This Virtual Night

by C. S. Friedman

  Oh, he wanted to leave. He wanted more than anything else to get out of this crazy war zone, to get far, far away from both arrow-wielding bark-mutants and the people who wanted to slaughter them. But then he would be alone in this station, without allies or supplies, waiting for exos to find him. Or for the vines to get him. Or a man-sized monster with claws.

  Sometimes choice is an illusion, he thought grimly. Does that make it easier or harder? “I’ll do what I can to help,” he said. “But I won’t kill people.”

  “Good enough, then.” He nodded toward the racks. “Jamal will help you suit up. Tell him you’re running support.”

  And then he headed off to the racks himself, to don insectoid armor and choose a weapon suitable for killing.

  Holy shit, Micah thought. What have I got myself into?

  What will our rhythmic milestones be, in this dark frontier? Bereft of solstice or season, harvest or tide, what events will we gather to celebrate? When our calendar is no more than a sequence of sterile numbers, and the orbiting of sun and moon have faded from memory, what excuses will we find to gather as a people, to reinforce the social bonds that are as necessary to human beings as food and water?

  SOLAN GETTYSBURG

  The Deep Space Paradox (Gueran Archives, Tiananmen Station)

  HARMONY NODE

  HARMONY STATION

  THE CASINO was full, as it had been every night that week. Since it was an elegant place the customers were all dressed elegantly, velvet gowns and spidersilk suits flowing in ripples of color beneath crystal chandeliers as facets of reflected light danced about them.

  Thirty-two chandeliers in all. One thousand and sixty-four crystals on each one. Thirty-six facets on each crystal.

  “Sir.”

  Guildmaster Kohl Dresden turned back from his vantage point on the balcony. His assistant was wearing a stylish tunic with twelve buttons down the front, and a hair clasp with thirteen rhinestones. There were three repeats of the geometric pattern on the carpet between them, and five sconces visible on the wall beside them. The flow of numbers was like background music inside his head: constant, soothing. “Yes?”

  “Guildmistress Vienna is here to see you.”

  Sparing one last approving look for the scene below, he headed to his office, where Raija Vienna was indeed waiting. She was wearing traditional Guild attire identical to his own, a flowing black robe that masked the outline of her body. Her naturally red hair was plaited into dozens of slender braids, which had been artfully woven around a complex headdress, the combination full of loops and whorls. It must have taken her hours to arrange. No, correction: it must have taken someone else hours to arrange. Her kaja was mainly yakimi, suggesting a love of speculation. Perhaps it was intended to honor the setting. “Mistress Vienna.” He nodded graciously and smiled. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “I’ve come for the Harvester Festival, and thought I should pay my respects. This casino is lovely. Is it yours?”

  “Co-owner. But I can’t take credit for the decorating, that was Desi.” Though I did insist that the mathematical proportions be pleasing. “Can I offer you a drink? Specialty of the house is a spiced pomegranate liqueur. Made with natural pomegranates, not the replicated kind. Fresh from Harmony’s own gardens.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled pleasantly. “I’d love to try one.”

  He flashed an order to his assistant, who sent him a confirmation icon in return. “Please, sit, relax.” He gestured to a plush autocouch. As she sat down it whirred softly, adapting its cushions to her body shape. He chose a matching chair that did likewise. “Things in Prosperity Node are going well, I hope?”

  She laughed softly. “Challenging, as always. I’m more than ready for a vacation.”

  “Then I’m glad we could offer you an excuse for one.” Even as he smiled the vacuous smile of a good host, he thought, Why are you really here? Guildmasters rarely did anything without deeper motive. Though he and Vienna were equal to one another in rank, and served the same vision—the Guild’s dream of a united humanity colonizing the galaxy—that very purpose made them rivals. Resources in the outworlds were limited, and Vienna’s node, like his own, had no nearby solar system to provide it with raw materials. Every element that their stations required must be shipped across vast distances, at great cost. Few investors were willing to commit to that, and any contract that Harmony won, other nodes would not win. Gain for one of them meant loss for the other.

