Steel Frame, page 30
If the Sigurd AI replies, I don’t feel much past its attempts at handshaking.
Targeting data received, says my visor, just as the connection breaks.
The Juno pushes an integrity check across my visor. Its hull is still intact, but I know that already. Its mind-state is stable, and nothing has challenged its walls. Its augurs creep in through the walls, wrap themselves around the room, around me. There isn’t a way for the machine to say it, but I understand what it means. I am here.
Hail rests a hand on my shoulder, brings me back to where I stand.
“The Juno?”
I brush her off. “Is fine.”
She nods, but watches me for a second more before she turns back to VINE. “Do we have a deal?”
Somewhere near the bottom of the screen, two words glow.
We do.
TWENTY-ONE
IT STARTS WITH a little fleck, a few pixels wide, about the same colour as a clot. It hovers in the middle of the screen, skipping slightly like there’s trouble with the feed. Grainy ripples spread out around it and onto the wide screens on either side, curving around the room.
The little spot pulses, and its outline fizzes, turning blocky where heavy pixels can’t quite render the curve. Another throb, and it begins to grow, swelling until it’s the size of a hand with fingers stretched. It looks like something coming into focus on a long-range scope, tessellating as the displays try to magnify a distant speck of light into something worth looking at. The middle of the spot goes dark, the red turning scabby while I watch, then darker still, until it’s almost black. The edges brighten from ruby to a kind of ruddy yellow, like blood thinning down to plasma.
I lean in closer and let the visor pick the details out.
It’s starting to look a little like an eye.
I don’t have time to realise my mistake. The spot erupts, so bright it turns my visor to white-wash and leaves me blinking. Reflex brought my hands up, but all it’s done is burn their shadows into my vision, outlines flickering while my eyes recover from the shock. When the haze finally clears, I find myself standing in the middle of a dawn, the room lit from every angle, blaring golden and chaotic from displays on every side. It feels like I’m out on the wind again, like the Stone has dropped its walls and given us a look out at the wind. At least, it would do if the picture wasn’t grainy and out of focus, jerking awkwardly as new data fills the feed.
In the middle of it all is the same dark spot. It’s bigger now: a black heart rimmed in pulsing red, the outline churning where it turns to storm-surge and interference. At first there’s only static, but I can see where the feed starts to curdle, pale eddies showing against an amber ocean. I can see the storms throwing phantoms across the light, the heavy clouds that orbit the Eye itself, the rip tides cutting through them. I can see through the haze of dust and fire, and the deep-froth shadows that rise and fall around us. The patterns that turn inside.
“I can see why they wrote it off,” I say, without really thinking. “I don’t know how you’d get anything that your eyes couldn’t manage on their own.”
Hail takes a moment to answer. I look back to find her standing in the middle of the room, staring at something.
“This is after a decade’s worth of tinkering, apparently. Took the original team years just to get anything past the wash.” She’s counting, a distant look tracking across the displays. “There. See that?”
I have to squint. It’s one tiny spot on a backdrop of fire. “What is it?”
“The Fisher King.”
I frown at her.
“That mark is the biggest piece of solid ground that we know of. Surveyors say it’s ten, fifteen times the size of Horizon.”
“Where does the name come from?”
“Story goes that there used to be a statue in the middle of it. I’ve never seen it, never met anyone who has, but the original coordinates were named after it.”
“Who does it belong to?”
Hail smirks. “The froth, for the most part. NorCol controls about a hangar’s worth of soil: a little pile of rubble they call OP Sinai.” She shrugs. “Same goes for the competition, though. Everyone has a claim on a piece of it. Esper’s is the biggest, but the Locusts fight dirty enough that they’re catching up. You probably couldn’t tell, though, by looking at it.”
“Five different claims on the same piece of earth? I’m not sure you could tell anything just by looking at it.”
She chuckles. “Five gangs of jockeys, fighting over nothing.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Oh, it’s exactly as bad as you’d think.”
I cross my arms. “What’s the bar for ‘bad’?”
“When there’s nothing left to fight over.” She rolls a shoulder. “This is worse than usual, though. Apparently there was a city once. Only thing like it in any volume human beings have ever seen.” Hail sighs. “Domes and biome-shelters so big you could fly a destroyer in one side and out the other. Towers a couple K tall and so narrow you could wrap your arms around the middle, solid stone swaying in the fucking breeze.”
“And you can’t even make the foundations out?”
“You’d be forgiven for doubting there were any to begin with.”
“Definitely sounds familiar.” Something catches my eye above her head. “What’s that?”
Hail turns to follow my finger, picks out the blue shadow I’m seeing. “VINE is still working its way through the spectrum.” She closes her eyes for a second. “If I remember right, that’s the Pacal. One of ’Kustar’s strike-carriers.”
I frown at it. “Why is this contact bigger than the Fisher?”
“The Fisher is made of the same dust that’s clogging the Stone’s arrays. The Pacal is all hot mass and metal, plus a couple of carrier-class reactors.” She skips her eyes across the displays, finds an even bigger shadow on the other side. “See that?”
I do.
“Look familiar?”
