‘Well, do I get the job or not?’
Yes, she probably did, but there would be other candidates to see before I made my final decision. I stood up and shook her small, lethal hand. ‘You’re certainly near the top of the list. And even if you don’t get the position we’ve discussed, there’s another reason I might want to keep your name on file.’
‘Yes?’
I thought about Gideon; still imprisoned down there after all these years. I had vowed that I would go down into the chasm again — if only to kill him — but the time had never been right. I knew he was still alive, since Dream Fuel was still reaching the city, albeit in tiny, sought-after quantities. There was still a perverse trade to be had in selling his terrors, distilled into a format humans could just assimilate. But he must surely be close to death now, and there could not be very much time left before my vow would become meaningless.
‘Just an operation I might have in mind; that’s all.’
‘And when would that be?’
‘A month or so from now; maybe three or four.’
She smiled again. ‘I’m good, Mister Mirabel. You’d better hope I don’t get poached by someone else in the meantime.’
I shrugged. ‘If it happens, it happens.’
‘Well, who knows.’
We shook hands again, and she began walking towards the door. I looked out the window; dusk was settling in now, lights burning in the Canopy; cable-cars tiny motes of light swinging through the eternal brown twilight. Down below, like a plain strewn with campfires, the lamps and night markets of the Mulch reflected a sullen red glow towards the Net. I thought of the millions of people who had found a way to think of this city as home, even after the transformations it had been through since the plague. It was thirteen years ago, after all. There were adults down there who had no real memories of what the place had been like before.
‘Mister Mirabel?’ she said, hesitating at the door. ‘One other thing?’
I turned around and offered a polite smile. ‘Yes?’
‘You’ve been here longer than I have. Did there ever come a point when you actually liked this place?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, shrugging. ‘I just know one thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘Life’s what you make it.’
REDEMPTION ARK
PROLOGUE
The dead ship was a thing of obscene beauty.
Skade looped around it in a helical pseudo-orbit, her corvette’s thrusters drumming a rapid tattoo of corrective bursts. The starscape wheeled behind the ship, the system’s sun eclipsed and revealed with each loop of the helix. Skade’s attention had lingered on the sun for a moment too long. She felt an ominous tightening in her throat, the onset of motion sickness.
It was not what she needed.
Irritated, Skade visualised her own brain in glassy three-dimensional complexity. As if peeling a fruit, she stripped away layers of neocortex and cortex, flinging aside the parts of her own mind that did not immediately interest her. The silvery loom of her implant web, topologically identical with her native synaptic network, shimmered with neural traffic, packets of information racing from neuron to neuron at a kilometre per second, ten times faster than the crawl of biological nerve signals. She could not actually perceive those signals moving — that would have required an accelerated rate of consciousness, which would have required even faster neural traffic — but the abstraction nonetheless revealed which parts of her augmented brain were the most active.
Skade zoomed in on a specific locus of brain function called the Area Postrema, an ancient tangle of neural circuitry that handled conflicts between vision and balance. Her inner ear felt only the steady pressure of her shuttle’s acceleration, but her eyes saw a cyclically changing view as the background wheeled behind the ship. The ancient part of her brain could only reconcile that mismatch by assuming that Skade was hallucinating. It therefore sent a signal to another part of her brain that had evolved to protect the body from ingesting poisons.
Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for making her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with a wider diet than would otherwise have been possible. It just had no place here and now, on the chill, dangerous edge of another solar system. She supposed it would have made sense to erase such features by deftly rewiring the basic topology, but that was a lot easier said than done. The brain was holographic and messy, like a hopelessly overcomplicated computer program. Skade knew, therefore, that by ‘switching off’ the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry. But she could live with that; she had done something similar a thousand times before, and she had seldom experienced any cognitive side effects.
There. The culprit region pulsed pink and dropped off the network. The nausea vanished; she felt a great deal better.
What remained was anger at her own carelessness. When she had been a field operative, making frequent incursions into enemy territory, she would never have left it until now to make such a modest neural adjustment. She had become sloppy, and that was unforgivable. Especially now that the ship had returned: an event that might prove to be as significant to the Mother Nest as any of the war’s recent campaigns.
She felt sharper now. The old Skade was still there; she just needed to be dusted off and honed now and then.
[Skade, you will be careful, won’t you? It’s clear that something very peculiar has happened to this ship.]
The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined entirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally.
I know.
[Have you identified it? Do you know which of the two it is, or was?]
It’s Galiana’s.
Now that she had swept around it, a three-dimensional image of the ship formed in her visual cortex, bracketed in a loom of shifting eidetic annotation as more information was teased out of the hulk.
[Galiana’s? The Galiana’s? You’re sure of that?]
Yes. There were some small design differences between the three that left together, and in as much as this matches either of the two that haven’t come back yet, it matches hers.
The presence took a moment to respond, as it sometimes did. [That was our conclusion as well. But something has clearly happened to this ship since it left the Mother Nest, wouldn’t you say?]
A lot of somethings, if you ask me.
[Let’s begin at the front and work backwards. There is evidence of damage — considerable damage: lacerations and gouges, whole portions of the hull that appear to have been removed and discarded, like diseased tissue. Plague, do you think?]
Skade shook her head, remembering her recent trip to Chasm City. I’ve seen the effects of the Melding Plague up close. This doesn’t look like quite the same thing.
[We agree. This is something different. Nonetheless, full plague quarantine precautions should be enforced; we might still be dealing with an infectious agent. Focus your attention towards the rear, will you?]
The voice, which was never quite like any of the other voices she heard from other Conjoiners, took on a needling, tutorial quality, as if it already knew the answers to the questions it posed. [What do you make of the regular structures embedded in the hull, Skade?]