The New Space Opera 2 (47 page)

“Let me see,” Danny said, peering over Kyal's shoulder. “Oh, I understand now. That's not a real account you're reading. That's a work of fiction we used to call a comic book. Back in my day they were printed on paper, in little pamphlets. I didn't know they'd be available electronically by now. Hell, I didn't imagine they'd still exist. In any case, those stories are all made up. Those supermen aren't real. Funny thing is, once we get home, we'll be the only supermen on Earth.”

“How's that?”

“Well, as the wise fellow—whose name I forget—said, ‘Any technology sufficiently advanced will seem like magic to a more primitive culture.' Substitute super powers for magic and you have my point. Earth's certainly gone out of its way to remain primitive.”

Danny went down to the galley to eat breakfast, leaving Kyal to ponder the implications of what he'd said. Four days out from Earthfall she approached him with an idea.

“Look at this,” she said, handing him a reading tablet. “It's another comic book. It's about a superhero called the Blue Shrike and his loyal assistant Clara Zarathustra. They protect a great metropolis called Empire City. He's just a normal man in a mask with a sword cane, but she's the last surviving warrior princess from a lost island paradise. She's ostensibly his servant, acting as his chauffeur and bodyguard, but they're more like equal partners.”

“Yeah, I remember reading their adventures way back when, though I suppose I was more a fan of Spider-Man. And Empire City is just a fictionalized version of New York. What about it?”

“They appear in hundreds of books and movies and television programs, as do all of the other comic-book heroes. Your world loves these people. They seem to possess an unquenchable hunger for superheroes.”

“Possibly. Who knows? But as I said, they don't really exist. What is it exactly you wanted me to see about the Blue Shrike and his intrepid assistant?”

“She reminds me of me. They remind me of us. I've been thinking about our new lives and careers. Our new chapter.”

 

Micah Orenstein, aka Hammerhead Mike, crept along the darkened corridor on the eleventh floor of New York City's Balder Building. It was late at night. Even the cleaning crews had come and gone. He had his pistol out, a nine-millimeter automatic. He'd come prepared to kill and anyone he might encounter tonight was a potential target. Mike was a torpedo and a good one. Seventeen times before, he'd murdered in the service of the Henry Moth crime family. Tonight would be his eighteenth. Charles Lamar Faulkner had witnessed some things he shouldn't have. Then he'd been foolish enough to admit as much to the police and to reporters and finally to the District Attorney. Faulkner's investment office was in this building, on this floor, and he had the habit of working late. Mike was here on witness cleanup detail.

Mike came to a double set of mahogany doors with a brass plate on them that read:
FAULKNER INVESTMENTS
. He tried the doorknob and found it unlocked. My lucky day, he thought. He was good at picking locks, but had grown superstitious about it. The one time he'd ever been pinched was when he was caught outside of a jewelry store trying to pick its reluctant back-door lock. That cost him two years of his life. An unlocked door was an especially good omen.

Carefully, he pushed the right-hand door open, taking his time. It swung without a whisper into a darkened outer office. The only light came from another open door beyond the empty receptionist's desk. Mike slid out of his brown loafers and padded silently across the thick carpet. There was a man in the inner office, seated behind a large desk. He was looking directly at Mike as he filled the doorway, but oddly made no move or sound.

Mike could see the man clearly, illuminated by the single desk lamp. He was dressed all in midnight blue. He wore a blue overcoat, blue gloves, a blue fedora, and, adding a profound capstone to the strangeness, a blue mask. The man in blue definitely wasn't Faulkner. He smiled as Mike entered the room. Don't be so happy, Mike thought. No matter who you are, you still have to die, because you seen me here.

Mike raised his automatic and aimed it at the masked man, who still smiled and still made no effort to move. Before he could fire, his gun hand was taken in a powerful grip from behind. Mike felt his arm wrenched violently skyward and then the rest of him followed, until he dangled entirely, and quite painfully, off of the floor. His body spun a bit as it rose and he saw the person doing the lifting. It was a woman who had to be seven feet tall, if she was an inch! She was dressed all in black, including a black mask and chauffeur's cap. She had beautiful golden skin and long dark hair that tumbled like angry silk down her shoulders. And, incredibly, she was holding Mike off of the floor, effortlessly, with one black-gloved hand.

The woman squeezed her grip and Mike's arm exploded in new levels of agony, until he had to drop the gun in his hand. Then she threw him contemptuously away. He flew across the room like a ragdoll, bounced hard off the far wall, and slid nearly senseless to the floor. He lay where he'd fallen, desperately trying to clear his head, catch his breath, and make some sort of sense out of the incredible situation he'd suddenly landed in.

