“And the free-fliers?”
“Deadsville, If they’re still out there, we’re not hearing anything from them.”
“Does it trouble you?”
“Of course it troubles me. How did you expect it would make me feel?”
“It makes remarkably little difference to me,” Schrope said easily. “Down here, entire days go by without me seeing a hint of the outside world. Legal work eats time like a machine, you know.”
He put the folder aside. Literally and metaphorically, he had been closing the file on Meredith Bagley. Every now and then, rumours had resurfaced that there had been more to her death than just a grisly accident during routine centrifuge maintenance. Svetlana’s anger at the merest hint that she might have tacitly sanctioned it had spurred her to authorise the inquest Schrope had helmed. He was good with legal inquiry: it utilised the same forensic instinct that had worked so well for him in Shalbatana.
Terrier-boy’s conclusion was that there had been nothing suspicious about the death. The rumours might continue, but there was nothing the Judicial Apparatus could do about that.
“Your work is important,” Svetlana said, “but I have to take the wider view. What’s the point of having a Judicial Apparatus if we don’t have a world left to govern?”
“Things aren’t that bad,” Schrope said soothingly. “It’s just a sky.”
“It won’t let us touch it,” she said. “We send free-fliers up to it and it repels them.”
“It probably has our best interests at heart.” One hand clicked the mechanism of a ballpoint pen, neurotically fast. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“I find it claustrophobic,” she said. “I used to swim. I was a pretty good free-diver. Water never bothered me, no matter how deep and black and cold. But I always hated having anything above me but sea and clear blue sky.”
“It’s no worse than what we had before — it’s been a while since there were stars up there, Svetlana.”
“But we could always leave if we wanted to.”
He put the folder back onto one of the shelves, squeezing it into place between two other bulging documents. For a colony of under two hundred people, Crabtree and its peripheral suburbs generated a considerable amount of legal business. That wasn’t too surprising, though. They’d had to build an entire economy from scratch just so that people could be paid for an honest day’s work. After twelve years, the High Hab was still processing complaints from people who felt they had been short-changed in the initial allocation of credits. There was even a black-market economy of sorts. Officially, there was no coffee left anywhere on Janus, but if you knew the right people, it was still possible to obtain hitherto unallocated rations.
“It would have killed us to leave,” Schrope said, “to drop out of the slipstream, out of the protective shadow of Janus. We’d have lasted about five minutes.”
“But it was an option. I’d always rather have the option, wouldn’t you?”
“Judging by the business that comes through here, Svetlana, most people are just getting on with life.” Schrope indicated one of his shelves. “That file on the end is a disputed paternity case. On Earth, we’d have settled it in a few minutes with a DNA profile. It wouldn’t even have reached court. Out here, we don’t have DNA sequencers. Axford’s doing the best he can, but he’s already a busy man, and I don’t wish to take up more of his time than is absolutely necessary. That’s just one file. We have divorce proceedings, personal-injury claims, accusations of libel… even the Symbolists are claiming religious discrimination.”
“They invented their religion from scratch,” Svetlana said indignantly. “I’ve got every damned right to discriminate against them.”
“Yet by all accounts they do a reasonable job of running things in the Maw.”
She conceded his point with a pout of displeasure. “Maybe. But how long can we rely on them? They’re already saying I’ve been heavy-handed. I’m not even allowed in the Maw now. I have to send Parry.”
“All I’m saying is… life goes on. Perhaps the Iron Sky isn’t as bad as you fear.”
“That’s what people keep telling me — that Janus is still supplying us with power and materials, that the icecap is still there… that if we’ve survived for twelve years, we can survive a bit longer.”
Schrope stopped clicking the pen and put it down. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“I don’t like it, Craig. I don’t like not knowing what’s out there. We should have arrived at the Spican structure by now.”
“Maybe we have,” he said soothingly, as if the matter was of only passing concern to him. “The binary consists of blue stars, Svetlana, hot and very bright. Not a healthy environment for humans. Perhaps the whole point of the sky is to keep us safe from harm.”
