The gush out of the mountain’s side showed no signs of abating. That front was already tens of metres high, and would soon reach the village.
‘I can’t believe how fast this stuff is rising,’ I said to Tilo. ‘The volume you’d need to fill up a valley like this—’
‘You and I are used to spacecraft, Lieutenant,’ Tilo said. ‘The dimensions of human engineering. Planets are big. And when they turn against you—’
‘We can still get you out of here. With our suits we can get you over that bridge and to the transport.’
‘What about the villagers?’
I was aware of the woman, Doel, standing beside me silently, just waiting. Which, of course, made me feel worse than if she’d yelled and begged.
There was a scream. We looked down the ridge and saw that the mud had already reached the village’s lower buildings. A young couple with a kid were standing on the roof of a low hut, about to get cut off.
Lian said, ‘Sir? Your orders?’
I waited one more heartbeat, as the mud began to wash over that hut’s porch.
‘Lethe, Lethe.’ I ran down the ridge until I hit the mud.
On the mud’s surface were dead fish that must have jumped out of the river to escape the heat. There was a lot of debris in the flow, from dust to pebbles to small boulders: no wonder it was so abrasive.
Even with the suit’s strength augmentation the mud was difficult stuff to wade through - lukewarm, and with a consistency like wet cement. The stench was bad enough for me to pull my visor over my mouth. By the time I reached the cottage I was already tiring badly.
I found the little ‘family’, parents and child, terrified, glad to see me. The woman was bigger, obviously stronger than the man. I had her hold her infant over her head, while I slung the man over my shoulder. With me leading, and the woman grabbing onto my belt, we waded back towards the higher ground.
All this time the mud rose relentlessly, filling up the valley as if it had been dammed, and every step sapped my energy.
Lian and Doel helped us out of the dirt. I threw myself to the ground, breathing hard. The young woman’s legs had been scoured by rocks in the flow; she had lost one sandal, and her trouser legs had been stripped away.
‘We’re already cut off from the bridge,’ Lian said softly.
I forced myself to my feet. I picked out a building - not the largest, not the highest, but a good compromise. It turned out to be the hospital. ‘That one. We’ll get them onto the roof. I’ll call for another pickup.’
‘Sir, but what if the mud keeps rising?’
‘Then we’ll think of something else,’ I snapped. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
She ran to help as Doel improvised a ladder from a trellis fence.
My first priority was to get Tilo safely lodged on the roof. Then I began to shepherd the locals up there. But we couldn’t reach all of them before the relentless rise of the mud left us all ankle-deep. People began to clamber up to whatever high ground they could find - verandas, piles of boxes, the ground transports, even rocks. Soon maybe a dozen were stranded, scattered on rooftop islands around a landscape turning grey and slick.
I waded in once more, heading towards two young women who crouched on the roof of a small building, like a storage hut. But before I got there the hut, undermined, suddenly collapsed, pitching the women into the flow. One of them bobbed up and was pushed against a stand of trees, where she got stuck, apparently unharmed. But the other tipped over and slipped out of sight. I reached the woman in the trees and pulled her out. The other was gone.
I hauled myself back onto the hospital roof for a break. All around us the mud flowed, a foul-smelling grey river, littered with bits of wood and rock.
My emotions were deep and unwelcome. I’d never met that woman, but her loss was visceral. It was as if, against my will, I had become part of this little community, as we huddled together on the roof of that crudely built hospital. Not to mention the fact that I now wouldn’t be able to fulfil my orders completely.
I prepared to plunge back into the flow.
Tilo grabbed my arm. ‘No. Not yet. You are exhausted. Anyhow you have a call to make, remember? If you can get me a data desk—’
Lian spoke up. ‘Sir. Let me bring in the stranded locals.’ She said awkwardly, ‘I can manage that much.’
Redemption time for this young marine. ‘Don’t kill yourself,’ I told her.
With a grin she slid off the roof.
