Empty Space (33 page)

‘George,’ she whispered. ‘My poor George.’

It was, she imagined, something the Pantopon Rose might have said. If he had been alive, the assistant could have asked George his professional advice: ‘How can a person like me be
shaking like this?’

Forty lights down the Beach, EMC’s crack grey ops team was doing a favour for a friend. The Levy Flight comprised a dozen ships, would take on anything. They gave the
big No! to the psychopathic conformity of the typical K-pod. Instead they encouraged a shifting membership of ten- to thirteen-year-olds with an interest in Military Collectibilia of Old Earth.
Their present mission might seem weird, even unhip, to today’s kids: until you realised that a hundred thousand years ago Panamax IV was inhabited by fuck-off telepathic reptile Aztecs from
beyond the universe. That was the draw.

Planetary interdiction would normally require one of the Flight to lay off at the L2 point and from there co-ordinate the operations of the others. The mayhem at Panamax IV discouraged this.
There being at least four parties to the conflict not counting the pod itself, fighting was going on in several locations at once, from five lights out in the neighbouring system –
catalogued as Alpha 5 Flexitone – to the lower reaches of the Panamax parking orbit. EMC heavy assets thugged it out realtime with the Nastic 8th Fleet in a classic exchange of bumps which
had already set fire to a nearby gas giant. Two dozen Denebian dipships mined the local sun. Dissident indigenes were arming scramjets and flying them into partial orbits straight off the factory
floor; while a gut-shot Alcubiere battleship – the
Daily Deals & Huge Savings
, run by a privateer crew of New Men under the leadership of two Shadow Boys who shared the name
‘Fermionic Joe’ – tried to aerobrake its way down to the surface of the planet. That was how half the Levy pod, including
Whiskey Bravo
,
Pizza Night
,
Fat Mickey
from Detroit
and
Uptown Six,
found itself banging about in atmosphere – no one’s preferred medium – at Mach 2 and below, negotiating airspace with one another as well
with hostiles. The other half, strung out between Flexitone and the Panamax Oort cloud, ran interference, making all the usual plays through curled-up dimensions at picosecond speeds, flipping in
and out of the 3D world as circumstance demanded.

‘—incoming, four degrees over the ecliptic, two lights out.’

‘I have him.’

‘Steady. In contact. Steady, steady—’

‘Right underneath you,
Fat Mickey
.’

‘All his bases are ours.’

Viewing the Flight’s efforts – which, in quotidian time, came to him as little more than a coloured dapple of flat-plane lightning across hologram images of empty space, a few
quiet voices in an FTL pipe, a historical record of things that had happened a million nanoseconds ago an astronomical unit away – R.I. Gaines was impressed by their calmness and skill.
There was so much work for them out there, you got the feeling they were embarrassed. The quiet rhythms and stresses of their exchanges returned language to something reliable. By contrast, the
embedded journalism AIs, their commentary piped in by the pilots themselves from commercial routers, were reporting: ‘There’s no let up for the Levy Flight. These boys wouldn’t
want one. They
want
to work.’

‘Levy Flight are
here
to work,’ Peat Teeter told Tanky LaBrom. ‘Work improves the way they
feel
about themselves.’

By any measure they were too late. Alyssia Fignall’s hilltop dig had been vaporised before they arrived. Her house, too, was blowing around in the clouds of oily black grit produced by
large-scale thermobaric exchanges. The fountain, the stone arches, the long cool spaces and luminous grey shadows of the cloister: all gone and maybe Alyssia with them. Below him now lay his last
chance of finding her.

The town had aged since Gaines last saw it, like a photograph of a ruin subsiding into coastline. Somewhere upstream a dam had burst, forcing a million tonnes of water through La Cava in an
hour. The karst system had fallen in on itself: the town had fallen into that. He couldn’t see how anyone could survive down there. But Carlo the K-captain had manoeuvred
Uptown Six
to within fifty feet of the greyish-brown turbulence, so Gaines gave him the respect of searching every remaining nook of stone. Right and left, other elements of the pod edged nervously about,
trying not run into one another, so low they were dashed with spray. They looked wrong – like a lot of executioners at a birthday party, with an intense interest in people’s weight or
how muscular their necks were – but they were doing their best to help, a class of behaviour that did not occur naturally to them. Daylight came and went suddenly and without reason.
Incoming gamma would light up the local sky, take the top off a hill, dig a trench a kilometre long; then it would get dark again. At moments like that the K-ships shivered and hunted, outlines
blurring as their stealth options cut in, weapons extruding with a kind of sluggish ferocity. Incoming gamma was more their kind of environment.

