Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  She attempted to sort some sense out of the nav gear’s gibberish and tried the ship’s external sensors, but they came up fuzz-gray. The back-ups were out, too, apart from one non-holo camera in the bow, fixed staring straight ahead. All it showed were lots of nebulae, a glimpse of a white disc ahead with a reddish-golden disc behind it, then nebulae again, then the white-disc/ red-gold disc combination again, and so on.

  “Where the hell am I?” she said.

  “Can’t read you,” Miz said. “Open a data channel.”

  “Only got input,” she said. “It’s open.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Okay, here’s what I have.”

  The nav gear started acting sensibly again. She was still on the Outside of Nachtel’s Ghost, about a quarter second Inward from the engagement position, tumbling and twisting toward the moon.

  “Right,” she said. “Just let me get my bearings here…”

  The external view she had now—flagged as thousand magnification—showed a wrecked excise clipper spinning slowly in front of her, its black hull flayed and pitted, its rear end gone, ruptured plates fluting tumorously from the craft’s waist to shred away to nothing from about three-quarters of the way back, ending in a glinting mess of shining metal.

  There was something biological, even sexual about the ruined ship, its matt-black skin like dull clothes ripped apart to reveal the flesh beneath, exposed and open. She’d never seen a ship so badly damaged.

  She thought, Poor fucker; lift that driver’s chow-bucket off its hook and send it back to Stores…then realized that this was the view from Miz’s ship; he was following her, and what she was looking at was her own craft. She was the unfortunate pilot she’d been consigning to oblivion.

  She selected trajectory forecast while she looked at the doc window. The medical unit seemed to have given up on her. Then she remembered where the doc’s tubes plugged into her. She shifted back to helmet-view, staring at where her left forearm disappeared between the bulging instrument bulkhead and the seat armrest; the gap was about three centimeters. Hmm, she thought.

  She shifted back to nav; she was heading straight for Nachtel’s Ghost. The icy little world was still nearly a tenth of a light-second away and it would take her the best part of an hour to get there, but she was going to go right down the throat of the gravity well. Even if she could miss Nachtel’s Ghost she’d be pointing at Nachtel itself, with no way to miss it; seen from its barely habitable moon, the gas giant filled half the sky. She’d have to sling-shot.

  Instinctively, she reached again for the main tanks.

  “Shit,” she said.

  She glanced at the group-status holo which had been part of the squirt Miz had sent. “Miz!” she shouted. “The others!”

  “Vleit and Frot are dead,” Miz said quickly. “Zef’s chasing Cara but getting no reply. Kid, there’s nothing you can—”

  “You’ve got damage, too!” she said.

  “Yeah, some laser-work from the cruiser and ice abrasion from that water-screen you left behind when you got zapped—”

  “Miz,” she whispered, “ are—?”

  “I’m sure, Sharrow,” Miz said, his voice thick. “Dead and gone. Probably never knew what hit them.”

  “How did they do this to us?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Miz said wearily. “Cenuij wants to call War Crime on that engagement; says nobody reacts that fast and there must have been an AI in charge; I think we just got out-lucked. Cruiser took some damage and flared home; now forget about the engagement! Have you any reaction mass? We have to get you into orbit around the Ghost.”

  She’d shifted into life support. “No point,” she said. “The recycler’s wrecked and I’m losing gas; I’ve enough to breathe for about…two hours, then that’s it.”

  “That suit or cabin?”

  “Suit. Cabin’s got less; pressure leak.”

  “Shit,” Miz said. She could almost hear him thinking. “The doc,” he said. “It could floor your metabolism and—”

  “The doc,” she said, “is fucked.”

  “Damn,” he said. It was such a mild curse she almost laughed. “Could you bail out?” he asked her. “I could match with you; you could zap across…or I could get over to you…”

  “I don’t think there’s quite the time,” she said. She glanced into suit-view and looked briefly at her one trapped and one…broken? dislocated? arm. “There might be other problems with that approach, anyhow.”

