Pandora's Star cs-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  …

  The heat seemed to be increasing with every step, along with the humidity. Ozzie was surprised by that. He’d walked enough Silfen paths between worlds now to know when the tracks were taking him over the threshold. The signs were subtle and very gradual. Not this time.

  They’d been walking through a deciduous forest on the second world since the ghost planet; it was midsummer, with wildflowers providing a gentle carpet of pastel colors across the forest floor. Palm trees and giant ferns began to intermingle with the doughty trunks of the forest. There was a strengthening scent, too, which took Ozzie a while to place. The sea. It had been a long time since he’d seen the sea. No Silfen path had ever led close to one.

  It was growing brighter as well; strong sunlight tinged with a hint of indigo. He fished in his top pocket for his sunglasses.

  “We’re somewhere else, aren’t we?” Orion asked eagerly. He was looking around with an entranced expression at the thick fronds crowning all the trees. Even the undergrowth had become thicker, with grass growing higher and turning a darker green. Creeping vines rose up to wrap themselves around the trees, sprouting white and lemon-yellow flowers.

  “Looks that way,” he said reassuringly. When he turned to look at the boy he could see that the path curved sharply behind them. He’d been walking in a more-or-less straight line for hours. Orion hadn’t noticed; he was holding up his friendship pendant, studying it intently. Since the ghost world he’d reclaimed it from Ozzie. The experience there had changed the boy’s opinion of the Silfen once again. They’d never be unquestioned idols again, but he was starting to accept them as true aliens. Ozzie supposed it was a sign of maturity.

  “Are there any of them nearby?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” Orion said, troubled. “I’ve never seen it like this before. It’s turned green.” He held it up to show Ozzie. The small exotic gem was shining a bright emerald as it dangled on the end of its chain. “Do you think it means something else is here?”

  “I’ve no idea what it means,” Ozzie said truthfully.

  The palm trees were thinning out, the thick grass coming up to their knees. Tochee was having to produce large powerful ripples along its locomotion ridges to shove its wide body through the clingy blades. Ozzie slowed in confusion, there was no path anymore, only the grass they’d trodden down behind them. Without the floppy fronds above his head, he could feel the star’s heat on his bare skin. Below his booted feet the ground was sloping downward. There were a lot of undulations ahead of them as the slope dipped away, but several kilometers in the distance was the unmistakable blue sparkle of the sea.

  NOW WHERE? Tochee’s eye patterns queried.

  Ozzie faced their alien friend and shrugged—a gesture that Tochee knew only too well by now.

  “We never walked through that,” Orion said abruptly. He was facing back the way they’d just come. Behind them was the rounded top of a modest mountain, its crown roughly covered by a jungle of palms and big ferns with a few spindly gray trees that might result if pines were crossed with eucalyptus. The whole patch couldn’t have been more than a kilometer across.

  Ozzie was working out what to say when an electronic bleep emerged from deep inside his backpack. The sound, so integral to Commonwealth society, was profoundly shocking here. He and Orion looked at each other in surprise.

  “Link to my wrist array,” Ozzie told his e-butler. There were function icons appearing in his virtual vision that hadn’t been there since the day he rode out of Lyddington. His inserts were regaining their full capacity. He shrugged off the backpack as if it had caught fire. His e-butler confirmed that his inserts were receiving a signal from his wrist array. He shook the contents of his backpack onto the ground, heedless of the mess. A tiny red power LED was shining on the side of his burnished wrist array. He slipped it around his hand and the malmetal contracted snugly. The OCtattoo on his forearm made contact with the unit’s i-spot. Lying amid the pile of clothes and packets he’d tipped out was a handheld array. He picked it up and switched it on. Its icons appeared immediately in his virtual vision. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. His e-butler started to back up insert files in both arrays. He let it do that while his virtual hands rearranged icons for the handheld array. Its screen unfurled to its full extent, measuring half a meter wide. “Please,” he prayed, and translucent amber fingers plucked symbols out of the linguistic files he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months.

