In the Mouth of the Whale (50 page)

Slamships carrying the second wave were fired from railgun launchers and crossed two million kilometres of void in less than three kiloseconds, dumping velocity in a fraction of that time, blasting straight down to the planetoid’s lumpy, cratered surface.

Electromagnetic pulses and sleets of gamma rays and exotic particles had killed everything unshielded, and the thermal pulses of the cannons’ deaths had shocked the deep-frozen regolith. Minor quakes sent boulders tumbling down slopes, opened cracks and vents. Jagged lines of geysers, fed by pockets of frozen methane and nitrogen that had undergone explosive phase changes, were shooting columns of vapour tens of kilometres high. Some of it fell back as nitrogen snow; the rest achieved escape velocity, and views of the planetoid were blurred by a thickening haze that was slashed everywhere by the flares of slamship drives.

Even as they fell, the ships fired off packages that exploded and loosed a rain of combat machines. Multi-limbed things that looked like squashed crabs or engorged snowflakes, each clinging to a crash balloon that absorbed the kinetic energy of impact and instantly deflated. In the diffused and dimming light of five new stars – the slagged cores of the laser cannon – the machines skittered away in every direction, across the floors and inner slopes of craters, across dusty intercrater plains, searching for any sign of enemy activity.

Pods of elite troops followed in slower slamships, falling away as the ships went into orbit, riding T-bar rocket bikes down to the surface. Quicks modified for low-gravity combat, with arms where their legs should be or legs fused into muscular coils, utterly lacking any notion of fear or forgiveness. Rangers, all of them women, all of them pregnant, their embryos arrested at three months’ development and heavily modified: implanted nervous systems loaded with reflexive subroutines; endocrine systems pumping combinations of combat drugs into their mothers’ bloodstreams.

Squads zeroed in on entrances to subsurface tunnels and voids mapped by fly-by drones. As soon as they touched the surface, enemy machines and child-sized troops erupted from dust pools and engaged in vicious firefights with rangers, Quick soldiers, and combat machines.

There was nothing noble or glorious about the battle. It was a slaughter. It was like trying to put out a fire by throwing people on it. And it continued remorselessly even though there was no point in capturing the planetoid after the destruction of the laser array. But we were Trues, and nothing less than full and outright victory would satisfy us.

The Horse refused to watch. He was hunched inside the blanket of his security, turned inwards, until at last he flashed a message to me. It was time to go.

Two of Prem’s cousins shepherded us to the garages under the outer skin of the ship and loaded us into a slamship that was being readied with fifty others for the next stage of the assault on the planetoid. We were seized, stripped, pumped full of drugs, and dumped in the coffins. Facemasks displaced the air in our lungs with fluorosilicone fluid. Dozily, happy and stupid thanks to the cocktail of muscle relaxants, soporifics, and neurosuppressors in my bloodstream, I watched on a tiny window as the slamship was swung out of the line waiting to be shunted through the forward railguns and was lowered into a big, cubic airlock. The double doors above shut; those below opened. The slamship dropped into black vacuum and shot away, powered by strap-on fusion motors, accelerating at a steady 3
g
towards Cthuga.

6

Several of the jockey-crew commons were empty and unused, and there were plenty of spare bots. So it was easy, once Ori had slipped away from the workshops during one of her rest periods, to walk one out on to the skin of the Whale, and flash a tag to Inas. Strange to be riding a bot again, to stalk through the marshalling yard. It seemed mostly unchanged and was as busy as ever, but the upper parts of the Whale were blotched with dark growths and enemy craft darted and jerked amongst spires and platforms hung up there in the sky, their shadows flowing and flitting everywhere.

At one point on her short journey Ori felt her passenger move forward and stand behind her eyes, and she wondered if it realised they were close to the place where they’d first met. And wondered too if it might leave her, push all the way out into the clear freezing air and become a sprite again. Fly out, she thought. Fly, fly. And something inside her head relaxed like a muscle unclenching and the sense of double vision faded. Whatever it wanted from her, it wasn’t yet ready to leave.

She and Inas met by one of the tipplers where freight cars were loaded with raw materials, and they spoke in gesture talk.

I feel horribly exposed out here
, Ori signed.

It’s safer than meeting face to face
, Inas signed back.

For me, or for you?

The others have good reason to be scared
.

I know. And I’m sorry. I’m scared too. Do they know you’re talking to me?

It’s better that they don’t. And that’s all I can say. Now, before someone spots us, tell me everything
.

It broke Ori’s heart that the war and the Ghosts stood between them, but she did her best to tell Inas about her work with the commissar, and passed on the data and specifications she’d gathered, and answered all of Inas’ questions.

Ori had been assigned to a group of Quicks being tested by Commissar Doctor Pentangel and a crew of Ghosts. Like her, the other Quicks had all experienced close encounters with sprites; had all been imprinted with a passenger. The Ghosts were intensely interested in this, and Ori and the others were subjected to all kinds of tests designed to probe and map the handful of affected neurons that, according to the commissar, mirrored the information-processing capacities of the sprites.

The tests were not difficult or unpleasant, but the regime was rigorous and repetitive, and Ori and the others had been tasked with learning techniques of ‘unthinking’, of completely clearing their minds to minimise activity that would interfere with measurements of the little clusters of mirror neurons. It was also exhausting, because the Ghosts did not sleep. Or rather, they were able to function in a reduced capacity with either the left or right halves of their brains asleep – what they called down time. Commissar Doctor Pentangel and Quicks he had recruited to work under him got by on catnaps and the drugs that True pilots had used to enhance their performance. She should be asleep now, Ori told Inas.

