Creation Machine (11 page)

Fleare blinked at the comms unit, while she tried to work out how she felt. Eventually she said, as evenly as she could: ‘You do realize we are on duty?’

She was still waiting for his answer when the comms crackled and then roared with eardrum-shattering static. Simultaneously the tank flared and went black, and a galaxy of warning lights blinked on. Fleare yelped and stabbed for the controls. She flicked the comms gain to zero and then cautiously inched it up. Almost immediately she heard Muz. He was shouting. ‘Come in! Fleare, come in!’

‘Here. What happened?’ Belatedly remembering her rank, she added: ‘Report.’

‘Electromagnetic pulse. Big one. Check your environmental.’ He sounded shaken.

She checked. ‘Oh, shit . . .’

‘What?’

‘Radiation.’ She gulped. ‘I got two hundred rem.’

‘Is it stable at that?’

She watched the display. ‘More or less. Crawling up by millirems. Whatever it was came in one hit.’ She tried to remember dosage tables. ‘Nasty but not quite fatal. I’ll get over it. What about you?’

‘Still reading. Give me a minute. Nah, that’s never right. I think the counter’s acting up.’

‘Well check it quickly. Have you got any other instruments?’

There was another pause. ‘Negative. All fried.’

‘Okay. Sit tight.’ Her mouth was dry and her heart was hammering. She did her best to suppress it, while her fingers first brushed and then stabbed at controls that took her down through horribly knackered layers of the skiff’s operating system until she found something that still worked. It turned out to be a basic video camera, with about half its pixel array burnt black. Enough still worked to give a ragged image; she patched it into a screen, and a star field blurred into view. She clicked her fingers. ‘Yes! You still online?’

‘Yup.’

‘Okay, I have visuals. Nothing ahead. Panning back to you. Oh. That’s—’ She stopped, checked the display settings and squinted at the image. She was looking at a blue-white disc, painfully bright, with Muz’s skiff, head-on, forming a monochrome silhouette at its centre. It looked almost comically like some kind of superhero symbol. She darkened the display and looked again, and her stomach lurched.

Stripped of its actinic brightness, the ball was plasma and debris. It was centred on where the space station had been.

Muz’s voice spoke in her ear. ‘What have you got?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Muz,’ she said slowly, ‘the station’s gone.’

‘What?’

‘Gone,’ she repeated. ‘Looks like a tactical nuke. That must have been the EMP.’

‘Oh, fuck.’ His voice was a groan. ‘But the crew . . .’

Fleare swallowed. ‘Yeah,’ she said, quietly. ‘The crew.’ She stared at the image, but for the moment all she could see were faces, watching her at the last briefing. It had only been three hours ago. Her hands began to shake.

Muz’s voice called her back to herself. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Fleare.’

‘Maybe not.’ She allowed herself to stare for a few seconds more. Then, as coldly as she could, she put one tragedy away and reached for the next. ‘Muz? Tell me your environmental readings.’

‘Mostly okay, but the radiation counter must be kippered. It says seventeen hundred rem. Rising; it was sixteen hundred when I first looked. At that rate I’m dead. Running diagnostics. What’s left of them. This place is a mess.’ He fell silent, but a background rustle told Fleare the line was still open. She waited, clenching her fists in an attempt to deny what she knew was coming.

After what felt like a long time Muz came back online. His voice was flat. ‘The reading’s fine. No, shit, I don’t mean fine. But it’s correct, or near enough. Now eighteen hundred, slowing a bit but still going up.’ He laughed, and suddenly he sounded like his old self. ‘Over three times the lethal dose. That’s practically showing off.’

‘No!’ Fleare almost shouted the word. ‘Look, are your engines online?’ She checked frantically. ‘Mine are. I’ll circle back to you, we’ll lock drives and head into the Heg’ hub. We can give ourselves up, they’ll fix you—’

She broke off, dropped a hand to the fly stick and had actually pulled her drive out of standby when Muz yelped: ‘No!’

She yanked her hand away from the stick. ‘No, what?’

‘No, don’t move. I just thought of something.’ He sounded calm again. ‘No, I thought of two things. They can’t fix me. I’ve had three lethal doses. Cancel that, it’s four now. I’m so dead, Fleare.’

Fleare wanted to thump the console, but there wasn’t room. ‘I have to try!’

‘No, you don’t. Check your levels again. What have you got?’

She peered at the console. ‘About the same as before. Tiny bit higher. So?’

