Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 118

by Neil Clarke

  He visibly tries to calm himself.

  “You shouldn’t have come here. You should never have come here.”

  She stares at him. She tries not to appear hurt, but suspects she does. “I came to bring you back.”

  “And how do you expect to do that, eh?” he says venomously.

  “I . . . ”

  “Got another set of wings, have you?”

  “No, but—” How does he know about that?

  “Got a fold-away flier in that belt of yours?”

  “Shut up!”

  His eyes don’t even register she’s screamed at him. He just stares at her.

  The humiliation physically hurts. She feels sick. What is she doing? She hadn’t thought; she’d just acted. Now it feels like the most stupid thing could have possibly done.

  “Rokri, look. I . . . ” she gulps and takes a breath. “I don’t understand. I deciphered your message. I thought . . . I thought it meant you wanted me to come here. I thought you needed help, that you were in trouble. Nobody else would come, nobody!”

  At this, Rokri just sneers.

  “Trouble?” he spits. “We’re in a shitstorm of it now, sis.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He looks incredulous. “Sephine. I didn’t send any message.”

  “You need to see something.”

  Rokri has pulled up a map on the terminal screen: a wireframe image of the Leviathan. At his command the view withdraws and sweeps down, as if looking through a camera attached to the Leviathan’s base.

  They are passing over a sprawling delta, the first body of water Sephine has seen in years. Text flashes in the corner of the screen: SALINITY 44%.

  The Leviathan can analyze the terrain’s chemical makeup, even from this height.

  “Salt lakes,” Rokri says vaguely. “We’ll be there soon.”

  “Where?”

  “Convergence.” He kills the screen. “Let’s go. And bring your guns—they know you’re here now.”

  He leads her out of the room into a corridor. The air is colder here. The corridor is lit by harsh strip-bulbs running along the corners of the ceiling. The walls are dotted with portholes, but the view beyond them is black. Sephine still doesn’t know where she is except that she is under the surface, inside the Leviathan.

  She wonders what’s beyond the windows.

  The next few minutes are a monotonous slideshow, corridor after corridor. After a time they come to an elevator. Rokri plucks a handheld terminal from his belt and flicks his pistol off the safety. He puts a finger to his lips and turns the terminal’s screen towards her.

  A map on the screen shows that they are below the edge-wall. The elevator shaft ends just feet from it, but on what side of the Leviathan Sephine can’t tell.

  They enter. The door snicks shut.

  While they ride the elevator, Rokri turns to her.

  “You’ve been lied to, Sephine,” he whispers. “We all have.

  “I’ve got to know this planet. What it is. I know how the construct works—it stays a mile off the ground, no matter what. In a few months it’ll pass over a mountain range—still stays up a whole mile. You can’t breathe outside. This all doesn’t mean anything particularly, except the Fractured have learned to manipulate gravity, probably stolen Leseum technology.” He shrugs. “But that’s what the whole war is about, really. Technology. They crave it. Covet it.

  “The engine’s in the base of the construct. I’ve seen it. It repels the surface, inverts gravity somehow. Getting too close isn’t . . . healthy.” He bows his head and shows her his scalp. There are rough bald patches over his head revealing sore-looking skin underneath, like blisters or burn scars.

  The elevator opens. Daylight explodes around them. The sky is a deep azure, cloudless. The sun steeps the surface with light, but the few towers Sephine can see are as black as they were at night. The other structures and machines are still unmoving and abandoned.

  The edge-wall is a little way off.

  Rokri takes her hand.

  “A few months ago I managed to break through the construct’s comms hardware. We thought Leseum had forgotten about us, but they haven’t. The constructs absorb the messages like sponges. They share it around with each other. I have a suspicion they’re laughing at us.” He takes on a bitter expression.

  Constructs?

  “They’re trying, Sephine. Leseum have been trying to contact us, but they haven’t been able to. I think they presume us dead—the last unique message came three years after the crash, but I think they still hope. Automated signals come every now and then.

