by Rick Partlow
“It’s people such as yourself who have declared us enemies! We have made no move against you, only protected ourselves and our citizens against predation…”
Sam swallowed hard; it seemed very much as if Priscilla was losing her temper and he hadn’t thought that possible. He felt like he should say something, should intervene, but diplomacy wasn’t his job…
“Sir,” he said, stepping into the space of an intake of breath between invective, “if we have a relativistic missile, and we were doing this as some sort of trick, then you’ve lost either way. Either you open your defenses to us or your planet dies right along with your civilization. Again. Your only hope is that we’re telling the truth; you have no other way out of this.”
He caught Priscilla’s glance in his peripheral vision, but it didn’t seem enraged; possibly annoyed at most. Danabri still seemed amused, unwilling to let the apocalyptic consequences of failure dampen his enjoyment of tweaking the officious Consensus politician.
Whatever Tejado’s response might have been to Sam’s reasoning, they’d never hear it. A chime sounded at the door and it creaked open a few centimeters. A functionary peeked his head through, flinching as if he expected something to be thrown at him.
“I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed!” Tejado bellowed, finally coming out of his chair, with enough force he nearly sailed up toward the ceiling and had to catch himself on the edge of his desk.
“Yes, sir,” the little man squeaked. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s the Prime Minister and she demanded to speak with you immediately.”
Tejado’s mouth worked and Sam could tell he wanted to curse and had to fight to control himself. The Deputy Minister motioned at Fellows.
“Stay here and watch them.”
“Yeah,” Danabri murmured as the tall man stalked out of the office, “we might corrupt your whole planet if you don’t keep an eye on us.”
“I hope to God he gives me the order to kill you,” Fellows growled, his right hand straying too close to his holstered sidearm for Sam’s comfort.
Danabri acted as if he hadn’t heard the Guardian, making a show of straightening his jacket. Sam tried to ignore the byplay, concentrating instead on what they could possibly do if Tejado sent them packing. He couldn’t think of anything short of declaring war on the Consensus, which seemed a self-defeating proposition.
The door was pushed open again and when Tejado walked through, Sam could have believed the gravity was twice standard rather than sixteen percent of it; the tall man dragged, reluctance visible in every motion. His eyes bored into them, sighting lasers for a weapon the man obviously wished he had.
“You’re going to Earth,” he said, the words prying themselves out of jaws tightly locked. “Just the two of you,” he pointed to Sam and Priscilla. “The rest of your crew, including him,” he sneered at Danabri, “will be confined to your quarters here on Luna until you return.” His fingers clenched and unclenched. “You’ll be meeting with the Prime Minister and her Privy Council.” He turned to Fellows, making a slashing motion. “Get them the hell out of my sight.”
Sam rose uncertainly, a tingle of disbelief running down his spine. What the hell just happened?
“Deputy Minister,” Priscilla said, smiling warmly as she paused in following Fellows out of the office, “it’s been a pleasure.”
Chapter Nine
Sam Avalon knew this was a momentous occasion, a sacred duty, certainly the most significant event of his career, but he couldn’t keep himself from grinning ear-to-ear like a kid on his first spaceflight. This was Earth, this was the ancient home of humanity, the stuff of legends, of bed-time stories. The number of Resolution citizens who’d been allowed down inside the atmosphere could have been counted on one hand without using all the fingers. It was all he could do to keep from leaning forward in his acceleration couch and trying to get a better view out the forward screens, even though he knew they were a holographic projection.
Thousands of meters below them, the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Canadian Rockies stretched in rugged magnificence no computer recreation could capture. Wind swept sprays of autumn snow off the ragged edges and he was sure if they went even lower, he’d see the mountain goats clinging tenaciously to the cliffs.
“We’re coming in west to east,” Priscilla remarked, seemingly unfazed by the incredible scenery. She turned toward the shuttle pilot seated to her left and slightly in front of her; she’d taken the center acceleration couch, leaving the copilot’s station to Sam, insisting he was more qualified. “Why? Wouldn’t it have been faster to continue with the polar insertion?”
