Into Everywhere (2 page)

‘Are you certain?’

‘I can show you my workings.’

Tony flicked through images of the intruder. It looked a little like a weaponised jellyfish got up from shards of charred plastic: a convex shield or hood three hundred metres across, trailing three stout tentacles ornamented with random clusters of spines. No one knew what the original function of G-class Ghajar ships had been, but plating their shields with foamed fullerene and attaching weapon pods and patches around their rims turned them into formidable combat vessels.

‘If they aren’t police,’ he said, ‘they must be pirates. Claim jumpers.’

‘The possibility is not insignificant,’ the bridle said.

‘A ship that size, running under a fake flag? It is the only possibility. The Red Brigade has frigates, doesn’t it?’

‘So do a number of other fringe-world outfits. We should challenge it,’ the bridle said. ‘You can use your notorious charm to get its crew to reveal who they really are and what they want.’

Her personality package, presenting as a bright eager capable young woman, was the front end of the AI that interfaced with the mind and nervous system of the actual ship, which like the frigate, like all ships everywhere, had been built by the Ghajar thousands of years ago. Tony’s C-class clipper was called
Abalunam’s Pride
, but no one knew its real name. The name its maker had given it long before it had been extracted from a sargasso orbit, refurbished and modified, and purchased by his grandmother. The secret name it might still call itself.

Tony said, ‘I already have a pretty good idea about what they want. And it is possible that they do not know we are here. So we will maintain radio silence and continue to monitor them. And if they contact us, we will tell them that we are just a freebooter with an exploration licence and nothing to hide.’

‘Which we are.’

‘Which we are. But my family has a history with the Red Brigade. And if that really is one of their frigates . . .’

Tony grazed the cicatrices on his cheek with his thumb as he thought things through. He was scared, yes, shocked and sort of numb, but he also felt alert and focused. Babysitting Fred Firat and his crew of wizards while they probed the ancient secrets of the slime planet had proven to be astoundingly tedious. There were no beasties to hunt, and the scattered Elder Culture ruins weren’t anything special. Junot Johnson was supervising the wizards’ work; Lancelot Askia was keeping them in line; after completing the survey of stromatolite sites and setting his little surprises, Tony had mostly stayed aboard the ship. Now, for the first time in four weeks, he was fully awake. At last he had something to do. And if that frigate really was one of the Red Brigade’s ships he would have a chance to test his skill and cunning against his family’s old nemesis.

He said, ‘How long before it gets here?’

‘Nineteen point three eight hours, if it maintains its current delta vee,’ the bridle said.

‘We will have a lot less than that if it fires off scouting drones. What about our assets at the mirror? Has our unwelcome guest pinged them, tried to spoof them, knocked any of them out?’

‘Not yet.’

‘It could have left behind assets of its own when it came through. Have one of the drones scan the mirror and the volume around it out to five thousand kilometres, but keep the rest dark. And shoot a message to Junot, brief him on the situation and tell him that the wizards should start packing up their stuff straight away.’

‘Then we’re going to make a run for it,’ the bridle said.

‘I am not going to sit on the ground and wait to see what that frigate does next,’ Tony said. ‘Check the mirror, message Junot, and raise the ship and aim it at the wizards’ camp.’

‘Shall I have the hand finish braiding your hair, too?’

The bridle had a nice line in sarcasm, but Tony took the offer at face value.

‘Why not?’ he said, settling back on the couch. ‘If those claim jumpers do want to talk to me face to face, I should look my best.’

