Splintered Suns

by Michael Cobley

  “Hello there, glad you could make it,” she said. “You’ll no doubt be greatly relieved to learn that after a lot of hard thinking and cogitating and all that palaver, I have decided to accept your unconditional surrender. This seems as good a time and a place as any to finalise our business and since there are no conditions to negotiate all we need to do is shake on it. What do you say?”

  For a moment all was a motionless tableau, just her, the slummy shacks, the city walls, the peaceful view of the river—and three lethal cybermechs looming over her. Then the Legacy descended towards her, yet shrank as it did so, became blurred into a stuttering, flickering mass. As it came down among a nearby cluster of huts it flared brightly for an instant—and suddenly there was the figure of a man strolling in her direction.

  He wore a beard and was dressed like a merc, but he had Pyke’s eyes and smile. It was a brazen theft, and a bad copy of his smile, all the sarcasm and none of the warmth—the last time she had seen this was when a possessed Pyke had snatched the Angular Eye before diving out of that window.

  The dirt path along which the Legacy walked ended a yard or two past Dervla’s shack. He halted a few feet from the door, snapped his fingers and a rudimentary chair appeared in his hand. He set it down firmly then parked himself and leaned back, one leg resting across the knee of the other.

  “You know,” he said. “We’ve not really had a chance for a proper face-to-face, what with all the tactics, the countermeasures, the incursions …”

  “Ah, like the time you executed me with a knife to the heart,” she said.

  The Legacy shrugged. “The board is the way it is, and the piece can only be approached in certain ways. But now we are, it appears, outwith such strategic concerns—we have reached a supremely important crux, which is why I thought we could have a friendly chat about your generous offer.”

  “It’s pretty straightforward,” Dervla said, adopting her own devil-may-care grin. “You cease all your activities in pursuit of your unpleasant goals, then hand over all command and security codes, and maybe we’ll keep you on in a minor capacity, a very minor capacity.”

  The Legacy laughed at that. “There’s certainly no ambiguity in your demands, Dervla, not much grey area! The question is, how are you going to enforce my compliance?”

  “With all the forces at our disposal,” said Dervla. “Every last … punishment delivery system that we have.”

  “Trouble is, I see no forces—my detection networks reveal no hostile legions poised and ready to swarm our positions and strongholds across the Simulation Enclave.” He leaned forward, his face full to the brim with glee. He was all but gloating. “Be honest, now—this talk of mighty forces is all just bluster, isn’t it?”

  Now it was Dervla’s turn to laugh—laughter being all she had left. “What kind of dimwit would I be to saunter out to face you without the certainty of full-spectrum backup, should I require it? You need to check your detectors, Mr. Legacy, sir—absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

  “Logically, that is correct but I am reasonably confident that the detection reports are a faithful assessment of the objective situation. In which case I must, regretfully, decline your magnanimous offer.”

  “I hope you can face the consequences,” she said, bracing herself for whatever came next.

  The Legacy’s voracious smile widened imperceptibly. “I’m looking forward to enjoying the consequences, Miss Dervla. You see, I know the effectiveness of all the forces at my disposal here in the enclave, their efficacy and their deployment. I also know how your florid performance veiled, momentarily, the translocation of that irritating, castoff drone-trinket back into the simulation’s main area. It’s currently running around, collecting any of the persona nodes that will listen to it, but my hounds will soon forestall any repetition of that breakout you all staged a while back.”

  She crossed her arms. “I admire self-confidence, especially in those heading for the big fail!”

  The Legacy’s smile remained fixed but the eyes gave her a dark look. “I’m sure you know that the force of my will and design extended far beyond the confines of the Simulation Enclave—of course you do. That drone-trinket somehow wormed its way into the archives and absconded with a batch of survey files, so you know.”

  Dervla shrugged. “Sure, I’ve seen your home movies.”

