Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

The slipstream rose to a roar for a minute and then they were between the foot of the relic and the fallen ship, and among the enemy. Lucinda keyed up her IFF, pretuned to the Carlyles’ and the Eurydiceans’ suits. She rolled off the sled, letting the suit save her in the tumble, and lay on the ground selecting targets and firing at any suit that didn’t come back with the agreed ping. She saw a ragged line of men emerging from the hatch of the wrecked ship, and shot them down one by one, faster and faster as they fled. Other Knights who had time retreated to the ship—some small squad of the Carlyle fighters followed them in. She only imagined she could hear the shots within as she sent forth more of her own.

A weight crashed on to her back before her suit could warn her, and hands in stronger armour than hers pinned her arms. A frantic voice found a channel.

‘Cease fire! Cease fire! It’s over! The Knights have stopped fighting!’

Lucinda recognised the voice. ‘Armand!’ she shouted.

‘Oh, Christ, it’s you.’ He rolled off, reached out and hauled her to her feet. ‘Can you get through to your commanders?’ he asked. ‘I can’t. Your soldiers won’t stop for me. It’s a massacre.’

Perplexed, Lucinda transmitted him the key to the firm’s command channel. She watched him shout, gesticulate, pace up and down. After about four more minutes, he stood still, then stalked up to her. A Black Sickle aircar drifted overhead.

‘Your—your barbarians were not taking surrenders!’

Lucinda shook her head. ‘Nobody told them to.’

Armand lifted his visor. ‘When we attacked the Knights, we kept negotiating. Each side lost, perhaps, a dozen. There were five hundred of the Knights. Your forces have killed three hundred of them.’

‘We lost hundreds too,’ Lucinda pointed out. ‘To the nuke, and on the hillside.’

‘Exactly,’ said Armand. ‘Only about fifty of you have reached here. They did most of the killing.’

‘Well, hey,’ said Lucinda. ‘That’s what you get when you call in the bloody Carlyles.’

‘So I see.’ He was calming down. ‘I confess myself relieved there are not more of you.’

She laughed. ‘We’ve won.’

‘Indeed we have.’ He looked distracted, turning away. ‘For now. There is another KE starship here, and it must be on its way. Let us hope the bloody Carlyles can stop it.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about—’

Colour, reddening, washed into the scene. Lucinda looked up to see its source. Something intensely bright had risen above the southeastern horizon and was soaring up the sky like a small unreasonable sun.

Winter had never been in his own conceit a philistine about opera. He could stand it fine, as long as it was in Italian. Hearing people singing English prose made him want to curl up or laugh and point. At least this one had plenty of proper songs as well. He and Calder waited sweating in the wings to provide one. Kowalsky playing Armand, creaky in a stiff uniform, beard oiled and moustache tapered, stood with one hand on his bemedalled chest and the other arm thrown out and sang:

I cannot do what you ask of me! It would be treason

to ESA and the Joint Chiefs, and nothing can make me break the oath

I swore in Paris when I took my office.

To which Alain Aruri, playing the Returner agitator Lawrence Hammond in labour-force fatigues and cropped hair, responded from the front of a massed chorus in beggars-banquet ragged finery:

It is the Runners who are traitors, not ourselves.

How does fleeing to the stars defend Paris, France, Europe, or Earth?

‘Where is Paris now? What lives in France? What walks on Earth and reaches beyond it even now?

Kowalsky’s arm pointed skyward to the proscenium’s planetarium hologram arch:

I’m glad you mentioned that! The war machines have already

taken Phobos and are only held back by constant and exhausting

batteries of laser fire! We’ll starve and die

under this power drain!

By fighting each other we only hurt ourselves, and aid the enemy.

Aruri sang back, furiously:

We shall return, we shall take Earth again!

Kowalsky turned on his heel and stalked off. That was their cue. Winter and Calder strutted out like militiamen on a rubble street with guitars instead of guns, and struck up ‘Great Old Ones’ with the massed chorus behind them:

Do you ever feel, in your caves of steel …

As he sang Winter twitched his cheek and tweaked the polarisation of his shades so that he could see the audience, out there in the evening dark of the park. Ben-Ami’s permit had come through just in time for the premiere. The stage itself was gigantic, a couple of hundred metres across, invested with floodlights, spotlights, and hologram projection devices that doubled as or could be mistaken for siege engines and laser cannon. Amplifiers made the air shake. The KE ship remained where it had been, overhead and a little to one side. The crowd was of at least a hundred thousand; many more throughout the city and beyond would be watching on screens or contacts. It was the biggest live audience Winter and Calder had ever performed to, in any of their lives. They’d always had a big following but it had always been dispersed: big in the asteroid belt, small in the venue. Tonight this was not their audience, but it made Winter shake a little to indulge the illusion that it was.

And from what he could see from here, it was not all Ben-Ami’s audience either. Already Winter could see here and there small circles of empty space where people had backed off from around tight, quiet knots of struggling bravoes; the glint of a dagger, the muzzle flash of a silenced automatic pistol betraying their favoured weapons for close-quarter fighting with no quarter asked or given. None of this meant there was a problem, or that Amelia Orr’s expectation of a riot was about to be fulfilled; no doubt most of the guys in these small savage exchanges affected some political affiliation, but to them Reformer and Returner meant team or gang colours, family honour, nothing more. None of the resurrected Returners, people whose real-life roles were being accurately or otherwise portrayed, were here; nor Amelia either. Winter had a good idea why, though he had not spoken to Amelia for some time. Their relationship had been good for the days and nights it had lasted, and he wasn’t sure where it currently stood; she’d just become absorbed in her intrigue with the Returners, and had disappeared without rancour or apology. Ben-Ami had assured him that this was nothing to worry about. There was, he’d decided, something a little alien about the very long-lived.

As one fight began, another ended. Black Sickle entopters swooped and picked up the pieces. Winter and Calder glanced at each other, grinned; thrashed and boomed the closing line:

‘We will COME BACK AND EAT YOUR BRAINS!!!!’

Darkness, spotlight, roar of applause. They bowed and walked off, carefully in the opposite direction to that taken by the chorus. Let them queue for their drinks in the twenty-minute interval before the third act. Winter and Calder had theirs set up with the actors and professionals. Kowalsky, Aruri, and Voigt, half a dozen others, clustered around a table in a backstage booth made of some smart fabric you could drape to shape and shake to harden. People dashed to and from the dressing-room, snatching drinks or smokes on the way back. The two musicians grabbed beers. Calder lit a cigarette.

‘It’s going well,’ said Winter.

Kowalsky frowned over a cocktail, tapped the table. ‘Don’t say that.’