In the Mouth of the Whale (23 page)

All of this had been built by True machines, using True technology. It was the very symbol of our strength, and we were stupidly proud that it had never been attacked.

Our ship made its final approach to T through layers of drones, smart rocks, one-shot gamma and X-ray lasers, kinetic cannon, particle-beam throwers, plasma mines, and strange attractors. As soon as it achieved a parking orbit at the edge of a small cloud of ships large and small, old and new, Prem Singleton and her cousins departed in a small flock of flitters for a barracks and processing centre under the bulging dome that capped T’s minor lobe; the Horse and I dropped to the deep rift in the major lobe, where we were met by a crew of troopers and prefects. As was customary, I had informed the authorities that I was coming to T, but when I told the official in command of our reception committee that I would like to get to work as soon as possible, she said that her boss wanted to talk to me, and escorted the Horse and me to a flitter that dropped into the rift. We fell beside a sheer wall of pyroclastic basalts clad in gossamer sheaths of construction diamond, and docked at a skinny building of some twenty storeys that clung to the wall some way above a broad, forested terrace. The Horse was led off by the troopers; I was taken to the office of Marshal Panchaanan, the chief of T’s internal security service.

It was a spherical room at the base of the building, with a porthole window that looked out across the gulf of the rift towards the folds and bulges of the far wall. We sat in a nest of cushions in front of that window, the marshal and I, and he served me tea himself and then explained that my services weren’t required because the hell had already been harrowed and made safe.

After I’d taken a moment to get past my surprise, I told him that the Library had no record of this. And since only my clan, by custom and contract, could harrow hells, it put both of us in a difficult position.

‘That is why your visit piqued our interest,’ the marshal said. He was quiet-spoken but his gaze was searching and seriously intelligent. Neat and straightbacked in scarlet uniform tunic and trousers, his black hair swept in a high wave. ‘We’d very much like to discuss it with you.’

‘I’d very much like to know who you employed to harrow your hell.’

‘Bree Sixsmith did the work and reported back to the Library. Don’t you wonder why your people didn’t tell you? Why they sent you here on a fool’s errand?’

‘They didn’t know the hell had been harrowed because Bree Sixsmith didn’t tell them. She couldn’t, because she’s dead.’

She had committed suicide following an encounter with a demon shelled in a doppelgänger: when she destroyed the doppelgänger, the real demon had been freed and had penetrated her defences and lodged in her mind. This was immediately after my disgrace and for some time many in the Library had believed the demon that had killed Bree was linked to the demon that had killed Arden and Van. Nothing had ever been proved, but it had deepened and darkened the cloud of infamy that clung to me.

After I had explained this, the marshal threw a packet at my security and said, ‘Is this her?’

I studied the images, and said that it certainly looked like Bree Sixsmith. There was biometric data too, but I couldn’t verify that without checking against records held in the Library, and said so.

‘She arrived after we sent the usual notification to the Library,’ the marshal said. ‘We had no reason not to believe she was other than what she seemed to be.’

‘Did you talk directly to someone in the Library, or post the request in the usual fashion? It could have been intercepted. Or it wasn’t sent at all. After she harrowed the hell, did you send anyone inside to inspect her work?’

After the slightest pause, the marshal said, ‘She provided a full record of her work. She had searched every part of the hell, found nothing of any significance, and sealed it.’

‘How do you know that it is not the record from some other harrowing, rather than the record of what she did here? My clan entered into a contract with Lathi Singleton in good faith, Marshal. It was not a task we relished, believing it would cause trouble for us, but we must see it through to completion. I suggest that you contact the Library directly, and do it quickly. Whoever this person is, she was not acting for us, and she might not have done what she claimed to have done. She might have released any demons inside the hell rather than binding them, just to begin with. Talk to the Redactor Svern. If you do not want me to enter this hell, ask him to send someone else. But do it quickly.’

