Forty seconds later, the main hold filled with light.
Internal comms tanked. Up in the control room, error signals jammed the boards. ‘Accept!’ Liv Hula told the pilot connexion. Nothing. She stuffed the wires into her mouth by hand. ‘Akphept!’ Too late. They were half in, half out when the connect halted. She pushed until she bled, but the system wouldn’t receive. Instead, Liv was snatched out of herself and began some long, identityless transit.
When things returned, she was seeing them via an exterior camera-swarm. Autorepair media raced along the brass-coloured hull like dust down a hot street. The stern assembly pulsed in and out of view. Outriggers, fusion pods, the tubby avocado-shaped bulge housing the Dynaflow drive: you could see the stars through them. From a source down there, where the holds and motors had once been, intermittent, washy-looking streams of plasma curved out into the dark, already an AU long and curved like scimitars. Liv felt sick. With the connector a lump of gold wire half-fused into the tissue of her soft palate, she was reduced to flicking switches. ‘Antoyne? Hello?’ No one responded. Inside the ship, engine rooms, holds, companionways, ventilator shafts, stairwells, winked out one by one. Go through the wrong door, who knew what you’d see? Liv was aware but blind. If you could blueprint grey on grey, that’s what filled the control room screens — a kind of luminous darkness where her spaceship had been. There was nothing there, but it had a strong sense of order.
‘Jesus, Antoyne,’ she said. ‘What are you fucking around with now?’
No one heard her.
Antoyne was enjoying a shit. Irene, who trusted Renoko as far as she could throw him, had zipped herself into a lightweight white eva suit, grabbed her favourite Fukushima Hi-Lite Autoloader from the weapons bar and, with a transparent bubble helmet under one arm, was making her way from the crew quarters to the main hold. Latticed stairways leaned at expressionist angles against the moody emergency light; in the rear companionways the ship’s gravity had become undependable. Communications were nonexistent. It was hard to tell which way was up. Irene, though, looked good with her close-fit suit, her determined expression and her flossy blond hair. ‘It’s hot as hell down here,’ she said. ‘Hello?’
She put her ear to the main hold doors.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Liv? Antoyne? I hear something!’ Setting helmet and Hi-Lite on the floor, she opened the door and stepped through.
Just as Liv heard Irene’s strange cries, the missing sections of the ship returned. Antoyne never knew any part of it had been gone. He appeared in the control room pulling up his trousers and together he and Liv ran through the Nova Swing, throwing themselves down stairwells as they tried to avoid pockets of deteriorating physics. The ship self-reassembled around them. Its hull rang and rang. The door to the main hold slid open on a vertical slice of lemon-yellow light: inside, some unacceptable transition was partially complete. There were oblique shadows, noises like sacred music, sparks on everything, a voice saying, ‘Fuck!’ Antoyne looked determinedly away from it all and at the same time reached in with one arm. It was a stretch, and he had to feel around aimlessly for a time, but eventually he got hold of Irene by one ankle and pulled her out.
‘Antoyne,’ she whispered, with a kind of puzzled matter-of-factness, ‘the universe isn’t what we think.’ She reached out a soft hand to Liv Hula, insisted, ‘Nothing here was made for us!’ Then, writhing about in Antoyne’s arms so she could see into his eyes: ‘Don’t look! Don’t look!’
‘He didn’t look,’ Liv reassured her.
She wasn’t sure if he did or not. The backs of her gums were bleeding where she had ripped the pilot connexion out. She could feel a lot of loose tissue up there. Sometimes Liv felt she had died a hundred lights back, on the mystery asteroid. Ever since, her nightmares were of being discovered by retrieval teams, lapped in faint ionising radiation at the junction of two corridors, an unreadable name stencilled above the faceplate of her eva suit. Day after day, plugged straight into the inner life of the hardware, she lay in the acceleration chair, always too cold, reviewing the internal surveillance data. Something had been wrong down there from the very first day of the Renoko contract, but with every new artefact they picked up, ship life had been less easy to observe. She had no idea if the Nova Swing could look after itself in its present condition.
