Ken MacLeod - Newtons Wake: A Space Opera

Ken MacLeod

www.orbitbooks.co.uk

To Charlie and Ferag

Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for lots, as ever; to Charlie Stross for sound advice; to Farah Mendlesohn for critical reading and comments on the first draft; and to Mic Cheetham, Tim Holman and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

SIDE 1: DEEP SKY COUNTRY

1 COMBAT ARCHAEOLOGY

2 BLACK SICKLE BLUES

3 RETURNERS

4 I DONT KNOW YOUR FACE, BUT YOUR NAME IS FAMILIAR

5 TIR NAN OG

6 BIG IN THE ASTEROID BELT

7 NEWTONS WAKE

8 SELF-RELIANT PEOPLE

9 STARSHIP ENTERPRISES

10 ENLIGHTENMENTS DAWN

SIDE 2: WHEN THE STARS ARE RIGHT

11 TEAM SPIRIT

12 NERVES OF STEEL

13 GIANT LIZARDS FROM ANOTHER STAR

14 THE BLOODY CARLYLES

15 REBELS AND RETURNERS

16 A HARDER RAPTURE

17 SUBTLE CONCEIT

18 HEROES AND VILLAINS

19 RETURNERS (REPRISE)

20 NO DEATH ABOVE

CODA: WORLDS AND LIVES

ORBIT

First published in Great Britain in March 2004 by Orbit

Published in eBook format in 2006

Copyright Ken MacLeod 2004

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system except in downloaded authorised eBook format, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing 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 including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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

eBook ISBN 0 7481 0597 2

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www.palimpsest-bp.co.uk

Orbit an imprint of

Time Warner Book Group UK, Brettenham House, Lancaster Place, London WC2E 7EN

www.orbitbooks.co.uk

Ken MacLeod graduated with a BSc in Zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research at Brunel University he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an M.Phil. thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many acclaimed science fiction novels, three of which were runners-up for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Ken MacLeod lives in West Lothian with his wife and two children.

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Also by Ken MacLeod

The Fall Revolution

The Star Fraction

The Stone Canal

The Cassini Division

The Sky Road

Engines of Light

Cosmonaut Keep

Dark Light

Engine City

Newton's Wake

THE NEW INTELLIGENCE

DEEP SKY COUNTRY

COMBAT ARCHAEOLOGY

As soon as she stepped through the gate Lucinda Carlyle knew the planet had been taken, and knew it would be worth taking back. It bore all the thumbprints of hurried terraforming: blueish grass and moss, low shrubbery like heather. No animal life was visible, but she had no doubt it was there. Five kilometres away across an otherwise barren moor dotted with outcrops and bogs a kilometre-high diamond machine speared the sky. Complex in aspect, somewhere between a basaltic cliff and a cathedral, it had shown up on the robot probe, but that was nothing compared to actually looking at it. She turned away from it and looked back at the gate. It was marked by a hilltop henge, whether by the gates builders or by subsequent, less sophisticated minds she couldnt guess: two three-metre slabs upended, and topped by a third. One by one her team stepped forth from the unlikely shimmer and gazed around at the landscape. A yellow G5 sun blinked a bleary, watery morning eye over the horizon.

Grim place, said Macaulay, the ordnance fellow, as drizzle gusted. Minds me ae Scotland. He heaved a Charnley plasma cannon to his shoulder, mimed a shot at the distant edifice, and abashed by Carlyles sudden glare looked to the robot walkers that carried the heavier gear.

Divil you were ever in Scotland, jeered Amelia Orr, comms op and Carlyles great-great-grandmother, who had been.

Shut it, said Carlyle. She flinched slightly at her own words, but she was in charge here, and she had to stamp authority on seniority, and fast. She strongly suspected that Orr had been put on the team to keep an eye on her, and harboured contingency plans to take over if Carlyle faltered. On the inside of her helmet the names of the rest of the ten-person team lit up one by one. Meanwhile the suits firewalls fenced with the atmosphere. The planet was habitable inhabited, even, damn their cheek but its bacteria, viruses and fungi all had to be neutralised. It would be an hour or more before the suits had passed on the new immunities to the teams bloodstreams, and the suits, or at least the helmets, could be dispensed with.

Are you picking up anything? she asked Orr, in a carefully polite tone.

The older woman tight-beamed a glyph of to Carlyles head-up. Usual encrypted chatter.

Some music. Dye want to hear it?

Carlyle raised a suit-gloved hand. No the now. She swept the hand forward. Come on guys, this is gonna be a slog.

It was.

Two hours later their suits were covered in mud and stained with bits of the local analogues of bracken, moss and lichen, crawling with tiny ten-legged analogues of arthropods, and their firewalls were still running the virtual equivalent of fever, but they were all standing in front of the glittering cliffs. Carlyle let the team deploy a hundred metres away from the first visible ground-level gap and consulted her familiar. Professor Isaac Shlaim was an Israeli comp sci academic whose vicissitudes since the Hard Rapture could have filled a book, and had. So far Carlyle had resisted his entreaties to have it published.

Whaddae ye make of it? she asked.

The familiars icon filled a quadrant of the head-up. The icon was a caricatured face that Lucinda varied whenever she felt too uncomfortably reminded that Shlaim had once been human.

From after my time, he said, a slightly smug tone overlying his usual mixture of resentment and resignation to his plight. Can you confirm that it is the only such artifact on the planet?

No.

May I access your remote sensing equipment?

Carlyle hesitated. The familiars efforts to escape the circuits of her suit were as predictable as they were persistent. On the other hand, she needed his assistance more than usual.

Ill scan then gie ye a download, she compromised.

Excellent! said Shlaim. Even centuries removed from muscle-tone and breath, his cheerful compliance sounded forced.

The radar and sonar pings and full-spectrum scan took about a minute and returned a mass of data quite incomprehensible to Carlyle, or to any individual human. She filed it, isolated it, and tipped it and a copy of Shlaim into a firewalled box. Let the poor bugger fight whatever demons might lurk in the electromagnetic echoes of the posthuman relic before them.

Macaulay was chivvying his iron gorillas into setting up the field pieces to triangulate the provisionally identified entrance. Orr was lying on her back surrounded by small dish aerials. The other team members were prone on the lip of a dip, periscope sights and plasma rifles poking over it, for whatever good that would do. From here the irregularities of the diamond cliff looked like crenellated battlements, its high black hollows like loopholes. But there was no evidence anywhere Carlyle could see of firing on the moor: no burn marks in the knotty ankle-high scrub, no glazed slag. The sense of being watched was overpowering, but she knew from experience that this meant nothing. Shed felt the same tension on the back of her neck in front of natural cliffs.