Dyson's Drop (2 page)

Passing through a cleanser was like passing through a waterfall with an old-fashioned transistor radio. The water shorted it out immediately.

Black used sixteen cleansers, each time becoming more and more sensor-invisible, before he arrived at his destination: a secret buried suite of compartments he had equipped as his personal command centre.

He called the place the ‘Spider’s Web’, in honour of an ancient fictional hero, Professor Moriarty, who fought valiantly against a cunning villain by the name of Sherlock Holmes. Unlike Black, however, Moriarty seldom won.

Once inside the Web, Black relaxed. He poured himself a cup of steaming Ruvian coffee, savouring the aroma.

‘Give me an update,’ he said abruptly to Karl, one of the three people who lived in the complex. They never ventured outside because they would perish immediately if they tried. Black had seeded nano sized i-bots into their bloodstreams that would react to the cessation of electromagnetic fields, causing them to excrete a deadly toxin that would leave the host brain dead in twenty seconds.

Karl had been recruited for his uncanny hacker abilities only two months before. He eyed Black with intense dislike.

Black sighed. ‘Yes, loathe me. Fine. Now, the report.
Please.
’

‘The first set of coordinates are, as you surmised, just a key to the second set. And I would hazard a guess that the second set is the key to the third and final set. Mika has confirmed it with a high probability algorithm. There seems little doubt, then, that there is no meaningful data in this set of coordinates.’

‘Decryption keys?’ asked Black thoughtfully.

Mika, a short dumpy brunette in her mid twenties, whose face bore a tiny, ancient brand that revealed she had once been a slave like Black, shrugged.

‘Certainly it’s a decryption key,’ she said. ‘But it’s also a kind of Rosetta Stone.’

Black raised his eyebrows.

‘I mean, I’m guessing it is. If I’m right, it won’t just decrypt the second set of coordinates, it will provide the key to
how
it must be read. I suspect it has its own unique underlying software, a machine language, which uses base-six mathematics to describe the two hundred sounds in human speech. It also has relevance to the entropic informational theory of black holes. So it’s a hell of a lot more complex than I first thought.’

‘Okay. That part’s not too surprising. But there’s not much we can do till we get the second set.’

‘Which is
your
job,’ said Mika.

Black ignored the jibe. For now, he needed the girl to be willing. Insubordination would be dealt with later. ‘Which, as you say, is my job. Any clue to the location of the second set?’

Here the third person in the room looked up. Jeera Mosoon was an emaciated eighteen-year-old with startling blonde hair and the bluest eyes Black had ever seen. She had an ethereal beauty that only Black saw and which he was sorry to have ‘captured’ with his reverse-toxin field. A being like Jeera could not be incarcerated for long. Like an exotic butterfly, she would wilt and die.

Black found himself, not for the first time, regretting that. He found her difficult to read. His intuition, not his calculating mind, told him she could not endure here. And it alarmed him.

Jeera stood up and paced the room. ‘Not simple,’ she said, her voice blunt and emotionless. ‘It’s a catalytic code on at least two levels.’

Karl frowned. ‘Which means what?’

‘It means we don’t crack it till we get the exact catalyst, then the whole thing cascades open. Only then will we get the second level.’

‘Interpretation?’ asked Black.

Jeera shrugged. ‘First level says
where.
Second says more specific where - or
how.’

Karl sighed. ‘Could you be a little less obscure?’ Jeera almost smiled. In that moment, Black wanted Karl dead and himself on the receiving end of that ghost of a smile. ‘To give you an example,’ she began. ‘Maybe first level says where in space, which planet, asteroid, system, which piece of empty
/
not empty quantum space. Second level says
where
inside the previous location, like which patch of a planet’s surface. That’s my guess, anyway.’

‘I figured it would be like that,’ said Black. ‘The ancients aren’t giving up their mysteries without a fight.’

‘Bastards,’ sniffed Mika.

Sarcasm, too. Black filed it away. ‘So we know there’s going to be a where,’ he said. ‘What about a when?’

