by John Ayliff
‘Items? Bullshit.’
‘What items?’ Tarraso asked.
Olzan quickly consulted the message in his implant. ‘Planetary Age artefacts. It’s a collection belonging to Anastasia Zhu. She’s already evacuated, but she’s leaving her collection. We’re going to, ah, rescue it.’
‘Bullshit!’ Vazoya slammed her cup in the middle of the table, spattering hot liquid onto the surface and making Brenn blink. ‘You don’t rescue objects. If we’re on an evac run then we should rescue people. I’m fine with us making a profit out of it. We can’t take everyone, so taking whoever can pay is as good a way of choosing as any. But you don’t visit a city in a Worldbreaker Red Zone unless you’re going to come away with your ship crammed with people.’
Olzan shook his head sympathetically. ‘Orders from Mr Glass. We take the artefacts. We can take some evacuees if there’s room after that.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘He’s right,’ Keldra said.
Vazoya looked at her in disgust. ‘Keldra, what the fuck?’
‘Mr Glass is right. They’re Planetary Age artefacts. There are only so many left and when they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re important, people are just…’ she shrugged, ‘people.’
Vazoya leapt across the table at her, scattering foil plates and sending the coffee cup spinning onto the floor. Olzan grabbed her around the waist and held her back as she struggled to reach the other woman. Keldra had sprung up, ready to return the blows.
‘Pack it in, both of you,’ Olzan shouted. ‘This isn’t up for discussion. We do the job Mr Glass pays us to do.’
‘Tell Mr Glass he can go fuck himself,’ Vazoya said, directing her anger towards Olzan now, or rather towards the implant they all knew sat at the base of Olzan’s skull. ‘I know you’ll watch this recording. You can go fuck yourself. I’ve had enough of this outfit. I’m getting off at the next rock.’ She stormed off down the corridor towards her quarters. Olzan let her go. She’d be back. She needed to vent, but she’d follow orders.
Brenn hesitated and then went out after Vazoya. Tarraso shrugged.
‘Ah, what’s it matter anyway? All be the same when the last rock’s gone.’
‘Doesn’t have to be.’ Keldra seemed to be talking to herself.
‘What was that?’ asked Olzan.
‘We should fight them. Don’t have to let them win.’
Tarraso laughed. It wasn’t a sarcastic or mocking laugh. He had genuinely found Keldra’s comment funny. ‘Can’t fight the Worldbreakers,’ he said as he left.
Keldra didn’t respond. She stayed seated, staring at the table.
Olzan watched her for a moment and then walked back to his cabin. ‘All right,’ he said under his breath, for the recording. ‘We’re on our way.’
‘What are the Worldbreakers?’
Jonas looked up from his terminal as Keldra strode onto the bridge. With a click of her fingers she summoned an image of a Worldbreaker onto the screen. It was a simple diagram, a black dodecahedron with its edges picked out in green wireframe. One of its twelve faces had five lines meeting in the centre where the Worldbreaker’s mouth could open, and from that face a faint wireframe extended inwards, sketchily showing what little was known of the Worldbreaker’s internal anatomy.
He stopped work and closed down his bridge terminal. He had a feeling this would take a while. ‘No one knows,’ he said.
‘Wrong.’ Keldra walked past her control nest, and stood in front of the screen like a schoolteacher giving a lecture. She stared critically at Jonas, as if expecting another response.
‘People say different things about them,’ he said. ‘Scribers believe that they’re angels, sent to usher us into Paradise.’
‘They’re wrong. They’re idiots.’
Jonas remembered the earnestness on Gabriel’s face, shining through the smoke from his incense burner as he’d talked about his beliefs. ‘They might be wrong, but they’re not stupid,’ he said carefully, not letting any emotion show.
‘The Scribers are idiots,’ Keldra repeated, as if she had just cut through all the complexities of their beliefs and settled the matter. ‘What else do people say?’
