Creation node, p.13
Creation Node, page 13
Kord said, ‘We believe in cooperating, here. Creative conflicts only.’
North grinned. ‘And I wonder how true that is. In my experience people are people, wherever you go.’
‘Well, we’re here to listen to your opinions, Captain North—’
‘Call me Jeorg. Let me gather up my gear.’ He did so, stuffing a bag with quick, brisk movements. ‘You know, I came up on one of your cargo boats, returning from cislunar. Asked what they were carrying.’
Kord knew. It was no secret. The ship had been accepting a cargo of liquid nitrogen for the Moon bases, in exchange for a much less valuable load of helium-3 destined for Earth.
‘Sums up the basics of Earth-Moon economics, doesn’t it?’ North said, with a goading tone. ‘Helium-3 for nitrogen. Helium-3, the lifeblood of this rocky world of yours – your most precious commodity, laboriously scraped out of the lunar ground. But you have to give it away in exchange for a scrap of what every one of the Earthbound breathes in and out, for free. If there were any justice—’
Kord cut him off with a gesture. He thought there was nothing subtle about the way North had picked up that cue and run with it. ‘We know all this, and we don’t need to be reminded of it. And whatever went before, the situation is changing, isn’t it? Because of Planet Nine—’
‘And the quasar,’ Doria said.
‘Which is what I’m here to discuss,’ North said. He hefted his bag. ‘Shall we get out of here?’
Kord led them out of the decon area and through a more public zone in this tourist-friendly spot, a meet-and-greet area with a corner set out with tables and chairs. The furniture was all very lightweight, to show off the Moon’s low gravity to new arrivals – or to visibly remind them of it.
A small serving bot slid silently over the floor towards them.
North slowed, sniffing the air. ‘Is that coffee? And I’m hoping not the tepid slop they serve you on the translunar flight.’
Kord grinned. ‘You want to stop here? We can talk as well here as anywhere. Sooner that than to bundle you off one vehicle straight onto another.’
‘But, security?’
‘You’ve already been passed. The place is swept daily,’ Doria said. ‘Mostly for reasons of commercial confidentiality. This, Tranquility, is a port, legally and in practice. A lot of deals are done right here, you can imagine. Or signed at any rate.’
‘Ah. This is where the oligarchs of Earth put the final squeeze on you innocent lunar folk, before they head straight back for the shuttle home.’
‘Something like that,’ Kord said dryly. ‘Come. Sit. Dump your bag. And tell the bot what you want …’
North asked for coffee, but Doria made a side order for him of a glass of pure water.
‘Lunar water,’ she said when the order arrived. ‘Or rather, comet debris, collected from the permanent shadow at Shackleton crater. It’s less scarce than helium-3 at least – we have a gigatonne of the stuff.’
North nodded, as if impressed. ‘Cheers.’ He raised the glass, sipped. ‘Good enough. And I guess I’ll be returning the gift through the recycler later on. So, to business. You know why I’m here. The prime cause anyhow.’
Kord said, ‘You mean the anomalies at Planet Nine.’
‘Right.’ North ticked off items on his fingers. ‘The – artefact – that Nine itself turned out to be. The creature they found, Feathers. Probably now the single most famous entity across all the worlds of mankind. And, not least, whether it’s all related, or not, the quasar event at the heart of the Galaxy. OK.
‘And from the beginning of this new phase of our lives I’ve been troubled by the way you people are being shut out of the argument. I’m serious. I’m from Earth, but I’m closer in spirit to pioneers like you.’ He swigged more water. ‘Of course Earth has a lot on its plate just now, other than business as usual. The global heating – I presume you see the data from the Earth governments?’
‘Also our own observatories,’ Kord said. ‘The big farside telescope farms. We do share it all, especially given the critical nature of all this – for all of us. But that may be more significant for Earth than it is out here, actually. At any location on the Moon we’re used to living with huge, unshielded swings in the sunlight intensity. No atmosphere, you see. But Earth has all those elaborate cycles of mass and energy, circulations of air and water and heat, those elaborate seasonal changes, all driven to a fine degree by the Sun’s heat. So that extra fraction already makes a difference. And that may be just the start, as far as we know.’
