Echoes of Earth (3 page)

“I’m not,” she said, biting down on a sharper denial. “It does feel like we’re being tested, though.”

“By whom?”

“
Other
than Earth, you mean?”

He laughed. “Aliens on one side, spies on the other. That’s not much of a choice. I’m glad it’s you and not me who has to make it.”

She turned back to the main screen to watch Alander soaking in his bath, and for a brief moment she envied him. He looked so peaceful, so unconcerned, so
real.
He wasn’t some ghost bouncing around the inside of an electron trap, conjuring up experiences and calling them authentic. He wasn’t fooled for a moment.

But then, that may have been as much his problem as it was his fortune. In their circumstances, if you didn’t allow yourself that self-deception, the whole house of cards came tumbling down—as they had with Peter. As soon as your doubts set in, you were as good as lost.

It was like that with command, she thought. Jayme had the right idea, for all that he was the military guy and she was the civilian. The hardest part of the mission was probably over (since the greatest physical risk to the
Tipler
and to them had been while in transit, when Sivio was in charge), but that didn’t make the job of juggling priorities any easier. Caryl Hatzis’s job was like that of a university administrator trying to deal with an overworked staff and limited resources—with no possibility of a funding increase.

Glitches she didn’t need. She had enough on her plate already.

She had been unconsciously watching Alander while she thought. He hadn’t moved, but the water level had, inching up his chest and to the top of the bath. Part of her had been waiting for him to switch off the flow, so when he didn’t, she started to feel concerned.

“Jayme, does that tank have a volume sensor?”

“It does.” The main screen rearranged itself, revealing a red line inching down a vertical scale.

She pursed her lips. “Will someone call him before I do and tell him to shut off the goddamn water? If we lose that reaction mass, I’m going to be seriously pissed off.”

“Sounds like you already are.” He paused. “I’ll let him know as soon—”

An alarm cut him off, and Hatzis found herself back in the vector display.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re picking up something,” said a new voice: Ali Genovese of telemetry.

“Where from?” asked Sivio. “Which satellites?”

“Everywhere! All of them! Whatever it is, it’s bright, and it flared up just seconds ago—but it’s not from the sun. It seems to be coming from Adrasteia.”

“Show us,” Hatzis ordered.

There was a moment’s silence as the conSense view changed.

Then: “Jesus fucking Christ!”

It was the first time Caryl Hatzis had ever heard Jayme Sivio swear.

1.1.3

The cold hit Alander’s shoulders like an open-palmed slap
as he sat upright and reached for the controls of the heating element. Cursing under his breath, he shut off the current and stood up. The bath was surrounded by a spreading muddy stain. He lifted out the end of the black hose and grimaced at the slow drip that issued from it.

“
Shit.
”

Swearing wasn’t going to solve anything, and neither was telling himself what he ought to have done. Yes, a cutoff switch of some kind would have stopped the tank from draining empty, but he hadn’t thought of it. It had never even occurred to him, because all he’d needed to do was keep an eye on the flow, and there wouldn’t have been a problem.

But he hadn’t. His mind had drifted, and the mistake was made. His biggest problem now was how to explain it to Caryl Hatzis.

An alarm pinged inside his head a split second before the communicator on the ground near his muddy environment suit did likewise. He stepped out of the bath and grabbed the makeshift towel he had prepared earlier, already dreading the call. He knew who it would be from. The tank must have had some sort of internal sensor, so the
Tipler
would’ve known the moment it had emptied. If only he’d
thought.

“Yes?” he said, clipping the headset over his scalp. He tried to sound casual, but the chill in the air was already making him shiver, giving a tremor to his voice.

“It’s Jayme.”

He felt a flicker of surprise and relief: not Hatzis. Not quite. “Listen,” he began, deciding to brave it out, “it was a mistake and I can fix it—”

“Forget that, Peter. Just look up.”