Briskly, I used my suit’s comms system to set up a fresh link to the Spline. I requested another pickup - was told it was impossible - and asked for Kard.
Tilo requested a Virtual data desk. He fell on it as soon as it appeared. His relief couldn’t have been greater, as if the mud didn’t exist.
When they grasped the situation I had gotten us all into, Admiral Kard and Commissary Xera both sent down Virtual avatars. The two of them hovered over our wooden roof, clean of the mud, gleaming like gods among people made of clay.
Kard glared at me. ‘This is a mess, Lieutenant.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You should have gotten Tilo over that damn bridge while you could. We’re heavily constrained by the Xeelee operations. You realise we probably won’t be able to get you out of here alive.’
It struck me as somewhat ironic that in the middle of a Galaxy-spanning military crisis I was to be killed by mud. But I had made my choice. ‘So I understand.’
‘But, Kard,’ Xera said, her thin face fringed by blocky pixels, ‘he has completed his primary mission, which is to deliver Tilo’s data back to us.’
Kard closed his Eyes, and his image flickered; I imagined Tilo’s data and interpretations pouring into the processors which sustained this semi-autonomous Virtual image, tightly integrated with Kard’s original sensorium. Kard said, ‘Your report needs redrafting, Tilo. Sharpening up. There’s too much about this dark matter crud, Academician.’
Xera said gently, ‘You were here on assignment from your masters in the Navy, with a specific purpose. They wanted to know what the Xeelee are up to. But it’s hard to close your eyes to the clamouring truth, isn’t it, Academician?’
Tilo sighed, his face mud-covered.
‘We must discuss this,’ Kard snapped. ‘All of us, right now. We have a decision to make, a recommendation to pass up the line - and we need to assess what Tilo has to tell us, in case we can’t retrieve him.’
I understood immediately what he meant. We were about to put the Xeelee in the dock - us, right here on this beaten-up planet, while the mud rose up around us. And the recommendation we made today might reach all the way back to the great decision-making councils on Earth itself. I felt a deep thrill. Even the locals stirred, apparently aware that something historically momentous was about to happen, even in the midst of their own misfortunes, stuck as we were on that battered wooden roof.
So it began.
At first Tilo wasn’t helpful.
‘It simply isn’t proven that this volcanism is the result of Xeelee action - and certainly not that it’s deliberately directed against humans,’ Despite Kard’s glare, he persisted, ‘I’m sorry, Admiral, but it isn’t clear.
‘Look at the context.’ He pulled up historical material - images, text that scrolled briefly in the murky air. ‘This is not a new story. There is evidence that human scientists were aware of dark-matter contamination in the stars before the beginning of the Third Expansion. They called the dark-matter life forms they found “photino birds”. It seems an engineered human being was once sent into Sol itself to study them … An audacious project. But this learning was largely lost in the Qax Extirpation, and after that - well, we had a Galaxy to conquer. There was a later incident, a project run by the Silver Ghosts concerning a “soliton star”, but—’
Kard snapped, ‘What do the Xeelee care about dark matter?’
Tilo rubbed tired eyes with grubby fists. ‘However exotic they are, the Xeelee are baryonic life forms, like us. It isn’t in their interests for the suns to die young, any more than for us.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps they are trying to stop it. Perhaps that’s why they have come here, to the halo. Nothing to do with us.’
Kard waved a Virtual hand at Mount Perfect’s oozing wounds. ‘Then why all this, just as the Xeelee show up? Coincidence?’
Xera protested, ‘Admiral—’
‘This isn’t a Commission trial, Tilo,’ Kard said. ‘We don’t need absolute proof. The imagery - human refugees, Xeelee nightfighters swooping overhead - will be all we need to implicate the Xeelee in this destruction.’
Xera said dryly, ‘Yes. All we need to sell a war to the Coalition, the governing councils, and the people of the Expansion.’ They seemed to forget the rest of us as they engaged in an argument they had clearly been pursuing before. ‘This is wonderful for you, isn’t it, Admiral? It’s what the Navy has been waiting for, along with its Academy cronies. An excuse to attack.’
