Transmission: Ragnarok: Book Two (47 page)

‘He used an unknown technique,’ said Zajac, ‘to escape a larger hostile force. Nothing in that constitutes treason.’

Jed, staring at the now-still holo, had a different question to ask.

‘What happened to Clara?’ he said.

Frowns came from all sides; but she was one of the few people involved here that he actually knew, and he liked her.

‘In the Med Centre,’ said Pavel. ‘With Clayton guarding over her.’

‘Well, good. Sorry.’

Max gestured, and the holoview was replenished. For a moment, Jed thought it was a replay, because it showed the same docking space. But this was an earlier time, with fewer ships at dock, and after a moment he recognized one of them. It was distinctive: black and powerful, banded with red. Configured for unusual work, since it clearly lacked cargo space.

‘That’s Carl Blackstone’s ship,’ he said. ‘I saw it on Fulgor.’

Several people looked at him. Everyone knew who Blackstone had been, and the story of his hellflight sacrifice, coming here to raise the alarm.

‘You’re right,’ said Max. ‘And the city will verify what you’ll see if you zoom in on her hull. Admiral Zajac, you have control.’

‘What?’

‘Of the image, sir. Please go ahead.’

‘Hmm. Right.’

The black-and-red ship expanded in the display, and the scoring became obvious: gashes in her hull only just beginning to heal and scar.

‘That’s not realspace weapon fire,’ said Whitwell.

Max smiled, as if he had placed a bet with himself about who would spot it first, and had won.

‘Are you fucking serious?’ Zajac’s voice boomed around the majestic chamber. ‘You’re saying that one of Schenck’s people tried to kill Carl Blackstone? Tried to stop him raising the alarm regarding Fulgor?’

‘That’s right,’ said Max. ‘That’s what fucking Schenck did.’

Matching Zajac’s profanity had no noticeable effect.

Whitwell said, ‘More than one, I think. A prolonged engagement could leave similar traces, but I think there were multiple attackers, perhaps an ambush.’

‘Ambush?’ said Zajac. ‘You mean you believe these bastards?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps I do.’

Zajac turned on Max.

‘You’d better have more than this.’

‘Of course I do,’ said Max. ‘When Schenck began to move openly, we had the final confirmation on who was part of his coup. Our surveillance has been years in the construction, you understand. Recruiting the counter-strike force and keeping it secret, that was Pavel’s work. He saved us, gentlemen, in case you haven’t got that yet.’

‘So you have the details of all Schenck’s … co-conspirators, is that it?’

‘One of whom’ – Max nodded to Whitwell – ‘was your aidede-camp, Admiral. I’m sorry to say that she was killed … on her way to assassinate you.’

‘What? You’ve got … evidence. Of course you have.’

‘Yes. Sorry. While you, sir,’ Max said to Zajac, ‘Schenck thought safe to leave in place. It gave us suspicions about you, but he simply thought he could use your … ebullience … to his advantage, at least in the early days of assuming total control.’

Jed thought: for ebullience read belligerence.

‘What’s more, um, rarefied,’ added Max, ‘is that we have some people capable of detecting a sort of malign influence that … Schenck is not normal, and he broadcasts some kind of signs of that. Our people haven’t determined its nature, but every sensitive individual detects the same phenomena under the same double-blind circumstances. Call it an evil aura.’

‘Is this some form of mysticism?’ said Zajac.

‘Not to me. Maybe to Schenck. The point is, Carl Blackstone was one of the sensitives, and so is his son.’ Max looked at Jed. ‘Currently in hiding, and I think someone should fetch him back, don’t you?’

‘Er … Yes, sir.’ Jed started to shift forward, the chair reconfiguring to help him stand.

‘Not right this moment. Stay now, for pity’s sake,’ said Max. ‘Your testimony is possibly the most important part of what we’re discussing today.’

Confusion twisted vortex-like inside Jed.

‘Me?’

Max sighed.

