I looked back. They were gaining on us, but as the water got deeper the advantage changed. By the time the water became too deep to wade, we were beyond their reach. Somebody whistled, and the dog too turned back. By now six people had gathered on the bank, and as we turned and headed downriver I noticed that one of them was speaking into a radio.
‘What do you think he’s up to?’ I asked Malley. For answer, Malley pointed back along the shore, to Under Flyover’s long wooden jetty. Four men were just visible, running along the quay. They scrambled down a ladder and into a boat. With the four of them working two pairs of oars, it pulled away from the quay and gave us chase.
‘They haven’t a chance,’ Malley said, just before two of the men shipped their oars and raised a mast, then a sail.
‘Looks like they do,’ said Suze.
With the sail up their rate of closing on us increased visibly, though I figured it would take them at least half an hour. I steered a course away from the shore, hoping to pick up the main current and gain some much-needed speed.
‘What
is
this?’ I demanded of Malley. ‘This is crazy. They must know you want to come along with us, you could have got away easily back there if you didn’t. They can’t all believe that story about me brainwashing you, or whatever. So why are they still chasing us?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m more surprised that your lot haven’t responded to our call.’
Not quite my lot, but he was right. It was most disconcerting. I looked around. The sunlight was by now at a quite acute angle, and the scene—the sheet of water over which we moved, the wooded banks curving to the left ahead of us—would in other circumstances have been idyllic. Waterfowl swam or skimmed the widened river, and its surface was otherwise marred by only a few small craft …
‘What about those other boats?’ I asked Suze. ‘Surely some of them are Union visitors?’
‘Yes, but it’s hard to say which—ah!’
She pointed downriver to a tiny vee of white spray. ‘We’re saved! That’s a Union patrol boat!’ Carried away by excitement, she began waving her arms and shouting, although the boat—a hydrofoil, I now saw—was still a couple of miles off. She desisted after a moment and stripped off her shirt and began waving that.
‘What does a patrol boat have to do?’ I asked.
‘River rescue, mostly,’ said Malley.
‘And maintaining a presence, as they say,’ Suze remarked, flapping her shirt and all but standing up.
‘Do they ever interfere with non-cos?’
Malley scowled and shook his head. ‘Maybe they should—the Thames boatmen are inclined to take what the traffic will bear. Daylight robbery.’
I didn’t understand this, but Suze gave it an appreciative laugh.
The hydrofoil’s course shifted a fraction. ‘They’ve seen us,’ I said. I looked over my shoulder. The men in the boat were working the sail again, tacking off in a different direction. Within a few minutes the hydrofoil—a thirty-foot launch, painted white, its ensign the Union’s starry plough—had cut back its engine and dropped into the water, and circled behind us and hove to alongside. The woman at the wheel waved to us and called out: ‘Hi! You having trouble with those people?’
‘Yes!’ I yelled. ‘Thanks for coming to help.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Alexandra Port—but the mouth of the Lee would be fine, if you want to give us a lift.’
‘Sure. No problem. Come aboard.’ She threw us a rope, and we pulled the wallowing dinghy in to a small ladder at the side of her boat. First Malley, then Suze, then I climbed in, and I used a boathook to haul the dinghy up after me. The woman, who introduced herself as Carla, had long blonde hair and a suntanned face and a smile that showed crooked teeth. Her yellow jumpsuit had a small patch with her name and ‘River Patrol’ stitched on it.
‘Did you pick up a call?’ Suze asked. ‘We tried to hail Alexandra Port.’
Carla shook her head. She motioned us into, the cabin in front of the cockpit, and re-started the engine. ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ she yelled. ‘Tell me about what happened when I’ve got this thing on course.’
