Fortress Sol

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Space Opera; Colonization

Synopsis

Elinor, aged about 30, toils on the innermost planet Mercury, exploited as a vast mine of metals and minerals. This is a life of enslavement, of hard physical labour. But now she has a baby son, Alfa. Alfa will be physically strong, but also shows signs of high intelligence - and so he may be selected to be taken to Saturn, where is to be found the highest technology in the Solar System - and a decent life.
But as it turns out labourers are going to be in more demand when Alfa is ready to start work, aged about seven. Elinor can't stand the idea of a life like hers for her baby son - and so she cuts off his right hand, rendering him of no use for manual labour.

The Solar System is as it is because, in the 25th century, the Scavengers, alien resource-hunters, arrived in the outer System and demolished Neptune, outermost of the major planets. Then it was discovered that the comet cloud beyond the planets is the rubble of an earlier predation, made before humans could observe and understand. If they have come twice, there is a danger that the Scavengers will return again to pick off more planets - eventually, Earth.

And as he grows Alfa comes to suspect that Fortress Sol is built on lies inside as well as outside . . .

Release date: September 26, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 480

Sample

The lumes are my own irresponsible invention, based on musings about how the useful life of the universe and its contents could be extended. If they don’t exist, perhaps they should be invented. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Early speculations on exploiting black holes for useful energy – the ‘Penrose process’ – were published by R. Penrose and R. M. Floyd, ‘Extraction of Rotational Energy from a Black Hole’, Nature Physical Science vol. 229, p. 177 (1971).

I discussed the social challenges of a ‘worldship’, a ship containing its crew for generations, in C. Cockell, ed., The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty, Oxford University Press (2022).

Useful and informed speculation about archaeological remains of humanity on Earth in the far future was given by Jan Zalasiewicz in The Earth After Us, Oxford University Press (2008).

The idea of covering Venus with an artificial buoyant ‘cloudscape’ was inspired by ‘Cloud Continents: Terraforming Venus Efficiently by Means of a Floating Artificial Surface’, by Alex R. Howe, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society vol. 75, pp. 68–75 (2022).

The idea of enclosing much of Mars under a roof has been studied by Richard Taylor (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society vol. 45, pp. 341–52 (1992)).

A recent review of what is known of the ‘ice giant’ outer planets is ‘Uranus and Neptune: Origin, Evolution and Internal Structure’, by R. Helled et al., Space Science Review 216:38 (2020). Though many such planets have now been discovered orbiting other stars, the ice giants are not well understood, with only one space probe having visited them – Voyager 2, which made flybys in 1986 and 1989 – but at time of writing more ambitious international probes are being planned.

The ‘solar wrap’ idea for extending the useful lifetime of the Sun was developed by astronomer Martin Beech, in Rejuvenating the Sun and Avoiding Other Global Catastrophes, Springer (2008). I had previously sketched the idea of cloaked stars in my story ‘Lakes of Light’ (2002; collected in Resplendent, Gollancz (2006)).

The star Ross 128, eleven light-years away, actually exists, as does its planet Ross 128b.

The speculative designs for antimatter-rocket spacecraft described here are mostly based on the relevant discussion in Frontiers of Propulsion Science, ed. M. Millis and G. Davis, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., Reston, USA (2009) (pp. 73ff); and see Indistinguishable from Magic by Robert L. Forward, Baen Books (1995).

On the astronomer Johannes Kepler, David K. Love’s Kepler and the Universe, Prometheus (2015) is a fine recent biography.

All errors and misapprehensions are of course my sole responsibility.

Stephen BaxterNorthumberlandSeptember 2024

We’re following the light, that’s all. Just following the light …

Rab Callis, as he grew, would always believe that he could remember that nightmarish flight with his mother. A flight through the aerial catacombs of Venus. And how that flight ended.

That was even though he could not yet have been two years old – years measured by Earth standard, as counted by the Unity of Mankind, the body which governed the Solar System from Solar Wrap to System Mask, as the proverb had it.

By Earth standard. A measure, more cynical Venusians would say, devised for a planet rotating two hundred times faster than their own, a planet now largely abandoned. So what use was that? …

So in a sense there was no surprise for Rab – after he had grown into a position, junior but responsible, aboard the Mask, his permanent station – no surprise when he was finally able to access the files held on him, as on each of the System’s teeming billions, living and dead, in finally finding a confirmation of the truth of his mother’s flight, and its grisly culmination.

