The lighthouse of kuiper, p.13
The Lighthouse of Kuiper, page 13
“I can’t take you in,” she told tDaer as they reached that wall.
The Iapetan ran a blue hand back through hen’s short, downy hair. “I’ll be here.”
“I’ll be quick,” Tharsis promised, and slid her hand into the reader.
The embassy was empty, unmanned since the Seventh—and last and worst—Propagation. Locked against anybody without Arran DNA and still claimed as sovereign territory, such Department of State sites served as both a refuge and evacuation point in case of a crisis. Traditionally, there were weapons caches, reinforced cellar safe rooms, explosives, gas, independent environmental systems, everything an ex-pat community might need to stay safe until military relief could arrive. Since the Seventh Propagation, most had dive cores.
Some had umbran.
Laughter echoed down the grand entry as she pushed the doors proper open, out from what looked to be a side hallway a few meters down. The sounds of ghosts. Once people, past-moments, never to be erased, a memorial to the civilian war dead.
The place had been Tok-bombed multiple times in peacetime, gassed, even taken for a fortnight during the Fifth Propagation. The Seventh Propagation had seen the Embassy’s entire population of 163 men, women, dogs, children, puppies, pulled from their safe rooms. Their mutilated bodies had been paraded through the streets like rotten balloons.
The Rallarhu had sky-hooked every Ibbie at the scene, but even that failed to appease Arran national anger; last rites couldn’t be said over any of the murdered. Nobody had been able to retrieve the bodies for burial, and with the Tenancy bans on religious expression outwell of Mars, no ceremonies could be performed.
Tharsis had never before really considered what that might have meant.
She shivered and hurried on.
The reading room was a round space on the top floor, and Tharsis found her way to it readily enough. Its purpose in the Embassy was simple: providing access, via the dive core in the basement, to restricted library collections hosted on Deimos.
Per the Accords, the Tenancy carried the responsibility of censoring cultural material. Graphic-interface silic networks, virtual-reality tech, recreational hallucinogens, had all been banned Heliosphere-wide, in an attempt to curb the worst excesses of the Euphemism. Beyond that, Landlords had the authority to expand restrictions within their own inwells and for their own citizens.
Mars, under the Rossen, had the fewest such laws. The only work that was outright banned from outwell distribution was The Book of Shoals, the ADSF’s compilation of the entirety of the Arcna’s ravings. The books banned by every other Landlord could have filled a room far larger than the one in which Tharsis now stood. Nothing had escaped; thousands of works of history, religion, scientific discoveries, philosophy, even fiction, could only be found on Mars.
Providing any of them to a voider—whether it was the younger New Standard Tri-Testament, or the classics, like The Republic or Beowulf or the Silicone Age’s Fairy Tales of Middlearth, never mention Shoals—carried an automatic death sentence. Not because Mars wanted it that way, but those were the terms in the Tenancy Accords.
And so it was that Tharsis found herself spooling through the database silic with more than a little hesitation, data-chip in hand.
“It’s always you young kids, isn’t it?” a voice said behind her. “Always thinking there’s no third option.”
She started.
Behind her was a figure. An umbran. Unlike any she'd ever heard of. Male, tall, lanky. A uniform hanging loose on his frame, not the gray or black of the void-deployed. Kelly-green, covered in patches she didn’t recognize, left side obscured. Ancient, she realized. Silicon-Era.
For a moment, it studied her. Every square centimeter of her. Everything she’d ever done, everything she’d ever do. Cutting through her, straight to the worldline of her soul, and the pain of it was unbearable.
For a moment.
Before it melted away, back into the penumbra.
Heart in her throat, Tharsis saw the file already up and on the screen.
Two terabytes, downloading to her chip, and she hadn’t so much as finished typing it into the search feature. Or approved the upload.
Briefly, staring at it, she considered going down to the basement, pulling up the dive core, trying to figure out how to contact the Barachiel. But she didn’t know their identifier codes, and had no idea how to operate the damn thing anyway, and so it was too easy to dismiss the idea entirely.
