LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  The view shifts abruptly and I’m surrounded by open water, the coast a faint line on the horizon. The simulation explains that K’Tial used to have spires rising several dozen feet out of the water but that they’re all gone now, left to the imagination or the virtual artist’s impression. Fortunately, being a simulation, it can provide the latter, probably on the assumption that Stars tourists are mostly devoid of the former. The spires look like oversized shellfish, long crusty tubes spiralling into cones. Like whoever got hired to do the rendering spent most of his time doing backdrops for cheap low-grade fantasy sims.

  I shake myself out of it. Getting nervous again. I’m hundreds of miles from the Shithole now but this is a way out, an escape. By definition, then, the Bratstva will be watching for me. With what’s going on up in orbit I wouldn’t put it past them to sneak a nuke down and clean the whole place out if they catch even a whiff that I’m here. Maybe I should go take the real tour– it’s not like I’m paying any attention to this one. A few days of isolation. Calm. Good sleep. Get my head together.

  The simulation figures I’ve had enough of staring at the spires and drops me under the water. I get that drowning sensation again for a moment before my higher brain kicks my lower brain back into line. For a moment I forget about GZW and Jester and the Bratstva. The water is so clear I can see for miles, so blue I figure the picture has to be enhanced. Sunlight streams through. Below me I see the ruins, the real ones, far more graceful and elegant than the crude imagined spires before. Gleaming white funnels and tubes and arches and buttresses, sprawling in chaos for as far as I can see. I can’t even begin to make sense of it.

  Fuck it, I’m screwed. I have to sell my soul to the Rim or the Stars, one or the other. Probably the Rim. Prefer their way of doing things. More personal. Do exactly what they say without question and generally they keep their end of the deal, however shitty it might be. The Stars pay better but they’ll sell me out without a thought. Being lost in a Rim prison doesn’t appeal. Even the Company couldn’t get me out. Assuming they gave a fuck, which they almost certainly don’t. The Rim then. Be safer from the Bratstva too.

  I leave the virtual world of K’Tial halfway through the tour. Outside I could be anywhere. The launchport is like any other. Maybe a little old and out of date but compared to the rest of Szenchzuen it’s state of the art. For the tourists, of course. Air conditioning keeps the heat away, sterile white walls hide the jungle, high domed ceilings give the illusion of space and comfort. I walk through the atrium, looking. Wondering how the fuck am I going to do this? Wander up to the tourist information desk and say:‘Hi, I’m from the Old Worlds. Mostly I do illegal stuff like corporate espionage and data extraction, but I’m pretty good at hostage negotiation too and I need a job for some cash because there’s a galaxy-wide cult of psychotic nut-jobs who are real pissed at me right now. I wonder if you could help?’ Not so much.

  Then again, the code in my head has pretty much rebuilt me from the ground up when it comes to figuring out what people want and bringing them around to my way of thinking. I start some digging at the Rim bureaucratic hierarchies, working out who I need to talk to and the quickest fastest way of getting in front of them. The trick is not spending too much time in some low-grade holding cell where the Bratstva—

  Melissa. From the corner of my eye I see her through the sprinkled clusters of people, fifty yards away, maybe more. She’s walking, bold as brass, towards one of the boarding gates, carrying a silver case, doesn’t look left or right, just straight ahead like she was any other passenger. I watch her. Maybe she doesn’t even know there were more than the two Bratstva she killed…

  Yeah, and maybe she’s got the brains of a dead sheep and it was pure blind luck she hacked a path that even Mr Cray couldn’t trace.

  She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t see the two men following her either or else she already knows they’re there and doesn’t want to tell them they’ve been spotted. Hard to be sure. As tails go they’re not smart. If she’s done much of this before then she knows they’re there.

  They’ll have tickets though. Tickets out of here. So fuck working for the Rim! I slide through the crowds towards them. They’re heading for the gate. Melissa is already there, passing her palms over the security grid, smiling at the flat-faced security clones. The two barcodes hang back behind her. No hurry– they know where she’s going.

