Blue Remembered Earth (52 page)

‘Thanks for sharing. You’re being paid handsomely for this little job, aren’t you?’

He shrugged at Sunday’s question. ‘No complaints, sweet cheeks.’

‘Then please shut the fuck up until I ask you a direct question. I’ve just lost someone very precious to me and the last thing I need is a dose of small-minded Martian nationalism.’ She took a breath. ‘And if you call me “sweet cheeks” one more time, I’ll personally rip those goggles off and ram them down your windpipe.’

Gribelin grinned, took another draw on his cigarette and leaned over to say in Jitendra’s ear: ‘I’m liking her more by the minute. She always this way?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Whatever the
Nevsky
had just docked with – there’d been a dull metallic
clunk
as it engaged with
something
– Geoffrey knew it could not be the aqualogy. They hadn’t come far enough. Yet communicated in that
clunk
had been an impression of immense, dull solidity. A station, perhaps, rooted to the seabed, or a much larger ocean-going vessel.

Merpeople led them down damp black corridors of armoured metal with flume tubes stapled to the ceiling and water-filled channels sunk into the floor. Through doorways Geoffrey saw more merpeople, lubber technicians and robots toiling under bright lights, surrounded by pallets stacked with elaborately decaled cargo pods. A striding exo-clad merwoman was actually checking something off on a clipboard using a glowing-tipped stylus.

Shortly after he grasped that they’d arrived in the launching facility for one of Tiamaat’s surface-to-orbit lifters, they showed him the rocket itself.

Blunt-nosed and pale green, it sat in its silo like a cartridge in a chamber. Loading belts poked through the walls, thrusting across open air to reach into the lifter’s cargo bays. The lower part of the three-hundred-metre-tall rocket was already submerged. Even as Geoffrey watched, the tide rose perceptibly, lapping over the aerodynamic bulge of its engine fairings. They were flooding the chamber in readiness for launch.

‘Basically just a big bottle of fizzy water,’ Mira Gilbert said as they viewed the rocket from one of the silo’s observation windows. ‘Given a good shake, waiting for someone to pop the cork.’

The rocket’s fuel was metallic hydrogen. Geoffrey knew just enough about MH to be suitably unnerved being this close to so much of the stuff. Nothing exotic or rare about MH: it was out there in bulk quantities, found naturally in the solar system, absolutely free for the taking. The snag was that it only existed at the bottom of the atmospheres of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, where it had been formed by the brutal crush of all that overlaying gas. Under barely comprehensible pressures of many dozens of gigapascals, normal hydrogen underwent a phase transition to an ultradense electrically conductive state. The key to MH was its metastability: after the pressure was withdrawn, it didn’t immediately revert to normal hydrogen. That didn’t mean it was
safe
, by any definition, just that it was stable enough to be transported and utilised as an energy-dense rocket propellant with a potential specific impulse far beyond anything achievable through purely chemical reactions.

They weren’t mining it yet. Akinya Space had a share in the programme established to develop MH extraction technology, literally lowering a piezoelectrically stabilised bucket into Jupiter’s atmosphere on a spiderfibre cable and ladling out the stuff, and there’d been some promising feasibility demonstrations, but doing that on a cost-effective, repeatable scale made space-elevator technology look like the work of Neanderthals. It was decades, maybe even centuries down the line, and a dicey investment given that MH had no clear economic application for deep-space propulsion, only the short-haul business of escaping planetary gravity wells. So for now they manufactured it, at ludicrous expense, in mammoth orbital production platforms, tapping the kinetic energy of incoming spacecraft to drive diamond-anvil pistons that were themselves as large and complex as rocket engines.

‘The tanks aren’t completely full of MH,’ Gilbert said. ‘That would be
really
terrifying. The MH tank is tiny, just a little bubble right down at the base of the vehicle. Problem with MH is that it burns hotter than the surface of the sun, and we still can’t make pumps or nozzles that can tolerate that kind of heat without melting. So we have to dilute it, to lower the burn temperature to the point where we can
just
handle the reaction, and for that we use liquid hydrogen.’

