Martin glanced at her. “You’ve got somewhere specific in mind to—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said tersely. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, winding the boy up like that. Either of you two noticed the air stinks?”
“Yeah.” Martin yawned widely. “Are we about—”
“—I am not a—” A thundering chorus of popping noises sounded outside the cabin. “—boy!” Vassily finished with a squeak.
“Belt up, kid. Main engine coming on in five seconds.”
Martin tensed, unconsciously tightening his belt. “What’s our descent curve?”
“Waypoint one coming up: ten-second course adjustment, one-point-two gees. We sit tight for four minutes or so, then we hit waypoint two, and burn for two hours at two and a quarter gees—this ends ‘bout four thousand klicks elevation relative to planetary surface, and we’ll hit atmosphere sixteen minutes later at about four k.p.s. We’ll have some reaction mass left, but I really don’t want to power up the main engine once we’re in air we’ll have to breathe afterward; so we’re going to drop the propulsion module once we’re suborbital and it’ll kick itself back into a graveyard orbit with the last of its fuel.”
“Er.” Vassily looked puzzled. “Four k.p.s. Isn’t that a bit fast?”
“No it’s—” A high-pitched roar cut into Rachel’s explanation, jolting everything in the capsule back toward the rear bulkhead. Ten seconds passed. “It’s only about Mach 12, straight down. And we’ll have dropped the engines overboard, first. But don’t worry, we’ll slow up pretty fast when we hit the atmosphere. They used to do this sort of thing all the time during the Apollo program.”
“The Apollo program? Wasn’t that back in the days when space travel was experimental?” Martin noticed that where Vassily was gripping the back of his chair, the lad’s knuckles had turned white. How interesting.
“Yeah, that was it,” Rachel said casually. “‘Course, they didn’t have nuclear power back then—was it before or after the Cold War?”
“Before, I think. The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?”
“Cold War?” piped Vassily.
“Back on Earth, about four, five hundred years ago,” Rachel explained.
“But they were doing this, and they couldn’t even build a steam engine?”
“Oh, they could build steam engines,” Martin said airily. “But they powered them by burning rock oil under the boilers. Fission reactors were expensive and rare.”
“That doesn’t sound very safe,” Vassily said dubiously. “Wouldn’t all that oil explode?”
“Yes, but Earth is an early population three planet, and quite old; the isotope balance is lousy, not enough uranium-235.”
“Too damn much if you ask me,” Rachel muttered darkly.
“I think you’re trying to confuse me, and I really don’t like that. You think you’re so sophisticated, you Terrans, but you don’t know everything! You still can’t keep terrorists from blowing up your cities, and for all your so-called sophistication you can’t control your own filthy impulses—meddling fools by politics, meddling fools by nature!”
Another burp from an attitude control thruster. Rachel reached over and grabbed Martin’s shoulder. “He’s got us nailed.”
“Aye up, ‘e’s got us bang to rights. It’s a fair cop, guv.”
Vassily glanced from one of them to the other in bewilderment; his ears began to glow bright red. Rachel laughed. “If that’s meant to be a Yorkshire accent, I’m a Welsh ferret, Martin!”
“Well, I’d be pleased to stuff you down my trousers any day of the week, my dear.” The engineer shook his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted Vassily’s glow spreading from ears to neck. “You’ve got a lot to learn about the real world, kid. I’m surprised your boss let you out on your own without a minder.”
“Will you stop calling me a child!”
Rachel hunched around in her chair and stared at him. “But you are, you know. Even if you were sixty years old, you’d still be a child to me. As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you’re a child. You could fuck your way through every brothel in New Prague, and you’d still be an overgrown schoolboy.” She looked at him sadly. “What would you call a parent who never let their children grow up? That’s what we think of your government.”
“But that’s not why I’m here! I’m here to protect the Republic! I’m here because—”
The main motor went critical and spooled up to full power with a deep bass roar, rattling the capsule like a tin can in a hurricane. Vassily was shoved back into his hammock, gasping for breath; Rachel and Martin subsided into their seats, slugged by a solid twenty meters per second of acceleration— not the five-hundred-kilo chest-squishing gorilla of re-entry, but enough force to make them lie back and concentrate on breathing.
