Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (16 page)

‘This is important news,' said Lianna as Roger concluded his report. ‘You've done well.'

‘Thank you.'

He was careful not to use her first name, this being their first meeting in reality.

Havelock seemed thoughtful. ‘I agree, it was good work. You understand why it was decided to send you in particular.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Roger, wondering what the issue was.

‘The Vachss Station judicial hearing was not public.' Lianna was frowning. ‘But some important events took place there. Even if the recordings don't go public – I'm afraid your name is destined to become well known on Vijaya.'

‘Crap,' said Roger.

‘Well, precisely,' said Havelock. ‘You said previously your success would depend on remaining unknown, but this time it's worked out differently. Not an entirely secret victory.'

So much for subterfuge and infiltration.

‘Since the Göthewelt raid,' Havelock went on, ‘there have been seven more Zajinet attacks in realspace. With Labyrinth on a war footing, you and your classmates are likely to be operational immediately on completion of training. The nature of those operations is . . . malleable.'

Meaning not what they had been trained for.

‘Understood, sir.'

But it was Lianna's words, at the conclusion of the meeting, that would stay with him.

‘Your father would be proud,' she told him. ‘Very proud.'

In return, he could have told her how much Dad had been in love with her when they were young, and how hurt he had been by her dismissal when she believed him to be Shipless; but some thoughts are best kept hidden for ever.

‘Thank you, ma'am,' he said.

TWENTY-FOUR

THE WORLD, 5575 AD

When the potential for flight among the worlds was discovered, the possibility of sailing the heaven-void, they cast for more Seekers to join them, and seven came. Alongside Seeker-once-Harij and Seeker-once-captive, they should be enough to respond to flux-queries from within the vessel – or so they believed.

Zirkana's thoughts were entirely different.

**It cannot fly.**

The excavation had completely uncovered the ancient vessel, which looked . . . younger. Newer. Vast and lustrous, dark green banded with white. It seemed capable of holding hundreds, perhaps a thousand sleeping people stacked in bunks, as the ancient legend said.

**In dreams through golden space they fled/Till xeno demons cut them dead.**

There was more to the old verse but, even among Seekers, few bothered with it; for it was clearly allegory and filled with indecipherable allusion: for one thing, space was most obviously black. In the absence of other Ideas from that period, the references made little sense today.

What had surprised the two hundred workers as they dug sand, brushed hardened clumps from the uncovered ship, and polished every part, was that the underlying metal – if it was metal: its properties were odd – had failed to deteriorate despite being buried for so long, a great many generations.

And after a time, as they had approached the end of the cleaning, the ship had begun to hum, a soft low fluxcast that lightened every heart, made every person smile and wonder.
That included Zirkana; but unlike the others, she broke away to spend time worrying, because the intent had arisen among the group without discussion: if the ship could fly, the Seekers wanted to try her out. They thought of the ship as female, for no reason they could decipher.

Zirkana was afraid for Seeker-once-Harij.

**Let the others try it, if they must.**

In their alcove within the dormitory caverns, when day was beginning outside and everyone else was asleep, she would hold him very tight. But they both knew that the urge to Seek was as strong as love and that to set them in opposition could only bring pain.

On the final night before the attempt, travellers arrived, twenty in number, from a settlement within a distant mountain. What they brought was a gift, a chunk of virgin dreamlode, its crystal free of contained flux. It was both a celebration of the project's triumph and a potential tool for the Seekers intending to fly the vessel.

Then the night came when all was ready, and there was no reason to delay, except perhaps for the breaking of one woman's heart. With over two hundred people gathered for a noble purpose and sharing a dream, an individual's fears were irrelevant. Zirkana kept her thoughts wrapped tightly in herself.

No one could know.

Seeker-once-Harij lost sight of Zirkana during the speeches by Starij and Kolarin, the leaders of the dig, when the combined flux of two hundred volunteer workers heterodyned into a blazing cheer. They were standing close together and the effect was awe-inspiring, so that the nine assembled Seekers could only stand at the base of the newly constructed ramp, letting the flux sink in.

Then it was time to climb to the opening that had appeared in the hull five nights before, revealing a chamber in which decay had not occurred. Emotions whirling, the Seekers
entered and waited. After a moment, as they had known it would, the opening flowed shut.

