But we would change more than just the hunters.
No victims this time. The hunted would be volunteers. It sounded insane, but this was the part Voronoff quickly warmed to.
There would be no prize for the survivors other than survival itself. But with it would come immense prestige. We would have all the volunteers we needed: drawn from the vast pool of bored, affluent near-immortals who filled the Canopy. In the revised form of the Game, they would have finally found a way to inject a controlled edge into their lives. They’d sign contracts with us, detailing the terms of a particular contest: the duration, the permitted range of play and the types of weapon allowed by the assassin. All they would need to do was stay alive until the contract expired. They would be famous and envied. Others would follow, anxious to do a little better: a longer contract; more challenging terms of play.
We would use tracking implants, of course — but they would not function in the same way as the device Waverly had installed in my skull, and which Dominika had so kindly removed at short notice. Assassin and hunted would carry matched pairs, and they would be primed to activate and transmit only when within a certain range of each other — again, covered by the terms of the contract. Both parties would know when that happened — a ringing tone in the skull, or something similar. And in that final hour of the chase, media would be allowed to descend for the first time, witnessing the end — however it played out.
Voronoff joined us, eventually. He was our first customer.
We called our company Omega Point; soon there were others, and we welcomed the competition. Within a year of operation, we had pushed the memory of the old hunt into oblivion. It was not a part of the city’s history that anyone wanted enshrined. And that was the way it happened.
At first, we were careful to allow our clients to survive the terms of their contracts, for the most part. Our assassins would lose their trail at the critical moment or misfire whatever single-shot weapon had been specified in the contract. It was a way of building up an initial client list, so that our name would spread more rapidly.
Once that began to happen, we got serious. Now it was for real; now they really did have to fight to stay alive for the duration.
And the majority managed it. The odds on being killed during a game of Shadowplay fluctuated somewhere around thirty per cent — safe enough so that players were not actively discouraged from participation, no matter how bored — but with enough of an edge to make survival, winning, something to be prized.
Omega Point became very rich indeed. Within two years of my arrival in Chasm City I counted myself amongst the hundred wealthiest individuals — corporeal or otherwise — in the whole Yellowstone system.
But I never forgot the pledge I had made to myself, during the long journey up to Refuge.
That if I survived, I would change everything.
With Shadowplay, I had started. But it was not enough. I had to alter the city totally. I had to destroy the system that had allowed me to flourish; to unbalance the unspoken equilibrium between Mulch and Canopy. I began by recruiting my newest hunters from the Mulch itself. There was no real risk to myself in doing this, for the Mulchers were as adept at the art as anyone I’d find in Canopy — and just as receptive to the training methods I advocated.
Just as the game had made me rich, I made my best players wealthy beyond their dreams. And watched as some of that wealth seeped back into the Mulch.
It was a small start. It might take years — decades, even — before there was a noticeable change to the hierarchy in Chasm City. But I knew it would happen. I had promised myself that it would. And though I had broken promises in the past, I was never going to do it again.
* * *
After a while, I began to call myself Tanner again. I knew it was a lie; that I had no right to that name; that I had stolen memories and then life itself from the man who really was Tanner Mirabel.
But what did any of that matter?
I thought of myself as the custodian of his memories; all that he had been. He had not exactly been a good man, not by any reasonable definition of the word. He had been callous and violent, and he had approached the arts of science and murder with the studied distance of a geometer. Yet he had never been truly evil, and in the moment which effectively sealed his life — when he shot Gitta — he had been trying to do something good.
What had happened to him afterwards; what had happened to turn him into a monster — none of that mattered. It did not tarnish what Tanner had been before.
It was, I thought, as good a name as any. And there would never be a day when it felt like any name but my own.
I decided not to fight it.
I realised that I had slipped into another reverie. The woman in my office was waiting for me to say something.
‘Well, do I get the job or not?’
Yes, she probably did, but there would be other candidates to see before I made my final decision. I stood up and shook her small, lethal hand. ‘You’re certainly near the top of the list. And even if you don’t get the position we’ve discussed, there’s another reason I might want to keep your name on file.’
‘Yes?’
I thought about Gideon; still imprisoned down there after all these years. I had vowed that I would go down into the chasm again — if only to kill him — but the time had never been right. I knew he was still alive, since Dream Fuel was still reaching the city, albeit in tiny, sought-after quantities. There was still a perverse trade to be had in selling his terrors, distilled into a format humans could just assimilate. But he must surely be close to death now, and there could not be very much time left before my vow would become meaningless.
‘Just an operation I might have in mind; that’s all.’
‘And when would that be?’
‘A month or so from now; maybe three or four.’
