Stars and Bones E-Book

Gareth L. Powell

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 435

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the BSFA Award, a stunningly inventive action-packed science-fiction epic adventure for fans of Becky Chambers and Ann Leckie from the multi BSFA award-winner, Gareth L. Powell. Seventy-five years from today, the human race has been cast from a dying Earth to wander the stars in a vast fleet of arks—each shaped by its inhabitants into a diverse and fascinating new environment, with its own rules and eccentricities. When her sister disappears while responding to a mysterious alien distress call, Eryn insists on being part of the crew sent to look for her. What she discovers on Candidate-623 is both terrifying and deadly. When the threat follows her back to the fleet and people start dying, she is tasked with seeking out a legendary recluse who may just hold the key to humanity's survival. Gareth L. Powell's Embers of War won 2018 BSFA Award for Best Novel and was shortlisted for the 2019 Locus Awards and the 2021 Seiun Awards in Japan. Its sequels, Fleet of Knives and Light of Impossible Stars, were both shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best Novel, and Fleet of Knives was also shortlisted for the 2020 Locus Awards.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

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Copyright

Prologue

Part One: Blue Arms Caught Me

Chapter One: Dream-Linking

Chapter Two: Full-Throttle Armageddon

Chapter Three: Boiling Miasma

Chapter Four: Substrate Fluctuations

Chapter Five: Invisible Hooks

Chapter Six: Really Wild Things

Chapter Seven: Rogue Growth

Chapter Eight: Comprehensively Trashed

Chapter Nine: Earth Was Over

Chapter Ten: Abrasions Of Sand And Time

Chapter Eleven: Cactus Shadows

Chapter Twelve: Accretion Disc

Chapter Thirteen: Peripatetic Megacity

Chapter Fourteen: Airtight Seal

Chapter Fifteen: One Of The Good Guys

Chapter Sixteen: Serious Fuckery

Chapter Seventeen: Internal Biological Processes

Chapter Eighteen: Fruit Rotting

Chapter Nineteen: Greasy And Unreliable

Chapter Twenty: A Boundless Universe

Chapter Twenty-One: Skull Damage

Chapter Twenty-Two: Marilyn Fucking Monroe

Chapter Twenty-Three: Infuriating Child

Chapter Twenty-Four: Rebuilt Or Replaced

Chapter Twenty-Five: Gnarly Surfing Conditions

Chapter Twenty-Six: Capitalism For Beginners

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Supervillain Lair

Part Two: The Broken World

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Godless Space Communism

Chapter Twenty-Nine: I Ain’T Used To Talking About This Kind Of Stuff

Chapter Thirty: Monkeys In Self-Driving Cars

Chapter Thirty-One: Raijin

Chapter Thirty-Two: Incomprehensible Function

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Ship Of Theseus

Chapter Thirty-Four: North Atlantic Conveyor

Chapter Thirty-Five: All The Guns

Chapter Thirty-Six: Blueprints

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Destructive Infant

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Distant Lanterns

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Fast And Clean

Chapter Forty: Crescendos Of Incomprehensibility

Chapter Forty-One: Hyena-Child

Chapter Forty-Two: Into The Trees

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Praise forStars and Bones

“Gareth Powell drops you into the action from the first page and then Just. Keeps. Going. This is a pro at the top of his game.” John Scalzi

“An interstellar intelligence has a plan for Earth’s future, but is humanity a part of it? Fast-paced and thoughtful, Stars and Bones leaves the reader well-fed with hearty helpings of mystery, suspense, adventure, and terror.” Marina J. Lostetter, author ofNoumenon

“Gareth Powell’s Stars and Bones is shocking and beautiful—an electric, epic, and sometimes gruesome look at humanity facing its biggest challenge yet. Powell keeps the pressure on and doesn’t let go. I enjoyed it immensely.” Karen Osborne, author ofArchitects of Memory

“A headlong, visceral plunge into a future equal parts fascinating and terrifying.” Adrian Tchaikovsky

“A gripping, fast-paced space opera that poses the unique question: what if instead of saving humanity, aliens decided to save the Earth?” Stina Leicht, author ofPersephone Station

“A grand scale adventure packed with fun banter, snappy prose, and masterful science.” Essa Hansen, author ofNophek Gloss

“A vividly imagined, propulsive read. Filled with a loveable cast of characters. Powell’s writing creates a rich tapestry of their voices and inner lives. I think readers will be thrilled by this story.” Temi Oh, author ofDo You Dream of Terra-Two?

“Big ships, big ideas and big emotions. Thrilling space opera which is epic in scope, yet always rooted at the human level, as all the best sci-fi is.” Emma Newman, author ofPlanetfall

“An interstellar collision of massive ideas and startling originality.” Zack Jordan, author ofThe Last Human

“Stars and Bones crafts a future that finds hope in dark places.” Valerie Valdes, author ofChilling Effect

Also by Gareth L. Powell and available from Titan Books

Embers of War

Fleet of Knives

Light of Impossible Stars

GARETH L.

POWELL

STARS ANDBONES

A CONTINUANCE NOVEL

TITAN BOOKS

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Stars and Bones

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094282

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094299

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: February 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 Gareth L. Powell. All Rights Reserved.

Gareth L. Powell asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

For Edith and Otis, with all my love.

“No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.”

PHILIP K. DICK

PROLOGUE

The ship fled between the stars.

