“But it will encounter opposition. They’ll already be expecting a police action. They won’t have weapons — yet — but they’ll have drills, cutting torches, mining armour —”
“Then there may be casualties. Reeves know that when they encounter significant resistance, it is better to accept a small number of deaths before stray fire causes many more deaths and injuries. But they never kill needlessly.”
Bella turned to Axford. “It can take care of Eddytown, but there’ll almost certainly be deaths.”
“There’ll be deaths if Svetlana moves against Crabtree,” Axford said. “Even if you give her what she wants, even if you hand over the High Hab in exchange for the passkey, there’ll still be people who won’t go easily. You’ve earned their loyalty, Bella. They won’t go without a fight, no matter what Svetlana might think.”
“I’ll surrender rather than see more blood spilled.”
Chromis interrupted gently. “Your primary concern, Bella, is not political control of Crabtree, but intercession to gain the passkey file. Then you must erase all the other Musk Dog construction blueprints before they do any damage.”
“I know. I just —” She shook her head, incensed and saddened. “How did things go from being so good to being so wrong? It only seems like yesterday that Svetlana and I were sitting together in the arboretum, putting the past behind us. Now I’m wondering how many of her people I can get away with killing.”
“You didn’t ask for this situation,” Chromis said. “She went to the Musk Dogs, not you.”
“You can’t tell me what to do, can you? For all your wisdom, all the thousands of years you have on me, you can’t and won’t do that.”
“I’m sorry,” Chromis said. “I hope I’ve been a friend to you, albeit for such a brief span of time. But I cannot be your master. You are the captain, Bella Lind. This has to be your call.”
* * *
Bella returned to her office, seeking a few minutes of calm alone with her fish before she had to meet Svetlana. In the office, with the door closed, she could pretend to herself that there was no crisis, and for a moment she allowed herself that solace.
Then Nick Thale knocked on the door and let himself in. “This had better not take long,” she said, knowing that the train was already on its way from Eddytown, knowing also that Thale would forgive her the discourtesy.
He passed her a flexy, letting Bella read the display before he said a word. She studied the data and then looked into his old man’s face.
“I don’t get it. Why are you showing me lava lines?”
“I’m showing you patterns of traffic,” Thale said, with the slightest hint of reproach. “Notice how the activity’s hotted up during the last three hours? The lines are busier than they’ve been since the Sky went up.”
Bella was about to say something when Thale jabbed a finger at the display and made it change. “Here’s seismic data,” he said. “And here’s a plot of grav-field variations at the main eddy points. Every parameter we can measure is spiking at five or six sigma outside normal variations.” He paused, then said solemnly, “If Janus was a brain, and we had it in a scanner, I’d say we were looking at an epileptic seizure.”
As one of her inner sanctum, tasked with preparing the evacuation, Thale knew all the salient details about the Musk Dogs and their intentions regarding Janus. “You think this is it?” Bella asked, warily.
“Something’s happening. You either believe in coincidences, or you conclude it has something to do with that thing that came back with Svieta.”
Bella closed her eyes, willing the world away. But the world had no intention of leaving.
She opened her eyes again to face a stubbornly present reality. “The Musk Dogs have started the countdown. It’s time to say goodbye to Janus, Nick.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Before she left her office, Bella received disquieting news from the far end of the shaft: the engagement had commenced. Two and a half light-minutes down from Janus, the Fountainheads, and perhaps their allies in the Shaft-Five Nexus, had encountered the Uncontained. Through the still-open door in the end-cap, evidence of the battle leaked through in stuttering flashes: blue-white light shading through ultraviolet into hard X- and gamma-rays, and God knew what else. The radiation took two hundred seconds to crawl its way to Janus, where it was detected by monitoring cams stationed on the surface of the Iron Sky. Cams situated near the endcap door had already expired, fried by stray fire from the battle.
Bella tried to call Jim Chisholm on the embassy channel, but after allowing five minutes for timelag, she concluded that the link had gone down. She did not immediately assume that Chisholm had been killed, although the lack of a reply hardly reassured her. Clearly someone was still fighting someone else, so the Uncontained could not have won yet. Perhaps the Nexus was just cleaning up the last of the resistance. They had already dealt with the Uncontained on an earlier occasion, according to the Fountainheads. They must have learned something of their enemy’s vulnerabilities in that earlier encounter, some data that had tactical value in the present engagement.
But the flashes continued. Now and then there’d be a pause, and Bella would hope (or fear) that the battle had reached a conclusion. Then the flashes would resume, sometimes with renewed ferocity, drenching the still-active sensors with radiation fluxes that would have been lethal even to a suited human. Occasionally, the embassy channel crackled with static, as if something or someone was trying to get a message through but was being jammed.
Even this far from the source of the flashes, Bella felt the ferocity of the engagement. It was bad enough witnessing it from a distance, worse knowing that — if Jim Chisholm was to be believed — Bella and her people would shortly be better off there than here.
