The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (109 page)

“I can.”

“You haven’t. The reason you’re still chasing him—and I’m sorry if this causes offense, but it happens to be true—is that you’re an obsessive compulsive. The only reason, Commander Myo.”

“I am what I am. And that makes me perfect for the job.”

“I disagree. You have poor leadership skills; you antagonize and alienate your fellow officers; you do not follow procedure; you do not believe anyone is capable of performing tasks as well as yourself—in other words you belittle them and are distrustful of them, which is why we find ourselves in this whole business of leaks. It has to be a leak, doesn’t it, because it couldn’t possibly be your fault, your screwup.”

“Would you like to say what you came here to say?”

“Certainly. As of now, I am appointing Alic Hogan to take charge of the Johansson operation.”

“No.”

“You will continue to be a part of the operation, of course, but it will be in an advisory role only. Hogan will direct the day-to-day running of this office, and facilitate policy and strategy.”

“That is not acceptable.”

“You are a navy officer, you will obey my orders.”

“I am not a navy officer, I am not a part of this bureaucratic farce. I am a police officer.”

“Not anymore. If you refuse my order you will be dismissed from the service.”

“This is my investigation.”

“It is not.”

Paula’s e-butler told her it had just been locked out of the office network. She gazed over the desk at Rafael Columbia; some kind of shock was holding her body rigid, she could feel her skin cooling. Some sick feeling that she suspected was close to panic had begun to clog her thoughts. It was obvious Rafael wasn’t going to accept a compromise, he wanted his man running the operation, LA was just the excuse. One thing was perfectly clear, she couldn’t continue the investigation as part of the navy.

“Fine. I resign my commission.” Paula stood up, which made Columbia flinch. She picked the quartz cube hologram off her desk and put it in her shoulder bag, then she took the rabbakas plant from the windowsill.

“Word of advice,” Columbia said. “Next time you get rejuvenated, get your Foundation fixed dominants taken out. The clinics can make anybody normal these days.”

She raised an eyebrow in interest. “There’s hope for you yet, then.”

Everybody in the office was sitting behind their desks as she walked out, holding the same position they were in when Columbia arrived. The only difference was the surprise on their faces.

“Good-bye,” she told them. “And thank you for all the hard work you did for me.”

Tarlo half rose from his chair. “Paula …”

She shook her head fractionally, and he fell silent. Without looking left or right she walked out of the office.

When she got down onto the street she walked automatically back to her apartment, a kilometer away. It was on the second floor of a centuries-old block that had a central cobbled courtyard overlooked by shuttered windows. Narrow stone stairs wound upward in the kind of central well that looked as if it had been water-eroded rather than built. In her one visible concession to security, the solid oak door of her apartment had a modern electronic lock to supplement the ancient mechanical one.

Inside, there were three rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, and the living room with a small kitchen alcove. She didn’t need anything more, she didn’t use anything more. It was somewhere to sleep conveniently near the office, an address for her clothes valeting service.

When Paula walked in the maidbot was sitting passively in the corner of the living room. It had already run through its daily cleaning routine, polished the age-darkened floorboards, dusted every flat surface, and put her breakfast crockery in the dishwasher. She opened the window that overlooked the courtyard, and put the rabbakas on the little dresser beside it where it would catch the sunlight every afternoon. With that taken care of she looked around the neat living room as if searching for a clue. There was nothing else for her to do. She sat on the sofa that faced the wall-mounted portal, perching on the edge.

Memories were filtering up inside her mind. Memories that had never been erased or transferred into safe storage at any of her rejuvenations. Memories she’d assumed were dormant. Right after her parents’ trial she’d gone back to the hotel with her police escort. That had been a big new tower in Marindra’s capital, with its cube rooms and clean new furniture and air-conditioning. The escort had left her alone, giving her a break before the Huxley’s Haven government official arrived to take her “home.” Now the trial was over, she didn’t know what to do. There was nothing to fill her time, no school to go to, no Coya to hang out with, no boys to eye up. She sat on the bed, perched on the edge looking out through the big picture window at the capital’s skyline, and waited. Strange things happened inside her head—Coya’s hysterical crying and pleading was still echoing around in there—and while her eyes looked through the window all she could actually see was her parents being led from the dock. Her father’s head hung low as his dreams and hopes lay broken around him. Her mother, equally haggard. But Rebecca turned to look across the court, meeting her stolen stepdaughter’s gaze, and mouthed: “I love you.”

In her small, empty Paris apartment Paula whispered, “I love you, too, Mum.” Then just as she had in that hotel room a hundred sixty years ago, Paula Myo started crying.

....

Preparation had taken many months, vast amounts of resources and industrial capacity had been diverted from the expansion expedition being mounted on the other side of the interstellar wormhole, but MorningLightMountain was finally ready. The other immotiles had been forming alliances that might eventually challenge its dominance. They were worried about its new technology. It knew that they had been experimenting with wormhole construction; its quantum wave detectors had picked up the telltale fluctuations from many settlements across the Prime system. If it didn’t act now, they would soon reach parity, its advantage would be lost permanently.

Three hundred twenty-eight wormholes were opened in unison. They were small, each of them measuring a meter and a half wide. Just enough for a ten-megaton warhead to pass through. The wormholes closed.

MorningLightMountain had opened them next to the primary groupings of all the other immotiles on the planet, inside the ultrastrong protective force fields that guarded them from the sky, and next to the sprawling buildings that sheltered and nurtured them. The warheads detonated immediately, wiping out every motile and immotile within a twenty-five-kilometer radius. Even as the first round of nukes were exploding, MorningLightMountain was opening the wormholes again, this time at the next series of targets, the subsidiary immotiles orbiting the Prime homeworld. After that it targeted the first of the two solid planets, the second. Then came the innermost gas giant, its moons, the asteroid habitats, the outermost gas giant, industrial stations. The wave of obliteration rippled out across the system for over a day. Not that many of the remaining immotile groupings ever knew they were at war; they had little or no warning of their doom. MorningLightMountain’s wave of assaults traveled across the star system faster than the speed of light.

