Final Days

SIX

Copernicus Array Security and Immigration Office, Luna, 21 January 2235

Thomas Fowler checked his reflection in the elevator’s mirrored side walls and saw the face of a man who hadn’t enjoyed a decent night’s sleep in weeks. A course of amphetamines from an understanding physician was helping with that, but he’d been warned more than once there was only so much abuse his body could take. But, then again, a solid night’s sleep was out of the question when you happened to know the world was going to end.

The doors slid open to reveal a busy operations room. While he waited for a guard stationed by the elevator to clear his ID, he counted at least a dozen uniformed ASI staff and a smattering of civilian analysts manning workstations. Dr Amanda Boruzov came towards him, weaving her way through staff and between workstations. The director of research for the Founder Project had skin like porcelain, while small folds around her eyes hinted at an Asiatic inheritance worn smooth over several generations. On this occasion, however, her eyes were rimmed with red, her exhaustion also showing in the way she carried herself.

The pro with women who had skin like porcelain, thought Fowler, was that they always looked like they might easily break.

‘Thomas,’ she said, as the guard gave him the all-clear, ‘I must have just beaten you here. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to make it, at such short notice.’

Fowler stepped forward, once again struck by the unaccustomed buoyancy of his body. No matter how often he made the trip to Copernicus, he never quite adapted to the sudden drop in gravity once he had passed through the Florida Array. The first-aid clinics that served the tens of thousand of people flowing back and forth through the CTC gates worked twenty-four-seven repairing broken bones and fractured skulls. They’d wound up padding the ceilings of the lunar-transit systems, once they realized most people coming through from Earth kept smacking their heads into them.

Their hands touched as they spoke, the touch lingering. If anyone had been paying attention at that moment, they might have guessed at their relationship.

‘I guess we should get started,’ he said.

He followed her across the busy room, passing wall-mounted TriView panels displaying real-time video of the mass-transit systems connecting Copernicus City to the nearby Lunar Array. They arrived at a second bank of elevators, where another guard checked their UPs for clearance, before allowing them passage.

They both relaxed as soon as the elevator doors closed. Amanda stepped in close to him, her hands taking hold of his lapels and tugging him down towards her, so that he had to bend over, in order to kiss. Fowler reached out and touched a button that halted the elevator between floors.

She pulled back and looked up at him. ‘I think it’s long past the time we started making plans, don’t you?’

He lifted her hands away from his jacket and faked his best smile. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’

‘And Marcie?’

‘I already told her lawyer that Marcie’s welcome to the house in New England, if she wants it. She can enjoy it while she has the chance.’

He cleared his throat, suddenly business like once more. ‘Listen, there’s something I need to tell you before we go into this meeting. There’s been a major breakdown in security. We’re working to plug it right now, before it has a chance to go public.’

He saw her eyes widen. ‘What happened?’

He started the elevator moving again, and it jerked slightly before continuing on its way. ‘One of your shipments of Founder artefacts has gone AWOL, grabbed off the road well inside the security perimeter, back in Florida,’ he explained, sending a copy of the latest report to her contacts. ‘We’re still trying to figure out how they managed to fly in a VTOL without us even knowing. That means a very high level of technical access to the er,ter systems.’

She nodded, her eyes becoming unfocused for a moment as she received the report. ‘Inez is in charge of local security there,’ she said. ‘Has he got an explanation?’

Fowler cleared his throat. ‘He realizes his neck is on the line over this, but it’s starting to look very much like an inside job, which takes a little of the pressure off him personally. And even if he has been negligent in some way, we’re still going to need him to protect the Arrays as soon as things start to turn bad. Right now we’re following up some possible leads, but it’s going to take time.’

She nodded, and he could see how the weight of what they were doing oppressed her. They would, after all, be abandoning billions to die; a large enough number to be little more than a comfortable abstraction for some, but not perhaps for Amanda.

She shook her head wearily. ‘It just doesn’t get any better, does it?’