Fortunately, the marshal was neither stupid nor vindictive. He told me that the Horse and I would be allowed access to the hell so long as we provided a full real-time feed, a concession I was happy to make. I would inspect it and do anything necessary to make it safe, and then the marshal would decide how to proceed from there.

‘There is one condition. Before you report to Lathi Singleton, you will report to me,’ the marshal said.

‘You’ll see everything we do.’

‘But we might not understand all of it. You’ll enlighten us afterwards with a full and frank account.’

A posse of troopers and prefects escorted the Horse and me to a busy interchange at the edge of the rift’s roof, and a capsule took us at great speed through a rapid-transit tube that cut a long chord beneath T’s surface. I told the Horse about my interview with the marshal, and we reviewed the records that one of the prefects gave us and worked up a strategy and prepared our gear. Providing the feed that the marshal had requested was simple enough, but we were still demonstrating it to the prefects when the capsule slowed and drifted into the terminus of the line where, with a thump and a jerk, the airlock at its nose mated with the airlock of the station.

The station was attached to a habitat that was cut into the sheer cliff of the inner face of a crater rim wall and overlooked a level dusty plain that fell away under the naked black sky. Lights raised on tall poles were strung along the roads that criss-crossed the plain, and set around ships that sat in cradles or under domes. It was a junkyard, a cemetery for ships that had been badly damaged in engagements with the enemy, retrieved, and returned to T for inspection and analysis. We passed the wreck of a big corsair, its hull riddled with holes of every size, swung around its stern and the torches of its fusion motors, twisted and warped like mutant flowers by some imaginable flux of energy, and ground on towards another dome.

An ancient Quick pinnace sat inside, an asymmetrical cluster of bubbles scarcely larger than our tractor. One of the prefects told us that it had been part of the first assault on the resurgent Ghosts, a comprehensive disaster that had grievously underestimated the enemy’s strength. Every ship had been killed; this one, like many others, had been brought back to T and had sat in the graveyard ever since, until Yakob Singleton and a data miner had boarded it and discovered the hell cached in its mind.

After the Office for Public Safety had discovered what Yakob Singleton had done, the ship had been isolated, and the hell had been harrowed – or so they thought. Because we had no idea what the person who called herself Bree Sixsmith had actually done, the Horse and I treated it like any other newly discovered hell. We set up a perimeter and sent in probes, and discovered nothing more than a small, low-bit-rate viron barely able to maintain the integrity of the simplest aspects of our avatars. It had not merely been harrowed; it had been collapsed.

‘Well, that’s that,’ the Horse said.

‘We’ll check everything,’ I said.

There was little chance that anything of any significance survived in there, but we tailored our avatars to the viron and went in anyway, emerging at the base of a rectangular block of a building sketched in wire-frame that broke up into blocky pixels when I attempted to increase resolution. All around, similar towers soared up to a sky the colour of a headache, fading away on every side into illimitable mist. Inside the building, the Horse and I climbed a long winding staircase and soon found that it contained a Mö bius warp, a twist that between one step and the next returned us to the base of the building. A simple trap of the kind I had demonstrated to Prem Singleton in the training suite, except this one didn’t contain a nasty surprise. We climbed back up the staircase and dropped through the twist and started to climb again.

‘I’m insulted,’ the Horse said.

‘That’s why we must remain alert. There may be other, more dangerous traps.’

‘There isn’t enough bit rate to support a child’s conjuring trick. This wasn’t much to begin with and it’s less than nothing now.’

‘Lathi Singleton said there was a back door to the Library.’

‘If there was, it isn’t here any more. We’d see the leakage. How many times are we going to climb this thing?’ the Horse said.

We had reached the point at the staircase where the metrical frame of the hell was warped.

‘Until I’m satisfied that there’s nothing hidden beyond it, and that it doesn’t go anywhere else,’ I said.

‘You won’t admit that this has been thoroughly harrowed, will you? That whoever did this was better than you.’

‘Better than you, too.’

‘All right, let’s go around again.’

