Godlike Machines (38 page)

“Come here, sky boy. You can’t hide forever!”

No, I answered to myself, but I can loop around to the control room and hope to get out the exit before either of you catch up.

“Don’t run, Don.” Cotton’s voice from further away, and falling behind. “It looks bad if you won’t even try to explain.”

“What’s to explain, Emma? He’s a rocket jockey, and he’s not getting his hands on the mines.”

Kindred was hard on my heels. Switching back to visible light, I saw torchlight dancing at the periphery of my vision.

I realised then that I had made a mistake. Kindred wasn’t relying on infra-red, so my heat-signature was irrelevant. Putting on a burst of speed, I managed to gain an extra second or two, dodging and weaving down corridors and rooms that had not seen human life for a decade or more. My internal compass—still working even if my gravity-sense was addled-told me that I had looped almost completely around and was already returning to the control room. I had to act soon or hand myself over to Kindred.

A T-junction loomed out of the darkness. His footsteps went left, so I ducked right and pressed myself flat against the wall, suppressing every audible breath. My heart pounded in time with his approach. The thudding of his feet sounded as loud as thunder.

My slavish pursuit of his path had lulled him into believing that I would turn left. Timing my move for the moment he reached the junction, I struck up and out with my left elbow. The blow carried my entire weight plus his considerable momentum, and struck him hard between the eyes. His head snapped back while the rest of his body kept moving. Loosened from his fingers, the torch continued forward into the wall. Darkness descended with a smash.

All was momentarily a confusion of limbs and senses. The glare of the torch had blinded me to the entire spectrum of frequencies and the impact jarred my body, making me feel as though I’d been hit by a pile-driver. I staggered away, nursing my shoulder and blinking in confusion. Behind me, I could hear Kindred struggling to cling to consciousness, which in itself was amazing. His skull must have been made of rock! Then he fell silent, either giving up the fight or becoming alert enough to realize that the sound was giving away his location. I was still seeing stars, but I turned and readied myself to do battle with him in the way I had been trained.

Something moved in the air. Something impossible to define and completely without sound, but I knew beyond certainty that it had come and gone. I blinked and tuned my ears to their highest sensitivity. Nothing apart from my heartbeat and shallow breathing. Kindred was making no noise at all. I felt forward with my left foot, seeking his inert body. Nothing. My left hand patted the wall on that side through a blur of musculoskeletal pain. There was the intersection. My feet crunched on broken glass: the torch. Here, then, was where Kindred must have fallen.

He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. My eyes cleared and the glowing pool of warmth where he had briefly lain became visible, but no more than that. Kindred had vanished into thin air, as though he had never existed.

A sequence of terrible logic unspooled in my mind.

In the dark, for a moment, silent and unseen by my dazzled eyes, no one had been observing him.

In that moment, the Director had struck.

I took a deep, sobbing breath and backed away from the volume of space he had occupied, as though distance alone would spare me the same fate.

A glowing shape appeared behind me—humanoid, burning hot. I spun, moaning in fear and raised my hands in an impotent gesture. All my training counted for naught in that moment. I am ashamed to say, Master Catterson, that I was completely unmanned.

“Huw? Huw, is that you?”

It was Cotton, of course. My horror had been so great that I didn’t hear the footsteps approaching and failed to recognize her silhouette. My fear had magnified that glowing shape until it seemed monstrously large.

“He’s gone,” I forced out.

She rushed forward, eyes seeing me standing over the pool of heat where Kindred had fallen. “No.” Her mind performed the kind of mathematics she had urged me to perform, earlier. “No!” Not realizing yet that I had only witnessed Kindred’s demise, not killed him myself, and seeing me reaching for her in turn, she assumed the worst and lashed out.

I cannot say, Master Catterson, what my precise intentions were, in that dark hour. I can only say that I was taken by surprise, and so Cotton succeeded where Kindred had failed. The blow caught me in the left temple. Stars flared again, and I dropped to my knees. The last things I experienced before blackness engulfed me were Cotton’s glowing shape looming over me, and the raw, anguished sound of her scream.

