City of Pearl (5 page)

“Frankland's gone down to the surface to make formal contact,” Lindsay said.
He's just a rating. Think of him as a rating. Don't weaken
. “You're only awake as a precaution in case of cryo failure. We're experiencing some technical problems.”

“Oh, great.”

“Frankland has the situation in hand.”

“And who's he?”

“
She.
Superintendent Frankland is from EnHaz and acting as an officer of the Foreign Office's Ethics Division. She's overseeing this mission.”

“Police? What the hell's all that about?”

“She was embarked after your cryo. Political matter. Don't worry about it. She's here to maintain proper procedures in acquisition of novel substances and processes.” Well, that much was true. Or at least that was what it said in the file. “You know how it is.”

Rayat looked as if he was going to protest but as his lips formed a word, his face paled a little. That was no mean effort in zero gee, with his blood patiently distributing itself fairly round his system. Then his cheeks bulged and he made a fast turn—too fast—to grab a sick-bag. Lindsay heaved herself up through the hatch and let his two colleagues deal with the gently drifting rain of vomit. It was only liquid nutrient, after all.

Back in the forward section of
Thetis,
the EEWC was conscious and checking suits and weapons. The small space seemed full of them; Barencoin, Becken, Webster, Chahal, and Qureshi. They seemed okay. They said ma'am, and saluted minimally: at least they had been trained not to bounce off the bulkheads.

“Everybody up, then, ma'am?”

“Some of them,” Lindsay said. “It goes without saying that this is turning into a lash-up. Frankland didn't want them revived until she'd secured an agreement with the colony. That means we'll have to keep them occupied until she says we can disembark.”

“I still think we should have sent the sarge down with her,” said Barencoin.

Bennett shrugged. “She can cope. No point pushing the quarantine. Anyway, they have access to kit that can stop this ship, so better to defer to them at the moment.”

“It's not her safety I'm worried about.” Barencoin clenched and unclenched his fist and looked at his palm and the inside of his arm. His face was illuminated by the glow from the bioscreen that was part of his skin. “Have we all got synchrony here?”

Lindsay checked her own palm at the same time as the three remaining marines and saw seven comm lines—her own plus each member of her unit—pulsing on idle above the panel that creased and flexed as she twitched her fingers. It was a spin-off of leisure technology. You could have a living display screen grown into your skin, anywhere you wanted, any size, any shape, as long as you had enough body and money; and while it was senseless fun for the well-off, it was unbreakable, totally portable comms and data tech for the military. She just hoped it worked. “Yes, got you all,” Lindsay said, and the others said, “Check.”

“No civvie superintendent,” said Barencoin. “Not wired?”

Lindsay shook her head. “Couldn't pick up anything from her at all. Not chipped, I assume. The bioscreen would have clocked something if she'd had ID implanted.”

“Do we know anything about her?”

“Only that she wants a Pagan rite if we have to dispose of her body before we get back home.”

Bennett tightened his webbing. “And she carries a 9mm handgun. Saw the outline, back of her waistband. Old but efficient tech. And a swiss.”

Lindsay felt a little shiver of uncertainty. “So she's Pagan, armed
and
gets paid too much.”

“What's a swiss?” said Barencoin.

“Very old, very valuable. A cylinder about as long as your hand, and it's got all these parts that fold out of it—blades, adapters, data storage, netlinks, ultrasound probe, you name it. And a dinky little display screen that pops up in a frame.”

Barencoin simply raised his eyebrows and said nothing. Antiques used casually prompted a little suspicion in the ranks. Everything they carried or wore was disposable, thin film, quick dry, organic tech, recyclable. Unnecessary luxury smacked of old money and wardroom snobbery.

But the handgun wasn't a toy. Lindsay doubted if Frankland wore it as a fashion accessory. There was something about the woman, even in her slightly unsteady post-thaw state, that suggested people normally didn't answer her knock on the door willingly. Lindsay swallowed back another wave of nausea: she'd have to get that medic Hugel to prescribe something for that.