  “You’ve seen, you know, you understand.” The Legacy stood and the chair vanished. “Let me paint a picture for you—I and my allies out in the real-matter world finally gain possession of all three crystal fragments and bring them together. Reunification! The Essavyr Key, named after its long-dead architect, is whole once more—the key that unlocks itself has become one. Inside it, an ancient purpose is reborn, along with all its implacable might.” He held up his hands, making a wide, sweeping gesture. “The skies above Granah will become one vast screen showing all that is taking place outwith the enclave, a display of unfolding magnificence.” He let his arms fall to his sides and glanced at Dervla. “I was going to have my servants drag you off to one of our decompiler facilities but instead I think I’ll keep you here so that you can see and enjoy the full show when it begins, uninterrupted.”

  So saying, he walked away, transformed back into an expanding cloud of bright struts and rods and flew off into the sky, leaving its humming servants on station overhead.

  Dervla gazed at the horizon, trying not to imagine all the things that RK1 showed her coming alive exactly as the Legacy described. Then she realised that she couldn’t bear even this sight so she went back inside her shack and closed the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Pyke, the planet Ong, the wreck of the Mighty Defender, the bridge

  The entrance to the bridge was a pair of sliding doors and they were jammed half-open. Inside, intermittent low-power lighting made partially visible a kind of foyer area with a wall curving round to the right. There was a strong smell of charred plastic and burned wood, and the gap between the doors had a faint shimmering opacity to it which reminded him of those time-facet side passages they had seen when they had first entered the forward section.

  There were sounds, too, an ominous medley of system alerts, beeps and synthvoice warnings, strange clicking noises along with rustling movements, and off in the background a deep metallic creaking interrupted now and then by a tearing, crunching noise like tech equipment being crushed.

  That shimmery veil, he thought. Is that a sign that there’s a time-facet on the other side, or just some kind of time-thrower barrier that I have to pass through?

  After close scrutiny he reckoned he could squeeze through the gap while shouldering both the rifle and Hokajil’s time-thrower, so he rearranged them to hang across his chest, one above the other. But before he could get his first leg through a familiar voice spoke.

  “Put a lag on the blag, ould son! You don’t want to jump into that viper pit without knowing a few crucial details.”

  Pyke let the tension drain out of him as he turned to see. Looking more spectral than before, Sim-Pyke was leaning against the corridor wall, hands in pockets. Pyke levelled a finger at him.

  “Nothing you had to say last time was any real help,” he said. “Especially when a clearly unhinged Ustril popped out of the woodwork with a crew full of derange-alikes. Then, just to add an extra layer of crazy-sauce, along comes a grizzled, grey-haired version of me! He deals with the Ustril gang, then makes some baffling comments, makes me a gift of one of his hand-me-downs, and buggers off!”

  “At least you still have the crystal,” said Simulation Pyke. “Y’know, after all that. Which is going to make what I need to say next pretty difficult to hear.”

  Pyke gave his ghostly otherself a narrow look of scepticism, with an eyebrow raised for emphasis. “Feels as if nothing can surprise me now so go ahead, knock yerself out.”

  “Okay—what you need to do next is head into the bridge, find Raven and give her the crystal!”

  Pyke’s initial react
ion was incredulity shading off into outrage with overtones of fury. But then the absurdity of it took hold, the sheer farcical, ludicrous inversion of everything … he found himself laughing till his ribs ached while Sim-Pyke waited, smiling and nodding. At last the hilarity subsided and a faintly uneasy realisation settled over him.

  “You’re actually serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “Horribly, deadly serious, I’m afraid—and before you start swearing and telling me how your friends paid with their lives to keep the crystal out of the Legacy’s hand … well, I know how all that happened …”

  “How could you possibly know?” Pyke shot back. “How could you understand what she did to them, what I saw …”

  “I know because I’ve heard their stories,” said Sim-Pyke. “Remember?”

  Pyke felt the bitter fury go out of him. Of course, the copies that the Legacy made and kept in its simulation menagerie. Not for the first time, he wished Dervla were here to get his head on straight.