Amazing! They were aboard a sky vessel on the verge of—

**Zirkana? How are you here?**

She rose from the floor where she had been curled up, holding her flux inside herself.

**The ship allowed me in.**

There was no time for Seeker-once-Harij to remonstrate with or hug her, because the other Seekers were focused on the dreamlode crystal – Seeker-once-captive was holding it against his chest – combining their thoughts to create a clean command.

Except that it would be request more than order, to such a wondrous ship as this.

**Rise, good vessel. Please rise.**

The floor and walls shivered as the air grew warm. It came to the conjoined Seekers that the ship was very old, and they were asking a great deal. People grow feeble, so it stood to reason that a living ship would—

A massive force slammed into them.

There was time to deal with bleeding noses while the ordeal lasted, time for their skins to lose the mottling of emotion and return to polished silver equilibrium. Finally, the ship's trembling lessened, and they felt themselves sinking.

Surely descending to the dig. There had been time for nothing more.

Finally, they felt the sensation of slowing descent, of settling in place; and everybody smiled.

The wall flowed open as before, and a strong draught swept through the chamber.

**The air feels oddly—**

Suddenly all communication with the other Seekers was gone. Only Zirkana's and Seeker-once-Harij's thoughts whirled together, pulsing and urgent.

**Physical contact. Keep hold. It's as if the air is dead to flux.**

**Yes. You're right.**

Maintaining his grasp on Zirkana's hand, Seeker-once-Harij clasped the nearest Seeker's shoulder; and after a momentary disorientation, that Seeker in turn grabbed two others. Soon they were communicating, panic over.

**We can breathe the air.**

**It sustains life, but not flux. How can that be?**

But of course, the answer was right outside. They just did not want to look, to process the sight of what was there.

**There are old Ideas treating those concepts as separate, but this is not the time to—**

**Stop. Just perceive.**

Together, they looked out of the vessel.

Silver sands stretched far to black mountains that were webbed with silver streams, rendering them visible against black sky.

**No place in the World has a desert like—**

**We're not on the World.**

**That's hardly—**

**This is Magnus.**

A landscape of silver and black.

They had seen it all their lives: on the face of the largest moon floating overhead. And now they were upon it, and it was vast, as big as the World.

Slowly, slowly, the ship extruded a tongue-like ramp of its own. She had not communicated with them in coherent flux, but this message was clear. Or was this whole flight a senile interpretation of everyone's wishes back at the dig site? She was so very old.

**What do we do?**

Old Ideas told of distant worlds that were airless, but this was different, and disconcerting: they could breathe, yet flux did not tumble through the air; it was attenuated to a faint echo of normality. There might be danger, but their course of action was obvious.

**We Seek.**

In a human chain, they walked down the ramp.

**A new world!**

Then the Seekers disengaged physical contact, leaving only Seeker-once-Harij and Zirkana holding hands. The fluxsilence was eerie.

When they looked back, the ship was unmoving. It seemed a promise that she would wait for them, though of course they might be wrong. But something winked on the distant mountainside, and a few heartbeats later, it did so again.

Nine Seekers and Zirkana felt the lure of new knowledge upon them.

It was time to Seek.

The passing of time was hard to reckon, but it took longer than a normal night to reach the black mountain. There was nothing to eat and nothing to drink as they trekked across silver sand, but Seekers were used to privation, and Zirkana was determined to match them. The closer they drew to the mountain, the more certain they were that buildings of some kind awaited them.

And so they did. Huge and ancient. Tall and shining, formed of obsidian and silver, all clean lines and cold beauty. Also empty, as if they had never been lived in.

Zirkana cast her opinion:

**There were never inhabitants.**

All ten were holding hands at that point, considering what to do next.

**Never? Then who built them?**

In a polished, bare hall, they turned in circles, overwhelmed by the structure.

**A ship, or something like it. Something that went ahead.**
Seeker-once-Harij stared up at a high arch, considering this.

**Why would it build them, my love?**

**For us to live in.**

**Surely that's not—**

**I mean our ancestors. The ship was supposed to carry them here, to Magnus.**

The Seekers were unsure.

**You really think it's the Ark?**

**You really think it isn't?**

But as they searched amid the polished magnificence, it was the absence of food and drink that was growing in their minds: so mundane a detail, but without supplies there could be no exploration. Zirkana would not let them set off early because of her; but soon enough, the Seekers, experienced wanderers all, were in agreement. They had reached the cut-off point, beyond which returning to the ship was dangerous.

