The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (71 page)

Today even she was caught up in the drama of the starship’s return. They swapped: “Have you heard?” and “Did you see the bit where …” as he watched her assembling his bap. He walked away back down the promenade, her parting smile lingering in his mind. There had never been so much temptation in his life before. It was an undisputed quality of Randtown; everybody here was so busy cramming their life full of events that mostly seemed to be parties and meeting other people, yet with all that they were never hurried. He had taken months to learn how to slow down and chill out after Augusta’s lean, focused routine of work and family, where enjoyment was centered solely around entertainment. His only fear about living here now was that he would give in one day, some of the girls were just divine.

Olivia was still on her break when Mark got back to the garage. He’d only just sat down and started on his triple chip chocolate and quorknut muffin when CST released the real bombshell. Two people had been left behind. The news was only just breaking because the company had been informing and counseling the families. Mark had enough trouble coping with that, never mind that one of them was actually Dudley Bose. For a while he was furious with the rest of
Second Chance
’s crew for abandoning them out there, such a thing was surely the ultimate betrayal. Just thinking about that much distance made him shiver. Then Captain Wilson Kime made a real-time statement. He was dressed in his full dark uniform, hair clipped neat and short, staring unflinchingly into the camera, knowing how many people would be staring back. All of them with one question on their lips.
Why did you do it? Why didn’t you wait for them?

“It is with the most profound regret that I find myself ending our historic voyage with this saddest possible news,” Wilson said. His deep solemn voice was so sincere Mark immediately switched to feeling sorry for him and the terrible weight of command. “I was forced to make the decision which every captain fears the most, to risk the lives of every person on board, or to leave our friends and colleagues behind. This mission was launched with the express commitment of bringing back vital information on Dyson Alpha, and the remarkable barrier surrounding this star. While the safety of my crew is paramount to me personally as well as enshrined in my duty, I could not overlook our ultimate objective. We found ourselves in a situation that placed the entire ship in grave danger. Faced with these circumstances, I had no choice other than to leave. It is a choice that I will have to face down every day for the rest of my life, always asking myself if we’d just stayed that fraction longer would they have got back in contact? But those few extra moments could equally have brought us calamity. Then we might never have brought back the information we have. The Commonwealth might not have been warned that the barrier is down, and the aliens it contained do not appear to be friendly. It is that information which I considered more important than the lives of our comrades. I know that if the tragic situation had been reversed, and I was out there lost in the alien station, that I would have wanted my shipmates to carry the essential knowledge home no matter what the personal cost. All of us undertook this voyage knowing there would be danger involved. None of us hoped it would be so profound. Thank you for your time.”

Mark slumped back in his seat, and pushed out a long breath. Given those circumstances, he supposed he would have done exactly the same thing. It was still a pretty frightening decision, though. And the captain thought the aliens were dangerous. That wasn’t good, not good at all.

The news company started playing images of the Watchtower. Mark followed the astronauts as they slid through the dark tunnels of the station. There seemed to be miles of the eerie passageways knotted together. The harsh breathing of the contact team members reverberated around the showroom office; Mark felt himself being there as gloved hands stretched out at the edges of the image, grabbing frayed sections of the tunnel wall to haul himself along. Then he was slow-motion somersaulting into an empty chamber. Conduits on the wall had split open, allowing optical fibers to drift out like some kind of slender aquatic plant. He followed them along to a box containing circuit cubes, resembling fogged glass. Excited voices called out. The gauntlets tried to tease one of the cubes out, but it started crumbling at the touch. Another, calmer voice instructed them to cut the whole box free of its mountings.

Mark shook himself. He wanted to go through the Watchtower inch by inch, examining its dark mysteries for himself. One night this week he’d take the time and lie on his bed, running a TSI of the exploration.

The news company switched to Senator Thompson Burnelli who was standing in front of Washington’s imposing Senate Hall. A broad semicircle of reporters was gathered around him, while he was flanked by two aides.

