That was Rudd’s cue to interject. “That’s all very well on paper, Member Chromis, and I don’t doubt that we have the industrial capacity to make such a thing happen. But I wonder if you’ve considered the risks of such an object falling into the wrong hands. Not all of our neighbours are quite as enlightened as we might hope: we already have enough trouble policing the harmful-technologies moratorium as it stands. Stuffing all our worldly wisdom into a bottle and tossing it into the great blue yonder doesn’t strike me as the wisest course of action, no matter how well intentioned the gesture.”
“We’ve thought of that,” Chromis said.
“Oh? Do tell.” Rudd sounded innocently intrigued.
“The artefacts will have the ability to protect their contents from unintended recipients. They won’t unlock themselves unless they detect the presence of the Benefactor’s mitochondrial DNA. There’ll be a margin of error, of course — we won’t want to exclude the Benefactor’s children, or grandchildren, or even more distant descendants — but nobody else will be able to get at the treasure.”
Again, Rudd played his part expertly. “Nice idea, Chromis, but I’m still not convinced that you’ve done the detailed work here. There is no Benefactor DNA on file in any Congress archive. All biological records were lost within a century of her departure.”
“We’ve got her DNA,” Chromis said.
“Now, that
is
news. Where from, might I ask?”
“We had to go a long way to get it — back to Mars, as it happens — but we’re confident that we’ve retrieved enough of a sample to lock out any unintended recipients.”
“I thought they’d already drawn a blank on Mars.”
“They did. We dug deeper.”
Rudd sat down heavily, as if the wind had been snatched from his sails. “In which case… I must congratulate you on your forward thinking.”
“Thank you,” Chromis said sweetly. “Any further questions, Member Rudd?”
“None whatsoever.”
There were disgruntled murmurs from some of the delegates, but few of them could begrudge Chromis and Rudd this little piece of theatre. Most of them had participated in similar charades at one time or another.
“Member Rudd is right to draw attention to the technical difficulties associated with this proposal,” Chromis said, “but let’s not allow ourselves to be daunted. If the project were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. We’ve had ten thousand years to do the easy stuff. Now let’s bite off something big, and show history what we’re made of. Let’s reach across space and time and give something back to the Benefactor, in return for what she gave us.”
Chromis allowed herself a pause, judging that no one would interrupt her at this crucial moment. When she continued speaking, her tone was measured, conciliatory. “I don’t doubt that some of you will question the wisdom of this proposal, even though it has already been subjected to every conceivable scrutiny by the combined intelligence of one hundred and thirty worlds. The problem is that, for most of us, the Benefactor is no more than a distant historical figure — someone with whom we have no emotional connection. But there is every chance that
she
is still out there somewhere, still living and breathing. She’s not a God, not a mythic figure, but a human being, as real as any of us. There was a time when I had trouble thinking of her that way, but not any more. Not since we recovered
this
, and heard her speak.” Chromis nodded gravely in response to her audience’s speculative murmurs. “That’s right: we’ve recovered an intact copy of the transmission that started all of this: the Benefactor’s original statement of intent; her promise to give us all that she could. Recovering this transmission was, in its way, as difficult as finding a sample of her DNA. The difference was that the recording was always part of our data heritage: just misplaced, buried, corrupted beyond recognition. It took centuries of forensic skill to piece it together, frame by frame, but it was, I believe, worth the effort.”
Chromis looked to the display cube and sent a subliminal command, causing it to begin replaying the clip. Music welled up and an ancient symbol — a globe and three letters in an alphabet no one had used for nearly fourteen thousand years — spun before them. “Please adjust your language filters,” Chromis said, “for English, mid twenty-first century. You are about to hear the voice of the Benefactor.”
Right on cue, she spoke, identical copies of her face projected on each facet of the cube. A delicate-boned woman: looking less like the kind of person who made history than the kind who became a victim of it. She sounded diffident, uncertain of herself, forced into saying something that did not come naturally to her.
“I’m Bella Lind,” she said, “and you’re watching CNN.”
