“company” invitation appropriated by celebrity anchors and chief executives.
Wilson sat in the front pew slapping one hand into the other while the organist played some dreadful twenty-second-century hymn. His perfectly tailored dress uniform with its flawless midnight-black cloth was becoming oppressively warm while he waited. And waited.
“Probably won’t show,” Captain Oscar Monroe said cheerfully, and loud enough for several nearby pews to hear. “I wouldn’t. Too much pressure. Should have had a private ceremony like you originally wanted.”
“Thank you,” Wilson hissed at his best man.
“Just doing my job; preparing you for the worst.” He twisted around in his seat. “Yep.”
“She’s here?”
“Nope. The press are all starting to smile at the nonarrival. It’s like a display of saber-toothed dentistry back there.”
Wilson felt the appallingly strong urge to giggle. “Shut up, you dick.”
With a theatrical flourish, the organist began to play the wedding march. Wilson and Oscar stood up, not looking at each other in case they started laughing out loud. Anna began her walk up the aisle on Rafael Columbia’s arm. A hundred professional retinal inserts followed her every move. Thousands of studio-based couture experts lamented that she was wearing her uniform. A unisphere audience of nine and a half billion completely ignored them.
Navy personnel filled the chapel’s garden. Off duty or just taking a break, they all turned up to applaud the Admiral when he and Anna came out of the chapel doors arm in arm, smiling in true couplelike unison. Both of them grinned at the spontaneous display of support, and waved as they walked over to the marquee set up beside the chapel. The rest of the guests spilled out onto the grass, looking up at the waning crescent of Icalanise beyond the crystal dome. Strong slivers of light shone a few hundred kilometers away from the gigantic alien starship, the new assembly platforms forming their circular pattern in front of the stars. For the politicians it was surprisingly reassuring to see their committee work and deal making and budget trading actually translated into solid hardware. A lot of them looked at the simple pattern of lights, and compared them to the images of thousands of ships descending on the Lost23 worlds. In such circumstances, total reassurance was difficult to come by.
Nobody let it spoil the festivities. Even the celebrity reporters behaved themselves, as well as could be expected. Nearly all of them tried to get up close to Nigel Sheldon at some point in the reception. He wasn’t often seen out in public, and the off chance of an exclusive was too tempting. Vice President Bicklu pointedly ignored Oscar, who raised a glass every time he caught the VP glaring in his direction. Ten-year-old Emily Kime, who was Anna’s one bridesmaid, managed to down two glasses of white wine before her parents found out. Alessandra Baron and Michelangelo adopted some magical people variant of identical magnetic poles repelling each other in order to avoid coming within ten meters for the whole reception.
Wilson and Anna left early for a luxury hotel over in New Glasgow. Officially they had twenty-four hours’ leave in which to conduct their honeymoon. The media were all quietly briefed that in reality they would both be back at work the following morning. Everybody was taking the navy’s response to the Lost23 very seriously indeed. The newlyweds were also postponing having any family until after the Prime alien situation was resolved. In that they were no different from any other couple in the Commonwealth. Womb tank leasing companies and germline modification clinics were going out of business on every world as people stopped having children. It was a trend that the Treasury was monitoring with some urgency, along with hundreds of other economic downturns.
It was close to midnight when Oscar left the party and took a personal pod over to the concave-walled tower that was Pentagon II. Even this late most of the offices were fully staffed. The navy was operating nonstop to finalize the designs of its new ships, and see them into production. Oscar was due to take the Defender out for a month-long patrol flight in a few days’ time; and he was expecting the starship to be effectively obsolete by the time he got back. CST technicians had already delivered the prototype marque 6 hyperdrive, with a theoretical speed of four light-years per hour. The test flight was scheduled for a fortnight’s time. Such was the pace of progress, the marque 5 had been obsolete before it ever even got out of the design array.
The elevator delivered him to the twenty-ninth floor. Up here, at the executive level, there were fewer people around. Nobody passed him as he walked the short length of corridor to his office. He locked the door and sat behind his desk, with the lights barely on. For a long time he did nothing. It wasn’t the first time he’d come up here ready to do this. Each time he’d…not chickened out exactly; anger had driven him away. Anger about Adam coming back and making this demand. Anger that fueled a determination not to give in, not to be pushed around. Not like before, when he was first-life young, when the two of them had been idiotic hotheads following a cause someone else had infected them with.
Some of those times spent sitting here, Oscar had nearly called Rafael Columbia. Just get it all over with. It would mean a terribly long time in life suspension, but when—or if—he ever did emerge it probably would be into a better society. That always made him laugh bitterly. Typical Monroe cop-out; let someone else get on with it while you wait for better days.
