Newton's Wake Page 2

  ‘Anybody else get short-circuits from that electromagnetic blast?’ Carlyle asked.

  They all had.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Any idea what it was?’

  ‘It was a signal,’ said Shlaim, breaking in to her mike. ‘And no, I have not analysed it.’

  ‘Just so long as you haven’t recorded it,’ snarled Carlyle. She hated being upstaged by her familiar.

  Something banged in the sky. They all looked up, and saw black fragments flying apart and falling down from a couple of thousand metres overhead. Then a screaming noise started, and glancing a way off they all saw a larger black object separate into six parts, which peeled away from each other, banked around, and began a controlled and rapid descent towards them.

  ‘Modular aircars in disposable hypersonic shell,’ said Shlaim.

  ‘Locals!’ yelled Carlyle. ‘Don’t shoot first!’

  The team and the robot walkers formed an outward-facing ring, bristling with weapons.

  Four of the aircars began a loitering patrol that circled from above the artifact to directly overhead. The other two came down a hundred metres before and behind the team, edging forward on racketting downdraft fans. They were smooth-shelled, streamlined two-seaters, like no aircar model Carlyle had seen before. They worked, she guessed, by aerodynamics. From the one in front a black-suited occupant vaulted out, leaving a pilot in the front seat, and stalked forward, rifle in hand but slanted down. The other hand came up.

  ‘Who’s in charge here?’ a male voice boomed.

  A default American speaker. AO, then, most likely.

  Carlyle stepped forward. ‘I am.’

  The man stopped and raised his visor, revealing a handsome oliveskinned countenance.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here? Don’t you know the law?’

  Carlyle cleared her faceplate to two-way transparency. The man’s face showed an odd flicker, as though something had startled him but he was reluctant to reveal his surprise.

  ‘We know you people don’t have anything to do with that stuff,’ Carlyle said, with a jerk of her thumb over the shoulder. ‘But it’s all right, we can handle it.’

  ‘The hell you can! Who do you think you are?’

  ‘We’re the Carlyles.’

  He stared at her. ‘The what?’

  ‘Oh, don’t kid on,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows who we are. And we know who you are. You’re AO, right?’

  ‘AO?’ He said it as if he’d genuinely never heard it before.

  ‘America Offline,’ Carlyle grated. He stared uncomprehendingly. Carlyle relaxed and found herself grinning. This was a joke. She pointed upward and waved her finger about. ‘You farmers, come from sky, yes?’

  The man didn’t find this funny.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Enough. You’ve—’

  He cocked his head, listening to something. His face paled, then reddened. He jabbed a finger at her.

  ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ His voice shook. ‘You’ve wakened war machines! You fucking stupid, stupid—’ He stopped himself. ‘Drop your weapons,’ he said flatly. ‘We’ve got you covered. We’re taking you in.’

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ Carlyle said, with willed calm. ‘We know about the, uh, war machines. Just let us go and we’ll come back in an hour and crunch them up.’

  ‘Oh yeah? With what?’

  ‘A search engine.’

  The man sneered, flicked down his visor and raised his rifle. From the corner of her eye Carlyle saw two of the circling aircars swoop.

  ‘In your own time, Macaulay,’ she said, and dived. The robot walkers had finished firing before she hit the ground. She rolled, glimpsing four smoke-trails, two flashes, feeling the crunch of the crashes through her bones, and then she was up and had the Webster jammed in the man’s groin. Another crash. Heather was burning off in the distance. Carlyle dragged the muzzle up to the man’s belly, flipped up his visor with her free hand and leered in his face.

  ‘Get yer hands up.’

  He cast away his rifle and raised his hands.

  ‘Now tell yer team to lay off.’

  ‘Disengage,’ he said.

  The two nearby aircars were still intact, hovering uncertainly, covered by the team and the robots.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you’ll be so kind as to gie us a lift to the gate.’

  ‘The what?’

  She was getting a bit sick of this. Guy must be a complete yokel or something. She stepped back and pointed.

  ‘That fucking cromlech thingie up yonder.’

  He half turned, looking over his shoulder. ‘The henge?’

