by Alex Lamb
‘You still with me?’ he checked.
‘Ow,’ she replied.
Mark carried her to the airlock over his shoulders in a staggering run. He dumped her inside and cycled the air. As soon as he had pressure, he removed her helmet. Her skin had taken on a sallow, waxy look that scared him. Her breath rattled.
‘I’m still married and this isn’t going anywhere,’ he said, ‘but this might help.’
Then he kissed her back, hopefully transferring a fresh payload of Transcended virus to her skin.
‘Bastard,’ she whispered as she lay gasping on the floor. ‘Trust you to pick a moment when I can’t enjoy it.’ She smiled, though.
Mark grinned back weakly and wished there was more he could do. He picked her up again and carried her out into the silent town beyond. Almost as soon as he had her propped against the settlement’s interior wall, he started receiving suit signals in his sensorium. Rachel and Clath had apparently made it down and their pod had just rolled up next to his own.
‘There’s an airlock half a klick from you,’ he told them. ‘Just follow the wall left. I’m inside. Don’t worry if it looks weird. It’s safe.’
The first clue he had of Ann’s approach was the sight of her striding across the scarlet meadow with her suit off. He could tell just by looking at her that she had her powers back. He grinned and waved as she approached.
She responded with a burst of superhuman speed straight at him before firing a very rapid biotendril into his neck. Mark gurgled in surprise. She retracted the tendril into her finger and stood looking down at his astonished face.
‘Sorry,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘Had to check you weren’t turned.’ She glanced back the way she’d come. ‘It’s okay, Ira. You can take off your suit. We’re clear.’
Mark rubbed the puncture wound on his neck.
‘They fixed you, I presume,’ she said.
Mark nodded. ‘Nice to see you, too. How are you doing?’
Her smile became a little sad. ‘Back to normal,’ she said.
The nearby airlock door cycled again and Clath and Rachel staggered in, glancing warily about. Clath was limping and looked utterly miserable. She regarded the half-dead human statues with worried disgust.
Rachel ran up and hugged him tight. Mark held her close.
‘So glad you made it,’ she said. She looked him in the eye. ‘Did the Transcended give you your brain back?’
Mark nodded. ‘So far as I know. No smart-cells, either.’
She grinned. ‘You have no idea how happy that makes me.’
‘What is this place?’ said Clath as she joined them. ‘What are these … things?’ She gestured nervously at the closest bliss-filled face.
‘Photes,’ said Mark. ‘Or they were. This is what the Transcended were trying to show us. This is what happens when they run out of orders. They just stop and melt. This has been happening all across Phote space behind our backs.’
Ira stared at him. ‘So the whole Backspace run …’
‘Wasn’t necessary,’ said Mark. ‘If we’d made the right reckless choices. It’s a real Wizard of Oz moment. Judj is going to hate it. Wait, where is he?’
Nobody spoke. Clath buried her face in her hands. Ann reached out and wrapped her arms around the scientist in the least Ann-like gesture Mark had ever seen.
‘He didn’t come with us,’ said Rachel. ‘No room. He volunteered.’
Mark struggled for something to say. His heart sank.
‘I’m glad we’re all in one piece,’ said Ira stiffly. ‘Do we think the whole planet’s like this? Did we win already?’
‘I can’t imagine so,’ said Mark, struggling for poise. ‘Even if the whole colony is rotting. Photes brought us here, and unless we took out every single one of them when the ark blew, the rest are going to come looking for us.’
‘Then we still have some surviving to do,’ said Ira. ‘We probably only have hours before they work out where we landed.’
‘No rest for the wicked,’ said Ann sourly. She reluctantly disengaged from Clath and took a sample from one of the living statues. ‘This looks like the pattern we encountered on those rotten worlds, just in the very early stages.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mark. ‘Those worlds weren’t attacked after the fact. They shut themselves down. That’s why you couldn’t find a weapon. That’s also why the air is safe in here – all the local spores have given up on finding new hosts.’
‘That’s great news,’ said Ira, ‘but does it help us get out?’
