‘Did?’ I stopped and looked around me, trying to encompass the enormity of it. ‘Did she do this?’
‘No, I did.’ A shrugged correction. ‘They did, I asked them to.’
‘You called down the angelfire? You hotwired an orbital?’
A smile drifted across her face, but it seemed to catch on something painful as it passed. ‘Yeah. All that crabshit we used to talk, and I’m really the one that swings it. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?’
I pressed a hand hard against my face. ‘Sylvie, you’re going to have to slow down. What happened to Ishii’s jetcopter?’
‘Nothing. I mean, everything, exactly what you read about in school. The angelfire got it, just like they tell you when you’re a kid. Just like the story.’ She was talking more to herself than to me, still staring away into the mist the orbital strike had created when it vaporised Impaler and the four metres of water beneath. ‘It’s not the way we thought, Micky. The angelfire. It’s a blast beam, but it’s more than that. It’s a recording device too. A recording angel. It destroys everything it touches, but everything it touches has a modifying effect on the energy in the beam as well. Every single molecule, every single subatomic particle changes the beam’s energy state fractionally, and when it’s done, it carries a perfect image of whatever it’s destroyed. And it stores the images afterwards. Nothing’s ever lost.’
I coughed, laughter and disbelief. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re telling me Quellcrist Falconer has spent the last three hundred years inside a fucking Martian database?’
‘She was lost at first,’ she murmured. ‘She wandered for such a long time among the wings. She didn’t understand what had happened to her. She didn’t know she’d been transcribed. She had to be so fucking strong.’
I tried to imagine what that might be like, a virtual existence in a system built by alien minds, and couldn’t. It made my skin crawl.
‘So how did she get out?’
Sylvie looked at me with a curious gleam in her eyes. ‘The orbital sent her.’
‘Oh, please.’
‘No, it’s.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t pretend to understand the protocols, only what happened. It saw something in me, or in the combination of me and the command software, maybe. Some kind of analogy, something it thought it understood. I was the perfect template for this consciousness, apparently. I think the whole orbital net is an integrated system, and I think it’s been trying to do this for some time. All that modified mimint behaviour in New Hok. I think the system’s been trying to download the human personalities it has stored, all the people the orbitals have burnt out of the sky over the past four centuries, or whatever’s left of them. Up to now, it’s been cramming them into mimint minds. Poor Grigori Ishii – he was part of the scorpion gun we took down.’
‘Yeah, you said you knew it. When you were delirious in Drava.’
‘Not me. She knew it, she recognised something about him. I don’t think there was much left of Ishii’s personality.’ She shivered. ‘There’s certainly not much left of him down in the holding cells, it’s a shell at best by now, and it’s not sane. But something tripped her memories of him and she flooded the system trying to get out and deal with it. It’s why the engagement fell apart. I couldn’t cope, she came storming up out of the deep capacity like a fucking bomb blast.’
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to assimilate.
‘But why would the orbitals do that? Why start downloading?’
‘I told you, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know what to do with human personality forms. It can’t be what they were designed for. Maybe they put up with it for a century or so, and then started looking for a place to put the garbage. The mimints have had New Hok to themselves for the last three hundred years, that’s most of our whole history here. Maybe this has been going on all the time, there’s no reason we’d know about it before the Mecsek Initiative.’
I wondered distantly how many people had lost their lives to the angelfire over the four hundred years since Harlan’s World was settled. Accidental victims of pilot error, political prisoners cut loose on grav harnesses from Rila Crags and a dozen other such execution spots around the globe, the few odd deaths where the orbitals had acted out of character and destroyed outwith their normal parameters. I wondered how many dissolved into screaming insanity inside the Martian orbital databases, how many more went the same way as they were stuffed unceremoniously into mimint minds in New Hok. I wondered how many were left.
Pilot error?
‘Sylvie?’
‘What?’ She’d gone back to staring out over the Expanse.
‘Were you aware when we pulled you out of Rila? Did you know what was going on around you?’
‘Millsport? Not really. Some of it. Why?’
‘There was a firefight with a swoopcopter, and the orbitals got it. I thought at the time the pilot miscalculated his rate of rise or something, or the orbitals were twitchy from the fireworks. But you would have died if he’d kept strafing us. You think…?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not a reliable link.’ She gestured around her and laughed, a little unsteadily. ‘I can’t do this sort of thing at will, you know. Like I said, I had to ask nicely.’
Todor Murakami, vaporised. Tomaselli and Liebeck, Vlad/ Mallory and his whole crew, the entire armoured body of the Impaler and the hundreds of cubic metres of water she floated on, even – I looked at my wrists and saw a tiny burn on each – the bioweld cuffs from my and Virginia’s hands. All gone in the microsecond unleashing of a minutely controlled wrath from the sky.
I thought about the precision of understanding necessary for a machine to achieve all that from five hundred kilometres above the surface of the planet, the idea that there could be an afterlife and its guardians circling up there, and then I remembered the tidy little bedroom in the virtuality, the Renouncer tract peeling away at one corner from the back of the door. I looked at Sylvie again and I understood some of what must be happening inside her.
‘What does it feel like?’ I asked her gently. ‘Talking to them?’
She snorted. ‘What do you think? It feels like religion, like all my mother’s crabshit pontifications suddenly coming home to roost. It’s not talking, it’s like.’ She gestured. ‘Like sharing, like melting down the delineation that makes you who you are. I don’t know. Like sex, maybe, like good sex. But not the… Ah fuck it, I can’t describe it to you, Micky. I barely believe it happened at all. Yeah.’ She grinned sourly. ‘Union with the Godhead. Except people like my mother would have run screaming out of the upload centre rather than really face something like that. It’s a dark path, Micky, I opened the door and the software knew what to do next, it wanted to take me there, it’s what it’s for. But it’s dark and it’s cold, it leaves you. Naked. Stripped down. There are things like wings to cover you, but they’re cold, Micky. Cold and rough and they smell of cherries and mustard.’
‘But is it the orbital talking to you? Or do you think there are Martians in there, running it?’
Out of somewhere, she came up with another crooked grin. ‘That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Solving the great mystery of our time. Where are the Martians, where have they all gone?’
For a long moment, I let the image soak through me. Our bat-winged raptor predecessors hurling themselves into the sky by the thousand and waiting for the angelfire to flash down and transfigure them, burn them to ash and virtual rebirth above the clouds. Coming, maybe, from every other world in their hegemony in pilgrimage, gathering for their moment of irrevocable transcendence.