Manhattan in Reverse (32 page)

‘This is an emergency situation, Paula. We have the Lost23 populations to resettle now, and those from the Second47 planets can’t be held in temporal hiatus forever. Building them replacement worlds for when they emerge is going to cripple our economy for decades to come. Sometimes we have to take short cuts.’

‘Sometimes?’

Wilson gave her an exasperated stare. ‘I’m not here to argue corporate politics with you. This is something else entirely. The natives on Jevahal are attacking the homesteads. The whole settlement project around Lydian is starting to stall. That can’t go on, Paula, and it certainly can’t be allowed to spread across the whole continent.’

Paula hesitated. ‘Natives? You mean the original pioneer landowners.’

Wilson Kime took a long breath, clearly ill at ease. ‘No Paula, I mean the indigenous life.’

‘Aliens?’ she asked in shock. ‘There are sentients there? Wilson, what have you done?’

‘Nothing,’ he said quickly. ‘The animals concerned are called Onids. Think fat kangaroos with spider legs and you’re getting close.’

Her e-butler was already retrieving the small xenobiology encyclopedia files on the Onid stored in the unisphere. The image did just about match Wilson’s description, once you’d thrown in dark-purple fur. ‘Your xenobiology team classified them as non-sentient,’ she read. ‘They were in a hurry, weren’t they? They had to open the planet for settlement for the Lost23 refugees. Farndale’s board put them under pressure.’

‘No. Categorically not. Check the dates. Menard was cleared for settlement before the Starflyer War began. It was a legitimate assessment by the xenobiology team, and in any case they’re independent, they have to be.’

Paula shot him a suspicious glance. She knew just how impartial things became when a company as vast as Farndale was involved. The amount of money involved in opening up a planet for settlement was phenomenal. There wasn’t much which could prevent the awarding of an H-congruent certification once the process had begun. Certainly not an independent scientific team with a foolish case of integrity.

‘Believe me, Paula. Farndale didn’t override anything here. That classification was genuine.’

‘All right, so what’s happened?’

‘That’s the billion-dollar question. It began about three weeks ago, with the Onid raiding some of Lydian’s outlying homesteads. Now it’s getting more serious. Packs of them are attacking any human they can find. Nobody’s going outside the town. Our local governor is asking the Farndale board for a squad of marshals with enough firepower to eradicate every Onid herd in the territory. And each day he’s asking louder. So far we’ve kept this out of the media, but that won’t last . . .’ He gave her a forlorn look. ‘We’ve just had a war that nearly ended in genocide. We stopped that, Paula, you and me. We played our part. Out of everybody, we now know that kind of situation cannot be allowed to happen again.’

‘What the hell do you want me to do?’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s hardly a crime in the conventional sense. Someone screwed up in the classification. You’re going to have to pull out of Menard.’

‘But why now?’ Wilson asked. ‘Humans have been there for nearly ten years; first a batch of science teams running tests, then preliminary construction crews building infrastructure. The Onid didn’t even notice us.’

‘They reacted because there’s more of us now?’ Paula ventured. ‘That always happens when new lands are conquered, the natives eventually realize what a threat the invaders are and start to fight back.’

‘How would they know how many of us there are? How would they know we’re spreading out across the continents? They’re animals, they don’t have any communication. They live in isolated herds.’

Paula waved her hands about in a gesture of futility. ‘How would I know? I’m not a xenobiologist.’

‘No,’ Wilson said softly. ‘But you are a puzzle-solver.’

‘Oh, please!’

‘You have to admit it’s fascinating, almost paradoxical.’

‘I find it mildly interesting – in the abstract. I also happen to believe the solution lies with your original classification. Either way, it doesn’t matter. This is not a Directorate problem, unless you do give the governor what he’s asking for. If that were to happen I would order a very thorough investigation.’

‘Which nobody wants, and if you personally were to shut down a new planet to immigration, especially at this time, your meagre popularity would hit zero and then fall off a cliff.’

