Creations (25 page)

“Well, they’ve got an archive of space probe imagery like you wouldn’t believe, decades old, a lot of it from the asteroid belt. There are probes there even now, searching out ore deposits that could be mined someday. But they use automated search
algorithms to analyse the data, and there’s something they should be looking for that I reckon they could miss.”

“You mean replicators, don’t you? You’re looking for replicators.” And in that moment he was back on the beach, sitting in a line with Safi, Ross and Doug, talking about life on other planets and Fermi’s paradox and how to spot the signs of an intelligent race spreading through the cosmos.

“Exactly,” Safi said. “I’m not saying they’re there right now, in fact they’re probably not. But if they’ve ever been there, the signs will still be visible. I’ve bought the rights to tap into the SRC archive, and I’ve had some search routines of my own coded up. They’re working on it right now, even as we speak. When they find what they’re looking for, they’ll tell me.”

“And how do you know what to look for?”

“Traces of mining or excavating. Any replicator will need to dig for its materials. The marks they leave behind are going to stand out, whatever they look like.”

“You sound pretty confident you’re going to find something.”

“I’m more than confident, I’m certain. Just do the sums, Max. Try to estimate the number of intelligent races that have ever existed in the galaxy over the past few billion years, then work out what proportion of the stars would have been visited by the replicators they built. There’s no doubt about it, we’re going to find something one day.”

“So the whole time we were on the island, you were doing this as well. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I want to keep it to myself until I get something worth talking about. It’ll make things easier this way.”

She seemed to be implying that Max should keep it quiet too, though he was uncertain as to the need for secrecy. He decided to leave the subject there and continued to look through the document in his hands. He paused at a page that Safi had marked.

“Now that one’s interesting,” she said, seeing where he was
looking. “That replicating factory they’re showing there is pretty much the way Anchorville was laid out. It’s amazing how advanced their designs were, even back then.”

“When was this written?”

“Nineteen-eighty-two,” she said. “But it took over half a century before we could put it into practice.”

Max looked at the black and white diagrams in the book, the conceptual lunar replicators laid out like huge factory complexes, their attendant robots going about their various jobs. “So is this what ESOS are building too?” he said.

She shook her head. “Unlikely. The details are pretty sketchy but we know they didn’t take this factory approach. It may be more similar to the Prospectors we built on the island. We’ll have to wait until we’re there before we can be sure.”

“And we’re just going to invite ourselves in and show ourselves around?”

“Pretty much, yeah. These research sites are huge, they’re difficult to guard. Plus I know some people up there who can help us out with transport.”

“Why does no one else know about this if those sites are so easy to explore?”

“Well, if it’s anything like Anchorville was, it won’t be listed as ‘Top Secret Self-Replicating Factory’, it’ll be something more generic like ‘Resource Optimisation Facility’. That’s the one we used.”

“And what do we do when we’re there? Take a look round and then come home?”

“We do as much as we need to do to get the evidence: pictures, samples, whatever.”

“With a bit of sabotage thrown in for good measure?”

She smiled. “You’re joking, right?”

“Yes, I’m joking, but only just.”

Thirty minutes later the boarding call came over the PA system.

“I guess this is us,” Safi said, jumping up and collecting her things. A change had come over her as soon as she heard the call. She was smiling broadly and hurriedly putting things in her bag, as if impatient to get going. “You okay?” she said. “You look nervous.”

“I’m okay,” Max said. “Come on, let’s go.”

They took the moving walkway out to the gate, moving through a long glass tunnel that led away from the terminal building. The sun had been up for just under an hour, but its full brightness had yet to break through the early morning haze. The sky above them was pale blue and speckled with cloud.

“In two hours’ time we’ll be above all that,” Safi said, craning her neck back.

Then at last they got to their gate, and saw what was waiting for them. For most of the journey from the terminal they’d been surrounded by rows of parked aircraft, the ubiquitous Boeings and Airbuses, ranging from five to fifty years old. None of them however looked anything like the craft that was sitting at the final gate. It slowly came into view as the tunnel took them round the last corner.

