by Alex Lamb
‘What about the clothes?’ he said.
‘They’ll be defabbed, like your body,’ she told him. ‘The station matrix will take note and give you a digital match. It’s only protein. And this planet knows all about protein.’
Will lay back in his pit and summoned his home node. When the station loomed in his mind, he took a step forwards and let it snap into reality. The busy concourse materialised. Over the heads of the crowd he could make out two Balance agents standing at the far end, huge and impassive.
Someone grabbed his hand. He turned and found Moneko attached to it. She frowned at him.
‘Best not to stare at them,’ she said, tugging his arm. ‘This way.’
She led him through the hall to an arch labelled Search Corridors, right under the gaze of a Balance agent posted there. Will held his breath as they walked past.
‘Can’t he tell what I am?’ he asked once they were clear.
‘Not without evidence,’ she said. ‘Until you do something dumb, you just look baseline.’
‘But isn’t baseline something you’re all trying not to be? Doesn’t it give me away?’
She fixed him with a long, cryptic look. ‘I assure you, Cuthbert, there are many ways of being different that have absolutely nothing to do with your appearance.’
Beyond the arch lay a long bank of what appeared to be elevator doors, at least a hundred of them, each with a green or red light situated above it. Pedestrians picked a door showing green and disappeared inside. The light briefly flashed red before resetting to its former green state. Dozens of people were vanishing every second.
Moneko led him to a door and spoke.
‘Carnevale di Peste,’ she said. ‘Balcony five.’
‘What?’ said Will, then realised she wasn’t speaking to him. The door opened, revealing a long passageway lined with doors, each with a small plaque beside it.
‘Search results,’ she explained. She pulled him into the corridor and straight through the first door on the right.
On the other side, their environment changed radically and so did their clothes. Moneko now wore a low-cut Venetian gown in red velvet, complete with a gold mask. Behind her, a colonnaded balcony curved away, deep in shadow, with views onto a huge open space under a starry sky. A fair of some sort was happening below, complete with multicoloured stages, tents and torches. Hoots of laughter and frantic music echoed up.
Will stared at his guide. ‘What the fuck?’
‘First, keep your voice down,’ she hissed. ‘We travelled, that’s all. Last time, you came the slow way over the mesh. Nobody uses that except for shopping and local hops. This time, we went by search. And yes, I’m wearing a dress. That’s what they wore back then, you know.’
Will looked down at the Renaissance jacket and gloves he’d suddenly acquired.
‘The clothes are a visual metaphor for the anonymiser protocol we just acquired,’ she explained. ‘Disguise in soft-space isn’t easy but this place has it in spades. It might look all costume drama here, but wherever we go next, you won’t be visible. You’re wearing a mask, by the way. Don’t take it off.’
Will touched his face and was surprised to feel something stiff and cold there.
He glanced to the left, down at the party. ‘What is this place?’ he said.
‘A niche site,’ said Moneko. ‘There are millions of them. All different. And no, we’re not going down there. It’s too risky. The way we want is over here.’
She dragged him to a grand doorway that led into yet another hallway, this one decorated in black marble with red veins. Gold filigree sconces lined the walls. Portraits of himself in regal garb making sinister, unhinged expressions gazed down at them. He’d apparently arrived in an Italian palace designed by Satanists.
‘Campy, isn’t it?’ said Moneko. ‘A little too Dante for my tastes. Still, it takes all sorts, and their software can’t be beaten.’
The hallway led to another bank of search gates where revellers in similar outfits were chatting in groups or calling up fresh corridors for travel.
‘Don’t say a word,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t even look.’
She led him silently past them towards a free portal. Will felt sure he could feel the other travellers’ eyes on his back.
‘Integumentary parsnip horse,’ she muttered.
A short corridor with just three side doors appeared.
‘Wow,’ said Will once the portal had shut behind him. ‘I’m surprised that search turned up anything at all.’
‘That’s the point,’ she replied. ‘Short searches underuse the amount of buffer normally assigned to a request. That leaves gaps.’ She strode to a stretch of blank wall at the far end. ‘Now watch.’
