In the Mouth of the Whale (43 page)

Somehow, I was outside, lying on cold stone in dull pewter light, the Horse kneeling beside me. The lichen hunter, Akoni, emerged from the doorway, Prem limp in his arms. He staggered towards me and knelt and half-lowered, half-dropped her. I remember the hollow thump her head made when it struck the stone.

I managed to push to my feet. My chest was tattooed with points of pain and blood dripped from the fingers of my gashed hand and one eye was hot and half-closed, but my mind was growing clear as thoughts knitted each to each.

‘She’s in shock but I think she’ll live,’ Akoni said. He was kneeling by Prem, looking up at me.

‘Who attacked me?’

‘I shot him. I picked up Prem’s pistol and shot him,’ the Horse said, and burst into tears.

There’s not much left to tell of the debacle. I used my security to engage with the translation frame, and after a few tens of seconds worked my way into its kernel and shut it down, and the tower stood as it had always stood. The body of a Quick lichen hunter lay just inside the entrance. It wasn’t one of our party; he must have been caught and turned by Bree Sixsmith, and left to guard the place.

The Horse and I found Yakob’s body on a platform at the top of the tower, beside an array of comms equipment. The top of his skull was gone and thousands of fine threads had pierced the membrane that wrapped his brain, and had grown through its meat. A bush robot that had been used to interrogate him.

There was no sign of Bree Sixsmith, and we could find no trace of the kernel of the hell that had been lodged here. We were still searching when two flitters dropped out of the mists and discharged troopers who’d come to investigate a strange signal, transmitted when Prem had sprung the trap that Bree Sixsmith had left behind. That was when we discovered that the lichen hunters had left, and had taken Prem with them.

9

Ori entered the resupply station through the hatch in the rear of the hangar and searched corridors and rooms until she found a helical ramp that climbed around the core to the diamond-paned dome at the top. There were no traces of any kind of fighting or struggle, and the motion detector of her suit registered no movement anywhere, but she walked warily, watching shadows and doorways, spinning around every ten steps. She was still wearing her helmet because she was afraid that the station’s air might be laced with subtle poisons, biologics, or psychotropics, and she carried a welding pistol she’d found in the hangar, an improvised weapon useful only at close range but comforting to hold as she stalked the deserted station.

Under the skylight dome, she skirted an abstract sculpture woven from thorny loops, threaded between hydroponic beds of banana plants and fruit bushes, vibrant green under bright suspensor lamps. Because the station was slowly rotating it took her a little while to locate
The Eye of the Righteous
: a bright star flaring away towards the enemy craft, which was suddenly close to it and suddenly far away again, skipping to and fro as if playing some deadly game of tag. It was much smaller than the ship but much quicker, and Ori was certain that the ship’s lashed-up railguns would be no match for it.

Run, she thought. Run.

And felt, at the back of her head, for the first time in days, the passenger stir in her personal dark. Felt it moving forward.

The Eye of the Righteous
was beginning to yaw now, a ponderous attempt to turn broadside. The enemy craft was below it, then off to one side. There were tiny puffs of vapour and white contrails shot past the black craft: the railguns had fired.

The enemy craft slid backwards very quickly and came to a sudden stop. A tiny mote hung way out across the sky.
The Eye of the Righteous
was still turning towards it when it drove forward. Ori saw what was going to happen and shouted
No!
and the enemy craft plunged straight through
The Eye of the Righteous
, punching through the upper surface and ripping out through the keel in a shower of debris that twinkled away towards the cloud deck as the enemy craft described a graceful circle and halted in the air again as if to survey the damage it had done.

The Eye of the Righteous
wallowed in the air. Another set of contrails raked out from its starboard side, aimed at nothing in particular. It was tilted downwards, stern first. Then a chunk of superstructure dropped away and the rest shot up, unbalanced. The motors flared and died, and then the ship was sinking, nose tipping up as it fell with increasing velocity towards the cloud deck.

Ori watched, paralysed by horror, as the enemy craft skipped and slid towards the resupply station. When something rustled behind her, she blinked and shuddered and swung around, raising the welding pistol, pointing it at something vaguely human-shaped, woven from black loops and twice her height. It was the statue, reconfigured. An enemy drone. It had a tiny head of loops constricted around a single eye, and two pairs of arms. Three terminated in long saw-toothed blades, the fourth in a broad plate that it held towards Ori. The plate buzzed and gargled, and a deep, pleasant voice asked her to put up her weapon.

‘We are your friend. Do no harm and no harm will be done to you.’

Ori held out the welding pistol, and the drone snatched it away with a flick of one of its arms.

‘Wait there. We are coming.’

The enemy swarmed into the domed garden like guests arriving at a party, full of energy and curiosity, laughing, calling to each other in piping voices, speaking a clacking language that Ori didn’t recognise. They wore hard-shell pressure suits decorated with swirling patterns or stripes or spots, some in black and white, others in bright clashing colours. They were smaller than her, so slender that she reckoned she could snap any one of them over her knee. Most had taken off their helmets, revealing round heads that seemed too big for their slender frames, and large eyes and skin paler than the palms of her hands. Translucent skin tinted pink with the blood beneath. Blond or brown or black hair shaved close to their scalps in patterns of swirls and dots and dashes that echoed the decoration of their pressure suits.

Ori, who’d been indoctrinated with the idea that the enemy were soulless hive creatures, all alike, all slaved to a central authority, was amazed and alarmed. They were no more than children, running around the aisles of plants in a happy and noisy chaos, tearing off leaves, sniffing them, tasting them.

Several gathered in front of her and spoke in careful, stilted Portuga one after the other, telling her that she was not their prisoner. No, they had rescued her from bondage. She had been a slave, and now she was free. Free to choose. Free to decide her fate.

