Into Everywhere

Book 0: Something Coming

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Humanity's future has been disrupted and shaped by the mysterious alien Jackaroo. We spread to the planets they gave us, and we discovered the ruins of a dozen previous civilistions. All previous clients of the Jackaroo, all dead. So far we have escaped that fate - but we have also escaped from the Jackaroo's planets and begun to explore the galaxy. The discovery of ancient spaceships, and the unlocking of their mysteries, has led to a new way of life. But humanity's failings and conflicts are always with us.

A woman living a quiet secluded life, with only her dog and her demons for company. The dissolute heir to a powerful merchant family. The laminated brain of the woman who led us into the universe. A policeman, seemingly working for the Jackaroo. All of these people are on the edges of a vast plan, one which will span decades and light years. A piece of alien code has awakened, and the end of our species may be happening around us.

And we may finally discover if the aliens really are here to help us.

(p) 2016 Orion Publishing Group

Release date: April 21, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

There were some days now when she didn’t think about the ghost in her head. Or there might be a moment when she’d wonder if it was asleep or awake, if it was looking out through her eyes, and then the moment would pass and she’d get on with whatever it was she happened to be doing. It hadn’t shown itself for eight years. It had receded into the background hum of her life. But then there was the day when it returned in all its terror and glory. Black lightning snapping in the cave of her skull. A thunderous swell obliterating all thought.

Lisa’s dog was nuzzling her neck when she came back to herself. She flapped a hand, trying to push him away or gather him close, she wasn’t sure. Pete sat back on his haunches and wordlessly barked, once, twice. She was sprawled in the yard, halfway between the house and the barn, looking up at the cloudless dark blue sky. Someone had hammered a nail into her skull, right between her eyes.

She pushed onto her elbows, managed to sit all the way up. A greasy swell of nausea washed through her and she rested her head between her knees for a minute or so. Her mouth tingled with a metallic taste like a battery’s kiss. The sharp pain in her head began to diffuse into a general skull-cramp; she noticed that her pipe wrench lay next to her. She’d been fixing something, a leak in the water supply to the hurklin pens. She’d gone to fetch the wrench from the toolbox in her pickup truck . . .

Pete told her that she had fallen over.

‘I’m okay now,’ Lisa said, although she was very fucking far from okay. She was frightened and confused and angry. After all this time it had happened again. After all this time her ghost had woken in thunder and lightning and had knocked her on her ass.

Later, she told her friend Bria that she didn’t know what had triggered it.

‘I haven’t been handling any especially weird shit. Just the usual tesserae, sympathy stones, so forth. And anyway, I haven’t had a client for two weeks now. More like three. I haven’t eaten anything I haven’t eaten a hundred times before, I’m clean and sober . . . I can’t figure out what I did to set it off.’

‘You sound like you’re trying to find some way of blaming yourself,’ Bria said.

They were sitting in Lisa’s kitchen, drinking coffee. Lisa dressed in her usual blue jeans and denim shirt, Bria in a pale green pants suit, caramel-coloured hair done up in a high curly ponytail. She’d been in a business meeting when Lisa had called, had insisted on driving over.

The two of them went way back. They had both come up and out to First Foot on the same shuttle trip, had both started out working as coders in the Crazy 88 Collective. Lisa’s freelance career had run onto the rocks, leaving her with a reputation as a brilliant eccentric whose best years were long behind her; Bria, ten years younger, with a relentless work ethic and good people skills, had founded one of the first code farms in Port of Plenty, was happily married with two kids. A rambling red-tiled house in the burbs, school runs, dinner parties, a subscription to the city’s theatre, weekends at the country club where she was attempting to reduce her golfing handicap with the focused zeal that characterised her work. The whole aspirational middle-class-professional bit. Lisa had once asked her friend if this was how she had imagined things turning out when she had won her emigration ticket; Bria had said that back in the day the so-called Wild West had opera houses and gas lighting, and wasn’t she dealing with weird alien shit every day, down on the code farm?

‘It’s been eight years since the last time. Eight years, three months, nine days. What I’m wondering,’ Lisa said, ‘is did Willie’s ghost give him a kick in the head too? I gave him a call, but it went straight to voicemail. So then I phoned around the hospitals and clinics. You know, just in case. No sign of him anywhere, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t zapped. Maybe he shrugged it off. Or he’s lying hurt somewhere . . .’

‘Have the two of you ever been affected at the same time?’

