by Alex Lamb
‘Will, meet Moneko,’ said John. ‘She’ll be your trainer.’
‘Nice to meet you, Cuthbert,’ she said, nodding briskly. ‘Welcome to the secret order of truth divers. I’m looking forward to working with you.’
As he smiled politely, Will realised that she must have been waiting for them for most of their conversation. For all he knew, he might have agreed to work with this woman a hundred times before. He couldn’t help wondering how many times she’d met him, and how many times she’d watched him die.
5.2: IRA
The virtual yacht wallowed on a lifeless sea. Nothing moved. In an attempt to render the metaphor a more compelling reflection of their plight, the virt had made the air outside the cabins stifling while boosting the air conditioning inside. The horizon shimmered under waves of simulated heat while the cabins froze.
Still, Ira was not to be dissuaded from his daily ritual of a drink on the deck. His coffee was now iced and his seat parked in the shade. To his mind, the ship needn’t have bothered with such aggressive psychophysics. For Ira and the others, the absolute lack of stimulus they’d experienced over the last eleven hours felt like a visceral pressure. The distance between them and any raiding party coming down the Flaw was terrifyingly small on the scales the crew was accustomed to using. And if anything was going to get them spotted, it would be that huge, static ion plume being emitted by their conventional engines.
The only thing they had going for them was the horrible geometry of the Flaw itself. In order to get anywhere close, the Photes would have to hit the edge of the bulk in almost the same spot and at a similar speed, otherwise they’d be dumped too far away to do any harm. When you fell into the Zone under warp, the loss of traction was so abrupt that overshoot from rear spatial expansion dumped you deep inside the bulk. Once there, the vast emptiness of space immediately made itself felt. Space without warp was the most unforgiving medium imaginable – an endless swallowing sea of nothing in which it took years to travel even trivial distances.
Needless to say, their own attempts to escape were just as stymied as any potential attacks. While the feeler-drones were still out there busily mapping the Flaw, the Dantes could barely speak to them. They were dependent on light-speed comms with motionless drones parked just outside, which meant a package-return time measured in days. In short, they were screwed.
Even so, a part of Ira relished that portentous stillness. This, he reasoned, was what space must have been like before warp-drive: deadly by simple virtue of its unbelievable vastness. But, as always, that sense of awe was drowned by the anxiety crackling off everyone else. Being pinned to the spot while a horde of implacable enemies raced up behind was making them tense. And as their death clock ticked down, emotions, shoulders and voices all ratcheted upwards.
A virtual crewman in a starched uniform appeared.
‘Sir, Autograd Muri wishes to see you in her stateroom.’
That was a start, at least. Someone wanted to communicate, even if it was just to piss on him again. Ira rose and walked down the yacht’s chilly companionway to her door. He knocked.
‘It’s open,’ yelled Palla from inside.
He found her lolling in a leather armchair near the window. The shades were drawn and the bed a mess. She wore neon plaid pyjamas that clashed terribly with the virt’s styling. The chromatophores on her scalp pulsed in slow, purposeful tides.
‘Shut the door and sit down,’ she said.
Ira sat. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I don’t know, can you?’ she said. ‘You had one job, Ira, and that was to keep Supergran and Captain Maverick away from each other’s throats. And you failed. What went wrong there?’ She glared at him but didn’t give him time to answer. ‘The rest of us are hard at work, shit though our fates may be, but you seem determined to be ballast. Unless you call skulking about on the deck in a sweaty shirt useful, that is.’
‘I didn’t see an opportunity to intervene,’ said Ira.
‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘You weren’t looking. If anyone is responsible for the damage Ann did to helm-space, it’s you. Judj is still memory-flushing some of the mediator SAPs she traumatised. He’s had to put a lot of them down already, their heuristics got that broken.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ira, ‘but I didn’t see a way to help resolve that issue. Otherwise I would have.’
He meant it. Seeing how badly Ann wanted to die made him feel like heading for the nearest airlock. Being around her kindled a hideous, familiar sadness in him that froze out thought. They’d been so close once. She knew so much about what he’d seen. He didn’t say that, though. Palla didn’t want to hear about sadness.
