Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two

by John Meaney

  Call it another message from Grandma.

  So what do I do?

  Think about it alone, was the best answer he had for now.

  And Maria?

  No. Alone meant alone.

  ‘I know it’s friggin’ early,’ said Arne, ‘but … Union Bar, anyone?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jim.

  Even Fatima nodded.

  ‘Can’t do it,’ said Lucas. ‘Sorry. Got my students to look after.’

  He watched as they all left.

  Scared scared scared.

  Even alone, he did not dare take the memory flake out of his pocket to look at.

  FORTY-FIVE

  MOLSIN, 2603 AD

  Jed-and-ship burst into realspace, then decelerated, beginning a spiral trajectory around the yellow-orange gas giant. As Jed disengaged from ship-rapport, he opened up comms. In a moment, he was linked to City Customs in the sky-city of Barbour; and the face that appeared in the holo was familiar.

  ‘Bodkin Travers,’ Jed said. ‘Bod, it’s Jed Goran here.’

  ‘I remember you, of course, sir. But I’m a little surprised. There’s been no notification of– Well, you know. Still’ – with a nose-tapping gesture – ‘there’s no problem here if someone needs to slide in and out under the old QT.’

  ‘The embargo’s not revoked. Sorry. But I’m not breaking it, either. Special dispensation from the powers that be.’

  ‘Er, right.’

  The political powers that Bodkin Travers recognized had nothing to with an Admiralty or mu-space city-world that he had never heard of.

  ‘Look,’ said Jed. ‘The embargo … It’s for your own good.’ With a grin: ‘I always hated it when my mum said that.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ said Bod. ‘So look, have you got another shit-load – er, shipload – of refugees? I’ll have to warn the—’

  ‘Just me, coming to visit.’

  ‘Right. I’ll warm you up a daistral, shall I?’

  ‘We’ll drink one together. Give me an hour.’

  ‘Looking forward to that, Pilot.’

  ‘Me too, Bod.’

  Roger woke up in Rhianna Chiang’s bed. Alone, in a sumptuous room that was part of an extended, luxurious suite, still on Deltaville. Guest quarters, not her home. And he had slept alone, he was sure of it.

  So how do I know it’s her place?

  Maybe it was the scent, that exotic fragrance she wore. Lately, he had been so much more attuned to smells; whether that was due to Molsin’s atmosphere or some chemical effect of the sky-city quickglass all around, he could not be sure. Yesterday he had, he had—

  He looked at his hands, but there was no blood.

  Shaking, he rolled naked from the bed, accustomed to the easy movement – complex physical exercise had always been part of his life: the whole-body yoga/dance/martial art routines that brought suppleness and coordination to the forefront – but today there was something more: the prowling of a fighter scanning his surroundings, alert and ready to kick off.

  I don’t remember killing him.

  His memory was stroboscopic, gestalt flashes of struggle against a backdrop of chaotic movement; but in the aftermath, no longer berserk, he had looked down on the bloody, shattered corpse of Greg Ranulph, along with the Deltaville law officers he had knocked down, and that was clear in his mind’s eye. Blood-rage had descended on him, and then it was gone.

  ‘They won’t be pressing charges.’ Rhianna’s voice, but he had sensed her a half-second before the quickglass melted open. ‘If that’s what was making you frown.’

  ‘Right.’

  He felt lean and predatory, and his nakedness was no worry.

  Get a grip.

  Ignoring Rhianna, he found his jumpsuit and pulled it on. As the clothing reconfigured, an all-over rippling sensation indicated it was cleaning him as well itself. A pine scent that he normally would not have noticed, rose from his collar.

  ‘While you slept,’ Rhianna said, ‘I tried using hypnotic techniques to relax you more deeply, and work on the trauma and guilt.’

  ‘I do feel OK about Ranulph.’

  ‘But that’s not my doing, that’s the point. There was nothing much to work on.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The man’s face had been a reddened mess.

  ‘I’m a little surprised by the shift in your behaviour patterns, Roger. But it made for one hell of an adaptation to the circumstances.’

