Crashing Heaven (36 page)

As he spoke, the darkness that had covered Kingdom fell away. The takeover was complete. Now Harry stood there, his eyes closed. His skin glowed gold. He was wearing Kingdom’s dark shirt and loose trousers. His battered face was wreathed with the numinous. Despite himself, Jack felt awe touch him. Harry opened his eyes, and looked down.

‘You?’ he boomed. ‘
LITTLE YOU
?’ His voice echoed around the conference chamber. He threw back his head and laughed. Virtual stars rang with mockery.

‘Oh yes,’ said Fist, his voice low and menacing. ‘Me. Little me. And I’ve got a bone the size of a planet to pick with you.’ He rose into the air, and floated towards Harry. ‘Do you remember what I said, that dark night in the garden?’

‘I’ll shatter you, puppet, if you come any closer,’ warned Harry.

Fist closed on him regardless. Jack felt his weapon set grind once again in his mind. The sound of its awakening went so deep, far beyond anything Harry had been able to summon. Jack slumped. Fist was boosting his offensive power by drawing on Jack’s resources. Harry hadn’t been able to do that either.

‘Are you OK?’ worried Ifor. Jack felt soft hands at his shoulders, holding him up. He found that he couldn’t move his mouth. Those parts of his mind were running other, more brutal systems.

[ I’m sorry,] Fist told Jack. He was controlling his voice so carefully, but still a wild, abandoned rage broke through. [ This is going to hurt. Him more than you, though.]

[ What are you doing?] The deep structures of Jack’s own mind groaned in protest as Fist snatched even more resources. [ I can’t let you,] he continued. He tried to call Fist back.

The puppet laughed. [ You can’t do that any more. Not since we were rebuilt. All you can do is watch. And trust me. You’ll never see me like this again. You might never see me again. But it’ll be worth it. Oh fuck yes.
WATCH!
]

Jack wasn’t sure if it was his own will or Fist’s that made him turn his head and reopen his eyes.

‘Jack,’ said Ifor. ‘You’re conscious.’ He followed Jack’s gaze, and then he too was silenced. Fist was drifting towards Harry, his body changing as his attack systems fired up.

‘I said I’d broken minds like yours before, and I’d break you too.’

His arms stretched out of his sleeves and his legs stretched out of his trousers. His torso grew. Piece by piece, his clothes ripped off him. A snapped bow-tie, fragments of dress shirt, a tattered tail coat, a pair of shredded black trousers – all fell away as he slowly advanced on Kingdom.

Each wooden body section exuded strands of attack code, coiling together to define Fist’s new, expanding self. It manifested as silver-grey barbed wire, growing into the shape of densely muscled arms and legs, vast shoulders and a squat, powerful neck. Fist’s hands and feet had grown too, fingers and toes stretching out into jagged claws and talons. Jagged wire sprang up and danced around them, then around Fist’s whole body. It leapt up to cover his now entirely white hair and he laughed.

Now his face stretched out and began to change too. His cheerful painted eyes fell back into his head, and there were two shadow pits where they had been. His little pointed nose fell in on itself, becoming a jagged slit in the centre of his face. He smiled, and his smile was an axe cut, ripping back into his cheeks. There was a loud crack, and his teeth broke through his jaw – uncounted sharp grey barbs, waiting to rend and tear.

Nothing remained of the well-dressed puppet that had been built to charm children. This was the elemental Fist, a deep and focused savagery unleashing itself on the world.

Harry stumbled backwards. ‘What are you?’ he breathed.

‘Death,’ hissed Fist, smiling his barbed-wire smile. His wooden face was a flat, dead mask on a thorned metal head. The wire filled his empty eyes and the slit that had been his nose. He brought his arms up from the side of his body, extending each metal-wrapped wooden finger. Blue sparks flickered round them. Harry gestured with his hands. Nothing happened. Fist kept coming.

‘
CHILD!
’ he shouted, the word rasping out from a hard metal tongue. ‘You’re five minutes old. I’ve been killing angels for seven years.’

Harry took a step back. He had his arms up in front of him. His own fire leapt to his hands. Fist continued speaking. There was no longer any trace of the toy he’d once appeared to be. Jack wondered if this was what the Totality had seen when Fist attacked them.

