It looked beautiful from this angle, too, and Zeb felt even guiltier at the thought.
Bump-bump.
Bump.
Zeb pulled his eyes away from the distance. The Bug had stopped, its upper claw frozen in the act of clamping round the guy. It swung a little, which somehow felt much more sinister than the jolting of the climb.
He hadn’t stopped it. There was a basic display panel in front of him. It should have been alive. Apart from a single, lonely tell-tale, it wasn’t. The little light blinked slowly – back-up power was available but not much else, apparently.
He cleared it and opened the comms. ‘Shol?’
Nothing.
He tried again. ‘Shol?’
The comms fizzed. ‘Yeah. Sorry. I was running a few tests. Well, trying to.’
‘I lost power. I’m on back-up.’
‘We all lost power. That’s what I was testing.’
‘Oh.’ The two tubes were conductors; smart pads on the gripping surfaces of the Bug’s claws picked up power that was fed into the system at the base. Except now it apparently wasn’t.
He waited. After a while Shol was back. ‘Okay, our problem just got much bigger. Someone told Orbital Joule we lost half our remaining people, and they unfurled another big section of Lid.’
‘Shit. How big?’
‘It takes us down another twenty per cent – and we don’t have twenty per cent. Not with those lenses down. Zeb? This is bad.’
‘Yeah.’ He thought. ‘Listen, I have to go on up.’
‘Yes, I think you do. How do your batteries look?’
He glanced at the tell-tales. ‘Okay, but they could be lying. How long should they last?’
She paused. ‘If the cells are in good shape there’s enough for a full ascent plus fifty per cent. Getting back down’s easier, of course.’
‘Yeah. Easier.’ It was: in an emergency you just unclamped from the guy and fell, trusting that the parachute was still working, and assuming there was anything left to get back down to. Zeb looked round the worn surfaces inside his Bug. ‘How old are these cells, would you say?’
‘As old as the Bugs are, I guess.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Zeb looked down at where the Base should have been glowing below him. It wasn’t, but his imagination filled in the picture of Shol sitting in semi-darkness in the comms room. It suddenly seemed very important to know that there was a human being somewhere near him.
He cleared his throat. ‘Shol, I need you to stay on line.’
‘Will do.’ She hesitated. ‘As long as the power lasts. We’re in trouble here.’
‘Yeah. But not just us. I’ve been thinking, Shol. A bunch of people left in a huff, right? Saying it’s time to switch off?’
‘So?’
‘So, what’s the best way to switch off the vrealities? Take out the power supply. That’s us.’
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘Zeb, we’re only a few per cent of the local grid, tops. Taking us out doesn’t change the vrealities.’
‘Yeah, but maybe it’s not just us. Hang in, Shol. I’ll see you down there.’
He waited for the okay. Then he breathed out, checked his display and tried to remember what the tell-tale was really telling him about the state of the back-up power. Healthy, probably – and misleading, very possibly.
Whatever. He powered up the controls and let the Bug resume its hesitant journey.
Bump-bump.
That much hadn’t changed.
The tower didn’t finish at the lens array. Above it, a single rope twisted from three more nanotubes extended another ten kilometres out, above the atmosphere and beyond the Lagrange point. On the end of the rope was a bob weight, whirling round the planet like the stone at the end of a slingshot, which kept the whole structure in tension. It was mathematically elegant, but technically crude – the sort of thing you did if you were improvising from a centuries-old parts bin.
Bump-bump.
The guys were getting closer together. Above him the lens array had turned from a dot to a circle, and then to a ring of circles which expanded until it was wider than his field of view.
When he was just metres below the array he stopped. The cell read-out hadn’t changed, which made him trust it even less, but for the moment he still had power. He spoke to the comms.
‘Shol? You okay?’
There was a pause. Then a voice, sounding distant as if he was at the far edge of its range.
‘Not much to report. Power’s running down. You?’
‘I’m nearly there.’