‘You let yourself down, and you let her down,’ said Palla. ‘But I’m not sure she even noticed. Do you have any idea why she defends you when I talk to her? Do you need defending, Ira?’
‘No,’ said Ira. ‘I definitely do not.’ Palla stared at him and appeared to be waiting for more, so he continued, ‘Ann and Mark have just had different life experiences, that’s all. Their defence of me might be a little hard for you to parse, but that’s because perception of their prior choices might be bound up—’
‘Don’t lecture me with your junior-psych bullshit,’ she snapped. ‘And don’t tell me I can’t feel their pain. We’ve all had pain, Ira. Welcome to modern life. But somehow I have no trouble talking with Judj or Clath. They get it. They’re used to making huge, horrible decisions every day, just like me. But none of us is used to carrying extra weight on behalf of bloated human supergiants who seem incapable of acting effectively even to save their own asses.’
Ira regarded the glower on her face and sighed inside. Palla cried herself to sleep at night. Ira knew this because he climbed out of his casket to check on the others when they weren’t monitoring him. She cried behind a privacy screen that she imagined was locked tight. Having grown up in a shadow-mediated world, it had never occurred to her that someone might keep tabs on her via physical space. He wished her words could spur some guilt inside him like she wanted them to. He hadn’t felt any in years. There was a glassed wasteland inside him where guilt used to live.
‘I thought Mark made the right call,’ he said.
‘What the fuck does that matter?’ said Palla. ‘Mark didn’t need your help. Ann did. You’re falling down on the job. You’re too quiet and too fucking old.’
‘Yep,’ he said.
It didn’t help to agree but what else was there to say? The New Society were never going to let him die. He was just too useful as a walking museum, whether he wanted it or not.
‘Is that it, then?’ said Palla. ‘Yes? Okay? Do you want me to tell the others about your run-in with Psych Security? About all the crazy shit they don’t know yet? They think I’m just being mean to you. Should I tell them the real reason why I’m needling you? Should I tell them about your attempt to defect?’
‘I didn’t try to defect,’ said Ira wearily. ‘I proposed finding a new kind of peace agreement. An enforceable one. I was talking about some kind of mutually assured destruction pact, not giving up.’
She scoffed at him. ‘Which you did by trying to make contact with the Photes independently.’
‘Of course,’ said Ira. ‘I was hardly going to risk anybody else, was I?’
The Fleet always seemed determined to take his statements out of context. A longing for peace was treated like treason these days. Photuria kept claiming they wanted it. It got awfully tempting after a while.
‘Treaties have been tried,’ said Palla. ‘Everyone was absorbed, remember? That happened on your watch, I believe.’
Just listening to her made Ira feel exhausted. He saw that she was trying to goad him into an authentic response. He’d have done the same in her place. But it took effort not admitting that he knew as much, which made feigning engagement correspondingly harder.
The problem was that he’d done her job. He understood their plight and was on board with the Academy plan. He just wished she’d stop w
orrying about him and get on with it.
‘Tell them if you want,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend it. It would probably impair morale.’
‘Impair morale? What the fuck is wrong with you, Ira Baron? Are you trying to make this hard for me? Do you want my job, is that it? Do you want to take over?’
‘Hell, no,’ said Ira quickly.
She looked pleased by that response. ‘You don’t think you could do a better job than me?’ she said.
‘That’s not the issue.’
‘Wow, that’s evasive. Then tell me, what the fuck is the issue?’
He nearly did, but wanted her ambition intact. Palla was in charge precisely because she hadn’t been here before. He’d been stranded in a cramped starship in unknown terrain before Palla was even born. Hell, he’d faced that one before her mother was born. Palla’s ignorance would liberate her choices and make them fresh. Then he’d check them and advise her if necessary. It was a far better approach than the alternative.
‘Nothing to say for yourself, Grandad?’ she urged. ‘Nothing? Christ, you’d better get your shit together, otherwise I’m going to dump you out of an airlock.’