Before the massacre of its crew, it had been scouting the territory a dozen light years in advance of the main body of the Continuance. Its mission had been to prospect for useful resources and forewarn the fleet of any potential threats. Unfortunately, on the last planet it visited—an unprepossessing rock known only as Candidate-623— it stumbled onto something that fell squarely into that latter category: a threat the like of which it had never encountered.

At the bottom of a steep ravine in the mountains, something had killed its crew. They awoke an entity in that gorge, and it dismembered them. Whatever that invisible presence was, it reached through their suits and flesh and wrenched the skulls, pelvic bones and femurs from their thrashing bodies. It burst their eyes from their sockets and cut short their hoarse screams as it tore away their jawbones and slopped their steaming viscera onto the rainswept ground.

Like every other ship in the fleet, the Couch Surfer was dream-linked to its navigator, whose name was Shay, and so had to endure all the confusion and terror the poor woman felt as her ribs snapped and were twisted from her chest. It shared her pain and sorrow, and the unbearable stab of loss that pierced her heart as it was ripped from her. And now, as the ship ran through the emptiness of interstellar space, Shay’s absence hindered it. Without a navigator, it couldn’t accurately traverse the substrate. It couldn’t plot a course, butthe imperative to warn the fleet remained deeply ingrained in its core programming. It was duty-bound to alert the Continuance. It had to send a signal, but protocol demanded it distance itself from the hostile force before broadcasting, to avoid the possibility of its message being tracked. The last thing it wanted to do was to lead an attacker back to the fleet, and the billions of civilians contained in its arks. So, the ship flipped and spiralled through the stars, blindly hurling itself through half a dozen random and potentially dangerous substrate jumps in an effort to throw off any chance of pursuit. Despite being unable to accurately navigate without a human mind on board, its only purpose now was to survive long enough to make its report to the Vanguard.

Something bad was down there. The Couch Surfer had no idea what that something might be—its crew had seemed to spontaneously burst apart like flowers opening to the sun—but the ship knew it had to relay news of the thing’s existence to its human masters before anyone else fell victim to whatever it was. Everything else, up to and including near-fatal engine degradation, came secondary to that objective. And so, it pushed itself harder and faster than it had ever pushed before, weaving an erratic course, no longer caring for its own physical survival. All that mattered now was the data it had collected, and the forewarning implicit within.

It was almost three light years from the site of the massacre and preparing to broadcast its message when, without warning or preamble, the same invisible presence that had dismantled its crew began now to reach into its mind…

PART ONE

BLUE ARMS CAUGHT ME

____________________

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.”

Werner Heisenberg

CHAPTER ONE

DREAM-LINKING

ERYN

“They get everywhere,” the Furious Ocelot moaned, speaking to me via the main console rather than through a physical envoy. “And you should see the state of some of their quarters. Clothes and empty plates all over the place. It’s disgusting.”

The Ocelot was a trailblazer. His job was to scout a path for the Thousand Arks of the Continuance. He was not— and he had taken every opportunity to point this out over the past few days—a passenger vessel. Usually, it was just the two of us out here among the unnamed stars, exploring the territory ahead of the main fleet. Having another three bodies aboard made the place seem overcrowded. Once we’d located Shay and her ship, I wouldn’t be sorry to say goodbye to this crew and reclaim my solitude.

From my seat on the Ocelot’s bridge, I stared out at the swirling, unreal light of the substrate. I knew Shay was out there somewhere, and I was going to find her. In the days since her ship’s disappearance, I’d lobbied hard to be allowed to lead this follow-up mission. I’d called in favours and banged on desks, and finally been given the assignment— on the strict condition I also bring a team of experienced search and rescue personnel. But the Ocelot didn’t like hauling passengers, and he made no secret of the fact.

“I’ll have a word with them,” I promised. “And ask them to pick up after themselves a bit more.”

“Please do.”

Green readouts on the windshield told me all the ship’s systems were operating within normal parameters. Despite his bitching, the Ocelot and I were still in synch. We were still functioning as an effective partnership. He remained the same old ship I had known for so long. I revelled in the familiar smell of the grease on the hydraulic arms supporting the cargo ramp, the clang of our footsteps on the metal gratings set into the decks, and the ever-present grumble of the engines.

The evening before our arrival at the Couch Surfer’s last known position, we gathered in the Furious Ocelot’s crew lounge for a final briefing from Tom Snyder, the ranking leader of the expedition. Food printers and a sink were set into one bulkhead, and a large screen into another. The rest of the wall space had been given over to equipment panels and overhead lockers. A hexagonal table took up one corner of the room. It doubled as an eating space and conference table. I sat with my hands curled around a coffee cup. The Ocelot’s envoy sat to my left. He was a heavy-set, bald, blue-skinned man in a three-piece suit the same colour as his complexion. Although physically human, he had no independent mind of his own, and it was the Ocelot that looked out from behind those cobalt eyes. The xenologist, Li Chen, sat beside him, with her back to the wall. She was somewhere in her twenties, and slightly built, with purple hair and contact lenses to match. Alvin Torres, the skinny paramedic, sat opposite me, and Tom Snyder occupied the stool to my right. With all five of us in there at once, the lounge felt cramped.

“Okay, listen up, folks.” Snyder had dark skin and a grey beard. “As you know, six days ago, one of our long-range scouts went missing. What you don’t know is that according to its last transmission, it ran through an emissions shell originating in this system.” The table surface cleared to reveal a map of nearby space. Snyder tapped one of the points of light. “More specifically on this planet here, which we’ve designated ‘Candidate-623’. It went to investigate, and it hasn’t been heard from since. Our job is to locate the missing ship and retrieve its crew, including Eryn’s sister.”

