Gardens of the Sun (21 page)

The Outers worked hard, eighteen hours a day, planning to quit Miranda ten days before the TPA ship arrived. They were still working when a nuclear warhead took out the old commune habitat on Titania.

The missile had been shot off by the TPA ship while it was still decelerating towards Uranus. It flared in on a trajectory that gained delta vee as it hooked around the ice giant, and headed straight out towards Titania and detonated five hundred metres above the tented habitat, vaporising it and melting a perfectly circular shallow bowl a kilometre across in the icy regolith. A clear message that the TPA wasn’t prepared to negotiate or take prisoners. That they had come here to clean out a nest of vermin.

And so, before the oncoming ship could launch more missiles, the Free Outers abandoned the habitat and boarded their ships in jittery haste. The last of Miranda that Macy saw before cycling through Elephant’s airlock was the scatter of decorative bricks she and Newt had dumped from the tug’s external lockers. Lumps of slag derelict on trampled dust.

They left without any formality beyond coordination of launch of their ships. Eighteen equipped with the fast-fusion motor, followed by four slower unconverted shuttles packed with as much equipment and construction material as they could carry and crewed by volunteers. Burning up from the floor of the deep groove where the habitat was hidden and from pits hidden in parallel grooves or close to the rims of craters on the rolling plain beyond, flying straight out from the dark northern hemisphere of the little moon into the diluted glare of the sun.

Idriss Barr sent a brief message from ship to ship, saying that they had become pioneers during their sojourn on Miranda and they would always be pioneers, never refugees. But as Uranus’s crescent dwindled behind them into the starry black Macy couldn’t help thinking that, rather than setting out on a grand adventure, they were simply running away, like rabbits scattering from the shadow of a hawk. One way or another she seemed to have been running away all her life. From the bleak compound of the Church of the Divine Regression, huddled on the dust deserts of Kansas, to the slums of Pittsburgh, where she’d briefly fallen in love before running away again, and joining the R&R Corps. And that had taken her all the way to Jupiter: to Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, where she’d become embroiled in a sleazy little tangle of intrigue and sabotage and murder. She’d blown the whistle on that and had defected, and had been rewarded with incarceration in an uptight little city from which she escaped with the help of Newt, running with him further out to Saturn, and his family home on Dione. Then war had come, and they’d gone on the run for the second time. And here she was, running away yet again.

The observatories on Oberon, Titania and Ariel, and a satellite left in orbit around Miranda, transmitted views of the TPA ship as it closed on Uranus, describing an aerobraking manoeuvre through the tenuous outer reaches of the atmosphere that drew a violet contrail halfway around the ice giant, then jettisoning its scorched heat shield and hooking out past Oberon on a periapsis raise manoeuvre that, inside six hours, brought it into an equatorial parking orbit beyond the broken arcs at the outer edge of the ring system. A spray of drones shot out towards the five larger moons, swung into orbit around them, and quickly located and took down the observatories. The satellite orbiting Miranda transmitted glimpses of nuclear strikes on decoy tents that had been set up on Oberon and Ariel, and then its signal cut out. The fleeing Free Outers would never know if the TPA ship located the habitat, or the ships hidden around and about, or the little refuges they’d scattered across Miranda’s surface. All they could do was plough on towards Neptune.

 

Think of the Solar System as a clock, with the sun at its centre and the planets sweeping out rings of increasing diameter around it, moving counterclockwise. Set Uranus at twelve o’clock, with Saturn off to the left at roughly nine o’clock, and Neptune all the way across the dial at half past five, on the far side of the sun. More than seven billion kilometres away, a vast gulf that even the ships equipped with the fast-fusion motor would take twenty-seven weeks to cross, while the unconverted shuttles would take much longer, more than two years.

The little fleet forged steadily onwards, dropping empty fuel tanks behind them as they rose out of Uranus’s gravity well. At last their motors cut out and they were falling free, vanishingly small and faint motes drifting in the great ocean of night.

