Newton's Wake

the pin sprang out. Johnstone didn’t react. She waved a hand in front of his faceplate. Still no reaction. She grabbed his shoulders and pushed him gently back. His feet paced, keeping his balance, but his eyes stared out, still in a dwam. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She wished she still had a familiar handy, to hurl a disposable and screamingly reluctant copy into the internal fray of Johnstone’s suit circuitry. But since Shlaim’s defection, she’d lost her trust in virtual slaves. She was alone in her suit.

Back to elementary first aid, the rule-of-thumb routines the Carlyles had put together from centuries of experience in dealing with CNS hacks. She drew back her fist, made sure he could see it coming if he could see anything at all, and punched at his faceplate as hard as she could. The blow didn’t shatter the plate, or numb her knuckles, but it knocked Johnstone off his feet.

‘What the fuck was that for?’ Then: ‘ … Oh, thanks.’

He struggled to his feet, disentangling himself from the cable.

‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. He blinked rapidly, eyes rolling as he paged through head-up menus. ‘Good, that’s it cleared.’

‘Sure?’

‘Best antivirus money can buy,’ Johnstone said smugly.

‘I bloody hope so.’

‘They don’t evolve, that’s one thing.’

‘Small mercies.’

Johnstone laughed. ‘It’s the biggest.’

They walked on. It was like being in the Valley of the Kings, or Manhattan, or Polarity, except that every one of the great machines contained more art and craft and mind than the entire civilisations that had produced these works of man. Carlyle, looking at it all with a looter’s eye, had long grown blase at this thought.

The QTD receiver was, in that place, brutal in its simplicity: a tenmetre torus of lead, with a ring of the same gold and instrumentation as the transmitter had, inlaid in a deep groove around its inner surface. Its base was an proportionately huge rectangular mass. Johnstone vaulted up on it, disengaged himself from the line, told Carlyle to do the same, and then passed the end of the cable around the ring. He knotted the rope carefully, checked it a few times, and gave a thumbs-up. With a lot of careful instructions and some errors they and Higgins between them managed to drag it to beneath the hole. Carlyle, sitting on the opposite side of the base, rode up with Johnstone as the cable carried the massive object up into the ship’s hold. Higgins rolled the crane forward and lowered the device to the floor.

‘I hope that was worth it,’ the pilot said, over the common circuit.

Carlyle, Higgins, and Johnstone looked at each other.

‘Tactless little prick, isn’t he,’ Johnstone observed. ‘Time to go, I guess.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Carlyle said. ‘There’s stuff in that cave that, well, I wouldn’t want to go to waste.’

‘You’re not thinking of hanging around,’ Higgins said.

‘No, no. But to make life easier’—she winced—‘so to speak, for a future team, we could leave the crane.’

‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Johnstone. ‘Well, hell, you paid for it, the Carlyles might as well have the advantage of it.’

Getting the crane out was awkward. The pilot brought the ship right down to the surface, with the hatch open much wider than before, fully retracted. Carlyle guided Higgins as she drove the crane off the floor of the hold and on to the surface close to the hole, then the pilot lifted the ship clear. He lifted it more than clear, taking it up to about five hundred metres. Very slowly it moved aside; as Higgins descended from the crane’s cabin Carlyle guessed that the pilot was looking for a spot where he could bring the ship down again without any risk of colliding with the crane. The ship’s lights shone bright in the dim glow of the ionized haze of Chernobyl air.

‘Let’s move over a bit,’ Higgins said. ‘Give him a couple hundred metres clearance. He says he’s worried about gusting.’

Carlyle was looking down at the ground again, picking her way cautiously forward, when she saw out of the corner of her eye a blue flash just above the horizon. She then saw another, and another, closer and closer. In between, like a shadow on the shining mist, a gigantic batwinged shape was just discernible.

It was far bigger than the ships she’d seen back at the DK spaceport.

The DK ship was heading straight for the Extacy, flying quite slowly, except that every few hundred metres, it fittled. It must, Carlyle guessed, be fittling a light-second away, then returning to the exact point from which it had departed, and moving forward again and repeating the process. Every 2.7 seconds, she realised: timed to avoid the pulsar beam. Just when it seemed about to collide with the Extacy, its enormous wings swept downward, meeting at the tips to form a circle. A blink later, and the wings encircled the Extacy from above. Another blue Cherenkov flash followed, almost overhead. Its afterimage faded. Both ships were gone.

CHAPTER 12 Nerves of Steel

Carlyle had her Webster out and aimed at Higgins’s faceplate before the woman’s mouth had closed. She felt betrayed, abandoned, fooled like a rube, and enraged.

‘You bastards! You stupid fucking bastards! Tell me what you did that for! I’ll blow your fucking head off right here!’

‘I had nothing to do with it!’

‘You must have been in on it together!’

‘I wish I had been—then I wouldn’t be left down here with you!’ Higgins’s metal face looked distraught and bewildered. Carlyle backed off, keeping the pistol levelled. Her knees felt rubbery.

‘So what’s your explanation?’ she demanded.

‘Never trust a commie,’ said Higgins.

Carlyle glared at her. ‘Never trust a Rapture-fucker, you mean!’

Higgins shrugged. ‘Takes two to make a deal.’

Her offhand attitude and flip answers reignited Carlyle’s fury. ‘Yeah, or three! Or four if it was you and that hick pilot!’

‘Not me!’

‘You knew nothing about this?’

‘No.’

The metal face was etched with anguish. Carlyle believed her. The anger dimmed, leaving a cold dismay. They were going to die more painfully and uncomfortably than she’d intended, but that wasn’t the worst. They were going to die for nothing. She squatted down, lowering the pistol.

‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she moaned. ‘Why the hell would they do that?’

‘Like I said, never trust—’

‘Oh, fuck that,’ Carlyle snarled. ‘That’s just a stupid fucking prejudice. When they do a deal they stick to it— it’s in their interests after all. I can buy an AO pilot selling us out, even to DK. I can’t buy a DK family cheating us.’

Higgins moved over and squatted down too.

‘We don’t know it was the same family as you were dealing with. Or the same group within the family. You should know about that, Carlyle.’

‘Don’t tell me what I should fucking know about,’ Carlyle said. ‘It still doesn’t figure. These DK clans compete all right, but they keep a united front to the rest of the world.’

‘How do we know it was DK at all?’

Carlyle rocked back on her heels. ‘Because it was a DK ship.’ She knew that was a fallacy even as she said it.

‘We don’t even know that,’ Higgins said. ‘It was like the one in the spec, sure. But it was a lot bigger and better.’