Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (6 page)

TEN

EARTH, 1954 AD

During her four weeks in Birmingham, the place had grown on Gavriela: the house in a leafy, genteel part of Edgbaston, and the redbrick campus court with the clock tower that would have looked at home in Florence. The buildings were different from the Munich of her childhood and the ETH in Zurich (always München and Zürich in her thoughts), yet inside, the labs brought back her youth: parquet floors, display cases filled with scientific instruments of brass and steel, textbooks old and new.

To celebrate the end of rationing, some of the faculty and postgraduate students travelled
en masse
to one of the new Berni Inns, where they tucked in to solid food that the
haute cuisine
critics disparaged but which, to poverty stricken PhD students, was worth every penny of the seven-and-six they paid for it.

‘Seven shillings and sixpence will hardly break the bank,' Anders had said, before raising an eyebrow as he realised his faux pas, because if you were counting the ha'pennies then any expenditure at all was significant.

Gavriela's enjoyment was spoilt only by the knowledge that her watch team were outside in the night, unable to eat, apart from the lucky team member who got to dine alone, behind a square-edged pillar, keeping her in view. But it was hard to keep her mind on Dmitri and the clandestine world, because something odd had been happening: at the age of forty-seven, she was falling in love – all over again – with physics.

The move of GCHQ from Eastcote to Cheltenham was pending, and if relocating to Gloucestershire was on the cards,
then why not somewhere else? A theoretician over thirty was doomed, but age did not constrain experimentalists. Could she? What if she failed to make a change her metaphorical spirit needed?

‘—in the City?' asked Patrick, a Jamaican post-doc with the most beautiful voice Gavriela had ever heard. ‘The archaeologists, I mean.'

Only yesterday she had passed a boarding-house in Kings Heath bearing the far-too-common sign:
No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs
.

‘Which city? Birming-gum?' She tried for a Brummie accent, and failed.

‘He means jolly old London,' said Anders. ‘Threadneedle Street and bowler hats, don't you know.' Not that bowlers were unknown among the faculty. ‘And now a Roman temple.'

Too busy with the contents of the departmental library, Gavriela had been ignoring the newspapers; the conversation was making little sense.

‘The Temple of Mithras,' explained Patrick. ‘Uncovered intact during building work.'

‘Next to one of the so called secret rivers, the underground Thames tributaries.' Anders nodded to Patrick. ‘It
is
interesting.' He smiled. ‘People are saying the place is haunted, a mysterious figure glimpsed at night, that kind of thing.'

But that was as far as the topic stretched among rational scientists, so Gavriela asked Patrick about his work with the new cryogenics equipment, investigating fluids that could flow by themselves unrestrained by viscosity, or conduct currents without experiencing resistance.

‘Stuff that spontaneously creeps up inside a flask,' said Patrick. ‘Spooky weirdness at a dimension you can see.'

There were understanding nods all around, because solving Schrödinger's wave equation was mechanical: as pragmatic practitioners, they ignored philosophical weirdness, and simply put the recipe to work, hoping that someday a new
theory would bring forth a more reasonable metaphor. Counter-intuitive quantum phenomena, challenging concepts as basic as cause and effect, were unsettling in objects you could hold in your hand, although in this case you would need a massively insulated gauntlet.

After the meal, Anders gave Patrick and Gavriela a lift in his new Morris Minor – for propriety's sake, dropping Gavriela off first. But she paused in the redbrick porch with the stained-glass panel above the front door, waiting for the Morris to drive out of sight, and her escort team to pull up at the kerb.

Only then, with her protection, did she go inside.

An empty house reveals itself by lack of vibration, but there is such a thing as self-deception, not to mention bombs and timers, so they went through the place – tonight they had been too overstretched to leave a watcher on guard – and at first found nothing. But during the second pass—

Oh, no. Don't bring children into this
.

In the bedside drawer – how had Dmitri, if it was Dmitri, known she would check there first? – she found a glossy monochrome photograph featuring a youngster and two adults, and she might have ignored it except that the schoolgirl, some eleven or twelve years old – around Carl's age – was like her brother brought back to life: Erik's features in feminine form.

With Ilse, Erik's wife – widow, and it was a surprise that she had survived – standing alongside a smiling Dmitri Shtemenko, they looked like a family group. Gavriela wished she could believe it to be technical trickery on the KGB's behalf, instead of what it seemed: Dmitri, so monstrous, in her dead brother's place.

And Gavriela had a new family member: for niece, read hostage.

So when are you going to make your move?