Five minutes later,
Abalunam’s Pride
was sliding sideways and low above eroded sheets of ancient basaltic lava. The lifeless black plain stretched away in every direction, studded with puddles and ponds gleaming orange in the level light of the soft sun, which at this high latitude was fixed just above the southern horizon. The slime planet, in close orbit around a cool, quiescent red dwarf star, was tidally locked, one face permanently turned to its star, the other to the outer dark. It had no name, only a number assigned by a rip-and-run survey team before the rise and fall of the two empires, and it was old, about twice the age of Earth. The tectonic plates of its lithosphere had set in place after its outer core had cooled and solidified; any mountains it might once have possessed had long ago weathered to dust; after its magnetosphere had decayed most of its original atmosphere had been blown away by the solar wind of its star. It had been cold and virtually airless when the so-called Old Old Ones, said by some to have been the first of the Jackaroo’s clients, said by others to have been the Jackaroo’s precursors, had arrived, thickening its atmosphere and rebooting its hydrological cycle by bombarding the vast ice cap on the dark side with comets diverted from the red dwarf’s threadbare Oort cloud. Now the slime planet was cloaked in a reducing atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and ammonia, and a shallow sea turbid with ferrous iron spread across its sub-stellar hemisphere, broken by a single sodden land mass near the terminator between light and darkness. Enormous rafts of sticky foam generated by blooms of photosynthetic bacteria floated everywhere on the sea, and colonies of stromatolites grew in a few muddy bays on the sunward edge of the lone continent.

Those colonies were what had brought Tony Okoye and the crew of wizards here, in a three-way partnership with the broker on Dry Salvages who had purchased the old survey team’s report. Unprepossessing mounds like melted candle stumps, built from layers of sediments and bacterial filaments and slime, the stromatolites contained nodes of archival genetic material and communicated with each other via a wide-bandwidth transmission system constructed from arrays of microscopic magnetic crystals. The chief wizard, Fred Firat, believed that they were the remnants of a planetary intelligence, a noosphere woven from algorithms that were the common ancestors of the various species found in active artefacts left by the Elder Cultures. A root kit or Rosetta stone that would unlock all kinds of secrets, including the causes of sleepy sickness, Smythe’s Syndrome, counting disorder, and other meme plagues.

Fred Firat had the grandstanding rhetoric and unblinking gaze of someone who carried the fire of true crazed genius, and like all the best salesmen, prophets and charlatans he was his first and best convert to his cause. He was convinced that the scant data buried in the records of that old expedition pointed towards something of fundamental importance, had sold the idea to Ayo and Aunty Jael during a virtuoso performance via q-phone. Which was how Tony had found himself embarked on what might be the biggest score of his freebooter career.

But extracting data from the stromatolites’ archival genetic material had been more difficult than anticipated. Tony had to park his ship fifty kilometres inland because
Abalunam’s Pride
leaked a variety of electromagnetic emissions that interfered with the stromatolites’ transmission system, the wizards had to isolate experiments on individual specimens inside Faraday cages to prevent feedback, and they and Aunty Jael had spent more than two weeks developing new tools and probes before getting down to the real work. But although they had sequenced the archival genetics, they had yet to discover how to read the data those sequences contained, or how to hack into the transmission system. And now a fully loaded G-class frigate had driven through the mirror, come to hijack their work or worse. There was no doubt about it. It was time to pack up. Time to boot.

The first glint of the sea had just appeared at the horizon when the ship’s q-phone lit up. It was Tony’s uncle, Opeyemi, saying with his usual brusqueness, ‘I hear you’re in trouble.’

‘I can handle it,’ Tony said, doing his best to hide his dismay. ‘And while I would love to talk, uncle, I
am
rather busy. What with having to get the wizards stowed away and so forth.’

He had always known that Lancelot Askai was his uncle’s man, seconded to the mission to the slime planet from his usual work of suppressing anti-family sentiment, but had not realised until now that the rat was equipped with a q-phone. Opeyemi had been monitoring everything, Tony thought with a throb of anger. Waiting to pounce on any mistake.

‘Am I right in thinking,’ his uncle said, ‘that you believe this so-called intruder is a Red Brigade ship?’

‘It is heavily armed, it is displaying a false flag, and it has been aimed at this remote and insignificant planet when we are in the middle of our work. Its crew must have found out about the stromatolites, and want to steal what is rightfully ours. And of all the pirate gangs, the Red Brigade is the only one that has tangled with our family before, and everyone knows that it covets ancient knowledge above all else.’

‘But you have no actual proof that these are no more than ordinary criminals,’ Opeyemi said. ‘Your desire for revenge is understandable, nephew. But do not let it cloud your judgement.’

‘Tell me, uncle,’ Tony said, trying to keep his tone light, ‘does Ayo know about this call?’

‘It is four in the morning here. The alert came straight to me, and I see no need to disturb your sister.’

