Galactic North

  Yet something kept her on the edge of sanity: the discovery that two hundred sleepers were missing. There was no sign that they’d been butchered like the others, which left the possibility that they’d been abducted by Captain Run Seven. It was madness—it would not begin to compensate for the loss of the others—but her psychology allowed no other line of thought.

  She could find them again.

  Her plan was disarmingly simple. It crystallised in her mind with the clarity of a divine vision. It would be done.

  She would repair the ship. She would hunt down Seven. She would recover the sleepers from him. And enact whatever retribution she deemed fit.

  She found the chamber where the four Conjoiners had slept, well away from the main dormitories, in a part of the ship through which the pirates were not likely to have wandered. She was hoping she could revive them and seek their assistance. There seemed no way they could make things worse for her now.

  But hope faded when she saw the scorch marks of weapon blasts around the bulkhead; the door forced.

  She stepped inside anyway.

  They’d been a sect on Mars, originally; a clique of cyberneticists with a particular fondness for self-experimentation. In 2190, their final experiment had involved distributed processing—allowing their enhanced minds to merge into one massively parallel neural net. The resultant event—a permanent, irrevocable escalation to a new mode of consciousness—was known as the Transenlightenment.

  There’d been a war, of course.

  Demarchists had long seen both sides. They used neural augmentation themselves, policed it so that they never approached the Conjoiner threshold. They’d brokered the peace, defusing the suspicion surrounding the Conjoiners. Conjoiners had fuelled Demarchist expansion from Europa with their technologies, fused in the white heat of Transenlightenment. Four of them were along as observers because the Hirondelle used their ramscoop drives.

  Irravel still didn’t trust them.

  And maybe it didn’t matter. The reefersleep units— fluted caskets like streamlined coffins—were riddled with blast holes. Grimacing against the smell, Irravel examined the remains inside. They’d been cut open, but the pirates seemed to have abandoned the job halfway through, not finding the kinds of implants they were expecting. And maybe not even recognising that they were dealing with anything other than normal humans, Irravel thought— especially if the pirates who’d done this hadn’t been amongst Seven’s more experienced crewmembers; just trigger-happy thugs.

  She examined the final casket, the one furthest from the door. It was damaged, but not so badly as the others. The display cartouches were still alive, a patina of frost still adhering to the casket’s lid. The Conjoiner inside looked intact: the pirates had never reached him. She read his nameplate: Remontoire.

  “Yeah, he’s a live one,” said a voice behind Irravel. “Now back off real slow.”

  Heart racing, Irravel did as she was told. Slowly, she turned around, facing the woman whose voice she recognised.

  “Mirsky?” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s your lucky day.” Mirsky was wearing her suit, but without the helmet, making her head appear shrunken in the moat of her neck-ring. She had a gun on Irravel, but she pointed it half-heartedly, as if this was a stage in their relationship she wanted to get over as quickly as possible.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, Veda. Trying to figure out how much shit we’re in; how difficult it’ll be to get this ship moving again. Guess we had the same idea about the Conjoiners. Seven went berserk when he heard they’d been killed, but I figured it was worth checking how thorough the job had been.”

  “Stop; slow down. Start at the beginning. Why aren’t you with Seven?”

  Mirsky pushed past her and consulted the reefersleep indicators. “Seven and me had a falling out. Fill in the rest yourself.” With quick jabs of her free hand she called up different display modes, frowning at each. “Shit; this ain’t gonna be easy. If we wake the guy without his three friends, he’s gonna be psychotic; no use to us at all.”

  “What kind of falling out?”

  “Seven reckoned I was holding back too much in the interrogation, not putting you through enough hell.” She scratched at the silver box on the side of her head. “Maybe we can wake him, then fake the cybernetic presence of his friends—what do you think?”

  “Why am I still alive, if Seven broke into the sleeper chambers? Why are you still alive?”

  “Seven’s a sadist. Abandonment’s more his style than a quick and clean execution. As for you, the pig cut a deal with your second-in-command.”

