by Paul McAuley
‘I wondered if you would find out about that,’ Colonel X said. ‘Two things. First, she actually called it a timeship. When it was accelerated to close to the speed of light it compressed time, and she hoped to ride it into the future. Second, I already have it. And it’s going to lead me to something much bigger. Take care, Mr Okoye. If we meet on the far side of this, I promise I’ll find some way of showing my appreciation.’
Tony brooded about that for a long time. He was on his couch, where he spent most of his time, enduring the 2.3 G-force during the stretches of constant acceleration and constant deceleration between mirrors. He was maxing out Abalunam’s Pride’s drive to make sure his pursuer couldn’t haul alongside and board her, and because he wanted to get to where he was going as quickly as possible. Especially now that he knew the police were also on his tail.
This time he did not have the ship’s hands to give him massages and otherwise attend to his needs. Although the bridle claimed that she alone had flown the ship from Dry Salvages to Veles, he was worried that Ada Morange might have found a way to get inside her; remembering the unrelenting fury with which Adam Apostu had attacked Bob, he had locked all the hands in storage, just in case. The bridle also claimed that, because her drones and other assets had been stripped out when she had been mothballed, she had hacked several of Freedonia’s police drones and used them to search for Tony after he had been kidnapped. That, at least, appeared to be true: she had stored hours of footage taken by the drones. They had kept watch on Raqle Thornhilde’s house and followed her around the city, but had lost contact after she had boarded small jet aircraft and flown beyond the limit of their operating range, to the village of the Real Free People.
The bridle could not explain how she had infiltrated police security. ‘I wanted to find out what happened when your comms cut off,’ she said, ‘so I just sort of did. It was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?’
‘What would you have done if you had found me?’ Tony said.
‘Oh, I’m sure that I would have figured something out,’ the bridle said.
That careless confidence was new, too. She had definitely changed, but she was by no means omniscient. She had been fooled by Raqle Thornhilde’s subterfuge of hiring a ship through one of her shell companies, had not seen the broker’s sons smuggle Tony aboard. And she readily agreed that from now on she would not take any initiatives without first consulting Tony.
‘At least it all worked out in the end,’ she said cheerfully.
‘We are still a long way from the end,’ Tony said.
After Colonel X’s call, he opened a window to Unlikely Worlds, the first time in several days. The !Cha was hunkered down in the hold where Tony had kept the wizards and the stromatolites during the escape from the slime planet. A black drum squatting on what was presently the floor.
Tony told the !Cha that he believed that he had been used to divert Ada Morange’s attention from Colonel X’s plans. ‘He could have intercepted that timeship while it was in the final stages of decelerating towards its destination. Months ago. Years ago. Long before Ada Morange found a way of escaping from my family. There must be something or someone aboard it that both of them want. Ada Morange was hoping that the Red Brigade would help her to take it back. But before she could, the colonel used me to lead the police to her.’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘You knew, didn’t you?’
‘It was a logical deduction. What will you do now?’
‘I still want to find Ada Morange and make her answer for what she did. I owe it to myself, and to Cho Wing-James and the other wizards, and everyone else killed in the raid.’
‘As far as I know, it is a universal rule that the dead have little interest in the sympathy of the living.’
‘I care about them, even so.’
‘Then you still hope to be a hero.’
‘I hope to avoid being killed in a battle between the police and the Red Brigade. If Bane doesn’t manage to kill me first.’
‘I don’t think you need to worry about Bane.’
‘Because this isn’t his story?’
‘Because he doesn’t know what he has stumbled into.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘You have been invited,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘He has not.’
Abalunam’s Pride fell through the next mirror, and the next, and the next. By now, Bane’s ship was three hours behind, emerging from the sixth mirror pair into the dim light of a small red dwarf star as Tony was decelerating on the final approach to the seventh, some eighty thousand kilometres away, the two mirrors orbiting each other in the trailing Trojan point of a frigid super-Earth.
