by Gary Gibson
Thanks to all from the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle past and present for their advice and suggestions, to my parents for their support, and of course to MJ, for suggestions, tea and reading out bits from Fortean.
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Prologue
Sagittarius Arm, Approx. 15,000 light years from Galactic Core.
Space twisted briefly around the probe as it emerged only a few thousand light years from the Galactic Core, the very weave and warp of the universe briefly exposed in a burst of exotic particles that destroyed themselves in minuscule flashes of energy. The probe was tiny, small enough to balance on the fingertip of one of the scientists who had designed it, a compact and powerful bundle of molecular circuitry that stored information on the deep quantum level, recording and collating everything it saw or detected.
It unfolded like a silver flower, a gossamer-leafed bauble catching the cosmic wind, at its heart a microscopic bud of molecular circuitry: the hub of a dizzying assortment of sensors directing their mindless yet infinite attention towards the stars of the Core.
Its aim had been off by a mere .23 light years – as good as dead-on; fourteen thousand light years closer to the heart of the Milky Way than the nearest of the Angel Stations, and over twenty thousand light years from Earth. The device that had been used to fire the probe across half a galaxy, in less time than it took for a human eyelid to begin to twitch downwards in a blink, had only consumed the energy equivalent of a thousand Hiroshimas.
Like a flower turning its head towards the midday sun, the tiny probe used its photovoltaic leaves to aim itself now in the direction of the Core.
It watched, and it waited.
There. Algorithmic formulae began spinning through the heart of the machine: analysing the background radio noise, the red and blue shift of the nearest stars, comparing what it saw with the stellar maps stored in its powerful memory. Other, similar probes had spun throughout the galaxy, appearing and then disappearing again, all looking for the clue, the sign. For one star dimmer by far than the stellar records showed.
The probe updated its stellar map, and then ran new routines that seemed to point, again, in one direction, concentrating on an object enormous in physical size, but so lacking in effect on the local star systems as to suggest it had no gravitational attraction. It also radiated no human-visible light, but the probe was no simple machine: it analysed and cross-correlated data from across the entire spectrum, picking up the blast of X-rays emanating from that one particular area of the sky.
It floated there, so far from home, like a bird of prey nervously circling some enormous, snuffling beast.
One
Sam Roy
The boy was there again, watching from a distance. Sam ignored him. He placed his hands against the smooth polished surface of the stone, and pushed. It rolled forward a few inches, then stopped. Sam grunted under the strain. He could still see the boy standing near the top of the cliff. He looked a lot like his father. Sam noted the frightened expression on the boy’s face.
Sam’s mind ran over the conversation they were going to have – the boy terrified his father would find out, wary of the powers his father possessed. Soon, despite these fears, he and his father would clash. In the meantime, he desired knowledge: why his father hated Sam so. Why he forced him to endure this eternity of punishment.
But first they would talk, Sam and the boy, about beginnings, but most especially about futures.
A recent wound had reopened across Sam’s thigh, where he had been slashed the night before with a long knife. It bled for a few seconds then began to heal again, rapidly. Sam’s flesh was a fine network of stab wounds, gouges from the million flicks of a lash. The chains that secured him to the rock pulled at his arms, tearing the skin. He had known nothing else for seemingly an eternity.
The boy glanced backwards, then down at Sam. He was young, perhaps thirteen. A cold breeze blew across the frozen landscape, dropping to the unsuspecting valleys far, far below. The boy began to walk down the steep path that led upwards to water and food at the top. Sam did not wait for the boy to arrive. He had not tasted water or food in days and, although he was more powerful than almost any other human being who had ever lived, there were limits to what even his body could take. When he next looked up from his labours, he saw the boy was just a few feet away, his lips set in a thin line of determination.
‘We need to talk,’ said Matthew.