“I hope so,” she said. “I’m just scared of what we might see on the other side, if we ever get the chance to find out.”
He sighed and rocked back in his seat, fingers meshed behind his head. “You’ve been good to me, Svetlana. You called me back from that place I was in and gave me a chance to make something of myself again.”
She nodded, but said nothing. Schrope still credited her with doing far more during his years of withdrawal than she knew to be true. Once, he had even told her how he had seen Bella, and how she had spoken to him. Svetlana knew for certain then that his memory of that time could not be trusted.
“I hope I’ve served Crabtree in some small way,” he continued, “but I know I’m not indispensable. I know that there are a dozen people who could do this legal dogwork just as well as I can.”
“I don’t know —” she began.
He shook his head and interrupted her. “But one day I hope I can be indispensable. Not by shuffling papers, but by doing something concrete. Something no one else will do.”
“I don’t follow,” she said.
“You’re scared, and I don’t blame you for that, but I’ve been to a place in my head worse than anything this universe has to offer. If they come, Svetlana, I’ll go to meet them. You can send me first. I don’t have anything to fear from the Spicans.”
“Craig —”
“I’m asking you to let me be your envoy. It’s the least I can do.”
EIGHTEEN
It came down without warning, nearly four hundred days after the sky had finally closed over Janus.
Seismic monitors, installed in concentric rings around Crabtree to detect signs of icecap break-up, registered a single massive spike. Time-of-arrival analysis revealed that the seismic disturbance had originated in a very small area of the icecap, about one hundred kilometres south of Crabtree. Once the initial reverberations had died down — the icecap flexing like a drum — the seismic activity returned to its usual quiet level. There were no aftershocks or hints of further movement after that first hammer blow.
Though she was unwilling to dismiss the incident, Svetlana was equally reluctant to send out a lander to scout the area. Fuel and spare-parts stocks were dwindling, and although Wang had lately become very good at coaxing miracles from the forge vats, complex spacecraft components were still a challenge. So Svetlana sent out a trio of tractors, which followed the line of a superconductor for twenty kilometres before turning south over hard, ungraded terrain. The tractors fanned out until they could just see each other’s strobe lights, then made a series of awkward sweeps through the area of the seismic disturbance. But they found nothing, and the going was hard. When one of the machines damaged a mesh wheel, she ordered the trio to return home while they were still able to assist each other. She ordered a free-flier sent aloft, but the free-flier’s cam was designed for inspecting hull damage at close quarters, not scanning a wide swathe of ice at high resolution. Nor did it have the power to generate effective ground illumination. It merely zigzagged ineffectively back and forth until it ran out of fuel.
A day passed while she brooded over the mystery. Should she risk committing a lander now, or send out another tractor sweep? All oper
ations beyond Crabtree carried a measure of risk. Janus was quixotic, and the hammer blow might only indicate that something had happened deep in the machinery, even though the evidence, such as it was, suggested an event near the surface. There had been bangs and crashes in the night before, and people had soon learned not to let such things worry them. Not when there were a hundred other things more deserving of their anxiety.
Then — as so often happened — some other affair pushed itself to the forefront of her attention. In fact, it was a constellation of distractions. Trouble from Nick Thale and the other Lind loyalists, pushing for concessions. Symbolist agitation in the Maw. Yet another round of troubling rumours concerning the death of Meredith Bagley — had it really been accidental, or had someone made that centrifuge motor turn while she was deep inside its gears? A coldness between her and Parry that resurfaced occasionally, when she would catch Parry looking at her as if she was someone he barely knew, let alone liked. It would pass — it always did — but during these intermissions in their relationship she would glide into a neurotic spiral of self-examination. Parry was good. Parry was honest. If he had a problem with her, then there had to be a reason for it. Maybe she had taken too tough a stance on some things. But it was never Parry who had to make the difficult decisions. He thought he knew what she was going through, what it was costing her, but really he had no idea. He facilitated her decisions, but Svetlana made them. She never caught Parry awake at three in the morning, his mind overheating like a sixty-year-old reactor with jammed control rods.
