Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two

by John Meaney

  Two small triangles, above and below a larger triangle: the hub was done.

  The first hollow, spherical shell was a five-layer grouping, with varying numbers of cities at each level. From top to bottom, once the shell was complete, the layers were: on top, Kakujing by itself; then Sakharovgorod-Penrose-Pneumos-Bernersley-Neumannstadt forming the second layer down; with Franklin2-Hodgekinston-Yukawa-Darwin9-Melville-Newton-IrEinstein forming the central ‘ring’. Below that was Lahore2.0-Reynoldston-Gödelburg-Emelianenkogorod-Dennettminster; while the singular Cantorℵ (which everyone but lawyers called The Big Aleph) formed the lowest point.

  Twenty-eight cities in place; only eight hundred and ninety-nine (plus babies) to go.

  Five careful days later, after a flurry of final checking, a single message propagated through every corridor and hall, every private dwelling and public space:

  Conjunction achieved.

  The tunnel-surfers were the worst: kids with superb intuitive control of quickglass, chasing each other whooping through the crowds. They sailed just over other people’s heads, propelling themselves by flicking strands of quickglass, or whipped along centimetres below the ceilings, hanging from fast-flowing strips. Falls were rare but frequent enough to jeopardize the innocent.

  Roger saw one such fall – a teenage girl dropping as she failed to swing from one extruded handle to another – but Rhianna gestured, flinging up floor-tendrils to catch the girl and lower her feet-first. ‘Thanks,’ the girl called, forming a slideway that carried her along the mall floor to a clear area, where she embedded her fists and feet in the wall and caused it to carry her upwards once more. There were smiles among the thronging adults, which Roger took to mean that such sports were nothing new, evoking youthful memories.

  ‘It’s Conjunction,’ said Rhianna. ‘Everyone needs to go a little wild on occasion.’

  ‘Even so …’

  He was approximately his old self, and she was reacting as if he were the unchanged Roger. But they both knew he could dig deeper, and react faster and differently compared to a mere six standard days before.

  ‘Better inside,’ she said, ‘than out on the hull. That’s what the law clamps down on.’

  ‘Are they from Deltaville, do you think?’ Roger gestured at another group hurtling past overhead. ‘Or passing through from elsewhere?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Right now, there’s only one titanic city called Conjunction, and that’s it.’

  All of Molsin’s humanity in one massive place. There was no need to point out the strategic implications; Rhianna had been way ahead of him, declaring that this was the flashpoint if Helsen was about to do something.

  ‘I’ve got assets from other cities as well as Deltaville,’ she said now, ‘and they’re all spacing themselves out, passing through as much of Conjunction as they can.’

  Helsen had stolen an autodoc capable of altering her features and her DNA signature. None of Rhianna’s assets – for asset read agent – were likely to sense the darkness that warped Helsen and perhaps controlled her.

  ‘It’s impossible. Spotting Helsen, I mean.’

  ‘Not as much as you think.’ Rhianna pointed at his tu-ring. ‘You’ve a few little extras in there, haven’t you?’

  ‘Maybe.’ But keeping secrets from your director in the field, when they could affect operational effectiveness, was a no-no. Commodore Gould had suggested Roger was a natural; so perhaps he should act as if he were already an intelligence officer, and Rhianna was local-controlling him. ‘Meaning yes. I’ve a massive amount still to explore. As far as I can tell, Dad dumped a copy of everything he had into here.’

  ‘Good to know. There are some tricks available to us’ – she wobbled her hand, tu-ring in front of Roger’s face – ‘which you’ll learn. There’s a range of possible alterations to Helsen’s DNA, but not an infinite range, certainly not if she planned on avoiding a lengthy time in coma. Likewise the grosser physical work: she won’t have altered her limb length and gait, unless she was willing to compromise her ability to run and dodge.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Just because the cities don’t like to spy on their inhabitants’ – Rhianna’s smile momentarily showed innocent joy, mirroring the teenage girl earlier – ‘doesn’t mean they can’t. Quickglass is quickglass, and my people will make use of it.’

