Event Horizon (Hellgate) (42 page)

He called three times before Kim answered in a bored tone. “Curtis, where are you? You’re coming back to the house?”

“We’re downtown.” Marin took a cup of almond chicken and noodles from Travers, and dug in a fork. “We just heard the news –”

“Opera house, midnight, they’re making a big production number of it.” Kim heaved a sigh. “The whole security caravan picks up and moves in an hour. Less. They’ve been sweeping the theater all day for any sign of Confederate agents. We’re on pace … and then, please gods, we can get
out
of here.”

“Bored?” Travers was listening in.

“Out of my tiny gourd,” Kim said acidly. “Aides are not permitted in the hallowed presence. It’s just been Harrison and President Prendergast, since we got here. My eyeballs are floating in tea. Still, I just sent for food and I’m going to kill some time with CityNet, now it’s back online.”

“We’ll join you at the theater,” Marin told him. “Give Chesterfield Security a heads up, or we’ll be bounced before we even get close to the door.”

“They’ll be looking for you,” Kim promised. “I’ll see you there, Curtis.”

Travers was eating an eccentric mix of Chinese, Italian and Moroccan over a bed of flashed sweet potatoes. With his back to the street he was studying the ancient terraformer machine, behind its armorglass. As he patted his lips with a napkin he said,

“You know, I never saw one of these before. I mean, actually
saw
one in reality. The terraforming at home was so long ago, the hardware was all shipped offplanet centuries ago. They’re bigger than they look on the vids.”

“Bigger and nastier.” Marin twisted in the white wrought kevlex chair to frown at the exhibit. “These things have torn entire ecologies to pieces – not here, but on other worlds – razed them down to bare dirt and then rebuilt them with engineered species that suit us. Humans.”

“You don’t have much regard for terraforming,” Travers observed.

But Marin only shrugged. “There was a need for it, centuries ago. These days we just keep on surveying till we find better-suited planets, but back then the engine technology wasn’t up to it. It was easier to take a planet with potential and rework it.”

“Thirty or forty billion humans,” Travers said thoughtfully, “where are you going to put them?”

“Exactly.” Marin frowned critically at the machine. “So you find a world with the right gravity, the right star, good atmosphere, geologically stable, enough liquid water, nothing nasty in the local stellar neighbourhood, no sign of intelligent life, and what are you going to do?”

“Stake a claim, survey it, modify it.” Travers chewed methodically, still focused on the terraformer drone. “Darwin’s was one of the lucky ones. It didn’t take much terraforming. Less than twenty years, to change the nature of the soil in areas that were designated agricultural, change the paths of a couple of rivers, eradicate some lethal species of swarming bugs. They chucked in a bunch of ice asteroids to raise sea level by a few meters – nothing too big and bad. Some engineered forests, like Jupiter spruce and a lot of acacias and eucalypts that’ll grow anywhere, desert or snow, they don’t care. Two decades to cook while the sleeper ships chugged their way out there on the earliest Auriga engines – today we wouldn’t trust ’em as far as you could throw one – and she was done.” He patted his lips with a paper napkin. “At the last census there were four billion people living on Darwin’s.”

“And immigration out to the Middle Heavens and the Deep Sky has been a major industry for about a century and a half.” Marin glanced sidelong at the museum. “You already know we were settled from the homeworlds and Darwin’s. Terraforming was quick, they didn’t have to do much, so the environment is still fairly liveable for the native species.”

“I noticed.” Travers gestured with a loaded fork. “Rabbits in the woods back there – until you take a close look. ‘Rabbits’ with frill necks, not ears, long tails and three claws as long as your thumb on every foot.”

“You noticed.” Marin half-drained a cup of iced green tea with lime and mint. “They’re harmless. Good pets, if you keep the claws trimmed. I had one myself when I was a kid. The frill necks angle around, collecting sound for six tiny little audio channels in the base of the skull, and they’re also like snake tongues, chemical receptors, tasting the air. These rabbits are enough like
rabbits
to be warm, soft; they make thrumming noises when they’re fed, content.” He smiled at the memory. “I haven’t remembered him in ten years. Longer. Not that
him
is the right word. They’re single gender, marsupial.”

“There’s a few native species left on Darwin’s,” Travers said thoughtfully, “but they’ve been driven way out by the cities and the domestic stock from Earth. You’re more likely to see horses, cattle, sheep, than any of the wild deer and goats. The indigenous wolves and big cats are virtually extinct in the wild, just a few left in the high mountains in the south.”

“It’s the same here.” Marin nodded vaguely into the south. “There’s a preserve, about a million square kilometers of native environment and a thousand drones creeping about, keeping it pristine perfect. Nothing’s actually extinct … but nothing’s
wild
anymore.” He frowned at the street, the throngs of people moving back and forth between the malls and civic buildings. “Too many people. That’s always been the problem.”

“Crowding and hunger are what brought humans out from the homeworlds in the first place.” Travers was in a philosophical mood. “If we’d been like the Resalq, never let overpopulation get into gear, we’d have taken another thousand years to escape the solar system.”

He was right, but Marin was far from convinced it would have been a bad thing. Scores of planets would have survived in their natural forms, rather than being hammered into pseudo-Earths. Done eating, he piled the debris into a bag. “You want to take a look at the museum? We don’t need to be at the opera house for an hour and a half.”

“Sure.” Travers was still eating. “They have anything Resalq here? I know the whole colony was named for the hero in a story – Jagreth.”

