Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  Vess realized he was swaying. He was trying to work out how to say that he couldn’t help it when he was spared the trouble; something behind him was holding him up. He heard a soft hissing and realized it was the sound of the dirigible, and he wondered how it ever had enough buoyancy to support him on top of its own weight. He managed one word. ‘Good?’

  ‘Yes. You were hacked when you looked into the light. It’s taking effect. Just relax.’

  With the dizziness had come panic but also a sort of euphoria. He wanted to be facetious, to tell them that he didn’t need their help to relax, to tell them something, but his voice wouldn’t work.

  The hissing suddenly seemed very loud, and then very distant.

  He relaxed.

  Tri-Gyre Approach

  EVEN THE THING nearest them was very big. Not as big as something like a planet, obviously, she’d get to that later, but planets were supposed to be big. A hundred kilometres across would have been tiny for a planet, but it was absolutely massive for something like Web City.

  She would get to Web City in a while. Meanwhile, Oblong.

  It wasn’t really oblong, but she could forgive that because she knew it had been, once.

  It had started out as an old container ship which was tumbling helplessly through space in what was then the recently abandoned middle of nowhere – abandoned by what would become the Inside, which in turn was on its way to becoming Inside rather than Outside. It had lost motive power and was barely airtight, really very much more container and rather less ship. It had perfectly suited the people who found it; they had nowhere to go, but they urgently wanted somewhere to be.

  Then some more people joined them, and suddenly the big old hulk had seemed not so big. That was when they had started to snare asteroids.

  One thing led to another. A millennium later the agglomerated mass that was still called Oblong consisted of the remains of about seventy asteroids, eight Light Cruisers, some tankers and a small yacht which had wandered unwittingly into the growing gravity well of the swollen composite body and never escaped. As a planet it would have been a pinprick at best. As an artificial object it had once been by a comfortable margin the biggest in the Spin and for quite a long way outside it.

  But only once. Now its child had overtaken it. Big was still a key word, but ‘bigger’ was the word for what it sat in the middle of. Web City wasn’t one object. It was presently a few thousand, and counting.

  Sooner or later an object like Oblong has to stop growing. It becomes too disordered, too hard to navigate, too hard to wire up and govern and just operate. So it had stopped, but the bits and pieces went on arriving, faster with every year since the place had acquired a sort of social gravity. If you wanted to start a new life you took anything you could get your hands on, made it space-tight, powered it with whatever and headed for Oblong. If and when you got there in one piece you tied yourself to the nearest similar object and began to call the place home.

  A few thousand objects later you had Web City – a tethered, roughly hexagonal close-packed spacescape of stuff full of people and commerce and informal manufacturing and sex and crime, sometimes separately. It was divided into cells a few hundred metres across, each with local shielding and atmosphere services, and each one, subject to any unresolved border disputes, linked to its neighbours by airlocked tube-shaped tunnels.

  The joins between the cells weren’t rigid, so Web City undulated very slowly around Oblong like a sleepy sea creature. Something about it raised Seldyan’s pulse rate, but not as much as the thing behind it.

  It was what they had seen as an eyebrow; apparently the locals called it the Arch. It was half a million kilometres from end to end and it lit up the sky above Web City with a ghostly shimmer of all colours and none. Bands of colour ran slowly along it, flickering through the spectrum; ragged patches effloresced and faded.

  It had been there for less than five years.

  They stared at it for a long time. Eventually Lyste let out a breath. ‘What the fuck is that?’

  Merish shook his head. ‘I’m no wiser than I was before. Debris, very hot, very radioactive. Weird debris, too. Not just radioactive, but full of really bizarre daughter elements.’

  Seldyan found it hard to tear herself away from the screen. She managed. ‘So, your bust-apart planet?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He frowned. ‘Or if it is, it’s not just that. Those daughter elements? They don’t belong. They’re what you get if you do a whole lot of complicated reactions at energy levels that don’t belong in a planet, with exotic elements that definitely don’t belong in a planet.’

