Chapter NINETEEN
Clotted white.
For fragments of a second, standing in the hatch of the Nagini and staring across the expanse of sand, I thought it had been snowing.
“Gulls,” said Hand knowledgeably, jumping down and kicking at one of the clumps of feathers underfoot. “Radiation from the blast must have got them.”
Out on the tranquil swells, the sea was strewn with mottled white flotsam.
When the colony barges first touched down on Sanction IV—and Latimer, and Harlan’s World for that matter—they were, for many local species, exactly the cataclysm they must have sounded like. Planetary colonisation is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn’t done much more than sanitise that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of whatever ecosystem they are raping. The invasion is all-pervasive and, from the moment of the barges’ initial impact, inevitable.
The massive ships cool slowly, but already there is activity within. Serried ranks of clone embryos emerge from the cryotanks and are loaded with machine care into rapid-growth pods. A storm of engineered hormones rages through the pod nutrients, triggering the burst of cell development that will bring each clone to late adolescence in a matter of months. Already the advance wave, grown in the latter stages of the interstellar flight, is being downloaded, with the minds of the colony elite decanted, awoken to take up their established place in the brand new order. It’s not quite the golden land of opportunity and adventure that the chroniclers would have you believe.
Elsewhere in the hull, the real damage is being done by the environmental modelling machines.
Any self-respecting effort at colonisation brings along a couple of these eco-AIs. After the early catastrophes on Mars and Adoracion, it became rapidly apparent that attempting to graft a sliced sample of the terrestrial ecosystem onto an alien environment was no elephant ray hunt. The first colonists to breathe the newly terraformed air on Mars were all dead in a matter of days, and a lot of those who’d stayed inside died fighting swarms of a voracious little beetle that no one had ever seen before. Said beetle turned out to be the very distant descendant of a species of terrestrial dustmite that had done rather too well in the ecological upheaval occasioned by the terraforming.
So. Back to the lab.
It was another two generations before the Martian colonists finally got to breathe untanked air.
On Adoracion, it was worse. The colony barge Lorca had left several decades before the Martian debacle, built and hurled at the nearest of the habitable worlds indicated on the Martian astrogation charts with the bravado of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a tank. It was a semi-desperate assault on the armoured depths of interstellar space, an act of technological defiance in the face of the oppressive physics that govern the cosmos and an act of equally defiant faith in the newly decoded Martian archives. By all accounts, pretty much everyone thought it would fail. Even those who contributed their copied consciousnesses to the colony’s datastack and their genes to the embryo banks were less than optimistic about what their stored selves would encounter at journey’s end.
Adoracion, as its name suggests, must have seemed like a dream come true. A green and orange world with approximately the same nitrogen/oxygen mix as Earth and a more user-friendly land-to-sea ratio. A plant-life base that could be eaten by the herds of cloned livestock in the belly of the Lorca and no obvious predators that couldn’t be easily shot. Either the colonists were a pious lot or arriving on this new Eden pushed them that way, because the first thing they did upon disembarkation was build a cathedral and give thanks to God for their safe deliverance.
A year passed.
Hypercasting was still in its infancy back then, barely able to carry the simplest of messages in coded sequence. The news that came filtering back down the beams to Earth was like the sound of screams from a locked room in the depths of an empty mansion. The two ecosystems had met and clashed like armies on a battlefield from which there was no retreat. Of the million-odd colonists aboard the Lorca, over seventy per cent died within eighteen months of touchdown.
Back to the lab.
These days we’ve got it down to a fine art. Nothing organic leaves the hull until the eco-modeller has the whole host ecosystem down. Automated probes go out and prowl the new globe, sucking in samples. The AI digests the data, runs a model against a theoretical terrestrial presence at a couple of hundred times real-world speed and flags the potential clashes. For anything that looks like a problem it writes a solution, genetech or nanotech, and from the correlated whole, generates a settlement protocol. With the protocol laid down, everyone goes out to play.
Inside the protocols for the three dozen or so Settled Worlds, you find certain advantageous terrestrial species cropping up time and time again. They are the success stories of planet Earth—tough, adaptive evolutionary athletes to a creature. Most of them are plants, microbes and insects, but among the supersized animals there are a few that stand out. Merino sheep, grizzly bears and seagulls feature at the top of the list. They’re hard to wipe out.
The water around the trawler was clogged with the white feathered corpses. In the unnatural stillness of the shoreline, they muffled the faint lapping of wavelets on the hull even further.
