Redemption Ark

‘Trick, Little Miss?’

  She nodded. She was there now. No more pussyfooting here either. ‘The police proxy knew, didn’t it? Just couldn’t get the evidence together, I guess — or maybe it was just letting me stew, waiting to see how much I knew.’

  The mask slipped again. ‘I’m not entire…’

  ‘I guess Xavier had to be in on it. He knows this ship like the back of his hand, every subsystem, every Goddamned wire. He certainly would have known how to hide Lyle Merrick aboard it.’

  ‘Lyle Merrick, Little Miss?’

  ‘You know. You remember. Not the Lyle Merrick, of course, just a copy of him. Beta- or alpha-level, I don’t know. Don’t very much care either. Wouldn’t have made a fuck of a lot of difference in a court of law, would it?’

  ‘Now…’

  ‘It’s you, Beast. You’re him. Lyle Merrick died when the authorities executed him for the collision. But that wasn’t the end, was it? You kept on going. Xavier hid a copy of Lyle aboard my father’s fucking ship. You’re it.’

  Beast said nothing for several seconds. Antoinette watched the slow, hypnotic play of colours and numerics on the console. She felt as if a part of her had been violated, as if everything in the universe she had ever felt she could trust had just been wadded up and thrown away.

  When Beast answered, the tone of his voice was mockingly unchanged. ‘Little Miss… I mean Antoinette… You’re wrong.’

  ‘Of course I’m not wrong. You’ve as good as admitted it.’

  ‘No. You don’t understand.’

  ‘What part don’t I understand?’

  ‘It wasn’t Xavier who did this to me. Xavier helped — Xavier knew all about it — but it wasn’t his idea.’

  ‘No?’

  Tt was your father, Antoinette. He helped me.‘

  She hit the console again, harder this time. And then walked out of her ship, intending never to set foot in it again.

  Lasher the pig slept for most of the trip out from Zodiacal Light. There was nothing for him to do, Scorpio had said, except at the very end of the operation, and even then there was only a one-in-four chance that he would be required to do anything other than turn his ship around. But at the back of his mind he had always known it would be him who had to do the dirty work. He registered no surprise at all when the tight-beam message from Zodiacal Light told him that his shuttle was the one in the right quadrant of the sky to intercept the vessel Skade had dropped behind her larger ship.

  ‘Lucky old Lasher,’ he said to himself. ‘You always wanted the glory. Now’s your big chance.’

  He did not take the duty lightly, nor underestimate the risks to himself. The recovery operation was fraught with danger. The amount of fuel his shuttle carried was precisely rationed, just enough so that he could get back home again with a human-mass payload. But there was no room for error. Clavain had made it clear that there were to be no pointless heroics. If the trajectory of Skade’s shuttle took it even a kilometre outside the safe volume in which a rendezvous was possible, Lasher — or whoever the lucky one was — was to turn back, ignoring it. The only concession to be made was that each of Clavain’s shuttles carried a single modified missile, the warhead stripped out and replaced with a transponder. If they got within range of Skade’s shuttle they could attach the beacon to its hull. The beacon would keep emitting its signal for a century of subjective time, five hundred years of worldtime. It would not be easy, but there would remain a faint chance of homing in on it again, before it fell beyond the well-mapped sphere of human space. It was enough to know that they would not have abandoned Felka entirely.

  Lasher saw it now. His shuttle had homed in on Skade’s, following updated coordinates from Zodiacal Light. Skade’s shuttle was now in free-fall, having burned its last microgram of antimatter. It was visible in his forward window: a gunmetal barb illuminated by his forward floods.

  He opened the channel back to the lighthugger. ‘This is Lasher. I see it now. It’s definitely a shuttle. Can’t tell you what type, but it doesn’t look like one of ours.‘

  He slowed his approach. It would have been nice to wait for Scorpio’s response, but that was a luxury he did not have. There was already a twenty-minute timelag back to Zodiacal Light, and the distance was stretching continually as the larger ship maintained its ten-gee acceleration. He was permitted exactly thirty minutes here, and then he had to begin his return journey. If he stayed a minute longer he would never catch up with the lighthugger.

