When they eventually pulled apart, she kept hold of the fabric of his sleeve, unwilling to completely detach as he led her across the packed dirt of the landing field towards a heavily fortified concrete bunker set into the foot of the mountain.
Menacing kill drones patrolled the loops of glinting razor wire that marked the perimeter of the field, lenses whirring and weapon systems twitching in response to every movement in their field of vision. Human guards stood at the doorway to the bunker. They carried plasma rifles in the crooks of their arms, and none of them wore memory collars.
“This is our main facility,” Carloman said. “From here, we’ve been scanning the whole cosmos for The Exalted’s tachyon signals from the future.”
“That’s possible?”
They passed through a set of metre-thick steel doors, into the cool of the mountain’s interior.
“Of course. The signals have to be decipherable by our AIs. So, there’s no reason we can’t pick them up, given a working detector.”
“And did it work? Did you find them?”
His smile possessed the delight of a ten-year-old child. “Yes! We found them. I know which star the signals will come from. The last part of the puzzle.”
Amahle eyed the rock walls. “This seems like a lot of security. Are you worried The Exalted will come for you in this time?”
“No. The Exalted were never a physical threat. Who knows, if we’d ever put our memories on a collar for them to live, they might even be excited by our piquant adventure to bring about their demise.”
“Then all this . . .”
“The government of this country intended to use this place as a command centre in case of another asteroid impact. Smart idea, the odds of an asteroid hitting the same place twice are so low to be effectively zero. And it’s been useful.”
Amahle couldn’t help being impressed. “So, how did you get hold of it?”
“It wasn’t easy. I had to overthrow the government.”
“By yourself?”
“Not entirely. You and I aren’t the only ones who remember our past lives.” His grin became conspiratorial. “There are others. There have always been others. And over the centuries, I’ve been able to call on them for help. The AI that came here on Zenia’s colony ship didn’t have the von Neumann level of replication technology of Pastoria’s defence station, but some of the people who reincarnated with me here knew what to do. They helped me construct a viable tachyon detector.”
A heavily shielded elevator took them down into the ancient strata of the planet. Watching the rock layers slide past its transparent diamond walls, Amahle wondered if this world had ever evolved intelligent life of its own. Maybe whole civilisations had been born and lost before humans ever reached this distant outpost, their only traces crushed beneath the petrified sediment of deep time. Perhaps by the time The Exalted became aware of what she and Carloman were planning, the human race would represent nothing more than an additional layer of fossils and an expanding emissions shell.
They reached the bottom of the shaft and Carloman led her into a lush, tropical climate. The cavern seemed to stretch away forever in all directions. Whitewashed accommodation blocks with terracotta roofs could be glimpsed among the trees. Even after so much time and distance, she thought, we still live in the forest.
Carloman took her to his living quarters and she watched him change into a brightly patterned shirt and white linen suit. She’d half-expected him to pack a case or gather some belongings, but what would have been the point? If their desperate scheme succeeded, this version of reality would cease to exist and everything would be reset.
* * *
The command centre was a large room filled with workstations and immense display screens. The detector it monitored consisted of five petal-like structures a thousand kilometres across floating sedately in geosynchronous orbit around the planet. Spun from monofilament by molecule-sized spiders, each petal sieved the incoming cosmic radiation for tachyons, focusing any identified signals to receptors on the planet below, where they could be translated and interpreted by the compliant AI Carloman had installed in the depths of this mountain. The detector’s construction had been a huge achievement that had required the resources of an entire world. And that was one of the reasons Carloman had decided to hide the control centre down there in this old bomb shelter. The populace resented the derailing of their fragile economy, but the instruments were safe down there. These catacombs had been designed to survive the fall of civilisation: they would be enough to keep the tachyon detector and his followers safe from civil unrest.
Carloman gave a final speech to his assembled team. They numbered a couple of hundred devotees, and Amahle couldn’t help trying to guess which were aware of their reincarnations and which had simply been convinced of the justness of this cause. Carloman stood on the lip of a fountain in a communal garden. Orange fish drowsed in the water behind him as he spoke. “Compadres,” he said. “We have come a long way. When we first excavated these caverns, we were posing as contractors constructing a refuge for the planet’s political leaders. Then we became the political leaders. We put the entire economy on a war footing and told the populace the truth about the conflict in which we’re embroiled.”