‘Sure. During the Bad Trip.’

‘Apart from that.’

‘Not that I know of. But Willie and I aren’t exactly close any more.’

Bria raised an eyebrow.

‘So he stops by now and then,’ Lisa said. ‘But he doesn’t tell me everything. I can’t help thinking he had some kind of accident. That maybe something happened to him and woke up his ghost, and that’s what woke up mine.’

‘He’s probably scratching around in the City of the Dead, out of phone range,’ Bria said. ‘Or he’s in the drunk tank after one of his parties.’

She didn’t have much sympathy for Lisa’s ex.

‘If Willie had been arrested I would probably know,’ Lisa said. ‘Because he would have asked me to bail him out.’

Willie had once bought a serious muscle car after making a good find, and a week later had totalled it during a street race in Felony Flats. He’d walked away with a broken collarbone, but the cops had busted him for dangerous driving and he’d served two months, six suspended. Willie was smart and funny and sweet, but he had poor impulse control and was about as dependable as the long-range weather forecast.

‘He’s like one of those cartoon characters,’ Bria said. ‘You smack him down with a hammer, he springs right back up. Forget about him, honey, and for once think about yourself. You had a shock. You need to rest. And you need to get yourself checked out. Seriously.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘If you’re worried about paying for it, don’t be. I’ll cover it.’

‘No need. I already had Doc Hendricks look me over.’

‘The old guy with the chicken farm?’

‘It’s also a clinic. And Doc Hendricks knows his stuff. He told me that it wasn’t a stroke or an epileptic fit. Nothing organic. As if I didn’t already know that. My ghost gave me a little kick, that’s all. The way it used to, the first few months after the Bad Trip. I don’t need to go to hospital. I don’t need any tests. I’m fine.’

Bria gave her a steady, serious look. ‘You’re very far from fine, honey. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.’

They pushed it back and forth. After Lisa refused to make an appointment with the consultant who’d tested her after the Bad Trip, no way was she going back to being a lab rat or to being zombified with anti-epileptic drugs, Bria changed tack, said that she was worried about Lisa being out here on her own.

‘I have Pete.’

‘I mean if it should happen again.’

‘This is the first time in more than eight years,’ Lisa said. ‘I really don’t think it’s going to happen again any time soon.’

But the flat fact was that she had no idea why the ghost in her head had woken up after so long. She didn’t know what it wanted; she didn’t even know exactly what it was. Despite the batteries of tests that she and Willie had put themselves through after the Bad Trip, hoping for a fix that had never materialised, no one could tell them whether they had been infected with an eidolon that had full agency, or some fragmented algorithm which threw random glitches. All she knew was that it was old and alien, like all the revenants and ruins on this old, haunted world, that it manifested as unusual activity in the temporal lobe of her brain, and that after eight years of inactivity, after she had begun to allow herself to hope that it might have faded away, it was back. It was awake again, fully present. It was as if something she couldn’t see was standing at her back. A visual stutter. A blind spot that jumped past something unimaginable.

Lisa didn’t tell Bria about that. She hadn’t talked about that aspect of her haunting with anyone except Willie. Maybe that was why she had felt the urge to get in touch with him: he was the only person who understood how it was to have something old and alien living inside your head, amongst your thoughts.

But Willie still wasn’t answering her texts and messages.

She told herself that her feeling that something awful had happened was just a hangover from the seizure, and tried to get back into her routine. Watering and feeding the hurklins. Mulching her vegetable beds and planting out eggplant and winter squash. Picking and canning tomatoes. For the first time in a couple of months she went to an AA meeting and testified and drank bad coffee and put some money in the hat. Keeping busy helped to cover up the hole in the world the seizure had made.

But then the geek police came, and everything changed again.

When the perimeter alert slammed down the pipe Tony Okoye was lying on his command couch and one of the hands was braiding his hair. He raised a finger to still the clever fingers of the man-shaped machine and said, ‘I hope this isn’t another cosmic-ray impact.’

‘Not this time,’ the ship’s bridle said.

‘Because if it is, I swear I will modify your detection filters with an axe.’

‘Then I’m almost glad I’m looking at an actual intruder,’ the bridle said, and opened an arc of windows in the dim warm air.

