Gardens of the Sun (56 page)

Colonel Stamford told Cash that Brasília’s spaceport was now in the hands of the revolution, but there was a dire shortage of qualified pilots sympathetic to the cause. ‘Many fled into orbit when the revolution started,’ he said. ‘And those that refused to cooperate were dealt with by the OSS. We have six ships that can make the trip, but we lack pilots with combat experience.’

‘How about it?’ Alder said.

‘I’m already there,’ Cash said.

 

He studied the mission profile while he flew with Alder and Avernus to Brasília in a little ramjet formerly owned by the governor of the Pessanha Territory. A suborbital lob took them high above the Caribbean and the vast green wilderness of central Greater Brazil, and then they were down, gliding towards the main runway of the military airbase at the edge of the spaceport’s pits and gantries and rows of square salt-white hangars.

Cash was given charge of a civilian shuttle more than fifty years old. Its hull was indelibly stained by the heat of a thousand re-entries and its controls were antiquated, but it was sturdy and had been scrupulously maintained, and was fitted with the new fusion motor. Cash did what he could about arming it, met with the crews of the other ships, then went up for the first time in more than seven years, grinning fiercely as acceleration pinned him against his couch and his bird shot through the top of the sky.

After a single orbit in which they assembled their formation and received confirmation that no one would challenge them, the six ships ignited their fusion motors and flew out towards the Moon’s lean crescent, passing above the nearside some seven hours later. Cash didn’t trust the safe-passage agreement: he ignored messages from traffic control at Athena and pings from the European and Pacific Community bases, and opened the doors of his shuttle’s cargo bay. A battery of rail guns hastily welded to the rear pallet were primed with charges of smart gravel, and he controlled by a dead man’s switch a one-shot X-ray laser cannon; if anything showed itself on the radar he’d have a bare second to evaluate the intruder and decide whether or not to let go of the switch and let the cannon’s AI take care of it.

Cash was back in the catbird seat of combat, but he was painfully aware that he was operating at only ordinary human speed, that he wasn’t merged with the shuttle’s systems and senses, inhabiting every corner of them, but was locked in the bone box of his skull, peering at displays painted with virtual light in front of his eyes, fumbling and jerking at a control yoke that introduced annoying lags and imprecisions. It was like trying to perform a delicate surgical procedure using a marionette equipped with forks and spoons. A singleship flown by a goddamn rookie could pop up and take him out before he knew it was there.

But nothing challenged the convoy as it slid eastwards through the lunar night. Cash felt a throb of nostalgia as he passed above landmarks familiar from the many exercises he’d flown while testing J-1 and J-2 singleships. Everything softened by Earthlight and drenched in shadow. The sooty plain of Oceanus Procellarum. The great ray system radiating from Copernicus Crater like a snowball spattered on a black windshield. Rumpled highland terrain around the dark lava seas of Mare Tranquillitatis and Mare Fecunditas . . .

As they passed over Mare Tranquillitatis, Avernus said, ‘That’s where it all began.’ The only time she spoke during the entire flight.

High above Mare Smythii, at the eastern edge of the nearside, Cash fired up the shuttle’s motor to put it in lunar orbit. The other ships followed in close formation, travelling with a velocity of 0.8 kilometres per second and an altitude of two hundred kilometres amidst a cloud of proxies that broadcast bogus IDs and electronic chatter to confuse any potential attackers. Earth set behind them and the sun shot up above the curved horizon, starkly illuminating the ancient battlefield of the farside. There were no dark seas here, no highland plains. Just the unmodified remnant of an inhumanly vast and unyielding bombardment that had left the surface smashed and riven with craters of every size. Strings and chains of craters, craters overlapping craters, smaller craters punched into the floors of larger craters or lancing their lips. A pitiless and trackless waste lacking any human scale and failing every definition of beauty.

Alder talked briefly with someone in the prison facility, then told Cash that it was safe to make his approach. Cash sent several proxies speeding ahead, just in case. They glittered like fugitive stars as they diminished into the black sky, and after they had passed directly above the facility without being challenged or attacked, Cash’s shuttle and the other ships briefly fired their motors and committed themselves to descent trajectories.

