The Rig

by Roger Levy

‘I said she’s alive. She’s alive. Don’t make threats, you aren’t in that position.’ Ligate nodded to Garrel, who glanced at the screen before saying, ‘Pellonhorc’s locked in the flycykle outside.’

  ‘Then let’s speak to him,’ Ligate said.

  Garrel pulled the flycykle’s comms device slowly from his pocket. He was watched closely by Ligate’s other men, as if Drame might not have grasped that Garrel had to be the spy. Maybe Drame hadn’t, though. Ligate clumsily snatched the device from Garrel and tossed it towards me. It fell to the floor and I picked it up.

  ‘You talk to him, boy,’ Ligate said.

  I put the unit to my mouth and said, observing that my voice was shaking, ‘Pellonhorc?’

  He answered instantly. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re talking to your father, on the screen, like before. He wants to know you’re okay.’

  Pellonhorc’s voice cracked. ‘Alef? What about my mother?’

  ‘Quickly, boy,’ Ligate said, slurring the words. ‘Tell him to confirm he’s okay. Nothing else.’

  I held the device tight, the controls pricking my palm. As clearly as I could, I said, ‘Communication’s open just for a moment. You have to tell him you’re okay. Do you understand? It’ll close again in a moment.’ I squeezed the device, keeping the words as steady as I could. ‘It’s open now. You only have a moment before I have to close it. Do you understand me? You have to confirm what I’m telling you.’

  There was silence, and I couldn’t tell if he’d understood. But then he said, firmly, ‘Yes. I understand, Alef. I’m okay.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Ligate gestured at me. ‘Close it.’ I flicked the device closed and tossed it to him. He didn’t attempt to catch it, and it bounced from his arm to the ground. He lifted a foot, nearly losing his balance as he did so, and stepped hard on the unit, shattering it.

  ‘Alef,’ my father murmured. He raised his head. I could see the effort it cost him.

  ‘You realise that if I say yes, Ligate,’ Drame said, a new sharpness in his voice, ‘Saul will never believe I mean it. You’ll never be able to trust him. He isn’t like you and me. I didn’t put him there on Gehenna. It’s where he wants to be. Put him anywhere else, he’ll be lost to me and no use to you. You know that.’ His voice dropped. ‘And one day, Ligate, I will reach you.’

  Ligate only smiled.

  My father was staring at me. He was hardly able to hold his head up. He said, ‘Alef, I –’ and I looked away.

  I looked away.

  My throat catches even to think of it, that I took away from him his last chance to speak to me, and at the same time I rejected my last opportunity to listen to him.

  So, I looked away from my father for the last time. I looked instead at Drame, who was still talking.

  ‘… And if I say no to you, you’ll kill them all.’ On the screen, Drame’s face hardened. ‘But if you do that, Ligate, there will be nothing to stop me.’ He said, slowly, ‘It is no choice. Do you understand? Do you fully understand the consequences of this, Ligate? I will have nothing left.’

  Then, suddenly and for the first time, Drame’s voice faltered and all expression in his face emptied away. At last he had seen what I had seen and my father had seen. This, for Ligate, had not at any stage been a negotiation. It was all intended to end here, for Drame to watch them all die. Ligate only wanted to see hope swell and fail in Drame’s eyes.

  Drame sat straight again, though it was clear that he was having to exert great effort to speak at all. His voice was thin. ‘I will come after you, Ligate,’ he said. He swallowed and added, ‘I will reach you.’

  Ligate shrugged. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if exhausted. ‘I already have nothing left, Ethan. This is all that matters to me now. Do you see what you have done, finally? We could have lived alongside each other, but you ended that. When you killed my family, you ended everything. Are you watching? Everything…’

  Nine

  RAZER

  ‘Just do your work,’ Razer told herself, but all she could think of was TEN PEOPLE AND ONE PAX OFFICER BELIEVED DEAD.

  She knew it was going to be Bale. She wasn’t going to check the updates, though. Not until the story was done. She started writing.