  If Dad’s work on Fulgor had included running a network of agents, he had never hinted at it. Roger wondered what psychological mastery was required to recruit someone and be certain that you were not betraying yourself to the authorities.

  ‘You could do your socialite thing again.’ Roger pointed at her functional clothing and practical hairstyle. ‘Get recognized, get on the newscasts with me standing beside you.’

  ‘When Helsen attacked before, she was expecting you to be a softer target, and she didn’t expect me at all. I don’t think the Judas goat thing will work a second time. She’s either going to carry on with her operation if there is one, or go deep into hiding.’

  ‘Marvellous. So is there any point in being here in Deltaville in particular?’

  Rhianna looked at him.

  ‘You want to go back to Barbour to see Leeja Rigelle?’

  ‘Er, no …’ He had not thought of Leeja for two days or more. ‘I didn’t realize you knew about her.’

  ‘Backtracking your details wasn’t hard,’ said Rhianna. ‘Pity Helsen’s proving less–Oh, hello. It’s the new observers.’ She blinked as her smartlenses flickered. ‘We have three possible sightings from urban surveillance. In three different cities.’

  The lenses cleared.

  ‘Let’s have nice a cup of daistral,’ she said.

  It was not what he expected, but it made sense: inside a cocoon of quickglass – privacy booth, less noticeable than usual, this being a festive occasion – Rhianna brought up a sequence of real-holo images, tiny dots glowing inside transparent city-representations. She had been dumping new observer-agents in place, with wider parameters. A sheaf of sighting possibilities had arrived before Rhianna shut off all outside comms, indicating twenty-three possible locations, each annotated in subsidiary holovolumes. Some were multiple sightings of the same individual; but there were seven different people involved, and potentially none of them was Helsen: none of the probabilities quite reached seventy per cent.

  Still, it was new data.

  ‘That’s probabilities based on our expanded search profile,’ said Rhianna. ‘Which is purely physical: gait, DNA, so forth. If I filter that through tactical analysis, we might get a narrower– There.’

  Five locations remained.

  ‘Using what criteria?’ asked Roger.

  ‘Destructive potential,’ said Rhianna, ‘based on current physical position within Conjunction or on normal cultural influence. Think highly connected networks: there’s a small number of cities which, if they undergo some catastrophe, would affect a large number of others.’

  ‘What kind of catastrophe?’

  ‘Any kind. Disease, you name it.’

  But of course she must be thinking of the Fulgor Anomaly, and the possibility that Helsen could create another such abomination here, through some mechanism neither of them had thought of.

  ‘So how do we narrow it down?’

  Information sprang up all around him. History and news related to the likely locations.

  ‘Read everything,’ she said. ‘Run any inference engines you can construct, and remember to use the one that’s right behind your eyes.’

  From the table, daistral and sandwiches rose up.

  ‘Expect it to take time,’ she added.

  Which was tough advice, given the incoming tide of urgency and fear, and the possibility that another world might die.

  Afterwards, it was difficult to work out which of them had spotted it. For sure it was Roger’s unconscious flinch that formed the immediate trigger; but if Rhianna had not noticed his reaction then he might not have followed up the topic of FULGOR SURVIVORS’ REUNION, and
seen what they did.

  Capturing a real time view, they swung in on a holo banner over rows of banquet-laden tables:

  <– Survivors of Fulgor: WELCOME –>

  Rhianna shook her head as they moved the viewpoint, while a dozen more holovolumes showed results from scanning constructs coursing through the quickglass systems: constructs locally injected by one of her agents. Reading Roger’s body language before he could speak, she directed a zoom-in to see a young woman greeting other survivors, looking shell-shocked rather than weeping. All sorts of reactions were on display.

