Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

Paula was quite pleased with herself as she went in and shut the door behind her. There weren’t many people in the Commonwealth who could walk into the Directorate building without being invited, let alone get all the way up to the fifth floor. And fewer that would want to. She’d narrowed the probables down to a list of three — Wilson Kime was the second.

‘Admiral,’ she said cautiously.

Wilson rose and shook her hand courteously. But then he was over three and a half centuries old, with manners from a bygone era; she wasn’t expecting an angry altercation. ‘So it really is true,’ he said ruefully. ‘You always get your man.’

‘Do my best,’ she said, annoyed with herself for sounding defensive. She was what she was, why should she ever apologize for that? ‘Though your lawyers were good.’

‘Best that money could buy. But you threw up a hell of a case, Paula.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That wasn’t exactly a compliment. Oscar Monroe sacrificed himself so the human race could survive a genocidal attack. Doesn’t that count for anything with you?’

‘Yes. But not at the intellectual level which I work at. I can’t allow that to influence me.’

‘Jesus,’ Kime muttered.

‘I did recover his memorycell myself,’ Paula reminded the old war hero. She didn’t go into how risky that had been. Kime’s own sacrifices during the final showdown with the Starflyer were at a level far above hers.

Millions had suffered bodyloss on the worlds invaded and obliterated during the conflict. Clinics across the Commonwealth were overwhelmed with people undergoing re-life procedures, where their force-matured clones were integrated with memories taken from their original bodies. Even so, a place could have been found for one of the human race’s greatest selfless heroes. Oscar’s personality was still intact in the memorycell she’d removed from his shattered corpse, it just needed a body to animate.

Instead she chose to put him on trial for previous crimes, namely a terrorist action at Aberdan Station decades before, which had killed dozens of innocent people. Defence council had argued that the young Oscar had been indoctrinated by extremists, that the passenger train wasn’t the actual target. The lawyer Wilson had retained was good, adding pleas for clemency from serious public figures, including Wilson himself. But Paula had prepared her case with equal proficiency. Time did not lessen the severity of the crime, she argued, and included testimony from the victims, the parents of children killed at Aberdan, all of whom were too young to have memorycells. They hadn’t bodylossed, they’d died a real death.

The judges had found Oscar guilty by three to two. He’d been sentenced to one thousand one hundred years’ suspension; as he was currently bodyless the senior judge ruled he shouldn’t be re-lifed until after the sentence was served. That was a judgement the defence team were already planning to challenge when Paula walked out of the court.

‘I hope you’re not here to ask a personal favour,’ she said to Wilson. ‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘What’s your next move? Appeal to the President for clemency and a pardon? I suspect you have the political clout to bring that off.’

‘Something like that. I’ll get him back, Paula. I won’t let him face the fate you have in store for him.’

‘The courts decided. That’s the trouble with this case, everyone thinks it’s personal. I don’t do personal.’

‘So you said.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘I’m here to ask a favour.’

‘Ha!’ she grunted as she sat behind the desk.

Wilson gave her a small smile. ‘Look, you need a break. We all do after what we went through on Far Away.’

‘I’m okay now, thank you.’

‘You’ve got half the human race gritting their teeth in scorn and anger when you walk past. Politically, you need to keep a low profile right now. Maybe do something else for a while.’

Paula opened her mouth ready to explain.

‘Yes!’ Kime said. ‘I know you have nothing else other than your work, that it’s how you were profiled. And that’s why I’m here. You remember Michelle Douvoir?’

‘No.’

‘One of Jean Douvoir’s daughters. She was living on Sligo when the Prime fleet hit it. She was lucky to get off.’

‘Yeah. Hoshe was there, too. He said it was tough.’

‘She didn’t want any special treatment, though God knows she could have had a mansion in any city on Earth if she’d asked. We owed her that much after what her father did. But I made sure she got to Menard; it’s one of the planets in phase three space which the Farndale company is fast-developing. Everything got accelerated after the war to give the refugees from the Lost23 worlds somewhere to stay. It’s a decent enough place, not too heavy on industry right now, of course, but somewhere she can start over.’

‘Glad to hear it. So why come to me with this?’

Wilson Kime gave a small grimace. ‘There’s a problem brewing on Menard. That’s maybe too strong a word, but it’s odd. And it’s causing trouble. Michelle called me directly about it.’

‘What sort of problem?’ Paula told her e-butler to call up a basic file on Menard. Planetary data ran across her virtual vision, infinity-focus neon graphics partially obscuring Wilson.

‘Michelle is living in Lydian, that’s a town on the Jevahal continent.’

The map image shifted in Paula’s virtual vision, showing the second largest continent whose northernmost tip jutted out to straddle the peninsula; various colourful symbols swarmed the land, provisional Farndale corporation development designations. ‘Arable country,’ Paula observed.

‘Great soil, good rainfall, warm climate, minimal intrusive native microbial ecology; it’s perfect for farming. And if the planet is going to accommodate a good percentage of the refugees from Lost23 worlds they’re going to need to eat. Farming is a priority for us. We need to get as much of those big open plains under the plough as possible.’

Paula gave him a critical glance as the virtual imagery faded to a shadow spectre. ‘Didn’t we try that in the Amazon basin once? The Environment Commission are still running restoration projects in that part of the globe.’

‘This is an emergency situation, Paula. We have the Lost23 populations to resettle now, and those from the Second47 planets can’t be held in temporal hiatus forever. Building them replacement worlds for when they emerge is going to cripple our economy for decades to come. Sometimes we have to take short cuts.’

‘Sometimes?’

Wilson gave her an exasperated stare. ‘I’m not here to argue corporate politics with you. This is something else entirely. The natives on Jevahal are attacking the homesteads. The whole settlement project around Lydian is starting to stall. That can’t go on, Paula, and it certainly can’t be allowed to spread across the whole continent.’

Paula hesitated. ‘Natives? You mean the original pioneer landowners.’

Wilson Kime took a long breath, clearly ill at ease. ‘No Paula, I mean the indigenous life.’

‘Aliens?’ she asked in shock. ‘There are sentients there? Wilson, what have you done?’

‘Nothing,’ he said quickly. ‘The animals concerned are called Onids. Think fat kangaroos with spider legs and you’re getting close.’

Her e-butler was already retrieving the small xenobiology encyclopedia files on the Onid stored in the unisphere. The image did just about match Wilson’s description, once you’d thrown in dark-purple fur. ‘Your xenobiology team classified them as non-sentient,’ she read. ‘They were in a hurry, weren’t they? They had to open the planet for settlement for the Lost23 refugees. Farndale’s board put them under pressure.’