Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

  “You know this because…”

  “I have already covered this. Wound pattern. The wolf did not kill anybody on the Ragtime. Nothing human in his belly. The robots did the killing.”

  “Malfunction?”

  “Robots don’t malfunction that way. They were programmed to kill. Reprogrammed.”

  Maybe.

  “Send me what you have on Maxwell,” says Fin.

  “Doing it now.”

  “And find—”

  “Links between Maxwell and any other passengers. In progress.”

  “Good man.” Oops. “Equivalence, was that offensive?”

  “No.” Was there a delay?

  “Ragtime Two out.”

  Something vibrates heavily and Fin braces, hands against two walls, expecting to be turned upside down but disappointed. The Ragtime settles like an upset stomach, although the lights flicker. Fucking space. Fucking spaceships.

  Indistinct chatter on the radio.

  One of those cleaner bots comes slithering by, and Fin tenses, but it just… cleans. Fin still wants to shoot it just on general principle. How many are there on board?

  He’ll go crazy if he ponders that. Instead, he goes back to what he knows. Data. Salvo has some information on Yan Maxwell shared, and a few candidates with links. Fin goes through the linked people first. Tenuous links at best, statistical anomalies, too far removed to be anything useful. He’s their employer, although with several intermediaries in between. He’s the wealthiest man in the Sol system. Indirectly, he employs everybody.

  Video files play on Fin’s IFC.

  A young Maxwell funding the first successful mining of an asteroid, piggybacked on someone else’s pipedream. Some bright spark tried to turn a space rock into a spaceship by coring it out, building life support inside and attaching propulsion systems. Ten years of failure. When the instigator moved on, Maxwell examined what was left with a moving R & D craft. He found hyperconductors, iridium, piezoelectrics, unknowns, unknowns, unknowns, all of which he ferried to Earth. He had to fight off a lawsuit from the pipedreamer, but soon became pretty much the richest person in the solar system – which, if explorers are to be believed, means the richest person in the galaxy. Adjusted. The rise of MaxGalactix.

  The first discovery was a freebie, scavenged from the cast-off of another enterprise. He sent robot ships far and wide – even, it is rumoured, into the Oort Cloud, beyond Earth’s nearest bridge. And it all flows back to Earth for analysis, conversion, empowerment of humanity. Geologists suddenly in higher demand than they have ever been; rock nerds to rock stars in one generation.

  And Maxwell? Shrank from view as his star rose. No scandals, no children, no drama. True, impossible to make that much money without pissing someone off, but Maxwell seems to have done it. Or paid off his enemies and scrubbed public records.

  Sixty-three years old at time of death. Some plaque in his carotid artery that might have got him within two or so decades. Massive amount of fat in the greater omentum. Heart encased in fat that must have rendered him breathless. Lungs healthy, no soot spots. Brain pristine. Polyp in rectum, but benign, unimportant. Curiously, one ingrown toenail that must have hurt given the inflammation around it. He could have had it sorted out surgically in less than an hour. Why did he leave it?

  Why the fuck are you dead, Maxwell?

  Fin pulls up a conceptual map of the passenger placement. Marking the diagram with the thirty-one dead shows most of the bodies on Torus 2, clustered around Maxwell, as if he is patient zero and the murder contagion spread from him to the pods adjacent. He was the target. Great. So many reasons for anyone to want to murder the richest man in existence. Fin rubs his eyes and dismisses the display.

  “Fin, come in.” Shell.

  “Captain?”

  “The Equivalence and the Decisive are going to stop thrusting now. You’ll need to help remove the manual locks from the hatch. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks. Uncle Larry will talk you through it.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “What?”

  “I thought that’s what you say in… never mind. When are you coming back this way?”

  “After I’ve inspected the passenger sections. Why?”

  “I have some news on the investigation.”

  “I do not care. Do you even understand our situation? We need to get planetside, to safety, and soon.”

