Divergence (20 page)

“Edward, the arms! Pull up the gloves and slip in your hands….”

Shaking, they both tried to force their hands into the sleeves, their flesh resisting, the stickiness gripping, and Miss Rose’s pain still echoing in their heads. And then Maurice felt a blessed relief and tingling. He was finally dressed. Quickly, he pulled the active suit’s hood over his head and turned to Edward.

“I can’t do it, Maurice.”

Tears splashed down Edward’s brown chest. The big man was tugging and tugging at the suit with one hand, burning his skin as he tried to force his other hand into the sleeve. There was another bang and the floor shook. Edward kept gasping and pulling.

“Stop it! Stop it!” shouted Maurice, panicking himself. “Stop it!”

Edward took hold of Maurice by the arms and began to squeeze. Maurice tried to break free, but he couldn’t. Strong as he was, Edward was stronger.

“Edward, you’ve got to let go of me. I can’t help you if you hold my arms.”

He looked at Edward, at his big brown chest and bare arms, at the silver tears streaming down his face.

There was a rattling sensation. Then a flash of silver at the corner of Maurice’s vision.

“Edward! They’re coming through the walls! Let go so that I can help you!”

And then one of the walls dissolved in a flurry of silver legs.

Maurice stood sobbing in the middle of the room, feeling Edward’s grip weakening. He had his eyes tightly closed; he couldn’t bring himself to look at Edward as he died. What had happened? In the space of a few minutes they had gone from everything to nothing. The ship had been eaten up. Edward was dying, Miss Rose was…what? What had happened to her?

Edward’s grip finally loosened, and Maurice tried to open his eyes. He didn’t want to look. Okay, count to three and then…he opened his eyes.

The living area remained untouched. The black carpet, the dining table, the neat stacks of black-and-white dishes in the kitchen were all unchanged. Even Edward’s glass, lying on the floor where he had dropped it.

“What happened?” asked Edward, still standing before him, looking puzzled.

Before he had time to think about it, Maurice helped Edward shrug his way into the arms of his active suit. Only when Edward had pulled the hood over his head did Maurice speak.

“I don’t know what happened. Look over there.”

They looked towards the wall where the VNMs had entered. There was a long empty corridor beyond that had not been there before. It led downwards.

“What happened?” asked Edward. “What’s going on?”

To Edward it was obvious what they had to do, so Maurice gave in and followed him down the corridor. There was nowhere else to go. Edward hated confusion, Maurice had noted. Whenever he was uncertain about what was going on, that was when he felt most ill at ease. When his choices were clear, he was happy. Edward felt that now their path was clear; they simply followed the seamless black corridor in front of them downwards.

“I think I can see something,” Edward said boldly, and then he stumbled and began to fall forward. Maurice made a grab for him and felt a stomach-wrenching surge of nausea as the world tumbled around him, leaving him floating free in the long tunnel.

“Help!” Edward called. “Maurice, help me.”

Weightlessness made Maurice feel sick. He was gulping down the thick acid bile that threatened to rise up and fill the hood of his active suit.

“Stay calm,” he gagged, then he clamped his mouth shut again and tried to overcome the nausea. A cool breath of scented air refreshed his face. The active suit was picking up on his distress. “The gravity’s gone,” he gasped. “We’ve left the zone of the
Eva Rye
.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know, Edward.”

He was tumbling head over heels now. Back in the direction from which they had come, he saw the tube contracting. The view of the living area vanished. A pattern of expanding dots flashed into life before his eyes, a projection from his active suit.

“The
Eva Rye
has gone,” said Maurice. “It’s been totally converted to VNMs.” He wiggled his fingers, tapping at an imaginary console. The active suit picked up the gestures and flashed up the information he had requested.

“And all in just under eight minutes,” he said.

They floated on through the black tube.

“I can see a light up ahead,” said Edward.