  “This whole situation has been a rapidly changing one,” Sim-Pyke went on. “Rensik and me, we actually know how to end all this, really bring it to an end, but we’ve only been in the position to do it very recently. If Raven had got hold of the crystal earlier, or retained it after the executions, she and the Legacy would have fused it with the other pieces before we were ready and … well, the end of everything is not putting it too strongly.”

  Pyke rebelled at this. “What do you even mean by ‘the end of everything’? These crystals are part of a weapon, and all weapons eventually meet their counterweapons …”

  “Not this one. I think it’s time you saw it for yourself.”

  “Saw what?”

  “Saw exactly what’s going on inside that crystal of yours.”

  One second he was standing outside the entrance to the bridge—in the next he was hanging in space over a planet, its silent, grey-swathed immensity rolling past. Part of him wanted to yell at Sim-Pyke to return him to the corridor, but as the seconds passed with no adverse effects he grew curious. Then his viewpoint moved forward and swooped planetwards, plunging down through cloud layers, a blurry stream of vapour and mist, till he burst out into clear air over a vast alien city. It was clearly the product of a highly advanced civilisation, at least going by the first impressions of immense constructions, along with radial grids suggesting intricate transport networks. But as he descended he realised that there were no ground vehicles rushing along connecting roads since they were not roads. Nor were there any signs of air traffic, no grav-cars, cargo drones or air-space monitors. Nor any sign of the inhabitants or any other creature.

  Then the voice of Simulation Pyke began to speak, relating the story of how, a million years ago, a foolish species had allowed the creation of a nano-viral matter assimilator, how it evolved and escaped from its lab, took over first a city, then a region, then an entire planet, how it acquired intelligence and began to plan, made the leap from planet to planet, bringing every satellite in that star system under its central control and, finally, its sun.

  The shifting viewpoint showed him how a sun was cordoned off, chained and caged, its thermonuclear might channelled off to serve the needs of the nano-plague intellect as it spread its dominion to neighbouring stars and further afield. Pyke saw how the nano-plague surged across the surface of a world on the front lines of its ruthless expansion—only what he saw was an immense frozen tableau, scene after scene of desperate humanoids fleeing waves, webs and hurtling tentacles of the relentless, obsidian nano-matter.

  Sim-Pyke then went on to explain how an adjacent interstellar autarchy, a galactic power of some consequence, collaborated with a wandering Ancient in isolating the nano-plague within a picketed volume of space. Before the blight could gather its strength and break out, the Ancient (last survivor of a vanished race) used its advanced mystic science to transform the entire picketed volume of space into an artificial containment, a dungeon constructed from an exotic dimensional lattice. The Ancient designed and defined its external appearance and properties—resembling a creature with its mighty wings spread. It was restricted to a size and weight that could be easily carried by a single sentient being.

  Having created this bizarre prison, the Ancient struck it a single harsh blow which broke it into three pieces, then told the autarchy’s ministers to send the fragments far away from each other, and to erase any hint of their existence. It was a ploy which kept them apart for hundreds of millennia.

  The last scene he saw showed towers and cables of nano-matter in frozen orbit around an obsidian-encased moon, supporting row after row of shipyards churning out vessels in a torrent flowing towards the staging areas of multiple armadas. Yet all motion was suspended—only his viewpoint was in motion.

  The incredible vista faded and abruptly he was back in his body, back in the corridor outside the bridge. Sim-Pyke was still there, watching him closely.

  “You weren’t actually gone that long,” he said. “The neural-resonance field makes it easy to fool the temporal sense with an accelerated immersion, so I’ve been told.”

  “So, all that’s true?” Pyke said. “There’s a kind of embryo nano-plague empire held captive inside this bloody crystal?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Right, fine …” Pyke tried to muster his thoughts. “So if keeping these pieces of the original prison apart is stopping this nano-plague from coming back, why in the name of everything that’s sane should I help that psychobitch Raven put them together?”

