by Paul McAuley
About a year afterwards, Willie found a recent excavation site out in the Badlands, claimed it was the spot where they’d been zapped, and elaborated a bunch of paranoid riffs about what had been dug up, who had taken it, and where it was now. Even though she’d been on the long slide to her nadir, Lisa knew that it was just another of Willie’s fantasies. No one could keep that kind of thing secret. The hole in the ground was just a hole in the ground, and the thing that had zapped them had probably been some kind of one-shot affair – an ancient machine, maybe, that had hoarded its energies for tens of thousands of years and discharged everything it had in one last spasm when they’d come into range. Eventually, they stopped arguing about it, and Lisa did her best to put the whole wretched affair behind her. But then the ghost in her head woke up, reminding her that she’d never be free of it. And then the geek police came knocking.
Lisa was changing the oil in the wind-pump gearbox when Pete barked a warning. She looked up, saw a little cloud of dust out in the tawny scrubland. Two, three vehicles negotiating the swales and dips of the track, headlights on, dust boiling up behind them.
By the time Lisa had clipped the chain to Pete’s collar and walked with him to the gate, the vehicles were cutting around the shelter belt of cottonwoods. The county sheriff’s patrol car leading two powder-blue Range Rovers, new models with slit-like windscreens that gave them a mean squint, badges on their doors and hoods. The UN Technology Control Unit. The geek police. Lisa had been visited by them half a dozen times since she’d moved out here: routine, random inspections of her workshop and equipment as per the terms of her licence. But they’d never before turned up mob-handed with the sheriff.
‘Don’t do anything dumb,’ she told Pete as the vehicles slowed and stopped.
Sure thing, he said, but his ears were pricked and his body was tense, the way he got when he saw a rabbit, and he barked twice when the door of the patrol car popped open. Lisa told him to hush, watched the sheriff ease out of his car, set his white straw Stetson on his head and walk up to the gate.
‘It would make things easier if you chained up your dog somewhere, ma’am,’ he said.
‘It would make things a whole lot easier if your friends turned around and headed back to the city,’ Lisa said.
‘I don’t disagree, but they have a job to do and so do I. It would be best for everyone if you allowed us to get on without any fuss.’
The sheriff, Scott Bird, was a rangy man about Lisa’s age, the brim of his Stetson angled low over his creased face. He’d been a deputy in Denton County, Texas before he’d come up and out; now he was sheriff of the Carolina Land District. A little old-fashioned, but a decent fair-minded man. Lisa liked him, had twice voted for him to stay in office.
She said, ‘I’m sorry to see they asked you to do their dirty work.’
Sheriff Bird held out a folded sheet of paper. ‘Sometimes I have to do things I don’t agree with. Comes with the badge and the territory. Which includes, I regret to say, serving this warrant on you.’
‘Are you arresting me?’
‘No, ma’am. This is a notice to search your property.’
Lisa felt Pete stir beside her as she reached out and took the warrant. She could feel the ghost at her back too, briefly wondered what it made of this little human charade.
She said, ‘You happen to know what they are looking for? Because I don’t have the faintest idea.’
Sheriff Bird hesitated, then said, ‘I also have some bad news. Maybe we could step over to your house.’
‘And let your friends trawl through my stuff while you distract me? Anything you want to tell me, you tell me here,’ Lisa said, and saw the serious look on the sheriff’s face and felt as if she’d hit an air pocket.
‘It’s your husband,’ Sheriff Bird said. ‘I’m sorry to tell you there’s been an accident.’
Lisa thought at once of the seizure.
She said, ‘Is he hurt? How bad?’
Sheriff Bird took off his hat. ‘He was working with a crew on a big dig out in the Badlands. There was some kind of accident, and everyone involved looks to have been killed.’
‘You’re kidding,’ she said, but she knew that he was not.
‘Why don’t we go sit down somewhere, ma’am, so I can tell you what I know?’
Lisa saw two figures step out of one of the Range Rovers. One a tall grey-haired man in a cream suit, the other dressed in a black tracksuit, moving with the sinuous gait of a dancer, golden highlights gleaming on a smooth skull. A Jackaroo avatar.