  ‘That’s the one. Now move.’

  She escorted him at gunpoint to the nearest aircar, motioned him to get in the passenger seat as she straddled the flange behind it. Orr, Stevenson, and a couple of others ran forward and lay across the stubby wings, clinging to their leading edges. Glancing back, Carlyle saw Macaulay supervise a similar deployment on the other vehicle.

  ‘Now forward easy,’ she said. ‘Remember, if you try to shake us off or anything, the robots have still got you in their sights.’

  The aircars flew forward, engines labouring, a few metres above the rough ground, increasing in speed as the pilots gained confidence that their unwelcome passengers weren’t about to fall off.

  The man found a shared frequency and hailed her above the noise. ‘What about the injured?’

  ‘Your problem,’ she said. ‘You sort them out when we’re gone.’ A thought struck her. Anyone who’d survived the aircar downings might be beyond repair, and in pain. She curved her arm and waved a hand in front of his face, mimed cocking and firing with two fingers and a thumb. ‘We could ask the robots to take care of them now, if you like.’

  His head jolted back. ‘No thank you.’ He muttered something else under his breath. So much for being nice.

  The henge loomed. Carlyle waved the other aircar to overtake, then yelled for a halt. She called her team off, one by one, and one by one they slithered from the craft and ran for the gate, until only she and Macaulay, astride the rear of each aircar, were left.

  ‘Go, Macaulay!’

  The gunner vaulted down and sprinted to the henge, vanishing in the space between the tall vertical boulders. Carlyle pressed the Webster muzzle at the nape of the neck of the man in front of her, just under his helmet. She suddenly realised that she hadn’t asked Macaulay to pass control of the robots to her. She hoped the other side hadn’t made the connection.

  ‘No funny business,’ she said. She put a hand on the smooth ridge between her knees, slid one leg upward. Without warning the craft bucked wildly, hurling her off. The suit moved her head, arms, and legs to an optimal position before she could so much as gasp. She landed on the backs of her shoulders and tumbled, coming to a jarring halt against a low rock. The Webster flew from her hand. She scrabbled for it. A pair of feet thumped on to her forearm. She invoked the suit’s servos and flexed her elbow. The feet slipped off. Before she could jump up the aircar had already come down, slowly and precisely in a storm of downdraft, its skids pressing across her ankles and chest.

  The engines stopped. She heaved at the skids, but it was too heavy; punched up at the shell, but it was impervious, stronger even than the suit. There were two people with guns at the stone pillars. The leader stood looking down at her.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m not surrendering, right, but I’ll stop fighting and I won’t try to get away.’

  The man raised his visor and bared his teeth, then sauntered off. She watched as he sent one of his comrades around the other side of the gate. He picked up a stone and tossed it between the uprights. It disappeared. Then the other man threw a stone from his side. The stone landed at the first man’s feet. He threw it back, and it disappeared. They repeated this experiment several times.

  The leader levelled his gun at the gate.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Carlyle yelled.

  The man stalked back over. ‘
Why not?’

  ‘Somebody might get hurt,’ said Carlyle.

  ‘That,’ said the man, ‘is what I had in mind.’

  ‘Then expect return fire.’

  The man stared down at her. ‘You mean what you say about not fighting or fleeing?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Carlyle.

  ‘I’ll have to ask you to take that suit off.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ She checked the internal readouts. ‘Looks like I’ve got the immunities,’ she said. ‘OK.’

  She unlocked the helmet, pulled it off and shoved it aside. For a moment she lay gasping in the cold air, then she did the same with the shoulder pieces. She squirmed out of the hole thus left at the top of the suit, moving by shifting her shoulders and buttocks awkwardly until her arms were clear of the sleeves, then hauling and pushing herself out. The headless suit remained trapped under the aircar, still bearing its weight. She rolled away from under the craft and stood up in her thin-soled internal boots and close-fitting one-piece, feeling exposed and vulnerable but determined not to show it. With the light utility belt still around her waist, she didn’t feel entirely disarmed. The man again gave her that strange look, as if he was surprised but too polite to show it more explicitly.