  It would be just enough time to establish airlock connections between two unfamiliar ships, just enough time for him to get aboard and find Clavain’s daughter, or whoever she was.

  He didn’t care who he was rescuing, only that Scorpio had told him to do it. So what if Scorpio was only doing what Clavain had told him to do? It didn’t matter, did not reduce in any way the burning soldierly admiration Lasher felt for his leader. He had followed Scorpio’s career almost from the moment Scorpio had arrived in Chasm City.

  It was impossible to underestimate the effect of Scorpio’s coming. Before, the pigs had been a squabbling rabble, content to snuffle around in the shiftiest layers of the fallen city. Scorpio had galvanised them. He had become a criminal messiah, a figure so mythic that many pigs doubted that he even existed. Lasher had collected Scorpio’s crimes, committing them to memory with the avidity of a religious acolyte. He had studied them, marvelling at their brutal ingenuity, their haiku-like simplicity. How must it feel, he had wondered, to have been the author of such jewel-like atrocities? Later, he had moved into Scorpio’s realm of influence, and then ascended through the shadowy hierarchies of the criminal underworld. He remembered his first meeting with Scorpio, the sense of mild disappointment when he turned out to be just another pig like himself. Gradually, however, that realisation had only sharpened his admiration. Scorpio was flesh and blood, and that made his achievements all the more remarkable. Lasher, nervously at first, became one of Scorpio’s main operatives, and then one of his deputies.

  And then Scorpio had vanished. It was said that he had gone into space, off to engage in sensitive negotiations with some other criminal group elsewhere in the system — the Skyjacks, perhaps.

  It was unsafe for Scorpio to move at any time, but most especially during war. Lasher had forced himself to deal with the likely but unpalatable truth: Scorpio was probably dead.

  Months had passed. Then Lasher had heard the news: Scorpio was in custody, or a kind of custody. The spiders had captured him, it turned out, maybe after the zombies had already picked him up. And now the spiders were being pressured into turning Scorpio over to the Ferrisville Convention.

  That was it, then. Scorpio’s bright, inglorious reign had come to an end. The Convention could make any charge stick, and in wartime there was almost no crime that didn’t carry the death penalty. They had Scorpio, the prize they had sought for so long. There would be a show trial and then an execution, and Scorpio’s passage into legend would be complete.

  But it hadn’t happened that way. There had been the usual contradictory rumours, but some of them had spoken of the same thing — that Scorpio was alive and well, and no longer in anyone’s custody; that Scorpio had made it back to Chasm City and was now holed up in the darkly threatening structure some of the pigs knew as the Chateau des Corbeaux, the one they said had the haunted cellar. And that he was the guest of the Chateau’s mysterious tenant, and was now putting together the fabled thing that had often been spoken of but which had never quite come into existence before.

  The army of pigs.

  Lasher had rejoined his old master and learned that the rumours were true. Scorpio was working for, or in some strange collaboration with, the old man they called Clavain. And the two of them were plotting the theft of a ship belonging to the Ultras, something that the orthodox criminal rulebook said could not even be contemplated, let alone attempted. Lasher had been intrigued and terrified, even more so when he learned that the theft was just the prelude to something even more au
dacious.

  How could he resist?

  And so here, light-years from Chasm City, light-years from anything he could call familiar, he was. He had served Scorpio and served him well, not just treading in his footsteps but anticipating them; even, sometimes, dancing ahead of his master, earning Scorpio’s quiet praise.

  He was near the shuttle now. It had the smooth worn-pebble look of Con-joiner machinery. It was completely dark. He tracked the floods across it, searching for the point where Clavain had told him he would find an airlock: an almost invisibly fine seam in the hull that would only reveal itself when he was close by. Distance to the hull was now fifteen metres, with a closing speed of one metre per second. The shuttle was small enough that he would have no difficulty finding the hostage aboard it, provided Skade had kept her word.

