Penumbra

19

Bennett lay in the command couch and allowed the Cobra to fly itself through the upper atmosphere of Earth. He monitored the screens set into the console that surrounded him, vigilant without a co-pilot to back him up. The ship entered the upper cloud layer, the aluminium blue of the troposphere replaced suddenly by opalescent cloud whipping around the viewscreen. The Cobra hit turbulence and rocked solidly, Bennett swinging in his couch. Seconds later the ship dropped through a raft of cumulus and the desert of northern India seemed to extend forever far below.

He got through to Control at Calcutta spaceport. “Ah, Bennett here. Mackendrick/Cobra/7-55.”

A tinny voice replied in the ear-piece of his flight helmet. “Ah-cha, Mackendrick/Cobra. You are cleared to land. Please copy these co-ordinates…”

For the next five minutes, as the Cobra roared over northern India, Bennett programmed the approach flight-path in the Cobra, then lay back and closed his eyes. His effective involvement in the process of bringing the Cobra to Earth was over.

Twelve hours ago he had awoken for the second time from suspension and climbed from the unit, shaking off images of bloated gas giants, alien statues and militia racing across the purple plain towards him. He had showered and eaten, bringing his body slowly back to life. When the ship phased from the void he had been greeted by a distant vision of Redwood Station, the dozen industrial orbitals winking silver in the sunlight, and he had to smile to himself. It seemed a long time since he had worked there; in real time it was over eight months ago, subjectively something like a week, though to Bennett it felt like years.

He had instructed the ship’s navigation system to program itself a return trajectory, from Earth to Penumbra, ready for indefinite inception.

He considered Penumbra and the people he had left behind. Hopefully by now Ten Lee’s leg wound would have healed and she would be up and walking. And Mackendrick? He had seemed well when Bennett left him with the rebels, but he had an amazing ability to hide the extent of his illness. Nearly four months had elapsed, and it would be at least another four months before he returned. Mackendrick had been given just one year to live, but that had been ten or eleven months ago, now.

He contemplated what Quineau had told Mackendrick, all those years ago. Was it possible that the Ancients had survived in an underground chamber, that they were in possession of some arcane healing lore? It sounded, he admitted to himself, like the stuff of legend. Only when he located the softscreen, and the rebels traced the underground chamber for themselves, would the truth be known.

The ship began the long deceleration burn as it came in on an oblique trajectory towards Calcutta spaceport. In a matter of hours he would be in the city, attempting to locate the softscreen with the help of Hupcka’s receiver. Of course, the screen might be anywhere on Earth, and even if he did locate it, it might not be so easily recoverable.

A voice sounded in his ear: “Mackendrick/Cobra receiving.”

“Ah-cha. Landing clearance, check. Mechanical maintenance and resupply authorised by Mackendrick Foundation, check. We will ready Cobra for immediate turn-around as requested. Ah, security will need to board ship for routine inspection. Also, they will need to interview you immediately after touchdown.”

“Fine by me, Control.”

“Ah-cha. Safe landing, Mackendrick/Cobra.”

Through the sidescreen Bennett looked down on the vast sprawling conurbation of outer Calcutta, sunlit beneath wisps of low-lying cloud. He seemed to take long minutes to fly over the city, a vast inland spread of crowded grey concrete. The Cobra banked north, tilting Bennett for a better view of the Ganges delta and the shimmering Bay of Bengal beyond.

The spaceport came into sight, the small shapes of other craft climbing slowly into space. The ship rattled as it decelerated and dropped steeply, giving Bennett a fullscreen view of the wide tarmac apron pocked with blast-rings and stationary ships.

The Cobra levelled out and slowed dramatically, hovering for seconds on its vertical boosters. Bennett watched the control tower and terminal building rise around the ship as it came in to land with a loud impact of stanchions, a diminuendo of engines, and then a sudden and startling silence.

He pulled off his helmet and unstrapped himself from the couch, feeling the tug of the Earth’s gravity as he walked from the flight-deck. He collected the holdall containing his scant possessions and palmed the sensor to lower the ramp and open the exit hatch.

He was greeted with the stench of India: dust and dung, the waft of spices. Strange, alien cries reached him from port workers, the engineers and grease monkeys swarming over the ship like parasites. A squad of blue-uniformed security officials was already striding up the ramp, pushing past him without greeting or acknowledgement before the hatch was fully open.

