Galaxias, page 41
Zhi had imagined he was beyond being shocked.
‘A solar mass of it? That close?’ He paged through imaging updates. ‘We can’t see through the sail, but we have plenty of cameras on the leading side . . .’
Sara shook her head. ‘I should have checked.’ She tapped a screen.
Up came a magnified image of a star field. A black circle at the heart.
‘Ta-da,’ she said quietly.
Zhi said, ‘It’s there. Shit. Sitting there all this time. There is a lesson we should have learned from the Al-miriykh. Every so often, look out the window.’
Sara shrugged. ‘It’s much denser than the Sun. Physically smaller – about a sixteenth the diameter. I’m trying to check the mass estimate – I mean the size of the negative mass – with gravitational lensing, which ought to be more obvious than with the Sun itself, given it’s so small. Lensing – the deflection of the light of distant stars by its gravity field.’
Zhi nodded. ‘Like Einstein’s famous solar eclipse experiment, where they proved relativity was correct – mass bending space . . .’
‘Of course this – negative Sun – would push starlight away, rather than attract it. Detectable even so.’
Marina put in, ‘And the TNOs? The anomalous scattering? Could your negative Sun do that?’
‘I think so,’ Sara said. ‘Simply by pushing TNOs out of their orbits. As opposed to dragging them in, like a normal-matter rogue planet, say. Everybody would have been looking for a pull source, not a push source – and so they were looking in the wrong place. I do need to check the modelling more carefully. I—’
‘And what about the lurker on the Moon?’ Zhi’s mind was racing now. ‘The projectile it fired out after Blink Day. Could that be a similar effect? Some kind of – negative matter drive?’
Sara smiled. ‘Possibly. I’d have to model it. It would be elegant to hypothesise a single technology to justify all these effects.’
Zhi said, ‘I think we need a break. Time to take all this in. One hour.’
Sara shook her head. ‘I should keep observing, refining the modelling—’
‘OK. Do it. One hour. Try to get some rest too. We’ll convene then. And we’ll put together some kind of report for Earth.’
Reluctantly, they agreed.
So they broke.
Zhi tried to relax, but couldn’t, despite his own advice.
He ate, drafted a report for Earth. Brainstormed queries, hypotheses, concerns, listing them on his phone. He had always enjoyed working in remote stations, even the Lodestone, where he was not under the constant command of mission controllers on Earth. But now, just for once, he longed to be able to talk to JPL or TsUP, to somebody in charge, without whole days of time delay.
Also Mel Kapur, Tash.
Even his mother. Though he found it hard to admit it.
They reconvened on the bridge after the hour.
Sara was first there, and when he arrived Zhi wondered if she had rested at all.
‘So,’ Marina said briskly, bustling in after Zhi. ‘Given this magic repulsive-gravity force.’
‘The Anti-Sun,’ Sara said.
Zhi smiled, hearing the capitalisation in her voice. Anti-Sun. We’ve named it. First step to dealing with it.
Marina said, ‘If this is the work of Galaxias, what does it have to do with the Blink?’
Zhi rubbed his face. ‘Actually I have some ideas about that. I looked up negative matter myself . . .
‘It’s thought you could build a drive with the stuff, with theoretically infinite capability. A negative matter rocket.’ He grinned, and held up two fists. ‘It sounds crazy the first time you hear it, but it’s logical. Suppose my left hand is the Sun, the right the Anti-Sun. The Anti-Sun pushes at the Sun, which moves further left.’ He moved his left fist that way. ‘But the Sun attracts the Anti-Sun. So the Anti-Sun follows, going left too.’ His right fist followed his left. ‘And they just keep chasing each other.’
He shut up, and let them pick holes in that.
‘Rubbish! You’re getting kinetic energy from nowhere . . .’
‘Not to mention momentum . . . What about the conservation laws, Zhi?’
‘You ought to have got that yourself, Sara. The negative matter has a negative energy content. Negative momentum too. So you start with no kinetic energy, and stay with no kinetic energy, even while the two stars chase each other around the cosmos. Start with zero. Plus and minus add to zero. End with zero.’
