Dark Angels Rising

by Ian Whates

  “I gave all that up for the cloud chamber,” she corrected him.”

  “Is it really that special?”

  “Don’t push it,” Naj whispered in his head, “or she might clam up. You’re doing so well at getting her to relax, don’t blow it.”

  “It’s like nothing else,” Saavi said. “The chamber is liberation, it’s mind-expanding, it’s like breathing freely after you’ve been shut away and stifled in a small hot room.”

  Mosi shook his head. “It’s so difficult to grasp what that must be like. How do you actually do what you do?

  “Careful,” Naj warned again.

  “It’s complicated,” Saavi said.

  “I don’t doubt that for a minute, but I’m genuinely curious. Could you try to give me some idea? Just pretend I’m an idiot, and I’ll keep up as best I can.”

  For a moment he thought she was going to refuse, to retreat into her customary privacy, but after a further plaintive ‘please’ to prompt her, she said, “Okay, I’ll try.”

  Saavi reached into a pocket in her overalls and produced what looked to be a folded square of dark-coloured cellophane. She placed it in the flattened palm of her hand. As soon as she let go, the square commenced to unfurl and open, stiffening to become a wafer thin paintpad.

  Saavi touched one corner of the surface with a fingertip, and a red spot appeared, slowly spreading outwards as she kept the finger in place, as if blood were being drawn out of her through its tip. When she was satisfied, she moved her hand to the opposite corner, placing the tips of all four fingers and thumb on the screen in a cluster, slowly drawing them apart to create a far larger and less regular red stain.

  She then lifted her hand slowly from the screen, spreading the fingers a little wider as she went. The red stain lifted in response, as if drawn upward by invisible threads, becoming a clump, a cloud, that hovered above the paintpad.

  Saavi drew her hand rapidly away and the cloud stayed in place. “This is where we are now,” she said, pointing to the original dot, “and this is where we’re going to be in the future,” and she indicated the hovering cloud.

  “The question is: how do we get from there to here?”

  The tip of her index finger moved rapidly, to create a series of thread-like red lines leading from the spot to the cloud, some straight but most curving outward and back, creating a tracery that resembled an elongated sphere, reminding Mosi of the cantaloupe melons that he and Najat had enjoyed so much as children.

  All other conversation in the room had ceased, as everyone concentrated on Saavi’s explanation. Mosi suspected that most if not all of them were hearing this for the first time.

  “These threads represent the possible paths from now till then,” she said. “What I try to do is explore each one to work out which is the best, but as I do, more possibilities spread out from each one, to create even more potentials, which I have to navigate and eliminate.”

  She sat back. “That’s it in a nutshell, but it’s a huge over-simplification, because there are many more than one possible tomorrows, so at any given moment our current state is connected by potential pathways to dozens of different clouds. Some are connected so tenuously that I can discount them because they are so unlikely. Unless, of course, one of them represents the only desirable outcome. In that situation, I have to look for the path that will heighten their likelihood and eliminate the more probable but less favourable outcomes. I try to advise accordingly.”

  “Gods,” Mosi said, impressed and appalled in equal measure.

  “Bet you’re glad you got me rather than becoming Cloud,” Naj said in his head.

  “How do you stay sane?” Jen asked quietly.

  Saavi laughed. “Some would argue that I lost that particular battle a long time ago. The truth is, I love it. This,” and she held up the paintpad, “is a mere toy compared to the chamber. With this I can conjure lines and pick at potential futures, trying to persuade them to reveal their secrets. In there, I’m immersed in them. I can step between possible futures, taste them, feel them, reject the worst ones in seconds and promote the best once I’ve identified them, working out where we need to go to produce the most favourable outcome. It’s…” She shook her head. “Sorry, I can’t even begin to put the differences into words.”

  “Sounds like with you on our side, we can’t lose,” Nate said.