The Ocelot put his pudgy hand over mine. The others wouldn’t meet my eyes.

After an awkward moment, Chen cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, did you just mention an emission shell?”

Snyder enlarged the picture of the planet. “It’s coming from a single source, located in the southern hemisphere.”

“One of ours?”

“Not as far as we can tell.”

“Then what is it?” Torres demanded.

Snyder shook his head. “We have no idea. But I guess we’ll find out when we find the Couch Surfer.”

Torres was about to respond but Snyder held up a hand to stop him. “You’re all here because you’re the best in your fields,” he said. “I’ve seen your work. You’re conscientious, highly knowledgeable, and still young enough to be open-minded.”

“But why didn’t you tell us this was more than a straight rescue?” Torres was clearly unhappy. “Why weren’t we told up front about this signal?”

“Because the Vanguard decided to keep this mission as classified as possible. It didn’t want any rumours leaking into the general population, in case anyone else decided to hop in a scout ship and come trampling all over our investigation.”

“And Eryn?”

Snyder glanced at me, and then looked away. “She’s here because her sister was on the ship that made the discovery, and because she called in a lot of favours to be assigned.”

My head felt hot and dizzy. My pulse thumped in my ears. I pushed the coffee away, feeling suddenly woozy. “So, they haven’t just disappeared? Something might have got them?”

Snyder looked uncomfortable. “Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I wanted you to be able to concentrate on your job.”

I opened and shut my mouth. Certain things were only now falling into place. For instance, the journey to the Couch Surfer’s last reported position had so far taken four days, and I’d spent most of that time hoping I might receive a substrate message from Shay saying she was back on our home ark and fine. When the signal didn’t come, I had resorted to touring the ship, inspecting all the fixtures and fittings. The Ocelot had just undergone an unexpected refit, so there were new scuffs and scrapes on the walls and equipment; a new aircon system had been bolted to the corridor ceiling; and the rusty ladder from the cargo bay to the crew area had been replaced with a bright new one.

The Furious Ocelot was a blunt-nosed wedge with large engines and four sturdy, retractable landing legs equipped with heavy-duty shock absorbers. Following the refit, a cluster of new blisters disturbed the lines of his lower hull. One housed a full-spectrum mil-spec sensor suite, which had been installed to aid our search for the missing ship. If there was anything larger than a hydrogen atom floating around out there, we were going to be able to spot it. The other blisters contained ship-to-ship beam weapons, and a complement of semi-autonomous combat drones.

When I’d first seen them, I had been confused. “That’s more firepower than I expected.”

The Ocelot’s envoy dabbed his forehead with a blue handkerchief. “It’s just a Vanguard thing. They want us to be prepared for all eventualities, however unlikely.”

And now I suddenly understood what those eventualities were.

Snyder said, “You’re upset.”

“Of course, I’m fucking upset. You just told me my sister vanished while investigating an alien beacon. Now, I don’t know what to think.”

“My apologies.”

Fighting my queasiness, I watched dust motes drifting through the beam of an overhead spotlight, borne aloft on the warm air. “Tell me what happened. I want to know everything.”

“I can’t really say. We don’t know much, and what we do know is classified. All I can tell you for now is that they put down on the planet designated Candidate-623, as I said, and we haven’t heard from them since.”

“That’s pretty fucking vague.”

“At the moment, vague is all we have.”

Into the ensuing silence, Torres said, “You knew there was a possibility they might have been lured into a trap, and you thought it would be a good idea for us to follow them?”

Snyder clasped his hands together. “Hence the combat drones and weapon upgrades.”

Chen rolled her eyes and let her head fall back. “Oh, fucking hell.”

CHAPTER TWO

FULL-THROTTLE ARMAGEDDON

HARUKI

Seventy-five years ago, the world came to an end. I was in my greenhouse at the time, talking to my personal assistant.

“They’ve launched nukes.” We had been discussing the worsening political and global climates, but now Juliet’s crisp and professional demeanour faltered.

Trowel in hand, I rose from the line of tomato plants I had been tending. “How many warheads?”

“At least two thousand.” She was standing on the wooden duckboards between the vegetable beds, tablet computer in hand, and her face was pale. “Some aimed at military and infrastructure targets, but the majority targeting civilian population centres.”

The air in the greenhouse was humid, and rich with the comforting scent of warm tomato plants. I shook my head and looked up at the rock ceiling overhead. I felt like crying. After years of escalating tension, the idiots had finally gone and done it. This wasn’t going to be limited to a tactical exchange—they were going for full-throttle Armageddon. “What triggered it?”

“The British Prime Minister made a joke about pressing the button. He didn’t realise his mike was hot.”

I suppressed a groan. That clown. I should have expected it. “So, who launched first?”

“Does it matter?”

“Projected survivors?”

“Globally, less than thirty per cent in the short term, dropping considerably over the next few weeks.”

Beneath the ceiling-mounted sunlamps, bumblebees drowsed along the orderly rows of flowering plants. In contrast to Juliet’s exquisitely tailored grey business suit, I wore a simple white t-shirt and a pair of blue designer jeans. It was as close as I ever came to being dressed casually. I put down the trowel and peeled off a pair of five-hundred-dollar gardening gloves. “Well, I guess that settles it,” I said. “It’s time to see if this place is as safe as it’s supposed to be.”

“Full lockdown?”