‘We’re not leaving,’ said Mark. ‘We’re fighting back. I’m going to take control of the planet from here, and everything in orbit, too.’
Ann raised an eyebrow. ‘You are? How?’
‘I have a Transcended weapon that flips the control switch for Phote hierarchies. You can see that this world has already started to slide. I’m going to finish the job. But I need network access – somewhere with a live connection to their mind-temple. Unless we can make a soft-link to the Photes who’re still chasing us, we’re screwed. The problem is, everything here is running on minimal life-support mode.’
‘I can help with that,’ said Ira. He peered at the tofu-encrusted towers. ‘I know how these towns work. I was responsible for the establishment of most of them. You’ve no idea how many standards you have to enforce for extrasolar settlements to make sure your contractors don’t cheap out and kill the occupants.’
He pointed towards a low-slung building in the middle of the complex, half-vanished under a drift of snow-clay.
‘These towns were required by law to have emergency comms-hubs. They’re always centrally located so people can find them. I’m pretty sure that’s one of them.’
‘Then let’s go,’ said Mark.
They made their way through the ghost town, past the glassy eyes of countless Photes to the structure Ira had identified. Ann carried Palla with indifferent ease.
The door of the comms-bunker had been left open. Inside lay a dark, windowless chamber where the pale floor-matrix had sent up tentacles and glued itself into the data ports in the wall. There was a row of old-fashioned visors clipped into desk-sockets and half a dozen touchboard surround-stations. The IPSO-era wall-screens were all a dead matte black. A single LED lamp cast a blue aquatic glow across the space.
‘Cosy,’ Palla remarked as they propped her against the wall.
Mark tested the network and found it live. He could feel the Photurian mind-temple humming there, waiting for him to join. It was like being offered a link to a shared virt, but infinitely creepier.
‘I guess that clinches it,’ he said. ‘Somewhere on New Panama, at least, the Photurian cause is alive and well.’
‘You’ll need help,’ Ann told him. ‘You’re talking about walking into their system unprotected. If they hack your interface, you’ll be dead before you can think.’
‘A risk I don’t mind taking,’ said Mark. ‘And besides, I can do a passable impression of a Phote now. That should help.’
‘I’m coming with you anyway,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll run a security cut-out.’
Mark raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You don’t have a perfect track record in that role. And anyway, how? This time we don’t have a ship to filter traffic for us.’
‘A private shadow-link,’ said Ann. ‘We allocate subminds to keep an eye on each other’s security.’
‘Okay,’ said Mark with a smile. ‘A buddy system. Sounds like a deal. You’ll need a copy of the Transcended puzzle code to interpret the temple-packets. You okay with that?’
Ann glanced back at Ira.
He nodded. ‘Do what you have to,’ he said. ‘We’ll hold down the fort. How long do you expect this to take? This place may not stay peaceful for long.’
Mark shrugged. ‘Ten minutes on the network is my guess. We should know pretty quickly if the hack is working.’ He glanced at Ann. ‘Ready?’
Mark pinged her shadow and passed her the puzzle code she needed. Then, together, t
hey shut their eyes and dived into the mind-temple – the great software citadel at the heart of Photurian society.
It was surprisingly dull. Without the iron enforcement of Photurian joy to enliven it, the temple control structure was as drab a virtual system as Mark had ever seen. The chambers were all uniformly spheroid. Ann’s presence beside him was represented as a matte-grey bead. And all the relevant information was represented through visual and sonic media tuned for intuitive understanding by any entity who’d drunk the Phote Kool-Aid. It looked like a badly formatted legal library and sounded like a gamelan concert being played by a team of undead accountants.
Fortunately, with the help of the puzzle the Transcended had given him, he could easily decrypt the black and white squiggles on the walls into meaning.
[Jesus, this place is ugly,] he said over their private link.
[It’s functional,] Ann retorted. [What did you expect?]
Mark ascended through the hierarchy of uniform spaces. Somewhere on the way, he got lost.
[Wait,] he said. [I think we need to backtrack. We’ve been through this cavern.]