Maurice saw it too: a pale light, the color of snow in moonlight. For a moment he had a flash of something, a memory from his childhood, then it was gone.

They floated on.

“The tube’s getting bigger,” Edward said, and it began to widen like a trumpet’s bell, then they floated out into a vast space that froze the breath in their lungs. They were now apparently drifting upwards, rising from a hole in some vast plain. They looked down and saw white patterns of frost curling in flames of fern beneath them, incredibly complex shapes curling around themselves in recursive patterns, painting pictures of cold fire across the ground.

“Where are we?” asked Edward.

“I don’t know,” repeated Maurice.

“It’s beautiful.”

They rose higher and higher. Now they could make out distant walls and a wide ceiling above them, shining in the pale blue light that illuminated the arctic volume of emptiness around them.

“I thought we were in space,” said Edward. “How can we be underground?”

“I don’t think we’re underground,” said Maurice. He was trying to remember something he had read years ago: how you used an active suit. You reached out your hands like this, and you turned them like this and…

Now he could feel the surface of the ice below. With the help of the suit’s augmented senses it was like he was running his hands along it. He could feel the cold metal that lay below the thin residue of frost, he could tap it and feel it ring hollowly through to the void beyond.

“What is it?” asked Edward.

Maurice was running his virtual hands along the distant floor; he was feeling the walls and ceiling, patting along them, sizing up the cavern.

“We’re in a long, flattened cylinder made of metal. There is air in here, Earth atmosphere but a lot thinner. Too thin to breathe, and too cold. Moisture has settled on the walls and frozen there. Hold on, Edward. I’m calling up a picture of the shape of this cylinder.”

The active suit set a mapping of the space before his eyes. Maurice knew what it was going to be even before it appeared.

“Edward,” he announced. “We are floating inside the
Bailero
.”

Edward was more confused than ever.

“But where have all the insides gone?” he asked. “Where are the engines and everything?”

Before Maurice had a chance to reply, a thin, unearthly sound filled the hoods of their active suits. A keening sound of utter agony, a cry of pain so pale and exhausted that it hovered on the edge of awareness, like someone trying to crawl away from life, only to find themselves tethered there by their pain.

“Make it stop!” called Edward. “Make it stop! What is it?”

Maurice couldn’t speak; he was vomiting, gagging. His suit was working hard to flush his hood clean, and still that dreadful screaming went on, keening above the hum of the extractors.

“What is it what is it what is it?” chanted Edward.

It was Miss Rose.

judy 2: 2252

Judy imposed her will
totally upon Saskia. She pushed the younger woman against the smooth wall of the corridor and held her there by the wrist as she gazed into her eyes. Saskia tugged halfheartedly at her, her thin body wriggling, but it was not a genuine attempt to escape; she was too much in awe of the power of Social Care, and Judy made her aware of that. She spoke in the voice; she overwhelmed Saskia, smashed through the young woman’s veneer of sophistication and scooped out her insecurities, throwing them to one side as she rummaged through her psyche for her core competence.

Only when she had totally subdued Saskia did she let her go.

“Pull on your active suit,” she instructed.

They stripped in the corridor, Saskia’s body very pale under the lights, her ribs outlined in shadows. They were halfway through pulling on the rubbery suits when Miss Rose’s first scream sounded, thin and agonizing. As if in a dream, Saskia began to move up the corridor, half dressed.

“Stop,” said Judy. “We’ll be no good to her if we die of decompression.”

“Okay,” said Saskia. It was the logical thing to do. They both dressed themselves calmly as another human died in agony nearby.

“I’m sorry,” said Judy, as they finally shrugged their arms into the suits. “I had to do this to you, Saskia.”

“I understand,” said Saskia, pulling the hood of the blue suit over her head.

“You understand
now,
” said Judy. “When I let you go, you won’t be so logical.”

They finished dressing as the air around them began to drift down the corridor. There was a popping sound as metal spiders pulled themselves free of the floor.

