Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50

by John Joseph Adams

  Ursomorph rockship Yogi-14 attacking Ceresian ships Featherlight and Honesty.

  I cringe. That was an unnecessary side effect of my scheme. An ursomorph rockship—shaped like a flint axe, kilometres long, sculpted by synthbio and fusion flame—refuses to admit that it lost a trajectory bid. The wispy medusa ships of the Ceresians descend upon it. The Highway-zoku struggles to contain the destruction, sends in their own q-ships, relocates lightmills to route traffic around the expanding bubble of the battlefield.

  Mass stream disruption in the Saturn corridor. Streamship Bubble Bobble buying mass stream queue positions.

  Lightmill in Martian orbit unavailable.

  Requesting Poincaré invariant surface access for Saturn kilocklick beam.

  Buying derivatives on future access rights to Saturn kiloklick beam.

  I hold my breath. That’s the great thing about the zoku: their jewels force them to follow the zoku volition. I watch with satisfaction as the Highway-zoku routes the Bob Howard to a slower beam. It does not buy me much—perhaps an extra week—but that is just enough for me to get to Saturn right behind the Rainbow Table Zoku ship. Hopefully that won’t be enough time for the Great Game to break Mieli completely.

  And of course, I now also have enough entanglement to trade for the tools I need for the Iapetos job.

  Smiling to myself, I step back into the Wardrobe’s main vir.

  • • • •

  It is snowing in the bookshop. Large white flakes drift down from the shadows in the ceiling. The bookshelves look like snow-covered trees, and the café table has been replaced by a tall lamppost, with a cast-iron gas lantern on top that casts yellow, fluttering light. My breath steams. It is cold. Matjek is nowhere to be seen.

  Somewhere, far away, there is the sound of tiny bells. A set of small footprints leads into the shadows between the shelves. There is a discarded candy wrapper on the ground, silver and purple against the snow. Turkish Delight.

  “Matjek!” I shout, in a snow-muffled voice. There is no reply. How the hell did he do this to the vir?

  I stick my hands into my armpits for warmth and fumble at my Founder code to repair the damage done by the future god-emperor of the Solar System.

  A snowball hits me in the back of the head.

  I blink at the stinging wetness that slides down my neck. Matjek laughs somewhere in the darkness. I’m still rubbing my head when the qupt comes. It’s Isidore.

  Jean! You can’t believe what I found! I struggle to receive an exomemory fragment, flashes of flying in the Martian sky, a bright star between a man’s fingers. It’s not just Earth, it’s the Spike, and the Collapse, you have to see this—

  The detective’s voice is lost in a flood of images. Phobos falling from the sky. A pillar of light in the horizon. An earthquake, the whole planet ringing like a bell, the Oubliette losing its balance.

  And then, silence.

  Copyright © 2014 by Hannu Rajaniemi.

  Excerpted from The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi.

  Published by permission of the author and Tor Books.

  All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born and raised in Finland, Hannu Rajaniemi lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is a director of a think tank providing business services based on advanced math and artificial intelligence. He holds a Ph.D. in string theory and is a member of the same writing group that produced Hal Duncan. Multilingual from an early age, he writes his science fiction in English.

  NOVEL EXCERPT:

  The Shadow Academy

  Adrian Cole

  PROLOGUE

  APRIL

  Skellbow moved through the corridors of the old building uneasily, pausing occasionally to listen for any sounds in the night. Outside, the moon was high overhead, near full but obscured by passing clouds. Skellbow had finished the nightly lockup, jangling his keys and stomping his feet as he made his way back down to the entrance foyer. The sounds he made were deliberate. He hated the silence of the ancient Academy at night. He much preferred the place in the daytime when it was teeming with kids, even though their rowdiness and cheek roused his anger. After nightfall the place was empty and echoing, dead. Colleagues mocked his fear of spirits and supernatural agents, but they weren’t the only reason he loathed this shift.

