Xeelee: Endurance (18 page)

Flood grunted. ‘You should read more history. Our fear of what Shira was up to was comparatively rational as a
casus belli
. Horrific wars have been fought over splinter-fine differences in ideologies. Look up the Crusades some time.’

‘But when we get an authentic first alien contact, rather than these dark hints and glimpses from the future . . . All of this might be remembered as mankind’s own last great civil war.’

‘The end of human war?’ Flood laughed. ‘I knew you were imaginative, Stillich. I didn’t have you down as a dreamer . . .’

An alarm chimed, as the flitter prepared to dock with the
Freestar.
Stillich straightened his uniform, preparing for duty.

So the humans emerged from their home System, optimistic, expansive.

Then came Stillich’s ‘authentic’ first contact. And everything changed.

REMEMBRANCE

AD 5071

‘I am the Rememberer,’ said the old man. ‘The last in a line centuries long. This is what was passed on to me, by those who remembered before me.

‘The first Rememberer was called Harry Gage. He was ten years old when the Squeem came . . .’

As he talked to some out-of-vision, flat-voiced cop inquisitor, Rhoda Voynet glanced around at her staff. Soldiers all, the planes of their faces bathed in golden Saturn light, they listened silently. The old man they saw before them, this ‘Rememberer’, was a Virtual, an image projected from a police station on Earth to this briefing room aboard the
Jones
, and the sunlight that shone on his face was much stronger than the diminished glow that reached this far orbit. Rhoda felt obscurely jealous of the warmth he felt.

Prompted by his off-stage interrogator, the old man continued. ‘Harry Gage. He was born on Mars, in the Cydonia arcology. His great-grandparents were from Earth. There was a lot of that, in those days, before the Squeem. Everybody was mobile. Everything was opened up. Anything was possible.

‘Harry’s parents brought him to Earth, a once-in-a-lifetime trip to meet great-grandma and grandpa. He never did get to see them. They sure picked a bad day to call.’

It had been the year 4874, nearly two centuries past. And Earth was about to be conquered.

The flitter bearing Harry Gage and his parents had tumbled out of the shimmering throat of the wormhole transit route from Mars to Earthport. As the flitter surged unhesitatingly through swarming traffic, Harry peered out of the cramped cabin, looking for Earth.

From here, the home world was a swollen blue disc. Wormhole gates of all sizes drifted across the face of the planet, electric-blue sculptures of exotic negative-energy matter. Mum sat beside Harry, a bookslate on her lap, and Dad sat opposite, grinning at Harry’s reaction. Harry would always remember these moments well.

The final hop to Earth itself took only a few hours.

‘Harry’s flitter landed in New York,’ the Rememberer said. ‘A spaceship coming down in the middle of Manhattan. Imagine that!’

Harry and his parents emerged onto grass, a park, in the sunshine of a New York spring.

Dad raised his face to the sun and breathed deeply. ‘Mmm. Cherry blossom and freshly cut grass. I love that smell.’

Mum snorted. ‘We have cherry trees on Mars.’

‘Every human is allowed to be sentimental about a spring day in New York. It’s our birthright. Look at those clouds, Harry. Aren’t they beautiful?’

Harry looked up. The sky was laced by high, fluffy, dark clouds, fat with water, unlike any on Mars.

But Mum closed her eyes. She was used to the pyramids and caverns of Mars, and could not believe that a thin layer of blue air could protect her from the rigours of space.

Harry was enchanted by Manhattan. He did not know then that most of what he saw was no more than decades old, painstakingly restored after the Starfall war. Nor could he know that little of it would be left standing mere hours from now. And as Harry peered up at the clouds he saw a line of light cut across the sky, scratched by a spark bright enough to cast faint shadows, even in the sunlight. He noticed New Yorkers looking up, vaguely concerned. This wasn’t normal, then. Even on Earth, even in New York.

‘It was the first strike of the Squeem,’ the Rememberer said. ‘Harry never forgot that moment. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It shaped his whole life. Even before the next wave came, falling on the cities.’

Rhoda and her soldiers listened, trying to understand, trying to decide whether to believe him. Trying to decide what to do about it.

While the old man rested – or had done eighty minutes ago, the time it took the signals from Earth to reach Saturn – Rhoda let her staff resume other duties, but summoned Reg Kaser, her first officer.

