LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  Twenty-Nine – LoneFire

  We hitch a ride with a commercial transport that happens to be going the right way, just clamp ourselves onto the side and let their spindrive take us with them. Don’t know if they even know we’re there. Curious how similar our shuttle is to the one that dumped me in New Amazonia. Don’t know where Jez got it from but I’m betting it’s Company property. No evidence of a spindrive… I’d ask, but we’re having a problem with conversation at the moment. When she speaks, Jez sounds too brittle and bright. Gemini hangs, squeezed between us like barbed wire.

  Banshee’s a border world, one of those places where the ground belongs to the Old Worlds and the skies to the United Stars. The only orbitals which haven’t gone over to the US belong to the planetary government. A couple of Stars frigates are in the system but they have no interest in anyone else, too busy with their own problems. We stay well clear but even so it’s obvious that one of them is close to being a derelict. There’s a lot of shuttle and comms traffic around, like someone kicked over an anthill somewhere. Something’s up. Can’t help but wonder if Doyle had anything to do with it.

  I check the news. Szenchzuen has blown up into a war zone. Fifty ships destroyed, looks like most of them were Stars ones too. Seems like the Rim kicked their butt good this time. Kinda went against expectations– after all, ain’t no tech like Stars tech, or so they tell us. Rumours of some sort of new energy weapon, some weird stealth technology, spinspace inhibitors, the usual paranoid crap. The reporting from the surface is severe and serious but the broadcasts from the orbitals are fiery, scared, doing what they can to stir up paranoia among the Old Worlds in support of the Stars: fear the mysterious closed society of the Rim! Fear their secret weapons! You could be next!

  Yeah. Devil you know, devil you don’t. But I know Gemini and I know the Bratstva and so on the whole I’ll take whatever devils the Rim has to offer. I share this with Ortov. He’s taken to using his real face again, a much later picture, an old wrinkled man with a wispy white beard.

  ‘ The Rim are a danger,’ he says.‘The Bratstva I understand.’ There’s something weird about the way he’s speaking, something stilted like his mind is somewhere else and he hasn’t allocated quite enough processing to handle the basics. I shake my head. Ortov doesn’t want to talk to me, Jez doesn’t want to talk to me…

  Well, fuck them. ‘Oi! Ortov! Wake up! Listen to this froth. Fucking sheep, the lot of them. Jeez. I’d have thought you’d be interested– this is your people getting kicked.’

  He frowns and sighs, and when he speaks again his voice is smooth.‘It’s a simple rule of control. The more people you gather together, the more they will do what you tell them. Rim, Stars, Bratstva, it doesn’t make much difference.’ He gives me a sour grin.‘Trust me on this.’

  ‘Yeah? And your point is?’ But he’s gone.

  The dark side of Banshee is a black hole in space before us, a burning crescent of sun-fire etched into its side. Jez guns the engines, flips a finger to an irate system traffic controller and hurls us forward. Can’t help thinking they’re going to take a dim view of us totally ignoring their nicely safe and controlled re-entry paths…

  We skip across the top of the stratosphere, across the night side and into the light. Traffic control shouts at us some more until Jez cuts into the wake of an orbital ferry and starts following it down towards the clouds.

  ‘Doyle and Su are already on the surface,’ she says, in case I hadn’t figured that out yet. She keeps her eyes carefully on her control screen.

  Time to talk this poison out of the air.

  ‘Yeah. So what do you want me for?’

  ‘Losche should be easy to pick up, but maybe not so easy to get her to talk. At least not in a hurry.’

  ‘What, not even with Doyle ripping her arms and legs off?’

  Jez tries a grin but it doesn’t come out too well. As we erupt from the underside of the clouds and Banshee spreads out to meet us, she spins the shuttle out of the ferry’s wake and dives for the ground, flips the autopilot on and turns her back to the screen and never mind the supersonic ground just a few feet below us. She leans against the controls; I lean against the back wall of the cockpit. We size each other up, subtly fighting to see which of us can adopt the most casual and unconcerned pose.