“Obviously I am disappointed by certain aspects of the flight,” Burnelli said. “Although I would like to take this moment to express my sympathy to the families of both Dudley Bose and Emmanuelle Verbeke for the shock they received today. In relation to that, I do think there are some very serious questions raised by the way the
Second Chance
left the area so abruptly. I believe a lot more effort should have been made to ascertain the nature of the Dyson aliens. As to the supposed threat: nothing actually fired on our ship, a few robot devices were getting close, that’s all. We don’t know they were missiles. Kime could have taken a second, a third, even a fourth look; kept on trying until we got some real information. The
Second Chance
was equipped with FTL, they could leap out clean and free from any genuine danger.”

“What’s going to happen now?” a reporter asked.

“The full Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council will be convening as soon as possible to review the results. Once we have done so we will make our recommendation to the President and the Commonwealth Senate.”

“What will your recommendation be, Senator?”

Thompson tipped his head thoughtfully to one side, frowning intently at his questioner. “I think that is obvious. Due to the lack of any real data, we’ll have to send another ship. This time commanded by a captain who has some nerve, one who can find out for us what’s really going on out there.”

Mark was nodding in agreement.
Maybe Kime was hasty. The
Second Chance
had good shielding, I remember that from the specs. Protection was a prime design driver.

Olivia returned, and they spent most of the afternoon watching the portal. CST released the recordings Dudley Bose had made, explaining and commenting on the data that the ship gathered. His descriptions fascinated Mark, they were pitched at a level he could understand, a clear confident voice turning the dry facts to vivid life.
No wonder he was such a respected, successful astronomer.

Mark went out to the workshop a few times that afternoon, trying to do some work on the autopickers. Each time his mind drifted from the job and he went back to check the portal again. A lot of the time was spent wondering what it must have been like for Bose and Verbeke at that moment when they finally realized the starship had gone for good. How would anybody handle knowledge like that?
Christ, how would I take it?

He shut the Ables garage up early, and drove home in his pickup truck. The first part of the journey was along the great highway that Simon Rand had built, taking him around the back of Blackwater Crag and into the steep narrow valley there. Terrestrial grass had been planted at the side of the highway, a vigorous variety that had evicted the boltgrass, converting the slopes above the fast-flowing stream to a rich healthy emerald. Fat sheep still in their winter coats ambled around dozily, munching away, while their new lambs jumped about excitedly. High above them, where there was less grass and more boulders, mountain goats scurried about, venturing in and out from the edges of the pine forest.

After a few miles the valley widened out, the hills on his right sinking away where a much broader valley branched off. He took the junction, and started driving along the long straight track of hard-packed stone chips. This was the Highmarsh Valley, the first in the district to be farmed, and long since drained by an extensive network of ditches, leaving the rich peat exposed for the tractorbots and cattle. Long driveways branched off from either side of the main track, leading to big bungalow ranches and clusters of barns. The only trees here were tall, slender liipoplars planted in perfectly straight rows to mark the boundaries.

After five minutes the track forked again. Mark took the route down into Ulon Valley. It was almost as wide as the Highmarsh, though the mountain walls were higher. Boulders and stone were littered about, with a new crop brought down by the snows every winter. Although the soil was reasonable, the Ulon wasn’t really suitable for cereal crops. Instead, and at Simon Rand’s suggestion, the first homesteaders planted vines of grencham berries, an Elan-native plant that was already earning a reputation among Commonwealth oenophiles, though it had only ever been cultivated on the northern continents. The first few years saw passable vintages produced along the Ulon; then new varieties were introduced, and the yards got organized, forming a cooperative for blending and bottling, and incorporating their brand name.

By the time the Vernons arrived, the whole operation had become slick and commercial. Two-thirds of the valley was under cultivation, with the remaining plots being snapped up. Any purchaser got their ten or fifteen acres to be planted with vines, and a house site at one end. The vines would be managed and harvested by the co-op, guaranteeing a modest income each year from the Ulon Valley label.