He'd landed facing the office's floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside of
the windows, one of which he now noticed had been busted in, he could see a giant featureless blue thing, hanging impossibly in midair.

“That's my
Raptor's Egg
,” the man in blue said, noticing the direction of his shocked gaze. “You'll be seeing a lot of it in town, from now on.”

The masked man got up from behind the big executive's desk as the giant woman walked over to it and lifted it in two hands, as if it weighed nothing. She turned and held the desk over Mike's head, ready to bring it crashing down on him. Mike heard a choked whimper and realized it had come from him.

“Oh, I don't think that will be necessary, Clara,” the man in blue said. He walked to stand over Mike, and as he did so, something grew out of one of his gloved hands and formed itself into a sword with a long and needle-thin blade. “I think our dear Mister Hammerhead knows by now what will happen to him if he tries to move without permission.” The man placed the point of his sword under Mike's chin. Mike dutifully froze in place. “There won't be any killings tonight, will there, Mike? Tell your boss, Mister Moth, that Faulkner is under our protection now and is to be left in peace.”

The woman shrugged and then casually tossed the desk aside. It landed with a crash and splintered into a thousand pieces.

“Who are you?” Mike cried.

“He's the dreaded Blue Shrike,” the woman said, with a smile that could light a skyscraper. “I'm his faithful aide, Clara Zarathustra, the mysterious and hauntingly beautiful last survivor of a magical warrior nation. We're superheroes.”

“Pass the word,” the man in blue said. “New York is our town now.”

Here's a tense interstellar thriller that demonstrates that sometimes the road onward even from total failure can lead to some very intriguing destinations…

John Meaney works as a consultant for a well-known software house, holds a degree in physics and computer science, is ranked black belt by the Japan Karate Association, and is an enthusiastic weight-lifter. He's sold stories to
Interzone, FutureShocks, Adventure, Live Without a Net, Sideways in Crime
, and elsewhere. His first novel,
To Hold Infinity
, was published in 1998. His other books include the three-volume Nulapeiron series, which consists of
Paradox, Context
, and
Resolution
, and the new Ragnarok series, comprised, to date, of
Absorption, Bone Song
, and, most recently,
Dark Blood
. He lives in Turnbridge Wells, in England.

C
all it fear, call it overwhelming hysteria, a natural response to floating in blazing space amid a billion suns. He is laughing as well as crying, protected by a slick layer of quickglass that scarcely seems to exist. He imagines he can breathe vacuum, rehydrate from nothing, hang here forever.

The galactic core is beautiful. He feels transcendent yet empty, because no one should see this alone, so far from everyone.

My love. I've missed you.

Most of the colonized worlds lie in the spiral arm of humanity's birth. Call it irrational fear not to have spread farther, because if the Pilots ever abandon humankind, each world—regardless of location—will be alone.

As he is now, without his love.

My name is Carl Blackstone, and I'm alive!

He catches a taste of salt before the quickglass absorbs his tears, even though the lifesaving layer presses against his eyes, making it impossible to blink against the coalescent brightness of so many suns: the heart of the galaxy.

And there's something else—a streaming length of energy, a jet one thousand light-years in extent, like some shining needle thrust through the galactic core by the hands of a god. Its shining is not just bright but
odd
, as if forming some new chromatic chord.

In the vastness, he is a tiny organism, his life span a cosmic picosecond. A speck against infinity.

I need to warn them, my love.

Humanity may be a fleeting phenomenon in the universe, but it's his species and he
cares
, unlike the bastard who ejected him into vacuum,
expecting him to die. Reacting to the memory, his body begins to shake. He is a powerless observer.

I need you so much.

It shines so brightly, the galactic core. What scares him is darkness, moving unseen.

 

Ten days earlier—or a matter of hours, depending on how you reckon time—and he's on a lower deck of Fairwell Rotunda, inside a lobby, standing near the entrance to a lounge. The cylindrical thirteen-deck tower is formed of deep-orange quickglass splashed with oceanic blue. Visitors consider it opulent, but in Vertigo City, it's a dive.

He has five minutes to go before meeting the woman.

In one corner, a seated group of churchgoers seems to be celebrating. Their foreheads bear three glistening red dots, equilateral triangles enclosing golden gamma symbols. Some kind of holoscript floats above their table.

Carl double-blinks his smartlenses to zoom in.

This day in history five hundred and seven years ago—apparently—orbiting and ground-based Earth telescopes detected simultaneous gamma-ray burster events, all three of them short-lived, orders of magnitude more powerful than supernovae. They looked like natural phenomena, yet formed a perfect equilateral triangle from the viewpoint of Earth. Their origin lay beyond a cosmological void, one hundred and fifty
million
light-years across, one of those vast volumes of emptiness between galactic superclusters: voids where no ordinary matter reigns.

