Authors: Alastair Reynolds

Tags: #02 Science-Fiction

Zima Blue and Other Stories (51 page)

BOOK: Zima Blue and Other Stories

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'Just fly it, priest.'

The sky on either side of the cockpit flared red, like a sudden bright dusk. Lasers stabbed past them, and then knifed closer, converging, so that the ornithopter was encased in a tunnel of linear red beams.

Again the buzzing in his skull.

The beams touched the wings, their veined skin vanishing in a puff of ionised chitin, leaving only a blackened skeletal subframe. The nose of the ornithopter pitched down as if in prayer.

'I think we're going to crash,' Sergio said, with what struck him as astonishing calm. He grasped for what remained of his faith, not entirely sure that there was anything left to salvage.

And then hit the ground.

There was light, and blackness, and a period of unguessable time - perhaps comparable to the limbo that the Founder had experienced aboard the Kiwidinok ship, during his flight to Perdition. Yet when it ended, Sergio found that he had barely travelled. He was face-down in sand, unutterably cold, his lungs engulfed in the pain of inhalation. The snapped wreckage of the ornithopter was visible in his peripheral vision, like a toy crushed by an indolent child. Haidar was looming over him.

'I think you'll live, priest, but you have to move, now.' The brother spoke with an ease Sergio now found unimaginable. He remembered that many of the clanfolk were better adapted to the Martian atmosphere than those who lived in Vikingville and the other cities. Sergio tried moving and felt several daggers readjust themselves across his chest.

'I think I've broken some ribs.'

'If you don't move, you'll have a lot worse to worry about. We have to get over this.'

Behind Haidar, a dune reached halfway to the zenith. 'You want me to climb that?'

'They're coming after us,' Haidar said, pointing towards the Temple. Almost convulsing from the effort, Sergio adjusted himself until he could see the view clearly. Mirror-faced Apparents were emerging from the central spire, dashing across the terrazzo. One of them had a fist projecting from his face.

'I'm not sure I can make it,' Sergio said. 'I'm pretty hurt - maybe you should just--'

The brother hauled him to his feet, a movement that set off an agonised fireworks display inside his chest. Strangely, though, when he was standing, the pain eased. 'If you have broken your ribs, you'll feel better - less pressure on your ribcage now that you're standing. Think you can make it?'

'You risked a lot to help me, didn't you?'

He shrugged, as if it was of no consequence. 'I owed it to Indrani. She'd have done it herself, except there was no way I was going to let her. For some reason she thinks she loves you, priest, even after nine years. Me, I don't pretend to understand women.'

Sergio planted one foot in front of the other. 'What will we find on the other side of this dune?'

'More clanfolk than you've ever seen, if a few good people keep their word. And I don't think they're going to be in a party mood.'

And as he spoke, something arced across the sky, from the dune's summit to the central spire of the Asymmetrist Temple. It was a weapon - a small missile - something salvaged by the clanfolk; a relic of the wars that had raged across Mars before and after the Synthesis. Where it hit, a shard of the spire dislodged and crashed to the ground, smashing through layers of underlying masonry as it fell.

'He said it'd be a jihad,' Sergio said. 'A holy war.'

'He was right,' Haidar said. 'And I think it's just begun.'

'Angels of Ashes' is a story with an amusing tale behind it . . . one that has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the piece itself. By the time the second half of the nineties rolled around, I was maintaining sales to
Interzone
at a satisfactorily steady rate of a story or two a year. I was grateful that they were taking my stuff, but also aware of how precarious my position was. I needed to prove to myself that more than one editor was willing to pay for my stories, so (since the UK market wasn't exactly over-endowed with paying magazines) I started to think about selling my material to US outlets. I can't remember if I wrote 'Angels' with that ambition specifically in mind, but I do remember that it was the first story in a long while that I didn't submit to
Interzone
. I
did
submit it to the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
but they bounced it very quickly: a nice enough rejection note, but not quite what they were looking for. So I sent it to
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
edited at the time by the much-respected Gardner Dozois. And I waited. And waited.
Three months went by. I heard nothing. According to the magazine's guidelines, if you hadn't heard back from them within three months, you could assume your submission had been lost in the mail. I waited a bit longer, just to be on the safe side. Then I dutifully printed out a new copy of the story and sent that off in the post, again to
Asimov's.
I included a covering note to the effect that I was resubmitting a story that must have gone astray the first time. And I waited. And waited.
At the time that this all happened, I was living in a Summer House - a '
zomerhuis'
. This is, I suspect, a peculiarly Dutch concept that doesn't translate too well. Basically, my home was a self-contained brick house built in the backyard of the house belonging to my landlady. Because I had no mailbox accessible from the street, all my incoming post had to pass through my landlady's house first. She'd sort it from her own, then pass it through to me. I'd become so accustomed to this system that I didn't give it a moment's thought. Until, that is, the day my landlady knocked on the door of the Summer House and presented a letter she'd found that day. 'Found', because it had turned up during a spring clean, when she'd discovered some post that had dropped under her own mailbox some months earlier. Inspection of the envelope showed that the letter had been posted from America half a year before. I opened it with trembling hands, half-knowing what it had to be. There it was, an acceptance letter - and contract - for the copy of the story I'd assumed to have gone astray. I was pleased, but also mortified at the fact that (a) I hadn't responded with the contract, and to say thanks, and (b) I'd added to the confusion by resubmitting the same story. But all was well in the end, which is to say that it wasn't the last story Gardner ever bought from me.
A misplaced letter, turned up during a spring clean, also played a role in the publication of my first novel. But that's another story. 'Angels of Ashes', incidentally, is the title of a song by the wonderful Scott Walker.

