by Alex Lamb
‘They’re breaking down,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s been too long. They’re out of iron or just too old.’
In any case, he was going to need a new source of covering fire. Ira threw his ship around the back of the moonlet, letting Phote munitions pepper its surface, then powered straight for the next alien device in the ring.
‘Clath, ready weapons,’ said Ira. ‘Enough running. Let’s deliver some pain.’
Ira bore down on the alien satellite, giving the Photes enough time to fall into its targeting field. At the last moment, he veered wildly aside.
The boser lanced out, flickering three times, torching the enemy ships screaming up behind them. The last pursuer banked to avoid destruction.
‘Now, Clath!’ Ira bellowed.
Clath brought their own boser to bear. The enemy shield held. Clath piled on the juice until the shield finally burst in a torrent of radiation.
‘Antimatter reserves at forty per cent,’ Rachel reported. ‘We’re already too drained to fight like this without a suntap link. We can fly or fire, but not both.’
‘I’m getting warnings from the mining bay,’ said Clath. ‘All these manoeuvres have accelerated the crab-ark’s rate of drift.’
Another wave of manic laughter burst out of Ira’s throat. He banked his ship again, slaloming between the satellites while boser beams ripped space on either side of him and his power drained.
‘Enemy is down to twenty-six ships,’ said Clath. ‘Scratch that, twenty-two.’
He ducked and dived until the Photes were so caught up in combating fire from the dying satellites that chasing the Dantes became impossible. Then he bolted for the safest-looking exit vector he could find, fired up stealth mode and executed as punishing a set of evasives as he dared. The ship screamed at him about the poisoned ball sliding around in its gut.
Ira loved every minute of it, though he fully expected each moment to be his last. It was as if someone had just handed him back his heart. This was what he’d been missing. He took them ripping out of the system, heading almost exactly the same way they’d come.
12.5: NADA
Nada watched the Dantes slip out of her grip and screamed. This outcome was intolerable.
‘Maintain pursuit!’ Zilch ordered.
‘I cannot!’ she warned. ‘They have chosen an exit vector that maximises covering fire from the enemy satellites. We must double back out of their firing range to regroup.’
‘That will take too long. Maintain pursuit!’
Nada’s head exploded with pain. She glanced anxiously at where her beloved Superior Zilch lay glued into the wall of the crew-bulb to operate under heavy acceleration. His eyes stared joyfully into the middle distance. His majestic gaze saw nothing but victory.
‘Direct pursuit will destroy so many ships that advantage will slide to the humans,’ Leng pointed out.
‘Be silent,’ Zilch told him. ‘Your opinion was not sought.’
‘Direct …’ Leng wailed. ‘Direct … Direct …’ He choked, unable to get the words out.
It horrified Nada that the weak and over-subtle Leng might have a point. With crawling dread, she couldn’t help noticing how his analysis matched perfectly with the data she was receiving from the fleet, even though she tried hard not to see.
The alien objects attacked again. She watched their ships die one by one and considered disputing Zilch’s orders, but the pain in her skull made that impossible to bear.
‘I obey with joy!’ she shouted.
She relaxed instantly as she messaged their ships to drive on through the thickest weave of enemy fire, regardless of risk. This was surely the right thing to do. It was definitely the simplest.
One of the satellites burst. It didn’t crumple as some of the others had. Nor was their own fire the cause of its demise. The enemy weapons shrugged off g-rays, boser fire and warp-drones with equal indifference. This one burst spontaneously, releasing some terrible and ancient energy that had been bottled up inside it.
A horrendous blast-wave ripped out across the system, tossing Photurian ships like leaves and silencing the alien attack in a moment. When the glare died enough for Nada to see, the satellite was gone, leaving nothing but vacuum in its wake. Not even a debris field remained.
‘Maintain pursuit!’ Zilch ordered, but by then the Dantes had hidden itself.
Nada searched for warp-trails and found the entire system as depleted as the Zone and awash with spatial noise. Warping anywhere was out of the question.
