by Paul McAuley
Ori was good at visualising spatial relationships. She imagined the globe of the world sunk to its waist in the flat disc of its rings, tilted at a slight angle towards the spark of the sun, so that it was also tilted with respect to the big disc of dust and debris of the belt behind it. Then she imagined that tilted world trundling in an arc that took it above the plane of the belt . . .
She said, ‘I think I see it.’
Lato said, ‘And do you see how it affects the way the enemy attacks us?’
‘The enemy live in the belt,’ Ori said. ‘At night we’re tipped one way against the belt. And by day we’re tipped in the opposite direction. So if the enemy comes straight at us along the plane of the ecliptic, where they hit will depend on the time of day.’
‘Basically,’ Lato said. ‘Although it’s more complicated than that, of course. Nothing travels in a straight line over long distances in any kind of gravity well . . . There. You see?’
It was a faint point of light, a new star suddenly flaring slightly above the faint band of the Belt, to the west of the star Sirius. It must have been moving fast, because it drew a streak across the darkness before it guttered out. Ori started to ask what it was, but then more stars appeared, streaking out in every direction from a central point, fading one by one even as more were born.
The display lasted for about ten minutes. A few of the stars were very bright, drawing streaks of pure white light across the sky that faded out to oranges and reds. Gradually, fewer and fewer stars appeared, stragglers flaring one by one at longer and longer intervals until at last the sky was quiet and dark again.
‘The enemy,’ Ori said.
‘Some of them.’
‘But they aren’t supposed to arrive for ninety hours.’
‘Nor will they. Those were outriders. Suicide probes discovering the limits of our defences. And those defences are a long way out, far beyond the orbits of Cthuga’s outermost moons. It always happens the same way,’ Lato said. ‘The enemy sends probes straight at our defences, and the defences destroy them. And then the second wave comes, trying to push through holes identified by the first wave. What we try to do is make deliberate holes in our defences, so that the enemy will punch through in places of our choosing. Places where we can be ready for them.’
‘They always do it the same way?’
‘So far. Maybe they’re not very smart. Or maybe they just don’t care about their losses, like the commander says. Maybe they figure that sooner or later they’ll overwhelm us.’
The night sky vanished. Ori pushed to her feet, thanked the veteran for showing her the battle.
‘That? It wasn’t anything,’ Lato said, and handed Ori a strip of patches. ‘Slap one on your arm, you’ll sleep nice and deep and wake up ready for anything. You’ll need it. They’ll be here soon.’
A day and a night passed. The entire crew was kept busy with preparations for combat. The drone jockeys spent most of their time in their immersion chairs, running simulations in which they lured a variety of enemy probes and other craft into killing zones where the predators could pick them off. Ori and the rest of the new recruits kept getting knocked out before they spotted probes, and the True predator pilots ragged them about it. New recruits were also bad luck, according to the pilots. They were strange attractors that generated all kinds of chaos that was best kept way out front, away from everyone else.
‘Some of you can fly a little, but none of you can fly well enough.’
‘You’re only here because there wasn’t time to raise new batches of real drone jockeys.’
‘Let’s hope the enemy has a sense of humour. Maybe they’ll die laughing when they see how badly you handle your machines.’
The taunts coming rapid-fire. To begin with, it seemed flattering. After all, it was the first time that most of the pilots had paid real attention to the recruits. But then the taunts sharpened to threats.
Always remember, the pilots said, that we’re the ones risking our lives out there. If we fuck up, we’re gone. That’s why, if you do something to fuck one of us up, or do anything that puts our lives at risk, the rest of us will come back and exact a price. We’ll flog all of you around the ship, and then we’ll select the guilty party for the long drop, and a couple of others at random. And they’ll get to wear p-suits, so they can experience every moment of it, all the way down until heat cooks them and pressure turns them into a pancake.