  “If only it were that simple,” Saavi said. “Right now there are so many possible outcomes, and so many of them are bad – beyond bad – that it’s taking me an age to eliminate missteps and plot the best path. Even then, ‘best’ isn’t always great, it’s just the least worst option.”

  “If you need help…” Mosi blurted.

  “Really?” Naj said in his head. “You want to go into that room of madness?”

  He ignored her and ploughed on, “I mean, surely Raider could step in and eliminate some of the least promising options, if nothing else.”

  “Thanks for the thought, and I know you mean well, but it doesn’t work like that,” Saavi assured him. “So much of what I do is intuitive, and Raider is an AI, albeit one paired with an Elder aspect. The two don’t mix, not at this level, trust me.”

  “Cloud is quite correct,” Raider said.

  “The potentials are unpredictable and increasingly volatile, to the extent that even the best options can be ambiguous. Sometimes I can see a detail clearly but at others it’s all nebulous, because things might shift at any moment. It’s as if I’m peering through thick fog or trying to tear away layers of gauze veils in order to glimpse what lies beneath them. That’s why I can provide specifics one minute but can only offer broad guidelines the next. I’m doing my best, I really am, but I worry that it won’t be good enough. Putting Barbary forward as our next destination, for example, that doesn’t look to be entirely a good move, but some good is likely to come of it, and it represents the best way forward I can find.”

  “What do you mean ‘doesn’t look to be entirely a good move’?” Leesa asked sharply.

  “I don’t know! That’s the frustration.”

  Mosi instinctively put an arm round her shoulders. She didn’t resist, and seemed to draw a degree of comfort from the gesture.

  “I can’t see where the danger lurks at Barbary,” Saavi continued, “but I know it’s there, a dark shadow looming over our visit, and I know we’ll all have to be on our toes… It’s just that every other move we might have made looked to be far worse.”

  “Now there’s a cheery summary,” Naj whispered.

  “It’s okay, Saavi” Mosi said. “We all appreciate that you’re doing everything possible, and no one means to put pressure on you.”

  “No one has to, believe me,” she replied. “Even sitting here with you now, I feel guilty for not being in there, trying to make sense of it.”

  “Everyone needs a break, Saavi, even you.”

  “But events don’t take a break when I do, Jen. Potentials keep evolving, and there’s so little time left to stop what’s coming. For all our sakes, I can’t afford to stop for long. I just can’t.”

  Twelve

  The next morning, Mosi found himself brooding over his chat with Saavi. He couldn’t claim that it had kept him awake, but it was the last thing on his mind when he fell asleep and was still there, picking away at his conscience, when he awoke. It seemed to him that they were all guilty of taking Saavi for granted, happy to go along with her habit of not socialising without accepting any responsibility for it. He determined to make amends moving forward, starting immediately.

  “Raider, is Saavi in the cloud chamber?” he asked.

  “Indeed she is,” the ship’s AI replied, “and has been for the past two hours.”

  Really? And he’d only just woken up. “Thank you,” he said, and headed towards the cargo bay, where Saavi’s private domain was situated.

  “You do know she had the hots for you, back in the day,” Najat said as they walked.


  “Don’t be daft.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “And I’m ignoring you. Even if that were true, it’s hardly relevant now, is it?”

  “Oh, I realise that much, given her physiological age, but I thought I’d mention it.”

  “Plus that was a decade ago, and I’ve changed in the meantime as well,” Mosi thought it worth adding. “I’m ten years older now.”

  “Don’t put yourself down. You’re still in pretty good shape… for an old man.”

  “Thanks, sis.”

  “You know you can always count on me.”

  The cargo bay was a cavernous area at the back of the ship, accessed via the rear of the ship but extending beneath the living quarters. It was largely empty these days, though a good half its floor space had been given over to the gym and the two additional chambers.

  “A trading vessel that doesn’t trade,” Naj said, following his thoughts. “Now there’s a novelty.”