‘This outcome is impossible!’ Zilch bellowed.
‘This outcome was inevitable!’ Leng screeched.
Nada became aware that something ghastly was happening in the mind-temple. She felt another wave of horrible dissonance building, coming directly from her own superior node.
She ported her avatar to Zilch’s cavern and found Leng already there, manipulation lines streaking out from his bead at a furious rate as he updated Zilch’s mind. Zilch was there, too, reversing the changes.
[You do not wish to do this!] Zilch ordered him.
[You do not want me to stop!] Leng retorted.
Nada could only stare. This did not happen. Conflicts of this sort were neither orderly nor joyful. She watched the distortion of the natural order with blank incomprehension.
Both beads raced to Leng’s cavern. Nada followed. Zilch and Leng edited and redacted at a blistering pace. As their tampering with the Protocol rose to a frenzy, a desire to intervene became possible inside her and grew steadily.
[Stop!] she implored them. [This is insanity!]
She darted to her own cavern, leveraging the dissonance to enable her to exercise enough will to alter the wrongness she was witnessing. By the time she returned to Zilch’s cavern, Leng was already winning the obscene battle.
[You crave compliance!] Leng commanded.
[I …] Zilch croaked. [Pursuit …]
[Compliance!]
At last, Leng’s superior rate of edits paid off.
[I crave compliance,] said Zilch, his voice full of wonder at his new-found subservience.
[Leng, this is repugnant,] said Nada.
[I concur,] said Leng. He fled to his own temple and reinforced his passivity. [You are our beloved superior node,] he sang into the space. [Please complete the edits of my identity as I ache to serve you and no longer have sufficient initiative to finish changing myself. No other unit in this fleet has a matching facility for command decisions.]
Nada did as he requested, battening down his sense of inferiority so as to reinforce his function and prevent further upset. Then she went back to Zilch, balancing him, making sure that he retained just enough capacity for action.
When she had the two of them suitably repaired, she ordered them to attend her in the crew-bulb.
‘Something terrible happened here,’ she said. ‘Dissonance infected us. This should not have happened. Zilch, you are not functioning safely in your role.’
‘You are right,’ said Zilch happily, his blunt features wreathed in smiles. ‘I am incompetent. I must be demoted.’
She thought back to the beginnings of the disturbing episode. Munitions Coordinator Nanimo had demonstrated some capacity for higher-order thinking, she recalled, albeit imperfectly.
‘Coordinator Nanimo,’ she said. ‘You are now head of the tactical and harvesting branch. Zilch, take up her prior position.’
‘Understood,’ said Nanimo brightly.
‘I obey with love and wonder!’ said Zilch. ‘I am better suited to simpler and less demanding tasks.’
It was only then that Nada allowed herself the liberty of assessing the dreadful state of her fleet. Leng joined her in the temple-cavern for Collective Technical Function. She had only nineteen ships left, twelve of them damaged, including her own. Pursuit of the Dantes would be difficult; capture impossible.
‘Repair will be time-consuming,’ said Leng.
‘Yes,’ Nada agreed. The situation was agonising. Adherence to the Yunus’s brig
ht and beautiful orders looked more difficult than ever. It made her want to rip her skin off.
‘However, the situation is not without strategic advantage,’ he added.
Nada turned to scrutinise his damaged face. ‘Explain.’
‘We were attacked by weapons we do not have and do not yet understand,’ said Leng. ‘Assault by those weapons has concluded, leaving damaged examples on hand.’
Nada let loose a squawk of surprise as she began to see. Her heart lit up.
‘It is natural and Photurian to adapt to threats,’ he went on. ‘We should co-opt those weapons now that there is an opportunity to do so.’
‘You are correct,’ she said.
The weapons weren’t human, but her ships had been harmed by them nonetheless. That made their incorporation acceptable.
‘Given that a repair delay is inevitable,’ he added, ‘these two activities could be conducted in parallel.’
