The Medusa Chronicles (15 page)

This was going well beyond the briefings that had brought Falcon here. “
Insert?
What am I now, a spy for Interplanetary Relations? I thought this project was about discovery. Science. Not espionage and politics.”

Springer sighed. “You're much older than I am, Commander, and I'm sure you're not naive. But I wonder if you grasp our deepest concerns. Am I right that you were born before the first World President was inaugurated?”

Falcon smiled. “I wasn't actually old enough to vote for Bandranaik, though.”

“Falcon, since those days, on Earth we've constructed a successful scientific world state. A dream centuries old. You could call it a utopia . . . if not for the bad dreams from the sky.”

More surprising poetry.

“Long term, our strategists are deeply concerned about the development of the Machine civilisation—if it's unified and developed enough to be called that—and what impact it might have on us. But in the short term we have enough turbulence with our own colonies. From Mercury to Triton, the colony worlds have been following their own political and cultural development from the days of the first footfalls.

“But Mars was always the key. There was a self-sufficient base on Mars for half a century even before Bandranaik was elected. And the World Government has consistently tried to engage with Mars—even to appease it, if you like, right back to the beginning of the WG itself, when Mars was declared a Federated Zone with full voting rights on the World Council. We find ways to pump money out there: the transfer of Spaceguard HQ to Hellas as far back as the 2120s, the establishing of the Port Deimos spacecraft construction yards in the 2170s. At the turn of the century Interplanetary Relations even put up the seedcorn money for the Eos Programme, their long-term terraforming project. More recently we tried to use the Moon as a bridge. Martians and other offworlders can come to Aristarchus Tech to study without high-gravity augmentation . . . Did you
know we even have Machines working there, on the Moon? That's another diplomatic experiment. Sure, they're banned from the home planet, but we employ them to process lunar ore, and on other programmes. A gesture of trust, right?”

“I know you allowed the Federation of Planets to set up their head­quarters on the Moon too.”

“Yes, after the Crawford Declaration they signed in 2186.”

“I was there—”

“The Federation still has no legal validity in the eyes of the World Government, but we treat it as a polite fiction even so.”

Falcon imagined how that kind of patronising dismissal played on Phobos, or at Lowell, or Vulcanopolis, or Oasis—even at Clavius Base. “You know, Colonel, I'm something of an outsider in all this myself. I don't fit into one world or the other. Hell, I'm older than most of these human worlds. But what I see is that with Earth's continuing economic and political domination of the solar system, you're restricting growth. The Martians I meet complain that they could expand a lot faster, even accelerate the Eos Programme, if only you'd increase shipments of essential supplies. Maybe the time's come for a change of policy. Look at history. From 1492, Columbus's first landings, to the American Revolution was—what, a little shy of three centuries? And from the first footsteps of John Young, the Columbus of Mars, to
now
, is about the same interval—”

“This isn't imperial Britain and colonial America, Falcon,” Springer said sternly. “You're showing your age. The history you learned is buried under centuries. This is a different era. Different technologies.

“Let me explain the cornerstone of government policy.
What the World Council fears above all is an interplanetary war.

“Think about it. Even you probably aren't old enough to remember the Brushfire Wars in the last years of the nation states . . . There were a number of incidents where aircraft—lumbering tubs driven by no more than chemical fuels—were flown into buildings. Acts of war and terror.”

“I grew up with the images.” In Falcon's young imagination such incidents had been like purposeful
Hindenburg
disasters.

“Now think about this. A civilian aircraft of the early twenty-first century, fully fuelled, packed as much punch as a few hundred tonnes of TNT. A modern interplanetary cruiser of the
Goliath
class, like the ship that brought you here, if flown into a city on Earth, would release as much energy as an entire all-out nuclear war would have done back in my ancestor Seth's day. Just one craft—and I'm only talking about the kinetic energy involved, even without the detonation of any fusion reactors or the use of any dedicated weapons systems.”

Falcon glanced up at the fragile dome over his head. “Offworld colonies are pretty vulnerable too.”

“Right. And so the judgement of the World Council, as advised by the Strategic Development Secretariat, is that an interplanetary war would be like no prior conflict in human history. It would be a potential extinction event for humanity.
All
of us, on Earth or off it.”