  Nature is red in tooth and claw, an ancient Terran poet had once proclaimed. It was no less true in Guild politics than it had been on the plains of Old Africa. And Vienna was a skilled player. He’d already lost one valuable corporate contract to her. Now she was here, on Harmony, “for a vacation.” Not damn likely.

  “I’m so glad you decided to go ahead with the Festival,” she said. “Given recent events, I was worried you might have to cancel.”

  He netted a query to his archivist, asking him to find out who she’d brought with her. “You mean the attack on the station?”

  “Yes. How frightening. Aren’t you concerned there might be another assault during the Festival?”

  Her delicately probing words scraped his nerves like fingernails on slate. “It’s been dealt with.”

  An eyebrow lifted. “You know who was behind it?”

  “He’s been dealt with.” Assuming Tridac is playing straight with me, he thought, and that they got the right man. If not, then whoever planned the attack was still out there and might well strike again. The thought of its happening during the Festival was unnerving, but what choice did he have? The damage to his reputation if he canceled celebrations this late in the game—and the cost to Harmony’s future—would be incalculable.

  His assistant came in with two glasses of crimson liqueur and handed one to each of them. The glasses themselves were quite beautiful, with a delicate fractal pattern engraved around the lip. (Sixty segments: it was one of Dresden’s favorite numbers.) She held hers up to the light for a moment, admiring the workmanship, then tasted the liqueur. Conveniently, Dresden’s archivist chose that moment to deliver his research, so the Guildmaster had time to focus on the words that appeared in his field of vision.

  RETINUE OF NINE, ALL GUILD: EXEC. SECY, P. ASSISTANT, ARCHIVIST, 4 DATA AQUISITIONS, 1 RANK UNIDENTIFIED. YOU WANT NAMES?

  Data acquisitions. Those would be her hackers. His mind whirred, trying to piece the puzzle together quickly, so that she wouldn’t sense his distraction. Why bring hackers with her if this was just a vacation? Clearly it was more than that.

  She looked up at him with a smile. “It’s delicious.”

  Somehow he managed to keep his face from betraying his growing tension. Somehow he managed to smile back and say, “We’re very proud of it.” As if nothing else was going on. As if they didn’t both know that if anything went wrong this week, those investors who had shown interest in Harmony would surely turn their eyes to another node . . . perhaps her own. Was it possible she had come to sabotage the Festival? He remembered her question about canceling the event. Might she even be connected to the Dragonslayer incident? Another random explosion would be the perfect way to bring him down—

  No, he thought. No Guild officer would ever orchestrate an attack on a station like that. Such a crime would be seen as betrayal of the Guild, and the last officer who had betrayed the Guild had been sealed in a pod and shot into the ainniq, to be devoured alive by the creatures that lived there. She wouldn’t risk that just to gain political advantage. But some more subtle gambit . . . that was very possible.

  “I’m curious about your plan to alter the data protocols,” she said.

  He was alert now. “What about it?”

  “You don’t think that’s risky? Surely there are businesses who wouldn’t want their communications delayed. They might not take kindly to your interference.”

  He
put his glass down on a side table. “In a few days this station will be filled to the brim with visitors: tourists, reporters, scientists, vid producers, you name it. News agencies will livecast the arrival of the harvester fleet. Schools have requested realtime feed of it. So have observatories. Add to that the countless spectators who will want to stream the spectacle back home to their loved ones, and you’re talking about more data than the station can compress and transmit in a timely manner. I’m simply giving priority to outbound traffic. Opening the floodgates, as it were, so the tsunami can pass through unimpeded. Yes, inbound data will be slow for a few days—that’s unavoidable—but it’s a small price to pay to keep everything running smoothly.”