She knew then that she was in serious trouble. She lifted her chin and said to Sheriff Bird, ‘Tell me everything. Right here, right now. You can start by explaining what that thing wants.’
4. Rogue Moon
Junot Johnson swore that he had no idea that Lancelot Askia had been liaising so closely with Tony’s uncle. ‘That Askia man and me, we hardly talked. He spent most of his time in his tent, or running out across the rock. He has those plastic muscle extenders – he can sprint like a ziphound. And even when he was out and about with the wizards he didn’t say much more than yes or no, and shut you down with a sharp look if you tried to be friendly. What with that and trying to keep track of the work, I didn’t have the chance to get alongside him.’
‘He had a q-phone,’ Tony said. He knew that he was angry with the old sidesman because he was angry with himself, and because he had been so thoroughly and publicly humiliated, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘How could you have not known about that? It was your job.’
‘I know I failed, young master. And I’m more sorry for it than I can say,’ Junot said.
A sturdy broad-shouldered man with a mass of curly grey hair squashed inside his pressure suit’s helmet, dutifully loyal and patient, he was from one of the families which had been with the Okoyes long before they had been given Skadi as a reward for their part in the overthrow of the Second Empire, and had served aboard Abalunam’s Pride for two years and counting.
‘What about Fred Firat?’ Tony said. ‘Was there any sign that he was communicating with someone off planet?’
‘That I think I would have seen,’ Junot said. ‘I was as close to him as his shadow for the most part. And if he had a q-phone, he hid it cleverly. It wasn’t in his personal stuff.’
Tony had sent Junot to check the dead wizard’s possessions before they were packed up with the rest of the camp. They were standing in the shadow of the ship now, watching the wizards stack equipment and folded tents onto a pair of sleds. Two of the ship’s hands moved smartly to and fro amongst them, carrying unfeasibly large loads, their white carapaces luminous in the level light of the eternal sunset. Lancelot Askia stalked up and down, now and then stopping to check a crate or package. They were taking everything, even the garbage. Everything except the body of Fred Firat. That lay on a flat rock nearby, wrapped in a winding sheet of pyrotechnic explosive printed by the ship.
‘He was a very clever man,’ Tony said, softening a little.
‘Do you really think he was a traitor, young master?’
‘It would be awfully convenient if he was, wouldn’t it? It would justify his execution, and show me up for a fool. In any case, his death will put a serious crimp in the work, which will please my uncle no end. He has been against it from the start.’
‘One thing I know to be true,’ Junot said. ‘There really is a labyrinth under those Ghajar ruins. Some of the wizards essayed a little expedition into them. They were looking for eidolons that might have absorbed something of the stromatolites’ code. But they didn’t find anything, and neither did I when I checked the place a few days after they finished. Just endless tunnels lined with dirty white plastic.’
‘Could Firat have kept himself hidden from the claim jumpers down there?’
Junot shrugged. ‘It would depend on how hard they searched for him, and how hard he worked at staying hidden. But those tunnels do go a long way back, and a long way down, too.’
They watched the
wizards work for a while.
Junot said, ‘Can we get home safe, you reckon?’
‘Oh, I have a good escape plan,’ Tony said. ‘Which also involves a tunnel, oddly enough.’
At last, after everything had been loaded onto the ship, Lancelot Askia marshalled the wizards in front of their leader’s body. They stood quiet and still in orange sunlight and long shadows while Tony said that if anyone had any last thoughts for their former chief they should think them now. He gave them a minute’s grace before he triggered the pyrotechnic shroud. It burned with a brief fierce intensity, sending up a plume of greasy smoke that the wind bent out to sea. Ash fell all around, on the black rocks, on the water of the bay, on the wizards and Lancelot Askia and Junot Johnson and Tony. Ten minutes after the fire had guttered out, leaving only a smear of sludgy soot on the rock, everyone was aboard the ship. The wizards and the tanks containing half a dozen live stromatolites were locked down in the cargo bay. Junot Johnson and Lancelot Askia were locked down in their cabins. And Tony was back in command.
