‘It’s fairly clear that Lynthax is becoming increasingly influential, almost a power bloc in its own right. Aligned as it is with the Western Bloc, Lynthax carries a great deal of weight at the UN. Even more worrying: we think it’s done a deal with the West, which is making the Asians decidedly nervous. Fortunately, they don’t have voting powers within the Court of Appeal. If they did, you would already be in Western Bloc hands.
‘Then there’s its growing popularity back home. Being able to offer cheap and instant emigration, no matter what your social or financial standing was bound to make them popular. They get good airtime, and plenty of column inches. Meanwhile, the press is portraying the Authority as an unnecessary and unwelcome restriction on growth.
‘I say this so that you’ll understand the headwinds we face in keeping you out of the Western Bloc’s hands. It’s getting rough. We knew it would be, but it’s rougher than we anticipated. No one expected public opinion to swing around as quickly as it has.’
She paused then smiled.
‘But it isn’t all bad. The UN has confirmed ISRA as the prime agency for everything related to migration from Earth, which is why we now have access to wormholes whenever we want them. Lynthax is also leasing a small number of holes to the Asian Bloc, for commercial use, as a sign of good faith—although I believe the terms are the same as for us: Lynthax will still control them.
‘This in itself hasn’t quite eliminated tensions on Earth, but it has helped reduce them.
‘Another advance: The Asian Bloc is pushing for a treaty on the use of wormholes. They see the holes as potential weapons delivery platforms, and they want a nuclear weapons-style convention put in place, including a robust verification programme. As Picton has just mentioned, they don’t trust the West and think it may have done a deal with the company. The Western Bloc is stalling, but we’re hopeful. If we can bring them inside a weapons treaty, the Western Bloc will have no choice but to fall into line: it’ll then be forced to put pressure on Lynthax to declare all that they have.’
Scat cut through the bull:
‘So, we’re no closer to a pardon or any further from a hanging, then.’
‘That’s correct,’ Mary conceded. ‘On balance, we’re where we were last month, but … you’re fast becoming yesterday’s news. Now I know that doesn’t offer much comfort, but the busier it is on Earth, the more cluttered the political calendar becomes. There’s still no date for the appeal hearing, and that’s a good thing. We’re doing all we can so as to spin it out.’
Scat yawned and looked out of the window noticing it was getting dark. He looked down at his graf and thought of taking a nap before dinner. It would be a better use of his time.
Part Six
Recover Your Soul
137
In Deep Mine 7, Makindra continued his preparations to throw the longest wormhole ever.
The Prebos Thing was off the radar. Lynthax had never used it to send emigrants to the Outer Worlds, so it went undeclared, as did several thousand of them, spread out across the galaxy.
The throw was to the M31 galaxy, some three million light years away. It was to be the first intergalactic wormhole. There was no commercial rationale to it. This was for R&D purposes only. Ratti was curious to see just how far they could throw a hole. It was a precursor to something bigger—something altogether more world-changing than instant space travel. He was convinced of the theory, but before he uttered a word of it to the board, he wanted the wormhole’s capabilities tested to breaking point. And unwittingly, Makindra was about to oblige.
In five minutes time, he would throw a wormhole to a distance so great, that Makindra wasn’t even sure how Ratti could know it had arrived. It wasn’t due to land on a planet, just among the stars. Shortly afterwards, a simple, stripped-down bugcam would be the very first man-made object to fly outside our Milky Way.
Three minutes. An operator activated the bugcam and allowed it to float a few feet off the floor while Makindra checked its systems.
One minute. The bugcam systems were running correctly. The wormholes’ orange ball was spinning, ready to release its energy. Makindra stood back from his console and looked down towards the eye, glancing back at the chamber camera to see if it had a square-on view. He then returned to the bugcam camera monitor. Everything was working, just as expected.
Ratti nodded. It was time.
He pressed the button to execute.
