The Veil (10 page)

“What does
that
mean?” her voice full of derision.

“Your smile warms my heart and your tears break it. The daughter I never had.”

Lucy cannot help but slump under the weight of the sentiment.

Robert waits patiently for the return of her gaze, bringing with it the resolution that they both need. He is not disappointed when she gives it—

The
crack
of wood snapping on the forest floor abruptly ends the moment, with Robert immediately on his feet, scanning the tree line about them. Silence.
A falling branch, perhaps?

Something makes a move, crashing through the undergrowth. Robert finds it—an upright figure heading away from them. He bounds into the shrubbery after it, pushing through the foliage with ease, enough to gain on the invader, only to then lose sight of him—or her.

He halts his pursuit to listen. Nothing.

“
Robert?
”
Lucy calls out from the path. “
What’s happening?
”

It’s enough to quell his confounded exasperation and he makes to head back.

A
crunch
of twigs betrays his quarry’s hiding place.

Before he can complete the turn to locate it, a barely discernable figure launches out from a dense patch of shrubbery, knocking him off his feet. He grabs at anything his hands might find—they find a clothed arm, the grip bringing his assailant down to the ground with him, the resulting tussle revealing a degree of strength that Robert is unable to overcome, his pawing hands finding only a garment that seemingly covers the individual from head to toe, tailored to their frame, but not slim fitting—folds of a luxuriant gray fabric that seemingly offer a means of purchase, but which is somehow slippery.

A
grunt
as they break free from his grasp.
A woman? Ramani?

Robert scrabbles about to regain some grip, but she is gone.

He hauls himself up, brushing off the dirt.

Lucy stumbles into the clearing.

“What was it? An animal?” she asks.

“More like Ril and Ramani up to no good.”

THE NEXUS

Robert and Lucy are seated at the patio coffee table looking out over the formal garden to the rear of the house, Robert with a coffee, Lucy with a fizzing hangover recuperative—despite Robert’s assertion that it was unlikely to have any effect
whatsoever
, but Lucy desperate enough to try absolutely
anything
.

Striding across the lawn toward them are Ril and Ramani.

Robert keeps his gaze fixed on Ramani as the two of them approach the seating area, having already prepped Lucy to play it cool about the previous evening’s encounter in the woods.

“Rested, I hope,” Ril says. “We have a tour planned for today.”

* * *

Ril starts them out on the same route that led to the pavilion, heading across the formal garden toward the woods. Robert positions himself alongside Ril, with Lucy and Ramani trailing behind.

“There was something in the woods last night,” Robert says casually.

“Really?”

“We haven’t seen any wildlife though.”

“That’s right—there is none here,” Ril says, leaving Robert to wonder whether he is not to be drawn on the subject, or seeking to duck the issue entirely. “A falling branch, perhaps?” Ril suggests. “There can be a bit of a breeze at night.”

Robert lets it go, deciding to play the hand he has been dealt close to his chest. Behind them Ramani has heard the conversation, Ril conveying his own sense of it by means of an innocent backward glance, Ramani skillfully obfuscating their exchange through an observation of Lucy’s condition.

“A little worse for wear, I see.”

“I feel just fine,” Lucy retorts haughtily, clearly not wishing to engage further, her standoffish manner eliciting a grin from Ramani.

On arriving at the woodland edge, and
Gog
, Ril takes them in a different direction—through the shrubbery, with no evidence of an established path. They push through to an open grassed area, neatly clipped.

Center stage, on a landing pad, is the Mombasa, made anew and resplendent.

“Good Lord!” Robert exclaims, all thoughts of the previous evening banished from his mind. “Is it a replica?”

“We took her into our workshops for repair shortly after you entered the dome,” Ril says. “We thought we would use it as a runabout.”

“A runabout?” scoffs Robert. “Surely you can do better than this. You won’t get much flight time in this gravity.”

“But fun, no?” Ril says. “The engineering is most impressive, and Ramani is itching to put the Mombasa through her paces.”

“So that’s it,” Lucy says. “I had the strangest feeling this morning. I can sense the Mombasa like the Afrika.”

“You will find that you have complete control over her, Lucy.” Ramani says. “Lower the access ramp, please.”

The ramp lowers for all to board.

