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Authors: Andrew Bannister

Tags: #Science Fiction, #space opera, #Science Fiction & Fantasy

Creation Machine

BOOK: Creation Machine
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About the Book

In the vast, artificial galaxy called The Spin, a rebellion has been crushed.

Viklun Haas, industrialist and leader of the victorious Hegemony, is eliminating all remnants of the opposition. Starting with his daughter.

But from her remote monastery prison, Fleare Haas has had time to plan her next move: a break for freedom that will take her across The Spin to the cluster of fallen planets known as the Catastrophe Curve. It is a journey that will take her and a team of loyal friends from exile to the very frontiers of a new war.

Because, in the brutal and despotic empire of The Fortunate, word has reached viceroy Alameche of a most unusual piece of plunder from their latest invasion.

For hundreds of millions of years, the planets and stars of The Spin have been the only testament to the god-like engineers that created them. Only now, beneath the surface of a ruined planet, one of their machines has been found . . .

The first in a trilogy of standalone novels set in a brilliantly conceived far-future,
Creation Machine
marks the arrival of an exciting new science-fiction talent.

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Obel Moon

Taussich, Fortunate Protectorate, Cordern

Obel Moon

Thale Port

Liberty Station, Society Otherwise, Outer Rotate

Private Estate, Semph Leisure Complex

Silthx, Fortunate Protectorate (disputed), Cordern

Thale Port

Old City, Catastrophe, Catastrophe Curve

Taussich, Fortunate Protectorate, Cordern

Catastrophe, Catastrophe Curve

Great Stadium, Citadel, Taussich

The Tanks, Catastrophe, Catastrophe Curve

Yeveg Island, Taussich

Tail End Port, Catastrophe

Privateer Orbiter, Catastrophe Curve

Fragment recovered from Archive, unknown

Deep Simulation, Plenum Level (‘Entry Hall’), Catastrophe Curve

Fragment recovered from Archive

Recovered personality

Server Farm Atrium, Catastrophe Curve

Recovered personality

Traspise Approach

Taussich, Cordern

Traspise, Cordern

Recovered personality

Traspise, Cordern

Recovered personality – Creation Machine

Traspise, Cordern

Clipper, Distal orbit Traspise

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Dedicated to the Leicester Writers’ Club

Obel Moon

THE THOUSAND AND
third day of Fleare’s imprisonment dawned clear and cold. Frost fuzzed the stone battlements of the Monastery, and the plains fifteen hundred metres below were veiled in mist. Fleare paused halfway through her daily walk up the Shadow Stair and gathered the thin prison fatigues into folds around her as if that would help keep out the cold. It didn’t.

She had been climbing for twenty minutes and her clothes were clammy with sweat that was beginning to freeze. An unmodified human would have been in trouble by now, and she wasn’t far behind. She shivered, and started climbing again. Movement was vital. She was twenty-two; she intended to live to be twenty-three. Beside her the small, elongated, featurelessly grey ovoid that followed her everywhere gave off its quiet hum.

Do something, anything, to get information out.

The Monastery was the oldest structure on Obel. No one knew who had built it. The name wasn’t original; it had first been called the Monastery when it was already a thousand years old, by a sect of flagellant penitents who had lived there at the end of the Second Industrial Age. The title had stuck for seventeen millennia and the present occupants, the Strecki Brotherhood, had kept it.

The Monastery rose from the Dust Plains in a jumble of ziggurats, domes and spires. Not all were vertical. Some stuck out sideways, a few were upside down and one whole section floated a little off to the side and inverted itself like an hourglass every eleventh day. The whole thing came to a point in the slender, rotating Tower of Prayer which tapered over its five-hundred-metre height to little more than the width of a man’s outstretched arms before expanding, two kilometres above the Plains, into the Lantern.

Make alliances. Look for weak points, systems to subvert. Biological as well as tech – fuck the guards if you have to. Anything to get a signal out.

Boredom was the issue. Having the sole run of the Monastery had helped to pass the time. Fleare spent days rooting around the huge disorganized archives that occupied most of the lower levels, studying the history of the Monastery and of Obel: two strands that had run parallel for so many millennia that they looked like one.

People said that somewhere in the partly collapsed core of the Monastery were buried the remains of a temple that somehow pre-dated the Spin, or the preserved brain and genitals of a demented god-king, or the secret of eternal life.

The facts were more prosaic. The place had a still-functioning power source of an unknown type, and an apparently senile AI that spoke several dead languages and answered every ninth question with an obscenity. Fleare enjoyed talking to the AI. She suspected it was less senile than it pretended; from time to time it seemed to forget itself and become lucid and even, in a strange way, tender. Then it generally made up for its lapse with a volley of profanity.

There were no other prisoners. What the Strecki knew about her was enough to put her in a security category all of her own. She had been alone on the prison transport, and when the creaking, smoke-belching machine had docked with the Entry Gate – with a thump that had knocked her off her feet – there had been no one to greet her.

She had been conducted along dripping corridors by a floating spherical drone about twice the size of her head. It smelled strongly of ozone. She wondered why, until the first time she slowed down. It nudged her gently, and the electric shock almost knocked her out.