  “What about reaction mass?”

  She glanced around. “Nothing.”

  “Come on! There must be something! Check!”

  She initiated a checking routine, and looked carefully at each tank glyph in turn. The check routine said zero everywhere and staying that way. Her own senses told her the same thing. She tried blipping the feed from each tank in turn, just in case there was water there and it was a sensor or display fault.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Displaying empty; acting empty.”

  “Think think think,” she heard Miz mutter. She suspected he hadn’t meant her to hear that, or had simply been unaware he was speaking. Suddenly she wanted to hold him, and started to cry again. She did it quietly, so he wouldn’t hear.

  “This might sound mad,” he said. “But I could use my laser; hit you in the right place, get some reaction that way…”

  “It does sound mad,” she said.

  “There’s got to be something!” She could hear the desperation in his voice.

  “Hey,” she said. “Want to hear another crazy idea?”

  “Anything.”

  “ Crash-land on the Ghost.”

  “What?”

  “Cruise in and crash-land, like a plane.”

  “You haven’t got any wings!”

  “I’ve got a shape that looks vaguely aerodynamic; bit like the end of a spiked gun. And there’s the snow-fields.”

  “What?”

  “The snow-fields,” she said. “They’re hundreds of meters deep on the Ghost, in places; lo-grav. And there’s air.”

  “Pretty thin air.”

  “Getting thinner all the time,” she agreed. “Unbreathable in another thousand years; crap terraforming…but it’s there.”

  “But how you going to fly?”

  “Oh, I can’t,” she said, taking another look round the ship’s systems from the highest level. What a total fucking mess. If this was a simulation, she’d be clicking out now and hitting Replay to go back to just before it had all gone so horribly wrong, and try again.

  “It was just an idea,” she told him. “I used to wake up in the night and try to think up ways out of horrible situations to get me back to sleep, and one idea I had was using the Ghost’s snow-fields to crash-land on.” She sighed. “But I always imagined I’d have some control as I went in.”

  She shook her head at the unsaveable mess around her and swooped back into close-range nav view. “I think I’m dead, Miz.” She listened to her own voice, and was amazed at how cool she sounded. Physically brave.

  “Forget it. I’ll run that idea of the crash-land past the machine; see what it thinks.”

  “Aw, don’t spoil my fun,” she said. “I never even ran it through mine…”

  “Fucking hell,” she heard him say after a while. “My machine’s as crazy as you.”

  “It says it’ll work?”

  “Um, three-quarters empty mass…drag…need details of the snow compression, depth it becomes ice…depends on the angle…no; the machine’s not quite as crazy as you. And you’d need some fine-tuning, in-atmosphere, at the start anyway…”

  “Run an insertion past the machine anyway,” she said.

  “Running it.”

  “At least it’d be spectacular,” she said. “Burning up in the atmosphere or slamming into the snow. Better than hazing out from oxygen starvation.”

  “Don’t talk like that!…Shit, there must be something…”

  She had remembered some time ago what the secret was. “
Hey,” she said gently. “Miz?”

  “What?”

  “Pick a number between one and two.”

  “What?”

  “Pick a whole number between one and two. Please.”

  “Oh…one,” he said. She smiled sadly. “Well?” he said.

  He said it the way he had when she’d got him to toss the coin outside the Bistro Onomatopoeia, a week earlier.

  She shook her head, even though it hurt and he couldn’t see.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Tell you later.” She shifted back to the doc, down into the external read-outs. Cabin cold, external air poor and pressure falling. Aggregate radiation dosage…Oh, well. She felt herself shrug and grimaced as her left arm protested. She was going to die, anyway; she wouldn’t live long enough to experience the radiation sickness. And I’d have made a lousy mother anyway, she told herself.

  She kept wanting to press Replay, to snap out of this disastrous simulation and start again, or just break the link and go for a drink with the guys. It didn’t feel right that she was trapped in this situation as firmly as she was trapped in the seat, pinned there by the weight of circumstance and chance.

