Revelations

by Nigel Foster

  They walked to the airlock in silence.

  Two embryonic suits hung from the ceiling. One marked Captain Keislack, the other Major Jones.

  < Consider it formal wear. You need to strip to undergarments.

  Kara stared at the globe helmet and bulky collar. She’d never worn a suit before. This was no time to learn. Then the simulity training cut in and she relaxed. Stripped to her body stocking, put on the helmet and stood with her arms akimbo and legs slightly apart. The suit unrolled itself from the base, as if a very dense liquid, and covered her body. She lifted a left foot. The material became a boot, same for her right.

  Ishmael anticipated and answered her questions. The suit was made of a smart liquid material developed – for once by humans – in the Wild. Once she was covered, it would become rigid enough to maintain its form, while allowing her complete freedom to move. Excess heat and moisture became part of the air re-breathing system, which also used her exhaled breath. Once she attached the compressed oxygen cylinder (good for six hours), her work belt and clipped on the lifeline, Kara would be ready. Communication with the SUT would normally be AI to AI, but no point because with Salome’s demise Ishmael would be talking to himself. And since little Pablo was also dead, Kara and Marc would communicate via intercom.

  > One question. How do I get out of the suit? Clap my heels three times?

  < You wouldn’t like Kansas. Simply ask. I’ll do it.

  Did Ishmael knowing about the Wizard of Oz make him more trustworthy? Did she have any choice? A few metres away Marc was also covered in a suit. He looked annoyed. And also like those illustrations she’d once seen in antique science fiction magazines. Skin-tight space suits, globular helmet fully transparent.

  Marc looked at her and grinned. “Very sexy.” No intercom distortion at all.

  “When we get back we should start a fetish sex club.”

  < It’s been done. So many, many times.

  Kara clipped Marc’s lifeline to the SUT. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re still sure?” Marc asked. "What if netherspace doesn’t like you?”

  “If there’s a problem Ishmael will get me out of there.”

  > Open the doors. If Ishmael knew how terrified she was, would he still do it?

  The doors slid open.

  < You’ll be fine, Kara. Merest hint of danger and you’re out of there.

  Kara stepped into the void to stare at, to be one with netherspace.

  It was so much more than the view on a screen. The colours more intense, plenty she’d never seen before, not even in the most technicoloured dreams. Many had a three-dimensional shape.

  Colours at war around her. Kara knowing this wasn’t what netherspace was, only how her mind interpreted it. She stood in the open airlock, Marc by her side, his face ecstatic. Kara fixed their safety lines and leaned away from the hull, as if crewing a yacht.

  And then it hit her from the soles of her feet up, from the top of her head down, like the greatest punch in the gut she’d ever known, one almighty clout to her arse: the sheer overpowering energy of the reality called netherspace... and how fucking insignificant she was.

  Not.

  Never.

  Kara Jones was loved (maybe) and loved in return (almost for sure). Kara Jones had a mission and Kara Jones would complete it. Kara Jones would bring her people home. None of that was insignificant and fucking netherspace should stop being so bloody full of itself.

  Then she realised she was thinking of netherspace as an intelligent thing, like Marc seemed to, and began to laugh.

  < That’s better.

  > I had a moment.

  < Any consolation, me too. I mean, it’s pretty fucking awesome up close.

  > Never heard you swear before.

  < Never fucking needed to.

  A colour moved towards them. A colour she’d never seen before in her life, that made her feel giddy and elated.

  “It’s one of the good ones,” Marc said over the suit intercom.

  Kara felt it snuffle around her, like a well-fed tigress perhaps wanting to play. She fought back the instinctive panic and tried thinking hello, there’s a good girl, at it... no, better to think how much she liked it. The colour went away.

  I’m in netherspace and just said hi to a good entity. Not bad for a sniper/assassin.

  “Are all the colours entities?” she asked Marc.

  “Only the ones that make you feel funny.”

  Kara concentrated on trying to sense Tatia’s trail. It was there but still faint.