“I see the logic. War must be averted at all costs. And this is your way of handling it? The Martians are agitating for independence, and your response is to clamp the lid down even tighter?”

“What would you have us do, Falcon? At least this way we keep control. At least this way we can exclude the unknowns—and a political liberation of the offworld settlements would be a massive unknown. That's even leaving aside the influence of the Machines in all this, which is another huge uncertainty.”

He said, “That's why Jupiter frightens you so much. You don't know what's going on down there. And what you don't know, you can't control.” Falcon studied Springer, her voice tight, her manner set, determined, clear-thinking—and, under it all, with a bit of poetry in a rebellious soul. And he thought of far-off Earth, nestling close to its sun, a world that had found peace and unity so tragically recently—and yet here was one of its citizens, out in the dark and the cold, wrestling with existential threats on behalf of the whole of humanity. He felt an odd admiration for her. But he didn't drop his guard.

As he studied her, so she studied him. She said now, “So will you help me?”

“What can you tell me about New Nantucket?”

Springer said nothing, returning his gaze resolutely.

“Or about the weapons emplacements you're installing at the sub-­Jovian point on Ganymede?”

“Are you making it a condition of working with us that I have to reveal classified information?”

Falcon gave in. “What, and miss Falcon Junior's journey to the heart of Jupiter? Hell, no. Okay, Colonel, I'll do as you say. I'll—observe.”

“By the way, you'll have my cousin Trayne for company.”

That surprised him. “Trayne? He's a bright kid but—”

“We need to have a Martian attached to this jaunt. Just to show Port Lowell we're not excluding the Martians from any of this.”

Falcon smiled. “And who better to play that part than Trayne? He's family for you, and he evidently knows absolutely nothing about the politics . . .”

“I'm not quite as cynical as that. I happen to believe Trayne will be a good crewmate.”

“I'm sure he will,” Falcon said dryly. “He's a Springer after all.”

A curt nod, and a smile back. “I'll be monitoring you all the way down, of course. But report to me in person when you get back.” And Thera Springer, her job done here, Falcon safely recruited, was already glancing at a wrist minisec, her mind evidently on her next meeting.

And Howard Falcon's thoughts turned, once again, to Jupiter.

23

In the pale air, a thousand hot-air balloons hovered in formation.

Falcon, once more at his control station in the
Ra
with Trayne at his side, was awed despite his own previous jaunts into Jupiter. Each of those tremendous envelopes, around two hundred metres in diameter, was emblazoned with the sigil of the World Government, an Earth cradled in human hands—a design, Falcon knew and few others probably remembered, based on the mission patch of the Apollo-Icarus 6 spacecraft—and boldly marked with an identification number. And beneath each golden balloon was a knot of equipment, a suspended factory that Falcon knew must be an atmospheric processing plant, with a dock for small, needle-shaped craft, evidently orbital shuttles, freighters. Even as Falcon watched, one craft sparked rocket fire and soared away from its balloon, out of the farm and up into the higher atmosphere, heading for orbit and a rendezvous with an interplanetary tanker, into which it would offload its precious cargo of fusion fuel for delivery to Earth and the colony worlds.

But it was the precise formation of the balloons together that was so impressive: a neat array in the hydrogen-helium sky, maintained despite a battering from the turbulent Jovian winds. It was a fantastic sight—and yet Falcon was reminded of a place and time far from here, of images of
a wartime London sheltering under a sky full of barrage balloons: images that had been only a century old when he was born.

The World Government Space Development Secretariat had supplied Falcon with more information than he needed on this, its grandest project: its helium-3 extraction operation, dozens of plants like this established deep in the clouds of Jupiter. Now Trayne consulted a display, bending forward stiffly in his exposit. “So this is the North Temperate Band Atmospheric Processing Station Number Four—NTB-4. The station's a long way from the lower-latitude zones where the native biota tends to congregate.”

That positioning was an act of conservation, Falcon saw, but also of simple common sense. He imagined a creature like a manta being drawn into one of those great extractor fans, or a medusa, kilometres across, at play in that forest of balloons . . .

“There are a thousand aerostat plants in this one station alone, with ninety-eight percent fully operational at present. It seems there are frequent breakdowns.”

“Hence the need for a crewed presence,” Falcon muttered.

