Ian Hocking - Red Star Falling

In the moment before Saskia Brandt awoke, she had a vision of red chrysanthemums falling. The flowers looked unreal. Their stems were too straight and their falls too slow. Their Gestalt was artful sadness.

Then the sky beyond them wintered and the dream faded.

She awoke to freezing darkness. Her throat was dry. She turned and coughed. The edge of her breast touched a cold surface and, with a shock that stopped her coughing, she understood that she was lying on a metal tray, naked but for a loose shroud. She raised her knees. They bumped metal too.

She passed her hands over her body. It was difficult to move them under the shroud. She found one injury: a deep cut high on the inside of her right leg.

She coughed again.

Saskia closed her eyes and tried to contact her computer agent, an Ego-class device that she carried disguised as a business card. There was no reply. It was the first time in years she had felt its absence. The computer was either nearby and offline, or too far away to contact.

Saskia reminded herself that she was the foremost in her Recruitment Clade. She would remain calm. She had scrambled through mud beneath plasma fire on the cold training field outside Berlin during the winter of 2024. She could cope with a metal box, a cut leg and a sore throat.

She did not know where she was, or how she had got here. The Meta Carrier Wave would remedy that. In the meantime, what did she remember? She would verbalise her story to herself. A mindful narrative. Just as she had been trained.

So I remember my name, Saskia Brandt, and I remember Meta. My designation: Agent (Singular). My training I remember, too. And Toaster, my Ego unit. I am nearing the end of a four-year mission. I left Meta at 4:55 p.m. on Monday, 15 June, 2026 and travelled through time to Siberia, 12 April, 1904. My mission is No. 11. I am following the money of the Yerevan Square Expropriation. She paused. I play Ms Mira Tucholsky, twenty-seven years old, crypto-anarchist …

At these words, Saskia stopped. She gave herself a first class mark for declarative memory. But there was something amiss with her mind. It felt slow and wrong.

Like any Agent Singular, her cranium carried electronic augmentation: a glass-covered chip connected to more than forty per cent of her grey matter by super-conducting carbon filaments. She did not know the details of its mechanism. A Meta doctor had explained that it added a third form of thinking. While the right hemisphere was dominant for parallel, holistic processes, and the left hemisphere was dominant for serial, detailed processes, the chip could coordinate both hemispheres and add a posthuman mode of thought that nobody could quite define. ‘Meta thinking’, perhaps. Saskia now felt the absence of this thinking in the same way she felt the absence of her Ego unit.

The chip spoke to her. An involuntary whisper passed through her dry lips and she heard: ‘Coda.’

CODA was a half-remembered acronym. It named a procedure in which the deceased–she deflated at that word–was granted a few hours’ activity post-mortem until the chip itself exhausted its power. Her chip would have spent the last few hours further infesting her tissues and hijacking her nerves until it could assume the role of physical puppet-master. As the chip was too small to contain a power source, it drew energy from something called Euler Space. It was the degradation of this energy bridge that determined the length of her CODA.

Saskia Brandt–ace student, her Major’s favourite–wanted to scream.

Agent Singular, she commanded herself, lead your fear.

She closed her eyes and recalled her last memory. She had been standing on the polished floor of the Amber Room in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars, south of St Petersburg. It had been a warm spring night. Ripe for the recovery of half a million roubles stolen from the State Bank the year before. Saskia had played a central role in the robbery. Indeed, she had inhabited her revolutionary part with a relish that only one like her, knowing the greater story had already been told, could bring. When those agents transporting the money north to Finland had betrayed the Party and stashed the money somewhere in St Petersburg, it had been Saskia who had led the recovery.

Last memory: She had been standing on that polished floor. The handsome Georgian revolutionary, Soso, had approached the statue of Frederick the Great, the base of which hid the satchels of cash, and put his hand on the leg of the horse. Soso: poet, Marxist, murderer, a man who collected aliases like dandies collected handkerchiefs. The Milkman. Soselo. The Pockmarked One. Koba.

She had been standing, waiting, on that polished floor, quite ready for Soso to congratulate her on the recovery of the monies.

His eyes. Those honey-coloured eyes had turned cold as he smiled. They had set to amber. Then he had given the slightest nod to someone over her shoulder.

In her cold metal box, remembering, Saskia hissed at the darkness. She saw red chrysanthemums tumbling through a wintering sky.

Last, last memory: She had been standing in the Amber Room when, in the setting eyes of Soso, her augmented perception had revealed the reflection of his henchman, Kamo, raising the butt of his revolver.

And now she was here.

I will lead my fear.

Saskia turned her head to tighten the shroud against her face. She bit the fabric. Snarled and jerked her mouth. The linen ripped. She slid her hands to the hole and forced it wider until the shroud split like a second skin. It sloughed from her body.

There was a hairline gap where the lid of the box met the side at her head. She pushed her fingers into it. Only the tips would go. She felt around the edges until she discovered that it was a hatch, hinged on one side and latched on the other.

She curled into a ball and reversed herself inside the locker until her feet were against the door. A label had been tied to her big toe and it fluttered against her sole. Thinking of Soso’s honey-coloured eyes, she braced herself against the sides. There was no quiet way out. She kicked and kicked. The top latch of the locker was already open, and this gave her leverage to break the lower one.

She slid out and fell to a crouch. A tear of blood dropped from her wound onto the tiles of a well-appointed autopsy room. The lights were off, but shuttered windows on the far wall bled halos of wan gaslight. Night, then. She smelled carbolic acid. All the work surfaces were empty and the drawers closed. The buckets were stacked.

The impression was not Russian. Where was she?

She crossed to the metal work-table that ran the length of the wall. The drawers beneath it were unlocked. In the topmost, she found a lancet. Holding this like a dagger, she retreated into a cavity beneath the bench and remained there for a moment, looking out. The mortuary was still. Nobody had come to investigate the sound of her escape.

There were double doors to the left of the lockers. She strained to hear breathing, or perhaps a fearful swallow.

Nothing.

Strands of her loose, shoulder-length hair swung in front of her face. She sniffed. There were traces of propellant, something smokeless with a low brisance. Cordite? If so, she had recently fired a rifle.

Saskia took the lancet in her teeth. She emerged from the cavity and looked through the drawers until she found sutures, needle and scissors. With care, she put the thread through the lips of her leg wound. The pain that she felt when tying it off was distant, a satellite below the horizon. Then she used the lancet to cut the string of her toe tag.

The installation of the ceiling lights had left a scar in the plaster that she traced back to the switch near the closed door. She walked to the switch and flicked it.