Some of the other gardeners had paused in their work to listen. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. My knees and back ached from hunching over the soil. “It’s our only option.” For months, my team had been preparing this bunker in the Canadian Rockies, financed by my personal fortune. When it was complete, I’d intended to gather my friends and key employees in order to sit out Doomsday—whether that came from climate change, pandemic, or asteroid impact—in relative comfort. But now the birds were in the air, none of that mattered anymore. There wasn’t time to get everyone here. My aged, leathery parents were in New York; my trophy popstar girlfriend at a charity gig in Boston; my management team still on their way from Los Angeles and not expected to touch down for another forty-five minutes, by which time it would probably all be over, one way or another. I’d have to cope with the skeleton staff already on site. Everything was screwed. All I could do now was make the best of what I had.

Thank god Juliet was here. She was my rock. What she didn’t know about the running of this bunker wasn’t worth knowing.

I was especially disappointed Frank Tucker wasn’t here. The young physicist showed real promise, and I had been sponsoring him for some time. Now, just as the kid’s research into wormholes reached an exciting point, everything was going to hell. I had hoped that in another five or ten years, I’d have been able to use Frank’s research to create a network of portals that would allow instantaneous travel between the major cities of the world. Maybe between Earth and the moon. But right now, Frank was stuck in his lab in Oxford and there was nothing I could do to change that. And even if I could magically conjure a wormhole to escape the coming holocaust, where would it lead? Earth was fucked and there simply wasn’t anywhere else to go.

I pulled out my own tablet and linked to Juliet’s. “Show me missile tracking.”

“This is what we have so far.” She fed through a Mercator projection of the Earth based on data assembled from hacked military feeds and instruments concealed aboard my own fleet of digital communication satellites. High above the scrappy remnants of the North Polar ice cap, Chinese and Russian missiles were nearing the zenith of their trajectories. Only minutes remained. On the ground, the population would be panicking. Some would be engaged in a futile scramble for shelter, while others raged at their leaders. Newsreaders would be clutching their earpieces and turning pale, unable to believe what they were about to report. Panicked crowds would be fighting to get into subway stations and underground car parks. Families would be huddling together, helplessly trying to protect each other in the face of the impending holocaust.

I had lived through stock market crashes and flu pandemics. I’d grown up with the ever-present threat of a steadily deteriorating climate and had devoted much of my personal fortune to discovering ways to fight back and ensure I could keep my loved ones safe during the next emergency. My whole life, I’d been preparing for the end of the world, and now here it was.

I cleared my throat. “Okay, sound the alarm and get everyone inside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Could this really be it? My shoulders felt like weights. All that struggle, all that work. The modern world had instant access to all the great achievements in science, art, music and philosophy, but now the barbarians were torching the library. After today, most of it would be forever lost. In the bunker’s archive, I had digital files of almost every book ever written and every song ever recorded—but they would only be of use to me, here, with my own private generator and electronics hardened against the effects of EMPs. I couldn’t use them to rebuild civilisation.

“We should have done more,” I said. If we’d had another couple of months, maybe we could have started to turn the tide of public opinion. Rigged an election or two. Deposed a few leaders or funded a few grassroots campaigns for peace. What was the point in being the richest man in the world if I couldn’t save it? I’d spent years preparing this underground refuge for myself. What billionaire hadn’t taken similar precautions? But now the hour was at hand, all I felt was a crushing sense of failure.

I should have done more.

“They pressed the button,” Juliet said, seemingly reading my thoughts. “Not us.”

“They caught us unprepared. I didn’t expect things to escalate this quickly.”

“I know.” Juliet’s voice was starting to lose its professional calm. “I’ve been hearing rumours. Something’s been going on behind the scenes. Something nobody’s been talking about.”

“Any idea what it might be?”

“I don’t know. Something to do with the outer solar system.”

“How could anything out there possibly be relevant to this?”

“There’s been some buzz about it over the past day or so.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. Not that it matters now.” She broke off to check something. “Okay, outer doors sealed. Air filters operative. We’re all zipped-up and as ready as we’ll ever be.” Her voice cracked into a nervous smile. “We did it, Haruki. We’re going to live through this.”

I pushed a hand back through my thinning grey hair. I knew she was right, but I still found it hard to reconcile the deaths of billions of people with any metric of objective success. Especially when I still had fresh dirt on the knees of my five-thousand-dollar jeans. I had intended today to be all about cultivating new life. About relaxing and taking a break from the infernal complexities of the planet’s politics. A few hours with my fingertips submerged in the loamy mulch of the gardens, my awareness pared down from the wider global perspective to the basic needs of the plant before me. I hadn’t been ready for this.

One of the missiles on the screen flashed red and my heart seemed to convulse in my chest. “Are we being targeted?”

“Fuck!” Juliet tapped her screen. “Yes, it’s a Russian Topol-M with six one-kiloton warheads.”

Indignation washed through me. “Why are they firing it at us?”

“Who knows? Maybe they think we’re a military installation.”

“Shit.” I glanced around at the garden I’d created and knew with terrifying certainty that we were about to die. This bunker hadn’t been designed to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear warhead. The idea anyone would waste a missile on this remote section of the Canadian Rockies had seemed laughable. But now, even if the lower levels survived the heat of the explosion, the upper levels would collapse like a concertina under the pressure wave, crushing everything within.

“How long?”

“Just under a minute.”

I fell to my knees in the soft dirt. This far below the surface, I didn’t think there was much chance of being instantly vapourised; but when the floor above gave way, we were likely to be flattened by megatons of semi-molten rock.