  Security! The Prime, Miss Vine, had an almost obsessive regard for it, especially with another Inspection due. She ruled her Academy with a remorseless will to succeed in all things. Getting anything wrong was not a good idea.

  “Security!” Skellbow muttered repeatedly, as if the word alone would ward off any consequences of error. “Not my fucking job. I’m just covering for Jordan. Not my fault if he’s ill.” He fiddled with the huge bunch of keys as though by doing so he would spot any that he hadn’t used to secure the building.

  There was a small overnight staff, and everyone would bed down in the Academy when they had finished their paperwork. The threat of the Inspection meant more work for all of them and some were frantically preparing for it. Rather them than him. At least, for once, the Prime wasn’t here. Skellbow never felt anything but highly nervous in her presence.

  His keys had their own secure cupboard near the tall double doors to the outside. Skellbow was about to lock them away when he was cut short by an insistent knock on the doors. He almost dropped the keys, turning to stare at the source of the sound in horror. The Prime! It’s her, for certain. The knock came again and he went to the door, pressing up against it. Very slowly he unlocked it, easing it open no more than an inch, prepared to slam it shut and relock it if need be. Light from the thick candle in the niche just over his shoulder slanted out into the darkness. By its flickering glow he could discern a face. No one he recognized.

  “Mr. Skellbow?” a gruff voice asked.

  “What do you want? This place is shut for the night.”

  “We’re the contractors. Working on the sea wall.”

  “It’s the middle of the fucking night,” Skellbow growled, readying to slam the door and bolt it.

  “I know. But we need our tools. We left them, thinking we’d be back in the morning to finish the job. But we’ve been called to do another down in the barracks. Early start. We need those tools. Only take us a minute.”

  Skellbow was trying to think of a good reason to argue, when he became aware that someone was behind him. He swung around, even more on edge.

  It was Carl Trencher, one of the senior staff. “Barry. What’s the problem?”

  “Builders, sir. They want their tools.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “Shall I tell them to . . . come back in the morning?”

  “I better have a word with them.”

  Trencher wore a long outdoor coat and was evidently about to go home for the night. He went to the door and eased it open a little further. Skellbow heard him speak to the men outside, not catching the words, but after a brief, polite exchange Trencher turned back to him.

  “It’ll be okay, Barry. Can’t be helped. Just let them get their stuff and they’ll be away again.”

  Skellbow nodded reluctantly.

  Trencher allowed the three men into the foyer. They were all thickset, muscular navvies, used to hard labor by the look of them.

  “Wouldn’t have bothered you, mate,” their leader told Skellbow. “We’d have stayed in the pub. But we need those tools.” It was clear to Skellbow from the man’s accent that he was no local man.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Barry,” said Trencher. He gave the caretaker a last nod and slipped out into the darkness.

  Skellbow grunted and led the three men further into the building. “Sea wall, you say?”

  “Yeah, north wall,” said the spokesman. The other two were silent, eyes taking in their surroundings, but they were otherwise apparently indifferent.

  Skellbow
masked his disapproval with difficulty. He hadn’t wanted these contractors here in the first place. Dunstan Fullacombe, the Master of the Watch, was a first-rate stonemason and he certainly hadn’t wanted contractors in to fix a wall, sea wall or otherwise. But Trencher was in charge of the premises and he had insisted.

  “Quiet in here at this time, mate,” said the spokesman. He had an angular, unshaven face and eyes that lacked any kind of warmth.

  Skellbow nodded. “Keep the noise down. Couple of staff, probably asleep by now.”

  They walked wordlessly down several echoing corridors until Skellbow opened a door to a narrow courtyard. Directly opposite them the high sea wall loomed like the threat of an avalanche. Moonlight picked out the curved line of its parapet and the stone steps that led steeply up to its wide, unprotected top.

  “I’ll be in the foyer,” said Skellbow, eager to be free of them.

  “It’ll take no time, mate. Wait for us there.”

