The Medusa Chronicles (28 page)

47

More than half a century after the destruction of Earth, Io was the first and last line of human security.

Jupiter itself might have fallen to the Machines, but humans still clung to its moons. All the Galilean satellites—the four big moons, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io—were militarised, serving as defence stations as well as armament and fuel factories. An unspoken truth, though, was that everything hinged on Io. This was the nearest large moon to Jupiter, swinging closest to the cloud layers; its hugely energetic surface environment had long supported a key industrial hub. Now the military government had thrown everything at Io, layering it with fortifications and packing sentries, cruisers and battleships into inclined orbits so tight that, in the radar echoes at least, they formed an almost solid shell. Nothing got close to that shell—or through it—without having passed the highest levels of authentication.

And it was not until the Springers' ship was inside the cordon that Io itself became visible.

Before the coming of people, the surface had been a sickly, mottled yellow brown—the entire moon crusted over with sulphur belched into airless skies from numerous geysers, billions of tonnes of it expelled
each year from the vast furnace of the moon's core. Now, under human occupation, the great energies of Io's interior had been dammed and diverted, providing power for the war effort. Refrigerated shafts had been sunk into the crust, pushing down through hundreds of kilometres of molten magma, grasping for the hard, hot prize of the core itself. The most trouble­some lava flows had been quenched or redirected, or looped into circuits, whichever served human needs the better. Now the geyser activity was down by a factor of two-thirds, with all that surplus energy used in refineries and factories larger than cities, their cooling towers and radiator vanes bristling out to heights of hundreds of kilometres: satanic installations that floated on the impermanent crust like plaques of carbon slag on molten iron. And each refinery or factory was in turn cordoned by an equally extensive battery of weapons. Gun after gun, each squat barrel like a miniature volcano. None had ever been used in anger, for the orbital screens had until now proven unbreakable. Nonetheless they were tested constantly, maintained at hair-trigger readiness.

It was into this military-industrial hell that Howard Falcon now descended.

*  *  *  *

Falcon watched the final approach from the bridge. “So, this weapon of yours. It's in Io somewhere?”

“Not
in
Io,” Valentina answered. “Io
is
the weapon.”

Falcon had long wearied of the Springer-Soames' clumsily enigmatic bragging. “You'll have to explain that to me. What will you do, blow up the whole moon?”

“That would be within our capability,” Valentina said. “But it wouldn't achieve much. A new ring system, a perturbation of the orbits of the other moons, some disruption to Jupiter's outer cloud layers . . . Our plans for Io are different—grander.
You
appreciate a grand gesture, don't you, Howard?”

He wistfully remembered Geoff Webster. “I used to.”

She nodded to her brother. “Do we have entry clearance?”

“Final authorisation just came in. For the last time—are we sure it's wise to bring him in?”

“He must see the engine,” Valentina insisted. “Then he'll understand—”

Without warning the ship dived hard for Io, arrowing down through a thicket of towers and vanes towards a smooth, black surface. It was going to take one hell of a pull-up, Falcon thought. And if anything went wrong . . . After all that he had endured, Falcon supposed that it would be a small mercy to die instantaneously, wiped out in a high-speed crash—neatly closing the long chapter of his life that had begun with another crash, eight hundred years ago—as if everything that had happened in between was but the dream of a dying mind.

The ground loomed.

And at the last instant a door irised open in the black surface. The Springer ship slipped through, harpooning down a long, straight shaft, with barely a whisker of clearance on either side. Red lights marked the speed of their descent, clipping past at what must have been several kilometres per second. Brother and sister looked on with a nerveless cool, as if they had done this a thousand times.

Falcon was almost impressed. “I knew you'd tapped the core. I had no idea there was anything this extensive. The pressure pushing back on these walls—”

“Is nothing,” Bodan said. “Nothing compared to what the Machines must be dealing with in Jupiter, at least. Tunnelling through a few thousand kilometres of moon is child's play.”

“Don't talk down our achievements, brother,” Valentina chided. “Think of all that bright magma, just beyond these walls, waiting to burst through and reclaim this tunnel we dug out of the rock. Does that scare you, Howard?”

“Other than human wickedness, I've more or less run out of things to be scared of.”

“Wickedness? This is total war,” Bodan said sternly. “There are no moral absolutes—no universal reference frames of good and evil. We do what we must to survive. Nothing else matters.”

“Oh, he's still cross with us about the Memory Garden,” his sister said with a mock pout.