So she put the hammer blow to the back of her mind.
Eight days later she had cause to remember it again.
There were reports of alien activity. This in itself wasn’t anything unusual, and would not ordinarily have raised any flags. People had been seeing things on Janus for thirteen years. Out on the ice, on a lonely drive between outposts, it was easy to understand why. The believers saw luminous entities, alien forms that could equally well have been angels or ghosts, who arrived with reassuring messages from loved ones left behind. The more spaced-out aquatics tended to see whales or dolphins in alien form. The Cosmic Avenger fans saw humanoid aliens that conformed to the show’s stiflingly repetitive template for extraterrestrial intelligence. Now and then there was something weirder, but nothing that Svetlana considered evidence of a genuine external phenomenon. Granted, Janus could still surprise them — but nothing she had seen in thirteen years had convinced her that the former moon was anything other than an automated mechanism.
Indeed, the new reports were not of aliens per se, but of alien things. It was that difference that convinced her to look at them more seriously. All over Janus, from the Maw to Eddytown to the outskirts of Crabtree itself, normally reliable people were seeing things. Reports of sightings of swift, fleeting entities — machines, it appeared — with a fluid, glassy appearance. They came in fast, sniffed around something — a generator, battery or superconductor junction — and then left, vanishing into the night as quickly as they had come. So far, no active cam had captured more than a few smudges. Were it not for the number of witnesses, and the apparent reliability of their testimonies, Svetlana would have ignored the images. There was, of course, also the matter of the hammer blow. On more than one occasion, the visiting entities had appeared to originate from the same area.
Something was happening.
She sent out another party of tractors, six this time, but again they found nothing. Finally she sent out Star Crusader, hoping that the lander — with its engine glow, floods and elevated trajectory — might see something that the tractors and the earlier free-flier had missed.
It did.
The ice crater was wide but shallow, easy to miss amidst the ridged and wrinkled landscape. A trail showed where a tractor had passed within metres of its edge. At the base of the crater was a black disc, like a fat coin lying flat on one side. Its edge flung back reflected light, as if it had been polished to a high sheen.
Crusader landed. Parry and Naohiro Uguru went out in Orlan nineteen hard-suits. They picked their way over the crater wall, then down to the coin-shaped object. The closer they got to it, the more massive and foreboding it became. It had looked quite small from the lander, but distance and scale were always difficult to judge on Janus. Up close, it seemed impossibly huge. It was ten metres thick, perhaps sixty metres across. As they approached, warped versions of Parry and Naohiro loomed in the reflective edge, wide as monsters.
“This must be what made all that noise,” Parry said.
Uguru touched the mirrored edge with a gloved knuckle, the way firefighters were taught to test wires that might be carrying electricity. “It’s cold,” he said, as the glove’s thermal read-out updated on his HUD, “cold and slippery as ice. What do you think cut this edge so cleanly?”
“Good question, buddy.”
But Parry was already looking up, craning back as far as he could go. He crunched elementary trigonometry. If the disc was sixty metres wide and the Iron Sky twenty kilometres above his head, then he was looking for a hole about a third of the apparent diameter of the full moon seen from Earth… if he could remember what a full moon looked like.
But the Iron Sky was black, and there might well be total darkness on the other side of the hole. If the hot blue radiation of the Spica binary was shining through the hole, they would have detected it already: it would have lit up Janus like a welding torch in a dark room.
But unless the sky had healed itself, the hole had to be up there. It was just a question of finding it. They would worry about who had cut it later.
“This is good, isn’t it?” Uguru said. “It means someone’s opened the tin. It means someone knows we’re here.”
Parry looked at him, recalling a similar conversation with Mike Takahashi, thirteen years and two hundred and sixty light-years ago.
“Could go either way,” he said.