  “I appreciate—”

  “Get off the comm unless it’s an emergency. Larry will need the channel open. Out.”

  Fin must be starting to like her because he isn’t even angry.

  He is barely irritated.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ragtime: Joké

  Joké has a better EVA suit than anything they have on the Ragtime – companies are cheap – but it’s still hard going. Her muscles are screaming with the exertion of it all, microgravity be damned. If not for the fluid and temperature balance of the suit, she would be drenched in sweat.

  Grab the next rail, propel forwards, try not to bounce off anything. Travel from node to node down the truss, try not to get confused by the turn off to the spokes of the torus.

  She is vigilant of robots, but they scramble about ignoring her, seeming to have their own mission. She sees a flash of her father crossing her visual field, running, saying words she cannot hear. That’s not now, so it must be later. She stops.

  “Decisive, come back,” she says.

  “Joké?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What is it, baby?”

  “Action Governor!”

  Lawrence sighs over the comm. “Is there a point to this?”

  “Mmm, no, just checking on you.”

  “Mission accomplished. Shutdown protocols in place. Equivalence goes first, then me.”

  “Mm-hmm, sounds good.” Joké ducks under a series of dangling cables that look like jungle vines; then she sees a man, sad, trudging, linked to the Us. “Nobody soothed his nightmares when he was a child.”

  “What, darling?”

  “Nothing, governor. Odabo.”

  A clear glowing arrow pointing aft, but an intersection, and different arrows – one pointing to Node M, the other to Node E. The first nodes without a number. There’s also a one-foot cut-out of Snoopy plastered to the wall.

  “Captain,” says Joké.

  “Go.”

  “Ahh, what’s in Node E?”

  “Node E is the wrong direction. The leak is aft.”

  “Mmm, and I’m going aft, but what’s in Node E?”

  “Experimental. I don’t know. They don’t tell us. It’s sealed and I’ll never know. It’s automated. All I do is check the door.”

  “Ooh. I like shiny, experimental things.”

  “Are you getting distracted?”

  “Uuuhh, no. Out.”

  She pledges to check out Node E on her way back because it gives her an uneasy feeling. With external microphones she can hear a whistling sound, the rushing of air through a small aperture. She pushes, flies through the air, feels a pull. Debris and loose objects move in the same direction. She is at the end, but not in danger, she doesn’t think. A shutter has slid down to form a seal, but it is incomplete. The door stopped about a foot from the end, and atmosphere rushes away, along with whatever objects will fit the space. Globules of grey-green fluid float in the air like a snowstorm, and she hopes that’s not something from the waste system. Joké’s body moves from momentum and air current, but her spacesuit won’t fit through, so she’s not worried.

  “Captain.”

  “Go.”

  “Some kind of emergency door has come down, but…” She describes the scene.

  “Are you anchored?” asks Shell.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can you see the emergency fire extinguisher?”

  “Uh-huh… yeah.”

  “Next to that, you’ll see a panel labelled ‘control’.”

  “I do.”

  �
�Open it, you’ll see something that looks like a winch handle. Turn it clockwise until the gap closes. Joké, we all depend on you being able to close that shutter.”

  “Go away now, Captain.”

  Joké sips water. The panel is where Shell said it would be, but the EVA gauntlet is too cumbersome to manipulate the latches. She takes off the top part of her suit. The air tastes like burnt rubber, but it’s breathable as it rushes out into the cosmos.

  The handle is cold.

  Joké pushes clockwise. The gap doesn’t seem to change, and it’s hard. Fine. She pushes harder and this makes maybe an inch of difference.

  “Fuck, this is not going to be unicorns and rose petals, is it?”

  She pushes, sometimes with two hands, but the swirling droplets land on her; one or two to start with, then she glistens with it. At least it’s not foul smelling, but she loses her grip.

  “Suboptimal.”

