Context

by John Meaney

  Laughter, but a recognition that the man’s teasing greeting had an order buried inside.

  Tom and Elva had an escort of six armed troopers. At the corridor’s end, a transverse intersection, Elva ordered one of the soldiers to pull the satchel from Tom’s back and hand it to her.

  ‘And put that thing in a holding pen.’ She was referring to Tom. ‘I’ll need it later, mind. Don’t damage it.’

  ‘Ma’am.’ Hasty salutes.

  And a hard boot kicking against Tom’s buttock, as they indicated the direction he should follow.

  The holding pen was a dank, black stone alcove: a far cry from the nacre and marble halls where the Collegium’s Magisters had once socialized and deliberated. Tom sat on cold stone, hunched inside his voluminous prisoner’s tunic, nursing the bruise to his lower ribs. The two soldiers had not damaged him significantly, but a final strike with a rifle butt had been irresistible.

  Floating dust sparked, outlining the horizontal alarm beams’ bands. It was the simplest security-tech imaginable, and for a starved prisoner barely able to stand, it would have been sufficient to hold him immobile.

  But, after Tom was sure the soldiers had departed and the corridor outside was deserted, he rose slowly, and shrugged off his outer clothes. Underneath, he was wearing a skintight black bodysuit with integral friction-slippers, which had come from Elva’s wardrobe.

  He wadded up the discarded clothes—he would need them later—and tossed them over the top barrier beam. They flopped onto the flagstones outside.

  The stone was rough, with hand- and footholds which would have been child’s play had it been dry, and Tom spider-climbed up to the ceiling, then slowly, slowly, climbed belly up over the waiting alarm beam, hauled himself—careful!—up to the outer corridor’s ceiling, then dropped lightly to the floor.

  Wait in the holding cell, Elva had told him, until I come for you.

  But she was going to be a while, and when else would he have the chance to infiltrate the Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum, cradle of the Oracles’ power?

  Solo infiltration is dangerous; but Tom was very good at this.

  There was one tense moment when chatting officers were coming towards him and the only way to move had been upwards, to hang suspended between a Doric column’s apex and the nearest wall, applying counterpressure against smooth polished pink-tinged marble while the officers passed underneath, oblivious. And then he slid down, carefully, to continue his exploration.

  Took a turn at random.

  And felt a strange change upon the air.

  A sense of dread.

  Once, in training at the Academy, Tom had been overtaken by a revulsion-driven need to kill a man: a small, odd-looking trooper with a crooked stance. The man had done nothing to attract Tom’s attention, but at first glance Tom was seized with the impulse to stamp him out of existence like a toxin-laden insect, or to beat an immediate retreat.

  He did neither of these things, but watched instead as a sergeant gave the trooper punishment duty, a long arduous run with heavy kit followed by acid-burning the latrines.

  ‘Court-martial found him not guilty,’ the sergeant muttered later. ‘But if he gets accused of rape again, I’ll shoot the little bastard in the head myself.’

  It was a chemical change, someone had theorized: a pheromone excretion which caused ordinary decent humans to react instinctively in the presence of a psychopath.

  And, in a totally empty corridor, that was the kind of sensation—though many times more powerful—which washed over Tom’s skin, and perversely drew him forwards.

  He looked over a sill, into a round hall cupped like a giant hand: an amphitheatre, filled with row upon curved row of seated figures.

  So many people.

  They were clad in pale grey, and their breath filled the atmosphere, an incessant hum though no-one spoke, for there were ten thousand individuals down there and, as Tom watched, it seemed their breathing was in total synchrony: ten thousand chests rising and falling to the same rhythm.

  Then, in the amphitheatre’s centre, a strange blackness flickered: a negation of light, an inverse of warming flame.

  Chaos. ..

  It was something primal; it was something very dark and strong: powerful beyond resistance, implacable as death. A force was manifesting itself, here, below him.

  Go back. Now.

  But he could not retreat, could only stare down at the shape-which-was-not-a-shape twisting in an outgrowth of nothingness, a growing void in the centre of their regard, of the ten thousand watchers ...

  Stench of ozone.

  No...

  Suddenly it seemed that stars were rippling in the dark flames, and Tom wanted to take a step backwards but fear prevented it.

  It cannot be.

  And then, in unison, ten thousand faces turned upwards, towards the balcony where he crouched, and focused their myriad gaze on Tom.

  ~ * ~

  62

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  Those eyes ...

  Tom sprinted, but with a prickling across his back, upon his entire body, as though ten thousand pairs of eyes were still trained upon him; and he knew with an absolute inner certainty that something—some thing—was fully aware of him.

  Then a sense of relief, as though some dark deity had blinked, forgetting the human insect which had momentarily caught that near-omniscient regard.

