Into Everywhere (50 page)

One day her bone-breaking weight suddenly vanished. A few hours later, gravity briefly come back, much weaker, coming and going in quick erratic cycles. The scow was manoeuvring. Lisa imagined it slipping out of the hold of the mad ship, heading towards the surface of the red planet . . . Free fall returned, and she was wondering how she could try to find out what was happening when the door of her cabin wrinkled back and Dave Clegg flew in, colliding with her, clamping one hand over her mouth as they rebounded from the wall, grabbing hold of the door frame with the other, telling her that he was going to save her life. According to him, Nevers’s little fleet had quit the mad ship after it had come under attack by Red Brigade drones. Because his piloting skills were no longer needed, he had been ordered back to his cabin, but he’d overpowered his guard and come looking for her. The Professor would be here soon, he said. It was time to make things right with her.

‘You’re going over to Ada Morange?’ Lisa said stupidly, when he took his hand away from her mouth.

‘Going over? I never left. I was just playing along because I didn’t have any choice. Until now,’ Dave Clegg said.

Probably best not to ask him if he’d had any choice when he’d killed the timeship crew. Lisa said, ‘And I’m what? Your prisoner? A hostage?’

Dave Clegg held up a short plastic shiv. It looked like it had been whittled from a table knife. There was blood on it. Lisa knew then what had happened to his guard.

He said, ‘We’re both of us Nevers’s prisoners. What I’m doing, I’m rescuing you.’

Now, the rocket stick plunged through a gap in the basket-weave funnel of the mad ship’s hold and spun around in a dizzy manoeuvre that killed its momentum. Orange sunlight lanced through the mesh on the far side; light and shadows tiger-striped the bulky bone-shape of the timeship, dead ahead.

Dave Clegg jockeyed the rocket stick into the mouth of a shaft cut into the timeship’s cladding, unhitched Lisa and Tony Okoye, and hauled them into the airlock. Inside, he took off their helmets but left them bound in their spacesuits and towed them out along the ship’s central companionway. It had a grubby, used look. Failed lights hadn’t been replaced, a long tear in the white padding had been patched with duct tape, and the air smelled bad, a deep musty rot like a zoo of long-dead animals. Lisa wondered if the bodies of Dave Clegg’s murdered shipmates were still aboard.

Tony Okoye was telling the man that it wasn’t too late to rejig his plan. ‘If you let me get to my ship, I can be your wing man.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t trust me. I understand. But Ada Morange is an old friend. In fact, she was my tutor—’

‘Save your breath. Nevers told me all about your relationship with her, why you both want to see her dead.’

‘She died a long time ago,’ Tony said. ‘She isn’t who you think she is.’

‘If she isn’t, why does Nevers want to kill her?’ Dave said.

‘Because he’s crazy,’ Lisa said.

‘That’s one thing we can agree on,’ Dave said.

He buckled Tony and Lisa onto couches in the cramped control gallery and began to wake up the ship’s systems. Tony watched with deep interest; Lisa supposed that everything must seem like an antique to him. The touchscreens, the banks of switches and pinlights. A fan with green plastic blades pushing stale air around.

The screens showed views of the sun-striped hold. After a couple of minutes there was a jolt, and the views began to change. They were under way. A voice spoke out of the air, said something about disabling the ship. Dave pulled on a headset, said into the bead mike, ‘You’re welcome to try, mate. But there’s a good twenty metres of fullerene foam shielding my baby, and I have Lisa Dawes and Tony Okoye on board. You want to risk killing them?’

Then gravity pressed down. The walls of the funnel flashed by and the mad ship was dwindling in the stern view and the curve of the red planet showed ahead.

Tony said, ‘You’re going to drive straight down?’

‘I’m getting into a lower orbit first,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll go around and you’ll tell me where to land.’

‘And meanwhile Nevers will target you and blow you out of the sky.’

‘No he won’t. Not with you two on board.’

‘How will we know where to land?’ Lisa said. Her thoughts were still lagging behind the actual world.

‘Wherever your eidolons tell you to go, that’s it,’ Dave said.

‘What about your eidolon?’ Tony said.

‘I have just enough of it to be able to fly the mad ship,’ Dave said. ‘It didn’t turn me into a human compass.’

Lisa said, ‘Did it show you pictures on the TV?’

Both men looked at her like she was crazy.