Marina continued to frown. ‘Very well, but what has this to do with the Blink? In which, it seemed, our Sun was instantaneously transported out here – well, at lightspeed.’
Zhi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But it can’t be a coincidence that the Anti-Sun, here, has the same mass as our Sun. And that it lies, pretty much, on a straight line out from our Sun through the Blink Point. This Barrier must have something to do with it. Even if it’s just the equivalent of – hell, I don’t know – a primitive but necessary technology, to support the rest. The concrete pad at the base of a rocket launch gantry . . .’ He glanced out of the window. ‘Maybe we are only at the edge of it, here. Perhaps out there are huge engines we have yet even to glimpse. Whole hierarchies of them, surrounding the Solar System. An – infrastructure. And we can’t even see it. Or only this one element.’
‘Next question,’ Marina said. ‘Are we going to crash into that thing?’
That shut them up.
Zhi had the impression that she had been bottling up the question.
‘The negative Sun. I mean, we are heading towards it with what is presumably still a good fraction of our incoming velocity—’
‘No,’ Sara said. ‘We won’t get that close. The negative gravity field will become intense as we close in . . . My preliminary estimates show we will probably be pushed away long before any impact with – well, whatever is there. Four or five radii out. We shouldn’t get any closer than that. And we won’t come to any other harm. Remember, this thing has the mass of a star, but it is not a star. There seems to be no radiant energy – no light, no heat. I estimate that we will come no further than about half the Moon’s distance from Earth.’
Marina snapped, ‘How do you know?’
‘Because we are moving too slowly to get any closer.
‘It’s counter-intuitive. At least for us creatures of normal matter. We know about escape velocity – you would have to be travelling six hundred kilometres a second to escape our Sun, from its surface, for instance, to get away from its gravity field. Any slower and you would fall back. Here it’s different. Here you would have to fall in, faster than six hundred kilometres a second, to force your way through the push of the antigravity field and reach the surface. Does that make sense?’
‘I guess,’ Zhi said uncertainly.
‘Now, the Anti-Sun is smaller in size than our Sun – the radius is about a sixteenth – though it has the same size mass, but negative. It’s actually smaller than Jupiter, and I will leave the reason for that to the physicists. Because it is smaller, the surface capture velocity is that much larger than the Sun’s escape velocity.
‘Anyhow it’s too powerful for us to reach. We simply aren’t coming in fast enough. Basically we will be pushed away, by the antigravity field, as we approach. In the process, at worst we might hit a few hundred gravities. But, remember, we should come to no harm. The antigravity is an inertial force. As the ship is pushed, so are we within equally pushed, and we will continue to float around safely. We won’t feel a thing.’
Marina frowned. ‘Easy to say that. What about tidal forces? At closest approach, even a small distance may make a difference to the size of the forces working on us—’
‘Negligible,’ Sara said. ‘I checked. Well, probably negligible. I’ll go over it all again. We may need to lock down the scoop before closest approach, though; that’s a pretty fragile, extended structure. I believe we will emerge unharmed. There is the question of what to do later.’
‘Later?’
‘After the closest approach. It’s possible we could just turn around and begin the long journey home – boosted by the Anti-Sun’s field, before we let the dark energy ramjet take over again.’
Zhi frowned. ‘Or?’
‘Or we could stay here. In this odd – system.’
‘How?’ Marina snapped. ‘This is not a gravitating body. We cannot enter a stable orbit around it . . . Can we? Hell, no, of course we can’t.’
‘True,’ said Sara. ‘But – look, we have our scoop, the dark energy thrust. I told you, I figure that acceleration will balance the negative-gravity repulsive force at – well, about here, half an astronomical unit out. And so – you get the idea?’
‘I think so,’ Zhi said. ‘The Anti-Sun pushing back would be exactly balanced by the scoop pulling us forward.’
‘Yes,’ Sara said. ‘In fact the Anti-Sun seems to be pushing at the dark energy field itself – as if there’s a breeze coming from it, for our ramjet to tap.’