“They keep several standing displays.” Marin was watching the threedee. “Even before the terraforming, the surveyor ships found the ruins of a Resalq city. It’d been abandoned so long before, it was decayed, half buried, like the Eternal City on Saraine, but…”

He stopped there to listen as the CNS display turned to grainy longshots of Fleet ships and graphical representations of worlds like Haven, Lithgow, Louverne, even Pakrenne. He had been deliberately tuning out the voiceover, but now gave it his full attention.

“Hijackings, mutinies, mass desertions,” a woman’s voice was saying in the slow, measured paces of the news narrator. “The story is the same across the Middle Heavens and on into the Deep Sky, where shocking scenes of violence have been reported on Borushek. The city of Sark, always one of the most peaceful
centers
in the colonies, exploded in riot and armed protest last week when the news from Velcastra and Ulrand was published to CityNet, following the defeat of suppression orders from Confederate news agencies.

“Widely referred to as the ‘Colonial Wars,’ the recent uprisings on both the civilian street and the decks of lesser Fleet vessels have prompted a clamp-down by military and civil authorities. For the first time, a dusk to dawn curfew has been enforced in Sark. Citizens abroad after 9:00pm and before 5:00am without valid passes and permits are being arrested, charged and shipped out to penal facilities on Borushek’s third moon, where they face sentences of up to six months.

“On Louverne, public, Tactical and Fleet security personnel clashed in Herschel Mall, in Colombo. A battle ensued, with more than two hundred people killed or injured, and more than three
thousand
arrested. These arrestees, along with eight thousand others taken into custody in similar confrontations across Louverne, have been detained in a makeshift camp in the Elizabeth Islands. Primitive conditions, inadequate sewerage and poor medical facilities raise grave concerns for the health of detainees, none of whom have yet been formally charged.

“Aboard the Fleet cruiser
Eugene
and the frigates
Ajax
and
Europa
, violence turned to bloody mayhem when the crewdecks mutinied and the command corps made the mistake of taking up arms in an attempt to quell the insurrection.” Stock shots of ships of the same class flashed up into the threedee; they were all too familiar from the action on the Omaru blockade.

“The death toll across the three ships, which were seized at the Fleet dockyards in the Haven system, has officially been set at 22, with 60 more officers and personnel wounded, some tanked in cryogen, waiting for cloned body parts without which they would surely die. Confederate loyalists were set down at the bauxite mines on Hephaestus, in Haven’s asteroid belt, where inadequate life support facilities caused panic. A rescue flight was made by the tender
Strauss
, and all hands were recovered, but the cruiser and frigates were long gone. Transmissions received before they quit the system reported them headed for Velcastra, where the stated intention of the mutineers is to pledge the vessels to the service of the Nine Worlds Commonwealth.”

Now, wide shots of the mines and dockyards were replaced by an animation of the Commonwealth flag – blue-white and beautiful, with the nine stars representing the nine sovereign territories signatory to the fledgling alliance. “Fleet vessels,” the newsreader went on in the same deliberately paced tones, “are regrouping at Haven, and though neither Quadrant Command nor Fleet itself has responded to media petitions for information, it is believed they are waiting for support from the Near Sky.

“The newly-launched super-carrier
Avenger
is believed to be cruising a route in the Middle Heavens, and military analysts speculate she will be held in reserve, for the defense of the homeworlds themselves. Meanwhile, the super-carrier
London
and her battle group were last recorded heading into the space between Borushek and Jagreth. Nothing further is known about their position or assignment, but with the Nine Worlds Commonwealth flag flying this morning over the sovereign state of Velcastra, it can only be a matter of time before independence is declared on Jagreth and Borushek.

“Rumor is rife in every city, on every ship, that military scientists in the Deep Sky colonies have developed a new ‘super-weapon’ which is more than a match for the ships of the Terran Confederacy’s DeepSky Fleet. No firm data is available but analysts agree, the existence of such a weapon will be proved out when the next colony declares its secession from the Confederacy.

“Which colony will it be? Military and political analysts are arguing between Borushek, Jagreth and even Omaru, where news to hand suggests there has been an interruption in comm and data traffic with the ships of the Fleet blockade.”

There was more, but Marin stopped listening and turned his back on the threedee. “It’s starting … and it’s a mess.”

“It was always going to be a mess.” Finished eating now, Travers had crammed his debris into the same bag as Marin’s. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better … but you have to believe it
will
get better.” He frowned into the threedee. “Spontaneous mutinies on Fleet vessels? Conscript crews aren’t stupid. And the more ships pare themselves away from Fleet, the less chance Fleet has of cracking the whip out here. With the super-carriers as good as gone –”

“The
London
,” Marin said bleakly, “could be dropping out in this system, right over our heads, any time this brand new, hardline commander of theirs cares to make the commitment. And you’ve seen Jagreth by now. It’s just a backwater, it has to look like the proverbial pushover.”

“Colonel Tomas
Carnairo
de Carvalho.” Travers’s lips compressed. “A pushover? The man’s about to get a bloody nasty surprise.”

Marin pushed back the chair and glanced over his shoulder at the threedee, where the local time was displayed in the bottom-right. “If you want to take a look at the Resalq exhibits, now’s your chance. In half an hour Chesterfield Security will be bringing the President to the theater, and then – game on.”

The words inspired a shiver. An odd chill, deep as the bone marrow, took him by surprise as he watched Travers drop the refuse of their meal into a service chute. On the street, people were gathering together in little knots and groups to watch CNS on a public screen here, a handy there. All heads in the café were turned toward the threedee and faces were pale, grim, as Marin headed away toward the wide, white marble foyer of the museum.