The terminal chimed, pulling her attention away for a moment.
File ready and uploaded.
A mob was gathering in Helion Plaza, pouring in, as Tharsis exited the embassy gates. “What the fuck?” she asked tDaer, who just made a disgusted little noise in hen’s throat.
“Sucksuck,” the blue-skinned voider replied. “I forget they do this scat on Fourday.”
“Why is it public?” Tharsis asked as emotion from the crowd lapped at her. “I know it’s necessary, but the Rossen doesn’t make a spectacle out of it.”
“Neither does the Scient. You report into the clinic on Titan, get a lethal dose of the blue stuff, drift off into whatever end your mind wants to imagine. No panic, no fear, nothing but the fade. But this?” tDaer said and spat. “Ibbie pomp and circumstance. I swear, they enjoy her killing them.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a vast speaker array crackling to life, a living twilight descending, fog-like, into the square. The gravity started shifting down, the crowd starting to rise. Music blared out across the otherwise dead silence of the square, something pompous and strange, an orchestra missing pieces of its full variety, the percussion far more varied than anything an Arran composer would dare even try.
A platform rose in all white from the center of the plaza, elevating the Rallarhu’s statue. Unformed wrapper oozed up around it, from it, as the sky tunneled down and opened the space to the void. Tendrils twisted to life, alien formations rising and falling like breeze-whipped nubs of lake waves. Readying themselves.
Tharsis poked tDaer. “Let’s get out of here.”
The sucksuck—the Rallarhu’s periodic exercise of executive privilege—was infamous around Humphryes, and not just because of who its perpetrator was. There were stories about sky-hooking; the Rallarhu dropping directly down to eject into the void some person who displeased her. But even with that, her vast police forces handled most of the minor offenses themselves. On the spot. Violators of major laws were brought here, and an utter spectacle was made of their deaths.
The going was slow, the huge plaza filled with bodies. Footfalls were hard to reach. Tharsis, not nearly as nimble as her void-born friend, soon found herself lagging far behind.
Struggling for the obscurity within the high buildings and narrow passages of Old Town, Tharsis heard the music swell, felt that weird bioluminescence of the wrapper growing, penetrating the crowd now, rendering everyone into gray blobs of inconsequence.
Behind them, in the center of the square, the sky was falling to earth.
Tharsis was knocked off balance by a stray push, thrown higher above the ground than what her boots alone could recover, and as she tried to lose altitude in the near-mig, she had an uninterrupted view of what was happening in the center of the plaza.
The sky draped like a sheet on laundry day across the encircling spires. The statue, still discernible beneath the waving sheets of energy-hungry xenocytes, was coming to life. A consciousness was gathering, concentrated into that form’s surface.
Beginning to move, the Rallarhu’s vessel did not mimic the motions of bone and ligament and muscle. Rather, it seemed to flow in and back out of itself, arms fading into the sides to push back out at the shoulder, fingers retracting into the hand-space and reasserting in a different configuration to stretch palm-open to the sky.
Sightless eyes turned their attention to the crowd, to the places where it was parting now, men and women—and children, the Arran lieutenant saw with another chill—pushed through. Naked, beaten, stumbling. Up to the base of the platform, towards down-winding tendrils of raw wrapper, attracted to the thermal energy of the human body, both devouring and decaying with its touch; the same biological functions that rendered exogear dangerous, awake, unleashed.
Flesh caught fire in the intense radioactive grasp of the raw wrapper, as those people were dragged into the platform. Through the sky. Into the void, silent, screams impossible.
Ashes drifted free.
Tharsis could see an auric brume rising from the crowd; emotional energy, escaping into the penumbra. A bright rose-red pink, horrible beyond belief in its beauty. The roar—of pain, from those on the execution stage, and of excitement, from those in the audience—was deafening.
