Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Oh, hell, break a leg.’

‘That’s better,’ said Ben-Ami, sweeping in with Al-Khayed on his elbow. The assistant smiled and winked at Calder.

‘You’re terrible ,’ she said.

‘That’s the intention,’ said Ben-Ami.

Winter was gazing fascinated at Voigt, whose costume looked as if it had blown against her and somehow snagged. She stood sniffing a blue tube and gazing intently to one side. She turned and looked straight at him. He thought she was staring back, and smiled with belated politeness and turned away a little, but she raised a hand.

‘Everything’s going wrong,’ she said.

People ignored her. Highly strung, the word went.

‘No, really,’ she said, her voice calm but carrying. ‘Everything’s going wrong. Get a newsfeed.’

‘A newsfeed ?’ said Winter. Even though he’d been expecting something to happen, it struck him as disjunct. Nothing happened in the real world during performances; you didn’t pay attention to the news. He noticed the coloured flicker on her eyes: contacts, tuned to a channel. A newsfeed. She meant it.

Winter fingered a card out of his shirt pocket, flipped it to palm-size, flat; clicked to news. Shoulders and elbows bumped him.

‘Hey, help yourselves.’ He shook it out to screen size, folded it slightly and stood it on the table.

The feed was grainy, pasted from pinhead cameras too small to resolve a good image individually; night-vision green with flaring flashes. The sight gave him a reminiscent shiver. Somebody even said it.

‘It’s just like—’

Somebody shut him up.

The relic, posthuman or prehuman, that Carlyle had disturbed and the Knights guarded was occasionally central in the view, glowing with dim but real light. Around it machines and armoured people moved, exchanging fire. A babble of voices, from the news channel and from around him, indicated confusion. There was no confusion on the scene. Every movement struck Winter as purposeful. The forces contending knew what they were doing. So did Winter.

He looked up, looked around at faces that had forgotten their surroundings. Some had a green pallor that didn’t come from the screen.

‘Eurydicean forces are contending with the Knights for control of the relic,’ Winter said.

It was the first clear explanation anyone had heard.

‘How do you know?’ asked Kowalsky.

Winter realised he shouldn’t know.

‘It’s obvious,’ he said, with a shrug.

Ben-Ami affected a wrist timepiece. He looked down at it and tapped it.

‘The show must go on,’ he said. A bell chimed.

Winter stared at him in disbelief. The actors and professionals were getting ready to go back on.

‘You’re kidding,’ Winter said.

‘No,’ said Ben-Ami. He jerked a thumb at the screen. ‘You think that is fighting? Interrupt this performance, and you’ll see fighting .’

Winter still couldn’t believe it. Calder looked at him and shrugged, drained his bottle and picked up his guitar. Winter followed suit. Together they walked to their place in the wings, ready to walk on for the first song about their own mutual hostility and separate, unrelated, pointless second deaths. Neither of them had any recollection of the Returner Rebellion—they’d both lost a few months’ worth of memories before, or in, their Black Sickle harvesting. Winter had a certain satisfaction in the thought that he’d died a Returner, and that his partner had at least had the courage of his Runner convictions, even if that particular detail had not gone down in history, or legend.

Kowalsky sang Jacques Armand’s loyal—or treacherous, depending on how you looked at it—warning to the Joint Chiefs. A chorus of them sang back and sprang into action. Behind a backdrop of scenes of welter, Voigt sang and danced an overflowing measure of feminist anger and feminine despair at the fratricide.

Outside, in the audience, the scuffles had stopped. Winter had the sense of hundreds of thousands of eyes turned to the stage, many of them looking at it past, or through, the fragmentary news of the real fight, the real rebellion, taking place in real time. But as the eyes watched Voigt dance and declaim, their attention did not waver.

A sound came from overhead, as if the sky was being ripped from one horizon to the other. Winter looked up, and saw a glowing object so huge he could not believe it was flying. It was like a mountain on a glide path, very high up in the northern sky. It moved too slowly to be a meteor, too fast to be an aircraft. It disappeared behind the horizon and the sound continued to roll down.

‘Asteroid,’ said Calder. ‘Incoming.’

The implication was too enormous for panic. Nobody so much as screamed. The KE ship above the park suddenly moved, displacing a great downward gust of air, and shot away in apparent pursuit of the vaster flying object. No lesser agency or action could affect whatever was to come. People who had stared upward turned again towards the stage.

Voigt danced on.

L

ucinda stared up at the thing climbing in the sky with a sense of the utter absurdity of life and death. If that was what she thought it was then there was a good chance that Eurydice was about to experience an extinction-level asteroid impact event. She grabbed Armand’s arm.

‘Call the starships!’ she said. ‘All of them! Get as many people off as possible!’

Armand, still gazing up, shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said.

At first it seemed that the gigantic bolide, now almost directly overhead, was breaking up in the atmosphere. Hundreds of smaller glowing sparks arced away from it, and its own glow faded a little. After a few seconds it became clear that the objects falling away from it were doing so in a definite pattern, a timed and successive release like an elaborate, enormous firework, and that their trajectories would take them down all around where she stood and in some cases directly on top of her. In a few more seconds their glow, too, faded to infrared and they became incoming specks, rapidly growing in her view. Some of them—scores of them—suddenly popped and dispersed into smaller specks that were too dim and small to see clearly even with her night-vision and zoom, but that—from the little she could glimpse—seemed to be gliding down, or even—to her utter disbelief—flying.

The diminished remains of the bolide itself finished crossing the sky and vanished behind the horizon before its offspring had fallen halfway to the ground. It couldn’t be an asteroid impacting, she was fairly sure of that: its trajectory was too high and steady for it to be anything but artificial and under some kind of control.

‘What the hell is that?’ she asked.

This time, it was Armand’s turn to grab an arm, and to look frightened.

‘It’s a war-machine deployment,’ he said. ‘Bigger than any I’ve ever seen, even back in the—’ He shook his head. ‘Call your commanders. I’ll get my people and the Knights. We have to fight this off together.’

He ran off, leaving her to raise Ian Carlyle’s callsign. It was Kevin who answered.

‘Ian’s dead,’ he said.

Amid all that was going on the shock made barely a ripple. ‘We’ll be fighting war machines any minute,’ Lucinda said. ‘They’re landing—’

‘I know that!’ shouted Kevin. Then, more calmly: ‘I’m trying to pull the troops together. Here’s the list.’ A message zapped in to her helmet. ‘I’ll find everybody who’s on Macaulay’s gun crew. You find the rest. Pull them into a bunch behind the starship wreck, or inside it if you can. Grab any abandoned weapons along the way. Hold out as long as you can. Amelia’s got us one starship, it’s coming in.’

‘ One? You know the Knights have a starship on the way?’