“Then he should get some perspective. There'd be no point commemo­rating Hope Dhoni if the Machines win. Left to themselves, they'd eradicate every trace that there was ever a prior civilisation in this system at all. We're vermin to them—nothing more.”

“You misunderstand them,” Falcon protested.

“No,” Valentina answered with a sudden fierceness. “
They
misunderstand
us
. They underestimate our resolve—how far we'll go. To make them understand is the point of the exercise, Howard.”

Turning back to a console, Bodan said, “Coming up on the enclosure.”

The ship began to decelerate. A secondary iris popped open ahead of them, and then they were through, still braking hard, as they emerged into a much larger sealed space. By now, Falcon judged, they must be deep inside Io—perhaps beneath the magma layer, even inside the core itself.

It was clear that the Springer-Soames had been busy.

The space inside Io was an artificial chamber many tens of kilometres across, the curvature of distant walls traced by a haze of fine red lines. And occupying much of the central part of the chamber was some kind of engine, or power plant, scaled up to mountainous proportions. The thing was walnut-shaped, with a kind of axle running through the middle of it, extending out both ends and sinking into colossal plugs on either side of the chamber. In fact, this engine was comfortably larger than any spacecraft or station Falcon had ever seen—larger even than the
Acheron—
no part of it smaller than kilometres across, the whole titanic assemblage itself the size of a small moon.

And all cunningly bottled inside Io.

The Springer ship, reduced to the proportion of a krill next to a blue whale, nosed slowly along the length of the device. Floodlights picked out areas of detail, with the occasional pinprick flash of a laser or welding tool hinting at ongoing activity. Falcon could see no human workers—they would have been lost in the detail.

“I take it this isn't some immense bomb?”

“We call it the MP,” Bodan said. “Short for Momentum Pump. It's a starship engine, in all but function. In fact the basic technology came from research into interstellar travel, the physics and engineering.”

“We already sent starships. The Acorn ships—one of your own ancestors was involved—”

“Toys. The records expunged. For now, we've a better use for the technology. What can move an asteroid-sized starship to a quarter of the speed of light can just as easily move a
moon
. Maybe not as fast or as far—but then again it doesn't need much of a push.”

“You see, Howard, when the MP is activated,” Valentina said, “it will alter the orbit of Io. Within a few circuits—much less than a week—the moon's altered course will bring it down.
We will smash Io into Jupiter
, destroying the moon utterly, of course, but also disrupting the Jovian atmosphere beyond anything it will have known since the formation of the solar system. The Machines won't survive. Nor will the medusae, or any other element of the Jovian ecology. But that is a price we will willingly accept.” She smiled. “So that's our cunning plan, Howard. Brutal but effective, don't you think?”

Falcon struggled to grasp the idea, the sheer scale of it—the audacity—the insanity. “Shoemaker-Levy 9,” he said.

Valentina frowned. “What?”

“A comet that hit Jupiter, long ago. The medusae still sing of that event. But
this
 . . .”

“The medusae will sing no songs of Io, Howard. There won't be any medusae left.”

“I'll say this for the two of you. You're doing a splendid job of turning my sympathies to the Machines.”

“Your sympathies don't interest us,” Valentina said. “But you
do
care about the medusae.” She grinned. “We'll show you we're serious. We'll
show
you what our engine can do. In the meantime, perhaps we should give you time to think it over. You can do that while we have you . . . checked over.”

48

The siblings returned him to Io's exterior. The security guards escorted Falcon from the ship into a connecting tunnel, through which he was free to roll on his wheeled undercarriage.

He was led into what he quickly identified as a medical facility, being run under military auspices. The walls were painted an austere grey and stencilled with authoritarian notices and warnings. There were guards and checkpoints at regular intervals, security screens, automatic sentry cannon swinging on their turrets as Falcon rolled by.

At last they passed down a series of ramps and came to an underground room of blank grey walls. A false window, set high in the wall, showed Jupiter, framed as if the view were natural. The slightly flattened sphere was sunlit on one side, dark on the other. Bands of coloured cloud wrapped the world, familiar enough in their hues—but little else about them looked natural. They forked into twos and threes, splitting along angular separations, or recombined, like conductive traces on a circuit board. Even on the night side some of the bands continued to be visible, glowing like neon banners. All of this, it was believed, was evidence of Machine activity under those clouds, activity on a titanic scale.
What the hell are you up to down there?

Valentina went to a comms panel in the wall—one of the room's few visible features—and spoke quietly into a grille.

