Fallen Dragon Page 5

  The lights were on in the lounge, turned down low. When she peered in, one of the girls from the Junk Buoy was lying facedown on the sofa, snoring with the erratic snorts of the comatose drunk. There were muffled voices and giggles coming from Josep's bedroom, along with familiar rhythmic sounds. Josep, Ray and the huge-breasted girl energetically straining seams on the jelfoam mattress together.

  It would be all right, Denise thought, once she was in her own room with the door shut. From past experience she knew the soundproofing was good enough to give her complete silence to sleep in. When she looked down at her skirt, she could see it needed spraying right away to get the wine stain out. Once she'd put it in the washing cabinet and programmed the cycle, she remembered the pile of clean laundry hurriedly dumped in the linen basket this morning, including all her other work clothes. She'd intended to do them when she got back from playschool in the afternoon. So there she was at quarter past midnight, tired and utterly miserable, standing in the kitchen in her robe, ironing her blouse for tomorrow while the shrill whoops of other people's orgasms echoed along the hall.

  If there was such a thing as karma, somebody somewhere in this universe was going to get hurt bad to level this out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lawrence Newton never saw a cloud until he was twelve years old. Until then, Amethi's light-time skies had been an unblemished azure from horizon to horizon. When the planet's orbit around its gas-giant primary, Nizana, eventually propelled it into dark-time and the stars came out, they would burn with a steadiness unnatural for any atmosphere, so clear was the frigid air. And with Templeton, the capital where young Lawrence lived, on the hemisphere that permanently faced away from Nizana, he never realized it was possible for anything exciting to exist overhead. In terms of landscape and environment, Amethi was crushingly boring. Nothing moved above, nothing grew on the icy tundra.

  To the McArthur Corporation, whose exploratory starship the Renfrew discovered it in 2098, such conditions were perfect In the late twenty-first century, interstellar expansion was at its height, with the big companies and financial consortia funding dozens of colonies. Any planet with an oxygen/ nitrogen atmosphere was being claimed and settled. But these ventures were expensive. The alien biospheres that had produced that precious blend of breathable gases were inevitably hostile and poisonous to terrestrial organisms, some immediately fatal. Establishing human communities amid such conditions was extremely costly. Not so Amethi.

  For all it was technically a moon, Amethi's evolution had been fairly standard for a world of its size. It started normally, with a reducing atmosphere that slowly changed as life began to emerge from primordial seas. Primitive organisms that could photosynthesize released oxygen. Carbon was consumed by new lichens and amoebas. An unremarkable cycle that was repeated across the universe wherever such conditions occurred.

  Evolution was progressing along standard lines until the asteroid was drawn in by Nizana's immense gravity field. Two hundred million years after the first primitive amoebas began fissioning, the seas were full of fish; plants had established themselves across the land. There were big insects with thistledown wings, and even small creatures not far removed from terrestrial amphibian genealogy. They all died in the aftermath.

  The impact explosion threw up enough dust and steam to obscure the entire surface. In doing so, it triggered the ultimate ice age. The glaciers that thrust out from the polar caps in the aftermath encroached farther and farther through the temperate zone until they actually merged at the equator. Seas, oceans and lakes surrendered their water to the single megaglacier as it continued to expand. Temperature plummeted right across the planet, combining with the water loss and darkened atmosphere to eliminate all forms of life except the most resilient bacteria. Amethi returned to an almost primordial state. But now with a fifth of the surface covered in ice to a depth of several kilometers, and the remainder a desert that was Mars-like in its desolation, there was no potential catalyst left to precipitate change. It had become a world trapped in stasis. The isolock.

  For the McArthur board members Amethi was perfection, an existing breathable atmosphere and no indigenous life. All that was needed was a slight rise in global temperature to end the isolock and restart a normal meteorological cycle.

