The Hydrogen Sonata c-10

by Iain M. Banks

  “Still making upward progress,” Berdle said calmly through the suit’s earbuds. “Relatively and… now absolutely.”

  The girl running towards Cossont looked shocked, her mouth hanging open as she glanced over the side. “You all right?” she asked as she knelt by Cossont, having to raise her voice over the screaming wind.

  Something burst from the surface of the waters, ten metres beneath, and rose towards them. It was vaguely human-shaped, but too big to be Berdle.

  “What the fuck?” the girl said.

  The whole airship seemed to shudder; the girl reached out to grab hold of a stanchion. The figure rising from the still falling waters — fifteen metres down now - rotated a little. It was Berdle, holding a naked man, supporting him with his own feet and an arm under his chest.

  “Reckoned the time for a stealthy approach was gone,” Cossont heard the avatar say as he landed beside her and the girl. “Barely had the AG to rescue this poor fellow.” The man he was holding had wide, terrified-looking eyes. He didn’t have a breather device in his mouth; he was coughing a lot. Berdle lowered him to the deck and the man clung to it, coughing up water. The girl patted his back.

  “Good day,” Berdle said to her, loudly, then held a hand out to Cossont. “Shall we?”

  Cossont got to her feet. “What’s happ—?”

  The whole fabric of the airship shuddered once more. Beneath, where the waters roared, fifty metres down, two explosions burst from the swirling waves.

  “Time to run!” Berdle said, turning and sprinting off along the walkway for a distant patch of light. “Follow me!”

  She raced off after him, vaulting the naked, coughing man and hammering down the walkway behind the avatar. Thin pillars of cerise light flicked into existence, splashing fire from the ceiling. One lanced through the walkway a metre behind Berdle’s flying feet; she jumped the resulting fist-sized hole.

  “One right turn at the next junction, steps up dead ahead,” she heard his voice tell her. “I’ll join you momentarily.”

  Then the avatar put out a hand, caught hold of one of the walkway’s supporting chains and was lifted off his feet and spun round, just as another pink bolt pierced the walkway immediately ahead of him. He dropped over the side of the walkway, at first falling, then curving away through the darkness and the everywhere roar of water. Light glittered again inside the tank as two shapes rose twisting though the air beneath, filling the space with hair-thin shining filaments.

  She put her head down, pounded along the wildly swinging gantry, skidded round the corner at the junction and saw a short flight of steps leading up through the ceiling.

  The storm of air howling down through the hole in the ceiling made it almost impossible to make any headway. She needed all four arms to pull herself upwards on the chain bannister rails, and all the strength in her own legs and the suit’s to force her way up the metal steps. Small pieces of debris came hurtling down from above and hit her shoulders or bounced off her head, hurting her even through the thin covering of suit-helmet.

  “Ow! Fuck!” she said, though the scream of air tearing around her was so loud she couldn’t actually hear anything else.

  She made the deck above, threw herself onto the soft, carpeted floor under subdued lighting and rolled away from the torrent of air being sucked howling into the emptying cavern beneath. Around her — in what looked like a very large, complicated, low-ceilinged room — terrified-looking people were staring wide-eyed at her over the top of luxuriously sculpted pieces of pale furniture. A man and a woman were sitting on a nearby couch, feet braced against the floor, causing rumples in the carpet, their fingers clawing into the soft material of the cushions they sat on. The couch itself was jerking and sliding across the floor, towards the hole. The woman closed her eyes. The man opened his mouth in what was probably a scream but there was too much other noise to tell.

  Cossont used all four hands to claw her way across the floor. Something white came whirling towards her; she ducked instinctively as a fat square pillow bounced over her and disappeared into the maelstrom around the aperture in the floor. Where it had come from, twenty metres away, part of the floor gave way and a set of couches and chairs holding maybe a half dozen people disappeared, sucked downwards into the darkness.