  It happened when he was ten metres from the hull. It grew from the heart of the Conjoiner spacecraft: a mote of light, like the first spark of the rising sun.

  Lasher did not have time to blink.

  Skade saw the fairy-light glint of the crustbuster proximity device. It was not difficult to recognise. There were no stars aft of Nightshade now, only an inky spreading pool of total blackness. Relativity was squeezing the visible universe into a belt that encircled the ship. But Clavain’s ship was in nearly the same velocity frame as Nightshade, so it still appeared to lie directly behind her. The pinprick flare of the weapon studded that darkness like a single misplaced star.

  Skade examined the light, corrected it for modest differential red shift and determined that the multiple-teratonne blast yield was consistent only with the device itself detonating, plus a small residual mass of antimatter. A shuttle-sized spacecraft had been destroyed by her weapon, but not a starship. The explosion of a lighthugger, a machine which had already sunk claws deep into the infinite energy well of the quantum vacuum, would have outshone the crustbuster by three orders of magnitude.

  So Clavain had been cleverer than her again. No, she corrected herself: not cleverer, but precisely as clever. Skade had made no mistakes yet, and though Clavain had parried all her attacks, he had yet to strike at her. The advantage was still hers, and she was certain that she had inconvenienced him with at least one of her attacks. At the very least she had forced him to burn fuel he would sooner have conserved. More probably she had made him divert his efforts into countering her attacks rather than preparing for the battle that lay ahead around Resurgam. In every military sense she had lost nothing except the ability ever to bluff convincingly again.

  But she had never been counting on that anyway.

  It was time to do what had to be done.

  ‘You lying fuck.’

  Xavier looked up as Antoinette stormed into their quarters. He was lying on his back on the bunk, a compad balanced between his knees. Antoinette had a momentary glimpse of lines of source code scrolling down the ‘pad, the symbols and sinuous indentations of the programming language resembling the intricately formalised stanzas of some alien poetry. Xavier had a stylus gripped between his teeth. It dropped from his mouth as he opened it in shock. The compad tumbled to the floor.

  ‘Antoinette?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know what?’

  ‘About the Mandelstam Ruling. About Lyle Merrick. About Storm Bird. About Beast. About you.’

  Xavier slid around on the bunk, his feet touching the floor. He pushed a few fingers through the black mop of his hair, bashfully.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, you fuck!’

  Then she was on him in a blind, pummelling rage. There was no real violence behind her punches; under any other circumstances they would have been playful. But Xavier hid his face, absorbing her anger against his forearms. He was trying to say something to her. She was blanking him out in her fury, refusing to listen to his snivelling little justifications.

  Finally the rage turned to tears. Xavier stopped her from hitting him, taking her wrists gently.

  ‘Antoinette,’ he said.

  She hit him one last time, then started weeping in earnest. She hated him and loved him at the same time.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ Xavier said. ‘I swear it’s not my fault.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He looked at her, she returning his gaze through the blur of her tears. ‘Why didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘That’s what I asked.’

  ‘Because your father made me promise not to.’

  When Antoinette had calmed down, when she was ready to listen, Xavier told her something of what had happened.

  Jim Bax had been a friend of Lyle Merrick’s for many years. The two of them had been freighter pilots, both working within and around the Rust Belt. Normally two pilots operating in the same trading sphere would have found it difficult to sustain a genuine friendship through the ups and downs of a systemwide economy; there would have been too many occasions where their interests overlapped. But because Jim and Lyle operated in radically different niches with very different client lists, rivalry had never threatened their relationship. Jim Bax hauled heavy loads on rapid high-burn trajectories, usually at short notice and usually, though not always, more or less within the bounds of legality. Certainly Jim did not court criminal clients, although it was not exactly true to say that he turned them away, either. Lyle, by contrast, worked almost exclusively with criminals. They recognised that his slow, frail, unreliable chemical-drive scow was about the least likely ship to attract the attention of the Convention’s customs and excise cutters. Lyle could not guarantee that his loads would arrive at their destinations quickly, or sometimes at all, but he could almost always guarantee that they would arrive uninspected, and that there would be no inconvenient lines of questioning extending back to his clients. So, in a more than modest fashion, Lyle Merrick prospered. He went to a great deal of trouble to hide his earnings from the authorities, maintaining a fastidious illusion of being constantly on the edge of insolvency. But behind the scenes, and by the standards of the day, he was a moderately wealthy man, far wealthier, in fact, than Jim Bax would ever be. Wealthy enough, indeed, to afford to have himself backed-up once a year at one of the alpha-level scanning facilities in Chasm City’s high canopy.

