Afterward, she liked him to talk about his resurrection, when no-thing became thing and he saw her face looking down through the swirl of tectors. This night he did not talk. He asked. He asked, “What was I like?”
“Your body?” she said. He let her think that. “You want to see the morgue photographs again?”
He knew the charred grin of a husk well enough. Hands flat at his sides. That was how she had known right away. Burn victims died with their fists up, fighting incineration.
“Even after I’d had you exhumed, I couldn’t bring you back. I know you told me that he said I was safe, for the moment, but that moment was too soon. The technology wasn’t sophisticated enough, and he would have known right away. I’m sorry I had to keep you on ice.”
“I hardly noticed,” he joked.
“I always meant to. It was planned; get out of Tesler Thanos, then contract an illegal Jesus tank down in St John. The Death House doesn’t know one tenth of what’s going on in there.”
“Thank you,” Sol Gursky said, and then he felt it. He felt it and he saw it as if it were his own body. She felt him tighten.
“Another flashback?”
“No,” he said. “The opposite. Get up.”
“What?” she said. He was already pulling on leather and silk.
“That moment Adam gave you.”
“Yes?”
“It’s over.”
The car was morphed into low and fast configuration. At the bend where the avenue slung itself down the hillside, they both felt the pressure wave of something large and flying pass over them, very low, utterly silent.
“Leave the car,” he ordered. The doors were already gullwinged open. Three steps and the house went up behind them in a rave of white light. It seemed to suck at them, drawing them back into its annihilating gravity, then the shock swept them and the car and every homeless thing on the avenue before it. Through the screaming house alarms and the screaming householders and the rush and roar of the conflagration, Sol heard the aircraft turn above the vaporized hacienda. He seized Elena’s hand and ran. The lifter passed over them and the car vanished in a burst of white energy.
“Jesus, nanotok warheads!”
Elena gasped as they tumbled down through tiered and terraced gardens. The lifter turned high on the air, eclipsing the hazy stars, hunting with extra-human senses. Below, formations of seguridados were spreading out through the gardens.
“How did you know?” Elena gasped.
“I saw it,” said Solomon Gursky as they crashed a pool party and sent bacchanalian cerristos scampering for cover. Down, down. Augmented cyberhounds growled and quested with long-red eyes; domestic defense grids stirred, captured images, alerted the police.
“Saw?” asked Elena Asado.
APVs and city pods cut smoking hexagrams in the highway blacktop as Sol and Elena came crashing out of the service alley onto the boulevard. Horns. Lights. Fervid curses. Grind of wheels. Shriek of brakes. Crack of smashing tectoplastic, doubled, redoubled. Grid-pile on the westway. A mopedcab was pulled in at a tortilleria on the right shoulder. The cochero was happy to pass up his enchiladas for Elena’s hard, black currency. Folding, clinking stuff.
“Where to?”
The destruction his passengers had wreaked impressed him. Taxi drivers universally hate cars.
“Drive,” Solomon Gursky said.
The machine kicked out onto the strip.
“It’s still up there,” Elena said, squinting out from under the canopy at the night sky.
“They won’t do anything in this traffic.”
“They did it up there on the avenue.” Then: “You said you saw. What do you mean, saw?”
“You know death, when you’re dead,” Solomon Gursky said. “You know its face, its mask, its smell. It has a perfume, you can smell it from a long way off, like the phermones of moths. It blows upwind in time.”
“Hey,” the cochero said, who was poor, but live meat. “You know anything about that big boom up on the hill? What was that, lifter crash or something?”
“Or something,” Elena said. “Keep driving.”
“Need to know where to keep driving to, lady.”
“Necroville,” Solomon Gursky said. St John. City of the Dead. The place beyond law, morality, fear, love, all the things that so tightly bound the living. The outlaw city. To Elena he said, “If you’re going to bring down Adam Tesler, you can only do it from the outside, as an outsider.” He said this in English. The words were heavy and tasted strange on his lips. “You must do it as one of the dispossessed. One of the dead.”
