Engine City (20 page)

“How about rocket exhausts?” asked Ann Derige.

“We have no instruments to detect them,” said the orange Multiplier. “Though doubtless,” it added in a hopeful tone, waving its limbs excitedly, “such instruments could be improvised.”

“Very difficult anyway,” said Telesnikov. “Fusion torches and such apart, and even they’d be almost invisible at this distance.”

“We seem to have arrived at a negative conclusion,” said Delavar. “The deep-space communication suggests a deep-space presence, the absence of evidence of antigravity or nuclear drives suggests that this has been accomplished with conventional rockets. This is more or less what we would have anticipated, if we had done any anticipating.”

Was this a dig at Matt? If it was, he laughed it off.

A day later, they jumped a year.

The dark side of Lucifer. Susan liked the idea; she knew that the Lightbearer was a dark power in some perverse mythologies. The interstellar flotilla, the
Investigator
and its five companions, hung in starlight a few hundred meters above the planet’s cracked surface. This was lower than many of its mountains; their chances of detection equivalently small—

“We’ve been pinged,” said Ann.

The two Multipliers pounced toward their apparatus. Their hands scrabbled over it and each other. Outside, the dish aerial moved, tracking.

“There appears to be a small artificial satellite in polar orbit.”

“We can improvise a control system to send one of your missiles toward it.”

“Within two of its orbits.”

Phil Johnson looked over at Matt. It was Phil who gave orders to the crew, but it had been well established that it was Matt who was leading this expedition.

“Go for that?”

Matt rubbed his nose. “No,” he said. “I have a better idea.”

He turned to the Multipliers. “Could you ask one of the skiffs outside to go after the satellite, catch it, and reinsert it in equatorial orbit?”

Even he could hardly have expected the speed with which his suggestion was carried out. The orange Multiplier tapped at the apparatus. Within seconds one of the skiffs riding alongside disappeared. Two minutes later, it was back.

“We have picked up and redirected the satellite. It was approximately one meter in diameter.”

“Fucking sputnik,” said Matt. “Now let’s shift a thousand or so kilometers out of the way.”

“Why?” asked Johnson.

“We’ve been spotted by what is probably a scientific satellite mapping Lucifer,” Matt said. “Within about one minute, the information will reach Nova Terra. If it’s a purely scientific probe, the likely result is that it won’t be processed for months. If it’s not, if it’s part of their space-defense network, we could be burned by a particle beam in about five or six minutes. So let’s move.”

They moved. It wasn’t a lightspeed jump, just a very fast move. The landscape below didn’t look any different.

“Right,” said Matt, “now we set up a jump to Nova Terra. Make it somewhere on the surface with plenty of cover and far away from any settled areas. Ann, could you patch up that map again?”

Matt peered at the map for a moment, then pointed at a zigzag line marking the northern border of the Republic of New Babylon. “There,” he said. “In the forests just north of the mountains, on the north side of the border. It looks pretty well uninhabited.”

Everybody just stared at him.

“I was wrong about Lucifer,” he said. “It’s not a safe place to lurk. The safest place I can think of is Nova Terra itself. If you’re watching for invaders from space, where’s the last place you’d look?”

“They’ll have spy satellites,” Telesnikov pointed out. “They’ll see
something.
”

“Yup,” said Matt. “I’m counting on it. I’m also guessing that the spy satellites are not likely to be those of”—he peered again at the map—“the Free Duchy of Illyria, and that it and New Babylon are not exactly friends.”

“And if you’re wrong?” said Phil.

Matt shrugged. “If I’m wrong, we’ll move somewhere else.”

Salasso stood up. “I am afraid,” he said, “that that is not an adequate answer. I think I see what you are trying to do, Matt, and I very much look forward to finding out how the Nova Terran news media cover—or cover up—the anomalous event of a satellite suddenly orbiting at ninety degrees to its previous orbit. I agree entirely that Nova Terra is the best place to lurk, now that we have found that even Lucifer is under observation. However, I strongly suggest that we make our base somewhere much less accessible and much less noticeable than a border region, however wild it may appear.”