The boat picked up speed, the foils dug into the water and we lifted off. Malley lit his pipe, Suze settled to gazing out of the window, and I stood beside Carla and told her a conveniently edited version of what had gone on. She was as baffled by the non-response as we were. We crossed Gunnersmere, Hammersea, Southwater and had just reached the City Basin when Carla remarked: ‘There’s a lot of non-co boats on the river this evening …’
I had noticed the boats, but not having any basis for comparison hadn’t known it was unusual. Rowing boats, sailboats, skiffs, steam-launches, smoke-trailing woodburners, and barges were visible all across the pool, their courses at first uncoordinated, and then—as I looked again and again—obviously converging. On us.
Carla noticed it a few seconds after I did. She frowned and tried her communications equipment. The microwave laser pinged off whatever satellite it was tuned to, but no response came back. The boats were still at a distance—a few hundred yards all around—but were slowly surrounding us. Suze and Malley came out of the cabin and we watched in silent puzzlement and growing dismay.
‘This is too much,’ I said. ‘No more miss nice girl. Carla, please take
fast
evasive action before they block us off completely.’
She grinned and gave me the thumbs-up and pulled out the throttle. The boat shot forward, then began a curving course towards the City towers, which gleamed gold and bronze in the low sun, like drunken, armoured Goliaths wading out to meet some aquatic David. Between them and us were a couple of non-co craft: a four-man rowing boat, perhaps similar to the one that had first followed us, which skittered across the water like a surface-tension bug; and a much slower, heavier wood-fired puffer that chugged with shocking determination across our bows. Carla touched the wheel, once to left, once to right. The rowing boat was swamped, and I glimpsed white faces from the steam boat’s decks as we hurtled past its stern with yards to spare. Then we were in among the leaning, looming towers, our reflection speeding and flashing in their glassy flanks.
I stepped carefully to the rear deck and squatted down and flowed the suit into its dish aerial form, and sent an urgent call to the
Terrible Beauty
.
The others were clinging to any available handhold, and looking at me in bemusement as I stood up with the reconstituted clothes climbing back over my skin.
‘Twenty minutes,’ I said. Our wake set waves crossing and recrossing the geometric spaces of the boxed canyons. The non-cos’ vessels prowled about the flooded buildings but kept well back.
‘Until what happens?’ Carla asked.
I grinned, suddenly cocksure again, already back in my own world, already far above this one, with its conspiracies of non-cooperators, its unresponsive rescue services, its general principle of leaving far too much to a natural world and a prehistoric humanity that pounced on any moment of weakness.
‘Watch the sky,’ I told them. ‘
Terrible Beauty
’s coming down.’
It was Malley who spotted it first, a new and brighter evening star low in the glare of the sunset. Although it was coming down, it seemed to climb, as it moved away from the horizon and towards us. Twice it seemed to flare, and broader secondary flashes drifted away. Then, closer, it really did flare, with a thunder that tumbled down to us through miles of air, and that was as suddenly replaced by the screaming whistle of the aerobraking flues. Plumes of superheated air founted from its surface, then the third and final parachute was deployed, a half-mile-wide canopy of monolayer carbon filament on which the huge ship floated like the seed beneath a thistledown.
‘Head for mid-channel,’ I told Carla. She complied, barely able to take her gaze away from the descending ship. The harrassing boats fled from its encroaching shadow in a widening circle of accelerating haste. We nosed out from among the towers and set a course to meet it, as if in perverse defiance of the surrounding panic.
‘Oh, oh!’ cried Suze. ‘It’s beautiful—terrible beauty all right!’
Its surfaces glowing like a lantern, curved like a shell, intricate like a vase; its shape like the paradoxical egg of an alien, avian species that lived in higher dimensions; its sound like a choir of angry angels or a host of adoring devils, the
Terrible Beauty
released its drogue, which flitted out of sight above the towers and trees, and no doubt made more than one fortune for whoever found it; fired its attitude jets and its final retro-flare, sending roiling clouds of steam across the water towards us, and settled at last on the riverbed of the pool of London.
‘That,’ said Malley, ‘is the most
shocking
waste of delta-vee I have
ever
seen.’
