Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley

working on a shuttle that had passed too close to an EMP mine. Its AI and control systems were stone-cold dead, but the rest of it, apart from some kind of fast-growing vacuum organism that coated much of the exterior shell of the fusion motor, was undamaged. The crew had cleared corpses from its lifesystem and unloaded cargo from its hold and had been stripping back the vacuum organism’s thick black crust when they’d found a bare patch on the skin of one of the insulated tanks that had supplied reaction mass to the attitude motors. In the centre of the patch was a circular cut-out, fixed in place by a thick seam of glue on the inside of the tank. When the crew removed it, they discovered that the tank had been drained. In a plastic bubble nestling between two of the anti-slosh vanes and filled with foamed aerogel at a pressure of 100 millibars a little girl slept inside a pressure suit.
    Her body temperature matched the suit’s internal temperature, 16° C; her pulse and respiration signs were slow but steady. A quick ultrasonic scan showed that her blood was circulating through a cascade filter connected to the femoral artery of her left leg. There was also a small machine attached to the base of her skull, and a line in the vein of her left arm that went through a port in her pressure suit’s lifepack and was coupled to a lash-up of tubing, pumps and bags of clear and cloudy liquids - a continuous culture of dole yeast growing in a cannibalised foodmaker powered by a trickle charge from a fuel cell. And the fuel cell was connected by superconducting thread to the vacuum organism, which absorbed sunlight and generated a small amount of electrical energy.
    The aide told Loc that the girl had been waking from deep hibernation when the crew had found her.
    ‘The revival process seems to have been triggered by a sensor that reacted to the change in the shuttle’s delta vee when it was taken out of its orbit. Someone on the shuttle must have put her to sleep, hoping that she would be rescued.’
    ‘I better come up there right away,’ Loc said. ‘Tell Barrett to leave her as she is. Don’t wake her. Outer children are smart and resourceful. As dangerous as their parents.’
    Excitement and self-interest were burning away his alcoholic fug. He was wondering why the little girl had been hidden away in the drop tank. If someone had put her into hibernation, hoping that she would be rescued, why not leave her in plain sight?
    ‘She’s no longer here,’ the aide said. ‘Colonel Barrett decided that he didn’t have the facilities to deal with her, and sent her down to the hospital in Paris. I’m sorry, Mr Ifrahim, but he didn’t bother to tell me. I didn’t find out until after the crew filed their report.’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘She went down in a gig three hours ago. As I said, I didn’t find out about this until the crew—’
    ‘Debrief them. Talk to them one by one and get every detail of what they found. And document the continuous culture and her pressure suit. Document everything.’ Loc was about to ring off when he had a thought and said, ‘Do you have a photo of her?’
    ‘Barrett didn’t—’
    ‘The crews’ pressure suits are rigged with surveillance cameras. Check the files, find a good shot of her face, send it straight to me. Get on it now,’ Loc said, and took off his spex and signalled to one of the waiters and ordered a double espresso.
    Yota asked if there was anything he could do.
    ‘You can order transport. I need to get to the other end of the city right away,’ Loc said, and called the hospital.
     
    The city’s main hospital, badly damaged by fire during the war, had not yet been repaired, so its medical services had been relocated to a converted warehouse at the eastern end of the city’s tent, close to the freight yards. The place was in uproar when Loc and Yota arrived. After Loc’s call, the hospital’s supervisor had checked the pod where the little girl was being