After a heartstopping moment, Dragon replied, “Ah, Swan.”
Swan could have said, What do you think you’re doing?, but they both knew that. Instead, she asked, “Why now, and not tomorrow, or the day before? Why this day of all days, after a century of waiting?”
“You are as tactful as ever,” Dragon said, “even about the matter of my cowardice.”
“Please, Dragon.”
Dragon’s voice was peculiarly meditative. “Your symphony reminds me of my duty, Swan. I came here a long time ago on the Circle of Swords. It was one of the proudest warships of—well, the nation has since passed into anarchy. I was the only soldier too afraid of my fate to swear the sacred oath to sing always against the coming silence. As punishment, they left me here to contemplate my failure, forever separated from my comrades.”
“Dragon,” Swan said, “they’re long gone now. What good will it do them, at this end of time, for you to die?”
“The Concert teaches that the fermata is our greatest form of immortality—”
“Dead is dead,” Swan said. “At this end of time, what is the hurry?”
The door whisked open. Swan looked away from the ship’s image and met Tiger’s curious eyes.
“Damn, ’Zhien,” Tiger said respectfully. “So you found the courage after all.”
“That’s not it,” Swan said. “The symphony wasn’t supposed to be about the glory of death.”
Loftily, Tiger said, “Oh, I’d never perform suicide art. There’s nothing pretty about death. You learn that in battle.”
After a silence, Dragon said, “What did you intend, then, Swan?”
The question brought her up short. She had been so absorbed in attempting to convey the swanships’ grandeur that she had forgotten that real people passed into the fermata to send their souls to the end of time. “I’ll change my music,” she said. “I’ll delete it all if I have to.”
“Please don’t,” Dragon said. “I would miss it greatly.” A faint swelling of melody: his ship was playing back one of her first, stumbling efforts.
“You’ll miss it forever if you keep going.”
“A bargain, then,” Dragon said. “I was never an artist, only a soldier, but a hundred years here have taught me the value of art. Don’t destroy your music, and I’ll come back.”
Swan’s eyes prickled. “All right.”
Tiger and Swan watched as Dragon’s ship decelerated, then reversed its course, returning to the station.
“You’ve sacrificed your freedom to bring him back, you know,” Tiger said. “If you finish your symphony now, it will lack conviction. Anyone with half an ear will be able to tell.”
“I would rather have Dragon’s life than write a masterpiece,” Swan said.
“You’re a fool, cygnet.”
Only then did Swan realize that, in her alarm over the situation, she had completely forgotten the theme she had meant to record.
Dragon helped Swan move the keyboard out of the observation room and into the rock garden. “I’m glad you’re not giving up your music,” he remarked.
She looked at him, really looked at him, thinking of how she had almost lost a friend. “I’m not writing the symphony,” she said.
He blinked.
“I’m still writing music,” Swan assured him. “Just not the captain’s symphony. Because you were right: it’s impossible. At least, what I envisioned is impossible. If I dwell upon the impossible, I achieve nothing. But if I do what I can, where I can—I might get somewhere.”
She wasn’t referring to freedom from the swanwatch.
Dragon nodded. “I think I see. And Swan—” He hesitated. “Thank you.”
“It’s been a long day,” she said. “You should rest.”
“Like Tortoise?” He chuckled. “Perhaps I will.” He ran one hand along the keyboard in a flurry of notes. Then he sat on one of the garden’s benches and closed his eyes, humming idly.
Swan studied Dragon’s calm face. Then she stood at the keyboard and played several tentative notes, a song for Dragon and Phoenix and Tiger. A song for the living.
SPIREY AND THE QUEEN
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
Alastair Reynolds is the author of eight novels and about thirty short stories. His fiction frequently shares the setting of his novel Revelation Space. His stories have appeared mostly in the British magazine Interzone, but also in several anthologies, such as The New Space Opera, Eclipse Two, One Million A. D., and Constellations. He is a winner of the British Science Fiction Award, and his work has often been reprinted in the various best-of-the-year annuals.
In his collection, Zima Blue and Other Stories, Reynolds says that “Spirey and the Queen” was a “pig” to write, and that it was a relief to get it out of his system. “The motor of plot only kicked in when I started looking at the story in thriller terms: spies, defectors, that kind of thing,” he said, and added that he always had the vague intention of returning to the milieu someday, if only to find out what happens after the last line of the story.
Space war is godawful slow.
Mouser’s long-range sensors had sniffed the bogey two days ago, but it had taken all that time just to creep within kill-range. I figured it had to be another dud. With ordnance, fuel, and morale all low, we were ready to slink back to Tiger’s Eye anyway; let one of the other thickships pick up the sweep in this sector.
So—still groggy after frogsleep—I wasn’t exactly wetting myself with excitement, not even when Mouser started spiking the thick with combat-readiness psychogens. Even when we went to Attack-Con-One, all I did was pause the neurodisney I was tripping (Hellcats of Solar War Three, since you asked), slough my hammock, and swim languidly up to the bridge.
