1
Private Towing and Salvage Vessel: Clara
Crew: Five
Cargo: 300,000 tonnes of mineral ore plus unidentified bio-material samples
Course: The Hub
The first thing Gambell thought was that the new diet Kathryn had him on was working, because he’d never before come out of cryosleep not feeling like he’d gone ten rounds with a particularly malicious heavyweight who took great delight in punching him in the gut until his insides turned to water.
As he sat up in the pod, rubbing his eyes and pulling off his monitors and catheter, he actually felt great. No cryo-hangover meant no lost, achy, blurry days when they made planetfall, and maybe he could actually take Kathryn out for their wedding anniversary tomorrow night for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long.
The other pods radiating out from the central life-support hub weren’t yet hissing and opening. Gambell’s always opened first—captain’s prerogative. His daddy always said that the skipper should be up first to welcome the crew in good times, and to protect them in bad. Well, it was good times at last for the crew of the STSV Clara, and for Gambell Reclamations.
The lights on the cryodeck were at full strength already. Gambell could hear them buzzing and flickering to life in the corridors that led off to the communal areas, quarters, and flight deck. Seemed like the Clara was recovering more quickly, as well. Gambell gingerly stepped out of his pod to test the strength of his legs—surprisingly good—and wondered if Kathryn had the old girl on a diet as well.
Gambell yawned and stretched and reached for the stew of post-sleep nutrients that was already gushing into the paper cup in the vending hatch at the front of his tube. He needed to pee, which he knew was totally a psychological thing, because the cryotube had been draining his bladder for the best part of the past three months. Then a shower, and a shave, and get out of these sleep shorts and vest… He sniffed at the front of his vest, suspiciously. Had Kathryn’s diet stopped him sweating?
There was something else, as well.
Was it too quiet?
“Mother?” Gambell called, his voice croaky and his throat dry. “Where’s my wake-up song?”
There was a hum and a pause, and then it started. “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Gambell’s daddy had always come out of cryosleep to it, and so did he after taking over the family business. MU/TH/UR said nothing, though. Gambell’s frown deepened. Was she sulking about something?
She’d always been a bit temperamental, that old computer. For a crazy moment, he wondered if Mother was jealous, then barked a laugh out loud that surprised even him. Computers didn’t have feelings—but she would have seen on the bioscans what Gambell saw after finishing the last planet-side job, before they all went into the chambers. He was glad to have his skipper’s hour before the rest of the crew woke up, to think about it, and decide whether he should tell Kathryn.
“Coffee in my quarters, Mother,” Gambell called, his legs now steady enough to take him out of the sleep deck. “I’m going to freshen up. Start waking the others in fifteen minutes.”
* * *
To be honest, the job had come as a godsend for Gambell Reclamations. They’d been cruising around the Frontier for the best part of five years, picking up bits and pieces of legit work, acting on rumors and tip-offs. Sometimes they were the first to the sites of salvage opportunities, more often than not second or third. It had been a pretty hand-to-mouth existence.
Gambell wasn’t even sure why they’d been approached to do the job on the tiny little satellite at the ass-end of nowhere. It had come through a third-party commissioner, and he neither knew nor cared who was the prime client. It was a lucrative little number, retrieving a cargo of oil-rich minerals from a crashed freighter. They were being paid handsomely, but not a fraction of the worth of the stuff sloshing about in the containers they were towing. After the Oil Wars had cooled off, the old black gold had been in great demand all over the colonies, as well as on Earth. Those that had it were keeping hold of it, and selling it for top dollar.
More than once since they’d done the straightforward salvage job, Gambell had flirted with the idea of just going dark and selling it themselves. But he guessed that whoever was behind the contract had the kind of influence and muscle to make things very, very difficult for them if that happened. Best to stay aboveboard.
Plus, there was the matter of the unexpected bonus they’d picked up on that barren rock.
Gambell toweled off and inspected his face in the mirror. He had the space-farer’s pallor, accentuating the lines on his face and the bags under his eyes. When was the last time he’d seen some sun, other than filtered through the viewing screens? Five years was a long time to be zipping about the frontier. He wondered if he should shave his beard, then decided to leave it. They were all due a break, and after what he’d seen when he put the others into cryosleep—”Be the last man to sleep and the first man to wake,” he heard his daddy’s voice say—there were some serious talks to be had.