  There was a bang overhead as another hypersonic shell disintegrated. Two of the six aircars that descended were white, marked with what looked like one part of the DK logo. Carlyle pointed.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Black Sickle,’ the man said. ‘Battlefield resurrection techs.’

  The Black Sickle. Oh my God. She had a momentary flash of her earliest bogeyman. If yir no a good girl, the ladies fae the Black Sickle’ll come an get ye! Carlyle felt her jaw tremble. She controlled it with an effort.

  ‘You don’t take backups?’

  This time he gave her a very odd look. The aircars settled near the distant device. Figures got out and started rushing around.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Matters seem to be in hand.’ He waved towards the gate. ‘What’s going on there?’

  ‘It’s the gate to a Visser-Kar wormhole,’ she said.

  ‘So I had gathered,’ he said. ‘Why does it only work from this side of the henge? Or is it like a Moebius strip, with only one side?’

  Carlyle felt somewhat nonplussed. The man wasn’t as ignorant as she’d thought.

  ‘It has two sides, and it works from both sides,’ she said. ‘Except, when you throw the stone in from that side, it would come out before you had thrown it, or at least before it went in. Causality violation, see? So it doesn’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t what?’

  ‘Go through the wormhole.’

  ‘How does it know?’

  She smiled. ‘That’s a good question.’

  The man scowled.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  She stuck out a hand. She refused to consider herself a prisoner. ‘Lucinda Carlyle.’

  He returned the gesture. ‘Jacques Armand.’ He said it as though expecting her to recognise it. ‘Also known as “General Jacques.’ ” He pronounced it ‘Jakes’ this time, and with even more expectation of recognition.

  ‘Not a flicker,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘All right, I’ll accept that something strange is going on.’ He lowered his visor, presumably checking something on his head-up for a few seconds, then raised it. ‘As it seems I must. No one recognises you. And the satellite pictures show your arrival. You are not from here.’

  ‘You find this surprising?’

  ‘You could say that.’ His tone was as guarded as his words.

  ‘Where is here, anyway?’

  ‘We call the planet Eurydice. The star—we don’t have a name for it. We know it is in the Sagittarius Arm.’

  ‘No shit!’ Carlyle grinned with unfeigned delight. ‘We didn’t know the skein stretched this far.’

  ‘Skein?’

  She waved her hands. ‘That wormhole, it’s linked to lots of others in a sort of messy tangle.’

  He stared at her, his teeth playing on his lower lip.

  ‘And you and your … colleagues came here through the wormhole?’

  ‘Of course.’ She wrapped her arms around herself while the thermal elements in the undersuit warmed up. ‘You didn’t know this was a gate?’

  Armand shook his head. ‘We’ve always kept clear of the alien structure, for reasons which should be obvious, but apparently are not.’ He pointed a finger; the sweep of his hand indicated the horizon, and the hilltop henges. ‘We took the circle of megaliths to be a boundary indicator, left by the indigenes. Today is the first time in a century that anyone has set foot within it. We keep it under continuous surveillance, of course, which is why your intrusion was detected. That and the signal burst. It went off like a goddamn nuclear EMP, but that’s the least of the damage.’ He glared at her. ‘Something for which you will pay, whoever you are. What did you say you were?’

  ‘The Carlyles,’ she reiterated, proudly and firmly.

  ‘And who’re they, when they’re at home?’

  She was unfamiliar with the idiom. ‘We’re at home everywhere,’ she said. ‘People have a name for the wormhole skein. They call it Carlyle’s Drift.’

  F

  urther conversation was interrupted by more bangs overhead and the rapid deployment of a variety of impressive ordnance around the gate, and yet more around the artifact. Carlyle watched in silence. She wasn’t at all sure at all how to take Armand’s claimed ignorance of her origins, and of the existence of the gate. His references to the artifact as alien, and to indigenes, were likewise perplexing. Aware that her own ignorance of the situation was almost as great, and that anything she said might be disadvantageous, she said nothing. Whoever they were, this lot weren’t from any culture she’d ever heard of.

