Something Coming Through

55. Some Kind of Connection

Mangala | 5 August–10 September

The walls of the hospital room were painted a soothing green, with a long narrow window shuttered by a venetian blind. Chloe could glimpse slivers of a dusty night sky through the slanted blades. It was as if she was afloat in a planetary ocean of deep smog. The lights dimmed in the evening and the pulse of the hospital slowed and settled, although there was always the clatter of a trolley on its way to somewhere else, the squeak of shoes on polished floors, human voices, and at last the lights brightened and it was another day. But it was always night outside. The night-year of Mangala.

Tethered to drips and the beeping monitor, she drifted on slow deep morphine tides.

One day she woke and the policeman, Vic Gayle, was perched on the chair by her bed. A large middle-aged man in a brown suit with a pink check, looking tired and a little awkward.

There were flowers on her bedside cabinet. Yellow roses.

He asked her how she felt, and she said it was about what you’d expect after being shot.

‘You look pretty good.’

‘That’s weird. Because I feel fucking awful.’

She seemed to be looking up at him from a deep pit. She couldn’t move anything but her eyes. The various cramps and jags of her damage were distant reports from another city, voices in another room.

Vic Gayle said, ‘They put you in what they call an induced coma to help your body heal. They brought you out of it a couple of days ago, but only just now let me in to talk. I don’t have long, though. If you have any questions you’d best fire them straight at me.’

‘Fahad?’

‘He’s safe. Squared away in an apartment in the UN building. He wanted to go home, but by the time we’d sorted out the little problem of his illegal entry the shuttle had departed.’

‘He has a little sister, back on Earth.’

It felt odd, saying that. Earth. You don’t need to think about the name of your home until you’ve left it.

‘He talks to her by q-phone every day,’ Vic said.

‘Is he still drawing?’

‘Not that I know of. Playing video games, complaining that we won’t let him go out…Drury’s organisation has fallen apart, there’s a little civil war over control of drug corners, but some hothead might decide to try to make a name for himself by taking a pop at the kid.’

‘The spaceship…?’

‘Was Fahad right about that? Has it arrived? I don’t know. No one knows. The storm has locked down everything in Idunn’s Valley. A UN team is trying to get through to the site, but communications are down all over. If something has happened out there it will take a while for the news to reach us. But don’t you worry, Chloe. It’s been taken care of. Everything is fine. All you need to do is rest and get better. Can you do that for me?’

‘I’m trying.’

‘The nurse is giving me a death stare. I have to go. Take care, Chloe. I’ll come back soon.’

And then the nurse was bustling around her and did something to her morphine drip, and everything sank away.

When Chloe woke again the room was lit only by the glow of the monitors and a wedge of light under the door. She listened to the noises of the hospital, and slept. When she woke, dry-mouthed and cottony, the policeman was there again.

‘Water,’ she said.

Vic called the nurse, who let her sip ice water through a metal straw. It was heavenly. When she had finished, she asked him about Henry Harris’s body.

‘It should go home. Back to Earth.’

‘It’s still in Winnetou. But as soon as the dust storm lifts I’ll make sure it’s sent back.’

‘Nevers. Is he still here?’

‘In jail. But not for long, I reckon. The British consulate has lodged a complaint, and there’s a rumour of some under-the-counter deal. We’re having more luck with Cal McBride. He’s been charged with the murder of Hanna Babbel. Fahad told us what you told him; at some point we’ll need a statement from you. McBride made bail, but he’s tagged, and he knows we’re watching him. And we’re still looking into his involvement in the death of Nevers’s partner, and a stack of old cases. One way or another, he’s going down.’

‘The avatar?’

‘No sign of it. Nevers claims he doesn’t remember anything. The scientists have been doing all kinds of tests on the memory wire he was carrying, but it seems to have burned out. No trace of activity left in it.’

‘The ship?’

‘Still no word. Fahad wants to visit, by the way. If I can swing permission for him, will you be up for it?’

‘Love to see him.’

‘He’s been having tests here, as a matter of fact.’

‘I think Ugly Chicken has finished with him. But if he starts drawing again…’

‘That’s one of the signs. Right.’