Question was, what was the protocol on this? It felt only right that it should be Kathryn to tell him she was pregnant, not the other way round, but when you knew something like that, what were you meant to do? Wait another month or however long it took her body to tell her what was going on, and then act surprised when she told him?
He dressed in his fatigues and buckled on his watch. Mother should have started the wake-up for the crew thirty minutes ago. They’d be emerging from cryosleep now.
“Mother, get some coffee on in the mess.”
Gambell felt that dry, electric pause again, that hum of almost… uncertainty? Which was ridiculous. MU/TH/UR was an old AI, nothing like the sophisticated ones they had now—and which Gambell could never afford. He’d grown up with her. She was attuned to his ways, and knew more about him than even Kathryn. Even so, she was still just a—
The lights dimmed and switched to a slowly pulsing red, just as an alarm began to sound in a low, insistent, whoop-whoop-whoop.
“Mother? What the hell?” Gambell said, pulling on his boots. But it wasn’t Mother that answered. The intercom crackled into life and it was Currie’s deep, Southern voice that rumbled out.
“Skipper? You dressed? Either way, you better get your ass to the flight deck pronto.”
* * *
“And where the hell is that?” DJ said, running a hand through her close-cropped hair and glaring at the viewing window as though the planet filling it was some kind of personal affront.
“Sure as hell not where we’re supposed to be,” Simpson said, his thin, pale hands cupped around his coffee.
DJ turned her gaze on him. “No shit,” she said witheringly. “Why is it you’re on this crew again? It ain’t for your incisive insights or your sparkling personality or your—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Currie said, hunched over a monitor and saving Gambell the job of intervening in the endless, infinite squabble-fest that Paul Simpson and DJ Roberts had been carrying on as long as they’d been on the crew.
“David, where are we?” Gambell said to Currie. He glanced at Kathryn, standing with her arms folded over her stomach, silhouetted in front of the big viewing window, against the yellow orb of the planet that was most decidedly not the Hub.
“LV-593,” Currie said, looking up at him. “Weyland Isles System.”
“The fuck?” DJ said. “That means we’re… what, six fucking weeks out from the Hub?”
“Eight, more like,” Simpson said. He turned his thin face to Gambell. “Why’d you wake us up, skip?”
It was a damn good question. Gambell felt Kathryn looking at him. They’d not had much chance to talk since she woke, but she had mentioned that she’d been throwing up. She put it down to a bad cryosleep, yet Gambell thought he knew better. Now wasn’t the time, of course, but he felt more disquiet than usual that things weren’t following the ordained path.
“Mother,” he said measuredly. “Why’d you wake me early?”
That pause again. Like she wanted to tell him something, but didn’t know how. He pushed the thought away. At least he knew why he hadn’t got the usual cryo-hangover now. He’d only been under for a little over a fortnight.
“I had an overriding… directive,” Mother said.
Gambell frowned. “From?”
“I… cannot say.”
“The fuck?” DJ spat.
Gambell suddenly had a very bad feeling. “DJ, Simpson, go and check the cargo.”
“I checked it,” Currie said. “We’re still towing.”
“Not that cargo.”
DJ nodded, hauled the thin frame of Simpson off his stool, and dragged him off the flight deck.
“Mother,” Gambell said evenly. “Who did the override come from?”
“I… cannot say,” Mother repeated. “I’m sorry, Jamie.”
Jamie. Mother hadn’t called him that since he was a kid. Did she sound… sad?
“There’s something wrong,” Kathryn murmured, sliding on to the stool Simpson had vacated. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
“It’s fine,” Gambell whispered. “As soon as we get to the Hub, I’ll get Mother looked at and—”
“I don’t mean that, Jamie,” Kathryn said. She still had her arms wrapped around her waist. “I mean something feels different… inside. Inside me.”
Gambell opened his mouth to say he had no idea what. Then the intercom spluttered.
“Skip,” DJ crackled. “We have one fuck of a problem.”
* * *
In the cargo bay there was a bank of mini-cryotubes, mainly for the transportation of small animals. Sometimes the colonies traded livestock, and one time the Clara had been paid a ridiculous amount of money to take a rich old lady and her five Chihuahuas to Earth. They’d used twenty-seven of them for the unexpected little bonus cargo they’d found in that crashed freighter.
