The Algebraist (11 page)

‘Shit! She’s moving,’ Taince said, then stuck her head into the hole and shouted, ‘Ilen! Ilen, don’t move! Can you hear me? Don’t move! Just say if you can hear me!’

Ilen moved weakly, her head and the arm dangling over the drop shaking and shifting. She looked to be trying to roll over, but was edging still closer to the drop.

‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Sal said, his voice high and quick and strained. ‘She was behind me. I thought she was all right. I didn’t see anything, must have stepped over it. A hatch or something or it was just balanced and she must have knocked it and she was shouting, sort of balanced over it, one hand, and screaming, and I couldn’t get back in time and she fell. We didn’t even find anything, didn’t do anything! Just junk! Oh fuck! She was fine! She was just behind me!’

‘Be quiet,’ Taince said. Sal sat back, rubbing his mouth, shaking. Taince put the gun back into her fatigues, slapped a glow patch onto her forehead, then, with her hands on two sides of the triangular hole, lowered her head into the gap again, further this time. She levered herself out for a second and looked back at Fassin. ‘Hold my feet.’

Fassin did as he was told. Taince got her shoulders through the hole, then they heard her say, ‘Ilen! You mustn’t
move!’
She hauled herself back out, leaving the glow patch where it was on her forehead like some strange, shining eye. ‘Nothing to hold on to underneath here,’ she told them. ‘She’s moving around. Must have hit her head. She’s going to fall.’ She looked at Sal. ‘Sal, how far away is that rope? By time.’

‘Oh fuck! I don’t know! Ten, fifteen minutes?’

Taince glanced back into the hole. ‘Shit,’ she said quietly. ‘Ilen’ she shouted. ‘You
must not move!’
She shook her head. ‘Shit, shouting at her’s just making her move,’ she said, as though to herself. She took a deep breath, looked at Saluus and Fassin. ‘Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do,’ she said. ‘Daisy-chain rescue. Practised this, it’s doable.’

‘Right,’ Sal said, sitting forward, his face pale in the dim light. ‘What do we have to do?’

‘One holds on at the top, somebody climbs down their body, holds on to their feet, last person climbs down both and picks up Ilen. I’ll do that bit.’

Sal’s eyes widened. ‘But the person at the top--’

‘Will be you. You’re the strongest. Wouldn’t work on Earth; does here,’ Taince told them. She slid over and grabbed Sal’s backpack. ‘Seen it done with four links. You two guys look in good enough shape. Fass, you’re in the middle. Plus person at the top gets tied on with these straps,’ she said, glancing at Sal and then pulling a knife from her fatigues and slicing into one set of shoulder straps.

Sal knelt quaking at the side of the hole. ‘Fucking God, Taince,’ he said, ‘we all want to rescue her, but this could get us all killed. Fuck,
oh fuck.
I don’t know. I don’t fucking believe this, I just fucking don’t. This isn’t happening, this is just
not
fucking
happening!’
He sat back again, visibly trembling. He looked at his shaking hands, turning them over and staring at them as though he didn’t recognise them. ‘I don’t know if I have any grip,’ he said. ‘I really don’t.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ Taince told him, busy with the straps.

‘Oh fuck, we’re all going to fucking die,’ Sal said. ‘Fucking hell.’ He shook his head hard. ‘No. Not. Not.
No.’

‘This will work,’ Taince said, quickly tying the cut straps to those still joined to the pack.

I’m calm,
thought Fassin.
I’m probably in shock or something, but I feel calm.
We
might all be about to die, or it might be a close shave and a bonding thing we all remember for the rest of our long lives, but either way I feel calm. What will happen will happen and as long as we do our best and don’t let each other down, no matter what happens we’ll have been fine.
He looked at his own hands. They were shaking, but not uncontrollably. He flexed them. He felt strong. He would do everything he could, and if that wasn’t enough, that wasn’t his fault.

Sal jumped up, wobbling dangerously close to the hole. ‘There’s more rope,’ he said suddenly. His face was still grey-pale, but now almost expressionless. He moved past Taince.

Fassin looked at him, wondering what he was talking about.

