Event Horizon (Hellgate) (41 page)

The garages were cool, dim, a mass of silver-gray plascrete with a green and white boomgate and full AI surveillance. Marin saw two blue-uniformed guards and three youths apparently whiling away the afternoon hand-polishing several ranks of luxury cars for politicians and celebrities. He regarded the vehicles impartially, but Travers was scathing about wealth, privilege and ‘seat polishers,’ albeit in a growl even Marin barely heard.

A polite security drone ID’d and palm-printed them before it released the
Grassetto
, and Marin was not very surprised when the AI knew them. Chesterfield Control had already logged them in, along with Shapiro and Kim.

The senior guard was an older woman, thickset, with gnarled hands and too much makeup, who looked entirely comfortable in the uniform. “You guys come down groundside
wi
’ the General’s party?” The accent was provincial, even for Jagreth, which was far from the bright lights of Velcastra, Borushek, Omaru. She looked up at them through the haze of the threedee. “You gotta be
feelin
’ like a
coupla
spare wheels
wi
’ flat tires.”

“The boss gave us a few hours,” Travers said easily as he accepted the
keycoder
. “Downtime. Don’t knock it.”

“Enjoy.” The woman gave the threedee a cursory wave, and the boom rose.

Chapter Eight

Westminster region, Jagreth

Local time ticked over to 17:30 as the car buoyed up on a storm of repulsion. Travers took it out to the broad rear courtyard in a well of blue shadow before hitting the igniters. Well-tuned lifters roared to life and he ran them up to full thrust in test. Marin took the opportunity to sit back and relish the moment of idleness as the Rand rose high over the comm arrays on the mansion’s red shingled roof and angled away into the south.

“So.” Travers spun the car slowly in its own length to take in the full three-sixty. “Where?”

Most cities were much alike, and Marin had little desire to revisit parks and monuments which were variations on the themes of those in Sark, Elstrom, Hydralis, before the war reduced it to rubble – even Marak City on Ulrand. The fastest way out of town was south, down the coast. He pointed Travers in the general direction and lounged in the passenger’s seat, taking as much pleasure in watching Neil handle the car as in the view.

The Samaral Ocean was bright as the sun westered. Jagreth’s warm yellow star had begun to settle into a bed of cumulus and stratocumulus, and the forecast would not be so good for Westminster tomorrow. Marin smiled, remembering how the region’s weather always changed from the northwest. When one had grown up here, murk on the horizon, a subtle rise in humidity, a welcome fall in the heat of a summer or autumn afternoon, gave the subliminal warnings of squalls before dawn, perhaps a rumble of thunder in the small hours of the morning. The Cailenne Current cut a long rip, north-south and three shades darker than the rest of the ocean, almost on the horizon as the car headed south down the coast, following the antlines of the traffic lanes.

Below, Westminster was a mass of golden stone and armorglass reflecting the lowering sun, and the dancing colors of the myriad flickering commercials which competed for attention along the rooftops. Marin spared it one long glance, saw little different from Sark and Elstrom, and turned his attention back to the ocean.

Minutes later Travers dropped out of the traffic lines and the car settled toward a small gravel parking lot. The area was deserted at this time of day, and mid-week. The signage read ‘Beluga Cove,’ and he was surprised. “You have belugas here? The Earth species, or something local that just reminded some xenobiologist of a beluga?”

“Neither, actually.” The engine whined down, the gullwings lifted, and Marin took a deep breath of fresh salt air. The sun was low now and he used a hand to shield his eyes. “The
Beluga
was a research vessel, scouting locations for the mid-ocean fish farms. She went down 20 K’s offshore in a monster storm about 150 years ago. You can still dive on the wreck – another touristy thing to do, but you need the noonday light. She’s in about 30 meters, and it quickly gets dark, down deep. You can carry lights, but they’re a nuisance.”

“You’ve dived it.” Travers was watching the gulls squabbling along a pebble beach where someone had recently cleaned a catch.

They were indigenous, very different from the gulls of Earth – silver-green, with wax-glossy scales and double-folded wings; but they filled the same niche and
sounded
exactly like the gulls that had been introduced to Velcastra and Borushek from Earth. Jagreth’s biosphere was close enough to Earth’s to be almost liveable without modification, yet different enough for Earth-native species to struggle without some reengineering. Domestic animals were tweaked for the colony, and few wild species were dangerous enough to be culled. Indigenous forms continued to flourish and three generations on, no one noticed how ‘gulls,’ ‘crows’ and ‘pigeons’ shone with gorgeous iridescent scales rather then feathers, and folded their wings in two places.

