by Alec Saracen
“So word gets around,” Zhai said.
“It does,” Harod said. “There was something similar in place thirty years back, and they had no answer. The best they can do is force it underground–”
The intercom hissed into life, interrupting Harod. Osmirci's excited voice rang out from the speaker overhead.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Commander Osmirci speaking. Sorry to interrupt your afternoon, but there's something really quite special out there. Tune in to exterior cameras 11 and 12 or go to the observation deck. Trust me, you don't want to miss this.”
“Good moment for a break,” Zhai said, standing up. “Observation deck?”
Tetaine shook his head vehemently. “No way. I'll just sit here and try to keep imagining we're not inside a tin can floating in a hostile alien dimension, thanks.”
“Fair enough,” Zhai said. Tetaine's primal fear of the Void wasn't one that Zhai shared, but it was one he understood. The fundamental wrongness of the Void was fascinating to him, and that fascination was only a hair's breadth from horror.
He and Harod hurried down the corridor and down a ladder to the observation deck, running into Sam on the way. When they reached the deck, virtually everyone else was there already. It wasn't a large room, big enough for five chairs and not much else. The defining feature was, predictably, a vast window the size of the wall, made of an ultra-strong transparent material.
Beyond the window lay the Void.
Here, in the relatively thin 'eastern' regions, it resembled a writhing mass of storm clouds, forever slithering and coiling around each other in an unsettlingly organic way. More than a few scholars of the Void believed that the clouds were alive somehow. Violet and indigo were the dominant colours, though nobody knew why. There was light in the Void, a dim glow whose source nobody had ever been able to identify. Somehow, that was worse than pure darkness. Alien light sources were one thing, but light without source was a troubling concept.
That was all Zhai saw. The Void danced outside the window, enigmatic, ineffable, and utterly inhuman – but ordinary.
“There's nothing there,” he said to Umbiba, who was standing next to him with a curiously rapt expression on his face.
“There is, Ambassador,” Umbiba whispered. “Wait.”
Zhai frowned and looked back at the window – and saw it.
It was first detectable as a faint white glow behind the clouds, just barely perceptible as something other than normal colour variation. Zhai squinted, leaning forward with his nose almost touching the window. The glow dissipated, and he began to think he'd imagined it. Then, in utter silence, piece by piece, it emerged.
If Zhai had sat down and tried to draw it, he would have drawn a chain of rectangles, each about twice as long as they were wide, connected at their narrow ends. It wouldn't have been a bad approximation, but nor would it have captured the entity at all.
The rectangles looked like they were made of pure light, a soft white glow which was completely flat and completely uniform. They each independently rotated on their long axis, revealing that they had no thickness at all – they were two-dimensional, disappearing from view entirely in the instant that they were flat relative to Zhai. They all rotated in the same direction, though at varying speeds.
There were no other features to it. It had no head, no tail. It was just that long chain of slowly spinning rectangles. Zhai was struck by a sudden memory of the wind chime that had hung outside his childhood home on Xanang – but the strings of wooden oblongs on the chime had been connected by a central string. There was no string here. In fact, as Zhai peered closer, he saw that there was a small gap between the individual segments of the entity. The rectangles never touched one another.
It spooled out of the cloud like a rope in zero-gravity, moving with gentle grace. No, not a rope, Zhai thought. It was more like water, if water could somehow be carved into shapes while retaining its fluidity. The thing twisted and looped almost at random, almost deliberately, hovering somewhere between the two. Half serpent, half slow-motion bolt of lightning.
The deck watched silently. Zhai tore his eyes away from the hypnotic motion of the entity, which still hadn't fully emerged from the cloud, and glanced around. Somehow, Peck was standing next to him, though he hadn't noticed her come in. Her face was inscribed with the same awe as everyone else's, Zhai's included. She noticed him looking and glanced back. Their eyes met for a moment. Something flashed between them, a mental flicker that cheerfully bypassed Zhai's emotional control. It was a fleeting instant of unity, a blip of shared humanity in the face of something vast and unknown and utterly alien, and their political divisions suddenly seemed totally insignificant in the flat white light of the entity dancing past the window.