Fowler shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. But we’ve managed to track down most of your remaining civilian staff.’

He watched her throat bob as she swallowed. ‘And the ones you haven’t found yet?’

He smiled grimly. ‘They’ll be taken care of soon enough.’

‘Please tell me that’s all the bad news you have.’

‘It’s not, I’m sorry to say.’

She sighed and nodded. ‘Can it wait until after the meeting? I’m not sure how much I can take right now.’

She glanced at her own reflection in the elevator’s mirrored wall, reaching up to touch one perfectly shaped eyebrow as if it were somehow out of alignment. He was forced to recall how Amanda had herself been deemed too great a potential security risk to be allowed to seek refuge in the colonies, and that knowledge still left him desolate. It was only meant to be a brief affair, following his divorce, and instead he had developed such complicated feelings for her – feelings that had already compromised his own chances of survival, given one single devastating discovery he had yet to share with her.

But, as she had said herself, there would be time for all that later.

The elevator doors slid open with a faint hiss, and Amanda flashed him a quick, tight smile before stepping out.

Every time he kissed her or felt her smooth milky skin moving against his own, a part of him wanted to shout out his confession to her, and that she knew too much for their masters to ever allow her to live.

And yet, whenever he summoned up the courage to tell her the truth, his tongue turned to lead and the words refused to emerge from his throat.

Tonight, he thought, after the meeting. It had to be then.

‘All right, first of all, let me bring you up to date on the current state of affairs,’ Fowler began, leaning back in his chair and regarding the various faces arranged around the table. ‘I’d like you all to make sure your contacts are live.’

The only visible decoration in the room was a framed photograph of the Copernicus CTC Array, taken from the vantage of a nearby ridge. It showed a sprawling complex that extended for kilometres around part of the crater wall.

Dana Paxton represented the Coalition Space Command Authority, while Hendrik Lagerlöf fulfilled the same role for the Board of Extraterrestrial Affairs. The current border situation with Mexical meant that Jimenez couldn’t be present. Coalition Navy Captain Anton Inez was also there, of course, taking time out from organizing the evacuation of essential personnel via the Florida Array.

Across the table from Amanda, and the two field investigators reporting directly to Fowler, were Mahindra Kaur and Marcus Fairhurst, representing the European Office of Security and the Three Republics Intelligence Office respectively. Fowler had met these last two only briefly in his capacity as the ASI’s Director of Operations, but they were also the reason this meeting was taking place.

A map of the local and interstellar wormhole networks appeared, floating above the table. A single wormhole gate connected the Florida and Lunar Arrays to each other, but the latter facility housed many further wormhole links connecting Earth’s moon to a dozen other star systems, some up to a hundred light-years distant. Galileo’s collapsed and soon-to-be-re-established gate was represented simply by a dotted line.

‘Part of the reason we’re here today,’ continued Fowler, ‘is to do with the consequences of the unique physics existing within the wormholes, and you’re going to have to forgive me if I go over some points you may already be very familiar with. Mr Kaur, Mr Fairhurst, this being your first time here, would you say you’re reasonably au fait with wormhole physics?’

‘In the very broadest details,’ Kaur replied.

Fairhurst laughed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘If I’d known there’d be a test, I’d have done some homework.’

Fowler nodded. ‘I’ll try and keep it simple, then. As you know,’ he glanced quickly around the table, ‘the colonies were founded by starships travelling at close to the speed of light, each carrying inside it one end of a wormhole linking it back here to the Moon. However, the way time flows within the wormholes means we can step through to a new star system within months of launching a starship – even though, within our own time-frame back here at home, that starship hasn’t yet arrived at its destination.’

‘I’ll have to admit I’ve never exactly been clear on just how that works,’ said Fairhurst, leaning forward.

‘The ce is in the name we use to describe the wormholes,’ said Amanda. ‘CTC means “closed timelike curve”, right?’

Fairhurst nodded.

