She had sensed a mind.
‘We touched something,’ she told Remontoire. ‘Or rather something touched us. It reached down the corridor and grazed against our minds, coming through at the same time as we received the instructions.’
‘And that was the evil thing?’
I can’t think of any other way to describe it. Merely encountering it, merely sharing its thoughts for an instant, drove most of us insane, or left us dead.‘ She looked at their reflections in the glass wall. ’But I survived.‘
‘You were lucky.’
‘No. It wasn’t luck. Not entirely. Just that I recognised the thing, so the shock of encountering it wasn’t so absolute. And because it recognised me, too. It withdrew as soon it touched my mind, and concentrated on the others.’
‘What was it?’ Remontoire asked. ‘If you recognised it…’
‘I wish I hadn’t. I’ve had to live with that moment of recognition ever since, and it hasn’t been easy.’
‘So what was it?’ he persisted.
‘I think it was Galiana,’ Felka said. ‘I think it was her mind.’
‘In the future?’
‘In a future. Not ours, or at least not precisely.’
Remontoire smiled uneasily. ‘Galiana’s dead. We both know that. How could her mind have spoken to you from the future, even if it was a slightly different one from ours? It can’t have been that different.’
‘I don’t know. I wonder. And I keep wondering how she became like that.’
‘And that’s why you left?’
‘You’d have done the same thing.’ Felka watched the mouse take a wrong turning; not the one she had hoped it would take. ‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you? You feel that I betrayed her.’
‘Irrespective of what you’ve just told me, yes. I suppose I do.’ His tone had softened.
‘I don’t blame you. But I had to do it, Remontoire. I had to do it once. I don’t regret that at all, even though I wish I hadn’t learned what I did.’
Remontoire whispered, ‘And Clavain… does he know any of this?’
‘Of course not. It would kill him.’
There was a rap of knuckle against wood. Clavain pushed his way into the space, glancing at the maze before speaking. ‘Talking about me behind my back again, are you?’
‘Actually, we weren’t really talking about you at all,’ Felka said.
‘That’s a disappointment.’
‘Have some tea, Clavain. It should still be drinkable.’
Clavain took the bulb she offered him. ‘Is there anything you want to share with me about what happened in the Closed Council meeting?’
‘We can’t discuss specifics,’ Remontoire said. ‘All I can say is that there is considerable pressure for you to join. Some of that pressure comes from Con-joiners who feel that your loyalty to the Mother Nest will always be questionable until you come in from the cold.’
‘They’ve got a bloody cheek.’
Remontoire and Felka exchanged glances. ‘Perhaps,’ Remontoire said. ‘There are also those — your allies, I suppose — who feel that you have more than demonstrated your loyalty over the years.’
‘That’s more like it.’
‘But they’d also like you in the Closed Council,’ Felka said. ‘The way they see it, once you’re in the Council, you won’t be able to go around putting yourself in dangerous situations. They view it as a way of safeguarding a valuable asset.’
Clavain scratched his beard. ‘So what you’re saying is 1 can’t win either way, is that it?’
‘There’s a minority that would be quite happy to see you remain out of the Closed Council,’ Remontoire said. ‘Some are your staunchest allies. Some, however, think that letting you continue to play soldier is the easiest way to get you killed.’
‘Nice to know I’m appreciated. And what do you two think?’
Remontoire spoke softly. ‘The Closed Council needs you, Clavain. Now more than ever.’
Something unspoken passed between them then, Felka sensed. It was not neural communication but something far older, something that could only be understood by friends who had known and trusted each other for a very long time.
Clavain nodded gravely and then looked at Felka.
‘You know my position,’ she said. ‘I’ve known you and Remontoire since my childhood on Mars. You were there for me, Clavain. You went back into Galiana’s nest and saved me when she said it was hopeless. You never gave up on me, through all the years that followed. You made me into something other than what I was. You made me into a person.’
‘And now?’
‘Galiana isn’t here,’ she said. ‘That’s one less link to my past, Clavain. I don’t think I could stand to lose another.’
In a repair berth on the rim of Carousel New Copenhagen, in the outer habitat lane of the circum-Yellowstone Rust Belt, Xavier Liu was having considerable difficulty with monkeys. The shop steward, who was not a monkey at all but an enhanced orang-utan, had pulled all of Xavier’s squirrel monkeys out of the workshop at short notice. It was not Xavier’s fault — his own labour relations had always been good — but the orang-utan had ordered the workers to down tools in sympathy with a party of striking colobus monkeys halfway around the rim. As far as Xavier could tell, the dispute had something to do with lemurs who were working at below-union rates and thereby taking work away from higher primates.
It was the sort of thing that might have been mildly interesting, even amusing, had it not impacted his latest job. But, Xavier reflected, it very much came with the territory. If he did not like working with monkeys, or apes, or prosimians, or even the occasional group of pygmy sloths, he should not have chosen to set up business in Carousel New Copenhagen.
