In the Mouth of the Whale (47 page)

‘I think we’re getting better at this,’ I said.

‘We’d better be, if it’s going to be like this at every back door,’ the Horse said.

‘I think we can find what we want here.’

‘They’re probably dead, the people who used it. Either Bree reached them, or they didn’t realise she’d turned their back door into a trap. Anyone who came through would have been possessed, and then the screaming and the stabbing would have started. Just like the cultists Yakob Singleton found, and all the others.’

‘That’s why we have to find any survivors as soon as possible.’

While the volunteers tracked the back door’s connection through the Archipelago’s network, the Horse and I set to work uncovering the footprints and fingerprints of its users. They led us to an antique office in a low building that overlooked the hulk of a half-built ship in dry dock. On a drafting table were diagrams hand-drawn in white ink on blue paper: information about construction of a laser array and its orbital dynamics, and tiny drones that were, according to Yenna Singleton and the Redactor Svern, when I showed them what we’d discovered, the kind used to scout enemy territory.

‘They can withstand tremendous accelerations, so can be fired by railguns for fast fly-bys,’ the Redactor Svern said.

I said, ‘Could they intercept a ship travelling at high speed?’

‘Hit it, you mean? Of course.’

‘You’re wondering if the cultists tried to contact the ship,’ Yenna Singleton said.

‘He has a point,’ the Redactor Svern said. ‘If the probes can survive the high acceleration caused by a railgun, they could survive high deceleration, too. And deliver some kind of message, or establish a comms node.’

‘It’s a trivial question, and one that will be answered soon enough,’ Yenna Singleton said. ‘Once we take control of the laser array, we will have control of the ship. We’ll know everything about it then.’

‘As for that, I have another task for you, Isak,’ the Redactor Svern said. ‘I want you to join the assault force.’

‘For the greater good of the clan, I suppose.’

‘For the greater good of everyone,’ Yenna Singleton said.

3

The enemy ship punched out of the atmosphere in an arc that took it halfway around the waist of Cthuga before it re-entered, shedding shells of superheated plasma, gliding towards the calm atmospheric layer where the Whale hung. Ori watched all this on one of the windows set before her face. She was wrapped in a cocoon that not only protected her from abrupt changes in gravity but also effectively imprisoned her, but she was allowed access to the vertiginous indices of the ship’s knowledge base and a zoo of blobjects that conveyed the status of various systems by their shapes and changes in colour, pulsations, and the pitch of their simple songs. She could trace links with other ships, too. Ships in orbit and ships trawling and transiting the atmosphere, and stations and rocks spread across the dust belt. So many of them. The enemy seemed to have moved everything they had to Cthuga.

Her captors were monitoring her all the while. Explaining that everything was open to all, that nothing was hidden. Guiding her to places and things they wanted her to see. Showing off their favourites with the innocent open pride of young children to whom everything is precious because everything is new, and everything is true. Streaming a dizzy kaleidoscope of vids and picts that gave Ori a headache and a kind of oceanic state of fear. Individually, each of the enemy was little more than a child. Collectively, knit by this open-access thing of theirs, united by a common purpose focused on a single goal, they were a Power. Ruthless. Implacable.

They wanted her to know the truth, they said. They wanted her to understand the true history of the human species. Where it had come from, what it had become, where it had gone wrong and how they were going to fix that. Once she understood all of this, she would know that she had made the right choice.

As the ship glided in towards the Whale, Ori saw how foolish she’d been, thinking that somehow she could contribute to its defence. For it had been taken and was being transformed. Hung at the centre of a great flock of platforms and towers and other structures floating under clusters of balloons, and swarms of ships and smaller craft that moved between them, it seemed superficially intact, and the cable still hung below it, dwindling away to the cloud deck. Ori could even see a train moving up the cable towards the inverted tree of the marshalling yard, returning for a fresh load of material to feed the never-ending work of construction and repair far below. But as the ship in which she rode skittered towards the upper flank of the Whale, she saw areas where the skin had been peeled back by explosions, and gaping holes burned into it, and black patches and scabs mottling it, growing into each other.