  “Berdle?” she yelled. But she didn’t even know if he’d be able to hear her — she couldn’t hear herself.

  The first problem was getting all the bits and pieces out of the way, so there would be room for itself.

  Actually, who was it kidding? The first problem was all about not blowing up the world, or at the very least not annihilating both itself, fifty horizontal kilometres of Girdlecity, who-knew-how-many lives locally and immediately, and then an additional who-knew-how-sizable number over a significant proportion of the rest of the planet with the resulting fireball, blast front, secondary debris impact events and all the resulting ancillary fire, tertiary impact and ground-shock effects.

  Another fucking day at the office, the ship thought, putting all such thoughts to one side and cascade-checking all the available variables, before just doing it.

  There were fourteen craft and over eighty individuals in the fifteen hundred metres of tunnel which started one hundred metres behind the stern of the Equatorial 353. The first task was Displacing them safely. Or at least quickly. The quickly mattered more than the safely, and one of the larger craft, containing nine or ten people, picked up rather more relative velocity at the far end of the Displace than the Mistake Not… would have liked, sending the flier flicking forward by a couple of extra metres per second as it bounced in. That might mean broken limbs if the occupants weren’t restrained, but that was the worst of it; everything else transitioned relatively smoothly.

  The space was clear. The ship went for it, jumping across into real space in a single vast snap, as precisely aligned as possible in the circumstances and the time available, its enclosure fields shrunk, sucked, wrapped as tight as they would go about itself, leaving it with maybe fifty metres all around it between the outermost of those tightly compressed fields and the nearest bit of Girdlecity solidity. There was an important part of the whole process that depended on something called — only slightly misleadingly — the singularity-expansor transfer component. The ship finessed that as well as it could, but this time its own safety — not to mention the safety of the Girdlecity, millions of people, the planet, etc. — trumped technical perfection, so the expansion ended up being relatively rough and ready, and undeniably abrupt.

  The ship blew into existence almost explosion-fast, creating a vast pulse of air that tore out through the fortunately dispersed structure of the open-work tunnel and the surrounding architecture of the Girdlecity, bowling people over, sending nearby aircraft tumbling, shattering antique windows and denting cladding panels for hundreds of metres about it.

  Messy, the Mistake Not… would be entirely prepared to concede, but never mind. In the end it had worked and it was where it had wanted to be; in the same huge basket-weave tunnel as the airship Equatorial 353, just a hundred metres behind it.

  ~What idiocy is this? the captain of the Churkun sent.

  ~A fitting idiocy, the ship replied. ~I fit. You won’t. And if I need to I can put my enclosure right around the airship from here, so I suggest you leave me be. Out.

  The blast of air seemed to have relented a little, if only because more floor panels had given way, providing additional routes for the air to escape through. The two people on the couch that had been slipping towards the hole in the floor had scrambled up and over the back of it, crawling away; the couch itself had stopped moving.

  “Berdle!” Cossont screamed. No reply. It was still bedlam but at least now she could hear herself. She saw another stairway, spiralling upwards ten metres away, behind the nearest semi-circle of chairs. She got onto one knee, heaved herself upright and leaned into the still-furious gale, forcing herself forward, straining to see any more debris coming her way.

 
Another shudder ran through the whole airship, sending her flying. She heard herself yelp as she fell, being blown backwards, caught in the lacerating torrent of air; she dropped to the floor and held on again, cursing.

  * * *

  Agansu pushed himself up against the pummelling force of the water, finally getting to all fours. The android body was gauging, calibrating, allowing for the vast pressing weight surging across it. It could still function, and its AG should still be effective. Walls burst, the floor gave way in a variety of places nearby, letting in a little more light, allowing the surging fall of water to escape.

  The remaining arbite reported when Agansu pinged it.

  ~Holding approximately steady in downward course of water, it told him.

  ~Attempt to rise, he told it. ~Head for the top of the tank. I shall too.