She said, ‘Mine showed me images of deserts. I think it was trying to communicate.’

‘The whole fucking planet is a desert,’ Dave said. ‘I need a place to set down and I need it now. So you can stop dicking around and give up what you know.’

Lisa said, ‘The others in your crew? Were they infected by my eidolon?’

‘Like this really is the right time to get into that,’ Dave said, with bitter exasperation. ‘I had to do what I had to do. Which saved your life, by the way. The others, they were planning to kill you.’

‘I think you saved me because we both carry copies of the same eidolon,’ Lisa said. ‘But it didn’t infect your crew, did it? Because they wouldn’t have tried to kill me if it had.’

‘The eidolon in my head also infected my ship’s mind,’ Tony said. ‘So it’s likely, isn’t it, that Lisa’s eidolon first copied itself into the mind of this ship. A Ghajar eidolon in a Ghajar ship, the two of them becoming something more than the sum of their parts. And then it got inside you, because you are the pilot. Because you interact with your ship’s mind.’

Dave Clegg’s stare was as narrow as a hawk’s. ‘So what are you saying?’

‘You should trust your ship,’ Lisa said.

‘Let it choose where to land,’ Tony said. ‘Some random spot that may turn out to be not so random after all.’

Tony had once flown a spinner under a thunderstorm on a dare, had realised as soon as the first updraught had flung his little craft into a dense squall of hail that pitting his skill against the storm’s raw power was going to be no fun at all. The ride down to the red planet was a lot worse than that.

Dave Clegg wasn’t a bad pilot. He knew how to get the most out of his antique interface, used the same manouevre that had helped Tony escape the Red Brigade at the hothouse planet: decelerating hard and letting atmospheric friction kill the rest of his velocity before warping gravity. But as soon as the timeship hit the outer edges of the atmosphere it began to shed parts of its ancient and badly battered fullerene casing, shuddering and shaking as random chunks spalled away, at one point pitching over by at least ten degrees before righting itself. Ghajar ships were tough, but they weren’t indestructible, and this one was taking a lot of torque. Its agony squealed and boomed inside the lifesystem like a full orchestra falling down an endless flight of stairs. Lisa Dawes, strapped into the couch next to Tony’s, had closed her eyes and her lips were moving in what might be prayer. Dave Clegg hunched at his controls, muttering oaths and imprecations.

At last the awful cacophony and bone-jarring shudders eased off. Dave reported that he had handed over to autopilot so that the ship could choose a landing spot. There was a final wrenching lurch as something big shook free; a couple of minutes later the ship came to rest. Dave conjured a virtual keyboard, entered a string of numbers. A small section of the panelling under the controls dropped down and angled out; he reached inside, unplugged a black tube and removed it, telling Tony, ‘You asked about assets. How about a fucking ray gun?’

‘You were lucky that the police did not find it.’

‘I gave up one just like it, and a bunch of conventional stuff from the armoury. This is my backup. Fully charged, ready to zap any unfriendly BEMs out there. That’s bug-eyed monsters, in case you call them something else.’

Lisa said, her voice thin and exhausted, ‘We didn’t come here to start a fight.’

‘Neither did I,’ Dave said. ‘This is insurance.’

He used a keywand to release the cords that bound Tony and Lisa, and they all climbed down the companionway, now a vertical shaft, Dave chivvying Lisa because she was slow and uncertain, stopping to rest several times before they reached the airlock and the tunnel cut through the fullerene casing. The ship stood on its stern in a warp of local gravity; Dave Clegg deployed a cable winch to lower Tony and Lisa to the ground, a drop of more than fifty metres. Lisa fell to her knees when she reached the ground, breathing so hard her helmet’s faceplate fogged on the inside. Tony helped her to her feet, asked her if she was all right; high above, Dave Clegg said, ‘She’s been fucked up by the wizards. Which is why she should be grateful I rescued her.’

When he followed them down, he let go of the cable a couple of metres too soon and fell flat on his behind. Tony saw a chance to step in and grab the man’s ray gun, but hesitated a couple of seconds too long. Dave bounced to his feet in the weak gravity, slapping red dust from the legs of his pressure suit, glaring at Tony and Lisa and telling them they wouldn’t find anything by standing around like a couple of dummies.

Tony told himself that if this was going to play out the way he thought it would, the man would be a useful idiot. Let him believe that he was in charge for now.