He pointed to the map. “You will notice,” he went on, “that the lines depicting political divisions are only present on one continent, Genea, the one inhabited mainly by the hominidae.” He tapped a long finger on the other one. “The one inhabited mainly by saurs is still marked simply as Sauria.”

It was something so obvious that none of them had noticed it. Every planet in their experience had at least an island continent reserved for saurs, and they had taken this one’s for granted.

“I don’t think blundering into a saur city or manufacturing plant is going to make us any less conspicuous,” said Matt.

“Indeed not,” said Salasso. “But as the Multipliers have told us, there are no skiffs operational except around the occasional starship, presumably in the harbor of New Babylon. That suggests strongly to me that there are no, or very few, saurs present on the planet. If for any reason we are detected there, what could be more natural than for our skiffs to be taken for those of returning or remaining saurs? Also, Sauria includes extensive areas of rainforest, mountain ranges, temperate forest, ruined cities. One in particular has ruins more than adequate to conceal our entire expedition.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Susan.

The saur gave her his almost undetectable smile. “I remember it well,” he said.

At that moment, Susan noticed Matt looking at his watch. A moment later, a bright flare filled the windows on one side, and the viewscreens went into an unstable cycle of failed adjustments. Several alarms went off. It was as though the ship had drifted out of the shadow cone into the savage sunlight; except it was the wrong window, and the light was fading, not increasing.

Matt looked from his watch to the window. “Plasma-cannon strike,” he said. “Vaporized the ground just below where we were a few minutes ago. From lunar orbit, by my reckoning—shit, they must have something big up there, one hefty motherfucker of a death ray projector. Let’s jump.”

They jumped.

Rhododendrons and flying squirrels in a big square of blue. Susan staggered away from the foot of the
Investigator’s
stair ladder, mistiming her steps in the subtly different gravity, then found her feet and ran to the door of the hangar-sized megalithic structure within which the ship and the ships were parked. They’d come out of the lightspeed jump a thousand meters up and a few thousand meters away—the Multiplier navigators, and Salasso’s memory, were that precise. Strangely, the flying squirrels avoided the structure, which might have seemed a suitable roost; Susan noticed as she ran that the floor was thick with dirt, but clear of any animal droppings.

Out in the open she stopped, and breathed deeply. She was ecstatic with relief. Only now that she was out of the ship could she realize how confined she had felt inside it; how tightly she had screwed a lid down on that feeling of confinement. The air was colder than she had expected, and better than she had hoped. It carried a sweet-sour smell of vegetation. She was facing northward, the mid-morning sun high to her right. Ahead of her was an area of ground covered with short grass and rhododendron overgrowth, riotous with rotten flowers. After about a hundred meters, the ground dropped away sharply to a rainforest valley many kilometers across, on the far side of which a range of mountains raised jagged white teeth to the sky. The cacophony of whoops and the symphony of chirps from the various species and sizes of flying squirrel, and the buzz and hum of insects, were the only sounds, and they were enough.

She turned to look back at the great door, fifty meters in width and height, whose lintel cast the black shadow from which the others were emerging. The two saurs first, and the other eight humans, and a dozen Multipliers. The aliens, to her surprise, suddenly rushed past everyone else, past her, and leapt onto the tops of the rhododendron bushes and then away down the slope into the trees, chasing the startled flying squirrels into flapping, screaming flocks.

“Are you all right?” Matt asked.

“Zeus! Wow! Am I all right!”

Nobody else seemed to be having quite the same reaction. They all stepped out into the glaring sunlight cautiously, sniffing the air like prey animals; turned around at once to check the sky and the skyline; the saurs wandered off to examine the side of the entrance. Matt stood beside her and looked about with more enthusiasm than the others, but without abandon.

“Plasma rifles,” he said.

His high temperature seemed to have run its course; Susan noticed that she couldn’t see the tracery of subcutaneous scar tissue he’d ruefully pointed out when they’d first met. It must be something about the light.

“What?”

“We should keep them handy. There are dinosaurs on Sauria.” He laughed harshly. “Perhaps that’s what’s kept it from being colonized by humans. ‘Here be dragons.’ ”

“Assuming it
has
kept it,” said Telesnikov, coming up. “I can see a scramble for this continent as soon as the rival nation-states on the other one work themselves up to it.”

