City of Pearl (2 page)

“Bet you'll miss all this,” said McEvoy.

Shan shook her head.
I want to be like other people. I want to look at ordinary things and not see all the pain that they can cause.
“I don't think I'll be able to miss it at all.”

“You could get a lot more pension contributions out of private security work, you know.”

“I'm not interested in watching anyone else's arse any longer. Not even for a better pension.”

“Not the smallholding thing, Guv?”

“I kept saying I'd get a life one day, and now I'm going to do it before I'm too old to bloody well enjoy it.” She thought of her tomatoes. It was reassuring trivia—trivia, the details other people didn't want you to look at, the clues, the building blocks, the very texture of life. But yes, she would miss the family of uniform. And getting by financially was a concern. “Don't forget that, Rob. You think you've got all those years ahead of you but they get eaten up fast. And you with them.”

She wanted to explain to him about all the corners she had cut and all the gray areas he would have to make black and white when he succeeded her, but her swiss chirped in her pocket and saved her from regret. She flipped it open and checked the message. “Well, the Foreign Office has a team inbound. They could have said so before we embarked, couldn't they? I hate joint ops with civvies.”

“How long?”

“Eight hours.”

It was typical of another department to do this without telling EnHaz. Shit, they probably set out at the same time as she did. She concentrated on the prospect of signing out of the service and made her way back to her cabin. As she walked—and it was a long walk following the central ring of the orbital—she passed the occasional station worker who hadn't been confined to quarters. Sometimes they stared and sometimes they just looked away.

It was definitely time to pack it all in. Staying objective was getting to be a struggle these days. She shut the hatch and loaded her music library into the swiss before flopping onto the bunk the wrong way round so she could stare like an astonished child at the face of Mars.

 

There was a chirp from the swiss. She opened her eyes, closed them again, and then there was an insistent knock at the hatch. “Bugger,” she said. The clock read 2017. She'd slept far too long. When she opened the hatch, there were two men at the threshold. They weren't company security muscle and they weren't police, but they slotted into their plain suits like men who had no other existence beyond their jobs, no messy home lives, no other role as daddy or darling or son. If they turned round, she expected to see voids where their backs should have been. “You're early,” she said. “Are you taking over jurisdiction now?”

One of the suits—very young, thinning blond hair—glanced over his shoulder; the older man blocked the hatchway. “This is nothing to do with your investigation, Superintendent Frankland,” he said. “Foreign Minister Perault is here to see you.”

Perault.
Eugenie Perault was a politician she had never met, another familiar two-dimensional player from a newscast without a family or a back to her head. Maybe this was a job offer. “I don't work for the Foreign Office,” Shan said carefully.

“This is a
K
ey
T
ask,” said Blond Suit, somehow adding capitals to his pronunciation.

“As of next month, I don't work for anyone anymore. I'm retiring. I'm going home.”

The two men looked embarrassed. Whatever they were, they weren't used to debate. “I'm sorry, Superintendent, but when a government minister travels this far to brief you, I really think you should hear her out.”

Ah, McEvoy and his pranks. A retirement joke. “Oh, okay. Funny. Can I go now?”

Older Man ignored her politely. “May we show her in?”

Blond Suit stepped forward; Shan stiffened. He was a few inches shorter, and she was surprised that she had already sized him up for a fight. It had been a long time since she'd had to do that sort of policing. His face was apologetic, bewildered. Something was half hidden in his hand, and it wasn't a gun. It was a sub-Q drug cartridge.

“This isn't a joke, is it?”

“No, ma'am.” He stepped back and Eugenie Perault appeared beside him as if she regularly dropped in unannounced on space stations.

“Minister,” Shan said. It was funny how the words came. The thoughts weren't there at all. But she kept her eyes on the sub-Q. “This isn't what I was expecting.”

Perault, all clipped gray hair and unnaturally uncreased fatigues, stared up at her. “I never leave a difficult briefing to others.” She looked over her shoulder at the suits, a silent prompt to leave and close the hatch behind them. The two women stood facing each other.

“Frankland, you're not going to like what I have to say, so I'm saying it as briefly as I can. We need you to…shall we say,
supervise
a sensitive mission.”

“I'm released from duty next month, ma'am.”

“We've had to override that.”

“You can't. I was conscripted, and my conscription has already been renewed for the maximum period. I should have been out ten years ago.”

“I'm really sorry about that. But we can. Emergency powers.”

“Oh, terrific. Okay. How long is this going to take?”
I want to go home. I need to go home.
“A couple of months is—”

“A hundred and fifty years. That's how long the return journey to Cavanagh's Star will take.”

