by Gary Gibson
Slow Blight? Somehow he couldn’t quite take it in. What Danny hadn’t said, but Elias already knew, was that there was no cure for it. Now there’s a time limit on everything I do, he thought.
He would die slowly, his nervous system rotting away, dying from the inside out.
Three
Autonomous Mining Collective ‘Essex Town’
(Mars/Jupiter orbit; Asteroid Cat: No. 2152 NZ20)
Ten Years Before
Something had happened to Pachenko. Elias moved ahead, scouting out the further curve of the corridor, his combat rifle gripped ready in the hands of his armoured pressure suit. These corridors were carved from bare rock, the flickering emergency lights that illuminated them bathing the walls in a blood-red glow.
‘Pachenko,’ barked Elias over the intercom. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Elias looked around. Pachenko had been at the rear.
A howl of pain and despair came over the radio. Elias turned back, pushing past Farell and Eduardez, heading back in the direction of the military transport that had brought them to this pressurized asteroid. He found Pachenko huddled against a wall.
‘They’re going to die,’ Pachenko babbled, as Elias knelt beside him. ‘I can see it,’ he said. ‘I can see it.’
‘What can you see?’
‘Blood, and pain and bodies,’ howled Pachenko. ‘I can see them, Elias. Can’t you see them?’
‘No, but I believe you.’
Another voice came over the intercom. It was Farell. ‘Sir? Everything’s gone to shit, sir. A firefight has broken out between Company A and the miners. I can’t contact Command. What should we do?’
Be anywhere but here, thought Elias. The miners had siphoned the atmosphere out of half the asteroid seconds after Elias and the other troop companies had boarded. Things were clearly not going the way Command wanted. Elias knew what Pachenko meant, what Pachenko was experiencing.
The mining community had carved itself into one of the scattered boulders of the Asteroid Belt. It was a kilometre-long slab of nickel and iron, positioned somewhere on the route between Earth and the Oort Angel Station, which only merited a serial number in a catalogue. The miners made their living by supplying raw materials to huge-bellied cargo ships that plied their way between the Oort Station and Earth. The nature of the Belt, its disparate communities scattered in lengthy orbits around the Sun, made any attempt at control or policing impossible. Corruption and lawlessness were the way of life here. Political expediency meant the attempt at control was made, nonetheless.
‘Pachenko, Liam, listen to me. I’m going to have to leave you here. Make your way back if you can – do you understand me?’ Pachenko nodded, his eyes still staring in horror at something Elias couldn’t see, didn’t want to see.
Pachenko was the one who’d made the scientists proud. We’re going to make special soldiers of you boys, they’d said, before beginning the gene-tweaking process. You’ll heal faster, live longer. They hadn’t mentioned any of the other stuff: being able to catch glimpses of the future, the nightmarish visions experienced. So many of the other men had gone insane within days. Scientists had then been replaced by smooth-talking men in civilian suits, reminding them of their duty, of the terms of the permissions they had signed.
Elias had more than a good idea what Pachenko was going through, and would go through, slipping slowly into insanity. Elias could only pray he himself wouldn’t end up going the same way.
Command had described the situation here to them during their briefing: a self-contained economic unit, a semi-socialistic enclave of God’s Pioneers who, it seemed, had been extorting neighbouring miner communities while themselves being in the pay of a corporation seeking a monopoly on mineral extraction rights.
Later, Elias would find out that Command had been wrong – disastrously, terribly wrong. There was no extortion. Their sources had been wrong, misinformed.
They came to a kind of crossroads, Farell and Eduardez both flanking Elias. Something drifted down from above, from out of the darkness. Elias looked up to see a young girl, perhaps seventeen or so, her young round face barely visible inside a several-times-patched pressure suit. She held a weapon. She raised it. She fired. Elias heard Eduardez yell, even as the three of them brought their weapons up simultaneously.
A girl, thought Elias. A little girl? He took aim, but someone else fired first. The girl exploded.
Heat and flames filled the cavern. They fell back, taking refuge in the same corridor from which they had just emerged. ‘Oh Jesus, what was that?’ yelled Farell.
‘Explosives,’ Elias heard himself say numbly. ‘They must have packed her with explosives.’ He was now finding out what Pachenko had meant. He knew now it was going to get worse.
More miners in pressure suits came crawling out of the dark, firing as they moved. Elias and his men returned fire, their armoured suits protecting them, but there were just three of them, and scores of miners. It was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed. Elias signalled for the other two to retreat further back.
New orders came through from Command. A 3D map came up on the inside of Elias’s helmet, showing him the route to take. He signalled to Eduardez and Farell, and they moved off again, re-entering the cavern they had just retreated from, and meeting with Company B coming from the opposite direction. A Korean named Lee Huang led them. The miners had vanished into the darkness.
‘We got ’em,’ said Lee. ‘They’re retreating now, pulling back. They weren’t prepared for this kind of onslaught.’
Elias thought of saying something, like, How do we even know they’ve done anything illegal? But he kept his mouth shut. They moved off together, coming to what the Command map indicated was a central dormitory complex.
