The Algebraist (12 page)

None of which destroyed the portal; that was done by the relativistic mass of the sacrificed ship itself.

Portals were only ever positioned at Lagrange points or other orbits distant from large heavenly bodies because they needed a section of space-time that was relatively flat. Too great a gradient - too near the gravity well of a planet or other large object - and they stopped working. Increase the S-T curve only a little more and they imploded and disappeared altogether, usually violently. The hurtling asteroid-ship was so massive and its velocity so close to light speed that it had the same apparent mass as a planet the size of Sepekte. The passing of its gravity well so close to the portal mouth, especially at that extreme velocity, was sufficient to collapse the portal and the ‘hole beyond, sending one more cataclysmic pulse of light flashing throughout the system.

The last few of the earlier attackers immediately fled but were either destroyed or were disabled and then self-destructed.

Two days before the attack took place, Fassin had been sort of in space, sort of on Sepekte, sitting in a revolving restaurant at the summit of the Borquille Equatower having dinner with Taince Yarabokin, who was due to head back to the Summed Fleet Academy the following day after an extended compassionate leave following the death of her mother. Fassin had just come out of a month-long trawl through some of the seedier, less salubrious entertainment palaces of ‘skem, Sepekte’s second city. He felt jaded. Old, even.

He and Taince had kept in touch since the incident in the ruined ship, though they’d never become especially close, despite a night spent together shortly afterwards. Saluus had kind of drifted away from both of them subsequently, then headed off early to a finishing college half the galaxy away, then spent decades being a problem playboy son to his vexed father - behaving more or less continually on a galactic scale the way Fassin did only intermittently on a systemic one - and returning to Ulubis very occasionally for brief, unannounced visits.

A Guard Rescue suborb had arrived at the ruined ship lying crumpled on ‘glantine’s North Waste Land a few minutes behind the Navarchy craft Taince had summoned. Its personnel had entered the alien ship and found Ilen’s broken body. There was an inquiry. Sal was fined by the civil authorities for violating the ship’s interior more than had been strictly required for the purposes of physical sanctuary from the external threat, while the Navarchy Military had awarded Taince extra course credits for her actions.

Fassin found himself copping for some sort of civil bravery award thanks to Taince’s testimony but managed to avoid the ceremony. He never did mention the piece of twisted metal that Sal had stolen from the wreck, but Taince had broached the subject herself over dinner in the Equatower. She’d known at the time, she just hadn’t found herself capable of being bothered enough to take it off Sal again. Let him have his pathetic trophy.

‘Probably their equivalent of a door knob or a coat hook,’ she said ruefully. ‘But one gets you ten, by the time it was sitting in Sal’s locker or on his desk it was the ship’s control yoke or the main-armament "fire" button.’

Taince looked out at the distant horizon and near surface of Sepekte, sliding past as the restaurant revolved, providing the appearance of gravity in this gravity-cancelled habitat, anchored at the space limit of a forty kilo-klick cable whose other end fell to ground in Borquille, Sepekte’s capital city.

‘Shit, you knew all the time,’ Fassin said, nodding. ‘I suppose I should have expected that. Not much ever got past you.’

Taince had gone on to become a high-flier in every sense, carving a perfect career through the Navarchy Military and being chosen for the Summed Fleet, one of the Mercatoria’s highest divisions and one into which very few humans had ever been invited. Commander Taince Yarabokin looked young, had aged well.

The three of them had.

Sal, despite his multifarious debaucheries, could afford the very best treatments and plausibly access some supposedly forbidden to him, so he looked like he’d lived through a lot fewer of the hundred and three years which had actually elapsed since Ilen’s death. Lately there was even a rumour that he was thinking of settling down, becoming a good son, learning the business, applying himself.

Taince had spent decades at close to light speed pursuing the Beyonders’ craft and attacking their bases, fighting quickly, ageing slowly.