  ‘That’s Alisha,’ said Roger.

  ‘All right.’ Rhianna directed the viewpoint to spin away. ‘Let’s see if we can find—’

  They did not see the first one: the phenomenon had already begun to manifest when they spotted it.

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Roger tried to point. ‘It’s—’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ Everything swung then sharpened. ‘Son of a bitch.’

  Blue glows were extending from one pair of eyes to another, and another and another: a network, expanding person by person as others stumbled back, beginning to notice. Soon there would be a stampede.

  ‘Anomaly,’ he said.

  Alisha was there. Alisha who no longer knew him. He had rescued her once but this time it was impossible.

  ‘Dubrovnik,’ said Rhianna. ‘Right in the fucking centre, and wouldn’t you know it.’

  Deltaville was six layers out. There was no way to get there in the next few seconds; and nothing that could be done to fight a second Anomaly, any more than they had the first: victory had consisted in getting clear.

  ‘We have to sound an evacuation,’ said Roger. ‘There’s no other way. Break up the Conjunction and spread the cities out.’

  If Rhianna could subvert urban systems, perhaps she could broadcast an official-looking—

  ‘That’s not an Anomaly,’ said Rhianna.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The body language is all wrong. Listen to me.’ She pointed, hand inside the image. ‘I’ve seen the footage from Fulgor: real time external views from the ships, and surveillance data they remotely captured. I’ve pored over the victims’ behaviour and this isn’t it.’

  Those unaffected were beginning their panicked escape: knots of people banging into each other, here and there a head disappearing as someone fell beneath rushing feet.

  Rhianna shut the holos down.

  ‘These victims look,’ she said, ‘as if they’re in a trance.’

  ‘Helsen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It rushed past him on every side, the quickglass. His arms were clamped against his ribs, fingers down as if at attention, legs squeezed together and toes pointed, and from someone else’s viewpoint he must have looked like a torpedo speeding through a fluid medium; but for him it was a hellride, his body banged and shaken, tearing through city-stuff – floor/ceiling/wall, it made no difference; and perhaps conjoining spars – he thought he had left Deltaville behind but there was no way to tell.

  He could not see Rhianna, keeping pace alongside; could not have said how he knew she was there.

  We have to go faster.

  As if Rhianna knew his thought, the vibration intensified, acceleration heightening as the world roared past in torrential flow.

  Torpedo, heading for the fight.

  Once inside the apartment, Jed looked around, liking the place – liking the woman too, though she was older than him, therefore older again compared to Roger.

  ‘He’s not been here for a few days,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry. They gave me this as Roger’s official address. Known address, I mean.’

  It had taken six days of bureaucratic negotiation to get this far; and he reckoned he was lucky it had only taken that long, given the privacy-obsessed culture. Although, on a world the size of Molsin, you would have thought there would be a Pilots’ Sanctuary to provide assistance – or if not, at least undercover spooks in place, people that Max Gould could have given him the means to get in touch with. Perhaps it had just slipped everyone’s mind – that weird memory flake, popping into existence above the conference table, had stirred everything up.

  Or it might be that there were spooks on Molsin, but they worked for Schenck and his mob: the ones that had been defeated in Labyrinth, but what about the realspace worlds? For all Jed knew, every Pilot spook in realspace might be acting for the enemy, knowingly or not.

  Best to keep things low-key and solo, then.

  ‘—daistral?’ she was saying.

  ‘Er, no thanks, Ms Rigelle. I don’t suppose you know where Roger is now, or even better, how to contact him?’

  His comms code did not function, possibly because Conjunction changed everything, nearly a thousand cities merging their comms systems while shutting out the rest. Either that, or Roger was deliberately out of contact.

  ‘He was on Deltaville, even before Conjunction, because he—’

  Soft redness flickered through walls, floor and ceiling, then again.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Jed.

  A deep moan began to sound: everything vibrating all around.