Most people slept most of the time. Outers had the knack of being able to drop into a deep sleep similar to hibernation, slowing heartbeat and breathing and metabolism, a spark of consciousness remaining so that they could wake up in just a few minutes. But although Macy had been given retroviral treatments to help her adapt to the stresses of microgravity, the hibernation tweak was more radical than adding a few regulatory genes and so she slept in a coffin like the one she’d slept in when she’d first voyaged out from Earth to Jupiter, cooled down to -4° Centigrade, at the borderland between life and death.

Waking was slow, and painful. She was briefly aware of choking up pink fluorosilicones that had infused her lungs, and then she passed out. When she woke again, sick, blinded and nearly paralysed by the universe’s worst hangover, she gradually realised that she was in a cocoon hung in a corner of Elephant’s living space. Someone swam towards her. It was Newt, saying something she couldn’t grasp. Words that were just noise, lost in the distracting thump of her headache. She slept and woke again, racked by bone-deep aches, her stomach clenched and empty, her bowels distended around fifty kilogrammes of concrete.

She was still strapped in the cocoon. A peristaltic line was feeding clear nutrient fluid into a vein in her left wrist. The living space was empty, lit by dim red light. Elephant’s motor was making a comforting rumble and pulling about 0.1 g sternwards. After unplugging the line in her wrist and unzipping the cocoon, Macy tumbled to the padded floor; it took all her strength to haul her aching carcass up the rungs to where Newt and Ziff Larzer and Herschel Wu lay side by side on the crash couches that took up most of the little control blister.

Newt started to get up, and Macy stumbled forward and dropped to her knees and embraced him, breathed in the familiar warmth and smell of him.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

‘I think I’m alive. More or less.’

‘You shouldn’t be up.’

‘What do you want me to do - go back to sleep? I’ve been asleep too long.’ Macy bumped fists with Ziff Larzer and Herschel Wu and said, ‘We’re all still here, so I guess the TPA didn’t try to cut us off.’

The three men exchanged glances.

Cold electricity zipped down Macy’s spine. ‘Something happened,’ she said.

Ziff Larzer said, ‘We have good news and bad news, and news we’re not sure about.’

Herschel Wu twiddled his fingers in the air: the memo space in front of the couches opened up and displayed a navigation plot curving through the orbits of moons scribed around a fat planet, tagged with way points, a bead blinking halfway along it. He said, ‘We’re about a hundred thousand kilometres out from Neptune, coming towards the end of a burn that will insert us into orbit.’

‘Around Triton or around Neptune? I thought we were heading directly for Triton,’ Macy said.

A telescope view of Neptune’s half-globe hung in a corner of the memo space, darker blue than Uranus, differentiated into distinct bands. Pale elongated wisps of cloud. A small black spot capped with a feathering of white cloud rode above the equator, close to the fuzzy terminator line between day and night. The ice giant was girdled by the bright circles of its two prominent rings, and hanging beyond the rings was a tiny disc: Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, their new home.

‘There’s a slight problem,’ Newt said.

‘Is that the bad news?’

‘The bad news is, we lost some people,’ Ziff Larzer said.

‘The unconverted shuttles,’ Newt said. ‘The TPA hit them with missiles. Nuclear warheads.’

Macy’s entire skin felt as if it had turned to ice and for a moment everything seemed to drop away from her. She’d known the people who had volunteered to crew the shuttles. Myk Thorne, Tor Hertz, Darcy Dunnant, Hamilton Browne . . . Sixteen people, all gone.

Newt was studying her with soft concern; she told him she was okay and he said that she was far from okay.

Ziff Larzer gave up his couch. Macy was persuaded to clamber onto it and she accepted a pouch of lukewarm mint tea that Herschel Wu brought up from the living space: the sovereign remedy for every kind of illness, he said.

‘I’m not ill, just half dead,’ Macy said, but she sipped the tea and, yes, felt a little better. Strong enough to ask about the third piece of news.

‘It’s to do with where we’re headed,’ Newt said. ‘Seems there’s a bit of a problem.’

‘A big problem,’ Herschel Wu said.

‘There are already people on Triton,’ Ziff Larzer said.

‘Isn’t that good?’ Macy said.

‘They’re Ghosts,’ Newt said.

‘What you still haven’t learned after all this time,’ Frankie Fuente told Cash Baker, ‘is how to relax.’