Tony pictured Opeyemi in his bare room up in the west tower of the Great House, some four thousand light years away. A slender unsmiling man with a shaven skull and deep-set eyes and a steady gaze. He would be sitting at the edge of his military cot, or perhaps he was standing at a narrow window, looking out at the tumbled roofs of the town stretching away in darkness to the cold dark iceberg-flecked sea. After the great betrayal and the deaths of Tony’s parents, Opeyemi, a lieutenant colonel in the Commons police, had resigned his commission and taken charge of his brother’s orphaned children, serving as acting head of the family until Ayo had reached the age of majority. Tony had often rebelled against his uncle’s exacting discipline, still resented the influence he wielded, and flinched now from the admonitory sting in his voice. It was exactly like all those times when he had been called to account for some minor transgression. The hot flush of shame and impotence. Trembling anticipation of his uncle’s minatory gaze.

He tried to assert himself, saying, ‘Perhaps you should disturb her anyway, uncle. After all, she signed off this deal. She deserves to know that it has gone bad.’

‘You did not think to trouble her yourself.’

‘I was planning to tell her as soon as I had the situation in hand.’

‘You like to think you are an independent operator,’ Opeyemi said. ‘You are not.’

‘You have made that abundantly clear.’

‘And you will not risk the ship, a valuable family asset, by making a stand against these claim jumpers. If that is what they are.’

‘The idea never crossed my mind,’ Tony said.

He had played endless games of Police v. Red Brigade when he was a kid, setting up ambushes in the courtyards and corridors of the Great House, staging skirmishes in the fields and plantations, but the frigate effortlessly outgunned
Abalunam’s Pride
, and he wasn’t as crazy foolish as some of his family believed. Reckless freebooters did not last long.

‘We will get our revenge when we’re good and ready,’ his uncle said. ‘You are neither the arm nor the instrument. Round up the wizards and make a straight run for the mirror. If these claim jumpers see that you are abandoning the prize, they will not waste their time trying to stop you.’

‘Absolutely.’

Tony had his own idea about how to evade the claim jumpers but he was not about to run that past his uncle. The crusty old fucker would probably forbid it.

‘Bring the ship home,’ Opeyemi said. ‘The wizards too.’

‘I thought I should head back to Dry Salvages first.’ Hopefully without the G-class frigate on his tail, but he would deal with that if and when. ‘I want to have a hard conversation with Raqle Thornhilde about how this claim jumper found me.’

‘You will do no such thing,’ Opeyemi said. ‘You have no proof that the broker is to blame. And if she is, she will be expecting you to come after her, and you would be meeting her on her territory, on her terms. No, it is too dangerous, and I will not allow you to endanger the family’s reputation out of some reckless notion about revenge. What you will do instead is bring the wizards to Skadi, where they will complete their work with the help of Aunty Jael, as already agreed.’

‘An agreement that Raqle Thornhilde will have invalidated if she told someone else about the stromatolites.’

‘We will make enquiries about that. Meanwhile, we will keep to our side of the bargain.’

‘This is something I must discuss with Ayo,’ Tony said.

‘She will tell you the same thing. Good luck and Godspeed. We will talk again very soon,’ Opeyemi said, and cut the connection before Tony could think of a riposte.

That was only the beginning of his humiliation.

The broken latticework spire of the Ghajar landing tower appeared off to the west; Tony saw a huddle of blue tents and the glinting pyramid of the Faraday cage at the edge of the shallow bay as the ship swung around and dropped lower, hovering on a warp in the planet’s gravity above a calm sweep of ochre water and the pavements and clumps of the stromatolites. Fred Firat and his six acolytes, dressed in uniform blue pressure suits, gathered in a mutinous clot as Tony rode a gyro platform from the ship’s cargo hatch to a slant of black rock at the water’s edge. As soon as he landed, the wizards’ leader stepped smartly forward, Junot Johnson and Lancelot Askai falling in on either side. Their pressure suits were white, like Tony’s, with the red and black triangle of the family’s flag on their shoulders.

‘You have compromised the local transmission system with this stupid manoeuvre,’ Fred Firat said. ‘You may have damaged the entire noosphere.’