She really had done this thing to him.

His own mother. The flight. The – act.

But that wasn’t enough. It was easy to confirm the facts, barely remembered – but what about the motivation? What desperation could have driven any mother to such an end?

There was little about her to be found in the records. Nothing much beyond the bare details of the fact, the act itself, the consequences – the subsequent banishment of Elinor Callis, for that was her given name, to the pits of Mercury. In fact Rab found little more than the record made by the officer, the Lieutenant, who had tracked her flight, had apprehended her – had resolved the situation as best he could, it seemed. A brief, ghastly epilogue as she was prosecuted for her crimes.

And after that, a slow but pervasive impact on Rab’s whole life.

Eventually Rab even found the officer’s name: Constable Jeo Planter, a solid Earth-dynasty pedigree. Three years older than Rab’s mother, in fact. Later even met the man …

Of the incident itself Rab knew nothing more, could remember nothing and knew little for sure. He had been an infant.

And yet he thought he did remember that desperate climb to the light. And his mother’s voice, reassuring, deceptive, so soft as she dragged him on, or bundled him in her arms …

‘Just following the light,’ Elinor said, growing breathless as she climbed. ‘Just following the light … the lovely glow of all those lumes, up in the sky …’

But just now they were still deep in the underbelly of the berg, and were climbing a steep, winding stair, the only light coming from her own headtorch, a splash ahead, her own shadow below. This deep in the lowest uninhabited sections of the berg – with only a few levels of workers’ dormitories below – there was no handrail of any kind, and the walls and the step surfaces were slick, smooth – thankfully dry. But her boots, flat-soled, were not made for climbing, and were prone to slippages even so.

She just had to climb this sky-berg one step at a time …

(Eventually Rab would learn the ident code of the berg itself: UY-HG-TDFC. One of a hundred billion that crowded the upper air of Venus, shoulder to shoulder.)

Climbing, climbing.

Little Rab was tucked up in his harness on her chest. He might be safer on her back, she knew, but she liked having him in front of her, so she could wrap her arms around him to protect him – so he could see her, and she him. And she promised herself that she would break her arm rather than fall on top of him.

Climbing, climbing. But this was Venus, with a lesser gravity than Earth – so the climbing was easier. Like Rab himself, Elinor had been born and raised here. Humans had been living on Venus – and rebuilding it – for centuries now, but not long enough, the scientists said, for significant adaptations in the human body stock to have occurred yet – especially since mechanical aids made it unnecessary, in any case, to have the body start evolving away from the Earth-spawned template.

In her own time, Elinor had spent too long in the light gravity of Mercury, a smaller world yet. But years on Venus had made her strong again.

If they fell, she was confident she could protect her son.

Mostly confident. She stepped cautiously as she climbed.

All the surfaces were the same. Slick and slippery. Pretty much everything in this interior space was manufactured from carbon-fibre constructs – as was the whole of the great berg and its fellows, in their immense interlocking clusters that floated on and contained the dense lower atmosphere of Venus. Carbon fibre because all of this had been manufactured from the thick dense air of Venus itself, and that was, or had mostly been, carbon dioxide.

She imagined people rarely came this way, save in emergencies: a route connecting the lower chambers of the berg where workers like Elinor lived and worked, and the upper surface, the playground of the rich and privileged. She sighed, ‘Otherwise these damn stairs would be more human friendly. How about a handrail?’

It got slowly harder. Soon her back was playing up, that old deep stiffness in the lower spine. A souvenir of her stay on Mercury, a relic of an ancient injury. She’d rather not be taking these risks, making this ludicrous flight at all, of course. But she couldn’t see any alternative right now. No alternative if she was to save little Rab from being taken away from her, and cast down in his turn into the pit that was Mercury, that ball of hot metal circling the wrapped-up Sun.

And so she climbed on.

She glanced down at little Rab’s round face, wide-eyed, staring up at her, his mouth open. She had him in a sling on her chest, his legs dangling down. It wasn’t as convenient an arrangement as she had hoped it would be when she had improvised it from other gear – in fact the harness was a relic of her own Mercury-surface suit, intended for working in the mines, a souvenir.

At least it was still tough enough to hold baby Rab’s weight, she thought. He seemed to be growing fast and strong – not that that was a good thing in the circumstances. It was possible that she couldn’t have attempted this ridiculous climb much later in his development.

