The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I don’t like hard space. It fucks with your head.

  It’s not anything physical. You can make more mistakes in space than at the bottom of the ocean, or in a toxic atmosphere like Glimmer Five’s. You can get away with far more in a vacuum, and on occasion I have done. Stupidity, forgetfulness and panic will not get you killed with the same implacable certainty as they will in less forgiving environments. But it isn’t that.

  The Harlan’s World orbitals sit five hundred kilometres out and will shoot down anything that masses more than a six-seater helicopter as soon as look at it. There have been some notable exceptions to this behaviour, but so far no one has been able to work out what caused them. As a result, Harlanites don’t go up in the air much, and vertigo is as common as pregnancy. The first time I wore a vacuum suit, courtesy of the Protectorate marines and aged eighteen, my entire mind turned to ice and looking down through the infinite emptiness, I could hear myself whimpering deep in the back of my throat. It looked like a very long way to fall.

  Envoy conditioning gives you a handle on most kinds of fear, but you’re still aware of what scares you because you feel the weight of the conditioning coming online. I’ve felt that weight every single time. In high orbit over Loyko during the Pilots’ Revolt, deploying with Randall’s vacuum commandos around Adoracion’s outer moon, and once, in the depths of interstellar space, playing a murderous game of tag with members of the Real Estate Crew around the hull of the hijacked colony barge Mivtsemdi, falling endlessly along her trajectory, light years from the nearest sun. The Mivtsemdi firefight was the worst. It still gives me the occasional nightmare.

  The Nagini slithered through the gap in three-dimensional space the gate had peeled back, and hung amidst nothing. I let out the same breath we’d all been holding since the assault ship began inching towards the gate, got out of my seat and walked forward to the cockpit, bouncing slightly in the adjusted grav-field. I could already see the starfield on the screen, but I wanted a genuine view through the toughened transparencies of the assault ship’s nose. It helps to see your enemy face to face, to sense the void out there a few centimetres from the end of your nose. It helps you to know where you are to the animal roots of your being.

  It’s strictly against the rules of spaceflight to open connecting hatches during entry into hard space, but no one said anything, even when it must have been clear where I was going. I got a strange look from Ameli Vongsavath as I stepped through the hatch, but she didn’t say anything either. Then again, she was the first pilot in the history of the human race to effect an instantaneous transfer from a planetary altitude of six metres to the middle of deep space, so I suspect she had other things on her mind.

  I stared forward, past her left shoulder. Stared down, and felt my fingers curl tight on the back of Vongsavath’s seat.

  Fear confirmed.

  The old shift in the head, like pressure doors locking sections of my brain up under diamond bright illumination. The conditioning.

  I breathed.

  ‘You’re going to stay, you might want to sit down,’ said Vongsavath, busy with a buoyancy monitor that had just started gibbering at the sudden lack of a planet beneath us.

  I clambered to the co-pilot’s seat and lowered myself into it, looking for the webbing straps.

  ‘See anything?’ I asked with elaborate calm.

  ‘Stars,’ she said shortly.

  I waited for a while, getting used to the view, feeling the itch at the outer corners of my eyes as instinct-deep reflexes pulled my peripheral vision backwards, looking for some end to the intense lack of light.

  ‘So how far out are we?’

  Vongsavath punched up figures on the astrogation set.

  ‘According to this?’ She whistled low. ‘Seven hundred and eighty-odd million klicks. Believe that?’

  It put us just inside the orbit of Banharn, the solitary and rather unimpressive gas giant that stood sentinel on the outer edges of the Sanction system. Three hundred million kilometres further in on the ecliptic was a circling sea of rubble, too extensive to be called a belt, that had for some reason never got round to coalescing into planetary masses. A couple of hundred million kilometres the other side of that was Sanction IV. Where we’d been about forty seconds ago.

  Impressive.

  Alright, a stellar-range needlecast can put you on the other side of so many kilometres you run out of places to put the zeroes in less time than that. But you have to be digitised first, and then you have to be downloaded into a new sleeve at the other end, and all that takes time and technology. It’s a process.

