‘It’s the principle of what they’re doing,’ his image said. ‘They didn’t ask us about this, they just barged onto the highway and set out to build their station without our permission.’
‘Did they need permission?’
‘Sure they did.’
The show went back to the studio. ‘Incredible,’ Alessandra said, shaking her head in saddened bewilderment. ‘Just how backward are they in Randtown?’
‘That was edited!’ Mark protested to the bar at large. ‘I . . . That wasn’t what I meant. I said other stuff, too. I told her about the nuclear micropiles. Why isn’t that in there? She’s making this – Christ, I look ridiculous.’ He felt Liz take his hand and squeeze reassuringly, and shot her a desperate glance.
‘It’s okay,’ she whispered.
‘The kind of backward you get from three generations of marrying cousins,’ Mellanie confided to Alessandra.
The Phoenix bar was totally silent now.
‘So in his view, not only do we, the Commonwealth, not have the right to put vital defence equipment on an uninhabited mountain,’ Mellanie said. ‘But wait for this next bit.’
‘Oh God,’ Mark said. He wanted the programme to end. Now. The universe to end, actually.
Earlier that day up at the blockade, Mellanie asked, ‘Surely if you oppose that then you’re taking an anti-human stance?’ in a fully reasonable tone.
Mark’s giant face smiled goofishly. ‘If this is being anti-human, then bring it on and give me more.’
Back in the studio Mellanie gave a what-can-you-do shrug to Alessandra.
‘Bitch!’ Mark yelled furiously. He jumped to his feet, his wine glass tumbling to the stone flag floor. ‘You fucking bitch. This is not the way it happened.’
Everyone in the bar had stopped drinking and talking to look at him. Alessandra Baron’s show vanished from the portal to be replaced by the New Oxford invitation open golf tournament. ‘Enough of those smartmouth whores,’ China growled, several OCtattoo curlicues were glowing scarlet on his bald head. ‘You sit yourself back down there, Mark. We can all see it was a stitch-up job. I’ll get you a refill for that glass, on the house.’
Liz put her hand round his wrist and tugged him back down. ‘That can’t be legal,’ he said. ‘Surely?’ Anger was giving way to shock.
‘Depends what you can prove,’ Yuri said earnestly. ‘If your memory of the event is replayed to a court then you can demonstrate they produced a detrimental edit.’ He trailed off under Olga’s sharp stare.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Liz said soothingly. ‘Everyone here knows you, they can see that the interview is a phoney. It’s the navy’s response to the blockade. They’re putting the pressure on Simon to let the convoy through. Newton’s law of politics.’
Mark put his head in his hands. His e-butler was telling him Carys Panther was calling again. So was Simon Rand. Messages were coming in from the unisphere at the rate of several thousand a second, directed at his public code. It seemed that everyone who had accessed Alessandra and Mellanie wanted to tell him what they thought of him. They weren’t being kind.
*
The heat seemed to be increasing with every step, along with the humidity. Ozzie was surprised by that. He’d walked enough Silfen paths between worlds now to know when the tracks were taking him over the threshold. The signs were subtle and very gradual. Not this time.
They’d been walking through a deciduous forest on the second world since the ghost planet, it was midsummer, with wildflowers providing a gentle carpet of pastel colours across the forest floor. Palm trees and giant ferns began to inter-mingle with the doughty trunks of the forest. There was a strengthening scent, too; which took Ozzie a while to place. The sea. It had been a long time since he’d seen the sea. No Silfen path had ever led close to one.
It was growing brighter as well; strong sunlight tinged with a hint of indigo. He fished in his top pocket for his sunglasses.
‘We’re somewhere else, aren’t we?’ Orion asked eagerly. He was looking round with an entranced expression at the thick fronds crowning all the trees. Even the undergrowth had become thicker, with grass growing higher and turning a darker green. Creeping vines rose up to wrap themselves around the trees, sprouting white and lemon-yellow flowers.
