Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Kindle Edition, 2013 © Penny Publications
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Lockstep Part III of IV
Karl Schroeder | 23342 words
Illustrated by Mark Evans
The story so far:
Toby Wyatt McGonigal is lost in space. The eldest son of a family that's gambled its fortune on homesteading in the outer Solar System, he was on his way to stake a claim on a dormant comet when something disabled his ship's engines. When Toby wakes from cold sleep, he discovers that his little deep-space tug is now orbiting a dark, frozen planet—an orphan world just as lost in interstellar space as he is. Although he can see the shapes of cities on its surface, they too are cold and dead. Out of resources, he goes back into artificial hibernation, certain that he's not going to wake again....
He does, in a sumptuous bedroom whose windows look out on an amber, glowing sky. He's been rescued by Ammond and Persea, a rich-seeming couple who live in one of the cities on the formerly dormant planet, Lowdown. They tell him that fourteen thousand years have passed since he was lost. In that time, a vast civilization has grown up between the stars. The lockstep worlds hibernate for years at a time while their automated systems gather resources for a brief awakening that can last as little as a month. Ammond and Persea promise to tell him more, but meanwhile, they are treating him suspiciously like a prisoner. Other than them, the only person he's seen since waking is a mysterious girl around his age, who seemed to be burgling Ammond's estate. She had with her a strange catlike creature. He can't get these two out of his mind.
When Ammond and Persea take him to the Europan ice planet of Little Auriga, Toby learns that he is indeed a pawn in some political maneuver. It seems that as the founding family in the deep-space worlds, the Mc-Gonigals were important, and Ammond and Persea want to exploit him in some way. Toby escapes from them with the help of one of the catlike creatures he saw on Lowdown, and meets the girl he saw burgling Ammond's estate. Her name is Corva, and she and her friends are gypsylike vagabonds known as stowaways. Their animal companions, denners, are synthetic life forms that help them to hibernate without using the official cold-sleep machinery of the lockstep.
Corva tells Toby that the thousands of planets in the lockstep are suffering under a tyranny, and that Toby is important because, well, he owns them all . He is the heir of the family that founded the lockstep system. This comes as a shock, but that's nothing compared to what she tells him next. Although fourteen thousand years have passed in real-time since Toby was lost, only forty have passed for the lockstep's founders because of their regular hibernation. Toby's brother and sister are both alive, and his brother, Peter, rules the lockstep empire.
Peter has learned that Toby is back from the dead—and Peter wants Toby dead.
Toby has no time to think about any of this, because Ammond and Persea are after them, and so he, Corva, and their friends stow away on an outbound freighter, going into cold-sleep again in a bid to escape the gathering forces that are pursuing Toby.
When he wakes again he's on a new planet—somewhere called Wallop. He doesn't trust Corva Keishion and her friends any more than he trusted the people who initially rescued him from fourteen thousand years of hibernation; so before Corva and the others revive, Toby leaves the cargo container they stowed away in, to find his own way on Wallop.
He has to get his bearings. Over the next few weeks Toby meets people from all over the lockstep. It really is a vast empire, because there are up to one-hundred thousand free-floating planets for every star in the galaxy. The entire seventy-thousand-world lockstep that Peter McGonigal rules is contained in the space between the Solar System and Alpha Centauri. Simple nuclear rocket technology is sufficient to create a vibrant civilization here, because all the worlds synchronize their hibernation cycle: thirty years asleep, one month awake. As Toby discovers, this stable, aeons-old civilization has become the safest investment in the galaxy, and a kind of 'backup' for the whole human race. Empires rise and fall on the fast worlds around the stars; posthuman singularities flash and vanish; eugenic crazes, political fashions and genetic manipulations depopulate whole planets; yet the locksteps abide.
