by Paul McAuley
A little over seventy minutes after the battle fleet was scattered, Earth’s day side dimmed. A warp or twist in the fabric of space-time had appeared beyond the orbit of the Moon, absorbing fifty per cent of the sunlight that passed through it. Earth lay in the cone of its shadow. The Long Twilight had begun. After two years, most of Earth’s cities had been destroyed by food riots and insurrection, and suzerains and scions were fighting each other for control of Mars and the Belt and the moons of the outer planets. After ten years, as ice marched out from Earth’s poles, the True Empire fell; weakened by civil war and massive and futile efforts to re-engineer Earth’s global climate, it was unable to resist a ragged alliance of posthumans, reivers, and rebel baseliners. After fifty years, with much of Earth mantled in snow and ice and ninety per cent of its population dead, the sunshade warp vanished.
Earth was still locked in a new ice age. The seraphs appeared to be unchanged. They occasionally swatted a drone or ship that approached too close, but otherwise seemed indifferent to human affairs, and to the prayers and petitions of their flock of followers.
As Brighter Than Creation’s Dark swept past them, maintaining a respectable distance, Hari opened a window, centred it, zoomed in. He wasn’t interested in the seraphs, but in their followers. Little stars brightened, resolved into the cylinders and cones and discs of ships and orbital platforms, fled beyond the margins of the window. At last, only one was left. A tiny twisted ring: Pabuji’s Gift.
8
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark sidled through the scattered cone of supplicants amidst a flurry of chatter and crosstalk. Rav’s son answered direct enquiries with a bland statement about a resupply mission, fended off several attempts to probe his ship, matched Pabuji’s Gift’s orbital velocity and her slow rotation. The two ships turning like partners in a dance, just a kilometre apart. The ring ship’s hatches were shut. Its running lights were dead and its beacon gave out only its false identity; it did not respond to pings or to family code.
After Rav’s son had tried and failed to detect any movement inside it, Hari explained that its paint job reflected radar, microwaves and neutron backscattering.
‘My father made her combat-ready because we worked in remote and lonely places,’ he said.
And it hadn’t made any difference, in the end, because they’d been betrayed from within.
‘Sketch the internal layout,’ Rav’s son said. ‘I can’t resolve any detail.’
Hari pulled down a window and captured an image of the ship and quickly limned the main corridors, the cargo spaces, the levels and partitions in the crew and passenger quarters. Rav’s son examined the diagram, asked questions, agreed that the service airlock next to the cargo hatches would be the best entry point.
‘I’ll wait here,’ Eli Yong said. ‘I have no experience of free fall. I’ve never even worn a pressure suit.’
Rav’s son studied her for a few moments, then said, ‘Work on Dr Gagarian’s files. The ship’s systems are locked, and I’ll know if you try to open them.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to begin,’ Eli Yong said.
‘I hope not,’ Rav’s son said, and flared his wings and smiled a sharp-toothed smile.
Eli Yong almost managed not to flinch. She drew on her dignity and said, ‘Suppose the worst happens? Suppose you don’t come back?’
‘You think I care about what happens after I die?’
They crossed to Pabuji’s Gift on two broomstick scooters. Riyya rode with Rav’s son; Hari rode solo, carrying his book inside his p-suit. He hadn’t told anyone what it contained, or how he planned to use it. He still hadn’t told anyone that one of his brothers had collaborated with the assassins, either.
Family secrets. Family business.
He studied the ring ship’s familiar contours and landmarks as they grew closer. Spars and tethers anchoring the motor pod in the centre of the ring ship’s Möbius strip. Cubical modules and domes of various sizes scattered over the surface. The two big rectangular hatches of the starboard garages. The cluster of dish antennae where he’d done his first work on the ship’s skin, helping Nabhoj swap out a frozen servo. The workshop blister where he’d assembled much of Dr Gagarian’s experimental apparatus. The hatch for the garage that housed his utility pod, 09 Chaju, a tough little unit with pairs of articulated arms either side of the diamond blister of its canopy. The hours he’d spent in the couch that took up most of the pod’s cramped cabin, ferrying and assembling components, welding . . .