We can sleep when we’re dead and the enemy is defeated, Inas signed. Tell me why the Ghosts are so interested in sprites
.

They don’t tell us anything. We’re supposed to know, I guess. And we don’t dare ask. All I can tell you is what the commissar told me
.

According to the commissar, the Ghosts wanted to change history. They believed that the history they inhabited was the wrong history. That it had taken a wrong turning in the distant past that had led them to this point, where they could begin to correct it. To do that, they had to send a message into the past, to their founder, Levi. He had already received such a message, but according to them it was the wrong message. They wanted to send back a different one, one that told Levi what to do to avoid the path they had already taken. A message that would enable him to set out on a new path.

‘History will be changed,’ Commissar Doctor Pentangel had told Ori. ‘Our present, which is far in their founder’s future, will not be erased, but it will become unreachable. He will move away from it and create a new future in which the Ghosts dominate the history of the human species from the beginning.’

‘What will happen to us?’

‘We will continue as before. But we will not be part of the dominant sheaf of timelines rising from Levi’s present, our past. We will be a rare example of a deviance. That is, if you believe that the classic Many Worlds interpretation is the literal truth. If it isn’t, then everything we know will be unmade. That’s why the Ghosts call themselves Ghosts. Because they believe themselves to be ghosts. The restless dead, striving to correct a great wrong in their past.’

The Ghosts believed that the so-called Mind lurking at the core of Cthuga was key to sending this message. And so was an ancient starship that they had captured. The starship contained what remained of a passenger who had been alive at the time when things had gone wrong, when history had switched to the wrong path. In fact, she had been at the centre of events that had changed history, a major player in the so-called Quiet War that had briefly given Earth hegemony over the cities and settlements on the moons of the outer planets. According to Commissar Doctor Pentangel, this meant that her light cone extended back to the crucial moment when Levi had received his message, so the Ghosts could use it to send
their
message and force history on to the correct path.

‘They have others from that era,’ the commissar said. ‘Heroes who, like her, live on in virtualities. And their minds will be entangled with the Mind of Cthuga, in due course. But there is a major problem.’

He looked at Ori, his apt pupil.

She said dutifully, ‘The Mind does not exist.’

‘Not yet. It will, it will. I will see to that. All of us here will see to that, by hard and clever work. Especially you, Ori, and the others like you.’

Is that what they’re doing?
Inas signed, after Ori told her all this.
Making the Mind?

Yes. But first they have to make sprites
.

Commissar Doctor Pentangel had explained this too, in his manic way. Saying that he’d been a fool, an idiot. Saying that he had seen everything front to back. Saying that now he understood how to see things properly because the Ghosts had opened his eyes. And how marvellously simple it was!

‘Your ancestors misled me. They misled everyone. At the last, when they knew they were done for, they dropped their seedship into Cthuga, claiming that its mind would unite with the Mind in the core of the world. But there is no Mind. It was a great and glorious deception. A lie that kept us busy for centuries.

‘The Mind does not yet exist. And when it does, it will not live in the core of the world. There are quantum effects at the core, yes. But they are both too uniform and too random. Uniform because the core is amazingly uniform. A solid sphere of metallic hydrogen generating everywhere the same effects. And those effects are randomly generated and transient because the core is so hot. Nothing lasts. I had thought that helium raining out of the atmosphere and falling through the core to the planet’s centre of mass would perturb those quantum effects in ways that could be used to support an information-generating network. I spent years investigating this, in theory and in practice. Every failure spurred me to greater effort. For I knew that there must be a Mind, and lacked only an explanation and evidence. And why did I know? Why was I so certain? Because your ancestors lied!’

The commissar pacing up and down in his long dark room, his exoskeleton clicking and creaking. Telling Ori that sprites were not manifestations of the Mind’s activity, or side-effects of the activity that sustained it. No, he said, they were the components of what would become the Mind.

‘Cthuga’s magnetic field is very strong, created by the rotation of its core, which is made entirely of metallic hydrogen leavened with a little helium. And where the field lines intersect with the solar wind of Fomalhaut, knots and vortices are created that propagate backwards, and create knots and vortices deep inside the planetary field. That is what creates the sprites. Millions of them. Billions. We do not know how many because we are still trying to pin down the parameters on which we can base our estimates. In any case, there are huge numbers of them, and they have the capacity to process information. In the wild, they decay because they are unstable. But we are creating stable sprites.’

They are making these things?
Inas signed.

They are trying to. Down in the deeps. At the base of the troposphere, below the water zone
.

So that’s why they still need the cable
.

That’s why they need us, Ori signed. We interacted with sprites, and some of their properties were imprinted on us. They are using us as templates to make sprites that will somehow form the Mind. And the Mind will be shaped by their heroes, and this old star traveller. And that’s all I know
.

Activity was increasing in the workshop, hour upon hour. There were more and more Ghosts busy there, and they were tireless and unsleeping. Making small pressure-shells packed with all kinds of intricate machinery that were sent down the cable to the inception points where sprites were being created. Testing Ori and the others. Modelling their altered state in virtual neuronal systems. Testing some kind of wide-pipe upload system that was supposed to plug virtual models of human consciousness into a flock of sprites; two of Commissar Doctor Pentangel’s Quicks had been taken away and their brains had been stripped neuron by neuron by bush robots, to upload alternative models into virtuality.

The commissar showed Ori and the other Quicks the spiky construction or growth that wrapped around the terminus of the cable in the hot dark far below, the way it bent and constricted magnetic lines and tangled them into self-sustaining knots sent whirling off like particles on a flood. Soon, he said, their templates would be used to give those sprites intelligence and volition. The first step in the creation of the Mind.