Jeera locked eyes with him, defiant. ‘As I said, it is a catalyst code. Probabilities can’t be calculated. One moment, not near, not even close. Then bam. Got it. Could be tomorrow. Could be next century.’

Black rolled his eyes. ‘Well, let’s hope for all our sakes, it’s closer to tomorrow.’

‘Or you will kill us?’ Karl asked.

Black stared back. He saw no reason to lie. ‘You do your job and one day you walk free. Not soon. And not until I’m bullet proof Then I don’t give a damn. Hell, you can sell your stories to the newzines for all I care.’

Karl studied Black, as if trying to read his mind.

‘I believe you.’

‘No reason you shouldn’t,’ said Black. ‘I don’t eliminate people for the fun of it. Too messy. Raises more problems than it solves. So be good and do your jobs and one day you get to see the sun again. Now. Another matter has come to my attention. Major-General Rench. I want you, Mika, to work up a profile on him. Get me everything you can, any skeletons in his closet. The man might need to be removed. Karl, I want you to launch a smear campaign against Colonel Jake Ferren. It’s time he went bye-bye.’

‘Why don’t you just kill him?’

‘Maybe you weren’t listening. I kill when I have to.’

‘I thought predators killed when they were hungry,’ said jeera. Black stared at her. The observation was so acute, so
knowing,
he was taken aback.

‘So I’m not hungry,’ he said. ‘Everybody back to work.’

That evening, he met with the Envoy, a member of the alien insectoid species who had, for arcane reasons, dedicated themselves to fulfilling Black’s
Kadros
- his galactic destiny. The Envoy happened to be unkillable. While many boasted this, it was actually true for the alien: his hatchlings were his clones, containing all his memories and knowledge, which were constantly and mysteriously updated. Only a galactic cataclysm could wipe out the one-who-was-many.

Black chose a cutthroat dive in the Draco Quarter for his meeting and set up an array of dampening fields around their table, not only suppressing their sonic signatures, but scrambling intelligibility as well. In any case, the Envoy’s species came with built-in dampeners, the oddest evolutionary development Black had ever heard of Unless, of course, genetic tinkering had occurred in their mist-enshrouded past. Either way, the Envoy’s conversation was spookily hard to eavesdrop on and impossible to record. Black knew; he’d tried.

To add to the difficulty, the Envoy used code, which the neural jack in Black’s neck translated.

‘I don’t like being summoned,’ said Black, sipping
Jai.
The Envoy drank nothing. Indeed, Black had never seen him eat or drink.

‘In your language, the two modes, brevity and command, are similar. My species does not waste speech. Nor do we command.’

‘I will remember that,’ said Black. ‘So what of the Sentinels?’

The Envoy said nothing for a long moment. Black never knew how to interpret his pauses. ‘Great secrecy enshrouds them,’ he said, finally. ‘And there is a terrible thing, a dread that can not be spoken of, that lies at the heart of their pledge.’

‘What kind of dread?’ Black leaned forward, eager to hear.

‘I do not know. It is very old. And old secrets that have stayed secret are the hardest to unearth, for the very nature of being has closed about them like the fist of life.’ He seized thin air in his own chitinous fist, and squeezed. ‘Indeed, we say such secrets are entwined in the structure of reality itself But there is no doubt that the world the Sentinels have guarded for the last thousand years is the key to this secret.’

‘Tell me
what you
think they guard on Arachnor.’

The Envoy looked at him. ‘What makes you think they guard anything there? What if they guard
us
from Arachnor?’

For the second time that day, Black was startled. Then he nodded curtly. The Envoy was right. Something in his words stirred an idea in the back of Black’s mind, but it was too tenuous and faded before he could grasp it.

No matter. It would come back. Such stirrings always did. ‘What else did you find?’

‘I travelled far, listening to the pulse of the rumours. The Sentinels figure in mythologies, nightmares. Sometimes in such things there is a kernel of truth.’

‘And?’

‘I need more data. The Sentinels are called monsters, demons, saviours and saints. They are linked with the old archetypes of Satan and God. Some believe they are the expression of humanity’s collective guilt, the
anima
made manifest.’

