Newton's Wake A Space Opera

CHAPTER 1 Combat Archaeology As soon as she stepped through the gate Lucinda Carlyle knew the planet had been taken, and knew it would be worth taking back. It bore the thumbprints of hurried terraforming: bluish grass and moss, low shrubbery like heather. No animal life was visible, but she had no doubt it was there. Five kilometres away across an otherwise barren moor dotted with outcrops and bogs a kilometre-high diamond machine speared the sky. Complex in aspect, somewhere between a basaltic cliff and a cathedral, it had shown up on the robot probe, but that was nothing compared to actually looking at it. She turned away from it and looked back at the gate. It was marked by a hilltop henge, whether by the gate's builders or by subsequent, less sophisticated minds she couldn't guess: two three-metre slabs upended, and topped by a third. One by one her team stepped forth from the unlikely shimmer and gazed around at the landscape. A yellow G5 sun blinked a bleary, watery morning eye over the horizon. 'Grim place,' said Macaulay, the ordnance fellow, as drizzle gusted. 'Minds me a Scotland.' He heaved a Charnley plasma cannon to his shoulder, mimed a shot at the distant edifice, andabashed by Carlyle's sudden glarelooked to the robot walkers that carried the heavier gear. 'Divil you were ever in Scotland,' jeered Amelia Orr, comms op and Carlyle's great-great-grandmother, who had been. 'Shut it,' said Carlyle. She flinched slightly at her own words, but she was in charge here, and she had to stamp authority on seniority, and fast. She strongly suspected that Orr had been put on the team to keep an eye on her, and harboured contingency plans to take over if Carlyle faltered. On the inside of her helmet the names of the rest of the ten-person team lit up one by one. Meanwhile the suit's firewalls fenced with the atmosphere. The planet was habitableinhabited, even, damn their cheek but its bacteria, viruses, and fungi all had to be neutralised. It would be an hour or more before the suits had passed on the new immunities to the team's bloodstreams, and the suits, or at least the helmets, could be dispensed with. 'Are you picking up anything?' she asked Orr, in a carefully polite tone. The older woman tight-beamed a glyph of to Carlyle's headup. 'Usual encrypted chatter.' 'Some music. D'ye want to hear it?' Carlyle raised a suit-gloved hand. 'No the now.' She swept the hand forward. 'Come on guys, this is gonna be a slog.' It was. Two hours later their suits were covered in mud and stained with bits of the local analogues of bracken, moss, and lichen, crawling with tiny tenlegged analogues of arthropods, and their firewalls were still running the virtual equivalent of fever, but they were all standing in front of the glittering cliffs. Carlyle let the team deploy a hundred metres away from the first visible ground-level gap and consulted her familiar. Professor Isaac Shlaim was an Israeli comp sci academic whose vicissitudes since the Hard Rapture could have filled a book, and had. So far Carlyle had resisted his entreaties to have it published. 'Whaddae ye make of it?' she asked. The familiar's icon filled a quadrant of the head-up. The icon was a caricatured face that Lucinda varied whenever she felt too uncomfortably reminded that Shlaim had once been human. 'From after my time,' he said, a slightly smug tone overlying his usual mixture of resentment and resignation to his plight. 'Can you confirm that it is the only such artifact on the planet?'[read more]