by Gary Gibson
Piri?
Her ship now made itself known to her as a dimly sensed but familiar presence. Her human brain wasn’t up to imagining the insanely complex web the derelict had spun, subverting the communications systems of an entire solar system to its own end, despite being itself heavily damaged and running at minimal capacity.
I’ll be ready. How long have the Bandati been as far inside the derelict as they are now?
Damn Corso and his protocols.
You could have let me know before now, Piri. This is extremely bad news.
What?
Shit. Corso told me they know we’re communicating, Piri., you and me and the derelict. They did a better job of getting information out of the both of us than I’d realized. All that matters now is getting the hell out of here as soon as possible.
But there was no reply. The facility had once more passed back out of range around the far side of the moon it orbited. There was a last fleeting glimpse of the gas giant: ancient storm systems and vast parallel bands of brown and pale grey. Gone also were the faintly whispering voices of the self-aware entities that lay within the derelict’s data stacks, eternally observing and recording, waiting for the return of the navigator, the one who could guide them . . . waiting for her.
No wonder the nascent Shoal Hegemony had been so terrified of the Magi when they’d arrived in the Milky Way. Any one of the Magi’s vessels could have become a formidable opponent in itself, a force strong enough to destroy the Shoal; and the Magi had employed an entire fleet of such vessels.
Corso had told her the only reason she remained alive was because he’d convinced the Bandati she was still essential. But she’d refused to play along with his plans and now he was gone, so how long before they decided to get rid of her? How many hours or days of life did she have left?
As the sun rose behind the tower, Dakota lay sprawled in the centre of her cell, feeling lonelier than she could ever remember having felt.
A Shoal coreship materialized in luminal space almost fifteen hundred light-years off its scheduled trajectory. It hung in the deep interstellar void on the edge of a nebula whose appearance was reminiscent of smoke bubbling over an undersea vent, with dim orange fire raging somewhere beneath clouds of tenuous gas spreading through an area almost a hundred light-years across.
Trader swam through the dense liquid core of the Shoal star-ship, finding his way unerringly in the absolute blackness with ease. The thousand-strong Shoal crew were just distantly sensed presences. He entered a control area, a metal sphere whose interior was studded with brightly lit instrumentation designed to withstand the crushing pressures of the deep-ocean environment.
The head of superluminal systems management was already there, but he departed without a word, swimming past Trader and out into the watery darkness – as they’d prearranged.
As far as anyone outside of a select elite was aware, Trader wasn’t even on board this particular coreship.
So I am to be a sacrificial beast, sent to the slaughter, Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals mused. On the other hand, blame could extend in more than one direction.
The official explanation for this unscheduled stopover was a glitch in one of the forest of spines that protruded from the surface of the moon-sized craft. These spines projected a field that allowed the craft to slip into superluminal space, and a hundred different subsystems had detected a failure that, if left unattended, could have potentially catastrophic consequences for the vessel.
The reality, of course, was quite different.
Under Trader’s guidance, a tiny craft with the outward appearance of an automated repair drone lifted off from the surface of the coreship’s rocky crust, boosting away from the starship before orienting itself in the direction of the nearby nebula.
Programmed subsystems within the smaller craft came on as the coreship crackled once more with energy, slipping back into superluminal space. Similar energies began to burn around the tetrahedral hull of the repair craft, and it then made the first of a series of incremental jumps that rapidly carried it far into the depths of the nebula.
Beyond the nebula lay a greater void – a sparse field of stars and dust that intervened between two of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. On the nearest edge of this relative abyss lay an open cluster of approximately forty thousand stars that, over time, had been drawn out into a long snaking line of light by the gravitational pull of dense clouds of molecular hydrogen weaving in and out of it. These gas clouds were illuminated from within by stars both dying and being born, giving it the appearance of a burning serpent made of light.
The repair craft dropped back into luminal space, maintaining its relativistic velocity as it did so. Shaped energy fields fore and aft prevented random interstellar particulate matter from ripping the craft apart with the brute force of bullets smashing through wet paper. It felt the faint gravitational tug of a nearby birthing star whose light stained the clouds of hydrogen surrounding it a deep, hellish red.
Onboard comms systems busily transmitted encrypted tach-net signals barely distinguishable from random static. There were replies from deep within the cluster: other robot craft had already been dropped off by other coreships making their own unscheduled repair stops.
Once it had established contact, the repair craft became part of an instantaneous-transmission encrypted ad hoc communications network spread over an area encompassing several hundred light-years.
Several days after it had been jettisoned from the coreship, the repair craft made a final jump to within a few AUs of another star, busy with Emissary communications traffic. And there it waited and watched with the mindless patience of an automaton. Occasional neutrino bursts, accompanied by sporadic dense comms traffic, made it clear that the rest of the cluster was far from unoccupied. A war of violent attrition was being waged throughout the dust – as it had been for long millennia.
