Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  The image was slightly uneven, as if seen through sculpted glass. He hadn’t noticed it before. A sail ought to be perfectly flat, but the Remembrance’s had become crinkled after being furled and unfurled so many times without proper maintenance. It was an old ship, a tired ship, kept running by and for Keldra’s obsession long after it should have been retired. If Cooper captured it, there was no doubt it would be unceremoniously scrapped.

  Jonas had never been much troubled by sentiment for inanimate objects, but the thought of the Remembrance being stripped for parts and its skeleton rotting in some city’s junkyard orbit filled him with an uncomfortable feeling that he couldn’t shake. It didn’t matter now that the Remembrance had destroyed the Coriolis Dancer and God knew how many other ships. It was a good ship and it deserved a good end.

  He looked to the side, taking in the rest of the sky. The sun was huge, glaring opposite its mirror image in the sail. Without the bridge screen’s image processing, it was too bright for Jonas to look at, and he couldn’t make out the rocks of Belt Two. In the opposite direction he could see the stars, the sprinkling of tiny lights cut into segments by two intersecting lines, the wire-thin sparkle of the ecliptic, and the broad, hazy band of the Milky Way.

  The anger had drained out of him now. He had a feeling of vertigo, as if clinging to the outside of a rotating grav-ring. More than ever before, away from the close-crowded rocks of the belts, he felt the scale of the universe. He, the ship, the vastness of the sail, the blinding sun, the inhabited belts, were all a point of light in a vast, borderless three-dimensional space in which hung billions of similar points. He imagined the Worldbreakers sweeping across the galaxy, spreading from star to star, multiplying, branching, stripping each point bare of worlds and life. The destruction of Sol’s inhabited belts was just one footnote in the story of the Worldbreakers’ mindless advance across the universe.

  For a second, Jonas couldn’t understand how he had ever been sympathetic towards Gabriel’s religion. Gabriel had gone to his death believing that the Worldbreakers were agents of his God and that their gravity beams were gateways to Paradise. The Worldbreakers hadn’t known or cared about those beliefs. He might as well have dashed his brains out against a city wall. The matter that had made up Gabriel’s body had become a tiny part of that Worldbreaker’s cargo, and by now it would have been incorporated into one of their constructions, most likely another Worldbreaker destined to pillage another star system. All Gabriel had achieved had been to infinitesimally speed up the Worldbreakers’ conquest of the galaxy.

  Gabriel wouldn’t have wanted that. If he had known the truth about the Worldbreakers, he wouldn’t have wanted to become part of the matter that made them. Involuntarily, Jonas felt his teeth clench, his lip curl up. He wanted to save Gabriel from that fate.

  He wondered if Keldra’d had a similar experience to this at the start of her crusade. Alone on the ship after she had killed Olzan and his crew, perhaps she had come up here and floated in the observation blister, conscious of herself as a tiny point in the expanse of stars. She had always thought that the Worldbreakers were machines, not gods or angels, even if she had believed that they had been deliberately targeted at humanity. He imagined her consumed with anger, and with nothing to focus it on, apart from the Worldbreakers. Everything wrong with her life, with the world she found herself in, could be traced back to them. Perhaps it was here that she had vowed to take her revenge, and begun the decade-long personal crusade that had led them to this point.

  He could feel a nobility in Keldra’s anger now. It didn’t matter that the Worldbreakers were mindless and would never know that they were destroyed; it didn’t matter that humanity’s war was lost and that fighting them could do no good. Faced with certain destruction it was nobler to go down fighting than to roll over and die.

  Cooper’s offer seemed genuine, one sensible part of his mind tried to say. He could live as a true-born again. He could be Jonas Reinhardt…

  He turned the image over in his mind, but it failed to conjure any emotion except disgust. To accept Cooper’s offer would be to run away. He’d been running for the last six years: running from tank-born life and hiding behind a false identity, running from the promise he had made to Gabriel on what might as well have been his deathbed. After the Iron Dragon, he had promised himself he would stop running. He wasn’t about to start again now.

