by Sam Hughes
Natalie is more than a little taken aback. "...I was in tears, earlier. For real."
"Oh, certainly," Anil agrees. "That was necessary. That would have needed to happen, regardless of who you were. But other than that, you are completely handling this. You know what I think? This is the you story. The reason you're here is to kick this rogue star's ragged arse and return home with some blessed confidence."
Natalie shakes her head, slightly disbelieving. "And why are you here?"
That's easy. "Perspective."
*
There was a city at the north pole of Earth-1. It was the size of modern Paris, far too massive to have been built directly on top of a floating ice sheet, and so was built on stilts, with its foundations all the way down in the Arctic Ocean's bedrock. A hardened plateau of artificial glass spread horizontally underneath the ice, serving as a building platform for the rest.
At the very pole was a sky tower, constructed from the same scrithlike material as the neighbouring Earths. It reached up far beyond the Kármán line to a captured asteroid, balanced at the top like the bud of a one hundred and fifty-kilometre-tall flower.
The city was called Qaaliqat, and the asteroid was XE171. The city is flattened wreckage now, and the asteroid is gone, along with the top two-thirds of the tower, leaving a blackened, jagged break. The asteroid landed somewhere in Greenland.
The original Greenland, that is. Earth, the original, was the only full-bodied physical planet in the worldring, and therefore the only structure robust enough to survive the opening attack largely intact. It is the last remaining halfway-habitable space in the inner solar system, and its poles are its least damaged areas.
Natalie and Anil aerobrake in over Qaaliqat's wreckage, dredging the compression heat out of the air in front of them and channelling it into their clean energy reserves, for a final approach so gentle and unfussed as to be eerie. It's local night; they navigate in using night vision and microwave radar. The city partly resembles scattered building blocks and churned icing, but thanks to the exposed glass it mostly resembles the back of a compact disc.
"Why?" Anil asks aloud, speaking of the sky tower as they coast in past it. It is kilometres thick, woven from nine thick braids. It splays out like a redwood tree at its base, for support, but even so there's no explanation that he can work out. "Why put a space elevator there, of all places? Even if you have the materials for it to be genuinely free-standing, what does it give you? It's not favourable for orbital insertion..."
"I don't think these people cared about favourable," Natalie says. "This is just the architectural style. The 'Because We Can' movement."
They steer in to a controlled landing on the edge of the Arctic suburbs, an area which hadn't been developed even before the attack. There's no surface ice here, just blank bluish glass with a grid of scrithwire inside it for strength. There should be cottages, lit with warm firelight from the inside. There should be a few full Moons' worth of artificial light cast from the top of the XE tower. Deep, cosy winter in the shadow of extreme technology. Everybody in this future lived permanently on holiday. But there's no village yet, and the tower's gone dark. The inner system has been completely evacuated of all humans, living and dead. The sky is absolutely clear except for shooting stars.
From Earth-8162-as-was to Earth-1, door to door, took a little less than twelve hours. They took a route computed to minimise transit time, which meant maximum acceleration followed by maximum deceleration. It was risky, and brutally expensive in delta-vee, and left an extremely slim margin for error. But the alternative was to linger in the 1-AU belt, a zone of space now swarming with fast-moving pieces of disintegrated artificial planet. "Asteroid belt" wouldn't do the cloud justice; there's enough material in it for a Saturn-like ring.
Once their vehicle is on the ground and motionless, Anil checks the dashboard. "That takes care of our entire delta-vee budget," he announces. "We've enough for a few emergency kicks. Reactionless kicks, I mean, if we need to zip straight upwards in a serious hurry."
"Could we get to orbit again?" Natalie asks.
"Not even close."
Natalie gets out. She doesn't need to stretch her legs; the suit takes care of every bodily need, from impact protection to scratching her nose when it itches. She wants to see the lay of the land. She climbs onto the car roof and scans the horizon. The car's headlights and interior lights cast a small circle of yellow on the ground, beyond which there's almost nothing to see but darkness. The tower can only be made out from the stars it obscures. In infrared the world only makes a little more sense.