  We hadn’t been through a process, or at least nothing humanly recognisable as such. We’d just bumped across a line. Given inclination and a vacuum suit, I could literally have stepped across that line.

  Sutjiadi’s sense of not belonging came and touched me again at the nape of the neck. The conditioning awoke and damped it out. The wonder along with the fear.

  ‘We’ve stopped,’ murmured Vongsavath, to herself more than me. ‘Something soaked up our acceleration. You’d expect some. Holy. God.’

  Her voice, already low, sank to a whisper on the last two words and seemed to decelerate the way the Nagini apparently had. I looked up from the figures she’d just maximised on the display, and my first thought, still scrabbling around in a planet-bound context, was that we had cruised into a shadow. By the time I remembered that there were no mountains out here, and not much in the way of sunlight to be obscured anyway, the same chilly shock that Vongsavath must have been feeling hit me.

  Over our heads, the stars were sliding away.

  They disappeared silently, swallowed with terrifying speed by the vast, occluding bulk of something hanging, it seemed, only metres above the overhead viewports.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, and a small cold shiver ran through me as I said it, as if I’d just completed an obscure summoning.

  ‘Range . . .’ Vongsavath shook her head. ‘It’s nearly five kilometres off. That makes it—’

  ‘Twenty-seven kilometres across,’ I read out the data myself. ‘Fifty-three long. External structures extending . . .’

  I gave up.

  ‘Big. Very big.’

  ‘Isn’t it.’ Wardani’s voice came from right behind me. ‘See the crenellation at the edge. Each of those bites is nearly a kilometre deep.’

  ‘Why don’t I just sell seats in here,’ snapped Vongsavath. ‘Mistress Wardani, will you please return to the cabin and sit down.’

  ‘Sorry,’ murmured the archaeologue. ‘I was just—’

  Sirens. A spaced scream, slashing at the air in the cockpit.

  ‘Incoming,’ yelled Vongsavath, and kicked the Nagini on end.

  It was a manoeuvre that would have hurt in a gravity well, but with only the ship’s own grav field exerting force, it felt more like an experia special effect, an Angel wharf-conjuror’s trick with holoshift.

  Vacuum combat fragments:

  I saw the missile coming, falling end over end towards the right side viewports.

  I heard the battle systems reporting for duty in their cosily enthusiastic machine voices.

  Shouts from the cabin behind me.

  I started to tense. The conditioning broke in heavily, forced me into impact-ready limpness—

  Just a minute.

  ‘That can’t be right,’ said Vongsavath suddenly.

  You don’t see missiles in space. Even the ones we can build move too fast for a human eye to track effectively.

  ‘No impact threat,’ observed the battle computer, sounding slightly disappointed. ‘No impact threat.’

  ‘It’s barely moving.’ Vongsavath punched up a new screen, shaking her head. ‘Axial velocity at . . . Ah, that’s just drift, man.’

  ‘Those are still machined components,’ I said, pointing at a small spike in the red section of the spectrum scan. ‘Circuitry, maybe. It ain’t a rock. Not just a rock, anyway.’

  ‘It�
�s not active, though. Totally inert. Let me run the—’

  ‘Why don’t you just bring us round and back up,’ I made a quick calculation in my head. ‘About a hundred metres. It’ll be practically sitting out there on the windscreen. Kick on the external lights.’

  Vongsavath locked onto me with a look that somehow managed to combine disdain with horror. It wasn’t exactly a flight manual recommendation. More importantly, she probably still had the adrenalin chop sloshing about in her system the same as me. It’s apt to make you grumpy.

  ‘Coming about,’ she said finally.

  Outside the viewports, the environment lighting ignited.

  In a way, it wasn’t such a great idea. The toughened transparent alloy of the viewports would have been built to vacuum combat spec, which means stopping all but the most energetic micrometeorites without much more than surface pitting. Certainly it wasn’t about to be ruined by bumping into something adrift. But the thing that came bumping up over the nose of the Nagini made an impact anyway.

  Behind me, Tanya Wardani shrieked, a short, quickly-locked-up sound.

  Scorched and ruptured though it was by the extremes of cold and the absence of pressure outside, the object was still recognisable as a human body, dressed for summer on the Dangrek coast.

