The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009
Page 62
His cover didn’t know where they were heading.
But Hamilton knew.
Normally on arriving at Mars, Hamilton would have booked into the Red Savoy Raffles, a tantalising distance from Mons, as the gauche advertising put it, and spent the evening arguing the toss of the wine list with Signor Harakita. Serfdom to the Bear offered a different prospect. The hull the serfs were kept in smelt of unaltered body. During the passage, they did the tasks that would have needed continual expensive replacements had mechanisms been assigned to them: maintaining the rocket motors, repairing the ship’s life-support infrastructure. There were two fatalities in the three weeks Hamilton was on board.
They didn’t take the serfs on face value. All of them were run through an EM scan. Hamilton watched it register the first level of his cover. It accepted it. The deeper cover would only be noticed once that print was sent, hopefully long after the fact when inquiries and excuses were the order of the day, to the cracking centres in the hives of St. Petersburg. It had also, to more deadly effect, been registered in public with the authorities at Orbital, and would thus also be cracked by every empire’s mind men in every capital.
But that was not all that the EM scanner did. It suddenly went deeper. But not searching, Hamilton realised—
Cutting!
Hamilton winced at the distant sight of some of the higher functions of his cover’s mind dissolving.
From that point on, it was like sitting on the shoulders of a drunkard, and Hamilton had to intervene a couple of times to stop his body getting into danger. That was all right. The serfs also smoked tobacco, and he declined that as well. A cover couldn’t look too perfect.
The serfs were strapped in as the Russian space carriage aerobraked around Mars’s thin atmosphere, then started its angled descent towards the surface. This was the first surprise. The carriage was taking a completely conventional course: it would be visible from every lighthouse. This must, realised Hamilton, wishing for a window, be a scheduled flight. And by now they must be very close to whatever their destination was, the resorts of Tharsis, perhaps—
Then there came a roar, a sudden crash, and the giddy sensation of falling. Hamilton’s stomach welcomed it. He knew himself to be more at home in freefall than the majority of those he encountered. It was the sea welcoming the shark.
He could feel the different momentum: they must have been jettisoned from the main carriage, at a very narrow angle, under the sensor shadow of some mountain range—
The realisation came to him like the moment when Isaac Newton had seen that tiny worm and started thinking about the very small.
Hamilton started to curl into the crash position—
Then with an effort of will he forced himself not to. Too perfect!
His seat broke from its fastenings, and he flew at the ceiling.
The quality of the air felt strange. Not enough! It felt like hell. And the smell. For a moment Hamilton thought he was in a battle. So where were the noises?
They pulled the darkness from around him. They were rough. There were bright lights, and a curt examination, his body being turned right and left. Hamilton had a sudden moment of fear for his body, not belonging to him now, carelessly damaged by the puppet he’d leant it to! He wanted to fight! To let his fists bite into their faces!
He held it in. Tried to breathe.
He struggled out of their grasp for a moment, only to look round.
A serf barracks, turned into a makeshift hospital. Bunks growing out of packed-down mud, providing their own sawdust. Bright Russian guard uniforms, blue and white with epaulettes gleaming, polished, ceremonial helmets off indoors. All wearing masks and oxygen supplies. All ceramics, no metal. Afraid of detectors. A Russian military medic, in his face again, flashing a torch into his eye. Masked too.
There was a rectangle of light shining in through the doorway. They were pushed from their beds, one by one, and sent stumbling towards it. Still couldn’t breathe. That was where the smell of battle was coming from—
No, not battle. A mixture. Bodies from in here. From out there—
Gunpowder.
Soil with a high mineral content.
He moved into the light and put a hand up.
He felt his skin burning and yelled. He threw himself forward into a welcome sliver of dark, shielding his eyes from a glare that could have blinded him.
He lay in shadow on the gunpowder-grey ground, with laughter from behind him, the sun refracting off angled rock, through a blurred sky, like a cold furnace.
He was in the Mariner Valley, the deepest gorge in the solar system, with the sun flaring low in the west, rebounding off the white buildings. There was hard UV in the sky. His lungs were hoiking on tiny breaths. Frost was already burning his fingers. And he wasn’t wearing any kind of protective equipment.
They made the serfs march along the shaded side of the valley. At least they gave them gloves.
An enormous wind would suddenly blast across the column of men, like a blow to the ground, sloughing them with rock dust, and then it would be gone again. It was a shock that breathing was even possible. Hamilton stole glances from the shade as he struggled to adjust, looking upwards to the nearest escarpment. In the valley proper, you wouldn’t necessarily assume you were in a gorge; the vast depression stretched from horizon to horizon. So this must be one of the minor valleys that lay inside the great rift. They could be six miles deep here. Given the progress of terraforming on the rest of the Martian globe, the air pressure might just be enough.
He realised, at a shout from the overseer in the Russian uniform, that he had slowed down, letting his fellow serfs march past him. But his cover was pushing his body to move as fast as it could.
He realised: he was different to the others.
He was finding physical action more difficult than they were. Why?
He looked at the man next to him, and was met with a disinterested misty expression.
