Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  From here, Schenck’s renegade base could not be seen. For the moment, that was good, because it worked both ways: they double- and triple-checked, and confirmed the absence of lookouts or surveillance drones. So far they were unobserved.

  Nakamura sent a signal blip, and the squadron moved out.

  Slipped back into mu-space for the final approach.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  VACHSS STATION, VIJAYA ORBIT, 2166 AD

  ‘They hate me,’ Jared told her, ‘because I smell funny. Please help me, Aunt Rekka.’

  Yoga be damned: a migraine was pulsing over Rekka’s right eye, refusing to diminish no matter how calmly she breathed. This trip was going dreadfully wrong.

  The new orbital station, which would eventually be in geo-synch above Mint City, where Sharp had died – had sacrificed himself – was filled with a mixture of Haxigoji and humans. This was to have been a happy reunion, Rekka’s first meeting for nearly twenty years with Bittersweet, whom she had not seen since Singapore, and her first return to Vijaya itself. The world whose name she had chosen – first contact privilege, a practice since revoked by UNSA. It had been fully twenty years since her time with dear, courageous Sharp.

  Instead, here was Jared nearly grown up – aged nineteen – and in trouble for flaring up literally, as only a Pilot could: using a bioluminescent flash to blind four Haxigoji who had grown perturbed by Jared’s presence for reasons no one had explained, not to any human’s satisfaction.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to do,’ said Rekka. ‘I am helping you, Jared.’

  Her protests to the on-board staff, that Jared had been frightened, a young Pilot away from Earth on a study trip, had caused massive debate among the Haxigoji – which they carried out with translator torcs turned off, so no humans could understand. Meantime, the senior human officials were furious with Rekka for the upset she had caused; she in turn raged back at them, because she had known Jared since he was a baby, and she was the person who had made first contact with the Haxigoji – didn’t they know? – so why the hell was tension ramping up on both sides over an incident that could only be due to cross cultural misunderstanding, and what kind of trained personnel were they if they could not sort out such a mishap, and prevent it from escalating to anywhere near the stage it had reached . . .

  Except that later, with time to herself, and now face to face with Jared in the cabin he had been confined to, it grew on her that she had known Jared when he was a baby, not since he was a baby. The young Pilot in front of her was a stranger.

  Of course he had lived in the Kyoto school since Rudolf and Angela had died, and his visits home to Singapore had grown ever less frequent over the years. When he made the move to ShaanxiThree, Rekka found out only by administrative accident: she was copied in on the full itinerary for the two Senators Highashionna as they made another tour of UNSA sites in Asia, and it turned out that they were spending time with select young Pilots in China – not quite protégés, but youngsters they had mentored from time to time – one of whom was listed as Jared Schenck, in training at the biggest base in Shaanxi Province. Rekka had thought he was still living in Japan.

  ‘I can’t believe that they think I smell,’ said Jared now.

  His tone implied that the Haxigoji were beasts and he was slumming it by being here.

  I really don’t know you, do I?

  Rekka’s infostrand, worn as a bracelet, vibrated against her wrist. She tapped it, and a tiny holosigil representing Bitter-sweet was projected in the air.

  ‘I’ll try to sort something out,’ Rekka told Jared, not answering the call yet. ‘All right? So you can get off this station without fuss.’

  ‘Well, good.’ He made no move to step forward and hug her. ‘Good.’

  She nodded, slid the door open, and stepped out into the corridor. Several male Haxigoji, bulky with muscle, guarded each end. She looked at them, then locked the door behind her.

  ‘Sorry.’ She opened the call from Bittersweet. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’

  ‘I’ve just arrived on board.’

  The words sounded flat, though the comms net was capable of transmitting the full emotional range of scent-speech as translated by the Haxigoji torcs.

  ‘Our shuttle had to wait,’ Bittersweet added, ‘because of the passenger container.’

  ‘What container?’