  “Seems to me,” Marc said, “you should concentrate on what made the bond between her and you special.”

  Kara knew exactly what he meant.

  * * *

  Returning home from the Cancri planet, the SUT quiet after the n-space suicide of an ageing engineer. Kara in her cabin, opening the door to see Tatia with a question in her eyes. And her old AI, who’d died in the Science Museum basement in Exhibition Road, asking if this is wise, does Kara know what she’s doing?

  Damn right she does: taking a beautiful, tawny blonde to her bed. Not because said blonde has been through hell and needs to feel human, needs the release. It is not therapy. It is what Kara wants because Tatia is beautiful and Kara is desperate to know, to taste and own her body...

  ... but so confused...

  < Relax. I have the memory set.

  Yes. The first time an explosion of want and need. The second lasted so very much, so languorously much longer. It wasn’t a matter of what they did to each other. But what they did together. Afterwards nestled together, breathing each other’s breath while exchanging secrets.

  “Marc turned me down,” Tatia had said.

  “I’m second best?” Kara teased.

  “Never. Just different. I thought you and him?”

  “Not possible,” Kara had said firmly. “Did he say why?”

  “Wanted more than a quick fuck.”

  “Man’s a fool.” She didn’t say that was what Marc had with Henk the medic.

  “I love your mouth.”

  “My tongue’s jealous.”

  “No need. It works so hard.”

  They both giggled. The usual intimate whispers that lovers have enjoyed forever...

  ... and it was that intimacy, Kara realised as she floated in netherspace, that had formed the bond between them, more than all the kissing and fucking. She would find Tatia not because she was great in bed. Not because Kara always brought her people home... or tried really, really hard to do so. But because Kara genuinely cared for Tatia. Loved her as a person, an individual. They’d probably never have sex together again – Greenaway would so not approve – but they would always be the closest of friends. Almost like... sisters? Uh, oh, this is getting weird, Kara thought and the next moment found Tatia’s trail, like a luminous dotted line and stronger than ever.

  < Got it. Go back inside.

  It wasn’t always so easy. Sometimes Kara had to wait several minutes before the trail was strong enough in her mind for Ishmael to dead reckon their way through what – Kara was convinced – was the archetype of every hell ever imagined. Once she tried to imagine the sequence, from empathy to AI to star drive. All she got was interacting energy fields, and that didn’t help.

  Not even a sense of motion.

  Except when it felt like she was falling towards the trail. But that was her, not the ship. Sometimes it felt like she was falling away. Human brain forever attempting to interpret, to make sense of a situation beyond understanding. Or she felt the trail go up, move away at an angle that seemed impossible, as Ishmael begged Kara and Marc to get back inside the SUT, close the outer door, now.

  They had arrived somewhere Tatia was. Or had been.

  It was a nasty little planet, even from space. An angry purple, grey clouds and a few black oceans. They landed in what looked like a swamp.

  < Atmosphere breathable. But disgusting, like a burst sewage pipe. No sign of movement or recognisable life.

&n
bsp; Kara and Marc stood in the open airlock. The planet did smell like a burst sewer pipe, and worse.

  “Well?” Marc asked.

  “Not here,” Kara said, her fingers playing with the lock of Tatia’s hair. “But she has been.” She concentrated, then recoiled slightly. “Something died here. Maybe Tatia killed it, impossible to say.”

  They left the planet and went back into netherspace. Either the trail was stronger or Kara had become more psi-sensitive.

  < Got it. Back inside.

  And they broke into normal space to see a distant sun and a close-by planet gleaming blue and white like Earth.

  “First a shower,” Marc said. “then a... Oops!” He caught Kara just before she slumped to the floor. “Food now. And a drink.”

  It wasn’t physical exhaustion. Only now could Kara admit – to herself – that she’d been terrified every second in netherspace. Terrified of the safety line breaking so she fell away from the ship forever, never dying. Terrified of a local eating her mind. Terrified of being lost.

  They ate a freeze-dried chili then Kara went to shower and change.