Carla looked at me sidelong. I nodded: ‘Full ahead.’ The hydrofoil surged across the few hundred yards that separated us from the improbable object on the river. As we drew closer the water hissed and bubbled, and the foils failed to support our craft. Carla moved a control lever and the hull sank back; skilfully she adjusted our speed until we came almost to a halt beneath the spaceship’s curving overhang. Around us, the silvery bellies of killed or
stunned fishes flashed in the churning water. Some of them had undoubtedly been cooked alive; I found myself hoping that the intake valves—already open and gulping in water, thirsty to replace the squandered reaction-mass—would filter some of them off to the commissary. It was probable: like many of the Division’s mechanisms, the ship had a sensitive nose—and a ravenous appetite—for usable organics.
About fifty feet above us, at the
Terrible Beauty
’s widest diameter, a hatch unlidded and a face peered down at us: Tony Girard, currently the security officer on the ship.
‘Hi, Ellen!’ he shouted. ‘Sending a ladder down.’
I caught the plastic ladder as it reached the boat, and turned to Malley. ‘After you.’
Malley grinned at me, all cynicism gone from his face. He looked like a small boy about to go on a carnival ride. He picked up his bag, looped its longest strap across the back of his neck and under his armpits, and set off up the ladder.
‘Carla,’ I said, ‘we’ll obviously wait till you’re well clear before we lift, but will you be all right?’
She made a performance of shading her eyes and looking around the now almost deserted stretch of river. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘There’s a Union station at the mouth of the Lee. I’ll find out there why nobody answered your call—or mine, and why there weren’t any other patrol boats around to help.’ Her expression darkened. ‘
Somebody
’s gonna have some hard questions to answer.’
‘Contact us when they do,’ I said, scribbling a note of our call sign and passing it to her, along with the money I’d taken from Graciosa. ‘And thanks for everything. Anybody gives you trouble, you just give us a call.’ I jerked my thumb at the ship, and she smiled—grateful for the moral support, but probably not taking my promise seriously. This is a mistake people make about the Division, but each person only makes it once. I smiled, half to myself, and grasped Suze’s shoulder.
‘You were great,’ I said. ‘You helped me a lot, and it was real neighbourly of you to come after us.’
‘Even if it wasn’t necessary!’ Suze laughed. ‘Forget goodbyes, Ellen. I’m coming with you.’ She put her hand on one of the steps of the ladder.
‘What? You can’t—’
‘I can,’ she said confidently. ‘Anybody in the Union can join the Division if there’s a ship available to take them, and—’ she patted the hull ‘—here it is.’
She was right. It was a rule, but in practice it was only applied by experienced spacers from the Inner System defences joining the Division as a natural progression, and by members of various administrative committees
coming out to exercise what they supposed was democratic oversight. We had long experience in dissuading starry-eyed youngsters from Earth, but ultimately we could only dissuade, and—if the new volunteer turned out to be useless—gently disillusion them with some really boring tasks.
‘But Suze!’ I expostulated. ‘You’ve got a job to do here. Something’s up among the non-cos—all this radio communication, nobody knew
that
was going on. You’d do better to use what you know to help the Union find out—’
She held up her free hand. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m useless for that now. The non-cos saw me with you, and we’ve seen how fast word can spread. They won’t trust me any more, and they’d be right! And if you’re really going to—where you said—I wouldn’t miss that chance for anything. I’m coming.’
And with that she turned away and climbed swiftly up the ladder. I watched her almost halfway, then looked at Carla. She had an ironic smirk, as if to say,
you’ll have trouble with that one
. The only response I could think of was to shrug and spread my hands.
‘That’s life,’ I said, shaking my head, and then followed my new comrade up the ladder and into the ship.
The sound of that hatch sealing behind me was the most welcome I’d heard for some time. Tony Girard caught me by the forearms, and then let himself be swept into a hug.