“There it is,” Safi said when she saw it. “There it is.”

The Spirit of Nevada
was almost the size of the 777s parked alongside, but looked more like a stretched version of the old space shuttles that Max had seen on display in Florida. It had the same black and white heatproof tiles as its ancestor, the same swept triangular wings, and the same thick windows round the cockpit. The passenger windows running down the sides were one major difference however, as was the engine pod on top of the rear fuselage, holding the turbojet engines that would take it through its first forty thousand feet of altitude. The three huge rocket engines that would take it the rest of the way were at the back, behind the fuel and liquid oxygen tanks that would feed them. The fuel tank was already loaded with kerosene, but the oxygen tank was empty, for the time being at least. The fact that
it was empty not only made the craft safe to take off from regular airports: the missing weight was the only reason it could take off at all.

They waited for ten minutes at the gate, standing by the windows, looking at the craft along with the other passengers. Most of them would be taking this trip for the first and only time in their lives, Safi explained. The development of vehicles like this one was supposed to make access to space affordable, and compared to the early days of space tourism the cost had dropped by a factor of a hundred. However the price of a return trip was still more than most people would pay for all the houses they’d ever own in their lives, and with GRACE controls affecting earthbound flights so badly, these trips had to be rationed as well. Few had been as lucky as Safi herself, making the journey into orbit countless times in the course of her career.

“How many times have you been up now?” Max said.

“Eighty-something I guess, but most of them were with the Air Force, strapped into a U-155. I’ve only gone up in one of these things once before.”

And considering how that trip had ended, Max was surprised to see her so eager to get back in one at all. However if there was one thing he’d learnt about Safi and her previous experiences it was that space travel and exploration were probably among the greatest loves of her life — and even “love” may not have been a strong enough word. It must have been the lure of a new frontier, an environment where humans hadn’t evolved to survive so had to ensure their own survival for themselves. He’d occasionally met divers and mountaineers who showed the same attitude: they loved what they did in spite of the danger, and when they were reminded of the danger, even if it affected them personally, it only made them love it more.

The call to start boarding came soon afterward, as the ground crew down on the tarmac finished their checks and preparations. As they walked down the embarkation ramp, Safi looked down
at the boarding card in Max’s hand.

“They’ve given you the aisle seat, haven’t they?”

“Yeah, looks like it. Why?”

“I’ll let you swap with me and take the window. This is one view you won’t want to miss.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind if you want to take it.”

“I’ve seen it plenty of times already. Go on, I even made sure we were on the left hand side.”

“Why’s that?”

She smiled mysteriously. “You’ll see,” she said.

The cabin was tiny, only four seats across, with a narrow centre aisle and no room to stand up. Once strapped into his seat, Max peered out through the window at his side. It was like looking through a tunnel bored into the skin of the craft and showed clearly just how thick the layers of structure and insulation really were. All he could see were reflections of the inside of the cabin as the light bounced around between the five or six panes that made up the window.

“They’ll turn the cabin lights off before we leave,” Safi said. “You’ll see things better then.”

The take off from the airport was just like any other, with the obligatory safety briefing as they taxied out. Just how useful the lifejackets and escape slides could be on a trip like this was debatable, but Max guessed they had to be there. Once their turn came to depart, the plane started its take-off run, slowly gathering speed as it rolled down the concrete. It must have used the entire length of the runway as it struggled into the air on its undersized jet engines before heading eastward into the desert, climbing all the way.

Almost an hour later the announcement came that they were forty thousand feet above the Arizona desert, waiting to meet up with their target: the cryogenic tanker plane that would provide the missing oxygen they needed to complete the ascent. It had come all the way from Kirtland, New Mexico, just to link up with
them for ten minutes of their flight. Max tried looking for the tanker as they lined up with it, but he didn’t manage to see it. The first signs of its presence were the muffled mechanical sounds as the refuelling boom made contact with the inlet port some way behind them. For the next ten minutes the planes flew in tandem as thousands of gallons of liquefied oxygen were pumped across, making their own craft heavier and heavier all the time.

