The Long War (43 page)

A
S
J
OSHUA AND
Bill’s journey wore on fruitlessly, just for a break, Bill lingered more often in what he said the comber community called ‘Diamond’ worlds – the opposite of Jokers, worlds with some unique attraction.

Earth West 1,176,865: this world came before they reached the Valhallan Belt, the American-Sea worlds, but here the Grand Canyon was drowned by a risen river: a truly spectacular sight, as Joshua saw from above, which drew tourists who camped along the canyon’s elevated rim.

Earth West 1,349,877: a world dominated by a strange, even unearthly ecology, in which familiar terrestrial creatures were surrounded by groves of green, twisted living things that crawled and spread, defying classification, neither animal nor plant – like slime moulds grown huge, perhaps, of many diverse forms. No biologist had studied this world. Visiting combers whispered of a Huge God, a hypothetical alien monster that had crash-landed here hundreds of millennia ago, leaving layers of flesh, bones and fat from which these organisms, descendants of parasites or some equivalent of stomach bacteria perhaps, had evolved. Joshua found the crowded variety of strange life on this world startling and in some way satisfying. As if something had been missing and he’d never even known it.

And somehow that train of thought led him to the answer.

It came to him while he was asleep. He sat bolt upright, in the dark, in his cabin in the gondola.

Then he ran out to the galley cum lounge observation deck, and stared at a blank piece of wall.

‘I’ve got it.’ When there was no reply he hammered on the thin partition that separated this room from Bill’s cabin. ‘I said, I’ve got it!’

‘Got what, yer mad eejit?’

‘I know where Sally has to be. She’s left me a clue, whether she meant to or not. It wasn’t what she left behind, but what she took away.’

He heard Bill’s muffled yawn. ‘And that is?’

‘
The ring
, Bill. The ring. Gold, set with sapphires. The one I brought with me and hung on this wall. It’s gone, Bill. When and how she sneaked on board to get it I don’t know. And how long it’s been gone – Sally will be laughing her head off.’

‘A ring. Ring-a-ding-ding. It’s only taken you three weeks to figure it out, Joshua. So where do we need to head?’

‘To Earth West 1,617,498 . . . To the Rectangles.’

‘Fine. We’ll start in the morning. Be there in three days. Now can I go back to sleep?’

I
N PREPARATION FOR
the approach to Valhalla, the Operation Prodigal Son airships assembled a hundred worlds to the East of the target, hovering like low clouds over the empty shore of this version of the American Sea, the best part of a million and a half steps from the Datum.

When the
Benjamin Franklin
took its place, Maggie was immediately hailed by the
Abraham Lincoln
, visible on the horizon. The
Lincoln
’s Captain told her that Admiral Davidson, commander of USLONGCOM, was aboard, and wanted to see her in person. The two ships closed, and touched down. Maggie changed her uniform, and waited for the Admiral in her sea cabin.

But then she got a summons from Nathan. ‘You’d better get down to the access ramp, Captain. We’ve got a situation.’

When she got there, she found that Acting Ensign Carl the troll, wearing the armband that comprised his ‘uniform’, had been included in the party that had greeted the Admiral. Or maybe he’d included himself; that would be like Carl, always interested, always wanting to make new friends. Only now, Captain Edward Cutler, aide to the Admiral, was holding a gun to his head.

The Admiral himself, a spruce sixty-year-old, looked on with amusement.

Maggie made her way to Cutler and whispered in his ear. ‘What are you doing, Captain?’

‘Containing a dangerous animal. What does it look like?’

‘Captain Cutler, this troll isn’t dangerous. In fact—’ Before this steely, intense man, she found herself embarrassed. ‘Carl is a member of the crew.’

Cutler stared at her. ‘Is this some joke?’

‘No, Captain.’ Maggie showed him Carl’s armband insignia. ‘I deposited the appropriate forms with the fleet.’ That was true enough, though she’d done her best to keep the bureaucracy from focusing its attention on the situation. ‘An experiment in cross-sapient cooperation.’

Admiral Davidson was openly grinning now. ‘Call it symbolic, Ed.’

Cutler looked at Davidson, Maggie, the troll. Then he called, ‘Adkins.’

A lieutenant trotted up. ‘Sir?’

