“I will decide what is a matter of command and control,” growled Siddiq. The memebomb card virus felt like lead in her right hand. She should have put it away. She couldn’t fight with this thing in her grip.
And Father Goulo would be here soon.
“Raisa,” Cannon said. Michaela said.
For a moment, Siddiq walked beneath pale-green poplars. The air smelled of a strange mix of honey and benzene, the odd biochemistry of that place. Michaela’s hand was in hers. They’d talked all night about how this could never be, Michaela complaining of her de-sexing and how her libido was unmoored from the needs of the body. Raisa had still been young then, the Howard Institute papers signed but not yet executed, still a woman, in love with another woman who stirred fire in her head and a burning desire in her loins, in love with the promise of time, endless time, and all that they could do together as partners down the long, endless years that lay before her. Her hand closed on her partner’s, her love’s, the woman who haunted her dreams and set her bedsheets aflame, the woman who was a small, hard rectangle…
She slid back into situational awareness as Cannon’s handstrike approached her neck. No human commanded seconds-subjective like a Before, and no Before commanded seconds-subjective like Raisa Siddiq. She slid under the strike, hardening her skin once more, allowing the edge of Cannon’s palm to graze her face, stealing energy across the dermal barrier in a theft that would sting the other woman like a high-voltage strike in a few dozen milliseconds and leave her hand useless for a critical span longer.
Cannon, slower but craftier in her way, lifted out of the contact so that the spark shorted. Ozone crackled as Kallus stepped so slowly back and began the agonizing progress of drawing his shock pistol.
Siddiq spun on her left heel, the deck shredding away under the pressure of her movement, to bring her right foot and offhand up for a follow-on strike. Then she remembered the memebomb virus card.
She aborted, her balance slipping as her foot dropped. Cannon stepped in, grasped her close, too close, and slammed them together in a tooth-cracking impact that opened to a kiss.
ABOARD POLYPHEMUS
Michaela gathered Raisa in her arms. Centuries fell away at the familiar scent, ghosts of long-vanished pheromones stirring. They kissed.
Somewhere close by, a starship screamed.
Somewhere close by, a man of divided loyalties struggled to bring a weapon to bear against a fight in which he had no part.
Somewhere very far away, a girl, long-lost to the fugue of years, returned to her body for a moment, surprised at its age and iron skin and the hideous decay in the face of the woman she loved.
Somewhere inside her own head, a woman looked into the eyes of a girl she’d once loved and recalled the existence of a betrayal so old she couldn’t remember why, or what had been worth giving this up.
Cannon slapped Siddiq. The girl within had for a moment forgotten thirteen hundred years of combat experience, and so the blow broke her neck.
Kallus braced his shock pistol, face drawn tight as if he were nerving himself to fire.
“Oh, put it down,” said Cannon. She dropped Siddiq to the deck. The Captain landed hard, her neck at a strange angle, her eyes blinking. Cannon knelt and picked up a small, blank rectangle that had tumbled from the woman’s fist. “She threw the fight to protect this…”
“A data card?”
“Maybe…” Cannon handed it to him. “Go figure it out, right now, someplace safe. I’m guessing that card carries something very bad for Polyphemus’s health.”
“Captain Cannon,” the starship said, her voice echoing softly along the passageway. “An unknown ship is on a fast intercept course from the surface of Sidero. I am attempting to peel IFF data.”
“Whatever it is they think they’re doing, they’re missing an important piece.” She nudged Siddiq with her toe. “Lock down against the incoming. No landing clearance; hell, no response to comms transmissions. Have the pair-master teams go dark again, if they’ve lifted security. Everybody else inside the hull and button it up solid.” If the ship carried an antimatter bomb, they were dead anyway. Anything else could wait.
The Before Michaela Cannon bent to gather up the still-breathing body of her oldest lover. Raisa weighed almost nothing in her arms, as if the long years had subtracted substance from her instead of armoring both their hearts beyond all recognition.
“Where are you heading?” asked Kallus, the data card clutched in his hand.
