The Long War Read online

  Lovell grinned. ‘Don’t bring me into it. I’m doing fine.’

  ‘And none of the “Aegis rights and responsibilities” crap spouted by President Cowley cuts any ice with me,’ Jack said. ‘Yes, Lieutenant, I’ll give you water to relieve the discomfort of these children you’re leading astray. Other than that – I could take your dollars, but I won’t, because I don’t like you, or the Datum government you represent, and I want to see the back of you.’

  Nathan could see Lieutenant Allen’s temperature rising, like a volcano on slow heat. ‘This is all bullshit!’

  Fox said earnestly, ‘With respect, sir, it’s not. This kind of meeting of minds is precisely why—’

  ‘Shut your cakehole, sailor.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Fox shrank back immediately.

  Allen produced a fold of currency from an inside pocket, hundred-dollar bills. He set this on Jack’s homemade desk. ‘I’m asking you to take this, sir. Or face the consequences.’

  Jack, totally at ease, just faced him. ‘What is it that poor troll said, when the likes of you tried to take her cub away?’

  ‘That was nothing to do with the US military—’

  ‘I will not.’ He repeated the phrase, backing it up with troll sign language. ‘I will not, sir. I will not.’

  Allen glowered. ‘Ensign Fox, cuff this man.’

  Jack just laughed. Fox sat frozen, indecisive.

  There was a flurry in the corner where the guys were playing Scrabble. ‘McKibben, you butthole, there is no way under the sun that DUCTTAPE is a single word . . .’

  ‘I don’t think cuffing is an appropriate response, Lieutenant Allen,’ Nathan said calmly.

  Allen stalked out of the house, furious.

  Nathan wondered how the hell he was going to explain all this to Captain Kauffman.

  When he did try, the first thing she did was to put Lieutenant Sam Allen off her ship, the first opportunity she got.

  The second thing she did was to ask to meet this character Jack Green, so she could learn all about this business of the favours for herself.

  20

  IN THE MINE Belt, the Valientés aboard Gold Dust witnessed a crisis.

  The airship fleet had stopped a couple of times over the arid worlds of this band, to take on board ore of various kinds – not just bulky stuff like bauxite, or even obviously precious metals like silver and gold, but a slew of minerals that were scarce now on the Datum, or at any rate hugely valuable: germanium, cobalt, gallium.

  But it wasn’t a colonized world where the incident happened.

  The family happened to be making one of their visits to the wheelhouse at the time, and Helen and Dan saw it all. The twain had slowed because they were approaching a notorious Joker, some eighty thousand steps from the Datum, and the pilot knew to take care, driving them forward at only a couple of steps a minute. When they finally stepped into the Joker, the landscape of the neighbouring world – a sparse green with forest clumps and prairie – vanished to reveal bare, brick-red, dust-strewn rock. Even the local Mississippi was reduced to a rusty trickle, striped down the centre of a valley that looked much too wide for it. From unknown causes, this Joker happened to be suffering from some kind of global desertification. It was like a landscape on Mars.

  And here was the downed ship.

  She was called the Pennsylvania. She had been caught in a dust storm when she tried, cautiously, to cross the Joker, and then one of her helium sacs, maybe already carrying a fault, split open at the sudden expansion caused by the heat of the Joker’s dry air. The leak had been quick but the crash slow, relentless; it must have been a terrifying experience. The Gold Dust passengers saw the wreck now through a veil of windblown dust that hissed against the windows, the remnants of the storm that had killed the ship. From the air it was a six-hundred-foot reef already half covered by drifting red sand.

  The Gold Dust was the first of the following fleet to come upon the wreck, and the largest. As Dan and Helen hung back, trying to keep out of the way, there was a hasty conference call with the Captain in his cabin, and the commanders of the other craft as they arrived in this world. A strategy was soon cooked up, and the crew swung into action with an efficiency and dedication that warmed Helen’s soul. They dropped anchor, and soon had a kind of improvised elevator working, taking crew to and from the ground on an open platform. Helen saw Dan’s buddy Bosun Higgs go down, joining working parties assembled from all the crews of the fleet.