  She knows what’s about to happen before it does, she sees it, and is calm. She loses her moorings, what anchors her in place, and is pulled towards the gap. Too late, she realises she has taken off the suit that would have stopped her from squeezing through and kept her alive.

  Joké is sucked out, banging her head and torso, spinning, into the cold blackness of space.

  She is in the Us, the nothingness and everything, the universe around her, all of spacetime open to her. Joyous.

  “Ahh… this place. You guys…”

  Others in the Us greet her in the Lamber way. Her mind is not nimble enough to take their form, but she can slip into and out of the Us at times. Her body can slip.

  They want her to stay, her human biology attractive to them, sustaining in some undefined way. They bob around her, tentacles everywhere, entangled. She has, in the past, spent aeons with them before returning to her point in the time stream.

  Her mother is in the Us somewhere, and it is likely that Joké has met her. But Lambers don’t do personhood in quite the same way as humans, and Joké’s flesh has always been a barrier to integration.

  She opens spacetime and inserts herself back into the Ragtime.

  This time she’s ready and gives it all her might. She wipes her hands on herself to keep the palms dry. Stubborn though it is, the winch submits to her determination. The gap closes. Pressurisation should start to build up again if life support isn’t damaged.

  Body aching, Joké allows herself to drift, to float free. To rest.

  It is only when she sees globules of blood in the air that she realises she is bleeding from somewhere.

  “Captain?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your hole is plugged.” Joké giggles.

  “Joké, check carbon dioxide levels. Are you getting CO2 narcosis?”

  “Naaah. It’s the thought of hole-plugging. Besides, I took my suit off.”

  “Why?”

  “I did a spacewalk… it doesn’t matter. There is one other thing.” She touches her head and the hand comes away bloody.

  “Go on.”

  “I might have a small skull fracture.”

  Joké loses consciousness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lagos Bridge: Awe, Beko

  Awe settles into the seat and takes a deep breath. He is brewing a headache and would rather be doing anything else. The iced tea he brought along stands on the table in front of him, untouched.

  “Connect IFC, Lagos,” he says.

  “Connected. Are you comfortable?”

  “Yes, thank you.” He knows the AI’s personality changes depending on whose IFC connects, but he finds her voice pleasant, lulling even. “I want to review the Ragtime service, please.”

  “Of course.”

  “What was the bridge path from Earth?”

  “Point of origin, Earth; then Daedalus, Crucial, Waikiki, Corazon, Brighton, Goldsmith, Oya, Harvest, Shango, Lagos. From Lagos to near-planet orbit on Bloodroot.”

  “Were there any complaints, cautions, notifications or sneezes from any of the other bridges?”

  “None.”

  “Not even Shango? They whine about everything.”

  “Not this time.”

  “Interesting. All right, show me the arrival.”

  “Do you want the raw data, or do you need visual accompaniment as well?”

  “Visuals, from the convergence. Panoptical view, please.”

  “Onset on my mark. Mark.”

  Awe steeples his hands.

  It starts in empty space – or, rather, space without human-made objects. Bridges are not permanent structures. A signal arrives from the nearest bridge – in this case, Shango – and Space Station Lagos bounces the signal to the Dyson swarm around the star.

  Awe observes eight of the Dyson elements break off, fully charged, and occupy the bridge zone. They form a crude circle and each forges links with the adjacent element. This takes hours but Lagos AI has sped it up for Awe.

  Once they have claimed relativistic space, the tunnel forms between Lagos and Shango. A communications satellite slips through first, as a test. When it arrives on the Lagos side, an all-clear signal is transmitted.

  The circle becomes opaque with light, and after five hours the starship Ragtime emerges. Lagos is its final hop. Awe thinks it’s ugly, with no streamlines. It looks like an insect, with the solar arrays looking like wings. A dragonfly, maybe. Awe has never seen an actual dragonfly, but photos and videos bring the picture home. He thinks the ships they build on Lagos are better-looking.

  “Lagos, Lagos, this is Ragtime. All systems nominal,” says the ship AI.