“Sick bay.”
SHIPMIND, POLYPHEMUS
She watched the Captain—Captain Cannon—chase everyone out of sick bay. Even the wounded. Four of Kallus’s men showed up to guard the hatch while emergency surgery continued in the passageway outside. Inside, Cannon laid Siddiq into an operating pod and began digging through the combat medicine gear.
“Do you require assistance?” the starship asked.
“No.” She glanced around the room. “Yes. I don’t know, damn it, I’m not a surgeon.”
“What is your goal? I can summon a surgeon from outside to assist you.”
Cannon found a tray of vibrascalpels. “I’ve amputated more limbs than that fool has ever sewn back on. Nobody ever understands who we Befores are. In any case, Siddiq is too dangerous to continue as she was.” She looked up again, as if seeking to meet Polyphemus’s nonexistent eyes. The starship recognized this as significantly atavistic behavior. The odds of both Befores succumbing to temporal psychosis in the same moment were very slim, but certainly possible.
“I’m not going to let her die,” Cannon continued. “Too many of us have been lost. Too many memories. But I can’t let her live, either.” She added in Classical English, “So I’m going to fucking compromise.”
Polyphemus realized that the Before Michaela Cannon was crying.
The woman grabbed a set of lines, sorting through them. “Blood, plasm, thermals, neural interconnects.” She gave a bird-mad grin. “Just like open-heart surgery. No modern hospital would have this crap—too crude—but here in deep space, we’re all third-millennium medical science.”
Then she began the bloody, rapid process of severing Siddiq’s head.
SIDDIQ, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS
The Before Raisa Siddiq dreamed. Mines, deep as the core of planets. A love sold away in the heat of combat. Asteroids rich in heavy metals. Women walking in sunlight with their hands twined together. Hidden troves of ice in hard vacuum. A petulant starship and a new mind, beastly eager to be born. A man in red robes with archaic lenses and the manners of another age.
When she tried to open her eyes, she found only more dreaming. This time she screamed, though her voice had no power behind it, so she keened like a broken bird until a sad man came and turned her down.
CANNON, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS
The Before Michaela Cannon watched as the Ekumen priest stepped cautiously out of the hatch of his strange little starship. It looked to be Polity-era equipment, which was curious. He seemed taken aback at what he saw.
“I seek the Captain,” the priest said, straightening and heaving his burden—a medical carrier.
For a strange, blinding moment, she wondered if he had brought yet another severed head.
“I am the Captain,” Cannon said, stepping out of the crowd of Kallus’s men and reluctant neutrals led by Testudo, the engineering subchief. The mutiny was collapsing under its own weight, bereft of both leadership and goal.
She had promised herself the pleasure of a quiet purge, later.
“Ah, Captain Siddiq is indisposed?” By the tone of his voice, Cannon knew this man understood his game was already lost.
“Permanently so, you may rest assured.” Her hand waved to take in the blood-spattered front of her armor. “You will now declare the contents of your box, Father.”
“Medical supplies.” His head bobbed slightly with the lie. “At the Cap—At Captain Siddiq’s request.”
Kallus hurried close, whispering, “I didn’t want to put this on c
omms. That card was a memebomb. Would have melted Polyphemus’s mentarium like a butter stick between a whore’s thighs.”
“Where is the data card now?” she asked, her eyes on the priest.
“I destroyed it.”
Cannon doubted she’d ever know the truth of that. She shrugged the thought off and advanced on the newcomer. “Give it up, Father, and you might live to make the trip home.”
“Goulo,” the priest said sadly. “Father Goulo.” He added something in a language she didn’t speak, then bent to touch the controls on the end of the box.
She didn’t have seconds-subjective. Burning her reserves, the Before Michaela Cannon took three long, hard strides and launched herself at the priest. His fingers touched the controls just before her feet met his chest. The box exploded beneath her, the blast lifting her against the hull of his ship even as it shredded his face and body.
Cannon hit the deck with a hard, wet thump and slid. She felt compressed, flattened to nothing, but she was still alive. Conscious, even.
