Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  The boats passed and the surface of the canal healed to a breeze-frosted glass. Vess turned away from the window and got ready to work. The servant had returned, and knew his habits; as Vess sat down at his desk he found a steaming flask at his left hand and a rolled-up spiced meat pastry at his right. He would need them both; it was going to be a long time before he could relax, if ever. The only safe assumption was that Sunskimmer was somewhere Outside, and in so many ways that wasn’t safe at all.

  His first action was to put in a call to the Gamer. He expected the answer would come soon. In fact it came sooner, before he had even finished the pastry; he wiped his mouth on his sleeve before he answered.

  ‘Vess?’ The voice was deep, dark and powerfully bassy. As the Gamer had no choice but to use a voice synth, this was obviously intentional. Vess always found it funny. It was probably racist but for his money an organism as spider-like as that should hiss rather than boom. He swallowed his amusement and knotted his arms in front of him in his closest approximation to a polite greeting. ‘Clo Fiffithiss, thanks for calling. How are you?’ His memory threw in a random fact. ‘Did you enjoy the Colony Dinner last night?’

  ‘Probably.’ Fiffithiss writhed in a gesture which could have been a shrug. It made Vess feel slightly queasy. ‘I will never be popular amongst my peers, but my fore-cock and my front legs feel as if they have been plaited and I seem to have some new tattoos. Those are both usually good signs. But you didn’t call to ask that.’ The nest of limbs became still. ‘There is a rumour amongst my underwriting friends that we have lost another major unit. Is that, can that be, true?’

  Vess nodded, and then remembered his manners and made what he hoped was the equivalent gesture. ‘Yes, it is. Sunskimmer.’ The gesture hurt his shoulders.

  ‘Sunskimmer? I see.’ The limbs were still motionless, which if you were prey wasn’t good news at all. It meant an imminent pounce with poison fangs ready. Even the certainty that those fangs were several klicks away couldn’t stop Vess’s body trying to go into fight or flight. He fought down his instinct and waited.

  Eventually the limbs relaxed and spread. Fiffithiss made a sighing noise which, through its artificially amplified voice, vibrated Vess’s seat. ‘Sunskimmer was the last of the legacy Main Battle Units. You do realize that?’

  ‘The disclosed ones, yes. They aren’t all accounted for. There could be a few more.’ Vess shrugged. ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘You really think so? Some backwoods bunch of retards have a legacy MBU up their smelly sleeve?’ The limbs straightened abruptly and spread into a flat fan in front of Fiffithiss. Emphatic negative; a shake of the head to the power ten. ‘I’d bet my unhatched eggs against it. And even if they have, they’re hardly going to render it up on demand for the good of the Inside, are they?’ Fiffithiss repeated the negative gesture and then collapsed into a sort of dejected ball of legs. ‘That was the last one. We have nothing else of note. I’ll tell you something, human, our ability to fight off the Outsiders is done for, if it wasn’t already. And if that’s done for, we’re all done for. You in particular, my friend.’

  Vess nodded slowly. ‘But not only that. This was visible. Everyone Inside and Outside will know about this in hours, if they don’t already.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. And, given that I got my first information from an open public source, I think we can assume that they do already.’

  ‘We can. Our reputation, our political capital, our position as the core of the Spin – well, it puts the difficulties of the insurance companies into perspective, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Loss of prestige on this scale puts everything into perspective. Enemies will be lining up. Friends will become enemies. I don’t envy you. There’ll have to be a Board Meeting, you know.’

  Vess nodded. ‘I’ve known that for a while.’

  ‘Of course. You’ll have my support if you need it.’ Fiffithiss leaned forwards. ‘Are you engaged in whatever passes for a sexual relationship amongst your kind at the moment?’

  Vess laughed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if I was you, I’d go and get some while I still could.’

  The connection broke.

