Newton's Wake

threw the shell sideways like a leaf. Sky and ground changed places, over and over. Armand’s hands left the controls and grabbed the ejector handles above his shoulders. Whirled and buffetted, Carlyle tried to do the same, but there was simply no chance to eject. The craft’s automation regained control far faster than any human pilot could have done, and brought it into the last seconds of a level flight at zero feet. With a rending screech, the craft hit the ground and chewed a path across the hillside, bumping and lurching, and finally came to a halt that threw both occupants forward then back.

The suits took most of the impact. Armand blew off the canopies. Carlyle hauled herself out after him and slid to the ground. They were on a hillside about a kilometre from the relic. Armand lifted his visor. ‘If you can walk away,’ he said, ‘it’s a landing.’

They were both looking up. Glowing bolides streaked across the sky in all directions, their paths radiating from the zenith. A bang followed in seconds and went on and on.

‘Fuck,’ Carlyle said.

‘At a wild guess, I’d say that was a spaceship exploding.’

‘Yeah. What got us was the downblast of a space-to-space missile.

Doesn’t usually destroy the ship directly, but a near enough nuke makes the main drive blow within about a minute.’ She frowned. ‘It’s a known bug.’

‘Poor bastards.’ Armand shook his head. ‘But they’ll all have had backups, no?’

They had started walking down the hill.

‘If they’re fae our firm,’ said Carlyle. ‘No if they’re Knights.’

‘Don’t they have the tech?’

‘Oh, sure. They just don’t use it.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Armand. ‘Why not?’

Carlyle shrugged, picking her way over tussocks. ‘It’s a physics thing.

They believe we’re all coming back.’

‘Reincarnation?’ Armand sounded scornful.

‘Hell, no,’ Carlyle said. ‘Cyclic cosmos.’

Armand guffawed. ‘Cold comfort.’

She paused to let him catch up, and gave him an offended frown. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘It’s no a religion or anything. They proved it. We’re living forever the now. This is it. Eternity.’ She remembered an ancient recording of a woman singing: It all comes back, in time. I certainly intend to.

‘So why do you take backups,’ Armand asked, ‘if you believe that?’

She thought about it. ‘It saves time.’

T

he Knight who walked up the hill to meet them was the most aged-looking person Carlyle had ever seen. The skin of his face was like old leather. Life-extension was another thing the Knights didn’t do. Or rather, they kept it natural. With herbal teas and Tantric sex and such like they had pushed their average lifespan to about a century and a half. This guy was at least two-thirds of the way there. Spry as a sparrow with it, though.

He wore black cotton trousers and T-shirt. The temperature was just above freezing and the wind chill was hellish. He wasn’t shivering, and his bare arms weren’t even goose-pimpled. Biofeedback yoga and general machismo—the Knights were heavily into both.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘The situation is under control.’

It always was, with the Knights.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Armand. ‘What just happened above us?’

‘A most regrettable loss of an enemy ship,’ the old man said. His gaze took in the company logo on their suits; flicked to Carlyle’s still-closed visor. For a moment, he seemed to stare right through its reflective surface to scan her non-optimal bone structure, then he turned away and pointed.

‘Your company is regrouping over there.’

‘Thank you,’ said Armand. The old man walked on up the hill.

As they made their way over to the growing assembly of people and materiel, Carlyle felt her knees wobble and her cheeks burn. To be associated with the loss of the search engine and probably of her original team was bad enough. To have the loss of a crew and—especially—of a ship linked to her name was appalling. Not that any of it was her fault, exactly, but in her family responsibility tended to be seen as causal, not moral.

The loss would undermine confidence in her. People would be that much more reluctant to join her teams, and the family that much less likely to underwrite her schemes. Backups were a boon to the survivors, not to the dead, and starships were expensive. Horrendously expensive. The firm had about twenty of them. She had just witnessed five percent of the family fleet and maybe one tenth of one percent of its net assets fall out of the sky like fireworks.

From the fringe of the clamourous huddle into which Armand had plunged, Carlyle looked up the hill to the henge and saw that the company troops there too were clearing off, making way for the tiny black-clad figures of the Knights. She scanned the nearby vehicles and troops, figured on her chances of somehow using these assets to break through. They weren’t good. Perhaps if Armand’s forces were allowed to remain on site, she could inveigle herself into the confidence of the Knights… .

Armand pushed back through the crowd, waving and directing as he went.

‘We’re pulling out,’ he told her. He grimaced. ‘The Knights insist on it, and the Joint Chiefs recommend it.’

People had started piling on to or into vehicles. Some of the vehicles were moving to deliberate gentle collisions, snapping together so that air-cars could lift ground vehicles and artillery. It would be a slow and overloaded evacuation, at least until the forces here could rendezvous with more powerful craft. Carlyle dogged it after Armand and clambered after him, to sit behind him like a pillion passenger on the fuselage of an aircar that formed the outrigger of an awkward aerial catamaran. Yells and a rattle of radio comms and they all moved off, watched impassively by a few of the Knights and recorded by a couple of news agencies that had evidently been allowed to remain on site.

‘It’s all a bit trial and error,’ Armand said over the radio. ‘We can dump this stuff in a depot on the coast and then get going a bit faster. Might even be able to plug together a hypersonic or two.’ He grinned over his shoulder at her. ‘For those of us in a hurry to get back to town. You can always drop off in one of the smaller settlements, if you’d rather keep a low profile for a while.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Carlyle said, abstractedly. She was looking around the site as if for the last time: the enigmatic machine towering above the moor, dwarfing even the great black shard beside it; the strung-out, limping column of Blue Water Landings vehicles behind her; the compact, fast-jogging squadrons of Knights, and their low flat gravity sleds skimming about, surrounding the relic and reinforcing their presence around the henge. As her gaze swept the scene she noticed again the henges on the other hilltops, and started as she remembered the crack that someone on her team had made the very first day.

Maybe they’ve aw got gates.

The assemblage of vehicles on which she rode and that headed up the withdrawal was moving towards the nearest glen that led to the south. By now they were making a fair clip of it, about fifty kilometres per hour.

Slipstream gusted past her visor. She looked around again. Half a dozen or so of the Knights’ Jeep-sized ground skimmers were spreading out from the site, heading for the nearby hilltops. It looked like they’d had the same thought as she had.

She blinked up a closed channel to Armand. ‘Could we bear right, go over the nearest hill instead of through the valley? Don’t make it obvious?’

‘If you like.’ He shrugged and gave the order. Very gradually the column drifted to the right and the slope.

‘Ah, I see what you have in mind,’ Armand added. ‘We shall slow down a little as we approach.’

Carlyle glanced back again. The skimmer aiming for the same hilltop was still a good way behind, and in no evident hurry.

‘What if it’s just a dolmen?’ Armand asked.

‘No loss in checking,’ Carlyle said.

‘Or worse, what if it takes you to somewhere uninhabitable, or dangerous?’