Nemesis (36 page)

‘Shoot,’ said Ash, his stomach churning.

‘You have some issue with Sam,’ said Mark. ‘I don’t know what it is, and if you don’t want to talk about it, I won’t make you. But I’m guessing and hoping that despite everything that’s happened between us, you don’t want me dead. So I’m going to ask you one question. Should I go down to Carter with Sam?’

Ash looked out at the virtual stars. He examined the back of his hand. What was he supposed to say?
No, it’s a fucking trap, you Aspie halfwit
, came to mind. And then, as he pondered, a plan started to form in his head.

‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘You should go.’

Because, he reasoned, the only way he’d ever get home on his own terms was if Sam was
off
the ship. And the only reason Sam would ever leave was if he thought he was winning.

‘Carter is expecting it,’ said Ash. ‘And so is Sam.’

Mark looked unconvinced and Ash knew he needed to say more.

‘You’re right that Sam has pissed me off,’ he admitted. ‘I’m beyond angry for what he did back at Nerroskovi. And you’re right that there’s more going on between us than either of us is saying. I’ll explain all of it to you, I promise, but now is not the time. Right now, you shouldn’t even ask. You should just trust me and go. And don’t think too much about it, either. What I can tell you is that I’ll keep your ship safe, and that I’ll watch over you from up here. I will do everything in my power to make sure you get back up here intact, and that we leave this place on schedule.’ Ash tried for a winning smile. ‘I haven’t done much in the last few years to make me worthy of your trust,’ he said. ‘I regret that. I was stupid. But as someone who shared a dorm with you, and memories, and, let’s face it, a family, too, you can trust me now.’

Mark peered at him. Ash had realised long ago that most roboteers ironically had less control over their avatars’ expressions than they did their physical faces, and Mark was no exception. Grimaces of anxiety twitched across his otherwise impassive features.

‘Okay,’ said Mark. ‘But I’m taking Venetia and Zoe down with me.’

‘You do that,’ said Ash. ‘That’s a great idea. I’ll take care of all of you.’

12.4: MARK

When Venetia and Zoe announced their desire to join the away team, Sam approved.

‘I was going to suggest it myself,’ he said. ‘The more united a front we present, the better this will come off.’

Mark kept his thoughts to himself. His conversation with Ash had left him feeling more suspicious than ever.

They docked at Carter’s tiny Fleet outpost. It was little more than an automated fuelling station hanging in a high orbit that it shared with three empty-looking habitats. From there, they took the
Gulliver
’s remaining shuttle down to the surface.

A tan sphere dotted with high, white cloud spread below them, unfolding into a vast, dry horizon. Venetia briefed them as they fell.

‘Carter’s a political place these days,’ she said over the roar of re-entry. ‘Not so happy. You want to bear that in mind and be careful what you say. Once they started getting Flag Drops, the colonists’ attitudes turned ugly fast. Lots of angry Frontier Protection types, I’m afraid. Tossers.’

Mark flicked his camera view to Sam in the seat behind him.

‘Does this fit with your experience?’ he asked.

‘Certainly the politics there are difficult,’ Sam replied blandly. ‘But I’ve been exposed to rather a different side of it than Venetia. I haven’t made it down to the surface much, but I’ve had to handle the grievances of the colony government for years. Every time their oxygen factory gets bombed or someone poisons their protein store, we have to send a ship. It’s the same sad story you hear all over the place these days.’

‘Why were you even here, Vee?’ said Zoe. ‘The place sounds like a dump to me. Looks like one, too.’

‘It’s actually pretty interesting,’ said Venetia. ‘There used to be a lot of scientists here before the violence got bad. We were studying the tunnels. This planet’s unique in that it’s studded with Fecund biolabs, very much like the kind of set-up we have on Davenport or Kurikov. The Fecund dedicated populations of disposable children just to man the labs and survey the local flora and fauna. We gained access to a ton of specialised Fecund machinery. The patent gains alone paid for the colony about ten times over. Not to mention everything we discovered about their culture. That’s what I was here to look at, unsurprisingly. You can learn a lot about alien minds by looking at how they do science.’

Mark glanced back at the lifeless brown ball below.

‘This was a
biosphere
world?’