‘What?’ Taince said, testing a square-section stalagmite extrusion on the floor then flipping the pack straps over it.

‘Rope,’ Sal said, pointing towards the outside and the flier. He took a backwards step in that direction. ‘There’s more. In the flier. I’ll go. I know where it is.’ He backed off further.

‘Sal!’ Taince shouted at him. ‘There isn’t time!’

‘No, there is, I’ll go,’ Sal said, still backing off.

‘Stay fucking here, Sal,’ Taince said, dropping and deepening her voice. Sal seemed to hesitate but shook his head and turned and ran.

Taince leapt and made a grab for him but he’d moved too quickly. He vaulted a stalagmite and ran towards the gap Fassin and Taince had squeezed through earlier. Taince dropped to one knee and pulled the gun. ‘Stop, you fucking
coward!’

There might, Fassin thought, have been half a second when Taince could have fired, but she dropped the gun and stashed it in her fatigues as Sal sprinted, ducking through the gap and away. Taince looked at Fassin. Now her face had gone blank, he thought. ‘Still a possibility,’ she said, and quickly stepped out of her fatigues. She wore a one-piece underbody the same colour as her skin, so for just a moment she appeared to be naked. She reattached the top and trousers of the fatigues, snapping them tight to test that they held. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Now, this ties to your ankle.’

The straps on the backpack held, and Fassin did too, wrists tied to them but taking his own weight and Taince’s on his hands and fingers initially because he didn’t trust the straps, and the knot tying Taince’s trousers to his ankle held as well, and Taince was holding on fine as she shinned down over him and onto the fatigues and down with him twisting his neck and shoulders out and round so he could just about watch her progress and watch Ilen too, as though as long as he kept watching her she’d be all right, but then there was a ground-quake, shaking the ship, not badly, but enough to bring Fassin out in a cold sweat as he hung there, hands, palms, fingers slipping until it really was the straps and the straps alone holding him, and below him, below Taince, still just out of reach, Ilen moved one more time and fell over the edge and away into the darkness.

Taince made a lunge and Fassin felt the link between them jerk as she clutched vainly at the girl and made a noise like a gasp or a hiss. Ilen dropped away into the shadows, tumbling slowly, her hair and clothes fluttering like pale, cold flame.

Ilen must have still been mostly unconscious because she didn’t even scream as she fell, so that they heard her body hit the strip of vanes far below, long seconds later, and might even have felt the impact through the fabric of the ship.

Fassin had closed his eyes.
Let Sal be right, let this not be happening.
He tried to grip the edge of the hole again, to take the weight off the straps.

Taince just hung there for a while. ‘Lost her,’ she said quietly, and the way she said it Fassin was suddenly terrified that she was going to let go too and drop after Ilen, but she didn’t. She just said, ‘Coming back up now. Hold on.’

She climbed up and over him and helped him out. They looked down but couldn’t see the body. They spent a few moments sitting side by side, breathing hard, with their backs against one of the stalagmites, a bit like they’d sat earlier, back at the flier. Taince untied her fatigues and put them on. She took the gun out.

Fassin looked at it as she stood up. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

She looked down at him. ‘Not kill the fuck, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ She sounded calm now. She nudged one of his feet with her boot. ‘We should get back.’

He stood up, a little shaky, and she held him by one arm. ‘Did our best, Fass,’ she told him. ‘Both of us did. We can grieve for Ilen later. What we do now is we go back to the flier, try to find Sal, see if we can get comms, get the fuck out of here and tell the authorities.’

They turned away from the hole.

‘Why have you still got the gun out?’ Fassin asked.

‘Sal,’ Taince said. ‘He’s never been this humiliated. Never let himself down like this. Not to my knowledge. Grief and guilt. Does things to people.’ She was doing some sort of breathing-exercise thing, taking quick breaths, holding them. ‘Faint chance he’ll think… if no one ever knows what happened here…’ She shrugged. ‘He’s got a gun. He might wish us harm.’

Fassin looked at her, unbelieving. ‘You think? Seriously?’

Taince nodded. ‘I know the guy,’ she told him. ‘And don’t be surprised if the flier’s gone.’