Shan heard the words. But they served only to split her into two parts, one part retrieving information about Cavanagh's Star and intrigued by the invitation, the other part screaming
no, no, no
. It triggered a reaction in her over which she had no control. She heard her other self ask a sensible question while her core being shrieked how unfair it all was. “What's important about Cavanagh's Star?”

“Constantine colony,” said Perault

“Constantine was lost.” Everyone knew that. It was history now. “At least it wasn't taxpayers' money.”

“It might have been lost, or it might not. A joint government and commercial reconnaissance mission is about to launch and I need a government representative there who isn't afraid of hard decisions.”

“So they've found it?”

“We have better data now that suggest the planet is economically and environmentally viable for humans.”

“But have they found the colony?”

Perault gave a little twitch of the mouth, a reluctant sad smile, and Blond Suit came into the cabin, this time with the sub-Q openly in his hand. “You've experienced a Suppressed Briefing before, Frankland? I know you Pagans tend not to like pharmaceuticals.”

Shan stared at the sub-Q, and then at Blond Suit's rapid blinking: well, at least she'd rattled him. “I have.” Suppressed Briefings were expensive. The drug cost more to keep under lock and key as an exclusive government resource than it did to produce. Under its influence, she would understand what she was being told, and her compliance with the instructions would be voluntary, but she would not consciously recall what information she'd been given until circumstances triggered its release. The one time she had worked under it before had been unpleasant, frustrating, like having a name on the tip of your tongue the whole time.

Shan didn't like her subconscious holding the reins. But the stuff did the job. She would have to trust it again, and reluctantly.

“It's that serious, then?”

“It's important enough for you to be given extended pension rights.”

“How extended?” When retirement meant sixty or more years, that
mattered.
“Until I return?”

“Until you return. But you can make up your mind after you've heard what I have to say. Suppression doesn't remove your ability to refuse the mission, remember.”

Shan did not believe in gift horses. She rolled up her sleeve and offered her arm to Blond Suit anyway. The sub-Q popped slightly against her skin and her ears began buzzing. She sat down.

Her swiss chirped: it was 2030.

The buzzing in her ears stopped. She looked up. The display on the wall said 2103, and Blond Suit was carefully wrapping two sub-Qs in foampak. She'd had the stopper, then—the second phase of the drug that brought her into the conscious now, and sealed whatever had been said to her into the retrievable past.

“Yes, ma'am,” Shan said. “Of course I'll go.” It felt good and right. Whatever had been said, it had persuaded her, and thoroughly. When she tried to recall it—and not trying to recall was like ignoring an itch—it left her tasting worry, determination and a disturbing guilt.

“You have a detachment of Royal Marines, Extreme Environment Warfare Cadre, as support.” Perault held out a ten-centimeter wafer of data pack. Shan, numb but still functioning, automatically took it. “The briefings in here are unclassified. The ship is the
Thetis,
and the civilians and EEWC have been embarked in chill-sleep, so I'm afraid you won't have the chance to talk to them for another seventy-five years.”

“I haven't got a clue how to command marines. I nick people. That's about it.”

“I think your skills are a little more sophisticated than that. Anyway, you'll have an FEU Navy officer as second in command.”

“And how are they going to feel about finding me in the luggage?”

“This is the best team of specialists we've been able to assemble. Nobody worries about who's wearing what cap badge these days—they slot in where we need them. The regiments and companies and ships are just there for tribal bonding purposes.”

“Even so—”

“You'll join them from here.”

Shan sat down on the bunk, weighed down by unfathomable time scales. “I can't go home first?”

“Can't risk that, I'm afraid. We can take care of your home and finances. And there's no family to notify, is there?”

“No.” Not anymore. “Nobody I can't live without seeing again, anyway.” Suddenly that thought seemed less pressing. Even getting out of EnHaz, even being temporarily robbed of her retirement garden, didn't feel so bad. Whatever had been in the Suppressed Briefing must have been extraordinarily stark.

“Don't forget,” Perault said. “The priority is Constantine and its planet. Nothing else.”

Shan looked into Perault's face and decided she was one of the few people she could not intimidate, and she couldn't work out why. She now
knew
Perault was not an ordinary politician, but the detail eluded her. She also knew why she had been given the task. And even though the reasons were still buried in pathways of her brain that were temporarily blocked, she believed them with a crushing emotional certainty located somewhere behind her sternum. It was an unpleasant sensation for a data-rational woman.

