Gardens of the Sun Read Free

tone light and friendly, ‘why you sent Berry to Dione?’
    ‘Oh, the ship’s no place for the boy,’ Arvam said. ‘It’s too crowded, and there’s nothing for him to do except get into trouble. Where I sent him, it’s being made over into my headquarters. It’s been thoroughly checked out, and it’s quite safe. A big garden with lawns and fields, trees and lakes. Just the kind of place for a healthy, active boy, yes?’
    ‘I’d like to see it. Your people might have missed something.’
    ‘I’ll tell you all about it after dinner tonight. The Pacific Community liaison secretary is paying a visit and for some reason he is eager to meet you. You can tell him about your gardens, and perhaps he’ll let slip some useful information about the situation on Iapetus.’
    ‘This is why you interrupted my research? To make small talk with a PacCom official?’
    ‘That’s one reason. I also have a new project for you,’ Arvam said. ‘A very important project. Come with me.’
    Sri and a comet-tail of aides followed the general to the medical bay and a curtained alcove at the far end where a young man lay in a slanted bed. A white sheet was tucked tight as a drumhead across his legs and waist; the black band of a heart-lung machine was clamped across his chest. His head was shaven and bandaged and his eyelids were taped shut, there were tubes in his nose, and a dripline attached to his arm looped up to a sac of liquid hung from the bulkhead beside him. The sac quiveringly pulsed at intervals, like a sluggish and fretful jellyfish.
    Arvam told Sri that the young man was Lieutenant Cash Baker, singleship pilot and war hero. ‘He was wounded in combat. Brain damage. I want you to fix it.’
    ‘I’m flattered, of course. But what can I do that your excellent and highly experienced medical staff can’t?’
    ‘You rewired his nervous system during the J-2 test programme. Also, it’s your fault he died.’
    After a heartbeat’s hesitation, Sri understood what the general meant. ‘He was flying the singleship that attacked Avernus’s tug.’
    ‘Yes, he was. But he may be useful to me, so you will have to find it in yourself to forgive him.’
     
    Lieutenant Cash Baker had piloted one of the singleships sent to intercept and destroy a chunk of ice flung at the Pacific Community’s temporary base on Phoebe, at the beginning of the war. His ship had been damaged by the ice’s automatic defence system, but it had managed to partially repair itself and as he’d fallen back towards Saturn he’d targeted an Outer tug that had escaped from Dione. The tug had been carrying Avernus, and Sri Hong-Owen had been in hot pursuit. When Cash Baker had ignored a direct order to call off his attack, it had been necessary to activate a suicide program buried in his singleship’s control system. In the aftermath, the singleship had plummeted through the plane of the ring system, a speck of basalt travelling faster than any bullet had pierced its hull and shattered into dozens of fragments, and one of those fragments had shot through the lifesystem and drilled Cash Baker’s visor and skull and brain. The lifesystem had put him in hibernation and saved his life, his singleship had been located and retrieved, and now General Arvam Peixoto wanted Sri to help the medical team tasked with repairing his brain damage.
    ‘We need heroes who can drum up support back home by telling stirring stories of extraordinary acts of bravery. This man is an excellent candidate.’
    ‘He is a fool who very nearly murdered Avernus.’
    ‘I’ll deal with his story, Professor Doctor. Your job is to fix him up. I don’t care if he can’t move from the neck down, but he has to be able to speak in full sentences without drooling. Think you can do that?’
    The chief surgeon told Sri that the fragment of basalt had struck the pilot just above his left eye, burning a path through his frontal cortex and corpus callosum and clipping the lower edge of the