Nemesis (37 page)

As they travelled further down the valley, the landscape changed. They reached an area where the ruins had been cleared away from the gently sloping banks and replaced by private habitat domes. Each pocket of air held a single grand home surrounded by a circle of perfect green garden. Colonnades and porticos decorated the facades. The grounds tended towards a romantic Surplus Age style, all oak trees and tennis courts tended by armies of gardenerbots. They looked like scenes from a history vid brought to life. A transit rail snaked between them.

Apparently, a lot of people in New Luxor lived in hundred-room palaces. To Mark, the houses looked weirdly lonely despite their opulence. They didn’t even share an atmosphere. His sense of unease was reinforced when they passed one with a failed envelope. A dirty mansion with smashed windows stood in a patch of dead vegetation almost as brown as the gravel that lay around it.

Zoe came over and stood at the window next to him. ‘Looks like all those patents bought some classy pads,’ she observed.

‘Land isn’t in short supply here,’ said Keir. ‘Neither are building materials or robots.’

‘Unless you’re a Flag,’ said Venetia with a wink.

Keir’s lips thinned a little.

Beyond New Luxor’s isolationist suburbs, the ancient riverbed widened and the real settlement began. Carter had avoided supertowers, preferring a more traditional style of development. Eclectically decorated buildings huddled under domes of various sizes. The colony sported only a single macrostructure – Government Tower. A needle of blue glass built into the canyon wall rose a couple of hundred storeys up into the pale lemon sky.

The pod transferred through another set of air gates, this time into a Martian-style transit tube that ran straight through the heart of the small city. Mark caught sight of brightly painted cafes with no patrons and grand parks where lonely figures wandered. Streets slid by lined with open-fronted stores selling nothing at all. But for the odd pedestrian trailed by domestic machines of various kinds, the place felt like a ghost town. He saw more robots than people.

The pod joined a rail rising up the side of the tower and the city fell away beneath them, becoming a cluster of clear bubbles packed with brightly coloured toys. The view opened out, revealing the mouth of the river and an expanse of perfectly flat, dead desert beyond. It made the wasteland they’d originally landed in look varied and dramatic by comparison.

As the transit slowed, Mark got a view into the interior of the tower. Dozens of floors of unused office space slid past, where robots sat dormant or stacks of still-sealed furniture lay waiting. The human colony here, he thought, appeared to be rapidly turning itself into a copy of the dead one it had displaced. He wondered if this was how Bradbury must have looked during the first decades on Mars – a city at the edge of nowhere with too much space on its hands, not quite sure why it existed.

Only the top ten floors showed signs of life. Wind whistled around the pod’s edges when it arrived at the executive level at the peak. From there, Mark could make out the curve of the horizon, and dark smudges of human habitation far off in the hazy nothingness of the empty ocean.

‘This way, please,’ said Keir as the door opened.

He led them down an echoing hallway ten metres high with skylights that let in slanting rays of creamy light. The place smelled faintly and familiarly of cabbage.

Mark knew that smell. He looked up at the corners of the ceiling and saw dark blotches on the biofabric walls. The place had tower flu, then, just like his former home in New York. He wondered how long ago that had set in.

Keir led them to a meeting room with a massive table of vat-grown wood covered in a thin layer of dust. It sported thirty old-fashioned vat-leather chairs scattered in various random positions and an incredible, if uniformly bleak, view over the post-oceanic plain.

‘Where is everyone?’ said Mark.

‘I’ll fetch them now,’ said Keir. ‘Please wait here.’ He stepped out. The door shut behind him.

‘What do you think?’ said Venetia.

‘I think it’s a dump,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s even worse than my old home town on New Angeles. I always assumed the cities at the New Frontier would be like mini-Bryants, full of energy and verve.’

‘They were,’ said Sam. ‘That’s kind of gone on hold recently, which is one reason why New Panama is booming so much. People don’t want to spend any more time out on the angry edge of civilisation than they have to.’

‘We could always just change the law,’ said Venetia. ‘Give the sects a better deal.’

Sam snorted. We did,’ he said. ‘About eight times, I think. Look how well that turned out.’

