by Paul McAuley
‘There is no situation,’ Prem said. ‘Not any more. The Quick who died weren’t wreckers. They were . . . guardians. They kept safe something which has been stolen from under your nose.’
‘And that was?’ the prefect said.
‘There’s no way of knowing now,’ Prem said, with perfectly calibrated bitterness.
I knew she was lying, but the prefect did not. He gestured at the Quick prisoners sprawled below us. ‘They might know.’
‘They are alive. Therefore they are innocent,’ I said. ‘Everyone who had anything to do with this conspiracy, so-called, was caught in the trap, and infected by the demon.’
‘Let them go,’ Prem told the prefect.
The prefect shook his head. ‘I will deal with them as I see fit.’
His smile was colder than ever. I felt sick. I knew that he knew that he possessed the authority to kill the Quick, and he was determined to exert it. To redeem his status. To prove to Prem that her authority was not absolute.
‘If you won’t let them go, then release them into my custody,’ Prem said ‘I will take them with me for further investigation.’
‘They are quarantined,’ the prefect said.
‘There is no need for the quarantine.’
‘I believe there is. You can question them here, of course. And then I will deal with them.’
‘I give you my word that they are innocent. Harmless.’
‘They worked with wreckers. They are tainted, whether or not they know it. I cannot take the risk that the taint will spread.’
‘The workers who died were not wreckers,’ Prem said.
‘If you have evidence to back up that assertion, I will of course examine it,’ the prefect said.
‘Do we have proof, Isak? Can you show this man that Yakob’s report is faked?’
‘Bree Sixsmith may have patched up the characteristics of the hell she and your cousin supposedly harrowed from reports of other harrowings. But I would have to check the records of the Library to determine that.’
‘What about the heat pump’s mind?’ Prem said.
‘I don’t think I can allow you to examine it,’ the prefect said.
‘I don’t think you can stop us,’ Prem said.
‘Your servant claims that it may contain some kind of trap,’ the prefect said. ‘If that’s true, it must remain in quarantine until it can be destroyed in place.’
Prem held the prefect’s gaze. Her face was still and calm, but she was poised as if to spring at his throat. He raised his right hand and aimed the plain black band on his forefinger at her; I prepared to hurl a nightmare, aware that the troopers around us had shifted their stances in readiness for action.
At last, without looking away from the prefect, Prem said, ‘Let’s go, Isak.’
‘I should like to look inside the mind of that heat pump,’ I said.
‘I don’t think you can.’
‘Before you leave, I want you to witness the last part of the containment strategy,’ the prefect said, and flicked a packet at his troopers.
Those down on the floor of the hatchery stepped back as drones swung in over the prone prisoners and in a rapid tattoo fired infrared lasers that cooked their brains to boiling soup. The prisoners shuddered as their skulls popped and cracked. Troopers moved past them to the ranks of cradles, scooping out newborns and dropping them on to the floor to drown in air.
Prem caught my arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing left for us here.’
Her face was still set with glacial calm, but red light swam and glittered in her eyes and sparkled in the tears that slid one after the other down her cheeks.
3
Ori and the rest of the crew of The Eye of the Righteous, awake for more than forty-eight hours, running on kaf and meth, were still trying to come to terms with the enormity of their situation. All the pilots were dead and all the predators were lost; more than half of the elite crew which had maintained the predators and served the pilots had committed suicide. Most of the drones were gone. The planetary net was down, every link broken. Radio yielded only the crackle of a distant storm and the slow, deep heartbeat of the planet’s magnetic field. There was no way of contacting anyone else. They were entirely alone, cast adrift in the vast and empty sky.