“Junk,” I said, looking over Yarrow’s shoulder at the readout. “War debris or another of those piss-poor chondrites. Betcha.”
“Sorry, kid. Everything checks out.”
“Hostiles?”
“Nope. Positive on the exhaust; dead ringer for the stolen ship.” She traced a webbed hand across the swathe of decorations that already curled around her neck. “Want your stripes now or when we get back?”
“You actually think this’ll net us a pair of tigers?”
“Damn right it will.”
I nodded, and thought: She isn’t necessarily wrong. No defector, no stolen military secrets reaching the Royalists. Ought to be worth a medal, maybe even a promotion.
So why did I feel something wasn’t right?
“All right,” I said, hoping to drown qualms in routine. “How soon?”
“Missiles are already away, but she’s five light-minutes from us, so the quacks won’t reach her for six hours. Longer if she makes a run for cover.”
“Run for cover? That’s a joke.”
“Yeah, hilarious.” Yarrow swelled one of the holographic displays until it hovered between us.
It was a map of the Swirl, tinted to show zones controlled by us or the Royalists. An enormous, slowly rotating disk of primordial material, 800 AU edge to edge; wide enough that light took more than four days to traverse it.
Most of the action was near the middle, in the light-hour of space around the central star Fomalhaut. Immediately around the sun was a material-free void that we called the Inner Clearing Zone, but beyond that began the Swirl proper: metal-rich lanes of dust condensing slowly into rocky planets. Both sides wanted absolute control of those planet-forming Feeding Zones—prime real estate for the day when one side beat the other and could recommence mining operations—so that was where our vast armies of wasps mainly slugged things out. We humans—Royalist and Standardist both—kept much further out, where the Swirl thinned to metal-depleted icy rubble. Even hunting the defector hadn’t taken us within ten light-hours of the Feeding Zones, and we’d become used to having a lot of empty space to ourselves. Apart from the defector, there shouldn’t have been anything else out here to offer cover.
But there was. Big, too, not much more than a half light-minute from the rat.
“Practically pissing distance,” Yarrow observed.
“Too close for coincidence. What is it?”
“Splinter. Icy planetesimal, you want to get technical.”
“Not this early in the day.” But I remembered how one of our tutors back at the academy put it: Splinters are icy slag, spat out of the Swirl. In a few hundred thousand years there’ll be a baby solar system around Fomalhaut, but there’ll also be shitloads of junk surrounding it, leftovers on million-year orbits.
“Worthless to us,” Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair that ran all the way from her brow to fluke. “But evidently not too ratty.”
“What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl.”
Yarrow gave me her best withering look.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Not my smartest ever suggestion.”
Yarrow nodded sagely. “Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours is to fire and forget.”
Six hours after the quackheads had been launched from Mouser, Yarrow floated in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath her. She resembled an inverted question mark, and if I’d been superstitious I’d have said that wasn’t necessarily the best of omens.
“You kill me,” she said.
An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren—first to swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin, which let us tolerate cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the billions of molecule-sized demons that coursed through our bodies, or the combat-specific psycho-modifications. But swapping your legs for a tail touched off too many queasy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve, though.
“What?” I said.
“That neurodisney shit. Isn’t a real space war good enough for you?”
“Yeah, except I don’t think this is it. When was the last time one of us actually looked a Royalist in the eye?”
She shrugged. “Something like four hundred years.”
“Point made. At least in Solar War Three you get some blood. See, it’s all set on planetary surfaces—Titan, Europa, all those moons they’ve got back in Sol system. Trench warfare, hand-to-hand stuff. You know what adrenalin is, Yarrow?”
“Managed without it until now. And there’s another thing: don’t know much about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three.”
“It’s conjectural,” I said. “And in any case it almost happened; they almost went to the brink.”
“Almost?”
“It’s set in a different timeline.”
She grinned, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, you kill me.”
“She made a move yet?” I asked.
“What?”
“The defector.”
“Oh, we’re back in reality now?” Yarrow laughed. “Sorry, this is going to be slightly less exciting than Solar War Three.”
“Inconsiderate,” I said. “Think the bitch would give us a run for our money.” And as I spoke the weapons readout began to pulse faster and faster, like the cardiogram of a fluttering heart. “How long now?”
“One minute, give or take a few seconds.”
“Want a little bet?”
Yarrow grinned, sallow in the red alert lighting. “As if I’d say no, Spirey.”
So we hammered out a wager; Yarrow betting fifty tiger-tokens the rat would attempt some last-minute evasion. “Won’t do her a blind bit of good,” she said. “But that won’t stop her. It’s human nature.”
Me, I suspected our target was either dead or asleep.
“Bit of an empty ritual, isn’t it.”
“What?”
“I mean, the attack happened the best part of five minutes ago, realtime. The rat’s already dead, and nothing we can do can influence that outcome.”
Yarrow bit on a nicotine stick. “Don’t get all philosophical on me, Spirey.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. How long?”
“Five seconds. Four . . . ”
She was somewhere between three and four when it happened. I remember thinking that there was something disdainful about the rat’s actions: she had deliberately waited until the last possible moment, and had dispensed with our threat with the least effort possible.