Kard’s face was stony. ‘The cold arrogance of you cosseted intellectuals is sometimes insufferable. It’s true that the Navy is ready to fight, Commissary. That’s our job. And we are ready. We have the plans in place—’
‘But does the existence of the plans require their fulfilment? And let’s remember how hugely the Navy itself will benefit. As the lead agency, a war would clearly support the Navy’s long-term political goals.’
Kard glared. ‘We all have something to gain. Xera, you Commissaries are responsible for maintaining the unity of mankind; the common principles, common purpose, the belief that has driven the Expansion so far. But isn’t it obvious that you are failing? Look at this place.’ He waved a Virtual hand through Doel’s hair; the woman flinched, and the hand broke up into drifting pixels. ‘This woman is a mother, apparently some kind of matriarch to her extended family.’ He pronounced those words with loathing. ‘They don’t even live in their Coalition-provided Conurbation domes. It’s as if Hama Druz never existed!
‘And if the Druz Doctrines were to collapse, the Commission would have no purpose. Think of the good you do, for you know so much better than the mass of mankind how they should think, feel, live and die. Your project is actually humanitarian! It has to continue. But if it is to prevail mankind needs purification. An ideological cleansing. And that’s what the bright fire of war will give us.’
I could see that his arguments, aimed at the Commissary’s vanity and self-interest, were leaving a mark. I got a sense of the great agencies of the Coalition as shadowy independent empires, engaging in obscure and shifting alliances. And now each agency would contemplate the possibility of a war as an opportunity to gain political capital. It was queasy listening. But there’s a lot I didn’t want to know about how the Coalition is run. Still don’t, in fact.
They had forgotten the Academician. But Tilo was still trying to speak. He showed me more bits of evidence he had assembled on his data desk - me, because I was the only one still listening. ‘But I think I know now why the volcanism started here, Lieutenant. Forget the star: this planet has an unusually high dark-matter concentration in its core. Under such densities the dark matter annihilates with ordinary matter and creates heat.’
I listened absently. ‘Which creates the geological upheaval.’
He closed his eyes, thinking. ‘Here’s a scenario. The Xeelee have been driving dark-matter creatures out of the frozen star - and, fleeing, they have lodged here - and that’s what set off the volcanism. It was all inadvertent. The Xeelee are trying to save stars, not harm planets. They probably don’t even know humans are here … The damage to the planet is entirely coincidental.’
But nobody paid any attention to that. For, I realised, we had already reached a point where evidence didn’t matter.
Kard ignored the Academician; he had what he wanted. He turned to the people of the village, muddy, exhausted, huddled together on their rooftop. ‘What of you? You are the citizens of the Expansion. There are reformers who say you have had enough of colonisation and conflict, that there are enough people in the sky, we should seek stability and peace. Well, you have heard what we have had to say, and you have seen our mighty ships. Will you live out your lives on this drifting rock, helpless before a river of mud - or will you transcend your birth and die for an epic cause? War makes everything new. War is the wildest poetry. Will you join me? ’
Those ragged-ass, dirt-scratching, orthodoxy-busting farmers hesitated for a heartbeat. You couldn’t have found a less likely bunch of soldiers for the Expansion. But, would you believe, they started cheering the Admiral: every one of them, even the kids. Lethe, it brought a tear to my eye.
Even Xera seemed coldly excited.
Kard closed his Eyes; metals seams pushed his eyelids into ridges. ‘We are just a handful of people in this desolate, remote place. And yet here a new epoch is born. They are listening to us, you know - listening in the halls of history. And we will be remembered for ever.’
Tilo’s expression was complex. He clapped his hands, and the data desk disappeared in a cloud of pixels, leaving his work unfinished.
We mere fleshy types had to stay on that rooftop through the night. We could do nothing but cling to each other as the muddy tide rose slowly around us, and the kids cried from hunger.