‘What does it matter?’ said Zoe. ‘We’re wasting our time. If we don’t get out of here and do something, there won’t
be
a New Frontier, no matter how shitty it is.’

‘Agreed,’ said Mark. ‘All this is very enlightening, but we should just make our point and leave. We’ve got work to do.’

Keir Vorn, though, did not return. Fifteen minutes dragged by. Mark’s anxiety grew.

‘What’s keeping the guy?’ said Zoe.

Mark pinged the room’s security but found he couldn’t get past the pitifully slow-witted room SAP.

‘I could find him,’ he said, ‘but I’d have to hack them first.’

‘Not the best way to make a good impression,’ said Venetia.

Sam sighed. ‘Look, I’ll go and find out what’s happening. You guys wait here.’

Venetia shot Mark an urgent look as Sam headed for the door. Mark had a choice: to stop him or let him go. Ash’s words echoed in his head. Should he trust Sam?

He gestured to Venetia with a flattened hand while his guts roiled.
Keep sitting.
He dearly hoped he’d chosen right. As Sam strode out into the hall, the door clicked shut behind him.

‘What now?’ said Venetia.

‘Now we wait and hope,’ said Mark.

Another fifteen minutes slid by.

‘This is bullshit,’ said Zoe.

She marched up to the door, which refused to open. She tried the manual pad on the wall. Nothing happened.

‘Hey, room!’ she shouted. ‘Open up!’

When the room didn’t reply, Mark reached out for it directly. The moment he did so, the window-wall swapped to video and Sam’s face appeared.

‘Hello, everyone,’ he said. ‘You’ve just discovered that you’re locked in. My apologies for that. I regret the duplicity. Unfortunately, there have been too many unpleasant coincidences during this mission.’ He counted them off on his fingers. ‘The apparent attempted murder, Mark’s disruption of my override, Zoe’s inclusion of non-mission-approved tech.’

‘What?’ Zoe roared.

Sam continued indifferently. ‘It’s my duty to figure out what’s going on and to resolve these issues while I have the chance. It’s vital I make sure there’s no foul play at work here,’ he told them earnestly. ‘In case the human race is being set up to pay the price.’

‘What?’ said Mark. ‘Since when? And how exactly does all this shit you just made up fit with the mission profile?’

‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,’ said Sam. ‘Once again, my apologies. I recommend that you make yourselves comfortable.’

He shut the channel.

‘Bastard!’ yelled Zoe. She pounded on the door.

Venetia leaned her elbows on the table and massaged her temples. ‘I guess we have our answer,’ she said.

Mark checked the security. He grabbed the simple SAP running the room and rammed commands down its API. The SAP flailed into submission, revealing a data connection behind it that had been isolated and shut down from the other end. Digitally speaking, their room had been locked from the outside. Barring the chance of catching some wireless traffic from data nodes on the floors below, they were cut off.

Mark surged to his feet and kicked his chair across the room, where it smacked into the biofabric panelling and broke apart.

‘Fuck!’ He turned to face Venetia. ‘Does
anything
he said make any sense to you?’

Venetia shook her head. ‘The actions he just took were predicated on the notion that he himself was above suspicion – a proposition he avoided on board while it suited his purposes. In short, he was bullshitting, as you suspected. By the way, what made you decide to let him go?’

‘I spoke to Ash, like you suggested,’ he said, embarrassment choking his voice. ‘I asked him if I should come here, and if I could trust Sam. He told me to go along with it and that everything would be fine. I took him at his word.’ Mark hung his head and felt like a fool.

‘So it’s both of them, then?’ said Zoe.

‘I was so sure it was Citra,’ said Mark. ‘I was too freaked out to think about the alternatives. I feel ashamed. That poor woman.’

‘That override moment,’ said Zoe. ‘Sam wanted Ash in control of the ship, and now he is.’

‘And I don’t think there’s any doubt that Sam dumped the fuel on purpose,’ said Venetia. ‘He brought us to Carter to make
this
happen.’

Mark fell back into another chair as the strength drained out of his legs.

‘They never wanted me on that ship,’ he breathed as realisation dawned. ‘This has been planned since Earth. Which means they must have known something about Tiwanaku. They were planning for it.’

Silence fell as they all stared at each other.

