The Ascendant Stars

by Cobley, Michael

  From behind came a multiple clunk followed by a hydraulic hiss. Robert laughed as he watched the stern hatch open downwards.

  ‘Ah, that anti-security briefing came in handy after all! Right, Kao Chih, let us get our passengers aboard.’

  Together, they carried the unconscious ones up the ramp and sat them in square-cornered, unpadded couches clearly meant for the impervious Shyntanil physique. The craft’s interior was stark and basic – there were thirty-two of those hard seats in two rows of eight-facing-eight, equipment racks between the bare hull struts, and a pilot console that seemed rudimentary. Once everyone was seated, with some help from the recovered crew members, Robert went forward to sit at the pilot instruments.

  ‘I’m going to move us out into the bay,’ he said, punching controls. ‘Then I’ll leave this idling while I go back out to open the launch shaft and the outer hull doors. And attend to a little surprise for our hosts.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kao Chih said uncertainly.

  Robert flicked several switches and with a sharpening hum the assault craft rose off the deck, wobbling slightly. Kao Chih, standing near the open hatch, held on to a strut as the craft glided out of the berth then settled onto its landing legs. Robert stood and hurried back to join Kao Chih.

  ‘Did you know that a cryptship’s interceptors are piloted by the truncated head, spine and nervous system of Shyntanil warriors, piped and merged into the craft’s systems? The command overseers can set the interceptors’ initial combat posture centrally or via small panels next to the craft conduits. Virtues of a top-down hierarchy, the need to ensure that units will act in perfect unison. Well, I intend to turn that to our advantage and concoct a little diversion by making them attack the Suneye ship.’ Then he was striding down the ramp and round out of sight.

  Kao Chih agonised for a moment then went forward to look out of the cockpit viewport. He could see Robert walk over to one of the panels he mentioned and tap in several key combinations, one after another, until a blue light came on. More key taps, and blue pinpoints winked on next to the other eleven doors. After another sequence of key presses Robert straightened, stepped back a little and stabbed a single button.

  At once a raucous alarm began to sound. At the same time there were waves of a thunderous rushing sound as one by one the blue pinpoints turned red. Meanwhile Robert had dashed across to another control panel on a pillar between two of the open berths. Watching once more from the rear hatch, Kao Chih saw the older man punch in more sequences until he found the right one. The entire midsection of the bay hinged down, revealing an inclined launch shaft. Kao Chih saw this, his mouth set with grim resolution. When Robert reached the foot of the assault craft’s ramp, he raised the Shyntanil handweapon and aimed it at the older man’s head. Robert stopped dead, a look of amused surprise on his face.

  ‘I don’t know what you are,’ Kao Chih said, ‘but I know that you’re not Human. You look to be about seventy years old, but you seem fitter and stronger than I am.’

  ‘Kao Chih, about a dozen heavily armed Shyntanil troopers will be coming through the upper balcony doors in a few seconds.’

  ‘What are you? Who are you working for?’

  Robert rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, you are correct – I am in fact a semiorganic simulacrum, an android, and I take my orders from the Construct.’

  Kao Chih laughed out loud. ‘Excuse me, but I believe I’ve heard this one before … ’

  There were thuds and shouts from a walkway that Kao Chih hadn’t noticed before, running right across the upper sections of the craft berths. Badly aimed energy bolts sparked off the deck and flared against the ramp. Robert glanced over one shoulder then leaped up at Kao Chih, wrenched the weapon from his hand, thumbed something on its side and fired off a volley of bolts just as two Shyntanil came charging into view.

  Almost in the same motion he slapped the hatch controls with his other hand. As the ramp rose up to seal the craft, Robert headed for the pilot console, scarcely pausing to toss the gun into Kao Chih’s hands.

  ‘Even Shyntanil weapons have safety catches,’ he said, sitting at the controls. ‘You can now shoot me if you like but it might distract me from flying us out of here!’

  Kao Chih, racked with shame, said nothing as he slumped into one of the hard seats.

  The deck tilted as the assault craft rose, swung round amid a storm of weaponsfire, and moved down the angled launch shaft. Thrusters ignited as the open hull doors loomed and the craft shot out from beneath the Shyntanil cryptship. Robert gave a satisfied nod as he scanned the instruments.

