She had missed Robot’s answer, and asked him to repeat it. He said, ‘The angels told Machine it would neutralize the processes the marauders had stolen.’
‘Stop creation,’ Dorthy murmured.
Robot hadn’t heard her. She saw his arm come up, pointing at the silhouette of the Vingança’s tapering spine. ‘Sweet Jesus, you see that?’
She saw it with his eyes before she saw it herself. A black leafshape flew out of the midsection of the Vingança on a burst of white fusion flame. It drifted for a few moments and then its reaction motor lit again, scratching a bright line across the accretion disc’s blue glare that swiftly dwindled to a star. And the star began to fade.
‘Fucking Suzy Falcon,’ Robot said. ‘Now what are we going to do?’
It was the singleship which had been captured by the Witnesses. Armed with the abstract weapon of the angels, it was aimed at the perimeter of the accretion disc, at the vast dwelling place of the marauders.
11
* * *
Suzy had come to a point that was not exactly exhaustion but where nothing could surprise her any more. One moment she was in the shared dream or whatever it was: the next, back in the cell with the dead guard and the smell of burnt meat. The cabin’s door was open and rat-machine was in her hand, and without thinking she flipped it against the wall hard as she could. That broke most of its limbs, but it managed to sear her knuckles with a laser pop before she delivered the coup de grâce with the butt of the guard’s pistol.
And then, just like that, she was free.
It turned out that the Witnesses had held her in a cabin of the module of the Vingança she knew best of all, the singleship pilots’ quarters. The room where she’d been interrogated had been the gymnasium, stripped back to the bulkheads, where she’d once spent hours pounding round and round an artificial grass track, exactly half a kilometre a lap.
Oh Christ, it would all crash down on her if she let it. Her steward shaking her awake. Being fitted into her ship’s holster with the steak breakfast heavy in her stomach and her fear a hollow bubble floating in her throat. Waiting in near darkness with head-up displays printing status indicators in her head while she waited for the drop, the bonecrushing kick of the ship’s strap-on boosters. No, she wouldn’t have it back, couldn’t have it back, not now.
Her built-up shoulders hunched, straining the seams of her suit liner, she padded barefoot down corridors that were familiar as soon as she saw them. She carried the dead guard’s pistol in her left hand, holding it just below her line of sight. The fingers of her right hand were already swelling from the burn the baby rat-machine had given her, a bad deep burn that was beginning to hurt like hell, worse than anything the interrogation had inflicted.
Every so often Suzy felt a stir of vibration grow and fade beneath her bare feet. As if a giant was trying to softly stalk her. She was so nervous she was like to jump out of her own skin. Each corner, she ducked down and stuck her head and the snub barrel of the pistol around to scope the next move. One thing kept her going was the hope she’d get the guy who’d mind-fucked her. She saw no one at all in the narrow, dimly lit corridors, but it still took her half an hour to move the short distance from the cabin to the nearest emergency lock.
Suzy began to feel a little better once she was inside the cramped, coffin-sized lock. She’d prised up the panel outside and pulled the override circuit, dogged the door down on the inside. Anyone came along now, it would take them ten minutes at least to get into the lock, and by then she’d be gone.
She pulled the big red throw down to its first notch—she had to put the pistol down because it took both hands to move the throw, and she winced as inflamed skin broke open and spilled clear sticky fluid over the knuckles of her right hand. The lock’s rack slid open in front of her. She stepped right into the p-suit it held, big clumsily-armoured job, servos swelling the joints of its limbs. She bit her lip as she worked her hands down stiff sleeves into the gloves, but she had to move fast now; pulling the throw would have lit an indicator on the main boards for anyone to see. And there was the dread that somehow Machine had gotten into all the ship’s systems, that he could somehow stop her.
She got her gloved right hand free of the rack, working hard against the resistance of the suit. Sweating with the pain of the burn, she set the heel of her palm against the throw, pushed it down to its second stop.
