Moon Flower Read online

  MOON FLOWER

  James P. Hogan

  There’s Something About Cyrene...

  Two development teams have utterly vanished planet-side. A third is on the way to set things back on track. But ruthless mercenary “facilitator” Myles Callen and his crew are in for a surprise — for they about to encounter a planet as magnificently strange as the vast alien artifacts of Arthur C. Clarke or Stanislaw Lem’s sentient oceans. And behind it all a new physical law so unexpected and fundamental that it may change the universe forever!

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Moon Flower: Copyright © 2008 by James P. Hogan

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-55534-X

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5534-6

  Cover art by Alan Pollack

  First Baen printing, April 2008

  These ePub and Mobi editions v1.0 by Dead^Man January, 2012

  dmebooks at live dot ca

  Retail edition, reformatted

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  PROLOGUE

  Some of the equipment deployed by the larger defense and security contractors thriving off the ongoing strife as the world reached the middle of the twenty-first century would have been worthy of many national governments in times gone by. Marduk was the newest addition to the arsenal of Milicorp Transnational, based in San Jose, at the southern end of Occidena, one of the regions that had seceded from the former United States. An orbiting bombardment platform carrying beam weapons, missiles, and guided bombs, Marduk was capable of shifting its orbit to target any place on the Earth’s surface within three hours.

  The Indonesian breakaway state of Tiwa Jaku had been established following takeover of the island by a military junta bankrolled and equipped by foreign commercial interests keen to secure access to the considerable tropical hardwoods reserves and recently confirmed deposits of rich nickel and tin ores. When the actions of a growing popular reactionary movement threatened to destabilize the regime, President Suwarko, who had liaised with Milicorp as a general under the former government and taken out his own contract with the corporation upon coming to power, called in their services to suppress the rebellion. For the directors and technical staff of Milicorp, the event provided a welcome opportunity to test Marduk’s capabilities.

  Flanked by staff officers in gray Milicorp tunics bearing the gold-lightning-flash-on-red shoulder insignia designating Tactical Orbital Command, Myles Callen stood in the center of the Opcon Room on Marduk’s Control Deck, staring down into the display “tank” presenting a composite 3-D image, reconstructed from direct observation and data from lower-altitude surveillance drones, of a magnified portion of the terrain below. Callen’s executive status as corporate “Facilitator” in charge of the operation placed him above the hierarchy of uniformed ranks. He wore a plain dark suit with traditional narrow tie and was addressed as “Mister.”

  The view being held in the tank showed an area of broken, rocky hills rising above scattered forest and plantations to the west of the capital on the island that was now called Tiwa Jaku. Colored icons and data superimposed on the image indicated the dispositions and strengths of the rebel units that had pulled back to take up a defensive stand there. The plan devised with Milicorp’s cooperation had been simple enough. A feinted retreat by the government forces and false reports spread by infiltrators of a general uprising had drawn the rebels out onto the plain, believing that they had an open road through to the city. When they had converged into columns, they were annihilated by remote-piloted ground-attack drones unloaded secretly by Milicorp personnel and deployed in the previous few days. Falling back to the hills, the survivors found themselves penned in by government troops who had moved in surreptitiously from the rear through the surrounding forests. The classical move would then be for government reserves to advance from the city and seal the trap, followed by a bloody and protracted operation of assault, reduction of the defenses, and mopping up. But Marduk offered a swifter and more economical option.

  The Ordnance Director spoke from his console to one side of the tank. His voice sounded also in earpieces of the active optic spectacles that Callen was wearing. “Pilot laser registered on Hill 327. Main beam armed and primed to fifty percent.”

  “Frame synched and locked. Opportunity window one minute, twenty-seven seconds,” another voice announced over the circuit. That was the time they had before Marduk’s progression along its orbit would take it out of effective range.

  Callen murmured a command that was picked up by a sensor that doubled as a tie pin. A zoom field opened up in the spectacles to show a close-up of the part of the display that his gaze was directed at. Hill 327 was a natural amphitheater of rocky scarps and shrub, formed in what could have been the remains of an ancient volcano, that the rebels were turning into a strong point overlooking their defensive positions. He could make out groups of figures digging slit trenches and filling sandbags for gun emplacements, and below them lines of others hauling packs and equipment up the slopes. The ravine at the reverse foot of the prominence — in the direction that Marduk’s firing window was moving — had been identified on the previous pass as a staging area for materials and munitions. Beyond that, in the forested valley slightly to the north, were the camouflaged hideouts housing the families, support base, and supply caches.

  Callen called up a countdown check and nodded to the Ordnance Director. “Fire sequence pattern. Take out the full list.”

  For an instant, a thin finger of radiance illuminated the ground zero point shown on the target designator screens as a reddened circle, ionizing a conducting path from the orbiting platform and perceptible on the ground as a faint column of violet coming down through the thin veil of cloud. Then a bolt of high-energy electrons flashed to the surface to hit the target area with the force of a mini-nuclear bomb, vaporizing everything inside a radius of a thousand feet. Callen had a brief impression of the blast wave sweeping outward from the fireball in a turmoil of rocks, debris, shattered trees, and bodies before the frame stepped to the next indexed target zone. Even after observing the test firings in Nevada, he was still impressed.