‘Looks that way,’ he said reassuringly. When he turned to look at the boy he could see the path curved sharply behind them. He’d been walking in a more-or-less straight line for hours. Orion hadn’t noticed, he was holding up his friendship pendant, studying it intently. Since the ghost world he’d reclaimed it from Ozzie. The experience there had changed the boy’s opinion of the Silfen once again. They’d never be unquestioned idols again, but he was starting to accept them as true aliens. Ozzie supposed it was a sign of maturity.
‘Are there any of them nearby?’ he asked.
‘I dunno,’ Orion said, troubled. ‘I’ve never seen it like this before. It’s turned green.’ He held it up to show Ozzie. The small exotic gem was shining a bright emerald as it dangled on the end of its chain. ‘Do you think it means something else is here?’
‘I’ve no idea what it means,’ Ozzie said truthfully.
The palm trees were thinning out, with the thick grass coming up to their knees. Tochee was having to produce large powerful ripples along its locomotion ridges to shove its wide body through the clingy blades. Ozzie slowed in confusion, there was no path anymore, only the grass they’d trodden down behind them. Without the floppy fronds above his head, he could feel the star’s heat on his bare skin. Below his booted feet, the ground was sloping downward. There were a lot of undulations ahead of them as the slope dipped away, but several miles in the distance was the unmistakable blue sparkle of the sea.
Now where? Tochee’s eye patterns queried.
Ozzie faced their alien friend and shrugged. A gesture which Tochee knew only too well by now.
‘We never walked through that,’ Orion said abruptly. He was facing back the way they’d just come. Behind them was the rounded top of a modest mountain, its crown roughly covered by a jungle of palms and big ferns with a few spindly grey trees that might result if pines were crossed with eucalyptus. The whole patch couldn’t have been more than a mile across.
Ozzie was working out what to say when an electronic bleep emerged from deep inside his backpack. The sound, so integral with Commonwealth society, was profoundly shocking here. He and Orion looked at each other in surprise.
‘Link to my wrist array,’ Ozzie told his e-butler. There were function icons appearing in his virtual vision that hadn’t been there since the day he rode out of Lyddington, as his inserts regained their full capacity. He shrugged off the backpack as if it had caught fire. His e-butler confirmed that his inserts were receiving a signal from his wrist array. He shook the contents of his backpack onto the ground, heedless of the mess. A tiny red power LED was shining on the side of his burnished wrist array. He slipped it round his hand and the malmetal contracted snugly. The OCtattoo on his forearm made contact with the unit’s i-spot. Lying amid the pile of clothes and packets he’d tipped out was a hand-held array. He picked it up and switched it on. Its icons appeared immediately in his virtual vision. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered. His e-butler started to back up insert files in both arrays. He let it do that while his virtual hands rearranged icons for the hand-held array. Its screen unfurled to its full extent, measuring half a metre wide. ‘Please,’ he prayed, and translucent amber fingers plucked symbols out of the linguistic files he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months.
On the screen, the spiky flower patterns which Tochee used were displayed in the deepest purple which the screen’s resolution could manage.
Tochee became very still. Hello, his forward eye segment projected.
‘Our electronic systems are working again,’ Ozzie said out loud. The hand held array translated into a series of patterns which it flashed up.
I understand.
‘Are those Tochee’s speaki
ng pictures?’ a fascinated Orion asked, peering at the screen.
The array translated, and Tochee produced an answer.
‘That is correct, small human one,’ the array said. ‘They sit in an incorrect visual spectrum. However I can read them.’
Orion whooped exuberantly and gave a massive victory jump, punching the air. ‘It’s me, it’s me, Tochee. I’m talking to you!’ He gave Ozzie a radiant smile, and they high-fived.
‘I am aware of the communication,’ the array translated for Tochee. ‘I have wished for this moment for a long time. My first true speech is to thank you large human one and small human one for the companionship you have given me. Without you I would remain at the cold house. I would not like that.’
Ozzie gave a small bow. ‘Our pleasure, Tochee. But this isn’t one-way, man. We would have had difficulty leaving the Ice Citadel without you.’
Orion rushed over to Tochee, who extended a tentacle of manipulator flesh which the boy squeezed happily. ‘This is great, it’s wonderful, Tochee. There’s so much I want to tell you. And ask, as well.’