  “When the Vierendelen crashed, its central AI tried to save itself by occupying a stasis bubble in Pod Country. The ship was taken down by a single needlehead to the fuel injectors in the bow. Our mother, her crew—all dead, instantly.

  “But it wasn’t just a needlehead.”

  They’ve reached the edge-wall. Rokri takes her shoulders and faces her, pushing her back against the wall. A sharp wind speaks up.

  “It was a digital payload. A copy of a consciousness: the Fractured’s consciousness. The one thing we’ve always known about the Fractured is that they’re a hive mind. The swarm that attacked you, the constructs. The flagships heading up their fleets, down to the fleet’s individuals themselves. There’s no centralized intelligence maintaining it, it’s just a singular consciousness. A colony.”

  “So . . . what? What does all this mean?”

  “The Vierendelen was destroyed, Sephine. Its AI substrates were replaced by the Fractured’s. By the time the ship hit the surface, it was already one of them.”

  Realization now—a glimmer of it. But disbelief, too.

  “The last time we talked to Del, the real Vierendelen, was when we were kids. Kids on a ship caught up in a war we had no part in.”

  “No,” she says quietly.

  “We were lied to. The whole time. We weren’t talking with the ship. We were talking to them.”

  And he turns her around, and when she peers over the wall she feels like she might vomit. Because all around them, floating high above the delta of salt lakes and distant canyons, even in the far distance where mountains ruffle the horizon, are others. Other Leviathans. Moving lazily above the surface, casting their perfect shadows upon imperfect terrain.

  Convergence.

  The sky darkens suddenly, and Sephine looks up, gaping at the sky; another is passing over them, just as massive as the Leviathan upon which they stand. She feels very, very dizzy.

  “I didn’t send any message, Sephine. It was the Fractured. You were tricked. We were tricked, into coming up here.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she says, her voice catching in her throat. “I won’t believe it. Your message . . . I deciphered it. With a Spite algorithm, your algorithm.”

  “Of course you did. And if you hadn’t have worked it out in time, they would have given you a nudge in the right direction.”

  And they did. She played Spite the day she deciphered the message. It had waited. Waited for its next pass over New Leseum, when it was close enough. When it could coax her into going up.

  “Tell me, Sephine. How could a Leseum-built, Golem-class AI like the Vierendelen not decipher a simple Spite algorithm? Come to that, why don’t you think the ship ever tried to repair itself? Just sitting there, wrecked, for all that time without a single attempt to rectify its situation? Just letting us get on, building our little city, our new home?

  “Biding its time, Sephine. Waiting. Goading us, me and you, to come up here and find out the truth about their prison planet. That’s what this is. A prison.”

  “But why us?” she says, her voice shaking. “Why not just kill us all? Why are we special?”

  He actually smiles. “Come on, sis. You know exactly why. The Fractured were looking for something on our ship. They cornered the Vierendelen in the gravity well of this planet and brought it down to find it. And you know what they were looking for.”

  An
d suddenly she does.

  “Now they’ve found it.” Rokri looks out over the swirling delta, at the dozen lazy Leviathans spotting the salt lakes with their shadows.

  Then comes a tingle in Sephine’s head. That inverted goose bumps feeling again, familiar, but now completely alien. And the next voice she hears comes not from Rokri’s mouth, but from her neuroweb:

  — Sorry, toots, the Leviathan says.

  CHAPTER 6/6: FLIGHT

  Coordinates.

  The route to Leseum Blue, encoded in their neurowebs.

  The Fractured want to win the war, and to do that they need a Leseum Commander—or a Commander’s insurance policy: their children. They need Rokri and Sephine. And Rokri and Sephine have offered themselves up to the enemy.

  The humiliation cuts her inside, the betrayal. And it just gets worse and worse as she puts the pieces together in her head.

  Why New Leseum was never attacked. How the “Vierendelen” had sourced the materials for her wings. How both she and Rokri had made it up here without being vaporized by the Leviathan. All perpetuating the illusion. How could she not have seen it? The voice in her head the night before flashes into her memory . . . that should have been enough, enough to tell her things weren’t right.