Tony watched as Bane’s ship began to turn towards him, but before it had completed the manouevre something shot away from the mirror behind it. Two, three, four drones, accelerating hard, closing fast. Tony remembered the cloud of disrupter needles that had been flung at Abalunam’s Pride when he’d escaped from the slime planet, watched with growing dismay as Bane’s ship engaged its drive and jagged away at an angle, shedding a fuzz of chaff and squalling countermeasures. Too late: a few moments later there was the bright blink of a fission explosion and Bane’s ship was an expanding ball of incandescent gas and debris.
‘We have a problem,’ the bridle said, and put up a window.
A ship stood behind the mirror that they were approaching. A sleek B-class picket ship somewhat smaller than Abalunam’s Pride, and studded with weapon pods. Tony hailed it, said as calmly as he could, ‘You just made a bad mistake.’
A woman answered, saying calmly, ‘The mistake was made by the ship that followed you here.’
‘The man who hired that ship was a harmless fool. And its pilot was innocent. Strictly work-for-hire.’
Tony had talked briefly with the pilot when he’d been smuggled aboard at Dry Salvages. A grandmotherly woman who had taken to the wandering life of a freebooter when she’d been just eighteen, and said that she had not regretted a moment of it.
‘The pilot accepted the risk when they accepted the job,’ the picket’s pilot said.
‘There are also police ships following me,’ Tony said. ‘When they find out what you have done, they will show no mercy.’
‘When have the likes of them ever shown mercy to the likes of us? Go through the mirror, and stand to. I will follow, and show you the way.’
As if he had any choice. The black mirror of the wormhole mouth was rushing towards him. It was too late to change his velocity or course. He was committed. He had been committed ever since he had booted from Veles.
49. Shanghaied
‘More than a hundred years ago, at about the same time that I arrived at Terminus, Ada Morange’s so-called timeship ran off into the unknown,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘And it never came back. She wasn’t aboard it, Lisa. You were. You had been kidnapped. Shanghaied. Forcibly conscripted into her crazy crew.’
After Lisa had been rendered unconscious in the bus on Niflheimr, Nevers said, a team of medical technicians had put her in a coma and processed her for suspended animation. Her blood had been replaced with a fluorosilicone fluid and her body chilled to four degrees Celsius, she had been inserted into a tank that fed her, removed her body wastes, and stimulated her muscles to prevent wasting, and the tank had been loaded onto the timeship, which had set out for the lonely M0 red dwarf, the lodestar of her eidolon.
The timeship had accelerated at 1.4 G, a compromise between the maximum acceleration of its bias drive and the comfort of its crew, to close to the speed of light. And after a long, long cruise across a hundred and sixteen light years it had turned around, decelerated and entered orbit around the M0 dwarf. Only seven years had passed aboard it, but a hundred and twenty-three years had passed as time was commonly measured by the human race. A wave of colonisation had spread through the New Frontier, two short-lived empires had risen and fallen, and a loose commonwealth of worlds had been established by the rebels who had overturned the Second Empire’s brief cr
uel reign. An island of civilisation surrounded by pirate nations and vast unexplored tracts of the wormhole network.
The crew of the timeship had used q-phones to stay in contact with Ada Morange and Karyotech Pharma. They could only transmit short text messages because of the huge differences in relative time frames, and although the link had dropped permanently after Ada Morange had disappeared and her companies had fallen apart, the crew had stayed loyal to her. Most had taken turns to hibernate, but the pilot had stayed awake the whole time because he was the link with the Ghajar shipmind. And that, Adam Nevers said, was what had saved Lisa.
‘The crew decided to kill you after they realised they had been beaten to their prize. They didn’t want you to fall into the hands of their enemies – the rest of humanity, basically. Fortunately, we had already established a communication link with the pilot, and we were able to persuade him to keep you alive. And here we are. Ada Morange thought that she could prevent me from rescuing you by sending you out here, against your will. As you can see, she was wrong.’
‘What happened to the pilot, and the rest of the timeship’s crew?’
‘The pilot works for me now. The others are dead.’
‘You killed them?’
‘The pilot killed them before they could kill you. It was the only way to save you.’
