by Ian Whates
"Hey, you bitch, what d'ya think you're doing?" snarled a voice from the neighbouring cell. "That stick was mine!"
A hand shot out, narrowly missing hers and, in the process, losing whatever chance it might have had of grasping the shockclub.
Reaching out to grab the smooth white baton was now simplicity itself. She drew the weapon into her cell and clasped it firmly to her chest, trembling with relief, cuddling it like some newborn babe. Next door the thwarted oaf was still ranting and screaming, shaking the bars of his cell, but the sound washed over her unheeded.
She was getting out.
The shockclub might have been unfamiliar, at least the end with the controls, but it was hardly the most complex weapon in the world. She thumbed the charge to maximum and pressed the metal plate of its business end to the cell's lock mechanism, dreading that nothing would happen and the door would remain firmly locked. Her hands were trembling and she felt her concentration drifting away. She squeezed her eyes shut, gritting her teeth and dragging her thoughts back where they belonged. Nothing mattered more than getting out of here. This had to work.
No point in delaying. She squeezed the trigger, sending a surge of power coursing through the lock. The club didn't tremble or warm up in her grasp, there were no sparks, no dramatic indication that anything at all had happened, except for the fact that her cell door swung slowly outward.
Still clutching the shockclub, prisoner 516 pulled herself out of the cell - the first time she'd ever passed through that door unsupervised. This wasn't yet freedom, but it was a huge step in the right direction and it felt good.
There was a knack to moving in zero g, one she'd been required to master a long time ago, though it wasn't a skill she'd needed to call on in a while. For long seconds prisoner 516 simply clung to the bars of her cell, anchoring herself while she marshalled her dwindling energy and shattered nerves. The jeers and screams of her fellow prisoners rose to new heights as they saw her escape into the corridor, and fresh gobbets of spit sailed towards her, but these were all easily ignored. At least nobody had thought to try and piss at her as yet, or worse.
She was going to have to traverse the length of the corridor while staying as far away as possible from the cells on either side and the clutching hands of the inmates, but push off from her current position and, whatever her trajectory, she would eventually end up against the opposite row of cells. That was by no means the only obstacle lying between her and ultimate freedom, but it was the most immediate. One at a time, that was all she could aspire to - cope with each new challenge as it arose.
She never once considered trying to free anyone else. Most of them deserved to be where they were, in this forgotten corner of human space - a former colony ship whose engines were disabled when they turned her into a prison satellite, the small cubicle-like rooms easily converted into cells. This was where the government sent their worst offenders, the dangerous ones. Her, for example.
The floor was unremittingly smooth. Nothing there she could grasp hold of and use. The ceiling, though, boasted a series of light fittings; shallow, elongated blisters, out of anyone's reach in normal circumstances, but not in zero g.
She'd need both hands for this, so hung the shockclub around one wrist via its strap loop and then pushed off from the bars, angling towards one of the light fittings. Not too hard - she didn't want to overshoot. The nearer she came, the more her concerns grew. The lights were pretty well sunk into the ceiling, leaving little to grasp, but she was committed now. Catcalls and whistles accompanied her move; a reminder of exactly what kind of a reception she could expect if she messed this up.
Her fingers reached for the nearest fitting, immediately slipping off its smooth curved surface. She fought to stay calm and tried again, cracked and broken fingernails scratching for purchase at the edges, where the light met the ceiling. All the while her body continued to drift towards an inevitable, if soft, collision with the ceiling which would bounce her ever so gently towards the nearest waiting thug. She had to twist around, the light fitting no longer in front but slightly behind her legs and body. Then she had it, the fingers of one hand fastening tenuously to a solid ridge at the fitting's rim, those of her other hand joining them a second later. It wasn't much, but proved enough to absorb her momentum, enabling her to stop herself. For precious seconds she rested there, crouching on the ceiling at the corridor's very centre, focusing her mind, zeroing in on the door at the far end, which represented the next step towards freedom.
"You can do anything," Louis whispered.
She pushed off, using her finger tips as the fulcrum. Progress was frustratingly slow, a mere drift in the right direction, but she daren't try for more momentum by pushing off with her feet; that would only send her legs away from the ceiling and her head towards it; a spin that could easily become uncontrollable and lead to disaster. Even so, there had to be a way of speeding things up. More guards could appear at any time, and with every passing second her chances of escape narrowed.
Time seemed to stretch and drag at her with the cloying grip of softened toffee, and her frustration built rapidly towards panic. This was hopeless. She was going to have to risk kicking off to achieve a more practical speed, but had missed any chance of doing so immediately. Drift had taken her steadily away from the ceiling and she was now out of reach of any surface.
She passed unheeding through globules of spittle and other less identifiable things, her concentration centred on the steadily approaching floor and her chance to gain some momentum. Mess this up and all her efforts would have been for nothing.
With the floor agonisingly close, her worst nightmare was realised. The door she had been focussing on slid open.