* * *
It was many years since events had moved so quickly on Janus. There was inertia at first, as if a once-great machine was now so encrusted with oil and filth that it could barely turn a cog. But once the movement began, it had no choice but to continue. Resources were reallocated and committed. Teams were broken up and reassembled in new formations. Crabtree hummed with expectation and rumour. Everywhere Svetlana went, everywhere her spies went, she heard the same thing: something is happening. Men, women and children alike were saying it, placing the emphasis on the second word, as if the events themselves needed encouragement, reassurance, to keep happening. The Iron Sky began to feel like a lifting depression. No one wanted the hole in the sky to close up again. It was like the first light of dawn after an appallingly long night.
Svetlana sent tractors out to drag the piece of sky back to Crabtree. She wanted to analyse it, cut it up, recycle it. There was more metal there (if indeed it was metal) than had ever been pilfered from the lava lines. Recovering it, however, turned out to be a more difficult task than she had anticipated: the harness kept slipping off the near-frictionless edges; the tractors couldn’t get enough grip to dislodge the disc from the depression it had stamped in the ice when it fell; none of their tools were sharp or strong enough to cut it into more manageable chunks. Svetlana permitted one abortive attempt to haul the disc out of the crater using the lander, then conceded defeat. It would have to stay where it was, for now.
By then, they had established a small hamlet of domes and equipment shacks around the crater. Someone started calling it Underhole, and the name stuck. A superconducting line was reeled out from Crabtree and a smoothly graded tractor route carved into the ice.
Twenty kilometres above Underhole, there was also activity. The hole in the sky had been located: scans had revealed a spot where the near-total absorption efficiency of the sky became perfect, as radiation escaped to the outside world. But it was not completely dark outside. In the optical and near-infrared, the hole glowed slightly more brightly than the surrounding regions. With dark-adapted eyes, and knowing
exactly where to look, it could be seen from Underhole as a tiny circle of not-quite-absolute darkness. Its dimensions had been measured and found to match the piece that had dropped to the ground. The sky did not appear to be healing itself.
Reports of alien sightings gradually died down. Nothing had been seen coming or going through the hole since its discovery. Perhaps the alien machines had already seen all that they needed to. After much consideration, Svetlana decided that it was safe to take a look at what was on the other side. Belinda Pagis stripped a spare free-flier to the chassis, then welded on as much high-res survey gear as the power and telemetry bus could run. She utilised the equipment Rockhopper would once have trained on comets for the benefit of Nick Thale and the other analysts — deep-penetration radar, terrain-mapping lidar, supercooled photon-counting cams with intrinsic energy-resolution — tools to unravel every secret light or matter could hold. She bolted on massive floodlights and then even more massive fuel tanks and reaction thrusters to handle the swollen payload.
“Okay,” she said, when her new creation was ready, parked like a bright-yellow wasp on a cradle thirty metres from Underhole. “Let’s kick the tyres and light the fires.”
Pagis programmed a vector into the free-flier, fired up the thrusters to haul it off the ground and then watched as it made its way up to the hole. Twenty klicks over Underhole, she took the joystick and slowed the free-flier to a hover. It nosed around the rim of the hole, recording the bright counterpart to the mirrored edge on the piece of sky lying below. Measurement of the diameter established that the hole had been cut through with something astonishingly fine, for there was no measurable difference in size between the hole and the piece that had dropped out of it. Perhaps the cutting tool had simply persuaded the inter-atomic bonds to unzip along a precise line.
Pagis tipped the free-flier on end so that its forward cam pointed out through the hole. Svetlana and Parry crowded around the meagre little array of flexies that was the best they could assemble. Scratches and hexel dropouts blotted the image as the ailing gelware struggled to process the incoming telemetry. There wasn’t much to see: just a blank absence stained orange by the false-colour display, like the sodium-light sky over a big city. Graphics boxes framed the image portion, updating with line plots and columns of numbers. Once, they would have meant something to Svetlana, but now all she felt was a faint prickle of recollection. Fluency with mathematics — in the context of any kind of engineering discipline or physical science — was a use-it-or-lose-it skill.