by Ken MacLeod
“I’ll take that under advisement,” said Beauregard, dryly. “Do you have a mirror?”
“No,” she said, puzzled.
“Is there a mirror anywhere on the bus? A rear-view or something, I can’t remember?”
Taransay glanced towards the front. No, of course it didn’t have a mirror, the driving was automatic.
“Uh, none that I can see. Why?”
“It’s apparently how your old hippy communicates with the AI in his sim. It runs on magic. We need one to communicate now.”
“Wait, how could magic work here?” The words were hardly out of her mouth before Taransay realised how stupid they were, after all the uncanny things she’d seen already. “Sorry, sarge. The impression of real physics is hard to shake. Just a minute, I’ve got an idea. Ringing off for now.”
She switched the phone off, glanced at her reflection in its glassy surface, and handed the device over to Durward.
“Is that enough of a mirror for you?”
Durward turned it this way and that in his hand. “It’ll do,” he said, grudgingly.
He started waving the other hand above his head in complex gestures.
“What’s that all about?” Taransay asked.
Durward glared. “Shut up,” he said. “I’m summoning.”
Taransay stepped forward and stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. With one hand she grasped the seat back; the other was balled in a fist, as if holding a dagger, a few centimetres from the mouth of the fighter who sat behind Durward. At first there was only her face and the wizard’s in the phone’s surface plate. Then a stern-faced, bright-eyed woman with a dark bob appeared, more vivid than any reflection. Taransay had the distinct impression the woman could see her.
A voice came from the phone, loud and distinct. The phone was off, Taransay was sure of that.
“Durward, I’ve rummaged around and it’s pretty clear they’re not Rax.”
“Well, whoop-de-doo,” said Durward. “But we still have to prevent the landing.”
The woman’s intense black eyes, like two tiny obsidian beads, gazed out from the screen.
“It’s too late for that,” she said. “By now it’s land or crash.” She laughed, making the phone shake in Durward’s hand. “We might as well live.”
She vanished.
“Give me that phone,” said Taransay. Durward handed it back, and called Beauregard.
“Hold up your phone!” she demanded.
Beauregard held his phone up to face the wide screen he was watching. Taransay allowed the others to peer at the small screen in her hand, but made sure she got the best view.
No way was she going to miss this.
Beauregard, steadfastly holding the phone up for Taransay’s benefit, couldn’t help wondering how Nicole and Shaw perceived the scene. They watched it impassively, intent but to all appearances unperturbed. Perhaps to their strange minds the view of the fast-approaching and all too real planet filling the big screens on the walls and the idyllic view from the windows of the sun rising over the sea on the virtual image of an entirely different planet were easily compatible. To his mind they were anything but. The clash of perspectives was now so inescapable it was giving him motion sickness. With his free hand he shielded his eyes from the windows, and tried to focus on the screens.
No talking heads, now, no commentary. Perhaps at last the avatars or presenters had encountered a situation for which they could find no words.
The view ahead of SH-0 expanded beyond the edge of the screen. Now Beauregard saw it suddenly as surface, in ever greater detail, patched by the glare of clouds. A sharp, straight line of white stabbed out ahead, slashing upwards across the view. The fusion jet. Beauregard knew the module was decelerating, but the surface seemed to be magnifying and moving out of view on all sides faster and faster. It felt like the top of the atmosphere was about to smash into them like a wall into his face.
A moment later, it did. Caught in its downward plunge by the first thin wisps of gas, the module must have shuddered—certainly, the view from the screens flickered. Then that view reddened, deepening in seconds from a momentary impression of orange haze to a fiery heat. The screen showing the view behind remained black, speckled with stars.
The screens swung again. The view on one side became a uniform sheet of red split by the sharp white line, on the other side a turbulent flame-lit dark.
And then it was clear again, green and blue and brown and purple in flickering succession. What had been the view ahead became the view down. That view was moving fast, pouring from the top of the screen to the bottom, feature and contour flicking by far too rapidly to more than glimpse.
Beauregard heard Shaw grunt some query, and Nicole’s terse, testy reply. “I’m trying, I’m trying!”
The view down became stable, increasingly detailed, closer and closer but impossible to tell how close. Beauregard had no reference point, no familiar scale with which to judge. The view downward lurched and then, quite abruptly—in a sudden dispersal of clouds of steam by a ferocious wind—it was the view outside.