The mental examination! They hadn’t ripped out the higher functions of the serfs purely in order to make them docile; they’d shut down brain processes that required oxygen!
Hamilton added his own mental weight to that of his cover, and made the body step up its march. He could feel his lungs burning. The serfs had perhaps a couple of months of life before this exposure caught up with them. It felt like he had a week.
He considered, for a moment, the exit strategy. The personal launcher waiting in a gulley—he checked his internal map—sixteen miles away.
That was closer than it might have been. But it was still out of the question without the oxygen supply that previously had been standard for serfs working in such conditions. If he was going to get out of this, he would need to steal such equipment, the quicker the better, before his body weakened.
On the other hand, if he stayed and died, after having made his kills, the mission would be successfully completed. The cover would still be planted.
He decided. He would not leave quickly while there was still a chance of success.
He took care to think of Annie and the quad and the noise of the Morgan’s engine. Then he did not think of those things again.
In the days that followed Hamilton was put to work alongside the other serfs. He mentally rehearsed that Raffles wine list. He remembered the mouth feels and tastes. He considered a league table of his favourites. Although the details changed, it was headed every day by the 2003 Leoville Las Cases.
Meanwhile, his body was collapsing: blisters forming on his exposed, sunburnt, and windburnt skin; deep aches and cramps nagging at his every muscle; headaches that brought blood from his nose. And the worst of it was he hadn’t seen Catherine Drewe.
His work crew were using limited ceramic and wooden tools to install growing pit props into what was obviously a mine shaft. Other serfs were digging, fed off nutrient bath growths that had been thrown up the walls of the valley. There was a sense of urgency. The digging was being directed precisely, according to charts.
> These were not fortifications that were being dug. Turpin’s conclusions had been rational, but wrong. This was not a military offensive. The Russians gave the impression of sneak thieves, planning to smash and grab and run.
So what was this? Hamilton had only seen one mercenary uniform, bearing the coat of arms of Drewe’s Army. The badge displayed the typically amateur and self-aggrandising heraldry of the mercenary bands. It claimed spurious (and now nonexistent) Irish aristocracy, but had nods to all the major courts of Europe, nothing that would inflame the temper of even the most easily offended monarch. The badge irked Hamilton. It was a bastard thing that revealed nothing and too much.
The emblem had been on the sleeve of some sort of bodyguard, a man with muscle structure that had been designed to keep going having taken some small arms fire. He moved awkwardly in the lower gravity. Hamilton felt a surge of odd fellow feeling, and knew this was the man from whom the emotional broadcast had originated.
He and his mistress would doubtless appear together at some point.
After three days, Hamilton’s crew swapped tasks with the other group, and were put to dig at the rock face down the tunnel. Hamilton welcomed it: the air pressure was slightly greater here.
He had started to hallucinate. In his mind, he saw great rolling clockworks against a background of all the imperial flags. Armies advanced as lines across maps, and those lines broke into sprays of particles, every advance countered to keep the great system going. He himself walked one of the lines, firing at imaginary assailants. Women spun in their own orbits, the touch of their hands, the briefest of kisses before they were swept away maintaining the energy of the whole merry-go-round.
And at the centre of it all . . . He didn’t know; he couldn’t see. The difference of accident, the tiny percentage effect that changed the impossible into the everyday. He bowed his head amongst the infinite cogwheels and prayed for grace.
He was broken out of his stupor by the sudden noise in front of him. There had been a fall of rocks. The whole working face in front of him had given way.
Something, maybe the pebbles beneath their feet, was making the serfs working with him sway and stumble. One beside him fell. The Russian overseer bent to check on the man’s condition, then took out a gun, thought better of the expense, and instead used a ceramic knife to slit the serf’s throat. The body was carried out to be bled over the nutrient baths, the overseer calling out orders as he walked with the man back towards the exit.
Hamilton put his face close to the rock wall that had been revealed. It felt different. It looked blacker. Iconic. Like a wall that was death ought to look. He thought he could hear something in there. That he was being called. Or was that the thought he wasn’t allowing himself, the chapel and Annie inside?
A voice broke that terrible despair that would have led him away. “There!”
Hamilton turned and smiled in relief to see her at last. Catherine Drewe. Face-to-face. Her hair was dark with dust, her face powdered around her oxygen mask in a way that looked almost cosmetic. Her eyes were certain and terrified. The other serfs were staring at her. Behind her came the bodyguard, his bulk filling the tunnel.
Hamilton’s right hand twitched.
She pushed past him and put her ear to the rock.
He decided not to kill her yet.
“You,” she said, turning to point at one of the serfs, “go and tell Sizlovski that we’ve hit a snag. The rest of you, get out of here, you’re relieved.”
The serfs, barely understanding, took a moment to down tools and start following the first towards the light.
Hamilton let his cover open his mouth in blank surprise and kept it there. He stayed put.
The bodyguard tapped her shoulder, and Drewe turned to look at him, puzzled. “I said you’re finished.”
Hamilton detected something urgent in her voice, something he’d heard in the moments before other situations had got rough. This was no setback, no sighing pause.