  ‘It has humans aboard, including a senator. They are waking up very angry.’

  This did not make sense, apart from the obvious part about waking up: passengers coming out of delta-coma, after a Pilot had dropped them off.

  ‘Not a Senator Higashionna,’ said Rekka. ‘Not one of them.’

  For a moment, she thought she was being stupid, expecting Bittersweet to know people’s names. But Bittersweet answered: ‘No, a Senator Margolis. Is this important, Rekka?’

  ‘I don’t . . . It would have been a strange coincidence, that’s all.’

  ‘Then please come to the docking lounge.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  The comm session ended.

  I’ve never been so confused.

  But her questions about the Higashionnas derived from a hot Arizona day, back when Sharp was still on Earth, and they had watched Simon’s brother Gwillem doing his aikido demonstration. Senators Robert and Luisa Higashionna had been there as VIPs. Afterwards, watching them depart in a TDV, Sharp had seemed puzzled by Rekka’s lack of reaction towards them.

  ‘Do you not taste their evil?’ he had asked her.

  ‘Evil?’

  ‘Can you not smell dark nothing?’

  She had been puzzled at the time, but had never forgotten his words.

  Do you not taste their evil?

  Another vessel hung near Vachss Station, maintaining a watch on the docked shuttle and eavesdropping on the in-station comms net. This vessel was shining and fast-looking, her central body pure silver, her delta wings copper and crossed with silver. Her Pilot had obsidian eyes, black-on-black, while another sat in the control cabin alongside her: an older Pilot, grey-haired, with metal sockets where his eyes had been before the surgery.

  The latter was humming to himself as he listened in on the signals. Finally, he stopped and turned to the younger Pilot, Ro McNamara, who was sitting there and trying to remain calm. These were interesting days, because as the first natural-born Pilot she had not needed UNSA surgeons and bio technicians to make her what she was; but without UNSA she would have had no ship, no way to fulfil her purpose in life.

  What she could not abide was the notion that all the younger Pilots living now, and generations still unborn, would face a stark binary choice between effective slavery or an unfulfilled and hollow life.

  And her friend here, Claude Chalou, though he had non Pilot family on Earth, and worked as an academic – he had been Dirk’s tutor at Oxford – missed mu-space dreadfully; but he was too old to fly, as decreed by the UNSA powers-that-be, and that was it. Career over.

  No one in UNSA considered mu-space as anything other than a milieu for sailing-routes along which vessels moved at their direction, for the sole purpose of shifting goods and people among the realspace colonies, research stations and Earth. The idea that mu-space was an entire universe in which Pilots might want to live . . . that had never, it seemed, occurred to them.

  Until now, of course, there had been no place for a Pilot to live, no habitable location, except in realspace. But that was changing, and the stolen matter-compiler that Ro was transporting in her hold right now (and whose theft, or at least illegal export, Claude had assisted with) would be one more component in making this so.

  But in order to carry out that mission – when everything she did was monitored by UNSA flight controllers, with no reason to go into mu-space except on a designated flight – she had temporarily abandoned a pod containing her VIP passengers, all deep in delta coma, leaving them to float safely in deep space. Then she had picked them up once more, and delivered them here to their destination; but they were
late, and the effects of such a long time in coma, with two insertions into mu-space, were unpredictable: severe headaches at best.

  ‘Look . . .’ Claude’s gravelly Gallic voice took her out of her thoughts. ‘This explorer, Mam’selle Chandri, who has caused so much trouble . . . If you slip away quietly, there will be little fuss. She’s all they’re interested in.’

  He was right, but as yet, Ro did not know whether her passengers were OK.

  ‘What if one of the passengers fails to wake up?’

  ‘And what if station personnel demand to scan the holds?’ Claude asked. ‘Standard procedure in an accident.’

  ‘They won’t find any malfunction.’

  ‘But’ – Claude raised a bushy eyebrow above one metallic eye socket – ‘they might find the matter compiler which MacLean and I stole for you.’