‘You dared –
YOU DARED
– to break into me, and force your way through me, and use me as a router.
A FUCKING
ROUTER
! To get to that bitch Yamata.’

A few words were shouted. Most were spat out in a vicious, barbed whisper.

Fire leapt from Harry’s hands. It didn’t reach Fist. The puppet’s feet had touched ground. He was walking. He was a foot or so taller than Harry. Wire dragged behind him, leaving a path of sparks. ‘You thought there’d be no comeback.’ He brought his hands up to his face, and looked at them appraisingly. He teased out a strand of wire from his left hand with the finger and thumb of his right. ‘Look at my strings now. You thought you were pulling them, didn’t you? But they bit into you, little god. So deep.’

There was a roaring in Jack’s head. He could watch, and he could think, and that was it. All through his mind, core structures were shaking themselves to pieces as Fist seized the capacity he needed to break a god. Jack could feel his own systems rushing to compensate for the chaos. Had he not become a digital version of himself, he would by now have been irrevocably shattered. He wondered if either of them would survive Harry’s death.

Harry laughed nervously. ‘You can’t hurt me, puppet.’

Fist snapped his fingers, and a barbed explosion of code leapt out of him. For a moment it hung in the air, and then it pulled itself round Harry, snapping his arms to his sides and his legs to each other, charring clothes black and scoring blue lines where it touched bare flesh.

Harry howled. Subroutines knifed into his mouth, his throat. His scream had a gurgling, half-broken quality to it. Fist snapped his fingers again. More wire leapt at Harry and bit at him, tracing hard symbols of pain across his skin and then dancing deep into his body.

‘
ARE YOU IN POSITION, TOTALITY?
’ he yelled.

‘Yes,’ said one of the snowflakes. ‘One of our craft is at the co-ordinates you gave us. A squad of minds have penetrated Devlin’s physical security systems and are ready to reoccupy the stolen servers he’s running on. They’ll use the link he’s established with Kingdom’s core systems to follow him there too.’

‘NO!’ screamed Harry. Wire poured into his throat, silencing him. He writhed, collapsing to the floor.

Fist sunk down so that he was right next to him. One hand touched Harry’s forehead. There was a tiny puff of smoke, a smell of burning flesh and then the black print of a wooden hand was branded in Harry’s flesh.

‘You’re the careless one, Harry. You never bothered looking deeper than the puppet. There’s so much more to me than that.’

Harry groaned. Jack was barely conscious. Fist took Harry’s head in his two barbed hands and pulled it from his shoulders. He roared with triumph. It was his last great effort, and it broke him. He shimmered and vanished. Harry’s broken corpse vanished with him. Code howled in Jack’s mind. Through it all came Fist’s voice, surprisingly quiet and controlled.

[Let yourself go, Jack. I’ve broken my weapon systems killing Harry. Now’s time to reboot and rebuild.]

Unconsciousness took Jack. It was kinder than death had been, but only a little.

Chapter 48

The spinelights were dimming over Homelands. Towers faded into the gloom as lit windows shimmered into being, a thousand tiny protests against the dark. Snowflakes hung above them all, now fully integrated into the weave and so into Station’s day-to-day life. Jack turned away from the window. Fist was sitting on a chair, knocking his hand against a conference table, making a loud, sharp, repeated tapping. He was four foot tall again, with a little painted face and a little painted body. He was wearing black tie, topped off with a rather natty monocle. His body was entirely physical.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can’t get over how this feels. This is a real table; here’s a real me; and here I am, hitting it. Who would have thought a meat body could fit little Hugo Fist so well?’

‘You’re a real boy at last.’

‘I’m not a boy, Jack, or a man. I’ve seen enough of people not to think I’m human any more. I’m an incarnate artificial intelligence. But then so are you, now – a digital pattern, running on a nanogel soup. Most of you isn’t even in that head of yours. It’s distributed across Station’s weaveservers. I don’t think there’s really any difference between us. You’re alive, but artificial – I’m artificial, but I’m alive.’