‘In other words,’ Jumai said, ‘MH is so scary that it makes normal hydrogen, this horrible flammable substance, this stuff that explodes and kills people, seem like the safe, cuddly option.’

‘It gets better,’ Gilbert said, cheerfully indifferent to the dangers. ‘You’re going up in it, both of you. Lifters are normally cargo-only shots but they
are
fully human-rated. It’s bumpy, but you don’t need to worry about that: you’ll be sedated for the ride.’

‘All that, just to get us to the Winter Palace?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘The launch was scheduled anyway,’ Gilbert said, deflating him slightly. ‘Besides, you’re not the only living, breathing passengers.’ And she nodded down towards one of the conveyor belts, at the torpedo-shaped cargo pod that was being fed into the lifter’s side. It was much larger than any of the other containers they had seen, and it was accompanied by six or seven technicians, mer and lubber, riding alongside like pall-bearers, giving every impression of attending to the pod with particular diligence.

‘What’s inside that?’ Jumai asked.

‘Not what,’ Gilbert corrected gently. ‘Who.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The ground refused to stop rising. Ever since leaving Vishniac they had been driving into the cold afternoon of an early spring day on Mars, ascending, always ascending. They were high up on the Tharsis plateau now, nine kilometres above the mean surface level of the rest of the planet, traversing a vast continent-sized lava bulge higher than Kilimanjaro, higher than Everest, higher than any spot on the surface of the Earth. Even now the terrain forged up towards the cone of Pavonis Mons.

Peacock Mountain. They couldn’t see it yet – the summit was mist-shrouded, and the volcano wouldn’t appear as much more than a gentle bump even in clear visibility.

And this wasn’t even the tallest volcano on Mars.

They’d passed nothing in the way of functioning civilisation. A handful of abandoned vehicles, the descent-stage of a long-abandoned or forgotten rocket, the shrivelled, wind-ripped carcass of a transport dirigible that must have come down decades ago. Once they’d passed near a tiny hamlet, a cluster of pewter-coloured domes with fantails of dust on their leeward sides. Lights were on in the comms towers above the domes, but there was no other indication that anyone lived there. None of these dismal landmarks merited even the briefest of glances from Gribelin. Sunday supposed that he drove this way often enough that the scenery offered little in the way of interest. That had been two hours into the trip. They’d gone a long way since then.

‘Here’s your fence, kids,’ Gribelin said eventually, slowing to guide the truck between a line of transponder masts, most of them leaning away from the prevailing wind direction. ‘Don’t mean a whole lot, truth to tell. Machines sense it, and they know they’ll be punished if they cross over. But that doesn’t mean they don’t try it on for size now and then. Also doesn’t mean we’re going to run into machines as soon as we cross it.’ He tapped a finger against a fold-down map, a physical display of the area east of Pavonis Mons. The display flickered and bled colour under his fingernail. Contour lines showed terrain elevation. Cryptic symbols, horse heads and castles and knights and pawns – like chess notation, except that there were also scorpions and snakes and skulls – were dotted in clumps and ones and twos throughout the roughly circular demarcation of the Evolvarium. There were hundreds of pawns, not so many scorpions, snakes and horse heads, only a few knights and skulls and castles. ‘It’s a big area, and there’s a fuck of a lot of room to get lost in,’ he said.

‘Are those symbols telling you where the machines are?’ Sunday asked.

‘Telling me where the best guess for their location might be, based on the last hard sighting, which could be hours or days ago. Bit of a head-trip for you, the concept of not knowing where something is?’

‘I’m from the Descrutinised Zone,’ Sunday said. ‘There’s no aug, no Mech, in the Zone – at least, not as most people would understand those terms.’

‘But that’s intentional,’ Jitendra said. ‘In the Zone, they’ve chosen to go that way. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to know where these machines are.’

‘There are public eyes in orbit,’ Gribelin said, ‘but when the dust’s up they can’t see shit. Machines are sly – they’ll exploit the dust whenever they can, and if there’s no dust many of them are able to kick some up or tunnel underground or use camouflage. Your next question’s going to be: why don’t they just carpet-bomb the whole fucking landscape with eyes?’

Sunday bristled. That had indeed been her next question. ‘And?’

