by John Meaney
The duration of Schenck’s dying was infinite, literally for ever.
Too bad Dirk had not thought of killing the entire family.
He tapped his tu-ring.
Calling for my mother. Some hero.
But Ro McNamara was the true and legendary First Pilot as well as First Admiral, and if she made an appearance, she could be a figurehead to rally morale, not to mention an aggressive tactician who fought just as he did, though perhaps without that edge of madness that took him through when rational tactics failed.
There was no reply to his ping, though, which meant that even Labyrinth had not thought of – or was not capable of – rousing Mother by reaching into whatever layer of reality she was using to skip through time, dipping into mean-geodesic timeflow like a skipping stone touching a lake. She and he both, of course, but by now she might be biologically younger than her own son.
Sons, if Kian still lived, the soft-hearted bastard. Silly fucker wanted everyone to love each other. Once, he had even said we should spend time among the Siganthians, getting to know their ways – that was a long time ago, before the place was declared a hellworld – because the aliens might be strange but they were robust and in their own fashion spiritual: fearsome to non-metallic lifeforms, but not to be shunned out of fear, rather embraced in mutual enlightenment.
Enlightenment! Silly fucker.
What had happened to Kian, on the day he was burnt by the mob, had helped to make Dirk the consummate fighter that he was. No other response was logical.
And now, a new and unexpected battle.
His platform continued soaring above the crowd as these odd, irrelevant thoughts swirled through Dirk. They were almost welcome: a symptom of the mind under combat stress. Below him, Pilots were disappearing into fastpath rotations. But he stayed on the platform, soaring over people’s heads, because he wanted to be seen.
Heading for the fight.
‘We need a battle plan.’ This was Admiral Whitwell, his words sounding in Dirk’s ears, his face a tiny virtual holo. ‘Formations to be—’
‘I have one,’ Dirk told him.
Accelerating harder now, the platform, with the docking bay in sight, his bronze ship awaiting him.
‘What is it?’
Dirk grinned as he soared towards her, his ship.
‘We kill the fuckers.’
Her hull was open for him.
Dirk-and-ship flew.
Hard lined and old school, from a time when every flight was intrinsically a mortal risk, they had every confidence in taking down soft-living, younger Pilots, however corrupted they might be, however strong this phenomenon, this so-called darkness.
All military commanders study history. Once, Dirk knew, an admiral called Yamamoto struck with a fleet out of nowhere; and if the place called Pearl Harbor had contained the whole military and civilian population of the targeted power, the war would have ended there.
Then, they had merely woken a sleeping giant. But Schenck had the opportunity to destroy Labyrinth in a single attack; and if she perished, who would mourn or take vengeance?
Even the Zajinets were gone.
**To me, Pilots.**
They flew out to face the invaders.
Chains of explosions blossomed around Labyrinth.
Whipping from side to side, Dirk-and-ship avoided weapons fire – others were perishing all around, some destroyed as they exited docking-caverns – making their assessment: the first objective was to take out the vanguard, Schenck’s long range attackers. Failure meant too few defenders would get clear of Labyrinth, and the attackers’ main fleet would be upon them, and that would be it: the end.
Those who had flown clear were scattered without formation, victorious in simply surviving so far, but more was needed. Most were fighting one-on-one battles, except notably for nine Sabre squadrons, who had not hung around to rally others but simply soared into clear space, before turning to observe and wait until they could make a difference.
Which was now, with Dirk McNamara in command.
**Here and here. All Sabres to attack together.**
Their ack-signals came back as fleeting blips.
**Do it, while I gather up the rest.**
Dirk switched to max-power broadcast, aiming to reach the scattering ships that were not special forces and needed specific commands. Some might think of personal survival, but if Labyrinth fell then renegades would rule, and isolated fugitives would live in fear until they were hunted down. They had to understand what was at stake here.
The SRS squadrons came hurtling in, taking out a leading rank of renegades in simultaneous firebursts, while Dirk blared his message to the largest concentration of survivors:
**This is Dirk McNamara. I need you, Pilots.**
There was incoming fire, but Dirk-and-ship twisted away.
**Labyrinth needs you! Come to me now.**
Something burned across the leading edge of ship-and-Dirk’s starboard wing, enough to hurt but not to slow them down.
**Time to fight, Pilots.**
He curved back towards the battle.
And, miraculously, the other Pilots and their ships accelerated, following their admiral.
Inside Labyrinth, Pilots were still running or fastpath-rotating to their ships. Escape tunnels were forming as Labyrinth reconfigured to provide maximum exit capability, needing the vessels to get clear, as many as possible, before weapons fire started to—
=I’m taking hits.=
This was Labyrinth under direct attack.
While thousands made their panicked way to the docking bays, public broadcasts direct from Admiral Whitwell kept them appraised of the situation outside. There was a pause in that commentary, Whitwell’s voice trailing off, before coming back strongly through every Pilot’s tu-ring.
‘Roger Blackstone is promoted to brevet-Admiral.’
Corinne received that signal as, cursing, she-and-ship flew clear of Labyrinth into a rain of weapons fire that took all their concentration to dodge. Only when they were clear of immediate danger could a part of her mind ask two very obvious questions.
