“How many despots and warlords have said that down the centuries, I wonder?” she retorted.
His face managed to be sad and sympathetic at the same time.
Alkad relented, and took his hand. “But thank you for coming with me, anyway. I don’t think I could stand the navy people
by myself.”
“It will be all right, you know,” he said softly. “The government isn’t going to release any details, least of all the name
of the inventor.”
“I’ll be able to walk straight back into the job, you mean?” she asked. There was too much bitterness in her voice. “As if
nothing had happened?” She knew it wouldn’t happen that way. Intelligence agencies from half the governments in the Confederation
would find out who she was, if they hadn’t already. Her fate wouldn’t be decided by any cabinet minister on politically insignificant
Garissa.
“Maybe not nothing,” he said. “But the university will still be there. The students. That’s what you and I live for, isn’t
it? The real reason we’re here, protecting all that.”
“Yes,” she said, as if uttering the word made it fact. She looked out of the window. They were close to the equator here,
Garissa’s sun bleaching the sky to a featureless white glare. “It’s October back there now. The campus will be knee deep in
featherseeds. I always used to think that stuff was a bloody great nuisance. Whoever had the idea of founding an African-ethnic
colony on a world that’s three-quarters temperate zones?”
“Now that’s a tired old myth, that we have to be limited to tropical hellholes. It’s our society which counts. In any case,
I like the winters. And you’d bitch if it was as hot as this place the whole year round.”
“You’re right.” She gave a brittle laugh.
He sighed, studying her face. “It’s their star we’re aiming for, Alkad, not Omuta itself. They’ll have a chance. A good chance.”
“There are seventy-five million people on that planet. There will be no light, no warmth.”
“The Confederation will help. Hell, when the Great Dispersal was at its peak, Earth was deporting over ten million people
a week.”
“Those old colony-transport ships have gone now.”
“Earth’s Govcentral is still kicking out a good million a week even now; and there are thousands of military transports. It
can be done.”
She nodded mutely, knowing it was all hopeless. The Confederation couldn’t even get two minor governments to agree to a peace
formula when we both wanted it. What chance has the Assembly got trying to coordinate grudgingly donated resources from eight
hundred and sixty disparate inhabited star systems?
The sunlight pouring through the mess window deepened to a sickly red and started to fade. Alkad wondered woozily if the Alchemist
was already at work on it. But then the stimulant programs steadied her thoughts, and she realized she was in free fall, her
cabin illuminated by a weak pink-tinged emergency light. People were floating around her.
Beezling
’s crew, murmuring in quiet worried tones. Something warm and damp brushed against her cheek, sticking. She brought her hand
up instinctively. A swarm of dark motes swam across her field of view, glistening in the light. Blood!
“Peter?” She thought she was shouting his name, but her voice seemed very faint. “Peter!”
“Easy, easy.” That was a crew-member. Menzul? He was holding her arms, preventing her from bouncing around the confined space.
She caught sight of Peter. Two more crew were hovering over him. His entire face was encased by a medical nanonic package
which looked like a sheet of thick green polythene.
“Oh, merciful Mary!”
“He’s OK,” Menzul said quickly. “He’ll be all right. The nanonic package can cope.”
“What happened?”
“A squadron of blackhawks caught us. An antimatter blast breached the hull. Screwed us pretty good.”
“What about the Alchemist?”
Menzul shrugged loosely. “In one piece. Not that it matters much now.”
“Why?” Even as she asked she didn’t want to know.
“The hull breach wrecked thirty per cent of our jump nodes. We’re a navy ship, we can jump with ten per cent knocked out.
But thirty… Looks like we’re stuck out here; seven light-years from the nearest inhabited star system.”
