by Colin Harvey
You should be aware that even running simulations of these plans has raised the Idiot's levels of activity to unprecedented levels. I hesitate to anthropomorphise it, but the nearest analogy would be to say that it's going frantic. It's testing my control of every sub-routine. It seems intent on gaining control of the reactor in case we dump it into space.
Can you keep it out?
If I can't, Loki said, you'll learn of it at the same time as I do.
Karl looked up to find the others studying him. "OK," he said. "We'll need to sit down again." More groans met the statement. "So we'll take just a few minutes while you stretch your legs, urinate or pray." Blank looks greeted his feeble humour. "Sorry, the jokes are due to nerves. I'll shut up."
"You're nervous?" Bera said. "How do you think we feel?"
Karl said, "Yes, you're right." He grinned. "I thought that you were all Viking warriors?" He raised his hands to fend off Bera's rain of playful slaps. "I surrender!"
He turned to the men. Arnbjorn was impassive. Orn looked as scared as ever, while Ragnar seemed lost in thought.
Karl was the last to visit the urinal. Then he retook what had become the captain's seat.
"Start the landing," he told Loki in a loud voice for the others' benefit. The engines fired a short burst, and they drifted toward the comet's ragged, battered surface.
The Idiot's reacting, Loki said. So far I am able to repel its attempts to seize control of the lateral vents.
They eased toward a wall of white. Loki fired the forward thrusters as they drifted gently, lazily toward the surface.
It's provoked a counter-attack on all fronts. Karl, it's trying to regain con– Loki went silent. Karl saw the construct's view of cyberspace, with jagged mountains of data hurtling across black, silent voids.
There was a bang from behind them, and all heads swung to look toward the corridor.
"What the hell was that?" Karl forgot to subvocalise, and simply asked it aloud.
Loki was silent, and Karl had the mental image of someone concentrating, with no time to answer. There was another bang, and Arnbjorn, face drawn, began unbuckling his restraints. Karl heard a distant whistle.
"Stay where you are!" Karl said.
Uh-oh, Loki said.
What? Karl sub-vocalised.
The Idiot isn't such an Idiot, Loki said. It's not after the reactor controls at all. It's fooled me. It wanted the access codes – it's blown the hatch on the roof of the corridor.
The whistling grew louder, and turned into a roaring wind.
TWENTY-ONE
The gale howled, tugging at them with greedy fingers, almost paralysing Karl with its insistence. The nanophytes would – by switching to emergency mode and pumping blood to his brain and limbs – give him two or three minutes of exposure to vacuum. But to stay where he was meant a swift and inevitable death.
Maintain position but tilt left ninety degrees, he told Loki. The Winter Song responded.
Karl emptied his lungs as much as he could and, releasing the catch on his harness, dropped to what was now the floor. The howling storm pulled him along, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the others unbuckling. "Stay there!" he yelled, emptying his lungs still further, but it came out as only a croak.
He ran through the vacant doorway and careered along the corridor toward the next door, the wind pulling him along so that he almost toppled over. That door was blown outward into the corridor, presumably by the Winter Song's idiot datarealm detonating catches in the door-frame, and too late as he hurtled past, he realised that he could have held on to it and used it to patch the gaping hatchway through which the air howled. His skin already felt cool, where whatever moisture had been on it evaporated. Two doors passed, one – maybe two if you're lucky – left. He got ready.
He leaned into a crouch as he rushed toward the next doorway, and hooked his fingers around the prone door's edge, stubbing them hard enough to draw blood, but he screened out the flaring agony and concentrated on tightening his grip. Had he not, someone thudding into his back would have knocked him loose.
It was Coeo. Fortunately Karl had slowed the adapted man's headlong flight, and Coeo flailed, grabbed and hung onto a metre-long projecting handle in the wall that was fixed at both ends.
Moments later, Ragnar in turn bumped into Coeo, almost jarring the adapted man loose. Coeo released one hand, and Karl saw the muscle-snapping effort that Coeo needed to hold on while clutching Ragnar in the crook of the adapted man's free arm.
"Told you! Stay behind!" Karl gasped.
"Others have!" Ragnar replied, equally breathless, then coughed. Blood trickled from his nostril. He looked pale and his eyes bulged.
Karl guessed that Ragnar had less than half his lung capacity. You have maybe a minute before it's too late for him, Karl thought.
Coeo nudged Ragnar into a position where the settler could grab and hold on to the bar. Coeo looked to Karl who beckoned him. Coeo dived for the door to which Karl was still grimly clinging, and with a whirlwind of scrabbling fingers, gained a purchase on it against the howling gale tugging at his back.
Karl was lucky – with his enhanced lungs he still had maybe a minute left, but he was unsure how much longer Coeo could last. Fortunately when Karl gasped, "Lift!" Coeo reacted immediately. Even so, it took everything he had to get the door to chest, then to shoulder height.
Ragnar squeezed between them, and Karl and Coeo lifted again with the old man's help. Karl felt the spasm of a muscle-strain in his back, Coeo grunted and Ragnar moaned softly, but they levered the door upright and pushed it over the gaping hatchway.