He reached for Amahle’s hand. She reluctantly let him, recalling when he’d been Jacob Raymond DeVinesse, the poet on Farshire, who held his audience of estate workers enthralled with his energy and with the urgency of how their lives could be so much more.
“And now,” Carloman said. “The Light Chaser has arrived, bringing us the weapon to end this conflict and erase it from history.”
The crowd cheered. Amahle felt mildly embarrassed. This had been their private war for so long, she didn’t quite know how to cope with her new public status. But . . . this too will pass.
“And not only the weapon,” Carloman continued, “but also the delivery system. Her great, ancient ship, the tool of the oppressor, will be turned against them.”
His fingers were intertwined with hers, just as their souls were bound together. She had come so far to find him again. They were quite literally going to be spending the rest of their lives together.
A band played. People partied like it was the end of the world. Fireworks crackled over the forest canopy. And then they bade their farewells. They went back to the landing field and took her shuttle back up to the Mnemosyne. Stepping aboard felt strange with no AI or cat to greet her.
“Are you sure about this?” she said.
Carloman put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ve come this far. We’ve sailed across this universe for thousands of years. And during all that time, the only thing I’ve always been certain about . . .” His fingers rose to touch her cheek. “ . . . has been you.”
His dark eyes burned into her. Somewhere in their depths, Amahle sensed the man she had forgotten—the love of her artificially extended single life. Her husband, who had ignored the until death do you part clause in their marriage contract and instead pursued her through lifetimes of hardship and deprivation.
She took the proffered hand and kissed his knuckles.
“Then, let’s do this.”
“Yes.”
* * *
The Mnemosyne turned its back on cloud-shrouded Zenia and powered up its negative mass drive. At close to lightspeed, the voyage to its target star would take fifteen years. When it arrived, it would destroy itself in order to deliver the strangelet it carried to the heart of that sun, killing The Exalted before they had chance to evolve, before even their homeworld had a chance to form from an accretion disk. An act of destruction which would liberate the human race from its artificially imposed stasis.
Walking through the familiar corridors of her home, Amahle smiled to herself. Fifteen years was a long time. They might be facing certain death—and chronological erasure—but she and Carloman had time. Time to get to know each other again. More time together than they’d ever had before.
Time to say hello.
/>
Time to say goodbye.
When she reached the bridge, stars beyond count blazed on the display. But one star was swathed by angry scarlet icons: their target star, into which the Mnemosyne would hurl itself like a lance thrown into a dragon’s face.
Amahle let out a breath. That moment would be the end of this long, tragic life. But there would be others to be had amid a new timeline where The Domain wouldn’t even be a memory for most. Liberated humans would arise from the ashes of this reality and build a society which could advance towards its full potential. For the next fifteen years, she’d be able to watch her death approaching, the seconds of her existence ticking inexorably down to zero, but for some reason, the thought didn’t bother her.
She had a purpose now.
She had Carloman.
Always.
CODA
SHE WAS BORN KERRY FLANAGAN, but as she grew older, she started to recollect her other names; with them came the memories of lives past, in timelines that no longer existed. Nothing distinct, just faint images of exotic places—some charming, some savage. There were events, too, both trivial and momentous, the kind of fleeting recollections that most would dismiss as subconscious daydreams. She treated them philosophically; after all, this was a big universe woven with mystery. Maybe all my days have been a dream. What is, is. So, she just got on with life. After all, she had a goal now, one of the greatest of the age.
To the anxiety and proud approval of her parents and her younger brother Sam, she left home the day after her twentieth birthday and travelled to the Rakara district, a thousand kilometres east of where she’d grown up. The little fi-cab flew in low over the coast, giving her a splendid view of Vespaer’s equatorial mountains rising up out of the vast ocean. And there, right ahead of her, was Mount Cloren. From its raw rock pinnacle twenty-four kilometres above sea level, the slim golden thread of an orbital tower stretched up to geostationary orbit, right into the circular heart of the Eng-Fyha habitat cluster, that sparkled like a clump of first magnitude stars in the cloudless sky.
She smiled up at it, knowing that in a few months—perhaps a year—when her groundside training was complete, she would be ascending to those distant specks. A fleet of specialist Light Chaser starships were being assembled by the habitat manufactories, and soon they would fly to Ollansio, the white dwarf twins, to investigate their strange figure-eight band of particles.