‘I’m not in this job for popularity.’

‘No, but you know very well that to function properly at the level your cases run at you have to have political influence. Securing that verdict against Oscar lost you every credit you won during the war. You can get that back with this case.’

‘It is not a case.’

‘Take a break, Paula. Christ knows you’ve accumulated enough leave time over the last century. That would leave you free to do whatever tweaked your curiosity. I could appoint you to any position you wanted in Farndale. Adviser to the Lydian territory governor, for instance.’

‘You have got to be kidding.’

‘It’s practical. It’s logical. It’s different. And you’d be helping a lot of people – actually, two species. I’m amazed you’re even hesitating.’

She wanted to tell him why, but couldn’t actually come up with a valid reason. The wretched thing was, it
did
intrigue her. For all his faults, Wilson Kime was an honourable man. If he thought (or knew) the xenobiology team had screwed up he wouldn’t be here. ‘I really can’t afford more than a couple of days,’ she said weakly.

‘That’ll be all you need,’ Wilson said with a grin.

*

The next morning Paula took a trans-Earth-loop train from Paris through the connecting wormhole to Madrid, then London, New York, and into Tallahassee, where she caught the express shuttle to Los Vada, an industrial world owned entirely by Farndale, which served as their manufacturing and financial base. Total time elapsed: forty-two minutes, which wasn’t bad for the notoriously piss-poor timekeeping of loop trains.

It was just after midnight local time on Los Vada when she arrived. The CST station there was enormous, a junction to over fifty worlds in phase two and three space; the commerce it had to carry was phenomenal, with over a thousand freight and passenger trains charging through every hour. There were five passenger terminals to cope with the volume of people, two of which were just for passengers arriving and departing Los Vada itself; the others were for interconnecting trains. Paula got off at the fourth, and took a small transfer capsule over to terminal five, which handled all the trains to planets in phase three space.

Her train left from platform 49H. Eight fat carriages crammed with refugee families, people who had fled their homeworld after the Prime assault wrecked the biosphere outside their city force fields. Since then they’d either been living with generous family members or endured Spartan accommodation in a government emergency transit centre. It was only in the last few months that the Commonwealth government was finally starting to get on top of the displaced populations problem and accelerating the opening of phase three space planets that had been in their provisional stage of development back when the war broke out.

The train trundled across the dark yard outside the huge terminal buildings, then slowly accelerated towards the distant cliff of machinery producing the wormholes. Over half of the circular rifts across interstellar space were open onto the daylight continents of their respective worlds, which shone an impressive variety of star-spectrums out into Los Vada’s moonless night. Menard was close to Sol’s standard white, with just a hint of violet staining the thick beam which the train track curved round to line up on. They slid in behind a long freight train whose open trucks were carrying big civil engineering bots, and construction machinery along with a host of infrastructure systems vital to support a planet whose population was currently expanding at a rate of thirty thousand a day, with a bump up to fifty thousand scheduled in four months’ time. According to Paula’s e-butler, trains were being pushed through with barely a minute’s separation.
That’s a lot of traffic
, she acknowledged. Empty freight trains were hurtling past on the return track.

Then they were through. The pressure curtain tingled across her skin like some fast phantom drizzle, and raw sunlight was blazing through the carriage windows. There was no sign of the wide open lands which Wilson prized so much on this world. Instead the two-mile length of track between the wormhole and the station ran straight through the marshalling yard, with stacks of containers forming a near-solid wall on either side. They formed their own mini-city, with avenues sliced by tracks where big old fission-powered shunters trundled along day and night. Giant loader gantries slid above the ever-changing stacks on eight-storey legs, malmetal tentacles reaching down to pull individual containers out of the stack and place them on the flotilla of trucks rolling along behind.

