Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (24 page)

THIRTY-FIVE

VACHSS STATION, VIJAYA ORBIT, 2166 AD

‘They hate me,' Jared told her, ‘because I smell funny. Please help me, Aunt Rekka.'

Yoga be damned: a migraine was pulsing over Rekka's right eye, refusing to diminish no matter how calmly she breathed. This trip was going dreadfully wrong.

The new orbital station, which would eventually be in geo-synch above Mint City, where Sharp had died – had sacrificed himself – was filled with a mixture of Haxigoji and humans. This was to have been a happy reunion, Rekka's first meeting for nearly twenty years with Bittersweet, whom she had not seen since Singapore, and her first return to Vijaya itself. The world whose name she had chosen – first contact privilege, a practice since revoked by UNSA. It had been fully twenty years since her time with dear, courageous Sharp.

Instead, here was Jared nearly grown up – aged nineteen – and in trouble for flaring up literally, as only a Pilot could: using a bioluminescent flash to blind four Haxigoji who had grown perturbed by Jared's presence for reasons no one had explained, not to any human's satisfaction.

‘That's what I've been trying to do,' said Rekka. ‘I
am
helping you, Jared.'

Her protests to the on-board staff, that Jared had been frightened, a young Pilot away from Earth on a study trip, had caused massive debate among the Haxigoji – which they carried out with translator torcs turned off, so no humans could understand. Meantime, the senior human officials were furious with Rekka for the upset she had caused; she in turn raged back at them, because she had known Jared since he was a
baby,
and
she was the person who had made first contact with the Haxigoji – didn't they
know?
– so why the
hell
was tension ramping up on both sides over an incident that could only be due to cross cultural misunderstanding, and what kind of trained personnel were they if they could not sort out such a mishap, and prevent it from escalating to anywhere near the stage it had reached . . .

Except that later, with time to herself, and now face to face with Jared in the cabin he had been confined to, it grew on her that she had known Jared
when
he was a baby, not
since
he was a baby. The young Pilot in front of her was a stranger.

Of course he had lived in the Kyoto school since Rudolf and Angela had died, and his visits home to Singapore had grown ever less frequent over the years. When he made the move to ShaanxiThree, Rekka found out only by administrative accident: she was copied in on the full itinerary for the two Senators Highashionna as they made another tour of UNSA sites in Asia, and it turned out that they were spending time with select young Pilots in China – not quite protégés, but youngsters they had mentored from time to time – one of whom was listed as Jared Schenck, in training at the biggest base in Shaanxi Province. Rekka had thought he was still living in Japan.

‘I can't believe that
they
think
I
smell,' said Jared now.

His tone implied that the Haxigoji were beasts and he was slumming it by being here.

I really don't know you, do I?

Rekka's infostrand, worn as a bracelet, vibrated against her wrist. She tapped it, and a tiny holosigil representing Bitter-sweet was projected in the air.

‘I'll try to sort something out,' Rekka told Jared, not answering the call yet. ‘All right? So you can get off this station without fuss.'

‘Well, good.' He made no move to step forward and hug her. ‘Good.'

She nodded, slid the door open, and stepped out into the
corridor. Several male Haxigoji, bulky with muscle, guarded each end. She looked at them, then locked the door behind her.

‘Sorry.' She opened the call from Bittersweet. ‘I'm glad you're here.'

‘I've just arrived on board.'

The words sounded flat, though the comms net was capable of transmitting the full emotional range of scent-speech as translated by the Haxigoji torcs.

‘Our shuttle had to wait,' Bittersweet added, ‘because of the passenger container.'

‘What container?'

‘It has humans aboard, including a senator. They are waking up very angry.'

This did not make sense, apart from the obvious part about waking up: passengers coming out of delta-coma, after a Pilot had dropped them off.

‘Not a Senator Higashionna,' said Rekka. ‘Not one of them.'

For a moment, she thought she was being stupid, expecting Bittersweet to know people's names. But Bittersweet answered: ‘No, a Senator Margolis. Is this important, Rekka?'

‘I don't . . . It would have been a strange coincidence, that's all.'

‘Then please come to the docking lounge.'

‘Yes, I will.'

The comm session ended.

I've never been so confused.

But her questions about the Higashionnas derived from a hot Arizona day, back when Sharp was still on Earth, and they had watched Simon's brother Gwillem doing his aikido demonstration. Senators Robert and Luisa Higashionna had been there as VIPs. Afterwards, watching them depart in a TDV, Sharp had seemed puzzled by Rekka's lack of reaction towards them.

‘Do you not taste their evil?' he had asked her.

‘Evil?'

