by Peter Watts
This hurts.
But pain doesn’t last forever. Not the pain of your skin ripping apart, or your fingers pulling. The pain of grabbing the handle just underneath as you pull the modified machete of your shoulder blade with a wet tearing and hiss.
Memory strata reforms the blade’s handle to fit your grasp, and the black edge of the blade sucks the light into it. The molecular surface is hydrophobic, the viscera and blood on it slide off and splash to the floor.
The Satrap’s thralls move toward you, but you put the edge of the short blade against the back of John’s skull. “Don’t.”
As one, they all pull back.
You could have killed John with your bare hands, you don’t need the sword. This is part statement. Theater to help the Satrap realize that you’re far more dangerous than it has realized. Because, if it can get away with it, the Satrap will have both its prize and keep your memories.
And that isn’t going to be happening.
“Give me my memories,” you tell it.
“Let me have my new world,” it replies in ten voices.
Ten. That’s all it has surrounding you.
But you want those memories, so the standoff continues. You broadcast your implacability. You will not be moving until you are given those memories. And first.
“Tell it half the coordinates,” you order John. You push the edge of the machete against his neck. Let’s dangle the prize a little, you think.
“No,” John says firmly.
“John,” You kneel next to him. And you whisper, “it will die with those coordinates in its head. Trust me. Don’t hold it to just yourself now, let it go. Let go of the burden. Let me help you. And then this will be all over.”
But you notice something in his response.
He has been sharing the burden. Someone else knows the coordinates. Who? His first mate. Jay. There was a bond there, you remember.
John stumbles to his feet. “If you want the coordinates, you’ll have to rip them out of my head yourself,” he says to the Satrap.
And why would he do that?
His body is warm, near feverish. A Satrap wouldn’t notice. Not a Satrap that had people under thrall to it with sores on their skin. But you notice.
You’re not the only player in this game. John has a different plan. A plan to protect the coordinates. A plan to give his people time to grab what they need: fuel. He’s got a bomb in him. Hidden, like your machete.
Well done, Mr. deBrun, you think.
Something moves from in the shadows. A large man with shaggy hair, seven and a half feet tall, muscle and fat and pistoned machine all stitched together like an art show gone wrong. A glimpse of what you could have been, if you’d been designed for strength and strength alone.
In the palm of his oversized hand, a brick that leaked superconducting fluid. ShinnCo logo on the outside and all. The last time you saw it . . . the last time you saw it, you’d woken up in a room and a man in a suit had sat with it in his lap. He’d explained to you that you were in that box. Everything that had once been you, at least. And now they owned it. And by extension, you.
“A copy of your memories,” the Satrap says. “You’ll hand deBrun over. I know you. I have tasted your memories. Partaken of you.”
“You know who I was, know who I am,” you say. “That was the me before, I’m the me after they took all that, sliced me apart, rebuilt me, and deployed me.”
You grab John’s head, and before anyone in the cavern can twitch, you slice his head off and hold it up into the air. John’s body slumps forward, blood fountaining out over the rock at your feet.
“How long before the dying neurons are inaccessible in here?” you shout.
Everything in the room is flailing, responding to the movements of the Satrap’s tendrils as they shake in anger.
You ignore all that. “Give me. My memories.”
The Satrap calms. “You are too impertinent,” the mouths around you chorus. “I am near immortal. I know the region the man was in. I will continue hunting for that world, and I will eventually have it. But you . . . ”
The large man crushes the memory box. Hyperdense storage crumples easily under the carbon fiber fingers and steaming coolant bursts from between his knuckles.
Fragments drop to the ground.
You stare at them, lips tight.
“Ah,” the Satrap sighs all around you. “Now those memories only live inside me. They are, once again, unique within flesh. So . . . if you kneel and behave from now on, I’ll tell you all about your life. Every time you complete a task, you will return and bow before me right here, and I will tell you about your life. I will give you your past back. Just hand me the head, and kneel.”
“You actually believe that I will hand you this head, and take a knee?” you ask.
“I do. From here, those are your only two choices. So the question is . . . ”
You throw the head aside and hold the machete in both hands firmly.
As expected, half the men and women in thrall scrabble for the head. There’s a twinge of regret. Maybe John would have been able to hide in his ship if you hadn’t shown up. Maybe he would have been able to sneak enough fuel to his ragged fleet to make for that hidden world.
But you doubt it.
And here you are.
Killing the puppets who are in thrall to the Satrap is a thankless task. They are human. Many of them would not have asked for this life. They are people from the home world who fell on hard times, and were given a promise of future wealth in exchange for service. If they live long enough. Others were prepaid: a line of credit, a burst of wealth for a year, and then thrall. Others are criminals, or harvested from debtor’s prison. Prisoners of war left over from various conflicts.
The Satrapy is “civilized.” So it says. It doesn’t raid for subjects. They have to, nominally, be beings that have lost their rights. Or agreed to lose them.
Doesn’t mean most can’t see what thralldom is.
