Hideaway

PART TWO

'There are definitely tunnels here,' Sayaca said, years later.

Their cutter was parked on an airless plain near Cinder's equator, squatting down on skids like a beached black fish. Bright Boy was almost overhead; a disc of fierce radiance casting razor-edged shadows like pools of ink. Merlin moved over to Sayaca's side of the cabin to see the data she was projecting before her, sketched in ruddy contours. Smelling her, he wanted to bury his face in her hair and turn her face to his before kissing her, but the moment was not right for that. It had not been right for some time.

'Caves, you mean?' Merlin said.

'No, tunnels.' She almost managed to hide her irritation. 'Like I always said they were. Deliberately excavated. Now do you believe me?'

There had been hints of them before, from orbit, during the first months after their arrival around the star. Starling had sent expeditionary teams out to a dozen promising niches in the system, tasking them to assess the benefits of each before a final decision was made. Most of the effort was focused around Cinder and Ghost - they had even put space stations into orbit around the gas giant - but there were teams exploring smaller bodies, even comets and asteroids. Nothing would be dismissed without at least a preliminary study. There were even teams working on fringe ideas like hiding inside the sun's chromosphere.

And for all that, Merlin thought, they still won't allow me near the other syrinx.

But at least Cinder was a kind of distraction. Mapping satellites had been dropped into orbits around all the major bodies in the system, measuring the gravitational fields of each body. The data, unravelled into a density-map, hinted at a puzzling structure within Cinder - a deep network of tunnels riddling the lithosphere. Now they had even better maps, constructed from seismic data. One or two small asteroids hit Cinder every month. With no atmosphere to slow them down, they slammed into the surface at many kilometres per second. The sound waves from those impacts would radiate through the underlying rock, bent into complex wave fronts as they traversed density zones. They would eventually reach the surface again, thousands of kilometres away, but the precise pattern of arrival times - picked up across a network of listening devices studding the surface - would depend on the route that the sound waves had taken.

Now Merlin could see that the tunnels were definitely artificial.

'Who do you think dug them?'

'From here, there's no way we'll ever know.' Sayaca frowned, puzzling over something in her data, and then seemed to drop the annoyance, at least for now, rather than have it spoil her moment of triumph. 'Whoever it was, they tidied up after themselves. We'll have to go down - get into them.'

'Perhaps we'll find somewhere to hide.'

'Or find someone else already hiding.' Sayaca looked into his face, her expression one of complete seriousness.

'Maybe they'll let us hide with them.'

She turned back to her work. 'Or maybe they'd rather we left them alone.'

Several months later, Merlin buckled on an immersion suit, feeling the slight prickling sensation around the nape of his neck as the suit hijacked his spinal nerves. Vision and balance flickered - there was a perceptual jolt he never quite got used to - and then suddenly he was back in the simulated realm of the Palace. He had to admit it was good; much better than the last time he had sampled Gallinule's toy environment.

'You've been busy,' he said.

Gallinule's image smiled. 'It'll do for now. Just wait till you've seen the sunset wing.'

Gallinule led him through the maze of high-ceilinged, baroquely walled corridors that led from the oubliette to the other side of the Palace. They ascended and descended spiral staircases and crossed vertiginous inner chambers spanned by elegantly arched stonework bridges, delicate subtleties of masonry highlighted in sunset fire. The real Palace of Eternal Dusk had been ruined along with every other sign of civilisation when the Huskers had torched Plenitude. This simulation was running in the main encampment inside Cinder, but Gallinule had spread copies of it around the system, wherever he might need a convenient venue for discussion.

'See anything that looks out of place?' Gallinule said.

Merlin looked around, but there was nothing that did not accord with his own memories. Hardly surprising. Of the two of them, Gallinule had always been the one with the eye for detail.

'It's pretty damned good. But why? And how?'

'As a test-bed. Aboard Starthroat, we never needed good simulation techniques. But our lives depend upon making the right choices around Bright Boy. That means we have to be able to simulate any hypothetical situation and experience it as if it were totally real.'

