by John Meaney
‘Yes, well. Of course you are.’
Then Lady Suzanne signalled for the palace steward to attend, and summoned up holo lattices of accounting data – Palace Avernon’s upkeep was a complex matter. As her steward stood before her in his white-and-platinum livery, cane of office in hand, he responded to his Lady’s questions and gave occasional recommendations, which she accepted. Lord Avernon gave the occasional nod, his attention elsewhere.
(Kenna followed his example, searching the Palace systems for deVries.)
In realtime she saw this: Pilot deVries stopping in a deserted corridor, kneeling on the floor, and keeping that pose as the quickstone whirled and he sank downwards, and out of sight.
*
The person that deVries met four levels down – still within the Primum Stratum, a lower level of the Palace complex – was a thin, hard-faced woman in the clothing of a drudge: an epsilon-level servitrix at best. Except that to Kenna’s perceptions, the smartlenses were obvious, and so was the conclusion: the woman was a Pilot living in deep cover.
‘I’m Linda Gunnarrson,’ said the servitrix.
‘Caleb deVries.’
‘Let’s get my standard report out of the way.’
There was a flash of light from deVries’s tu-ring.
‘Got that,’ he said. ‘You’re doing a good job, clearly. Any concerns?’
‘I don’t need the case officer pep-talk, deVries. All I want is—’
‘Working off the sins of the father?’
Gunnarsson flinched. ‘So you did your homework. But my father wasn’t— You think I’m after redemption?’
‘I’ve done the time-distorting hellflight bit myself. But look . . . My sister died on Göthewelt. I don’t blame your father for the Zajinet raid, and I sure as hell don’t blame you.’
‘Damn you.’ Smartlenses do not prevent tears. ‘All right.’ She blew out a breath. ‘Perhaps I needed that.’
‘And perhaps I can’t imagine the stress you live under, in this place.’
Gunnarsson reached inside her plain garments and extracted a cloth-wrapped bundle. She folded back one corner, revealing a crystalline object. It looked like a spearhead. ‘It came from an archive chamber,’ she said. ‘Part of the Palace museum. The stores are filled with old stuff.’
‘Surely they check inventory.’
‘I replaced it with a quartz replica. Here.’
As he took it from her, deVries’s eyes widened.
‘Right,’ said Gunnarsson. ‘Hard not to feel it.’
‘But it’s a forgotten relic? Where the hell could it have come from?’
‘That’s going to take Labyrinth’s finest to work out. If they manage it.’
(Kenna cursed. Whatever she might have been once, her sensors picked up nothing untoward now.)
Then deVries switched his attention back to Gunnarsson’s welfare, and she unburdened herself by sharing stressful details of her life, but refusing deVries’s offer, clearly genuine, to extract her from Nulapeiron. ‘There’s opposition to the status quo,’ she said. ‘I’ve gathered some of them together and the group has a name, Grey Shadows, with an elected leader. Not me.’
Recruiting assets, running networks. Kenna remembered how that went.
Meeting over, deVries ascended to the part of the Palace he was staying in for the duration of his contract. The start date was immediate. Looking exhausted, his sleep-wake cycle clearly out of synch with this place, deVries performed a light stretching routine, ate a frugal meal delivered by a servitor, and went to bed, leaving his cloth-wrapped bundle on the bedside table.
His tu-ring nicely subverted the bedchamber’s inbuilt security system, so that it kept watch over him more than on him. But his espionageware remained unaware of Kenna’s system intrusion, subtle and deep: she had had five decades to work on it.
Motile fibres extruded from the wall.
For seconds, they sniffed the air for smartmiasmas, sensing nothing. Then they stretched out, growing microscopically fine as they extended all the way to the bedside table, to the cloth-wrapped package on it, and finally through the fabric.
It took an hour, while deVries slept but could have awoken at any time, to determine the shearing angle and the force required, and projection angles for collimated anti-sound to counter the tiny snap accompanying the act itself: the cutting off of a tiny sample.