Vic changed the subject and talked about preparations for the arraignment of Cal McBride and predictions about the dust storm’s duration until the nurse sent him away.

Chloe had lost twelve centimetres of her colon to Drury’s bullet, and it had chipped her pelvis and caused some nerve damage. She’d also contracted pneumonia and suffered congestive pressure to her heart. And there was something else, something growing under the skin of her wrist. When the biochine had bitten her, it had left something behind.

One of the consultants treating her said that she’d seen similar examples of biochine infection amongst prospectors and ruin miners. Fibrous growths of carbon whiskers with complex nanostructures incorporating copper and iron and other elements, with a pathology similar to neurofibromatosis.

‘In your case, fortunately, the fibroid is localised and highly organised. As if it has a purpose or function. Although what that is, I’m afraid we do not yet know.’

‘Is it still growing?’ Chloe said. The idea of a weird alien parasite stealthily invading her flesh was simultaneously unnerving and queasily fascinating.

‘The scans show that it appears to have stabilised, although threads resembling afferent nerves have extended up your arm and made connections to your sensory and paranervous systems at the fifth cervical vertebra.’ The consultant touched her neck to show what she meant. ‘You aren’t the only person infected, by the way. Your friend, Fahad Chauhan, has a similar growth.’

‘He must have been bitten too. He didn’t mention it…’

‘The other good news is that it appears to have had no effect on your immune system or brain activity,’ the consultant said. ‘And there is no loss of mobility in your wrist or hand. You’ll hardly notice it’s there.’

It took a moment for Chloe to realise what she meant. ‘You aren’t going to remove it?’

‘Surgical excision is often unsuccessful — the fibroids grow back. And any attempt to remove the threads embedded in your spinal cord could cause paralysis. We’d like to do some more tests,’ the consultant said. ‘With your permission, of course.’

‘Maybe when I’ve healed up.’

Chloe had a good idea what the growth was for. A terminal. A connector. She had been prepared. Fahad had been prepared too. And maybe the idea that she’d been prepared was part of that preparation.

She gave Vic Gayle a statement about witnessing Hanna Babbel’s murder, and over several days told him about everything else, from the breakout in Dagenham to the final confrontation at Site 326. One day she realised just how ill she had been, and knew then that she was getting better. Soon afterwards, she was able to begin physical therapy. It would be a while before she could walk again, but the cheerful young Romanian physiotherapist who put her through her gruelling routines said that if she continued to exercise regularly she would probably only have a trace of a limp.

Vic told her about progress in the case against McBride. The dust storm was still blowing and communications were still down between the city and Idunn’s Valley: there was no news from the excavation site.

‘Which almost certainly means there’s no sign of a ship yet,’ Vic said.

‘One is on its way. Fahad was sure of it.’

‘Maybe this Ugly Chicken lied to him. Or he misunderstood. I wouldn’t blame the kid if he did.’

‘This ship, or whatever it is, it may have been asleep for a long time. Thousands of years. Tens of thousands…It may need a while to get back up to speed again. Take it from me.’

Fahad visited her, too. He showed her a brief video message from Rana, sent via q-phone. They talked about the confrontation between Ugly Chicken and the Jackaroo avatar, and discovered that they’d seen different things.

‘It was inside our heads. Real and not real,’ Fahad said. ‘We were trying to make sense of something we didn’t understand.’

Which as far as Chloe was concerned just about summed up the last month.

Their patches were identical: pale oval blotches sitting just beneath the skin, flexible, very thin. Like Chloe, Fahad was absolutely certain that they had something to do with the spaceship. Some kind of connection.

‘We’ll find out what they can do when it comes,’ he said.

‘If the Jackaroo let us keep it. If the UN lets us visit it.’

‘I’ve tried to talk to Mr Gayle about that, but he always changes the subject. I don’t think he has the authority to help us. I’ve decided to stay on,’ Fahad added. ‘The UN asked me if I wanted to go home on the next shuttle, but I want to be here when the ship arrives. If it ever comes.’

‘Maybe it’s waiting for the dust storm to blow out,’ Chloe said.