  ‘Holy God,’ whispered Vongsavath, again.

  A blackened face peered sightlessly in at us, empty eye sockets masked in trailing strands of exploded, frozen tissue. The mouth below was all scream, as silent now as it would have been when its owner tried to find a voice for the agony of dissolution. Beneath a ludicrously loud summer shirt, the body was swollen by a bulk that I guessed were the ruptured intestines and stomach. One clawed hand bumped knuckles on the viewport. The other arm was jerked back, over the head. The legs were similarly flexed, forward and back. Whoever it was had died flailing at the vacuum.

  Died falling.

  Behind me, Wardani was sobbing quietly.

  Saying a name.

  We found the rest of them by suit beacons, floating at the bottom of a three-hundred-metre dimple in the hull structure and clustered around what appeared to be a docking portal. There were four, all wearing cheap pull-on vacuum suits. From the look of it, three had died when their air supply ran out, which according to suit specs would have taken about six to eight hours. The fourth one hadn’t wanted to wait that long. There was a neat five-centimetre hole melted through the suit’s helmet from right to left. The industrial laser cutter that had done the damage was still tethered to the right hand at the wrist.

  Vongsavath sent out the manigrab-equipped EVA robot once again. We watched the screens in silence as the little machine collected each corpse in its arms and bore it back to the Nagini with the same gentle deftness of touch it had applied to the blackened and ruptured remains of Tomas Dhasanapongsakul at the gate. This time, with the bodies enfolded in the white wrap of their vacuum suits, it could almost have been footage of a funeral run in reverse. The dead carried back out of the deep, and consigned to the Nagini’s ventral airlock.

  Wardani could not cope. She came down to the hold deck with the rest of us while Vongsavath blew the inner hatch on the airlock from the flight deck. She watched Sutjiadi and Luc Deprez bring the vacuum-suited bodies up. But when Deprez broke the seals of the first helmet and lifted it off the features beneath, she uttered a choked sob and spun away to the far corner of the hold. I heard her retching. The acid reek of vomit stung the air.

  Schneider went after her.

  ‘You know this one too?’ I asked redundantly, staring down at the dead face. It was a woman in a mid-forties sleeve, eyes wide and accusatory. She was frozen solid, neck protruding stiffly from the ring of the suit aperture, head lifting rigidly clear of the deck. The heating elements of the suit must have taken a while longer to give out than the air supply, but if this woman was part of the same team that we’d found in the trawl net, she’d been out here for at least a year. They don’t make suits with that kind of survivability.

  Schneider answered for the archaeologue. ‘It’s Aribowo. Pharintorn Aribowo. Glyph specialist on the Dangrek dig.’

  I nodded at Deprez. He unsealed the other helmets and detached them. The dead stared up at us in a line, heads lifted as if in the midst of some group abdominal workout. Aribowo and three male companions. Only the suicide’s eyes were closed, features composed in an expression of such peace that you wanted to check again for the slick, cauterised hole this man had bored through his own skull.

  Looking at him, I wondered what I would have done. Seeing the gate slam shut behind me, knowing at that moment that I was going to die out here in the dark. Knowing, even if a fast rescue ship were dispatched immediately to these exact coordinates, that rescue would come months too late. I wondered if I would have had the courage to wait, hanging in the infinite night, hoping against hope for some miracle to occur.

  Or the courage not to.

  ‘That’s Weng,’ Schneider had come back and was hovering at my shoulder. ‘Can’t remember his other name. He was some kind of glyph theorist too. I don’t know the others.’

  I glanced across the deck to where Tanya Wardani was huddled against the hull wall, arms wrapped around herself.

  ‘Why don’t you leave her alone?’ hissed Schneider.

  I shrugged. ‘OK. Luc, you’d better go back down into the lock and get Dhasanapongsakul bagged before he starts to drip. Then the rest of them. I’ll give you a hand. Sun, can we get the buoy overhauled? Sutjiadi, maybe you can help her. I’d like to know if we’re actually going to be able to deploy the fucking thing.’

  Sun nodded gravely.

