Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  Ferl Corplane’s office was in a section dominated by shiny white ceramic with silver edging, which seemed an unnecessary echo of the icescape and freezing oceans outside. But that was true throughout the building: the floors were stacked like decks in a submarine or sky vessel, with armoured hatches everywhere, all of it hard-looking, devoid of luxury.

  Perhaps sheer depression had motivated Corplane to pick up extra money by selling shipment details to Zajinet agents – if not to Zajinets directly – with no thought to the lives of Pilots and passengers who might be killed in stealth raids or ambushes, or the subsequent suffering of colonists unable to receive supplies which in some cases were necessary simply to live.

  ‘I’m Jed Goran.’

  ‘Corplane.’ In flat near-monotone: ‘Happy to meet you, Pilot.’

  He was shaven headed with implant loops curled around his neck. Jed had met members of the Corpuscular Plasmonad before, although he never entirely understood their philosophical views relating humanity’s destiny to homeostasis and apoptosis, the desirability of self-immolation for the sake of the status quo. Those people, he had found unexpectedly good-humoured. Corplane, however, was blank-faced, almost without emotional affect.

  Sending you down will be a pleasure, you sour faced bastard.

  No doubt a professional would be more even-tempered, but Jed felt anger rising on behalf of the dead, and had consciously to control his breathing, calming down to get on with the job.

  ‘Here are our shipment requirements,’ Corplane went on. ‘Some of the required delivery dates are quite tight.’

  There were no seats or desks in the office, only work-shelves against the walls. That at least was contemporary, as men and women across the realspace worlds were finally throwing off habits from the sedentary centuries that had had such a deleterious effect on mind body health. Jed approved, but Corplane was still the enemy.

  A sheaf of holos blossomed in the centre of the room.

  ‘Let’s see how well we can match up,’ said Jed. ‘You understand that availability and pricing are determined by technical constraints as well as logistics.’

  The secrets of mu-space navigation were not to be shared, but it was occasionally necessary to point out the difficulty or impossibility of a would-be client’s request, for example a foray to the galactic core – where the corresponding mu-space region was a turbulent spacetime typhoon – or some mad request such as a voyage to Andromeda, not understanding that other galaxies remained out of reach, if not as unthinkably so as in realspace.

  Jed’s tu-ring generated branching possibilities, rendered as golden holo streams that fitted in among the sheaf projected by Corplane, and negotiating modules in the displayware found best fits and highlighted them for approval.

  There were two main sets of proposal capable of matching the requirements, and after an emotionless inspection, Corplane pointed to one of them. The corresponding holo elements gleamed.

  ‘Done,’ said Jed.

  The legal notarising took femtoseconds. Holos winked out of existence, leaving only Corplane and Jed standing in the office. Without even a nod, Corplane turned his back on Jed, and gestured to begin working with a his-eyes-only holo.

  Charming.

  ‘Nice doing business with you,’ said Jed.

  Then he left without checking for a reaction from Corplane. As he walked along the white corridor, he reviewed the interaction in his mind, deciding that his own annoyance would have appeared entirely natural, without betraying his secret knowledge of Corplane’s duplicity.

  Let’s see how you handle the outcome, you bastard.

  Corplane had just bought his own doom.

  The Zajinet attacks had been subtly placed, so that it had been difficult to backtrack to the security leak; but now Clara’s people had done just that, there would be counter-ambushes set up and waiting, ready to destroy the attackers while incidentally gaining legal proof of Corplane’s guilt, as the Zajinets followed the false data supplied by Jed.

  Soon enough, Jed found himself in another concourse, its architecture bare – suggestive of a cargo hold embellished with a series of catwalks – but filled with the bouncing chatter of some three dozen people on a break, the animated energy of those who had been working quietly for hours and had more to do, needing to interact with friends and colleagues while they had a chance.

  He bought himself a hot drink and carried it to one of the upper catwalks, where he could lean against the rail, sipping his drink and watching the people, wondering if someone was going to make contact.

