Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera (26 page)

“Very neat, professor”
Aiyana said. She poised herself to jump off the buggy down to the lunar
surface.

“Oh no you don’t!” Carson
yelled. “Those Tech footprints are unique – we can’t trample over them. Sorry,
but we’re going to have to do this without touching the ground.”

“Suits me” said the buggy
“what with my mashed landing gear.”

They devised a plan. First,
Tallis used one of her small craft to record a high-definition survey of the
whole site. Then she landed on top of the first sealed module and positioned
her gamma ray generator. Carson and Aiyana unrolled the new sensor array built to
replace the improvised setup used on Mirama. Using cables they dangled it from
the buggy, which then positioned itself so that the array rested against the
side of the target unit. They both retreated inside the cabin as the first
image was captured.

“Bingo!” Carson shouted
as they examined the result. The module was clearly packed with supplies. They
re-opened the hatch to let Aiyana climb down on top of the container. She
unfastened the sensor and attached the cables to the unit’s recessed handholds.
The buggy eased the module off the ground and deposited it at a location a
hundred meters away.

They both jumped out to
examine their prize. Unlike the modules on Mirama this one was in near-perfect
condition with nothing more than a few micro-meteor scratches. Carson examined
the inventory on the side.

“Drugs, medical supplies…
look – clothing! This is unique, none of the colonists’ clothing survived. I
can’t wait to see the Archivists’ faces when we get home.”

“One down, twenty-nine to
go” said Aiyana.

After hours of intense
work they had removed ten full storage modules. Of the remainder, four had been
looted by the settlers of Falk, and the other sixteen had been emptied by the
Techs.

Carson and Aiyana were in
a fine mood. They posed together, leaning against the modules, smiling through
their visors while the buggy captured images. Finally they worked up the energy
to ferry the units to the ship. Mercifully, the moon’s low gravity made the
bulky containers easy to maneuver but their little craft’s carrying capacity
was limited, and eventually it took four journeys.

“Over there,” said Aiyana
as they lifted off with the last load, “isn’t that a blast circle?”

They brought the buggy
directly over the patch of blackened ground.

“That must be where the Yongding’s
shuttle craft landed” said Carson. “They were using fusion-powered reaction
motors. Yes – see, more footprints.”

He gazed down at the
ancient landing site, thinking about the Techs. The more he learned about the rebels
the harder it was to accept the way they had always been portrayed. Whatever
their reasons for stealing the Yongding, these people were not selfish cowards.
It took courage to ride down to an unknown world on a pillar of flame. And it
took iron determination to try to build a colony from scraps.
They could
almost be brother and sister
Aiyana had said of Samuelson and Cissokho; her
words were truer than she realized.

Had the Techs survived? Most
historians assumed that trapped with no resources in an empty starship they had
all perished long before reaching a new world. Now he knew differently. Replenished
with the new supplies they had a fighting chance. How far could they have
travelled?
Where were they?

“Great work” said Carson
as they peeled off their environment suits in the ship’s cabin “now let’s get
out of here and set a course for New Earth before Tabarak figures out what
happened.”

“New Earth” Aiyana said,
“what do you mean?”

“Honey, we have to call
it quits – everything has become far too dangerous – there’s no way I can
expose you, Tallis, and the ship to any more of this cat and mouse game.”

“No” she said.

“What do you mean,
no
?
How many times can we do this? We just missed being incinerated by a fraction
of a second!”

“I mean no.”

She took his hands in her
own. “Darling, Samuelson said there is something far more important than simple
cargo on Orpheus, and if we don’t go straight there Juro’s goons will beat us
to it. It must be what he’s really after – God knows what it is though I
guarantee it will not be good news for anyone else.”

“But –”

“But nothing. Do you
really want that withered old bastard to triumph after everything we’ve been
through? Besides,” she added, “don’t you have deliveries to make, Mister
Mailman? What’s that motto?
Neither solar storm, nor meteor shower…
We’re
going to Orpheus and that’s that!”

Carson held up his hands
in surrender. “Alright Aiyana, you win, Orpheus it is.”

He mooched off to get a
shower.

“How did I do?” Aiyana
asked the ship once he had gone.

“Perfect – you had me
convinced.”

“The poor thing, he so
desperately wants to find the rest of the treasure.”

“You’re okay with this,
aren’t you?” she said addressing Tallis.

“
The trail runs deep through the unknown forest,
and we quiver with anticipation as we follow the scent
.”

“Me too, nest-mate. Hey,
you guys are great!”

Aiyana could not have
know it, but she had just changed the course of human history.

Aiyana drifted through the star map which
surrounded her like countless dust motes in a sunlit room. Near her face was
Sirius, burning through its store of hydrogen so furiously that in less than a
billion years it would become a white dwarf, just like its orbiting binary. Further
away was the sullen orange glow of Arcturus, pouring energy into the infrared
as it barreled through space at over a hundred kilometers a second. Dominating
them all was giant Canopus, ten thousand times brighter than Eridani, radiating
pure white light.