At the foot of the ramp stood a tall, overweight man in a similar blue uniform, his arms crossed over his chest. He wore his black hair in ringlets, tied back from a plump face glistening with sweat in the heat of the Indian sun.

“Bennett, isn’t it? Welcome to India. Please excuse the haste of my team—pressure of work, as I’m sure you’ll understand. I’m the chief of security here at the port. If you could spare ten minutes of your time, I’d like to ask a few routine questions. This is purely a formality I go through with all unscheduled landings. If you’d care to come this way.”

Touching the warm oval of the receiver in the pocket of his flight-suit, Bennett followed the perspiring security chief across the tarmac to the control tower. A ten-minute formality he hoped was all it would be; he was more than a little impatient to begin his search.

They entered a small room looking out over the port, furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs. The security chief gestured Bennett to sit, and he sank back into a ridiculously padded sofa. The officer himself elected to perch on the arm of a nearby chair, establishing a positional superiority. He glanced down at the com-board in his right hand. With his free hand he mopped his face with a red bandanna.

“You’ve come a long way, Mr Bennett.” He indicated his screen. “All the way from the Rim. Do you mind describing the nature of your flight?”

Bennett wanted nothing more than to get away from here. He would answer the questions quickly—and lie, of course.

“Exploration,” he said. “I work for the Mackendrick Foundation and I was prospecting a number of outlying systems for the usual mineral deposits.”

“Alone? Without even a co-pilot?”

“The Cobra’s a good ship,” Bennett said, and added, “and I’m a good pilot. I didn’t need a co-pilot.”

“No doubt. But you would agree with me, wouldn’t you, that solo flights so far out are a little unusual?”

Bennett shook his head. There was something about the chief of security that he didn’t like, a presumed familiarity beyond the call of duty. “I see nothing unusual in it at all. Many ships these days are flown solo.”

“Then perhaps I’m behind the times. Tell me, which systems were you prospecting on the Rim?”

“I looked at three systems in the G5 sector.”

“And you found?”

Bennett returned his stare, considering his reply. “That information is confidential and between myself and my employers.”

“Of course.” The officer waved a feigned apology. “You discovered no habitable planets?” His smile showed that the question was intended as his little joke.

Bennett played along. “Unfortunately not.”

“And you have returned to Earth for what reasons?”

“To report to my employers with my findings.”

The officer nodded, stood and moved to a com-screen on a desk in the corner of the room. He considered the screen for a minute, lips pursed.

He looked up. “My team informs me that the Cobra is programmed for a return flight to the G5 sector.”

Bennett tried not to let his surprise show. He wondered since when protocol allowed port workers, even those in security, to access the flight systems of privately owned starships.

“Well, Mr Bennett?”

“I wasn’t aware that you’d asked a question.”

A look of impatience flashed across the security chief’s face. He mopped his brow. Bennett noticed that his hand was shaking.

“Why return, Mr Bennett, if you have already prospected that system?”

“I don’t see what that information has to do with the security of Calcutta spaceport,” Bennett replied. “But for your information there are more planets in the systems to be explored.”

The officer waved a hand, it must be an interesting life, prospecting the stars.”

“It pays a wage. If that is all, I have a lot to do.”

“Why, of course, Mr Bennett. I do hope I haven’t been intrusive, but one must be vigilant. India has many enemies and one can never be too careful.” He reached into the desk and produced a small polycarbon card. “This allows you entry into India for a stay of up to three months. It is official authorisation of admittance, so please keep it about your person at all times.”

Bennett took the card and slipped it into the breast pocket of his flight-suit.

The officer held out a hand. “My apologies if I have kept you, Mr Bennett. Enjoy your stay in India. If you will make your way round the tower to the terminal building, immigration will process your card.”

Bennett shook the proffered hand, found it warm and sweat-soaked. He was aware of the man’s eyes on his back as he left the room.

He crossed the tarmac and entered the terminal building, and five minutes later he was through the checks. He crossed the foyer, bustling with the newly arrived and those come to greet them, and stepped through the sliding glass doors into the harsh sunlight of the subcontinent.

He took a taxi and they crawled down streets crowded with pedestrians, stall-holders and beggars not averse to thrusting their hands into the open window of the moving car. He closed his eyes, at least visually editing the strangeness of the country from his consciousness. The noise of the place, however, was not so easily ignored. The blare of horns set his nerves on edge, along with the cries of vendors and the occasional stentorian boom of a passing ad-screen.