  * * *

  Earth it wasn’t, although inhabited by humans. They landed near a large town, sat in the open airlock, waiting for someone to say hello or try and kill them.

  A small crowd gathered several hundred metres away. It looked nervous.

  Eventually a lone figure walked towards them.

  < Human, male, approx seventeen Earth years old.

  As anyone could see.

  < Wearing a brightly coloured sack. It could be ceremonial.

  Or simple bad taste.

  * * *

  The young man was nervous and spoke in a strange English dialect. Kara used Ishmael first to understand the initial outpouring and then for the questions she needed to ask.

  “Earth unofficial colony. Taken over by the pre-cogs,” she told Marc. “Tatia, or someone just like her, came with an Originator’s ship. Apparently she was meant to be sacrificed – they do that a lot round here – but Tatia decided otherwise. Instead, killed the official executioner and a high priestess. Then the ship took off.”

  “You believe him? She’s still alive?”

  “I do. He’s terrified.”

  After twenty-four Earth hours and three more planets that Tatia had visited, Kara was less terrified by netherspace. It would never be a favourite place, somewhere to visit for a relaxing weekend. Being able to stay alive without protective clothing was counter-intuitive and always a slight worry: what if netherspace changed its mind? In an instant unable to breathe, deathly radiation sleeting through her body. Which was another thing: she’d come to think of netherspace as being aware of her. She had stared into the abyss and the abyss was staring back.

  Yet the earlier terrors had faded. Continual exposure had lessened the netherspace effect. Now she could look at it for as long as twenty Earth minutes before her sanity weakened. Marc spent as long outside as he could. Ishmael thought that Marc was either genetically immune, perhaps bred to it; or netherspace liked him and so did no harm.

  > Really? Kara asked. Netherspace got favourites?

  < You’ve felt something similar.

  > I sensed maybe awareness. Not socialising.

  < We need all the friends we can get.

  And if the price for the lack of fear was visual, a price worth paying. Or so Kara told herself in front of the mirror, staring at the reflection of her face with eyes that glowed in an orgy of rainbows.

  She supposed that she’d need to wear very dark glasses back home. One more bloody thing sent to annoy her.

  Thirty-six hours after leaving the dying Gliese, the Iron Thrown jerked into real space and Kara knew they’d arrived. It had to be.

  “Will you look at that,” Marc breathed.

  A giant planet shimmering every shade of blue hung in space. There were three moons, equidistant from each other so the planet was in the middle of a vast triangle.

  And also what Marc immediately thought of as tombstones. Hundreds, thousands of vast oblongs in close orbit around the planet. Incredible engineering, far beyond anything humanity had realistic plans to build. He and Kara stared at the main screen, equally fascinated and wary. This had to be the civilisation at the heart of the repcog empire. A line of poetry came into his head: Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.

  “Tatia’s here,” Kara said. “I know it.”

  “They’ll know we’re here. Anyone who can build that will squash us like flies.”

  “They’re probably expecting us,” Kara said. And how does the scenario play out? What am I, what are we meant to do?

  < There are several Originator-model craft three point six two thousand kilometres above the planet’s north pole, as we view it.

  “Activate weapon systems and go there,” Kara said out loud. “Not too close to those constructs.” And in her head, to Anson Greenaway: I’ll bring her home. I will.

  12

  Anson Greenaway thought the attack would come in the small hours. Not dawn, since the enemy would be silhouetted against the sunrise. In the small hours, probably trying to infiltrate along the banks of the Severn. He’d been out the previous night, setting traps and trip wires. His enemies were skilled but he’d know when they were coming. In the end, he knew, they’d forget about subtlety and tactics. They’d simply rush the house, either caught up in blood-lust madness or each convinced that the person next to them would die.

  It would be sad not to welcome back Kara and Tatia. And maybe Marc, if he’d ever rejoined the real world, Greenaway’s world, the one he’d dedicated his life to saving. Sad that he wouldn’t see the final victory.

  There would be a victory. There had to be.

