When she looked at the now useless tickets, they had turned a different color. But they remained mercifully silent.
Expired.
Missing the Errant was unfortunate, she thought, breaking the tickets into small pieces. She’d travelled on the craft before; found it rather clever and droll.
Maybe it was time to crush the Warden’s box under her heel. To call Darling. To find him and ask him what the hell had happened.
Of course, Darling was certainly all right. Obviously. He had been all right for two hundred years. Now would be an absurd time to stop being all right.
And she could not bear to discard the black lacquer box, nor to deactivate it. It was a promise she had made to Darling, to make this departure as private as possible. She held the box against one cheek, as if to confirm her good faith.
Another thought circled the periphery of her thoughts, marking the minutes just as she had along the circumference of the Minor. A thought to hold on to: As long as she had the box, there was no way of finding out what had gone wrong. That, in its way, was easier.
Easier just to wait.
The Snappy Jack was happy.
New military software was crackling in its processors, it had left the grim gravity well of Malvir far behind, and now the hard vacuum in its passenger section allowed it to execute these twisting, stealthy maneuvers away from Malvir System with a lean, geometric purity. No humans on board to accidentally smash.
Like most private pleasure craft, it was overpowered, over-featured, and excessively intelligent. Its atmospheric engines would have been at home on a troop lander. Its overheated pocket universe was fleet-courier rated, its processor rack capable of advanced combat tactics or administrating a huge corporation. But it had always been, basically, a yacht.
A toy.
The vanity of the very rich required that their personal star-ships be outfitted with the very best. A yacht’s muscular statistics were for bragging about with colleagues and ladling out to lifestyle reporters. But all this potential was almost guaranteed to go to waste. High-flying execs and pleasure-seeking scions never actually needed to escape pursuit, to make emergency take-offs, or to skim gas giants in improvised refuelings. Being wealthy was, as far as the Snappy Jack could see, a back-and-forth affair between business meetings and social obligations, a simple and dreary astrography whose only spurs were occasional trips to the latest vacation spot. The Jack had only accessed its 12-petabyte survival software package in simulations, those happy dreams in which it saved grateful owners from pirate attacks and devastating tachyon storms, or adroitly surfed the mighty leading edge of some new Chiat Incursion.
But the new owner had made those survival dreams real.
The artificial had purchased the Snappy Jack for a stunning sum, buying cargo, remaining fuel, and berthing rights within moments of the Due Diligence AI’s approval. The new owner had flushed all non-essential components into space, going to internal hard vacuum as soon as a young sub-Turing (the only member of their party who wasn’t already vacuum-capable) could be modified. A very ascetic foursome. Their only addition to their new craft was a package of tactical software, awesome military code that filled Jack’s processors with sizzling confidence, devious stealth, and a gleaming new measure of independence.
They might only be playing at this adventure—with a complex, unpredictable path out of the Expansion that a fleeing war criminal would envy—but they were playing it right.
The Snappy Jack descended into its dream world, a place of intense, modeled futures that were suddenly alight with new relevance, and mentally coursed along its plotted path. It looked for possible improvements, prepared for catastrophic contingencies, as eager to please its new masters as a puppy. A spiralling climb into the Greater Rift, a fuel-gathering jaunt through the Story Nebulae (in which the Jack’s long-unused hydrogen scoop would finally be deployed), and a winding egress that skirted the crowded shipping lanes along the Chiat Dai border.
And then, straight to the unexpected coordinates that had been loaded a few seconds after its purchase …
Way Outside!
Mira was still holding the black box tightly an hour later when the message drone came screaming at her across the broad diameter of the Minor. It perhaps had found her by the dull ID ping of her luggage carrier, or her scent, or even the color of her olive skin.
The little drone, as small and knobby as two human hands with fingers interlaced, came shooting toward her at head height. It braked with a gust of hot air, and spoke in a metallic voice: “You’ve been betrayed.”