One good thing: the fall of the net meant that Ori didn’t have to send any more reports to Commissar Doctor Pentangel. And despite the warnings of his philosopher-soldiers, the device they’d implanted hadn’t punished her when she’d missed the last deadline. Perhaps those warnings had been empty threats, or perhaps the device was intelligent enough to know that it wasn’t her fault she couldn’t send reports: Ori didn’t care. She wondered how Inas was, what she was doing, whether the Whale had been attacked, but otherwise had no time for regrets, no time for the past. She was living from moment to moment, experiencing everything with a pure and lucid intensity.
‘We’re in a tight spot, but we’re not helpless,’ Commander Tenkiller told her crew. ‘We will make more drones and turn them into flying bombs. We will convert the launch cannon into kinetic weapons, and we will search the library of maker templates for useful weaponry, or for tools that can be turned into weapons. We have suffered a grave setback, but we are not out of the fight. When we confront the enemy, we will have a few surprises in store. We will give back more than we get. This I promise.’
Some of the crew were given the task of prepping the small number of spare drones and assembling various kinds of explosive loads from components spun by the ship’s makers. The rest, including Ori, set to work converting the launch cannon. Buttoned up inside their chairs, they each woke a maintenance bot and walked them out of the hutches and across the upper deck of the ship in bright clear early morning light. The sky empty except for a feathering of cumulonimbus clouds, the great span of the ring-arch, and the baleful spark of one of the orbital forts burning low in the west.
The launch cannon were guide rails ringed with a series of superconducting hoops that ran the full length of the upper surface of the ship. Drones attached to sleds that ran along the rail were accelerated by magnetic fields generated by the hoops, each kicking it faster and faster until the sled crashed into the retaining buffer at the far end of the gun and the drone shot off; once it had cleared the ship, the initial acceleration imparted by the cannon was boosted by solid-fuel rockets to a velocity that would sustain air-breathing flight. Simple machines, the launch cannon, dumb as a bag of spanners and with no moving parts except for the sled and the load grab, but the circuits that coordinated the priming and discharge of the hoops were delicate and frangible, there were safety devices that had to be stripped out or circumvented, and the hoops themselves were constructed from an intricate knit of superconducting plastics. It took Ori and the rest of the crew all day to break down one cannon and use the modular components to make four smaller units, and then plug in reprogrammed control circuits and check everything for integrity.
Towards the end of the day, Ori found herself working alongside Hereata, fixing the bolts that held the terminal unit and retaining buffer of the railgun in precise alignment. Each bolt possessed a spark of intelligence that sensed its position relative to the others and could minutely alter the angle at which it was fixed, to allow for small flexings in the ship’s superstructure. They cheeped anxiously when they were removed, and continued to cheep in the bots’ catch nets; no one had worked out how to switch them off.
After a little while, Hereata said, ‘Hira has an interesting idea. She claims that the Mind called down the enemy. She says that’s why the defences failed. Not because the enemy overwhelmed them, but because the Mind reached out to them.’
‘It sounds like another of her fantasies,’ Ori said. ‘Nothing you should take seriously.’
‘We know the defences failed. We do not yet know why.’
Ori selected a bolt from the net slung between her bot’s forward manipulators and inserted it in the chair that held the rail to the sector plate.
‘That doesn’t mean we should accept the first silly explanation that someone cooks up. Especially someone like Hira.’
Hereata said, ‘Hira also says that our drones survived because we’re linked to the Mind. And because the Mind is allied to the enemy, we’re a danger to the ship.’
‘She told you that?’
The bolt’s cheeping slowed as Ori tightened it, stopped when it was properly seated.
‘Her bunky did. Lani.’
‘I told you how Hira was, back on the Whale,’ Ori said. ‘She hasn’t changed. When something bad happens, she looks for someone to blame. But if you’re worried about what she’s been saying, we could call her out. Confront her. After all, she has a piece of a sprite in her head, just like us. She served time on an observation station, just like we did. If we’re linked to the Mind, so is she.’
‘But her drone was destroyed,’ Hereata said, ‘and ours survived.’
Ori laughed.