That was how it felt, anyway.
Nine of the quackheads detonated prematurely, far short of kill-range. For a moment the tenth remained, zeroing in on the defector—but instead it failed to detonate, until it was just beyond range.
For long moments there was silence while we absorbed what had happened. Yarrow broke it, eventually.
“Guess I just made myself some money,” she said.
Colonel Wendigo’s hologram delegate appeared, momentarily frozen before shivering to life. With her too-clear, too-young eyes she fixed first Yarrow and then me.
“Intelligence was mistaken,” she said. “Seems the defector doctored records to conceal the theft of those countermeasures. But you harmed her anyway?”
“Just,” said Yarrow. “Her quackdrive’s spewing out exotics like Spirey after a bad binge. No hull damage, but . . . ”
“Assessment?”
“Making a run for the splinter.”
Wendigo nodded. “And then?”
“She’ll set down and make repairs.” Yarrow paused, added: “Radar says there’s metal on the surface. Must’ve been a wasp battle there, before the splinter got lobbed out of the Swirl.”
The delegate nodded in my direction. “Concur, Spirey?”
“Yes sir,” I said, trying to suppress the nervousness I always felt around Wendigo, even though almost all my dealings with her had been via simulations like this. Yarrow was happy to edit the conversation afterward, inserting the correct honorifics before transmitting the result back to Tiger’s Eye—but I could never free myself of the suspicion that Wendigo would somehow unravel the unedited version, with all its implicit insubordination. Not that any of us didn’t inwardly accord Wendigo all the respect she was due. She’d nearly died in the Royalist strike against Tiger’s Eye fifteen years ago—the one in which my mother was killed. Actual attacks against our two mutually opposed comet bases were rare, not happening much more than every other generation—more gestures of spite than anything else. But this had been an especially bloody one, killing an eighth of our number and opening city-sized portions of our base to vacuum. Wendigo was caught in the thick of the kinetic attack.
Now she was chimeric, lashed together by cybernetics. Not much of this showed externally—except that the healed parts of her were too flawless, more porcelain than flesh. Wendigo had not allowed the surgeons to regrow her arms. Story was she lost them trying to pull one of the injured through an open airlock, back into the pressurized zone. She’d almost made it, fighting against the gale of escaping air. Then some no-brainer hit the emergency door control, and when the lock shut it took Wendigo’s arms off at the shoulder, along with the head of the person she was saving. She wore prosthetics now, gauntleted in chrome.
“She’ll get there a day ahead of us,” I said. “Even if we pull twenty gees.”
“And probably gone to ground by the time you get there, too.”
“Should we try a live capture?”
Yarrow backed me up with a nod. “It’s not exactly been possible before.”
The delegate bided her time before answering. “Admire your dedication,” she said, after a suitably convincing pause. “But you’d only be postponing a death sentence. Kinder to kill her now, don’t you think?”
Mouser entered kill-range nineteen hours later, a wide pseudo-orbit three thousand klicks out. The splinter—seventeen by twelve klicks across—was far too small to be seen as anything other than a twinkling speck, like a grain of sugar at arm’s length. But everything we wanted to know
was clear: topology, gravimetrics, and the site of the downed ship. That wasn’t hard. Quite apart from the fact that it hadn’t buried itself completely, it was hot as hell.
“Doesn’t look like the kind of touchdown you walk away from,” Yarrow said.
“Think they ejected?”
“No way.” Yarrow sketched a finger through a holographic enlargement of the ship, roughly cone-shaped, vaguely streamlined just like our own thickship, to punch through the Swirl’s thickest gas belts. “Clock those dorsal hatches. Evac pods still in place.”
She was right. The pods could have flung them clear before the crash, but evidently they hadn’t had time to bail out. The ensuing impact—even cushioned by the ship’s manifold of thick—probably hadn’t been survivable.
But there was no point taking chances.
Quackheads would have finished the job, but we’d used up our stock. Mouser carried a particle beam battery, but we’d have to move uncomfortably close to the splinter before using it. What remained were the molemines, and they should have been perfectly adequate. We dropped fifteen of them, embedded in a cloud of two hundred identical decoys. Three of the fifteen were designated to dust the wreck, while the remaining twelve would bury deeper into the splinter and attempt to shatter it completely.
That at least was the idea.
It all happened very quickly, not in the dreamy slow-motion of a neurodisney. One instant the molemines were descending toward the splinter, and then the next instant they weren’t there. Spacing the two instants had been an almost subliminally brief flash.
“Starting to get sick of this,” Yarrow said.
Mouser digested what had happened. Nothing had emanated from the wreck. Instead, there’d been a single pulse of energy seemingly from the entire volume of space around the splinter. Particle weapons, Mouser diagnosed. Probably single-use drones, each tinier than a pebble but numbering hundreds or even thousands. The defector must have sown them on her approach.
But she hadn’t touched us.
“It was a warning,” I said. “Telling us to back off.”
“I don’t think so.”
Federations Page 18
