Stone Clock

by Andrew Bannister

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake …’ It wheeled round and disappeared upwards. Skarbo had to admit that the downdraught it left smelled smoky. He shrugged. No Spin, perhaps – but then he had never really believed he would get there.

  He shut his eyes, and promised himself there would be no dreams.

  The smell of smoke was getting stronger. He felt himself beginning to curl up into what he sensed would be his last position. Perhaps it would be quick.

  Then something knocked against his shell. He opened his eyes, and saw Grapf. It pulled away.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. The Orbiter says we need to evacuate. Please follow me.’

  It floated off a few metres, and waited. Skarbo hauled himself upright and followed. The ground seemed steadier, but there was definitely something odd about the gravity – an uneasy sensation of motion that didn’t stop if he stood still.

  The machine led him back to the clearing where he had found the ovoids. He had expected to see them scattered around, but somehow they were still on their columns. He shrugged. ‘What now?’

  ‘The Orbiter’s breaking the moon open.’

  Skarbo blinked. ‘Breaking?’

  ‘Yes. Ah – here’s the pod.’

  A white sphere about four metres across floated into the clearing and lowered itself to ground level just in front of them. The machine positioned itself over the top of the thing and dropped sharply on to it. There was a dull click, and the side of the pod split into slim segments that floated out of the way. The machine bobbed inside. ‘Come on. The Orbiter can’t wait long.’

  Skarbo climbed warily into the thing. The inside was plain and there was nothing to sit on, so he stood. There was a rattle of wings and The Bird skidded to a stop on the floor next to him. It looked around, and then turned to the machine. ‘Looks new. Out of character. Why?’

  ‘It’s not new. It’s as old as the Orbiter. It’s just never been used before. Please keep clear of the entrance; we’re about to leave.’

  The Bird hopped a few steps further into the pod. ‘That old? Untested? Not reassuring.’

  ‘I’m sure it works very well.’ The machine swung gently sideways until it knocked into the wall, and the slender segments fitted themselves back into the entrance, knitting together with long seams that glowed briefly blue and then vanished. There was a faint smell of ozone.

  For a moment the inside of the pod was dark. Then the walls flickered and disappeared, and suddenly they seemed to be standing in nothing. The forest floor was dropping away fast, although there was no sense of motion – they were already a hundred metres above the treetops. Not far from where they had been, the forest was burning, and Skarbo could see the bright spreading smudges of other fires further off, with columns of smoke rising and swirling in spirals towards the centre. Other sunlets must have fallen. The forest wouldn’t last long.

  He turned to the machine. ‘You said the Orbiter was going to break open the moon,’ he said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Exactly what it says. Watch.’

  And as it said the word watch the moon split itself neatly in two – a line appeared round its circumference and spread quickly into a black chasm. The forests next to the split leaned almost horizontally into the gap, and Skarbo imagined screaming winds as the moon’s air was sucked out. The fires all flared a hungry yellow as the air whipped them, and then just as quickly subsided to angry red glows.

  Then the two halves of the moon were apart, and Skarbo could see the old Orbiter, framed slightly off-centre between them.

  Again without any sense of motion, the pod flicked neatly through the gap and came to a halt still some distance above the Orbiter.

  For a few breaths everything seemed still. The Bird made a creaking sound somewhere at the back of its throat. ‘Yaw. Fire’s out. Moon’s wrecked. And?’

  ‘Ssh.’ Skarbo tapped it with a leg. ‘Look. Something’s happening …’

  Something was. A section of hull at the back of the Orbiter had opened – just a pair of doors hinging outwards, looking very old-fashioned but somehow very purposeful. Then a pale pink haze appeared between the doors, expanded to become a bubble, and elongated itself towards the split moon, weaving a little, in a way that made Skarbo think of the questing limb of some blind sea creature. When its tip was between the two halves it opened into a wide funnel shape.

  Skarbo squinted. There was a grainy shadow across the outer end of the thing … Then he realized. It wasn’t a shadow. It was trees.