So much for the secret of her body armor. It was almost worth the look on Kallus’s face when he reached her side to see her raising her hand for help.
SHIPMIND, POLYPHEMUS
“Captain,” the starship said.
Cannon was on her third day in the sick bay, and getting mad about it. In the shipmind’s experience, this was a good sign. “What?” she snarled.
She’d been staring at the head of Siddiq, floating now in a preservative tank with a jackleg tangle of hoses and tubes and wires joining to the neck stump. The eyes opened sometimes to flicker back and forth, but there was never any point of focus that Polyphemus could identify.
“Pair-master team is back on schedule and anticipates meeting the original milestones.”
“Good. Then we can go—” She stopped and laughed bitterly. “I was about to say ‘home.’ How foolish of me.”
The starship didn’t know what to say to that, so she pushed on. “We have not yet identified Gimel from Plan Green. Kallus is not certain of the name of the other leader.”
“Then Kallus is protecting them for a reason.” Cannon sounded very tired. “That makes this Kallus’s problem. While I do trust the man not to be deeply stupid, please inform him that I will add his head to my collection if Gimel resurfaces.”
“So noted.” Polyphemus forwarded a clip of the Captain’s words to Kallus.
“And, ship…”
“Yes, Captain?”
“I think she’s been talking to me. Keep an eye on her, will you?”
Polyphemus watched the Before Michaela Cannon slip into a troubled sleep. After a while, Siddiq’s eyes opened. Her mouth began to move, bubbling slightly. The shipmind analyzed the words forming on the cyanotic lips.
The quantum matrix in the severed head was speaking. It rambled on about mining techniques in low-gravity, high-temperature conditions.
A voice box is required, the starship told herself. Some sort of output interface. The personality is gone, but the data remains. All has not been lost here.
A library of ancient knowledge, to be accessed at need.
Wondering what it might be like for her Captain to be as fully embedded in hardware as she herself was, the starship withdrew her attentions from the sleeping Before and her muttering lover. Polyphemus needed to examine the forensic reports from the death of Father Goulo, and contemplate the future.
It was good to have a Captain.
NEAL ASHER
SHELL GAME
Born in Essex, England, but now living in Crete, Neal Asher started writing at the age of sixteen, but didn’t explode into public print until a few years ago; a quite prolific author, he now seems to be everywhere at once. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, The Agony Column, Hadrosaur Tales, and elsewhere, and have been collected in Runcible Tales, The Engineer, and Mason’s Rats. His extremely popular novels include Gridlinked, Cowl, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, The Engineer Reconditioned, Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity, and Hill-diggers. His most recent books are a new novel, The Line War, and a new collection, The Gabble and Other Stories.
In the headlong adventure that follows, he reaffirms the wisdom of that old advice about never getting involved in religious disputes. Particularly alien religious disputes…
I woke up panicking in the middle of the night, or rather what we called night aboard the Gnostic, sure that something catastrophic had happened. Then I realized that the gravplates weren’t fluxing and that what I was experiencing was entirely due to the new drinks synthesizer Ormod had installed in the refectory. I settled back to try and sleep again, and found myself worrying about the disastrous course of my life and how it would probably end the next time some suicidal impulse overtook me—probably when I went to feed our cargo. I got up and took a couple of Alcotox and a sleeping pill, chased down with a pint of water, then returned to bed, sure I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep—then, seemingly an instant later, woke to the sound of the day bell.
As I sat up, the lights in my cabin flared into life. I peered at my clothes, crumpled on the floor, and at the general disarray, and again contemplated how it had come to this. At a standard two hundred years old, I was now hopefully getting through that watershed for the immortal when it’s possible to drown, that period of their lives when people suddenly decide that free-climbing mile-high tower blocks or swimming with great white sharks might be a fun thing to do—and I agree, they were.
