Into Everywhere (6 page)

A hundred and fifty years ago, not very long after the Jackaroo made themselves known, human explorers found the entry point to a vast, multi-stranded wormhole network that spanned the outer arms of the Milky Way. Despite the discovery of a dozen or more Ghajar navigational datasets, despite the efforts of scholars, wizards and amateur obsessives who had broken their minds trying to find patterns in the clustering of mirrors and links between mirror pairs that might span a dozen or ten or fifty thousand light years, the network was still mostly unmapped. It had been called the New Frontier at first, but then an empire jacked itself up from its first settlements, ruled by a warlord, Truman Johnson I, whose fleets controlled choke points in the network of mirrors, taxed every ship that passed through them, and attacked worlds which refused to acknowledge his primacy. Only Earth and the fifteen gift worlds were spared, protected by the UN’s navy and separated from the nearest wormhole mouth in the New Frontier by a gulf that made it impossible to mount a sneak attack.

Eventually Truman Johnson was assassinated by his eldest son, Able Truman Johnson, whose brief reign, the so-called Second Empire, was even more brutal than his father’s. When he executed a general who refused to carry out his order to use nuclear weapons against the only city on the desert world Karnak V, officers loyal to the dead woman became the focal point of a rebellion that spread through the empire’s navy, spanning four years and much of the wormhole network, and ending with the disappearance of Able Truman Johnson. A rumour that he had been murdered by two of his younger brothers was never substantiated; neither was the story that he had discovered a ship with a version of the fabled faster-than-light Alcubierre drive, and had set out to discover the location of the Jackaroo’s homeworld.

After his disappearance, Able Truman Johnson’s empire fragmented into squabbling apanages that were swiftly subjugated by elements of the rebel navy. The victors formed a loose commonwealth that acknowledged the power of a security council and its police to referee disputes and patrol the volume of the wormhole network, but after eighty years its stability was as fragile as ever, threatened by territorial disputes, civilian rebellions and breakaway groups that attempted to set up independent principalities on fringe worlds or turned pirate, preying on merchant traffic and staging quick raids on the worlds and resources of the Commons.

Tony Okoye believed that he had been claim-jumped by one such rogue group, maybe his family’s old nemesis the Red Brigade, maybe someone else. And although he had escaped their trap, his ship was half-blinded by its own countermeasures and he was still a long way from home.

As soon as
Abalunam’s Pride
passed through the mirror, the bridle threw up images and scans, saying, ‘The claim jumpers must have spoofed our assets and fed us fake telemetry – there was some serious throw-weight emplaced around the mirror. One-shot X-ray lasers, shrapnel missiles, ship-killing warheads . . . But they didn’t use them. They tried to cripple us, but they did not try to destroy us.’

‘Because they discovered that all the other stromatolites are gone, and they want what we are carrying,’ Tony said. ‘That’s good. It means that they will not do anything that could endanger our cargo. And that means that they will not do anything that could endanger
us
.’

But if Raqle Thornhilde had told the claim jumpers about the expedition to the slime planet, they would know who owned
Abalunam’s Pride
. They would know where his family lived. He would have to deal with that as and when. Right now, he still needed to make good his escape.

As the mirror of the wormhole throat dwindled into the starry scape he dropped a couple of drones that would keep watch for the claim jumpers’ frigate, and reprogrammed and deployed a drone that clamped itself to the ship’s prow. It was a poor replacement for the arrays which had been burned away when he had taken out the disrupter needles, but at least he could see where he was headed.

The mirror orbited a brown dwarf, a small sub-stellar object whose dim disc rapidly expanded ahead as
Abalunam’s Pride
swung past on a gravity-assist manoeuvre. Ragged shadows of silicate vapour clouds stretched across the faint violet glow of the brown dwarf’s inner layers like dirt streaked across a failing neon globe, suddenly filling the sky and then whipping past and falling away as the ship flew on. Its velocity had increased by the small amount of orbital energy it had stolen; it was now aimed at the brown dwarf’s sun, a K0 main-sequence star over six billion kilometres away, with a swarm of more than five hundred mirrors orbiting at the inner edge of its habitable zone.