‘The mortsafes!’ Irene screamed. ‘The mortsafes!’
Liv Hula slammed the main hold door and backed away from it carefully, holding out Irene’s Autoloader in both hands.
They dragged Irene back to the crew quarters. She was hanging by a thread the whole way, hallucinating and crying out. When they got there she made Fat Antoyne dress her in her newest clothes and carry her to a porthole. They couldn’t find a single mark on her, but she was slipping away so fast you could feel her go past you and out into empty space.
‘Those stars! So beautiful!’ she said, and closed her eyes. Her skin had a lead-coloured glaze. Antoyne, whose arm had felt weird since he thrust it into the hold, looked down at her and concluded she was already dead. But after a while she smiled and said: ‘Antoyne, promise me you won’t get a cultivar of me. If I have to die I want to die forever, here and now in this utterly for-real place.’ She seemed to think about it for a moment. Then she clutched his arm and said, ‘Hey, and I want you to find someone else! Of course I do! We should never be alone in this life, Antoyne, because that is what human beings are for, and you will have many experiences of love yet. But honey, I want you to lose me. Can you understand that?’
Antoyne, dumb with it already, said he could.
‘Good,’ she said.
She sighed and smiled as if that weight was off her mind. ‘Look out at those stars,’ she urged Antoyne again. And then, in a change of subject he could not follow: ‘All the shoes you can eat!’ She pulled herself up with her hands on his shoulders to get a look around the crew quarters.
‘Oh, Liv,’ she said. ‘And our lovely, lovely rocket!’
Antoyne felt himself begin to cry. All three of them were crying after that.
TWENTY FOUR
Spike Train
Three fifty am, the assistant visited Ou Lou Lu’s on Retiro Street, a venue added only recently to her night’s round. There she drank a cup of espresso, holding it in both hands and dancing thoughtfully to the sidewalk music the way R.I. Gaines had taught her, watching out for the flash of pre-dawn light above the city. When it came, she drove back over to Straint Street to talk to her friend and confidant, George the gene tailor. It was fine rain like fog. The Cadillac rolled down Straint, its 1000hp engine already turned off, and came quietly to a halt outside Sharp Cuts. The assistant — let’s call her the Pantopon Rose — tall, white-blond hair cropped to not much of anything — possessing the kind of height and fuck-off good looks which come naturally from the most radical tailoring — stepped out on to the sidewalk.
‘Hey, George!’ she called.
No answer. Her expression grew puzzled. The door hung wide open and the rain was blowing in from the street.
She could smell the dockyards. From the factories she could hear the sound of women clocking on for the early shift. The light had a yellow colour: it picked out the ceramic receiver of the reaction gun she now took out quietly, holding it down alongside her thigh. One instant she was outside, the next she was in, silent and motionless, smiling around. The chopshop seemed empty. Nevertheless she didn’t feel alone. Something was masking itself in the IR, RF, acoustic and active sonar regimes. It was near. She could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, but it wasn’t that. Something was in the room with her. It was impure in the sense it didn’t fit. It was the kind of thing that didn’t fit in and if you failed to grasp that you had already made a mistake. She couldn’t smell it, but she knew it had a smell. She couldn’t locate it, but she knew it had a location. Then came the whisper she almost expected, the amused voice from an empty corner:
‘My name is Pearlent —’
The assistant put a Chambers round exactly
where her systems placed the voice. A soft, coughing thud and the corner of the shop burst into rose and grey flames. Heat splashed back. In the shifting lick of that — the warm flicker of geometry followed by dark — she identified an object moving. It was a decoy. It was all over the room. It was all around her with —
— and the low, charismatic laugh of a rebuilt thing.
If it shot back she was dead. It was there, not there: there, not there. Then it was right in her face. Tall, with white-blond hair cropped to nothing much. The fuck-off body language of someone who can run fifty miles an hour and see in sonar. Someone whose very piss is inhuman.