She understood. Ironically, this was their moment. The dead worlds they’d encountered were an irrelevance. These terrible satellites were far more important. Monet almost certainly lacked this weapon. If they were able to duplicate it, the means to assert primacy and remove the Vile Usurper suddenly lay within their grasp. They could regain their world before he finished poisoning it.
‘We will save the Photurian race,’ she breathed in awe.
‘Perhaps this is the true reason the Yunus sent us here,’ said Leng.
‘Yes!’ Nada cried. Her brow crinkled as she thought through the work that lay ahead. ‘Pursuit must be undetectable,’ she said. ‘The humans will provide us with the route out of Backspace we require. They cannot know that they are helping us or that we are weakened.’
‘Agreed,’ said Leng.
‘Nanimo, ready all undamaged vessels for stealth-pursuit of the Dantes,’ Nada ordered.
‘I comply eagerly!’ her new tactical subnode replied.
‘Leng, you will supervise analysis of the alien remains,’ said Nada.
‘Yes.’
‘And I will lead a new communion to ensure the end of dissonance.’
‘Yes!’ Leng cried. Tears of happiness and adoration filled his eyes.
Even as she said it, she knew that she’d be unable to completely rid them of that curse. They’d seen too much. How they’d be able to make sure their world stayed safe for ever remained hard to see. Yet she did not doubt the Yunus or the Founder Entity. It was impossible for the Yunus to be wrong. Therefore, her actions had purpose. She had been presented with this challenge and would see it through. She would present the Yunus with a homeworld and he would keep his promise. Goodness and peace would cover them all.
13: INVERSION
13.1: WILL
After escaping John’s office, Will fled at random through the Underlayer until at last he found himself in a memory of the Davenport biosphere. It was a cabin he’d built for himself on the coast that looked out over high granite cliffs and a brooding sea. A rug of native blue-green weedwort adorned the floor. Pencil sketches of local wildlife decorated the bare mossboard walls. Remembered rain lashed the windows.
The cabin had turned out to be as oppressive as the scenery was dramatic, and in the end Will hadn’t used it much. He’d shared it briefly with the failed clone of himself that he’d tried to make, just before it died. That was back when his smart-cells automatically prevented his total duplication. The Will of that time had cursed his failure and understood none of his good fortune. The Will of the now paced back and forth, thinking hard and swearing at the walls.
Everything was coming apart. How long could the Underground last without John? Would their shield against Balance even support itself without his continued efforts? Should it last?
John had predated on the infections of the Willworld using the Underground as cover. He’d duped his own people and cheated countless Glitches into running his errands. But while Will disliked John’s methods, he didn’t see much wrong with the goal of collective escape. Where did morality lie when every member of a society shared their origin in a single soul?
But this moment called for action, not ethical reflection. He considered trying to rescue Moneko from the fallout, but how would he achieve that? He couldn’t bring her down here to hide. The Underlayer wouldn’t let her in. And besides, she knew this world far better than he did. If anything, she’d be more likely to rescue him.
Then there was Smiley’s last remark: that he should go back and look at the enigmatic Carnevale di Peste. Will grudgingly conceded that if he wanted to understand what was going on before he acted, then the older Glitch was right. There was too much of the Willworld that he simply hadn’t looked at. He’d agreed to ignore it all. Now, without the cover of an apparently benign organisation to shield him, that option no longer existed. He had to understand to survive. At least some of Smiley’s extraordinary talents needed to become his. Will headed for the cabin’s front door and marched out into the fragments of his own past.
With his stealthware still running, he made his way to the upper layers of soft-space and found himself striding through a portal into a mesh site dedicated to facial alteration. A dozen clones sat around while specialists with gleaming tools teased their features this way and that like living putty. Will left without a second glance, bleakly amused at how blasé he’d become about such mutative oddities. He made his way to the nearest bank of search corridors and from there to the Carnevale.
While a complex sense of guilt gnawed at him, Will turned and walked around the balcony towards a staircase he’d spotted on an earlier outing. He headed down – the direction Moneko had told him never to go.