Marin had grown up with these, and was transfixed by the feathered birds brought out from Earth. Genuine birds were common in colonies where terraforming was so comprehensive, native species were obliterated in the wild to make space for burgeoning human populations. Terraforming usually resulted in worlds where native creatures perished and were replaced by reengineered types from Earth and from environmentally compatible colonies. Indigenous life hung on only in vast, domed ‘parks’ where the virgin environment was carefully preserved as a scientific record. Marin had always mourned the near-annihilation of native life to accommodate humans.

“I dove on the
Beluga
three or four times when I was about fifteen,” he told Travers. “I had a skiff, used to tie up at the mooring on the point there. Don’t know what happened to the boat. It was still in the shed when my conscription notice was posted, but my parents were long gone from this planet by the time I was free to walk away from Fleet.” He heard the dark, introspective tone in his own voice. “I suppose they sold it along with the furniture.”

The ocean glittered as the northwest wind wafted coolness through the car, sharp with the tang of the incoming tide. He forced himself back to the present, discovered Travers frowning at him and hunted for a smile. “You want to get sand between your toes?”

But Travers’s dark head shook. “We can do that anywhere. It’s pretty, but a beach is a beach. We’ll come back when we have a few days, and maybe rent a boat, dive that wreck.” He dropped the gullwings and hit the igniters again. The hot engines lifted the car swiftly, and he turned the nose on south, leaving the city behind and heading into ‘clear air’ – traffic zones where the load was too sparse for antlines to form up, and drivers could cut their own paths.

Fifty kilometers over Westminster’s horizon lay the delta of the Murchison River, and there Travers turned inland, east, following the course of the river from the broad, swampy meander close to the coast to the jagged depths of Glen Rowan Gorge, where ancient glacial torrents had carved a chasm hundreds of meters deep. The southbound Kanagawa Highway soared over the gorge on the great wings of a road-and rail-bridge, a structure woven of seemingly gossamer filaments, spun kevlex-titanium riding grav-resist fields.

“Now,
that’s
pretty.” Impressed, Neil braked the car to a hover, five hundred meters westward.

“Three monster generators are buried in the bedrock below, there’s a permanent gang of drones maintaining it,” Marin told him. “It has its own AI – and you’re seeing it at the best time of the day, with the sun low in the west.”

The structure gleamed, with the northbound freight express headed like a bullet for Westminster on the maglev rail and flights of snow-white condors wheeling below on the early evening thermals, fanning out in search of carrion – supper. In the distance the landscape darkened with the endless carpet of the
Itaruma
Forest, dense, original old-growth tracts of native hardwoods – big enough, old and tough enough to withstand an environment skewed by the modest terraforming.

“Swing around, follow the highway.” Marin pointed ahead to the arrow-straight line of plascrete cutting an arc into the northeast, where the hills rose steadily toward mountains still over the horizon. “It’s only early autumn here, so there’s enough daylight.”

“Enough light for what?” Travers took the car under the bridge rather than over, where the upward press of the grav-resist field gave a rollercoaster sensation for a moment.

“A place called Taylor’s Creek ... since we’re in the area, at this time of year.” Marin leaned forward, bringing the GPS online and scrolling till he found what he wanted.

A wood of maple, aspen and birch, built from reengineered trees. The result was a designer landscape – nothing about it was natural to Jagreth, but it had the look and feel and
smell
of the Hudson River area of Darwin’s World, and several parts of the northern latitudes of Earth’s Americas. For more than a century Jagreth had celebrated the First Fleet’s origins in the Near Sky, and specifically Darwin’s, Mars and Earth itself. Many landscapes around Westminster were built by the terraformer fleet to make the first generations comfortable. They were as artificial as their trees and wildlife were real and alive; and they were as beautiful as any place in the homeworlds.

The colors of the season were already beginning to show, and the low sun cast a golden blaze across a birch hillside. Westminster sprawled away to the sea, busy, self-possessed, handsome with a certain quaintness which had been cast off decades before by more affluent and populous cities of other worlds.

Travers set the car down on the cracked old plascrete of a lookout, and as the canopies whirred up Marin swung out, stretched his back and took a long breath. The air was quite still here, two thousand meters above the coast, cooler, and rich with the scents of soil, decay, humus. The year was swinging quickly toward winter; fall here was short and damp after the extended summer months. Drifted fallen leaves crackled underfoot as he made his way to the half-strange, half-familiar gazebo-style shelter, thirty yards back from the lookout.

The wood was the same; the knife-carved graffiti had worn with time but the table was very new. Birch and aspen clustered around and the undergrowth grew much more thickly than he remembered, but nothing could change the smell of the place, and it triggered a thousand memories. The view over Westminster to the sea was dramatic with the harsh shadows of early evening; smoke from the few fires still smoldering cast a haze over the city, but if Marin closed his eyes, seventeen years seemed to fall away from his bones like a snakeskin.

