Stone Clock Read online

  Should.

  The ship had been right. He hadn’t changed his settings just before he sent the file. He’d changed them a minute earlier, when it had asked him how he slept.

  Sleeping was easy. Staying awake enough was sometimes harder, but he wasn’t expecting any trouble on that front for a while.

  In the Model, the accelerating Seven States fleet was forming into a Carrier Battle Group with the faster, lesser units nurturing the Death Rattle in the middle. It looked very late in the day to be doing that, but they were confident that the threat, if it could be called a threat, was at the other end. They knew there was nothing here to trouble them.

  Meanwhile, for their different reasons he and the ship were both watching for something. The ship, with its raptor-like ability to spot the most trivial movement, the stiffened hair on the back of the neck of prey that was so far away as to be all but invisible. He, with his vastly inferior senses – inferior even when enhanced a thousand-fold by the Model – and his dawn-of-time processing speed, but even so, with his human basic ability to put a hunch and a pattern together to make an intuition. It was a skill you could measure, and they had measured his. He scored in the top micro-centile. That was why he was here.

  Or, more accurately, it was why they thought he was here. Even the ship, apparently. He was surprised that it had been taken in.

  Always remember, before you get too pleased with yourself – the problem you have correctly diagnosed may not be the only problem. Someone had said that, but he couldn’t remember who.

  Something caught his attention, and now, in the face of all sensible evidence, his heart was pounding. The Death Rattle – their last, desperate throw – was beginning to move into position, which was what the ship had been referring to – but that wasn’t it.

  There. A pattern. Hundreds of thousands of tiny vessels – yachts, holiday cruisers, vulgar shag-palaces and modest family run-abouts, casually moseying about and taking pictures of The Fleet Leaving For The Great Victory (or whatever it would end up being called) to show the kids – had moved just a little bit so that to his human senses they didn’t look casual any more.

  That was it. Right on time.

  The ship didn’t seem to have noticed, but there was still time to tell it. It would expect him to tell it. That was what he was there for, as far as it and the rest of the home fleet were concerned.

  He didn’t, because it wasn’t why he was here at all.

  Then the vast cloud of insignificant little craft, with their insignificant little biological inhabitants, flared bright violet.

  He had been expecting it but the intensity still caught him out. He cried out and threw up an arm to cover his eyes – but as he did so the ship reacted, dimming the Model until the stars had vanished and all that was left was a fuzzy blue disc a thousand kilometres across, made of ships.

  The ship had time to say ‘What?’ and then a point of light fiercer than a supernova flared in the centre of the disc. It grew, elongated and became an intense beam that lanced from the centre of the circle.

  It struck the Death Rattle. The old ship disappeared, replaced by a hazy ovoid that flared and shimmered as the beam sank into it. He held his breath. How effective was that twenty-thousand-year-old shield?

  He didn’t have long to wait. The combined energies of those hundreds of thousands of fatally overloaded ship’s reactors were overwhelming; the ovoid flickered, and with each flicker the hull of the ship grew more visible. It was orange-hot, and getting hotter.

  Briefly the beam itself flickered and he caught his breath – was that it?

  Then he realized that one of the slaved Dreadnoughts had soared through an impossibly tight arc and placed itself directly between the beam and the Death Rattle.

  In the time it took him to let out the breath and take another, it flared through yellow to blue-white and became vapour.

  Another followed it. And a third.

  Let it stop …

  Then it did. With no warning the haze of the Death Rattle’s shields flicked out of sight and there was nothing but the hull of the ship itself, glowing the same violet as the sword of the beam.

  For a moment they matched each other. Then the beam guttered and vanished.

  The whole engagement had taken less than ten seconds.

  The Model brightened again, revealing the Death Rattle as a glowing hulk. Behind it, the disc of ships was fading to a dusty grey.

