Slow Bullets

by Alastair Reynolds

  “It’s the end of everything. You think we’ll make the slightest difference?”

  “We can,” I said. “We’ve already begun to preserve what we can—cut it into our flesh, into the flesh of the ship. Now we have to start putting that wisdom to good effect. It’s not much, I grant you. But we’ve got the benefit of hindsight. We know our history—what worked, what didn’t work. If people survived the Sickening on Tottori, then they survived elsewhere. We’ll find them. We can start saving these worlds, a planet at a time.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  I removed the injector from its bundle, giving Orvin plenty of time to recognise it, and see that it was intact and came with all the necessary elements.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not the one who needs luck today.”

  “Ah, I see. An eye for an eye. The appetiser before the main dish of my execution. Well, be careful. You wouldn’t want me to die before they put me into hibo.”

  “As if I cared.” I smiled. “But actually, I do care. That’s why the injector and its bullet are properly sterile, unlike the thing you put into me. I’m not going to let infection be the thing that eases you out of this. Oh, and I’ve never really believed in an eye for an eye.” I hoisted the injector by its grip, curling my fingers around the bulky trigger. “But there is a certain justice in it, I suppose. Can you guess what’s going to happen now?”

  “You’re going to do to me what I did to you.”

  I allowed him a good look at the injector. “Standard issue, Orvin. Not modified in any way.”

  “And the bullet?”

  “That would be telling. We wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun, would we?”

  Still holding the injector, I used the knife in my other hand to slit the fabric of his trousers a little above the knee. I pushed the injector against the skin, until the nozzle had almost buried itself in his flesh. I drew a breath and squeezed the trigger. I heard the crack and hiss and felt Orvin’s leg spasm as the slow bullet was propelled into him. To his credit, he let out only a grunt.

  I was sure I had made more noise than that.

  “Get this over with, Scur.”

  “What’s the hurry? There was no hurry when it was my turn. You left me with that thing working its way through my leg. I’m sorry about the pain, incidentally.”

  “Are you really?”

  “It’s less about revenge, more to do with me wanting you to carry an indelible memory of this procedure. If there was no discomfort, it might easily slip your recollection. And it’s very, very important to me that you remember the slow bullet.”

  “Maybe it slipped your mind, but I’m about to be executed.”

  “No, you’re not. And I don’t want you to die of infection, either, which is why I made sure the injector and the bullet were both sterile. Later, you’d better treat the wound with a first aid kit. There’ll be one in the capsule. Use it sparingly, though. It’ll be all you have.”

  Orvin narrowed his eyes. He could tell this was not going the way he had expected, but exactly what I had in mind was evidently still a mystery to him.

  “What capsule?”

  “Yes,” Prad said from behind me. “What capsule?”

  “The escape pod,” I said, twitching my head to address both of them. “The one we’re going to put Orvin inside. Silly me, though—I’m getting ahead of myself. Can you feel the bullet’s progress, Orvin?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Unlike the one you put into me, it’s not going to kill you. It’ll hurt, and it’s going to keep on hurting. But it’s not going to damage any vital organs or bleed you out. All it’s going to do is keep going until it reaches its destination—the core body location where your other bullet’s already lodged. Then it stops. The entry track will heal. You’ll get over the pain, more or less. There’ll be no sepsis. But the bullet will be there. In you.”

  “Why two bullets, Scur?”

  “It didn’t stop you putting another one into me.”

  “Ah, but that was pure, unadulterated sadism. You’ve something else in mind.”

  “Insurance,” I said. “In case the first bullet loses its power, or fails in some way. This one is fresh, since it hasn’t been inside you while you were in hibo. It has enough power to last the rest of your life, by a comfortable margin. Wherever you get to, we’ll easily find you again.”

  “Wherever I get to?”

  I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re a piece of dirt, Orvin—the lowest of the low. But you’re also a man from the past. You were alive before the Sickening came. That makes you too valuable to execute. Now move.”

