Sadly, human nature being what it is, century-duration flights were just too long, the ideal of colonization too abstract to motivate the governments and large institutions of the time into building these proposed space arks. The real clincher, inevitably, was cost. There could never be any return on the investment. So it seemed as though the fresh start idealists would just have to go on dreaming.
One such thwarted dreamer was Julian Wan, who, more resourceful than his colleagues, persuaded the board of the New Kong corporation to research faster than light travel. His pitch was that it would be a small, cheap project testing the more dubious equations of Quantum Unification Theory, essentially a few wild theoretical physicists with plenty of computer time. But if it could be made to work, the commercial opportunities would be phenomenal. Noble concern for human destiny and the search for pure knowledge never got a look in.
New Kong successfully tested the ZTT drive in 2115, and the arkship concept was quickly and quietly discarded. Beautifully detailed plans and proposals drawn up by a multitude of starflight societies and associations were downloaded into university library memories to join the ranks of other never-made-it technologies like the nuclear powered bomber, the English Channel bridge, geostationary solar power stations, and continent birthing (the so-called Raising Atlantis project, where fusion bombs were proposed to modify tectonic activity). Then the Tyrathca world of Hesperi-LN was discovered in 2395, along with the news that it was actually a colony founded by an arkship. The old human plans were briefly revisited by history of engineering students, interested to see how they stood up to comparison with a proven arkship. That academic interest faded away inside of a decade.
Joshua, who fancied himself as something of a spaceflight buff, was fascinated by the dull blip of light which
Lady
Mac
’s sensors were focused on. It was in a wildly elliptical orbit around Hesperi-LN, with a twelve thousand kilometre perigee and four hundred thousand kilometre apogee. Fortunately for their mission, it was just under three hundred thousand kilometres away from the Tyrathca planet, and climbing.
They’d emerged two million kilometres out from Hesperi-LN; a distance which put them safely beyond the planet’s known SD sensor coverage. The Tyrathca world was not a cradle for the kind of space activity found above industrialized human worlds. There were a few low-orbit docking stations, industrial module clusters, communication and sensor satellite networks, and twenty-five SD platforms supplied and operated by the Confederation Navy. Not that there was a lot of worry about pirate activity, the Tyrathca simply didn’t manufacture the kind of goods which could be sold on any human market let alone the underground one. The Confederation was far more concerned by the prospect of blackmail by a rogue starship captain armed with ground-assault weapons. Although they didn’t have consumer products, the Tyrathca did mine gold, platinum, and diamonds among other precious commodities for their indigenous industries. And the colony had been established in AD 1300; rumours of vast stockpiles accumulated over millennia persisted on every human world. Any bar or dinner party would have someone who knew somebody else who had been told of a first-hand witness who’d walked through the endless underground caverns filled with their glittering dragon hoards.
So the Navy maintained a small cost-ineffective outpost to guard against the possibility of any inter-species
incident.
It had been abandoned, along with all the other human-maintained systems, when the Tyrathca broke off contact. According to the briefing Monica and Samuel had given to
the
Lady Mac
’s crew, the Tyrathca would find it difficult to keep the SD systems functional for very long.
“But we have to expect them to try,â€
Candles shaped like dark lily pads bobbed about over the bath water, never managing to touch the two bodies resting in the middle. Several of them had become mired in the burgs of apple-scented bubbles, their wicks sizzling as the flames struggled to stay alight. More candles were flickering gamely along the bath’s marbled rim, half a metre tall; they were cemented into place by thick rivulets of wax. As the only source of light in the suite’s dilapidated bathroom, their weak yellow flickers bestowed an appropriately dingy appearance.