Something hummed at her back as the rack closed up the suit’s double seam. The helmet came down; Suzy pulled in her chin to clear the rim. Thump at her back as the LSP frame clamped on, then the hiss of cool metallic air. Its dry tang filled her nostrils. Vibration over her entire body as the armoured suit’s servos powered up. Now she could move easily inside its cumbersome embrace. Amber figures ghosted across her sight, the suit’s circuit telling her everything was okay.
Little silicon pads in the fingertips of the suit’s gloves gave some semblance of touch feedback. Suzy felt the throw bar ease a notch in her gloved grip, bore down again, yelling to ride out the pain, her voice loud in the helmet. The lock’s outer hatch blew open. She kicked with the sudden outrush of air, flew out of the frame and through the hatch into raw space.
Disorientation swept through her like a wave, and then she was on top of it, riding it. She pulled the reaction pistol from the suit’s utility belt, squeezed off a measured squirt to slow her drift out from the ship’s skin. Turned her head this way and that in the helmet, looking, measuring.
The module curved away beneath her boots. She saw it mostly as a dimensionless outline against the frozen billows of the shell of gas clouds hung at vast distances beyond the accretion disc’s ultraviolet haze. The fuzzy points of birthing stars clustered here and there. The double spheroid of the wormhole planetoid and the dim red disc of its star were shadowed against the sullenly glowing traceries too, small as Suzy’s gloved hand.
At her back, a river of deadly blue radiance filled half the sky, swirling downward to its invisible vanishing point. She didn’t care to look at it, frightened it could burn out her eyes despite the helmet’s filters. She imagined that she could feel the inexorable tug of the black hole, a pressure centred between her kidneys.
Now she had a handle on where she was, she used the reaction pistol again, started to move at an angle above the module. Its curve was mostly defined by sparse strings of red guide lights, more and more coming into view as she moved away from it. The rest of the ship was a strangely long time in coming into view. And when it did, it was a long way away, and she saw that all of the modules, more than two dozen, had split away from the spine. It didn’t surprise her. Maybe nothing could, any more. It was like being in a saga.
Breaking up the ship had to be Machine’s move. And he’d known where she was, he’d wanted her out of the way, in limbo. Suzy bared her teeth inside her helmet. She’d done the right thing. Machine, Robot, that Yoshida woman, none of them could be trusted. Yoshida had the Enemy in her head, for Christ’s sake, what could you expect?
Suzy was far enough above the ship to see it all. Every one of the modules had blown off, leaving the keel’s long spine bare apart from the bulky drive units at its stern. She changed her course again, taking a long shallow angle towards the bare keel, aiming between two boxy, slowly tumbling modules. One was venting a huge cloud of some vapour that glittered as it dissipated into vacuum and the shadows of suited figures suddenly swarmed through this fugitive glitter. Suzy glimpsed an eyehurting thread of light, then one of the modules split apart, ragged halves trailing debris as they spun away from each other. A particle beam pistol, firing stripped hydrogen nuclei at light speed. People out there were serious. Suzy wondered if they were Witnesses or the Navy, not that it made any difference.
She was very close to the wreckage now. Little knots of struggle scattered in the widening gap. Suzy called up the overlay, but less than half the figures had readable identity tags. The rest were little blurs of light: they’d be Navy personnel, for sure. So Machine had freed them
, too. Vector readings showed that most were more or less at rest with respect to the ship, but someone was climbing up towards Suzy.
Suzy used her gas pistol to build up delta vee as the Witness—his tag named him as Zia Al Qumar—grew remorselessly closer. For a moment Suzy thought she was going to slip past, but then something wrenched her ankle and she started to spin.
It was a tether. Its flexible tip whipped around the cleated boot of her left foot, then stretched to curl around her calf, working higher with blind persistence. She could feel it tighten against the suit’s stiff material. The blade of the multitool from Suzy’s utility belt wouldn’t cut it. Glimpsed at every revolution, tumbling modules and wreckage and the hand-to-hand fighting, the stripped keel of the Vingança against glowing gas clouds, the Witness who’d snared her. He was reeling himself up the tether.
