Lucinda snatched her hand away as if burned from the comms link Higgins had made in the command table. Sam Yamata glared at her. His face flushed then as quickly paled. She could hear his breath. In. Out. In.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘There is no danger. Whatever has intruded cannot upgrade our ship’s software. But still. We now have’—he paused, paging the display too fast for her to follow—‘an agent program of Lamont’s ship on our side of the firewalls. It is active. Very active.’
Lucinda’s knees shook. Yamata had okayed the transaction, but she felt again responsible. She was still kicking herself when she saw Yamata suddenly straighten up and listen intently to a message in his personal comms. Her own chimed a moment later and she heard Amelia Orr shouting: ‘Lift! Lift!’
In the external visual display, still up on the end of the command table, she saw the two other ships—the Knights’ and the one Amelia had swapped crews into—vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving a wrack of disturbed low cloud.
Yamata reached for the control menu of the command table. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
Armand and Lucinda were barely in their seats when the ship lurched upwards. They were pressed down, then released so that they almost rose out, then were slammed back again. Yamata was more skillful than Higgins had been at compensating for the ship’s damaged controls, but the ride was rough. In the small view of the lab, still up on the table, she could see the three Rapture-fuckers braced under the table at which they’d worked, Lamont’s long arms holding the other two and a stanchion at the same time.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Lamont demanded.
‘Emergency lift,’ Lucinda said. ‘Apart from that I don’t know.’ The obvious thought struck her. ‘Has this something to do with what your ship did?’
‘No,’ replied Lamont. ‘It succeeded. It cracked into the relic’s control over the war machines. You can call your commander and check.’
Lucinda did just that while watching the visual display. It was already showing the blue curve of the planet below, black above. Kevin’s voice came through: ‘Aye, they’re standing down. But forget about that. The corrupted DK ships are attacking.’
So that was why they’d taken off so fast. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Good luck down there.’
‘We’re heading for the shelters,’ said Kevin, and signed off.
She relayed the information in an undertone to Armand. He frowned, staring at the visual diplay, now all black and blank but for a fleeting glimpse of Orpheus.
‘Fucking useless,’ he muttered.
Yamata was talking quietly, switching seamlessly from Japanese to American as he spoke to the other KE pilot and to somebody called Nardini, the guy flying the Carlyles’ ship. He shot Armand an impatient glance and stabbed a spot or two on the board with his finger. The visual display changed to a schematic. It showed the situation on several scales, from system-wide to local, with tags. Lucinda immediately grasped how it was put together. If the Knights had followed standard practice they’d have sown the system with transceiver sondes on all wavelengths and modes of communication, enabling the ship to build up a picture from radio and FTL comms, gravity-wave detection, reports and, she guessed, wild surmise. There were four ships marked as enemy, three—including their own—tagged as friendly, and named. The ship she was on was the Subtle Conceit, the other KE one the Small Arrangement of Chrysanthemums; and whatever the now Carlyle-piloted ship had been called originally, it was now hailing as the Stanley Blade. The clutter of AO vessels and uncorrupted DK ones were not in the fight, except as targets: the former location of two DK ships and one AO were shown as fading glows. The remainder were taking fast evasive action—a rapid-fire Cherenkov flicker and, moments later like thunder after a lightning-flash, a rumble of gravity-wave disturbances, showed them fleeing the system as fast as they could fittle.
‘Cowards,’ muttered Armand.
‘No,’ said Lucinda. ‘They’re helping us—clearing the board. Cuts down on chronology tangles, too.’
She watched intently as the Stanley Blade and the Small Arrangement raced to the points that triangulated Eurydice’s gravity well. The enemy ships, millions of klicks away, had formed the corner of a vastly larger enclosing square. Both sides were following well-grounded tactical moves for a starship battle. What came next would be a game of bluff and chance, which could last for hours or be over in seconds. The decisions were up to the pilots, the execution to the computers. But the enemy ships were being flown by their computers, or rather by the combative virus that had infested them. Whether this gave her side an advantage she would soon discover. That was the only outcome she would know in this life; if the opposite was the case, she would be dead.
