Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "But there's so much out there in space we need to see and understand."

  "No, there isn't, son," his father said firmly. "Government space agencies sent ships to just about every kind of star there was to collect data right back at the start of the interstellar age. We've examined every stellar anomaly within range and found more planets than the human race can afford to exploit. We've been out there and done it all. That's over, now. This is the time when we benefit from all that knowledge and effort and expense. It's our golden age. Enjoy it."

  "I'll go to another company then, join their starship program."

  "Hello? This universe calling Lawrence. Did you not hear everything I just said? Son, nobody is exploring anything anymore. There is nothing left to explore. That's why your school concentrates on the courses you'll need to manage Amethi. You have to know what's required to complete the terraforming project. Your future is here, and I want you to start focusing on that, right now. So far I've been tolerant of all this misbehavior, but it ends today. It's time you started measuring up to this family's expectations."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "The world had been chosen by the Last Church to site its Supreme Temple because it was close to the Ulodan Nebula, which was remarkable for its darkness. Normally nebulas can be the most glorious of all stellar objects. They're bunched-up, twisted cyclones of gas and dust that measure light-years across, so big they often have several stars inside. The light from those stars makes them glow, fluorescing the dust and vapor into a blaze of scarlet or violet or emerald. But not the Ulodan. The Ulodan was mostly made up from carbon dust, as black as the gulf between galaxies. There were stars inside, including one very famous one that was home to the Mordiff; but they were all invisible from outside. There was no glow, not even a glimmer. The Ring Empire called it the cloud of the dead, especially after their explorer ship found the Mordiff planet. For the Last Church, it was perfect. Standing on their planet and looking up into the sky, the Ulodan eclipsed half of the core suns. It was as if they were being eaten away.

  "Mozark's ship landed there on the fifth year of his journey. I suppose it was inevitable he would go to the Last Church at some point during his voyage. Everybody at some time in their life at least considers religion, and Mozark was no different. He left his ship at the spaceport and went to the city of the Supreme Temple. Over the next few weeks he had many meetings with the priests who ran it. They were pleased to receive him, as they were all people. But of course in Mozark's case they made a special effort. He was a prince from a kingdom in a part of the Ring Empire where they had few churches, and he was looking to enlighten his whole people. With his patronage they could convert many new worlds to the true cause."

  "What cause, miss?" Edmund asked. "Did they have Buddha and Jesus and Allah?"

  "No." Denise laughed, running a hand through her newly shortened hair. "Nothing like that. You have to remember the Ring Empire was a very old civilization. They were long past believing people who claimed to have spoken to God, or to be related to Him, or to have been sent on a divine mission to enlighten this universe. I'm not even sure 'Church' is a very good translation for what the Last Church represented. It was a kind of evangelical physics, really. Unlike all our religions, there was nothing in their doctrine that was contrary to scientific fact, no way their teachings could be weakened as people learned and understood more about the universe. Instead they were a product of that same learning that had given the Ring Empire all of its fabulous technology. They worshiped—again if that's the right word—the black heart of the galaxy."

  The children drew in breaths of astonishment. There were a few nervous titters.

  "How could they worship nothing, miss? You said the heart of the galaxy is a black hole."

  "I did," Denise agreed. "And that's what it is. A huge great hole into which everything falls and from which nothing ever returns. It's already eaten millions of stars, and one day it will finish devouring the whole galaxy. But not for billions and billions of years. And that's why the Last Church revered it and studied it. Because finally, all that will be left of the universe is black holes. They will consume galaxies and superclusters alike. Every atom that ever was will be locked inside them, and then they'll merge, eventually into one. And after that..." she teased.

  "What?" It was a frantic cry from over a dozen small mouths.

  "That's why there was a Last Church, because of the uncertainty. Some of the Ring Empire's astrophysicists said that at the moment when the black holes unite and become one, then a new universe will be born, while others claimed that it's the end of everything forever. The Last Church wanted people who believed that after the unification would come a new universe. You see, as everything in this universe would be absorbed by the black holes, they thought they might be able to influence the outcome. Matter is crushed to destruction inside a black hole, but the Last Church believed it is possible for energy to maintain its pattern inside, either by inscribing it on the crushed matter, or as some independent form. They wanted that pattern to be thought. Souls, if you like. They wanted to send souls into the black heart so that when the end of time came, and the neat order of physics and time fell into chaos, there would be purpose.

  "Now as you can imagine, this appealed to Mozark. The sheer worthiness of the concept dazzled him: making sure that existence itself continued. It was something to which the kingdom could devote itself with vigor and enthusiasm. It would also appeal to Endoliyn, he thought. But then he began to have doubts, the same kind of doubts that always threaten religion, no matter how rational its basis. Life is a natural product of the universe; to believe its purpose is to artificially impinge upon the end of time is a huge article of faith. The more he thought about it, the closer the Last Church's gospel seemed to be taken from divine intervention. Their very first physicist-priest had made a choice, and in his vanity wanted everyone else to agree with it. Mozark wasn't sure he could do that for himself, let alone his whole kingdom. For all its grandeur, life is small. To expend it all on a mission that may or may not be necessary in hundreds of billions of years' time was to demand just too much faith. A life in the service of the Last Church wouldn't be spent wisely, it would be wasted. That wasn't what Endoliyn wanted.

