Firstborn

  And at the apex of this rickety structure of power and control was Bella, a compromise candidate in a compromised position.

  In the short term, she thought, the three spacegoing powers might try to leverage the sudden irruption of an actual threat into some kind of advantage over Africa, which had become prominent since being relatively spared by the sunstorm. The tectonic plates that underpinned the Council might start to shift, she thought uneasily, just at the very moment it was being called upon to act.

  “You’re thinking politics,” Paxton growled.

  “Yes,” she admitted. As if this anomaly, whatever it was, was just a new item on the agenda of the world’s business. But if this was another threat like the sunstorm, it could render all that business irrelevant at a stroke.

  Suddenly she felt weary. Old, worn-out. She found she resented that this crisis should be landed on her plate so soon into her chairmanship.

  And, looking at Paxton’s intent face, she wondered how much control she would have over events.

  “All right, Admiral, you have my attention. What do you recommend?”

  He stepped back. “I’ll gather more data, and set up a briefing on options. Best to do that back in Washington, I guess. Soon as we can manage.”

  “All right. But we’ll have to look at the wider implications. What to tell the people, or not. How to prepare for the incoming anomaly, whatever it is.”

  “We’ll need more data before we can do that.”

  “And what do we tell those we report to?”

  Paxton said, “As far as the politics go it’s essential we make sure our mandate and capability aren’t diluted by politico bull. And, Chair, if you’re agreeable, for the briefing I’ll incorporate material gathered by the Committee.”

  She felt the hairs on her neck prickle a warning; after most of a lifetime at the upper levels of large organizations she knew when a trap was being set. “You mean your Committee of Patriots.”

  He smiled, sharklike. “You should come visit us sometime, Madam Chair. We work out of the old Navy Special Projects Office in DC; a lot of us are old navy fliers of one stripe or another. Our mission, grant you it’s self-appointed, is to monitor the responses of our governments and super-government agencies to the alien intervention that led to the sunstorm, and the ongoing emergency since. Once again your predecessor didn’t want to know about this. I believe he thought dabbling with the wacko fringe would damage his fine career. But now we really do have something out there, Madam Chair, a genuine anomaly. Now’s the time to listen to us, if you’re ever going to.”

  Again it was hard to gainsay that. “I feel you’re drawing me into an argument, Bob. Okay, subject to my veto.”

  “Thank you. There’s one specific.”

  “Go on.”

  “One beef the Committee has always had has been with the almost willful way the authorities have never followed up the hints of the alien. Developing our own weaponry and armor is one thing, but to ignore the enemy’s capability is criminal. However we do know of someone who might be our way in to that whole murky business.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman called Bisesa Dutt. Ex British Army. Long story. She’s the reason why I came to London today; she has a base here. But she’s not around, or her daughter. Since arriving here I got word she may have booked herself into a Hibernaculum in the States, under an assumed name. Of course she may have moved on from there by now.” He eyed Bella. “With your permission I’ll track her down.”

  She took a breath. “I have the authority for that?”

  “If you want it.” He left it hanging.

  “All right. Find her. Send me your file on her. But stay legal, Admiral. And be nice.”

  He grinned. “All part of the service.”

  Paxton was happy, she saw suddenly. He had been waiting for this moment, waiting out the whole of his anticlimactic life since his heroic days on Mars during the sunstorm. Waiting for the sky to fall again.

  Bella suppressed a shudder. As for herself, she only hoped she could avoid creating any more James Duflots.

  9: FLORIDA

  Myra got Bisesa out of the Hibernaculum and took her to Florida.

  They flew in a fat-bodied, stub-winged plane. It was driven by a kind of air-breathing rocket called a scramjet. Bisesa still felt frail, but she used to ride helicopters in the army, and she studied this new generation of craft—new to a sleeper like her, anyhow—with curiosity. A jaunt across the continent, from Arizona to Florida, was nothing; this sturdy vessel really came into its own on very long-haul flights when it had the chance to leap up out of the atmosphere altogether, like a metallic salmon.