  Templeton was founded in 2115. At first it was nothing more than a collection of prefabricated igloos with a single track linking it to a runway bulldozed into the frozen dunes. The engineers and administrators who lived there were tasked with establishing a manufacturing base that would be self-sustaining, the idea being that once the initial investment was made, all you needed to do was shovel in local raw materials at one end and ultimately any product you wanted would pop out the other. After that, the only imports would be people and new designs to upgrade and expand the first few factories. Information cost nothing to transport between stars, while people would buy their own tickets to a new land with immense opportunities.

  Over the first three years, spaceplanes ferried down their cargo from eight starship flights. At the end of it, industrial facilities in heavily insulated factories could supply most of the burgeoning colony's needs. But not all. There were always a few specialist systems or chemicals essential for the economy or special projects that only Earth with its abundant production facilities could provide. Time after time Temple-ton's governor sent back requests for additional units to be flown out, without which the whole project would stall.

  The financial strain that Amethi placed on McArthur wasn't as bad as that for most other colony worlds, where human biochemists fought desperate battles against alien biospheres. Here there was just HeatSmash, the climate project, to initiate. Templeton's first indigenous industrial undertaking was to establish an orbital manufacturing station, Tarona. With that up and running in 2140—after nearly a third of its systems had been shipped in from Earth—they began local production of asteroid capture propulsion engines. Nizana had so much junk rock strewn around in orbit it could have provided HeatSmash with enough material to reheat a dozen worlds. The inaugural impact came in 2142, when a lump of stony iron rock measuring eighty meters across smacked right into the center of Barclay's glacier.

  The explosion vaporized nearly a cubic kilometer of water and melted a considerably larger quantity. It had refrozen within a week. The steam clouds never even reached the edge of the glacier before they condensed into bullet-hard snow-flakes and rained down.

  Once the planetary engineers had correlated all the data from their sensors, they estimated that the atmosphere would have reheated sufficiently to induce and sustain glacial melt after 111 years of one impact per year, involving asteroids four times the mass of the test impact. With this mildly favorable prognosis, the colonists set about building their new world. By the time Lawrence Newton was born in 2310, economic and social changes on the old homeworld had modified the nature of the colony. Although the physical task of terraforming the world had progressed without interruption, it was no longer a destination for exultant pioneers searching for a little homestead amid a wilderness that was slowly being resurrected.

  * * *

  The big school bus rolled easily along Templeton's main north highway, fat tires clinging to the grubby concrete with its lacework of fine cracks. Twenty-five kids, aged nine to twelve, chattered excitably or threw crumpled biscuit wrappers at each other before ducking down behind their seats to avoid retaliation. Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Ridley, their teachers, sat up at the front, doing their best to ignore what was going on behind. They'd left the school dome only ten minutes ago; it was going to be a long day.

  Lawrence was sitting midway along the bus. The seat next to him went unoccupied. It wasn't that he didn't have friends at school; he did, as well as several cousins and a tribe of more distant relatives. He just didn't have any close friends. Teachers described him as restless. He was clever enough, naturally, given he was a Newton, but that intelligence was never quite captured by any of his academic subjects. Report after report fi
led with his parents had the age-old comment: can do better. In the competitive environment of the school, where application and achievement received the highest accolades, he was too different to fit in comfortably. Not quite a rebel—he was still too young for that classification—but there were plenty of danger signs that he could fall into the dropout category if something wasn't done fairly soon. It was an almost unknown development among Amethi's well-ordered population. For a member of a Board family it was unthinkable.