  Trembling, he found his cached prisoner’s tunic and baggy trews, and pulled them on. Then he stumbled onwards, slowing to a bent-backed shuffle as a patrol—six troopers summoned by the gathering Blight: he was sure of it—hurried to block the corridor before him.

  ‘Commander Hilsdottir,’ he mumbled. ‘Orders. Must find Commander Hilsdottir.’

  The patrol leader’s lips moved, as he silently reported Tom’s capture.

  Tom’s skin prickled again, just for a second, before the sensation faded to nothingness.

  He swallowed in relief, not even minding the blow which thudded against his head and knocked him to the ground.

  ‘The commander’s in her office; I saw her earlier. Take the thing to her.’

  Boots against his ribs, not hard, and Tom forced himself to react slowly, pulling himself upright as though it took all his mortal strength merely to stand.

  He moved at a stumbling pace, off balance, for there was a fine line: if he slowed too much, they would merely kill him and bring another prisoner, a replacement unit, to carry Elva’s satchel for her.

  Walls of lustrous mother-of-pearl, here a deep swirling blue, and big curved pillars of the same hue which bellied outwards, fat and richly decorated. Thick azure carpet beneath their feet. From somewhere, soft Aeolian music—

  And a yell, cut short by the liquid spit of graser fire.

  Elva!

  He knew, with dread certainty, that they had caught her in the act of theft.

  They left him, five troopers running towards the sound, with only one remaining—and his attention was not on Tom. A fatal error, as Tom added one more to the list of dead souls who would stand before him in his dreams; it took an ankle sweep assisted by a hand-edge throat-strike, then a knee-drop to the fallen man—an audible crack as the ribs went—and a foreknuckle collapsing the laryngeal cartilage to make sure.

  Tom cast aside the baggy outer clothes and sprinted after the patrol.

  A row of membrane doors extended beneath curved arches, one of them already dissolved, and that was where the patrol headed. Tom upped the pace, legs pumping, silent across the thick blue carpeting.

  This is my future.

  And then he was into it.

  This is my Now.

  Inside the chamber, a trooper was down and another on one knee, clutching his eyes and softly whimpering. Elva was grappling with another, using her teeth against his throat, while another tried to hook punches over his comrade and into the side of Elva’s head.

  The five reinforcements, sensibly, were holding back. Their leader gave the command to draw g
rasers—but Tom was upon them then, and it was too late to play a waiting game.

  Spilled crystals scrunched underfoot but he kept his balance, scythed a shin-kick across one man’s thigh—the trooper dropped, muscles paralysed—used finger-claw, elbow and knee in quick combination on a second, and then, incredibly, Tom laughed.

  He took out another man with a spectacular spinning hook-kick, which amazed himself after the fact.

  ‘Elva.’ Sidestepping. ‘Didn’t you know I’d come back for you?’

  Side-kick, and he bounced the patrol leader off the wall and met the returning body with a throat-punch. A heavy blow exploded on the back of Tom’s head but he spun regardless, conditioned to hard contact, and his answering combination used knee and palm-strikes, and then he was behind the man, and his arm slipped softly, serpent-like, round the throat, grabbed the man’s left epaulette, then a bend and twist and he was out of it.

  Elva’s opponents, too, were down. With a grim efficiency Tom had not seen before, she used a small triangular black knife to finish them.

  ‘Quickly, now. They didn’t call for assistance’—she was gathering up a spherical grey bag (it might have contained a large children’s lightball, from its size) and a handful of crystals—‘but we don’t have much time.’

  After Tom had pulled on a uniform over his bodysuit, they left together. His was the lower nominal rank, so he took the black satchel, now with the round grey bag and stolen crystals inside, and walked to Elva’s right, half a pace behind, keeping in step.

  It was what the Seer showed me.

  The fight in the office. The Seer-given vision of Elva which had guided Tom for so long—but no longer.

  We’re in an unknown future now.

  At an intersection, with a great round-domed hall beyond, a patrol moved across their path, jogging at double-march, graser rifles at port-arms, and Tom almost stopped dead. But he took his cue from Elva, recovered his pace, and heard her murmur:

  ‘If they’d found the bodies, the Eminence itself would look for us.’

  The Blight.

  And it would find them. Tom had no doubts of that.

  We’re insects before it.

  Or perhaps that was not it. Crazily, since their lives depended on acting calmly, Tom found his thoughts wandering, drawn to the intellectual puzzle.

  Perhaps It, the Blight, is more like a sea of bacteria.

  Ten per cent of every person’s body weight is bacterial. At a deeper level, mitochondria, the powerhouse organelles of all animal cells—which drive all movement, all being—have their own DNA inherited solely, always, from the mother: evidence of a symbiosis between two bacterial species, one absorbed inside the other, which eventually became animal life.

  We’re just emergent properties of a vast bacterial sea.