  On the screen, the spiky flower patterns that Tochee used were displayed in the deepest purple that the screen’s resolution could manage.

  Tochee became very still. HELLO, its forward eye segment projected.

  “Our electronic systems are working again,” Ozzie said out loud. The handheld array translated into a series of patterns that it flashed up.

  I UNDERSTAND.

  “Are those Tochee’s speaking pictures?” a fascinated Orion asked, peering at the screen.

  The array translated, and Tochee produced an answer.

  “That is correct, small human one,” the array said. “They sit in an incorrect visual spectrum. However I can read them.”

  Orion whooped exuberantly and gave a massive victory jump, punching the air. “It’s me, it’s me, Tochee. I’m talking to you!” He gave Ozzie a radiant smile, and they high-fived.

  “I am aware of the communication,” the array translated for Tochee. “I have wished for this moment for a long time. My first true speech is to thank you, large human one, and small human one, for the companionship you have given me. Without you I would remain at the cold house. I would not like that.”

  Ozzie gave a small bow. “Our pleasure, Tochee. But this isn’t one way, man. We would have had difficulty leaving the Ice Citadel without you.”

  Orion rushed over to Tochee, who extended a tentacle of manipulator flesh that the boy squeezed happily. “This is great, it’s wonderful, Tochee. There’s so much I want to tell you. And ask, as well.”

  “You are kind, small human one. Large humans two, three, five, fifteen, twenty-three, and thirty also showed some consideration for my situation, as did other species at the cold house. I hope they are well.”

  “Which ones are those, Ozzie?”

  “I don’t know, man. I guess Sara is large human two, and George must be in there somewhere.” His virtual hand pulled the translation routines down out of stasis, slotting them into the large processing power of the handheld array. “Tochee, we need to improve our translation ability. I’d like you to talk to my machine, here.”

  “I agree. I have my own electronic units that I want to switch on.”

  “Okay, let’s go for it.”

  The big alien reached around with its manipulator flesh, and removed one of the heavy bags it was carrying. Ozzie, meanwhile, picked several sensor instruments out of his pile, switching them on one by one. “Man, I came this close to leaving these back at the Ice Citadel,” he grunted.

  “What have you got?” the excited boy asked.

  “Standard first contact team stuff. Mineral analyzers, resonance scanners, em spectrum monitors, microradar, magnometers. Things that’ll tell me a lot about the environment.”

  “How are they going to help?”

  “Not sure yet, man. It kinda depends on what we find. But this place is different from the others we’ve walked through. There must be a reason the Silfen have stopped screwing with electricity.”

  “Do you think…” Orion stopped, and looked around cautiously. “Is this the end of the road, Ozzie?”

  Ozzie very nearly told the boy not to be stupid. His own growing uncertainty stopped him. “I don’t know. If it is, I would have expected something a little more elaborate.” He gestured out at the rolling landscape. “This is more like a dead end.”

  “That’s what I thought,” the boy said meekly.

  Results from the sensors were building up in grids across Ozzie’s virtual vision. He ignored them to give the boy a reassuring hug. “No way, man.�
�

  “Okay.”

  Ozzie turned his attention back to the sensor results. He noticed that Tochee had switched on several electronic units. His own scans showed the alien’s systems to be sensors and processor units not entirely dissimilar to his own. Apart from that, there was little for his own units to go on. Strangely, this planet seemed to have no magnetic field. The general neutrino level was above average, though. Local quantum field readings were fractionally different to standard, though nothing like enough to produce the kind of warping necessary to open a wormhole—he thought it might be a residual from the electron damping effect. “Weird, but not weird enough,” he said quietly.

  “Ozzie, what’s that in the sky?”