Elias
Once Elias was safely under the city roof, some of the cold winter chill lifted from his bones. It was dark down here amongst the ruined causeways, and as he moved he could discern figures in that grey twilight world, lost amid the shadows of what had once been a busy shopping centre. Occasionally, as they cut through the shafts of evening light that found their way through the broken ceiling far, far above, the figures resolved themselves briefly into human beings with fear and resignation cut deep into the lines on their faces – the look of the terminally downcast.
There were rules here, in the Arcologies, as in all places. If not reflecting human civilization as it was more commonly understood, then they at least constituted an etiquette of living, albeit an occasionally deadly one. This was a place long abandoned by the city authority’s security forces, and in their place an understanding existed between the various gangs that plied their business here, far from the constantly scrutinized streets of London itself.
It would get dark within the hour, the worst time. Everyone was finding a place to sleep for the night or, better yet, to hide.
When night fell in these Arcologies, there were no electric lights to illuminate either the giant causeways or the once brightly coloured streets, and the only people who prowled the spiderweb-thin bridges criss-crossing beneath the cracked roof were the Mala Pata and their turf rivals, the Reavers. Elias had no business with the Reavers, his business was solely with Mik. Mik had been with the Mala Pata since birth, given over to the gang before he could even walk, for the Mala Pata had never been above kidnapping or trading in children and newborns.
The Mala Pata weren’t hard to spot: they all carried facial wounds, gained through ritual contests. Mik’s was a jagged wound running across his cheek, from just below his left nostril, then up past his ear. Ugly, certainly, and the kind of thing that could still be fixed with cheap medical cosmetics, but if Mik’d done that, it would have demonstrated a serious lack of cojones, tantamount to resigning from the Mala Pata. And the only way out of the Mala Pata was death.
‘Hey.’ A whisper out of the shadow. Elias looked up, saw a murky silhouette on one of the bridges, twenty metres or so above his head. ‘Up here, Elias. It’s me.’
Elias could see a bank of twenty or so escalators, which hadn’t functioned in decades, stretching upwards to the next level. He walked over, put one foot experimentally on a metal step and listened as it creaked and shifted ominously. He stepped back, glanced up again. Mik gestured down, waving his hand towards a staircase at the far end of the row of ruined escalators. Elias walked over to it, and climbed upwards.
‘Murray, ’s you, right?’ Mik squinted at him as Elias traversed the thin bridge. Elias disliked these bridges because they looked so flimsy, but they had been well designed, made by using nanocarbon tube technology t
hat meant you could drop a house on this bridge if you liked, and the bridge would win. Still, Elias kept one hand on the wire-thin rail and avoided looking down.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
‘We’ll get there, we’ll get there,’ said Mik. ‘No hurry, right? I mean, not like she getting any better. They’re expecting you. Don’t want to be first to get to the party. Meantime, we can take a stroll through the neighbourhood.’ Mik glanced at Elias’s face. ‘You nervous?’
Elias looked at Mik, standing there on that thin strip of material forty metres long, which seemed to be supported by nothing but air at any point except where it began and ended. Mik was probably no older than thirteen, but he already had a reputation: he liked to kill.
‘I’m not nervous,’ said Elias coolly. ‘It’s just cold.’ The winter chill was reaching to him on a stiff northern wind that blew in from above. Elias looked up to where the roof had once been. It looked like it might even be snowing.
‘That’s good,’ said Mik. ‘I wouldn’t want to think you were frightened. I mean, in your position I would be, you know, frightened. Are you sure you’re not frightened?’ Elias felt his lips compress in a thin line. Mik was goading him. The boy was wearing an expensive-looking leather coat, under which a barely concealed weapon was strapped across his chest, its blunt muzzle shifting languidly as Mik moved from foot to foot. A sonic slammer, thought Elias; something that could make a not unimpressive mess out of whoever it happened to be fired at. But usually only good for one shot. After that it was about as effective a weapon as an attractively shaped tin can.
If Mik was interested in carrying a weapon that looked less impressive but might actually be of some use, he’d have carried, say, a small flechette gun – a tiny, palm-sized one that could be concealed in the smallest of hiding places. Something like the gun Elias now carried, as a matter of fact.
