Galactic North (47 page)

Irravel ordered the rest of her crew—all ninety of them—to be warmed, and then delegated tasks, mostly programming. Servitors were not particularly intelligent outside of their designated functions. She considered activating the other machines she carried as cargo—the green- fly terraformers—but that cut against all her instincts. Greenfly machines were von Neumann breeders, unlike the sterile servitors. They were a hundred times cleverer. She would only consider using them if the cargo was placed in immediate danger.

“If you won’t unleash the greenflies,” Markarian said, “at least think about waking the Conjoiners. There may only be four of them, but we could use their expertise.”

“I don’t trust them. I never liked the idea of carrying them in the first place. They unsettle me.”

“I don’t like them either, but I’m willing to bury my prejudices if it means fixing the ship faster.”

“Well, that’s where we differ. I’m not, so don’t raise the subject again.”

“Yes,” Markarian said, and only when its omission was insolently clear added: “Captain.”

Eventually the Conjoiners ceased to be an issue, when the work was clearly under way and proceeding normally. Most of the crew were able to return to reefersleep. Irravel and Markarian stayed awake a little longer, and even after they’d gone under, they woke every seven months to review the status of the works. It began to look as if they would succeed without assistance.

Until the day they were woken out of schedule, and a dark, grapple-shaped ship was almost upon the comet. Not an interstellar ship, it must have come from somewhere nearby—probably within the same halo of comets around Luyten 726-8. Its silence was not encouraging.

“I think they’re pirates,” Irravel said. “I’ve heard of one or two other ships going missing near here, but it was always put down to accident.”

“Why did they wait so long to attack us?”

“They had no choice. There are billions of comets out here, but they’re never less than light-hours apart. That’s a long way if you only have in-system engines. They must have a base somewhere else to keep watch, maybe light-weeks from here, like a spider with a very wide web.”

“What do we do now?”

Irravel gritted her teeth. “Do what anything does when it’s stuck in the middle of a web: fight back.”

But the
Hirondelle
’s minimal defences had only scratched the enemy ship.

Oblivious, it fired penetrators and winched closer. Dozens of crab-shaped machines swarmed out and dropped below the comet’s horizon, impacting with seismic thuds. After a few minutes, sensors in the furthest tunnels registered intruders. Only a handful of crew had been woken. They broke guns out of the armoury—small arms designed for pacification in the unlikely event of a shipboard riot—and then established defensive positions in all the cometary tunnels.

Nervously now, Irravel and Markarian advanced around a bend in the tunnel, cleated shoes whispering through ice barely more substantial than smoke. They had to keep their suit exhausts from touching the walls if they didn’t want to get blown back by superheated steam. Irravel jumped again at the pattern of photons on her visor and then forced calm, telling herself it was another mirage.

Except this time it stayed.

Markarian opened fire, squeezing rounds past the servitor. It lurched aside, a gaping hole in its carapace. Black crabs came around the bend, encrusted with sensors and guns. The first reached the ruined servitor and dismembered it with ease. If only there’d been time to activate and program the greenfly machines. They’d have ripped through the pirates like a host of furies, treating them as terraformable matter . . .

And maybe us, too,
Irravel thought.

Something flashed through the clouds of steam: an electromagnetic pulse that turned Irravel’s suit sluggish, as if every joint had corroded. The whine of the circulator died to silence, leaving only her frenzied breathing. Something pressed against her backpack. She turned slowly around, wary of falling against the walls. There were crabs everywhere. The chamber in which they’d been cornered was littered with the bodies of the other crew members, pink trails of blood reaching across the ice from other tunnels. They’d been killed and dragged here.

Two words jumped to mind:
kill yourself.
But first she had to kill Markarian, in case he lacked the nerve to do it himself. She couldn’t see his face through his visor. That was good. Painfully, she pointed the gun towards him and squeezed the trigger. But instead of firing, the gun shivered in her hands, stowing itself into a quarter of its operational volume.

“Thank you for using this weapon system,” it said cheerfully.

Irravel let it drift to the ground.

A new voice rasped in her helmet. “If you’re thinking of surrendering, now might not be a bad time.”

“Bastard,” Irravel said, softly.

“Really the best you can manage?” The language was Canasian—what Irravel and Markarian had spoken on Fand—but heavily accented, as if the native tongue was Norte or Russish, or spoken with an impediment. “ ‘Bastard ’s’ quite a compliment compared to some of things my clients come up with.”

“Give me time; I’ll work on it.”

“Positive attitude—that’s good.” The lid of a crab hinged up, revealing the prone form of a man in a mesh of motion-sensors. He crawled from the mesh and stepped onto the ice, wearing a spacesuit formed from segmented metal plates. Totems had been welded to the armour, around holographic starscapes infested with serpentine monsters and scantily clad maidens.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Captain Run Seven.” He stepped closer, examining her suit nameplate. “But you can call me Seven, Irravel Veda.”

“I hope you burn in hell, Seven.”

