Ragnarok 03 - Resonance

by John Meaney

  ‘Are you all right, Dr Woods?’ It was Hannah from Admin, her hair freshly permed, with a silk headscarf to protect it. ‘You seem a little pale.’

  ‘Too many doughnuts,’ said Gavriela. ‘But I’m fine now, thank you.’

  Nothing untoward happened on the journey home, and in the end she said nothing to Rupert about her possible brush with the darkness, because what could he have done about it?

  That night, in her comfortable bedroom that felt so right, she knew as she was falling asleep that she was going to dream, vividly and in strong colours. Yet she encountered neither crystalline beings nor wolves and swords as she expected; instead, the world in which she found herself was constructed of mathematical metaphor, and in the middle of the dream she had the thought that Lewis Carroll would be proud.

  Wonderfuler and wonderfuler, she decided.

  Strolling across a meadow of integers, she laughs at the sight of matrices flying in V-formation above, then picks irrational chrysanthemums with florets arranged in infinite recursion, while a row of fractions watches, nudging each other and winking.

  An infinity symbol comes bounding across the integers, then stops in front of her, bouncing up and down slowly, like a Lissajous figure trapped upon an oscilloscope screen.

  ‘I’m boundless,’ mutters the infinity.

  An apparently identical infinity comes bounding into view.

  ‘So am I,’ it says. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  She waits while they bounce in place.

  ‘You look bare and boundless to me,’ she says. ‘Has Möbius been stripping again?’

  The infinities titter.

  ‘What will happen if you divide us?’ they say. ‘What will happen then? Can you tell, or do we need to swallow you up for all eternity?’

  She clears her throat.

  ‘I can tell straight away,’ she tells them, ‘provided you answer me two questions.’

  The infinities, still bouncing, angle inwards to look at each other, then face her once more.

  ‘Ask us,’ says the infinity on the left. ‘We’ll tell you the answer.’

  ‘Anything at all,’ says the infinity on the right. ‘Really anything.’

  ‘Or imaginary anything,’ says Left Infinity.

  ‘As complex as you like,’ says Right Infinity.

  She lets out a breath, knowing that these two are rascals but bounded by their promise, if nothing else. All around, the meadow of integers stretches for ever, but you can tell that the infinities are different . . . though whether from each other, it is hard to tell.

  ‘If you were to twist yourselves into alephs,’ she asks thoughtfully, ‘what would your subscripts be?’

  ‘I say.’ That’s Left Infinity.

  ‘That’s a little personal.’ Right Infinity.

  ‘Do you want to stay bound by a promise for ever?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘Suppose not.’

  They bounce a little more, then wriggle into knots, and re commence bouncing in their new forms.

  ‘Unity,’ she says.

  ‘We beg your pardon?’ they say together.

  ‘You’re both aleph nulls,’ she points out. ‘So you’ll divide to produce one, and it doesn’t matter which of you is on top.’ Which would have been her other question, of course.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘How risqué.’

  ‘Little people can be so rude.’

  ‘Can’t they just.’

  She calls up: ‘I’m not little!’

  But her voice is tiny because she is shrinking, with integers growing large around her. Already they are above her head, and the twin infinities are about to be obscured from sight, which seems hardly fair because she asked only one question.

  ‘You promised two answers!’

  ‘By George, she’s right.’

  ‘By Cantor, so are you.’

  The integers are so very big, taller than trees and still growing.

  ‘What is—?’ She forces her voice to grow louder. ‘What’s the pattern in the numbers?’

  ‘Oh, dear . . .’

  ‘Hmm . . .’

  She spirals inwards in endless recursion.

  Except that the infinite series of her transformations turns out be convergent, and so she wakes before the end of time, staring at the grey gloom and muttering to herself, ‘Too many jam doughnuts,’ a second before sleep comes back, this time minus dreams.

  When Gavriela woke up, her notebook, closed, was atop the candlewick bedspread, and her fountain-pen, actually borrowed from Rupert, was neatly beside it, cap screwed in place and not an ink blot anywhere. She had no memory of taking either object to bed.

  Senility strikes at last.

  Pushing down the covers, she forced herself up to a sitting position, sideways on the bed, wanting to pee but needing to check something first. It was decades since anything like this had happened, but perhaps the notebook contained sentences from her unconscious mind, written while she slept, as on that wartime night in Oxford.

  Out in the hallway, the phone began to ring.

  The notebook opened naturally at the midpoint, to a pair of facing pages that yesterday had been blank. The left-hand page now bore a blotchy ink sketch:

  And the opposite page contained only a handwritten note, a first draft of a message intended to be written by her, not sent to her, although the intent was not obvious.

  You will see three. You will be wrong.

  G

  P.S. Pass it on! κ∞ = 9.42 ; λ∞ = 2.703 × 1023; µ∞ = .02289

  Rupert tapped on the door – it could not be anyone else – so she closed the notebook and pulled her dressing gown around her, hoping this would not take time because she really did have to pee.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said when she opened the door, ‘but I needed to tell you . . .’