  At first, when she’d joined up, she’d thought she could never be one of the dead ones. She told herself they must have made a mistake, and she just wasn’t going to.

  Later she’d started to get scared sometimes, when pilots she’d thought even better than she had died. Had she been wrong about how good they were, or wrong about skill saving you every time? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe luck did come into it. And that made it frightening, because nobody knew how to train for that. You carried a lucky tooth or a special letter or always made sure you were last out of the mess; she’d known people who did that sort of thing…A lot of them were dead, too.

  “Look,” Miz said, “I’m still catching up with you; I’ll match velocities. I’ll get over to you. It can’t take—”

  “Miz,” she said, quieting him. “No.” She let out a long, ragged sigh. “I’m trapped in here. I’d have to be cut out.”

  “Oh, shit,” he groaned.

  The way he said it, she knew he was talking about something else. “What?” she said.

  “You don’t need that much to take you into the Ghost’s atmosphere at the right angle,” he said. “Just a nudge; a few seconds’ burst…Hey!” His voice brightened again. “I’ll nudge you! I’ll just fly alongside and—”

  “Forget it; you’ll just break your own ship.”

  “Look, if we can’t think of anything—”

  “Wait,” she said.

  “What?”

  She reached into the ship’s plumbing, found no read-out for the relevant section of pipe, but the record of valves shut…

  “Hey,” she said. “You know I put the thrust the wrong way at first; made the spin worse?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got confused because before that I tried sending the water round the loop against the spin.”

  “So?”

  “So there might be water in the closed section of loop.”

  “Isn’t it showing?”

  “No read-out.”

  “Shit,” he said. “There might be some in there.”

  “Yes, and it might be frozen,” she said, shifting into the ship’s patchy temperature map.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I’ll run it through…” His voice went away. She was left alone for a few moments.

  She’d always expected to be re-living her life at this point, but it didn’t seem to be happening. She felt cold and battered and tired. This combat flying lark was supposed to have been just a little exotic incident in her life, something to tell people about when she was old. It had never been meant to get this important, never been planned to be this crucial and ghastly and hopeless. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be the end of everything. It couldn’t all just end, could it?

  Yes it could, she thought. Somehow she’d never really thought about it before, but yes; of course it could. She didn’t just accept it now; she knew it now. What a time to learn that particular lesson.

  “Yeah!” Miz hollered. “If it’s there, there’s enough!”

  “Well,” she said. “We won’t know until we try.”

  “But you’ve got reaction mass!” he yelled. “You can do it!”

  “Two minutes ago you were telling me I was crazy to even think about this; now suddenly it’s a great idea.”

  “It’s a chance, kid,” he said, quieter. There was something else in his voice, too; the equivalent of one arm holding some surprise behind his back, and a sly smile on his face.

  “And?” she said.

  “I just ran a routine for your in-atmosphere control.”

  “Using your astonishing powers of laser control, you will fashion a pair of crude but serviceable wings from—”

  “Quiet, smart-ass; dig down to the clip’s non-mil suite.”

  “Pardon? Oh all right.” She shifted down the systems root to the clipper’s full display. What was this heap of civilian shit meant to do? Was he just trying to distract her?

  “See the gyros?”

  “Gyros? No.”

  “Labeled FTU1 and 2; Fine Trimming Units.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, the bow cluster, anyway. Shit, I thought those were stripped when these boats were militarized.”

  “They never got around to it,” Miz told her. “Now, can you get power to that bow cluster?”

  “Yes. But wouldn’t it be better—?”

  “No; it doesn’t matter that you’re tumbling on insertion if we get the burn timed right and you might need all the maneuvering power in those gyros.”

  “All right, all right,” she said. “They’re taking power.”

