Dusk (20 page)

They ushered along in silence as the tethered
station, now clearly a dodecahedron, grew on the horizon line. The
journey to the station seemed longer and more taxing than the five
relative years since they had awakened from their Hyposomatic
sleep. Each of them stood before the window of the Paracelsus in
absolute silence watching the impossible unfold before them.

Cyrus ran through the possibilities in his
head. The only realistic possibility was that Winberg had been
correct. Man had somehow conquered the light-speed barrier in their
relativistic lifespan and quite possibly, as Winberg had also
proposed, in their original lifespan. The biggest and most pressing
question, at least to Cyrus, was if that barrier had been broken
before or after the Damocles had been built. The anxiety made the
room seem impossibly hot.

“They seem a bit uninviting, no?” someone
uttered more to themselves than everyone else.

“Something is very unsettling. Why does a
colony need fighters? Especially ones they can scramble that
quickly. Something here is off,” Commander Uzziah folded his arms,
watching the window intently.

They moved farther away from the star that
illuminated their way as the station loomed before them, now in
clear view. They were close enough to see indiscernible movements
in the windows like moirés on an antiquated vid monitor. There were
four tethers that tapered into the base of the station. The tethers
must have been anchored to the ground more than thirty thousand
kilometers below. They gleamed in the light cast from behind and
arrested Cyrus’s attention. Something moved along one of them
toward the station. It seemed like a bulge in the cable at first,
but the contrast of the polished gray to the shimmering gold of the
cord it ran along proved to Cyrus that it was in fact an elevator
car. It also proved that even though the station now eclipsed their
view of the horizon almost entirely, they still had not witnessed
the full magnitude of the thing’s size.

As the elevator module became overshadowed by
the titanic orbiter, the glistening tethers, catching and
reflecting the orange rays of Set as the Paracelsus passed between
them, gave the impression of white hot fire. It was as if the
cables had been erected by the gods themselves to keep these
strange men leashed to the planet they had chosen as their home.
And then, the idea set upon him like a falcon, as swift as it was
arresting.

“Whoever these people are, they have managed
something we could not accomplish on Earth for four hundred years,”
the awe in Cyrus’s voice was magnanimous.

Everyone, stymied in their own right, let the
words hang on them until, some seconds later, Dr. Winberg expressed
his puzzlement at the comment, “I fail to see what can be more
dumfounding than this ordeal as a whole.”

The statement was less rhetorical than it
sounded, but Cyrus was too transfixed to be annoyed, “The very
existence of this station is dumfounding. We could never build an
orbital this size—not with tethers like that. This was all
impossible on Earth.”

“I don’t understand, we have the Lunar
Tether, the Martian Cable Station, the Eros Slingshot,” Dr.
Rousseau interjected.

Dr. Qin understood what Cyrus was getting at,
but was not sure where he was going with it. “Those tethers you
mentioned are all much shorter; they aren’t under the same
gravitational stress.”

“Nor do they have the same problem of
atmospheric corrosion. Aluminum suffices for the thinner Martian
upper atmosphere, but these tethers—at least ten thousand
kilometers of each tether—are coated in gold.”

The words floated through the room, but were
processed more quickly than his initial statement. “How can you
know it’s gold? Any number of metals can exhibit that coloration
and luster,” the anxiety in Milliken’s voice made him seem
indignant.

“True, but gold and platinum are virtually
immune to atmospheric corrosion. The only coating suitable for
Terran tethers is gold. Aluminum, in the atmosphere of Earth, would
have to be repaired so often it would render the tether unusable,”
the amazement in Cyrus voice could not be overshadowed by the angst
of the moment.

“Then how did they manage that here?” Dr.
Jang asked, leaning on the console, trying to get as good a view of
the glinting cables as he could before they were completely
consumed by the sheer mass of the station.