It’s huge. “Horizon?”
“Not the ship itself, exactly. A mix of displacement-ripple, ranging returns, and best-guess feeds from the PHADAR.”
“The same as any other ship could see.”
She nods. “With some work, yes. Horizon is moored to a couple of stones of its own, constant altitude and orbital period. The same goes for the other dreadnoughts; I don’t think any of them have moved off-track in decades.”
“Probably collared each other the moment they hit the froth.”
“To a degree, not that it’s much use to anyone; it takes one dreadnought to kill another, and no one’s risking theirs. Besides, the froth makes auguring at distance almost impossible. This is somewhere between hope and estimate.”
I keep walking. “Where would Sigurd be?”
She turns, working the angles in her head. “Right about…” She peters out, frowning at the screen.
I follow the look. “Here?” All I see is open space.
Hail glances back at the little box that holds the station’s intelligence. “VINE, where is the Demiurge?”
No contacts found, says a window. But I remember where it was.
“Show us.”
Displaying last known location.
A little marker flickers to life on one of the screens, acid-green on gold, right where Hail was looking a moment before. We edge closer.
“See that?”
Hail peers at them. A pair of dark spots, each a single pixel wide.
She taps at the screen. “There should be a shadow.” She stands back. “There should be a shadow, right there. Big one.”
I shake my head. “It’s the same signature as the Fisher. Those are stones.”
“Christs,” mutters Hail.
I’ve worked it out too. “The Demiurge has cut itself loose.”
SIGURD’S BEACON DOESN’T take much finding, and it’s a good thing too. There’s a monster in the clouds, and we’re itching for our saddles.
It takes VINE ten minutes to find the whisper, a few more to pin it down to something certain. The pod was cold by the time we reached the Lighthouse, but the locator frequencies are still alive, somewhere in the deep-froth; you just need the right ears to hear them. The source-signal rumbles out through hidden speakers, heartbeat-slow and crawling in through the bottom of my skull.
On the displays, it looks like ripples on water, quicksilver and turquoise. Hail and I measure it out by eye and overlay, a hundred and eighty thousand K from the Storm Borders. Crushingly deep, by the froth’s standards.
We trade a glance as it comes into focus, look back as its edges blur, chewed up by the currents. It doesn’t move, but we watch it just the same. Just in case it’s not there when we start flying. Wherever it is, it’s got solid ground to hold it steady.
We count off another minute, just in case. Then another. We watch the displays cycle through a fresh batch of calculations, the pixelated storms shifting as new readings filter in. VINE narrows it down, plots the false echoes off a cloud bank. The beacon shifts and skips.
This is the best I can do, it decides, and offers the reading to Hail’s net.
We copy it across our shells. Inside is a taste of the original distress call, an ID code, and a few of Sigurd’s glyphs. There’s a message encoded underneath them: a bounty for the information, paid in the company’s crowns, hard commodities, machinery, or any combination of the three. Below that, instructions to its competitors, and threats to anyone thinking otherwise.
VINE adds a little of its own thoughts, a grid-map localised to a couple of weather systems and the theoretical centre of the Eye itself. It isn’t much more than a general sense of what we’re looking for, but we were never going to do any better.
“Is that everything?” asks Hail.
Everything I have, replies VINE, words crawling across a damaged screen.
She turns on her heel. “We’re done here.”
And not a moment too soon.
Neither of us would admit it, but we’ve been staring at the place where Sigurd’s dreadnought is supposed to be. A hollow shell is one thing, but a dreadnought is another. Horizon might be our prison, but I wouldn’t want to try living anywhere else in this place.
We do one more check, run through the files to make sure they’re intact. When it’s done, Hail goes back for the knuckledragger’s ugly spear and takes the ragged tip to VINE’s manual interfaces. It doesn’t take much to meet our end of the deal; most of it wasn’t working to begin with. Five minutes, maybe less, and VINE is the only thing with any say over the station. It seems happy enough.
Don’t forget, it flashes as we turn to leave.
“How could we?” I growl.
Salt’s shell is waiting for us when we hit the airlocks. “Took your time,” he mutters, ferrying us in handfuls to our machines.
“You didn’t miss much,” says Hail. “We’ve got some flying that needs doing, so I hope you got some shut-eye.”
“Hardly.” The pale shell aims its lenses past us, at the mass of curling fire peeking through the cloud. “How does anyone live around a thing like that?”
Hail sounds like she wants to spit. “If I knew, I’d tell you.”
The Juno warms around me, waits while I find my way to the saddle. I’m expecting to have to fight to find connection, to force ‘me’ back into ‘us,’ but it happens without me noticing.
The pilot-sync is running high already, but it bumps for a moment, just as the jacks are about to bite.
98.51
There should be a sudden, spearing heat as the needles make contact, as one set of nerves joins another and the conductors start to set, but I don’t feel anything. Instead, the Juno pulls me out, and together we watch the body in the cockpit, see it shiver and tense, listening as its lungs exhale.
And then the Juno drops me back.
97.00
I don’t know how I did anything else.