Doria nodded, with what looked to Kord like genuine sympathy for the hapless Earth dwellers. ‘You’ve just come from Earth, Jeorg. How bad is it so far?’
North shrugged. ‘I only follow the news. There are already fears that the big farming areas are drying out. In parts of North America, you know, it’s still the case that much of the water for arable land is drawn from aquifers. All over there’s been water rationing: in China …’
Doria nodded again. ‘It’s like the climate-crisis generations all over again. My family had some tales to tell about that. I guess most people did. Here, we could just dig in for a while, Matt is right. But we aren’t safe here. Not fully independent, not yet. Everything leaks, on the long term. If support from Earth folded – well, we wouldn’t last long.’ She glanced at Kord. ‘I do understand that, you know. And Earth knows it, of course, and it’s always been a lever.’
North smiled, encouraging her to speak, to say more.
Kord was becoming more and more wary of this man. He still couldn’t spot North’s true motives.
But Doria seemed oblivious to such subtleties. She said now, ‘There’s also the question of the humanoid on Nine.’
‘Feathers,’ said Jeorg North. ‘You should have been down on Earth when the news broke about that. Among other things, it’s our first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence – indeed, extraterrestrial life. She’s an enigma from beak to feathery ass. Nice open questions, and there are plenty down on Earth rushing to provide answers, of one kind or another. Usually not too scientific, though.’
Kord nodded. ‘I heard about this. Religious reactions too? I mean, a birth without parents? Even Jesus had a biological mother …’
‘You’ve not had that here?’
Kord considered. ‘I think people here, those born here and immigrants too, are less – religiously inclined – than folk on Earth. That’s my personal impression. On Earth you are standing on a world that wasn’t made by humans, and even now has been little modified by humans, save for the worse: all those extinctions, the fouling up of the environment. Here, it was different. Here we didn’t start with a living world and trash it; here we are taking a dead world, if you like, and making it live. We don’t need to believe any god made this world.’
Kord smiled. ‘She’s right. Nobody here is praying to Feathers yet.’
Jeorg nodded. ‘Nobody on Earth either. But they are sending out a ship, right? The Cronus. And if they win that undeclared race, if they get there first – if they can capture this exotic technology, whatever it is, and this religious icon, Earth may have made a decisive move. Never mind squabbles over duties on a race of helium-3, or an embargo on nitrogen exports to the Moon. A move that could cut off the extraterrestrial future for good.’ He looked hard at them both. ‘Don’t you see the threat? Don’t you see the opportunity, if you can get out there and at least match them in the race?’ He sneered. ‘Or you could always go join the Conservers, and live off scraps for all eternity.’
Kord saw that he was becoming aggressive, forceful, so carried away was he with his own argument. Kord found this manner repulsive, in fact. Which wasn’t to say he mightn’t be right.
But Doria was scowling, intense. North’s arguments did mirror the views of many lunar colonists – especially the young. North had got through to her, and he knew it, Kord saw. He had recognised the half-tamed rebel in her, and was now reaching out to that rebel.
And Kord wondered, not for the first time, if, in bringing her into his own minuscule administration, he had made a strategic error.
But still, it couldn’t be denied that everything was in flux. What did he want himself? What did he see as the way forward?
Play for time. He sensed that generations of bewildered politicians and managers and administrators were whispering in his ears. Bluff. Keep them talking.
Ask him what he wants.
‘So,’ Kord said at length. ‘Jeorg North, you are here on a mission. Evidently. But why come here?’
North grinned. ‘I think you know. Because you have one ship here that I believe is capable of catching, even overhauling, the Cronus. At least as far as Saturn. Even now you’re fitting it out for the trip.’