Oh gods, I thought, I hope it’s quick. I couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped in the rubble, injured and slowly dying of thirst and radiation poisoning.

“Thirty seconds,” Juliet said.

All this work, all the money I’d spent. I’d wanted to preserve something for the future and protect my family, but now I was going to die along with everyone else. Somehow, it seemed unfair.

If I’d have known it was hopeless, I would have stopped worrying and spent more time surfing.

“Twenty.

“Fifteen.” Juliet’s cheeks were wet with tears, but she seemed determined to stay at her post until the end.

“Ten.”

I thought of my parents in New York.

“Five.”

I thought of my ex-wife.

“Four.

“Three.”

My dog.

“Two.”

I closed my eyes.

The lights flickered.

The world shook to a huge pulse of sound—a thrum so deep it was barely audible, yet I felt it vibrate through every cell of my being…

And then there was nothing, save the whisper of the ceiling fans and the hammering of my heart.

I was still alive!

Had the timings been wrong? I looked at my palm screen, but the map was blank.

“Juliet?”

She had fallen into the dirt. “I’m here. Goddammit, I’m here!”

“Juliet, what’s happening? Was it a dud?”

She was silent.

“Juliet?”

“I’m reading zero impacts. No detonations.”

“So, we survived?”

“No, you don’t get it.” She sounded dangerously close to hysteria. “I’m talking zero impacts globally.”

“You’re kidding?” The missiles had been falling like a hard rain. Nothing could have stopped them. “Is the data correct?”

She swiped frantically through her feeds. “It has to be! It’s coming through on a live channel. All military bases and monitoring stations are still online. The satellite network detects no EMPs. No seismograph readings. No detonations at all.”

I fought down a wild laugh. “But that makes no sense.”

I climbed to my feet and brushed myself down. The other gardeners were standing around in puzzlement and shock. Two of them were hugging.

I’m alive. My fists clenched with a wild and unexpected fury. They tried to kill me! They tried to kill the whole damn world, but we’re still here.

The anger burned away any trace of relief. I don’t know how we survived, but I’m going to find out.

“Prepare a conference call,” I snapped. “I want all the world leaders on the screen in my briefing room within the hour.”

“They’re probably rather busy right now.”

I scowled. “I’m beyond caring. They’ll have to talk to me; I’ve got dirt on all of them. After what they just tried to pull, they’re lucky they’re not being torn apart by angry mobs.”

I stepped from the garden into the elevator that took me down to my private floor, almost half a kilometre below the surface. If I was going to confront the rulers of the world using my leverage as richest man and owner of the planet’s largest global communications network, it would be better not to be dressed as a muddy peasant.

I was halfway down the shaft when Juliet came back online. “We’ve got something from the satellite network,” she said. Her voice was shaky. She was probably in shock. “Some weird readings. Something big…”

“What is it?”

She choked back a strangled noise. “Holy shit,” she breathed, “you are not going to fucking believe this.”

And she was right, I didn’t. At least, not at first. Because high above the atmosphere, something vaster and older than the Earth had reached down and snatched every ICBM from the sky, every torpedo from the ocean, and every tank shell, mortar round, and bullet from every battlefield on the planet.

And it was not at all amused.

CHAPTER THREE

BOILING MIASMA

ERYN

After the briefing, Chen brought me a cup of coffee. I was back up on the bridge. I couldn’t be away from my duties for more than an hour or so, or the pathway I had intuited would collapse. This usually meant the ship had to drop out of the substrate when I needed to sleep. But right now, I didn’t feel able to rest. The faster we reached our destination, the sooner I’d know whether Shay was alive.

Chen looked out at the unreal light surrounding the ship. “You must love it up here,” she said.

“I guess.” While grateful for the coffee, I wasn’t in the mood for distraction. Chen seemed nice enough, but the ship couldn’t find its way through the substrate without my help. No computer could.

She perched on the co-navigator’s couch, and I felt a prickle of resentment at her casual invasion of my workspace.

“Have you been doing this a long time?” she asked, oblivious to my annoyance. “Navigating, I mean.”

“About five years.”

She looked out at the glittering, unreal light. “I can see the attraction.”

The substrate underlay our universe the way a seabed underlies an ocean. But instead of being made up of sand and mud and dead whale carcasses, the substrate existed as a kind of plasma: a roiling hot soup of disassociated atoms freed from the normal laws of physics. As it underpinned our reality, we could use it to jump from one point in space to another, crossing in hours distances that would otherwise take years or even centuries to traverse using conventional means. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be done without a conscious biological mind at the helm. I’d been told this was due to an unanticipated variation of what the physicists called the Observer Effect—the quantum physical theory that tells us the act of perceiving a phenomenon inevitably changes the phenomenon itself. Once observed, particles that have also been behaving as waves (and vice versa) collapse down into one state or the other. All the different possibilities resolve into one singular reality. The box opens and we find out whether the cat’s dead or alive. That’s how it was with the substrate. The act of looking for a pathway brought that pathway into being. At least, that’s how it had been explained to me. There had been pages and pages of equations that I skipped.

Substrate navigation relied as much on intuition as calculation. And while ships such as the Ocelot could think considerably faster than the average human, they were still just glorified computers. When they looked at the substrate, all they saw was chaos. A place where the laws of physics were more like vague guidelines than hard and fast rules. The base reality of the universe only revealed itself to a living brain. So, to get around the problem, the ships of the Continuance were connected to a specific navigator via a two-way link to an implant buried deep in the navigator’s subcortex, where it could interface with their subconscious mind—a process that had become known by the navigators and their ships as ‘dream-linking’. So, while the ship handled all the tricky mathematics, all I had to do was sit here and look out of the window while my subconscious mind collapsed the wave function ahead of the ship, turning formlessness into flightpath.