PART ONE - 2057+
ONE
Parry Boyce looked up from the rippled red surface of the comet. He cuffed down his helmet binocs, keyed in mid-zoom and waited for the image to stabilise.
Only a breath of thrust held fifty thousand tonnes of ship over his head. The precious mass driver was fully extended now, but still braced alongside
Rockhopper
. A spray of flickering blue lights near the head of the driver showed activity still taking place around the jammed deployment gear. Chrome-yellow robots worked the repair duty, with one tiny, suited figure hovering to the side. He knew it was Svetlana even before his helmet dropped an icon onto her figure.
They hadn’t parted well. He’d been on her case about the repairs, but only because Bella was on
his
case. It was getting to them all, sitting out here, doing nothing.
Parry stood on the floodlit edge of the abyss that he had cut into the skin of the comet. The cylindrical shaft was geometrically perfect, an intrusion of order into the otherwise chaotic landscape of the crust. It was a hundred metres deep and fifty metres wide, the curving side already lined with a neat, laser-smooth plaque of hardened blue-grey sprayrock.
He voiced on some music from the Orlan nineteen’s files and lost himself in the soaring qawwali of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. After what could have been minutes or hours, the floods picked out the moving shadow of another suit lumbering towards him. Whoever it was had just emerged from one of the dome-shaped surface tents set back twenty metres from the rim of the shaft. Beyond the tents sat the angular, splayed-leg form of
Cosmic Avenger
, the heavy lander that had carried them from
Rockhopper
.
Parry tried to read the walker’s gait before his head-up ID’d the approaching figure. Feldman and Shimozu moved with the cautious economy of underwater workers — they’d been transferred from DeepShaft’s marine division on Earth — but Mike Takahashi was a spacewalker to the marrow. Even wearing a thirty-year-old Russian surplus Orlan nineteen, ballasted with nearly a tonne of depleted uranium, he moved with a loping grace, unafraid to lose contact with the surface for long moments.
The HUD bracketed Takahashi’s nineteen and appended his name in pulsing blue letters, accompanied by a Manga-style face icon.
“Nice hole, Chief.”
“Thanks,” Parry said.
“Thing is, it isn’t going to get any nicer just because you keep staring at it.”
“I’m thinking it might need another layer,” he said, hands on his hips. “Maybe just a dab down there?”
Takahashi stood next to him, their bulky shadows spilling into the abyss. The other man favoured glacial Estonian choral music: Parry heard it seeping over the voicelink.
“We need you inside,” Takahashi said.
Parry wondered what was up. Takahashi could have called him inside easily enough without making the trek in person.
“What’s the story?” he asked, as they walked back to the tent.
“Don’t know. Something’s going down, that’s all. You checked out the ship lately?”
“A while back.”
“Maybe you should take another look.”
Parry cuffed down the binocs again.
Rockhopper
leapt into view as the Nikons found their focus. Everything looked the same, except that the flicker of repair torches around the head of the driver was absent — nor was there any sign of Svetlana’s hovering figure.
“Interesting,” he said.
“Good or bad?”
Parry stowed his binocs. “Could go either way.” He reached for the tent flap and pulled it wide enough to admit the two men.
The tent was unpressurised: a stiffened dome-shaped shelter, fabric wired with superconducting mesh to afford the bare minimum of protection against charged particles. Gillian Shimozu and Elias Feldman sat either side of a plastic packing crate, playing cards spread across the lid. The cards, some faded and crudely redrawn in magic marker, were printed on thick, texturised plastic, better for handling with spacesuit gloves.
The four suits exchanged protocols with a warble.
“Still time to deal you in,” Shimozu said, looking up as Parry sealed the flap behind them.
“I’ll pass.” Behind Shimozu, balanced on a bright-red oxygen pump, a flexy showed a picture of Saturn, with the blue logo of
China Daily
in the top-left corner.
“Spoilsport,” Shimozu said, taking a card from the table.
“Any word from Batista or Fletterick? There are signs we might be in business,” Parry said.
Feldman lowered his hand, revealing a set of aces. “The driver?”
“Looks like work’s been called off. Unless Saul’s managed to swing shift changes for his robots, it’s got to mean we have a functioning deployment system.”
