Aurora Rising

by Alastair Reynolds

  Dreyfus smiled to himself. He’d felt the scope of the investigation widening the moment a connection to the Eighty entered the frame. But nothing had prepared him for this shift in perspective.

  “Keep talking to me, Boss. I’m still on the line.”

  “There’s a Conjoiner ship here. It’s just sitting in the middle of the rock.”

  Sparver paused before answering. Dreyfus could imagine him working through the ramifications of the discovery.

  “Remind me: what have Conjoiners got to do with our case?”

  “That’s what I’m very eager to find out.”

  “How did the ship get where it is?”

  “No idea. Can’t see any sign of a door in the chamber, and there definitely wasn’t one on the outside. Almost looks as if it’s been walled-up in here, encased in rock.”

  “You think the Conjoiners hid it here for a reason?”

  Dreyfus brushed his hand over the control panel again. “I don’t think so. Apart from the ship itself, nothing in the rock looks Conjoiner. It’s more as if the ship’s being held here by someone else.”

  “Someone managed to capture and contain a Conjoiner ship? That’s a pretty good trick in anyone’s book.”

  “I agree,” Dreyfus said.

  “Next question: why would anyone do that? What would they hope to gain?”

  Dreyfus looked at the one facet in the chamber that was burnished silver and realised that it was a sealed door rather than an opaque panel in the bank of windows. The chamber’s illumination traced the ribbed tube of a docking connector, stretching across space from the door panel to meet the light-sucking hull of the ship.

  “That’s what I’m going to have to go aboard to find out.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Boss.”

  Dreyfus turned to the panel again. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to leave. But the policeman in him had to know what was inside that ship; what secret was worth murdering to protect.

  His hand alighted on another toggle control, this one marked {X}—the universal symbol for an airlock actuator. The silver panel whisked aside silently and smoothly. Sensing his intentions, lights came on in sequence along the connector. The golden band arced down until it vanished into a docking port on the side of the lighthugger.

  Nothing now prevented him from boarding.

  “I’m going inside. Call me back as soon as you get through to Panoply.”

  While Thalia had been talking with her House Aubusson companions, they had crossed another window band spanning a brief ocean of space and stars (most of which were in fact other habitats), and now the train was slowing as it neared its destination. They crossed a series of manicured lawns, skimming high above them on a filigreed wisp of a bridge, then descended back down to ground level. On either side, Thalia saw the tapering stalks of the Museum of Cybernetics, each structure rising at least a hundred metres into the air, each surmounted by a smooth blue-grey sphere, each sphere marked with a symbol from the hallowed history of information processing. There was the ampersand, which had once symbolised a primitive form of abstraction. There was an ever-tumbling hourglass, still the universal symbol for an active computational process. There was the apple with a chunk missing, which (so Thalia had been led to believe) commemorated the suicidal poisoning of the info-theorist Turing himself.

  The train plunged into a tunnel, then slowed to a smooth halt in a plaza under the central stalk of the polling core. People came and went from trains parked at adjoining platforms, but Thalia’s party had an entire section of the station to themselves, screened off by servitors and glass barriers. They rode escalators into hazy daylight, surrounded by the ornamental gardens and rock pools clustering around the base of the main stalk. Nearby, a bright blue servitor was diligently trimming a hedge into the shape of a peacock, its cutting arms moving with lightning speed as it executed the three-dimensional template in its memory.

  Thalia craned her head back to take in the entirety of the stalk. It rose from a gradually steepening skirt, climbing five or six hundred metres above the ground before tapering to a neck that appeared only just capable of supporting the main sphere. The sphere was much larger than those balanced on the smaller stalks, banded with tiny round windows where they were blank. Geometric shapes were in constant play on its surface, indicating—so Thalia guessed—the changing parameters of abstraction flow and voting patterns.

