Into Everywhere (44 page)

‘We passed it twenty minutes ago,’ Dave Clegg said. ‘The fucking bastards running the show want us to get closer.’

‘How much closer?’

‘All the way in, could be. If I knew I’d tell you.’

‘Well, we’re not dead.’

‘Not yet. Whatever it is you’re doing, keep doing it, okay?’

‘Right. You too.’

She had no idea how their ghosts were protecting them; the thought that they might suddenly stop whatever they were doing or be overwhelmed by the mad ship’s malign warp crept into her mind like a trickle of ice-water. The silhouette and radar images of the mad ship revolved twice more, then stabilised and centred in every window. The reaction motor thumped distantly; Lisa felt a phantom of gravity pass through her as the tug briefly accelerated. The silhouette began to grow.

‘They want us to do a drive-by,’ Dave Clegg said. ‘Skim past at a minimum distance of three hundred metres. If we survive this you’re going to see some fine flying.’

They were aimed at the huge funnel at the stern of the mad ship. Details began to resolve in the radar images. There were structures embedded in the thick strands of the funnel’s mesh: building-sized blocks and plates, a patch of pyramidal cones packed in a Fibonacci spiral like seeds in a sunflower head.

‘No. No, I don’t,’ Dave Clegg said to someone on the other end of his comms. Then, ‘I’m changing course now.’

His fingers made shapes in the air in front of his face.

The reaction motor thumped again. In the windows, the funnel slid sideways, foreshortened. The bulk of the rest of the mad ship showed beyond, and Lisa realised that the tug was swinging around to the pinched nozzle that terminated the funnel.

But it wasn’t pinched shut now. A freezing watchfulness gripped Lisa. She couldn’t tell if it was her fear or her ghost’s fascination.

The nozzle was retracting and pulling apart in a roughly circular gape, like the mouth of a monstrous worm.

‘Fucking hell,’ Dave Clegg said reverentially.

The mad ship was waking up.

Four days into the voyage to the G2 star’s Earth-sized planet, a flight of drones burst out of the mirror that
Abalunam’s Pride
and the Red Brigade picket had left behind. They came through all at once, an expanding fast-moving swarm that immediately engaged with the drones and mines sown by the picket. A hyperkinetic wavefront of strikes and counterstrikes flared across a million cubic klicks; driving sunwards, Tony glimpsed a tiny glitter of X-ray and gamma-ray sources, a stuttering constellation of brief-lived stars. The picket ship’s pilot shared an image snatched by a stealthed surveillance drone: ships emerging from the mirror, one after the other. Four J-class interceptors bristling with assets, heading from the ice giant in line-of-battle formation.

‘They don’t realise they are outnumbered,’ the pilot said.

‘They dealt with your drones easily enough,’ Tony said.

He had been nursing the faint hope that Bane and Colonel X had been lying about the police ships, was dismayed by their appearance. It was a dangerous and unpredictable complication.

‘Let ’em think they have the advantage,’ the pilot said cheerfully. ‘That little engagement was just a taster. Pretty soon you’re going to see some real fun.’

A sentiment echoed by Mina Saba when she called an hour later, wanting to know if the police ships had been sent by Colonel X.

‘Ada Morange tricked a broker into hiring me to help investigate the slime planet. Her hand killed one of the broker’s sons on Veles. The broker told the police everything, and here we are,’ Tony said.

‘You have been less than honest with me, Mr Okoye. I’m disappointed,’ Mina Saba said.

‘I was hoping that the broker was bluffing,’ Tony said. ‘I’m sorry to see that she was not. Where is Ada Morange, by the way? Is she with you?’

‘Don’t expect any help from the police,’ Mina Saba said. ‘They have badly underestimated my resources. We will talk again when you reach my ship. We will talk face to face. And if you are less than candid with me, if there is any more trickery, I can promise you that things will go badly.’

‘Ask Ada Morange what happened in her house in Tanrog,’ Tony said. ‘Ask her how she tricked Raqle Thornhilde. Ask her how she tricked my family. Ask yourself how she might be tricking you.’

But Mina Saba had cut the connection.

Abalunam’s Pride
and the picket ship flew on, separated by just ten kilometres, decelerating on a course that intersected with the planet. One of the police ships aimed a maser at them, transmitting a declaration that this was a designated forbidden zone, a command to prepare to surrender, and a message from Opeyemi, ordering Tony to give up his futile plans for the good of the family. Tony told the bridle to block anything else that the police sent.

