The Medusa Chronicles by Alastair Reynolds & Stephen Baxter

Author:Alastair Reynolds & Stephen Baxter [Reynolds, Alastair & Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781473210219
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2016-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

For an old stager like Falcon, floating through time, it had been a surprise when the Ultimatum’s centenary had suddenly arrived, marked by grim headlines and analyses.

But even in an age when extreme longevity was becoming routine, the making of a threat to be fulfilled five centuries hence – perhaps twenty old-fashioned human generations away – seemed beyond the capacity of most people to comprehend. It didn’t help to focus minds that at first the Machines had appeared to do nothing more threatening than to suspend shipments of Jovian helium-3 and other products to Earth.

The authorities had responded, however. Saturn, the second of the solar system’s gas giants, had been fast-tracked as an alternate source of fusion fuel. Back home, great new projects were afoot. Falcon had been fascinated by plans to erect space elevators around the equator of Earth, beanstalks that would allow fast and cheap access to space on a massive scale – and would provide a fast mass evacuation route, if it came to that.

But behind the scenes, successive administrations had put more subtle measures in place to respond to the Ultimatum. The Phobos Treaty had been one step. Meanwhile a new Planetary Security Secretariat had been established – a typical bureaucratic response, people had grumbled at the time, but it had laid down some useful groundwork.

Despite all the strategic thinking and wargaming, however, it had still been a shock, Falcon thought, when, over a century after the Ultimatum, the Machines had finally made their first significant move with this assault on Mercury. And it had led to predictable demands that the World Government do something about it.

Falcon, semi-detached from humanity himself, rather resented having been drawn into Planetary Security’s covert plans in response. Yet here he was, standing in the Hermian sunlight.

Borowski said now, ‘The Machine ships came in at superspeed. Better than anything we’ve got. Even the warning from Spaceguard got to us only a little before the vanguard arrived. Some of our technical analysts think the Machines have got what they call an “asymptotic drive”. Do you know the theory? You throw matter into a miniature black hole, and as it’s crushed out of existence you get a pulse of energy that can drive a spacecraft. But you’d need some way of manufacturing miniature black holes to make it work . . .’

Uneasily, Falcon remembered Adam’s talk of the Machine he called 90, and a radically new physics dreamed up out in the dark, surrounded by a spinning sky . . . From that, perhaps, something like the asymptotic drive might have come.

However they were powered, nothing had been able to catch the Machine ships.

‘They landed at Inferno,’ Borowski said. ‘Second city on Mercury, slap bang in the middle of the Caloris Basin.’

Falcon nodded. Caloris was a mighty impact crater that sprawled across much of one hemisphere of Mercury. ‘They would land there. Machines have a sense of symbolism too – or at least of symmetry.’

‘They started their construction work on day one. We saw it from surveillance satellites.

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