Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  Lila stared at the exquisite demon, feeling a wild hatred. She stared at the imp, wet and dripping as it rested its sad face on its paws, clinging to the lip of the jug. Towards it she felt rage and pity. “Talk sense!”

  Madame Des Loupes shrugged airily, “There is never any need to conjure Hell, Ms. Black. We all go there in our own time. It is a place created in the moment, an act of perception. I am the keeper of Hell, for I see what is, and those are the limits of Hell. There is no need to send you anywhere, for you are already there, and you have been there since long before you came to Demonia.”

  “What crap!” Lila snorted. She gave the imp another glance to see if it was coming, because clearly it was time to leave and she was leaving, no doubt about it. “Are you coming?”

  “You cannot save him,” Madame said sadly.

  “I don’t want to save him!” Lila snapped. “He owes me a mage spell.”

  The bird demon tilted her head to one side and considered Lila. “There may be hope for you yet,” she said and then reached over and tipped the imp out of the jug onto the tray. She looked up at Lila. “Always beware of males who wish to return to the tit.” Then to the imp she said sternly, “That porcelain is made from the bones of my enemies. You were fortunate not to number among them on the day I had it made. Begone and do not hinder this one on her way. If I find you more meddling than ornamental I will have your hide for a handbag.”

  The imp scampered across the furniture, leaving a trail of milk droplets, and raced up Lila’s arm to her shoulder. A familiar pain pierced her ear as he clutched hold. He was quaking.

  “Return when you are ready,” Madame added to Lila. “I will await you.”

  “Go to Hell,” Lila said.

  “Been there, done that,” Madame replied. “Be firm with your minion. They don’t understand kindness.” Her beady gaze was fixed on the imp.

  Lila stared at the demon for a moment, beyond speech, then turned on her heel and stormed out, barely noticing the hulking shapes moving aside to let her pass.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Calliope Jones rode the crystal flow like an old rodeo hand easily taking the humpbacked punishment of a wild bull. She moved as Malachi watched her from the security of the Ghost Hunters’ barge and put her feet on the blazing torrent of aetheric hard light, changing from rider to surfer in a fluid move that she must have done a thousand times.

  At Malachi’s back the demon heeled the barge hard over as the crystal set in its prow started to make a keening noise and struggled visibly against the delicately engineered bonds that held it in a trap. The flow of channelled aether streaming from its focus whipped and twisted like a snake. Within the light that made it up Malachi could see fragments of runes, words, and programming that made up the schematic that the Hunters had been creating over the last day and a half. They had encoded their instruction to the crystal matrix and now it was working to create—Malachi didn’t exactly know what although the theory had been drilled into him at exasperating length. Faeries rejected technology mostly—not because they hated it, like the elves, but mostly because they didn’t see the need for it. And they didn’t have the attention span for science. He’d tried to follow all the jargonistic hoohaa, but he was comfortable enough to know that Calliope was riding an ocean of saddled aetheric light in order to set up a trap for the formation of ghosts.

  The barge, Matilda, was a mongrel creation. Like the Hunters’ base it was magical and material at the same time but its exclusion field was the most important part of it. It let them float around and look at I-space without actually being in it. Only Jones was in it, riding the stream, sliding along its length far into the blurry greyness of the in-between. Somewhere out there the immense nets and spongelike tangles of half-formed aetheric matter were visible as they congealed out of the uniform greyness of I-space. Jones would see them first and the crystal-shaped stream would run under her guiding feet to a point where she would harness them into a ring and then spin the ring to a sphere. Within the sphere aetheric potentials would collect, attracted by magical gravity created by the crystal force. At such a point it was only a matter of time before they witnessed Immanence, Jones had promised him. The end of several months of hard labour at much less glamorous and exciting tasks, programming and building. As ghosts attempted to form within the shell of the crystal sphere the aether stream would feed information back to the instruments on the barge and they would see with their strandloper sight things Malachi would never see—how ghosts were made.