But if Dmitri were intending to exert pressure on Gavriela, recruiting her for his Soviet masters, there was a way to neutralise the threat: render herself unsuitable. In operant conditioning terms she now had both positive and negative rewards
awaiting, should she choose to resign: returning to her first love, and avoiding the betrayal of her adopted country.

Assuming that was Dmitri's intent.

Term-time came and with it the end of the operation, without results, since Gavriela had said nothing of the photograph she finally burnt, an action she regretted afterwards. Back home with Carl, and with moving house inevitable even if she stayed in her current job – because of the organisation's westward relocation – she made her decision, and went to talk to Russell Sheffield, the head of section to whom she reported.

From behind his desk, he listened to her explanation as he whittled through his unlit meerschaum with a flexible pipe-cleaner. In the past, he had often given her unused pipe-cleaners to take home for Carl: they were excellent for creating geometric framework shapes, though her attempt to explain a hypercube had been premature. Perhaps when Carl was older.

‘I found an old acquaintance working at Imperial,' she said, ‘who'll put in a good word for me. And they're actively looking for researchers.'

Lucas Krause, last seen heading off to the States with his new wife during the war, was back in London and settled down. It would be strange to have a link to her student days, all the way back to attending her first lecture and Professor Möller with the flowing white hair and the spectacular demonstration with the tall wire basket.

‘I rather considered that kind of thing myself, returning to the halls of academe' – Sheffield looked up from his pipe-cleaning operation – ‘when I was younger.'

‘Point taken, sir.'

At least he had not insulted her by dragging out the matter of her pension, and the extent to which it might be reduced by her departing now. But she was not the only one making big decisions: the atmosphere around the place, as work-in-progress files went into archive cases for transportation to the
new site, was very odd, with choppy conversations and unsettled expressions everywhere.

‘If you're truly certain' – he put down his pipe, stood up, and reached out across the desktop – ‘then I'll shake your hand and wish you the best of luck, old girl.'

She stood up, and they shook.

‘You know I—' But there was no way to complete the sentence.

‘After they kick me out of this place, I'll be tending roses,' said Sheffield, ‘or pushing up daisies. Certainly not good for anything else. I do believe I'm rather envious.'

Gavriela gave a sad laugh.

This was a lot like leaving home.

On her first day at Imperial, walking beneath an open window of the Royal College of Music, she heard a breath-catching rendition of a Mozart piece for string quartet. Across the road reared the dome of the Royal Albert Hall, where perhaps the students would play one day, if they hadn't already. As for her, this was like the first day of term, a new beginning – like Carl off to school in his cap and gaberdine raincoat, satchel and plimsole bag slung from one shoulder – except that she had an old friend waiting for her in the Huxley building reception: Lucas, his once-curly hair now receded and merely wavy, controlled by hair-tonic. She could smell the Silvikrin.

‘Gabrielle.' It was a good start, remembering not to call her Gavriela. ‘I'll show you to your office.'

They shook hands while the porter watched, though Gavriela would rather have hugged him.

‘How's your wife, er—?'

‘Enjoying Nebraska,' he said. ‘Come on, we'll drop off your coat and you can meet everyone.'

Upstairs, she found that her room was pokey, featuring a scarred desk maybe half the size of the one she had used in Eastcote, with cardboard folded beneath one leg for stability.

‘It's wonderful,' she said.

A stack of loose-leaf pages bore columns of figures with headings like Declination, Azimuth and Peak, along with pencil-drawn graphs.

‘Readings from the old instrumentation,' said Lucas. ‘You'll have plenty of your own soon enough.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘Most of us really aren't that good at stats.' Lucas meant statistical analysis ‘Good luck on plucking meaning out of that lot, but the rest of us can't.'

He was not really talking about the data; it was more an oblique acknowledgment of her time spent on work she could never discuss, for most of the eight years since the war, a gap she would have to fill with fiction as far as her other colleagues were concerned.

The strange thing was, as she fell asleep that night, she half-dreamed of deciphering a pattern in just such data, though not now, not yet: something do with meson detection and an equilateral triangle that could not be explained, yet neither could it be ignored. An insight she would keep to herself . . . A comforting thought, as she drifted further into sleep.

Secrecy kept her safe.

ELEVEN

LUNA, 503970 AD

Crystalline and serene, Roger and Gavriela held hands as they stared up at the crimson-banded disc of Earth. To him it was the species' birthplace, an ancestral home, but she had been born and lived her organic life there, half a million years ago.

—What do you think is going to happen, Roger?

—I've long given up trying to read Kenna's mind
.

