The Reality Dysfunction

  Jenny’s death had been fast (thank God) but very, very messy.

  Ralph knew he should be reviewing the memory of the ape-analogue creatures, gaining strategically critical information on the threat they faced, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Let the ESA office on Ombey study the memory sequence, they wouldn’t be so emotionally involved. Jenny had been a damn good officer, and a friend.

  The spaceplane’s reaction drive cut off. Free fall left Ralph’s stomach rising up through his chest. He accessed a nausea-suppression program and quickly activated it.

  Huddled in his chair, Gerald Skibbow began to tremble as the forked strands of his filthy, blood-soaked beard waved about in front of his still-bleeding nose.

  Ekwan’s hangar was a cylindrical chamber ribbed by metal struts; the walls were composed of shadows and crinkled silver blankets. The spaceplane, wings fully retracted, eased its squashed-bullet nose through the open doors into the waiting clamp ring. Actuators slid catches into a circle of load sockets behind the radar dome, and the craft was drawn inside.

  Three of Ekwan’s security personnel, experts at handling troublesome Ivets in free fall, swam into the cabin, coughing at the ash dust which filled the air.

  Will took the zipcuffs off Gerald Skibbow. “Run, why don’t you,” he said silkily.

  Gerald Skibbow gave him a contemptuous glance, which turned to outright alarm as he rose into the air. Hands clawed frantically for a grip on the cabin ceiling. He wound up clutching a grab loop for dear life.

  The grinning security personnel closed in.

  “Just tow him the whole way,” Ralph told them. “And you, Skibbow, don’t cause any trouble. We’ll be right behind, and we’re armed.”

  “You can’t use TIP carbines in the ship,” one of the security men protested.

  “Oh, really? Try me.”

  Gerald Skibbow reluctantly let go of the grab loop, and let the men tug him along by his arms. The eight-strong group drifted out into the tubular corridor connecting the hangar to one of the life-support capsules.

  Sir Asquith Parish was waiting outside the zero-tau compartment, a stikpad holding his feet in place. He gave Gerald Skibbow a distasteful look. “You lost Jenny Harris for him?”

  “Yes, sir,” Will said through clamped teeth.

  Sir Asquith recoiled.

  “Whatever sequestrated him has several ancillary energy-manipulation functions,” Ralph explained. “He is lethal; one on one, he’s better than any of us.”

  The ambassador gave Gerald Skibbow a fast reappraisal. Light strips circling the corridor outside the zero-tau compartment hatch flickered and dimmed.

  “Stop it,” Dean growled. He jabbed his TIP carbine into the small of Skibbow’s back.

  The light strips came up to full strength again.

  Gerald Skibbow laughed jauntily at the shaken ambassador as the security men shoved him through the hatch. Ralph Hiltch cocked an ironic eyebrow, then followed them in.

  The zero-tau compartment was a big sphere, sliced into sections by mesh decking that was only three metres apart. It didn’t look finished; it was poorly lit, with bare metal girders and kilometres of power cable stuck to every surface. The sarcophagus pods formed long silent ranks, their upper surface a blank void. Most of them were activated, holding the colonists who had gambled their future on conquering Lalonde.

  Gerald Skibbow was manoeuvred to an open pod just inside the hatchway. He glanced around the compartment, his head turning in fractured movements to take in the compartment. The security men holding him felt his muscles tensing.

  “Don’t even think of it,” one said.

  He was propelled firmly towards the waiting pod.

  “No,” he said.

  “Get in,” Ralph told him impatiently.

  “No. Not that. Please. I’ll be good, I’ll behave.”

  “Get in.”

  “No.”

  One of the security men anchored himself to the decking grid with a toe clip, and tugged him down.

  “No!” He gripped both sides of the open pod, his features stone-carved with determination. “I won’t!” he shouted.

  “In!”

  “No.”

  All three security men were pushing and shoving at him. Gerald Skibbow strove against them. Will tucked a leg round a nearby girder, and smacked the butt of his TIP carbine against Gerald Skibbow’s left hand. There was a crunch as the bones broke.

  He howled, but managed to keep hold. His fingers turned purple, the skin undulating. “No!”