Finally, its 'tail' appeared, identical to its 'head'. The size of the thing was impossible to tell beyond a minimum length of fifty metres and a maximum of several hundred. It hung there, coiling lazily – and then its 'head' started to turn their way.
A murmur of apprehension shivered through the observation deck as it nosed slowly towards them. Was there uncertainty or caution in its movement? Did those terms make any sense when applied to a phenomenon like this? Closer and closer the head came, revealing its massive size – Zhai had counted at least twenty segments, and each now looked at minimum ten metres by five – and closer, and closer. Zhai stood frozen, powerless, tiny.
The head touched the V-shield. The first rectangle compressed slightly, widening at the top.
The rotation stopped. Every segment suddenly snapped into place, turning the entity into an enormous flat white ribbon. With incredible speed, it suddenly jetted off in the opposite direction, diving into the clouds like a spear of light and vanishing from sight as if reeled in by a vast and hidden fisherman. From its appearance to its departure, it had made no sound.
Outside the window, the empty Void roiled.
Zhai let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. Tangible relief suffused the room, which was still quiet but not as uncannily silent – people moved, breathed, allowed themselves to make the ordinary little sounds of life.
People waited for an announcement over the intercom, but none came. What could Osmirci say? Anything would have seemed trite. Instead, they began to disperse gradually one by one, nobody speaking a word. Umbiba, his eyes distant and distracted, almost stepped through Zhai as he left the room. Before long, it was just Zhai, Harod, Sam, Ceq, and Peck.
“Tell me something, Ambassador,” Peck said quietly. She didn't look at him. “Are you a religious man?”
“No,” Zhai said. Then, smiling, he added: “Though I'm not quite as sure of that as I was ten minutes ago.”
Peck nodded slowly. Zhai had meant it as a joke, but she seemed to be taking it seriously. “I think I know what you mean.” Zhai watched her face in profile, trying to gauge how genuine this was and getting nowhere. “I was brought up Geminist. Unitarian. I was taught that the Twins were gods, sent to Home to save us. At some point I must have realised that Risi and Gali were just men. Extraordinary men who did extraordinary things, but still just men. Not gods. Better that way, don't you think? I liked the idea that we could save ourselves without any divine intervention. It's – comforting.” She flashed him an unreadable look. “But when I see what's out there...”
“It'd be nice to have a few gods on our side,” Zhai finished.
“It would,” Peck said. She didn't blink, Zhai had noted, which meant she had enhanced synthetic eyes.
“And here we are,” Zhai said, “playing our little games in our little universe.”
Peck said nothing this time. Her artificial eyes stared out at the Void, unfaltering. What was she thinking? Zhai was getting very little from her. The eyes didn't help, but her face and body language in general were carefully controlled. He was beginning to think the disdain he'd detected in their first meeting had been deliberately leaked to throw him off. She was SSA, after all, and not from their more grounded military branch
but from their shadow-bound clandestine arm, notorious for either recruiting or breeding sociopaths. Both, probably. How much of the Peck he'd seen was real, and how much was a mask? If it was all fake, why? To confuse him? To mislead him? Just for the hell of it?
“We do what we do,” Peck said finally, as if that meant anything at all, and left without looking at him. Harod sidled up in her place and leant on Zhai's shoulder, which he'd always claimed was exactly the ideal height for his elbow.
“Strange one, isn't she?” he said.
“Maybe,” Zhai said. He could smell Harod's wood-scented aftershave. “We're all a little strange in the Void.”
“It's a strange place.” Harod straightened up and cleared his throat. “Makes you wonder what else is out there.”
That night, Zhai lay awake in bed, watching the entity trace glowing curls on the inside of his eyelids. When sleep finally crept up on him, it came with distant, jumbled dreams of light swirling in the dark.
6
Grey Hawk had expected several days' agonising wait before they were allowed offworld. Instead, less than four hours after Black Horse walked into her life, she was in the Void.