“Yeah,” said Matt vaguely. “The falling rate of profit, and all that.”

“I hope not,” said Susan. “Wow, it’s beautiful!”

Matt’s attention snapped back to her. “You’re very high,” he said.

“It’s, um, just good to be off the ship,” she said. “Uh, cabin fever, you know?”

“Oh, shit,” said Matt. ‘Wow I get it. You suffer from—”

“
Don’t
fucking say it!”

The two Cosmonauts laughed unsympathetically.

“Just as well you didn’t get the tests we went through—”

“You mean, the pipes we went—”

She grabbed his arm hard enough to hurt. “Don’t. Fucking. Say it.”

Matt gave her a warmer look. “All right,” he said. “Sorry. Christ, I’ve been worried about you. You haven’t cracked a smile since we jumped from Planet Selkie.” Then he ruined it all by adding: “Thought you were missing your parents or having PMS or something.”

She shrugged away from him. He looked at her helplessly for a moment, then turned away and called and beckoned everyone together.

“We have a couple of things to talk about,” he said. “Let’s get the first one out of the way while our friends are away enjoying themselves. Have any of you here taken up the Multipliers’ offer?”

They all shook their heads. Including the saurs, Susan noticed, as if the question might be relevant to them. Maybe it was.

“I didn’t know they could just do it, like, any time,” said Obadiah Hynde, the rocketeer. “Didn’t know we had the option, see.”

“Well, we do,” said Matt. “They don’t need machines. It’s like . . . an infection. They give it to you. I took it, when we were lurking out in the cometary cloud.”

“How could you do something so crazy and irresponsible?” said Ramona. “Oh, what am I saying? I am talking to Matt after all. Well, Matt, tell us what it is like.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Matt. “I don’t know if I can, because one part of it didn’t take. The orange Multiplier, the one who tried, said it was ‘like biting fruit and finding stone.’ They read your genes, then tweak them. I think that’s what they do. They could read mine but they couldn’t alter them, because they’ve been altered already by the process—whatever it was—that gave us longevity. But apart from that . . . yeah, I can tell you what it’s like. It’s like having an infection that doesn’t make you ill, then an infestation that doesn’t itch, and after that you remember things that never happened to you. That’s the most disturbing thing about it, I’ll give you that. But it’s not delusional . . . I remember them happening, but I don’t think they happened to me. I can remember doing things, without thinking that I did them.”

“What kind of things?” asked Ramona.

“Budding,” said Matt. “Seeing my hand break off and run away, and wishing it well. Sharing knowledge, knowledge of the world and knowledge of how my body was built. The pleasure of that.” He laughed. “Our friends have more fun than we know. And now I know more. Strange things. So anyway—is anyone else willing to try it?”

“So you’re telling us,” said Ramona, “that the Multis can give us the long life. Except for those who already have it. For the rest of us, it’s hardly an issue—I don’t think there’s one of us here who is over twenty-five, am I right? And besides that, they mess with your head. So what’s the advantage in taking the risk?”

“Its one big advantage,” said Matt, “apart from the long life, is that you do not fall sick, and that most injuries self-repair very fast. I do have that.”

“How,” asked Telesnikov, “if they could not alter your genes?”

“That part of it has nothing to do with genes,” said Matt. “It has to do with . . . some of the very small offspring of the Multipliers continuing to live inside you.”

“You stay infected?” Ramona Gracia took a couple of steps away from him. “No thanks.”

Matt shrugged and spread his hands. “I see I haven’t sold anyone on this. Well, you can all watch and see if I turn into something strange.”

(“You’re there already,” Ramona muttered.)

“The next thing we need to discuss is what we are doing. We didn’t have any detailed plan before we came here, because we didn’t know what we’d find. In a sense, we still don’t. We know they have separate states, and that at least one of them, most likely Nova—New Babylon, as it calls itself now—has some pretty heavy space defense. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy our chances going up against that kind of hardware with our fireworks. I’ve considered stunts like, you know, jumping a skiff or even the
Investigator
, right inside one of the orbital forts, but, well, I’d rather not rely on dumb luck or brute force. So.” He brushed imaginary dust off his palms. “Anyone got any bright ideas?”