‘Can you not smell dark nothing?'

She had been puzzled at the time, but had never forgotten his words.

Do you not taste their evil?

Another vessel hung near Vachss Station, maintaining a watch on the docked shuttle and eavesdropping on the in-station comms net. This vessel was shining and fast-looking, her central body pure silver, her delta wings copper and crossed with silver. Her Pilot had obsidian eyes, black-on-black, while another sat in the control cabin alongside her: an older Pilot, grey-haired, with metal sockets where his eyes had been before the surgery.

The latter was humming to himself as he listened in on the signals. Finally, he stopped and turned to the younger Pilot, Ro McNamara, who was sitting there and trying to remain calm. These were interesting days, because as the first natural-born Pilot she had not needed UNSA surgeons and bio technicians to make her what she was; but without UNSA she would have had no ship, no way to fulfil her purpose in life.

What she could not abide was the notion that all the younger Pilots living now, and generations still unborn, would face a stark binary choice between effective slavery or an unfulfilled and hollow life.

And her friend here, Claude Chalou, though he had non Pilot family on Earth, and worked as an academic – he had been Dirk's tutor at Oxford – missed mu-space dreadfully; but he was too old to fly, as decreed by the UNSA powers-that-be, and that was it. Career over.

No one in UNSA considered mu-space as anything other than a milieu for sailing-routes along which vessels moved at their direction, for the sole purpose of shifting goods and people among the realspace colonies, research stations and Earth. The idea that mu-space was an entire universe in which Pilots might want to live . . . that had never, it seemed, occurred to them.

Until now, of course, there had been no place
for
a Pilot to live, no habitable location, except in realspace. But that was changing, and the stolen matter-compiler that Ro was transporting in her hold right now (and whose theft, or at least illegal export, Claude had assisted with) would be one more component in making this so.

But in order to carry out that mission – when everything she did was monitored by UNSA flight controllers, with no reason to go into mu-space except on a designated flight – she had temporarily abandoned a pod containing her VIP passengers, all deep in delta coma, leaving them to float safely in deep space. Then she had picked them up once more, and delivered them here to their destination; but they were late, and the effects of such a long time in coma, with two insertions into mu-space, were unpredictable: severe headaches at best.

‘Look . . .' Claude's gravelly Gallic voice took her out of her thoughts. ‘This explorer, Mam'selle Chandri, who has caused so much trouble . . . If you slip away quietly, there will be little fuss. She's all they're interested in.'

He was right, but as yet, Ro did not know whether her passengers were OK.

‘What if one of the passengers fails to wake up?'

‘And what if station personnel demand to scan the holds?' Claude asked. ‘Standard procedure in an accident.'

‘They won't find any malfunction.'

‘But' – Claude raised a bushy eyebrow above one metallic eye socket – ‘they might find the matter compiler which MacLean and I stole for you.'

‘Goddamn it, Claude.' She pronounced his name correctly, Claude-rhymes-with-ode, courtesy of her Zurich upbringing. ‘The passengers are my responsibility.'

He considered this, then nodded. ‘
C'est ça. C'est exact, bien sûr.
'

So they were in agreement. But as soon as Ro learned that the passengers had woken without medical emergencies, she
was taking herself and Claude out of here. It was not just that the matter compiler in her ship's hold was needed in mu-space – she had also made a binding promise to Claude that he would finally see, after years of blindness on Earth, the secret project-in-progress that select Pilots knew about. No one else in UNSA suspected that such a thing might be possible, never mind that such construction was already being carried out in a clandestine fashion, with volunteers working hard for the sake of the future.

Claude deserved to see the first huge constructions, the oddly growing halls and bays and courts that were already forming in ways that went beyond design parameters, with inherent systems evincing properties that excited the Pilots working there, for they exceeded anything that had been de liberately planned.

Labyrinth was going to be magnificent.

Bittersweet's eyes changed colour from amber to honey as the light shifted. Her tabard and trews were grey, edged with silver, and there were flecks of grey in her fur. She was accompanied by a broad-antlered male who bowed deeply when Rekka said: ‘Redolent Mint. How are you doing, old friend?'

‘Well, thank you, Rekka.'

It had been a long time since Singapore, when Redolent Mint had been foremost among the bodyguards accompanying Bittersweet; except he had always been more than that, and was now clearly of senior rank.

He withdrew now, leaving Bittersweet and Rekka to talk in private, in a screened-off area of the arrivals/departures lounge. No one else was around: the centre of attention was currently the medical bay, where human passengers were being examined and awakened from delta-coma.

‘We always meet,' said Bittersweet through her torc, ‘in surroundings your people have built.'