  He was wearing his dressing gown with the burgundy lapels, and the new slippers she had bought him to replace the tattered monstrosities he wore when she moved in – less than four months ago, yet already the distant past.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  The lines on his face were deeper than ever.

  ‘Your niece Ursula,’ he said, ‘must’ve been further enceinte than I realised. Apparently you’ve had a great niece for the past two months. I had no idea Ursula had given birth.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Gavriela made a guess, hoping she was wrong. ‘The baby’s ill or even . . .’

  She did not want to say it.

  ‘Missing,’ said Rupert. ‘The baby is missing.’

  ‘How could that happen?’

  What kind of mother was Ursula if she could not even—?

  ‘—from the house,’ Rupert was saying. ‘At least three men were involved, in addition to the female decoy. Even I might have opened the door to her, because by all accounts she sounded convincing.’

  Some tale of woe, whose details Gavriela could not process because in her mind she was wondering how bloody stupid she could possibly have been, ignoring a clear warning that an enemy was near, almost certainly Dmitri Ivanovitch Shtemenko, who seemed to have some inhibition against killing her – given the opportunities he had passed up – but clearly possessed the capacity to be monstrous.

  ‘One of the men was thin and not young according to other witnesses. Sounds like Shtemenko, though Ursula did not see him, so our people can’t be sure.’

  Would he have killed the baby out of spite?

  It was horrible, but Dmitri might be evil enough to do such a thing.

  ‘The woman,’ Rupert added, ‘was identified by Ursula from a photograph as one Daniela Weissmann, a young Stasi officer under Shtemenko’s command. One rumour says she’s his lover also, but that’s not known for sure.’

  ‘He’s taken the baby,’ said Gavriela. ‘Taken her home with him.’

  ‘Not even a KGB colonel would mount a team operation purely to snatch a two month old relative,’ said Rupert. ‘He must have been here for something
else.’

  Of course he was, but there was no likelihood of SIS or Five finding out, and if they did, surely there was no reason to divulge the information to a retired spymaster or the equally retired cryptanalyst who shared a house platonically with him.

  But Rupert had influence still, it seemed.

  ‘You know the Chester Terrace out-station?’ he asked.

  ‘Vaguely heard of it,’ said Gavriela. ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Nice place. Georgian mansion, overlooking Regent’s Park, ideal for eavesdropping on the Soviet embassy. Stank to high heaven last time I was there, but that was because they were re lacquering the parquet flooring on the top floor, and half the rest was dug up.’

  Gavriela glanced at her notebook.

  ‘They’ve invited us over,’ Rupert went on. ‘To talk to Ursula’s watch team and find out what went wrong.’

  ‘I had a sense of the darkness yesterday,’ she said. ‘Not exactly the kind of information I can share with them.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Maybe we need protection.’

  Gavriela thought about it.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But it can’t do any harm.’

  Rupert would act on his own suggestion, faking a story that suggested the KGB might know his private address and have reason to perpetrate personal vengeance, so that he obtained a permanent watch team to safeguard him and incidentally Gavriela. Whether that was unnecessary, or whether it was the presence of the watch team that prevented the enemy from making a run at Rupert, they would never find out.

  Not for as long as Rupert lived, at any rate.

  FORTY-TWO

  MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

  Roger was promoted to captain, with a hint of fast-track advancement to come, on the basis of his intelligence report concerning the dark matter star (to use the newly revived archaic term) that sat at the heart of the realspace galaxy. Roger’s ultra-hellflight had become an unofficial legend; and unlike his father, he had not needed to die in order to achieve success. It felt undeserved.

  But it was the entire squadron’s analysis of the renegades’ base, not just Roger’s report, that was of immediate interest to the battle planners. Linguistically, the base was again labelled Target Shadow, which gave more than a hint of how they saw it. The combined telemetric data of thirty-eight ships produced a reasonable model not just of defensive resources and their disposition, but also the residential deep-space modules and the massive devices under construction, whose purpose and mode of operation remained conjecture.

  This was war, officially so, which meant that personal secrets could not be kept private if germane – hence Roger providing a sealed addendum to his report, the heart of it related as a personal reminiscence of his father’s memories: ‘After using my tu-ring to defeat the locking mechanism, I opened Greybeard’s case to reveal a fist-sized device, purpose unknown. All this while, Greybeard remained in delta-coma, but he wasn’t going to stay that way, because his closed eyes were flicking from side to side.

  ‘But when I tried to pick up the device, small though it was, I failed. It was so massive I could not shift it. Yet when Greybeard awoke, he was able to lift the thing easily.’

  There were more details, but that was the salient portion, as he pointed out in the covering metadata, in which he also explained the addendum’s provenance: ‘These are my father’s memories, that is Carl Blackstone, from a covert operation conducted nearly twenty standard years before I was born – memories inherited from his ship by mine, but inaccessible to my father due to targeted amnesia applied during debriefing.’

  Such treatment prevented memory retrieval during conjunction trance, effectively repressing the ship’s memory also . . . unless that ship gave parthenogenetic birth to a daughter, in which case the daughter’s Pilot might uncover those buried memories, as Roger and his ship had done.

