Angel Stations (20 page)

We did this
, thought Kim suddenly, as the corridor walls slid by them. There were still miles to go, but a roar sounded from far behind them, and she could swear it was getting closer. She glanced to one side, at Fitz mounted in the open driver’s seat, his expression grim. He glanced back at her briefly, then away again.

She thought again of Howard Carter, and all the other explorers who had gone before her. Of the dead kings who had left traps to catch thieves and the curious.
We did this
, she thought,
just by being here
.
Maybe someone doesn’t want us here
. She wasn’t so sure later, but that idea still stuck.

All my fault
, she thought, and realized there was blood running down her arm, partly drying now. She hadn’t even realized she’d been injured. A dull ache filled the arm and she felt dizzy. Looking around her, she saw the fold-down table and the contours of the tiny room she lived in, so claustrophobic and so narrow.

The effects of the Book were still clinging to her, so that it seemed in some way she was still racing through the lost corridors of the Citadel, her dead lover beside her.
Who am I?
she wondered, and was not sure what the answer was.

Elias

Three days after he reached the Angel Station, Elias located Eduardez.

The micro-gravity environment brought back unpleasant memories.

He carefully watched the people who lived there, who didn’t seem to walk so much as hop from wall to ceiling to wall in their movements around the pressurized zones of the torus. Then he followed their lead, and soon got the hang of it. Just like old times.

Eduardez was scraping a living carrying out odd jobs in and around the Station. He’d spent several years outside as a rock hermit, then moved into the local black market, supplying unregulated gene treatments and drugs to soldiers as they were rotated through. The Station seemed to provide excellent opportunities for black marketeers: every six months or so a whole new clientele turned up with nowhere to spend their money but the Angel Station.

Like Elias, Eduardez had lived under a dozen false names, finding his own niche somewhere along the way. For Elias it was a lucky break that Eduardez happened to be in the same system he’d arrived at.

‘Never heard of the guy,’ said Eduardez, flipping the picture back at him. ‘What you doing out here, anyway?’ he asked. ‘Get in trouble with the law?’

‘Something like that, yeah.’

Eduardez studied him for a long moment. ‘Gene treatment did nothing for me, man, not that the military authorities seem to think that makes a difference. You’re the one with superpowers – you and Pachenko. If you’ve cut some kind of a deal with anyone to hand me over, I got a lot of friends who’ll cut you down ’fore you even know you’re mincemeat, you hear me, Elias?’

‘I hear you. It isn’t like that – that’s the truth.’

Eduardez glared at him. ‘Yeah, well maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. You just remember what I’m saying, okay?’

‘I’ll remember.’

‘Yeah, well. Anyway, you hear about Pachenko?’

Elias hadn’t heard anything more about Pachenko since they’d found him curled up in a ball in the same spot Elias had left him. ‘No. No I didn’t.’

‘Went crazy after we all got back from the Rocks – you know that much, right? They locked him in a cell, then went looking for him one day. He wasn’t there. No window, no way out, just gone. Weird as shit.’

‘You sure about this?’

‘As sure as I’m sure they didn’t give us one single straight answer when they fucked around with our DNA. I’ve got contacts, heard stories how people used to see Pachenko, crazy and still screaming about bodies and blood and stuff, him wandering around, even when they knew he was still in the cell.’

‘I don’t understand. You mean he
did
get out?’

‘No, Elias, I mean he was in two places at once. You ever hear of anything like that before?’

Elias thought of Vaughn. ‘Maybe. I’m not sure. Listen, I’m looking for that man in the picture. He’s here somewhere.’ He showed Eduardez a smartsheet, then tapped at it until figures and names scrolled up. ‘This is a ship’s manifest.’

‘The
Jager
? Yeah, I know that one. One of the big cargo ships. He on the crew?’

‘Not exactly. He’s on ice, somewhere aboard. I need your help.’

A look came over Eduardez’s face. Not sly exactly, but calculating. ‘Anything for an old friend, Elias, but times are hard, you know?’

‘I can pay you.’ Elias had discovered, to his surprise, that he was rich: payments from people, from deals over the years, all accumulated in anticipation of just such a day.