‘It would be like the Lodestone,’ Zhi said. ‘That’s held in place in the umbra of Earth by a balance of forces . . . it would be an unstable equilibrium, right?’ He held out his forefingers, pressed them against each other – mimed a slip, a slide. ‘But we could manage that actively. The ship is smart enough for that. It may be useful for humanity to have long-term observers, here, at the nearest thing we have to an outpost of Galaxias. Who knows what we may discover?’ He eyed Sara. ‘From what you say it sounds like we need to make a decision to commit to this course now – I mean, before we wait for a forty-eight-hour round-trip conversation with Earth.’
‘Indeed,’ Sara said. ‘We must use our own judgement.’
‘We can always set off for home later,’ Marina said. ‘But . . .’
‘Go on,’ Zhi said.
‘Well, this antigravity field is a pretty gentle barrier, isn’t it? Even for a ship like ours, made of spider-web and thistledown. It’s not an aggressive technology. It’s as if—’ She held up a hand, mimed a scoop. ‘It’s as if Galaxias is guiding the moth from the candle flame.’ She spoke softly, her Russian accent coming out more strongly.
‘That’s one interpretation,’ Zhi said, more coldly. He found it hard to think of the entity that had killed his fiancé and so many more people as non-aggressive.
Sara asked, ‘An alternative interpretation being?’
‘Think about it. OK, we set off from the Sun, headed roughly out to the Blink Point, and on through. What were the chances that this solar-mass object would be right here, right in our way?’
‘Ah,’ Sara said. ‘Good point. You couldn’t shield the whole Solar System this way, with solar-mass blockers everywhere. So Galaxias – came to meet us.’ She held up her own hand in a stop gesture. ‘Galaxias is shielding us from the flame. But we are not allowed to go any further.’
‘Correct.’ Zhi let that sink in. Then he said, ‘OK. The purpose of the trip was to explore Galaxias’s capabilities, its intentions. Well, now we know. It is bottling us up. With kindness.
‘Well, we have a way forward. And we have work to do. Let’s go over the arguments again, then draft some kind of update for Earth. And then . . .’ He glanced out towards the huge, occluding shadow of the sail. ‘Until we’re ordered home, this ship is going nowhere.’
39
July AD 2066: Year 10 ERC, Winter
After a flight across the North Sea from the mainland to New Aberdeen, without any problems as far as Tash could tell, the RAF helicopter smoothly began its descent.
The bird itself had been heavily modified since Tash had last taken a ride, with very obvious ash-screening filters over the engine inlets and what appeared to be robust supplementary armour layered over the outer hull. In the cabin, a peculiar webbing was embedded in the interior walls: Grace called it a Faraday cage, a new shell of protection against beamed cyber-attacks.
And as they flew they had been accompanied by a swarm of spotter and missile-carrying drones. Tash had the sense of a watchful infrastructure, from satellites overhead to warships in the ocean, and, she could see as they descended, human sentries on the Middle Sea dams.
Three years on from Naples, with the volcano’s aftermath still unravelling – it had been the single worst post-Blink disaster by far – the world was an introverted, paranoid place, criss-crossed by refugee flows, marred by low-level conflict. Hungry, cold and sick. It was, in longer memories – such as her father’s – like a throwback to the crisis years of the 2030s, when the great powers eyed a failing world, and each other.
Which, Tash knew, was a key subtext to this latest conference on Galaxias and all its works. Or so she supposed. She had been kept in the dark, excluded subtly even by Fred Bowles, more than she was used to. She knew the surface objectives were scientific and diplomatic – or at least she inferred that Fred hoped so, in his usual consensus-building, bridge-crossing fashion. After all, he had already achieved the major coup of persuading the Chinese government to send a delegation, led by Wu Yan, in the hope, presumably, of getting them to talk at last about whatever they were doing on Mercury, seven years after the first landings on the planet.
And speaking of introversion, paranoia, and being kept in the dark, Tash had got barely a word out of Grace during the flight. Even though they sat together for the whole crossing, just ahead of Charlie Marlowe, and a couple of rows behind Bowles, their boss.
Grace had self-evidently never recovered from the loss of her sister and niece in the aftermath of Naples. It didn’t help, Tash supposed, that almost every minute of every day she did her job, Grace was reminded of those losses. Grace kept keeping on, Tash saw. For now anyhow. But even so . . .
