“Were you watching when my Directorate team arrested your Fiech body? Some clever little vantage point nearby, perhaps?”
Svein pressed his face up close to Paula, his mouth parting with an angry snarl. “That obsession you mock in me is exactly the same one that runs through you, Investigator Myo! Friland didn’t have to sequence it into your genome quite as much as you were led to believe. It’s not artificial, it’s you. It’s your heritage. It’s my heritage. It’s what we are. And this is our world. You’re home, Paula. Welcome back.“
She smiled lightly. “I know what I am, and I know where my home is. Good luck finding yours.”
The Svein body took a half step back from her. All four of the nest were frowning in annoyance now. “Why are you here?” they demanded in unison.
“To ensure that the sentence passed on Fiech is carried out in full,” Paula told them.
“I thought it had been,” the Volkep body said coldly.
“It hasn’t been yet, because you made sure that part of you didn’t remember. But memory’s a funny thing, it’s triggered by association. And your mind is shared.” Paula gestured around at the empty air. “It’s all around us, if you know how to look.” Her virtual hand touched Nelson’s communication icon.
“I’ve got enough,” she said out loud.
“What-” all four nestlings grunted.
The wormhole opened behind her, expanding out from a micron-wide point to a two-meter circle. Bright light shone through, silhouetting Paula’s naked body. She stepped backward, crossing the threshold to be enveloped by the light. She lost her footing as Augusta’s slightly heavier gravity claimed her, and fell on her arse in a completely undignified manner. Svein and his nestlings never saw that. The wormhole closed the instant she was through.
She was sitting in the middle of the alien environment confinement chamber of the CST Augusta Exploratory Division, a huge dome-shaped chamber with dark radiation-absorptive walls. In front of her was the five-meter-wide blank circle of the wormhole gateway, its gray pseudosubstance emitting strange violet sparkles. Halfway up the curving surface behind her was a broad band of reinforced windows with the big operations center behind it. Nelson Sheldon was pressed up against the superstrength glass, grinning down at her. Behind him, the hundred-strong staff controlling the wormhole were peering over the tops of their tiered rows of consoles, curious and eager to see the conclusion to their oddest operation ever. Tracking her movements on Merioneth and keeping the wormhole close by had stretched the machinery to its limit.
“You okay?” Nelson’s amplified voice boomed down from the ceiling.
“Yeah,” Paula said, climbing to her feet. “I’m okay.”
* * *
WHAT I KNOW REALLY HAPPENED
The court guards were utter bastards to me. After that idiot judge passed sentence they dragged me down to the holding cell while I shouted that I was innocent. They just laughed as they slung me inside. I heard them later. Deliberately. They said that the Justice Directorate had developed a suspension system that allows a tiny part of your mind to stay awake during the sentence, so you’re aware of each long year as it passes. It’s part of the punishment, knowing all the opportunities you’ve lost, the life you’ve missed.
Not true. Just another Unisphere myth.
After, they put me down on the bed in the preparation room. No. I’ll be honest. After, they held me down. I fought them, Damnit, I’m innocent! I was a classic case of someone who went down screaming and kicking. They won’t ever forget me. It took six Directorate orderlies to hold me in place while the malmetal restraints wrapped around my limbs. And after that, I still shouted. I cursed them and their families. I swore vengeance, that in two and a half thousand years I’d become the killer they wrongly thought I was, and I’d hunt down their descendants and torture them to death.
No use. They still infused the drugs. Consciousness faded away.
I woke up. The room that slowly came into focus around me was very similar to the preparation room I’d gone to sleep in. Stupidly, I was bloody grateful that I hadn’t known all that time flowing around me. The waste of my potential lives. But I was alive. Warm. And pleasantly drowsy.
There was something around my neck that seemed familiar somehow, something from the time in my life I’d lost. Icons in my virtual vision were blinking green, showing that the memorycell channels into my neural structure were wide open.
Then that queen bitch Paula Myo came in. I tried to get up to throttle her. That’s when I found I was still restrained, with malmetal coiled around my arms and legs.
“What the fuck is this?” I shouted. My voice was weak.
“I had you woken,” Myo told me. “I have something for you, something you’ve forgotten.”
“What? What is this?”
“You,” she said, and took off her suit jacket. Something was glowing underneath her white cotton blouse. I could see shapes moving.
“Help,” I cried. “Someone. Help me.” The colored shadows on her abdomen began to writhe faster and faster. My virtual icons changed from green to blue, showing incoming impulses.
“What is that?” I whispered in fright.
She glanced down, as if only becoming aware of the light. Her smile made her face ugly. “A kind of prison, I suppose. You know, in ancient times necromancers used to draw pentagrams to trap demons in. They thought that if they were imprisoned, they could use their powers. A very misplaced notion, I suspect. In this case, geometry isn’t important. I simply had to have a large receiving element. Your thoughts are big, after all. But I managed to catch them. Not all of them, just the right ones. Those that were relevant to the crime.”
“My thoughts?” The icons expanded abruptly, wiping out my sight. Then faces emerged through the blue mist. Four of them in some kind of dilapidated room. Faces I knew. Svein. I remembered him. I remembered… being him.