Merlin agreed. The discovery that the tunnels in Cinder were artificial had enormously complicated the hideaway project. They had been excavated by a hypothetical human splinter group, which Sayaca had dubbed the Diggers. No one knew much about them. Certainly they had been more advanced than any part of the Cohort, but while their machines - lining the tunnels like a thick arterial plaque - seemed unfathomably strange, they were not quite strange enough to suggest that they had been installed by the Waymakers. And they were quite clearly human: markings were in a language that the linguists said had ancient links to Main. The Diggers were simply one of the thousands of cultures that had ascended to heights of technical prowess without making any recognisable dent on human history.

'. . . Anyway, who knows what nasty traps the Diggers left us?' Gallinule was saying. 'With simulations, we'll at least be able to prepare for the more obvious surprises.' His youthful image shrugged. 'So I initiated a crash programme to resurrect the old techniques. At the moment we have to wear suits to achieve this level of immersion, but in a year or so we'll be able to step into simulated environments as easily as walking from one room to another.'

They had reached a balcony on the sunset side of the Palace of Eternal Dusk. He leaned over the balustrade as far as he dared, seeing how the lower levels of the Palace dropped away towards the rushing sea below. The Palace of Eternal Dusk circled Plenitude's equator once a day, travelling with the line that divided day from night. Its motion caused Plenitude's sun to hang at the same point in the sky, two-thirds of its swollen disk already consumed by the sea. Somewhere deep in the keel of rock the Palace rode lay throbbing mechanisms that both sustained the structure's flight - it had been flying for longer than anyone remembered - and generated the protective bubble that held it in a pocket of still air, despite its supersonic velocity relative to the ground.

Merlin's family had held the Palace for thirteen hundred years, after a short Dark Age on Plenitude. The family had been amongst the first to rediscover powered flight, using fragile aircraft to reach the keel. Other contenders had come, but the family had retained their treasure across forty generations, through another two Dark Ages.

Finally, however, the greater war had touched them.

A damaged Cohort swallowship had been the first to arrive, years ahead of a Husker swarm. The reality of interstellar travel was dimly remembered on Plenitude, but those first newcomers were still treated with suspicion and paranoia. Only Merlin's family had given them the benefit of the doubt . . . and even then had not fully heeded the warning when it was given. Against their ruling mother's wishes, the two brothers had allowed themselves to be taken aboard the swallowship and inducted into the ways of the Cohort. Their old names were discarded in favour of new ones, in the custom of the swallowship's crew. They learned fluency in Main.

After several months, Merlin and Gallinule had been preparing to return home as envoys. Their plan was simple enough. They would persuade their mother that Plenitude was doomed. That would not be the easiest of tasks, but their mother's cooperation was vital if anything was to be saved. It would mean establishing peace amongst the planet's various factions, where none had existed for generations. There were spaces in the swallowship's frostwatch holds for sleepers, but only a few hundred thousand, which would mean that each region must select its best. It would not be easy, but there were still years in which to do it.

'None of it will make any difference,' their mother had said. 'No one will listen to us, even if we believe everything Quail says.'

'They have to.'

'Don't you understand?' she said. 'You think of me as your mother, but to fifty million of Plenitude's inhabitants I'm a tyrant.'

'They'll understand,' Merlin said, only half-believing it himself.

But then the unthinkable had happened. A smaller element of the swarm had crept up much closer than anyone had feared, detected only when it was already within Plenitude's system. The swallowship's captain made the only decision he could, which was to break orbit immediately and run for interstellar space.

Merlin and Gallinule fought - pleaded - but Quail would not allow them to leave the ship. They told him all they wanted was to return home. If that meant dying with everyone else on Plenitude, including their mother, so be it.

Quail listened, and sympathised, and still refused them. It was not just their genes that the Cohort required, he said. Everything else about them: their stories. Their hopes and fears. The tiniest piece of knowledge they carried, considered trivial by them, might prove to be shatteringly valuable. It was many decades of shiptime since they had found another pocket of humanity. Merlin and Gallinule were simply too precious to throw away.

Even if it meant denying them the right to die with valour.

Instead, on Starthroat's long-range cameras, relayed from monitoring satellites sown around Plenitude, they watched the Palace of Eternal Dusk die, wounded by weapons it had never known before, stabbing deep into the keel on which it flew, destroying the engines that held it aloft. It came down slowly, grinding into the planetary crust, gouging a terrible scar across half of one scorched continent before it came to rest, ruined and lopsided.