Everything looked the same. Everything had changed.
No one challenged them as he led Rav’s son and Riyya towards the inner surface of the ship, opposite the control and command tower. He brought his broomstick to a halt with a little flourish and shot anchoring tethers fore and aft and without waiting for word from the others kicked away from it, caught a grab rail next to a small square hatchway, popped the cover of the manual controls, and threw the power switches. He felt a brief vibration through his gloves. Silently, smoothly, the airlock’s outer hatch slid back and lights flicked on inside.
The three of them made a tight fit. The outer hatch closed; the lock pressurised with a hiss that grew in volume and cut off with a sharp crack; the inner hatch opened on a spherical staging area. As soon as he was inside, Hari attempted to access the ship’s control systems and the family commons, and wasn’t surprised to discover that the codes had been changed. The passenger commons was down, too, but he was able to force a connection between his p-suit’s comms and the little mind of the airlock.
He told Rav’s son he was shut out of the ship’s systems, said that he would need to reach the access point to perform a manual reset.
‘Where is this access point?’
‘In the command and control tower.’
‘Where any hijackers are most likely to be.’
Rav’s son’s stare was sharp and vivid behind the visor of his helmet. Hari wondered for the fifth or tenth time if the Ardenist suspected that he was withholding information.
‘If there are any hijackers on board, I expect they will be coming to greet us,’ Hari said. ‘We should find them before they find us.’
‘Wait here,’ Rav’s son said, and kicked off across the staging area, falling neatly through the hatch on the far side.
Hari called up the eidolon, told her it was time to get to work. ‘Try to keep the djinn quiet until I ask you for help.’
The eidolon said that she would do her best. ‘It is good to be home, Gajananvihari.’
She had claimed that she did not know when or how a limited copy of herself had been ported into the book, had become flustered and sulky whenever Hari pressed her about it. She didn’t know how a copy of the djinn, also much reduced, had been ported into the book either. Hari suspected that the original in his neural net had been responsible, and was using the eidolon as an interface, as it had used other machine intelligences to defend him elsewhere. He also suspected that the djinn had made the copy long before he’d escaped from Themba. It had mostly remained dormant, escaping detection by the commissars in Fei Shen and the tick-tock matriarch, but Hari believed that it had manifested itself at least once: after he’d left the book with the ascetic hermit in Ophir, it had frightened the man into throwing the book away, so Hari would retrieve it.
The eidolon hadn’t been able to tell him if the copy of the djinn had influenced the book’s mind, whether it had chosen the stories he’d read, but she had assured him that it would help him take back the ship. He had broken the procedure down into a series of steps and constructed a simple virtual model, and he and the eidolon had rehearsed what needed to be done a score of times. The eidolon had always been dutiful and compliant, but despite her assurances Hari did not trust the djinn. It was his father’s agent, after all. Some of its objectives coincided with his; some, he suspected, did not.
Now he said, ‘This isn’t like the time on Themba, with the drone. Or the time I was being held prisoner by the skull feeders. I’m in no imm
ediate danger. And I may be able to take back control of the ship manually. The best way of protecting me is to stay in the background until I ask you for help. And then – and only then – to do everything I told you to do, in the order we agreed.’
‘We both understand,’ the eidolon said.
‘I can’t access the commons, so I’ll have to port you into the airlock’s mind. After that, you’ll have to do a point-to-point migration. Leave a link in the airlock’s comms node. Listen out on the common band.’
‘As we rehearsed.’
‘Yes. Exactly as we rehearsed,’ Hari said, and opened the channel.
‘We will not fail you,’ the eidolon said, and then she was gone.
Riyya asked if he was all right; he told her that he had been trying to find a way into the ship’s systems. She hadn’t been privy to his conversation with the eidolon, and he hoped that Rav’s son hadn’t been able to eavesdrop either.
She said, ‘You really aren’t going to tell me what you’re going to do, are you?’
Hari was watching the data flow through his comms as the copies of the eidolon and the djinn migrated from the book to the airlock’s mind. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do until I find out what I need to do,’ he said.