With her free hand, she opened a door that Will felt certain wasn’t there before she reached for it.
She watched his astonishment with a smirk of accustomed amusement. ‘You didn’t see a door because you weren’t expecting to,’ she explained. ‘Don’t worry, it happens to everybody. I had to be shown it, too.’
On the other side of the opening lay a causeway suspended high across an abandoned trench town of the sort that Galatea used to build. The glass overhead was smashed. Drifts of pale sand covered the tiered gardens far below where the turf had turned a dead yellow-grey. Ruined furniture and broken robots lay in heaps.
Will peered at the scene. ‘I know this place!’ he said. ‘I helped with the clean-up here after a storm hit. It was one of my first ever roboteering jobs. Before I even joined the Fleet. It was called Fortitude, or something like that. I haven’t thought about it in years.’
Moneko shrugged at him. ‘It just looks like a blank wall with a broken-link sigil to me. This is where your special talents kick in.’
‘You can’t see that?’ said Will, glancing between her and the view.
She shook her head. ‘Don’t remember anywhere called Fortitude, either. I can open these gates but I can’t go through them. Now listen – I have to explain fast otherwise people will start wondering why our light’s still red. Here’s what you need to know. First, keep your disguise on. Don’t touch the mask. It’s your lifeline. If you can’t see through your hands on the other side, you’ve got a problem. It means you’ve lost your stealthware, which is bad. Second, avoid everyone you see. They’re either Balance or a Figment. Either way, you don’t want to mess with them. Nasty shit can happen. Third, when you get where you’re going, for God’s sake try not to touch anything. Balance has some of this stuff tripwired, so keep your sticky mitts off the metaphor.’
‘Wait,’ said Will. ‘So I’m just supposed to wander around?’
‘That’s right. Get the feel of it. That’s all you need to do this time.’
‘But how do I leave?’
‘Hold your breath and count to twenty,’ said Moneko. ‘That’s the cognitive trigger for emergency exit – the soft-space equivalent of a hard reboot. You’ll surface in physical reality at whatever location is most tightly coupled to the virt-site you’re standing in.’
She took a lace handkerchief from the sleeve of her dress and tucked it in the front of his doublet.
‘There,’ she said. ‘I just twinned my exit to yours. The handkerchief codes for a non-local tether. We should pop up in adjacent bodies, or as close as the planet can manage. Now, if you think you’re being followed, or if you suspect for any reason that something has gone wrong, just pull the plug, okay? Don’t run, or try to fight, or any other silly shit. Freeze and hold your breath. Got it?’
Will nodded, suddenly anxious about what lay ahead. He felt like he was being briefed for a jump out of the back of a shuttle.
‘Okay, good luck,’ she said. ‘Take as long as you need.’ She curtseyed and gestured for him to step through.
Will gritted his teeth and walked onto the causeway. His feet immediately turned ghostly while the temperature dropped about twenty degrees. A chill breeze whipped about him. The causeway’s railings moaned in the wind. Everything sudden
ly smelled unpleasantly of ammonia and dust.
‘This is weird,’ he said, but when he looked back, the Venetian search corridor was already gone.
6.2: MARK
For the next three days, Clath toiled relentlessly while her new method yielded nothing. Mark felt his confidence in her wane but tried not to let it show. He kept to himself, thought about Zoe and cursed himself for a fool. Then, on the fourth day, Clath came back to him to request a modification.
‘I want to run power through the emitters,’ she said. She was almost at the end of her rope. He could see it in her unfocused gaze and the sluggish way she moved. ‘Even though we won’t actually make warp. Ideally, we’d simulate tau-bursts for the extra mass, if that’s okay with you.’
Mark acceded, even though he knew the plan would use an outrageous amount of fuel. They simply had nothing to lose. At the end of the following day she returned, excited, with a visualisation to show him. Mark let her drag him into helm-space where she painted the void before them with a map.