Venetia nodded. ‘Yep. Not so green now, I grant you. A suntap flare will do that. But this world still has a little plate tectonics going, and a nice thick atmosphere that’s already re-stabilising. There’s a ton of water in that permafrost. And with people here that process will go much faster. The planet’s practically gagging to come back to life. Give it a thousand years and it’ll be nicer than Earth is now. So take a good look, ladies and gents. This place is basically what Earth would’ve turned into if the Transcended hadn’t prevented the Fecund from reaching it while we were all still swinging in the trees.’

Mark regarded the dead world with fresh respect.

‘That’s a thousand years of good treatment, of course,’ she added. ‘First the fuckwits on the surface will have to stop arguing about land rights, access to the ruins and all that other pointless shit.’

The shuttle descended along the flight path Vorn had sent them, passing over an endless desert of undulating dun-coloured hills before landing at a tiny spaceport that sat alone on a dusty plain. A flat, white sky hung overhead, tinged butter-yellow at the edges.

As they finally settled on the ground, the reality of slightly leaden gravity settled onto Mark. A docking arm telescoped out from the spaceport’s solitary terminal to greet them, down which a transit pod slid to kiss against their airlock.

‘Welcome to the colony of New Luxor,’ said Venetia. ‘Armpit of the universe.’

The doors slid open, ushering a tang of dust into the shuttle cabin. Keir Vorn stood beyond them in the transit pod, dressed in a New Angeles-style formal kilt and T-shirt, with a curious spiral logo emblazoned on his chest. He was a far larger man than Mark had expected and built like a weightlifter. His face seemed fixed in a hang-dog expression.

‘Glad you could all come,’ he said solemnly. ‘We appreciate it.’ He gestured towards the pod. ‘Please, step this way. The governing council will see us as soon as we get back to town.’

‘Town?’ said Mark.

Keir nodded. ‘We have a conference room ready for you.’

Why hadn’t they just come to the spaceport? Mark wondered. The further he got from his ship, the more nervous he felt. Still, he’d come all the way from orbit. A mile or two more wouldn’t hurt.

By home system standards, the pod Keir had provided looked both oversized and vaguely rustic. It had plastic bench seating and real windows offering a view out across the desert. The metallic tang of surface dust clung to the air.

Vorn shook their hands as introductions were made. Then the doors sealed and they started off. From the spaceport, the pod headed down an unshielded rail that led out into the empty landscape and picked up speed.

In the distance, Mark could see the tip of a single tower jutting over the horizon.

‘Is that where we’re headed?’ said Mark. It looked depressingly far away.

Keir nodded. ‘That’s Government Tower. Doesn’t look like much from here. It’s better up close. We should be there in about forty minutes.’

‘Why did you build your spaceport so far from your city?’ said Mark. ‘That’s got to be awkward.’

‘Partly because of the placement of Fecund ruins,’ said Keir. ‘Plus we expected the city to scale and picked facility sites to support that. Over the last ten years we haven’t seen as much growth as we expected. Unless you count the illegal ghettos out in the ocean.’

‘The
ocean
?’ said Zoe.

‘Well, where the ocean
used
to be,’ said Keir. ‘Right now we’re up on what was a continent until about ten million years ago. The colony was built along an old river valley because that’s where the Fecund focused their activity. All the continental land was claimed by legitimate freeholders so the Flags just set up out in the old ocean. They didn’t care about the terraforming plans that slated it for reflooding. They don’t think that far ahead. And it’s convenient for them – they can make raids to steal from any of our sites out along the coast.’

As if on cue, the pod banked right as the rail turned to run parallel to a great canyon now opening out before them. Then it descended into a sloping trench carved out near the canyon wall before diving into a tunnel. The pod slowed in the darkness.

‘Air gate,’ said Keir. ‘This is where we couple with the old hydraulic system.’

Lights came on, revealing a utilitarian-looking industrial airlock that opened before them. Another identical lock lay beyond, and another after that. The pod went through six of them.

‘Weird engineering,’ said Zoe, peering up at the mechanism as they passed.

‘Not really,’ said Keir. ‘Saves on pumping
and
time. Doors are cheap.’

On the other side of the air gates lay an oval vaulted tunnel ten metres high. Down the left side of it ran a bank of enormous windows made of curving crystal smeared with dust. Despite the grime, they offered an extraordinary view onto the broad, sloping floor of the canyon beyond. The other wall had been covered with a crazily dense mix of alien braille and bas-relief carving depicting thousands of Fecund figures engaged in some kind of battle.