The ship’s bridle reported that the claim jumpers’ frigate hadn’t changed its heading, said that as far as she could tell it hadn’t deployed any assets around the mirror or sent drones to scout the slime planet ahead of its arrival. ‘But I’m afraid that my surveillance ability is very limited, and the frigate may possess superior security and stealth tech.’
‘There is only one way to find out,’ Tony said, and dropped the go command.
The bridle counted down from ten in the traditional way, booted at zero. As the ship jolted away in a long rising arc above the dark sea and its archipelagos of bruise-yellow foam, Tony detonated the thermobaric bombs he had planted in every stromatolite colony, glimpsing the chain of flashes just before the coastline dropped below the horizon. When the claim jumpers arrived, they would find only a couple of dozen flooded craters floored with baked mud and rubble.
The ship punched out of the atmosphere, fired off a package of tiny cube satellites, and continued to rise. The horizon rounded and the dull spark of the slime world’s solitary moon rose above it, a skull-shaped chunk of rock fifty kilometres across, with an erratic retrograde orbit. Fred Firat had believed that it was an asteroid that had been moved into orbit by some Elder Culture for some unclear purpose; deep radar scans had revealed that it was riddled with tunnels, including a shaft that pierced it through its rotation axis.
After Abalunam’s Pride matched the little moon’s orbital velocity, Tony took control for the final manoeuvre. Blipping the ship’s drive, setting her on a trajectory that would intersect with the moon’s surface. This was the fun part. The target area was relatively small, and there was only a narrow window before the frigate appeared over the horizon of the slime planet.
The moon swiftly grew, its lumpy cratered landscape raked with fault-line scarps. Abalunam’s Pride swung around it, dawdling towards the flat top of a debris cone: the north polar entrance to the shaft that pierced the moon, created by unimaginable energies that had vaporised fifty kilometres of rock. Much of that vapour had boiled away, escaping the grip of the moon’s feeble gravity; a small fraction, cooling, had fallen back to the surface and formed symmetrical cones at the poles.
Tony mirrored the visual feed to his passengers so that they could watch some real piloting skill, killed the last of the ship’s forward momentum as the cone’s flat top slid past, and dropped into the black circle of the shaft’s entrance. He fired off a package that would anchor itself to the shaft’s lip and allow him to keep in touch with the cube sats, and then Abalunam’s Pride was falling between smooth melt-rock walls, slowing, slowing, until it was floating freely at the midpoint of the shaft, balanced at the null point of the asteroid’s feeble gravity.
‘We will wait here until the frigate puts down,’ he explained over the common channel. ‘And when it does, we’ll make a run for the mirror.’
He had to wait almost twelve hours, half a day in old money, while the G-class frigate swung around the slime planet in a near-polar orbit that would enable it to scan almost every part of the surface. No doubt they had checked out the little moon, too, but Tony was pretty sure that his hiding place was safe. Radar scans could render the moon transparent, but their resolution was limited. The claim jumpers would not see his ship until he wanted to be seen.
At last, the frigate fell out of orbit in a smooth trajectory aimed at the lone continent. Tony told his passengers to brace themselves, and exactly a hundred seconds later booted the ship. Maximum acceleration. The walls flashed past; a star of sunlight flared ahead and widened into a perfect circle; Abalunam’s Pride shot out of the shaft like a cannonball, still accelerating. The moon dwindled astern, and the slime planet dwindled too, rounding into a half-globe that shrank into the big dark like a pebble dropped down a well.
The frigate sent an interrogatory message. Tony ignored it. He was back in control, back on track. All he had to do now was reach the mirror.
It orbited the L5 point where the slime planet’s gravity balanced that of its star. Tony flew a flat geodesic trajectory, accelerating all the way. This was the part he loved. He was cradled in his command couch, ramped up on combat drugs and plugged into the ship’s bridle and her radar, EM and optical feeds. Flying free into the unknown. Master of his own fate.
He was more than halfway there when the feeds from the cube sats he’d left in orbit around the planet went dark. No problem. He had been half-expecting it after the claim jumpers’ frigate had pinged him. But as he closed in on the mirror the assets that had been keeping watch on it went dark too.
