Gardens of the Sun (43 page)

Captain Neves held him as he choked out his secrets, told him that none of it mattered.

‘So much blood,’ he said. He had a wretched, empty look. ‘Once you start killing, it’s hard to stop. Because it makes things so simple. It gets rid of the problem. It clears a path. I’ve waded in blood. Swum in it. And as long as I got what I wanted I didn’t care. But all of it, everything I have, is soaked in blood . . .’

‘Hush,’ Captain Neves said. She was cradling him in her lap, stroking his braids as he sobbed and snuffled. As she had held hurt and unhappy children when she had been no more than a child herself, in the dusty camps in the great desert of the American Midwest. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone now. We’ll buy ourselves out after this, just like we agreed, and go to Earth, and start over. We’ll have such fine times together. You’ll see.’

Slowly, Loc began to recover, ascending day by day from the depths of his depression like a diver returning to the sunlit surface of the ocean. He and Captain Neves found an observation blister where they could avoid the rest of the people on the ship, play their little games, talk hour after hour. Stars scattered everywhere in the black sky wrapped around them: stars of every colour and brightness everywhere they looked. Captain Neves pointed out and named constellations, something she’d learned as a kid out on the ruined prairies. They made love after their fashion, and afterwards blotted floating droplets of blood from the air. They talked about everything they wanted to do when they returned to Earth. Loc said that they could be on their way almost as soon as they had returned to Saturn. He would find a way of getting her a posting in Greater Brazil. They wouldn’t be detained by debriefings or discussions about following up the negotiations with the Outers because the negotiations would come to nothing.

Captain Neves was happy to listen to his plans about the future, his fluent and cynical contempt for his superiors. He was healing.

 

Slowly, Neptune resolved from a bright star to a minute blue disc. The freighter fired up its motor and spent several hours decelerating at 0.5 g - after all the time they’d spent in the various microgravities of Saturn’s moons, this was a crushing force that more or less immobilised Loc and Captain Neves - slowing so that it could be captured by Neptune’s gravity, entering into a wide orbit and creeping towards the outermost moon, Neso, where the Outers were waiting for them.

It was a dark, irregular rock just sixty kilometres across, a fragment of a moon that had been broken up by tidal forces when Triton had been captured: one face an undulating cratered plain that had once been part of the surface of its parent body, the rest cut by shear planes and deep fractures, like the broken roots of a rotten tooth. It traced a retrograde orbit that took twenty-five years to complete a single circuit around Neptune, with a semi-major axis of more than forty-eight million kilometres. A distance that the Ghosts and Free Outers considered to be a just and adequate quarantine for their contentious visitors.

The conference venue was a bubble habitat that had been especially constructed and set in orbit around Neso. A sphere five hundred metres across blown from insulating layers of aerogel interleaved with tough halflife polymers, given rigidity by the pressure of its atmosphere, an internal skeleton of fullerene struts, and bands set at ninety degrees to each other, running from pole to pole and around the equator. A toy globe. A bright little sphere of air and warmth and light afloat in an infinite cold black ocean. Two shuttles of Outer design stood a little way off, lines linking them to airlocks on the surface of the habitat. After the Brazilian freighter nosed close, a pair of Outers zipped across the gap in a scooter, dragging a line which the delegates used to cross over.

Loc was stricken with delirious vertigo as he was carried in a sling across a black gulf as deep as the universe. An Outer in a pristine white pressure suit received him at the far end and brusquely shoved him into the airlock, a hemispherical bubble on the outer curve of the habitat that opened into another, bigger bubble stuck to the habitat’s inner wall. When Captain Neves cycled through, Loc was still in his pressure suit, helpless and trembling, loathing his weakness and longing for a cleansing jolt of pandorph. She helped him strip off his suit and calmed him down, and together they swam out into the habitat’s dimly lit, roomy interior.

It was criss-crossed with the three-dimensional web of its internal skeleton and a kind of spherical tree or bush hung like the nucleus of a cell at its centre, a rigid tangle of forking branches scaled with stiff black leaves. Sleeping pods hung like giant fruit on the struts, glowing in shades of pink or orange, and motile lights swam everywhere, a small galaxy of wandering fireflies. Rayleigh scattering in the aerogel layers of the habitat’s wall diffused their light to a deep twilight blue like a ghost of Earth’s sky; it took an effort to remember that the skin of this bubble was less than a metre thick, with an infinity of freezing vacuum beyond.

This spooky fairyland was inhabited by a gang of young men and women in their twenties and early thirties, tall and fiercely bright and quick, a group of heroes at the height of their physical powers. Barefoot, equipped with opposable big toes, they manoeuvred around the web of struts like a troop of monkeys, used hand-held reaction jets to zip through gulfs of thin air. Feral human beings, space and zero gravity their native domain.

They were evenly split between the two factions that had colonised the Neptune System. Ten members of the Ghost cult, all dressed in white, severe and reserved, pale faces marked with tattoos of the constellation Hydrus; ten Free Outers. Sada Selene, a fierce young woman who had once helped to kidnap Loc but ignored him now, was amongst the former; Macy Minnot was amongst the latter, looking tired and careworn.

During the round of introductions, Loc managed to avoid Sada Selene and brought himself close to Macy Minnot and exchanged a few words, expressing his pleasure at seeing her again, saying how strange it was that they should meet after all this time, at such a distance from their home.

‘Some might call it fate,’ he said.

‘Or bad luck,’ Macy Minnot said. ‘I hope you aren’t planning any of your usual mischief.’

