Context

by John Meaney

  Elva. You had a sister.

  It was obvious that their nervous systems had been quantum-entangled since an early age. And that it was Elva who had expected to die, when Litha committed suicide and her consciousness made the transition to Elva’s body, displacing the original Elva identity—her thoughts and feelings and memories: her soul—in the process.

  And had Elva, too, held back from expressing her feelings towards him, because she had expected oblivion to strike at any moment?

  Perhaps she had both loved and hated her sister, knowing that Litha, if she found information of sufficient value, would be prepared to make that sacrifice without hesitation.

  ‘... funding from,’ Sentinel was saying. ‘But it’s always been effective.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Tom tried to focus. ‘I missed that.’

  Corduven smiled.

  ‘You haven’t,’ he said, ‘asked the question I was expecting.’

  For a moment, Tom could not think what he meant. Then:

  ‘Does that mean you know where she is?’

  ‘It’s deep in Blight territory. In Realm Buchanan—if we can still call it that, five SY after the Earl’s execution. Really deep in the heart of—’

  ‘You have to send me in.’

  Real fear took hold of him, that after finding out this much he would not be able to reach her. But Sentinel relented then, transforming the floating diagram into a holomap into which he pointed.

  ‘In any other briefing, you have to understand, Elva Strelsthorm’s whereabouts would not be first item on the agenda.’ He held up a placating hand. ‘What I mean is, there’s a news item which may be of immense significance, given the pattern spread of the Blight’s invasions. There are places it seems unable to manifest itself directly inside, but now...’

  Tom looked at Corduven, wondering if he understood any of this. It made no—

  “The Dark Fire,’ Sentinel said, ‘has taken the Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum. One of the Collegium’s three sites has fallen; the other two are at high risk.’

  He gestured, rotating the display.

  “There, near the place where Oracles are made’—Sentinel spoke without regard for Corduven’s feelings: without realizing the emotional significance of the place which had turned Corduven’s brother into something both more and less than human—‘lies a place which appears to be a death camp. We have no agents in place around there, so our details are sketchy.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I don’t—•’

  ‘Captain Strelsthorm is there.’

  ‘In the death camp?’ Tom was half out of his seat.

  ‘Not as a prisoner.’ Again, the placating hand gesture. ‘She’s infiltrated their command structure in a way we’ve never achieved. Her cover name is Herla Hilsdottir, and she’s safe enough for now.’

  At the heart of Blight territory, in a camp where who knew what atrocities were being carried out, at this moment.

  Elva. You really are alive.

  ‘We want you to—’

  Tom stood up. ‘I’m going to get her out.’

  Reservation Gamma was a vast series of interlinked natural caverns, never before used, to anyone’s knowledge, since the colonists’ founding of Nulapeiron twelve centuries before.

  But now it was an assault-training area, purchased at minimal cost from High Duke Frendino (in whose realm it was nominally located), sealed off by opaque smartfilm while the men and women inside faced their fears and drilled their reflexes. And the training casualties sometimes included life-threatening injuries; everyone knew that sooner or later trainees were going to die.

  A guard saluted as Tom stepped through the membrane. Inside, a black-visored sergeant bowed.

  The cavern was gone, or so it seemed.

  Open sky—

  A holo-sky, lemon-tinged and grey-clouded, replaced the cavern ceiling, and troops crawled across the broken ground, as though they were on the world’s surface. But, even as Tom watched—standing there without flinching, while the training officers stared at him, obviously unable to believe his lack of reaction—five soldiers, in catatonic foetal positions, were carried by aides from the battlefield.

  Those aides, like the training officers, wore polarizing smartfilters to block out the nonexistent sky: to them, the rock above them was as solid and reassuring as ever.

  ‘How goes it?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Poorly, my Lord.’ The sergeant, face hidden behind his visor, shook his head. ‘Perhaps we should increase the—’

  ‘No. Decrease the duration’—it was the way Tom had conditioned himself — ‘but increase the frequency.’

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  ‘They will acclimatize.’ Remembering: his long hard climb up the terraformer sphere, the Oracle’s skyborne home, with murder in his heart. ‘Believe me, they will.’

  Next day, when he returned from his run, a message was waiting for him in his quarters: an invitation from Lady Sylvana.

  Tom wiped the crystal, reinitializing it with a waved command, then tossed it into a communal storage bin on his way to the mobilization caves.

  Extract from an internal report: Beyond the Academy zone, where veterans are billeted awaiting their return to the front, discipline grows increasingly difficult to maintain.

