Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Look,’ said Carlyle, ‘I don’t know who you people are, and it looks like you don’t know who we are, so can we just sort that out and then let me go back through and calm things down?’

‘Don’t let her do that!’ said a loud voice from the suit’s speaker. The empty suit was getting to its feet, holding the helmet and collar under one arm like a stage ghost. Everybody in the vicinity turned on it, staring.

‘Shut up, Shlaim,’ said Carlyle. How the hell had the familiar managed to hijack the suit’s motor controls? That wasn’t supposed to happen.

‘What is this?’ demanded Armand.

‘My familiar,’ said Carlyle. ‘It’s acting up, sorry.’ She gestured Armand to keep out of the way and walked up to the suit, touching the private-circuit mike at her throat as she did so. ‘Don’t you say a fucking word,’ she subvocalised, ‘or you’ll fucking regret it.’ She reached for the emergency zapper on her belt to back up this threat, and was still fumbling with the catch of the pouch when the suit, to her utter astonishment, swept her aside with a glancing but acutely painful blow to the elbow and stalked over to Armand. He and the nearby personnel had the thing covered, and looked quite ready to blast it. It raised its arms, letting the accoutrements drop, and held its hands above where its head would have been.

‘Professor Isaac Shlaim, Tel Aviv University, Department of Computer Science, deceased. I wish to surrender to you as a representative of a civilised power. Let me do that, and I promise, I’ll tell you all you want to know about the bloody Carlyles.’

Carlyle glared at the treacherous machine, but before she could warn her captors not to listen to it, the bulbous, armoured prow of a search engine lurched through the gate. She ran towards it, waving her arms, as everyone else—including her runaway suit—fell back to behind the field pieces a few tens of metres downslope from the henge. The great grinding tracks of the search engine crunched over the scree as its flanks barely cleared the dolmen’s uprights, then it tipped forward and began to move slowly down the hillside. Its elongated half-ovoid of shell gleamed like a beetle’s back. Carlyle heard the spang of bullets ricocheting from it and threw herself flat. She wished desperately that she still had her suit. As it was she just clamped her hands over the back of her head and hoped the Eurydiceans recognised an impervious carapace when they saw one.

Perhaps they did. The rattle of rifle fire and the whizz of bullets ceased. Carlyle peered up just in time to see a white-hot line form in the air between one of the field pieces and the search engine. Not laser, not plasma—she had only a second to wonder at it, and then the line extended from the stern of the vehicle to the top of the gate. The supposedly impenetrable search engine had been cored right through. The line persisted, buzzing in the air. The transverse stone of the dolmen suddenly disintegrated, and there was a bright flash from the gate, with a Cherenkov-blue flare that Carlyle recognised as an energy condition collapse. A moment later the search engine crumpled inward like an air-evacuated tin can and burned to white ash. Against the Eurydicean weapon it might as well have been made of magnesium.

Carlyle lay there blinking away tears and afterimages, shaken by dry heaves. Three people in white suits ran to the wreck and began poking through it, then walked away. No doubt everyone in it had been backed up, and whatever had happened was quick, but it was still shocking. Even without finality, death was death. Some of the people she’d been with less than an hour earlier were dead: people on her team, dead on her watch, therefore her responsibility—that was how it would be seen back home, and she couldn’t help seeing it that way herself. What was more shocking yet, as the implications sank in, was that the gate had been closed. It might not reopen for weeks. Until then she was stranded on Eurydice. The firm would rescue her eventually, she was sure of that, and in the meantime she could try and find some way to fittle out, but the fact that she’d never heard of a colony in the Sagittarius Arm, and the colony had never heard of the Carlyles, made that unlikely. The place must be really isolated.

Armand walked up, rifle at the ready, and kicked her in the ribs.

‘Get up, you slaveholder bitch.’

‘What?’ She rolled away and staggered to her feet. ‘What the fuck was that for?’

‘Your so-called familiar,’ said Armand. ‘He’s a human being .’

‘He was once,’ said Carlyle. ‘He’s posthuman now. You know? The talking dead? One of the bastards who did all this? Talk about having it coming. Don’t give me this slaveholder crap, farmer.’

Armand frowned and lowered the rifle, visibly calming down.

‘We have matters to discuss,’ he said. ‘Later.’

He strode over to the henge again and threw a stone. Then he stepped through it himself, walked around the back and returned.

‘What happened there?’

‘Your weapon overloaded the gate. It’s collapsed.’

‘Will it stay closed?’

She wondered if there was any advantage in lying about it. Probably not. She shrugged.

‘Couple of weeks maybe, a month at the outside.’

‘Let us be thankful for small mercies.’

‘Yes, you won’t be isolated for long.’

From the expression on Armand’s face she gathered that this was not the mercy he meant.

E

nough people were to remain around the relic for there to be more than enough room in the aircars that were returning. Armand gestured to Carlyle and she climbed into one of them, behind a pilot who returned her gaze with a blank-visored nod. The seat was hard but adapted instantly to her shape, the restraints automatic and insistent. She settled in. The canopy thudded shut. It was of a better grade of glass than she was used to, practically invisible. Jets whined and vibration built, thrumming her spine; the aircar rose and accelerated, pressing her down. As it banked to the southwest she glimpsed vertiginously the tilted moor and the hills, an expanse of blue-green and brown with flashes of yellow and flickers of sunlight reflected on innumerable tiny lochs, like light showing through holes in a pricked curtain. Then, with another surge of power to the rear jets, the aircar rose into a cloud. After a moment of clammy greyness it emerged on the upper side, climbed further and levelled out at, she guessed, eight or nine kilometres up, from which height there was little to see but the endless similarity and uniqueness of the cloud-tops, and glimpses of the land between and beneath them.

Carlyle could look at clouds and lands without boredom, but she was too angry to appreciate them. She had known discipline and discomfort, but always they had been willed and accepted by herself. Not since childhood had she felt thus: helpless, ordered about, confined. She willed herself to calm; turned her head from habit to suck at a coffee nipple that wasn’t there; raged again. There was a bottle of water clipped to the back of the pilot’s seat. She drank it and grimaced, finding it lukewarm. It quenched her thirst but not her anger; and of course, as soon as she pushed the bottle back in its clip, she felt a strong need to piss. In her suit she could have done it, without discomfort or consequence, but not here. She compressed her lips and knees and looked out at the bright illusory solidities of clouds.

The clouds gave way in the distance to blue, white-flecked sea, and the aircar tipped forward and in to a fast, spiralling descent: either a show-off, or a military habit. She suspected the former: Armand’s lot, somehow, didn’t strike her as familiar with contested landing-grounds. They went through and under the clouds, to thin rain, a long beach and breakers, and alongside the beach a huddle of low buildings and domes, and a kilometre of tarmac strip at one end of which the craft came rocking to a halt, followed shortly by seven others.