The Centauri Device (20 page)

Truck took the gun off him, got his hands under the Colonel's armpits, and with difficulty hauled him aft, bruising the limp body in frequent collisions with bulkheads and pieces of machinery. 'Sorry, ben Barka.' Ben Barka, looking a bit of a mess and still out, said nothing.

Truck sniggered. 'You're going to enjoy this, ben Barka.' And he described to the Colonel just how it might feel out there in the graveyard orbit, down along that firework trajectory. But when he arrived in the cargo bay he forgot all about that for a while; and by the time he had finished composing Fix's poor torn corpse, he'd decided to put ben Barka in a suit after all.' It would give him time to wake up and take an interest in the long drop.

He went forward, sealed the bulkheads, and evacuated the hold with no prayers. Out went Fix and ben Barka, in a white storm of Opener leaflets. Ben Barka's suit began to broadcast immediately and indiscriminately — an all-band distress call. 'Damn,' said Truck. 'Isn't that just typical?'

Egerton's Port came through again. 'Are you going to hang around all day,
Intestinal
Revelation
?' said the duty officer. 'We need that slot.' Then, suspiciously: 'Is there something wrong up there? I keep getting something that sounds like an SOS,'

'It's a fault, actually,' said Truck.

'It doesn't sound like a fault to me.' There was a pause. 'I've got someone here from the Port Authority. They want to know what an Opener vessel is doing hauling ironmongery to Sad al Bari — '

'Oops,' said Truck.

' — not to mention going off the field like half a frigate squadron. Can you assist?'

Truck switched the communications gear off.

'Tiny,' he said, 'start the Dynaflows. We're leaving.'

He fired up the navigational systems and set
Ella Speed
hunting like a three-dimensional compass needle until her blunt prow pointed at Alpha Centauri (or a spot where her sluggish internal processes remembered it to be). Tiny got the converters operating and came back up to the bridge. The exterior screens shimmered eerily, already probing out into the mysterious reaches of space.

'Right,' said Truck. He cut in the Dynaflows, pushed the throttles about, and the old
Ella
howled down the Galactic freeway toward Centauri, on overdrive. 'It's time we started getting some of our own back, Tiny.'

There wasn't much hope of getting their own back on anything they found orbiting Centauri VII. Six or seven hundred miles off the wan gray face of that murdered planet,
Ella Speed
pushed her bows into the edge of the immense envelope of debris. Like the remains of huge animals in some valley too deep for dawn to reach, forgotten in a mist of frozen air, dead ships lay in futile ambush for Eternity. It was a dark, still zone, full of dead men drifting in slow curves among fused machinery, rat-trapped with the dull red embers of melted atomic piles, whole engine rooms, like lumps of cooling slag, decaying in sullen aureoles of radio-static.

Deeper in, parts of the graveyard were still fun of a white, fitful glare, a deceptive and piscine motion, as a few bolt-shaped UASR(N) cruisers slugged it grimly out with IWG.

They were outnumbered and unformated, but they seemed to be fully occupying the Fleet — no vacuum commandos were out, communications silence were being observed. Truck tried frequency after frequency, found interference breaking like waves on a beach strewn with smashed and rusting armor at the candle-end of time. He picked up a few desultory syllables of a common Morphian dialect (enough at least to tell him who had done the dying out there), a moan, gunfire scissoring open a hull, distant, decaying, obsessive.

Ella Speed
nosed on through a dream of violence. None of the combatants spotted her.

Behind her, quite unaware of each other, the cruisers
Solomon
and
Nasser
skulked the graveyard like two pike after the same minnow. Truck never suspected he might be followed: perhaps he was too occupied by the young gunner from Parrot who had attached himself to the boat, tumbling lazily about her bow in some gravitational eddy, beckoning Truck and Tiny on with one stiff arm as if inviting them out there to share his cold peace. His intestines, covered in a hoarfrost of condensation, were spilling infinitely slowly from his ruptured pressure suit, but his insignia were polished and bright.

Truck couldn't tell which side he was on.

Centauri captured them, filled the screens like an accusation.