They had come down somewhere in the planet’s high latitudes, in the level light and long shadows of a late afternoon that would last until the dwarf star guttered out in a trillion years or so. A flat landscape of red sand, pavements of dusty red rock, small fleets of scalloped dunes stretching away in every direction. The fat orange sun hung above the horizon in a pinkish cloudless sky.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Dave said, after they had walked out of the shadow of the timeship. He turned a full three-sixty, sunlight flaring on his helmet visor, the ray gun’s tube clutched in a gloved paw. ‘There’s nothing fucking here.’

His voice cracked with frustration. The man had the patience of a toddler.

Tony said, ‘We could climb back inside and ask the ship to try again. Another throw of the dice.’

‘I’ve seen maps of this place. Sand everywhere on the sunward side. Ice on the dark side. No,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll keep walking. And you better tell me straight away if you see anything that tickles your eidolons. Because if we don’t find something soon I’ll have to conclude that you’re fucking with me.’

‘We are all in this together,’ Tony said, trying to calm the man. ‘If we do not find anything here, we can look elsewhere. Along the edge of the terminator, perhaps. On tidally locked worlds like this, Elder Culture ruins are usually found along meltwater rivers that flow from the dark-side ice cap.’

‘Any rivers dried up a couple of billion years ago,’ Dave said, kicking a wedge of sand with the toe of his boot. ‘The ice cap is shrunken way the hell back.’

‘Then we ask your ship again. Or ask it to call mine down.’

‘Don’t start that again.’

‘I mean only to help,’ Tony said, believing that he could use the man’s anxiety to get inside his stubborn belligerence. ‘My ship’s mind has definitely been changed by the eidolon. It may be able to find things yours cannot.’

‘I see something,’ Lisa said.

She had walked a little way off and was looking up-sun with one hand shading her helmet’s faceplate, probably because she didn’t know how to polarise it. Tony pulled up a window with an augmented view, but couldn’t spot anything other than sand and rock. No alien ruins, no glittering city, no deputation of big-brained ambassadors from a lost race. In the far distance, the horizon looked a little hazier than it had before, perhaps the sky was a little darker . . .

‘It’s just sand blowing in the wind,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t there a moment ago. It just sort of jumped up. I think it’s heading our way.’

Tony used his pressure suit’s radar. The signal was faint and fuzzy, but something was definitely moving towards them, moving fast, five or six kilometres a second and rising into the sky as it came on, already turning the sun blood-red.

‘Maybe we should get back to the ship,’ Dave Clegg said.

‘I don’t think we have time,’ Tony said.

A wind got up around them, blowing dust across the blocky pavement, blowing tendrils of sand that whirled high into the air, thickening into columns and sheets that leaned above them. ‘Jesus fuck,’ Dave Clegg said, and then the sandstorm hit.

Lisa was battered to her knees in a jet-engine roar of wind-blown sand, but somehow knew, kneeling there in the stiff pressure suit and the calm bubble of her helmet, that she wasn’t in any danger. She remembered a picture in her Grammy’s house, a blonde angel with white wings and a white silk robe hovering beside a little boy and girl as they crossed a rickety bridge over a raging torrent, and smiled at the bathos of it. The eidolon was an unknowable alien intelligence, neither angel nor devil, yet she felt stupidly comforted.

It had woken just before the storm had hit. Lisa had found herself staring at the horizon with her ghost at her back, had felt as if clear light had zapped through every one of the optical fibres the wizards had grown in her brain.
Wake up! Pay attention!
And she was definitely more alert now, was back in her self, back in the world, although she was still bone-tired and soul-bruised, felt as if the wizards had left their grubby fingerprints on every cell of her body. And worse than any damage inflicted by their stupid experiments was the deep aching sense of being irrevocably lost in time and space. Everything she had known, everything that defined her, had been torn away. She had been shanghaied and thrust into the future and there was no way back. No way back to her home. No way back to her life.

Sand smashed into her, hissed over her helmet, accumulated in creases in the material of her suit. Stuttering chains of sparks whirled past and vanished in the dim red rush like the shapes she’d seen flickering in the current of Ghajar narrative code when she’d first opened it, back in Bria’s code farm more than a century ago, and she felt herself tugged after those fugitive constellations like a balloon on a breeze, thought that it would be so easy to let go . . .