‘Everyone, this footage I’m about to show you is from my ship. You’ll see Jed Goran’s ship appearing in it. The point is, since he was there with me, he’ll have similar footage from his own vessel’s memory. Not to mention, he can verify what he saw himself.’

Jed both understood and did not. Everything had been massively strange since the moment he gave chase to Max Gould; only now could he see that it had been two insane episodes, not one: the events at the galactic core, then here on the docks.

This time the holoview showed realspace, but blazing so brightly that someone had to ask: ‘Where is this, exactly?’

‘It’s near the heart of the galaxy,’ said Max. ‘There’s a phenomenon that I’ve known of for some time, but had not witnessed myself. Unlike Carl Blackstone.’

Jed did not know what to make of that.

‘I was there,’ he said. ‘Following the commodore.’

The image swung, revealing the linear spike from the galaxy’s core, like a needle thrust into a shining ball.

‘Galactic jet,’ said Whitwell. ‘In our galaxy. I didn’t know, but what is the point?’

Everything was in slow motion. They watched as the space station swung into view, saw the five mu-space vessels that were Max’s pursuers, and the ripple in reality that preceded the triple explosion destroying three of the ships. Jed looked away, not wanting to see Davey’s death again.

‘Let’s reset.’ Max gestured, and the galactic jet was visible once more, the image frozen. ‘And take a look at the geometry, will you, everyone?’

Numeric data glowed.

‘The ascension and declination look familiar,’ said Zajac. ‘I mean, tracing the jet’s path, the way it’s pointing …’

‘Earth,’ said Whitwell. ‘The jet is pointed radially out of the core, directly at Earth.’

That was when the air above the table began to ripple.

‘Holo, out!’ commanded Max.

Without the image, the distortion was obvious, and growing bigger. People began pushing themselves back from the conference table, getting to their feet.

‘Evacuate,’ said Max. ‘Everybody get—’

A hole in reality appeared, and a small white-and-red object fell out, hit the tabletop and bounced. Then spacetime wriggled back to normalcy, and the phenomenon was past.

Everyone looked to Admiral Whitwell for the answer – he had a reputation for immense eclectic knowledge, and his observations on the holo footage had been perceptive and incisive – but he shook his head, mouth downturned.

‘I think I know what it is,’ said a Pilot who looked too young to be part of this. ‘I’m a history buff, and my dad was a – he flew a large-distortion geodesic before I was born, see. With the time dilation, he remembers visiting Earth centuries ago. So I’ve always been interested in artefacts, and … Can I?’

Max took hold of the small object, remained still for a moment – nothing happened – then slid it along the table.

‘Oh, yeah.’ The young man picked it up. ‘This is great. Fantastic specimen. You’d think it was made yesterday instead of—’

Zajac growled.

‘Oh. Er … Sorry. It’s a graphene flake.’

‘What’s a graphene flake?’

With a blush: ‘Graphene was the miracle material of the twenty-first century. They called it a metamaterial, effectively a two-dimensional solid.’

To a roomful of Pilots, this was quaint, unimpressive stuff.

‘Get on with,’ said Max. ‘What use is a flake of material?’

‘Oh, didn’t I …? It’s a memory flake, almost indestructible. Data storage device. No one’s used anything like this for five hundred years.’ And, with a wondering look: ‘If there’s any data on here, it would be like a message from the past, wouldn’t it?’

Zajac looked at Max.

‘Your doing?’

‘No, sir.’

Jed wondered if everyone was as confused as he was.

So here it was: Los Angeles. White-top freeways, crowded and stinking, and sun-glitter everywhere. The airport pick-up had no air-con, and the hot draught did little to help the seven passengers breathe. No one talked to the driver. Two British couples started comparing cynical notes, popping up local news sites on their qPads and pointing out the lack of international reportage. One of them muttered about parochialism. Lucas stared out the window as if he spoke no English, only occasionally glancing at the driver whose frown deepened by the mile.