Eventually, by dumb persistence, the Horse and I discovered an entry point that took us somewhere else: a seemingly limitless level stretching away under a low ceiling supported by squat pillars set at random intervals, where a trace of processing activity yet remained. It wasn’t much. A faint irregularity in the low-resolution fabric of the floor, but as significant as a bootprint in the dust of an uninhabited rock. There had been a doorway here, once. It had been sealed and reduced, there was no way of reconstructing it or finding out where it had led to, but it had been there.

We pulled our avatars out of the hell, collapsed it to the smallest amount of information required to describe it, and archived the kernel inside a secure file. I worked up my report on the return journey to the rift; there was little to it other than the fact that the hell had been made safe, and once had been linked to at least one other viron. The prefects went off to talk to the marshal; the troopers took the Horse and me to the forest that covered a setback terrace halfway down the side of the rift, about two kilometres above the thready ribbon of lights and neon of the rest-and-recreation complex.

The trees grew very tall in T’s shallow gravity, their soaring trunks bursting into fluffy clouds of leaves at the very top. They were linked by walkways and ziplines, and shell-like cabins and lodges occupied platforms slung between them or built around their trunks, to house officers and other senior personnel on leave.

The Horse and I were lodged in a cabin little bigger than one of the bubbles of the Quick ship that had brought us to T, high up in the canopy of one of the trees. It was comfortable enough, but it was a jail all the same: because the marshal couldn’t prevent me reporting to Lathi Singleton once I left T, he had decided to keep me there until he had discovered who ‘Bree Sixsmith’ really was, and who she was working for.

The troopers were stationed below the cabin and a small flock of drones and a sentinel net monitored us, but I determined at once that it was easy enough to fool their security, just as my fellow novitiates and I had often fooled the security net of the Permanent Floating Market using gear designed to crack and unriddle the knottier and far more dangerous encryptions of hells and broken networks. Within a few hundred seconds, I had set up illusions of both the Horse and myself, and rendered us invisible to the gaze of the machines – they saw us, but did not register us. We inhabited a floating blind spot.

‘That’s all very well, but we’re still stuck on top of a tree,’ the Horse said. ‘We can’t climb down because troopers occupy the platform below ours, and we can’t jump because the fall would be fatal even in gravity as shallow as this. Or do you have wings hidden on your person?’

‘I did think about gliding, using fabric ripped from the screens,’ I said. ‘Then I realised that if we can’t climb down this tree, we can climb down another. Or at least, you can. The canopy of this tree meshes with its neighbours.’

‘You’re closer to a monkey than I am,’ the Horse said. ‘And even if we escape this tree, we’re still on T.’

‘So is Prem Singleton. And as luck would have it, I forgot to tell the marshal about her.’

There was a moment when I thought my plan wouldn’t work. The Horse clambered along a branch that jutted towards a neighbouring tree, but it grew so thin at its extremity that his meagre weight caused it to bow down through almost ninety degrees. Clinging to it by hands and feet, the Horse looked down and around, glanced up at me and winked, and then threw himself across the gulf, and disappeared in a flurry of foliage.

I sat down and waited, reviewing what we had found in the remnants of the hell, thinking about the implications. A thousand seconds passed, and another thousand, and another. I was pacing to and fro in the confined space of the cabin, looking out in every direction across the treetops, when I saw a flitter racing towards me. For a moment, I thought the marshal’s prefects had come to take me away for interrogation; then I realised that it was as invisible to the security net as I was. It came to a crash stop and slid sideways until it rested in the air a pace or so from the entrance to the cabin. Its canopy slid back and the Horse said, ‘Where do you want to go?’

6

Ori wrote up her dream and the patterns she’d seen in the darkness as part of her daily report. She told herself not to expect a response, but couldn’t help thinking that it would interest the philosopher-soldiers. Perhaps even come to the attention of Commissar Doctor Pentangel. The train would return and take her off-station and return her to the Whale, where she’d be welcomed and rewarded . . .