‘That’s what I thought. Mine are still racing up. Come on, Fleare, think. Just for once I flew by the book. My ship is exactly between you and the nuke. You’re in my shadow. We both caught the gamma flash, but the slow heavy stuff, alpha particles and neutrons and shit, they’re hitting me and stopping. If you move out of my shadow you stop some too, and you can’t afford to stop too many before you end up where I am.’

‘Oh.’ She wanted to say something else, but she couldn’t think what. She stared at the crippled visual. Whatever was leaking past Muz’s skiff wasn’t doing the camera any good; more pixels had blacked out, but the silhouette was still there.
Superhero
, she thought.
Too right. And I ran away
.

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, willing the hot pricking behind them to go away. To her surprise, it nearly did. Then she muted the comms for a second while she got her breathing under control, and switched back in. ‘Right, Corporal, let’s get this sorted out. How do you feel?’

‘Huh?’ He sounded genuinely surprised.

‘Report!’ She blinked at her own sharpness, while a small traitor part of her admitted that it was better than pleading with him to keep talking to her.

‘Um, right. Not great, to be honest. Some nausea, tongue and lips beginning to swell.’

‘Do you have manoeuvrability?’

‘Checking.’ A pause. ‘Yes and no. Drive is sixty per cent; controls only ten per cent. I could do a pretty good drunkard’s walk.’

‘Fine. So slave your controls to me. We’ll stay in formation, but let’s get further away from the problem.’

‘Okay, but I’m still dead.’

‘Not yet you aren’t, and I’m not leaving you alone.’ She watched what was left of her display blurring into a fresh pattern as it incorporated the control memes of Muz’s skiff. When it was finished the display dimmed briefly – the AI equivalent of a nodded head – and she took hold of the console. ‘Stand by. Accelerating in five.’

The drive kicked in, pressing her back into her couch. She stared at the rearward camera with its increasingly ragged view of Muz’s silhouette. She had programmed straight, level flight for both craft and it looked as if that was what she was getting; the silhouette stayed steady in the field of view, still at the centre of the now-receding nuclear fireball. When she was satisfied with the flight path she ramped up the linked drives to fifty per cent, and spoke into the comm. ‘We’re off. What’s your status?’

‘Kind of okay. Uh, no, wait.’ There was a pause full of the tell-tale silence of a muted mike, and Fleare took the chance to swing the mostly crippled camera round to give a forward view. Then the silence ended in a soft pop and Muz was back, sounding slurred. ‘Sorry. Acceleration doesn’t do much for nausea.’

‘Yeah, I bet.’ Fleare stared bitterly at the patchy view of Heg’ territory for a second. Then she set the comm to all channels
en clair
and spoke through clenched teeth. ‘Calling all Hegemony units. This is Captain Fleare Haas, Society Otherwise. Medical emergency: one fatal radiation dose to human male, one critical to human female. We surrender under humanitarian terms. Location is as message source. Please assist urgently.’ She repeated the message twice more, set the comm to broadcast it as a recording, and got ready to wait.

It was a short wait; the response took ten seconds. ‘Calling Captain Haas. Your signal is acknowledged. We have your location. If you maintain your present course and delta-vee our ETA is six minutes.’ The voice paused, and then added: ‘But what’s with all the surrender shit? I thought we were friends.’

It was Jezerey. Fleare felt her eyes trying to widen with shock, but the sense of relief was too great. Despite everything she could do, they closed instead.

Fleare struggled to wake. There seemed no urgency; she was comfortable, although for some reason she couldn’t move. For a moment there were faces – she saw Jezerey and Kelk, but she wasn’t sure if they were real. She wondered why Muz wasn’t there and felt a touch of disquiet, but then a warm cloudiness spread through her and she slept.

When they finally withdrew the sedation, it took her a while to wake up. She groped back to consciousness to find herself lying under discreet guard in a room in a Hegemony military hospital. Kelk and Jezerey were sitting with her. When she was awake enough to listen, they began talking. It took even longer before she was awake enough to understand.

Talking done, they nursed cups of steaming chai. The silence lengthened. Eventually Fleare said: ‘What, all of them?’

‘Seems so.’ Kelk sipped his drink. ‘It was simultaneous. Every station, at least every one we had news of. All at once. Mostly tac nukes, like us. A few big energy-discharge weapons. Some people are saying the Heg’ must have had help from inside. I don’t know.’ He fell silent again, concentrating on his drink. The expression tightened fields of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and Fleare thought how much older he looked.