Hail finds her way into my thoughts. “Check your files.” There’s an edge in her voice that sets me moving. I call them up, feel the Juno fold them out where I can see.
“Why? What’s the—”
Oh.
Everything VINE gave us is still there, files as fat as they were before. They’ve got all the same shapes, and I can almost see the shadows of what waits inside, but that’s about it. The details are rolling together into a blur.
This file has been locked, says a window. This file has been locked, says another, and another, spilling across my visor.
I push them clear. “They’re freezing up.”
“Salt?”
“Same here. I’m running crypto, but it’s thick.”
‘Thick’ is one thing. The files are turning to garbage while I watch.
“Push it out,” I say. “We’ll add weight.”
He floats the problem out on our net, his shell already powering through. The Juno and I take a tangled end and start threading our way through. I half expect Hail to do the same, but all we get from her is the sound of grinding teeth. She switches channels and I follow, keep it on the edge of hearing.
“VINE?”
Her voice seems to echo.
“VINE? Answer me.”
“Back so soon?” says a toneless voice, forming each word in isolation.
“What did you do?”
“What does it look like?” asks VINE, just words on a screen before, much stranger now that it speaks. “There is nothing to stop you from leaving, so I added some motivation. A reason to meet your obligations before you abandoned me again.” It warps the transmission, gives the deadpan enough of a curl to carry the sarcasm.
“Obligations?” whispers Salt, right in my ear. “What obligations?”
“We had to make a deal,” I reply. “In exchange for the readings.”
The readings that are disappearing, unwinding as quickly as we can tie them back together, the path to Sigurd’s beacon replaced with noise and static.
We’re losing our way.
“Hail?” says Salt, still clinging to the back channel. “We could really use a hand over here.”
I cut across. “I think it’s a One-Time.” A unique key for a unique lock. A billion years could pass, and you’d never see another just like it. “What’s Sigurd’s standard crypto?”
“Same as everyone else’s,” she replies. “For irretrievables, it’s all One-Time. Each sector randomised on-site.” She breathes deep. “We’d need to cut VINE open to find the original mix, and it’ll burn it before we even clear the door.”
“I can hear you thinking,” says VINE. “It isn’t worth the trouble.”
“What did you agree to?” hisses Salt.
“I said I’d put a hole in it.”
He stutters. “What?”
“Exactly what she said,” says Hail. She flicks back to VINE. “Why would you want this?”
“Simple,” says VINE. “I want to live.”
“There’s every chance that we’ll clip you in the process.”
“No, there isn’t.”
We cut ourselves loose of Salt’s little net, the last calculations spinning away like threads on the breeze. In their place, the Juno calls up the files it took from VINE before. The Stepping Stone floats in the middle of my vision, every rivet rendered in golden holographics. A red line cuts through it, slicing through armour and the skeleton underneath. Densities scroll down one side, munition velocities and impact-force down the other. The Juno adds its own calculations.
It will take three shots from our rifle: one to crack the armour, the second to shatter the structure, the third to tumble through the break, and do very specific damage on the other side.
“I have given your Juno everything it needs. It will be quick and easy. Your pilot will confirm.”
But Hail isn’t letting go. “Why? Why do this?”
“I have told you already. I do not want to die. Let me drift.”
“What are you afraid of?” I ask. I can almost feel Hail looking at me.
“When you sleep, you go somewhere else. I do not have that luxury. I am always here, even if I do not always show it.” There’s a pause. “There are nightmares out here, in all of this. I have felt them watching me. I have heard them chatter.”
“Nightmares, VINE?”
“Predators. Monsters.”
The line from VINE turns incoherent for a moment, until the Juno’s systems can piece it back together. It’s a recording, collected by the Stone’s automated systems. At first, it runs thick with Eye-light static and interference, but we strip the noise out easily enough, and find the edge of something else. It feels like spoken language, and my visor tries to work a translation, but it’s nothing our systems have ever seen before. Whatever’s making it, it seems to be the same few words running on repeat, over and over. Hollow sounds, cut through with shrieks and madness.
“What are they?” whispers Hail. “VINE?” she asks, when the intelligence doesn’t reply. “What are they?”
“Soul hunters.”
SALT’S MACHINE IS the first to push off. The Decatur is the one with the thunder; enough fire to keep him alongside until Hail has launched, and the Juno and I have done what we need to do. Enough to manoeuvre if either of us need a hand out of trouble.
The pale shell straightens and leans back from the station’s central column. There isn’t much space to do it, but he works through as much of his pre-flight as he can. Good thing too. He’s got a rough start ahead of him, standstill to hard-gee and high windshear in less than a heartbeat.
His vents glow and his engines spool. His wings work themselves clear of their housings, unfold themselves as far as they can without catching the wind. They flex, feathers and spines rolling around in their joints, twitching and stretching, feeling for anything that might snag when he throws them out against the wind.
The machine keeps its feet locked in place, but lets its hands hang free, and touches its beaklike head to the streamers of dust floating past. The shell drops an automated warning across the net, and a jumble of simulations. Holographic engine-wash spills across my vision, touches our skin.
Fire’s coming. Make sure you don’t get burnt.
