Authors: Charles Stross
I'm dozing in the close warm darkness of a cabin and when somebody kicks my hand it gives me the shock of my life. I open my eyes and jacknife awake against the sleeping straps all at once, and yell: "
shit!
" -- even though it was only a light kick. Then I see who it is. "Raisa --"
"Yes." It's confused, everything's tumbling, and there's clothing in the air that makes it hard to tell what's what, and it's dark. She holds on to me then tries to squirm around until she's face to face: it's difficult getting oriented in free fall. "Oshi. I want to talk --"
"-- was asleep," I groan. Suddenly hear what she said. "Want to
talk
? What about?"
"What do you think?" she asks. She's holding me tight, nothing very intimate about it except the fact of the contact in itself. I shiver, look, see how she's changed. She's only been out of the tank a day, and I haven't seen much of her. Her new body is much like the last. Hair a fine dark stubble, skin tight and pale and new, barely dry. The smell of her is the odour of the tanks, acrid grainy waft of synthetic chorionic fluid. "You just came in."
"Ack." She leans back to see more of me. She looks pleased to see me, which is a realization that shakes me. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's as if she's forgotten whatever happened last time we met: or maybe wasn't even there at all. "Been up to much?"
"I'm exhausted. Messing with critpath analysers. Boris and Mik went toy-happy as soon as they woke up; comes of having something to plot. They're both the same: no respect for humanity. Want me to staff for them. How about you?"
"You mean they've been up for days?" She looks annoyed. "I was meant to be first out --"
The smell, the touch, of her: I bend forward, snap out of the sleep restraint. "Yes," I say; "but the plans changed. " She lets go of me. "They figured it's more important to know who you need first, before they pull them through. So, load one meat chassis before another. What does it mean to them? I'm here, you're here. And I'm tired, while you want to talk. Is there no justice in Hell?"
She laughs, a little brittle, holding her distance now. "Do you ever think of anything else? Sex or violence?" Reaches out and pinches my arm in a way which sends a thrill through me. "What are you thinking?"
"I was born to go fast and explode," I say. Remembering:
dropping through layers of atmosphere, chutes banging open overhead.
Yes, I go fast and explode. I look over her shoulder. The cabin door has closed automatically, conserving airflow. "You're cold."
"Huh." She leans closer, hanging on my shoulders and hips by fingertips and agile toes. Microgravity drifts us both backward into the net of sleep webbing. "I'm here now. Aah, shit." She looks away, troubled. That black coif of thick hair is missing; she purses her lips, holds her breath in for a moment. I freeze, trying to memorize the shape and presence of her, trying to make myself a camera. Trying to understand that initial flash of fascination, back on the colony, why something like it is still there despite the intervening nightmare. "I've been doing some thinking. There's a long way to go, I admit. I'm not sure what I want. When you arrived I was on a backswing from something messy. But I like you. I'm just not sure --"
"Why the revelation?" I ask, heart pounding.
She hesitates a moment before replying: "Don't try to push me, Oshi. There's a lot you don't know."
I stare. "That goes without saying," I say. I feel very cold: "were you in the colony medicentre? Do you know what happened there after the radiation storm?"
She looks startled. "No --" Stop. "Was it bad?"
"You can have
no
idea," I say.
"Never mind then," she adds. "It's over. Just give me some time and come visit me. I just wanted to say that." She half-smiles, then leans closer and hugs me. "Okay?"
"Yes. What happened to --"
She looks at me oddly. "You happened, that's what."
I feign incomprehension to cover my real confusion. "I happened? I don't understand."
"You wouldn't," she says. A little tightly, "There was no room in the Duat. Everyone knew everyone else, and we all had our skeletons to bury from the time ... before then. Coming on so direct was, a bit, unexpected. I won't say unwelcome. But I've had to do lots of thinking."
"What happened?" I ask. I hold out my arms.
"What happened --" she bites her lower lip. Looks at me, with a speculative expression I've seen before that shocks me with its directness. She takes my fingertips and lets me pull her closer, until I can feel her breath on my face.
"You know about the goon squad?" she asks.