Tony sat up, bare-chested in lime-green ‘second skin’ shorts, pushing a fall of loose hair from his face as he studied multi-spectrum images, vectors, estimates of the intruder’s capability. She was real. She was big. A G-class frigate ten times the size of his C-class clipper, bristling with weapon pods and patches. She had come through the mirror less than two minutes ago, she was already driving straight for the slime planet, and she was displaying a police flag. CPF Dauntless.

‘What are the police doing here? Have they said what they want?’

‘They haven’t said anything. And they aren’t the police,’ the bridle said. ‘The Dauntless is a G-class frigate, but that G-class frigate is not the Dauntless. The configuration of her assets is wrong, and her flag’s certificate is a clever fake. Clever enough to fool the average freebooter, but not quite clever enough to fool me.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘I can show you my workings.’

Tony flicked through images of the intruder. It looked a little like a weaponised jellyfish got up from shards of charred plastic: a convex shield or hood three hundred metres across, trailing three stout tentacles ornamented with random clusters of spines. No one knew what the original function of G-class Ghajar ships had been, but plating their shields with foamed fullerene and attaching weapon pods and patches around their rims turned them into formidable combat vessels.

‘If they aren’t police,’ he said, ‘they must be pirates. Claim jumpers.’

‘The possibility is not insignificant,’ the bridle said.

‘A ship that size, running under a fake flag? It is the only possibility. The Red Brigade has frigates, doesn’t it?’

‘So do a number of other fringe-world outfits. We should challenge it,’ the bridle said. ‘You can use your notorious charm to get its crew to reveal who they really are and what they want.’

Her personality package, presenting as a bright eager capable young woman, was the front end of the AI that interfaced with the mind and nervous system of the actual ship, which like the frigate, like all ships everywhere, had been built by the Ghajar thousands of years ago. Tony’s C-class clipper was called Abalunam’s Pride, but no one knew its real name. The name its maker had given it long before it had been extracted from a sargasso orbit, refurbished and modified, and purchased by his grandmother. The secret name it might still call itself.

Tony said, ‘I already have a pretty good idea about what they want. And it is possible that they do not know we are here. So we will maintain radio silence and continue to monitor them. And if they contact us, we will tell them that we are just a freebooter with an exploration licence and nothing to hide.’

‘Which we are.’

‘Which we are. But my family has a history with the Red Brigade. And if that really is one of their frigates . . .’

Tony grazed the cicatrices on his cheek with his thumb as he thought things through. He was scared, yes, shocked and sort of numb, but he also felt alert and focused. Babysitting Fred Firat and his crew of wizards while they probed the ancient secrets of the slime planet had proven to be astoundingly tedious. There were no beasties to hunt, and the scattered Elder Culture ruins weren’t anything special. Junot Johnson was supervising the wizards’ work; Lancelot Askia was keeping them in line; after completing the survey of stromatolite sites and setting his little surprises, Tony had mostly stayed aboard the ship. Now, for the first time in four weeks, he was fully awake. At last he had something to do. And if that frigate really was one of the Red Brigade’s ships he would have a chance to test his skill and cunning against his family’s old nemesis.

He said, ‘How long before it gets here?’

‘Nineteen point three eight hours, if it maintains its current delta vee,’ the bridle said.

‘We will have a lot less than that if it fires off scouting drones. What about our assets at the mirror? Has our unwelcome guest pinged them, tried to spoof them, knocked any of them out?’

‘Not yet.’

‘It could have left behind assets of its own when it came through. Have one of the drones scan the mirror and the volume around it out to five thousand kilometres, but keep the rest dark. And shoot a message to Junot, brief him on the situation and tell him that the wizards should start packing up their stuff straight away.’

‘Then we’re going to make a run for it,’ the bridle said.

‘I am not going to sit on the ground and wait to see what that frigate does next,’ Tony said. ‘Check the mirror, message Junot, and raise the ship and aim it at the wizards’ camp.’

‘Shall I have the hand finish braiding your hair, too?’

The bridle had a nice line in sarcasm, but Tony took the offer at face value.

‘Why not?’ he said, settling back on the couch. ‘If those claim jumpers do want to talk to me face to face, I should look my best.’