  ‘Just as I hoped, those dozen interceptors are still trying to engage the Suneye vessel. Both ships have lost control of the asteroid as well so it should take them a while to clear up the mess. Enough for us to fire up the hyperdrive and transtier our way to the Roug system … ’ He paused. ‘And warn them what’s on the way – which just happened to be my orders.’

  ‘I see … I see that I have been unduly suspicious. My apologies

  Just then, one of the rescued crewmen waved a hand in the air, face looking as if he had just woken up. ‘Can somebody please tell me what the hell’s going on?’

  Robert grinned and made a gesture inviting Kao Chih to fill the fellow in on current events. Kao Chih sighed, nodded, then moved over and began to explain.

  JULIA

  The datasphere of Earth was a multilayered phantasmagoria of wildly exotic, near-endless delights. It was also a pitiless sinkhole of corrosive depravity, ultracommercial illusions and callous delusions, all cunningly crafted. And it was an intertwining system of security webs and counter-intrusion nodes, a maze of peril where the promise of deletion was everywhere.

  And running through it was the Glow, a virtual playground for Humanity’s Earthbound 10.9 billion, plus the population of the moon, Mars, the Jovian satellites and the nomadic mining habs, which added another billion. Arenas, theatres, battlefields, art installations, historical subworlds, stocks and speculation crucibles, sensuality extravaganzas, word-by-word political drama, sport of every kind, wildlife of every kind, refinements of every kind, fripperies and trivia of every conceivable shade of irrelevance, and all available in a deluge of unrestrained abundance.

  From the moment they arrived at the edge of the datasphere, in the auxiliary buffer of a mothballed weathersat orbiting Mars, Harry warned her to keep her wits about her.

  ‘I’ve already sent a coded message to Reski Emantes,’ he said. ‘He maintains a private network for Glowless transactions, very secure and very safe, but it cannot be accessed at a distance. Therefore we have to transvector ourselves through the data-sphere to a datanode close enough to gain access. In the meantime you should have this.’

  He handed her a small brassy ornament of a boy sitting on a rock and holding an archaic spyglass to one eye. Frowning, she studied it.

  ‘A sensory org?’ she said.

  ‘Something like that,’ Harry said. ‘It’s a mirager – it reads dataflows and watches for the presence of nullors, which are tracker-catchers or karcers, which are hunter-killers. Then it puts up a protective shell of fake info and idents merge-adapted to the immediate vicinity.’

  Nodding, she considered their surroundings. They were standing in a long corridor whose ceiling was open to an immense cylindrical space criss-crossed by dataflows, some like chains of pulses, others like tightly woven braids, and a few bright as molten steel. Stretching up, a distance haze made the higher flows pale, almost insubstantial.

  ‘It sounds as if you’re expecting trouble,’ she said. ‘Should I be worried?’

  He smiled. ‘Anxious, perhaps, not worried.’

  ‘How does that affect the exters? Will our appearances change?’

  ‘No – we’ll continue to appear as we do between us while the miragers keep us blended with the surroundings.’ Harry made a wiggly gesture with his hand. ‘Ready to leave, Ms Bryce?’

  Wordlessly she nodded, inwardly marvelling at her composure as Harry said, ‘Compr
ession one … ’

  The long corridor and the cylindrical sky of criss-cross dataflows froze, cracked and swirled down into dark nothingness …

  … and swirled up and remade itself in lush forest colours, which was appropriate since they seemed to have been dearchived into a strange zone of glittering, glowing trees. Huge towering trees whose branches sprouted blooms that received curving lines of sparkling data from the massive helix that spiralled past overhead.

  ‘The public multi-discipline precinct at Copernicus University on Luna,’ said Harry, who then pointed. ‘There, a trio of nullors.’

  They looked like ruby caltrops scribing unfathomable trajectories above and among the stylised trees, spinning as they did so. Suddenly a mesh of faint lines sprang up around Julia and Harry.