  “Okay!” he yelled. “We’ll re-work the figures when we’re closer. Now, I’m going to try and match velocities; that should make things more accurate. Get ready for some incredibly skillful flying on the part of the Tech King, and then be ready to read out lots and lots of exciting numbers once I’m alongside, unless you can get the output comm link sorted.”

  “Can’t wait,” she said, the tiredness tingling through her. She just wanted to sleep. She forgot about her left arm for a second and tried to stretch.

  She cut off the shout of pain as fast as she could.

  “What?” Miz’s voice said quickly.

  She breathed hard a couple of times.

  “I just remembered I paid my mess bill yesterday,” she lied.

  “Wow.” Miz laughed. “You really do tempt fate, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It must be male.”

  “That’s more like it,” he said. “Okay; let’s see if I can get this thing spinning and twisting like yours…”

  “Okay,” he said, and she could hear the fear in his voice. “Here we go, kid.”

  They had talked it through for the last half hour; she’d given him all the data she could, he’d run it past his machine dozens of times and every time it came out Maybe. She’d got the gyros up to speed, braked each one in turn and the ship had responded. She’d settled on a routine that would let her use the gyros to control the ship during its descent through the atmosphere of Nachtel’s Ghost.

  They’d done a tenth-second burst from the pipes into the reaction chamber and got power; there was water in the pipe and it wasn’t frozen. They’d got a recent snow-field map of the Ghost from their base via Dloan, who was escorting Cenuij’s damaged craft back there; they’d selected a big snow-field on the equator. Miz had shown her the view he had of her ship, perfectly parallel with his own and slowly rolling while the rest of the system revolved around it. She’d complimented him on his flying and tried not to look too closely at the damage.

  But now he had to move away, and she had to make that last burn, hoping the water in the pipe-work would be enough, and it hadn’t frozen somewhere further up the duct, and that the pump would work, and that the power didn’t fail, or even fluctuate.

  “You take care now,”
she said.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Thirty seconds.”

  “Me, worry?” she said, trying not to let him hear the fear and pain in her voice. She was finding it more of a strain now. Her arm was hurting really badly and she was frightened. She wanted to tell Miz that there was a precedent for all this, that when she’d been five years old she’d been saved by a fall into the snow, but she had never been able to tell him that full story, and he had never pressed her for it. She wanted to tell him she loved him and she was pregnant by him, but she couldn’t tell him any of that, either.

  “Look, ah…kid,” he said (and she just knew he’d be grimacing now, and that if he hadn’t had the helmet on he’d be scratching the side of his head), “I know there’s…you know; things we haven’t said during the last few months; I mean, me and you, since we’ve been, you know, well, together, but—”

  “You’re making a complete mess of this, Miz,” she told him, her voice matter-of-fact while her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t say anything else now. Tell me later. Ten seconds.”

  He was silent for six of them.

  Eventually he said, “Good luck, Sharrow.”

  She was still thinking what to say in reply when she opened the valve, the motor roared in the distance and she had to devote all her attention to the attitude and heading readings. She shifted to the view through the one little flattie camera in the craft’s nose.

  The planet came up to meet her; a curved white wall. The ship encountered the atmosphere’s outer layers. She tried the radio and heard interference. “Miz?” she said.

  “. . . ust hear y—”

  She shouted, “If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!”

  If he replied, she never heard him.

  The falling ship plowed deeper into the planet’s atmosphere and began to judder and moan.

  The four of them sat on the tavern terrace a little outside Pharpech city, she with her memories.

  The others watched the huge stom as it wheeled and banked above the deep country a kilometer east of the tavern, beating back up toward the middle-layer of Entraxrln membrane it had cruised down from earlier. The monkey-eater birds mobbed it, stooping at its back and head in great plummeting circles, turning quickly this way and that, zig-zagging erratically, unpredictably, wings like jagged hooks in the air. The stom, four times the size of the monkey-eaters, moved with a ponderous grace that approached dignity, as it ducked its massive reptilian head and took what ponderous, almost gentle evasive action it was able to.