Gardens of the Sun (8 page)

The two men were sitting on a café terrace that overlooked the silken slide of the semicircular waterfall that plunged into a seething basin of wet rocks and ferns and the jewelled cushions of giant mosses. The basin fed a river that ran away downhill between stands of newly planted saplings towards the Green Zone at Paris’s midpoint. The terrace, with its quaint wooden tables and white umbrellas, stands of tree ferns and black bamboo, and strings of fairy lanterns, was the preserve of senior civil servants, diplomats and military officers. Its food - shrimp and fish grown in the city, lobster tails and steak shipped at tremendous expense from Earth - was excellent. In one corner of its terrace a guitarist and flautist played delicate choro numbers that floated on a cool breeze invigorated by the iron tang of falling water. It was one of the most pleasant places in the city, redolent of the privilege Loc craved, but he slouched sulkily in his sling chair, a slender, dark-skinned man dressed in a tailored canary-yellow suit and a pink shirt open to his navel, oiled black hair done up in a cap of short braids tipped with ceramic beads. A dandy whose handsome face was spoiled by an air of jaded cynicism that he no longer bothered to hide.

His companion, Yota McDonald, was a sleek, plump young man who before the war, in Brasília, had worked alongside Loc in the commission that had analysed information about the cities and the main political players in the Jupiter and Saturn systems and had developed the asymmetric ‘quiet war’ strategies that had proven so effective in taking down the Outers. Like Loc, Yota had a taste for gossip about the failings of his superiors, but he lacked Loc’s ambition. He was content with his position in the middle grade of the diplomatic service and looked forward to returning to Greater Brazil in a couple of years’ time, when he would use the bonuses he was assiduously banking to get married, and the contacts he had made to win a well-paid job as an adviser in the private sector.

‘You are smart and shrewd, but you feel that you must have everything at once,’ he told Loc. ‘Try patience, for a change.’

‘I want to get what I deserve before I die,’ Loc said.

‘Of course. But destroying yourself in the attempt to win it makes no sense.’

‘Perhaps I have already destroyed myself. I have given up my health and my marriage prospects in service to God and Gaia and Greater Brazil. So winning fame and fortune is all I have left. My only reason for living. Yet I am frustrated at every turn by men who have grown rich at my expense. Fools who know nothing, who can do nothing, who have suffered nothing. Fools whose only virtue is to have been born into the right family. Lucky sperm. All they have to do is reach out and pluck the golden apples that dangle in front of their faces. And most of the time they get someone else to do it for them.’

‘We are lucky enough, considering who we are. Look how far we’ve come!’

‘Yes. But not yet far enough.’

Yota skilfully changed the subject, telling Loc about the latest row between General Arvam Peixoto and Ambassador Fontaine over treatment of Outer prisoners.

‘Our ambassador is still struggling to impose any kind of “normalisation” on the general and his merry men,’ Yota said. ‘Did you hear that he wants to mount a punitive expedition to Uranus?’

‘Military command and the Senate have vetoed it; he is threatening to do it anyway,’ Loc said. ‘And you know what? He’s right. We know that every kind of Outer malcontent is skulking out there. And every day we leave them alone they grow stronger and bolder. We have to deal with them now, before they decide to deal with us.’

‘Don’t let anyone in the security service hear that kind of talk,’ Yota said. ‘It’s defeatist.’

‘It’s the truth.’

Yota shrugged. ‘Even so, it could get you sent back to Earth.’

‘Nothing could get me sent back to Earth. It’s punishment enough that I remain here,’ Loc said.

‘Now your grievances are showing again,’ Yota said amiably.

‘There has to be more to it than this, Yota. You deserve more. I deserve more. And most of the people who are making good, they don’t deserve it at all.’

Loc was thinking of Colonel James Lo Barrett, the officer in command of the salvage yard. A lazy, self-satisfied bully of a man with no regard for schedules or the minor details that kept the project running right, bombproof because he was one thirty-second consanguineous with the Nabuco family. The latest slippage in the salvage work had been entirely due to Colonel Barrett’s laissez-faire attitude, but it was Loc who’d had to explain it to the subcommittee of the Economic Commission.