  The carbine came down again. Ralph put his hands flat against the decking above, and stood on Gerald Skibbow’s back, knees straining, trying to thrust him down into the pod.

  Gerald Skibbow’s broken hand slipped a couple of centimetres, leaving a red smear. “Stop this, stop this.” Rivulets of white light began to shiver across his torso.

  Ralph felt as though his own spine was going to snap, the force his boosted muscles were exerting against his skeleton was tremendous. The soles of his feet were tingling sharply, the worms of white light coiling round his ankles. “Dean, switch the pod on the second he’s in.”

  “Sir.”

  The hand slipped again. Gerald Skibbow started a high-pitched animal wailing. Will hammered away at his left elbow. Firefly sparks streaked back up the carbine every time it hit, as though he was striking flint.

  “Get in, you bastard,” one of the security men shouted, nearly purple from the effort, face shrivelled like a rubber mask.

  Gerald Skibbow gave way, the arm Will had hammered on finally losing hold. He crashed down into the bottom of the pod with an oof of air punched out through his open mouth. Ralph cried out at the shock of the jolt that was transmitted back up his cramped legs. The curving lid of the pod began to slide into place, and he bent his knees frantically, lifting his legs out of the way.

  “No!” Gerald Skibbow shouted. He had begun to glow like a hologram profile, rainbow colours shining bright in the compartment’s gloom. His voice was cut off by the lid sliding into place, and it locked with a satisfying mechanical click. There was a muffled thud of a fist striking the composite.

  “Where’s the bloody zero-tau?” Will said. “Where is it?”

  The lid of the pod hadn’t changed, there was no sign of the slippery black field effect. Gerald Skibbow was pounding away on the inside with the fervor of a man buried alive.

  “It’s on,” Dean shouted hoarsely from the operator’s control panel.

  “Christ, it’s on, it’s drawing power.”

  Ralph stared at the sarcophagus in desperation. Work, he pleaded silently, come on fuck you, work! Jenny died for this.

  “Switch on, you shit!” Will screamed at it.

  Gerald Skibbow stopped punching the side of the pod. A black emptiness irised over the lid.

  Will let out a sob of exhausted breath.

  Ralph realized he was clinging weakly to one of the girders, the real fear had been that Gerald Skibbow would break out. “Tell the captain we’re ready,” he said in a drained voice. “I want to get him to Ombey as quickly as we can.”

  Chapter 02

  The event horizon around Villeneuve’s Revenge dissolved the instant the starship expanded out to its full forty-eight-metre size. Solar wind and emaciated light from New California’s distant sun fell on the dark silicon hull which its disappearance exposed. Short-range combat sensors slid out of their jump recesses with smooth animosity, metallic black tumours inset with circular gold-mirror lenses. They scoured a volume of space five hundred kilometres across, hungry for a specific shape.

  Data streams from the sensors sparkled through Erick Thakrar’s mind, a rigid symbolic language written in monochromic light. Cursors chased through the vast constantly reconfiguring displays, closing in on an explicit set of values like circling photonic-sculpture vultures.

  Radiation, mass, and laser returns slotted neatly into their parameter definition.

  The Krystal Moon materialized out
of the fluttering binary fractals, hanging in space two hundred and sixty kilometres away. An inter-planetary cargo ship, eighty metres long; a cylindrical life-support capsule at one end, silver-foil-cloaked tanks and dull-red fusion-drive tube clustered at the other. Thermo-dump panels formed a ruff collar on the outside of the environmental-engineering deck just below the life-support capsule; communication dishes jutted out of a grid tower on the front of it. The ship’s midsection was a hexagonal gantry supporting five rings of standard cargo-pods, some of them plugged into the environmental deck via thick cables and hoses.

  A slender twenty-five-metre flame of hazy blue plasma burnt steadily from the fusion tube, accelerating the Krystal Moon at an unvarying sixtieth of a gee. It had departed Tehama asteroid five days ago with its cargo of industrial machinery and micro-fusion generators, bound for the Ukiah asteroid settlement in the outer asteroid belt Dana, which orbited beyond the gas giant Sacramento. Of the star’s three asteroid belts, Dana was the least populated; traffic this far out was thin. Krystal Moon’s sole link to civilization (and navy protection) was its microwave communication beam, focused on Ukiah, three hundred and twenty million kilometres ahead.

