by John Meaney
A section of wall is flowing open, revealing a shining scarlet lattice-form. On the deck lies a pile of what looks like blue sand. Zajinets clothe themselves in solid material, but perhaps they act more freely in their natural form.
Pretty much everything Carl knows about Zajinets is conjecture.
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As a Zajinet communication it is typical, perhaps clearer than the average, but useless to Carl.
‘I think you’re bluffing.’ Greybeard squeezes Xala. ‘I think you care what happens to her.’ He speaks as if he understands the Zajinet.
You know the lightning.
The words are a splinter of memory, from one of his Tangleknot instructors.
You know how fast it moves.
So often there have been misunderstandings and violence between Pilots and Zajinets, though it has never spilled over into protracted military engagements. Can they be allies here?
Xala’s scalp tattoos are writhing in response to her agitation.
Become the lightning.
Then Greybeard’s tu-ring shines, and the Zajinet’s lattice-form jumps in the air and pulses – as if receiving a shock – before returning to its normal steady shine.
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Carl holds back, tensing with the effort. The Zajinet is somehow entangled now with Greybeard’s tu-ring. Any attack on Greybeard will injure the Zajinet also.
‘Drop me off where I tell you,’ says Greybeard. ‘And I’ll release the link and you go on your way, everyone safe and sound.’
He releases Xala. She slumps to the deck.
‘Do the honours, will you?’ Greybeard adds to Scarface. ‘Delta-bands for everyone. We’re flying onwards now.’
The Zajinet drifts out, ignoring the pile of blue sand on the deck.
‘You don’t look very scared.’
Shit.
Greybeard is addressing him.
‘I-I’m scared.’ The shake in his voice is easy to produce. ‘Believe me.’
‘Good.’
All around, Scarface is pressing people’s delta-bands, sending them back into sleep. When everyone but he, Carl and Greybeard are under, Scarface says: ‘You’ll be last to activate the band, is that it? While we’re helpless.’
‘You’ve been paid and you’re safe. If I needed to kill you, I could do it now.’
Scarface nods. ‘All right.’
Greybeard and Scarface turn to look at Carl. He has no choice but to lie back, check the delta-band is snug on his forehead, and put his finger on the activation stud; but he does not press down. He hears the two men lie down, and senses the activation of their delta-bands; then he opens his eyes.
Transition.
It is like liquid amber filling the air: spacetime as it is meant to be, the fractal freedom that exhilarates. Carl swings himself off the couch and onto his feet.
He is in his element, but so is the Zajinet crew. Through the still-open doorway he finds a short corridor and follows it, entering a round windowless chamber where three Zajinets are floating. One is blue tinged with green; another is green tinged with blue.
The last Zajinet, a deep scarlet, shifts towards Carl.
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‘So you did recognise me.’
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Carl has never heard of such clear unambiguous communication from a Zajinet. Most people would say it is impossible.
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He has no idea how to assess the situation. The humans, Greybeard included, are helplessly asleep back in the hold; but this Zajinet is in some sense a prisoner, entangled with Greybeard’s tu-ring.
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The vessel shivers into realspace. In seconds, the delta-bands will power down automatically.
‘Shit.’
Carl sprints back to the hold, leaps towards the unconscious Xala and tears the delta-band from her forehead. Kaleido-scopic colours swirl across her bare scalp before coalescing into maroon-and-silver dragons, scaled and fierce as they coil and slither.
‘Ah, my head,’ she moans. ‘The case.’
‘What?’
‘Open his—’
‘Got it.’
His tu-ring is working furiously, and the case pops open as his spyware succeeds in defeating its locks. Inside is a small, complex device about the size of Carl’s fist. He has no idea what it might be. But Greybeard’s closed eyes are shifting from side to side, moments from waking, so Carl abandons caution to reach inside, closes one hand around the device and—
What the hell?
—totally fails in his attempt to tug it upwards. It feels massive.
‘—interacting with the darkness,’ Xala is saying. ‘They told me, the Zajinets.’
‘What was that?’
He tugs, and perhaps it shifts slightly.
‘We’re just shadows. Ghosts,’ says Xala. ‘I mean because we’re baryonic matter.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t—’
Greybeard turns his head, eyes opening. ‘Well, how about that?’
Too late.
‘Where did this come from?’ It is the most important thing for Carl to ask. ‘Who made it?’
‘No one alive,’ says Greybeard. ‘No one who’s left any trace of their work.’
‘Fuck you,’ says Carl.
Because the implication is right there: no trace means zero survivors.
‘Open up.’ Greybeard swings his feet to the deck, takes the case one handed – at his touch, it closes up around the device – and lifts it without effort. ‘I mean the hull.’
His tu-ring sparks, and Carl senses a wild pulse of energy – the Zajinet equivalent of howling in pain – from the control cabin. After a moment, a large section of inner hull grows transparent, and Xala sucks in a breath; perhaps Carl does likewise.