  She studied his face for a moment, then looked back to the screen. ‘Merish? Being blown up doesn’t belong in a planet either. I’m withholding judgement, if you don’t mind. Now, you said you wouldn’t want to be within half a million klicks of this thing, and yet here we are. How safe will we be in Web City?’

  Merish shrugged. ‘It depends where and for how long. Oblong’s shielding looks fine.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Let’s take dosimeters with us.’

  Lyste laughed softly. ‘Wonderful. Tell me, Seldyan, at what point will we decide we should have stuck with where we came from?’

  She had to take another couple of breaths, but for a different reason. When she felt able she said, slowly, ‘Never. Is that clear?’

  Apparently it was, because no one said anything more.

  They approached at one notch above dead stop, with every remote-sensing gadget that the old ship could muster quivering at maximum gain. That was lots: a tumbling wave of information that spilled out of the tank like phosphorescent foam. Merish and Kot were crouched over the tank like statues, if statues could look that tense. Lyste was fingering some wooden puzzle that never seemed to leave her hands. It made a faint clicking noise. Seldyan was learning not to find it annoying. Hufsza sat in a personal pool of calmness which hadn’t reached Seldyan; she waited, chewing a nail.

  Then, all at once, Merish and Kot straightened up, and the ship made its listen-to-me chime and said, ‘Contact.’

  On one of the parts of the display that she actually understood, Seldyan watched the velocity tell-tale scroll down to zero and stay there. She turned to Merish.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yes. We brushed the tiniest outpost of the dumbest sensor tendril; probably a long-term impact warning system.’

  ‘Okay.’ She glanced at the tank, which now showed a single faintly bluish filament extending out from Oblong towards them. ‘Will it know what we are?’

  ‘Not yet. It probably thinks we’re a really boring asteroid. We’re incognito, Sel, until we get closer in. Then we’ll send a “hello” signal back, so they don’t have to do any nervous guessing.’

  She nodded, and went on looking. The black hole was invisible but she could just make out the field that kept it apart from the little sun at the other side of the formation. It looked like a blurred ghostly spindle hanging from a star, with three planets spinning round it.

  ‘Beautiful.’ She said it under her breath, and even as her lips closed around the last thread of the whisper, she thought that it was probably the first time in her life she had used the word. She grinned to herself and said it again, louder.

  ‘Beautiful.’

  Merish laughed. ‘Letting it get to you?’

  ‘Damn right. That’s the new world. Hope they’re ready for us.’

  ‘So, definitely not nervous?’

  She shook her head. ‘They might be. I’m not.’

  Merish studied his hands for a moment. Then he smiled at her. ‘Where do you get it from, Seldyan?’

  ‘The same place you did, remember? I just did something different with it.’ Then she bit her lip as his smile faded.

  He nodded once, very slowly. Then he turned away. ‘Better let them know we’re here.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The screens showed the knobbly mass of Oblong in the foreground, now utterly dwarfed by the backdrop of the Tri-G
yre. At this distance the components of Web City had dispersed to the point where you could have dismissed them as space trash, but the three planets were big enough to fill the whole field of view. If you stared at them long enough they started to fill your whole mind as well.

  It was as well to pull back a little. When Seldyan did, she realized that there was a sort of graininess between her and the planets. It was moving, crawling around slowly like specks in some vast experiment. Another shift of focus gave her the answer and her mouth went dry; the specks were ships. Thousands, probably many thousands, of ships.

  She hadn’t realized there were that many ships anywhere. She swallowed. Then she looked around quickly. The others hadn’t noticed.

  She had been watching them. She knew them, of course; she had known them since the Sorting on the Hive and she had come to know them far better through the clandestine sharing in the Mind Stack, but she had never known them under normal conditions. Whatever passed for normal; she suspected their present circumstances weren’t it.

  So she had watched. Merish, his eyes half closed, was still deep in an hours-long silent conversation with the ship AI. Lyste, small and dark, was sitting hunched over her toy in merciful silence.

