Erebus (28 page)

“Can I go back in? Please,” he sobbed. “Just let me go back to her.”

“Not yet, Ronnie. I still need your help,” I told him. “Which moon?”

“I don’t…a smaller one. The captured-asteroid one.”

“The small one?” I looked up at Sihota.

“Iwa,” he said quietly.

“Was it Iwa, Ronnie?”

“Yes, yes, that sounds familiar. Can I go back in? Please,” he whispered. His bloodshot eyes were wide and staring around the room.

“In a minute.” I squeezed his hand reassuringly. “Did anyone go look?”

“No, no. I don’t think so. A few days later, he started joking that he was just bullshitting. That he had strung us all along. After that, he never mentioned it. Then he went home. Back to Earth, I mean.”

“Okay, thank you, Ronnie. Just one more thing. This pyramid—”

“No, no-no-no,” Ronnie shook his head frantically. “It wasn’t a pyramid. Pagoda—that’s what he said it was—a pagoda.”

“Thanks, Ronnie.” I patted his arm and stood up. “We’ll let you go back in now.”

“Thank you.” He breathed a sigh of relief and, with a trembling hand, reached across to the console.

***

“You’ve fucking left him like that? For how bloody long?” I was fuming as I stormed up the path, and it was Langdon’s turn to be on the defensive.

“I told you, we don’t have any therapists here. He’s too far gone,” she said miserably.

“So much for this being a perfect little community,” I scoffed.

“Don’t you think we know it’s bad? Have you ever dealt with a VR addict?”

I thought back to a job in London while I was still a young probationary constable. I remembered walking into a stinking, disgusting apartment, finding a VR-addict mother who had let her two children, one a toddler and the other a baby, die of starvation in squalor and filth, all because she was wired up pretty much twenty-four/seven to some immersive online game. They were the first dead children I had seen, but, sadly, not the last. “Yes, and it’s tragic—for everyone involved. But the one thing I am sure about is they can’t be left to just rot,” I said more gently.

“So tell me, what are we supposed to do? You have seen what he’s like when we pull him out of it. He’s happiest replaying memories of his dead wife.”

I’m sure he is,
I thought. VR addiction was insidious. Our HUDs, implants, computing technology—all were steps along the road to that sickness but were necessary to function in modern society. Some people just fell into it; others made conscious decisions to immerse themselves. It was a horrible catch twenty-two situation, and some people simply couldn’t balance their lives enough to be able to cope with the technology.

“Listen,” I said, my anger abating. From my Met days, I knew just how frustrating addicts were, no matter what their poison of choice was, whether it was drugs or technological. “
Gagarin
probably has updated therapy schemes and things like that in her archives. I’ll get them sent down to you. Just please, help him. Otherwise, someone’s going to go in that house one day and find him dead. No one deserves to die alone like that.”

“I’ll get you a link for the doctor. Perhaps you can forward the files to him, and we can see if he can sort something out?” Mrs. Langdon suggested.

“That’ll be the first thing I do.”

“What do we know about this Akarga?” I asked as we walked back along the faux-gas-lantern-lit shale path to our hotel.

“It’s a large gas giant. Would have been even bigger a long time ago, but much of the atmosphere has boiled off. Twenty moons, none of which have been extensively surveyed, ranging from tiny babies like Iwa all the way up to something the size of Mercury,” Sihota replied as his footsteps crunched on the path.

“How come it hasn’t been surveyed?” It seemed weird to me; people had been here for nearly sixty years, after all.

“The Sirius exploration mission has always been about astronomical research into the twin stars. Planetary research, beyond this place,” Sihota gestured around, encompassing the small bubble-covered village, “is virtually nonexistent. No one has any particular desire to mine the place, especially when you look at how easy it is in the Tau Ceti system, so they simply haven’t bothered.”

“Fair enough.” We walked on in silence past a couple more cottages before I spoke again. “Someone has redacted, in a pretty piss poor way, the flight data for the
Longhorn
. Considering Jerry left pretty much as soon as he could after that last repair run, I suspect someone paid him off to “forget” what he saw out there.”

“Not a bad supposition. It fits the evidence.”

“See?” I slapped the pilot on his back. “We’ll make a cop of you yet.”