‘I’m very sure, Mik. Maybe we should get going,’ Elias replied. He was constantly aware of the drop below him. How had people been able to use these damn bridges back when they first built them? Then he remembered: each bridge used to be surrounded by a transparent tube, completely enclosed. The cheap plastic tubing was gone, but the bridges remained.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mik, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I like these bridges. You can have some real fun with them.’ Mik started to jump up and down in the middle, and to Elias’s horror it started to vibrate under the impact of his boots. He tightly gripped the narrow railing, trying to make the gesture look casual and unhurried. Heights were not his strong point. He reminded himself that these bridges were far tougher than steel, near as damn unbreakable, but Elias could have sworn he heard an ominous creaking, although it might just be the wind sighing through the cracked ceiling far above.
‘One time, Elias,’ continued Mik, while seeming to use the bridge like a trampoline, ‘I saw this guy who’d been messing with the Mala Pata. He got dropped from a bridge and his head went boom! When he hit, it went everywhere like a big red rotten egg, ha ha!’ Mik cackled with childish delight.
Elias just stood there and waited, his face an impassive mask, unable to head further in the direction they were going until Mik let him pass. For a moment, in his childish pleasure, Mik actually looked like a real child, rather than a murderous monster. Somehow, this only made the horror of it all that much greater.
But Mik had stopped now, suddenly bored. ‘Anyway, we can go now.’ He turned, looked over his shoulder. ‘You’re something, scared of heights like that.’
Up they went, higher still, until Elias could feel the sting of the occasional snowflake on his cheek. It didn’t take a genius to recognize Mik was deliberately leading him on a long and convoluted trail. The higher they got, the more inclined the boy seemed to lead him across yet more of those spiderweb bridges, high enough to make Elias’s head spin if he risked looking down. At first he thought it was a ploy to confuse him and thus make it hard for him to find the safe house again if he wanted to. But after a while he realized his companion was only playing with him, wanting to see Elias lose his cool, to buckle at the knees, or balk at crossing one of the uppermost bridges running just below the Arcology ceiling.
Finally, finally they left the damned bridges behind and went deeper into the Arcology’s internal structure, farther from the soaring central atrium. The Mala Pata graffiti was now everywhere, while faces emerged from the shadows, both men and women, all cruelly scarred. The only light now came from a string of coloured bulbs crudely tacked up along one side of the long corridor, above walls dented and scratched. Music blared out of open doors from sound systems ramped up to ear-splitting levels.
Elias thought he could hear someone screaming behind the intense noise, a woman, perhaps. He kept walking. Interfering would just get him killed.
They came eventually into a long, low-ceilinged room that looked like it might have been a corporate meeting area in another era. A heavily scarred table stretched almost the entire length of one wall, and the original wallpaper was hidden under years of graffiti and water stains. Boxes of contraband were stacked up in one corner, and two tall, bulky men stood by the table itself. They were dispensing white powder out of a crate, using a set of scales to measure it before pouring the powder carefully into small plastic bags, which they tied at the neck with practised ease. Both men wore small, surgical-style masks, and a couple of rifles lay further along the table, within easy reach.
Then, Elias saw it: a small, plain-looking attaché case sitting by the far end of the table, leaning against a leg. He felt his hands grow damp and clammy. Objective achieved. He wasn’t even supposed to get it out of there, that was for the genuine professionals. Elias was just supposed to confirm it was there, then get out.
Unfortunately, there were certain niceties still to be dealt with.
Mik had stepped ahead of him in the few seconds it had taken Elias to appraise the large room, and now he stood by a darkened doorway at the far end. He nodded into the gloom beyond, and Elias followed.