[That shouldn’t be possible, ] said Ann. [I’ve studied the Protocol – it’s laid out in a strict hierarchy.]
[Not here, it’s not,] said Mark.
He felt a moment’s unease. Being lost in the world’s least interesting virtual maze hadn’t been part of his plan. He briefly opened his eyes to check in with Ira.
‘Small delay,’ he said. ‘Bear with us.’
He doubled back and tried again. This time he found what had to be the root. The chamber didn’t have a proper skylight, just a lot of little side-holes moving about weirdly in sync with the patterns on the walls. The music had a glutinous, limping beat and irregular melodies full of awful-sounding quarter-tones.
It didn’t look or sound the way it had in his puzzle dream – nothing had so far. The whole system felt off-kilter – a mirror-maze distortion of the tidy order he’d glimpsed. Maybe the Transcended intelligence simply wasn’t perfect on this subject.
[This isn’t good,] said Ann. [This is not what the Protocol root is supposed to look like.]
[My thoughts exactly. You think we’re in the wrong place?]
Ann paused. Her bead radiated concern.
[No. Use the weapon anyway.]
Mark dipped into his sensorium, retrieved the switching program and ran it. A beam of light licked out from his bead to etch a sigil onto the wall.
[Done,] he said.
[Now what?] said Ann.
[Theoretically, I’ve asserted primacy,] said Mark. [I’m now the boss. As soon as the message propagates, I can start making edits and shut down their task stacks.]
[How long should that take?]
[I don’t know. Seconds? Minutes?]
Things began to happen, but far more slowly and erratically than he’d expected. Instead of a cascade of mechanical changes rippling down to every cavern below him, the wall-patterns just moved around faster.
Abruptly, a grey avatar-bead darted in through one of the side-holes, followed by another. They flickered at him. The messages didn’t translate through his Phote Protocol code at all. They should have.
Mark did his best to radiate bland authority. [I am your superior node,] he told them grandly.
[We have no superior,] they replied.
[Leave me,] he told them. [I am making edits.]
The beads did not leave. Instead, they seemed to be watching him.
[Time to go, I think,] he messaged Ann. He hadn’t made any edits yet, but even trying was looking like less and less of a good idea.
[Agreed,] she said.
Mark tried to pull his mind out of the Photurian virt, but instead of leaving, all sensation from his physical body disappeared. Just being a bead wasn’t a good feeling.
[Ann, can you pull out?] he said nervously.
[Working on it,] she said. [Reorganising my subminds.]
[How is this even possible?] said Mark. He reached for his tether to Ann’s shadow and found it unresponsive.
[Your puzzle code,] said Ann darkly. [It locked us in.]
Mark felt the surface of his mind being probed, like questing fingers on his face in a lightless room.
[Ann, is that you?] he said.
[No,] she told him. [Hang on. I’ve got you.]
The feeling stopped, then all hell broke loose. Thousands of avatar-beads started appearing around him like digital popcorn. They all began messaging him but none of it made any sense. The gamelan backdrop accelerated into a deafening bombardment.
[Ann, we need out!] Mark yelled.
[I’m trying!] she replied. [Our exits are being denied.]
[Denied?] he exclaimed. [What do you mean, denied? Weren’t you on security?]
[We’re secure, Mark. We just can’t leave.]
[Why the fuck not?]
[Right now, I have no idea.]
21.4: IRA
Ira sat and waited while guilt at Mark’s revelation sloshed around in his head. If someone had made the right strategic choices, the war would have ended years ago. That someone could only be him. Was it so wrong that he’d tried to keep his people alive?
‘Ira?’ said Clath worriedly.
‘What?’
‘I kept an link open to our landing sphere. I’m getting readings outside the dome.’
‘Show me,’ he said.
She dropped infrared images of the dust-choked horizon into his shadow. Two Phote lifters were flying towards them, followed by a swarm of atmospheric drones. The storm made their progress sluggish, but they were coming.
Ira watched them with a sense of desolate inevitability. He’d known they’d catch up. They always did.
‘Ann, trouble coming,’ said Ira.
