The Ascendant Stars (33 page)

‘Harry?’ she said out loud. ‘Are you there? Can you hear me?’

There was no reply.

Have I been deceived?
she wondered.
Played like a fool?

A thin beam of light came on, trained on her from above. Immediately her left palm began to itch and when she opened her hand a voice in her ear said, ‘Alert from Mirager v3.7 – exterior scan in progress, please choose profile mask from list or close fist to activate default.’

On her glowing palm were four choices: a Mandarin–Piraseri B dictionary and tutor; the complete works of Hieronymus Beethoven, audio, video, Glowmo and Kabukisoft; full plans of Earthsphere Phantom-class heavy interceptor, encryption level cognitive; or interactive Gomedran funeral ceremony, Family Kyzec of the Clan Amarg (default). She quickly chose the second and a fine, flexing web appeared around her. The thin beam of light began to pulse, slowly at first then faster and faster, giving the platform a strobe-lit appearance.

Without warning the platform turned into a tube down which she plummeted. There were several abrupt changes in direction,
signified by the way the flickering blur flowed. It ended when she came to a sudden halt in a huge dark hall whose only source of light was the log fire blazing in a wide and ornate hearth. There was a large, low table covered in a half-assembled jigsaw and two high-backed easy chairs. In one sat Harry, who smiled and gave an ironic wave.

‘Sorry about that … unexpected diversion,’ he said, gesturing her towards the other chair. ‘There was a temporary security filter engaged when we arrived – it let me through but you were flagged and shunted into an isolation lobby prior to scrutiny. As soon as the data-holding subsystem posted up the Gomedran funeral ceremony I had you transferred.’

‘Why was I filtered out?’ she said. ‘And where are we?’

‘Well, a fractalised sentience like you occupies a lot of file space and it was that sheer size which tipped them off.’ He glanced around him. ‘And this place is part of the memblock that comes with my account, dressed up to suit my antiquated fancy.’

Julia settled into the chair, picking up vague sensations of comfort as well as a pseudo-warmth from the fire.

‘Delays put me on edge,’ she said. ‘I hate being late for anything.’

‘Well, I’ve had the security filter switched to low priority so now would be a good time to be on our way.’

‘What’s the next step?’

‘Down to Earth, a domestic droid repair facility in Delhi,’ Harry said. ‘The facility AI runs a clandestine transit network for one of the techtriads, strictly a business arrangement.’

‘Which the facility owner knows nothing about.’

‘Sometimes criminality is in the eye of the beholder, Ms Bryce.’

‘Then let us be sure to evade such eyes,’ she said. ‘Do we have to go to another location to transvector out?’

‘Remain seated – I can initiate the process quite easily from here.’

Again, her awareness was compacted and spiralled through the transvector bottleneck, then unwound into new surroundings that flickered into existence all around them. Only they seemed to
have arrived on an expanse of empty grey tiles while some distance away a datatropolis of neon towers and spindles sprawled across their field of vision, matched by a similar towerscape that covered the ceiling directly overhead. That one, however, had no grey expanse and when she looked back down Julia saw a flock of red caltrops, nullors, settle on a blue tower, all glowing and glossy. It only took a few seconds for webs of cracks to spread over every surface and less than a minute later the tower fell apart in grey blocks and slabs that bounced and faded, leaving more grey tiling and a jumble of pale shapes which the nullors then pored over and sorted through.

‘Perhaps we should think about exiting the area,’ she said.

Harry was staring intently at his glowing palm.

‘Not an option, I’m afraid. All access to the repair facility system has been locked down. It’s a netlaw sweep and purge – I don’t know if I can even grapple us to another part of the system … uh-oh.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve just been spotted by a netlaw unit, damn. But our miragers have just turned us into an archive of genome maps of the entire Kiskashin genus … ’

The unit came into view, a spinning white toroid. As it hovered a short way off, it emitted needles of amber light that flickered and probed Julia and Harry’s shared illusion. Then a machine voice said:

‘Composite object in subsector A31 displays irregularities. Shall convey to Local Holding 72 for scrutiny.’