Chen turned her head to face me. “So, Snyder’s a bit of an asshole, huh? I mean, I don’t dislike the guy, but he could have fucking told us what we were getting into.”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter. I’d have been here either way.

Chen lay back in her couch. “And what do you think of Torres?”

“I get the impression he doesn’t much care for the confines of a Vanguard scout ship.”

Chen smiled. Her eyes were still the same purple colour as her hair. “He doesn’t like getting too close to people, if that’s what you mean, but he can actually be almost polite when he makes the effort.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

“I guess so.”

I sipped my coffee and kept my attention on the swirling void.

“So, Eryn.” Chen leant across the gangway separating our chairs. “Is there anyone waiting for you back in the fleet?”

“Like who?”

She gave a little shrug. “I don’t know. A boyfriend, maybe…?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Chen stuck out her bottom lip. The unnatural light of the substrate played across her cheek. “That’s a shame.”

“I guess it is.”

“So, are you looking?” She gestured at the chaos outside. “Or does all this get in the way?”

“The only person I’m looking for is my sister.”

Chen drew back. “I’m sorry. I’ve offended you.”

She looked hurt, and I belatedly realised why she’d brought me the drink. The close confines and forced proximity of life on a scout ship seemed to have an aphrodisiac effect on some people. It was like time away from the real world—a limbo between existences where anything was permitted and nothing counted, and whatever happened in that netherworld stayed a secret known only to those involved. As far as I was concerned, since leaving the fleet our relationship had been nothing more than professionally cordial. We’d made small talk and shared the occasional coffee. But now, on our last night before facing who-knew-what, she’d apparently decided to take a chance.

“Ah.” I felt my cheeks redden.

“I’m sorry.” Chen wrapped a short strand of purple hair around an index finger. “I thought whatever happened in the substrate stayed in the substrate.”

“This really isn’t a good time.”

“Damn it,” she said. “I should have known you wouldn’t be interested.”

She looked so crestfallen, I felt kind of bad. “I didn’t say that.” My cheeks were absolutely burning now, but I felt I owed her an explanation. “I don’t know. It’s… just been a long time. And I don’t usually… Not with—”

“Girls?”

“Passengers.”

“Ah.”

Flustered, she rose to leave.

I called after her, “Thanks for the coffee, though.”

“You’re welcome.” She paused at the hatch. “And I’m sorry I dropped this on you out of nowhere. But you know where to find me if, you know, you change your mind.”

“Let me think about it, okay?”

She smiled and turned away.

“Don’t take too long.”

* * *

The ship’s cat claimed not to be able to remember his original name, so I just called him Sam. For some reason, it suited him.

Sam was a ginger tabby of indeterminate breed. He had an orange coat with black vertical stripes running down his sides and banded stripes on his legs and tail, like a miniature tiger. I’d acquired him a couple of years back, when he’d trotted up the cargo ramp and curled up on a pile of used packaging material. Like most of his kind, he sported a shiny white collar that translated his thoughts into sound, allowing him to communicate with humans.

“What do you think of Chen?” I asked. We were on the bridge, and he was curled up in front of one of the heating vents.

“The female?”

“Yes.”

“She doesn’t drop enough food on the floor.”

On the couch beside mine, the ship’s envoy sniffed. He’d never really approved of Sam’s presence on board and had only learned to tolerate the animal since the cat had reluctantly agreed to use a litter tray rather than whatever random corner of the ship he happened to be in when he needed a pee.

I said, “I think she likes me.”

Sam cocked his head to one side. “I think you’re right.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“Pheromones everywhere.” He scratched behind his ear. “If I had to guess, I’d say she was in heat.”

The Ocelot cleared his throat. “I don’t think humans work that way.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“What do you think I should I do?”

The envoy rolled his eyes. “You’re seriously going to ask dating advice from an unneutered tomcat?”

“Oh god, I am, aren’t I?” I made a face. “What’s wrong with me?”

The cat sniffed. “In my experience,” he said haughtily, “humans really overthink sex.”

The Ocelot interlaced his blue fingers across his ample midriff. “I guess compared to you, they do.”

The cat scowled, but otherwise chose to ignore him. “I’m serious, Eryn. It’s been months since you last got laid.”

I flinched at the way he phrased it. “I can’t think about that kind of stuff right now. I’m going out of my mind worrying about Shay. I don’t have the spare emotional bandwidth.”

“All the more reason.” Sam stretched and slouched towards the door, tail high. “Blow off some steam. Relieve some stress.”

“What are you, my shrink?”

The cat looked back at me. “I worry. I want you to be okay. You’re one of the least intolerable humans I’ve ever met.”

* * *

The following morning, Chen came to see me in the crew lounge while we were prepping equipment for landing. She wore a charcoal grey jumpsuit with the Vanguard’s logo embroidered in large letters on the front and back.

“Reporting for duty,” she said. She’d tied back her purple hair and ditched the matching contact lenses, revealing her eyes as a lustrous chestnut brown.

“Good morning,” I said.

“I’m not too early, am I?”