The CST planetary station was a lot more basic than usual, consisting of just five platforms, all prefabricated, and sheltering beneath a tinted polymesh dome which did absolutely nothing to cut down the equatorial sun’s intensity.

Gary Main was waiting for her on the platform as the train pulled in. He introduced himself as an aide to the Planetary President, a fourth-life Englishman five years out of rejuvenation, with a spiderweb of purple and yellow OrganicCircuitry tattoos mottling his face.

‘Wilson Kime assigned me to you for the duration,’ he shouted over the noise as everyone else thronged down the platform on their way to local trains. It was Farndale’s policy to simply shunt all the new arrivals on to the lands they were due to occupy as soon as they arrived. Nobody wanted a huge out-of-work population occupying the capital.

‘Thanks,’ Paula shouted back. ‘How do I get over to Jevahal?’

‘We have a plane waiting for you.’

Several of the nearby crowd paused to give them a look. A couple must have recognized Paula judging from the frowns. Or it could have been envy at her transport. They were all due up to a month on trains and ships and buses before they got to their promised patch of frontier dirt.

*

Wilson had laid on a ten-seat corporate hypersonic jet at the city’s single airport. Paula had to smile at that. He really was giving her mission top priority. Cruising speed was Mach eight, which gave them a flight time of two hours. Paula spent it reviewing the xenobiology team’s report on the Onid. After an hour’s reading she reluctantly concluded that the team’s original certification might have been correct – based on the research data provided. The Onid showed no sign of sentience, they were basic herd animals roaming the plains and forests of Jevahal. Each herd had its own territory, which they were fiercely protective of. They didn’t demonstrate even elementary tool-building, nor language. Their only communication was a few hooting sounds to alert each other of any danger. However, they did bury their dead. Each herd had an area set aside for their graves. They weren’t particularly neat, just holes scraped out of the soil. But the team had recorded them dragging bodies a long way from where they’d died to the herd’s burial ground. There were a lot of speculative notes on group identity, and rudimentary community awareness. A thesis backed up by the totem. Every Onid was buried with a totem: a stone or stick. They weren’t carved or shaped, but something was always dropped into the grave as the soil was scraped back over the corpse. It didn’t qualify as a presentience marker on any methodology the Commonwealth used to determine emerging awareness.

Paula didn’t know enough to make a judgement, but she certainly followed the tribal cohesion argument in the appendix. The conclusion was that the totems were simply instinct, like peeing on a tree, it marked territory.

The hypersonic landed on a field just outside Lydian’s latest boundary. The town had only been in existence for five months, its whole history could be measured in rings of construction activity like tree-years. Farndale had shipped in every building along a laser-straight highway of enzyme-bonded concrete that led all the way back to a port on the coast. The same colossal JCB roadbuilders that had extruded the highway had stayed on to lay out Lydian’s concentric grid. Silver-shaded housing was now erupting across the long curving blocks; bungalows whose walls and roofs had been flatpacked together in giant containers that could be assembled by a minimum number of bots. The larger civic buildings were also modular, clipped together to sprawl across the ground. Nothing was over a single storey high. Why bother? Land here cost next to nothing, and vertical assembly was an additional expense.

Lydian’s purpose, like a hundred other towns springing up across Jevahal, was a transport and market centre for the homesteads that were busy converting the plains to arable country. Soon there would be a railway for the prefabricated station already built on the western side; the tracks were only three hundred kilometres away now, and coming closer at the rate of two kilometres a day. With them would come a whole new level of prosperity. Concrete foundations for the grain silos were laid ready, with their metal load pins marking circular outlines where the giant cylinders would dominate the town’s skyline for decades to come.

Like a smaller version of the capital, it was supposed to receive the busloads of recently arrived settlers and ship them out across the eternal plains to their new lives. Paula had seen several roads radiating out from Lydian during the hypersonic’s approach, a simple spiderweb pattern of concrete that gradually devolved into thick dirt tracks. She hadn’t noticed much traffic on them.