by John Ayliff
‘What happened?’ Keldra demanded.
‘One of Glass’s people tackled me. He had a programming spike. He broke through your muscle override.’
‘How did you get out?’
‘I talked my way out.’
She smiled. ‘My plan did work, then. I knew you’d be useful.’
‘I barely made it out. You could easily have lost the transponder.’
‘I’d have lost you. I’d have found some other way to get the transponder.’ She took the transponder from the servitor and pushed herself towards the transit module, turning her back on him. She was acting self-satisfied but Jonas could tell it was bluster, false self-confidence. Finding him free-willed in the escape capsule had thrown her.
‘What’s the transponder for?’ he called after her. ‘It wasn’t the most valuable artefact there, and I don’t think you’re going to sell it, so what do you need it for?’
She didn’t turn round. ‘I’m not sure you need to know that.’
‘You’re putting the Seagull together, aren’t you?’
Keldra froze, floating from a handhold, her body halfway through the transit module door. Now she turned to look at Jonas, unsuccessfully hiding her surprise behind a stony mask.
‘You’re collecting the pieces of the Seagull,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve got the fuselage.’
‘How do you know about the Seagull?’
‘I’m not sure you need to know that.’
She hesitated for a moment, then propelled herself back to him, grabbed the front of his suit, and launched him into the transit module.
‘Yes, I’m putting the Seagull together. I’ll show you.’
Keldra kicked open a locker in the transit module wall and pulled out a yellow emergency vacuum suit. Jonas pulled it on over his clothes as the transit module began to rumble along the Remembrance’s spine into the cargo bay. The spine here became an open network of struts running down the middle of the bay, and the shutters over the transit module’s windows automatically slid aside so that he could see out into the bay. The bay door had closed, so they were running down the middle of a cylindrical metal cavern, like a much smaller version of the city habitation cavern as seen from the rail-taxi. Close to the airlock, the three servitors that had caught the escape capsule had removed the airtight seal and were beginning to push the capsule towards the side of the bay. Deeper into the bay, cargo containers slid past the windows; he spotted the Reinhardt Industries logo among the logos of a dozen other companies. Keldra’s initial tour had only taken him as far as the loading control room at the top of the bay, and the transit modules had refused to take him further during the journey to Santesteban, so he hadn’t seen past the first row of containers before.
At the very bottom of the cargo bay, against the wall that separated the bay from the reaction drive’s fuel tanks, a group of old containers had been arranged to form a vaguely hemispherical bubble. Suspended in the middle by long strands of cargo webbing was a white shape that Jonas recognized from Olzan’s memories.
Keldra checked that he had the suit sealed, then led him through an airlock at the bottom of the spine and out into the bubble. Close to, he could see the changes she had made to the spaceplane since she had ‘rescued’ it from Konrad’s Hope: thruster packs strapped beneath the wings, and assorted antennae and sensor nodes affixed to its hull. None of them looked like original components: they broke up the clean curves of the original design, as if the spaceplane had broken out in boils. There were rectangular patches covering the bullet holes.
‘That’s the Seagull,’ Keldra said, pulling herself along the webbing towards the spaceplane’s entrance hatch. ‘It’s a Planetary Age spaceplane. It would have landed on Earth. The long fins are wings; they were used for flying in atmosphere. The spaceplane would ferry people between the surface and the mother ship.’
She opened the hatch and pulled herself head first into the Seagull’s cabin, followed by her two servitors. Jonas tried to follow, but the second servitor expressionlessly held up a hand to block him. Jonas watched through the cabin windows as Keldra opened a panel in the spaceplane’s internal wall and began attaching the transponder to the nest of wires within. The servitors waited nearby, holding out tools for her, but she did the work herself.
‘You’re making it fly again,’ Jonas said.
‘In a crude way. It’s got enough for basic manoeuvres. It couldn’t fly in an atmosphere again, or climb out of a planet’s gravity well. Not that that matters anymore.’
‘What’s this for, Keldra? You’re not assembling this for a collector.’
‘No,’ she said firmly.
‘Then what’s so special about the transponder? The Seagull would fly without it.’