‘Fuck,’ said Zoe in awe. ‘The whole mission’s a set-up.’ She leaned against the wall and slid down it to sit on the floor. ‘I can’t believe it took us this long to notice.’

Mark suddenly felt very, very stupid. He should have seen it. The pieces had been right in front of him all along. It had just never occurred to him that the entire mission was fabricated. No wonder they’d never met the other ships at the rendezvous. That had never been part of the story.

Their predicament still didn’t make sense, though. The drones they’d fought were absolutely real and their technology profoundly foreign. The whole of IPSO had been duped, but it was totally unclear how or why.

13:
JUSTIFICATION

13.1: WILL

As the pod doors shut, Will took in his surroundings. He’d been delivered to a garden of sorts – a white-walled space filled with shrubs and trees lit by ceiling-lamps three storeys above. It appeared to be a cross between an experimental botanical garden and a recreation area. Rubberised pathways ran between the trees. Sofas and work tables sat at the intersections. The air smelled of rosemary and carried the soft hiss of air-scrubbers.

From out of the greenery stepped Parisa Voss.

‘Hello, Will,’ she said.

Will stared at her, sick astonishment welling up inside him.

‘You,’ he said.

Exactly what percentage of his life was a lie? he wondered. All of it? Pari had been the most consistent, benign feature of his political life for years. How had she found the time for shit like this?

‘Are you really so surprised?’ she said. ‘Who else would have the political muscle to bring all this together?’ She looked pleased with his reaction, and herself.

‘You …’ Will started. He struggled for adequate words. ‘You
disgust
me.’

‘I would expect nothing less,’ said Pari, apparently satisfied. ‘Anything else?’

Will could only stare. The man he’d been before his short flight on the
Chiyome
might have railed at her and shouted out his wrath. Now, he just felt ill.

‘No,’ he said.

She looked slightly disappointed. ‘I imagine you’re probably upset,’ she said, ‘but the only reason you’re here is because you didn’t do your job.’

Will’s anger rumbled back into life. ‘What?’

‘You think we found a weapon to use against Flags,’ she said, ‘but that’s the smallest part of what we found. Before you judge us, look.’

She tapped the jewelled bracelet on her left wrist and a link invitation appeared in Will’s sensorium. Will struggled briefly with the urge to subvert the room’s network, take Pari hostage and bend the entire station to his will. There’d be time for that later, though. He accepted the link.

An image bloomed in his mind of the world situated below them. It looked …
odd
. It wasn’t just the black continents or mauve seas. The entire world had a curious texture. He zoomed in for a closer look and found a landscape covered with weird linear features tangled across each other, as if the planet had been coated with monstrous spaghetti.

Barring the curious starfish structures, the linear shapes appeared to cover every inch of landmass on the planet, dipping beneath the waves at the coasts. Nowhere could he see the familiar hallmarks of geology, except perhaps in the overall features of the continents themselves.

‘It’s a self-sustaining biosphere,’ she said. ‘Artificial, we believe, and incredibly advanced. It’s unlike any other biosphere world we’ve ever seen. This one tolerates humans without issue.’

Will shot her a look of unalloyed disbelief. She smiled, apparently misinterpreting his scorn for some gentler variety of scepticism.

‘The environment on Snakepit is robust, self-correcting and incredibly stable,’ she said. ‘Every one of those linear formations you can see is a self-contained, self-extending habitat system. A living root, if you like, with usable space inside.’

The display in his sensorium updated to show him schematics and cross sections.

‘This entire world is covered with them, about ten layers deep. Snakepit could house and feed the Earth’s fifteen billion tomorrow, while using only about ten per cent of its available resources. It’s also an example of functional terraforming of a sort we’ve never achieved. That oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere is the result of ambient air-bleed from the self-contained habitats, much as you see above Bradbury, which means that this system is even proofed against the Galatea Effect. When the atmosphere here started to reorganise, all the biomass remained safe below.’ She smiled knowingly. ‘Amazing, isn’t it? It’s a dream come true.’

‘You could say that,’ said Will.

It was admittedly an incredible find – a piece of technology potentially more useful than anything the Transcended had ever given them. Taken at face value, it was the solution to all of Earth’s problems, presuming they could ever build enough starships to ferry people over. But the idea that such bounty might come with heavy costs didn’t appear to have occurred to Pari. He almost pitied her for that.

