And so they all walked on, and at last Paris rose above the close horizon, a bright chip set in the dark slopes of the inner edge of the crater’s rim. A great cheer went up and the column surged forward, passing through vacuum-organism fields, passing the spaceport, some people running ahead of the rolligons now, leaping like gazelles, eager to be the first through the airlocks.
The big freight-yard airlocks were able to take a hundred people at a time, but more than five thousand had walked to Paris and although the operation worked as smoothly as the evacuation of the New City it took several hours to process them all. Macy, Abbie Jones and the other representatives waited their turn, and were met by Tommy Tabagee and the Brazilian ambassador on the other side. All around them, Parisians were moving out of the maws of the airlocks and flowing across loading platforms and marshalling yards, still wearing their pressure suits, helmets under their arms and day bags slung over their shoulders. Spreading out into the empty avenues and streets and parks, organising themselves into groups and crews to open up apartment buildings, setting up kitchens in the parks to give everyone their first meal, taking charge of the power and water and air plants, and the rest of the city’s infrastructure.
All of this videoed by drones, footage that was edited on the fly and zipped into compressed transmissions aimed at the Ghost fleet and at Neptune.
Late that night, on the top floor of the TPA administration building, high above a city enlivened by the lights and music of a hundred street parties, Macy was stuck in an interminable discussion between Paris’s representatives and senior members of the TPA about measures to make sure that Euclides Peixoto’s forces couldn’t retake Paris - distribution of small arms from the military armoury, organisation of volunteers into cadres, and the disposition of battle drones which had been pulled off patrols around the periphery of the New City. There were fewer Outer ships than expected, mostly scows and tugs left behind by Euclides Peixoto. Former pilots and engineers worked up plans to fit them with rail guns and drones loaded with high explosive, a small but significant addition to the resources that the Europeans and the Pacific Community were assembling as a last-ditch measure against the Ghosts, who as yet had made no acknowledgement of the transmissions showing the liberation of Paris.
It was after midnight by the time everything had been hashed out. Macy ate a meal with Abbie Jones, talked about her gypsy life with Newt and the twins.
‘I should send a message,’ Abbie said. ‘In fact, we should locate all the families of your people and ask them to send messages too.’
It was a good idea, and it kept Macy busy all the next morning. Abbie organised a couple of technicians who aimed one of the dish antennas of the city’s uplink station towards Nephele, and a steady trickle of people came in and recorded messages that were transmitted over and again until Nephele dropped behind Saturn.
Macy recorded her own message, scripted with the help of the Brazilian psychologist, appealing to Sada Selene to open up a dialogue. And then, while it was being transmitted to the Ghost fleet and to Neptune on a continuous loop, she used an avatar to appear before the Tactical Group panel on Iapetus, answering questions about the Ghosts and their city.
The next morning, the Ghost fleet was fast approaching the picket line established by the Flower of the Forest, the Getûlio Dornelles Vargas, and a small fleet of singleships and Outer shuttles and freighters, some hundred million kilometres out from Saturn. There had been no response to Macy’s message to Sada Selene, or to any of the other messages aimed at the Ghosts.
Pete Bakaleinikoff and Junko and Junpei Asai had woken the telescope cloud that all this time had been sleeping in orbit around Saturn’s trailing Trojan point, and pointed it at the picket line. All over Paris, people huddled around slates or put on spex and watched the live feed. Macy and members of the new city administration watched it on a memo space on the top floor of the TPA administration building. A technician had set up a holo of a clock counting backwards to the moment of first encounter. As it approached the last minute everyone in the big round room on top of the administration building fell silent. The whole city was hushed and watchful.
The Brazilian ships were strung in a line a hundred thousand kilometres long that ran parallel to the projected path of the Ghost ships, and clouds of kinetic weapons and laser-cannon platforms and proxies and nuclear and EMP mines had been sown across the volume of space through which they would pass. The four ships were switching their mass drivers on and off at unpredictable intervals, altering their delta vee so that their trajectory couldn’t be precisely plotted, travelling one after the other in a sharply curved arc at a velocity of almost three thousand kilometres a second, about 0.1% the speed of light. Even though their arc stretched for some ten thousand kilometres end to end, it traversed the Brazilian picket line in a little over thirty-six seconds, smashing through a gauntlet of kinetic weapons and X-ray lasers and conventional and hydrogen-bomb explosions whose ragged flowers were still expanding and fading as the Ghost ships ploughed on.
