Divisions (22 page)

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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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But it had gone on long enough.
‘OK, comrades,’ I yelled. ‘Stop laughing at the sex channels and get back to your posts. We got work to do.’
When everyone had drifted—or, in Malley’s case, been hauled—back to their couches, I attached myself loosely to my own and positioned myself to see and be seen.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’ve established, at least provisionally, that New Mars hasn’t yet had a runaway Singularity. If it has, somebody’s making sure it looks and sounds like it hasn’t—but we can’t rule that out. The obvious way to check is to send down a few small, unobtrusive probes and see what it’s like close up. But first, we want to let them know we’re here. As far as we know, we haven’t been spotted yet, but we certainly will be as soon as we start our approach burn and go into orbit.
‘We’ve been through all this before, but let me go through it one more time. They don’t have space defence in a military sense, but they do have
laser-launchers, and spacecraft with missile and laser capability. They use them whenever one of their incoming comet fragments looks like it might fall in the wrong place, or fall too hard—terraforming by cometary bombardment is a bit of a risky business. Their lasers aren’t powerful enough to burn us out of the sky—they only use the laser-launchers for little robot craft like the Wilde simulacrum came back in—but they could do us a lot of damage, and even the fighter-bomber might find their missiles too hot to handle. They have a charmingly casual way with nukes, by the way.
‘So let’s do this by the book. The first thing I suggest we do is for Suze and Yeng to compose and send a nice, reassuring hailing message, and for Jaime and Andrea to put us on a course which plainly is aiming for a high orbit around the planet. Geostationary, or to be precise—’ I paused, smiling at my own pedantry ‘—
neo-areostationary
above Ship City would be ideal.’
‘Not right above it,’ said Tony. ‘Too intimidating.’
‘OK, just so long as we stay above the horizon. Before we start hailing, I’d like Boris to power up a dozen probes—little ones, mind, whose final stage will just float through the air like a leaf—and have them ready to fire them off shortly after orbital insertion. Meanwhile, I want you in Fire Control from the moment before we start signalling to well after we’re sure we’re welcome; and you and Jaime be ready to scramble the fighter-bomber. Yeng, you could scan for any response to our message on the aerospace-traffic control channels, or whatever they have, and Suze can do the same for the news broadcasts. It shouldn’t be too long before we’re the number one item.
‘Finally … last we heard, they don’t have a state here. All to the good, no doubt, but what they have instead is a lot of competing defence companies. It ain’t like the Division, or even the Union—we don’t worry about tooled-up people, because we aren’t violent. These people may not be as violent as you’d think from their television, but they’re a bit, ah, touchy and unpredictable.’ I looked enquiringly at Malley.
‘I think that’s safe to say,’ he acknowledged.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it. By the book.’
 
 
We got our first reply very quickly. This historic first contact between the Solar Union and humanity’s first and only extrasolar colony went as follows:
‘This is Solar Union passenger spaceship
Terrible Beauty
, out of Callisto via the Malley Mile, calling Ship City traffic control. Requesting permission to enter geostationary orbit and—’
‘GET THE FUCK OFF this channel, kid. I’m warning you, you’re endangering traffic, and we’re triangulating your source
right now
. You are in deep shit, you little scumbag. OK, we’ve got you, we—’
Long pause. ‘Uh oh. Jonesy, we got a bogey. I say again, we got a bogey. Condition Yellow. Going over to encryption Zero-Prime, I say again, Zero-Prime as from now,
kcchchchgh
…’
‘Try another channel,’ Suze advised. ‘See if their competitors are more open-minded.’
Yeng worked her way through a succession of rebuffs from Ship City ATC Inc, Reid Industrial Airways, Lowell Field Control Tower, Barsoom Buddies, Xaviera’s Friendly Flight-Control …
‘When you said to go by the book, Ellen, you might have told us you meant the Yellow Pages,’ Malley said.