  ‘Tell me about the Chute,’ I asked Bale in our aftersex. My head was resting comfortably in the crook of his elbow. His bed was little more than a cot, and Bale [need to change name, something active, sense of menace. Risc?] took up most of it, but it didn’t matter to me.

  ‘It was discovered by accident. Imagine an immense underground cave system, like a natural burrowmite warren, only this has been scoured out by the wind. Five hundred kils of tunnels splitting and relinking, winding and doubling back, narrowing and widening. Imagine the wind in it like water in endless flood, only this is Bleak’s wind and it’s like a whirlwind forced through a drinking straw.

  ‘It was used for research at first,’ he said. ‘Lookout was its dormitory. This was before they discovered core here. But the Chute came first.’

  I was surprised at how he lit up as he said it, this man of such fierce mood, but he did. The blue in his eyes could seem electric. There was nothing concealed in him, and maybe that was what I had fallen for, here on the planet Bleak. Over the clock years and light years of these journals, as I’ve roamed the System and met humanity in all its masks, I’ve had more adventure and found deeper passion, but Bale touched me as few others had. Bale was a rare find; a good man.

  He said, ‘They used it as a testbed, on the principle of a wind tunnel. Everything you see here on Bleak was tested in the Chute. If it couldn’t survive the Chute, it couldn’t survive Bleak.’

  I said, ‘But most of Bleak’s under shield, isn’t it?’

  ‘The rigs aren’t. Thrummers aren’t. There’s fixed stuff, too, outside the shield. All the environment monitors, shuttles, tracks –’

  Outside his room, the day was mostly gone, purple evening light filtering through the window. I fell back in the sheets. Two weeks we’d been together now, and I was still happy to be with him, to talk or to be quiet. Simply to look at him. Bale was special. [His name – Stele? Possible. Steal my heart. And steel, a hint of crimer too. Definitely possible.] Bleak suited him and it didn’t, at the same time. He was fiery and flawed, a soul adrift.

  And at this moment he was a man with a child’s light in his eyes, telling me of the games he played. ‘So they dropped stuff into the Chute, watched how far it got before it was ripped apart. They redesigned, remade, watched it get ripped apart again, but each time it lasted a few seconds longer. Vehicles, buildings, bits of rig – the Chute took anything. Even deepspace ships got impact-tested here. If there was a fault, the Chute’d rip a billion-dolor hull to nanoshreds in zero point no-time.’

  His enthusiasm was endless. How like a small boy he always was in our aftersex, a boy who’d done something forbidden and not been caught. His bedroom was not a boy’s, though. It was clean and lifeless. Metal furniture, wallscreenery facing the small bed. The only untidiness – the only personality – was the clot of our clothes on the floor.

  I stroked the hair of his arm as he said, ‘The channels aren’t uniform but the wind is, so there’s fast and slow curves, high and low g-grades, and there’s debris and…’ He sighed almost mournfully. ‘I can’t explain.’

  It wasn’t that he lacked the words. He just wanted to say it all at once. As if I knew nothing. He had no idea what I had seen, where I had been, though I’d made no secret of it, as I never do. You can’t tell the stories of women and men on the edge unless you live there with them for a while. You learn to fix and to fight, to shoot and to pilot almost anything. And I had learnt it all.

  I’d thought his ignorance of me strange at first, but then I realised why Bale hadn’t sought me out on the Song. It wasn’t out of any lack of interest in me, but because his Pax life was full enough of searching and checking. With me, it was enough for him simply to be. The ignorance was born of trust.

&n
bsp; I twined my fingers in his and asked him, ‘Why don’t the Chute’s walls get shredded?’

  ‘They do. It’s like a river eroding its banks.’

  ‘And you deliberately drop yourself into this?’

  ‘People who work on Bleak, they’re of a type,’ he said.

  I smiled at him and said, ‘I’ve noticed that. But who was first to think of it as a ride? Or did someone fall in and survive? That’s usually the way with these freak discoveries.’

  He reached across me to take a drink from the glass by the bed. I enjoyed the press of his weight, the added gravity. ‘Not this time,’ he said. ‘Someone was curious, designed some sort of a suit and jumped in. Just one man on a whim.’