The engine burned for a long time, carrying them away from the drifting wreckage of battle, toward an uncertain rendezvous.
DELIVERY SERVICE
The husks of two spent Bouncer ships drifted toward the edge of the system, tumbling end over end at well over stellar escape velocity. They didn’t matter anymore; they’d done their job.
Behind them, the wreckage of the New Republican home fleet scattered like ashes on a searing hot wind. Two-thirds of the ships bubbled and foamed, engineering segments glowing red-hot as the disassembler goop stripped them down; bizarre metallic fuzz sprawled across their hulls, like fungal hyphae drilling through the heart of dead and rotting trees. Almost all of the other warships were boosting at full power, pursuing escape trajectories that would take them back into deep space. The space around Rochard’s World was full of screaming countenneasure signals, jammers and feedback howlers and interferometry decoys and penaids that—unknown to their owners—were proving as effective as shields slung over the backs of tribesmen fleeing in the face of machine-gun fire. A scattering of much smaller, slower ships continued to decelerate toward the planet ahead, or coasted slowly in. For the most part the remaining Bouncers ignored these: lifeboats weren’t generally troublemakers. Finally, coasting in from a range of astronomical units, came the first trade ships of the merchant fleet that followed the Festival around. Their signals were gaily entertaining, flashy and friendly: unlike the New Republic, these were not ignorant of the Festival, its uses and hazards.
But the Festival barely noticed the approaching trade fleet. Its attention was directed elsewhere: soon it would give birth to its next generation, wither, and die.
Antimatter factories the size of continents drilled holes in the fiery solar corona, deep in the curved-space zone just outside the photosphere of Rochard’s star. Huge accelerator rings floated behind their wake shields, insulated by kilometers of vacuum; solar collectors blacker than night soaked up solar energy, megawatts per square meter, while masers dumped waste heat into the interstellar night overhead. Every second, milligram quantities of antimatter accumulated in the magnetic traps at the core of the accelerators. Every ten thousand seconds or so, another hazardous multigram payload shipped out on a beam-riding cargo pod to the starwisp assembly zone around Sputnik. There were a hundred factories in all; the Festival had dismantled a large Kuiper body to make them and placed the complex barely a million kilometers above the stellar surface. Now the investment was paying off in raw energy, a million times more than the planetary civilization had been able to muster.
The starwisps weren’t the Festival’s only cargo, nor were the Fringe and the Critics the only passengers to visit the planetary surface. Deep in the planetary biosphere, vectors armed with reverse transcriptase and strange artificial chromosomes were at work. They’d re-entered over the temperate belt of the northern continent, spreading and assimilating the contents of the endogenous ecology. Complex digestive organs, aided by the tools of DNA splicing and some fiendishly complicated expression control operons, assimilated and dissected chromosomes from everything the p
ackage’s children swallowed. A feedback system—less than conscious but more than vegetable—spliced together a workable local expression of a design crafted thousands of years ago; one that could subsist on locally available building blocks, a custom saprophyte optimized for the ecology of Rochard’s World.
Huge Lamarckian syncitia spread their roots across the pine forest, strangling the trees and replacing them with plants shaped like pallid pines. They were fruiting bodies, mushrooms sprouting atop the digested remains of an entire ecosystem. They grew rapidly; special cells deep in their cores secreted catalytic enzymes, nitrating the long polysaccharide molecules, while in the outer bark long, electrically conductive vessels took shape like vegetable neurons.
The forest parasite grew at a ferocious rate, fruiting bodies sprouting a meter a day. It was a much longer-term project than the rewiring of the incommunicado civilization that the Festival had stumbled across; and one more grand than any of the sentient passengers could have imagined. All they were aware of was the spread of intrusive vegetation, an annoying and sometimes dangerous plague that followed the Festival as closely as did the Mimes and other beings of the Fringe. Come the dry season, and the Festival forest would become a monstrous fire hazard; but for now, it was just a sideshow, still sprouting slowly toward its destiny, which it would reach around the time the Festival began to die.