  There was a local team in place, their job to maintain surveillance on Corplane and detect any contacts he made, and preferably to follow anyone that Corplane met in person. Jed knew nothing beyond that, not even their numerical strength, save for the team leader’s name: Shireen Singh. She had a recognition code for introducing herself if she thought it desirable, otherwise Jed would end up leaving Coolth knowing nothing, until such time as Clara or someone else in the Admiralty might share a titbit of information regarding his success or failure here.

  The sight of three racks of antlers among the crowd surprised him, until he remembered the rumours, that Haxigoji were travelling to other worlds now, more than just the occasional official delegation to Earth, the previous extent of their voyaging.

  Suddenly the antlers jerked.

  What have they seen?

  Of course he meant smelled, or did he? Either way, something had disturbed the Haxigoji down below, and as far as Jed was concerned they were trustworthy friends, because they had protected him on Vachss Station after he had killed the thing that had been Rick Mbuli, and the reason for their protection was that they had perceived Mbuli’s true nature.

  So what had they detected here?

  Corplane. Must be.

  The bastard had been in close contact with an Anomalous component, or more likely a renegade Pilot, and the Haxigoji could detect some echo of that. It was the logical explanation, except that Jed could not see anything of Corplane. Raising his tu-ring, he was about to send a comm signal in the hope Corplane would answer, when a woman appeared beside him and his tu-ring beeped a code-received acknowledgement.

  ‘I’m Shireen.’

  ‘Jed. Corplane is—’

  ‘Still in his office. Whatever they’ve spotted, it’s not him.’

  So she had noticed the Haxigoji too.

  Her smartlenses were dark brown, enough to make her look like an ordinary human under normal circumstances; but Jed caught sight of tiny golden sparks inside. She was worried and getting ready for action, and if someone were trying to engineer another Anomaly here, the only way to save the research station crew was sudden violence, to kill the once-human component before it could begin absorbing others.

  More killing.

  The thought made him tremble, because killing Mbuli was already hard enough to deal with. But he would do whatever was necessary now.

  You need me, my love?

  Not yet. Stay up there.

  All right.

  His ship’s presence, a kilometre overhead, gave him strength, allowing him to centre himself.

  ‘Look there,’ said Shireen. ‘In the corridor.’

  One of the Haxigoji had left the concourse proper, and was pressing his double-thumbed hand against a view window. From here it was impossible to tell what he was seeing.

  ‘Someone outside,’ said Jed.

  ‘I’ll call in my team.’

  ‘Right. You do that.’

  He broke away, jogged along the catwalk to the steps, then threw normal behaviour aside, throwing one leg over the rail and commanding his jumpsuit fabric to become friction-less, as far as it was capable. Like a schoolchild, he slid down fast, hopped to the concourse deck, ignoring the reactions of everyone around, and pelted into the corridor, popping blue smartgel into his mouth because the air outside was impossible to breathe unassisted.

  There was an emergency exit and it responded to his tu-ring’s signal and
then he was in cold air, stumbling across snow, trying to correct his gait and squint against the wind – stronger than before – to make out the man who was staring at him.

  Narrow-bodied, brown hair, plain jumpsuit. Nothing special about him – except that when Jed glanced back, two of the Haxigoji were standing in the open exit and pointing. The atmosphere was even less suitable for them, nor were most of them prone to violent behaviour, which was exactly what was needed now.

  ‘Jed?’ It was Shireen, calling via her tu-ring. ‘Corplane’s dead. We just checked his—’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I’m triggering the public emergency net.’

  The figure ahead was moving away now, his boot-soles elongating to form snow-shoes, moving with an easy-looking gait that drew him further and further away from Jed’s awkward pursuit through ever-deepening snow.