He’d been through this soul searching so many times in the years immediately after Abadan Station. It had taken a decade for the pain and guilt to subside. After all, it had been a mistake. Not an accident; he didn’t ever give himself that easy option out. But it hadn’t been deliberate, not the deaths. They hadn’t set out to do that. So he’d rebuilt his life, not as himself; but he’d used the surprisingly well-made cover that the Party provided, and got himself a job, and friends, and made a real contribution. Working for CST’s exploration division he’d opened up dozens of new worlds, where people could make a fresh start and leave behind the dishonesty and greed and corrupt politicians and the Dynasties that were the majority of the Commonwealth. Some of those worlds he’d been back to, and found them quiet and pleasant, full of hope and expectation. He’d given people a chance. And that was what really mattered, which is how he’d come to live with himself once more. What those people did with that chance was up to them. One man could never give them anything more. Unless you were an arrogant little shit like Adam Elvin, who was surely the most self-deluding bastard who’d ever walked the Commonwealth planets.
But for every other fault and stupidity, Adam wasn’t dishonest. He really thought something odd had happened on the Second Chance.
And the hell of it is, I still don’t understand how we lost Bose and Verbeken at the Watchtower. Not really.
Oscar pulled a high-density memory crystal from his pocket, then another. In the end he had eight of them lined up on his polished desk. He slotted the first one into the desktop array.
“Access the Second Chance log recordings,” he told his e-butler. “Isolate the period between the barrier coming down and us going back into hyperspace. Give me a list of file classes.”
The data rose silently into his virtual vision. The ship had an engineering log, bridge log, visual and data, environmental systems log, external sensors, power systems, communications, ancillary vehicles, individual space suit logs, food consumption records, crew medical records, fuel levels, plasma rocket performances, hyperdrive logs, navigation logs, satellite flight logs, life-support wheel deck section general recordings; a list that went on and on down into ancillary systems and structural analysis. Oscar hadn’t realized just how much of their life on the voyage had been monitored and recorded, how little privacy they had in practice. He used his virtual hands to designate the categories he thought might be useful, right down to the waste management files, and told his e-butler to copy them. The download took a long time.
CHAPTER FOUR
One hundred twenty years.
He marveled that it had passed without notice. He was surprised he had no knowledge of the long years, that there was no sense of all that time elapsing. He couldn’t even recall any dreams, but then his thoughts were sluggish as he moved from a state of profound sleep into full consciousness. As yet he hadn’t even opened his eyes. For now he was content to exist as just a few tenuous strands of thought amid the infinite darkness.
Memories: he was aware of them, jumbled colors and scents, no more substantial than ghosts. As they swirled around him, coalescing and strengthening, they provided unreal glimpses into strange worlds, places where light and sound had once existed. A zone of space and time he used to occupy when he’d lived his earlier lives.
He knew now why he had been away. There was no guilt within him at the knowledge. Instead he felt a warm satisfaction. He was still alive, his mind intact—and presumably his body, though he’d get to that in a while. When he was ready. It would surely be an interesting universe, this one into which he was emerging. Even the Commonwealth, with all its massive societal inertia, must have progressed in many directions. The technologies of this day would be fearsome. The Commonwealth’s size would be impressive, for they would have started expanding across phase four space by now, if not five. With all that came fabulous opportunity. He could start again. A little less recklessly than last time, of course, but there was no reason why he couldn’t reclaim all that had been his before it slipped so frustratingly from his grasp.
Grayness competed for his attention now, battling against the tauntingly elusive memories. Grayness that came from light falling on his closed eyelids. It was tinged with a sparkle of red. Blood. His heart was beating with a slow, relaxed rhythm. A sound leaked in, a soft heaving. Human breathing. His own. He was breathing. His body was alive and unharmed. And now he acknowledged it, his skin was tingling all over. The air flowing around his body was cool, and slightly moist. Somehow he could sense people close by.
Just for a moment he experienced anxiety. A worry that this tranquillity would end as soon as he opened his eyes. That the universe would be somehow out of kilter.
Ridiculous.
Morton opened his eyes.
Blurred shapes moved around him, areas of light and dark shifting like clouds in an autumn sky. They sharpened up as he blinked away rheumy tears. He was on some kind of bed in a small featureless room, with a trolley of medical equipment to his left. Two men were standing beside the bed, looking down at him. Both of them wore medical-style gray-green smocks. Smocks that were very close in style to those the Justice Directorate people had worn when he’d been put into suspension.
Morton tried to speak; he was going to say: Well, at least you’re still human, but all that came from his throat was a weak gurgling sound.
“Take it easy,” one of the men said. “I’m Dr. Forole. You’re okay. That’s the important thing for you to know. Everything is fine. You’re just coming around from suspension. Do you understand that?”
