“They’ve already been here,” she pointed out.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, there is that.”
“So why come back?”
“Lots of possible reasons. It could be some university co-funding a one-shot mission to take a look at systems in the Bureau database. Pure research. It could be a small mining outfit paying to be part of the probe’s mission profile, looking for commercially useful data.”
She passed a hand over her shaven scalp. “It’s not any of those things, though.”
“No. It’s a dangle.”
She raised an eyebrow.
I sighed. “You’re looking for someone,” I said. “You can’t be sure where they are, but you can be sure who they are, and if you think hard enough about it you can come up with an idea of the kind of place they might be. You can’t physically visit all these places and check them out yourself, so what you do is send out provocations. That’s your dangle. And if one of your provocations gets a response, you know you’ve found something worth checking out.”
She blinked at me.
“The Bureau second-guessed the Writers. It’s been grand-touring probes through all the systems in its database where it thinks they might be hiding, hoping that one will get shot down.”
“Could still be a malf, though.”
“So you send a manned follow-up to check it out. If the probe’s just broken down or hit something, no harm. On the other hand . . .”
“How long?”
I shrugged. “With the latest motors they have? If they come from Nova California? Fifteen months.” I saw her relax fractionally and said, “The Bureau has thousands of manned assets in transit at any one time. They drop out of hyperdrive at five-day intervals to make contact with base because the Bureau’s terrified of losing them. That’s why their ships take so long to get anywhere. All it takes is for one of them to drop out within striking distance of us and get retasked. There’s no telling when they could get here. For all we know, they’re insystem right now.”
“The dewline would tell us.”
“The dewline didn’t spot the probe, and I was talking to Shaker about that when you muscled in.”
She ignored that. “Dammit,” she said. “We did this once before, you know, before you arrived. We lost two habs; we never did find them.”
“I know,” I said, although I thought lost was a relative term. For all anyone knew, the populations of those habs had taken a snap vote and elected to use the opportunity to strike off and set up their own colony.
“It was early on; the tech hadn’t settled yet, we were still jumpy and unsure of ourselves. We did a proper check of the data afterwards,” she went on, looking up at the ceiling of the bar. “There’d been a glitch, made the dewline think we were under attack. We lost forty thousand people, all because of a few crappy lines of code.” She looked at me. “We can’t do that again, Duke.”
“No,” I said. “And it’s my responsibility, anyway.”
* * *
I was having dinner in a restaurant on Angel’s Rest when a very tall woman came over and sat down opposite me.
It was ice-storm season and Probity City was battened down for the duration. I’d walked out on my job and was gradually burning my way through my savings in a slow drift through the Colonies. I’d spent a year or so with the mining operation in Gliese 581c’s asteroid belt, a few months on Holden’s Landing, and I’d had the misfortune to arrive on Angel’s Rest just as the weather went into its regular decade-long overdrive. Now I was stuck here, watching the figures of my bank balance unspooling and considering going into suspension until the weather calmed down and the ground-to-orbit shuttles were able to take off again. What I shouldn’t have been doing was sitting in the expensive restaurant of my expensive hotel and eating an expensive meal. The food was outstanding, though.
I’d just started on my main course when the very tall woman came in. Every head in the place turned in her direction. She was very nearly three metres tall, slim as a willow, stunningly beautiful, and bald as a coot, and she was wearing a clean but much-patched and repaired set of olive-green coveralls. She looked around the restaurant for a few moments as if looking for someone, then she came over to my table, pulled out the chair opposite me, and sat down and folded her hands in her lap. She looked mildly amused about something.
We looked at each other for a few moments, then one of the waiters came over and offered her the menu, but she waved it away. “I’ll just have an espresso, thanks all the same,” she told him.
“I’m afraid madam will have to order food if she wants to remain in the restaurant,” the waiter said.
She stared at him. Even sitting down she was almost as tall as he was. Then she reached out and grabbed a couple of breadsticks from the glass in the middle of the table. She crunched one and grinned at the waiter. “Espresso, thanks,” she said, and after another moment he backed away.
I went back to my Kobe beef.
After a minute or so, she said, “I watched your press release. Very funny.”
“I’m eating,” I said.
She noisily ate another breadstick until it annoyed me enough to make me look up from my meal.
“What makes a man like you quit a job like that?” she pondered, tipping her head to one side.
“If you’ve seen the release, you’ll have a good idea.”
She shrugged. “It was a good job, too. Lots of mucky-mucks in the BoC, but not that many high mucky-mucks.”
“I’m not talking to the Press,” I told her evenly. “I thought I made that clear.”
“Oh, I’m not the Press,” she said brightly. “I’m not even a groupie—and you do have your fair share, Mr. Faraday. I’m here to offer you a job.”
“I don’t want a job.”
She grinned. “Oh, c’mon, Duke—can I call you Duke?—everybody wants a job.”
“I don’t.”
“Well you can’t keep eating that stuff forever, then,” she said, nodding at my plate. “Man with expensive tastes and no job, that’s trouble.”
“I’ll manage.”
