by Neal Asher
“Horden!” One-Ear barked the name in the human tongue, prompting Escandala to turn to her mentor. “Do not make that communication to Earth.” He had a sidearm aimed at Horden.
“I won’t stop,” said Horden. “You will have to kill me.”
“Do not make me.” One-Ear ground his teeth in irritation. “We were told the Earth-loyalty meme sweeping through the humans on Detroit was to be tolerated, a harmless morale booster. The White Knights will be very disturbed if they even suspect one of their human slaves had contacted Earth. When they are disturbed they lash out. Their punishments are severe and indiscriminate. Do you wish to be responsible for the extermination of your entire species?”
Horden stopped, looked at Escandala, and then turned back to his task at the communication console. “Better to die free than live a slave,” he said.
One-Ear stiffened the grip on his weapon.
Horden whirled around, his combat knife arcing toward One-Ear’s throat.
One-Ear fired. A jet of plasma burrowed through Horden’s chest, out his back and into the vessel’s communicator, which sparked and went dim. Twin plumes of crimson steam erupted from the holes in Horden’s suit, freezing instantly.
Escandala looked to One-Ear. Horden’s knife was buried deeply into the Jotun’s throat.
Both were dead.
She alone was responsible for the children now. There would be no last-minute rescue from the radioactive ash on Utgard’s surface.
Her suit reported only seventy minutes of air remaining.
Their remnant of the Pheidippides never did reach Utgard orbit. Instead, it began yielding to the pull from the mass of Akinschet. When the Muranyi monitor boats passed around the far side of Utgard, Escandala was surprised to find herself relaxing. Death for her was only an hour away. No matter how much she might fight it, her air would run out whatever she did. She decided to spend her final hour in appreciation of Akinschet’s murderous beauty.
With her boots wedged in the Sleeve frame, she hitched a ride on the Pheidippides only tens of meters away from the crèche with no way of knowing for sure whether anyone lived inside… until a child’s voice spoke in her helmet.
“We heard everything you said. You and Sergeant Horden.”
Distortion scratched at the transmission but there was no mistaking the voice was her son’s. “How can you—?”
“No time. Christophe is eldest and most augmented. Do you know, he can launch processing threads in his cognitive implant up to a limit of eight teraflops? Still took a while to rig a short-range transmitter. Listen, we can effect Sergeant Horden’s plan, though we must do it the hard way.”
“Explain.”
“We will deliver the design of our augmentations inside our desiccated corpses.”
“But... Zenothon!”
“No, it’s all right, Momma. Christophe has found a way to pump a semi-inert atmosphere by reversing components of the air scrubbers. That should arrest the decay of our cadavers, and the crèche will shield us from cosmic radiation.”
Zenothon misunderstood her again. How could she explain? She didn’t want her emotionless cyborg of a son to succeed!
“Christophe has been hacking into the navigation system for the last three subj-years,” said Zenothon. “Calculating a couple of slingshots around our star to aim at Sol is no sweat.”
“What? In this?”
“Yes.”
She did not doubt them. Not their capability but she did doubt the rightness of forcing their change upon Earth. If the child corpses ever did get to Sol, no good, nothing human would come of it.
“We need your help,” said Zenothon.
Escandala ground her teeth. She did not wish to give her help.
“I can’t,” she said. Then she added: “Good luck.” But it was no use: the children would know she was lying. She wished them well, but not luck. Zeno would die knowing his mother wanted his life to end in failure.
Then she let go. A quick burst from her thrust pack and her velocity diverged enough from the Pheidippides to watch the twist of silvered metal drift away.
“We need two of the engines shifted to the port side,” said Zeno. “They need to be aligned with the others. Doesn’t have to be precise but we need this soon.”
The engines already on the port side burst into a violet-blue flare for ten seconds.
“Please...”
Another burst of fire. The Pheidippides was pulling away, shrinking against the churning disc of Akinschet.
“Momma, we can’t do this alone.”
Escandala told her suit AI to match velocity with the children. A long sigh escaped her lips, fogging her faceplate until the environmental systems cleared the obstruction away.
She repeated the harsh words she’d spoken to her son on the gravitoid. “You are no longer human,” she whispered to the Universe. “But I am.”
She gave freely of her fuel until the Pheidippides drew nearer. In her heart, she knew that her Zeno, however corrupted, deserved hope and purpose in his breast when he died.
To realign the vector adjustors to Christophe’s requirements was a simple task; it took her only a few minutes.
“Thank you,” said Zenothon. “We can go home.”
The engines she had positioned began a series of short calibration bursts. Escandala released her grip on the Pheidippides, letting go of the children.
“You imagine your home is Earth,” she told them. “Mine was always here, in vacuum lit by alien worlds, fighting someone else’s war.”
Overriding the safety, she popped open her neck seals and removed her helmet, freeing herself to the void. Air exploded out of her open mouth; her tongue prickled as its moisture boiled.
The cloud of steam erupting from her mouth obscured forever her view of Zenothon’s vessel as it began the long journey home.
Good luck!
Fables from the Fountain
Edited by Ian Whates
A volume of all original stories written as homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Tales from the White Hart, featuring many of today’s top genre writers, including Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter, James Lovegrove, Liz Williams, Adam Roberts, Eric Brown, Ian Watson, Peter Crowther, and David Langford.
The Fountain, a traditional London pub situated in Holborn, just off Chancery Lane, where Michael, the landlord, serves excellent real ales and dodgy ploughman’s, ably assisted by barmaids Sally and Bogna.
The Fountain, in whose Paradise bar a group of friends – scientists, writers and genre fans – meet regularly on a Tuesday night to swap anecdotes, reveal wondrous events from their past, tell tall tales, talk of classified invention and, maybe, just maybe, save the world…
Available now as a paperback, and a special dust-jacketed hardback edition signed by all the authors on two bespoke signing pages. Limited to just 200 individually numbered copies.
Also available as a Kindle eBook from:
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NEWCON PRESS
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Dally McFarlane Gary McMahon, Ken MacLeod, Ian R MacLeod, Gail Z Martin, Juliet E McKenna, John Meaney, Simon Morden, Mark Morris, Anne Nicholls, Stan Nicholls, Marie O’Regan, Philip Palmer, Stephen Palmer, Sarah Pinborough, Rod Rees, Andy Remic, Mercurio D Rivera, Adam Roberts, Justina Robson, Gaie Sebold, Robert Shearman, Sarah Singleton, Martin Sketchley, Kari Sperring, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Brian Stapleford, Charles Stross, Tricia Sullivan, EJ Swift, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Steve Rasnic Tem, Lavie Tidhar, Lisa Tuttle, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Ian Watson, Freda Warrington, Liz Williams, Neil Williamson… and many, many more.
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