‘And I was hoping for some kind of plan.’
Hari liked the way she said it. Trying to keep it light, trying to pretend that taking back the ship was a harmless game. He felt a pang, a little pinch of guilt and sorrow, hoped that she’d forgive him.
Rav’s son returned and said that he had released a swarm of drones but so far hadn’t found any trace of activity. ‘It may not mean anything. The internal walls and bulkheads are as opaque as the hull. We’ll have to hunt down any hijackers in the old way.’
The idea seemed to please him. He was his father’s son, all right.
They kept their suits sealed as they sculled along the curve of the corridor. Familiar scuffed, off-white wall quilting. Familiar insets glowing with soft light. But here was a long scorch mark; there was a rachet spanner slowly turning in mid-air . . .
Riyya snatched the spanner from the air as she passed. It was as long as her forearm, and the shift in her centre of mass spun her against the wall. She let go of the spanner as she tried to steady herself, and Rav’s son caught it and flicked it away down the corridor.
‘What I am supposed to do when we meet the hijackers?’ Riyya said. ‘Charm them into submission?’
‘You will stay behind me while Hari and I deal with the situation,’ Rav’s son said.
They were only lightly armed. Rav had preferred to use his wits to get himself out of trouble, and his teeth and claws if talk and charm failed. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark’s maker lacked templates for hand weapons; its armoury consisted of an ancient pistol that Rav’s son wore on his hip. Hari carried a cutting wand he’d found in a maintenance kit, and the shuriken he’d programmed the maker to manufacture on the voyage between Ophir and Tannhauser Gate, using the template he’d worked up back on Themba.
He asked Rav’s son what his drones were telling him.
‘That the way ahead is clear.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘Isn’t it?’
As they neared the intersection with the main throughway that ran around the ship, a manikin, naked in its grey plastic skin, drifted out to meet them. It wore the face of Deel Fertita. She smiled at them and the manikin opened its right hand and scattered a drift of little black pips in the air. The infiltration drones.
Hari sent the family’s distress code through the common band and Rav’s son fired his pistol, snap snap, and the manikin was knocked backwards and its chest burst open, spraying shards of debris cased in little flames that flickered blue and yellow and snuffed out. Riyya drifted past, kicking and flailing as she tried to reach the wall, and Hari sensed a movement at his back. A displacement of air. A shift in the shadowless light. Rav’s son must have sensed it, too. He turned with Hari, both of them somersaulting and planting gloved hands on the wall quilting to steady themselves.
Manikins crowded the corridor. As Hari reached for his cutting wand they surged forward, moving so fast that Rav’s son managed to shoot no more than three before the rest swarmed over them.
9
Stripped to their suit liners, manikins gripping their arms, manikins crowding ahead and behind, Hari and Riyya and Rav’s son were swept through corridors and companionways to the omphalos, the heart of the section of the ship once given over to passengers. Sailing through the central shaft to a platform that jutted from the wall of architectural weave, where a woman in an acid-yellow bodysuit was studying a clutch of windows. Eli Yong and a burly, black-bearded man slouched in sling chairs nearby.
Hari recognised the man at once. Nabhoj. His brother, Nabhoj.
Riyya was escorted to a sling chair; a manikin snapped tethers around the wrists and ankles of Rav’s son, tethering him to the platform. The Ardenist had been sedated, was curled up inside the caul of his wings.
The woman gestured; the manikins dragged Hari towards her. She had the same pale skin and sharp, angular face as her sisters, her sister assassins. Her shock of black hair was brushed back and stiffly lacquered into a hundred points.
‘Welcome home,’ she said.
Hari looked past her, looked at Nabhoj. He tried to speak, wet his lips, tried again. ‘Hello, brother. I wish I could say that it’s good to be home.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Nabhoj said. ‘This is necessary.’
