Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (42 page)

Overhead on the catwalk, the guards were talking among themselves, paying no attention to their charges below. Escape was impossible for the prisoners, and overseers would check the assembly work before the final part of the casing was fastened in place, so why should they bother spending every second watching sub-humans at work?

Erik was dehydrated but not fully, and he could feel it in his bladder now.

‘Tell me,’ he said to the Russian, ‘if the guards turn this way.’

‘What? Yes.’

Pulling at his ragged trousers, Erik shuffled so he was pressing up against the exposed guidance system.

I’ll show you reprisal
.

A thin stream of urine trickled out. All around him, expressions altered, just a little.

Try guiding yourself after this
.

It would evaporate, and the overseers would never know.

‘Now,’ said the Russian.

Erik was at work again by the time the guards looked down. And the prisoners had a weapon of their own, a final riposte before their coming death.

Rhianna was clad in a tight jumpsuit, matching Roger’s. All around, the quickglass chamber was set to a malleable softness, for their protection.

‘In the old days,’ said Rhianna, ‘when the first Pilots were created by nanosurgery and their eyes were removed—’

Roger shuddered.

‘—they learnt aikido,’ Rhianna continued, ‘along with other bodywork systems to enhance their somatic awareness. So let’s do the traditional unbendable arm trick.’

‘Er …’

‘Place your left hand palm-up on my right shoulder.’

He did so.

‘Now,’ Rhianna went on, ‘stop me bending it.’

She clasped her hands atop his biceps, close to his elbow, and hauled down. Her own elbows travelled close to her body, the strongest form of pulling motion. He tried to fight it, but was already failing. His arm bent at the elbow, despite the tension in his muscles.

‘All right.’ She released him. ‘Try again. This time, extend your arm fully as you visualize your fingers reaching to the far wall. Imagine energy flowing down your arm and out of your fingertips, that’s right, and see what happens …’

She hauled down on his hyperextended arm to zero effect.

‘Cool,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it?’ Rhianna stepped back. ‘The visualization is just that, although imaginary
ki
or
chi
flow often maps to neuropeptide movement in the body.’

‘Er, right.’

‘But mainly, the hyper-rotation has deactivated your biceps and triceps, and effectively screwed your joint into position, held by elastic tension in the rotator cuff. It’s because your upper arm
can’t
tense that I have nothing to work with when pulling down, because the use of your strength tends to bend your own elbow.’

Roger put his proprioreceptive awareness into his arm, remembering the position.

‘The triceps,’ he said, ‘was hanging there loose. The biceps was stretched right out, which means … the Golgi reflex kicked in. Of course.’

The same reflex that activates when someone loses an arm-wrestling match: the sudden switching off of all tension, the limb going floppy in order to protect muscles from tearing.

‘Well done,’ said Rhianna. ‘Well done. Now for fighting under extreme conditions, you really don’t want the Golgi reflex to work, because the other fucker will kill you in that moment.’

Roger blinked at the strong language, so different from her normal speech.

‘So I’m going to teach you,’ Rhianna went on, ‘to disengage the reflex. Attack me.’

‘What kind of—?’

The slap against his face was shocking.

‘Just fucking
fight!
’ she yelled.

He went for it.

Holy shit
.

The ceiling whipped past his vision, something massive hammered into his entire back – the floor – and her legs were across his chest and throat, his left arm extended and caught in her grip as she leaned back, pain flaring as the armbar technique hyperextended everything.

He tapped twice, the traditional signal to acknowledge an inescapable hold was on, that he could not release himself short of allowing his arm to snap.

‘I didn’t say give up!’ she shouted. ‘I said fight!’

‘Holy … fuck.’

He worked at it.

‘Put the pain aside,’ she said. ‘Leave it for later.’

‘I …’

‘Just fight!’

A loud crack sounded as his forearm broke—

Holy shit!

—but his limb was no longer trapped, the armbar depending on the forearm’s integrity. He squirmed around and hit her in the jaw. She twisted away.

‘Good.’ She spat blood. ‘Good.’

Rolling further, she made distance and rose to her feet.

‘Stand up,’ she said.

He came up ready, covered in sweat, a predator about to kill.

‘And relax, Roger. Let’s take a look at that arm.’

Blowing out a breath, he shuddered, stepped back, and regained control.

Fuck, it hurts
.

Something told him this was
not
the most painful lesson she had lined up.

Darkness, and the movement within it.

Now
.

She was close behind him and he whipped back, an elbow-uppercut to the rear, using his good arm –
contact
– then his kidneys exploded with pain. They went down together, Rhianna and he, squirming on the floor until her legs scissored around his throat, his right arm caught between her thighs but not helping him, because his own shoulder, pressed into his carotid artery, enhanced the triangle technique. And then he was asleep.

The lights were bright when she brought him awake.

The ninth time, he gave as good as he got. Afterwards, Rhianna smiled a red-and-white smile, and pulled out the tooth his elbow-strike had broken. She stared at the quickglass wall, causing it to pucker then create a small alcove. She placed the tooth inside, and returned to the room’s centre as the wall sealed up.

Rhianna’s going to make me pay for that
.

His pain was everywhere, but he would not let it matter.

Here goes
.

Scarlet light blazed, and massive, thunderous vibrations drove through him – battlefield simulation – and Rhianna came for him at incredible speed.

Fuck
.

