Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  orbitbooks.net

  orbitshortfiction.com

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Dendrocopos LTD

  Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover images by Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Barbara Bella

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10104

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  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Gollancz and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2018.

  First Trade Paperback Edition: January 2018

  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

  The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957208

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-55567-8 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-55566-1 (ebook)

  E3-20171207-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Meet the Author

  Also by Alastair Reynolds

  Praise for Alastair Reynolds’s Books

  Orbit Newsletter

  From a distance it almost looked natural.

  A planet with a ring.

  A world of ochre and mustard clouds, with nothing of the surface visible. A poisonous place, peevishly inimical to human habitation. One shrivelled moon. Ten billion such worlds clotted the galaxy: useless to all but the most desperate of species and civilisations.

  The conjunction of planet and rings was not, in itself, worthy of note. It was the natural business of things, where gravity had its way with rubble and ice. Granted, it was more usual to find rings around gas giants rather than a small, rocky planet like this one. But even the tiniest of worlds might lay temporary claim to a ring system, if a moon or asteroid fell too deeply into their gravity well. Gravitational dynamics being what they were, though, such a ring system would not endure more than a few million years.

  This ring system was much younger even than that.

  Young because it was the work of people, not celestial mechanics.

  They had come here in vast starships, crossing the gulf of light years from Earth. Down in the permanent ochre murk of Yellowstone’s toxic atmosphere they had founded Chasm City, the greatest urban settlement in human history. And in a girdle around Yellowstone, an adornment to the metropolis below, they had set into orbit ten thousand artificial worlds, each an exquisite fabulation of rock and metal and glass, each with its own name and customs, each bountiful with air and water and a teeming cargo of people. They called this circling river of worlds the Glitter Band, and at the peak of its glory it was home to one hundred million living souls.

  The worlds coexisted in peace, for the most part. The people were as grudgingly content as the truly free will ever be. Wealth and power were in almost limitless abundance. Matter and energy danced to human whims. Even death itself was in slow, stubborn retreat. There was no militia, no standing army. Weapons were rarely glimpsed, rarely spoken of. Crimes were exotic, Olympian achievements—crimes of passion even more so. Few social tensions arose because each world was allowed to choose its own destiny, its own political and administrative path. Citizens could move between worlds as they wished, selecting the environment that best met their desires. The only binding law was the iron rule of universal suffrage. Flawless, incorruptible machinery ensured each citizen had their say, not just from year to year, but from day to day, hour to hour. Citizens were polled on every conceivable matter. The process of participation became as habitual as breathing. It was a dream of democracy. But unlike most dreams, it worked.

  Or at least, most of the time.

  Occasionally there was a fault in the polling systems, or a tiny loophole that some unscrupulous faction tried to exploit. This became a minor but nagging problem. And so the worlds of the Glitter Band agreed to create a monitoring taskforce, a small, independent body of trusted officials who would be free of ties to any one world, who would not themselves have the vote, but who would operate solely to keep the machinery of mass participation running smoothly, inviolably.

  They were called prefects.

  They were assigned a tiny, pumpkin-faced world of their own, scarcely more than a hollowed-out boulder, and it was named Panoply. So small was the scale of the problem that at first it was believed that fewer than a hundred prefects would be needed. Eventually, and after some resistance, their numbers were permitted to rise to just below a thousand. They were given vehicles, monitoring instruments, some limited forms of enforcement.

  One prefect for every ten worlds. One prefect for every hundred thousand citizens. It did not seem sufficient. But it was, and for decades the prefects went about their work almost without attention. They were never liked, never welcomed, but they were very rarely required to use the powers at their disposal. When they did, it was always as a last resort.

  But then the time had come when the prefects had to do something terrible. To save the Glitter Band, it had been necessary to kill part of it.

  1

  Late that evening, high in the Shell House, just before drowsiness snatched him to unconsciousness, he stirred from his bed and moved to the window. Fingers of orange and russet light played through the shutters, accompanied by a distant crackling and hissing that rose and fell in tide-like waves.

  Cautiously, struck by some faint sense of impropriety, he opened the shutters on the glassless window and took a breath. The evening air flooded his lungs, sooty with combustion products. He coughed, a sudden human sound that seemed louder than it had any right to be, and then stifled any further coughing with his hand.

  Across the grounds, far from the Shell House—but still within the family dome, on the edge of Chasm City—something was on fire.