One of the DK ships blinked away in an FTL jump. In instant response the two other KE-built ships darted away from the planet, while the Subtle Conceit dived towards it, deep into the gravity well. The manoeuvre took five seconds. In less time than that the ship that had vanished reappeared, having fittled a mere two light-seconds. Close enough now to see where they were, but far out of missile or laser range. Lucinda had seen this short-hop FTL capability before; Yamata had not, but he showed no surprise. He tapped a finger; a scatter of nuclear proximity mines were expelled from the ship; and then the Subtle Conceit once again moved fast, to one-tenth light-speed in two seconds. This time, those on board felt no fraction of the ferocious acceleration: Yamata had mastered that problem. The enemy ship fittled again, to reappear close to where they had been. The proximity mines detonated. The enemy ship’s drive exploded. A portion of the screen whitened for a moment.
Yamata allowed himself a small grunt of satisfaction. Armand and Lucinda whooped and punched the air.
The other two friendly ships, having diverged, were again converging. Another of the enemy ships fittled. The Stanley Blade’s and the Small Arrangement’s trajectories instantly halted. The enemy appeared, as it seemed on this scale, right beside them, and as rapidly was destroyed.
‘Ya beauty!’ yelled Lucinda.
‘What happened there?’ Armand asked.
‘Chronology Protection trap. It came out of the jump just too far away to hit them, and it couldnae fittle the remaining distance without going outside its own light-cone or back in time. They had a moment while it waited tae catch up wi itself, fired off a nuke, and—’ She clapped her hands.
Both the remaining enemy ships fittled away at the same moment. One of them reappeared between the Small Arrangement and the Stanley Blade, and Lucinda saw something bigger than a nuclear explosion: the deliberate detonation of one stardrive, and the secondary detonation of two more. To anyone looking in that direction from the ground it would have appeared like a supernova. There was no time to respond to the shock. The one remaining enemy ship had not reappeared. It was Armand who guessed its location.
‘Behind Orpheus,’ he said. Yamata reached for the table.
‘Take your time,’ Armand said. ‘There’ll be nothing but debris.’
And so there was. The enemy ship had run straight into one of Eurydice’s own defences, a particle-beam battery on its moon. But as Yamata took them back towards the camp and the relic, Lucinda carried no great sense of triumph with her to the ground. And when she found that Amelia Orr had not been, as she had assumed, on the Stanley Blade, she ran straight to her arms and cried.
Lamont sat alone in the lab for a long time, talking to the Hungry Dragon, and to a greater mind whose name he did not know. Eventually he felt silver hair brush his face, a warm metal hand clasp his wrist. He looked up into depthless eyes of glass.
‘You can leave now,’ Morag Higgins said. She smiled. ‘We’ve landed.’
‘I know we’ve landed,’ said Lamont, ‘but—’
‘But nothing,’ she said. ‘Come on. People are waiting for an explanation.’
‘But there’s so much more to find out.’
‘You can leave now,’ said the Hungry Dragon. ‘You know enough to tell them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lamont said, standing up, staring at the screen.
‘You need not apologise,’ said the Hungry Dragon. ‘I have someone else to talk to. An equal mind. So have you. Go with her.’
Lamont flushed.
‘You needn’t apologise to me either,’ said Morag Higgins. She flicked her hair back. ‘I could tell from your pulse.’
‘Tell what?’ he said, feeling as if he was in the ship’s webbing, and flailing mentally.
‘Your’re the first normal man who has looked me as if I’m a normal woman.’
‘Oh,’ said Lamont, dismayed. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He looked away, let his nails dig into his palms, looked back. ‘I’m not a normal man.’
She frowned. ‘In what way?’
‘I’ve been alone with my ship for five years. I’ve become eccentric, almost autistic, and perverted.’
‘Perverted?’
‘Well, you know. I’ve . . . been having sex with the ship. It . . . sent me incubi. From among its avatars.’
‘Oh,’ said Higgins. ‘And what were they like, these avatars?’
Lamont described curves with his hands.
‘You mean, like, beautiful women?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. I see. That’s different, of course.’
‘Different?’
‘Different from me. I’m not beautiful.’
He was shocked. ‘You are beautiful, don’t say that!’
‘You really think so?’ she asked. He could tell from her intonation that she was no longer teasing.
‘Of course.’
‘So. I’m a beautiful woman, and I’m a machine. I don’t see the problem.’
He could see it from her point of view when he thought about it. ‘Neither do I.’
‘Show me,’ she said.
It was Johnstone who came looking for them, but he gave them time.