Slowly, slowly, the motile fibres drew the minute crystal splinter back to the ornate wall; then the splinter was inside the quickstone, and the first stage of the operation was complete.
By capillary action, the crystal splinter moved within the Palace walls, with speed no longer an issue, only the need to keep it undetected as it travelled to the laboratory chambers, close to Kenna’s main components that remained, static as ever, in place.
There was no hurry now.
TWENTY-SIX
EARTH, 2154 AD
Jared Schenck was orphaned two days before his seventh birthday. The call came for Rekka at 7:32 in the morning, while Jared was asleep in her guest room, no doubt with his chocolate-brown teddy-bear in his arms. She was already up, even though it was Sunday, her limbering-up asanas complete, and about to drink her one and only espresso of the day.
‘No,’ Rekka told her wallscreen. ‘They can’t be dead. Not Randolf. Not Angela.’
She put down the tiny cup.
‘I’m so very, very sorry.’ Google Li, on screen, looked shocked herself. ‘It was only a short passenger hop, but they’re saying everyone on board was killed.’
Rekka stared at the door to Jared’s room.
‘Oh no.’
‘Do you want me to come over?’
In the seven years that Rekka had worked in Singapore, Google Li had not become a friend, but there was no real enmity. Google Li cared only what UNSA management thought of her; and provided you took that into account, you could at least deal with her as a colleague.
Jared’s door clicked open.
‘Auntie Rekka?’
He was holding the teddy bear.
‘Oh, honey.’ She turned to Google Li. ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Do it any time. I mean any time.’
And then there was the stomach-wrenching task of telling a young boy that his parents were gone. It was one of those things you see on holodramas and hope never to have to do yourself; one of those dealing-with-tragedy procedures you don’t get to rehearse in advance, and wouldn’t want to.
‘They’re gone away,’ she told him. ‘Gone to . . .’ But she did not believe in heaven, because a single copy of software does not survive the immolation of the hardware it resides on; and she had a deep distrust of education founded on the concept of lies-to-children. ‘They don’t exist, Jared. Dead means gone for ever, and there’s never any way to—’
But then the sobbing took hold of her, and she crushed Jared to her, as he in turn hugged the bear, and he cried because she did, for he surely could not understand what she was telling him, not yet.
It would be Randolf and Angela’s continuing absence over the years and decades to come that would render meaning to untimely death.
Of course Jared’s biological parents were Amber and Mary. Amber was committed to her life as a Pilot, and deeply unhappy during her times on Earth, for her eye sockets were metallic I/O interfaces linking her to her ship, her occipital lobes and visual cortex having been nanovirally rewired for that purpose during the procedures that turned her into a Pilot.
Mary, absent from Jared’s life since before his first birthday, had contributed the rest of the DNA; and she had also stolen fractolon infusions from the long-preserved Ro McNamara cultures, so that Jared might be a true Pilot. That had still required Amber, who carried Jared inside her, to spend the final months secretly in mu-space, there to give birth to her beautiful, wonderful obsidian-eyed boy.
Jared’s legacy would be a golden universe unimaginable to ordinary humans, and yet he would be fully functional on Earth: a child of two continua.
Until now, it had worked out perfectly.
As the month progressed, legal processes crept into action.
Given that Rekka had exactly zero rights where Jared was concerned, you could say that UNSA did everything right. The shocking thing was her own ambivalence: love and obligation on the one hand, against a deep conviction that she would be an awful stand-in mother. After all, had Rekka’s own mother not tried to kill Rekka along with herself? Was she not an accidental survivor of a Suttee Pavilion? And what kind of legacy was that? But she needed to know that Jared would be safe; and perhaps the UNSA welfare psychologists who talked to her picked up on that: Rekka left those meetings feeling reassured, without ever understanding what had been accomplished.
Perhaps, in retrospect, the same psych specialists were equally adept at manipulating Amber and Mary. Legally, it was the biological parents whose wishes counted now.
‘Zurich is supposed to be the best,’ said Amber, sitting in the tropical garden at the back of Rekka’s apartment block. ‘With Karyn McNamara in charge.’
