Hamilton allowed the surprise to show on his face. “Sir?”
“We’ve found family trees that suggest they’re actually cousins, similar in appearance, with a decade or so between them. We’ve got carriages on the way to what we’re going to call George’s Star, and people examining that projection. We don’t expect to find anything beyond a single automatic in orbit.”
“So… the girl—” He took a chance on referring to her as if he didn’t know her, hoping desperately that she’d kept the secret of what he hadn’t reported, all those years ago.
“We kept an eye on her after the interviews. She told us she’d learned the access codes for Ransom’s embroidery from when she was on that enormous carriage she mentioned. Another thing we tellingly haven’t found, by the way, along with any high performance carriages in the Ransom garages. But she hadn’t quite got enough detail on the earliest years of Lustre Saint Clair’s life. A brilliant cover, a brilliant grown flesh job, but not quite good enough. She faltered a little when we put it to her that, struggling over that gun with you, she was actually trying to save Pollux Ransom’s life. We decided to let her out of the coop and see where she led us. As we expected, she realised we were on to her and vanished. Almost certainly into the Russian embassy. Certainly enough that we may find ourselves able to threaten the Czar with some embarrassment. You must have wondered yourself, considering the ease of your escape from the embassy, her reluctance to take the observer machine…” He raised an eyebrow at Hamilton. “Didn’t you?”
Hamilton felt dizzy, as if the walls of his world had once more vibrated under an impact. “What were they after?”
“Easy enough to imagine. The Russians would love to see us move forces out of the inner solar system in order to secure an otherwise meaningless territory in the hope that these fictitious foreigners might return. And just in the week or so while we were interviewing her, you should have seen the havoc this story caused at court. The hawks who want to ‘win the balance’ were all for sending the fleet out there immediately. The doves were at their throats. The Queen Mother had to order everyone to stop discussing it. But fortunately, we soon had an answer for them, confirmed by what we got out of Castor. An elegant fable, wasn’t it? The sort of thing Stichen would put together out of the White Court. I’ll bet it was one of his. You know, the strange-looking wounds, red birds, booming sounds, fine fly detail like that. If we hadn’t planted that tracker on you, the girl would have had to find some way to signal us herself. Or, less wasteful, you’d have been allowed to escape. Of course, the Ransoms’ worldwide network isn’t quite the size they made it out to be, not when you subtract all the rubles that are vanishing back to Moscow. But even so, clearing all that out makes the balance a bit safer tonight.”
Hamilton didn’t know what to say. He stood there on the grown polished wood timbers and looked down at the whorls within whorls. An odd thought struck him. A connection back to the last certainty he recalled feeling. When his world had been set on sturdier foundations. “Ambassador Bayoumi,” he said. “Did he make it out?”
“I’ve no idea. Why do you ask?”
Hamilton found he had no reason in his head, just a great blankness that felt half merciful and half something lost. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “He seemed kind.”
Turpin made a small grunt of a laugh, and looked back to his papers. Hamilton realised that he’d been dismissed. And that the burdens he’d brought with him into the room would not be ended by a noose or a pardon.
As he made his way to the door, Turpin seemed to realise that he hadn’t been particularly polite. He looked up again. “I heard the record of what you said to him,” he said. “You said nobody would care if she killed you. It’s not true, you know.”
Hamilton stopped, and tried to read the scarred and stitched face of the man.
“You’re greatly valued, Jonathan,” said Turpin. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t still be here.”
A year or so later, Hamilton was woken in the early hours by an urgent tug on the embroidery, a voice that seemed familiar, trying to tell him something, sobbing and yelling in the few seconds before it was cut off.
But he couldn’t understand a word it said.
The next morning, there was no record of the exchange.
In the end, Hamilton decided that it must have been a dream.
THE INVASION OF VENUS
by Stephen Baxter
For me, the saga of the Incoming was above all Edith Black’s story. For she, more than anyone else I knew, was the one who had a problem with it.
When the news was made public I drove out of London to visit Edith at her country church. I had to cancel a dozen appointments to do it, including one with the Prime Minister’s office, but I knew, as soon as I got out of the car and stood in the soft September rain, that it had been the right thing to do.
Edith was pottering around outside the church, wearing overalls and rubber boots and wielding an alarming- looking industrial-strength jackhammer. But she had a radio blaring out a phone-in discussion, and indoors, out of the rain, I glimpsed a widescreen TV and laptop, both scrolling news—mostly fresh projections of where the Incoming’s decelerating trajectory might deliver them, and new deep-space images of their “craft,” if such it was, a massive block of ice like a comet nucleus, leaking very complex patterns of infrared radiation. Edith was plugged into the world, even out here in the wilds of Essex.
She approached me with a grin, pushing back goggles under a hard hat. “Toby.” I got a kiss on the cheek and a brief hug; she smelled of machine oil. We were easy with each other physically. Fifteen years earlier, in our last year at college, we’d been lovers, briefly; it had finished with a kind of regretful embarrassment—very English, said our American friends—but it had proven only a kind of speed bump in our relationship. “Glad to see you, if surprised. I thought all you civil service types would be locked down in emergency meetings.”
For a decade I’d been a civil servant in the environment ministry. “No, but old Thorp—” my minister “—has been in a continuous COBRA session for twenty-four hours. Much good it’s doing anybody.”
“I must say it’s not obvious to the layman what use an environment minister is when the aliens are coming.”
