by John Ayliff
‘You’re parroting some preacher. There’s nothing wrong with your spirit.’
Gabriel looked down shyly. ‘You could come with me. There’s time for you to purify yourself before the next ship leaves, if I vouch for you. We could do it together.’
‘You know I don’t believe any of that.’
‘You don’t believe anything,’ Gabriel said quietly. ‘I’ve tried to convince you.’
‘We can be together if you stay here with me,’ Jonas said. ‘Be a lifelong Scriber ascetic, if you like. Lots of people do that.’
‘I can’t stay here. Not with you. You know how I feel about you.’ Gabriel’s voice was barely more than a whisper. He was still looking down, unable to meet Jonas’s eye. The smoke from the incense burner was thinning out, its fuel almost gone.
‘Gabriel, I feel the same way. You know that.’
‘I know, and that’s why I can’t stay.’
The weight of Gabriel’s decision was boring into Jonas’s chest. He wanted to rewind time to before this conversation had happened. He had always known, in theory, that this was the end point of Gabriel’s religion, but he had told himself that he wouldn’t go through with it. He wished he’d tried to talk him out of Scriberism earlier, rather than indulge it. His mind raced, trying to think of something he could say to talk Gabriel around. Jonas had always had a knack for persuading people, but right now, where it was most important, everything he could think of seemed like he was clutching at straws.
‘We can be together and keep it secret,’ he said. ‘You get a lot of privacy.’
‘No. When people hear my name, they ask, “Why isn’t he married yet? Why doesn’t he have children? He needs to carry on the family name.” I can’t face that.’
‘We could run away together.’
‘There’s nowhere to run to.’
‘We could go to Belt Two. There are free cities there, run by tank-borns. No one will care about your family name.’
‘There’s nowhere to run to,’ Gabriel repeated insistently. ‘The material world is ending. We need to purify ourselves and join the angels.’
‘You’re not impure!’ Jonas shouted. ‘You just think that because of the demands your society puts on you. If you’d been raised a tank-born you’d know there’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘The demands my society has put on me are part of who I am. I can’t be me and not feel like this.’ Gabriel looked up at Jonas, finally. He looked earnest and in pain. ‘This is what I want, Jonas. When I think about the Immolation, I feel at peace. There’s no other course for me. The only thing I regret is that you won’t join me.’
‘You know I can’t join you. Don’t ask me again.’
Gabriel picked up the delicate silver tongs that lay next to the burner and carefully opened its lid, then slowly fed it another block of incense. ‘Then promise me something, Jonas.’
‘What?’
Gabriel clicked the lid closed and looked up. ‘Promise me you’ll do something with your life. You’re so much better than me.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is. I was born into my position. I’ve achieved nothing. You worked your way up. You’ve got so much potential.’
‘You’ve got potential, too, if you weren’t throwing your life away for a myth!’
‘Just promise me, Jonas. You could achieve something great; you can make the end times a better place for the people who are staying.’
‘You could achieve something great, Gabriel. We could do it together. When people hear the name Gabriel Reinhardt they won’t think about you not being married, or whatever, they’ll think about what you achieved.’
‘No, I can’t do that.’ Gabriel poked absently at the incense burner with the tongs. ‘Just promise, Jonas. Promise, for me.’
Jonas closed his eyes. He had, finally, run out of things to say. He knew with a sinking certainty that there was nothing he could say that would change Gabriel’s mind. The religion was like a disease of the mind, and if Jonas had caught it sooner, he might have been able to cure it, but Gabriel was now too far gone. He might as well have been sitting by his deathbed.
He opened his eyes, feeling numb. He hated Gabriel for this but he couldn’t deny a deathbed promise. ‘I promise,’ he said.
The electrodes dug into Jonas’s scalp, feeling as though they had always been there. He stared at the point where the wall met the floor in front of him, which seemed to shift and float as the interrogation room came back into focus. He felt as if he was emerging reluctantly from a dream.
‘Jonas.’ Lance Cooper’s tone was curt, critical.