  If not, Greenaway would prefer not to wait for people who’d never return...

  * * *

  “What now?” Cleo had asked three days ago, as they finished a bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir.

  “Now I try and rescue what’s left of GalDiv.”

  “Berlin has fallen. GalDiv is occupied by the Free Earth Co-operative, whatever that is. There is no GalDiv. You didn’t wipe out all the religious fanatics. People feel fear, resentment and hate which, as usual, is directed by populist leaders.”

  “I didn’t realise...”

  “Your AI is unwell.”

  < Your AI is keeping its head down.

  “Twist is still active.” Twist the super AI that ran GalDiv and therefore humanity in space.

  “Maybe. Still, Berlin not a good idea. No city state is.”

  Kara would be learning the SUT controls, even if the instructions were already implanted in her mind. Kara left nothing to chance. Greenaway remembered how they’d made love on the way to Scotland, when need had overwhelmed them, giggling like children. So different from the previous night when both were as much concerned with the other’s pleasure.

  “Uh, oh,” Cleo said. “My AI says you’re on a death list.”

  Greenaway had expected it, although not so soon. “Any idea who?”

  “Six mercenaries hired from Tea, Vicar? in Bermondsey, London. The clients are former followers of Earth Primus. It’s a platinum contract remains in force.”

  Earth Primus, the anti-alien, Earth-first movement that had been destroyed several months ago. And how ironic was it that the mercenaries were hired from Kara’s favourite bar, her own home-from-home. “How are the mercs rated?”

  “Triple A, which is why they won’t give up the contract. You also seem to have really annoyed them in the past. It’s personal. Anson, stay here. You’ll be safe with us.”

  Greenaway shook his head. “Wilders would die protecting me.” The mercs would have access to all the latest weapon and surveillance tech. A platinum contract guaranteed the mercs would kill Greenaway or die trying.

  “Their choice.”

  “No. Mine. I’ll take my chances.” Or until I’ve killed my pursuers. Because while the contract’s in force, anyone near me is also in danger. And that co
uld include, in a day or so, both Kara and Tatia. They are not returning to Earth to be slaughtered by mercenaries.

  “You just went somewhere.”

  “Sorry. Planning.”

  “It may take some time to solve.”

  Would it? The pre-cog forecasts, Tse’s plan, had indicated success less than five days after Kara and Marc had been reunited. “If it does we failed.”

  “Nothing’s certain, love. In the end, it’s all probabilities and they change in an instant.” A very bad idea to tell him the truth about Kara’s mission.

  Greenaway looked at her in surprise. “And you once sold me on their certainty. If this, then that.”

  “Maybe that,” she corrected and stood up. “Give us a hug, love. One day soon we’ll all meet and be happy.” She turned and walked out of the mill house without looking back.

  Greenaway wondered if he’d just heard his own epitaph. He loaded a box of wine into his own jitney, thought for a moment and took out a bottle of Sicilian red. Broke the neck, splashed most on the ground beneath the ruined tree. Every year the first crocuses and snowdrops in Scotland had somehow thrived in winter’s last snow. Greenaway took a mouthful of wine and raised the bottle in salute to whatever elemental lived there – and, judging by the inside-out bodies in the woods, still did. Then took a last look round and left.

  He flew south over Wild country, keeping close to the ground. If the mercenary team weren’t already tracking him, they soon would. On a deserted part of the old Lancashire coast he stopped at a well-camouflaged arms depot. He’d begun setting up secret arms depots the year he’d taken over GalDiv, because it’s always best to plan for the worst. He filled up the rest of the jitney. Wine, food in stasis containers, guns and explosives, together with a near desperate optimism. A sad commentary on his life. He then wired the depot to explode if anyone attempted to enter it... and to explode anyway four hours after he’d left. Then flew south again, landing for a few minutes every twenty miles or so, knowing the mercenaries would have to check each stop in case he’d got out and sent the jitney on empty.

  The GalDiv AI called Twist contacted him, via Greenaway’s nervous personal AI, over Snowdonia.