He crumpled his cover into the darkness of his mind.
He slammed his palm against the wall beside her head.
The bodyguard moved—
But she put up a hand and he stopped.
He let out his Irish accent. “You’ve got a problem, Miss Drewe,” he said.
She considered that for a moment.
He smelt the edge of the ceramic knife as it split molecules an inch from
his eye.
He flathanded the wrist of her knife hand into the wall, his other hand catching the gun she’d pulled at his stomach, his finger squashing hers into firing it pointblank into the bodyguard. His face exploded and he fell and Hamilton ripped aside the weapon and threw it.
There was a shout from behind.
Hamilton grabbed the Webley Collapsar 2 mm handgun from the folded dimensions in his chest, spun into firing stance, and blasted a miniature black hole into the skull of a Russian officer, sending the man’s brains flying into another universe.
He spun back to catch Drewe pulling another device from her boot.
He grabbed her wrist.
He knew intuitively how to snap her neck from this posture.
In moments, the gunfire would bring many soldiers running. Killing the
overseer had compromised Hamilton’s mission but slightly. It was still something that a Russian assassin might do, to give his cover credibility. He had completed half his mission now.
But why had she pulled that, instead of something to kill him with?
He looked into her eyes.
“Do what you were going to do,” said Hamilton.
He let go.
Drewe threw the device at the overseer’s body, grabbed Hamilton, and heaved him with her through the rock wall.
The thump of the explosion and the roar of the collapsing tunnel followed them into the chamber, but no dust or debris did. It was a vaulted cavern, sealed off, with something glowing. . . .
Hamilton realised, as he didn’t need to take a breath, that the air was thick in here. He started to cough, doubling up. Precious air! Thick air that he gulped down, that made his head swim.
When he straightened up, Drewe was pointing a gun at him. She looked shocked and furious. But that was contained. She was military, all right.
He let his gun arm fall to his side. “Well?” he said.
“Who are you?”
Hamilton carefully pulled out his uniform tag identification.
“British. All right. I assume you’re here for that?” She nodded towards the glow.
He looked. Something was protruding from the rock in the centre of the chamber. A silver spar that shone in an unnatural way. It seemed to be connected to something that was lodged—no, that was in some way part of the rocks all around it. There were blazing rivulets threaded in and out of the mass. It was like someone had thrown mercury onto pumice stone.
It was like something trapped. And yet it looked whole and obvious. It seemed apt that it had formed a place where they could live, and a wall they could step through. It spoke of uneasy possibilities.
“What is it?”
She cocked her head to one side, surprised he didn’t know. “A carriage.”
“Some carriage.”
“You don’t know. That wasn’t your mission.”
“I was just having a poke around. I didn’t expect a non-Russian here. You’re Catherine Drewe, aren’t you? What’s your mission?”
She considered, until he was sure she wasn’t going to tell him. But then—“I saw this thing. In my prayers. I spent a week in an isolation tank in Kyoto. You see, lately I’ve started to think there’s something wrong with the balance—”
“Everyone always thinks that.”
She swore at him. “You have no idea. Inside your empires. You know what that is?”
“No.”
“A new arrival.”
“From—?”
“Another universe.”
Hamilton looked back to the object. He was already on his wa
y to the punchline.
“I followed it calling,” Drewe continued, “via a steady and demonstrable provocation of the field. I proved the path led to Mars. I used my rather awe-inspiring political clout to whisper all this into Czar Richard’s ear. By which I mean: his ear.”
“Why choose the Russians?”
She ignored the question. “I dreamed before I set off that only two people would find it, that their motives would be different. I took Aaron into my confidence. He was motivated only by art, by beauty. But you killed him.”
“How do you feel?”
She bared her teeth in a grim smile, her gaze darting all over his face, ready for any provocation. “I’m strongly inclined to return the compliment.”
“But you won’t.” He slowly replaced his gun in its dimensional fold. “Destiny says it’s two people.”
She kept him waiting another moment. Then she slipped her own gun back into the folds of that dangerous gown.
They looked at each other for a moment. Then they stepped over to the glowing object together. “That glow worries me,” she said. “Have you heard of nuclear power?”
Hamilton shook his head.
“Energy produced by the radioactive decay of minerals. An alternative technology. It’s poisonous like hard UV. A dead end. One of the outsider sciences something like this might bring in.”
Hamilton consulted his internal register, holding in a shudder at the damage he’d already taken. He hadn’t anything designed to log radioactivity, but he changed the spectrum on his UV register, and after a moment he was satisfied. “I’m not seeing any radiation. Not even .. .” He stopped. He wasn’t even detecting that light he could see with his own eyes. But somehow he doubted that what he was seeing would allow him to come to harm.
Drewe put a hand on the apparently shining limb, deploying sensors of her own. “There’s nobody in here, no passenger or driver. But . . . I’m getting requests for information. Pleas. Greetings. Quite . . . eccentric ones.” She looked at him as if he were going to laugh at her.
In a civilian, Hamilton thought, it would have been endearing. He didn’t laugh. “A mechanism intelligence? Not possible.”