Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera (27 page)

Initially the inhabitants
hoped that the reduction in solar output would be minor, but after two decades
of dropping temperatures and increasing glaciation they were forced to confront
the inevitable. Five years of political and social uproar culminated in the
bitter decision to abandon the planet. Now thirty million souls and a
planet-worth of infrastructure were moving to the asteroid belt.

“Can you imagine the chaos
down there? Well my dear, unpack those summer outfits, we’d better run up some
cold weather gear. And we should take the portable camp, we may have to rely on
our own resources.”

The reloaded buggy came
to a halt ten thousand kilometers above Orpheus.

“So where do we land?”
Aiyana said.

They scanned the
magnified image of the northern hemisphere which had been overlaid with a map
from the ship’s library. Many of the principal cities had disappeared beneath the
ice but further to the south the capital, Alarcos, still existed although it
had a strange chewed-over appearance.

Carson opened a traffic
control channel.

“Who the hell are you?”
asked a voice. Protocol had obviously been abandoned.

“Commonwealth mail
carrier. Can you give me landing coordinates? I gather things are pretty
confused.”

“Now there’s an
understatement. Find the Imperial Palace – it’s in the center of Alarcos – and
put down at the staging area about a kilometer to the east. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks, is the Post
Office still functioning?”

“You are joking, aren’t
you? Just land and ask around – someone should be able to take the delivery. Over
and out”

The staging area was
located in what had been the Royal Park. The lawn where vacationers had once
picnicked was now a brown expanse of permafrost dotted with spacecraft, ground
vehicles, piles of supplies, and prefabricated buildings. Carson found a
cluster of parked craft and settled the buggy beside them.

“Oh God!” Aiyana yelled
as the biting air flooded through the hatch. They turned up the heating in
their suits and jumped out. Workers and machines swarmed everywhere, but like
Tallis’s nest the mayhem had purpose.

“I think the site offices
are over there” Carson said. He had hooked into the local net but most of it
was unresponsive or hopelessly out of date. They were going to have to rely on
more primitive techniques to find their way about.

As they crunched through
the frozen grass the ground rumbled and they were engulfed by a massive shadow.
They looked up: the largest transport Carson had ever seen was flying over
their heads. The evacuation was going full tilt.

Eventually they found
themselves at sprawling prefabricated building. The interior was a single huge
space filled with people and equipment. After several misdirections they
located a small woman crouched over a cluster of displays. She appeared as if
she had not slept in days but perked up the moment Carson introduced himself.

“Mail!” she said, “this
could be good news. You have it on you? Excellent!”

He handed over the
silvery package.

“Good afternoon,
Postmistress Salima” the package said. She inserted it into her consol and
examined the display.

“This is a great yield –
we haven’t had mail in months – no starships from New Earth, you understand. Why
the hell would they want to come here?”

“Did I hear you got a
mail carrier?” shouted a voice behind them.

A woman in a black flight
suit strode up to Aiyana. She held up her right hand.

“Have we been waiting for
you!” she said. “I’m Caelin, this operation’s lift boss.”

“Aiyana, glad to meet
you, but the mailman is over there.”

“Welcome to Orpheus, or
what’s left of it” she said touching palms, and then went over to introduce
herself to Carson.

“Do you have something
for the Imperial Treasurer?” she asked.

“Sorry, I have no idea
what I’m carrying.”

Caelin snorted and turned
her attention to the postmistress.

“Is there anything?”

There was a pause while
Salima scanned the mail. “Yes, two financial transmissions.”

“Great! How much?”

“I can’t tell. We need
the Treasurer to open them.”

“Rasul, get over here” Caelin
bellowed across the room.

An bleary-eyed man
scampered through the maze. Following Salima’s directions he placed his hand on
the consol’s command plate. He immediately became agitated.

“This is fantastic! A
grant of four billion from the Commonwealth Emergency Fund and one point three
billion from Architectural Heritage Appeal.”

He gave the postmistress
a hug then turned to Carson and Aiyana. “You couldn’t have come at a better
time.”

Caelin smiled and ran a
hand through her cropped black hair. The good news had put her into a better
mood. “Say, I haven’t eaten anything since dawn, why don’t I take our visitors
to the commissary.” With that she strode off.

The commissary was a
large tent-like structure some sixty meters across and thirty high at its
conical apex. The entire structure was composed of thousands of linked
transparent pieces like the windows of Lilly Cathedral, except these were
obviously flexible and, Carson suspected, their color was programmable. He was
right: the panes dimmed as pale sunlight emerged from behind a bank of clouds.

Rasul joined them at one
of the trestle tables. The food was plentiful and loaded with calories –
everyone was expending a lot of energy. Even as she ate Caelin’s expression
frequently went blank as she checked incoming messages.