She strained to see, twisting around for a better look, expecting to hear the heavy tread of magnetised boots at any second, followed by rough hands dragging her back to her cell. Yet, despite the doorway gaping wide for several seconds before it closed again, the entrance remained empty. Nobody had come in. Then she caught a slight distortion; nothing much, just a quick stretching of details in the corner of her eye, readily dismissed as an after-effect of the drugs still flowing though her veins, but she knew better. She recognised that effect. Shimmer suit. Somebody had entered after all, but why would anyone be wearing eye-foxing shimmer suits here? In order to rescue somebody. This was the raid she'd suspected. It was happening here, on her landing. How were these would-be rescuers going to react to finding someone in the middle of the corridor, clearly intent on their own escape? Kill or ignore; these seemed the most likely options and there was little she could do now to influence which they chose.
Of course she prayed for the latter, yet it seemed those prayers were to go unanswered as an unseen hand grabbed her arm, stopping her.
"This her?" A woman's voice, rich-toned and self-assured.
She tried to struggle but was easily subdued and held.
"Yeah." A man's reply.
Something stung her arm, lightly, no more than a lover's kiss compared with much that she had endured of late.
"DNA match," the woman said. "It's definitely her."
Me? A corner of her thoughts queried. They're here for me? Impossible. She wasn't important enough for all this effort, not to anyone.
Somebody grabbed her arm. Instinctively she lashed out.
"For pity's sake, Mya, stop fighting us will you? We're here to get you out."
She knew that voice. "Louis?" Her brother, come to the rescue, here to keep her safe. Joy swept through her.
"No, Mya... not Louis. You know it's not Louis."
Not Louis? No, of course not; she realised that now. Another image formed in her mind. A man's face: a large, oval face, but strong and ruggedly handsome with intense eyes. Memories washed over her in a wave, and recollection brought with it hope, gratitude, joy, and even the echo of love. Yet it also brought with it crushing disappointment that this wasn't her brother, that it would never be her brother. The torrent of feelings swept through her
, as the final barriers collapsed and all the things she had deliberately walled away, never expecting to need them again, were freed.
Correction; perhaps there was one person to whom she meant this much after all.
"Jim?" Jim Leyton? Her former lover. The man she once believed she would spend the rest of her life with. That was before, of course. Before Louis died and the ability to love deserted her forever.
She recalled the recent interrogation and for a bizarre moment was convinced that the session, that constant thinking about this man and the repetition of his name spoken out loud, had somehow conspired to bring him here, as if summoned via some arcane ritual. Ridiculous, of course, but she couldn't escape the conviction that it was true.
She felt the need to reassure him, to let him know that this really was her, to make sure he wouldn't abandon her here. "What took you so long?" she asked and tried to smile.
Prisoner 516 stopped resisting, allowed the two ghosts to lead her along what remained of the corridor and through the door that, mere seconds ago, had seemed so far away. Beyond was a space which, though still cramped, was at least free of clutching arms and free-floating liquids. She stood docile as her rescuers pulled a shimmer suit up over her body and sealed it, and revelled in being in her own space, cocooned and protected from Sheol Station, no longer a part of that vile place. The hated number had been left behind forever. Mya knew they were still exposed and that speed would undoubtedly be of the essence, but at that instant she didn't care. Sobs started to wrack her chest and tears rolled free to wet her cheeks. Her eyes screwed up as her face contorted and she collapsed against Leyton, clinging to him as, in another life, she had clutched him so hungrily in the throes of passion and body-jarring ecstasy. She drank in the solid fact of him, while memory of the lust and the love that had once burned so fiercely between them took her breath away. Crying suddenly became the easiest thing in the world.
Chapter Four
Speculation about 'First Contact' was nothing new. Such things pre-dated space flight and became all the more popular once mankind had spread to the stars. Most people took it for granted that there were sentient aliens out there somewhere, particularly when a handful of simpler, non-sentient ones were encountered on various worlds. General consensus seemed to be, "Well if we've done it, why can't they?"
In a poll conducted a score or so years before the Great War, 87% of people were found to believe in sentient aliens. Admittedly, in a similar poll taken ten years after the War, that figure had dropped to 74%, but everyone agreed that the dip was only to be expected. Naturally, they failed to agree on why this was expected - some experts argued it was due to the general exhaustion and depression of a populace subjected to a century and a half of constant warfare, while others put it down to the opposite, claiming that optimism and high spirits resulting from the War's end meant that less people yearned for the psychological crutch of technologically-superior aliens and were more confident of humanity's ability to forge their own future.
What no poll managed to predict was how slight the impact on everyday life of mankind's first meeting with another civilisation would prove to be. People heard about the Byrzaens, talked about them, speculated, offered their opinions, and then went on with their daily routines as if nothing had happened. After all, work was still there the next day, their boss was still the same old cranky self-serving bastard he'd always been, food still needed to be paid for, and energy prices continued to creep inexorably upwards at every turn. What had changed?
Not that this was a one-off headline soon to be forgotten, of course; the Byrzaens were here to stay and the media went out of their way to ensure the story remained fresh and bright. The public were bombarded with images, analysis and comment on the minutest of developments and with the views of a succession of experts (though many a cynic questioned how humanity could possibly have experts on the subject). Then there were the learned debates and panel discussions that did little but rehash the limited material available, though frequently spicing it with a liberal helping of unfounded conjecture. None of which amounted to anything more than a series of fanciful diversions for the ordinary person in the street, of marginal relevance at best.