Five minutes later, Abalunam’s Pride was sliding sideways and low above eroded sheets of ancient basaltic lava. The lifeless black plain stretched away in every direction, studded with puddles and ponds gleaming orange in the level light of the soft sun, which at this high latitude was fixed just above the southern horizon. The slime planet, in close orbit around a cool, quiescent red dwarf star, was tidally locked, one face permanently turned to its star, the other to the outer dark. It had no name, only a number assigned by a rip-and-run survey team before the rise and fall of the two empires, and it was old, about twice the age of Earth. The tectonic plates of its lithosphere had set in place after its outer core had cooled and solidified; any mountains it might once have possessed had long ago weathered to dust; after its magnetosphere had decayed most of its original atmosphere had been blown away by the solar wind of its star. It had been cold and virtually airless when the so-called Old Old Ones, said by some to have been the first of the Jackaroo’s clients, said by others to have been the Jackaroo’s precursors, had arrived, thickening its atmosphere and rebooting its hydrological cycle by bombarding the vast ice cap on the dark side with comets diverted from the red dwarf’s threadbare Oort cloud. Now the slime planet was cloaked in a reducing atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and ammonia, and a shallow sea turbid with ferrous iron spread across its sub-stellar hemisphere, broken by a single sodden land mass near the terminator between light and darkness. Enormous rafts of sticky foam generated by blooms of photosynthetic bacteria floated everywhere on the sea, and colonies of stromatolites grew in a few muddy bays on the sunward edge of the lone continent.

Those colonies were what had brought Tony Okoye and the crew of wizards here, in a three-way partnership with the broker on Dry Salvages who had purchased the old survey team’s report. Unprepossessing mounds like melted candle stumps, built from layers of sediments and bacterial filaments and slime, the stromatolites contained nodes of archival genetic material and communicated with each other via a wide-bandwidth transmission system constructed from arrays of microscopic magnetic crystals. The chief wizard, Fred Firat, believed that they were the remnants of a planetary intelligence, a noosphere woven from algorithms that were the common ancestors of the various species found in active artefacts left by the Elder Cultures. A root kit or Rosetta stone that would unlock all kinds of secrets, including the causes of sleepy sickness, Smythe’s Syndrome, counting disorder, and other meme plagues.

Fred Firat had the grandstanding rhetoric and unblinking gaze of someone who carried the fire of true crazed genius, and like all the best salesmen, prophets and charlatans he was his first and best convert to his cause. He was convinced that the scant data buried in the records of that old expedition pointed towards something of fundamental importance, had sold the idea to Ayo and Aunty Jael during a virtuoso performance via q-phone. Which was how Tony had found himself embarked on what might be the biggest score of his freebooter career.

But extracting data from the stromatolites’ archival genetic material had been more difficult than anticipated. Tony had to park his ship fifty kilometres inland because Abalunam’s Pride leaked a variety of electromagnetic emissions that interfered with the stromatolites’ transmission system, the wizards had to isolate experiments on individual specimens inside Faraday cages to prevent feedback, and they and Aunty Jael had spent more than two weeks developing new tools and probes before getting down to the real work. But although they had sequenced the archival genetics, they had yet to discover how to read the data those sequences contained, or how to hack into the transmission system. And now a fully loaded G-class frigate had driven through the mirror, come to hijack their work or worse. There was no doubt about it. It was time to pack up. Time to boot.

The first glint of the sea had just appeared at the horizon when the ship’s q-phone lit up. It was Tony’s uncle, Opeyemi, saying with his usual brusqueness, ‘I hear you’re in trouble.’

‘I can handle it,’ Tony said, doing his best to hide his dismay. ‘And while I would love to talk, uncle, I am rather busy. What with having to get the wizards stowed away and so forth.’

He had always known that Lancelot Askai was his uncle’s man, seconded to the mission to the slime planet from his usual work of suppressing anti-family sentiment, but had not realised until now that the rat was equipped with a q-phone. Opeyemi had been monitoring everything, Tony thought with a throb of anger. Waiting to pounce on any mistake.

‘Am I right in thinking,’ his uncle said, ‘that you believe this so-called intruder is a Red Brigade ship?’

‘It is heavily armed, it is displaying a false flag, and it has been aimed at this remote and insignificant planet when we are in the middle of our work. Its crew must have found out about the stromatolites, and want to steal what is rightfully ours. And of all the pirate gangs, the Red Brigade is the only one that has tangled with our family before, and everyone knows that it covets ancient knowledge above all else.’

‘But you have no actual proof that these are no more than ordinary criminals,’ Opeyemi said. ‘Your desire for revenge is understandable, nephew. But do not let it cloud your judgement.’

‘Tell me, uncle,’ Tony said, trying to keep his tone light, ‘does Ayo know about this call?’