  Thalia’s party walked into the shaded lobby of the stalk. The structure appeared to be hollow, its inward-leaning interior walls given over to towering murals, each of which depicted a great visionary of the PreCalvinist cybernetic era. A thick column rose up through the middle of the dizzying space, buttressed to the walls by filigreed arches. That had to be the main data conduit, Thalia judged, carrying abstraction services and voting packets to the polling core high above her head. The citizens here might not be as thoroughly integrated into abstraction as those in New Seattle-Tacoma, but their enthusiasm for the voting process would nonetheless ensure hefty data traffic. Thalia imagined the flow of information in the pipe, like high-pressure water searching for a loose rivet or leaky valve. Rising next to the column, but separated from it by a few metres of clear space, was the thinner tube of an elevator shaft, with a spiral walkway wrapped around it in ever-receding vertigo-inducing loops. The data conduit, elevator shaft and spiral staircase plunged through the ceiling at the top of the stalk, into the sphere that sat above it.

  Thalia knew she was rubbernecking, that even this tower would have been considered unimpressive by Chasm City standards, but the locals looked happy that she was impressed.

  “It’s an ugly big bastard all right,” Parnasse said, which was presumably his way of showing a fragment of civic pride.

  “We go up?” Thalia asked.

  Paula Thory nodded. “We go up. The elevator should already be waiting for us.”

  “Good,” Thalia said. “Then let’s get this done so we can all go home.”

  Not for the first time in his life, Sparver found himself cursing the inadequacy of his hands. It was not because there was anything wrong with them from a hyperpig’s point of view, but because he had to live in a world made for dextrous baseline humans, with long fingers and thumbs and an absurd volume of sensorimotor cortex dedicated to using them. The stubby, gauntleted fingers of his trotter-like hands kept pushing two keys at once, forcing him to backtrack and initiate the command sequence all over again. At last he succeeded, and heard a chirp in his helmet signifying that he was in contact with Panoply, albeit on a channel not normally used for field communications.

  “Internal Prefect Muang,” a voice announced. “You have reached Panoply. How may I be of assistance?”

  Sparver knew and liked Muang. A small, stocky man himself, with looks that were at best unconventional, he had no conspicuous problem with hyperpigs.

  “This is Sparver. Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear. Is something wrong?”

  “You could say that. Prefect Dreyfus and I were investigating a free-floating rock owned by Nerval-Lermontov, as part of a case we’re working. As we were making our final approach the rock opened fire on our corvette and took out our long-range communications.”

  “The rock attacked you?”

  “There were heavy anti-ship weapons concealed under its surface. They popped out and started shooting at us.”

  “My God.”

  “I know. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Thing is, we could use some assistance out here.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m patching in via a transmitter inside the rock itself, but I don’t know how long this link is going to hold up.”

  “Copy, Sparver. With luck we can rustle up a deep-system vehicle. Do you need a medical team? Are either of you injured?”

  “We’re separated from each other, but otherwise both okay. If I could put Dreyfus through, I would, but it’s all I can do to rig this connection from my own sui
t.”

  “Is your ship flightworthy?”

  “We could limp home if we had to, but it would be better if Panoply sent out a couple of heavy ships to pick over this place.”

  “Do you have orbital data for this rock?”

  “Aboard the ship. But all you have to do is check the assets of the Nerval-Lermontov family. We’re sitting on a two-kilometre-wide lump of unprocessed rock in the middle orbits. You should be able to image our corvette, even if you can’t pick out the debris cloud from the attack.”

  “Should narrow it down. Sit tight and I’ll get the wheels moving.”

  “Tell those ships to come in cautiously. And make sure they know Dreyfus and I are sitting inside this thing, in case anyone gets trigger-happy.”

  “I’ll get the message through immediately. You shouldn’t have to wait more than an hour.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Sparver said.

  He closed the link and re-established contact with Dreyfus, glad when he heard his laboured breathing coming through nice and regularly, as if Dreyfus was pulling himself along a docking connector.

  “I got through, Boss. Cavalry’s coming.”

  “Good.”

  “So now might be the time to rethink that plan of yours to board the ship.”

  “I’m nearly there. Might as well go all the way, after coming this far.” Dreyfus took deep breaths between sentences. “There’s no telling what mechanisms might kick in to destroy evidence if the rock senses our intrusion.”