  For a while Vess sat staring at nothing. Then he straightened his back and blinked down a data pipe. Not the public system – that was far too insecure and besides, it was censored to the point of uselessness – but the hack-hardened back room of the city servers. It was the first time he had accessed data for himself in months and he was out of practice, but it was that or delegate to his staff. And none of his staff needed to know about this. For one thing he had never been quite certain whose staff they were.

  It took him a while to find what he wanted. Then information tumbled down his vision. At first the rate control eluded him, then he sent it the wrong way so the figures blurred, and finally he got it right and scrolled back up to the top.

  Then he sat, absorbed.

  He was discovering the woman called Seldyan. There was much to discover. It took him an hour to read the file, but he was happy to invest the time. After all, she had just ended his career and, more than likely, killed him.

  He owed her the time.

  When he had finished he blinked the pipe closed and remained quite still.

  Slavery wasn’t practised on all the Inner planets, but it was still common enough. There were many reasons why someone might become a slave but only a few why they might do so from birth. In Seldyan’s case the short answer was population pressure. Pressure is always against something, and this time it was against money.

  It was close to a rule – and certainly more than a guideline – that populations tended to grow while resources were fixed. That bit especially hard when the boundaries of your world were shrinking by the decade.

  The Inside had no centrally imposed scheme for population control, but it had targets; individual members of the Federation came up with their own ways of meeting them. Seldyan’s parents had lived on a manufacturing world that had happened to be heavily indebted and close to its population ceiling at the same time.

  Selling unwanted children was a perfect solution to both problems. In Seldyan’s case it helped with another too: her parents had been broke and starving. The sale of their second child to the Hive had solved most of that.

  It had also meant that both of them were sterilized; the state could only afford to meet that sort of bill once. Their first child had apparently been still-born; Seldyan was their second and last. The record didn’t show what had happened to them in the end. It didn’t include unimportant people.

  It didn’t include Vess’s parents either. He rarely thought about that, but for some reason he was thinking about it now.

  The signal interrupted him. He sighed and glanced down at the surface of the desk, which fogged briefly and resolved into a short piece of text. The Board Meeting had been brought forward to the following morning and he was to attend. Well, he could have predicted that, and so had Clo Fiffithiss, which wasn’t surprising. Vess wondered if the being had gamed it or merely guessed it. But that wasn’t all; he read the rest of the message. It was about the meeting venue.

  He sat back and blew out his cheeks. That venue was reserved for the sort of Board Meeting that could be denied afterwards.

  All the signs were pointing in the same direction. He began to think he ought to take the Gamer’s advice.

  Spin Inside – Border Region

  THE SHIP LIGHTS flashed to red three times and returned to normal. Some lights flickered, and the main data pipe lit up with a querulous pre-recorded message from an insurance company regretting that their cover had lapsed, now and for ever.

  Seldyan turned the message off.

  The good ship formerly known as Sunskimmer, originally Flamejob, freshly rechristened Suck on This, crossed the border between Inside and Outside at full power and went on accelerating. The last vestiges of hopelessly outclassed pursuit fell away, their courses bending into a set of golden-series arcs that ended back over the Border.
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  They had escaped. Unbelievably, they had escaped. And, even more unbelievably, the five of them had done it in something a kilometre long.

  The controls, such as they were, seemed far too trivial. In her view it should have taken walls of lights, rooms full of consoles and anxious people responding to alarms and, just, stuff.

  Instead there was this plain room with a hazy horizontal disc floating at waist height. The disc was roughly big enough to seat four for a meal and it showed, well, she wasn’t exactly sure what all of it showed. Parts looked obvious – she could see speed and direction, certainly. And part of it was clearly a starscape, although it seemed to contain more than just stars. The starscape flipped up to vertical and expanded if you looked at it, and then you had what she guessed was a view looking forward. She watched it for a while, lost in slowly expanding stars. Then something occurred to her. She weaved experimentally from side to side, looking to see if the disc followed. It didn’t. She grinned to herself, and walked round it. It narrowed to a perspective oval, shrank to a dim line as she passed its edge, and expanded again – but not to the same view.