‘It is four in the morning here. The alert came straight to me, and I see no need to disturb your sister.’

Tony pictured Opeyemi in his bare room up in the west tower of the Great House, some four thousand light years away. A slender unsmiling man with a shaven skull and deep-set eyes and a steady gaze. He would be sitting at the edge of his military cot, or perhaps he was standing at a narrow window, looking out at the tumbled roofs of the town stretching away in darkness to the cold dark iceberg-flecked sea. After the great betrayal and the deaths of Tony’s parents, Opeyemi, a lieutenant colonel in the Commons police, had resigned his commission and taken charge of his brother’s orphaned children, serving as acting head of the family until Ayo had reached the age of majority. Tony had often rebelled against his uncle’s exacting discipline, still resented the influence he wielded, and flinched now from the admonitory sting in his voice. It was exactly like all those times when he had been called to account for some minor transgression. The hot flush of shame and impotence. Trembling anticipation of his uncle’s minatory gaze.

He tried to assert himself, saying, ‘Perhaps you should disturb her anyway, uncle. After all, she signed off this deal. She deserves to know that it has gone bad.’

‘You did not think to trouble her yourself.’

‘I was planning to tell her as soon as I had the situation in hand.’

‘You like to think you are an independent operator,’ Opeyemi said. ‘You are not.’

‘You have made that abundantly clear.’

‘And you will not risk the ship, a valuable family asset, by making a stand against these claim jumpers. If that is what they are.’

‘The idea never crossed my mind,’ Tony said.

He had played endless games of Police v. Red Brigade when he was a kid, setting up ambushes in the courtyards and corridors of the Great House, staging skirmishes in the fields and plantations, but the frigate effortlessly outgunned Abalunam’s Pride, and he wasn’t as crazy foolish as some of his family believed. Reckless freebooters did not last long.

‘We will get our revenge when we’re good and ready,’ his uncle said. ‘You are neither the arm nor the instrument. Round up the wizards and make a straight run for the mirror. If these claim jumpers see that you are abandoning the prize, they will not waste their time trying to stop you.’

‘Absolutely.’

Tony had his own idea about how to evade the claim jumpers but he was not about to run that past his uncle. The crusty old fucker would probably forbid it.

‘Bring the ship home,’ Opeyemi said. ‘The wizards too.’

‘I thought I should head back to Dry Salvages first.’ Hopefully without the G-class frigate on his tail, but he would deal with that if and when. ‘I want to have a hard conversation with Raqle Thornhilde about how this claim jumper found me.’

‘You will do no such thing,’ Opeyemi said. ‘You have no proof that the broker is to blame. And if she is, she will be expecting you to come after her, and you would be meeting her on her territory, on her terms. No, it is too dangerous, and I will not allow you to endanger the family’s reputation out of some reckless notion about revenge. What you will do instead is bring the wizards to Skadi, where they will complete their work with the help of Aunty Jael, as already agreed.’

‘An agreement that Raqle Thornhilde will have invalidated if she told someone else about the stromatolites.’

‘We will make enquiries about that. Meanwhile, we will keep to our side of the bargain.’

‘This is something I must discuss with Ayo,’ Tony said.

‘She will tell you the same thing. Good luck and Godspeed. We will talk again very soon,’ Opeyemi said, and cut the connection before Tony could think of a riposte.

That was only the beginning of his humiliation.

The broken latticework spire of the Ghajar landing tower appeared off to the west; Tony saw a huddle of blue tents and the glinting pyramid of the Faraday cage at the edge of the shallow bay as the ship swung around and dropped lower, hovering on a warp in the planet’s gravity above a calm sweep of ochre water and the pavements and clumps of the stromatolites. Fred Firat and his six acolytes, dressed in uniform blue pressure suits, gathered in a mutinous clot as Tony rode a gyro platform from the ship’s cargo hatch to a slant of black rock at the water’s edge. As soon as he landed, the wizards’ leader stepped smartly forward, Junot Johnson and Lancelot Askai falling in on either side. Their pressure suits were white, like Tony’s, with the red and black triangle of the family’s flag on their shoulders.

‘You have compromised the local transmission system with this stupid manoeuvre,’ Fred Firat said. ‘You may have damaged the entire noosphere.’

Tony ignored him, looked at Junot. ‘Why aren’t these people packing up, as I ordered?’

