The Long Mars

And in the cage, Snowy had found a man, bound and gagged, in the remains of a marine uniform.

Maggie immediately snapped out orders. ‘Nathan, go round up those superstars and tie ’em down. Use lethal force if you need to.’

Nathan Boss hesitated for one second – that was the glamour fighting against Navy discipline in his head, Maggie thought. Then he said, ‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Mac, Yue-Sai, Snowy, come with me. Let’s go rescue that marine.’

It wasn’t hard to bust open the cage.

When they’d got through, Maggie went in herself to release the man. She pulled the gag away from his mouth tenderly. He was filthy, rough-shaven. He whispered hoarsely, ‘Thank you.’ Yue-Sai had a water flask. She passed it over and he drank greedily, his gaze flickering nervously from one face to the next. ‘Hey, Wolverine,’ he said at length. ‘Don’t eat me.’

‘He’s a member of my crew,’ Maggie said reassuringly. ‘His name’s Snowy. Acting Ensign Snowy.’ She turned to Mac. ‘Now do you see why I brought him along?’

‘Thank you, Snowy,’ the marine said seriously. ‘Without you finding me – well, I reckon those damn Happy Landers would have left me for dead, after you took them off this place. Probably only kept me alive after you showed up as an insurance policy. Or hostage, maybe. They think things through, all ways up.’

‘I know you,’ Maggie said. She smiled. ‘Though I’ve seen you looking better. You served under me on the Franklin.’

He gri

‘I remember. Sorry about that.’

‘No, you were right.’

‘Lieutenant Sam Allen, right?’

‘Yes. US Marines. But I’m a Captain now.’

‘OK, Sam. This is Joe Mackenzie, my ship’s surgeon.’

‘I remember you too, sir.’

‘Sure you do, son.’

‘I’ll have Mac look you over, and get you out of here and up to my ship. And then we’ll have a serious talk with David and the rest.’

‘Captain—’

‘Yes, Sam?’

‘My wife and kid. I guess they’ll think I’m dead.’

He was on the verge of tears, and Maggie imagined a five-year flood, pent up. ‘I know they’re fine. I met them at the—’

‘The funerals?’

‘They’re waiting for you in your family home. Benson, Arizona, right? Where you grew up. We’ll take you back, son. We’ll take you back.’

‘Are we under arrest?’

David and the others sat on the ground, out in the open, hands visible. Armed marines circled them, well out of range, and the scene was being watched over by two airships.

‘Well?’ David snapped. ‘If so, under what authority? Military, civilian? Do you claim to be acting under the US Aegis? Can such a concept be any more than a fiction in a world so remote that the very genetic basis of life is different – where nothing like North America, even, is recognizable?’

Maggie studied him. He was handsome, forceful, quite unafraid, very impressive. He seemed to have a sense of entitlement about him, a right to power over others, that she had seen in scions of old-money families, for instance. And yet there was more than that, something outside human norms. Something compelling, hypnotic.

She murmured to Mac, ‘If I start falling under his spell, pinch me.’

‘I’ll do that, Captain.’

Sam Allen, showered, fed, tended to by Mac, in a fresh uniform that didn’t quite fit him, stood by Maggie. ‘Don’t let him take the lead, Captain. He’s smart with words. Even when he doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about, he can work it out awful fast. Filling in the gaps, figuring stuff out. Before you know it, he has your head spi

David sneered at him. ‘I wonder how you survived at all, among us.’

‘By not listening to a word you said, pretty boy.’

‘OK, David. Let’s just hear it. The unvarnished truth, please. You come from Happy Landings. You grew up there, right?’

From a fragmentary account drawn from David and the rest, interspersed with more of that high-speed private language between the others – and interrupted by Sam Allen, who during his years here had picked up more of the truth than David and the others seemed to have realized – Maggie pieced together the full story. Almost everything they’d been told so far was a lie. But the five had come from Happy Landings.

Happy Landings was a strange place, that was clear enough. Even in the a

Maggie had insisted that Shi-mi join her in these sessions for background briefings. Now the cat murmured privately to Maggie, ‘Did you know that Roberta Golding was from Happy Landings, originally? And now she is in the White House.’

Even before Yellowstone, before the great flood of refugees out of Datum America and the rest of the planet, there had been trouble in Happy Landings. Since Step Day many more people had been moving around the Long Earth than the earlier handful of natural steppers, and more had been arriving in Happy Landings than the community could absorb. Everybody was upset by this sudden flux of outsiders. These were people who didn’t fit in with the local ways and didn’t want to – and, worse for such a private community, started to feed back accounts of peculiar features to the Datum authorities, and attracted still more unwelcome attention.

‘They were in turmoil,’ David said, with some contempt. ‘The mayor. Our so-called leaders, elders all of them.’

‘Let me guess. You stepped up to help.’

‘Our insights were deeper, those of us of the younger generation. Our minds qualitatively stronger. Qualitatively. Do you understand what that means, Captain? We think better than those who went before us. This is a demonstrable fact. And this despite our lack of years.’

Mac growled, ‘You offered to take over, did you? A benevolent dictatorship.’

‘We offered leadership, if that’s what you mean. We would not have excluded the elders. We knew we needed their knowledge, experience. But the wisdom was ours.’

‘Ah. The wisdom, and the decision-making. I’m guessing your offer was politely refused. And I’m guessing you were prepared for that refusal.’

It had been a kind of coup d’état.

‘We had acolytes in all the townships,’ David said, sounding almost dreamy, like a kid recounting some feat at school sports. ‘We had weapons. Our pla

‘It didn’t last long,’ Sam Allen said with contempt. ‘Their glorious reign. Getting them out was bloody, however. Captain Stringer – of the Armstrong I – knew more of the detail than I ever did. What’s for sure is that by the time this bunch were put down, there were a lot of dead, among their own followers, I mean, as well as those who supported the “elders”, as they put it. These five were the ringleaders. Five twenty-year-old Napoleons. According to the mayor, they showed no remorse.’

‘Remorse?’ David said, as if surprised by the word. ‘To feel remorse would imply that one accepts some mistake, would it not? We made no mistake. Our rule would have been the optimal way forward, for Happy Landings. This can be demonstrated logically, even mathematically—’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Maggie snapped.

‘The elders seemed unsure what to do with them,’ Sam said. ‘They don’t practise capital punishment in Happy Landings. They didn’t want to lock them up for ever, for as sure as eggs is eggs they’d bust out some day. And they didn’t want to turn five young psychotic geniuses loose on the rest of humanity.’