by Paul McAuley
But, as always, there was no reply.
She remembered now why she had come out here in the first place and put out a call to Inas, waited out a long, long silence, called again. Nothing. Not even the ping of acknowledgement. Perhaps the comms were jammed because of the attack; perhaps they were about some business of their True master. Ori hoped it was the former rather than the latter. She hoped that Inas and the rest of her former crewmates weren’t enacting some stupid and no doubt suicidal plan of their True master.
She disengaged from the bot, levered herself off the immersion couch, set out towards the commons of jockey crew #87. She’d have to confront them face to face, tell them she’d killed the commissar. And wondered why she hadn’t thought of that before. Thought to lie. Maybe it was because she didn’t know how; because it was a last desperate chance to get close to the True. She’d have to find some way of brazening it out, of pretending that she’d done what had been asked of her. And if Inas and the others fell for it, they’d take her to the True, and she’d tell him about the descent of the Ghosts’ champion, and find some way of convincing him of its importance, of what had to be done.
And if he didn’t believe her . . . But that was unthinkable.
She was no longer afraid. She knew that death was just around the corner but she was no longer afraid. In that moment, she was free. Fully awake, fully aware. Every sense sharp. Feeling a weird exultation, in this hour of her death. Her passenger still rode behind her eyes. A funny kind of pressure, like a word she couldn’t say or an image she couldn’t see, that was beginning to turn into a headache. She wondered if it understood what she wanted to do. She wondered if it would be freed when she died, or if it would die with her.
It should have been a straight run to the commons. Back to the elevator ring, up three floors, and out towards the rim. Ten minutes at the most. But when Ori reached the concourse in front of the elevators she discovered that it was crowded with knots of Ghosts that swept back and forth. After a moment, she realised that they were fighting. Slashing and bludgeoning each other in furious silence. One wielded a cutting tool, waving its spike back and forth, scorching lines of black char across the faces and chests of his attackers. Another swung a whip of monofilament wire, clearing a wide space in front of her. Two gangs ran at each other, merged in a wild flurry of fists and feet. The wounded and dying and dead curled up as if asleep, sprawled in spreading pools of blood.
As Ori hung back, trying to work out how she could safely cross this battlefield, wondering if she could find an alternative route, she heard a strange ululating chant coming towards her. Within moments, it doubled in volume, doubled again. And then a wedge of Ghosts came around the corner and she was swept along in the flood as it battered and smashed its way across the concourse. A few Quicks were caught amongst the crowd and when the wedge stalled in front of the freight elevators Ori fought her way to the nearest Quick and asked her what was happening.
‘War!’
‘Between the Ghosts?’
‘I think so!’
They were leaning into each other and shouting, but they could barely hear each other over the whooping chants of the Ghosts crowding all around.
‘Why?’ Ori yelled.
‘I don’t know!’
‘Where are they going?’
‘I don’t know!’
And then Ori and the other Quick were pulled apart and a tide of Ghosts drove Ori into a freight elevator and it slammed upwards. She was jammed in one corner. The noise of the chants was colossal in the confined space and two windows showing images of the starship shed a ghastly light over the tight scrum. A teardrop of radiation-blackened ice, scarred and pitted, indescribably ancient. She wondered what it was going to do, down there. Whether its passenger really could pass from her viron, move out into sprites, and what would happen if she did. What she would become . . .
Then the elevator doors slammed open and she was swept out into one of the hangars. A big chilly brightly lit space into which the crowd around her quickly dispersed, breaking up into small groups that set out in different directions. Ghosts and Quicks and autonomous bots were working on small, boxy craft parked in rows. Hauling them up, fitting pressure shells around them, filling the shells with impact gel. It looked to Ori very much like they were preparing for a mass evacuation. She picked amongst a rack of tools, found a welding gun, and walked away. Trying to look purposeful, trying not to look directly at a drone that turned to watch her. Wondering if she could take it out if it tried to stop her.