He was fizzing with anger. Anger at his uncle’s intervention; anger at his failure to assert himself; anger at the wizards’ insubordination.

‘We need more time,’ Fred Firat said, before Junot could answer. ‘We’ve made a good start, but a start is all it is. And now you’ve set us back by bringing the ship here. I realise you are upset by these so-called claim jumpers, Mister Okoye, but you should have known better. You should have thought things through.’

Tony met Fred Firat’s bright bold gaze. ‘You have isolated some specimens in the Faraday cages, haven’t you?’

‘Of course, but that isn’t the point.’

‘Didn’t you tell me once that their memory is holographic? Which means, I think, that a small portion will contain everything in the whole.’

‘We hadn’t done enough work to prove that it was. And anyway, that’s not really how holograms work,’ Fred Firat said. He was an old man, eighty or ninety, with the squat build of someone born and raised on a heavy planet. He stood foursquare in front of Tony, arms crossed over the chestplate of his pressure suit, the faceted oval of his ancillary eye, socketed in the middle of his forehead, glinting behind his visor like a gunsight.

‘Nevertheless, you are done here,’ Tony said. ‘Load those specimens and whatever else you have as quickly as possible. The window for escape is closing fast.’

‘You aren’t listening,’ Fred Firat said. ‘I have a plan.’

‘It’s you who are not listening,’ Tony said, thrusting his face so close to the wizard’s that their helmets almost kissed. ‘Another ship is coming here. A big ship, well armed, ready to take us prisoner and steal what is rightly ours. We have to boot as quickly as possible. You and your people should be packing up your equipment and your specimens, not quibbling about my orders.’

‘I have a better idea,’ Fred Firat said. ‘You can take the specimens and most of my crew. I’ll stay behind with a couple of volunteers. We can hide in the Ghajar ruins – we have mapped a network of voids beneath them. We’ll wait out the claim jumpers, and after they leave we’ll start work again, and you can bring back the rest of my crew.’

Tony couldn’t believe it. No, he could. Wizards were clever but naive, put their faith in friction-free models of messy reality, and lacked any kind of common sense.

He said, ‘That isn’t going to happen.’

‘If you force me aboard at gunpoint, I’ll sue you and your family for breach of contract,’ Fred Firat said. ‘But if you leave me here to finish my work, I promise that I’ll make all of us rich.’

‘It isn’t going to happen because there won’t be any stromatolites left for you or the claim jumpers to exploit,’ Tony said, and ordered the ship’s bridle to implement Plan B.

A hatch opened amongst the jags and points of the ship’s base and a black cylinder tumbled out, splashing into the shallow water.

‘That is a pop-up high-impulse thermobaric bomb packed with powdered aluminium and nanoparticles of isopropyl nitrate and RDX,’ Tony said. ‘Powerful enough to sterilise this bay and the surrounding area.’

Fred Firat and the other wizards cried out in shock and fury; a tall skinny young man broke away from the group and ran head down and howling at Tony, who stood his ground and took a half-step sideways at the last moment, blocking his attacker with his hip and using the man’s momentum to pivot him off his feet and smash him onto his back. The man stared up through the curve of his faceplate, wide-eyed with shock, as Lancelot Askia stepped forward and aimed his pistol at him.

‘Don’t,’ Tony said, and felt a wash of relief when the enforcer shrugged and lowered his weapon and turned back to the other wizards.

‘There are other colonies,’ Fred Firat said. ‘We will work on them.’

‘No, you won’t,’ Tony said. ‘Because I have planted bombs in every colony along this shore. They will be triggered when we boot. The only stromatolites left will be those we take with us.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Too bad. Get your crew moving. We boot in two hours. Anything that isn’t on the ship by then will be left behind.’

‘And if I refuse? What will you do? Kill me?’

‘Why not?’ Lancelot Askia said and raised his pistol and shot Fred Firat through his helmet visor.

The wizard collapsed. Blood splashed the inner surface of the crazed visor: the round had nailed him through his ancillary eye.

In the moment of shocked silence, Tony told Lancelot Askia, ‘I needed that man. You had no right.’

‘Orders,’ the enforcer said calmly. ‘I was told that anyone who suggested staying behind could be the one who betrayed us.’

‘And now we will never know if he did.’

‘Of course he did. That’s why I shot him,’ Lancelot Askia said, and turned away and ordered the wizards to shape up and get moving. ‘You can pack your shit and get on board the s