Centauri Device

by John H. Harrison

  'Oh, Hell' Poor old Tiny. 'All right then.' The electronic lock hummed and chimed, the hatch slid open. Truck dropped Fix's chopper, and the sound clattered back along the sub-frame of the boat like a laugh. 'I'll get you, you bastard,' he said, holding out his hands to demonstrate their emptiness.

  Tiny had got himself backed up into a comer, his hands well above his head, small beads of sweat on his bald patch. A shallow laceration with bruised edges ran down his left cheek.

  He looked accusingly at Truck and complained, 'I don't think much of your friends.' Track moved a bit further into the cabin, to discover Colonel Gadaffi ben Barka lounging against the approach-radar board with an arid smile on his thin lips.

  'Don't think that'll help you when the time comes,' Truck told nun, nodding at the military issue Chambers gun that had lately blown such a large hole in Fix the bos'n's insides. 'I owe you for all this, ben Barka. Nobody threatens me on my own boat'

  The Arab shrugged elegantly. He had crossed one leg over the other, his whole body unconsciously mimicking the feral repose of his own death commandos. His uniform was as neat as a pin. But he looked tired, and the desert, never very far away, was etching at his brain.

  'You shot my bos'n,' Truck insisted.

  Ben Barka's soft brown eyes hooded themselves for a heartbeat. He seemed to be studying his pistol. 'You can't think I'm unaware of that, Captain. Neither are you aware of how much is at stake. You did plenty of killing last night.' Another oasis choked to death in the long, empty night. 'He attacked me after fair warning. He was very brave. Do you think I did it lightly? I'm sorry if you do.'

  John Truck had found Fix the dwarf washed up in the port hinterland of Gloam — disoriented and illiterate among the hustlers and prostitutes, having no real understanding of the twilight subculture that had swallowed him after his escape from the rural manors and squirearchies of Chrome. The two-thousand light-year brawl that had followed was Truck's responsibility; so was its end, down there under the arc lamps of Avernus. Like Annie Truck, Fix was a dependent.

  'Are you apologizing to me? I didn't own him. Apologize to him!'

  'Come, Captain — '

  'I'm going to kick you to death some day, you bastard.'

  The desert shifted, rustled, extended its perimeters: it had made vast inroads since the meeting in the ganger's shed; from being a means, a sympathetic terrain for imaginary revenges, it had mutated into an end. The olive groves had withered, the aqueducts fallen to rubble. Cairo and Alexandria was bleached shells in the ancient sunlight. High up in mountains ben Barka had never seen, exfoliation was cracking rock enough to make a Galactic sand-sea; sand was already spilling from his skull to submerge everything; in peace, he would slip along the wadies of the mind, stalking Reality's pitiful little punitive expeditions —

  He made a small gesture with the pistol. 'If you'll take your place at the controls, Captain Truck. Your vessel has been commandeered.' His teeth were like bones exposed by the dry winds. 'Mr Skeffern, you'll note, is still alive and well.'

  'Get your backside off the switchgear if you want the boat to go anywhere, ben Barka.'

  The command-cabin of a Transit class hauler is laid out with dual controls and duplicated navigational aids; two acceleration chairs provide access to these, and a third can be brought up on runners from the rear of the bridge and locked abreast of the other two. It is a habit of transport pilots to leave this one permanently in place: ben Barka sat himself down in it and indicated that Truck and Tiny should strap-in either side of him. He put his pistol close to Tiny's ear.

  'I think you were going my way anyway, Captain. We might as well travel together.'

  'Oh yes?' Truck powered up his controls. 'Where's that?'

  Ben Barka sighed and shook his head. 'Captain, Captain. The pistol's pointing in the wrong direction for obliquity.' He smiled down at Tiny, who hunched his shoulders like a nomad in a sandstorm. 'Grishkin, that impatient priest, had it from normally reliable sources that today had been chosen for an Arab attempt on the IWG blockade of Centauri VII (there is in fact an action in progress there: it's significant enough to keep IWG fully occupied, but hardly planned to be an actual military success).

  'He realized almost immediately that he could never wish for a better diversion: with the result that you, Captain, received an en clair message from him early this morning. (It was couched, I felt, in rather fulsome tones even for a priest.) He expects your landing to go quite unobserved by either myself or the good General Gaw. He may even be down there already, waiting for you — one of our ships reported a boat in Opener livery sneaking a shade ineptly past the perimeters of the engagement some two hours ago.