To have tried to run the fluorescent vee-slash of the Necroville gate would have been as certain a Big Death as to have been reduced to hot ion dust in the nanotok flash. The mopedcab prowled past the samurai silhouettes of the gate seguridados. Sol had the driver leave them beneath the dusty palms on a deserted boulevard pressed up hard against the razor wire of St. John. Abandoned by the living, the grass verges had run verdant, scum and lilies scabbed the swimming pools, the generous Spanishstyle houses softly disintegrating, digested by their own gardens.
It gave the cochero spooky vibes, but Sol liked it. He knew these avenues. The little machine putt-putted off for the lands of the fully living.
“There are culverted streams all round here,” Sol said. “Some go right under the defenses, into Necroville.”
“Is this your dead-sight again?” Elena asked as he started down an overhung service alley.
“In a sense. I grew up around here.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Then I can trust it.”
She hesitated a step.
“What are you accusing me of?”
“How much did you rebuild, Elena?”
“Your memories are your own, Sol. We loved each other, once.”
“Once,” he said, and then he felt it, a static purr on his skin, like Elena’s fingers over his whole body at once. This was not the psychic bloom of death foreseen. This was physics, the caress of focused gravity fields.
They hit the turn of the alley as the mechadors came dropping soft and slow over the roofs of the old moldering residencias. Across a weed-infested tennis court was a drainage ditch defended by a rusted chicken-wire fence. Sol heaved away an entire section. Adam Tesler had built his dead strong, and fast. The refugees followed the seeping, rancid water down to a rusted grille in a culvert.
“Now we see if the Jesus tank grew me true,” Sol said as he kicked in the grille. “If what I remember is mine, then we come up in St John. If not, we end up in the bay three days from now with our eyes eaten out by chlorine.”
They ducked into the culvert as a mechador passed over. MIST 27s sent the mud and water up in a blast of spray and battle tectors. The dead man and the living woman splashed on into darkness.
“He loved you, you know,” Sol said. “That’s why he’s doing this. He is a jealous God. I always knew he wanted you, more than that bitch he calls a wife. While I was dead, he could pretend that it might still be. He could overlook what you were trying to do to him; you can’t hurt him, Elena, not on your own. But when you brought me back, he couldn’t pretend any longer. He couldn’t turn a blind eye. He couldn’t forgive you.”
“A petty God,” Elena said, water eddying around her leatherclad calves. Ahead, a light from a circle in the roof of the culvert marked a drain from the street. They stood under it a moment, feeling the touch of the light of Necroville on their faces. Elena reached up to push open the grate. Solomon Gursky stayed her, turned her palm upward to the light.
“One thing.” he said. He picked a sharp shard of concrete from the tunnel wall. With three strong savage strokes he cut the vee and slash of the death sign in her flesh.
Thursday
He was three kilometers down the mass driver when the fleet hit Marlene Dietrich. St Judy’s Comet was five AU from perihelion and out of ecliptic, the Clade thirty-six degrees out, but for an instant two suns burned in the sky.
<
br /> The folds of transparent tectoplastic skin over Solomon Gursky’s face opaqued. His swr-arms gripped the spiderwork of the interstellar engine, rocked by the impact on his electromagnetic senses of fifty minitok warheads converting into bevawatts of hard energy. The death scream of a nation. Three hundred Freedead had cluttered the freefall warren of tunnels that honey-combed the asteroid. Marlene Dietrich had been the seed of the rebellion. The corporadas cherished their grudges.
Solomon Gursky’s face-shield cleared. The light of Marlene Dietrich’s dying was short-lived but its embers faded in his infravision toward the stellar background.
Elena spoke in his skull.
You know?
Though she was enfolded in the command womb half a kilometer deep within the comet, she was naked to the universe through identity links to the sensor web in the crust and a nimbus of bacterium-sized spyships weaving through the tenuous gas halo.
I saw it, Solomon Gursky subvocalized.
They’ll come for us now, Elena said.
You think. Using his bas-arms Sol clambered along the slender spine of the mass driver toward the micro meteorite impact.