“Really? You gunning for a job swap?” Sihota said with a rare grin.

“Hell, no.” I thought back to the complicated cockpit. “I can barely tie my shoelaces, let alone fly a ship.”

“Small steps, my friend, small steps.” His momentary levity slipped from his face. “So if he got bought off, then, by extension…”

“Someone paid him off, yes. And that someone would have to be in a position to make that offer thirty or so years ago. Let’s have a look.” I paused on the grass-bordered path, opened my HUD, and began running a search. “The original gate was sponsored by Universities Consolidated. Does that ring any bells?”

“Yes. They are a venture capitalist outfit, contrary to what the name indicates. They fund gateways to systems that have some kind of deep scientific interest that may be a little more long term than the quick wins the corporations tend go for. As I recall, they did so with technical and financial assistance from Red Star. Red Star’s motivations were a little more pragmatic, though. They were attempting to have the first interstellar starship return to Sol, and Sirius was a good target destination.”

“Red Star again?” I asked.

Sihota nodded. “They lost the race. The
Endeavour
Tau Ceti expedition returned a few months earlier than the Sirius mission.”

“Okay,” I said. “Following that, a number of corporations decided to throw research missions through, right?”

“Again, not unusual. Once the gateway has been set up, that’s the majority of the cost taken care of.”

“So,” I said as we climbed over a low sty and walked through a small meadow, “where’s the motive to actually set up a gateway, then? Why not just wait until your rival does it, takes on the outlay, and then just go through?”

“You sound like the interview panel on my Helios assessment, Layton, which, I might add, I dipped,” Sihota said with a sad smile. “That is a combination of things. The original draft of the Outer Space Treaty said that no nation or entity could claim ownership of a celestial object. However, when the gateways were created, the entity that built each one effectively had de facto ownership of the destination as they were the only people who could get there.”

“So they had to open them up to everyone to use?” I asked.

“That’s right. It was decided in what’s now called the Lagrange Accord that ownership had to be negated. The best way to do so was to legislate that a gateway had to be open to anyone who could pay a fair toll. This led to a second problem; it removed the impetus to be the first to set up a gate. What the Accord decided was that whoever funded a given gate would have a year and a day of exclusive use to give them a head start and a few quick wins from the system. That and the toll they could demand would likely go a long way toward recouping the set-up costs.”

“But they wouldn’t even be able to get back to Earth in a year and a day.” I said.
      

“No, but they would be the first in a position to return with any prizes,” Sihota said. “Whether that be astronomical data, biologicals, or simply the latest pet. Of course, this was all just in the early days. The gates are currently being propagated through the local galactic neighborhood by means of Von Neumann gateships. That’s why passage through the gates has become all but free.”

This I knew about. The first VN gateship was launched to great fanfare when I was still at school. They were to herald in a new age for humankind, and so we did lots of projects on the subject. They were clever robots that launched to a target star and built a gateway in situ and five “daughter” gateships, which would then spread to five neighboring stars. Rinse and repeat. But all this came much later than the original gates that were set up by the corporations and governments.

“Clever, I guess.” The economics of building gateways had never really crossed my mind. The sad truth was that there needed to be a financial imperative to go to the stars. “So Universities Consolidated and Red Star were the first through, but a year and a day later, every man and his dog could make the trip. It was the rest of the Big Five—Helios, Shen Kong, Paracola, and Zvesda—who followed with a few smaller concerns.”

“Yes, once the initial gold rush had settled down,” Sihota said, “Helios put the largest contingent here, although that term is strictly relative. They weren’t that interested in the place. It was more an expedition of a few hundred people.”

We finally got to the tiny hotel, well, boardinghouse would be more accurate, and let ourselves in. It wasn’t locked, which was somewhat disconcerting for a city boy like me, but I doubt anyone would want my change of clothes and wash bag, which was about all I had bought along.

“Any of those major corps would have the funds to make the kind of offer that would make a Skipper rethink his lifestyle and head back to Earth,” Sihota continued as he seated himself in one of the arm chairs in the small, quaint lounge.

“Goddamn it, I wish I could just link the office and ask them to run a check. This light speed barrier is inconvenient, to say the least. Sixteen years to get a reply is just…it’s just…” I trailed off. It felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach.

