by Paul McAuley
For a moment, he felt a plangent sorrow wash through him, so deep and profound that it completely unmoored him. And then it was gone, draining away and leaving not a wrack behind.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ he said. ‘What happened here?’
‘They are dead,’ the bridle said.
‘Dead? How can they be dead?’
Tony had never before seen a dead mirror. He had never before heard of one.
‘Their machineries are no longer functional. There is no tau neutrino flux and their sparks of intelligence are gone. The ends of the wormholes are pinched shut.’ The bridle paused, then added, ‘The ship and its eidolon grieve for them.’
‘I think my eidolon does, too.’
But the chill that passed through Tony was entirely his own. He and the ship’s mind were sharing the emotions of alien ghosts . . .
‘A bad thing happened here,’ the bridle said. ‘I am sampling the local environment. We appear to be inside a diffuse ring of metal-rich dust.’
‘Debris from destroyed ships?’
‘Possibly. There are anomalies in the planet’s magnetic field, too. And at least one of its moons has been shattered. Two arcs of water-ice rubble share the same orbit.’
‘It happened a long time ago,’ Tony said, mostly for his own reassurance. And then he remembered the hot flower of Bane’s ship.
‘It is not yet over,’ the bridle said.
‘Is that what you think, or is that what the ship and its eidolon think?’
‘It’s hard to tell.’
A few minutes later, the B-class picket that had been guarding the far side of the mirror emerged in a flare of false photons. After it had killed its residual momentum and rendezvoused with Abalunam’s Pride, its pilot transmitted a flight plan: their destination was a rocky planet that orbited at the inner edge of the G2 star’s habitable zone, a trip of ten days. She also dispatched a small carrier drone. Tony received it in the auxiliary airlock and unpacked it himself. It contained a q-phone. Apparently, the philosopher queen of the Red Brigade, Mina Saba, wanted to speak with him.
Tony took the call in a small space he had partitioned off in the passenger accommodations, after the ship was under way. He’d given some thought to the decor, settling on blood-red curtains around the walls and a single spotlight on a tall back ironwood chair, where he sat with Unlikely Worlds at his side. He wanted the !Cha to be a witness.
He was dressed in the traditional clothes of his family, a knee-length black shirt with gold embroidery, black trousers, a matching cap set on his braids. Sitting straight-backed with his forearms resting on the arms of the chair, the way Ayo sat when receiving petitioners, his palms sweating on smooth wood as a window opened in front of him and there she was.
The woman who had ordered the murder of his father. Who had planned the raid on Skadi, and had tried to murder him. The proximal cause of his family’s fall from grace.
She did not look anything like the crazed flame-eyed monster, bristling with surgical enhancements and haunted by half a hundred fearsome alien ghosts and djinns, of popular legend. She was an old woman with a cloud of white hair, cupped in a sling chair and dressed in a knee-length grey jumper. A cloud of little windows framed her head, displaying the faces of fourteen men and women – the captains of her fleet, Mina Saba told Tony, after they had exchanged preliminary niceties.
‘Before we talk about anything else,’ she said, ‘I want to deal with the unfortunate incident at HD 115043, and the death of your father. Commons propaganda has it that we staged an ambush as an act of revenge for an earlier attack. That is exactly the opposite of the truth. Hardliners in the Commons government wanted to sabotage the parlay, and were preparing to attack our delegation. We were forced to counter-attack and flee, and in our flight we destroyed the ships that stood between us and the nearest mirror. I know now that your father was aboard one of those ships. I ask you to believe that his death was an accident, caused by a conspiracy of reactionaries in the government he represented. I believe that those same reactionaries may also have murdered your mother. We may not be on the same side, but we have an enemy in common. And that is why I am so glad that you have come here. Together, we can do much to right serious wrongs.’
It was a good speech, contrived to push as many of Tony’s buttons as possible. He was certain that Ada Morange had a hand in it; that she had told Mina Saba about his family’s belief that his mother had been assassinated. And he did not trust a word of it. Oh, it was possible that the so-called reactionaries might have been planning an ambush, but the Red Brigade had acted first, and it had been a massacre.