At age one hundred and seventy, I’d been safely installed in a design job at Bionic Plastics, had enough credit stacked up to afford a flat in New York and a beach apartment on the Dubai coast, and to not be too worried if Bionic Plastics should kick me out. I’d also just finished my fourth marriage and was contemplating doing the tourist thing and going world-hopping. Then, suddenly, none of it seemed enough; I was bored, terminally bored, just felt like I was no longer alive. The risk-taking started then; the usual stuff, though I credit myself for inventing lava skiing, which is somewhat risky. Then came my great idea: get out of the circuit altogether, head somewhere really remote, and truly experience the alien. I sold everything, stepped from world to world to the very edge of the Polity, the Line, and there spent decades doing some things…well, let’s just say that the Grim Reaper must have been sharpening his scythe in anticipation of a sure harvest. A few years ago, I decided to crew on some cruiser, probably because I had finally started to calm down. I found the Gnostic on a world where real coffee and a working coldsuit were the height of culture.
Outstanding.
I’d been on the Gnostic for a year now as a standard crewman, which basically meant I got the shit jobs the broken-down robots couldn’t manage.
Stepping carefully from my bed, I picked up my discarded clothing and shoved it in the sanitizer, then pulled out some fresh clothes from one of the enormous cupboards in my huge cabin—cupboards that contained empty racks for pulse-rifles. Next, I pulled on monofilament overalls, and took up my armored gauntlets, visor, and stun stick. I followed this routine every morning, because every morning, it was feeding time. I stepped out of the cabin to be greeted by Ormod strolling down the corridor.
The captain of the Gnostic was a partial choudapt: the result of splicing human DNA with the genetic code of an alien species like giant woodlice, which were kept as pets on a world where the culture had gone the full biotech route, and even lived in cysts on giant seaweed floating in the warm seas. He stood about two meters tall, and looked like a heavily built hunchback with segmented armoring over his hump. His wide head lacked a neck, and mandibles ran down his jawline to fold up before his mouth. His ears were bat-like, his eyes pure blue, and his hair was styled in the cut and queue of a Samurai, to match the armor of those ancient warriors, which he wore over skin all shades of white, blue, and cerise. And I don’t think he was entirely sane, which, though I seemed to be easing off on the self-destruct, was probably why I had decided t
o crew for him.
He parted the mandibles over his mouth and grinned distractedly to expose teeth sharpened to points. “Feed the little darlings?”
“It seems my lot in life,” I replied.
He patted me on the shoulder and moved on up toward the bridge, which lay about half a mile away. I headed on down toward cargo holds big enough to lose a couple of cathedrals in.
At the end of the corridor, I reached a drop-shaft, which had ceased to function five days ago. Grav still operated down below, so I had to climb a fifty-foot ladder affixed to the side of the shaft, which wasn’t so bad going down, but got a bit tiresome on the way back up. I’d queried the Gnostic’s AI about this, and had gotten in response some obscure poetry by William Blake about invisible worms and roses. It seemed I’d gone for the full set—not only was the captain of this ship crazy, so was its artificial intelligence. It could perform its main task of operating the U-space engines to eventually get us to the required destination, but everything else seemed to be falling by the wayside. I often wondered how long it would be before the AI ceased to function at all, and stranded us out in the middle of nowhere.
Then again, perhaps all these faults were due to the huge structural alterations that had been made to the ship, because when I checked records, they showed that the Gnostic had started as a trapezoidal Polity dreadnought with external U-space engines. Now it looked like a set of pipes from an ancient church organ, with the U-engines located in the smallest pipe. I could see no reason at all for this, other than that it might reflect the unstable condition of the mind controlling the ship.
At the bottom of the ladder, I stepped out of the drop-shaft, reached around, and hit the manual control for the lights, which sometimes came on automatically, but on this occasion did not. Star lights in the ceiling suffused the massive space of Hold One with an eerie blue glow. From where I stood, I could not see the far wall. To my right lay an aisle between cargo containers and racks, down which lay the far wall, a mile away. Putting on my visor and pulling on my gauntlets, I headed to the left, where the “little darlings” were located—a cargo that had been aboard Gnostic for two years with seemingly no place to go.
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