Zero Dark: The Novel 1 - 1

'What do you think they're going to do with her?'

Colyn turned away from the window.  He had seen Lison coming up behind him, reflected in the thick duraglaze of the observation room's exterior wall.  She was already dressed for dinner in an elegant pink gown that drifted from hips to floor and moved languorously in the point-three gravity of the ship's passenger section.

It was the question on everyone's lips, right now.  It had been asked so many times Colyn's will to live had begun to creak at each new idea or theory, but with the intersection just hours away, now, he admitted that excitement was growing even in his cynical bones.

'I think I'm with the orbital ring crowd,' he admitted, as he kissed her on the cheek and felt the scented brush of her lips against his face.  'But whether they make practical use of it or just decide to wear it for a few centuries, for fun, I've no idea.  I guess I'd be disappointed by either option.'

They turned back to the window.  Colyn had been alone in the long room when Lison had arrived but now others were drifting in after her.  No surprise.  Lison had always been watched by those who needed a bellwether for the niceties.  It was her Aichar upbringing.  Colyn, a pureblood Sek, was expected to be socially incompetent and so took delight in doing exactly what he pleased.

'I'm hoping for fireworks,' she replied, slipping an arm through his.  He was in uniform, but not the formal dress wear he was supposed to be in for dinner.  Instead, he was still wearing the dirt-brown fatigues and light-grey ballistic armour of patrol duties, his only concession to the privileges of his rank being the beret tucked into his pocket in lieu of the demi-helmet his subordinates would be wearing right now.  They made an incongruous pair, he thought, shifting his focus from their reflection and back to the object a few hundred kilometres away from the ship.  They had discussed pairing, once or twice, but were more comfortable with the sexless - but not unaffectionate - friendship they had cultivated over the last three decades or so.  Lison the diplomat.  Colyn the soldier.  She rested her head on his shoulder.

Ammit tumbled.

The asteroid did so with a perfect grace that was almost, even to Colyn, spiritual.  He had seen plenty of its kind before, of course - out on the journey to Enceladus and back, last year, setting up the Sek defence presence for the colony's tentative exploration beneath the satellite's frozen surface.  But Ammit was no stellar fly-speck.  Fifteen kilometres from core to the lowest point on its surface, it was almost a hundred in circumference at its widest point.  Of the Bright S type, it was mostly iron but exploratory reports had suggested the possibility of an ice core and the fascinating scientific research possibilities that could offer.  But Earth had laid her claim.

Fair enough, really.  The main reason anyone had paid any attention at all to Ammit was because she was on a direct collision course with the Pacific Ocean, about fifty kilometres off the coast of Japan.  Colyn suppressed a shiver.  A hundred years ago, Ammit would have been the end of humanity.  Now...

"M-Fin-C47", usually known as Caroline, was what was usually termed an exploratory research vessel.  But "exploratory research" was mostly short-hand for "rich people playing around" these days.  Caroline was no exception and, although this was strictly a diplomatic mission, the opportunity to follow Ammit's trajectory to Earth for three months was mostly an excuse for the usual inter-caste schmoozing that passed for diplomacy these days.  Colyn had expected a more challenging journey, but the Joint Terran Council of Cities had made it clear that they considered Ammit to be Earth property, so he had only had to intercept covert attempts to launch a landing on the asteroid three times.

The Terrans were picky about these things.  He struggled to imagine what it was like to live in one of their city-states, each one packed with hundreds of millions of souls, when the whole of Mars was fewer than seventy million in population.  He struggled enough to imagine what it meant to stand beneath a blue sky and draw breath.  Four generations since the end of the Restructure War and Mars was yet to move beyond some very hardy, modified strains of lichen surviving in its thin, irradiated atmosphere.  Still, there was progress of sorts.  Perhaps in another fifty years there might be surface water.  And if the theories about the core were right, maybe even a magnetosphere...

'Stop thinking so loud,' complained Lison, gently batting him on the arm.  A member of the purser's team wandered past with a tray of drink bulbs and she picked up two.  'You are, actually, off duty, remember?'

'I should go and get changed,' he riposted, pointing the bulb she'd handed him towards the smart figures of the other guests nearby.  'I'm letting the side down.'