"The goons? Didn't Anubis make them out of --"
A finger stills my lips. "She's dead, now," says Raisa. She doesn't sound desolate: she's managed to reach the stage of looking back on it from that level of equanimity that lets us keep our sanity in return for a certain coldness in the soul. "Anubis took her, along with the other over security specialists. All except Mikhail, in fact, turned into ... weapons. I heard this later. I never saw Amina again, not as anyone I could recognize. You die a little when that happens. We'd been together years before the evacuation, thought we'd be together afterwards, one way or the other ... wrong. That was the big mistake I regret: assuming there'd be time to say goodbye. It was years ago, when I first arrived, and there were other people in mourning. That's why we never did anything about the goons before. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
"Wrong," I manage. "I think --" I look her in the eye, remembering the scene in the lobby of Anubis's last retreat, and suddenly I can't think of Ivan any more. "I may have been there too. Once. The worst is knowing that you'll never know what happened, isn't it? What they -- what Anubis -- did. Death is the ultimate unfinished story, isn't it?"
"'Death is the ultimate unfinished story'; I like that." She strokes my hair absently. "That's what made you so abrupt?"
"There are no second chances."
She sighs. "Maybe not." Then she looks me in the eye and I see something there, some stoicism that I hadn't recognized before: she's tougher than I am, I think, able to live with the consequences of her mistakes in a way that I'm still vacilating about. "What do I mean to you, Oshi? You don't know me, I don't know you. What is it?"
"You're very attractive," I say, automatically and truthfully. "And also --"
"Thank you, but I'd rather leave that unfinished," she said, smiling faintly. "You get defensive when you're not in control of the situation, don't you?"
"What situation?" I demand.
She leans closer and I can feel her heartbeat, her proximity. I'm really tired, I ache with it, but I can't let go now. She's too important. "This," she says, lightly touching my forehead. "If you'd ever put down roots in a world, then had them lopped off, you'd know what real loss was about."
"But I have --"
"Roots?" she's so skeptical it runs through me like a knife. "You've never been loved, Oshi, that's what it looks like. Don't tell me more. You said yourself; your background, your childhood, everything. You think you can love, and you're probably right, but whoever is first to fall in love with you ..." her expression softens ... "be gentle with them."
"I will," I promise.
"I mean it," she says. Half-smiling again: "it might be me, if you work at it. And if you give me enough space to make my own mind up. You can be very overbearing, you know."
"I'm sorry."
"Think nothing of it. Look, I've got to go on watch, check the download status, better go now --"
I stifle a yawn. "Right. Look, I really need to sleep. Something about dropping out of the pod -- think Boris screwed up the timing, you know? It's dead of night. I'll be okay, but I'm on a different sleep shift -- ah --" I yawn for real.
"Sure," she says, understandingly. "We've got a lot to talk about. The future, maybe." She moves closer and embraces me, sleeping bag and all. We kiss, for longer than is sensible. She tastes of hot neutrality, some kind of amniotic lubricant; androids in love. I'm beginning to wake up again when she says , "I'll be back soon," breathlessly.
"Wait," I say. She's already pushing off towards the door. I watch her leave through half-shut eyes, until the door closes on the red dimness of the tunnel. I really do not understand that woman, I decide. I don't understand my own reaction to her. So hot, so bright, so fast: almost like a reflection. Do I look like that to other people? A shudder of hot warmth suffuses me. Then I'm asleep.
I awaken to chaos. The hatch is open and a breeze is gusting intermittently, while maintenance drones mumble quietly in the corners of the cabin. I hear voices undamped by antisound. Someone comes by, hand over hand, pauses to look curiously in at me: "oh sorry," she says, and is away before I can glare at her.
Shit
. There's an arrhythmic banging from up front, as if someone's attacking the walls with a truncheon. I slide out of my sleeping bag and stretch, straining at grab-bars on opposite walls, then listen to the voices in my head --
Manifest up to 60%. New arrival: Atman Jarre. Condition: stable, conscious. Attention: support to transfer bay, support to transfer bay ...