‘I’m pretty relaxed right now,’ Cash said. ‘Maybe you should take a picture to remind yourself what it looks like.’

‘What you are right now is the exact opposite of relaxed. You’re wired so tight I could nail your head to one end of a plank and your feet to the other and play a tune on you. And you know what? You’re like that all the time.’

The two men were leaning side by side at the edge of an infinity pool, chest-deep in warm clear water, elbows resting on polished concrete, looking out across restored rainforest that stretched to the horizon under an enamelled blue sky pierced directly overhead by the white-hot nail of the sun. Behind them was the stone-and-glass saucer of the hilltop house owned by the governor of the Bernal family’s territory, set amongst manicured lawns and beds of tropical flowers. In a few hours, Frankie Fuente and Cash Baker would mingle with guests at a cocktail party on one of its broad terraces and give short talks about their role in the Quiet War, the plans for reconstruction, and the opportunities presented by opening up the Outers’ store of knowledge and exploiting their artistic, scientific, and engineering expertise.

Cash Baker was a bona fide gold-plated war hero, dividing his time between teaching cadets at the academy in Monterrey and public-relations tours: giving speeches at schools and universities and rallies, visiting research institutions, shipyards, factories and munition plants that supported and supplied the Air Defence Force wings at Jupiter and Saturn, and making nice to members of the great families that dominated the political and economic scene in Greater Brazil. It wasn’t a bad life. Teaching cadets was useful work; Cash tried to do his very best by them. And promoting the work out at Jupiter and Saturn, that was important, too, and surprisingly easy. He was able to draw on his deep reserve of lollygagging Texas charm to woo his hosts and their guests, and before setting out on the cocktail-and-chat circuit he’d spent a month being trained in public speaking and the finer points of etiquette and social chit-chat, from how to eat an oyster to the correct form of address for the wife of a foreign ambassador.

The benefits were all that anyone could ask for. He stayed at some of the best houses and hotels in Greater Brazil, enjoyed every kind of luxury and met with all kinds of important and famous people. He’d even toured the European Union, visited Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow . . .

But it wasn’t what he wanted, which was to get back to the job he’d won by training, hard work, and application of his God-given talent to the virtual exclusion of everything else: flying J-2 singleship space planes in combat. It was what he had been born to do. It was what he had been made to do, when he’d been fitted with the neural network that allowed him to interface directly with his bird. To become one with her. And although he knew that part of his life was over, he still ached for it every day.

Physically, he was almost fully recovered, apart from some weakness in his right side, and a slight, almost undetectable limp. But his head still wasn’t quite right. His brain had been pierced. The swathe clear-cut through its delicate, intricate forest had been regrown, but his memory was still full of holes: he couldn’t remember a thing about the mission that had nearly killed him, or much of anything else about the mission to the Saturn System. And despite a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, he suffered from wild mood swings. He’d be in the middle of some completely routine task - exercising, preparing a lecture, cleaning his shoes - and his vision would blur and he’d feel wetness running down his cheeks: tears, stupid tears. Or he’d be picking at his food during a banquet and would have to stamp on the sudden impulse to pick up the plate and throw it at the person opposite, or stab the bore next to him with his fork just to shut the fucker up. Or, and this was the worst thing, the world would suddenly go flat. As if colour and meaning had been sucked out of everything, leaving only stuff like poor imitations of the real thing, people like awkward robots: meat puppets spouting flat gibberish.

He’d been told to expect sudden alterations in his internal weather system; emotional lability was a condition commonly found in people recovering from violent traumas to the head. But no one had warned him about the awful feelings of flat unreality, worse than any species of depression or despair, and he’d suffered in silence because it was the kind of thing that crazy people must feel, and he didn’t want to be crazy because they’d never let him anywhere near a singleship or any kind of flying machine ever again, even if he was a war hero. So he hadn’t ever mentioned these spells to the psychologist who checked him every month, or told his best friend Luiz Schwarcz about them the one time they’d met when Luiz had come back to Earth for a spell of leave before lighting out for Saturn again, and he’d done his best to keep it hidden from his handlers and the men and women who partnered him on the PR tours - the other war heroes.