The anomaly had been discovered over a century before by a Light Chaser ship from Winterspite. News which swept through The Human Dominion at point-nine lightspeed, carried by the myriad starships which connected all the thousands of settled planets in harmonious unity as they disseminated hard data and great gossip. There were many theories about the weird band of identical de-phased particles: relic of an alien race, true nanotechnology, an intrusion from a different dimension, a post-biological entity . . . The speculation was fascinating, many Human Dominion worlds were dispatching scientific exploration ships. As soon as she heard of it, Kerry knew this was why she was alive. Vespaer was a glorious world to live on but perhaps a little too comfortable. She wanted excitement and adventure, exploring the beautiful unknown to hammer on the door of cosmic mysteries. To be back in space, where I belong.
As it passed over the beach of pristine white sand, the fi-cab merged into the flow of similar vehicles that formed airborne traffic ribbons above the district’s canals. Rakara’s ancient waterways barely carried any actual boats these days, only tourist traps and meticulously crafted hobby vessels. Consequentially, the surface was awash with water lilies and their sweet flowers, adding to the district’s naturalistic vibrancy.
The fi-cab landed on the rooftop pad of a quaint old-fashioned accommodation block running alongside a minor canal. Kerry had only brought one bag with her, so she dismissed the waiting concierge bot and lugged it down the stairs by herself. Her four-room apartment, allocated by the Vespaer Astrophysics Bureau, had a nice fern-lined balcony overlooking the canal, and if she leaned out far enough, she could just see the ocean.
The house bot was unpacking the bag when there was a knock at the door. She opened it and immediately found herself smiling at the young man outside. In return, his grin was worshipful.
“Hi,” he said. “My birth name is Billy-Tu, but you can call me—”
“Carloman.”
About the Authors
Photograph of Peter F. Hamilton © Neil Lang; photograph of Gareth L. Powell © TomShot Photography
PETER F. HAMILTON began writing in 1987, and sold his first short story to Fear magazine in 1988. He has written many bestselling novels, including the Greg Mandel series, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, the Commonwealth Saga, and the Void trilogy, as well as several standalone novels, including Fallen Dragon and Great North Road.
GARETH L. POWELL writes science fiction about extraordinary characters wrestling with the question of what it means to be human. He has won and been short-listed for several major awards and lives in Bristol, UK, with his children.
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Also by Gareth L. Powell
THE EMBERS OF WAR SERIES
Embers of War
Fleet of Knives
Light of Impossible Stars
THE ACK-ACK MACAQUE TRILOGY
Ack-Ack Macaque
Hive Monkey
Macaque Attack
STANDALONE NOVELS
Ragged Alice
Silversands
The Recollection
COLLECTIONS
Entropic Angel and Other Stories (short fiction)
The Last Reef
NONFICTION
About Writing
Also by Peter F. Hamilton
THE GREG MANDEL TRILOGY
Mindstar Rising
A Quantum Murder
The Nano Flower
THE NIGHT’S DAWN TRILOGY
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSE
Misspent Youth
Pandora’s Star
Judas Unchained
THE VOID TRILOGY
The Dreaming Void
The Temporal Void
The Evolutionary Void
THE CHRONICLE OF THE FALLERS
The Abyss Beyond Dreams
Night Without Stars
THE QUEEN OF DREAMS
The Secret Throne
The Hunting of the Princes
A Voyage Through Air
THE SALVATION SEQUENCE
Salvation
Salvation Lost
The Saints of Salvation
THE ARKSHIP TRILOGY (AUDIO)
A Hole in the Sky
STANDALONE NOVELS
Fallen Dragon
Watching Trees Grow
Great North Road
COLLECTIONS
A Second Chance at Eden
Manhattan in Reverse
The Confederation Handbook
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
CODA
About the Authors
Also by Gareth L. Powell
Also by Peter F. Hamilton
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LIGHT CHASER
Copyright © 2021 by Rutland Horizon Ltd and Gareth L. Powell
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Ben Zweifel
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Lee Harris
A Tordotcom Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark ofMacmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-76981-7 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-76982-4 (trade paperback)
First Edition: August 2021
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Light Chaser Page 11