The Long War

‘No, no. The fallout from the atomic mining. On we go . . . Now we will speed up. You understand these ships are an experimental sort, developed by our own engineering companies in conjunction with the Black Corporation. One purpose of this exploration is to test the new technologies.’

The passing of the worlds accelerated until, as Jacques could tell from his own pulse, the realities were washing past at the rate of roughly one a second, blink, blink, blink, then faster still. Most of the worlds were unremarkable, blankets of green under sunshine or cloud. But in some glaciated worlds the sunlight glared from ice sheets, safely far beneath the prows of the twains.

They were shown to a kind of lounge area. A steward circulated with food, soft drinks, China tea, and they sat, chatting while whole worlds flapped by, unremarked. Jacques suspected Roberta would rather have been alone, studying, reading, making her own observations. But she sat politely enough, if mostly silently.

After an hour or so the airship paused, the light subtly different. When Jacques looked up he saw butterflies, a tremendous swarm of them, all around the ship, battering silently at the windows of the observation deck. Most were small, plain, but some were more colourful, and some had wings the size of saucers. The sunlight shone bright through their pale substance.

Chen laughed at their reaction. ‘Butterfly world. What the westerners call a Joker. Of course an ecology needs more components than just butterflies. Nevertheless, here in this part of China, butterflies are all that come to greet us. We have no idea how this has come about, what is different here. Yet here we are. You see, Roberta Golding, I told you we would be counting butterflies! What do you think?’

At length Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai said, ‘It would certainly be hard to demonstrate chaos theory here.’

They were all silent as they worked that out. Then Jacques was the first to laugh.

Roberta, however, merely looked puzzled.

18

T

HE CREW OF the Benjamin Franklin did take seriously their mandate to project the authority of the US Datum government across the Long Earth. It wasn’t all about saving kittens stuck up trees, as Maggie told her crew.

Which was why the twain made an unannounced stop at a town called Reboot, Earth West 101,754, in a stepwise New York State.

A small group led by Executive Officer Nathan Boss – a rare jaunt for him away from his desk – were landed from the twain in a kind of clearing of trampled-down mud, beside a spidery trail that ran up from the coast of the local copy of the Atlantic. Nathan had seen the layout for himself clearly from the air, aboard the Franklin. The town itself was out of sight but a short walk away, cut into the green of the crowding forest: neat little fields and houses with smoke rising up, all connected by wide dirt tracks.

This was one of the first of what Captain Kauffman was calling their ‘hearts and minds’ assignments. They would turn up unannounced at a community on some world like this, in order to make themselves and their mission known, and, well, to gently remind these colonial Americans that they were still Americans . . . This early in the mission they were still finding their way. So was Nathan Boss, his first time in charge of a ground team.

And in this case the logistics were surprisingly complicated. This town and its stepwise neighbours were linked in a kind of extended Long Earth ‘county’. So the Franklin was hopping between the worlds, visiting one community after another, dropping equipment and setting down groups of sailors and marines at each of those neighbours.

There were lots of ways such an operation could go wrong, as Nathan was all too well aware.

Add to that the fact that the worlds of the Long Earth were themselves somewhat bewildering, for the twain’s mostly Datum-born crew. As the Navy guys waited for the marines to follow them off the Franklin, reflexively they spread out to form a perimeter, though there was no visible threat, here in Earth West 101,754. They looked around, evidently kind of baffled. Most of them were from urban backgrounds. Well, there was no urban background here. Nothing but the muddy clearing. Nobody around but a deer (well, Nathan thought it was a deer) that peered at them from out of a clump of forest. Nothing to read but a sign, home-made, hand-lettered:

WELCOME TO REBOOT

FOUNDED 2026, A.D.

POP. 1465

Ensign Toby Fox, the IT nerd type from engineering who had been tasked with making a census of the Long Earth, dutifully wrote down the population number.

There was no sign of sun under a clouded-over sky, but the warmth was intense for an early May day, and Nathan was immediately sweating in his combat fatigues, with his pack on his back.

It was when Lieutenant Sam Allen came down from the twain, the last to land, and the Benjamin Franklin popped away stepwise with a soft implosion of air, that the real trouble started.