And that wasn’t even the worst that could happen – becoming a fried pancake. No, the pilots said, the worst that could happen was being captured by the enemy. They’d flay you down to your nervous system and extract every bit of information from you, just to begin with. And then they’d take your brain and stick it in one of their halflife monsters. You’d still be you, and you’d also be a monster, obeying their orders, knowing you were a traitor, racked with horrible pain, unable ever to escape. And the only thing that stands between you and that, the pilots said, is us. You do right by us, and we’ll keep you and the ship safe. You fuck up, and we will fuck you up twice as hard and twice as long.
There was a last meal before the mission, a last prayer session. Ori was trying to come to terms with the hard reality of what was coming, could tell by the way everyone stood stiff and quiet around her that they were as nervous as she was. Captain Tenkiller told them that numbers of the enemy had been revised. This was a big attack. One of the biggest for some time. She wished them all good luck and good hunting. Everyone was subdued after that, even the veterans.
Ori began to feel a little better when she made the final prep. Attending to her drone, following routines that had become as familiar and commonplace as breathing, calmed and centred her. At last, she zipped herself into her immersion chair and everted into Cthuga’s night. And fell with the other drones, taking her assigned place at the rear of one of two lines that formed an arrowhead formation. The air here, high above the cells and spikes of the cloud deck, was cold and thin and calm. It took only a little attention to maintain trim and altitude, and proper distance from the drone ahead and the drone behind. Ori had plenty of time to look all around.
The ship was already falling behind, a chip, a speck, a mote lost in the vastness of the black sky. Running silent and dark. Cloaked. Transparent to the drone’s radar and microwave and the rest of its sensors. The cloudscape unrolled far below. It was no longer a calm and level plain. Here, near the edge of boundary layers dragging past each other in opposite directions, it was an intricate scrollwork of cells and eddies and long streamers, faintly luminous, lit here and there by the restless red strobings of lightning storms bigger than worldlets, generated by friction between the two bands.
Above, the black sky and stars and the rigid span of the ring-arch. The AI of Ori’s drone bracketed an area twenty degrees north of its heading, low above the curve of the horizon, where the enemy force was expected to enter the atmosphere. Her passenger was quiet, far back in the dark behind her eyes.
The drones flew east at a steady six hundred kph, twenty-six of them, each separated from each by five kilometres. At last the supervisor spoke, said that the predators had left the ship. And soon afterwards the drones were on station, above the pale eye of a semi-permanent storm embedded in laminar flows and intricate swirls. Ori began to fly doglegs from point to point, a small part of a pattern woven across ten thousand square kilometres of sky, and broke out the signal package and began to broadcast. Electronic noise, false radar images, chatter. All low-level and fragmented, as if leaking past corrupt shielding, a honey-pot simulation designed to lure in enemy probes. Bait.
An hour passed, and another hour. The predators were on station now, moving in wide and random circles beyond the drones’ honeypot. The supervisor spoke at intervals, telling the jockeys to stay frosty, chiding one or another of them if they exceeded error parameters.
And, in the south, a star fell.
It fell in a long curve, arcing in above the cloudscape. It was small and faint and white, suddenly flari
ng blood-red and winking out.
For several seconds nothing else happened. Then new stars appeared amongst the fixed stars. Two sets of them, moving quickly towards each other in short brief arcs, radiating out from opposing central points, passing in opposite directions, flaring, vanishing. All in perfect silence and without registering on any of the drone’s senses. Whatever it was, it was happening beyond the planet’s atmosphere: Ori used a simple triangulation method to determine that it was slightly over fifteen thousand kilometres away.
And more of these patterns were appearing all over the black sky in the south and east, tiny and bright and sharp and distinct. Ori, still flying her drone point to point with mindless regularity because she hadn’t been told to do anything else, imagined opposing fleets of ships firing at each other as they passed. A hundred of them, two hundred. Going out one by one until the sky was quiet again. Then something flared dead ahead, a little way above the area where the enemy was expected to enter. It brightened and spread, a kind of gauzy grid of faint electric-blue lines defining a loose net that was growing across the sky, dividing it into cells hundreds of kilometres across. It was the defence net, generated by forts orbiting at the inner edge of the rings.