Jonas decided there was no point in arguing about Gabriel’s honour now. He pushed Gabriel’s memory out of his mind and tried to recall the other religions’ beliefs about the Worldbreakers. ‘The Arkites say they’re a second Flood.’ He had only a vague idea what the first Flood was meant to have been; he had trouble visualizing enough water to cover the surface of a planet. ‘Once the belts are gone, God will make the planets re-form and people can start again.’
‘Hah. Any day now, I’m sure.’
‘The Eternalist groups believe that they’re part of the natural order,’ Jonas said. ‘The planets are made and un-made on an endless cycle. The True Belters say that there never were any planets – they’re a myth – and the Worldbreakers and the belts have always been there. Some people say they’re a natural phenomenon and it’s nothing to do with God, if there even is a god.’
‘Wrong, wrong, wrong,’ Keldra said. ‘What do you believe?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t believe anything.’
‘You believe whatever works best for your persona, I bet.’
‘Sometimes,’ he said. He let a little of his annoyance show. ‘Are you going to get to a point? If you’re so sure everyone is wrong, I assume that means you’ve got it all figured out.’
‘They’re not angels, or demons, or gods,’ Keldra said. ‘But they’re not natural either. They’re machines.’
He gave her a disdainful look. ‘Machines. Built by people?’
‘Built by aliens.’
‘Machines built by aliens.’
‘It’s not so far-fetched. It’s obvious, if you look at the data rather than listen to the babbling of the churches.’
‘Really.’
‘I’m not even the first one to have this idea. It was the scientific consensus, back in the first century after the Worldbreakers came. Back when there were still universities and researchers.’ Her voice dripped venom. ‘The information’s out there, on the city datanets, if you know where to look. But no one does look. They’d rather believe in angels and gods.’
‘So what is this information?’
Keldra clicked her fingers again. The Worldbreaker disappeared from the screen, replaced by a belt chart, concentric circles around the yellow orb of the sun. But instead of the normal five belts, there were nine, and instead of the normal hazy toroids, all but one of the belts was a fine line with a single circle standing out on it like the jewel on a necklace.
‘This is the solar system before the Worldbreakers arrived,’ she said. ‘Four inner rocky planets, the primordial belt, four outer gas planets. Plus other minor bodies; this is a simplification.’ She snapped her fingers and a line appeared on the edge of the chart, arrowing in from interstellar space. ‘That is the first sighting of the Worldbreaker Cluster. It arrived from another star system. It didn’t just appear.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Jonas said. ‘Angels could come from another star system.’
‘Shut up,’ Keldra said. ‘You don’t need angels to explain the Worldbreakers. Look at what they do.’ She waved at the screen and the circles began spinning, fast-forwarding through time. The Worldbreaker Cluster moved in towards the planets and then split into countless red lines, like the tendrils of a microgravity adjusted plant. In Jonas’s day, each Worldbreaker travelled alone, independent of the others, but the ones on the screen moved in swarms, hundreds or thousands strong. The largest swarm went straight down towards the sun. Others swerved towards the jewel-like dots on the belt lines: the planets.
One by one, as the Worldbreaker swarms reached them, the planets winked out.
‘They need two things,’ Keldra said. ‘Raw material and energy. Energy they get from the sun. That’s why they get so close to it. Raw material they get from the planets. They blew them up, and then they started scoop
ing up the debris.’
‘What do they need it for?’
‘To keep running. They’re self-sustaining; they make more of themselves. My point is, they’re not magic. They’re technological artefacts. Machines.’
‘They don’t look like any machines I’ve seen,’ Jonas said.
‘That’s because they weren’t made by us. They’re much more advanced, maybe by millions of years.’ She brought back the Worldbreaker diagram. ‘I think they’ve learned to manipulate gravity somehow. They use that for both their weapon and their reactionless drive. I don’t know how it works, but I don’t think it breaks any physical laws. They can’t create something out of nothing; they still need energy and raw materials.’
‘All right. Supposing that’s true, why would anyone want to build these machines?’