When it was over, when every other immotile grouping had been reduced to a lake of radioactive lava, MorningLightMountain used the wormholes again. This time it sent connections through, microwaves or fiber-optic cable, inserting itself into the core-less communications networks of its vanquished rivals. Its thoughts and orders flooded into the minds of the surviving motiles, expelling their mental heritage, turning MorningLightMountain into the sole sentient entity in the star system. Every motile was enmeshed in its thoughts as it took control of the infrastructure and spaceships that remained. For over a week it sent its billions of new motiles out to survey the wreckage and list the mechanical systems that had survived unscathed. Most of the farms and food production plants had come through intact, as had a great many industrial facilities. The information was used to assemble a strategy for integration, bringing together every production center in a single unified organization. It began to amalgamate thousands of motiles into new subsidiary groupings of itself to cope with the huge demands of managing an entire star system. Without rivalries, and acting in conjunction, the combined industrial output of every manufacturing plant was greater than before.

Synergy,
the Bose memories called it. The alien’s concepts and words still lingered and lurked amid MorningLightMountain’s system-wide thoughts, even though the coherent article had long been erased. It had even taken the precaution of physically eradicating the immotile unit that the Bose memories had been stored in. All that remained now were memories of memories, disseminated information that manifested in the odd alien phrase. There was no concern left of possible contamination. It was pure now, a single life that lived throughout this star system, and was now expanding into a second.

The effort to reach the Commonwealth resumed, with hundreds of ships flying daily through the interstellar wormhole to the staging post star system, carrying equipment that would build the next sequence of wormholes.

Out of all the hundreds of billions of motiles hurrying to perform their appointed tasks, one did not obey MorningLightMountain’s instructions. Because such individuality was impossible to a Prime, it moved where it wanted and saw what it needed. No other motile possessed the kind of independent thought structure that would question it; as long as it avoided the attention of MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines it was perfectly safe to come and go as it pleased.

For over a day it had been moving around the base of the giant mountain building that contained the original heart of the massive interlinked creature that was MorningLightMountain. It didn’t move as smoothly as all the other motiles, it wasn’t used to four legs, nor the strange way they bent and twisted. But it made progress.

In the background of its mind were the directives and thoughts of MorningLightMountain, emerging from the little communications device attached to one of its nerve receptor stalks. It ignored them because it wanted to, a mental ability that other motiles did not have. Although the images and information coming out of the communications device were a useful guide to what was happening across the Prime system.

High above it, dazzling lightning bolts lashed down repetitively against the protective force field dome, sizzling away to ground out along the top of the ancient valley. Clouds boiled along at a speed it had never seen before. They were thick and black, blotting out the sky as they unleashed monsoon-like downpours several times an hour. So heavy was the unnatural rain that rivulets formed across the force field, carrying away the water to the saturated ground beyond. Whole tides of mud were slithering around the protected, sacrosanct valley.

The motile regarded the new weather intently, with one thought starting to dominate its mind:
Nuclear winter.

....

Paula Myo took the express from Paris direct to Wessex. She had a long wait in the CST planetary station there; the train to Huxley’s Haven only ran once a day. It was dark outside when she eventually went to platform 87B, which was situated in a small annex at the end of the terminal. The train she found standing there was made up from four single deck carriages being pulled by a steam engine that could have come straight out of a museum. She’d forgotten that the journey was on a historical throwback. On any other world such a contraption belching out thick black smoke from the coal it burned would have been prohibited under any number of antipollution laws; here on one of the Big15 nobody cared.

She climbed into the first carriage and sat on one of the velvet bench seats. A couple of other people came in, and ignored her. Just before their scheduled departure time a guard walked down the carriage. He was dressed in a dark blue uniform that had bright silver buttons down the waistcoat, and a tall peaked cap with red piping.

“Ticket, please, ma’am,” he said politely.

She handed over the small pink hard copy the machine at the end of the platform had printed out for her. He produced a pair of clippers, and punched a small Z-shaped hole in the corner.

“Won’t be long now,” he said, and touched the peak of his cap.

The one hundred fifty years of cynicism and cultural sophistication that formed her usual defensive shell wilted away. “Thank you very much,” she said, and meant it. There was a great deal of comfort in a culture that was so honest and straightforward.

She held the ticket in her hand, looking at it as the steam engine tooted loudly and began to pull out of the station amid a cloud of pure white steam and clanking pistons. In theory Huxley’s Haven represented home, though she felt no attachment of any kind to the planet and its people. Going back would seem to any observer (and she was sure Hogan would be keeping a virtual eye on her) as if she were running for cover, returning to the one place she would fit in.

There was the usual slow crawl across the planetary station yard. Other trains seemed to charge past, the lights from their carriage windows producing a smear of illumination. Signals were bright red or green points against the dark background, stretching away for kilometers like a thinly populated city. Every now and then the glaring front lights from a heavy goods train would flow across the silver rails, followed by the dark bulk of the wagons, eclipsing the rest of the yard.

Their gradual progress forward took them into a pale amber light that washed across this section of the yard like strong moonlight. When she pressed her face against the window, Paula could see the gateways lined up ahead of them, over two-thirds illuminated by the daylight of the worlds they led to. In front of them, the rails were full of trains. It was unnerving seeing how little distance there was between each one as the station traffic control arranged them in a continual sequence. Only the single track that the steam engine rolled along was empty ahead and behind. They curved around to face the gateway, which glowed with a diffuse primrose light.