Final Days (9 page)

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ he said, after studying them for a moment. ‘Just a big metal box with wheels. How did you swing my secondment with Hanover?’

‘One of his task force’s members got killed in the line of duty,’ Sanders replied. ‘A man named Mitchell Stone, to be exact.’

Saul opened and closed his mouth. ‘You’re shitting me. Mitchell?’

‘I know he was a friend of yours,rsquo; said the agent. ‘I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you.’

Saul had a sudden mental flash of the last time he’d seen Mitchell, years before. They’d been in a bar far up north, near Inuvik, close by the Jupiter platform’s CTC gate. They’d both moved on since then – Saul to police work, Mitchell to off-world security – but they had a shared history that bonded them. He remembered Mitchell, sober and drawn, at his brother’s funeral; then, months later, grinning in a field under a brilliant Arizona sun, tugging off his wing-suit and laughing as Saul clung to the soil as if it were a lover.

‘He was killed serving under Hanover?’

Sanders glanced at Donohue, who replied. ‘He was just coming to the end of a long-term secondment to a high-security research programme when he died, so, strictly speaking, no. He was due to rejoin Hanover’s task force in a couple of weeks. His death makes it easy enough to put you in his place as a temporary replacement. Frankly, the timing couldn’t be better. Hanover’s going to be taking his task force out to follow up the hijack, and we’re going to make sure you go with them. We’re betting that if someone on his team was involved in the snatch, they’re going to show themselves.’

‘Show themselves how?’

‘Put yourself in their shoes, what would you do?’

Saul thought about it. ‘Find any evidence of my involvement and do what I could to destroy it.’

Sanders stepped up close to him. ‘Find our mole, then, Saul,’ he said, ‘and there’s a chance we can figure out who’s responsible for losing Galileo.’

Copernicus Array Security and Immigration Office, Luna, 21 January 2235

Thomas Fowler checked his reflection in the elevator’s mirrored side walls and saw the face of a man who hadn’t enjoyed a decent night’s sleep in weeks. A course of amphetamines from an understanding physician was helping with that, but he’d been warned more than once there was only so much abuse his body could take. But, then again, a solid night’s sleep was out of the question when you happened to know the world was going to end.

The doors slid open to reveal a busy operations room. While he waited for a guard stationed by the elevator to clear his ID, he counted at least a dozen uniformed ASI staff and a smattering of civilian analysts manning workstations. Dr Amanda Boruzov came towards him, weaving her way through staff and between workstations. The director of research for the Founder Project had skin like porcelain, while small folds around her eyes hinted at an Asiatic inheritance worn smooth over several generations. On this occasion, however, her eyes were rimmed with red, her exhaustion also showing in the way she carried herself.

The pro with women who had skin like porcelain, thought Fowler, was that they always looked like they might easily break.

‘Thomas,’ she said, as the guard gave him the all-clear, ‘I must have just beaten you here. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to make it, at such short notice.’

Fowler stepped forward, once again struck by the unaccustomed buoyancy of his body. No matter how often he made the trip to Copernicus, he never quite adapted to the sudden drop in gravity once he had passed through the Florida Array. The first-aid clinics that served the tens of thousand of people flowing back and forth through the CTC gates worked twenty-four-seven repairing broken bones and fractured skulls. They’d wound up padding the ceilings of the lunar-transit systems, once they realized most people coming through from Earth kept smacking their heads into them.

Their hands touched as they spoke, the touch lingering. If anyone had been paying attention at that moment, they might have guessed at their relationship.

‘I guess we should get started,’ he said.

He followed her across the busy room, passing wall-mounted TriView panels displaying real-time video of the mass-transit systems connecting Copernicus City to the nearby Lunar Array. They arrived at a second bank of elevators, where another guard checked their UPs for clearance, before allowing them passage.

They both relaxed as soon as the elevator doors closed. Amanda stepped in close to him, her hands taking hold of his lapels and tugging him down towards her, so that he had to bend over, in order to kiss. Fowler reached out and touched a button that halted the elevator between floors.

She pulled back and looked up at him. ‘I think it’s long past the time we started making plans, don’t you?’

He lifted her hands away from his jacket and faked his best smile. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’

‘And Marcie?’

‘I already told her lawyer that Marcie’s welcome to the house in New England, if she wants it. She can enjoy it while she has the chance.’

He cleared his throat, suddenly business like once more. ‘Listen, there’s something I need to tell you before we go into this meeting. There’s been a major breakdown in security. We’re working to plug it right now, before it has a chance to go public.’

He saw her eyes widen. ‘What happened?’

He started the elevator moving again, and it jerked slightly before continuing on its way. ‘One of your shipments of Founder artefacts has gone AWOL, grabbed off the road well inside the security perimeter, back in Florida,’ he explained, sending a copy of the latest report to her contacts. ‘We’re still trying to figure out how they managed to fly in a VTOL without us even knowing. That means a very high level of technical access to the er,ter systems.’

She nodded, her eyes becoming unfocused for a moment as she received the report. ‘Inez is in charge of local security there,’ she said. ‘Has he got an explanation?’

Fowler cleared his throat. ‘He realizes his neck is on the line over this, but it’s starting to look very much like an inside job, which takes a little of the pressure off him personally. And even if he
has
been negligent in some way, we’re still going to need him to protect the Arrays as soon as things start to turn bad. Right now we’re following up some possible leads, but it’s going to take time.’

She nodded, and he could see how the weight of what they were doing oppressed her. They would, after all, be abandoning billions to die; a large enough number to be little more than a comfortable abstraction for some, but not perhaps for Amanda.

She shook her head wearily. ‘It just doesn’t get any better, does it?’