Rekka nodded, knowing Bittersweet understood the gesture.

‘And yet you are family to this Jared Schenck,' Bittersweet continued. ‘Is that not true?'

‘Friend of the family.'

‘Perhaps, in any case, it is not hereditary.'

‘Excuse me?' Rekka tried to work this out. ‘Are we talking about Jared?'

But Bittersweet was gesturing around the meeting area.

‘This is official, Rekka. We wish to constrain the relation ships between your people and ours.'

Rekka was not here as a UN ambassador: her objective had been to sort out the mess that Jared had caused, nothing more.

‘Your people that Jared attacked' – Rekka knew that
attack
might imply some legal liability, but no longer cared – ‘have refused medical treatment. They insisted, or their friends insisted for them, on returning to the surface.'

‘To where they felt safe,' said Bittersweet.

More turmoil in Rekka's head: she had come to rescue Jared only to find him unlikeable at best; and now it seemed the Haxigoji were scared, of Jared or something more.

‘I don't understand, Bittersweet.'

The reply stopped Rekka's heart for a moment.

‘Do you not smell the darkness, Rekka Chandri?'

They finally said farewell in a calm, regretful fashion, after Bittersweet had detailed terms which Rekka knew that UNSA would have to agree with: Vachss Station alone to be where humans were based, with no more of the constant traffic between surface and orbital. Human individuals were to be allowed down to the surface only on occasion, after they had been vetted in advance, right here, by Haxigoji officials. The numbers of Haxigoji living on Vachss Station would diminish; and while they were here, they would live in separate quarters, capable of being isolated from the rest of the station, and equipped with drop-bugs that would allow them to evacuate and descend safely to Vijaya's surface in case of emergency.

No definition of a likely emergency was ever spelt out.

As for Jared Schenck, the Haxigoji wanted him off the station as soon as possible, with no word said about punishment. Rekka felt they needed him to be far away, and that was enough; of course she agreed.

Finally Bittersweet's double-thumbed hand grasped Rekka's shoulder.

‘We will not meet again, I think.'

‘No . . .' Rekka blinked. ‘I need to say . . . about Sharp.'

The grip, which could have crushed her shoulder, tightened just a fraction.

‘What about my brother?'

Rekka sniffed.

‘I loved him,' she said. ‘I've never met anyone as brave.'

‘Neither have I, dear Rekka.' Bittersweet's alien eyes softened. ‘Neither have I.'

She bowed and walked away.

THIRTY-SIX

NULAPEIRON, 2713-2721 AD

At one point early in the extended process of self-transformation, something happened to give Kenna pause. Inside the Oraculum, where Lord Alvix's proto-Oracles, still children, lay dreamily on couches and occasionally muttered fragments relating to future perceptions, the one called Mandia turned her head to stare at the wall – right where Kenna's main sensors were hidden – and focused her eyes to an unusual extent.

‘Liquid. Crystal.
Moving,'
she said, then turned her head away.

Her shoulders slumped into normal listlessness.

No. This tells me nothing new
.

In particular, it did not guarantee Kenna's success.

As for the alpha-class servitors who tended the poor, damaged children, they were unlikely to make anything of those words, for Kenna had hidden her project nicely. And of course the original crystal spearhead was long gone, no doubt in Labyrinth now. She wondered what the Admiralty analysts were making of it; but she had her own concerns, and in truth, she was neither Pilot nor ordinary human these days. She was a cyborg on the threshold of becoming something else.

Except that the transition took another eight years of preparation, by which time Mandia had become a young woman, or nearly so, and her Oracular perceptions had diminished as the rest of her brain rewired itself defensively: a process the researchers had allowed to continue, because it allowed them to analyse the warning signs of such reversal, and the complex neurochemical changes they would need to prevent in order to create true Oracles.

To Kenna, it implied that Mandia, unlike her fellow pro-to-Oracles whose health was dreadful and worsening, might some day be able to take care of herself, living a reasonably independent life, provided her environment was not overly challenging.

Kenna's timetable matched the weightiness of her intent: to get everything right, she expected another five years of work, and would be happy if it was longer. No sense of hurry infected her work, until one Shyedemday in the month of Jyueech, when her most distant sensors perceived alarm signals at the Palace perimeter, along with the tang of burnt flesh, before coherent graser beams tore through her furthest components and all sensation there was lost.

Palace Avernon was under attack.

My fault, Alvix
.