  That was the theory anyway. Malachi was more interested right now in watching the other hunters. He’d thought he knew them at first; knew their race. But after spending more time around them he realised they were like their instruments, peculiar hybrids. This wasn’t a physical alteration. It was aetheric. Jones was human but she had an active aetheric aura, a spirit body that could take up all her material form into itself, and remake it anywhere, or not make it. A faery like him was in a similar state in half-shift but he could hardly sustain it. She had no trouble, and they were all like her.

  The demon at the ship’s wheel fought hard against currents of aether flowing at them from the unstoppable, unknowable vastness beyond. He kept them stable between those forces and the warp of the crystal stream, the strain visible on his face, a sheen of dark-yellow flame-sweat flickering from his eyes and nostrils as he used his colossal physical strength to its limits. Servo motors thrummed in tune with him, obeying the commands the same as he did as they came from Matilda’s onboard systems. The demon’s spirit form spilled out in a direct contact with the ship itself, joining him to its processes and its aether field. Malachi was impressed with the jerry engineering—all down to the solemn, near-silent elf and another demon who sat in the bow in positions of meditation. He wondered how they had done it, so few and all alone; they could not be alone of course, and he added that to his growing store of assumptions for future consideration. The ship reminded him of Lila and that brought a fierce smile to his predator’s face. Then he remembered he was supposed to be helping.

  Jones was out of sight, the only connection to her the weaving hawser of charmed light. Lightning crackled as electromagnetic forces were created by the computer system’s power supplies hitting resonant harmonies of important magnitude with the unstable aether field . . . flashes of blue, red, and orange flared in zags and sheets across the metal-plate deck of the ship and flared harmlessly against Malachi’s gleaming polished shoes. He noted that as well, trying to commit to memory what Lila would have effortlessly recorded—he missed her scrupulous fieldwork now more than ever. As it was, there was just another rare and inadequately understood phenomenon happening under his nose and he would probably misreport the important part since he had no real idea of what it meant. The demon at the wheel snarled and heaved to. There was a whining note from the crystal that briefly threatened to deafen Malachi eternally and then it resolved into a major chord of beauty.

  The meditators in the prow leapt to their feet and began chanting, their hands braced forwards in a spellcasting action Malachi was most used to seeing fey warlocks adopt when mastering elementals and other unreliable creatures. Behind the background of action the featureless drift of pale grey seemed at once distant and closer to him than his own breath. Where aether massed against the ship’s field it condensed into a thick, oily liquid and briefly skirled across the surface before evaporating again. He thought it tried to form shapes but he was not sure it wasn’t just his imagination. Where it was sucked into the crystal’s supply fans it became a distinctly treacly kind of white gas before being flung into the facets of the machine. Before him simplified readouts leaped in bands of bright colour.

  He watched a yellow stripe rapidly decrease, “Fundamental potentials dropping,” he said, feeling important and proud of himself as the second demon worker reacted instantly to this and began working hard at various valves on the juddering engine that sat amidships. The contraption jiggled and groaned and the flow of aeth
er increased as the fans whirred, their enriched gemstone blades humming a complementary note to the main crystal song.

  An orange stripe dipped. A blue one peaked. “Energy inflow maximised. Stability above ninety percent.” It was indeed very exciting!

  “Drop the anchor!” screamed the second demon into the mists.

  There was a silent interval of no more than a second and suddenly all was quiet. The streaming power calmed to a trickle of steady, almost flat-lined beam. Malachi’s colours faded in intensity and dropped to steady states. The barge seemed to enter a sudden doldrum and the demon wheelmaster gave a great sigh. The casting pair released their control over whatever they had been holding. There was quiet.

  Malachi turned his attention to the sweeping readouts of his secondary panel—the proximity detector. He had forgotten it until now and was relieved to see no dotted telltales of ghosts or the streaks of dragons marring its empty perfection. For a few moments there was a beautiful silence and the aether furled against their bubble with pearly luminescence like a particularly expensive brand of nail polish or the reforming blankness of a violently shaken Etch-a-Sketch.