  But the security was ferocious. They even had to submit to searches and scans in flight. This paranoia was a legacy not just of the sunstorm but of incidents when planes and spaceplanes had been used as missiles, including the destruction of Rome a couple of years before the storm.

  Security was in fact an issue from the beginning. Bisesa had come out of her Hibernaculum pod without the latest ident tattoos. There was an office of the FBI maintained on site at the Hibernaculum to process patients like her, refugees from slightly more innocent days—and to make sure no fugitives from justice had tried to flee through time. But Myra had come to Bisesa’s room with a boxy piece of equipment that stamped a tattoo onto Bisesa’s face, and she gave her an injection she described as “gene therapy.” Then they had slipped out of the Hibernaculum through a goods entrance without going anywhere near that FBI office.

  Since then they had passed every check.

  Bisesa felt faintly disturbed. Whoever Myra had hooked up with evidently had significant resources. But she trusted Myra implicitly, even though this was a strange new Myra, suddenly aged and embittered, a new person with whom she was, tentatively, building a new relationship. Really, she had no choice.

  They deplaned at Orlando and spent a night at a cheap tourist hotel downtown.

  Bisesa was faintly surprised that people still shuttled around the world to destinations like this. Myra said it was mostly nostalgic. The latest virtual reality systems, by interfacing directly with the central nervous system, were capable even of simulating the sensation of motion, acceleration. You could ride a roller coaster around the moons of Jupiter, if you wanted. What theme park could compete with that? When the last of the pre-sunstorm generations gave up chasing their childhood dreams and died off, it seemed likely that most people would rarely venture far from the safety of their bunker-like homes.

  They ate room service food and drank minibar wine, and slept badly.

  The next morning, a driverless car was waiting outside the hotel for them. It was of an odd, chunky design that Bisesa didn’t recognize.

  Cocooned, they were driven off at what felt like a terrific speed to Bisesa, with the traffic a hairsbreadth close. She wasn’t sorry when the windows silvered over, and she and Myra sat in a humming near-silence, with only the faintest of surges to tell them that they were speeding out of the city.

  When they drew to a halt the doors slid back, allowing bright sunlight to flood into the car, and Bisesa heard the cries of gulls, and smelled the unmistakable tang of salt.

  “Come on.” Myra clambered out of the car, and helped her mother follow stiffly.

  It was March, but even so the heat hammered down on Bisesa. They were on a stretch of tarmac—not a road or a parking lot, it looked more like a runway, stretching off into the distance, lined with blockhouses. On the horizon she saw gantries, some of them orange with rust, so remote they were misted with distance. To the north—it had to be that way, judging from the wind blowing off the sea—she saw something glimmering, a kind of line scratched onto the sky, tilted a little away from the vertical. Hard to see, elusive, perhaps it was some kind of contrail.

  There couldn’t be any doubt where she was. “Cape Canaveral, right?”

  Myra grinned. “Where else? Remember you brought me here on a tourist trip when I was six?”

 
“I expect it’s changed a bit since then. This is turning into quite a ride, Myra.”

  “Then welcome back to Canaveral.” A young man approached them; a smart suitcase trundled after him. Ident-tattooed, he was sweating inside a padded orange jumpsuit plastered with NASA logos.

  “What are you, a tourist guide?”

  “Hi, Alexei,” Myra said. “Don’t mind my mother. After nineteen years she got out of bed on the wrong side.”

  He stuck out his hand. “Alexei Carel. Good to meet you, Ms. Dutt. I suppose I am your guide for the day—sort of.”

  Twenty-five or twenty-six, he was a good-looking boy, Bisesa thought, with an open face under a scalp that was shaven close, though black hair sprouted thickly, like a five o’clock shadow. He looked oddly uncomfortable, though, as if he wasn’t used to being outdoors. Bisesa felt like an ambassador from the past, and wanted to make a good impression on this sunstorm boomer. She gripped his warm hand. “Call me Bisesa.”