  Is that what you came for, why you brought your hackers with you? To study the tsunami, perhaps to manipulate it? He would have to set his own team to watching her people, which pissed him off, because it meant he would have to pull them away from other important business. Maybe that was her plan—to nurture paranoia in him, so that he would start making mistakes. He had to work at keeping the smile on his face.

  “I suppose that makes sense,” she said.

  There was other talk after that. Small talk, empty talk, meaningless social repartée that he fielded automatically. His mind was no longer in the conversation. It was not on Harmony at all. He was remembering a trip he had taken two years prior, when he’d accepted an invitation from Tridac Enterprises to check out the damage that had been done to Shenshido Station. Scavs had literally torn the place apart, making it hard to even find a place to dock. If the station had belonged to him he’d probably have stripped it down for raw materials, but the man from Tridac (what was his name again, Khatry something? Gatry?) saw potential in it. Whatever. Corporate business was of little concern to Dresden.

  It was while he was on the observation deck of the inner ring that he’d had a vision. He could see the coming Festival in his mind’s eye, could hear its music, could feel its myriad rhythms pulsing in his veins. And he could see a great wave of data gathering, as every man, woman, and child on the station sent outgoing messages at the same time—more data than Harmony’s network could possibly handle. Would it crash, and take all connectivity with it? Might the outernet itself fail, casting Harmony Station into digital darkness? In his vision he saw himself ordering a change in data protocols as the great wave bore down on him, opening the digital floodgates so it could thunder through.

  He had understood, in that moment, what was required to keep Harmony functioning. And in the months that followed, as plans for the Harvest Festival took shape, that vision had remained clear in his mind. Others might question its wisdom—indeed they did!—but he had seen the truth, as clearly as he was now seeing this room that surrounded him. And they would see it, too. The day would come when the floodgates would open, and they would understand why this had been necessary. His name would be praised, his foresight would be celebrated, and Terran corporations seeking to establish themselves in the outworlds would choose Harmony Node for their headquarters.

  He had seen a vision of that too, while on Shenshido.

  Soon, he told himself, as he traded meaningless pleasantries with his rival. Soon they will all understand.

  Those territorial instincts which we so casually disown—blaming our animal origins for their existence, citing civilization as the cure—were never truly eradicated. We may repress them, deny them, redirect them into more acceptable channels, but they remain part of our nature, always awaiting the catalyst that will free them.

  SANJAR RANIYA

  The Shadow Within

  HARMONY NODE

  SHENSHIDO STATION

  THEY OFFERED Ru weapons. Most were hand-held items of wood or salvaged plasteel, plus a few pipes and axes from Bio’s maintenance stores. Some of the sharper items were tipped in black poison—which she was warned not to touch—and others were studded with scalpel blades, glass fragments, anything that was small and sharp and could be embedded in wood. There were a few projectile weapons that looked like guns but fired sleek bolts—poisoned, of course. They weren’t accurate at a distance and couldn’t pierce heavy armor, so they seemed of limited value to her, but she took one anyway, just to have something that could function at range. Now that Ivar had taken her gun, the only weapons she had left were meant for hand-to-hand combat, and her goal was never to get that close to someone who wanted to kill her.

  There were no charge weapons available. No explosives. No sonics. Though the bios (as she had come to call Zevi’s people) had tried to construct them from salvaged materials, none had passed the testing stage—which seemed strange even by the standards of Shenshido, where strangeness was commonplace. Why would such diverse designs all fail their tests? They had nothing in common save mechanical complexity, and if they worked they would be infinitely more effective than the primitive weapons everyone was carrying. What natural or unnatural phenomenon would cause them all to fail like that?

  Add it to the list of things that didn’t make sense.

  They also offered her armor made from slices of salvaged building material—mostly plasteel—layered over a base of heavy cloth. Normally her safeskin coat would have been protection enough, but she wasn’t sure if the beating it had taken earlier would affect its functioning, so she accepted a breast plate and a gorget, extra protection for her vital organs and her neck. They wouldn’t protect her from charge weapons, but from what Zevi told her, it didn’t sound like the enemy had those. Maybe their complex weapons failed testing also.