  Malachi was lost in admiring this instant of loveliness when his sonaron began to blip and then belch concern at him. A spirit was coalescing out of the aether, moving at high speed inwards to the barge like an arrow building itself sharper and more lethal in every instant of its flight. It paid no attention to the trap or the humming lure of the line.

  “Incoming!” Malachi screamed with sudden alarm and then he heard the big demon laughing with a sound of boulders being rolled around a disco by a very amused Barry White and several of Barry White’s bigger cousins.

  A streak of silver parted the gas, punctured the barge shield with barely a ripple—and the ripple closed over the wet, shaking head of Calliope Jones, her brown hair in rats tails, her vagabond’s clothing coated in a shimmer that evaporated even as she straightened up and flung her rope-riding harness to the deck. The casters got up and one handed her a beer which she cracked open with a strike of one hand and drained half of in one go. The elf woman laughed.

  “Yeeee-haaaa!” Jones cheered and spun around to look at Malachi, still stunned, at his post.

  “Defensive!” called the demon at the helm and they leapt as one to new positions, except Malachi, who was scheduled to remain on monitor duty no matter what happened, mostly for his own safety. He was still gathering his wits over the strange sight of Jones materialising from one universe into another with such ease, trying to figure out if he had to revise his ideas about strandlopers, trying to figure out if he trusted this band of lunatics . . . when a fuzzy blot appeared on his radar, or whatever it was. It looked like radar. He wasn’t fussy about the details. Something had sensed the bait of what Jones called “morphic” energy, promised by the crystal line and secured upon the position they had cast.

  In response the team cracked open some more beers and the atmosphere of party and celebration aboard the Matilda increased. Someone put on some music. The No Shows doing a soft soul number with aching Mode-X bass—it was more like a party than most parties Malachi had been to recently.

  “Too late . . .” Zal’s haunting voice soared across the ship, “for making nice . . . too late for good advice; your smile is on my mind but I’m not the dancing kind . . .”

  The groove deepened and they were all dancing, to the irresistible bass beat and the individual rhythms of their own machines as each of them flowed to a pitch of attunement Malachi recognised and revelled in as he joined them: the high of someone doing what they loved the most, out of time, beyond tick and tock and the rules of ordinary days. With the music they drifted into the eternally brilliant groove of mind, body, and spirit united; like the greatest fuck or the most wonderful food or the moment of a smile unexpected . . . he was dancing himself as he watched the strange blur move towards their trap with the soft sways of a late-night drunk. Deep and away in the aether a bell sounded; clang clang . . . clang clang . . . the warning two-notes of an approaching vessel lost in fog or darkness.

  “Oh man!”or some such phrase, he didn’t quite catch, breathed the elf, “it’s here . . . so close all the time, just like we hoped.”

  “Category Five,” Jones hollered . . . “Whoo-hoo it IS the fucking Temeraire!”

  “Yeah, baby,” endorsed the demon behind Malachi as he used a length of a hawser no human could have lifted to secure the barge wheel into a locked position.

  Then about fifty other points of light, faint as fireflies seen through an evening mist, began to show up on Malachi’s radar. “Hey,” he said. “What’s this . . . Got a lot of,” he searched for the right term and gave up before it was too late, “little ghostettes moving around . . .”

  “Tem comes with a whole flotilla,” the demon rumbled, for the first time sounding anxious. All the others hesitated for a moment, Malachi couldn’t help noticing.

  “Flotilla?”

  “Category Five apparitions are highly developed, complex creations that have accumulated Category Four and Three spectrals into their mythos,” the elf said. “They’re semisentient but the Cats Four and Three probably aren’t yet. Look for Twos and Ones and proto activity around them too. Log it all.” She had the tone of someone trying hard not to be impatient with the new, stupid member of the team who hadn’t done enough homework.