The lieutenant sacrificed what little momentum she had to knock the tiny boosters in her boots on and went for it.
tDaer wasn’t hard to find, glowering under an empty cafe’s awning, the spots on her neck incandescent. Eyes flat, hen reached out as the lieutenant came closer, pushing hen’s long, thin fingers through the Arran’s more substantial ones, holding on, breathing hard.
Something strange in hen’s dark eyes.
“They’re the lucky ones in a way, aren’t they?” hen mused.
Behind them, deathlights rose, curling smoke spreading against the lifting ceiling of the false sky, brighter than the blue daylight glow reasserting itself there, ash floating off into the void beyond. Tharsis felt like weeping.
“Shut the fuck up, tDaer.”
The lights continued all the way back to the train station.
“Who gave these fucking Landlords the right to do this to us, anyway?” Tharsis asked when they finally got in a car, trying to block out the cheerful chatter of the Ibbies, fresh from the sucksuck and giddy.
tDaer leaned forward in their facing seats, strange fire in hen’s dark eyes. “See, Tharsis? Now you’re catching on.”
The next three days passed in a haze.
Tharsis knew she needed to go back to Humphryes. Fucking report what she knew. Deal with the consequences as they came. But Hinden still had her on leave, and judging from the looks she got when she went to the Wardog the night after the sucksuck, looking for Junia, he’d made some kind of statement about her to the rest of the officers. Nobody was going to risk getting redded up to help her, and so Tharsis tried to put it out of her mind.
Concentrate on figuring out what tDaer was after.
Most of the Iapetan’s project passed completely over the lieutenant’s head. Still, she understood enough basic theory on radio transmission—and enough of the Heliosphere’s military history—to see what tDaer was trying to do.
The Arcna broadcasted on numerous frequencies in different voices, only some of which could be properly deciphered by the ASDF’s quants. With Shoals, tDaer seemed most interested in the sections still encrypted. tDaer had hen’s chemical-hybrid silic processors stripping through the terabytes, looking for the pre-conflict sections and running them through the wet-base algorithms from hen’s lab on Iapetus.
“Location,” tDaer kept saying, “we need a location.”
“Location for what?” Tharsis asked again, during a break on the third night of number crunching. They’d been operating on no kind of set schedule—not for eating, sleeping, working, or fucking—and she found it all oddly liberating.
“Tharsis, I’m not sure—”
“It’d help if I knew what we’re looking for.”
After a moment’s more hesitation, a blue hand waved across the silic array, raising a projected map of the Heliosphere into the center of the tiny room. “We know the signal bounces off a few dozen discreet repeaters seeded through the Kuiper before it hits the first major relay on Pluto. But the interesting thing is in how the signal moves once it hits there.” Hen entered a few lines of command code, and the projection shifted, a spiderweb of tiny threads of light arcing across the Heliosphere.
Tharsis nodded. They’d spent a year on diagrams like that in her military strategy classes. “It targets specific locations. Passes certain messages to certain Nalatok cells before anyone else gets them.”
“Right,” tDaer said, waving hen’s hand in command, and the lines disappeared. “What I found was that the earliest signals, like the one I intercepted, have been blocked at Pluto.”
“Blocked by what?”
“I don’t know. The university’s data is incomplete. I was hoping I could mine the intended destination out of the data in Shoals. Seems to me that the key to figuring this mess out is knowing who in the fuck she’s trying to contact.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Tharsis, I’ve spent a year working on this—”
“Do you want my help or not? What are you looking for?”
“Fine. Look, remember Ceres? The Lighthouse?”
“What, like I’m going to forget almost fucking dying out there?”
“Shut up, you were fine. But according to some of the Nalatok cells,” and hen hesitated again, “the last known set of navigation stones was kept there.”
“Where?” And Tharsis groaned, comprehending. “The Kuiper? Noqumiut? Motherfucker, you can’t just go out there.”
