re still standing is because the Nems must be keeping them busy.’
‘What’s option two?’
‘We go inside. We’ll make slower progress in the tunnels but the League won’t be able to track us. The downside is that the planet will want to scope you out.’
‘More bioblocker?’
Ann shook her head. ‘It’s not nearly so bad, but it’s not pretty, either. When normal people go down there, they get sick at first and then they get better. Sometimes a lot better. The planet does threat assessment on their biology and then lets them go. But for some reason, Will, this planet doesn’t like your smart-cells. I’ve seen the test results.’ She looked anxious.
‘What happens?’
‘The biome just keeps interacting with your tissue,’ she said. ‘Never invasively, but it doesn’t stop. Eventually, in every test we ran, your cells died.’
Will peered at her, trying to assess the risks. He could achieve a lot more as a complete entity than his cells could manage on their own. He had to hope that counted for something.
‘After how long?’
‘Even for a tiny sample, it takes hours,’ said Ann. ‘And that might be enough for us to get where we need to go. But I’m telling you, it won’t be fun in there. I think it’s our best shot, but there’s no way I’m stepping inside unless you’re ready.’
‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ said Will. ‘Lead on.’
15.3: MARK
Massimo led them into his house. Servants in white smocks with shaven heads manually closed the door behind them.
The interior looked surprisingly modern and spacious, if ecclesiastical in tone. A lounge area with low couches and white carpet lay to their left. The far wall-screen showed slowly alternating panoramic landscapes of the famous biosphere worlds. Ahead of them, through another arch, Mark could make out what appeared to be a study area. But instead of robots, Massimo had people – all young and androgynous in appearance.
Two of them moved quietly around the lounge, dusting the surfaces. Another pair stood by the wall, simply waiting for instructions. They all wore matching smart-collars. The sight of
them gave Mark the creeps. The submissive way they crept about smacked of the worst elements of Triton society.
Massimo stripped off his long gloves and tossed them to the nearest servant.
‘I hate wearing this stuff,’ he confided. ‘Part of the job, I suppose. And more fun than skin cancer.’ He threw his hat to a willowy teenager who caught it with one hand. ‘Don’t worry. You can relax in here. The walls are properly shielded and the house has its own air filters.’ He shucked off his long white coat, revealing relatively normal T-shirt and sweats underneath, also white. ‘The next shipment should bring better shielding,’ he told them. ‘When we finally move into the new tower, I won’t have to wear this crap all the time. The whole place will be properly rad-blocked. I can’t wait.’ He slumped down on a tall chair set against the wall to swap his formal trainers for flip-flops.
Mark watched their host’s casual behaviour and wasn’t sure how to feel. The man looked genuinely pleased to see them and something about the way he carried on felt normal. Except the transition from death threats to houseguests had been too abrupt, and the context was too strange. He couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow they were still seconds away from being shot.
Massimo surveyed the three of them with a private smile.
‘You all look uncomfortable. I can understand why. The trip out here was probably pretty jarring. Still, you can relax now – if you want to, of course. Let’s have something to eat.’
He led them to a doorway on the right. Servants opened it for them, revealing a sunny dining room with a single place set. More bald servants entered from what looked like a manually run kitchen, carrying plates for the rest of them. Through the open door came a strong smell of cooking. Mark’s stomach roared at him loud enough to solicit an amused glance from Massimo.
‘Hungry, then?’ he said. ‘That’s good. Don’t worry, by the way. The food here’s all good. It’s not the stuff we give the Following outside. This house has its own fab, and a little farm in the basement for organics.’