‘It’s mayhem down there,’ Carlo remarked. Then he warned one of the other ships, ‘Tanky, you’ve still got me off your starboard stern. Ten metres and closing.
Keep up.’

Gaines watched the floating junk bouncing off buildings and bridges on its way down to the sea. ‘There’s nothing left here,’ he was forced to admit.

‘Jesus, Rig, I’m really sorry,’ Carlo said. ‘Hey, we can go lower! How would it be if we went lower?’

‘Get us out of here, Carlo.’

Carlo switched on the
f
-Ram drivers. All around the
Uptown Six
, the other ships were torching up. The Levy Flight stood on its stern and ascended through the clouds of
radioactive ash at Mach 40. They spent a moment or two in the parking orbit, looking down. Someone up there – someone not so far away, with access to top-shelf assets – had lost their
temper: Panamax, as Tanky LaBrom put it, was fucked. High volume X-ray devices quartered the crust, vaporising the first fifty metres on contact, then steadily melting the rest. Surface features
higher than a couple of hundred feet were already a kind of geological paste, fairground scarlet at the leading edge and forcing itself across the remains of the landscape like a tongue between
your lips. Plate tectonic activity was up. The atmosphere roared and whistled with heated gases. Gaines stared down, wishing he had understood his daughter as well as she had understood him. He
remembered her saying, ‘Rig, these people were so old!’ and he wished there could be one single patch of unburnt ground left somewhere down there. As he thought about Alyssia, the
Nastic cruiser – on the other side of the planet now, and only 50,000 feet up – switched on its gravity engine and drove itself into the softening crust. Physics ran wild. A huge
bulge began to form on the surface beneath
Uptown Six
.

‘Fucking shit, guys,’ Carlo said, ‘he’s coming all the way through.’

The Levy Flight weren’t going to miss that.

You can originate from a freezer, Impasse van Sant believed, and still make an identity for yourself: but the thing is, you never feel sited. Day after day he hung in empty
space, wondering not so much why he had no news from home as where his home had been. He knew there was a war on, but he didn’t know who to side with. That made him feel both unreal and
nostalgic. How can you be nostalgic for something you never had? Wow, he caught himself thinking: a war at home! It must be something, to have all your certainties knocked over in that way. He
caught fragments of media here and there. Wrecked ships slowly tumbling in hard light; long views of planets he never heard of. Children singing something against a black background. A headline
that just said—

WAR

It gave him a warm feeling – like ‘Christmas’ or ‘growing up’ – to think that other people were having this most humanising of experiences, losing
everything they cared about, everything that made them what they were. The majority of Imps’ news came from the K-Tract, as data he couldn’t decode, and was only news if you were
interested in high energy magnetic fields. He was thinking about this when the shadow of his friend fell across him. One monitor wasn’t enough to display her; she hung there in high aspect
ratio across three of them, allowing the K-tract to paint her tip feathers mint-blue and rose-pink.

‘Hey,’ Imps breathed.

‘What do you want,’ she said.

‘You look beautiful today.’

‘You broadcast every frequency. You call me up. You stare into the dark until you find me there. What do you want from me?’

Imps thought.

He felt he should tell her, ‘My day is crap when we don’t talk,’ or, ‘I think you’re lonely too,’ but both of those were too close to the truth. So he
decided to say the next thing that came into his head. Sometimes he made lists of the places he might have come from. For instance he liked the sound of Acrux, Adara, Rigil Kentaurus and,
particularly, Mogliche Walder. But Motel VI was his favourite. Motel life, as he understood it, wasn’t too demanding. It was a lot closer-in than empty space, but still comfortably on the
edge of things. It sounded like a good compromise between what he experienced now and some sort of full humanity. He wanted to ease himself into that. He had downloaded a brochure entitled
Mobile Homes of the Galaxy
, which also featured dwellings based on the classic Moderne hamburger joint – all pastel neon, pressed and ribbed aluminium – set against sunsets and
mountain dawns. He showed her some of these.