I know. When long-range cleared after the blast, we caught the signatures of blip-fusion burns.
Hand over hand over hand over hand. One of the first things you learn, when the Freedead change you, is that in space it is all a question of attitude. A third of the way down a nine-kilometer mass driver with several billion tons of Oort comet spiked on it, you don’t think up, you don’t think down. Up, and it is vertigo. Down, and a two kilometer sphere of grubby ice is poised above your head by a thread of superconducting tectoplastic. Out, that was the only way to think of it and stay sane. Away, and back again.
How many drives? Sol asked. The impact pin-pointed itself; the smart plastic fluoresced orange when wounded.
Eight.
A sub-voiced blasphemy. They didn’t even make them break sweat. How long have we got?
Elena flashed the projections through the em-link onto his visual cortex. Curves of light through darkness and time, warped across the gravitation marches of Jupiter. Under current acceleration, the Earth fleet would be within strike in eighty-two hours.
The war in heaven was in its twelfth year. Both sides had determined that this was to be the last. The NightFreight War would be fought to an outcome. They called themselves the Clades, the outlaw descendants of the original Ewart/OzWest asteroid rebellion: a handful of redoubts scattered across the appalling distances of the solar system. Marlene Dietrich, the first to declare freedom; Neruro, a half-completed twenty kilometer wheel of tectoplastic attended by O’Neill can utilities, agriculture tanks, and habitation bubbles, the aspirant capital of the space Dead. Ares Orbital, dreaming of tectoformed Mars in the pumice pore spaces of Phobos and Deimos; the Pale Gallileans, surfing over the icescapes of Europa on an improbable raft of cables and spars; the Shepherd Moons, dwellers on the edge of the abyss, sailing the solar wind through Saturn’s rings. Toe-holds, shallow scratchings, space-hovels; but the stolen nanotechnology burgeoned in the energy-rich environment of space. An infinite ecological niche. The Freedead knew they were the inheritors of the universe. The meat corporadas had withdrawn to the orbit of their planet. For a time. When they struck, they struck decisively. The Tsiolkovski Clade on the dark side of the moon was the first to fall as the battle groups of the corporadas thrust outward. The delicate film of vacuumcompatible tectoformed forest that carpeted the crater was seared away in the alpha strike. By the time the last strike went in, a new five-kilometer deep crater of glowing tufa replaced the tunnels and excavations of the old lunar mining base. Earth’s tides had trembled as the moon staggered in its orbit.
Big Big Death.
The battle groups moved toward their primary targets. The corporadas had learned much embargoed under their atmosphere. The new ships were lean, mean, fast: multiple missile racks clipped to high-gee blip-fusion motors, pilots suspended in acceleration gel like flies in amber, hooked by every orifice into the big battle virtualizers.
Thirteen-year-old boys had the best combination of reaction time and viciousness.
Now the blazing teenagers had wantonly destroyed the Marlene Dietrich Clade. Ares Orbital was wide open; Neruro, where most of the Freedead slamship fleet was based, would fight hard. Two corporada ships had been dispatched Jupiterward. Orbital mechanics gave the defenseless Pale Gallileans fifteen months to contemplate their own annihilation.
But the seed has flown, Solomon Gursky thought silently, out on the mass driver of St Judy’s Comet. Where we are going, neither your most powerful ships nor your most vicious boys can reach us.
The micrometeorite impact had scrambled the tectoplastic’s limited intelligence: fibers and filaments of smart polymer twined and coiled, seeking completion and purpose. Sol touched his sur- hands to the surfaces. He imagined he could feel the order pass out of him, like a prickle of tectors osmosing through vacuumtight skin.
Days of miracles and wonder, Adam, he thought. And because you are jealous that we are doing things with your magic you never dreamed, you would blast us all to photons.
The breach was repaired. The mass driver trembled and kicked a pellet into space, and another, and another. And Sol Gursky, working his way hand over hand over hand over hand down the device that was taking him to the stars, saw the trick of St Judy’s Comet. A ball of fuzzy ice drawing a long tail behind it. Not a seed, but a sperm, swimming through the big dark. Thus we impregnate the universe.