  The handheld array flashed the question up for Tochee as well. The alien put aside its own gadgets to follow Orion’s pointing arm. Ozzie followed the boy’s gaze, narrowing his eyes as he squinted almost directly into the vivid sunlight. It looked as if there was some kind of silver cloud at very high altitude, a thin curve that stretched across the sun. When his retinal inserts brought their high-intensity filters on-line and zoomed in he changed his mind. No matter what magnification he used, the little strip of shimmering silver didn’t change. The planet had a ring. He tracked along it, using both array memories to file the image. The scintillations he could see coming from within the cloud were actually tiny motes. There must have been thousands of them. He wondered briefly how their composition differed from the rest of the ring. Then he came to where it crossed in front of the sun. It didn’t. And the scale shifted again, to a terrifying degree.

  “Christ fuck a duck,” Ozzie mouthed.

  What he could see was a halo of gas that went right around the star. Which meant the planet they were standing on was orbiting right inside it.

  “I know this place,” he said in astonishment.

  “What?” Orion blurted. “How could you?”

  Ozzie gave a very twitchy laugh. “I was told about it by someone else who walked the Silfen paths. He said he visited artifacts called tree reefs. They floated in a nebula of atmospheric gas. Wow, whatta you know, and I always thought his story was mostly bullshit. Guess I owe him an apology.”

  “Who was it, Ozzie? Who’s been here?”

  “Some dude called Bradley Johansson.”

  …

  After a five-minute trip, the train from Oaktier pulled up to platform twenty-nine in the Seattle CST station’s third passenger terminal. Stig McSobel stepped out and asked his e-butler to find the platform where he could catch a standard-class loop train to Los Angeles, which was the next stop on the trans-Earth line. It told him the loop trains all left from terminal two, so he hopped on the little monorail car that carried people between the terminals. He slid smoothly along the elevated rail as it took him out over the vast marshaling yard that had spread out over the land to the east of Seattle, while two-kilometer-long goods trains pulled by hulking great Damzung T5V6B electric engine units passed underneath him as they rolled out of the bulk-freight gateway to Bayovar, the Big15 connected directly to Seattle. While trans-Commonwealth express trains flashed along on their magrails like aircraft flying at zero altitude. Down to the south he could see a long line of gateway arches throwing off a pale blue light that produced long shadows across the weed-colonized concrete ground. The Seattle CST station was a junction for over twenty-seven phase one space worlds in addition to Bayovar, routing all of the freight and passengers that flowed among them. Thousands of trains a day trundled across the station, providing the huge web of commercial links that helped maintain Seattle’s high-tech research and industry base.

  Stig sat at one end of the tubular monorail car, quickly scanning his fellow travelers and transferring the images into files. His wrist array ran comparisons with the thousands of visual files he’d accumulated since he began working in the Commonwealth itself. Seven of the people in the monorail had been on the train from Oaktier, which was only normal. If one of them was following him, they had reprofiled their face since the last time they’d shared a train together.

  Terminal two was a huge metal and concrete dome, half of which was underground. Its multitude of platforms were arranged in a radial fashion on two levels, lower level for incoming, upper for departures. Stig paid cash for his standard-class ticket that would take him all the way around the loop to Calcutta, and took a moving walkway out to platform A-seventeen, where one of the twenty-carriage loop trains was just pulling in. He stood waiting casually by an open door on the second carriage, watching latecomers hurry across the platform. Nobody from the monorail car got onto the loop train. Satisfied, he went on board and walked down the carriages to the fifth. Only then did he take a seat.

  Hoshe Finn stood in the queue for the Bean Here franchise stall at the end of platform A-seventeen and watched his target get onto the local train. “Have your people got him?” he asked Paula, who was standing beside him.

  “Yes, thank you. Team B is boxing him. He just sat down in the fifth carriage.”

  He bought a coffee for himself and a tea for Paula. “So do you suspect any of team B?”

  “I don’t have any real suspects, sadly,” she said, and blew across the top of her cup. “That means I have to treat everyone as the possible leak.”

  “Does that include me?”

  She sipped her tea, and gave him a thoughtful look. “If you are working for an executive security service, or some corporate black ops division, then whoever planted you has resources and foresight beyond even my ability to counter.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Thank you for doing this, Hoshe.”