He said, as calmly as he could, ‘We certainly have much to discuss.’
‘Perhaps we can begin with your recent adventures,’ Mina Saba said. ‘I know something about them, but some things are unclear. Your association with Colonel X, for instance.’
When they’d been much younger, Tony and Òrélolu had sometimes sparred in the Great House’s gymnasium. Òrélolu hadn’t been much of a boxer, dancing about, landing only a few butterfly pats, but occasionally one of his jabs would really connect. Tony felt that same jarring surprise now, but realised at once that Ada Morange must have told Mina Saba about Colonel X, after she had hacked the bridle.
‘It was not much of an association,’ he said, and explained how Colonel X had helped him escape from the custody of his family, and how the colonel had used, betrayed and abandoned him. He was selling himself, hoping to persuade Mina Saba that he had gone over to her side because he wanted payback for the colonel’s treachery.
The captains, their windows enlarging when they spoke and shrinking back into place afterwards, asked questions about his involvement in the discovery of the stromatolites, the Ghajar algorithm they contained and the eidolon it generated, his adventures on Dry Salvages and Veles. Tony answered as best he could while Mina Saba sat quietly in the middle of their host, watching him with a steady gaze that he found impossible to read.
When the philosopher queen at last ended the interrogation, Tony took the opportunity to ask about Ada Morange and the wizards. Were they prisoners or partners in her enterprise?
‘If you believe that Ada Morange is your partner, remember that she betrayed me and my family twice,’ he said. ‘First by telling you about the slime planet, and then by helping you raid my home. She is not to be trusted.’
There was a brief silence. Tony met Mina Saba’s gaze, could feel the attention of the fourteen captains leaning at their little windows.
Mina Saba said, ‘We will need to test you and your ship for the activity of that Ghajar eidolon. I take it you won’t object?’
‘Of course not. That is why I’m here.’
One of the captains, a grim black-haired man in a window that dilated above Mina Saba’s left shoulder, said, ‘It doesn’t prove anything one way or another.’
‘I would think that my surrender has already shown that I came here with the best of intentions,’ Tony said.
‘You didn’t surrender,’ the captain said. ‘We captured your ass.’
Unlikely Worlds spoke up, startling Tony. ‘There are many paths he could have taken. Yet he is here of his own free will, and I believe that he has brought what you need.’
‘If he needs a trickster like you to make his case, he’s in a bad way,’ the captain said.
Mina Saba held up a hand; the captain’s window shrank into the general cloud. ‘You know who we are and what we can do,’ she told Tony.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Then do nothing to provoke us. We will talk again,’ Mina Saba said, and she and her host of captains vanished.
Tony told Unlikely Worlds that he thought that Mina Saba would not harm him because only he could interface with the ship’s bridle. ‘She is tailored to me, and she is the only connection to the ship’s mind and the Ghajar eidolon that has infected it. And because she has been altered by the eidolon, the Red Brigade will not dare try to hack her.’
&n
bsp; ‘It’s quite possible,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘Perhaps I am making up a story to convince myself that they will not kill me.’
‘You are more important than you think. Think of all you have discovered since being reunited with your ship.’
‘I fear that all I have discovered is that I do not know enough.’
The bridle was frustratingly vague about how she had been changed; how the ship had been changed. She claimed that she saw things differently now, that she saw what she called the imprint of history, but when Tony had asked if that meant she could see the ghosts of the Ghajar she had said that it wasn’t like that.
‘I see the places they have been and the things they have done. I see all that, but I don’t understand everything. Do you think I will? I hope I will.’
She still could not communicate directly with the eidolon, or understand how it had altered the ship’s mind.
‘It shows me pictures, sometimes,’ she would say.
Or: ‘Sometimes I just get this great notion.’
Tony said, ‘Were you able to boot from Dry Salvages because the eidolon gave you the idea?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps,’ she said. ‘All I know is it seemed to be the right thing to do.’
