He bent down slowly, and began scraping at the fine sand. Little swirls of it puffed up as his gauntlets raked around.
“We’ve acquired the Reynolds beacon, sir,” Commander Hogan said.
“Three kilometers away, bearing forty-seven degrees.”
“Well done,” Nigel said. “You guys scoot over there and get us some answers from the science equipment, huh?”
“Yessir.”
Wilson thought he might have got the position slightly wrong. After all, the Eagle II could have shifted around, twisting as its undercarriage struts collapsed. He saw the transRover start to rock and jolt its way across the rucked sands, all six navy personnel clinging to the frame.
“What are you looking for?” Anna asked.
“Not sure.” He moved a few paces and bent down again. “Okay. The flag, actually. I know we got the damn thing up. Must have been blown over.”
She put her hands on her hips, and turned a full circle. “Wilson, it could be anywhere out there. The storms here are really ferocious. They can last for weeks.”
“Months, actually, and they cover most of the planet.” He gave up grubbing through the dirt. “I’m sure I remember using a power drill to screw the pole legs in. We were supposed to secure it.”
Nigel had walked up the slope of the sand piled against the Eagle II’s fuselage. His hand touched the remnants of the tailfin. “This ain’t right, you know. She deserves better than this. We should arrange to take her home. I’ll bet the California Technological Heritage Museum would love to have her. They’d probably pay for the restoration.”
“No,” Wilson said automatically. “She’s broken. She’s a part of this planet’s history now. She belongs here.”
“She’s not so badly broken.” Nigel stroked the top of the fuselage. “They built well back then.”
“It was her heart you broke.”
“Goddamn! I knew it, man, I fucking knew it. You are still pissed at me.”
“No I’m not. We were both part of history that day, you and I. My side lost, but then we were always going to. Wormhole technology was inevitable. If you hadn’t done it, someone else would.”
“Yeah? You have no idea how tough that math was to crack, nor following up by translating it into hardware. Nobody but Ozzie could have done it. I know his wacko rep, but he’s a genius, a true one, a fucking supernova compared to Newton, Einstein, and Hawking.”
“If it can be done, it will be done. Don’t try and personalize this. We represent events, that’s all.”
“Oh, brilliant, I’m nothing but a figurehead. Well, excuse me.”
“Will you two monster egos pack this in, please,” Anna said. “Wilson, he’s right, you can’t let these old ships decay any further. They are history, just like you said, and a very important part of history.”
“Sorry,” Wilson mumbled. “It’s just…I got wrong-footed coming back here. You don’t erase half the stuff you think you have at rejuvenation.”
“Ain’t that a fact,” Nigel said. “Come on, let’s go find a souvenir that isn’t a lump of rock. There’s got to be something lying around here.”
“I never even got a lump of rock last time,” Wilson said.
“You didn’t?”
“No. We didn’t run our science program. I think Lewis picked up his first sample, but NASA kept that once we got home.”
“Damn! You know, I don’t remember picking up any rock, either.”
“Christ,” Anna said. She bent down and picked up a couple of twisted pebbles, and handed one to each man. “You two are bloody useless.”
***
Roderick Deakins strolled down Briggins as casually as anyone could, walking around the Olika district at two A.M. He was grateful there hadn’t been a patrol car driving past, though that was only a matter of time. Olika was where a lot of rich types lived. They had deep connections in Darklake’s City Hall. The police maintained a good presence here, not like the Tulosa district where Roderick lived. You rarely saw a cop there after dark, and then never singularly.
“Is this it?” Marlon Simmonds asked.
Roderick had worked with Marlon many times down the years. Nothing too serious, you couldn’t call them partners, but they’d seen their fair share of juvenile street rip-offs, followed by a string of break-ins when they’d run with the Usaros back in ’69. After that they’d done time together for a Marina Mall warehouse heist that had gone seriously wrong in ’73. When they were paroled they’d drifted into helping out Lo Kin, a small-time boss who ran a protection racket on Tulosa’s westside, where they’d been stuck ever since. All that history and the trust that went with it made them a perfect pair for this job.
“What does the fucking number read?” Roderick hissed back.
“Eighteen hundred,” Marlon said, glancing at the brass numbers screwed into the drycoral arch above the gate. That was the thing about Marlon: nothing much seemed to bother him. His biochemically boosted body weighed at least twice as much as Roderick, and moved along with the inevitable inertia of a twenty-ton truck. His general attitude was a reflection of his physical presence, allowing him to cruise through life knowing there was very little that would get in his way.
“Then that’s it, isn’t it?” Roderick said. The man who was an associate of Lo Kin, the one they were doing this for, had been very specific. The house number, the name of the man they were going to talk to, the short time in which they had to perform the job.
“Okay, man.” Marlon took a harmonic blade from his jacket pocket, and sliced through the wrought iron around the lock. The gate swung open with the tiniest of squeaks from the hinges. Roderick waited a moment to see if any alarms were triggered. But there was no sound. When he waved his left palm around the gate, his e-butler said it couldn’t detect any electronic activity. Roderick grinned to himself. It had cost a lot to get the OCtattoo sensor on his palm, but every time like this he knew it was worth it.