“So what does a lift boss
do?” Aiyana asked her.

“Lift things” she
laughed. “Very large things. You’ve arrived at a good time, tomorrow is the granddaddy
of all projects.”

She nodded out of the
window. Carson stared but all he could see was the ornamental turrets of the
Imperial Palace.

Seeing his confusion
Caelin added “that’s it, that’s what we’re lifting.”

“The Palace?” Carson
squeaked.

The Palace, Rasul
explained, was considered to be one of the greatest examples of gothic
architecture in the Commonwealth. Upon learning that it was to be abandoned to
the glaciers, the Heritage Fund had launched a major appeal to raise the money
to preserve it.

“We went ahead on the
promise of a minimum of five hundred million Ecus, but we were getting nervous
until you arrived.”

Caelin’s team had spent
the last year strengthening the ancient structure and cutting it free of the
bedrock. Now it stood on a ten meter thick table of granite reinforced with a
lattice of monomolecular girders. The underside was embedded with
oversized push drives.

“The Palace is balanced
on just stone twelve pillars. Tomorrow morning we explosively cut them, and then
up she goes.”

“Goes where?”

“Diotima, in the asteroid
belt. They’re building an environmental dome to house it. Fortunately not my
problem – I just get the damn stuff off the planet.”

“What drives are you
using, Wartsila-Sulzers?” Aiyana asked.

“Exactly right – twelve
core engines. You’ve done some pushing?”

“Have I! I spent thirty
years shunting asteroids for a living.”

Caelin spun round to face
her. “Hey, you could be really useful tomorrow. I need as many people as
possible monitoring the drives during the lift.”

She turned to Carson. “How
about you?”

“Sorry, flying a buggy is
the limit of my experience.”

“Carson owns a starship”
Aiyana said.

“Does he now?” said
Caelin, visibly unimpressed.

She stood up. “Got to get
to work. See you at zero dark five tomorrow morning.” She walked out the
commissary.

“How much is the
evacuation of the planet costing?” Carson asked Rasul.

The Treasurer laughed. “How
much have you got? We’ve passed four hundred billion and we’re still spending. About
third of that has been covered by donations from neighboring systems. It would be
nice to think they were motivated purely by altruism, but in reality they’re terrified
of the idea of thirty million refugees.”

“And the rest?”

“Debt mostly. We’ll be
paying off the loans for the next two hundred years, but we’ll survive.”

They said goodbye to
Rasul and trudged to the buggy. As they walked Carson was alarmed to see that
Aiyana was crying.

“These poor people,
losing their home world just like we all did eight thousand years ago.”

Rasul cautioned them that
accommodation at the operations center was primitive and suggested that they
camp out in one of the abandoned commercial buildings surrounding the city
center.

“Just take your pick, if
it’s empty, move in.”

They ended up in the atrium
of Cancelli Developments, a company that had once offered homes to the
discriminating wealthy. As they walked in a young woman wearing a wildly
inappropriate summer dress stepped out in front of them.

“Welcome to Cancelli” she
said, “builders of Citrus Realm, Orpheus’s finest private metropolis.”

“Someone forgot to turn
the power off” Aiyana said as she walked through her.

At least it was warm and
dry, and they set up camp amid a forest of three-dimensional images of luxury
houses. Carson, wary of another ambush, brought the buggy inside as well.

“This is perfect, no-one
will ever spot us in the middle of this mess.”

“So what’s the plan”
Aiyana asked him as they settled down to eat in the courtyard of a ghostly
mansion.

Carson spread his hands. “Not
much of one, really. We’ll hang around for the show tomorrow morning, then as
soon as we can head south to check out Lanzor.”

“Do you think we’ll still
be able to find the cache?”

“Good question – the
modules may be buried under the snow. If so, I’m hoping they have enough of a
radar signature to show up against the bedrock.”

“Oh God, imagine coming
all this way for nothing.”

“Imagine”

The following day, an
hour before dawn, they set out from the Cancelli building on the scooter,
leaving the buggy hidden inside. By the time they arrived at the operations
center it was boiling with activity. The liftoff was to be controlled by the
center’s automated intelligence, but most of the pre-launch preparations were
overseen by humans.

One end of the giant room
had been cleared and was now occupied by a live image of the Palace standing in
ornate isolation. The area surrounding the projection was reserved for
visitors, although in truth it was a corral to keep them from interfering with
the real work. More people were arriving every minute – uniformed dignitaries,
media reporters, anxious preservationists, boisterous construction workers,
historians, government officials – everyone was coming to see the big show.

They found Caelin by a
set of huge windows overlooking the lift site. She glowed with the synthetic
perkiness of a person who had taken a lot of stimulants.