by Paul McAuley
It was a grand vision, but seemed impossibly distant. There was always more work to be done. Measurements to be refined, ideas to be tested and retested. We must be patient, Aakash told his family. We must take the long view.
A year passed, Dr Gagarian’s second aboard Pabuji’s Gift. They put in at Porto Jeffre to purchase consumables, and elements required for fabrication of components of Dr Gagarian’s probes, and resumed their cruise above the plane of the ecliptic. But the family’s credit lines were almost exhausted, and Nabhomani and Nabhoj were growing mutinous. At last, Aakash and Dr Gagarian agreed to suspend their work for a short while, and Pabuji’s Gift headed out to search for salvage in a distant and long-abandoned garden, Jackson’s Reef.
5
Hari had retreated to a hiding place high up in the hollow spire, braced in the angle where three spars met in absolute shadow beside the exit hole and its zipline. He was draped in camo fabric that absorbed his p-suit’s infrared and electromagnetic signatures, and had set up decoys at various levels – man-shaped balloons kept inflated and heated by simple resistor circuits. They wouldn’t fool anyone for more than a couple of seconds, but he hoped that be enough time to spring his traps. The nets and the darts, the deadfall and all the rest.
He wished for what must have been the hundredth time that the hermit’s maker had possessed templates for firearms or energy rifles. He had managed to persuade it to extrude simple weapons – darts, throwing knives, shuriken – but right now he would have traded all of them for a basic kinetic handgun.
Feeds from cameras on top of various spires gave him overlapping views of the crater. The gleam of friction tracks laid across dun ground, running between wiry tangles of vacuum organisms. Bootprints everywhere. The rock field of the cairn. The grave of Kinson Ib Kana. The small crater blasted by the drone’s descent. It was close to sunset, and the cluster of spires threw long shadows towards the rim wall.
Let his enemies come. Let them step into his trap. Let them come now. Let this be over. Let this be over.
Then the camera feeds vanished all at once and a patch of wall at the base of the spire glowed red and white and blew out in a transient caul of vapour and dust. The last reserves of Hari’s confidence vanished. He’d set most of his traps around the entrance to the spire, hadn’t thought of this obvious move. Two pressure-suited figures stepped through the circular gap. At once, the murals and picts sprang into life and Hari’s traps fired. Spring-loaded tubes shot ceramic darts at the entrance; nets woven from fullerene thread spun towards the floor, propelled by tiny canisters of carbon dioxide; the lower part of the hollow space was filled with a storm of metallic flakes designed to confuse radar and other imaging systems. A moment later, squibs of reaction mass ignited and the deadfall, a tall narrow box fabricated from fullerene sheets and packed with rock dust, guillotined down.
The nets and darts missed the intruders. One waved the broad beam of an infrared laser through the floating flakes, shrivelling them; the other released a crowd of tiny drones that rose up in spiralling search patterns. A moment later, the murals and picts went out.
Someone was trying to talk to Hari on the common channel. A woman’s voice, calling to him, telling him to surrender. The balloon decoys began to pop one by one as the drones discovered them.
‘It’s over,’ the woman said. ‘Come out now.’
Less than a minute had passed since the intruders had stepped into the spire, and Hari was down to his last trick. He activated the first of the command strings he’d written into the lifepod’s control system, and set off strings of flashbang explosives. As they filled the hollow spire with sharp stutters of lightning and blew open bladders containing his special mix of chemicals, he shrugged off the camo fabric and grabbed the grips of the zipline pulley and kicked off as hard as he could.
He flew out of the spire into an expanding dust storm. Above, he could just make out the spark of the lifepod’s motor, powering away into the sky.
The wall of the neighbouring spire loomed out of the dust. A moment later Hari shot through the hole he’d cut in it, crashed into layers of expanded foam that killed most of his momentum, and struck the far wall with a solid thump. As he drifted backwards through collapsing sheets of foam, he let go of the zipline pulley and ripped a ceramic throwing knife from the velcro patch on his left hip. Caught the edge of the hole, severed the zipline, and hung there, listening to the harsh engine of his breath.