The outer layers of the ice-shields of the first and second ships, which had been closest to the Brazilian picket line, were breaking up in large chunks. But the shields of the others, although cratered by the impacts of numerous kinetic weapons, were largely intact. One instant replay of a magnified section of the general view showed a trio of singleships targeting a Ghost ship as it swept past, firing X-ray lasers into the maw of its exhaust; another showed a swarm of proxies striking the Getûlio Dornelles Vargas, flares bursting across the big ship’s prow, fountains of debris expanding above rents in its hull; a third showed a kinetic weapon piercing the Flower of the Forest from stem to stern, exiting between the vent nozzles of its fusion-motor cluster in a massive plume of flame as glittering sprays of debris expanded from the shattered hull.
Attempts to raise anyone aboard the two Brazilian ships came to nothing. Beyond their shattered hulks, surviving singleships were frantically decelerating, attempting to kill their delta vee so that they could turn around and return to the Saturn System. The Ghost fleet ploughed on, less than nine hours from an encounter with Titan, and then with Saturn.
The first round of the battle for the Saturn System was over. The second would soon begin. Pacific Community ships accelerated outward, preparing to mount a last-ditch attack. Tugs and scows hastily converted to weapons platforms and piloted by remote control hung in synchronous orbits above the cities of the inhabited moons, and in and around the cities crews worked to make ground-based weaponry ready. On the top floor of the TPA administration building in Paris, strategy teams elaborated responses to every kind of scenario. There was still no general consensus about what the Ghosts planned to do. It still seemed most likely that they would slingshot around Titan and Saturn and pass straight through the system, heading inward to Jupiter or Mars or Earth, but as they passed they could aim kinetic weapons at TPA installations and the Outer cities, or release drones and proxies able to decelerate by ploughing deep into Saturn’s atmosphere and so achieve a variety of orbits amongst the rings and moons, waging war long after the Ghost fleet had passed on.
People kept coming up to Macy with questions. She couldn’t answer most of them; was amazed that she could answer any at all. She’d had already sent video of the Ghost ships running Euclides Peixoto’s picket line to Newt, and between interruptions she sent messages describing the ongoing discussions and speculations. He sent back that his surveillance satellites had spotted the H-bomb explosions, said that the Free Outers had held a debate and voted overwhelmingly to recognise the new government of Paris and to begin a dialogue with the TPA administration.
- Too little, too late if you ask me. But we can’t do much else. Even if we had the fuel it would take us nine weeks to get there.
- Stay in contact, Macy sent. And you might want to get ready to welcome a bunch of refugees if this goes bad.
She discovered that she was hungry, wolfed down a pouch of CHON yoghurt that tasted faintly of burnt rubber. The holo clock had been reset and was counting backwards towards the Ghost fleet’s encounter with Titan, less than an hour away. Arguments were breaking out across the crowded room. The Brazilian ambassador and Abbie Jones were standing in front of a memo space, talking to Tommy Tabagee and other members of the security council on Iapetus. Raphael, Sri Hong-Owen’s representative, had been discussing something with Pete Bakaleinikoff, and now they picked their way through the knots of people to Macy.
‘This one wants me to point the telescope cloud at the rings,’ Pete said. ‘Says something’s about to happen there that everyone needs to see.’
‘You must do it now, or you will miss it,’ Raphael said. Yo’s disturbingly beautiful, androgynous face was impossible to read. ‘And please, Macy, don’t ask me about what is going to happen. It is much easier to show it than to explain.’
The neuter had volunteered to come to Dione to help supervise the evacuation. Macy had wondered about yo’s motivation then, and now she felt a strong pang of unease. A cold snake uncoiling in her guts.
She said to Pete, ‘Will it take long to swing those telescopes around?’