That was something Tony had learned, at least. He knew now that Ada Morange had told the bridle about his plight on Veles, but she had not been able to take control of the ship, as he had once thought. Instead, the bridle appeared to be under the influence of the unholy alliance between the eidolon and the ship’s mind.
‘We are all being driven by the desires of a ghost,’ Tony told Unlikely Worlds. ‘And we do not know what it wants, or what it can do.’
‘Oh, I think we will soon find out,’ the !Cha said.
51. Mad Ship
‘You’d better be ready to get your magic on,’ the pilot told Lisa. ‘Otherwise that ugly motherfucker is going to kill us. Or, even worse, drive us stark staring insane.’
They were sidling towards the mad ship in a tug not much bigger than Lisa’s pickup truck, lying side by side in its cramped cabin. Various views of their target hung before them.
The mad ship was huge. It was dark. In visible light it was hardly there, a shadow against the galaxy’s river of star-smoke, but radar and microwave images revealed its bulk: a fat egg more than three kilometres long. A city-sized structure just hanging there in vacuum. Spines of different lengths jutted from one end – the smallest was taller than the UN building in Port of Plenty. The other end tailed away in a kind of mesh cone or funnel that narrowed to a flattened nozzle.
Ordinary Ghajar ships were divided into twenty-one classes, and every ship in a particular class was the same shape and size. But while all mad ships possessed those spines, that mesh funnel, they varied wildly in tonnage. There were eight mad ships in the sargasso that orbited the M0 dwarf, from sprats only a little larger than the tug to the monster it was approaching. And all were as dangerous as unshielded, unmoderated nuclear piles. People who approached too closely were either driven insane, or died when their brain-stem activity shut down. Animals and AI systems above a certain level of sophistication were killed, too. The mad ships appeared to selectively warp the fundamental properties of space-time in their immediate vicinity, specifically affecting electromagnetic activity associated with information processing. So far, no effective shielding had been discovered. They could be captured by remotely piloted haulers, but no one had yet discovered how to board them, let alone control them.
Lisa was heading towards the biggest of those killer ships in a frail human-built craft steered by the pilot of the timeship, Dave Clegg, a compact, shaven-headed Brit with the sour sarcastic manner of someone who always expects to be short-changed by life. He wouldn’t talk about his defection or the deaths of the timeship’s crew, said only that he’d done what needed to be done after he’d flown into an ambush, and his reward for cooperating with his hijackers was flying this shitty little tin can on shitty little missions.
Adam Nevers’s crew of wizards – what they called scientists here – claimed that Dave Clegg had been infected with a copy of Lisa’s eidolon. He had buzzed the outer edge of the mad ship’s zone of affect several times, with no detectable effect on his brain activity. Now he was supposed to take Lisa deeper in.
She had managed to snatch a brief conversation with him while they were being prepped, saying that if she really could get control of the mad ship, they could fly away. ‘After all, no one would dare follow us.’
She’d been half-joking, but Dave Clegg took it seriously. ‘Were you paying attention at the briefing? If I deviate a millimetre from the flight plan, another pilot will take over, fly the tug by wire. Plus, we’ll be watched by drones tipped with thermonuclear weapons. One wrong move and we’re hot plasma.’
‘They’re probably bluffing,’ Lisa said. ‘They need me. You too.’
Nevers’s wizards had begun a series of experiments designed to measure and define the activity of the eidolons imprinted in Lisa’s and Dave Clegg’s brains, subjecting them to low frequency electric pulses, tightly focused magnetic fields, patterns of flickering light and synchronised pulses of sound, so forth. They reminded Lisa of the tests she and Willie had undergone after the Bad Trip, and so far hadn’t revealed anything she didn’t already know.
‘If you want to test that notion, do it on your own time,’ Dave Clegg said. ‘Meanwhile, just try to relax, will you? Enjoy the ride. And don’t even think of trying anything funny.’