  Then she bursts out laughing.‘When I was a kid, I always thought those orbital ferries were the most graceful spaceships around. I didn’t really know anything about aerodynamics and shit like that but I always wanted to fly on one of them. I never figured I’d be hiding behind them one day. This isn’t one for Doyle. Either Losche is being used, in which case pulling bits out of her is probably going a bit far, or she’s a pro. And if she’s a pro then I want her dealt with like one. Which means you. Use Doyle if you want to, but you’re handling the interrogation.’ She turns around and stares out at the rushing screen.‘I’d never have figured you for a Gemini pawn. A couple of years ago I’d have been real pissed off, but for some reason it doesn’t much bother me now. Actually I’m a little impressed you could do it without me finding out. I guess it’s kinda par for the course really. And it’s not like I don’t deserve it. It’s not like Toni and Andreas wouldn’t sell us all out for a good scoop. We are what we are, each one of us.’ She pauses for a moment, starts twisting her fingers through her hair.‘She’s probably a nobody isn’t she? Losche? One of the billions of ordinary people who live happy easy lives without a clue that shit like this is going on around them. I think I’m getting too old or too smart, or too cynical or too something.’

  ‘I know the feeling. Sometimes I’m afraid that if I look too closely I’ll see there’s nothing else. But you said yourself you didn’t want to trade this in for the quite life. What would you do?’

  ‘Interior design.’

  OK, she’s got me there. Not quite sure what to say to that. Trying to match Jez the scheming plotting exhumer of conspiracies with interior design. Doesn’t quite work. The best I can manage is to look stupid and gasp:‘What?’

  ‘Oh, it’s what I always wanted to do before I got caught up in this shit. I have a bad feeling, C. I don’t like this job anymore. I don’t know who my friends are and I find that really bothers me. Something’s rotten. It’s either the government or the Longthornes, but whichever it is, it’s so close to the heart of what makes Cestus tick that it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. It’s going to get nasty soon. We’re getting close enough to hurt them.’ She turns around again.‘Fuck. You’ve got me feeling sorry for myself as well now. Come here, I want to show you something. And you can tell Gemini all you want– maybe it can figure this out, ‘cause this is way weird.’

  I go slowly to her. This isn’t the Jez I know; I have to wonder if I’ve broken something I can’t fix. She looks older, sounds tired, all out of energy. The Jez I knew always looked like she could go on forever.

  ‘Sit.’ Her fingers flash across the computer screen. It’s hard to take my eyes off the ground outside. Never mind the effort of attention I’m giving to figuring Jez’s head, it’s kind of distracting to know there are supersonic trees out there, missing us by something less than ten feet. I can feel the shuttle sliding up and down through the air with the contours of the hills outside, but only just. One bad memory location, one misplaced instruction, one faulty statement and we get to be forest fertilizer.

  ‘Couldn’t we fly just a little bit higher? I mean, blowing all the squirrels out of the trees is all very well and amusing but who’s going to scrape them off the paintwork?’

  Jez shakes her head.‘Banshee’s got pretty good airspace coverage– we need to be this low. Anyway, pay attention!’ She points back to her screen full of numbers.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘LoneFire’s sales of Longthorne assets.’

  I give her a nasty grin.‘Funny. Ortov showed me a couple of articles about LoneFire before we left. One about AI cloning and one about some Network SixtyNine feature on impending disasters.
A feature I suspect I had something to do with squashing.’

  Jez squirms and looks uncomfortable.‘Yeah. They had some sort of theory that bad things were going on in the LoneFire project. Once the Longthornes took over, everything got wiped. Everything except the stuff you and Jester snatched. That’s why I wanted to see it.’

  ‘Most of that went up on Szenchzuen.’

  ‘Bloody annoying. Puts what happened there in a different light though, doesn’t it? Whatever this Jorlson guy found out, someone wanted it squashed real bad.’

  ‘Jorlson disappeared.’

  ‘Him and the whole fucking production team! Transferred, according to Network SixtyNine, never existed according to their new owners.’ She shakes her head.‘This can’t go on. No one can hide shit like that forever.’