‘Can you see anything?’
‘Nothing to see. The array looks fine, but I’m a hundred metres below it. Going to creep the rest of the way and then take a close look; plug into some diagnostics.’
‘Okay. Be careful.’ He could hardly hear the voice.
‘I will.’
He took hold of the climb-handle and set the Bug crawling upwards on its slowest speed setting so that the arms reached and hauled barely half a metre at a time. He wasn’t quite sure why, but it felt right.
Five minutes later the Bug snuggled up against the bulbous structural joint where the guys were tied to the delicate metal-and-glass flower of the array, and stopped. The Bug was quite capable of climbing round the joint and heading further up, but there was no need because the bit Zeb was interested in was at array level.
He woke the part of the board that handled diagnostics and let it look for a connection to the A-sub-I that ran the system.
A short pause. Then a couple of lights blinked once, and settled down to a sullen purple glow. Zeb pursed his lips. The little machine was alive, but not talking – the equivalent of the lights being on, and someone home, but definitely no visitors please.
It could just be a regular failure, he told himself. As well as being nearly mindless it was very old and very second-hand: it had been running various kinds of remote energy plant for thousands of years at least, switched from job to job by whoever chanced to own it at the time. And after all, everything the Wall Collective built, owned or managed to steal was second-hand, lashed together to last for just one more job. It was a metaphor for something, and not just for the Collective.
But the old A-sub-I was also very tough. Simple meant strong, especially if the simple thing was in a radiation- and debris-proof casing, had no moving parts and used a baby closed-loop fusion reactor that was almost everlasting. Therefore he didn’t believe himself. It shouldn’t go wrong.
He tapped his fingers on the console. Then he sighed and switched the comms from pod-to-pod to general broadcast. He thought for a while, then took a breath. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m up here. From the state of the array control I guess you are too. I can find out what you’ve done here, and I reckon in a while I’ll be fixing it, but I’m guessing it didn’t break itself – so for now, let’s talk instead.’
Nothing. He tried again.
‘Hello?’
And waited, counting heartbeats.
He had got to a hundred, in what felt like a pretty short time, when the comms spoke.
‘Hi. It took you a while.’
He stared at the display. ‘Bugs aren’t that fast. Especially if someone cuts off their mains power. Who is that?’
‘Dekefstiel. Hello, Zeb.’
Zeb breathed out. ‘Just you, or others as well?’
‘Just me. The others have gone on. I thought I’d wait for you.’
‘Me especially? How did you know it would be me?’
‘It was easy to guess. You’re the vreality addict, and you and Shol are the only atmos-trained people left down there. And Shol was always going to stay on the ground. Hence, you.’
At the mention of Shol, Zeb reached out and quickly toggled the comms to ground. Nothing; not even pilot tone. Shol had faded out. Suddenly he wanted very much to be down there.
That wasn’t an option yet. He switched back to broadcast.
‘—going to ask what’s going
on up here?’
‘Okay – what?’
‘We took out the array. Obviously.’
‘Are you going to take out the rest?’
There was a pause. ‘No. Not yet. We want to talk before we do that.’
Zeb felt his heart racing. Not yet. That meant some time, and without the arrays there would be no down there. He forced himself to sound calm. ‘Talking to me isn’t the same as talking to the whole Collective.’
‘I know. But people listen to you. Aish listens to you.’
‘She used to.’
‘Don’t piss around.’ The voice was sharp. ‘You haven’t got time and neither have I.’
Zeb raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re starving the Base of power. People are going to die if that doesn’t change. What do you want?’
‘Well, long term, a real civilization with a proper stakeholding in real planets.’
Zeb laughed. ‘I could have guessed that. Shit, I could have written it. And I’d have ignored it. Try again. Start with the bit where you want all the vrealities switched off.’
There was a laugh in the voice. ‘Okay, fine. We want all the vrealities switched off.’
‘And I don’t. If that’s all there is this won’t be a long conversation.’
