Peter Hamilton - Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

“I have followed the arch-diabolist here from the city. And nothing I have seen has given me the slightest hope for the future. His interest in the spaceport can only indicate he is ready to move on. His work on Lalonde is complete. Violence and anarchy reign beyond the city. What monstrous curse he has let loose is beyond my imagination; but each new day brings darker stories down the river, sucking away the citizens’ hope. Fear is his real weapon, and he possesses it in abundance.”

Marie held out a small object Graeme took to be a Jovian Bank credit disk. The spaceport administration official proffered its counterpart.

“The alliance has been formed. His plan advances another notch. And I cannot believe it will bring anything other than disaster upon us. Four decades has not reduced the fear. What has he achieved in those four decades? I ask myself this question time and again. The only answer must be: evil. He has perfected evil.”

The office light went out. Graeme emerged from his sheltered recess, and walked along the side of the hangar until he could see the administration block’s main entrance. The drizzle was worsening, becoming rain. His suit felt cool, and unbearably clammy, restricting his movements. A prodigious amount of water was running off the ezystak-panel roof overhead, splattering onto the chippings round his soaking feet. Despite the physical discomfort and nagging consternation at Laton’s presence, he felt an excitement that had been absent for years. This was real journalism: the million to one break, the hazardous follow-up, getting the story at any cost. Those shits back in the editing offices could never handle this, safe paunchy career creatures; and they would know it too. His real victory.

Laton and his cohorts had all emerged into the bleak night wearing cagoules against the weather. They had their backs to him, heading for the flight line where the indistinct outlines of the parked McBoeings formed windows into an even graver darkness. Laton (betrayed by his height) had his arm around Marie.

“The beauty and the beast, look. What can she see in him? For Marie is just a simple colony girl, proud and decent, loving her new planet, working long hours like all of this city’s residents. She shares the planetary ethic of her neighbours, striving hard to achieve a better world for her children. Yet somehow she has stumbled. A warning that none of us is immune to the attraction of the dark side of human nature. I look at her, and I think: there but for the grace of God go I.”

Halfway along the McBoeings was a smaller spaceplane. It was obviously Laton’s goal. Bright light shone out of its open airlock, casting a grey smear across the ground. A couple of maintenance crew personnel were tending the mobile support units under its nose.

Graeme sneaked up to the big undercarriage bogies of a McBoeing forty metres away, and crouched down below the broad tyres. The spaceplane was one of the small swing-wing VTOL marques starships carried in their hangars. He switched his retinal implants to full magnification and scanned the fuselage. Sure enough, the name Yaku was printed on the low angular tail.

Some kind of argument was going on at the foot of the steps leading up to the airlock. The administration official was talking heatedly to another man wearing a cagoule with the LDC emblem on the arm. Both of them were waving their arms around. Laton, Marie, and Emlyn Hermon stood to one side, watching patiently.

“The last obstacle has been reached. It is ironic to consider that all that stands between Laton and the Confederation is one immigration official. One man between us and the prospect of galactic tragedy.”

The argument ended. A Jovian Bank disk was offered.

“Can we blame him? Should we blame him? It is a foul night. He has a family which looks to him for support. And how harmless it is, a few hundred fuseodollars to avert his eyes for one swift minute. Money which can buy food for his children in these troubled times. Money which can make life that fraction easier. How many of us would do the same? How many? Would you?” Nice touch that, involve people.

Laton and Marie went up the battered aluminium stairs, followed by a furtive Emlyn Hermon. The administration official was talking to the two ground crew.

Just as he reached the airlock hatch, Laton turned, the hood of his cagoule falling back to reveal his face in full. Handsome, well proportioned, a hint of aristocracy: Edenist sophistication, but without the cultural heritage, that essential counterbalance which made the affinity gene carriers human. It looked as though he was staring straight at Graeme Nicholson. He laughed with a debonair raffishness. Mocking.

Everyone in the Confederation who accessed the sensevise in the weeks which followed experienced the old journalist’s heart thud inside his ribs. All of a sudden breath was very hard to come by, stalling in his throat.

That pause, the derision. It wasn’t an accident, chance. Laton knew he was there, and didn’t care. Graeme was too far beneath him to care.

“He is going now. Free to roam the stars. Should I have tried to stop him? Put myself up against a man who can make entire worlds tremble at the mention of his name? If you think I should, then I am sorry. For I am so frightened of him. And I do not believe I would have made any difference, not against his strength. He would still be on his way.”

The airlock hatch shut. The two ground crew scuttled about, hunched against the rain, unplugging the thick dark-yellow ribbed hoses from their underbelly hatches. Compressors wound up, kicking out micro-squalls of the heavy rain. Their reedy sibilance built steadily until the spaceplane rocked on its undercarriage. It lifted into the murky sky.

“My duty now is to warn you all. I will do what I can, what I must, to ensure this sensevise reaches you. So that you know. He is coming. It is you who must fight him. I wish you luck. Those of us left here have our own battle against the calamity he has unleashed out in the hinterlands. It is not one for which we are well prepared, this is not a planet of epic heroes, just ordinary people like yourselves. As always, the burden falls upon those least able to shoulder it; for a terrible night has fallen on Lalonde, and I do not think we will see the dawn again.”

The spaceplane swooped up in a sharp climb, its wings beginning to fold back. It arrowed into the low, bulging cloud base, and disappeared from view.

A dozen paltry fires spluttered and hissed on the broad road outside the Governor’s dumper, the flames devouring fence posts and broken carts that had been snatched for fuel. Little knots of protesters clustered round them under the watchful eyes of the sheriffs and deputies circling the carbotanium cone. An uneasy truce had broken out after the anger and violence of the day. The earlier barrages of stones and bottles had been answered each time by cortical-jamming impulses from the sheriffs. Thankfully the protesters had refrained from using any real weapons today. Now the chanting had stopped. The naked menace in a thousand throats screaming in unison wasn’t something Colin Rexrew was accustomed to dealing with. He could never make out what they had been chanting for these last few days; he thought they weren’t entirely sure themselves apart from wanting the turmoil to end. Well, so did he. Very badly.

Each time Colin Rexrew looked out of his window he could see some new plume of smoke rising from the vista of dark rooftops. Tonight the horizon was dotted with three or four fierce orange flares as buildings burned. If it wasn’t for the rain and humidity Durringham would have been reduced to a single giant firestorm days ago.

And the deteriorating civic situation in the city wasn’t even his real problem.