It's night, and it'll stay night for the next four months. From this spot, the Sun will just travel around and around below the horizon, never rising. Hiding from the light in this way was instinctive. Whether line of sight with Ra would genuinely put them in more danger is anybody's guess. It could well be that they're constantly mobbed in danger. The world is still soaked in Ra's listeners.
Natalie and Anil have worked rules out. The suits don't come off, not for anything. The suits protect them at the atomic level.
"That said," Anil continues, prodding more readouts, "we still have bottomless chemical/electrical/heat reserves, and we can transmogrify the car into anything we need. Something which actually pushes against the universe to move, I mean. Old-school. Third Law-style."
"You mean a car."
"Something like that."
Shooting stars. As Natalie watches, a forty-kilometre-long fragment of Earth-5 re-enters. It burns for long enough to light the entire tower up as it passes. "We should find cover," she says, jumping down again. "This planet's being bombarded. And it's going to continue being bombarded for at least another million years."
Anil looks out of the vehicle window and straight down. A readout on his suit helmet tells him that breaking a hole in the reinforced glass would be possible, but prohibitively expensive in energy.
"We should try for the tower," Nat says, just as he's coming to the same conclusion. He gives a curt command, and the vehicle bulks up into a new configuration, rising up on fat new wheels.
*
They've been driving across ice slush for ten minutes when Natalie spots the first figure through her window. She writes the first one off as a trick of her eye. The second one gets her attention. She calls for Anil to stop the car. Anil is caught slightly off-guard by this, having assumed that Natalie was the one driving. Apparently, the car had been cheerfully guiding itself.
They're just inside the limits of the wrecked city. Underfoot there's slush and refrozen ice, with patches of exposed glasswork. The figure Natalie sees is at the top of a listing four-storey building. The building is darkened, but seems designed to be aesthetically pleasing even deep in the polar night, half-buried in snow. There are strange extrusions, as if the building had been connected to others, or part of a much larger structure. Maybe it's a snapped-off piece of sky tower.
"They still use... buildings?" Anil wonders aloud.
Natalie spotlights the figure, which immediately disappears. She switches from simulated sounds (the suit adding effects for boots crunching, and so on) to genuine external audio, but is rewarded with nothing but roaring wind.
The building shimmers in the spotlight. It appears to be made of thick, dark crystal.
"This part of the planet wasn't hit as strongly by the attacks," Natalie says, apparently to herself. "A glancing blow."
"Sorry?"
"I wonder what the equatorial belts are like," she says. "The Sahara must have been glassed."
"If there are people left, we should—"
"There aren't any people left," Natalie says quickly.
"Okay?" Something bleeps urgently in Anil's ear. He checks his wrist. "We need to get going."
Natalie returns to the car, and they drive on. The road becomes choppier, but the tyres simply expand until they can retain the required grip, sometimes raising the body of the car up to make room. They have to skirt more fallen chunks of detona
ted skyscraper, and overcome snowdrifts.
After a few more kilometres, they sight a figure in the middle of the road. The car cruises directly for it, oblivious. Anil is about to shout something about forward radar and Natalie is making a futile request for the car to stop moving when the figure opens fire, spraying them with a cocktail of ionising radiation and electromagnetic interference. The radiation is invisible, but the car exterior lights up urgently where the radiation is absorbed. The interference was already intense enough to impair the car's distributed brain. Within another half-second the vehicle is totally corrupted, and ceases to exist, obeying malicious external orders.
Anil and Natalie are dumped into the snow at fifty-some kilometres per hour, and roll hard. Anil skids to a halt at the feet of the figure. It's tall like a rake, with illogical bones and huge fingertips instead of arms or legs. It—
With a heart-stopping jolt, Anil recognises it. It's the dead ghoul from D12A. It's a particular nightmare that was made real, and has now been made more real. He can smell the thing, even hermetically sealed into the suit. He recognises the odour very clearly. It smells like unwashed skin from inside a newly-opened plaster cast.