I was the one standing in the desert outside Ridgeview while the rest of me lived our life. It was hot out there. Bloody unpleasant, actually. The sun burned my arms and face. I took a leak against some local plant. That way if the forensic team were any good, they’d find it and confirm the Fiech body’s DNA.
Then the air traffic control data playing in my virtual vision showed me that the plane was taxiing to the runway. I took a breath and got the missile ready. A simple thing, really, three of me had built it in the engineering center under the Lake Hill house. Most of the components were off-the-shelf, and the custom ones were easy enough for the bots to manufacture. We built quite a few.
The finished product was a simple blue-gray launch tube over a meter long, with a shoulder saddle and a handle. It was heavy when I rested it on my shoulder; I squatted down on the stony sand to make the weight easier. I could see the big old Siddeley-Lockheed lift into the sky, with its engine rumble faint in the hot desert air. It took what seemed like an age to climb up to its cruise altitude, curving around the city in a wide arc. The passenger list said it was just about full, over a hundred and thirty people. It would be quick. Death in such a fashion always is. And the passenger list confirmed the Dynasty scum were on board. The missile’s sensors locked on. There wasn’t anything else in the sky to confuse them.
I fired the missile. The bloody launch tube slammed into my shoulder. If I hadn’t been bracing myself, it would have knocked me down. The roar of the solid rocket booster was obscenely loud. For a couple of seconds, I was overwhelmed. It was like being hit on the side of the head. Smoke was seething all around me. I crouched, staggered about. Then I recovered enough to stand still and look up into the wide open sky. The hyperram had kicked in, which made the missile just about impossible to see.
I expected the explosion to be bigger. This was just a white pinpoint flash, no fireball. But behind the blaze, the plane started to disintegrate, tumbling out of the sky, dark fragments twirling away from the main body.
There was no way I could move. Actually, my whole nest of bodies froze up as I watched the
spectacle. There was something obscenely beautiful about the sight, and better still was the knowledge that I had created it. If I could do this, I could do anything! I’d be able to force through Merioneth’s Isolation now. I had the courage and determination.
The first fragments hadn’t even reached the ground when I turned and hurried down to the shore where the boat was anchored. This point was critical. The whole area would be swarming with people. The Unisphere was already flinging out alarms. Rescue crews and police would be dispatched within minutes. And any local citizens nearby would no doubt rush to help. My Volkep body released the warning message into the Unisphere as I reached the shoreline.
After that, it was a quick trip across the sea to Ridgeview. I waited on the station platform for my train back to Earth. It was an eerie experience. Everyone around me was accessing the Unisphere reports of the plane crash. Nobody said anything; they were all too shocked at the disaster just outside town.
When I got back to Sydney, I took a cab straight to the apartment. The rest of me were a pleasant sensation of reassurance as I took the memory wipe drugs. The Volkep body took the array necklace from my neck and smiled proudly. I could feel the connection with myself reducing, darkness replacing the joy and color of my true memories. One contact remained, a single thread of experience: the alibi trip to Ormal. Damn, that stewardess was great-looking. I wish I hadn’t been so wrapped up on a mission.
Then I was alone. And the drugs kicked in, and I knew nothing more.
Then I was without one of me. Just for an instant, I felt regret. But I am many. The loss of a single body is irrelevant. That’s what I am, a New Immortal. That’s why I am. I continue even after the loss of one, or more. I live.
I was shivering when the glare of color and sensation subsided into simple knowledge. Paula Myo was looking down at me, pulling her suit jacket back on. The flare of activity within her OCtattoo was subsiding.
“Bitch!” I couldn’t sense me. For the first time since I nested, I was devoid of myself. One body with a single mind, completely alone.
“Good-bye,” said Paula Myo.
“No. No!” A Justice Directorate orderly had entered the loom. He was carrying an infuser. Paula Myo nodded at him.
“Carry on,” she ordered.
“Why have you done this to me?” I cried. “This is inhuman!”
She turned in the door, her face blank as she stared at me. “You are the person who committed the crime. The whole person, now. This is your sentence. The sentence you tried to avoid. Justice has prevailed.”
The orderly pressed the infuser against my neck. I screamed, my mind crying out to the rest of me, to help me, to comfort me. There was no answer.
* * *
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
Nelson Sheldon was waiting in the entrance hall of the Justice Directorate as Paula came out of the elevator. “How did it go?” he asked.
“Successfully. The true Dimitros Fiech is now serving his sentence.”
“Shame about the rest of him.”
“Not really.”
“Oh?”
“When suspension was first introduced, the Justice Directorate examined the idea of leaving convicts aware while their bodies slept. It was abandoned almost immediately. The experience was too much like sensory deprivation. The minds went insane very quickly under such circumstances.“
“So how does that help us?” Nigel asked curiously.
“Dimitros Fiech is now unaware of his predicament. He’ll sleep soundly for the next two and a half millennia, and he’ll be offered extensive therapy when he gets out-assuming the Commonwealth is still around. Meanwhile, on Merioneth-”
“Ah. Svein Moalem’s nest knows part of him is in suspension. And as an Immortal-”
“He’ll endure those two and a half thousand years aware of the Fiech body’s state. The punishment is shared. Or rather, it isn’t, because it’s all his. Just experienced in different ways.”