Soon, tiny lights began to swarm inside the net’s grid, swirling and darting here and there with quick and seemingly aimless agitation. Lights in a particular patch of black sky would turn towards each other and suddenly swarm together and there’d be a terrific flare and when it faded the net in that part of the sky would be dimmer. And while this was happening, stars began to fall. Some fell straight down. Others corkscrewed violently. Some flared and expanded into pale blotches that dropped ragged clusters of tiny tumbling contrails and went out; others vanished below the horizon. Little bursts of radio noise, hardly distinguishable from the fraying crackle of lightning storms. Blips of high-energy particles. X-rays and gamma rays, intense fluxes of neutrons.
‘Here we go,’ the supervisor said. ‘Stay on station. Whatever happens, do not deviate.’
The enemy had arrived.
Ori continued to fly dogleg patterns under the net that wrapped the sky. It was beginning to unravel now, the net. Threads were breaking apart, disintegrating. Fewer and fewer stars fell, and almost all of them exploded into tumbling debris fields as they were struck by the energy and impact weapons of Cthuga’s inner defences, and then there were no more falling stars.
For a little while, it seemed as if the attack had been met and defeated. But then there were blinks of lights in the sky around Ori’s drone, ballooning and fading. She took immediate evasive action, just before the supervisor told her to go go go. She pulled hard left and spiralled down in a random pattern, strewing little clouds of drones and chaff to either side.
The drone was feeding her all kinds of information and its flight AI was chattering wildly because she’d exceeded every kind of tolerance. It was plunging towards the outer edge of the eye of the storm, falling more or less nose down, velocity building fast, and she began to pull out because if she didn’t do it now the drone would break up. There was a tremendous judder and the drone pitched wildly as it levelled out, threatening to go into a spin, but then she had it under control and the AI stopped screaming at her and began to adjust trim and drag characteristics.
She was alone in the clear air, less than a hundred kilometres above the storm. She began to veer left and right at what she hoped were unpredictable intervals, looking for survivors, trying to assimilate what had happened to the predators and the other drones. Ionisation trails stood up from the cloud deck, tall pale threads beginning to bend and fray as they were caught by the westerly air current.
The supervisor told her to keep circling – they needed data.
‘This one would like to ask how many drones survived.’
‘Yours and one other.’
‘And the predators?’
‘Cut the chatter. Keep circling.’
The woman sounded worried and frightened, and Ori felt frightened too. The enemy had reached down from high orbit and casually swatted the predators and most of the drones from the sky, and they hadn’t been able to defend themselves.
The trails matched those of a known kinetic weapon, according to the drone’s AI: a multiple warhead that punched projectiles – nuggets of pure iron flashed to plasma and bound by hyper-Tesla fields – through the atmosphere at a significant percentage of the speed of light. No way to avoid them. Only pure chance that her drone hadn’t been hit.
She wondered about the other drone that had survived, but didn’t dare ask the supervisor and kept flying circles. The remnants of the sky net were still dying back, its grid disintegrating, expanding into a general haze. And there was something badly wrong with one of the orbital forts. It had grown brighter and fuzzier. Enhanced views showed that its cratered surface was fracturing at one of its poles and the fractures were spewing fountains of ice particles and water vapour, feeding a kind of shawl of ejected material. Cthuga was full of portents too. The usual slow wash of its radio signal was perturbed by squawks and rumbles and staccato hisses, and across the spectrum signals pulsed at different speeds like so many heartbeats. To the north, curtains of green and yellow hung in a long array, folded and pleated in intricate patterns.