  As the three men crossed the yard, Skellbow closed the door and returned through the building. Once back in the foyer, he slid a bolt across the main doors to keep anyone—or anything else—out.

  He waited, slumped against one of the stone columns beside the doors, cursing his fellow caretaker, Jordan Creech, whose shift this should have been. Still, he could get off to the pub in time for a pint, as soon as these three goons had gone. They were military men, typical of the types that the Central Authority in distant Londonborough was sending out more and more these days. Seemed the Authority wanted its own people to swell the ranks of the forces in the barracks here in Petra. Skellbow, like many of his fellows from the area, resented the influx into their southwestern province of Dumnonia.

  His morose thoughts were interrupted by a flickering of the candle that told him its life expectancy was fading. At the bottom of the key cupboard there was a box of fresh, fat candles. He took one out, lit it with the last of the existing one, and slid it into its holder. The exercise prompted him to consider, impatiently, Where the fuck are they? Shouldn’t take them this long to find their tools.

  Skellbow made his way back down the corridors, and as he approached the door to the courtyard, he saw movement through a window. Instinctively he ducked, though he was probably invisible from outside. What he saw made his breath catch in his throat.

  Two of the men were carrying something through another doorway into the courtyard—a door he’d locked earlier. It led to an internal stairway up to some offices and a private staff area. He knew he’d locked it because he’d been up there a short time ago, talking to Drew Vasillius, one of the teachers. Vasillius, one of the staff working late that night, had been happy for Skellbow to lock the lower door because he was going to bed down in the back room once he had finished his work.

  How in buggery did they get a key to that door? Skellbow asked himself, his whole body growing cold. The men were carrying some kind of large sack. Sack? Transfixed, the caretaker watched them manhandle it through the courtyard and up the first of the narrow steps ascending the fifty-foot-high sea wall.

  He had no choice but to respond. He moved to the door to his right, threw it open, and crossed the courtyard. The spokesman for the three contractors stepped out of the shadows at the foot of the steps to the sea wall, limned in a pale wash of moonlight. He looked like a spectre.

  “What the fuck is going on?” said Skellbow, conscious that he was shouting.

  “Nothing to worry about, mate. One of your colleagues is a bit under the weather.”

  “Who is it? Mr. Vasillius?”

  “He’s had a fainting fit.”

  Skellbow pulled up just short of the man, whose hands were in shadow. “That’s bollocks—”

  The man shook his head. He looked very alert, body tensed. “Overworking. Needed some air.”

  Skellbow looked upwards. The two others had got their burden onto the sea wall and now disappeared from sight. Skellbow was a biggish man, the nature of his work making him fitter than most men of his age, close on fifty, and he had never shirked a fight when he was younger. Instinct took over now, brushing away all his earlier fears—this was no supernatural threat he was facing—and he abruptly pushed the spokesman aside.

  Though he was taken unawares, he made a grab for Skellbow. Skellbow, deceptively nimble, escaped the contractor’s grip on his forearm and scaled the steps. It was a treacherous, awkward climb, but he clambered upwards with purpose. Behind him the contractor snarled an angry warning to the two men who were on top of the wall. Beyond its low parapet, which was no more than two feet high, was a drop of over a hundred feet to the churning sea below.

  In front of him, Skellbow saw the two other men. They were alone. There was no sign of what they had been carrying.

  “What’s happened?” he gasped, dragging in ragged breaths.

  “He went nuts!” said the first of them. “We were trying to help him. Get him some air. He just hit out at us. Started swearing. Next thing, he was up on the parapet.” The man pointed to it.

  His companion joined in. “Yeah. Lost his head, mate. Jumped off.”

  Skellbow, aghast, walked to the parapet and looked over its edge, but below the incessant crashing of waves and the explosive rise of spume obscured any sign of a body. No one could possibly have survived a plunge into that. Beneath that white maelstrom there were rocks, jagged and merciless. Vasillius would have been smashed to pieces.

  “Nothing we could do, mate.”