Then, finally, the expected signal came.
One after the other, the repair craft cracked open, blowing away their outer shells to reveal heavily armed attack drones – machine-sentient nova missiles of immense destructive power. Each was small enough that its neutrino echo could be discounted as merely background noise – or the product of Shoal patrols somewhere out amongst the systems that delineated the borders of the Long War.
Even if the Emissaries had wondered at the random, minuscule bursts of energy produced by the drones, and even if they’d detected them materializing on the edge of dozens of occupied star systems within the cluster that served as their battleground with the Shoal, Trader felt secure in the knowledge they could never have guessed what he and his cohorts had in mind.
Operating independently while maintaining their covert network, each of the weapons gradually manoeuvred itself closer to the heart of its respective target system, hunting out the bright fire burning at its centre.
Eight
Some time before his encounter with Dakota and his subsequent failure to engage her cooperation, Lucas Corso had woken in a drugged stupor in an identical cell, his mind entangled in a whirl of pain and confusion that obliterated any attempt to think clearly for more than a few moments at a time.
He was entirely aware of undergoing near-unendurable
torment within the past few hours, but his memories of being interrogated and tortured by the Bandati were still, for the moment, vague and indistinct. He opened his bruised eyelids with excessive caution, pained by the morning light beyond the cell’s door-opening. His body had been reduced to a map of half-remembered agonies, so he faced the bright morning sun with due care.
At that point, barely more than a week had passed since the beginning of his incarceration. Some of that time remained a blank, whereas the rest was typified by long days and nights alone within his cell. But he knew there had been at least two previous occasions when he’d woken from his slumber to find himself strapped to a gurney and under interrogation.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, he had begun to remember the previous night’s torments more clearly; and with these memories came despair, and anger, and fear – all laced together with a deep vein of self-pity.
The torture, in particular, had been terrible. His flesh betrayed no visible evidence of damage, but he couldn’t deny the reality either of the pain he’d felt, or of his own screams of agony.
It wasn’t until later that he learned the ambrosia being fed to him was a different concoction than that fed to Dakota, for it numbed him and blurred his thoughts without stealing them away entirely. It seemed the Bandati wanted his mind relatively clear so that he could tell them everything they needed to know about the protocols.
They hadn’t yet realized Dakota was the truly indispensable one.
In the meantime, his inner sense of self-preservation made him keep away from the ambrosia pipe for as long as possible. Like Dakota, he became terrified of falling asleep, since his torturers never came for him when he was conscious. But as the long lonely hours passed and the sun dipped down towards the mountains once more, the need for some kind of sustenance always drove him back to the pipe.
His thoughts slowed as he drank, and he then collapsed to one side, filled with a sense of false bliss.
They had not come for him that particular night, but he didn’t lack for nightmares to bring him awake in the dark, heaving with terror.
He dreamt he was back on the shores of Fire Lake, back on Redstone, watching his friend Sal scream at him in terrible fear. Corso couldn’t make out what he was saying, but Sal kept pointing upwards. Corso knew he didn’t want to see whatever it was Sal was pointing at, because he knew with the inevitable logic of dreams that whatever it was, it would be the worst thing imaginable.
But in the end he looked up, because he had to, and because it was a dream. And overhead, the sun was tearing itself apart in an act of cosmic self-immolation.
Vast loops of burning gas arced across the sky, before falling down on the world of Corso’s birth like a burning scythe.
He woke in panic, but saw only the shadows of his cell, and the lights of distant towers outside.
The next several days had crawled past with interminable slowness.
Corso was not aware of any specific point during this period at which he began talking to himself. At first he rationalized his behaviour; surely someone was listening by means of hidden microphones. To simply discard him here made no kind of rational sense, so he talked as if addressing an unseen audience.
He also tried to attract the attention of passing Bandati, most of them barely visible as mere specks in the distance. He enjoyed no more luck in this venture than Dakota did, so he vented his rage on passing cargo blimps, shouting entreaties and threats until his throat grew sore and his voice hoarse. Then he would crouch silently by the door-opening while the hours dragged past, always aware of the ambrosia pipe close behind him, waiting until the hunger and thirst became unbearable before crawling back into the greater darkness at the rear of his cell to fill his stomach.
He would then slip into a half-vegetative state for the next several hours, content merely to watch the sun crawling across the sky, if he didn’t simply doze off meanwhile.
Corso grew increasingly haggard and wild-eyed, and his crouching on the lip beyond the door-opening and ranting at the silent towers beyond became something of a habit. He would yell out about his willingness to cooperate, all in return for the Freehold’s involvement. His voice ranged from an angry shout to a bare mumble; yet it seemed no reply would ever be forthcoming.