‘Stop it,’ Suzy told the suit. ‘Just stop it.’
The bland voice of the suit’s circuit told her the instruction was incomplete.
‘The rotation. Stop the rotation.’ She had closed her eyes. The spinning was making her dizzy.
It wanted her to specify rest coördinates.
‘How the fuck do I know! The ship, bring me to rest with respect to the ship.’
—No loran beacon has been located. Ranging identifies three structures with higher than seventy per cent probability of being a vessel. Please specify rest coördinates.
The tumbling modules were confusing the suit’s simple linear mind. Suzy opened her eyes to the dizzy whirl of stars, ship, gas clouds. Head-up radar told her the Witness was less than a hundred metres away and growing larger with each revolution. She was going to do anything, she’d have to do it herself.
She started to bring up the reaction pistol. The tether around her leg tightened even further. Next moment the Witness crashed into her.
He grabbed one of her boots, scrambled clumsily up her, jacked out her suit’s servos. Instantly, it was as if Suzy had fallen into a gravity well five times as steep as Earth’s. The man’s breath was loud in her ears; he’d tapped into her suit’s transceiver. He demanded to know who she was, and Suzy paused for only a second before telling him. After all, the Witnesses wanted her alive, or they’d have killed her when they’d done with their questioning.
He told her to relax. ‘I can get you to safety, Seyoura Falcon. There is no need for you to be out here. You should activate your identity tag, you could get hurt otherwise.’
‘I was in the crew accommodation module. Woman guarding me said we should get out when it cut loose, but I don’t know where she went after we did. Can’t you switch my suit back on?’
‘Better for you to let me take charge, Seyoura,’ Zia Al Qumar said. It was the voice of reason, the voice she’d always hated, the voice of an owner to the owned. She was only a woman, so she needed protection whether she wanted it or not.
The Witness released the tether and spun her around, reaching for the D-ring on her utility belt. Suzy concentrated all her will on moving her left arm, on bringing the reaction pistol to bear. The man saw what she was doing, moved to take the pistol away from her. Just as his glove closed around it, Suzy used the last of her strength to press the ignition trigger, working against the suit’s dead resistance so convulsively that her index finger popped out at the knuckle.
Through a red wash of agony she saw the Witness spin away from her, chest of his white suit scorched, his arms and legs waving. She was spinning slowly in the other direction. Sweating with pain, she transferred the pistol to her burned right hand, terrified that she might let go now that there was no feedback from the suit’s servos. She didn’t dare try and reach around and switch the suit back on; probably couldn’t, anyway. Every time she saw the wrecked module she fired a short burst of gas, fingers cramping with the effort needed to work the trigger, until at last she was no longer tumbling.
Now Suzy was moving slowly away from the fighting, slowly closing on the Vingança’s bare keel. The half-dozen command blisters were like beads shaken from the very end of the long spine. Even as she watched, the centre of one of the blisters started to glow with white heat: someone had turned a laser on it. Then the keel eclipsed everything.
She turned so her boots were towards it, tried as best she could to flex her knees inside the suit’s dead weight, began to kill her momentum with brief puffs of her reaction pistol. Even so, she rebounded straight away when she hit, flipped onto her belly, thinking the hell with elegance, shot one last burst of gas and landed on all fours, gloves sliding over hull metal, both hands hurting badly, until she found purchase.
She was clinging by her fingertips to the edge of a docking hatch, five light days above the black hole at the centre of the Galaxy.
The rest was easy. She walked across the hull on the tips of her fingers and toes until she found an airlock, pulled up the handle and rotated it. The hatch hummed beneath her and then it slid back and she fell through into red light, bounced off the wall and found the throw bar, slammed it down. The hatch slid shut and she was buffeted by a gale of air.
She was in.