‘Things have got a lot more blurred lately,’ agreed Jack. ‘All these new ways of being alive. I suppose that’s one good thing to come out of it all.’

‘It’s just a shame it had to happen the way it did.’

‘Well. That’s a fight that’s not over yet.’

‘That sounds worryingly like sedition,’ said Lestak, appearing at the door.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Fist smoothly. ‘It’s just his grumpy way. And besides, it’s much harder to be seditious these days. Now that the Totality sits on the Pantheon as an equal member, and fetches have pretty much the same rights as the living, there’s no them and us any more. There’s just us, and plotting against us, rather than them, is pretty pointless.’

‘You make it sound so simple,’ replied Lestak. ‘Not everyone sees it like that. It’s created a lot of work for us.’

‘And what about the divinities who supported Kingdom?’ asked Jack. ‘Any work gone into finding them?’

‘They’ll have covered their tracks by now. We wouldn’t be able to prove anything.’

‘So the gods are too big for justice?’

Lestak sighed. ‘There’s been enough change, Jack. People have lost so much faith in the Pantheon. Keeping a lid on it all is a big challenge. If another god fell – well, who knows where it would end.’

‘Very sensible,’ interrupted Grey, shimmering into being. ‘Humans, gods – we’re all so fragile. Too much change, too suddenly, could overwhelm us all.’

‘We’d survive. Even if the whole Pantheon fell.’

‘But not all of us would go down. And those of us who remained would be even more powerful. Even fewer checks on our behaviour. Remember what Harry was like when he thought he ruled Station. Power corrupts, and you’d be feeding us more of it. Think about that, Jack, before you start toppling gods.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Of course, factually you’re quite right. At least one of my colleagues did support Kingdom. Perhaps more. Covertly, of course.’ His voice took on a forced cheerfulness as he swept his arm out towards the peaceful city. ‘And now, I think, looking at all this, they’re very much regretting doing so.’

‘You won’t tell us who they are, though, will you?’ asked Jack. His voice was weary.

‘We’ll be late for the ceremony if we stand here talking,’ replied Grey jauntily. ‘Won’t we, Lestak? Hadn’t we better head for the main hall? Don’t want to keep people waiting.’

‘There’s not going to be any ceremony, Grey. Jack’s refused it,’ Lestak told him.

‘Rejecting the thanks of the gods?’ said Grey. ‘Some would call that ungracious.’

‘Fist’s been granted full citizenship. The Totality helped build him a body. My record’s been cleared. There’s nothing else either of us wants from you.’

‘You’ve really got to stop focusing on the downside,’ chided Grey. ‘You’d be so much better off if you let yourself enjoy what you’ve achieved. You and Fist are heroes. You purged Kingdom and you protected all of us from Harry. And as we’ve just agreed, anyone who can bring down a Pantheon member is a threat to us all.’ He shot Fist a pointed look.

‘Oh, I know that very well,’ said Fist. ‘I’m only sorry that I couldn’t stop Harry before he destroyed Kingdom.’ He almost sounded as if he meant it. ‘It’s Jack who’s the pessimist, not me.’

Jack glared back at Grey. ‘Harry kills Kingdom, Fist kills Harry, problem solved, all done and dusted,’ he spat. ‘Nice and easy and resolved. That’s how East’s spinning it too, isn’t she? Let the blame fall on the dead, don’t dig into the crimes of the living.’ He sighed. ‘All we’ve really done is enable a whitewash.’

‘Nonsense,’ exclaimed Grey. ‘Think about the bigger picture. You’ve enabled peace. Your actions brought the Pantheon and the Totality together. When Fist killed Harry, it left a space they had to fill. Their immediate takeover of his corporate structure saved tens of thousands of lives. The revelation of Kingdom’s crimes offset their opening of the Coffin Drives and paved the way for their acceptance into Station. Without you two, the peace negotiations would never have led to such a positive outcome. And now we’ve got that peace, we really can’t do anything to risk it. Which is why we’re all going to look forwards, not backwards, from now on.’

‘If it’s built on a lie,’ replied Jack, ‘it’s not really peace at all.’