'Enjoy your drink, first,' she insisted, tapping her bulb to his.  'Once you get those fancy reds on, I'll have to fight my way through a pack of predatory young Exeks to get a word in edgewise.'

'I should've seen a tailor before we left,' Colyn opined.  'The reds are bit more snug than they used to be, Lison.  I'm getting old.'

'We're all getting old, Colyn,' she replied, looking around the room.

'Not you,' he complained.

'It's an illusion,' she insisted, running her free hand across her scalp.  'If I had hair, you'd see it was white and thinning already.  You should try it.'

Colyn smiled at her, but his eyes were sad.  Lison had stage three ovarian cancer.  She was forty-three standard years old.  The odds were not good that she would make it back to Mars.  Such was the life of the Martian: more than three quarters of them never made it to fifty, and although they lived most of their lives underground and had some outstanding medical treatments and pain-suppressors, the daily barrage of cosmic radiation caught up with most of them eventually.

It was a point of bitterness that Earth wouldn't help.

The homeworld's technological advances made its colonies on Mars and Venus look as if they were standing still.  But trade was slow and begrudging on the part of Earth.  Even Venus had as little to do with its siblings as it seemed able.  For all that their planet's surface was a howling tempest of death, it had a magnetosphere.  Venusians either died young, because they made a mistake, or they lived: well past a hundred in many cases, if the stories were to be believed.  Colyn wasn't sure if he did.

'Fine, go,' retorted Lison, pushing him.  'I'm not going to have you standing here mourning me before I'm gone.  Push off and make yourself look handsome.'

'Oof,' he smirked, knocking back what was left in his bulb.  'I may be some time!'

*

The dining room was filling fast by the time Colyn returned.

It was a large room, but the needs of the rotating passenger section meant that it was oddly proportioned to sustain visibilty from one end to the other whilst maintaining consistent gravity.  Long and thin, it was filled with tables and chairs, fixed to the deck to reduce the chances of an accident in the event that that the rotating mid-section of the ship had to lock into place.  Although the illusion of gravity was sufficient that they could, theoretically, have eaten off normal plates, it was still convention to service everything under covers that pinned each plate to the surface.  When one ate, the cover was removed.  If you paused - even just to take a drink - the cover went back on.

One wall of the dining room was punctured with windows and the ship had been placed into a corkscrew flight path around Ammit to keep it artfully within view.  Every few minutes, the shadow of the Caroline drifted across its face.

'Step well, Colonel Gryre,' said a clear, bell-like voice behind him and he turned, composing his features.

'Step well, Skymaster Lil-Tek-Paiyou,' he replied.

Paiyou was several inches taller than Colyn, and slender to the point that he looked as if a good wind might break him.  But appearances were deceptive.  The Venusian Skymaster - his exact status in Venusian society wasn't clear, but the mere fact that he was travelling between Mars and Earth was enough to indicate that it was very high indeed - would not have been there if he wasn't as physically robust as he was intellectually brilliant.  His skin was so pale that the blue veins on his oiled scalp - a common Venusian affectation, not an affliction like Lison's - stood out like the topography of an alien world.  His body suit was an oily blue-black, tight to the waist then spreading to shimmering bloomers, gathered at the ankles above bare feet.  Colyn suspected the Skymaster was 90% augmetics under his amphibian-like flesh.  For all the Venusian's charm and intellect, the soldier didn't much like him.  But that was Mars and Venus.  As in myth, so in life.

They sat for dinner, and Colyn felt that sharing a table with both Lison and Paiyou was a score-draw of an experience.

'You've been utterly tight-lipped on the subject, Skymaster,' Lison joshed the Venusian with her usual charming smile, whilst waving a fork dangerously above her plate cover.  'Why not share Venus's expectations for Ammit?  What do you think the Terrans plan for her?'

'The Terrans confuse us too often for me to make a confident prediction, Ambassador deLyl,' Paiyou parried her inquiry.  'They have always been mercurial and the last few years have seen the peculiarities of their global temper get worse, in my opinion.  They could blow it into a billion pieces with a nuclear warhead or turn it over to an army of zero-gee sculptors to recreate Michelangelo's David in meteoric iron and neither outcome would be in any respect inconsistent with the homeworld's previous global decisions.'

'Of all people,' interrupted Lance FinAcer, the Caroline's captain, sitting opposite Colyn, 'I would've thought you'd know more about how the Terrans think, Skymaster.  Haven't you just spent a decade with them in the Jovan colonies?'