A fierce light flared high overhead, glowing through the fog of falling dust. The shadows of the spires slanted through it, fading as the flare-light dimmed.
The eidolon appeared beside Hari. Saying, ‘You blew up the lifepod.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Your distraction.’
‘To cover my escape from the spire. And if they think I tried and failed to flee Themba, they may not come looking for me.’
‘They may not have noticed it,’ the eidolon said, and showed him an infrared image. It was the spire, glowing with the ghost heat of chemical reaction. At the base, two small figures shone brightly, caught in awkward attitudes, unmoving.
Hari floated down through falling dust into the absolute darkness around the bases of the spires and found his way to the far side of the hollow spire. His helmet light showed that the hole the two intruders had blown in the wall was filled with a grotesque bulge of black stuff, like an organ spilling from a wound. A small portion of the foam generated when the two chemicals had been explosively mixed, expanding to fill the spire from top to bottom and hardening almost at once.
He pulled up the infrared view again. The intruders were still caught in the same positions. One crouching, the other sprawled face-down. When Hari called to them on the common channel, a woman answered, saying she’d kill him when she got free.
‘What’s your name?’
‘I am the arm and hand.’
‘Whose arm and hand?’
‘My own, now. You killed my sister. The foam damaged her lifepack. Did something to her rebreather. Have you ever heard someone dying of anoxia? Listened to their breathing get faster and faster? Listened to it stop? We would have saved you, boy. Those were our instructions. Find you. If you were dead, bring back your body. If you were alive, bring you back safe and sound. But you killed my sister, and I’m going to strike you down by my own arm, my own hand.’
‘You should keep still,’ Hari said. Nabhomani had taught him how to control his voice; he sounded a lot calmer than he felt. ‘Don’t struggle. The foam is an excellent insulator, so your suit won’t be able to exhaust your waste heat. If you struggle, you’ll die of heatstroke.’
The woman cursed him and his ancestors, cursed all the children he would never have after she had finished with him. She was very imaginative, but her breathing soon became laboured and she fell silent.
Hari asked her again who she worked for.
‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’
‘Deel Fertita and the others were friends of yours, weren’t they?’
The woman didn’t reply.
Hari said, ‘Who paid them? Who paid you?’
Silence.
‘Your employer has my ship and my family. I have Dr Gagarian’s head. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Dr Gagarian’s head, and the files it contains. That’s why you were looking for me. Well, you found me, and I’m ready to make a deal. I want to negotiate with your employer. If you tell me how I can contact them, I’ll free you.’
‘That’s the best you can do?’
‘It’s a good deal. If things work out, everyone will get what they want. You, me, your boss, my family.’
Another silence. Hari let it stretch. Let her think about the way out she’d been offered.
At last, the woman said, ‘You aren’t in a position to help your family. All you can do is decide whether or not you want to save yourself. And the only way you can do that is by cutting me free and giving me the tick-tock’s head. Do that, do it right now, and I’ll
let you live.’
She would be able to free herself when the foam cooled and began to lose its integrity, but Hari wasn’t about to tell her that. He said, ‘It seems to me that you aren’t in a position to threaten me.’
‘Do you really think we were the only ones looking for you? As soon as we found you, boy, we called our sisters. They’re on their way, and you aren’t going anywhere. We came down on a broomstick that went into orbit as soon as we hopped off, and it won’t return unless I call it. And your lifepod blew up when you tried to put it out of harm’s way.’
‘Is that what you think you saw?’ Hari said.
‘You don’t have any way of getting off this rock,’ the woman said. ‘We’ll wait here, you and I, until my sisters arrive. And when they do, you’ll spend the last hours of your life wishing you’d surrendered the head when I asked you to.’
‘I’ll only give it up when your boss agrees to free my family.’