All of them were now empty, the plasteel fronts smashed.
Gambell stared wordlessly for a moment at the carnage. The planet where they’d salvaged the freighter had a sub-Earth atmosphere, but they’d suited up fully anyway, given the storm that had been raging and the marked acidity of the precipitation. Which was fortunate, because in the hold of the freighter, which they’d given a cursory sweep after attaching the towing containers filled with ore, they’d found… well, he didn’t know what they were.
Which was the whole point.
Eggs, had been his first thought. Soft and organic. Pulsing slightly. About as tall as his waist. Not hugely pleasant to handle, even with their thick gloves. There were twenty-seven of them in total, and both Currie and Kathryn had wanted to leave them, but Gambell had a hunch. Whatever these things were, they were going to be worth something to somebody. Biotech was quite the thing at the moment. Everybody had heard the tales of black goo raining down on frontier worlds, even if nobody really knew what it was or what happened afterward. But the word in the bars and on the salvage chatter streams was that everybody was looking for bioweapons.
True, these egg things didn’t appear particularly dangerous, but what was he, an expert in this kind of shit? Never look a gift horse in the mouth, his daddy always said. So Gambell had had the crew load them up into the mini-cryos for the journey to the Hub. Once he’d delivered the ore he’d start putting the feelers out to find a buyer for whatever the hell these things were.
Or at least, that had been the plan. Now there were twenty-seven busted mini-cryos, and no eggs.
“Maybe they hatched,” Simpson said, looking around warily. As though he expected to see… Gambell had no idea what sort of thing would come out of an egg like that, if they were indeed eggs. A bird seemed doubtful. He got a mental image of something spider-like, which he brushed away.
“Mother!” Gambell yelled. “What am I looking at, here?”
It seemed as if there was a trembling in the air, but Mother said nothing. Gambell felt Kathryn’s heavy stare on him, and did his best to ignore it.
“The fucking things hatched and broke out and they’re running around somewhere,” Simpson said, his eyes wide.
“Dick.” DJ sighed. “If they were eggs there’d still be eggs wouldn’t there? Even if they’d hatched. Or… eggshells.”
“What fucking things?” Currie said, an undertone of menace in the big man’s voice. “What do you know, Simpson?”
“I hear stuff,” Simpson said, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “We all hear stuff, right?”
Kathryn was standing by one of the empty mini-cryos, fingering the glass shards in the broken panel. Gambell wanted to yell to her to put it down. God knows what those things were, and what… what chemicals were on them. She had to be careful now. In her condition.
“Jamie,” she said, turning to him and frowning. “Most of the glass is on the inside. Nothing broke out of these cryos. Someone smashed them from the outside.”
“Mother!” Gambell roared, looking around as though he could see the presence of the invisible AI in the air around him. “Who has been on my ship? Were we boarded?”
“Override forbids—”
“Mother!”
They all looked at him, head thrown back, fists clenched, the scream dying on his lips.
“Jamie, I’m scared,” Kathryn whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Mother said, and Gambell couldn’t deny sensing a sadness in her electronic voice. “I’m sorry. You should make your peace with your gods and say your goodbyes.”
The Clara had been bought by Gambell’s father Dennis when his wife died and he sold up every inch of property they had on Earth, ploughing his last cent into setting up Gambell Reclamations. Dennis had left his only son with his sister until Jamie was nine, and then took him out into space and taught him the ropes of the business he would inherit when the old man died—which happened ten years ago.
Gambell could barely remember his mother, and couldn’t recall their life on Earth much at all. He’d been brought up on the ship, he’d spent most of his life in space. The Clara was his home.
Whump!
The charges clamped to the drive at the rear of the ship exploded, setting off a chain reaction that caused the Clara to list sharply to starboard, ripping a hole in the hull. The ship went into a spin toward the planet below them, a series of smaller explosions bursting through the vessel, taking all the major networks and life-support systems off-line.
When the lights went out in the cargo bay, Gambell drew Kathryn close to him and told her he loved her, and would always love her, and that he was sorry for what had happened to her, to him, and to the life that grew in her belly. And he held her tight as she fought and wailed until it was all over, and the Clara was no more.
2
Everyone told her to leave it alone, which of course only made her more determined not to.