“Good luck, Frankland.” Perault reached out and squeezed her shoulder. Few people dared touch Shan but the gesture didn't feel intrusive this time, even though this was a stranger and a minister. “Thank you. And thank you for Helen.”

The hatch closed behind her and Shan sat back on the bunk again. Who was Helen? No, she'd remember when it mattered. This time, she had no lurking suspicions that someone had lied to her or set her up, as she did the last time she had been suppressed. She felt focused and urgent.

Now she'd have to make sure she had a last drink with Rob McEvoy before he returned to Earth. He would be the last friend she would ever see from her own time.

She checked her uniform in the mirror and prepared to step outside again, unable to get the name Helen out of her mind.

Eddie Michallat didn't care for Graham Wiley. Wiley was a broadcasting Brahmin, a professor who had the prime science correspondent slot across thirty Web channels. He treated Eddie like a tabloid hack, because, Eddie believed, he didn't regard his Master's in anthropology as serious scientific credentials. It was rare they came this close physically in real life, but this was an important news conference. Everyone worth a byline in the journalistic community was there.

Tech came and tech went, and the dissemination of information and opinion could take place a hundred different ways, delivered straight to the brain and optic nerve of the audience in many cases. But a news conference required flesh-and-blood attendance, because only flesh could enjoy the food and wine laid on afterwards. Eddie was glad there was some respect left for tradition.

“I put in for the docco assignment they're advertising on the Ariel staffnet,” he said, by way of a throwaway remark to Wiley. “To Cavanagh's Star.”

Wiley, affecting professorial tweeds today, gave him a sympathetic look all the way down his nose. “Well, someone had to.”

“Could be some extraordinary stuff at the end of that.”

“Could be 150 years out of circulation for nothing, too.”

“Okay, what if the planets around Cavanagh's Star really are habitable long-term? What if the colony made it after all? I'd say that's one great story.”

Wiley, gazing up and down the rows of hotel seating in the conference room, said nothing and stayed saying nothing for an irritatingly long time. To a journalist it was the equivalent of a gunslingers' standoff, and Eddie's metaphorical hand hovered over his verbal gun. Suddenly he didn't care anymore and filled in the silence the ex- professor had dug hole-deep before him.

“Whatever you say, I'm still interested,” he said. “I still think it's the most important mission in the history of the space program. The network wouldn't be contributing so much to the cost if it weren't. I'm going.”

Wiley blew out a long silent breath through pursed lips. “It's living death,” he said. “Living death. Now, where's that bloody lunch?” He looked round impatiently for signs of the caterers moving in with trolleys of delights. “You don't know what audience you'll have in twenty-five years when the signal starts reaching Earth. Or even which network. All you need is yet another damn planet being detected after you've left and you've wasted your time.”

“I thought you'd express some concern about my leaving my nearest and dearest.”

“I didn't think you had any.”

You bastard.
“I don't. The mission's restricted to singlestatus personnel.”

“Well, then, I'm sure it'll be time well spent for you.”

It was a very tedious news conference after that. Eddie left before the buffet lunch was served.

He found himself getting angry only when he was halfway through his supper in his favorite restaurant. He hated that habit. He suspected the internal replay of
he said, I said
that was running before his unfocused eyes while he ate was evident to other diners. Perhaps he was even moving his lips. He snatched the wineglass up to his mouth just to make sure he wasn't talking out loud.

Smug little shit, Wiley. He might have been making his money in punditry, dismissing exploration, but he might still be around in twenty-five years when Eddie filed his first reports, and that would show him. This was real drama. There were lost tribes and big business and a new Earth. All right, it was roughly the 67,450th planet detected, but the people factor was immense. It was absolutely logical that he should go, and observe, and report, even if nobody ever got to hear his words. He couldn't believe that instinct wasn't hardwired into everyone somewhere.

After all, facing the unknown hadn't ever deterred the first explorers, had it? How was he different from the Vikings setting off across the uncharted Atlantic, worried about getting close to the edge of the world? On the other hand, perhaps he already knew too much, perhaps more than the sailors of the past had ever created in their imaginations. He knew that even if his journey took months or years, the world left behind him would be aging far faster. Living death, as Wiley had said.

Eddie suddenly found swallowing was hard work. He had always thought phrases like “chill of fear” and “cold anxiety” were clichés, and not ones he would lower himself professionally to use, but that was precisely what went through him at that point—cold. He reassured himself it was the by-product of epinephrine. It was just his body pumping out hormones to prepare him to deal successfully with a stressor. That was all it was, blind physiology, not prophecy, not premonition, not at all. He repeated it to himself over and over.

And he was still cold. But he was still going.