  There was no other option. If Keldra slowed to let him off at Belt Two, the Iron Dragon would probably catch her. Even if it didn’t, she was weaker than she realized. She needed him to maintain the ship. To run would be to condemn her grand plan to failure.

  No. This time he would fight. This would be his great achievement, the one he had promised to Gabriel, the only great achievement left for the defeated human race. This would be his revenge on the Worldbreakers for what they had done to Gabriel, just as it would be Keldra’s revenge for what they had done to her clouds.

  He took one more look at the stars and then spun himself around and climbed back towards the transit module.

  Keldra was on the bridge when he got back, her chair docked with the control nest. The Iron Dragon was flaring in the middle of the screen, but Keldra was looking down at one of the displays angled around her. She scowled at Jonas as he entered. ‘You contacted Lance Cooper,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d try to get rid of him.’

  ‘He’s still there.’

  ‘It was worth a try.’

  ‘So, are you taking him up on his offer? I’ve seen the log.’

  He ignored the question and sat down at his terminal. ‘You can’t let me off at Belt Two,’ he said.

  ‘What?

  ‘We can outrun the Dragon, but only if we keep straight on. Even changing course to pass close to a city could slow us down too much.’

  ‘Fuck you, Jonas. I’m giving you a chance to live.’

  ‘Besides, you might need me on the way down,’ he continued. ‘It’s too risky to try with just one person.’

  Keldra glared at him, but there was a look of calculating acceptance there, a tiny hint of a nod. ‘Whatever you like.’

  Jonas’s terminal showed that the communications laser was still tracking the Iron Dragon. He began another call. After a moment, Captain Cooper’s face appeared on the screen.

  Cooper glanced at Keldra, then ignored her and turned to Jonas.

  ‘Jonas. I assume you’ve taken time to consider my offer?’ His tone was calm, almost casual, as if he didn’t much care what his answer was.

  Jonas cleared his throat. He had been going to give a simple ‘no’, but another thought popped unbidden into his mind. ‘Captain Cooper, I wonder if I could ask you for a small favour. This is entirely separate from your offer.’

  Cooper looked puzzled. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘If I were to use the Remembrance’s missile launcher to launch a small item into a higher orbit, with a cargo transponder attached, could your ship pick it up?’

  Keldra glared at him and began to hiss something, but he waved her into silence.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Cooper said. ‘What is this item?’

  ‘An admin implant. I’d like you to have it delivered to Emily Taylor Glass. It contains memories of her relationship with her tank-born freighter captain. I think she should have it.’

  Keldra shrugged and settled back in her chair. Cooper paused, then nodded. ‘As much as I disapprove of Ms Glass’s choice of lover, I am not heartless. Perhaps the memories in the implant will help her to grieve and then move on. I take it the fact that you aren’t delivering the item yourself means you’ve decided to decline my offer.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Jonas said.

  Cooper’s professional mask didn’t slip. ‘Very well. The offer stands. Your true-born status is already in the Authority’s records for you to claim, if you change your mind.’

  ‘Thank you, but my mind is made up.’

  Cooper’s flat expression bro
ke, a little, but to Jonas’s surprise it wasn’t to put on some show of anger or incredulity. It looked almost as though he was relieved. ‘I think I understand,’ he said. ‘You will not be pursued. Godspeed, Jonas Reinhardt.’

  Chapter Twenty

  The Remembrance of Clouds passed through Belt Two without slowing. Jonas listened on the bridge to the cities’ comms chatter: traffic control, entertainment broadcasts, banal un-encoded ship-to-ship banter. Updates on Worldbreaker movements, volumes to avoid. Halfway around the belt, a city Jonas had never heard of was in a Worldbreaker Red Zone and was being evacuated.

