by Paul McAuley
The staging post was near the base of the Whale’s vertical cylinder, at the lip of the conical end cap that tapered to the cable’s insertion point. Immediately above, a marshalling yard spread like ivy around a tree trunk, bustling with purposeful movement. At the upper end, hoppers stuffed with a variety of raw construction materials scooted down rack-and-pinion tracks towards tipplers that lifted them up and turned them upside down and mated their hatches with the hatches of bulbous freight cars. The hoppers shed their cargo with quick peristaltic shudders, were swung right-side-up and set down on return tracks on the far side of the tipplers, and zipped back to the refinery. Further down the yard, loaded freight cars assembled themselves into long strings that trundled away along one of the four parallel magrails that crossed the inverted hill of the end cap and converged on the cable, rolling over flying bridges at the insertion point and gathering speed as they descended the cable towards the deck of fluffy white ammonia clouds that sheeted the sky from horizon to horizon, passing strings of empty cars climbing in the opposite direction.
Ori had a few moments to take in this familiar view while she waited for her crewmate and bunky, Inas, to sign off the go-list for the ignition system of one of the probe’s separation motors. The strings of freight cars, descending and ascending. A crew of bots prinking about the edge of the vacuum-organism farm that patched the curve of flank above the marshalling yard with a couple of square kilometres of dull red fibrous tangles. The bulk of the Whale looming beyond like a moon-sized thunderhead. Her world entire: a fretted cylinder ten kilometres tall, hung in the upper troposphere like a stylus balanced on its point, packed with hot hydrogen ballonets, fusion generators, try works and refineries, accommodation modules, garages, workshops, and the great engines that kept it stabilised in the winds that roared around Cthuga’s equator.
Out in the wide green-blue sky, a small formation of ramscoop drones was heading inward, laden with organic material collected from plumes that trailed downwind of upwelling festoons at the northern edge of the Equatorial Zone. And higher still, at the limits of the resolution of the optics of Ori’s bot, a black fleck moved through the diffused glare of the sun’s white point. A shrike-class raptor orbiting the upper levels of the Whale.
She often wondered what it would be like to fly one of those sleek, powerful machines. Fly, not ride. That was the thing. The True pilots didn’t control the raptors from an immersion chair safely lodged inside one of the Whale’s accommodation modules. No, their fierce pride and honour demanded that they put up their lives every time they flew, testing themselves against the storms and hurricane winds of Cthuga, bringing the war directly to the enemy.
Ori had come a long way in her sixteen years, working her way up from general-purpose swabbie to refinery loader, machinist, and finally bot jockey. Working hard to prove her worth, abasing herself when she had to, showing initiative whenever she could, finally making it all the way to the outside. Why not higher still? Maybe she could try out for mechanic one day. After all, keeping raptors sweet couldn’t be that much different from running system checks on probes. And if she did well at that, perhaps she’d be allowed to fly one of the drones that accompanied raptors during long-range patrols . . .
The raptor’s tiny thorn swung away around the bulk of the Whale. Inas jogged Ori, saying, ‘No time for dreaming, kid.’
‘They don’t usually hang around the Whale. Raptors.’
‘The phils want to start rolling this bird yesterday, and we still have to run through the rest of the go-list.’
‘You ask me, something’s up.’
‘I’m asking you to give me some help here.’
‘We’re still ahead of everyone else.’
‘By a bare second. Let’s swing.’
‘Aye-aye.’
‘You want to fly, you need a spotless rep.’
Inas knew all about Ori’s ambitions, and cared enough to encourage her.
‘Or I could just let go,’ Ori said, raising up and hanging from just two limbs for a moment, dangling above the vertical length of the probe, the long drop past the inward-angled slope of the end cap, and the even longer drop beyond, ten klicks to the top of the cloud deck, another hundred and fifty through layers of ammonia-ice, ammonium sulphide, and clouds of water-ice where lightning storms flickered . . .
‘Falling isn’t flying,’ Inas said.