Even her daddy, weary and grieving and with the stuffing knocked out of him, sighed when she told him what she was planning and rubbed his eyes.
“Cher, honey, just let things lie.”
It took four commissioning editors saying no before one said, “Yes, well, maybe, let’s just see what you turn up. I can’t give you a commission, but I can promise to look at what you get. You know you’re poking a hornet’s nest here, right?”
She wasn’t at all surprised to find a handwritten note under her windshield wiper two days before she left Earth, written in solid block capitals.
SMART MONEY
SAYS DROP IT
It was like nobody really knew Cher Hunt at all.
One person who would like to know her better was the guy with the beer belly and triple chin who’d been casting lascivious glances at her as they climbed into the cryosleep pods, just after leaving Earth’s atmosphere. Not for the first time did she wish she had enough money to fly business class instead of coach. At least then she’d get a private cryo chamber and not have to feel self-conscious in the stupid grey vest and pants they made you wear on the communal sleep deck. It was only three weeks out to the Weyland Isles anyway. She’d have been happy to sit that out awake.
But RyanSpace ran its vessels on a shoestring and didn’t have the crew or on-board infrastructure to deal with non-sleeping passengers. So here she was, waking up with her usual cryo hangover and the first person she sees is Mr. Beer Belly, staring at her from the tube opposite hers, rearranging himself in his shorts. She knew “cryo-wood” was a thing for guys, which is why they always usually stalled a bit getting out of their tubes until the women had cleared out. She swore to God that if the guy didn’t stop rummaging around in his shorts and staring at her, she was going to go over and kick his ass.
While she stood in line for the showers, Cher scrolled through the news feeds, more hungry for updates than her stomach was for food. They said a week was a long time in politics; three weeks was a lifetime in journalism. Another reason she hated cryosleep. Yes, her body was only minutes older than when she’d set off from Earth, but the political situation back home and across the colonies hadn’t been frozen in the same way.
There was a joint-agency effort underway to reclaim the outer suburbs of Canberra and rid them of radiation poisoning, three years after the end of the Australia Wars. A Globe Corporation whistleblower who claimed that her former employer was locked in a “silent war” with rivals Weyland-Yutani had been found dead in a New York alleyway.
Nothing about her sister Shy.
Nothing about Hasanova. Not that there was any reason there should be. It had been six months since the hearing at The Hague concluded that Captain Kylie Duncan of the Colonial Marines had nothing to answer for in the wake of the widespread deaths on the Iranian colony, including those of Shy Hunt and the rest of her colleagues at McAllen Integrations, who were only on Hasanova to set up environmental systems for the massive data storage facility there.
Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? The whole thing had been a total whitewash, and while nobody was talking about the actual events on Hasanova, the ripples were still spreading out through the colonies. The Independent Core Systems Colonies had declared war on the United Americas over the desultory inquiry, and while it had been more of a war of words than all-out Armageddon, as some had feared, the political crisis was rumbling on, and showing no signs of reaching any kind of resolution.
On Earth, at least. There was news filtering in from the outer colonies that things were a lot less diplomatic there. Raiding missions, ships being shot down, and the endless third-, fourth- and fifth-hand tales of bioweaponry being deployed, the black goo raining down on remote colony worlds. Nobody knew what it was or who was supposed to be throwing this shit around, or even what it did. There were no direct reports of what was happening.
Just rumors.
Often being a journalist was like holding up a set of weighing scales and trying to achieve some kind of balance between the conspiracy nuts on one side, who believed and talked about anything, and on the other side the stuff that was actually happening but which was being suppressed.
But black goo wasn’t Cher Hunt’s responsibility, or even of any interest to her, at least not right now. What was her responsibility was finding out exactly why her sister had died on Hasanova. The official line was “collateral damage during a covert Colonial Marines operation.” That might do for the final report, to be filed away and never looked at again, but for Cher it raised more questions than it answered.
What happened on Hasanova wasn’t just the latest salvo in an age-old spat between America and Iran. It was something else. And, after the final day of the hearing in the Hague, she had vowed to find out what.