I had to laugh (and yes, we did have Yellow Pages, even in the moneyless commonwealth); but we could all imagine the calls that were undoubtedly going on, to yet another list of companies: the ones that sold protection from incoming space-junk. We also knew that the people on New Mars had what seemed to them good reason to worry about things coming at them out of the wormhole. Five years earlier, Jonathan Wilde’s robot copy had disappeared through the Malley Mile, desperately worried that the Jovian fast folk were about to take control of its other end. This concern had been misplaced, but he’d never reported back …
And our own intentions weren’t entirely friendly. If the New Martians had known just what they
were
, they’d have scrambled every interceptor they had, and blown us out of the sky.
Suze called out: ‘We’re on the news!’
Yeng leaned over and swung a display screen around so that we could all see it. It showed an excited small boy, talking very quickly in front of a picture of a blurry but recognizably ovoid blob.
‘—the UFO is still moving slowly towards us from the wormhole Gate. According to a well placed source, it claims to be a human expedition from the Solar System! Sources remain tight-lipped, however, about whether this claim is true—or whether the fast folk back home are pulling a fast one on us! Are we about to face a real invasion—or a virtual one? Software Seduction Services urges everyone to update their anti-virus systems. Don’t take chances—call this number now!’ A long number appeared at the bottom of the screen. ‘And now … we bring you, live and exclusive, an outside broadcast of Mutual Protection’s crack comet-busters scrambling from Lowell Field! No job’s too big for Mutual Protection—and no job’s too small! Is
your
home or business as safe as it could be? Call Mutual Protection, and you too can enjoy the security that only the most experienced protectors can provide, in a proud tradition that stretches all the way back to Old Earth, and is still out in front on New Mars!
‘And off it,’ the kid ad-libbed admiringly, as the screen filled with a startling floodlit view of scores of needle-shaped rockets leaping into the night
sky like the arrows at Agincourt, the snarl of engine after engine rising and merging into one baying yell.
At the bottom of the screen was another number to call.
‘Boris, Jaime, get in the fighter-bomber,’ I said. ‘Don’t separate until I tell you, unless you see incoming. Jaime, give us an estimate on how long these rockets will take to arrive—’
‘They won’t,’ Boris said flatly. ‘That picture is
bullshit
, Ellen. Archive footage or outright fake. These are last-ditch anti-missile missiles. Type we used to call Citizens. No use for comet-busting unless the comet’s almost on top of you. It’s a diversion—’
The alarm went off and the forward view lit up with laser fire meeting its targets. Heavy thuds resounded through the ship—not hits, as my first shocked notion was, but decoys being launched from the hull’s tubes in a crazy, confusing non-pattern to distract any radiation-seeking incoming missiles with a bewildering variety of radio, radar, and infrared emission profiles.
‘Strap down!’ yelled Andrea. Our suits, responding to the alarm with the equivalent of conditioned reflex, were already hardening around us, tightening our straps. Andrea fired the attitude jets and, while the ship was still rolling over, engaged the fusion drive. The acceleration pressed down on me like a smothering, giant hand. Despite all the support of the suit, my ribs were almost cracking under the strain of breathing. I began to black out, then felt my skin prickle all over as the suit started slipping oxygen directly into my blood through micrometre-wide tubules. The forward view—what I could see of it through the flaring patches that the weight on my eyeballs was generating on my retinae—was a storm of expanding spherical flashes.
And then we were in free fall again. I lay gasping painfully. The suit’s multitude of tiny needles withdrew, their infinitestimal pains indistinguishable from the pins-and-needles of returning circulation.
‘Stay where you are!’ Andrea’s warning was again redundant—none of us could have as much as raised our heads. ‘We did it,’ she went on. ‘We outran them.’
Boris was scanning engagement and damage reports.
‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘Hull damage is within tolerance.
Carbon Conscience
is intact and seems to have fought pretty well on its own account.’
‘What
happened
there?’ Suze asked plaintively. ‘Were we attacked?’