First, what the hell was Whitwell playing at, with such a battlefield promotion for someone so young, even if it was her Roger?
And second, where the bloody hell was Roger?
Up ahead, a makeshift squadron, one of many, was forming: some two dozen ships coming together as directed by Dirk McNamara – now there was a real admiral! – so Corinne-and-ship flew to join them. The backdrop was a vast wall of approaching renegade ships, a hundred thousand in the first plane, four times as many crowding behind, eager and menacing and simply overwhelming in their numbers.
Three ships in the nascent squadron of defenders blew up.
Shit.
Ship-and-Corinne hurtled through to take command, leading the survivors along a helical escape trajectory, an avoidance manoeuvre designed to give them time, but doing nothing to immediately hurt the enemy.
This is bad.
Two more ships exploded, either side of her.
We’re going to lose.
Corinne sent a determined signal to the survivors.
**With me, everyone.**
Her squadron turned to face the enemy.
FORTY-NINE
EARTH, 1989 AD
Gavriela used the joystick to position her wheelchair under her rosewood desk, then opened up the terminal emulation session on her Hewlett Packard while the modem blinked furiously.
She had written code back when most people thought that a ‘computer’ was a woman with a calculating machine. To her, ‘data transmission’ still evoked images of tape reels and motorcycle couriers; but here she was, at home in Chelsea and talking to a mainframe in Kensington, itself allowing passthrough to CERN.
Using her Imperial login, she accessed the astrophysics server that she needed, typing with her frail, blotched hands. Despite her eighty-two years, she had felt herself to be an old woman only since the stroke.
But she st
ill had her mind, and the richness of memory.
$ cd /astro/geoff/heimdall
$ grep ‘meson’ *
A wealth of occurrences of the word ‘meson’ appeared. Using the cat command, she examined the contents of the archived research files.
The surprise was that some of the dates were recent, and she realised that her no-longer-young friend Geoff – some of his former PhD students were now supervisors in their own right – had resurrected the old project, or at least the name, while consolidating new cosmic-ray data with the old. She checked, but there were no new readings from the direction of the galactic anti-centre. No one besides her, then, had seen significance in the old data.
Message in a bottle.
Edmund Stafford had brought her up to date, and helped her obtain the necessary permissions on the necessary machines. In the world of computing, everything seemed to change so fast; but it was Stafford’s musing over the new edition of The Selfish Gene that verified her thinking on the best way to send a message into the future.
‘Dawkins is absolutely right in the new foreword,’ Edmund told her. ‘The book became the replacement orthodoxy without controversy among scientists. It was the theme’s reputation that later aroused irate discussion, mostly among the clueless. But I heard a visiting biochemist in the Bird and Baby’ – he meant the pub where Gavriela first met Rupert – ‘call Dawkins a genetic determinist, which is nonsense.’
Ingrid had kept them supplied with coffee and Bourbon creams, not joining in the conversation, but giving approving looks at the increasingly feminist tone of Edmund’s diatribe, as his thoughts leapt from Dawkins to Sagan, then the groundbreaking work of Sagan’s ex-wife Lynn Margulis, who first described the origins of mitochondria, the in-cell power-house organelles common to all animal life, and likewise the chloroplasts occurring in plants.
Those organelles, Margulis argued, were the remnants of archaic symbionts, separate bacterial species absorbed but not digested, instead continuing in mutual cooperation.
‘Species can work together instead of fighting,’ Edmund said. ‘Maybe if a man had said it, people would have taken the idea more seriously right from the beginning. Like Beatrix Potter proposing that lichen is a symbiotic pairing of two species.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Gavriela told him. ‘Is it?’
‘It absolutely is, but the Royal Society didn’t think so at the time, which was why she ended up writing children’s books instead of becoming a scientist.’
Gavriela might never have applied that thinking to computers, but Edmund made the analogy explicit. ‘In a few years, people won’t remember languages like Algol or RPG,’ he said. ‘But bits will still be ones and zeros, and characters will be encoded in EBCDIC or ASCII, or a superset thereof, with TCP/IP at the root of comms. And don’t be too surprised if C continues to run, for decades, if not centuries.’
‘To be fair, some things deservedly die out,’ Gavriela had said. ‘Remember those one-hand card punches? They used to give me cramps.’
‘I hated the blighters,’ Edmund had said, and laughed. ‘And when you only had one chance a day, most likely overnight, for your program to compile . . . These youngsters with their interactive debuggers and the like are just so spoilt.’
And there the conversation took a new direction, but his provocative advice remained; and when she later needed practical hints, Edmund helped in that regard as well. Because new technology would retain its primitive ancestors deep inside, like the chemical powerhouses in every human cell, and if mi tochondria could survive for six hundred million years, surely a few words in plain English could last for decades.
Four days later, Gavriela’s handwritten note was now a .JPEG file, cocooned in self-replicating code that would someday send a POP message to a recipient not yet born.