Web-based systems managed the telescopes, succumbing to a data-corrupting worm attack that took weeks to recover from. Some people claimed that the triangle of gamma-ray bursters was an illusion, either implanted by the virus or an accidental artifact of data reconstruction. Others declared that the observations were real.

No one, before the founding of the Temple of the Equilateral Redemption, had a convincing explanation. But the future Prophet Robinson was born at 3:03
A.M
. on March 3, 2013, coincident with the phenomenon. On her thirty-third birthday, divine revelation manifested in the form of—

Carl turns away, blinking his lenses back to normal. Just another me-metic cult, a contagion of delusion. Thinking this, he sees a gray-bearded, dark-clad man watching the Equilateral Redemptionists. A priest's collar encircles the man's throat. His eyes—as he glances at Carl—are gentle yet unsettling. Then he turns away.

As the priest leaves the lobby and enters the lounge, Carl rocks in place, suffering a moment of unbalance as if something just shifted at the edge of his vision, yet when he turned to look, nothing was there.

Nerves, that's all.

He's about to book passage and it's strictly illegal. But he will go through with it.

Thoughts of Equilateral Redemption fade as he enters the half-empty lounge. Sitting on a curved couch is a woman whose scalp is pale and shaven, burgundy dragons sliding across it in endless iterative chase. Motile tattoos.

This must be Xala.

“You're Devlin Cantrelle?” she asks.

“Er, yes.” It's the name he's lived under for seven years, since arriving here on the world of Molsin. “Looking to buy passage to—”

“Nerokal Tertius, to see the ruins. I heard. And you're a teacher?”

“Um, sure. Gregor TechNet.”

Nerokal is under embargo now, as far as Molsin is concerned, and no Pilot is taking passengers there from here, not if they're operating legally. Just another trade war.

Xala's smartlenses film over for extra privacy. Probably displaying his biographical details.

“All right.” Her eyes blink back to normalcy. “Orbital ascent in fifty minutes. Departure will be…some time afterward.”

“You're traveling too?”

“Uh-huh. Me, that family over there”—Xala's glance flickers toward two adults with defeated-looking eyes, then their children—“plus those priests over there. Thirteen in total.”

There's a group of six dark-suited men around a table. A seventh stands by a quickglass pillar, watching the room. An old scar forms a diagonal slash beneath his left eye. His hands are muscular, knuckles swollen with callus.

“Priests,” says Carl.

Of the seated “priests,” five are playing a private game, probably of cards, in a consensual holo controlled by blinks of their smartlensed eyes and flickering finger gestures. The sixth man has a gray beard and gentle eyes: the watcher from the lobby.

“No one's asking
you
why you're traveling this way.” Xala's voice softens. “It's polite to extend the courtesy to others.”

“Nerokal's off limits to—”

“There are other ways to get there. Like traveling to Fulgor first.
They're
not recognizing the embargo. Have a vacation, say, two days in Lucis City, then fly onward.”

“I can't afford that.”

“Well, don't worry.” Xala picks up a bulb of sweetscent and takes a sniff. “God, I needed that. So, payment. You can afford
our
rates, can't you?”

“Um, sure.”

“So do you want to pay in orbit or right now?”

“I might as well—”

“Excellent.” Xala gestures a monetary phase-space into being. “Cache payment preferred.”

Carl gestures to effect the transfer. It's only a thirteen-dimensional transaction: simple, safe, unlikely to be noticed by the authorities.

“Nice doing business with you, Mr. Cantrelle.”

“Er, call me Devlin.”

“So what are you going to do while you're waiting, Mr. Cantrelle?”

Carl gestures to the scentbulb. “Would you like another—?”

Her expression grows blank.

“Um, right.” Carl blinks. “I should leave you to it, I guess. You might get more passengers.”

“That'd be nice.” She takes another sniff of her sweetscent. “The more the merrier.”

There's a small man looking nervous off to one side of the lounge. Every time the door to the lounge melts open, he practically pees himself. Carl mentally tags him as Mr. Shifty.

“Maybe that guy?”

“Who?” Xala follows his gesture. “Oh, shit. Go relax by yourself, Professor.”

“Trouble?”

“Not for us. Not if you act natural and piss off now.”

Carl gets up and moves away. Crap. His arms are trembling, and it's not just a question of what's going on with Mr. Shifty here. Carl has spent weeks following hints and talking to the wrong kind of people, slumming it in Vertigo's lower decks. That's been in his spare time, of which there's been more since Fiella moved out—just another of his relationships collapsing for lack of a stable base, one more failure in the sequence.