  He watched it, mesmerised and troubled. There was a glow, concentrated in a small area and hemmed in by a darker mass of trees and vegetation that obscured the heart of the fire. Above the conflagration the dome panels reflected the glow in dusky variations of the same orange tones he had seen through the shutter.

&nbs
p; If there was a fire in the grounds … but, no, he thought. There was no danger of such a thing taking hold and spreading. Automatic sprinkler systems would cut in long before the flames posed any risk to the Shell House itself. And besides, his father would have programmed Lurcher to detect fire and take immediate action to extinguish it.

  The only curious thing was that the robot had not already done so.

  Then he caught a movement above the tree-line, silhouetted against the glow: a metallic arm sweeping into view before returning to concealment. Puzzled, certain of what he had seen, but not understanding its significance, he watched and watched—while slowly drawing the shutters, until he peered out through a single furtive slit.

  Presently the glow grew less intense. The crackles and hisses ebbed to silence. The smells faded, as the air in the dome was subjected to its usual circulation and filtering process.

  Still he observed, certain the evening’s mystery was not over.

  He did not have long to wait. Lurcher emerged from the dense cover of the inner part of the gardens. The robot strolled nonchalantly, silver legs scissoring, two of its four silver arms swinging. In the other pair it carried buckets of tools, as it often did when attending to its gardening chores. From the domed head at the top of its tall, slender body, a single eye stared ahead with unblinking focus.

  His instinct was to retreat further back into his darkened room. But if the robot detected that its nocturnal activities were being witnessed, it gave no indication.

  What was left of the glow guttered out. A red reflection lingered on the dome, fading until only his imagination insisted there was still a trace of it.

  The fire was out. The thing—whatever it was that had been set alight, and allowed to burn—had been consumed.

  He closed the shutters fully and returned to bed. Under the sheets he coughed the last traces of smoke from his lungs. It was not long before the drowsiness took its hold of him, properly this time—vengefully, almost—but in the last moments of clear consciousness a distinct certainty formed in his mind. A white tree had stood where the fire had been.

  A dead white tree, hollow to the core, in which he had once liked to play.

  Thalia Ng would have preferred not to have an audience while she worked. That was not the way it was happening, though. A small party of civic functionaries was in attendance, watching in a loose semicircle while she completed the routine upgrade that was her day’s business in the Shiga-Mintz Spindle.

  “And … we’re done,” she said, as the core began to sink back down into its pit, status symbols confirming the upgrade had proceeded without difficulty.

  “You’ll be on your way now, then,” said the citizens’ designated spokesperson, a functionary named Mander.

  The core was nearly back where it belonged. She eyed it for a few more moments before turning to look at the thin-faced man. “Someone might think you wanted to see the back of me, Citizen Mander.”

  “It’s not that,” Mander said, his Adam’s apple moving hard.

  The polling core sank fully into the floor. An iris whisked shut to seal it from casual tampering.

  “Then what?”

  “I’ll say it if Mander won’t,” said a tall woman standing just behind Mander. “We don’t have pretend you’re welcome here, Prefect. Of course you can visit and do as you please while you’re here.” She brushed a hand through long auburn hair, pushing it away from a shrewish face. “But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. Not after what happened. Not now that we know.”

  “Know what, exactly?”

  “What you’re capable of,” said another man, emboldened by the woman’s outburst. “What you’ll do, when it suits you.”

  “You mean,” Thalia said mildly, “the lengths we’ll go to to protect your interests?”

  “It was butchery,” said the woman.

  “It was surgery,” Thalia corrected, keeping her voice level, uninflected, unintimidated.

  “It’s no good arguing with them,” someone muttered. “They’ve got a justification for everything. They could murder us all and still say it was in the shining name of democracy.”

  It was just a spasm, but Thalia felt her fingers twitch for the handle of her whiphound, still holstered on her belt.

  “If you don’t like democracy,” Thalia said, “then you’re in the wrong solar system.”

  “As if we have a choice,” sneered the woman.

  “There’s always a choice,” a red-faced man said. “They’d just rather none of us were aware of it. But maybe it’s time to consider the unthinkable. Maybe it’s been time ever since they showed their true colours. We all know what’s possible, if enough of us take a stand. Panoply won’t intervene now—they’re too afraid.”

  “Be grateful you’ll never need our intervention,” Thalia said. “But if you did, you’d still have it. You don’t have to like us to count on us.”

  It was an old line, one she had picked up from Dreyfus.

  Something buzzed in her ear. She pressed a finger against her earpiece, squeezing it.

  “Ng.”