It wasn’t much of a choice, it turned out. Join them, or be worked to death as a prisoner. But it was more than Ori had expected.

She told them she was with them. What else could she do? They laughed and clapped, and the machine let her go and stepped back as she fell to her knees. The enemy were all around her, helping her up, patting at the visor of her helmet, smiling at her.

‘You have joined the company of heroes.’

‘You and your companion.’

‘The little intelligence that has made its home in your head.’

‘Yes, we know about that.’

‘We know everything about you. Commissar Doctor Pentangel is one of ours, now.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Ori said.

‘First, you must choose a name.’

‘You must shed your slave name. Here. Choose.’

A list scrolled in the air. She chose a name at random. ‘Janejean.’

‘That’s good.’

‘That’s wonderful.’

‘An old name.’

‘A good name.’

‘One of the first martyrs.’

‘Come with us now. There’s so much to be done.’

They flowed out of the domed garden at the top of the station, taking Ori with them, carrying samples of plants and dirt in sealed cases. Out through an opening cut in the outer skin of the station, into a transparent bubble divided by a mesh floor at its equator into an open space above and a motor below. The bubble detached and skittered out across the gulf of empty air towards the enemy’s ship, and that was it: Ori had become a Ghost.

Part Four

CTHUGA

1

We searched long and hard for evidence of sabotage and at last it was found by one of the small robots crawling across the pitted sheath of ice and fullerene that had protected our ship during its voyage: a tiny, complex probe embedded deep in the centre of a small crater marked by a sunburst of bright rays, scarcely larger than an old-fashioned bullet of the kind fired by the ancient rifles carried by some of the wildsiders, weapons handcrafted by their great-grandparents and handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. This, though, was a very subtle bullet. It was sheathed in layers of diamond alloy interleaved with layers of impact gel; its interior was packed with microscopic machinery; there was a ring of tiny one-shot motors around its waist.

Although it had been built to withstand tremendous acceleration and deceleration, the impact had killed it. It had registered on the ship’s log, but had not been checked: the frequency of small collisions had begun to increase as we approached Fomalhaut, even though we were travelling above the plane of the system. Now we sent out robots to check the site of every similar impact, and presently we found another probe. Or rather, what was left of it. This one had survived, and split open like a seed. The machinery inside had spun threads that had sunk into the icy sheath of our ship, mining it for elements used to grow a fractal microwave aerial and a complex pseudohyphal network that had spread through the sheath and interfaced with the ship’s nervous system.

We had no doubt that this parasitic system had spawned the intruder and inserted him into the viron, and at once began to map and analyse it. We wanted to reconstruct the matrix from which he’d sprung. We wanted to understand his origin so that we could find him, and the Child. And then we wanted to use that knowledge to destroy him.

What we failed to see was that we were being manipulated by something more powerful and subtle than the intruder. We failed to detect another network that went deep into the nexus of our interfaces with the systems of the ship. We failed to understand that we were as blind to our true situation as the Child was to hers. And while we were deconstructing the intruder, atom by atom, the Child and Jaguar Boy were walking away from the burrows and galleries of the Sloth People, crossing trackless swales of iron-hard caliche in a dead zone created by deforestation and climate change, when it began to rain.

They’d lived with the Sloth People for so many days that the Child had lost count of them. They were a gentle, slow, small race, the Sloth People, none taller than the Child’s waist. They spent much of their time sleeping, and most of the rest grooming each other or singing long plaintive songs that could take days to complete, as singer after singer took up the thread of the melody. The songs were all they had of their history, a much degraded mythos that described the cosmos outside their burrows (which they never left) and where they had come from. Songs of a distant Earth.

There were no children. The Sloth People were born fully formed after a gestation of two years in ectogenetic tanks, and lived on average a little over twice that. The tanks were maintained by bots, as were the gardens of fungi that grew in low galleries on mulches of wood chips collected from the distant forest by roving machines. In real life, Jaguar Boy told the Child, the fungi were vacuum organisms, growing on carbonaceous material collected from the surfaces of the asteroids into which the Sloth People had burrowed. The Child said that she knew about vacuum organisms – the Outers had developed many kinds, to generate power from the faint sunlight at Jupiter and Saturn, to mine carbon and other elements from the silicates and ice of the gas giants’ moons, to manufacture edible plastic and CHON food, and so on, and so forth.

‘Vacuum organisms went everywhere humans went in the Solar System and beyond,’ Jaguar Boy said. ‘They are genuine commensals. As rats and cockroaches and fleas once were, in the ships that sailed the oceans of Earth in the long-ago. The genetic templates of all kinds of organisms were carried in seedships, but few were used, and most of those died out in places like this.’

The Sloth People were slow and small because theirs was a low-energy ecosystem. Carbon and nitrogen were plentiful, but many other essential nutrients were not. Their machines had adapted them to their circumstances, and over time they had lost all curiosity and much of their intellect. All they had was their past, celebrated in song and in murals they daubed on the walls of their burrows. Recycling was not perfect, so essential elements were slowly lost and had to be replenished from dwindling sources. And as the resources of their chosen home became rarer and harder to mine, the Sloth People grew smaller still, and their numbers further declined: a meagre tribe huddling against the encroaching cold and dark.

After Jaguar Boy had explained this long, slow attrition, the Child said that it must have taken millions of years. She had the floating feeling that this was a dream. A calm acceptance of the impossible. She’d had it ever since she’d first met the River Folk. The feeling that Jaguar Boy had drugged her and was controlling her dreams. Or perhaps she’d been dreaming when she’d first met Jaguar Boy in the strip of forest in the ruined city, and was dreaming still, and would wake up to find that her mother wasn’t engaged to Vidal Francisca, that she wasn’t going to be sent away . . .