  Roger blinked, then felt his eyes narrow, aggression beginning to rise.

  ‘He killed millions by creating the Anomaly.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Rhianna, ‘he got off lightly. I’d have gone for elongated torture. Preferably after interrogation, but that’s not a criticism of you. He was trying to kill us, and you used deadly force in response. Totally appropriate, also legal.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He had become a killer but not a criminal. There was no joy in it, but nor was there guilt. Because he had a strong, integrated personality that accepted necessity? It would be nice to think so. He was still Roger Blackstone, but everything was different, and he felt strong enough to deal with it.

  ‘On Fulgor,’ he said, ‘Rafaella Stargonier – look you know the details of what happened there, right?’

  ‘I don’t know about details, but I know she was the seed. Merged with other minds through the virtual environment there. Skein, is it? Formed a group mind, a gestalt, obviously inhuman.’

  ‘Only Luculenti used Skein in full, so she attacked them first. But she had Zajinet tech in reserve. Eventually she – well, by now she was it, the Anomaly – it was able to start joining its global mind to the ordinary Fulgidi, by creating shortcut links through the Calabi-Yau dimensions. Creating neural connections as if all their brains were physically wired together.’

  ‘Perhaps my briefing was a little more detailed,’ said Rhianna. ‘Our analysts looked at how Skein worked – we had agents in place on Fulgor since its beginning, and by the way I knew your father – and did you know the story of Rafael de la Vega?’

  ‘Er … You knew Dad?’

  ‘Not well. He lectured a couple of times at Tangleknot when I was training.’

  ‘Tangleknot?’

  ‘The intelligence service academy in Labyrinth.’ Rhianna gestured at the quickglass walls. ‘We’re surveillance-free in here, by the way. This de la Vega guy was a rogue Luculentus, a psychopath, and he attacked his fellow Luculenti through Skein, and also copied torn neural patterns from the buried plexcores of dead people.’

  Roger knew enough neuroscience to understand that thought is holistic, mental state emerging from the interplay of neural-clique activation across the brain – or brain-and-plexcores as a single unit.

  ‘So when did this happen? I grew up there and I never heard of it.’

  ‘A hundred years ago, mean geodesic. It wasn’t like the Anomaly, not quite. De la Vega’s so-called vampire code performed copying based on destructive quantum measurement: he copied his victims’ thoughts and memories into himself, while destroying the originals. It was fatal to the victims.’

  Dad had never mentioned this, but why would he? He might not even have known the story. Clearly the intelligence analysts had gone back to their archives to make sense of the Fulgor Catastrophe. Perhaps they understood far more than he did; perhaps being caught up in events was not the best way to interpret what happened.

  ‘How many victims?’ he said.

  ‘That I can’t remember,’ said Rhianna. ‘It was definitely dozens at least. His mind must have started to shift into nonhuman cognition, but unlike the Anomaly, we’re talking about a single human body, de la Vega’s. A body linked to external plexcores – too much hardware to fit inside his body, you see. Pilots based in Sanctuary were involved in the peacekeeper operation that took de la Vega down, so the old reports are full of detail.’

  Roger rubbed his face. His bladder was full, and he needed a cup of daistral: output and input to start the day. But he also needed to unders
tand why Rhianna was telling him this. Dad would have called it a background briefing.

  ‘Sanctuary.’ Roger tightened his bladder muscles. ‘That’s where Jed Goran was when the whole thing began this time.’

  ‘And all he could do was get clear, luckily with you on board. So the point is, a hundred years ago, the Luculenti had these plexcores inside themselves, each the size of a large daistral mug, you know?’ She gestured. ‘This big.’

  Roger stopped himself groaning.

  ‘Give me a moment.’

  He gestured for an opening in the wall, the formation of a bathroom-facility alcove, and went inside, the quickglass sealing up as he was still stepping through. Peeing in his clothes would have been possible – smartfabric lived up to its name – but not without Rhianna noticing. Relieved, he used smartgel to cleanse face, hands and hair. Feeling human, he went back out into the bedchamber.

