by Adam Roberts
Somebody had shot Bar-le-duc with a piece of heavy ordnance. This had literally, and horribly, chopped his body in two. The shot had broken in through the wall of the bubble – and smashed the docked sloop in half too. Using goddess-alone-knew-what advanced targeting technology, somebody outside the bubble had locked onto Bar-le-duc, and fired a superfast projectile through the wall of the globe right through him.
Almost as pressing a question as who? was – how? But more pressing than either was: what shall we do to stop this haemorrhage of air?
Diana saw that she was being sucked towards the breach in the wall of the globe. She saw three of Bar-le-duc’s men wriggling in flight, all pulled along the same trajectory. The fourth man was nowhere to be seen. He had been standing, she recalled, near where the gash in the side of the wall now was, so presumably he had been obliterated.
Whirlwind.
The RACdroid was leaning in their direction, although it had anchored itself automatically to the guy-cable.
Sapho, weirdly parti-coloured – sprayed red down one side only – was flying at a tangent to Diana. Dia saw her land in amongst the threshing bushes, waving her arms to absorb the impact, and struggling to hold on.
The vagaries of the impact had thrown Iago in the opposite direction to the breach – Diana saw him disappear into the miniature forest. Like Sapho, he looked as though a spray gun had coated him with a fine mist of red paint.
That red had been Bar-le-duc, moments before.
It occurred to Diana that Iago must be being sucked out of the second hole. Because there must be an exit breach to correspond to the entry point. The projectile having entered and bisected the globe must have punched through on the far side – that was why Iago was sucked away in that direction. That meant his death. He had vanished; he must be floating airless and blasted in empty vacuum. But it meant their deaths too – no globe this size could survive two major breaches. The air would drain like water through a sieve. They had moments, only, left.
They were all going to die. The thought crystallised briefly in Diana’s mind: Iago said this was the choice! To go with Bar-le-duc, or for everybody to die.
She collided against the side of the sphere with enough force to punch the air out of her lungs. Rebound-bounced. Span three sixty. She caught sight of one of Bar-le-duc’s men vanishing into the projectile’s entry-hole. The fellow threw his arms wide, his face a rictus of panic, and clawed at the lip of the hole, trying to hold on. But the sides were slippery, the curved edge of the gash worked against him, and the force of air too strong. He scrabbled for a moment, and then he was gone. As she hurtled diagonally across the mouth of the hole Diana saw, briefly, right down it – into a chaos of swirling spaceship metal fragments and rubbish, and beyond that into blackness.
A hole in the fabric of the world and all air and heat and life swooshing through it.
All around her people were yelling; their mouths working and flexing. She could even, just about, hear the wah-wah-wah of their words, though smothered and distorted beyond comprehension by the huge noise of gushing air.
A second impact, cushioned by the foliage. Diana clung to the springy branches, and felt the whole stretch of bush heave as if about to come away from the wall. But it stayed where it was, and she clung for her life. The two remaining Bar-le-duc men had found similar gripping points.
As she turned her head to scan the chaos inside the dome, she saw something massy and angular fly through the air. This object, whatever it was, struck one of the two men on the head. The collision deflected it only marginally – it was clearly very massy – and it zoomed towards the breach.
Had it reached the gap face on, it would have slipped straight through. But Providence, or the goddess, determined that it reached the gap in such an orientation that its angular corners jammed in the aperture. The ambient roar of air changed timbre, rose a little. The wall bulged; but the obstacle stayed put.
There was still a great wind, tugging at Diana and trying to suck her into space, and death; but now that the hole was partially blocked, its force was diminished somewhat.
And, unexpectedly (wait a minute! Shouldn’t he be dead?) – here was Iago himself. Alive! Not sucked into space through the exit breach after all, but flying from the far side of the bubble and holding in his arms a gelsheet.
He reached the breach, and covered the whole area with the sheet, in one smooth motion. The sheet spread itself, its edges searching for the circumference of the gap, not in the least incommoded by the heavy object rammed in there.
In a moment the breach was sealed.
