The Long War

52

ABOUT A WEEK after Maggie’s meeting with George and Agnes Abrahams, the Benjamin Franklin approached the Low Earths, heading for the Datum.

Maggie detected relief in the crew of the Franklin that, thanks to their wonky turbine, they were heading for some unscheduled home leave. Their tour of the Westward Long Earth was wearying. Day after day they crossed world after world of numbing emptiness – numbing at least for the city kids who made up most of the dirigible’s crew – punctuated by calls to resolve one idiotic situation after another.

And the trolls were gone: how strange it continued to be to experience, even as seen from within the walls of a military vessel, a peculiar existential shift that cast a shadow over every world they visited.

Still, as the Franklin swam through the increasingly murky skies of the industrializing Low Earths, Maggie – even though she herself was a country girl – felt a warm tug of recognition, and wondered whether city living had some merit after all. The news as they approached home, however, was extraordinary. There was some kind of geological disturbance going on in stepwise versions of Yellowstone, across most of the Low Americas. Maggie found herself staring at images from East 2, of a herd of cattle choked by carbon dioxide emissions, and from West 3, of people being evacuated from threatened townships by twains. Isolated in the reaches of the Long Earth, Maggie and her crew had heard only the vaguest outernet hints that all this was going on.

Strange times, she thought, times of unbalance in the natural world and the human, on Datum Earth itself and far beyond.

Back at the Navy dirigible service’s graving yard at Datum Detroit, the technicians were soon swarming all over the Franklin, along with gleaming diagnostics platforms with robot arms like a waltz of praying mantises. XO Nathan Boss and Chief Engineer Harry Ryan watched all this like hawks – along with Carl. The young troll wasn’t allowed off the ship, the presence of trolls being problematic anywhere on the Datum, and the trolls being uncomfortable in this human-crowded world anyhow, but Carl was taking considerable interest in every spanner, wrench and robot test pod.

Even now, looking at Carl, it was hard for Maggie to remember that he wasn’t some kind of chimp or gorilla. He was smarter than that, even if you left out the long call and the trolls’ strange group intelligence. His own communication was more complex than any chimp’s, and he could make and handle tools that would have been beyond the imagination of Cheetah. It was more useful, Mac had advised her, to think of trolls as more like human ancestors. Something between chimp and human. But these beasts, Mac reminded her, weren’t living fossils, but had enjoyed millions of years of natural selection since splitting off from the line that led to humans. They weren’t primitive humans; they were fully evolved trolls. Maggie was just gratified that her trolls, for now, had chosen to stick around.

The cat too, Shi-mi, took to stalking around the flayed-open carcass of the dirigible with every air of ownership and inspection. Maggie never saw Shi-mi communicating with a worker, or even one of the robots . . . She wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or appalled by the cat’s presence.

What she was faintly appalled by was the omnipresence of the Black Corporation. Every one of those spanners and wrenches that so fascinated Carl was marked with the logo of Black, or one of its subsidiaries.

Black seemed to have moved into the support of the dirigible fleet, and the US military infrastructure in general, in a much bigger and more visible way than she remembered from even before the Franklin’s mission began a couple of months back. Or maybe it was just that much more in her face, now she had a ship of her own. Black’s relationship with the military was long-standing. He had after all donated the twain technology in the first place by making it open source, and was a prime contractor for all the armed services. Since abortive attempts to militarize his operations under eminent domain arguments some years before, his relationship with the military high command and purse-holders seemed to Maggie to have become, not just contractually unbreakable, but institutionalized.

Even so, now she thought about it, now she was so blatantly immersed in it, the situation made her uncomfortable.

That feeling got sharper when the job was done, and the yard boss sought Maggie out to tell her that the offending turbine two had been replaced, gratis, by a more modern Black Corporation model. She instinctively protested, but got no support from her chain of command.

And she remained suspicious when the Franklin was released from dock and made trial runs in the murky Datum sky. The ship was purring along like a sewing machine, running overall distinctly better than before. But she had Nathan Boss and Harry Ryan run a fresh systems and security check, stem to stern, just to make sure the Black people hadn’t left any little surprises aboard, such as tracking devices or control cut-outs or overrides. Nothing showed up.

Not unless you counted the cat, Maggie thought. The damn thing had taken to sleeping, or at least simulating sleep, in a basket in Maggie’s sea cabin. Somehow Maggie didn’t have the heart to kick her out.

Harry Ryan’s scan came through clean. Still Maggie remained suspicious.

That night, the Franklin’s last on the Datum before resuming its mission, Maggie was woken at three a.m. by an urgent message. According to patchy outernet reports leaking down from the High Meggers and beyond, the Neil Armstrong was lost.