Trayne said dryly, “If you count Machines as crew, yes. There are said to be ten Machines for each Martian working at this facility. Each plant processes three thousand cubic metres of Jovian atmosphere per second, in order to extract one
gram
of the isotope helium-3 . . .”

It sounded so little, just the merest trace to be extracted from Jupiter's enormous reservoir of air. But that trace was enough to sustain a mighty interplanetary civilisation. And, economically, it was an effective, indeed a highly profitable operation.

The Martians were paid either in credit or in trade goods—oil or other complex organics—or sometimes in high-tech gear they could not yet manufacture themselves. It had always been that way, Falcon thought sourly. An empire bought bulk raw materials from its colonies in exchange for complex products from the centre, just as the Romans had traded with the provincial British, and the British in turn had traded with the colonial Americans. The Machines, meanwhile, had been rewarded with access to a few inner-system asteroids rich with the metals they craved.

But, Falcon knew, a dependence on this collection strategy made Earth vulnerable too. Fallbacks were being explored, he had heard; since Geoff Webster's day Falcon had maintained contacts in the World Council and other high echelons of the WG, so he knew that Space Development was already trying to establish similar atmospheric-mining operations in the clouds of Saturn.

All that for the future. Right now it was time for Howard Falcon, agent of the government, to go to work.

Viewscreens on Falcon's console lit up with images of a human, evidently a Martian, a male aged perhaps forty, head cradled in a massive brace, and alongside him a Machine, its own “head” an ungainly cluster of sensor gear. Even after all these years, each time he encountered a Machine Falcon found himself looking into camera lenses in search of a soul.

“Calling
Ra
,” said the human. “Welcome to Station NTB-4.”

“
Ra
reporting in, NTB-4.”

“I am Hans Young,” said the Martian. “Citizen Second Grade. I'm in charge of the human team attached to the Orpheus project. And before you ask—no, no relation.”

Relation to whom? Oh, yes, John Young. Falcon ignored that bit of Martian bragging. “We've corresponded, Dr. Young. Good to see you.”

Young waved. “And hi to you too, Trayne. How's your mother?”

“Good, thank you, Hans.” Trayne glanced at Falcon. “Mars is a small world.”

“So I gather.”

“And I,” intoned the Machine in a smooth synthetic voice, “will be known for the purposes of this expedition as Charon 1.”

“Charon . . . More classical mythology. Orpheus's guide across the Styx?”

“Correct. I will guide the first stage of the descent. There will be further ‘Charons' later. The mission must proceed in stages, adapting to the conditions we encounter as we travel deeper into Jupiter. It was thought appropriate to establish a series of base camps as we progressed. The logic is rather as when humans once challenged mountains such as Everest.”

Falcon said dryly, “I can tell you that Earthlings
still
climb mountains.”

“And so do Martians,” put in Trayne.

“Let's review the strategy,” Falcon said. “We won't be able to track Orpheus even as deep as the thermalisation layer—we'll manage only a few hundred kilometres, less than one percent of the journey he's undertaking.”

“Nevertheless your company will be welcome. And you will stay on station as one of a chain of relays.”

“As agreed.” Falcon glanced at a clock. “I see Orpheus is prepared for launch. Is there any need for us to come aboard?”

Young smiled. “Commander Falcon, one thing you learn when working with Machines: there's no ritual, no routine. When they're ready to go, they just go. Not so much as a countdown.”

“I concur with that.”

An image of a black cube appeared in the viewscreens.

“It is I. Orpheus. Or, ‘Falcon Junior.' Welcome to the project, Com­mander Falcon. Adam sends his personal regards.”

“Thank you—”

“Follow me if you dare.”

The images relayed from NTB-4 shuddered, just a little.

Hans Young glanced at an off-screen monitor. “He's gone—he and the remaining Charons—bathyscaphe away!”

“Just like that?”

Young smiled. “Told you.”

Trayne nudged Falcon and pointed through a window. “Look! There he goes!”

A kind of ship had tumbled out of the base of one of the hovering balloons, a silvered sphere no more than a few metres across. As it fell through the air a canopy deployed and quickly inflated, slowing the drop to a steady sinking.

Falcon tapped his controls and felt the
Ra
turn sluggishly in response. “There he goes indeed,” he muttered. “Come on, Trayne, we have an explorer to chase . . .”