  “Or which might kick in to destroy us. That’s also a possibility.”

  “I’m still going in. I suggest you return to the corvette and await the back-up.”

  That sounded like an excellent idea to Sparver as well, but he had no intention of abandoning Dreyfus inside the rock. Besides, what his boss had just said was equally applicable to the data stored in the rock’s router log.

  It did not take very long, now that he knew his way around the architecture. But when the list of outgoing message addresses spilled across his facepatch, he assumed there must be some mistake. He’d been expecting hundreds, even thousands, of entries in the last hundred days. But there were only a few dozen. Whoever was controlling the Nerval-Lermontov rock had been very sparing with their usage.

  Looking down the list, he recognised the address of the Ruskin-Sartorious sphere, with a timetag corresponding to just before the attack by the Accompaniment of Shadows. That was the message that had prompted Delphine to break off negotiations with Dravidian. Yet as pleasing as it was to see that in the log—confirmation that they’d been following the right leads—it was dismaying to see some of the other entries.

  There were about a dozen different addresses Sparver didn’t recognise off the top of his head. But there were another dozen entries that were shockingly familiar.

  They consisted of two different addresses, interspersed randomly. Apart from the last three digits, one was identical to the format he’d just used to contact Muang.

  Someone had been using the Nerval-Lermontov rock to call Panoply.

  But if anything it was the second of the two addresses that unnerved Sparver the most. He recognised it instantly, for it was still fresh in his mind from his most recent investigation. But it had no business being any part of this one.

  It was the address of House Perigal.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” he said, mouthing the words in something more than a whisper. “There’s no connection. The cases don’t belong together.”

  But there was no mistake. The numbers weren’t going away.

  “You still there, Boss?”

  “I’m nearly at the airlock. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just discovered something that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Someone used this rock to contact House Perigal.”

  “You mean Ruskin-Sartorious,” Dreyfus said testily.

  “No, I mean exactly what I just said. There’ve only been a handful of outgoing messages, but they include transmissions to both Panoply and House Perigal, in addition to Ruskin-Sartorious. That means there’s a connection between the two cases, and a Panoply connection.”

  “There can’t be,” Dreyfus said.

  “The evidence is staring right back at me. There’s a link.”

  “But Perigal was an open-and-shut case of polling fraud. It has no bearing on the murder of Ruskin-Sartorious.”

  “Boss, we may not be able to understand the link, but I’m telling you it exists. We already know this case is bigger than a simple incident of revenge or assassination—we’d figured that much out before you went and found a Conjoiner ship buried inside this rock.” Sparver paused: he could feel something behind his eyes trying to come into clarity, but not quite succeeding. “We went after Perigal because of voting fraud,” he said. “We nailed her, too, and all along it felt too easy.”

  “Too much like a debt being settled,” Dreyfus said, echoing Sparver’s tone.

  “Maybe what we should be focusing on is the consequence of that case. Not the fact that Perigal’s under lockdown, but the security hole it drew our attention to.”

  He heard a silence on the end of the line. Then: “We’re closing that hole, Sparv. That’s what Thalia’s doing.”

  “That’s what we think she’s doing. But what if we’ve been led up the garden path?”

  “We can trust Thalia,” Dreyfus said.

  “Boss, we don’t have time to think through all the implications. All we know is that something’s wrong, and that, knowingly or otherwise, Thalia may be a part of it.”

  “You’re right,” Dreyfus said eventually. “I don’t like it, but… something doesn’t fit.”

  “Thalia’s still out there, isn’t she?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “We have to get a message to her. She has to stop those upgrades until we figure out what’s going on.”

  “Can you contact Panoply again?”

  “No reason why not,” Sparver said. “But it’ll mean me dropping out of contact with you again until I’m done.”

  “Do it immediately. Call me back when you’ve got word to Thalia. Do it now, Sparv.”

  He closed the connection with Dreyfus and re-established the jury-rigged link with Panoply.

  “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again so soon,” Muang said, before Sparver could get a word in. “Good news is Jane expedited immediate retasking of a deep-system vehicle. It’s on high-burn as we speak. Should be on your position inside forty-five minutes.”