  Tom saw what that meant in human terms as he passed a grim scene: two cargo-levs smashed into one pile of twisted junk, and a torn bloody corpse.

  Platoons from two rival services had been involved. One of them stole the cargo-levs—from their rivals—then drove the two vehicles straight at each other, diving from the controls just before they hit.

  If it had been only a matter of wrecked vehicles, the situation would have been little more than an annoyance, a symptom of cooped troops, fearing uncertainty more than death, blowing off the pressure with an act of uncontrolled vandalism. But the man who had been guarding the cargo-levs had been tied by smartrope to the front of one of them, and when the two vehicles collided head on, he had been crushed into red pulp by the impact.

  A hard-faced military proctor told Tom the story, while his colleagues used sting-batons on the now-sober perpetrators—already confessing their guilt; one of them was weeping — before taking them away for trial.

  This was nothing which would appear in any propagandized report on the war’s progress. It would remain yet another dark secret until the war was won, or until the failings and weaknesses of human civilization ceased to matter.

  Tom pulled his cloak round himself, and walked on.

  By a turquoise, mineral-saturated pool in another cavern, a small group of young bare-chested soldiers held up their dead trophy, posing for a holocamera-bead: a five-metre-long sealaconda, viciously barbed with long dorsal spikes. They had used knives for the kill, which was a local tradition though the soldiers looked to be from far away, and they pulled open flagons of gripplewine and drank a victory toast, the pale liquid running down their bare smooth-skinned chests, knowing that this was a moment of brief shared joy they would remember forever if they survived this long dark war.

  But Tom knew that the sealaconda, for all its fierce appearance, was a gentle coward which fed on microflukes and fungi and the occasional ciliate-newt, and offered no threat to the band of bipedal killers which had hunted it down for sport.

  He quickened his pace, nearing his destination.

  In the final cave, a squad of quiet, watchful men was waiting, and their commander was Adam Gervicort. Tom’s former servitor was now a battle-scarred veteran with a habit of holding himself very still, like a neko-feline with prey in sight.

  ‘My Lord.’

  There was camouflaged smartfilm, and Adam led him through.

  ‘Look at this, Tom.’ They were alone, in the membraned-off end of the cave, where he could ignore Tom’s rank. ‘Talk about stripped for speed. What do you think?’

  It was a low-slung arachnabug of mottled grey, with a collapsed sled and food bundles tied behind the seat. The vehicle’s tendrils looked like
faded rope.

  ‘It’ll burn itself out,’ added Adam, slapping the nearest tendril, ‘to get you there. Programmed to self-immolate when it can go no further, or at your command.’

  No comfort. Everything sacrificed for speed and endurance.

  It’ll get me to Elva.

  ‘Is it ready to go?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Aye, it is. And’—Adam held out his hand—‘sooner you than me, my Lord.’

  ~ * ~

  59

  MU-SPACE CONTINUUM

  AD 2143

  <>

  [20]

  It had an aura of confession, amid the miraculous amber glow flowing like a viscous river through the cabin. Odd, fractured visual echoes stuttered around them, and when Ro spoke, her words rippled and reflected like waves breaking upon a shore.

  ‘I think we’re in danger, Pilot. I’ve made enemies among the Zajinets.’

  With silver cables depending from her eyes, the Pilot’s smile looked grim, disturbing.

  ‘I know.’

  Golden space, and the fractal stars of darkness.

  ‘They’re capable, I think, of mu-space travel.’

  ‘I’ll say. There are two vessels following us right now.’

  Hunting me?

  If they wanted to rid themselves of humans—of Ro McNamara—an accident in mu-space would place them beyond blame. She had placed everybody in danger.

  No. It wasn’t my choice to be here.

  ‘Do we have weapons?’

  ‘We thought we had no enemies.’ Again, the I/O cables drew unsettling curves across the Pilot’s smile. ‘Not out here.’

  ‘Can you lose them?’

  ‘I haven’t managed it yet.’

  Damn, damn...

  ‘Drop out into realspace?’

  ‘We’re still not armed. I suspect they are.’

  There was a control pad, used by ground crew for status checks and diagnostics, and Ro waved it into life, though her hands seemed to move through pale amber water.

  Am I going to die here, Father?

  But the place of his death was not exactly here: in fact it was some considerable energy-expenditure away. (Despite her grasp of fractal physics, there was no adequate labelling of spacetime separation, of length, in a milieu where the distance between two points grew larger the closer one looked.) For she remembered every detail of the story, told so often by Mother and Gramps that she could visualize everything that had happened.