  Within minutes a robot probe emerged from the gate. It stepped out on the grass and scanned the surroundings rapidly. It was instantly lunged at by the two people guarding the gate, whereupon it scuttled back through.

  ‘That was a mistake,’ said Carlyle. ‘Next time, expect something tougher.’

  Armand grunted. ‘We can cover it.’ He was directing the deployment, waving to someone to lift the aircar that had landed on the suit. He barely spared her a glance.

  ‘Look,’ said Carlyle, ‘I don’t know who you people are, and it looks like you don’t know who we are, so can we just sort that out and then let me go back through and calm things down?’

  ‘Don’t let her do that!’ said a loud voice from the suit’s speaker. The empty suit was getting to its feet, holding the helmet and collar under one arm like a stage ghost. Everybody in the vicinity turned on it, staring.

  ‘Shut up, Shlaim,’ said Carlyle. How the hell had the familiar managed to hijack the suit’s motor controls? That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  ‘What is this?’ demanded Armand.

  ‘My familiar,’ said Carlyle. ‘It’s acting up, sorry.’ She gestured Armand to keep out of the way and walked up to the suit, touching the private-circuit mike at her throat as she did so. ‘Don’t you say a fucking word,’ she subvocalised, ‘or you’ll fucking regret it.’ She reached for the emergency zapper on her belt to back up this threat, and was still fumbling with the catch of the pouch when the suit, to her utter astonishment, swept her aside with a glancing but acutely painful blow to the elbow and stalked over to Armand. He and the nearby personnel had the thing covered, and looked quite ready to blast it. It raised its arms, letting the accoutrements drop, and held its hands above where its head would have been.

  ‘Professor Isaac Shlaim, Tel Aviv University, Department of Computer Science, deceased. I wish to surrender to you as a representative of a civilised power. Let me do that, and I promise, I’ll tell you all you want to know about the bloody Carlyles.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Black Sickle Blues

  Carlyle glared at the treacherous machine, but before she could warn her captors not to listen to it, the bulbous, armoured prow of a search en
gine lurched through the gate. She ran towards it, waving her arms, as everyone else—including her runaway suit—fell back to behind the field pieces a few tens of metres downslope from the henge. The great grinding tracks of the search engine crunched over the scree as its flanks barely cleared the dolmen’s uprights, then it tipped forward and began to move slowly down the hillside. Its elongated half-ovoid of shell gleamed like a beetle’s back. Carlyle heard the spang of bullets ricocheting from it and threw herself flat. She wished desperately that she still had her suit. As it was she just clamped her hands over the back of her head and hoped the Eurydiceans recognised an impervious carapace when they saw one.

  Perhaps they did. The rattle of rifle fire and the whizz of bullets ceased. Carlyle peered up just in time to see a white-hot line form in the air between one of the field pieces and the search engine. Not laser, not plasma—she had only a second to wonder at it, and then the line extended from the stern of the vehicle to the top of the gate. The supposedly impenetrable search engine had been cored right through. The line persisted, buzzing in the air. The transverse stone of the dolmen suddenly disintegrated, and there was a bright flash from the gate, with a Cherenkov-blue flare that Carlyle recognised as an energy condition collapse. A moment later the search engine crumpled inward like an air-evacuated tin can and burned to white ash. Against the Eurydicean weapon it might as well have been made of magnesium.

  Carlyle lay there blinking away tears and afterimages, shaken by dry heaves. Three people in white suits ran to the wreck and began poking through it, then walked away. No doubt everyone in it had been backed up, and whatever had happened was quick, but it was still shocking. Even without finality, death was death. Some of the people she’d been with less than an hour earlier were dead: people on her team, dead on her watch, therefore her responsibility—that was how it would be seen back home, and she couldn’t help seeing it that way herself. What was more shocking yet, as the implications sank in, was that the gate had been closed. It might not reopen for weeks. Until then she was stranded on Eurydice. The firm would rescue her eventually, she was sure of that, and in the meantime she could try and find some way to fittle out, but the fact that she’d never heard of a colony in the Sagittarius Arm, and the colony had never heard of the Carlyles, made that unlikely. The place must be really isolated.