  In the final comments, he added his own analysis of the reported memory, highlighting its importance as he saw it: ‘Since my father underwent amnesia induction, and since his original report remains archived beyond my clearance level, I cannot tell which details are on record and which were lost. It might be that certain facts which are obviously relevant today, in the light of actions taken by former Admiral Schenck and the other renegade Pilots, would not have seemed significant at the time.

  ‘I note that the human criminals coerced Zajinets into taking them to the galactic core, probably in order to deliver the device to fellow humans living there. That seems to have been their main objective. However, it is the device itself, although I have no insight into its purpose, that I would urge our analysts to consider.

  ‘In particular, I would note that the device appeared alternately massive and light, depending on who touched it. The device was clearly constructed of ordinary baryonic matter. My conjecture is that it was able to interact with non-baryonic matter or non-gauge forces under controlled circumstances, a scientific achievement normally considered impossible.

  ‘Could the renegades be using this technology to affect the galactic jet emanating from the core? Or could they be preparing the locale in some other way – perhaps the jet is a side effect – in either case to construct a bridgehead for the enemy we know is coming eventually?

  ‘My recommendation is covert research into the device’s origins. However, Greybeard indicated he had covered his traces by murder, so there may be no trail to follow.

  ‘Infiltrating the renegades’ base would be highly dangerous, and in any case the base should be considered a primary target for overt, massive assault, with an objective of obliteration rather than capture.

  ‘End of report. Captain Blackstone out.’

  The report was professional and he was proud of it; but he had just suggested the violent extinction of probably two thousand people – one in four being Pilots, renegades like Schenck – which under other circumstances would be termed an atrocity. When exactly had he become capable of thinking this way?

  It bothered him, too, that his fellow Pilots thought so highly of him, because his ultra-hellflight had been hard but not heroic, more like desperate; and again it was all about ideas more than reality, because it seemed to him that what he had broken was a psychological barrier.

  Perhaps it had been physically possible for the last few generations of ships to survive a flight through the mu-space turbulence that matched to the realspace galactic core. Perhaps the real barrier had been sociolinguistic hypnosis, due either to the real limitations of earlier ships or deliberate thought-sabotage by some previous member of the Aeternum language institute.

  If this were true, Roger’s example would have broken the inhibition, and other Pilots would match the feat soon. Except that there was a war to concentrate upon, fought on two fronts or three, depending on whether you separated the Anomaly from the darkness. While Roger and the rest of his SRS squadron obsessed on the renegade base they had seen, the Admiralty planners had a different view of things, since the Zajinet numbers were far greater than that of the renegades, and their attacks were growing in frequency and ferocity.

  Or so Roger deduced after attending the highest-powered meeting of his career so far.

  Admiral Whitwell said: ‘Thank you for coming, Captain. I wanted you to see the battle plans, so that you understand why we’re asking you to take such a risk.’

  A vast array of holos filled the war chamber. Some thirty people, most outranking Roger by far, stood among them.

  ‘Understood, sir,’ said Roger.

  Commodore Max Gould highlighted a holovolume. What it showed was a simulation, not a recorded image, of something like the renegades’ realspace base, but nowhere near the galactic core: it was floating in a region where stars were sparse and space appeared black.

  ‘The segments are under separate construction,’ he said. ‘In mu-space. Transfer and assembly will be fast, and the location will be here.’

  Another holo gleamed. The dummy base would lie on a familiar line,
heading outwards from the galactic centre to a distant void: a line on which Earth also lay, at least on a map of this scale.

  ‘Why would Admiral Schenck . . .’ Roger’s voice trailed off. ‘Zajinets?’

  ‘Exactly, Captain. They’re the enemy we plan to break first.’

  Roger examined the dummy base.

  ‘It’s convincing,’ he said. ‘Provided they know what the real Target Shadow looks like, but why should they?’

  Whitwell’s voice fell flat.

  ‘Certain recordings from your squadron’s mission have fallen into the hands of Zajinet agents. The data makes it hard to determine the exact location, but obvious what kind of installation it is. Therefore a new, similar base with known co ordinates should form a tempting target.’

  ‘But how could—?’

  Max Gould shook his head, as a comment on Roger’s naivety. Roger nodded.

  So how many poor bastards died this time?

  Or ended up in torture chambers, like the one that Clara and Clayton rescued Max Gould from four years ago. Because the best way to leak information to an enemy was to allow it to be captured, in the hands of sacrificial goats who had no idea their own masters had betrayed them.

  A senior officer unknown to Roger said: ‘Petra Helsen was killed by your friend Jed Goran, or rather by Goran’s ship.’

  Roger blinked. ‘When did this happen?’

  The officer frowned while a few other mouths twitched: special forces had a different view of discipline, and lacked subservience when addressing their seniors. Plus Roger had entered SRS from the intelligence service, not the regular fleet, and so had never picked up the protocols of command. Roger had already said sir to Whitwell, which as far as he was concerned was more than enough for the sake of politeness.

  ‘During a recent mission’ – the officer had clearly decided to ignore Roger’s attitude – ‘to backtrack shipping route data being passed on to Zajinet agents, or so everyone thought, on the basis of earlier attacks on our Pilots.’