Jonas blinked away nausea and tears. ‘You’ve seen it now. Gabriel joined a Scriber ship and killed himself.’
‘You’re still lying.’
‘What the hell are you talking about? You just saw the memory. That was the moment he told me.’
‘It was a bluff. You resisted that memory in order to make me interested in it, because you knew it would put you in the best light.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’
‘You seduced Gabriel Reinhardt, and then you manipulated him into killing himself,’ Cooper spat. ‘It makes me sick to think that you’ve been living among us for so long.’
‘You can watch every second of my life,’ Jonas shouted. ‘You won’t find the story you want to find because you made that story up!’
Cooper leaned forward, staring at Jonas through the glass. There was a hint of Keldra in his expression, he thought. He had got him angry.
‘I’ll find what I’m looking for,’ Cooper said. ‘We have plenty of time before we reach Fides.’
The egg-shaped white ship was a distant dot, on its way to its engagement with an angel. After weeks of refusing, Jonas’s only wish now was to be on it.
‘Mr Reinhardt?’
Wearily, Jonas turned around. The speaker was a young woman with dark brown hair pulled back in a neat bun. The suit she wore looked brand new. She looked nervous, as if it had taken all of her willpower to approach him.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ she said. ‘I heard you’d be here, and I thought I’d see if you had any time. My name’s Ayla. Uh, Ayla 2485-Oberon-14572. I wanted to see you about the co-pilot position?’ She took a little step back. ‘You, uh, you are Gabriel Reinhardt?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m…’ Jonas glanced back out of the window, but he could no longer tell which distant speck was the Immolation ship. It was gone. He turned back to Ayla and put on his best, most convincing smile. ‘I’m sorry, I’m busy now; I’ll have to see you later,’ he said. ‘But, yes, you’ve got the right person. I’m Gabriel Reinhardt.’
Chapter Thirteen
The interrogation room came slowly back into focus. Jonas could hear a quick-repeating chime, not loud but cutting into the centre of his brain with its shrillness. At first he thought it was an artefact of his headache, but as his surroundings stopped swaying he realized it was coming from Cooper’s lighted room.
The captain stared at one of his screens, a startled look on his face. ‘I have to deal with something,’ he said. He gave a quick, mocking smile, but it wasn’t convincing. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’
Jonas managed to feel a little satisfaction as the nausea subsided. It looked as if his plan had worked. ‘You’re going to want my help with that,’ he called out.
The alert shut off. Cooper was using an intercom earpiece, nodding from time to time or saying something too quiet for Jonas to make out. Eventually, he put the intercom down and turned back to him.
‘What do you mean, I’ll want your help?’
‘The Aurelian is targeting you, isn’t it?’
‘It’s transmitting an ultimatum.’
‘Let me hear it.’
Cooper picked up his intercom handset and spoke a few more orders that Jonas couldn’t hear, ignoring him.
‘You might as well,’ Jonas said.
Cooper glared at him then shrugged and stabbed a control.
A woman’s voice sounded out in the interrogation room. The accent was strange – 300 years old, Jonas guessed – but there was something else odd about it, on top of that. It was too calm, and the inflections were just a little inhuman. It was a synthetic voice, albeit a more realistic one than he had ever heard before.
‘Unidentified ships, this is the Earth Authority cruiser Aurelian. Transmit transponder code to identify yourselves as human. Fail to transmit the code and you will be fired upon. Arm any weapons system and you will be fired upon. Alter course and you will be fired upon. You have twenty minutes to transmit the code before missiles are launched.’
‘You lied to me,’ Cooper said.
A chill ran through Jonas when he realized that the Aurelian had addressed its message to unidentified ships; he had hoped it would only be threatening the Iron Dragon. Perhaps he had miscalculated and doomed them all. He managed to keep his fear from showing on his face. It didn’t change his next move. ‘I can call off the Aurelian,’ he said. ‘Get me back onto my ship and I can save both of us.’
‘You’re lying again.’