‘Sure were,’ said Boris. ‘Nothing too sophisticated, though. Looks like they had a small swarm of comet-breakers parked around the wormhole. They weren’t much use against active-defence. Wasted the decoys on them, really. Pity about that.’
‘Why,’ I asked, staring in disbelief at the swelling dark circle in the forward view, ‘are we heading straight for New Mars?’
‘Ah,’ said Andrea. ‘Sorry, comrades. Reflex, I’m afraid. I can make a course correction if you—’
‘No, no, leave it for now.’ I was beginning to reconsider our approach, literally as well as figuratively. The television news was still coming through.
‘—the UFO has punched through our first line of defence and is now
heading straight towards us
! Stay tuned for—’
‘“UFO”, indeed!’ said Malley. ‘Bloody cheek.’
‘What’s a UFO?’ asked Yeng.
‘Something people believed in before they had the true knowledge,’ Malley flipped back.
‘Yeng,’ I said, before her moment of puzzlement could turn to hurt, ‘I wonder if you can access the New Martian communications network, and
call that number
?’
‘Call up Mutual Protection?’
‘Yes, why not? Suze, do you think you could talk to them? Do a deal?’ Suze laughed. ‘I don’t know about that, but I could make them very confused. ’
‘It’s worth a try, anyway,’ I said. ‘OK everybody, stay strapped in. Enough of trying to persuade them not to be paranoid. We’re going to give them something to
really
worry about. Andrea, give us a three-gee course towards them, then spin us round and bring us down anywhere that looks uninhabited and not too far from Ship City. Suze, Yeng, keep trying the numbers. Boris, Jaime, get in the
Carbon Conscience
and ride along as long as you can; disengage before we hit atmosphere, make an aerodynamic landing, and use up all the firepower you need to get us through.’
‘That’s what I like,’ said Boris. ‘Covering fire for a contested landing. Takes me back.’ He disengaged from his couch and followed Jaime in a straight dive for the transfer airlock.
I decided that reminding him that he’d never done any such thing, and that I had, would be bad for his morale. A minute or so later he called us up from the fighter-bomber and announced that he and Jaime were ready for the burn.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now let’s show those non-cos what we’re made off.’
‘Here’s hoping they don’t have to work it out from our scorched DNA,’ said Andrea, just before the drive kicked in. This time the gee-force was less than in our evasive manoeuvre, but it was considerably more prolonged. The moment of free fall during the roll-around provided no respite—parts of me that were enduring a dull ache took the opportunity of the weight coming off to report in as acute pain, and didn’t shut down when the deceleration began and the weight came on again.
‘Disengaging,’ said Boris. ‘See you on the ground, if you make it.’
‘I love you too,’ I said. ‘Take care.’
In the lateral view the complex insectile shape of the fighter-bomber shifted away on a parallel course by a brief burst of its jets, and fell rapidly behind us. Then its main drive lit up and it shot past us again, on its own different, perilous, and necessarily one-way descent.
Suze and Yeng simultaneously said something, hard to make out as their voices strained against the weight on their chests.
‘Say again please,’ I said heavily.
‘We’re through,’ groaned Suze, her voice making it sound as if she meant that we were finished. ‘We’re in contact with Mutual Protection. They seem to be taking us seriously. Got them on hold right now.’
‘Put them on the main screen,’ I said. ‘Patch me through.’
A serious-looking young man’s face appeared above me. ‘Hi,’ I said feebly. ‘We’re about to make a powered landing outside your town, and we want to assure you we’re friendly and ask you to keep your missiles off our backs. We can fight them off anyway.’ This was a bluff, but my face was probably so distorted that my expression was unreadable. ‘But we’d rather land peacefully.’
‘You the starship that calls itself
Terrible Beauty
?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Starship, I thought. That’s better than calling us a UFO!
‘Can you offer collateral?’
‘Call what?’
‘Excuse me,’ said Suze, cutting in. ‘We can offer at least one ton of gold as collateral against any damage.’

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