Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Closing to range,’ said Higgins. The ship lurched forward; everyone was thrown back.

‘Locking on target,’ Higgins reported. Her hand moved, poised to strike.

The object vanished.

‘Did you see that?’ yelled Higgins.

‘Where’s it gone?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Higgins, tapping the board. ‘I do know I saw a Cherenkov flash. It fittled.’

‘That thing’s a starship ?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Higgins. ‘Wait, wait … oh, look at that.’ She sounded awestruck.

‘What?’

Higgins straightened up, turned away from the board. The view on the screen flipped. ‘Looking behind us,’ said Higgins. She zoomed the view, centred it on the relic. Another kilometre-tall spike, rougher but just as large, now loomed beside it.

‘It didn’t crash,’ said Higgins. ‘It landed. It fucking landed .’

C

yrus Lamont hung in the webbing and wept. Partly it was with relief at his survival. It had more to do with a sense of loss and a sort of agoraphobia. He knew he could have chosen to ask the ship to return to space after its fatal lading had left it and it had taken control of the new engine. Instead he had chosen to land in the midst of what fighting there had been, out of a desire to do right and to undo, if possible, the damage of which he and the ship had been the instruments. That did not make the thought of losing the ship’s continuous company, and of reacquainting himself with humanity, any less daunting.

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked the ship.

‘Try to raise whoever’s out there.’

‘Our aerials were severely degraded in the entry,’ said the ship. ‘We have no external communications. Repairing them will take me some time.’

‘I could sit here and wait,’ Lamont said. ‘Somebody is bound to investigate.’

‘Eventually,’ said the ship. ‘For the present, the people around the base of the asteroid and of the relic are being deterred by the presence of numerous war machines.’

‘Are they indeed?’ said Lamont. ‘In that case, I had better leave.’

He shifted convulsively and tumbled a couple of metres into another part of the mesh.

‘Your reflexes have not yet readjusted to gravity,’ pointed out the ship. ‘I would not recommend your attempting a thousand-metre descent.’

Lamont rolled, bounced, and grabbed a length of elastic rope. ‘I’m learning. See?’

‘You may be attacked by the war machines, or by the humans. Both are on hair-trigger.’

‘Better that than waiting.’

‘You can survive here indefinitely.’

Lamont scratched an eyelid. ‘That was the worry, yes.’

‘I shall miss you,’ said the ship.

‘And I’ll miss you,’ said Lamont. ‘I expect to be in touch with you very shortly. Once I’ve abseiled down and made contact with whoever is in control here.’

‘For me, that is a long time,’ said the Hungry Dragon .

Lamont eyed the exit hatch. ‘You have much to think about,’ he said.

‘That is true,’ said the ship. ‘I have much data to integrate.’

‘Good,’ Lamont, scrambling upside-down, downwards through the mesh, blood queueing for his head. ‘Now spin me a rope.’

Higgins brought the ship down where it had originally been, in convenient location for the camp. The vegetation beneath where it had been parked for the past weeks formed a distinct pale square. Some automatic mechanism stopped the ship’s descent where it could remain horizontal a metre or two above the uneven ground, its lower corners perfectly level with each other, as though on an invisible plane. The whole manoeuvre looked, Higgins said, cleverer than it was.

For a few minutes after landing they looked at the scene outside. The virtual daylight of the ship’s visual display gave a much clearer picture than their night-vision could provide, and from a good vantage. People were emerging from the diamond-shelled camp buildings and staring at or focusing instruments on the grounded asteroid. Their view of it was partially obscured by the relic, but the bases of the two gigantic objects appeared to be about half a kilometre apart. The asteroid speared up into the night, its surface pitted with curiously smooth and regular cavities as well as by the fused remnants of its natural bricolage. Long veins or strands snaked and branched down from its summit, at which a relatively tiny structure, perhaps a hundred metres high, was perched like a cairn on a mountaintop.

‘Zoom on that,’ said Lucinda.

‘It’s a ship,’ said Higgins, as the view expanded. It was sticking up from the confluence, or source, of the veinings like a tree-trunk from its roots. Scorched, stubbled with broken aerials, it looked like a wreck.

‘Well, somebody must have flown it,’ said Lucinda. ‘There must be a pilot.’

‘That or some smart machinery,’ said Higgins. ‘My money’s on that.’

‘Speaking of machinery,’ said Lucinda.

Higgins expanded the view again. Several species of war machines were visible, lurking around the bases of the relic and the asteroid and in the middle distance, and in the air maintaining midge-like holding-patterns around them. They were neither attacking nor being attacked; the situation seemed to be a standoff. The hundreds of people on the ground had stopped milling about and had begun to organise: sullen clumps of the defeated Knights, tidy platoons of Eurydicean troops, scattered bands of the Carlyle fighters. As they watched, a man detached himself from the nearest such band and walked towards the ship. He took off his helmet and waved, beckoning. It was Kevin, looking more cheerful than Lucinda had expected.

‘Oh, well done!’ he said, as Lucinda and Higgins descended the ramp from the ship.

‘We didn’t do much,’ said Higgins, glancing up at the monstrous addition to the landscape.

‘You tried,’ said Kevin. ‘You took the ship up and you locked on to that thing. That’s as clever and brave as you had to be. Probably just as well you didn’t shoot it down, anyway.’

‘Is it still a threat?’ Lucinda asked.

Kevin shrugged. ‘We’ve been scanning it. There are war machines around the base of it, just like around the relic.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘We’ll consider taking them on later, when we’ve got ourselves sorted out. Right now, they just seem to be guarding the thing. There aren’t any more war machines on it. That’s definitely a Eurydicean ship stuck to the top of it.’

‘A Eurydicean ship? With a starship engine?’

‘That’s no weirder than a Eurydicean ship turning an asteroid into a fucking nest of war machines.’

‘Corrupted its fabricators,’ Higgins diagnosed confidently. ‘Same thing’s been done to the DK habitat-builders, that’s my guess.’

‘What’s that?’ Kevin asked.

They relayed what Johnstone had told them.

‘Sam Yamata didn’t tell us anything about any of this,’ Kevin said. ‘Shit.’

‘Who’s Sam Yamata?’

‘Leader of the Knights here. Christ, I could wring the little fucker’s scrawny neck.’

‘You couldn’t,’ said Lucinda. ‘Martial arts.’

‘Ha, ha,’ said Kevin. ‘If we’re up against starships controlled by a virus from the relic, to say nothing of yet more nests of war machines that could just fittle in any time like that fucking rock did, we’re in deeper shit than we knew.’

‘Aye, deep enough,’ said Lucinda bitterly. ‘Only the biggest disaster since the Hard Rapture. Leave aside whatever rampage the war machines are daein.’ She jabbed a finger towards the relic. ‘That thing created the skein, and now it controls it. Not us, no the Knights and for sure not Armand. Speaking of which, we don’t have enough forces on the ground to even hold the site nominally. Fuck.’ She glared around. ‘I rue the day I ever found this place. Everything I touch turns to shit.’