“Nice place,” Travers said cautiously. “I know a few like it on Darwin’s and Velcastra.”

Every world had them – scores of them. Hundreds. Marin chuckled softly. “It’s not
a
place. It’s
the
place.”

Travers hopped up to sit on the table, feet on the bench, listening, perhaps guessing.

“I was sixteen,” Marin told him. “He was about a year older, but his conscription notice hadn’t been posted yet. It was about this time of year … still warm, humid. Clear skies, great stars except in the east where the spaceport lights always make it too bright for stars … about an hour off midnight, which is not as late as it sounds. The day’s a tad shorter here, remember?”

A smile had ambushed Travers. “I remember. You lost your virginity here.”

“Yes, I did.” Marin indulged himself in a rich chuckle. “He had a car, he’d already graduated … Chris. Nice kid, all long limbs and yellow hair and brown skin. Smooth as a girl, at that age. Ready for plucking and desperate to be plucked, if only the right partner would come along. You know the type.”

“I’ve met a few.” Travers beckoned and when Marin went to him, laced his fingers at Curtis’s nape. “You’d have fallen into the same category yourself … damn, I’ll just bet you were a beauty. It was good?”

“It was interesting,” Marin allowed. “Not a
complete
disaster.” He leaned his forehead on Neil’s and closed his eyes, the better to perceive the sprit of the place. “Nothing really changes here except the people. They come and go, but Jagreth seems to drowse, so far from the bright lights of Velcastra, Omaru, Borushek – and if you ask the people who’ve spent a lifetime here they’ll tell you, they like it that way.”

“So do it. It’s nice.” Travers feathered a kiss around his cheek, flicked his lips with a warm tonguetip. “The Three Rivers region of Darwin’s is a lot like this. The pace of life is slow enough that you can actually see the seasons changing around you instead of running, running, the way we’ve spent the last couple of years.”

“I’ve been running for a lot longer.” Marin leaned back to look into his face. “Dendra Shemiji. One day I’ll tell you a few of those stories.” Then he looked over Travers’s head into the woodland shadows, where rabbits and deer would soon be creeping out to forage in the twilight. Not the same animals Earth knew as rabbits and deer, but creatures that filled the same niches in the environment, and were close enough to be called by the same names.

For a moment the memories were sharp enough to be almost painful. Inside Marin, disturbingly close beneath the skin, was the callow, confused youth, longing for adventure, dreading his five-year hitch yet relishing the challenge of opting for officer selection at the end of the rookie year, studying for an eventual place in the command corps. Perhaps even a command of his own. He might have done it, if he had not watched the murder of a friend. One night changed everything, and there was no way back.

He shook the memories away with an enormous effort and focused on Travers, who was just watching him, waiting for him to return to the present. Loving him a great deal just then, Marin stooped and kissed him soundly before he said against Neil’s lips, “You getting hungry?”

“Starving,” Travers confessed. “I was starting to wonder if you wanted to duck into the woods for a quickie –”

“If we were seventeen, I’d take you up on the offer,” Marin said, amused. “I’m old enough to want a firm mattress and a tube of something cool and sweet, if I’m going to get humped!” He traced the lines of Travers’s brow, nose, jaw. “Beside which, you’re hungry.”

“You know any good restaurants?” Travers pressed a last kiss to his palm and let him go.

“A few, but we don’t have a booking.” Marin stepped away, though he held onto Travers’s hands and pulled him to his feet. “How fancy do you want to get?”

“I don’t care about ‘fancy’ – feed me,” Neil said plaintively.

“In that case, let me drive now.”

Sunset flooded east through the sky in shades of blood, purple, gold, green, as the car lifted. Lights danced across the rooftops of Westminster and for a moment Marin held the car on a static hover while he cast around for his bearings, not quite ready to take the easy way out and opt for the GPS.

Travers snorted with ribald humor. “You
do
know where you’re going?”

“Hey, it’s been a long time,” Marin protested.

And then the car spun, dove down the forest-dark face of the Wichita Hills and entered the city traffic lines over the Bremen sector. Downtown was already bright, glittering with animated signage and a million lights, crisscrossed by the traffic lanes while the flaretails of orbital shuttles arced high above, heading up from the spaceport to Sanmarco and the clipper terminal at Westminster High Dock.

He threaded into ‘Watsonia Street,’ the busy east-west express lane at 700 meters altitude, and followed it to a familiar pair of red and white banners dancing in laser light over the apex of the South Cambrai parking garage. When he saw the green ‘space available’ sign, he handed the car over to the building’s AI pilot.