  On Terra, as in Nulapeiron, bacteria crawled, lived, reproduced, struggled and died on every visible surface, on the deep ocean floor, and inside the very world-stuff, inside both planets’ crusts as far down as anyone had ever measured. It had been one of the first lessons Tom had learned in his emergenics studies at the Sorites School.

  But bacteria could—chemically—communicate as well as fight, and could swap DNA across ‘species’ so easily that the term sometimes became nonsense, in a vast planet-wide, microscopic-dimensioned, eternally uninhibited ongoing orgy.

  And perhaps that was the natural way of things, as Terra’s NetWars had given hint of, as the Fulgor Anomaly had possibly proved.

  Vast communal beings, stretching across entire worlds, if not further.

  Individual animal and human organisms, perhaps, were in the same boat as archaic bacteria. A stage in evolution, still existing, still contributing to biomass, but scarcely aware -except in the most peripheral way, when more complex beings’ actions led to proliferation or extinction as a result of purposes and actions unknowable by simpler organisms—of the growth in intellect, in society.

  What did a human global economy mean to a single bacterium? What could the powers and intentions of the vast Blight mean to a single human being?

  Humans were a part of it, Tom was sure, only in the same way that E.coli bacteria are part of every person. Were its capabilities as far beyond human thought as intellect is above the simple chemical reactions of a bacterium or virus?

  You can’t fight a god.

  Then Elva’s soft words broke his reverie.

  ‘Checkpoint ahead. Follow my lead.’

  They passed through the first checkpoint, and the next.

  But the Blight-controlled territories stretched a thousand klicks or more in every horizontal direction, and they would never get away from here on foot through public tunnels. Or escape an extended search if they became the subject of a realm-wide manhunt.

  Whatever they did next, it would have to be swift, imaginative, and undetectable.

  ‘This way,’ said Elva.

  ~ * ~

  63

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  Below the chamber’s open portal, the walls dropped almost sheer to the bottom of the pit. Brass ramps spiralled down to the pit floor, where half a dozen flyers and cargo-bugs sat waiting, all with hulls coloured pale grey, zigzagged with scarlet lightning flashes.

  Tom edged back from the opening, into the half-lit chamber.

  Elva had been Tom’s security chief, and a good one. Sneak-and-peek had been her favourite impromptu exercise, using burglary techniques to pass through smartfilms and avoid patrols, testing his demesne’s defences which she herself helped to design and continually upgrade.

  She’s better at this than I am.

  They were inside a cargo chamber, in a high-security section of this realm which, vertically, spanned seven strata: a military base within the greater occupied territory. And Elva had sneaked them inside as part of a general’s entourage, following the bewigged burly man with the purple cape and ample brocade, splitting off from among the following junior officers, and bypassing every automated scanfield until they reached this hiding place.

  Her eidetic memory helped, of course: she had visited here only once, had caught a single brief subsequent glance of the base schematics.

  Now he waited among teardrop-shaped steel containers, while Elva worked on gaining access.

  ‘Done it.’

  They crawled inside the dark container, exchanged a long mutual look while there was still illumination—the words of love unspoken—then Elva pulled the hatch shut behind them with a muted clang.

  Darkness.

  And the long wait.

  They sat with backs against the inner hull, his hand clasped in both of Elva’s, with the heavy satchel tugged round so it lay in his lap. And, in a soft murmur with lips held close to each other’s ears, they talked.

  ‘I know ... as Litha, I know a thing ...from nine years ago.’

  Nine SY? That had been an eventful year.

  ‘What is it, my love?’

  A long pause in the darkness.

  Then, ‘They found a body on the ground, on the surface. Shattered. When they were searching for the Oracle’s killer.’

  Poignard blade, hard into his body. Scarlet blood, splashed bright across the blue-white floor.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Grey Shadows, undercover. We—they hid the evidence.’

  And the escape. In the floating terraformer, high in Nulapeiron’s skies, and the brief vision of himself, despair-filled with anger turning inwards, throwing himself suicidally from the balcony at the great sphere’s apex.

  But that was hallucination.

  Except that more recent events suggested otherwise.

  ‘They tested its DNA,’ whispered Elva. ‘Reconstructed the features. Litha saw it.’

  Her dead twin’s memories, not fully displaced by Elva’s occupancy of what had been Litha’s body.

  ‘What did they find?’

  Dreading the answer.

  Don’t say it, my love.

  Knowing the answer in advance.

 
; ‘It was you, Tom.’ Her voice was eerie in the darkened container. ‘The dead body was you.’

  Take-off.

  They clutched each other in the vibrating darkness, a tremendous roar pulsating through their bodies, hammering the air so that they could not even shout to each other. Their cargo container was in a flyer’s hold, rising fast through the vertical shaft, heading upwards, bursting free into open air, shooting upwards into lemon skies whose nature Elva could perhaps imagine, but which she had never seen. Her grip on Tom tightened, hard.