Manhattan in Reverse by Peter F Hamilton

Author:Peter F Hamilton [Hamilton, Peter F]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, short stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9780230761711
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Of all the memories Paul was able to extract, arrival was the clearest.

The angel clung to the starship’s fuselage as the big commercial freighter emerged from its wormhole a thousand kilometres above the bright blue expanse of Anagaska’s major ocean. Dwindling violet light from the wormhole’s exotic fabric washed across its face, revealing late-adolescent features that were carefully androgynous. With its firm jaw it would be considered a striking and attractive female rather than classically beautiful, while as a male people would think it inclined to the delicate. The baggy white cotton shirt and trousers it wore offered no clue as to its gender orientation.

As soon as the wormhole closed, the starship began to decelerate, chasing down towards the planet where New Helsinki lurked behind the darkness of the terminator. From its position just ahead of the starship’s engineering section, the angel could see the archipelagos rolling past beneath. The impression of speed was such that it felt there should be a wind blowing its long honey-coloured hair back. Instead it just smiled across the vacuum at the world which awaited it. Advancer senses revealed the dense electronic chatter of the planetary cybersphere ghosting through the atmosphere, with intangible peaks reaching out to connect with Anagaska’s satellite constellation. When the angel accessed the starport’s traffic control it could find no hint that their flight was subject to any additional audit. Security was light and no intelligent scrutineers were probing the starship’s systems. The local Protectorate group didn’t know it was here. Not that there was ever any active presence at the starport; but every visitor to Anagaska was quietly recorded and checked; if it had arrived incognito there was a small risk their identity-examiner programs would raise a query. This way was safer. It was playing very long odds against detection.

As soon as the starship fell below orbital velocity, the angel let go. It configured the biononic organelles inside its cells to provide a passive deflective field around itself, one that would surreptitiously warp the active sensor radiation pouring out from the starship’s navigation network. The energy sequence flowing through its biononics was even sophisticated enough to disguise its mass, leaving it completely undetected as the starship raced away.

The angel began its long fall to the ground. It expanded its integral force field into a lenticular shape over two hundred metres wide. Electric-blue scintillations slithered over the surface as it caught the first wisps of Anagaska’s upper atmosphere, aerobraking in a long curve to subsonic speed. Its descent strategy was simple enough, the majority of its flight was out over the ocean where there would be no one to see the tell-tale crimson flare of ions against the force field as it sank ever-lower, nor hear the continual thunderclap of its hypersonic passage through the air.

When it reached a three-kilometre altitude its downward plummet had slowed to less than a hundred kilometres an hour, thanks to the protective force field which was now over three hundred metres wide and acting like a parachute.

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