Engine City (17 page)

She motioned the boat forward and the steersman, perhaps not understanding, complied. The nearest log was a meter and a half away. Lydia picked up her case and put one foot on the prow.

“No!” yelled the doryman.

Lydia jumped—it was hardly more than a step, but the boat moved backward behind her—onto the wet rough bark. Then she sprang to the next, and the next, dancing across the rolling logs (the bucking backs), from one to the next before each had time to roll further (to notice), with her case (her frantically-held pack of food) a burden but at the same time a help in keeping her balance.

Halfway to the ship, she slipped. She crashed forward, the arm with the case thrown over the top of the log. Her side thumped hard against the bark, her legs in very cold water to the knee. There was no pain but the breath was knocked out of her. She saw the crushing logs converge (the pounding hooves trample) and her whole body convulsed in one complex movement she could never have intended, and she was astraddle the log and then standing, running along its back to regain her balance, and then she leaped sideways.

A minute later her last leap took her through the open deck door of the ship, where her heel skidded on slopped water and she fell hard and slid four meters on her arse and banged up against a bulkhead. Everything hurt. She sat and stared at her grazed palms and cried.

The deck door shut behind her like a snapping clam.

Saurs glared at her, then turned away. The human clan members looked at her with compassion and amazement. A kid helped her to her feet.

“How did you
do
that?”

She looked at her hands. The grazes were already fading. Bits of dirt and bark, expelled from under her skin, flaked away. She dusted her palms and smiled.

“Just luck.”

The Delibes were kind; they took her to the senior family’s skiff and helped her into dry clothing and gave her hot drinks, even though they were themselves in upheaval over their landing’s being aborted. The krakens had set a course back to Nova Terra. The Delibes’ route only intersected the de Tenebres’ at some points, of which Novakkad was one; they had left Nova Terra a few weeks before the de Tenebres had arrived, so they knew nothing of Volkov and his dire warnings and wild projects, and little of the historically recent arrivals on Mingulay. Lydia spent the hour before the lightspeed jump filling them in. But they were more interested in the Multipliers, and the Bright Star Cultures.

“This is bad for us,” said Anthony Delibes, the clan patriarch. “It is a new sphere, intersecting the Second Sphere and supplanting all our routes. The saurs and the kraken are terrified. They seem too shocked even to talk. But—”

He hesitated, stroking his beard. “In itself it does not seem bad. It is not the invasion and war that your Volkov feared.”

Lydia nodded eagerly. “I feared much worse myself. But what I’ve seen on Novakkad is very different from what I expected. The species we know already are mingling much more than before, and the two new species are just”—she spread her hands—“accepted.”

She did not tell them all she knew. She could remember touching a carbon atom, and how its springy, slippery feel matched the sight of its wavelength in the spectrum of a supernova; the dissolution of death, and the wild joy of jaws closing on a deer’s throat; flying with wings, and swimming with fins. These and myriad other fragmentary memories, random thoughts, equations solved and principles understood, floated in her mind as disparate bright shards, which someday and with untold effort she might assemble to a mirror, and see in it a new self.

Until she saw that new self, she could talk about none of this. She felt restless, and excused herself to take a walk around the ship. She was at the navigator’s pool at the moment of the light-speed jump.

The navigator had recoiled to the side of the pool. Gouts of sepia blackened the water. This was not the normal response to a jump. Within a couple of seconds, alarms sounded. The saurs and humans of the ship’s complement rushed to evidently prearranged posts. Lydia scrambled to the nearest skiff. Only the pilot was in it.

“What’s happening?”

“I do not know,” the pilot said. “We are definitely at our destination, but Nova Terra bears . . . an unfamiliar aspect. And we have been hailed, perhaps even challenged. The kraken are disturbed.”

“Indeed they are,” Lydia said. “Which suggest that we should be terrified.”

The saur himself was trembling slightly. “I am awaiting instructions,” he said. “I am ready to die.”

Lydia regretted her flippant tone. “Shall we look outside?”

The pilot palmed the controls. Lydia scanned the familiar landmasses of Nova Terra.

“Look at Nova Babylonia!” she said. “The air’s filthy!”

“Yes,” said the saur, as though something more important had been missed.

Lydia felt an odd sensation on the back of her neck. She turned and saw a huge shape glide—as it seemed—above them, then come to a halt in front of them.

“It is we who are moving,” explained the saur. “The other craft is in Trojan orbit.”

“How far away is it?” Lydia asked.

“About a kilometer.”

The scale of the thing snapped into focus. Toroidal, rotating about a stationary hub, bristling with antennae and what Lydia guessed were armaments, and accompanied by a dozen or so small vessels with long jointed legs.

“Gods above,” she said. “It’s bigger than we are.”

“Orbital fort,” said the pilot. “Keeping station on the jump destination.”

Lydia had not known that jump destinations were at Trojan points.

One of the small craft burned off a brief boost and scooted toward the starship, closing the gap in seconds. Its retro-flare almost overloaded the screen’s brightness controls. As Lydia blinked away afterimages she saw its rockets make a few smaller nudges. It vanished below her line of sight, apparently docking. The saur fingered a control and the view cut instantly to the side of the starship, on which the craft resembled a small spider clinging to a large pipe. The docking bays, Lydia noticed with interest, were compatible.

“We have been boarded,” said the saur. His tone carried a faint note of melancholy.

“Can you switch to an internal view?”

He shook his head. “I have no access to the ship’s internal sensors.”

“No,” Lydia said patiently. Saurian thought ran more deeply than the human, and therefore in deeper ruts. “But you do have access to the skiff’s external—”

“Ah.”