It was open to the vacuum.
‘We didn’t do this,’ said Eduardez. ‘Who did this?’
Messages flew between Command and the three companies who had boarded the asteroid. Something had gone very wrong. Company C was on its way. The miners had simply pulled back, ceased resisting.
So where were they?
As they moved into the dormitory complex, they found miners everywhere, faces slack, their twisted bodies floating in the airless vacuum. Blood, and pain and bodies, thought Elias. They were all dead, so Pachenko had been right, not that Elias had ever doubted him. Blood, and pain and bodies.
They had suicided, down to the last man, woman and child. He turned to see Lee vomiting inside his helmet.
Things became very strange after that; his memory of subsequent events grew patchy. One memory remained strong: they had attempted to rescue some of the miners. Like trying to fix something that can’t be fixed, he’d thought crazily. But one thing he remembered well, above all else. Something he would never forget.
There had been a child, her face blue with hypoxia. He had watched as the girl was cut from her pressure suit and placed on a gurney. There she had lain in the stillness of death. He stared at her, and touched her face gently, a hollow feeling deep within him, in a place where a part of him had once lived but now seemed lost forever. He wanted so badly to bring her back, to rectify all the things that had caused her to be here, in this time, this place.
Then the miracle had happened.
The miracle that had sealed the fate of anyone who had emerged, transformed, from the gene treatments.
Especially Elias.
Getting back home had been far from easy. Once the mission was over, Elias had a gut feeling they’d try and find a way to hold on to all of them forever. They were, he realized, too valuable or too dangerous to be let go. So Elias had bribed a sergeant to stow him in a deep-sleep coffin on board a cargo shuttle that took a year to wind its automated way back to Earth after a long, slow solar orbit. After that, well, losing yourself in London was easy, if you knew how, and Elias had become an expert.
The experiments had left him changed, different – and not just because of the nightmares that he knew would haunt him forever. And one day, sitt
ing in the secluded corner of a bar, the darkness obscuring his features, he was listening to an old man telling a story he hadn’t heard in a long time, and felt a chill run down his back as the details of it flooded back to him. He distantly recalled the childhood stories, something whispered in those steel and concrete playgrounds that were the streets he’d always known from infancy. It was a story of someone blessed with a kind of second sight, the power to heal. Sometimes the Primalists came into the story – and someone who was the Messiah the Primalists had been waiting for. But always, in these stories, he’d eventually deserted the Primalists, instead of leading them into the Promised Land, wherever that was.
Studying any one particular variation of this legend, it was easy to find yourself realizing, only when it was much too late, that you’d been following the wrong path, and the truth lay elsewhere. Some variations on the story maintained he’d been a soldier serving on the re-contact missions to the colonies which were originally lost for two centuries, thanks to the Hiatus. He had, the legends further claimed, the power to bring people back to life, a power he’d gained when he met an Angel, the last of its kind. Nonetheless, there was a resonance to all these stories that Elias couldn’t have been conscious of before the events he experienced out there amongst the Rocks.
Listening to the old man’s story, Elias remembered the twisted, ruined bodies of the God’s Pioneers, and became suddenly obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the legend.
And if there might be someone else like himself.
He began to scour the streets of London, hustling contacts and information, until he found himself standing before the entrance to a service tunnel running under one of the big maglev stations servicing London’s lower levels. The kid who’d shown him the way there led him through a broken vent tucked behind an abandoned access corridor, which only a few people knew about. Down there, the kid had whispered, you could hear people walking about, people from all over the world.
That was when he’d found the name behind all the stories.
Trencher.
Trencher told Elias he remembered what it was like before they excavated the great tunnels that carried the maglev trains between continents, but Elias doubted that. The tunnels had been in place for over a century and Trencher was an old man, but Elias knew he couldn’t be that old. Elias returned to the service tunnel many times, and once Trencher trusted Elias enough, Elias got to see the miracle worker at work. He watched the old man cure a woman of cancer simply by touching her, and again he remembered the miracle out amongst the Rocks.
Whenever Elias asked him about his past, Trencher had been guarded, but it was clear to both of them that they shared a gift, though a gift that was more like a curse. In turn, Elias told Trencher about his life in the military, the terrible things that had happened there. Elias came across Dan Farell who had been in the Rocks with him, and found that Danny had escaped not long after Elias himself, and had since become a priest. Elias became part of his world too, and for a while, his life found a meaning and a depth that he had never realized was missing from it. It was from Trencher he first learned about Vaughn and about the Primalists.
‘You mean this guy Vaughn is like a ghost?’
‘Not a ghost.’ Trencher had coughed. They were somewhere high up, near the curve of the Dome, the bleached grey wall of some vertical slum visible through an open window. Rain streamed through a crack in the city’s facade, falling a quarter of a mile or more to the streets far below. ‘He’s human. As human as you or me, at any rate. It’s as if he can be in two places at once, like a kind of astral projection.’
Elias cocked his head to one side. ‘Is it something we can do?’