Fifty kilometers above the ocean, still traveling at twelve times the speed of sound, the naval lifeboat spread its thistledown rotors behind the shock front of re-entry and prepared to autorotate.
“Makes you wish the Admiralty’d paid for the deluxe model,” Lieutenant Kossov muttered between gritted teeth as the capsule juddered and shook, skipping across the ionosphere like a burning sodium pellet on a basin of water. Commander Leonov glared at him: he grunted as if he’d been punched, and shut up.
Thirty kilometers lower and fifteen hundred kilometers closer to the coast of the northern continent, the plasma shock began to dissipate. The rotors, glowing white at their tips, freewheeled in the high stratosphere, spinning in a bright blurring disk. Lying in an acceleration couch in the cockpit, the flight crew grappled with the problem of landing a hypersonic autogyro on an airfield with no ground control and no instrument guidance, an airfield that was quite possibly under siege by hostiles. Robard’s blood ran cold as he thought about it. Reflexively, he glanced sideways at his master: a life dedicated to looking after the Admiral had brought him to this fix, but still he looked to him for his lead, even though the old warhorse was barely conscious.
“How does he look?” Robard asked.
Dr. Hertz glanced up briefly. “As well as can be expected,” he said shortly. “Did you bring his medications with you?”
Robard winced. “Only his next doses. There are too many pill bottles—”
“Well then.” Hertz fumbled with his leather bag, withdrew a pre-loaded syringe. “Was he taking laudanum? I recall no such prescription, but…”
“Not to my knowledge.” Robard swallowed. “Diabetes, a dyskinesia, and his um, memory condition. Plus his legs, of course. But he was not in pain.”
“Well, then, let’s see if we can wake him up.” Hertz held up the syringe and removed the protective cap. “I would not normally so brutalize an old man before landing, especially one who has suffered a stroke, but under the circumstances—”
Twelve kilometers up, the autogyro dropped below Mach 2. Rotors shedding a disk of thunderous lightning, its ground track angled across the coast; where it passed, animals fled in panic. The lifeboat continued to lose altitude while Hertz administered his wake-up injection. Less than a minute later, the craft dropped to subsonic speed, and a new keening note entered the cabin. Robard glanced up instinctively.
“Just restarting the aerospikes,” Kossov mumbled. “That way we can make a powered touchdown.”
The Admiral groaned something inarticulate, and Robard leaned forward. “Sir. Can you hear me?”
The lifeboat flew sideways at just under half the speed of sound, a bright cylinder of fire spurting from the tips of the rotor disk that blurred around its waist. The copilot repeatedly tried to raise Imperial Traffic Control, to no avail; he exchanged worried glances with his commander. Trying to land under the missile batteries of the Skull Hill garrison, with no word on who was holding the city below, would be nerve-racking enough. To do so in a lifeboat short on fuel, with a desperately sick admiral aboard—
But there was no breath of search radar bouncing off the lifeboat’s hull. Even as it rose over the castle’s horizon, drifting in at a sedate four hundred kilometers per hour, there was no flicker of attention from the ground defense batteries. The pilot keyed his intercom switch. “The field’s still there even though nobody’s talking to us. Visual approach, stand by for a bumpy ride.”
The Admiral muttered something incoherent and opened his eyes. Robard leaned back in his seat as the rotor tip aerospikes quietened their screeching roar, and the pilot fed the remaining power into the collective pitch, trading airspeed against altitude. “Urk.” Lieutenant Kossov looked green.
“Hate ‘copters,” mumbled the Admiral.
The motors shut down, and the lifeboat dropped, autorotating like a fifty-ton sycamore seed. There was a brief surge of upward acceleration as the pilot flared out before touchdown, then a bone-jarring crunch from beneath the passenger compartment. A screech of torn metal told its own story; the lifeboat tilted alarmingly, then settled back drunkenly, coming to rest with the deck tilted fifteen degrees.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” asked Robard.