The ship docked above one such patch. It extended for a kilometre down the skin of the Whale, flat in some places, erupting in clusters of latticework spires in others. Some of the spires were several hundred metres long, and small lightnings stuttered around their tips. Then the window shut and the cocoon around Ori relaxed. She clambered out of its slick embrace. All around her the enemy were twittering and laughing as if at the end of some hugely entertaining joyride. Most ignored her, and for a moment she wondered what she was supposed to do, and was more afraid than ever, as if she was exposed on a high pinnacle, where a single misstep could send her plunging down in a long, long drop.

Then someone touched her elbow, told her that she shouldn’t be afraid.

‘You’re with us now. You’re free.’

The way they spoke, it was as if they were sight-reading unfamiliar words. Perhaps they were – perhaps some AI function was translating for them, putting up what they needed to say to her.

She said, ‘What do you want me to do?’

The enemy studied her. A grave little thing, with olive skin and dark brown eyes and a spray of pigmented spots over its snub nose. Ori realised that she didn’t know if it was male or female or something else. It smiled, and said, ‘Why don’t you find your friends first? They’ll help you understand what you need to do.’

‘My friends?’

‘In what used to be called the commons of jockey crew #87.’

It was a strange, heartbreaking homecoming. The interior of the Whale was hardly changed at all, apart from the enemy swarming cheerfully and purposefully down the main companionways. They made a tremendous noise, talking to each other, exchanging greetings, taking up snatches of wordless songs – high weird ululations, chanted streams of nonsense syllables with simple rhyming schemes – and there were so many of them. If the Whale was as crowded everywhere else as here, Ori thought, its captors easily outnumbered the original crew by at least ten to one.

Ori was taller than any of them and slower than most, and wondered if this was what Trues felt like, in a crowd of Quick. She found her way to one of the elevator shafts and descended past the docking areas and got off and rode another elevator down past the manufactory levels and got off again, and took a third elevator down to the zone of the crew commons. She saw a few Quicks on the way, clumping along amidst the slight figures of the enemy, no Trues. She supposed that all the Trues had died in the fighting, or had committed suicide rather than be captured, or had been given the long drop.

The crowds thinned out as she made her way through familiar companionways towards the commons, passing murals she remembered being painted, a big mobile sculpture made from old tools strung on wire below an airshaft, turning in the faint breeze of the air conditioning. The commons was empty. Everyone was on shift, she supposed, as the rush of recognition hit her. A blow to the heart. It was as if she had stepped out just a few minutes before. The tubular space lit by the yellowish glow of panels in the low ceiling. The soft, scuffed black floor. Niches in offset rows down either side. Low tables, seatpads, the casual detritus of living.

Something salty slid down the back of Ori’s throat and she realised that she was crying. She snuffled, wiped tears with the back of her hand. She’d come all the way around the world, had lost good companions, had been captured and told she’d been freed, and now she was back, and she had no idea what to do next.

Someone was standing behind her and she turned but no one was there. It was the sprite, of course. The passenger in her head. Her silent sharer.

She climbed into the niche she’d shared with Inas, into the old familiar smell, the double groove in the temperfoam, and although she didn’t think it would be possible, she fell asleep. And when she woke, people were watching her. A small group, standing back as she swung out of the niche. She recognised them all. There were far fewer than there had been, but she was glad to see them, and there was Inas, and they fell into each other’s arms, and Ori started to cry all over again.

Inas touched the half-healed wound in her cheek; Ori said it was nothing.

‘I underestimated the malice of someone who disagreed with me. She’s dead, now. They’re all dead, Inas. Only I survived . . .’

Emere, the oldest of the crew, said, ‘You can’t stay here. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

‘They told me to come here,’ Ori said, looking at her across Inas’ shoulder.