Yota took a sip of brandy from his oversized glass and said, ‘Here’s something that might please you. It seems that Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen is increasingly out of favour with General Arvam Peixoto. She’s spending too much time out in the field, working on those exotic gardens, when she should be providing the general with technological miracles he can profit from.’

Loc had already heard about this, but it was good to have it confirmed from another source. As far as he was concerned, it was not only important to succeed - it was also important that your enemies should fail. And he believed Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen shared a large part of the responsibility for his present plight, for she’d whispered poison about him in the general’s ear after the gene wizard had escaped, when in truth it had been entirely her fault. She was obsessed with the hunt for Avernus, and it was a delicious irony that this obsession, coupled with her self-regarding arrogance, might yet be her downfall.

He said as much to Yota, hinting about the small part he’d played in cutting her down to size, smiling and shaking his head when Yota asked him to elaborate. He liked secrets; liked to make people think that he had an inside angle on everything.

‘I have allies in unexpected places,’ he said. ‘One day soon, perhaps, I’ll be able to tell you more. But not yet. It isn’t that I don’t trust you, Yota. But I don’t want to put you in danger.’

‘Of course not,’ Yota said, clearly believing that this was another of Loc’s revenge fantasies.

It was and it wasn’t. After the humiliation of his appointment, Loc had reached out to a cousin and rival of Arvam Peixoto. He’d met the man before the war, when they’d both been involved in one of the projects of the failed and little-mourned peace and reconciliation initiative meant to enhance trade, cultural exchange and mutual understanding between Greater Brazil and the Outers. The project had failed; Loc, working clandestinely for Arvam Peixoto, had played a small part in its failure. But when it became clear that he would never be properly rewarded despite all he’d done, he had begun to make tentative approaches to Arvam’s rival, feeding him little bits of information, such as the truth about the hero-pilot who was promoting the war back in Greater Brazil, and doing a few minor favours. Nothing much so far, although one errand had been amusing - slipping a handwritten note to Sri Hong-Owen that suggested it would be in her best interests for her to look for a new sponsor. Luckily, the bitch hadn’t taken the hint. Loc hoped that she’d stick with Arvam Peixoto until the day of reckoning came; he very much wanted to have a hand in her downfall, even though he couldn’t see any way of profiting from it.

Meanwhile, he was stuck on the dreary round of his dead-end job, rotating between Paris and the orbital salvage yard. Dione’s elegant shipyard, a gossamer web dotted with workshops and cradles, had been destroyed during the war. Its replacement was a grim utilitarian lash-up of modified cargo cylinders, with noisy air conditioning, an ineradicable odour of stale cooking and chemical toilets, and little privacy. Loc had to bunk in his tiny office, with his aide snoring on the other side of a betacloth curtain; the rations were military MREs; the recycled water reeked of chlorine and showers were rationed to two minutes once every three days. Colonel James Lo Barrett, the soldiers of the security detail, and the Outer salvage crews didn’t seem to mind the appalling living conditions, but Loc loathed the place, and would have spent as little time as possible up there if he hadn’t had to cover for Colonel Barrett’s deficiencies.

The salvage yard hung in the middle of a Sargasso Sea of derelict ships. More than sixty of them now, and one or two still arriving every week, even though it was a year and counting since the war had ended. Their shapes sharply silhouetted against Saturn’s foggy bulk, flashing like fugitive stars as they tumbled slowly through black vacuum. Those damaged beyond repair were stripped of reusable components, their fusion and attitude motors were dismounted, and their lifesystems, hulls and frames were rendered into chunks of scrap metal, fullerene composite and construction diamond. Most were powerless and frozen but otherwise intact, killed when their cybernetic nervous systems had been zapped by microwave bursts or EMP mines during the investment of the Saturn System. Salvage and refurbishment of these brain-dead ships was fairly straightforward, apart from having to deal with the remains of the dead.