Grey said nothing. Jack turned away from him. The dusk outside had turned to night. The windows had become great dark mirrors, showing all in the room back to themselves. Jack found that he could meet his own gaze. Lestak finally broke the silence. ‘If that’s it,’ she said, ‘I need to escort you out.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Grey. ‘I can show him the way.’

‘Wait,’ Fist cut in. ‘Before you go – will you be seeing Issie soon?’

Lestak smiled sadly. ‘Perhaps. Sometime in the next couple of weeks. She’s exploring the servers of Titan just now, I think. I haven’t talked since she left for out-system. She sounded very excited.’

‘Say hello to her,’ Fist told her. ‘Send her to see us. When she’s back!’

‘I don’t know when that’ll be. But yes, I will do.’ There was something approaching desolation in her voice.

‘Goodnight, Lestak,’ said Grey, with the soft, final force of a dismissal.

‘Goodnight,’ she replied abstractedly. Then she gathered herself. ‘Goodnight, Fist. And Jack. Think about what Grey’s said. Remember who I serve. I’m sure I’ll see you again. Please don’t let it be in my professional capacity. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.’

And then she was gone, and it was just the three of them.

‘What are you going to do now, Jack?’ asked Grey.

‘You’ll find out, won’t you? Even if I don’t tell you.’

‘No, Jack. I’ll let you be.’

‘Really? That’ll be a first.’

‘You deserve some peace of your own, Jack. You always have done. If it wasn’t for – everything – I wouldn’t have found you again when you came back to Station. I was a victim of circumstances as much as you were; and you were the only tool I had to hand. I’m sorry for that.’

‘Sorry for using me?’

‘Sorry I was placed in a position that forced me to.’ Grey put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘Let it all go. We’ve got the best world we can have, for now – and new lives for you and Fist. I’m glad that this is how it is, glad that all’s settled down.’

‘Glad that you’re back in power. That the people of Station have accepted it all so easily.’

‘East is managing her audience wonderfully.’

‘Always one more string to pull.’

‘We’re all more likely to survive now we’re working together, not against each other. That’s all we ever wanted. But I’m not going to convince you, am I? So it’s time for us to go, at last.’

‘I’ll find my own way out.’

‘All right, Jack. And really – this is as perfect a world as we can ever have. This is a heaven, of sorts. Let it be.’ Another soft touch of his hand, then he was gone.

‘I can breathe again,’ said Jack, letting out a long sigh. ‘I always so want to believe him, you know.’

‘That’s hardly surprising.’ Fist hopped off his chair. ‘He did do a lot for you, over the years.’

‘Always on his terms. Perhaps that’s all that gods can ever do.’

‘Well, he’s gone now.’ Fist sighed. ‘No more battles to fight.’

‘No one shooting at us, at any rate. And very little left to fight back with. Everyone saw you burn your weapon systems out killing Harry, and East’s taken back most of her gifts to me.’

‘You’re going to ignore everything Grey and Lestak said, aren’t you?’

Jack stood up. ‘Come on, Fist. Let’s go.’

‘Seeing Andrea tonight?’

‘If her fetch stabilisation work lets her. If not, there’s my father.’

‘Assuming of course your mum’s persuaded him that you’re not a complete shit. And we’ve got to track down Mr Stabs.’

‘I do hope we can get him rehoused in a better body.’ Jack bent down and put his arms out. Fist hopped into them, nestling snugly in the crook of his elbow. ‘You’re a lot heavier now, Fist.’

‘Well, I’m real, aren’t I?’

‘You always have been.’

Fist laughed. ‘I suppose so. And for all that he’s a manipulative old shit, Grey was right about one thing. We might not have entirely won, Jack, but we certainly didn’t lose. Kingdom was the bad guy, and Harry was pretty fucking evil too. We stopped them both. And you’re the big Totality fan – we helped them, and the dead too. You should take some pleasure in that, at least.’

‘Maybe.’ He half-smiled. ‘It does sound better coming from you than it did from Grey.’

They were at the door. The lights in the room hushed to darkness. Jack turned, and with Fist looked out over the city.

‘Home, at last.’

The ghost of a hunting dog nuzzled at them, before blurring and vanishing. Then Jack and Fist were gone too. The dark room was silent, and the city beyond it seemed to be at peace.