  ‘Hand, you’d better start thinking of contingencies, because if the buoy’s fucked, we’re going to need an alternative plan of action.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Schneider looked genuinely scared for the first time since I’d met him. ‘We’re staying around here. After what happened to these people, we’re staying?’

  ‘We don’t know what happened to these people, Schneider.’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? The gate isn’t stable, it shut down on them.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Jan.’ There was an old strength trickling through the rasp in Wardani’s voice, a tone that made something flare up in my stomach. I looked back at her, and she was on her feet again, wiping her face clean of the tears and vomit specks with the heel of one palm. ‘We opened it last time, and it stood for days. There’s no instability in the sequencing I ran, then or now.’

  ‘Tanya.’ Schneider looked suddenly betrayed. He spread his hands wide. ‘I mean—’

  ‘I don’t know what happened here, I don’t know what,’ she squeezed out the words, ‘fucked. Up. Glyph sequences Aribowo used, but it isn’t going to happen to us. I know what I am doing.’

  ‘With respect, Mistress Wardani,’ Sutjiadi looked around at the assembled faces, gauging support. ‘You’ve admitted that our knowledge of this artefact is incomplete. I fail to see how you can guarantee—’

  ‘I am a Guild Master.’ Wardani stalked back towards the lined up corpses, eyes flaring. It was as if she was furious with them all for getting killed. ‘This woman was not. Weng Xiaodong. Was not. Tomas Dhasanapongsakul. Was not. These people were Scratchers. Talented, maybe, but that is not enough. I have over seventy years of experience in the field of Martian archaeology, and if I tell you that the gate is stable, then it is stable.’

  She glared around her, eyes bright, corpses at her feet. No one seemed disposed to argue the point.

  The poisoning from the Sauberville blast was gathering force in my cells. It took longer to deal with the bodies than I’d expected, certainly longer than it ought have taken any ranking officer in Carrera’s Wedge, and when the corpse locker hinged slowly shut afterwards, I felt wrung out.

  Deprez, if he felt the same, wasn’t showing it. Maybe the Maori sleeves were holding up according to spec. He wandered across the hold to where Schneider was showing Jiang Jianping some kind of trick with a grav harnes
s. I hesitated for a moment, then turned away and headed for the ladder to the upper deck, hoping to find Tanya Wardani in the forward cabin.

  Instead, I found Hand, watching the vast bulk of the Martian starship roll past below us on the cabin’s main screen.

  ‘Takes some getting used to, huh?’

  There was a greedy enthusiasm in the executive’s voice as he gestured at the view. The Nagini’s environment lights provided illumination for a few hundred metres in all directions, but as the structure faded away into the darkness, you were still aware of it, sprawling across the starfield. It seemed to go on forever, curving out at odd angles and sprouting appendages like bubbles about to burst, defying the eye to put limits on the darkness it carved out. You stared and thought you had the edge of it; you saw the faint glimmer of stars beyond. Then the fragments of light faded or jumped and you saw that what you thought was starfield was just an optical trick on the face of more bulking shadow. The colony hulks of the Konrad Harlan fleet were among the largest mobile structures ever built by human science, but they could have served this vessel as lifeboats. Even the Habitats in the New Beijing system didn’t come close. This was a scale we weren’t ready for yet. The Nagini hung over the starship like a gull over one of the bulk freighters that plied the Newpest to Millsport belaweed runs. We were an irrelevance, a tiny uncomprehending visitor along for the ride.

  I dropped into the seat opposite Hand and swivelled it so that I faced the screen, feeling shivery in the hands and the spine. Shifting the corpses had been cold work, and when we bagged Dhasanapongsakul the frozen strands of eye tissue branching like coral from his emptied sockets had broken off under the plastic, under the palm of my hand. I felt them give through the bag, I heard the brittle crickling noise they made.

  That tiny sound, the little chirrup of death’s particular consequences, had shunted aside most of my earlier awe at the massive dimensions of the Martian vessel.

  ‘Just a bigger version of a colony barge,’ I said. ‘Theoretically, we could have built that big. It’s just harder to accelerate all that mass.’