Her Liege Lord – except that she had never sworn legal fealty, neither to him nor his forebears, not even the Duke – had made enemies, by virtue of his experimental Oraculum, and the potential wealth and political threat it represented. She should have been more forceful in telling him to form strong alliances, or else in strengthening his demesne's defences. Even now she could sense Palace guards, attempting to rush to the attack location, being blocked by quickstone walls flowing across corridors and hardening in place, resistant even to grasers: the result of sophisticated sabotage, subverting the Palace itself.

She had done the same, of course, for very different purposes.

I'm years from being ready
.

But she was even less prepared to die, and if the Palace was being attacked with subversive femtovectors, she had to trigger the transfer now, before her distributed self could be caught up in the sabotageware attack, and her mind was rewritten. That could not be allowed.

So it happens today
.

Quickstone under her control melted away, forming access
tunnels to a hidden chamber where her masterpiece lay on a couch formed of steel and platinum: a body of living crystal, grown and adapted from a tiny fragment of that ancient crystal spearhead, linked by a thousand crystal fibres to her cyborg nervous system, embedded in the Palace walls.

Some fibres ran all the way to her pseudo-face and other components splayed against the side of Alvix's main laboratory chamber, where he had been working but had now vacated – her optical surveillance sensors told her in the seconds before she shut them down for ever – and was now running towards the Great Hall, calling for Lady Suzanne.

Conscious of her face on that laboratory wall, she closed her eyes for the final time, and felt her sensations withdraw as she triggered the process now.

System.getController(  ).getTransform(Project.Metamorph).initialize( )

Every part of her seemed to shudder, though she had no proprioceptive or autokinetic senses in her current form, the distributed body she was about to leave.

And she wanted to scream but her output channels were already disconnected; and then it began.

Transfer.

Afterwards, it was like remembering dying – again – with every separate thread and shard of cognition accompanied by howling, burning pain. Cascades of processes split apart, rushed headlong to their new receptacles, and came crashing together in a torrent of new computation, far closer to death than birth because a baby during expulsion from the womb is yet to have a mind, while she destroyed – had to destroy – every part of her complex, long-lived self in order to survive.

The ceiling was above/before her when she opened her eyes.

I will have to move
.

This was supposed to have been years in duration, the process of learning to move once more, the gradual sharing of
thoughts between her Palace embedded self and this new – glorious! – form. But her old self was gone.

Really move, because they can kill me now
.

She looked like nothing anyone would recognise. Any Palace guard or member of the attacking forces would trigger their weapons at the sight of her, and at this stage she was not even sure that she could walk, let alone run or fight.

The transformation, performed this way instead of to plan, had left her vulnerable. A baby without care will not survive; but she
had
to survive, because she was needed, and if she could not get through one armed attack, what use would she be in the great confrontation to come?

She wondered if Alvix was calling her, if he had time to be shocked or feel regret at her old self's death, or whether he was wrapped up in thoughts of his own and Lady Suzanne's survival. That probably depended on the attack force's orders: if their objective was to steal the contents of the Oraculum and get away, that would bode better than if they intended to secure the Palace while an occupation force made its way here, and then took over.

Strange sensations washed through her as she sat up – for the first time in over a century – and looked down at her new body. Everything was immediate and odd and beautiful in its intensity, and the danger lay in her growing enraptured at her own existence and failing to take action right now because this was mortal danger unless she got her act together and actually bloody
moved
.

Fibres withdrew into her, disconnecting her from the old, dead Kenna system, and then she did something simple, ordinary and yet entirely miraculous: she swung her legs to one side of the couch, leant forward . . .

Amazing
.

. . . and stood.

On actual feet.

With legs.

A body.

Arms and hands . . .

Focus
.

Everything so wonderful.

Focus now
.

She swayed, balance tipping. Corrected herself.

Got it
.

Took a step.

A second step.

Definitely got it now
.

Third step, and it was almost automatic, in time with a distant bang followed by screams.

Time to really move.

She was most of the way to one of her primary escape routes, feeling guilty yet desperate because of her selfish focus on survival of self – and hang the rest – when she saw in her mind's eye a helpless, addled girl-woman, the victim of worldly ambition more than logosophical exploration, and then there was a feeling of relief that it was necessary to go back and confront the danger. There are times when you want to do something and are scared to, have found excuses to avoid it; and then some factor forces you to do it anyway, and all you can feel is thankful that you've been forced to do the right thing, to confront the fear: that was how Kenna felt now.

Mandia had foreseen liquid crystal moving, but to Kenna's knowledge the poor girl had never had an opportunity to see such a thing; yet every prediction was a verbal description of something she was to see in the future. For her prediction to be true, she must survive the armed assault in order to see . . . well, Kenna as she was now. So for all her vulnerability in her stumbling new body, Kenna could not abandon Mandia, not if there was a risk of Mandia's dying.