* * *

Robert and Lucy strap themselves into the flight deck passenger seats as Ramani skips though the preflight checks with what Robert considers to be reckless abandon. Ril, in the copilot’s seat, does not seem at all bothered, save for a jocular assessment as Ramani brings the Merlin aero rocket engines up to full tilt.

“Make sure those restraints are secure. The ride is likely to be interesting.”

The Mombasa lifts away, keeping low over the trees. From the position of the morning sun Robert assesses their direction to be northeast, assuming the orientation of the Emerald City is true to Mars north–south. That would mean they are likely heading toward the small, almost circular, collapse crater in the caldera’s northern sector, but it is impossible to make out any original features, not just because of the terraforming, but also the sheer scale of the landscape. Time for some questions.

“How long did it take to create all of this?” Robert asks.

“Six years—Earth years—though it was completed over a decade ago.” Ril says, straining his neck round best he can against the seat harness. “Construction started just after the last manned mission, the political climate at the time making a return unlikely for many more decades.”

“Making it easier to hide?” Robert quips.

“Quite so,” Ril affirms. “Doctoring the feeds from all the Mars probes was easy enough, as was a surface projection to hide the caldera from even the best terrestrial telescopes, but we couldn’t risk human inspection up close.”

“And a certain amount of, shall we say,
political
manipulation?” Robert makes no attempt to disguise his cynicism, Ril in turn offering no response.

“What’s the dome made of?” Lucy asks.

“It’s an energy barrier—what you might call a force field, of sorts. Veil technology.”

“How is it generated—?”

Robert’s earlier assessment of their flight path is spectacularly confirmed as the Mombasa dives into a truly vast crater—easily ten kilometers across, the floor some three kilometers below them, the dense forest all around its rim and their low level of flight having hidden it from view until the very last moment.

The engines whine under maximum thrust, the descent alarmingly fast, Ramani taking them daringly close to the cliff wall, a wicked grin plastered right across her face, while Ril carries a distinctly nonplussed air about him. Robert grips his restraints as Lucy cranes forward against hers for a better view.

A kilometer of terrifying fairground ride and Ramani takes them away from the crater wall in a gentle arc toward the center. It is only now that Robert realizes that there has been no obvious terraforming here—apart from the atmosphere the terrain looks original.

“The Merlins are
magnificent
,” Ramani enthuses. “Little heavy in the stick, though.”

Ahead, dead in the center of the crater floor, is a low structure of the same ochre-red material as the landing platform. A cylindrical building, perhaps three hundred meters in diameter, ringed by a wide band of smooth ground.

“The Nexus,” Ril says. “Where we created the ecosphere.”

Ramani brings the Mombasa down on the band of smooth crater floor—more of the concrete-like material—before a giant portal in the building’s wall, seemingly open to the elements. Ril has them disembark in short order and without delay they head inside.

The building is just a plain shell—a cover for a yawning hole in the ground, a shaft itself two hundred meters across, plunging to an unseen depth, its walls of some precise construction, with a light that emanates uniformly. Hugging the inner edge of the shaft, level with their approach, a platform protrudes out into thin air. Ril makes no pause in stepping out onto it, Ramani and Lucy following likewise, trailed by an apprehensive Robert—there is no guard barrier. The platform descends silently, Robert finding no obvious means of traction or guidance, the pace quickly gathering.

Lucy steps forward, right to the outer edge, peering directly down, the descent ruffling her hair. The instinct to call her back quickly passes for Robert. Ril and Ramani have made no move, and none of them are likely to be in any danger from such a place as this. Not from its structural and mechanical elements at least—Robert envisages an invisible web that might catch their fall, or some such device that dispenses with the need of something as intrusive as safety rails.

He catches Ril and Ramani watching him watch Lucy.

Cavernous openings race by—brightly lit rectangular holes in the cylindrical wall. Robert looks to Ril for some description.

“The upper levels are nurseries, where the flora was grown,” he says. “Below are factories, workshops and atmospheric processors.”

“Are there…people here? Engineers? Technicians—?”

“Everything you see is non-sentient automation.”

Not quite a direct answer to his question, and Robert wonders how the turn of phrase sat with Lucy, although she doesn’t seem to be listening. Robert had instructed her to be most observant, and capture as much detail as she could in her memory for future analysis, not that she needed any encouragement, her nature tending to be something of an information sponge.