Powered by zero-point energy, warping the gravitational constant to create a local propulsive gradient,
Abalunam’s Pride
drove towards the mirror-swarm and safety at an acceleration equivalent to 2.3 g, the maximum acceleration permitted by her bias drive, the maximum acceleration of the bias drive of every Ghajar ship, from A-class jaunt ships to U-class haulers. After more than a hundred years no one knew if this was an inherent property dictated by fundamental physics, or a limit built into the drive for some inscrutable reason – some argued that it was the maximum acceleration force the Ghajar, which appeared to have been fragile gasbag colonies of specialised individuals, had been able to survive. But it meant that, after using the wormhole to traverse thousands of light years in a blink of an eye,
Abalunam’s Pride
would take eleven days to cross the void between the brown dwarf and the mirrors orbiting the K0 star.

Tony moved around as little as possible in the heavy pull of constant acceleration, spent most of his time on his bed’s silicon-gel mattress. One of the ship’s hands gave him full-body massages and spread soothing salves on his aching back and limbs. He sent a text message via the q-phone.
All well. Homeward bound as instructed
. He wanted to talk to Ayo about the close encounter with the claim jumpers, Opeyemi’s interference and the execution of Fred Firat, but because his uncle had taken control of the q-phone link it would have to wait. He made regular checks on the drones stationed at the mirror orbiting the brown dwarf, and Junot Johnson kept him informed about the wizards. After arguing about whether they should continue to work after the execution of their boss, they’d turned to intense discussions about the data they’d obtained during their stay on the slime planet. It seemed like a hopeful sign to Tony. He was also monitoring Lancelot Askia. The man spent most of his time sleeping or grimly exercising, and as far as Tony could tell had not used his clandestine q-phone to talk to Opeyemi.

The claim jumpers’ frigate came through the mirror two days after
Abalunam’s Pride
. An hour later, the bridle told Tony that someone had hacked the carrier signal from the watch drones and was attempting to infiltrate the ship’s comms.

‘Shut them down,’ Tony said.

‘The drones or the comms?’

‘Both.’

Four days later, he turned
Abalunam’s Pride
through one hundred and eighty degrees and began to decelerate, the first stage in preparing to rendezvous with the mirror-swarm. If the claim jumpers intended to destroy his ship, they would continue to accelerate, overtaking
Abalunam’s Pride
and knocking her out with shrapnel or smart gravel. But the frigate made its own turnover manoeuvre two days later, and was still lagging behind when Tony aimed his ship at one of the mirrors and passed through into orbit around a young yellow star surrounded by a belt of churning rocks and ice and gas a billion kilometres across. A giant structure orbited the far edge of this protoplanetary disc, a flat, fractal snowflake several thousand kilometres in diameter and of unknown provenance and purpose, as yet undisturbed by the monkey curiosity of humans.

The mirror from which
Abalunam’s Pride
exited was one of eight in close orbit about each other. Tony aimed his ship at the nearest, emerging in orbit around a ringed gas giant that orbited a blue-white B0 star. And felt a little better: the claim jumpers would have seen which mirror he had used in the wilderness, but they couldn’t know which of the seven possible exits he’d just now used.

Tony lingered only for the handful of hours it took to traverse to the next mirror, and then he was somewhere else, out in another wilderness of mirrors fifteen thousand light years away, this one at the L5 point in the orbit of an Earth-sized planet tidally locked to its red dwarf star, with a narrow habitable ring between the ice cap of the dark side and the howling desert of dust seas and volcanoes of the sub-stellar hemisphere. There were hundreds of worlds like it, most of them littered with the usual Elder Culture ruins, the usual secrets waiting to be unlocked. This one had been colonised by an atechnic cult sixty years ago. Maybe they were living the life of pastoral utopianism they’d planned; maybe they had descended into savagery and were roasting and eating prisoners of war captured in tribal wars fought with stone-tipped spears. No one knew nor cared.

Abalunam’s Pride
transited three more times, and after twenty-eight hours emerged into the familiar light of a M0 red dwarf star and aimed herself at a rocky world with an equatorial belt of ocean pinched between ice caps that covered most of its northern and southern hemispheres. Skadi. After two years of banging around the galaxy as a freebooter, Tony had come home.