  Then, as the crew worked, the Captain used the ship’s intercom to ask for volunteers from among the passengers to go down to help. Volunteers from among the passengers. Helen’s heart sank when she heard that phrase.

  Of course she couldn’t stop him.

  It all went well enough, for three, four hours, as the sun slowly went down, and the sandstorm finally petered out. From Helen’s godlike point of view high in the sky, she watched what looked like very organized ants working on the carcass of the fallen ship. They cut channels through the wreckage, led out walking wounded, and carried out the worst afflicted, and the dead. A field medical post was set up under a tent, and soon the first of the most seriously injured were being brought up to the Gold Dust on the elevator. The Gold Dust was the best placed of the fleet to take the injured on board, with a well-equipped medical bay that could be quickly expanded into a hospital. Other parties worked at salvaging what they could of the Pennsylvania’s cargo, mostly Corn Belt wheat. Still others performed the sad duty of digging out graves around the crash site.

  Then there was an alarm in the wheelhouse. One of the Gold Dust contingent had got himself trapped, deep in the interior of the Pennsylvania’s envelope, when a bit more of the structure had collapsed around him as he was trying, heroically, to reach one last group of stranded passengers. He was stuck in the collapsed framework, too high off the ground to be able to step out safely. A rescue attempt was quickly improvised.

  ‘Wow,’ Dan said, listening to the crackly radio messages. ‘Who do you think it is, Mom?’

  Not your father, Helen pleaded silently. Not Joshua. Just this once, not Joshua.

  A new line was let down from the nose of the Gold Dust, with two individuals clinging to it: Bosun Higgs and Sally Linsay. Helen’s hopes sank faster than the platform. With great caution they were lowered through a rip in the twain’s collapsed envelope, and disappeared into darkness. Helen heard muttered reports on the radio link, saw the spark of cutting torches deep in the Pennsylvania’s carcass. Then a period of silence.

  At last Sally called: ‘Take her up!’

  Slowly, cautiously, the winch turned. The platform came up first, with Sally and the crewman, trailing a length of cable. Then the line shuddered, and Sally waved a halt. Helen heard: ‘He’s OK. Not very dignified, but OK. Keep lifting.’

  Up came the cable, rising out of the wreck. And at last, lifted into the low sunlight, dangling upside down with the cable wrapped around one ankle, was Joshua.

  Dan rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, Dad!’

  Helen thought that summed it up.

  Eventually, to Helen’s chagrin, the whole incident made it on to the outernet, and the news channels. Sometimes it was hard being Lois Lane.

  And – as Joshua had to point out later, for Helen hadn’t been looking at her – as soon as Joshua was clear of the wreck, Sally had grinned up at the watching crew of the Gold Dust, and disappeared.

  21

  AS IT HAPPENED the Benjamin Franklin passed through the Mine Belt only a few days after the wreck. Via an outernet communiqué, the Franklin had been ordered to backtrack from Reboot to a Mine Belt world around seventy thousand steps from home, where some idiot had shot a couple of trolls.

  As the Franklin ploughed through the worlds, Maggie Kauffman wondered – not for the first time since the start of this mission – whether the whole Long Earth was a test which humanity was singularly failing. On the one hand there were still Datum-Earthers who led lives that had nothing to do with the landscape outside their h
eads, the immensity beyond their garden walls; and on the other hand, even now, twenty-five years after Step Day, there were still people stepping East and West, even to the High Meggers and beyond, without so much as looking up which mushrooms were safe to pick. One of the unstated duties of this voyage, as it had emerged, was to give a ride to a place of safety to the wounded, or even just the severely embarrassed, who had given up after their first winter without electricity, or a visit by an unexpected bear or pack of wolves – or maybe the odd dinosaur-descendant if you went far enough. Smart people, while they might at first have everything to learn, soon developed effective ways of making things work out here, but Maggie was seeing very little of them. Dumb people kept doing dumb things – such as shooting trolls, despite the intense political atmosphere after the Gap incident. And it was to the fallout from such dumbness that the Franklin, Maggie was finding, was repeatedly summoned.