“Of course we can. What did you think the Arcna’s talking about? It’s time. She’s going to show us Noqumiut. She wants us to see it,” came the reply. “But that navigation resource is gone. I was hoping I could extrapolate—”
But before hen could finish that sentence, the silic chimed. Compiling complete.
A fresh thread squirmed across the projection field. Gold and thin, bisecting the system.
“I thought you said it was being blocked,” Tharsis said, eying the line’s termination point.
“No, it’s being redirected,” and tDaer pulled up a second field on the projector, double-checking the numbers. “That’s the Second Propagation right there, umm, hS0145.”
“A full year before it began,” Tharsis muttered to herself, and then, to tDaer, “What about the others?”
Another line of code and ten more minutes of escalating anxiety brought up the Third. Fourth. Seventh.
All directed at the inwell of Earth.
tDaer, silent, stood up, heading for the door.
“Where are you going?” Tharsis asked, before hen could leave.
“Gonna give our patron a call.”
“We can’t go to Earth.”
“Sure we can. Gravity’s a little harsh, the air’s completely unbreathable, but there’s probably something that can handle that.”
“Even if you, a voider, were still physically able to set foot on the surface, the scat is very illegal.”
tDaer’s face clenched up tight. “We’re sitting here with an illegal copy of Shoals. On the very off chance we get caught, what the fuck are our Landlords going to do? Kill us twice?”
“This is stupid.”
“Don’t you want to know what’s out there? What she’s discovered? What she’s built?”
“What difference does it make? Nothing’s going to change.”
“Everything will change! Everything! That’s the point of Noqumiut, Tharsis!” And hen grabbed her. “These Landlords, they failed us, they took Noqumiut away, and now nothing’s the way it should be. Doesn’t that bother you?”
The lieutenant sighed and pushed that hand away. “You know it fuckin’ bothers me.”
“I thought you were with me on this,” tDaer whispered, still holding on, more desperate now. “I need you with me.”
Tharsis rolled her eyes to the ceiling, to the dusty duct work, the faint whir of the hostel’s atmo circulators. It was insane, what tDaer was proposing. Nobody went to Earth, not without permission, and not without consequence.
But her gaze dropped back down to the projection still orbiting slowly in the center of the room. There was something there, she knew, something strange she couldn’t put her finger on. In the route of the signal, maybe, or the source, the purpose, of that diversion. Why it had happened six times before, but not on the First, or now, in the developing Eighth.
Maybe, she told herself, knowing it was self-deceptive spider scat, maybe if you had a little more to offer in terms of intel…
“I might be able to stand the gravity for a few hours,” Tharsis replied, and untangled herself from tDaer’s arms, moving away.
tDaer didn’t respond for a moment, and then grinned, reaching out and pulling Tharsis back in for a kiss. “I’ll be downstairs in the comm room,” hen whispered against the Arran’s lips. “Shut this down for me, okay?”
Sitting back down on the floor by the silic as tDaer left, Tharsis flicked the tiny blue symbol for Earth, scattering its light, breaking its form.
Wondering what in the fuck she’d just agreed to do.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The sun came up fast at the equator. Bright. Hot.
It made her long for the sunrises of her first life. The slow roll of high desert. The chill of night giving way under the softest tendrils of light creeping through atmospheric dust, cast in a thousand different shades.
How long had it been since she had gone back there? Watched it again? Too long. Maybe she would manage it this life.
The little girl, who was not a child, watched the sun crest the eastern rim of the ocean now.
Something was coming.
She could have said something, but the people here didn’t always understand. They cared, of course, but they didn’t always listen. She was too young, they thought. Too small. Too fragile.
Sometimes others came to visit her. The ones who understood. The ones who remembered her. She had known them all, over the years. They didn’t treat her like a child, the other Landlords.
Perhaps she had been. A child. Once. Long ago. Before the weight of centuries accumulated. Before the past crushed in so deeply that not even her still developing four-year-old brain could keep it from her.