‘Zeb, I could just take the whole array down.’
‘Yes. And the Lid. And everything else. And kill all your friends. And see how long it takes for the Belt to catch up with you.’ And, he thought, we’re using up some more of that time you haven’t got.
Dekefstiel didn’t sound concerned. ‘With respect, I don’t think they’re my friends, and you’re the one hanging by one claw ten kilometres above the ground. Look, this is me being reasonable. We don’t just want to shut everything down, you understand? We want a compromise.’
Zeb laughed. ‘What kind of compromise? Like, just kill off a couple of trillion and leave the rest in peace?’
‘Just killing them off isn’t what we want.’
‘The fuck it isn’t. You’re Switchers.’
‘And you’re oversimplifying. You know the vrealities better than anyone, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know. Possibly. So?’
‘What’s the speed ratio?’
Zeb shook his head. ‘It varies. Where are you going with this?’
‘Roughly?’
‘Couldn’t we have discussed this at ground level?’
‘We’re discussing it now. Come on.’
‘Well, okay. A few hundred thousand to one. So?’
‘So, let’s agree a time.’
For a moment Zeb didn’t understand. Then he said, slowly, ‘Are you talking about a deadline?’
‘Call it a lifetime. Many, many lifetimes – say, half a million years?’
‘Or half a year, as I call it. And then?’
‘And then, we power down. Respectfully, if you like. We could even have a ceremony.’
Zeb stared at the comms. ‘You have to be fucking joking,’ he said eventually.
‘Why?’
‘Where do you want me to start?’ He shook his head. ‘Okay, forget that you think it’s okay to kill a trillion people. Forget you think waiting six months before you kill them makes a difference. Seriously forget that you just suggested a ceremony. A ceremony! With what? A respectful speech and some sad music? Forget all that. But suggesting it to me? Me? Really?’
He had tried to sound calm but by the time he got to the last word his throat had tightened and his voice was rising. He reined himself in and waited.
Dekefstiel sounded amused. ‘Yes, you. Really. If you want someone to make a difference, start with someone difficult. I’m starting with you. Tell me something – why do your friends down below want to keep the vrealities running?’
Zeb felt himself growing wary. ‘Because they – we – have a contract.’
‘Yes. Simple enough for them, isn’t it? They do the day job in the real world and stay out of the pretend one. But you don’t care about contracts, Zeb.’
Zeb didn’t answer.
There was a long silence. When Dekefstiel broke it, he sounded brisker. ‘Whether you like it or not, the future of intelligent life lies out here, Zeb. Not in there.’
‘Fine. You think that, and I think that makes you less like intelligent life than the people in there. So what? Just kill me. That ought to do it.’
Dekefstiel laughed. ‘If you were the only obstacle? Certainly. We might even give you a ceremony. But you aren’t. There are whole planetary systems with entrenched economic models that have only one purpose, and you know it. We’re growing, and we’ll get there, but we need people behind us. Not in our way.’
‘Join your movement. Is that it?’
‘There’s no movement to join, as far as I’m concerned, and if there was I doubt if you’d go that far. Not publicly.’ Dekefstiel paused. ‘But privately, maybe? You wouldn’t be the only one.’
‘Oh, I bet I wouldn’t.’ Zeb felt anger crackling inside him. ‘Same as I bet that the guys who abandoned us down there didn’t just have an overnight conversion, right?’
‘You’d need to ask them.’
‘I won’t bother. They’re probably too busy listening to you whispering in their ears.’ Zeb shook his head violently. ‘This has gone on long enough. I’m going to fix this array, and if I ever meet you, I’m going to fix you too. Got it?’
He had shouted the last few words. It felt good.
‘Okay, whatever you say.’ The voice was regretful, though still a little amused. ‘But you might find that some things are harder to fix than you think – and much harder to get down from, afterwards. And Zeb? We are going to win.’