  Even in the old days, before they disbanded, trading in the traditional sense had become far less of a priority, particularly as their notoriety grew. This enabled them to convert large areas of the bay for other purposes – the artefact room, the gym and, of course, the cloud chamber.

  The bay still had plenty of empty floor space, though, which was accessed via a metal gantry that led from the deck where the sleeping quarters were housed. As Mosi came down the metal steps that would bring him to the bay’s floor, he realised that someone else was already there ahead of him.

  “Morning, Mosi.”

  “Jen.”

  “Just thought I’d pop in and see how Saavi’s doing. It’s an age since I last saw inside the cloud chamber.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Of course that’s the only reason she’s here,” Naj said in his head. “Great minds think alike,”

  They walked beside each other towards the oblong bloc of the cloud chamber.

  “To be honest, some of what she said yesterday evening set me thinking,” Jen admitted. “We’ve all got a lot going on right now, but perhaps, even so, we could put a bit more effort into making Saavi feel included, to show we understand what she’s gone through, and what she puts herself through constantly for all our sakes.”

  Mosi found himself nodding. “Yeah, that’s pretty much why I’m here too.”

  “Mind you, turning up mob-handed like this, she’s going to think we planned it.”

  “Better that than she thinks we don’t care.”

  “True.”

  They had arrived in front of the huge metal box which Cloud had made her own. It always put Mosi in mind of an oversized shipping container.

  “What do we do now,” Mosi wondered, “knock?”

  “We could try that,” Jen said. “Or we could do this instead: Raider, please tell Saavi she has visitors.”

  “Yeah, there is always that option,” Mosi conceded, feeling like an idiot, but the comment earned him a grin from Jen.

  “Cloud says for you to go straight in,” Raider said almost immediately.

  Jen looked at him, ruefully. “Well,” she said, “here goes.”

  At which point he realised that, although he had made the decision to be here for Saavi’s sake, he wasn’t looking forward to this at all.

  The door to the cloud chamber slid open, and they stepped inside. Waiting for them was a surrealist’s dream.

  “Wow!” Mosi said, quietly. He was stunned. Astonished.

  He couldn’t make out the far side of the room. The air was filled with shades and rainbows. He hesitated to call them mists, or clouds, or anything. It was as if coloured powders swirled up and around, each carried on its own current of air. They blended at times to form new colours and tones but for the most part entwined around one other, touching and separating but remaining distinct.

  “I’ve… I’ve been in here before but it was never like this,” Jen murmured.

  A little ahead of them, standing near the centre of the chamber with her back to them, stood Saavi. Her outstretched arms swept this way and that, her fingers weaving and gesturing as if she were performing some arcane ritual. She drew in strands of colour and created transient images that formed and dissipated before Mosi could be certain of what he was looking at.

  She seemed even more diminutive, somehow, set against this chaos of roiling colour and form, yet at the same time there was an authority to her movements, a deftness that suggested here was a master craftsman at work in their specialist medium, or perhaps a virtuoso creating an entirely new form of music.

  “Jess, Mosi, just give me a sec and I’ll be with you.”

  True to her word, after a further moment conducting her rainbow symphony, Saavi brought her arms together in front of her and then slowly dropped her hands to her side. The strands she had been moulding receded, and all around them the frenetic movement quieted. It didn’t stop, continuing to swirl in brooding fashion, but there was no doubting the comparative calm.

  “Sorry about that, you caught me right in the middle of something,” Saavi said, turning around and smiling at them.

  “Is this what you do all day?” Mosi asked.

  “No, not exactly that at any rate. I just had to try a few things, to eliminate a batch of potentials in a hurry, and that’s the quickest way of doing so. A lot of what I do is pretty serene compared to that. Come and sit down.”

  Mosi hadn’t even seen the chairs until Saavi gestured towards them. They were against the wall to their left – two of them, powder blue and comfortable-looking. Jai stood beside them, configured as a sapphire lizard, a slightly darker shade of blue than the chairs.