Bella had often contemplated the shape and texture of her life and wondered how it might one day come to an end. She’d always imagined soft light and hospital drapes, fake smiles and plastic flowers, sad visits from well-wishers. Somehow — even given what had happened to Garrison — she had never imagined dying in space, because of space. And it had certainly never occurred to her that she might become collateral damage in a strategic conflict between warring alien cultures, so far into the future that her own species was little more than an archaeological data point.
Perhaps she was being ungrateful, but this development did not necessarily strike her as a positive one.
She wondered how Svetlana felt about it.
* * *
The train arrived on time. Doors aligned precisely with luminous docking apertures etched into the side of the tube. Glass barriers whisked open, accompanied by warning chimes.
No one on the platform moved or spoke. There were eight of them: Bella, Ryan Axford, Liz Shen, Mike Takahashi and another four of Bella’s closest allies. She had asked Takahashi to come along because he’d been one of Parry’s old EVA miners and was liked by everyone, and she hoped that his presence would defuse some of the tension. Parry was also present: the Judicial Apparatus of the High Hab had just handed him over. He stood a little back from Bella’s party, detained by a hatstand-shaped robot bailiff. No one was wearing spacesuits, as per Bella’s orders. They wore normal clothes, markedly bare of ornament or ostentation, so that the absence of weapons or instruments of mass disorientation might be obvious.
Three figures stepped from the train wearing suits of the Chakri five series — white and smooth-limbed as soapstone figurines. The suits carried no external equipment that might have been mistaken for weapons. Bella had examined Jim Chisholm’s original Chakri five and she knew that while the suit was capable of protecting its occupant against all manner of hostile environments, it was not in itself capable of inflicting serious harm on others.
The three figures stepped away from the glass partition and the train doors chimed and closed behind them. They formed a triangle, one figure ahead of the other two, and walked slowly towards the committee, stopping when they had covered half the distance. By the manner of her walk, Bel
la knew that the person in the lead suit was Svetlana.
Bella spoke first. Her throat felt dry, but she forced out the words. “Thank you for coming. As you can see, we’re all unarmed and unprotected. You have nothing to fear from us.”
Svetlana’s amplified voice boomed from the first suit. “You’ve brought Parry. That’s good.”
“We had a deal,” Bella said. “I’ve every intention of sticking to my side of it.”
“Then you’re ready to hand yourself over?”
“Just as soon as you hand over the passkey. We need it more urgently than ever now. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but Janus is showing worrying signs of instability.”
“Not that story again.”
“It’s the truth. The first evacuees are already on their way to Underhole. When you assume command, I want you to continue with the evacuation plan. Leave Nick in charge: he’ll see it through.”
“You presume to tell me what to do when I take over?”
“I have a duty to Janus until the last second of my command.”
“Fine. It’s coming up fast.” Svetlana’s tone became businesslike. “I have the data in my suit: standard constructor format. If you try anything, I’ll erase the file. You won’t be able to recover it.”
“I’m not going to try anything. All I want is that passkey. Nothing else matters to me except evacuating this colony and getting us behind that endcap door.”
“She’s telling the truth,” Mike Takahashi said.
Svetlana reached up slowly and released her helmet. She lifted it free and touched it against the hip of her suit, where it formed a temporary adhesive bond. She glanced back at her companions, who reached up and removed their helmets. Denise Nadis shook free her dreads, letting them spill out over the suit’s neck ring. Josef Protsenko was the third member of the party. He nodded at Bella with no visible animosity, as if this was all simply some mildly unpleasant bureaucratic necessity, like a bankruptcy hearing.
“I’ll give you the passkey,” Svetlana said, “but not in one go. I’ve split the document into two. Neither half is any use without the other.”
Bella shrugged. “However you want to play it.”
“Send Parry over to me. I get him back, you get one half of the file.”
Bella motioned to the bailiff robot. The machine escorted Parry across the platform to a point just in front of Svetlana.
“Release him,” Bella said. The Judicial Apparatus had already given her verbal authority over its bailiff. The robot released Parry’s restraints and stepped back on its spindly black hatstand legs. Freed, Parry stretched his arms and examined his wrists where the bonds had been applied.
“Did she hurt you?” Svetlana asked.
Parry shook his head. “I’m okay, babe. Bella treated me good.” He tried to kiss her, but the bulk of her suit got in the way. Abandoning the attempt, Parry looked back at Bella. “I came to you willingly with that evidence,” he said. “I never resented what you did.”
“I know,” she said. “You don’t have to feel bad about this. It isn’t your battle.”
Svetlana pulled her helmet from its grip point. “I’m going to put this back on now, Bella. I need to be wearing the helmet to tell the suit to send the file. You trust me, right?”
“Do whatever you have to do.”
Svetlana dropped the helmet back into place. After twenty or thirty seconds, she reached up and pulled it off again. “Transfer should be in progress: it’s a big file, even split in two. I’ve e-mailed it to the address you specified.”
“I need to confirm that it’s gone through,” Bella said, unzipping her jacket. “I’m going to pull out a flexy and make a call to Wang. You cool with that?”
“Go ahead.”
Bella removed the flexy, stiffening it with a flick of her wrist — a movement so familiar now that it felt burnt into her muscles. The flexy came alive with ShipNet options. According to the high-level menu, normal services had been suspended due to the state of emergency. Bella, however, did not need normal services.