Waiting for Reg in her cabin, Rhoda powered up her percolator, her one indulgence from her Iowa home. While it chugged and slurped and filled the cabin with sharp coffee scents, she faced her big picture window.

The
Jones
was a UN Navy corvette. It was locked in a languid orbit around Rhea, second largest moon of Saturn. In fact the
Jones
wasn’t far from home; its home base was on Enceladus, another of Saturn’s moons. Rhea itself was unprepossessing, just another ball of dirty ice. But beyond it lay Saturn, where huge storms raged across an autumnal cloudscape, and the rings arched like gaudy artefacts, unreasonably sharp. The Saturn system was like a ponderous ballet, illuminated by distance-dimmed sunlight, and Rhoda could have watched it for ever.

But it was Rhea she had come here for. Within its icy carcass were pockets of salty water, kept liquid by the tidal kneading of Saturn and the other moons. That wasn’t so special; there were similar buried lakes on many of the Solar System’s icy moons, even Enceladus. But within Rhea’s deep lakes had been discovered colonies of Squeem, the aquatic group-mind organisms that had, for a few decades, ruled over a conquered mankind, and even occupied Earth itself.

The
Jones
was named for the hero who had crucially gained an advantage over the Squeem, through a bit of bravery and ingenuity, which had ultimately led to the Squeem’s expulsion from the Solar System – or so everybody had thought, until this relic colony had been discovered. The xenologists were already talking to these stranded Squeem, using antique occupation-era translation devices. It was Rhoda’s task to decide what to do with them. She could have them preserved, even brought back to Earth.

Or she could make sure that every last Squeem in Rhea died. She had the authority to destroy the whole moon, if she chose, to make sure.

It was a hard decision to make.

And now she had the complication of this old man, the self-styled ‘Rememberer’, and his antique saga of the occupation which he insisted had to be heard before any decision was made about the Squeem on Rhea.

First Officer Reg Kaser arrived, and waited silently as she gathered her thoughts.

They were contrasting types. Rhoda Voynet, forty years old, came from an academic background; she had trained as a historian of the occupation before joining the service. Kaser, fifty, scarred, one leg prosthetic, and with a thick Mercury-mine accent, was a career soldier. He had taken part in the counter-invasion a decade ago, when human ships, powered by hyperdrives purloined from the Squeem themselves, had at last assaulted the Squeem’s own homeworld. They worked well together, their backgrounds and skills complementary. Kaser had learned to be patient while Rhoda thought things through. And she had learned to appreciate his decisiveness, hardened in battle.

‘Tell me what we know of this old man,’ she said.

Kaser checked over a slate. ‘His name is Karl Hume. Born and raised on Earth. Seventy-four years old. He’s spent his life working for the
UN
Restoration Agency. Literature section.’

Rhoda understood the work well enough. Much of the material she had drawn on in her own research had come from the Restoration’s reassembling. The Squeem were traders, not ideological conquerors, but in their exploitation they had carelessly inflicted huge damage on mankind’s cultural heritage. A hundred and fifty years after their expulsion the Restoration was still patiently piecing together lost libraries, recovering works of art, even rebuilding swathes of shattered cities brick by brick, like New York, where young Harry Gage had watched the sky fall.

‘Hume was a drone,’ Kaser said, uncompromising. ‘His work was patient, thorough, reliable, but he had no specific talent, and he didn’t climb the ladder. He held down a job all his life, but nobody missed him when he retired. He had a family. Wife now dead, kids off-Earth. He never troubled the authorities, not so much as a dodgy tax payment.’

‘Until he tried to abduct a kid.’

‘Quite.’

The boy, called Lonnie Tekinene, was another New Yorker, ten years old – the same age as Harry Gage, Rhoda noted absently, when he had witnessed the Squeem invasion. Hume had made contact with the kid through a Virtual play-world, and had met him physically in Central Park, and had tried to take him off to Hume’s apartment. Alert parents had put a stop to that.

And as Hume had been processed through the legal system, he had become aware of the discovery of the pocket of Squeem on Rhea, moon of Saturn, and the deliberation going on within the
UN
and its military arm as to what to do about it.

Kaser said, ‘Hume didn’t harm a hair of the kid’s head. At first he just denied everything. But when he heard about Rhea he opened up. He said it was just that his “time” had come. He was the “Rememberer” of his generation. But he was growing old. He needed to recruit another to take his place – just as he was recruited in his turn by some other old fossil when
he
was ten.’