* * *
They were six hours out of LV-593, which filled the monitor screen in the passenger liner’s cramped arrival deck. Remarkably Earth-like in appearance, though a tenth of the size of home. It had been a dream of a find for the Three World Empire, located square in the habitable zone of a yellow sun. She could see why the British loved it. As if on cue, the image of the approaching planet fizzed out on the big screen and was replaced by a promotional video for their destination.
“Welcome to New Albion!” a voice declared in a plummy, upper-class English accent. The seat-belt sign above her flashed on and Cher fastened up for the descent. “You are imminently about to arrive on the jewel of the Weyland Isles colony world network, a temperate paradise that’s just like home!”
The camera swooped through a very polished but very obvious artificial representation of the New Albion colony. There was a wide river flowing right through the middle of a green, lush park, surrounded by ordered avenues lined with trees, and streets full of widely spaced townhouses. There was even a recreation of Big Ben set against the blue sky, and in the hazy distance a ring of high-rise apartment blocks surrounded the city center. Cher was reminded of New Delhi back on Earth, where the British raj had tried to recreate an idealized vision of London in the stifling heat of a land that was not theirs to claim.
“Throughout its long and illustrious history, Britain has had a reputation of expanding throughout all possible territories, bringing peace, technology and our great sense of fair play to people and lands at first on Earth, and now across the galaxy. The British pioneering spirit has been forged into a relentless drive to colonize space and disseminate our values far beyond the limits of the home planet over which we once held sway with a benign and magnanimous rule.”
Jeez, Cher thought. She knew that New Albion had been basically colonized by a clutch of the richest Old Money families from Britain, but not that they were buying so much into the old British Empire bullshit. Cher knew her history. Far from being a “benign and magnanimous rule,” the British Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been essentially a mass invasion of pretty much every country on Earth outside of Europe, wherever they could get boots on the ground.
The footage changed to a procession of faces smiling at the camera and trotting out platitudes about how wonderful it was to live and work on New Albion. A lot more diverse than the old British Empire, Cher guessed. There, the black and brown faces would have been either crushed underfoot in their homelands or put to work, actually or practically slaves, to feed the money-sucking beast of London.
“I work in data analysis,” an Indian woman said.
“I work in transport,” a black man said.
“I work in the coal mines,” a young white man said with a cheeky grin.
“We work for New Albion,” the three said in unison, and the camera pulled back to reveal a huge crowd of them, waving and cheering. “We all work for New Albion!” the whole group of them chorused, and the picture cut to an animation of the breeze rippling through the trees in an idyllic park.
“They work for New Albion… Why not join them, and make New Albion work for you?” the plummy voice said. “Immigration applications are now open. And the best of British to you!”
The monitor switched back to the planetary image, now filling the screen. Cher would have to endure that promo film at least another half dozen times before they made planetfall. Flying coach with RyanSpace meant she was crushed up against passengers on either side of her, both of whom had resolutely laid claim to the armrests with their elbows. Across the aisle she saw Mr. Beer Belly hollering in a southern English accent to one of the hosts, demanding that they bring him a gin and tonic.
Cher dug into her pocket and pulled out a sleep mask.
This was going to be a long six hours.
* * *
Cher didn’t know exactly what she was going to find on New Albion, but she did know she had to be there. Four weeks earlier, a postcard had arrived at her home in New York—an actual paper postcard, sent by actual post across the galaxy. Three questions had occurred to Cher when she received it and looked on the front image of the raging whirlpool known as Charybdis.
How long had this taken to get from Hasanova?
Why the hell did Hasanova even have postcards, which suggested an actual goddam gift shop, in a data storage facility?
And, of course, who the hell had sent it?
On the back, in the space to the left opposite Cher’s address, it simply said “NEW ALBION” in blocky handwritten capital letters.
From that point it had taken her a week to get the commission—and arrange funding that would allow her to book passage to LV-593—and now here she was, waking from an uneasy doze as the trademark tooting horn recording of RyanSpace announced that they had landed at the terminus.
“This is your captain speaking, thank you for flying RyanSpace to New Albion, where the local time is 10:23 AM and the weather is rain with an outside temperature of 16 degrees Celsius. We hope you enjoyed your flight and wish you well on your onward journey.”
Cher filed off the ship with the rest of the passengers, putting space and bodies between her and Mr. Beer Belly, who—with six hours’ worth of gin and tonic inside him—was weaving unsteadily and bouncing off the walls. ...
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