“Come on,” she said. “Let's get to it. We've got a planet to secure.”

Shan waited by the shuttle. The sky burned turquoise; the air ticked and burbled with unseen creatures. In a biohaz suit, the beautiful day was just a curse of trickling sweat in places she couldn't reach. She was close to ripping the hood off, filter and all, and letting any pathogens try their luck. It seemed a reasonable price to pay for a good scratch.

But caution prevailed. She visualized not feeling the itches. She concentrated on what appeared to be trees and for a moment the vivid autumnal reds and golds distracted her from the misery of the suit.

She kept herself fixed on the immediate diplomatic task at hand by rehearsing greetings and pleasantries until movement caught her eye. It was a small, battered allterrain vehicle, growing larger and larger against the amber backdrop. It drew up to her, whirring like an antique friction toy.

A man in late middle age looked her up and down with complete indifference and indicated the passenger seat. She switched off her comms link to avoid interruption.

“Welcome, Commander,” he said. It was the style of English she'd heard over the comms system, not so very different from her own, but oddly accented, every syllable clear and separate from the next. “Get in.”

“Superintendent Shan Frankland. Police—EnHaz division. I'm not the military.”

“Superintendent,” he said, as if testing the sound of it. He tapped his chest. “Sam.”

“Pleased to meet you, Sam. We thought you were all dead.”

Sam looked unmoved. “You were wrong.”

She handed him the container of blood samples from the crew and eased herself into the cab, aware that the suit's fabric was making obscene noises against the seat cover. “Now this is what I call a perfect autumn day,” she said.

Sam's eyes never left the track ahead. “It's spring.”

“Spring's supposed to be green.” She attempted to break Sam out of the monosyllabic rut. “And light green at that.”

“Anthocyanins,” he said. His accent fascinated her, and she had to steel herself against mimicking him, slipping breaths and vowels between every consonant. His shapeless tunic and pants were all of the same buff material. “I'll drop the samples off first and then I'll take you to see Josh Garrod. He's getting ready for the holiday, so he's busy.”

“Holiday?” she asked.
Don't put yourself out, I've only been on the road for a few decades
. Discretion prevailed again. This was not an interrogation. “What holiday?”

“Christmas,” he said, emphasizing both syllables as if it were a foreign language. “It's Christmas Eve.”

The autumnal landscape was alien enough, but Christmas in spring jerked her back out of what little familiarity she was beginning to establish. “Still sticking to the old calendar?”

“Yes. It's slipped out of sync with this place over the years.”

“I don't suppose you thought of tying it in with the natural cycle.”

“You want to work a nine-day week?”

“I'm not sure I'm even ready for the thirty-hour day.”

“Some things we can't reorder. Besides, the Lord labored for six days and on the seventh He rested. You'll be glad of that.”

All the way along the route to Constantine, the fresh foliage on the huge cycad-like plants was hot with cyanide compounds. She would have liked to pause and wander among the ridged orange trunks. But she made a mental note to travel this road again in her own time. The cycads thinned out one by one, and they were suddenly on a plain of shimmering gentian blue. Her monkey-brain tried hard to put familiar labels on the utterly alien, telling her
heather, bluebells, lavender.
But it was nothing of the sort. The flying creatures she could see skimming the vegetation weren't birds; and the odd opalescent patches that flared up behind them defied any classification.

Sam drove on in silence. Around them, the plain gave way to gently rolling hills carpeted with what looked like gray ferns. Shan wondered why he wasn't staring at her, or at least showing some sign of curiosity at seeing someone from another world. But he kept his eyes ahead of him as if she were regular cargo, nothing especially noteworthy. It occurred to her that he might be trying to avoid getting into conversation with an outsider.

“Here we are,” he said, and began slowing the ATV.

