Empty Space

The control-room displays came to life suddenly. In them Irene could see: jerky fragments  of light bobbing  along ribbed  slick-looking tunnels;  shadows caught  by a panicky glimpse behind; misleading images from the gas of nanocameras  now investing the wreck. Everything was processed to look ‘real’, arriving preassembled as a narrative from selected points of view, a software psychodrama in which Liv Hula dragged herself along, surrounded by a slow explosion of cable ripped off the walls during the salvage attempt. Through the eva faceplate her lips could be seen opening and closing, though nothing came out. Behind her, clearly imaged and yet difficult to understand,  something was emerging from the tunnel wall.

Irene, who had no intention of allowing the ship any time inside her, took a moment  to study the manual filter options. Then she shook Fat Antoyne awake.

‘Honey, I need you.’

Antoyne  crawled back  on  the  couch.  He  cleared  his  throat loudly. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘I wish there was time for that, I really do.’

Antoyne adjusted the displays but soon gave up the attempt to interpret what he was seeing. ‘Why is it drilling holes everywhere?’ he said.

‘We can none of us know that, Fat Antoyne.’

Liv Hula found herself at a junction  she recognised. The tunnel split into three. MENGER knelt solicitously over SIERPINSKI but  wrote  ‘curvature’, as if he was thinking  of something  else. For her part, SIERPINSKI stared down at the floor as if it had betrayed her. They had died the way every entradista  expected, doing what they wanted to do, and now cast three or four shadows each in this tableau of escalating bad luck. It was, in short, the classic entradista  soul-fuck, which Liv recalled with great contempt. ‘Come on,’ she was heard to urge them, looking back over her shoulder: ‘Everyone is culpable here, guys.’ Then, exactly four minutes  and thirty-two  seconds later: ‘For fuck’s sake, Antoyne, I’m back at the reactor housing.’ She was tired. Her senses were dull. She was running out of air. If she didn’t do something soon, the eva suit would perform an emergency spinal puncture, reduce her metabolic rate by twenty or thirty per cent, set its FTL beacon and  await extraction.  They would find her sitting on the floor, head slumped, legs splayed, HULA stencilled above her faceplate, another identical fuck-up in the house of fun. Behind the reactor she discovered the rest of the salvage team, tumbled  together in a heap. Unlike MENGER &  SIERPINSKI, her head-ups  told her, these bodies had high residual radiation  counts. They were armed with hand-held thermobarics, but seemed to have made no attempt to use them. Backed against the reactor housing, too tired to take any further action, watching a low-grade dosimeter alarm blink on and off in the side of her eye, she tried once more to raise the Nova Swing. ‘Hello? Are you getting this?’ A two-minute  gap, during which she seemed to whisper fractiously to herself before calling out, ‘Christ! The reactor’s heating up again!’ For Liv, yellow light fell through blue. There was a dull buzz, less a sound than a vibration in her central nervous sytem: a moment of vertigo. Then an object half a metre in diameter and two metres long emerged stealthily from the tunnel  wall beside her. It was made of some slick black ceramic. Along its sides, bizarre reflections from the context could be discerned as a calligraphy of dim blue splatters. It slipped out of the wall, two or three feet up, blind-looking but with an air of intelligence. It knew she was there. It was at her elbow. When she looked away, it bumped and pushed at her thigh. Her whole body filled with the taste of metal. She turned her head and tried to puke clear of her faceplate. Nothing  else happened, except that when she left, the artefact followed her attentively out into empty space, its blunt nose never more than ten inches away from her left hip. Comms sorted themselves as soon as she cleared the wreck. The first thing she heard was Antoyne’s voice.

‘Jesus, Liv, where have you been? Liv, if you can hear me, we believe the thing you saw is the item we were sent to collect.’

‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

After they attempted to store it separately, the new cargo drilled its way through the bulkheads until it could float between the other items in the main hold, its surface spattered with reflections which didn’t quite match the lighting pattern. It seemed newer than the others. It was certainly less knocked around.

‘You could shop for it,’ was Irene the mona’s conclusion.

She licked her finger and touched.  Tiny electric feelings! She liked it for its shiny values and — now that it could be examined more closely — those faint, smooth, organic deviations from the cylindrical  that  made  its  front  end  such  a  lighthearted  phallic parallel.  Fat  Antoyne  approached  with  more  caution,  and though the object allowed itself to be examined with a basic six-regime loupe, learned little. He couldn’t date it, he said. It was alien. It was ceramic all through,  although deep inside he found minutely-structured  variations  in  density  which  he took  to  be high-temperature superconducting  devices.

‘We’ll never know,’ he said, implying that someone else might.

Still shaken and sweating, with her electrolyte levels shot to hell, Liv Hula refused to enter  the hold, confining herself instead to the pilot cabin and a determined program of rehydration coupled with shots of Black Heart no ice. These puzzles had such nightmare significance for her, she said, she was reluctant even to join the discussion: but she had revised her estimate of the object’s age.

‘I think the salvage team brought it with them.’

Although what they had intended to do with it, she had no idea. If, as rumour  had it, MP Renoko had begun stripping the assets of Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant at around that time, perhaps they had acquired it from him, sight unseen as illegal items often were. Maybe it was some kind of mining machine. ‘As for this,’ she said, bringing up a blurred image of the Oklo reactor down in the wreck, ‘what to make of it?’ After four hundred  million years of downtime this crude artefact was back on its five hour cycle, venting hot steam into empty space for no purpose known to man. ‘I don’t think they were connected with one another at all.’

MENGER & SIERPINSKI haunted  Liv’s dreams from then on, seen waving to her through a radioactive glow, their headpieces enigmatically empty.

TWELVE I Am Not Renoko!

R.I. Gaines took his suitcase and left.

In the following days, the assistant tried to forget what she had seen. Routine being as important  to her as ever, she sat in her car, she sat in her office, she sat upright  in the immersion  tank  on C-Street watching herself come. Everywhere the job took her, she thought  up names for herself. She tried Ysabeau, Mirabelle, she tried Rosy Glo. She tried Sweet Thing and Pak 43. She was a police detective, in the street and in her car, looking in the wing mirror, signalling left or right. Day and night the town surrounded  her with all the elements of her profession: gun kiddies cruising the shadows, cutters up to their elbows in the black heart of humanity, trade goods smuggled down from the stars; soft intuitions, sneaking suspicions. She was taking  notes,  making  reports.  She was sitting at her desk while shadow operators crawled about among the papers like old cobwebs and dusty, unfinished hands. She tried Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire;  Stormo!  and  Te Faaturuma.  She dialled up the uniform branch and asked for Epstein.

‘That haulier  you boarded,’ he informed  her: ‘It’s long gone from Carver Field.’

She opened the Nova Swing paperwork across one wall. A picture of Epstein’s face appeared on another. ‘What’s a “mortsafe’? It says here they took on a “mortsafe”.’

‘You’re the educated one,’ Epstein’s face said.

He’d been at the Port Authority all morning, drinking java from a paper cup; then in the port itself. ‘Enka Mercury’s still here,’ he said. She was high in the warehouse ceiling now, the colour of oily smoke and tars, as transparent  as soap. She was still hanging open under one arm. Still dead. From a distance the flap of skin resembled  torn  cloth. ‘Get alongside Enka in the cherrypicker, you’ll detect what I’d call a faint but definite smell.’

‘She’s still rotating?’

‘Toni Reno too,’ the cop confirmed. ‘Although Toni seems a little slower today. I can provide footage of that.’