  ‘Goddamn it, Claude.’ She pronounced his name correctly, Claude-rhymes-with-ode, courtesy of her Zurich upbringing. ‘The passengers are my responsibility.’

  He considered this, then nodded. ‘C’est ça. C’est exact, bien sûr.’

  So they were in agreement. But as soon as Ro learned that the passengers had woken without medical emergencies, she was taking herself and Claude out of here. It was not just that the matter compiler in her ship’s hold was needed in mu-space – she had also made a binding promise to Claude that he would finally see, after years of blindness on Earth, the secret project-in-progress that select Pilots knew about. No one else in UNSA suspected that such a thing might be possible, never mind that such construction was already being carried out in a clandestine fashion, with volunteers working hard for the sake of the future.

  Claude deserved to see the first huge constructions, the oddly growing halls and bays and courts that were already forming in ways that went beyond design parameters, with inherent systems evincing properties that excited the Pilots working there, for they exceeded anything that had been de liberately planned.

  Labyrinth was going to be magnificent.

  Bittersweet’s eyes changed colour from amber to honey as the light shifted. Her tabard and trews were grey, edged with silver, and there were flecks of grey in her fur. She was accompanied by a broad-antlered male who bowed deeply when Rekka said: ‘Redolent Mint. How are you doing, old friend?’

  ‘Well, thank you, Rekka.’

  It had been a long time since Singapore, when Redolent Mint had been foremost among the bodyguards accompanying Bittersweet; except he had always been more than that, and was now clearly of senior rank.

  He withdrew now, leaving Bittersweet and Rekka to talk in private, in a screened-off area of the arrivals/departures lounge. No one else was around: the centre of attention was currently the medical bay, where human passengers were being examined and awakened from delta-coma.

  ‘We always meet,’ said Bittersweet through her torc, ‘in surroundings your people have built.’

  Rekka nodded, knowing Bittersweet understood the gesture.

  ‘And yet you are family to this Jared Schenck,’ Bittersweet continued. ‘Is that not true?’

  ‘Friend of the family.’

  ‘Perhaps, in any case, it is not hereditary.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Rekka tried to work this out. ‘Are we talking about Jared?’

  But Bittersweet was gesturing around the meeting area.

  ‘This is official, Rekka. We wish to constrain the relation ships between your people and ours.’

  Rekka was not here as a UN ambassador: her objective had been to sort out the mess that Jared had caused, nothing more.

  ‘Your people that Jared attacked’ – Rekka knew that attack might imply some legal liability, but no longer cared – ‘have refused medical treatment. They insisted, or their friends insisted for them, on returning to the surface.’

  ‘To where they felt safe,’ said Bittersweet.

  More turmoil in Rekka’s head: she had come to rescue Jared only to find him unlikeable at best; and now it seemed the Haxigoji were scared, of Jared or something more.

  ‘I don’t understand, Bittersweet.’

  The reply stopped Rekka’s heart for a moment.

  ‘Do you not smell the darkness, Rekka Chandri?’

  They finally said farewell in a calm, regretful fashion, after Bittersweet had detailed terms which Rekka knew that UNSA would have to agree with: Vachss Station alone to be where humans were based, with no more of the constant traffic between surface and orbital. Human individuals were to be allowed down to the surface only on occasion, after they had been vetted in advance, right here, by Haxigoji officials. The numbers of Haxigoji living on Vachss Station would diminish; and while they were here, they would live in separate quarters, capable of being isolated from the rest of the station, and equipped with drop-bugs that would allow them to evacuate and descend safely to Vijaya’s surface in case of emergency.

  No definition of a likely emergency was ever spelt out.

  As for Jared Schenck, the Haxigoji wanted him off the station as soon as possible, with no word said about punishment. Rekka felt they needed him to be far away, and that was enough; of course she agreed.

  Finally Bittersweet’s double-thumbed hand grasped Rekka’s shoulder.