‘Send a message to the White House, by the fastest means possible. Tell President Cowley that we are hereby surrendering to the hobo and okie types who infest the Long Earth. And in the process we are handing over control of our vessels to trolls, raccoons, prairie dogs, and any other dumb animals we happen to come across.’

‘Right away, sir.’

‘But just before I resign my own commission I think I’ll put a bullet in the head of this little one—’

Maggie approached him again. ‘Cutler. Are you a parent?’

‘What? No, not yet.’

‘Well, Captain Cutler, Ensign Carl won’t hurt you whatever you do. But if you don’t lower that weapon I will kick you so hard that your chances of
ever
fathering a child will be pathetically slim . . .’

It was a relief to get the Admiral into the relative sanity of her sea cabin. An ensign – not Carl – served coffee, and closed the door, leaving them alone.

Davidson leaned forward. ‘So, Captain Kauffman.’

‘Sir.’

‘I’ve never been one to waste my time. You know that.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Let’s get to it, then. In the short time you have commanded the
Benjamin Franklin
you have treated the ship as if it were your personal property, going well beyond the already loose parameters of your orders – to put it bluntly, making up the rules of engagement as you went along. Not only that, you have allowed possibly dangerous creatures to run free in the ship.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Resulting in such incidents as the humiliation of poor Ed Cutler, out there, over a troll.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He grinned. ‘Well done, Maggie.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Personally, I particularly liked the way you handled the situation at New Purity. Having the dead of the trolls placed in the same cemetery as those poor pioneers. That went down well most every place that saw the record. You’ve done a great deal, and very visibly, to promote the kind of ideals that I, and others in the military – hell, even some in President Cowley’s administration – believe should be guiding our behaviour in the Long Earth. I wanted you, all of you captains, to reach out your hand to these scattered new cultures. Not to wield an iron fist. Ours is not to police our people, or to moralize; our duty is to protect our own from external threat. But for us to do that we have to know who and what we are protecting, in this strange new landscape we face today. And for you to achieve those goals you had to be open; you had to listen, to learn. Which is what you’ve done. I could never have ordered you to do all this, Captain; you had to learn your way, which you have done, and I’m glad you did.’

‘Thank you again, sir,’ she said, uncertain.

‘As to the future – well, somebody with your experience and particular skills should not be utilized simply to babysit every colonial group that hasn’t read the manual. Captain, once this business at Valhalla is concluded, I’d like you to consider a new command: the USS
Neil Armstrong II
.’

Maggie caught her breath. The second
Armstrong
was a new dirigible marque, semi-secret, designed to explore the Long Earth far beyond the limits reached so far, even by the Valienté expedition, even by the rumoured Chinese venture.

‘Your primary mission, as you’ll understand, will be to seek out whatever became of the
Armstrong I
and her crew. We haven’t even been able to send a ship out to search. Well, now we can. After that—’ He gestured. ‘
Out there
. Of course you can select your own crew.’

She thought of Mac, and Nathan, and Harry – even Toby Fox. ‘That won’t be a problem, sir.’

‘I thought not.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Well, we have a heavy duty to fulfil when we get to Valhalla. I think we’re done here.’ He stood. ‘But while I’m aboard, I think I would enjoy meeting your Ensign Carl, in a less confrontational situation . . .’

That night, Maggie lay half asleep in her bunk, lulled by the micro-sounds of the ship: every little click and creak and groan, so familiar after the voyage. Every sailor knew that a ship had a life of its own, an identity, idiosyncrasies – even moods.

She felt paws on the bed. She turned over. The cat’s face loomed in the dark, green eyes glowing bright.

‘You aren’t asleep,’ said Shi-mi.

‘You really are a genius of perception, aren’t you?’

‘What are you thinking, Captain?’

‘That I’ll miss this battered old tub.’

‘Yes. I hear congratulations are in order.’

‘You would hear that, wouldn’t you? And through you the whole of the Black Corporation, probably. In any event I haven’t decided. You hear that, Abrahams, whoever you are?’

‘You’ll need a cat.’

‘Oh, will I?’

‘Personally I like the
Benjamin Franklin
. But I wouldn’t mind roughing it with you. Think it over.’

