Angel Stations (10 page)

‘Take a look at this.’ Elias pulled out a crumpled smartsheet and dropped it onto Hollis’s lap, still keeping his gun pressed against the back of the policeman’s neck.

‘What is it?’ asked Hollis shakily.

‘Just look at it.’ Elias reached over Hollis’s shoulder, touching the smartsheet here and there. As information began to scroll down, a long sigh escaped Hollis’s lips.

‘See that?’ said Elias. ‘It’s a ship’s manifest. I got it from Josh – just before I killed him. Not an official manifest. It’s got details of where they kept him, where they’re moving him to.’ There were other things on the sheet. A pixellated image of a man being lowered into a deepsleep coffin, his body sprouting wires. Trencher.

‘I didn’t know about this, Elias. Really, I didn’t. You have to believe me.’

‘I thought Trencher was dead,’ snarled Elias, his voice rising. ‘All these years, I thought he was dead. And now I find he’s still alive – if you can call that living.’ He pushed the gun harder into the other man’s neck, forcing Hollis to lean forward under the pressure. ‘If you even intimate for one second you didn’t know about this, it’ll be the last thing you ever say. Does he know where he is – or what’s happening to him?’ Elias pressed his free hand over one side of his head; it felt like he had a headache. No . . . worse than that.
Not now
, he thought.
Not here
. The pain was growing.

‘I don’t know. We don’t have him anymore. He was given over to a private research group for storage and research. They said he died during procedures. That’s all I know, Elias, believe me.’

‘I don’t know, Hollis. You’ve always been a slippery little bugger, haven’t you? Maybe you’re still lying. Maybe I should just kill you.’

‘No.’ Hollis was weeping. Elias scowled, feeling sickened. His finger touched the trigger, and he pushed forward again until Hollis’s head was forced down even further. Pain filled one side of his skull. There were images, thoughts flickering in the back of his mind, unwelcome ghosts of people and places he’d never seen or been to, all crammed together in a meaningless jumble.

Do it
, thought Elias. He’s worthless, scum. The world would be a better place. Remember all the threats, all the living in fear.

Elias shook his head, while staring in wonder at the corrupt policeman. ‘You people truly never fail to amaze me.’ He pulled the pistol back and hit Hollis twice, hard, in the back of the head. Hollis slumped, unconscious, face pressed against the console.

Then it hit: a wave of nausea and pain, and then the visions. Not the tiniest fraction of the power of precognition Trencher had been blessed or cursed with, but an overwhelming experience nonetheless. A tiny scrap of the future tumbled out of the sky, and fell between Elias’s eyes.

Nothing. Darkness. The negation of being. He howled with pain and terror, as his altered cells showed him the end of everything.

Vincent

‘Hey, Vincent.’

Eddie Gabarra. Vincent Lani hadn’t seen Eddie in years. He grinned despite himself. They’d worked together, briefly, at Arecibo, before Gabarra had been moved upstairs, literally.

‘Eddie.’ Vincent leaned his bicycle against the door to his office and shook the other man’s hand. ‘Long time, no see. I thought you were—’ Vincent made an upwards-pointing motion with his hand.

‘Still ILA? Yeah, I still am. This is my first time back in, oh, two years.’ Somehow, in the surprise of finding Eddie waiting for him outside his office at the University, Vincent had neglected to notice the pair of crutches Eddie was leaning on.

‘Oh, you’re . . .’ Injured? ‘I’m sorry, I had my mind on other things . . .’

‘Thank you, Vincent. Yes, I’ll be just fine,’ Eddie said, deadpan.

Vincent thought for a moment. One of the problems with working in low-gee had always been the deleterious effect on the human anatomy. The longer you had to live in low or zero gravity, the harder it got to deal with normal gravitational levels. But these days there were medical techniques that could deal with that kind of thing: tailored viruses and medical processes that could more or less rebuild your skeleton from the inside, with relatively little pain or fuss.

Expensive, though. As far as Vincent knew, the treatment cost about the same as getting someone up to the ILA and keeping them there for a couple of years. The ILA was the International Lunar Array, a complex on the dark side of the moon, which itself formed part of the Deep Space Observation Array. Eddie was Head of Operations for the Array, one of the sweetest jobs an astrophysicist could have.