“Yeah,” the man admitted, shrugging. Then he smiled with a mischievous glint to his dark eyes. “But I like the view coming in this way.”
The pilot, Sully he’d called himself, wasn’t anything like what Sam had expected; he was young and enthusiastic and seemed to genuinely love flying. He hadn’t mentioned the political situation and the only interest he had in the fact they were Resolutionists was they hadn’t had the chance to see the sights of Earth before and he got to be their tour guide.
He could tell the young shuttle jock was grating on Priscilla’s nerves, but he wasn’t sure if it was simply the man’s garrulous demeanor or maybe the lack of privacy she resented. He couldn’t say he knew her well enough to unfailingly read her moods, but he sensed she wanted to discuss their strategy before they met with the Consensus Prime Minister.
Probably because she doesn’t want me screwing up, he thought. It was fair, he decided; they wouldn’t have Danabri to read the situation and he was, as he kept reminding everyone, a pilot and not a diplomat.
“I’m gonna show you guys somethin’ really cool,” Sully declared, pushing the steering yoke downward. The pitch of the jets changed and Sam could feel the loss of altitude in his guts before he noticed it on the viewscreen.
It still freaked him out, the concept of trusting physical flight controls, but he supposed it made sense since the Consensus considered cybernetic implants just as blasphemous as nanotechnology and genetic engineering. He’d learned how to use the system, of course, in case of emergency, but they were considered a last resort in the Resolution and he hadn’t touched a physical control yoke since flight school. Watching Sully caress the sleek, silver-chased controls, he was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t missing out on the fun.
“I’m not sure if we have the time…” Priscilla started to say, but Sam shot her a pleading look.
“How many chances you think we’re going to get to do this?” he asked softly.
She hesitated, a hint of chill in those frost-blue eyes, and he thought maybe he’d gone too far and pissed her off. But the chill melted away like the frost under the morning sun and she smiled at him with a fondness in her gaze as invigorating as the sights of unknown Earth.
“All right, Sully,” she assented, some of the tension gone out of her voice. “What have you got for us?”
“Check this out…”
They were low, much lower than traffic control would have allowed on any settled Resolution world, only a hundred meters or so above the hard deck, and yet Sam heard no radio chatter even questioning Sully’s flight path. Beneath them, rolling hills had given way to endless, grassy plains…and equally endless herds of bison, elk, deer and rumbling, swaying mastodon, grazing in the midday Sun or sipping warily from watering holes under the watchful eye of predators.
He could see the predators better than their prey could, see them concealed in the tall grass, in stands of trees, waiting in the grey fur of wolves, the tawny coats of saber-tooth cats, the speckled camouflage of stalking cheetahs. They were fewer in number, but they caught his eye every time he passed over one, an evolutionary adaptation from a day when humans, too, had been down on plains much like those, watching for those same predators.
“This is what?” he asked the pilot. “The Great Plains?”
“Yeah,” Sully said, nodding, his helmet wobbling on his head when he di
d. That was another odd thing, a pilot wearing a helmet like he was a Marine or something. He guessed that was for some sort of Heads-Up Display reading his eye movement; it was all technology centuries out of date for the Resolution and he couldn’t help feel a bit of sympathy for the young man.
“We call it the Great Plains Preserve,” Sully went on, with what sounded like pride in his voice. “There’re ten preserves, planet-wide. After the wars wiped everything out, the animals had a chance to repopulate and get back some of their natural territory, and when we started climbing back up and rebuilding, we decided we wanted to make sure we didn’t repeat our old mistakes.”
“That’s a…very enlightened view,” Priscilla ventured. Sam thought she sounded surprised; he knew he was. It wasn’t an attitude he would have expected from the Consensus.