  Sitting on the other side of the bridge was Hufsza, a coil of muscle that looked barely reined in even at rest. Next to him sat Kot, the least humanoid-looking of all of them. She came from a planet where tar-sand extraction was the main activity. The tar sands contained mutagens; Kot’s people had the fastest-moving DNA in the Spin. She was a full head shorter than the others, but broader even than Hufsza with an upper body almost square in section.

  The silence had lasted a long time. Finally Lyste looked up and said mildly, ‘It’s been ages since you signalled. What’s going on?’

  Seldyan looked at Merish, but to judge by his unfocused eyes he was still deep in trance with the ship AI. He’d been there for most of the day. She sighed and gestured to the screen.

  ‘They look busy. Could be just that.’

  Hufsza uncoiled himself. ‘Maybe this is normal. Whatever; I’d rather wait here than still be in the Hive.’

  Seldyan shot him a grin.

  Then they all jumped. The comms chimed and then spoke.

  ‘Hello MBU, ah, Suck on This. Neat name by the way. This is Web Approach. Sorry you’ve been kept waiting. You’re free to go forward to Oblong Outer Skin, coordinates attached. A Shuttler will meet you there. I’m afraid you’ve got to stop that far out; any further down our gravity well and something as big as you could tow us out into space, if you wanted to.’

  Seldyan looked around the others and got a series of nods, apart from Merish who was still somewhere else. ‘Thanks, Web Approach, we’ll do that. What was the hold-up?’

  There was the tiniest hesitation. ‘No big deal. You’ve got a legacy Main Battle Unit, which we have seen before, but you also have a fully un-zipped battle-ready AI in charge, which we haven’t. We’ve been trying to talk to it, and it’s pretty defensive. Allow us a little caution?’

  ‘You’re allowed. Thanks, Web Approach. See you in a while.’

  Seldyan closed the connection, waited a moment until she was sure it really was closed, and then turned to Merish. ‘Wake up,’ she said. ‘Now, Merish. You’re needed.’

  His eyes opened slowly. ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘We’re on our way. Did anything happen while you were, ah, in there?’

  He raised his eyebrows, then winced and rubbed at his temples. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I guessed. What was it?’

  ‘Outside contact. It started with a quick ping like a friendly hello and then grew, like really fast, until there were data filaments everywhere. They didn’t get anything. The AI just hunkered down and shrugged them off.’

  Seldyan felt her lips tightening. ‘Were we attacked, Merish?’ Behind her Lyste’s toy clicked and fell silent.

  ‘You could call it that, maybe. Or a very invasive probe. Someone wanted to get deep into the AI.’ He shrugged. ‘They didn’t.’

  She nodded. Her mind had already been made up. ‘Okay. Everyone? We got this far. Let’s go the rest of the way – but let’s not assume anything. Agreed?’

  They nodded. Lyste picked up the toy again. Click, click.

  An hour later the ship had threaded its way through the ridiculous traffic with a sort of delicacy that made Seldyan think of a vast throwback lizard treading carefully through a crèche. It had come to a cautious local stop at the end of a long pontoon. They sat on the bridge watching the strangest thing Seldyan had ever seen wandering towards them.

  The body – there was something about it which invited comparison with living things – was a stubby irregular dull grey cylinder which had a peculiar twisted look to it. It seemed to be able to sprout things at will; where the pontoon broadened into a wide track the thing grew a pair of tall, plumply tyred wheels that it hung between, swinging slightly. When the pontoon narrowed the wheels – disappeared? were reabsorbed? went, anyway – and the thing climbed along on six articulated limbs.

  Kot got there first. ‘What the fuck is that?’

  Merish had been studying the comms. Now he looked up, grinning. ‘I think it’s a Shuttler,’ he said. ‘Looks like a smoother ride than the shuttles we’re used to.’