The refectory was bright and busy, stark polar light slanting in through tall angled windows. If you stood at the room’s east side, you could see the rows of wind turbines stretching off into the distance, like an army of giants encamped on their way to torture a Spanish knight. The rest of the view was blocked off by an extension to one side of an Arcology, one of the seven Arcologies that housed the three million population of Antarctica City.

Inside the refectory, palm trees brushed the thick, protective glass, bathing in sunlight. Vincent deposited Eddie at a table there and fetched a couple of coffees for them both.

‘How long you been back?’ Vincent asked, sitting across from Eddie. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, it seems a little mysterious, you turning up out of the blue like that.’

‘I pree-fer to be . . . mysterious,’ Eddie replied, in mock-sinister tones. ‘Well, I guess I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself. Besides, I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Vincent sipped at his coffee, and thought about that reply for a couple of moments. ‘So let’s see. You came all the way – from the moon – because you wanted to talk to me?’

Eddie shrugged. ‘Sure, why not?’

‘There are easier ways. Phone? The Grid?’

Eddie just looked at him calmly and waited.

‘Okay, then, why are you down here?’

‘Well, put it this way, you know I run the ILA. It’s a pretty demanding job, and more about politics and not enough science for my taste, but the money and the prestige that come with it are just ridiculous,’ he said with a smile. ‘Every now and then, though, something comes up which really blows your mind. I mean the big stuff, Vincent. Up there with finding the Angel Stations big.’

Vincent nodded and leaned back. He glanced around the cafeteria, where students milled about, and he could see a couple of other lecturers in the distance, getting fuelled up for their morning classes. Vincent liked real science, but he liked teaching as well. Sometimes, while explaining things, he could work something out in his head, often connected to what he was actually teaching at the time by only the most tenuous link.

Eddie, on the other hand, was the kind of guy you’d have at a party because you knew he was someone people could connect to, who could make things happen socially, but he was also a brilliant scientist, renowned for his abilities, on Earth and other places too. Vincent knew Eddie well enough to know that when he said something like this, he really didn’t mean it lightly.

‘Are you sure this is where we want to talk?’ Vincent asked him. ‘It’s kind of public.’

‘If anybody really wanted to listen in to our conversation, they’d have bugged your office. If they’ve bugged you personally, we’re screwed anyway. But here we can just sit and talk and nobody will pay much attention.’

Vincent nodded, not really thinking about how he had gone all the way from greeting an old friend to worrying about surveillance in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. ‘Okay,’ he said carefully.

‘Okay, first your research.’
My research?
thought Vincent. ‘How’s it going?’

Vincent blinked. ‘Are we talking about the important thing now?’

Eddie wore a very patient look. ‘Yes.’

‘Fine, I guess,’ Vincent said with a shrug. ‘Most of it’s just librarianship, keeping up with the data coming in from the other deep-space arrays, collating and cross-referencing it all, comparing it with other information gathered by other people over the centuries since they found the first couple of Angel Stations.’

‘Discovered anything interesting?’

‘Lots,’ Vincent said immediately. ‘The most important finding would involve fluctuations in levels of gamma radiation on a galaxy-wide basis. The Angel Stations aren’t spread evenly enough to provide a truly accurate picture of how the galaxy’s evolved over the past couple of hundred million years, but, using the Array here, and at the moon, along with the Arrays they’ve re-established out at the other Stations now, what you get is pretty remarkable. Sudden surges of gamma radiation, separated by huge periods of time. More than might be accounted for by typical burster activity.’

‘Big surges, right?’

‘Yes,’ Vincent said carefully, wondering where all this was leading. Eddie maintained an intense expression, while Vincent kept talking. ‘Big surges – more like explosive.’ Explosive? That was the word he’d been looking for. ‘That’s what you basically have. Maybe some kind of a super-burster. Evidence seems to suggest there are regular explosions of lethal gamma radiation, emanating from the core region of the galaxy, and spreading outwards from there over periods of thousands of years.’

‘Lethal?’