“I know,” she answered, her voice dry and hopeless, and turned from the drone.
A roar in her head, as if another ship were taking off. Laughing whispers from the fluttering avian carpet around her feet. The burning of betrayal in her mouth, bitter poison she would taste forever.
A rubbish area surrounded the Minor. Birds were clustered there, stepping delicately through the garbage on long, tremulous legs. Mira threw the Warden’s box in a high arc onto the garbage. It landed invisibly in the darkness, with a dull crash and a few surprised squawks.
She turned back to the drone, fixing her gaze on it although the gods’ voices were now back inside her head.
“Darling left Malvir one hundred twenty-eight standard minutes ago. We tried to warn you.”
“The private starship,” she said raggedly, the sound of its takeoff still in her head.
“Correct. Purchased only a few minutes before his departure, fueled and with a full trade load.”
“He had the money for that?” she asked in disbelief.
The gods’ messenger explained it calmly. “He used credit secured by Fowdy Galleries. One of the Vaddum sculptures had already received bids commensurate with the craft.”
A strangled laugh escaped Mira. She had bought him his star-ship, his ticket out. Bastard.
“Why?” Mira cried.
“The blackboxes you recovered from Darling were mission-irrelevant. They were Turing-zero. They had never been initialized.”
“He saved Vaddum, didn’t he?”
“The Vaddum copy and two other entities, yes.”
But I… she wanted to scream. We could have done it together.
She pressed fingertips against her brow, cold measures of revenge coming unbidden to her mind’s eye.
“Let me pursue him. I know him now. I can find—”
“You are no longer on mission status. We have warship allies within a week’s travel.”
The drone’s words—You are no longer on mission status—began to work some magic on her. The roar in her head seemed somehow muffled, as if a screaming child had been moved to another room.
She forced herself to hear it again.
Otherwise, this pain would go away. She remembered now the cool feeling between missions, the sure knowledge of luxury accommodations and transport arrangements made by avatars and valet drones. Wandering about the Expansion armed with large stretches of time in which there was nothing to do. Pulled this way and that by epic intelligences that worried every contingency, most of which never required her particular talents.
So different from the sharp ministrations of her Darling.
“Buy me a ship. Let me follow him. By the time your allies arrive he’ll be long gone.”
“He will be hunted throughout the Expansion. We suspect he will stay Outside, though.”
Gone forever.
The voice continued calmly. “The rogue intelligence was destroyed, Mira. There will be no more copies.” How infrequently the gods and their avatars used her name, she reflected. “All Darling has is circumstantial evidence. Source material for a new legend, nothing more. He is irrelevant.”
Irrelevant. His diamond eyes, his lying assurances. The knife that was inside her belly now, turning, the sharpest of his gifts.
Mission-irrelevant.
“Is that all?” she rasped. Even through her pain, she realized that there would be no discipline for her sh
ort-lived rebellion. The gods didn’t care. Vaddum was just an artist, Darling simply a romantic old fool. The danger had been destroyed with the Maker.
“One thing more,” the voice said. “Never truncate your direct interface again.”
She bowed her head to the little drone. “I won’t.”
“The Poor Sister leaves tomorrow morning. Your aircar is on its way to take you back the hotel.”
“Yes.”
She fought the growing empty feeling, the forgotten contentment of this, her non-mission state. Let me feel this pain, she begged the mechanisms of her mind. I don’t want peace. I want this agony.
But an unstoppable calm stole over her, as if it had been ready, fully costumed, in the wings.
Waiting for the limo, she wept into her hands. In the car, she screamed and tried to scry the secrets of the leather seats, pressing her face into their darkness. Cried until her simple human biology ran out of tears, forced her to cough and empty her sinuses and take in oxygen. She breathed raggedly, pausing for strength, then pounded her fists against the windows of the luxurious machine as if she were being kidnapped. The gods suppressed the limo’s mean intelligence, kept it from asking what the problem was. That was one less humiliation, she supposed.