The outer habitat lane was a bristling grey torus spinning within the Rust Belt, the ramshackle procession of habitats and the gutted remains of habitats that, despite all that had happened, still orbited Yellowstone. Habitats came in all shapes and sizes even before they began to suffer age, sabotage and collision. Some were enormous air-filled cylinders or spheres, adorned with mirrors and delicate gold sunshades. Others had been constructed on small asteroids or comet fragments, eased into orbit around Yellowstone by armies of Skyjacks. Sometimes the habitats wormed deep within these solid foundations, transforming their rocky hearts into a confusion of vertiginous plazas and air-filled public spaces. Others were built mainly on the surface, for ease of access to and from local space. These domed low-grav communities were clumped together like frogspawn, shot through with the iridescent green and blue of miniature biomes. Typically, the domes showed evidence of hasty repair work: scars and spider webs of emergency epoxy sealant or foam-diamond. Some had not been resealed, and what lay within was dark and lifeless, like the ashes of a fire.
Other habitats conformed to less pragmatic designs. There were wild spirals and helices, like blown glass or nautilus shells. There were enormous concatenations of spheres and tubes resembling organic molecules. There were habitats that reshaped themselves continually, slow symphonic movements of pure architecture. There were others that had clung to an outmoded design through stubborn centuries, resisting all innovation and frippery. A few others had cloaked themselves in fogs of pulverised matter, concealing their true design.
Then there were the derelicts. Some had been evacuated during the plague and had suffered no major catastrophes afterwards, but the majority had been struck by collision fragments from other habitats that had already crashed and burned. A few had been scuttled, blown apart by nuclear charges; not much remained of those. Some had been reclaimed and re-fitted during the years of reconstruction. A few were still held by aggressive squatters, despite the best efforts of the Ferrisville Convention to evict them.
Carousel New Copenhagen had weathered the plague years more successfully than some, but it had not come through totally unscathed. In the current era it was a single fat ring, rotating slowly. The rim of the ring was a kilometre wide. Seen from a distance, it wa
s a festering blur of intricate structures, as if a strip of industrial cityscape had been wound on the outside of a wheel. Closer, it resolved into a coral-like mass of gantries and cranes and docking bays, service towers and recessed parking bays, spindly latticework exfoliating into vacuum, studded with a million stuttering lights of welding torches, advertising slogans and winking landing beacons. Arriving and departing ships, even in wartime, formed a haze of insect motion around the rim. Traffic management around Copenhagen was a headache.
At one time the wheel had rotated at twice its current rate: sufficient to generate a gee of centrifugal gravity at the rim. Ships had docked in the de-spun hub, still in free fall. Then, at the height of the plague, when the former Glitter Band was being downgraded to the Rust Belt, a rogue chunk of another habitat had taken out the entire central hub. The rim had been left spinning alone, spokeless.
There had been deaths, inevitably, many hundreds of them. Emergency ships had been parked where the hub had been, loading evacuees to ferry down to Chasm City. The precision of the impact had looked suspicious, but subsequent examination showed that it had been caused by exceptional bad luck.
Yet Copenhagen had survived. The carousel was an old one and not especially reliant on the microscopic technologies that the plague had subverted. For the millions who lived within it, life continued almost as it had before. With no easy location for new ships to dock, evacuation was painstaking at best. By the time the plague’s worst months were over, Copenhagen was still mostly inhabited. The citizenry had kept their carousel running where others had been abandoned to the care of faltering machines. They had steered it out of the way of further collisions and taken ruthless measures to stamp out plague outbreaks within their own habitats. Barring the odd subsequent accident — like the time Lyle Merrick had slammed a chemical-drive freighter into the rim, gouging the crater that the tourist ghouls still came to drool over — the carousel had survived major catastrophe pretty much intact.
In the years of the reconstruction, the carousel had tried time and again to raise the funds for rebuilding the central hub. They had never succeeded. The merchants and ship owners complained that they were losing commerce because it was so hard to land on the moving rim. But the citizenry refused to allow the wheel to be spun-down, since they had grown accustomed to gravity. Eventually they reached a compromise that pleased neither side. The spin rate was sapped by fifty per cent, dropping rim gravity by one-half. It was still tricky to berth a ship, but not quite as tricky as it had been before. Besides, the citizenry argued, departing ships were given a free kick by the carousel, flung away at a tangent; they shouldn’t complain. The pilots were not impressed. They pointed out that they had already burned the fuel that would have given them that kick during the approach itself.
But the unusual arrangement turned out to have strange benefits. During the occasionally lawless years that followed, their carousel was immune to most kinds of piracy. Squatters went elsewhere. And some pilots deliberately berthed their ships on Copenhagen’s rim because they preferred to make certain repairs under gravity, rather than in the usual free-fall docks that the other habitats offered. Things had even begun to perk up before the outbreak of war. Tentative scaffolding pointed inwards from the wheel, hinting at the spokes that would come later, followed by a new hub.
There were thousands of dry-docks on the rim. They came in many sizes and shapes, to accommodate all major classes of in-system ship. They were mostly recessed back into the rim, with the lower side open to space. Ships had to be eased up into a dock, usually aided by robot tug, before being anchored securely into place with heavy-duty docking clamps. Anything not anchored fell back out into space, usually for good. It made working on berthed ships interesting, and it was work that required a head for heights; but there were always takers.