It didn't take much to convince Xala that he was her kind of customer. Perhaps he should be disturbed by that. But what worries him is the thing
he cannot ask about—the identity, or rather the species, of just who will be flying the mu-space ship.

There's a subliminal stirring in the lounge. Carl backs away to stand against the wall, wondering what's about to happen. Then he sees the scarlet uniforms in the doorway—a squad of proctors—and behind them a slim figure dressed in close-fitting black, a long black gold-trimmed cape hanging from her shoulders.

Gods, no. It's impossible.

Her face is triangular, her eyes shining obsidian—black on black without surrounding whites—but it's not just that she's a Pilot. This is Marina, and the chances of her failing to recognize him are zero.

Turning to the quickglass wall, he makes the control gesture known universally as
gotta-pee
. An opening sucks apart, and he steps into an ovoid interior. It seals up behind him, concealing him from the lounge, as toilet facilities are extruded from the floor. A mirrorfield brightens beside him.

He activates the tu-ring on his right forefinger, then turns back to face the way he entered. His ring's covert capabilities are many. Right now it is causing a rectangle of orange quickglass to grow unidirectionally transparent. He wouldn't want anyone out there to see him.

Marina has stepped back, still partly visible beyond the lounge doorway. Everyone else is watching the proctors converge on Mr. Shifty, hands palm-forward as they speak, exercising verbal de-escalation skills that appear to be having an effect. But suddenly Mr. Shifty curls two fingers into a control gesture, leaving the proctors no choice.

He collapses.

“Idiot,” says Carl, knowing that no one can hear.

Whatever smartmiasma surrounded Mr. Shifty before, it has dissolved into dust after a battle lasting nanoseconds, fought at the femtoscopic scale between arrays of tailored smartatoms. That was invisible, but what the proctors do next is designed to make an impression. With glittering tape, they bind him like a mummy, then activate the tape's induction circuits. A lev-field raises him to waist height, where he bobs, suspended horizontally.

“Well done.” It's Marina's voice.

She's just the same.

Except that's not true, because ten years have strengthened her tone of decisive command. Carl presses his hand against the quickglass, watching the swirl of her cloak as she turns and then strides out of view. The
proctors take their time, maneuvering Mr. Shifty as they leave. They'll be heading away from Fairwell Rotunda, deeper into the city; Marina will be ascending to the rotunda's top deck, more than likely, ready to return to her ship.

He wonders what Mr. Shifty did. Smuggling, probably. He pushes the thought away, forgetting the man forever.

It's Marina who's alive in his mind, her beauty still compelling, along with another memory: the way contempt floated into her black-on-black eyes that time—the moment when he realized that she despised him, when he simply could not say the words to change her mind.

Their friend Soo Lin used to say that success is knowing how to swallow bitterness. Carl wonders what happened to him, where he is now.

I know where
I
need to go, and the land of memories isn't it.

He dissolves the quickglass wall and steps into the lounge.

“Ten minutes to detachment,”
sounds through the air.
“Those not traveling outsystem are welcome to remain in the rotunda. Total time away from Vertigo will be two-point-four hours.”

Xala is talking to a pair of hard-faced women—more passengers, perhaps. The so-called priests have gone back to playing cards. The small family are frowning, even the kids. Then the father takes charge, leading them to an expanse of blank curved wall. He mutters a command. Dark orange fades to transparency, forming a view window.

Outside are glowing clouds, pale-peach and massive, among which Vertigo City floats as always. Carl moves closer, still enjoying the view after seven years here.

“Maybe we shouldn't do this,” the husband is saying.

“We've paid.” The wife tousles her daughter's hair. “And we have to, remember?”

There's some family drama here that will remain a secret. Intimacy even in adversity.

“But dealing with some rebel Pilot—”

“Hush, for God's sake. You want to bring the proctors back?”

The husband tightens his lips. At a guess, he's enumerating the possibilities: the whole deal might be a scam; there might indeed be one or more Pilots willing to break the embargo they're obliged to obey; or it might be a Zajinet ship. They're the only alien species to have mu-space travel. While they sometimes maintain embassies on human worlds, their relationship with Pilots includes violent incidents stopping just short of all-out war.

Marina
. Thinking of Pilots.
Will I ever see you again?

He's just had his chance. If she were to return, he'd hide away again.

Remember Graduation.

Bitterness is not helping. Concentrating on his surroundings might be more useful.

“Five minutes to detachment.”

The fake priest with the real facial scars is approaching the view window. Carl mentally labels him Scarface, which is unkind but specific, a way of keeping track of who is where.

“Hey, pretty clouds.” Scarface turns to the children, pulling his lips back into a predatory rictus. “You kids like it here?”

The family draws away.

“What are you looking at?” Scarface has shifted his attention to Carl. “You got a problem, my son?”