‘This is all you return with?’ Black was disappointed. If he could not find the weakness of the Sentinels, he could not control them. And without controlling them, he could not win.

His Grand Plan depended on it.

Only no one had ever bribed the mysterious beings. They were said to be untouchable.
Temporalis inviolate.
Beyond the touch of the times: neither corruptible nor controllable.

Black intended to put such myths to the test.

‘No.’

Black blinked. He’d forgotten that he had asked a question.

‘It is not all that I return with,’ said the Envoy.

‘Well? Spit it out.’

‘An odd expression,’ the Envoy said. ‘Spitting for us is a form of attack. To blind. To maim. To win. But for you, it is to reveal, to unburden, to share.’

‘Spare me the comparative etymology lesson,’ said Black, irritated. ‘What exactly did you find?’

‘The unfindable.’

Black sighed. It was one of those days. ‘Okay. I’ll play along. And what was the unfindable thing that you found?’

‘It is more a rumour, but from a credible source. A dreadnought.’

Black blinked. Twice. Then sat up slowly.

The Envoy went on, unaware that Black’s heart was thumping. ‘Floating off the end of Orion’s Belt. Five kilometres long. It is said that it blotted out the background stars like a hole in the fabric of space.’

Black found his voice. ‘What - what class?’

The Envoy peered at Black, eyes glittering beneath the blood red cowl he wore. ‘M-class.’

Black breathed out. ‘A
Destroyer.’

Unbelievable. Preposterous. How could it
be?
All the dreadnoughts had been mothballed, hidden. That’s why he sought the lost coordinates! But -

As if reading his mind, the Envoy said, ‘Space is vast. Vaster than humans know. Yet when something wishes to be found, it usually is.’

THE dead don’t always die. Someone had spoken those words, but Anneke couldn’t remember whom. Nor could she tell if the dream was real or the reality a dream. She was running for her life, pounding across cloud tops shaped like the canopy of a vast forest. Coming to a gap she leapt, trusting her Normanskian muscles to carry her across. But she misjudged, clawed at the far edge of the gap, and fell.

And fell and fell.

As she plummeted, she started to burn. Screaming, she lunged awake, breathing heavily, sweating. Anneke Longshadow looked about. She was in a plain room, simply furnished, a soft light creeping from optical fibres embedded throughout the ceiling. Heavy velvet curtains hid the windows.

She planted her feet firmly on the floor, feeling the texture of the cold stone. Many feet had worn a shallow depression where she had placed hers. Thus anchored, she reviewed her memories. She was in the House of Healing on Stormhagen and she had been one month out of the womb-like drench vats that had saved her life, rebuilding her after the terrible ordeal of Arcadia, the cloud city that had nearly been destroyed. The healing, of course, was more mental than physical.

I saved a million people, but couldn’t save myself

She dressed quickly and went down to breakfast, limping slightly. Healer Elinor said the limp was psychosomatic. Not real. A payment for guilt.

‘But I don’t feel guilty. I saved those people. Jake said so.’

‘You did save them. But the guilt is older than that, I think.’

Anneke bowed her head. ‘My parents,’ she mumbled.

‘Perhaps. Survivors often feel great blame.

Children more so.’

‘I dreamt of them while I was in the vats.’

‘Perfectly normal.’

‘I thought I’d put all that behind me.’

‘You thought wrong.’

Anneke shut her eyes. ‘I don’t think I have the strength to deal with it again.’

‘You are stronger than you think and weaker than you believe. Like us all.’

‘Weak? My work is far from done.’

‘You misunderstand me, child. Strength and weakness, yin and yang, light and dark. Both are needed. Rest now.’

She’d closed her eyes, dreamed of her parents again, dreamed of being on the space liner, a bubbly six-year-old with no more concern than what to dress her dolly in that day. But her dolly never did get dressed. Instead, space pirates struck. And in the cacophony of alarms and laser violence, smoke filled the air and she lost sight of her parents, her mother reaching for her, her face torn by terror.