For years the Chatsworth had been one of central Edmonton’s most renowned five-star hotels, attracting the wealthy and the famous. But successive changes of management and ownership had seen it decay badly over the last two decades as too much of its cash flow had been diverted from maintaining standards to inflating shareholder dividends. Eventually it was trading solely on its name, and that could never last. Now it was closed for a much needed refurbishment and re-launch. But the work crews and their mechanoids hadn’t even started stripping the old fittings out when New York’s problems with the possessed hit the
AV news. After that, most of Earth’s long-term commercial investment projects were put on hold while the financiers and entrepreneurs waited to see what the outcome would be. The Chatsworth included.
Quinn had taken it over with quiet efficiency to use as his home base in the arcology. The three-man caretaker team left inside were possessed, and every last connection to the outside world was severed: power, water, data, air conditioning. He knew that police and government security forces tracked the possessed by the glitches they caused, but they could only do that when there was working processor-governed machinery nearby. So he and his loyal followers made do with the water left in the hotel tanks, cooked on camping gear in one of the ritzy function rooms, and used candles. Bath water was heated purely by energistic power. The soaps and oils were stolen from a local mall. Along with booze.
Quinn reached for the bottle of Norfolk Tears chilling in an ice bucket among the candles, and poured the pale liquid over Courtney’s glistening breasts. She giggled as her nipples hardened from the cold, and arched herself further out of the water. There were bruises and teeth marks on her gold-tanned skin, evidence of Quinn’s recent predilections. She didn’t mind the kind of sex he wanted; it was kind of interesting, the physical things he could do with his new black magic. That kind of misused power really turned her on, further proof of his omnipotence. He didn’t have to worry about censure, or being caught. He wrote the rules now. And there was never much pain, nor did it last long. He didn’t have to hurt her to confirm their relationship; he knew she had submitted herself completely to him and the cause. Joyfully, too. By embracing the serpent beast in its dark lair, Courtney’s life had changed, becoming so much better. Hotter. Brighter. She got all the stuff like clothes and
AV fleks she wanted now; and she didn’t have to take shit from anyone anymore, either. Not bad going for a sect whore.
Quinn threw away the bottle, and started to lick the luxurious drink off her skin. “This is the fucking max,â€
It was a foul job, but better than scouting round the starscrapers. Tolton and Dariat were driving a truck slowly over Valisk’s grass plains in search of servitor bodies. Food was becoming a critical commodity within the enfeebled habitat. During Kiera’s reign the possessed had simply helped themselves to existing supplies with little thought devoted to replenishing them. Then after plunging into the dark continuum, the survivors had turned to butchering the wild terrestrial animals that had fallen into unconsciousness. Large cooking pits had been dug outside the northern endcap caverns, where the Starbridge tribes took charge of trussing the beasts on long poles to be roasted over the flames as if for a medieval banquet. It was a predictably monotonous diet of goat, sheep, and rabbits; but nourishing enough. None of the other lethargic survivors complained.
Now that operation was being accelerated. The animals were gradually slipping from their strange comas into death. Their carcasses had to be recovered and cooked before they started to decay. If it was hung in the coolest caverns, properly cured meat could be stored for several weeks and still remain edible. Building up a stockpile of food was also a
logical precaution to be undertaken in times of war. Rubra’s regiment of descendants all knew about the visitor, and had been surreptitiously supplementing their armaments ever since. The remaining survivors hadn’t been told.
Tolton wondered if that was why he and Dariat had been given this particular task, so he wouldn’t have much contact with the refugees occupying the caverns.
“Why should the personality distrust you?â€
Fifty years ago, Sinon had visited the Welsh-ethnic planet Llandilo, where he’d spent a cold three hours straddling sunrise to watch a clan of New Druids welcome the first day of spring. As pagan ceremonies went, it was a fairly boring affair for an outsider, with off-key singing and interminable Gaelic invocations to the planet’s mother goddess. Only the setting made it worthwhile. They’d gathered on the headland of some eastward-facing coastal cliffs, where a line of tremendous granite pillars marched out to sea. God’s colonnade, the locals called it.
