Firstborn

“I like the little horses,” said Candida.

Their uncle put his hands on their shoulders. “Come away now.”

With some relief, Bella straightened up.

Drinks arrived, sherry, whiskey, coffee, tea, served by a subdued young aunt. Bella accepted a coffee and stood with Phillippa.

“It was kind of you to speak to them like that,” Phillippa said.

“It’s my job, I guess,” Bella said, embarrassed.

“Yes, but there are ways of doing it well, or badly. You’re new to it, aren’t you?”

Bella smiled. “Six months in. Does it show?”

“Not at all.”

“Deaths in space are rare.”

“Yes, thank God,” Phillippa said. “But that’s why it’s been so hard to take. I had hoped this new generation would be protected from — well, from what we went through. I read about you. You were actually on the shield.”

Bella smiled. “I was a lowly comms tech.”

Phillippa shook her head. “Don’t do yourself down. You ended up with a battlefield promotion to mission commander, didn’t you?”

“Only because there was nobody else left to do it by the end of that day.”

“Even so, you did your job. You deserve the recognition you’ve enjoyed.”

Bella wasn’t sure about that. Her subsequent career, as an executive in various telecommunications corporations and regulatory bodies, had no doubt been given a healthy boost by her notoriety, and usefulness as a PR tool. But she’d always tried to pull her weight, until her retirement, aged fifty-five — a short one as it turned out, until she was offered this new role, a position she couldn’t turn down.

Phillippa said, “As for me I was based in London during the build-up to the storm. Worked in the mayor’s office, on emergency planning and the like. But before the storm itself broke, my parents took me out to the shelter at L2.”

The shield had been poised above the Earth at the point of per-petual noon, at L1, the first Lagrangian point of gravitational stability directly between Earth and sun. The Earth’s second Lagrangian point was on the same Earth-sun line, but on the planet’s far side, at the midnight point. So while the workers at L1 labored to shelter the world from the storm, at L2 an offworld refuge hid safe in Earth’s shadow, stuffed full of trillionaires, dictators, and other rich and powerful types — including, rumor had it, half of Britain’s royals.

The story of L2 had subsequently become a scandal.

“It wasn’t a pleasant place to be,” Phillippa murmured. “I tried to work. We were ostensibly a monitoring station. I kept up the comms links to the ground stations. But some of the rich types were throwing parties.”

“It sounds as if you didn’t have a choice,” Bella said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“It’s kind of you to say that. Still, one must move on.”

James Duflot’s widow, Cassie, approached them tentatively.

“Thank you for coming,” she said awkwardly. She looked tired.

“You don’t need—”

“You were kind to the children. You’ve given them a day to remember.” She smiled. “They’ve seen your picture on the news. I think I’ll put away that hologram, though.”

“Perhaps that’s best.” Bella hesitated. “I can’t tell you much about what James was working on. But I want you to know that your husband gave his life in the best of causes.”

Cassie nodded. “In a way I was prepared for this, you know.

People ask me how it feels to have your husband fly into space. I tell them, you should try staying on Earth.”

Bella forced a smile.

“To tell you the truth we were going through a difficult time.

We’re Earthbound, Doctor Fingal. James just went up to space to work, not to live. This is home. London. And I went into town every day to work at Thule.” Bella had done her research; Thule, Inc., was a big multinational eco-recovery agency. “We’d talked vaguely of separating for a bit.” Cassie laughed with faint bitterness. “Well, I’ll never know how that particular story would have turned out, will I?”

“I’m sorry—”

“You know what I miss? His mails. His softscreen calls. I didn’t have him, you see, but I had the mails. And so in a way I don’t miss him, but I miss the mails.” She looked sharply at Bella. “It was worth it, wasn’t it?”

Bella couldn’t bear to repeat the platitudes she knew were expected of her. “I’m new to this. But it’s my job to make sure it was.”

That wasn’t enough. Nothing ever could be. She was relieved when she was able to use the excuse of another appointment to get out of the pillboxlike house.

8: Euro-needle

For her appointment with Bob Paxton, Bella was driven to the Liv-ingstone Tower — or the “Euro-needle” as every Londoner still called it. The local administrative headquarters of the Eurasian Union, and sometime seat of the Union’s prime minister, it was a tower of airy offices with broad windows of toughened glass offer-ing superb views of London. During the sunstorm the Needle had been within the Dome’s shelter, and on its roof, which had interfaced with the Dome’s structure itself, was a small museum to those perilous days.

Paxton was waiting for her in a conference room on the forty-first floor. Pacing, he was drinking coffee in great gulps. He greeted Bella with a stiff military bow. “Chair Fingal.”

“Thanks for coming all the way to London to meet me—”

He waved that away. “I had other business here. We need to talk.”

She took a seat. Still shaken by her encounter with the Duflots, she felt this was turning into a very long day.

Paxton didn’t sit. He seemed too restless for that. He poured Bella a coffee from a big jug in the corner of the room; he poured for Bella’s security people too, and they sat at the far end of the table.

“Tell me what’s on your mind, Admiral.”

“I’ll tell you simply. The new sightings confirm it. We have a bogey.”

“A bogey?”

“An anomaly. Something sailing through our solar system that doesn’t belong there…”

Paxton was tall, wiry. He had the face of an astronaut, she thought, very pale, and pocked by the scars of radiation tumors. His cheek tattoo was a proud wet-navy emblem, and his hair was a drizzle of crew-cut gray.

He was in his seventies, she supposed. He had been around forty when he had led Aurora 1, the first manned mission to Mars, and had become the first person to set foot on that world — and then he had led his stranded crew through the greater trial of the sunstorm. Evidently he had taken the experience personally. Now a Rear Admiral in the new space navy, he had become a power in the paranoiac post-sunstorm years, and had thrown himself into efforts to counter the threat that had once stranded him on Mars.

Watching him pace, caffeine-pumped, his face set and urgent, Bella had an absurd impulse to ask him for his autograph. And then a second impulse to order him to retire. She filed that reflection away.

In his clipped Midwestern accent, he amplified the hints Edna had already given her. “We actually got three sightings of this thing.”

The first had been fortuitous.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, having made mankind’s first re-connaissance of the outer planets, had sped on out of the solar system. By the fifth decade of a new century Voyager had traveled more than a hundred and fifty times Earth’s distance from the sun.