Kenna had told them, pleased that they were here at this time together, that something interesting was about to occur, and they might like to view it from one of the many balconies. And so they had come outside, watching from mid-way up the titanic, complex palace that their headquarters had become over hundreds of millennia. In the beginning, electro-magnetic distortion fields had hidden the place, but for a long time, according to Kenna, there had been no need to hide.

No explanation embellished that item of information, and Roger and Gavriela knew better than to ask, because there were severe limits on such knowledge as could be taken into the past to their original minds, despite such thoughts being buried beneath layers of amnesia and misdirection, unavailable to their long-dead conscious selves.

They both remembered what Kenna had told Roger a century earlier.

—This is not the first Ragnarok Council
.

—If we're the second, what happened to the others?

—They perished in paradox
.
I will not allow you to fall that way
.

Silver discs were growing on the planet's surface, thirteen of them fully or partly visible, covering land or sea without distinction, then stabilising as unmoving dots.

Kenna stepped onto the balcony.

—The Diaspora has been a long time coming. Its execution is fast
.

Gavriela asked:

—Humanity's leaving Earth?

—You could say that
.

Whatever craft they used would be invisible from here.

—And do Pilots like Roger still exist?

—I dare not learn the answer to that myself
.

Roger was about to ask a question concerning the future, but Kenna forestalled him.

—We should wait a century for things to settle. Perhaps two centuries
.

—Before doing what?

Starlight reflections painted Kenna's crystal smile.

—Making Earth ready for the warriors to come. Our very own Einherjar
.

They were perfectly adapted to vacuum; yet Roger and Gavriela shivered.

Perhaps a part of them had hoped that Ragnarökkr could yet be avoided.

TWELVE

VIJAYA ORBIT, 2604 AD

Since its construction in the decades following first contact with the Haxigoji, the orbital called Vachss Station had become a floating city, kept in geosynch orbit above Mintberg (once Mint City, its renaming a xenosemantic subtlety), one of the hubs of global Haxigoji culture. Up here in orbit, the architecture was a complex embellishment of the station's original cage-like design, with polyhedral nodes, some the size of a single cabin, others the size of a thousand-room hotel, linked by giant spars, some of which were important thoroughfares, their corridors busy. Much of it glittered gold, due to the use of an exotic 2-D sulphur allotrope in its construction.

Everyone said the Haxigoji were a fine species, which was an anthropomorphic slant on things: their behaviour paralleled the best of human virtues, even the self-sacrificing pain involved in child-rearing, in the passing-on of knowledge. Only the manner of that sharing disconcerted human observers.

‘I find cannibalism hard to swallow,' Jed said in Spanalian.

He was in his control cabin, on slow approach to the orbital, its image rendered in sharp-contrast chiaroscuro in the holoramic display. A secondary volume showed Clara's face, her expression neutral. She was on board the orbital, having made things ready. Waiting for him.

‘Spanalian is not the only human language that talks about digesting knowledge,' she said. ‘And while Faraday used the concept of “field” as a metaphor to help understand electro-magnetic phenomena, Einstein said that physicists of
his
day “imbibed the concept with their mother's milk”, considering fields as real things.'

‘You're saying Einstein was one of the Haxigoji? Never saw antlers in any of the old holos.'

‘Food absorption, potentiation at the molecular level, and neural connection formation: it's all biochemistry, and languages reflect that. Metaphor from intuition. The human brain is basically a structured lump of fat.' Still no trace of a smile. ‘Some more so than others, wouldn't you say?'

‘I have no idea why I put up with this,' said Jed.

‘Because you love me.'

He looked at her lean, endurance-athlete features in the holo. Now she was smiling.

‘That must be it, then,' he said.

‘Good.' For a second, they stared at each other. ‘All right, we're ready to receive them both. Check their autodoc status?'

Still lightly conjoined with his ship, Jed knew the answer without checking the tertiary holo floating beside him: like bodily sensations, he
felt
the signals inside the passenger hold.

‘Check,' he said. ‘Both passengers fine and healthy, the autodocs say.'

‘Healthy.'

‘Yeah, until they wake up and remember everything.'

‘Shit,' said Clara.

Never mind all that stuff about fields and metaphors and cannibals, keeping them occupied while the on-station facilities made themselves ready. This was the Clara that Jed had fallen in love with: hard-edged, with the kind of practical compassion only a tough person can possess.

Station management gave Pilots a great deal of leeway – the orbital's total dependence made that a given – which they usually made little use of; but today, several tunnels were closed ‘for maintenance' to allow Jed and the two autodocs to pass unhindered, all the way to the on-station Pilots Sanctuary. In comparison to the set-up he had enjoyed on Fulgor, the elegant walled enclosure on the edge of Lucis City, this Sanctuary would be utilitarian, but never mind: this was no holiday.