Silence rang like a bell in Diana’s ears.
She was gasping hard, pulling at the air with lungs that didn’t seem to be working.
Iago kicked off again, and passed in straight-line flight to a storage chest set in amongst a patch of heather against the wall. It took him only a moment to dial up the reservoir-air, and with a gorgeous gushing sound the pressure inside the bubble began to rise.
White noise. Breathing slowly became easier.
Breathe.
Breathe.
Diana gulped. Her inner ear snapped right, left, and the quality of sound shifted downward. Her heart was wiggling frantically in her breast.
She gathered enough of her wits to take stock. The space inside Iago’s ‘Dunronin’ looked like a shaken snowglobe: all manner of floating detritus and leaves and (ugh!) globules of blood circling slowly through sluggish air.
Sapho was clinging to a bush on the far side of the bubble. At least she was safe! Two of Bar-le-duc’s original four men had vanished into space, but that still left two inside the house with them. One was hanging on a branch not far from Diana; the other was in motion, scrambling away to the far side of the world, with his weapon in his hand.
They were armed, of course. Her heart gulped and hurried.
And there was Iago: his face a mask of intense fury. She had never seen him look so fierce before. He kicked off against the storage trunk, and flew straight towards her. Grabbed her shoulders. ‘Are you alright?’ he demanded. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, breathlessly. ‘How did you seal the second hole?’
‘Second hole?’
‘The exit hole – oh, yargo, I thought you’d been sucked out! I thought you’d been sucked out of the far side and were dead!’
‘There’s no exit hole,’ he said, looking briefly puzzled. And then, kicking off against the side, he leapt to the man hanging nearby. He grabbed him not by the shoulders but the neck.
‘How?’ he yelled. Diana had never seem him lose his temper before – she had lived with him, effectively, for years – close-quarters – and she had never seen him lose his temper before. The effect was made more appalling by the fact that he was painted all over with a glistening, scarlet, sticky coating. ‘How? How did he know where I was?’
‘He knows you have the FTL,’ the man gasped.
Iago’s eyes widened momentarily. Then he said: ‘What?’
‘He said so. He said it! The Ulanovs don’t know, or they’d have sent an army to take this place. Monsieur wanted to seize you by himself, and take you as a prize to his masters.’
This was the man who had been thumped by the chunk of flying debris – whatever that had been. The gash was deep in his forehead, and prongs and dabs of blood oozed from it. Globs broke from the end of this liquid extrusion to join the general aerial throng of scarlet droplets. Indeed, the blow seemed to have stunned him. He glanced across at his colleague. He had one arm hooked around a bush, and in his other hand he held his weapon. But he looked unsure what to do with it.
Iago didn’t let go of the man’s neck. ‘What’s your name?’
‘My name?’ he repeated, stupidly.
‘Yes your name!’ yelled Iago.
‘Mahyadi Panggabean,’ said the man.
‘Indonesian?’
‘I come,’ Mahyadi Panggabean said, slurring the words a little, ‘from a settlement called Acc
ess 17, which orbits . . .’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ snarled Iago. ‘You know what I mean. Your line traces back to Indonesia?’
The man tried to wipe blood from his eyes, and in doing so only spread it more completely about his face. Blinking and wrinkling up his brow into ridges and valleys. He made a series of whimpering sounds. ‘I know what you’re really asking,’ he said. ‘I know. There are lots of Indonesians working for Clan Yu, it’s true. But there are Indonesians working for all the Clans – Gongsi, too.’
There was a really bestial ferocity in Iago’s manner. Diana actually flinched a little, just watching it. He took hold of Mahyadi Panggabean’s head and shook the fellow’s whole body, like a doll, in mid-air. The fellow moaned, and blood began coming more fluently from his head wound. ‘Is this a Transport move?’ Iago shouted. ‘Is this the Clan Yu trying to grab the FTL for themselves? Is that why you came?’
‘Sukarno!’ Mahyadi Panggabean wailed, evidently calling to his colleague. But although the other man had a weapon in his hand, he did nothing but cower deeper into the foliage growing against the wall.