In a moment a band of the skiff’s hull had become as glass. On the wall across from the skiff, beside the equivalent rack of skiffs, a stairway zigzagged to the interior deck near the navigator’s pool. Three space-suited figures trooped down it, heavy-duty plasma rifles at the ready. As they turned on a landing, their open helmets revealed human faces.

The pilot stared at them and turned to Lydia, and she could see by his expression that he had never seen and barely imagined their like. Their clumsy suits were of obvious human manufacture, their rocket maneuvers were perfect; their fort resembled one of the space stations Volkov had told her about, the kind the Germans had imagined and the Americans never built, perhaps because by the 1950s the Americans already understood that deep space would never be theirs. They’d abandoned it, too hastily, to the Russians, not realizing that it didn’t belong to the skiffs’ little grey pilots either. Knowing nothing of this, the Russians were the first to meet the galaxy’s real masters. The Nova Terrans in the past century had founded a human space presence more formidable than anything even the Russians had attempted, and they had done so in a full knowledge of its possible consequences. Lydia had to admire them for that. She was afraid of them, but she admired them, and she took a certain malicious joy in the saur’s discomfiture at this unexpected display of human capability.

“What are they?” the saur asked.

“Cosmonauts,” Lydia said.

It turned out they called themselves astronauts.

Lydia returned to the deck and found the senior Delibes had gathered there ahead of her. Anthony, his pugnacious jaw thrust forward, was making an effort to be polite.

“Naturally,” Lydia heard him say, “I share your concern for the security of the Republic. I assure you that nothing and nobody on this ship could compromise it. You have my word. I am a Member of the Electorate!”

“So’m I,” said the cosmonaut who stood in the apex of the group. He gestured at the other two, a pace behind his shoulders. “So’re we all.”

“Ah!” The merchant smiled and relaxed. He held out his hand. “Welcome aboard, fellow citizens. Anthony Delibes, at your service, officers.”

“Thank you, citizen.” The cosmonaut returned the handshake, then jerked a thumb at his chest. “Astronaut Sarn’t Claudius Abenke; Astronauts Alexander Obikwe and Titus Adams. Space Defense Force of the Democratic Republic of New Babylon.”

“Oh, shit,” said Lydia, unable to stop herself.

The astronauts glowered at her; the Delibes turned, startled.

“You have a problem with that, citizen?” said Abenke.

“Volkov,” said Lydia.

The astronauts all looked uncomfortable. Abenke composed his features to a steadfast frown.

“Volkov is dead.”

The Modern Regime

EVERY DAY WAS
the same. Reveille, canteen breakfast, assignment. For most of the steadily growing number of inmates—a thousand or so, increasing by scores every day as new ships came in—the assignment was to light work, or recreation. For Lydia it was to interrogation. Torture had been abolished.

One interrogator sat on the other side of the table, the second over to her side, just at the edge of sight. Every so often they would change places.

“What do you know of the aliens’ plans for invasion?”

“Nothing.”

“What happened to you on Novakkad?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“Tell us again.”

Sometimes there was a different tack. “What was your assignment from Volkov?”

“There was no assignment.”

“What were your relations with Volkov?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“Tell us again.”

The detention center was on an island in the Half Moon Sea, within sight of the city. Concrete blockhouses, barbed wire, a jagged shore and hungry currents—nobody tried to leave. Every day a few dozen people were released and loaded on a boat to the city. Grim rumors circulated about what happened to them, but nobody thought in their hearts that they were fed to the whales. Every day a few score more people arrived. The star-ships from which they had been taken would remain for a few days in the harbor, and then depart.

Lydia was certain that her own clan had been detained and released. She was not at all certain that she would be. Every night she went down to the fence and gazed across the kilometers of water to the lights of the city. It was winter, and dark came early, and cold. There were far more lights than before, and they reached higher into the sky, but they were almost always veiled in murk. Overhead passed aircraft like she had never seen before, with bright lights at the wingtips and along the sides, and engines that roared. Surface vessels almost half the size of starships arrived, sitting low in the water, and left a day or two later riding high. Lydia was told that they delivered petroleum. It could be distilled and burned; hence the murk. She had seen this done on Croatan, but she had never thought that Nova Terra needed terraforming.

On clear nights, though, she could still see the stars. They now seemed forever beyond her reach. She could also see the moons, and the tiny new moons, the orbital forts and communications satellites in stately steady array. Beyond them, she could see the comets. Five in the one sky.

She talked to people in the evenings. Their stories were similar to her own, though none admitted, any more than she did, to having been changed by the aliens. Most of them had, like the Delibes, not encountered the aliens at all. Their kraken navigators had recoiled from the planets on which they landed, all of them fifty light-years or more away. Nobody had any idea what had happened here on Nova Terra.

After a month her interrogators either became convinced of her innocence or bored with her intransigence. They turned her over to the center’s administrative office, who returned her suitcase and gave her ten thousand thalers. In Nova Babylonia this would have been a year’s pay for a skilled worker. In New Babylon it was a month’s. Lydia assumed this meant the standard of living had risen twelvefold in her absence. Every note and coin bore on its obverse the profile of Volkov, and on every one that image was defaced.

She climbed the ladder off the boat and found Esias waiting for her on the quay. They hugged each other and then stepped back. Other reunions went on noisily around them.

“How did you know to expect me?”

“I’ve been coming here every day.”

“Oh.”

They looked at each other warily.

“Are you all right?” Esias asked.

“How do you mean?”

“You don’t suspect yourself of going mad?”

“Not at all,” said Lydia. “Do you?”

Esias sighed. “No.”

“Well then.”