The ship was a mess. It drifted listlessly against its anchors, the paint on the Sauberville side scorched to black and bare metal glints by the wind from the blast. A couple of windows had blown out at the same time and it looked as if some of the untidy pile of nets on deck had caught and melted. The angles of the deck winch were similarly charred. Anyone standing outside would probably have died from third-degree burns.
There were no bodies on deck. We knew that from the virtuality.
“Nobody down here either,” said Luc Deprez, poking his head out of the mid-deck companionway. “Nobody has been aboard for months. Maybe a year. Food everywhere has been eaten by the bugs and the rats.”
Sutjiadi frowned. “There’s food out?”
“Yeah, lots of it.” Deprez hauled himself out: of the companionway and seated himself on the coaming. The bottom half of his chameleochrome coveralls stayed muddy dark for a second before it adjusted to the sunlit surroundings. “Looks like a big party, but no one stayed around to do the clearing up.”
“I’ve had parties like that,” said Vongsavath.
Below, the unmistakeable whoosh-sizzle of a Sunjet. Sutjiadi, Vongsavath and I tensed in unison. Deprez grinned.
“Cruickshank is shooting the rats,” he said. “They are quite large.”
Sutjiadi put up his weapon and looked up and down the deck, marginally more relaxed than when we’d come aboard. “Estimates, Deprez. How many were there?”
“Rats?” Deprez’s grin widened. “It is hard to tell.”
I repressed a smile of my own.
“Crew,” said Sutjiadi with an impatient gesture. “How many crew, sergeant?
Deprez shrugged, unimpressed by the rank-pulling. “I am not a chef, captain. It is hard to tell.”
“I used to be a chef,” said Ameli Vongsavath unexpectedly. “Maybe I’ll go down and look.”
“You stay here.” Sutjiadi stalked to the side of the trawler, kicking a seagull corpse out of his way. “Starting now, I’d like a little less humour out of this command and a little more application. You can start by getting this net hauled up. Deprez, you go back down and help Cruickshank get rid of the rats.”
Deprez sighed and set aside his Sunjet. From his belt he pulled an ancient-looking sidearm, chambered a round and sighted on the sky with it.
“My kind of work,” he said cryptically, and swung back down the companionway, gun hand held high over his head.
The induction rig crackled. Sutjiadi bent his head, listening. I fitted my own disconnected rig back in place.
“…is secured.” It was Sun Liping’s voice. Sutjiadi had given her command of the other half of the team and sent them up the beach with Hand, Wardani and Schneider, whom he clearly regarded as civilian irritations at best, liabilities at worst.
“Secured how?” he snapped.
“We’ve set up perimeter sentry systems in an arc above the beach. Five-hundred-metre-wide base-line, hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Should nail anything incoming from the interior or along the beach in either direction.” Sun paused for a moment, apologetic. “That’s line-of-sight only, but it’s good for several kilometres. It’s the best we can do.”
“What about the uh, the mission objective?” I broke in. “Is it intact?”
Sutjiadi snorted. “Is it there?”
I shot him a glance. Sutjiadi thought we were on a ghost hunt. Envoy-enhanced gestalt scanning read it in his demeanour like screen labelling. He thought Wardani’s gate was an archaeologue fantasy, overhyped from some vague original theory to make a good pitch to Mandrake. He thought Hand had been sold a cracked hull, and corporate greed had gobbled up the concept in a stampede to be first on the scene of any possible development option. He thought there was going to be some serious indigestion once the team arrived on site. He hadn’t said as much in the construct briefing, but he wore his lack of conviction like a badge throughout.
I couldn’t really blame him. By their demeanour, about half of the team thought the same. If Hand hadn’t been offering such crazy back-from-the-dead war-exemption contracts, they probably would have laughed in his face.
Not much more than a month ago, I’d nearly done the same to Schneider myself.
“Yes, it’s here.” There was something peculiar in Sun’s voice. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t ever been one of the doubters, but now her tone bordered on awe. “It’s. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“Sun? Is it open?”
“Not as far as we are aware, Lieutenant Kovacs, no. I think you had better speak to Mistress Wardani if you want details.”
I cleared my throat. “Wardani? You there?”
“Busy.” Her voice was taut. “What did you find on the boat?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Yeah, well. Same here. Out.”
I glanced over at Sutjiadi again. He was focused on the middle distance, new Maori face betraying nothing. I grunted, tugged the rig off and went to find out how the deck winch worked. Behind me, I heard him calling in a progress report from Hansen.