‘Do you want to reply to Opeyemi?’ the bridle said.

‘It probably wasn’t even him,’ Tony said. ‘Just some avatar got up by the police.’

But it had woken the itches of old doubts. Colonel X had abandoned him. He had run from his family. And now he was running from the police into the arms of the Red Brigade, with no idea of what would happen when he got there.

His destination, presently showing as a crescent off to one side of the star’s incandescent coin, was a cloud-wrapped hothouse planet somewhat resembling Venus. Like Venus, a runaway greenhouse effect had baked carbon dioxide from its crust, muffling it in a thick atmosphere several hundred kilometres deep; unlike Venus, it was protected from solar winds by a strong magnetic field, and had retained most of its water. Venus’s clouds were mostly concentrated sulphuric acid; here, they were composed of tiny droplets of carbonic acid that constantly rained out towards the hot surface, turning into carbon dioxide and superheated steam that was recirculated high into the atmosphere to begin the cycle again.

The bridle reported that she had detected the signature of photosynthetic pigments in the calm upper layers of the clouds: aerial plankton whose rate of reproduction exceeded the rate of removal by rain falling towards the surface. A little later she said that she had detected a small fleet of ships in orbit around the planet’s equator: a U-class hauler and twelve smaller ships in a higher, separate orbit.

Tony said, ‘The hauler will be remotely controlled. And it contains a mad ship. That’s why the other ships are keeping their distance.’

‘I have found something else,’ the bridle said. ‘Several hundred small radar-reflective bodies in the planet’s atmosphere.’

Tony wanted to know if they were ships. He imagined a fleet of them, each hung under giant balloons in the thick cloud cover. A floating sargasso drifting on the wind . . .

‘We are too far away to resolve them,’ the bridle said. ‘But it is possible that at least one of them could be a mirror. The planet is emitting a small excess of tau neutrinos consistent with the operation of mirror machinery. And the eidolon . . .’

‘What about the eidolon?’ Tony said, after a few seconds’ silence.

‘It is very interested in the planet. I think it is searching for something down there. Or maybe it has found it, and is talking to it,’ the bridle said. ‘It isn’t clear. I wish I knew more, but there it is.’

‘Has anyone ever found a mirror floating in a planetary atmosphere?’

‘I know! Isn’t it amazing?’

‘Can you locate it? If it is a mirror.’

‘Not yet. It may be possible when we are closer. Also, I could build more detectors. Do you want me to do that?’

‘If it will help you find this mirror,’ Tony said carefully. He was still wary of the bridle’s new abilities. He was worried that she might decide that her interests – or the interests of the eidolon – were more important than his.

‘I think it will. Yes. It’s exciting, isn’t it?’ the bridle said happily.

‘Keep looking,’ Tony said. ‘Keep looking everywhere. And open a line to that picket.’

He was going to tell its pilot that he wanted to talk to Mina Saba again. He believed that he finally had some leverage in this game.

After Lisa had been extracted from the tug and stripped of her sensor patches, a guard clipped a short cable to her waist and towed her down the length of the hold. Gliding in free fall through deep shadow and splashes of brilliant light, past two A-class jaunt ships, actual alien spaceships like giant whiskery catfish carved from obsidian, to a curtain of plastic webbing on the far bulkhead, where Adam Nevers and three Jackaroo avatars were waiting.

‘We wanted to congratulate you in person,’ Nevers said.

He was gripping the webbing with both hands, as if afraid that he would fall if he let go. The three avatars hung quiet and still in the air beside him. It was a shock to see them, but not a surprise. Their translucent gold skin. Their black tracksuits, which here in the future must look like antiques. The dark glasses that masked the white stones of their eyes.

‘So who’s really in charge?’ Lisa said, hooking a couple of fingers in the webbing and turning to the avatars. It was a little like floating in water, except that there was no sense of up or down. ‘You or Mr Nevers?’

‘We are here to help,’ the middle one said.

‘Yeah, I know all about your help.’

Lisa was shaky and exhausted after the jaunt in the tug, her spine and hips ached from hours of being immobilised in the rigid shell of her pressure garment, and for the first time since she had woken in the future she badly needed a drink. It parched her tongue and throat, burned in her belly.

