Crashing Heaven (31 page)

Chapter 44

Jack was lying on his back in hot, stifling darkness. A muffled mechanical snarling roared from somewhere above him. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. They were hemmed in by hard, rough surfaces. He tried to sit up, but bumped his forehead. The snarling noise came in short, rapid bursts, each one a little louder than the last.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Fist. Light leapt into being, dazzling Jack. ‘Oops!’ The light moved out of Jack’s eyes. Fist was holding a torch. They were squashed into a long, cramped, wooden box. There were gaps between some of the slats. Grey concrete had oozed through them and set hard. ‘It’s the best I could do, Jack.’ Fist was squashed into his chest. The noise started up again and he had to shout. ‘All this is virtual. We’re deep inside your mind.’

‘What’s the noise?’ Jack shouted back.

‘Drilling. Harry’s trying to break in.’

‘How long have we got?’

‘A few minutes. It’ll be enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘I’m sorry, Jack, I’ve got no choice.’

‘No choice but what, Fist?’

‘I have to do it. I’m not letting that cunt get his hands on my weapon systems.’

‘What are you talking about?’

The drilling noise was getting even louder.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Fist yelled. ‘It won’t hurt for long.’

He leant forward and clamped his little wooden hands over Jack’s nose and mouth. It took Jack a moment to realise what he was doing. He thrashed and flailed and tried to breathe, but the coffin was tight about him and Fist’s grip was firm. At last he had to give up.

Darkness shimmered and he could no longer feel the coffin’s wooden walls. He was hanging in infinite space. He thought of East’s cathedral. A great, soft rhythm surrounded him, the beating of mighty wings.

Then Jack died.

Chapter 45

The first thing that Jack felt was the cold. A bleak wind scythed through his wet clothes. There was a roaring sound. He remembered drills and a feeling that it was very important someone shouldn’t reach him. This noise was softer and more organic. He was lying on a yielding, frigid surface. The breeze gusted and a shiver shook him. Then something even colder splashed over and rolled around him, dragging him back to full consciousness. He opened his eyes.

Black sand stretched away. White foam danced up it, the sea’s softest touch. The beach seemed to carry on forever, curving away to left and to right. Water rushed back down it as the wave broke, then died back into the sea. Jack was soaked. He rolled over and sat up. Memories of the coffin’s hot closeness made the cold feel like a blessing. The grey sea stretched away to touch grey clouds at the horizon. Another wave rolled in. Jack scrambled to his feet, looking round for a little wooden body lying on the shore or bobbing in the waves. But there was no sign of Fist. The wind shook him again as he remembered an educational film he’d seen as a child, and realised where he was. ‘Fuck,’ he breathed. Fist had brought him to the outer edges of the Coffin Drives.

It took Jack a good ten minutes to reach the dunes that shadowed the beach’s edge. Every so often small gaps would open in the clouds. Bright beams of sunlight lanced through, some flickering briefly then disappearing, others burning softly on. He wondered if the clouds ever lifted. He couldn’t imagine clear skies opening up over this gloomy landscape. Thick clumps of scrubby green grass danced in the wind. Jack shivered as he walked. He hoped that his clothes would dry soon, or at least that the dunes would offer some shelter. The land of the dead lay beyond them, but no fetch was allowed to speak of it. Station people did their best to ignore everything but its most basic details, not wanting to imagine where their dataselves would spend eternity.

A shrill whistling danced towards him. At first he thought it was just the wind, but then he heard notes sketching out a simple melody. He wondered who was playing. Perhaps it was some kind of digital psychopomp, waiting to conduct him into the lands of the dead. But he’d arrived in such an unusual way. Fetches were normally very carefully constructed over a period of months. He’d broken in, a direct copy of a living mind. He wasn’t sure if the Coffin Drives would even recognise him as a functioning consciousness, if he’d be able to communicate with those others who lived within them. The thought of an eternity alone stretched out before him, and he shuddered.

At last he reached the dunes. He climbed towards the whistling, sand slipping away beneath his feet. He lost his footing and tumbled down the other side of the dune, swearing loudly. The fall winded him and it took a moment to recover. There was chuckling. A voice he never thought he’d be so happy to hear spoke.

‘That was quite some entry, Jacky boy!’

Fist was leaning back against black sand. He was dressed in white shorts and a rough, canvas smock. He held a tin whistle in one hand.

‘I knew you’d find me sooner or later. I pulled you out of the sea as far as I could, but I couldn’t wake you. And it’s cold down there.’

‘You left me?’

‘I wanted to look around! And what are you going to do, Jack? Die again?’ He tootled out a few more notes. ‘The waves were going to wake you sooner or later. And if I kept playing this, I knew you’d hear me.’

