Galactic North

by Alastair Reynolds

  But perhaps Nightingale will need no persuasion, when she decides the time is right. It seems to us that the ship will return one day, of her own volition. She will make orbit around Sky’s Edge and announce that the time has come for us to be separated. Nightingale will have decided that we have served our purpose, that we have walked the world long enough. Perhaps by then she will have some other memorial in mind. Or she will conclude that her message has finally been taken to heart, and that no further action is needed. That, we think, will depend on how the ceasefire holds.

  It’s in our interests, then, to make sure the planet doesn’t slip back into war. We want the ship to return and heal us. None of us likes things this way, despite what you may have read or heard. Yes, we’re famous. Yes, we’re the subject of a worldwide outpouring of sympathy and goodwill. Yes, we can have almost anything we want. None of that compensates, though. Not even for a second.

  It’s hard on all of us, but especially so for Martinez. We’ve all long since stopped thinking of the big man as Norbert. He’s the one who has to carry us everywhere: more than twice his own bodyweight. Nightingale thought of that, of course, and made sure that our own hearts and respiratory systems take some of the burden off Martinez. But it’s still his spine bending under this load; still his legs that have to support us. The doctors who’ve examined us say his condition is good, that he can continue to play his part for years to come—but they’re not talking about for ever. And when Martinez dies, so will the rest of us. In the meantime we just keep hoping that Nightingale will return sooner than that.

  You’ve seen us up close now. You’ll have seen photographs and moving images before, but nothing really compares with seeing us in the flesh. We make quite a spectacle, don’t we? A great tottering tree of flesh, an insult to symmetry. You’ve heard us speak, all of us, individually. You know by now how we feel about the war. All of us played our part in it to some degree, some more than others. Some of us were even enemies. Now the very idea that we might have hated each other—hated that which we depend on for life itself—lies beyond all comprehension. If Nightingale sought to create a walking argument for the continuation of the ceasefire, then she surely succeeded.

  We are sorry if some of you will go home to nightmares tonight. We can’t help that. In fact, if truth be told, we’re not sorry at all. Nightmares are what we’re all about. It’s the nightmare of us that will stop this planet falling back into war.

  If you have trouble sleeping tonight, spare us a thought.

  GALACTIC NORTH

  Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo—AD 2303

  The two of them crouched in a tunnel of filthy ice, bulky in spacesuits. Fifty metres down the tunnel, the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal legs, transmitting a thermal image onto their visors. Irravel jumped whenever the noise shifted into something human, cradling her gun nervously.

  “Damn this thing,” she said. “Hardly get my finger around the trigger.”

  “It can’t read your blood, Captain.” Markarian, next to her, managed not to sound as if he was stating the obvious. “You have to set the override to female.”

  Of course. Belatedly remembering the training session on Fand where they’d been shown how to use the weapons— months of subjective time ago; years of worldtime—Irravel told the gun to reshape itself. The memory-plastic casing squirmed in her gloves to something more manageable. It still felt wrong.

  “How are we doing?” she asked.

  “Last team’s in position. That’s all the tunnels covered. They’ll have to fight their way in.”

  “I think that might well be on the agenda.”

  “Maybe so.” Markarian sighted along his weapon like a sniper. “But they’ll get a surprise when they reach the cargo.”

  True: the ship had sealed the sleeper chambers the instant the pirates had arrived near the comet. Counter-intrusion weaponry would seriously inconvenience anyone trying to break in, unless they had the right authorisation. And there, Irravel knew, was the problem; the thing she would rather not have had to deal with.

  “Markarian,” Irravel said, “if we’re taken prisoner, there’s a chance they’ll try to make us give up the codes.”

  “Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind already.” Markarian rechecked some aspect of his gun. “I won’t let you down, Irravel.”

  “It’s not a question of letting me down,” she said, carefully. “It’s whether or not we betray the cargo.”