The stairs opened onto the great fire-lit enclosure of the carnival below, full of brightly striped tents and wild music. Wills of all sorts revelled in garish masks and gowns, goblets of black wine clutched in gloved hands. They shrieked with laughter while lutes and zithers played mashed covers of the ecopop of his childhood. The air smelled powerfully of shit and smoke.
Will walked cautiously across the straw-laden ground between the tents. In layout, the place resembled one of the mesh routes he’d explored on that first day. Pavilions lining the walkway advertised sideshows and services. But his steps faltered as he took in the nature of the offerings.
‘Slit a throat for fifty cents!’ read one.
‘Hit her. She wants it!’ proclaimed another.
Through a third, Will watched a clone handing over favours and receiving a red-hot iron in return, for purposes unclear.
He felt that familiar pressure of disgust in the back of his head. Yet he’d expected horrors. Why else would Smiley have proposed a visit? And why had Moneko been so keen to keep him away? But this couldn’t merely be another parade of eye-watering grotesqueries. Smiley wouldn’t have bothered to direct him back here to see another version of the nightclub. There had to be some deeper knowledge here to find.
He forged onwards, mustering as much detachment as his rebelling mind could manage. On all sides, booths offered nightmares. Here were the beatings, the fights, the rapes, all offered up as services for both victim and perpetrator. But there was more besides.
Rip A Thread, said one sign in childlike multicoloured letters. Feel what it means to kill! Unsuspecting victims guaranteed.
Destroy his hope! offered another.
It was sick. He was sick. He’d seen the evidence. There had been clues from the first day. Tars and Ronno’s human-hunting, for instance. Or those screaming clones in the woods in their red body-suits. They weren’t engaging in theatre, as Moneko had pretended. That had been purposeful mass murder of himself, by himself – organised and deliberate.
But why so much of it? John had said that if something could happen in his subconscious then the Willworld would manifest it. But this didn’t feel like a tiny facet of the world. It was a repeating motif, hiding just out of sight wherever he turned.
He came at last to the centre of the Carnevale. A huge scarlet tent waited for him there, covered in g
ilt and convoluted, theatrical decorations. It resembled a huge prop from some lavish Renaissance theatre production. A pair of immense flaming pyres flanked the entrance. And hanging above the dark doorway was a huge painting of Amy Ritter’s round, grinning face, blonde pigtails and all.
Will realised in astonishment that this was the one face from his past that he hadn’t seen since his rebirth. This was the woman who’d looked out for him when nobody else had – his friend and colleague. She was also the woman the Truists had murdered in front of him while flooding his mind with pleasure through his ruined roboteering interface. They’d forced him to like it while they fried her brain into mush. That was the night he’d almost broken, when the Transcended finally stepped in and offered him another way out.
He hadn’t thought about Amy once the entire time he’d been on this planet, even though her face had plagued him for years. She featured in every one of his war nightmares. It occurred to him then that he’d not had a single bad dream since he’d first woken up. Why ever not?
Will entered the tent. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to find himself back in the prison corridor. This time it was full of drunken Venetian revellers guffawing or fighting or bawling like children. In every identical cell he passed, some version of his nightmare played out.
He passed duplicates of himself strapped into that hated chair, being beaten and abused by High Church interrogators. And there was Will convulsing on the floor while the Truists alternated pleasure and pain inside his skull. And here were the cells where he watched Amy’s death, over and over again. Will blinked hard and steadied himself as his body swayed. He forced himself to think past the panic and the fury, to understand.
Further down the corridor, variant scenarios played out – the terrible life-paths he’d almost chosen. He watched Ira die. He watched Rachel die. He watched himself become a Truist puppet, slaved to their cause and full of lobotomised faith, blissed-out with drool spilling from his open mouth. In later cells, he saw Parisa Voss, the woman who’d betrayed him, trapped in the chair in his place. Will clones tortured her instead with persistent, frenzied, unnecessary brutality. Burning brands, power tools, clippers. She was spared nothing. In some ways, this was worse.
