Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "Thanks, cretin," Dennis Eason said. He turned back and applied a medicsensor to Lewis's damp forehead, checking the readout that popped up on his field-aid kit.

  "Do you even know what you're doing?" Karl Sheahan asked.

  Dennis tapped the Red Cross symbol on his tunic shoulder. "You'd better hope so, pal. I'm your best hope for survival."

  "You couldn't even give him a fucking aspirin without checking with that whale they call a doctor."

  "I'm not authorized to administer anything," Dennis said tightly. "Not when there's a qualified ship's doctor on call. It's a jurisdictional thing."

  "Yeah? Is that what you told Ntoko? Huh? Too much blood, it's a jurisdictional thing."

  "Fuck you!"

  "Enough," Amersy announced quietly. "Karl, watch the fucking movie and stop causing me grief."

  Karl grinned as he performed a neat midair spin and landed gently on a chair couch. It turned out the sheet screen didn't have an interactive driver; all it showed were third-person fixed-view dramas. Up on the ceiling the young actress was tooling up to slaughter the vampires that were taking over Brussels. It meant she had to wear a lot of tight black leather.

  Hal was in the chair couch next to Karl, staring up at the movie. He hadn't even heard the goading. Karl held on to a strap and leaned over to slap Hal on the arm. "You could give her one, couldn't you, dickbrain. Huh?"

  Hal's leer grew broader.

  Some of them managed to sleep for small periods during the rest of the flight. It wasn't easy. There was always noise, if not in their compartment, then from others, drifting incessantly through the ship like an audio-only poltergeist. People flailed about the cabin, sucking noisily on the water hoses, and microwaving snacks, then bitching about how they tasted of nothing. The toilets were used, which always ended in exclamations of misery, and the small cubicles let out a smell each time the doors were folded back. Who had the worst-smelling farts was an ongoing topic of conversation. Nic Fuccio kept score. Those who couldn't sleep kept their eyes shut from exhaustion, shifting around fitfully in the tiny gravity field. At some stage, almost everyone shouted at Dennis to give them tranks. He refused.

  Lawrence nearly cheered out loud when the crap movies finally ended and the Moray's captain showed them an external camera view. The Koribu was five kilometers distant, surrounded by a shoal of smaller support and service ships.

  Even now, after twenty years in strategic security and flying to eleven different star systems, Lawrence still got an adrenaline buzz from seeing the huge starships. Like every other starship still flying, the Koribu was designed as a colonist carrier. Not that there were any other designs—even the explorer craft that had once probed interstellar space around the Sol system had the same layout. Only the size varied.

  Their shape, and to some degree, form, was constrained by the nature of the compression drive. Although FTL capability was a scientific and technological breakthrough of the highest order, it didn't have the kind of commercial viability Earth's corporations and financiers would have liked. The development team had originally talked about starflights taking the same time as intercontinental aircraft journeys. A more honest analogy would have been with sailing ships. Like a portal, the FTL drive generated a wormhole by compressing the fabric of space-time with a negative energy density effect. As such an energy inverter consumed a colossal amount of power simply to open a wormhole, and the only practical source was a fusion generator, the subsequent wormhole was extremely short in comparison to the distance between stars. That wasn't a technological problem, as the starship flew down the wormhole it was creating, so the drive would simply redefine the endpoint, moving it ever forward. Although a valid solution, it also stretched out the flight time.

  Modern starships could make the Centauri run in a week, giving them a speed of just over half a light-year per day.

  The Koribu was such a ship. She had been intended as a colonist carrier forty-two years ago when she was being assembled in one of Centralis's freeflying shipyards. Cost structuring by Z-B's accountancy AS had given her an effective range of forty light-years. With that as their mandate, the designers had housed her energy inverter in a drum-shaped superstructure two hundred meters in diameter that made up the entire forward third. Seventy percent of its volume was given over to the eight fusion generators required to provide the massive quantities of power that the drive consumed, an engineering reality that explained why the outer surface was a mosaic of thermal radiators, mirror-bright silver rectangles five meters long, throwing off the phenomenal heat-loading produced by the generators' support systems during flight.