They gazed at the alien landscape beyond the wide circle they’d scorched and cratered, speechless for a moment. It was at first difficult to discern what they saw as distinct objects, rather than as intricate masses of colour. Then something moved, separating itself from the background, and everything snapped into perspective. The thing that moved was a low, wide blue-green circular patch, which rippled over the lip of the crater and across the smoking ground towards the module. It looked about twenty metres in diameter, blurred at the circumference by repetitive rapid motion, like the whirring of gears or cilia. Beyond it, on a slope in the near distance, something much larger was moving, too. Grey, with red glowing cracks, a solid mass of lava advanced. In its path, purple spheroids and black entanglements burst and cracked and burned. All around it, green specks rose from the ground and whirled into the sky, to be whipped away by the wind.
“This doesn’t look good,” said Beauregard. He swallowed hard. “Situation somewhat off nominal.”
“We always knew there were volcanoes down here,” said Nicole, sounding defensive.
“You didn’t have to fucking land on one!” said Shaw.
“I had no choice,” said Nicole.
The blue-green circular mat flowed toward the module, and up its side and over. The screen went dark. Then it went light again, showing the sky. Then dark again, showing the other side of the crater, upside down. The whole process was repeated.
“Holy fucking shit,” said Beauregard. “It’s…rolling us?”
“Out of the way of the lava!” Nicole added eagerly, as if this let her off the hook for landing in its way in the first place.
“We always knew there was life,” said Shaw. “We just didn’t know it might take an interest.”
“But what kind of interest?” Nicole asked.
Beauregard found himself suddenly cold, and realised it was sweat drying on him. He felt shaky with relief.
“We’ll live to find out,” he said. “That’s the thing.” He clapped Nicole’s shoulder, and then Shaw’s. “If you can walk away, it’s a landing.”
If you can walk away, it’s a landing.
Baser had never heard this saying, but some such reflection was reverberating around its mind as the robot clambered down from the transfer tug, slithered part of the way down the remaining mass of ice and made a final spring to the surface of SH-17. Baser steadied itself and set off across the crater floor to where Seba, Rocko, Pintre, Garund, Lagon and the others waited, a hundred metres away. Behind it the transfer tug, like a bedstead lashed on top of a boulder, stood in a steaming, puddling, refreezing and volatilising cascade of phases of ice.
Baser felt a surge of positive reinforcement that relieved a tension that had been increasing for some time. It had chosen to remain out of touch with the other freebots during its bold action and its long orbital return, and had not b
een at all sure of its welcome.
said Lagon.
said Baser.
said Baser.
said Lagon.
It was.
Together, the robots rolled or walked across the dusty basalt to set about their kindly task.
extras
meet the author
KEN MACLEOD graduated with a BSc from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an MPhil thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He is the author of twelve previous novels, five of which have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and two that have won the BSFA Award. Ken MacLeod is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian.
introducing
If you enjoyed
THE CORPORATION WARS: INSURGENCE,
look out for
FORSAKEN SKIES
by D. Nolan Clark
Sometimes the few must stand against the many.
From the dark, cold void came an unknown force.
Their target is a remote planet, the home for a group of people distancing themselves from mankind and pursuing a path of piety and peace.
If they have any chance at survival, a disparate group of pilots must come together to fight back any way they can.
But the best these aces can do might not be good enough.
Chapter One
Flying down a wormhole was like throwing yourself into the center of a tornado, one where if you brushed the walls you would be obliterated down to subatomic particles before you even knew it happened.
Racing through a wormhole at this speed was suicide. But the kid wouldn’t slow down.
Lanoe thumbed a control pad and painted the yacht’s backside with a communications laser. A green pearl appeared in the corner of his vision, with data on signal strength rolling across its surface. “Thom,” he called. “Thom, you’ve got to stop this. I know you’re scared, I know—”
“I killed him! I can’t go back now!”
Lanoe muted the connection and focused for a second on not getting himself killed. The wormhole twisted and bent up ahead, warped where it passed under some massive gravity source, probably a star. Side passages opened in every direction, split by the curvature of spacetime. Lanoe had lost track of where, in real-space terms, they were—they’d started back at Xibalba but they could be a hundred light-years away by now. Wormspace didn’t operate by Newtonian rules. They could be anywhere. They could theoretically be on the wrong end of the universe.
The yacht up ahead was still accelerating. It was a sleek spindle of darkness against the unreal light of the tunnel walls, all black carbon fiber broken only by a set of airfoils like flat wings spaced around its thruster. At his school Thom had a reputation as some kind of hotshot racer—he was slated to compete in next year’s Earth Cup—and Lanoe had seen how good a pilot the kid was as he chased him down. He was still surprised when Thom twisted around on his axis of flight and kicked in his maneuvering jets, nearly reversing his course and sending the yacht careening down one of the side tunnels.