  The forests were flowing out of the halves of the moon, down the funnel and into the body of the ship.

  Skarbo found his voice. ‘Is it saving the trees?’

  ‘No.’ Grapf sounded breezy. ‘Most of them won’t live through the vacuum. Too much cellular damage – but it will record their genes. And it never wastes biomass. The trees would have been worthless as soot and charcoal.’

  They watched the silent procession of dying trees for a moment. It was already tailing off; the process had been very quick. Skarbo wondered how many megatonnes of wood had flowed through that tenuous link. He glanced up at the shadowy ranks of warships; they looked as if they were watching too. He smiled at himself.

  Then the great harvest was over. Skarbo had half expected the funnel to withdraw, but instead it was tilting upwards and the pod was dropping towards it. Then they were in it, and the haze closed around them.

  Skarbo was getting ready to ask when they would be on board the old ship, when the floor kicked softly under him and the haze vanished. The pod made a click and the side opened.

  The old dry voice of the Orbiter said, Welcome.

  Skarbo looked around. ‘Oh,’ he said, and his voice echoed.

  He was standing on grey stone flags, flecked with blue and gold. Each one seemed to be a different shape, and they were tightly jointed along fine black lines of mortar. They looked flat but weren’t – the surface curved gently up, becoming walls that disappeared upwards into mist a hundred metres or so away so that he felt as if he was standing in a cupped hand.

  In the curve of the stones, there was something he recognized – an intricate cluster of spheres, some shining and some dull.

  It was a model of the Spin.

  He found his voice. ‘Did you make this?’

  It isn’t exactly made. But yes, I caused it. I said we had something in common.

  The Bird rustled past him and flew a circuit of the model, spiralling upwards to hover directly above it. Its wings made faint swirls in the mist. ‘Very good,’ it said. ‘As good as anything the insect made in eight hundred years! You can talk about planets together.’ It glided down and dropped to the ground next to Skarbo. ‘Now where am I going to be?’

  Here.

  ‘Oh, no. Not here. Somewhere with trees. You’re full of trees!’

  Yes. And other things. But I want you here.

  Skarbo fought back a smile. ‘Why?’

  I am busy. The Sphere was attacked – is still under attack, by an outlier of the Warfront. I have had to bring forward some plans. This has killed approximately a megatree, which I regret. Now I am needed. You may watch.

  The mist around the edge of the stones darkened and became space.

  Skarbo caught his breath.

  The view was of roughly what they had seen from the mouth of the tunnel that had brought them into the ship – but at the same time very, very different. Before, the great ships had been shadows and silhouettes and grey shapes. Now they stood out as bright, sharp-edged monsters against the fuzzy sea of junk behind them. And, he realized, they were moving. With the delicacy of dancers and far too quickly for their size, they slid round each other, leaving behind their uneven rows and forming themselves into a sphere within the larger sphere of debris. And with the old Orbiter in its own hollow at the centre of the sphere, Skarbo noticed.

  The voice of the old ship broke in on the thought. Please prepare for a bright light – and as it finished saying li
ght, the sphere of ships flared a harsh, nerve-burning white.

  He had shielded his eyes just in time. Fierce after-images smudged across his vision even so.

  He heard The Bird say, ‘Shit …’

  He cautiously unshielded an eye. The ships were still there, but the debris had gone. All of it – he could see all the way to the little molten star in the centre of the Sphere and, in the other direction, all the way to the gauzy outer field.

  There was something wrong with the field. Even though he had never properly seen it before, he could tell that without doubt. Most of it was still the shifting, multicoloured veil he had expected but there were ragged patches of plain colour – sullen reds and blues, and here and there a nauseous yellow. They were spreading. He pointed at them.

  ‘Orbiter?’

  Yes. The attack has damaged the outer field. Those colours mean that sentience has ceased in those areas. The Sphere would have died in days. Now it will die in hours, if no one intervenes.

  ‘Oh.’ Skarbo watched the patches. Two were growing towards each other, one red and one blue. When they touched, they snapped together into one. The colour flickered harshly for a second and settled into red. It looked unpleasant, and he dropped his gaze. ‘Is it in pain?’