Her face had been so badly cut up it took Elias a few moments to be sure it was really her, Mia. Her brother Josh was high up in the Mala Pata, a loyal soldier. A distant memory came to Elias, still surprisingly sharp: a smile, soft breath against his earlobe, softer hands caressing his back. She’d have been, what, seventeen, back then? Late twenties now. Although it might have been due to the relative gloom within the cramped space Mik had led him to, it had been difficult initially for Elias to tell whether the body he observed had even been a woman. She lay naked on a sheet spread across a bare mattress, and as Elias’s eyes adjusted to the low lighting, he realized that not only had her breasts been cut off, but also her heart had been pulled halfway out of the ribcage. Elias turned away, then, automatically, almost grateful that her face had been so badly mutilated it was impossible to discern what the final expression on the once beautiful features might have been.
‘That is Reavers making a joke,’ explained a voice from the far side of the room. He’d been so preoccupied with the state of Mia’s body, he’d failed to register her brother Josh sitting in a far corner.
‘Joke?’ said Elias, stepping away from the mattress. The stench of death in the room was almost unbearable.
‘Think they funny.’ Josh stood and stepped towards Elias. He wasn’t the hardest man to spot in a crowd, because he’d had his nose sliced off in a particularly nasty fight a few years before and, like the rest of the Mala Pata, he refused cosmetic surgery and wore the mutilation like a badge of honour.
Of all the Mala Pata, it was probably Josh – brutal, psychotic Josh who used white-hot pokers to torture and then murder his victims – who most struck fear into Elias.
‘Take my sister, kill her Mala way. Big joke to Reavers. Get me?’ he growled.
‘I get you,’ said Elias. Almost to his disappointment, things were going exactly as Hollis had predicted they would. ‘What do you need me for?’ Elias asked, already knowing the answer.
> ‘You do stuff for Mala. Now you do stuff for me. Tell me who do my sister. Then I cut their balls and eyes out and make their mother eat ’em for lunch. You say who, I give you reward. You be grateful.’
Elias glanced at Mik, who was still hovering in the room. Mik had a cocky smirk on his face, though he gazed with open admiration at Josh. Clearly, for Mik at least, there was some very definite mentor–protégé stuff going on here.
‘It true you do what they all say, Elias?’ Mik asked him then. ‘You do stuff like magic, all kind shit?’
‘Not magic,’ said Elias carefully. ‘Something else. It’s hard to explain.’
‘Bullshit. Not magic, what then?’ said Mik. ‘I hear about you. Stuff you do, no people dare lie to me. They tell truth. I hear you only half-person: fucked-up mongrel made in lab.’ Mik’s voice had taken on a jeering quality.
‘Shut up, Mik,’ said Josh and, to Elias’s relief, the boy shut up. ‘I don’t give shit what you do, just you find out who kill Mia. Then I give you reward. Okay?’
‘Sure,’ said Elias. ‘Give me a couple of minutes.’ His mind was racing. Maybe Mik was just guessing about the lab, but he’d stumbled on the truth. Somehow Elias didn’t think so. And with stories about him like that flying around, it would get harder and harder to avoid official government attention. And if it came to that, maybe Elias would be better off dead.
Josh and Mik fell back into the shadows, leaving Elias to do what he had to do. He forced himself to sit by Mia’s broken, ruined corpse, breathing through his mouth to alleviate the stench. He touched her hair, soft and dark, knowing as he did so that in future any time the memories came back of those few days when he had known Mia so long ago, they would be mixed with the memories of now kneeling on a bloodied mattress, studying her ritually mutilated corpse.
Elias let the light take him. He thought of it as a tiny star, bright and fierce, something that had always been with him, part of him. Like a star, it seemed to flicker in his subconscious with a thin, pale light, which neither he nor Trencher had ever been able to find appropriate words to describe. It was as if they could each open a mental valve and let it spill out into the world beyond. With that thought in mind, he felt it flow out of him, discharging through his fingertips, seeking out the flickering trace of life still trapped somewhere inside Mia’s body. Josh and Mik meanwhile stood near the wall, staring, but unable to see the light.