  So the dirigible drifted across arid versions of Texas, listening out on shortwave, looking for a party whose location stepwise and geographically was only roughly known. The crew was intrigued by accounts of the disaster that had befallen the Pennsylvania; Maggie ascertained that no assistance was needed from her in the aftermath.

  At last, not far from the footprint of Houston, the ship flew over a rough campsite, with a small, solitary figure looking up from below. Nathan Boss pointed out a clump of woods near by which showed a lot of disturbance, the result of some kind of fight maybe.

  And Mac gently drew her attention to an infrared image of slumped, cooling forms, deep inside the forest clump. Where the bodies had been dumped, evidently.

  Maggie, Nathan and Joe Mackenzie descended. The lone figure at the campsite, a woman, waiting for them by a smoking fire, was a tough-looking forty-something – a few years older than Maggie – evidently a pioneer type. She gave her name simply as ‘Sally’. Among the weaponry lashed to her back was a ceramic composite rifle, and she had a face full of unfinished business.

  Maggie knew her officers well enough to be sure they would step lightly. And she also knew, she thought, from her pre-mission briefings on the Long Earth, who this woman was.

  Sally offered them coffee, rolls of bedding to sit on. After that she didn’t waste any time. ‘I don’t want you here. I believe in handling this kind of stuff myself. I didn’t call you.’

  Nathan asked, ‘Then who did?’

  ‘He’s long gone – lit out of here. However, you’re here. So here’s the set-up. I’ve secured near by several so-called scientists who have killed at least three trolls.’

  Nathan asked, ‘Scientists?’

  ‘Biologists. Actually up here to study the trolls, so they say. One of them was the one who called for help; I let him go. The rest—’

  ‘And “secured”?’ Maggie asked sharply. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Sally grinned evilly. ‘The trolls were captured here for some kind of “experiment” in cross-breeding with other humanoids. Unsurprisingly they resisted and stepped away, heading due West, which led to a chase, and a male and two females being shot dead – at least that number, I didn’t see it all. Left behind one orphaned cub. I’m sure you’re aware of the furore around our treatment of the trolls just now—’

  ‘That doesn’t sanction some kind of vigilante action by you, whoever you are,’ Mac said thickly.

  Sally just smiled. ‘Oh, nobody’s dead. They’re not exactly comfortable, but nobody’s dead. Unlike those trolls. And by the way if your crew try to apprehend me I’ll step out of here faster than you can say “beam me up”.’

  Maggie was all too aware that for all Sally’s self-confidence the slightest evidence of a threat from her would bring down the lightning from the Franklin. On the other hand Maggie needed to get a hold of this situation – and, as she thought she recognized this woman, she saw a way.

  ‘OK,’ she said now. ‘I’ve no intention of trying to apprehend you – umm, Sally. We’re not out here to be a police force. For all I know, these characters deserved whatever you dished out. However I would advise you at the least to put aside those weapons on your back. Let’s just calm tensions here. And then I suggest that you and I stroll over to that clump of woods, where the bodies are, and have a little parley. Get this situation resolved.’

  Sally hesitated. Then she nodded, dumped her weapons, and the two walked towards the woods, leaving Mac and Nathan to sample a little more much-brewed coffee.

  ‘Of course, I know who you are,’ Maggie said quickly, seeking to put Sally off her stride.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Sure. You’re the woman who stepped out of the Mark Twain with Joshua Valienté. News gets around.’ More specifically, she had cropped up in Maggie’s briefings as a well-known rogue element – and, yes, suspected vigilante – out in the Long Earth. ‘Sally Linsay, right? That’s at least one of the names you’re known by.’

  Sally shrugged. ‘And I know about you, Captain Margaret Dianne Kauffman. Oh, it wasn’t hard to find out about your military career – anybody concerned about Long Earth politics knows all about the Franklin and its officers and the rest of the fleet and their galumphing Starfleet-type mission. Actually I’m kind of glad it was you who showed up; you’re evidently one of the less stupid of the Captain Kirks running around out here.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Sally eyed Maggie shrewdly. ‘Listen – since you’re here. And since you’re evidently not some military-issue psycho.’