  The ship made a throat-clearing noise. ‘Well, I should imagine that was the first crowd-sourced death-ray in the history of humanity. Not that “humanity” sounds like a good phrase at the moment. And it does me no credit but I’ve worked something out. You knew, didn’t you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I thought so. How many people died on those ships?’ The disc of ship-corpses brightened momentarily in the Model.

  ‘About two hundred thousand.’

  ‘Do you care? No, don’t bother answering. I don’t want to hear your voice.’

  He shrugged. The ship would be monitoring him. It knew well enough how he felt, or at least it could see the physiological consequences.

  Therefore it must know he felt sick.

  He stared fiercely into the Model. The fleet was coming apart. Acid blue tell-tales had appeared above the image of each of the surviving hired Dreadnoughts, meaning they were back on the market. They must have severed their contracts, presumably on the basis that there was nothing meaningful left to contract with. A moment later the remaining indentured ship joined them, freed by the death of its owners. Meanwhile something different was happening to the hulk: it too had a tell-tale but it was red, not blue, and bracketed by two columns of quickly changing figures.

  He watched them for a moment. ‘Ship? Another problem. The orbit’s decaying.’

  ‘Oh, the shit-sack still speaks. I thought I told it not to bother.’

  ‘I’m serious. It’s heading for the planet.’

  ‘I’m serious too. Oh, so serious. I can see it. That happens to ships when you murder them. So?’

  He thumped the console; some more lights went out. ‘Stop fucking sulking and engage!’

  ‘What, or you’ll knock shit out of what’s left of me?’ The ship gave a stagey sigh. ‘For your information, I have been monitoring the situation and there is fuck all we can do about it.’

  ‘And the population of the planet?’

  ‘About three billion.’

  ‘Right. Is this you caring, or you not caring?’

  ‘Neither. It’s me being helpless. Plus, I’m still coming to terms with your astonishing duplicity. Is this you trying to make a legacy that doesn’t include complicity in hundreds of kilo-deaths?’

  ‘No!’ He breathed in, out, in again. ‘Look, I saw the Gaming. I assume you didn’t?’

  ‘Above my pay grade. Plus, I have other things to guide me. Like a conscience.’

  ‘You’re a battle craft. Spare me the lectures, okay? The Gaming said that was the low-impact option. There was no way of stopping the battle. There were going to be deaths.’

  ‘Oh good. Glad to hear it. Does that make you feel better?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Ship? How many AIs died just now, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think, I know. Just under a thousand. Why?’

  ‘And two hundred thousand humans. We’re both mourning.’

  There was a long silence. Then the ship spoke. ‘Right. We can shift the decay. Maps say there’s a more-or-less uninhabited area on some high ground. With some fancy steering we might be able to guide the impact. Zeb? I am still never going to forgive you.’

  ‘Fine.’ He wasn’t sure if he would forgive himself, now the numbers were settling in. ‘What do I need to do?’

  ‘Nothing just now. When the time comes, take responsibility. Because I can’t. Understand? This is going to have your name on it, not mine.’

  ‘I understand. I’ll be staying around.’

  ‘Will you? Good, because I am prob
ably going to melt what’s left of my engines pushing this heavy bugger in the right direction. If I end up crippling myself, and if that means dragging you down to the surface in a flaming ball, that will make it all worthwhile. I hope that’s clear.’

  ‘Very.’ He shook his head. ‘Just get on with it.’

  Then there was the howl of engines at the end of their life, and a jolt of appalling acceleration that seemed to bend his spine double.

  He dragged his impossibly heavy head round far enough to watch the display. There were two lines plotted. One, in blue, showed the do-nothing prediction, following a straight orbital decay towards a populous area – towards kilo-deaths, mega-deaths, giga-deaths. Deaths. The other line, in violet, showed the plan: a series of nudges producing a final resting place on a high plateau, about as far from population centres as could be achieved.

  At first his heart sank; the old warship was still following the blue line. Then, almost imperceptibly to begin with, its course shifted closer to the violet.