  Keldra focused the bridge screen on Tannhäuser. The city was a dark shape against the bronze wall of the sun, until the Remembrance moved past it and it seemed to slide out in front of the stars. Tannhäuser was a new city, founded only a couple of decades before as part of the sunward sweep of colonization from Belt Five. The spherical rock was nearly pristine, a stubby docking spindle with a blinking red traffic light the only external sign of habitation.

  The city hailed them as they approached. A traffic control girl with a thick Belt Two accent asked if they’d be docking, and pointed out they were off course. She sounded puzzled when Jonas told her they were just passing through the belt. Almost no one passed through a belt without stopping, and almost no one ever went sunward of Belt Two.

  Tannhäuser slid faster across the star field as the Remembrance passed it, showing a crescent, and then swelling into a fully illuminated disc. Keldra let the view zoom out, and Jonas watched the rocks of Belt Two form a sparkling band that shrank away starward.

  An expanse of blue stretched, glistening, above Jonas. He ran his eyes across it, planning his next action, then slowly raised the brush and painted a great sweep of white. He twisted his hand, adding curls and feathering, letting the white paint mingle with the still-wet blue. The smell of paint filled his nostrils. Balanced on the stepladder, he felt as if he was floating in a painted sky.

  It had been his idea to help Keldra continue her ceiling cloud mural around the first ring’s central corridor. She had added to it, section by section, over the years, as the mood had struck her, the different periods of work visible in the layers of fade that began outside her quarters and stretched two-thirds of the way around the ring. Confined to the wheelchair, she couldn’t continue the mural, and servitors couldn’t do the job adequately, either: a servitor painting programme could cover areas in flat colour or mechanically reproduce designs, but it couldn’t provide the free-willed human touch that gave Keldra’s designs their character. Jonas had suggested that he finish the murals for her. It was somehow important for him that the mural be complete before the Remembrance reached its destination.

  He moved the brush until its paint was gone, using the last uneven bit of paint to create a feathered area of blue-white, and then stepped down from the ladder.

  ‘How’s that?’

  Keldra whirred forward in her chair and peered up at the painted clouds.

  ‘It’s good,’ she said.

  He looked back across his work, comparing it with her older painted skies. Even if he imagined his section fading, it would be easy to see the join. His clouds were large, swirling, filled with big curves where he had swung his arm around. Hers were smaller, with short jagged lines visible among the curves.

  ‘It doesn’t quite match your style,’ he said, disappointed.

  ‘Doesn’t have to,’ Keldra said. ‘You’ve got your own style. Be yourself for a change.’

  ‘I’d like it to match,’ he said. ‘I want the whole thing to be a complete work.’

  She made a non-committal grunting sound, but she wasn’t listening. Her eyes were closed and her face was screwed up in concentration.

  ‘Keldra? What is it?’

  ‘Shut up.’ She twitched slightly in the chair, listening to the ship-sensations from her implant. ‘There’s a problem.’

  ‘Another ship?’

  ‘It’s our sail. There’s a tear. A micro-rock must have punched through it as we passed through Belt Two.’

  She spun around and headed for the transit module, the chair carrying her surprisingly quickly.

  Jonas jogged after her. ‘I thought sails were self-repairing.’

  ‘They are. Ours was calibrated for Belt Three. The light pressure is tearing it apart faster than it can repair itself. Help me into a suit.’

  They had reached the transit hub, and Keldra was opening a vacuum suit locker. Jonas took the suit she handed him and unzipped it, then knelt down and carefully lifted her limp legs into the suit’s. He helped her out of the chair and held her standing as she pulled the rest of the suit around herself.

  ‘You’ll be all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Legs don’t matter in microgravity. Just get me into the module.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said as he strapped her in.

  ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘You’re not an engineer. I’ve got a gang of servitors meeting me in the spine. I don’t need you hovering over my shoulder being useless. You can monitor from the bridge, if you like.’

  He passed her the suit helmet; she snatched it out of his hands. ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘All right.’

