Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

People had started piling on to or into vehicles. Some of the vehicles were moving to deliberate gentle collisions, snapping together so that air-cars could lift ground vehicles and artillery. It would be a slow and overloaded evacuation, at least until the forces here could rendezvous with more powerful craft. Carlyle dogged it after Armand and clambered after him, to sit behind him like a pillion passenger on the fuselage of an aircar that formed the outrigger of an awkward aerial catamaran. Yells and a rattle of radio comms and they all moved off, watched impassively by a few of the Knights and recorded by a couple of news agencies that had evidently been allowed to remain on site.

‘It’s all a bit trial and error,’ Armand said over the radio. ‘We can dump this stuff in a depot on the coast and then get going a bit faster. Might even be able to plug together a hypersonic or two.’ He grinned over his shoulder at her. ‘For those of us in a hurry to get back to town. You can always drop off in one of the smaller settlements, if you’d rather keep a low profile for a while.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Carlyle said, abstractedly. She was looking around the site as if for the last time: the enigmatic machine towering above the moor, dwarfing even the great black shard beside it; the strung-out, limping column of Blue Water Landings vehicles behind her; the compact, fast-jogging squadrons of Knights, and their low flat gravity sleds skimming about, surrounding the relic and reinforcing their presence around the henge. As her gaze swept the scene she noticed again the henges on the other hilltops, and started as she remembered the crack that someone on her team had made the very first day.

Maybe they’ve aw got gates.

The assemblage of vehicles on which she rode and that headed up the withdrawal was moving towards the nearest glen that led to the south. By now they were making a fair clip of it, about fifty kilometres per hour.

Slipstream gusted past her visor. She looked around again. Half a dozen or so of the Knights’ Jeep-sized ground skimmers were spreading out from the site, heading for the nearby hilltops. It looked like they’d had the same thought as she had.

She blinked up a closed channel to Armand. ‘Could we bear right, go over the nearest hill instead of through the valley? Don’t make it obvious?’

‘If you like.’ He shrugged and gave the order. Very gradually the column drifted to the right and the slope.

‘Ah, I see what you have in mind,’ Armand added. ‘We shall slow down a little as we approach.’

Carlyle glanced back again. The skimmer aiming for the same hilltop was still a good way behind, and in no evident hurry.

‘What if it’s just a dolmen?’ Armand asked.

‘No loss in checking,’ Carlyle said.

‘Or worse, what if it takes you to somewhere uninhabitable, or dangerous?’

‘So far, naebody’s encountered anything they couldnae handle in a space suit,’ Carlyle said. ‘I’ll take my chances, and if there’s nae inhabitants and nae connection tae an inhabited place I can always just hop straight back.’

The column laboured up the slope, the top now just a few hundred metres away. The Knights’ nearest skimmer was overtaking the first of the stragglers at the tail end.

‘Something has been puzzling me,’ Armand said, in a tone that suggested he was trying to keep her mind off any nervousness. ‘Does the gate that you came through lead to a terraformed world?’

‘Oh aye,’ said Carlyle. ‘I’ve already told you all that, on television.’

‘Ah, so you have,’ said Armand. ‘Why do organisms from that world not pass through to this, and vice versa? The biota of Eurydice is, as your team quickly found, distinctive. Yet it was new to you. And there are no plagues or pests, which one would expect.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Carlyle. ‘We’ve wondered that too. It just disnae happen, or no very much. There are aye anomalous animals, of course.’

Armand laughed. ‘Strange big cats?’

At that she laughed too. ‘You have them an aw?’

Two hundred metres. She glanced back. The Knights’ skimmer was accelerating, catching up fast.

‘Faster,’ she said. ‘We can dae just like I tried the first time. Remember?’ Armand leaned forward and said something to the pilot. The unwieldy raft shot forward, cresting the hill, and then its aircars’ fans were thrown into reverse and its flaps dug in. Armand, already braced, stayed put. Carlyle tumbled forward and hurtled past him, bounced off the leading edge and rolled in heather. The suit and its reflexes, so much sharper than her own, protected her. She stood shakily just at the side of the henge. The Knights’ skimmer slewed to a halt, metres away. Two black-clad stocky men vaulted out and lunged towards her. They weren’t in space suits. She grinned ferally at them, skipped back, turned around and stepped between the rough stone pillars. The moment of transition, when what she saw and the gravity she felt and the readings in her head-up all changed at once, was as disconcerting and disorienting as ever. All the more so as she was stepping on empty space and falling forward.

She fell half a metre on to sand, and found herself kneeling on a sundrenched beach, and looking upon the stony face of Marx.

Blue sky, blue sea. Yellow sun, low in the sky. Ambient temperature thirty Celsius. There was no sign of human habitation to left or right. Behind her was dense forest in a long crescent curve to headlands that marked the limits of the beach, and beyond which she could not see. Gulls and cormorants patrolled the sea and the air above it. On the horizon, long low sea-ships, probably bulk carriers or tankers, moved with distant deliberation. Two hundred metres out to sea, like a gigantic stone shipwreck survivor wading ashore, a statue of Marx rose about twenty metres above water that reached its elbows. Behind it, Lenin stood in water up to the knot of his tie, and beyond him Mao, head just above the waves as if swimming the Yangtse.

Farther out than Mao a pair of bespectacled eyes and a quiff were all that betrayed the location of Kim Jong-I1.

From this Carlyle deduced that the planet had a moon, that the sea was tidal, and that the tide was high. The origin of the statues wasn’t so much a deduction as a no-brainer.

‘Fucking DK,’ she said to herself. She’d instantly recognised the commie statuary style, in all its ludicrous grandiosity. What the fuck the statues were doing in the water, and what the commies were doing on a terraformed world in the first place, she had no idea. Terraforming was definitely an America Offline thing. As far as DK were concerned, terraforming was a waste of a perfectly good tip, not to mention a contamination of a perfectly good strip-mine site.

As she pondered this it occurred to her that the planet might well be Earth itself. That would certainly account for the immediate appearances, but it raised other problems. She’d never heard of a gate on Earth. The nearest, in fact the first one the Carlyles had stumbled upon, was on Mars.

And speaking of stumbling upon gates, how come no one had stumbled upon this one? Like, say, while they were erecting the statues? Surely people had come ashore to the beach. Yet the gate was quite unmarked.

Carlyle walked down to the strandline and picked up a piece of drift-wood. She retraced her footprints to where she fallen from the gate, and swung the stick slowly forward, keeping the tip of it close to the ground.

To her surprise and relief, it vanished into the barely visible shimmer of the gate without being cut off at knee-height. Instead it thumped against something firm but not hard: soil, she guessed. She slid it upward until it cleared the obstacle and jerked forward. Then the stick was wrenched from her hands and tugged away through the gate. She jumped back smartly.