‘Here’s the interesting thing,’ said Pari. ‘This star system never saw a suntap flare, even though it’s sitting here right in the middle of Fecund space. We’ve analysed the spectrum and can’t see any signs of damage. Besides which, the biosphere would have been fried. So what do you think that means?’

Will could think of several implications, not all of them pleasant.

She answered for him. ‘It means it was left for you to find.’

Will peered at her.

‘Yes, you,’ she said. ‘Do you imagine this world that offers so much is here by accident? I don’t. The Transcended put you in the frame. They gave you the ship and the tools. They made it possible for you to find this gift. The one they left for us.
Why didn’t you?
’

Will’s mouth curled into a snarl. ‘You’re asking
me
? I was trying to save your fucking planet from itself. Or didn’t you notice?’

She waved a tutting finger at him. ‘No, Will. That’s not what you were doing. You were trying to save
everybody
. That’s not the same. You didn’t learn the one big lesson the Transcended tried to teach you. What makes the difference between a species that prospers and one that dies is
constructive self-editing
. They told you that explicitly. All your accounts feature it prominently. But they were talking about editing at the species level, Will, not just about you personally. And editing requires cutting.’ Her expression darkened. ‘You left that job to the Fleet. And that’s why the Rumfoord League had to take it on.’

‘Very convenient,’ said Will. ‘The end justifies the means and all that bullshit. I’m sure you must feel very noble interpreting my experiences for me. How convenient that you get to choose who cuts, and how! And with such a handy scalpel just lying there in space! Tell me, Pari, what kind of a fucking idiot abuses alien tech? Wasn’t one war enough of a lesson?’

‘We learned from the war and you didn’t,’ she said without hesitation. ‘We aren’t doing this to wage a war but to prevent one. Take a look at this.’

She passed him a new invitation. This one opened to reveal a suite of cliometric simulations – huge ones, running thousands of scenarios with billions of pseudo-human agents individually modelled. Will blinked at the level of detail that had gone into them.

‘We have Andromeda Ng-Ludik to thank for all this. I believe you’ve met?’

The work was undeniably impressive. Ann was good for something, at least, even if it wasn’t making sound ethical decisions.

‘She presented this work at a closed meeting on Triton over a year ago. You missed it – for personal reasons, as I recall. The finding from her research is irrefutable. If action is not taken, social pressures in human society will result in war and subsequent economic collapse.’

‘But we knew that already,’ said Will. ‘That’s what we’ve been trying to solve!’

‘How?’ said Pari. ‘By talking to the senate? By threatening people? By getting upset and punching holes in a half-a-million-peace-coin podium? You should have paid more attention, Will. Models like these don’t just tell us what’s going to happen. They tell us
how
. And they show us the solutions that can actually work. And guess what, you consistently avoided using the one variable the models suggested was absolutely necessary: force. You just expected everyone to start behaving better because
you
did. That’s not good enough, Will. And that’s why you’re here.’

She tweaked the display in his sensorium, drawing his attention to the huge starfish shapes dotting Snakepit’s surface.

‘As I’m sure you’re aware by now, this planet comes with a self-defence mechanism. Those bio-forms are defensive nodes. If the planet is damaged or exploited in any significant way, it constructs a matching response.’

‘Drones,’ said Will.

‘Exactly. What we call Nemesis machines – bio-formed warp-enabled munitions. An extraordinary concept, is it not? The response is extremely predictable. This means that whenever the sects land a new Frontier-busting settlement, we can shut it down without IPSO being any the wiser. So far it has been used no fewer than eight times at the Far Frontier.’

Will’s gaze snapped to her face. ‘
Eight?
’

She looked saddened by his surprise. ‘Will, the proxy war you imagined we were trying to start at Tiwanaku has been going on for more than two years. Flags have been capitalising on Fleet limitations and claiming worlds outside of IPSO control for months now. They’ve been trying to seize territory without even a glance in the Fleet’s direction. And had they succeeded, the balance of power would already have changed. The sects would have abandoned politics. That war you fear would have long since started. You see, Will,’ she said, ‘you failed already. We’ve been covering your ass for years. Take a look.’