  “Good,” Sparver said, barely hearing what Muang had to say. “Now listen to me. Has Deputy Field Ng returned from her mission?”

  There was no need to elaborate. Everyone in Panoply knew of Jason Ng’s daughter.

  “I don’t know. I can check with Thyssen, but—”

  “Never mind, there isn’t time. Can you patch me through to Thalia? I need to talk to her urgently.”

  “Wait a moment. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Sparver did not breathe. It could only have been tens of seconds before Muang spoke again, but it felt like hours. “She isn’t aboard her cutter, which is currently docked at House Aubusson. I’m trying to contact her through her bracelet, but if she’s out of range of the cutter, the transmission will have to be routed through the habitat’s own abstraction services. This may take a moment—”

  “No one’s going anywhere,” Sparver said.

  After another eternity, Muang said, “I’m picking up her bracelet, Deputy. It’s ringing. If she’s wearing it, she’ll hear you.”

  Dreyfus slowed his passage along the tube, gripped by an almost overwhelming urge to turn back. But he focused his resolve and continued until he reached the black wall of the entry lock. There was no suggestion of a door. He touched the armour of the Conjoiner ship and felt it ease inwards under the pressure of his fingers. It was neither metal nor ordinary quickmatter.

  The only visible controls c
onsisted of a smaller version of the panel he had already used. It had been glued to the side of the hull, fixed into place by crusty dabs of bright green adhesive. There were only two toggles. Dreyfus reached for the one marked with the airlock symbol and gave it a hefty twist. After a moment, a luminous blue outline appeared in the black, defining the rectangular shape of a door. The outline thickened, and then the entire rectangular part pushed outwards and sideways, unassisted by any visible mechanisms or hinges.

  Dreyfus pushed himself into the interior of the Conjoiner vehicle. He looked back, holding his breath until he was satisfied that the rectangular door was not going to seal him in. He followed a winding, throat-like corridor until he reached a junction. Five corridors converged on this point, arriving from different angles. Light—of a peculiar blue-green sickliness—was leaking down one of the routes. The others were singularly dark and uninviting, and appeared to feed back towards the rear of the ship.

  He followed the light. When he estimated that he had moved twenty or thirty metres towards the bow, he found himself emerging into a very large room. The light, which had appeared bright from a distance, now revealed itself to be meagre, obscuring detail and scale. Dreyfus unfixed his helmet from its bonded connection with his belt and used the crown lamp to investigate his surroundings. His illumination glanced off steely surfaces, glass partitions and intricate tangles of plumbing.

  That was when he felt something cold and sharp press against his naked throat.

  “There are lights, for emergency use,” a woman’s voice said, speaking very calmly into his ear. “I shall bring them on now.”

  Dreyfus kept very still. In his lower peripheral vision he could see the gauntleted knuckle of a hand. The hand was holding a blade. The blade was tight against his Adam’s apple.

  The lights came on at full strength, yellow shading to pale green, and after a few moments of blinking in the sudden brightness Dreyfus saw a room full of sleepers, wired into complicated apparatus. There were dozens of them, eighty or ninety easily, maybe more. They’d been arranged in four long rows spaced equidistantly around an openwork catwalk. The sleepers did not lie in closed caskets, but rather on couches, to which they were bound by black restraining straps and webs of silver meshwork. Transparent lines ran in and out of their bodies, pulsing not just with what Dreyfus presumed to be blood and saline but with vividly coloured chemicals of obscure function. The sleepers were all naked and they were all breathing, yet so slowly that Dreyfus had to study the rise and fall of a single chest intently before he convinced himself that he was looking at anything other than a corpse. It was sleep dialled down almost all the way to death. He could make out nothing of their heads, for each sleeper wore a perfectly spherical black helmet sealed tight around the neck, which in turn sprouted a thick ribbed black cable from its crown, connected into a socket recessed into the adjoining wall. The impression of a room full of faceless human components, smaller parts plugged into a larger machine, was total.