Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

‘No. Categorically not. Check the dates. Menard was cleared for settlement before the Starflyer War began. It was a legitimate assessment by the xenobiology team, and in any case they’re independent, they have to be.’

Paula shot him a suspicious glance. She knew just how impartial things became when a company as vast as Farndale was involved. The amount of money involved in opening up a planet for settlement was phenomenal. There wasn’t much which could prevent the awarding of an H-congruent certification once the process had begun. Certainly not an independent scientific team with a foolish case of integrity.

‘Believe me, Paula. Farndale didn’t override anything here. That classification was genuine.’

‘All right, so what’s happened?’

‘That’s the billion-dollar question. It began about three weeks ago, with the Onid raiding some of Lydian’s outlying homesteads. Now it’s getting more serious. Packs of them are attacking any human they can find. Nobody’s going outside the town. Our local governor is asking the Farndale board for a squad of marshals with enough firepower to eradicate every Onid herd in the territory. And each day he’s asking louder. So far we’ve kept this out of the media, but that won’t last…’ He gave her a forlorn look. ‘We’ve just had a war that nearly ended in genocide. We stopped that, Paula, you and me. We played our part. Out of everybody, we now know that kind of situation cannot be allowed to happen again.’

‘What the hell do you want me to do?’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s hardly a crime in the conventional sense. Someone screwed up in the classification. You’re going to have to pull out of Menard.’

‘But why now?’ Wilson asked. ‘Humans have been there for nearly ten years; first a batch of science teams running tests, then preliminary construction crews building infrastructure. The Onid didn’t even notice us.’

‘They reacted because there’s more of us now?’ Paula ventured. ‘That always happens when new lands are conquered, the natives eventually realize what a threat the invaders are and start to fight back.’

‘How would they know how many of us there are? How would they know we’re spreading out across the continents? They’re animals, they don’t have any communication. They live in isolated herds.’

Paula waved her hands about in a gesture of futility. ‘How would I know? I’m not a xenobiologist.’

‘No,’ Wilson said softly. ‘But you are a puzzle-solver.’

‘Oh, please!’

‘You have to admit it’s fascinating, almost paradoxical.’

‘I find it mildly interesting — in the abstract. I also happen to believe the solution lies with your original classification. Either way, it doesn’t matter. This is not a Directorate problem, unless you do give the governor what he’s asking for. If that were to happen I would order a very thorough investigation.’

‘Which nobody wants, and if you personally were to shut down a new planet to immigration, especially at this time, your meagre popularity would hit zero and then fall off a cliff.’

‘I’m not in this job for popularity.’

‘No, but you know very well that to function properly at the level your cases run at you have to have political influence. Securing that verdict against Oscar lost you every credit you won during the war. You can get that back with this case.’

‘It is not a case.’

‘Take a break, Paula. Christ knows you’ve accumulated enough leave time over the last century. That would leave you free to do whatever tweaked your curiosity. I could appoint you to any position you wanted in Farndale. Adviser to the Lydian territory governor, for instance.’

‘You have got to be kidding.’

‘It’s practical. It’s logical. It’s different. And you’d be helping a lot of people — actually, two species. I’m amazed you’re even hesitating.’

She wanted to tell him why, but couldn’t actually come up with a valid reason. The wretched thing was, it did intrigue her. For all his faults, Wilson Kime was an honourable man. If he thought (or knew) the xenobiology team had screwed up he wouldn’t be here. ‘I really can’t afford more than a couple of days,’ she said weakly.

‘That’ll be all you need,’ Wilson said with a grin.

The next morning Paula took a trans-Earth-loop train from Paris through the connecting wormhole to Madrid, then London, New York, and into Tallahassee, where she caught the express shuttle to Los Vada, an industrial world owned entirely by Farndale, which served as their manufacturing and financial base. Total time elapsed: forty-two minutes, which wasn’t bad for the notoriously piss-poor timekeeping of loop trains.

It was just after midnight local time on Los Vada when she arrived. The CST station there was enormous, a junction to over fifty worlds in phase two and three space; the commerce it had to carry was phenomenal, with over a thousand freight and passenger trains charging through every hour. There were five passenger terminals to cope with the volume of people, two of which were just for passengers arriving and departing Los Vada itself; the others were for interconnecting trains. Paula got off at the fourth, and took a small transfer capsule over to terminal five, which handled all the trains to planets in phase three space.

Her train left from platform 49H. Eight fat carriages crammed with refugee families, people who had fled their homeworld after the Prime assault wrecked the biosphere outside their city force fields. Since then they’d either been living with generous family members or endured Spartan accommodation in a government emergency transit centre. It was only in the last few months that the Commonwealth government was finally starting to get on top of the displaced populations problem and accelerating the opening of phase three space planets that had been in their provisional stage of development back when the war broke out.

The train trundled across the dark yard outside the huge terminal buildings, then slowly accelerated towards the distant cliff of machinery producing the wormholes. Over half of the circular rifts across interstellar space were open onto the daylight continents of their respective worlds, which shone an impressive variety of star-spectrums out into Los Vada’s moonless night. Menard was close to Sol’s standard white, with just a hint of violet staining the thick beam which the train track curved round to line up on. They slid in behind a long freight train whose open trucks were carrying big civil engineering bots, and construction machinery along with a host of infrastructure systems vital to support a planet whose population was currently expanding at a rate of thirty thousand a day, with a bump up to fifty thousand scheduled in four months’ time. According to Paula’s e-butler, trains were being pushed through with barely a minute’s separation. That’s a lot of traffic , she acknowledged. Empty freight trains were hurtling past on the return track.

Then they were through. The pressure curtain tingled across her skin like some fast phantom drizzle, and raw sunlight was blazing through the carriage windows. There was no sign of the wide open lands which Wilson prized so much on this world. Instead the two-mile length of track between the wormhole and the station ran straight through the marshalling yard, with stacks of containers forming a near-solid wall on either side. They formed their own mini-city, with avenues sliced by tracks where big old fission-powered shunters trundled along day and night. Giant loader gantries slid above the ever-changing stacks on eight-storey legs, malmetal tentacles reaching down to pull individual containers out of the stack and place them on the flotilla of trucks rolling along behind.