When he encounters Corva Keishion again, Toby learns that her planet is being punished by the tyrant Peter McGonigal. Her brother came to Wallop to bring her home, but he's now trapped in cold sleep in a military complex. Corva wants to get him back, and Toby is her key. Because he's a McGonigal he can override the cold-sleep system. Toby is disappointed to learn that she had an agenda when she saved his life, but he decides to help her anyway.
With the help of Corva's friends, Shylif and Jaysir, they break into the complex. Toby is about to use his override on the hibernating ship when they are captured by Nathan Kenani, a servant of Toby's brother. Kenani declares that he's going to keep them prisoner until Toby's apparently murderous sister Evayne arrives onWallop. As he sends them into cold sleep, however, Kenani is acting oddly. Perhaps he isn't as loyal to Evayne and the other McGonigals as he claims to be....
12
He'd felt this before.
Thrum... thrum thrum. Pause. Thrum...
Not so far away, though; never so weak. Toby struggled to move—even to open his eyes. He felt like a lump of stone neglected by the sculptor. Buried in a hill. Lost in time...
He could feel the source of that faint vibration: a small, heavy body sprawled atop his. Orpheus was struggling.
Toby remembered the first time he'd awoken in between destinations. He'd been confident, had no idea that the tug had missed its target and wandered for thousands of years. He'd fallen down a well of centuries and not even known it. And this time? How long had it been?
But this wasn't like that time. Orpheus was with him. Yet Orpheus was dying, he could hear it in the weakness of the vibration that traveled up and down his body. Dying, and it was Toby's fault.
He couldn't move, but after a profound struggle he was able to crack his eyes, just enough to see that the lid to his cicada bed was closed. Its transparent surface was mostly frosted over, but outside, dim blue light showed the ceiling furred by the same white frost he'd seen in the tug. Frozen air, Sol had called it. The internal tell-tales of the bed were active, and registered red: emergency power-up. Orpheus must have tripped them when he climbed in.
Orpheus and the bed were fighting: he was using all his power to try to revive Toby, and it was using its to push him back into hibernation. There was no question which one would win. This bed wasn't set to care for a denner, though; Orpheus would die if he stayed here. He couldn't possibly have enough energy left to wake himself again.
"Go..." He tried to say back to sleep, but his jaw wouldn't move. If only he had his glasses he could contact Orph through his interface, tell him to reset his clock—
Interfaces... didn't these beds have their own internal controls? Of course they would. He twisted, flailed around in the narrow space, and felt a keypad near his right hand. He mashed numb fingers against it and was rewarded as data windows blossomed into existence in the crystal canopy.
The display showed that the bed was drawing on an inexhaustible well of power from elsewhere in the city. It was programmed to push Toby back into sleep, and it would keep at it until it succeeded. After all, he wasn't due to wake up for another twenty-two years.
Why twenty-two? Then he remembered it all: Nathan Kenani's strange hinting statements, and Toby's own desperate plan. The order he'd sent to Orpheus just before they'd been sent to their beds.
"This is..." his voice was a ragged whisper, but he had to try it. "This is Toby Wyatt Mc-Gonigal. Wake me up."
The indicators in the data window changed, and seconds later Orpheus's drone ended. He felt the denner collapse into the gap between his arm and his body. Around them both, the bed was now humming into action.
Rest, Orph.
This time, Toby awoke refreshed. He blinked lazily at the distant frosted ceiling, remembered everything, and turned on his side, gathering Orpheus into his arms. The denner was limp.
"Oh no, no." He hugged Orpheus to him, crying. The bed had woken Toby, but it had ignored the denner. Maybe it wasn't too late, though. Cicada beds could perform medical wonders, and reviving creatures from the brink of death—or beyond—was their specialty. And somewhere nearby was the bed Orpheus had been in until today.
Toby went to lift the bed's lid, but got an alarm in response. TOXIC ATMOSPHERE and FATAL TEMPERATURE DIFFERENTIAL were just two of the indicators that flashed red. He could lift the lid, but the first breath he took would freeze his lungs into solid cages.