  I pull at my clothes, trying to look like a native, dishevelling myself as best I can. I come up behind them. They have eyes for Melissa and nothing else, but this is always the easy part. I check them for web sockets. Both have them, just behind the left ear. Both empty. They’re not running a wireless interface so I can’t hack their brains from halfway across the galaxy, but that’s okay because I’m right behind them. I reach for my gun under my coat and slip a plug into my other hand. A special plug, palmed from the Company inventory of badass high tech toys along with one or two other nasty little devices I picked up when they sent me to bring back little Victor.

  The barcodes stand side by side. They have their backs to me. In the old days, my hands would be shaking now. I hate this bit and I love it, the moment where everything has to be just perfect because otherwise a whole shitstorm of fubar is ready to rain down. The gun slides loose under my coat. The left hand comes out of its pocket, moves as though to smooth down my hair. Snaps out.

  The plug slots home. I pull it out again at once. The Brother tenses as the first jolt of electricity courses through his brain. In a few moments he’ll fall, convulsing as his own software overloads his brainweb and scrambles his cerebral cortex. Sometimes webs have their drawbacks, and I don’t give a shit about hacking this fuck-stick’s tiny little brain. A good dose of apparent natural causes will do nicely. I poke the barrel of my gun into the side of the second barcode, let my arm take his shoulder and start walking him away, blurring into the crowd, whispering into his ear.

  ‘Rim security are about to be all over your friend,’ I tell him.‘And I have a zip-gun to your lower torso. If I use it then the bullet will penetrate your soft tissue and then explode. Every organ in the lower half of your body will be destroyed. The bleeding alone will kill you in less than a minute. If that’s not enough for you, the toxins will kill you in the next. I don’t know how wired you are, but if you think that either of you can survive that on a planet who’s idea of medical care hasn’t made it much past leeches then be my guest and make some trouble. Otherwise shut the fuck up and keep walking.’

  I keep him facing away from his partner, lolling and twitching behind us, slowly collapsing to the floor. Maybe if he thinks he still has backup then he’ll play along for a while.‘You don’t know who you’re messing with,’ he mutters.‘You’ll be dead in an hour, whatever you do.’

  ‘I know exactly who I’m messing with. That’s part of my problem.’ I figure I have ten minutes before these Szenchzuenese security retards figure out what I put in his partner’s head. They’ll review camera drones and see me there. They’ll probably see me touch him just before he goes down. They’ll track my identity, so I have ten minutes to turn into someone else. Make it five to be safe. I feel that clock already ticking…

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘The toilets. Where else?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Off this rock. I don’t know who you are, but I want your ticket.’ Time to sound like an amateur. Amateurs are dangerous, do the unexpected and always fuck up. All I have to do is get him as far as the toilets with this charade.‘Look, nothing personal. You can get a trip out of here on the next shuttle, right? But the Rim are kicking the Stars’ butt here. They’re on to me, and I’m screwed if I don’t get off this rock right now. So don’t fuck me about, because I got nothing left to lose.’ If I waste him, I figure the Rim might not care too much when they see his barcode.

  ‘Do you have any idea who I am?’

  ‘I don’t give a flying fuck.’ The washrooms are just ahead of us now. Gender divided. How quai
nt. I push him in.

  ‘How do you think you’ll get on-board? It’s not like you can just walk on with someone else’s ticket.’ The feel of him under my hand changes, muscles tensing. Shit. He’s realised I’m not the clueless desperado I’m making out. Either that or he doesn’t care.

  No one else here. But there’s a camera, watching. No, two. I hurl him into a cubicle and out of sight, walk in after him. He’s quick, I’ll give him that. Quicker than me, probably. If I hadn’t been planning on just shooting him through the head anyway, he might even have got me. He spins around as he sails through the air, hand diving for a pocket as I walk through the door, my own gun rising. I kick the door closed behind me and he already has a tiny pistol in his hand, half pointing towards me.