  ‘These coordinates . . .’ Ro concentrated on setting fractional variables. ‘Is that location accessible from here?’

  ‘Not easily. I’m going to have to push things hard, and the event-membrane may not hold back some of this continuum’s odder phenomena.’

  It was another reminder that this place was very different.

  Amber sea ...

  Magical beauty tugged at her.

  It was so peaceful in this place, in the wondrous continuum where she belonged, that danger was hard to believe in. But the status display showed two sparks of light following, and the Pilot’s word was good enough for Ro.

  But how to persuade her to abandon any sensible route, and strike out for such a far location?

  Yet already the quality of golden spatial flow seemed different, harder and more turbulent, and it came to Ro that perhaps the Pilot was already following her suggestion.

  ‘Why are you—-?’

  ‘You didn’t have to explain.’ The Pilot’s body shuddered, then her voice grew dreamy, suffused with a reverent awe: ‘Any one of us would recognize those coordinates.’

  Once, when she began to lose focus, Ro felt herself drifting into the deck, while the cabin and the stars outside receded in all directions, and she snapped herself out of it before she was lost.

  They continued to arrow through golden space.

  Pilot Vaachs was deep inside herself now, one with the vessel, as she charted a course no unaltered human being could ever understand. Brain virally rewired to cope with this continuum, blind in the cold reality of her homeworld—yet here she was a bird in flight, mistress of the elements, at one with the golden flow of a universe that was not her own.

  Amber, flowing...

  And Ro was able to follow the Pilot’s calculations, tracking through the infinitely recursive dimensions of the mu-space continuum, to the place she had dreamed of all her life.

  Vessels, following.

  Closing.

  ‘Soon now.’

  The Pilot’s voice was a prayer as much as a promise.

  Closing...

  Their destination was close, measured in the remaining effort to get there, when suddenly the ship shuddered. Violet lightnings splashed past outside, and Ro knew they were under attack.

  ‘Whatever you’re going to do’—Pilot Vaachs, her voice tight with tension—‘now’s the time.’

  Diving inwards, fractally smaller, but the enemy vessels were following.

  ‘It’s been an honour—’ the Pilot began.

  But Ro was already broadcasting, forcing the control pad to spew out its recorded message in all dimensions, pushing the transmission’s gain all the way.

  ++ HELP ME, FATHER ++

  The ships came closer.

  Father... Am I insane?

  Violet lightning fell again, but the Terran ship held, though it felt as though it would shake asunder.

  Praying to a dead man I’ve never known.

  Was her old delusion going to bring death to them all?

  And then—

  Yes... No.

  Nothing.

  Yes.

  A presence grew.

  It shimmered without light; it sang beyond sound. It coalesced, yet there was nothing to see or feel but an invisible blazing of energies, of a presence beyond understanding or the limited filters of human perception.

  Golden space, mirage-like, twisting...

  A sense of warmth.

  ‘They’re going to fire! Watch—’

  Lightnings sparked towards them as their pursuers opened fire. Ravening gouts of violet and orange energy—

  Faded, flickered.

  Father?

  Were gone.

  The attackers’ weapons no longer functioned.

  ‘Oh, no ...’

  Was this what she had wanted? But it did not matter, as she watched the shivering of space itself, for the process which was occurring was implacable. And the power behind it was unimaginable.

  The Zajinet ships rippled apart...

  Oh, God.

  And then they were gone.

  For a moment, the ship hung there in mu-space, alone in the golden deep, until some power—not the Pilot, who yelped in surprise—thrust them through the deepest currents of the fractal universe. They whirled, they sang—and then the moment of transition into cold blackness, where stars like diamonds shone, and a blue world was hanging before them, clothed in puffy clouds.

  They were back in realspace, and home was close.

  Father...

  But it was a home which would never be the same. Not for Ro.

  There was snow in Reykjavik, cold and dry beneath a grey and lilac sky.

  Everything seemed preternaturally real: immediate and minutely textured. She tasted the air’s coldness, felt the landing field’s reassuring solidity beneath her insulated boots.

  TDVs moved like hunched beetles among the landed shuttles, retrieving the still-sleeping passengers, complete with the couches on which they lay, for transfer to the warmly lit reception domes.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Gramps leaned close, his face reddened by the cold, a bright hood enclosing his head.

  ‘Of course she is.’ Mother, holding Ro by the elbows. Her blind metallic eye sockets notwithstanding, she could ense deeply in matters of mood and health. ‘She’s fine.’