  At first she didn’t understand. There was a starscape, showing the Inside: eleven planets, four suns and a Border marked out with enough paranoid defensiveness to have earned itself a capital letter, but it was receding, and in the foreground there was a huge something – two rough cones joined back to back.

  Then she realized, and the realization emptied her lungs.

  The huge something was the ship.

  The wonder of it tugged at her gut. She whispered: ‘Oh, shit …’ Then she laughed. Part of the disc looked like comms. She gestured at it. ‘Merish?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘We did it. We actually did it!’ She laughed. ‘We escaped in a stolen spaceship – the biggest ship Inside! How cool is that?’

  ‘Are we over the Border?’

  ‘Yes; just crossed.’ She felt herself trembling. She got ready to say that she hadn’t really believed … but then didn’t. Sometimes, she knew, she had to do the believing for both of them.

  As the ship had crossed the Border the display had flickered. Now it froze for a second, fuzzed to grey and then went blank. Seldyan tutted.

  It flicked back into life. Seldyan stared for a moment. Then she felt herself grinning. ‘Merish? Can you see the main displays, wherever you are?’

  ‘Sure, if I want to. Should I?’

  She paused. ‘Oh yes. Take a look at the size of the prize.’

  ‘Okay. Just a minute. Oh, wow …’

  ‘Yeah.’ She stared at the expanded, far more dramatic image. ‘The whole of the Spin. Eighty-nine lovely juicy planets.’ It wasn’t just that the view was expanded. The definition was better, somehow. It was a bit like looking at a work of art.

  ‘Yeah. Well, eighty-eight, now. Minus the one that got blown up, supposedly.’

  Seldyan fiddled with some controls until she found the zoom. Her point of view accelerated into the image while bloating distorted planets zoomed past her. She waited for the quality to degrade, but it just didn’t. A single star was swelling in the centre of the field; as it expanded she could see individual threads of gas flaring from it. The magnification must have been up in the millions.

  She shook her head in admiration, and took the view back to where it had started. ‘So why has this turned up on the screens?’

  ‘Version control, I guess. This is a pretty old ship, remember. It pre-dates the Border. As a cruise ship it only needed to know the Inside. Now we’re Outside maybe it’s trying to revert to type.’

  ‘Type? Oh …’ Seldyan looked at the starscape. ‘Type being warship?’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly. Not any more, though; they unzipped its brains when it was converted to cruising.’

  ‘Really?’ She shook her head. ‘That sounds cruel. Can we re-zip them?’

  ‘Possibly. Why?’

  ‘I feel sorry for it.’ A spot near the base of her spine itched. She reached behind herself and scratched it gently, feeling the flat bump. ‘Think of it as a kindred soul, okay?’

  ‘Yeah, right. What’s the other reason?’

  Seldyan glared at the comms. ‘Because the Hive is still there. Because a million people aren’t here with us. Because we’re heading into the unknown. Because I want a warship to play with. Okay?’

  ‘Ah. Okay.’ The comms went dead.

  Seldyan frowned at it, and then felt for the itchy spot again. It never quite went away.

  The old ship was quiet. Before they had crossed the Border they had unloaded the passengers and the exec team on to one of the shuttles Sunskimmer towed around, pointed it at the nearest planet and given it a metaphorical slap on the rump. It would get there before they ran out of air and water, although they might be hungry.

  Now it was just the five of them.

  A holo readout wavered in the air. Seldyan peered at it. ‘There’s five different levels of operating system here,’ she said. ‘Don’t they ever clear anything out?’

  Merish pushed back his hair. ‘No. Just cover it over. Didn’t you know? It’s like your DNA. Mostly redundant shit that used to be there to make you a better lizard.’

  ‘Fuck that. I’m already the best lizard you can get.’ She waved a hand. ‘Anyway, the oldest bits of this stuff probably think we still are lizards.’

  ‘The oldest bits of this stuff think it’s a warship, Sel. That’s what you wanted, right?’