‘You are kind, small human one. Large humans two, three, five, fifteen, twenty-three and thirty also showed some consideration for my situation, as did other species at the cold house. I hope they are well.’
‘Which ones are those, Ozzie?’
‘I don’t know, man. I guess Sara is large human two, and George must be in there somewhere.’ His virtual hand pulled the translation routines down out of stasis, slotting them into the large processing power of the hand-held array. ‘Tochee, we need to improve our translation ability. I’d like you to talk to my machine, here.’
‘I agree. I have my own electronic units that I want to switch on.’
‘Okay, let’s go for it.’
The big alien reached round with its manipulator flesh, and removed one of the heavy bags it was carrying. Ozzie mean-while picked several sensor instruments out of his pile, switching them on one by one. ‘Man, I came this close to leaving these back at the Ice Citadel,’ he grunted.
‘What have you got?’ the excited boy asked.
‘Standard first contact team stuff. Mineral analysers, resonance scanners, em spectrum monitors, microradar, magnometers. Things that’ll tell me a lot about the environment.’
‘How are they going to help?’
‘Not sure, yet, man. It kinda depends on what we find. But this place is different to the others we’ve walked through. There must be a reason the Silfen have stopped screwing with electricity.’
‘Do you think . . .’ Orion stopped, and looked round cautiously. ‘Is this the end of the road, Ozzie?’
Ozzie very nearly told the boy not to be stupid. His own growing uncertainty stopped him. ‘I don’t know. If it is, I would have expected something a little more elaborate.’ He gestured out at the rolling landscape. ‘This is more like a dead end.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ the boy said meekly.
Results from the sensors were building up in grids across Ozzie’s virtual vision. He ignored them to give the boy a reassuring hug. ‘No way, man.’
‘Okay.’
Ozzie turned his attention back to the sensor results. He noticed that Tochee had switched on several electronic units. His own scans showed the alien’s systems to be sensors and processor units not entirely dissimilar to his own. Apart from that, there was little for his own units to go on. Strangely, this planet seemed to have no magnetic field. The general neutrino level was above average, though. Local quantum field readings were fractionally different to standard, though nothing like enough to produce the kind of warping necessary to open a wormhole – he thought it might be a residual from the electron damping effect. ‘Weird, but not weird enough,’ he said quietly.
‘Ozzie, what’s that in the sky?’
The hand-held array flashed the question up for Tochee as well. The alien put aside its own gadgets to follow Orion’s pointing arm. Ozzie followed the boy’s gaze, narrowing his eyes as he squinted almost directly into the vivid sunlight. It looked as if there was some kind of silver cloud at very high altitude, a thin curve that stretched across the sun. When his retinal inserts brought their high-intensity filters on line and zoomed in he changed his mind. No matter what magnification he used, the little strip of shimmering silver didn’t change. The planet had a ring. He tracked along it, using both array memories to file the image. The scintillations he could see coming from within the cloud were actually tiny motes. There must have been thousands of them. He wondered briefly how their composition differed from the rest of the ring. Then he came to where it crossed in front of the sun. It didn’t. And the scale shifted again, to a terrifying degree.
‘Christ fuck a duck,’ Ozzie mouthed.
What he could see was a halo of gas that went right round the star. Which meant the planet they were standing on was orbiting right inside it.
‘I know this place,’ he said in astonishment.
‘What?’ Orion blurted. ‘How could you?’
Ozzie gave a very twitchy laugh. ‘I was told about it by someone else who walked the Silfen paths. He said he visited artefacts called tree reefs. They floated in a nebula of atmospheric gas. Wow, whatta you know, and I always thought his story was mostly bullshit. Guess I owe him an apology.’
‘Who was it, Ozzie? Who’s been here?’
‘Some dude called Bradley Johansson.’