“It’s beautiful down here,” Sam said, not trying to hide his admiration. It was one thing to see this sort of splendor on a Resolution world, where it had been designed by the Mother computer. To see such incredible biological diversity unfold naturally after the devastation of a civilization-ending war…
They were climbing again, and Sully had fallen silent, which seemed out of character; he found out why once they reached Capital City…or, more accurately, hundreds of kilometers before they reached it.
Sam had read about open-pit mining, but he’d never thought to actually see it. It was a huge, open wound on the land, infested with the metallic infection of the digging equipment, the processing machinery, the ore trains running on electromagnetic rails inward to the factories. The factories were boxes, ugly in their own right and lined up in an artless cluster for the sake of efficiency and pragmatism.
“Gaia,” Priscilla breathed, echoing the disgust roiling in Sam’s gut. “I know you have Lunar mines and orbital processing facilities. Surely this isn’t necessary?”
Sam couldn’t see Sully’s eyes beneath the half-visor of his helmet, but the way his mouth pulled down and his face went slack, he could tell the younger man seemed stricken.
“We put all of our off-Earth processing capabilities into producing spacecraft for defense and interdiction.” The line was rote, clearly an excuse he’d been given so many times he had it memorized and yet just as clearly, he didn’t buy it. “Plus,” he went on, less rehearsed and perhaps more truthful, “the Belters make more money dealing with the Jovians and you guys than they would with us.” He sighed in resignation. “All the major residential areas are like this, and it’s worse on the Indian subcontinent and out in east Asia.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Sam said, and meant it. He shared a look with Priscilla. “There should be something we can do about that, shouldn’t there?”
“It’s definitely something to consider,” she replied noncommittally.
He could see the wheels turning behind her eyes, though, and he bit down on a knowing grin.
The city itself came into view only minutes later, charming in its own way but sprawling and jumbled, clearly not a planned metropolis like Dauphin City or Uruk. Individual, disconnected buildings in the ancient, pre-war style were clustered around newer, more modern, self-contained structures, and public transportation was supplemented by actual surface streets, another thing Sam had heard of but never expected to see. There were cars running around inside the city, like some old movie about ancient Earth; and as inefficient as it all was, Sam found it utterly fascinating.
The shuttle’s atmospheric jets rumbled a low-pitched roar as it spiraled down over the spaceport, low enough for Sam to see through the clear walls of some of the closer buildings, see the workers inside pacing from one task to the next like insects. One or two paused to press close to the glass, staring at the aerospacecraft’s descent. The belly jets added their shuddering scream to the throttling-down main engines and Sam felt their upward thrust pushing him into his seat.
Despite Sully’s demonstrated piloting skills, Sam still felt a cold pit deep in his stomach as the ship touched down, just not trusting human instincts to land something as big and heavy as a cislunar shuttle. But the landing treads touched down as gentle as a feather, and he was almost surprised when the pilot pulled off his helmet and began unstrapping from his seat.
“It was nice flying you guys,” he said cheerfully, scrambling over the top of his chair instead of waiting to power it around. Without his helmet, his hair sprang free, long and blond and unruly. “Sorry to leave you hanging here, but I gotta’ meet a girl.” He slapped the button to lower the shuttle’s belly ramp. “There’s a hopper waiting for you just outside with someone from the government to take you the rest of the way.”
And then he was gone. Sam stared in silent bemusement at the space where he’d been, but Priscilla was already turning her seat and yanking the quick-release on her restraints.
“I didn’t think they’d be like that,” he admitted, following her example. “He seems…normal.”
“Most people are just people,” she reminded him. “Living their lives and not really caring much about what their government does as long as it doesn’t affect them.” She smiled wanly back to him as she started down the ramp. “You and I are the strange ones.”
***
Sam didn’t know what he’d expected from the Ministry Building, but this was not it. More than anything else, it resembled a Gothic cathedral, or at least what he’d seen of Gothic cathedrals in the historical records Mother had brought with her from Earth, right down to the ribbed vaults and flying buttresses, though on a grander scale than Medieval architects had imagined. Grey and foreboding, it towered above them in what might have been an attempt at intimidation or perhaps something less malevolent and more nostalgic, meant to recall the greatness of Earth before the war.