When the sun rose, pink and gold out of the swaddling sea mist, its crescent was aligned perfectly along the line of pillars. One by one, their tops had blazed with rose-gold coronas as the shadows flowed away. Gladdened by nature’s poignancy, the congregation of white-clad New Druids had finally managed to achieve a decent harmony and their voices rang out across the shore.
It was a strange recollection for Sinon to bring to his new serjeant body with its restricted memory capacity. He certainly couldn’t remember his reason for retaining it. An overdose of sentiment, presumably. Whatever the motive,
the Llandilo memory was currently providing a useful acclimatisation bridge to the present. Nine thousand of the serjeants trapped on Ketton’s island had gathered together near the edge of the plateau to exert their will, with the remainder joining their endeavours via affinity as they walked resolutely over the mud towards the rendezvous point. They weren’t praying, exactly, but the visual similarity with the New Druids was an amusing comfort. The beleaguered Edenists needed whatever solace they could garner from the dire situation.
Their first, and urgent, priority had been to stem the gush of atmosphere away from the flying island before everybody suffocated. A simple enough task for their assembled minds now they had acquired some degree of energistic power; the unified wish bent whatever passed for local reality into obedience. Even Stephanie Ash and her raggedy little group of followers had aided them in that. Now it was as though the air layer around the outside of the island had become an impregnable vertical shield.
Encouraged and relieved, they stated their second wish loud and clear: to return. In theory, it should have been easy. If a massive concentration of energistic power had brought them here to this realm, then an equally insistent concentration should be able to get them back. So far, this argument of logical symmetry had failed them utterly.
“You dudes should give it a rest,â€
Rocio waited a day after the Organization’s convoy returned from the antimatter station before he abandoned his routine high orbit patrol above New California and swallowed out to Almaden. Radar pulses from the asteroid’s proximity radar washed across
Mindori
, returning an odd fuzzy blob on the display screens. It fluctuated in time with the human heart. The visual-spectrum sensors showed the huge dark harpy with its wings folded, hovering two kilometres out from the counter-rotating spaceport. A glitter of red light could just been seen through eyelids that weren’t completely shut.
In turn, Rocio focused his own senses on Almaden’s docking ledge. Each of the pedestals had been struck by laser fire, spilling a sludge of metal and plastic out across the rock where it had solidified into a grey clinker-like puddle with a surface badly pocked by burst gas bubble craters. The nutrient fluid refinery and its three storage tanks had also been targeted.
Rocio shared his view with Pran Soo who was back at Monterey.
What do you think?
he asked his fellow hellhawk.
The refinery isn’t as badly damaged as it looks. It’s only the outer layers of machinery which have been struck. Etchells just ripped his laser backwards and forwards over it, which no doubt looked spectacular. Lots of molten metal spraying everywhere, and tubes detonating under the pressure. But the core remains intact, and that’s where the actual chemical synthesis mechanism is.
Typical.
Yes. Fortunately. There’s no practical reason why this can’t be returned to operational status. Providing you can get the natives to agree.
They’ll agree,
Rocio said.
We have something they want: ourselves.
Good luck.
Rocio shifted his senses to the counter-rotating spaceport, a small disk whose appearance suggested it was still under construction. It was mostly naked girders containing tanks and fat tubes, with none of the protective plating that spaceports usually boasted. Three ships were docked: a pair of cargo tugs and the
Lucky Logorn
. The inter-orbit craft had returned ten hours earlier. If the Organization lieutenants in the asteroid were going to discipline the crew, they would have done it by now.
Rocio opened a short range channel. “Deebank?â€
From the safety of the little plateau, a quarter of the way up the northern endcap, Tolton trained his telescope on the lobby of the Djerba starscraper. Another swirl of darkness was pushing up through the dome of white archways. Pieces of the structure tumbled across the crumpled lawn circling the forlorn building. He kept expecting to hear the sound of breaking glass reach across the distance. The telescope provided a good, sharp image, as if he was just a few metres away. He shivered at that errant thought, still able to feel the wave of coldness that had swept through him every time the flying monster passed overhead.