Fowler shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. But we’ve managed to track down most of your remaining civilian staff.’

He watched her throat bob as she swallowed. ‘And the ones you haven’t found yet?’

He smiled grimly. ‘They’ll be taken care of soon enough.’

‘Please tell me that’s all the bad news you have.’

‘It’s not, I’m sorry to say.’

She sighed and nodded. ‘Can it wait until after the meeting? I’m not sure how much I can take right now.’

She glanced at her own reflection in the elevator’s mirrored wall, reaching up to touch one perfectly shaped eyebrow as if it were somehow out of alignment. He was forced to recall how Amanda had herself been deemed too great a potential security risk to be allowed to seek refuge in the colonies, and that knowledge still left him desolate. It was only meant to be a brief affair, following his divorce, and instead he had developed such complicated feelings for her – feelings that had already compromised his own chances of survival, given one single devastating discovery he had yet to share with her.

But, as she had said herself, there would be time for all that later.

The elevator doors slid open with a faint hiss, and Amanda flashed him a quick, tight smile before stepping out.

Every time he kissed her or felt her smooth milky skin moving against his own, a part of him wanted to shout out his confession to her, and that she knew too much for their masters to ever allow her to live.

And yet, whenever he summoned up the courage to tell her the truth, his tongue turned to lead and the words refused to emerge from his throat.

Tonight
, he thought,
after the meeting
. It had to be then.

‘All right, first of all, let me bring you up to date on the current state of affairs,’ Fowler began, leaning back in his chair and regarding the various faces arranged around the table. ‘I’d like you all to make sure your contacts are live.’

The only visible decoration in the room was a framed photograph of the Copernicus CTC Array, taken from the vantage of a nearby ridge. It showed a sprawling complex that extended for kilometres around part of the crater wall.

Dana Paxton represented the Coalition Space Command Authority, while Hendrik Lagerlöf fulfilled the same role for the Board of Extraterrestrial Affairs. The current border situation with Mexical meant that Jimenez couldn’t be present. Coalition Navy Captain Anton Inez was also there, of course, taking time out from organizing the evacuation of essential personnel via the Florida Array.

Across the table from Amanda, and the two field investigators reporting directly to Fowler, were Mahindra Kaur and Marcus Fairhurst, representing the European Office of Security and the Three Republics Intelligence Office respectively. Fowler had met these last two only briefly in his capacity as the ASI’s Director of Operations, but they were also the reason this meeting was taking place.

A map of the local and interstellar wormhole networks appeared, floating above the table. A single wormhole gate connected the Florida and Lunar Arrays to each other, but the latter facility housed many further wormhole links connecting Earth’s moon to a dozen other star systems, some up to a hundred light-years distant. Galileo’s collapsed and soon-to-be-re-established gate was represented simply by a dotted line.

‘Part of the reason we’re here today,’ continued Fowler, ‘is to do with the consequences of the unique physics existing within the wormholes, and you’re going to have to forgive me if I go over some points you may already be very familiar with. Mr Kaur, Mr Fairhurst, this being your first time here, would you say you’re reasonably
au fait
with wormhole physics?’

‘In the very broadest details,’ Kaur replied.

Fairhurst laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘If I’d known there’d be a test, I’d have done some homework.’

Fowler nodded. ‘I’ll try and keep it simple, then. As you know,’ he glanced quickly around the table, ‘the colonies were founded by starships travelling at close to the speed of light, each carrying inside it one end of a wormhole linking it back here to the Moon. However, the way time flows within the wormholes means we can step through to a new star system within months of launching a starship – even though, within our own time-frame back here at home, that starship hasn’t yet arrived at its destination.’

‘I’ll have to admit I’ve never exactly been clear on just how that works,’ said Fairhurst, leaning forward.

‘The ce is in the name we use to describe the wormholes,’ said Amanda. ‘CTC means “closed timelike curve”, right?’

Fairhurst nodded.

‘Well,’ Amanda continued, ‘CTC is just a fancy word for time travel. When we send one end of a wormhole to another star, time on board the ship carrying it moves extremely slowly, relative to the outside universe. But, because of the wormhole link on board, we can walk through the wormhole and on to the deck of that ship any time we like, throughout the journey, since the flow of time within the wormhole remains contiguous with its point of origin.’

She tapped a finger on the table in front of her. ‘It essentially allows you to step decades into the future, since the time-frame on board the starship is such that anyone who remains on board throughout its journey is going to experience a transit time of only a few months. So long as the far end of the wormhole is moving at relativistic speeds, it’s a time machine as well as a shortcut across the universe.’

Fairhurst nodded uncertainly. ‘I never understood why we can’t see the wormholes from the outside. I mean, if they go all that way across space, we should be able to see them, shouldn’t we?’

Fowler barely managed to suppress a grin at the look on Amanda’s face.

‘That’s because the wormholes don’t pass through the intervening space at all,’ she explained patiently. ‘They tunnel through hyperspace instead, outside of the physical constraints of our universe.’

Fairhurst looked none the wiser. ‘Please tell me all of this has something to do with why we’re here.’

Fowler nodded to Inez. ‘If you would, Anton.’

Inez cleared his throat and leaned forward. They’d already decided the bad news was best coming from him.

‘What I’m about to tell you,’ he began, addressing Kaur and Fairhurst in particular, ‘was known to only a very select group until a few days ago. About fifteen years ago, a standard unmanned reconnaissance of the outer Kepler system stumbled across the first evidence of advanced alien intelligence.’

Fowler watched for any signs betraying that either man might know more than he should. Fairhurst simply looked stunned, but Kaur, before reacting, hesitated just a moment too long to be quite convincing.