  ‘That’s the miragers at work,’ he said. ‘We’ve just become a mixed-media doctorate dissertation on interspecies cultural influences, complete with pseudo-AI response analyser.’ Harry chuckled. ‘Our next waypoint is a Glowatchers club on Plunder-world, one of Earth’s pleasure orbitals – its owner runs a black server on which I have an account.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  From conscious awareness to compressed data then through the transvector to decompress back to conscious awareness. And found herself standing on a wide circular platform surrounded by a pearly grey radiance. She was alone, but she still had the trench-coat image. Feeling the stirrings of anxiety, Julia walked over to the edge and caught sight of a few other similar platforms lower down, all resting on thin stalks. Far below lay multicoloured clusters of light, citylike but not a city.

  ‘Harry?’ she said out loud. ‘Are you there? Can you hear me?’

  There was no reply.

  Have I been deceived? she wondered. Played like a fool?

  A thin beam of light came on, trained on her from above. Immediately her left palm began to itch and when she opened her hand a voice in her ear said, ‘Alert from Mirager v3.7 – exterior scan in progress, please choose profile mask from list or close fist to activate default.’

  On her glowing palm were four choices: a Mandarin–Piraseri B dictionary and tutor; the complete works of Hieronymus Beethoven, audio, video, Glowmo and Kabukisoft; full plans of Earthsphere Phantom-class heavy interceptor, encryption level cognitive; or interactive Gomedran funeral ceremony, Family Kyzec of the Clan Amarg (default). She quickly chose the second and a fine, flexing web appeared around her. The thin beam of light began to pulse, slowly at first then faster and faster, giving the platform a strobe-lit appearance.

  Without warning the platform turned into a tube down which she plummeted. There were several abrupt changes in direction, signified by the way the flickering blur flowed. It ended when she came to a sudden halt in a huge dark hall whose only source of light was the log fire blazing in a wide and ornate hearth. There was a large, low table covered in a half-assembled jigsaw and two high-backed easy chairs. In one sat Harry, who smiled and gave an ironic wave.

  ‘Sorry about that … unexpected diversion,’ he said, gesturing her towards the other chair. ‘There was a temporary security filter engaged when we arrived – it let me through but you were flagged and shunted into an isolation lobby prior to scrutiny. As soon as the data-holding subsystem posted up the Gomedran funeral ceremony I had you transferred.’

  ‘Why was I filtered out?’ she said. ‘And where are we?’

  ‘Well, a fractalised sentience like you occupies a lot of file space and it was that sheer size which tipped them off.’ He glanced around him. ‘And this place is part of the memblock that comes with my account, dressed up to suit my antiquated fancy.’

  Julia settled into the chair, picking up vague sensations of comfort as well as a pseudo-warmth from the fire.

  ‘Delays put me on edge,’ she said. ‘I hate being late for anything.’

  ‘Well, I’ve had the security filter switched to low priority so now would be a good time to be on our way.’

  ‘What’s the next step?’

  ‘Down to Earth, a domestic droid repair facility in Delhi,’ Harry said. ‘The facility AI runs a clandestine transit network for one of the techtriads, strictly a business arrangement.’

  ‘Which the facility owner knows nothing about.’

  ‘Sometimes criminality is in the eye of the beholder, Ms Bryce.’

  ‘Then let us be sure to evade such eyes,’ she said. ‘Do we have to go to another location to transvector out?’

  ‘Remain seated – I can initiate the process quite easily from here.’

  Again, her awareness was compacted and spiralled through the transvector bottleneck, then unwound into new surroundings that flickered into existence all around them. Only they seemed to have arrived on an expanse of empty grey tiles while some distance away a datatropolis of neon towers and spindles sprawled across their field of vision, matched by a similar towerscape that covered the ceiling directly overhead. That one, however, had no grey expanse and when she looked back down Julia saw a flock of red caltrops, nullors, settle on a blue tower, all glowing and glossy. It only took a few seconds for webs of cracks to spread over every surface and less than a minute later the tower fell apart in grey blocks and slabs that bounced and faded, leaving more grey tiling and a jumble of pale shapes which the nullors then pored over and sorted through.

  ‘Perhaps we should think about exiting the area,’ she said.

  Harry was staring intently at his glowing palm.