  'It was me who leaked the information to his pathetic intelligence machine: they'd never have got it without help, I don't wonder he didn't bother to code the message. Half his people are working for me or the General anyway. There you have it: we're going to the same place, Captain, We always were.'

  Truck engaged a bank of rocker switches below the engine-room repeaters and warmed up the Powerslide pile for take-off, wondering just how much allowance ben Barka had made for Grishkin's fanaticism and the General's not inconsiderable cunning.

  'Be it on your own head, Colonel.'

  My Ella Speed rumbled and shook. The cargo ramp pulled itself in slowly, tipping Fix the bos'n into the hold like a bale of fresh animal skins. Truck got a go-ahead from the Port Authority, giving his destination as Sad al Bari and his cargo as 'mining machinery.' Two massive, caterpillar-tracked LTOA vehicles moved in across the dock and stood the boat gently on her tail. He checked that Tiny's controls were shut down, worked the rocket engines through the pre-lift part of their power-curve a couple of times.

  'I can go any tune you want, Colonel.'

  'Do it.'

  My Ella Speed, well into the spirit of the thing, wiggled along her length like a bitch in heat, and threw herself upward.

  While the colossal cruisers of UASR(N) have so-called 'autonomic gravity' environments which protect their crews against the devastating G effects of a battle maneuver, third-hand Transit class haulers do not. They are safe from inertia only during dyne-field shifts; and My Ella Speed, lustily fighting the attractions of Avernus, made it from relative rest to escape speed in a very short time indeed.

  The multi-G blast is a concomitant of the spacer's way of life: Truck and Tiny, who had been lifting like that since birth — and before — took it stoically, with G standing on their faces and stumping all over their ribs.

  But ben Barka was used to a more generous kind of travel. Perhaps he simply forgot.

  Certainly, it was too late when he remembered.

  He dropped his Chambers gun when they were about a mile up. He tried comically to move his arms from his sides, sweat breaking out all over his face. His eyes rolled and protruded as Truck poured it relentlessly on. He gasped for breath; his skull snapped back against the head-restraint: when he tried to shift it, Truck — feeling somewhat wilted himself — made a vast effort, steered his hand the full two inches from armrest to controls, and let it fall against the emergency thrust button.

  My Ella Speed howled and quaked. Ben Barka made a choked, surprised sort of sound. His eyes opened wide; suddenly, a dark thin trickle of blood issued sluggishly from his left nostril. His tongue poked out from under his mustache like a misshapen fig. He passed out.

  Captain John Truck, a haulage man from way back, who, in the dark womb of Annie Truck, had come down the infamous Carling Line in an unguided drone that was little more than a high-G tin can with refrigeration, held it until Tiny Skeffern was unconscious too, just to make sure. Then he settled into a parking orbit, said, 'Never mess with a pro on his own ground, Colonel,' and began to run checks on Ella's misused hull. He'd been in tougher lifts.

  Egerton's Port got on to him by radio and wanted to know just what the boy-wonder Rocket Ace in the clapped-out Transit thought he was up to.

  He grinned. 'Sorry about that,' he told them. 'Wron
g switch.' Horse laughs all around.

  A few minutes later, Tiny woke up and unstrapped himself. 'That was a bit bloody hairy,'

  he complained. He saw ben Barka. 'Oh-ho!' he said. 'Can I shoot him?' he asked, getting hold of the pistol, which had fallen down the side of his seat, and waving it carefully around.

  'No, I'm going to put him out of the rear lock without a suit. It's something I just thought of,' said Truck proudly. 'He'll look good, going down on the night side. It's quite artistic, really.'

  Modesty, modesty.

  Tiny examined ben Barka's congested face. 'You hit me,' he said coldly. He reached out and wiped the barrel of the Chambers gun down the Arab's cheek. 'Go on, Truck,' he said, 'let me shoot him, eh?' He grinned ingratiatingly.

  Truck took the gun off him, got his hands under the Colonel's armpits, and with difficulty hauled him aft, bruising the limp body in frequent collisions with bulkheads and pieces of machinery. 'Sorry, ben Barka.' Ben Barka, looking a bit of a mess and still out, said nothing.