They pulled up by the awning over the hotel entrance. The driver got out first, to unload the luggage from the side compartment. Lucas, whose bag came out last, slipped the driver a ten-dollar coin. Perhaps the tip-your-service-provider meme kept cash in existence here; back home, it was cultural inertia.

As the pick-up bus pulled away, Lucas scanned the sky and busy road before looking back at the entrance. There was a doorman, but he was helping one of the couples. Lucas might not be a trained spy or criminal, and he had flown on his passport because he had no idea how one might get a forgery; but he had been to the States before, and knew there was something unknown to the urban culture, a blind spot that might allow him to slip surveillance.

It was called walking; or perhaps he was relying too much on perceived gross differences. But so much of the city area was devoid of footpaths, designed only to be driven through.

His bag could be worn as a backpack, and after he had left the immediate environs of the hotel, he adjusted the strapping and slipped it over his shoulders, then tightened it up without breaking stride. As he walked, he thought back to the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and his sojourn in England before the First World War. It was G.H. Hardy in Cambridge, renowned in the mathematical world, who had spotted the self-educated genius – had Ramunajan been a painter, he would have been called a primitive – and brought him over from southern India.

For about a mile, Lucas continued in the absence of a path or track. In England one walks on the pavement; in the States pavement is for driving on. He could imagine the British couples making snotty remarks. Finally he was back on a real pavement – sidewalk – passing a row of single-storey businesses.

One of the things about Ramanujan – Lucas resumed his meditation – was his vegetarianism. Him and Gandhi both, Lucas recalled. The thing was, Edwardian cooking had no notion of balanced meatless diets: between the lack of nourishment, the damp cold, and his customary lack of exercise, Ramanujan’s health plummeted; and back in India he suffered a grim and painful death at the edge of thirty-two.

Now Lucas was in a residential area, the streets laid out in a geometric grid with empty sidewalks. It was mid-morning and the place looked empty. Again, there was the contrast to every other country he had been in: the rectilinear layout, streets labelled by numbers rather than names: practical yet subtly oppressive. Perhaps that was due to his sense of enemies watching from everywhere, because arrival in the States usually perked him up, straightening his spine as he resonated with a sense of confidence and self-determination so lacking in his usual life.

His colleague Arne did have confidence: strapping and muscular, strictly vegetarian, fond of the occasional lager but a fanatic about physical conditioning. He had a second dan black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and had previously competed in powerlifting, while these days his strength training consisted mostly of exercises from India, traditionally used by wrestlers: yoga-like, strenuous callisthenics called dands and bethaks. Once, he had demonstrated the movements in the Imperial bar, to the joy of his colleagues, Lucas included.

Bethaks, it turned out, were deep knee-bends, while dands were cat-lick push-ups that looked like the motion of a tireless male porn star – ‘He’s forgotten to put a woman underneath him,’ Jim had said – after which they had given Arne a new name: Captain Carpet Shagger.

In Edwardian Cambridge, where Town and Gown remained disparate, the well-off took a four-hour walk every afternoon, while impoverished working men spent the same amount of time walking to and from their jobs – and their wives would make the same journey in the middle of the day, fetching lunch to their husbands. It was a contrast to the self-taught mathematical genius who remained shut up in his rooms to work amid gloomy days and dark unlit nights, with Cambridge blacked out in case of Zeppelin attack.

Arne followed a Hindu-inspired lifestyle that gave him enormous vitality; poor Ramanujan had dwindled to skin and bones for the same reason.

When he reached the next shopping area, Lucas went into a diner and ordered steak and eggs, OJ and coffee. Ongoing free refills of juice and coffee: another difference from home. He took alternating sips from glass and cup as he powered up his qPad and checked the route to Caltech. The jet lag was catching up with him, but if he could stay awake for a full Californian day, he would avoid the danger of checking into a hotel where they might ask for ID. Or was that paranoid thinking?

They deleted data from Palo Alto and LongWatch
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