The Six Directions of Space

by Alastair Reynolds

  There were six lifeboats, accessed through six armored doorways, each of which was surmounted with a panel engraved with both operating instructions and stern warnings concerning the penalties for improper use. Qilian was floating at the far end, next to the open doorway of the sixth boat. I had to look at him for a long, bewildered moment before I quite realized what I was seeing. I wondered if it was a trick of my eyes, occasioned by the gloomy lighting. But I had made no mistake. Next to Qilian, floating in states of deceptive repose, were the bodies of Jura and Batbayar. A little further away, as if he had been surprised and killed on his own, was Uugan. They had all been stabbed and gashed: knife wounds to the chest and throat, in all three instances. Blood was still oozing out of them.

  In his good hand, Qilian held a bloody knife, wet and slick to the hilt.

  “I am sorry,” he said, as if all that situation needed was a reasonable explanation. “But only one of these six boats is functional.”

  I stared in numb disbelief. “How can only one be working?”

  “The other five are obstructed; they can’t leave because there is damage to their launch hatches. This is the only one with a clear shaft all the way to space.” Qilian wiped the flat of the blade against his forearm.

  “Of course, I wish you the best of luck in proving me wrong. But I am afraid I will not be around to witness your efforts.”

  “You fucking—” I began, before trailing off. I knew if I called him a coward he would simply laugh at me, and I had no intention of giving him even the tiniest of moral victories. “Just go,” I said.

  He drew himself into the lifeboat. I expected some last word from him, some mocking reproach or grandiloquent burst of self-justifying rhetoric. But there was nothing. The door clunked shut with a gasp of compressed air. There was a moment of silence and stillness and then the boat launched itself away from the ship on a rapid stutter of electromagnetic pulses.

  I felt the entire hull budge sideways in recoil. He was gone. For several seconds, all I could do was breathe; I could think of nothing useful or constructive to say to Muhunnad, nothing beyond stating the obvious hopelessness of our predicament.

  But instead, Muhunnad said quietly: “We are not going to die.”

  At first, I did not quite understand his words. “I’m sorry?”

  He spoke with greater emphasis this time. “We are going to live, but only if you listen to me very, very carefully. You must return me to the couch with all haste.”

  I shook my head. “It’s no good, Muhunnad. It’s all over.”

  “No, it is not. The River Volga is not dead. I only made it seem this way.”

  I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “There isn’t time to explain here. Get me back to the bridge, get me connected back to the harness, then I will tell you. But make haste! We really do not have very much time. The enemy are much nearer than you think.”

  “The enemy?”

  “There is no Mandate of Heaven. Either she scuttled back to the portal, or she was destroyed during the same attack that damaged us.”

  “But you said…”

  “I lied. Now help me move!”

  Not for the first time that day, I did precisely as I was told.

  Having already plotted a route around the obstructions, it did not take anywhere near as long to return to the bridge as it had taken to reach the lifeboats. Once there, I buckled him into the couch—he was beginning to retain some limb control, but not enough to help me with the task—and set about reconnecting the harness systems, trusting myself not to make a mistake. My fingers fumbled on the ends of my hands, as if they were a thousand li away.

  “Start talking to me, Muhunnad,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on. Why did you lie about the Mandate!”

  “Because I knew the effect that lie would have on Qilian. I wished to give him a reason to leave the ship.

  I had seen the kind of man he was. I knew that he would save himself, even if it meant the rest of us dying.”

  “I still don’t understand. What good has it done us? The damage to the ship…” I completed the final connection. Muhunnad stiffened as the harness took hold of his nervous system, but did not appear to be in any obvious discomfort. “Are you all right?” I asked warily.

  “This will take a moment. I had to put the ship into a deep shutdown, to convince Qilian. I must bring her back system by system, so as not to risk an overload.”

  The evidence of his work was already apparent. The bridge lights returned to normal illumination, while those readouts and displays that had remained active were joined by others that had fallen into darkness.

  I held my breath, expecting the whole ensemble to shut back down again at any moment. But I should have known better than to doubt Muhunnad’s ability. The systems remained stable, even as they cycled through startup and crash recovery routines. The air circulators resumed their dull but reassuring chug.

  “I shall dispense with artificial gravity until we are safely under way, if that is satisfactory with you.”

  “Whatever it takes,” I said.

  His eyes, still wide open, quivered in their sockets. “I am sweeping local space,” he reported. “There was some real damage to the sensors, but nowhere as bad as I made out. I can see Qilian’s lifeboat. He made an excellent departure.” Then he swallowed. “I can also see the enemy. Three of their ships will shortly be within attack range. I must risk restarting the engines without a proper initialization test.”

  “Again, whatever it takes.”

  “Perhaps you would like to brace yourself. There may be a degree of undamped acceleration.”

  Muhunnad had been right to warn me, and even then it came harder and sooner than I had been expecting. Although I had managed to secure myself to a handhold, I was nearly wrenched away with the abruptness of our departure. I felt acceleration rising smoothly, until it was suppressed by the dampeners.