‘It’s great to be back!’ I said when I’d let go of him and he’d stood aside, red-faced, as we stepped out of the airlock. The inner hatch closed behind us and we heard a brief, muffled surge as the airlock filled with water. The deck thrummed under my feet, the curving walls of the narrow corridor enclosed me, the familiar shipboard smells of metal and plastic and blue-green, of endlessly recycled air and water and organics, filled my grateful nostrils. ‘That was a brilliant landing, I must say.’
‘Great to have you back,’ Tony said. ‘Especially with such success.’
I turned the sides of my mouth downward. ‘Wilde would’ve been better. He
knows
the way—’
‘And who’s to say it still works? We’ll get more out of Malley in the long run. You did fine.’
‘Hope you’re right. Have to dry him out and give his brain a reboot first.’
Tony laughed. ‘Two tabs from the medical bay. I’ve pulled worse cases out of brawls in Aldringrad.’ He motioned me to precede him along the radial corridor. ‘Who’s the little sweetie?’
‘Calls herself Suze,’ I told him. ‘Don’t know her other names. She’s just volunteered. I met her by chance, and she’s been helpful. She’s a sociologist—’
‘A what?’ I glanced back at him. He rolled his eyes up, then down. ‘Oh, right, I see.’ He blinked hard, shutting off his suit’s encyclopaedia.
‘Check her out,’ I advised. ‘She’s nice, but—’ I spread my fingers and waggled my hand where he could see it over my shoulder.
‘Gotcha,’ he said. ‘You had some trouble with the locals?’
‘Minor trouble,’ I said. ‘No tissue damage to anyone—but something serious is going on. Malley was leaned on by a couple of guys who claimed to be from the Inner System’s space defence, and the descriptions of them check out, low-gee reflexes and all that. Hinted that he was a potential source of an outbreak. He denies it, but what he’s actually been doing is teaching electronics to the non-cos—no harm in that, but the grubby sods are using radios.’
‘Mind viruses could have been the worry.’
‘Possible,’ I said. ‘Or maybe the appeasers have picked up some hint of what we’re up to. The local Union rep is looking into it, she’ll be in touch.’
‘I’ll keep an ear out,’ Tony said. We’d reached the internal doorway to the mid deck. ‘Oh, and Ellen …’
‘Yes?’ I paused, my hand on the plate, and looked back at him. He eyed me up and down and mimed disapproval. ‘You can’t face the rest of the crew dressed like
that
.’
‘Oh.’ I looked down at my torn jumpsuit, stained webbing, scratched boots; thumbed the straps of my backpack. ‘I suppose not.’
I put down the bits of hardware I’d accumulated and hesitated before transforming the suit. In the natural human environment of free fall or low-gee most of us went for some permutation of closely fitting and lightly floating; but we weren’t going to enjoy that comfortable condition for some time, and I’d need some padding. I selected the appropriate parameters, and let the suit come up with something to match them. I found myself in a bulky, quilted one-piece with the arms and legs sealed at the wide cuffs to skintight gloves and socks. It had a thrown-back anorak hood which could quickly convert to a helmet in an emergency. Deep pockets were on the front of each thigh. The whole thing was presumably modelled on its race memory of a Project Apollo spacesuit, except that it was rendered in pale pink satin quilting, and embellished with a deep pink satin sash and lot of lace, ribbons and bows, all pink.
The suit has its little moods, sometimes.
‘Oh, very dignified,’ Tony said. ‘You look like somebody’s great, great grandmother in a bed jacket.’
So that was what was on its mind. There were several layers of clothing underneath; from the feel of them, the suit had elaborated further on the maternal-boudoir theme. Perhaps it had registered that I was pregnant, even though I hadn’t asked it to check. It was quite touching, in a way.
‘I
am
somebody’s great, great grandmother,’ I reminded Tony, as I gathered
up the pistol, ammo, and clasp knife. He looked at the last with covetous interest.
‘A Swiss Army knife!’ he said. ‘Can I have that?’
‘No,’ I said, pocketing it. ‘You can have the gun, though. I think our new recruits will expect it of the security officer.’
