Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘No funny business,’ she said. She put a hand on the smooth ridge between her knees, slid one leg upward. Without warning the craft bucked wildly, hurling her off. The suit moved her head, arms, and legs to an optimal position before she could so much as gasp. She landed on the backs of her shoulders and tumbled, coming to a jarring halt against a low rock. The Webster flew from her hand. She scrabbled for it. A pair of feet thumped on to her forearm. She invoked the suit’s servos and flexed her elbow. The feet slipped off. Before she could jump up the aircar had already come down, slowly and precisely in a storm of downdraft, its skids pressing across her ankles and chest.

The engines stopped. She heaved at the skids, but it was too heavy; punched up at the shell, but it was impervious, stronger even than the suit. There were two people with guns at the stone pillars. The leader stood looking down at her.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m not surrendering, right, but I’ll stop fighting and I won’t try to get away.’

The man raised his visor and bared his teeth, then sauntered off. She watched as he sent one of his comrades around the other side of the gate. He picked up a stone and tossed it between the uprights. It disappeared. Then the other man threw a stone from his side. The stone landed at the first man’s feet. He threw it back, and it disappeared. They repeated this experiment several times.

The leader levelled his gun at the gate.

‘Don’t do that!’ Carlyle yelled.

The man stalked back over. ‘Why not?’

‘Somebody might get hurt,’ said Carlyle.

‘That,’ said the man, ‘is what I had in mind.’

‘Then expect return fire.’

The man stared down at her. ‘You mean what you say about not fighting or fleeing?’

‘Sure,’ said Carlyle.

‘I’ll have to ask you to take that suit off.’

‘Just a minute.’ She checked the internal readouts. ‘Looks like I’ve got the immunities,’ she said. ‘OK.’

She unlocked the helmet, pulled it off and shoved it aside. For a moment she lay gasping in the cold air, then she did the same with the shoulder pieces. She squirmed out of the hole thus left at the top of the suit, moving by shifting her shoulders and buttocks awkwardly until her arms were clear of the sleeves, then hauling and pushing herself out. The headless suit remained trapped under the aircar, still bearing its weight. She rolled away from under the craft and stood up in her thin-soled internal boots and close-fitting one-piece, feeling exposed and vulnerable but determined not to show it. With the light utility belt still around her waist, she didn’t feel entirely disarmed. The man again gave her that strange look, as if he was surprised but too polite to show it more explicitly.

There was a bang overhead as another hypersonic shell disintegrated. Two of the six aircars that descended were white, marked with what looked like one part of the DK logo. Carlyle pointed.

‘What are they?’

‘Black Sickle,’ the man said. ‘Battlefield resurrection techs.’

The Black Sickle . Oh my God. She had a momentary flash of her earliest bogeyman. If yir no a good girl, the ladies fae the Black Sickle’ll come an get ye! Carlyle felt her jaw tremble. She controlled it with an effort.

‘You don’t take backups?’

This time he gave her a very odd look. The aircars settled near the distant device. Figures got out and started rushing around.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Matters seem to be in hand.’ He waved towards the gate. ‘What’s going on there?’

‘It’s the gate to a Visser-Kar wormhole,’ she said.

‘So I had gathered,’ he said. ‘Why does it only work from this side of the henge? Or is it like a Moebius strip, with only one side?’

Carlyle felt somewhat nonplussed. The man wasn’t as ignorant as she’d thought.

‘It has two sides, and it works from both sides,’ she said. ‘Except, when you throw the stone in from that side, it would come out before you had thrown it, or at least before it went in. Causality violation, see? So it doesn’t.’

‘Doesn’t what?’

‘Go through the wormhole.’

‘How does it know?’

She smiled. ‘That’s a good question.’

The man scowled.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

She stuck out a hand. She refused to consider herself a prisoner. ‘Lucinda Carlyle.’

He returned the gesture. ‘Jacques Armand.’ He said it as though expecting her to recognise it. ‘Also known as “General Jacques.’ ” He pronounced it ‘Jakes’ this time, and with even more expectation of recognition.

‘Not a flicker,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘All right, I’ll accept that something strange is going on.’ He lowered his visor, presumably checking something on his head-up for a few seconds, then raised it. ‘As it seems I must. No one recognises you. And the satellite pictures show your arrival. You are not from here.’

‘You find this surprising?’

‘You could say that.’ His tone was as guarded as his words.

‘Where is here, anyway?’

‘We call the planet Eurydice. The star—we don’t have a name for it. We know it is in the Sagittarius Arm.’

‘No shit!’ Carlyle grinned with unfeigned delight. ‘We didn’t know the skein stretched this far.’

‘Skein?’

She waved her hands. ‘That wormhole, it’s linked to lots of others in a sort of messy tangle.’

He stared at her, his teeth playing on his lower lip.

‘And you and your … colleagues came here through the wormhole?’

‘Of course.’ She wrapped her arms around herself while the thermal elements in the undersuit warmed up. ‘You didn’t know this was a gate?’

Armand shook his head. ‘We’ve always kept clear of the alien structure, for reasons which should be obvious, but apparently are not.’ He pointed a finger; the sweep of his hand indicated the horizon, and the hilltop henges. ‘We took the circle of megaliths to be a boundary indicator, left by the indigenes. Today is the first time in a century that anyone has set foot within it. We keep it under continuous surveillance, of course, which is why your intrusion was detected. That and the signal burst. It went off like a goddamn nuclear EMP, but that’s the least of the damage.’ He glared at her. ‘Something for which you will pay, whoever you are. What did you say you were?’

‘The Carlyles,’ she reiterated, proudly and firmly.

‘And who’re they, when they’re at home?’

She was unfamiliar with the idiom. ‘We’re at home everywhere,’ she said. ‘People have a name for the wormhole skein. They call it Carlyle’s Drift.’

F

urther conversation was interrupted by more bangs overhead and the rapid deployment of a variety of impressive ordnance around the gate, and yet more around the artifact. Carlyle watched in silence. She wasn’t at all sure at all how to take Armand’s claimed ignorance of her origins, and of the existence of the gate. His references to the artifact as alien, and to indigenes, were likewise perplexing. Aware that her own ignorance of the situation was almost as great, and that anything she said might be disadvantageous, she said nothing. Whoever they were, this lot weren’t from any culture she’d ever heard of.

Within minutes a robot probe emerged from the gate. It stepped out on the grass and scanned the surroundings rapidly. It was instantly lunged at by the two people guarding the gate, whereupon it scuttled back through.

‘That was a mistake,’ said Carlyle. ‘Next time, expect something tougher.’

Armand grunted. ‘We can cover it.’ He was directing the deployment, waving to someone to lift the aircar that had landed on the suit. He barely spared her a glance.