After a relatively short while the platform arrives at the bottom of the shaft, there having been no sensation of dropping and the depth of descent difficult to gauge—

“Just short of four kilometers,” Ramani says, obliging an awestruck Robert gazing back up at the vanishing point above.

The space around them is as plain as it is empty, devoid of any feature save for five giant tunnels equally spaced around the perimeter of the shaft, each receding into an inky dark. Ril and Ramani step off the platform, striding briskly toward the center of the shaft’s floor, some one hundred meters away, the pace such that Robert and Lucy have to put some effort into keeping up.

As he marches along, Ril gestures with outstretched arms at two opposing tunnels to either side of the group.

“Service ways to the entire ecosphere above,” he calls out, a sense of pride in his voice. “And a further four kilometers below us, the Gravimetric Grid—simultaneously the source of the city’s power and its gravity field.”

Robert is fairly certain that
that
was the first time either of them had referred to this place as a
city
. Their effortless diction may well conceal pertinent facts, evident only to the cognizant, their placement quite possibly very deliberate. He catches himself in the midst of that train of thought—more likely the Emerald City tickling the wisps of paranoia in his mind.

Halfway to the center and a glow emanates from it, coalescing and resolving into a huge three-dimensional model of Olympus Mons, a semi-opaque manifestation showing the entire extent of its inner world. Such is the size of the volcano that they are already far within the model, its flanks reaching back behind them, the reduced scale placing the caldera before them at just below eye level as they seem to trudge up the slope toward it.

Within the caldera the detail shown is its original topography of collapse craters, with no sign of the dome or its ecosphere. Instead the focus is the internal transformation of the mountain, which for the most part is located directly underneath the caldera, with a span exceeding it by about one third in all directions. The orientation of model puts the Nexus, and their current location, foremost, the tunnels fanning out in an asymmetrical manner to cover the full expanse of the region within the caldera’s ridge.

Below the Nexus is a flat lattice structure with an irregular edge that traces the contour of the mountain’s surface flank as if an isometric line drawn deep within its volume.

“The Gravimetric Grid?” Robert enquires of Ril.

“Yes.”

“It creates the gravity field?” Lucy pipes up. “Why doesn’t the volcano collapse under its own weight?”

“Look closer,” Ramani suggests.

The Grid’s lattice is not regular in its pattern, but a distorted mesh. From its surface faint tendrils snake their way throughout the mountain like veins.

“The Gravimetric Grid stabilizes the geological structures by altering the fabric of space in which they exist.”

“Are you suggesting that it changes the laws of physics?” Robert says.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Supposing its power source were to fail—what then?”

“It has no power source,” Ril says. “It no more needs one than a stone pillar. It is a construction of space-time. A structure, if you will, that once set in place, persists. Indeed, its very presence yields sufficient energy to provide for the needs of this place indefinitely.”

“Can it be controlled?” Lucy asks.

“On a local level, yes. It is used to move things—like the shaft elevator.”

“But you could have built a city without the need for a higher gravity,” Robert says.

“Some things here need it,” Ramani replies.

“What things?” Lucy asks.

* * *

The engineer observes from just within the tunnel entrance so as to remain hidden, not from the two creatures in the Map Room, to whom it is invisible, but from the two
familiars
. They would surely detect its presence should it venture closer.

Brothers and sisters occupy similar positions in the other tunnels, all equally eager to make a firsthand observation of their own, their subspace clicks and whistles conveying first impressions.

The female, though corporeal through manufacture, appears almost as fragile as the male. It would be easy to detach their limbs—perhaps one by one—though such an experiment would not be useful at this stage as it may result in permanent damage, rendering the samples useless, and upsetting the Community.

Nevertheless, the familiars have performed well in their selection, though they themselves are of no consequence, being only approximations that can yield no assured insight, and now threaten to become a nuisance. The temptation is to sweep them aside and proceed in a more direct manner.

A brother is more cautious, reminding all that they are to limit their physical involvement so as not to anger the Community, as they inadvertently had with a number of previous opportunities. Perhaps they should let the
scenario
play out as intended and derive their conclusions accordingly.