The ship that Xavier Liu was working on, alone now that his monkeys had gone on strike, was not one he had serviced before, but he had worked on many of the same basic type. She was a Rust Belt runner; a small semi-automated cargo hauler designed to nip between habitats. Her hull was a skeletal frame on to which many storage pods could be hung like Christmas-tree ornaments. The hauler had been running between the Swift-Augustine cylinder and a carousel controlled by the House of Correction, a shadowy firm that specialised in the discreet reversal of cosmetic surgical procedures.
There were passengers aboard the hauler, each packed into a single customised storage pod. When the hauler had detected a technical fault in its navigation system it had located the nearest carousel capable of offering immediate repairs, and had made an offer of work. Xavier’s firm had returned a competitive bid, and the hauler had steered towards Copenhagen. Xavier had made sure there were robot tugs to assist the hauler towards its berth, and was now clambering around the frame of the ship, adhesive patches on his soles and palms gripping him to ticking cold metal. Tools of varying complexity hung from his spacesuit belt, and a compad of recent vintage gripped his left sleeve. Periodically he spooled out a line and plugged it into a data port in the hauler’s chassis, biting his tongue as he made sense of the numbers.
He knew that the fault in the nav system, whatever it was, would turn out to be relatively simple to fix. Once you found the fault, it was usually just a matter of ordering a replacement component from stores; a monkey would normally have brought it to him within a few minutes. The trouble was he had been climbing around this hauler for forty-five minutes, and the precise source of the error was still eluding him.
This was a problem, since the terms of the bid guaranteed that he would have the hauler back on its journey within six hours. He had used up most of the first hour already, including the time it had taken to park the ship. Five hours was normally plenty of time, but he was beginning to have the nasty feeling that this was going to be one of those jobs that ended with his firm paying out penalty money.
Xavier clambered past one of the storage pods. ‘Give me a fucking clue, you bastard…’
The hauler’s subpersona was shrill in his earpiece. ‘Have you found the fault in me? I am most anxious to continue my mission.’
‘No. Shut up. I need to think.’
‘I repeat, I am most anxious…’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
There was a clear patch near the front of the pod. He had so far avoided paying too much attention to any of the recipients, but this time he saw more than he intended to. There was a thing inside like a winged horse, except horses, even winged horses, did not have perfectly human female faces. Xavier looked away as the face’s eyes met his own.
He spooled his line into another plug, hoping that this time he would nail the problem. Maybe there was nothing actually wrong with the nav system, just with the fault-diagnostics web… hadn’t that happened once before, with that hauler that came in on a slush-puppy run from Hotel Amnesia? He glanced at the time display in the bottom-right corner of his faceplate. Five hours, ten minutes left, including the time he would need to run health checks and slide the hauler back out into empty space. It was not looking good.
‘Have you found the fault in me? I am most…’
But at least it kept his mind off the other thing, he supposed. Up against the clock, with a knotty technical problem to solve, he did not think about Antoinette with quite the usual frequency. It had not become any easier to deal with her absence. He had not agreed with her little errand, but had known that the last thing she needed was him trying to argue her out of it. Her own doubts must have been strong enough.
So he had done what he could. He had traded favours with another repair shop that had some spare capacity, and they had pulled Storm Bird into their service bay, the second largest in all of Copenhagen. Antoinette had looked on nervously, convinced that the docking clamps could not possibly hold the freighter in place against its hundred thousand tonnes of centripetal weight. But the ship had held, and Xavier’s monkeys had given it a thorough service.
Later, when the work was done, Xavier and Ant
oinette had made love for the last time before she went away. Antoinette had stepped back behind the airlock bulkhead and a few minutes after that, on the edge of tears, Xavier had watched Storm Bird depart, falling away until it looked impossibly small and fragile.
A little while after that, the shop had received a visit from a nastily inquisitive proxy of the Ferrisville Convention: a frightening sharp-edged contraption that crawled around for several hours, seemingly just to intimidate Xavier, before finding nothing and losing interest.
Nothing else had happened.
Antoinette had told him that she would maintain radio silence when she was in the war zone, so he was not surprised at first when he did not hear from her. Then the general news-nets had carried vague reports of some kind of military activity near Tangerine Dream, the gas giant where Antoinette was planning to bury her father. That was not supposed to have happened. Antoinette had planned her trip to coincide with a lull in military manoeuvres in that part of the system. The reports had not mentioned a civilian vessel being caught up in the struggle, but that meant nothing. Perhaps she had been hit by crossfire, her death unknown to anyone but Xavier. Or perhaps they knew she had died but did not want to advertise the fact that a civilian ship had strayed so far into a Contested Volume.
As the days turned into weeks and still there had been no report from her, he had forced himself to accept that she was dead. She had died nobly, doing something courageous, if pointless, in the middle of a war. She had not allowed herself to be sucked into cynical abnegation. He was proud to have known her, and quietly tormented that he would not see her again.
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