In the Mouth of the Whale

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Hush now. Sleep.’

  And then, somehow, the Child was in her bed, and a great wave of exhaustion was rolling through her, carrying her away. Her last thought was that the stars stuck to the ceiling had been rearranged into new and unfamiliar constellations.

  5

  ‘It’s splendid,’ the Horse said. ‘But it isn’t war.’

  ‘It seems to fit every definition,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the point. It looks like war, but it isn’t. Or at least, it is not the main event. It’s a sideshow. It’s distraction. It’s bait-and-switch.’

  ‘Bait-and-switch?’

  ‘A trick shills use in the Permanent Floating Market. It’s older than the market, older than the Quick or the True for that matter. Shills on Old Earth used it before the first ships hit vacuum. They were probably using it in the first cities. You and your partner show the marks a fancy box and open it to show something desirable inside. Nepenthe, fine tea, a handwrought pistola . . . Any old goods at a bargain price. You show it round, you let them handle it, sniff it, taste it, and then you start them bidding on it. You get the patter flowing, and you and your partner throw the box back and forth between you. Distraction, you see? The patter confuses the marks; the hand is faster than the eye. You get the marks to bid against each other and drive up that bargain price. That’s one thing. The other, when the hammer comes down on the bidding, you throw the lucky winner a box containing dodgy goods. Like but not like the stuff you showed them at the start. Cheaper stuff. Shoddy stuff.’

  ‘What happens when your customers finds out they’ve been cheated?’

  ‘The odd one that comes back looking for restitution gets a refund, of course. But most don’t come back. They don’t like to admit they’ve been fooled. Or they think it’s all part of the entertainment, the price for the thrill they had outbidding everyone else. But that’s not the point. The point is that even the cleverest mark can be fooled. And that’s what’s this is,’ the Horse said. ‘Bait-and-switch.’

  We were strapped in facing crash seats in a niche deep inside the cramped quarters of an assault ship. Windows hung between us showed various views of the laser array. It was the first time we’d been able to talk in private since we’d harrowed the back door in the Library. We’d been taken aboard the assault ship separately, had spent the journey – a straight slam across some two hundred million kilometres – doped up and breathing an oxygen-rich silicone liquid inside coffins packed with gel to protect us from the worst of the brutal acceleration and deceleration.

  The assault ship was part of a wing that was standing off at a distance of more than three million kilometres, behind spinning mirrored sails designed to deflect any energy beams. Spy drones sent zipping past the array at tremendous velocities were transmitting updates and there were multiple views from the third wave of combat drones that was sweeping towards the enemy defences. Several windows gave views at different distances and angles of the five laser-cannon assemblies in the array, silvery ship-sized cylinders forming the points of a pentagon that orbited a small planetoid. Another window mapped the clouds of aggressive machines that defended them. Two waves of combat drones had attacked these defences while we still slept, opening up holes through which the third wave would manoeuvre towards the planetoid at the centre of the array. And when the planetoid was secure, we would be sent in to harrow the machines that controlled the laser array, so that Yenna Singleton’s philosophers could take command and guide the starship to a safe harbour in the Archipelago.

  That was the plan according to the Redactor Svern and Yenna Singleton, but although I had done my best to seem eager for action when they had explained it to me, in truth I’d felt anxious and resentful, realising that I would be no more than a small component of a scheme whose architects I did not entirely trust. I had enjoyed being a free agent more than I cared to admit. I’d thought that I had been the hero of my story; the discovery that I was instead a pawn, that the Redactor Svern had used and manipulated me, even if it was for the greater good of the clan and the Library, had cut deeper than Prem’s casual betrayal. And I feared and disliked Yenna Singleton, and was worried that she was using and deceiving the Redactor Svern as he had used and deceived me.

  So I wasn’t angered by the Horse’s impertinent ridicule of the plan to capture the array. No, I was intrigued, because it chimed with my own feelings.

  I asked him if by bait-and-switch he meant that there might be another laser array. ‘One more powerful than this?’