“What?” All he could see was a pale patch where the sun tried feebly to shine through the clouds. He was about to say as much when a streak of gold swept from one side of the sky to the other, above the clouds but moving as fast as he could swing his arm over his head, and so bright it left a faint afterimage. The line to the
Tipler
crackled furiously at the same time, momentarily deafening him.

Another appeared a second later, heading in a different direction across the sky; then a third. All three paths intersected at a point behind the cliff wall against which his shelter huddled. He headed for the edge of the ledge to see better.

“You should probably get dressed first, Peter,” said Sivio with some impatience. “We can’t afford to lose your body.”

With some embarrassment, Alander clutched his environment suit to his chest and headed for the relative warmth of the shelter, where he dressed with as much haste as he could muster. Through the translucent material of the tent he caught the brief glow of another golden flash.

“What’s going on, Jayme?” he asked when the interference passed.

“We’re not sure. They arrived not long ago, and we’ve been trying to hail them. So far there has been no response.”

Alander zipped the last seal shut.
“
Who
arrived, Jayme?”

“I don’t have time to describe it to you right now. See for yourself. There’s a direct feed available on conSense. I just wanted you to know that it looks like they’re heading your way.”

Sivio’s voice dissolved completely into static. Alander put down the headset and went outside. The sky was on fire with a wave of crisscrossing golden lines. He shielded his eyes with a hand and tried to work out what he was seeing. Some sort of aurora? Had the sun flared unexpectedly? It had all happened so suddenly and was taking place so silently that he almost doubted that it was real. Yet he knew it wasn’t anything coming through the conSense network, as had been the illusion of Cleo Samson; his eyes were seeing nothing but the sky, despite how unlikely that appeared.

He tried to access the net but failed. The channel to Sivio was still nothing but noise. He waited a minute and, when the fire in the sky had faded, tried again. This time he got through. But Sivio was already gone, no doubt dragged away by other duties. Swallowing his nervousness, Alander dipped into the net and surrendered himself to the conSense feed.

A chaotic menu of images confronted him, all blazing and changing in real time. He selected one at random and found himself staring at what looked like a shining, yellow spindle extruding a white-hot thread out of one pointed end. Despite heavy processing, he couldn’t make out the background to the spindle, and when he checked the scale in one corner of the image, he refused to believe it. If it was true, the spindle was over two kilometers long.

He jumped to another image, this time noting its vantage point. He was in a Lagrangian point between Adrasteia and its one moon, high above the
Tipler
and most of the observation satellites. The familiar muddy-brown globe was alive with light. Arcs and spirals flashed into view, then just as quickly disappeared; sudden, startlingly straight lines stabbed out from the equator, then also vanished. There seemed to be no order to the display, as though data from a Day-Glo cloud chamber had been somehow mixed up with ordinary biospheric information. But already his incredulity was beginning to fade. This was no mix-up, and it was too elaborate to be a joke.

A third view showed him a second spindle from far away. It was in geostationary orbit, and it, too, was extruding a burning line toward surface of the planet below. The end of the line was dropping steadily downward at a rate of several meters per second. The view shifted slightly to show another, darker thread appearing from the far end of the golden spindle.

A counterweight,
Alander instantly thought.
My God, they’re building—

“You’re seeing this, Peter?” Cleo Samson’s husky voice startled him.

“It’s an orbital tower!” he said in response. “They’re building orbital towers!”

The ground beneath his feet rumbled.

“We know,” she said, her voice fuzzed with static. “Take a look at this.”

Alander’s view shifted at another’s command, disorientating him momentarily. This time he saw a rough three-dimensional map of the world beneath his feet. There were seven golden spindles in geostationary orbit around Adrasteia; all were dropping threads of various lengths down to the surface. As Alander watched, another appeared in the display at the midpoint of the arc connecting two others. A rough measurement confirmed that the spindles were equally spaced around the equator—or would be if two more appeared to fill the obvious gaps. Within moments of the thought, they had done just that.

Ten spindles building ten orbital towers. And the longitude of one of them was disturbingly close to Alander’s own.