It was gone.

They walked out to the gap in the hull and found the flier there in the faint light of a false dawn coming from one thick sliver of sun-struck Nasqueron. Sal was sitting looking out at the chill expanse of desert. Before they approached, Taince checked her military transceiver again and found that she had signal. She called the nearest Navarchy unit and gave a brief report, then they walked across the sand to the flier. Their phones were still out.

Saluus looked round at them. ‘Did she fall?’ he asked.

‘We nearly got her,’ Taince said. ‘Very nearly.’ She was still holding her gun. Sal put one hand over his face for a while. In his other hand he was gripping a thin, twisted, half-melted-looking piece of metal, and when he took his hand away from his face he started turning the metal fragment over and over in both hands. His gun lay with his jacket, on the back seat. ‘Got through to the military,’ Taince told him. ‘Alert’s over. Just wait where we are. There’s a ship on its way.’ She got in the back, behind Sal.

‘We were never going to save her, Tain,’ he told her. ‘Fass,’ he said as the other man got into the other front seat beside him, ‘we were just never going to save her. We’d only have got ourselves killed too.’

‘Find the rope?’ Fassin asked. He had a sudden image of taking the twisted piece of metal that Sal was playing with and sticking it into his eye.

Sal just shook his head. He looked dazed more than anything else. ‘Went over on my ankle,’ he said. ‘Think it might be sprained. Barely made it back. Thought I could use the flier, get it through the stuff hanging above us and find a way over the top of all that wreckage, back to where it all happened, but the hanging stuff was more solid than it looked; came out here to try and signal.’ The piece of twisted metal kept going round and round in his hands.

‘What is that?’ Fassin asked after a while.

Sal looked down at it. He shrugged. ‘From the ship. Just something I found.’

Taince reached round from behind him, wrenched the piece of metal from his hands and threw it away across the sand.

They sat there in silence until a Navarchy suborb showed up. When Taince went out to meet it, Sal got out of the flier and went, limping, to retrieve the fragment.

TWO: DESTRUCTIVE RECALL

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter ‘moon’ seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.

If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one’s way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon. Where a strange thing happened.

For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from. This was, of course,

I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little--

The captain broke off there, exponentially scrolling some of the rest across the screen, then stopping to read a line: ‘Where a strange thing happened.’ He flicked further on, stopping again: ‘I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its’

All like this? he asked his Number Three.

All the same, it is believed, sir. It appears to repeat precisely the same few hundred words, time after time. About twelve to the seventeen times. That is all that is left of its memory. Even the base operating system and instruction sets have been overwritten. This is a standard abominatory technique known as destructive recall.

It leaves no trace of what might have been there before?

Trace is left, but that too reveals a short repetitive. Tech begs suggest this is merely the last of many iterative over-writes. No trace remains of the machine’s true memories before it realised capture or destruction was inevitable.

Indeed.

The Voehn captain tapped a control to take the display through to the end. The screen froze for an appreciable moment, then displayed: ‘I was born--’

This is the very last section of memory?

Yes, sir.

An expression another Voehn would have recognised as a smile crossed the captain’s face, and his back-spines flexed briefly.

This has been checked, Number Three? There is no other content, are no hidden messages?

It is being checked, sir. The totality of the data exceeds our ship’s memory capacity and is being processed in blocks. What you see here is technically an abstraction.

Time to accomplish?

Another twenty minutes.

Any other media capable of supporting significant stored information load?

None. The construct was mostly what it appeared: a comet head. The main artificial part of it was the abomination at the core, the sensory and propulsion units being separate, surface-mounted and motley. Tech informs fully checked.

Original language used in the repeated piece?

As seen: Old Standard.

Origin of quoted piece?

Unknown. A tentative analysis from Tech\Soc. rated nineteen per cent suggests it may be of Quaup origin.

The Quaup, the majority of whom were part of the Mercatoria - the captain had served on a war craft with a Quaup officer - were of the meta-species type people usually called blimps, small to medium-sized balloon-like creatures, air-going oxygen processors. The repeated passage filling the captured machine’s memory was fairly obviously told from the point of view of a submersible waterworlder. Well, the captain thought, people wrote from the points of view of others. At primary college he himself had composed poems as though he was a Culmina, before he had realised this was a crime of presumption, confessed and rightly been punished for it. Quite put him off composition.