‘Well,’ Amanda continued, ‘CTC is just a fancy word for time travel. When we send one end of a wormhole to another star, time on board the ship carrying it moves extremely slowly, relative to the outside universe. But, because of the wormhole link on board, we can walk through the wormhole and on to the deck of that ship any time we like, throughout the journey, since the flow of time within the wormhole remains contiguous with its point of origin.’

She tapped a finger on the table in front of her. ‘It essentially allows you to step decades into the future, since the time-frame on board the starship is such that anyone who remains on board throughout its journey is going to experience a transit time of only a few months. So long as the far end of the wormhole is moving at relativistic speeds, it’s a time machine as well as a shortcut across the universe.’

Fairhurst nodded uncertainly. ‘I never understood why we can’t see the wormholes from the outside. I mean, if they go all that way across space, we should be able to see them, shouldn’t we?’

Fowler barely managed to suppress a grin at the look on Amanda’s face.

‘That’s because the wormholes don’t pass through the intervening space at all,’ she explained patiently. ‘They tunnel through hyperspace instead, outside of the physical constraints of our universe.’

Fairhurst looked none the wiser. ‘Please tell me all of this has something to do with why we’re here.’

Fowler nodded to Inez. ‘If you would, Anton.’

Inez cleared his throat and leaned forward. They’d already decided the bad news was best coming from him.

‘What I’m about to tell you,’ he began, addressing Kaur and Fairhurst in particular, ‘was known to only a very select group until a few days ago. About fifteen years ago, a standard unmanned reconnaissance of the outer Kepler system stumbled across the first evidence of advanced alien intelligence.’

Fowler watched for any signs betraying that either man might know more than he should. Fairhurst simply looked stunned, but Kaur, before reacting, hesitated just a moment too long to be quite convincing.

The CTC network map was replaced by an image of an irregularly shaped lump of rock, the swirling atmosphere of a gas giant visible behind it. The only thing that suggested it was anything other than a typical fragment of stellar detritus was the gleam of burnished metal dotted about its cratered surface.

‘Specifically, we found an abandoned space station,’ Inez continued. ‘Inside was a wormhole gate connecting to a network of thousands of other wormhole gates that may have been in existence for .well, billions of years. The network also appears to extend across what might be billions of light-years. We’ve been exploring it for some time, and we’ve made some interesting discoveries.’

Understatement of the century, reckoned Fowler.

‘We’ve had research and exploration teams investigating the network ever since,’ continued Inez. ‘We call the hypothetical aliens who built the network “Founders”, for want of a better name. We don’t know what they looked like, where they came from, or whether they even constituted a single species or more than one. If they left any written records – or records of any kind – we haven’t found them yet. All we have are the wormhole gates they left behind and a few recovered artefacts.’

Fairhurst uttered a strangled sound, glancing between Inez and Fowler. ‘Captain Inez,’ he finally managed to say, ‘with all due respect, assuming any of this is true – and I’m not convinced you aren’t pulling my leg – I’m struggling to understand why something like this wasn’t already known to me.’

Inez started to reply, but Fowler cut in, instead.

‘Marcus, we both report to the same people, but not to each other. We’ve managed to keep a very tight lid on this for a long time, and we did it by not sharing information unless it was absolutely necessary. It’s not like there haven’t been rumours for years.’

Fairhurst pursed his lips, clearly unsatisfied. ‘Crackpot rumours, you mean. Are you suggesting that, with our involvement, this information would have been less secure?’ he demanded, his tone noticeably sharp.

‘That decision wasn’t made lightly,’ Fowler replied, ‘nor was it made in isolation. It was deemed strictly need-to-know, all the way to the top.’

‘You mentioned artefacts,’ said Kaur. ‘Are these samples of alien technology?’

‘Yes,’ said Inez. ‘In fact, based on our analyses of some artefacts, we managed to develop a form of faster-than-light quantum-communications device.’

‘I’m not sure I quite understand,’ said Kaur.

Inez spread his hands. ‘Communications instantaneously, without limitations – even across light-years.’