  The suit let him stand, unsteady, shuddering, in the torrent. Agansu saw two broken-looking bodies being swept past, naked.

  He activated the AG, lifted off the floor, and began to make his way, quivering, battered from all sides, up through the chaotic swirl of the descending column of water.

  He and the remaining arbite burst from the surface of the water into a great dark space more than sixty metres high and hundreds across, buffeted by swirling winds.

  High above, just beneath a randomly pierced ceiling, a rig of metalwork gantries hung suspended. Some figures moved up there.

  ~Avatar-android identified, the arbite told him as they rose, accelerating, together.

  ~Fire, destroy it, he told the arbite.

  Violet bolts seared through the air, sparking explosions from the ceiling; sparks and pieces of glowing debris fell towards them. Two figures were running, overhead.

  ~Target employing visual camouflage fields, the arbite reported, still firing as they rose. Next thing, the leading figure — a composite haze of images, like a stacked pack of ghosts — fell or threw itself from the gantry and came whirling down through the turmoil of air and falling debris towards them, light glittering from it.

  The colonel realised suddenly, only at this point, that he had lost the kin-ex side-arm. He had no idea exactly when or where. This was upsetting. The android body had its pair of forearm-mounted lasers — but he doubted they would prove especially effective after what had happened at Bokri. The arbite fired at the falling figure, seeming to hit it. Agansu raised his arms, aiming at the other running figure, then, in a single staggering impact and a wash of white, was hit by something, and sent tumbling.

  He was aware of falling, somersaulting. He steadied himself, or the suit did. He didn’t know. When he was floating in mid-air, he looked around and could see nothing of the last arbite or the figure that had dropped from the gantry. Below, in the great swirl of water and dashing, chaotic waves, there were the fading remains of what might have been two large splashes on the dark waters.

  ~Arbite, report, he said.

  “Comms internal only,” the android body told him. Agansu felt groggy. And odd: strange, unbalanced. He looked at his right arm, which was not there. He stared. The arm ended at about midway on the upper part. The stump was still smoking.

  ~Arbite… marine oper— he started to say, still unsure regarding what had happened.

  “Comms internal only,” the android body repeated.

  “Yes, of course,” Agansu said, looking inside himself to monitor the body’s operational state. Severely compromised. AI substrate intact, obviously: AG, conventional locomotion and one arm and one laser left.

  ~Upwards, he thought, and ascended through the bruising cataract of air.

  “Ximenyr? Where’s Ximenyr?” she yelled, crouched down by the frightened-looking man in front of her He was clad in one of the dark tunics, and holding grimly on to a desk as the air rushed past. This level, one up, looked like the foyer of some exclusive hotel. Getting up here had been a little easier than her last ascent as the storm of air gradually lessened. It was still fierce enough.

  “Where’s Ximenyr?” she shouted again over the roaring. The man just shook his head.

  She turned away, muttered, “Suit, any idea?”

  “Interrogating local systems,” the suit said, still in Berdle’s voice. “Mr Ximenyr’s suite is this way; please follow.”

  The suit seemed to raise itself. It faced a broad, well-lit corridor. She walked with the suit, then started to jog through the noticeably thinner air. “Switching to supplemental oxygen supply, ten per cent,” the suit announced. She felt something connect delicately with her nostrils; a cool draught hit the skin there.

  “Still trying Berdle?” she asked the suit.

  “Constantly,” it told her, in his voice. “Here,” the suit said, drawing them both to a stop at a double doorway. “Open?” it asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Opening,” the suit said, and the doors slid apart.

  Oh shit, the ship thought to itself.

  The Mistake Not… had lost contact with all of its devices on and in the airship, including its own avatar. It was busily scattering new surveillance stuff all over the place now, as fast as it could, but it might already be too late.