Someone called to her. Called her name. Her heart turned over but she didn’t look around and kept walking.
Footsteps behind her: Commissar Doctor Pentangel tall in his exoskeleton, his narrow smile, his gaze lit with triumph. Ori raised the welding pistol and black pain seized and unstrung her.
When she came around, she was lying on the floor. She’d pissed herself and every muscle and joint hurt and a sharp pain pulsed behind her eyes. The commissar bent stiffly so that his face was centimetres from Ori’s.
‘Did you forget your implant? I used it to track you down, child, because it’s time! Time to be translated! Time to become part of the Mind!’
Crowds of Ghosts surged out of the elevators and across the floor of the hangar, singing and chanting. Two surges, three. And then the elevators stood empty and Commissar Doctor Pentangel pushed Ori forward, his hands on her shoulders, his implacable grip grinding her bones.
Ori was sick at heart, cursing her bad luck, cursing herself for not putting up a fight. She’d believed that she was free, but she wasn’t. She was still a slave, weak at her core, giving in at the very sight of a True. There was nothing she could do. She could barely think around her splitting headache.
As the elevator plunged down, the commissar told Ori that he alone could save the day now. ‘The Quicks failed, but I will not fail. We will not fail. We will create the Mind, Ori. You and me and your so-called passenger.’
‘The Quicks failed?’
‘Their so-called champions lost contact with the starship as it fell towards the core. And now different factions are fighting for control. They worked towards one goal in harmony, but now they’ve failed they can’t agree what to do next. But I know! I know. I’ll make the bridge to the past they want and need.’
‘This one believes that many of them are preparing to leave.’
‘Many already have. Let them! I don’t need them. But they need me.’
Commissar Doctor Pentangel talked on, telling Ori about changing the past and erasing the present, about how he’d survive that erasure because he would be at the root of that change, and she felt the old, cold chains of submission settle on her. He was going to strip down her brain, neuron by neuron, to search for the template that he believed was imprinted there. She would die, and for what? The starship and its passenger had most likely been stamped flat by pressure and boiled away long before it reached the outer edge of the hydrogen ocean, Ori thought. And then she remembered how the sprites had rushed up to meet it. Dancing like the crewmates of bunkies who vow permanent partnership . . .
The elevator began to slow. The commissar spoke to it, told it to take him all the way down to the workshop level, but it stopped and the door slid back and would not shut when the commissar told it to.
‘Nothing works properly any more,’ he said, and shoved Ori forward again.
There was no fighting at this level, just small knots of Ghosts moving with swift purpose. As they crossed the wide curve of the concourse, Ori spotted a drone hung high up, silhouetted against the light panels, and wondered if the crew was looking for her. But the drone was turning, drifting away. The commissar spoke sharply, told her to look straight ahead and pushed her towards a hatch that led to the service walkways.
As they ducked through, someone stepped towards them. It was the True that Inas and her crew had rescued. He was strapped inside an exoskeleton, his face like a skull, teeth bared to the gums in a rictus grin as he swung a l
ength of pipe and whacked the right leg of the commissar’s exoskeleton at the knee joint. The commissar yelped and went down, and the True hit him again and again, swinging left and right, the crack of the pipe against the exoskeleton echoing flatly in the long column that housed the spiral walkway.
The commissar was on his back, one arm crooked over his face, the other beneath him. His right leg twitching and quivering as its motors fought to straighten the damaged joint. The True jabbed the end of the pipe at Ori’s face and told her to stay right where she was – she was next.
‘That’s an order,’ he said.
His face shone with sweat and blood stained the edges of the halflife bandage around his bare torso. His bloodshot gaze shone with a desperate craziness.
Ori jerked her head up and down and the True turned to the commissar, resting his weight on the pipe as he leaned in. Saying, ‘This isn’t the end you deserve, you filthy traitor. But it’s what you’re getting.’