The alternative was . . . what? Death by paradox? The self-immolation of a closed time like curve of events? Of people that had existed and events that had occurred but would turn out never to have been?

Once upon a time I was a fighter.

Never mind her notions of becoming a general, a chief of staff, a war leader in ages to come: this was immediate, raw, physical danger and she had to face it or the rest was nonsense. She gestured to the nearest wall, and waited for the Palace to recognise the codes she broadcast by microwave from her hand. It took a full half-second for the Palace to make the adjustment to her new form; then the wall liquefied and melted open, revealing one of the hidden servitor tunnels (it would not do for the nobility to be distracted by the sight of menial workers engaged on mundane tasks) and stepped inside.

Leaning forward slightly, she forced herself into a shuffling jog, a shamble compared to her mental image of running freely, but as she followed the tunnel her gait became smoother, then smoother again, through an incremental sequence of improvements; and by the time she drew near to the Oraculum, she was running faster than any but the fittest of endurance athletes.

Armed attackers were entering the tunnel up ahead, but she gestured and the quickstone wall slammed down on them, burying them. Then she was running past and a new opening was growing in front of her, and when she leapt through she was in the Oraculum, where the proto-Oracles were thrashing on their couches – only Mandia was upright, struggling to stand – and the staff were gone, either fled or helping the fighters outside: graser fire caused the air to crackle in the surrounding corridors.

Kenna grabbed Mandia.

The others were helpless, but Kenna had to accept her current limitations, and save the one she could. She hauled Mandia into another, newly opened servitor tunnel, commanded the entrance to flow shut, and pulled Mandia into a staggering run. When they had made enough distance horizontally, Kenna stopped, holding Mandia upright – the girl was wheezing, wet with sweat and trembling – and commanded the floor to melt.

At this point the Palace was five levels deep, but where they stood was above internal walls, five metres thick or more, in the lower levels. They sank downwards – in a bubble of air for Mandia's sake – until they were all the way through and below the Palace, coming into a corridor in the Secundum Stratum.

By chance it was deserted for the moment: a polished marble-like corridor with clean lines, not too different from the style of the Primum Stratum where the Palace was situated, except that here the surroundings were solid, not quickstone, with little in the way of inbuilt systems.

I'll need disguise.

So much for planning in advance. Leaving Mandia slumped against the wall, Kenna jogged along the corridor, knowing she had to do something fast: she was a woman formed entirely of crystal and there was no way she could blend in while looking like this.

Here.

It was a store fronted by vitreous membrane that was currently hard and opaque, not open for business, and it came to Kenna that this must be one of those areas where everything was brightly lit all the time, and people chose sleep-wake cycles to suit themselves individually, unlike the communal-consent approach which was the most common alternative.

The membrane liquefied and Kenna stepped through, leaving it softened because she was going to exit through it very shortly. There were clothing racks – the store was dark but she could see well enough – and she found leggings, pulled them on, then smart-boots that wrapped around her feet and calves, tightening themselves in place. Then a dark tunic with long sleeves, and when she pulled it on, the sleeves lengthened to cover her transparent hands all the way to the fingertips, and morphed to form integral gloves. Finally a full-length hooded cloak.

A small payment pad rested on a shelf, requesting recompense for the garments that the customer was purchasing.
Kenna had no time to decipher its protocols – there had been nothing like this in the Palace – so she reached out and crushed it into powder instead.

No alarms followed.

Good enough.

When she went back out, there was still no one in sight, but voices drifted from around a long curve in the corridor: easy conversation, a light laugh, and total ignorance of the violence taking place in the Primum Stratum above. Kenna slipped away in the opposite direction, pulling her hood low, and returned to Mandia, who was now sitting on the floor, back against the wall, staring blankly.

Once more Kenna pulled Mandia upright, and supported her as they walked, coming out into a larger thoroughfare where people did not quite stare at them – this was a polite place – as they headed for a large, platinum-inlaid disc on the floor. Ruby lights winked at their approach, and Kenna pressed Mandia's palm against a horizontal pad atop a waist-high stalk, a metre from the disc – which began to rotate and separate into a complex affair of blade-like segments that clacked and clattered, then dropped to form a helical staircase. The rotation stopped as the treads snapped into place.

Kenna kept one arm around Mandia's waist as they descended. Once down and clear of the treads, the whole assemblage reversed procedure, pulling upwards and turning as the disc reformed and locked into place – except that Kenna and Mandia were now below it: a circle on the ceiling of the Tertium Stratum, and one that would not grant access without specific authorisation.