  “Ragtime, this is Space Station Lagos. How was your flight?”

  “Uneventful.”

  “And your cargo?”

  “Asleep, intact.”

  “Good to hear, Ragtime. Please transmit telemetry for comparison and power down for servicing.”

  “Will do, Lagos Bridge. See you on the other side.”

  Awe knows the interaction did not go like that and that Lagos dramatised it for his benefit. AIs talk to each other in binary and hexadecimal bursts of information over fractions of seconds.

  The Ragtime goes dark while a flock of robot ships converges on it. They replace fuel cells, repair the micrometeorite damage on the outer Whipple shielding of the hull, replace panels, replace stuffing, run integrity tests, check the air quality, look for any relativistic travel side effects, and they check the integrity of Omega Protocol for last-resort safety.

  There is one anomaly, but Awe chalks it up to instrument error. One of the passengers’ vital signs seems to read wakefulness, but a rescan shows all asleep.

  Four days later, the Ragtime is spanking new, charged up, ready to soldier on to the colony Bloodroot, a mere fortnight away.

  “Happy trails, Ragtime,” says Lagos.

  “Stay reliable, Lagos,” says Ragtime.

  The servicing-robot ships withdraw like a school of fish who spot a shark, and Ragtime fires engines, orients itself and heads for Bloodroot, ahead of schedule.

  The video stops.

  Awe rubs his chin.

  “Are you happy with what you saw?” says Lagos.

  “Yes, I am,” says Awe. “But I want to see it again.”

  Beko

  Secretary Beko is silent for the first few minutes, attending to documents; then she looks up, sharp, birdlike. “Well?”

  “It went like it’s supposed to, like clockwork. Nothing missed, no shortcuts taken, nothing damaged left unreplaced. The gate dismantled, Dyson elements returned to the solar swarm without attrition. All the drones and bots returned to base, accounted for, and returned to routine construction in the dry docks. The whole process left me thinking of the Philosopher’s Axe.”

  “What?”

  “You know the saying. You buy an axe, the handle breaks, you replace it, then years later the head gets damaged, so you replace that too. At that point, do you still have the original axe?”

  “Is this… meant to be funny or to provoke reflection o
n my part, Awe?”

  “I’m sorry, Madam Secretary. I misspoke.”

  She exhales heavily. “Send three ships to Bloodroot.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Where’s the old dodderer?”

  “He… ah… the governor went to the mines, Ma’am.”

  “Why? To do what?”

  “An inspection tour, Ma’am. He gets bored. You said to keep him out of your way. The mines are out of the way.”

  “Awe.”

  “Yes, Ma’am?”

  “Is he going to be talking to miners while out there?”

  “I—”

  “The moment after you leave this room, I’ll be speaking to the representatives of miners about their conditions. It’s delicate work. I don’t want Lawrence Biz fucking it up. Recall him immediately.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Except the Decisive is out of range of comms, which is impossible. There are deep-space relays between the space station and the mining belt. They have to have them for safety.

  Awe queries the governor’s IFC location. Not found. No joy looking for the Decisive’s beacon either.

  Where the blazes is the old man?

  Awe systematically queries the personnel of each mine and unless one of them is lying, the governor never went to the mines in the first place.

  You old goat, did you fuck me?

  Awe puts out a quiet alert using only the IFC hardware code. It won’t raise any alarms, but every ship AI, every scan-capable robot and Lagos herself will be on the lookout for him.

  Awe tries to locate Joké. She’s nowhere to be found either, but that’s not unusual. Lagos often records conflicts, exceptions and errors when it comes to her IFC location. Been like that since she was a child. It doesn’t mean anything.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  He updates the mission profile for the three ships on their way to the Ragtime: Look out for the governor. If you find him, bring him home. Alive.

  Shit.

  Awe calls his wife, Ibidun, to let her know he won’t be home. He settles in for a long night of waiting and sifting through data.