  “Because it’s the only way to completely destroy it! Look—the Ancient broke the original crystal into three parts, remember? Well, I’m sure you know how hard that crystal shard of yours is; nothing can crack it, dent it or even scratch it—immunity to physical alteration is an inherent property of the dimension lattice. But when the Ancient split it in three it was only because he had adjusted the lattice’s integrity enabler system, creating three weak shear points. We now have control over that system and once the three shards are reunited we can fundamentally alter the dimensional lattice and create thousands upon thousands of those weak points! All it would take is a single bullet or an energy bolt, even just a good whack with a rock, and kersmash-tinkle, it’s over, it’s done! No one’s putting that back together …”

  Pyke listened closely, trying to take it in, trying to fit all that with the bits and pieces he’d picked up along the demented road that had led him to this place. And still, the very idea of walking up to Raven Kaligari and just giving up the very prize she was desperate to have—it made his blood run cold. Simulation Pyke read the doubt in his face.

  “Not convinced, eh?”

  “After all the stinking, rotten crap she’s put me and my crew through,” Pyke said. “All she deserves is to be gunned down like the trash she is … I’ll even be merciful and put a round in her head!”

  “What makes you think you’d get near enough to do any of that?” Sim-Pyke indicated the stuck doors. “None of us have any idea what’s actually waiting for you in there but you can bet yer last cred that Raven’s goons are going to be all over it, heavily armed and ugly as sin to boot. So just how are you going to get up close to her?”

  “No idea,” Pyke said, feeling frustrated and angry at himself for not thinking it through. “What about you, then? What’s your plan … or do you even have one?”

  Simulation Pyke gave a mocking smile. “Actually, I do. See that hoody protector you got tied around your waist? Ideal. Get that on, mess up your hair, scrape up some dust and grime and get your face grubbied up, and add some light scratches to forehead and cheek for extra grit. You should probably ditch Hokajil’s time-thrower, bit of a giveaway. Then go in there and bluff like a bastard!”

  Pyke had to admit, it had all his hallmarks and seemed to be the only vaguely workable plan going. The simulation-life in which the echoes of his crew were caught now seemed like a temporary reprieve.

  “So you weren’t really planning on surviv
ing, I take it,” he said as he tugged the hooded protector loose from about his waist.

  “Not our top priority, no,” said Sim-Pyke. “Either way, we don’t see ourselves coming out the other side—either the crystal gets smashed, which means game over, or the Legacy unlocks the reassembled crystal key and releases the nano-plague in which case, same outcome. So we’re just focusing on trying to throw as many spanners into the Legacy’s works …”

  Pyke slung the heavy rifle back over his shoulder—after a moment’s consideration, the time-thrower joined it. Then he bent down, wiped some grime from the filthy deck and smeared it over his face. Sim-Pyke smiled approvingly.

  “That’s it, the hard-bitten, surly, brusque demeanour,” he said. “I’ll be going invisible again, but I promise that if we can offer advice we will.” As he finished the sentence his form faded from view.

  “Reassuring, I guess,” said Pyke, moving towards the jammed doors. Just then a shape scuttled across the gap on the other side, making Pyke jump.

  “What the hell was that?” came Sim-Pyke’s voice in his head.

  “The grey-haired version of me said something about the Damaugra having parasites that he called cyberlice,” said Pyke. “I was expecting something like insects but that’s the size of a skagging turtle!”

  “Lovely. Extra-bulky vermin. Carry on.”

  Lifting one leg, Pyke stepped through the opaque veil into the low-lit foyer. The charred and burned smells were stronger here, sharper. Only a handful of ceiling glowdiscs were active, their stuttering illumination revealing padded seating around the walls, the smashed remains of a low table and other detritus. And a body lying face down over where the wall curved round to open on the bridge. Blood had pooled around the corpse and dark handprints had smeared along and down the nearby wall panels. Pyke sidled past it and gained his first view of the bridge of the Mighty Defender.