Seven smiled—she could see the curve of his grin through his visor; the oddly upturned nostrils of his nose above it. “I’m sensing some negativity here, Irravel. I think we need to put that behind us, don’t you?”

Irravel looked at her murdered adjutants. “Maybe if you tell me which one was the traitor.”

“Traitor?”

“You seemed to have no difficulty finding us.”

“Actually, you found us.” It was a woman’s voice this time. “We use lures—tampering with commercial beacons, like the scavenger’s.” She emerged from one of the other attack machines wearing a suit similar to Seven’s, except that it displayed the testosterone-saturated male analogues of his space-maidens: all rippling torsos and chromed codpieces.

“Wreckers,” Irravel breathed.

“Yeah. Ships home in on the beacons, then find they ain’t going anywhere in a hurry. We move in from the halo.”

“Disclose all our confidential practices while you’re at it, Mirsky,” Seven said.

She glared at him through her visor. “Veda would have figured it out.”

“We’ll never know now, will we?”

“What does it matter?” she said. “Gonna kill them anyway, aren’t you?”

Seven flashed an arc of teeth filed to points and waved a hand towards the female pirate. “Allow me to introduce Mirsky, our loose-tongued but efficient information-retrieval specialist. She’s going to take you on a little trip down memory lane, see if you can’t remember those access codes.”

“What codes?”

“It’ll come back to you,” Seven said.

They were taken through the tunnels, past half-assembled mining machines, onto the surface and then into the pirate ship. The ship was huge, most of it living space. Cramped corridors snaked through hydroponics galleries of spring wheat and dwarf papaya, strung with xenon lights. The ship hummed constantly with carbon dioxide scrubbers, the foetid air making Irravel sneeze. There were children everywhere, frowning at the captives. The pirates obviously had no reefersleep technology: they stayed warm the whole time, and some of the children Irravel saw had probably been born after the
Hirondelle
had arrived there.

They arrived at a pair of interrogation rooms where they were separated. Irravel’s room held a couch converted from an old command seat, still carrying warning decals. A console stood in one corner. Painted torture scenes fought for wall space with racks of surgical equipment: drills, blades and ratcheted contraptions speckled with rust.

Irravel breathed deeply. Hyperventilation could have an anaesthetic effect. Her conditioning would in any case create a state of detachment: the pain would be no less intense, but she would feel it at one remove.

She hoped.

The pirates fiddled with her suit, confused by the modern design, until they stripped her down to her shipboard uniform. Mirsky leaned over her. She was small-boned and dark-skinned, dirty hair rising in a topknot, eyes mismatched shades of azure. Something clung to the side of her head above the left ear: a silver box with winking status lights. She fixed a crown to Irravel’s head, then made adjustments on the console.

“Decided yet?” Captain Run Seven said, sauntering into the room. He was unlatching his helmet.

“What?”

“Which of our portfolio of interrogation packages you’re going to opt for.”

She was looking at his face now. It wasn’t really human. Seven had a man’s bulk and a man’s shape, but there was at least as much of the pig in his face. His nose was a snout, his ears two tapered flaps framing a hairless pink skull. His pale eyes evinced animal cunning.

“What the hell are you?”

“Excellent question,” Seven said, clicking a finger in her direction. His bare hand was dark-skinned and feminine. “To be honest, I don’t really know. A genetics experiment, perhaps? Was I the seventh failure, or the first success?”

“Do I get two guesses?”

He ignored her. “All I know is that I’ve been here—in the halo around Luyten 726-8—for as long as I can remember. ”

“Someone sent you here?”

“In a tiny automated spacecraft; perhaps an old lifepod. The ship’s governing personality raised me as well as it could, attempted to make of me a well-rounded individual . . .” Seven trailed off momentarily. “Eventually I was found by a passing ship. I staged what might be termed a hostile takeover bid. From then on I’ve built an organisation largely recruited from my client base.”

“You’re insane. It might have worked once, but it won’t work with us.”

“Why should you be any different?”

“Neural conditioning. I regard the cargo as my offspring—all twenty thousand of them. I can’t betray them in any way.”

Seven smiled his piggy smile. “Funny; the last client thought that, too.”

Sometime later, Irravel woke alone in a reefersleep casket. She remembered only dislocated episodes of interrogation. There was the memory of a kind of sacrifice, and, later, of the worst terror she could imagine—so intense that she could not bring its cause to mind. Underpinning everything was the certainty that she had not given up the codes.

Everything was quiet and cold. Once she was able to move, she found a suit and wandered the
Hirondelle
until she reached a porthole. They were still lashed to the comet. The other craft was gone; presumably en route back to the base in the halo where the pirates must have had a larger ship.

She looked for Markarian, but there was no sign of him.

Then she checked the twenty crew sleeper chambers; the thousand-berth dormitories. The chamber doors were all open. Most of the sleepers were still there. They’d been butchered, carved open for implants, minds pulped by destructive memory-trawling devices. The horror was too great for any recognisable emotional response. The conditioning made each death feel like a stolen part of her.

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.