  Yes, in its own way. But we have an agreement.

  The ships were moving again, undoing the globe as if it was a puzzle and instead forming a hollow cylinder. Not quite hollow, Skarbo realized – there was one ship in the middle of it. It looked bigger than the others; he hadn’t noticed it before. It also looked more battered, like one of the hulks he had seen on the way here.

  The hollow cylinder was pointing towards the centre of the Sphere, and suddenly Skarbo had a vision of what might be about to happen. ‘Is the old ship part of the agreement?’ he asked.

  Yes. That was the vessel that overwhelmed Hemfrets’s ship. It volunteered. It was damaged. Now it, too, is choosing to die.

  Skarbo nodded.

  Beams of light leapt from the surrounding ships, lining the cylinder with a complex latticework that flexed and shrank until it was a close fit round the old ship in the middle. The light flared, just once, and the old ship was gone, launched like a spear towards the centre of the Sphere.

  By the time it reached the molten core, it was an orange speck against the yellow-white incandescence. It disappeared.

  The core convulsed, shrinking for a second. Then expanded, almost too quickly for Skarbo to follow, into a vivid globe of flaming plasma. Even as he began to turn away it reached them, streaming past the ships in writhing gouts of bright gas. He flinched, but then saw that the inferno was parting as it reached them; against its brilliant light he could see a faint translucent cone. Some sort of field, then.

  And then the gas was past them, and pouring into the outer field.

  The field flared, came apart like paper, and swirled away in dying shreds.

  Skarbo took a breath. ‘Is that it?’

  Yes. The Sphere is over. I am sorry.

  ‘Now what?’

  Watch.

  ‘What? Oh …’

  As he watched the formation broke up. The movements were different. Instead of being graceful and sinuous, they were jerky – almost brutal. Then half the ships flicked out of sight completely. The view zoomed out, making his head swim, and he was standing on nothing, apparent kilometres above an Orbiter that had become an elongated dot.

  Ahead of him there were more dots. Many, many more – a fleet, at the least, and a smaller group that he guessed were the old ships from the Sphere, squaring up to them.

  He pointed. ‘Is that the outlier?’

  Yes. They have exposed themselves.

  The old ships were outnumbered tens to one – hundreds. More. It was impossible.

  Then, too quickly to follow, the formation of the old ships blurred and stuttered. Patterns formed, changed and vanished, and with each movement it seemed to Skarbo that the numbers of the enemy – he heard himself use the word, and almost laughed – were reduced.

  And then it was over. He hadn’t counted the numbers of the old ships but there didn’t seem much change. The other ships were gone.

  He breathed out. ‘Orbiter? Did we win?’

  That battle, yes. But they were mainly Baschet Clients – privateers and chartered yachts, never more than half-integrated into the Warfront. They stood little chance against professional warriors.

  Skarbo nodded. ‘I didn’t think of you as warlike.’

  I am not. But when you are as old as me, it pays to have warlike friends.

  There didn’t seem much Skarbo could add to that – but he found himself agreeing with it thoroughly.

  The thought made him look for The Bird, which had been uncharacteristically quiet. It was standing next to him, its eyes bright in the darkness. Its head was a little on one side, and its expression was quite unreadable.

  Skarbo smiled to himself.

  Then the ship added, And now, we are at war, too. Even if that was just an outlier, it was Warfront.

  Skarbo stopped smiling.

  Sholntp (vreality)

  THE HIGH SQUARE window was plain glass. There was a diagonal crack in it, and the blue-white beam of the street lamp outside threw a slanted square of light across the face of the woman sitting on the other side of the table. The shadow of the crack looked like a scar.

  The woman was thin and elderly and pale, and her voice sounded thin and pale too.

  ‘You must understand,’ she said. ‘You said there would be a crash, a short time before the two ships impacted. What happened may well wipe out life on this planet. How did you know?’

  It was Zeb’s third day in the cell. He had woken there, they had treated him there, and now they were questioning him there. Politely, but insistently. He was answering – uselessly.