  In all, six bursts of devastation were delivered before Marduk stood down from active operations on that pass of its orbit.

  But by then, the battle was already over.

  The following day, Callen put a call through to Colonel Guadalez, commander of the Milicorp ground force. Shots had been coming through all morning of government soldiers bringing in trucks full of bewildered survivors, many still in shock or suffering from flash burns, to wire detention cages erected outside the city. “What are the latest numbers?” he inquired.

  “It’s looking like around twenty-eight hundred to three thousand. Could be up to three-quarters rear echelon.” Guadalez’s swarthy face with its thick mustache broke into a grin showing strong white teeth against the background of the trailer that he was using as a local command post. “That means we really hit their fighting edge hard. They shouldn’t be much of a problem for a long time now. You guys up there got it right on.”

  Callen acknowledged with a noncommittal nod. “I just do my job.”

  “Do we have word on what to do with them yet?”

  “San Jose have been talking to Suwarko. He’s decided that he needs to teach a lesson to discourage other would-be troublemakers. Our contractual commitment is fulfilled. Stand
down your mission and turn them over to Suwarko’s people. They’ll deal with it. We’ll be airlifting you out the day after tomorrow.”

  Guadalez returned a matter-of-fact nod. It was to be expected as part of the business. Being seen to be involved in the liquidating of prisoners was not good for corporate public relations. “That gives us two nights here to celebrate,” he said. “Much appreciated. I’ve heard wild things about this city. I guess you guys don’t get to party much up there, eh?”

  “I wouldn’t have the time anyway,” Callen told him.

  “Still working?”

  “Always working.”

  “It, ah... doesn’t exactly sound like what I’d call a life,” Guadalez commented, picking at a tooth with a thumbnail.

  “I just do my job,” Callen told him.

  Callen took a lander down to the surface on Marduk’s next pass over the West Coast. The summons from Milicorp headquarters had said simply that he was required back urgently to be briefed on his next assignment. Rath Borland, the Operations Vice President in San Jose, had not gone into detail when Callen called to inquire further, on the grounds that the matter was sensitive. He had confided, however, that the job would be of a long-range nature, far from Earth.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Einstein’s theory of gravitation, better know as General Relativity, revolutionized physics by interpreting gravity as an effect arising from geometry. Basically, the presence of mass induces a curvature into the structure of space and time that determines the paths that moving objects, light, and other forms of mass-energy follow.

  A common analogy to illustrate the idea imagines a cannonball resting on a stretched rubber sheet, creating a dish-shaped depression. A marble introduced to roll frictionlessly around at some equilibrium level does so not because the cannonball send out an invisible “force” to attract it, but because the geometry of the space that it is moving in constrains it to.

  In the 1950s, a German physicist by the name of Burkhard Heim, who had been badly crippled by a laboratory accident in the course of his work during World War II, investigated the problem of reconciling General Relativity with quantum theory, which while immensely successful in predicting experimental results, seemed incompatible in terms of many of its basic concepts and requirements. Heim’s approach involved a geometrical interpretation of the electromagnetic force similar to the way in which General Relativity had treated gravity. It turned out as it required two extra dimensions in addition to the earlier theory’s four. In them, it became possible to interconvert gravitational and electromagnetic energy, one to another. Extensions of Heim’s work carried out in the first decade of the twenty-first century introduced a further two dimensions, bringing the total to eight, and involved two new types of force previously unknown to physics. An implication that Heim had not really pursued was that a suitably equipped vessel could exploit these new realms of existence to travel between points without physically traversing the dimensions of ordinary space in between — analogous in a superficial way to air travel enabling journeys from one point to another at speeds much higher than anything attainable on the ground. When detailed studies produced the startling revelation that the transit times implied worked out at somewhere in the order of a few hours from Earth to Mars, and perhaps a couple of months for distances measured in tens of light-years, experimental work began in earnest, and practical demonstrations took place within a decade. The long-speculated interstellar “hyperdrive” had arrived.

  Exploration of other star systems and discoveries of new worlds followed with astonishing rapidity. Those who for many years had thought and written about humanity one day expanding across the solar system and beyond had envisioned it as beginning an epoch of unparalleled scientific advancement and adventure. However, such was the nature of the powers who controlled these enterprises that the prime motivation behind the missions sent to open up the new frontier was the insatiable demand of the predatory beast that the global economic system had become for more resources to exploit and new outlets to “develop” for the further generation of profit.