And then he screamed and reared back, dropping the pipe and clapping both hands to the smoking wound that the commissar had burned into his face with the welding pistol. The commissar heaved up, right leg crooked, most of his weight on his left, and pressed the welding pistol over the True’s heart and there was a thump and an awful stench of burning and the True collapsed.
Ori stepped out of the way and kept stepping, moving towards the pipe, and the commissar saw her and raised his hand and shook his forefinger back and forth. He was leaning on the rail at the edge of the ramp, breathing hard, his right leg still ticking and trembling.
‘Never forget what you are,’ he said. ‘My best pupil. The last alive. The last best hope to change things for ever. We’ll walk down. You lead.’
They started down. The commissar holding the welding pistol at Ori’s back. Jabbing her with it every half-dozen steps. They were three levels above the workshop when the ramp trembled lightly. Ori hesitated, the commissar jabbed her hard in the back with the pistol, and the ramp trembled again and did not stop. Ori grabbed hold of the rail as the sloping floor bucked and jumped. Things grated and sang. Something fell past her – the True’s body, moving fast. There was a tremendous muffled boom far below, everything jerked hard, and there was a feeling in the pit of Ori’s stomach like riding a fast elevator.
The juddering gentled to a slow back-and-forth swing. The commissar stood upright, towering above Ori, and ordered her to move on.
‘The cable must have broken,’ she said. ‘Can’t you feel it? The Whale is rising.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Move!’
She sprang at him, and black pain crowded into her head and something pushed clean through the pain. A tall cool bright flame that stood between her and the commissar, bending towards him. He screamed and fired the welding pistol, and the flame winked out and Ori ran at him. She ran fast, bent low, ducking under the commissar’s clumsy swipe, hitting him full force. He staggered and she gripped him around his thighs. She knew she couldn’t match the strength and power of his exoskeleton, so she simply lifted him up, hearing her joints crack with the effort, and threw him bodily over the low rail.
His brief scream was cut off by a crash as he bounced off the side of the ramp several floors down, and he dropped in a loose tangle of limbs. Ori looked away and heard the hard smack when he hit bottom.
Then she started back up, running faster and faster towards Inas and her friends, to tell them that they were free.
ESEMPLASY
1
The dropship punched into Cthuga’s upper atmosphere, shedding velocity as it shot comet-wise across the sky inside a shell of white-hot plasma, stooping down as gravity began to overcome its failing velocity, ejecting its heat shield, re-forming into cruise configuration.
It sailed the upper air of the equatorial band, outrunning winds, at last sighting the orphan it had come to find. The Whale, drifting free, the long section of broken cable hanging below it deformed by drag into a shallow curve. Its base was badly damaged. Ragged chunks missing. Sections of skin burned or blown away, exposing broken lattices of structural elements and collapsed tiers of floors. Higher up, scrofulous black growths mottled its flanks and hangar doors gaped like screaming mouths.
Riding their bots out on the skin of the Whale, Ori and Inas watched the little dropship approach like a minnow edging up to Leviathan. Swinging around and around the Whale in a wide slow spiral from bottom to top, blitzing the hulk with sensors and probes, launching drones that shot through rents in its skin and sent back damage reports.
‘Standard scan-and-search procedure,’ Ori said, as the dropship swung past at roughly the level where she and Inas were hunkered down. ‘They’re worried about walking into a trap. That’s why they sent such a small ship. One they can afford to lose.’
‘We’re lucky they didn’t shoot us out of the sky,’ Inas said.
‘They could have done that while the Ghosts were still in control,’ Ori said. ‘And it would have been much easier to destroy the Whale than attempt to sever the cable. But they pulled it off. They cut the link with the lower depths, screwed up the Ghosts’ plans, and set the Whale drifting free.’
‘And nearly killed us.’
Inas said this without any trace of bitterness or anger. That the True believed the Quick aboard the Whale to be expendable was, as far as she was concerned, a simple flat statement of fact. An inescapable property of the universe, like gravity, or inertia.
‘We’re still here,’ Ori said. ‘We saved the Whale and we saved ourselves. Everything will work out. You’ll see.’