She smiled again. ‘I’m good, Mister Mirabel. You’d better hope I don’t get poached by someone else in the meantime.’
I shrugged. ‘If it happens, it happens.’
‘Well, who knows.’
We shook hands again, and she began walking towards the door. I looked out the window; dusk was settling in now, lights burning in the Canopy; cable-cars tiny motes of light swinging through the eternal brown twilight. Down below, like a plain strewn with campfires, the lamps and night markets of the Mulch reflected a sullen red glow towards the Net. I thought of the millions of people who had found a way to think of this city as home, even after the transformations it had been through since the plague. It was thirteen years ago, after all. There were adults down there who had no real memories of what the place had been like before.
‘Mister Mirabel?’ she said, hesitating at the door. ‘One other thing?’
I turned around and offered a polite smile. ‘Yes?’
‘You’ve been here longer than I have. Did there ever come a point when you actually liked this place?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, shrugging. ‘I just know one thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘Life’s what you make it.’
REDEMPTION ARK
PROLOGUE
The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty.
Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s attention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sickness.
It was not what she needed.
Irritated, Skade visualised her own brain in glassy three-dimensional complexity. As if peeling a fruit, she stripped away layers of neocortex and cortex, flinging aside the parts of her own mind that did not immediately interest her. The silvery loom of her implant web, topologically identical with her native synaptic network, shimmered with neural traffic, packets of information racing from neuron to neuron at a kilometre per secon
d, ten times faster than the crawl of biological nerve signals. She could not actually perceive those signals moving — that would have required an accelerated rate of consciousness, which would have required even faster neural traffic — but the abstraction nonetheless revealed which parts of her augmented brain were the most active.
Skade zoomed in on a specific locus of brain function called the Area Postrema, an ancient tangle of neural circuitry that handled conflicts between vision and balance. Her inner ear felt only the steady pressure of her shuttle’s acceleration, but her eyes saw a cyclically changing view as the background wheeled behind the ship. The ancient part of her brain could only reconcile that mismatch by assuming that Skade was hallucinating. It therefore sent a signal to another part of her brain that had evolved to protect the body from ingesting poisons.
Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for making her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with a wider diet than would otherwise have been possible. It just had no place here and now, on the chill, dangerous edge of another solar system. She supposed it would have made sense to erase such features by deftly rewiring the basic topology, but that was a lot easier said than done. The brain was holographic and messy, like a hopelessly overcomplicated computer program. Skade knew, therefore, that by ‘switching off’ the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry. But she could live with that; she had done something similar a thousand times before, and she had seldom experienced any cognitive side effects.
There. The culprit region pulsed pink and dropped off the network. The nausea vanished; she felt a great deal better.
What remained was anger at her own carelessness. When she had been a field operative, making frequent incursions into enemy territory, she would never have left it until now to make such a modest neural adjustment. She had become sloppy, and that was unforgivable. Especially now that the ship had returned: an event that might prove to be as significant to the Mother Nest as any of the war’s recent campaigns.
She felt sharper now. The old Skade was still there; she just needed to be dusted off and honed now and then.
[Skade, you will be careful, won’t you? It’s clear that something very peculiar has happened to this ship.]
The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined entirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally.
I know.
[Have you identified it? Do you know which of the two it is, or was?]
It’s Galiana’s.
Now that she had swept around it, a three-dimensional image of the ship formed in her visual cortex, bracketed in a loom of shifting eidetic annotation as more information was teased out of the hulk.
[Galiana’s? The Galiana’s? You’re sure of that?]
Yes. There were some small design differences between the three that left together, and in as much as this matches either of the two that haven’t come back yet, it matches hers.
The presence took a moment to respond, as it sometimes did. [That was our conclusion as well. But something has clearly happened to this ship since it left the Mother Nest, wouldn’t you say?]
A lot of somethings, if you ask me.
[Let’s begin at the front and work backwards. There is evidence of damage — considerable damage: lacerations and gouges, whole portions of the hull that appear to have been removed and discarded, like diseased tissue. Plague, do you think?]
Skade shook her head, remembering her recent trip to Chasm City. I’ve seen the effects of the Melding Plague up close. This doesn’t look like quite the same thing.
[We agree. This is something different. Nonetheless, full plague quarantine precautions should be enforced; we might still be dealing with an infectious agent. Focus your attention towards the rear, will you?]
The voice, which was never quite like any of the other voices she heard from other Conjoiners, took on a needling, tutorial quality, as if it already knew the answers to the questions it posed. [What do you make of the regular structures embedded in the hull, Skade?]