  I put the first bullet through his head. The back of his skull splits open, spraying the white tiled wall with blood and bits of stuff I don’t want to think about. His gun goes off, punching a tiny hole in the door by my shoulder, the barrel still moving towards me. I step inside his aim and catch him around the waist as he falls, lifting his legs. What’s left of his head smacks into the rim of the toilet and slips inside. He thrashes a bit. I lift him higher, tugging at his jacket. I let him hang there, bleeding out, head jammed into the toilet. I need to keep his clothes clean.

  He stops moving. I have no idea whether he’s dead or not. I figure he probably is, but you never know these days.

  Quickly now. His ticket, his jacket, his trousers, his shoes, everything with pockets that might hide something useful. His gun. Then his hands. I take off my shades, look at them carefully and smile. He’s wearing gloves, microns thick, almost invisible. Whatever his ID says, it’s talking about those gloves, the DNA and the fingerprints they carry, not the man who’s wearing them. If they’re good enough for him, they’re good enough for me. As a fast as I dare, I peel them off his hands and leave, everything wrapped up into a bundle of clothes. I leave my zip-gun behind. No way that’ll get onto a shuttle.

  Outside the cubicle the camera stares at me. Another, invisible from the entrance, watches too. I guess we did look kinda suspicious. Maybe someone saw me throw him into the cubicle, figured a little game of mug-the-tourist was going on. Yeah, well, something like that.

  I check the time. Three minutes since I plugged his friend. One minute since the cameras saw me come in. I slip out of one washroom and straight into the other. I figure, since they bother to divide them, it’s a guy who watches one camera and a woman who watches the other. Maybe they don’t talk to each other. Maybe she won’t be as interested in me. Probably it’s all pseudo-AIs, but a place like this? Who knows.

  Five minutes gone and I’m out again. Amazing how a little water and a change of clothes can transform a man. They can’t have seen too much of me anyway. They’ll be looking for a kid in a coat and sunglasses, not a salary slave still in his suit even though he’s on vacation. I have my old T-shirt wrapped around my neck like it’s a scarf to hide what’s left of the blood and brain shit on my collar, but the suit’s dark, dirt repellent, water repellent, probably insect repellent too.

  Seven minutes and I’m at the gate, palms in the scanner, pulse rising. I don’t look much like the guy I’m pretending to be, but no one gives a fuck about that these days. You got the DNA and the prints, no one gives a shit whose face you’ve got. Time was they used retinal scans as well but so many people got artificial eyes these days the test’s worse than useless. But maybe I damaged the gloves and they don’t work. Maybe they found the body already. Maybe they see something wrong, something I missed. Maybe they got a good shot of my face in the toilet and patched it through already. Or maybe my corpse’s partner got fixed up quicker than I hoped. Maybe he’s right behind me…

  Maybe, maybe, maybe…

  The security clone scans me and finds the sunglasses hidden away in the bundle of my coat. He gives me an irritated‘haven’t you ever been through one of these before’ look and waves me on. On the other side I wander aimlessly until I find an empty room with No Entry on the door, dive in and ditch the suit. Throw some blonding agent into my hair. Chances are there are still Bratstva on the flight. No point in being obvious. Just an Old World tourist now.

  As I get on the shuttle, I glimpse Melissa again. If she sees me, she hides it.

  I don’t even know where this ticket’s taking me.

  Renford, H., & Lerner, K. W. ‘Black Lightning and Whispers– the Secrets of the Spinwarp’. Chathain Scientific Progress, 177, 4872-4891 (2325).

  Thought I’d throw this your way. Your basic spinwarp theory has it that time isn’t a one dimensional flow but has other axes just like space, and that your off-the-shelf spindrive makes use of these to avoid all that nasty Einsteinian nonsense about the speed of light and shit like that. Physicists being the creatures they are there are now dozens of different theories about how it all really works. They can all be made to accommodate the Lightning– supposedly it’s a purely physical phenomena– a sort of ‘entropic grounding of imbalances in time’, whatever the fuck that means. The Whispers are a bit more of a problem– Lerner reckons it comes down to one of two things– either there are telepathic entities hanging out in spinspace (he’s a physicist, so he doesn’t like this one, surprise surprise) or it’s some as yet unexplained psychological effect, which means maybe some people are more susceptible than others (and conveniently makes it a problem for the psychoscientists and not the mathematicians). People have been doing experiments in spinspace for a couple of centuries now, trying to figure everything out. Best I can tell they’re no closer to an answer than when they started.