Keldra pushed the transponder fully into its alcove and then moved away from the wall. The lights on the transponder’s surface had changed from red to green.
‘The transponder’s the key,’ she said. ‘The transponder makes the mother ship recognize the Seagull as its shuttle.’
‘The mother ship? That would be an Earth ship. Are there any left?’ Jonas frowned. He had seen parts of Earth ships in collections, but none that he knew of were still intact.
‘That’s right.’ Keldra pulled herself through the spaceplane’s hatch and headed back towards the transit module.
‘What are you planning, Keldra?’
‘I’ve told you enough, for now. Tell me how you knew about the Seagull.’
‘Wendell Glass mentioned it.’
‘Wendell Glass believes it was destroyed. The whole collector community believes it was destroyed. I made sure of that.’
They were back in the transit module now. Keldra set it moving towards the hab rings and took off her helmet, then looked at Jonas expectantly while he did the same.
‘Wendell Glass told me about the Thousand Names, his ship that went missing at the same time,’ Jonas said. ‘The Thousand Names matches this ship’s description, so I put two and two together.’
‘You’re too clever. I should kill you now.’
‘You won’t.’ Jonas began to pull off the vacuum suit and return it to the transit module locker.
‘Why not? I’ve got the transponder. That’s what I needed you for.’
‘You only got the transponder because of my skills, and you might need those skills again. But that’s not all you needed me for.’
‘What, then?’
‘You need someone to talk to,’ Jonas said. ‘When you first captured me I said that to goad you, but it was true then, and it’s true now. You need someone to keep you sane, someone to keep you human.’ He gestured to the ghostly shape of the spaceplane as it shrank behind them. ‘You didn’t need to show me the Seagull, but you wanted to. You wanted to show it off.’
‘To hell with you. I’ve never needed anyone before.’
‘You’ve never done anything important before. You’ve killed six Worldbreakers, out of tens of thousands. That’s nothing but a grain of dust in the belts, and you know it.’ She glared at him, but he pressed on before she could respond. ‘But now you’re planning something else, aren’t you? Something bigger, and you want someone to see you do it, don’t you? You want an audience to make it real.’
‘To hell with you. You know nothing about me.’
They rode in silence back through the cargo bay and down to the second hab ring. As soon as the doors opened, Keldra stalked off, not looking at Jonas. Her servitors followed her, leaving him alone. The doors closed and the module moved back up to the spine and deposited him in the first ring.
He went back to his cabin, sat down at his desk, and clicked his fingers three times to conjure the implant’s virtual desktop.
There were two locked memories left, timestamped just a few hours apart. If the muscle override and Cooper’s disruption of it had both caused previously locked memories to play, it was likely that the blocks on the remaining memories would have been weakened. The secret of Keldra’s past would be in ther
e, and that, if anything, would be the key to manipulating her. He thought he was getting a feel for how the implant’s malfunction worked. It shouldn’t take too long to unlock the remaining memories.
He closed his eyes and began running images through his mind: the Seagull, the transponder, Santesteban, the Remembrance of Clouds rotating to catch the escape capsule…
Slowly, Olzan scanned the ship diagram, making sure the implant was recording the picture into memory. The model was rotating on the 3D screen in the lounge, the largest screen they had with the bridge still offline. Worrying red and yellow lights picked out systems along the ship’s length, but the most prominent were at either end of the sail and the reaction drive.
‘There must be something we can do,’ he said.
‘The main drive can’t be repaired without a shipyard,’ Tarraso said. ‘We don’t have the parts on board.’ He, Keldra, and Vazoya perched stiffly on the couch, looking ridiculously formal in the casual setting.
‘And the sail?’ Olzan asked.
‘Is fine, except that we can’t control it. We need a pilot.’
‘For God’s sake, Tarraso, there must be some way—’
‘It’s Earth-tech,’ Keldra butted in. Half of her face was covered by a pink gel-plast where the shrapnel wound was healing. ‘It and the pilot implant. No one understands how they talk to one another. There’s no research anymore.’