But you kill anyway. Their blood, sliding down the hydrophobic blade to drench your sleeves. The three nearest, beheaded quickly and cleanly. There’s no reason to make them suffer.
You walk through a mist of their jugular blood settling ever so slowly to the ground in the lower gravity. The Satrap, realizing what’s happening, pulls humans around itself. One of them holds deBrun’s head in their arms covetously.
The big guy is the artillery.
He advances, legs thudding, even here. Dust stirs. You walk calmly at him. He swings, a mass-driver, extinction-level powered punch that grazes you. Because what you have is speed. Mechanical tendons that trigger and snap you deep into his reach.
Just the whiff of his punch catches you in the ribs, though. They all crack, and alloys underneath are bent out of shape.
Warning glyphs cascade down your field of sight.
You ignore it all to bury your blade deep into the giant’s right eye socket, then yank up.
Even as the body falls to the ground, you’re facing the Satrap once more.
“I’ve already called my brothers and sisters down on the ground to come for you,” it says through the remaining puppets. “You are dead.”
“People keep telling me that,” you say.
And maybe they’re right.
The puppets come at you in a wedge. All seven. It’s trying to overwhelm you.
You use the machete to cut through the jungle of flesh, leaving arms and limbs on the ground. And when you stand in front of the Satrap, it wriggles back away from you in fear.
“Let me tell you a memory,” it begs through speakers, using the machines now that it has been shorn of biological toy things.
“It’s too late,” you tell it. “I’m dead.”
You drive the machete deep. And then you keep pushing until you have to use your fingers to rip it apart.
There’s a sense throughout the habitat that something major has shifted. Free humans are bunched together in corners, and others are dazed and wan
dering around. The rumor is that the Satrap has suddenly disappeared, or died. But what if it comes back? What happens when other Satraps arrive?
You find the docks and a row of deBrun’s crew with guns guarding the lock. They stare at you, and you realize you are still covered in blood and carrying a machete. Everyone on the station has given you a wide, wide berth.
“If you wanted to steal fuel, now’s the time,” you tell them. “The Satrap’s not going to be able to stop you. Everyone out there doesn’t know what to do.”
There are some other alien races sprinkled in throughout the station. But they seem to have locked themselves away, sensing something has gone wrong.
Smart.
“Who did the captain leave in charge, if he died?” you ask. They don’t answer, but take you back into the ship, and the first mate comes up.
“You’re in charge?” you ask.
“Yes,” he nods. “I’m John.”
You frown. “He called you Jay on the bridge, when I came out.”
The first mate smiles sadly. “John deBrun. The junior John deBrun. Jay because we don’t need two Johns on the bridge. Though . . . I guess that won’t happen anymore.”
“He gave you the coordinates, in case he was taken.”
John’s son nods. “You were taken with him, by the Satrap? You were there?”
You pause for a moment, trying to find words that suddenly flee you. You change direction. “You have three hours to steal as much fuel as you can before forces from the planet below arrive. We should both be long gone by then. Understand?”
“Three hours isn’t long enough.”
You shrug. “Take what time you have been given.”
“You don’t understand, we’re taking on extra people. People we didn’t plan to take on. That adds to the mass we need to spin up. We have the other ships docking hard, and we’re taking refugees from Hope’s End. People, who if they stay, will be back in thrall at the end of those few hours. We won’t have enough fuel to get where we need to go. Maybe, three quarters of the way?”
And out there in space, you were either there or not. There was no part way. No one was getting out on foot to push a ship. Those are cold calculations. They come with the job of captain. Air. Food. Water. Carbon filters. Fuel.
“Sounds like you need to shut your locks soon,” you say. “Or you risk throwing away your father’s sacrifice.”
“I will not leave them,” John says calmly. “He may have been able to. You may. But I will not. We are human beings. We should not leave other human beings behind.”
“Then you’d better hope your men hurry on the fuel siphoning.”
You have no use for goodbyes. You leave him in his cockpit. But you stand in the corridor by yourself in the quiet. Your legs buckle slightly. A wound? Overtired muscles sizzling from the performance earlier? You lean against the wall and take a deep breath.
When you let go, you stare at the bloody handprint.
You lost it all. So close, and you lost it all.
And now what? What are you?
You’ll never have those memories. They aren’t you anymore. You are you. What you have right now, is you. What you do next, will be you. What will that be?
A cold heart and a bloody hand. That’s what you’ve been. What you are.
You turn and go back into the cockpit.
“Is the planet real?” you ask. And look John’s son for any hint, any sign of a lie. You can see pulse, heat, and micro-expressions. Things that help you fight, spot the move. And now, spot intent.
“It’s real.”
“There is another way,” you say.
“And what is that?”
“Take me with you. Get as much fuel as you can, but leave early. Even if it means we only get halfway to where you are going. I killed the Satrap, and everything protecting him. And it wasn’t the first. When we run out of fuel, we’ll dock and I’ll rip more fuel out of their alien hands for you. For you. Understand? I can train more like me. When your fleet passes through, those that stand against us will rue it. I will do this because there is a debt here, understand?”