  ‘General alarm. We’re taught about it school, but I’ve never—’ She gestured a holo into being. It showed an image of people in a crowd, their eyes joined by a criss-crossed web of glowing blue light. ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’ Jed grabbed her. ‘With me, now. Leave everything.’

  Her eyes sparkled with tears and fright.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Fucking, fucking shit,’ said Jed.

  SIXTY-SIX

  LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

  It glowed above Max’s flowmetal desk – newly extruded in his new office – watched by Pavel, Clayton, Clara with a rebuild-cast large and clunky around her shoulder, and an addition to their inner circle: white-haired Kelvin Stanier, Head of Records and older than the cosmos, who not only remembered more than the combined memories of everyone else present, but assumed the right to criticize Max Gould as though he were a schoolboy. Right now, riding high on a wave of triumph – although the countercoup’s nature and extent were unknown to most of Labyrinth: political circles being rife with waves of disinformation planted by Max’s senior officers, while Pilots at large knew nothing – Max needed someone like Kelvin to keep him on track. Some of the service’s officers, especially the younger ones, looked at Max with new-minted awe. Kelvin would have none of that, which meant if Max made a mistake, there would be at least one adviser to tell him so.

  Pavel did raise a concern which they would have to return to: what to do with the realspace intelligence networks. Between Max’s long-term counter-surveillance and Pavel’s own operations, there were some agents in place known to be compromised. But they were aware also, from the mass debriefing that was already underway, that the majority of Schenck’s people knew nothing of the darkness; if they thought anything about the internal struggle for power, it had simply been that: the extension of politics by covert means, therefore business as usual.

  ‘This is clearly long term.’ Pavel gestured at the holo. ‘I mean, think of the timescales we know about. It’s not like we need to solve the problem before lunch.’

  Kelvin, his lined face unreadable, gave a slow headshake that could have meant anything; but they already knew his views: that semantics betrayed their collective parochialism.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘galaxy’ and ‘universe’ had been synonyms, though within decades that had changed. What remained constant for nearly six centuries afterwards was that the galaxy containing Earth remained simply ‘the galaxy’ while others gained names and M-numbers. It said something not just about realspace humanity’s perspective, but also that of the Pilots who thought they held themselves apart by living here in Labyrinth.

  ‘Should we have explored more?’ said Max, gesturing at the holo. ‘As a species, I mean.’

  ‘A matter of scale,’ answered Pavel. ‘Like I said.
We’re doing all right.’

  But to Max’s eyes, the image denied that proposition. The faint needle of light from the galactic centre, pointing not just to the spiral arm containing Earth, but to Earth precisely; and continuing that line, the observation – deciphered from the centuries-old memory flake dropped into their collective lap – of a mystery beyond a cosmic void, something lined up.

  ‘No, I want to follow this up.’ Max looked at Kelvin. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Suicide missions.’

  ‘What?’ Clayton looked at them both. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘A series of observation flights,’ said Max. ‘I want to set distance intervals of a hundred-and-fifty million lightyears. The first to appear here’ – he pointed on the notional line – ‘the next here, and so on.’

  The steps were huge, equal to the galactic radius, each destination farther out from the galactic core.

  ‘So they’re very long observation flights,’ said Pavel. ‘What’s suicidal about that?’

  ‘Because’ – Max slid his finger along the line – ‘at some point, one of the observers is going to meet something nasty coming the other way.’

  ‘And that Pilot,’ said Kelvin, in case anyone failed to grasp the point, ‘won’t come back. So I’ll have someone else’s identity to expunge from Records.’

  ‘Or not.’ Max looked at him. ‘Things have changed. Any officer who falls, deserves to be honoured.’

  Clara shrugged her good shoulder.

  ‘If the timescales are as Pavel says, then by the time … it … arrives, won’t Earth have rotated far away from your pretty line here?’

  Max looked at them, one by one, as though deciding what they were up to hearing.