As if she could, in their coffin-sized quarters. She was studded with dots and patches that monitored her life signs and the activity of her brain and the eidolon, was dressed in a skintight one-piece pressure garment that had stiffened into a rigid casing as soon as the techs had buckled her into her couch. She couldn’t even scratch her nose. All she could do was watch the shadow of the mad ship grow in various windows as the little tug edged closer. She tried to feel how her ghost felt, tried the Zen thing of emptying her mind of thought so that she might sense its sly presence, but all she got was a tension headache pulsing behind her eyes.
Beside her, Dave Clegg gave status checks and answered questions she couldn’t hear. Over and again the stark shadow of the mad ship rolled off the screen and the tiny stars of the timeship and the S-class scow that housed Adam Nevers’s operation appeared, more than a thousand kilometres distant. Lisa had glimpsed a close-up view of the timeship when the tug had been launched. It looked hard-used, ancient, its bulky shields fore and aft deeply pitted and cratered by explosive impacts with microscopic grains of interstellar dust, its whole length sandblasted. Incredible to believe that she had spent seven years aboard the thing, sleeping more deeply than any fairytale princess while howling through the interstellar void at close to the speed of light . . .
The mad ship reappeared at the upper edges of various windows and crept downwards and disappeared again. The tug’s paper-thin hull pinged and creaked; Lisa sweated into her rigid pressure garment, remembering the jaunt in the Orion capsule when she’d visited Ada Morange a couple of lifetimes ago. At last, she gave in and asked how much longer they had to go until they reached the boundary of the zone of affect.
‘We passed it twenty minutes ago,’ Dave Clegg said. ‘The fucking bastards running the show want us to get closer.’
‘How much closer?’
‘All the way in, could be. If I knew I’d tell you.’
‘Well, we’re not dead.’
‘Not yet. Whatever it is you’re doing, keep doing it, okay?’
‘Right. You too.’
She had no idea how their ghosts were protecting them; the thought that they might suddenly stop whatever they were doing or be overwhelmed by the mad ship’s malign warp crept into her mind like a trickle of ice-water. The silhouette and radar images of the mad ship revolved twice more, then stabilised and centred in every window. The reaction motor thumped distantly; Lisa felt a phantom of gravity pass through her as the tug briefly accele
rated. The silhouette began to grow.
‘They want us to do a drive-by,’ Dave Clegg said. ‘Skim past at a minimum distance of three hundred metres. If we survive this you’re going to see some fine flying.’
They were aimed at the huge funnel at the stern of the mad ship. Details began to resolve in the radar images. There were structures embedded in the thick strands of the funnel’s mesh: building-sized blocks and plates, a patch of pyramidal cones packed in a Fibonacci spiral like seeds in a sunflower head.
‘No. No, I don’t,’ Dave Clegg said to someone on the other end of his comms. Then, ‘I’m changing course now.’
His fingers made shapes in the air in front of his face.
The reaction motor thumped again. In the windows, the funnel slid sideways, foreshortened. The bulk of the rest of the mad ship showed beyond, and Lisa realised that the tug was swinging around to the pinched nozzle that terminated the funnel.
But it wasn’t pinched shut now. A freezing watchfulness gripped Lisa. She couldn’t tell if it was her fear or her ghost’s fascination.
The nozzle was retracting and pulling apart in a roughly circular gape, like the mouth of a monstrous worm.
‘Fucking hell,’ Dave Clegg said reverentially.
The mad ship was waking up.
52. Somewhat Resembling Venus
Four days into the voyage to the G2 star’s Earth-sized planet, a flight of drones burst out of the mirror that Abalunam’s Pride and the Red Brigade picket had left behind. They came through all at once, an expanding fast-moving swarm that immediately engaged with the drones and mines sown by the picket. A hyperkinetic wavefront of strikes and counterstrikes flared across a million cubic klicks; driving sunwards, Tony glimpsed a tiny glitter of X-ray and gamma-ray sources, a stuttering constellation of brief-lived stars. The picket ship’s pilot shared an image snatched by a stealthed surveillance drone: ships emerging from the mirror, one after the other. Four J-class interceptors bristling with assets, heading from the ice giant in line-of-battle formation.