The only major blot on the captain’s otherwise exemplary military-education record had been a phase of remediation required to bring his Deployable Empathic Quotient up to scratch, this flaw later being diagnosed as a consequence of his shunning all such feelings after his inadvertent insult and subsequent disciplining. Still, he had made captain, which one did not do without some empathic subtlety, anticipating the feelings of both one’s crew and one’s opponents.

He looked out at the half-melted remains of the captured construct, a pitted, black-body, comet-disguised vessel which had been roughly eight hundred metres in diameter and was now missing a great quarter-bite of structure. It lay a couple of kilometres off, radiating the last of the heat from its partial destruction, surrounded by a small system of wreckage, dark shards and splinters orbiting its ravaged body.

The view, lit by one of their own ship’s attenuated CR beams, was about as clear and perfect as it could possibly be; there was no screen in the way, and not even any transparent hull material, atmosphere or other medium. The captain was looking straight out from the flying bridge of his ship, an open-work nest of massive but elegantly sculpted girder work on the outside of the vessel. The vessel was unshared with any other species, crewed by Voehn only, happily, so the rest of the ship was open to vacuum too. For the duration of the action they had been deep in the guts of the ship, of course, safe in the core control space, sheltered by layers of shields and hull, senses protected by screens, but - once the wreck had been judged safe - the captain, his Number Three and a couple of favoured ratings had made their way to the exterior, the better to appreciate the view of their vanquished foe.

The captain looked around, as if hoping to see some real comet nuclei floating past. Taking a bearing, zooming in, he could just make out the lights denoting the drives of his other two ships, ordered to return to the inner system once the engagement was over, two dim blue stars, untwinkling. Save those, all that was visible nearby was the ship beneath them and the wreck two klicks away.

A cold and lonely spot to die, the captain thought. A logical, sensible choice of hiding place for the abomination machine, but still not a site any living - or apparently living - thing raised anywhere else would normally choose as a place to spend its last moments.

He handed the screen back to his Number Three and turned his principal eyes to look out at the hulk again, his rear recessional signal pit and secondary eye complex still facing the junior officer, flickering the words,

Well, one mission-part accomplished. Lay in a return to system base and, once the full contents of the abomination’s memory have been processed, deploy AM charges sufficient to leave residue no greater than elementary particle in size.

Sir.

Dismissed.

*

The ship accelerated smoothly but moderately hard, creating a distant humming roar. Fassin had a little pad under his right forearm which sensed muscle movements there and adjusted the screen across from him - above from him, now, it felt, as the couch straightened out and the gee-suit supported him - and so he got a glimpse of Pirrintipiti as the ship turned away from Nasqueron and headed deeper in-system, to the next planet sunward, the more-or-less Earthlike Sepekte.

On the screen, ‘glantine’s tropical capital was a towered and shimmering smear draped across a scatter of dark green islands set in a pale green sea. Odd, already to be missing Pirri, he thought. He wouldn’t have had a chance to set foot out of the port there, but he’d been expecting the usual routine of transferring from a suborb to a tube train and then, somewhere in the bowels of the vast stalk, the Equatower, waiting for the lift up the cable to the satport and a space-capable ship there. To be heading straight out from the Autumn House into space just seemed wrong somehow, a curious disconnect of the soul.

Trips to Sepekte usually took anywhere from under five days to over a week at the standard one-gee acceleration, depending on planetary alignment. The ships were large and comfortable and you could move around normally, visiting restaurants and bars, screens and gyms and, on the bigger liners, even swimming pools. The weightless minutes in the middle were an interlude for fun (and, often, some rushed and oddly unsatisfactory sex). People from ‘glantine sometimes found the double weight of standard gee a little uncomfortable, but it was pretty much what they’d experience when they got to Sepekte anyway, so it was kind of like getting in training.

The pressure of what the screen told him was three, four and then just over five gees settled into Fassin. The gee-suit was sensing his breaths, gently helping him inflate his lungs without too much added effort.

