Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  Cassandra had donned one of the other standard-issue spacesuits from the shuttle’s emergency inventory. Either the angle of the deck had worsened or the gale had intensified, because she was almost unable to walk, leaning like a bent-backed old woman, placing each footstep with aching deliberation. Every now and then, some jagged piece of metallic debris slid across the deck or sliced through the air, narrowly missing her.

  “Careful…” Floyd breathed. He looked around the tight confines of Caliskan’s ship, trying to imagine how they were all going to fit inside, in the unlikely event that the machine could be persuaded to fly.

  “Looks as if the nuclear strikes have eased off a bit,” Auger said, watching proceedings from the other porthole. “Maybe there’s still somebody up there with an ounce of sense.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Caliskan said.

  The observation deck lurched again, its angle becoming even steeper. Floyd felt the horrible beginnings of a slide as Caliskan’s ship lost traction against the metal plating.

  “We’re going over,” he said, a sick feeling churning in his stomach.

  But then suddenly they were still again, and the angle of the deck seemed to level out. He looked at Auger, and then at Caliskan, but saw nothing in their faces to indicate that they understood what was happening, either.

  “Cassandra’s nearly here,” Floyd said. “Lower that ramp again, will you?”

  But then Cassandra slowed her approach. With obvious effort, she stood up straight against the roar of the gale and looked at something to her left. Floyd followed her gaze as far as the restricted angle of the porthole allowed, and saw what had brought her to a halt.

  “You really need to see this,” he said.

  “What?” Auger replied, from the other side of the cabin.

  “Come here and see for yourself.”

  He waited until her face was jammed next to his, looking through the same porthole.

  Beyond the edge of the observation deck, something enormous was rising ponderously into view. It was huge and bulbous and aglow with mysterious lights, arranged in curves and coils and cryptic symbols that suggested the luminous markings of some titanic, tentacled sea monster, rising from the deeps to tower over some hapless little ship. Cassandra stood silhouetted against this moving mountain of light, her arms slightly outspread as if in welcome—or prayer.

  “Caliskan,” Auger said, “I think help’s just arrived.”

  Caliskan looked back over his shoulder, while his hands continued to work the controls. “What did you say?”

  “There’s a significant chunk of Slasher hardware hovering off the side of the tower.”

  Caliskan left the control panel and took Floyd’s place at the porthole.

  “Damn thing must have followed us in,” Floyd said.

  “Cassandra’s walking towards it,” Auger said.

  Caliskan returned to his controls, letting Floyd resume his position next to Auger. “What’s she doing?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Auger replied. “I suppose it’s possible that she might be trying to communicate with—”

  Multiple lines of light speared from a gunport in the swollen belly of the monstrous ship. They ripped through Cassandra like rays of sun through cloud, pinning her in place even as her tiny body danced like a flag. Then the beams of light were gone, and Cassandra was still there, but with ragged holes etched through her. She collapsed to the ground, and then the whipping force of the gale slid her crumpled form towards the edge of the deck. Her limp body tumbled limb over limb like a rag doll, then splayed itself across the remains of the railings, like washing hung out to dry.

  Hard white flashes pocked the horizon.

  The huge ship began to swivel, turning to bring some other part of its structure into line with the observation deck. It was as large as the Hindenberg, Floyd estimated, or an aircraft carrier. Larger, perhaps. A thing like that had no business just hanging in the sky.

  Caliskan’s face was grave. “It looks as if they’ve come for one—or both—of you.”

  “Did you bring them here?” Auger asked.

  “No. I was trying to keep you from them. They must have the fury countermeasures. Or else they want something so badly that they’ll risk anything to get it.”

  The Slasher ship now presented its long side to the tower. Floyd was reminded of a museum piece he had once seen: a deep-sea squid preserved in formaldehyde, with its tentacles coiled into a single corkscrewing blade. The ship had something of the same daggerlike functionality. The lights and symbols on its sides seemed to lie beneath a layer of translucent jelly. The ship was creeping closer, like a bank of luminous fog.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Auger said. “I don’t know anything about their plans that they don’t already know for themselves. And yet if killing us was what they wanted, they could have done that already.”