It was dark in the bungalow’s garden. The tall drycoral wall blocked most of the illumination from the streetlights outside, while the low building at the center remained unlit. Roderick switched his retinal insert to infrared. It produced a simple pink and gray image that was oddly flat. That lack of depth always slowed him down; one day soon he’d get a matching insert for his other eye, which would give him a decent resolution in this spectrum. It could even be with the money from this job; Lo Kin’s associate certainly paid well.
Roderick’s hand moved inside his leather jacket and removed the Eude606 ion pistol from its holster. The gun fitted snugly into his palm, as well it might do. He’d never held a piece of hardware as expensive as this before. It felt good. The power it contained gave Roderick a raw confidence he didn’t experience often.
Marlon cut through the wooden front door, slicing around the lock. Roderick couldn’t detect any electrical activity. It fitted with what they’d been told. Paul, the old man who lived here, was eccentric verging on plain nutty. They stepped cautiously into the dark hallway.
“What are you doing?” Roderick whispered. Marlon was going along the shelving, examining the vases and figurines sitting there.
“You heard what the man said: take anything you want. Is any of this art crap valuable?”
“I don’t fucking know. But we do that after, get it?”
Marlon’s huge frame shrugged dismissively.
Roderick switched on his small handheld array. The screen glowed brightly in the lightless bungalow; it displayed a floor plan, with the master bedroom clearly marked. “This way.”
They started walking cautiously, watching out for anything on the floor. The place was a mess; nobody had cleaned up in an age. Roderick checked the first few maidbots resting in their alcoves; none of them had any power in their batteries. He’d never been anywhere with so little electrical activity; it was like being in the stone age.
When they were halfway across the lounge, Roderick’s retinal insert failed, plunging him back into a world of ebony shadows
. “Goddamn!”
“What is this?” Marlon complained.
Roderick realized his handheld array was dead. His e-butler was also offline. “Shit. Are your inserts down?”
“Yeah.”
The unease in Marlon’s voice added to Roderick’s growing anxiety; it wasn’t often the big man sounded uncertain. He squinted into the darkness. Two big arching windows were visible as gray sheets, casting the tiniest amount of illumination into the room. He could just make out the regular sable shapes of furniture.
“This is no accident; our electronics got hit.”
“What do we do?” Marlon asked. “I’ve got a flashlight. You want some light?”
“Maybe. He must know we’re here. What do you reckon?” Roderick caught a motion over by one of the windows. A patch of dark sliding up the wall. Which was crazy. Not to mention disturbing. Or was it just his adrenaline-pumped imagination? He brought the Eude606 up, pointing it in the direction the shape might have been if it was real. Sweat was pricking his brow.
“Well, what’s he going to do?” There was a kind of bravado in Marlon’s voice now. Neither of them were bothering to whisper.
Roderick steadied his pistol, holding it level and ready to turn to face whatever threat was revealed. “Okay then.” He waited while Marlon fumbled around in his jacket. Then the narrow beam stabbed out, amazingly bright in the gloomy lounge. It swept over the walls, with Roderick following the wide circle with his pistol. Marlon turned completely around, exposing the antique décor with its dusty coating. There was nobody in the lounge with them. More importantly from Roderick’s point of view, there was nothing on the wall by the window, nothing that could move about.
“Okay, old man,” Marlon said. “Out you come now, we ain’t gonna hurt you.” It was the kind of tone used to calm a panicked animal. “We just want the artwork, that’s all. There ain’t gonna be no trouble.”
They looked at each other. Roderick shrugged. “Bedroom,” he said. Something moved in his peripheral vision. Above him. “Huh?” Marlon must have caught it, too; the beam tilted up. Roderick looked at the ceiling, which was covered in broad patches of peculiar rust-colored fur.
The nostat directly above Roderick let go. It was like a soft blanket dropping on him, its edges falling below his elbows. Shock made him yell and thrash about, trying to tug the thing off. The nostat’s soft fur changed, strands twining together into needle-thin spikes. It tightened around its prey, a motion that slid over ten thousand of the slender barbs through Roderick’s clothing and into his flesh. His scream of utter agony was cut off as spikes penetrated into his throat, filling his gullet with blood. Reflex made him convulse, even though the pain had virtually rendered him unconscious. It was exactly the motion that the nostat had evolved to take advantage of. The barbs were slim and strong enough to remain extended as its prey’s muscles flexed, allowing them to rip through the tissue as if they were miniature scalpels. The entire outer layer of Roderick’s upper torso was shredded to the constituency of jelly. Blood erupted from his body as it collapsed onto the floor, which the nostat sucked down hungrily through the hollow core of each spike.
The first contraction didn’t quite have the strength to push the spikes through Roderick’s skull. Instead they penetrated the softer areas of flesh, ripping apart eyes, ears, nose, and tearing through his cheeks. The last thing he heard as he finally lost consciousness was a terrified roar coming from Marlon, and furniture exploding as both of them fired their ion pistols in random bursts.
