Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

two-day hold at the surge point. I told her I'd be back, but she shouldn't worry if I was a few days late.

    Outside a diplodocus slouched by with a freight container strapped between its legs.

    I told Katerina I loved her and couldn't wait to get back home.

    While I walked back to the Blue Goose , I thought of the message racing ahead of me. Transmitted at light-speed up-system, then copied into the memory buffer of the next outgoing ship. Chances were, that particular ship wasn't headed to Barranquilla or anywhere near it. The Aperture Authority would have to relay the message from ship to ship until it reached its destination. I might even reach Barranquilla ahead of it, but in all my years of delays that had only happened once. The system worked all right.

    Overhead, a white passenger liner had been slotted in between the bulk carriers. I lifted up my mask to get a better look at it. I got a hit of ozone, fuel and dinosaur dung. That was Arkangel all right. You couldn't mistake it for any other place in the Bubble. There were four hundred worlds out there, up to a dozen surface ports on every planet, and none of them smelled bad in quite the same way.

    'Thom?'

    I followed the voice. It was Ray, standing by the dock.

    'You finished checking those planes?' I asked.

    Ray shook his head. 'That's what I wanted to talk to you about. They were a little off-alignment, so - seeing as we're going to be sitting here for eight hours - I decided to run a full recalibration.'

    I nodded. 'That was the idea. So what's the prob?'

    'The prob is a slot just opened up. Tower says we can lift in thirty minutes.'

    I shrugged. 'Then we'll lift.'

    'I haven't finished the recal. As it is, things are worse than before I started. Lifting now would not be a good idea.'

    'You know how the tower works,' I said. 'Miss two offered slots, you could be on the ground for days.'

    'No one wants to get back home sooner than I do,' Ray said.

    'So cheer up.'

    'She'll be rough in the tunnel. It won't be a smooth ride home.'

    I shrugged. 'Do we care? We'll be asleep.'

    'Well, it's academic. We can't leave without Suzy.'

    I heard boot heels clicking toward us. Suzy came out of the fog, tugging her own mask aside.

    'No joy with the rune monkeys,' she said. 'Nothing they were selling I hadn't seen a million times before. Fucking cowboys.'

    'It doesn't matter,' I said. 'We're leaving anyway.'

    Ray swore. I pretended I hadn't heard him.

    I was always the last one into a surge tank. I never went under until I was sure we were about to get the green light. It gave me a chance to check things over. Things can always go wrong, no matter how good the crew.

    The Blue Goose had come to a stop near the AA beacon that marked the surge point. There were a few other ships ahead of us in the queue, plus the usual swarm of AA service craft. Through an observation blister I was able to watch the larger ships depart one by one. Accelerating at maximum power, they seemed to streak towards a completely featureless part of the sky. Their jibs were spread wide, and the smooth lines of their hulls were gnarled and disfigured with the cryptic alien runes of the routing syntax. At twenty gees it was as if a huge invisible hand snatched them away into the distance. Ninety seconds later, there'd be a pale-green flash from a thousand kilometres away.

    I twisted around in the blister. There were the foreshortened symbols of our routing syntax. Each rune of the script was formed from a matrix of millions of hexagonal platelets. The platelets were on motors so they could be pushed in or out from the hull.

    Ask the Aperture Authority and they'll tell you that the syntax is now fully understood. This is true, but only up to a point. After two centuries of study, human machines can now construct and interpret the syntax with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of runes that will almost always be accepted by the aperture's