After being escorted by Lieutenant Jane Springer-Soames on a high-acceleration dash across the solar system—and despite the urgency, there were only days left before the Ultimatum expired—Falcon knew he needed rest. Before descending to Earth he had the liner from Saturn stop at the venerable Port Van Allen.
Falcon tried to remember when he had first come here, to a station that predated his own first flight into space, and how many times he had visited since. He knew there would be no attempt to save or salvage Van Allen when the Machines came. Instead, like the other stations which still studded near-Earth space—and indeed the great equatorial space elevators that had become fountains of fleeing refugees—in the final days Van Allen would be used by a corps of Witnesses. And then it would be abandoned, to the whim of the Machines.
For now, as he relaxed in the care of the great wheel’s primitive but sufficient facilities, within the scuffed aluminium walls of his favourite room, Falcon sat before the window and looked out at Earth and Moon.
The Moon was no longer the Moon, the human Moon of antiquity. Since the Machines had moved in on the satellite at the time of the Jupiter Ultimatum, Falcon, like much of the rest of mankind, had watched with reluctant fascination as human relics had been dismantled or simply ploughed into the dust, from the famous old Federation of Planets building to the fragile remains of Borman’s pioneering Apollo lander. Then the work had gone much further. The regolith had been strip-mined, leaving great rectangular scars; the inner heat of the Moon had been released to flood the great old craters and the dark maria with fresh lava. All this was visible from Earth, from where the face of the Moon came to look like a lurid industrial landscape—or like Mordor, and Falcon wondered if anybody else alive would pick up that reference.
But, of course, the Moon had not been the Machines’ true target. Now, reluctantly, Falcon looked down on the turning Earth.
The world had been transformed since his own first youthful forays into space. The ice now encroached far from the poles, north and south, even though it was northern midsummer. Still, the environmental recovery overseen by the WG in earlier generations had largely survived. The northern continents were still swathed in oak woods, the forests had recovered in South America and Africa too, and grasslands washed over much of what had once been the great deserts, the Sahara, in central Asia. Falcon knew that those forests and plains still swarmed with wildlife. As Ultimatum Day approached, every effort had been made to sample and preserve offworld all the planet’s ecosystems. But Falcon knew that all the living things down there on Earth itself, the animals, the vegetation—the elephants and the oak trees—all of them were doomed to be casualties of a war of which none of them could have any understanding. Now the old station passed over Earth’s night side, much of which had already fallen largely dark. In the end, with whole nations abandoned, a diminished mankind had huddled in a few centres. But even now some cities still blazed with defiant light—and some, sadly, burned in the night, immense bonfires of culture.
Just as it had only been in the last few decades that the great refugee flows off the planet had begun, so it had been only at the end that the most concerted conservation efforts had been made. Physical records and treasures—even whole buildings, wrapped in shells of quasicarbon, itself once mined from the depths of Jupiter—had been transported offworld. Those treasures that could not be saved had been mapped and sampled and imaged. Thus dreamers in the clouds of Saturn could roam across “Earth II,” a crowd-sourced virtual copy. Falcon had tried it; in some options you could watch the people who had happened to be there on the day the recordings were made, and they would look into the camera and smile.
Once or twice Falcon had cautiously ventured down to Earth himself. He had found an age of tragic glamour. Falcon would always remember wandering around a mostly abandoned London, when, rolling up from the flooded, reforested valley of the Thames, he had come upon the great Victorian museums of South Kensington, looming above the green—and he had been reminded of a similar antique palace surviving in a greened, abandoned England, discovered, in the pages of Wells’s much-loved book, by a Traveller who had gone much further in Time than even Falcon had, to the year 802,701 AD . . . In the end Falcon had found London, like Earth itself, hard to bear: a great city stilled and silent save for the cries of birds and animals, and he had retreated to his orbiting refuge.
In the last years, there had been gestures of despair. Mass-suicidal “games.” Religions that flourished and died like mushrooms. Some even affected to worship the Machines themselves; people dressed up, or altered themselves, to become faux cyborgs. There had been a decade when Falcon himself, reluctantly, became a kind of fashion icon to such people—before the mood shifted again, and he came to be hated once more as a relic of an age of blame.
And yet there had been nobility too. Consider the Witnesses, volunteers who were preparing to sacrifice their lives to provide a final human account of the fate of the planet—and to gather evidence against the day when the Machines stood in the dock to account for this tremendous crime.
But, whatever the complexity and tragedy of the response to the coming deadline, the end was approaching now, at last.
In the final few days, above these scenes of desperation and sacrifice—and visible from Port Van Allen itself—the great ships of the Machines at last arrived, lenticular forms kilometres across, driven across space by a physics no human understood, and now were suspended like silver clouds above the cities of Earth . . .
* * * *
Jane Springer-Soames burst into the cabin.
“Sir—Commander Falcon! I’m sorry to disturb you—”
Falcon stood stiffly. “Jane, it’s fine. What’s happening?”
“We’ve had a message from my grandmother—from the President. An offer.”
“Of what?”
Jane, panting, swallowed hard. “A hostage exchange, sir.”
“You mean the Peace Hostages . . . ?”
As he had travelled to Earth, Springer-Soames’s stratagem had become brutally clear. Two of the last sleeper ships—cargo scows with crowded hibernacula in their holds—had been diverted to Unity City and forced to land under the watchful eye of armed security guards. And there they had been kept, with twelve thousand people crammed helplessly in their cold hives.
“If Springer-Soames ever thought that holding a human shield like that would persuade the Machines to spare Unity City, let alone Earth, she’s a fool, Jane—”
“I don’t know what she was thinking, sir,” Jane said. “Honestly. I can only tell you what she’s offering now.”
“You said an exchange.”
“She will release the twelve thousand—in exchange for you.”
Falcon took that in. “Ah. Of course. That’s what this has been all about. She wants to lure me down to Earth, in the hope, probably, of luring a Machine ambassador there too—Adam himself, no doubt.”
“What for? A final negotiation?”
Falcon looked at the planet below. “She must know that’s futile. More a photo opportunity, I think.”
“Sorry. An antiquated reference. Well, it will do no harm. You’re sure she will release the twelve thousand if I go down?”
“She is my grandmother, sir. I trust her that far.”
He smiled. “And I trust you, Lieutenant. Let’s make the descent.”