'It's wrong to think of the Jovans as Terrans, captain,' replied Paiyou without looking up from his meal.  'The Joint Council might lay territorial claim to the Jovan moons, but more than half the population there, now, was born off-Earth.  They are their own people.  In fact, I agreed to carry with me to Earth a petition to the Joint Council for them to be recognized as their own city-state instead of being beholden to distant parent-cities they mostly despite.'

'Despise?' asked Colyn, covering his meal to speak.  'Are you suggesting there's enough anger for an uprising of some sort?'

'Against whom, Colonel?' replied the Venusian.  'Their so-called parents over half-a-billion kilometres away and - as if you hadn't noticed - Earth has been neglecting its deepspace-capable fleet.'

Colyn's eyebrows twitched at that.  It was true: Earth had sold off most of its deepspace fleet to Mars, in fact.  Everyone had expected this to herald the construction of a new generation of deepspace vessel.  Speculation had been pretty wild that Terran scientist were developing a new kind of zero-fuel drive.  But it had been three years and the shipyards above the Moon were either mothballed or servicing travel within the Terran gravity well only.

Conversation drifted aimlessly for a few minutes until a midshipman appeared at FinAcer's elbow and whispered in his ear.

'You'll have to forgive me, ladies and gentlemen,' the captain said, rising with a meaningful glance at Colyn.  'And Colonel Gryre, too.  We have a minor emergency that will require our attention.'

'Well, there's only an hour until the intersection!' cried out Lison in mock-alarm.  'You hurry back for the view!'

Colyn shook his head affectionately as he rose and winked at her as he followed in Lance's wake towards the bridge.

*

As they clambered up to Caroline's spine where freefall gravity reasserted itself (and Colyn regretted bolting his meal quite so fast), the midshipman chattered to the captain.  Colyn held his peace and listened.

'-just shut down,' the young woman was saying.

'In the middle of a sentence?' asked FinAcer.  'As if they got cut off?'

'No, sir,' she replied, hoisting herself into the spinal column and along the pull rungs, the two senior officers close behind.  'They finished a sentence, said "got to go" and then the line went dead.'

'"Got to go"?' scoffed FinAcer as they pulled into the bridge.  'How does Orbital Traffic Control "got to go"?'

'They refused all further attempts to raise them, sir, so I came to get you.'

Like most ships, the bridge was a cramped space - especially compared to the passenger areas.  Four seats were arranged around a dense bank of sensor displays and control panels.  There was an exterior window, but it was hidden behind armour shielding for use only in an emergency, when the crew seats could be rotated to face it with manual controls.  But the vast majority of the time, the ship was controlled on instruments only, much like a submarine.  Two seats were occupied by the officer of the watch and a pilot petty officer.  The captain slipped into one of the vacant seats and the midshipman gestured Colyn to the other, but he shook his head.

'It would be wasted on me, lass,' he told her, pushing into a corner.  'You do your job.'

There wasn't, it turned out, much they could do.  There were a dozen vessels in or approaching Terran orbit and none of them could raise Orbital Traffic.  The surface base on the Moon was similarly silent, although that wasn't unusual - it had often been left unoccupied for months at a time unless there was some specific reason to use it.

Caroline's native systems bot was set to look for any open radio communications frequency, but other than that...

'Lance, what's this?' Colyn asked, overlooking bridge protocol in his confusion.  He had opened up a screen on his retinal display to scope the live Terran news feeds.  They were close enough now that they were coming through live and with good resolution.

FinAcer looked up at him, and he flicked the display to the shared AR feed on the bridge.

There should have been a newsperson, or a journalist, or some footage of whatever - perhaps something about an Orbital Traffic Control strike, although that wasn't really a Terran thing.  Mars still had strikes of some group or another most weeks.  Earth was weird like that.  But there was nothing but text:

SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE

'What the hell is going on down there?' asked Lance.

'Caroline's found some broadcast signals, too, captain,' said the Watch Officer, Lieutenant Shamsi.  She put them up on the screen alongside the display.

'See you on the other side!'

'-you on the other side!'

'-on the other side!  See you-'

They were on loops, in several languages that no one on the bridge spoke but the intonation was clear.  They all said very much the same thing.

