‘Wow. Yes. Your firm has one set up?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Lucinda. She pushed the half-empty vodka glass across the table. ‘Here, finish this. It’ll get you started on the downward path again.’ She stood up, winked. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
The combat archaeologists and the rest of the Carlyles’ fighters sometimes called themselves soldiers, but that was just the traditional way of referring to the family’s members and the firm’s employees. It did not imply acquaintance with military strategy, tactics, or discipline. This wasn’t much of a disadvantage: none of the other powers had the capacity or the necessity to build armies; in interstellar warfare all ground engagements were skirmishes, and anyway the real enemies were non-human. The biggest and best army in the human population of the universe was probably that of Eurydice. And it, they expected, was on their side.
‘What a rabble,’ said Higgins. Suited up, kitted with a laser rifle, a Webster, and a combat knife, she looked no different from the rest. Just as well. Kevin, in charge of the squad, knew who she was. The other seventeen people on it didn’t. Lucinda knew a few of them: the gunner Macaulay and the biologist Stevenson from her first mission to Eurydice were there, but this time Macaulay was second-in-command to Kevin, and Stevenson was on the same level as Lucinda and Higgins: grunts.
They formed up into double file at the terminal building, stared at by travellers and smiled at by refugees, and set off through the skein. It didn’t get any faster doing it as soldiers, except that you weren’t stopped at the gates. After a couple of hours they were outside of the warren of spatially connected corridors and hiking or driving on sleds between gates on uninhabited and hitherto unexplored planets. Some of them had life, all of it unicellular on the usual pattern: bacteria and slime moulds and algae, biospheres of snot. Here and there, close to the gates, were the enigmatic remains of posthuman activity, on every scale from the gargantuan to the minute. On one world, glimpsed sidelong as the squad’s gravity sleds raced across a desert of riddled clinker, low flat buildings of diamond pane housed machinery that still moved; on another, the sticky slime was slowly being converted into crystalline objects like the workings of a mechanical watch. Others still were scarred with previous teams’ passage from days or weeks earlier as Ian Carlyle’s commandos explored the connections of the skein and laid down tactical nuclear firebreaks through kilohectares of malevolent machinery.
‘What a bloody waste,’ said Higgins, her boots crunching over the scorched shreds of rubbery synthetic slugs the size of whales that had browsed the hardened mucus of the planet’s—perhaps—natural inhabitants.
Carlyle shrugged. ‘These things don’t look like they’re more than a slight case of exuberance on the part of a dumb program.’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Tell you what, if we make it back you can have first dibs. Yuck.’
‘It’s the principle.’
‘Leave that to the Knights. God, times like this I can sympathise with the farmers. Better their green fields than this green slime. It’s like God didn’t
‘And left the angels the job of wiping it off,’ added Higgins, as they stepped through the gate and emerged on the other side—a hot lunar vacuum—with their boots as clean as if they’d just been polished. Cleaner, in fact: sterile. The filtering process was a feature of the skein, definitely, but nobody knew how it worked, or why. It seemed uncharacteristically benign. The posthumans had never left any other impression that they cared for the welfare of humanity or the integrity of biospheres.
But then—and the thought made Lucinda break pace for a moment—if the Knights were right, and she was right, the skein and the gates with all their convenient and inconvenient features had not been made by the posthumans generated in the Hard Rapture. They had been generated by the relict machine on Eurydice, the transformed remains of the starship: the consequence of a different Singularity entirely, whose AI enablers had envisaged different ends from those of the American military-industrial complex whose transcendence had taken Earth’s best minds away and scattered their disquieting products across the galaxy.
She did not yet know what to do with that thought.
Two jumps later, the squad arrived at the gate closest to the DK planet. Methane slush, a distant dim primary, buckyboard walkways to the launch field where a boxy AO ship waited to take them the remaining dozen light-years. The ground under the slush had been churned by many tracks in the past day or two. When they filed aboard the ship they realised it didn’t have pressure outside the cockpit. They sat on the floor in gloomy rows.
‘We’ll get tae take our helmets off in half an hour,’ said Kevin, cutting across grumbles. ‘So shut the fuck up, guys and gals.’
The ship lifted and fittled. There was nothing to see, and nothing to hear until atmosphere screamed and whistled. The pilot wisely took his time about the descent: the ship had nothing in the way of heat-shielding. After about ten minutes the sound diminished, then stopped. The hatch opened to blue sky. The fighters stood up, walked forward and dropped, one by one, from a metre up in the air on to a long beach. The ship, not hanging around, lifted behind them as soon as the last was off. A few hundred metres up the beach, below the tideline, stood a diminishing series of statues with their heads blown off. Over to Lucinda’s right smoke rose from the still smouldering jungle. As she followed the others’ example and opened her helmet her nostrils were choked with the smell of wet ash. The whole beach looked as though it had been invaded from the sea: search engines, gravity sleds, robot walkers, heavy weaponry, bivouacs, latrines, hundreds of soldiers. Then you noticed there weren’t any boats. The gate she’d come through was now clearly marked with a big loop of glowing plastic. A ramp of board- held sand led up to its lip, and the big screen of a hair-thin fibre-optic probe stood on the beach beside it.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘This place used to be a nature preserve. And there was no call for shooting up the statues, dammit.’
‘You’ve been here?’ asked Higgins, gazing around. She’d covered her face with green and black camo slap; not a bad trick.
‘Uh-huh. That gate up there’s how I got away from Eurydice.’ She shook her head. ‘Met the biologist who looked after it. He kind of guarded it.’
‘Maybe he started the shooting.’
‘Aye, it’s possible,’ Lucinda conceded. ‘Poor wee bugger. I wonder if he knew what was coming. Probably not.’
She started inquiring among the advance guard. Nobody had seen Ree, or found a corpse in the statues, but that didn’t mean much—the search would have been cursory, and he might now be feeding the fishes he’d studied. If Ree was dead he wasn’t coming back. The commies used life-extension but didn’t take backups. It went against the self-reliance idea.
She stalked off and confronted Kevin, who was stooped over a map table.
‘Any idea who did this?’
Kevin shook his head.
‘No that I’ve heard of. Ian did a deal wi the local collective through the usual channels. They didnae mind us going through here against the Knights. We found this place just as it is.’
‘Sure it wisnae our advance guard securing the area, just tae mak siccar?’
‘Oh aye.’ He caught her sceptical scowl. ‘Truly. It wisnae us. It was recent, mind, but it wisnae us. Same thing’s happened at the nearest settlement, on the mainland. Shot tae fuck and abandoned. Horrible. Deid weans in the ruins and that.’
Lucinda remembered the bright, eager children and felt sick. ‘What? Who could have done that?’
Kevin shrugged, glanced down pointedly at the map. ‘Ian thought at first it might hae been the Knights fae Eurydice, but there’s nae trace of anyone’s coming through this gate anyway. Maybe it was some kindae commie faction fight or family feud.’
‘Aye, maybe,’ said Lucinda.
She wandered off for a bit and shot at cormorants.
Good to see the boss taking a lead,’ said Higgins. Ian Carlyle stood on a large boulder near the headland while the troops gathered.
Lucinda snorted. ‘You won’t see him going through the gate.’ Behind her hand she added: ‘He doesn’t back up.’
