Event Horizon (Hellgate) (131 page)

“He doesn’t speak for the community,” Mark said pointedly.

“But I’ll just bet he wishes he did,” Tor muttered. “Two words, Dar, and I swear he’ll be picking his teeth out of the carpet.” He paused and gave Dario a grin. “Me being the mongrel bastard with bad manners,
nobody’ll
even blink.”

“Except maybe to arrest you,” Dario said too loudly. “You think Raishenne doesn’t have a security force? You reckon you can whang the captain of the
Freyana
and just walk away?”

“Worth a try,” Tor snorted.

“Worth thirty days cooling your heels in their lockup!” Dario gave him a beseeching look. “Don’t embarrass me.”

“What you got to bribe me with?” Tor challenged as the Capricorn’s engines fired.

Chuckling, Travers touched his combug. “
Wastrel
Flight, this is
Wastrel
101. Raishenne is sending us a landing beam … locked in and we’re on our way.”

“Have a good flight, 101,” Judith Fargo said from Ops. “Take pictures, Neil … it looks like one hell of a nice place.”

“We should be so lucky, and find another just like it,” Vidal breathed.

The Capricorn was out seconds later and Travers turned the nose down, following the acquisition signal, though he could have homed on the comm noise from Raishenne. The planet was a blue-green crescent, fleeced with cloud, noticeably larger than Velcastra or Borushek, and much larger than Jagreth. Raishenne sat just short of the terminator, in late afternoon, while the yellow sun cast long, inky shadows from mountain ranges to the west. The city was built on the east coast of a major continent, 32
^o
south, and from what Neil could see, they had chosen the perfect location.

A landing field ambled away from the town and the early signs of a spaceport had begun to grow there. An apron of four square kilometers of plascrete glared in the afternoon sun, flanked on two sides by enough warehousing to support a city ten times the size of the current Raishenne, which meant the city
equeros
intended it to grow. Permanent gantry cranes stood guard between a rank of comm arrays almost a kilometer long – the colony transmitters – and the deep bunkers of docking bays designed around small ships. Engine signatures showed half the bays occupied.

Late afternoon light shone gold across an arboreal forest, virgin territory where ancient trees reared massively against the sky as the Capricorn dropped in over a range of low hills. The ocean stretched far beyond the horizon, not a vessel or an installation to be seen yet. The colony was too new.

Travers checked coordinates, wondering if ATC had vectored the Capricorn to Raishenne Field, but the acquisition beam took them five thousand meters north, where a deep bay curved inland, with a steeply-raked beach and a complex system of dunes. Raishenne stood just above the tidal zone.

He had been fascinated to see their work, and he was impressed. Marin leaned over for a better view as the Capricorn approached, and murmured in approval. Raishenne was the work of standard constructor drones shipped off an assembly line in the Deep Sky, but the drones would build whatever they were programmed to build; and here, they had conjured architecture that had not been seen outside a museum in almost ten centuries.

He recognized the palisades, courtyards and roofs from Saraine’s ruined, buried Eternal City, and from the museum in Westminster, on Jagreth. But these structures were
living
, busy with people, bright with gardens, and the banners of a new colony streamed on the sea wind as he took the Capricorn in. The plane rotated around and dropped neatly into the side of a property where a house sprawled in an eccentric pattern, as Resalq buildings often did.

It fronted onto a street twice as wide as any street in Riga or Sark; the colony had space to spare. On approach, Travers estimated no more than a thousand houses, each in its own vast garden which would have made any property developer in the Deep Sky salivate. Many indigenous trees shaded the avenues, with the city designed around them, so Raishenne already had an established look and feel, as if it had been here much longer than a scant half year.

Low on the horizon, the sun gilded the red and white rooftops as the Capricorn settled. The engines were still cycling down as Travers opened up. Several Resalq had gathered on the back porch of the house as the plane came in, and from the cockpit he and Marin watched as Mark greeted people he knew well. These Resalq represented every part of the community; two were ancestrals but three more were probably younger than Dario and Tor, and so nearly human in appearance, only their height and the slightly broader hips betrayed them, if one chose to notice. Vivid caftans in the traditional hues made the different body morphology almost impossible to see.

“You want to go with?” Travers wondered as instrumentation shut down and the Capricorn’s rudimentary AI took over surveillance.

Marin hesitated, watching the others at the back of the house, and then shook his head. “I don’t need to hear the story told … we were there. I don’t need to pretend to enjoy wine that would pickle onions!” He stood, flexing his back, working his shoulders. “I’d rather walk, see the town, watch the sun set. If you’re hungry –” He gestured over his shoulder with one thumb. “I remembered to set up the ’chef in the back. We won’t starve.”

“Deal,” Travers decided. “Besides, give them an hour and they’ll be talking politics.”

The air was sweet, heavy with the scents of flowering shrubs native to Saraine and yet thriving here. He wondered if they had been engineered for the soil, the climate, or if the Resalq had simply been blessed with a world where the biochemistry was close enough for a few minor tweaks to make it perfect. The gardens had already grown in, and he saw vegetables, herbs, fruit, as well as shrubs and trees a human might have called hibiscus, oleander, rhododendron, magnolia.

“Ten years,” Marin guessed as they walked down toward the sea, “and this is going to be beautiful. Give it long enough for the rough edges to be worn smooth. The older Resalq will be coming in from sanctuaries like Riga, right across the Deep Sky. This is a
lot
like their old worlds used to be. Just add people.”

“And what about the younger Resalq?” Travers mused. “Tor was bred in Riga and born in Sark.
Borushek’s
his homeworld, Sark’s his hometown, he even talks like a kid from a military town.”