‘He won’t shoot,’ Iago snarled. ‘He won’t shoot me, because he’s been told either I’m taken alive or he’ll be killed himself. Am I right, Sukarno?’ he called across. ‘They want me alive or they will be wroth. They want me alive for what they think is in my head. And he Sukarno won’t shoot anybody else here, because he knows,’ Iago was yelling. ‘He knows that if he does I – will – literally – cut the flesh from his bones. I will flay him alive with my sharp-edged glass knife.’ Sukarno shrank deeper into the greenery. ‘Tell me who sponsored this raid?’
‘Don’t—’ cried the man.
‘Was it Clan Yu? Tell me.’
‘Clan Argent!’ Mahyadi Panggabean screamed, as if the words were being wrenched from him. ‘They will execute me for telling you! It was them!’
Iago released the man. The fellow started rotating slowly in space, his hands to his face, making no effort to reach out and correct his orientation.
‘Clan Argent,’ Iago said, in a steady voice. All the rage had instantly vanished from his manner.
‘Everything is in turmoil. The Ulanovs have recognised a new head of the Clan – the two old leaders have vanished, the rumours say dead,’ gabbled the rotating man. ‘Something so dangerous, this new weapon – the survival of humanity. That’s what Monsieur said! It cannot be uninvented, sir. So which is a better environment in which to contain so terrible a thing? The new leader of the Clan will support the Ulanovs, repressive though they be. Better that than the chaos of civil war, or revolution – and such a weapon in general circulation? If the Ulanovs are deposed, it will be war System-wide. In such a maelstrom, what if one faction or another chances upon . . . this thing?’
‘This thing,’ repeated Iago.
‘This FTL,’ gasped the fellow.
With a series of deliberate gestures, Iago wiped the smeary blood from his face and hands. He looked up and down the interior of his ruined house.
‘Mr Sukarno,’ Iago shouted, without turning his head to look at the bushes where the man was hiding. ‘You can come out, now. I’m not going to harm you.’
‘I have a gun, Mr Glass!’ came Sukarno’s quavery voice from out of the vegetation.
‘I know you do. That doesn’t make any difference now.’
‘I have killed men, Mr Glass!’
‘But you’re not going to kill anybody here today,’ Iago replied. ‘Come out of the bushes. I shall not kill you. It is true that I will have to leave you here. In my house I mean, for a few weeks at least. But there’s plenty of ghunk, and it’s a pleasant environment, and fruit will start growing in a week or so. I promise you I will alert the authorities and they will rescue you. Although presumably they know you are here.’
‘I don’t believe they do,’ said Sukarno. ‘Mr Bar-le-duc wanted to capture you himself, and receive all the bounty. I don’t believe he informed the authorities where he was going.’
‘It that case I shall notify them that you are here.’
There was a pause. ‘They will not be pleased to discover that Mr Bar-le-duc is dead!’
‘No,’ said Iago. ‘No they will not.’
Sukarno came out of the bushes, and gave himself a gentle foot-push to fly over to where the others were. There was so much red in the air that he could not avoid becoming coated in it as he passed.
‘I apologise for the damage to your house, sir. Only Mr Bar-le-duc said he was certain that you did possess the FTL,’ said Mahyadi Panggabean. His injured head wobbled awkwardly on its neck. ‘He was quite certain of that.’
Did he tell you the nature of our relationship?’ Iago asked.
‘He did – sir.’ It was remarkable, to Diana, how easily these two men had fallen into roles subordinate to her Iago. That she still tended to think of him as a servant made this odder. But she knew what was happening, of course. Bar-le-duc had dosed his men with CRFs. This made them loyal, and eroded their capacity for initiative and independent action. Now that their master was dead they were at a loss. By acting decisively, Iago tapped into their raw certainty-seeking brain chemistry.
‘Mr Glass,’ said Sukarno, taking hold of his colleague, to stop his slow drift and spin. ‘Permit me to ask. Do you have the FTL?’