The tunnel is narrow, red-lit, metal-walled, like a prehistoric water ship. I bounce hand-over-hand towards the front end, passing the open control room doors. Boris is there, arguing about something with Mik. Lorma is strapping herself into a hammock, chattering volubly about something over a voice-only comm channel: "can't let her do it, we don't have the nitrogen cycle reserves." I hit the front end module, airlock muzzles opening on all sides, door retracted back into the hull to keep it internal. I look round. "Yo! Mik --"
It's not Mik but Lorma, the saturnine biosciences chief. She looks unhappy. "Up already?" she asks.
"Yes," I say. "Have you seen Raisa?"
"Huh? I think she's in the receiver bay." She points back down the tunnel. "Hack left at the end, antispinwise -- you'll see the arrows -- got it?"
Her patronizing tone annoys me. "I know my way around. You busy with the payload?" I gesture at the red- and yellow-striped hatch capping the tunnel. Tiny lights blink around it, cautioning me.
"Yes. You don't want to go through, it's unpressurised right now. Powering up the drones. Check out with Trotsky; he'll tell you." Lorma stops and listens to a voice that I can't here. "Yeah, back in the bridge. I've got to go now."
She turns and kicks away towards another door, that opens before her and disgorges some kind of maintenance robot. I watch, but the drone pays me no attention. I head back for the bridge.
Boris is wrapped in eyefaces, a full helmet bridging his skull for maximum resolution. I wait in the doorway until he notices at me: "want something?" he asks, pushing up his goggles.
"Talk."
"If you want." I hear something, glance down the tunnel to see someone I don't recognize pulling themselves into a cabin. More voices. "We're coming through now. Been doing lots of training in the Dreamtime; we rigged a practice universe, ran through this about eighteen times by cranking up our timebase to a dozen times faster than normal. I think you can settle back for the raid. Rendezvous is due in point seven megaseconds, eight days. Drones check out green, Lorma is seeing to the engineering upgrades now. Our energy budget is stable for the foreseeable future."
"What happened while I was sleeping?"
"The crew of an attack fleet downloaded itself, that's what happened. Pol Pot and Group Two will initiate distractions as soon as -- well. We're ranging in. The enemy is static at six million klicks right now, a bit far for any direct work. We can't drop a threat cloud, but there's a bus on standby which will torch off six big ones to start things cooking when we launch the drones. They're a quarter of a megaton each, optimized to pump out mostly visible light and a bit of microwaves. We've got four hundred attack drones, each with a crew of two piloting by secure control channels. The goal is to get as close as we can before being seen, then make a fast end-run. Virtually everything is disposable except the two-way upload link to Pascal Dreamtime, and that's going to be totally saturated during the fight."
The fight. I remember boiling streets, mushy under my feet, the scabbed scorched log-like structure of a charred Dubrovniki on the way out to the RDV. A man trailing his skin in the dirt, sloughed off at the heels like a dying insect. "When do we go?" I think I sound eager, but actually there's something else underneath.
"In due course. Tell me, you ever been part of a tiger team, hmm? Ever done a back-door job to test operational integrity?"
I stare. "You fingered me." Boris recoils. I decide I'm not scaring him enough; he might start taking me for granted.
"I know you were sent here by some Superbright faction. I don't know what you used to do for them but I can guess, right? We're not planning anything for you, but an indication of your long term plans would be appreciated."
"I don't have any," I say calmly. "I want out. I've seen things you wouldn't believe, done some of them too. All for shit. And now I want out. This was my ticket, Boris, my last little chore. I'm not going to get in your way whatever you do."
"That's good." He looks thoughtful. "But I wouldn't be too sure."
"Why?" My heart's in my mouth, I'm edgy with the butterly stomach of an adrenalin rush in free fall.
"Watch --" he hoses me down with wisdom. Schemata, critical path analyses, clinically plotted intersections from his side of the strategic planning. "I think we'll make it. Assuming your controllers haven't planted a time bomb, some kind of sabotage mechanism --"
"They've done it before." I remember Miramor Dubrovnic, tricked into immolation by a Superbright ruse. "They're not going to relish a starship full of rogue humans spreading the news about what they've been up to among their affluent trading partners." I grab a dangling belt and pull myself over. Boris hangs like a spider in free fall, a spider wearing a vac suit liner and EVA boots.
"The Superbrights sent you to check things out." He's cool.