‘Hey man, I’m not being greedy. I’m just saying—’

‘I can pay you, okay? Now I need to know, can you – or anyone else – get me on board that ship?’

‘Sure,’ said Eduardez. ‘Sure, no problem.’

Vincent

When Vincent got to the Kasper Angel Station, he found himself doing a lot of waiting around.

First, there had been a slow crawl out from the moon to the Oort Angel Station, out in the loose halo of cosmic debris orbiting Sol, far beyond the edge of the planetary system. That meant having to take an orbiter out from Luna to one of the high-speed cargo cruisers that fell in a constant stream from the Oort Station in a vast, elliptical solar orbit, for him there to be dropped into deepsleep and shipped out the rest of the way. He didn’t dream, which was good, since he’d now become infected with Eddie’s sense of urgency. Every day that it took to get himself out to Kasper seemed a day wasted.

He now toured the Station, feeling what he was sure was a typical sense of psychic shock at suddenly finding oneself somewhere remarkable one had only ever read about or viewed on a screen somewhere. It didn’t take long to walk around the whole structure. It was a lot further into the Kasper system than the distance from the Oort Station back home to the Sun. And instead of orbiting the star itself, it orbited the next planet out, which was just a cold ball of iron and ice, the Kasper Angel Station being its only moon.

It really is Kim, he decided, having spotted her there in the distance: that small, heart-shaped face framed by unruly dark brown hair cropped short, on top of a long-limbed body. He started towards her.

She stared at him, a frightened expression on her face. She was passing at the far end of a crowded corridor, too narrow for him to squeeze through quickly. By the time he had worked his way past the throng of people, she was gone. But Kim was definitely on board the Angel Station.

‘I need to see the Commander,’ Vincent demanded. He had reached an office near the cargo bays; it was a refitted fuel tank jutting out from the side of the Station. Vincent had needed to pass through at least three layers of security – mandatory scans, security men with barely concealed weapons and hostile expressions – to get this far.

‘Commander Holmes is busy right now,’ said the man behind the desk. Vincent had found out that the military used this office as an administrative buffer between themselves and the Angel Station’s civilian population.

‘I appreciate that,’ said Vincent. ‘He knows why I’m here.’

‘Can you tell me the nature of the enquiry?’ asked the man behind the desk.

Vincent shook his head. ‘Classified.’ He handed over the smartsheet he had found waiting for him on his arrival. Perhaps Vincent had been hoping people here would suddenly jump to attention, usher him through, apologizing for the delay. That didn’t happen.

The desk man nodded politely. ‘I need to check this with Commander Holmes’s office. Come back at seventeen hundred hours. We should have something back by then.’

‘It’s already been checked.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but it’s procedure. I don’t have any notification otherwise here.’ The desk man shrugged his shoulders and gave him a friendly smile. Vincent wondered how many people were responsible for manning the desk; this was the third person he’d found here in as many days. ‘We can’t do anything without the appropriate authorization.’

He was being stalled; he could feel it in his bones. But why?

The answer came within twenty-four hours.

He woke up in the middle of the night to find the mail light on his quarters datacom blinking. He sat up groggily, found the right button, and a fresh smartsheet slid out of the datacom’s printer. It was a message from Eddie.

Not just a regular message, but an encrypted data-file locked to the security code he’d been handed by Eddie before his departure from Luna. After entering the code, he found himself watching a maximum-compression video in which Vincent could just see an amplified image of the Earth over Eddie’s shoulder. He must have recorded this at home, Vincent thought. He realized months had passed since they had last talked, but to Vincent it seemed barely a couple of weeks. Eddie really did look older, worn out.

‘Things are not good, Vincent. The news of the burster event should have gone completely public by now. There’ve been leaks, of course, and a lot of questions, but nobody above a certain level is either talking or taking any kind of stand.’ Note to self, Vincent thought: pay more attention to the news feeds.

