“I didn’t need them. Remember that case we worked a couple of years ago, involving the disputed ownership of a carousel built by one of the families? I copied reams of Eighty-related stuff onto my compad back then, and it’s all still there, with summaries for all the players.”
“Including the Nerval-Lermontovs?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
Dreyfus did as Sparver suggested, plunging deep into Chasm City history. The article was several thousand lines long, a summary that could easily have been expanded by a factor of ten or a hundred had Sparver selected different text filters. The system’s major families were nothing if not well documented.
Dreyfus hit the Eighty. One name leapt out at him across fifty-five years of history.
“Aurora,” he said, with a kind of reverence.
“Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was just a girl—twenty-two years old when she went under Cal’s machines.”
“Poor kid. No wonder they were pissed off.”
They had been, too, Dreyfus remembered. And who wouldn’t be? Calvin Sylveste had promised true immortality to his seventy-nine volunteers. Their minds would be scanned at sub-neuronal resolution, with the resultant structures uploaded into invulnerable machines. Rather than just being static snapshots, Calvin’s Transmigrants would continue to think, to feel, once they’d been mapped into computer space. They would be true alpha-level simulations, their mental processes indistinguishable from those of a flesh-and-blood human being. The only catch was that the scanning process had to be performed with such rapidity, such fidelity, that it was destructive. The scanned mind was ripped apart layer by layer, until nothing lucid remained.
It wouldn’t have mattered if the procedure had worked. All had been well for a while, but shortly after the last volunteer had gone under—Calvin Sylveste had been the eightieth subject in his own experiment—problems began to emerge with the earliest subjects. Their simulations froze, or became locked in pathological loops, or regressed to levels of autistic disengagement from the outside universe. Some vital detail, some animating impulse, was missing from the design.
“Do you believe in coincidence, Sparver?”
Sparver tapped one of the thruster controls. The rock had doubled in size, its wrinkled ash-grey surface details becoming more distinct. The potato-shaped asteroid was more than two kilometres wide at its fattest point.
“Why d’you ask?”
“Because I was already wondering why the Sylveste family kept coming up in this investigation. Now we’ve got another hit.”
“They’re a big octopus. Sooner or later you’re bound to trip over another tentacle.”
“So you don’t think there’s anything odd about this?”
“The Sylvestes weren’t a charity. Only families with influence and money were able to buy themselves a slot in Cal’s experiment. And only families with influence and money can afford to hold on to rocks like this. The key here is the Nerval-Lermontovs, not the Sylvestes.”
“They tried to take down the Sylvestes, didn’t they?”
“Everyone tried. Everyone failed. This is their system. We just live in it.”
“And the Nerval-Lermontovs? They’ve been quiet since the Eighty, haven’t they? They’re hardly big players any more. If they were, I’d have recognised the name sooner. So what the hell are they doing implicating themselves in the Ruskin-Sartorious affair?”
“Maybe they were used. Maybe when we dig into this place, we’ll find it was just used to bounce signals from somewhere else.”
Dreyfus felt some of his earlier elation abate. Perhaps his cherished instincts had failed him this time. If necessary, they could go outside and read the message stack, just as they’d done with the Vanguard Six router. Sparver had sounded confident that the process was repeatable, but what if it wasn’t quite so easy to backtrack the signal a second time?
Dreyfus was musing on that theme when the rock launched its attack.
It came fast and without warning; it was only when the assault was over that he was able to piece together the approximate sequence of events. Across the face of the rock, small regions of the crust erupted outwards as if a dozen low-yield mines had just detonated, showering rubble and debris into space. The shattered material rained into the corvette, the noise like a thousand hammer blows against the hull.
Alarms began to shriek, damage reports cascading across the display surfaces. Dreyfus heard the whine as the corvette’s own weapons began to upgrade their readiness posture. Sparver grunted something unintelligible and began to coordinate the response with manual control inputs. But the attack had not really begun in earnest. The eruptions on the rock were merely caused by the emergence of concealed weapons, tucked under ten or twenty metres of camouflaging material. Dark-muzzled kinetic slug-launchers rolled out and spat their cargoes at the corvette. Dreyfus flinched as the walls of the corvette’s cabin appeared to ram inwards, before a cooler part of his mind reminded him that this was the corvette doing its best to protect the living organisms inside it. The wall flowed around his body, head to toe, forming an instant contoured cocoon. Then he felt the corvette swerve with what would have been bone-snapping acceleration under any other circumstances. With the little consciousness available to him, he hoped that the corvette had taken similar care of Sparver.
The swerve saved them. Otherwise, the first kinetic slug would have taken them nose-on, where the corvette’s armour was thinnest. As it was the slug still impacted, gouging a trench along the entire lateral line of the ship, taking out weapons and sensory modules in a roar of agonised matter that was still nerve-shreddingly loud even through the cushioning of the cocoon. The ship swerved again, and then once more, harder this time. Two more slugs rammed into it. Then the corvette began to give back something of what it had taken.
Many of its weapons had been damaged by the slug impacts, or could not be brought to bear without presenting too much tempting cross section to the still-active slug launchers. But it was still able to respond with an awesome concentration of destructive force. Dreyfus felt rather than heard the subsonic drone of the Gatling guns. Another salvo of debris rained against the hull: that was the Gatling guns churning up the rock’s surface even more, kicking more material into space. Four sequenced shoves as the corvette deployed and then traded momentum with its missiles, spitting them out like hard pips. The foam-phase-tipped warheads selected their own targets, punching hundred-metre-wide craters in the crust.
The Gatling guns resumed firing.
Then, with disarming suddenness, all was silent save for the occasional clang as some small piece of debris knocked into the ship.
“I am holding at maximum readiness condition,” the corvette said, its voice dismayingly calm and unhurried, as if it was delivering a weather report.
“Situational analysis indicates that the offensive object has been downgraded to threat status gamma. This analysis may be flawed. If you nonetheless wish me to stand down to moderate readiness, please issue an order.”
“You can stand down,” Dreyfus said.
The cocoon released him. He felt like a single man-sized bruise, with a headache to match. Nothing appeared broken, though, and he was at least alive.
“I think this just stopped being a peripheral investigation,” Sparver said.
Dreyfus spat blood. At some point during the attack he must have bitten his tongue.
“How’s the ship doing?” he enquired.
Sparver glanced at one of the status panes.
“Good news is we’ve still got power, air and attitude control.”
“And the bad news?”
“Sensors are shot to hell and long-range comms don’t appear to be working either. I don’t think we’re going to be able to call home for help.”
The absurdity of their predicament rankled Dreyfus. They were still inside the Glitter Band, in the teeming thick of human civilisation, no more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest inhabited structure. And yet they might as well have been far beyond the system, drifting in interstellar space, for all the difference it made.
“Can we reach anyone else?” he asked.
“We still have signalling lasers. If we can get a visual signal to a passing ship, we might be able to divert