  Erick’s neural nanonics reported that pattern lock was complete. He commanded the X-ray lasers to fire.

  Two hundred and fifty kilometres away, the Krystal Moon’s microwave dishes burst apart into a swirl of aluminium snowflakes. A long brown scar appeared on the forward hull of the life-support capsule.

  God, I hope no one was in the cabin below.

  Erick tried to push that thought right back to the bottom of his mind.

  Straying out of character, even for a second, could quite easily cost him his life. They’d drilled that into him enough times back at the academy.

  There was even a behavioural consistency program loaded into his neural nanonics to catch any wildly inaccurate reactions. But flinches and sudden gasps could be equally damning.

  The Villeneuve’s Revenge triggered its fusion drive, and accelerated in towards the stricken cargo ship at five and a half gees. Erick sent another two shots from the X-ray cannon squirting into the Krystal Moon’s fusion tube. Its drive flame died. Coolant fluid vented out of a tear in the casing, hidden somewhere in the deep shadows on the side away from the sun, the fountain fluorescing grey-blue as it jetted out from behind the ship.

  “Nice going, Erick,” André Duchamp commented. He had the secondary fire-control program loaded in his own neural nanonics. If the newest crew-member hadn’t fired he could have taken over within milliseconds.

  Despite Erick’s performance in the Catalina Bar, André had a single nagging doubt. After all, O’Flaherty was one of their own—after a fashion—and eliminating him didn’t require many qualms no matter who you were; but firing on an unarmed civil ship ... You have earned your place on board, André said silently. He cancelled his fire-control program.

  Villeneuve’s Revenge was a hundred and twenty kilometres from the Krystal Moon when André turned the starship and started decelerating. The hangar doors began to slide open. He started to whistle against the push of the heavy gee force.

  He had a right to be pleased. Even though it had only been a tiny interplanetary jump, two hundred and sixty kilometres was an excellent separation distance. Since leaving Tehama, Villeneuve’s Revenge had been in orbit around Sacramento. They had extended every sensor, focusing along the trajectory Lance Coulson had sold them until they had found the faint splash of the Krystal Moon’s exhaust. With its exact position and acceleration available in real time, it was just a question of manufacturing themselves a jump co-ordinate.

  Two hundred and sixty kilometres, there were voidhawks that would be pushed to match that kind of accuracy.

  Thermo-dump panels stayed inside the monobonded silicon hull as the Villeneuve’s Revenge rendezvoused with Krystal Moon. The jump nodes were fully charged. André was cautious, they might need to leave in a hurry.

  It had happened before; stealthed voidhawks lying in wait, Confederation Navy Marines hiding in the cargo-pods. Not to him, though.

  “Bev, give our target an active sensor sweep, please,” André ordered.

  “Yes, Captain,” Bev Lennon said. The combat sensors sent out fingers of questing radiation to probe the Krystal Moon.

  The brilliant lance of fusion fire at the rear of the Villeneuve’s Revenge sank away to a minute bubble of radiant helium clinging to the tube’s nozzle. Krystal Moon was six kilometres away, wobbling slightly from the impulse imparted by the venting coolant fluid. Thrusters flared around the rear bays, trying to compensate and stabilize.

  Ion thrusters on the Villeneuve’s Revenge fired, nudging the bulky starship in towards its floundering prey. Brendon piloted the multifunction service vehicle up out of the hangar and set off towards the Krystal Moon. One of the cargo-bay doors slowly hinged upwards behind him.

  “Come on, Brendon,” André murmured impatiently as the small auxiliary craft rode its bright yellow chemical rocket exhaust across the gap.

  Ukiah traffic control would know the communication link had been severed in another twelve minutes; it would take the bureaucrats a few minutes to react, then sensors would review the Krystal Moon’s track. They’d see the spaceship’s fusion drive was off, coupled with the lack of an emergency distress beacon. That could only mean one thing. The navy would be alerted, and if the Villeneuve’s Revenge was really unlucky a patrolling voidhawk would investigate. André was allowing twenty minutes maximum for the raid.