Kord had been expecting that. He played for time. ‘You mean the Aquila – you know about that? How?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m a top pilot. Pilots talk. I know about ships, Earth’s or otherwise.’ He grinned again. ‘I always fancied taking the Aquila for a trial run … Look, you have a ship that will at least get you into the game of – well, whatever follows when Cronus reaches Saturn. So I believe. It’s always served as a cislunar freighter but is capable of much more than that. Your pilots, too, probably never go further than the Lagrange points. But in me, you have an experienced commander capable of getting you out there. Because I’ve been out there. All the way to Ceres, remember.’ He leaned forward. ‘This is the pitch I made to your colleagues, like Doria here, but I do understand it’s your decision to make.
‘You need to get a ship to Saturn. You have the ship. Let me fly it.’
Doria turned to Kord. ‘He’s got me halfway convinced, Matt. Why not? Show him the Aquila. See if he can live up to his promises.’
‘Or his boasting,’ Kord said.
He considered North again. He found it hard to believe that a man like this gave a damn about the political future of the Solar System, still less that of the Lunar Consortium, which must seem to a denizen of Earth to be a small, scruffy operation. If that wasn’t his motive, though, then what?
But on the other hand Kord had no other way he could see of involving the Consortium in the events at Saturn, and whatever might unfold from here.
‘I’ll make a deal,’ he said at last. Or play a gamble, he thought.
The way North looked at him, sharply, eagerly, convinced Kord he had made the right play. Still in control.
‘What kind of deal?’
‘If we show you the Aquila – and if you still honestly think you can handle such a mission as we’ve discussed – then you have to answer me, truthfully and fully, one question. Is that acceptable?’
‘What question?’
‘You’ll find out.’
North grinned widely. ‘Acceptable and accepted. Now show me your treasure.’
The Aquila was an experimental ship, Kord knew. Its purpose was to demonstrate a relatively independent means of transport and communication – independent of Earth, at least. A craft built of and fuelled by lunar materials almost entirely, both for structure and propulsion, and constructed by lunar industries.
And it worked. It had made a few runs in the environs of the near-Earth asteroids, camouflaged as much as possible. Earth probably knew about the existence of this ship, but, he was confident, didn’t know its capabilities.
Test runs over, for the time being it had been returned to a dry dock, a grave-like pit dug deep into the substance of the Moon – only a short journey from the Tranquility public area. So that was where they took North now.
And when they delivered him to the dock, North was clearly transfixed.
The bay was spacious, deep, and brilliantly lit, with the Aquila lying at rest in a cradle. A conveyor belt took them slowly along a pressurised, glass-walled corridor, paralleling the length of the Aquila, with North peering at the craft, barking out technical questions at Doria.
The main body was a hundred metres long, around fifty wide, aside from fold-out radiator panels that would extend past that limit once in space. The lightness of the ship’s framing and inner supports, and the lack of a solid hull, made it easy to see the detail. It had a roughly cylindrical arrangement, with major components of different diameters connected by struts. At the centre was a gleaming sphere, at the rear a cluster of nozzles.
‘That small compartment at the nose is the control room,’ Doria said softly. ‘You can see rocket clusters for braking, around the nose. They make a hell of a racket in the cabin when they fire, by the way, the noise passing through the frame. Behind that, electricity storage cells, then that big section contains the propellant tanks—’
‘What propellant?’
‘Hydrogen. From Shackleton water. The main crew quarters are inside the tank cluster—’
‘For radiation shielding?’ North asked.
‘Correct.’
‘That big sphere is the fission engine?’
‘Correct again. Behind that you have the drive units, basically hydrogen rockets. Fusion fuels, like helium-3, deuterium, are scarce on the Moon – and Earth buys all it can. But what we do have are heavy metals in the same relative abundances as Earth. That includes a hundred million tonnes of uranium – not that Earth will buy any of that any more. But we figure we have the uranium to support hundreds of thousands of missions of this scale.’ She grinned again. ‘We aren’t as rich as Earth, or its colonies, such as Saturn—’
‘But you’re pretty smart at making use of what you’ve got. I get it. And this baby would take us to Saturn—?’