Fassin had joined the family firm and become a Slow Seer after all, so spent his own time-expanded decades conversing with and gradually extracting information from the Dwellers of Nasqueron. He’d had, like Saluus, his own wild years, been a roaring lad ripping through the highs and dives of ‘glantine, Sepekte and beyond, taking in a not so Grand Tour of his own round some of the supposedly civilised galaxy’s more colourful regions, losing money and illusions, gaining weight and some small amount of wisdom. But his indulgences had been on a smaller scale than Sal’s, he supposed, and certainly took place over a shorter timescale. Before too long he came home, sobered up and calmed down, took the training and became a Seer.

He still had his wild interludes, but they were few and far between, if never quite enough of either for the taste of his uncle Slovius.

Even in the millennia-hallowed halls of Seerdom, he had kept on making waves, upsetting people. The trend over the last fifteen hundred years - the years of Uncle Slovius’s reign - had favoured virtual delving over the direct method. Virtual or remote delving meant staying comatose and closely cared-for in a clinic-clean Seer faculty complex on Third Fury, the close-orbit moon riding barely above the outer reaches of Nasqueron’s hazy atmosphere, to communicate from there with the Dwellers beneath by a combination of high-res NMR scanners, laser links, comms satellites and, finally, mechanical remotes which did the dirty dangerous bit, keeping close contact with the flights and flocks and pods and schools and individuals of the Dwellers themselves.

Fassin had been a ringleader in a small rebellion, insisting, with a few other young Seers, on sliding into cramped arrowhead gascraft, breathing in gillfluid, accepting tubes and valves into every major orifice and surrendering body and fate to a little ship that contained the Seer, accepted the gees and poison and radiation and everything else and took him or her physically into the gas-giant’s atmosphere, the better to earn the respect and confidence of the creatures who lived there, the better to do the job and learn the stuff.

There had been deaths, setbacks, arguments, bannings and strikes, but eventually, largely on the back of unarguably better delving results and more raw data (unarguably better delving results in the sense that they were manifestly superior compared with what had gone before, not unarguably better in the sense that the old guard couldn’t claim this would all have happened anyway if everybody had just stuck to their ways, which were probably what had really prompted this long-overdue improvement in the first place) the youngsters had triumphed, and delving the hard way, Real Delving, hands metaphorically dirty, became the norm, not the exception. It was, anyway, more exciting, more risky but also so much more rewarding, more fun for the Seer concerned, as well as being more viewer-friendly for those who chose to pick up the edited, distilled, time-delayed feed that the more progressive Seer houses had been putting out to the entsworks for the last half-millennium or so.

‘You have made it into something like a sport,’ Slovius had said sadly one day, when he and Fassin had been fishing together in a dust-boat on ‘glantine’s Sea of Fines. ‘It used to be more of the mind.’

Nevertheless, from being a steadfast, heels-in critic of the whole Real Delve movement, Slovius, who had always been quick to seize any opportunity to advance the interests of his Sept, had become a sort of - appropriately - remote champion, supporting Fassin and eventually putting the full weight of Sept Bantrabal behind him and his fellow revolutionaries. That both Fassin and Slovius had been right, and their Sept flourished to become arguably the most productive and respected of the twelve Septs of Ulubis system - and so by implication one of the foremost Seer houses in the galaxy - had been the single most satisfying achievement of Slovius’s time as Chief Seer and paterfamilias of Sept Bantrabal.

Fassin was now arguably the best-known Seer in the system, especially after his time with the Tribe Dimajrian, the wild pod of adolescent Dwellers he’d befriended and effectively become part of for a seeming century and a real half-dozen years. He was not yet even at the start of his prime by Seer reckoning but was nevertheless already at the top of his game. He had been born three hundred and ninety years earlier, had lived barely forty-five of those in body-time, and looked a decade younger.

Sometimes he thought back to what had happened in the ruined alien ship, and he looked at all that had happened to Sal and Taince and himself, and reflected that it was as though they had all come away from that nightmare with a sort of bizarre blessing, an inverted curse, a trio of charmed lives, quite as if Ilen had unknowingly given up whatever golden future had awaited her to add that weight of divided bounty to theirs.

