"Sir."
Stillich heard screaming from the farmer's children. He did not look back.
AD 4814
Starfall minus 6 years
Armonktown, Footprint. Alpha System
Suber's youngest son, little Suber, Su-su, called him out of the house. "Dad, come see. I think there's another one up there, another GUTship!"
Suber had been helping Fay prepare the evening meal. Fay, at thirty, Suber's second wife, was nearly seventy years Suber's junior, though thanks to his AS treatment she actually looked a little older. She grinned across at him. "Go. You can help me for the next hundred years; Su-su will only be seven years old once. Go!"
So he grabbed his coat and let his son drag him out of the house, down the darkened street towards the park, where, away from the streetlights of Armonktown, you got the best view of the sky. But Suber was soon winded as he tried to keep up with Su-su. He had been born on Earth—though Su-su did not know that, and nor did Fay, and they never would-and even after seven decades here and extensive nano treatments Footprint's stronger gravity still hung heavy as a lead coat.
They came to the park. It was a fall evening, and the dew lay on the grass and the roses' thorns, and glistened on the blisters of the rope-trees, a native species allowed to prosper in their own little bubbles of Footprint air inside the town dome. And there on the grass, little Su-su turned his button face up to the sky. "See, dad?"
Suber looked up.
The sky was crowded and complex. From Footprint, a world of Alpha A, sun B was a brilliant star in the sky, closer to Alpha A than planet Neptune was to Sol, bright enough to cast sharp shadows; on this world there were double sunrises, double sunsets, strange eclipses of one star by the other. And there was a line of light drawn across the sky: dazzling, alluring, that zodiacal gleam was the sparkle of trillions of asteroids. The mutual influence of A and B had prevented the formation of large planets; all the volatile material that had been absorbed into Sol's great gas giants was here left unconsolidated, asteroids drifting in huge lanes around the twin stars. Footprint's sky was full of flying mines.
But what interested Su-su wasn't the natural wonders of the sky but the signs of human activity. He pointed with his small finger, to a cloud of light slivers not far from the zenith. "Can you see, dad? I can count them. One two three four five seven twelve! And there's a new one since they passed over yesterday."
"Your eyes are better than mine," Suber said. "But, you know, I think you're right ... "
The splinters of light were ships: GUTships, a veritable fleet of them in a medium-altitude orbit over Footprint. Under magnification they showed the classic design, lifedome and GUTdrive pod connected by a spine kilometres long. Somebody was assembling an orbital armada—and presumably bringing in the ships even from other star systems, for there was no facility to construct GUTships anywhere save Sol system itself.
Suber had heard no announcement about this mustering, seen no news source refer to it, even though it was clearly visible to everybody. He wondered why no imperial official had been out to inspect it. He had even considered trying to get some message to the Empress's court himself. But it was unlikely in the extreme he'd be able to do this without blowing his personal cover.
It was while he was thinking of Earth, oddly, in that quiet moment with his son, that his life on Footprint ended.
The voice behind him was soft. "Densel Bel?"
He turned, unthinking. "Yes?" And then, "Ah." He had responded to a name he hadn't heard spoken since he left Earth.
The man facing him was dressed entirely in black, some fabric so dark it seemed to absorb the light from the sky; he was a shadow, even his face concealed.
Densel-Suber did not dare glance around for Su-su. "May I say goodbye to my son?"
"No." The man pointed a finger.
There was a shock, not of pain, but of cold. He felt his heart stop before he hit the ground.
And when he could see again, he was enclosed by walls, in a room, bathed in bright light. He winced, and lifted a hand to shield his eyes. And he staggered, for he was standing, held by a mesh web.
Somebody handed him a beaker of liquid. He drank, and felt warmth course through his system.
A man stood before him. A broad face, aged with no apparent recourse to AS, stocky build, crop of grey hair. Densel thought he recognised him. Others stood by—a young woman at this man's side, perhaps a daughter. Densel wondered if they were armed.
The room had a single window that opened on blackness. The smart webbing filled the room, holding the people unobtrusively. He was in microgravity then, in orbit perhaps.
The man studied him. "Are you all right, Densel Bel? You were injected with a nano anaesthetic. I hope it didn't hurt; you were obviously unprepared in the conventional medical way."
"I'm fine." He drew a breath. His chest ached vaguely; he wondered if he had had some minor heart attack. "You know who I am."
"Obviously. And you know me, don't you?"
"You are Flood. Ambassador to the Empress's court." Flood's was one of the more famous faces in the small pool of Alpha cultural life.
"Former ambassador. I retired some years ago. Now I am engaged on other projects."
"I want to speak to my family—"
"You mean the two families you raised on Footprint, to whom you lied all their lives? Forget them, Densel Bel. You are dead to them. They are dead to you. That part of your life is over."
The shock of this abduction seemed to be hitting Densel; if not for the webbing he might have fallen. "For seventy years I have prepared for this moment. Still it is hard."
"You chose your own path. This always lay at the end of it."
"How long have you known?"
"We have known all about you since you came tumbling out of the wreckage of the last Poole wormhole."
Once Alpha and the other colonised star systems had been linked by faster-than-light wormholes, assembled in Jovian orbit, their interfaces laboriously hauled across interstellar distances by GUTships. Seventy years ago Shira XXXII, on ascending to the Construction Material Throne, had ordered the links to be cut.
"I was trained since I was a boy for the task," Densel said. "I knew nothing else but the purpose. I suppose you would say I was conditioned. I should have died when the wormhole collapsed."
"Yes. You are a suicide bomber who failed to die."
"I was stranded on Footprint. Unexpectedly alive, it was as if I awoke. I built a life, an identity—I built a soul. Do you begrudge me that? I have been cut off from my world for seven decades—"
"Your world? Isn't this your world now, a world you have helped build with your skills in exotic-matter engineering, skills developed for destruction put to better use?"
"Why did you not deal with me before?"
"Because we always thought you might be useful. You were doing no harm in the meantime."
Densel frowned. "Who is 'we'?"
"We are a loosely bound, loosely defined group, but with a single clear goal."
"Which is?"
"The liberation of the star born from the tyranny of the Shiras. You were involved in the strengthening of the Empresses' grip. The wormholes were cut so that Earth might be protected from us by a blanket of spacetime, while possessing a near-monopoly on GUTship construction technology. So we can be controlled, forever."
Densel took a breath. "Is the rule of the Shiras so bad? The empire's touch is light—"