‘Where is everyone?’ she had asked, in the reception cell. The squat little monk hitched at his stained robes and rolled his eyes, showing dark yellow whites. ‘You
are
everyone,’ he told her. ‘Solitary confinement. No one wants to get near a filthy slot-crotch like you. Even the guards won’t come further in than the Second Circle. So you’ll be making your own entertainment. I know what you foul sluts get up to.’ He licked his lips. ‘There are cameras.’

Fleare suppressed a shudder. ‘Don’t you prefer boys?’ she asked innocently.

He grinned, showing black teeth. ‘Say what you like,’ he said. ‘Your ransom’s ten billion standard. Until someone raises that you’re stuck here on your own. Or not quite.’ He waved towards the cell door. ‘Some company for you.’

Fleare followed his gesture, and saw a featureless grey ovoid, floating at head height. It gave off a hum that, although soft, managed to set Fleare’s teeth on edge. She looked back at the monk, whose grin was even broader.

‘You’d better get used to it,’ he said. ‘It will follow you anywhere, through anything. It can flay you in ten seconds. Watch.’

He thumped an old-fashioned looking switch on the wall beside him. The room darkened, and images covered the far wall.

Fleare lasted nearly thirty seconds before being sick.

What the monks would have done if they had known everything, instead of only something, she didn’t like to think.

As it was, they found ways to amuse themselves. Nothing so elaborate as the little floating ovoid, although even that could be used subtly. Sometimes, especially in the early days, she had woken from the fitful sleep which was all the hard shelf and thin, smelly covers allowed, and had heard – silence. No buzzing. She had sat up quickly and stared round her cell, her heart knocking a sickly rhythm while she tried to locate the thing, listening to the silence with her hearing so enhanced that sooner or later nothing could be silent, and the darkness became full of the buzzing and hissing of the noise floor of her own ears.

Then the thing had appeared beside her head, its noise so loud and sudden that she had jumped violently enough to pull a muscle in her abdomen.

Somehow, the monks seemed to know. The next day there had been something wrong with her food; it looked and tasted only as bad as usual but a few hours after eating she began to retch. She ran to the toilet hole in the corner of her cell and crashed, vomiting, to her knees with every spasm tearing at her injured muscle so that she howled bile.

Eventually, she slept a little, and woke to find that the attack had shifted so that she was voiding jets of scalding filthy-smelling liquid shit. She had no choice but to use the floor because the toilet hole had closed itself up while she slept.

Remember, almost anything can be information. Even just a repeated behaviour-pattern, if that’s all you can manage.

The early abuse had tailed off. She had learned to ignore the ovoid’s absences and after a while it seemed to have given up. These days it contented itself with floating a metre above her head while she tried to sleep, tilted slightly downward so that the blade-end of its casing pointed at her crotch. The buzzing made it almost impossible to sleep. Even when she managed, she was quickly woken by hunger.

Just once she had flicked at the thing in anger. Just once; a tongue of violet light had licked out of the front of the casing, almost too fast for her eye to follow, and then she had her hand cradled in her lap while blood welled from her half-severed finger. Inevitably, the cut had festered. Even a year later it still hadn’t quite healed.

We’ll be watching.

Fleare hoped someone still was.

At last the Shadow Stair turned inwards, climbing through a narrow access into the heart of the Tower itself. Another handful of steps led out on to a wide platform. She had reached Millien’s Vigilance.

Who or what Millien had been was one of many Tower unknowns, but everyone agreed that the Vigilance had been created after the Tower was finished. Where the rest of the Tower was inscrutably unmarked, the inner surfaces of the Vigilance showed faint, irregular tool marks almost as if something had gnawed its way through.

The other thing everyone agreed on was that the creation of the Vigilance should have felled the Tower like a tree.

Take a round tower. Punch through it with something rectangular, a bit over half its own diameter wide and twice the height of an average human. Rotate ninety degrees. Repeat.

The four columns that remained at the corners of the Vigilance were obviously, wonderfully,
stupidly
too thin to carry the weight of the hundred metres of Tower above them, never mind the unknown quantity of the Lantern. The first time Fleare had seen them she had actually flinched at the enormous weight that seemed about to crush her to two dimensions. These days the flinch was internal, but it never quite wore off.

She took a deep breath that was half unconscious and stepped on to the platform, rubbing her palms together and kneading her fingers. At this altitude frostbite would happen in twenty minutes no matter what she did, but if she did nothing it would happen a lot faster. So far she had done this a thousand times – the anniversary had not escaped her – and still had all her fingers.

The muscles in her legs felt hot, cold and numb at the same time. The weakness was getting worse. If she let herself think about it she knew that she was being starved to death, as slowly as possible. It was one of a growing list of things she didn’t dare let herself think about.

It was okay to think about heights. Heights were distracting. When she had first seen the Vigilance the unprotected drop had sent her into a dizzying panic which had not faded until she was back on the solid lower terraces. The next time she made the climb she had brought a long coil of lightweight rope, surplus to Monastery needs and dusty from centuries of storage. Working partly with her eyes shut, she had tied it round the four columns to form a token rail, just above waist height.

BOOK: Creation Machine
12.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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