A few moments later part of the wall slid aside and a tall, thin-faced woman came into the room from an adjoining office. She wore a high-­buttoned tunic in a dark surgical green, trousers, green boots. Her hands were laced together behind her back. She walked around Falcon once, without speaking, without touching him. She had an upright bearing, her back ramrod straight. Her grey-blonde hair was worn in a severe and unflattering style: shaved at the sides, what remained cut short, brushed straight back from her brow and glued down with some kind of blueish gel.

She stood before Falcon, eyeing him in the way one might study a particularly septic wound. “This was how you found him?”

It fell to Bodan to answer. “Yes, Surgeon-Commander. We ran some preliminary scans in the Memory Garden, but that's as far as it went. It didn't seem likely that he'd die before we got back to Io.”

“
Didn't seem likely
, Mr. Springer-Soames? I would have thought something more concrete than guesswork was warranted. He is, after all, one of our most valued tactical assets. Or so I'm repeatedly informed.”

“Falcon is in your hands now,” Valentina said. “I'm sure you'll do all that's necessary to prepare him for Jupiter, Surgeon-Commander. The strict essentials, of course. Anything more can wait until he returns.”

“I wouldn't waste a moment of effort,” the woman answered. “Not when my clinical resources are already stretched to overload.”

The doctor turned to Falcon, meeting his eyes at last. Falcon stared back. There was no warmth or empathy in that contact, only a cold scrutiny. But Falcon wondered about the peculiar dynamic between the Springer-Soames and the Surgeon-Commander. To all intents, the siblings were at the top of the tree, and a mere Surgeon-Commander must be far down the hierarchy. But brother and sister were now, temporarily at least, guests in her domain rather than theirs . . . He supposed that doctors, given that life and death was in their hands, always had a certain power in any society. Given that, perhaps they preserved a certain independence of mind, even under the most totalitarian of regimes.

And he had the odd sense that he
knew
this Surgeon-Commander from somewhere—something in that look, that stare.

She said coldly, “The living parts wouldn't fill a small bucket. Half the neocortex is artificial, even. This isn't a person. This is the end product of a botched experiment from the dawn of cybernetics. But since you insist that his case be prioritised . . .”

“We do,” Bodan said.

“I hate to be any trouble,” Falcon said dryly.

“Oh, you're no trouble to me,” the Surgeon-Commander answered. “A nuisance, a distraction. I won't permit you to be more than that.”

“Good to hear I'm in caring hands.”

“How long do you need?” Bodan asked.

“To make sure Jupiter doesn't kill him quickly? A day, maybe two, to run over his most vital life-support systems. Beyond that, you'll just have to take your chances. And free up some space in the mortuary for the men and women I won't be able to save in the meantime, won't you?”

For the first time—certainly the first time since he witnessed the destruction of the Memory Garden—Falcon felt some small flicker of empathy for the Springer-Soames. It was one thing to despise them; it was quite another to see them despised by a third party.

“Hate me if that helps you get on with the job,” Falcon said, addressing the Surgeon-Commander. “But keep one thing in mind: I'm going to Jupiter to try to stop this war, not wage it.”

“If you hadn't helped those Machines become what they are, maybe we wouldn't have a war at all.”

“They didn't need any help from me,” Falcon replied, keeping his voice level. “They were on their way to sentience no matter what happened.”

“I'm glad your conscience is clear.”

“If I've still got one.”

The Surgeon-Commander raised her eyebrows. “I'll look for it when I open you up.” She nodded at the Springer-Soames. “You may leave us. I'll keep you updated. Hurry along.”

“Thank you,” Valentina said. “Your dedication won't go unnoticed.”

Falcon watched as the sister and brother left the room. When the door had closed after them, it was hard to tell where it had been.

*  *  *  *

Alone now with the Surgeon-Commander, Falcon kept his silence as she brought her face closer to his, wrinkling her nose with distaste. She walked around him again, rapping a knuckle against the hard casing of his torso. She pulled apart his eyelids, took a little pocket device from her tunic, shone a piercing light into his engineered pupils.

Falcon felt himself warming to her, just by a degree or so. She was a doctor,
being
a doctor, in this most ghastly of environments. “I'm Howard to my friends, by the way.”

“I know your name. I've been studying your medical files for weeks, ever since I heard they were going to bring you in.”

“Do you have a name, Surgeon-Commander? Or is that what you were called at birth?”

“I'm Tem. Surgeon-Commander Tem. That's as much as you need to know.”