As the slumped and battered rim of Korolev Crater drifted beneath the shuttle’s keel, Cash assumed manual control, ready to punch out if the defence system so much as squinted at him. He was falling in a long arc, passing over terraced slumping and lobate sheets of mass-wasted material on the inner side of the wall and sliding out across the floor of the crater, which was as pockmarked and riven as everywhere else on the farside. He used attitude jets to bump above over contours, concentrating fiercely, trying to compensate for the annoying lag between thought and action. The navigation system lit up with flight-guidance arrows and lines as it synchronised with the facility’s traffic control, and then he saw a gleam like ice at the horizon, the facility’s tent like a faceted insect eye socketed in a small and perfectly circular crater.

Alder was talking to someone on the ground again. Cash and the other pilots waited for go/no-go, balancing their ships on attitude jets, letting them drift as sideways, until Alder said that it was safe to land. Cash told the other pilots he’d go in first, notched up his velocity, overshot the dome of the tent, spun his bird around, and stooped towards the landing field in a flare of retrojets that blew long windrows of dust from the ground.

Forty minutes later, wearing paper coveralls over their suit-liners, Cash Baker, Alder Hong-Owen and Avernus were sitting at a table in a conference room in the administration blockhouse, facing the European governor of the facility, Ella Lindeberg, and the acting head of security, Colonel Carlos Hondo-Ibargüen. Ella Lindeberg, a pale, slim, austere woman, did most of the talking. Explaining that the prison had been set up as an experiment in self-government: trusties overseen by guards employed by the Brazilian and European administration had policed the prisoners, who’d grown their own food and maintained facilities within the prison’s tent. Shortly after the revolution had begun in Greater Brazil, the governors from the Peixoto and Nabuco families and other senior Brazilian officials had taken off for Athena. The prisoners had subdued the trusties, seized control of the airlocks, shut down the surveillance system and the system that controlled their security implants, and locked the administration out of the controls for the prison’s fission pile and the life-support systems of both the prison tent and the administration blockhouse. Threatened with loss of power and air, and with more than twenty guards held hostage inside the prison, the administration had come to an agreement with the prisoners. The prisoners would be allowed to control everything inside the tent, and the administration would not attempt to regain it by main force. The stand-off had lasted for almost two weeks now. The prisoners couldn’t escape because they lacked pressure suits; Ella Lindeberg had been instructed by her superiors to maintain order until a peaceful transition could be negotiated.

‘My government was always a minor partner in this enterprise,’ she said. ‘It is happy to cede authority to you so long as you guarantee safe passage for all personnel.’

‘I don’t have any kind of authority,’ Alder said, ‘but you’re certainly welcome to leave.’

‘I thought you represented the Brazilian government,’ Ella Lindeberg said.

Alder laughed. ‘There isn’t any government at present. But I suppose I can put you in contact with someone senior to the colonel. Will that do?’

‘There is one problem,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. A burly man with dark brown skin and black hair trimmed in a square topknot of the kind favoured by marines. Clasping his big hands tightly on the table in front of him, clearly embarrassed. ‘It concerns the OSS detachment and a modification to the prison’s air plant that the prisoners uncovered. If activated, it would have increased the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the air of their living quarters to a lethal level. The OSS had sealed orders instructing them to use it if they lost control of the prison. The prisoners introduced a work-around, and informed us about it after the negotiations were successfully concluded.’

‘I want you to know that I knew nothing about this,’ Ella Lindeberg said. ‘Nor did the colonel, or any of the people under his direct command.’

‘I arrested all the members of the OSS detachment,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. ‘Confined them to quarters. The problem is this: what do you want to do with them?’

Alder said, ‘Did they try to use this modification against the prisoners? ’

‘The logs show that they didn’t,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. ‘Although logs can of course be altered.’

‘But you have no evidence that they were altered?’

‘No, sir. We lack the necessary forensic expertise.’

‘And no one in the OSS has confessed.’

‘Every one of them claims to know nothing about it.’