  Truck sniggered. 'You're going to enjoy this, ben Barka.' And he described to the Colonel just how it might feel out there in the graveyard orbit, down along that firework trajectory. But when he arrived in the cargo bay he forgot all about that for a while; and by the time he had finished composing Fix's poor torn corpse, he'd decided to put ben Barka in a suit after all.' It would give him time to wake up and take an interest in the long drop.

  He went forward, sealed the bulkheads, and evacuated the hold with no prayers. Out went Fix and ben Barka, in a white storm of Opener leaflets. Ben Barka's suit began to broadcast immediately and indiscriminately — an all-band distress call. 'Damn,' said Truck. 'Isn't that just typical?'

  Egerton's Port came through again. 'Are you going to hang around all day, Intestinal Revelation?' said the duty officer. 'We need that slot.' Then, suspiciously: 'Is there something wrong up there? I keep getting something that sounds like an SOS,'

  'It's a fault, actually,' said Truck.

  'It doesn't sound like a fault to me.' There was a pause. 'I've got someone here from the Port Authority. They want to know what an Opener vessel is doing hauling ironmongery to Sad al Bari — '

  'Oops,' said Truck.

  ' — not to mention going off the field like half a frigate squadron. Can you assist?'

  Truck switched the communications gear off.

  'Tiny,' he said, 'start the Dynaflows. We're leaving.'

  He fired up the navigational systems and set Ella Speed hunting like a three-dimensional compass needle until her blunt prow pointed at Alpha Centauri (or a spot where her sluggish internal processes remembered it to be). Tiny got the converters operating and came back up to the bridge. The exterior screens shimmered eerily, already probing out into the mysterious reaches of space.

  'Right,' said Truck. He cut in the Dynaflows, pushed the throttles about, and the old Ella howled down the Galactic freeway toward Centauri, on overdrive. 'It's time we started getting some of our own back, Tiny.'

  There wasn't much hope of getting their own back on anything they found orbiting Centauri VII. Six or seven hundred miles off the wan gray face of that murdered planet, Ella Speed pushed her bows into the edge of the immense envelope of debris. Like the remains of huge animals in some valley too deep for dawn to reach, forgotten in a mist of frozen air, dead ships lay in futile ambush for Eternity. It was a dark, still zone, full of dead men drifting in slow curves among fused machinery, rat-trapped with the dull red embers of melted atomic piles, whole engine rooms, like lumps of cooling slag, decaying in sullen aureoles of radio-static.

  Deeper in, parts of the graveyard were still fun of a white, fitful glare, a deceptive and piscine motion, as a few bolt-shaped UASR(N) cruisers slugged it grimly out with IWG.

  They were outnumbered and unformated, but they seemed to be fully occupying the Fleet — no vacuum commandos were out, communications silence were being observed. Truck tried frequency after frequency, found interference breaking like waves on a beach strewn with smashed and rusting armor at the candle-end of time. He picked up a few desultory syllables of a common Morphian dialect (enough at least to tell him who had done the dying out there), a moan, gunfire scissoring open a hull, distant, decaying, obsessive.

  Ella Speed nosed on through a dream of violence. None of the combatants spotted her.

  Behind her, quite unaware of each other, the cruisers Solomon and Nasser skulked the graveyard like two pike after the same minnow. Truck never suspected he might be followed: perhaps he was too occupied by the young gunner from Parrot who had attached himself to the boat, tumbling lazily about her bow in some gravitational eddy, beckoning Truck and Tiny on with one stiff arm as if inviting them out there to share his cold peace. His intestines, covered in a hoarfrost of condensation, were spilling infinitely slowly from his ruptured pressure suit, but his insignia were polished and bright.

  Truck couldn't tell which side he was on.

  Centauri captured them, filled the screens like an accusation.

  Only one planet was ever killed —

  At the climax, the absolute fervid crux of MIEV bombardment, when defense is a rag of memory in a hot wind and the sky shakes with ionization, much of the surface water is stripped off the crust as 'live' or superheated steam. The target vanishes under a cloudbelt several miles deep, there is a corresponding radical increase in its albedo — a last despairing heliograph of pain —

  At five o'clock in the afternoon, July fourth 2180 AD, the shroud covered Centauri and, as a good shroud should, spared the living the ultimate patient indictment of the dead. The General Gaws of the day turned from their bomb-room repeaters, satisfied, shrugging and yawning — perhaps even a little bored — and certainly wondering how they might turn one half of Earth into the same sort of mess without actually damaging the other beyond habitable minimums laid down by their biologists. Ever since that merciful occlusion, Centauri had been a rubbish heap smelling of wet ashes.