  The Horse shook his head. ‘There could be a hundred arrays. A thousand. It wouldn’t make any difference. Yenna Singleton and her generals think that whoever controls the array controls the ship. They’re wrong.’

  ‘And you know this because?’

  ‘Why were we able to find out about the array in the first place?’

  ‘We defeated a demon and secured the locations of the back doors—’

  ‘Aside from our guile and cunning,’ the Horse said.

  ‘If you interrupt me like that in front of anyone who counts, I’ll have to punish you,’ I said. ‘The Singleton clan is very old-fashioned, and this is a ship of the line besides.’

  ‘This one would like to explain that his presumption is motivated by his desire to protect his master.’

  The Horse didn’t look especially scared. Defiant, certainly. A shine in his eyes, his expression grim and eager. We sat face to face amongst the windows inside the little niche, like equals.

  I said, ‘Your master would like you to break the habit of a lifetime, and speak plainly for once.’

  ‘We followed Bree Sixsmith from hell to hell,’ the Horse said. ‘Each was collapsed to a minimum size and data was erased. But the data about the array and the probes was not only left intact, all of it was left in plain sight.’

  ‘She couldn’t erase that data because it was in the Library. She could only attempt to prevent access to it. And she underestimated the speed at which we were able to unravel her traps.’

  ‘Or perhaps we were meant to find it,’ the Horse said. ‘Because it’s sham masquerading as quality.’

  ‘All right. Let’s suppose Bree led us here. To what end?’

  ‘The demon riding her wanted us to come here because it works for the enemy. The enemy wants us to come here because it wastes our time and resources. Because it distracts us from what is really going on. There is no point capturing the laser array because it does not control the trajectory of the starship. It doesn’t control the starship because the enemy already has it.’

  ‘I see. And what about the ship imaged by Yenna Singleton’s philosophers?’

  ‘Also a sham. A clever duplicate carved from some icy rock and powered by a drone.’

  ‘And yet, despite your amazing insight, you are not even a trooper, let alone a general.’

  The Horse ducked his head. ‘I had help,’ he said.

  ‘I think you had better tell me everything.’

  ‘Back on T, I got out of that treehouse where we were being held in custody, and I came back with a flitter and fresh clothes—’

  ‘That was my plan.’

  ‘And very good it was. But after I got out, I was intercepted by two Quicks. They knew why we were there, and what we were searching for.’

  ‘Let me guess. They were cultists.’

  ‘They did not admit it, but yes, I am certain that they were. They told me that Yakob Singleton’s quest had something to do with the ancient starship and its passenger. As I told you, later on. But I didn’t tell you everything—’

  ‘No, you didn’t. To begin with, you didn’t tell me who told you.’

  The Horse ducked his head again. ‘I also didn’t tell you that the cultists had made direct contact with the starship’s passenger.’

  ‘I assume you had a good reason.’

  I was angry now.

  ‘This one believed that you would be endangered if you knew too much. Also, like the laser array, that you would provide a useful
distraction.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There’s more.’

  The Horse threw a package at me and said it would explain everything.

  ‘It appears to come from Prem,’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘She gave it to you? When?’

  ‘One of the techs slipped it to me while I was being prepped for the voyage,’ the Horse said.

  ‘And you opened it.’

  ‘It is addressed to both of us.’

  ‘It probably isn’t from Prem at all, but from some clique inside her clan that wants to use or confuse me to further some petty intrigue.’

  ‘If it is, I’m sure you’ll see through it.’

  Deep inside my security, I watched as Prem walked out of the shadows between two black cypresses into bright sunlight, stepping beside a small stream that ran down a dusty slope towards a mud-rimmed pool. I recognised the place immediately: the platform owned by Lathi Singleton. Prem was wearing the same white shirt that she’d worn when we’d first met, its hem clinging to her bare thighs. Her gaze was cool and steady. She looked imperious and infinitely desirable.

  ‘If I’m talking to you now, it’s because things have gone wrong,’ she said, and I realised at once that she had recorded this message before we had met. That she had prepared for this moment.

