The Long Mars

But the trolls had gone. It was an eerie echo of 2040, when in response to wider disturbances the trolls had withdrawn from all the human worlds . . .

‘Trouble’s coming,’ he said. ‘But what kind of trouble?’

Sally looked up at the sky. ‘Maybe that kind.’

Two huge airships had materialized right over their heads, their heavy envelopes emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes, their plated undersides bristling with observation ports and weapons. Having arrived stepwise, the ships turned their vast prows towards Happy Landings. Joshua felt a warm downdraught of air from their turbines.

The Next youngsters gaped. Then they picked up their scant belongings and began to hurry towards the town, Paul and his sister Judy leading the way, hand in hand.

43

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the Armstrong and Cernan took up station over Happy Landings, Captain Maggie Kauffman summoned Ed Cutler, Captain of the Cernan, over to her sea cabin aboard the Armstrong. ‘We need to discuss your note,’ had been her only order.

Then, on second thoughts, she asked Joe Mackenzie to join them.

Before the officers arrived, Shi-mi rubbed up against her leg. ‘Why Mac?’

‘Because I feel I need a voice of sanity.’

‘I’m a voice of sanity.’

‘Yeah, right. Just keep out of the way.’

‘Oh, I always keep out of Mac’s way . . .’

Mac arrived first, in his green medical scrubs, straight from work, crumpled, informal. ‘What a circus this all is,’ he said as he threw himself into a seat. ‘That idiot Cutler.’

‘I agree, a circus. But it’s what we have to deal with. Want a drink?’

Before he could reply, in walked Captain Edward Cutler, carrying a small briefcase. He was in full uniform, and insisted on standing to attention and saluting.

Mac gri

Cutler frowned. ‘I have literally no idea what you’re talking about, Doctor.’

Maggie glared at Mac. ‘I do. Not the time for old movie jokes, Mac. At ease, for Christ’s sake, Ed. Sit down. Just tell me again what you put in your note.’ A handwritten memo delivered to Maggie personally by Cutler’s XO, Adkins, evidently a trusted officer.

‘Well, you read it, Captain—’

‘You really have a tactical nuke aboard the Cernan?’

Mac gaped. ‘What the hell are we talking about here?’

‘We’re talking about a nuclear weapon, Doctor. Which I didn’t even know we carried until we got here. Which, it seems, we also carried all the way to Douglas Black’s new Shangri-La and back again, entirely without my knowledge. Which Ed Cutler knew we had all along . . .’

‘It has about the firepower of a Hiroshima.’ Cutler pushed the briefcase across the desk to her; she didn’t open it. ‘The enabling mechanism is in the case, along with a copy of my orders. It’s self-explanatory. You’ll need one other officer to authorize its use, but that’s your choice, doesn’t have to be me.’

‘Oh, it’s nice to know I have some leeway.’

‘I’m just the delivery system, if you will.’ He was clearly glowing with self-righteousness, and the sheer pleasure of fulfilling his covert orders.

Mac said, ‘Let me make sure I got this clear. We carried this damn bomb—’

‘And a maintenance facility for it.’

‘It gets better. All the way to Earth Quarter Billion and back?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t specifically loaded for this mission, to be brought to this place. To Happy Landings.’ He said the silly name as if it were heretical. ‘It was meant to provide you with an option, Captain. In case of a certain kind of threat.’

‘What the hell kind of threat demands a nuke?’ Mac growled.

‘An existential threat. A threat to the whole human species. The mission pla

Maggie said, ‘I can imagine a lot of threats against which a nuke would be no use at all.’

‘True. As I said, Captain, the intention of the orders was only to give you an option, and my task was to ensure that option was in place when you needed it.’

‘In your judgement.’

‘In my judgement, yes. The choice was always yours, however. To use it or not. Admiral Davidson was always clear that a twain Captain has a great deal of autonomy, being so far out of contact with the chain of command, was he not? So it is with this.’

He was right about that, of course. Before Step Day the armed forces, like everybody else, had got used to a wired-up world where you could speak to anybody, anywhere, with a delay of only fractions of a second. But when the great dispersal across the Long Earth had come, all that had broken down. Maggie in the remote High Meggers had been as out of touch with USLONGCOM as Captain Cook had been with the Admiralty in London, when he stopped at Hawaii. And old models of distributed command dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries had had to be dusted off. Yes, Maggie had a vast amount of autonomy out in the field; she’d been trained to face decisions like these.

She said, ‘But I never anticipated facing this situation, Ed, you and your damn nuke.’

Mac growled, ‘And what’s the overwhelming threat that requires us to consider this option? A bunch of smart-ass kids?’

‘Who broke out of the high-grade military facility they were confined in, Doctor.’ Cutler shook his head. ‘Who took down a USN ship. Who are a new kind of being walking among us, of unknown capability. They are clearly a “potentially existential threat” within the meaning of my orders. And this place, Happy Landings, is some kind of locus, a source. A nest, if you like. We were sent here—’

Mac snapped, ‘To study the place! To speak to the people! We’ve gondolas stuffed with ethnologists, anthropologists, geneticists, linguists, to achieve this. Those were our orders.’

‘All that was just cover,’ Cutler said dismissively.

‘Hmm,’ Maggie replied. ‘And in your note you say that you’ve already implanted the nuke. Even before telling me about its existence.’

‘Again, orders, Captain Kauffman.’ He tapped the briefcase. ‘Now all you have to do is make your decision. From this unit you can disable the weapon, we can retrieve it, take it away. Or—’

‘OK, Ed, you’ve said your piece. Get out of here.’

He stood up, smug, smooth, neatly groomed. ‘I’ve fulfilled my own orders. But if you need any more input from me—’

‘I won’t.’

When he’d gone at last, she reached under the desk. ‘Now I need that drink. Fetch the glasses, Mac. Christ. As if I didn’t have enough to deal with concerning the fall-out from the mission.’

Mac just nodded sympathetically. Their long journey had left a loose end. On the way back they’d been able to retrieve the party Maggie had left to study the crab civilization of Earth West 17,297,031. But earlier, at the moon-Earth, West 247,830,855, there’d been no trace of the equivalent science party. Given the state of the ships’ supplies it hadn’t been possible to stay long to investigate, and Maggie was reluctant to strand anybody else, any search party, given the uncertainty about when if ever a new mission might be sent out here. So they’d come home, leaving behind supplies, beacons, messages – Stepper boxes – in case the missing crew found their way back to the rendezvous point. Maggie hated to lose people. On her return she’d thrown herself into the work of contacting the families, before Davidson had called her in for a fresh assignment, and sent her out once more – to this.

And now, here she was sitting on a nuclear weapon like an unhappy hen.