He booked into a hotel close to the spaceport, drank a beer from the cooler in the room, then sat on the bed and pulled the receiver from his pocket. He stared at it for a long time, before touching the panel Hupcka had told him would activate the small screen set into the silver face of the device.

Only when the screen flashed on did Bennett realise that he’d been holding his breath. The screen was working, but there was no flashing arrow or numerical measurements to indicate the direction and distance of the softscreen. It was, he supposed, highly unlikely that he would have struck gold at first try. The screen had a range of ten kilometres. After a meal he would take a taxi and cross and re-cross the sprawling city.

If that failed, then he would reassess the situation.

He dined in the hotel restaurant—the first real meal he had eaten in weeks—then withdrew local currency on his credit card from the hotel bank. He left the building, ignored the press of beggars encamped on the steps, and boarded a taxi. He instructed the driver to take him to the city centre. There he would buy a map of Calcutta and block off the sections of the city as he searched.

He tried not to dwell on the awful possibility that the receiver might be defective.

As the taxi carried him from the hotel drive and gained speed along a busy main road, Bennett considered the events that had conspired to bring him back to Earth. The incidents on Penumbra, from the landing to his capture and subsequent escape, and his time with the rebels to the flight in the Cobra, had about them the quality of a dream. After the unspoilt vastness of Penumbra, the noisy, overcrowded streets of Calcutta seemed imminent and ultra-real. He found it hard to credit that on a distant world Mack, Ten and the rebels would be impatiently awaiting his successful return.

He pulled the receiver from his pocket, touched the control and stared at the screen. It was still blank. He watched it, expecting the arrow and numerals to appear at any second. When they did not, he took to looking away for long seconds at a time, staring through the window at the passing city, and then glancing almost surreptitiously at the screen, hoping each time to see the arrow.

The taxi was passing down narrow streets flanked by long, low lines of concrete shops, each unit open like a garage and stacked with goods: fruit and vegetables, bolts of cloth, household goods. Before most shops were beds without mattresses, dining chairs on which men sat in circles and smoked. Above each shop was a sign in Hindi, with the occasional English word appearing more alien for being misspelled. Ahead, Bennett made out the rearing polycarbon skyscrapers of central Calcutta, shimmering in the midday sun.

He was considering the daunting possibility of having to search the whole of India for the softscreen when he glanced down at the receiver and, to his disbelief, saw a flashing arrow, and beneath it the distance in jade green: 9 kilometres, 500 metres, and counting down.

The arrow was pointing in the direction of the city centre. He experienced a surge of relief, followed by a warning to himself that it couldn’t be so easy. He had still to locate the screen. If it were in the possession of someone unwilling to part with it, for any amount of money, what then? Or what if it were part of an antique collection in some upmarket emporium, priced beyond his reach? There were, he decided, a hundred possibilities, all of which were futile to contemplate. He would simply have to wait and see where the receiver led him.

He watched the screen count down, the arrow shift fractionally as the road took a slight bend. It was pointing directly at the skyscrapers of the city centre.

7 kilometres, 300metres, and counting down.

The Indian driver tried to engage him in small talk. Was this his first time in India? Was he here on important business? Bennett pointedly ignored him, watching the crowds stream by outside, and soon the Indian gave up.

4 kilometres, 600metres, and counting down.

Soon, the fact of the human colony on Homefall would be known to the Expansion. Then would begin the opening up of the planet dreaded by the Elders of the Church of Phobos and Deimos. He considered the media coverage of the event, the story of the discovery of a lost colony on the Rim.

2 kilometres, 100 metres.

They were passing through streets lined with old Victorian buildings, which soon gave way to more modern structures, ugly concrete office blocks, then the sleek, soaring shapes of modern polycarbon architecture.

1 kilometre, 200 metres.

But now the arrow was turning to the left, and the counter was rising. They were moving further away from the softscreen. Bennett leaned forward. “Left here…”

At the next intersection the car turned and joined a solid flow of traffic heading down a wide, palm-fringed boulevard. The receiver read 0 kilometres, 900 metres, and began rising again.

“Stop! Anywhere around here.”