  He was right. When it was close to them the Shuttler reared up, extended its limbs and took the tiny proportion of Suck on This that it could actually reach in a careful embrace that made scratching noises through the hull. Then it lowered its body towards them. There was a dull clang and the sound of an airlock cycling.

  The Shuttler was less interesting on the inside. It was too big for them; ten rows of four seats split by a central aisle reminded Seldyan of old-style planetary airliners. She had never been on one, but she had seen pictures. But Merish was right – it was much smoother than the shuttles they were used to. Motion was imperceptible, and she couldn’t tell when the thing switched between legs and wheels. She would have preferred something noisier; it would have given her something to distract her on her way into the unknown.

  Better to stare it down. She glared at the forward viewing screens.

  As well as being smooth the Shuttler was faster than it looked. Oblong was growing quickly, so that its rough bulk soon blotted out the planets directly behind it. At a distance it looked black but as they closed on it she realized that its surface was mottled and irregular, like a chemical experiment that had fizzed into a block of iridescent grey bubbles and then set. Closer still and she understood why Shuttlers had legs as well as wheels. She could see several of them moving over the surface, and nothing else could have looked so at home.

  The pontoon met the surface at a right angle. The Shuttler went round the corner without slackening speed, fingering its way quickly over the bumps and chasms and lowering itself on to a flattish protrusion. There was an industrial-sounding clunk and another airlock sighed.

  Lyste looked up from her toy, which to Seldyan’s relief had been quiet since they had been in the Shuttler. ‘Welcome to the new world,’ she said.

  Seldyan heard the brittleness in her voice. Apprehensiveness. It mirrored her own; she looked at the others and found their own versions of the same thing in their faces and their body language. I brought them here, she thought. This bit’s up to me.

  She smiled widely. ‘You know what, I bet we’re the most interesting thing that’s happening to them today. I’m pretty sure we’re the most dangerous as well. People like us are the reason this place exists. We’re the future. Shall we go out and grab some of it?’

  She marched down the aisle and lowered herself into the airlock. Just before she let her head drop below floor level she looked up again; they were all watching her.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘We’re here because we don’t want to have to do shit we don’t like. Yes? So if you’re worried, share it with me, or share it with the others. Let’s stay dangerous.’

  She dropped into the airlock and got r
eady to follow the instructions that floated fuzzily in front of her. Behind her she heard a brief buzz of conversation and then a click. She smiled to herself. In her own way Lyste was coping. She hoped the others would too.

  The lock finished its cycle. She clenched her hands and walked out into the new world.

  Oblong Embarkation

  THE NEW WORLD was certainly new. It was getting newer almost as Seldyan watched. Listened, too – she had been sent on enough non-consensual construction projects to recognize what they sounded like.

  Embarkation was one of the oldest parts of Oblong. It had been formed by joining together the blocky hulls of six of the founding Light Cruisers to make a low pillared space about two hundred metres on a side. These days that was blatantly not big enough. Admittedly the five of them were used to living at high densities – the Hive world was nothing if not full – but those had been orderly high densities. This was a shouting, jostling, sweat-smelling free-for-all. Seldyan felt her palms itching, and clenched her fingers.

  She realized she had missed something. She turned to the off-white-robed concierge who had greeted them from the Shuttler, and leaned in towards her a little.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  The bony face smiled. ‘I said, fifty million passengers came through here last year. That’s up fifty per cent from the year before and it’ll be up another fifty per cent next year.’

  That seemed to be it. Seldyan nodded, and tried not to get caught studying the woman’s face. She had introduced herself as Shahatiel – she emphasized the second syllable with a sound almost like a bark – and she was extremely skinny. She also had the kind of bone structure that showed it. Her age was indeterminate. Her scalp was shiny-bald and her skin was an odd slightly greyish brown which seemed natural; the only obvious sign of cosmetics was a bold fingertip-sized spot of green just above her left eye. Seldyan overcame her caution and pointed at it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  The smile broadened into a grin. ‘That, my new friends, is what freedom of religion looks like. The newest star! Welcome to democracy.’