‘There are only two I know of, Vaughn and one other, who have that ability.’ They drank mint tea out of stainless steel mugs that belonged to an elderly woman Trencher knew, who to all intents and purposes ruled the building Trencher was now sheltered in. ‘Vaughn comes to me sometimes, like a ghost, but that’s because really he’s far away. He wants me to go back to the Primalists.’ The old man laughed. ‘Imagine? Did I ever tell you about the Primalists, Elias?’
‘No,’ said Elias, wondering if he should say anything else or wait and see what the old man said next. He’d been trying for months to get some idea of Trencher’s origins, but the other had remained taciturn.
Until now.
‘I’ll tell you, then,’ said Trencher.
The Primalists had started out in Japan a long time ago, before the Stations were found, and centuries before Elias was born. They’d used a different name back then and their philosophy combined elements of eastern mysticism and western millennialism – a real fire-and-brimstone, the-end-is-coming kind of ideology. When the Angel Stations were first discovered, the Primalists decided they were there for the sole purpose of taking a chosen few out to safety amongst the stars, where God would get things right this time.
By this point, they’d grown powerful and influential, spreading outwards from Japan into America and Europe, using the pooled funds and knowledge of their richer members to make investments in high-yield research industries, particularly those reaping rich rewards from inventions linked to the newly discovered alien technologies recovered from other star systems.
It seemed that the Angels – or whatever they’d actually called themselves – had carried out genetic manipulation on an unimaginable scale. This much had been public knowledge for centuries, and had led to the development of Angel-derived technologies such as read/write bioware for recording memories and experiences by biochemical means.
Any of the worlds the Angels had visited, where life existed, they’d altered in some way, travelling between those worlds via great waystations that could carry them across vast interstellar gulfs in the blink of an eye: the Angel Stations. Identical strings of apparently ‘junk’ DNA had been found in species on worlds light years distant from each other.
And somewhere during the time that came to be known as the Hiatus, when the Oort Angel Station had nearly been destroyed by the scientists studying it, and contact between the scattered fragile colonies around other stars had subsequently been lost for almost two centuries, research into the Angel-altered gene sequences had continued unabated. Paradigm-altering discoveries about human DNA were then made, and it didn’t take long for some of the new theories to be tested out on human beings. If I’d known more about these things, thought Elias, maybe things would have been different.
It didn’t take long for Elias to realize what the old man was telling him. The Primalists had actually created Trencher, in a breeding programme designed to bring about a new Messiah – but a Messiah that would serve only the needs of the Primalist religion.
Elias had listened appalled to Trencher; appalled at what they had done to him, appalled that they had succeeded in so many ways.
‘I didn’t want any part of it,’ Trencher assured him. ‘And I told them so. They didn’t want to let me go either, but they had made us too powerful. The Primalists were going to kill all of us but one, but we rebelled. I rebelled. This was all a long time ago, Elias. A long time ago.’
More than three centuries ago, Elias realized. It was indeed a long time. He wondered if the old man would ever die, or if he’d just keep going. ‘You said ‘‘us’’?’
‘Sure, Elias, us. Three of us. Three supermen, and the Primalists couldn’t control any of us.’ The old man sipped again at his mint tea with merry eyes, enjoying the consternation, the confusion in the other man’s face.
‘But they didn’t breed me. We were all adults, all soldiers, when we underwent the treatments that made us the way we are.’
‘Dangerous,’ said Trencher. ‘How many of you now left with the power? Just you, you said? Pity. The rest weren’t strong enough to handle it, I suppose, not in the body or the head. Now they’re after you too.’
‘But the Primalists are still looking for you, right?’
‘Sure. They can’t necessarily account for me, and I c
ould screw things up for them.’
‘What are they planning?’
‘Things.’ Trencher looked out to the rain as a bird flew by, navigating the cavernous spaces between the buildings. ‘Look at that, Elias. I swear, must have been years since I saw a bird flying down in here. Not so many of them left outside either. Things’re getting bad.’
‘What are the Primalists planning?’ Elias persisted.
‘You’ll know, Elias. Best you don’t torture yourself till the time comes. We’ve all got a burden to carry, and yours is greater than most.’
Unsettled, Elias put down his mug. ‘You’re talking about the future?’ Trencher’s ability for precognition was extraordinary, while Elias’s own visions were like faded family photographs, bleached images so vague in detail they could represent almost anything. But Trencher saw so much more. The old man had known precisely when to glance out of the window, Elias realized: just at the right moment to see a sparrow fly past, its tiny wings beating furiously in the still dead air.
Trencher had sighed heavily then. ‘I told you there were three of us. Vaughn was one of the others. He’s going to come to you, soon. Don’t listen to him, Elias, whatever he says. He’s powerful, dangerous. He believes in everything the Primalists taught him, and more.’
The old man was silent for a few moments. ‘Something bad’s going to happen, Elias,’ he said at length. ‘I’m going somewhere soon, and I need you to do something for me, okay?’
‘Something bad? How bad?’
‘Let’s just say I’ll be gone for a while. I want you – I want you to do the right thing.’
‘What?’
‘The right thing – when the time comes.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘When the time comes,’ Trencher had repeated patiently, ‘you’ll know what to do.’