  The implication of that sunk in. “Markarian gave him the codes?”

  “It wasn’t you, Veda.”

  Strange relief flooded Irravel. She could never be absolved of the crime of losing the cargo, but at least her degree of complicity had lessened.

  “But that was only half the deal,” Mirsky continued. “The rest was Seven promising not to kill you if Markarian agreed to join the Hideyoshi, our main ship.” She told Irravel that there’d been a transmitter rigged to her reefer-sleep unit, so that Markarian would know she was still alive.

  “Seven must have known he was taking a risk leaving both of us alive.”

  “A pretty small one. The ship’s in pieces and Seven will assume neither of us has the brains to patch it back together. ” Mirsky slipped the gun into a holster. “But Seven assumed the Conjoiners were dead. Big mistake. Once we figure out a way to wake Remontoire safely, he can help us fix the ship; make it faster, too.”

  “You’ve got this all worked out, haven’t you?”

  “More or less. Something tells me you aren’t absolutely ready to start trusting me, though.”

  “Sorry, Mirsky, but you don’t make the world’s most convincing turncoat.”

  Mirsky reached up and gripped the box attached to the side of her head. “Know what this is? A loyalty shunt. Makes simian stem cells; pumps them into the internal carotid artery, just above the cavernous sinus. They jump the blood-brain barrier and build a whole bunch of transient structures tied to primate dominance hierarchies; alpha-male shit. That’s how Seven kept us under his command—he was King Monkey. But I’ve turned it off now.”

  “That’s supposed to reassure me?”

  “No, but maybe this will.”

  Mirsky tugged at the box, ripping it away from the side of her head in curds of blood.

  Luyten 726-8 Cometary Halo—AD 2309

  Irravel felt the Hirondelle turn like a compass needle. The ramscoops gasped at interstellar gas, sucking lone atoms of cosmic hydrogen from cubic metres of vacuum. The engines spat twin beams of thrust, pressing Irravel into her seat with two gees of acceleration. Hardly moving now, still in the local frame of the cometary halo, but in only six months she would be nudging light-speed.

  Her seat floated on a boom in the middle of the dodecahedral bridge. “Map,” Irravel said, and was suddenly drowning in stars: an immense thirty-light-year-wide projection of human settled space, centred on the First System.

  “There’s the bastard,” Mirsky said, pointing from her own hovering seat, her voice only slightly strained under the gee-load. “Map—give us projection of the Hideyoshi’s vector, and plot our intercept.”

  The pirate ship’s icon was still very close to Luyten 726-8; less than a tenth of a light-year out. They had not seen Seven until now. The thrust from his ship was so tightly focused that it had taken until this point for the widening beams of the exhaust to sweep over Hirondelle’s sensors. But now they knew where he was headed. A dashed line indicated the likely course, arrowing right through the map’s heart and out towards the system Lalande 21185. Now came the intercept vector: a near-tangent that sliced Seven’s course beyond Sol.

  “When does it happen?” Irravel said.

  “Depends on how much attention Seven’s paying to what’s coming up behind him, for a start, and what kind of evasive stunts he can pull.”
>
  “Most of my simulations predict an intercept between 2325 and 2330,” Remontoire said.

  Irravel savoured the dates. Even for someone trained to fly a starship between systems, they sounded uncomfortably like the future.

  “Are you sure it’s him—not just some other ship that happened to be waiting in the halo?”

  “Trust me,” Mirsky said. “I can smell the swine from here.”

  “She’s right,” Remontoire said. “The destination makes perfect sense. Seven was prohibited from staying here much longer, once the number of missing ships became too large to be explained away as accidents. Now he must seek a well-settled system to profit from what he has stolen.”

  The Conjoiner looked completely normal at first glance—a bald man wearing a ship’s uniform, his expression placid—but then one noticed the unnatural bulge of his skull, covered only with a fuzz of baby hair. Most of his glial cells had been supplanted by machines, which served the same structural functions but also performed specialised cybernetic duties, like interfacing with other commune partners or external machinery. Even the organic neurons in his brain were now webbed together by artificial connections which allowed transmission speeds of kilometres per second; factors of ten faster than in normal brains. Only the problem of dispersing waste heat denied the Conjoiners even faster modes of thought.