When Lisa arrived on First Foot, the Alien Market had been on the very edge of Port of Plenty: a maze of converted shipping containers, Quonset huts and flat-roofed mud-brick buildings crammed into a narrow triangle between Elysian Creek and the meatpacking district. Tomb raiders and prospectors who came in from the back country to do business had camped out on the far side of the creek, and every Sunday there had been an unofficial flea fair along the main drag where dealers, collectors and scouts haggled over unlicensed artefacts and other finds.

Now the city’s low-rise sprawl spread far beyond the creek. A Holiday Inn stood where the tomb raiders had once camped, the slaughterhouses and cold stores of the meatpacking district had moved out to Felony Flats, the flea fair was no more, and most of the assayers, analysts, traders, chandlers, coders and pawn shops had been displaced by bars, coffee shops, bubble-tea houses and restaurants, shops that sold gimcrack souvenirs and replicas of famous finds, stuffed animals and the shells of biochines, and expensive field kit and utility clothing that no prospector would ever use. It was a popular weekend destination. You could eat brunch, buy a pair of hurklin-hide shoes, a snow globe containing a replica of the spires of Mammoth Lakes, jewellery made from spent tesserae, or a phial of blue sand from the so-called Arena of Kings, and round off your day in one of the quaint themed bars.

But some of the old businesses still clung on, and Lisa could map moments from her past as she led Pete through the passages, alleyways and courtyards. Here were the shallow steps down to the cellar bar where she and Willie had spent way too much time back when; here was her favourite sushi counter; here was the ground-floor room in the three-storey stack of shipping containers where she’d first set up business on her own, although the containers had recently been painted in bright primary colours, and what had been her workshop was now a store front advertising ‘genuine gemstones and geodes’.

And here was the place where she’d once tried to make contact with her ghost. She’d been desperate back then, in the first year of her possession. She’d broken up with Willie, had begun to numb herself with booze because she was scared of the thing in her head, of what it might do, of what it might already have done. There had been anxiety attacks, lurid nightmares, the whole nine yards. She pestered her friends, asking them if they thought she’d changed, looking for confirmation of her fears in their gaze, in casual conversations. Her obsession had driven many of them away, confirming her belief that she was turning into something else. That she was carrying in her head a monstrous entity whose loathsome aura horrified and repulsed other people.

Back then, a dozen mediums and psychics had been operating in the Alien Market, claiming to be able to channel the spirits of ancient intelligences from Elder Cultures, tap into deep wells of weird wisdom, exorcise unwelcome eidolons and talk to the human and alien dead. Coders and assayers made fun of their mystic woo, but there was an undercurrent of self-recognition in the jokes: both psychics and coders were attempting to quantify the unquantifiable, and their jargon and methodologies echoed each other. Eidolons v. ghosts. Avatars v. spirits. Reynolds traps v. crystal balls. Code stripping v. cold reading.

Lisa hadn’t given psychics much thought before the Bad Trip, but after her neurology consultant had told her that it was impossible to remove the eidolon without causing serious brain damage, she began, like a cancer patient who’d been given a terminal diagnosis, to search for cures outside mainstream medicine. Meditation and mindfulness. A sleep machine that was supposed to modify her alpha waves. And then she finally nerved herself to walk into the psychic parlour she passed every day on the way to work.

She waited until the place was about to close. Feeling, as she slipped inside, like a kid trespassing on a grouchy neighbour’s lawn. There was none of the paraphernalia – velvet drapes, antique furniture, wax-encrusted candelabra, batteries of crystals – she’d expected. Just two plastic stacking chairs either side of a small glass-topped table, recessed lights in the ceiling, a doorway screened with a waterfall of plain glass beads that clicked as a young man pushed through them.

He wore a white shirt, black pants and wire-framed glasses, looking more like an architect or a college lecturer than someone who communed with alien spirits. Holding up a hand when Lisa began to explain why she was there, giving her a lingering look, saying that he could see that she was troubled, that she wanted help. It was her aura, he said. It was an unhealthy colour and had a swollen, lopsided look.