‘That’s why you can’t stay,’ Emere said. She had a strained expression that was mirrored in the faces of the others. Anxiety. Disapproval.

‘I’m not one of them.’

‘That’s what everyone says,’ one of the others, Ahe, said.

‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ Emere said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘Where else would she go?’ Inas said. ‘Aren’t we her friends and comrades?’

‘Are we?’ Ahe said.

‘I’ll go.’ Ori uncoupled from Inas’ embrace. She was upset and angry at this naked rejection, but resigned too. She should have realised how different things were, now. That there was no going home again. She said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise that I was putting you in danger. If I did, I wouldn’t have come here.’

She hadn’t gone far when she heard someone hurrying after her, heard Inas calling her name. ‘We agreed that you need to know what happened here,’ Inas said. ‘I can tell you that, and I think I can tell you what the Ghosts want from you, too. But don’t ask any questions. Even if I know the answers, I can’t deal with them.’

‘I understand. You’re afraid that I’m a spy.’

‘We’re all of us afraid all of the time,’ Inas said. ‘You’ll see why, soon enough.’

They talked in a crowded commons where Quicks and Ghosts ate at long tables, the Ghosts noisy and ebullient, the Quicks hunched and subdued. The food was strange. Smoky or bitter gruels, bowls of tasteless, slippery red ribbons, little nodules that crumbled to a grainy sweetness on the tongue. Ghost food.

Ori told Inas about her sojourn in the station down below, her transfer to
The Eye of the Righteous
and the terror of the invasion and the long voyage that had ended at the pelagic station, where she’d been captured and brought here. Inas told her about how she and the other jockeys had been riding their bots out on the skin of the Whale when the enemy had invested it, so they’d had a grandstand view of the battle. The loss of the raptors, enemy ships settling all around the Whale, Trues flying sleds and flitters loaded with explosives at the ships, Trues and the enemy fighting in hand-to-hand combat after the enemy broke into the Whale’s modules and compartments, how a gang of Trues had attempted to blow most of the ballonets and send the Whale plunging down, and how some Quicks had rebelled against them.

‘They killed the Trues and saved the Whale,’ Inas said. ‘Not because they were in league with the Ghosts, but because they wanted to save their sisters. They wanted to save us. And they did. Most died fighting the Trues. The rest died fighting the Ghosts. Some say that they’re heroes. I’m not so sure.’

Inas had changed. She’d been spiky, confident, outgoing, and now she was troubled and vague and confused. As if she was ashamed that she had survived. She told Ori about the flocks of tiny enemy machines that had settled in huge patches that had disintegrated into black nanostuff that spread and transformed the Whale’s skin. They’d been ordered to contain the infection, Inas said, and although it had been like trying to bail out a reservoir with a cup, they’d kept at it until their connections had been cut and they’d found themselves back in their immersion chairs with the enemy crowding around, helping them up, telling them that it was all right, it was all over. Some of the crew had refused to cooperate and they’d been taken away. Everyone else had been converted.

‘Most of the Trues were dead by then,’ she said. ‘We didn’t know what to do, so we did as we were told.’

‘Did they make you take a new name?’ Ori said.

Inas nodded. ‘One of their saints. Janejean.’

‘I chose that name too!’

Inas’ smile was weak, there and gone. ‘Don’t think it means anything. There weren’t that many to choose from. Apart from the thing with the names, they’ve mostly left us alone. We still work out on the skin, although we aren’t dispatching probes any more. Mostly, we help to load hoppers, help keep the cable growing. Can’t let that stop. Nothing’s really changed. Except, of course, we’re free now. According to the Ghosts, anyway.’

‘Do they watch you?’

Inas took Ori’s hands in her own. ‘You mean, are we being watched now? No. That’s not how it is.’

But Inas’ fingers were moving on Ori’s palms, shaping the signs they used to pass on gossip and jokes about Trues while riding bots out on the skin of the Whale.