‘I want you to help me go back,’ he said.

‘You came here of your own accord.’

‘Did I?’

She considered this. ‘Now you want to go back where you came?’

‘I came too far,’ he said.

‘You thought this was what you wanted.’

‘Peer pressure brought me here. It would be too much to suffer the disapprobation of my friends.’

Rig and Emil and Fedy von Gang, hacking busily away at the mysteries in Radio Bay; Ed Chianese who, it was rumoured, had himself plugged into a K-ship and fired into the Tract itself, as dumb
a thing as anyone had ever done. The entradistas, the sky-pilots like Billy Anker and Liv Hula. People who called their ship
Blind by Light
, or
Hidden Light
, or
500% Light
,
or anything with
Light
in it. People who left a note by the bed, a message in the parking orbit: Torched out, catch you later. Who were wired up wrong from the first. Whose engines cooked
with hard X-rays. Who went out unassuagable and came back rich or mad, towing a derelict starship from another galaxy. Rocket jockeys the Halo knew by their first names. Imps shrugged. He excused
himself and got a beer. When he came back to his seat she was still there, and he said: ‘Out here thirty years, and I find I was never like them. Whoa! What’s this? Imps, you want to
go back, find your home? Stop looking in the dark for stuff no one’s ever going to understand?’

‘You came too far,’ she mused.

Van Sant didn’t know if she was agreeing with him, or what. When he looked up at the monitor again, she had vanished.

She was gone two days, and when she returned it was only so that they could regard one another in a kind of continuing puzzlement – honest on his side, Imps thought, angry on hers.

‘What?’ he said.

Another screen came to life and began generating images of the war. Naked bodies in vacuum, rows of K-craft so long they vanished in blackness. An entire planet with a hole through it. Chaotic
scenes of the displaced. Tourists who had passed this way a week ago, off to make fuck-footage in the twilight zone of Kunene, who now found themselves dirty and sleepless on the concourse of the
very terminal which had promised so much. Or were pictured, still dressed in the easy to wear greige stylings of the moment, anxiously disembarking from a chartered shorthaul flight a hundred
light years from their point of origin, to be bussed into temporary cities already crammed with refugees, media, aid-agency reps and dysfunctional gap-year adolescents drawn to the inferno for
reasons they didn’t understand.

‘All over the Halo people are losing their way of life,’ van Sant whispered. He meant: ‘How lucky is that?’

She took it some other way.

‘I remember all these atrocities you’re looking at,’ she said. Then: ‘I’ve done worse.’ And finally: ‘Is it right to think so much about
yourself?’

Imps got the wrong end of this; felt hurt. ‘Hey, I was careful to ask you things! You claimed you don’t remember!’ But she was already sailing away again, banking white and
narrow against the absolute arc of the vacuum. ‘Are we having our first quarrel?’ Imps called after her. The reply arrived too faint to hear, as if she had slipped out of more than
local space.

After she found the dead man, the assistant stayed on at Sharp Cuts for an hour, unsure how to proceed. Once or twice she got up from George’s side to look between the
window-boards into the street. Eventually she made a call to Epstein the thin cop. She didn’t want him too close to the problem, she said, but she could do with some help. Epstein said it
was fine with him, but he had heard she would soon run out of favours elsewhere. The uniform branch arrived to disperse the morning drinkers and extinguish the Cadillac fire. A little later, they
towed the shell.

‘I loved that engine,’ she said absently.

The fourth floor at Uniment & Poe sent her a new vehicle from the motor pool. She loaded George into the front seat and drove him across the city to her room by the rocket port in
GlobeTown. ‘It’s not much of a car, this one,’ she told him as they passed The Church on the Rock. ‘Look at the church, George.’ Each turn they went round,
George’s upper body sagged to one side or the other. In the end she was driving with one hand and using the other to prop him up. Though moving a corpse about was nothing much for a person
like her, it was at least something to do. It was something you could throw yourself into. ‘George, you’re too easy to carry,’ she laughed. ‘You should eat more, really.
Do less drugs.’ She bore him up two flights of stairs and laid him on her bed. Then she took his clothes off, washed him with a damp towel, paying attention to the clots round his armpit,
and got him under the covers. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You see?’ George lay there collapsed-looking and stared at the ceiling.