Most of the survivors of the various encounters of the past thirteen or so hours had gathered in one of the Knights’ dining-halls, a long buckysheet shed with sheet-diamond windows, interior wall surfaces like blond wood, and a score or so of low, long black tables. It was not crowded. From the door Lucinda reckoned there were about a couple of hundred people here. They had divided, more or less, along party lines: Knights, Eurydiceans—regulars and Returners in a single bloc—and Carlyle gang. Morag Higgins and Camplbell Johnstone sat together, near the front, a little apart from everyone else. Lucinda sat down among the Carlyle soldiers beside Kevin and Amelia. The ebon lacquer of the table couldn’t be scratched with a thumbnail. It couldn’t be scratched, she discovered in a moment of vicious idleness, with a diamond blade. The news she’d heard in the last hour or so was, on the whole, good. The war machines in the skein had stopped attacking outside its gates. They still patrolled its corridors and concentrated at its nodes, but they let people pass. This did not smell like victory.
The Knights had called it a conference. Yamata and Armand sat at a table up at the front, facing the room, conferring quietly. Rumours had flown, and Lucinda hadn’t caught any. The Knights looked insufferably smug, the Eurydiceans excited, the Carlyle gang glum. At length Lamont arrived, walked briskly to the front table and sat down between the other two. At a word from Yamata he stood up. He patched his comms to everyone else’s; there was no need. But the audience was wider than those present: news-gathering motes hovered in the air or perched on the tables, relaying the news to the rest of Eurydice, and thence—pending propagation delay and chronology disentanglement—to the rest of humanity.
‘Um,’ Lamont said. He scratched his appalling beard. He introduced himself, for the benefit of the majority who didn’t know who he was. Lucinda found herself, like others around her, shifting on the bench.
‘What has happened,’ Lamont said, coming to the point at last, ‘is quite simple.’ He stopped and stared at the ceiling. ‘In a manner of speaking. What we have referred to as the relic is indeed the ship that took us or our ancestors to Eurydice. Its function was to create and put in place machinery for downloading and incorporating its passengers, and provide them with accomodation and tools and so forth. Before doing that it modified the entire biosphere of Eurydice, creating multicellular organisms from the native bacteria. It did more. What the outsiders refer to as the skein is a wormhole network which it generated.’
He hesitated, as though wishing to spare them bad news, or avoid inciting their incredulity. ‘This network even now continues to propagate. Already it encompasses most of the galaxy. Eventually it may extend to others.’
Lucinda felt the same falling sensation that she’d had on the ship. She had a vivid mental image of the relic’s diamond spike like an ice pick striking the great black bowl of the sky, turning it crazed with cracks, milky with flaws. The cracks might propagate outwards forever. If so, there would be no more untouched nature: wherever humans went, their work—or that of their creation—would be already there before them. The whole face of God, or Nature, changed irrevocably by the work of Man! And to think that they had called the skein ‘Carlyle’s Drift’!
‘Then,’ Lamont continued, ‘the colony ship’s mind upgraded itself to the same condition as the previous wave of posthuman intelligences, those we call the Raptured, and went away, to—wherever they have gone. It left behind the source-code of its original self, and some autonomic defence mechanisms. Those we call the war machines. They were its immune system. When the Carlyle . . . gang’s intruders broke into it, these machines were activated, and a data-rich virus was transmitted that took over machinery that could build more of them. As it happens, the only such machinery it found in any suitable location was the fabrication system of my ship. This was used to build war machines, and to provide the asteroid with a stardrive. Later, it managed to likewise infect the DK ships.’ He shrugged. ‘You know the rest.’
‘No, we don’t!’ someone called out.
Lamont scratched his hair. He told them about how he and the Hungry Dragon had worked, alone in space, to isolate the intrusion, and how they had almost succeeded. His stern gaze fixed on Lucinda. ‘But before we could finish, yet more high-energy weapon discharges around the relic brought the reserves into action. The ones on my asteroid. They acted to protect the skein.’
The Carlyle fighters and Eurydiceans stirred angrily. Armand made a cut-off gesture.
‘That is what it was doing,’ he affirmed. ‘Our bad luck. Our good luck that Lamont and his ship gained control of the asteroid’s descent.’
Lamont went on. The Hungry Dragon had finally reasoned itself out of the control of the virus. It had then repeated the process to cut the relic’s control over the war machines, and to assume control over them itself. That had, however, left the infected DK ships as autonomous war machines in their own right. These had now been dealt with. All that remained were the war-machine nests they’d established on four asteroids that had been intended as raw material for DK space habitats.
‘These will not be a problem,’ he said. ‘They are now under control again.’
