‘I can call for help, you know.’
‘Seven.’
‘All right, all right! Calm down.’ Zinda sighs. ‘I didn’t want to tell you. Not until you had had a chance to settle in. We traced your trajectory to its origin, of course. This is what we saw.’ She gestures, and a small q-dot screen appears above the table. It shows Earth, and a shape that she instantly recognises as Perhonen. It is caught in a storm of Hunters, daggerlike Sobornost weapons. Her mouth goes dry. You stupid, stupid girl. You didn’t have to.
The ship is a spiderweb of threads and modules in the centre of a pair of solar sail wings. It unravels as the Hunters come, swift like beams of light, each impact and scan beam flash taking a piece away.
And then the ship slowly swings around and dives towards the blue and white globe. In a moment, it is a burning scar, drawn across the face of the Earth. It vanishes beyond the horizon, and is gone.
‘We couldn’t find any traces of it afterwards,’ Zinda says. ‘That was just before the Dragons came. I’m sorry.’
Mieli closes her eyes but the world does not go away. Her enhancements paint a cold ghost landscape around her. The walls of the apartment are like her skull, squeezing her brain.
She lets out a wordless cry, runs to the balcony, opens her wings and takes to the air.
Mieli flies without destination, pushing the microfans in her wings until the air is thin and the strip below is like a road, disappearing into the horizon, crisscrossed by other strip habitats. There are hundreds of them, passing beneath each other, binding the giant planet tight. Playful zoku trueforms try to join her in flight, but she pushes herself harder until the fusion reactor in her thigh complains, outdistances them, flies on until the blue of the sky starts to fade into black and she feels the faint, familiar touch of the Dark Man of the void. She yearns for it, for the hard vacuum and radiation and pressure drop, for the stinging black slap after the heat of an Oortian sauna. But Saturn won’t let go of her that easily
Perhonen is gone. I always loved you better than she did, the ship said, before it shot her out with the zoku jewel, when the Hunters came.
She lets the planet’s gravity pull her into a long, rushing glide, follows it until she reaches the edge of the world.
It is a wall that looks like a mass of sunset-tinted clouds, reaching from the ground to the top of the sky, twenty kilometres high. Up close, it is a mass of cells filled with a gas, held up by thin smartmatter threads, erected on the rim of the habitat strip to keep the atmosphere in.
Then she is above it, wings whining in the almost absent air, and sees the abyss beyond. The mass streams that support the strip are spiderweb pillars that vanish into the yellow-ochre haze of Saturn, far, far below. A storm boils down there, winter blue cream swirling in a giant cup.
Perhaps it will be better to fall like she did.
What happened was her fault. But it was the right thing to do. On Earth, she died a thousand times to find the courage to face down the pellegrini. She drew a line that she would not cross, refused to allow a child’s self to be stolen. She did not expect to live, afterwards.
She should let Saturn take her, dive into the ammonium crystal clouds and water vapour and deeper down, until the crushing metallic hydrogen in the planet’s depths give her the end that belongs to her. So easy: her momentum will carry her over the edge, down towards the storm and its eyewall, a chain of maelstroms the size of Oortian comets, threaded together like beads on a string, like jewels.
And then something stronger than gravity stops her, a memory rising from the depths. Sydän.
She fights the momentum and brakes, folds her wings and dives straight down, at the top of the wall. The wing microfans overheat and moan. She comes down near the edge, hard, rolls like a broken bird. The cloud-wall is soft and slippery and absorbs the impact like water. Her landing sends slow ripples through the gas sacks: the surface is soap-bubble thin, but it stabilises to support her weight. She lies on top of it for a moment, hurting and breathing hard. The air is like watered milk, thin and tasteless.
After a while, she gets up and walks to the edge, slowly, with comical, bouncy steps, treading against the movement of the gas sack beneath her feet. When she sits down and hugs her knees, looking at the endless pale yellow expanse of Saturn below, it keeps rocking her gently up and down, like a mother on her knee.
With a voice that is almost inaudible in the sparse air, she prays to Kuutar and Ilmatar for guidance, and hopes they have power in this dark place where everything changes and nothing is real.
As Mieli quiets her mind, she becomes aware of a murmur in her head: the Rainbow Table jewel is whispering to her. Somehow, it has ended up in the folds of her robe. She frowns: she does not remember picking it up. She takes it out and looks at it. The jewel tells her that there are routers and Realmgates nearby, pinpoints them amongst the network of mass streams and q-tubes below, gives her a compulsion to go and make adjustments to a stream buffer controller.
She kills the thought with a quick command to her metacortex. She feels the jewel’s disapproval, an unravelling of the entanglement it contains. She ignores it and throws the bauble over the edge. She watches it fall for a long, long time, until it finally disappears from sight.
‘It amazes me,’ says a warm voice, ‘that you have the tenacity to keep praying to your gods, when I’m the only one who ever answers.’
The pellegrini rises slowly from the abyss, a tall auburn-haired figure in a white dress, hands open at her sides, as if ready to embrace Mieli.
Mieli stares at the Sobornost goddess. ‘Go away. I told you: I don’t work for you anymore.’ She feels cold and empty. Even her rage at the woman who has lived in her head for so long is a fading ember.
The pellegrini rolls her eyes. ‘And I can’t believe it took you so long to get rid of that ridiculous jewel. I could not risk being detected. I tried to speak to you, in the Realm. Clearly, you did not listen.’ She opens her purse and takes out one of her foul white stick-things, lights it with an elaborately carved lighter, and takes a drag. Then she holds it delicately to one side, sprinkling hot ash onto the eye of Saturn below.
‘As for our current relationship – fine. But I can’t leave that easily, Mieli. I am in your mind. You let me in, remember?’ She takes another drag from the stick. ‘Now that I have calmed down a bit, I must admit that I was impressed by the backbone you showed on Earth. Too bad you had to choose such a misguided moment to do so.
‘Well. Here we are. I should have self-destructed when you were captured. But I was made a gogol when I was quite old, and I have always found such extreme measures … difficult.’ She smiles. ‘So do you, it seems, in spite of all you have lost. We are stuck with each other, like it or not.’
‘I could tell them about you,’ Mieli says.
‘Of course you could. But it would not be wise. You may find them friendly and polite now, Mieli, but if they knew you had a Sobornost Founder gogol inside you? They would have me at any cost, and I am hiding so deep that they would have to tear you apart to get me.’
‘Perhaps I’m not afraid of that.’
‘No: you do not fear death, you have shown that many times. But this would not be death. You know what I’m talking about: you have interrogated gogols yourself. And they don’t believe in copies. They would transfer you into one of their Realms, turn the process of cutting me out into a game. You would be changed, utterly. Trust me, you don’t want that.’
Mieli shivers. The pellegrini will say anything to get what she wants. But she has a feeling that the goddess is not lying, this time.