Felice rolled the guard’s body on its side and switched off the manifold valve that was bleeding air through the face mask; she had vented most of his own supply, but he reckoned that he would be able to survive on what was left in her tank. He tried to stand up again but his ankle gave way and he sat straight down. He wondered if he could crawl to the trike, wondered if he could climb onto it, wondered if the killer had disabled it . . .
However it fell out, there was only a slender chance that Bel Glise or one of her friends would think to search for him. Yet he wasn’t ready to die. He had enough air for six hours if he stayed awake; much longer if he willed himself into the deep sleep that slowed his metabolism to a crawl. And if he was never found, at least his death would be more merciful than he deserved.
7
Newt and the other members of the motor crew had built from spare and scavenged parts a couple of dozen small satellites equipped with optical and radio arrays, and had strung them in orbit around Nephele’s trailing Lagrangian point so that they could keep watch on Neptune and Saturn. The bubble habitat was more or less complete, but everyone slept on board the ships and took part in weekly evacuation drills. When war came they’d be a soft target for either the Ghosts or the TPA; they had to be ready to bug out at a moment’s notice. But for a long time nothing happened. The Ghosts broadcast messages warning the TPA to quit the Saturn and Jupiter systems or face the consequences, but did not appear in any hurry to carry out their threat of mounting a war of liberation, while the TPA had not yet launched a counterstrike against the Ghosts to avenge the loss of its ship.
Loc Ifrahim said that this wasn’t surprising: it look a long time to organise a long-range campaign, and required detailed planning and the accumulation of a great deal of intelligence. Not only that, but relationships between Greater Brazil and the Pacific Community had greatly deteriorated and it was widely expected that war would break out between them before too long. And that meant that Greater Brazil could not spare any ships of the line, especially as the Pacific Community had built up a considerable presence on Iapetus since the end of the Quiet War.
Few of the Free Outers took any notice of Loc’s opinions. After all, not only was he Brazilian, but he’d also been some kind of spy before the Quiet War. He was their guest, so they treated him with consideration and courtesy, but they also made it clear that he wasn’t especially welcome and couldn’t be trusted. Several people suggested that he ought to be exiled to a tent on Nephele, but the majority thought this was a repugnant and barbaric idea, and so it fell to Macy Minnot to take care of him. She had insisted on rescuing him, so she was responsible for his welfare.
She almost felt sorry for the poor guy. He was homesick and heart-sick. He’d lost the woman he loved and couldn’t even mourn her properly. The bodies of the two Free Outers who’d been killed during the breakout from the habitat at Neso, and that of a grievously wounded marine who’d died before he could be placed in hibernation, had been resomated with due and proper ceremony, and their nutrients had been incorporated into the hydroponic gardens of the bubble habitat, but Loc Ifrahim refused to give up Captain Neves’s body: it was still in deep-freeze, waiting to be somehow returned to Earth. Which almost certainly would never happen. And meanwhile Loc was marooned in the outer reaches of the Solar System with a bunch of Outer refugees, and he refused to take part in housekeeping chores and other communal activities because, according to him, he was a prisoner of war, with rights that he expected his captors to respect.
‘You can’t be a prisoner of war,’ Macy told him. ‘Because we aren’t at war.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘If you really want to be a prisoner of war, we could send you back to Neptune, let the Ghosts take care of you.’
‘Or you could send me home.’
‘I’d do it, if it was possible. I’d do it in an instant, just to get rid of you.’
That was mostly how their conversations went. At least Loc was much calmer now. Immediately after he’d been rescued, he’d alternated between sulky silences, flights of self-hating sarcasm, and rages at everything and nothing. Now he skulked around like a ghost, spending most of his time on his own, watching the panoramas transmitted by Newt’s array of surveillance satellites or studying the Ghosts’ crude propaganda.
Macy, who knew all about the deep ache of homesickness, had some sympathy for Loc’s plight, and was pleased when one day he volunteered to help with the hydroponic gardens. She believed that he might be coming to terms with his situation, as she had long ago come to terms with hers. That he was finally showing some backbone.
