Peter Hamilton - Judas Unchained

Mark sniffed. He wiped away the moisture clotting his eyes. “I understand, sir. Tell Otis to shoot straight.”

“Thank you, Mark. Once again, I’m proud you are family.”

Ozzie groaned in dismay and gave Mark a sullen glance. “Since when did you turn into a bonehead hero?”

“Fuck you,” Mark spat.

“Nige, you know damn well I am not turning this frigate over to MorningLightMountain,” Ozzie said angrily. “I’m going to stop you and it from killing each other.”

“You’ve stolen the only two items of technology that can guarantee the human race survives the war, Ozzie. This isn’t dicking around, this isn’t playing the wacky smartass to my corporate stiff. You are attempting to kill humanity. Do you understand that?”

“I’m going to save you,” Ozzie barked back at him. “Trust me, Nige, you always used to. Please.”

“Come back.”

“No. You come with me.” Ozzie hated how petulant he sounded. “Switch the TD channel off,” he told the SIsubroutine.

“Confirmed.”

Ozzie took a couple of minutes out just staring at the systems displays in front of him, allowing his temper to cool. He didn’t like to admit to himself just how rattled he’d been by Nigel’s threats. In the end he released the plyplastic bands from his arms, just keeping his legs loosely restrained, and drew a breath. “Hey, er, Mark, Nigel doesn’t actually have a fleet of these frigates, does he? I mean, they’re all still being built, right?”

“Honestly? He has the Scylla, and three more which have just completed assembly. None of them have been flight tested, but they passed their systems integration trials. Otis flew Charybdis against Hell’s Gateway with a damn sight less preparation than that.”

“Great. Thanks for that, man. I officially appoint you chief morale officer.” Ozzie could see this was going to be a flight with minimal conversation. “Where’s the food? I need a decent meal.”

Mark’s smile was the kind used by evil emperors at their victory celebrations. “What food? We left before the stores were brought on board.”

Highway One was the first major civil engineering project to be attempted on Far Away, and the last on such a grand scale. At the time construction began Armstrong City was little more than a camp of mobile homes and prefab buildings squatting in a giant mud lake around the newly constructed gateway. There had been talk about moving the gateway directly to the recently discovered Marie Celeste, but as they had on Half Way the Commonwealth Council demanded a safe separation distance. In any case, during those early years they were still hoping that other alien artifacts would be discovered, equal or greater than the crashed arkship. The gateway stayed where it was above the shores of the North Sea, and the Council shipped in a pair of massive micropile-powered JCB roadbuilders.

They took twenty-seven months to chew their way southeast over the equator, extruding a wide ribbon of enzyme-bonded concrete onto the flat strip they’d cut through the sandy flare-sterilized soil. Seven main rivers were bridged, and three broad flood plain valleys traversed with long switchbacks on either side.

As well as leading to the starship, Highway One was originally intended as the major access route to the southern hemisphere. As it curved back west around the Dessault Mountains to the Marie Celeste’s valley, another road branched off to head eastward for the shore of the Oak Sea. After that, the intention was to carry on south until it eventually reached the Deep Sea. By then the JCBs were in need of heavy-duty maintenance, which couldn’t be done in the field. The rough stony terrain and constant lack of spare parts had taken their toll on the massive machines. Once they left the Marie Celeste behind they never made it to the Deep Sea. The Black Desert proved too inhospitable; its fierce heat and constant sandwinds abrading too many already degraded components. With more than five hundred kilometers of desert left to traverse the team finally turned around and drove back along the length of their creation. The JCBs were refurbished as best Far Away’s embryonic engineering industry could manage and spent the next few years laying smaller roads across the Aldrin Plains and Iril Steppes where the farmlands were taking hold before they finally decayed beyond economic repair. No more were ever imported.

A road that began in the capital and stretched thousands of kilometers away across the planet until it ended abruptly in the middle of a desert was always going to be a romantic road. People drove along it because it was there, especially the younger generations of Far Away natives who would take off on bikes and spend months moving along from community to community. As with all roads through virgin territory, it was the starting point for pioneers setting up their farmsteads. Villages sprang up along its sides, especially along the first thousand kilometers outside Armstrong City where the temperate climate was suited to farming. Each small settlement evolved into a junction for the empty land beyond as the revitalization team gradually expanded the area that could be successfully planted. Farmers set out to the east and west, bringing their own vegetation to a gritty soil now ripening with bacteria. The Barsoomians traveled along Highway One until the equator when they turned eastward to establish themselves around the northern shores of the Oak Sea and the remoter regions of the Great Iril Steppes. According to some their domain even extended out to the westernmost shore of the Hondu Ocean.

This great conduit of humanity helped expand the new vegetation across an elongated stretch of the ruined planet far quicker than the revitalization teams could with their fleet of blimpbots. From space, life’s progress could be seen as a verdant stain that spread out eagerly from the road, covering the barren ground with fields and forests. Eventually, the planet began to revert to an overall green tinge that had been missing ever since the flare saturated it with radiation. Even amid that patina the road’s borders were still a prominent slash of bright emerald.

Beyond that first main stretch of population reaching out from Armstrong City the travelers scattered their own biological detritus. Some were deliberate, like the hundred-sixty-kilometer length straddling the equator where an ancient hermitlike émigré from Earth called Rob Lacy devoted thirty years to hand-planting giant GMredwoods on either side of the concrete, turning it into a mighty greenway. There was the infamous Jidule Valley where somebody with a bad sense of humor had illicitly reprogrammed the revitalization project’s agribots to plant silk oaks in the pattern of a copulating couple five kilometers across, a forest whose shape could be seen in its entirety from the top of the valley. And the Doyle swamp, famous the Commonwealth over for its profusion of Jupiter cat trap plants, an example of early Barsoomian handiwork, plants modified from Venus flytraps until they were big enough to capture small rodents. It became something of a ritual for anyone riding down the wide concrete lanes to bring seeds of their favorite plant with them, to be scattered at random, producing a weird mishmash of vegetation that was now among the most established on the planet.

Stig had traveled along Highway One enough times to be familiar with most of its diverse sections. A couple of hours after they’d left rendezvous point four, the Guardians’ vehicles reached the first built-up section. The countryside directly outside Armstrong City was predominantly fields and sweeping grasslands split up into estates owned by some of the richest people on the planet. Beyond the estates the land rose into the Devpile hills that were the province of sheep and goat farmers. It was only after Highway One swept down out of the hills on the other side and crossed the Clowine River that the buildings started to bunch up close around it. The houses and commercial blocks were only three or four deep, but this particular urban segment ran for over eighty kilometers. Along its entire length, slender composite arches curved high over the four lanes of ancient enzyme-bonded concrete, alive with lights and commercial signs. There were more garish fluorescent signs along the edge of the road, enticing drivers to stop off and buy everything from farm supplies to motel rooms to dental work. In places the building fronts actually bordered the cracked concrete road. Vans and pickups trundled along between all the side streets and turnoffs; they’d even seen a couple of people riding horses.