The infrared image showed that the woman was gripping a laser wand in her right hand. It was jammed against the breastplate of her p-suit, and she was trying to twist back and forth in the coffining foam, trying to open a space so that she could use the wand to cut herself free.
She said, ‘What if I told you that you can’t help your family because they’re dead? As dead as my sister.’
Blood beat in Hari’s head. The monster stirred in the shadows.
‘Prove it,’ he said.
‘There it is,’ the woman said. ‘There’s the problem with the way you’re trying to play this. You won’t believe anything I say, and I don’t care if you cut me free or not. If you don’t do it, my sisters will. But I’ll give you one more chance to do things my way. Cut me free, and then fetch the tick-tock’s head from its hiding place and lay it at my feet. That’s the best deal I can offer. The only deal you’re going to get.’
Hari decided to call her bluff. ‘I can’t walk away from my family. But I can walk away from you. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to take the gig you stole and leave you to strangle in your own waste heat.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ the woman said, and there was a red flash and something struck Hari and knocked him backwards. He flew a long way, bounced once, twice, ground and sky wheeling past, and smashed into a clump of dark red wires and was caught there, dazed and breathless. After a little while, the p-suit’s eidolon bent over him, asking him if he was all right, if he could remember his name, if he could at least talk.
‘She blew herself up,’ Hari said stupidly.
His head sang, and when he began to extract himself from the wires he discovered that he couldn’t move his left arm. Downslope, the spires stood quiet and still under the black sky.
‘I sustained no significant damage,’ the eidolon said, ‘but I’m afraid that the humerus of your left arm is fractured. I have numbed and set it, but it will require further medical attention.’
‘I’m all right,’ Hari said.
‘I would have prevented her if I could,’ the eidolon said.
‘It was my mistake. I thought I could talk to her. I thought I could make a deal.’
‘She tried to kill you by killing herself. Why would she do that?’
‘Because she was a fanatic. Because she was no ordinary dacoit.’
The eidolon was silent for a few moments, as if processing this. Then she said, ‘What will you do now?’
‘I can’t stay here. I have to assume that she was telling the truth. That her sisters are on their way.’
‘How can you leave? The gig is still in orbit. And so is the broomstick that the woman and her sister used to reach the surface. I will try to command it to return, but I cannot guarantee that it will listen to me.’
‘I have a better idea,’ Hari said. He used his bios to send a brief command string, and pointed out the brief flicker of motor exhaust to the eidolon.
‘That is not the gig,’ the eidolon said. ‘I would know if you were flying the gig by wire.’
‘It’s the lifepod.’
‘You destroyed the lifepod.’
‘It flared off a couple of hundred grams of reaction mass through a safety valve, and ignited it with a brief pulse of its motor. As if it had been fatally damaged when I tried to escape. We’ll use it to reach the gig.’
‘Do you think you can outrun her sisters?’
‘I’m going to try,’ Hari said.
6
Jackson’s Reef was a froth of bubble habitats wrapped around a shaped sliver of rock some ten kilometres long. Half its volume was ravaged, open to vacuum; the rest had devolved to low-diversity, low-energy ecosystems dominated by tough, slow-growing chlorophytes, blue-green algae, and archaebacteria. There were hundreds of similar bodies within the Belt and beyond; Jackson’s Reef was distinguished from all the others by its eccentric, long-period orbit.
It had once been the centre of the Golden Mean, a kingdom of gardens and settlements in the outer belt that had flourished several centuries before the rise of the True Empire. When they’d been deposed by a vicious civil war, the last members of its ruling family had hastily converted their capital city into a multigeneration starship and aimed it at 61 Cygni, but its mass drivers had failed before it could acquire solar escape velocity. It had become trapped in a cometary orbit with a period of more than six hundred years, taking it out above the plane of the ecliptic and across the Kuiper belt to the edge of the Oort Cloud before swinging back towards the sun. Its original inhabitants were either dead or long gone by the time it first returned to the Belt. A crew of rovers laid claim to it, tried and failed to revive its ruined biomes, abandoned the project. And now it was returning to the Belt for the second time, and Nabhomani and Nabhoj had devised a plan to strip out salvageable machinery and artefacts, and mine what was left of its ecosystem for useful biologics and unique genomes.