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “Giving you the thing you don’t deserve,” I said. “A second chance. Not much of one, I’ll grant. But down on Tottori, they need someone like you more than I need revenge.”

  “I did not think Scur would do the obvious thing,” Prad said, with a wondering tone.

  “This is a trick,” Orvin said.

  I smiled in his face as we pushed him out of the cell, Prad keeping a tight grip on the energy pistol. “The fact is, Orvin, you know stuff. You can’t help it. Dregs and scraps of knowledge, it’s true. No more than the average sadistic thug. But right here, right now, just being an average sadistic thug puts you centuries ahead of the rest of civilisation—at least on Tottori.”

  “You’re quite mad, Scur.”

  As we made our way to the escape pod I kept on talking. “I can’t promise that you’ll end anywhere close to a settlement—not after what Prad told me about the guidance control on these escape vehicles. So you’re going to need to button up well and steel yourself for a long hike. But eventually you’ll make contact with the locals. You’ll figure out the hard stuff for yourself—language, customs, communicable diseases.”

  “And then?”

  “You start making a difference. For the better. You’re going to help with medicine, agriculture, basic technology. The ruins are still in place. You can help those people begin to put things back together. You can stop them taking wrong turns. Help them begin to rebuild. Tell them what you are, if you think it’ll help. Or make up some other story—say you’re a traveller from the south, or a wizard, or whatever you think will work. It’s up to you. Be creative.”

  We had reached the entrance to the escape pod. It was one of a curving row of airlocks, each of which fed a vehicle clamped onto the other side of the hull like a limpet. We would be losing the pod, squandering it on a single occupant. It was only one of many, though, and the sacrifice struck me as acceptable.

  I had expected Orvin to resist, as soon as my intention became clear. Prad was ready with the energy pistol, just in case—I had told him to dial up the yield, if he needed to make his point more forcefully. But when Orvin did try and break away from us, the gesture seemed more token than any genuine attempt at escape.

  We were giving him a chance at life, when the alternative was recapture and execution.

  I shoved him into the capsule, told him to buckle in well. I pointed out the survival rations and first-aid kit, reminding him to treat the wound in his leg. He was breathing rapidly, his face glistening with sweat, his eyes wide. By now the pain must have been excruciating.

  He had needed it. It was essential that he remember. A year or ten from now, it would be too easy to allow the knowledge of it to slip from his preoccupations. I wanted the pain of this to burn through the years like hell’s own fire.

  He could never be allowed to forget.

  “I don’t know when we’ll be back,” I told him, when we were ready to seal the door and detach. “I doubt it’ll be any time soon. Maybe the skip will kill us. Even if we make it, there are a lot of systems out there we need to visit, and besides—I do need to give you some time to make a difference.”

  “And when you return—if you return—exactly how will you decide whether I’ve measured up?”

  “You’ll be called to account, that’s all I�
��m saying. We’ll find you easily enough. Give it your best, and you’ll be treated fairly. Fail us—fail the world—and it’ll be a simple business to tell your bullet to kill you. You wouldn’t even need to know that we’ve returned. We could learn a lot just by looking down from space.”

  “And what if you don’t come back?”

  “Then enjoy your old age. Remember, your best chance of survival is to lift that world out of the dark ages. I’d get working on that pretty quickly, if I were you.”

  “Give me a weapon. Doesn’t have to be much.”

  “You have a weapon,” I said, studying the hopeful gleam in his eyes. “It’s called fear. It’s going to be at your back, every waking hour of your life.”

  I backed away, exchanged one wordless glance with Orvin, and then sealed the airlock. Prad double-checked the settings displayed on the launch board next to the airlock. The pod’s automatic guidance system would home in on Tottori and do its best to drop him on dry land, as close to the equator as possible.

  Nothing else was guaranteed.

  “You are sure of this, Scur?”

  “Perfectly.”