“I don’t know,” Marin said honestly. “The
decision’ll
come down to the individual, it always does. People who want peace and quiet and the old ways will come here. The younger ones will have to decide, do they want to be traditional Resalq, play a part in the rebirth of the culture … or not.”

“Luckily, they’re going to get the choice.” Travers strolled to a halt at the top of the beach.

Fishing nets flapped in the breeze, hung over a frame to dry, and several boats were pulled up onto the dry sand. The ocean smelt of salt, life, death, mystery, like oceans on any world Travers knew. At this hour the tide was low, small waves frothing onto dark gold sand with a soft shushing, almost like a sigh. Indigenous gulls – a meter across the wings, emerald green, with crested heads, fanned tails and oily feathers – squabbled there, where ‘trash fish’ had been dumped after the nets were brought in.

“Looks like you can eat the local fish,” Travers observed with a gesture at the nets.

“You can. I took a look at the
Aenestra
data.” Marin thrust hands into pockets and gazed into the bloated orb of the sun, which had sunk into a mass of cloud on the horizon. “The forests are distant cousins of acacia or eucalypt, even though they look a lot more like cedar or spruce; the native grasses won’t bother the Resalq – humans might have a few major allergy problems. But the local fruit is perfectly edible, just short of a couple of nutrients Resalq need, so they’ll either engineer the indigenous forms or plant their own; and the seafood is supposed to be pretty good.”

The colours of sunset had begun to flush across the sky and two of the world’s three moons were up, white, gibbous, pretty, in the northeast. The last time Travers had breathed open air, felt the sun on his face, was on Jagreth, a lifetime ago. He
savored
the sunset, watched the brightest stars begin to show. Strange stars, he thought. Astronomers would name new constellations describing the
Mare Aenestra
, and in a century Raishenne would be just one of many populated worlds stretching back like pearls on a necklace into the Deep Sky.

“I like this,” Marin said as they walked back up from the beach. “I could live here.”

“Twelve days back to Borushek,” Travers said doubtfully.

“Only ten to Velcastra,” Marin argued, “only nine to Saraine … not that there’s anything much on Saraine. Yet,” he added. “Mark sent the
Carellan
there immediately, to seed the comm buoys. It’s ironic. Now the Zunshu threat is history, he could found a new Resalq colony, live on Saraine safely – but Confederate agents would be on him like a rash. How’d you like to put your neck on the block to save the Deep Sky – humans as well as your own people – and wind up shot dead by a bounty hunter on a fat sanction issued in Chicago or Marsport?”

“Its stinks,” Travers agreed, “and you know the clans back on Earth – the Rutherfords, the
Carvalhos
, even the
Mayhews
– will be gunning for revenge. They’ll call it justice, but a bullet is a bullet.”

Twenty yards back from the beach a cable rang, bell-like, against the flagstaff from which flew the blue and green banner of Carahne. Marin stopped there, watching the moons rise while Travers admired the stars of the
Mare Aenestra
with the fresh eyes of a transspace navigator. Hellgate was not visible from this quadrant; the stars were brilliant, inviting, almost taunting him to explore, with the promise of new worlds, the possibility of very different intelligence flourishing in extraordinary places.

“Excuse me … sorry to interrupt, but…”

The Slingo language and the accent of Borushek, in this place, jolted Travers back to the present. He turned toward the voices, grateful for the pale, cold light of two moons, which made the
Carahnean
night a soft blue twilight. Marin had taken a step forward, not quite defensive as old reflexes triggered, but Travers perceived no threat.

Seven young Resalq were coming down from Raishenne; three carried blankets and cooler chests. They were not just young by Resalq standards, Travers saw – they were younger than himself and Marin, by years. He saw manes of gold-blond hair, kneeless blue jeans, rope sandals, white
meshlex
tunics loose around slender limbs, single-thumbed hands. Two of them were
almost
girls, and for a moment he wondered if they were actually human, till something indefinable about the faces, the eyes, told him the truth. Some of them were teens, probably not even twenty years old yet, of the generation of Resalq who had grown up among humans, been nurtured by human culture, to the point where they identified with gender.

They were alien here on Carahne. The truth hit Travers hard. These kids spoke Slingo with an accent, the dialect of a military town. If they spoke more than a few words of the old language, he would have been surprised. They followed steelrock bands and aeroball teams, turned on to human dancers and actors, wore this year’s Sark and Elstrom chic, braided their hair with beads and feathers, the way kids did in Hydralis, flaunted their long-fingered hands –

And on Carahne they were fish out of water. Travers was taken aback by the realization, but Marin was offering his hand to the young man who had spoken to him. “I know you,” he was saying. “Not personally, but I’ve seen you on CityNet, haven’t I? You won the Arago Challenge – twice, in fact. Tigh Stromberg, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Thanks for remembering.” Stromberg took Marin’s hand, clasped it in what seemed to be a genuine expression of gratitude. “It’s nice to be recognized – I mean, here. That is, I mean …”

“Hey, it’s okay.” The long-limbed, gold-maned ‘girl’ stepped closer, taking Stromberg’s arm. “They probably know what you mean, Tigh.”

“This is Winona.” Stromberg slid his arm around her. “Winona Breck. We’re, uh, from Riga.”

“I know. I’m Colonel Curtis Marin …. this is Colonel Neil Travers.” Marin shook the girl’s hand and smiled sidelong at Neil. “These two were all over CityNet, after Riga was evacuated.”

“I remember.” Travers took the young man’s hand, gave the girl a smile. “You’re a long way from home.”