‘Why would I do that? If I can’t call off the Aurelian then it doesn’t matter which ship I’m on when the missiles hit.’
Cooper leaned forward. ‘You do understand that the device you’re strapped into is a memory probe? I can extract the memory of how to work the transponder.’
‘In twenty minutes?
‘I’ll put a gun to your head and you’ll tell me how to work it!’
Jonas managed not to blink. ‘Go ahead. If you get me back to Fides then I’m dead. Given the choice I’d rather take you with me.’
Cooper started to move, but hesitated. ‘You’re bluffing.’
‘You have no idea whether I’m bluffing or not. You can’t read me, even with a memory probe. I lied to you in the cell and you believed me because it suited your preconceptions. You didn’t believe your own machine when it went against the story you’d invented about me. So go on, put a gun to my head. Maybe I’m bluffing. What do you want to bet?’
Cooper stared at Jonas for several seconds. ‘You’re a goddamn namekiller,’ he said. Not taking his eyes off him, he raised the intercom and spoke slowly, voice acidic. ‘Corporal, take the prisoner to the shuttle bay. Deck-chief, get a shuttle prepped for launch and get a pilot in it. The prisoner is to be put back on the Thousand Names as quickly as possible.’
Cooper hurried out of the room. A moment later, the guards who had brought Jonas to the interrogation room entered again, undid his straps, and escorted him back to the transit module.
As the module moved the general quarters alarm sounded abruptly, a quick series of chimes, painfully loud in the enclosed space. An officer’s voice boomed out that this was not a drill. The doors opened and the guard pulled Jonas out into a jostle of bodies, crew members rushing to their stations as the general quarters alarm echoed through the cavernous white shuttle bay. In one corner of the bay a gang of orange-suited engineers swarmed around a taxiing shuttle.
The deck chief hurried up to Jonas and his escort. ‘This the prisoner? We’ve prepped shuttle five for you. Get going.’
The engineers completed their checks of the shuttle and swarmed away from it as it settled onto the upper door of one of the shuttle airlocks. The pilot glanced down from his seat and nodded Jonas through the side door and into the passenger area.
The shuttle was lowered into the airlock and moments later it was falling into space, nose tipping down to point towards the Remembrance of Clouds. Moving between the shuttle’s little windows, Jonas could see the grey mass of the Iron Dragon receding behind the shuttle, and the delicate rings of the Remembrance of Clouds in front. Its sail was furled: the sail still couldn’t be used without a pilot, so Cooper’s prize crew must have kept up with the Iron Dragon using the reaction drive. As the shuttle’s attitude stabilized and the Remembrance began to grow larger in the window, Jonas could see another of the Iron Dragon’s shuttles docked at the forward airlock. He squinted towards the sun but he couldn’t make out the Aurelian.
He waited until the shuttle had completed its midpoint turnaround, flipping its engines towards the Remembrance of Clouds to decelerate in to dock, and then tapped on the partition to the pilot’s compartment. ‘Call up Captain Cooper. I want to speak to him.’
The pilot glanced back, frowning. ‘I don’t have any orders that you can communicate with anyone.’
‘I’m the only person who can stop the Aurelian from destroying both our ships,’ Jonas said. ‘The captain will want to talk to me.’
‘I’m putting you through,’ the pilot said after a moment.
The circuit crackled open. ‘Cooper here.’
‘You’ve got a crew on board the Remembrance, haven’t you? I can see a shuttle docked.’
‘Of course, I’ve got a crew there.’
‘Get them back to your ship. I want to be alone, or there’s no deal. Except their commanding officer; she meets me when I dock, and then goes back with the shuttle I’m now on.’
A slight pause, then, ‘All right, Jonas. I’ll issue the order.’
‘One more thing,’ said Jonas. He glanced between the rear and forward windows, guessing how close he was between the ships: he wanted to time this right. ‘I want Keldra. Put her on another shuttle.’
Cooper laughed sarcastically. ‘You’re welcome to her.’
