Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘I hope that was worth it,’ the pilot said, over the common circuit.

Carlyle, Higgins, and Johnstone looked at each other.

‘Tactless little prick, isn’t he,’ Johnstone observed. ‘Time to go, I guess.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Carlyle said. ‘There’s stuff in that cave that, well, I wouldn’t want to go to waste.’

‘You’re not thinking of hanging around,’ Higgins said.

‘No, no. But to make life easier’—she winced—‘so to speak, for a future team, we could leave the crane.’

‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Johnstone. ‘Well, hell, you paid for it, the Carlyles might as well have the advantage of it.’

Getting the crane out was awkward. The pilot brought the ship right down to the surface, with the hatch open much wider than before, fully retracted. Carlyle guided Higgins as she drove the crane off the floor of the hold and on to the surface close to the hole, then the pilot lifted the ship clear. He lifted it more than clear, taking it up to about five hundred metres. Very slowly it moved aside; as Higgins descended from the crane’s cabin Carlyle guessed that the pilot was looking for a spot where he could bring the ship down again without any risk of colliding with the crane. The ship’s lights shone bright in the dim glow of the ionized haze of Chernobyl air.

‘Let’s move over a bit,’ Higgins said. ‘Give him a couple hundred metres clearance. He says he’s worried about gusting.’

Carlyle was looking down at the ground again, picking her way cautiously forward, when she saw out of the corner of her eye a blue flash just above the horizon. She then saw another, and another, closer and closer. In between, like a shadow on the shining mist, a gigantic batwinged shape was just discernible.

It was far bigger than the ships she’d seen back at the DK spaceport.

The DK ship was heading straight for the Extacy , flying quite slowly, except that every few hundred metres, it fittled. It must, Carlyle guessed, be fittling a light-second away, then returning to the exact point from which it had departed, and moving forward again and repeating the process. Every 2.7 seconds, she realised: timed to avoid the pulsar beam. Just when it seemed about to collide with the Extacy , its enormous wings swept downward, meeting at the tips to form a circle. A blink later, and the wings encircled the Extacy from above. Another blue Cherenkov flash followed, almost overhead. Its afterimage faded. Both ships were gone.

Carlyle had her Webster out and aimed at Higgins’s faceplate before the woman’s mouth had closed. She felt betrayed, abandoned, fooled like a rube, and enraged.

‘You bastards! You stupid fucking bastards! Tell me what you did that for! I’ll blow your fucking head off right here!’

‘I had nothing to do with it!’

‘You must have been in on it together!’

‘I wish I had been—then I wouldn’t be left down here with you!’ Higgins’s metal face looked distraught and bewildered. Carlyle backed off, keeping the pistol levelled. Her knees felt rubbery.

‘So what’s your explanation?’ she demanded.

‘Never trust a commie,’ said Higgins.

Carlyle glared at her. ‘Never trust a Rapture-fucker, you mean!’

Higgins shrugged. ‘Takes two to make a deal.’

Her offhand attitude and flip answers reignited Carlyle’s fury. ‘Yeah, or three! Or four if it was you and that hick pilot!’

‘Not me!’

‘You knew nothing about this?’

‘No.’

The metal face was etched with anguish. Carlyle believed her. The anger dimmed, leaving a cold dismay. They were going to die more painfully and uncomfortably than she’d intended, but that wasn’t the worst. They were going to die for nothing. She squatted down, lowering the pistol.

‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she moaned. ‘Why the hell would they do that?’

‘Like I said, never trust—’

‘Oh, fuck that,’ Carlyle snarled. ‘That’s just a stupid fucking prejudice. When they do a deal they stick to it—it’s in their interests after all. I can buy an AO pilot selling us out, even to DK. I can’t buy a DK family cheating us.’

Higgins moved over and squatted down too.

‘We don’t know it was the same family as you were dealing with. Or the same group within the family. You should know about that, Carlyle.’

‘Don’t tell me what I should fucking know about,’ Carlyle said. ‘It still doesn’t figure. These DK clans compete all right, but they keep a united front to the rest of the world.’

‘How do we know it was DK at all?’

Carlyle rocked back on her heels. ‘Because it was a DK ship.’ She knew that was a fallacy even as she said it.

‘We don’t even know that ,’ Higgins said. ‘It was like the one in the spec, sure. But it was a lot bigger and better.’

Carlyle snorted. ‘So who built it? Aliens?’

‘Whoever built it,’ Higgins said, ‘might have sold it to someone else. Someone who wanted a QTD real bad. Or maybe just wanted another DK ship real bad and knew they could buy one with a QTD. Either way, I think there’s some third party out there.’

‘The Knights?’

Higgins shrugged. ‘They’re in hostility mode. Why not?’

‘Why not indeed,’ Carlyle said bitterly. ‘That makes sense. They bought the first QTD off us and there’s no reason they shouldn’t steal the second. Seeing as we’re fighting them and all. Shit.’

She sat for a moment staring in silence at Higgins, not wanting to divulge the next thought that followed on from that. If the Knights of Enlightenment had an even better model of the latest DK ship than the one she’d gone through all this to buy, then her bright idea of using a DK ship to outmanouevre them at Eurydice was so much chaff.

‘I guess,’ said Higgins, ‘that you planned to use the ship against the Knights at this new planet, and—’

‘Oh, shut up!’

Higgins’s steely lips compressed.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Carlyle went on, slightly apologetic, ‘is what Johnstone would get out of it.’

‘You mean, apart from a lot of money when he comes back from the dead?’

‘Aye,’ said Carlyle. ‘Apart from that. What’s money tae a Rapture-fucker? The truth about this’ll come out soon enough, likely as soon as my backup back hame wakes up and asks where the shiny new ship is. And after that his life willna be worth a damn anywhere we can reach. And there’s naebody but us who’ll poke around like we do in the tech, which means nae other suckers tae latch ontae if Rapture-fucking’s yir fix.’

Higgins shrugged. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere.’

‘Aye, you’re telling me!’ In a sudden surge of renewed rage Carlyle brandished her pistol. ‘Do you want to get it over with now? Put the guns to each other’s heads, count of three?’

Higgins shook her iron head, her steel tongue dry on her steel lips.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust that method of suicide, not any more and not here.’ She glanced in the direction of the hole. ‘Remember what Johnstone said.’

‘You heard all that?’

‘Sure, it was on the open circuit.’

‘Fuck. You’re right. Anyway. So what do we do, if we cannae just kill ourselves?’

‘I’ll tell you what we can do,’ said Higgins, standing up. ‘We use the time we’ve got. Johnstone thought there must be another gate in there. We can go looking for that.’

‘With no guarantee that we’ll find it, or that it’ll lead anywhere more hospitable.’

‘Any less hospitable and it’ll be instantly lethal,’ said Higgins wryly. ‘Which is kind of the point, yeah? And anyway, looking for it will take our minds off things. And we might find some interesting stuff on the way.’