  A major player in the race to acquire assets and create fresh markets — either in the form of suitably advanced and susceptible native populations, where such opportunities presented themselves, or by promoting Terran emigration and colonization — was Interworld Restructuring Consolidated, with headquarters functions distributed across offices in China, Japan, Europe, the Central Arabic Federation, and North America. Alien native cultures, however, were not always immediately appreciative of the benefits that would flow from such interference in their affairs, and one of the attractions for Terrans who chose to emigrate tended to be the prospect of being left alone and enjoying greater independence. It was therefore regrettable but unavoidable that to recoup a reasonable return on the expenditure and effort that had been put into a venture, the corporations that had been entrusted with protecting their investors’ interests sometimes found it necessary to apply forcible measures when irrational opposition was encountered, or threats to order and security put the maintaining of sound policy at risk. Hence it followed that Interworld Restructuring was also a major contractor for the services of Milicorp.

  Rath Borland was a small, sinewy man with a shock of black hair and gnarled features that gave the impression of having accumulated over greater than his actual number of years, which were somewhere in the late forties. A woman on the marketing executive staff had once confided to Callen that he put her in mind of a “simian walnut,” which seemed to fit well. Like many small men, Borland overcompensated by being generally more contentious than circumstances required, and displaying an insistence on being assertive, even when it didn’t matter. This was especially true when dealing with men like Callen, who were bigger physically and capable of projecting a certain social charisma when it suited their ends.

  As far as Callen was concerned, this didn’t affect their working relationship one way or another. Despite his four years of deputizing for Borland, the feelings between them had never acquired a measure that went beyond the purely professional. Earlier phases of Callen’s career had involved work in intelligence and industrial espionage that had left him with few delusions about the world of corporate realities that lay behind the public imagery. As a professional, he acknowledged Borland’s capacity for objective analysis and ability to exercise intellectual detachment in the pursuit of the efficiency that the stockholders expected. Both of them had passed on the order for the execution of the prisoners taken at Tiwa Jaku with the same impartiality. Should the corporation’s objectives ever so require it, Callen could have arranged for Borland’s assassination, with equal dispassion.

  They met in Borland’s office suite on the penthouse level of the Milicorp headquarters skyscraper dominating the eastern fringes of the sprawl extending from San Jose. Borland stood by the picture window that formed one wall of the office area, looking out over sparsely built hillsides toward the Alum Rock launch complex a few miles away — although Heim drives were not generally used for surface-to-orbit shuttling, more efficient, sustained-thrust nuclear engines and ground-based power lasers had made obsolete the blast zones and remote siting associated with the earlier chemically propelled behemoths. Callen listened from a chair turned away from the conference table on the far side of the room from Borland’s desk, his elbows spread easily, one foot crossed over the opposite knee. The decor was angularly geometric, with the furnishings all of black leather and chrome. Visitors sometimes commented that the atmosphere it imparted seemed cold and harsh. Borland said it symbolized Milicorp’s commitment to detachment and efficiency.

  “When probes sent back the first surveys and profile reports, the people at Interworld thought they had an ideal situation.”

  Borland was referring to a recently discovered planet that had been named Cyrene, orbiting a Sun-like star called Ra Alpha, which with a smaller, redder companion known as Ra Beta constituted a binary system in the constellation of Canis Minor. Its abundant life
included a humanoid race — surprising to some but, as it turned out, not uncommon — that in what appeared to be the most progressive region had produced a culture roughly comparable to that of Europe in the eighteenth century. This made it ripe for an introduction to the benefits of more advanced methods, along with innovative ways of extracting from the populace the wherewithal to pay for them.

  Borland went on, “So they organized a follow-up mission that included an ambassador and a diplomatic staff in addition to all the usual scientists, mapmakers, et cetera. That was about eight months ago now. The trip out took close to two months. As far as anyone can tell, they seem to have arrived in good shape. But before they’d been there for another two, the whole operation was coming apart.”

  Callen’s brow creased. “Coming apart?” he repeated. “How do you mean?”

  Borland turned from the window and made a throwing-away gesture. “Disintegrating. The reports back started getting fewer and fewer, and what did come through wasn’t making any sense. People started saying that the mission objectives were all wrong or didn’t matter, and talking about needing time to ‘rethink values’ — whatever that’s supposed to be about. I’m talking about experienced Interworld task-group directors and project managers, not a few academics with some cuckoo-land theory of sociology who went along for the ride. Then they started disappearing — first the scientists; pretty soon it was everybody. Before long it didn’t seem there were enough left in the base to run the communications properly. As I said, it was all coming apart.”

  Callen frowned while Borland waited for a reaction. There had been a few cases of disaffected groups taking off to fend for themselves in uninhabited wilderness worlds, and one instance that he knew of where a religious sect who helped set up a colony among a population of primitive tribes had decided to go native and departed from the Terran settlement to spread their word. So long as the numbers were small and not sufficient to affect the main enterprise to any significant degree, the normal policy was to let them go. With scant resources at their disposal, the Terran authorities took the attitude that if there was discontent wanting to express itself and potentially disruptive energy that needed dissipating, everyone would be better off if they did so elsewhere. In any case, anything that helped spread Terrans and their ways farther abroad could only be good for business in the long run. But he had never heard of anything on this kind of scale, affecting virtually the entire mission.