A flicker of Iago’s former fury sparked again. ‘Do you honestly think I’d be sitting around here if I had a functioning faster-than-light drive? You think I’d be risking torture and death at the hands of the Ulanovs? If I did possess FTL, I’d have a ship that could outrun any Tachyon Thrust, wouldn’t I? No police sloop could ever catch me. I could leave altogether. I could shake the dust of the Solar System from my boots and explore the whole galaxy. Couldn’t I? Wouldn’t you?’
The men looked at their own boots.
‘Is that really what you would do?’ Diana asked.
‘Wouldn’t it solve two problems in one go?’ he replied. ‘Assume I possess a working FTL, and the knowledge how to make it. By flying to a distant star I would remove the danger of both from humanity; and keep myself safe, at the same time.’
‘You don’t have the FTL,’ said Diana. ‘So why did this Bar-le-duc think you did?’
‘Another question,’ Iago returned. ‘An even more pressing one.’
‘What?’
‘Who killed him?’
The first thing was to check the damage. Iago unpacked a giant filter fan, and began drawing the air inside the bubble through its meshes. Slowly at first, but then with greater rapidity, the rubbish and blood droplets in the air were cleaned away. Breathing no longer involved coughing on fragments of leaves, or choking (horribly) on iron-tasting gobs of red. In fact, the device’s filter clogged up not once but three times as it strained to clean the whole, so cluttered was the space inside that sphere. Each time it jammed Iago slid the filter free and scraped a goo of lumpy black into a plastic sack. Meanwhile, Sapho wrapped a bandage around Mahyadi Panggabean’s injured head, folding it and arranging it to leave his eyes clear, like a white balaclava.
The seal around the breach was sound. There was a small panic when the airlock door – ten metres or so from the breach – refused to open. It took a good deal of wrenching to get it to swing free. ‘The metal of the joint and the hinges has been deformed,’ Iago said, holding his crowbar like a sword. ‘Unsurprising considering the violent forces that have acted upon this sphere.’
But they got it open in the end. That meant they could see that the Red Rum, on the far side, was undamaged. Its air pressure was still good, and all its electrics were working. But the ship on which Bar-le-duc had arrived was completely shattered. The path of the fatal projectile – whatever it was – had intersected Bar-le-Duc’s ship as well as his body, spilling its contents in a glittery cloud and rending the remaining spaceship metal in great petal-edged gapes. The decompression over there had been complete; the structural failure instantaneous and catastrophic. Nobody could have survived.
All five of them crowded inside the Rum’s hold and gawped at the damage. Iago asked the House AI to check for activity outside, but it reported nothing. ‘That only means,’ said Diana, ‘that the sloop that shot at us is well camouflaged. That’s all that that means.’
‘Bar-le-duc’s ship was connected to ours,’ Diana said, gazing in horror. ‘It’s lucky it didn’t simply rip Red Rum off the airlock, or we would have been stranded here.’
‘It will have applied unusual structural stresses to the Rum,’ said Iago. ‘We’ll have to check it carefully before we think of flying away. But that’s not my main worry.’
‘What is your main worry?’
‘Look at the damage,’ was Iago’s instruction. ‘Do you see?’
Diana didn’t see at first, and looked again. Then she saw. ‘Oh goddess,’ she muttered, turning to look back through the airlock into the bubble.
Sukarno was also there, as were Mahyadi Panggabean and Sapho. ‘We should leave now,’ said Sukarno. ‘Whoever is out there might shoot again at any moment.’
‘Fool,’ said Sapho. ‘They can shoot a space ship, as it runs, as easily as they can shoot a shanty bubble.’
Mahyadi Panggabean spoke slowly. ‘Perhaps the ship that launched this attack upon your bubble has flown away? For indeed, if it is still out there in space, we might wonder why it has not fired again.’
‘Think,’ said Iago. ‘Look at the evidence. The beam of this weapon, or the path of this projectile, was powerful enough completely to smash your sloop, to punch through the wall of my home bubble, and to turn your late employer into red steam. Such a blast would easily be powerful enough to smash through the antipode point on my sphere. It would, in point of fact, necessarily have drilled right through.’