Jed, along with his colleagues Angus and Al, had destroyed that other Sanctuary's systems before getting clear of the place when the planet fell, but the superstructure would have remained intact. Now any humans on Fulgor were components of the global gestalt Anomaly. He wondered if they used the buildings, or stood about outdoors in herds, uncaring of physical comfort.

Ants in a group mind. Cells in a body.

The Vachss Station Sanctuary entrance folded inwards, and the two autodocs slid inside, Jed following. As things sealed up behind him, the welcoming committee came forward: Clara, not huggable while working, with her boss Pavel Karelin, plus a hatchet-faced woman unknown to Jed.

‘Dr Sapherson will be on hand as we wake them up,' said Pavel. ‘Tannier has already been conscious for a period after leaving Molsin, so we'll do him first.'

‘And the other?' Jed placed a hand on the autodoc.

‘You talked to Leeja Rigelle, not to mention rescuing her. Perhaps yours should be the first face she sees.'

‘I'd only just said hello when everything went to hell. There's no actual, er, relationship. Although she was more than friendly with Roger.'

‘Friendliness is good.' The tiny muscles of Clara's face moved when she smiled.

‘This Roger—' began Sapherson.

‘Not available,' said Pavel.

Clara looked satisfied at the way he cut Sapherson off. No love lost, then.

‘We'll tell Leeja Rigelle, when she wakes up,' said Clara, ‘that Roger sent his love. Wishes he could be here, sort of thing.'

Sapherson said, ‘Why reassure her? The more off-balance she is, the easier she'll be to question.'

‘She's not a prisoner,' said Pavel.

Clara stared at Sapherson with loathing.

‘I'll make myself scarce,' said Jed. ‘Just in case some of that
classified stuff comes up, things I'm not meant to know.'

‘Yeah,' said Clara, still focused on Sapherson. ‘That might be best. When people learn a little too much, it doesn't always turn out well.'

Sapherson looked away.

I am
so
not going to ask
.

Jed headed for an inner doorway, hoping that the on-board systems could produce a decent cup of daistral.

‘Leeja thought Tannier was a bad influence,' said Clara later, when she and Jed were sitting up in bed together, drinking daistral. ‘When they met first, that is. Tough cop, getting Roger into trouble. But she's beginning to mellow towards him. To Tannier.'

‘And her world being destroyed? How did she cope with that?'

‘Ah, not well,' said Clara. ‘Not well at all.'

They hugged, side by side, careful with the daistral, thinking of all the ways the universe could rip people apart from each other.

‘I'm glad I found you.' Jed kissed her ear.

‘That's just what I was going to say.'

‘You want to know how glad?'

She smiled, putting down her drink.

‘Show me, show me.'

Pavel and Sapherson departed the next day, leaving Jed and Clara with the opportunity to spend delightful time together – ‘They owe me leave, but this counts as work, which is even better,' she told him – but after three more nights, it was time for her to go as well.

‘Just a few more days here for me,' said Jed. ‘I'll be back in Labyrinth in no time.'

‘You'd better be.'

The Sanctuary resident was a Pilot called Draper, one of the Shipless and an expert in xenoanthropology, busy turning his
study of Haxigoji culture into his life's work. Draper's girl-friend was a non-Pilot, an Earth-born bioengineer, pleasant enough company when they dined together, the four of them, before Clara left: Jed and Clara, Declan Draper and Emma Mbaka. Several hundred tonnes of export goods were due, later than scheduled, to be shuttle-lifted up to Vachss Station over the next few days. With the original Pilot pick-up cancelled, Draper was arranging for Jed to get the business, taking these and other products to Finbra V, Yukitran and Earth.

‘They'll expect a discount, what with you being here already,' Draper had said.

‘Perfectly reasonable,' Jed had answered.

‘And you'll deliver my report to Far Reach?'

‘Of course I will.'

Perhaps, as a Pilot without a ship of his own, Draper's anxiety to have full disclosure on any commercial deal, to show he was not receiving kickbacks, came from his dependence on others and his position in Sanctuary. But Pilots living in realspace were generally nervous. Schenck and his mu-space renegades were gone from Labyrinth, but no one knew how many Pilots still working among ordinary humans, whether undercover or openly like Draper, had been part of the conspiracy.

Everyone was under scrutiny, and Admiralty observers were everywhere, deconstructing history, reading between the lines. Every now and then, it was whispered, people disappeared for questioning, and did not necessarily return.