The signal cut before Zeb could reach the comms to kill it. He stared at the board for a moment, while all the things he still had to say to Dekefstiel bounced round his head. Then he let out a growl and flicked back to downward comms – still nothing.
He compressed his lips and turned to the array and its unresponsive A-sub-I. He had projected plenty of certainty at Dekefstiel, but that hadn’t left much for himself. He had no idea what they had done to the system.
Well, it was time to find out. He fired up the full diagnostics suite, enabled the forced-entry function and set it loose on the sullen patient. The board display lit up to show a pool of rapidly changing numbers and symbols which Zeb couldn’t read, but which he knew was a mind-map of the little machine.
He watched them, imagining that the diagnostics was some ancient cutting tool in the hands of a barber-surgeon, slicing down through skin and bone and muscle tissue and gristle to expose the heaving guts beneath …
The diagnostics gave an assertive buzz. The randomly wandering symbols flashed once and became a uniform pattern.
They were in. Zeb rubbed his hands and reset the diagnostics to ‘investigate’.
The board flashed again, and this time it didn’t dim; the symbols brightened through the spectrum until they were a glaring blue. Zeb raised a hand to shield his eyes and craned back in his seat.
Then the board began to smoke.
‘Shit!’ Zeb fanned away the smoke and, when more joined it, edged himself sideways off the seat and shrank back against the wall of the Bug, as far as he could get from the flaring device. As he watched between carefully parted fingers there was a sharp buzz like an old-fashioned electrical circuit shorting and then a crack. The whole board jumped a few centimetres upwards and then settled back on its pedestal.
The glare was gone. The smoke drifted upwards and formed a hazy disc in the curve of the ceiling.
Zeb lowered his hand slowly and got ready to move forward. Then he stopped. There was something … He pressed himself back against the wall of the Bug, tensed, and recoiled.
That was it. The wall was getting warm. He tried again. Definitely. And warmer now – becoming hot.
His stomach leapt. Batteries. The fucking batteries were behind that wall.
There was nothing he could do. He moved away and waited. He could feel th
e heat radiating off the metal, and the already smoky interior of the Bug was beginning to smell of hot structure.
There was a soft, almost disappointing boom, and the Bug wobbled, just hard enough to make Zeb stagger backwards and bang his head on the wall.
‘Ow!’ He rubbed his skull. Then, as the pain faded, he let himself slide down the wall until he was hunched on the floor.
Without power – and he definitely was without power, because he could feel the Bug cooling down already – that was it.
He couldn’t even release the claw from the guy and fall because the claw release was on the control board, and everything on the board had an unhelpful melted look. He reached up and prodded it anyway, just to make sure, and nodded. Completely fried – geriatric plastic welded to more geriatric plastic. One more prod, and a big piece of the corner of the board fell off and clattered on the floor.
It had been a hack, and an aggressive one. They had used the old A-sub-I as a conduit for an attack that had completely overwhelmed whatever passed for the brains of the Bug. It seemed to be over; he assumed that there wasn’t anything much left to hack.
He laughed. Game over, basically. Time to wake up. Except that he was awake, and there was nowhere to go. He wondered if dying of cold was better or worse than asphyxiation, and which would come first.
‘Ah, fuck it.’ He repeated the words, much louder, so that they bounced round the inside of the metal coffin. ‘Fuck it!’
Then he froze. The Bug had moved – a definite sideways jink. He stood up, and by the time he was upright there had been another, and another – a little kick every couple of seconds. He glanced outside but there was nothing there except the milky film of the Skylid, now just below him, and the midnight blue-black of high-atmosphere near-space above it. But the Bug kept twitching, as if someone was gently plucking the guy.
Then he felt his eyes widen. Not plucking – climbing. That had to be it. Another Bug must be coming up the guy to rescue him.
He grinned. There was only one other Bug and only one person left down there who could work it. He grinned wider and spoke the name out loud to help make it true.
Stone Clock Page 11