The last time she'd been offworld was a two-month school excursion to the galactic west, a tour that had taken them through the ruthlessly materialistic hubs of Star City and the Federated Star Nations. They had taken the space elevator then, making the long ascent through Plenty's atmosphere before filing onto their V-ship.
This time, they took the express route. Liberation built their own V-ships rather than contracting them out to Star City and the Low People, which meant that there was always a steady supply of V-ships ready to launch on the surface of Plenty. The school trip had warranted a vast V-ship to carry a hundred-plus excitable students, but Liberators didn't get the same creature comforts.
Grey Hawk knew what was in store, but it was still a shock when she saw her 'bunk'. It was just that: a two-by-one-by-one-metre nook, equipped with wires and leads that would fulfil the only physical needs Liberators had – energy and minor waste recycling – and that would hook them into a unified sim feed. Once she settled down in the third bunk, below Red Wolf and Blue Bull and above Blue Wasp, she knew she wouldn't leave it for two days. They only met their crew in passing.
They flashed straight into the Void from the planet's surface. Grey Hawk's body had been shorn of most of its natural physiological responses, but it had no answer to the unnerving hypothalamus-deep yank that marked the transition between dimensions.
“Oh, I fucking hate that part,” Blue Bull muttered. “Feels like someone's stirring my brain with a spoon.”
Grey Hawk stared up at the blank metal overhead, feeling slightly nauseated despite her lack of a digestive system. It was slowly overcome by a giddiness at finally leaving Plenty as a fully-fledged Liberator.
Her goodbyes had been brief. She had never cultivated many friends even before entering the Liberator program, and social pursuits had always been a long way down her to-do list after that. Not many people knew she was going. None knew where she was going. She didn't mind that. She knew.
She plugged into the sim.
They had no official commander. That was the Liberation way. The four of them were theoretically equals, with all decisions taken by non-binding votes on the best way to advance the cause. In practice, Red Wolf led the way, and Grey Hawk immediately understood that this was the way the squad always operated. She had always been taught to distrust authority, though she grudgingly admitted that experienced leadership was a necessary evil in their line of work. The Third Primary Principle in action.
Red Wolf had them running drills and scenarios for six hours. Blue Bull and Blue Wasp were one fire-team, which left Red Wolf and Grey Hawk together. Grey Hawk had secretly been hoping to get Blue Wasp, who was the only one of them who didn't seem to have taken an immediate dislike to her, but she suspected that Red Wolf wanted to keep an eye on her personally.
She flung herself into the drills with fanatical focus and dedication, willing herself to prove Red Wolf wrong. Grey Hawk was faster, stronger, tougher, and a better shot, but Red Wolf's years in the field had made her wily in a way Grey Hawk found hard to predict. At one point they played a sim where they were both deposited in a labyrinthine faux-industrial environment with only their most basic sensors functioning. Grey Hawk lost three times in a row to Red Wolf's ambushes before she wised up and started clawing her way back. It was six-five to Red Wolf when they moved to two-on-two battles in the same arena.
They were five-all against the Grade Sevens going into the deciding round. Red Wolf, having clambered up a rickety pipe, managed to cripple Blue Bull from a shadowy vantage point high overhead, but was jumped by Blue Wasp as she went in to confirm the kill. Grey Hawk finished the job, splattering Blue Bull's simulated brain chunks all over the metal floor with a well-placed sniper round. She and Blue Wasp circled the arena for what seemed like an hour, each vaguely aware of the other's location, each moving too quickly to be pinned down.
At last, Grey Hawk threw caution to the wind and, masking her movements with a sonic grenade, made her play. With Blue Wasp as far away as he could be and distracted by the explosive noise of the grenade, she threw Red Wolf's dead sim-body over her shoulder and darted around the corner, dumped the body out of sight, and returned to where it had been lying. There, she threw herself to the floor, face-down, and mimicked Red Wolf's splayed limbs.
Blue Wasp took more than a minute to return to that spot. Grey Hawk shielded as many of her emissions as possible, but if Blue Wasp gave her more than a cursory look, he would know.