  A wail cut through the air behind him, followed by a ripping sound – icequake! – but it was not the ice-mass beneath the snow that was splitting apart: it was the research station behind him, the domes and linking tunnels all cracking into segments, sealing themselves into fifty or more modules; and as Jed watched, they began to slide away from each other, their motive power unclear but visibly accelerating, smoothly moving across snow and heading for the cold ocean, because ice-quakes were not uncommon and this was a viable defensive procedure for most contingencies.

  Jed was not sure that an incipient Anomaly was one of them.

  It’s more likely a renegade.

  An Anomalous component might have tried to initiate absorption, the process obvious because it was accompanied, as far as anyone had ever observed, by a characteristic spillover glow that was a precise shade of blue. This might be one of Schenck’s renegades, but even at this range Jed should have been able to detect the induction neurons and other characteristics of a fellow Pilot. Everything indicated that this was an ordinary man he was chasing.

  A man capable of moving faster than Jed, and perhaps heading for a weapons cache or transport, even a submersible flying shuttle, because that was what the researchers used for—

  He had stopped, the man, amid falling snow but with an ellipsoidal volume of clear air surrounding him, and it took Jed several stumbling moments to realise what he was looking at: a smartmiasma, no doubt weapon-primed and ready to strike.

  I’m dead.

  Jed’s tu-ring had weapon capabilities and he even had an old-fashioned knuckleduster with embedded grasers tucked inside a pocket, but they needed human action to initiate a strike while the whole point about smartmiasmas and similar technology was that they operated at a trillion times the speed of thought, because organic brains are slow.

  The man smiled and raised his arms.

  I’m sorry, my—

  Something huge and bronze crashed into existence.

  What for, lover?

  It was a ship, gleaming and beautiful.

  Where did you—? I love you.

  And I love you.

  Which was why she had taken the risk, not descending through air but transiting via mu-space, such a dangerous transition, perfectly executed, and smashing any matter in the way, say a human body, to misty oblivion.

  It was not the icy wind that brought tears to Jed’s eyes.

  Before he left Coolth for good, there was one last event to finish off a very odd day. After the all-clear had been sounded, and the research station modules crawled back together and reformed while Jed’s ship hovered overhead, all weapons powered up just in case, Jed had a final meeting with Shireen Singh. Her team had analysed both Corplane’s body and the evaporated remains of the unknown man – a man redolent with the scent of darkness, according to the Haxigoji witnesses – along with Corplane’s business systems.

  ‘We think Corplane was acting under some kind of compulsion,’ Shireen said. ‘Which is worrying, but not the most interesting thing. I want you to know this as added back-up to my own report, because the Admiralty need to find out.’

  Jed looked into her steady faux-brown eyes.

  ‘Find out what? That I’ve killed again?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly you this time. Plus’ – with a smile – ‘the person your ship wiped out was one Petra Helsen, responsible for the Anomaly coming into existence.’

  ‘That bitch.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But it was a man I—’

  ‘Autodoc,’ said Shireen, and shrugged. ‘Identity change.’

  ‘Of course. She did it before, on Molsin. Not to that extent.’

  He should have thought of it earlier.

  Clara was a boy until she was seventeen. You know that.

  I know, I know. I’m glad one of us could think clearly in the moment.

  Any time, my love.

  Shireen raised an eyebrow, as if aware that he was in thought conjunction with his ship, although of course she could not eavesdrop: no one could.

  ‘You did good, Pilot Goran.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Give my love to your wife. And belated congratulations to both of you.’

  ‘Cheers. I’ll do that.’

  His ship, who had been hovering high overhead once more, took her time descending, and after taking him on board rose slowly. The team of agents, with Shireen at their centre, watched from the ground. There was no hurry now.

  Jed-and-ship could fly home in quiet triumph.

  FORTY-ONE

  EARTH, 1972 AD

  It happened on the morning that, over breakfast, Rupert asked Gavriela where cosmic rays came from, and she told him they came from the cosmos – where did he expect? – then after some badinage she talked about radiation from nebulae where stars were born, and the magnetic bow wave thrown up by the galaxy as it hurtled towards Virgo, at which Rupert raised an ironic eyebrow.