  An extruded table was laden with daistral and pastries, and two chairs were in place, with Rhianna already seated.

  ‘Breakfast.’ She gestured. ‘Eat.’

  ‘You’re a genius.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’ She waited while he took his first sip of daistral and began to eat, then: ‘Plexcores, we were talking about. Large things, bigger and heavier than the modern plexnodes. So de la Vega, the more he had in his array – outside his body, remember – the more he was affected by lightspeed delays fragmenting his holistic thoughts.’

  Roger pushed in a half-eaten mouthful.

  ‘You mean – sorry – he used Zajinet tech to get rid of the delays.’

  ‘Well done, except that he actually used our tech. Mu-space relays of the kind we don’t let realspace folk have access to, not these days.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Perhaps this was not such an obscure story after all, not for educated Pilots, if it had caused a policy shift.

  ‘But that is exactly why Rafaella Stargonier was after Zajinet technology. Realspace hyperdimensions or mu-space, either one will do to shorten lightpaths. Incidentally, our analysts think there’s an eighty per cent probability that the Fulgor authorities had a captive Zajinet in the research institute you visited, and a ninety-seven per cent probability that there was such a captive somewhere on the planet.’

  ‘A prisoner?’

  ‘They believe that your benign Fulgidi government institutions were involved in torturing a Zajinet over a period of two decades to extract its knowledge and capabilities. That’s based partly on intelligence supplied by your father. They also think the Stargonier woman succeeded where the Fulgidi failed.’

  It occurred to Roger that Rhianna must be a senior officer to have access to so much classified information.

  ‘And from your own report, Roger,’ she continued, ‘it was this Helsen woman who manoeuvred Stargonier into thinking about Calabi-Yau manifolds. Using a friend of yours to convey the suggestion.’

  ‘Alisha, yes.’ He put down the food. ‘She … You know what happened to her?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But the question now is’ – Rhianna appeared to become more relaxed than ever – ‘what use Zajinets would be here on Molsin, given that there’s no Skein and no Luculenta Stargonier to subvert.’

  ‘Maybe Helsen just wants to be able to teleport,’ he said.

  Not much of an answer. He had not thought about the bitch’s intentions: he simply wanted to kill her.

  Steady on.

  Understanding an enemy was a prelude to destroying them. That made sense.

  ‘You think Helsen and Ranulph were trying to capture the three Zajinets?’ he added. ‘It looked like they were trying to kill us all.’

  ‘They did something to Tannier that made him want to kill you specifically. It’s not hypnosis as such, more like the hypnosis of melodramas than real trancework. You can get someone to do things they normally wouldn’t, but you do it by deep unconscious association, subliminal operant conditioning, that kind of stuff. More Pavlov than Mesmer, if you know your psych history.’

  Roger wondered how she knew so much about mind-bending. Perhaps there were aspects to intelligence work that Dad had never chosen to mention.

  ‘Tannier’s going to be all right, by the way,’ she added.

  ‘Oh. I … Oh.’

  ‘We won’t tell him you forgot to ask. So, that Pavlov. He was a sick son of a bitch, did you know? Surgically operated on children, attached glass vials to their faces, so that when he stimulated the unconsciously installed saliva response, he could measure the volume of generated saliva.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘My doctoral thesis was called Torture, Sadism and the Birth of Neuroscience. And then’ – she gestured at herself – ‘I became a Barbour socialite and fashion icon. Isn’t life strange?’

  ‘Is this some psych manipulation thing you’re doing on me now?’

  Rhianna smiled.

  ‘Always,’ she said. ‘Do you feel better for having had breakfast?’

  He understood enough basic psych to be sensitive to her intonation, feel better having the emphasis of a covert command.

  ‘I don’t feel awful, anyhow.’

  Rhianna’s laugh sparkled, echoing from the quickglass surroundings.

  ‘I think you’d make a fine intelligence officer, Roger.’

  ‘I’m no longer sure that’s a compliment.’