"What do we do now, Orph?" From his position on his side he could see through the bed's lid; most of the frost had cleared off it now. The beds containing Corva and Shylif were right next to his. Beyond them, the room was dark except for the blue tell-tales indicating where infrastructure machinery, designed to operate in hypercold conditions, was maintaining the ideal hibernation conditions for the city.
It was incredible, but Orpheus had survived that environment. Toby had known the denners could survive without air, and in deep subzero temperatures, for a little while. They had to have those abilities to be able to wake themselves from cold sleep. They were biological, but seriously genetically engineered at some point in the past.
He craned his neck to look down at the floor, and saw little denner paw-prints criss crossing the thin snow that covered everything. There were broad drag-lines through that snow, too. They seemed to start at a set of lockers in the dim corner of the room, and ended up below Toby's bed. What had Orpheus put so much effort into hauling over?
He couldn't see it, but suddenly he knew. "Orph, you're a genius," he whispered to the lifeless body he cradled. "Hang on, hang on, I'll get you help."
Toby took several deep breaths then, holding his breath, slammed the bed's lid back.
The cold hit him like a hammer. He just had time to roll off the bed and make a grab at the balled-up environment suit; then he couldn't move. His fingers were painfully cramping into claws, and he just managed to reach out and cradle the suit's helmet before his hands went numb.
The suit woke, and swarmed up his arm, built itself over his head. It felt like he was plunging into an icy lake as the pieces conformed themselves to his arms, his shoulders, covered his face and mouth, and ringed his torso. The thing flipped him over as it finished its work and, just as he was seeing spots and about to faint, he felt a blast of cool—but not cold—air shoot down his throat.
Coughing, frost-bitten by the material sheathing his whole body, Toby rolled, thrashed, and banged his head on the base of another bed. Then he was able to sit up. The air rushing into him was getting warmer, and so was the metal touching him everywhere. The suit was trying its best.
More coughing; he crouched there for a long time, until the painful tingling of reawakening nerves settled into a mere clammy chill. Then he levered himself to his feet and looked around.
Half the room's beds were showing amber telltales. They were trying to wake their sleepers. Toby stumbled over to one and scraped away the frost to reveal the face of a grim, middle-aged man within it. One of Nathan Kenani's soldiers, no doubt.
"Go back to sleep," he said. The beds' indicators flickered and then changed. Quickly, he gathered Orpheus into his arms and crunched through the frozen air to the denner's original cicada bed, which he found by following Orpheus's paw-prints into the next room. The petbeds were little boxy affairs suitable for cats and dogs, set along the far wall. It was easy to find Orpheus's—it was the one with the open lid, whose lights were flashing red while it beeped in alarm. He set Orpheus carefully inside and commanded it to start emergency treatment.
Next he had to take care of Kenani's bots— which were, after all, McGonigal bots. Several stood in the darkened corners of the main room. These were watching Toby. They'd probably been awakened by the alarms that had gone off when Orpheus tried to override his bed. They were doubtless programmed to wait for the human soldiers to wake up before taking any action.
"You're mine now, all of you," he told them, and his voice overrode their settings. "Find my glasses and warm them up."
He went to the other boxes, and commanded them to awaken Shadoweye and Wrecks. Then he returned to the main room, and gave the same order to the beds where their masters slept. One of the bots handed him his glasses, and he pushed them against his face-plate until the suit understood and built itself a mouth to bring them in. It fitted them onto his face, the interface sparkled into life around him, and he activated the Cicada Corp Console.
And then... And then there was no more to do. He found himself turning around and around in the middle of the room, adrenalin making him swing his arms and curse—but the beds were working. He was done here.
