Firstborn

ball.”

Bisesa heard a crash of glass, drunken laughter, and then a dull crump. Looking back, she saw that flames were already licking out of the darkened upper windows of the Lexington Hotel.

53: Aurora

December 7, 2070

With Bill Carel and Bob Paxton at her side, Bella Fingal gazed out of the shuttle’s small blister window as they approached one of the most famous spacecraft in human history.

Bella felt exhausted, deep in her bones, after the strain of the last months. But now it was almost over. Only a few more days remained to the Q-bomb’s closest approach to Earth: “Q-day,” as the commentators called it. The astronomers and the military assured her daily that the bomb had stuck to the path to which it had been deflected after the Eye on Mars had suddenly flared to life; the Q-bomb would come close, even sailing between Earth and Moon, but it would not impact the planet.

Bella had to plan her affairs as if that were true. Today, for instance, she had to get through this conference on Aurora, fulfilling one of her last self-appointed duties, the kick-starting of a new debate about the future of mankind. But she suspected that like the rest of the human race she wouldn’t quite believe it until the Q-bomb really had passed by harmlessly. And like much of mankind she planned to spend Q-day itself with her family.

After that she could lay down the burden of office at last, and submit herself to the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, and somebody else would have to make the decisions. She was content with that. Content even at being relieved of office before the final act of this lethal drama was played out, in the abandonment of Mars.

The shuttle turned. She was maundering; she had almost forgotten where she was. She peered out of her window, concentrating on a remarkable, and familiar, view.

Shining in raw sunlight, Aurora 2 was ungainly, fragile-looking. She looked something like a drum majorette’s baton, a slim spine two hundred meters long connecting propulsion units and habitable compartments. The ship was badly scarred, paint peeling, solar-cell arrays blackened and curled up, and in one place the hull of the crew dome had burned and wrinkled back, exposing struts and partitions. Aurora had visibly withstood a terrible fire.

But she had achieved what had been asked of her.

Aurora had been the second manned ship to Mars. She had been intended to pick up Bob Paxton and his crew, who would have sailed home to their heroes’ welcome. But the sunstorm had put paid to those plans, and Aurora 2, one of the largest spacecraft of its day, was needed for other purposes than exploration, and she was brought back to Earth. L1, a stationary point between sun and Earth, was the logical place to hang a shield intended to shelter the Earth from the raging of the sunstorm. So it was here that Aurora had been stationed, to serve as a shack for the construction crews.

The shield was gone now. The storm had left it a monumental wreck, that had then been cannibalized to build new stations in space and on the Moon. But the Aurora herself remained here at L1, a permanent memorial to those astonishing days, and a stub of the shield had been kept in place around the ship, its glistening surface spiralling out from the embedded hull like a spiderweb.

Bella glanced at her fellow passengers. Bill Carel, frail, trembling slightly, his face full of anger at the betrayal by his son, barely seemed able to see the approaching ship.

Bob Paxton’s expression was harder to read.

Bella herself had served on the shield during the sunstorm, and had been up here many times since, for memorials, dedication services, museum openings, anniversaries. But for Bob Paxton it was different. As soon as he got back to Earth after the storm, he had gotten through the medals-and-presidents stuff as quickly as possible. Then he had thrown himself back into his military career, and had ultimately devoted his life to the issue of how to deal with the future Firstborn threat. Paxton had never visited L1, and probably hadn’t even seen Aurora 2 since he glimpsed her from the surface of Mars, sliding through the sky on its flyby pass, abandoning him and his crew. Now the old sky warrior’s face was creased, clamped, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

The shuttle turned with a remote clatter of attitude thrusters and nestled belly-down on the curving hull of Aurora’s habitable compartment. The sun was directly below Bella now, casting vertical shadows, and through a small window set over her head she saw the Earth, a blue lantern hanging directly opposite the position of the sun. Earth was full, of course; it always was, as seen from L1.

She wished she could see it more clearly.

With the docking complete, the shuttle closed its systems down.

“Welcome to Aurora 2, and the Shield Memorial Station.”

The soft female voice sent a shiver of familiarity through Bella.

This was different from all her previous visits. “Hello, Athena.

Welcome home.”

“Bella. It’s good to speak to you again. Please come aboard.”

A hatch opened in the floor. Bella released her seat restraint and floated into the air.

Alexei Carel and Lyla Neal were waiting for them on the bridge of Aurora.

This was the ship’s single most prestigious site, the location where Bud Tooke had once masterminded the salvation of the Earth. Now it was a museum, and the antique-looking softscreen displays, headsets, clipboards, and other bits of detritus from the days of crisis had been lovingly preserved under layers of transparent plastic. It always made Bella feel old to come back here.

Bill Carel was the last to come through onto the bridge. Clumsy in microgravity, evidently feeble, he looked oddly comical in his orange jumpsuit. But when he faced his son his expression was twisted. “You bloody little fool. And you, Lyla. You betrayed me.”

Alexei and Lyla clung to each other, drifting a little in the microgravity, nervous, defiant. Alexei was a skinny kid, only twenty-seven, and Lyla looked even younger. But then, reflected Bella, all true Spacers were just kids.

Alexei said, “We don’t see it like that, Dad. We did what we had to do. What we thought was best.”

“You spied on me,” Carel snapped. “You stole my work. You were a brilliant student, Lyla. Brilliant. And you’ve come to this.”

Lyla was cooler than her lover. “We were forced into it by your own actions, sir. You kept secrets. You wouldn’t tell people what they needed to know. You lied! If we were at fault, so were you.”

“And that,” Bella broke in, “is the first sensible thing anybody’s said.”

“I agree,” Athena said dryly. “Perhaps you should all sit down.

A small educational area has been set aside at the rear of the bridge…”

It was a plastic table, its top drenched with kid-friendly sunstorm info, with small seats set around it with microgravity bars to hook your feet onto. The five of them sat here, over the glimmering primary colors of the table, glowering.

“Well, I’m glad to be here, at any rate,” Athena said.

Bella looked up. “Was that a joke, Athena?”

“You remember me, Bella. I always was a joker.”

“You thought you were. So you’re pleased we brought you home from Cyclops.” If a distributed intelligence like Athena could be said to “be” anywhere, she, or rather her most complete definition, was now lodged in a secure memory store in one of Aurora’s abandoned engine rooms.

Athena said, “I was made welcome at Cyclops. I was protected there. But I was born to run the shield, born to be here. Of course I, this copy of me, have no memory of the sunstorm itself. It is actually educational for me to be here, to access the data stores. To learn what happened that day, as if I were any other visitor. It is humbling.”

“And may I humbly ask,” Bob Paxton asked sourly, “why the fuck you have dragged us all up here?” It was