M. Harrison - LIGHT

'You aren't leaving him here, are you?' Mona the clone called up anxiously from the human quarters.

'Are you deaf?' said Seria Mau.

'I wouldn't put it past you, that's all.'

'Shut up.'

The Krishna Moire pod, realising what had happened, swept in, fanned out into the parking orbit with a kind of idle bravado, the way shadow boys in one-shot cultivars occupy a doorway so they can spit, gamble and clean their nails with replicas of priceless antique flick-knives. They could afford to wait. Meanwhile, to move things along, Krishna Moire himself opened a line to the White Cat. He had signed on younger than Seria Mau, and his fetch, though it was six feet tall and presented itself in full Earth Military Contracts chic, including black boots, high-waist riding breeches and a dove-grey double-breasted tuxedo with epaulettes, had the demanding mouth of a boy.

'We want Billy Anker,' he said.

'Go through me,' Seria Mau invited.

Moire looked less certain. 'This is a wrong thing you are doing, resisting us,' he informed her. 'To add to all those other wrongdoings you done. But, hey, we didn't come for you, not this time.'

'I done?' said Seria Mau. 'Wrongdoings I done? '

Outside, explosions marched steadily across the mud, flinging up rocks and vegetation. Elements of the pod, becoming impatient with the half-minute wait, had entered the atmosphere and begun to shell the surface at random. Seria Mau sighed.

'Fuck off, Moire, and take speaking lessons,' she said.

'You're only alive because EMC don't care about you one way or another,' he warned her as he faded to brown smoke. 'They could change their minds. This operation is double red.' His fetch flickered, vanished, reformed suddenly in a kind of postscript. 'Hey, Seria, I got my own pod now!' it said.

'I knew that. So?'

'So next time I see you,' the fetch promised, 'I'll let the machine speak.'

'Jerk,' said Seria Mau.

By this time she had the cargo bay open. Billy Anker, dressed in a vintage EV suit, was shuffling head down towards it with all the grim patience of the physically unfit. He fell. He picked himself up. He fell again. He wiped his faceplate. Up in the stratosphere, the Krishna Moire pod shifted and turned in hungry disarray; while high above it in the parking lot, the hybrid ship awaited what would happen, its ambivalent signature flickering like a description of the events unfolding below. Who was up there, Seria Mau wondered, along with the commander of Touching the Void? Who was presiding over this fumbled op? Down in the cargo bay, Mona the clone called Billy's name. She leaned out, caught his hand, pulled him inside. The cargo ramp slammed shut. As if this was a signal, long vapour trails emerged from the cloudbase at steep angles. Billy Anker's ship burst open. Its engines went up in a sigh of gamma and visible light.

'Go,' Seria Mau told the mathematics. The White Cat torched out in a low fast arc over the South Pole, transmitting ghost signatures, firing off decoys and particle-dogs.

'Look!' cried Billy Anker. 'Look down!'

The South Polar Artefact flashed beneath them. Seria Mau caught a fleeting glimpse of it-a featureless gunmetal ziggurat a million years old and five miles on a side at the base-before it vanished astern. 'It's opening!' cried Billy Anker. Then, in an awed whisper: 'I can see. I can see inside-' The sky lit up white behind them, and his voice turned to a despairing wail. The pod, growing frustrated, had hit the ziggurat with something from the bottom shelf of its arsenal, something big. Something EMC.

'What did you see?' Seria Mau asked three minutes later, as they skulked at Redline L2 while the White Cat's mathematics tried to guess them a way out under the noses of their pursuers.

Billy Anker wouldn't say.

'How could they do that?' he railed. 'That was a unique historical item, and a working one. It was still receiving data from somewhere in the Tract. We could have learned something from that thing.' He sat white-faced in the human quarters, panting and wiping the adrenalin sweat off his face with his do-rag, the top half of the muddy EV suit peeled back. The shadow operators were cooing and fluttering round him, trying to fix his dislocated finger, but he kept batting them away with his other hand. 'This old stuff,' he said, 'it's all we have. It's our only resource!'

'Where you look, you find,' she told him. 'There will always be more, Billy Anker. There will always be more after that.'

'Nevertheless, everything I learned, I learned from that thing.'

'And what did you learn, Billy Anker?'

He tapped the side of his nose.

'You'd like to know,' he said, laughing as if this assertion showed how sharp and clean his intuition was. 'But I won't tell.' He was a beachcomber, with all the tidal scouring of the personality that implies. His big discovery shored him up. He had to believe she would be interested in whatever tacky insight into the nature of things he thought it gave him. 'I can tell you what EMC want, though,' he offered instead.

'I know that already. They want you. They followed me all the way from Motel Splendido to find you. And here's another thing to think about: the Moire pod wanted to try me out. They think they're good enough. But whoever's in that other ship wouldn't let them, in case you were caught in the crossfire. That's why Krishna Moire bumped your artefact, Billy. He's pissed at his superiors.'

Billy Anker grinned his sly grin.

'And are they good enough?' he said. 'To try you out?'

'What do you think?'

Billy Anker contemplated this answer with approval. Then he said, 'EMC don't want me. They want what I found.'

Seria Mau felt cold in her tank.

'It's it on board my ship?' she said.

'In a manner of speaking,' he acknowledged. He made a gesture meant to take in all of Radio Bay, maybe even the vast sweep of the Beach itself. 'It's out there too.'

Some hours after he shot Evie Cray, Ed Chianese found himself on the waste ground behind the New Men warren.

It was pitch black out there, lit with oddly angled flashes of white light from the docks. Occasionally a K-ship left its slip on a vertical line of fusion product, and for perhaps two or three seconds Ed could see low hummocks, pits, ponds, piles of broken engineering objects. The whole place had a smell of metal and chemicals. Vapour drifted out the yards like a ground mist. Ed was throwing up again, and the tank voices were back in his head. He dumped the guns in the first pool he came to. A life like his, and finally he had killed someone. He remembered boasting to Tig Vesicle:

'Once you've done all the things worth doing, you begin on the things that aren't.'

A little smoke came up from the pool, as if there was more in it than water. Shortly after he got rid of the guns, he came across an abandoned rickshaw. It loomed up in front of him suddenly-out of context, one wheel in a flooded hole-tilted at an odd angle against the sky. Detecting his approach, advertisements crawled across the sides of its hood, coalesced as soft lights in the air above it. Music started up. A voice echoed across the waste ground:

'Sandra Shen's Observatorium and Native Karma Plant, Incorporating the Circus of Pathet Lao.'

'No thanks,' Ed said. 'I'll walk.'

In the light of the next flare from the rocket yards, he discovered the rickshaw girl. She was on her knees, bowed down between the shafts, breathing in with a kind of hoarse whistle, letting it out as a grunt. Every so often her whole body tensed up as tight as a fist and began to tremble. Then she seemed to relax again. Once or twice she laughed to herself and said, 'Hey, man.' She was occupied with dying the way she had been occupied with life, to the exclusion of everything else. Ed knelt down beside her. It was like kneeling next to a foundered horse.