Lucinda could not contain herself. She jumped up. ‘You mean they’re now controlled by your fucking ship!’
Lamont shook his head, matted locks flying. ‘No, no!’ he said. ‘You don’t understand.’ His fingers rampaged through his beard. ‘I haven’t explained this yet. The war machines really are like an immune system, controlled by reflex. When that was compromised, a higher level of processing was awakened. That is what currently controls the skein and all the war machines.’ He blinked hard. ‘It’s . . . benign, and it’s . . . friendly towards the colony of Eurydice, which after all is its own work.’
‘How do you know it won’t go off on some Rapture of its own?’
Lamont shrugged and spread his hands. ‘This is not the original mind,’ he said. ‘This is like a ganglion, a subroutine. It’s powerful enough, a superhuman sentience, but it’s not ambitious. Or so the Hungry Dragon assures me.’ He glanced down at Armand. ‘It wants to speak to the Joint Chiefs,’ he added. Armand smiled and nodded.
Lucinda sat down shaken and dismayed, and turned to Kevin and Amelia. ‘We’ve lost the skein. It’s Eurydice’s now.’
Kevin shook his head. ‘No, surely not. We can fight war machines, for fuck sake!’
‘Not an endless supply of them, we can’t!’ Lucinda said. ‘And it isnae just a matter ae war machines anyway. If that muckle thing out there controls the skein itself, who’s to know what it could do? It could switch the gates away fae our planets. Reconfigure the whole skein, for that matter.’
Kevin frowned at her for a moment, nodded slowly, then stood up.
‘Come on,’ he said to the Carlyle fighters. ‘There’s nothing more for us here.’
He led them away from the tables, striding to the door without a backward glance. Their departure was noticed, but not remarked on or, as far as Lucinda could see, regretted except by Morag Higgins, who gazed after her. Lucinda beckoned to her, with a smile and a slight flexure of her fingers; Higgins’s silver lips compressed, and she turned her attention back to Lamont like all the rest. But Armand met Lucinda’s gaze with a sharp glance and a small nod.
Somebody called out:
‘What about Eurydice’s fossil record? What about the fossil war machines?’
Lucinda stopped, turned around. This question had been nagging her too.
‘I understand,’ Lamont said slowly, ‘that the ship was equipped with what are called Darwin-Gosse machines. They are capable of evolving an entire biosphere in virtual space, and creating the result. The ship’s own capabilities well exceeded that. It reshaped Eurydice’s lithosphere. It laid down new strata. It created the fossil record.’
Lucinda remembered what Johnstone had said in the Chernobyl caves, about worked rocks that looked like they’d formed naturally.
‘But why?’ she shouted, almost from the exit. ‘Why the hell should it do that?’
‘I have asked it that myself,’ Lamont said, ‘and it told me why it did it.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘For the panache!’
It was early afternoon. The clouds had cleared; the shadows of the spike and the space mountain were short, but still covered the camp. Ones and twos of Knights and Eurydiceans here and there stood watch. One reporter pursued Lucinda, but she waved her hand in front of her face and said nothing, and it flew back in to the conference. She jogged over to where the remaining Carlyle fighters were piling on to four of the company’s gravity sleds.
‘We arenae going tae ride these aw the way back tae New Start,’ Lucinda complained, as she caught up with the others.
Kevin gave her a look. ‘We are no,’ he agreed vehemently. “We’re going tae ride them up intae the hills a way and get picked up by one ae our ain starships that hae been lurking out-system. If you’d been paying attention, Amelia’s made the contact and set up the rendezvous.’
Lucinda glanced around the matériel-cluttered encampment as she clambered aboard a sled alongside Amelia and grabbed a handrail. ‘Why not land here?’
Amelia jerked her thumb at the Subtle Conceit. ‘Knights are just a wee bit touchy about bringing one ae our starships down here. Too much possibility for misunderstanding.’
Lucinda chuckled darkly. ‘OK.’
The sleds lifted and accelerated forward. The slipstream whipped her hair, snatched at her breath. They passed out of the great shadows, into the sunlight. It was exhilarating, and it lifted her spirits and diverted her attention from brooding on the catastrophe that had been brought upon the clan. That had been brought upon it by her. She thrust the thought away. The Carlyle ethos was causal, not moral; based on results, not intentions. But even in that unforgiving light she found it possible to think that what had happened wasn’t entirely her fault.