Where did they get the records? he wondered, feeling the tug of the wind from the ducted fans of the hopper teasing at his jacket as the little aircraft took off and left them there with the Consensus representative. I thought the nanite wave destroyed everything. Books maybe, physical books. Those might have survived.
He’d read the nanite wave weapons of the last war had destroyed anything electrically powered, but they’d still had actual paper books back then. He tried to imagine the survivors huddled in the wreckage of their civilization, jealously hoarding the few books they could find. He shuddered at the image, wondering how they’d ever rebuilt any sort of society after that.
“Follow me,” their government rep assigned to them grunted with a reluctance she didn’t try to hide.
Hell, she didn’t even bother to tell us her name.
The woman didn’t want to be there, that much was clear; it was written on the sour curl of her lip, making a small mouth look even smaller, in the arch of her eyebrow and the furl it sent up through her hairline. She was dressed in what passed for professional wear among the younger Consensus citizens: a subdued, grey business suit with a high, buttoned collar, the only touch of color a lavender scarf tied low around her neck, and her hair was cut close to her scalp. She was a sharp contrast to Sully, both in appearance and attitude, and much closer to the stereotypical Earther he saw in news reports and entertainment media.
She led the two of them away from the Ministry’s broad, public entrance with its flow of people and tight security screening, and over to an unmarked door about forty meters down the sidewalk. It opened at the touch of her palm on a subdued scanner set in the side of the wall. Sam thought he caught a few stares from passers-by at his Resolution uniform, and he tried to keep himself from staring back, or from rubber-necking like a tourist at the teardrop-shaped ground-cars humming by on three wheels.
The glare of the mid-morning sun disappeared into the shadows of a narrow stairwell just inside the door and Sam followed Priscilla and the Consensus representative downward. The impact of their shoes on the metallic grating of the steps echoed ahead of them in a descending spiral, and just when Sam was beginning to wonder if they were taking the stairs down to the very center of the Earth, they came to a landing…a
nd an elevator bank.
The door slid aside for their guide’s biometric ID and the metal-walled, claustrophobically tiny car took them down even further, not stopping along the way. It all seemed very mysterious and momentous and Sam wondered if that was the point, to impress them. Then again, maybe it was simply the fastest and most private route to where they were going; he chided himself for assuming the worst yet again.
At least there’re no subsonics this time.
The ride was quick and silent, and his pilot’s instincts told him they’d travelled at least a hundred meters straight down, which meant the building was at least as deep as it was tall. It was meant as a shelter as well as a government center, he realized, a place for the Prime Minister and her cabinet to keep the Consensus running in case of another devastating war.
Still, for a shelter, it was nicely appointed. Paintings, done by hand in the classical style, hung in gilt frames on walls of cherry wood, and marble statues hid in alcoves as if they’d stepped into a museum. He noticed Priscilla pause for half a step as she passed by a painting of Venus emerging from the ocean; he wondered why it had caught her eye, other than the exactness with which it had been duplicated.
Nothing was marked or labelled in the winding hallway, but their guide took them straight to their destination with the familiarity of one who took the same path every day. Another security scanner---How many of those do they need?---and they were abruptly there. It wasn’t an office, wasn’t a conference room as much as…Maybe a courtroom? Sam couldn’t be sure of the assessment, but he and Priscilla were deposited unceremoniously into a large chamber and waved to seats behind a bare, wooden table.
Before and above them on a raised platform enclosed by a polished, cherry railing was a semi-circle of five, throne-like seats. They were ornate, hand-carved if he was any judge, with rampant lions in each armrest, but didn’t appear that comfortable, lacking any sort of padding.
Maybe it shouldn’t be comfortable being a judge, he reflected.
