for Lamont to detect it. Two of the ships peeled off from the formation and vanished into the gravitational fuzz of Orpheus, while the remaining two sped on, still slowing, to the greater pull of Eurydice.
Intuitive physics are Aristotelian. What goes up must come down. What
‘What the hell is
Winter looked sharply up from the littered notes and cups on the table he and Calder shared with Ben-Ami at the Bright Contrail. It was the third day of trying to make something from the raw material of interview and recollections. Calder was pointing at the horizon. His arm shook. Winter’s gaze followed it, and he trembled too. He jumped to his feet. Ben-Ami bounded on to a chair, rocking and staring. After a moment Calder clambered on to the table, steadying himself with a hand on Winter’s shoulder.
Away in the distant sky visible high above the line of buildings on the other side of the park were two thick, shallow black arcs, like the brows of an invisible giant. With every second they became bigger and blacker. At first they could have been taken for things small and close, hang gliders or such, but as their apparent size increased it became evident that they were enormous. Others were noticing too, and the word was spreading. Around him tables toppled, crockery crashed, vehicles halted and slewed the traffic into chaos. The noise rose as the objects approached, as though to meet them. Within thirty seconds the objects were in the air above the city.
Shaped like rectangular pieces cut from a hollow sphere, they were each hundreds of metres on each side. They moved at a constant altitude of five hundred metres, their speed slowing. Their shadows darkened the park, dappled the buildings. Then, right above the Jardin des Etoiles, they stopped, hanging poised in midair. The expectation of their imminent crushing fall made Winter’s nails dig into his palms. He opened his hands with an effort of will, and clutched the table edge behind him in a moment of giddiness.
‘These aren’t—’ he began.
‘—anything I’m familiar with,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘They must be the star-ships.’ He turned, eyes shining, to the two musicians. ‘This is marvellous! The end of our isolation! It is no longer possible to doubt it!’
Some had doubted it, Winter knew. There was a flourishing undercurrent of conspiracy theory that the two strangers, Carlyle and Shlaim, were in fact Eurydiceans in some DNA-deep disguise, or covert resurrectees; that the whole thing had been got up by Armand’s company or the Returners or the Joint Chiefs, for some nefarious and improbable reason, usually to do with the defence budget. It had almost made him nostalgic.
‘Yeah, that’s nice,’ he said, shrugging Calder’s hand from his shoulder.
‘In itself. Can’t say I’m thrilled at the thought of the ships’
‘Why not?’ asked Ben-Ami. ‘They are human beings like us.’
‘Exactly,’ said Winter, as Calder cackled.
Have you seen—?’
Jacques Armand’s voice came from Carlyle’s new local phone. She palmed it and thumbed a yes.
‘We’re all looking,’ she said. Beside her, on the railed walkway of some automated production facility, her guide for the day was gawping, gob-smacked. One of the ships had just begun to move again, at slowly increasing speed, leaving the other above the park.
‘Do you know whose ships they are?’ asked Armand, urgently.
‘Cannae tell from here,’ said Carlyle, still staring. ‘We buy ships like that fae the Knights and hack them.’
‘There would be nothing to lose in getting out, whichever side it is,’ said Armand. ‘And this might be a good time.’
‘It might indeed, if we’re no too late. One ae them’s leaving.’
‘Let’s go for it. See you at the field.’
‘On my way.’
She pocketed the phone and turned to her guide. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘and thanks, but I do have to go now.’
The guide didn’t even look at her. ‘Fine, fine,’ he said. He was already scanning numbers on his own phone, and finding them all busy.
Carlyle ran along the walkway and down the twisting stair to the monorail platform, and waited fretting for a few minutes until a capsule whizzed up and whined to a halt. She jumped on and for the next half hour hopped from capsule to capsule along the route to Lesser Lights Lane.
Down in the streets the roads and sidewalks were dot-painted with faces looking up. Traffic had slowed almost to a standstill, with a few vehicles managing to jink and jitter their way through the jams.
Armand awaited her at the station in a two-seat entopter.
‘Jump in!’ he shouted. The seat hugged her from behind, cushioned the back of her head. The bubble door slid shut and the little craft took off like a fly from under a swatting hand. Its flight and evasive actions were in similar mode. The sides of buildings loomed, then flicked away, again and again. Armand, she saw with relief, wasn’t controlling it at all, he was talking to someone else. He had earphones and she hadn’t, so she couldn’t hear a word above the relentless buzz. The airfield suddenly appeared, like a clearing in a forest, and the entopter touched down on the grass. One of Armand’s people was waiting for them, with suits. Carlyle had taken to wearing her undersuit under whatever of the fashions of the day covered it best. Today’s was a chinoiserie silk pyjama outfit, thus not a problem. She scrambled into the suit and checked through the now familiar, though not yet intuitive, interfaces that Armand had trained her on. Armand was already running to the hypersonic shell. She jumped into the rear cockpit seat of the top aircar module and had barely time to buckle up before the double canopies thudded shut above her and the engines of all the aircars in the stack rose to a scream. The shell went through vertical take-off, loiter, and forward acceleration in seconds.
About ten minutes after take-off, with the city already dropping away behind them, Armand’s voice came over the phones.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘One of these big fuck-off ships has just landed beside the relic. Some of the occupants have emerged and politely announced themselves as the Knights of Enlightenment. The troops on site have been told to stand down by the Joint Chiefs, of course.’
‘Wise move,’ said Carlyle. ‘What are the Knights doing?’
Armand listened for a few more minutes.
‘Deploying around the relic,’ he said. ‘Being very polite and firm.’
‘That’s their style,’ Carlyle said.
‘Do you want to turn back?’
‘Not as long as there’s a chance I can make the gate.’
‘Still no word of its being open,’ Armand said.
‘Maybe I could sort of hang around with your folks, assuming they’re not being pushed right off the job, and take my chance if it comes.’
‘OK,’ said Armand. He laughed. ‘I want to meet these Knights of Enlightenment myself.’
The northward journey took a lot less time than its southern counterpart had done a couple of weeks earlier. Within an hour they had crossed the ocean and passed high above the ragged shore of North Continent.
This time Carlyle had a chance to observe the view, and to notice the bright domes of settlements or science stations in the drab, tundra-like landscape.
These became fewer as the hills got higher. Then in the far distance she saw the diamond spike of the relic and the black fleck on or just above the ground beside it. Air screamed as the jet flues swung forward and the craft decelerated, with a shudder on the way back down through the sound barrier.She felt herself pressing forward against the restraints. Evidently blowing off the shell would be a complete waste, given that there was no need to deploy the aircar units separately. Armand was talking to his people on the ground, evidently got clearance for landing, and banked the shell into a wide swing around the far side of the relic and the KE ship. As they lost altitude the bright specks of the company’s other aerial vehicles and the armour on the ground came into view; the aircraft a variety of bright colours, the tanks and artillery a dark mottled green, more she supposed from tradition than any effectiveness as camouflage.
The brown and green moorland was now just a couple of hundred metres below. The direction of the jet flues shifted, from forward to down, and the craft began to sink. At that point a blast of air came from above and