It would be a long way for Rekka to visit; but the point of a residential school was that you saw children only on holidays, wasn’t it? She had no right to tell Amber what to choose.
It was now three weeks since the memorial service.
‘But I told the welfare people,’ Amber continued, ‘that Switzerland was too far for Auntie Rekka to travel to, and Sue, that’s Dr Chiang, told me that Kyoto is excellent. Better in some ways than Zurich.’
‘Oh.’
‘And you can come with me to check the school out. I mean without causing problems work-wise.’
It was the UNSA culture: if they decreed that an employee was to spend time on some UNSA-approved human welfare task, that employee’s line managers had better show enthusiasm, or they were in trouble. Often Rekka thought that the organisation was too involved with people’s private lives, though her own solitary existence was unaffected; but at times like these you could take advantage of the corporate parental attitude.
‘Of course I’ll come with you,’ she said.
‘Good.’ Amber picked up her iced lemon tea, then put it back down. ‘Am I a terrible person, Rekka?’
‘No.’ Rekka took hold of her hand. ‘You are the very best, and Jared is proud of you.’
‘He’s my son, and so very young.’
On Earth, Amber saw herself as a cripple in several ways – those metal eye sockets were incapable of shedding tears – while in mu-space she soared, like a ballerina or gymnast or perhaps a dolphin in her natural element. However much Rekka thought secretly that Jared needed a full-time parent, she could never even hint that Amber might wrench herself from life as a Pilot. A bitter, half-insane mother would be worse than none at all.
‘The only family I’ve got is an aunt in Oregon.’ Amber sounded miserable. ‘But a stranger, you know? Wouldn’t even know Jared’s name.’
She sounded so empty.
Rekka squeezed Amber’s hand and said, ‘You will make the best choice for your son, and I’ll be there to help.’
‘I love you, Rekka. You know that, don’t you?’
Rekka was straight and Amber wasn’t, yet there was nothing awkward in the moment.
‘We’re family,’ said Rekka.
The family that you choose, you make, which need not be the one you were born with.
‘Yes, we are.’
But all families have the power to screw up children’s lives, and their decisions over the coming weeks would affect Jared for ever.
*
Zen gardens in the heart of the city, silence punctuated by children’s laughter during the breaks, gleaming polished halls and classrooms, laboratories and gymnasia. Rekka, her hand on Amber’s arm to guide her, walked through the school premises, increasingly impressed.
‘We are teaching freedom and self-discipline, respectful of but not constrained by the local culture,’ said a recorded holographic Frau Doktor Ilse Schwenger at the start of the tour. ‘While much of the teaching is in English and Nihongo, we also deliver lessons using Puhongua, and the advantages of that are obvious.’
One of those advantages was that knowing Puhongua – still ‘Mandarin’ to the uneducated – made it easier to use Web Mand’rin online.
‘Excuse me, ma’am. Pilot,’ said a young boy with black-on-black eyes. ‘I’m Carlos Delgasso and I’m nine years old. Would you like to see an aikido class?’
‘We would, thank you.’
Rekka’s sole physical discipline was yoga, and other stuff bored her; but aikido and Feldenkrais body-awareness training had been part of Amber’s initiation into Pilothood. Any mugger who laid a hand upon a Pilot, including those who were blind in realspace, was likely to find their face smashed into concrete, and their shoulder dislocated, or worse.
The class was impressive. A slight grey-haired man, in white gi jacket and black floor-length hakama split skirt, moved with magical ease while bodies flew everywhere. His demonstration was against adult black belts; when he took his younger charges through training drills, they seemed to spend most of their time rolling without hurting themselves.
Rekka said nothing of what she glimpsed, or thought she had, from the corridor that led here: a soundproof glass panel on a dojo door that revealed a mêlée of lean figures in black jumpsuits in swarming, robust combat, with throws and kicks and punches, almost too fast to see.
‘You like living here?’ Amber asked young Carlos, back outside in the corridor.