He didn't. He padded past without a second glance, and Grey Hawk shot him in the back of the head from the floor.
“Ah, shit,” he said.
Red Wolf was incredulous. “That outfoxed you?”
“It was pretty clever,” Blue Bull said grudgingly. The industrial arena faded away, replaced by the default sprawling green field, where they found themselves standing in a circle.
Blue Wasp smiled ruefully. “It was. But she's right, I should never have fallen for that.” He jokingly shook a fist at Grey Hawk. “Next time, kid!”
Grey Hawk had hoped that she'd made inroads with Red Wolf during the scenarios, but all the older woman ever gave her was ruthlessly practical advice. Grey Hawk found her deeply impersonal, which stung a little when she saw the way Blue Bull and Blue Wasp chatted and joked with each other. Their personal chemistry wasn't quite matched by their field chemistry, however, which puzzled Grey Hawk enough to ask Blue Wasp about it over a private channel.
They stood two hundred metres apart in the sim, hurling a heavy steel ball back and forth at ballistic speeds. Despite the distance, Blue Wasp sounded as if he were right next to her.
“You don't fuck around, do you?” Blue Wasp said. In the distance, he caught the ball one-handed and, instead of spinning into a discus-like throw like he usually did, he paused, tossing the ball from hand to hand.
“I speak my mind,” Grey Hawk said.
“I can tell,” Blue Wasp said. He hefted the ball and sent it hurtling towards her, deliberately overcooking his throw so that she had to sprint fifty metres back to make the catch. “I like that. Others won't.”
“I don't care,” Grey Hawk said. She sent the ball back, hard and flat and rifled like a bullet. “They can think what they like.”
Blue Wasp made a needlessly acrobatic diving catch, throwing himself into a series of somersaults as he landed and drawing a smile from Grey Hawk. “And they will.” He stood up, dusting off simulated dirt. “Let me give you some context. How long do you expect to live?”
Grey Hawk knew the answer. “Nine years.”
“Yeah, about that,” Blue Wasp said. “How does that make you feel?”
She shrugged. “I made my choice. I knew the risks.”
“You were aware of the risks. Maybe you didn't know them.”
“You sound like Black Horse.”
“He's
a man worth listening to,” Blue Wasp said. He threw a pinpoint moonball which arced up high into the air and dropped right into Grey Hawk's cupped hands. “Oldest Liberator alive, and he didn't get that way by being stupid. Seriously, kid, you are very probably going to die for Liberation. So am I. So is Blue Bull, so is Red Wolf. Maybe not on Tor, maybe not on the next world, or the next, but nobody lives forever. Liberators don't retire. We die.”
“I know,” Grey Hawk said. She swapped the ball out for a javelin, which she hurled at where Blue Wasp's heart would have been.
He let it hit him, the point crumpling against his armoured body. “Do you? Ever seen anyone die?”
Grey Hawk hesitated for a moment. “No,” she said.
“Never killed anyone, then.”
“No.”
“The second one is easy,” Blue Wasp said. He bent the javelin into a ring and flung it her way as a flying disc. “Surprisingly easy. It's the first one that's hard.”
Grey Hawk caught the ring and waited, knowing from his tone that more was coming.
Blue Wasp sighed. “OK. Here's your history lesson for the day. When Blue Bull and I joined the squad, it was only Green Dragon and Red Wolf. They'd just lost Green Fox and Gold Ray on Freewheel Station. They never told us the details. Classified. I partnered Red Wolf, and Blue Bull ran with Green Dragon. And, two months ago, we were deployed on Lamayne, and–”
“Green Dragon got killed,” Grey Hawk said bluntly.
“Yeah,” Blue Wasp said, after a moment. “We don't know who, how, or why, but they got him.” He paused again. “And here we are. Finished the deployment, came back to Plenty, debriefed, just started our mandatory leave – and then the Coalition went crazy, and suddenly every available squad was recalled, reconstituted, and redeployed. Enter the Grade Eights.”