Only one planet was ever killed —

At the climax, the absolute fervid crux of MIEV bombardment, when defense is a rag of memory in a hot wind and the sky shakes with ionization, much of the surface water is stripped off the crust as 'live' or superheated steam. The target vanishes under a cloudbelt several miles deep, there is a corresponding radical increase in its albedo — a last despairing heliograph of pain —

At five o'clock in the afternoon, July fourth 2180 AD, the shroud covered Centauri and, as a good shroud should, spared the living the ultimate patient indictment of the dead. The General Gaws of the day turned from their bomb-room repeaters, satisfied, shrugging and yawning — perhaps even a little bored — and certainly wondering how they might turn one half of Earth into the same sort of mess without actually damaging the other beyond habitable minimums laid down by their biologists. Ever since that merciful occlusion, Centauri had been a rubbish heap smelling of wet ashes.

By the time Dr Grishkin, under the auspices of God and a well-known Galactic encyclopedia, came to sink his first bore in search of the bunkers, a lukewarm rain had been falling evenly over the new landscape for almost two hundred years. He found a planetary fen drained by vast slow rivers: shallow, stagnant meres, inconceivable acreages of mud-flat and salting — and every cubic foot of water filled with corrupt organic matter caught at some point between decay and dissolution, cloudy, brackish with old death. None of the continents resembled anything he found on the pre-Genocide maps: finally, it was beneath the human and animal silts of the estuaries and deltaic fans that he discovered water percolating through the slaughtered regolith in small secret streams, to the abandoned redoubts miles beneath.

There, he dug.

If he was a little mad to begin with, Centauri helped him further along the way. Nothing was alive there, unless you count the echoes of water. Water: and the wind, mumbling thick-lipped between the blasted, mysterious columns of masonry that poked up through the silt like fingers searching the air for the source of their long pain. In continual twilight, corpse-lights shone. The sky was green and gray, luminous with radio-decay products. Wind walking in a rubbish heap; dead lights and water; something was haunting Centauri, but it wasn't the Centaurans —

They were underfoot, even their due corruption suspended for some other time.

John Truck brought his boat home along a line of lavender flame, aiming for Grishkin's fifteen-figure reference. She settled steaming and contracting on a mudbank. Around her stretched the flat, unmarked flood-plain of some vast estuary off to the east. Nothing moved, nothing cried out or ran away. For a moment, the rain had stopped, but there was nothing out here to notice.

After a few minutes, Truck and Tiny emerged from the cargo bay done up in white carbon-fibre helmets, lead-glass goggles, and respirators like squat black snouts. Dark, shiny jumper-suits covered their bodies, which were full of anti-radiation drugs (prescribed) and amphetamine (unprescribed) from
Ella
's overstocked medical chest. Truck's Opener cloak flapped drearily in the wind. They stood around in silence, shuffling their feet and gawping at the inhospitable landscape; pointed in different directions and waved their arms at one another; then set off along the indistinct banks of a clogged watercourse.

Despite the amphetamine, Truck became quickly depressed — at first disturbed, then obsessed by the puzzling, fibrous consistency of the mud. When a tangle of thin bones, eroded and luminescent white, caught at his feet, he measured his length in the stuff.

Thrashing about with revulsion, he kicked Tiny — who was irritably attempting to help — in the chest. 'Do it yourself, then.' He wiped himself off. Down there were nests of papery, corroded steel, lumps of stone, objects. He'd come up holding the broken handle of some piece of domestic apparatus, bright blue. He shuddered and threw it away. Tiny wasn't speaking to him.

It was a miserable excursion. Panting and withdrawn, they struggled upstream, looking for a sign: which they eventually found in the shape of Omega Shaft. By then, Truck was convinced by some half-dream that
everything was still going on down there in the silt
. He grew fearful that some initiation lay before him, some induction — inevitable by right of birth — into the strange decomposed half-life of his mother's race, an existence carried on in terms he couldn't quite imagine, in smashed houses among bits and travesties of human paraphernalia accumulated without logic after their drift down the watercourse.

Hidden in a freak fold of land, the Omega Shaft complex of buildings — from which Dr Grishkin had begun the excavation which was to lead to the discovery of the Centauri Device — was a sprawl of massive pre-cast concrete sheds, dull in color and filmed with an unpleasant moisture. They served to house the generators, air-exchangers, and lift motors of the shaft, a collection of machinery that in operation caused the ground to vibrate palpably. It was surrounded by a chainlink fence into which was set a military checkpoint — a later addition of General Alice Gaw's.