Now, staring up at her, he was pushing his thumb into his mouth – his right thumb, his right hand. She sighed. ‘Make the most of it, kid. Because if the worst comes to the worst—’ But it hadn’t come to that, not yet. That wide stare. She could see the intelligence in those deep, hypnotic eyes. ‘You’re too smart for this world, kid. Too smart for me …’

Something in that made him smile, and his whole face lit up.

And she lost it, just for a moment. She crumpled into tears, folded over him – one hand held out flat against the wall to keep stabilised.

She sat on a step, and sat him up on her lap.

‘Plenty of time for breaks, kid,’ she mumbled. ‘Seven kilometres from bottom to top. Either they’re on to us or they’re not. And if they are they’ll no doubt be tracking us with exquisite precision.’ She faked a big beaming grin. ‘My only hope is that they’ll fuck up more than I have, and we’ll get away with it, without my playing my wild card …’

The cuss word seemed to make him smile.

And with her heart melting like a snowflake on Mercury, she fumbled in a pocket, pulled out a bulb of water. He took the nipple hungrily, reaching for the bottle with his hands, those precious, intricate little hands …

‘I’m teaching you bad habits, little boy. Or the wrong habits.’

Hold it together, Elinor.

He was so young. She’d waited until he was weaned, at least, before embarking on this desperate escape attempt. Still, he was barely two. But already the various ability-potential tests he’d had to take – so soon after his birth – had mapped out his career, and his fate.

A fate she was determined to defy. She shouldn’t wait any longer.

He wasn’t done with the water, and was playing with the bottle with those tiny, precious hands. She couldn’t take her eyes off his hands, such was her mood.

He had always been a curious little boy, it seemed to her, from the moment he opened his eyes, in her arms. The preliminary psych-potential had confirmed as much. It was ironic that, she suspected, much of that potential had come from the father, now a senior manager at Caloris on Mercury, who himself had been the subject of what had seemed a harsh allocation decision, a double-length assignment. After her own assignment to Mercury, Elinor had returned to Venus, pregnant. Her lover had never complained about his fate, her reassignment, his being kept apart from his son after she’d gone – not to Elinor. All the way up to his own premature death.

And now, her son.

They won’t take him too. Mercury can’t have him.

Rested, her determination reinforced, she tucked away the bottle, got Rab settled in his harness, and stood up cautiously. After a grizzled protest, he nestled against her chest once more.

And she continued her plod upwards along this steep, apparently interminable stair.

As she settled back into her rhythm, Rab quickly drifted off into a kind of half-doze, as he glared around at the mostly nondescript surfaces around them.

Nondescript, maybe, but not unchanging, and before setting out on this desperate flight Elinor had worked out a route that ought, she thought, to keep her away from the more populated volumes in this particular berg.

Berg: a simple word, a word little Rab might learn soon. He was a bright little boy.

Berg: in the context of Venus that word summed up something magnificent – or hubristic, she sometimes thought. A berg: a segment of the artificial world humans had built around this planet.

The bergs were a planet-wide clustering of balloon-like vessels, like upended airships, that literally floated on the crushingly dense, warm air below, far above the lethally hot ground of the planet itself. All seven kilometres long, crammed together, side by side, built to support a habitable surface above, they were a geometric layer of huge interlocking segments.

That was where the privileged lived. On that comfortable upper tier. Even the gravity was about right, kinder, in fact, than Earth’s.

It was a world of engineering. At the vessels’ base, the air was thirty-six times as dense as Earth normal; at the top, the density was just about Earth-normal – and Earthlike, with nitrogen, oxygen imported by humans or processed from Venus’s primordial atmosphere …

It was all a legacy of ancient engineering, it was said, put together before the Solar Wrap had been assembled within the orbit of Mercury to harvest all of the Sun’s energy, before the Mask had been spun around the Solar System, just inside the orbit of ruined Neptune – before the invasion from deep space. No, the remaking of Venus had been earlier than that, an epic venture that must have caught the imagination of generations – only to be dwarfed by the tremendous feats that followed, when humans had even blocked out the light of the Sun, and had hidden from the stars themselves.