At that moment they were precisely thirty-six and a half light-years from their G3 home star, Garissa. If they had trained
the
Beezling
’s remaining optical sensors on the faint diamond of light far behind, and if those sensors possessed sufficient resolution,
then in thirty-six years, six months, and two days they would have seen a brief surge in the apparent magnitude as Omuta’s
mercenary ships dropped fifteen antimatter planet-buster bombs on their home world. Each one had a megatonnage blast equivalent
to the asteroid impact which wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth. Garissa’s atmosphere was ruined beyond redemption. Superstorms
arose which would rage for millennia to come. By themselves, they weren’t fatal. On Earth, the shielded arcologies had sheltered
people from their heat-wrecked climate for five and a half centuries. But unlike an asteroid impact, where the energy release
was purely thermal, the planet-busters each emitted the same amount of radiation as a small solar flare. Within eight hours,
the rampaging storms had spread the nuclear fallout right across the planet, rendering it completely uninhabitable. Total
sterilization took a further two months.
The Ly-cilph home planet was located in a galaxy far removed from the one which would ultimately host the human Confederation.
Strictly speaking it wasn’t a planet at all, but a moon, one of twenty-nine orbiting a gas supergiant, a formidable orb two
hundred thousand kilometres in diameter, itself a failed brown-dwarf star. After its accretion had finished it lacked enough
mass for fusion ignition; but none the less its inexorable gravitational contraction generated a massive thermal output. What
was ostensibly its nightside fluo-resced near the bottom end of the visible spectrum, producing a weary emberlike glow which
fluctuated in continental-sized patterns as the dense turbulent clouds raged in never ending cyclones. Across the dayside,
where lemon-shaded rays from the K4 primary sun fell, the storm bands shone a lambent salmon-pink.
There were five major moons, with the Ly-cilph planet the fourth out from the cloud tops, and the only one with an atmosphere.
The remaining twenty-four satellites were all barren rocks: captured asteroids, junk left over from the solar system’s formation,
all of them less than seven hundred kilometres in diameter. They ranged from a baked rock ball skimming one thousand kilometres
above the clouds, from which the metal ores had boiled away like a comet’s volatiles, up to a glaciated planetoid in a retrograde
orbit five and a half million kilometres out.
Local space was hazardous in the extreme. A vast magnetosphere confined and channelled the supergiant’s prodigious outpouring
of charged particles, producing a lethal radiation belt. Radio emission was a ceaseless white-noise howl. The three large
moons orbiting below the Ly-cilph homeworld were all inside the radiation belt, and completely sterile. The innermost of the
three was chained to the ionosphere with a colossal flux tube, along which titanic energies sizzled. It also trailed a plasma
torus around its orbital path, the densest ring of particles inside the magnetosphere’s comprehensive embrace. Instant death
to living tissue.
The tidal-locked Ly-cilph world coasted along seventy thousand kilometres above the tenuous outer fringes of the magnetosphere,
beyond the reach of the worst radiation. Occasional palpitations within the flux lines would bombard the upper atmosphere
with protons and electrons, sending squalls of solar-bright borealis lights slithering and twisting silently across the rusty
sky.
Atmospheric composition was an oxygen-nitrogen mix, with various sulphurous compounds, and an inordinately high water-vapour
level. Mist, fog, and stacked cloud layers were the norm. Proximity to the infrared glow of the super-giant gave it a perpetual
tropical climate, with the warm, wet air of the nearside constantly on the move, rushing around to the farside where it cooled,
radiating its thermal load away into space, and then returning via storms which traversed the poles. Weather was a drab constant,
always blowing, always raining, the strength of the gusts and downpours dictated by the orbital location. Night fell in one
place, at one time. On the farside, when supergiant and planet were in an inferior conjunction, and the hellish red cloudscape
eclipsed the nearside’s brief glimpse of the sun.
It was a cycle which was broken only once every nine years, when a new force was applied to the timeless equation. A four-moon
conjunction, which brought chaos and devastation to the surface with storms of biblical ferocity.
The warmth and the light had incubated life on this world, as they had on countless billions throughout the universe. There
had been no seas, no oceans when the first migratory interstellar germ fell onto the pristine planet, rooting its way into
the mucky stain of chemicals infecting the bubbling muddy waters. Tidal forces had left a smooth surface, breaking down mountains,
grinding away at the steppes left over from the time of formation. Lakes, rivers, and flood plains covered the land, steaming
and being rained on. There was no free oxygen back then, it was all combined with carbon. A solid stratum of white cloud ensured
the infrared radiation found it hard to escape, even in the centre of the farside. Temperatures were intolerably high.