‘So you’ve tested this technology,’ Kaur asked.

‘We did.’ Inez nodded. ‘In fact, we attempted to contact our future selves.’

‘Excuse me?’ said Fairhurst, his expression transforming into outright incredulity.

Fowler realized he had been right to pick Inez for the job. He had an air of authority that made it hard for others to challengeeven the most lunatic-sounding ideas, when they came from him.

‘Specifically,’ Inez continued, his face set like granite, ‘we transported a prototype quantum transceiver to Ptolemy, fifty-five light-years from here. The intention was to communicate with identical transceivers located both here on Luna and on Earth.’

He spread his hands, then clasped them again. ‘Keep in mind that time dilation means Ptolemy, as accessed through the CTC gates, is about sixty years in our future. So when that message was sent from Ptolemy to here, without passing through the gate, it arrived – or, rather, it will arrive – sixty years from now. That means any reply from back here can’t be sent until then.’

‘And?’ asked Kaur, his skin taking on a grey tinge.

‘The only reply we got from our future selves was a montage of video fragments,’ Inez explained. ‘What it showed made us very worried indeed. Once you’ve seen it, it’ll be clear why we need your help.’

Fairhurst made a sound of disgust and leaned back, arms folded, but Inez continued unfazed. ‘Based solely on these video fragments, we made the decision to send a starship carrying a secret wormhole gate back to Earth, from a star system much closer to our own, in order to try and understand what happened.’

‘And this gate arrived back here . . . when?’ asked Kaur.

‘A little over a decade in our future.’ Inez brought up a new set of images that segued from one to the other every few seconds. ‘Before we get to that, you’d better take a look at the video sequence.’

The image of the mottled grey rock changed abruptly to a view from the deck of a ship somewhere on Earth, sailing close to the base of a clearly alien structure rising out of the deep ocean. It looked, at first glance, like some abstract sculpture of a flower rendered in sheet metal and plastic, and painted in gold and silver. Compensation software, built into the contacts of whoever had recorded the footage, reduced natural eyeball jitter.

They watched as the view panned first across and then upwards, thus giving a sense of the staggering scale of the thing. Clouds drifted around its uppermost petals. The view suddenly blurred as whoever was recording it shifted himself to cope with the ship’s rolling motion.

Fowler found his attention drawn to clouds of dark steam shrouding the structure at the point where it rose out of the waters. From what his analysts had been able to tell him, its apparent rate of growth was so great that it might have attained this enormous size within days. There was even reason to believe it had spread roots deep into the Earth’s crust, which might account for the overwhelmingly violent seismic activity that would shortly be contributing to the near-extinction of the human race.

‘There’s nothing like that thing in the oceans anywhere on Earth,’ said Fairhurst, his voice rising.

‘Not yet, no,’ Fowler agreed. ‘Here’s more, recorded by our own sci-eval teams, after they’d passed through the CTC gate leading back to our near future.’

Images now appeared of the airless ruins of Copernicus City, and these were followed by high-definition orbital images of the Earth’s scarred and lifeless surface. Photographs, taken under high magnification from orbit, showed dozens more flower-like structures pushing through the cloud cover over land and sea. Much of the land was wreathed in smoke like ash, and what little remained visible had clearly been scorched empty of life. All in all, it looked like a vision of hell.

‘I still don’t understand,’ said Fairhurst, squinting as if in pain. ‘You’re saying this has already happened?’

‘Is going to happen,’ Inez corrected. The images continued to cycle through, like the holiday snapshots of a dark and vengeful god.

Inez sat back then, and Fowler picked up where he’d left off. ‘Once we’d established the wormhole link back to our own near future, we found no signs of life anywhere on Luna or Earth. Whoever uploaded that montage to the transceivers did it as a warning.’

‘But . . . what could possibly have caused this?’ Fairhurst blurted.

‘To be frank,’ Fowler replied, ‘we have no idea. It seems obvious the growths and the devastation are linked, although we can’t say for certain one caused the other. But it does seem likely.’