  And for many years his act worked. Until the day a bored police cutter decided to pick on Lyle for no other reason than that he had never troubled them before, and so therefore had to be up to something. The cutter had no difficulty matching trajectories with Lyle’s scow. It requested that he initiate main-engine cut-off and prepare for boarding. But Lyle knew he could not possibly comply with the enforced main-engine cutoff. His entire reputation hinged on the fact that his hauls were never inspected. Had he allowed the proxy aboard, he would have been signing his own bankruptcy notice.

  He had no choice but to run.

  Fortunately — or not, as the case proved — he was already on final approach for Carousel New Copenhagen. He knew that there was a repair well on the rim just large enough to hold his ship. It would be tight, but if he could get inside the bay, he would at least be able to destroy the cargo before the proxies forced their way aboard. He would still be in a lot of trouble, but at least he would not have broken client confidentiality, and that, for Lyle, mattered a lot more than his own wellbeing.

  Lyle, of course, never made it. He screwed up his last approach burn, harried by the cutters — there were now four of them swooping in to escort him, and they had already fired retarder grapples on to his hull — and collided with the outer face of the rim itself. Surprisingly, and no one was more surprised than Lyle, he survived the impact. The blunt life-support and habitat module of his freighter had pushed itself through the skin of the carousel like a baby bird’s beak ripping through eggshell. His velocity at impact had only been a few tens of metres per second, and although he had been bruised and battered, he suffered no serious injuries. His luck continued even when the main propulsion section — the swollen lungs of the chemical fuel tanks — went up.
The blast rammed the nose module further into the carousel, but again Lyle survived.

  But even as he realised his good fortune, he knew that he was in grave trouble. The impact had not occurred in the most densely inhabited portion of the carousel’s ring, but there were still many casualties. A vault of the rim interior had decompressed as his ship plunged through the rim, the air gushing through the wound in the carousel’s fabric. The chamber had been a recreational zone, a miniature glade and forest lit by suspended lamps.

  On any other night, there might have been no more than a few dozen people and animals enjoying the synthetic scenery by moonlight. But on the night Lyle crashed there had been a midnight recital of one of Quirrenbach’s more populist efforts, and several hundred people had been there. Thankfully most had survived, though many had been seriously injured. But there had still been fatalities: forty-three dead at the final count, excluding Lyle himself. It was certainly possible that more had been killed.

  Lyle made no attempt to escape. He knew that his fate was sealed. He would have been lucky to avoid the death penalty just for refusing to comply with the boarding order, but even if he had wriggled out of that — and there were ways and means — there was nothing that could be done for him now. Since the Melding Plague, when the once glorious Glitter Band had been reduced to the Rust Belt, acts of vandalism against habitats were considered the most heinous of crimes. The forty-three dead were almost a detail.

  Lyle Merrick was arrested, tried and sentenced. He was found guilty on all counts relating to the collision. His sentence was irreversible neural death. Since he was known to have been scanned, the Mandelstam Ruling was to apply.

  Designated Ferrisville officials, nicknamed eraserheads, were assigned to track down and nullify all extant alpha- or beta-level simulations of Lyle Merrick. The eraserheads had the full legal machinery of the Convention behind them, together with an arsenal of plague-tolerant hunter-seeker software tools. They could comb any known database or archive and ferret out the buried patterns of an illegal simulation. They could erase any public database even suspected of holding a forbidden copy. They were very good at their work.