When people had first ventured away from Earth, their attention had naturally been drawn to the inner planets, and their moons, if any. And for the inhabitants of the third planet, Venus, second planet from the Sun, must have seemed a prime target for exploitation, for colonisation. Venus was a world of iron and rock, similar in size to Earth. But, being so close to the Sun, Venus had had a surface temperature some four hundred degrees higher than Earth – any water had long been boiled off – and an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, ninety times as massive as Earth’s. Oh, and its ‘day’ was over a hundred Earth days long.

The first generations of pioneers and their robot predecessors had battled these conditions with little success – until they observed that while Venus might be an inferno on the ground, it was Earthlike in the clouds – some fifty kilometres high – where the air pressure was about that at Earth’s sea level, the cloud temperature no worse than at Earth’s surface. The upper air itself was usable – so long as you filtered out the acid clouds.

So while mining machines toiled on the surface far below, people started to live in airships, floating in the sky. Such ships grouped together, soon linked to make floating islands, the bergs, which huddled together in great herds …

Why not go further? If you had the resources, why not cover up the whole ground? Why not make a new surface up in the sky, where it was moist and temperate, enveloping the whole world, leaving the useless rocky ground far below, and the remnant bulk of the lethal atmosphere, all that carbon dioxide, useful only to be mined for its carbon …

So, for centuries, generations had lived in these crowding cloud cities, high above the planet’s glowing-hot surface, fed by sunlight and water from the sky, and by metals and minerals extracted by robots from the ferocious Venusian landscape below – a landscape studiously ignored save when ancient volcanoes erupted, and the jostling bergs moved or rose to escape damage.

Farms and cities, floating in the sky.

So successful were these enterprises that Venus had soon started to export food to Earth. The mother world was under its own agricultural pressures, as ecologies were reconstructed – as farmland was replanted with forest and savannah, some of it for the first time in millennia …

That was before Neptune.

The attack on the ice giant and all that followed – the dousing of the Sun, the expulsion of the stars – meant little immediately to Venus, or the inhabitants of its island-crust world. The engineers simply spun a new transport web around the planet, indeed the planets, that allowed lumes, carefully controlled, to shed their mysterious light on the roof-world of Venus, emulating that of the shrouded Sun. And eventually a new transport net, the Frame, brought water across the Solar System from ice moons, water that rained down on Venus – and turned it into the breadbasket of the Solar System. That, and a workshop. As for the bergs, aside from their basic function of supporting the habitable surface, the bergs contained a host of necessary infrastructure – storage, sewage processing, waste disposal, air and water processing.

Population boomed. But even as the bergs grew downward in sophistication, so there was a population crisis on the upper sunlit roof-worlds above.

Soon, the workers who maintained this strange planet had to live inside one of the great bergs. Lived and worked there. Elinor and her son among them, like generations before them.

And now the Unity police were coming to take her son away, to cast him down into Mercury, Elinor could think of only one means of escape from this aerial maze. If she was to find sanctuary, there was nowhere inside the berg, her home, to hide. She needed to reach the top deck, the roof, the lifted landscape of a transformed Venus. There, in an environment not so heavily patrolled and controlled as her own level – one where no one knew her – she might find refuge, for herself and Rab.

All this was a horribly vague plan. To hide among the rich and powerful and privileged?

And to get to that refuge above, she had to climb.

It was all she had. Save one fallback, she reminded herself. One fallback if the worst came to the worst … She struggled to her feet, secured Rab, and resumed her climb.

That was when she became aware that she was being tracked.

She froze.

It had been an echo that wasn’t quite an echo.

Coming from below.

Not an echo of her own clattering at steps. Not the metallic chime as her harnesses hit the ladder. Not even an echo of Rab’s occasional gurgles.

It was all unravelling. So quickly. She knew that she was already in trouble. Even by making this unauthorised climb so far, especially with a baby in hand, she was breaking several ordinances. Most probably she could be arrested, apprehended.

Her baby taken away, even earlier than otherwise.

She stared into Rab’s intelligent, inquisitive eyes. He gurgled, burped and smiled at her. She’d had to try, she told herself, had to save him if she could, given the slimmest hope of evading Mercury.

And on the other hand she wasn’t actually apprehended yet.

There was still a chance. There was no reason not to go on as long as she could, until there wasn’t the slightest chance of winning through. As long as Rab came to no harm.

So she took a deep breath, and climbed up further, through the next hatch.

And emerged into another vast, enclosed space.