  I thought of the bullet eating its way through Orvin, the twitch and snag of its tractor grapples and probes. It struck me that I had made him into another kind of slow bullet. I would fire him into the skin of this world and leave him to worm his way to some position of power or influence, however slight.

  My plan was not foolproof. Given sufficient shielding, the slow bullet could be screened from long-range detection, and similarly isolated from any kill-command. But on Tottori their industrial civilisation had declined to the level of pack animals and sailing ships. Merely to create the necessary screening would compel Orvin to initiate a minor revolution in metallurgical refinement and manufacture.

  I would not quibble with that.

  By the same token, though lodged deep in his chest, the bullet would not be entirely beyond the reach of conventional surgery. But for such a dauntingly ambitious operation to succeed, Orvin would need to advance medicine and anaesthetic control to something close to our own. Orvin could be as self-interested as he wished, provided there were tangible benefits to the rest of the population.

  We would see. I cannot say that my hopes were high. But this was our first attempt at resurrecting a world and there were bound to be some miscalculations. Orvin was an unlikely ambassador for a new planetary enlightenment. But if he could make a difference, there was hope for the rest of us.

  Not much, perhaps. But I would take what we could get.

  I heard a thump, as of a fist on the other side of a heavy metal bulkhead.

  I touched the launch control.

  There was no countdown, no moment of hesitation before the pod’s departure thrusters fired. There was a muffled clunk, like a key turning in a lock, and then silence. Against the vast mass of our ship, we felt nothing of the recoil. But through the adjoining viewports Prad and I watched the little lozenge-shaped capsule tumble rapidly away, our own rotation seeming to curve its trajectory against the planet’s white-mantled hemisphere. The thrusters would operate only long enough to carry the pod to the edge of the atmosphere, whereupon it would make a fiery and barely controlled descent to the surface. By the time its scorched shell reached the ground, fuel tanks drained, there would be no possibility of it returning to space.

  “Almost until the end, he still thought you were going to kill him,” Prad said, when at last we had lost sight of the falling object.

  I nodded at the face of the world. “What makes you think this isn’t a death sentence?”

  “I do not think you have it in you, Scur. You would like to think that you are as capable of cruelty as Orvin, but you are not. You want him to redeem himself, and you want him to help this world.”

  That was when I heard a set of footsteps, approaching rapidly from both directions.

  I still had my knife, and Prad’s bruise was looking better by the moment.

  “All right,” I snarled. “You’ve done your part.”

  It was Yesli and Spry coming from one direction, Sacer and Murash from the other.

  “What in the worlds . . .” Spry began.

  “He’s gone,” I said. “I let him go.”

  “No,” Sacer said, with a flat certainty. “She couldn’t have done this. He’s still in his cell. This is some kind of weird bluff.”

  “I am afraid she is quite sincere,” Prad said, caressing his bruised jaw. “I saw everything, as well. She broke Orvin out of confinement, put a slow bullet in him. The pod has already commenced atmospheric entry. It’s quite beyond recall now.”

  “I thought . . .” Yesli started to say.

  “You thought what?”

  “That you would kill him, given half the chance. Do back to him, what he nearly did to you.”

  “I did.”

  “But to different effect,” Spry said. “Not to torture him . . . but to make him useful to us. That was your plan, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded, for there was no point in lying. “Murash knows that world better than any of us. But we couldn’t send Murash—she’s much too valuable to us up here.” I looked at her apologetically, for I knew we would soon be skipping away from this system, away from this home of hers, and there was no guarantee that we would ever return. “I’m sorry, Murash—that’s just the way it is. Anyway, you’d be almost as much a stranger to those people as Orvin will be.”

  Murash’s face was stony. I did not know what she liked the least: that she could not go back, or that I had deemed Orvin an acceptable substitute.

  A hero for a war criminal. It was not much of a bargain. But I suspected we had harder ones ahead of us.