She passed him another invitation. This time, Will couldn’t bring himself to open it. He didn’t doubt she had the proof. People had been expecting the sects to make a move since before he lost Rachel. His shoulders sagged. History had been advancing all around him and he’d never even noticed. He, who had been personally tasked with saving it.

‘Instead,’ she said, ‘we clear up each incident without ever impacting the Fleet’s finances. Each operation the Nems carry out is immaculate. They’re so tidy that nobody needs to know they happened. Except the sects, of course, who’re spitting with rage. All they know is that their horrid little military outposts full of religious fundamentalists keep disappearing. But this pattern is unsustainable. Every new illegal outpost is larger than the last. And the larger the target the Nems consume, the more human data they internalise and the less predictable they become. Which meant that Tiwanaku had to be the very last site we let them take. We knew that without something to reset politics, the sects would eventually win. As ever with Earth, it’s just a numbers game. They have them. We don’t. And if they win, your vision of a unified species will be lost for good.’

‘So why didn’t you just
tell
me?’ said Will.

‘Because we judged, based on prior experience, that you couldn’t make the necessary cold decision. So we arranged for Fleet scouts to witness an “alien event”. We laid a warp trail linking Tiwanaku straight to Earth. And then we made sure that you and the
Ariel Two
would become unavailable. The Nemesis machines will attack Earth. And then they’ll be beaten before they can adapt. With Earth’s population under threat, the sects will have no choice but to support the Fleet. And with evidence that the Far Frontier holds alien dangers, political support for Frontier-jumping will vanish. The human race will be reunified.’

Will shivered at the implications. ‘At the cost of billions of lives,’ he said quietly.

Pari wagged her finger at him again. ‘Actually, just a few million. We’ve been quite careful about that. Our ships will be ready when the attack begins. The Nem swarm will never reach Earth itself. There’ll be losses in the out-system, of course, and surface casualties due to the radiation impact, but that’s all. Frankly, it’s a low price to pay compared to that of another interstellar war.’

Will couldn’t stomach her talk of costs and cutting and paying. It felt cheaply clinical to him – the kind of decision-making leaders engaged in when they felt certain they’d never have to bear the brunt of their own choices.

‘How nice that you won’t be paying,’ he sneered.

Pari’s smile dropped away. She suddenly looked very angry.

‘Aren’t I? Haven’t I? You remember, I hope, that rebels on Earth murdered my family. I’ve spared you the footage of their charred corpses staked out on the ground. Did you know that some of those gang members were as young as twelve? All were executed after the trial that followed, of course. Earth’s justice is as pathetic as its discipline. You seem to forget that I’m
from
Earth, Will. I’ve dedicated my life and my career to helping it. I could so easily have done what my father wanted and supported the interests of his sect, but I chose not to. I tried to follow in
your
footsteps, Will Monet, and make a difference. I took
your
sacrifice and
your
vision seriously. More seriously than you did, apparently.’

Her nostrils flared as she spoke. Her voice trembled. Pari Voss’s famous exterior had cracked, spilling out some of the poison froth from inside.

‘It was in the wake of that … those …
killings
that I realised helping the world was never going to be enough. I saw that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I gave and gave, there would always be more poverty. More horror. More death. The Earth was like a mindless machine just churning it out. And that’s when I realised I needed to turn the horror machine off. If I did that, it would make the whole species sit up and take note.’

‘But how can
this
possibly help?’ said Will sadly. ‘Even if your plan works, how does hitting the Earth make it better? You’re not making the poverty go away.’

‘Can you really not see?’ she snapped. ‘We had all the tools to end poverty hundreds of years ago, Will, so why does it still exist? Because people squeeze each other. They can’t help themselves. And they keep squeezing and hurting and crushing and maiming right up until someone starts squeezing them back. We had to make it look like someone else was doing the squeezing. We had to give humanity the gift of
fear
– the one gift you were never going to give us. The one gift that would offer people an incentive to stop fighting. You see, Will, you were ready to change yourself for mankind. But you were never ready to change mankind for
itself
.’

‘Because I believe that change should be a choice,’ he said.