The first life, as always, was algae, a tough slime which spread through the water, seeping down rivers and streams to contaminate
the lakes, hurried through the air by the tireless convection currents. It altered and adapted over geological eras, slowly
learning to utilize the two contrasting light sources as an additional energy supply. Success, when it came, was swift, mere
millennia. Oxygen poured forth. Carbon was digested. The temperature fell. The rain quickened, thinning the clouds, clearing
the sky. Evolution began once more.
For millions of years, the planet’s governing nine-year cycle was of no importance. Storms and hurricanes were an irrelevance
to single-cell amoebas floating sluggishly through the lakes and rivers, nor did they matter to the primitive lichens which
were creeping over the rocks. But the cells adrift in the water gradually began to form cooperative colonies, and specialization
occurred. Jelly-like worms appeared in the lakes, brainless, instinct-driven and metaboli-cally inefficient, little more than
mobile lichen. But it was a start. Birth and death began to replace fission as the premier method of reproduction. Mutations
crept in, sometimes producing improvements, more often resulting in inviability. Failed strains were rapidly culled by merciless
nature. Divergence appeared, the dawn of a million species; DNA strands lengthened, a chemical record of progress and blind
alleys. Crawling creatures emerged onto the lakesides, only to be scalded by the harsh chemicals making up the atmosphere.
Yet they persisted.
Life was a steady progression, following a pattern which was as standard as circumstances would allow. There were no such
things as ice ages to alter the direction which this world’s creatures were taking, no instabilities causing profound climate
changes. Only the nine-yearly storms, appearing without fail, which became the dominant influence. The new animals’ breeding
cycles were structured around it, plant growth was restricted by it.
The planet matured into a jungle world, a landscape of swamps and lush verdancy, where giant ferns covered the surface from
pole to pole, and were themselves webbed and choked with tenacious creepers reaching for the clear sky. Floating weeds turned
the smaller lakes into vast marshlands. Elaborate ruff flowers vied for the attention of insects and birds, seed pods with
skirts of hardened petals flew like kites through the air. Wood was non-existent, of course, wood required decades of uninterrupted
growth to form.
Two wildly different flora genealogies sprang up, with the terminator as an unbreachable dividing line, and battleground.
Farside plants adapted to the sun’s yellow light: they were capable of tolerating the long nights accompanying conjunction,
the cooler temperatures. Nearside was the province of red light, falling without end: its black-leafed plants were taller,
stronger, more vigorous, yet they were unable to conquer farside. Night killed them, yellow light alone was insufficient to
drive their demanding photosynthesis, and the scattered refraction of red light by the thick atmosphere never carried far
enough, haunting the land for a couple of hundred kilometres beyond the terminator.
The animals were more adaptive, ranging freely across farside and nearside. Dinosaur-analogues never appeared, they were too
big, requiring too much time to grow. Apart from bird-analogues, lizard creatures with membranous wings, most animals were
smallish, reflecting their aquatic heritage. All were cold-blooded, at home in the muddy streams and weed-clogged pools. They
retained that ancestral trait out of pure necessity. For that was where their eggs were laid, buried deep and safe in the
mud of the lakebeds, hidden away from the worst ravages of the storm. That was how all life survived while the winds scoured
the world, as seeds and eggs and spores, ready to surge forth when stability returned in a few short weeks.
On such an inimical world life can evolve in one of two ways. There are the defeated, littered on countless planets across
the cosmos, weak, anaemic creatures huddled in their dead-end sanctuaries, a little protective niche in the local ecology,
never rising above a rudimentary level, their very lack of sophistication providing them with the means of continuation. Or
there are the triumphant, the creatures which refuse to be beaten, which fight tooth and nail and claw and tentacle against
their adversity; those for which circumstances act as an evolutionary spur. The dividing line is thin; it might even be that
a devastating storm every eight years could bring genetic ruination. But nine years… nine proved enough time to ensure survival,
allowing the denizens to rise to the challenge rather than sink back into their ubiquitous mires.