The old man ran a hand over his pale freckled scalp. ‘Not long, no. But we’ll lose our best view of the Ghost fleet.’
‘At the moment, what is about to happen in the rings is more important,’ Raphael said. ‘There are other telescopes, of course. But yours is the most useful because it is above the plane of the rings.’
‘I guess it can’t do any harm to take a quick look,’ Macy said to Pete.
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘But you’re the one in charge.’
She laughed: a nervous bark. ‘The hell I am.’
‘Of course you are,’ Pete said, and hooked on his spex and began to cut and caress the air with his hands.
The big memo space in the centre of the room turned black and then displayed a view of Saturn’s butterscotch globe and the sunlit side of the rings curved around it: a broad bow intricately grooved with threads and bands of varying brightness and colour, tans and creams and spectral greys incised by thin black gaps and the wide sooty stripe of the Cassini Division.
Raphael laughed, stepped towards the memo space with slinky grace, and pointed to a cluster of tiny bright lights near the Keeler Gap, at the outer edge of the A Ring. Five, ten, twenty point sources that were clearly moving outward.
‘Ships!’ several people said, and someone else said it wasn’t possible, there were too many of them and besides, they were accelerating too quickly to be ships.
‘Whatever they are, they’re on an interception course,’ Pete said.
He opened a window that showed a schematic of the inner system, drew an arc that curved away from Saturn and swept out to connect with the track of the Ghosts’ fleet just before it encountered Titan.
Everyone in the room was watching the memo space now. Raphael turned to look at them all, yo’s smile broad and happy, yo’s hands raised as if to bestow a blessing. ‘This is a gift from Sri Hong-Owen,’ the neuter said. ‘She has chosen to sacrifice these seeds for the immediate good.’
‘Seeds? They’re propeller moonlets,’ a woman said. ‘I’m picking up changes in ring-particle streaming right now.’
Macy asked Pete what the woman meant; Pete explained that there were thousands of irregular bodies between thirty and a hundred metres in diameter orbiting in a thin belt in the A Ring, remnants of a small moon shattered by collision with an asteroid or comet. Their gravity caused characteristic patterns of turbulence in the ring plane, like the wakes of so many speedboats.
Raphael waited out a clamour of questions, then lifted yo’s hands again and said that Sri Hong-Owen’s people had not had time to turn all the propeller moonlets in the A Ring into seeds, but they had transformed a significant proportion.
‘If the first wave does not overwhelm the Ghosts’ defences, then we have more than enough to try again.’
People started to ask more questions, and Raphael told them that everything would soon become clear. Meanwhile they should get back to work. ‘We don’t yet know the Ghosts’ intentions, so our best hope is to prepare for every conceivable possibility.’
‘I don’t know whether to punch you or kiss you,’ Macy told the neuter.
‘Sri asked me to not to reveal this unless it was necessary,’ Raphael said.
‘And you always obey your mistress’s whims.’
‘They may sometimes seem strange or inappropriate, but they are never whims.’
Pete Bakaleinikoff put up a blurred video grab of one of the moonlets powering away from the rings. An irregular potato-shaped chunk of pitted ice wrapped with a helical band of fullerene composite, some kind of sheath or cap at one end, a cluster of mass drivers at the other. A scale bar put it at around eighty metres along its main axis, roughly forty metres across. Calculations by various hands started to scroll up beside it. The seed was accelerating at more than 20 g and would consume a significant proportion of its mass as it powered out to Titan, but it would still mass some 60,000 tonnes when it intercepted the Ghost fleet, and would be travelling at a relative velocity in excess of thirty-five kilometres per second.
‘The impact of just one of those things should punch right through their shields,’ a woman said.
‘They could retaliate before they’re hit,’ another woman said. ‘We can’t rule out some kind of suicidal spasm.’
‘We’re expecting that anyway,’ the first woman said.
Everyone went back to calculating impact parameters and working up defence scenarios. Macy studied the image of the transformed moonlet, wondering what the sheath at the forward end contained. It looked a little like the acrosome that capped the head of a human sperm. Seeds. Packages that contained new life, everything it needed to get started.