‘Sure it is. Except when you’re flying, you’re in control,’ Ori said, and came down to a squat beside her bunky’s bot and started the tedious work of checking each function of the separation motor’s simple nervous system.
The probe and its twin sat side by side in launch cradles on flatbed rail cars, attended by a small crew of bots that clambered over and around them. The bots were flexible, radially symmetrical machines that looked a little like brittlestars: ten long and many-jointed limbs set around central discs edged with the glittering buttons of optical, microwave, and radio sensors. All engaged in an intricate ballet of hesitations, negotiations and sudden bursts of decisive activity, all talking constantly to each other. Updates on what they planned to do, what they were doing, and what they had just finished doing, interlaced with gossip and jokes and banter. A familiar and comforting polyphonic work song.
Ori and Inas were responsible for checking out the little solid-fuel motors that would fire as the probe approached the cable terminus, separating it from its cradle, boosting it past the very end of the cable and correcting for yaw and spin imparted by the cable’s pendulum-like swing. After that, the probe’s primary-stage motor would ignite, a brief fierce burn driven by antimatter fusion that would punch the secondary stage through a thickening fog of liquid hydrogen; when it reached the edge of the transition point where the fog turned into a vast deep sea, the shaped charge of the secondary stage would consume itself in a single violent moment and inject the bullet of the payload into the sea’s currents, where it would drift down towards the dense hot sphere of superfluid metallic hydrogen at the planet’s core.
The payload had already been inserted into the probe: microscopic yet potent amounts of degenerate matter, raw quarks and strange solitons, each suspended in pinch fields stitched into lattices of flawless diamond micropellets that were cased in rhenium carbide and yttria-stabilised zirconia felt. When the casings and diamond micropellets eroded, violent interactions between their cargoes and the superfluid would help to map and anatomise the place where reality itself broke down. Or so the theory went. In practice, only a few payloads ever reached their target. The sea of liquid hydrogen wrapped around Cthuga’s core was tens of thousands of kilometres deep, squeezed by pressure that could stamp the Whale flat as a sheet of paper in an instant, reaching a temperature of more than five thousand degrees centigrade at the boundary with the metallic hydrogen core. After more than a century, the True philosophers had scarcely begun to unravel the mysteries of Cthuga’s core. And now the gas giant was swinging around in its long orbit towards territory occupied by the Ghosts. War – real war, not skirmishes and scouting fly-bys – was imminent. Time was running out. The phils were sending down pairs of probes as fast as the manufactories could assemble them. At least one pair every day, sometimes more. And still it wasn’t enough.
Ori was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t at first notice the alarm, reacting a sluggish thirty milliseconds after it began, skimming the top layer of the fat burst of raw data, dumping the rest. Far below the cloud deck, something had struck the cable with enough force to snap it like a whip: residual energy was propagating up its length in a sine wave whose peak was just fifty kilometres away and closing fast. It was the real thing, no drill. No time to return the probes to the garage. Barely enough time to lock everything in place and hope for the best.
She looked all around, hoping to spot some trace of the enemy, seeing only empty sky. High above, a string of freight cars had halted near the exit of the marshalling yard. Beyond, bots were scrambling amongst hoppers and tipplers. Fierce little sparks bloomin
g everywhere as hoppers were welded to their rack-and-pinion tracks. Inas and the rest of the crew were working at the base of the flatbed car, welding it to the skin at brace points, uncoupling power and transmission cabling, clearing clutter from the staging post’s platform. Ori swung over the curved flank of the probe, and froze as something blurred past three klicks out. A sleek shape driving straight down towards the cloud tops far below, dwindling away to a bright point seconds before the roar of its afterburners reached her.
Ori called to Inas. ‘Did you see that?’
‘See what?’
Ori threw a picture. ‘The raptor. Every weapon pod everted. Told you something was up.’
‘Are you done skywatching? Because I could use some help.’