A few hours after Clara's departure, Jed was in a diamond-windowed lounge watching space tumble past. Different portions of Vachss Station rotated in different ways – spars along longitudinal axes, larger sub-assemblies of nodes and arcs around their individual centres – forming a kaleidoscopic mandala, something to watch while he thought about Clara.

His tu-ring beeped, and he acknowledged the request.

‘Got an arrival,' Draper said in a virtual holo. ‘Dropping off refugees from Fulgor. An
unscheduled
arrival.'

‘Sounds unusual.'

‘Says he picked them up while making a delivery on Berkivan-deux. They wanted to come here. Weren't being treated well where they were.'

‘Poor bastards.'

All Fulgor survivors had been double-checked by Admiralty teams for trace of Anomalous influence, but paranoia was understandable.

In the holo, Draper shrugged. ‘Holland didn't go into detail.'

‘Holland? That's the Pilot?'

‘Guy Holland, Labyrinth-based.'

‘Don't know him, but never mind,' said Jed. ‘I'll pop over and say hello.'

He considered taking Tannier and Leeja along: survivors of Molsin having something in common with refugees from Fulgor. It seemed a good idea, so he made the call, arranging to meet them in Receiving Lounge 17A. They must have been keen enough, because by the time Jed reached the lounge, Tannier and Leeja were already there, standing next to each other with shoulders almost touching.

Survivors together.

It seemed Tannier had already got to know some of the long-term station residents. He introduced a tall slim man called Vilok, who greeted Jed by pressing palms in the manner of someone from Hargdenia Polity.

‘We're not the only ones interested,' said Vilok, ‘in an unexpected arrival. See there.'

Through the far entrance, several Haxigoji were entering: six or seven antler-racked males, eight or ten females (or perhaps some young males), all in a group. Their fur ranged from cream to dark chocolate beneath their ornate, brocaded tunics and trews. Half again as tall as humans, with double thumbed hands and amber, horizontally slitted eyes.

By the standards of xeno evolution, they were practically identical to humanity.

In fact Clara, before leaving, had shown him holos of Vijayan embryos, so like their Terran counterparts, clumps of cells that twisted early on into a topological cylinder. She had shown off by quoting a centuries-old Earth scholar: ‘”It is not birth, marriage or death but gastrulation that is truly the most important event in your life.”'

Thinking about her, Jed took several moments to process Vilok's tension as he focused on a virtual holo emitted from his tu-ring. ‘Is something wrong?'

‘Pilot Holland is being . . . prevented from leaving his ship.'

He shared the holo: Haxigoji were crowding a flexible corridor whose far end was a smartmembrane placed against a visiting ship's hull.

‘And the refugees?' Jed glanced at the Haxigoji here in the lounge. ‘They're still on board the ship?'

‘They're almost here. Came directly from the hold via another—'

Jed ignored the holos, because the Haxigoji were moving towards an entrance from which a confused-looking group of people were emerging. No . . . They were converging on a single member of the group, a dark-skinned young man with an odd expression and disjointed gait, who stopped and said to the xenos: ‘My name. Is. Rick. Mbuli from. Ful-gor.'

Jed's skin crawled.

I've heard that name before
.

The Haxigoji were shuffling from left foot to right foot and back, over and over, in a form of agitation that appeared to surprise Vilok as much as Jed. But the name . . . And there was holo footage Jed had watched, he and Roger mulling over all that had happened.

Vilok said: ‘Why have they switched off their torcs?'

He meant the Haxigoji; Jed understood.

No
.

It came to Jed that the Haxigoji were psyching themselves up to attack a human for the first time ever, but if they were right then the danger was immense.

Not here
.

Clara was away and safe, but there were others here, hundreds on board and an entire inviting world below, and that could
not
be allowed to happen, not another Anomaly, not again.

Now
.

Fire exploded from Jed's tu-ring – not a feature of normal rings, not at all – and Mbuli's head detonated into strawberry spray, spattering everywhere; but that was not enough, so with tightened fist Jed kept the beam directed, playing up and down along the corpse, obliterating it, while sending a coded signal for Draper to get here now, and be ready with a smart-miasma capable of spreading through a room and hunting down every human cell with a given DNA sequence, because nothing of Mbuli could be allowed to persist.

Automated beam weapons, designed to be highly visible threats, swung down from the ceiling, while security personnel were already entering the lounge; but as Jed powered off his tu-ring's weapons, his viewpoint was blocked: over a dozen Haxigoji were moving between him and the security team, forming an arc with their backs towards Jed.

Protecting him.

Their torcs were still switched off, but a soft scent of triumphal rose petals rose from their bodies: a vote of thanks and approval for what he had done, whatever the legal consequences.

He hoped that Clara would not be disappointed.