She couldn't see anything resembling a settlement. The vegetation had become sparse and silver, but that was all. Sam steered the vehicle slowly, as if he were negotiating invisible obstacles, and then the track dipped and enveloped them, and they were suddenly driving down a tunnel with a brilliant white light at the end. It blinded her. She couldn't help thinking how much it looked like a neardeath experience.

They were underground.

“We park here,” Sam said. “No vehicles beyond this point.”

He jumped down from the ATV and let her struggle out of the cab unaided. She stared around her; her eyes adjusted to the light and she realized she was standing in a large vaulted chamber like the cellars of a vineyard. There was a patch of bright bluish light at the far end, and Sam was walking towards it. She followed him.

“Josh is in the church,” Sam said suddenly, and it made her start. “Have you ever been in a church?”

“No,” Shan said. It wasn't strictly true: she'd visited churches as architecture. She'd walked through the flooded ruins of Chichester cathedral. But she knew that wasn't what he meant. “I'm a Pagan.”

Sam paused noticeably. “I'll take you there first, then.”

The pool of light at the end of the vault turned out to be a doorway, and she stepped through it into a vision of long-destroyed Petra. The settlement was carved out of the rock, Nabataean style.

Terraces of buildings stretched out on either side of her, but instead of the gloom of caves she walked in diffuse sunlight. Was she back on the surface? She strained to look up as far as she could, expecting artificial illumination, bewildered at the mix of apparent high technology and simplicity.

“Okay, what powers the lighting?” Shan asked.

“Sunlight,” said Sam.

“How?”

“Gathered at the surface, reflected down here.” He didn't seem about to go into detail. So they were definitely underground. “It normally suffices.”

“Is the climate that extreme?”

“Extreme?”

“You live underground.”

“No, the winters get cold, but I would not say extreme.”

His silence was sudden and complete. It was all she was getting out of him. Small talk had failed; her alternative interview technique, beating the crap out of the interviewee, was out of the question. She decided to save her questions until she met the community leaders. Sam was just the gofer.

There were no people in the streets, and few sounds except the distant wail of a baby. She wondered if she were walking through an elaborate ruin. But there were lavender-flowered vines crawling up the walls towards the light, and the feel of life. She couldn't smell anything through the biohaz filter, and yet she could almost taste fresh air.

Whatever technology they had, its results were impressive for such a small colony. She stared at the circular windows and arched doorways, imagining a souk of sorts.

And there it was ahead of her.

A church.

In an underground chamber, trillions of miles from Earth, a traditional Norman-style church rose up out of the rock floor with a spire that dissolved into the light above.

“Oh my,” she said.

“St. Francis. Out of the living rock.”

On closer inspection the huge church was relatively modest. It had no elaborate stone ornamentation, and from the outside its stained glass looked like a craft class'first efforts. A block of stone set in the wall near the doors bore an inscription:
GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK.
.

The entrance was a tunnel of round arches, and along the walls the space between them was taken up with a narrow wooden bench. She walked through behind Sam, an alien in a space suit, wandering into a church. From outside herself, she could see how bizarre it looked. The cool darkness swallowed her and her eyes took time to adjust again.

What she saw revised her opinion of the glass. The leading, whatever it was, made no sense from the outside, but with the sun streaming in the images and colors were breathtaking. There were curious opal-white areas that looked as if someone had run out of ideas for halos: apart from that, the human figures—out of biblical stories, she imagined—were exquisite. Pools of brilliant emerald and violet and ruby were beginning a slow, majestic sweep across the altar.

“Josh,” Sam called out, in a strained loud whisper. “It's the task force.”

So that was how they were seen. And maybe he was right. She had a problem: she was here with a handful of aid troops—nominally, anyway—and commercially sponsored researchers, in a world where the inhabitants clearly needed no aid and probably wanted no research.

Josh bobbed out from behind a pillar and stood staring at her. He held a small plant tub in one hand and a bunch of pink and white hellebores in the other. No, they were artificial; very realistic, but they were paper. She noticed that before she truly noticed Josh. He was a broad and very lean man, leaner than most humans she was used to: forties maybe, wiry light hair, very pale blue eyes, a man whom other men would probably have liked to resemble. His clothing was the same utilitarian buff fabric as Sam's, except the top buttoned up like a frock coat.