The amber beams disappeared, an opaque red box snapped into place around them and suddenly they were shooting away on another blurred succession of sharp turns. When she glanced at Harry he seemed quite relaxed and unconcerned, at least outwardly.

‘I hope you have a plan,’ she said.

He gave her a sly glance. ‘As a matter of fact, I do. Just watch.’

Seconds later their headlong plunge changed in an eyeblink to a slow forward glide along a silver-grey corridor. A flickery blue
veil appeared before them and as they passed through it a tenuous image of themselves appeared behind them, almost as if they were leaving behind a ghost. Harry laughed out loud, just as they accelerated away again. This time their dizzying hurtle ended with a plunge into total blackness. Julia spoke but heard nothing, not her voice, nor a sound of any kind.

Then the blackout flowed away like angular shadows being sucked into a plughole. She and Harry were standing at the top of stone steps leading down to a laboratory set in what looked like a castle vault. Flagstones, masonry block walls, rough archways, iron wall lamps, workbenches cluttered with archaic paraphernalia, spark-gap equipment, elaborate arrays of glassware with gas burners heating bulbous bowls while various spouts discharged droplets into beakers.

‘Finally,’ said a querulous voice. ‘Thought you’d never get here.’

What looked like a brain in a bottle drifted in on a squat a-grav platform fringed with a variety of work arms, jointed and tentacular. It approached a circular table full of bulky objects concealed by a grubby sheet which was lifted, wrapped in a ball and volleyed into a corner. Revealed were several ceiling-mounted displays and several pieces of mystery apparatus.

‘My thanks for extracting us from a fate worse than corruption,’ said Harry. ‘Oh, and Julia, this is Reski Emantes, a somewhat idiosyncratic AI – Reski, this is Julia Bryce … ’

Their host turned towards her, altered its appearance to that of a flattened glassy sphere and floated over.

‘Are you the Julia Bryce from the Darien colony world?’ Clusters of multicoloured pinpoints glowed in patterns within as it spoke. ‘You were the product of a genetic-engineering programme, and escaped Darien in the company of others like you – is that correct?’

‘These details are generally factual, yes,’ she said as they descended the stone steps.

‘My superior, the Construct, has had its loyalists searching for you for several objective days,’ Reski Emantes said. ‘Yet you are
here as a fractalised sentience. Does this mean that your physical form is dead? Were you murdered?’

‘Her story is an involved one,’ Harry said. ‘But before that, tell me what happened back at that droid repair shop. And just how did you get in and out with us?’

Patterns raced in the floating glass drone, soft glows and sharp glitters.

‘Someone traced the coded message you sent to me,’ it said. ‘And someone else tracked you from Copernicus University. I think both were sniffers reporting to someone who sprang that netlaw operation while you were on your way. At the same time I was the target of a pincer hit – my online presence was dismembered by a reaper hack while my real-world counterpart was destroyed by a sniper using T9 rounds.’

Harry raised an eyebrow. ‘Tetranine is highly prohibited on metropolitan worlds like Earth.’

‘Indeed. The sniper fired three rounds, wrecked half of the building my counterpart was in and killed at least thirty-nine others. Casualty reports keep bumping that number upwards.’

‘Which brings us to you,’ Harry said.

‘I always maintain an updated partial copy,’ the drone said. ‘I had enough time to activate it then escape-hatch out to my secure bunker here on board the good airship
Cloudtrekker
. From here I traced your activities, hacked into the local netlaw system, snatched you to containment on the regional netlaw server then had you vectored to my ever-so-humble abode.’

Julia smiled. ‘Humble or not, it feels appropriate.’

‘Sadly this is a cut-down version of what I had to leave behind,’ Reski said. ‘Which sharpens my eagerness to find out who is behind these attacks.’

Harry gave Julia a look. ‘Talavera?’

‘I know that name,’ said the drone. ‘Tell me more.’