It is a magnificence of stars, an incandescence of a billion suns.
‘Where is this?’ whispers Xala.
‘Galactic core,’ says Carl. ‘The only place it can be.’
Greybeard’s smartmiasma glitters deliberately, reminding them of the threat. Then he looks at the inner bulkhead to address the Zajinets, and raises his fist, emphasising the tu-ring.
‘Detonation in thirty seconds.’
‘No!’ shouts Carl.
Greybeard turns and runs at the transparent hull which, liquefying, allows him to pass through and tumble into space. There is only one chance for Carl and that is to follow, sprinting hard before the hull can harden, throwing himself through – wetness sliding across his skin – and then stars are whirling as he tumbles over and over, trying to sight Greybeard – there – but the bastard is out of sight again because Carl’s tumbling is chaotic, so hard to orient himself to—
A blaze of light marks the Zajinets’ exit from realspace. The ship is gone.
Oh, you stupid bastards.
Thinking they could break the quantum entanglement by entering mu-space while Greybeard’s tu-ring remains in this continuum.
Haven’t you heard of a deadman switch?
Whatever Greybeard rigged up, it will have detonated the instant the Zajinet vessel entered mu-space.
Issue the command.
It is the voice of panic inside his he
ad.
No. Too soon.
Panic because he cannot breathe and soon his blood will boil. His eyes are already bleeding, hence his stinging vision while the most magnificent sight of his life in realspace shies everywhere: the centre of the galaxy, where a billion suns are gathered.
There it is, the thing that had to be here: some kind of craft taking the figure of Greybeard aboard.
Wait.
Such an ache in his desperate lungs.
Can’t—
Just wait.
Tumbling still.
Going?
It is hard to tell, with his smeared vision, whether the vessel is moving away.
Yes.
A flare and a spurt of motion, and it accelerates away, leaving him.
In the void, tumbling and dying.
Now?
It is a vast relief.
Yes, now.
He presses his tu-ring and it commands the quickglass, in emergency mode, to spread fast across his body. From the band around his waist, inside his clothes, it extends across everything, including his eyes – he has to fight against reflex to keep them open – and into his open mouth, forcing its way down into his lungs, painful and hard, or at least it feels that way – shit – and the pain increases – shit shit shit – before something wonderful happens and suddenly he feels euphoric.
Oxygen entering his bloodstream.
Fantastic.
Soon the hypoxia fades, but the euphoria remains, because he is floating in magnificence.
How many have seen what I’m seeing?
Well, more than one might expect, given that Greybeard had allies here: allies possessed of at least one ship and probably more, perhaps even permanent stations, and you had to wonder how they got here without assistance from Pilots. Were Zajinets involved?
Given their reaction to Greybeard, maybe not.
Pilots, then.
Helping . . . whatever it was that manipulated Greybeard.
Tumbling still, but breathing and surviving.
Help me.
He understood the artificial link that Greybeard formed between his tu-ring and the Zajinet: that understanding had been immediate because of that other link, the one that Pilots did not talk about (other than perhaps the Shipless, who knew only theory, never the reality), the bond between Pilot and ship. They never discussed it because they did not need to. They knew how beautifully lucky they were.
Come now.
Knowing she has heard him.
Come to me, my love.
And is even now, black and scarlet-edged and powerful, soaring through golden space to reach him.
I love you.
Twenty-five thousand lightyears and transition between universes are not enough to keep them apart, and never will be.
Oh, my love.
Soon enough, she will come for him.
And they will be together, as they are meant to be.
As they will always be.
]]]
When Roger disengaged from the memory sequence, his face was chill, with cold tracks down his cheekbones left by evap-orating tears.
I’ll do my best, Dad.
To be half the man his father was: still his only real ambition, more than enough for a lifetime’s work. Now, though, he was in realspace, with more immediate tasks to attend to.
‘Vachss Station Control to Pilot. Are you status green?’
He wiped the back of his hand across his face.
‘Pilot to Vachss Station Control. Status green, and commencing approach now, if you’re willing.’
‘Approach approved. We’ll pour some daistral ready, Pilot.’
Roger smiled.
‘I’ll hold you to that.’
He immersed himself back in wonderful conjunction with his ship, and together, slowly, they moved towards the orbital, concentrating on the work, fulfilled by it. Worrying about Jed Goran and the legal niceties could wait: just manoeuvring to a docking-port was enough to occupy ship-and-Roger.
Call it Zen and the art of Piloting.
‘Contact made, Pilot. Welcome to Vachss Station.’
‘Thank you, Control.’
He sighed as he slipped out of conjunction trance.
Time to deal with people.
TWENTY-TWO
EARTH, 1956 AD
His daughter’s outburst kept coming back to him: ‘You’re a monster.’
Not yet seventeen, yet so sure of herself, so willing to judge him.