  “My pleasure. I just hope it gets you what you need.”

  “Me, too.”

  He stood beside the Bean Here stall and watched the train pull out of the station. All in all, it was a strange business, and whatever the outcome, he knew he wouldn’t like it. Either the President was killing off citizens with impunity, or that lunatic Bradley Johansson had been right all along. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

  It took ten minutes for the loop train to reach LA Galactic. Most of that was spent crawling slowly through the Seattle station as they waited for their slot amid the goods trains at the trans-Earth loop gateway. Centuries ago, when it was starting out, not even CST could afford a chunk of real estate in LA the size it needed to house a planetary station. So it moved south of San Clemente and leased some of Camp Pendelton from the U.S. government, in an agreement that provided the Pentagon with direct access to wormholes, giving them the ability to deploy troops anywhere on the planet (or off it). The military requirement had slowly ebbed as more and more of Earth’s population left to find their own particular brands of freedom and nationalism out among the stars, leaving fewer and fewer warlords and fanatics behind until finally the Unified Federal Nations came into existence. While the old armies were dying off, CST had continued its inexorable expansion. Over half of phase one space’s H-congruous planets had been discovered and explored from LA Galactic; and when the CST finally moved its exploratory division out to the Big15, the commercial division quickly stepped in to take up the slack. LA Galactic rivaled the stations on any of the Big15 for size and complexity.

  Stig got off the loop train on platform three in the Carralvo terminal, a giant multisegment modernistic building of white concrete bled even whiter by California’s unforgiving sunlight. Despite the sheer size of the structure, it thrummed and vibrated from the passage of trains that wound in and out of it along elegant curving viaducts, that were sometimes stacked three high thanks to elaborate twisting buttresses. He could have found his way around the Carralvo in complete darkness, and not just the public areas; the utility corridors, management offices, and staff facilities were all loaded in his insert files. Not that he really needed the reference. The other seven passenger terminals were equally familiar.

  He had spent years working here. If the Guardians could be said to havea regular base of operations in the Commonwe
alth it was at LA Galactic. It was the perfect, and essential, place for them. Hundreds of thousands of tons of industrial and consumer products were routed between its gateways every day. Food imports came to over a million tons, while raw materials in transit accounted for an even bigger market. Thousands of import-export companies, from the Intersolar giants to virtuals that were no more than a coded array space and a numbered bank account, had their offices and warehouses and transport depots within the city-sized station compound. Each one was plugged into the giant network of rails and CST cargo-handling facilities, both physically and electronically. Each one with multiple accounts in the finance network. Each one with links to the Regulated Goods Directorate. Each one with offices, from entire skyscrapers to suites of leased rooms. They grew, shrank, went bankrupt, floated and went Intersolar, moved headquarters from one block to another, changed personnel, merged, fought each other bitterly for contracts. It was supercapitalism in a confined pressure-cooker environment that was merciless to any weakness.

  Over the decades, Adam Elvin had formed and folded dozens of companies at LA Galactic. He wasn’t alone. The number of companies that came and went within a single month could often be measured in hundreds. His were hidden amid the flow, no different from all the other chancers who set themselves up to supply markets they either knew about or believed in. He would create identities for himself, along with all the associated datawork, and use the name to register a company that wouldn’t be used for years. When he did start it up, it would be as a legitimate business competing for trade along with all the others.

  It was a process that had served the Guardians well. Every operation to deliver armaments and equipment to Far Away involved a front at LA Galactic. It allowed him to track the shipments passively. And at some time all the items would pass through for checking, or switching, or to be disguised. As far as Paula Myo and the Serious Crimes Directorate knew, they were just another rented warehouse in the chain.

  This time, with Johansson embarking upon his planet’s revenge project, and the navy becoming perilously efficient in pursuing them, the scale of the operation was larger than ever before, and its focus expanded. After Venice Coast, Adam was developing his paranoia to new heights.