  “I know.” For a moment they studied each other’s face through their visors, acknowledging what had once been more than professional friendship; the shared knowledge that they would kill each other rather than place the cargo in harm’s way.

  Their ship was the ramliner Hirondelle. She was damaged; lashed to the comet for repair. Improbably sleek for a creature of vacuum, her four-kilometre-long conic hull tapered to a needle-sharp prow and sprouted trumpet-shaped engines from two swept-back spars at the rear. It had been Irravel’s first captaincy: a routine seventeen-year hop from Fand, in the Lacaille 9352 system, to Yellowstone, around Epsilon Eridani—with twenty thousand reefersleep colonists aboard. What had gone wrong should only have happened once in a thousand trips: a speck of interstellar dust had slipped through the ship’s screen of anti-collision lasers and punched a cavernous hole in the ablative ice shield, vaporising a quarter of its mass. With a vastly reduced likelihood of surviving another collision, the ship had automatically steered towards the nearest system capable of supplying repair materials.

  Luyten 726-8 had been no one’s idea of a welcoming destination. No human colonies had flourished there. All that remained were droves of scavenging machines sent out by various superpowers. The ship had locked into a scavenger’s homing signal, eventually coming within visual range of the inert comet the machine had made its home, and which ought to have been chequered with re-supply materials. Irravel had been revived from reefersleep just in time to see that none of the goods were there—just acres of barren comet.

  “Dear God,” she’d said. “Do we deserve this?”

  After a few days, despair became steely resolve. The ship couldn’t safely travel anywhere else, so they would have to process the supplies themselves, doing the work of the malfunctioning surveyor. It would mean stripping the ship just to make the machines to mine and shape the cometary ice— years of work by any estimate. That hardly mattered. The detour had already added years to the mission.

  Irravel ordered the rest of her crew—all ninety of them—to be warmed, and then delegated tasks, mostly programming. Servitors were not particularly intelligent outside of their designated functions. She considered activating the other machines she carried as cargo—the green- fly terraformers—but that cut against all her instincts. Greenfly machines were von Neumann breeders, unlike the sterile servitors. They were a hundred times cleverer. She would only consider using them if the cargo was placed in immediate danger.

  “If you won’t unleash the greenflies,” Markarian said, “at least think about waking the Conjoiners. There may only be four of them, but we could use their expertise.”

  “I don’t trust them. I never liked the idea of carrying them in the first place. They unsettle me.”

  “I don’t like them either, but I’m willing to bury my prejudices if it means fixing the ship faster.”

  “Well, that’s where we differ. I’m not, so don’t raise the subject again.”

  “Yes,” Markarian said, and only when its omission was insolently clear added: “Captain.”

  Eventually the Conjoiners ceased to be an issue, when the work was clearly under way and proceeding normally. Most of the crew were able to return to reefersleep. Irravel and Markarian stayed awake a little longer, and even after they’d gone under, they woke every seven months to review the status of the works. It began to look as if they would succeed without assistance.

  Until the day they were woken out of schedule, and a dark, grapple-shaped ship was almost upon the comet. Not an interstellar s
hip, it must have come from somewhere nearby—probably within the same halo of comets around Luyten 726-8. Its silence was not encouraging.

  “I think they’re pirates,” Irravel said. “I’ve heard of one or two other ships going missing near here, but it was always put down to accident.”

  “Why did they wait so long to attack us?”

  “They had no choice. There are billions of comets out here, but they’re never less than light-hours apart. That’s a long way if you only have in-system engines. They must have a base somewhere else to keep watch, maybe light-weeks from here, like a spider with a very wide web.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Irravel gritted her teeth. “Do what anything does when it’s stuck in the middle of a web: fight back.”

  But the Hirondelle’s minimal defences had only scratched the enemy ship.

  Oblivious, it fired penetrators and winched closer. Dozens of crab-shaped machines swarmed out and dropped below the comet’s horizon, impacting with seismic thuds. After a few minutes, sensors in the furthest tunnels registered intruders. Only a handful of crew had been woken. They broke guns out of the armoury—small arms designed for pacification in the unlikely event of a shipboard riot—and then established defensive positions in all the cometary tunnels.