“Who the hell
are
they? Are they from Earth?” He dispensed with the communicator even though speaking into the void brought back the terrible feelings of dissociation that had dragged him to the surface in the first place. “Jayme? Cleo?”

There was no answer from the
Tipler
, and a moment later the conSense feed began to break up again. He eased gratefully out of it and stood blinking under the golden sky. A roar he had not consciously noted before turned out to be the shuttle negotiating the tight confines of the canyon, blue white jets issuing from its curved, black underbelly. Alander backed away as it maneuvered closer and extruded landing struts. A gray python whipped out of its side before it had touched down and began to suck at the water in the bath. At the same time, a hatch lifted open on the side of the shuttle.

“You have ten seconds to board.” The autopilot’s crisply accented voice spoke directly into his head.

Alander took the hint and clambered up the rungs built into the side of the craft.

The space inside was close and uncomfortable, not designed for biological passengers. There was barely room for the two other bodies it contained, propped awkwardly against a number of modular boxes and roughly strapped equipment. Alander had just enough time to get inside before thrust pushed him down onto one of the other bodies. He felt it shift beneath him and its breathing quicken, but otherwise it made no other response. Unoccupied, impersonal, corpselike, it could take no offense.

He swore under his breath, irritated at being hijacked without warning or explanation.

The shuttle’s engines whined, and the interior light flickered.

“Where are we going?” he shouted over the noise.

“Drop Point One,” the autopilot replied.

“Why?”

“That is where I’ve been instructed to take you.”

“By whom?”

“Survey Manager (Civilian) Caryl Hatzis.”

He thought for a second, then asked: “What would you have done if I hadn’t boarded in time?”

“I was instructed to leave without you.”

Bitch.

Alander did his best to ride out the bumps and dips. There was no response from conSense when he tried to bring it up again; either it was still being interfered with or the shuttle was keeping a low profile. ConSense—the communal illusion through which the virtual passengers of the
Tipler
interacted with each other and the world around them—required constant streams of data in both directions. The shuttle would stick out like a second sun if it logged him in.

Not that it would be hard to miss, anyway. Judging by the forces acting on Alander’s body, the shuttle certainly seemed to be in a rush to reach its destination, six thousand kilometers to the southeast. But he didn’t resent Hatzis for this. It couldn’t be easy up there, dealing with
... whatever
they were. If they weren’t responding to hails, then that left everything open. One less chance taken could make a difference. She wasn’t to know.

The lights flickered again, and he felt his stomach drop. For a second he was in free fall, then the shuttle braked hard and landed with a jerk. The engines whined a moment longer, then they quieted and the hatch opened. It was dark outside; his eyes weren’t designed for multifrequencing or hard radiation. He could see little apart from fog reflecting the shuttle’s landing lights.

He sat up and waited, but nothing else happened.

“Now what happens?”

“I am to remain at Drop Point One and await further instructions,” the autopilot replied.

“No,
me
,” said Alander irritably. “What the hell am I meant to be doing?”

“I am unable to answer that.”

“Great.” Clearly it hadn’t been told what he was supposed to do once he had arrived at the drop point. He forced himself to concentrate on why he might be there. Apart from being away from the down point of a possible orbital tower, he could see no immediate reason for his sudden relocation. DPO contained little more than a few sheds, a basic nanofacturing plant, and a maser relay for use in emergencies.

That’s it,
he thought with a sense of accomplishment. Only a month ago making such a connection would have been beyond him.

He got out of the shuttle and walked across the landing field. The soles of his feet registered warmth from the heated concrete, but the rest of him was cold. Icily so. DPO was high on the lip of South Basin 2 and currently experiencing the local equivalent of winter. Had there been water vapor in the air, everything would have been covered with ice and snow.

Even so, the main compound’s door was stiff. As he wrestled with it, a faint yellow glow shone through the clouds on the north horizon. The spindles were still spinning their webs, he gathered. How long until the towers were complete he couldn’t estimate, and what they would do next he had no idea at all. He figured that was pretty much up to them. Sooner or later, he was sure, they would make contact.