  ‘It means,’ she said, ‘that poor Yakob is dead, and Yenna Singleton has found out about our quest. You’re in her power; I’ve had to flee. But I must be alive because you’re listening to this message, and not the other one. So there’s still a chance, Isak. We can still make something good from this.

  ‘I have friends. And they are your friends, too. One of them made sure you received this message. He’s ready to take you to me.’ She smiled. ‘Wherever I am. I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know. But if you’re watching this, it means that my future self knows what Yakob found, and what to do about it. But I need your help. So come to me, Isak. Please. Any conditions you like. Any precautions. Any price. My friends will agree to them all. But I hope you’ll come to me because you know it’s the right thing to do.’

  The final assault on the enemy position began like most engagements in the war: flocks of insensate killing machines zipping past each other at high relative velocities, each using microsecond windows of opportunity to try to destroy the other. Views of the array began to flicker and jump as the enemy locked on to camera drones and took them out with kinetic weapons, or blinded them with X-ray or gamma pulses. But there were more drones behind them, and more behind that. The planetoid and the five cannon of the laser array were each enclosed in loose shells of brilliant flashes and sheets of raw lightnings. Tiny novae blinked as antimatter bomblets let go. Expanding clouds of debris were pierced by the violet or red threads of particle beams.

  Deep inside the energetic displays, microscopic Q-drones were attaching to each of the cannon. Most died before they could hatch their nanoassemblers, zapped or poisoned by the equally small machines of the cannons’ immune system. The few survivors grew networks that pierced the integuments of the cannons and shook hands with their nervous systems and attempted to subvert them.

  Every attempt failed. One after the other, the cannon self-destructed in fierce blinks of raw light as antimatter batteries yielded all their stored energy at once, scorching the surface of the planetoid and washing past the first wave of assault ships and killing everyone on board.

  Slamships carrying the second wave were fired from railgun launchers and crossed two million kilometres of void in less than three kiloseconds, dumping velocity in a fraction of that time, blasting straight down to the planetoid’s lumpy, cratered surface.

  Electromagnetic pulses and sleets of gamma rays and exotic particles had killed everything unshielded, and the thermal pulses of the cannons’ deaths had shocked the deep-frozen regolith. Minor quakes sent boulders tumbling down slopes, opened cracks and vents. Jagged lines of geysers, fed by pockets of frozen methane and nitrogen that had undergone explosive phase changes, were shooting columns of vapour tens of kilometres high. Some of it fell back as nitrogen snow; the rest achieved escape velocity, and views of the planetoid were blurred by a thickening haze that was slashed everywhere by the flares of slamship drives.

  Even as they fell, the ships fired off packages that exploded and loosed a rain of combat machines. Multi-limbed things that looked like squashed crabs or engorged snowflakes, each clinging to a crash balloon that absorbed the kinetic energy of impact and instantly deflated. In the diffused and dimming light of five new stars – the slagged cores of the laser cannon – the machines skittered away in every direction, across the floors and inner slopes of craters, across dusty intercrater plains, searching for any sign of enemy activity.

  Pods of elite troops followed in slower slamships, falling away as the ships went into orbit, riding T-bar rocket bikes down to the surface. Quicks modified for low-gravity combat, with arms where their legs should be or legs fused into muscular coils, utterly lacking any notion of fear or forgiveness. Rangers, all of them women, all of them pregnant, their embryos arrested at three months’ development and heavily modified: implanted nervous systems loaded with reflexive subroutines; endocrine systems pumping combinations of combat drugs into their mothers’ bloodstreams.

  Squads zeroed in on entrances to subsurface tunnels and voids mapped by fly-by drones. As soon as they touched the surface, enemy machines and child-sized troops erupted from dust pools and engaged in vicious firefights with rangers, Quick soldiers, and combat machines.

  There was nothing noble or glorious about the battle. It was a slaughter. It was like trying to put out a fire by throwing people on it. And it continued remorselessly even though there was no point in capturing the planetoid after the destruction of the laser array. But we were Trues, and nothing less than full and outright victory would satisfy us.