  Skellbow turned around. The spokesman had joined them on the wall. He and his two fellow contractors were staring pointedly at the caretaker, and they shifted with practiced ease into a formation that penned him in, up against the parapet. God, are they going to fling me off, too?

  “Why would he do it?” said Skellbow. He was too afraid now to ask them about the sack.

  “Stressed out.” The spokesman’s right hand moved into a shaft of moonlight and Skellbow saw with rising horror that it held a long bladed knife. The caretaker’s shoulders tensed, his fists balling.

  “You’d better go down and give the alarm, Mr. Skellbow. Let people know what’s happened. But get it right, you hear me?” The knife swung slowly up, its point levelled at Skellbow’s chest.

  “Suicide,” he breathed.

  “In a minute, the three of us will be gone. We were never up here. We just picked up our tools down below and were out in a couple of seconds. Okay?”

  Skellbow said nothing. His skin crawled as though something in the darkness was uncoiling, only inches away from touching him, polluting him.

  The spokesman delicately touched the edge of his blade. “You’re a family man, Mr. Skellbow. You’ve a fine wife, Myra, right?”

  Skellbow felt his gorge rising. “What do you mean?”

  “Young son, doing well here at the Academy. Davie, is it? Yeah, Davie.”

  “You leave them out of it!” Skellbow hissed.

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Skellbow. Barry. But I need to hear you say what I want you to say. We came, picked up our tools, and left. Then, when you came out here to lock up, you saw Vasillius fling himself off the wall. You agree that you’ll stick to that no matter who asks you what and we won’t need to pay a visit to Myra and Davie, when you’re not around.”

  Skellbow felt something briefly touch his arm, but his eyes remained fixed on the knife.

  “Shit, why don’t we just heave him over?” said one of the other men.

  The spokesman scowled. “No, no. We’ve done our job. No need to queer the pitch by dumping Mr. Skellbow. That right, Barry?”

  Reluctantly the caretaker grunted his assent.

  “Good. We’re going now. Lock up after us and then raise the alarm.”

  Skellbow’s resistance drained. He could hardly move. The spokesman waved his two companions along the wall and they descended the steps as quickly as the incline would allow.

  “Now you,” the spokesman said to Skellbow, pointing to the stone steps with hi
s knife. The caretaker managed to find the will to move and went down after the others.

  A few minutes later they were back in the foyer. Skellbow unlocked the main doors and two of the men slipped outside. Their spokesman turned for a last word.

  “Do the sensible thing, Barry. By the morning, we three will be long gone on the road back to the city. No one will know you’re not telling the truth.”

  “What about the wall, your work?”

  “All finished earlier today. And we put a little something into the stones. This place is marked now, Barry.”

  Skellbow hardly moved, his teeth clamped, holding back the fury within him. Marked? What does he mean by that? Marked for who—or what?

  “If I find out you’ve let me down, someone will be back. And I promise you, it will be very bad, Barry.” Something evil in the spokesman’s eyes reinforced the threat.

  “Okay, okay. Just leave my family alone.”

  Beyond the door, a sudden gust of wind swept across the playground and the spokesman cocked an ear as if listening to it. “Hear that, Barry? Keep your ears and eyes open. Every breath of wind, every bird that flies by, every wave that breaks on the wall, you can be sure that we’ll be watching, listening.”

  Skellbow shuddered. God alone knew what agents these men could call upon. “I hear you.”

  The spokesman gave a curt nod, as if he had just concluded a routine business transaction, and he was gone, swift as thought.

  Skellbow shut the door, locked it, and bolted it. He made his way quickly along the ground level corridors, back into the courtyard, and crossed to the doorway that led to the stairs to Drew Vasillius’s office. He quickly ascended the tower’s winding staircase, only to find Vasillius’s office empty, with nothing indicating there had been a struggle. It struck him as strange, given what he had seen. The room was tidy, papers put away, the chair tucked under the desk. As though Vasillius had put things in order before leaving. Skellbow left the room, closing the door behind him.