“Clearly, such an expense was not an issue
here,” Cyrus said as a large bay door opened, still several
kilometers in front of them. A mist of dust and small debris spread
from the opening, catching rays of starlight as it rushed from
beneath the door with the escaping oxygen. Then the humming ceased,
and the new, profound silence, incomparable to anything they had
heard in each of their lives, engrossed the ship. It was if death
itself had enshrouded them and their ears had failed. The anxious
warmth was now gone and was replaced with hard, cold fear.

As their momentum carried them into the mouth
of the colossus, lights inside the docking bay came to life. They
were ushered closer and could see men in vac-suits in formation
around the spot set aside for them. And the men were all
brandishing weapons.

• • • • •

—
Did anything interesting happen at school today,
Dari?

—
Not really…

—
Nothing at all?

—
Well, there was one thing, but it wasn’t a big
deal.

—
It wasn’t a big deal? Is that why Miss Hasabe
comm-satted me today while I was at the Arcology?

—
She comm-satted you?

—
Yes, and she told me about the whole thing. But
I want to hear it from you before I say anything.

—
I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Terry,
Scott, and Anthony were playing by the air vent. They had some
sweetbar wrappers and were making them hover over the vent. I was
playing with them and I made a little man out of a stylus tip and
put him on my wrapper. I was pretending he was riding on a
lev-barge, giving a speech like the Chancellor, but the wrapper
twisted and the stylus tip fell into the vent. The vent started
smoking and it stopped, so we ran to the other side of the room and
acted like we didn’t know what happened. They had to call a
maintenance bot to fix it. It didn’t take long to fix, but we had
lost class time because we had to wait in the hall. Miss Hasabe was
losing her mind and screaming at everyone and when she started
asking what happened, those guys told on me.

—
Is that it?

—
Well, no, not really. She calmed down a little
and asked me in front of the whole class what my problem was, and
why I was playing with the vent. It was kinda embarrassing and I
felt bad because I wasn’t the only one, so I told her that I wasn’t
the only one playing with it, but I didn’t tell who did it. She
asked me if I thought that it was a good idea to do something just
because everyone else did, and I told her that every day she’s
always making me do things because everyone else does it that way.
Then, she asked me if everyone was jumping off a bridge, would I
jump off too, and I told her that it depended on how high the
bridge was, what was underneath it, and why they were jumping off.
After that, the class started laughing and she completely lost her
y-drive and flipped out. She left class and a proxy came in for a
few minutes, and when she came back, she was still kinda fritzy,
but she was at least leveled-out again. She didn’t say anything
else to me for the rest of the class, so I thought everything was
atmospheric again. Besides, I was pretty hot at Terry, Scott, and
Anthony for making me out to be the vent monkey.

—
I want you to listen to me, because I don’t want
to repeat this again. I don’t care if your teacher is off her y and
x-axis, you don’t mouth off in class again, copasetic?

—
But she started it. The way she came at me was
sideways, Dada.

—
I understand that and I agree, but still, she
writes policy in that room. If she comes at you sideways, you
stomach it until you have a free moment, and you comm-sat me or you
accept the consequences.

—
Well, what if she’s being a bully and she’s dead
wrong? What if setting her level is worth the consequences?

—
If it is duly worth the trouble, and you feel
you’re man enough to re-write policy, then when I ask you what
happened, you damn sure better be man enough to tell me.

—
Fair enough, Dada.

—
Besides, I’m sure from now on, she’ll think
twice about asking questions she doesn’t want answered.

• • • • •

As the ship had settled in the electromagnetic net
inside the hangar, the armed men had stood around it as the hangar
door closed and the bay pressurized. They had surrounded the ship,
concentrating on the entrance hatch and cargo bay doors with guns
that were integrated into the design of their suits—presumably so
they could be fired in a vacuum. Instructions to lay down any arms
and surrender their ship for boarding and inspection had been
issued over their comm-link, and they had complied. The soldiers
that had boarded their ship were neither hospitable nor gentle. The
soldiers had shown complete disregard for the ship and equipment as
they had brusquely ushered the scientists from the bridge into the
hangar, down a long hallway, and directly into a climber unit. The
soldiers had only spoken to bark a direction through their speaker
units, usually followed by some scathing insult, or to tell one of
the scientists to shut up—usually followed by some barely
decipherable, but obviously more scathing, insult.