  ‘Yes, it was. It still is.’ She shook her head. ‘I still seem to be waiting.’

  ‘So you do. No, hang on. Ah-ha …’

  ‘What?’ Then she saw it. The displays had changed. She looked for a while. ‘Okay,’ she said slowly. ‘I get it. We’re a warship again, right?’

  ‘Yup. What do you think?’

  The planets were the same. Everything else was – she sought for the word – more. What had been a map was now a landscape, a beautifully detailed strategic sculpture of risk and possibility.

  She watched for a long time. Then she pointed. ‘What are the big dots?’ They were a kind of fuzzy cerise, scattered sparsely through the image.

  Merish laughed. ‘They’re the other legacy MBUs.’

  ‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘Why are they highlighted?’

  ‘Because they’re powerful enough for the ship to worry about.’

  She squinted at the display. ‘There are other dots.’

  ‘Well, yes. Those would be other legacy units. Smaller than us but still handy.’

  ‘Right.’ She began counting, and then gave up. ‘There are lots.’

  ‘Yeah. Some big hitters have crossed the Border over the last few thousand years. Try not to worry, Sel. They’re mostly a long way away and some of them may not work any more.’

  ‘Oh good. That makes me feel so much better.’ She hesitated. ‘How long until we get to Oblong?’

  ‘About four hours.’

  ‘You nervous?’

  ‘A little. You?’

  She watched the display for a while without answering. At first it seemed static, but then she realized that it was alive with movement, with dots and streaks of coloured light swarming around and over each other against the backdrop of stars. It reminded her a little of a sparse swarm of shiny insects weaving blindly through space. The idea made her smile. We’re all insects, she thought. All equal.

  Equal was a refreshing concept. She looked up at Merish. ‘Remember where we came from?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll never forget it.’

  ‘Nor will I. So, would anything, anything at all, make you go back?’

  He shook his head quickly.

  ‘Me neither.’ She turned back to the display, and after a moment he did too.

  She had managed not to answer the question.

  Sometimes she chided herself for having taken so long to reach her decision. Being chipped hadn’t been enough; the Supervisor hadn’t been enough; even seeing what had happened to Merish hadn’t quite been enough – and
that was harsh criticism when she replayed it through sleepless hours.

  No. Finally, it had been someone she barely knew.

  Her world had been made of routine – a daily cycle of basic classes, exercise and a little rest, measured out by sleeps. The classes would have been fun if she had been allowed to ask any questions, but questions weren’t allowed. Sometimes she asked them anyway, and received no answer.

  Then, one morning halfway through Seldyan’s fourteenth year, she was woken early by a jarring siren, much louder than the usual waking call. She opened her eyes and immediately screwed them shut again because instead of the usual early-morning glimmer the lights were set to full day brightness. An unfamiliar guard hauled her off her pallet and shoved her out of the sleeping quarters. Around her she saw the same thing happening to everyone.

  In the square it felt colder than usual. Everyone seemed to be here; she looked around for Merish and saw him standing a little way away, his arms wrapped round his body. She beckoned him over.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I think we’re being Sorted.’ His teeth were chattering so much she had to ask him to repeat the last word. She was about to ask him what he meant when there was another siren. There were shouts from the guards and they found themselves being driven out of the square, towards the teaching units.

  Even the floor felt colder than usual, to her bare feet.

  They ended up in an area she hadn’t been in before. It was a tall, broad hall, bigger than anything she had yet known. For as far as she could see the floor was occupied by workstations – plain pedestals topped with a flat desk. There was a screen on each desk, similar to the ones she was used to but bigger.

  Another siren, and an amplified voice: ‘Find a station.’

  Quite a few people seemed to be hesitating; she shrugged, walked to the nearest vacant station and took hold of the edges of the desk as if she was claiming territory.

  She looked around. People had got the idea. Across the floor of the huge hall, the crowd was forming itself into a grid to match the workstation layout.