‘It’s the best,’ he said.
‘Some Pilot children live in ordinary homes,’ said Rekka. ‘With families.’
Carlos looked solemn as he nodded.
‘We’re very sorry for them.’
Perhaps that was the moment that clinched their decision. Before Rekka and Amber left, Jared was officially enrolled, and all that remained was the logistical task of getting him to Kyoto with his belongings.
And saying farewell, of course.
The only surprise, when Rekka returned to work, was that Google Li had handed in her notice and already left. No one seemed to have any idea of her plans, or even whether she remained in Singapore.
It would be many years before Rekka bumped into Google Li by chance at a conference in Frankfurt, where they did something very rare for both of them: got tremendously drunk on schnapps, Cointreau and tequila, and woke up the next morning on separate twin beds in Rekka’s hotel room.
That morning, Google Li would share the suspicions that caused her to question her career aspirations and leave UNSA without a word; but by then, Rekka had been asking herself similar questions for years, regarding the likelihood that Randolf and Angela’s death had really been an accident, instead of orchestrated murder in which their fellow passengers and flight crew were collateral damage within acceptable parameters, by the standards of an organisation grown too big and remorseless to own a conscience.
Or in which schemers like the two UN senators, Luisa and Robert Higashionna, wielded such unquestioned influence, pursuing goals that no ordinary people could guess at, moving like sharks through a sea of political and corporate power that minnow-like citizens would never understand.
Rekka and Google Li would share tears and hugs that morning, and never see each other again.
TWENTY-SEVEN
MU-SPACE, 2604 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
Call him a fuck-up seeking atonement. As far as Piet Gunnarsson was concerned, the first part – without the atonement-seeking – was what everyone did already.
Self-loathing and desperation do not lend attractiveness to any business proposition, but somehow he persuaded the Far Reach Centre logistics people – he talked to someone called Rowena James – to let him make a reschedul
ed cargo delivery to Vachss Station, in orbit around Vijaya, along with a personal package for one Jed Goran, Pilot. It was urgently required, the main cargo load, because some sort of onboard crisis had caused the original delivery to be cancelled.
The schedule was almost impossible, unless Piet followed something close to a hellflight trajectory. A whole bunch of other Pilots, he was sure, had already turned down the job.
‘This is important, then?’ he asked.
‘Lives aren’t at stake, but’ – Rowena touched the personal package – ‘you know what people are like.’
‘Whatever. I’ll take the job.’
‘Thank you, Pilot Gunnarsson.’
Her straightforward politeness was very different from the glances he received afterwards, walking along the Poincaré Promenade, heading for the great docking bay where his ship was waiting for him, filled with unconditional, understanding love.
You’re OK, my love.
I’ll try to be, for your sake.
For his sake, she acquiesced in the choice of geodesic; and as they flew the almost-hellflight, their conjoined selves filled with pain as well as the exhilaration of effort. Their suffering brought them closer than ever, offering the possibility of healing and redemption in a way that Piet did not feel he deserved.
Tearing through an unusual spiralling trajectory, Piet-and-ship burst out of a blood-coloured nebula close to their destination, finding themselves behind three Zajinet ships whose weapon systems were in the process of powering up.
So. Zajinets.
Whatever Piet’s role in causing hostilities, there had been open attacks on seven worlds that he knew of: it wasn’t just about him. If this was another such raid then he could not allow it to happen.
We fight, my love?
Oh, yes. We fight.
Only soft people who have never experienced conflict believe in the concept of a fair fight. There has never been such a thing. When the objective is to take out the enemy, an attack without warning is the surest strategy. Ship-and-Piet followed the three Zajinet vessels through a realspace insertion and cut loose immediately, taking out the centremost vessel and arcing right, away from the explosion, aware that violet beams of not-quite-analysable energy split vacuum only metres away from Piet-and-ship’s wing. The surviving Zajinets were zig-zagging to set up a pincer attack on ship-and-Piet, whose weapons-fire sprayed past them, finding them hard to target—