Is that just his brain filling in the extra detail? Or is the thing already inside his suit systems?
Anil flails, and makes it to his feet. Natalie's standing too, but is looking in every other direction.
"We're surrounded," she reports.
"Car systems just collapsed like a damn soufflé," Anil says, holding onto Nat as they back away.
"I'm intact," Natalie says. Her active radar enumerates a hundred and ten shadows closing on them. She reconfigures her right forearm into a heavy silver beam weapon and vaporises the first ghoul.
Anil's suit shows him nothing so useful. Everything he calls up arrives in the form of opaque black squares on his helmet HUD, which he can't dismiss. They progressively obstruct more of his vision. "I'm not. I've got an issue. Nat, I recognised that thing."
Natalie sweeps a foot through the light layer of snow, exposing the carpet of sapphire underneath it. "Ra's onto us. We should have stayed in space."
"Me," Anil corrects her. "Ra's onto me. You might have a little more time. I think it's inside my head. Nat, look where we are."
Natalie grabs Anil by the scruff of the neck and pumps clean energy into his suit, burning out the invading Ra nanites. It takes more than half of her own clean energy reserves, and as soon as she lets go, Anil is infected again. She can't do anything about the corrupted programming.
"Anil," Natalie says, "when did you make your personal energy cache?"
"We— Just after the laser pass, right? Only a few seconds after Ra went berserk."
Natalie hesitates for just long enough to make the next sentence significant. "I made mine earlier."
"You— We have separate caches?"
"I thought something was going to happen. I built my own portable Ra. I'm paranoid. I try to step ahead."
"You did that before the attack?"
"About sixty seconds before," Natalie says. She pushes Anil to the floor and projects vertical slicing fields out in all directions, one through the cranium of each encroaching horror. This incapacitates about half of them. She goes to the long list of weapons and rifles through the rest of it like a Rolodex, looking for something effective and chemical.
"I've been contaminated this whole time," Anil realises. "And you—"
Natalie scatters metallic pink gobbets of something furiously dangerous on the floor around them. As the gobbets begin to smoke, she commands "Jets," and hoists Anil out of the arena on a pillar of flame. The ghouls follow them with laser beams and conventional projectile weapons, which Anil and Natalie's suits are just about able to turn away. They land heavily, another kilometre closer to the tower, but still hopelessly far from it. Natalie gets up immediately, Anil stays kneeling. More ghouls start to gestate under the snow around them.
"I don't think I can sterilise you properly," Natalie says, flicking through still more options on her suit HUD. "We're still surrounded with Ra particles, and both our systems are running flat out to keep them at bay. Your suit AI is twisting inside-out, it's going to turn against you any second now. I don't think I can even get a clean copy of your mind-state."
"If you're that far ahead of all of us," Anil shouts, "why do you even need me alive?"
"That's a stupid question!" Natalie shouts back.
Anil's suit helmet turns totally black, and he screams like someone who knows exactly what is happening to him.
Short of other options, Nat broadcasts a radio mayday. It is an act of absolute desperation. It could bring all Ra down on their heads, but how could that make things worse? She's starting to understand now, what Anil was saying before.
Somebody answers. Immediately.
"Intercessor 200C9A66 to idiots with no callsign! Do you have the faintest idea the stunts I'm pulling to grab you two? Stand by for extraction in thirty-five seconds, mark! This is going to be incredibly fucking ugly!"
Natalie whirls around, sighting an honest-to-god rocketship rising over the southern horizon towards them. The rocket is fat and brightly-painted, with three fins, something from Forties pulp. But all she can see of it is the blast from its single huge chemical engine, aimed almost directly at them as the thing decelerates in. She shouts into the radio, "Prove you are not Ra!"