‘He never explained why he chose this kid, this Lonnie? What criteria he used?’

Kaser shrugged. ‘Looking at the police files, I don’t think anybody asked. Hume was just a nut, to them. Probably a sexual deviant.’

Rhoda said, ‘But he insisted we need to hear what he has to say. Some truth about the Squeem occupation, preserved only in his head, that will shape our decision.’

‘We know all about the occupation,’ Kaser said. ‘It was a System-wide event. It affected all of mankind. What “truth” can this old fool have, locked up in his head, and available nowhere else?’

‘What truth so hideous,’ Rhoda wondered, ‘that it could
only
be lodged in one man’s head? What do you think we should do?’

Kaser shrugged. ‘Assess the Squeem colony on its own merits. Maybe they’re just stranded, left behind in the evacuation. Or this could be a monitoring station of some kind, spying on a system they lost. Maybe it even predates the occupation, a forward base to gather intelligence to run the invasion. Whatever the reason, it needs to be shut down.’

‘But the Squeem themselves don’t necessarily need to be eliminated.’

‘True.’

‘You think I should just ignore this old man, don’t you?’

He grinned, tolerant. ‘Yes. But you won’t. You’re an obsessive fact-gatherer. Well, we have time. The Squeem aren’t going anywhere.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see if the old guy has finished his nap.’

Karl Hume, bathed once more in strong Earth sunlight, talked to his inquisitor of memories passed down through a chain of Rememberers: the memories of ten-year-old Harry Gage.

Before the invasion, humans had diffused out through the Solar System and beyond in their bulky, ponderous, slower-than-light GUTships. It was a time of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future. Then the first extra-solar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.

Only a few years after first contact Squeem ships burst into the Solar System, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system beyond human understanding. They maintained an interstellar network of trading colonies. Their human label, a not very respectful rendering of the Squeem’s own sonic rendering of their title for themselves – ‘
Ss-chh-eemnh
’ – meant something like the Wise Folk, rather like ‘
Homo sapiens
’
.

Communication with the group-mind Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. With no separation between individuals, the Squeem hadn’t evolved to count in whole numbers, for instance. But eventually common ground was found. And despite fears that mankind might be overwhelmed by a more technically advanced civilisation, trade and cultural contacts were initiated.

The Squeem were welcomed into the Solar System.

Then – it was a morning in New York – in orbit around every inhabited world and moon in the Solar System, cannon platforms appeared. Humanity’s slower-than-light GUTdrive warships had no hope of blocking the Squeem’s hyperdrive convoys.

And on Earth, rocks began to fall.

‘They came in too fast for the planet’s impactor defences to cope with,’ the Rememberer whispered. ‘Rocks from the Solar System’s own belts of asteroids and comets, sent in at faster than interplanetary speeds. And they were targeted. Obviously it was the Squeem’s doing.

‘Harry and his family, stranded on Earth, got an hour’s warning of the Manhattan bolide. Harry’s father knew New York. He got Harry off the island through the ancient Queens-Midtown tunnel.

‘The bolide came down right on top of Grand Central Station. The impact was equivalent to a several-kiloton explosion. It dug out a crater twenty metres across. Every building south of Harlem was reduced to rubble, and several hundred thousand people were killed, through that one impact alone, on the first day of the invasion. Harry saw it all.

‘And Harry’s mother didn’t make it. Crushed in the stampede for the tunnels. Harry never forgave the Squeem for that. Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’

Harry and his father reached Queens, where a refugee camp was quickly organised.

And the world churned. All Earth’s continents were pocked by the impact scars. Millions had died, cities shaken to rubble. People were horribly reminded of the Starfall, a human war fought with similar techniques only decades before. But now the aggressors were aliens, lacking any human kinship or conscience.

The damage could have been far worse. The Squeem could have sent in a dinosaur-killer, or a relativistic missile like the Fists of the Alpha System rebels of the Starfall war. They could have put Earth through an extinction event, just as easily.

‘It took a day for their true strategy to be revealed,’ the Rememberer said. ‘When people started dying, in great numbers, in waves that spread out like ripples from the impact craters. Dead of diseases that didn’t even have names.’

It had been an ingenious strategy, and evidently rehearsed on other subject worlds before. The impactors had been carefully prepared. They had all been seeded with
bits of Earth
, knocked into space by massive natural impacts in the deep past, and so well preserved that they even carried a cargo of antique life. Spores, still viable.