  The city was never attacked because the Fractured couldn’t risk killing either of them. The attack on the Farside Basin that day had been a ruse—probably delivering the materials for her filament wings.

  Sensra had been right: all arrogance, no foresight.

  Sephine feels nothing but devastatingly stupid.

  “We have to get out of here,” she says in a weak, trembling voice. “Rokri, we have to get out.”

  — You could always jump. Kill yourselves. It’s a long way down.

  Rokri sees the sudden, horrified expression come to her face. “Turn off your ‘web. Turn it off now.”

  — Of course, if you do try that, I’ll probably just send a—

  Sephine switches on her neuroweb’s privacy settings. The Leviathan blips into silence.

  “What do we do?”

  “We go back down, into the construct.” Rokri is already heading back, pulling her with him. “Now you know, they’ll make their move.”

  He’s still dragging her, but doesn’t have to for very long; she runs with him. They dart through the towers together, past the elevator from which they emerged. They’ll be expecting them, Sephine figures. Rokri knows where they are going—time to test his mapmaking.

  A loud hiss. The sound of machines. A tower opens to their right, and vomits a swarm of drones, dispersing and coalescing together, shimmering through the air like static. Rokri clocks the swarm and his gun is up barely before Sephine even registers they’re being attacked. The swarm makes a layered, stuttered groaning noise and collapses in an iron hailstorm.

  “Come on,” he says, running past her.

  They run until they come to another black tower, another elevator. The door snicks open, and Sephine swings round, met by the Fractured again, only this time it’s not a swarm, but a single machine, bristling with weapons and made of countless contra-rotating components creating the vague shape of a face. Whose she doesn’t know. She swings the splinter-rifle over her shoulder and fires, backing into the elevator. The Fractured jerks sharply, components locking as the splinter collides with a festoon of wires in its middle. Its weapons fire indiscriminately and it tumbles to the ground.

  As the elevator door begins to close, the machine shakes and a metal limb cracks and groans and points at her. It fires a second too late, but Sephine flinches and falls back against the elevator’s far wall. The shot collides with the tower. The elevator rumbles around them.

  “Can we escape?” she gasps, catching her breath.

  Rokri rubs his temples and bows his head, as if considering some impossible conundrum. Finally he says, “Yes. But at a cost.”

  “What cost?”

  “There’s a hangar in the lower levels, above the engine. There’s ‘fold-capable craft in there, Leseum-built, too. Assuming they want us alive and we aren’t obliterated on sight, we might be able to get off-planet. But, Sephine—”

  “The others.”

  Without her or her brother, the Fractured would think nothing of destroying the city. Without them, its people are expendable. Worthless.

  “And that’s assuming the city isn’t dust already,” Rokri says darkly.

  She hadn’t thought of that. “Well . . . if that’s the case, then . . . ” She can’t bring herself to say it.

  She’s spent almost half her life in that half-city. She’s always known New Leseum wasn’t her home, but it’s been the closest thing she’s had to one. Her friends. Teachers. The Makers. She grew up with those people, and each one would have protected her with their lives had they known the secret she holds in her head.

  And now she’s considering leaving them to their deaths.

  She screams in frustration and thumps the elevator wall.

  Rokri says, “I don’t see what choice we have.”

  Neither does she.

  The elevator descends past the floor of Rokri’s makeshift home, into the belly of the construct.

  “Be ready,” Rokri says, racking his weapon. “The Fractured won’t let us go that easy.”

  She racks her rifle as the elevator comes to a halt, and the door slides open.

  The space inside the Leviathan is vast. There are dormant ships everywhere. None is nearly as big as the Vierendelen, but they’re all large enough for a substantial crew. Sephine can see a few that are Leseum-built, but most are Fractured vessels. Their style is more streamlined yet somehow less elegant, like ornamental knives gone to rust. There are even a few ships that are neither Leseum nor Fractured, with filament sails, shadow-drives, knife-edge fins towering high above the hangar. She has no idea to which civilization they belong.