Hari saw a flash of movement in the corner of his eye. A boxy drone darting in, clamping a thin band around the top of his head. Something gross and irresistible shouldered through his thoughts. His bios cut out; a window scrolled down in front of his face. It was black and infinitely deep, and a star twinkled in its centre, jittering around a fixed point with an engaging eccentricity. He couldn’t look away, the star commanded his entire attention, and it was suddenly exploding towards him, a wavefront of searingly bright rapacious light . . .
When he came back to himself, the assassin was closing up windows one by one. He felt the functions of his bios begin to return, suppressed the urge to call out to the eidolon.
‘People keep doing this to me,’ he told the assassin. ‘It never ends well for them.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the assassin said. ‘We have Dr Gagarian’s files and we have you, and the files locked in your neural net. We have your friends and their ship, too, and your brother will be of no help to you. You caused us a little trouble in the past, but now everything you are and everything you have belongs to us.’
‘They came through the hull,’ Eli Yong said, leaning forward in her sling chair, her voice sharpened by distress. ‘There was an explosion and a howling gale and I couldn’t breathe, and a dozen manikins came crowding in. They shoved me in a box and told me they would expose me to vacuum if I didn’t give up the files. I won’t apologise. They already had my cache, I was helpless, I didn’t have any choice. So I gave them the key and told them about the copy in the ship’s mind. I won’t apologise. They would have killed me if I didn’t.’
‘Be grateful I didn’t kill all of you,’ the assassin said.
‘No more killing,’ Nabhoj said. ‘That was the agreement.’
Hari said to the assassin, ‘Where are your sisters?’
‘I need no help, as you can see.’
‘One of them, Deel Fertita, died here, on this ship. Two died on Themba, another died in Fei Shen. Two more killed themselves rather than surrender. Angley Li in Ophir; Ang Ap Zhang in Tannhauser Gate. Are you the only one left?’
‘We are many,’ the assassin said, and turned to Nabhoj. ‘Your father’s backup is still in the boy’s neural net. We will unpack him and put him to the question.’
Nabhoj said, ‘If you hadn’t trashed his viron, we could have restored him here.’
‘And if we did that, he would immediately attempt to take back the ship,’ the assassin said. ‘Given your unsatisfactory a
ctions when we took control, there is a strong probability that he would succeed.’
They stared at each other. Nabhoj was the first to look away. He said, ‘I will talk to my brother before you take him away.’
‘Talk, then,’ the assassin said, as if it meant nothing to her.
Nabhoj said, ‘I will talk with him alone.’
‘You’ll talk now or not at all,’ the assassin said.
‘This is a family matter,’ Nabhoj said, with a flash of his old authority.
He was dressed as usual in tan coveralls cinched by a utility belt. Sitting straight-backed in the embrace of his chair, elbows on knees, hands joined beneath his beard, hooded eyes gleaming under tangled eyebrows.
Hari said, ‘I no longer have any family.’
‘Like you, I wish that things had taken a different course,’ Nabhoj said.
‘Wishes won’t bring back your dead,’ Hari said.
Nabhoj tried to stare him down. When Hari didn’t look away, Nabhoj said, ‘We did not know that it would lead here, Nabhomani and I. But we are where we are, and we cannot go back. We must move forward. And we can do that together, Gajananvihari.’
‘You and Nabhomani have already done enough,’ Hari said.
‘We did what we had to do. Aakash was ruining our family, and he would not listen to reason.’
‘So you decided to kill him,’ Hari said.
‘No. No, no, that was never our intention,’ Nabhoj said. ‘We wanted only to depose him before he did more damage to our business. He was stuck, Gajananvihari. He was obsessed with Dr Gagarian’s work. It had consumed him. It had driven him mad. You didn’t see it because you were too close to him. You lacked perspective and experience. And Agrata, well, Agrata was always unquestioningly loyal. But we saw it, Nabhomani and I, and it was . . . so sad. So sad, so painful. Aakash thought he could revive the golden age of the Great Expansion. That’s what he told you. That’s what he told us. That’s what he told himself. But he was wrong. The golden age is long gone. Nothing can bring it back. Our father was chasing a dream of past glory, driving us in the wrong direction. We did what we had to do to save the family, and our business, and our ship.’