‘We now have a local gradient measure,’ she said, ‘and we’ve tracked it over a decent path length. You can thank Ann’s burst manoeuvres for that – our conventional velocity is crazy. From our samples along that line, we can extrapolate to the surrounding space. And when we add the tight-beamed pings we’ve received from our remaining feeler-drones, something interesting happens.’
As he watched, Clath’s visualisation expanded from a few scant patches of colour-coded data to a great swathe of bright landscape. They’d cut straight inwards, he could see, near a huge, undulating kink in the Flaw. It doubled back ahead of them like a twisting river. Mark stared at it, disbelieving, and felt a slow grin curving his lips. If the diagram was right, they could cut straight across the gap. In fact, they were already most of the way there.
‘It wasn’t that hard, really,’ said Clath, ‘not once we got really deep into the bulk. Understanding this place is simply about having the right equipment in the right places, just like I always expected.’
‘Are you sure about this?’ he said.
‘No. I may be missing something in the models and just finding what I want to see. But it’s exciting anyway, isn’t it?’
They called Ann. After several urgent requests to her cabin, the goddess reluctantly appeared, arms folded tight across her chest.
‘What?’ she said.
As Clath explained, an expression of hunger built on Ann’s face.
‘They could be waiting for us at the exit point,’ she said. ‘I want helm control when we get there.’
‘Sure,’ said Mark, laughing. ‘So long as you don’t send us back down the Flaw to fight them.’
She shot him a withering look. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll do nothing so sensible.’
Two days later, everyone gathered early to watch the ship exit the bank. They sat around in helm-space waiting while data points from the emitters slowly arrived. Gradually, the curvon flow began to change. Eventually, around lunchtime, they finally made it out. Everyone except Ann broke into cheers.
‘Quiet,’ she said. ‘I’m scanning for Photes.’
As she kept searching and finding nothing to fight, a fresh look of dismay crawled onto her features.
‘We’re clear,’ she said quietly. ‘Though they may be waiting further down the Flaw. We have no idea how far ahead they might have travelled.’
‘If we hit trouble, you get to fly,’ said Mark as he gently plucked the pilot control symbol from her fingers. Vindication built inside him like a storm. ‘In the meantime, how’s that navigational feed looking?’
This time, Ann had almost nothing to do. The data from their few remaining feeler-drones couldn’t have been better. She stood listlessly while Clath’s map kept growing faster than they could explore it. Mark tried not to giggle. He ramped their warp – carefully this time – teasing himself with the promise of success.
By the end of the day, they’d reached the other side. As they burst out into clear space, the rainbow of open cosmos stretched before them, more beautiful than a glistening sea.
‘My God,’ Mark breathed. ‘We did it. We fucking did it. We beat the Zone. We’re through.’
He felt a rush of joy and the urge to cry. He was going to do this thing. Neither the Academy nor anyone else could stop him. They were going to make it and the war would be over.
He dropped them out of warp and jumped back into helm-space so that he could run over and kiss Clath on the forehead.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’
Clath’s eyes filled with tears. She was grinning so hard it looked like her face would split. Judj and Palla took turns hugging her.
Ann regarded them with an expression of bewildered disgust.
‘Don’t any of you get it?’ she said. ‘This is just a different way to die.’ With that, she vanished out of helm-space.
‘What’s her problem?’ said Judj with a derisive snort. ‘Of course we’re still dead. That doesn’t mean this isn’t awesome.’
‘Ignore her,’ said Palla. ‘We’re the first people ever to cross the Depleted Zone. Let’s just revel in that for a minute, shall we?’
Mark was too high to care about Ann’s attitude. They’d cheated death again and it felt great, just like it had in the old days.
Ira looked set to follow Ann back into yacht-space, but before he could make an exit gesture, Judj spoke up.
‘Wait, what’s that?’ he said.
He pointed to a small, passive marker that had appeared in the display. Something was holding position with the end of the Flaw ahead of them, much like the science station had on the other side. A steady signal sung out from it.
Mark switched to an EM filter. It was definitely an artefact of some kind. He zoomed in. An old IPSO buoy hung there like a tiny dimpled moon.