‘In six years, by minimum-energy trajectories,’ Doria said. ‘Easily matching Cronus. She has already launched, but we’re confident Aquila can overhaul her. “Aquila” means “eagle”, my friend, and this eagle will fly straight and true.
‘And once we’re there, the Consortium will have a presence as far as Saturn at least, and then … Well, we’ll see. Plenty of time to figure it out from there. At the very least they’ll know we’re coming.’
North nodded, looked around once more. ‘You know what you’re doing. And this is a fine ship.’ He extended a gloved hand to Kord. ‘If you’ll have me, I’m in.’
Kord shook his head, withholding his own hand. ‘Not yet. Now you have to answer me that one question, truthfully.’
North frowned, dropped his hand. But he nodded.
Slowly, Doria led them out of the bay.
‘One question,’ North prompted Kord as they walked.
‘Tell me, then – why do you want this? To leave Earth, your home, your world – to betray it, in a sense, in this way? We know you have pretty senior contacts. And no more guff about the Lunar Consortium’s relative economic disadvantage and whatever. Why does it matter to you that you should be on this ship?’
North hesitated, sighed. ‘OK. Because I had a tentative posting on the bridge of the Cronus, when its six-year mission was hastily put together. Cronus to Saturn, and then beyond to Planet Nine. I say tentative. The posting was promised to me by the World President’s science advisor herself. And I didn’t get it. The posting. I didn’t get the gig. My husband did. Now my ex-husband. Bheki Molewa. He had better contacts, frankly. And he used them to cut my heart out. Look him up. Bheki Molewa. Is that enough for you?’
There was a stony silence.
Doria frowned. ‘That’s all?’
Kord believed him implicitly. He laughed. ‘On such details, the destinies of billions depend.’
Doria looked bewildered. ‘This is why I’ll never understand people, for all your tuition, Matt. So. OK. You’re in. Shall we take a look at the specifications …?’
Year 4
AD 2259
16
The day they found the nest was about four years after the discovery of Feathers herself – and about four years after two craft from the Earth-Moon system began their race to Saturn.
But it started for Salma pretty much as every day had since that discovery – or anyhow since the Shadow crew, and Feathers, had settled into a routine, of sorts.
Not long after finding Feathers, and with the crew of the Shadow evidently going nowhere soon, they had migrated en masse onto the transformed Planet Nine, with its vast, roomy but featureless surface – and, they confirmed, the safe lack of a radiation environment. Here they had set up an airtight habitat, improvised but well-lit and spacious, all powered by a small reactor scavenged from the ship.
Even in this extraordinary environment, they soon settled into a mundane cycle of chores, maintenance, science observations, and long-distance communications with Conserver bases and other human outposts – even Earth itself, given the interest in their adventure across all the factions of mankind. Elizabeth Vasta, science adviser to President Mason herself, was a frequent contact, despite the long time delays. All of this was punctuated by a routine of exercises and diet supplements devised by Meriel to get the crew used to Earthlike conditions after decades in microgravity.
As to the bigger picture, they still didn’t know who Feathers was, or where she came from, or the meaning of her existence in this universe – if universe was the right word any more. And they weren’t likely to learn much more of the wider picture, not yet. The governments of Earth had evidently unified enough to launch a joint mission to Nine, and had insisted the Shadow crew did no more meddling – such as poking Nine itself with any more fake Hawking radiation – until the Cronus, for now still en route to Saturn, finally got here to Planet Nine eleven years after the discovery.
It was an extraordinary location, an extraordinary situation – to live on Nine, on a strange relativistic artefact. But Nine, for all its ambiguous and baffling properties, just sat there, and you got used to it.
On the other hand, Feathers, just as ambiguous and baffling, did stuff, and the crew had to react, deal with that, cope with it. Soon Feathers wasn’t just an anomaly, a science study. She was part of their lives. Part of the family, Boyd said.
As for Feathers herself, Meriel took it as a good sign that she had generally become more active with time.