‘Yeah,’ he said as I pushed the plate and the door slid open. ‘I just don’t think they’ll expect that suit of the skipper.’
The mid deck is the control area on a fusion clipper. Circular, fifty feet across and fifteen feet high, it’s shielded from the engine by the main water tanks, and from external radiation by shells of water between the outer and inner hull. It looks and feels like a greenhouse, warm and slightly humid, with illumination provided by water-filtered sunlight and electric lamps; the instrumentation and cabling intertwined with the hydroponics and the inevitable coiled tubes of transparent plastic through which the algae circulate. In a sunstorm the whole company—usually up to sixty, counting crew and passengers—can crowd into it, but most of the time it’s occupied only by the active crew. On this trip there were no passengers, so we were all there.
My wonderful team, my gang. Tony Girard beside me, my security expert, whose conspiratorial skills went back to the old faction fights in Lagrange. Jaime Andrades, the navigator, who joked that his talents came from his Portuguese ancestry, but who was a pure-black survivor of the famously disastrous Angolan moon colony. Boris Grobovski, the gunner, who’d spent his first century of adulthood with the Sino-Soviet mobile artillery, in their slow but inexorable advance from Vladivostok to Lisbon, spreading democracy from sea to shining sea. Andrea Gromova, the pilot, who had started out, before the Fall, boosting antique Energias crammed with bonded labourers from the privatized gulags to the asteroid mining camps, then gone over to the revolution in the battle of New South Yorkshire. Lu Yeng, the computer specialist; at seventy, she was the youngest, born on Callisto. Her parents had come there in the initial negotiations between the Union and the Division. The intensity of her experience with neutralizing Outwarder viruses more than made up for her relative youth, although in political terms she was a bit naive, retaining an odd reverence for Kim Nok-Yung, Shin Se-Ha and other finders of the true knowledge.
None of the crew so much as raised an eyebrow at my suit when Tony and I strode out on to the mid deck. Eccentricity is policy. Suze and Malley were sitting together on the edge of an acceleration couch, and they had some difficulty not laughing out loud. I gave them a withering glance, and grinned and waved at the other crew members, who were spread out around the circle of a dozen or so acceleration couches.
‘Thanks, everybody,’ I said. ‘That was an excellent landing. Congratulations to Jaime and Andrea.’ The navigator and pilot waved back. I walked straight over to the nearest acceleration couch and lay down. Tony settled in another couch, hauled down a boom-borne instrument resembling a television screen with handlebars, and began scanning.
‘Tony,’ I asked after a minute, ‘are there any people within a mile of us?’
He kept twisting the bars for a few seconds.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘None on the water, for sure, and any who’re too deep in the trees for me to pick up should be safe enough.’
‘Sound the alarm anyway,’ I said.
The internal alarms on a fighter-bomber are cacophonous. The external alarms on a fusion-clipper about to lift from a planet are calculated to wake the dead and send them running anywhere out of its range. We only heard it faintly ourselves, but it still set our teeth on edge. I let it sound for ten minutes while we went through the final checklist: everybody strapped in, water-intake valves closed, fusion lasers powered up, flight path clear …
‘OK, comrades,’ I said, ‘let’s lift.’
Andrea eased out the fusion regulator, and the ship rose, slowly at first, shuddering from nose to tail.
‘Fifty feet,’ Andrea intoned. ‘One hundred, hundred and fifty, two hundred …’
‘At two thousand feet, go for the burn,’ I said.
‘Eat proton death, Canary Wharf!’ said Suze.
‘Hey, come on,’ I said. ‘A few broken windows.’
Ten seconds later Andrea pulled out the regulator all the way, and a succession of invisible people started an unkind experiment to find out how many could lie on top of me. By the time we reached orbit, they’d piled up seven deep.
The drive shut off, and they all went away. I unbuckled and let myself drift for a moment, enjoying the sensation while it lasted. ‘Everybody all right?’ I called out. Everybody was.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘don’t get too happy in free fall. We’re going to pick up some ice, and then we’re boosting all the way at one gee.’