Nelson smiled. “We can live with that.”
“Good, because I have no intention of returning to Merioneth.”
“Thank you for going in the first place,” Nelson said. “The Dynasty is most grateful. We don’t forget who our friends are.”
Paula grinned back shrewdly. “I'll remember that.”
* * *
OWNER SPACE
Neal Asher
Taken from the Short Story Collection “Galactic Empires” (2008) edited by Gardner Dozois
* * *
Born and still living in Essex, England, Neal Asher started writing at the age of sixteen but didn't explode into public print until a few years ago; a quite prolific author, he now seems to be everywhere at once. His stories have appeared in Asimov's, Interzone, The Agony Column, Hadrosaur Tales, and elsewhere, and have been collected in Runcible Tales, The Engineer, and Mason's Rats. His extremely popular novels include Gridlinked, Cowl, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, The Engineer Reconditioned, and Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity. Coming up is a new novel, Hill diggers.
In the wild and pulse-poundingly-suspenseful adventure that follows, he vividly demonstrates that it might be a good idea for the citizens of opposing Galactic Empires to stay well away from each other-especially when there are deep, bitter, and long-lasting grudges between them.
* * *
Kelly Haden worked herself into a sweat on the training machines positioned in the outer ring of the Breznev's spin section, the scars on her arms and chest tightening. She would have preferred to use free weights, but such were not allowed aboard ships like this, since a malfunction of the spin section or, for that matter, of the ship entire, could result in heavy lumps of iron hurtling about like chaff. There was also the matter of the weight itself, when a lightly constructed training machine like the one she was using could stand in for a few hundreds pounds of iron.
Finishing her workout, she picked up her towel and headed for the ladder leading up to the inward hatch, but the exercise had not dispelled the taut feeling of frustrated anger in her stomach. She climbed up into the sleeping quarters.
"Feeling better now, Societal Asset Haden?" enquired Longshank from his bunk. He was reading his notescreen again-some esoteric biological text, no doubt. She glanced at him, took in his long gray hair tied back with some confection of colored beads, at his graywear deliberately altered for individuality: sleeves cut away above the elbow, red fabric from the three Collective flags they found aboard sewn around the collar and waistband. They all did this sort of thing. Kelly had been one of the lucky ones to have found an old Markovian uniform jacket, which she had altered to fit, and had cut off her graywear trousers at just below the knee. It was a form of escape—the only escape for them that seemed likely now.
"No, I don't feel much better, Societal Ass Longshank," she replied.
What had once been a humorous exchange now contained a hint of bitterness.
The inner ring of the spin section was the bridge. It was without a ceiling, and while working at any of the consoles it was possible to see one's fellows upside down overhead. Kelly, being a ship's engineer, had been quite accustomed to this sort of thing, but it had taken some getting used to for the other escapees, and the vomit vacuums had seen plenty of work.
"How are we doing?" she asked Traviss, who in the low grav sat strapped into his chair at the center of a horseshoe of navigation consoles before the projection cylinder.
Traviss was a young hyperactive man who had been in the Collective military until he showed a talent with computers and spatial calculus and was reclassified as a "societal asset." Like them all, he had resented the resultant scrutiny from the Doctrinaires. He touched a control and the projection cylinder filled with stars.
"Our slingshot around Phaeton is taking us nicely out of the system's gravity sink and we'll be able to U-jump in sixteen hours." One of the stars flashed red, and, a little way out, flashed the blue spinning-top icon of the Breznev. Between the two lay three icons
representing the Collective pursuit vessels from Handel. They weren't the problem. The problem was a green icon accelerating out from the nearest star to Phaeton. The Lenin, though not as close to them as the other ships, would now easily be able to intersect their course. It was also faster, so there would be no outrunning it.
Traviss continued, "I calculate that the Lenin will be able to knock us back into the real in three days if we continue along our present course."
The others were gathering around now: Slome Terl, astrophysicist and their paternal figurehead; Olsen Marcos, who was a geneticist and an amateur historian, though that was a pursuit now strictly controlled in the Collective; and Elizabeth Terl, Slome's daughter and plain physicist in her own right. Of the fifty people aboard, everyone was an expert of some kind, and everyone had been reclassified as a "societal asset" and come under doctrinal scrutiny and control. To say the Collective was ruled would be to deny what it claimed to be, but it was ruled, by those who did all they could to skew reality to fit doctrine. The Doctrinaires knew that anyone above a certain intelligence level was a danger, yet also essential for a space-faring civilization, so such people had to be managed.
"Space has, by definition, three dimensions," said Slome. He was old, bald, and running to fat, and possessed a mind that sliced through problems like a microtome.
"Somewhat more than that, I would suggest," said Elizabeth, young, arrogant, and, though intelligent, more intent on displaying that intelligence than using it.
"Shut the fuck up, Liz," said Kelly distractedly.
The girl gave Kelly a superior look, then reached up to flick a lock of her bright ginger hair aside. She was pretty, too, which Kelly also found annoying.
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