Aakash surprised Hari and his brothers by making only token objections. But really, Nabhomani’s and Nabhoj’s case was more or less airtight. The family had spent more than two years collaborating with Dr Gagarian, they were low on credit and the consumables required to make up for inefficiencies in the ship’s recycling systems, and their current course, cruising above the plane of the ecliptic, meant that they were well placed to reach Jackson’s Reef with a minimal change in delta vee.
While four specialists recruited by the family’s broker in Tannhauser Gate zipped towards Pabuji’s Gift in a bottle rocket, Hari and his brothers readied the gigs and bots, prepped refineries, separation tanks and mass chromatographs, grew up bacterial cultures and suspensions of halflife nematodes, surveyed the reef using a swarm of fast flyby drones, and planned a schedule of work. Dr Gagarian kept to himself, analysing the results of his experiments and keeping watch on his chain of detectors. It was a busy, pleasant time.
The specialists arrived, unpacked their equipment, familiarised themselves with Pabuji’s Gift’s systems. The ship was making its final approach to the reef, and Hari was in one of the storage bays, sourcing a replacement for a failed component in the motor of one of the gigs, when a brief tremor set tools and small machines and machine parts rocking and chiming in their racks. The link between Hari’s bios and the ship’s commons fell over. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t talk to anyone else. And then he discovered that the bay’s hatch had locked itself.
He thought at first that it was one of Nabhomani’s stupid pranks. His brother had locked him in, and now he had to figure out how to escape. He tried and failed to force the hatch to respond to his commands, tried and failed to dig into the security shell that had sprung up around its stubborn little mind. Shouting at it was equally useless, although it relieved the sudden hot pressure of his anger. He swam up and down the storage racks, looking for another way out and failing to find it, came back to the hatch, studied its mechanism, went to search for a couple of tools.
He was dismantling the hydraulic latch when the hatch’s clamshell halves parted with a juddering groan, seizi
ng up before they were fully open, and someone in a red pressure suit eeled through the narrow gap.
It was Agrata. Her helmet hung on one hip, a fat cryoflask hung on the other. She gripped Hari’s hands in hers and drew him close and asked him if he was all right.
‘What happened?’
The old woman’s grim, haunted gaze frightened him. She smelled strongly of smoke.
‘We have been hijacked,’ she said, and told him that one of the members of the specialist crew had sabotaged the ship’s comms system and its mind, picted a clip showing a storm of sparks sweeping out from the reef: sleds ridden by hijackers, a small fleet of drones and bots. They had swarmed through cargo hatches and airlocks, Agrata said, securing the ship module by module, hunting down its occupants. Aakash’s viron had been infected by djinns and erased; she hadn’t been able to contact Nabhomani and Nabhoj. Their bioses were down. She believed that they were dead, that she and Hari were the last of the family. They had lost control of the ship and were outnumbered and outgunned.
Shock blanked Hari’s mind. He asked several stupid questions. Who had locked him in? Why did she think that Nabhomani and Nabhoj were dead? How had they died? Where was Dr Gagarian?
Agrata gave him a stern and tender look that pierced him through and through. ‘You have to be ready to do a hard thing,’ she said.
Something was caught in Hari’s throat. ‘You want to surrender.’
‘I want you to follow me.’
The four-way junction outside was hazed by drifting layers of smoke. The pungent odour made Hari sneeze. He recoiled against the frame of the hatch, clung there, saw a body floating overhead. It was one of the specialists, a thin pale man named Odd Samuelson. Slowly turning, arms and legs askew, a dark patch of blood seeping across the chest of his blue suit liner. One of the maintenance bots hung close by. It was dead too.