The winch turned out not much different to a shuttle loader, and with Vongsavath’s help, I got the mechanism powered up before Sutjiadi was finished on the comlink. He wandered over just in time to see the boom swing out smoothly and lower the manigrab for the first haul.
Dragging in the nets proved another story. It took us a good twenty minutes to get the hang of it, by which time the rat hunt was over and Cruickshank and Deprez had joined us. Even then, it was no joke manoeuvring the cold, soaking-heavy drapes of net over the side and onto the deck in some sort of order. None of us were fishermen, and it was clear that there were some substantial skills involved in the process that we didn’t have. We slipped and fell over a lot.
It turned out worth it.
Tangled in the last folds to come aboard were the remains of two corpses, naked apart from the still shiny lengths of chain that weighted them down at the knees and chest. The fish had picked them down to bone and skin that looked like torn oilcloth wrapping. Their eyeless skulls lolled together in the suspended net like the heads of drunks, sharing a good joke. Floppy necks and wide grins.
We stood looking up at them for a while.
“Good guess,” I said to Sutjiadi.
“It made sense to look.” He stepped closer and looked speculatively up at the naked bones. “They’ve been stripped, and threaded into the net. Arms and legs, and the ends of the two chains. Whoever did this didn’t want them coming up. Doesn’t make much sense. Why hide the bodies when the ship is here drifting for anyone to come out from Sauberville and take for salvage?”
“Yeah, but nobody did,” Vongsavath pointed out.
Deprez turned and shaded his eyes to look at the horizon, where Sauberville still smouldered. “The war?”
I recalled dates, recent history, calculated back. “Hadn’t come this far west a year ago, but it was cutting loose down south.” I nodded towards the twists of smoke. “They would have been scared. Not likely to come across here for anything that might draw orbital fire. Or something maybe mined to suck in a remote bombardment. Remember Bootkinaree Town?”
“Vividly,” said Ameli Vongsavath, pressing fingers to her left cheekbone.
“That was about a year ago. Would have been all over the news. That bulk carrier down in the harbour. There wouldn’t have been a civilian salvage team on the planet working after that.”
“So why hide these guys at all?” asked Cruickshank.
I shrugged. “Keeps them out of sight. Nothing for aerial surveillance to reel in and sniff over. Bodies might have triggered a local investigation back then. Back before things really got out of hand in Kempopolis.”
“Indigo City,” said Sutjiadi pointedly.
“Yeah, don’t let Jiang hear you calling it that.” Cruickshank grinned. “He already jumped down my throat for calling Danang a terror strike. And I meant it as a f*cking compliment!”
“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “The point is, without bodies this is just a fishing boat someone hasn’t been back for. That doesn’t attract much attention in the run-up to a global revolution.”
“It does if the boat was hired in Sauberville.” Sutjiadi shook his head. “Bought even, it’s still local interest. Who were those guys? Isn’t that old Chang’s trawler out there? Come on, Kovacs, it’s only a couple of dozen kilometres.”
“There’s no reason to assume this boat’s local.” I gestured out at the placid ocean. “On this planet you could sail a boat like this one all the way up from Bootkinaree and never spill your coffee.”
“Yeah, but you could hide the bodies from aerial surveillance by chucking them down into the galley with the rest of the mess,” objected Cruickshank. “It doesn’t add up.”
Luc Deprez reached up and shifted the net slightly. The skulls bobbed and leaned. “The stacks are gone,” he said. “They were put in the water to hide the rest of their identity. Faster than leaving them for the rats, I think.”
“Depends on the rats.”
“Are you an expert?”
“Maybe it was a burial,” offered Ameli Vongsavath.
“In a net?”
“We’re wasting time,” said Sutjiadi loudly. “Deprez, get them down, wrap them up and put them somewhere the rats can’t get at them. We’ll run a post mortem with the autosurgeon back on the Nagini later. Vongsavath and Cruickshank, I want you to go through this boat from beak to backside. Look for anything that might tell us what happened here.”
“That’s stem to stern, sir,” said Vongsavath primly.
“Whatever. Anything that might tell us something. The clothing that came off these two maybe or…” He shook his head, irritable with the awkward new factors. “Anything. Anything at all. Get on with it. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like you to come with me. I want to check on our perimeter defences.”
“Sure.” I scooped up the lie with a slight smile.
Sutjiadi didn’t want to check on the perimeter. He’d seen Sun and Hansen’s résumés, just like me. They didn’t need their work checking.
He didn’t want to see the perimeter.
He wanted to see the gate.