  ‘Not an option, I’m afraid. All access to the repair facility system has been locked down. It’s a netlaw sweep and purge – I don’t know if I can even grapple us to another part of the system … uh-oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve just been spotted by a netlaw unit, damn. But our miragers have just turned us into an archive of genome maps of the entire Kiskashin genus … ’

  The unit came into view, a spinning white toroid. As it hovered a short way off, it emitted needles of amber light that flickered and probed Julia and Harry’s shared illusion. Then a machine voice said:

  ‘Composite object in subsector A31 displays irregularities. Shall convey to Local Holding 72 for scrutiny.’

  The amber beams disappeared, an opaque red box snapped into place around them and suddenly they were shooting away on another blurred succession of sharp turns. When she glanced at Harry he seemed quite relaxed and unconcerned, at least outwardly.

  ‘I hope you have a plan,’ she said.

  He gave her a sly glance. ‘As a matter of fact, I do. Just watch.’

  Seconds later their headlong plunge changed in an eyeblink to a slow forward glide along a silver-grey corridor. A flickery blue veil appeared before them and as they passed through it a tenuous image of themselves appeared behind them, almost as if they were leaving behind a ghost. Harry laughed out loud, just as they accelerated away again. This time their dizzying hurtle ended with a plunge into total blackness. Julia spoke but heard nothing, not her voice, nor a sound of any kind.

  Then the blackout flowed away like angular shadows being sucked into a plughole. She and Harry were standing at the top of stone steps leading down to a laboratory set in what looked like a castle vault. Flagstones, masonry block walls, rough archways, iron wall lamps, workbenches cluttered with archaic paraphernalia, spark-gap equipment, elaborate arrays of glassware with gas burners heating bulbous bowls while various spouts discharged droplets into beakers.

  ‘Finally,’ said a querulous voice. ‘Thought you’d never get here.’

  What looked like a brain in a bottle drifted in on a squat a-grav platform fringed with a variety of work arms, jointed and tentacular. It approached a circular table full of bulky objects concealed by a grubby sheet which was lifted, wrapped in a ball and volleyed into a corner. Revealed were several ceiling-mounted displays and several pieces of mystery apparatus.

  ‘My thanks for extracting us from a fate worse than corruption,’ said Harry. ‘Oh, and Julia, this is Reski Emantes, a somewhat idiosyncratic
AI – Reski, this is Julia Bryce … ’

  Their host turned towards her, altered its appearance to that of a flattened glassy sphere and floated over.

  ‘Are you the Julia Bryce from the Darien colony world?’ Clusters of multicoloured pinpoints glowed in patterns within as it spoke. ‘You were the product of a genetic-engineering programme, and escaped Darien in the company of others like you – is that correct?’

  ‘These details are generally factual, yes,’ she said as they descended the stone steps.

  ‘My superior, the Construct, has had its loyalists searching for you for several objective days,’ Reski Emantes said. ‘Yet you are here as a fractalised sentience. Does this mean that your physical form is dead? Were you murdered?’

  ‘Her story is an involved one,’ Harry said. ‘But before that, tell me what happened back at that droid repair shop. And just how did you get in and out with us?’

  Patterns raced in the floating glass drone, soft glows and sharp glitters.

  ‘Someone traced the coded message you sent to me,’ it said. ‘And someone else tracked you from Copernicus University. I think both were sniffers reporting to someone who sprang that netlaw operation while you were on your way. At the same time I was the target of a pincer hit – my online presence was dismembered by a reaper hack while my real-world counterpart was destroyed by a sniper using T9 rounds.’

  Harry raised an eyebrow. ‘Tetranine is highly prohibited on metropolitan worlds like Earth.’

  ‘Indeed. The sniper fired three rounds, wrecked half of the building my counterpart was in and killed at least thirty-nine others. Casualty reports keep bumping that number upwards.’

  ‘Which brings us to you,’ Harry said.

  ‘I always maintain an updated partial copy,’ the drone said. ‘I had enough time to activate it then escape-hatch out to my secure bunker here on board the good airship Cloudtrekker. From here I traced your activities, hacked into the local netlaw system, snatched you to containment on the regional netlaw server then had you vectored to my ever-so-humble abode.’