Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

“What the hell did that?” he asked in dismay. The North’s heart was in tatters, reduced to a purple-red mush surrounded by a jelly of clotted blood.

“The blades moved once they were inside,” the coroner said in shock. “Praise be to Allah, blades like fingers stabbed into him then closed around the heart, completely shredding it.”

The transparent globe was made out of a carbon silicon compound whose particular superstrength molecular structure could only be produced in zero g. It measured three meters across and had a small access air lock where it was attached to the mountain-sized space habitat’s external axle spindle. Even with the material’s impressive qualities, it was eight centimeters thick to ensure that anyone inside would be well protected. Jupiter orbit was a notoriously hostile radiation environment.

But beautiful, Constantine North thought as he watched the black speck that was Ganymede’s shadow traverse the gas giant’s eternal storm bands. That was why he’d built the observation bubble, so he could float in a cross-legged yoga position like some kind of Buddha gyroscope and stare out at his bizarre yet wondrous chosen home. Some days he would gaze out at Jupiter’s fantastic racing clouds and whirling moons for hours at a time.

As always he watched the vast bands of variegated whites and pastel browns and gentle blues gyrate against one another without any enhancements, content with everything his raw eyes could show him. From his vantage point, half a million kilometers above those frenetic clouds, the gas giant was a two-thirds crescent, big enough and bright enough to cast a spectral light across him. But cold. There was no heat in the pearl radiance that fell across his newly youthful face, no substance. Out here, beyond the sun’s habitable zone, light by itself wasn’t strong enough to support planetary life.

Out there in the blackness, little flares of blue flame flickered briefly around a dazzling silver flower. The Minantha was returning from Earth, maneuvering on its final approach to the habitat amalgamation. A slim cylinder a hundred thirty meters long, it contained the fusion reactor for its high-density ion drive—along with the crew section and several hundred tons of cargo—all surrounded by the vast curving petals of the mirror-silver coolant radiators. Jupiter possessed three of the ferry craft, all of them flying twenty-seven-month loops between the gas giant and Earth.

Opening the Newcastle gateway to Jupiter orbit back in 2088 had been a onetime operation, allowing Constantine to deliver all the industrial machinery and the initial wheel-hostel he needed to start his small empire in magnificent isolation. It had taken a day and a half to shunt everything through, a process that left the modules tumbling all around Jupiter space. Without an anchor mechanism turning it to a stable gateway, the open end of a trans-spatial connection would oscillate through spacetime around its exit coordinate like the tip of a tree in a hurricane. It had taken Constantine, his sons, and their followers a month to gather all the modules and factories and tanks and generators together into a stable constellation around their chosen carbonaceous chondritic asteroid so that they could begin mining and processing the minerals into raw. Only then could they begin construction of their new home.

Now Constantine’s only known contact with Earth was through the ferry ships, which brought cargo from Gibraltar—mainly seeds and genetic samples to expand the habitat’s extensive genebank, but also specialist microfacture systems, and even sometimes a few people whom they’d recruited to add to their modest number of indigenous residents.

A bell rang in an old familiar tone, stirring Constantine from his reverie. Strange what his mind prioritized, but that particular 110-year-old memory of a telephone ringing in a marbled hallway had always drawn his attention. Every time it used to ring, Kane North would hurry to answer it and nothing else mattered, even if he was spending a rare moment with his three brother-sons.

Constantine closed his eyes against the icy splendor of the storms-cape and the much closer glittering constellation of industrial systems that were his own creation. Still the ancient telephone bell rang, an impulse seeping into his brain at a deeper level than any auditory nerve could reach. He let his consciousness rise through several levels of autonomous thoughts, which now formed the strata of his resequenced brain, until he reached the artificial layer, the one that stretched beyond his skull. His attention slipped across the multitude of connections until it reached the junction with the simplest nerve bundle that handled communications to the habitat AI. It opened like some third eye, revealing a topology that could never exist in a Newtonian universe. The ethereal call of the telephone vanished.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Dad,” Coby replied. “You have a message.”

“From whom?” There was no question of why he’d been disturbed. Coby, or indeed anyone at Jupiter, knew not to interrupt him when he was contemplating the universe. Whatever event occurred, it would have to be supremely important to warrant breaking his ruminations. The AI alone didn’t have the authority unless they’d suffered a catastrophe, like a full-on asteroid impact. Therefore only a very limited number of people could send a message that got bumped up the nominal chain of command to this exalted altitude. Two, in total, out of all humanity. He made a guess which it was.

“Augustine,” Coby said.

Right . Constantine breathed in, scenting the faintest tang of atmospheric filter purity, an air really too clean for humans. At the moment, time delay on a radio signal from Earth was forty minutes. This was not a conversation. And there were a limited number of things the brothers had left to say to each other. He made another guess as to the topic—and it wasn’t good. After all, Augustine’s medical and genetic technology wasn’t as advanced as anything available at Jupiter. “What does he want?”

“It’s encrypted. A very heavy encryption. I’m assuming you have the key.”

“Let us hope so. Route it to me.”

The message began to play. Constantine’s eyes snapped open. His shocked consciousness viewed the autopsy images superimposed across supersonic cyclone spots the size of oceans charging along the storm bands to clash with counterswirls in neighboring bands amid explosion blooms of frozen ammonia and grubby ultraviolet-charged smog. An eerie backdrop indeed for the sharp functional graphics detailing cellular decay, blood chemistry composition, and hard-focus pictures of the sad butchered heart of a dead nephew-brother.

The message ended, leaving him trying to blink away the tears that would never otherwise flow free in zero-g. And how arrogantly wrong he’d been about the topic. Not that it was a bad thing, but the fright he was experiencing was akin to the sight of his own grave opening up. He was aware of his heart rate increasing, of adrenaline rushing through his blood, flushing the skin that radiated the new heat back out toward the lonely, majestic gas giant beyond the bubble. No , he told himself, this is not fright. This is excitement that the challenge has finally come. It has been long enough .

“Dad?” Coby asked. “Is there a reply?”

“No. Just an acknowledgment that the message was received. I will prepare an appropriate message of sympathy later.”

“Right.”

“I’m coming down. Please have Clayton and Rebka meet me at home. And prep a lightwave ship for a trip to Earth.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”