The wind dropped immediately, the howl fading to a whine, and no longer sucked along by the miniature hurricane, weightlessness again exerted its influence. Ragnar ripped a piece of his tunic off and stuffed it into the main gap. The whine quietened, and Coeo slouched, drawing a bushel of air into his lungs. Ragnar drifted against the wall, gasping.
Karl took a deep rasping breath until he felt giddy. Mustn't hyperventilate, he thought. "OK." He wiped a trickle of blood from his nose. "Need to get back, stop this happening again."
He helped Coeo to his feet, and turned to Ragnar, whose face had turned a muddy, ashen colour, but who shook off any offers of help, and bumped and barged back against them as they swaggered slo-mo through the snowstorm of debris that had swept out the bridge, toward where the others waited in the doorway.
Arnbjorn and Orn pushed themselves to his father's side. "You stubborn old bugger," Arnbjorn said. "I told you to let me take care of it."
Ragnar shook his head. "You're needed to run the farm. Yngi's not up to it, much though I love the boy. Orn will help you as well."
"No need for talk like that," Orn said.
Bera took Karl's arm. "Are you OK?"
Karl smiled. "I was about to ask you the same question." She looked unaffected by the experience, apart from being slightly pop-eyed from higher blood pressure. Karl pressed the small of his back where the muscle had torn, and winced.
"What now?" Bera said. "It seems to have gone quiet."
"That's because the Idiot thinks we're dead," Karl said grimly. "That changes now."
Are you sure you wish me to do this? Loki said. It was an all but rhetorical question – they had discussed it already on the way back.
Positive, Karl sub-vocalised. We've lost too much time already. But only if you're sure that you can do it. A botched attempt will be worse than no attempt at all.
I'm certain, Loki said. And content to do it now. As soon as the Idiot made an attempt on our lives, it legitimised any response.
Then let's stop talking and start doing. With his usual grimace, Karl plugged the jack into the nape of his neck and sitting down, said to Bera: "I'll seem to go out for a few seconds. Don't worry about it." He slumped.
You ran down the vast corridor that was no corridor at all, but a representation of the connection.
Karl was far behind you, at the mouth of the corridor, arms folded. "
Good hunting!" His voice echoed down the corridor. A breeze blew softly from ahead of you. You lifted a hand in acknowledgement.
It felt strange, as if you were part of conjoined twins suddenly split asunder by a surgeon's laspel. But there was no going back, and you knew that being back in this sort of environment – even one whose setting was as impoverished as this one – was really, secretly, what you'd been waiting all these weeks of confinement for. You hefted the plasma-carbine one-handed, feeling its balance. It was symbolic of course – no more real than your lean, muscular body, but it was a potent symbol, which made it in many ways as real as you were. As real as the little canvas bag that you'd visualised into existence that was slung crossways over your shoulder, and which bumped against your opposite hip.
You turned, leaving the corridor and entering the tunnel into the city.
Karl returned to consciousness like a drowning man clutching at a rope.
"I thought you said catatonic," Bera snarled tearfully, tugging at his earlobe. "You didn't say anything about dying!"
He gave her a broken grin. "Mere details," he said, rubbing his head. "Ach, no Loki lurking at the back of my mind. It's weird to feel empty-headed again, if you know what I mean."
"Your head is empty, judging by that folly," Bera said. "What's happened to him?"
Karl indicated the console. "Downloaded. He's gone hunting the datarealm. Even if they just keep each other occupied, it'll give us a chance to get on with dumping the reactor." Karl clutched at her for support. "Still a bit unsteady," he said. "The world keeps moving around."
The viewscreen showed the comet ahead of them, vapour boiling from it in the glare of Gama and Deltasol, rising in wraiths of steam.
Come on, stop daydreaming, he thought, rubbing his head. He had once placed an antique reality patch on his head, to see how the thing worked. It had been a memory of a visit to a tooth repairist – a dentist, that was the word – back when teeth either wore or fell out. The subject had actually had a tooth knocked out, and kept probing the gap where it had been, feeling the roughness of the surrounding molars. It was that feeling of emptiness that Loki's absence reminded Karl of. The feeling that something, no matter how reluctantly accepted it had been, was no longer there, leaving only a phantom of memory. Karl shook his head, and releasing his harness, drifted around the cabin with a small sack in hand, stuffing items of debris into it. All Bera's patient gathering of materials for their eventual return to the surface had been undone in a matter of seconds. For some reason that made Karl angrier than anything else.
Leaning on the console, Karl began to flick switches; slowly, then a flurry as he understood a sequence, then slowing again. He swore. "That thruster firing wasn't supposed to happen. Oh, I think it's Loki and the Idiot, fighting."
The lights suddenly dimmed, then returned to full intensity. "That wasn't me," Karl said.
"Karl!" Bera said.
"Not right now, unless it's really urgent, Bera," Karl murmured.
"It depends if you consider Ragnar's having some sort of seizure is urgent!" she snapped.