Mark turned onto the track that led up a short slope to his home, slowing as the suspension bounced him around in the puddles and potholes. Once again, as he did every morning and evening, he reminded himself to get some decent gravel delivered. The vine trellises were stretched out on both sides of the track; lines of wires and poles, like flimsy fences, set a couple of meters apart, extending as far as the eye could see. Small gnarled brown strands of the vines themselves were carefully wound along the wires, each one trimmed identically, no more than five buds along each frond. It was too early in the year for any growth, leaving the whole plot looking pretty bleak with only the narrow strips of straggly grass providing any color between the trellises, though they seemed to be more mud and stone than living tufts. Up at the top of the ridge, where the house sat on an acre of flat land, the lawn was a vigorous emerald carpet. At the moment it surrounded two houses. The one they’d brought with them on the back of a big flatbed truck as a pile of square weather-resistant composite panels that could be clipped together in any design. Liz and Mark had settled on a simple L-shape, with a long rectangular living room at one end attached to three square bedrooms, a bathroom, kids-room, kitchen, and spare room—which was still crammed with crates of stuff they’d brought from Augusta and hadn’t yet opened. Its roof was made up from curved solar collector sections that slotted on top. The whole thing was cheap, easy to assemble, and the kind of place that you wouldn’t want to live in for more than a few months, especially not in winter. They’d been on Elan for almost two years now.

Behind the temporary prefab, their true house was still growing. In keeping with Randtown’s green ethos, they’d both decided it was going to be drycoral—which was strangely rare for an eco-obsessed district. Normally the plant was grown over an existing structure, but Liz had tracked down a company on Halifax that offered a much cheaper method. She’d started with what was essentially a cluster of hemispherical balloons, a simple made-to-order any-size-you-want membrane that she spread out over the ground and inflated. Then she just planted the kernels all around the outside, and waited for them to grow. As the strands slithered their way upward, she twined them together and pruned judiciously, ensuring the walls were smooth and water-tight. Because of Ulon Valley’s harsh winters, she selected a drycoral variety thicker than most, to provide a decent insulation. When they were done, a simple domestic solar-pumped heatstore cube would keep them warm and snug all winter. But it was that necessary additional thickness that made them realize why few Randtown district homes were made from drycoral: it took a long time to grow upward. Every day when he got out of the pickup truck Mark would take another look at the tops of the pearl and cornflower-blue strands to see how far they’d gotten. On four or five of the smaller outlying dome rooms they were already up to the crest, where Liz was knotting them together in a minaret finishing twist; but on the three largest domes they still had a couple of meters to go. “They’ll be ready by midsummer,” Liz kept saying. Mark prayed she was right.

Barry burst out of the house and ran over to Mark, flinging his arms around his father. It used to be his father’s legs, now they were above his hips.

“What did you do today?” They both said it together as ritual demanded, and smiled at each other.

“You first,” Mark said as they walked back to the temporary house.

“I was reading, and spelling this morning, then we had Mr. Carroll for math and programming. I did general history with Ms. Mavers, and Jodie took us for practical mechanics to finish off with. I liked that. It was the only thing that made sense.”

“Really, why’s that?”

They walked into the kitchen, where Liz was sitting at the big cluttered table, trying to coax Sandy into having some soup. Mark’s daughter looked the picture of misery with her cheeks and nose all red, eyes damp, and wrapped in a big warm blanket. It was a flu variant that had been going the rounds of all the local kids. Barry had managed to avoid it so far.

“Daddy,” Sandy said weakly, and held her arms out.

Mark knelt down and gave her a big cuddle. “So how are you feeling today, my angel, any better?”

She nodded miserably. “Little bit.”

“Oh, that’s good. Well done, darling.” He sat in the chair next to her, and got a very fast and perfunctory kiss from Liz. “How about eating some of this soup then?” he asked his daughter. “We’ll eat it together.”