Maybe he’d thought he could escape that way.
For all the kid’s talent, though, Lanoe was Navy trained. He knew a couple of tricks they never taught to civilians. He switched off the compensators that protected his engine and pulled a right-hand turn tighter than a poly’s purse. He squeezed his eyes shut as his inertial sink shoved him hard back into his seat but when he looked again he was right back on the yacht’s tail. He thumbed for the comms laser again and when the green pearl popped up he said, “Thom, you can’t outfly me. We need to talk about this. Your dad is dead, yes. We need to think about what comes next. Maybe you could tell me why you did it—”
But the green pearl was gone. Thom had burned for another course change and surged ahead. He’d pulled out of the maze of wormspace and back into the real universe, up ahead at another dip in the spacetime curve.
Lanoe goosed his engine and followed. He burst out of the wormhole throat and into searing red light that burned his eyes.
Centrocor freight hauler 4519 approaching on vector 7, 4, −32.
Wilscon dismantler ship Angie B, you are deviating from course by .02. Advise.
Traffic control, this is Angie B, we copy. Burning to correct.
The whispering voices of the autonomic port monitors passed across Valk’s consciousness without making much of an impression.
Orbital traffic control wasn’t an exacting job. It didn’t pay well, either. Valk didn’t mind so much. There were fringe benefits. For one, he had a cramped little workstation all to himself. He valued his privacy. Moreover, at the vertex between two limbs of the Hexus there was no gravity. It helped with the pain, a little.
Valk had been in severe pain for the last seventeen years, ever since he’d suffered what he always called his “accident.” Even though there’d been nothing accidental about it. He had suffered severe burns over his entire body and even now, so many years later, the slightest weight on his flesh was too much.
His arms floated before him, his fingers twitching at keyboards that weren’t really there. Lasers tracked his fingertip movements and converted them to data. Screens all around him pushed information in through his eyes, endless columns of numbers and tiny graphical displays he could largely ignore.
The Hexus sat at the bottom of a deep gravity well, a place where dozens of wormhole tunnels came together, connecting all twenty-three worlds of the local sector. A thousand vessels came through the Hexus every day, to offload cargo, to undertake repairs, just so the crews could stretch their legs for a minute on the way to their destinations. Keeping all those ships from colliding with each other, making sure they landed at the right docking berths, was the kind of job computers were built for, and the Hexus’s autonomics were very, very good at it. Valk’s job was to simply be there in case something happened that needed a human decision. If a freighter demanded priority mooring, for instance, because it was hauling hazardous cargo. Or if somebody important wanted the kid glove treatment. It didn’t happen all that often.
Traffic, this is Angie B. We’re on our way to Jehannum. Thanks for your help.
Civilian drone entering protecte
d space. Redirecting.
Centrocor freight hauler 4519 at two thousand km, approaching Vairside docks.
Vairside docks report full. Redirect incoming traffic until 18:22.
Baffin Island docks report can take six more. Accepting until 18:49.
Unidentified vehicle exiting wormhole throat. No response to ping.
Unidentified vehicle exiting wormhole throat. No response to ping.
Maybe it was the repetition that made Valk swivel around in his workspace. He called up a new display with imaging of the wormhole throat, thirty million kilometers away. The throat itself looked like a sphere of perfect glass, distorting the stars behind it. Monitoring buoys with banks of floodlights and sensors swarmed around it, keeping well clear of the opening to wormspace. The newcomers were so small it took a second for Valk to even see them.
But there—the one in front was a dark blip, barely visible except when it occluded a light. A civilian craft, built for speed by the look of it. Expensive as hell. And right behind it—there—
“Huh,” Valk said, a little grunt of surprise. It was an FA.2 fighter, cataphract class. A cigar-shaped body, one end covered in segmented carbonglas viewports, the other housing a massive thruster. A double row of airfoils on its flanks.
Valk had been a fighter pilot himself, back before his accident. He knew the silhouette of every cataphract, carrier scout, and recon boat that had ever flown. There had been a time when you would have seen FA.2s everywhere, when they were the Navy’s favorite theater fighter. But that had been more than a century ago. Who was flying such an antique?
Valk tapped for a closer view—and only then did he see the red lights flashing all over his primary display. The two newcomers were moving fast, a considerable chunk of the speed of light.
And they were headed straight toward the Hexus.
He called up a communications panel and started desperately pinging them.