She saw shadowy forms high above her. There was plenty of plumbing up there, she noticed. It was like looking up into the stomach cavity of some giant anatomical model: memories stirred, of ancient emergency-medicine training on Mercury.

‘This isn’t a lived-in place,’ she murmured to a wide-eyed Rab – she would swear he was curious, staring around. ‘This bit, all this complicated stuff, supports places you would live in. Up there, beyond the ceiling. All those pipes taking power in and waste heat out, and water and food in and sewage out, and air to be breathed in and out and then cleansed of all the carbon dioxide—’

‘Those who work here call such places catacombs,’ came a male voice.

It sounded as if it came from the bottom of the latest ladder she had used. Close, then.

Elinor grabbed her baby and flinched back.

The voice called again. ‘You are Elinor Callis?’

She closed her eyes. Was the game up already? ‘You know who I am?’

‘May I come up? I mean you no harm.’

‘I – do I have a choice?’

‘Good question. All the choices you do have, apart from surrendering, will probably have worse outcomes for you, if not for your baby.’

‘I don’t know who you are.’

She saw him now. He was a dim, blocky form climbing slowly out of the darkness beneath.

‘My name is Planter. Jeo Planter. My rank—’

‘Constable.’

‘Good guess. Can you see my insignia?’

‘No. Do I know you?’

‘Not personally. Rab’s nursery alerted my commanders when you …’ His voice tailed off.

‘You can say it. When I abducted my baby.’

‘Baby Rab. He’s safe? Well? Uninjured?’

She flared at that. ‘He’s safe. He’s with me.’

‘I had no doubt. It was a formality for me to ask. But I have to ask even so. The only harm done in the eyes of the state, so far, is that he has been taken away from his nursery school before role allocation. But I’m guessing that’s the problem here. The allocation itself. I’ve seen the records. You protested against what seemed to you to be a likely unjust life-vocation assignment, based on his age-group tests. And I see you were given the same assignment, at a similar age. To Mercury. You came back after—’

‘Have you been to Mercury?’

‘Not to work—’

‘Then you don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘I have been to Mercury. An orientation trip; we get a lot of refugees from down there … It is a mine. Would you say that? A planetary mine. Closest of all planets to the Sun, it is a world of nearly molten lava. Of course now that the Mask has blocked the solar insolation—’

She said, ‘A world of cooling lava. Five billion years of heating cannot be shed in a few centuries. A human can’t venture out on the surface save in the heaviest of protective gear …’ She was speaking rapidly, she knew. Letting it spill out. ‘You may say the mining of metals is largely automated there. Of course it is. But in such conditions, even after centuries of development, still a human presence is necessary. And the toll of accidents and deaths, even today—’

‘I’m aware of the statistics,’ he said softly.

‘Statistics are one thing. The misery inflicted on the humans sentenced to serve there, as I once did—’

‘Such an assignment is not a sentence but a duty to be fulfilled—’

‘You parrot jargon. I served there. You know this. I survived. Others of my cadre, of my friendship groups, did not. The death toll is shockingly high. And now my son—’ Her voice caught; she clenched, refusing to break down. Strength was the only option. Especially if her plan, such as it was, had to be followed to its bitter end. ‘And I’d still be there, labouring in those damn mines, if not for my own injury.’

‘Yes, I read the file. A minor back injury. And so you were reallocated to the sky farms here … For all our engineering prowess, all our experience, we still need people to work down here, and frail human bodies still come to harm. And yet Mercury with its metal-mining is a linchpin of the whole Solar System economy. And it’s a source of other materials, such as silicates in the crust – did you know that? That is why we must go there.’

‘We.’ She made the word sound as bitter as she could. ‘You need not go. I have been. My son will not go.’

‘But if he is needed there – and we all must serve the Unity where we are needed, and where we are fit to serve—’

‘He can serve the Unity here. I know what Venus is. And I know that this world of floating farms was built, or modified, before the Solar Wrap was completed. When the sunlight was lost, a network of lumes was installed to match the lost solar insolation … I know this. So let my son be a farmer, here, on the planet where he was born. Let him feed all those other hordes as they pursue their own noble goals.’

That sour remark made the constable laugh. But he pressed the point. ‘And if we have enough farmers?’

‘Then let him learn other skills. You’ve seen his preliminary assays – you must have. He is intelligent, or will be. He will have a technical intelligence I do not share – or you, I dare say, constable – and he would prove to be a great asset. More so than in what amounts to manual labour in the lava fields of Mercury. Send him to the Wrap!’