Ira wished her threat held more bite and less appeal. As she read his face, her mood appeared to nudge into something between anger and panic. Her body language said clutching at straws, desperate to precipitate affect.
‘All right, try this on for size, then,’ she said. ‘You must have noticed that Ann is close to breakdown.’
‘Of course,’ said Ira, crossing his arms.
‘What you don’t know yet is that the infected spy she let back in to Galatea specifically targeted people close to Ann as soon as she hit port. The Najoma family, for instance, are all dead.’
Ira’s insides tightened. That poor family. And poor Ann.
‘That was the main reason for getting her out on a mission fast,’ said Palla. ‘Our psych models of her all pointed to behavioural cascade if she ever discovered the truth. She was going to wig out and run off Phote-hunting without a plan, losing us the Ariel Two and God knows what else. Even if we convinced her to stay at home, models suggested she’d be dead in a fortnight.’
Ira stared. He’d wondered why the mission warranted the inclusion of a military superstar such as Ann, despite all the reasoning they’d given. Now the answer was clear: they’d had no choice. Left to her own devices, Ann would have imploded as her last empathetic bridge to the human race collapsed.
‘But now I’m going to tell her anyway,’ said Palla.
‘Why?’ said Ira, appalled. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because if we’re already toast, what the point in not coming clean?’
‘You can’t,’ said Ira. ‘It’d finish her.’
‘That’s likely, yes,’ said Palla, looking pleased with herself. ‘And now you have to share that burden along with me. So let’s get her in on the meeting immediately.’
He rose to his feet. ‘No!’
Palla smiled darkly and clicked her fingers. Two seconds later, there was a knock on the door. The pit fell out of Ira’s stomach.
‘Come in,’ said Palla.
Ann walked in stony-faced. He stared at her and felt his pulse race. As usual, all the light and hope in the room leached away the moment Ann entered it.
‘What is it?’ said Ann.
Her fury from the other day had turned to listlessness. Ann had tried for her glorious exit and failed. Behind that imperious gaze, a terrible vulnerability lurked.
‘Sit,’ said Palla. ‘I want to talk about your actions. I’m holding you responsible for what happened at the edge of the Flaw. This is a disciplinary meeting.’
Ann regarded them like a couple of barely interesting insects as she took a seat.
‘An unfair interpretation,’ she said woodenly. ‘You’re welcome to it.’
‘Mark made a decision,’ said Palla. ‘You blocked him. Fleet officers don’t block each other. I think you’re aware of the Yes-And Protocol?’
‘Of course,’ said Ann.
Ira watched her face with curdling dread. When was Palla going to drop the bomb? Throwing him into space wasn’t a problem. Seeing Ann hurt again, though? That he couldn’t hack. He already had too much of her pain on his conscience.
‘Galatean Fleet officers put their teammates first,’ said Palla. ‘They adopt whatever role is necessary. You failed to do that. Mark made a judgement call. He may not have made the right choice, but your duty was to back him up anyway. As a representative of the Galatean people, I expect all officers on this ship to behave like modern adults.’
‘If Mark’s strategy had your direct backing, you should have made that clearer,’ said Ann.
‘His strategy did not have my backing,’ said Palla. ‘Nor did he need it. I am a political officer. He is not. I simply knew we were going to run into a bank of dead space once we entered the Flaw. It was obvious. I also knew that you were going to hold the lion’s share of the responsibility in causing that disaster.’
Now she had Ann’s attention. ‘I see,’ Ann said slowly. ‘Then I fail to understand how you can be disappointed.’
Ira watched the tension in her posture winding back up.
‘Because I gave you a chance to fuck up and you stepped right into it!’ said Palla. ‘You, a human super-weapon, were outguessed by a bunch of noob officers and a pile of SAP software before we even left port. What does that say about your combat risk profile? I gambled, given the inevitability of the outcome, that the benefit of letting you and Mark fight it out was worth more than supporting one of you over the other. And that’s because this mission is absolutely dependent on the two of you forging a successful relationship. Which means recognising your weaknesses and fixing them.’ Palla’s eyes slid back towards Ira. ‘I was also waiting to see if this schmuck would get involved. At least your bickering with Mark proves you’re both alive. Your incompetence would be hard to fake. But Admiral President over here didn’t move a muscle. You know what I don’t trust? Serenity.’ She sneered the word. ‘This shit-wad—’
‘That’s enough,’ barked Ann. ‘Where’s your respect? Without Ira, you wouldn’t even be here.’