  They told him it was a miracle that he had survived. His rescuers had not, and nor had ninety million people so far. The count was rising, they said. He must be able to shed some light, they said.

  It wasn’t in their nature to resort to indelicate methods, they said, when he continued not to help. And paused just long enough for him to imagine what they meant.

  The thin woman was a recent arrival. He suspected she was their last throw, before they overcame their natures and got indelicate with him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, for the hundredth time. ‘I can’t help you.’

  They had dragged him, in a charred medical pod, out of the remains of the low-atmosphere flyer that had somehow made it nearly two hundred kilometres from the crash site before the plasma storm of the old warship’s dying engines had whipped it out of the sky. They had told him it was by luck that he had been found in the first place; it was luck the pod had protected him; it was luck that someone alive had been close enough to the wreck of the flyer to find him over again. He had been luckier than his rescuers, who had not survived.

  He didn’t feel particularly lucky.

  Eventually the thin woman seemed to run out of different ways of asking the same question. She sat frowning at him, and he returned the frown as levelly as he could until she shook her head slightly, stood up and left. Zeb watched the door close behind her and listened for the quiet snick that meant locking. Then he stood up himself, stretched, and winced as the movement tightened half-healed skin. His ankles were encased in cylinders of barely yielding foam-heal, which meant that he walked stiffly but without pain. The foam would be removable tomorrow, they had told him.

  Apart from the table and two chairs, the world of his cell contained an electro-san that was the highest-tech thing he had seen here, and a cot which was much more primitive. He had little idea of the world outside his cell, except that it often contained sirens and sometimes the sound of crowds. He lowered himself on to the cot, pulled the discoloured cover over himself and got ready to wait.

  Then he sat up again. A siren had wailed, but it was different. The others had been classic way-clearers – sharp, Doppler-shifting tones that sw
elled and faded as they passed. This was an urgent, rising howl that spoke directly to the part of the brain that said Run.

  The crowd sounds had paused when the siren started. Now they were back, with an edge that hadn’t been there before.

  It sounded like panic, and it didn’t stop. It almost drowned out the snick of the door opening.

  Zeb had expected the thin woman, or a medical orderly, or any of the anonymous questioners he had met over the last three days. He got Keff.

  The thin creature was dressed in military drab. As much to gain time to think as for any other reason, Zeb pointed at it. ‘What’s that all about?’

  ‘Things are getting pretty official out there. I’m blending in. Someone might even ask me to do something useful. I’ll tell you what that feels like, shall I, if it happens?’

  Zeb sat down again. ‘Fuck off, Keff.’

  ‘No. I’m enjoying this too much already. Do you have any plans?’

  ‘Beyond staying alive? No. I was supposed to die up on the plateau, wasn’t I?’ He glared up at Keff. ‘I bet it really cooks your shit that I didn’t.’

  ‘Not really, given that I had to intervene more than once to get you out in one piece. How interesting do you think you’d be to me dead?’ Keff walked over to the cot and stood over Zeb. ‘I am in charge here, Zeb. I am in charge, and I have some games to play with you. The next one starts now – well, started ten minutes ago, really. The wind has changed, and the dust cloud from the ships is blowing this way. Did you hear the sirens?’

  Zeb nodded.

  ‘Well, they’re radiation alarms. Stay outside, here, and you’ll get a lethal dose in a day. Inside it’ll take longer. Someone once said that panic is worse than radiation. I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely quicker.’ It shook its head theatrically and then knelt down by the cot, reached out a hand and laid it on Zeb’s shoulder. ‘People are being simultaneously crushed and irradiated, and you did it. Don’t you feel just a touch of pride?’

  Zeb turned his face away.

  ‘Well, whatever. Three things you need to know now. One – the government has run away, starting from when the sirens started. Two – your image, and a version of your part in this, has been on news channels for the last twenty-four hours. And three – the door to this cell no longer locks.’ It stood up and rubbed its hands together in front of it. ‘Good luck.’