by Neal Asher
From How It Is by Gordon
Jarvellis woke feeling sick, but not from pain or injury. It struck her as ironic that here she was, a starship captain without a ship, and suffering from space sickness. Her condition, she supposed, aggravated the sickness. But the main reason was that she was too soft these days. It had been, as far as she could recollect, nearly five solstan years since she had experienced weightlessness. What need was there to experience it when every ship and station had gravplates? What need was there to experience its antithesis, when AG could waft a ship into orbit? Even visiting heavy-G worlds was not a problem. She either stayed in the ship or in areas adjusted to Earth gravity. With such thoughts she occupied herself as she fought nausea, and wondered when the Outlinkers would be back to take her out of this damned frame.
It was Tull who returned first. She could see that something more than her dangerous presence was worrying him. He came in and hovered over her, inspecting the sealed wounds. After a moment he went to inspect a readout on the medbot.
‘Will you let me out of this?’ Jarvellis asked.
Tull stared at her long and estimatingly.
‘I’ll be careful of you,’ she added.
Tull made no move to release the clamps. Some of them were through to bone, and Jarvellis felt no inclination to fight them.
‘I cannot contact the surface,’ said Tull.
‘Understandable,’ said Jarvellis. ‘You weren’t much further from the EM pulse than me. It’ll have knocked out your com.’
Tull nodded thoughtfully. ‘I have cameras that track all objects that might represent a danger to this station. I’ve just looked at the replay.’
‘Quite a firework display,’ said Jarvellis uneasily.
‘Yes, planar explosives unless I miss my bet. By the vector of the explosion, I would say it hit your underspace engine. My concern is why you would have such explosives onboard.’
Jarvellis found she just did not have the energy to lie creatively, so she kept her mouth shut. Tull pushed himself away from the frame and she tried to follow, with her eyes, where he went. He was out of sight only for a few seconds when something touched against the back of her neck. Numbness rolled down her body. Nerve-blocker. Everything bar the autonomies inclusive of breathing and heartbeat was shut down below her neck.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘We are not uncivilized, Captain Jarvellis, but we are very aware of our fragility, as you know. I can only assume by your silence that you have been involved in something illegal, and that perhaps you would want to avoid talking to the ECS investigators when they eventually come up here.’
‘Look,’ said Jarvellis, ‘just let me go. I won’t cause you any problems. I’ve been through too much already.’
Tull came back into view. Jarvellis heard the clamps snapping off her body. To one side of Tull she saw a line of small ruby peas coiling away. Tull wiped them from the air with an absorbent pad. The cell-welder hummed briefly.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I’ve given you two pints of synthetic blood so you shouldn’t experience too much dizziness or nausea. The clamp and probe holes may be a bit sore, but they will quickly heal.’
‘Then you can take the blocker off,’ Jarvellis said.
‘Not until I’m sure that myself and Jeth are utterly safe,’ he replied.
‘You’re going to keep me like this until the investigators get here?’
Tull shook his head. ‘I told you we are not uncivilized.’
Jarvellis felt herself drifting from the frame. Tull was propelling her to the door.
‘It won’t take me long to run a diagnostic and initiate another dish. In fact our transceiver will be back on line within the hour. It may take some time for the investigators to get here. For a ship blown in orbit with planar explosives, I should think we’ll get someone from Earth. Nerve-blocking, for any length of time, can become a very unpleasant experience. There is also the chance that it might damage the innocent life you carry.’
He had her to the door now, and then through it. To her right the little robot had appeared and was swinging along with her.
‘Are you sure about this?’ she heard Jeth saying, but she could not see Tull’s wife.
‘Oh, I’m sure. Laser burns through her suit, planar explosives . . . we know what that means,’ said Tull.
Jarvellis wondered what he would say if she told him how she had actually received the laser burn. Best not—he might keep her blocked for her own safety, and the safety of that ‘innocent life’, rather than for that of himself and his wife.