“Whoop-de-doo,” Shimozu said. She had her antiglare visor tipped down: its near-matte coating blocked any possible reflection from the cards in her hand.
“You could tone down the enthusiasm a smidge,” Parry said. “I’ll ask again: any word?”
Takahashi pointed at the screen. “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the driver at all. They were showing Saturn just now.”
“That why you pulled me in?” Parry asked.
“I thought it was weird. Why show Saturn?”
“Batista and Fletterick,” Parry said patiently. “Anyone?”
“Maybe there’s been an accident,” Takahashi said, wonderingly. The other two had dealt him into the game, but he appeared to be more interested in the screen behind Shimozu. “Anyone know how to get that feed on my helmet?”
“Use your drop-down menu,” Feldman said testily, as if he’d been over this before. “Select preferences, then HUD audiovisual display options, then —”
Parry walked past the game to the oxygen pump and picked up the flexy, squeezing it gently so as not to injure the quasi-living thing. The main image was still Saturn, but now a pundit in an overlaid box was talking. Nobody he recognised. Chinese text ticker-taped along the bottom of the screen.
Maybe Takahashi was right. Maybe something was happening around Saturn. But what could be big enough to hold the attention of
China Daily
this long? The major newsfeeds made Bella Lind’s fish look like masters of sustained concentration.
That was when his HUD rearranged itself spontaneously, a priority window popping open, filled with Bella’s face.
“Parry,” she said. ‘Thank goodness. I was beginning to think we’d need to send
Crusader
to pick you up. It appears that the repair squad cut through the power bus to the downlink.“
“Hope you give them hell.”
“Ordinarily I would, but… now isn’t the time.”
No one said anything. They were waiting for Parry to speak for them. The cards were on the table.
“What’s up, Bella?”
“Something big,” she said, “big enough that I’m going to need you back on the ship, and quickly. But before you leave, I want the driver shaft prepped to accept an FAD.”
“We don’t need to chip anything off this one, Bella. She’ll fall nice and stable all the way home.”
“I’m not talking about reshaping,” she said. “I’m talking about blowing it out of the sky.”
* * *
Svetlana Barseghian dabbed bright-green disinfectant onto the pressure sores around her groin, then snapped a dosimeter cuff from her wrist and checked that the mission dosage was still on the low side of four hundred millisieverts. She pulled on jogging pants and a black Lockheed-Krunichev Fusion Systems T-shirt, jammed stained grey sneakers on her feet and raked a hand through hair flat and itchy after the spacewalk.
She pushed in a pair of pink ear protectors, muting the background noise. Except for the two hours a day when they turned off most of the machines, it was noisier in
Rockhopper
than in the Orlan eighteen.
A warren of interconnecting corridors brought her to the number-two centrifuge. When she reached Bella’s office she saw that Craig Schrope was already there. She reminded herself to be on her best behaviour.
Bella invited her in, pushed a cigarette into an ashtray and said something to Svetlana. Her lips were moving but no sound was coming out — Svetlana realised that she still had the ear protectors in. She popped them out and squeezed them back into their little plastic case, then secured it against the Velcro band of her jogging pants.
“Sorry.”
“I was suggesting you might want to take a seat,” Bella said nicely. She waited patiently until Svetlana was settled on a lightweight folding chair.
Bella’s soundproofed and carpeted office was the largest private space in the ship; it doubled as her sleeping quarters. The walls were pastel-grey, papered here and there with false-colour seismic survey maps: grainy images of shipwrecks and coral reefs grabbed during scuba expeditions. The only fixture that never changed was Bella’s fish tank, all five hundred litres of it.
Schrope hated the fish tank, Svetlana knew. It was a rule-twisting indulgence, exactly the kind of thing he’d made so many enemies stamping out on Big Red. Terrier-boy, they called him back there. Word was DeepShaft had put Schrope aboard
Rockhopper
to get him as far away from Mars as possible.
He sat there now, next to Bella, behind the same desk — the one Jim Chisholm
should
have been sitting behind — twirling a company ballpoint pen and looking pleased with himself.