‘That’s all for now,’ Jonas said. He tapped on the pilot’s partition again. ‘Close the channel. I need a vacuum suit.’
‘There’s a locker under the seat.’
He pulled the bright red emergency suit from the locker and struggled into it, using the shuttle’s deceleration to brace himself against the wall. He examined the suit’s communications suite: robust and comprehensive, as he’d expected from an Authority issue suit. It should easily be enough for what he had planned. Through the rear window he could see the other shuttle detach from the Remembrance of Clouds and begin accelerating on an opposite course.
His shuttle shuddered in to dock, the Remembrance’s old but reliable docking mechanism clasping it firmly. He waved to the shuttle pilot and propelled himself through the doors as they opened.
Lieutenant Sands was waiting in the docking area, in her armoured vacuum suit. She scowled at Jonas through her visor. ‘You’re a namekiller.’
‘We don’t have time to call one another names, Lieutenant,’ Jonas said. ‘Tell me what you’ve done to my ship.’
‘We’ve reactivated all the systems you took offline, dismantled your nuclear warhead, and installed temporary controls to let us fly the ship without a pilot,’ Sands said. ‘There wasn’t time to remove them, so I guess you get to keep them.’
‘What have you done with the cargo?’
‘We performed an inventory but otherwise left it as it was.’
‘The spaceplane’s still there?’
‘It ought to be in a collection, and not languishing in some tank-born pirate ship; but yes, it’s still there.’
‘Thank you, Lieutenant. Get back to your ship.’
Jonas watched as Sands entered the shuttle and it undocked – he didn’t want any of Cooper’s people staying on the ship to catch him later – and then climbed around to the observation blister. The familiar scent of the ship wafted around him; cheap machine oil and a hint of stale sweat; the familiar rhythms of its much-repaired systems rumbled away in the distance. It felt good to be back on a ship with a personality, after the impersonal cleanliness of the Iron Dragon.
He found the catches and unfolded the manual controls from their alcove, then retrieved the code from the implant’s memory and unlocked them. He hard-sealed the inner door of the main docking airlock, checked that the outer door and the docking clamps would still work, and then turned to the communications panel. He knew enough about comms tech to be able to align the Remembrance’s communications laser at the source of the Aurelian’s transmission. The ultimatum was still repeating, now giving only six minu
tes. He patched the Iron Dragon emergency vacuum suit’s communications system wirelessly into the Remembrance’s communications system. He’d be able to transmit and receive through the comms laser from anywhere in the ship.
He took a transit module down the Remembrance’s spine. The cargo bay lights were off, and the cargo containers rushed past him in the darkness, each momentarily visible as a splash of bright colour in the light from the transit module windows. He passed the gutted shell of the Haze of the Ecliptic’s escape capsule that Keldra’s servitors had been breaking down for parts.
The transit module came in to a stop at the bottom of the bay, just before the wall that separated the cargo bay from the reaction drive’s fuel tanks. Jonas checked his suit and then cycled through the airlock into the bubble formed by the stacked cargo modules. The Seagull was still there, suspended in the darkness by strands of cargo webbing that seemed to glow as the beams from Jonas’s helmet lamps brushed over them.
He kicked off from the airlock, grabbed a strand of webbing, and climbed around in the dark towards the Seagull’s entrance hatch. The spine’s lights were out, so the only light came from his helmet lamps, and the only sound was his breathing in the vacuum-suit helmet. Without Keldra, the Remembrance of Clouds was a ghost ship.
He reached the Seagull’s hatch and pulled himself into its cabin. Tiny green and red lights showed that some of the spaceplane’s automatic systems were active, including the transponder. It looked as though Sands’s engineers hadn’t touched it.
The transponder was transmitting, but its signal wasn’t penetrating the Remembrance’s cargo bay radiation shield. That would be why the Aurelian was threatening to fire on both ships rather than just the Iron Dragon. Jonas searched with his suit’s communications system until he could pick up the transponder’s complex coded signal, then set the suit to relay it through the Remembrance’s comms laser.