Two hours later she was walking home through a damp grey pea-souper fog, inured by frequent exposure to the airborne tang of sulphur dioxide, wondering why she had agreed to help, while knowing there was no other choice. There was evidence she had worked hard to confirm that Erik had been a slave at Peenemünde, almost certainly starved and worked to death on one of the projects headed by Werner von Braun, now sunning himself in Florida and raking in the big bucks from NASA, never mentioning the doodlebugs and V2 rockets that had devastated British cities, bringing fear and death to civilian adults, children and their pets.
So now there was Ursula Wolf, who called herself Ursula Shtemenko, asking someone on the British Council, at an artists’ event in East Berlin, for help in defecting. Did she really have access to her stepfather’s information? Or did Dmitri plan on using Ursula as leverage against one Gavriela Wolf? He might believe that Gavriela-turned-Gabrielle was an intelligence officer still; and even if he knew she was retired, there were secrets worth pulling from her brain.
What if the real game were Dmitri versus Rupert, while everything else was context?
Berlin beckoned, regardless.
EIGHTEEN
NULAPEIRON, 2604-2605 AD
Realspace, where every one of the countless points of light-against-darkness may be a distant star, an even more distant galaxy, a cluster or an ancient supercluster beyond a cosmic void. The photons that convey this information have travelled for up to thirteen point seven billion years without experiencing the passing of a moment – it is only those photons that reach non-vacuum media, such as human-built windows, that slow down and experience the march of time.
Here floats an Earth like world, large for its type, its purple-grey continents strewn with clouds, showing no sign – save for some near-deserted orbitals – of the humans carving out a new society in strata below the cheerless surface. They call it Nulapeiron, the name implying boundlessness, with a paradoxical irony typical of the human culture’s designers, for the dwellings are subterranean.
And now a golden ship appears, banded with cobalt blue, polished and magnificent.
We’re here.
Another new world, my love.
Yes.
Rhianna Chiang disengages from her ship, wanting to review her briefing material before descending to the surface; and it is that decision which will account for the deciseconds-long delay reacting to movement on the periphery of her ship’s senses.
In a tenth of a second, everything can change.
Shortly, she will discover that.
Before the disaster occurs, she will have time to display only a first-facet projection of her briefing materiaclass="underline"
LANGUAGES: Plentiful.
In the four centuries that Nulapeiron has been inhabited, deliberate design has prevented single-language monopolies (cf. Whorf Sapir hypothesis and the Web Mand’rin Catastrophe) from jeopardising cognitive Weltanschauung diversity. Only one of the major language groups is fully artificial, the others deriving from recognised Terran antecedents.
ECOSYSTEM: Constrained.
In the lower strata, light and oxygen are provided by force-evolved fluorofungus, which is plentiful. The foundation of habitable-area ecology is imported autotrophic bacteria; in a real sense, the planet’s native lifeforms exist outside the human demesnes and realms, especially upon the surface.
ARCHITECTURE: Deliberate.
The aristocracy’s subterranean palaces in the upper strata are a far cry from the habitation tunnels of the lower strata. Note that various leitmotifs are global, cf. the use of simple hangings to form walls and doorways in dormitory tunnels, contrasted with the wall membranes of well-to-do dwellings; likewise the use of fluorofungus compared to soft-luminescence smartmarble.
EDUCATION: Encouraged.
Despite the deliberate creation of an aristocracy (justified by the Founding Lords with reference to the controversial emergent élites doctrine as being inevitable therefore requiring optimisation), education is available in the poorer (lower) strata, while educational content is monitored and censored. The use of logotropes as femtoscopic drug-like treatments form an approach in contrast to that of the Fulgor education system designed by LuxPrime, and may (among the aristocracy at least) surpass it.
ARISTOCRACY: Powerful.
While the power structures are amenable to normal sociological deconstruction, note that the soi-disant Logic Lords and Ladies almost invariably possess superior intellects by virtue of their intensive training in the all-purpose academic discipline of logosophy.
Ethico cognitive modelling by Admiralty analysts notes that the presence of repressive social elements, including slavery, occasional employment of cyborgs and a pitiless legal system, may be overlooked by future historians if the integration of all academic disciplines (including philosophy-as-science) in logosophy matures as promised.
There are three points of movement. The moment is now.
Ships.
What—?
Zajinet ships.
All briefing notes are forgotten as Rhianna slams downward into emergency trance, the kind that produces physical after-effects due to shocking suddenness, irrelevant unless the Pilot survives; but these vessels are closing fast, and ship-and-Rhianna experience a hull-tingling resonance of powered-up weapon systems: the attack is imminent and movement is necessary now.
They corkscrew away but something tears into their left wing – bastards! – as their own weapons come online, pulsing with build-up – there – and they cut loose with their beams, Rhianna-and-ship; and the first of the attackers explodes – die, you fucker – but the others are swerving and two more beams lance towards them, and the second hits – damn damn damn – as ship and Rhianna fling themselves through another evasion, firing at another of the Zajinets and hitting it – good – and then the last – all dead – but not before more pain blossoms in their hull and then they are—
I love you.
I’ve always loved you.
—falling.
Rhianna has killed the Zajinets, and they have killed her.
She screams as reality explodes and a fragment is flung away – the fragment that is her – tearing her mind so that the smartgel and extruding stubby wings mean nothing, because everything is over.
It happened so very, very fast . . .
Dying now.
But that is not the tragedy.
‘—be all right if we—’
Fragments impinge on the awareness that was human, that was Pilot once.
Man, bearded.
Images like shards.
Hurts . . .
Pain. Oceanic pain.
Beads of computation in sequences, in threads, in damaged processes.
Diagnostic: livelock-free – achieved.
Such agony, the negentropy of working things out, of logic activated.
Diagnostic: deadlock-free – achieved.
Reality flickers.
‘Activating you now.’
Steadies.
‘I am Duke Avernon.’ The bearded man produces acoustic vibration to be parsed and rendered into semantic-analytic components for matching. ‘You’re alive again.’
Tonal analysis estimates likelihood of irony at 27 per cent.
‘It’s been a standard year since the crash, Pilot.’
Self model indicates send-signal capacity is 30:70 vision:speech.
Ambulatory capacity equals zero.