The docks that ran the length of the keel were under pressure, but lit only by dim emergency lights, no brighter than full moonlight on Earth. There was no generated gravity. It was very cold. Suzy had left the crippled suit in the lock. Freezing metal stung her fingertips (she’d popped her index finger back into joint, but it was sore as hell) as she manoeuvred through the tangle of girders and winch braces and servo housings above the graving docks.
Most of the launch cradles were empty. There were a handful of surface-to-orbit tugs, a couple of sleek combat singleships, and the biggest drone Suzy had ever seen, long sensor booms folded along its black thorax like the antennae of a wasp. But she knew what she wanted, and knew where it was even before she saw it. Its launch cradle the focus of a dozen overlapping arc lights, her ship seemed to float at the bottom of a pool of light.
A single guard hung in a zero gee web by a bank of flatscreen monitors. He had a tanglewhip thrust through the belt of his coveralls, a pistol in a holster strapped above his heart. Suzy clung by her fingertips to a cableway a dozen metres above, moving her head back and forth to disperse the fog of her breath. She still had the reaction pistol, but in here it was as much use as a child’s balloon. Sneak up on him…sure, and get wrapped in thread and maybe blown away for good measure.
She watched the guard watching his monitors, which were showing the fighting outside the keel, amongst the slowly tumbling, fragmenting modules. Watched a long time, frustration twisting in her chest like a kinked rope, until she realized that there’d always been weapons here, if you looked at them the right way.
She couldn’t use the plugs because she wasn’t a mechanic, didn’t have a mechanic’s augmented arm. But there were back-up manual controls, a joystick for controlling gross motion, a kind of glove of flexible plastic mesh with silver hoops at the knuckles and fingerjoints and a thick braided cable linking it with the machine. Right-handed, of course. Suzy couldn’t help making a noise as she drew the glove over her raw blistered knuckles, but the guard was engrossed in the monitors, didn’t look up until the grapple started to swoop down into the pit.
If he’d thought to roll under the singleship’s launch cradle he might have escaped. But he kicked out of the web and shot across the mesh platform, reaching for the holster on his chest as the grapple swooped to follow him, big talons opening (high above, on the shadowy cat-walk, Suzy flexed her fingers) like the petals of a predatory flower. The guard got his pistol out, but then he saw what was about to happen and grabbed mesh with his free hand and pulled himself sideways just as the talons of the grapple (Suzy cried out with the pain as she made a fist) clashed together where he’d just been.
The grapple swung back and up, talons opening again as the guard brought up his pistol, braced his right wrist with his left hand, and fired.
Light and noise filled the pit like a stroke of lightning. The beam, narrow as a scribed line, b
right as the Sun, missed Suzy by metres. But still its heat seared her face, its light blinded her.
Blind, shaking, she swept the grapple down, squeezed her fingers together. The guard’s choked scream was louder than the sudden gale that howled around Suzy, and then there was only the wind. It nearly took her when she shook free of the control glove. The guard’s shot had holed the hull.
If she looked sideways, around dazzling yellow-green after-images, Suzy could just about make out where she was going. She dove headfirst into the pit, hand over hand down a power cable as thick through as her thigh.
Air roared around her. Needlepoints pressed in her ears, she kept swallowing to relieve the pressure. By the time she reached bottom, her nose had started to bleed and her eyes felt as though thumbs were mashed into their corners. She caught a sideways glimpse of the guard’s body, broken between the grapple’s talons, then launched herself in a desperate trajectory, kicking as hard as she could for the open hatch above the singleship’s lifting surface. Wind took her sideways, but she managed to catch hold of a cable and haul herself along it.
Push with hands and feet at the lip of the hatch. Follow the cable back to where it plugged in. Eyes blinded by icy tears as well as after-images. Something bubbling inside her lungs. Pull back latches, unplug it, haul the heavy awkward cable out. No air, no air! Fumble for the throw, bloody fingertips sliding on slick plastic. Pull down. Suzy felt rather than heard the hatch close, and then there was a roaring sound, the noise of the air plant’s blowers.
Eternal Light Page 32