She taught him how to prick out seedlings. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, lettuce, spinach: strains cut to grow quickly and crop within a couple of weeks. He wasn’t much good at it, but he persisted, working alone, slowly and clumsily, while the children and the rest of the farm crew made a game of their work. After a few days he began to unbend a little, and told Macy that he had been thinking about how the Free Outers could make the best of their situation.
‘I was listening to your partner and his friends discuss how to stealth habitats like this with shells of water ice and radar-reflective skins,’ Loc said. ‘I admire their ingenuity, but it seems to me that it would be a dismal and desperate kind of life. And in any case, it hasn’t worked very well for you so far, has it? You were driven from the Uranus System, and then from the Neptune System, and now, in greatly reduced circumstances and numbers, you are huddled around a frozen chunk of debris, living hand to mouth and hoping that somehow history will pass you by.’
‘We know that it won’t,’ Macy said. ‘That’s why we’re making plans. Some of us, anyhow.’
They were resting side by side at the root of one of the main spars, just above the big bubble of the central nucleus. An array of hydroponic platforms dwindled away down the length of the spar, orientated towards lights fixed to the habitat’s equatorial girdle. Other spars were splayed at different angles above and below and all around, nets strung here and there like cobwebs in an attic, arenas where the Free Outers played or held meetings, or simply basked in warmth and light. A flock of children were chasing each other through this maze, screaming with laughter and delight as they swung from spar to spar like a troop of monkeys, Han and Hannah amongst them.
‘I know all about your plans,’ Loc said. He wore a suit-liner like everyone else, had taken all the beads out of his hair and cut it back to a thin stubble, and seemed to have aged about ten years. ‘Some of you think that you can hide out here, replenish your strength, and move on to some other godforsaken snowball. Others hope that the Ghosts will make good their promise to drive the TPA from the Jupiter and Saturn Systems. And that simply isn’t going to happen.’
‘Or maybe the TPA will tear itself apart first,’ Macy said.
‘Greater Brazil goes to war with the Pacific Community, and the winner of that mighty conflict is so weakened that the Ghosts can easily defeat it.’
‘Or it sues for peace.’
‘A pretty little fantasy, spun by people with no experience of war. You see, Macy, war is never entered into lightly. A nation preparing for war builds manufactories to stamp out weapons and tanks and planes. It builds fleets of ships and spaceships. It drafts and trains tens of thousands of people to serve in its armed forces, and many times that number are indirectly involved. Its scientists and technicians are drafted, too, and spend every waking hour devising ingenious methods of mass destruction. All its resources, every gram of its political will, is poured into the war effort. So if there is a war between Greater Brazil and the Pacific Community, the victor will be stronger at the end of it, not weaker. And besides, how many Ghosts are there? Five thousand? Ten thousand? There are more than two billion people in Greater Brazil. Twice that number in the Pacific Community. I’d say that those were pretty hopeless odds, however you cut it.’
Macy said, because she knew otherwise he would take for ever to come to the point, ‘If we can’t hide, if we can’t rely on the Ghosts, what should we do?’
‘Why did Greater Brazil send a diplomatic mission to Neptune?’
‘You’re going to tell me it wasn’t anything to do with negotiating a peace treaty.’
‘The negotiations were important, inasmuch as the possibility of a peace treaty with Greater Brazil would have compromised the Ghosts’ dealings with the Pacific Community. But it was also an intelligence-gathering operation. It’s always useful to know as much as possible about your enemies. Even if they are as insignificant as the Ghosts.’
Macy thought about that for a moment. ‘You think we should tell the Brazilians everything we know about the Ghosts? Then what? They’ll be so grateful that they’ll leave us alone?’
‘No, Macy, I do not think that you should talk to the Brazilians,’ Loc said, as if to a small child. ‘It would mean trying to strike a bargain with Euclides Peixoto, and I know very well that he cannot be trusted. But haven’t you ever thought that the Pacific Community might be of some help to us?’
‘You have to admit, it’s a good point,’ Macy told Newt. ‘We even have someone we could contact. Tommy Tabagee wasn’t such a bad guy, for a diplomat. A straight-talker. Plus, if even half of what he told me about Pacific Community’s dealings with the people of Iapetus is true, it will give us a fair hearing.’