‘I know. It’s ridiculous,’ Hereata said. ‘But if we confront her, she’ll say that we’re doing it because we really do have something to hide. And people are scared, Ori. They might listen to her.’
‘Lani got to you, didn’t she?’
‘I don’t like her. She is a violent person.’
‘Don’t worry about her. I’m on your side. And Hira can hardly tell Tenkiller or any of the other Trues about this stupid fantasy of hers, so it won’t come to anything. It’s just talk.’
‘Unlike Hira, I don’t claim any special insight about what the Mind may or may not want,’ Hereata said. ‘But I have been thinking about it. It seems to me that it is constrained by the logic of its situation. And logic gives it just four choices. It can side with us. The Trues and the Quicks. It can side with the enemy. It could choose to fight both us and the enemy, and drive us off its world or destroy us. Or it can remain aloof, either because it does not choose to fight, or because it does not even notice that we are fighting each other. Even though we are fighting over who should make contact with it.’
‘I like the idea that it stays aloof,’ Ori said. ‘Things are bad enough as it is, worrying about what the enemy is planning to do.’
‘But it hasn’t stayed aloof,’ Hereata said. ‘It touched me. It touched you. And all the others. Even Hira.’
Ori said, ‘What’s yours doing, right now?’
It was a little like talking about sex, she thought. Embarrassing and illicitly thrilling.
‘My sprite? It has been very quiet.’
‘Mine too.’
‘I wonder what that means.’
‘It means they aren’t interested in what we’re doing,’ Ori said. ‘It means they’re staying aloof.’
They worked on in silence and were finishing off the final checks on the terminal section of the truncated railgun when stars began to fall from the sky. Stars radiating out from a point a few degrees west of the burning moon, falling in long fiery streaks that passed above the ship. Ori tried to focus on the bright point at the head of one streak, but couldn’t make out much more than a fuzzy white speck a few pixels across.
Hereata flashed a pict of the speck’s absorption spectrum: carbon doped with titanium and wolfram.
‘Fullerenes,’ Ori said.
‘My best guess also. No doubt a heat shield.’
Ori watched a falling star drop behind the horizon, followed by another, and another. ‘There are so many of them.’
The stars continued to fall. Brighter now. Leaving distinct contrails. Then one exploded directly overhead and both Ori and Hereata flinched, clamping to the surface of the ship with all of their bots’ limbs. Ori replayed the explosion in slow motion, saw a triangular shape break apart into several sections that tumbled away, burning. Chalices full of flame . . .
The ship juddered as its main motor fired up. A moment later Commander Tenkiller’s voice cut through the background chatter of the other Quicks, ordering them to assemble on the general deck.
The commander was in formal dress, black jacket, trews slashed with scarlet, and a gold skullcap, flanked by the two surviving Trues in their exoskeletons and yellow and green uniforms, their breasts splashed with merit and valour bars. She’d dispatched flocks of autonomous microdrones on a scouting expedition, she said. Enemy activity had been detected some eight hundred klicks upwind and they were going forward to engage. She did not yet know what they would encounter, but they would meet the enemy with glad hearts and minds, and strain every sinew and neuron to win a victory.
‘I cannot promise you more than that. We have no safe haven now. We can only fight. And even if we do not win, we will make such a mark against the enemy that it won’t be forgotten any time soon. We are already under way and will be within striking distance inside ten hours. There is still much to do, and we will all of us work together to make sure that we are ready when we need to be ready. On a personal note, I want to say that I am honoured by the presence of each and every one of you under my command. I know that you will not fail me, or fail your comrades-in-arms. Now, let us pray.’
She led prayers to the One God for deliverance from the enemy and a great victory, and her second-in-command stepped up and gave the new orders of the day, and everyone went back to work. Ori saw Hira moving off amongst her acolytes, saw one of them, Hira’s bunky, Lani, turn and give her a frank and hostile stare. Ori stared back, and felt a small satisfaction when Lani looked away and turned and hurried to catch up with her friends.