‘But how?’ Fairhurst demanded. ‘Was it a meteor, something like that?’

Fowler shook his head. ‘There’s no impact crater, so no. There’s no trace of radioactivity in the near-future atmosphere that might suggest some kind of nuclear bombardment; nothing but the growths, and a lot of ash. Apart from those few slivers of information, we’re as much in the dark as you are. All we know is that the end is coming, far, far sooner than anyone realizes.’

Kaur stared at him, his face pale. ‘So just how long do we have?’ he finally managed to ask.

‘Less than three weeks, possibly only two. Ever since we made these discoveries, we’ve been working on an emergency evacuation programme for essential personnel. If you can help us with certain matters, I can guarantee safe passage for yourselves and your immediate families, at the very least.’

‘I know this is hard for you to take in,’ Dana Paxton spoke up for the first time, ‘but I’ve been through the CTC gate to our future, myself. So has Mr Lagerlöf. There were hundreds of these flower-like growths scattered all across the globe. We dropped a number of winged drones into the atmosphere from orbit, but they always slipped out of contact after just a few minutes.’

‘So whatever did this,’ mumbled Kaur, ‘whatever force brought this about, it’s still down there?’

‘That’s the only reasonable assumption,’ Paxton agreed. ‘We had some of the same problems when it came to exploring the near-future Moon, but we were at least able to investigate the remains of Copernicus City with remote probes. Given the circumstances, you can understand how we were ready to shut down the gate leading back to Tau Ceti the instant we came under attack. Luckily, we never had to. But if you do decide you want to see all this for yourselves first-hand, I’ll be responsible for your safety.’

‘We’re facing an extinction event,’ added Fowler, ‘and if it wasn’t for the existence of the interstellar colonies, the human race would be finished. We can save some of the people back home, and here on the Moon, but not all. Our responsibility from here on is to make sure the colonies survive.’

‘Three weeks?’ echoed Fairhurst, sounding like he was having trouble getting the words out.

Kaur’s skin had taken on a waxen quality. ‘And we’ll be allowed to bring our families through the Array – if we help you in some way?’

Fowler nodded.

‘Surely there must be some way to prevent this,’ Fairhurst protested.

‘Possibly,’ Fowler replied. ‘Or, at least, it would be monstrous of us not to try. Which brings me to my next point: we need your help in locating a missing shipment.’

Fowler held the whisky at the back of his mouth, rolling it around his tongue before finally swallowing it down. Amanda had collapsed into the chair opposite, settling slowly into the cushions under the lunar gravity. Behind her, a window of Fowler’s apartment looked towards the tall peaks rising at the centre of the Copernicus Crater. Much of the city was buried deep beneath the regolith, but a significant number of buildings, whose financiers could afford the extra shielding, rose to a considerable height.

‘I spoke with Anderson at the Coalition Security Council,’ he said, staring out the window. ‘You’ll be thrilled to know he still thinks we can pull a rabbit out of a hat and save the day.’

‘He really thinks we can change what’s already happened?’

He finally glanced over at her. ‘Can you blame him? Look at Fairhurst – he’s probably already convinced himself our meeting never even happened, and both of them are cut from the same cloth.’ He studied the glass in his hand. ‘Even so, the heads of all three Republics have agreed to making some kind of joint public announcement.’

‘When?’

Fowler shrugged. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it? My guess is they’ll wait until it’s obvious to everyone else that something terrible is happening.’ He thought of some of the atmospheric phenomena recorded by the probes studying the devastated future Earth: bright twists of light that some interpreted as distortions of space and time, and others considered as evidence of some non-material intelligence.

He noticed her shiver. ‘Maybe there’s a chance it isn’t too late,’ she said. ‘Maybe we can still stop this from ever happening. Maybe that’s why someone left us that warning, because they knew there was still a way.’

‘How?’ Fowler shook his head. ‘By going back into the past and changing things? Can’t be done. Remember your Novikov.’