The
Grassetto
touched down like a feather, and as the canopies lifted he took a breath of the city night air – sharp, metallic with the reek of hot engines, rich with the smells of plum pork, lemon chicken, frying onions, sizzling fish, issuing from the stalls on the north parapet. Forty levels up, they heard only a faint growl of street traffic, but the air overhead was thick with cars, jangling with music from the food vendors’ stands, and Marin shouted to hear his own voice.

“This way – stay with me.”

The parking AI issued a chit for the car, and as they headed for the elevators the massive red lobster claws picked up the
Grassetto
, swung it vertically in an Arago cradle and shunted it into the first available slot in the building’s cubic-concentration storage.

Two minutes later they were on the street and Marin was the first to admit, downtown Westminster was almost indistinguishable from Sark or Elstrom or even Santorini. He had never visited Venice, on Darwin’s World, but it could be little different. Travers was impartial, content to follow as Marin took him a hundred meters north, thirty east; and then he whistled as he saw the illuminated fountains outside the Jagreth Colonial Museum.

The fountains were the one unique feature the city possessed, and they appeared in every brochure. Even now a gaggle of tourists posed in front of the leaping-dolphin arcs of spun lexan about which the water performed an intricate ballet of rainbow-hued jets. The display was lit from below the surface by animated lights in complex patterns of color. Travers watched, impressed, and then gave Marin a hopeful look.

“You said something about food?”

In fact, Marin could already smell it and followed his nose. The museum fronted onto Shackleton Strand with a broad, red-paved forecourt and vast armorglass windows displaying an original terraformer drone – forty meters long, fifteen high, twenty wide, painted the garish red and yellow that made these machines instantly visible in the forest. This one had its handler arms extended as if it were taking apart a hillside, and was surrounded by a regiment of its worker bots. Opposite the windows, a line of kiosks marched away toward the art gallery, the opera house, the Santorini Hotel. Between the kiosks and the monstrous, dormant terraformer machine, a bevy of blue and white parasols perched over numerous café tables.

Most tables were occupied, but one in the back was free. Marin claimed it by sitting there while Travers strolled off to explore the kiosks and indulge himself. Curtis was content to watch, enjoying the opportunity to sit and be still, until the big threedee on the south side of the courtyard flickered to life. Moments later the CNS feed began.

His nerves prickled. If CNS was back on the air, it could only mean the system-wide comm jamming had stopped. On a whim he took the combug from his pocket, slipped it in and gave it a tap. At once he heard
Wastrel
Ops, and he said quietly,

“This is
Wastrel
101 … no more jamming?”

The voice answering belonged to Tully Ingersol. “Hey, Curtis, you notice that. They just quit the comm blanket,” he affirmed, “and you gotta know what that means.”

“It means it doesn’t matter any longer if the news of the takeover gets out,” Marin mused. “They’re ready to proclaim sovereignty, right now – ready for the
London
battle group. It can happen any time.”

“And it will,” Ingersol said darkly. “Uh, where are you guys?”

“Downtown Westminster,” Marin told him. “Shackleton Strand, ten minutes from transportation. Where do you want us?”

“You’re fine where you are, just don’t go far.” Ingersol paused, more than likely to monitor another channel. “Chesterfield Control just buzzed the whole system with the news … the official proclamation’s going to be broadcast to the cosmos at midnight, your time, from the … the Madeleine Chen Theater. You got any idea what that is?”

“The opera house – about four hundred meters south of where I’m sitting. I can almost see it from here.” Marin was watching Travers threading his way back between the tables. “Gives us a shade under two hours to kill. Where’s Shapiro?”

“Still at Chesterfield House with the President. According to the security feed, they’re moving to the theater soon. If you’re looking to hook up with them there, you better let Jon Kim know you’re coming in, so he can liaise with their goon squad. They’re artillery right up to the eyeballs, with a rep for being bloody trigger happy – mind you, full marks to Prendergast’s people. They’ve had this whole thing buckled down tight.”

“Except for the small fact we ran into Terran agents with missiles before we even saw the LZ,” Marin added tartly. “Good thing we were in the right place at the right time.”

“You and Neil,” Ingersol said dryly, “always were the two luckiest pups I ever knew.”

Travers had just set down an armful of food and drink, and Marin said to the combug, “I’ll talk to you later, Tully. 101 out.” He gestured at the threedee, off to his left. “CNS just came back up. The big statement’s being made from the opera house – that Greco-Roman monstrosity on the other side of the art gallery – midnight. Speaking of which – hang on.” He clicked the combug down to the Chesterfield Security band. “
Wastrel
101 looking for Jon Kim.”