General Arvam Peixoto had refused to mount any kind of expedition to rescue the crews and passengers of the crippled ships. There were too many ships in too many orbits, and the risk that rescue crews might be attacked by survivors was too great. So every ship was a tomb, because those trapped on board without power and life support had either committed suicide, suffocated, or succumbed to the relentless cold. Before salvage could begin, the dead were located and documented and removed, along with all their possessions, the black boxes containing the ship’s logs and flight data were handed over to an intelligence officer for analysis, and any cargo was inventoried and offloaded. Then the hulk was guided into a cradle where crews of men and robots replaced AIs and control systems, overhauled and quickened the lifesystem, checked attitude motors, and gave the fusion motor a static test before the ship was inspected by flight technicians, certified, and handed over to the transport wing of the Three Powers Authority.

The salvage work went slowly because there was a shortage of skilled Outer volunteers, and the Air Defence Force claimed that the only flight technicians it could spare were the surly pair who certified the salvage work. The job Loc detested would last for at least two years. Maybe more. But then a chance to redeem himself came out of the empty black sky.

 

Loc was in Paris, recuperating from another bruising session with the Economic Commission’s subcommittee, when his aide called and told him that one of the salvage crews had found a live body.

It was late in the evening. Loc was dining with Yota McDonald. They’d finished a bottle of expensive imported wine and were working on their second brandies, so Loc was a little thick-headed, saying stupidly, ‘A live what?’

‘A passenger. One of the salvage crews found a live passenger.’

The crew had been working on a shuttle that had passed too close to an EMP mine. Its AI and control systems were stone-cold dead, but the rest of it, apart from some kind of fast-growing vacuum organism that coated much of the exterior shell of the fusion motor, was undamaged. The crew had cleared corpses from its lifesystem and unloaded cargo from its hold and had been stripping back the vacuum organism’s thick black crust when they’d found a bare patch on the skin of one of the insulated tanks that had supplied reaction mass to the attitude motors. In the centre of the patch was a circular cut-out, fixed in place by a thick seam of glue on the inside of the tank. When the crew removed it, they discovered that the tank had been drained. In a plastic bubble nestling between two of the anti-slosh vanes and filled with foamed aerogel at a pressure of 100 millibars a little girl slept inside a pressure suit.

Her body temperature matched the suit’s internal temperature, 16° C; her pulse and respiration signs were slow but steady. A quick ultrasonic scan showed that her blood was circulating through a cascade filter connected to the femoral artery of her left leg. There was also a small machine attached to the base of her skull, and a line in the vein of her left arm that went through a port in her pressure suit’s lifepack and was coupled to a lash-up of tubing, pumps and bags of clear and cloudy liquids - a continuous culture of dole yeast growing in a cannibalised foodmaker powered by a trickle charge from a fuel cell. And the fuel cell was connected by superconducting thread to the vacuum organism, which absorbed sunlight and generated a small amount of electrical energy.

The aide told Loc that the girl had been waking from deep hibernation when the crew had found her.

‘The revival process seems to have been triggered by a sensor that reacted to the change in the shuttle’s delta vee when it was taken out of its orbit. Someone on the shuttle must have put her to sleep, hoping that she would be rescued.’

‘I better come up there right away,’ Loc said. ‘Tell Barrett to leave her as she is. Don’t wake her. Outer children are smart and resourceful. As dangerous as their parents.’

Excitement and self-interest were burning away his alcoholic fug. He was wondering why the little girl had been hidden away in the drop tank. If someone had put her into hibernation, hoping that she would be rescued, why not leave her in plain sight?

‘She’s no longer here,’ the aide said. ‘Colonel Barrett decided that he didn’t have the facilities to deal with her, and sent her down to the hospital in Paris. I’m sorry, Mr Ifrahim, but he didn’t bother to tell me. I didn’t find out until after the crew filed their report.’

‘When was this?’

‘She went down in a gig three hours ago. As I said, I didn’t find out about this until the crew—’

‘Debrief them. Talk to them one by one and get every detail of what they found. And document the continuous culture and her pressure suit. Document everything.’ Loc was about to ring off when he had a thought and said, ‘Do you have a photo of her?’

‘Barrett didn’t—’

‘The crews’ pressure suits are rigged with surveillance cameras. Check the files, find a good shot of her face, send it straight to me. Get on it now,’ Loc said, and took off his spex and signalled to one of the waiters and ordered a double espresso.