The Abyss of Time

Chapter Sixty Two

     It was a year later.

     Miller looked up at the dome that now covered the colony. The individual triangles of crystal of which it was composed were almost too small to see, but they held in a breathable atmosphere that allowed the residents to walk around a kilometre-wide area without oxygen masks. Through it, the branches of the Atlas trees, twenty kilometres tall and almost as broad, still hid the sky from view, but that didn't bother the colony's new Administrator. There would have been nothing to see but storm clouds anyway. The storm that had blanketed the whole planet for untold aeons and would continue to do so until the steadily warming sun finally drove away the last trace of the planet's atmosphere a few million years from now.

     "This place is really starting to look like something," said Jack, now walking quite normally and naturally on his prosthetic leg. He was looking at the accommodation blocks, made of local rock quarried from beneath the colony. By taking the rock from there, it also opened up artificial caverns for the colony's industries. All the processing and manufacturing that any city depended on would one day take place underground, leaving the surface to be a garden that would be decorated with plants from the huma era, a billion years in the past. As soon as they had the ability to print seeds and embryos from the data crystals they'd brought down from the Lucina.

     Miller nodded. He thought the place still looked like an urban slum. The buildings were plain and blocky and the ground between them was bare except where it was piled up in heaps of loose earth. Children dressed only in their underclothes were shouting at each other as they kicked a football across the uneven ground. Their perspiration, gleaming in the light of the sun-globes that hung from the dome, glued their hair to their foreheads and made dust stick to their golden skins in muddy streaks. Miller was pleased to see them enjoying themselves, safe in the peace that now reigned over the small community, but it somehow made the colony look even more makeshift and ranshackle, as if it were a refugee camp for the survivors of a natural disaster.

     The artists' impressions the architects had shown him looked good, though. Five years, they told him. Five years before the fantasy they displayed on monitor screens could be turned into reality. "It's getting there," he replied therefore. "Rome wasn't built in a day, though."

     "True," his son agreed. "But it's being built. Kathleen really knows what she's doing."

     "Well, it was what she originally signed on to do," said Miller. "I think she's a lot happier doing that than trying to run the whole place. She was never a good choice for that. She only did it because there was nobody else."

     "So she's okay with the idea of answering to you?"

     "I think she's happy to have any job at all. I think she was expecting to be thrown into a prison cell after we killed the cyborgs. She realised we were right the moment the shock of the attack had worn off, but by then it was too late. We've sort of agreed not to talk about it. If someone else brings it up we just change the subject as quickly as possible."

     "I saw Amanda the other day," said Jack. "She seems happy as well. They all seem happy."

     Miller nodded. The entire ruling council had resigned upon the return of Miller's attack squad from the cyborg camp, triumph mingled with grief for the men they'd lost. The council members were carrying a massive burden of guilt, knowing that the attack force would have suffered far fewer casualties, maybe none at all, if they'd let the entire army go. They had offered to let Miller appoint a new ruling council, with himself as their leader, and Miller had replied by appointing all the former Councillors back to their old roles. Only Kathleen was demoted, but Miller had made her the Councillor responsible for overseeing the further growth of the colony. She had accepted the role with gratitude and Miller was well pleased with her work so far.