“Commander,” he said politely. He put the tub down and held out his hand for shaking.

She took it as firmly as she could in her glove, and tried again. “Superintendent. I'm a police officer. Good to meet you.”

“I'm sorry we asked you to come alone,” he said. “We don't want to appear hostile. But we didn't plan on having visitors from home, and it's a shock to have our first contact with troops.”

“I can understand that now,” she said, and meant it. All the forces of secular enforcement were soldiers to him. “I apologize. We could have done this better.”

“You've come a long way. We need to do some talking.”

“If I've interrupted something important, I can wait.” She was stepping gingerly from one cracking slab of conversational ice to another, never sure when she would fall in. “Busy?”

Josh held out the flowers for inspection. She put out a hand to touch them but the suit made the exercise pointless. The restriction was irritating her.

“Hellebores,” he said. “We have real holly as well, but the trees are too large now to bring them inside. We wouldn't cut them just for decoration, of course.”

“They're very realistic.” She longed to scratch between her shoulders. “Look, how long will it take for you to analyze the blood samples?”

“We're processing them now. I promise you it won't take long.”

At least it proved they'd retained some level of sophisticated technology if they could run a lab. Had they also developed that defense system? They'd had nearly two hundred years to do it. But she doubted it.

“Why don't you sit here awhile?” Josh offered, as if she could have done anything else. “I'll be back as soon as your own samples are cleared.”

Shan found herself alone in the church. It would have been a serene experience if the suit helmet hadn't amplified her breathing. She concentrated on the rise and fall of her chest and settled into a shallow rhythm. Colored light from the window edged across her lap, picking out the monitor panels and seals. It was hypnotic.

A saint surrounded by animals hung motionless in light before her. She read the words on a scroll at his feet: “It is Satan and his henchmen who martyr animals.” It was almost wiccan. She knew Josh wouldn't have agreed.

 

Shan woke with a start, heart pounding. Josh was standing over her. He smiled and tapped his head. “You can take that off—you're clear,” he said. “Sorry I startled you.”

She broke the seal with relief. The air that rushed in was wood-scented and slightly damp, underlaid by unidentifiable smells that reminded her of fruit as they hit her palate. “That's better,” she said. “I nodded off. I think my metabolism is still screwed from the cryo. So, no bugs?”

“Some, but nothing we can't handle. Come on. I'll show you the town.”

She followed him back down the nave, relieved to be getting out, like a burglar who had lost her nerve. Treading on other people's sacred soil always disturbed her. She paused to look up at the fine stained glass again.

“That's quite a sight.”

“I'm told the translucent areas are actually the most wonderful blues and mauves,” Josh said. “But not to human eyes.” He looked suddenly awkward, and turned away. Was he talking about the vision of angels? Perault's voice intruded from the dead past:
We know they made contact with aliens
. She decided not to ask, not yet.

It seemed indecent to take off the rest of her suit in the church. When she reached the porch she struggled free of it, draping it over one arm. She could feel a slight but steady breeze on her face—artificial, she imagined—and a heady mix of cooking smells that she couldn't quite identify beyond garlic and ginger.

“I'll walk you round the main parts of town, so you get your bearings,” he said. “It'll take awhile. We don't use vehicles much. Are you able to walk?”

“I'll get used to the gravity,” she said, and noted that Josh was a head shorter when she drew level with him. He could still walk faster, though: it would take her a few weeks to get used to weighing an extra seven kilos. They walked up the long sloping road to the surface, passing windows that spilled brilliant light. There was so much of it. It seemed to burst out from underground, as if there were a sun at the heart of the world. Shan pointed at the sunken dwellings.

“Houses?” she asked, then tried the same question from a new tack. “Why are they like that?”