Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Higgins attempted a smile. Reflective surfaces moved. ‘Just get me out.’

Carlyle grasped her hand. ‘OK.’

Together they stepped through the gate. As soon as they did so their knees buckled, their arms went instinctively in front of and above their faces, and again at the same moment, they both laughed and looked embarrassed at each other. They lowered their shielding arms. With an effort Carlyle straightened up, Higgins a moment later. 1.2 g: it was no worse than carrying a pack. Before them stretched a plain of cratered ice, sharply lit by a distant yellow-white F7 at what looked like 10 AU and blue-shaded by reflected light from the plain-featured sub-Jovian ice giant that filled a third of the sky and that had, for a moment, looked as though it was hurtling down upon them. Another moon, sulphur-yellow to its jet-black terminator, hung in the sky, its disc plain among a prickle of stars. Carlyle took a few steps forward and turned to look back at the gate. It was marked by a perfect parabola of smooth, sculpted-seeming ice.

‘Where are we?’ Higgins asked, feebly and querulously.

Carlyle gave her a smile she hoped was encouraging.

‘In the skein, if we’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Race you through the catalogue.’

Higgins flapped a hand, and squatted, elbows on thighs. ‘You do it.’

Carlyle blinked up the Messier 102.02 on her head-up and systematically scanned the sky. Her suit’s sensors fed every available scrap of incoming information to the catalogue: the positions of the visible stars, the spectrum of the sun and of the light from the planet, the temperature of the ground, the motion of the other moon… . It took about a minute to match them and come up with the anonymous string of numbers that identified the system. She cross-referenced the result with the skein map.

‘We’re lucky,’ she told Higgins. ‘We’re in the skein all right. If not exactly in the Drift. None of the firm’s outposts is anywhere nearby.’ She licked her cracked lips, winced. ‘That gate we came through isn’t marked. There’s another one, but it’s about twenty kilometres away. North-northwest.’ She looked around, letting the suit take a bearing from the now charted sky. The moon they were on had no magnetic field. ‘We should make it.’

Higgins looked sceptical. ‘Where does it take us?’

Carlyle hesitated, then gave her the bad news. ‘A KE homeworld.’

Higgins rose to her feet. She even smiled. ‘The Ladies of Enlightenment? That’ll be something to see.’

‘Good on you,’ said Carlyle, dubious though she felt at the prospect. She had never heard of any outsider going to a KE homeworld, let alone coming back from one. This had, she hoped, more to do with the protectiveness of the Knights towards their homes than with anything more sinister.

They set off across the ice, following the bearing on her head-up. That gave them a direction, and it changed by dead reckoning as they detoured around craters large and small. It didn’t so much as suggest an optimal route.

‘Footprints behind us again,’ said Higgins, as they walked down a small valley that looked as if it had been carved by flowing water, but surely couldn’t have been.

‘That’s our own footprints,’ said Carlyle. She wished Higgins hadn’t said that. The thought that the haunter of the Chernobyl cavern could have followed them hadn’t ocurred to her before. Now it wouldn’t go away.

‘Why are they in front of us?’

‘Because we’ve had to retrace our steps.’

‘I can’t see properly,’ said Higgins, sounding relieved and resigned.

She laid her hand on Carlyle’s shoulder, and before long, a fair bit of her weight too. Carlyle vomited suddenly, and almost blacked out as she held her breath while the suit’s cleaning mechanisms cleared the airways and the spew went into the recylers. They couldn’t do anything about the stink, but after a while it had so saturated her nostrils that she couldn’t smell it.

They stumbled on. The other moon moved in its orbit to a place where its shadow cast a spot, a solid ellipse of perfect black, on the ice giant. The shadow moved, it sometimes seemed, as they watched, and at other times, dismayingly, moved back.

‘Relative motion of the moons,’ said Higgins, surprising Carlyle with that sensible reassurance.

The other gate appeared as a tiny regularity on the horizon a long time before they reached it; this world was bigger than most of the terrestrial planets, let alone moons, that either of them were used to walking on, and their intuitions played them false. The gate was marked with a square of ice, bevelled like a picture frame. It advanced and receded in Carlyle’s sight as they approached, hour after hour. The moon-shadow vanished from the top of the giant planet’s placid blue atmosphere.

‘Are we there yet?’ said Higgins, when they were a hundred or so metres from the ten-metre high gate marker, then laughed at herself. She swayed and began to topple forward. Carlyle ducked, letting her fall over her shoulder, and struggled upright. Higgins was surprisingly light. Carlyle staggered towards the gate and almost fell through it. A sudden wash of light made her shut her eyes until the faceplate had adapted. Her feet were in something soft. Higgins felt suddenly lighter. Carlyle staggered a few paces away from the gate and then fell face-first into sand. After a moment she crawled forward, out from under Higgins, and looked around.

Daylight of a young blue-white star, arc-weld bright and small, in a pale blue sky. She was on a rocky terrestrial, 0.86 g, thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. To all appearances utterly lifeless: sand dunes, wind-eroded sandstone of the same beige colour, black wind-polished rocks. After Chernobyl and the ice moon it felt like a garden. And it looked like a garden—a Zen garden, though with wheel-tracks rather than raked lines. A few hundred metres ahead of her was a complex diamond-pane greenhouse arcology, hundreds of metres high and kilometres in extent. Behind her, two black rock pillars marked the gate. Between it and the ruts in front of the arcology there were no tracks of any kind. She heaved Higgins back on her shoulder and set out to make some.

The difficulty was finding an entrance. As she drew closer the transparent walls rose before her like an unbroken cliff. There was no response to her croaked shouts on the standard hailing frequency. With stoned lucidity she realised that her best bet was to find some wheel tracks and follow them. She trudged across the sand until she found one, then trudged along its curving path. After ten minutes’ walk she found herself in front of a five-metre-high airlock. There was, not to her surprise, no doorbell, and still no response to her distress calls. She dropped to the ground, crawled from under Higgins again, and walked over to the wall beside the lock and started banging on it, then kicking. Fifteen minutes of this had no effect. She backed off about a hundred metres, drew her pistol, and started shooting at the wall above the airlock. Not even the concentrated succession of Webster bolts could do more than blacken the sheet diamond, but it made one hell of a racket. The airlock door began to open. Carlyle at once ceased fire, dropped the pistol and raised her hands. An optic poked cautiously out, then withdrew. The airlock opened fully and a squad of five spacesuited figures emerged and jogged towards her.

The faceplates were sun-shaded; she couldn’t see the faces. After a moment voices found her frequency, and her Japanese-American translator kicked in.

‘Who are you and where do you come from?’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘Lucinda Carlyle,’ she said. She pointed. ‘Morag Higgins. We have come through the gate back there, from Chernobyl. We have severe radiation sickness and request your help.’