  I stumble and find myself leaning against the control panel. We’re slowing.‘So what’s all this supposed to tell me?’

  Her fingers flash again and a series of rows are highlighted.‘This is part of the data you recovered. The bit that survived. You wanted to see it, so here it is. Looks like all we’ve got here is an edited dump of LoneFire’s daily records– nothing that isn’t public data already. You can see the steady selling off of Victor’s shares, if you know what to look for, but we already knew about that. This…’ another blur.‘I was looking at this while we were in spinspace. Watch.’

  I stare at the numbers. They make no sense at all. Random numbers of shares in random companies sold at random times. I tell her this. Outside, an invisible hand ripples the treetops ahead of us as we drop through the sound barrier.

  ‘Yeah. But look, they’re all for weird small numbers. Look at the rest of the numbers. It’s easy to pick out the pattern.’

  ‘Yeah. So?’

  ‘See this“L” tag? That means LoneFire’s doing the selling from its own reserves.’

  Clearly I’m missing something. I give Jez a blank look.

  Exasperation.‘Don’t you see? It’s a message. LoneFire’s writing a coded message into the galactic financial markets. Or more to the point, someone’s tricked it into doing it. So who’s going to read it?’

  ‘Stockbrokers?’

  She laughs, a proper belly-laugh.‘Jesus, C! Don’t be such a fucking idiot. No human is ever going to spot this unless they’re already looking for it. Pseudo-AIs. That’s who’s going to see this. What if it’s a virus? Everything we’ve seen points to someone manipulating the remains of Victor Longthorne’s empire, so why not LoneFire too?’

  I have that cold feeling in the pit of my stomach again. The shuttle is coming to a stop. I begin to see why Jez is so edgy. I have to ask.‘Why?’

  She leans sharply back in her chair, flicks the computer off with an angry wave and sighs.‘I don’t know. Could be some plot to take control of the markets by introducing a virus into other dealers. Could be a plot to crash the whole system, I just don’t know. Either way, I don’t want to think about the chaos it could cause. And I start coming up with all these scenarios, like, what if it’s a virus that kills LoneFire? Sure, we rebuild from backup, but then the new LoneFire scans all this in, reads the virus again and splat, down it goes. Without LoneFire, the market crashes. And what happens if the Old Worlds financial system collapses when the Rim and the Stars are on the brink of a major war? And why is it that the Bratstva happen, right now, to be the most active they’ve ever been? Jesus! We could have a total galactic meltdown on our hands. So you see, you and Gemini all seems a bit trivial right now.’

  I feel Charlemagne stirring inside me. Endgame in sight. Somewhere. Big stakes. Chances to win gloriously. Chances to die. I lean forward and sink my fingers into her jaw hard enough that it hurts, force her to look at me.

  ‘Gemini is never trivial, Jez.’

  Don’t think Jez has seen Charlemagne before. For a moment she looks frightened. For a moment only, before her eyes harden and she knocks my hand away and grips my wrist. My turn to be hurt. But her words are soft and gentle. Wistfully sad.

  ‘Constantine, we mess up even once and now we’re dead. No nice Company trauma team, no high-tech Company hospital, no free Company insurance– we never existed. You go figure out who’s side you’re on and you tell me. And if it’s out you want, you go. No strings, no catch. No money either, but hey…’ She shrugs.‘I’ve got neither time nor space for bullshit here.’

  ‘You know what would be so Gemini? Break everything. And then walk in, the AI with all the answers to watch over and protect us all.’ I shake my head.‘Uh-uh. Over my dead body. I’m not going anywhere.’

  Shit. I actually mean that, too. I can feel the patterns moving together, just out of reach. Fighting with me against the temptation to simply walk away.

  A slight jolt as the shuttle touches the ground. I only notice the distant hum of the engines as they start to wind down. I get the feeling this shuttle is a wolf dressed up as a rabbit.

  A moment later and Doyle is in the cabin. Must have been waiting for us right where the airlock was to have got in so quickly.