  "Once again, Mozark returned to his ship, and left the First Church planet to continue his voyage. He rejected the Last Church's abstract spirituality just as firmly as he rejected The City's devotion to materialism."

  Denise looked round at her little audience. They weren't quite as enthusiastic as they had been when she'd told them about the wonders to be found in The City. Hardly surprising, she chided herself; they're too young to be preached at.

  "Sometime soon," she said in a low, awed voice that immediately gained their attention, "I'll tell you about the Mordiff planet and all of its terrible tragic history."

  The Mordiff planet was another of those legends of the Ring Empire that made the children shiver with chilly delight every time she mentioned it. Thanks to the vague hints she'd dropped, it had taken on the form of a particularly aggressive hell populated by well-armed monsters. Which wasn't quite a fair description, she thought, but for using as a bogeyman threat to get the garden tidied at the end of the day it was just about peerless.

  * * *

  After work Denise took a tram up to the Newmarket District of town. A twenty-minute ride, moving slowly away from the substantial buildings clustered around the marina and docks, out into the suburbs where the roads were broad, and the shops and apartment blocks had flat unembellished fronts. Long advertisement boards hugged the street corner buildings, no longer screen sheets but simple paper posters. Side roads showed long rows of nearly identical houses, whitewashed concrete walls scabbing and crumbling in the humid salty air, small gardens overflowing with ferns and palms.

  She got off a stop from the enclosed mart she wanted, and walked. There were no tourists here, just locals. She strolled casually, taking her time to look in shop windows. The bars that were ope
n all had tables and chairs on the pavement outside; their patrons preferred the inside where the lighting was low and the music loud. A scent of marijuana and redshift lingered around the darkened doorways, thick and sweet enough for her to imagine it spilling over the step like a tide of dry ice.

  As she approached one, a triad stumbled out into the bright sunlight, blinking and shielding their eyes while their slim wingshades unfurled from gold nosebridges. They giggled with the profound scattiness that only the truly stoned can manage. Two men in their late twenties, large, manual workers of some kind judging by their overalls, and a woman. She was in the middle, with her arms slung around both of them. Not much of a figure, not terribly pretty, either. Her tongue glistened in the sunlight as she licked one man's ear, shrieking with delight. His hand closed on her rump, squeezing hotly.

  Denise stopped abruptly and turned away. Despite the sunlight and humidity, her skin was suddenly chilly. She cursed herself, her weakness. It was just the combination that had caught her off guard. From her angle: two men dragging the woman off. Incipient sex. Laughter indistinguishable from cries.

  Idiot, she raged against herself. There was a wild impulse to slap herself hard across the cheek. Knock some sense into you, girl. Would have done it, too, if this wasn't so public.

  It was crazy that her body could be so strong, while her mind was so feeble. Not for the first time, she wondered if Raymond and Josep had asked for subtle neurochemical alterations to be incorporated into their modifications. Human psychology was highly susceptible to chemical manipulation. Could you get a drug for cool?

  The triad wobbled away around a corner, and Denise started walking again. A couple of deep breaths and squaring her shoulders tautly returned her traitor body to equilibrium.

  A curving glass roof ran the length of the mart, branching out in a cruciform shape a third of the way down from the entrance. Inside, the air was conditioned, scrubbed of moisture and dust. Open-fronted shops had speakers blaring out music and amplifying the spiel that the owners shouted without pause. At the front, the majority of shops were protein knitting; taking raw protein cells from the city's food refineries and blending them with various hydrocarbons and baseline compounds to produce textual approximations of original terrestrial food. There were greengrocers with colored globes purporting to be fruits and vegetables, butchers with burger-steak approximations of every animal from sheep to ostriches, fishmongers with glistening white slivers of flesh on crushed ice; shops with fresh pasta, new-baked bread, rice, curry, cheeses, chocolate, speciality teas and coffees. The smells were enticing as she walked past. Plenty of people loitered, haggling over portions, testing their consistency.

  Denise made her way to the back of the mart where Like-side Bikes had their shop. Like every bicycle shop in the universe it had a small front area cluttered with bikes still in their wrappings, while a counter partitioned off a workshop full of tools and small boxes of spares. There were three main work areas, centered on elaborate clamps that held the bikes at chest height. All of them were occupied with machines in various states of assembly with mechanics working on them. Cycling was a popular mode of transport in Memu Bay, and business was brisk.

  The assistant manager, Mihir Sansome, looked up and immediately abandoned the child's bike he was working on.

  "Hi." Denise flashed him a bright smile. "Has my order come in yet?"

  "I believe so." Mihir glanced at his two colleagues and gave Denise a twitchy grin.

  She kept her gaze level: it was almost a rebuke.