  He offered me the glass. The visky tasted of him. We’d finished half the bottle before stumbling, undressing, towards the bed, and now a swirl of gritty lees was all that remained to be finished. Licking the roughness from my lips, I said, ‘What happened to the first man?’

  ‘He lasted fifty metres. The next man lasted longer, and it was about a year before someone looped the circuit and climbed out half alive. After that, it was just technique and bringing down the record. Sport. You’ve seen the exos we wear? They’re unique to the Chute.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. What do you need from them?’

  ‘You’re flying, so it’s protection plus clips and cutters, fins and lines. They all modify your speed and trajectory some way or another. Some flyers carry streamers. Some flyers like to go soft, some hard.’

  I reached and put my hand between his legs, wanting him again. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Not like that.’ He grinned at me.

  She stopped writing. It hadn’t been a grin on his face. By then, the sex had gone wrong between them. But she left the words there. This was part of why she wrote, so that the story she wove around the truth could take root. The present might last a moment, but its memory, well-prepared, could remain a comfort. Razer was a master of such adjustment.

  Yes, she was being good to Bale, and she was being good for her readers, but it was only important, in the end, to be good to herself. To create a good past from a harsh present.

  She carried on writing, trying not to think of him dead.

  Afterwards, when his breath was running even again, he continued our conversation as if nothing had interrupted it. ‘Soft means you fly safe and central, with less risk. Hard means you take a bit more control. Are you getting all this?’

  ‘Fins, I think I can guess,’ I told him. ‘And streamers, maybe. The rest, no. Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘They can’t be told. Not by me, anyway.’ He leaned back and looked at me. His hair was tousled and I brushed it away from his eyes. The blue of them had paled, and I remembered a sky that colour above Vegaschrist, the black-haired girl at my side laughing as her yellow kite disappeared into the blue. [link here]

  ‘Tell me something else, then,’ I said.

  I wondered how much I really knew of Bale. Of the stories he wore on his body. Of the small scars that were a pitted constellation on his right cheek, of the shadowed hub of a collarbone healed without care. Yes, I knew those stories, and I knew what they told of him. But otherwise, what did I know?

  He said, ‘Okay. Here’s one for you. You ever heard the word darkspeed?’

  I thought a moment. Darkspeed was the name of a ship I’d once been on. It was drug jargon on some planets too, darkspeed an imprecise memory bleach. The clumsier kidnappers veined their victims with it before returning them amnesiac. Not just amnesiac, though. Families discovered they’d paid for the return of twenty-year-old mewling infants. I had used the idea once [link here], following a long day on Further talking to a woman whose gaze never settled and never would again.

  I was sure Bale didn’t mean this, though. There were several other usages of the word, all of them less intriguing. Darkspeed was an interesting word, but it was an obvious enough reverse-construction out of lightspeed, a term just looking for a use. It was always the usage that interested me more.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’ve never heard it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s a fuckdrug too, but not here on Bleak. Listen.’

  He moved slightly and I could feel the acceleration of his heart. He brushed the heel of a hand across his overnight stubble and said, ‘You go fast down the Chute, the g-grades rise, so you get heavy.’ It was always action that excited him. The talk of it and the thought of it were enough. And that was what we had between us, this adrenaline-soaked talk and restlessness, and that was why it couldn’t last. It was a constant moving forward that was simply a prelude to moving on.

  He said, ‘This isn’t the even compression that rocketeers get, though. Straight rocket suits won’t do for this. If you want to manoeuvre at Chute-speed, you have to wear a special exo. This suit needs as much g-damping as it can get, but you’re not sitting in a cabin here. Efficient damping like in a rocket suit wouldn’t be any use. You ever worn one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s like wearing a pair of mattresses front and back.’ He caught himself and stared at me and said, ‘You’ve worn one?’

  I smiled at his astonishment. ‘I’ve done lots of things, Bale. Some of them even real.’ How much of me he didn’t know. Lost souls both of us, brief companions in the dark, dark night.

  ‘If it ain’t real, it ain’t real,’ he said, then paused and added, ‘You’re always a surprise, Kes, you know that?’