  ‘Maybe it isn’t. OK, last thing, almost: the Zajinets have gone. I talked to them after yesterday’s events, and they summoned their ship – one vessel for all three of them – and disappeared. Before they went, they mentioned the darkness more than once, but not in any way that made much sense. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Plus I have my own bias, given that my uncle died fighting those bastards.’ She presumably meant in one of the occasional violent incidents that had broken out over the centuries without ever escalating into war. ‘But the Zajinets also asked whether we were staying, you and me, meaning Pilots. When I said yes, they said we should flee as well. That part was clear.’

  ‘They’re afraid of Helsen.’

  ‘And they see her the same way you do, Roger Blackstone. Infested with this darkness, and they even use the same word. So perhaps you’re not delusional after all.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Not that thinking like a Zajinet is anything to be proud of. Are you done?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘With breakfast. Are you finished?’

  ‘Oh. Sure.’

  She gestured and the table melted back into the floor, the crockery dissolving, organic leftovers digested by the quickglass.

  ‘Final item you need to know,’ she said. ‘If Helsen’s goal is to create another Anomaly, and if she has the means to do it, Zajinet-inspired or otherwise, then we have ten days to find her. You know about Conjunction, right? I mean, I gather you were shacked up with an older lover in Barbour. No better way to get to grips with local culture, is there?’

  Roger looked at her, feeling not the slightest hint of blushing.

  ‘There was quite a lot of conjoining going on,’ he said. ‘I was too busy to pick up trivia.’

  Rhianna gave a slow nod.

  ‘Noted. But you surely knew that sky-cities are always on the move, and that Deltaville’s giving birth to D-2 would normally be attended by more than just Barbour.’

  ‘Because all the cities are moving to this Conjunction, which is …?’

  ‘Exactly what it sounds like.’

  ‘Of course.’ He clasped his hands, interweaving his fingers as he used to do when Dad was thrashing him at chess or go. ‘Every city in Molsin’s skies coming together in one spot. Cultural interchange. Very natural.’

  ‘Happens every four standard years.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘Right. I don’t think the authorities quite appreciate what Helsen might do, or don’t believe what we’re telling them. The cities are far too independent of each other for e
ffective action anyhow, despite Conjunction. At best we can hope they’ll give us the nod if surveillance spots her, and then I’ll set you loose.’

  Roger stared at her.

  ‘Interesting wording,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re dying to kill Helsen, aren’t you?’

  So it was not an illusion: he had changed, and she saw it too.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I think you should.’

  FORTY-SIX

  EARTH, 1942 AD

  Gavriela spent four days in Washington amid an absence of skyscrapers, talking to codebreakers working on Japanese naval ciphers. Then it was back to Princeton via train, thanks to Payne, where a student from the Institute of Advanced Studies met her at the station, rode with her in the taxi to Fine Hall where she left her bag, and walked with her to Nassau Street. They were in time to see two gentlemen perambulating towards them, one with the mane of white hair and farmer’s moustache, looking as if he were strolling through his olive orchard.

  ‘There they are, ma’am. You want I should introduce you?’

  ‘No need, thank you. The professor and I are old friends.’

  ‘You know Professor Einstein?’

  Morning sickness and the train ride had kept her irritated, deprived of sleep.

  ‘Why else would they have asked you to take me here?’

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘I’m not familiar with Princeton, that’s all.’

  ‘Then, um … Do you want me to wait for you?’

  He was gawky, the young man, embarrassed to have annoyed her, and uncomfortable in the proximity of the great men approaching. Gavriela realized she was behaving badly, and softened her voice.

  ‘You’ve been kind,’ she said, ‘but there’s no need.’

  ‘Um … OK.’

  After the young man left, she waited, trying to force away the gritty, sleep-deprived feeling behind her eyes.

  ‘Gavi.’ Another familiarity, as if they had known each other for years. Einstein kissed her cheek, then continued in German: ‘Kurt, allow me to make introductions. Herr Professor Gödel, meet Fräulein Doktor Wolf.’