  ‘We will not meet again, I think.’

  ‘No . . .’ Rekka blinked. ‘I need to say . . . about Sharp.’

  The grip, which could have crushed her shoulder, tightened just a fraction.

  ‘What about my brother?’

  Rekka sniffed.

  ‘I loved him,’ she said. ‘I’ve never met anyone as brave.’

  ‘Neither have I, dear Rekka.’ Bittersweet’s alien eyes softened. ‘Neither have I.’

  She bowed and walked away.

  THIRTY-SIX

  NULAPEIRON, 2713-2721 AD

  At one point early in the extended process of self-transformation, something happened to give Kenna pause. Inside the Oraculum, where Lord Alvix’s proto-Oracles, still children, lay dreamily on couches and occasionally muttered fragments relating to future perceptions, the one called Mandia turned her head to stare at the wall – right where Kenna’s main sensors were hidden – and focused her eyes to an unusual extent.

  ‘Liquid. Crystal. Moving,’ she said, then turned her head away.

  Her shoulders slumped into normal listlessness.

  No. This tells me nothing new.

  In particular, it did not guarantee Kenna’s success.

  As for the alpha-class servitors who tended the poor, damaged children, they were unlikely to make anything of those words, for Kenna had hidden her project nicely. And of course the original crystal spearhead was long gone, no doubt in Labyrinth now. She wondered what the Admiralty analysts were making of it; but she had her own concerns, and in truth, she was neither Pilot nor ordinary human these days. She was a cyborg on the threshold of becoming something else.

  Except that the transition took another eight years of preparation, by which time Mandia had become a young woman, or nearly so, and her Oracular perceptions had diminished as the rest of her brain rewired itself defensively: a process the researchers had allowed to continue, because it allowed them to analyse the warning signs of such reversal, and the complex neurochemical changes they would need to prevent in order to create true Oracles.

  To Kenna, it implied that Mandia, unlike her fellow pro-to-Oracles whose health was dreadful and worsening, might some day be able to take care of herself, living a reasonably independent life, provided her environment was not overly challenging.

  Kenna’s timetable matched the weightiness of her intent: to get everything right, she expected another five years of work, and would be happy if it was longer. No sense of hurry infected her work, until one Shyedemday in the month of Jyueech, when her most distant sensors perceived alarm signals at the Palace perimeter, along with the tang of burnt flesh, before coherent graser beams tore through her furthest components and all sensation there was lost.

  Palace Avernon was under attack.

  M
y fault, Alvix.

  Her Liege Lord – except that she had never sworn legal fealty, neither to him nor his forebears, not even the Duke – had made enemies, by virtue of his experimental Oraculum, and the potential wealth and political threat it represented. She should have been more forceful in telling him to form strong alliances, or else in strengthening his demesne’s defences. Even now she could sense Palace guards, attempting to rush to the attack location, being blocked by quickstone walls flowing across corridors and hardening in place, resistant even to grasers: the result of sophisticated sabotage, subverting the Palace itself.

  She had done the same, of course, for very different purposes.

  I’m years from being ready.

  But she was even less prepared to die, and if the Palace was being attacked with subversive femtovectors, she had to trigger the transfer now, before her distributed self could be caught up in the sabotageware attack, and her mind was rewritten. That could not be allowed.

  So it happens today.

  Quickstone under her control melted away, forming access tunnels to a hidden chamber where her masterpiece lay on a couch formed of steel and platinum: a body of living crystal, grown and adapted from a tiny fragment of that ancient crystal spearhead, linked by a thousand crystal fibres to her cyborg nervous system, embedded in the Palace walls.

  Some fibres ran all the way to her pseudo-face and other components splayed against the side of Alvix’s main laboratory chamber, where he had been working but had now vacated – her optical surveillance sensors told her in the seconds before she shut them down for ever – and was now running towards the Great Hall, calling for Lady Suzanne.