Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Ben-Ami looked hard at the strange small man, fascinated and appalled.

‘How many of these son of bitch bastards are there, do you reckon?’ Calder asked.

‘Only hundred million,’ said Ree. ‘I will kill every last one of them even if I have to die like Leonid.’

‘No,’ said Amelia firmly. ‘You will not. That’s revenge, not recompense. What you want to do is damage them, yes, kill some, yes, but gain something from it yourselves. You should think of it as collecting on a debt.’

‘Debt collection is not war,’ said Ree. ‘Is well-understood in DK.’ He gave Amelia a very ambiguous stare. ‘As we know from previous dealings with Carlyles. But conflict and debt collection would not only be with Man Conquers Space. They would not do this on their own. We suspect they are backed by the wicked Chinks.’

‘Who?’ yelped Calder.

‘Knights of Enlightenment, so-called,’ said Ree. ‘To disincentive self-reliant people from getting involved further in terraforming for Yank farmers. So we may need help from bloody Carlyles.’ He looked beseechingly at Amelia. ‘Would this be problem for you?’

‘Not for me, it wouldn’t,’ said Amelia cautiously. ‘I wouldnae object if you were tae raise a few fighters. Gie the Knights a wee payback.’

Ree shook Amelia’s hand. ‘Is done, is deal?’

‘Uh, yes,’ she said. ‘Inasmuch as it’s up to me. But … we have another deal to fulfil first. Maybe.’

‘Is no hurry,’ said Ree. ‘We build our forces. Gain experience.’

‘Ah,’ said Amelia. ‘Would you like to gain some experience fighting the wicked—the Knights, on, ah, some other planet?’

‘I would indeed.’

‘Amelia sucked in her lips. ‘Could you use your untraceable comms right now, to ask them to come here? Discreetly? I would like to meet them. Quite urgently.’

Ree nodded, turned away and spoke as though to himself in a language Ben-Ami didn’t know, then turned back and smiled with a thumbs-up.

‘Wait a minute,’ Ben-Ami said, leaning forward. ‘The Joint Chiefs would be most upset if Returners and Carlyles and God help us, commies were involved in an attack on the Knights.’

‘You’ve always known about this,’ said Amelia. ‘We talked about it.’

‘Not in a way I had to take seriously,’ said Ben-Ami.’ And not in a context where … all these other forces are involved. If the Joint Chiefs were to find out about this conversation, the consequences could be severe.’

He looked solemnly around all the faces at the table, then laughed.

‘So let us ensure that they don’t,’ he said.

L

amont sat on a bench, his legs stretched out, at the skyport concourse beside Morag Higgins as they waited for the Returner fighters to emerge from the changing rooms. Outside, on the field, the hypersonic transports of Blue Water Landings, like all the other vehicles in the parking apron, were dwarfed by two KE-built starships suspended on nothing a few metres above the landing strips. One of these ships was the Carlyles’. Other starships—AO trucks, DK batwings—hung in the sky like so many box or dragon kites. Around the perimeter of the skyport the usual bright-painted red and yellow emergency or auxiliary vehicles had been supplemented by darker, heavier military cars and tanks, bristling with cosmic-string projector guns. Nothing was going to land or take off from New Start without the Joint Chiefs’ approval, and all air and space traffic was being directed here. Whatever Armand had hoped, the Eurydicean government was already moving to take control of the skies. Even the little entopters were being grounded one by one, ostensibly for safety as the city revelled. Anyone disembarking would have to use the monorails and shuttles. The thought made Lamont break into a cold sweat of agoraphobia, but he knew he could overcome it. The only arrangement that had been made—in a very guarded in-flight phone conversation—with Amelia was to meet up at some cafe on the edge of the central park, the Jardin des étoiles. Lamont guessed Amelia had some plan in mind—perhaps to bring another Carlyle starship down on a sharp vertical descent over the park to pick everybody up.

The Returners trickled out, dressed in the scanty or elaborate costumes of the day. Lawrence Hammond, who seemed to be the leader of the handful of Eurydiceans among them as well as of the recently resurrected, was the first to walk over, quite unself-conscious in high-heeled boots and a fringed white leather suit set here and there with small shiny stones. He looked down at Lamont.

‘You ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you not going to get changed?’ Higgins asked.

Lamont looked along the length of his body to his boots, then at her.

‘No.’

‘You’ll kind of stand out.’

Lamont snorted. ‘I’m a celebrity now. Nothing I can do about that. What about you?’

She was getting stared at more than him, not to his surprise. Her metal features, though they looked like painted flesh, were in stark contrast to her black cotton suit.

‘I have an idea,’ she said.

She stood up and stripped off her tunic and trousers and threw them in the nearest drexler bin.

In her underwear she looked like she’d painted herself silver from head to foot.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Ready to party.’

They set off through a corridor to the monorail platform. The capsules that they boarded were empty apart from themselves, but as they swooped and soared between the towers and trees of New Start and stopped at other platforms they soon filled up. Lamont clung to a stanchion, sweating in his suit, breathing slowly. He kept his eyes closed, or looked outside. The city had changed in his absence; as he might have expected, it was the most massive and ancient-looking buildings, the ones built of stone and concrete, that were new and strange to him. The nanofactured, quasi-organic tree-like structures of towers and walkways, that could in principle be reconfigured overnight or returned to the ground, were all familiar; the city’s old growth.

T

he wildest party in the history of Eurydice was what had been promised, and that was what was delivered. Every light was on, every speaker was loud, every glass was full, every couple were in love for as long as it lasted. Winter wasn’t entirely sure if he and Lucinda were among them. She’d explained to him that a bunch of Returners were on their way, with some kind of plan or instructions from Armand about getting a starship in, and after a bit more conversation she’d traipsed off to the park to talk to the gang who’d arrived with her and to liase with—as far as he could see, over many heads—a steadily increasing number of what looked like DK types, if their fancily cut but drably coloured outfits were anything to go by.

Winter found a guitar in the back of the cafe, and he and Calder sat on the cafe’s pavement-edge railing, legs dangling, sweat falling, and sang and played all they could remember to anyone who cared to listen. At some point towards the dusk, Winter looked down and saw Lucinda at the table beneath his feet, talking to Ree and to Ben-Ami, who hadn’t shifted all afternoon, letting people come and go, and shouting his approbation or otherwise at the musicians.

‘Oh you daft scunner,’ Lucinda was telling Ben-Ami. ‘Of all the folks you could hae picked tae be a doomed romantic hero, it had tae be bloody boring Brezhnev.’

Ben-Ami shrugged. ‘Artistic licence, my dear.’

‘And you,’ she went on, turning to Ree, ‘you poor daft buggers, you had tae dae the same! Oh it ashames me! With all the worthless heroes of history to choose from. You could have had Mao, did you but know it. Or Guevara. Or Bonny Prince Charlie. Or even—’

She reached up for Calder’s guitar. ‘Give me that.’