***
The day after he went to Mars, Nigel woke up in bed with his wives Nuala and Astrid. Both of them were biologically in their mid-thirties, though chronologically more than a century old. They were what he tended to think of as the mother comfort personalities of his harem. He sought them out when he wanted an untroubled sleep; and last night he’d really needed one. It had been a bad week; dealing with the innumerable problems spinning out from the Lost23 refugees on top of the high politics of the War Cabinet. He’d thought Mars would be a distraction from the problems he had to deal with in the office. Typical mid-life-crisis response, get out from behind the desk and do something practical; but there had been far too many old memories lurking amid that desolate frozen landscape to ambush his emotions. The broken ancient spaceplane had kindled a totally unexpected pang of guilt. When they finally returned from that abandoned planet his mood had turned bleak.
He’d visited Paloma and Aurelie first, the newest members of his harem. First-lifers that hadn’t reached their twenty-first birthdays yet, the pair of them were beautiful, giggly, and utterly guileless girls. They came very firmly in the sex athlete category, with personal trainers keeping them fit and toned, an unlimited wardrobe budget, and stylists to confer the kind of elegance he enjoyed in all his women.
Every time he came out of rejuvenation, his harem was made up mostly of girls like them. It was only when he started advancing into his biological early thirties that the ratio began to swing back, and the more secure and stable types made up the majority as yet another generation of his children was born. As a single child himself, Nigel always enjoyed being surrounded by a large immediate family; that was something that no rejuvenation had ever altered. As always in his case, the human universe bent to accommodate him with the alacrity of a gravity field around a neutron star. There was never a problem in finding women who were happy with the harem arrangement; he was sent thousands of intimate requests every day. His main difficulty was sorting through them all.
Right now there were only five of the younger, sexy ones. He knew that none of them would hang around for more than a couple of years. Girls like that never did; they weren’t stupid, and eventually they’d grow weary of the household’s formality, the way everything was structured around his preferences. Unless he had children with them—unlikely now—they’d move on, just like thousands before them.
Until that happened, they were the best possible sex he could wish for. It was only after romping with Paloma and Aurelie for nearly two hours he left, almost sneaking out, to find Nuala and Astrid, who snuggled up cozily and gave him that welcome sense of comfort so essential for a deep dreamless sleep.
Breakfast, as always when the household was in residence at the New Costa mansion, was held on the terrace. He sat at the head of a long table sheltered from the sharp blue-white glare of Regulus by a canopy of lush grapevines, whose broad leaves filtered the exotic sunlight to a manageable lambency. The day’s first gusts of the dry El Iopi wind were already blowing across the grounds, rustling the foliage above him. Eleven of his wives joined him, bringing their children, who ranged from three-month-old Digby to Bethany, who was approaching her fifteenth birthday. Several senior family members who were staying in the mansion also arrived with their partners. It was a bustling lighthearted meal, which finished off the mood transformation that his serene sleep had begun. His thoughts had calmed considerably, which was a relief; he knew his judgment became impaired the more wound-up he got.
“Are you going to rehouse the refugees who’re being looked after by the Hive?” Astrid asked. She was poring over a paperscreen as she ate her fruit and honey yogurt. “I mean, they’re being made welcome, and all, but they aren’t gonna wanna stay there.”
“Long-term, they’ll certainly move on. We’re busy designating phase three and late stage-two planets that can absorb all the refugees. As to when a Commonwealth-endorsed settlement project gets under way, that depends on the Senate. For now, everyone’s just concentrating on providing relief for the survivors.”
“Half of them will be absorbed back into mainstream society without any government aid packages,” Campbell said. “The majority are skilled people who can integrate into any modern economy; it’ll just be a question of finding a planet with an ethnic base that suits them. Augusta companies have received a lot of employment inquiries already. So have the other Big15.”
“It says the insurance companies won’t compensate them,” Astrid sai
d, her manicured finger tapping the news article on her paperscreen in accusation.
“All the local insurance companies were destroyed along with their planets,” Nigel said.
“They’re subdivisions of the major companies,” she said. “You know that.”
“Sure. But compensation is going to have to involve government. The Dow-Times index is still down eight thousand; the finance houses can’t afford to pay out trillions right now. We need to concentrate our taxes on the navy and strengthening planetary defenses.”
“That’s outrageous,” Paloma exclaimed. “They need our help. They suffered because of Doi’s stupid mistakes.”
Nigel tried not to smile at her righteous anger. She had the full indignation of youth, a fieriness that promoted her attractiveness. “I pushed for the Second Chance mission.”
“Well, yes.” Paloma reddened. “But the government knew the Primes were a threat. They should have taken it seriously.”
“That’s the benefit of hindsight talking. We prepared as well as any reasonably civilized culture could be expected.”
“Will they come back, Daddy?” little Troy asked, peering anxiously over his cereal bowl.
“They might. But I promise you, all of you,” Nigel said earnestly when he saw the other children looking at him for reassurance, “I will make sure you’re safe. All of you.” He exchanged a glance with Campbell, who pulled a face before returning to his eggs Benedict.
When Nigel finished breakfast, he was almost tempted to go back to Paloma’s bedroom. But there was a ton of work to be done, so he set off to the wing of the mansion where he maintained his personal offices. It was a long walk.