‘Sure, almost certainly. But it’s hard to be accurate. We found the first Angel Station out in the Oort Cloud at the end of the twenty-first century. Now, that let us jump to other Angel Stations at different points throughout the galaxy. Some are closer to the galactic core, others are further away. The one in the Kasper system is the closest to the core. So that gives us several vantage points from which we can measure these fluctuations.’ Vincent beamed at him.

‘Go on.’

‘Okay,’ said Vincent. He could feel himself slipping comfortably into lecturer mode. ‘When the Oort Angel Station failed three centuries ago, we lost contact with all the other Stations and their associated human colonies for two hundred years.’

‘The Hiatus.’

Vincent nodded. ‘Observations from those other Angel Stations resumed a century ago, when the Oort Station’s singularity was successfully reactivated. Now, the Hiatus made for some big gaps in our knowledge. I’ve been correlating data gathered before the Hiatus along with data obtained since we re-established contact. It’s long been thought that similar surges or explosions might have been responsible for mass extinctions here on Earth. The geological evidence is there, in the rock. That’s also part of my research.’

‘And how certain of that are you?’

‘Pretty certain. Can’t test it out, obviously, but I’d say all the evidence is strongly in favour.’

‘I’d agree.’ Eddie nodded. ‘I’ve got something you should take a look at. No, make that
have to
look at.’ He reached inside his jacket and brought out a smartsheet with bright red edging. He rolled it up and put it in Vincent’s hand. ‘I want you to take a good look at that. But, before you do, I want to ask you not to show it to anyone else, or talk about it to anyone. When I say the stuff on that is confidential, I really mean it. And once you’ve finished reading it, I want you to dispose of it, carefully.’

Vincent laughed nervously, but Eddie’s face remained grim. ‘Oh, come on, Eddie, what do you expect me to do – eat it? I mean, grilled or boiled?’

Vincent caught the glimmer of a grin at that remark, but immediately it was gone. Still, Eddie had relaxed a little. This was not like the man he knew, and Vincent had an inkling of the kind of pressure the other’s job must put him under. ‘So can you give me any idea of what’s on this thing?’

‘Only a little. It’s information that corroborates and supports your theories, too much so for my liking. But it’s really important you don’t spread this around, okay? I can’t say that often enough.’ Vincent raised his hands, palms displayed towards Eddie, in a placating gesture: point taken. Eddie rolled his eyes and swirled the coffee around in the bottom of his paper cup, then put it down again.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m only down here for a few days. I’m not even officially here, kind of, so I’ll have to come back. I’m going to shake some hands and do some politics, and I’ll be back here in two days’ time. Then you can tell me what you think of what’s on that smart-sheet.’

Ursu

More days passed, and Ursu waited for some further sign that he suspected, in his more candid reflections, would never come to pass.

He spent more time with Turthe, fulfilling his new duties as a Master-in-Waiting, but with less fervour or pleasure than he might have otherwise done.

‘Did I ever tell you how I came to be the Guardian of the Book of Shecumpeh?’ Turthe began one time, while Ursu studied some of the ancillary texts Turthe kept stored on shelves in his workroom. Most of those other works recorded events in other cities, other lands, information gained through trading or war.

‘No, I don’t think you ever did,’ said Ursu. He had earlier been helping Turthe grind down a particular form of stiff, puttylike fungi – called icewort – which grew mostly under the eaves of buildings, particularly after it had been raining. It was slimy to the touch and possessed a foul smell, but was a vital ingredient for producing ink.

Rumours continued that the army outside the walls was preparing for a grand assault any day now. There had been an exchange of messages during the last two days, and Ursu had been there when Nubala’s own message-bearer had re-entered the gates of the city. Ursu noticed how the messenger’s face had looked drawn, his ears spread flat and stiff across the back of his skull.

The icebeasts in their stables had finally been sacrificed to the needs of the people, and were even now being roasted, their meat cut into long strips and salted to preserve it. The hardships of siege had long since made Turthe painfully thin, and Ursu worried lest the old Master was too frail to survive much more of it.

‘It happened when I was young,’ Turthe continued, watching his pupil work.

‘Shecumpeh showed you the Great Book and told you that you were to be its Guardian?’ Ursu spoke more sharply than he had intended. ‘You told me so.’

‘So I did,’ he said. ‘But I lied, you know.’