  “Then perhaps I was wrong,” Caliskan said with sudden urgency. “Perhaps it isn’t you they’re interested in after all. Or Floyd, for that matter.”

  “Then that only leaves one thing,” Floyd said. “If it isn’t us, and it isn’t you, then it must be something we brought with us.”

  “The cargo,” Auger said.

  Caliskan played the controls one last time, then abandoned them with a dismissive sweep. “Put your helmets back on and find somewhere to hide outside on the observation deck.”

  “They’ll find us,” Auger said.

  “They’ll certainly find you aboard this ship. Outside, with the storm and the electrical interference, you have a fighting chance of staying alive until reinforcements arrive.”

  Auger weighed the options. “I think he’s right, Floyd,” she concluded, reluctantly.

  “You don’t have time to cycle through the airlock,” Caliskan said. “I’ll have to blow the outer door as soon as you’re inside it.” He reached beneath his seat and produced a melted thing that looked like Salvador Dali’s idea of an automatic pistol. “Take this,” he said, handing it to Auger. “I’m sure you can work out how to use it.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “I have a spare. I’ll do my best to cover you until you can reach shelter.”

  “Thanks.” Auger slipped the gun into the equipment belt of her spacesuit, then helped Floyd latch his helmet into place. Her voice came through to him again, rendered thin and buzzing by the helmet’s internal microphone. “There must be stairs down to the next level,” she said. “We’ll try to find them.”

  “Go,” Caliskan said. “Now.”

  Floyd was first through the blown door. He hit the metal decking hard, nearly landing on his face. He looked back in time to see Auger emerging, lightning freezing the expression behind her helmet glass.

  “We’d better keep radio silence from now on,” she said. “Stick by me and we can shout if we need to make ourselves heard.”

  The luminous wall of the Slasher ship nudged the observation deck, making it sway. It would have cost that behemoth nothing to plough through the tower, smashing it like a wooden jetty.

  “Auger, have you any idea—”

  “Floyd,” she hissed. “Not now. They’re almost certainly listening in for EM traffic.”

  They walked in a crouched, crablike fashion, using the debris for cover as they scurried from shadow to shadow. When they had reached what appeared to be the upper entry point to a stairwell, Auger touched him on the shoulder and pointed through a mangled heap of girders and sheet metal to the enormous spectacle of the ship. She pressed a finger to the chin of her helmet, signalling him to silence.

  A doorway had opened in the side, forming a drawbridge across the gap between the hovering ship and the edge of the observation deck. Figures were emerging from the bright aperture of the doorway, six of them in total. They walked slowly across the makeshift bridge. They wore suits of their own—seamless blobs of highly reflective armour that shifted constantly as if made of mercury. The squad reached the observation deck and stepped g
ingerly on to the tilted platform. They walked upright, the only sign of hesitation being the deliberate way in which they planted each footstep before proceeding with the next.

  Auger pushed Floyd lower. He shifted his footing until he found one of the embossed metal steps that led below. He didn’t want to think how far down those stairs went—or not, for that matter.

  She touched her helmet against his. Her voice came through the glass: she had turned the radio off. “We have to go lower.”

  “I want to see what those guys want with Caliskan.”

  “Leave it, Floyd. Can’t you see that he didn’t set us up?”

  “Kid: someone set us up, and I’ve had doubts about Caliskan since the moment I saw him.”

  “Well, maybe someone set Caliskan up,” Auger said. “Is that such a leap?”

  The silver-suited men fanned out, picking their way through the labyrinth of traps and pitfalls on the surface of the platform. They were linked together, bound by a network of very thin silver strands extruded from their armour. It formed a shifting cat’s cradle, floating above the deck at head height, connected to each man by the crown of his helmet.