‘They have no need of him at the Solar Wrap. Not when he matures—’

‘The Mask, then.’ She thought she heard her voice catch at that.

And it seemed as if the constable reacted to that. ‘The edge of the Solar System. Where he will be as far from you as it is possible to be?’

‘I will have to accept that.’ She stared at him frankly. ‘I think you are not without – empathy, Constable Planter. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. But I would sooner he be far from me and safe, than close to me and in danger: in the dull, stupid, inevitable danger of the Mercury mines.’

He seemed to muse over all this. ‘This cannot end well, you know,’ he murmured. ‘I mean, without your giving up the boy one way or another.’ He waved a hand. ‘It wasn’t the most foolish idea to hide out on the top deck. Criminals from up there generally flee down here … You have gone the other way.’ He studied her. ‘But you failed. I am trying to disabuse you of the notion that there is anywhere you can run or hide. Why, I have caught you already. Even if you were to evade me, the automatics will never forget you. You have to end this attempt to flee now.’

He sounded genuinely sympathetic.

She nodded. She thought through her response, one more time, and she knew she was certain.

She grabbed little Rab to her chest, and with the other hand she rummaged in a pocket, produced and held up a tool.

‘This is a metal-cutter,’ she said.

The constable seemed shocked. He held up empty hands. ‘Elinor …’

‘A metal-cutter,’ she repeated. ‘It’s capable of slicing through hardened steel the thickness of my own finger.’

Planter hesitated. ‘What do you intend to do with that?’

‘Not use it as a weapon. Do you have an emergency medicine kit?’

‘I—’

‘Do you have the kit?’

He seemed to suppress a sigh. ‘I have the kit. Tell me what you intend to do.’

She sat little Rab up against the wall, making sure he couldn’t fall or come to any harm. He looked up at her, wide-eyed. Expecting a game, probably.

Smiling at him, she wielded the metal-cutter. He grabbed for it as if it was a toy, but she kept it out of his reach.

The constable asked again, ominously, ‘What do you intend to do?’

‘You have seen Rab’s test results. You know that intellectually he would make a suitable recruit for service at a high-intellect posting such as the Mask. But physically, too, he is fit and strong; so he would also make a suitable recruit for labour on Mercury …’

The very brightest and best, everybody knew, were generally meant for the complex engineering of the Mask, out beyond Uranus, or possibly the equally complex management of the Solar Wrap, at the very heart of the Solar System – or even the Frame, the great integrated transport network that connected the worlds. But where you ended up, as you matured to allocation age, depended as much on need in different locations as on availability of human potential.

‘It’s not fair so much as rational. But when it’s my own child …’

The constable nodded, as if confirming her own thoughts. ‘But there will probably be no postings at the Mask, or the Wrap come to that – at least there will not be in a couple of decades’ time when he is ready to serve. Whereas on Mercury, we know—’

‘I will not let him be sent to Mercury. Not – him. Not my boy.’ She held up the cutter again.

‘Ah.’ The constable, evidently, now saw her plan. ‘He is physically able to work on Mercury. You intend to disqualify him from that work through – disability.’

She hesitated.

He spoke no further.

Deadlock. The moment stretched. He was forcing her to respond, she realised. All he had to do was to wait until she lost her nerve. This cop was too smart to be bluffed.

She was going to have to go through with it.

‘Sooner longevity with a disability than a short life on Mercury,’ she said.

She opened the cutter and, gently, laid her son’s tiny arm over it, so that the blades would close over his wrist. He looked at her, and at the tool, and giggled.

‘He thinks you’re playing a game,’ the constable said softly.

‘No game.’ Still she hesitated.

‘You’ll kill him.’

‘No.’ She tapped a pocket of her suit. ‘I have a smart med pack. The wound will be cauterised – I have already administered an anaesthetic—’

‘But even if he survives, he may be crippled. After such a clumsy procedure it might not be possible to fit a prosthetic.’

‘That’s a chance I’ll have to take.’

‘What mother would do this?’

She looked at him. ‘A desperate one.’ She swallowed. She braced herself, prepared to close the cutter—

‘No. Wait.’

She hesitated.

‘Don’t make me wait long, Constable.’

He touched his ear, looked distracted. ‘Let me … my superiors are debating