Ann did not reply.
‘Ann,’ he said. ‘Time’s up. We have to go now.’
She still didn’t respond, so he shook her. She slumped sideways. Her head hit the floor. Ira’s heart skipped a beat. He tried Mark and found him just as unresponsive.
‘I’m going to yank the circuit,’ he said and reached for the switch on the wall.
‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ said Rachel. ‘Look at the load on the network.’
She passed him a window. Ann and Mark were swallowing a lot of packets.
‘They’re fully meshed,’ said Rachel. ‘If roboteering interfaces work the same way now as they did when I was flying, you can’t risk it. Yank them now and you might kill them.’
Ira roared and slammed his fist into the wall.
‘The Photes are practically on top of us and we have no weapons, an indefensible site and our best fighter is jacked in,’ said Clath. ‘What are we supposed to do?’
She sat staring hopelessly into the middle distance. With the loss of Judj, her trademark optimism appeared to have popped like a false-matter bubble.
‘Improvise,’ said Rachel. ‘What we always do. Ira, you said you helped design these towns. What can we use?’
‘Not design,’ he said. ‘Just policy negotiation. That was back during IPSO, when Frontier settlements were ten per cent building work and ninety per cent legal.’
‘Think!’ she said. ‘What got the lawyers excited?’
‘Air rights,’ he said. And then he had it. ‘Okay! We know the airlock system is running, and it must have a mandatory physical lockout – I passed that law. So we shut it down with a simulated threat. That gives the Photes a choice: they can kill everyone inside or cut their way in.’
‘That’s a plan?’ said Clath. ‘Threaten suicide?’
‘We just have to hope that the Photes still care about all the coma-cases in here.’
‘And if they don’t?’ she said.
‘Then we’re dead. But if they do, there’s a foam-projector system to detect breaches. I’ll raise the setting to high alert to fire at any cuts they make.’
He knew he was clutching at straws. Foam against rail guns wasn’t exactly a convincing defence. It’d probably buy them
minutes at most while the Photes got over their laughter.
‘Okay,’ said Rachel. ‘You work on that, I’m going looking for physical weapons.’ She darted out.
Ira picked an old visor off the wall and tossed another to Clath. Then he grabbed a touchboard and made the command swipe for civic integrity. Hopefully the old base-level interfaces would still exist, because why rewrite them?
At first, the system refused to respond. Ira had to swap out his touchboard twice before he found one that would accept the gesture. But, at last, a dated human-style interface sprang up before him. He exhaled in relief. As he’d hoped, the Photes hadn’t bothered overwriting the utility code, just added their own hooks on top. He sought out the emergency air facilities, hit the lockdown icon and boosted the foam-response acuity to alert status.
‘That should hold them for a good few seconds,’ he said.
‘Terrific,’ Clath retorted. ‘You’ve put my mind right at rest.’
While he was here, he thought, he might as well see what else there was. These old towns had a lot of automated systems – fire prevention, micro-impact tracking, civic-alert audio. Why not use all of them?
Meanwhile, a lighter-than-air lifter shaped like a militarised whale and about a quarter the size of the town itself set down outside. Rachel ran back in, breathing hard. She had two lengths of ceramic pipe in her hands.
‘These were the best I could find,’ she said. ‘They’re here, by the way.’
‘We noticed,’ said Ira.
In his visor, he caught sight of an armoured Phote rover rolling up to the nearest airlock. He directed the town’s micro-impact lasers at it. Their beams chased over the vehicle’s sides, leaving mild discolouration but not a hint of damage.
‘Okay, that failed,’ he said.
The rover docked and tried the lock. When it didn’t open, the vehicle retreated.
Ira squeezed out a smile. ‘Score one for team human.’
The next thing to come out of the lifter’s enormous belly was a revolting machine resembling a cross between a tank and a squid, with a translucent storage sac hanging off the back.
‘Oh, shit, it’s a harvester,’ said Clath.
‘Anyone want to leave?’ said Ira. ‘Start running up that Phote-tube we passed? Because I wouldn’t blame you.’