**We'll come back with supplies. Plenty of them.**

**You think the ship will carry us back and forth from the World?**

**What else does it have to do?**

Perhaps it was true – perhaps even a ship needed a purpose in life. The thought made it easier to abandon the empty, unexplored buildings and begin the reverse trek, steadily moving across glistening sand, plodding antiparallel to their own footprints. There was always the possibility that the ship would have decided not to wait; but they had trusted her, and she remained in view as they approached.

Finally, on board, they sank down on the metallic deck, hamstrings aching, ankles sore, and waited for something to happen. But nothing did.

**Ship. Take us home.**

The opening did not seal up. There was no thrum of power to whatever mechanisms allowed the ship to fly; only her steady background hum remained, as if she were waiting for something. But whatever it was, they could not give it to her.

Desperately, the Seekers tried geometrically intricate flux patterns and every trick of rhetoric they knew, but nothing produced a response from the ancient vessel. Perhaps she really was senile; perhaps she had finally completed her
original mission – as she saw it – and was resting here until she died.

No one railed at her for long. Fatigue and hunger were met-amorphosing into lethargy, and soon enough they would be unable to do anything as their bodies shut down and that was that: the end of them. But they were Seekers, and one Seeker's wife, and they could summon composure if nothing else.

Eight Seekers sat cross-legged in a circle, hands joined as they entered flux-trance, chins on chests and drooping forwards as their strength failed, sinking fast inside themselves, preparing. Lying apart from them, Seeker-once-Harij and Zirkana clasped each other, merging their thoughts.

**I love you.**

But death would soon be here.

Whether Seeking carried with it a sense of fatalism, Zirkana could not quite say, but she alone roused herself at the tiniest pinprick of distant energies, of disturbance propagated only faintly through the insulating medium of air, this strange dead air that Magnus possessed. She squeezed Seeker-once-Harij, who roused himself – it would be so easy to slip back into sleep – and forced himself to move, to shake the other Seekers into wakefulness.

And slowly, painfully, to shuffle to the exit and down the ramp.

Standing on the silver sand, they watched a huge vessel – or was it a creature? – move slowly in the night sky. Then, with twin bursts of pure white light, two more craft burst into being. All three bore some kind of resemblance to the ancient ship that brought them here; but they were different also, slowly morphing in shape, uncurling external tendrils, billowing gently.

From them, streams of bubbles began to descend.

**What are they, Harij?**

**I don't know, my love.**

But each bubble, as it approached the ground, clearly
contained a person. Or rather, a near human lacking silver skin. Seeker-once-Harij felt none of the panic that he experienced with the other soft-skinned beings – no sense of abomination, of that inhuman group mind – and Seeker-once-captive looked equally calm. That was good, because it took the last of their energy simply to stand here and wait.

For whatever was about to happen.

Each bubble, as it touched the sand, dissolved. Its former occupant walked clear. When there were some thirty folk gathered, they walked slowly forward, approaching the Seekers and Zirkana; and then they halted.

Seeker-once-Harij cast a greeting.

Two of the strangers moved their mouths in an odd fashion. One had ordinary human eyes (perhaps lacking protective membrane) despite the soft skin; the other's eyes were pure black: polished obsidian.

**Communication.**

That was the oldest Seeker, searching his memory for Ideas, then touching each of his fellows in turn with his fingertips, sharing his thinking: words without flux, nevertheless cast upon the air. But the two newcomers looked to be thinking equally hard, blinking as if at sights only they could see – and suddenly the black-eyed stranger, surely a woman, raised her hand and a silvery mist spread outwards – from her ring, Seeker-once-Harij thought – and spanned the gap between her and the nine Seekers plus Zirkana.

This time, when her mouth moved, the mist came alive with blazing flux.

**GREETINGS!**

The Seekers staggered, and Seeker-once-Harij tripped and fell backwards, thumping into the ground. Zirkana went down on one knee beside him, but he was laughing; and after a moment, she was laughing too.

Seeker-once-captive managed to keep composure and reply.

**Greetings.**

But they were all smiling, even the soft-skinned beings, even the ones standing well back. This was a strange world and they did not know each other, but there was a sense only of warmth, of the possibility of friendship; and so long as no one did anything stupid, that was how things would proceed. Seeker-once-Harij was sure of it.