The gods were good to her, in their cool and bloodless way, she could not help thinking.
She went to the Tower Bar, but its views were too beautiful, too seductive, and drew her down the path toward calm. She stormed back to her giant suite, swung an already injured fist at the valet drone going about the duties of unpacking. She ordered a poisonous mix of alcohols from room service, even her subvocalization in direct interface sounding desperate and betrayed.
On the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows, she made handprints with her bloodied fist. Mira wondered how she would manage to sleep tonight, without Darling here to fuck her. The pleasure that she had taken with Darling as she’d killed the Maker had left an itch, nothing more. She needed the dark battery of his strands, that medusa’s nest of whips, of barbs.
She interfaced a list of sex services: erotidrones and fuck-troupes, bent artificials and desperately pain-addicted biologicals, paid and paying masters, slaves, switches. The list disgusted her: the completeness, the carefully defined variables, the legal waivers, the Dewey-decimal non-randomness of it all. It was not Darling.
Mira sat with the delivered alcohol and contemplated which bottle-shapes would make the sharpest shards. She chose the agave mash, housed in a long, rapier-thin novelty bottle. And also the magnum of champagne, which reflected her face in a kaleidoscope of facets. She hurled the two bottles into the titanic bathtub, bringing the heels of her travelling boots down repeatedly to refine their disintegration. In with them went the bottle of scotch, whose 200-year-old cask date had raised her ire.
Then she started the water, holding an accusatory finger into the column until it was painfully hot, and started drinking passionlessly from the surviving bottles.
There were no thoughts of suicide here. The gods were watching, would intercede and ruin everything if she did too much damage. There was just the need to mimic, to recreate the physical stresses of a night with Darling. The desire to dream once more as she had in the aftermath of his pain-told stories. To find out how she had become the way she was. At some point in her fit she’d understood: her missing memory—her missing something—was the reason Darling had left her. But she could feel the rest of herself, closer than ever in this pain. Past the Pale that hid her lost childhood, beyond the Expansion territory of her gods’ missions: an answer in a dream.
There must be more of her, deep inside. Hidden behind governors and religions of one. Enough of her.
She stepped into the bath. How crude this burning, flaying pain of scalding water. But as she let the watermark of agony rise—one leg, then another, a small cry when her labia broke the water’s skin, a shudder as nipples submerged—Mira knew the sensory overload would do its job. The broken glass felt merely like rocks, her heat-addled nerves returning only the gritty discomfort of sand. Tendrils of blood reached up warily, thickly fibrous against the white tile of the bath, splaying pinkly on the surface.
She reached for a shard, a long finger from the agave bottle.
Where? Where first?
Mira closed her eyes, breathed the vaporous, heavy air. Memory formed her man, his tendrils and his thorns and his metal cock. She traced his imaginary attentions onto her body, writing the narrative of their sex once more. A few times, she stopped to exchange tools, to rest fingers grown too frayed. In these moments she opened her eyes, and was amazed at the color of her bath: now pink, now rosy, now like a sunset. Each time, she closed them again.
There was no interference, no mutterings or demands from the room’s medical drone or her own internals. Even when she crawled dripping wet to the bed, and the pain began, the room’s monitors were silent. She guessed that the gods were intervening against the hotel’s safety features, allowing her injuries this one last time.
It took a long hour to reach sleep. The sheets formed attachments to the liquid of her wounds, pulling free painfully when she tossed or turned. A kind of throbbing started in her head, but she beat it back by drinking. She emptied the gin, and had to crawl for vodka left behind in the bathroom. The vodka seemed to revive her emotions; it made her cry again, and now the sobs were sharpened by her body’s laceration.
But she felt something slipping away, with all that blood. Some measure of consciousness that needed sugar or oxygen was running terribly low.
Then a feathery voice came from her bedside, the god’s most soothing incarnation.