  “We don’t have much time.” He snapped his fingers and the suitcase opened. It contained two more orange suits, neatly folded, and more gear: blankets, water bottles, packets of dried food, what might have been an assembly-kit chemical toilet, a water purifying kit, oxygen masks.

  Bisesa looked at this junk with apprehension. “It’s like the gear we used to take on field hikes in Afghanistan. We’re taking a ride, are we?”

  “That we are.” Alexei hauled the jumpsuits out of the suitcase. “Put these on, please. This corner of the facility is low on surveillance, but the sooner we’re in camouflage the better.”

  “Right here?”

  “Come on, Mum.” Myra was already unzipping her blouse.

  The jumpsuit was easy to put on; it seemed to wriggle into place, and Bisesa wondered if it had some limited smartness of its own. Alexei handed her boots, and she found gloves and a kind of balaclava helmet in a pocket.

  In the Florida sun, once she was zipped up she was hot. But evidently she was headed somewhere much colder.

  Myra bundled their clothes into a smaller pack she took from the car, which also contained their spare underwear and toiletries. She threw the pack into the suitcase, which folded closed. Then she patted the car. Empty, it closed itself up and rolled away.

  Alexei grinned. “All set?”

  “As we’ll ever be,” Myra said.

  Alexei snapped his fingers again. The tarmac under Bisesa’s feet shuddered.

  And a great slab of it dropped precipitately, taking the three of them and the suitcase down into darkness. A metal lid closed over them with a clang.

  “Shit,” Bisesa said.

  “Sorry,” Alexei said. “Meant for cargo, not people.”

  Fluorescents lit up, revealing a concrete corridor.

  10: LAUNCH COMPLEX 39

  Alexei led them to an open-topped vehicle a little like a golf cart.

  They clambered aboard. Bisesa felt bulky and clumsy, moving in her jumpsuit. Even the suitcase was more graceful than she was.

  The cart moved off smoothly down the tunnel. It was long and crudely cut, and it stretched off into a darkness dimly lit by widely spaced fluorescent tubes. There was a musty smell, but at least it was a little cooler down here.

  “This is kind of a cargo conduit,” Alexei said. “Not meant for passengers.”

  “But it’s away from prying eyes,” Bisesa said.

  “You got it. It’s a couple of klicks but we’ll be there in no time.”

  His accent was basically American, Bisesa thought, but with an odd tang of French, long vowels and rolled r’s. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ve slept through the rebuilding, haven’t you? We’re heading for LC-39.”

  Faint memories stirred in Bisesa’s head. “Launch Complex 39. Where they launched the Apollos from.”

  “And later the space shuttles, yeah.”

  “Now it’s used for something else entirely,” Myra said. “You’ll see.”

  “Of course it had to be LC-39 they used,” Alexei said. “As indeed it had to be Canaveral. I mean, it’s not an unsuitable site, especially now they have the hurricanes licked. There are better locations, closer to the equator, but no, it had to be here. The irony is that to launch the new Saturns that are taking the Apollo retreads into orbit, they had to build a new pad altogether.”

  Bisesa still didn’t know what they were talking about. They used the pad for what? “Carel—how do I know that name?”

  “You may have met my father. Bill Carel? He worked with Professor Siobhan McGorran.”

  It was a long time since Bisesa had heard that name. Siobhan had been Britain’s Astronomer Royal at the time of the sunstorm, and had ended up playing a significant role in mankind’s response to the crisis—and in Bisesa’s own destiny.

  “My father was with her as a graduate student. They worked together on quintessence studies.”

  “On what?…Never mind.”

  “That was before the sunstorm. Now Dad’s a full professor himself.” The cart slowed. “Here we go.” He hopped nimbly off the cart before it had stopped. The women and the suitcase followed a bit more cautiously.

  They gathered on a block of tarmac. A lid opened above them with a metallic snap, revealing a slab of blue sky.

  Alexei said, “We shouldn’t be challenged aboveground. If we are, let me do the talking. Hold tight, now.” He snapped his fingers.