And now Gallinule had made this.

'If you can do all this now . . .' Merlin mused. He left the remark hanging, knowing his brother would take the bait.

'As I said, full immersion in a year or so. Then we'll need better methods to deal with the time-lag for communications around Bright Boy. We can't even broadcast signals for fear of them being intercepted by the Huskers, which limits us to line-of-sight comms between relay nodes sprinkled around the system. Sometimes the routing will add significant delays. That's why we need another kind of simulation. If we can create semblances--'

Merlin stopped him. 'Semblances?'

'Sorry. Old term I dug from the troves. Another technique we've forgotten aboard Starthroat. We need to be able to make convincing simulacra of ourselves, with realistic responses across a range of likely stimuli. Then we can be in two places at once - or as many as we want to be. Afterwards, you merge the memories gathered by your semblances.'

Merlin thought about that. Many cultures known to the Cohort had developed the kind of technology Gallinule was referring to, so the concept was not unfamiliar to him.

'These wouldn't be conscious entities, though?'

'No; that's far down the line. Semblances would just be mimetic software: clever caricatures. Of course, they'd seem real if they were working well. Later--'

'You'd think of adding consciousness?'

Gallinule looked around warily. It was a reflex, of course - there could not possibly have been eavesdroppers in this environment he had fashioned - but it was telling all the same. 'It would be useful. If we could copy ourselves entirely into simulation - not just mimesis, but neuron-by-neuron mapping - it would make hiding from the Huskers very much easier.'

'Become disembodied programmes, you mean? Sorry, but that's a definite case of the cure being worse than the disease.'

'Eventually it won't seem anywhere near as chilling as it does now. Especially when our other options for hiding look less and less viable.'

Merlin nodded sagely. 'And you'd no doubt do all in your power to make them seem that way, wouldn't you?'

Gallinule shrugged. 'If Cinder's tunnels turn out to be the best place to hide, so be it. But it's senseless not to explore other options.' Merlin watched the way his knuckles tightened on the stone balustrade, betraying the tension he tried to keep from his voice.

'If you make an issue of this,' Merlin said carefully, 'you'd better assume I'll fight you, brother or not.'

Gallinule touched Merlin's shoulder. 'It won't come to a confrontation. By the time the options are in, the correct path will be clear to us all . . . you included.'

'The correct path's already clear to me. And it doesn't involve becoming patterns inside a machine.'

'You'd prefer suicide instead?'

'Of course not. I'm talking about something infinitely better than hiding.' He looked hard into his brother's face. 'You have more influence on the Council than I do. You could persuade them to let me examine the syrinx.'

'Why not ask Sayaca the same thing?'

'You know very well why not. Things aren't the same between us these days. If you . . . oh, what's the point?' Merlin removed Gallinule's hand from his shoulder. 'Nothing that happens here will make the slightest difference to your plans.'

'Spare me the self-righteousness, Merlin. It's not as though you're any different.' Then he sighed, looking out to sea. 'I'll demonstrate my commitment to the cause, if that's what you want. You know that Pauraque's still exploring the possibility of establishing a camouflaged base inside Ghost's atmosphere?'

'Of course.'

'What you probably don't know is that our automated drones don't work well at those depths. So we're going in with an exploration team next month. It'll be dangerous, but we have the Council's say-so. We know there's something down there, something we don't understand. We have to find out what it is.'

Merlin had heard nothing about anything unexpected inside Ghost, but he feigned knowledge all the same.

'Why are you telling me this?'

'Because I'm accompanying Pauraque. We've equipped a two-person cutter for the expedition, armoured to take thousands of atmospheres of pressure.' Gallinule paused and clicked his fingers out to sea, making the blueprints of the ship loom large in the sky, sharp against the dark-blue zenith. The blueprint rotated dizzyingly. 'It's nothing too technical. Another ship could be adapted before we go down there. I'd be happy to disclose the mods.'

Merlin studied the schematic, committing the salient points to memory.

'This is a goad, isn't it?'

'Call it what you will. I'm just saying that my commitment to the greater cause shouldn't be in any doubt.' Another finger click and the phantom ship vanished from the sky. 'Where yours fits in is another thing entirely.'