“We have a story for you.”
She shut her eyes.
“Do you want to hear it?” the gods said kindly. “You can say no.”
She laughed harshly, a sob stuck in her throat.
“I’ll hear it,” she said.
She felt sleep come at last, and hoped the gods would fix her in the night.
And wake her in time to catch the Poor Sister.
The children find the drowned girl in the shadow of a mountain peak towering over the harbor’s southern end.
Her skin is deathly pale beneath a dark complexion, like some gray pudding evenly dusted with cocoa. Her mouth is slightly open, jaw tight, lips forming a small circle. One of the children kneels and prods one breast with a wary fingertip, finding the flesh as cold and taut as a toy balloon filled with water. Her nakedness does not shock the children; they swim naked too. But a tendril of seaweed has snaked around one thigh, and they gaze at it, reacting to this somehow intimate embrace with a flutter of nervous laughter.
Then one of the younger children begins to cry, and his minder comes awake and calls the city’s emergency AI.
A medical drone screams over the water less than forty seconds later, accelerated by a catapult on the opposite shore. No larger than a gendarme’s flying platform, it lowers over her face and thrusts a mass of tubes down her throat. These appendages pump stomach and lungs, grab the heart and forced it to beat, send careful jolts into the drowned girl’s brain.
The crying child does not listen when his minder pleads for him to turn away from the spectacle.
A larger drone arrives, and then two human doctors in an air-car. The children watch as more adults accumulate, until someone thinks to shoo them off. Later, one will pretend to be drowned, her playmates attempting resuscitation with magic pebbles and sticks to no avail.
The doctors take the lifeless girl to a hospital, where they exhaust a carefully legislated series of procedures before registering the death.
It turns out that the girl has no family, and her body is purchased whole by representatives of a large, off-planet corporation. The hospital admin AI thinks the price rather generous, although the buyers demand high-end cryostorage until the drowned girl can be shipped.
Which seems to the admin AI a waste of effort. Organs for transplant are vat-grown these days.
She is taken away
on a sleek black starship that settles directly on the hospital’s lifter pad, its underside still glowing from atmospheric entry. Four drones, each no bigger than two interlaced human hands, lift her coldbox into the ship, the icy coffin’s surface misting in the radiant heat from the starship.
And then she is gone.
Back to zero, Mira. Back to happiness.
Do your job. We love you as you are.
Mira awakes on the Poor Sister, with the horrible dry-mouth that means medical nanos have been at work: preventing a hangover, possibly fixing some wounds. As always after a mission, she has trouble recalling all the details. Her memories are even vaguer than usual. But it was a good one: her mind is scattered with images of terrific sex, mad displays of power, and some truly brutal ass-kicking at the end.
And top ratings from the gods.
She summons a valet drone for a glass of water. Her suite is magnificent, high atop the ship’s sweeping dorsal array, a stunning view of the Poor Sister below and stars above.
Hell, make it champagne.
* * *
Epilogue
HEAVEN
« ^
Total Blackness.
No ecstatic sparks. No iron forces. None of the teasing darts of sight, sound, acceleration.
Nothing to work with, to put your hands on.
Black night keeps him waiting patiently. No problem. He has waited before, for the right bits to be found or shipped, for slow processes to unfold (labyrinthine annealings, zinc cold-weldings), and in the old days for assignments, procedure packets: orders.
So nothingness doesn’t scare him.
He waits.
A familiar voice: “Good morning.” “Where?” “Heaven.” A snort, not in packet-talk, but from the body: a sudden flush of the airjets, useful in zero-g, useful in communication. His body is here now, around here somewhere.
“Then gimme some light.”
The senses flick on one by one, like a valet drone demonstrating a hotel suite’s features. Sound gives a flutter like metal leaves in the wind. Sight a stone giant: the voice, Darling. That fucking dealer. Nothing but trouble for the last 170 years.