But passage around Saturn was unremarkable. Elephant more or less flew itself, following the course that Newt had plotted and laid in. All Macy had to do was lie back and keep watch. The minuscule comet-tail of the Ghost ships sank towards Saturn’s ringed crescent and the nightside of the gas giant swung at her, expanding, blotting out more and more of the starry sky. Elephant juddered briefly, making the insertion burn, and then they were racing around the dark side of Saturn, faintly illuminated by the ghost light of ringshine. The pearl of the sun blistered the joint between black space and the planet’s chthonic arc, sweeping upwards above the pastel bands of day. And the sweeping bands of the rings lay dead ahead like heaven’s bridge as Elephant soared outward towards Iapetus.
Beyond the outer edge of the ring system, Iapetus’s traffic control warned Macy to stand by for interception. Less than an hour later, she picked up the radar trace of a ship closing behind her. A ground-to-orbit shuttle, a flattened oval like a pumpkin seed with the green star of the Pacific Community splashed across its tail assembly, matching Elephant’s velocity, laying off three kilometres to starboard.
Macy opened a channel and surrendered control of Elephant. The shuttle fired tethers that clamped to Elephant’s hull and the two ships reeled close. Three marines in pressure suits cycled one after the other through the airlock, big men bulked out by black battle armour, smoking with cold in the fuggy air of the lifesystem, taking up most of the cramped space. One immediately took control of Elephant; the other two escorted Loc and Macy across the gap to the bright cave of an airlock cut into the black shadow of the shuttle’s hull. Macy was thoroughly disorientated by the arrival of strangers and the noise and unfamiliar surroundings of the shuttle’s spacious passenger compartment. Her pressure suit seemed flimsy and shabby compared with the armoured bulk of the marines; she felt like a runaway child taken into custody by concerned adults.
Loc was already deploying his charm, chatting with the officer in charge all the way down to Iapetus and the small city that the Pacific Community had built in Othon Crater, on the dark northern plains of the sub-saturnian hemisphere. Macy and Loc were decanted into a pressurised APC and driven from the spaceport down a straight highway to the main habitat. A phalanx of officials from the three member states of the TPA and delegates from the five free cities greeted them at the transport hub, chief amongst them Tommy Tabagee. The venerable diplomat pumped their hands and welcomed them to Heaven’s Gate. He wore a dark high-collared suit, and his grey dreadlocks were caught up in a gold net, but his manner was as breezily informal as ever and he was in high good humour.
‘If we can put an end to this nonsense before it becomes something serious, then we can be satisfied with lives well-lived, I reckon,’ he said, and explained that his aides would escort Macy and Loc to their quarters, where they would have a good hour to freshen up and get ready for their first meeting with members of the Tactical Group. ‘I’ve told them to go easy on you - that you need to rest up before the reception. Don’t worry, nothing formal. A meet-and-greet session with everyone involved in this great enterprise of ours. Now, you’ll excuse me if I cut and run, but I have some business of my own. We’ll talk later. We’ve much to discuss, and little time.’
After the long hours of Loc Ifrahim’s coaching, after imagining every possible way it might go wrong, Macy found the preliminary interview with the panel of TPA diplomats and military officers something of a relief. She had reached her destination; her worst fears had proven to be unfounded; she could at last begin the work she’d come to do.
As a token of what the chairperson of the panel called ‘a policy of openness and full cooperation’ a Brazilian Air Defence captain walked Macy through the latest data on the Ghosts’ little fleet. Throwaway drones had shot past them several days ago and returned pictures showing that each was encased in a sculpted shell of ice fifty metres thick and shaped like a spearhead - a very effective armour against kinetic weapons, high explosives, and ablation by high-energy weapons, according to the captain. The surfaces of the shells were coated with reflective material and inlaid with intricate grooves, and they contained layers of superconducting mesh to protect the ships from the effects of EMP mines, and their shape meant that they could be used as aeroshields: it was possible that the Ghost ships could shed a considerable proportion of their velocity by ploughing through Saturn’s atmosphere, and then they could loop around Titan and the other moons, picking off targets at will. The initial deceleration forces would exceed 15 g, but were survivable if the crews were packed in acceleration gel, with air in their lungs and body cavities displaced by oxygenated fluorocarbon fluid.