It was herself.
It was gone. It was next to her yet out of range. For an instant everything hung suspended, then fell.
‘Christ!’ the assistant screamed. She redlined her equipment. She was quick enough to get a round off at the blur in the doorway. The round fizzed away like an angry cat and burst in the street. When the assistant arrived out there she found she had shot her own car. Flames were already reflecting in the window of the Tango du Chat, appearing curiously still, like cut-out flames, or flames in an old book. Spooked drinkers stared out. They hadn’t even begun to duck. She could hear running footsteps, but they were unhurried and already three streets away. That was something you might puzzle over later in your room, when you recalled a face just like your own glaring madly into yours from ten inches distance — permitting itself to be seen in five false-colour overlays, teeth bared and laughing with your own perfected fuck-off arrogance — and admitted just how far things had slipped away from you. You would be forced to express it, she thought, in a similar way to this:
But no one is quicker than me!
Back in the chopshop, a few scraps of orange light from the Cadillac fire slipped between the window-boards, barely touching the dusty counter, the shoot-up posters and powered-down proteome tanks. If light could be described as fried, the assistant thought, this was how it would look, this was how it would illuminate a bare resin floor and reveal the open eyes of the corpse. She knelt down. George had bled out an hour ago from a deeply penetrative wound in his right armpit, as if someone had come up from the floor at him — waited there all night, in complete silence in the photon-hungry dark on the dirty floor, then come up at him and driven one of their hands, fingers stiffened to make a cone, deep into his armpit. He looked almost relaxed, as if the worst thing he could imagine — the very thing he was most afraid of — had finally happened, thus relieving him of his anxieties at the same time as it confirmed them.
‘George,’ she whispered. ‘My poor George.’
It was, she imagined, something the Pantopon Rose might have said. If he had been alive, the assistant could have asked George his professional advice: ‘How can a person like me be shaking like this?’
Forty lights down the Beach, EMC’s crack grey ops team was doing a favour for a friend. The Levy Flight comprised a dozen ships, would take on anything. They gave the big No! to the psychopathic conformity of the typical K-pod. Instead they encouraged a shifting membership of ten- to thirteen-year-olds with an interest in Military Collectibilia of Old Earth. Their present mission might seem weird, even unhip, to today’s kids: until you realised that a hundred thousand years ago Panamax IV was inhabited by fuck-off telepathic reptile Aztecs from beyond the universe. That was the draw.
Planetary interdiction would normally require one of the Flight to lay off at the L2 point and from there co-ordinate the operations of the others. The mayhem at Panamax IV discouraged this. There being at least four parties to the conflict not counting the pod itself, fighting was going on in several locations at once, from five lights out in the neighbouring system — catalogued as Alpha 5 Flexitone — to the lower reaches of the Panamax parking orbit. EMC heavy assets thugged it out realtime with the Nastic 8th Fleet in a classic exchange of bumps which had already set fire to a nearby gas giant. Two dozen Denebian dipships mined the local sun. Dissident indigenes were arming scramjets and flying them into partial orbits straight off the factory floor; while a gut-shot Alcubiere battleship — the Daily Deals & Huge Savings, run by a privateer crew of New Men under the leadership of two Shadow Boys who shared the name ‘Fermionic Joe’ — tried to aerobrake its way down to the surface of the planet. That was how half the Levy pod, including Whiskey Bravo, Pizza Night, Fat Mickey from Detroit and Uptown Six, found itself banging about in atmosphere — no one’s preferred medium — at Mach 2 and below, negotiating airspace with one another as well with hostiles. The other half, strung out between Flexitone and the Panamax Oort cloud, ran interference, making all the usual plays through curled-up dimensions at picosecond speeds, flipping in and out of the 3D world as circumstance demanded.
‘ — incoming, four degrees over the ecliptic, two lights out.’
‘I have him.’
‘Steady. In contact. Steady, steady —’
‘Right underneath you, Fat Mickey.’