I woke an hour later on my right side in the control room with my wrists and ankles securely tied. I ached all over, and my mouth was desperately dry, but for the moment I was glad that Cotton had not slit my throat and left me for dead. She must have dragged me there herself, over some considerable time. I am small, like all my brothers in the Guild, but not light.

Her voice came from somewhere behind me.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I wrenched myself to a sitting position and twisted on my buttocks to face her. She was crouched in a corner with Kindred’s pistol on her lap. Its size was a better match for her petite hands. That it wasn’t yet pointed at me I took to be another good sign.

The question, though, was not.

“Is what true?”

She rolled her eyes. “That you’re a spacer-astronaut, sky boy, rocket jockey, whatever.”

“We were all spacers once, Cotton.”

“Just give me a straight answer.” Tears eased freely from eyes as though from a surfeit of grief. She wasn’t weeping, but I perceived that she had been. “Under the circumstances, I think you owe me that.”

“If you’ll be straight with me in return,” I said, “regarding the mines.”

“You must be kidding.”

“Put yourself in my shoes. If you were about to be shot, wouldn’t you want to know the truth?”

The muscles of her jaw clenched. Her mouth twisted into an ugly line.

“All right,” she said. “You go first.”

I took a moment to compose my thoughts. The reasoning behind my offer was simple. Whatever she told me, I could transmit that information to you, Master Catterson. The broadcast would only take a second and be undetectable to her, so at least my death at her hands would not be for nothing.

But breaking my vows did not come easily. My heart quailed at the very thought of telling the truth, no matter the circumstances.

“The Guild of the Great Ships,” I began, slowly at first. “That’s who I work for. And yes, I was sent here to investigate the mines. But if you think about it, I haven’t really lied to you. I just asked questions. You assumed on your own that I was a newbie, along with everyone else.”

“Stop,” she said. “Stop talking now.”

The gun was in her hand and I was close enough that even her shaky aim couldn’t miss. But I didn’t obey.

“I was born in orbit above a world called Alfvén IV. It shines like a diamond at its poles, but the temperate regions are green, so green it hurts your eyes to look at it. My name was given to me by my hub-mothers, who raised me until I turned five and commenced training to be a Guildsman. I was one of 20 new recruits. We all looked alike. That we were clones was never hidden from us, not from the moment of our births. I was proud to be like my brothers, and we never mixed each other up. I knew we were all different on the inside. We all dreamed the same thing, in our own ways: of boarding one of the Great Ships and voyaging to the stars ourselves. That was our destiny. There we would find our true home.”

Her tears dried up, but my words did not. I told her everything, Master Catterson: of my graduation to full service and my first missions with the Guild; of promotion through the ranks and individual training in your capable hands; of the gradual accumulation of data concerning Gevira and the mission to ascertain the facts behind them; of being specifically chosen by you to infiltrate the mine and relay what I found there. I told her (as I tell you now) that I felt safe revealing so much to her because I knew that in the short time remaining to her she was unlikely to pursue the matter with what higher authorities existed in the mines. Let the spacers visit and explore, I told her. What harm can come of it? We are scientists, not conquerors. It is the very nature of the mines to make people curious. Perhaps we can find answers that others before us have not.

Last of all, I admitted that I would feel duty bound to communicate any discovery concerning new means of traversing interstellar space. If the shape of the mine was as she said, why should it be hoarded and not shared by all? What possible reason would stay my lips, were I to survive beyond the next ten minutes?

“How confident do you feel on that score?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t read your thoughts.” I struggled to find a comfortable position on the hard, cold floor. My left side still ached from my collision with Kindred, and my temple throbbed with a bloody heat. Keeping both arms behind my back was proving increasingly painful. “Would you care to share them with me?”

She avoided meeting my gaze directly. “Well, I was telling the truth about the mines, which puts us in a bit of a bind. I don’t want to shoot you in cold blood, but I’m not convinced I shouldn’t.”