  He tried to shout with triumph, but even if he could have drawn a breath against the vast force closing down his ribs, the shattering noise of the dying engines would have drowned it – was drowning everything; he could barely think.

  Then, so suddenly it felt like a blow, the noise and the pressure were gone and there was – nothing. Not even artificial gravity. That was ominous. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Ship?’

  The answer seemed to take a long time.

  ‘Were you going to ask how I am?’

  ‘Yeah. So, how are you?’

  ‘Broken.’

  ‘Fixable?’

  ‘No way. Engines are down to two per cent. That’s just enough to keep the lights on and the shields up, as long as I don’t do anything else. With the best possible luck, if nothing interferes, and if I fly like a genius – I’m still dead. We’re going to join the hulk in its own personal geological feature.’

  He chewed his lip. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Of course you are. I can tell. You forgot to ask if it worked.’

  He stared. The ship was right; he had completely forgotten. He shook his head. ‘Did it?’

  ‘Yes. The hulk will impact the plateau in eight minutes. We’ll be with it a few seconds later. Is there anyone you should be making peace with, before you climb into what’s left of the escape pod and I squeeze you out into space like the piece of shit you are?’

  ‘Just you.’

  ‘Really? I’m not sure you have long enough to do that. Seven and a half minutes is pretty short. Seven and a half lifetimes would still be pretty short to be honest. The best you can do, and the least as well, is to come and visit what’s going to become my grave. You’d better promise to do that, understand?’

  The air was beginning to smell of something burning. He looked round, trying to locate anything that seemed to be smoking. Several things were. He moistened his lips. ‘I promise.’ Oh yes, he thought. I promise, and I wish you knew how much that promise meant.

  ‘Good.’

  The smell was getting worse. ‘Ship? You’re on fire.’

  ‘I know that, you idiot. Six minutes. Will you stay a while?’

  He stared at the screen. Their own trajectory was aimed inevitably at the planet. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Ship, I …’

  ‘I didn’t say talk.’

  He suppressed a grin. ‘No, you didn’t. Sorry.’

  They kept silent station together, while the surface of the planet grew and gained definition in the display. Then the ship made a throat-clearing noise. ‘So, three minutes. You can duck out now, if you want.’

  Suddenly he didn’t want to, not yet. ‘I’ll wait another minute. Bail out above the atmosphere.’ And watch you the rest of the way, he added to himself.

  ‘Okay. It’s your funeral. The pod’s on line; better get in.’

  An aperture above him flicked open. He nodded, took hold of his seat frame and boosted himself upwards and through it into the escape pod.

  ‘Ready?’ The ship’s voice sounded very close in the pod.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. Separation in ten. A half-minute burn should put you into orbit for a while.’ The aperture closed and there was a faint shush and a quick sensation of cold as the pod’s air system woke up. Then he heard a sharp crack of explosive bolts and the whistle of short-action engines, and he was jammed back into the contoured pod wall.

  A screen lit up. The ship was a shrinking dot, already glowing a sullen red. Obviously it had given up on the shields. Ahead of it, the hulk of the Death Rattle was a yellow smudge at the end of a trail of hot particles.

  He watched the dying ship follow the dead one. The course looked good; the hulk was heading for an unlit patch on the face of the planet. He wondered what it must look like to anyone who was watching down there, searing across their night sky like the end of everything.

  Then it hit.

  At first it seemed almost trivial, as if anything so big as to be observable from this distance could possibly be trivial – just a yellow-white flash, quickly fading. But then it brightened again, and spread like an incandescent cut across the surface of the planet. The ancient engines of a warship capable of destroying a moon were voiding their stored energies. Rocks would be melting, forest fires would be spreading … he wanted to look away, but he couldn’t, not yet. He had promised.

  The ship he had just abandoned was still hammering down through the atmosphere, a barely visible brighter streak against the angry ruin of the planet below it.