'Hold on,' said Shamsi, 'we've got something else, here.'

She quashed the other feeds and threw up the new one.

'Where the hell is everyone?  Is there anyone out there?  Can anyone hear me?'

It was a man's voice, panicky and rough, speaking accented English.

'Can we respond on the same frequency?'

'Already on it, captain.  Speak when ready.'

FinAcer cleared his voice, self-consciously.

'This is Captain FinAcer of Martian Exploratory Vessel Caroline.  Please identify yourself.'

There was a delay of several seconds.

'Oh, thank God!  What the hell is going on?  Where is everyone?  This place is empty!'

'This is Captain FinAcer.  Who am I talking to?'

'Ah... Jeff.  Where is everyone?'

'Jeff, where are you?'

'San Diego.  There's no one here.'

'What do you mean there's no one there, Jeff?'

'I mean, I, um, came out of my apartment and there's no one here.  This place is empty.'

'I guess that's not normal?'

'In San Diego??  No!!  Where are you?'

'We're about an hour away from Terran orbit, Jeff, trying to get instructions from Orbital Control.  Do you know what might have happened to them?'

'What happened to everybody??'

Colyn waved a hand to catch FinAcer's eye and the captain nodded and gestured for him to speak.

'Jeff, this is Colonel Colyn Gryre.  Do you know what Earth's plans are for Ammit?'

'For what?'

'Ammit.  The asteroid due to intersect in... about thirty minutes.'

'Intersect?'

'It's going to hit Earth, Jeff, if no one stops it.  The Joint Council haven't told us their plans to intercept it.  Do you know?'

'What the f-'

'Jeff?'

'Jeff?' FinAcer asked again.

'He's in San Diego, sir, and broadcasting on a radio frequency not via satellite.  He's just dropped over the horizon.  We can't reach him.'

They all looked at each other.

'I can't believe I'm saying this out loud,' said Colyn.  'But is it possible that the Joint Council has no plans for Ammit?'

'They'd just let it impact?' replied Shamsi.  'Of course not!'

But there was doubt in her voice that Colyn saw in the faces of everyone on the bridge.

'What do we do?' asked the young midshipman, a look of horror on her face.

'Options?' asked the captain.

'We have no weapons to speak of,' said Colyn.  'We have no way to break up something as huge as Ammit.  Frankly, even if we crashed the whole ship into it, it wouldn't make more than the tiniest difference to its velocity.'

FinAcer nodded his head.

'You're right,' and his voice was full of private relief.  Colyn could tell he had been considering that very act.  'We can't stop Ammit.  But surely Jeff can't be the only person on a radio receiver.  We can send out a warning.  We need to get something out.  Nothing makes sense, but if this is all some mad and tasteless Terran joke, the worst we could be accused of is lacking a sense of humour and I can live with that.'

'We need Lison,' said Colyn.

*

'People of Earth, if you can hear me, find shelter immediately.  A massive asteroid is about to hit your planet.  We fear the Joint Council has taken no steps to prevent it and we have no way to intervene.  The impact will be in the North-West Pacific Ocean in approximately ten minutes.  Find shelter immediately.  The deeper, the better.  Go to cellars, bunkers, underground parking lots.  Take whatever food and water you can gather in the little time you have.  Many of you will die.  Some will survive.  The people of Mars are coming to your aid.'

'People of Earth, if you can hear me...'

*

Lison's calm, clear voice broadcast on a loop as the passengers and crew of the Caroline gathered in the observation room, all sense of occasion and anticipation gone.  Only a mounting, uncomprehending horror attended them.

Several other small vessels could be seen within a few hundred kilometres of them, none larger than Caroline.  FinAcer had spoken to their crews.  None had contact with Earth.  None had any idea what was going on.

A brief discussion was had as to whether they should watch at all - whether it would be better to turn away and wait for the aftermath.  The sensors, after all, would record whatever happened.  But, even now, they were praying for some surprise response, some clever intervention that would bring relief and simple anger at the Joint Council instead of confusion.  Many people were already weeping.

But when Ammit swept through a cluster of low-orbit satellites, it was like a switch was thrown.

'Oh, God,' someone whispered in the silence as, rapt, the whole audience watched the asteroid flare from red to white-hot, as it met air resistance,  and then -