Peter Hamilton - Reality Dysfunction - Emergence

No kidding?ruben asked heavily.

Was there ever a plague on Anglade?tula asked.

Yes, Oenone said. Twenty-three years ago. I don’t have any record of an attack on an aid convoy, though.

You do surprise me,syrinx said.

This captain seems to be a nice young man, Oenone said. He’s obviously very taken with you.

I’d sooner join an Adamist nunnery. And just leave the psychological analysis to us humans, please.

The silence in her mind was reproachful.

“Yes, well, that was the past,” Syrinx said awkwardly to Joshua Calvert. “Your problem is here in the present.”

Syrinx?oxley called.

The cautious mental tone warned her. Yes?

We’ve opened two of their cargo-pods. They both contain the tokamak coils listed in the manifest. No antimatter-confinement technology in sight.

What? They can’t have tokamak coils.she looked through Oxley’s eyes into the MSV’s tiny cabin. Eileen Carouch was strapped in a web next to him; several screens were covered in complicated multi-coloured graphics. The liaison officer wore a worried frown as she studied the displays. Outside the port, Syrinx could see one of the Lady Macbeth ’s cargo-pods gripped in the MSV’s heavy-duty waldo arm. It had been opened, and the tokamak coils had been removed by some of the mandible-like manipulator waldos.

Eileen Carouch turned to face Oxley. “It doesn’t look good. According to our information both of these pods should contain the confinement coils.”

We’ve been had,ruben said.

Will you stop saying that,syrinx demanded.

What do you want us to do?oxley asked.

Examine every pod supposed to hold the antimatter-confinement coils.

OK.

“Everything all right?” Joshua asked.

Syrinx opened her eyes, and manufactured a killer-sweet smile. “Just fine, thank you.”

Eileen Carouch and Oxley opened all eighteen cargo-pods supposed to contain the illegal coils. In every one they found neatly packaged tokamak coils.

Syrinx ordered them to open another five pods at random. They contained tokamak coils.

Syrinx gave up. Ruben was right, they’d been had.

That night she lay on her bunk, unable to sleep even though the body tensions due to ten days of enforced stealth routine had almost abated. Ruben was asleep beside her. There had been no prospect of sex when they came off duty, her mood was too black. He seemed to accept their defeat with a phlegmatism which she found annoying.

Where did we go wrong?she asked Oenone . That ratty old ship was never out of your sight. You followed them superbly. I was more worried about the Nephele keeping up. Its spacial orientation isn’t a patch on yours.

Perhaps it was the operatives at Idria who lost track of the coils?

They were very certain the coils had been put on board. I could accept Calvert hiding one set in the ship, there’s a lot of cubic volume there, but not eighteen.

There must have been a switch.

But how?

I don’t know. I’m sorry.

Hey, it’s not your fault. You did everything you were asked to, even when you were coated in foam.

I hate that stuff.

I know. Well, we’ve only got another two months to go. We’ll be civilians after that.

Great!

Syrinx smiled in the cabin’s half light. I thought you liked military duty.

I do.

But?

But it’s lonely, all those patrols. When we’re on commercial runs we’ll meet lots of other voidhawks and habitats. It’ll be fun.

Yes, I suppose it will. It’s just that I would have liked to finish on a high note.

Joshua Calvert?

Yes! He was laughing at us.

I thought he was nice. Young and carefree, roaming the universe. Very romantic.

Please! He won’t be roaming it for much longer. Not with an ego like that. He’ll make a mistake soon enough, that sheer arrogance of his will force him into it. I’m only sorry we won’t be there when he does.she put an arm over Ruben so that he would know she wasn’t angry with him when he woke. But when she closed her eyes the normal vista of starfields that accompanied her into sleep had been replaced by a roguish smile and a rugged face that was all angles.

His name was Carter McBride, and he was ten years old; an only child, the pride of his parents Dimitri and Victoria, who spoilt him as best their circumstances would allow. Like most of Aberdale’s younger generation he enjoyed the jungle and the river; Lalonde was much more fun than the cheerless dry concrete, steel, and composite caves of Earth’s arcologies. The opportunities for games in his new land were limitless. He had his own little garden in the corner of his father’s field, which he kept chock-full of strawberry plants, geneered so that the big scarlet fruits didn’t rot in the rain and humidity. He had a cocker spaniel called Chomper that was always getting underfoot and making off with clothes from the McBride cabin. He was receiving didactic courses from Ruth Hilton, who said he was absorbing the agronomy data at a satisfactory rate, and would make a promising farmer one day. And because he was almost eleven his parents trusted him to play unsupervised, saying he was responsible enough not to wander too far into the jungle.

The morning after Horst Elwes encountered the Ly-cilph in the church, Carter was down by the river where he and the other kids were building a raft from scraps of timber left over from one of the adults’ construction projects. He realized that he hadn’t seen Chomper for about fifteen minutes, and looked around the clearing. A flash of ginger fur in the trees behind the community hall made him shout in exasperation at the silly animal. There was no immediate response, so he set off in vigorous pursuit, boots kicking up a splash in the thin layer of mud. By the time he reached the boundary of the jungle he could hear Chomper barking excitedly somewhere inside the crush of trees and creepers. He waved at Mr Travis, who was hoeing the soil around his baby pineapple plants, and plunged into the jungle after his dog.

Chomper seemed intent on leading him directly away from the village. Carter called and called until his throat felt raw. He was hot and sticky and his fraying T-shirt was smeared in long streaks of green-yellow sap from the broken creepers. He was also very angry with Chomper, who was going to be put on a choker lead as soon as they got home. And after that there would be the proper obedience-training classes that Mr Manani had promised him.

The chase finally came to an end in a small glade of tall qualtook trees, whose thick canopy of foliage didn’t let much sunlight through. Spindly blades of grass grew up to Carter’s knees, vines with a mass of lemon-coloured berries foamed up around the glossy trunks. Chomper was standing in the middle of the glade, his hackles raised, growling at a tree.

Carter grabbed hold of his neck, yelling out exactly what he thought of dogs at that moment. The spaniel resisted the pulling and urging, yapping frantically.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded in exasperation.

Then the tall black lady appeared. One second there was only a qualtook tree in front of him, the next she was standing five metres away, dressed in a grey jump suit, and pulling her hood off. Long chestnut hair tumbled down.