Subsonics from the deeper levels of the bore itself trembled in Truck's bones as he stood with Tiny just beyond the reach of the arc-lights that surrounded the compound, sweating in the heat from the nearest extractor outlet. A small, stubby ship was parked on its tail in the gloom a hundred yards from the checkpoint: hull scorched and deformed by a misjudged high speed re-entry, venturis sunk fifteen feet into the ooze, it wouldn't be leaving that place for some time. It was empty, and a recent, hasty paint job hadn't obscured its Opener livery. It had the air of something abandoned by an owner whose mind was occupied elsewhere.

Truck hung about indecisively for a while, human silt drying and flaking off his coverall.

The gates (and indeed the whole complex) seemed to be deserted. The Fleet police weren't in evidence, and neither could he detect any sign of military activity. He turned to the dim, snouted little figure by his side, and pantomimed an advance.

'I'm not going down there, mate — '

'Yes, you bloody are.'

Tiny dragged his feet. In silence and moving slowly, like the performers of some decadent choreography rehearsing without audience, they made it to the checkpoint. No one greeted them.

Two dead Fleet men lay face up in the mud by the gates, their respirators torn off. Their goggles had been shattered by the same explosion that had torn down the fence, but they were otherwise undamaged. Their eyes were fixed on Centauri's unforgiving sty, and it was hard to dispel the impression that something had issued from the shifting streams of silt and finished them off without a sound.

In the Transit Lanes

Thoughtfully, Truck stole their guns.

The shafthead itself was littered with bodies in IWG uniforms, flung radially away from the center of a second explosion in postures stark and raw and strange. Has someone been here already, thought Truck. He stared around at the deserted sheds, doors banging in the wind, all those machines operating away unattended. It was coming on to rain again, trim gray curtains blowing between the buildings like wraiths. Truck attempted to scratch his head through his helmet.

'They've all had it,' reported Tiny Skeffern, trotting doggily from corpse to corpse, feeling his amphetamines and elated at not getting into a fight, 'I think.' His voice, filtering out through the capillaries of the respirator, was flat and ghoulish.

'Come on, Tiny.'

Truck left him to it and went to find the elevator mechanisms. The shafthead throbbed around him like a plucked string. Rain smoked at him unexpectedly round blind corners.

Smears of rust on the walls. He found the lift cage, wiped absently at a film of moisture on the control panel.

DISENGAGE SECTION 5 AND PRESS FOR DOWN.

Under the earth again, he thought, under the earth again. He felt divorced, disinterested.

None of the murder at the shafthead seemed to have affected him: perhaps he was preparing himself for his encounter with the Device, tying off unproductive sensory channels, shutting out all irrelevant stimuli.

'Come on, Tiny.'

They sealed the pressure doors of the lift cage, removed their respirators, and began their descent into the crust of Centauri VII.

Truck had no more sense of homecoming. The lift was slow, there was nothing to look at but Tiny. He was suspended between realities, he was powered down. Two miles deep, and he checked his dosimeter to see if he'd picked up any of the active caesium floating about on the surface. Two and a half, and he imagined desultorily the earth groaning and shifting beyond Omega Shaft, swallowing him up. It didn't happen. He breathed on the wall of the cage and wrote his name in the condensation.

'Oh, wow,' said Tiny, snapping his fingers. 'Under the earth, what a blast'

The cage grounded gently. Truck worked the doors.

Shaft Zero: they entered the bunker-chain ('Stay here and stop anyone who tries to come down,' Truck told Tiny. 'Not on your life,' said Tiny, shuffling his feet and looking paranoically over his shoulder) and almost immediately became lost in a labyrinth of filter passages, transit lanes, and every conceivable sort of dead end.

Plate movements during the later stages of the MIEV bombardment had tilted the whole system, giving the tunnels a general easterly slope of five or six degrees; some terminated abruptly at fault-lines, others were waterlogged and impassable. In the rest, power failure had left natural convection as the sole medium of ventilation, and the air in them was hot, humid, and heavy. Curious white clumps of mold, fat and glutinous, clung to the walls, giving the place a musty, evil odor. And while Grishkin's team had introduced fluorescent lighting to the major bunkers and some of the corridors, most were lighted only by the wan phosphorescence of the algae that dripped from the outputs of the ventilation plant like listless hanging gardens.