Work was good. Work helped Ori forget everything else. She rode her bot and helped to move explosive loads and to check out the systems of the reconstructed railguns. There was a round of dry firing, supervised by Commander Tenkiller herself. Five of the guns worked and three failed in various ways, and the crews set to tracing faults and fixing them.
As they worked on, a few more falling stars streaked overhead, dropping past different parts of the horizon. And then there were no more.
After the failed railguns had been retested and passed fit for duty, Ori and the others were rotated off shift and given a four-hour break. She snagged a tube of water and a tube of vegetable paste, returned to her chair and lay down and slept. And jolted awake a little over two hours later to the soft ululation of the general-quarters alarm. She activated her chair and woke her bot.
It was early in the morning. Fomalhaut’s tiny disc glaring a handspan above the horizon in the east; a few stars still showing in the west. And stars were falling high above, leaving thin white scratches as they ripped across the sky’s dark blue dome. Ten, twenty, fifty. Tracking algorithms showed that the stars were falling to the south and east of the platform, burning down the sky, punching through the cloud deck about seventy klicks away. Too far away for the bot’s cameras to grab any detail, but Ori imagined the stars breaking apart inside the cloud deck to hatch enemy predators, the new-born flock turning, hunting, looking for targets, locking on to them . . .
Commander Tenkiller came on line, issuing crisp calm orders to prep the railguns for immediate firing. As Ori and the rest of the crew began to move towards their stations, more stars fell. Some shot straight overhead; others fell on either side. Ori saw one plunge past the port side, less than twenty klicks out. A finned shape falling straight down, vanishing into the cloud deck, where sporadic glows were appearing, burning foggily inside the thick veils.
The Eye of the Righteous was beginning to turn. Ori saw a trio of bright shapes flash past, shockingly close, trailing long cords of shock-heated soot. She didn’t see the one that hit the ship.
It struck somewhere forward of her position. There was a terrific slam and a flash and debris flew up and the curved upper decking of the ship rippled. Ori’s bot was flung backwards in a long arc and slammed into a winch. She grabbed hold of the winch’s housing as the deck yawed. Damage reports popped up and there was something wrong with the feed: she couldn’t see anything clearly and fine motor control was fading in and out. Then everything failed completely. For a moment, she was in her chair
, hearing panicky voices shouting at each other, and then a secondary link kicked in and she was riding her bot again.
It had started up its autorepair sequences in the few moments she’d been gone. Rerouting control of its fine manipulators, clearing dead patches in its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. But its sonar and deep radar were still down, and joints on two of its limbs had lost lubricant; it walked with a distinct limp as Ori steered it towards the point of impact at the bow of the ship.
At least half the bots that had been working outside were gone: knocked off the ship by the impact. Some of those left were working on the railguns; one signalled to Ori.
‘There may be more of them. Help us, damn you.’
‘The ship is damaged,’ Ori said. ‘Internal comms are down. We need to know our situation before we can work out what to do.’
The curve of the upper surface had acquired a distinct lean, tilting forward and to the right, and a hole some ten metres across had been punched into the plates close to the prow. Ori crabbed her bot over buckled plates. The edge of the hole exposed layers of insulation and fibrous fascias of pressure tanking, all of it distorted, as if a bubbling, dripping, roiling slough of liquid had been instantly frozen. Infrared and ultraviolet overlays revealed patches of activity. Hot spots. Intricate feathery streaks and veins that pulsed and shifted, extending fine threads into hull plating around the gash like some kind of horrible rot of the inanimate.
Ori extended an arm equipped with a set of probes and micro-manipulators. Zoomed in on one of the invasive threads and saw that it was composed of rod-shaped microscopic units, each attached to its neighbours by hairlike pilli. Even as she watched, rods pinched in half at their waists and the two halves pulled apart and promptly began to grow. Nanomachines, each with intricate internal architecture, extending and dividing in rhythmic pulses of activity.