Even so, Tash found herself becoming, reluctantly, ever more wary of Grace and her moods, Grace and her increasingly furtive, taciturn ways. She and Grace had worked together for ten years already, and all the way through the Blink. And yet it felt as if they were growing further apart, not closer.
Tash was, in fact, suspicious of Grace. Though she couldn’t have said specifically why.
A distant boss with an agenda he wouldn’t or couldn’t share. An unreliable, scary colleague at her side. Everything seemed to be fraying. She wished she had someone to talk to about it.
Ideally Mel or Zhi, she supposed. But right now Zhi was still nearly two hundred astronomical units out in space, in a Pioneer 14 spacecraft slowly developing into a permanent station, its new purpose to observe the enigmatic artefacts of Galaxias – if that was what those remote negative-gravity structures were. And Marlowe herself had apologised to Tash, as they had boarded the chopper, for the absence of Mel, who was working back at Bouldershaw Fell. ‘I couldn’t spare her, too much stuff back at the ranch, especially since we had that anti-science crazies’ petrol-bomb attack . . .’
Well, where Grace was concerned, Tash resolved to stay wary, but to try not to brood. And she would do her best to support Fred Bowles any way she could – trusting him, even if he didn’t feel he was able to trust her.
The pilot called the landing.
Tash sat back, pulled on her ash-filter face mask, and peered out of the window at the approaching conference centre. Again . . .
As soon as the chopper had landed on the conference centre roof, Grace and another couple of military guards – marines, anonymous behind masks – clambered out to lead the party across the landing pad to elevators down to the interior floors. A new feature since Tash’s last visit was a gaudy spire that thrust up from the centre of the roof.
Tash clambered out behind Marlowe and Bowles. They were greeted by a harsh, cold, damp wind, peppered with what felt like sleet to Tash, as it battered her face. This was July, but such was the drift of the calendar by now that it was a seasonal winter – as correctly mapped by Caine’s new regularised calendar.
But there was some spectacle out here. Tash saw now that the ugly spire – probably a mask for an antenna complex – actually rotated, revealing a huge banner draped from one flank:
ENGLAND
WORLD CUP 1966
CENTENARY CELEBRATION
The words were set against a shifting, dissolving montage of images of young men in red sports shirts, cheering and laughing, set in brilliant sunshine.
Marlowe essayed, ‘Soccer players?’
Bowles nodded. ‘I take it you don’t know the game, Charlie.’
Tash shrugged. ‘Nor me. Not really. My dad has mentioned it.’
‘Minority sport now, but all the rage a hundred years back. One of the great mass spectacles we don’t do any more. And it gave an English team possibly its finest sporting moment. So some history books say. We were planning to host a large-scale event this summer to mark the centenary. Maybe recreate the final with holograms, even robots.’
Marlowe grinned. ‘Another of Mara Caine’s quasi-patriotic stunts? Which of course will only repel the Scots and Welsh and Irish she wants to draw back into the old British union.’
‘Well, Naples put a stop to that.’ Fred gestured at the immense banner. ‘I went along with the display, though. I thought we should throw up everything we have to make this latest symposium as memorable as we could. As symbolic, as significant. Colourful. There’s always an anniversary if you look hard enough.’
‘Every little helps, I guess,’ Tash said.
He grinned, rueful. ‘Well, you know me by now. But of course it’s also a reminder that we don’t get sunny July days like that any more.’ He sounded tired.
Marlowe said gently, ‘They even abolished July.’
Tash felt tired. She would be forty the following year. We’re all getting old, she thought. She looked again at the football players, holding aloft their golden trophy, on what looked like an unfeasibly sunny summer afternoon. Some part of her longed to be there. Back then, in 1966.
They were approaching the elevator doors now. Tash tried to focus.
She saw that among the military types waiting was Harry Regent, a surprising sight. He stood out in his blue USAF uniform among the English marines, and detachments of English and Scottish police. As she walked up, following Marlowe and Bowles, Tash clearly saw Regent and Butterworth nod to each other, then prepare to walk side by side in the vanguard of Fred’s escort . . .