John looks warily at you. “You were with my father. He didn’t kill the Satrap?”
“There is a debt,” you repeat.
“He helped you?”
“Give me weapons. The non-humans on the station, they enjoy a position of power. They have avoided mostly being in thrall, as we are the new species for that. So even though we have time, they will figure out what we are doing and act against us. You’ll want me out there, buying you time.”
John nods, and reaches out a hand to shake.
You don’t take it. You can’t take it. Not with his father’s blood still on it.
“Weapons,” you repeat. “Before your men start dying unnecessarily.”
Cycled through the locks, deBrun’s men behind you, you walk past the stream of frightened people heading for the ship.
You stand in the large docking bays and survey the battlefield.
This is who you are. This is who you will be. This is who you choose.
A cold heart and bloody hands.
When this is over, when you help deliver them to their new world and repay your debt, you can go home to Earth. Stalk for clues to your past. See if you wander until you find that palm tree on the island you remember.
But for now, you are right here.
Right now.
Waiting for the fight to come to you.
The Sarcophagus
Robert Reed
The object was gray and smooth to the eye and the eye’s first glance gave no clue about its size or mass or its true importance. The second look, a much more careful examination, proved nothing except that almost nothing about the object’s appearance had changed. One very simple sphere was reflecting the light of a million suns. The likely assumption was that the eye had found something close and quite small. Old instincts judged its speed; the object crossed its diameter twice every second. That made for a very slow walk between the stars. Even the laziest eye could follow its passage, and the lazy hand had ample time to reach up, fashioning a bowl of fingers that would catch what was making its gentle plunge.
But no hand remained, certainly none that would ever work, and the eye was not much of eye either. Death had severely degraded its imagination, and worse, slowed its capacity to recognize even obvious mistakes.
Something huge and quite ancient was approaching. The object only seemed to be dumbly simple. The reality was that this was a machine woven out of complications, baffling and enigmatic to every eye. That gray hull was smoother than any polish, and as it grew closer, the eye noticed fierce little lights rising from hull and crisscrossing its face. Between here and there, the vacuum was filled with brilliant sparks and whispery veils. Each glow had its flavor. Every glimmer excited the basic elements of the universe. That eager light held telltale blue-shiftings, and once its old talents were awakened, the eye began to understand how utterly wrong it had been, believing in small sluggish things as insignificant as a child’s ball.
The machine was fifty thousand kilometers in diameter.
Bigger than most worlds, ten seconds would carry this marvel across one million kilometers. That meant it was moving at one-third the sacred speed of light, and what’s more, that eye wasn’t too stupid or too dead to ignore what would surely happen next.
Slashing its way through the galaxy, the Great Ship refused to be slowed and only grudgingly allowed itself to maneuver. Space was a cool vacuum mixed with quite a lot more than vacuum. Gas and dust waited in the darkness. There were also lumps of stone and iron, and little comets and giant comets, and countless sunless worlds, most of them dead but the living worlds still numbering in the millions. The captains had methodically laid out the safest profitable course. But to hold that course meant firing the giant engines, and even a tiny course correction meant a long burn many years ago. There were always obstacles that couldn’t be avoided. Collisions were inevitable, and
every impact had to be absorbed. The hull was deep pure hyperfiber, able to endure horrific abuse, but no machine, not even this machine, would survive forever. Without smart help, the hull would eventually erode away, and the soft body beneath would shatter, and how could anyone measure such a loss?
Fortunes were lashed to this wonder.
Monetary fortunes, and the egos of captains and crew, plus the rich long lives of passengers numbering in the hundreds of billions.
The Great Ship had no choice but plunge onwards. That’s why the captains ordered gigantic mechanical eyes built on the bow, mapping every hazard; and that’s why an arsenal of lasers and shaped nukes and other superior weapons had been pressed into an endless, unwinnable war. Comets and lost moons had to be found early and properly shattered. Then the rubble was chiseled to dust and the dust was boiled into gases that quickly mixed with the native interstellar fog. Brilliant, brilliantly stubborn engineers had devised elaborate means to harvest what was useful from the fog. Each tiny fragment of matter was given an EM charge, enough charge to obey magnetic fluxes, and what was valuable and what had no particular value was gathered up in these electric nets, gently guided into traps and fuel tanks.
But not every inbound object could be stopped. Every war had lost battles. Sometimes an asteroid would slip past. Jolting impacts proved spectacular, without doubt. But casualties were few, bearable and few, the damage limited to the hull. Specialists quickly patched every hole. And because any successful voyage can become more successful, the captains deep beneath the hull made plans, acting on some very old questions:
“What if something we happen to want happens to be ahead of us?
“What if we spot a small, enticing treasure?
“What are our options to save that treasure, and what are the costs, and how do we pay those costs, and what lives do we risk?”
For two trillion seconds, the Great Ship had been plunging through the populated heart of the Way of Milk.
That day, one muscular pulse of microwave light was sent ahead, as a scout.
And what returned was a tiny bright echo.
Something peculiar was lurking out there.