Soon Tull had her in the elevator and had pushed her to what would be the floor in the outer ring. Now she could see that Jeth was holding a bundle of clothing and a bag filled with blocky items. The Outlinker pressed these down beside her.
Tull said, ‘When you reach the outer ring, Sam will remove your blocker. After that all the elevators will be shut down. Now, there are service tubes you could find to get back here, but be aware that, should you try that, we will immediately leave the station, so you’ll achieve nothing.’
Jeth said, ‘Here’s food and clothing.’ She pointed to these items and turned away guiltily.
‘I wouldn’t have hurt you,’ said Jarvellis. ‘I’ve never hurt anyone.’
‘Yes,’ said Tull, stepping back with his wife, then closing the elevator door on her.
Jarvellis considered what she had just said. It was true: personally she had never inflicted injury on anyone. What concern was it of hers what people did with the weapons she smuggled? They were the criminals. She was just trying to make a decent profit. That was all right, wasn’t it?
Weight returned and pulled her head down onto the worn decking. The elevator door slid open and, as it did so, feeling returned to her body. Jarvellis sat upright and looked down at Sam. The little robot held the nerve-blocker in one three-fingered claw. It held it up above itself as if frightened she was going to hit it and so was demonstrating how it had helped her. She looked to the bundle of clothes and the food. The latter was out of the question at the present. The one-quarter G that dispelled space sickness was pulling at and twisting those places where she had been cell-welded, and where the clamps and probes had been pulled out. She now effectively felt as if someone had methodically pinched over her skin with a pair of pliers. She reached for the clothing: disposable underwear and deck shoes, a soft cloth shirt and padded trousers. With hands that did not seem to have any grip in them she slowly dressed herself. Once this was done she felt better, and began to think what the future might hold for her. Her prospects did not seem much better than they had done outside. Now though, she was beginning to feel hope. Maybe John was not dead yet. Maybe, even if he was, she could get to that bastard Pelter. Maybe she could live.
‘Please take the bag and step out of the elevator, Captain,’ said Tull over an intercom.
Jarvellis did as she was told, faintly amused that the intercom had crackled like the one in the Lyric, only this intercom crackle was genuine.
‘The cabins to your left you will find comfortable. We maintain them for visitors from the surface.’
She headed in that direction, wondering where Tull might have positioned pinhead cameras, then it occurred to her that the EM pulse might have knocked those out as well. Any systems on the outer ring of the station, unprotected by its bulk, would have gone down, and the little cameras were prone to do so. Then again, maybe there were no cameras. She was assuming he might be as paranoid as herself. She stopped at a door and pressed one of the two square buttons beside it. A buzzer sounded inside. She pressed the other button and the door slid open. At the threshold she paused; she might well be walking willingly into her own prison. She shook her head and stepped back. When the door closed again, she squatted down and opened the bag.
It contained fresh fruit, probably from the station’s hydroponics, film-wrapped sandwiches with some sort of meat filling, even a small bottle of a wine that bore the name ‘Pass
ion’ on its label. As Jarvellis looked up from the bag, it occurred to her that she would not remember the Outlinkers’ generosity. After ECS tried her for arms smuggling, and then mind-wiped her, she would remember nothing. She’d be a pregnant mother operating on instinct: a mere animal until they downloaded a personality into her, and—whether construct or real—that personality would never be her own. She closed the bag, stood up, and began walking. In the cabin she could just hear Tull’s voice speaking over the intercom. No cameras, then. She knew that the Outlinkers would have some sort of AG shuttle at the centre of the station for their own use. What she now wondered was if any of the station’s original shuttles remained in this outer ring.
* * *
Dawn flung greenhouse light across the land. It seemed, with this coloration to the light, that the temperature should be high. But the day began wintry and showed no sign of changing as it advanced. Viewed from above, the ruins had the appearance of an impact site in the forest of blue oaks and chequer trees, and perhaps at one time that was precisely what this had been. The two bikes skimmed over crumbling buildings towards the central ring of the broken dome. They came in to land at the edge of the dome, where there was just enough room to fit the sky-bikes close together on apparently firm ground.