‘A solar mass of it? That close?’ He paged through imaging updates. ‘We can’t see through the sail, but we have plenty of cameras on the leading side . . .’
Sara shook her head. ‘I should have checked.’ She tapped a screen.
Up came a magnified image of a star field. A black circle at the heart.
‘Ta-da,’ she said quietly.
Zhi said, ‘It’s there. Shit. Sitting there all this time. There is a lesson we should have learned from the Al-miriykh. Every so often, look out the window.’
Sara shrugged. ‘It’s much denser than the Sun. Physically smaller – about a sixteenth the diameter. I’m trying to check the mass estimate – I mean the size of the negative mass – with gravitational lensing, which ought to be more obvious than with the Sun itself, given it’s so small. Lensing – the deflection of the light of distant stars by its gravity field.’
Zhi nodded. ‘Like Einstein’s famous solar eclipse experiment, where they proved relativity was correct – mass bending space . . .’
‘Of course this – negative Sun – would push starlight away, rather than attract it. Detectable even so.’
Marina put in, ‘And the TNOs? The anomalous scattering? Could your negative Sun do that?’
‘I think so,’ Sara said. ‘Simply by pushing TNOs out of their orbits. As opposed to dragging them in, like a normal-matter rogue planet, say. Everybody would have been looking for a pull source, not a push source – and so they were looking in the wrong place. I do need to check the modelling more carefully. I—’
‘And what about the lurker on the Moon?’ Zhi’s mind was racing now. ‘The projectile it fired out after Blink Day. Could that be a similar effect? Some kind of – negative matter drive?’
Sara smiled. ‘Possibly. I’d have to model it. It would be elegant to hypothesise a single technology to justify all these effects.’
Zhi said, ‘I think we need a break. Time to take all this in. One hour.’
Sara shook her head. ‘I should keep observing, refining the modelling—’
‘OK. Do it. One hour. Try to get some rest too. We’ll convene then. And we’ll put together some kind of report for Earth.’
Reluctantly, they agreed.
So they broke.
Zhi tried to relax, but couldn’t, despite his own advice.
He ate, drafted a report for Earth. Brainstormed queries, hypotheses, concerns, listing them on his phone. He had always enjoyed working in remote stations, even the Lodestone, where he was not under the constant command of mission controllers on Earth. But now, just for once, he longed to be able to talk to JPL or TsUP, to somebody in charge, without whole days of time delay.
Also Mel Kapur, Tash.
Even his mother. Though he found it hard to admit it.
They reconvened on the bridge after the hour.
Sara was first there, and when he arrived Zhi wondered if she had rested at all.
‘So,’ Marina said briskly, bustling in after Zhi. ‘Given this magic repulsive-gravity force.’
‘The Anti-Sun,’ Sara said.
Zhi smiled, hearing the capitalisation in her voice. Anti-Sun. We’ve named it. First step to dealing with it.
Marina said, ‘If this is the work of Galaxias, what does it have to do with the Blink?’
Zhi rubbed his face. ‘Actually I have some ideas about that. I looked up negative matter myself . . .
‘It’s thought you could build a drive with the stuff, with theoretically infinite capability. A negative matter rocket.’ He grinned, and held up two fists. ‘It sounds crazy the first time you hear it, but it’s logical. Suppose my left hand is the Sun, the right the Anti-Sun. The Anti-Sun pushes at the Sun, which moves further left.’ He moved his left fist that way. ‘But the Sun attracts the Anti-Sun. So the Anti-Sun follows, going left too.’ His right fist followed his left. ‘And they just keep chasing each other.’
He shut up, and let them pick holes in that.
‘Rubbish! You’re getting kinetic energy from nowhere . . .’
‘Not to mention momentum . . . What about the conservation laws, Zhi?’
‘You ought to have got that yourself, Sara. The negative matter has a negative energy content. Negative momentum too. So you start with no kinetic energy, and stay with no kinetic energy, even while the two stars chase each other around the cosmos. Start with zero. Plus and minus add to zero. End with zero.’