At last, the eastern horizon grew a slim lens of light that flared against the base of the ring-arch. Day was coming. As the bright spark of the sun leaped up, the supervisor came on line and shouldered Ori out of the way, cutting her off from control of her own drone. It began to reset itself, preparing for a suicide dive, and then she was cut out of the loop completely, and her immersion chair began to unfold and tip up to vertical.
The chairs in the big dimly lit chamber were open and empty, apart from one other. Hereata sitting up in it, looking at Ori with dazed confusion.
The battle was over. The war for Cthuga had begun.
PART THREE
THE DUST BELT
1
If the boy with the head of a jaguar had a name, he could not or would not tell the Child what it was. Shrugging when she asked him, hands held out in a gesture of negation.
‘Then I’ll call you Jaguar Boy,’ she said.
Again he shrugged.
He could speak, and his speech was not as malformed as it might have been, given his animal mouth and his animal tongue and palate. But he did not say very much, conveying meaning more by eloquent gesture and looks than by words, and he didn’t respond to any of the Child’s questions – where did he come from, were there others like him, where were they going.
At first, she wondered if he was in some way mentally handicapped. Certainly his brain, constricted by his sleek narrow skull, must be smaller than hers. And how much of it was animal, and how much human? He seemed to understand only a little of what she said to him, and ignored the rest or dismissed it. Yet he was lively and alert, and his movements were purposeful and poised.
He was handsome, too, she decided. He wasn’t a monster, or a clumsy chimera stitched from parts, but was as elegant and fully formed as any product of natural selection. The black commas and dashes on the dusky golden-brown fur of his head faded into dappled patterns on his neck and shoulders; white fur on his throat thinned into a soft stubble where the cords of his neck defined a hollow at the top of his naked chest. His slim, narrow-shouldered build meant that his head did not look disproportionately small, and it was beautiful, his head. Shapely, proud, with alert, pricked ears, dark fur on the broad snout between his round yellow eyes, the stiff fans of whiskers either side of his muzzle. He held his head high, swinging it to the left and right as he walked, the rifle slung on a bare shoulder, his bare feet interrogating and gripping the ground. Taking possession of it with each step. Mapping it into reality.
They walked a long way the first night, past the edge of the solar farm to the north of the little town and on across dry cracked earth and scrub into the forest, following a narrow animal track that wound through scant drought-killed undergrowth and
around and between the buttress roots of tall trees. Jaguar Boy had given the Child a pair of night-vision glasses that showed everything in grainy shades of white. A ghost forest through which they walked and walked, the Child excited and not at all sleepy, and not at all afraid, either. Feeling instead a heady defiance. She had made her choice and she was determined to stick to it.
Near dawn, they found shelter in a kind of cave under the roots of a fallen tree that rested at a slant in the arms of its neighbours. They shared Jaguar Boy’s water bottle and the Child dug a hollow in the dirt to fit her body while Jaguar Boy perched on a stout root above her, silhouetted against light that slowly filled the clearing made by the fallen tree. She was exhausted by their trek but slept fitfully, waking after a couple of hours as a troop of capuchin monkeys descended a neighbouring tree, each carrying a macambillo fruit. One by one, they dropped them in front of the Child and when the last had made its offering they all fled as one, screeching as they chased each other up a tree and went crashing off through the canopy.
The Child asked Jaguar Boy if they were friends of his. He shrugged and picked up one of the orange fruits and split it with his thumb and ate with delicate nipping motions of his stout incisors. The Child broke open a macambillo too, ate the sweet pulp, cracked the seeds between her teeth. It was so good that she ate another at once, then told Jaguar Boy she had to go pee. He shrugged again.
When she came back, he was still sitting on his root, watching a pair of butterflies tumble above the tall grass in the clearing. The hot air was heavy as velvet. She asked him where they were going, and he surprised her by pointing east; she’d thought they would be heading north-west, towards the hills where the wildsiders had their strongholds. When she asked him about this, he pointed east again, saying, ‘People live there. People you need to meet.’