She extended a finger ten
light years long; the tip touched a small star and it burst into radiance. A
brilliant green line followed her gestures, leaping from sun to sun.

“I go to the conservatory
for a couple of hours and the damn cabin fills up with stars!” Aiyana glanced
over her shoulder to see Carson silhouetted against the hatchway.

“Isn’t it lovely?” she said.
“I was talking to the ship about where we’ve been and it generated this map for
me. Here’s Mita.”

She pointed and one of
the stars lit up with a
ping.

“Cool sound effect”
Carson admitted.

“Then we have New Earth”
Aiyana continued, “then Mirama, Falk,
ping, ping
… Hey, where’s Orpheus?”

Another star brightened a
meter away.

“That’s quite a way.”

“Fifty-six light years
from Falk” Carson said, “and eighty-four from New Earth. The distances are approximately
the same as the systems I put into the fake tape. I wanted to keep it real in
case Sakyamuni started talking about the journeys.”

“I wonder why they went
so far for the final drop.”

“God knows, maybe we’ll
find out when we locate the cache.”

“So what’s the furthest
you’ve been, my darling space rover?”

“We’ll have to change the
scale” the ship said.

The three-dimensional map
imploded. Now, instead of sunlit motes, the stars compressed into a solid
glistening mass like snow under moonlight. Structure emerged: gaseous nebulae
and clouds of dust a thousand light years long that looked unnerving like smoke
billowing from a campfire. And between the massed stars empty chasms appeared.

“That’s Watson’s Gap,
which separates the local spur” Carson said pointing at massive volume of empty
space. “Over the other side is the Sagittarius arm.”

“Six spiral arms in all”
the ship added, “but we’d have to pull back a lot further to see them all.”

“Thank you, I did study
geography at school. So where was it you got to?”

A blue line meandered
through the starmass, following a drunkard’s walk away from New Earth. It leapt
to the adjacent galactic arm where it resumed its seemingly random path. The map
imploded again and a segment of a third spiral arm came into view. The line
jumped once more then headed spinward before finally halting.

“Howacond, in the
Scutum-Crux Arm.”

“Scutum?” Aiyana said wrinkling
her nose, “isn’t that Ancient English for –”

“ – it’s also called the
Centaurus Arm if that makes you feel better. Anyhow, there you have it, my
longest journey, thirty thousand light years. The round trip took nearly a century,
and still not a quarter of the way across the galaxy.”

“Oh God! Was it worth
going so far?”

He told her about
Howacond, a rare binary where two earth-like planets revolved around one
another in close formation.

“It’s the center of a
huge alliance called the Fremina League. No-one from New Earth had visited for hundreds
of years so I had
lots
of mail. And once I got there I owed it to all the
nouveau rich inhabitants to sell them some antiques.”

“How much did you make?”

“Well, their money was no
good, no-one outside the League uses it, so I traded for information. There’s
only two things worth transporting across deep interstellar space: information
and art work. Although I suppose you could call that a special kind of
information as well.”

“So darling” Aiyana said
again, putting her arms around him, “how much did you make?”

“I harvested everything I
could. All the public stuff – maps, demographics, official histories, economic
data, and so on – then I used the local currency I had accumulated to purchase
a lot of other material: proprietary research, some patents, images,
entertainment archives.”

“So how much…”

“I sold the lot on New
Earth for nine million Ecus, plus of course I had my mail fees.”

“Oh my God!”

“Yeah, but think about
it. That was a century’s work, so it averages out at ninety thousand a year. Decent
money, that’s all.”

“But you did get to visit
places no-one has ever seen.”

“True, but let me show
you what I’d really like to do. Hey ship, can you bring up the Grand Tour?”

The image of the stars
imploded once more. Now the whole galaxy came into view, face on, as if viewed
from above. The blue lined snaked from New Earth, circled round the galactic hub,
then continued to the other side of the disk.

“There are places out
there that don’t even have names. Their only contact with New Earth is a kind
of osmosis – information jumps from system to system and eventually seeps all
the way across the galaxy, by then it’s over a thousand years old.”

“There are so many wild
rumors – systems where humans have modified themselves to live in a vacuum,
planets made of diamond, arcologies orbiting neutron stars, and of course
aliens, lots of aliens.”

Carson shook his head and
smiled. “Who knows what’s really out there?”

“Will you ever do it?”

“Maybe – if we return to
New Earth in one piece there should be enough money to pay off the loans on the
ship, which will make me a free agent. But three hundred years… that’s a hell of
a commitment.”

“You’re thinking too
small” said the ship.

The image imploded yet
again. As it shrank other stellar systems appeared, first the two orbiting
galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, and then the majestic grandeur of the
Andromeda Nebula. The blue line shot out and connected the two whirlpools of
stars.

“The Andromeda
Expedition” said the ship, “also known as the Great Leap.”

“Hey, that actually
happened” Aiyana said. “I remember learning about it in history class.”