  The Horse refused to watch. He was hunched inside the blanket of his security, turned inwards, until at last he flashed a message to me. It was time to go.

  Two of Prem’s cousins shepherded us to the garages under the outer skin of the ship and loaded us into a slamship that was being readied with fifty others for the next stage of the assault on the planetoid. We were seized, stripped, pumped full of drugs, and dumped in the coffins. Facemasks displaced the air in our lungs with fluorosilicone fluid. Dozily, happy and stupid thanks to the cocktail of muscle relaxants, soporifics, and neurosuppressors in my bloodstream, I watched on a tiny window as the slamship was swung out of the line waiting to be shunted through the forward railguns and was lowered into a big, cubic airlock. The double doors above shut; those below opened. The slamship dropped into black vacuum and shot away, powered by strap-on fusion motors, accelerating at a steady 3 g towards Cthuga.

  6

  Several of the jockey-crew commons were empty and unused, and there were plenty of spare bots. So it was easy, once Ori had slipped away from the workshops during one of her rest periods, to walk one out on to the skin of the Whale, and flash a tag to Inas. Strange to be riding a bot again, to stalk through the marshalling yard. It seemed mostly unchanged and was as busy as ever, but the upper parts of the Whale were blotched with dark growths and enemy craft darted and jerked amongst spires and platforms hung up there in the sky, their shadows flowing and flitting everywhere.

  At one point on her short journey Ori felt her passenger move forward and stand behind her eyes, and she wondered if it realised they were close to the place where they’d first met. And wondered too if it might leave her, push all the way out into the clear freezing air and become a sprite again. Fly out, she thought. Fly, fly. And something inside her head relaxed like a muscle unclenching and the sense of double vision faded. Whatever it wanted from her, it wasn’t yet ready to leave.

  She and Inas met by one of the tipplers where freight cars were loaded with raw materials, and they spoke in gesture talk.

  I feel horribly exposed out here, Ori signed.

  It’s safe
r than meeting face to face, Inas signed back.

  For me, or for you?

  The others have good reason to be scared.

  I know. And I’m sorry. I’m scared too. Do they know you’re talking to me?

  It’s better that they don’t. And that’s all I can say. Now, before someone spots us, tell me everything.

  It broke Ori’s heart that the war and the Ghosts stood between them, but she did her best to tell Inas about her work with the commissar, and passed on the data and specifications she’d gathered, and answered all of Inas’ questions.

  Ori had been assigned to a group of Quicks being tested by Commissar Doctor Pentangel and a crew of Ghosts. Like her, the other Quicks had all experienced close encounters with sprites; had all been imprinted with a passenger. The Ghosts were intensely interested in this, and Ori and the others were subjected to all kinds of tests designed to probe and map the handful of affected neurons that, according to the commissar, mirrored the information-processing capacities of the sprites.

  The tests were not difficult or unpleasant, but the regime was rigorous and repetitive, and Ori and the others had been tasked with learning techniques of ‘unthinking’, of completely clearing their minds to minimise activity that would interfere with measurements of the little clusters of mirror neurons. It was also exhausting, because the Ghosts did not sleep. Or rather, they were able to function in a reduced capacity with either the left or right halves of their brains asleep – what they called down time. Commissar Doctor Pentangel and Quicks he had recruited to work under him got by on catnaps and the drugs that True pilots had used to enhance their performance. She should be asleep now, Ori told Inas.

  We can sleep when we’re dead and the enemy is defeated, Inas signed. Tell me why the Ghosts are so interested in sprites.

  They don’t tell us anything. We’re supposed to know, I guess. And we don’t dare ask. All I can tell you is what the commissar told me.

  According to the commissar, the Ghosts wanted to change history. They believed that the history they inhabited was the wrong history. That it had taken a wrong turning in the distant past that had led them to this point, where they could begin to correct it. To do that, they had to send a message into the past, to their founder, Levi. He had already received such a message, but according to them it was the wrong message. They wanted to send back a different one, one that told Levi what to do to avoid the path they had already taken. A message that would enable him to set out on a new path.