  It was six years since they’d woken him. Remontoire had not dealt well with the murder of his three compatriots, but Irravel and Mirsky had managed to keep him sane by feeding input into the glial machines, crudely simulating rapport with other commune members.

  “It provides the kind of comfort to me that a ghost limb offers an amputee,” Remontoire had said. “An illusion of wholeness—but no substitute for the real thing.”

  “What more can we do?” Irravel had said.

  “Return me to another commune with all speed.”

  Irravel had agreed, provided Remontoire helped with the ship.

  He hadn’t let her down. Under his supervision, half the ship’s mass had been sacrificed, permitting twice the acceleration. They had dug a vault in the comet, lined it with support systems and entombed what remained of the cargo. The sleepers were nominally dead—there was no real expectation of reviving them again, even if medicine improved in the future—but Irravel had nonetheless set servitors to tend the dead for however long it took, and programmed the beacon to lure another ship, this time to pick up the dead.

  All that had taken years, of course—but it had also taken Seven as much time to cross the halo to his base; time again to show himself.

  “Be so much easier if you didn’t want the others back,” Mirsky said. “Then we could just slam past Seven at relativistic speed and hit him with seven kinds of shit.” She was very proud of the weapons she’d built into the ship, copied from pirate designs with Remontoire’s help.

  “I want the sleepers back,” Irravel said.

  “And Markarian?”

  “He’s mine,” she said, after due consideration. “You get the pig.”

  Near Lalande 21185—AD 2328

  Relativity squeezed stars until they bled colour. Half a kilometre ahead, the side of Seven’s ship raced towards Irravel like a tsunami.

  The Hideyoshi was the same shape as the Hirondelle; honed less by human whim than the edicts of physics. But the Hideyoshi was heavier, with a wider cross section, incapable of matching the Hirondelle’s acceleration or of pushing so close to C. It had taken years, but they’d caught up with Seven, and now the attack was in progress.

  Irravel, Mirsky and Remontoire wore thruster-pack-equipped suits, of the type used for inspections outside the ship, with added armour and weapons. Painted for effect, they looked like mechanised samurai. Another forty-seven suits were slaved to theirs, acting as decoys. They’d crossed fifty thousand kilometres of space between the ships.

  “You’re sure Seven doesn’t have any defences?” Irravel had asked, not long after waking from reefersleep.

  “Only the in-system ship had any fire power,” Mirsky said. She looked older now; new lines engraved under her eyes. “That’s because no one’s ever been insane enough to contemplate storming another ship in interstellar space.”

  “Until now.”

  But it wasn’t so stupid, and Mirsky knew it. Matching velocities with another ship was only a question of being faster; squeezing fractionally closer to light-speed. It might take time, but sooner or later the distance would be closed. And it had taken time, none of which Mirsky had spent in reefersleep. Partly it was because she lacked the right implants—ripped out in infancy when she was captured by Seven. Partly it was a distaste for the very idea of being frozen, instilled by years of pirate upbringing. But also because she wanted time to refine her weapons. They had fired a salvo against the enemy before crossing space in the suits, softening up any weapons buried in his ice and opening holes into the Hideyoshi’s interior.

  Now Irravel’s vision blurred, her suit slowing itself before slamming into the ice.

  Whiteness swallowed her.

  For a moment she couldn’t remember what she was doing here. Then awareness returned and she slithered back up the tunnel excavated by her impact, until she reached the surface of the Hideyoshi’s ice-shield.

  “Veda—you intact?”

  Her armour’s shoulder-mounted comm laser found a line of sight to Mirsky. Mirsky was twenty or thirty metres away around the ship’s lazy circumference, balancing on a ledge of ice. Walls of it stretched above and below like a rock face, lit by the glare from the engines. Decoys were arriving by the second.