Jack sat down next to him. ‘So we’re dead now?’

‘Out there, we are. I wiped your mind and then deleted myself. There’s no thought left in that body of yours, no memories, nothing.’

‘And we’re just copies—’

‘You’ve never been software, have you? It’s how things travel when they’re digital. New copy here, old copy erased. Are you Jack? Are you just a copy of Jack? Is there a difference?’ Fist waved his hands around mesmerically. ‘Spoooooky! When you were alive, you were flesh, but you were also a pattern of mind carved into that flesh. Now the flesh has gone, but the pattern remains, unchanged.’

‘Very metaphysical, Fist.’

Fist raised an eyebrow at Jack. ‘Dying does that to you.’

‘How long have we been down here?’

‘In real time? A few hours, at most.’

‘Shouldn’t it take months to reassemble us?’

‘No, Jack. Think about it. We’re totally different from fetches. They’re built from scratch out of a lifetime’s worth of data. We’re two living consciousnesses cut and pasted directly down here. No reassembly needed, we’re already complete. And the Coffin Drives’ bandwidth is vast, so the transfer’s pretty zippy. Dying’s much easier than you’d think. Who knew?’

‘We didn’t just die – we were killed.’

Fist looked away for a moment, suddenly less cheerful. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. I had to do it.’

‘Not your responsibility. Harry forced you. He killed us just as surely as he killed Yamata.’

‘That bastard. I always told you not to trust him.’

Jack sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Fist. You were right. But we did need him. And we wouldn’t have got as far without him.’

Fist waved a wooden hand at the barren space around them. ‘We wouldn’t be here without him, either.’

Jack laughed. ‘You’ve got a point.’

‘And he’s still got our body.’

‘Can he do anything with it?’

‘No. All my hardware’s wrapped around your spine, but there’s nothing left to bring it to life. It’s like having a gun without any bullets.’

‘So he can’t fire up your weapon systems?’

‘No. He’d need us, and we’re out of his reach now. Even if he did catch us, he can’t force us to do anything we don’t want to. Even if he could, my countermeasures would break him first.’

‘I thought they didn’t work?’

‘Plan A was the coffin. It protected us for long enough to get down here. And there’s a Plan B too. Ooh, It’s a beauty!’

‘Tell me.’

‘I couldn’t stop Harry from using me as a bridge to Yamata, but when he did key parts of him were inside me. In my memory. Accessible. Lots of security there, but—’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s some ninja code working its way into him. A few hours, it’ll have gone as deep as it can, and we can trigger it. It’ll cripple him, at least for a bit – and it’ll also ping us with a precise fix on his core servers. We’ll know where he is, and we’ll be able to go after him physically.’

‘Once we’re back in the land of the living.’

‘Well, yes, there is that, but it’s just a detail. I’ll get us out of here somehow.’ Jack found himself starting to feel irritated by Fist’s breezy overconfidence. ‘In the meantime,’ Fist continued heedlessly, ‘we’ve got Harry right where we want him!’

‘Indeed,’ said Jack sardonically. ‘But even if we put aside how we’re going to get out of here, there’s something you’re forgetting.’

‘What?’

‘Kingdom. If anyone can fire up your weapons, he can.’

‘Harry hates him. He’ll never hand your body over.’

‘Do you really think Harry can stand up to a god? Sooner or later, Kingdom’ll take the body off him. And he’ll find us too. He can force us to do things we don’t want to, and we don’t have any countermeasures against him.’

‘Oh yes we do!’ Fist bounced up happily. ‘Me! I’ll just have to kill him. With a bit of warning, of course, so that someone nice and powerful can step in and sort his people out.’ He winked at Jack. ‘I’ll be very ethical.’

‘If Kingdom catches us, he’ll wipe me and burn your personality out before he drops you back into our body. By the time you get your hands on your weapons hardware, you’ll be his creature. And he’ll be able to repair you properly, and point you at whoever he likes. And that means he’ll run the Pantheon.’

‘Bollocks,’ grumbled Fist, kicking at the sand in theatrical frustration. ‘It was all looking so good.’

‘Sticking to the plan is more important than ever. We need to expose Kingdom before he catches up with us. Though gods know how we’ll do it from here. You’ve still got the files that prove he was running Yamata?’

‘Oh yes.’ Fist turned a shoulder to show Jack a little rucksack, strapped to his back. ‘Safe in there.’

‘And we might not know how we’re going
to get out, but at least we can find out
the last piece of the puzzle.’

‘What other piece?’ asked
Fist. ‘We know everything.’

‘No. We need to find out
why Penderville’s so important.’

‘I don’t see why
that matters.’