‘All right,’ Olzan snapped. The last thing he wanted was for Keldra to start one of her sullen rants about the state of the universe. He turned back to Tarraso. ‘There’s no way to hack it? Not complete control, but something?’
Tarraso shook his head. ‘Sail’s a black box. It’s not responding to anything we do. Either it’s broken, in which case we’re screwed, or it’s just that we can’t talk to it in the way it wants.’
‘Okay. No reaction drive, no sail.’ He turned to Vazoya. ‘No chance of getting to a port with thrusters?’
Vazoya was looking at the floor, with no indication that she had even heard him. She’d barely spoken since Brenn’s death. Her facial tattoos were black, like a veil painted onto her face.
‘We’re drifting out of the ecliptic,’ Tarraso said after a moment. ‘The thrusters don’t have enough delta-vee to get us back into the belt. It’ll be six months before we hit the belt again, and our supplies won’t last two.’
‘What if we ration—’
‘That two months was based on the strictest rationing scenario possible,’ Keldra said icily. ‘I was a hab engineer before you kidnapped me. I know what I’m talking about.’
‘All right,’ Olzan said. ‘Can we call for help?’
‘The main comms laser was knocked out by debris,’ Tarraso said. ‘We can broadcast, but out here that’s more likely to attract pirates.’
‘Yeah.’ Olzan filed the idea away. He might be able to negotiate with pirates, especially if he could convince them that Mr Glass would pay for his safe return, but the pirates would most likely take the Seagull. Losing the spaceplane and having to be ransomed would ruin any chance he had of convincing Mr Glass to pay for his treatment. He might never even see Emily again. He scoured the diagram once more, looking for ideas. Think outside the box. ‘What if we had a pilot?’
‘Then we could get the sail open right away, assuming it still works,’ Tarraso said wearily. ‘But we don’t have a pilot.’
‘No, but what if we did? We have the implant. You could extract it.’
Vazoya looked up, startled, but said nothing. Brenn’s body was on ice in the cargo bay, ready to be given an Arkite funeral when they reached port; Vazoya claimed that this had been his wish, although Olzan had never heard him mention his religion. Arkite tradition was for bodies to be embalmed and stored as intact as possible so that they could be given true burial on New Earth when the planets reappeared. Olzan didn’t believe the planets would ever come back, but it was just common decency to respect another person’s religion. Removing the implant would mean dismantling his skull.
‘No,’ Tarraso said. ‘The implant might still work, but you can’t just put a pilot implant in someone. Pilots have to go through training, step up through the intermediate implants. To be selected at all, they have to have that…I don’t know…that special gift.’
‘What would happen?’ Olzan asked. ‘They wouldn’t be able to control the sail?’
Tarraso squirmed in his seat, uncomfortable, but Olzan stared at him until he answered. ‘They probably would, but…We’re talking about permanent psychological damage here, Olzan. They’d be able to control the ship, but I don’t know how much of the person would be left.’
‘There’ll be none of us left if we can’t control the sail. Can you do it?’
‘Olzan—’
‘Just tell me if you can do it.’
‘Yes. I can extract the implant and put it into someone else,’ Tarraso said slowly. ‘Who’s the new pilot, though? I’ll be performing the operation.’
‘I could perform the implantation,’ Keldra said. ‘It’s not as hard as extracting it.’
‘All right,’ Tarraso said. ‘Anyone could perform the implantation. So who’s the new pilot? Do we draw lots?’
Vazoya looked up at Olzan. Her mouth was curled up as if in anger but there was a tear in her eye.
‘Vaz?’ Olzan said gently. It looked as if she was about to volunteer herself. Sacrificing herself to save the crew was just the sort of foolish, emotional thing she might do, especially after the blow of Brenn’s death. Olzan was tempted to let her go through with it. It would get them all out of trouble, get him back to Emily with the spaceplane. It might even be the best thing for her.
‘I say we use Keldra,’ Vazoya said.
Keldra was on her feet, instantly in a defensive posture. ‘To hell with you!’
‘Calm down!’ Olzan tried to get between them.