After a few moments Wang was on the line: white-haired and wizardly, ancient as the hills, utterly unrecognisable as the eager young man who had dropped into her world half a century ago. Until he smiled, that was, and then the years fell away. He was a brave man, willing to remain behind in his lab while the rest of the colony raced to the hills.
“I have the data, Bella. Half of a construction file.”
“That’s great — you’ll get the other half shortly. Does it look valid to you?”
“I’d need days just to skim the surface operations. There’s really only one way to be sure that a construction file is valid, and that’s to see what happens when you feed it into a vat.”
“I understand. Just keep in mind this is something a little out of the ordinary.”
She ended the call, folded up the flexy and stuffed it back into her jacket to warm itself. “We’ll discuss the other half now.”
“That means you,” Svetlana said.
Bella spread her arms magnanimously. “I’m all yours. How would you like to proceed?”
The pace of events and Bella’s pliant willingness clearly unsettled Svetlana. “You can begin by announcing your resignation.”
Bella barely blinked. “I resign. What else?”
“Announce that you are handing over authority to me.”
“I’d love to.” Bella touched a finger to her lips. “Problem is, I just resigned. I have no more authority than you do. Or do you want me to unresign, for the sake of procedure?”
Svetlana growled her displeasure. “Walk to the train. There’s an open door at the back.”
“Just me?”
“Just you, Bella.” Svetlana looked pointedly at Liz Shen and the other Lind loyalists on the platform. “This isn’t about recrimination. Everyone will be treated fairly, including you.”
Bella did as she was told, then paused when she was almost at the door. “I’m going to get inside now. I take it the train will return me to Eddytown, to some state of incarceration?”
“Janus isn’t big enough for both of us,” Svetlana said. “The only way we can share it is if one of us is locked away.”
“Just get your people out of there. I don’t care if you leave me behind, but evacuate that town.”
“We’ve been over this. No one’s going anywhere.”
“Is Emily there?”
“You know she is.”
“Then you’re sentencing your own daughter to death. If you care about her — if you care about anyone — get them on the train.”
“Pretty low, Bella, emotional blackmail like that.”
“I know you care about Emily. You still have a chance to save her.”
“Get on the train.”
Bella paused again just as she was about to step through the luminous aperture into the waiting maglev. “As soon as I know Wang has the second file.”
“He’ll have it the moment you step onto the train.”
“Just a second. Before I step inside, I want to show you something.”
“You played yourself, Bella.”
“Maybe I did, but I didn’t play Chromis.”
“Chromis?” Svetlana asked, the name meaning nothing to her.
Bella looked at the memorial cube. So, following her gaze, did Svetlana. The cube had been there all along, quietly waiting in the shadows at the back of the concourse.
There was just enough time for Svetlana to register recognition and then surprise.
Then the air moved. A storm of black shapes erupted from the visible face of the memorial cube. They were awesomely fast, cutting through the air like the shadows of fast-moving clouds on a summer day. The reeves poured forth, orbiting the two parties in a vicious black gyre, creating a savage draught that chivvied their clothes and forced them to lean into its pressure. Still they poured forth from the cube: an endless gush of black that defied the common-sense laws of what could possibly be contained in such a
small volume. In a flash, the gyre of motion halted and the reeves were suddenly on the ground — many dozens of them, poised motionless on the platform: black, sleek, knife-handed, hatchet-faced terrors from the depths of history.
The wind dropped, the concourse suddenly silent.
“Do nothing, say nothing, think nothing,” Bella said, still poised at the side of the maglev carriage. “These things are very, very dangerous.”
Svetlana had the nerve to speak. “What are they?”
“Reeves,” Bella said. “Instruments of government. They’re pure femtotech. There must be a hundred of them here now, but the cube could make thousands of them if I ordered it.”
Svetlana frowned at the cube. “I knew you’d found it. I also heard you’d had no more luck than I had in figuring out what it did.”
“That was true at first,” Bella said. “The difference is I touched it.”
“You touched it?”
“It was a message for me, sent eighteen thousand years after our departure. A token of goodwill, and a kind of toolkit.”
“Eighteen thousand years,” Svetlana said, with an automatic headshake of disbelief.
“That’s just the start of it,” Bella said. “I’m sorry, but we’ve come a lot, lot further into the future than eighteen thousand years. How far, I don’t quite know — but it has to be tens of millions of years, probably more.”
“And you just know all this somehow.”
“I know that the human species is extinct, and we’re all that’s left. The cube told me a lot, Svetlana, but it wasn’t just that. You had your doubts as well. You came to believe that the Fountainheads were lying.”
With a trace of unease, she said, “Yes.”
“Well, you were right. But they were lying out of kindness. We simply weren’t ready for the truth.”
“What now, Bella?” Svetlana looked around at the massed regiment of reeves. “You appear to have the upper hand.”
“Nothing’s changed,” Bella said. “This was a demonstration, that’s all. In a moment, the reeves will return to the cube and everything will continue as planned. I’ll get on the train, you’ll send the file to Wang, Wang will make the passkey, you’ll get yourself and everyone else off Janus.”