We’ll just have to get into an honest business, she thought. With the income from the skein gone, what could they do? Combat archaeology remained, but with Eurydiceans—or their friendly superintelligence—in control of the skein, and on better terms (as they now seemed) with the Knights, it would be more difficult. But, she thought, looking over the heads of the fighters on the sleds, the clan and the firm could deal with difficulties in its own way, and as it always had. They were still the bloody Carlyles.
And they still had a job to do here. She recalled Armand’s subtle nod.
‘Do you think General Jacques is still with us?’ she asked Amelia, loudly into her ear in rushing wind.
‘Still up for the Return?’ Amelia yelled back. ‘I’m no sae sure. No himself personally, anyway.’
‘But he’s promised his troops!’
‘Aye,’ said Amelia. ‘He has that. So we wait and see, aw right? That’s why we’re going back tae New Start.’
Within about half an hour the flotilla of sleds had crested the nearest ridge, a few hundred metres from a gate—still guarded by war machines, whose sensors pinged them as they passed—and all but the upper parts of the gigantic objects behind them had dropped out of sight. The sleds skimmed along at a few metres above the ground, along a blue-green glen shadowed by flitting clouds. It was a classic U-shaped valley, scoured out by glaciers that had perhaps never existed but in the imagination of a god with a sense of style. Lucinda scanned the sides of the glen, and saw with delight a little flock of small grazing animals, long-limbed and dark-haired, skipping among outcrops of rock and falls of scree. High above, some winged predator circled on an updraft, a black speck in the blue sky. Terraforming, even with Darwin-Gosse machines, was an unpredictable procedure, more a matter of evolution than creation; trial and error. Even this simple food chain, if that was what she was seeing, was itself a triumph.
Something else moved among the rocks. She glimpsed it only out of the corner of her eye, and when she turned it was gone. Her gaze swept the slope—there, something again—a human figure, so well-camouflaged it was as if the grass or shrub had shifted. It darted across the side of the glen, about halfway up, a little ahead of them and running in the direction opposite to theirs, and disappeared behind a rock.
She tapped the comms unit at her throat and pinged Kevin, in the leading sled. ‘Bandits on the slope at two o’clock,’ she said. ‘Time for a fast lift.’
‘Got ya.’
The sleds shot into vertical ascent, stopping seconds later at a couple of hundred metres above the hills that defined the glen. The vehicles didn’t have much in the way of instrumentation. Heads, Lucinda’s among them, peered cautiously over the sides. She wished she’d kept her suit. But the man was now much easier to see. He stood and waved his arms above his head.
Kevin sent out a cautious interrogatory and identifying ping. After a few moments he reported back.
‘He claims he’s alone, and he’s pleased to see us,’ he said, sounding surprised. ‘Says his name’s Ree, and he’s asking for you. Lucinda.’
It really was like a weight off her shoulders. A small weight compared to what remained, but a relief nonetheless. ‘Wow! He survived!’
‘Who is he?’
‘The wee commie biologist fae the statues. Can we pick him up?’
‘Is that safe?’ Kevin asked.
‘I think so.’
Lucinda elbowed her way to the front and asked the sled’s driver to take them down. Reluctantly, he complied. They drifted to the man’s level, and hung in the air ten metres away from him, keeping him covered. He was wearing his survival suit with the visor up, and he was grinning.
‘Hello again, Miss Carlyle Lucinda,’ he said.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ she said. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Through the gate, three days ago,’ he said.
‘Wasn’t it guarded?’
Ree put his fists on his hips. ‘Juche martial arts superior to those of decadent effete Knights,’ he said proudly. He mimed knocking heads together. ‘Left guards unconscious and ran to hills. Since then have been living self-reliantly and awaiting your heroic production brigade’s arrival. Most impressive battle, observed from safe distance. Also observed your departure.’
‘How did you know we would be coming this way?’
‘Lucky guess of optimal route out of artifact region, and very fast running.’ He held out a hand. ‘May I come with you?’
‘Uh, sure,’ said Lucinda. She gestured to the driver; he edged the sled towards the slope. ‘But why did you come here?’
‘To see great playwright Ben-Ami,’ Ree said. He caught a rail and vaulted deftly aboard. ‘I have much to tell him.’
They lifted off to join the other sleds, which were returning to a more sustainable altitude.
‘I meant—I thought you were escaping,’ Lucinda said, ‘from whoever wrecked the statues and burned the jungle and destroyed your settlement.’
Ree looked grim and grieved. ‘That too,’ he said. ‘They are connected.’