  Caliskan appeared at the entrance to his ship, gun in hand. Using the rim of the door for cover, he took aim at the nearest trio of advancing men and zapped them with the gun. A line of bright light stabbed from the muzzle, connecting with the middle man. His silver armour evaporated in a flash, revealing a stooping human core. Caliskan ducked back, adjusted something on his gun and then fired off another shot, aiming at the unprotected man. The man’s right arm puffed away at the elbow and he bent double in pain. But before Caliskan could fire again, the silver armour of the two uninjured men on either side of him became diffuse, expanding in size until it formed a protective cloak around their comrade.

  Caliskan readied the gun again and delivered another lancing beam to the merged form of the silver figures. But now their armour resisted his attack: swelling in size, shimmering brightly, but not dissipating. Floyd wondered when they were going to retaliate, instead of just lapping it up. He had no sooner thought this than light scythed from the hovering ship, piercing Caliskan’s head.

  He slumped to the ground next to his ship, the gun slipping from his fingers.

  Floyd guessed that answered his doubts about the man.

  The six men had only sustained one injury. While the first party stepped over Caliskan’s body and examined his ship, the other three worked their way along the side of the platform until they reached Cassandra, her body still draped limply over the railings.

  Auger tapped Floyd’s elbow and gestured “down.” Floyd motioned for her to wait, torn between fear and an urgent need to know what the men were interested in. They knew Cassandra was dead. Why did her corpse concern them so much?

  The brightest explosion yet tore the horizon open. Floyd jammed his eyes shut, but still saw everything in negative as the glare tore through the metalwork. A few seconds later, he felt that same freight-train shudder as the entire tower rattled.

  “Getting closer,” Auger said. Her hand was on the melted form of the weapon Caliskan had given her, but she had not yet removed it from her belt.

  He risked another glance across the observation deck. The three figures had convened around Cassandra’s splayed form. Their silver armour had merged and was now pushing from its chest region a thick, splayed tentacle, as wide across as a thigh. With a vile questing motion, the tentacle touched Cassandra in different places, gently, methodically, as if trying to elicit some last twitch of life.

  “What are they looking for?” he asked queasily.

  “I don’t know,” Auger replied.

  The three figures stepped back as one. The silver tentacle suddenly gathered strength, whipping back before plunging into Cassandra’s chest. The ensemble took a further step back, and as they did so they peeled the impaled body from the railings. Then the tentacle made a flicking motion too fast to follow and the speared body flew apart in five or six pieces.

  The bloody tentacle crept back into the linked body. The three men remained merged together for a moment or two longer, and then the armour began to divide, separating them into individual entities once more. They looked around, stepped away from each other and once again began to search the deck.

  “Whatever they’re about, they’re not done yet,” Auger said. She drew the melted gun and pressed it to her chest, ready for use.

  Floyd looked down. She must have already realised that the stairwell offered no escape. It ended less than a dozen steps below them, hanging uselessly above empty space. It was at least thirty metres down to the second-stage observation deck, and the only possible routes to it were via the elevator shaft (assuming that wasn’t severed as well) or the girders forming the legs of the tower itself.

  They weren’t going anywhere.

  Floyd looked back to Caliskan’s ship. Two of the figures had gone aboard while one waited outside. Floyd tapped Auger’s shoulder, alerting her to what was happening just as one of the men emerged with a box. A moment later, the second man brought out the other two boxes of artefacts.

  Floyd glanced back to the other three. They had left Cassandra’s remains where they had fallen: whatever they were looking for, they had obviously not found it on or inside her body.

  He returned his attention to the others, feeling Auger resettling herself, raising the silver gun a little higher. Two men stood outside with the three boxes, while the third had gone back in again.

  “Careful,” he hissed to Auger.