  By the time Dr Grishkin, under the auspices of God and a well-known Galactic encyclopedia, came to sink his first bore in search of the bunkers, a lukewarm rain had been falling evenly over the new landscape for almost two hundred years. He found a planetary fen drained by vast slow rivers: shallow, stagnant meres, inconceivable acreages of mud-flat and salting — and every cubic foot of water filled with corrupt organic matter caught at some point between decay and dissolution, cloudy, brackish with old death. None of the continents resembled anything he found on the pre-Genocide maps: finally, it was beneath the human and animal silts of the estuaries and deltaic fans that he discovered water percolating through the slaughtered regolith in small secret streams, to the abandoned redoubts miles beneath.

  There, he dug.

  If he was a little mad to begin with, Centauri helped him further along the way. Nothing was alive there, unless you count the echoes of water. Water: and the wind, mumbling thick-lipped between the blasted, mysterious columns of masonry that poked up through the silt like fingers searching the air for the source of their long pain. In continual twilight, corpse-lights shone. The sky was green and gray, luminous with radio-decay products. Wind walking in a rubbish heap; dead lights and water; something was haunting Centauri, but it wasn't the Centaurans —

  They were underfoot, even their due corruption suspended for some other time.

  John Truck brought his boat home along a line of lavender flame, aiming for Grishkin's fifteen-figure reference. She settled steaming and contracting on a mudbank. Around her stretched the flat, unmarked flood-plain of some vast estuary off to the east. Nothing moved, nothing cried out or ran away. For a moment, the rain had stopped, but there was nothing out here to notice.

  After a few minutes, Truck and Tiny emerged from the cargo bay done up in white carbon-fibre helmets, lead-glass goggles, and respirators like squat black snouts. Dark, shiny jumper-suits covered their bodies, which were full of anti-radiation drugs (prescribed) and amphetamine (unprescribed) from Ella's overstocked medical
chest. Truck's Opener cloak flapped drearily in the wind. They stood around in silence, shuffling their feet and gawping at the inhospitable landscape; pointed in different directions and waved their arms at one another; then set off along the indistinct banks of a clogged watercourse.

  Despite the amphetamine, Truck became quickly depressed — at first disturbed, then obsessed by the puzzling, fibrous consistency of the mud. When a tangle of thin bones, eroded and luminescent white, caught at his feet, he measured his length in the stuff.

  Thrashing about with revulsion, he kicked Tiny — who was irritably attempting to help — in the chest. 'Do it yourself, then.' He wiped himself off. Down there were nests of papery, corroded steel, lumps of stone, objects. He'd come up holding the broken handle of some piece of domestic apparatus, bright blue. He shuddered and threw it away. Tiny wasn't speaking to him.

  It was a miserable excursion. Panting and withdrawn, they struggled upstream, looking for a sign: which they eventually found in the shape of Omega Shaft. By then, Truck was convinced by some half-dream that everything was still going on down there in the silt. He grew fearful that some initiation lay before him, some induction — inevitable by right of birth — into the strange decomposed half-life of his mother's race, an existence carried on in terms he couldn't quite imagine, in smashed houses among bits and travesties of human paraphernalia accumulated without logic after their drift down the watercourse.

  Hidden in a freak fold of land, the Omega Shaft complex of buildings — from which Dr Grishkin had begun the excavation which was to lead to the discovery of the Centauri Device — was a sprawl of massive pre-cast concrete sheds, dull in color and filmed with an unpleasant moisture. They served to house the generators, air-exchangers, and lift motors of the shaft, a collection of machinery that in operation caused the ground to vibrate palpably. It was surrounded by a chainlink fence into which was set a military checkpoint — a later addition of General Alice Gaw's.

  Subsonics from the deeper levels of the bore itself trembled in Truck's bones as he stood with Tiny just beyond the reach of the arc-lights that surrounded the compound, sweating in the heat from the nearest extractor outlet. A small, stubby ship was parked on its tail in the gloom a hundred yards from the checkpoint: hull scorched and deformed by a misjudged high speed re-entry, venturis sunk fifteen feet into the ooze, it wouldn't be leaving that place for some time. It was empty, and a recent, hasty paint job hadn't obscured its Opener livery. It had the air of something abandoned by an owner whose mind was occupied elsewhere.