  My arm was sore from the jolt, as if it had been almost pulled from its socket.

  “That is all I can do for us now,” Muhunnad said. “Running is our only effective strategy, unfortunately.

  Our weapons would prove totally ineffective against the enemy, even if we could get close enough to fire before they turned their own guns on us. But running will suffice. At least we have the mass of one less lifeboat to consider.”

  “I still don’t quite get what happened. How did you know there’d still be one lifeboat that was still working? From what I saw, we came very close to losing all of them.”

  “We did,” he said, with something like pride in his voice. “But not quite, you see. That was my doing, Ariunaa. Before the instant of the attack, I adjusted the angle of orientation of our hull. I made sure that the energy beam took out five of the six lifeboat launch hatches, and no more. Think of a knife fighter, twisting to allow part of his body to be cut rather than another.”

  I stared at him in amazement, forgetting the pain in my arm from the sudden onset of acceleration. I recalled what Qilian had said, his puzzlement about the ship twisting at the onset of the attack. “You mean you had all this planned, before they even attacked us?”

  “I evaluated strategies for disposing of our mutual friend, while retaining the ship. This seemed the one most likely to succeed.”

  “I am… impressed.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Of course, it would have been easier if I had remained in the harness, so that we could move immediately once the pod had departed. But I think Qilian would have grown suspicious if I had not shown every intention of wanting to escape with him.”

  “You’re right. It was the only way to convince him.”

  “And now there is only one more matter that needs to be brought to your attention. It is still possible to speak to him. It can be arranged with trivial ease: despite what I said earlier, I am perfectly capable of locking on a tight beam.”

  “He’ll have no idea what’s happened, will he? He’ll still think he’s got away with it. He’s
expecting to be rescued by the Mandate of Heaven at any moment.”

  “Eventually, the nature of his predicament will become apparent. But by then, he is likely to have come to the attention of the Smiling Ones.”

  I thought of the few things Muhunnad had told us about our adversaries. “What will they do to him?

  Shoot him out of the sky?”

  “Not if they sense a chance to take him captive with minimal losses on their own side. I would suggest that an unpowered lifeboat would present exactly such an opportunity.”

  “And then?”

  “He will die. But not immediately. Like the Shining Caliphate and the Mongol Expansion, the Smiling Ones have an insatiable appetite for information. They will have found others of his kind before, just as they have found others of mine. But I am sure Qilian will still provide them with much amusement.”

  “And then?” I repeated.

  “An appetite of another kind will come into play. The Smiling Ones are cold-blooded creatures. Reptiles.

  They consider the likes of us—the warm, the mammalian—to be a kind of affront. As well they might, I suppose. All those millions of years ago, we ate their eggs.”

  I absorbed what he said, thinking of Qilian falling to his destiny, unaware for now of the grave mistake he had made. Part of me was inclined to show clemency: not by rescuing him, which would place us dangerously close to the enemy, but by firing on him, so that he might be spared an encounter with the Smiling Ones.

  But it was not a large part.

  “Time to portal, Muhunnad?”

  “Six minutes, on our present heading. Do you wish to review my intentions?”

  “No,” I said, after a moment. “I trust you to do the best possible job. You think we’ll make it into the Infrastructure without falling to pieces?”

  “If Allah is willing. But you understand that our chances of returning to home are now very slim, Yellow Dog? Despite my subterfuge, this ship is damaged. It will not survive many more transitions.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make the best of wherever we end up,” I said.

  “It will not feel like home to either of us,” he replied, his tone gently warning, as if I needed reminding of that.

  “But if there are people out there… I mean, instead of egg-laying monsters, or sweet-looking devils with tails, then it’ll be better than nothing, won’t it? People are people. If the Infrastructure is truly breaking down, allowing all these timelines to bleed into one another, than we are all going to have get along with each other sooner or later, no matter what we all did to each other in our various histories. We’re all going to have to put the past behind us.”

  “It will not be easy,” he acknowledged. “But if two people as unalike as you and I can become friends, then perhaps there is hope. Perhaps we could even become an example to others. We shall have to see, shan’t we?”

  “We shall have to see,” I echoed.

  I held Muhunnad’s hand as we raced toward the portal, and whatever Heaven had in store for us on the other side.

  About the Author

  Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain, all big sprawling Space Operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. His most recent books are a novel, Pushing Ice, and two new collections, Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories. Coming up is a new novel, The Prefect. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he works for the European Space Agency.

  Reynolds’ work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale (in one story, “Galactic North,” a spaceship sets out in pursuit of another in a stern chase that takes thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to complete; in another, “Thousandth Night,” ultrarich immortals embark on a plan that will call for the physical rearrangement of all the stars in the Galaxy. In the hard-hitting and disquieting story that follows, Reynolds shows us a brutal Galactic Empire embattling itself to defend against attacks by other Empires that come not just from elsewhere in the Galaxy, but from other universes altogether!

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