‘It’s her fault Brenn’s dead!’ Vazoya spat. ‘If we’d blown the doors on that hangar we’d have been out of there long before the Black Line.’
‘It was my call.’
‘Bullshit. Your suit comms were still transmitting. I heard what happened. She practically had a gun to your head.’
Tarraso stared at Keldra. ‘Is that true?’
Olzan hesitated. It wasn’t true, exactly. He’d been scared of Keldra after she’d killed the hijackers, and he still was, if he was honest with himself, but the others didn’t know how much he’d wanted to get an intact spaceplane back to Mr Glass, or why. It was easy to let Vazoya put more of the blame onto Keldra than she deserved. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘She had a gun back there, and she wasn’t following my orders.’
‘You should be volunteering yourself,’ Vazoya said to Keldra with contempt. ‘People are just people, isn’t that what you said? We don’t need two engineers.’
‘To hell with all of you!’ Keldra spluttered. ‘Olzan, you can’t do this.’
‘If we’re going to do this, we should draw lots,’ Tarraso said. ‘I don’t know what went on back there, but this isn’t the time to weigh up who deserves to be brain damaged. The right thing to do is draw lots.’
‘Fuck drawing lots,’ Vazoya said. ‘She killed Brenn! You know that.’
‘Shut up, all of you,’ Olzan said. ‘Tarraso, go open up Brenn’s head. We need that implant.’
Tarraso started to get up. ‘We’re going to draw lots, then?’
Olzan hooked his thumb through on his belt, moving it close to the nerve gun that hung there. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Vaz is right. We use Keldra.’
Vazoya leapt at Keldra like a coiled spring, knocking the other woman to the ground. As she fell, Keldra managed to land a solid blow on Vazoya’s jaw. Vazoya was on top of Keldra, pinning her. There were spots of blood on her face, spattered across the tattoo veil.
Tarraso hadn’t moved. ‘Olzan, this isn’t right. I still say we should—’
‘I’ve made my decision,’ Olzan said. ‘Keldra’s the only person we can afford to lose. Go get read
y for the surgery.’
Tarraso hurried off, as if not wanting to be part of what was happening in the lounge. Olzan stood over Keldra. She was still pinned by Vazoya, but she had stopped struggling. The brawl had knocked off most of the gel-plast, and her face beneath it was smeared with blood mixed with the gel-plast’s fibres, the wound not fully healed. She was glaring up in anger, but there was a new look on her face as well: it was the first time he had seen her show real fear. He felt a perverse rush of pleasure at seeing it.
He clicked the gun to ‘paralyze’ and fired.
‘Sorry, Keldra. It’s the only way.’ He put on his cocky salesman’s smile. ‘Looks like you’ve just joined the ranks of brain-damaged trade ship pilots.’
A schematic of the Seagull spun on the bridge screen. Keldra had called Jonas to the bridge a few hours after she had installed the transponder. Now she stood in front of the screen and gestured for Jonas to sit at his console. It looked as though he had been right: she couldn’t resist telling him her plan for long. After the betrayal he had witnessed in the last memory, he wondered if she had been able to talk so openly to anyone in the last eight years. Perhaps a captive, with an implant that prevented him from harming her, was the only audience she could trust.
‘I didn’t know what the Seagull meant, when I rescued it,’ she said. ‘After I got it, I did some research on the city nets. The information’s out there, if you know where to look, it’s just that no one puts it together. No one studies the Planetary Age artefacts. They break them up and sell the pieces. Put them on stands.’ She looked darkly at the Seagull schematic. Among the labels marking the pieces she’d recovered or added there were more labels indicating the pieces that were still missing.
‘What did you find?’ Jonas prompted.
‘The Seagull was a shuttle belonging to a larger ship. The big ship would stay in the Earth’s orbit, and the Seagull and the other spaceplanes would take people down to the surface.’
‘I know that,’ Jonas said.
‘Shut up. Once I got into the Seagull’s logs, I found the name of the ship it had belonged to: the Aurelian, an Earth Authority cruiser that had been co-opted for a science mission. It was active at the end of the Planetary Age, during the Worldbreaker war.’