Red dots flick up behind the lone engine, identified by a data feed provided to her by the intercessor. There are enough of them to coat the whole sky in that direction. They are kinetic harpoons and minuscule, artificially intelligent nuclear submunitions. They are not decelerating. All of them are converging on the intercessor, and the first of them will arrive at ground zero less than a second after the intercessor itself does. "That's Ra," the voice informs her.
This is still not enough proof.
Nat accepts it anyway. "My friend doesn't have thirty seconds. He needs immediate nanotechnical support. His suit's chewing him to pieces!"
"Acknowledged," the intercessor replies. The tone is flat.
"Don't just acknowledge! He's going to die!"
"Friend, I died sixty-eight times to get here and we're all going to die more times than that on the way out. Stand by."
"What do I need to do?"
Anil falls onto his side. He is convulsing and clawing at his helmet, and can no longer be heard.
The intercessor repeats: "Stand. By."
A split second before impact, just as Natalie is beginning to convince herself that she can feel the heat of the rocket's engine, it cuts out. A familiar red cutting laser spits out and back, in a practised flick-knife-like move which slices a fifteen-metre-wide circle around her and Anil. A controlled pulse of downward and lateral momentum shoves the circle of glass out from under their feet. There's an air gap between the underside of the glass plateau and the surface of the Arctic Ocean. They drop like stones into the darkness.
The rocketship follows them at a shallow angle and fifty times the speed, slipping through the gap with a clearance of millimetres. The ship just misses the two falling suited figures, hitting the water first and much harder. The cut circle is flipped back into place, and the same laser seals the glass behind them. The engine bell shrieks as it flash-chills.
Nat hits the water. Anil hits the water. The rocketship wraps them all in concussion shielding. Ra arrives.
There's another light show, bright enough to turn the bottom of the ocean into daylight. The layer of scrith-glass doesn't even crack.
Anil floats above Natalie. She is face-up. He is face-down and inert, silhouetted in the light, his suit helmet still black.
200C9A66, in the pilot seat, considers his options. Playing against Ra at such close quarters is like five-hundred-dimensional chess. Still, he's made it across the board.
He brings the interlopers aboard with a whump of matter transmission. He digitises their patterns and makes their corporeal forms safe from Ra's listeners— which is to say, he
destroys their suits and bodies with fire.
He moves.
*
Physical acquisition was a non-negotiable component of the mission profile. You can't rescue a soul from Hades with a fishing line. 200C9A66 had to descend into the gravity well in person, and fight hordes of daemons on the way.
Physical extraction, meanwhile, was never even on the table. Anil and Natalie and their shepherding intercessor bounce across the Solar System as signals, mast to dish, asteroid to probe to numberless space rock. 200C9A66 splits himself up, one version going ahead to secure each receiving installation while the other defends the transmitter from Ra's nuclear/electronic attack. They cross the asteroid belt five times trying to lose the pursuers, which are able to corrupt and repurpose the captured transmitters to follow the trail, and sometimes to anticipate future destinations. From 200C9A66's perspective - that is, from the perspective of the sole instance of 200C9A66 who lives all the way to the end - extraction takes around eighty fraught, subjective seconds. Natalie and Anil, travelling as data, perceive nothing. From above the system, using false colour, an observer would see red and blue packets flitting across space from node to node, like some interplanetary hacking minigame, and it would take about six real-time days.
They finally lose their tail at a minuscule cubewano, forty-something AUs distant from the Sun and far above the ecliptic. The rock having no name, 200C9A66 - its first human visitor - decides he gets to name it. He names it "Cubewano". He breathes for a luxurious second, and transmits them all home.
End of the line is Psamathe, which orbits almost as far out from Neptune as Mercury does from the Sun. Psamathe is a bustling metropolis compared to the rest of the route, but still not much more than a worthless pebble in the grand scheme of the Solar System. On the list of the system's most notable moons, it just about scrapes into the top hundred.