Marina continued to frown. ‘Very well, but what has this to do with the Blink? In which, it seemed, our Sun was instantaneously transported out here – well, at lightspeed.’
Zhi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But it can’t be a coincidence that the Anti-Sun, here, has the same mass as our Sun. And that it lies, pretty much, on a straight line out from our Sun through the Blink Point. This Barrier must have something to do with it. Even if it’s just the equivalent of – hell, I don’t know – a primitive but necessary technology, to support the rest. The concrete pad at the base of a rocket launch gantry . . .’ He glanced out of the window. ‘Maybe we are only at the edge of it, here. Perhaps out there are huge engines we have yet even to glimpse. Whole hierarchies of them, surrounding the Solar System. An – infrastructure. And we can’t even see it. Or only this one element.’
‘Next question,’ Marina said. ‘Are we going to crash into that thing?’
That shut them up.
Zhi had the impression that she had been bottling up the question.
‘The negative Sun. I mean, we are heading towards it with what is presumably still a good fraction of our incoming velocity—’
‘No,’ Sara said. ‘We won’t get that close. The negative gravity field will become intense as we close in . . . My preliminary estimates show we will probably be pushed away long before any impact with – well, whatever is there. Four or five radii out. We shouldn’t get any closer than that. And we won’t come to any other harm. Remember, this thing has the mass of a star, but it is not a star. There seems to be no radiant energy – no light, no heat. I estimate that we will come no further than about half the Moon’s distance from Earth.’
Marina snapped, ‘How do you know?’
‘Because we are moving too slowly to get any closer.
‘It’s counter-intuitive. At least for us creatures of normal matter. We know about escape velocity – you would have to be travelling six hundred kilometres a second to escape our Sun, from its surface, for instance, to get away from its gravity field. Any slower and you would fall back. Here it’s different. Here you would have to fall in, faster than six hundred kilometres a second, to force your way through the push of the antigravity field and reach the surface. Does that make sense?’
‘I guess,’ Zhi said uncertainly.
‘Now, the Anti-Sun is smaller in size than our Sun – the radius is about a sixteenth – though it has the same size mass, but negative. It’s actually smaller than Jupiter, and I will leave the reason for that to the physicists. Because it is smaller, the surface capture velocity is that much larger than the Sun’s escape velocity.
‘Anyhow it’s too powerful for us to reach. We simply aren’t coming in fast enough. Basically we will be pushed away, by the antigravity field, as we approach. In the process, at worst we might hit a few hundred gravities. But, remember, we should come to no harm. The antigravity is an inertial force. As the ship is pushed, so are we within equally pushed, and we will continue to float around safely. We won’t feel a thing.’
Marina frowned. ‘Easy to say that. What about tidal forces? At closest approach, even a small distance may make a difference to the size of the forces working on us—’
‘Negligible,’ Sara said. ‘I checked. Well, probably negligible. I’ll go over it all again. We may need to lock down the scoop before closest approach, though; that’s a pretty fragile, extended structure. I believe we will emerge unharmed. There is the question of what to do later.’
‘Later?’
‘After the closest approach. It’s possible we could just turn around and begin the long journey home – boosted by the Anti-Sun’s field, before we let the dark energy ramjet take over again.’
Zhi frowned. ‘Or?’
‘Or we could stay here. In this odd – system.’
‘How?’ Marina snapped. ‘This is not a gravitating body. We cannot enter a stable orbit around it . . . Can we? Hell, no, of course we can’t.’
‘True,’ said Sara. ‘But – look, we have our scoop, the dark energy thrust. I told you, I figure that acceleration will balance the negative-gravity repulsive force at – well, about here, half an astronomical unit out. And so – you get the idea?’
‘I think so,’ Zhi said. ‘The Anti-Sun pushing back would be exactly balanced by the scoop pulling us forward.’
‘Yes,’ Sara said. ‘In fact the Anti-Sun seems to be pushing at the dark energy field itself – as if there’s a breeze coming from it, for our ramjet to tap.’