“They’ll be lighting the centre engine in a minute,” Safi said. “Then things are gonna get noisy round here.” She was grinning as she spoke, clearly back doing something she adored. “You’re gonna just love this, Max.”

Within a minute they heard the first of the rocket engines firing up, as the weight of the plane became too much for the jet engines alone to handle. The muted roar came at them through the structure of the plane, entering Max’s body through his seat rather than his ears. As the tank got closer and closer to being full, the vibrations increased, until Max found himself blinking to clear the blurring in his eyes.

Then the noise suddenly increased again as the final two engines were lit. He looked across at Safi to ask if that meant they were ready for the final push, but all she was doing was sitting with her eyes closed saying, “here we go, here we go,” again and again under her breath. He guessed that meant they were and turned to look back outside. Then things started to happen quickly.

First he heard the sound of the hook-up to the tanker being broken as it pulled its fill line away from their plane. Then he heard the engines rise in pitch even more, as their plane used the brute force of its rockets to fly under and ahead of the tanker. There was no time for the other plane to delicately manoeuvre out of the way here; every second that was wasted would use up gallons of precious fuel and oxygen that both craft had laboured to carry this high. Instead, all their plane could do was open up
the throttles while the tanker hauled itself away from a collision. And then, for the first time, Max saw it: the converted cargo plane peeling away from their own trajectory, banking impossibly steeply for something so large, with the early morning sun glinting off its bright white fuselage, the sky-blue “Kirtland LOX” logo painted down the side, and a trail of freezing vapour streaming from its refuelling boom.

In seconds it was gone, lost behind them as their own speed increased. By now even Max’s teeth were shaking as the noise and vibration grew. He could hear one of the women passengers behind him shouting, “Oh my God!” over and over in terror, but she was almost drowned out by Safi’s shouts and cheers. “This is it!” was all he could make out from her before her voice was lost in the cacophony.

As the noise increased, so did the acceleration, pushing Max further and further into his seat, until he felt as if he was lying on his back looking up at the ceiling. He tried to lift his head to look straight ahead but it wouldn’t go, so instead he kept it where it was, facing the window. Even his breathing became difficult, as if a hundred-pound weight was sitting on his chest. He concentrated instead on the view outside; he couldn’t see the ground, but the sky was divided into definite bands of light and dark by the rising sun, and he could see the plane’s climb angle creeping closer to the vertical. Then, as the lighter bands disappeared and the darker bands got darker still, the overall colour of the sky went from blue to navy, and finally to black.

Safi was yelling with excitement, and Max could feel it too, though he couldn’t have made a noise even if he’d tried. Instead, all he could do was grip onto the armrests of his seat and ride it out. He suddenly realised that Safi’s hand was squeezing him back, but he didn’t know how long it had been there. He was starting to feel the same fear as the woman behind him, as if he was on a roller coaster ride that had gone off the rails but hadn’t hit the ground yet and gripping Safi’s hand seemed to be the only
reassurance he could get.

The ascent went on for whole minutes, deafening and shaking them in their seats the entire time. Then at last the plane manoeuvred, rolling and pitching out of its near vertical climb in a series of slow, deliberate rotations. Max could see the patches of sunlight and shadow moving round inside the cabin as the plane’s orientation changed. The force and noise from the engines was still just as loud as before, but now he could hear Safi shouting to him, “Max! Max! Look outside now!” He did as she’d said, straining to move his head closer to the glass, and then he suddenly realised why she’d wanted him to see this sight. Laid out beneath him, sliding across his window like some fantastically detailed map, was the northern Gulf of Mexico, and directly below, at least two hundred miles straight down, was the Mississippi delta, the branches of the river feeding into the Gulf like fingers of land and water. The sight was breathtaking; he’d seen pictures from space before, but this was different, this was with his own eyes. “Oh my God,” was all that he could say.