‘To destroy us,’ Keldra said. The image on the screen changed again, this time filling with stars scattered through three-dimensional space. ‘Someone else out there must have spotted us. We were broadcasting from Earth for hundreds of years before the Worldbreakers arrived; maybe they heard us. Or maybe it was longer ago, and they just spotted a planet with life on it in our system. I think they saw us as a threat. As competition. They wanted to wipe us out before we became too powerful.’
‘Or maybe they had a reason we can’t imagine,’ Jonas said.
‘However alien your mindset, kill or be killed will always apply.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe. Maybe. What do you think?’
He shrugged. ‘You’ve got the implant in my head. I’ll think whatever you tell me to think.’
She glared at him but didn’t seem to have anything to say to that. Behind her, the stars on the screen vanished.
‘Why did you tell me all this, Keldra?’ he asked.
‘I want you to know what we’re up against,’ she said. ‘This is the enemy: the Worldbreakers and whoever made them. This is what we’re fighting.’
‘You don’t need me to know anything about that,’ Jonas said. ‘It won’t make me help you run this ship more efficiently. You’re not telling me what we’re doing in Santesteban, which might be more useful.’
Her sarcastic laugh was weaker than usual. ‘You’ll find out when we get there.’
‘You told me your theories about the Worldbreakers because you wanted an audience. You’ve been working on these theories on your own for years, and now you want the validation of someone saying they agree with you. Well, you won’t get it from me, not while I’m your slave. While you’ve got the implant in my head, I’ll believe whatever you tell me to believe.’ He tilted his head forward and pulled the back of his shirt collar down with one hand, exposing the back of his neck. ‘Deactivate your triggers and then I can tell you what I really think.’
Keldra stood scowling at him for a moment, as if she were considering it, but then strode back out of the bridge. ‘Get back to work.’
A few hours out from Santesteban, Keldra walked into Jonas’s cabin and tossed another bundle of clothes at him: a grey business suit from his wardrobe on the Coriolis Dancer, along with some jewellery suitable for a formal true-born gathering. ‘You wear that tomorrow.’
‘You’re letting me off the ship at Santesteban, then?’
‘You’re a true-born business owner,’ Keldra said. ‘You ran the LN-411 mining operation. When the Worldbreaker showed up you packed up and ran like the coward you are.’
‘Should have fought, yeah. We’ve been through this.’
‘Shut up. You didn’t have your hauler ship with you when the Worldbreaker arrived. It was off making a delivery. You only had your private escape shuttle, so you had to abandon most of your operation. You had space to take your free-willed employees and the most valuable bits of equipment. The hab system core, some other things. Here’s a list.’
Jonas glanced at the data pad she handed to him. Miscellaneous bits of technology, the valuable and portable stuff: it was what he would have chosen to save if her story were true. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where’s this going?’
‘During the journey, you decided you didn’t want to pay your employees, so you slave-spiked them all. They struggled, and the shuttle took some damage.’
‘Is that something you think I’d do?’
‘Yes, it is. But that doesn’t matter. It has to be part of the story.’ She snapped her fingers and a belt chart appeared on the pad in Jonas’s hand, with a line picking out his imaginary course. ‘You got as far as the Kellman trading post. Kellman didn’t have the parts to repair the shuttle, so you sold it for scrap. You couldn’t sell the servitors there because they were illegal; no paperwork. So you bought passage on the Remembrance of Clouds, a perfectly innocent freighter, which was heading to Santesteban. If you look at the ship’s logs you’ll find it was at Kellman at the right time.’
‘I’m sure I will. So what’s the plan? I take it you’re not letting me go with some servitors and a hab core.’
‘You’re going to meet the owner of the city.’ Another click of Keldra’s fingers, and a man’s face appeared on the pad. He looked somewhere in his fifties, completely hairless, with flabby, unhealthy looking features. ‘You can get in to see him because you’re a true-born and you have things that he’ll want. You’re going to him because you want to offload the servitors: you don’t have the black market connections to sell them, but you know that he won’t care that they’re illegal. The reason he’ll talk to you is because of the hab core. Santesteban’s life support is in a poor state because the owner doesn’t like paying full price for anything. Your used hab core is exactly the sort of deal he’d want, but it’s legally yours so you’re not in so much of a hurry to get rid of it, as you are the servitors. You could take it to another city if you thought you could get a better deal.’