Donning their helmets, the four advanced through the wreckage, their boots crunching on broken glass and heat-splintered plascrete. All around, old wiring and the remnants of computer systems were sinking into decay. Most surfaces were covered with grey and yellow lichens. This ruin could have been thousands of years old, rather than the few hundred it actually was. Soon all four stood at the rim of the dark shaft of one of the underground silos.
Cormac gazed into that dark and contemplated what these ruins meant. This is what happened when worlds seceded from the Polity. This is what happened when base humanity tried to govern itself.
‘Cormac,’ came Mika’s voice over his comunit. ‘The dracomen just grabbed the AGC. They’re coming your way.’
‘Shit!’
Cormac looked up at the sky, but could see no craft. What was Dragon up to? What were the dracomen up to? He was tempted to put a hold on the mission until he found out, but, after thinking about the chances of getting some answers out of the dracomen, he decided to go on.
‘Thorn, put a shot down there and see what stirs.’
Thorn leant over the edge and fired. The purple flash disclosed the depth of the silo before rubble exploded from it on a hot flash. Something began screeching in the ruins behind them and they turned to see a couple of corvine birds flap raggedly into the sky. Thorn tracked their course for a moment, and then turned back to the silo. The rest of them turned with him and, as smoking stones rained down, they waited expectantly.
Eventually Thorn said, in a bored voice, ‘Nothing stirring.’
‘Try the next one,’ Cormac told him.
They circled the edge of the silo, well back from the corroded metal at its lip. Thorn made adjustments on his weapon.
‘If this doesn’t work, do we move on to the CTDs?’ he asked casually.
‘Have to,’ said Cormac.
He could see Thorn’s smile of satisfaction.
Shortly they reached the lip of the next silo.
‘Energy readings . . . difficult to locate,’ said Aiden.
Thorn moved forwards. ‘We’ll see—’
It shot out of the next silo like a white-hot jack-in-the-box. Cormac’s visor polarized, re-adjusted—and before him was the fantastic creation of some godlike glass-maker. It was a dragon, a real dragon. Then, the next moment, it was not.
The Maker seemed to be made of glass supported by bones that were glowing tungsten filaments. It had a long swanlike neck ending in a nightmare head that had something of a lizard and something of a praying mantis about it. Wings opened out, seemingly batlike at first, then taking on the appearance of a mass of sails. A heavy claw gripped the edge of the underground silo, or was it a hand shaped like the body of a millipede, with hundreds of leglike fingers? A glowing bullwhip tail thrashed the air, sprouted sails, fins, light. Cormac froze. The Maker was about five metres high. How had it gotten through a twenty-centimetre hole? Then he realized: it was not matter, it was energy; it could probably be any size. He had just never seen anything like it before. Was it Dragon’s ultimate joke to name itself thus, when the kind that had made it looked like this?
‘Bastard!’ came Thorn’s voice over the static on com. He fired. The proton beam hit the Maker and diffused from the other side. It jerked back and a bolt of white light shot from its jaws, splashed into Thorn and wrapped around him. For a moment he seemed to be struggling against snakes of light, then, as if the force of it had only just caught up, he was flung back. Cento and Aiden fired too. In return, two bolts of a different colour hit them. They both sat down with an undignified thump. Cormac lowered his weapon as the creature rose over him. Then an AGC streaked past its head, and it turned to watch the car as it circled and came back. The top of the car had been ripped away, and the dracomen were visible. One of them was firing a laser carbine. Pins of red light were flickering in the Maker’s body; beyond this there was no visible effect. The car streaked past again and kept going. The Maker made a sound like the gusting sigh of a strong wind, watching them go, then turned its attention back to Cormac.