  It was almost as if Bale had said he loved me. Just close enough and no more. Just right. This man.

  He chewed on the dregs of the visky, the grit cracking in his teeth, then went on. ‘Okay, you get the idea. You need fins to bring your lines tight, but fins also cut your speed. Clips, cutters, streamers, all the rest, they give you a bit of refinement, take away some of the raw. You also need good visor screenery to read the Chute upwind and check the laterals, but most flyers think that’s cheating, they only like to use available signs –’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’ He grinned. ‘I use what’s available. I got no shame. If tech’s available, yes, I’ll take it.’ He raised the glass and held it up to the window, squinting at the pale late afternoon light lensing through it.

  ‘You were telling me about darkspeed,’ I reminded him.

  ‘I was getting there. What I was trying to say, it’s all a trade-off. Speed and control. Like being alive and staying alive. The one’s speed, the other’s control.’

  I noted that for later. I hadn’t heard it before. He’d made a little frown before saying it, and I was certain it was a phrase all his own. Yes, Bale was special.

  ‘At some stage, the point comes when the suit can’t carry the gs. Usually you don’t quite black out, because, like I said, the gs are uneven. You blubber and cramp, but you can take that, so you go faster. Now…’ His blue eyes were glittering. ‘Faster still. Going into a curve, you’re blurring and losing peripheral focus, but as you straighten and lock steady, your head comes back again, sharp and clear.’

  He closed his eyes and then opened them, and I could see he was on the brink of tearing up. ‘It feels better than ever. Your focus is incredibly clean. This is the edge.’ He emphasised it, repeating it so I would know it was something important.

  ‘The edge,’ I said back to him, almost as hooked by now as he was. My heart was thumping. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Right.’ He pushed me off him and sat up straight, and I could see that this man was somewhere else altogether, somewhere alone.

  Dreamily, as if suddenly hit by the visky, he said, ‘You’re fine but going even faster now, and here comes another curve.’ He swayed slightly. ‘Your fins are perfect, the cut’s perfect, you hear the Chute around you and you’re part of it. You watch yourself making exact and infinitesimal adjustments. This is perfect. You cannot imagine it being otherwise. Nothing else exists but you and the Chute and the sweet, beautiful curve approaching. And you have a choice to make.’

  He stoppe
d and sat back, slightly flushed.

  ‘And?’ My heart was pounding.

  ‘Your choice is this. You can take a shallow line, taking slightly lower gs at this speed, coming back from the edge, or –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Or you can go midline and try to hold it, to stay on the edge –’

  He blinked, the tiny movement making me catch my breath.

  ‘Or else you can force it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, far too sharply. It was just a story, after all. I folded myself back into the warmth of him, trembling, waiting for him to continue. Bale always said he wasn’t interested in stories, but he was a born teller.

  ‘You decide to force it because out of the curve there’s half a second of straight and wide and that’s long enough to recover.’ He was leaning to the side and I was leaning into him, the sheets caught around us and taut. ‘You go tight into the curve and immediately you’re halfway down the straight at the far side.’

  He suddenly held me. It felt like he had caught me in a fall. I gasped.

  ‘You understand, Kes? There was no sensory pause. It was just a seamless that/this. Done. You lock and carry on.’ He looked straight at me and said, ‘You see? The curve never happened, it was so fast.’

  I tried to collect myself. ‘But it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been.’

  ‘Of course. Yes. What really happened, you blacked out into the curve and recovered the other side of it. And that’s darkspeed. You hit darkspeed.’

  ‘Risky,’ I said. My mouth was dry.

  ‘Yes. Another term usually goes with it: You fell into a black hole.’

  ‘Dead. I can guess that one.’

  He said, ‘Flyers say no one ever really sees the edge because no one ever stays there. They come back or they go over.’

  ‘How many times have you gone over, Bale?’

  He looked at me slyly. ‘What edge are we talking about?’

  I laughed at him. ‘Every one of them, Bale. Every edge you’ve ever seen, you’ve jumped, haven’t you?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’ He paused, then he said, ‘What about you, Kes?’