  “No one ever comes to see me in here,” Saavi said, sounding delighted that they had. She insisted they took the chairs.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Raider installed a drinks machine for me to save having to run up and down to the galley all the time.”

  She reminded Mosi of a teenager showing off her room to honoured visitors. He had never appreciated until that moment just how lonely Saavi might be in here.

  The offer reminded him that he hadn’t stopped for breakfast yet that morning. “I’ll take a coffee, please,” he said, “with milk but strong.”

  “And I’ll go for the same,” Jen added.

  The two of them exchanged a glance, which convinced Mosi they were both now intending to stay here longer than either had originally planned.

  Drake sat in ops, nursing a bulb of fresh coffee. Leesa occupied the other pilot’s chair beside him, sipping a bright orange viscous-looking fruit juice. It was early morning and no one else had surfaced as yet.

  “We need to decide how we’re going to play this,” Drake said.

  “Coming into Barbary, you mean?”

  He nodded. “We’ve already been caught out by the Blue Angel ident once.”

  “Yeah, and we both know how the Barbary authorities will react to any ship they catch trying to sneak in under a false ident.”

  The dubious nature of many of the vessels and crew that habitually docked at Barbary meant the authorities were warier than most and sensitive to any deception. The last thing they wanted was for a snatch team to infiltrate the place with a view to spiriting away some infamous scoundrel to face justice – a not unknown occurrence in Barbary’s early days as a safe haven. For the sake of their reputation and credibility among the shadier elements that frequented the spaceways, those who ran and profited from Barbary’s lucrative status took measures to protect it. These measures included a network of automated defence platforms, which now orbited the planet. If not exactly a fortress world, Barbary had become a place no one ventured to lightly.

  “Shoot first and ask questions later,” Drake agreed.

  “On the other hand, if we go in openly as the Ion Raider…”

  “Word will get out. Everyone on the planet will know who we are long before we touch down.”

  “Crowds to greet us,” L
eesa said, “either adulation or a lynch mob, depending on how many of the folk we’ve pissed off in the past are around. Maybe a mixture of both – competing mobs, all eager to claim a piece of us. After that, liggers, anyone still nurturing a perceived grudge and doubtless the authorities, all watching our every move. We won’t be able to go anywhere, won’t be able to sneeze without it being observed and reported.”

  Drake nodded “And if there are any agents of Saflik hanging around on Barbary in hope of snaring a former Dark Angel or two, we’d make an irresistible target.”

  “Bearing all this in mind, is it such a good idea to go to Barbary at all?”

  “Unfortunately, I reckon it is, despite the risks. We have to trust Cloud’s judgement. Doing so has worked for us so far, and if she says this is the best place for us to be right now, I’m willing to back her up. We just need to figure out the best approach.”

  “Okay, so going in as ourselves beats going in as Blue Angel but is still far from ideal, which leaves…?”

  “Option three.”

  “Which doubtless you’re making up on the spot, but let’s hear it anyway.”

  “Raider,” Drake said, “what was the name of the ship we used as false ident when we needed to in the past?”

  “The Lion of Lincoln,” Raider supplied.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Not so sure option three was worth the wait after all. Our use of the Lion of Lincoln was featured in that ridiculous holodrama they made about the Dark Angels. People will know it’s us.”

  “Good. I’m counting on it.”

  Leesa nodded, as she followed his reasoning. “You know, that might just work. No one could accuse us of trying to sneak in because it’s public knowledge that we use that ident, but at the same time we’re not shouting from the rooftops that the Dark Angels are back in town. Some people are going to work out it’s us, no doubt, or at least suspect as much, but the reaction ought to be far more muted than if we went in brazenly.”

  “Precisely. Just to play safe, we’ll contact Barbary Control on approach, making no bones about who we really are, and trust they don’t hold it against us. They’re not idiots, and their whole economy relies on sailing close to the wind, bending the rules when necessary. I’m counting on them having the nounce to recognise our actions for the ploy it is and realise why we’re so keen to keep things low key.”