Tem, Tem.
Did he know that name? “Did you ever work under Hope Dhoni?”

“Doctor Dhoni died a long time ago. They told me you'd lost track.”

“Maybe.” He felt moved to try to reach her. “Out of touch? I feel out of time, sometimes. I grew up in the age of the World Government. It was an idealistic project. Dedicated to freedom, choice—even to a respect for other minds, through the First Contact directives.”

“You make it sound like a utopia.”

“Maybe it was for a while . . .”

“A utopia that lost an existential war. What use was it?”

“And is the arrangement you have now any better? How about the last coup?”

“There have been no coups.”

“Right. And there's no such figure as
Boss
, either.”

“I'd watch your tongue.”

“Oh, don't worry about me. I'm much too useful to be shot.”

“I wouldn't count on that.”

She touched an actuation point on his torso and his primary access panel popped open. At once the barely audible sound of pumps and valves became more obvious, and there was a meaty, yeasty smell. She leaned in with her little light. Falcon did not look down. It was one thing to accept the fact of what he had become, quite another to watch someone poking around inside him.

She murmured, “So you're here to talk the Machines into a ceasefire, are you. Will they agree to it?”

“That's up to them.”

“Even with the threat of a secret super-weapon turned against them? Oh, you needn't be coy, Falcon.” He felt a cold touch, a painless but unnerving sense of his innards being prodded and displaced. “It's impossible to live and work on Io and not have some inkling of our glorious leaders' plans. We're all on evacuation readiness—every living soul on this moon. Have you seen what they've built?”

“Is this a test of my ability to keep a secret?”

“I've better ways to waste my time.” She pulled her hand out of him. “Stay still. I want to draw a blood sample. There's a valve in here somewhere.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

She went to the wall and waved a hand, causing an alcove to appear. She drew out a small tray of sterile surgical appliances. A pillar rose from the floor beside Falcon; she set the tray on the pillar and snapped on a pair of milk-coloured gloves.

“I'm not sure if I need a tune-up. I've been back to Jupiter so many times they wave me through customs.”

She delved back inside him. “Selfless of you to say so, but I have my orders—
damn
it!”

As she drew out her hand Falcon saw that she had cut herself on some sharp edge. It had gone right through the glove, drawing a bead of blood on the tip of her thumb. Apparently furious, she snapped off the gloves and threw them down at the floor, where they were absorbed. She
prepared a sterile swab and dabbed at the wound on her thumb. “The last thing I need is for your archaic DNA to contaminate
me
.” She taped up her thumb, tugged on new gloves, and returned to the task of drawing the blood sample. This time she managed to avoid hurting herself.

Odd thing to have happened, he thought. He was in an advanced medi­cal facility, deep in a moon of Jupiter, in the twenty-ninth century. A
cut thumb
?

She said as she continued, “Some would say that the Machines don't deserve the chance of peace.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, I'm biased. The Machines murdered my parents. One of their raids on Saturn, the fall of New Sigiriya . . .”

Again memory tingled; Falcon had visited the laputa with that name.

“I was lucky to have escaped before then.” She put her equipment back on the tray and closed up his hatch.

“Escaped?”

“To medical school. The Life Sciences Institute on Mimas. As far as I'm concerned, the Machines deserve whatever they get.”

This woman was complex, he thought. Still working as a doctor, still thinking as one, even in the middle of a war—even given her own personal trauma, evidently. Yet even she had a monochrome view of the Machines. “That's not a very enlightened attitude. You should research Carl Brenner . . .”

She opened a secondary hatch, just under his right armpit. Here was the access circuitry for his electronic sleep regulation. With the touch of a control, she could put him under as easily as any anaesthetist.

She said now, “I learned a very powerful lesson, long before my training—long before I came to Mimas. Actually it's what pushed me into this career. My defining moment. What makes us human isn't the shape we are. It's how we show kindness. That's my problem with the Machines; that's the gulf between us. The Machines look like us now, don't they?”

“If they choose.”

“It's just a mask. Peel it back and there's a void howling back at you.”

“You're wrong, Surgeon-Commander Tem. There's empathy in the Machines. I've seen it. One day we'll realise we've been looking into a mirror all along.”

“You're a dreamer, Commander Falcon.” She touched one of the inputs under his arm. Falcon felt a cloak of drowsiness begin to descend on him.

“Then dream,” he heard her say, almost as if she thought he'd already slipped under. “Go to sleep. We can't keep our masters waiting, can we?”