  Nervously now, Irravel and Markarian advanced around a bend in the tunnel, cleated shoes whispering through ice barely more substantial than smoke. They had to keep their suit exhausts from touching the walls if they didn’t want to get blown back by superheated steam. Irravel jumped again at the pattern of photons on her visor and then forced calm, telling herself it was another mirage.

  Except this time it stayed.

  Markarian opened fire, squeezing rounds past the servitor. It lurched aside, a gaping hole in its carapace. Black crabs came around the bend, encrusted with sensors and guns. The first reached the ruined servitor and dismembered it with ease. If only there’d been time to activate and program the greenfly machines. They’d have ripped through the pirates like a host of furies, treating them as terraformable matter . . .

  And maybe us, too, Irravel thought.

  Something flashed through the clouds of steam: an electromagnetic pulse that turned Irravel’s suit sluggish, as if every joint had corroded. The whine of the circulator died to silence, leaving only her frenzied breathing. Something pressed against her backpack. She turned slowly around, wary of falling against the walls. There were crabs everywhere. The chamber in which they’d been cornered was littered with the bodies of the other crew members, pink trails of blood reaching across the ice from other tunnels. They’d been killed and dragged here.

  Two words jumped to mind: kill yourself. But first she had to kill Markarian, in case he lacked the nerve to do it himself. She couldn’t see his face through his visor. That was good. Painfully, she pointed the gun towards him and squeezed the trigger. But instead of firing, the gun shivered in her hands, stowing itself into a quarter of its operational volume.

  “Thank you for using this weapon system,” it said cheerfully.

  Irravel let it drift to the ground.

  A new voice rasped in her helmet. “If you’re thinking of surrendering, now might not be a bad time.”

  “Bastard,” Irravel said, softly.

  “Really the best you can manage?” The language was Canasian—what Irravel and Markarian had spoken on Fand—but heavily accented, as if the native tongue was Norte or Russish, or spoken with an impediment. “ ‘Bastard ’s’ quite a compliment compared to some of things my clients come up with.”

  “Give me time; I’ll work on it.”

  “Positive attitude—that’s good.” The lid of a crab hinged up, revealing the prone form of a man in a mesh of motion-sensors. He crawled from the mesh and stepped onto the ice, wearing a spacesuit formed from segmented metal plates. Totems had been welded to the armour, around holographic starscapes infested with serpentine monsters and scantily clad maidens.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Captain Run Seven.” He stepped closer, examining her suit nameplate. “But you can call me Seven, Irravel Veda.”

  “I hope you burn in hell, Seven.”

  Seven smiled—she could see the curve of his grin through his visor; the oddly upturned nostrils of his nose above it. “I’m sensing some negativity here, Irravel. I think we need to put that behind us, don’t you?”

  Irravel looked at her murdered adjutants. “Maybe if you tell me which one was the traitor.”

  “Traitor?”

  “You seemed to have no difficulty finding us.”

  “Actually, you found us.” It was a woman’s voice this time. “We use lures—tampering with commercial beacons, like the scavenger’s.” She emerged from one of the other attack machines wearing a suit similar to Seven’s, except that it displayed the testosterone-saturated male analogues of his space-maidens: all rippling torsos and chromed codpieces.

  “Wreckers,” Irravel breathed.

  “Yeah. Ships home in on the beacons, then find they ain’t going anywhere in a hurry. We move in from the halo.”

  “Disclose all our confidential practices while you’re at it, Mirsky,” Seven said.

  She glared at him through her visor. “Veda would have figured it out.”

  “We’ll never know now, will we?”

  “What does it matter?” she said. “Gonna kill them anyway, aren’t you?”