Her gaze was as pinched and suspicious as ever. Her skin grainy, dark smudges under her eyes, her auburn hair cropped unflatteringly short. Despite her years in exile she was nowhere near as adept at manoeuvring in free fall as her companions. Loc could almost feel sorry for her, exiled out here, living an unnatural life with unnatural creatures.

‘I’m here to observe the proceedings,’ he told her. ‘And to give advice, as required. And you? Despite being an outsider, you must have risen high in your little society.’

‘I guess you could call me an observer too. I know I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on you.’

‘We’re going to be stuck here with each other for a while, Miz Minnot. Given the circumstances,’ Loc said, ‘it wouldn’t hurt to be candid with each other.’

‘If we’re being candid, you can tell me who your woman friend is.’

‘Captain Neves is in charge of our security. Where is your good friend Newton Jones?’

‘At home. Looking after our kids.’

‘Home being Proteus. It can’t be easy, living on a barren chunk of ice so far from anything you could call civilisation.’

’We’ve made the best of it.’

‘And you have multiplied. Begun a dynasty.’

‘We don’t have children of our own yet. The twins, they were orphaned. Their father was killed by your people back at Uranus, when they attacked his unarmed ship,’ Macy Minnot said, with a fierce direct look that Loc remembered very well.

‘Not my people,’ he said. ‘That would have been Arvam Peixoto’s expeditionary force. And the good general, as you may have heard, received his just deserts for that and other careless actions.’

‘Yet you survived.’

‘We have both survived, Miz Minnot. Despite everything. Let’s hope that we can survive this.’

‘Let’s hope we can make something of it,’ Macy Minnot said.

After the introductory session, everyone sat down for a meal in the largest of the habitat’s pods. A primal ritual: two tribes meeting and breaking bread together, sizing up each other’s differences and strengths and weaknesses.

Both the Ghosts and the Free Outers were supposedly democratic collectives in which everyone had equal rank and authority, but it quickly became clear that Idriss Barr, charismatic and tirelessly enthusiastic, was the primary interlocutor for the Free Outers, while the Ghost delegation was led by Sada Selene, who immediately made a point of protesting about Loc’s presence. He’d been part of the diplomatic mission in the Saturn System before the war and was therefore, quite obviously, a spy. And he’d murdered one of her people at a scientific conference on Dione. It was not right that he should be here now. She wanted him to leave.

Sara Póvoas was prepared for this. She said that Loc was an important member of her team, personally appointed by Euclides Peixoto, but since the Ghosts had genuine reservations about him she would make sure that he would have no active role in the negotiations. A clever ploy that used Loc’s presence to unsettle and provoke the Ghosts, and pretended to withdraw privileges he’d never possessed as a sop to their pride. The Ghosts fell for it at once, with Sada Selene taking obvious pleasure at having scored a point. Loc, amused by her naivety, told Captain Neves that the Ghosts’ leader would have done better to hold that card in reserve and use it to disrupt the proceedings if things had started to go against her.

‘She’s too aggressive. And she believes that aggression is a virtue, so she’s also arrogant. A fatal combination. Póvoas and her team will play her easily.’

The next day, the negotiations began in earnest.

To begin with, Sara Póvoas and the other diplomats cleaved to a conciliatory line, asking the Outers what they wanted to do out here, how they saw their future, what they needed or didn’t need from the TPA . . . Vaguely phrased questions that gently probed the Outers’ outlook and convictions and attitude. Non-specific replies to the Outers’ list of demands. Soothing generalities. Bland assurances.

Sada Selene responded to this exactly as Loc had predicted, making it clear that she and her associates were not interested in any kind of treaty or trade mission, or anything else that would compromise their autonomy. The Ghosts had no need of anything the TPA had to offer, she said, and they had nothing to fear from the TPA either. She conjured up views of the Ghosts’ city on Triton - chambers and manufactories bustling with all kinds of activity, refineries that produced metals and minerals from water drawn from Triton’s deeply buried ocean, work crews swarming over the frames of ships in a vast hangar, racks of pods in which masked operators lay, flying swarms of attack drones by remote control. She said that the Ghosts commanded the volume of space around Neptune, claimed that they would have no trouble taking control of the Uranus System if they wanted to, and reminded the Brazilians and Europeans that the cities on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter were as vulnerable to attack now as they had been before the Quiet War. As was Earth, if it came to it.

‘If you hit us, we’ll hit back ten times harder,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you haven’t forgotten the attack we mounted on the squatters on Phoebe, at the beginning of the last war.’

Loc thought that was a nice touch: the last war. The Ghosts were ready to go at it again, and they wanted the TPA to know it.

While Sada Selene was all razor-blade sarcasm and barbed aggression, the spokesperson for the Free Outers, Idriss Barr, was genial and relaxed, although no less serious. He spoke for several minutes at the end of that first session, telling the Brazilians and Europeans that although the Free Outers cared passionately about the Jupiter and Saturn systems and the fates of their friends and relations, they had made a fresh start out here. The war had given them the opportunity to light out for new territory, and they weren’t going back. This was their home, and although they would resist every attempt to bring it under the jurisdiction of the Three Powers Authority, they were willing to talk with the TPA as equals. To make sure that the terrible mistake of the Quiet War was not repeated. To begin to explore some way of moving forward.

After that speech, Idriss Barr was content for the most part to sit back and let others talk things through, although he displayed a knack for intervening at crucial moments, usually when both sides were exhausted and uncertain about where to take the discussion next. Loc studied him with grudging respect; Captain Neves agreed that he was trouble. A true alpha male. Kingly. Someone who could cause serious problems if he could ever reach out to the Outers in the Jupiter and Saturn systems.

‘Killing him right now would save us a lot of trouble later on,’ Captain Neves said, and Loc believed that she was only half-kidding.