Cormac stooped down and placed his weapon on the ground. Over his comunit he could hear strange whistlings and creakings. The Maker brought its head closer to him. He could feel the energy of it; as a tension in his face and a thrumming in his bones. He could see that it possessed three of what seemed to be eyes. Mandibles of glass opened from the sides of its jaws. Cormac looked into the throat of hell.
Again: laser fire flickering inside the glassy body. The dracomen were back. The AGC circled and the dracoman with the carbine fired continuously. The Maker made that wind-sound again, but now there seemed to be to Cormac an element of anger in it. Fire flashed from its mouth and struck the AGC. The car shuddered and pieces of it fell from the sky. It shuddered again and something detonated under its cowling. Trailing black smoke, it went into a dive and eventually fell into the forest to the north of the ruin. The Maker turned its head and looked at Cormac again, its glass mandibles opening and closing as if in indecision, or anticipation. Then, with a surge of power and light, it launched itself into the sky, remained poised there for a moment, then shot down into the trees.
‘Oh my God! Ohmegod!’
‘Colonel, sir, please respond. The creature—’
‘What the fuck?’
‘Will you look at that!’
‘Shaddup, Goff! Colonel? Colonel?’
Cormac did not want to answer. He could do without those jabbering human voices. There was a stillness here that he wanted to savour. But, as he stood motionless, his sense of duty re-asserted itself. He sighed and returned to the world.
‘Cormac here.’
‘Sir, an AGC just went down in the forest, a thing . . . light . . . It landed where the AGC crashed.’
‘What’s happening now?’
‘Trees . . . burning . . . No, it’s coming up!’
Cormac stared across the ruins and saw the Maker rise into the sky. It held the two dracomen silhouetted against its body, looking black as if charred by that fantastic light. Suddenly it became an actinic torpedo, blurred, wing-sails grabbing at the air, and then it became a streak of fire to the east.
* * *
That it had no AG was obvious at a glance through the dusty portal. Its main body was a flattened cylinder terminating in a full-screen chainglass cockpit. A pair of ion engines was set back on either side of the cockpit, and another pair was set just forward of a stabilizing fin like a huge rudder. Each of the four engines was a sphere with a slice taken off it to expose the grids inside. Each could be moved independently to give a degree of forward and reverse thrust, but only so far as they did not blast into each other. The shuttle might well be fuelled and its small fusion tokomac might sti
ll be serviceable, Jarvellis could not tell. The shuttle rested on the floor of the small bay with the doors open before it, and the arc of the station curving away from the top of that opening. If she wished to reach it, she had to cross ten metres of floor through vacuum. That would not have been too much of a problem for the Outlinkers, and maybe she too could have made it. But how long would it take for the lock on this side of the bay to cycle? How long for the lock on the shuttle? And would there be atmosphere inside it?
Jarvellis moved away from the portal and looked around. This worn corridor ran round the bay in an arc, and there were doors behind her. She tried one, pressing the correct button this time. The door slid aside with a low grinding to reveal a wedge-shaped room that was utterly empty. The fifth room she tried contained the lockers and soon she was inspecting a spacesuit that made the one she had owned seem state of the art. It had a bowl helmet of scratched plastiglass: a helmet that was actually breakable. The material of the suit itself was layered, and just that: material. There was no armouring, no sealant layer. Air was provided by an external bottle with a vulnerable pipe that plugged into the neck-ring. She wiped dirt from an old digital readout and saw that the bottle did contain air, though how the pressure reading related to time or suit pressure, she could not say. Laboriously she pulled the suit on, and then tucked the helmet under her arm as she headed for the lock. The inner door, a great thick thing that actually operated on hinges, opened with surprising silence. As she stepped inside, a different noise greeted her.
‘Is that you in that lock, Captain Jarvellis?’ Tull asked over the intercom.
Jarvellis ignored the voice, put her helmet on and twisted it into place. Maybe the seals would not work so well. Maybe they would work for long enough. She opened the valve on the air bottle and got a hiss of air that was breathable, but had a vaguely putrid smell.