138
The airlock was cold. It had been vented. Scat was grateful he didn’t need a suit. At least he wasn’t wearing one, yet he was still OK. He felt himself floating, from wall to wall, looking down at the floor. He wondered why anyone would furnish an airlock with his bunk bed, desk and the usual bedroom clutter. Even his dirty laundry was lying on the floor, ready for collection.
He remembered he hadn’t yet finished his last Pathfinder report, and didn’t care. He was having fun, floating in the airlock above his bunk.
‘What are you doing?’ The voice came from nowhere.
Scat struggled to maintain his aerial balance as he swung around.
‘Are you going to float along like this all day, or are you going to deal with it?’ the voice asked.
Scat couldn’t see the source of the question. He swung around again.
‘Hey, Knuckle Head! When are you going to deal with it?’ The voice sounded a tad irritated.
Scat grabbed the top rung of his bunk and stopped spinning.
‘For Jesus Christ’s sake! Are you going to wake up to what you’re not doing?’ This time it sounded angry.
‘I will. I will, for fark’s sake.’ Scat heard himself reply. ‘But why? I’m going great guns.’
‘Take your head from out of your arse and look at me.’ The voice was a familiar one. But where in the Hell was it coming from?
‘Sure. Where are you?’
‘Here! Over here. I’ve been here for, like, ages!’
Scat looked across the room to where the last question had come from. He saw nothing and felt everything.
Oh, crap.
‘Pierce?’
‘Are you awake, now?’ Pierce asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ Scat said hesitantly. He couldn’t truly be awake, not if he were talking to Pierce. But he was on his bunk, he was no longer floating.
‘So what are you going to do?’ Pierce was pushing again. But at what?
Scat looked blankly at the ceiling while his mind raced. He was fairly certain he was still dreaming, and that Pierce’s menacing attitude couldn’t harm him.
‘I don’t know. It depends on what “it” is, I guess.’
‘Scat, I’ve been trying to speak to you for, like, ages. Didn’t you feel at least a little bit of it?’
Pierce still wasn’t making any sense. For sure, he was still dreaming, though it wasn’t as frightening as usual—just more lucid.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’
‘Not the least bit disturbed? Not even slightly unsettled?’
‘Oh! You mean the “heebie-jeebies”. Sure.’
‘You were the easiest to reach.’
‘The easiest? For what?’
‘Talking to. Getting a message to. I’ve been trying for ever, but it hasn’t been that easy.’
Scat started to sober up, or at least begin to think that maybe this wasn’t a dream.
‘Why’s Petroff a mate of yours?’ Pierce asked, unexpectedly.
‘He isn’t. We had to work together.’
‘Really. Still a company man, eh?’
‘Not the whole time,’ Scat said, not bothering to mention the five years they were trying to kill each other.
‘I guess things change,’ Pierce said. ‘I’ve noticed that since I died. But we digress. You need to get working on a solution.’
‘To what?’
‘A solution to everything, for every soul.’
Scat decided he had had enough. He shook his head, walked across to the sink and splashed his face.
Pierce continued talking.
Scat ignored him. He pulled clean clothes from under his bunk.
‘I’ve got to see a doctor. This isn’t good.’
Pierce demanded a reply. Scat stared into the mirror. He tried to look around the room without inviting comment, but Pierce saw him do it.
‘You can’t avoid me, Scat. You have to acknowledge me. Souls are at stake.’
Again, Scat didn’t answer him. He couldn’t see him, so he doesn’t exist.
‘He’s in my head. A doctor will get him out of there.’
To kill his thoughts, he flicked on all the lights. That didn’t help by much, so he opened the door and stepped into the corridor. In the distance, he could hear a claxon, but it was a long way away. At least the dorm wasn’t on fire—not this one anyway. He looked back inside his bunk. There was nothing there. But then he hadn’t actually seen anything when he was in his bunk. He had just felt it … heard it.
He pulled the door to and made his way down the stairs to the ground floor canteen. He stood at the counter waiting to order a coffee, but the night time cook was too busy talking to someone at the door in the rear of the kitchen. When he eventually saw Scat, he came rushing over.