  Because of the debilitating effect of freefall on human physiology, especially on twenty-seven thousand untrained colonists over ten weeks, some kind of gravity field had to be provided for them and the crew. It came in the simplest fashion there was: six life support wheels, fat doughnuts thirty meters wide and two hundred in diameter. They were arranged in pairs, counter-rotating around an axial shaft to balance precession. Their hulls, in common with all spacecraft operating outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field, were blank, without ports or markings; just the standard coating of light gray foam rucked from particle impacts and bleached from the light of different stars.

  Adapting them for strategic security transport was an easy refit. Z-B turned common rooms and lounges into gyms and sim-tac theaters; some dormitories were taken out of commission and used as Skin suit depots, while the remaining dormitories were unchanged. Between them, they could billet twenty thousand squaddies.

  Behind the life support wheels came the cargo section, a broad open cylinder section built up from a honeycomb lattice of girders, which formed deep hexagonal silos. They had once carried modules of industrial machinery and essential supplies that the colonists needed to maintain their settlements. Modifying the silos for asset-realization missions was a simple matter of changing the hold-down clamp designs.

  Now, seven orbital transfer ships held station three hundred meters away, encircling the Koribu. One-man engineering shuttles glided backward and forward between them and the starship with halo bursts of green and blue flame, carrying the Third Fleet's lander pods, which they slotted down into waiting silos. At one end of the honeycomb, silos had been merged to form long, deep alcoves. They contained space-planes, the familiar sleek profile of Xianti nose cones just visible rising above the shadows.

  Koribu's final stage was its main reaction drive, five direct fusion rockets in the shape of elongated cones over three hundred meters long, ribbed with a filigree of pipes and cables. Big spherical deuterium tanks were plugged into the stress structure at the head of the cones, along with ancillary support equipment and ten small tokamaks that provided power for the main engine ignition sequence.

  The Moray docked just ahead of the life support section, nuzzling up to a tunnel that had extended out beyond the star-ship's body. Lawrence had to wait for another twenty minutes listening to the clamor of other platoons banging their way through the orbital-transfer ship's habitation cabins and into the tunnel. Finally, they were given clearance to disembark.

  It was a long trek through the starship's freefall corridors to the rotating transfer toroid of their wheel. Inside the top of the wheel spoke was an elevator that was barely high enough to take an adult. They all aligned themselves, tucking the boots into the floor hoops. The G-force built as they descended, much to Lewis's relief. They stopped on the middle of the three decks occupying the wheel itself, where the gravity was an eighth Earth-standard. Enough to settle their stomachs and restore normal circulation patterns. But with it came a disconcerting spinning sensation, as if the decking were about to heave over. They emerged from the elevator, reaching out to steady themselves against the wall.

  Every time he came down into one of the wheels, Lawrence swore he wouldn't let the effect trick him again. Every time his body promised him he was about to flip over. He gingerly took his hand away from the wall. "Okay, I know it feels like we're wa
shing about. Ignore it. You're all down and stable. Let's go find our quarters."

  He set off down the corridor. After ten paces he had to move to one side to avoid Simon Roderick and his retinue of senior managerial staff. The Third Fleet's board representative was so busy snapping out instructions to a harried aide he never even noticed the platoon. Lawrence kept his own face impassive. He'd followed the investigation Roderick and Adul Quan had launched in the wake of the bar fight in Kuranda. His Prime program had loaded unobtrusively into the base's datapool, passively observing the surge of traffic shunting between AS programs, the information requests to skyscan. Their inquiries had withered away after a couple of days, and the police had never turned up anything. Even so, it was a shock coming face-to-face with a board representative who'd taken such a keen interest in his off-base activities.

  Roderick and his entourage disappeared up the curve of the corridor, and Lawrence walked on without breaking stride.

  The dormitory that they'd been given was probably only double the size of the compartment on the Moray. It had two ranks of bunk beds each with its own locker containing a standard clothes package for everyone, a couple of aluminum tables with chairs and a sheet screen. There was a small washroom next door.