Toby left the main room to find a window. The suit's interface said it was hundreds of degrees below out there, and what air there was, was hydrogen and very thin. The normally bustling spaces looked post-apocalyptic with drifts of snow covering the carpets and frost on the dead video signs. Here and there, faint tell-tales glowed from dormant equipment. He soon found a door to the main spaceport hall, and walked over to one of the transparent outer walls of the city. Outside, he could see the other spheres of the continent, vast dark curves breaking up the starscape. Stars meant the city must be very high in the atmosphere, and indeed when he ventured a look down he saw nothing below but black.
Yet kilometers overhead, attached to the side of the dark spheres, was a fantastical lantern. Glowing warm yellow, the single solitary city-sphere cradled greenery inside it, while little bright dots of flying machines drifted lazily around its curving side.
The Weekly lockstep was awake.
Toby sagged against the clear wall. For a second he thought he was going to faint—but at least now he knew there was somewhere to go once they got out of this room. They could even find a hot meal up there.
He hadn't really thought this would work. The only thing that made him set Orpheus's alarm for seven years less a day, just after Kenani got the drop on him, was his memory of Corva and Shylif talking him into sleeping in the shipping container. This kind of hibernation had seemed impossible, but they'd done it. More than that, they claimed to do it all the time. If they could perform such routine miracles, why couldn't Toby do something as simple as set Orpheus to wake in seven years' time instead of thirty? He'd guessed that the petbed couldn't override Orpheus's own internal clock, and based on what he'd seen in the kitchen downstairs, Orpheus should have no problem getting out of it. His modified biology should let him survive long enough to open Toby's own bed and climb in. And then he could wake his human.
Simple enough, but so many things could have gone wrong. Even a simple mechanical lock on the petbed would have killed the plan—and probably Orpheus. Toby certainly hadn't factored in the lack of air. It had been Orpheus's own idea to drag a pressure suit over to Toby's bed, though he couldn't actually lift it in.
Toby turned his head; he could see Orpheus's icon through the wall, or so the glasses made it seem. The indicator was no longer red, but amber.
He wanted to dance in a circle and shout his elation, but there was still something to do. This task was the biggest, and after bare survival, the most important by far. A responsible man wouldn't be wasting his time jumping around. He'd be acting.
Toby selected a dozen or so military bots and said, "You're coming with me."
With them thudding through the snow behind him, he headed for the elevators.
Even with the heaters going full-blast, the passengers were shivering as they entered the terminal lounge. Most looked aro
und in sad confusion; they'd expected to be awakened on normal lockstep time, and it was clear that hadn't happened. Some were angry, and a knot of these approached Toby where he sat at the exit.
At the far end of the hall, the elevator was just disgorging the latest of the refugees from Thisbe. Toby scanned the faces quickly, but nobody there seemed likely to be the one he was looking for.
He turned his attention back to the five angry men now standing before him. One of the military bots flanking him shifted slightly, and distant Weekly city-light slid liquidly over its armor. One of the men glanced at it nervously.
"See here," said the one in the lead. "Why're we off-frequency again? We know we were quarantined—"
"You tholes rolled over for the McGonigals," said another. "It's disgusting—"
"But why this?" The first waved at the creaking walls and wreathes of subzero vapor that coiled and flanked the passengers like cobras. "It's a mess!"
Toby cleared his throat. He'd had plenty of confrontations with angry characters and usually dealt with them well—in game worlds. Generally those characters didn't all talk at the same time, as these guys were doing, nor did they egg their bot companions on to posture threateningly in front of combat bots that could squish them instantly. If combat bots had any sense of humor, Toby was sure his were laughing on the inside.
Suddenly he too had to laugh. The men glared at him.
"What's so funny?"
"If you're all like that on Thisbe then I see where Corva gets it," he said.
"Corva?"
Toby turned. A man not more than a few years older than Toby himself pushed his way through the encircling crowd. He had piercing dark eyes, black hair, and familiar high cheekbones. He wore a multi-pocketed jacket and baggy trousers, had a collapsed pressure suit knotted around his waist, and a satchel slung over his shoulder. "Did you say Corva?"
Analog Science Fiction And Fact - May 2014 Page 1