‘All of this began with him. His death
was nothing to do with the bombings, he died before
the Soft War even began. It was nothing to do
with sweat smuggling, either. Yamata was very clear about
that. There’s something deep and dark there – something that
Kingdom’s very scared of. We’ll uncage Penderville and
find out what it is. We might also be able
to release some of the anti-war people too. They
’ll back our story up.’

‘A jailbreak! I’m in
.’

‘There’s just one thing we need to sort out
.’ Jack waved his hand at the landscape around them. ‘You
got us in here. How the fuck are you going
to get us out?’

‘If I can kill gods, I
’m sure I can bring us back from the dead
,’ Fist replied in a tone too airy to be properly
reassuring. ‘Weavespace is up there beyond the clouds. I’ve
got a pretty good sense of how fetches work, I
’ll have a look at one and reverse-engineer a
way out, we’ll be fine.’

‘We won’t be
fine. We’ll be ghosts. What about my body?’

‘Remember
what Harry said about it? He was going to put
one of Yamata’s control systems in it and wear
it. If he can do that, you can too.’

‘If
we can avoid Kingdom and get our hands on it
.’

‘Details, details,’ said Fist. ‘Everything’s sure to sort itself
out. Oh, and, talking of clouds, there’s a silver
lining to all this.’

He paused dramatically.

‘Gods’ sake,’ said
Jack. ‘Just tell me.’

‘Now I’ve killed you, I
can’t kill you! Neither of us live in your
body any more, so I won’t have to take
it from you and you won’t have to die
in it!’

‘Fucking hell, Fist,’ groaned Jack.

‘I thought you
’d be happy,’ said Fist, sounding hurt.

‘I suppose it
is good news. But it doesn’t mean anything if
we
can’t get out of here. And if we can’t find my body again and bring down fucking Kingdom.’

‘Gods, Jack, you worry too much. We’ll escape first, we’ll worry about the rest once we’re out. We need to find some fetches, I’ll take a look under the hood, if that doesn’t work something else will turn up, we’ll go from there.’

‘That’s not really a plan, Fist.’

‘And you want to jailbreak Penderville and his mates. So we need to go where the dead guys hang out. Where’s that? Not too many of ’em round here.’

‘Fucking hell.’ Jack grumbled for a bit, but in the end had to admit that Fist was right. ‘We’re on a big, round island,’ he said. ‘The dead live in the middle, beyond these dunes.’

‘Then let’s go find them.’

It took much longer to cross the dunes than it had the beach. Jack slithered up and down, straining to reach each peak then tumbling down the other side. His feet vanished in soft black avalanches whenever he put any weight on them. He found that half-climbing, half-crawling was the most efficient way of moving. His wet clothes hung heavily on him and black sand stuck to him, rubbing against his skin like so many small razors.

‘It’s a pretty convincing simulation,’ commented Fist cheerfully. ‘Very impressive.’ Being lighter, he was finding the going far easier.

‘Easy for you to say,’ Jack wheezed. He’d been panting for a while now, forcing himself to keep going as he felt unreal muscles become more and more tired. ‘You don’t get out of breath. Can you turn my physical presence off ?’

‘Sorry, Jack. You’re still very new to this virtual lark. Your subconscious expects physicality. Losing it all of a sudden would be too much of a shock. All sorts of bad things would happen.’

‘Can’t be worse than this.’

Fist didn’t hear him. He was already skipping down another sand dune. Jack half-ran, half-tumbled along behind him. Fist ran quickly up to the top of the next one, his rucksack bobbing perkily, leaving Jack sprawled at its base.

‘Jack – get up here! This is your last dune.’

‘Thank the gods.’

Jack dragged himself up to join Fist. The wind snapped at him. His clothes were nearly dry. ‘So that’s where fetches live,’ he said, looking down at the sight before him.

The dunes formed a vast circle around a deep, dusty, lens-shaped depression, several kilometres across. A river stretched all the way around the rim of the dip, a dark ring, leaden in the gloom. Four bridges crossed it, equally spaced at the four points of the compass.

Beyond the river, corrugated metal gleamed dully, sometimes almost silver, sometimes a rusted red, forming an uncountable rabble of small buildings and shacks. Hard, bright patches of colour blazed out where shafts of light broke through the clouds from the weave. A round, black lake lay at the heart of the ramshackle city, a pupil in the city’s lens. Its waters were perfectly still – a mirror, showing the sky back to itself.

At the heart of the shining waters was a higgledy-piggledy pile of something that at first looked like rubble. Looking closer, Jack saw that it was a mountain of small black cubes.

‘I never imagined it like this,’ he told Fist.

‘Can you see anyone?’ Fist replied.

‘I don’t know.’