“Into Miss Rose’s room,” urged Judy.

“No, I’ll get a body bag first,” said Saskia. “Listen to her scream. We’ll never get her into a suit when she’s in that much pain.”

“Yes, good thinking.”
So that’s where your self-belief comes from. You really are competent when you allow yourself to be….

Saskia went to a nearby locker to get the body bag. Judy headed on to Miss Rose’s room. The door was covered in black-and-white stripes; a message formed in the center.

DO NOT OPEN. CORRIDOR PRESSURE IS BELOW THAT OF THE ROOM BEYOND.

“Not for long,” said Judy. “Override. Let me in there.”

The door slid open. Judy pushed her way against the leaking air into Miss Rose’s room. The door slammed shut behind her. She was shocked at the state of the room itself, but even more shocked by the sight of Miss Rose. She lay on the bed, naked and bleeding at several points. Her arms, her thighs. Her vagina. She was screaming, writhing in agony. Her eyes looked at Judy, apparently without seeing her. Then she spoke, in a thin, bubbling voice.

“Get them out of me,” she gasped. “Get them out, get them out.” And then she gagged and began to scream again.

Something was moving inside her body, something was squirming in there. The pale, loose, liver-spotted skin over her stomach raised itself up for a moment and Judy saw the outline of a shape: a short squat body. A VNM. Inside her. Her arm moved and Judy saw a VNM holding the loose, wrinkled skin apart from inside as it pushed its way along the bone.

Judy gagged. The meta-intelligence cut in and she now saw Miss Rose as nothing more than a pattern of consciousnesses: one of them human, several machine. A symbiote was forming, rather elegant in its form. Certainly a more valid expression of resources than the failing system that was Miss Rose…
No! That isn’t the true picture
. Judy forced the meta-intelligence down and let her own emotions loose. Miss Rose was
alive
—listen to her scream.

Then air pressure dropped, and the walls around her dissolved in a tangle of silver legs as the
Eva Rye
was eaten up by VNMs.

Saskia was there within the expanding cloud. She had already had the good sense to link her active suit to Judy’s. The two suits locked on to each other’s signatures and moved closer, fighting through the explosion of air and thrashing silver legs and the detritus from Miss Rose’s room. Somehow they got the body bag around Miss Rose, somehow they clung together, and somehow they weathered the storm.

“Where are we?” wondered Saskia.

They stood on an iron plane, patterns of frost curling in tongues of ice around their feet, the circle of the access tube that had brought them there was irising closed by their feet. They were two tiny figures, one blue, one black-and-white, dwarfed by the huge iron space around them. Judy bent over Miss Rose, peering at her through the transparent body bag, trying to hold eye contact with her. It was no use: the old woman’s eyes were closed, her mouth stretched wide, the thin tired scream emerging from it carried to them through the hoods of their active suits.

“Saskia? Is that you?”

Maurice sounded as if he was standing just next to them.

“Maurice? I can’t see you?”

“I’m with Edward. We’re floating inside the hull of a ship. I think it’s the
Bailero.
”

Saskia looked around. “I think we must be in there with you. Listen, we’ve set our active suits to stick us to the walls. Can you walk here and join us? Miss Rose is hurt.”

“I can hear that,” Maurice said.

Judy wasn’t listening. She watched as the skin on Miss Rose’s leg was slowly unzipped from the ankle up to the thigh, silver legs reaching through to encircle the limb.

Saskia’s voice sounded hoarse in her ear. “Kill her.”

Judy looked up at Saskia, face dark in her hood, the surrounding blackness of the
Bailero
’s interior framing her.

“Kill her,” repeated Saskia, “like you did that little girl. Can’t you see she’s in agony?”

Judy nodded. She placed her hands on the body bag, pinching it closer to Miss Rose’s head, wriggling her fingers through folds of plastic until she could grip the old woman’s neck. She began to squeeze.