  ‘Praise indeed.’

  ‘I do believe in serendipity. Grabbing opportunities. There’s an idea I’ve been playing with, about law-enforcement.’

  ‘That’s not our role, strictly speaking . . .’ Somehow Maggie was back on the defensive. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You may be less stupid than your peers, but what a dumb mission you’re engaged in. It really is like bloody Star Trek – a handful of ships patrolling an infinity of worlds. Look, if you want to manage the Long Earth then you have to get holistic.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re suggesting.’

  ‘I’m suggesting you need an ally that’s spread as wide as the Long Earth itself.’ She looked directly at Maggie. ‘I’m talking about trolls.’

  That took Maggie totally by surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘Use the trolls. Take a couple on your ship, even. Look, they are, or were, being used all over the Long Earth already, wherever people want a friendly hand. Why not the military too? They have an extensive communications system, coupled to a huge folk memory—’

  ‘The long call.’

  ‘Yes. Not to mention being somewhat physically intimidating.’

  This was too much for Maggie to take in. It occurred to her that her mission had evolved a hell of a way from that tough-love speech by the President, to this. On the other hand maybe she should be making some kind of response to this business of the trolls. ‘I’ll need to think about it . . . Why would you want this?’

  Sally shrugged. ‘I’m on the trolls’ side. How better to protect them than to have them work with the soldiers? Also, maybe it will help them learn to trust us again . . .’

  They reached the clump of forest. Maggie followed Sally into the shade, where they found two dead trolls – the third Sally mentioned had presumably left a corpse off on some stepwise world – and a live juvenile still trying to cuddle up to one of the bodies.

  ‘You say you have these scientist characters stashed somewhere near by.’

  ‘You’ll find them. You better had, in fact, before the other trolls get here.’

  ‘What other trolls?’

  Sally gave her a knowing look. ‘At twilight, young though it is, this orphaned cub will attempt to join in with the long call. That will summon other trolls. And when they turn up – look, trolls are comparatively merciful. More than most human parents would be. But they are protective of their cubs.’

  ‘Point taken.’

  They began to walk back to the fire.

  ‘Listen,’ Sally said now
, apparently on impulse. ‘There’s something else. Since I believe you have the right stuff, Captain Maggie, take a look at this.’ She rummaged under a small heap of gear, and pulled out a piece of shining tech.

  It was a tube encrusted with keypads, vaguely resembling some kind of musical instrument, but technologically advanced. It was like an ocarina redesigned by Einstein, Maggie thought.

  ‘This is a troll-call.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Call it a two-way translation device for talking with trolls. I’m pretty good at it by now, I can call for help, or to signal danger. I mean, our language is nothing like theirs – this is just a prototype – and you can’t get across much more than basic concepts. But for now it’s the best we can do. With a few trolls on your ship, and one of these . . .’

  ‘How do I get hold of one?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not for sale,’ said Sally. ‘But I could get one for you from the manufacturer.’

  ‘Who is the manufacturer?’ asked Maggie.

  Sally just smiled.

  Maggie took a leap into the dark. ‘OK – get me one. That way I keep my options open. And I will consider what you’ve said.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘How will I find you? . . . Oh. You’ll find me, right?’

  ‘You’re getting the hang of this.’

  Any dirigible crew, when on the ground, were routinely wired up and monitored; Maggie’s officers had of course overheard every word.

  Nathan Boss thought they should have apprehended Sally Linsay, or at least tried to.

  And Joe Mackenzie thought she was crazy even to be thinking about taking trolls on board.

  ‘I don’t know, Mac. We do need new ways of working out here. I’ve learned that much in the past month. I mean, she’s right, once you are more than ten steps from the Datum, it’s like interstellar space. You can’t control the Long Earth like it was some occupied city in a war zone. Or even Datum New York. Freedom’s a mess, isn’t it? Listen, Mac – do some research for me. Find me some troll experts . . .’