‘Thank god for that,’ said Malley, who was clinging to his couch as if he were afraid of falling off. Suze had the silent, pale look of someone who is determined not to think about being sick. Several crew members made mutinous moaning noises.
‘Shut up, you lot,’ I said. ‘I’ve been in one gee for three days, while you’ve all been loafing about in orbit. You can live with it for another ten days.’
‘But we’ve
already
lived with it for ten days,’ grumbled Andrea. ‘On the way in.’
Malley rolled on his couch and looked over at me. ‘So you’ll have been in one gee for all of twenty-three days? I wonder how the human frame can stand it.’
‘It can’t,’ I said, launching myself over to float above him. ‘Hence many of the ills that flesh is heir to. Which reminds me.’
I grabbed a boom and pushed myself over to the medical bay and clicked out three surgeries.
‘Just swallow these,’ I told him on my return. He clutched the colour-coded capsules and looked at them suspiciously.
‘What’ll they do?’
‘One’s to stop your addictions—you’ll still enjoy a drink or a smoke, but you won’t need them—one to rejuvenate you—circulation, muscle tone, skin and so on—and one to burnish up your synapses.’ I grinned at his suspicious look. ‘Just the hardware—the software’s still down to you. No commie brainwashing involved, honest.’
‘I guess I have to trust you sometimes,’ he said wryly, and placed the surgeries in his mouth and swallowed hard. ‘All I feel right now is I could do with a drink.’
‘Better wait until we’re under acceleration,’ I said. ‘Squirting from bulbs ain’t much fun.’
Suze observed this with dull interest.
‘I don’t suppose,’ she asked plaintively, ‘you have anything for space sickness? ’
‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘You just have to get used to it.’ I refrained from adding the bit about the first six months being the worst.
Suze fixed her gaze on something above her and nodded, her lips set in a thin line. I felt sorry for her, but at the same time a little amused that she’d come up with the same request as every other newbie we’d ever lifted. A cure for motion sickness, indeed! What did they expect from medical nanotechnology—miracles?
‘What’s with the imperial units?’ Malley asked, as we watched and listened to Andrea guiding us in to dock with the ice tanker.
‘You’ll hear arguments about human scale and intuition and convenience and so forth,’ I explained, ‘but the older and coarser characters in space will sum it up in two words: fucking NASA. Most of the space settlements were built with ex-NASA stock or to NASA spec way back in the early days, and ever since then it’s been too much trouble to change. We’re locked into it.’
‘Yeah,’ said Andrea. ‘Which is why we are now two point five seven miles from a hundred thousand metric tons of ice. You’ve just gotta love the consistency of it all.’
‘Mind you,’ Malley chuckled, his teeth clenched on an unlit pipe, ‘I suppose I should be grateful. The Malley One Point Five Eight Kilometres just wouldn’t have the same ring to it.’
Even Suze managed a laugh, though she was still looking a bit green. The thought of the mess she could at any moment make impelled me to seek out a couple of suits. I hauled them over and thrust one each to Malley and Suze.
‘What do I do with this?’ Suze asked, drifting away with her arms wrapped around a twenty-pound, eighteen-inch ball of rubbery glop.
‘Just let it get to know you,’ I told her. It was already flowing around her waist and across her midriff. ‘It’ll take the form of a set of basic fatigues and backpack in the first instance, and it’ll show you how to vary that if you want. It can mimic almost any texture and external appearance you specify.’ I waved a satin-gloved hand, pink lace flurrying around my forearm. ‘If you don’t specify the details, expect surprises! But no matter how frivolous it may look, it reacts to vacuum before you can blink. If you go outside, or if we have, uh, a
sudden loss of cabin pressure
, it snaps into a spacesuit. Grab an oxy bottle if you can, but if necessary it can work on a closed-loop basis indefinitely. ’