The driver pulled into the side of the road, and Bennett paid the fare and climbed out. After the air-conditioned interior of the car, the humid air enveloped him in a viscous embrace. He unzipped the jacket of his flight-suit and glanced down at the receiver. He was 960 metres from the softscreen, and the arrow was indicating ten o’clock. He took a street at right angles to the boulevard, past a parade of plush shops lining the ground floor of a tall polycarbon skyscraper.

The counter fell with his every stride. The arrow indicated eleven o’clock—he was heading in the approximate direction of the screen. He moved through crowds of well-dressed shoppers, a multi-national mix of racial types, predominantly Indian and European, and tried not to make his glances at the receiver that obvious. His curiosity as to where he might find the softscreen was almost unbearable.

He was one hundred metres away when he came to a wide road that crossed the street at a sharp angle, and the arrow moved back to ten o’clock. Bennett turned left and watched the counter count down: 89, and, seconds later, 80.

He hurried along a wide pavement lined with stallholders and food-vendors, their cries loud and incoherent. To his left was the fa ç ade of an ancient building, to his right the stalls of frying food, stacked fruit and vegetables set up in the gutter. He glanced at the screen: 25metres.

When he judged that he had walked that distance, he looked down at the screen again. The arrow had turned to nine o’clock, pointing towards the monstrous Victorian building to his left, and the counter read 10 metres. He turned and stared up at the imposing stone fa ç ade. A flight of steps rose to the sliding glass doors, above which ran the legend: calcutta police headquarters.

He stood and stared up at the building, buffeted by impatient passers-by, and wondered how to proceed. Nearby was a chai stall, a wooden table covered by a makeshift carbon-fibre awning. He ducked under the cover, sat down on a rickety wooden chair and ordered a chai.

He sipped a glass of the sweet milky tea and considered his options. The softscreen could be inside the police building for a number of reasons: it could be stolen goods, or lost property, or the possession of someone who had it adorning the wall of his office. How best to find out? There was one obvious course of action.

He finished the chai, crossed the pavement and climbed the steps into the police headquarters. He was gratified to see that he was not the only civilian in there: the corridors seemed to be home from home to half the city, squatting on their haunches and looking doleful. He glanced at the screen. Two arrows had appeared: the main one read 3 metres and indicated two o’clock, and the new arrow in the corner of the screen was pointing straight ahead to the words: 6metres, up. So the softscreen was located six metres above him and then three metres in the direction of two o’clock.

He noticed a flight of stairs to his right. Civilians seemed to be using them, so he joined the procession and climbed the steps. When he came to the first floor and glanced down at the screen, only one arrow showed. It indicated three o’clock, and below it 5 metres.

He turned right and walked along the corridor. Offices opened off the corridor, each one bearing a sign projecting from the wall at right angles to the open entrance. The signs were printed with two legends, one in Hindi and the other in English.

He came to an office beneath a sign saying: security. He looked at the screen. It was pointing into the office and reading 2 metres.

A small man in a khaki uniform with sergeant’s stripes sat at a desk behind a com-screen. What now? Before Bennett could think, much less move from the open doorway, the sergeant looked up and saw him. “Yes?” he rapped in English. “How can I help you?”

Bennett slipped the receiver into his pocket, took a breath and entered the room. “I’d like to report the theft of a softscreen,” he said.

The sergeant stared at him. “This is not the correct office to be reporting stolen property.” Then he blinked. “What did you say has been stolen?”

“A softscreen, the recording of a mountain expedition—”

“Please describe the softscreen.”

“Well…” Bennett gestured. “It’s just an old softscreen, showing scenes of an expedition through mountainous territory.”

The sergeant stood. “Please stay here. I’ll be one moment only.” He moved around the desk and left the office.

Bennett slipped the receiver from his pocket. The screen indicated that the softscreen was located directly before him, and less than a metre away.

It was in the sergeant’s desk, then.

He considered looking through the desk while the sergeant was away. But if he was caught… No, better to wait, as instructed.

Two minutes later the sergeant returned and took his seat behind the desk. “If you would care to wait one moment, please. There is someone who would like to see you.”

Bennett nodded and sat back in his chair, confused by this turn of events. The softscreen, which he had travelled from the Rim to find, was less than one metre from him, and he was absolutely powerless to do anything about it.

He wondered who, in Calcutta, might wish to meet him.