SPIREY AND THE QUEEN

Space war is god-awful slow.

Mouser's long-range sensors had sniffed the bogey two days ago, but it had taken all that time just to creep within kill-range. I figured it had to be another dud. With ordnance, fuel and morale all low, we were ready to slink back to Tiger's Eye anyway; let one of the other thickships pick up the sweep in this sector.

So - still groggy after frogsleep - I wasn't exactly wetting myself with excitement, not even when Mouser started spiking the thick with combat-readiness psychogens. Even when we went to Attack-Con-One, all I did was pause the neurodisney I was tripping (Hellcats of Solar War Three, since you asked), slough my hammock and swim languidly up to the bridge.

'Junk,' I said, looking over Yarrow's shoulder at the readout. 'War debris or another of those piss-poor chondrites. Betcha.'

'Sorry, kid. Everything checks out.'

'Hostiles?'

'Nope. Positive on the exhaust: dead ringer for the stolen ship.' She traced a webbed hand across the swathe of decorations that already curled around her neck. 'Want your stripes now or when we get back?'

'You actually think this'll net us a pair of tigers?'

'Damn right it will.'

I nodded, and thought: She isn't necessarily wrong. No defector, no stolen military secrets reaching the Royalists. Ought to be worth a medal, maybe even a promotion.

So why did I feel something wasn't right?

'All right,' I said, hoping to drown qualms in routine. 'How soon?'

'Missiles are already away, but she's five light-minutes from us, so the quacks won't reach her for six hours. Longer if she makes a run for cover.'

'Run for cover? That's a joke.'

'Yeah, hilarious.' Yarrow swelled one of the holographic displays until it hovered between us.

It was a map of the Swirl, tinted to show zones controlled by us or the Royalists. An enormous, slowly rotating disk of primordial material, 800 AU edge to edge; wide enough that light took more than four days to traverse it.

Most of the action was near the middle, in the light-hour of space around the central star Fomalhaut. Immediately around the sun was a material-free void that we called the Inner Clearing Zone, but beyond that began the Swirl proper: metal-rich lanes of dust condensing slowly into rocky planets. Both sides wanted absolute control of those planet-forming Feeding Zones - prime real estate for the day when one side beat the other and could recommence mining operations - so that was where our vast armies of wasps mainly slugged things out. We humans - Royalist and Standardist both - kept much further out, where the Swirl thinned to metal-depleted icy rubble. Even hunting the defector hadn't taken us within ten light-hours of the Feeding Zones, and we'd become used to having a lot of empty space to ourselves. Apart from the defector, there shouldn't have been anything else out here to offer cover.

But there was. Big too, not much more than half a light-minute from the rat.

'Practically pissing distance,' Yarrow observed.

'Too close for coincidence. What is it?'

'Splinter. Icy planetesimal, you want to get technical.'

'Not this early in the day.' But I remembered how one of our tutors back at the academy put it: Splinters are icy slag, spat out of the Swirl. In a few hundred thousand years there'll be a baby solar system around Fomalhaut, but there'll also be shitloads of junk surrounding it, leftovers on million-year orbits.

'Worthless to us,' Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair that ran all the way from brow to fluke. 'But evidently not to ratty.'

'What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl.'

Yarrow gave me her best withering look.

'Yeah, okay,' I said. 'Not my smartest ever suggestion.'

Yarrow nodded sagely. 'Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours is to fire and forget.'

Six hours after the quackheads had been launched from Mouser, Yarrow floated in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath her. She resembled an inverted question mark, and if I'd been superstitious I'd have said that wasn't necessarily the best of omens.

'You kill me,' she said.

An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren - first to swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin, which let us tolerate cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the billions of molecule-sized demons that coursed through our bodies, or the combat-specific psycho-modifications. But swapping your legs for a tail touched off too many queasy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve, though.

'What?' I said.

'That neurodisney shit. Isn't a real space war good enough for you?'

'Yeah, except I don't think this is it. When was the last time one of us actually looked a Royalist in the eye?'

She shrugged. 'Something like four hundred years ago.'

'Point made. At least in Solar War Three you get some blood. See, it's all set on planetary surfaces - Titan, Europa, all those moons they've got back in Sol System. Trench warfare, hand-to-hand stuff. You know what adrenalin is, Yarrow?'

'Managed without it until now. And there's another thing: don't know much about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three.'

'It's conjectural,' I said. 'And in any case it almost happened; they almost went to the brink.'

'Almost?'

'It's set in a different timeline.'

She grinned, shaking her head. 'I'm telling you, you kill me.'

'She made a move yet?' I asked.

'What?'

'The defector.'

'Oh, we're back in reality now?' Yarrow laughed. 'Sorry, this is going to be slightly less exciting than Solar War Three.'

'Inconsiderate,' I said. 'Think the bitch would give us a run for our money.' And as I spoke the weapons readout began to pulse faster and faster, like the cardiogram of a fluttering heart. 'How long now?'

'One minute, give or take a few seconds.'

'Want a little bet?'

BOOK: Zima Blue and Other Stories

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