He spun away growling and the fight was on.

Again.

For two thousand nights and more, he Sought. Across the Sere Wastes and the Shattered Range, he followed Ideas, sharing those he captured with the villagers he came across, always receiving hospitality, always bidden farewell with relief: his difference was both useful and unsettling.

Once, he skirted a settlement where a flux storm combined with a buried crystal lode had induced foam-mouthed insanity. They were raving and armed, too dangerous to approach. He wondered, sometimes, how long they had lasted before death took them. But most of the adults he met were normal, with names and remembered childhoods, so unlike him; for he was Seeker, and that was all he could be.

Sometimes he walked past dawn, the rising sun shining red upon his burnished skin; but only if he was sure of shelter before the conditions grew deadly. There was some kind of enjoyment in not having the constraints that ruled villagers’ lives; but the true joy was finding Ideas like the one captured yesterday, swirling in his mind:

**Vacuum is a phase of spacetime as ice is a phase of water. The properties of a vacuum are emergent, just as the properties of solids – the existence and hardness of surfaces – arise independently of the quantum attributes of constituent molecules.**

Tonight, as he walked beneath the light of Magnus and Minissimus, both of them full-orbed, he wondered if this region harboured a Theme. Yesternight’s Idea resonated with one he had captured two nights earlier, and with another he had received in trade from a fellow Seeker on one of those rare occasions when two paths of Seeking crossed.

This was the Idea that the other Seeker had given him:

**Emergence is more obvious the wider one travels. It is rare to find two worlds whose organisms use the same molecule or group of molecules (the latter tending to feature one or more autocatalytic reactions) as the basis for replication. No planet besides Earth has ever shown evidence of DNA. Yet evolution occurs similarly in every biosphere, producing predator-prey relationships alongside symbiosis.**

It was an old Idea, long-held in some crystal lode; but the one he had snagged himself two nights before featured even more archaic references, linkages to other deep Ideas that might or might not be lost to time, broken apart into random flux perhaps generations before Seeker’s birth.

**Poor mad, suicidal Boltzmann correctly derived the behaviour of gases by considering their molecules to be small, hard, miniature billiard balls flying about at random. His ideal gas law is a decent fit to observed behaviour; while adding the concept of electrical charge gives the ‘real’ gas law, an even better match. This remains true even though molecules are clouds of probabilistic vibration, not billiard balls at all.**

So much in common, with such tantalizing gaps, suggesting missing Ideas whose absence cried out for discovery. He was thinking these things as something bright arced meteor-like across the night and landed, or appeared to land, somewhere among the rippling ridges that lay ahead.

The next day, he sheltered – having pushed himself too long into the hours of heat – close to a lode bearing an energetic Idea, but not close enough for him to catch it. Hunkered down, he ached with the need to take it, unable to sleep as it called to him. Finally, daring to move before dusk, he pulled the complex, twisting flux inside himself.

**‘Phase transition’ and ‘symmetry breaking’ are synonymous terms, though it may not be obvious. In the very early universe, the electroweak force was singular. When it shivered apart, spacetime itself entered a new phase.**

Unusually, the flux had tangled with a tenuous strand, leading him to a linked Idea embedded in the same lode. After a moment, Seeker realized it had been a single Idea broken in two, and a sense of rightness filled him as he pulled the second half inside himself.

**Faster-than-light travel was long thought to destroy causality, allowing travel outside the light-cone. However, relativistic lightspeed performs
two
functions: the speed on which all observers agree, and the universal speed limit for motion. Finite FTL breaks this symmetry – different observers will not agree on an FTL flight’s duration – and causality is indeed distorted from the Newtonian paradigm, but not to randomness, no more than distance and duration are destroyed by Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations.**

If this region did in fact contain a lost Theme, he should notify as many people as he could, in the hope that more Seekers would learn of it. But he was drawn by something else: the sight of that meteor, which lay a night’s journey ahead of him, or so he thought.

In fact it was two nights later when he peered over a ridge and saw the strange, massive, shining craft on the sands below, with its soft-fleshed but human-shaped crew and their metallic, dragon-like companion, and the silver-skinned prisoner, bound and kneeling.

It was the other Seeker, whom he had met so recently.

There was a niche to hide in, though buried seams contained tangled flux – powerful but random, therefore dangerous – but he had to do it, to secrete himself and think, to work out what to do. He was terrified, that was the thing: too scared to imagine courses of action, never mind carry them out. They had overwhelmed the other Seeker; they could do the same to him.

Vibrating in his hiding-place, he managed to form two questions: where had the awful-looking things come from? And why had they landed where they did?

It was a craft, the huge device below; and as he thought of it – without having the courage to risk another look – the outside had been damaged, blackened and torn, much as the other Seeker’s skin would turn in daylight if they kept him out there. While from below the sand he had caught a sense of something archaic and huge, buried very deep, in place for a long time – many generations, maybe even fifty or more.

A howl of agonized flux spun this away.

They were torturing their prisoner.

Portrait of a scared physicist, one Lucas Woods, hiding out in a damp-smelling budget hotel room for which he had paid cash (no questions asked, this being the dodgy end of Bayswater), working on a fake-ID qPad likewise bought for cash (this time with raised eyebrows but acceptance, in a small Tottenham Court Road establishment), dividing his time between reading and thinking and puking up with fear in the en suite, before reading once more: