Beyond the Reach of Earth: Book Two of the Lightspeed Trilogy

BEYOND THE REACH OF EARTH Who was actually in Black Horizon? A handful of scientists and officers had broken the news to their astonished governments. The crews of certain submarines and other craft were obviously complicit – though just how many and how much was unknown. The conspiracy was almost certainly highly compartmentalised. It could be presumed that submarines were used as starships only when they were out of contact when on patrol. It was possible that some crew members didn’t know they were on another planet at all, even if they disembarked – and not all did. The rest of the conspiracy remained hidden. And not only on Earth. It was known that they’d been to other planets than Apis, but no mention of these had been made. No one yet knew what resources and reserves Black Horizon might have stashed across the sky beyond the reach of Earth. BY KEN MACLEOD The Fall Revolution The Star Fraction The Stone Canal The Cassini Division The Sky Road Engines of Light Cosmonaut Keep Dark Light Engine City Newton’s Wake Learning the World The Execution Channel The Night Sessions The Restoration Game Intrusion Descent The Corporation Wars Dissidence Insurgence Emergence Lightspeed trilogy Beyond the Hallowed Sky Beyond the Reach of Earth ORBIT First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Orbit Copyright © 2023 by Ken MacLeod Excerpt from Some Desperate Glory by Emily TeshCopyright © 2023 by Emily Tesh The moral right of the author has been asserted. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-356-51481-9 OrbitAn imprint ofLittle, Brown Book GroupCarmelite House50 Victoria EmbankmentLondon EC4Y 0DZ An Hachette UK Companywww.hachette.co.uk www.orbitbooks.net In MemoriamNorman Edgar1948–2022 Contents The story so far Chapter One New Foundations Chapter Two Matching Velocities Chapter Three Instructions Chapter Four Local call Chapter Five Battlestar Europa Chapter Six Continental Drift Chapter Seven A Peak in the Darien Scheme Chapter Eight Meet the Press Chapter Nine Black Gospels Chapter Ten The Keeper of the Bees Chapter Eleven Cephalic Nerve Ganglion Chapter Twelve Wave Function Chapter Thirteen Returns Chapter Fourteen Big River Chapter Fifteen Ancients of New Mu Chapter Sixteen The Cherenkov Flash Chapter Seventeen This Just In Chapter Eighteen Moon of the Mushroom Men Chapter Nineteen In the Eye of Silence Chapter Twenty The Port Glasgow Boys Chapter Twenty-One Sum Over Histories Chapter Twenty-Two Prior Indigenes Chapter Twenty-Three Coda: Terra Nullius Acknowledgments The story so far This is the second volume of the Lightspeed Trilogy, which began with BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY. I assume you’ve read that book, but not that you’ve read it recently. So here’s a quick recap. Faster-than-light (FTL) travel was discovered around 2020 and is being kept secret. This can’t stop other people from discovering it. One of them is London PhD student LAKSHMI NAYAK. In 2067, she receives an airmail letter in her own handwriting, with equations that point to the possibility. To her this apparent communication from a future self implies both FTL and time travel. She expands the equations into a paper and publishes it online, where it’s torn to shreds. After gaining her PhD she’s warned off any further work on FTL by MARCUS OWEN, a humanoid robot operative of the British Council (now a feared intelligence service). The world has three big powers: the Alliance (the Anglosphere plus India and minus Ireland and Scotland), the Union (the former European Union, now a revolutionary ‘economic democracy’) and the Co-ordinated States (China and Russia), all with various client states and non-aligned countries outside. NAYAK defects to the Union and moves to Scotland, where she works for a planning consultancy and secretly develops her theory into a practical engineering proposition. In 2070 JOHN GRANT, a Clydeside shipbuilder, sees a nuclear submarine rise out of the sea and vanish in a blue flash. His queries are blocked by Iskander, the Union’s universal AI interface. At work he’s approached by a colleague who is in ‘the cadre’, the network of revolutionaries that riddles the Union’s democratic institutions. She asks him to investigate and contact NAYAK. He does, by offering to build her ship. Others in the cadre tell GRANT that the Alliance and the Co-ord have had FTL travel for at least fifty years, and use nuclear submarines as starships. Soon a civilian submarine, the Fighting Chance, is taking shape in the semi-automated shipyard, with a stardrive of NAYAK’s design inside it. NAYAK trains to operate the controls. Meanwhile, OWEN has been dispatched to the Union’s Venus cloud colony, Cloud City, as Alliance cultural attaché. Everyone there knows he’s a robot, and a spy. The Alliance consul, PEREGRINE WALWORTH, passes on instructions for OWEN to block a Union attempt to retrieve a sample of mysterious rock from the surface. This rock resembles an equally mysterious rock already found on Earth, and now under secret investigation by the Alliance military. OWEN gets into a relationship with FRANCESCA MILLOY, who is building a suit for human survival on the surface. OWEN manages to get himself sent to the surface of Venus. He finds the glassy rock extends to a chasm below the surface, within which he sees the face of a woman. Something in the rock communicates with the onboard instance of Iskander in OWEN’s spacesuit. At that moment, a volcanic resurfacing of Venus begins. Back on Cloud City, OWEN learns that the rock sample has been retrieved by a team from Cloud City,