As far as Philip could see, those most directly affected by the Byrzaens' arrival were the celebrities of the hour. They weren't any more, at least not to the same extent.
The normality of it all left Philip bemused. He found his native world Home post first contact to be pretty much identical to Home before first contact. Philip and his father returned there sooner than either of them had anticipated. Once the initial excitement caused by the Byrzaens settled down a little and matters on New Paris began to take on a semblance of order, somebody found time to notice the presence of the two enhanced partials, and nobody seemed to have the foggiest idea what to do with them. In the end, rather than use them as a resource as Malcolm stridently argued, the ULAW officials decided to pack them off back to Home.
"But my help could be invaluable," an exasperated Malcolm had argued. "I built The Noise Within for goodness sake!"
"Yes, we're aware of that, Dr Kaufman, but matters have moved on, and the pirate ship is no longer our primary concern," a smiling ULAW official explained. Of course not, top priority would be the Byrzaens themselves - a subject Malcolm also had some unique firsthand experience of, though he seemed reluctant to advertise as much. Still in the process of finding his virtual feet, Philip was happy to accept parental guidance on such things for the moment.
"Thank you for your offer. We know where to find you should we need to," was ULAW's final brush off.
Personally, Philip suspected that those government officials onsite saw shipping the two transhumans out as the quickest and most convenient means of removing an unknown factor from the equation. He toyed with the idea of cloning himself and leaving a version behind on New Paris to see what could be uncovered about the Byrzaens, but supporting a virtual personality as complex as he'd now become required a lot of power and it was bound to be noticed. The only person he'd trust to cover for him on something like this was Leyton, the government agent who'd been present at his corporeal 'murder' and, indeed, had hunted down his killer. Unfortunately, Leyton - one of ULAW's elite force of Intelligent Gun wielders, or eyegees - had dropped off the radar somewhere along the line, presumably assigned elsewhere to some other covert project.
Besides, the prospect of having two versions of himself running around was strangely unsettling for Philip, who was still coming to terms with having one virtual version of himself, so he shelved the idea.
Philip was still testing the boundaries of this new existence. In theory, he could simultaneously occupy all of a given system, but in practice that proved a disturbing experience when he tried it. Even within the comparatively limited confines of the New Paris' stationwide net, he felt his sense of self, his very identity, slipping away and quickly pulled himself back into a centred node of awareness which he knew to be Philip.
"That's a dangerous game," Malcolm told him.
"You've tried it, then?"
"Of course, when I first uploaded. But I don't intend to try it again in a hurry."
Philip could understand why. He had a feeling that if he'd stayed that thinly spread for any length of time, all sense of who he was would have evaporated with little chance of its ever returning.
The two of them hitched a ride back to Home aboard a ULAW ship, travelling officially within the ship's systems rather than stowing away as Malcolm had on the outward trip.
Once underway, Malcolm seemed to accept the return to Home with remarkable good grace. Indeed he seemed almost eager to do so, his anger at being prised away from New Paris quickly forgotten. Philip knew his father too well and was determined to work out what the wily old goat was up to before being told.
"What's the rush?" he asked,
"You tell me."
Philip thought for a split second. "Money." He'd been concentrating too firmly on what they were leaving b
ehind and not paying attention to what awaited them.
"Exactly."
Philip Kaufman was now officially dead. The funds he'd always taken so much for granted were no longer his but now formed part of an estate, to be distributed according to his officially recorded will. Theoretically, in the absence of objections, that could all take as little as a matter of days. In Philip's case it would inevitably be longer, due to both his prominence and the complexity of his financial affairs, but, even so, the process of freezing accounts and valuing assets would have already begun. Living on as a transhuman would cost money that was swiftly slipping from Phillip's grasp.
"You've taken contingencies, I assume?" Malcolm asked.
"Of course." Funds tucked away in hidden accounts, investments which didn't appear in any official record - reserves against unforeseeable circumstance. "They won't amount to much, though, not in the long term."
"We might have to be a little loose and free with the law."
"You mean tamper with my will." To create a provision, to ensure sufficient funds were in place to support his virtual self in perpetuity.
"Something like that."
"I didn't think that was possible." Wills were supposed to be sacrosanct, heavily encrypted with such sophistication that they were beyond the reach of hackers and would-be thieves.
"It isn't," Malcolm confirmed, "which is why it's so expensive. Impossible things always are."
A further reminder that Philip was still a babe in virtual terms, reliant on his father's experience.
As soon as they reached Home they paid a visit to Catherine Chzyski, acting CEO of Kaufman Industries following Philip's demise and almost certain to be confirmed in the role once the board got their act together. The transfer from the spaceport to Catherine's office was all but instantaneous, a feat Philip only wished he could have managed in his former corporeal life. Catherine accepted their call without hesitation. He didn't think he'd ever been happier to see the severe features of his former colleague and sometime boardroom adversary than he was at that moment, though it was a little strange being greeted as a visitor in an office he'd occupied for so long.