It was the usual rock sculpted into a long cone, with the wormhole throat embedded in its flat base: a round dark mirror two kilometres across, framed by the chunky braid of strange matter that kept it open. The only mirror in orbit around this star. The only way in, the only way out. When he had come through, Tony had dropped off a package of drones that had established wide triangular orbits around it. They had not detected anything sown by the frigate, but it had set traps all the same.
Abalunam’s Pride was briefly painted by radar and launchers planted around the mirror’s rim flung a cloud of disrupter needles: electronic countermeasures packaged in little blades of cubic carbon allotropes denser than diamond, designed to lodge in the hulls of Ghajar ships and paralyse their nervous systems. There was no time for any kind of evasive manoeuvre. Tony shot a drone carrying a totally illegal pinch-fusion bomb with a yield of point six kilotonnes from Abalunam’s Pride’s launch cannon. Ayo had given it to him just before he’d set out two years ago, telling him that it had been held back when the family’s armoury had been stripped by the Commons police, and was to be used only as a final measure in extreme circumstances. Well, if this didn’t count as an extreme circumstance he didn’t know what did. The bomb detonated scant seconds after launch, obliterating the needles in a furious fireball, and Tony screamed in triumph and blind terror as the ship slammed through the expanding shell of superhot plasma, plunged into the mirror of the wormhole throat, and emerged eight thousand light years away.
5. Breakout
The next day, Lisa met up with Bria in Port of Plenty and downloaded everything she knew. Everything that Sheriff Bird and the boss of the geek police team, Adam Nevers, had told her. It wasn’t much. It was heartbreaking.
It seemed that Willie had found something out in the Badlands, something too big to dig out on his own. He’d partnered up with a crew and they’d uncovered a powerfully malignant artefact that had got inside their heads and turned them against each other. Five people were dead; three, including Willie, were missing, believed to be buried under tons of rubble at the bottom of the excavation shaft after someone had blown it in, possibly in a futile attempt to contain the breakout.
‘Do you remember the thing in Bitter Springs, two years ago?’ Lisa said to Bria. ‘The police said it was like that.’
A prospector had brought an artefact into the little desert settlement of Bitter Springs, the loc
al assayer had woken the eidolon inside it, and there’d been a breakout and a massacre. People attacking each other with teeth and nails and fists and feet. Neighbours and strangers. Husbands and wives. Mothers and children. Lisa had seen the artefact in the Port of Plenty museum after it had been purged of every trace of its algorithms. A smooth slim black needle about the size of a spearhead, gleaming and sterile in its glass case. A reminder of the awful unknowns yet to be unearthed.
‘Now I know what caused that seizure,’ Lisa said. ‘It was the same day the breakout happened. No way is that a coincidence. No. Fucking. Way.’
Bria reached across the little table and gripped her hands. ‘Oh, Lisa.’
They were sitting outside the big Starbucks that anchored the western end of Pioneer Square. Lisa was drinking iced tea sweetened with half a dozen packets of sugar, Bria a flat white. Pete sprawled under the table with a dish of water. All around, people sat at café tables in the late-afternoon sunlight, perched on broad steps that dropped to the well where a gout of water pulsed and plashed. Smart little yellow trams ran along one side of the square, which was bordered by office buildings and the plate-glass windows of high-end shops. A sliver of Earth jammed into this alien world, where a dozen or more Elder Cultures had lived and died out or ascended to some unfathomable stage of consciousness, leaving behind ruins and artefacts, scraps of technology, algorithms and eidolons. A perfectly ordinary scene that, distorted by Lisa’s blind spot and the intimate presence of her ghost, seemed weirdly unfamiliar, like a hyper-real simulation where everything was a banal, idealised version of itself and nothing fit together properly.
‘Willie finally went and did it,’ Lisa said, squeezing Bria’s hands. ‘After all this time, he finally found the thing that zapped us. It zapped him again, zapped the people he was working with. And it reached out to me. It woke the ghost in my head.’