‘It would be like the Lodestone,’ Zhi said. ‘That’s held in place in the umbra of Earth by a balance of forces . . . it would be an unstable equilibrium, right?’ He held out his forefingers, pressed them against each other – mimed a slip, a slide. ‘But we could manage that actively. The ship is smart enough for that. It may be useful for humanity to have long-term observers, here, at the nearest thing we have to an outpost of Galaxias. Who knows what we may discover?’ He eyed Sara. ‘From what you say it sounds like we need to make a decision to commit to this course now – I mean, before we wait for a forty-eight-hour round-trip conversation with Earth.’
‘Indeed,’ Sara said. ‘We must use our own judgement.’
‘We can always set off for home later,’ Marina said. ‘But . . .’
‘Go on,’ Zhi said.
‘Well, this antigravity field is a pretty gentle barrier, isn’t it? Even for a ship like ours, made of spider-web and thistledown. It’s not an aggressive technology. It’s as if—’ She held up a hand, mimed a scoop. ‘It’s as if Galaxias is guiding the moth from the candle flame.’ She spoke softly, her Russian accent coming out more strongly.
‘That’s one interpretation,’ Zhi said, more coldly. He found it hard to think of the entity that had killed his fiancé and so many more people as non-aggressive.
Sara asked, ‘An alternative interpretation being?’
‘Think about it. OK, we set off from the Sun, headed roughly out to the Blink Point, and on through. What were the chances that this solar-mass object would be right here, right in our way?’
‘Ah,’ Sara said. ‘Good point. You couldn’t shield the whole Solar System this way, with solar-mass blockers everywhere. So Galaxias – came to meet us.’ She held up her own hand in a stop gesture. ‘Galaxias is shielding us from the flame. But we are not allowed to go any further.’
‘Correct.’ Zhi let that sink in. Then he said, ‘OK. The purpose of the trip was to explore Galaxias’s capabilities, its intentions. Well, now we know. It is bottling us up. With kindness.
‘Well, we have a way forward. And we have work to do. Let’s go over the arguments again, then draft some kind of update for Earth. And then . . .’ He glanced out towards the huge, occluding shadow of the sail. ‘Until we’re ordered home, this ship is going nowhere.’
39
July AD 2066: Year 10 ERC, Winter
After a flight across the North Sea from the mainland to New Aberdeen, without any problems as far as Tash could tell, the RAF helicopter smoothly began its descent.
The bird itself had been heavily modified since Tash had last taken a ride, with very obvious ash-screening filters over the engine inlets and what appeared to be robust supplementary armour layered over the outer hull. In the cabin, a peculiar webbing was embedded in the interior walls: Grace called it a Faraday cage, a new shell of protection against beamed cyber-attacks.
And as they flew they had been accompanied by a swarm of spotter and missile-carrying drones. Tash had the sense of a watchful infrastructure, from satellites overhead to warships in the ocean, and, she could see as they descended, human sentries on the Middle Sea dams.
Three years on from Naples, with the volcano’s aftermath still unravelling – it had been the single worst post-Blink disaster by far – the world was an introverted, paranoid place, criss-crossed by refugee flows, marred by low-level conflict. Hungry, cold and sick. It was, in longer memories – such as her father’s – like a throwback to the crisis years of the 2030s, when the great powers eyed a failing world, and each other.
Which, Tash knew, was a key subtext to this latest conference on Galaxias and all its works. Or so she supposed. She had been kept in the dark, excluded subtly even by Fred Bowles, more than she was used to. She knew the surface objectives were scientific and diplomatic – or at least she inferred that Fred hoped so, in his usual consensus-building, bridge-crossing fashion. After all, he had already achieved the major coup of persuading the Chinese government to send a delegation, led by Wu Yan, in the hope, presumably, of getting them to talk at last about whatever they were doing on Mercury, seven years after the first landings on the planet.
And speaking of introversion, paranoia, and being kept in the dark, Tash had got barely a word out of Grace during the flight. Even though they sat together for the whole crossing, just ahead of Charlie Marlowe, and a couple of rows behind Bowles, their boss.
Grace had self-evidently never recovered from the loss of her sister and niece in the aftermath of Naples. It didn’t help, Tash supposed, that almost every minute of every day she did her job, Grace was reminded of those losses. Grace kept keeping on, Tash saw. For now anyhow. But even so . . .