‘But even if they pass through the Saturn System on a slingshot manoeuvre, they could cause considerable damage with missiles, proxies, and kinetic weapons,’ the captain said. ‘There is much that is still unquantifiable.’
That last pretty much summed up everything about the Ghosts, as far as Macy was concerned.
After the captain’s presentation the panel began to fire questions at her. She told them that she didn’t know the extent or exact population of the City of the New Horizon, described what she had seen during her single visit, and outlined the experience of other Free Outers who had visited the Ghosts. She had never met the Ghosts’ leader, Levi, she said, and didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but she supposed that the Ghosts believed that he was alive, for how else could his future self send prophesies into the past? She confirmed that the Ghosts had obtained the specifications of the fast-fusion drive from Free Outers who had defected to their cause, said that she didn’t know exactly how many ships the Ghosts possessed or where or when they had built the ships that were approaching Saturn: the Ghosts had begun to settle Triton a decade before the Quiet War and they planned for the long term. The ships could have been constructed well before the Free Outers arrived in the Neptune System, or they might have been built within the last year, in graving docks deep under Triton’s surface.
The panel asked her about the attack on the Brazilian ship at Neptune, and she gave a brief account of the negotiations, the sudden exit of the Ghosts, and the attack on the Brazilian ship, explained how some but not all of the Free Outers had managed to escape and meet up with those who’d fled from their settlement on Proteus.
Every so often the strangeness of all this hit Macy: she had come all this way to give sworn testimony about ships set on mounting some kind of attack on another planet. And then she’d think of the Ghosts’ comet-smear setting behind the misty limb of Saturn, and get a chill.
One of the members of the panel, a European Navy second lieutenant, was a psychologist. He asked a number of perceptive questions about Sada’s part in Macy’s escape from the city of East of Eden, where she’d been more or less held prisoner after defecting from the Rainbow Bridge construction crew, and after the panel’s chairperson had thanked Macy for her help, she had a long conversation with the psychologist about Sada and tried her best to answer as fully as she could a series of questions about how she thought Sada might react to a variety of hypothetical situations.
Macy said, ‘You think she’s leading this attack, don’t you?’
The psychologist had an annoying habit, probably a professional tic, of answering a question with another question. Saying now, ‘Is that what you think?’
‘I know she would want to be part of it.’
‘We have AI models of the most prominent members of the Ghosts,’ the psychologist said. ‘Worked up from interviews with people who knew them before they joined the cult, from the meetings with Mr Tabagee and his crew, and from the partial notes that our diplomats were able to transmit before the Ghosts murdered them. Sada Selene is a very dominant figure, strongly embodying characteristics idealised by other members of the cult. She is their Joan of Arc.’
‘One thing you should take aboard,’ Macy said. ‘They don’t think of themselves as a cult.’
‘What, then?’
‘They think they’re a new species. The latest best new thing. And they believe that the future is theirs, because their leader’s future self told them so.’
One of Tommy Tabagee’s aides, a slender, extremely polite young woman named Gita Lo Jindal, escorted Macy to a pod in one of the residential blocks that were scattered amongst the forested landscaping of the habitat’s cut-and-cover tube. Ankling along a road of crimson halflife turf, breathing in chill air edged with the clean odour of the tall pines standing on either side, bright spangles of light shining through chinks in the dense green boughs, Macy felt a plangent note of nostalgia, remembering the forests along the northern boundary of the Fontaine Territory where she had been working when she’d been co-opted for a prestigious position on the construction crew sent out to quicken the new biome at Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. Where her life had changed for ever, and she’d embarked on a long and strange journey that had taken her to the beginning of the edge of the Solar System and back again.
