Gary Gibson - Final Days

The pro with women who had skin like porcelain, thought Fowler, was that they always looked like they might easily break.

‘Thomas,’ she said, as the guard gave him the all-clear, ‘I must have just beaten you here. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to make it, at such short notice.’

Fowler stepped forward, once again struck by the unaccustomed buoyancy of his body. No matter how often he made the trip to Copernicus, he never quite adapted to the sudden drop in gravity once he had passed through the Florida Array. The first-aid clinics that served the tens of thousand of people flowing back and forth through the CTC gates worked twenty-four-seven repairing broken bones and fractured skulls. They’d wound up padding the ceilings of the lunar-transit systems, once they realized most people coming through from Earth kept smacking their heads into them.

Their hands touched as they spoke, the touch lingering. If anyone had been paying attention at that moment, they might have guessed at their relationship.

‘I guess we should get started,’ he said.

He followed her across the busy room, passing wall-mounted TriView panels displaying real-time video of the mass-transit systems connecting Copernicus City to the nearby Lunar Array. They arrived at a second bank of elevators, where another guard checked their UPs for clearance, before allowing them passage.

They both relaxed as soon as the elevator doors closed. Amanda stepped in close to him, her hands taking hold of his lapels and tugging him down towards her, so that he had to bend over, in order to kiss. Fowler reached out and touched a button that halted the elevator between floors.

She pulled back and looked up at him. ‘I think it’s long past the time we started making plans, don’t you?’

He lifted her hands away from his jacket and faked his best smile. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’

‘And Marcie?’

‘I already told her lawyer that Marcie’s welcome to the house in New England, if she wants it. She can enjoy it while she has the chance.’

He cleared his throat, suddenly business like once more. ‘Listen, there’s something I need to tell you before we go into this meeting. There’s been a major breakdown in security. We’re working to plug it right now, before it has a chance to go public.’

He saw her eyes widen. ‘What happened?’

He started the elevator moving again, and it jerked slightly before continuing on its way. ‘One of your shipments of Founder artefacts has gone AWOL, grabbed off the road well inside the security perimeter, back in Florida,’ he explained, sending a copy of the latest report to her contacts. ‘We’re still trying to figure out how they managed to fly in a VTOL without us even knowing. That means a very high level of technical access to the er,ter systems.’

She nodded, her eyes becoming unfocused for a moment as she received the report. ‘Inez is in charge of local security there,’ she said. ‘Has he got an explanation?’

Fowler cleared his throat. ‘He realizes his neck is on the line over this, but it’s starting to look very much like an inside job, which takes a little of the pressure off him personally. And even if he has been negligent in some way, we’re still going to need him to protect the Arrays as soon as things start to turn bad. Right now we’re following up some possible leads, but it’s going to take time.’

She nodded, and he could see how the weight of what they were doing oppressed her. They would, after all, be abandoning billions to die; a large enough number to be little more than a comfortable abstraction for some, but not perhaps for Amanda.

She shook her head wearily. ‘It just doesn’t get any better, does it?’

Fowler shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. But we’ve managed to track down most of your remaining civilian staff.’

He watched her throat bob as she swallowed. ‘And the ones you haven’t found yet?’

He smiled grimly. ‘They’ll be taken care of soon enough.’

‘Please tell me that’s all the bad news you have.’

‘It’s not, I’m sorry to say.’

She sighed and nodded. ‘Can it wait until after the meeting? I’m not sure how much I can take right now.’

She glanced at her own reflection in the elevator’s mirrored wall, reaching up to touch one perfectly shaped eyebrow as if it were somehow out of alignment. He was forced to recall how Amanda had herself been deemed too great a potential security risk to be allowed to seek refuge in the colonies, and that knowledge still left him desolate. It was only meant to be a brief affair, following his divorce, and instead he had developed such complicated feelings for her – feelings that had already compromised his own chances of survival, given one single devastating discovery he had yet to share with her.

But, as she had said herself, there would be time for all that later.

The elevator doors slid open with a faint hiss, and Amanda flashed him a quick, tight smile before stepping out.

Every time he kissed her or felt her smooth milky skin moving against his own, a part of him wanted to shout out his confession to her, and that she knew too much for their masters to ever allow her to live.

And yet, whenever he summoned up the courage to tell her the truth, his tongue turned to lead and the words refused to emerge from his throat.

Tonight , he thought, after the meeting . It had to be then.

‘All right, first of all, let me bring you up to date on the current state of affairs,’ Fowler began, leaning back in his chair and regarding the various faces arranged around the table. ‘I’d like you all to make sure your contacts are live.’

The only visible decoration in the room was a framed photograph of the Copernicus CTC Array, taken from the vantage of a nearby ridge. It showed a sprawling complex that extended for kilometres around part of the crater wall.

Dana Paxton represented the Coalition Space Command Authority, while Hendrik Lagerlöf fulfilled the same role for the Board of Extraterrestrial Affairs. The current border situation with Mexical meant that Jimenez couldn’t be present. Coalition Navy Captain Anton Inez was also there, of course, taking time out from organizing the evacuation of essential personnel via the Florida Array.

Across the table from Amanda, and the two field investigators reporting directly to Fowler, were Mahindra Kaur and Marcus Fairhurst, representing the European Office of Security and the Three Republics Intelligence Office respectively. Fowler had met these last two only briefly in his capacity as the ASI’s Director of Operations, but they were also the reason this meeting was taking place.

A map of the local and interstellar wormhole networks appeared, floating above the table. A single wormhole gate connected the Florida and Lunar Arrays to each other, but the latter facility housed many further wormhole links connecting Earth’s moon to a dozen other star systems, some up to a hundred light-years distant. Galileo’s collapsed and soon-to-be-re-established gate was represented simply by a dotted line.

‘Part of the reason we’re here today,’ continued Fowler, ‘is to do with the consequences of the unique physics existing within the wormholes, and you’re going to have to forgive me if I go over some points you may already be very familiar with. Mr Kaur, Mr Fairhurst, this being your first time here, would you say you’re reasonably au fait with wormhole physics?’

‘In the very broadest details,’ Kaur replied.

Fairhurst laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘If I’d known there’d be a test, I’d have done some homework.’

Fowler nodded. ‘I’ll try and keep it simple, then. As you know,’ he glanced quickly around the table, ‘the colonies were founded by starships travelling at close to the speed of light, each carrying inside it one end of a wormhole linking it back here to the Moon. However, the way time flows within the wormholes means we can step through to a new star system within months of launching a starship – even though, within our own time-frame back here at home, that starship hasn’t yet arrived at its destination.’