St Judy’s Comet. Petite as Oort cloud family members go: two point eight by one point seven by two point two kilometers. (Think of the misshaped potato you push to the side of your plate because anything that looks that weird is sure to give you cramps.) Undernourished, at sixty-two billion tons. Waif and stray of the solar system, wandering slow and lonely back out into the dark after her hour in the sun (but not too close, burn you real bad, too much sun) when these dead people snatch her, grope her all over, shove things up her ass, mess with her insides, make her do strange and unnatural acts, like shitting tons of herself away every second at a good percentage of the speed of light. Don’t you know you ain’t no comet no more? You’re a starship. See up there, in the Swan, just to the left of that big bright star? There’s a little dim star you can’t see. That’s where you’re going, little St Judy. Take some company. Going to be a long trip. And what will I find when I get there? A big bastard MACHO of gas supergiant orbiting 61 Cygni at the distance of Saturn from the sun, that’s what you’ll find. Just swarming with moons; one of them should be right for terrestrial life. And if not, no matter; sure, what’s the difference between tectoforming an asteroid, or a comet, or the moon of an extra-solar gas super-giant? Just scale. You see, we’ve got everything we need to tame a new solar system right here with us. It’s all just carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, and you have that in abundance. And maybe we like you so much that we find we don’t even need a world at all. Balls of muck and gravity, hell; we’re the Freedead. Space and time belong to us.
It was Solomon Gursky, born in another century, who gave the ship its name. In that other century, he had owned a large and eclectic record collection. On vinyl.
The twenty living dead crew of St Judy’s Comet gathered in the command womb embedded in sixty-two billion tons of ice to plan battle. The other five hundred and forty were stored as superconducting tector matrices in a helium ice core; the dead dead, to be resurrected out of comet stuff at their new home. The crew hovered in nanogee in a score of different orientations around the free-floating instrument clusters. They were strange and beautiful, as gods and angels are. Like angels, they flew. Like gods in some pantheons, they were four-armed. Fine, manipulating swr-arms; strong grasping bas-arms growing from a lower spine reconfigured by Jesus tanks into powerful anterior shoulder-blades. Their vacuum-and-radiation-tight skins were photosynthetic, and as beautifully marked and colored as a hunting animal’s. Stripes, swirls of green on orange, blue on black, fra
ctal patterns, flags of legendary nations, tattoos. Illustrated humans.
Elena Asado, caressed by tendrils from the sensor web, gave them the stark news. Fluorescent patches on shoulders, hips, and groin glowed when she spoke.
“The bastards have jumped vee. They must have burned every last molecule of hydrogen in their thruster tanks to do it. Estimated to strike range is now sixty-four hours.”
The capitan of St Judy’s Comet, a veteran of the Marlene Dietrich rebellion, shifted orientation to face Jorge, the ship’s reconfiguration engineer.
“Long range defenses?” Capitan Savita’s skin was an exquisite mottle of pale green bamboo leaves in sun yellow, an incongruous contrast to the tangible anxiety in the command womb.
“First wave missiles will be fully grown and launch-ready in twenty-six hours. The fighters, no. The best I can push the assemblers up to is sixty-six hours.”
“What can you do in time?” Sol Gursky asked.
“With your help, I could simplify the fighter design for close combat.”
“How close?” Capitan Savita asked.
“Under a hundred kays.”
“How simplified?” Elena asked.
“Little more than an armed exo-skeleton with maneuvering pods.”
And they need to be clever every time, Sol thought. The meat need to be clever only once.
Space war was as profligate with time as it was with energy and distance. With the redesigns growing, Sol Gursky spent most of the twenty-six hours to missile launch on the ice, naked to the stars, imagining their warmth on his face-shield. Five years since he had woken from his second death in a habitat bubble out at Marlene Dietrich, and stars had never ceased to amaze him. When you come back, you are tied to the first thing you see. Beyond the transparent tectoplastic bubble, it had been stars.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 49