“No, you’re fine.” I still wore my pyjama bottoms and a battered old t-shirt. I had only slept for a couple of hours, and now all I wanted was an IV-drip filled with coffee. Or maybe a mental jumpstart from the ship’s batteries. Snyder, on the other hand, had been awake since six o’clock this morning, checking and rechecking our equipment, and testing himself on the shooting range the Ocelot had improvised in the cargo hold. According to the ship, he’d only paused once, to drink a litre of water and inhale a printed sandwich filled with pastrami, sauerkraut and pickles.

Despite my anger at him for keeping us in the dark about what we faced, I had to admire his hustle. He had a kind of driven toughness I could never match. A hardiness learned on the job, rescuing explorers marooned on the landscapes of strange and potentially dangerous worlds. According to his personnel file (which I’d surreptitiously downloaded when I finally admitted that I wouldn’t be going back to sleep any time soon), the guy had faced all sorts of shit and always come through. When an aggressive alien pollen incapacitated the other members of his jungle team, he’d been the one to drag the survivors to safety. Caught in an avalanche, he alone managed to dig his way out and drag himself four kilometres to raise the alarm, despite a broken leg. I’m sure every mishap he’d handled and colleague he’d lost had left their share of scars on his soul—but perhaps the cruellest blow he’d suffered had been the loss of his wife in a shuttle accident while still in the fleet. Reading about it, the hairs had risen on the back of my neck. She had died in the same accident that had taken my parents, and I began to feel that maybe I understood him a little better. That maybe all his exterior toughness and apparent callousness masked a void he could never refill.

Or maybe Chen was right, and he was just an asshole.

Chen looked at me like she knew what I was thinking. “Hard night?”

“Bad dreams.”

“About your sister?”

“It won’t affect my work.”

“So, what if it does?” She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Honey, it’s okay to feel scared and upset now and again. We’re all the same on the inside. We’re all just kids in adult bodies. Everybody feels frightened and alone most of the time, and nobody knows shit about anything; we’re all just winging it the best we can.”

My eyeballs bristled with unexpected tears. “Shut up.”

Her smile broadened, and she covered my hand with her own. “You’re going to be okay,” she said. “And if you’re not, well…” She squeezed my fingers. “Maybe you don’t have to face it alone.”

* * *

I dozed during the night, waking occasionally to make sure the Ocelot was still following the correct heading. When we eventually reached our destination, his envoy was on the bridge with me as we rose out of the substrate. Together, we watched the boiling miasma give way to the cool, star-speckled darkness of ordinary space.

Candidate-623 lay directly ahead, wreathed in yellow-tinged clouds that gave it the aspect of an ancient, rheumy eye.

“Out of the fire…” he murmured.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.” He settled intertwined blue fingers contentedly over his protruding stomach. “It’s an old Earth saying that means, ‘I’m sure we’ve thought of everything and there’s nothing that can possibly go wrong.’”

In front of the heat vent, Sam the cat made a tutting noise, and curled himself into a tighter ball.

CHAPTER FOUR

SUBSTRATE FLUCTUATIONS

HARUKI

The angel entered our inner solar system aeons before the dinosaurs first walked on land. For millions of years, it lurked dormant in the sepulchral darkness of the Oort cloud—that tenuous halo of comets and ice far beyond Pluto’s orbit— watching the inner planets for signs of a technological species on the rise.

During its long life, it had evaluated every potentially habitable world within a thousand light years. But while ninety per cent of those evaluations would record nothing more significant than the slow bubbling of bacteria around submerged hydrothermal vents, or the playful insouciance of marine creatures with no ambition beyond their simple sub-aquatic subsistence, this particular assessment picked up atmospheric changes on its target world that suggested the inhabitants were evolving along a dangerous path.

The angel had already seen a brief flowering of life on Venus, before the huge tectonic ructions that caused the planet to spiral into an unrecoverable, runaway greenhouse effect, boiling away all its liquid water and leaving it with a surface temperature sufficient to melt lead. It had also monitored promising hints of life on Mars. Some single-celled organisms; even some small, skittering crab-like creatures. But the little planet was just too small to hold onto its breathable air.

The middle planet—Earth—was the only one to remain capable of sustaining living beings. The angel watched ice ages come and go. The advance and retreat of glaciers. The slow dance of the continental plates. Dispassionately, it monitored a parade of extinctions, the last of which led to the demise of the dinosaurs. It could not prevent any of these disasters, nor did it wish to. Such events were part of the natural order of things. They encouraged evolutionary adaptation and experimentation and led to the rise of new species. The only time it would have interfered would have been if it detected a threat to the existence of all life on the planet—and that didn’t happen until the eighteenth century, when it registered a sudden uptick in atmospheric carbon. Prior to that date, fluctuating levels of the element in the atmosphere could easily be explained by forest fires or other natural processes—but when an abrupt, continuing increase registered on the angel’s passive senses, suggesting the mass burning of fossil fuels, it began to rouse itself from its millennial slumber. And then later, when it started to detect radio transmissions, it knew it had been right to return to full wakefulness. We had begun to develop and exploit a scientific understanding of our world. Over the next few decades, it paid close attention to our weak signals—first radio, and then television—archiving everything for future reference and study.

Finally, when electromagnetic pulses announced the development and testing of fission and fusion warheads in the atmosphere, the angel began to make preparations to intervene. By that time, the technological overspill from our factories and power stations had begun to heat our planet’s atmosphere to levels that risked triggering irreversible and catastrophic climate change. Trajectories were calculated, dangers assessed and minimised. And then mighty wings flapped silently in the lonely darkness, nudging the angel on its way.