*
After a five-minute trip, the train from Oaktier pulled up to platform twenty-nine in the Seattle CST station’s third passenger terminal. Stig McSobel stepped out and asked his e-butler to find the platform where he could catch a standard-class loop train to Los Angeles, which was the next stop on the trans-Earth line. It told him the loop trains all left from terminal two, so he hopped on the little monorail car which carried people between the terminals. He slid smoothly along the elevated rail as it took him out over the vast marshalling yard that had spread out over the land to the east of Seattle. Kilometre-long goods trains pulled by hulking great Damzung T5V6B electric engine units passed underneath him as they rolled out of the bulk-freight gateway to Bayovar, the Big15 connected directly to Seattle. While trans-Commonwealth express trains flashed along on their magrails like aircraft flying at zero-altitude. Down to the south he could see a long line of gateway arches throwing off a pale blue light which produced long shadows across the weed-colonized concrete ground. The Seattle CST station was a junction for over twenty-seven phase one space worlds in addition to Bayovar, routing all of the freight and passengers that flowed between them. Thousands of trains a day trundled across the station, providing the huge web of commercial links which helped maintain Seattle’s high-tech research and industry base.
Stig sat at one end of the tubular monorail car, quickly scanning his fellow travellers, and transferring the images into files. His wrist array ran comparisons with the thousands of visual files he’d accumulated since he began working in the Commonwealth itself. Seven of the people in the monorail had been on the train from Oaktier, which was only normal. If one of them was following him, they had reprofiled their face since the last time they’d shared a train together.
Terminal two was a huge metal and concrete dome, half of which was underground. Its multitude of platforms were arranged in a radial fashion on two levels, lower level for incoming, upper for departures. Stig paid cash for his standard-class ticket which would take him all the way round the loop to Calcutta, and took a moving walkway out to platform A-seventeen, where one of the twenty-carriage loop trains was just pulling in. He stood waiting casually by an open door on the second carriage, watching latecomers hurry across the platform. Nobody from the monorail car got on to the loop train. Satisfied, he went on board and walked down the carriages to the fifth; only then did he take a seat.
Hoshe Finn stood in the queue for the Bean Here franchise stall at the end of platform A-seventeen, and watched his target get on to the local train. ‘Have your people got him?’ he asked Paula, w
ho was standing beside him.
‘Yes, thank you. Team B are boxing him. He just sat down in the fifth carriage.’
He bought a coffee for himself and a tea for Paula. ‘So do you suspect any of Team B?’
‘I don’t have any real suspects, sadly,’ she said, and blew across the top of her cup. ‘That means I have to treat everyone as the possible leak.’
‘Does that include me?’
She sipped her tea, and gave him a thoughtful look. ‘If you are working for an Executive security service, or some corporate black ops division, then whoever planted you has resources and foresight beyond even my ability to counter.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘Thank you for doing this, Hoshe.’
‘My pleasure. I just hope it gets you what you need.’
‘Me too.’
He stood beside the Bean Here stall and watched the train pull out of the station. All in all, it was a strange business, and whatever the outcome, he knew he wouldn’t like it. Either the President was killing off citizens with impunity, or that lunatic Bradley Johansson had been right all along. He wasn’t sure which was worse.
*
It took ten minutes for the loop train to reach LA Galactic, most of that was spent crawling slowly through the Seattle station as they waited for their slot amid the goods trains at the trans-Earth loop gateway. Centuries ago, when it was starting out, not even CST could afford a chunk of real estate in LA the size it needed to house a planetary station. So it moved south of San Clemente and leased some of Camp Pendelton from the US Government, in an agreement which provided the Pentagon with direct access to wormholes, giving them the ability to deploy troops anywhere on the planet (or off it). The military requirement had slowly ebbed as more and more of Earth’s population left to find their own particular brands of freedom and nationalism out among the stars, leaving fewer and fewer warlords and fanatics behind until finally the Unified Federal Nations came into existence. While the old armies were dying off, CST had continued its inexorable expansion. Over half of phase one space’s H-congruous planets had been discovered and explored from LA Galactic; and when the CST finally moved its exploratory division out to the Big15, the commercial division quickly stepped in to take up the slack. LA Galactic rivalled the stations on any of the Big15 for size and complexity.