The storm blew through the rest of Mangala’s night-year. Every day, Chloe spent four excruciating hours in physiotherapy. She endured batteries of tests that reminded her of her time in Ada Morange’s lab. The doctors were excited by the discovery that pulses of ultrasound at particular frequencies focused on her wrist patch induced a form of parathesia — made her see geometric patterns, taste salt, feel transient pulses of heat or cold travel up her arm. Chloe, only half-joking, said that it made her feel like a broken robot. ‘Maybe you can find the code that’ll help me walk in a straight line.’

She gave a statement to two UN investigators, who wanted to know more about Nevers and Ada Morange than she could tell them. A lawyer paid a visit and told her that he had been instructed by Ada Morange to provide any legal aid she required. She told him that as far as she knew she wasn’t in any trouble and sent him away.

The storm was still blowing when Vic Gayle visited Chloe again, early one morning. He found her in the hospital’s physio room, heaving herself back and forth along a set of parallel bars. She was supporting most of her weight with her arms, taking baby steps. It still hurt. It hurt a lot.

‘They’re here!’ he said as he strode towards Chloe. ‘They’re here!’

The physiotherapist tried to intercept him, telling him off for interrupting the session. Vic sidestepped her. He was grinning hugely.

‘This is more important. The damn kid was right! They’re here!’

There were two ships, he said, and pulled out his phone and showed Chloe images of a pair of elongated teardrops shaped from a froth of bubbles and pierced at random by gleaming spars. They hung above neighbouring mounds at Site 326 like the ugliest balloons in the universe. They had sunk down through the atmosphere two days ago, Vic said. It had taken that long to get the news back to Petra because comms were still down.

The ships were each about as big as a three-storey house. Close-ups showed that their skin was mottled with subtle shades of grey and blue.

‘Both of them opened ports. Right there,’ Vic said, zooming in on what looked like a tear or wound at the tapering base of one of the ships. ‘And that’s all they’ve done. No coherent electromagnetic activity, although there are random emissions in the ultraviolet spectrum, and a steady pulse at around fifty megahertz. That’s what the report said. I don’t know what any of that shit means.’

Chloe asked if anyone had been inside; Vic said not yet, although the team on site had sent in camera drones.

There were views of a space webbed with spars of various thicknesses, illuminated by a harsh blue-white glare which came from nowhere in particular. Irregular blisters on the walls which might contain the machinery of the ship’s drive and its lifesystem.

‘The temperature is about forty degrees Celsius, very humid,’ Vic said. ‘And the air is thin, about half ordinary atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth, with just enough oxygen to make it breathable. The light is rich in ultraviolet, too. The Elder Culture that made these things seems to have come from a world with a hotter, bluer sun.’

He told Chloe that a specialist team had been rushed out. ‘Engineers, physicists. Also a retired astronaut and a couple of jet-plane pilots. Hopefully they’ll figure out how they work. If they can.’

‘The UN should take Fahad back there. In fact, he should be the first to go aboard.’

Chloe was stroking the oval patch under the skin of her left wrist. Two ships. Two pilots. A thought amazing and terrifying.

Ada Morange’s lawyer visited her the next day. He told her that she would profit immensely by helping Ada Morange pursue her claim to the find.

‘If she wants to buy me out, I’m not interested in selling,’ Chloe said, and didn’t listen to anything else the lawyer had to say before the ward nurse came and ejected him.

The day-year dawned and the storm started to die back. According to the news feed from Earth, the Jackaroo’s only reaction to the appearance of the two ships was that it was ‘an interesting development’. Adam Nevers was still refusing to answer questions about why they had supported his attempt to stop Fahad and Ugly Chicken calling down the ships.

One day, Vic told Chloe that the UN had taken Fahad out to Site 326; a week later Vic was on his way there too. A couple of days later, the UN commissioner held a press conference: one of the ships had gone into orbit, and had returned safely. Ada Morange’s lawyer phoned Chloe while the commissioner was still speaking.

‘We really do have things to discuss.’

‘Tell Dr Morange I’ll be happy to talk to her any time she likes,’ Chloe said, and hung up.