In his more lucid moments, he began to feel as if he were splitting into two distinct individuals: the one who roared at the skies until his voice cracked, and the other, more rational one that recognized he was fast losing an already tenuous grasp on reality.
The growing conviction he would live his remaining years isolated and naked in this tower-cell did nothing to alleviate his fear.
He had awoken one evening to a dim red glare that flickered against the frame of the door-opening, quickly followed by a muffled explosion that echoed briefly between the towers. As the glare faded, Corso crawled over to watch as an airship of a kind he hadn’t seen before opened fire on a train of cargo blimps winding its way through the canyons of the city.
Unlike the blimps, this newcomer appeared to be occupied, for he could just make out tiny winged figures moving around inside the gondola suspended beneath. He watched as some of the blimps were rapidly reduced to ragged and burning ruins, and sent tumbling in flames to the river running far below.
As he continued to watch in amazement, a second airship of similar construction appeared around the side of his own tower, lights constantly blinking in patterns along the rim of the gondola suspended beneath it. This newcomer came under instant attack from the other aircraft, before retaliating with missiles that left pale, hazy trails of exhaust as they flew towards their target. The first airship meanwhile veered away from the blimp train and out of the line of fire, moving back around Corso’s tower until it was out of sight.
It came close enough to his cell for him to see individual Bandati within the gondola frantically working to put out the fire caused by a missile strike. One of the gas bags was aflame, and as a consequence the whole craft was becoming increasingly lopsided. As it lost height rapidly, it looked like it might spill its passengers out into the air at any moment. Corso watched till it slid out of view, and continued to stare out into the darkness, unable to shake the conviction that he’d witnessed something of overwhelming significance.
The final straw had come two days later when Corso woke to find himself once again strapped onto a pallet, and back in the torture chamber. For a while there, he’d had reason to believe the intermittent torture sessions were over; after all, he’d been left undisturbed for several days in a row, now.
Clearly he had been mistaken.
Dakota was there too, and they yelled out a brief exchange of information before seemingly unending pain descended on them both. Once more Corso offered his cooperation, framing each statement carefully in the dim and distant hope his black-eyed tormentors might actually understand a single word he was saying. But there was little evidence they understood his answers any more than he understood their questions.
When he woke back in his cell early the next morning, wild-eyed and bedraggled, his mind fusty from the drugs they’d used to knock him out again, he knew he couldn’t take any more.
So he decided to climb out of the window and escape.
Below his cell there were three platforms visible, all bedecked with haphazard-looking buildings. The closest projected to one side, but at least thirty metres down; so in order to get to it, he’d have to climb sideways around the tower for about ten metres before even starting to work his way downwards.
The second platform was positioned directly below him, but further down and partly hidden beneath the first. If he lost his grip, landing on it shouldn’t be too difficult. Surviving the drop was something else.
Below both of these, Corso was just about able to make out the outside edge of a third platform, visible only because it was significantly larger than the two above it.
From studying other towers nearby, he could discern no regular pattern to the location of these jutting
platforms. Sometimes they appeared to be clumped close together like barnacles, while wide stretches of intervening wall remained entirely bare. He thus came to the conclusion that any individual Bandati could simply construct a platform on the side of a tower wherever he chose to; the reasons for doing so remained opaque – unless these random protrusions were, indeed, nothing more than the sites for dwelling-places.
For long, tense minutes he stared down at the closest platform, slightly to one side, then began testing handholds on the rough grooves that almost horizontally encircled the tower’s circumference in a shallow spiral. All the time, the same thought kept running through his mind: This is insane, suicidal, crazy. Over and over again.
And it was crazy, he realized, even as he leaned out from the tiny ledge, all too aware of just how far he’d plummet if he lost his grip even once. But the dread of remaining in that cell – under the constant threat of unendurable torture and the fear of being trapped there for ever – was far greater.
Then – without thinking any further about it – he pulled himself out into the open air and took a firm grip on one of the thick grooves without allowing himself to look down.
It had not taken long to meet trouble.
The wind had been building up into sharp gusts interspersed with sheets of rain that made the shallow handholds slippery. Yet a determination born of incipient madness made him reach down and grasp each handhold in turn, regardless of the risk. He probed tentatively with his bare feet for one toehold after the other, and the fact that the tower tapered inward slightly as it rose towards its mid-point was some small help.
Within those first few minutes of his spur-of-the-moment descent, Corso was forced to cling on for dear life as a sudden gust nearly yanked him free of the tower wall. He was tiring fast, his muscles aching and his breathing more ragged and desperate. On top of that, the surface of the wall tore at the bare skin of his hands and knees. And although he was no weakling, the terror of climbing unaided down the side of such a high building made him grip each handhold far harder than was strictly necessary, which tired him even more.