‘Machines ate ’em. You’re basically throwing down foodstuff, nourishment, in a desert. Yum, yum.’

‘Fix trackers to the machines, then,’ Jitendra said.

‘Same problem. Any kind of parasite like that, anything not directly beneficial to the host, gets picked off and eaten like a grub.’ He tapped the map again. ‘Lame as it is, this is the best we’ve got. Based on intel compiled and shared by the Overfloaters, when they’re feeling in a compiling and sharing mood.’

‘Overfloaters?’ Sunday asked.

Jitendra cut in before Gribelin had a chance to reply: maybe he wanted to show that he wasn’t completely ignorant of the situation here; that he had done at least some homework. ‘The brokers who run the Evolvarium. Think of them like . . . cockfighters, trying to create the ideal fighting animal. They’re always dreaming up new ways to stress the population, to force the machines to keep evolving. And whenever the machines throw up something useful, some innovation or wrinkle on an existing idea, the brokers race each other to skim it off and make some money on the technologies exchange. That’s why this place is on June Wing’s radar.’

‘June Wing?’ Gribelin asked.

Jitendra smiled quickly. ‘A . . . friend of mine. With an interest in fringe robotics. How much do you know about us?’

‘Just that there’s a job, that the fish-faces are behind it, and beyond that I’m not to ask questions.’

‘You knew about the golem,’ Sunday said.

‘The Pans said not to hang around once you were off the train. I was also told to watch out for a claybot, in case your follower got the march on you. As to why the golem’s on your tail, sweet cheeks, I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell.’ He grinned a mouthful of weirdly carved and metal-capped teeth at her. ‘Shit, I called you it again, didn’t I?’

‘We’re not tourists,’ Sunday said levelly, deciding to let her earlier threat slide. ‘The Pans will have told you to take me as near as possible to a set of coordinates in the Evolvarium. There’s a reason for that.’

‘Which is?’

Sunday and Jitendra exchanged glances before she spoke. ‘There’s something buried in the area, something that belongs to me.’

‘Belongs?’

‘Family property,’ she said. ‘But not property that I’d want the golem to get hold of ahead of me.’

‘And you know it’s buried?’ Gribelin asked.

‘If it isn’t, what are the odds of it still being here?’

‘Pretty fucking slim.’

‘I still have to be sure,’ Sunday said.

Gribelin’s skull bobbed up and down as he shrugged. ‘Your call.’

After a moment she asked, ‘What are those things on your skull?’

‘Ears.’

‘I mean the tattoos. Do they signify something? They look like rock art or something.’

‘Rock art.’ He grinned again. ‘Yeah, that’d be about right.’

They passed their first carcass an hour into the Evolvarium.

Dust-scouring wind and the graft of enthusiastic scavengers, both human and mechanical, had stripped the war machine back to a rust-coloured skeleton, a hundred metres from tip to tail. Formed from dozens of articulated modular segments, the ruined robot resembled the vulture-picked spine of some much larger creature. The dust was thin on the Tharsis Bulge, a layer only a centimetre deep covering laval rock, so the war machine’s metal bones were exposed almost entirely to the sky. Gribelin slowed to skirt around the corpse, eyeing it warily.

‘Been here longer than most,’ he said in a low murmur. ‘Deadsville, completely harmless and pecked clean of pretty much anything usable. But sometimes active units use it as a place of concealment. Ambush predators. I think we’re good today, but—’

‘Would they attack us?’ Sunday asked.

‘Mostly, the machines are smart enough to leave us alone.’ He shot her a glance, Sunday’s face bulbous in his goggles. ‘Basic self-preservation: fight each other, use whatever they can, evolve, but don’t piss off the Overfloaters.’

‘You said “mostly”,’ Jitendra said.

‘Darwinism in action, my friend. Every now and then something comes along and tears up the rule book.’

‘You’re risking a lot, bringing us here,’ Jitendra said.

‘I know the terrain.’ He eyed the map again. ‘And I know who to keep away from. You think I’d be here if I didn’t believe the odds were in my favour? Your friends are paying well, but nothing’s worth suicide.’