  The doors closed, and Jonas felt the transit module rumble away upwards.

  He went to the bridge and brought up a damage control view on his console. There was nothing unusual, at first glance, just the normal dotted orange warnings from the ageing systems, and nagging messages about the cooling systems working overcapacity. Then he spotted the red icon at the ship’s nose indicating a problem with the sail. For details of sail problems he had to flip to another scale, orders of magnitude larger than the normal one: the kilometres-wide sail dwarfed the body of the ship. He could see the tear now; a red dot with a warning label beside it. As he watched, the dot expanded into a short line.

  He called Keldra’s suit. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘I can hear you.’

  ‘Looks like the tear’s widening,’ he told her.

  ‘I know. I’m on a sail runner. I’m heading there as fast as I can. I’ll talk to you when I can see the damage.’ The circuit closed.

  Jonas watched his console. He couldn’t see Keldra or her servitors on any of the displays; he would have to wait until she told him she was at the site of the tear. It was expanding, stretching out into a long line and widening like a mouth. Half the sail was blinking orange as the nanomaterial shared the pressure from the tear. It wasn’t yet big enough to cause a change in the ship’s acceleration, but if left unchecked, it couldn’t last long.

  ‘I can see it,’ Keldra said. She sounded out of breath, as if she’d been exerting herself, but she didn’t sound as tense as Jonas felt.

  ‘Can you fix it?’

  There was silence from her channel. After a few moments, his console buzzed for attention. A second red dot had appeared on the sail, near the first tear. It began to spread, even more quickly than the first.

  ‘Keldra! There’s another tear!’

  ‘That’s me,’ Keldra said. ‘I can’t close the tear. I’m going to have to cut out the whole section.’

  Jonas watched the damage control screen. Half a dozen new dots appeared, spaced around the original tear: Keldra’s servitors, Jonas assumed, making their own incisions in the sail. They began to move in curved paths, tracing segments of a circle.

  ‘You’re cutting away an awful lot,’ he said.

  ‘I can cut it so that it doesn’t stress the rest of the material,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘Yes, but do you need to cut away that much? It’s more than a square kilometre.’

  ‘Yes! I have to take out the stressed material, not just the tear itself. This isn’t the time to ask layman questions.’

  ‘I was a ship captain for six years, Keldra. I’m not totally clueless.’

  ‘Shut up and let me work!’

  Jonas watched as Keldra and her servitors completed their arcs and joined up,
forming a perfect circle. As soon as the last connection was made, the tear vanished: instead, the entire circular area flashed red and buzzed urgently. He turned off the warning. The orange stress from the rest of the sail was gone, but there was a noticeable effect on the ship’s acceleration. A smaller sail area meant less thrust.

  The communications circuit came back to life. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘It’s looking stable,’ he confirmed.

  ‘For now. It’s under strain just from being this close to the sun, though. It’ll give out at some point. Right, I’m on my way back.’ Keldra’s hostility was gone, at least for now. She sounded elated.

  ‘You managed okay?’ Jonas asked.

  ‘Like I said: you don’t need legs in microgravity.’

  ‘You could stay in microgravity most of the time, if you wanted to,’ he pointed out. ‘I could help you set up quarters in the spine, or we could even spin down one of the rings.’

  She laughed. ‘Nice thought, but no. The spine’s hab systems aren’t meant for long stays, and spinning down a ring isn’t as simple as you might think. Besides…’ She trailed off, as if embarrassed.

  ‘What?’ Jonas prompted.

  ‘Earth had gravity.’

  He smiled. ‘Yeah. I’ll see you inside.’

  The old ship creaked and groaned, its structure straining against the bombardment of solar radiation. Its course chart showed it curving more and more sharply sunward as light bombarded the sail.

  The sun grew larger day by day, half-filling the bridge screen now without any magnification. It first became too bright to look at from the observation blister without welding goggles, and then too bright for someone to enter the blister at all without a radiation-proofed suit and tinted helmet.