  She tested her shock rod several times, for both snap extension and charge, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with it. Apparently only high-tech items that were created on Shenshido suffered random failure. Maybe these people just sucked at making weapons. She removed a collapsible knife from her boot and tucked it into a sheath pocket in her coat, and of course she had her rings on. Good enough for hand-to-hand combat.

  The journey back to the world upstairs was more complicated than she expected. Zevi’s people had sealed off the transport tube months before when the “crazies” upstairs found it, which meant the raiding party had to use passages intended for other purposes. From the narrow stairs of an observation tower in Biome Four to a maintenance scaffold, to a series of ladders and service hatches and a crawl space above the sky-dome, they moved upward level by level, silent and focused. Eighteen people, plus Ivar and Ru. Hardly an ideal army.

  Hopefully there would be no need to fight, Zevi had told her. But on a station where so many things went wrong, Ru wasn’t betting on it.

  Ivar stayed close by her side, as he’d promised to. She was his ticket out of this hell, and he made it clear he was not letting her out of his sight. There were worse things than having a strong, well-armed man by her side, but she wondered how long he would stay there if he figured out that her ship was moored to the station.

  Finally they came to the security hatch that would give them access to the upper levels of the station. They stopped for a moment, and Zevi’s second-in-command, an older man named Vestus, handed out dust masks and eye protection to everyone. No explanation was offered. When Ru looked to Ivar for enlightenment, he just shrugged and muttered, “Air quality might get bad.”

  Then the hatch was unsealed, and as they climbed through it single file, the lights of the second level came on, revealing a clean, well-illuminated corridor. Not stark white like the part of the station where Ru had been before, but with walls of a pale blue-gray, accented with stripes of darker blue along the upper and lower edges. Equally spotless, of course. The lab levels were always spotless. Whatever cleaning bots served this station required no human master to guide them.

  There was an identification code over the hatch, and Ru entered it into her mapping program. The station map appeared in her mind’s eye, and a moment later a red dot appeared on it, marking her position. The tension that had been coiled inside her eased ever so slightly. Now that sh
e knew where she was, she could find her way around the station without assistance. Which meant she could head back to Engineering whenever she wanted. She minimized the map and kept it in view. Its presence was empowering.

  “Are we clear?” Zevi asked Vestus.

  In answer the man took a small device from his pocket. The scientists in Bio had once used surveillance cams to observe their experiments, and Zevi’s people put it to good use, bugging the entire route. The group waited while Vestus gathered data and studied it. If a human being had so much as sneezed in these corridors after scouts had passed through, Vestus would know it.

  “Nothing,” he said a last, a hint of triumph in his voice. “No one’s been here but us.”

  Good news was a rare commodity on Shenshido, and a couple of people smiled in relief, but it was clear from the expressions of others that they were skeptical. Hands remained poised over weapons while eyes scanned the corridor nervously, ahead and behind.

  “All right,” Zevi said. “Let’s move out.”

  * * *

  The tunnels Micah had to crawl through were narrow, irregular, and difficult. That was because they were not tunnels at all—at least not in their original intention—but random spaces between pipes and ducts and conduits and junction boxes, some barely large enough for a person to squeeze through. They connected to form a twisting pathway, more like an organic cavern than a maintenance corridor. It even had the claustrophobic effect of a cavern, invoking awareness of the station’s great mass pressing in from all sides. Normally such a space would only be accessed in mechanical emergencies, so the entrance points were few and far between, but Serjit and his crew had cut through the back wall of a storage room for their initial access, and now and then Micah saw another place on the right-hand wall where someone had cut—and then resealed—a crude doorway. But the parts of their route that were completely enclosed felt suffocating.