  ______________

  Later I was allowed to witness Orvin’s passage through the atmosphere, tracked by our sensors. No part of this ship was new, and there had always been some doubt in my mind that the pod would function as it was meant to. But Orvin’s landing was entirely within the specified parameters for survivability. Our observations showed that he had come down in an area of forested mountain, now under snow. We had no visual direct acquisition of him, just a bright thermal smudge, the only hot thing in this landscape, but the telemetry from the pod, and the continued functioning of his slow bullet, told us that nothing untoward could have happened.

  But for a long hour nothing happened.

  The pod was inert, the slow bullet showing no measurable change in location. Perhaps, despite everything, I had been too rash in sending the lifeboat away when Orvin was loose of his restraints. Perhaps, the telemetry notwithstanding, something must have gone wrong—some fault that the pod was too damaged to report.

  On the other hand, if it were me in that thing, I would not be in a desperate hurry to leave it. The pod was safe and warm, for now, and I had not lied about the supplies and equipment. Outside was a freezing cold snowscape, a forested wilderness stretching for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. Even with the on-board provisions, crossing that bleak territory on foot would be a particular sort of hell. And beyond it, there was no promise of warmth and light and the nourishments of civilisation. The best our envoy could hope for was something one step up from the dark ages. Cold rooms, dark nights, and lives bent by war, misery, disease and the almost universal prospect of early death. He would be mad to leave the capsule.

  But sooner or later he would need to. He could wait until the last moment, when starvation and cold had forced it upon him, or he could do the wise thing and begin his journey immediately, when he was at his strongest and sharpest.

  We waited.

  Presently Prad drew my attention to a small cluster of moving heat sources, not very far from Orvin’s landing zone. The tree cover prevented any clear view of the moving things, but their questing, packlike behaviour left us in no doubt that they were some kind of hunting animal. From above, where we could not see their legs or more than the grossest details of their anatomy, they moved like hot maggots. I thought of something as hardy
as a wolf, either a native organism or something imported from Earth. Perhaps the sound of Orvin’s arrival had drawn the curiosity of these creatures.

  “What are they?” we asked Murash.

  “Hungry,” she said.

  The hot maggots, twenty or so of them, had arrived close to the capsule. A number broke from the main mass and approached the parked vehicle. They circled it, coming closer before darting away and approaching again.

  “Movement,” Prad declared.

  A sudden change in the heat signature of the capsule. Air blushed out of it. Orvin had broken the seal, surrendering his little pocket of warmth. We watched a smaller blob detach itself from the capsule—cooler than the container it had arrived in. The blob made trudging movements—it was not made for locomotion in this environment. The animals had backed off, but they were not retreating. They formed a pincered crescent, ready to dart for Orvin if he made a dash for the left or right.

  For long moments Orvin and the animals stood their mutual ground. Then three of the creatures broke from the centre of the shield and began to advance.

  Orvin’s blob extended a spiked pseudopod. Heat flashed from the end of the pseudopod.

  “You gave him a weapon?” Sacer asked.

  “Standard issue energy pistol,” Prad answered. “There is always one in the survival pack, although I do not think Orvin would have known until he looked.”

  One of the animals tipped over. We could see it properly now. It was perfectly still, oozing warmth into its surroundings. The other pair had sprung back. The cordon was breaking up, retreating. Orvin stretched his arm again and fired the pistol a second time.

  A second animal dropped.

  “Be careful,” I whispered to myself. Did he imagine there were additional power cells, somewhere in his supplies? Or was he just applying a calculated reinforcement of his first demonstration, knowing full well that each shot had to count?

  The animals, except for the two he had killed, dispersed into the woods. They would regather later, I was sure. But they would take no further interest in this bewildering newcomer.

  Orvin moved to the first of the corpses. He seemed to kneel next to it. We had no idea what he was doing, except that it took several minutes and when he was done the animal’s warm remains were spread over a larger area. He moved to the second animal, and repeated the same bloody ritual. Then he returned to the capsule. His blob vanished back inside the cooling shell. He was busy for only a few minutes before re-emerging.