Here and there, situated randomly, were clusters of black cubes of varying size and orientation. They appeared to have been pressed into the hull as if into wet clay, so that their faces were half-concealed by the hulk’s hull material. They radiated curving tails of smaller cubes, whipping out in elegant fractal arcs.
I’d say those are what they were trying to cut out elsewhere. Obviously they weren’t fast enough to get them all.
[We concur. Whatever they are, they should certainly be treated with the utmost caution, although they may very well be inactive now. Perhaps Galiana was able to stop them spreading. Her ship was able to make it this far, even if it returned home on autopilot. You are sure that no one is alive aboard it, Skade?]
No, and I won’t be until we open her up. But it doesn’t look promising. No movement inside, no obvious hotspots. The hull’s too cold for any life-support processes to be operational unless they’re carrying a cryo-arithmetic engine.
Skade hesitated, running a few more simulations in her head as background processes.
[Skade… ?]
There could be a small number of survivors, I admit — but the bulk of the crew can’t be anything other than frozen corpses. We might be able to trawl a few memories, but even that’s probably being optimistic.
[We’re really only interested in one corpse, Skade.]
I don’t even know if Galiana’s aboard it. And even if she is… even if we directed all our efforts into bringing her back to the living… we might not succeed.
[We understand. These are difficult times, after all. While it would be glorious to succeed, failure would be worse than never having attempted it. At least in the eyes of the Mother Nest.]
Is that the Night Council’s considered opinion?
[All our opinions are considered, Skade. Visible failure cannot be tolerated. But that doesn’t mean we won’t do our best. If Galiana is aboard, we will do what we can to bring her back to us. But it must be done in absolute secrecy.]
How absolute, precisely?
[Knowledge of the ship’s return will be impossible to conceal from the rest of the Mother Nest. But we can spare them the torment of hope, Skade. It will be reported that she is dead, beyond hope of revival. Let our compatriots’ grief be quick and bright, like a nova. It will only make their efforts against the enemy more strenuous. But in the meantime we will work on her with diligence and love. If we bring her back to the living, her return will be a miracle. We will be forgiven our bending of the truth here and now.]
Skade caught herself before she laughed aloud. Bending of the truth? It sounds like an outright lie to me. And how are you going to ensure that Clavain sticks to your story?
[Why do you imagine Clavain will be a problem, Skade?]
She answered the question with a question of her own. Don’t tell me you’re planning on not telling him either?
[This is war, Skade. There is an old aphorism concerning truth and casualty with which we will not presently detain you, but we’re certain you grasp the point. Clavain is a major asset in our tactical armoury. His thinking is unlike any other Conjoiner’s, and for that reason he gives us a constant edge against the enemy. He will grieve and grieve quickly, like the others, and it will be painful. But then he will be his old self again, just when we need him the most. Better that, don’t you think, than to inflict upon him some protracted period of hope and — likely — crushing disappointment?]
The voice shifted its tone, perhaps sensing that it still needed to make its point convincingly. [Clavain is an emotional man, Skade — more so than the rest of us. He was old when he came to us, older in neurological terms than any other recruit we have ever gained. His mind is still mired in old ways of thinking. We mustn’t ever forget that. He is fragile and needs our care, like a delicate hothouse flower
.]
But lying to him about Galiana…
[It may never come to that. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we have to examine the ship — Galiana may not be aboard after all.]
Skade nodded. That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Then we’d know that she’s still out there, somewhere.
[Yes. But then we’d have to address the small matter of whatever happened to the third ship.]
In the ninety-five years since the onset of the Melding Plague, the Conjoiners had learned a great deal about contamination management. As one of the last human factions to retain an appreciable pre-plague technology, they took quarantine very seriously indeed. In peacetime the safest and easiest option would have been to examine the ship in situ, as it drifted through space on the system’s edge. But there was too much risk of the Demarchists noticing such activity, so the investigations had to be conducted under cover of camouflage. The Mother Nest was already equipped to take contaminated craft, so it was the perfect destination.
But precautions still had to be taken, and that entailed a certain amount of work out in open space. First, servitors removed the engines, lasering through the spars that braced them on either side of the lighthugger’s tapering conic hull. An engine malfunction could have destroyed the Mother Nest, and while such a thing was nearly unthinkable, Skade was determined to take no chances while the nature of what had happened to the ship remained mysterious. While that was going on, she ordered tractor rockets to haul slugs of black unsublimated cometary ice out to the drifter, which servitors then slathered on to the hull in a metre-thick caulk. The servitors completed their work quickly, without ever coming into direct contact with the hull. The ship had been dark to begin with; now it became impossibly black.
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