‘Yes, I know.’ She sounded irritated. ‘If an event can bring about a paradox—’

‘Then the probability of that event taking place is zero,’ he finished for her. ‘Or were you thinking about alternate timelines? They’re a fiction, and there’s nothing we can do to change the inevitable.’

He quickly drained the last of his whisky; no telling when he’d next get the opportunity for another. To his irritation, the glow of the alcohol failed to chase away the clamminess of his skin.

‘Now for some of that news I’ve been saving,’ he said. ‘We’ve identified your survivor – the one your people brought back from the near future.’

She gripped her glass in both hands, the knuckles turning pale. ‘And?’

‘His name is Mitchell Stone. He used to be under Hanover’s command.’

They’d found him preserved inside an experimental cryogenics unit on Luna, ten years in the future. He’d been the only living thing left alive, and there were many, many questions they wanted to ask him.

‘But he’s—’

‘The same Mitchell Stone who suffered what should have been a fatal accident at Site 17 just a few weeks ago,’ he agreed. ‘And now,’ he arched an eyebrow, ‘thanks to the vagaries of time travel, we have two Mitchell Stones in existence at once, both recovering from separate incidents.’

‘Oh, for . . .’ Amanda put her glass down on a small side table next to her chair, and covered her face with two carefully manicured hands before letting them slide down to cover only her mouth and nose. She peered over her fingertips to regard him with a mixture of horror and awe. ‘The one you brought back here from the near future? The one who was frozen? Is he awake yet?’

‘Yes, and has been awake for a couple of days now. It was touch and go for a while, when it came to reviving him, but we’ve already begun an interrogation. Hopefully he can tell us something about just what it is we’re dealing with now.’

‘And the other one? The one who got swallowed up in that pit?’

‘Still under heavy sedation. Obviously it’s the near-future Mitchell we really need answers from. He must have witnessed everything that’s going to happen.’

He gave her a moment to try and absorb everything he’d told her.

‘Listen,’ she said after a moment. ‘About . . . us.’

He raised both eyebrows.

‘I know we’ve been avoiding discussing any plans about the future,’ she said. ‘It’s not like there was ever a right time to talk about it. I wasn’t sure until now, but . . . I’m not going off to the colonies with the rest of you.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’m staying here.’

He stared at her wordlessly for a moment, before he could summon a response. ‘I don’t understand.’

She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and then falling. ‘I don’t know if I want to survive what’s coming, knowing I had a part to play in all . . . all of this.’

In the end of the world, he guessed she meant to say, but couldn’t bring herself to speak the words.

‘You’re serious?’

‘Think of it like the captain going down with the sinking ship after she’s steered it straight into an iceberg, Thomas. I should have listened more to my staff when they warned me not to let those artefacts be brought to Earth until we knew exactly what we were dealing with.’

‘We don’t know that the artefacts are responsible. And you can’t blame yourself for—’

‘Then who do I blame?’ she snapped.

He cleared his throat. ‘There’s no point worrying about what can’t be undone.’

‘If we do follow the rest of them to the colonies, we’ll be cut off from everything we’ve ever known. All of it . . . gone.’ She shuddered. ‘I’d say I can’t even imagine it, but I don’t need to. I’ve seen it.’

She stood up then, smoothing her skirt down over her thighs, her movements slow and fluid in the lower gravity. He had a sudden flash of memory from several nights back, of her laughing and then sighing as he kissed her thighs, pulling himself up and on top of her.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t . . .’

She walked over to the door. ‘Don’t even bother trying to convince me, Thomas. I want to see how it ends.’

‘There’s something you need to know,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘About the video message – the warning. You haven’t seen all of it.’

She frowned and let go of the door handle. ‘I haven’t?’

‘I had part of it redacted.’

She regarded him uncertainly. ‘What’s in the bits you took out?’

He got up to fetch himself another drink. He was going to need it to get through this.

‘You are,’ he replied.