‘Guess!’ the cook said, putting both hands on the counter, ignoring Scat’s tray.
‘Guess what?’ Scat asked, still half asleep, looking through dry and crusted eyes at an empty tray.
‘Guess what’s just happened! Come on guess!’ the man persisted, willing Scat to answer him. Finally, he couldn’t hold himself back. ‘Them wormholes have shut down. All of ‘em. They just stopped working!’
That got Scat’s attention. He repeated what he had just heard to himself and then looked up, his eyes just starting to widen. Well beggar me, he thought.
‘That’ll change things.’
139
It wasn’t a temporary shutdown. The wormholes were no longer working. The extent of the shutdown was becoming clearer by the hour.
Every wormhole known to ISRA’s Runnymede office had closed down, and nothing the Lynthax techies tried to do could make them work again. The energy spheres had stopped glowing. They no longer spun. The wormhole constructs were empty; there was no idle eye, no flowing lens, no orange glow or chrome sheen.
A few hours after the closure it became clear that not even Lynthax’s far away wormholes were working. Scat overheard one of the dorm guards tell the cook to ration the coffee; that the company would replace the Runnymede-Trevon resupply wormhole with an LM. There would never have been the need for that unless the whole wormhole network had gone down.
There was panic over at the ISRA diplomatic mission. It no longer had contact with its offices on the far away planets. It dawned on them that millions of emigrants could be lost to Earth, beyond practical ftl support.
But Mary also sensed an opportunity. She chanced her arm. She stormed into Petroff’s office and demanded to know how such a thing could happen. She went on at him, interrupting him each time he tried to explain. Petroff stumbled through an unconvincing explanation until Mary cut him off, for a final time, with a demand that he give her access to the buoy network.
Petroff sat looking at her. He wasn’t sure what she meant by that: she had access to the network from the diplomatic mission. But she pointed to his PC and walked around to his side of the desk, to make it clear she meant now. He logged off, got up and offered her his chair.
As he watched Mary send a message back to the Authority’s Secretariat on Trevon, he thought he saw a flash of a smile. He then realised he had made a mistake; he had just shown her how vulnerable he felt. She had verbally shellacked him, and he had caved.
At that point, he knew his power was slipping away. Things were changing, and they would change even more when the Western Bloc realised it had lost its miracle source of intelligence. There would be a feeding frenzy.
He walked to the door, called Rogers over and pulled him to one side.
‘Who do we still have who can fly a starflyer, Rogers?’ he asked, quietly.
‘A starflyer, sir?’
Rogers stared over Petroff's shoulder at Mary, wondering how she got to be sitting at his boss’ desk. Petroff leaned sideways slightly, to block off his view and to kill the distraction. He snapped his fingers in front of Roger’s face.
‘Yes, Rogers, a starflyer. Who do we have?’
Rogers curled his lower lip. He hadn’t a clue.
‘I don’t know, sir. We haven’t used one in ages.’
Petroff looked him in the eye, and cocked his head, waiting. Rogers saw Petroff was expecting him to do something. Or to catch on. Finally, he did.
‘I’ll go find out, sir. There’s bound to be a crew here somewhere. We’ve still got a starflyer out at the number four hangar.’
Petroff relaxed slightly.
‘OK, then. Go find out. And tell control it can’t go anywhere without my permission. Oh, and then send the captain to speak to me.’
‘Yes, sir. Are we going somewhere?’
‘No Rogers. I just need to know that I can.’
Mary finished uploading her messages, and without a thank you, she left the room.
Then they waited.
Mary batted correspondence back and forth with the Secretariat.
Scat kicked-back and tried to sleep but was plagued by more and more, increasingly disturbing dreams.
Petroff chased Ratti for answers but didn’t get any. He fielded queries from head office as best he knew how. He trawled the buoy news to get a sense of how this was playing out on Earth.
As he sat low in his chair, with his feet up on his desk, he also pondered corporate life without wormholes. He wondered just how the board would play the Western Bloc now the wormholes were down. Just how much metal did they have in their spines? And what protection did he have?