The people who had cared for her on the long voyage were dead. Just about everyone she knew was dead. The road dogs were dead. Her old boss, Valerie Tortorella. Willie’s girlfriend, Brittany Odenkirk. All her neighbours. The kid who’d packed her bags in the Shop’n’Save that last time. Everyone in Joe’s Corner; everyone on First Foot. Bria was dead, and Lisa hadn’t had the chance to send her that money, let alone apologise properly. Shit, even Bria’s kids must be dead by now. Just the thought of it gave Lisa a profound, lonely feeling. She had awoken more than a hundred years in the future and thousands of light years from home, and there was no way of returning. She had become a ghost, unmoored in time.
Her own ghost had been quiet since she’d been revived, but there was always a faint sense of its presence at her back, a feeling as if someone had just left the room. And the tug of the lodestar was still there too. It was no longer in one place but performed a slow spiral around her – something to do with being aboard a ship in orbit around it, she supposed. She was too tired and too brain-fogged to be able to work out the precise mechanics.
Isabelle Linder was dead, too. She hadn’t been part of the timeship’s crew; Nevers said that he’d arrested her, on Niflheimr. After she’d been interrogated and released she had returned to Earth and the Omega Point Foundation, but a couple of years later she had been killed in an automobile accident.
Ada Morange, though, she was still alive. After a fashion.
Technically she was no longer human, Adam Nevers said. She’d had her brain laminated: a form of amortality that turned you into an imperfect copy of yourself. Laminated brains weren’t considered to be human beings these days, and Ada Morange had passed through several owners and ended up in the hands of a minor honourable family – descendants of one of the rebellious naval officers who had brought down the Second Empire.
‘So she’s still causing trouble,’ Lisa said. ‘Good for her.’
Adam Nevers said, ‘Do you believe that you owe her your life?’
It was a serious question, seriously asked.
Lisa said, ‘She offered to help me, but she took it too far. I didn’t agree to travel into the future. I thought I was going to eyeball the lodestar from a safe distance.’
‘So she tricked you.’
‘It doesn’t mean that I owe you anything either, Mr Nevers. I didn’t ask to be rescued. If that’s what this is.’
He didn’t seem to hear her, launching instead into a long rambling story about how the family who owned Ada Morange’s laminated brain had recently discovered Ghajar code that, like the code which had infected Lisa on the Bad Trip, contained a powerful eidolon. How that wasn’t a coincidence, but had been part of a plan by Ada Morange to free herself, so that she could take control of the timeship at the end of its long voyage. He had thwarted her, Nevers said, and he had also made sure that he would catch up with her on what he called the other side of the mirror. Lisa didn’t ask him what he meant by that. He liked to dole out his information in fragments. It was a way of controlling her.
This was during their fourth conversation, a week after Lisa had been woken. She was still pitifully weak. Although Nevers’s ship was in free fall, moving around the little cabin was painfully difficult; despite several weeks of therapy and nanotech treatments before she had been woken, her muscles were badly wasted, and her spine and joints stiffly ached. Her digestion was shot because the medical technicians hadn’t yet stabilised her gut microbiome. Nerve damage in the tips of her fingers and toes numbly tingled. The face she saw in the mirror was the haggard face of her grandmother just before she had died, and the hair growing out in a stubbly crewcut was pure white.
She was suddenly old, and so was Adam Nevers. Bald, bent-backed, his beardless face lined and creased, his skull showing through his papery scalp. But his gaze was still sharp, and he’d lost none of his acid wit, or the iron will that had turned him into the most determined stalker in history. After his failed mission to Terminus, he’d retired from the geek police and had spent ten years petitioning billionaires until he’d found one who shared his crazy paranoia about Ada Morange’s meddling with Elder Culture tech. His sponsor had given him a ship that had travelled at close to the speed of light in a loop that had delivered him back to his point of origin, eighteen years ago. He had been recruited by some kind of hereditary admiral and joined a cabal of spies and spooks that suppressed or acquired disruptive technology, much as the geek police had done.