The alarming speed with which the climber
descended had been countered by what must have been a gravity wave
generator of some sort. The fall to the planet had taken a mere two
hours—an impressively short time to travel thirty thousand
kilometers in an elevator, but much too long to be shoulder to
shoulder, surrounded by surly soldiers with loaded weapons who
seemed to have a marked distaste for your presence—especially when
you had no idea what the hell was going on. Jang had remarked to
Cyrus that the station was called the J.L. Orbital as evidenced by
a placard in the climber, but he had been immediately threatened
with a weapon and told to shut his dung-sucking cake hole.

Now, traveling along the ave in a personnel
carrier that had been converted to carry freight rather than
humans, wispy apparitions of vapor, too ephemeral to be called
clouds, hang over the barren expanse like a cataract. The ave to
the city was a wide, unnaturally straight depression, honed to a
smoothness that made it look like water in the rays of Set that
wavered in the lines of heat rising from the surface.

The personnel lev that ushered them along was
deceptively fast and yet moved more smoothly than anything
planet-side Cyrus could remember. It was not clear how fast the
carrier was moving until they began to pass tall, monolithic spires
that seemed to mark each kilometer.

The road seemed to be leading toward a second
sun that stood at the end of the ave in defiance of the burning
ball of orange gas alarmingly low on the horizon behind them. As
they approached, Cyrus realized the orange flame they were speeding
toward was a reflection of the light from the star behind them, and
that the round ball that reflected it was a dome of some sort. It
must have been overwhelmingly large as the spires appeared at a
much higher frequency than its rate of growth.

Even though it was smaller and less dense
than the Earth in theory, everything about Asha this day seemed
foreboding and unreasonably big. The personnel lev moved past a
plateau alongside the road almost as fast as it had appeared on the
horizon. Then, there was a pebble that grew to a boulder the size
of the craft itself in a matter of seconds. The pilot must have
known the boulder was there because he reacted to it even before it
had become an obvious obstacle, accelerating the craft on its
z-axis, rising momentarily above the precipice of the plateau, and
then coming back smoothly down to its original altitude.

Jang leaned close to Cyrus, uttering beneath
his breath, “Did you notice something strange about that
z-shift?”

Cyrus mumbled a negative response through
closed lips.

“No hair-rise on the back of the neck. No EM
flux,” he explained through his own lips, tightly pursed.

“Gravity drive,” Cyrus muttered, a little too
loud. One of the soldiers, his face obscured by his vac-suit visor,
turned to face Cyrus. The soldier lifted the weapon enclosed within
the arm of the suit and bellowed through a loud speaker, “No
talking, terrasitic punt-mongrel!”

Momentarily the heat that flowed into Cyrus’s
face and centered behind his eyes overwhelmed his shock. He could
not take weapons drawn on him lightly, especially with the pretense
of intimidation. Even in his anger, Cyrus caught a glimpse of the
thin badge over the soldier’s heart. It did not display a name,
only a metal square with rounded corners and what looked like a
hexadecimal barcode with a number beneath it—43235. When the
soldier turned, the dome was large enough now to see that the light
reflected by the construction was not a reflection at all.
Blinding, a pale orange light was being cast from every inch of the
city’s protective covering, but it wasn’t consistent. It was hard
to look at for very long, but it seemed like the luminescence
throughout the dome wavered slightly, and near the lower parts of
the structure, the light seemed somewhat dimmer. All of the
scientists were forced to turn away or look toward the ground, but
the soldiers held their positions, the tinted faceplates of the
suits sheltering them from the increasingly fierce light of the
city.