‘One of you was with Mr Nevers when he raided my place,’ she said. ‘And a couple of your buddies turned up at Terminus, scaring Ada Morange into kidnapping me and booting me into the future.’

Nevers said, ‘If you must blame anyone for your plight, Lisa, blame Ada Morange.’

That even, faintly sarcastic tone of his, as if speaking to a child.

‘Did you ever ask yourself how you got here, Mr Nevers? The way I see it, we’ve both been manipulated by those showroom dummies from the get-go.’

Lisa didn’t believe for a moment that the avatars were disinterested observers of the antics of their clever, curious monkey clients. The Jackaroo had helped dozens of client races. Hundreds. All of them had spread through the wormhole network and all of them had vanished, destroying themselves in catastrophic wars, evolving into something beyond human comprehension, or simply dying out, stretched too thin by the effort of embracing the Jackaroo’s gifts. No one knew. All the Jackaroo would say was that every client found its own path. But one thing was clear: none of their clients had survived contact unchanged.

She looked again at the avatars, floating there like a too-cool-for-school trio of pop stars, and said, ‘I have a question.’

‘Of course.’

It was the left-hand one who spoke this time. Lisa looked straight at it, her face dimly reflected in its dark glasses.

‘The eidolon inside my head. Can you speak to it?’

‘We know it was once like you.’

‘Is it one of your clients?’

‘Those clients have moved on.’

‘The eidolon didn’t. What does it want?’

‘It should speak for itself,’ the middle Jackaroo said.

‘It’s interesting. You say you want to help. It’s your tag line. Your USP. But whenever you’re asked anything you put on this act, all aloof and fucking mysterious. You tell us that we have to choose our own path, and then you push us in the direction you want us to go. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To make sure Mr Nevers does the right thing.’

‘There is always a choice,’ the left-hand avatar said. ‘Even the straightest path has two directions.’

‘Not as far as I’m concerned,’ Lisa said. ‘I travelled into the future, and I can’t go back.’

Man, she could so do with a cold tall one right now. She could see the amber liquid pouring into the glass, the rising head of foam, smell that yeasty tang . . .

‘Then find another path,’ the middle avatar said.

‘Or choose not to follow it,’ the right-hand avatar said.

The three of them in their fucking sunglasses and black tracksuits, so above it all.

Lisa said, ‘Do you believe this bullshit, Mr Nevers?’

‘I believe that I’m doing the right thing,’ Nevers said calmly.

‘You think they’re helping you, but you’re really part of their plan to stop us finding anything that might actually reveal what’s really going on.’

But she knew she’d never make him see that. He’d pared his life down to this single purpose. He’d exiled himself into the future because of it. He’d dedicated himself to it like some kind of warrior saint, and probably rededicated himself twice daily.

‘You’re angry and confused,’ he said. ‘But mostly you’re afraid. It’s entirely understandable, given the way Ada Morange tried to use you, and where you’ve ended up because of it. In your situation? I wouldn’t trust anyone either. But now you have an opportunity to put all that right.’

‘Use my powers for good, or some such bullshit?’

‘You’ve already done that, by helping to open up the mad ship,’ Nevers said. ‘And now Mr Clegg must learn how to talk to it, so that we can ask it nicely if we can ride it through that wormhole. Meanwhile, until I need your help again, I think you should take a well-earned rest.’

‘I was kind of hoping I was done here.’

‘Oh no. Not at all. We’ve only just begun.’

As before, Tony sat in the ironwood chair in the red-curtained space he had created. As before, Unlikely Worlds stood beside him. Mina Saba was late. She was calling his bluff. She was planning some baroque punishment for his presumption. And then the window opened, showing the philosopher queen lounging in her sling chair, this time wearing a silvery quilted jacket with a collar that flared behind her head. A small neat woman in her early thirties perched on a stool at her right hand, dressed all in black. Milky skin, red pigment on her lips and the nails of her hands and bare feet, a cap of glossy hair the colour of midnight.

Her smile showed small white teeth. ‘Master Tony. I’m so glad that you found your way here.’

It was an avatar of Ada Morange. A version of her younger self before she’d been laminated, or perhaps an ideal image of what she believed to be her true self. She greeted Unlikely Worlds with some warmth, told Tony that she had first met the !Cha on Earth, a century and a half ago.