  “I’m alive,” Irravel said. “Where’s the entry point?”

  “Couple of hundred metres upship.”

  “Damn. I wanted to come in closer. Remontoire’s out of line of sight. How much fuel do you have left?”

  “Scarcely enough to take the chill off a penguin’s dick.”

  Mirsky raised her arms above her head and fired lines into the ice, rocketing out from her sleeves. Belly sliding against the shield, she retracted the lines and hauled herself upship.

  Irravel followed. They’d burned all their fuel crossing between the two ships, but that was part of the plan. If they didn’t have a chance to raid Seven’s reserves, they’d just kick themselves into space and let the Hirondelle home in on them.

  “You think Seven saw us cross over?”

  “Definitely. And you can bet he’s doing something about it, too.”

  “Don’t do anything that might endanger the cargo, Mirsky—no matter how tempting Seven makes it.”

  “Would you sacrifice half the sleepers to get the other half back?”

  “That’s not remotely an option.”

  Above their heads, crevasses opened like eyes. Pirate crabs erupted out, black as night against the ice. Irravel opened fire on the machines. This time, with better weapons and real armour, she began to inflict damage. Behind the crabs, pirates emerged, bulbous in customised armour. Lasers scuffed the ice, bright through gouts of steam. Irravel saw Remontoire now: he was unharmed, and doing his best to shoot the pirates into space.

  Above, one of Irravel’s shots dislodged a pirate.

  The Hideyoshi’s acceleration dropped him towards her. When the impact came she hardly felt it, her suit’s guy lines staying firm. The pirate folded around her like a broken toy, then bounced back against the ship, pinned there by her suit. He was too close to shoot unless Irravel wanted to blow herself into space. Distorted behind glass, his face shaped a word. She moved in closer until their visors were touching. Through the glass she saw the asymmetrical bulge of a loyalty shunt.

  The face was Markarian’s. At first it seemed like absurd coincidence. Then it occurred to her that Seven might have sent his newest recruit out to show his mettle. Maybe Seven wouldn’t be far behind. Confronting adversaries was part of the alpha-male inheritance, after all.

  “Irravel,” Markarian said, voice laced with static. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  ?
??Don’t flatter yourself you’re the reason I’m here, Markarian. I came for the cargo. You’re just next on the list.”

  “What are you going to do—kill me?”

  “Do you think you deserve any better than that?” Irravel adjusted her position. “Or are you going to try to justify betraying the cargo?”

  He pulled his aged features into a smile. “We made a deal, Irravel; the same way you made a deal about the greenfly. But you don’t remember that, do you?”

  “Maybe I sold the greenfly machines to the pig,” she said. “If I did that, it was a calculated move to buy the safety of the cargo. You, on the other hand, cut a deal with Seven to save your neck.”

  The other pirates were holding fire, nervously marking them. “I did it to save yours, actually. Does that make any sense?” There was wonder in his eyes now. “Did you ever see Mirsky’s hand? That was never her own. The pirates swap limbs as badges of rank. They’re very good at connective surgery.”

  “You’re not making much sense, Markarian.”

  Dislodged ice rained on them. Irravel looked around in time to see another pirate emerging from a crevasse. She recognised the suit artwork: it was Seven. He wore . . . things, strung around his utility belt in transparent bags like obscene fruit. She stared at them for a few seconds before their nature clicked into horrific focus: frozen human heads.

  Irravel stifled an urge to vomit.

  “Yes,” Run Seven said. “Ten of your compatriots, recently unburdened of their bodies. But don’t worry— they’re not harmed in any fundamental sense. Their brains are intact—provided you don’t warm them with an ill-aimed shot.”

  “I’ve got a clear line of fire,” Mirsky said. “Just say the word and the bastard’s an instant anatomy lesson.”

  “Wait,” Irravel said. “Don’t shoot.”

  “Sound business sense, Captain Veda. I see you appreciate the value of these heads.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Mirsky said.