‘Fine!’ said Palla, before Ira could interject. ‘Then you can work with him. He seems very concerned about you.’
Ann’s fiery eyes swivelled in his direction. ‘I don’t need anyone’s concern.’
‘Funny,’ said Palla, ‘because he says he doesn’t need your defence. And if the two of you ancients are so keen on justifying each other’s existence, you can definitely be a team. Your new job, Captain Ludik, will be to work with Ira to determine the size of the patch of dead space we’re buried in. Are we going to be here for a day or a lifetime? Because if it’s a lifetime, I’m shutting down the habitat core. No battles, no pyrotechnics, just a boring dead crew. Comprendez? I don’t see a reason for us to resort to slow-time if the human race will be dead before we reach it.’
Silence fell.
‘You’re both dismissed. Now get out of my sight.’
Ira watched Ann struggle with that kind of treatment. She rose abruptly and strode for the exit with Ira right behind her.
As soon as Palla’s door was shut, she turned on him.
‘With respect, Ira,’ she growled, ‘I do not need your concern. I am a professional. I don’t need you mooning at me like I deserve some kind of pity. I’m a big girl now. So big I could crack your skull with my pinkie.’ She held one up to show him.
‘And it’s exactly that kind of hyperbolically defensive remark that worries me,’ said Ira, breathing hard. ‘If you could cut that shit out, please, maybe we’d be able to get some work done.’
She glared at him and stalked off. Ira stared at her departing back and writhed inside. He knew exactly what Palla had done to him. She’d reached him at last by making Ann’s awful pain his responsibility, just as it had been long ago, before he’d walled that part of himself off. He’d escaped this time without the truth coming o
ut, but Palla would want him to change. The rest of the flight was going to be excruciating.
5.3: NADA
When the Infinite Order reached the edge of the Zone, Nada watched. She couldn’t help herself. This was too important a moment for her to leave to her underlings and the prospect of yet another verbal report made her chest ache. So she navigated the mind-temple to Ship-Wide Inputs and piggybacked on a feed that one of her ship-brains was receiving.
What she saw when they dropped warp appalled her. The ships of her advance strike force swarmed idly near the entrance to the Alpha Flaw like a cloud of lethargic bees. The human ship she’d expected to see was conspicuously absent. They had failed.
Nada gulped air and squirmed free of the vesicle’s wall trailing a mess of bio-support cables. Where was the ship? What had her people been doing? Why wasn’t this solved already? She scrabbled frantically over the moist inner surface of the vesicle and thrust an arm through the sphincter. It twitched open in surprise.
On the far side, the ship’s crew-bulb was a densely packed mess of filmy membranes, human bodies of various colours and trailing support umbilici. The walls crawled with studiously cleaning lice. Pale light from wall-cysts lit the scene in shades of cream and orange.
‘Leng!’ Nada shouted. ‘Zilch! What is going on? I require an immediate situation assessment.’
Leng’s eyes shot open. He took in the sight of her head and arms at the opening, an almost human expression of alarm blooming on his face.
‘Superior Nada,’ he said. ‘I am surprised to see you outside your vesicle.’
One by one, the other crew opened their eyes and regarded her with uncomprehending stares. Zilch gulped like a beached fish.
‘The situation is urgent!’ she said. ‘The ship we were pursuing is not present. What is the status?’
‘I have not yet received word from the advance-force coordinator,’ said Zilch.
Nada loosed a strangled shriek and dived back into the mind-temple, letting her body go slack. She ported her avatar-bead directly to the ship’s central comms and pinged the coordinator herself, pumping urgency packets at him along with her request.