  “Ghost ships,” she added with a sudden turn to him, fixing him with her green stare. “The Lost Fleet.” She sounded nervous too, now. Everyone tensed as she said the words. Malachi watched her swig down some potent-looking elven brew with faint misgiving. “We got a history with the Fleet,” the elf said to him, staring into nothing for a second or two before shaking herself free.

  “They won’t actualise,” Jones yelled with confidence over the No Shows’ effortless segue into thumping dance-floor rock. “Focus on the ship herself! C’mon!”

  There followed a bewildering array of screamed instructions, one to another, focused on the trap and the securing of the giant ship Temeraire, whose rigging Malachi had spied only a few hours before sailing away from him into a threatening dusk of aether. He knew more about it now than he had at the time, which was a mercy then and a bane now: the Temeraire was the name of a ghostly sailing vessel which was part ironclad battleship and part pirate clipper, part spaceship, and part steamboat, and possibly also some kind of submarine akin to the famous Nautilus. She had the features of the first great boat of her kind, the long lines of oars that heaved at Argo’s sides, and the pompous majesty of the Titanic and the awful, grim promise of the dreadnoughts of earlier times, loaded with cannons and suppurating, unstable dynamite. She had unspeakable engines of light. More than that she had a personality, made from all these legends, that was uniquely described by the image and name of the ancient painting by the long-dead artist Turner. She was the glory and the loss of all seagoing vessels since the dawn of time. She was a primal.

  Nobody knew if she had a crew or a captain. They thought not. They wanted to know. It was part of discovering what made ghosts tick and the answer they wanted to find (in order to secure funding for further research, if not because it was the actual truth) was this: ghosts are constructs, a form of aether that happens to brush upon the consciousness of some being or other and picks itself a form. Thereafter it seeks the same from others it encounters, sucking it from them along with their energy and their life and their material structure in a great siphon of meaning-bearing energy—information and power. The Tem was a big, old ghost and to see it forming, as it went through the various stages before actualisation, was to read some of its history. So the Ghost Hunters told Malachi, and who was he to disbelieve them?

  This information would provide the beginnings of a theory of how aether became actualised in all its forms. The implications for the aetheric races were pretty clear—evolutionary theory was headed their way and science was there to punch it home with solid data: data Malachi was instrumental in collecting! Then they would only nee
d to complete the work on the Aetheric Relativity Theories and a science of aether would be well on the way to full integration with the physical sciences of old Earth—a theory of everything! He felt as high as a kite for a moment. Then the barge shuddered.

  The line had been tugged. The morphic energy laid down, promising more information as well as energy to the aether form, had been picked up without hesitation.

  “Tem always grabs like a fuckin’ shark,” muttered the second demon, locking her feet and tail into special grabs placed on the decking at regular intervals. “Hold tight.”

  The barge slewed sideways with a sickening lurch. Malachi felt his harness bite into his humanoid body and then three of the minor spectrals lit up and focused to points. “Three Actual!” he screamed, with the automatic reaction of his drilling at Jones’s hands.

  “Fuck!” hissed Jones and at the same instant the crystal started to whine, the engines roared up several notes, the barge started shaking like it was going to disintegrate, and the energy line flowing down to the trap snapped taut. Malachi didn’t need to be told over the next few seconds that they were being towed . . .

  “How can that happen?” the elf asked, cool as though she was observing some dull play.

  “Tem’s passing energy . . .” Jones guessed. “Always thought it would. Joined to the Fleet. They’re not really separate.”

  “Should we cut the line?” the helmsman asked, nervous, his Barry White turned all to fluttering in an instant.

  “No, stay on it,” Jones insisted with what Malachi well recognised as the zeal of the mad and the genius. Trouble was, he wasn’t sure which one she fell under.

  “Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria . . .” the elf logged calmly. “The Fates . . .”

  Malachi’s head swam—the Fates? Had he heard right?