  Mihir cleared his throat. "I'll check." He went back into the workshop and picked up a box from his work bench. "Here we go. Front suspension pins, five sets."

  "Thank you." She put cash down on the counter, separating the notes into two piles. Mihir made a show of swiping the box's strip into the till. Five notes went into the cashbox; the larger pile was deftly folded and slipped into his pocket without his colleagues' seeing. He put the box into a carrier bag and handed it to Denise.

  As she walked back down the mart, she allowed herself a small smile. Mihir wasn't the greatest actor, but the bicycle shop with its autoclaves and catalytic bonders was incredibly useful. The risk of his activities being noticed was tiny. And even if he was queried by his colleagues or the manager, they'd just assume it was some kind of illegal scam he'd got himself involved in. That was the beauty of every cell-structured underground group: outside of the command group, nobody knew anybody else.

  Even if the worst-case scenario came about and the authorities became aware of a cell, they'd only be able to close down that one unit. Taken by itself, the items Mihir had produced for them would mean nothing to the police. He'd probably be able to describe Denise, but as far as he knew she was just a courier. He'd been recruited by members of another cell, who had been given the information that his cousin had died during the last invasion. After skirting around his sympathies, they'd asked him if he could help out making life difficult for the next occupation force. It wouldn't even cost him anything; the movement would be happy to pay for his trouble. Once he'd agreed, the only contact he had was through encrypted packages containing the specifications of components. And Denise.

  Had it been a normal radical movement, then they would have used a low-level courier to collect the box. This was a little different Indigo data scrolled across her sight as the Prime in her pearl ring trawled the datapool for real-time police messages. There were hundreds of them, the majority simple routine contacts and location monitors. There were even some special investigation branch operations. None of it related to her.

  Even so, she kept an eye on her fellow pedestrians, noted the few cars and vans parked along the street, watched the cyclists. None of them seemed interested in her, except for a couple of lads. But then surveillance operatives wouldn't show an interest; it was recurring faces that she was hunting for.

  Only two people got on the tram with her. She switched trams twice before she finally arrived at the workshop, confident no one was following her. It was one of twelve identical workshops in a two-story block designed to accommodate light industry. The whole place had a fairly dilapidated appearance, with windows covered up with reflective shields or wood panels. A faint whine of air-conditioning sounded along the narrow deserted street that led to the rear loading bays. Piles of discarded packaging were accumulating by several of the roll-up doors. She'd never seen anyone put rubbish out, or a city council crew collect any. But the size and position of the piles changed on a weekly basis, so someone else used the workshops.

  Denise asked her neural pearl to check the workshop's security network, which reported that the perimeter was secure. She waved her left hand over the lock sensor and pushed the door open. It was a large concrete-walled room inside, empty apart from a long wooden carpentry bench they'd set up in the center and a metal storage rack that took up half of the loading bay wall. Both windows and the roll-up door had been bricked up and reinforced with carbon webbing.

  Josep was already sitting at the bench, milling cylinders of stainless steel on a programmable electron beam lathe. "Did you get them?" he asked.

  "Hope so." She dropped the box on the bench and broke the seal. Two dozen black cylinders spilled out. They both started examining them.

  Mihir had produced slightly conical tubes of boron beryl-hum composite ten centimeters long. The narrower end was open, while the base was sealed with a small hole in the center and an outer ridge. Denise wondered if he knew he was producing bullet casings. The shape was obvious enough, though the high-strength composition could be misleading.

  "Not bad," Josep said. He was measuring his casing with calipers, the liquid crystal display blurring as they closed around the base. "Not bad at all. He's got the dimensions within spec."

  "I'll start filling them," she said. The casings were the last component. They already had the bullets, the caps and enhanced explosive. Combined with the rifle they'd assembled, a single shot would be able to punch clean through Skin
from over two kilometers away.

  The rifle was just one of the weapons they planned on using. Other weapons and booby traps were being put together by cells across Memu Bay. Innocuous little components locking together into lethal combinations. This time when the invaders arrived, the resistance movement would be there and ready to make life hell for them.

  * * *

  Platoon 435NK9 had to wait in the base's transit lounge for five hours. Lawrence didn't mind that for himself—the lounge was air-conditioned, he had a memory chip loaded with a good multimedia library, the drinks machine was free, missiontime pay had begun that morning. Squaddie heaven. He stretched his legs out over three chairs and relaxed while the big departure sheet screen kept repeating the same messages about their scheduling delay and mechanical service requirements. Somewhere out across the hot runway, teams of mechanics were peering quizzically into the inspection hatches of their assigned spaceplane, trying to find which one of the fifty thousand subcomponents the AS pilot was bitching about. AS pilots monitored every component parameter constantly, running the results against International Civil Aerospace Agency performance requirements. Lawrence had heard that operating companies often rebooted their vehicle electronics with AS programs down-rated from the manufacturer's primary installation, allowing a degree more flexibility when it came to determining flight-worthiness. The letter of ICAA's law equaled huge maintenance costs.