  Then he noticed something new nearby: a metallic smudge in the air, like a thousand twinkling bees, which somehow moved towards the tower against the force of the wind. He flinched, thinking it had to be something to do with the men who had killed Cassandra and Caliskan. But the smudge was approaching them in a series of furtive darts and feints, suggesting that it was just as eager as they were to avoid the attention of the search party. Close to Floyd and Auger now, it settled over them, concealing itself in the same hiding place. The twinkling mass flexed and flowed, forming brief patterns and shapes.

  Floyd touched Auger gently on the shoulder and directed her attention to the dancing form. She flinched as well—she hadn’t seen it until then—and snapped the gun towards it. The smudge pulled away nervously, but didn’t retreat beyond the sanctuary of the stairwell. The gun trembled in Auger’s hand, but she held back from firing. Then, very slowly, she let the barrel fall until it was no longer aimed at the smudge.

  For four or five seconds, nothing happened.

  Then the smudge darted for her, wrapping itself around her helmet. Auger thrashed at the halo of twinkling stars, trying to swat them away. She cried out in terror or pain, and was abruptly silenced. Horrified, Floyd watched the cloud of twinkling things shrink in size as one by one they found a way into her helmet.

  Then Auger was suddenly very still.

  The stairwell shook, loosening rusted bolts free into the endless space below them. Tons of metal went crashing down through rusted spots in the observation deck, tumbling down to dash against the lower limits of the tower. Squeals and groans of agonised metal bellowed through the night.

  Something snapped inside Floyd. Before Auger could react, he pried open the stiff fingers of her hand and removed the gun. The gun seemed eager to oblige, squirming from her grip to his almost as if alive. In his own gloved hand, it felt as fragile as something made from aluminium foil.

  Auger showed no reaction. She was perfectly still now, a constellation of twinkling lights swarming behind the glass of her helmet.

  So they’d got her, after all. Soon, he presumed, they would do the same thing to him. There was no way off this tower, and the three searchers would soon be upon them. If he waited, there might be no time for even a gesture of defiance, however futile it might be.

  Sometimes, a gesture was all you were allowed.

  He pointed the gun at the nearest silver figure and squeezed the teatlike nub that he hoped was its t
rigger.

  The gun quickened in his hand, writhing like an eel and spitting out a blast of something. The figure’s strange armour came apart like ash on the wind. Floyd fired again, blowing a chunk out of the exposed Slasher. He fell to the deck, lost amidst the tangle of broken and buckled metal.

  Now the other five were joining forces. The three near Caliskan’s ship walked close enough to each other for their armour to merge, while the other pair combined their own armour and began to approach the trio. Floyd levelled the gun again, aiming it at the larger group. Again it shifted in his hands, and again the silver armour dissipated, blowing away in twinkling flurries. But this time the damage was much less significant, the combined armour having formed some kind of reinforcing shield.

  Beside him, Auger finally moved. “Give me the gun,” she said.

  She took it from him before waiting for his answer. She made quick adjustments to the settings, then sprang out of their hiding place and fired the gun with inhuman speed and accuracy, squeezing off burst after burst until the barrel was as bright as molten iron. Her shots were only intermittently aimed at the advancing party. She had gone mostly for the ship itself, shooting at its gunports.

  She fell back into shelter. “I’ve bought us a little time. I hope it’s enough.”

  “Is is safe to talk?”

  “For now. My reinforcements are jamming their communications and sensor activities.”

  “Your reinforcements?”

  “This will take a little explaining.”

  Floyd looked down just in time to see a blur of light streak through the spread legs of the tower, between the second and third stages. He followed the motion as best he could, peering through a dark complexity of girderwork, and made out another moving clump of lights shadowing the first. Floyd tracked the sleek, flexing shapes as they arced higher, reaching an apex before hairpinning and diving back towards the base of the tower. They moved so fast that they cleaved rippling lines in the air, suction vortexes that pulled loose debris into them.

  “Please, explain away,” he said.

  “I’ll try. You saw what just happened?”