Jonas paused as he took all this in. ‘So what’s the job? I’m guessing we’re pulling off some kind of con. What do I do when I get in?’
‘You sell the servitors. You sell the hab core if you can get a good price. Then you spend a few hours hobnobbing with true-borns, drinking champagne out of real glass glasses, or whatever. Then you come back here. If you try to leave…’ She tapped the back of her neck.
‘Come on, Keldra. You need me for something more than just getting better prices for your stolen goods. Tell me the plan and maybe I can help.’
‘When did you think I started trusting you? I’ve told you all you need to know.’
‘All right.’ As she turned to leave he called after her. ‘Who’s the mark, anyway? I mean, the city owner. What’s his name?’
‘Wendell Taylor Glass.’
Chapter Six
Santesteban was a dark grey lozenge thirty kilometres long, once a droplet of iron that had spilled out of a planet’s molten core, now swarming with the signs of habitation. The city’s first owner had spun the rock up around its long axis, and its surface was studded with solar panels, heat sinks, and high-grav starscrapers. One end of the lozenge tapered to a point that formed the base of the counter-rotating docking spindle, and a dozen ships nuzzled against their docking pylons amidst tangles of boarding tunnels and fuel lines. Rickety looking freighters and light cruisers, some of them sporting visible weapon emplacements and the skull-and-gun motifs of pirates, floated next to the glittering playthings of the true-born elite.
Keldra furled the sail a safe distance from the city and made the final approach using thrusters, while Jonas exchanged messages with the weary voice of traffic control. Assigned a pylon, the Remembrance of Clouds began the careful process of docking.
Jonas made his way to the docking airlock at the tip of the Remembrance’s spine. Floating with his arm hooked through a handhold, he could feel the gentle shudders running through the walls as the ship made contact with the spindle. A dozen servitors, the mind-wiped husks of his mining foremen from LN-411, hung around the wall behind him, their microgravity movement programmes keeping them inhumanly still. Keldra had shaved their heads and dressed them i
n orange coveralls. Strapped to the back of one was the life support core, a bulky mass of machinery that would have taken two strong men to lift under gravity. It took a few moments for Jonas to realize that the servitor carrying the core had been Matton. His face was skull-like with his beard gone.
I’ll find a way to save all of us, Jonas had told Matton as the Remembrance of Clouds bore down on them, while Matton had told Jonas that he could only save himself. In the end, Matton had won the argument and lost his life. Jonas still couldn’t think of anything he could have done to save his crew, but the feeling that he’d failed them persisted.
On the airlock’s monitors he could see servitors in city issue vacuum suits working to attach fuel and power lines to the Remembrance’s ports. A light went green, indicating that the airlock connection was in place. Jonas cycled through the airlock and then floated along the white tunnel of the pylon into Santesteban’s docking spindle.
After weeks cooped up on the Remembrance of Clouds with only Keldra for company, Jonas felt a catch in his breath as he emerged into the huge space filled with noise, colour, and people. The interior of the spindle was a polished steel wall broken by the hatches to docking pylons. Automatic transfer lines ran along the surface, their varying speeds distinguished by colourful patterns. Jonas climbed hand-over-hand across increasingly fast lines until he was on a true-born-only express line towards the city. The servitors followed him faithfully, but he made sure not to do more than glance at them: a self-assured true-born didn’t acknowledge his servitors in public.
The express line took him past an open pylon gate where an inter-city liner’s passengers were disembarking. The few experienced microgravity travellers were already on transfer lines, but most of the people were struggling to keep their drifting suitcases in check. Tank-borns, all of them, in utilitarian jumpsuits. Despite their drab appearance, all of these tank-borns must have done very well for themselves if they could afford passage on an inter-city liner. Many of the stragglers would be immigrants taking the only inter-city voyage of their lives.