They caught a long march rocket out of Shiuquan Spaceport.
The ancient spaceport sprawled across the glacier-fed floodplains of what had once been the Gobi Desert, weathered by storms of dust the color of sunset, brutal in its simplicity.
Korchow and Arkady were suited and strapped in by Uigur tribeswomen whose stolid gazes and flat-planed faces reminded Arkady briefly and faintly of Catherine Li. The women prepped and dressed the two Syndicate constructs with the impersonal disinterest of stevedores hauling cargo dockside.
The preparations were archaic and alarming; Arkady had boosted off-planet before, but never off such a heavy planet or riding on such antiquated hardware. Still, Korchow didn’t seem worried, or even very interested in the proceedings, so Arkady hoped there wasn’t much to worry about. They would boost into orbit and meet with their jump-ship offshore of the String of Pearls Arc. The trajectory had been carefully planned to avoid all unnecessary human contact.
Neither construct spoke during liftoff, or when the secondaries kicked in.
Rendezvous in seventeen hours and counting, the shipboard computer announced in what must have been intended to be a soothing contralto.
“How long until we reach Gilead?” Arkady asked Korchow.
“What?” Korchow turned away from the window, his face a shadowed landscape haloed by the black void beyond the porthole. “What did you say about Gilead?”
He seemed dazed by the contrast between the darkness outside and the brightly lit cabin. He had been like this ever since the Palestinians brought Arkady to him. It was as if Korchow had been used up, and was now a mere husk of the man who had so terrified Arkady.
“I said when do we get home?”
“How can you be so blind, Arkady?”
Understanding seeped through Arkady’s mind a moment before Korchow’s next words, and in a way that made him see he’d known and yet refused to know.
“We’re not bound for Gilead. There is no Gilead, Arkady. Not for either of us.”
“You,” Arkady breathed. “You interrogated me for months, and you never got sick. You’re a carrier as well.”
“We couldn’t understand it.” Korchow spoke in the same cold flat voice that had so terrified Arkady during the long months of his interrogations. But now Arkady realized that what he had thought of as ruthlessness could just as easily be called despair. “Half the debriefing group went down within the first week. We assumed the vector was one of the other survey team members, one of the ones who actually got sick. And since I spent more time with you than anyone else and never got sick myself…It was only after we’d tracked down all the people who’d been in contact with you and looked at the infection rates that we began to ask the right questions. And by that time I had started infecting people too.”
“How badly has it spread?”
“Not at all, so far. It will, obviously.” Korchow smiled thinly. “Some people actually proposed letting it loose on the Motais on purpose, but thankfully cooler heads prevailed. So it’s quarantine for now, and a race to find a splice for the virus before the quarantine breaks down.”
“So if we can’t go home,” Arkady asked, “where do we go?”
Korchow shifted in his seat, pulled a spinstream monitor from his pocket, flicked it into motion, and handed it to Arkady to look at.
He peered into the little screen and saw brilliantly white sunlight flashing on the terminator line of a planet that he only slowly identified as Novalis.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Something you need to know about. It’s spinfeed from the tacticals on Novalis. Long out-of-date, of course. We only got it a week or so ago.”
The tacticals’ feed was disorienting; most of what they were pulling into the spinstream was navigational data instead of straight visuals. But after a moment Arkady realized he was seeing the launch of an orbit-to-surface troop transport.
The view cut to groundside, though it was still readouts from the tacticals, not standard spinfeed. The tacticals’ readouts gave a somewhat artificial feel to the unfolding battle—if battle was the right word for it. Because as Arkady watched the months-old recorded and dispatched satellite feed ticking through its time frames, the word that came more readily to mind was massacre.
The tacticals had arrived at the other landing party’s base camp just after dawn, and had obviously roused them from unsuspecting sleep. The whole thing made Arkady’s skin crawclass="underline" the tacticals advancing on the camp, its inhabitants rushing around in bewildered confusion, the jumble of tents and bags and equipment turning the tacticals’ visual feed into outright chaos.
But then, just as it seemed the worst was upon them, something happened that would put this segment of spinfeed on the greatest-hits parade of intelligence services, newspins, and theoretical physicists all over UN and Syndicate space.
The figures milling around the base camp vanished.
Not vanished as in faded off into the surrounding forest.
Not vanished the way a hologram sputters out and fades into white noise when a generator goes down.
Not vanished with the clanking cumbersome apparatus of Bose-Einstein transport.
Just…vanished.
And in the moment of their vanishing—the last moment in which either the tacticals or the orbital satellite supporting them or any other piece of Syndicate equipment in-system relayed any data out to the BE buoy—something extremely problematic appeared on the spinfeed from the orbital satellite.
Most of the experts eventually agreed that it was a ship. But that was more or less the only thing they did agree on.
It was vast and sleek. It had a wedgelike shape that led a slim majority of the experts to argue that it was designed to withstand atmospheric flight—and the rest of the experts to argue that it was merely designed to resemble atmospheric craft for aesthetic reasons. They never got a full view of the ship; just an ant’s-eye view of its massive undercarriage. There were no markings or numbers on the part of the hull they could see; only the faint and shadowy outline of a flying hunter, its claws and pinions fully extended. Some of the experts identified it as a crow. Others insisted it was a hawk or an eagle or a dragon. A few dissenters, not given much mileage, even argued that the shadowy silhouette was the image of some beast utterly unknown to human myth or science.
The satellite feed wasn’t really good enough to say anything about the ship with any certainty. And the satellite feed was all they ever got; because the moment after the base camp’s inhabitants vanished, the ship also vanished.
“What does this mean?” Arkady breathed, staring at the now-dark screen.
“We don’t know. We don’t even know if they’re human.”
“So…there never was any UN team there. The contrail we were all so terrified about was them, not the Peacekeepers. And Arkasha was right all along; the virus was a terraforming tool. Their terraforming tool.”
“So it seems.”
“Which must mean that Novalis was theirs?”
“Whoever they are. Whatever they are.”
“Did they destroy the Bose-Einstein buoy too?”
“No. We’re not even sure they realized it was out there. Perhaps they did but just dismissed it as garbage. They obviously have some form of transport that makes quantum-assisted spinfoam transit look like smoke signals. We sent a second team back in—KnowlesSyndicate this time. But of course it’ll be another four months before we even know if they got there in one piece.”
“So…have you told UNSec? This has to be the end of any fighting between us and them. Or them and Earth, for that matter.”