Before attending the interview with the panel Macy had sent a message to Newt, telling him she had arrived safely on Iapetus, that if she’d been arrested it had been so subtle she hadn’t noticed. When she got back to her pod, she found a reply waiting for her: a brief video of Newt and the twins crowding close to the camera, telling her that they were rooting for her. Han had sent a drawing too, showing a stocky red-haired figure in a blue spacesuit straddling the joint of Iapetus’s white-black ying-yang disc. Macy had Gita Lo Jindal print off a copy and tacked it to one of the walls, where she could see it while she dozed for a few hours in the pod’s sleeping niche.
When the aide returned, Macy asked her if she could find someone who could do something about the bird’s nest she liked to call her hair. Gita Lo Jindal told her that someone would come to take care of it right away. ‘Meanwhile, can I suggest a few touches of make-up, too?’
‘What kind of reception is this, anyway?’
‘Oh, just the usual mix of everyone who’s anyone. But you don’t have to worry about a thing,’ Gita Lo Jindal said. ‘You’re one of the stars, which means you can’t do anything wrong.’
The reception was held on top of the largest of the habitat’s buildings, a helix of platforms, offices and meeting rooms twisted around a central core. It was already in full swing when Macy and Gita Lo Jindal arrived, people clumped and knotted across a broad terrace with a view across treetops towards the end wall, where silky waterfalls plunged between spires and pillars of black rock. Loc Ifrahim intercepted them, bowed to Gita Lo Jindal, and told her that he would like to borrow Miz Minnot for a little while - there were people she needed to meet. He had shaved off his beard and his hair was trimmed and woven into many small braids that gleamed as if oiled, and he was dressed in a silvery suit, a white shirt, and white slippers. He had recovered much of his old poise and was clearly excited by the buzz of the crowd. In his element. Back home.
‘I have been talking to my old friend Yota, and I have some news,’ he told Macy, as he escorted her down the length of the terrace. ‘There’s going to be an announcement tonight. Euclides Peixoto has finally decided to take part in the talks.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It means he thinks they’re important; it doesn’t mean that he agrees with what we’re trying to do. Yota thinks that he’ll try to wreck them, and I’m inclined to agree, but we’ll see soon enough. Meanwhile, we must make nice with our hosts and pretend we don’t know.’
‘What am I supposed to say to them?’ Macy said.
‘All you have to do is be yourself,’ Loc said, and introduced her to the Brazilian ambassador, Paulinho Fontaine, several of her senior aides and civil servants, and an androgyne neuter dressed in a white jumpsuit who told Macy that they had something in common.
‘You once worked for Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen, at Rainbow Bridge. And I have the honour of working for her now.’
It seemed that Sri Hong-Owen was living with a small crew on the co-orbital moon Janus, building a habitat and working on some kind of secret project - a simple gift that would, according the neuter, Raphael, transform the way people lived in the outer system.
‘The Ghosts know that the Professor Doctor is a great gene wizard - and a great prize,’ Raphael said. ‘They have contacted her several times, offering to help her defect. She turned them down, of course, and they did not take it well. And now they are coming here. Everything is at hazard, and we are offering to help in any way we can.’
The talk turned to the latest news about the Ghost fleet. There had been no response to the cycle of messages that the TPA was transmitting to the fleet and to Triton, and time was beginning to run out: very soon the TPA would have to decide whether or not to stage an all-out attack on the Ghost ships, and how best to do it. Everyone wanted to know Loc and Macy’s opinions; Macy was happy to let Loc deal with their questions. She was tired, and felt intimidated by the crowd of strangers. Her attention was beginning to drift away from the conversation, which had the stale flavour of opinions rehashed for the fourth or fifth time, when a tall old man with papery skin and a snow-white spade-shaped beard interposed himself between her and the rest of the group, introducing himself as Tariq Amir Tagore-Mittal, the mayor of Camelot, Mimas. He wanted to know why the Free Outers had not returned with the fleet of ships that they had, according to him, stolen. Macy started to explain that some had been abandoned on Miranda when the Brazilians had invaded the Uranus System and others had been lost when the Ghosts had mounted their coup against the Brazilian delegation, but the old man cut in, telling her that those ships were needed to protect the Saturn System right now: it had been left exposed because of the Free Outers’ selfishness.