  So he sat by himself ignoring the antics of his peers, watching the city go by outside. On either side of the highway were drab curving walls of nullthene; huge sheets of the ultrathin translucent gray membrane from which the city domes were made. The standard size was four hundred meters across, produced in one piece by the McArthur factory, and wholly indigenous. Relatively cheap, and simple to establish, it was used by every town and city on the planet. All you needed was a flat patch of land over which to spread it The sheet had a built-in hexagonal web of slim tubing made from buckyfilament carbon (extruded up at Tarona) that was pumped full of epoxy. The resultant force was enough to lift the lightweight nullthene off the ground like some giant balloon that never quite managed to become airborne. The edges had to be buried hurriedly as the membrane's molecular structure had been designed to act as a near-perfect heat trap. Air inside quickly warmed to temperate and even tropical temperatures, exerting quite a lifting pressure from within. Large circulation and thermal exchange units (also built locally) were installed around the edge, helping to maintain the required climate inside. Once the dome was up and regulated, all that was needed to reinvigorate the soil was water and terrestrial bacteria, and it was ready for planting.

  Right at the heart of the city, most of the domes were communal. Above average in size at six hundred meters in diameter, they had a single apartment block skyscraper in the center, acting as an additional support for the vaulting surface. Inside, rich parkland had been established around the skyscrapers, complete with artificial lakes and streams. Nobody outside top-level management used cars to get about within the city; the domes were all linked by a comprehensive rail transit network. The only vehicles on the road with the school bus were twenty-wheel juggernauts, agroform machinery, and civil engineering trucks, all of them cheerfully pumping hihydrogen fuel fumes out into the atmosphere.

  Factories filled the gaps between the dome rims, squat bunkers built from glass and aluminum. Encrustations of dust streaked the big panes, built up over years as heat and moisture creeping out of the city structures loosened up the frozen ground. Even here, the air suffered as it did in every human city, a pollution of particles and vapor that hadn't known freedom for a hundred thousand years, churned up by the whirling zephyrs thrown off by the trains and road vehicles and dome circulation fans—for decades, the only wind on the whole planet. But it allowed plants to flourish. All along the side of the road, Lawrence could see tufts of dark green grass clogging the ruddy native soil. There were even little fissures where free water had on occasion run, fed by trickles of condensation along badly insulated panels or tattered slits in the nullthene.

  Farther out from the city center, food refineries began to replace the domes—industrial sites the size of small towns where pressure tanks and enzyme breeder towers and protein convectors were woven together with a maze of thick, insulated pipes. Hot vapor shivered the air for hundreds of meters above the dulled metal surfaces as small fusion plants pumped their megawatts into the elaborate processes that kept Amethi's human population alive. Each refinery had its own quarry, huge vertical-walled craters gouged deep into the frozen soil by AS-driven bulldozers. Caravans of big utility trucks trundled up and down the pitside ramps all day long, bringing hundreds of tons of elusive, rare minerals to the catalytic furnaces.

  The trans-Rackliff Basin pipe ended somewhere on this side of the city, too. It stretched a quarter of the way around the planet to the Barclay's glacier runoff, bringing that essential component of life: water. It was actually cheaper to pump it in than to melt it out of local soil. Both the domes and the refineries were greedy consumers.

  Lawrence watched the various human enterprises that made up the city with detached interest, visualizing how Templeton and its peripherals must look from space. Some weird plastic flower seventy kilometers in diameter that had blossomed on this barren alien world as the atmosphere warmed. One day it would burst, the nullthene membranes ripping open in the wind so that the terrestrial spawn nurtured within could be flung out across the entire planet Only with that kind of image did he ever begin to appreciate the enormity of the undertaking that was his homeworld. It was the endless statistics and enhanced images that he could never get his head around, everything the school felt impelled to provide and emphasize.

  Out past the last of the refineries, the tundra extended away to the sharp horizon—dirty vermilion soil broken only by rocks and ancient crumbling gullies. Swaths of darkness cut through it at random. When Barclay's Glacier formed, sucking the moisture out of the air and sending the temperature plummeting, the forests were still standing. Their trees had long since died from the cold and lack of light, but the slumbering glacier calmed the air rather than enraging it. There were no winds or sandstorms to abrade the sturdy trunks. The scatterings of moisture left in the soil turned to ice, transforming the surface into a hard concrete mantle, keeping a possessive grip on sand and dust particles.