‘The orders were still sealed?’

‘They seemed to be.’

‘Then they are free to go,’ Alder said. ‘It isn’t for us to judge what people may or may not have done under orders from the old regime. Before we’re through, we’re going to have to forgive many things. Either that, or turn a large portion of the country into a prison camp.’

‘Things have changed, of course,’ Colonel Hondo-Ibargüen said. ‘I’m happy to accept that.’

‘Things have changed and will continue to change for some time yet,’ Alder said.

 

Alder, Avernus, Cash Baker and the crews of the other shuttles walked in through the main airlock of the prison tent unescorted, dressed in pressure suits and carrying their fishbowl helmets, stepping out into a loading area with a small crowd waiting in front of flimsy-looking storage sheds. Cash had gone toe-to-toe against the Outers in the Quiet War, but this was the first time he’d met any of them. Tall, seriously skinny men and women dressed in grey coveralls with numbers stencilled across chests and backs, dignified and calm and polite, moving forward and shaking hands with their rescuers. Avernus and Alder went off with a dozen of them to negotiate terms of surrender.

By now, the crews had begun to bring in sleds carrying pressure suits and other supplies. Cash was helping to unload them when Avernus returned and told him that she needed his assistance. ‘A man is gravely ill. He must be evacuated as soon as possible.’

‘Someone you know?’

‘My daughter and I once encountered him. Please. If I am to have any chance of saving him we must do this now.’

In among the racks of pressure suits and other supplies were several of the fat clamshells used for moving injured people: coffins with lifepacks. Cash wheeled one alongside Avernus as she led him to Trusty Town’s clinic. She asked him if he knew anything of spies disguised as Outers and planted by the Brazilians in Outer cities before the war.

‘I don’t remember everything that happened around then,’ Cash said. ‘I have holes in my memory. I guess I always will.’

‘They were creations of Alder’s mother. Trained to infiltrate and sabotage our cities.’

‘If this guy is one of them, what’s he doing here?’

‘He told me that he was working for the Brazilians, but he defected. He also told me that he planted some kind of spyware in the place where my daughter and I lived,’ Avernus said. ‘And that later on he tried to kidnap us. This was in Paris, Dione, just before the war. The city’s mayor had arrested us, and many others involved in the peace and reconciliation movement. We were being held in a prison outside the city. When the war began and Paris was attacked, someone broke in and knocked out the guards. My daughter overpowered him, and we freed the rest of the prisoners and left him there. This man says that he remembers her. That she was very quick and strong, and stabbed him with a tranquilliser dart. That’s certainly what happened, and only a few people saw it, and most of them are dead . . .

‘Well, he meant us harm, once upon a time. Myself and my daughter. And now I am going to do my best to save his life. What would you call that?’

‘Mercy, I guess.’

‘Mercy. Yes. Why not?’

The guy was in a bad way. Feverish and barely conscious, deep bruises mottling the pale skin of his torso, his left leg encased from ankle to thigh in an inflatable cast. The woman who’d been caring for him, Bel Glise, helped Cash load him into the clamshell, and trotted alongside it as Cash and Avernus wheeled it back to the airlock, telling a long and complicated story about the murder of two mathematicians who had created a back door into the security system as part of an escape plot, the death of a trusty (‘The beast Jealott’), and the murder of Trusty Town’s medical technician, the sick man’s only friend. It seemed that the sick man had been badly injured when he’d confronted the killer, who had been one of the guards and also some kind of spy.

Cash didn’t know what to believe. While he was waiting for transportation to his shuttle, he told Alder Hong-Owen that the injured man, Felice Gottschalk, could just as easily be the killer. ‘He could have murdered those two guys because he wanted to use their escape plan. And then he murdered the trusty and the guard because they got in his way.’

Alder grew thoughtful, saying, ‘My mother was involved with at least two secret projects before the war. Both were located on the Moon, and both had something to do with ectogenic breeding programmes. She grew babies in artificial wombs, and tweaked them. She didn’t give me many details, but I know that one led to the development of the fusion motor that gave us such an advantage.’