Though she barely suspected the things he had done.
‘Du bist ein Ungeheuer,’ had been Ursula’s exact words, and while she was in fact his stepdaughter and he was in truth a psychopath, according to the diagnostics described in KGB-approved psychology texts, Dmitri Shtemenko was hurt by her accusation. At least to the extent that he understood how words might wound an ordinary person.
‘I haven’t killed anyone for years,’ he had told her.
It had been the wrong thing to say, but he had been distracted by the details of Ilse’s funeral, the senior colleagues he would have to talk to and the opportunities that might be presented. Such tactical thinking separated him from the weak-minded, and he was normally efficient in hiding it; at the same time, he did have regret at Ilse’s passing.
There would be a certain emptiness in his life, at least until he filled it.
It was in going through her mother’s things, poking around the old shambling house they lived in – surrounded by fields, far from the tenements of the proles – that Ursula had stumbled upon the trail to the garden shed, the boxes buried beneath unused spades and forks, and sprung open the box containing finger bones. Another girl – he still could not think of her as a woman – might not have recognised the withered human digits, but Ursula was interested in both painting and biology, anatomy the intersection of the disciplines, and knew exactly what they were.
He should have denied ownership, of course.
Once before, during the Great Patriotic War, he had thrown away his little souvenirs before setting sail for Japan. For a long time he had felt little need to indulge himself, forcing himself to leave all evidence behind on those occasions when he gave in to overwhelming urge. Eventually, though, he had felt settled enough to return occasionally to his old ways.
‘Give the box to me,’ he had commanded. ‘And say nothing of this. Do you understand, Ursula?’
Trembling, so that the box rattled as if containing dice, she handed it over.
‘I understand.’
Cold loathing, so very adult, coated her voice. She was mature enough to understand what happened to anyone who crossed a KGB colonel; and a colonel with his proven homicidal background was even more dangerous than the rest. He felt a hint of paternal pride in her ability to assess risk during fraught times.
Alone now in his bare study, he opened another box on his desktop. Ursula had seen inside this one also, but had failed to sense anything special about the metal shard. As for Dmitri, he felt the stuff was strange, but possessed no means to analyse it further.
There had been other remnants for the research team to keep, and make sense of if they could. Somehow he thought they would fail.
For Dmitri, it was victory enough that he had brought it back from Siberia without his superiors’ knowledge. Metallurgical analysis did not excite him. The only person he had showed it to was young Daniela at work: she was twenty-one years old, lean and angular with a cruel face that excited him to look at. He had not yet taken her as a lover, Lieutenant Daniela Weissmann, but he thought it would happen soon.
But his third and real treasure . . . That was in the loft, and he was never sure what had called him to it, two years ago. People had been excited about the archaeological find in London, yet no else had sensed the presence of the buried crystal inside damp clay. Call it a gift of the darkness – except that no stirrings in his head accompanied his digging the thing out.
No commands from the darkness at all.
Perhaps his sensitivity to t
he crystal had simply been a side effect, nothing intentional or useful, of the dark power that corrupted him.
He remembered the thrill of sneaking past the guards, going down into the dig beneath the City, wondering what he was doing there. With his shielded torch, he had his own private viewing of a stone mask dating back to Londinium; but it was a blank wall of wet clay, the edge of one of the excavation pits, that had drawn him. Then the digging with fingers by torchlight, the slick-yet-sticky feel of the stuff, and the glint of crystal when he found it.
Crystal, shaped like a spearhead, and buried for centuries in London mud.
So precious, and yet he would never sell it.
Nor tell his KGB masters what he had found.
Of course, he had been in London for operational reasons. Going across to the West had kept him on edge; perhaps stealing an unsuspected archaeological find had been less dangerous than giving in to his other desires. A police manhunt might have made things awkward.
And what about Ursula?
He really did not want to think of her as a woman.
She is a problem, though, is she not?
Not as another potential victim.
Or would her screams be all the sweeter for their overtones of innocence betrayed?
Berlin, at least the Allied sectors, formed an island of western freedom in a Communist sea. But once there, for all the dangers if discovered and the recent tightening of access controls, it was relatively easy for Gavriela, with all the assets available to SIS, to slip into the Russian Sector.
Living in London, so different from the rest of Britain, made it natural to adopt the tough-humoured Berlinerisch attitude, and lose the hard g in words like Inge. Coats were even drabber than in England (Paris, on her holiday, had been a revelation), so she had dressed for the part, as had the two men forming her protective escort.
It was the 23rd of November, and freezing fog was everywhere.
The contact who met them at the safe house in Treptow, inside the Russian Sector and close to the black-looking waters of the Spree, was a grey-haired dour man who said: ‘She’s a schoolgirl, didn’t you know? Not exactly prime defector material.’
‘So what?’ said Gavriela, a hard-edged Ja, und? ‘It’s not her we’re interested in.’