‘Things have changed,’ Inas said.
It was one of the mantras that Ori had adopted to bind the surviving Quick together and keep up their morale.
‘Things have changed,’ Ori said firmly.
After a final assault by True raptors and drones had cut the cable, it had fallen to Ori, using her experience of salvaging The Eye of the Righteous, to organise the surviving Quick and work out how to stabilise the Whale. And so she had, unwillingly, become their leader, and Inas had become her second-in-command. Her mainstay. Her drift-anchor. Her sounding post.
Ori had tried to put a positive spin on the arrival of the dropship, but in truth she shared Inas’ sense of foreboding. She’d sent several messages to the ships in orbit around Cthuga, explaining that the Quick crew had taken charge of the Whale, explaining what the Ghosts had been trying to do and how they had failed, explaining that the Ghosts were either dead or had attempted to flee in the mass exodus that had engaged the True ships for so long. None of her messages had been acknowledged, and although Ori told herself that it was probably because the Trues believed they were some kind of Ghost trick – lures for the unwary; trojans for subtle demons – she couldn’t shake the idea that the Trues didn’t feel that they needed to respond to a gang of leaderless Quicks. That the dropship wasn’t coming to rescue them, but to reclaim a valuable resource.
Inas said, ‘It was nice while it lasted, our little republic.’
‘We knew this day would come. We knew all along that we’d have to prove our worth. And what we’ve done here is more than worthy.’
‘Do you really think they care if any of us are still alive?’
‘They’ll want to know what we’ve done. They’ll want to hear our stories.’
They watched the dropship appear and disappear as it spiralled higher. At last, a gig detached from its belly and shot across the airy gap and was swallowed by the maw of a hangar. After several minutes, the hangar door irised shut.
‘Well,’ Ori said, ‘I suppose we’d better get ready to meet them.’
The surviving Quick inhabited two farm decks close to the waist of the Whale. They’d sealed the bulkheads and kept the decks warm and lighted, ran air- and water-recycling units with power from fusion batteries wired in series and makeshift windmills they’d erected on the Whale’s skin. Only one fission reactor was still online, and all its output went to the control systems and to heating the surviving ballo
nets to provide the lift that kept the Whale in the high, thin, relatively stable stream of air beneath the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere.
Ori and the others lacked the equipment to make any real inroads on the damage the Whale had suffered during the brief fierce civil war between Ghost factions. Most of it was dark, littered with debris, and depressurised. Gales of frigid hydrogen blew down passages and walkways, howled around hangars and factory decks. Ori had organised corpse-parties that had cleared out the dead and given them all, True or Ghost or Quick, a proper farewell before entrusting them to the long drop. The handful of Ghosts who had survived their civil war had either died of their wounds or had willed themselves to die; isolated from their companions, they had turned inwards and shut down like so many defective machines. After Ori’s crews had patched up the Whale’s altitude- and attitude-control systems and secured the two farm decks, there had been little else they could do but conserve their dwindling reserves of power and food, air and potable water, and wait for rescue.
Now Ori, Inas, and all the others gathered before the airlocks they’d rigged. The farm stretching away behind them, a quilt of greenery spread out under brilliant rows of lights. Windows hung in the air showed views of the boarding party stalking down passages and serviceways. Jerky shots captured by static cams that kept blinking out as they were discovered and neutralised. All but one of the party were troopers, clad in bulky armoured pressure suits and armed with pulse and glaser rifles. A variety of combat drones sharked alongside them. The exception was half the height of the others, and dressed in a plain blue p-suit with a gold-filmed visor. Ori hoped that was a good sign, that the boarding party included a Quick. She hoped that it was a sign of respect. She hoped that they wanted to parlay.
At last, the boarding party reached the far side of the bulkhead. Drones scanned the airlocks; troopers assumed defensive positions; the small person in the blue p-suit conferred with a trooper badged as a cornet, then stepped up to the central airlock and spread its empty gloved hands in the universal gesture.