Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

She smiled lightly. ‘I know what I am, and I know where my home is. Good luck finding yours.’

The Svein body took a half step back from her. All four of the nest were frowning in annoyance now. ‘Why are you here?’ they demanded in unison.

‘To ensure the sentence passed on Fiech is carried out in full,’ Paula told them.

‘I thought it had been,’ the Volkep body said coldly.

‘It hasn’t been yet, because you made sure that part of you didn’t remember. But memory’s a funny thing, it’s triggered by association. And your mind is shared.’ Paula gestured around at the empty air. ‘It’s all around us, if you know how to look.’ Her virtual hand touched Nelson’s communication icon.

‘I’ve got enough,’ she said out loud.

‘What…’ all four nestlings grunted.

The wormhole opened behind her, expanding out from a micron-wide point to a two-metre circle. Bright light shone through, silhouetting Paula’s naked body. She stepped backwards, crossing the threshold to be enveloped by the light. Lost her footing as Augusta’s slightly heavier gravity claimed her, and fell on her arse in a completely undignified manner. Svein and his nestlings never saw that. The wormhole closed the instant she was through.

She was sitting in the middle of the alien environment confinement chamber of the CST Augusta Exploratory Division, a huge dome-shaped chamber with dark radiation-absorptive walls. In front of her was the five-metre-wide blank circle of the wormhole gateway, its grey pseudo-substance emitting strange violet sparkles. Halfway up the curving surface behind her was a broad band of reinforced windows with the big operations centre behind it. Nelson Sheldon was pressed up against the super-strength glass, grinning down at her. Behind him, the hundred-strong staff controlling the wormhole were peering over the tops of their tiered rows of consoles, curious and eager to see the conclusion to their oddest operation ever. Tracking her movements on Merioneth and keeping the wormhole close by had stretched the machinery to its limit.

‘You okay?’ Nelson’s amplified voice boomed down from the ceiling.

‘Yeah,’ Paula said, climbing to her feet. ‘I’m okay.’

The court guards were utter bastards to me. After that idiot judge passed sentence they dragged me down to the holding cell while I shouted that I was innocent. They just laughed as they slung me inside. I heard them later. Deliberately. They said that the Justice Directorate had developed a suspension system that allows a tiny part of your mind to stay awake during the sentence, so you’re aware of each long year as it passes. It’s part of the punishment, knowing all the opportunities you’ve lost, the life you’ve missed.

Not true. Just another unisphere myth.

After they put me down on the bed in the preparation room. No. I’ll be honest. After they held me down. I fought them, Damnit , I’m innocent. I was a classic case of someone who went down screaming and kicking. They won’t ever forget me. It took six Directorate orderlies to hold me in place while the malmetal restraints wrapped round my limbs. And after that, I still shouted. I cursed them and their families. I swore vengeance, that in two and a half thousand years I’d become the killer they wrongly thought I was, and I’d hunt down their descendants and torture them to death.

No use. They still infused the drugs. Consciousness faded away.

I woke up. The room which slowly came into focus around me was very similar to the preparation room I’d gone to sleep in. Stupidly, I was bloody grateful that I hadn’t known all that time flowing round me. The waste of my potential lives. But I was alive. Warm. And pleasantly drowsy.

There was something round my neck which seemed familiar somehow, something from the time in my life I’d lost. Icons in my virtual vision were blinking green, showing the memorycell channels into my neural structure were wide open.

Then that queen bitch Paula Myo came in. I tried to get up to throttle her. That’s when I found I was still restrained, with malmetal coiled round my arms and legs.

‘What the fuck is this?’ I shouted. My voice was weak.

‘I had you woken,’ Myo told me. ‘I have something for you. Something you’ve forgotten.’

‘What? What is this?’

‘You,’ she said, and took off her suit jacket. Something was glowing underneath her white cotton blouse. I could see shapes moving.

‘Help,’ I cried. ‘Someone. Help me.’ The coloured shadows on her abdomen began to writhe faster and faster. My virtual icons changed from green to blue, showing incoming impulses.

‘What is that?’ I whispered in fright.

She glanced down, as if only now becoming aware of the light. Her smile made her face ugly. ‘A kind of prison, I suppose. You know, in ancient times, necromancers used to draw pentagrams to trap demons in. They thought that if they were imprisoned they could use their powers. A very misplaced notion, I suspect. In this case geometry isn’t important, I simply had to have a large receiving element. Your thoughts are big, after all. But I managed to catch them. Not all of them, just the right ones. Those that were relevant to the crime.’

‘My thoughts?’ The icons expanded abruptly, wiping out my sight. Then faces emerged through the blue mist. Four of them in some kind of dilapidated room. Faces I knew. Svein. I remembered him. I remembered… being him.

I was the one standing in the desert outside Ridgeview while the rest of me lived our life. It was hot out there. Bloody unpleasant, actually. The sun burned my arms and face. I took a leak against some local plant. That way if the forensic team were any good, they’d find it and confirm the Fiech body’s DNA.

Then the air traffic control data playing in my virtual vision showed me the plane was taxiing to the runway. I took a breath and got the missile ready. A simple thing really, three of me had built it in the engineering centre under the Lake Hill house. Most of the components were off-the-shelf, and the custom ones were easy enough for the bots to manufacture. We built quite a few.

The finished product was a simple blue-grey launch tube over a metre long, with a shoulder saddle and a handle. It was heavy when I rested it on my shoulder; I squatted down on the stony sand to make the weight easier. I could see the big old Siddley-Lockheed lift into the sky; with its engine rumble faint in the hot desert air. It took what seemed an age to climb up to its cruise altitude, curving round the city in a wide arc. The passenger list said it was just about full, over a hundred and thirty people. It would be quick. Death in such a fashion always is. And the passenger list confirmed the Dynasty scum were on board. The missile’s sensors locked on. There wasn’t anything else in the sky to confuse them.

I fired the missile. The bloody launch tube slammed into my shoulder. If I hadn’t been bracing myself it would have knocked me down. The roar of the solid rocket booster was obscenely loud. For a couple of seconds I was overwhelmed. It was like being hit on the side of the head. Smoke was seething all round me. I crouched, staggered about. Then I recovered enough to stand still and look up into the wide open sky. The hyper-ram had kicked in, which made the missile just about impossible to see.

I expected the explosion to be bigger. This was just a white pinpoint flash, no fireball. But behind the blaze, the plane started to disintegrate, tumbling out of the sky. Dark fragments twirling away from the main body.

There was no way I could move. Actually, my whole nest of bodies froze up as I watched the spectacle. There was something obscenely beautiful about the sight, and better still was the knowledge that I had created it. If I could do this, I could do anything. I’d be able to force through Merioneth’s Isolation now. I had the courage and determination.