She leaned forward and clasped her hands together on the tabletop. “What if I were to offer you a way to do more than just manage? What if I were to offer you the chance to be part of a great adventure?”
“I’m really trying to have a quiet life, Ms. . . .”
“Lang. Conjugación Lang.” She smiled at me and lowered her voice until only I could hear her. “What if I were to offer you a way off this howling nightmare of a planet? Right now?”
“You have some kind of magic spaceship that takes off through seven - hundred - kilometre - an - hour blizzards?”
She wrinkled her nose and grinned coquettishly. “Oh, I have something better than that.”
* * *
Probity City’s spaceport was ringed with underground hangars, and in one of them nestled a little insystem tug, rough and blocky and unsubtle, covered in propulsion nozzles and tetherpoints and battered industrial tech.
“Very funny,” I said. I had finished my meal and then, at Conjugación Lang’s suggestion, packed what passed for my luggage and followed her down here, two hundred metres below the wind-scoured tundra of the spaceport.
Standing beside me, she nodded. “Good, isn’t it?”
The words Something Better Than That were sprayed on the side of the tug in Comic Sans, which really was the least of the little vehicle’s problems. It looked as if it could barely get off the ground on a calm midsummer’s afternoon, let alone reach orbit in the middle of an ice storm.
I turned to go, but she put a hand on my arm. It was a strong hand. She squeezed gently and I felt a thrill of panic. The Bureau was, in general, too smart and frankly too busy for petty score-settling, but I’d included a couple of ad hominem comments in my press release and the people I’d made them about were vindictive little bureaucrats who couldn’t sleep at night unless they had come out on top during the day. I’d probably been responsible for some
sleepless nights.
I said out loud for the benefit of the cameras in the hangar, “I claim political asylum.”
Lang looked down at me and beamed. “Bless you, Duke, I don’t work for the Bureau, this isn’t a kidnapping, and I spoofed all the cameras when I first got here. Nobody knows we’re here but us.” Her expression became serious. “Look. Just hear me out. If you still don’t want to come, I’ll bring you back and nobody will be any the wiser.”
“You’re crazy and I want to leave,” I told her. But she didn’t let go of my arm. Cameras or not, I was faced with the choice of having a fight with a very tall bald woman, or doing what she wanted. I said, “I’m a lawyer. What on earth do you want with a lawyer?”
She bugged her eyes out at me and licked her lips. “Never eaten a lawyer before.”
“Look at my face,” I said. “Look at my face while I scream in terror.”
She let go of me. “What you did, that took stones,” she said. “Not the quitting—anyone could have done that. Quitting and publicly criticising the Bureau like that, that’s unusual.”
Some years previously, a group of colonists had died while in suspension on their way to one of the newer settled worlds. Their families had brought a suit against the Bureau, and I had been one of many, many Bureau lawyers defending it. I hadn’t actually come to any great liking for any of the individuals involved, but there had been instances of sharp practice involved in assembling our defence with which I was not in the slightest bit comfortable.
I’d taken my concerns to my superiors, who immediately slapped me down and suggested that I take a week or so off to think over my position, without pay.
Now, I was a grown-up and I knew the road. I was at least self-aware enough to know that the world was not perfect and that monolithic entities such as the Bureau of Colonisation always get their way, and I was realistic enough to realise that either you get on board or you get bulldozed. It was, therefore, still something of a mystery to me why, after a couple of days mooching around my apartment, I had found myself drafting a letter of resignation and a press release which made me, for an hour or two, one of the most recognisable faces on Earth.
My departure and whistleblowing had not affected the case at all, but it had made me feel better. Not particularly heroic or righteous, but better about myself, which counts for a lot sometimes. It had not made me feel in any way special or valuable.
I said, “Other lawyers are available.”
She laughed. “We don’t want a lawyer, Duke, although a lawyer might come in handy from time to time. No, we want you. Now. Want to take a ride?”
I sighed. “Lead the way.”
We cycled through the tug’s little airlock—there was just barely room for us both—and into the cramped control room. Lang sat down in one of the control couches and started punching buttons and waking up displays.
“Sit down, Duke,” she told me.
I stood where I was, my tote slung over my shoulder, genuinely curious about a number of things. Firstly, whether the tug could actually take off at all. Secondly, how it was going, as she claimed, to get into orbit when it was a basically non-aerodynamic shape which would be flying through a storm of hail powerful enough to turn a skyscraper into an eroded stump. Thirdly, how she was planning to take off when spaceport control would have to open the doors at the end of the hangar which connected it with the tunnel leading to the surface. This was, I decided, going to be one of the shorter trips I had taken.
“Well, you might want to hang on to something, then,” she said.
I didn’t move.
She shrugged irritably. “Okay,” she said. “I gave you fair warning.” And she typed a couple of commands and I was falling.
I flailed my arms and legs and windmilled in mid-air, my inner ear refusing to process anything that made any sense. I threw up my expensive dinner, and it became a big sphere of vomit that drifted swiftly across the cabin, hit a bulkhead, and exploded into hundreds of smaller spheres of vomit. I threw up again.