‘I’ve been hearing a lot of stories,’ the video continued. ‘Some of them are verging on the extremely paranoid, but there’s a couple I’m not sure I can discount. I keep on hearing the same story from different sources. You’ll know about the Blight? Well, it’s spreading. It might even be out of control now.’

The Blight? Product of Angel technology, thought Vincent. A corrosive, destructive nano-organism. The bug that ate India.

‘. . . talk and more talk. But you’re talking about a disaster, a global disaster, Vincent. No other way to describe it.’ Vincent saw that wild look in Eddie’s eyes, the same one he’d seen that time Eddie had come to visit him in Antarctica. ‘Where do we go if we don’t have Earth anymore? Where do we go if we manage to devastate our own world?’

Kasper
, Vincent thought immediately.
Where else could we go?
A genuinely Earth-like world. Even the higher orders of life there had a DNA not far removed from that found on Earth, almost certainly thanks to the aliens everyone called Angels. It was, of course, a deeply paranoid reaction. The Blight had been a problem for decades, and wasn’t likely to go away soon, but surely it wasn’t about to ravage the planet? Surely things hadn’t become so bad?

‘All I know is that, for some people, letting the Kaspians die off wouldn’t be such a bad thing because, after the radiation’s passed, they’d leave behind a world free of higher-order creatures,’ Eddie continued. ‘Which means, in the face of this global disaster back on Earth, it would be very hard to raise any serious moral objections to turning Kasper into a human colony. Now I know,’ Eddie’s pixellated features spoke quickly, one hand raised, ‘just how paranoid and ridiculous this sounds. But I have to consider all the options. All we can do here is raise the stakes, make people aware of it before it actually happens – if it does happen. Bring things out in the open. But keep doing what you can, Vincent. We need you out there. Do what you can.’

But how?
thought Vincent. What was he supposed to do – stand in the middle of a crowded passageway and tell everybody the end of the world is coming, like some of the wild-eyed crazies in tattered pressure suits he’d already seen wandering the corridors here?

I can’t even get hold of the people who run the Station. And, what do you know, I try to get hold of some of the scientists running the Kasper Deep Space Array, and the whole thing is under temporary military jurisdiction. Refer to Holmes
.

Despite himself, Vincent found he believed Eddie’s theories. The only bit he hadn’t known about was how serious the Blight had become. Back in Antarctica, there’d been talk about how far it could spread. How bad it could get. But all the available information then seemed to suggest it was containable, within acceptable parameters. Could that information be falsified, distorted? Perhaps it could, but it seemed so symptomatic of some dizzying descent into out-and-out madness and paranoia, where everyone was your enemy, or potential enemy. Could the sheer worry of it have affected Eddie’s mind?

If it had, it was now affecting Vincent’s too. He decided to check the public news feeds. The service in his quarters was too limited, so he went out to a coffee bar and hit the feeds there, feeling tired and fuzzy from too little sleep.

The news feed was linked to the Grid back home by dense packet bursts fed through every time the Station’s singularity was powered up. Since ships came through only a couple of times a day, it meant he was several hours behind on the most recent events, drawing instead on a localized Grid-image updated with each burst.

That was all he needed, in the end. He went looking for information about Eddie. A news item said Eddie had retired from his post, several days before. No reason given.

Vincent looked around and saw there were only a few other people about. He shook his smartsheet until it became rigid, then leaned it on one of his knees as he tapped his way through information.

I am getting very paranoid
, thought Vincent, studying those few other people nearby. None of them appeared to be paying any attention to him.
Nobody here is a spy
, thought Vincent.
Nobody here is out to get you
.

Eddie sends me a note, next thing I know and he’s disappeared. There was no information, on any of the mainstream news feeds, about either the Blight or Kasper, or waves of radiation, or anything. Whatever crucial news Eddie had been trying to get out about what was happening, he seemed to have failed.

Vincent did find some related stuff in other parts of the Grid, however. Some people seemed to be paying attention, but there were the usual people proclaiming the end of the world, like the Primalists and a score of other crackpot religions. That made it hard to separate hard science from irrational preaching. And didn’t the Primalists preach that Kasper was the new Eden?

Vincent thought about that for a moment. Perhaps . . .