‘All his bases are ours.’
Viewing the Flight’s efforts — which, in quotidian time, came to him as little more than a coloured dapple of flat-plane lightning across hologram images of empty space, a few quiet voices in an FTL pipe, a historical record of things that had happened a million nanoseconds ago an astronomical unit away — R.I. Gaines was impressed by their calmness and skill. There was so much work for them out there, you got the feeling they were embarrassed. The quiet rhythms and stresses of their exchanges returned language to something reliable. By contrast, the embedded journalism AIs, their commentary piped in by the pilots themselves from commercial routers, were reporting: ‘There’s no let up for the Levy Flight. These boys wouldn’t want one. They want to work.’
‘Levy Flight are here to work,’ Peat Teeter told Tanky LaBrom. ‘Work improves the way they feel about themselves.’
By any measure they were too late. Alyssia Fignall’s hilltop dig had been vaporised before they arrived. Her house, too, was blowing around in the clouds of oily black grit produced by large-scale thermobaric exchanges. The fountain, the stone arches, the long cool spaces and luminous grey shadows of the cloister: all gone and maybe Alyssia with them. Below him now lay his last chance of finding her.
The town had aged since Gaines last saw it, like a photograph of a ruin subsiding into coastline. Somewhere upstream a dam had burst, forcing a million tonnes of water through La Cava in an hour. The karst system had fallen in on itself: the town had fallen into that. He couldn’t see how anyone could survive down there. But Carlo the K-captain had manoeuvred Uptown Six to within fifty feet of the greyish-brown turbulence, so Gaines gave him the respect of searching every remaining nook of stone. Right and left, other elements of the pod edged nervously about, trying not run into one another, so low they were dashed with spray. They looked wrong — like a lot of executioners at a birthday party, with an intense interest in people’s weight or how muscular their necks were — but they were doing their best to help, a class of behaviour that did not occur naturally to them. Daylight came and went suddenly and without reason. Incoming gamma would light up the local sky, take the top off a hill, dig a trench a kilometre long; then it would get dark again. At moments like that the K-ships shivered and hunted, outlines blurring as their stealth options cut in, weapons extruding with a kind of sluggish ferocity. Incoming gamma was more their kind of environment.
‘It’s mayhem down there,’ Carlo remarked. Then he warned one of the other ships, ‘Tanky, you’ve still got me off your starboard stern. Ten metres and closing. Keep up.’
Gaines watched the floating junk bouncing off buildings and bridges on its way down to the sea. ‘There’s nothing left here,’ he was forced to admit.
‘Jesus, Rig, I’m really sorry,’ Carlo said. ‘Hey, we can go lower! How would it be if we went lower?’
‘Get us out of here, Carlo.’
Carlo switched on the f-Ram drivers. All around the Uptown Six, the other ships were torching up. The Levy Flight stood on its stern and asce
nded through the clouds of radioactive ash at Mach 40. They spent a moment or two in the parking orbit, looking down. Someone up there — someone not so far away, with access to top-shelf assets — had lost their temper: Panamax, as Tanky LaBrom put it, was fucked. High volume X-ray devices quartered the crust, vaporising the first fifty metres on contact, then steadily melting the rest. Surface features higher than a couple of hundred feet were already a kind of geological paste, fairground scarlet at the leading edge and forcing itself across the remains of the landscape like a tongue between your lips. Plate tectonic activity was up. The atmosphere roared and whistled with heated gases. Gaines stared down, wishing he had understood his daughter as well as she had understood him. He remembered her saying, ‘Rig, these people were so old!’ and he wished there could be one single patch of unburnt ground left somewhere down there. As he thought about Alyssia, the Nastic cruiser — on the other side of the planet now, and only 50,000 feet up — switched on its gravity engine and drove itself into the softening crust. Physics ran wild. A huge bulge began to form on the surface beneath Uptown Six.
‘Fucking shit, guys,’ Carlo said, ‘he’s coming all the way through.’
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