“Oops,” said Lang. “Well, you can’t say I didn’t tell you so.” She reached up and snagged my belt and pulled me down until I could grab on to one of the armrests of the vacant control couch and strap myself in. She, meanwhile, was jackknifing expertly out of her own couch and unclipping a hose from a cupboard to vacuum up my dinner.
I sat panting in the control couch, my balance going haywire. And then I saw the centre display on the control panel and for a moment I forgot about everything.
We were in orbit.
Angel’s Rest hung in the display, a great dirty white ball of cloud. One side of it was dimpled by dozens of depressions where ice tornadoes tracked back and forth across the uninhabited Western Continent, a place so truly awful that no one had bothered to give it a name. There were plans to build great underground arcologies there one day, but that was something for the far future because for eleven months of the year it was literally impossible to travel anywhere in the west.
That there were people here at all was due mainly to a number of coincidences. The Bureau’s policy regarding exploration was to make it as cost-effective as possible; it used telescopes in Earth’s cometary halo to identify stars with exoplanets, then sent unmanned probes to them for a closer look. There were a lot of alien solar systems out there, so the probes usually had an itinerary running into the hundreds, and each initial probe was tasked for a simple fast-flyby, a snapshot of rocky worlds and gas giants and asteroid belts, with a special focus on any planets within the liquid-water band of that particular sun.
Stars with likely looking worlds—roughly Earth-sized rocky bodies within the liquid-water belt—got a second visit. The second wave of probes were tasked to stick around longer and do a proper survey of the system, but they were programmed with if/then loops—if the planet has an atmosphere then conduct a spectroscopic analysis; if the planet has no atmosphere then move on to the next target, that kind of thing—and that sort of programming is open to all kinds of errors.
In the case of Angel’s Rest, the second probe arrived near the beginning of the planet’s temperate phase. It found a rather chilly but still habitable world at the outside edge of the liquid-water zone—but Earth is in a similar position, and nobody’s ever complained about that—with a breathable atmosphere. It finished its tests, transmitted them back to base, and moved on.
The Bureau was under a bit of pressure in those days to start living up to its name and actually come up with a colonisation programme, and what they did next was cut some corners. The Bureau’s keywords when considering a planet’s suitability as a colony were environmental impact. Here, there was no problem. The highest form of animal life was a little smaller than a rabbit and lived in enormous burrow-colonies deep underground, and the most advanced form of plant life was an insanely tough and hardy hedge-thing that grew in sheltered places. People could live here without worrying about displacing native species. It was perfect. The Bureau filled up a transport with colonists and sent them on their way.
The efficiency of the hyperdrive motors back then being what they were, the colonists arrived just after the beginning of the next temperate phase, and the moment they were settled and had time to look around they realised that their new home was going to get a bit cold and windy in about fifteen years’ time. Instead of withdrawing the colony, which would have been a huge PR disaster, the Bureau funnelled resources into helping the colonists survive the coming ice-storm season. Half of them died anyway, which was the aforementioned huge PR disaster, but the survivors said something like, “Fuck it, we’re not going to let this place beat us,” and they were so well-prepared by the time the next hyperweather came along that nobody died. Angels were, by common agreement, some of the craziest people in the known universe.
Lang finished hoovering my sick out of the air and strapped herself back into her control couch. She looked over at me and grinned. “Good, innit?” she said.
“You can’t go into hyperdrive inside
a gravity well,” I said calmly. “The motors won’t work.”
“Ah.” She tapped the side of her nose with a fingertip. “I have magic motors.”
“No you don’t.”
She chuckled. “So. Have I impressed you?”
I burped, tasted sick, heaved, managed to keep what was left of my stomach contents where they were. I said, “Will you tell me how you did that?”
“No,” she said. “But I will take you to someone who will. Not that it’ll do you any good; only about four people understand it.”
I said, “Ms. Lang—”
“Connie.”
“Who do you work for, Connie?”
“Have you ever heard,” she said seriously, “of Isabel Potter?”
* * *
The Writers lived all the way across the system, which with the latest generation of hyperdrive motors took less time to reach than typing the destination coordinates into the navigation computer. It took me longer to sit down in the control couch of One Potato, Two Potato and do up the harness.
The Writers lived in a hollowed-out rock tucked away in the system’s pathetically modest asteroid belt. One Potato was a considerably smaller rock—most of our ships were hollowed-out asteroids of varying sizes—and we approached the Writers’ vessel like a pebble nudging up against Manhattan. There was a tunnel hidden away in the bottom of one of the many craters on the rock’s surface, near the axis at one end; we dropped smoothly into it and emerged in a cavern the size of an aircraft carrier, its tiered walls ranked with hundreds of tugs and ships. I found One Potato a space on one of the ledges, landed us, and floated through the docking tunnel into another, rock-walled tunnel.
As I drifted through the tunnel I felt my inner ears start to assign an up and a down, the rock’s rotation providing a semblance of gravity that grew stronger and stronger and drew me down to the tunnel’s floor and was eventually enough for me to bounce along. It was only a sixth of a gee or so, but after months in freefall I felt heavy and sluggish.
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