Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

L

ucinda glared at Johnstone. He looked back at her incuriously, as if she was just another Carlyle grunt. She remembered to flip up her visor. His expression changed to a grin. He was younger than she remembered him. Perhaps her own face projected a like innocence.

‘Good to see you again,’ he said. ‘Can you ask your goons to stop pointing their guns at me? It’s making me nervous.’

For a moment she was inarticulate with the gall of the man.

‘No bloody thanks to you that I’m here!’

‘You were expecting to die,’ Johnstone pointed out, reasonably enough. He thumbed his chest. ‘I’m a resurrectee, too. My death was just as unpleasant as yours, no doubt. I remember as little of it as you do. So let’s cut the recriminations, shall we?’

‘I know why you stole the QTD,’ she accused.

‘Good,’ said Johnstone. He jerked his head back. ‘It’s in the lab in the hold, along with the rest of the research gear.’

‘What research gear?’

‘What we’ve been using to study the relic.’

She stared at him. ‘You have all the gear in the ship ? You don’t go into the relic?’

‘Oh, do get a clue, Carlyle. The Knights are subtle. They don’t barge in like looters.’

‘So what are they doing with you, Rapture-fucker?’

He looked eager to tell, then stopped as if he’d just remembered something. ‘I don’t have to tell you that.’ His cheeks twitched. ‘Geneva Convention.’

‘Want me tae work him over?’ one of the grunts asked.

Lucinda glared him down. ‘I do not.’ She returned her attention to Johnstone. ‘That only gets you off so much. You still owe us billions. We’ll get it out of your hide one way or the other.’

Johnstone laughed, showing better teeth than he’d had in a past life. ‘Owe youse? Wait till you see what I’ve saved you, and you’ll call it quits.’

She took a step forward. ‘Don’t fucking fence with me.’

Her helmet pinged: Higgins had patched her through. The situation on the ground and in the sky was unchanged. Still no attack from the war machines. She kept the icon up in a corner of her eye.

‘All right, all right,’ Johnstone was saying. ‘You wanted to buy one of these fancy new DK ships, right? Well, the one I rode in on—under, actually, in the Extacy —seems to have got off all right, but the ones that were in the system for some time have got buggered up something rotten. I don’t know what kind of addled eggs they laid out in the asteroid belt, but they sure aren’t hatching out habitats. And the commie crews have been sending out discreet distress calls to the farmers. Most of them have abandoned their ships and been rescued in AO flying boxes. Big loss of face, so it’s got to be serious. Just be glad you weren’t trying some flashy fittling in one.’

She ignored the jab. ‘Any idea what the problem was?’

Johnstone shrugged. ‘We got hit by an unidentified virus shortly after arriving in the system. Firewalls knocked it right back, of course, and even the AO ships laughed it off, but the commies seem to have got infected. Must have bought cruddy vulnerable tech from some kind of cowboys and incautiously reverse engineered it into their new drives.’ He chuckled. ‘Self-reliance, my arse.’

Lucinda rolled her eyes and gazed up at the laquered ceiling. ‘Fuck,’ she said.

Her helmet pinged again. ‘We got a situation,’ Higgins said calmly. ‘Maybe you should take a look.’

‘Keep him here, boys,’ Lucinda told the grunts, then turned and ran back the way she’d come, leapt over the hatch and sprinted on down another corridor and around a corner to the control deck. She pushed through a delicate array of tall fronds and stepped up to where Higgins stood leaning over the command table. A small corner of the display was comprehensible to Lucinda. It was the interface Higgins had cobbled together for the existing comms link. Higgins was gazing at the centre of the table, into depths where colour-coded sigils and symbols moved like ornamental fish. Lucinda looked up from them, baffled.

‘What’s going on?’

‘The good news is we’ve got the two starships out of each other’s sights,’ said Higgins. ‘They won’t be attacking each other. And the war machines aren’t attacking us, in fact they seem to be retreating. They’ve landed on the hilltops around us and they’re scuttling away through the gates.’

Lucinda beat her fist on the table. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

‘What?’

‘They’re not running away!’ she shouted. ‘They’re taking control of the skein!’

She could just imagine them, boiling out of gates all across Carlyle’s Drift, brushing aside the lightly armed customs enforcers and fending off or attacking the locals, finding new nodes and surging on.

‘Oh,’ said Higgins. She seemed as overwhelmed as Lucinda felt.

‘What’s the bad news?’

Higgins pointed at the display. ‘That huge thing that passed overhead—it’s coming around again, and it’s coming down . Here. Right on top of us. In about ten minutes, I reckon. We have to get everybody off.’

Lucinda squeezed her eyes shut. ‘No,’ she said. ‘First we have to close the gates. Do what the Knights did—put a tac nuke through each of them.’

‘I don’t have that level of skill,’ said Higgins.

‘Then call up Armand’s lot, tell them to fire their high-energy guns at the gates.’

Kevin broke into the circuit. ‘Countermand that,’ he said. ‘We don’t have time, and we need all the firepower we have. Higgins—can you lift the ship, and at least fire a nuke if the target’s big enough?’

‘Sure,’ said Higgins.

‘Then go for it,’ said Kevin. ‘Try to bring down or break up that flying mountain before it comes over our horizon. We can get everybody into the Knights’ accomodation blocks and ride out the shockwave.’

It was feasible, Lucinda knew—a KE encampment was proof against anything but an on-target nuke, or an asteroid landing on the roofs. They might survive it. And if not, it was better than waiting.

‘Everybody on to the ship,’ she told the squad. When they had all checked in she waved to Higgins. ‘Close the hatch and lift.’

The ship lifted with a frightening noise and violent jolt as it pulled itself clear of the packed earth. Then it shot up in the air. To Lucinda’s horror, she could feel some of the acceleration, like in a fast lift. She found a fixed seat and sat down, clutching the armrests, as the ship tipped and swayed. Crashing and slithering sounds came from all around her.

‘What the fuck!’

Higgins’s hands danced across the command table. ‘Controls are a bit unresponsive. The field’s fluctuating. It’s all the damage from the bolt, that’s how it came down in the first place. Kind of thrown off balance.’

‘Can you call up something that lets me see what’s going on?’

Higgins muttered something about ‘idiot board’ but spared a moment to project a vertical screen from the table, in which what Lucinda hoped was a forward view appeared. Leaning carefully out of the chair, she examined it. It was quite a convincing fake full-colour daylight picture of the scene, thrown together from input from the ship’s instruments. The sort of hand-hold she could imagine the ship’s real pilot disdaining even more than Higgins did. The ground was dropping below them and falling behind them, the horizon widening by the second. Already they were on the edge of the atmosphere, at about thirty thousand metres. Low above the horizon was a small bright dot, becoming higher and larger as she watched. The picture had no vernier or grid-lines, but a mental calculation was all she needed to show her the scale and speed of the thing. It had to be at least a kilometre long and travelling at several times the speed of sound.