Even so, Tash found herself becoming, reluctantly, ever more wary of Grace and her moods, Grace and her increasingly furtive, taciturn ways. She and Grace had worked together for ten years already, and all the way through the Blink. And yet it felt as if they were growing further apart, not closer.
Tash was, in fact, suspicious of Grace. Though she couldn’t have said specifically why.
A distant boss with an agenda he wouldn’t or couldn’t share. An unreliable, scary colleague at her side. Everything seemed to be fraying. She wished she had someone to talk to about it.
Ideally Mel or Zhi, she supposed. But right now Zhi was still nearly two hundred astronomical units out in space, in a Pioneer 14 spacecraft slowly developing into a permanent station, its new purpose to observe the enigmatic artefacts of Galaxias – if that was what those remote negative-gravity structures were. And Marlowe herself had apologised to Tash, as they had boarded the chopper, for the absence of Mel, who was working back at Bouldershaw Fell. ‘I couldn’t spare her, too much stuff back at the ranch, especially since we had that anti-science crazies’ petrol-bomb attack . . .’
Well, where Grace was concerned, Tash resolved to stay wary, but to try not to brood. And she would do her best to support Fred Bowles any way she could – trusting him, even if he didn’t feel he was able to trust her.
The pilot called the landing.
Tash sat back, pulled on her ash-filter face mask, and peered out of the window at the approaching conference centre. Again . . .
As soon as the chopper had landed on the conference centre roof, Grace and another couple of military guards – marines, anonymous behind masks – clambered out to lead the party across the landing pad to elevators down to the interior floors. A new feature since Tash’s last visit was a gaudy spire that thrust up from the centre of the roof.
Tash clambered out behind Marlowe and Bowles. They were greeted by a harsh, cold, damp wind, peppered with what felt like sleet to Tash, as it battered her face. This was July, but such was the drift of the calendar by now that it was a seasonal winter – as correctly mapped by Caine’s new regularised calendar.
But there was some spectacle out here. Tash saw now that the ugly spire – probably a mask for an antenna complex – actually rotated, revealing a huge banner draped from one flank:
ENGLAND
WORLD CUP 1966
CENTENARY CELEBRATION
The words were set against a shifting, dissolving montage of images of young men in red sports shirts, cheering and laughing, set in brilliant sunshine.
Marlowe essayed, ‘Soccer players?’
Bowles nodded. ‘I take it you don’t know the game, Charlie.’
Tash shrugged. ‘Nor me. Not really. My dad has mentioned it.’
‘Minority sport now, but all the rage a hundred years back. One of the great mass spectacles we don’t do any more. And it gave an English team possibly its finest sporting moment. So some history books say. We were planning to host a large-scale event this summer to mark the centenary. Maybe recreate the final with holograms, even robots.’
Marlowe grinned. ‘Another of Mara Caine’s quasi-patriotic stunts? Which of course will only repel the Scots and Welsh and Irish she wants to draw back into the old British union.’
‘Well, Naples put a stop to that.’ Fred gestured at the immense banner. ‘I went along with the display, though. I thought we should throw up everything we have to make this latest symposium as memorable as we could. As symbolic, as significant. Colourful. There’s always an anniversary if you look hard enough.’
‘Every little helps, I guess,’ Tash said.
He grinned, rueful. ‘Well, you know me by now. But of course it’s also a reminder that we don’t get sunny July days like that any more.’ He sounded tired.
Marlowe said gently, ‘They even abolished July.’
Tash felt tired. She would be forty the following year. We’re all getting old, she thought. She looked again at the football players, holding aloft their golden trophy, on what looked like an unfeasibly sunny summer afternoon. Some part of her longed to be there. Back then, in 1966.
They were approaching the elevator doors now. Tash tried to focus.
She saw that among the military types waiting was Harry Regent, a surprising sight. He stood out in his blue USAF uniform among the English marines, and detachments of English and Scottish police. As she walked up, following Marlowe and Bowles, Tash clearly saw Regent and Butterworth nod to each other, then prepare to walk side by side in the vanguard of Fred’s escort . . .