“No human could possibly
survive hibernation long enough to make the trip, so in the fourth millennium New
Earth dispatched three automated ships loaded with super-redundant systems. The
plan was for a two thousand year journey out, a thousand years of exploration,
and then another two thousand for the return.”

“Which means they should
be halfway home” Carson said.

“How thrilling!” Aiyana
cried. “Imagine what they’ve discovered.”

“I don’t know. A lot of
people feel that the whole thing was a very bad idea. God knows what the
expedition stumbled on. Suppose the moment they got there they ran into a
super-advanced civilization that said ‘Oh, there’s intelligent life in the
Milky Way galaxy’, and straight away
they
decided to come
here
. They’d
be due just about now.”

They stared at each other
in silence, the only sound the whisper of the environmentals. Finally Carson grinned
and said “I know it’s a cliché, but it really is a big universe out there.”

Aiyana gave a small
laugh.

“If it’s any comfort”
said the ship, “I don’t believe any complex system can function for two
thousand years without major maintenance, let alone five, so I reckon they
never even got there.”

That seemed to cheer up
Aiyana. “Enough with the inter-galactic travel! We’ve got work to do.”

“At least I’ll be on
familiar territory” said Carson. They were examing an image of Orpheus
retrieved from the ship’s library.

“
You have visited before?”
asked
Tallis.

“Yeah, about two hundred
years ago. It’s thriving – and not just the planet, there’s a booming economy
in the asteroid belt. You should feel right at home Aiyana.”

She peered at the globe. Two
thirds of the surface was covered by sea, with most of the landmass
concentrated in the northern hemisphere.

“Sakyamuni liked
positioning the supply dumps at landmarks that would be easy to find.”

“Roger that. I’ve already
got a list of potential sites. Here’s my favorite.”

The image zoomed in to a
lonely island in the southern ocean.

“The locals call it Lanzor
– it’s an extinct volcano like Kaimana. It’s cold and dry, not a lot of vegetation,
no extreme weather. And according to the ship no-one lives there, so there’s a
good chance the cache will be intact.”

“All of which may have
occurred to Tabarak and his little friends.”

Carson sighed.

“I tried to send him off
in the wrong direction – remember I told him we had already explored Orpheus
and found nothing – but who knows whether he took the bait. Our best weapon is
speed: get in, grab the supply modules, and get out before he arrives.”

“Well, the buggy is
repaired and good to go. Hey ship, when do we get there?”

“Forty-seven hours and
thirteen minutes.”

“We had better get lots
of rest” Carson said. “Oh God, I hope this one is easy.”

“How are you feeling?”
Aiyana asked the buggy.

“Good, the replacement
battery is working fine and I love my new landing gear, but my chassis is still
out of kilter.”

Carson laughed. “Think of
it as a badge of courage.”

“Thanks, I’ll file that
under inexplicable cultural references.”

Two days had passed; the
ship had announced their arrival at the Orpheus system and launched the
periscope. There was no time to waste and they were already in the final stages
of preparation for the inward journey.

“Are you going to do any
reconnaissance first?” Aiyana asked Carson.

“Hell no, this is one
place that I’m familiar with. Imagine – when I last visited I spent weeks
grubbing around for antiques and all the time I was within a few thousand
kilometers of fabulous treasure.”

“We’ll make up for it
this time” she said pulling on her new clothes. During the long voyage Tallis had
upgraded the ship’s fabrication facilities, and now that Aiyana had gotten used
to the idea of not walking around naked she never had anything to wear.

“How are our little spies?”
Carson asked the ship.

“We’re already deploying.”

After the encounter with
the minefield in the hinterlands of Falk they were determined not to imperil
the starship again. Tallis had modified her survey fleet to create a posse of
outriders that could patrol a million-kilometer sphere of surrounding space. The
craft were unarmed but as her tug had demonstrated, even a tiny vessel
travelling at relativistic speed can pack a mighty punch.

“No-one is going to sneak
up on
me
again” said the ship.

“
We will miss your smell nest-mates
”
Tallis said. She was staying onboard to maintain the defenses.

“So will we” Carson said
pulling a face at Aiyana. “Come on, let’s get going.”

He was climbing into the
buggy when the ship came on the communications channel.

“Sorry to break up the
party but you had better come inside. I’ve just downloaded the welcome package
and it’s not good news.”

They hurried into the
bowels of the starship. As they entered the main cabin they were greeted by a
new image of Orpheus. Unlike the picture of a verdant world stored in the
library this one was dominated by two massive ice caps.

“Oh God!” Carson yelled. “What’s
that?”

The ship replied with
just two words:
ice age.

It started fifty years
ago the package explained, when Orpheus’s parent star revealed itself to be one
of a new class of super long-term variables.

“I’ve heard of them” said
Carson. “The trouble is they can only be detected using an incredibly long
baseline – the cycles last tens of thousands of years. It wasn’t until the
sixth millennium that anyone even realized they existed.”