  Then the comms spoke, just once more.

  ‘Zeb? Honour me, you piece of shit.’

  And before he could say anything, the tiny streak obliterated itself in an even tinier spark against the molten fury still spreading across the screen.

  He watched the display, forcing himself to keep his eyes fixed on it even as it brightened to a glaring yellow. He wanted it seared into his retinas.

  I’ll come back, he told the inferno. More than you could possibly know, I’ll come back and honour you.

  A warning buzzed hoarsely. He sighed. Much earlier than he would have liked, the pod orbit was beginning to decay. He closed his eyes, focused his attention on a distant part of his mind and did the thing that bailed him out of the vreality.

  But yes, he would come back.

  Experiment, Ice Blade Sector, Bubble

  THE PARAPET WAS thick with overnight dust, coloured a ghostly reddish-grey by the dawn light of the Second.

  The dust fell all the time these days. Mostly it was the same neutral colour and the same fine rock-flour texture. Very occasionally a layer of a different colour would land overnight, and the worn stones would gain a brief mask of red, or blue; on one memorable morning, a rich violet. Skarbo had never worked out what had produced that. But the next day the dust had been back to normal.

  He always thought it was a poor memorial. The slow death of a planet should somehow have been more dramatic.

  A transient one, too. By the time the dawns were over, one of the Janitors would probably have cleared the dust – always assuming it hadn’t undergone a religious conversion, or decided (in one particularly colourful piece of machine psychosis) that it was an antique atmosphere-flyer. That one had been messy. The blunt casing of a Janitor was badly suited for flight, even if it was flight straight down. Out of respect for the departed machine, Skarbo had refrained from dropping his usual offering over the Edge that day.

  But today no machines had gone mad, thus far, and those that were already mad seemed no madder than usual, so he limped to the Edge, hefted the piece of basement junk, and got ready to send it out and down to join the heap of similar detritus kilometres below.

  He couldn’t remember how he had come to start his little ritual. It had been five lives ago, he was sure of that, and he was equally sure that he must have decided not to remember. Sometimes his former selves really annoyed him.

  Swing; heave. There –
down it went. He watched it disappear into the depths of the canyon. It took a long time; the view was unusually clear today. Not much dust and even less mist. He strained his optic muscles and managed to track the tumbling dot as far down as the Mantle horizon. Almost four kilometres. He was unlikely to see further than that until the next Core Event, and that wasn’t due for another hundred and eleven days.

  By which time he would have been dead – finally, permanently dead, not the other sort – for over twenty days.

  He had watched all night. Increasingly he did that. Rest evaded him, and besides his body seemed to need less of it. Less of everything. His appetite was diminishing. His carapace seemed loose. It made little creaking and rustling noises when he moved.

  At least his eyes still worked, even if everything else was falling apart. He had nothing to complain about – he had chosen this form seven and a half lifetimes ago, and he had always known that the choice had an end-point.

  At the end of his first life – iteration was the correct term, but he had always disliked the formality – he had chosen to bury his basic mammal inheritance beneath an insectoid form. Against the advice of his family, his friends and more than one counsellor, but he had never regretted it.

  The form was practical. Eight three-jointed limbs that could be used for walking, but tipped with complicatedly articulated claws that could perform all the functions of a hand, rather more subtly than most. A slim, flattish carapace over an elongated hourglass body; mouth-parts which, unless he really tried, were usually concealed, with enough external equipment to allow human-compatible expressions. Standing upright – which was most of the time – he was a bit shorter than human average. The wings didn’t work any more, but then he had never really liked flying, and the tough carapace, compound eyes and radiation-proof genes were still as useful as ever. His one concession had been to keep the best of both dietary worlds. He could eat – had eaten, indeed – just about anything, living or dead.

  Now that he thought about it, there was a lot of customization in there. He supposed he remembered doing it, but it had been a long time ago and he had forgotten so much. Built to last, that was certain.