‘It was ready for combat,’ Ori said. ‘It has to mean the enemy hit the cable.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. It could be an eddy. Wind shear. Any kind of extreme weather. All I know is what I’m told. And all they’re telling us is it’s coming fast,’ Inas said.
‘I hear you,’ Ori said, and swung around and down and started welding the other side of the brace point that Inas was working on. For all the good it would do. The flatbed car was already locked down on the magrail; if that gave, a few welds weren’t going to hold it.
She kept half her eyes focused on the distant cloud tops while she worked, half-hoping to see some trace of combat. If it was an attack, it would be the fifth in less than a hundred days. Three had been routine engagements with infiltrator drones far downwind of the Whale, but the last had been just a hundred klicks north and east, a whole wing of raptors streaking out to engage a package that had drawn a thin violet contrail as it slanted through the troposphere, vanishing beneath the cloud deck as they chased hard on its tail, the clouds lighting up a few seconds later as if struck by a localised thunderstorm. Controlled falling. Absolutely.
Bots worked with graceful haste around the two flatbed cars. In under a minute they had done all they could and all movement ceased everywhere. Inas’ bot wrapped its limbs around the post of a power point and the bots of the rest of the crew clung limpet-like to various protrusions or squatted inside hastily spun nests of elastomer fibrils. Hunkered down. Waiting for the uprushing wavefront of the quake to hit.
Ori clambered back on to the flatbed car and clung to the edge of the cradle, so that she had a good view up and down the length of the Whale. For a few heartbeats nothing happened. Then the cable humped and buckled at the point where it pierced the cloud deck, and sprites suddenly stood on every sharp edge of the flatbed cars and the equipment scattered around them. Crackling coronal discharges that danced and swayed like flames, blue at their cores, shelled in pale yellows and greens that spat spiky fractal sparks.
One burned so close to Ori that her optical sensors whited out for a moment. When they came back on line the sprite was gone, but tens of others were dancing all around, jumping from point to point with no seeming transition. Several swayed at the nose of the probe like a crowd of curious ghosts, flattening now in the hard wind pushed ahead of the oncoming shock wave.
It travelled up the cable with relentless speed. A subtle sinuous flexing of the tremendously strong structure, moving inside a silvery envelope of warped air. Little jets of vapour, mostly visible in infrared, spat in every direction as attitude motors on ballonet spars tried to maintain the cable’s rigidity. Ori flattened her bot against the cradle and felt a brief moment of bilocation. She was riding her bot, extended into every part of it, splayed flat against the cradle, and she was sitting in her immersion chair, hands cramped inside control gloves, blocks of data floating before her eyes and in the midpoint of the bot’s wrap-around vision.
Then, directly below the blunt point of the end cap, sections of track buckled and sheared away from the cable and the Whale hummed with subsonic vibrations as the cable flexed in the collars that held it fast inside the great structure’s spine.
Ori’s entire attention snapped back inside the bot. She saw a rainbow shimmer of intricate stress patterns race across the cone of the end cap, and then a black fog of superheated atomic carbon, stripped from the cap’s cladding of fullerene-diamond polymer, rolled upslope. Ori closed down her external sensors, felt the staging post judder and heave, rattling the probe’s flatbed car sideways and up and down against its tracks, rattling her bot against the cradle, twisting it, plucking at it. Everything went white and Ori was back in her body, breathing hard, feeling the floor shudder under her chair, and then the connection rebooted and she was back, and the shaking was still bad but it wasn’t as bad as it had been, gentling now, everything suddenly still and quiet.
The hot fog had blinded most of the sensors on the bot’s right side, cutting a wide swathe out of its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, but Ori glimpsed movement high above and swivelled and focused as best she could and saw that the magrail above the staging post was disintegrating. Broken sections fell like a shower of spears as the magrail unzipped towards the string of freight cars at the exit of the marshalling yard. The leading car tipped forward and fell away, and the string whipped out above it, snapping apart one by one. The car at the end of the whip dropped straight down, tumbling free in clear air, gone, but the rest struck the Whale’s skin as they fell, bouncing off and spinning away in every direction.