  In the centuries after the glacier formed, Amethi's dead, blackened plants stayed resolutely upright in the still air. Time alone aged them, for there were no elements anymore. Over a hundred thousand years, even petrified wood lost its strength. They corroded slowly, snowing ebony flakes onto the surrounding soil until enough had been shed to make the whole unstable. Then the entire brittle pillar would crack, tumbling over to shatter as if made from antique black glass. More often than not, in the denser forests, they would bring down a couple of their neighbors, initiating cascades of devastation. Where the forests once stood were now areas where the soil was blanketed with low black dunes of congealed grit.

  The children quietened at last as this new landscape unwound beyond the bus; here was where their future was birthing with pained deliberation. The first delicate effects of the HeatSmash were proudly visible. Crevices and tiny rills in the hard ground were host to tiny arctic plants. They were all heavily v-written for this world, to endure not only its coldness but also the long light-times and dark-times. Plants that grew above Earth's Arctic Circle through long wearisome days and equally oppressive nights had the closest environmental conditions to those on Amethi. This meant their genes needed the least amount of viral modification to withstand the hostility of this frigid wilderness.

  Several of them boasted flowers, tiny dainty coral trumpets or golden starbursts. The most significant accomplishment of the geneticists had been modifying the pollination cycle so that the spores were expelled by ripening anthers into the quiescent air. A haze light enough to drift on Amethi's minimalist breezes, little more than a draft of perfume, yet eradicating the necessity of insects. None of these perennials had needed nurturing in greenhouses and planting out; they were self-set. The first naked terrestrial colonists.

  While dark bottle-greens flourished in the earth's crannies, dry-rubber blotches of sulfur yellow and cinnamon brown encrusted exposed rock, from entire cliff faces down to pebbles scattered amid the carbon dunes of the old forests. The lichens that were first spread across Amethi's continents from high-flying robot aircraft in order to kick-start the new ecological cycle, expanded now as never before in the rush of warmth and rising humidity.

  Lawrence liked the color invasion stampeding across the bleak tundra. It signaled an astonishing level of achievement. Fundamentally reassuring, that human beings were capable of such visionary endeavor. He began to smile, letting his daydreams build out of the landscape where the impossible was happening. It was easy out here; the demands of his family and school restrictions were falling behind as the bus
raced on into the realm of possibilities.

  His gaze drifted around and up. He squinted, suddenly alert. Hot urgent hands wiped the bus window where his breath was steaming it up, despite the insulative quality. There. In the sky, something very strange was moving. He knocked on the glass to try to show people where they should look. Then, realizing nobody would ever listen to him, he put his hand up above the window and found the red emergency handle. Without hesitating, he tugged it down hard.

  Antiskid brakes engaged as the AS driver program brought the bus to a halt as fast as its engineering parameters would allow. A signal was flashed to the Templeton traffic authority, putting emergency services on immediate recovery standby. Sensors inside and outside the vehicle were reviewed for any sign of abnormality. Nothing was found, but the human/manual intervention was not one the AS could ignore. The bus continued its abrupt deceleration, engine and gearbox whining sharply in mechanical alarm. Kids were hauled back hard into their seats as the safety webbing contracted. Yells and screams ran the length of the aisle. Mr. Kaufman lost hold of his coffee cup and biscuit as he cried: "Fatesbloody-sake..."

  A second later the bus was motionless and silent, a state almost as alarming as the sudden braking. Then the horn started a repetitive bleat, and amber hazard strobes on the front and back blazed away. Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Ridley gave each other a frantic uncomprehending look and slapped at their web release buttons. The red light above one of the emergency stop handles was flashing urgently. Mr. Kaufman never got a chance to ask whose seat it was before Lawrence was running past him to the front door, which had popped open automatically. The boy was zipping up the front of his baggy coat.

  "What...?" Ms. Ridley blurted.

  "It's outside!" Lawrence yelled. "In the air. It's in the air!"