He took a card out from his shirt pocket and waved it across the lock of his desk drawer. He opened it and looked down. They were still there, for years unused: his Hoover files, his stay out of jail card—a spine-stiffening reminder to over half the board that when the going gets rough, they had better be tough.
For a moment or two, he wondered if he would need to use them. He ran his tongue back and forth along his lower lip as he thought that through.
He hoped not.
But then again, he did not like the idea of going back to running planet security.
He liked the idea of jail even less.
140
He told himself that it was three weeks after the wormholes had stopped working. A stranger was nudging him awake. Picton stood next to him, looking down.
‘Scat, you might like to see this.’
‘What is it? It’s the wee hours.’
‘Something no one has seen before, Scat. It’s worth a look.’
Scat hesitated. It was another dream. He wanted to turn over: to kill the dream and fall back into the fuzzy blackness.
Picton tapped him on his shoulder again. He wouldn’t go away. He was smiling—not a Petroff smile, but a clean, decent smile.
‘Let’s go, Scat. You’ll want to see this.’
He followed Picton and his unknown friend out of the room. When they got to the end of the corridor, the unfamiliar face unlocked the door and pushed it open onto a fire escape that led up to the flat roof. Picton and Scat stepped out.
The sky was clear from horizon to horizon, but it was filled with flashing lights; straight lines of white or blue, some flashing once, others several times.
One line of light seemed to flash furiously, flicking around a single point, like the hand on a stopwatch.
Occasionally, one end of a flash burst quickly outward. It would grow into a ghostly silver-grey bubble and then slowly fade away.
Then it dawned on him. He had been involved in one-on-one dogfights, but this was the first time he was seeing one as an observer.
Wow! So, this is what a full-on battle in space looks like!
He sat down on the skylight wal
l, his mouth gaping wide open, looking up, not wanting to miss a second of it. Picton sat down beside him holding a PIKL, which Scat thought was odd.
‘Almost beautiful isn’t it? From here, I mean,’ he said, looking up in a different direction.
It certainly was.
‘Jeeze! I’ve seen some things in my time, but never ...’
Scat’s voice trailed away as he realised he might not be dreaming. Everything felt clearer, more focused. He trailed a finger along the skylight wall until his nail split. Yep. It was broken. There was even the familiar jolt of adrenaline. He sat up straighter. Was he wearing clothes? He looked down. Yes, he was. Had he made sense to Picton when they spoke? He glanced at him. Picton appeared to be a lot more interested in what was going on above them, so perhaps he had.
The violence above them was real, and it was getting more frantic. There were several multiple arcs of light sweeping in different directions across the night’s clear sky, all originating from the same point. Possibly a frigate, he thought.
Several flashes of straight lines of longer length cut across it: possibly a couple of starflyers.
Then the multiple arcs fired up again, but this time the frigate, or whatever it was, was moving from left to right just above the horizon, perhaps thousands of kilometres up in space. The lighting effect was incredible.
Further out or closer in—it was difficult to judge—individual lines of light cut through the sky, appearing to be of different length. Scat assumed the shorter ones were lasers, firing away from, or perhaps towards, his point of view.
More bubbles: flux-drives exploding. From Runnymede, they looked like bath bubbles, and just as pretty. Closer in, they would be as violent as any nuclear explosion.
He tried to count the number of starflyers out there, but couldn’t. Vessels of one type or another were continuously dropping into and jumping out of space in deep blue flashes of fuzzy light.
Hell, this was four-dimensional, mass-formation warfare, the first of its kind.
‘Well, we can’t hang around all night, Scat, sorry. Ms Sheffield needs you. Whenever you’re ready, please.’
‘What?’
‘Ms Sheffield needs you. I was to brief you on the way. Well, you’ve just had the visual and here’s my summary: The ORF is attacking Runnymede. ISRA aims to take control of Lynthax’s assets—all of them. The Western and Asian Bloc starflyer fleets are also out there, sitting this one out, watching each other. We don’t have a lot of time. Let’s go!’