You emerged from the tunnel not inside the cityscape as you had expected, but on the wrong side of a meshfence several metres high. As a deterrent, it was pretty feeble, you decided, visualising a rabbit hole at the base of the fence, and when it appeared, rolling under the fence through the gap it created.
The skyscrapers were a little blurred around the edges, like a picture magnified so that the pixels show. Huge flying ziggurats that you suspected were data objects floated serenely across a lemon and grey sky that you recognised as Isheimur; it was, after all, even though you had only witnessed it through Karl's eyes, the only sky you had ever seen. Shuttle-type shapes comprised of pockets of data flitted like little fishes from ziggurat to ziggurat. And vast columns of numbers rose high into the sky, all the way up to orbit.
Of people, of course, there was no sign. You weren't surprised. There would, after all, be only one inhabitant of this city.
The others gathered around Ragnar's prone body, Arnbjorn kneeling, clutching a box. The container was open, showing bottles and phials scattered. Arnbjorn's face was ashen, and a solitary tear track glistened on one cheek. "I can't read any of these things!" he said and, leaning back on his haunches, shot Karl an imploring look.
"Let me," Karl said, although he had little hope of understanding the labels. He ran his finger over each in turn and listened to the instructions that each label recited. Smart labels, he thought, these bottles must date from when people were just starting to lose archaic skills like reading. But although drug names and ingredients were similar across languages, he didn't know enough to know what the drugs did. Some labels recited what sounded like instructions, but his Kazakh wasn't adequate to translate more than simple phrases.
Karl gazed at the torn-open shirt and the network of scars criss-crossing Ragnar's exposed chest. Ragnar's face drooped on one side, and drool trickled down his face.
Arnbjorn wiped the spittle away. "Help us," he begged.
"I don't know what to do," Karl admitted. "Without access to the medical programme, I don't even know what it is."
"It's a stroke," Bera said. "My grandmother had one. There are drugs that can thin the blood, and–" Her eyes widened. "Would your nanophytes fix him?"
Karl thought, You idiot! Panic in the face of an archaic medical condition with no access to proper intel had frozen his brain. "They might," he admitted, and rummaging in the box, pulled out a knife sheathed in sterile wrapping. He willed clusters of nanophytes to his hand, felt the slight tingling in his arms that spoke of their movement, and after a few seconds, made an incision. "There won't be enough to completely fix him, but they may alleviate the worst effects."
Taking a syringe from its sterile wrapper, Bera drew back the plunger and slowly filled it with blood from the cut. "Inject this into his carotid artery," Bera said, passing the syringe to Arnbjorn, who took it as if it were a poisonous snake.
Arnbjorn fumbled it, so Orn snatched it, and plunged it into Ragnar's neck. "Don't worry," Orn said. "Some of us react better to these situations than others." Arnbjorn didn't answer, preoccupied with his own private hell.
Bera sniffed at a jar and wrinkled her nose. "I think these have gone off." Instead she simply wrapped bandages around the wounded hand.
Ragnar's eyelids fixed on Karl, and he tried to speak, but it came out as a drunken-sounding mumble that Karl couldn't make out.
"If Loki can take control of the ship," Karl said to Bera, "then we should be able to access the medical records."
"You should concentrate on the ship," Bera said. "Leave me to tend to Ragnar." She added, "The first twenty-four hours are key to any recovery, but until the nanophytes have had time to work, we can't do too much apart from keep him comfortable. Go on, leave us to it."
Stamping on any guilt that seeped into his thoughts, Karl returned to the console, and cursed as the Winter Song lurched.
Not now, Loki! he sub-vocalised – then remembered that the construct wasn't there to hear him. Sort that Idiot out.
For the longest time you thought that you were alone, as you wandered the city streets looking for the One.
When you saw him on the skyline, you thought at first that he was astride a horse. As you drew closer, step by step down the avenue lined with trees whose leaves were lined with crystalline veins, you realised that the mounted horseman was actually a centaur, his face bearing the cruel look of a Kazakh warrior. "What are you, interloper?" the centaur said, the Kazakh words turning into Standard a micro-second after his lips moved; the faintest of lags, but still visible.
"A construct, the same as you." You made yourself grow bigger, so that you were the same two-and-a-half metres tall as him; no medieval program was going to psych you out.
From nowhere, it seemed, the Winter Song's datarealm drew a bow and turned and fired an arrow at your heart in one smooth motion.
But you stepped to the left so that it sailed harm
lessly past you. You pointed the gun at him left-handed but as his lips curled in a sneer, instead took a phial righthanded from the little canvas sack. "Tailored virus," you said, and threw the phial, whose contents were suspended in a solution, at the centaur. "No cure for this," you said. "It's pure germ warfare, as a billion people on New Ithaca learned."
Moments later, the centaur screamed.
"It's the viral equivalent of an old, prehistoric neutron bomb," you said to the twitching, dissolving mess. "Kills the enemy but leaves the buildings intact."
It seemed to take forever, but even in cyber-time it was probably only a minute or so, in outside time perhaps a half-second, and nothing remained of the datarealm but a bubbling pool.