He and Taince parted with a kiss. She was heading to the portal and through the Complex to the far side of the galaxy, to the Fleet Academy to spend a year passing on her knowledge. Fassin was going to the far side of Ulubis, where Nasqueron was at the time, to continue trying to extract knowledge from the Dwellers.

Taince was safely through the portal a day before it was destroyed. Fassin was on a liner, a day out of Sepekte. He understood even as the news was still coming in that he might never see her again.

Sal, who might so easily have been away, was at home with his long-suffering father when the attack took place. After ten catatonic hours of disbelief he spent a month mourning his lost freedoms, trying to sink, fumigate and fuck his sorrows away in what passed for the pleasure-pits of Ulubis. In fact, Sepekte, and especially Borquille, had perfectly disrespectable bars, smoke houses and bordellos - Borquille had a whole district, Boogeytown, set aside for just such recreations - but the point was they were not the rest of the civilised galaxy. Fass had bumped into Saluus in a Boogeytown spike bar once, though Sal had been so out of it that he hadn’t recognised his one-time friend.

Then Sal straightened out, cut his hair, lost a few tattoos and a lot of acquaintances and at the start of the next working week turned up bang on time at the company offices, where people were still running around in a frenzy, spooked by all the numerous false alarms, expecting to be invaded at any moment. Right from the start, the questions were: Why? Why us? What next? And: Anybody else?

Had something like this happened everywhere? It would take over two centuries for Ulubis to discover if it was part of a wider catastrophe or had been singled out for its own specific disaster. From being no more remote than any other system at the end of a single wormhole - and so orders of magnitude less remote than the many hundreds of thousands of Faring systems still to be connected or reconnected - Ulubis, its principal planet Sepekte, its three significant inhabited moons including ‘glantine, its thousands of artificial habitats and the twenty billion souls that the whole system contained were fully as remote and exposed as they’d always seemed from any casual glance at a galactic star chart.

The Guard, Navarchy Military and surviving units of the Ulubis Ambient Squadron repaired and regrouped. Martial law was declared and a War Emergency Plan actioned which turned the bulk of the system’s advanced productive capacity to weapons and war craft. As a consequence, Kehar Heavy Industries, Saluus’s father’s company, expanded and prospered beyond its founder’s most avaricious fantasies, and Saluus went from wastrel heir to a great fortune to inheritor-in-waiting of a vast one.

In the system hierarchy, thought was given at the highest levels to attempting to construct a wormhole of Ulubis’s own and a carrier fleet to take one end of it to Zenerre. But aside from the vast cost and the point - assuming a portal would be heading in the other direction before too long - that it would be a waste of time and effort which would bring reconnection no quicker, there was one clinching argument that would apply until either no signal arrived from Zenerre or word came of an utter breakdown in civil society: in the Mercatoria only Engineers were allowed to make and emplace wormholes.

There were sanctions and punishments for those systems and rulers who even began a ‘hole-creation programme without explicit permission, and that permission had not been present in the Mercatoria’s pre-agreed War Emergency Plan for Ulubis.

Back in space, distributed around the Lagrange point where the portal had lain, the few pieces of recovered Beyonder ships indicated that the portal’s attackers had been made up from the same three groups which had troubled Ulubis and some of the nearby volumes for thousands of years: Transgress, the True Free and the BiAlliance, for this one occasion working in concert and in far greater numbers than they ever had before.

Anxious, on edge, waiting for whatever a Beyonder invasion might bring, the people of the system reverted to a state something more like that of Earth’s rHumanity before it had been fully brought into the galactic community.

It was a truism that all civilisations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed that they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe. Even knowing that the rest of the galactic community did exist - at least in some form, even in a worst case - the culture of Ulubis system shifted fractionally towards that earlier, pre-ascensionary state.