  “It’s Sparver,” she heard. “Thalia, drop whatever you’re doing. Even if the core’s still exposed, leave it—we’ll secure it remotely. Are there citizens with you?”

  She eyed the civic functionaries, feeling the full needling pressure of their suspicion and distrust.

  “Yes, and they’ve been most hospitable. What’s the—” She was about to say “problem” but prefects never spoke of problems, at least not in public. “What’s required of me, Prefect Bancal?”

  “There’s a situation inside the habitat. I’m passing coordinates to your whiphound. It’ll proceed ahead of you and secure the area.”

  It was probably some kind of civic disturbance, a citizen mob or something the local constables were not equipped to handle.

  “I’ll be right behind it.”

  “Not immediately. Return to your ship. There’s a containment vessel in the aft stowage compartment. Retrieve it, break out a second whiphound, and follow it to the first.”

  Her hand moved back to the whiphound. Nothing about this was part of the plan for visiting Shiga-Mintz. It was an in-and-out, all perfectly routine. Nothing about second whiphounds or cases in stowage compartments.

  “Prefect Bancal …”

  “Get on it, Thal. When I say every second counts, I mean it.”

  She drew the whiphound’s handle from her holster. In its stowed form the whiphound—an autonomous robot whip with enforcement, detainment and evidence-acquisition capabilities—was a black, grip-coated rod about the size and thickness of a truncheon, inset with a battery of twist controls at one end. On sensing its removal from the holster, the whiphound extended its roving filament, pushing out a thin silver tentacle until it made contact with the ground. The tentacle stiffened along its length and formed a snakelike traction coil at the point where it met the floor. A single bright red eye glared from the other end of the handle.

  The whiphound had gone from being an inert tool on her belt to a thing that was alive, purposeful and more than a little intimidating.

  “You know what to do,” she said. “Go.”

  The whiphound nodded its handle and slinked away, picking up speed with a series of sinuous whipping motions. It made a dry whisking sound as it skated across the floor and the functionaries jerked back to allow it passage. It vanished through the doorway, already moving faster than a person could run.

  “What’s going on?” asked Mander, as if he had every right to an explanation.

  She ignored him, still pressing a finger to her earpiece.

  “Whiphound deployed, Prefect Bancal. I’m on my way back to the cutter.”

  “Quick as you can, Thal.”

  She took him at his word, leaving the polling core and the gawping, mystified functionaries behind, breaking into a jog and then a run. She sprinted up a ramp, through a short warren of corridors, into the bright sunlight of civic gardens, past a hissing line of o
rnamental fountains, up an escalator to a forested plaza, onto a high-speed tram to the dock.

  She stood on the tram, one hand on the ceiling hoop, as it accelerated away from the stop. It had been three, maybe four minutes since Sparver had first contacted her. There were citizens on the tram, watching her with puzzled, worried expressions.

  “It’s all right,” she said, pausing to catch her breath. “This is a local emergency, nothing to be concerned about.”

  Panoply must have been pulling strings to override local traffic patterns because the tram made a non-stop sprint for the docking complex. Thalia boarded her cutter—the smallest class of Panoply spacecraft, and the only type she was authorised to operate single-handedly—while her hand kept reaching for the whiphound. It felt wrong to be back in the cutter without her weapon. But she opened the aft hatch, craned down to look inside, and found a silver object she didn’t recognise.

  It was a stubby cylinder, about the size of a space helmet, and there was a handle on top of it.

  “The silver thing, Sparver, I’m presuming?”

  “Take it. Your backup whiphound knows where to go.”

  She hoisted the cylinder, then went to the foil-sealed cavity that held the second whiphound. She broke the seal, extracted the whiphound, hefted the heavy black handle for a few moments and then let it deploy.

  “Want to tell me what this is all about?”

  “Follow the whiphound. Your first unit is already on-site and securing the theatre.”

  She left the cutter and headed back into the public spaces of Shiga-Mintz, the cylinder dangling from her left hand. It was awkward more than heavy, as if it was mostly hollow. The second whiphound slithered ahead of her, showing the way, glancing back with a puppy-like impatience. In a minute she was back on the tram, retracing at least part of her route, the whiphound slinking up and down the tram’s interior, its eye sweeping menacingly.

  The tram was nearly empty this time, with only a handful of passengers at the far end of the compartment.

  “What do you mean, theatre?” Thalia asked, keeping her voice low.

  “You’ll find a citizen,” Sparver said. “They’re dying. You’re going to operate on them.”