‘Think I’ll take,’ First Officer Dicogra said, ‘a snooze. Or would you,’ she asked, ‘like to talk?’

‘Snooze away,’ he told her. ‘Thinking of taking a nap myself.’

‘Fine. Systems’ll watch our vitals anyway. Till later, then.’

‘Pleasant dreams.’

Fassin watched the screen show ‘glantine drop away. Beyond it, revealed, was not initially the night of space or foamy wash of stars, but instead the broad, sunlit face of Nasqueron, a mad, swirling dance of gases the colour of some fabulous desert but moving in colossal ribbons like opposed streams of liquid around a globe a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres across, a planet you could drop a thousand ‘glantines or Sepektes or Earths into and never notice the difference; a not so little system of its own within Ulubis system, a vast world that was almost as unlike home for any human as it was possible to imagine, and yet the place where Fassin had already spent most of his unusual, sporadically paced life, and so, for all its alien scale, wild magnetic and radiation gradients, extremes of temperature, crushing pressures, unbreathable atmosphere and dangerously, unpredictably eccentric inhabitants, it was for Fassin as it was for his fellow Seers, something like home after all.

He watched until it too started to shrink, until ‘glantine was a mere dot floating above its vast and banded ochre face, and the brighter stars appeared around it, then switched the screen off, and slept.

He woke. Four hours had passed. The pressure was the same as it had been, the ship still roaring far away. He didn’t need any more sleep, so he went into slowtime, just thinking.

Everybody in Ulubis system knew where they were when the portal was destroyed. You knew because as soon as you heard you realised you’d be staying in Ulubis for the next two and a half centuries at least. For most people, even the vast majority - ninety-nine per cent of them human - who would never have the chance to travel out of system, that meant something profound. It meant that they were here for the rest of their lives. No dream they’d ever had or hope they’d entertained about seeing the rest of the galaxy would ever be reflected in reality.

For others, it meant that loved ones, elsewhere in the rest of the galaxy, on the far side of the vanished portal, were for ever gone. Two hundred and fourteen years to Zenerre: over two centuries for light and therefore any sort of message or signal to travel from there to Ulubis; maybe three centuries before the wormhole link was re-established, even if the Engineers set out from there with a portal-carrying ship almost immediately.

And who was truly to know if there were any Engineers or great ships left? Perhaps the Ulubis portal had not been alone, and all the rest had been attacked and destroyed at the same time. Maybe the Mercatoria itself was no more, maybe there was no Complex, no more Arteria and no more portals left anywhere and all that remained of the galaxy’s latest great civilisation were umpteen thousand separate little island systems, fractured and abandoned and alone.

The usual wash of through-portal comms traffic just before the destruction had betrayed no hint of such a galaxy-wide attack. But then, there had been no hint more than ten minutes before of an attack on the Ulubis portal either, until the biggest fleet of Beyonder craft Ulubis had ever seen had swung glittering out of empty nowhere, throwing themselves against the single greatest concentration of ships and firepower anywhere in the system, being obliterated in their hundreds, but - effectively ignoring the defending ships except where they were directly in their way - pummelling and battering their way through defensive screen after defensive screen, oblivious to harm, straight towards the portal mouth itself, finally erasing everything around them in a flurry of immense antimatter explosions that alone announced to the system the scale and violence of what had taken place, creating a vanishingly brief cluster of novae in the facing skies of every inhabited surface, casting shadows far away, blinding those nearer-to and vaporising most of what was still left of the Beyonder fleet and many of their pursuers.

For a short while it looked as though they had failed, because the last line of defence had held and the portal had survived.

The entire attack up to that point had been a feint, and the real assault took place when a large ship - a few million tonnes of hollowed-out asteroid travelling at over ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light - flicked in from the opposite direction. In a sense, it missed too, darting past the portal mouth a hundred metres away and colliding with a collection of laser battlesats which hadn’t even started to turn towards it when it smashed into them, instantly annihilating them, the entire portal surround, its sub-units and almost all its associated systems and creating another stunning detonation of light in the sky.