  She went in to Imperial late, as was fitting for a retired scientist, but young Geoffrey was equally late, and they entered his office together. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and featured a six-foot vertical strip of computer printout on the back of the door: Ursula Andress, bikini-clad, the shading rendered in alphanumeric characters. Or perhaps it was Raquel Welch, from One Million Years BC. Embarrassed, Geoffrey hung his overcoat from the door hook, obscuring Ursula or Raquel, whichever.

  ‘Sorry. I, er—’

  A tap on the door was followed by Hannah, one of the administrators, poking her head inside and saying, ‘Alex really needs you, Geoffrey, to sort out that budget thing.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Gavriela said. ‘If that’s the meson data over there, why I don’t I just poke through it by myself?’

  ‘Oh. Yes, why not?’

  She was supposed to be good at this, making sense of columnar figures, allowing patterns to emerge in her mind’s eye as easily as a collection of printed characters might be perceived as a movie actress wearing a bikini. But the office was warm and perhaps she was feeling her age, because she jerked her eyes open and realised she had been dozing. At least Geoffrey had not discovered her that way: luckily, his bureaucratic task seemed to be dragging on.

  On an A4 pad she wrote, in pencil, some fragments of Fortran code that might group the data in more useful ways, so that the patterns she was unable to see might grow apparent. Why she thought there were patterns, she could not say. Geoffrey could piece the subroutines into a program on the PDP11, and if he spotted nothing in the output, perhaps she might wander in again next week and have another try.

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Hello, Geoffrey. I thought you’d been sucked into a bureaucratic hell for ever.’

  Geoffrey’s expression was the same as when he spotted Gavriela looking at the printout on the back of the door. ‘I, um, sort of was. The thing is, some people think we’re falling behind King’s College – London, I mean – because they’re working on new stuff, on black holes.’

  ‘Seriously?’ said Gavriela. ‘You can’t mean that.’

  The phenomenon might be allowed by general relativity, yet that did not mean suc
h objects existed, any more than quarks, which to her mind were mathematical figments reflecting the choice of equations in the model, having little to do with what was really there. A meson might be a paired quark-plus-anti-quark, but it seemed unlikely.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Geoffrey, ‘I kind of volunteered to investigate the field. But that means . . .’

  ‘Abandoning this line of research. I understand.’ She looked at the stack of printed numbers, and her scribbled lines of Fortran. ‘Archive this where I can find it, Geoffrey, and I’ll come pootling along to browse when I’m able. No doubt I’m verging on senility, but when I pick up my Nobel Prize, I’ll mention you in my speech.’

  ‘You think I’ll be working on a flawed theory?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And didn’t Bohr win the Nobel for his pre-quantum atomic model?’

  It predicted the energy spectrum of helium, hence the prize, but his theory was wholly inadequate to a proper understanding of the atom, and in a real sense was incorrect.

  ‘Good point,’ said Gavriela. ‘When you make the speech, maybe you can mention me.’

  Geoffrey grinned at her.

  ‘More importantly,’ he said, ‘I hear they’ve got fresh doughnuts in the tea-room.’

  ‘You mean we’re wasting time talking about the nature of the universe when we could be doing something useful. Was that plain doughnuts or jam?’

  ‘Jam, of course. We’re not barbarians.’

  There were little pings of arthritis when she stood.

  ‘I’ll race you,’ she lied.

  Outside the college, she stood looking at the redbrick grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, while music drifted from the Royal College of Music behind her, next to Imperial. She smiled and listened: it was the whimsical Bach piece that they used on the telly – dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum; da-da-da, da-dum, da-da-da, da-dum – as the countdown to educational programmes.

  But some forty seconds in, the pleasantness was disturbed by a discordant intrusion – da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da – far off to her right. When she looked, a thin man might have just disappeared around the corner, or she might have imagined it. Her sense of being in the presence of darkness faded.