  The floor is meshed wrought-iron. There are stairwells dotted around leading down further, as if the hangar is a vast missile silo. Sephine spots a faint, white-blue light far below through the crisscrossing holes in the floor—that must be the engine. She heads to the nearest stairwell and peers down through a tangle of gantries and railings.

  “Are we really going to do this?” She turns to Rokri. His face is stone. Again she notices just how old he looks. “We’re just going to leave them here?”

  “It’s either that or risk home. Risk losing the war.”

  “But—”

  “We have no choice, Sephine! It’s fifty thousand, or countless millions—if we stay, and the Fractured take those coordinates from us, we’ll be dead. And they will be too. And then they’ll attack our home, and there’ll be nothing left of us. Nothing! Damage control, Seph. If we do something now, at least there’s a chance to save home and ourselves. Maybe New Leseum, too. Maybe.”

  “If we can bring a fleet in time.”

  “Right.”

  “And if we don’t die escaping.”

  “Yes.”

  “And if the city wasn’t destroyed the moment I left.”

  “Not likely. But yes.”

  Sephine thinks for a moment. “I can’t help but feel we’re being selfish.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I mean, she thinks, maybe we should just kill ourselves. Blow our brains out right here and just be done with it.

  Now who’s being selfish . . . she adds silently.

  Realization comes to his face. “Don’t you even think it,” he says. (Sephine imagines the Vierendelen saying—Too late!, and grimaces.)

  “Either way,” he continues, “All those people will die.” He takes her face in his hands, cradling her, and his expression becomes soothing and concerned, but laced with what looks like pleading. “If we die, we go out trying, at the very least. We’re taking the one course of action that has a chance of a positive outcome. You have to see that.” His eyes flick back and forth across hers, desperation in his face. “Please.”

  Noises: metal on metal. Scurryi
ng, like impossibly heavy insects. Some way across the hangar, a deafening blast. A ship has exploded. A scorching arch loops into the air.

  “We have to get to a Leseum ship.” Rokri grabs Sephine’s arm and pulls her across the hangar.

  Movement under the spindly feet of a nearby ship. Plasma fire. A shot screams past, barely a meter from them. Sephine feels the heat of it on her face.

  “This way!” Rokri pulls her in the other direction. She catches a glimpse of their assailer before he turns—another singular drone. Jogging backwards, Rokri fires, sending a white-hot projectile into the Fractured machine. It careens backward and up with the force of the shot, tumbling though the air to slam into the hull of the ship behind it, exploding violently.

  Then there are more.

  Sephine and Rokri weave their way around and under ships, and each time they look up there are more and more Fractured pursuing them. Sephine hears the now-familiar buzzing of a swarm, and when she looks up into the empty, cavernous expanse of the Leviathan, the are tens of them, a sentient iron storm threatening to rain destruction upon them, optical-sensors like livid scarlet lightening.

  She grabs her brother by the arm and hauls him under the cover of a small craft, just as a deluge of little drones descends. They batter the floor where they had just been standing.

  They roll together and emerge, and are met by a trio of machines, weapons powered up. Sephine and Rokri fire before the Fractured can. All three burst into crackling pieces of twisted metal.

  They sprint towards the middle of the hangar.

  Another ship explodes, somewhere. She feels as if they’re running aimlessly. She can’t bring herself to look back, but she can hear the noise of metal footsteps behind them.

  Another shot tears past her head, inches away, burning her cheek and singeing her hair. She arcs her arm out awkwardly behind her and fires blind. An explosion abruptly follows.

  Ahead are two ships, noses pointing inwards, each standing on three legs about two meters high. Beyond that there is a railing. Beyond that, nothing.

  “Shit!” Rokri slows his pace as they pass under the ships’ noses, but Sephine can’t stop in time and slams into the railing, bending over double, winded, and for a second she is poised over it at the waist by her momentum, staring down, down into the depths of the Leviathan, its mighty engine. Her wing-grazes split. Pain rips across her back.