“Do you think Kindred would have?”

That made her look at me again.

“It’s possible,” she said, “although I think he was angrier at me than you.”

“I think so too. I’m sure he wasn’t going to tell you about Trelayne.”

“Say we’re no worse off and I really will shoot you now.”

“As you wish. Do I need to point out that while I might have been a fake—”

“My body was definitely real. That had occurred to me, Donnie Boy—or whatever your name is.”

“It’s as you know it. I swear.”

She stared at me for a long while, and I was content with that. I wanted her attending to me as the person in whose company she had run from Gevira, not building up the courage to shoot someone she had redefined as an enemy combatant.

“If I let you go,” she said, “are you going to follow me to Trelayne?”

“No,” I promised her, “but I will come with you if you ask me to.”

She bowed her head, and I wondered if it was because she was weeping again. Her shoulders shook, and although she made no easily distinguished sound, it did appear to me that she was in distress.

When she looked up, however, I saw that it was in fact silent laughter that gripped her.

“You’ve got a fucking nerve,” she said. But she did come over and release my hands and feet from their bindings, so I felt I had no grounds on which to argue that particular point.

**

The first thing I did upon my release was assuage my thirst with water provisioned from Kindred’s pack. Fortunately, he had left it behind before barreling off in pursuit of me. Cotton has charge of it—if I want something, I have to ask-but by tacit agreement it seems that we won’t be parting in Samagrinig, as she now calls this level, so his abandoned resources are fair game. Unless she changes her mind, I will be going at least as far Panaion, the place Kindred went to pursue his mysterious lead. From there, the map is blank.

Therefore, Master Catterson, the second thing I have done is prepare this account for you. Cotton says that we are far from Gevira, not without conviction, and if that is true then my earlier reasoning is tragically flawed. If the mines truly are scattered across numerous far-flung worlds, this document might never reach you. My mission should be to return to a point where the relays to the Great Ship will pick up my packets and convey them to you.

I am, however, yet to be wholly convinced. I need evidence before committing myself solely to that belief. For all I know, Terminus is a counter-insurgency group designed to seed misinformation in the minds of those seeking the truth. Until I have proof that I am not the one being misled, I will operate on the assumption that nothing has changed, and the relay drones on Gevira will detect any transmission I dispatch and pass it on to you.

I send these words to you, therefore, in the hope that a reply will be swift on their heels. Your advice is sorely needed, Master Catterson, by this Guildsman far out of his depth.

(Thus concludes my second transmission since meeting the Terminus agent E. C. Cotton. Everything that follows is taken from notes compiled during our subsequent expedition and transcripts of pertinent conversations.)

Kindred secreted his charts and other data in memory wire woven into his pack’s hardy fabric. Cotton knew where to look and how to access the data thanks to her familiarity with him and his methods. I am building up a picture of him as a rugged idealist, an academic born into the body of a giant. For all his violent outrage, aimed at me and spacers in general, I am certain that he was no trained fighter. I am reassured, therefore, that Terminus is not necessarily a paramilitary group devoted to defending the mines from incursion.

The chart reveals that 17 levels lie between us and Panaion. (I refuse to refer to them as “planets.” Levels or zones they will remain until I can be convinced otherwise. The truth of the mines, if such it is, must take time to sink in.) Cotton pores over the complicated map for an hour, seeking a shorter route. Her tension grows as the futility of the exercise becomes increasingly certain. Seventeen is the minimum, so seventeen it must be.

The knowledge weighs heavily on me too. Seventeen times will the Director strike before we reach our destination-and who knows what will happen there, when we attempt to stay?

But there is no turning back. My mission, until I am told otherwise, is to follow the mystery, and if Trelayne truly has the answers I seek, then there is no other clear course open to me.

The pool of heat where Kindred fell must have long dissipated into the ambient chill, but it burns in my mind still, like a ghost. I fear it will haunt me forever.

We are both exhausted, physically and emotionally. When we set out, we switch off the lights behind us and return the control room to its endless slumber.