Drifting in undetected, it took up residence within the atmosphere of Jupiter. By the time we became aware of it, it resembled nothing more uncommon than a minor whorl of reddish storm clouds. Meanwhile, it had ruthlessly scanned our Earth, soaking up every TV and radio broadcast, every Wi-Fi signal and mobile phone transmission. Its senses traced the fine webs of information encircling the globe. They plundered the Internet more thoroughly than any hacker could ever dream. They traced electrical power grids and population densities; mapped out the routes of ships and trains and migrating herds in order to divine the complicated, interdependent nature of international trade; and gathered data on the savage reduction in biodiversity caused by pollution and other forms of climate disruption.

Then, when the angel had milked the electromagnetic spectrum for every possible scrap of information, it paused to cogitate.

Humanity threatened the existence of its own ecosystem. However, through a complex analysis of the data gleaned, the angel predicted that the problem would shortly solve itself. Global tensions had risen to a flashpoint. All it would take to trigger an international nuclear conflict would be one inciting incident.

The angel sat back to watch the coming conflagration. The destruction would be horrendous, but some species would survive, the same as with all of the previous extinction events. Once the humans had taken themselves out, new forms of life would evolve and crawl from the seas to take their turn on the Earth’s stage.

But even as the war began and the first missiles launched, the angel perceived fluctuations in the local substrate. Down on the surface, in a place called Oxford, a wormhole had been opened.

If the angel had been capable of an emotion small enough to be understood by humans, it would have registered surprise, maybe even shock. Its assessment of our technological capabilities had suggested we would not have time to discover substrate travel before our global civilizational collapse. Nevertheless, there could be no mistaking the faint dimensional disruption. Somehow, it had been done.

New protocols clicked into place.

The angel reclassified the Earth as being of the highest possible priority. It revised the status of the human race from ‘problematic’ to ‘worthy of further study’.

But the war was already in motion.

So, it intervened.

CHAPTER FIVE

INVISIBLE HOOKS

ERYN

We came in fast, accompanied by two combat drones.

Usually, I’d have performed a survey of the terrain from orbit, but Snyder didn’t want to expose our presence until it was absolutely necessary. His reasoning being that it would be better to get in close, where the combat drones could provide us with a certain amount of cover, before revealing ourselves.

Candidate-623 was a cloud-swirled crescent. As warm, humid air spread north and south from the equatorial ocean, it clashed with cooler fronts from the planet’s large polar caps, producing storms, hurricane force winds, and almost perpetual rain.

The Ocelot said, “According to my sensors, the ocean plays host to an ecosystem based around an abundant krill-like species, which absorbs enough CO2 and pumps out enough oxygen to keep the atmosphere almost breathable. I wouldn’t go out there without a suit, though.”

I looked at the waters circling the equator. “There’s life down there?”

“Only in the sea. As far as I can detect, the land’s bare and lifeless. If multicellular organisms ever crawled up out of the surf, they didn’t stay long. Either they gave up the struggle, or something drove them back into the water.”

We dropped through the upper layers of the thin atmosphere with the ship’s leading edges glowing a dull crimson. Beside us, the two drones sliced cleanly through the air. They were designed to fall fast and cool, presenting as little in the way of a visual and thermal target as possible. With their wings swept back, they resembled diving hawks. When they reached the rainclouds, they tipped back and spread those wings, aerobraking savagely while simultaneously bringing their belly-mounted weaponry to bear on any potential dangers from the surface.

From the Ocelot’s bridge, I watched them disappear into the overcast, banking and weaving around in order to shed more velocity. Then we hit the cloud deck ourselves and visibility dropped to almost zero. Lightning flickered and thunder rolled. The ship could have pierced the murk with its active sensors, but I had them turned off in order to draw as little attention as possible. We were plunging into the unknown, and I was forced to agree with Snyder that the less we advertised our approach, the better.

The mists cleared at ten thousand feet. The Ocelot fired his thrusters and deployed all airbrakes and parachutes in order to make a harder-than-standard landing on a rock-strewn plain five kilometres from the source of the transmission.

For a moment, we bounced on the ship’s shock absorbers as thick, thumb-sized raindrops drummed against the hull’s upper surfaces and the wind lashed its sides. The drones were already establishing a perimeter. In the crew lounge, Snyder and his team were unstrapping and reviewing the data we’d collected during our descent.

“The signal’s being broadcast from a ravine in these mountains,” Snyder was saying as I climbed down the short ladder from the ship’s bridge. “It’s not very high-powered and because of the rock walls, difficult to detect unless you happen to be right overhead.”

* * *

The mountains were too rugged for the crawler carried by the Furious Ocelot, so the only alternative was to suit-up and hike. While the others were down in the hold preparing their pressure suits and equipment, the Ocelot’s envoy pulled me aside.

“I have to tell you something,” he said. He took me up to the bridge and activated one of the screens. “Snyder was telling the truth when he said your sister’s team landed here. I picked up some footage from one of their helmet cams.”

“They’re still functioning?”

“The suits are running on battery power, and they’re still trying to upload their last recordings to the Couch Surfer, which isn’t here anymore.”

“So, what have we got?”

“It’s pretty bad.” The envoy tipped his head to one side. “And by that, I mean horrendous. I don’t think you should actually watch it.”

My fists tightened in my lap. “I rather think that’s for me to decide, don’t you?”

The blue man let out a sigh. “I’m only trying to spare you.”

“Then don’t.”

“Eryn, I’m serious. This footage is going to upset you. It depicts your sister’s death in some detail.”

“Just show me.”

“As you wish.”