As always, she had dozed off from time to time during her work. It seemed inevitable that late in the third evening, she came awake to find that she had typed while asleep, hard-coding the message destination in the source code (based on a nonexistent URL, with a device name-value pair that made no sense with current technology), along with the trigger timestamp.
If this code survived, the send routine would activate on the ninth of September, 2033, at 07:30 Universal Standard Time, meaning half past eight if they still put the clocks forward in summer, thirty-four years from now.
Or else the stroke made me insane, if I wasn’t already.
She opened the image one last time to check.
Dearest Lucas,
How wonderful to have a grandson! My words will seem very strange, since we do not know each other and I speak from your past. Still, I must ask you a favour, and be assured it must be this way. Even banks can fail over time, although it is to be hoped that some familiar names survive, so I am forced to contact you in this indirect way, with the hope that you will feel curious enough to investigate as I tell you.
Please, my grandson, look under the parquet flooring, in the right-hand outer corner as you look out the window at the park.
Love,
Gavi (your grandmother!)
X X X
Then she closed down everything apart from a monochrome console window, and fired off a shell file that would send out the first generation of her code package. Like organisms, some would survive to propagate while most would die; but it took only one copy to persist in order to count as victory.
Madness, of course.
The Christmas holidays rolled around, and with them came Brody. Her grandson had put on a little more muscle in addition to the massive increase over the summer, extra mass that suited him, and he had grown a first patchy attempt at a beard, which didn’t suit at all.
It gave Gavriela and Ingrid something other than the fall of the Berlin Wall to talk about. ‘Es ist nicht möglich,’ Ingrid would mutter, ‘dass die Mauer zerstört ist,’ while Gavriela would declare it the death of Communism: ‘Das Kommunismus ist ja kaput.’ Brody’s first term of A-level physics had been too easy, he said, which worried Gavriela a little, because everyone needs a challenge.
He and Amy had joined an astronomy club, which was perhaps an excuse for being together late at night, but seemed also to have sparked a genuine interest in cosmology.
‘I’ll give Geoffrey a ring,’ she told Brody, wanting to encourage him. ‘Perhaps he can get one of his students to show you the particle accelerators.’
It was a well-established principle of labour and autocracy: pharaohs had slaves, academics had grad students. But when she rang him, Geoffrey surprised her. ‘I’ll show you around myself,’ he said, taking it for granted that she intended to accompany Brody.
‘Um, I’ll need to use the goods ramp,’ she told him. ‘Because of the wheelchair.’
‘For you, anything. You can have a dozen chaps bearing you aloft on their shoulders, if you prefer.’
‘Grad students, of course.’
‘Well, yes. Nice to get some use out of the buggers.’
His touch of East London coarseness had the same effect as Ingrid’s formality when speaking German: both caused Gavriela to smile, both made her feel at home.
‘I’ll spare them the effort,’ she said. ‘But I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Next morning, they disembarked carefully from the taxi – Ingrid and Brody helping Gavriela in the wheelchair – and went inside with the college porter’s assistance. They rode up in a lift with Geoffrey, and as a group of four they poked around inside one of the labs, chatting to a researcher who seemed glad to share his enthusiasm for the work. Brody looked fascinated.
Gavriela drifted away, having a ‘senior moment’, before realising she needed the bathroom. Remembering the way, she steered her wheelchair out into the corridor, accompanied by Ingrid.
‘When you die,’ Gavriela told Ingrid for the twentieth or the hundredth time, ‘they’ll make you a saint. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Let’s put off the moment for both of us,’ Ingrid replied. ‘This door here?’<
br />
‘That’s the one.’
*
Afterwards, they found Brody in a different lab, left temporarily by himself (which he seemed proud of) after a departmental secretary had dragged Geoffrey away to deal with something.
Brody grinned, showing Gavriela several large colour monitors atop a lab bench.
‘They’re running pattern recognition over your work,’ he told her. ‘And they’ve found a rare astronomical event of some sort. See?’
To prevent people from switching off the processors in mid-run, someone had put a felt-tip-written label beneath one of the monitors.
Property of Project HEIMDALL. Please leave running.
But this was bad. Someone had found her old data of interest. No one was supposed to know what Gavriela had spotted amid the cosmic-ray data. Or did it not matter at this time?
‘Tell me.’ Her voice came out as a whisper.
‘Sure, Gran. See here?’ He pointed at the leftmost monitor, where among scattered white dots, three scarlet points glowed brightly, forming the vertices of an equilateral triangle. ‘There’s the event.’
‘Finally,’ whispered Gavriela.
To see them rendered like this . . . It meant she had not deluded herself about the pattern in the data; and if that were true, then perhaps the strangest of her thoughts and actions were founded in reality also.
‘What do you mean, finally?’ Brody looked puzzled.
‘Never mind,’ she told him, her voice a little stronger.
Then a hard woman’s voice sounded from behind her wheelchair: ‘No, I’d like to know. What did you mean by that, Dr Wolf?’
Gavriela used the joystick, rotating her chair. The woman was a stranger, with twists and shards of darkness encircling her head
And death in her eyes.
‘I’ve led a long life,’ Gavriela told her.
But Brody must live.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to the screen?’