  The tarmac block became an elevator that surged upward with a violence that made Bisesa stagger.

  They emerged into sunlight. Alexei had seemed more comfortable underground; now he flinched from the open sky.

  Bisesa glanced around, trying to get her bearings. They were at the focus of roads that snaked out over the flat coastal plain of Canaveral, crammed with streams of vehicles, mostly trucks. There was even a kind of monorail system along which a train of podlike compartments zipped, glistening and futuristic. All this traffic poured into this place.

  And before her was a vast rusting slab, a platform that reminded her oddly of an oil rig, but stranded on the land, and mounted on tremendous caterpillar tracks. The crude metal shell of the thing was stamped with logos: mostly “Skylift Consortium,” a name that rang faint bells. Close by stood more strange assemblies, squat tubes that stood erect in mobile stands, like cannon pointing up at the pale blue sky.

  “This platform looks for all the world like one of those old crawlers they used to use to haul the Saturns and the shuttles out to the pad.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Alexei said. “A mobile launch platform, reused.”

  “And what are those cannon? Weapons?”

  “No,” Alexei said. “They’re the power supply.”

  “For what?”

  Myra said gently, “Things have changed, Mum. Look up.”

  Mounted on top of the big crawler was what looked like a minor industrial facility, where unlikely-looking machines rolled around in a kind of choreography. They seemed to be trucks, basically, but with solar-cell wings on their flanks, and on their roofs were pulleylike mechanisms that made them look like stranded cable-cars. Their hulls were all stamped with the Skylift logo.

  These peculiar engines were lining up before a kind of ribbon, shining silver, looking no wider than Bisesa’s hand, that rose up from the platform. Each truck in turn approached the ribbon, dipped its pulley spindle, clung to the ribbon, and then hauled itself off the ground, rising rapidly.

  Bisesa stepped back and lifted her face, trying to see where the ribbon went. It rose on up; Bisesa could see the trucks climbing it like beads on a necklace. The ribbon arced upward, narrowing with perspective, becoming a shining thread tilted slightly from the vertical, a scratch ruled across the sky. She tipped her head back higher, looking for whatever was holding the ribbon up—

  Nothing was holding it up.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “A space elevator.”

  Alexei seemed interested in her reaction. “We call it Jacob’s Ladder. In 2069, it’s an eve
ryday miracle, Bisesa. Welcome to the future. Come on, time to find our ride. Are you up to a little climbing?”

  They had to scramble up rusty rungs, fixed to the side of the mobile platform. Bisesa struggled, Hibernaculum-enfeebled, encased in her suit. The others took care of her, Alexei going ahead, Myra following.

  Once on the upper surface of the platform they gave her a few seconds to catch her breath. The trucks rolled to and fro in their orderly way, their motors whirring gently.

  Embarrassed, she tried to say something intelligent. “Why use a crawler?”

  Alexei said, “It’s best to keep the base of your elevator mobile. Most of them are based on facilities at sea, actually—reused oil rigs and the like—including Bandara, the first.”

  “Bandara?”

  “The Aussie elevator, off Perth. They call it Bandara now. Named for an Aboriginal legend of a world tree.”

  “Why do you need to move your base? In case a hurricane comes?”

  “Well, yes, though as I said they’ve got hurricanes pretty much licked these days.” He glanced at the sky. “But further up there are other hazards. Relic satellites in low Earth orbit. Even NEOs. Near–Earth objects. Asteroids. This thing goes a long way up, Bisesa, and has to deal with a lot of perils along the way. Are you ready to move on?”

  He brought them to one of the trucks. He called it a “spider.” It had solar-cell wings folded up against its flanks, and that complicated pulley mechanism on its roof. Its transparent hull was loaded up with some kind of cargo, palettes and boxes. The spider was actually moving, though slower than walking pace, rolling in a line of others identical save for registration numbers stamped on its hull—the spiders were making for the thread in a kind of complicated spiral queuing system, Bisesa saw.