‘I was a stateless person,’ Nevers said. ‘A man out of time. And she took me in and found me useful employment.’
He was dressed in a light green shirt and dark green trousers, the uniform of the Commons police. It hung on his gaunt body like a suit on a valet stand. There was a lot of gold braid on the right shoulder of his shirt: apparently he was a full colonel. He had been selected for this mission because he had specialist knowledge of the timeship, Lisa, and the eidolon in her head.
‘And here we are,’ he said. ‘After all this time, here we are.’
He also said that Lisa was lucky that he had found her. ‘There was a suggestion that the timeship should be destroyed. A nuclear weapon, gravel strewn across its path with sufficient density to overcome its shielding . . . Others wanted to capture you and try to pull the eidolon out of your head. You wouldn’t have survived that. They would have sliced up your brain while you were conscious. Luckily for you, I was able to prevail.’
Later, Lisa learned that he had not travelled to the M0 dwarf star the hard way, but had transited through a wormhole that orbited it, unknown to Ada Morange or anyone else when the timeship had departed. It had not been an easy journey, following an obscure branch of the wormhole network and at one point traversing between stars in a long-distance binary, but it had taken far less time than the timeship. And there was a second wormhole orbiting the M0 dwarf, Nevers said. One very different from the wormholes the Jackaroo had towed into the L5 point between Earth and Moon at First Contact, and the wormholes in the vast network that spanned the Milky Way.
He opened one of the virtual-light windows that had replaced phone and computer and TV screens here in the future, showed her an image of that strange wormhole. She immediately felt her ghost crowding her attention, triggering some kind of anomalous activity in her brain that was picked up by the room’s surveillance machinery and relayed to Nevers.
‘Your eidolon really can’t get enough of this,’ he said. ‘We did some tests on it while you were in recovery. It was awake even when you were completely out of it, and every time we showed this it perked up like a dog sighting a rat. It’s definitely your lodestar.’
Inside the window, an irregular sheet
of black material was slowly turning end over end against a starry backdrop. A silvery ring was embedded in one face: a wormhole mouth set in material composed of condensed iron nuclei, incredibly dense and a billion times stronger than steel.
According to Nevers, the wormhole mouth was closed. Locked. ‘But there may be a way to unlock it,’ he said, smiling. His teeth had been replaced with ridges of white plastic.
‘Let me guess,’ Lisa said. ‘My ghost is the key.’
‘There’s a small sargasso of mad ships orbiting here, too. No one has ever figured out how to pilot one, and everyone who has tried to board one has either died or been driven insane. But the wizards who have been studying that wormhole think that those ships may contain protocols for opening it. And they also think that you, Lisa, can very much help with that.’
50. The Desires Of A Ghost
Abalunam’s Pride emerged into a sky dominated by the heaven tree of a stellar nursery. Billowing thunderheads and swirling currents of sooty dust, silicate grains and gas aglow with the radiation of hot bright stars embedded in them. Ragged pillars, shaped by light and stellar winds, clawing across a dozen light years, spalling offshoots tipped with the blowsy haloes of stars birthing in collapsing knots of protostellar material. A vast, violent engine of creation.
Tony hardly noticed this glory. Numb and angry, he noted the positions of drones in powered triangular orbits around the mirror, the pale blue disc of an ice giant some three million kilometres away. According to the bridle, the ice giant orbited a yellow G2 star at an average distance of 2.5 billion kilometres, and it was orbited in turn by several moons, one big enough to retain a tenuous and frigid nitrogen atmosphere. And there were other mirrors close by: eight of them in a loose cluster. Tony’s first thought was that there were more than enough to get lost in if he needed to flee. But when he looked more closely, he saw that the rings of strange matter around their mouths were not embedded in sculpted rocks, but were instead set in irregular sheets of stuff with the sheen of black mica. And the mouths themselves were not bordered with the usual ring of red-shifted light that leaked through from the far end, giving an illusion of depth, of deep pools lit from below. These looked as dull and flat as dusty black glass . . .
