Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Yes,’ said Kevin testily. ‘I’m trying to ping them both so they don’t shoot each other down.’

Lucinda froze for a moment, paralysed by the magnitude of that potential disaster. The thought struck her that she was cursed, and had been from the moment she had stepped inside the relic. She shook off the superstitious notion and followed Kevin’s order, with a backward sense of relief that at least her moment of doubt and silence had spared him any further distraction from her.

The head-up in her helmet that Kevin had provided was a standard self-updating chart of who was on the team and what their role and current vital status was. Most of the entries had gone dark. Macauley’s gun crew still had their names in lights, forming a hillock of hierarchy in the otherwise almost flat management structure of the squad. She paged the others en bloc and began to be joined by them one by one as she ran towards the crashed KE ship. The heads of the Knights she’d shot down were already being harvested by the Black Sickle. She doubted they’d be grateful, but she felt glad to see it herself. The ground was buckled and ripped by the ship’s ploughing into it, hundreds of tons of earth displaced in all directions. The downed ship’s engine must still be working, she realised, otherwise the gigantic vessel would be fallen flat instead of still sticking out, wedged into the slope like a slate in shale, at an angle of thirty degrees to the hill and fifteen to the horizontal.

‘If we had a pilot,’ she muttered, half to herself, ‘we could move this mother… .’

Higgins, running about ten metres behind her, broke in. ‘I can fly a starship.’

‘You? How?’

‘Skill I downloaded accidentally once.’

‘Then why the hell didn’t you use it to earn some money ?’

Higgins giggled. ‘Would you trust a Rapture-fucker with a starship?’

‘Looks like I’m gonnae.’

The hatch from which the fleeing Knights had emerged was right in the groin of the overhang. Lucinda stopped under it and checked the remainder of the gang. Twenty-nine of them, all present and correct. She flashed Kevin a message of her intentions.

‘You and Higgins do it,’ he told her. ‘Leave the rest on guard for now. If you can lift the ship, sure, pick everybody up.’

She grabbed the edge of the hatch, chinned herself up, swung aboard. The usual disorienting sensation as she moved from the planet’s gravity to the ship’s. Higgins replicated the manoeuvre one-handed. They stood up and looked around. Lucinda hadn’t been in a Knights’ ship before, but she’d been in KE-built ones, and the interior was familiar except that there were more trees. The damage done by the bolt wasn’t evident here. Her head-up lit with a couple more names, the squad members who’d gone inside the ship. She pinged them. They had about ten dead Knights on their hands and one prisoner, not a Knight.

‘I’ll join you,’ Lucinda told them. She turned to Higgins. ‘Know your way to the control deck?’

‘Down there and to the left.’

‘OK. Before you do anything else, open a comms link to the grunts on the ground and patch me through.’

Higgins nodded and ran off. Lucinda leaned out of the hatch, told her troops to send a Black Sickle tech into the ship as soon as possible, then swung back with another insult to her inner ear and set off along a corridor defined by lines of bonsai and broken algae tanks in which fish flopped, still dying. Human corpses and body parts lay among the splintered glass. She stepped over or past them carefully, alert to the possibility that they might not all be dead, but she reached the two squad members without mishap. They were sitting in a grass-paved social arena, a lounge or something like that, with their weapons pointed at a man who sat in the centre, hands on his head. He wore black clothing but he was indeed no Knight. He was Johnstone.

C

yrus Lamont clung in the webbing like a frightened child on a roller coaster. About a tenth of the asteroid’s mass, and almost half its bulk, had been removed by the deployment of the war machines or by ablation in the atmosphere. The spindly residue, with the ship stuck to the front end, was still red-hot as it hurtled over the ocean.

‘I appear to be alone,’ said the Hungry Dragon . ‘The intrusion is in stored rather than active mode. I have acquired a connection to the new drive within the asteroid.’

‘Can you control it?’

‘I believe so,’ said the ship, with uncharacteristic hesitancy. ‘I would not wish to attempt a faster-than-light jump at this stage.’

‘I’m relieved to hear that,’ snarled Lamont. ‘Faster than sound seems quite enough to handle. Could you possibly slow our speed to a point where we are not actually burning up in the atmosphere?’

The ship disdained to reply. There was no sense of deceleration, but quite abruptly the ocean and cloud-banks below stopped flashing past and assumed a more stately progression. Slowly the glow in the air around and the rock behind faded.

‘Mach 5,’ announced the ship, in a satisfied tone.

‘Good for you,’ said Lamont. ‘Do you have any capacity to, perhaps, steer?’

‘I am reluctant to attempt it,’ said the ship. ‘I would prefer to attempt a controlled landing.’

‘I think I could live with that,’ said Lamont.

‘Ah,’ said the ship, sounding imposed upon. ‘You require a landing that is not just controlled but survivable.’

‘Ideally,’ sighed Lamont.

‘Very well,’ said the ship. ‘I shall now adjust the altitude.’ After a few minutes it added, as if to itself: ‘Now let us see whether moving this the other way reduces the altitude… .’

T

hey were not going to die. It was, Ben-Ami wryly reflected, probably the absence of a searing shockwave and rain of impact ejecta that had given the crowd the first glimmering of this conviction. They had restrained their panic; they did not restrain their relief. There was a lot of sobbing and clinging and wild laughter going on out there. A lot of cheering and applause too, enough to make the performance inaudible without earphones to anyone in the audience. Ben-Ami seriously doubted that his play’s most rhetorically and artistically dodgy section—its attempt, by means of some fanciful virtual reality dream sequences and offline debates, to make the colony’s flight into a triumph—deserved anything like this approbation. But the reprieve from what had seemed inevitable catastrophe made the final act of Rebels and Returners an experience that would for all those watching it be forever associated with joy and life. For every critic but himself it would go down as one of his triumphs.

Andrea Al-Khayed clutched his arm and sighed, watching Gwyneth Voigt showered with bouquets and taking bows.

‘How are we still alive?’

‘God knows,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘Perhaps that thing just skimmed the atmosphere. Or maybe the Knights’ ship was able to, ah, deflect it.’

Al-Khayed shook her head, still watching the singer. ‘Your grasp of physics is as charmingly intuitive as ever, Ben.’

He waved a hand. ‘Whatever.’ He kissed her suddenly, surprising her. ‘Come on. It’s time for us to take our bows.’

‘Not me,’ said Al-Khayed.

‘I insist.’

Together they walked to the front of the cast and led them once more on to the stage. The applause hit them like a shockwave. Then, as though the applause itself was withdrawing like surf on a beach, all the crowd breathed in at once and fell silent. Ben-Ami squinted out into the darkness and, with an impatient gesture, cut the lights. High in the sky the bright object had returned. It had travelled right around the planet, Ben-Ami realised. It was no longer glowing, and it appeared to be smaller, or else actually higher in the sky than before, outside the planet’s shadow-cone, lit by the sun that had already set over New Start. It surface had become faceted, and for a moment that was how Ben-Ami saw it, foreshortened and glittering, like a knuckled fist of gems.