Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘None,’ said the ship. ‘It would appear that they are not using any kind of rocket.’

‘So it’s RIP, Sir Isaac?’

All the wild talk from Eurydice of FTL starships and wormhole gates had suggested that Einsteinian physics had been in some respects superseded, but seeing the backwash lapping at Newton’s feet was as unexpected and unsettling as it should have been, in retrospect, predictable.

‘A first-cut analysis suggests that new physics are involved, yes,’ said the machine. ‘This is compatible with the claims made in recent news broadcasts. Let me show you how the anomalies first showed up.’

It ran the screen back a few minutes—it was even more uncanny to see the objects’ masses asymptotically increasing—then flipped to a visual-light display of four microsecond bursts of blue light.

‘Cherenkov radiation,’ it said, ‘from a moment of travel faster than light in the interstellar medium, at the initiation of deceleration. Prior to that one can only speculate that they were travelling faster than light in the vacuum, but there is no trace of their passage, so presumably it was through something other than the vacuum.’

The display toggled back to the gravity-wave rendition. Lamont gazed in fascination at the fading gravitational wakes of what he now knew with near certainty to be starships. As the past fortnight’s news from Eurydice had sunk in, Lamont had found the whole war-machine business—despite his involuntary personal involvement—a great deal less interesting and soul-shaking than the discovery that the Eurydicean colony was not isolated from—or the sole survivors of—humanity, and not stranded far in the future of its historically and subjectively recent past. An entire culture and set of attitudes had been built around both assumptions. Their removal was disturbing his personality in unexpected and not altogether comfortable ways. He did not doubt that it was doing the same to everyone else.

‘The two outer traces are diverging,’ said the machine. A whole minute later, the motion was gross enough for Lamont to detect it. Two of the ships peeled off from the formation and vanished into the gravitational fuzz of Orpheus, while the remaining two sped on, still slowing, to the greater pull of Eurydice.

Intuitive physics are Aristotelian. What goes up must come down. What stays up must be held. What—

‘What the hell is that ?’ shouted Calder, jumping to his feet and pointing.

Winter looked sharply up from the littered notes and cups on the table he and Calder shared with Ben-Ami at the Bright Contrail. It was the third day of trying to make something from the raw material of interview and recollections. Calder was pointing at the horizon. His arm shook. Winter’s gaze followed it, and he trembled too. He jumped to his feet. Ben-Ami bounded on to a chair, rocking and staring. After a moment Calder clambered on to the table, steadying himself with a hand on Winter’s shoulder.

Away in the distant sky visible high above the line of buildings on the other side of the park were two thick, shallow black arcs, like the brows of an invisible giant. With every second they became bigger and blacker. At first they could have been taken for things small and close, hang gliders or such, but as their apparent size increased it became evident that they were enormous. Others were noticing too, and the word was spreading. Around him tables toppled, crockery crashed, vehicles halted and slewed the traffic into chaos. The noise rose as the objects approached, as though to meet them. Within thirty seconds the objects were in the air above the city.

Shaped like rectangular pieces cut from a hollow sphere, they were each hundreds of metres on each side. They moved at a constant altitude of five hundred metres, their speed slowing. Their shadows darkened the park, dappled the buildings. Then, right above the Jardin des Étoiles, they stopped, hanging poised in midair. The expectation of their imminent crushing fall made Winter’s nails dig into his palms. He opened his hands with an effort of will, and clutched the table edge behind him in a moment of giddiness.

‘These aren’t—’ he began.

‘—anything I’m familiar with,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘They must be the star-ships.’ He turned, eyes shining, to the two musicians. ‘This is marvellous! The end of our isolation! It is no longer possible to doubt it!’

Some had doubted it, Winter knew. There was a flourishing undercurrent of conspiracy theory that the two strangers, Carlyle and Shlaim, were in fact Eurydiceans in some DNA-deep disguise, or covert resurrectees; that the whole thing had been got up by Armand’s company or the Returners or the Joint Chiefs, for some nefarious and improbable reason, usually to do with the defence budget. It had almost made him nostalgic.

‘Yeah, that’s nice,’ he said, shrugging Calder’s hand from his shoulder.

‘In itself. Can’t say I’m thrilled at the thought of the ships’ occupants .’

‘Why not?’ asked Ben-Ami. ‘They are human beings like us.’

‘Exactly,’ said Winter, as Calder cackled.

Have you seen—?’

Jacques Armand’s voice came from Carlyle’s new local phone. She palmed it and thumbed a yes.

‘We’re all looking,’ she said. Beside her, on the railed walkway of some automated production facility, her guide for the day was gawping, gob-smacked. One of the ships had just begun to move again, at slowly increasing speed, leaving the other above the park.

‘Do you know whose ships they are?’ asked Armand, urgently.

‘Cannae tell from here,’ said Carlyle, still staring. ‘We buy ships like that fae the Knights and hack them.’

‘There would be nothing to lose in getting out, whichever side it is,’ said Armand. ‘And this might be a good time.’

‘It might indeed, if we’re no too late. One ae them’s leaving.’

‘Let’s go for it. See you at the field.’

‘On my way.’

She pocketed the phone and turned to her guide. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘and thanks, but I do have to go now.’

The guide didn’t even look at her. ‘Fine, fine,’ he said. He was already scanning numbers on his own phone, and finding them all busy.

Carlyle ran along the walkway and down the twisting stair to the monorail platform, and waited fretting for a few minutes until a capsule whizzed up and whined to a halt. She jumped on and for the next half hour hopped from capsule to capsule along the route to Lesser Lights Lane.

Down in the streets the roads and sidewalks were dot-painted with faces looking up. Traffic had slowed almost to a standstill, with a few vehicles managing to jink and jitter their way through the jams.

Armand awaited her at the station in a two-seat entopter.

‘Jump in!’ he shouted. The seat hugged her from behind, cushioned the back of her head. The bubble door slid shut and the little craft took off like a fly from under a swatting hand. Its flight and evasive actions were in similar mode. The sides of buildings loomed, then flicked away, again and again. Armand, she saw with relief, wasn’t controlling it at all, he was talking to someone else. He had earphones and she hadn’t, so she couldn’t hear a word above the relentless buzz. The airfield suddenly appeared, like a clearing in a forest, and the entopter touched down on the grass. One of Armand’s people was waiting for them, with suits. Carlyle had taken to wearing her undersuit under whatever of the fashions of the day covered it best. Today’s was a chinoiserie silk pyjama outfit, thus not a problem. She scrambled into the suit and checked through the now familiar, though not yet intuitive, interfaces that Armand had trained her on. Armand was already running to the hypersonic shell. She jumped into the rear cockpit seat of the top aircar module and had barely time to buckle up before the double canopies thudded shut above her and the engines of all the aircars in the stack rose to a scream. The shell went through vertical take-off, loiter, and forward acceleration in seconds.