Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [331]
Reid abruptly stopped arguing, and started mobilising what resources of money and charity there were in Ship City for disaster relief. New Mars had no famines, no wars, and just enough industrial accidents to sustain the need for such organisation. What they now faced was a disaster in reverse.
We cut to the cameras and remotes overlooking the shore of the cometary lake. In that dark, nutrient-rich water, the process by which we’d resurrected Wilde was repeated and multiplied, with the terrifying speed of smart-matter processing. Bodies formed, by the hundreds, then the thousands, to drift or thrust themselves towards the raw, recent shelf of the lake’s beach. Dripping, coughing fluids from their new lungs, they hauled themselves blindly onto the shore and lay for a while in the sunlight. After a few minutes they’d look up at the circling aircraft, the hovering helicopters, and wonder where the hell they were.
The last we saw of Wilde he was far along the shore, searching among the naked and shivering bodies for Annette, whom he had counted, and who had counted him, among the dead.
The lasers boiled us into orbit, then our chemical rockets took over. We let the guidance-systems do the work – I rather fancied trying out my rocketry reflexes again, after all this time, but Meg talked me out of it. We talked a lot, in that long topple to the daughter wormhole: about what we might find, and what we could do if there was no-one left to warn, or able to act on a warning. The fast folk had come up with a few suggestions. Our first priority, on arriving in the Solar System, would be to find the resources of matter and energy to carry them out. The real constraint was the resource we couldn’t be sure we had – time.
We fell through the wormhole gate.
What we saw almost made me flee back into it.
We emerged, as predicted, in orbit around Jupiter – a high orbit, which had not been been predicted. For the first time I saw the Ring from above. It was nothing to Saturn’s, but it was spectacular nonetheless. Concentric white rings, divided by smaller black rings which must have been scribed over the centuries by the orbits of Jupiter’s remaining moons. Jupiter itself had changed, its coloured bands now tamed, channelled into up-wellings that formed hexagonal cells, with a sketchy hint of more solid structures dividing them.
‘It’s like a honeycomb!’ Meg whispered, behind my mind.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And we don’t want to meet the hive.’
Meg’s reply was to magnify my forward view. A hundred kilometres ahead, along the same orbital path, was a swarm of the nastiest-looking spacecraft I’ve ever seen. They had a perfection of mechanism, a finished look to their huge articulated extensions of gleaming brass and steel. Their multiple eyes and probing antennae were turned on us. Their missiles and lasers moved into combat-ready position like unsheathed stings.
Our own antennae were instantly battered with hailing-frequencies. I felt the feathery touch of radar on my hull.
‘Firewalls up?’ I asked Meg.
‘Yes.’
I cautiously opened an incoming video link, and sent an identifying burst of microwave to the orbital forts – or fighters – ahead.
On the video-screen in the visual centres of my mind, hazy through the protective firewalls of anti-virus software, appeared a woman’s face. A young woman, with braided locks, epicanthic eyelids, broad cheekbones, coffee-coloured skin and thin lips and wide teeth…it’s hard to say just what elements went to make up the conviction, but I was certain she was of a new race, one different from any I’d encountered before: human, I guess is the word I’m after.
‘Spayk Angloslav, robot?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘English?’
She smiled. ‘Yays, Ehnglish. You pick it up from old transmissions,