‘Did any of our guys get out?’ she asked.

‘Just us two. Kelk figured we should play watchmen too, since the station sensors were offline. So we were a thousand klicks out when the nuke went off.’

‘And Muz?’ It had always been Fleare’s first question. She just hadn’t
asked
it first.

Jezerey and Kelk looked at each other. Finally Kelk spoke. ‘You can talk to him, if you like,’ he said slowly. ‘But you need to know, he’s not himself.’

Fleare jumped up, spilling chai. ‘Not himself? But he’s alive?’

‘Sort of.’ Kelk looked directly at Fleare. ‘His body’s dead. He’s running as a simulation.’

‘He’s a sim? But that means he can be re-bodied!’ Fleare felt a huge grin breaking out.

‘No, it doesn’t.’ Kelk looked helplessly at Jezerey, who stood up and took Fleare’s hands in her own.

‘Muz was almost gone when we got here. We’re not sure how he did it, but he managed to upload himself to the skiff’s AI cloud.’

‘So?’ Fleare felt elated. ‘He can still be re-bodied. It’ll just take a while.’

‘No. The Heg’ won the war, Fleare. They don’t do the whole mods thing, remember? It’s all illegal again, and that includes new bodies.’

Fleare stared at her. ‘But that means
we’re
. . .’ she faltered.

It was Kelk who answered. ‘Illegal too. Yes. We are.’

‘And Muz?’ Fleare felt the ground opening in front of her. ‘There must be something? I mean, he’s okay, right?’

‘We don’t know.’ Kelk looked at her sadly. ‘He’s not saying anything.’

Fleare pulled her hands from Jezerey’s and folded her arms. ‘I still want to talk to him,’ she said. And you can’t stop me, she almost added.

‘I know you do. It might do him good.’ Kelk looked at Jezerey, who nodded slightly. ‘Uh, before we go, there’s someone else who wants to hear from you.’ He reached into a pocket, pulled out something the shape of an antique calling card and held it out to Fleare.

It was blank on both sides. She looked at it suspiciously. ‘Is that who I think it is?’

‘Probably.’ He shrugged. ‘It turned up while you were asleep. We couldn’t decide whether to burn it or hand it over. Sorry.’

‘Not your fault.’ She took the card and watched as handwritten letters walked across the blankness.
Can we talk?
It was in her father’s handwriting. She gazed at it until the letters had faded, and then shoved the card into her own pocket. Then she looked up, and smiled brightly. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Muz?’

Jezerey nodded. ‘Sure.’ She glanced at Kelk, who pursed his lips and reached for a call patch.

The door opened almost before he had time to complete the gesture.

She was taken underground. She wasn’t sure how far, but the ear-popping, stomach-lifting descent had lasted minutes, suggesting pretty far. Then there had been corridors, with three lots of airlock-style doors. The last one had opened with a faint but distinct sucking noise and a sigh of indrawn air that had made Fleare raise an eyebrow. There was no doubt about it. The space beyond the lock was under a slight vacuum. Someone wanted to make sure nothing got out.

She had assumed that Jezerey and Kelk would come with her, but the door of her room had slammed emphatically shut before they had had a chance to follow, and had shown no sign of reopening despite forceful requests. She expected they would manage. Now she stood in front of a cylinder made of some sort of translucent, smokily greyish glass. It was about the size of a human torso and it floated, motionless and apparently unsupported, so that its middle was roughly level with her eyes.

As far as she could tell through the cloudy glass, it was empty. She frowned, and turned to the orderly that stood at her shoulder. ‘Where is he?’

The orderly raised a stick-thin arm towards the jar. ‘The entity is within the containment,’ it said. Its voice was like the rustle of insects but with a bass undertone. She gave it a glare and then turned back to the jar.

It looked – odd. There was something about the greyness of the glass, if it was glass, that stopped her eyes from focusing on it. It seemed to move. Then she realized. The glass was clear. The greyness was within, a subtly shifting fog. She took a step back and looked at the orderly. ‘Is that him? The floating stuff?’

It nodded. She turned back to the cylinder, leaning down so that her nose was against the glass. ‘Muz?’

There was no answer. Fleare straightened up and turned to the orderly. ‘Has he said anything?’

‘Since being contained it has not communicated, although there is no known reason why it should not.’