“Are you okay?” Sihota asked.

“Eight years have gone by, haven’t they?” I murmured. This talk had begun to crystallize in my mind just how far—and how long—I had come. I’d known in theory, but in my gut? It was just hitting me.

“Sit down, Layton,” he said. Standing back up, he gently guided me by the arm into the seat he had vacated.

“Shit.” I felt woozy and leaned back into the chair. The blood rushed to my head. A warning on my HUD showed my pulse was racing.

“Easy. It’s to be expected.”

“Everyone’s going to be eight years older. Sixteen, by the time we get back.” That fact was hitting me like sledgehammer.

“You’re having a discontinuity attack. It’ll pass,” he said, his voice calm and soothing. “Your emotions have caught up with where…when we are. It’s common in star travel.”

“In that case, why the fuck are you so calm?” I snapped.

Sihota smiled. “Either it hasn’t hit me yet or, psychologically, I was prepared for it. After all, I wanted to be a star traveler, a Skipper. Maybe I’ve come to peace with it already, or maybe I’m going to get hit tomorrow. Just breathe.”

“Why the hell did I even come along? It’s not like I can offer anything. I’m just a cop!” The rational side of me knew I was whinging now, but still, I couldn’t help myself.

“Layton, everyone who goes through the gate gets assessed as to whether they can cope with it. Most who do have years of training and preparation. They get their affairs in order. As far as I’m aware, we are unique, blasting through a gateway with just a few days' notice, no preparation, nothing. No wonder you’re feeling put out.”

“Everyone back home will have moved on and gotten older. Me? I’m still the same. What the hell can I bring to this mission? I don’t even know why I’m here!”

“We needed you to come with us,” Sihota said calmly, trying to placate me. “Look, I’m a pilot, a damn good one, too. But chasing a criminal, terrorist, or whatever Frain is? That’s what you, Vance, and Major Phillips are for. Hell, you and I wouldn’t even be standing on this rock and have uncovered the Mitchell lead if you hadn’t pushed to get us down here. The rest of us? We are just here to help you do it. Vance is probably going through the same thing you are.”

“Not Dexter?” I gave a weak smile.

“Frampton,” he said with a grin, “is probably loving every second of this.”

When I finished up with my ignoble wobble, Sihota suggested we grab a couple of hours rest while we waited for
Gagarin
to return. My good intentions to sleep it off didn’t quite work, though. I just lay on my creaky wooden bed in the tiny boardinghouse room and ruminated.

I’d always been pretty chill, able to roll with the punches, sometimes literally. To actually have a freak-out was pretty rare for me. The fact I had one alarmed me almost as much as the reason why.

Sixteen years for me—how long we’d actually be gone for. Sixteen years ago, subjectively, I had just finished university and had rolled up fresh faced for my first day at New Hendon, the training school for the Metropolitan Police, in an affluent, leafy part of London. For everyone back on Earth, that was now twenty-four years ago. If I were to turn around and go back through the gate right now, by the time I got back, that event would be thirty-two years in the past—that was almost my entire lifetime.

I’d known it rationally, but, as Sihota said, I’d only just processed it. To everyone I knew, I’d be a distant memory, that guy from way back when who’d disappeared on short notice. I wondered where they thought I had gone, what they thought had happened to me.

“Shit,” I murmured. I had completely forgotten my promise to my parents to send a message as soon as I could.

As I lay in bed, I opened up a HUDmail and began striving for some words. “Hey, Mother, Dad. Just getting settled in. Things are pretty good here. Life is a little basic, if you get my meaning.” I opened up a video feed and let it play around the sparsely appointed room, capturing the faux-wood desk, small holocube, and nondescript photo murals on the wall of green Earth scenes. “But it is nice to go back to basics. Anyway, just keeping my promise. I have to go back to work. Laters, Gaters,” I signed off with my customary goodbye to them.

I dragged myself into the shower, letting the warm water of another world flow over my body. That was the other weird thing. I’d shared the same casual childhood dream of many to travel to the stars, but I had never actually believed that one day I would be here on some icy rock circling a star that wasn’t our sun. And definitely not having a shower trillions of miles from home in a boardinghouse that wouldn’t look out of place in some country village.