‘I will. I promise. Now get some sleep.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

T
HREE DAYS AFTER
his discovery that the ring was gone, when they got to the world they had informally called the Rectangles, there was only one obvious location for Joshua to make for.

He sat silently as Bill guided the airship over an arid, crumpled landscape to a dry valley, its walls honeycombed with caves, its floor marked with those familiar rectangular formations, like field boundaries or the foundations of vanished buildings – and that one monumental stone structure, like a sawn-off pyramid.

Even from the air the place oppressed Joshua. Here, ten years ago, with Lobsang and Sally, he had found sapient life, some reptilian form. How did they know it was sapient? Only because, in a jumble of dried skeletons in a cave, a relic of some last spasm of dying, Joshua had found a finger-bone wearing that ring he’d taken away: clean gold with sapphires. So these creatures had evidently been sapients, and were just as evidently long dead, and Joshua still felt the odd, existential ache of that near miss, as if he were stranded on some island watching a ship pass, oblivious.

And, oddly, he felt an echo of that strange experience in this new time, the Long Earth without the trolls. More worlds with something missing.

‘Well, this is the site,’ he called up to Bill. ‘I kind of expected it to be swarming with trolls.’

He could almost hear Bill’s shrug. ‘And I never expected it to be that easy.’

‘I guess not.’

‘The world’s a classic arid Joker,’ Bill said. ‘According to my instruments. Drier than my gob in Lent.’

‘Take us down well away from that pile. It’s hot.’

‘Actually I thought I might make for the person on the ground down there waving to us.’

When Joshua looked away from the monument, it was obvious. Silvery emergency blankets had been spread over a rock bluff, positioned to be visible from the sky but not from the ground. And somebody was standing there in olive-green coveralls, waving both arms.

‘Good plan,’ Joshua said.

The
Shillelagh
descended smoothly. They both disembarked this time, with their boots on and packs on their backs – Bill was laden with a Stepper box, and Lobsang’s troll translation kit – ready to explore.

Joshua wasn’t particularly surprised at the identity of the person who had summoned them from the sky. ‘Lieutenant Jansson.’

‘Joshua.’ Jansson was thin, pale, sweating, evidently a lot more unwell than when he’d last seen her. As they walked up she sat down on an outcrop of rock, clearly exhausted from all the waving.

‘We came to the right world, then. We guessed correctly.’

‘About Ms. Linsay taking the ring? What it signified, where you were to come? Oh, yes. She complained about it being hard for her to find – the ring. “Trust that idiot to take it with him on his holidays,” was her phrase, I’m afraid. Then she
hoped
you wouldn’t notice its absence. And even if you did, you wouldn’t follow her here. She hoped that, she said, but she did plan for you showing up . . . You took your time to work it out, Joshua.’

Joshua shook his head. ‘You’re still a cop, retired or not. Only a cop would call Sally “Ms. Linsay”. We need to be here, Monica. We have our own mission, from Lobsang. About the trolls.’

Jansson smiled. ‘I think Sally anticipated that too. “That meddler Lobsang’s bound to get involved in this”—’

‘I know, I know.’

‘I said she planned for you to come, Joshua. Whether she wanted it or not. That’s why I’m here. She brought me over to wait for you. Call me a stalking horse. She did a complicated deal with the beagles over that.’

Joshua stared. ‘
Beagles?
’

‘I know. Long story. Truth be told I think they were glad to have me stashed out of their sight, I smell bad to them . . . You know, it’s been a month since we’ve been here, most of it playing for time, hoping something would turn up. Sally’s patient. The instincts of a hunter, I suppose. It’s been harder for me.

He inspected her. ‘I’m guessing you’re self-medicating.’

‘Yes, and I’m doing fine, so don’t fuss. Now, just listen, Joshua . . .’

Jansson quickly told them that Sally was twenty-six worlds further over, and what the situation was: about the kobold, about the sapient canines.

‘Finn McCool,’ Bill growled. ‘Playing both ends against the middle, I’ll be bound. The little gobshite.’

For now, Joshua took in very little of this. ‘Kind of complicated.’

‘So it is,’ said Jansson.

‘That’s what happens when Sally Linsay gets into your life . . . But, as I said, we have our own mission here. OK. Well, we’re going to leave the airship here and walk over.’