  Seven flashed an arc of teeth filed to points and waved a hand towards the female pirate. “Allow me to introduce Mirsky, our loose-tongued but efficient information-retrieval specialist. She’s going to take you on a little trip down memory lane, see if you can’t remember those access codes.”

  “What codes?”

  “It’ll come back to you,” Seven said.

  They were taken through the tunnels, past half-assembled mining machines, onto the surface and then into the pirate ship. The ship was huge, most of it living space. Cramped corridors snaked through hydroponics galleries of spring wheat and dwarf papaya, strung with xenon lights. The ship hummed constantly with carbon dioxide scrubbers, the foetid air making Irravel sneeze. There were children everywhere, frowning at the captives. The pirates obviously had no reefersleep technology: they stayed warm the whole time, and some of the children Irravel saw had probably been born after the Hirondelle had arrived there.

  They arrived at a pair of interrogation rooms where they were separated. Irravel’s room held a couch converted from an old command seat, still carrying warning decals. A console stood in one corner. Painted torture scenes fought for wall space with racks of surgical equipment: drills, blades and ratcheted contraptions speckled with rust.

  Irravel breathed deeply. Hyperventilation could have an anaesthetic effect. Her conditioning would in any case create a state of detachment: the pain would be no less intense, but she would feel it at one remove.

  She hoped.

  The pirates fiddled with her suit, confused by the modern design, until they stripped her down to her shipboard uniform. Mirsky leaned over her. She was small-boned and dark-skinned, dirty hair rising in a topknot, eyes mismatched shades of azure. Something clung to the side of her head above the left ear: a silver box with winking status lights. She fixed a crown to Irravel’s head, then made adjustments on the console.

  “Decided yet?” Captain Run Seven said, sauntering into the room. He was unlatching his helmet.

  “What?”

  “Which of our portfolio of interrogation packages you’re going to opt for.”

  She was looking at his face now. It wasn’t really human. Seven had a man’s bulk and a man’s shape, but there was at least as much of the pig in his face. His nose was a snout, his ears two tapered flaps framing a hairless pink skull. His pale eyes evinced animal cunning.

  “What the hell are you?”

  “Excellent question,” Seven said, clicking a finger in her direction. His bare hand was dark-skinned and feminine. “To be honest, I don’t really know. A
genetics experiment, perhaps? Was I the seventh failure, or the first success?”

  “Do I get two guesses?”

  He ignored her. “All I know is that I’ve been here—in the halo around Luyten 726-8—for as long as I can remember. ”

  “Someone sent you here?”

  “In a tiny automated spacecraft; perhaps an old lifepod. The ship’s governing personality raised me as well as it could, attempted to make of me a well-rounded individual . . .” Seven trailed off momentarily. “Eventually I was found by a passing ship. I staged what might be termed a hostile takeover bid. From then on I’ve built an organisation largely recruited from my client base.”

  “You’re insane. It might have worked once, but it won’t work with us.”

  “Why should you be any different?”

  “Neural conditioning. I regard the cargo as my offspring—all twenty thousand of them. I can’t betray them in any way.”

  Seven smiled his piggy smile. “Funny; the last client thought that, too.”

  Sometime later, Irravel woke alone in a reefersleep casket. She remembered only dislocated episodes of interrogation. There was the memory of a kind of sacrifice, and, later, of the worst terror she could imagine—so intense that she could not bring its cause to mind. Underpinning everything was the certainty that she had not given up the codes.

  So why was she still alive?

  Everything was quiet and cold. Once she was able to move, she found a suit and wandered the Hirondelle until she reached a porthole. They were still lashed to the comet. The other craft was gone; presumably en route back to the base in the halo where the pirates must have had a larger ship.

  She looked for Markarian, but there was no sign of him.

  Then she checked the twenty crew sleeper chambers; the thousand-berth dormitories. The chamber doors were all open. Most of the sleepers were still there. They’d been butchered, carved open for implants, minds pulped by destructive memory-trawling devices. The horror was too great for any recognisable emotional response. The conditioning made each death feel like a stolen part of her.