  The airship Equatorial 353 was riding as high as it could go, tearing its upper surfaces to shreds along the giant grater that was the ceiling of the huge open tunnel, shedding panels and pieces of equipment as it ground slowly to a stop, all the while dropping what looked like megatonnes of water from its lower reaches: whole falls, giant cascades of water were issuing from its sides, while further sheets and folds of water fell straight down from its ventral line, taking bulkhead panels and entire sections of hull with them, falling, spinning slowly away in the colossal squall of rain. The airship ground to a stop, trapped against the ceiling of the tunnel. Water continued to gush from its lower hull.

  Crushed, broken bodies littered the network of pipes, girders and structure beneath the stricken craft. Not all were dead; the ship Displaced what medical support drone and life-saving equipment it had to those still able to be saved.

  There were a lot of drone-like military devices floating about the place — over two hundred and forty of them. They were making a nuisance of themselves; sixty-four had already tried attacking its outermost bump-field with X-ray lasers — though exactly why and with what hope of success, the ship was unable to work out; maybe they’d all gone mad — plus all of them now seemed to be working themselves up to attack it again with some other piece of seed-shootery nonsense, so, once it had despatched all its medical teams, it targeted all of the enemy drones, disabling each with a pinpoint granule of plasma fire and instantly — even before they could explode properly — wrapping them individually in Displace fields and swatting them into hyperspace, directed roughly towards where the Churkun was — it assumed they were its.

  There might be more of these aggravations inside the airship, it supposed. It still couldn’t see within the vessel properly and its devices were taking their time getting inside.

  Fuck this, the Mistake Not… decided, and sliced a tiny cone, less than a couple of metres deep and the same across, off the very stern of the airship with a millimetrically flourished ZPE/b-edged destabiliser field. The cone fell away in a cloud of sparkling grey. No bodies sliced in half, which was good, but there was still 4D shielding ahead. The ship cut again; three metres this time, still with no casualties, or result.

  The zero-point energy/brane edging component seemed be handling the 4D shielding well; much less blow-back than it had been led to expect from the simulations. The Mistake Not… was growing more confident using the weapon. This time it cut twenty metres off the stern of the crippled airship and held the resulting hull section in a maniple field, lowering the conic section to the soaking, pooled floor of the tunnel, trying to avoid laying it on any of the bodies.

  Finally.

  It was past the shielding. It could see into the interior of the airship. It could already tell there were a lot more dead and dying bodies inside, though no more annoying drone military.

&
nbsp; ~Berdle? Anybody? it asked.

  Ximenyr’s suite or not, the man himself wasn’t there.

  “No persons present,” the suit told her.

  She looked around. Some sort of sitting or reception room. The place looked banal, in a spacious, luxurious, understated sort of way. Quite different from the sumptuous, over-dressed surroundings she and Berdle had found The Master of the Revels in the last time they’d been in the airship.

  “What about that… chest, thing, Berdle mentioned?” she asked.

  She moved towards another set of double doors. The lights flickered in the suite, seeming almost to fail, then recovering.

  “Item fitting description in adjacent cabin, facing,” the suit said helpfully just before it opened the doors for her.

  Still nobody about. One giant octagonal bed; many curtained alcoves, some holding items of furniture. In one stood the big upright chest Berdle had talked about earlier.

  It was about as tall as she was and maybe a metre wide and deep when closed. It had a small wheel at each corner and stood hinged open to about ninety degrees. Clothes on a rail filled most of one side; the other side was all drawers.

  She opened the top drawer, going up on tiptoe to see inside. The little cylinder lay on a piece of soft, folded material along with the rest of the bits and pieces that had been on the necklace they’d seen ten days earlier.

  She stared at it, picked it up.

  Behind their little window of thick crystal, the pair of sea-green orbs that had looked like berries seemed to stare back at her.

  “Anomalous pres—” the suit began.

  Then two things happened.

  She was struck — kicked, it felt like — in the back, very hard, though somehow she and the suit managed to stay standing. At the same time something burst brightly, pink and white, off the drawer-front immediately before her, about level with the middle of her chest.