“Shut up and mind your business,” grated Commander Leonov. He hauled himself out of his couch and cast about. “You! Look sharp, man the airlock! You and you, break open the small-arms locker and stand by to clear the way.” He began to clamber down the short ladder to the flight deck, hanging on tight despite the fifteen-degree overhang, still barking out orders. “You, Robot or whatever your name is, get your man ready to move, don’t know how long we’ve got. Ah, Pilot-captain Wolff. I take it we’re on the field. Did you see any sign of a welcoming committee?”
The pilot waited while Leonov backed down the ladder, then followed him down to the deck. “Sir, humbly report we have arrived at Novy Petrograd emergency field, pad two. I was unable to contact traffic control or port air defense control before landing, but nobody shot at us. I didn’t see anyone standing around down there, but there are big changes to the city—it’s not like the briefing cinematograph. Regret to report that on final approach we ran a little short of fuel, hence the bad landing.”
“Acceptable under the circumstances.” Leonov turned to the airlock. “You there! Open the hatch, double quick, ground party will secure the perimeter immediately!”
The Admiral seemed to be trying to sit up. Robard cranked up the back of his wheelchair, then leaned down to release the cables securing it in place. As he did so, the Admiral made a curious chuckling noise.
“What is it, sir?”
“Heh—‘omit commit. Heh!”
“Absolutely, sir.” Robard straightened up. Fresh air gusted into the confines of the lifeboat; someone had tripped the override on the airlock, opening both hatches simultaneously. He could smell rain and cherry blossoms, grass and mud.
Lieutenant Kossov followed the ground party through the airlock, then ducked back inside. “Sir. Humbly report, ground party has secured the site. No sign of any locals.”
“Hah, good. Lieutenant, you and Robot can get the old man down. Follow me!” Leonov followed the last of the officers— the flight crew and a couple of lieutenant commanders Robard didn’t recognize, members of the Admiral’s staff or the bridge crew—into the airlock.
Together, Robard and Lieutenant Kossov grunted and sweated the Admiral’s wheelchair down a flimsy aluminum stepladder to the ground. Once his feet touched concrete, Robard breathed in deeply and looked around. One of the lifeboat’s three landing legs looked wrong, a shock absorber not fully exten
ded. It gave the craft an oddly lopsided appearance, and he knew at once that it would take more than a tankful of fuel to get it airborne again, much less into orbit. Then his eyes took in what had happened beyond the rust-streaked concrete landing pad, and he gasped.
The landing field was less than two kilometers from the brooding walls of the garrison, on the outskirts of the scantily settled north bank of the river. South of the river, there should have been a close-packed warren of steep-roofed houses, church spires visible in the distance before a knot of municipal buildings. But now the houses were mostly gone. A cluster of eldritch silvery ferns coiled skyward from the former location of the town hall, firefly glimmerings flickering between their fractally coiled leaves. The Ducal palace showed signs of being the worse for wear; one wall looked as if it had been smashed by a giant fist, the arrogant bombast of heavy artillery.
The Admiral slapped feebly at the arm of his chair. “’Ot right!”
“Absolutely, my lord.” Robard looked around again, this time hunting the advance landing party. They were halfway to the control tower when something that glowed painfully green slashed overhead, making the ground shake with the roar of its passage.
“Enemy planes!” shouted Kossov. “See, they’ve followed us here! We must get the Admiral to cover, fast!” He pushed Robard aside and grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, nearly tipping it over in his haste.
“I say!” Robard snapped, angry and disturbed at his position being usurped. He cast a worried glance at the sky and decided not to confuse the issue further; the Lieutenant’s behavior was unseemly, but the need to get the admiral to safety was pressing. “I say, there’s a path there. I’ll lead. If we can reach the tower—”
“You! Follow us!” Kossov called to the perimeter guards, confused and worried ratings who, thankful at being given some direction, shouldered their carbines and tagged along. It was a warm morning, and the Lieutenant wheezed as he pushed the wheelchair along the cracked asphalt path. Robard paced along beside him, a tall, sepulchrally black figure, hatchet-faced with worry. Weeds grew waist high to either side of the path, and other signs of neglect were omnipresent; the field looked as if it had been abandoned for years, not just the month since the invasion. Bees and other insects buzzed and hummed around, while birds squawked and trilled in the distance, shamefully exposing the locals’ neglect of their DDT spraying program.
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