  “It checks out clean,” Bev Lennon reported. “But the crew must have survived that first X-ray laser strike, I’m picking up electronic emissions from inside the life-support capsule. The flight computers are still active.”

  “And they’ve suppressed the distress beacon,” André said. “That’s smart, they must know we’d slice that can in half to silence any shout for help. Maybe they’ll be in a cooperative mood.” He datavised the flight computer to open an inter-ship channel.

  Erick heard the hiss of static fill the dimly lit bridge as the AV pillar was activated. A series of musical bleeps came with it, then the distinct sound of a child crying. He saw Madeleine Collum’s head come up from her acceleration couch, turning in the direction of the communication console. Blue and red shadows flowed over her gaunt, shaven skull.

  “Krystal Moon, acknowledge contact,” André said.

  “Acknowledge?” a ragged outraged male voice shouted out of the AV pillar.

  “You shithead animal, two of my crew are dead. Fried! Tina was fifteen years old!”

  Erick’s neural nanonics staunched the sudden damp fire in his eyes. A fifteen-year-old girl. Great God Almighty! These interplanetary ships were often family operated affairs, cousins and siblings combining into crews.

  “Release the latches on pods DK-30-91 and DL-30-07,” André said as though he hadn’t heard. “That’s all we’re here for.”

  “Screw you.”

  “We’ll cut them free anyway, Anglo, and if we cut then the capsule will be included. I’ll open your hull up to space like the foil on a freeze-dried food packet.”

  A visual check through the combat sensors showed Erick the MSV was two hundred metres away from the Krystal Moon. Desmond Lafoe had already fitted laser cutters to the craft’s robot arms; the spindly white waldos were running through a preprogrammed articulation test. Villeneuve’s Revenge was lumbering along after the smaller, more agile, auxiliary craft; three kilometres away now.

  “We’ll think about it,” said the voice.

  “Daddy!” the girl in the background wailed. “Daddy, make them go away.”

  A woman shushed her, sounding fearful.

  “Don’t think about it,” André said. “Just do it.”

  The channel went silent.

  “Bastards,” André muttered. “Erick, put another blast through that capsule.”

  “If we kill them, they can’t release the pods.”

  André scowled darkly. “Scare them, don?
??t kill them.”

  Erick activated one of the starship’s lasers; it was designed for close-range interception, the last layer of defence against incoming combat wasps. Powerful and highly accurate. He reduced the power level to five per cent, and lined it up on the front of the life-support capsule.

  The infrared beam sliced a forty-centimetre circle out of the foam-covered hull. Steamy gas erupted out of the breach.

  André grunted at what he considered to be Erick’s display of timidity, and opened the inter-ship channel again. “Release the pods.”

  There was no answer. Erick couldn’t hear the girl any more.

  Brendon guided the MSV around the rings of barrel-like cargo-pods circling the Krystal Moon’s mid-section. He found the first pod containing microfusion generators, and focused the MSV’s external cameras on it. The latch clamps of the cradle it was lying in were closed solidly round the load pins. Sighing regretfully at the time and effort it would cost to cut the pod free, he engaged the MSV’s attitude lock, keeping station above the pod, then datavised the waldo-control computer to extend the arm. Droplets of molten metal squirted out where the cutting laser sliced through the clamps, a micrometeorite swarm glowing as if they were grazing an atmosphere.

  “Something’s happening,” Bev Lennon reported. The electronic sensors were showing him power circuits coming alive inside the Krystal Moon’s life-support capsule. Atmosphere was still spewing out of the lasered hole, unchecked. “Hey—”

  A circular section of the hull blew out. Erick’s mind automatically directed the X-ray lasers towards the hole revealed by the crumpled sheet of metal as it twirled off towards the stars. A small craft rose out of the hole, ascending on a pillar of flame. Recognition was immediate: lifeboat.

  It was a cone, four metres across at the base, five metres high; with a doughnut of equipment and tanks wrapped round the nose. Tarnished-silver protective foam reflected distorted star-specks. The lifeboat could sustain six people for a month in space, or jettison the equipment doughnut and land on a terracompatible planet. Cheaper than supplying the crew with zero-tau pods, and given that the mother ship would only be operating in an inhabited star system, just as safe.