But they were not, ultimately, immune.
It took only one habitat to fall to the plague. Within days most of the people aboard died, and most of their habitat’s self-replicating systems began to go haywire in ways that seemed nastily purposeful. The habitat’s ecosystem collapsed fatally. Uncontrolled, the habitat drifted out of its orbital slot like a chunk of carved iceberg. Ordinarily the chances of a collision would have been small… but the Glitter Band was already congested to within a hairsbreadth of disaster.
The first rule of collisions between two orbital bodies was that they were very rare indeed… until one happened. Then the shards of the destroyed bodies would splinter off in different directions, significantly increasing the likelihood of another impact. It would not be such a long wait until the next collision. And when it happened again, the number of shards increased once more… such that the next collision was a practical certainty…
Within weeks, most of the habitats in the Glitter Band had been fatally holed by collisional debris… and even when those impact fragments were not in themselves sufficient to kill all aboard, they also tended to be contaminated by traces of the plague originating from the first habitat to fall. They became orbiting hulks, as dark and dead as driftwood. By the end of the year, barely two hundred habitats had remained intact: principally the oldest and sturdiest structures, sheathed in rock and ice against radiation storms. With batteries of anti-collision lasers emplaced around their skins, they had managed to fend off most of the large chunks.
That was six years ago. In the intervening time, Quirrenbach told me, the Rust Belt had been stabilised, with most of the debris mopped up and conglomerated into hazardous lumps which had been sent spinning into the boiling face of Epsilon Eridani. Now at least the Belt was not growing any more fragmented. The hulks, for the most part, were kept in check by periodic nudges from robot tugs. Only a handful had been successfully repressurised and settled, although there were predictable rumours of all manner of sinister factions squatting furtively amongst the ruins.
This much I had learned from the nets. Seeing the ruins for the first time was something else entirely. Yellowstone was an ochre immensity blocking half the sky, now tangibly a world like the one I’d left, rather than a pale two-dimensional disk against the stars. As the Strelnikov swooped towards the habitat where it would dock, the silhouettes of other, ravaged ones crossed the face of Yellowstone. They were gnarled, gutted, pocked and cratered with the evidence of titanic collisions. I tried to hold in my head the numbers of dead the Rust Belt represented: although many of the habitats had been in the process of being evacuated when they were struck, it couldn’t have been easy to remove a million people at such short notice.
Our habitat was shaped like a fat cigar, spun about its long axis for gravity in the same manner as Idlewild. Sister Amelia had told me that the place where we were headed was called Carousel New Vancouver. It was carapaced in ice, mostly dirty-grey in hue, but occasionally patched with acres of bright new ice to repair what I assumed were recent impact points. It was spinning silently, throwing off a dozen lazy coils of steam from its skin like the arms of a spiral galaxy. A huge spacecraft was attached to the rim, shaped like a manta-ray and with scores of tiny windows around the edges of its wings. But the Strelnikov arced in towards one tip of the cigar, a triad of jaws opening to admit it. We nosed into a chamber walled in a maze of intestinal pipes and fuel tanks. I saw a few other shuttles clamped in parking bays: two sleek atmosphere cutters like bottle-green arrowheads and a couple of vessels which looked like cousins to the slowboat, all blunt angularity and exposed engine components. Spacesuited figures were swarming around all the ships, carrying umbilical lines and repair kits. A few robots were toiling away on hull-repair tasks, but for the most part the work was being done by humans or bio-engineered animals.
I couldn’t help remembering my earlier fears about this system. I’d expected to be entering a culture several centuries ahead of my own in nearly every respect, a peasant stumbling through kaleidoscopic wonders. Instead, I was looking at a scene which could easily have belonged to my own world’s past… even something out of the era of the Flotilla’s launch.
We docked with a bump. I gathered my belongings — including the things I had appropriated from Vadim — and set about worming my way upship to the exit.
‘Goodbye, I suppose,’ Quirrenbach said, amongst the general throng of people waiting to filter through into New Vancouver.
‘Yes.’ If he was expecting any other kind of response, he was out of luck.
‘I — um — went back to check on Vadim.’
‘A piece of dirt like that can take care of himself, you know. We probably should have thrown him out the airlock while we had the chance.’ I forced a smile. ‘Still, as he said, he was part of the local colour. I’d hate to deprive anyone of a unique cultural experience.’
‘Are you staying here long? In NV, I mean?’
It took me a moment to realise he was talking about New Vancouver.
‘No.’
‘Taking the first behemoth down to the surface, then?’
‘Very probably.’ I looked over his shoulder to where the crowd was pushing through the exit. Through another window I could see a part of the Strelnikov’s hull plating which had broken loose during the docking sequence and was now being nudged and epoxied back into place.
‘Yes; get down as quickly as possible, that’s my intention as well.’ Quirrenbach patted the briefcase he clutched to his chest like a tabard. ‘The sooner I can get to work on my plague symphony the better, I think.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be a resounding success.’
‘Thanks. And you? If I’m not being too nosy? Any particular plans for when you get down there?’
‘One or two, yes.’
Doubtless he would have kept grilling me — getting nowhere — but there was a release of pressure in the jam of people ahead of us, opening up a little gap through which I inserted myself. In a few moments I was out of Quirrenbach’s conversational range.
Inside, New Vancouver was nothing like Hospice Idlewild. There was no artificial sun, no single air-filled volume. Instead, the entire structure was a densely packed honeycomb of much smaller enclosed spaces, squeezed together like components in an antique radio. I didn’t think there was any hope of Reivich still being in the habitat. There were at least three departures to Chasm City per day, and I was fairly sure he’d have been on the first available flight down.
Still, I stayed vigilant.
Amelia’s estimate had been unerringly accurate: the Stoner funds I had brought with me would just cover my trip to Chasm City. I had already spent half on the Strelnikov; what remained was just enough to pay for the descent. True, I had harvested some money from Vadim, but when I examined the cash properly it only amounted to about as much as the change left from my own funds. His victims, newcomers obviously, had not carried much local cash with them.
I checked the time.
Vadim’s watch had concentric dials for both local twenty-six-hour Yellowstone time and twenty-four-hour system time. I had a couple of hours before my flight down. I planned to kill the time walking around NV, looking for local information sources, but I quickly found that large areas of the habitat were not accessible to anyone who had arrived via anything as lowly as the Strelnikov. People who had come in via high-burn shuttles were segregated from scum like us by armoured glass walls. I found somewhere to sit down and drink a cup of bad coffee (the one universal commodity, it seemed) and watched the two immiscible streams of humanity flow past. The place where I was sitting was a dingy thoroughfare, seats and tables jostling for space with metre-thick industrial pipes which ran from floor to ceiling like hamadryad trees. Smaller pipes branched off the main arteries, curving through the air like rusty intestines. They throbbed unnervingly, as if titanic pressures were only just being contained by thin metal and crumbling rivets. Some effort had been made to gentrify the surroundings by weaving foliage around the pipes, but the attempt had been distinctly halfhearted.
Not everyone shuffling through this area looked poor, but almost everyone looked as if they wished they were elsewhere. I recognised a few faces from the slowboat, and perhaps one or two from Hospice Idlewild, but I had certainly not seen the majority of the people before. I doubted that all of them were from beyond the Epsilon Eridani system; it was just as likely that NV was a gateway for in-system travellers. I even saw some Ultras, strutting around flaunting their chimeric modifications, but there were just as many on the other side of the glass.
I remembered dealing with their kind: Captain Orcagna’s crew aboard the Orvieto; the woman with the hole