Mark’s ebullience faltered. Helm-space suddenly felt a little colder.
‘Not the first, then, apparently,’ said Palla quietly. ‘Is anyone else surprised to see that there?’
‘I am,’ said Judj. ‘And I don’t like it.’
‘We should hail it,’ said Ira. He looked transfixed by the device.
‘Hang on,’ said Mark. ‘Isn’t it possible that this is some kind of Phote trap?’
‘Why would they bother?’ said Ira. ‘If they were this far ahead of us they could have staged an ambush already. And besides, what kind of Phote ships carry antique relay buoys? This belongs to someone else.’
‘Grandad is right,’ said Palla. ‘This feels wrong. We need to know what’s going on.’
Mark fought back an irrational reluctance to act and sent an access request to the buoy. The response was immediate. He had to rummage around in the ship’s database to find a suitably obsolete compression filter so that he could read the reply burst, but once he had it, the rest was easy.
‘By the look of the time-stamps, this thing has been running for decades,’ he told them. ‘It has an open suntap link to a red dwarf almost two light-years away. It must have taken years to come online.’
‘Wow,’ said Palla. ‘That’s impressive. And slightly creepy. Someone’s been waiting a long time.’
‘What it’s doing here?’ said Judj.
‘What do you think?’ said Ira, staring intently at the lonely machine. ‘There’s only one ship I can think of that this could have come from.’
Mark’s skin flushed cold. They all knew exactly which ship he meant: Rachel’s.
‘Looks like your half-mum made it through after all,’ said Palla.
‘Let’s not jump to conclusions,’ he snapped, and regretted his sharpness immediately.
She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Getting a little twitchy, Mark?’
‘Can we unpack that, please,’ said Ira. He pointed at a marker file in the reply burst. Besides the buoy’s schematics, it was the only substantive piece of data it had sent.
Mark unfolded it. A reference to a nearby G-class star appeared. A
pparently, the IPS Diggory was waiting for them there – Rachel’s ship.
He blinked at the display, stunned.
‘It’s just not possible,’ he said.
Powerful, unexpected emotions roiled inside him. He’d hoped to exorcise the ghosts of Will and Rachel on this mission, not wake them up to torture him again. Was he now going to have to investigate Rachel’s death and figure out the whole tragic story of her lost mission? Would he have to play her log-vids and watch her starve?
‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Judj. ‘Why is there a beacon here and not a ship? Was it left here by the crew, or by the autopilot SAP after they all died?’
‘It has to be the crew,’ said Ira. ‘Otherwise, why go to a G-type? The only reason to make the trip is habitable planets. For all we know, there might be a Mars-Plus world there where the survivors set up base.’
‘Her ship didn’t have the equipment for that,’ said Mark. ‘It was a long-range scout. And in any case, they’d all be dead by now.’
Ira shot him a dry look. ‘Am I dead, Mark?’
‘No. But you’ve been drowning in anti-ageing meds for most of your life.’
‘She had a coma-casket,’ said Ira.
Mark shook his head. ‘Even with cryo active, those old caskets were terrible. I’ve never heard of one lasting forty years. Not even with spares.’
‘This still doesn’t add up,’ said Judj as his pale eyes scoured the data. ‘If they had the means to navigate the Flaw this far, why didn’t she come back?’ His narrow jaw jutted forward in disapproval.
‘Maybe they couldn’t,’ said Ira. ‘What if they used up everything they had getting here?’
‘Leaving no word of their success?’ said Judj. ‘No tight-beamed pulse at the science station? No drones sent back through the Flaw retracing their steps?’
Ira was quiet.
‘You know what I think?’ said Judj. ‘I think this looks like a set-up.’
Ira broke into an unexpected smile. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
Palla clapped her hands. ‘Okay, here’s what your great and wise SAO thinks. I propose that we follow this signpost. After all, the system it’s pointing at is only fifty hours from here. It’s on the way and we badly need to refuel. Also, we should detonate that buoy, just in case one of those Photes actually bothers coming after us.’