‘I see all that,’ Newt said. ‘But what can we tell this guy that he doesn’t already know? After all, he and his crew visited with the Ghosts. He spent more time on Triton than I ever did.’
They were sitting in the control blister of Elephant. They’d put the twins to bed and were sharing a pouch of vodka that someone had distilled from fermented CHON and flavoured with a cocktail of congeners, passing it back and forth over the memo space, which was displaying a fuzzily enlarged view of the Saturn System.
‘He probably doesn’t know very much about the attack on the Brazilian ship. And he doesn’t know what the Ghosts did to us, either. And we lived next door to the Ghosts for five years,’ Macy said. ‘We know how they think, what they want . . .’
‘They aren’t making any secret of what they want,’ Newt said, holding out the pouch. ‘There’s just a sip left.’
‘You can finish it for me. Loc says that it doesn’t matter what we know as long as the Pacific Community believes we know stuff that will be useful to them.’
Newt sucked the pouch flat and said, ‘So this is Mr Loc Ifrahim’s big idea. We rat out the Ghosts to the Pacific Community, and hope that buys us some protection.’
‘That’s putting it crudely.’
‘It’s how everyone will see it,’ Newt said.
‘Including you?’ Macy said.
‘What I don’t get,’ Newt said, sidestepping her question, ‘is why he wants to help the Pacific Community. Wouldn’t that make him a traitor? Especially as the Pacific Community is about to go to war against Greater Brazil.’
‘He says that he can’t go back to Greater Brazil because no one would believe that he isn’t a traitor or a double agent, after he survived the Ghosts’ attack,’ Macy said. ‘If he ever returns, he says, there’ll be a show trial and afterwards he’ll be hung in front of the Memorial dos Povos Indigenas in the Eixo Monumental, the big park in the centre of Brasília. That’s what they do to people they don’t like, in Greater Brazil. Kill them and leave their bodies for the crows and vultures, so they are returned to Gaia in the worst possible way.’
‘He wants to save his skin by trading information with the enemy.’
‘I know it sounds bad. But I think it would help us, too.’
‘And how would he trade this information? We can’t aim transmissions at Saturn. It would give us away to the TPA.’
‘We could move one of your satellites further out, use it as a relay. Make it look like the transmission was coming from somewhere else. Better still, we could take him to Iapetus.’
‘So that’s what this is really about. Getting Loc Ifrahim back to what he likes to call civilisation.’
‘As far as he’s concerned, yes. But it could help us, too. And besides, do you want to keep him here for the rest of his life?’
‘It’s a bold move,’ Newt said. ‘But I don’t think that you have any chance of making it fly.’
‘Because I’m still an outsider, even after all this time. But if someone else made the case . . .’
‘Hey, don’t put me in the middle of this.’
‘Why are we out here? Because you took a stand. You supported the idea of expansion and exploration and driving human evolution forward, all of that, and I came along with you. Well, now I’m taking a stand.’
‘Things are different now. We can’t just go chasing off after some wild idea. We have to work out what’s best for all of us. You can ask for a debate about this, but if you do, it’ll be put to a vote. And if the majority decide against it, well, that’s that.’
‘Sometimes the majority gets it wrong. I know you know that, or we wouldn’t be here in the first place,’ Macy said.
She couldn’t stand being in the cramped confines of Elephant any longer, and crossed over to the habitat, put on her flippers and scuba gear, and went for a long swim inside the bubble of water at its core, amongst long strands of red and black kelp that grew from racks strung through the clear water. She couldn’t run in zero gravity and she’d never really mastered the knack of flying, but swimming to and fro and around and around in the giant goldfish bowl was almost as good as running for calming her down and getting her thoughts unknotted.
At last she went back to Elephant and made up with Newt. But the tension between Macy’s support for Loc’s idea and Newt’s reluctance to challenge the status quo quickly became knotted at the centre of their lives, and there didn’t seem to be any way of untangling it.
‘You’ve changed,’ Macy said. ‘You’ve become just like everyone else.’