One dropped straight towards the staging post. Ori saw it in the brief instant before it slammed end on into the post’s outer edge. Its sheath buckled and shattered and its load of carbon nanotubes flew out, a black cloud that completely enveloped the flatbed car and Ori’s bot, and then there was a tremendous jolt and everything swung sideways.
The cloud thinned and blew away and Ori discovered that she was hanging upside down with nothing between her and the cloud deck far below. It took her a moment to work out what had happened: part of the staging post’s skin and the track attached to it had been ripped open and peeled backwards by the impact of the freight car.
She called to Inas, but comms were out across every channel, internal and external. She knew that she should disengage, leave the bot to its fate and check on damage inside the Whale, but she wanted to see what happened next.
Things large and small were falling past on either side. A hard rain of hoppers and bits of track and machines. Bots twisting in mid-air, limbs whipping this way and that as they tried and failed to snatch at any hold. One slammed into the side of the probe’s cradle, close to Ori, and clung there for a moment. And then something struck it and it whirled away. Debris drummed on the upper side of the peeled length of skin, making the flatbed car hanging from its underside shiver and shake. The power to the track was off and only the welds at the bracing posts were holding the flatbed car in place; now they began to fail with sharp little explosions. One side lurched outward, and bots that had been clinging there fell away, dwindling past the end cap, gone.
For a moment, nothing else happened, and then something struck the skin above with tremendous force, and the flatbed car dropped straight down, shedding bots and shards of debris. Ori hung on as sky and cable and cloud deck spun around each other. She had a brief bright picture of the flatbed car smashing into the cable and vanishing in a white-hot flare as the antimatter in the probe’s fusion motor let go, and she began to move crabwise up the launch cradle. The tumbling motion pulled her outwards, body-slammed her against the cradle, pulled her outwards again. She crawled over the lip, flattened nine limbs against the skin of the probe, locking them down with millions of nanofibril tubes and claws, and reached out with the tenth. Stretching towards the access point for the separation motor’s nervous system, making the connection.
The latches sprang free and the separation motors set around the base of the probe flared and it shot away from the cradle and speared into the streaming white mist of the ammonia clouds. Ori clung on, plugged into the probe’s simple nervous system, forcing it to run its stabilisation reflex over and over. By the time its erratic tumbling had been corrected, it had punched throug
h the underside of the ammonia clouds and was falling through clear air again. Another layer of cloud spread far below, tinged dirty yellow. Clouds of ammonium hydro-sulphide, rifted apart in one place to show darker underlayers. A kilometre away from the falling probe, the cable plunged straight down through the cloud deck, dwindling away into unguessable depths.
Ori felt a wild elation that couldn’t be contained. She whooped and yelled across every channel, and as if in answer there was a flicker of motion below her and a sprite suddenly stood up on the probe’s blunt nose, a cold blue flame that flexed and swayed with the delicate adjustments of a tightrope walker, bending towards Ori’s bot, seeming to look straight through the connection, looking straight into the core of her mind.
Something clamped down. Ori lost all sense of motor control and feedback from the bot. Only vision was left, and the wild wail of wind whistling past the falling probe. The sprite was still bent towards her, a blue glow that filled half the bot’s field of view, commanding Ori’s complete attention. For a moment, she thought that it had climbed inside her head; then fields of data scrolled down and she realised that one of the True supervisors had taken control, and the connection cut out completely and she was back inside her body, cramped and sweating in the immersion chair.
She shut everything down, saw the rest of the crew crowded around her chair. Inas was at her side, helping her stand, saying, ‘So how far did you fall?’
Ori peeled off her gloves and straightened her aching back, wanting to fix this moment in her mind for ever. The ghost of the sprite’s attention clung to her still; she half-expected to see it burning amongst her crewmates. They were all looking at her, waiting for her to speak.