  Hal looked around, his face screwed up in dismay. "Oh man, what is this shit?" he exclaimed.

  Amersy laughed. "Best quarters in the fleet, welfare boy. Lie back and enjoy. You get fed, you get paid and nobody shoots at you. Now find a bunk and make the most of it."

  "I'll go fucking stir crazy." He made to climb onto a top bunk, only to find his way blocked by Karl's forearm.

  "Bottom rung, kid," Karl said, grinning a challenge.

  "Jesus fucking wept." Hal threw his small bag onto a lower bunk and hopped on after it. "I can't take these closed-up rooms."

  "You'll put up with it," Lawrence said. He dropped his own bag on a top bunk, momentarily fascinated by the weird curve of its fall. "Settle down, all of you; you know the onboard drill. I'll find out what our canteen schedule is, and then we work training and fitness around that. Lewis, how are you feeling?"

  "Not too bad, Sarge. Guess the doc was right."

  Lawrence made his way over to the small keyboard set into the wall beside a sheet screen. Platoon dormitories didn't rate an AS program, but the operating system was sophisticated and easy enough to operate. He called up their basic shipboard data: where they ate and when, what the local time was, when departure was scheduled.

  "Hey, you guys want to know where we're headed?" he asked.

  "Thallspring," Karl shouted back. "Didn't they tell you, Sarge?"

  Hal gave him a puzzled look. "How did you know that? It's like top secret."

  Karl shook his head. "Fuck, you are a big waste of space, kid."

  They were due to depart in twenty-two hours. Lawrence read the Third Fleet data from the screen and muttered, "Jesus."

  "Problem?" Amersy asked quietly.

  Lawrence took a quick glance round the dormitory. Nobody was paying attention to them. "Seven ships. Is that what the Third Fleet is these days?"

  "More than a match for Thallspring. Their population is small, barely seventeen million."

  "Projected," Lawrence said. "That's no true guide. But it's not what I'm worried about."

  "The ships?"

  "Yeah. Fate! My first mission, to Kinabica, that took seven weeks of spaceplane flights just to lift us and our equipment offplanet. There must have been thirty-five starships on that mission."

  "We don't have that many starships anymore. Not since Santa Chico."

  "Not just there. Second Fleet lost two ships on approach to Oland's Hope. No one projected they'd have exo-orbit defenses. But they did."

  "You want to eject?"

  "Hell no. I'm just saying this one could be tough. We're going in too small."

  "They'll cope." Amersy clapped him on the shoulder. "Hell, even the kid will pull through."

  "Yeah, right." Lawrence began pulling menus from the starship's computer, seeing what he could throw up on the screen. He read one schedule and smiled, hurriedly calling up supplements. "You might want to see this," he told the platoon. "You'll probably never have another chance for ringside seats this good."

  The screen brightened with an image from one of Koribu's external cameras. It was centered on the portal, glowing a hazy blue against the void. Colony trains were clustered around like a shoal of eager technological fish.

  "Two minutes to the starting gun," Lawrence announced happily. Despite all he hated about Z-B, he had to admit, they got this absolutely right.

  His mood was broken by Hal's petulant voice asking, "What the fuck is that thing, a radioactive doughnut? Order me a couple of coffees to go with it, Sarge." He trailed off fast at Lawrence's look.

  Lawrence just managed to stop himself from bawling out the kid. He couldn't believe anyone was that ignorant about the most important endeavor the human race was undertaking. But then Hal was just some teenager from a welfare block in some godforsaken city. Lawrence himself had been a teenager with the best education his home planet could provide, as well as apparently unlimited data resource access, and he hadn't known that portals existed. It had been Roselyn who told him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In five years, Amethi's climate had undergone a profound degree of alteration. The changes wrought by Heat-Smash had become self-sustaining and were now accelerating on a scale that allowed human senses to register them. Locals were calling it the Wakening. Instead of surprise and delight at seeing a single cloud, they now welcomed the sight of a small patch of sky through the sullen cloud mantle.