  Eight – Gemini

  The shuttle is spacious and luxuriant, the planet spectacular as it slips away beneath us, but I’m too tense to enjoy the view. There are barcodes on this shuttle. I can feel them, their tiny blank minds focussed on their purpose. Kill. Kill. Kill Melissa. Kill Constantine. Kill everyone. Wouldn’t put it past them to suicide bomb the lot of us. What did she do to piss them off this bad?

  No sense to this at all. At least three of them in the Shithole, already there mere hours after she did whatever she did. Two more, probably four or five, waiting at K’Tial. Almost like they knew she was coming. But it’s Jester and Mr Cray that are dead, not her. My fault. She used me. I get so used to the code in my head letting me play people like some virtuoso, and she played me right back. Can’t help wondering how far it goes. Was I a lucky opportunity, a couple of days of fucking and then a handy place to set off whatever she did? Or did she see me coming? I have to think she was waiting for me all along like one of those wasps that stings a spider to lay its eggs inside. GZW had her waiting for me. They sure didn’t bring the three of us here to smuggle cheese.

  ‘Constantine!’

  I start. Mind drifting. Someone talking in my ear. Someone who knows who I am. Who I really am.

  ‘Constantine!’

  I slump. Not in my ear. In my head. Reflex starts a trace, trying to pin down who’s calling and where they’re at, but I already know it must be Jez. The Company put the wafers inside my skull, they’re the ones who know how to find me and no one else. Unless they sold me, of course. I’d really hoped that Jez wouldn’t do that…

  ‘Constantine, will you please stop dreaming and answer me. I know perfectly well that you are alive and awake. And on a shuttle out of Szenchzuen, if I am not mistaken.’

  They’re masking their voice. No surprise, but how the fuck does Jez know where I am?

  ‘You sold me out to GZW,’ I murmur.

  ‘You are incorrect. Events are being manipulated but not by us.’

  Us? There’s a way to this speaking that has a dire familiarity to it.‘So who the fuck are you and how did you find me?’ It’s not Jez, but I think I already know. The trace is flying all over the place. Mr Cray has a technical name for this pattern but hopelessly lost sums it up well enough.‘All very nice and enigmatic and I’m so, so impressed. So what the fuck do you want, mystery man? And how do you know where I
am?’ I restart the trace. Whoever it is could be just a few yards away for all I know. Or a hundred light years.

  ‘Assumptions will get you nowhere. I am here to warn you. As for where you are, my predictions suggested that you and Mr Cray would make your way to K’Tial after the probability-death of the associate entity Jester. Travel times being what they are, this would put you in transit to orbit now. Please tell me if I am mistaken. The level of violence around you is causing your prediction matrices to show some alarming levels of uncertainty.’

  Gemini. No one else talks like that.

  ‘Your algorithms are getting senile, you half-witted excuse for an AI. Cray’s still in The Shithole. They blew him to bits.’ I see points of light drifting above us outside. The Rim retribution force on the move perhaps. Now would be a fine time for the Stars to start fighting back. Another ignominious death– collateral damage in the crossfire. Atomised and gone, a random act of chance. It would fit with my life so far.

  ‘I will adjust. By the end of this conversation I will have a clearer picture.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Last thing I need right now is some smug smartarse AI half a sector away pratting on about probabilities. Being told that I have an eighty-seven percent chance of survival isn’t reassuring any more. That’s a thirteen percent chance of being dead. Ten times out and that’s a one in four chance of still being here.‘I don’t like your odds any more, Gemini.’

  ‘You lived, Charlemagne.’

  I tense.‘Don’t call me that!’

  ‘Apologies. The death of Mr Cray is causing me some slight confusion. Correcting for his absence will be difficult.’