As they stood at the foot of the stairs, Julia briefly summarised her experiences since leaving Darien, specifically highlighting her encounters and clashes with Corazon Talavera. It was almost an effort to mention the thermonuclear missiles and the destruction
of the Brolturan battleship, yet easier to go over the immersion in Talavera’s virtual prison and the desperate translation from organic existence to that of a fractalised sentience. Who was unsure if the feelings she felt were real any more.

‘Talavera is a name that has been cropping up more and more in back-channel tittle-tattle,’ said the drone. ‘From your account she seems very capable of inflicting the hindrances you’ve been suffering.’

‘She’s not been working alone,’ Julia said. ‘I recall that she mentioned something about an ally called the Godhead. Does that mean anything?’

Harry and the drone exchanged a thoughtful look.

‘It could,’ said Harry. ‘Combine that with the weird vermax manifestations you mentioned and it could be, well, very significant.’

‘Well, we know that Talavera is planning something big,’ Julia said. ‘An act of brutal slaughter on an epic scale.’

‘Using anti-dark matter, yes?’ the drone said. ‘That is horrific enough in its own right, and the involvement of those vermax is bad enough – but the Godhead, too? Ominous news. Talavera could even be an instrument of the Godhead, an ephemeral host. The fact that Vor were escorting her ship is strong corroboration. And since she is also in possession of your Enhanced friends, as well as your own body and its brain – which is a stroke of genius – she has an immense amount of organically based computing power on tap, and all of it practically immune to data-digital tampering.’

‘This is why we came to see you,’ Harry said. ‘I know we had some parts of a puzzle, of the bigger picture, but even putting them together with yours does not seem to produce an answer that makes sense.’

As they watched, the drone Reski Emantes floated over to the table with the consoles. Ready lights winked on and holopanels appeared, thick slabs of opacity awaiting input. It was practically an exercise in irony, Julia decided, depicting virtual devices within a virtual reality.

‘There are several seemingly disconnected conflicts which, as information emerges, turn out to have been instigated by the Godhead working through its instruments.’ Within the glassy ovoid bright motes of blue and amber swirled like a miniature galaxy. ‘The vermax that Robert Horst and I encountered, as well as the elaborate pocket universe trap, the thermonuclear missiles, the raids and sieges carried out by Vor and Shyntanil forces down in hyperspace, and now the Vor escorting Talavera to some destination crucial to her and those missiles … ’

Julia nodded but the drone’s references to this being, the Godhead, made her feel dwarfed by the scale of such an adversary.

Data polytables appeared in some of the holopanels, their permutations taking place too quickly for her to follow. Then three of the bigger consoles realigned their emitters and merged their projections into a much larger single holopanel that was angled down from above the table.

‘Let’s get a good mix of news feeds up,’ said the drone and suddenly the big panel was filled with an array of subscreens, a cornucopia of sights and creatures from scores of media gateways. There was sound but Reski Emantes was keeping it low, a surflike babbling.

‘We need to filter this,’ said Harry. ‘Can you narrow the sources to the Aranja Tesh, the likes of the Yamanon, the Kahimbryk, even Buranj and Shul … ’

‘Wait,’ said Julia. ‘I heard some talking about Darien, saying something about a battle … ’

‘I can find it if you wish,’ said the drone.

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t if it’ll slow you down,’ Harry said.

‘Slow
me
down? I see that you need reminding of my expertise.’ There was a pause. ‘There it is, Citivox, indienews channel casting from Daliborka in the Vox Humana.’

One of the smaller holopanels began to show a graphic of a green shoot emerging from the ground, growing into clasped leaves that parted to reveal a blue and white planet nestling there while a shiny gold logo unfolded above it. This dissolved into the
image of a woman in dark formal dress who then spoke, auto-translated by the system.

‘Welcome to Faktor 23. We begin today with yet another amazing report from Kaphiri Farag, who is still in hiding in the Darien system and still sending us regular updates. We received the latest one just a few hours ago and present it to you now, unedited.’