  Now that the overall air temperature had risen several degrees above freezing, the Barclay's Glacier meltdown exhaled water vapor into the atmosphere at a phenomenal rate. Giant cloud banks surged out from the thawing ice sheet, reaching almost up to the tropopause where they powered their way around the globe. In their wake, warmer arid air was sucked in, gusting over the ice where it helped transpiration still further, keeping the planet-sized convection cycle turning.

  When the clouds rolled over the tundra they began to darken, condensing to fall as snow. By the time the flakes reached the ground they were miserable gray smears of sleet Great swaths of slush mounted up over the entire planetary surface, taking an age to drain away in stubborn trickles that were often refrozen by fresh falls. On the continental shelves, muddy rivers slowly began to flow again, while across the dead ocean beds, the deep trenches and basins were gradually filling with water. The thin viscous sheets of dirty liquid that rolled sluggishly downslope across the sands carried along the crusting of salt that had lain there undisturbed since the glacier had formed. It was all dragged down into the deepening cores of the returning oceans, dissolving to produce a saturated solution every bit as dense and bitter as Earth's Dead Sea.

  Above it, meanwhile, the air was so clogged with hail and snow that flying had become hazardous. Spaceplanes were large enough to power their way up through the weather, but smaller aircraft remained sheltered in their hangars for the duration. Driving also was difficult, with trucks newly converted into snowplows running constantly up and down the main roads to keep them clear. Windshield wipers were hurried additions to every vehicle. Major sections of the Amethi ecology renewal project had been suspended until the atmospheric turbulence returned to more reasonable levels. The insects already scheduled for first release were as yet un-cloned; silos holding the seed banks were sealed up. Only the slow-life organisms remained relatively unaffected, carrying on as normal under the snow until they were unlucky enough to be caught by a fast flush of water. Lacking even rudimentary animal survival instinct, they never had the sense to wriggle or crawl away from the new torrents raking across the land.

  This particular phase of Amethi's turbulent environmental modification was proceeding as expected, claimed the climatologists, it was just more vigorous than most of their AS predictions. Some quick revisions incorporating new data estimated
the current turmoil wouldn't last more than a few years. Specific dates were not offered.

  Lawrence rather enjoyed the Wakening, secretly laughing at all the chaos it had brought to McArthur's meticulously laid plans and the amount of disturbance it caused his father. This was nature as it existed on proper planets, playing havoc with human arrogance, exactly what he wanted to witness firsthand in star systems across the galaxy where alien planets produced still stranger meteorology. However, after the first nine months or so of Amethi's whiteouts and oppressive obscured skies, even he grew bored with the new phenomena.

  That boredom was just one of the contributory factors suggested to his parents for his continuing behavioral problems. By the time he reached sixteen his thoroughly exasperated father was already sending him on weekly trips to Dr. Melinda Johnson, a behavioral psychologist. Lawrence treated the sessions as a complete joke, either exaggerating grossly or simply answering every question with a sullen yes or no depending on how pissed off he felt at the time. It probably helped disguise just how alienated he was from the rest of Amethi's society, which was why she never made any progress with him. Lawrence knew he was growing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He should have been an American astronaut in the 1960s or a deepspace astrophysics officer in the last decades of the twenty-first century when starships first set out to explore the new worlds around Sol. Yet telling that to the professionally sympathetic Dr. Johnson would have been a huge admission of weakness on his part. No way was he giving in to her. She, and everything she stood for, the normality of Amethi, was the problem, not the solution. So the lies and moods just kept on swinging a little further each time, picking curiously at the envelope of acceptability as if it were an interesting scab. All the while he built a defensive shell of stubborn silence around himself, which grew progressively thicker each time his father raged and his mother showed her quiet disapproval. Nothing apart from i-media interested him, nothing apart from gaining more i-media time motivated him. He had few friends, his teachers virtually gave up, and sibling rivalry at home began to resemble a full-blown war zone. With his hate-the-world attitude and his rampaging hormones, he was the basic teenager from hell.