Mirror-calm black water filled the bottom of the tube, turning it into a covered canal. The pod ran along one of a set of elevated rails jutting out of the channel. They contrasted harshly with the almost art nouveau – and decidedly non-human – lines of everything else.

Mark regarded the bewildering maze of figures sliding past with awe. The Fecund had always struck him as looking like beaked aquatic monkeys. In the art here, though, they came in all shapes and sizes, with bodies that resembled everything from hippos to wolves. They all had the same weirdly turreted eyes.

‘Whoa,’ he said, taking it all in.

Sam laughed. ‘Gets everyone.’

‘Fecund transit tube,’ Keir explained with a dry smile. ‘Takes a lot of visitors by surprise. I generally don’t try starting any kind of meaningful conversation with visitors until we’re closer to the city, otherwise I just get interrupted by the sightseeing.’

‘You ran your transit system through Fecund tunnels?’ said Zoe.

‘Why not?’ said Keir. ‘The tunnels were already here and they go to all of the places we want to go. So it makes sense to save on engineering, even if it does raise our atmosphere costs.’

‘And the water?’ she asked.

‘That was already here,’ said Venetia. ‘These tunnels were full of ice when people showed up. The Fecund used water-tubes for almost everything – food, transport, communication, you name it. And given the amount of permafrost melt they have here now, the biggest problem most of the time is getting the tunnels to drain properly once they’ve been pumped back up to pressure.’

‘You’ve visited before, then?’ said Keir, eyeing her warily.

Venetia nodded. ‘Years ago. You want to know something crazy?’ she asked Zoe. ‘There’s evidence that some of these tunnels pre-date the Fecund by several million years, meaning they were second-hand when the beak-faces got here. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’

Keir frowned. ‘That’s never been conclusively proven,’ he said.

‘It would certainly mess up a lot of the paperwork around legal claims, that’s for sure,’ said Venetia with a wry smile. ‘Permits for stripping sites of undetermined heritage are much harder to acquire, as it turns out.’

The defence minister took a moment to re-appraise his passenger. ‘Fortunately, that hasn’t been an issue for years,’ he said quickly. ‘We have bigger problems on our plate these days.’

‘Don’t we all,’ said Sam.

But Venetia only warmed to her topic, her own advice about not baiting the locals apparently forgotten.

‘The Fecund cared less about planets than we do,’ she said. ‘Unlike us humans, they tended to prefer orbitals and only bothered setting down on worlds where there was something to exploit or learn from. Like old tunnels, for instance. But most people agree that the Fecund were primarily here for bioweapons.’

‘Either that, or simply
biochemistry research
,’ said Keir. ‘Opinions are mixed. Many don’t hold such a dim view of the species. We try to maintain a respectful attitude towards the prior owners.’

Mark refrained from commenting. If the Fecund had treated this place anything like humans had treated Davenport, Venetia was probably right. He moved over to the window to look at the view flashing past. On the far bank of the canyon stood rows of what looked like disused industrial buildings, enormous in scale and all in advanced states of decay. Given that ten million years had passed, it was astonishing they were standing at all. Those tectonics Venetia mentioned couldn’t have been too active in the meantime.

What had once been the bed of the river running down the canyon was now a flat swathe of gravel pocked with broken pieces of mechanised junk, the broad banks dotted with what looked like giant harvesting machines of some kind. They stood crumpled and forlorn like the skeletons of ancient monsters poking out of the dust.

The transit tunnel reached a vast block-shaped building jutting out from the side of the canyon wall. As they ran through it, the transit tube briefly became glass on both sides. Around them towered the interior of some kind of factory space where a row of dozen-metre-tall robots, filth-smeared, decrepit, older than humanity, stood waiting for new tasks that would never come.

‘They built to last, then,’ he observed.

‘Hell, yes,’ said Venetia. ‘You’ve seen the
Ariel Two
. These guys didn’t mess around. Mind you, this whole valley was clogged with dust when people first arrived here. It had been that way since the Transcended caused the biosphere shutdown. The colonists uncovered it all in the first years of habitation. The ruins won’t last nearly as long exposed to the atmosphere – just a few tens of thousands of years, by current estimates.’