  ‘Miss Breen. We’re good to go.’

  Blahh, Y. Y. ‘Spinspace– not so hyper after all?’ Physics Review, 97 448-468 (2178).

  Does my head in, this one. Some arcane ramble about how spinspace isn’t another time-like dimension or anything like that but actually accesses a lower energy state of the universe itself. Blahh envisions a continuum of negative energy particles coexisting with normal matter and that the energy needed to drive an object into and through a spinwarp is simply what’s required to knock holes in this continuum into/through which the object moves. Having negative energy means different physics or something. Then I lose it– there’s a lot of funny symbols which I suppose mean something if you’re a spinspace physicist. Funny thing is, I sort of remember some of this stuff, the ideas. How can that be?

  Thirty – War

  We sneak up off the surface and get all the way into orbit before Banshee traffic control start shouting at us, and this far out, who gives a fuck? Far as I know, no one even knows Losche is missing yet– Jez has her tanked up with something to silence the wailing and the pleading and all that shit. Can’t believe we just walked into her house, picked her up and walked away again– either this woman has no idea what she’s messed up with or she’s a serious death-wish case. Way too easy, like, what’s the catch? Because there has to be one.

  Of course, I’m assuming this is another shuttle with an impossibly small spinwarp drive, so we can hop off to wherever we damn well please whenever we damn well feel like it. I realise I’m assuming we’ve got one and that Jez has simply neglected to mention it.

  Traffic control have pretty much given up shouting at us when something new bursts onto our comms. Well, more like out of than onto– a translucent three dimensional head-andshoulders sprouting up like the machinery’s suddenly been possessed by some demon with a regrettable taste in facial hair.

  ‘ Cestus shuttle! Cease manoeuvres immediately or be fired upon!’ The man talking to us has a uniform– at least, the top quarter of him that I can see has, fuck knows what the rest of him looks like– and doesn’t look like Banshee traffic control. I’ve seen something like this before, not long ago, tugging at the edge of memory. Must have been Szenchzuen. Something about his voice– never mind the sideburns– puts him in the military rather than police or customs or any of that lightweight shit, not that there’s much difference sometimes. Oh yeah, and the wild staring eyes are bit of a giveaway. Whoever he is, he’s a fanatic, deeply disturbed, on a mission he probably thinks is for God, and he doubtless has a steadfast believe in the cleansing power of nuclear fire.

  Bratstva then. Figured they’d catch up with me sooner or later. Well, never mind, we can spin out of here, right? Right? Maybe I should ask, but it’s kind of an image thing to slouch back, look bored and assume everything is under control. I sneak a look at the faces around me just in case– for all I know this is just another part of the plan Jez hasn’t quite got round to telling me. Doyle
, tense, ready for action, sliding into the pilot seat, slipping one end of a thin black cable into the silver hole behind her ear, the other end out of sight, somewhere beneath the consoles. Nothing Doyle likes more than being shot at.

  Su’s nervous. Jez looks irritated. Alarmed too. Not part of the plan then.

  She slides to the comms console.‘And who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Admiral Hayes of the carrier Endemoniada. You have on board a citizen of Banshee who has been illegally and forcibly removed from the surface. Stand to and prepare to be boarded.’

  No shit. One wonders how he knows this thing. And I remember where I’ve seen the uniform before. Not Szenchzuen. Gateway. All the toy soldiers running around trying to pretend they weren’t in the middle of setting up Sunscreen’s command and control centre when the Rim squid-ships arrived. Old Worlds navy. Whatever the fuck they’re doing here.

  Time to give Ortov a poke, see what’s happening back home. I give my headphone a mental tap. No answer.

  Jez gives Su an urgent look. I look outside. Stars, more stars. Banshee, big and blue-green. Banshee’s sun, blinding white. Everything spinning slowly. Barely enough force to keep us in our chairs if we fart. I kind of expect to see a great big hulking warship out there somewhere, but of course it’s too far away not to look just like any other star. Probably looks boring and brick-like, knowing the Old Worlds navy. Always substance over style with these military types.