Dark Currents Read online

  She examined her hands, which of all things marked her trade. The webs between the fingers were delicate but obvious. Mutation was part of the package. Bodies came back from the Void in all states, viable and non. It took the strongest mind to rebuild perfectly. Eleanor was good, but nobody of her generation was that good. Isender’s body was crippled, a lop-sided spine and buckled legs like an accident victim. Who cared? Bodies came back deformed but minds returned stronger with each voyage.

  Recently, the last three worlds or so, people had started to notice her hands even through the Assumptor field. The machine was failing, she knew, and soon she would not even be able to walk amongst her own kind without being a freak.

  Home, she thought, but what were the chances that she would ever get home?

  She had flown a score of skirmishes against the Commonwealth before that fatal mission. In the Void, freed into her own sea-lit world, she had loved to fight, had taken chances that her instructors railed over, that her peers admired and tried to emulate. She had coasted on the wave of an adrenaline that touched only the mind, as she shifted and soared and stooped on Commonwealth soldiers, lancing with her brain against the shields of theirs, shearing past them with outstretched claws to drag at their minds. She had never been freer than dogfighting across non-space, turning and corkscrewing and doubling, confounding them, outmatching them – knowing, in the moment when she shattered their minds, that even her enemies adored her.

  Three times she had received the call to drop out of the Void for a land assault, and those she hated. The sudden, angry wrench as her body was shuffled together, the hostile sight of a Commonwealth control room or hangar or mess. Her webbed hands would fumble for her kit. The Particle Spear to disrupt their electronics or their nervous systems, the Jung-Saffer cannon to madden their minds, the Strife Gun to set friend against friend, even a plain knife for the most desperate corners. A moment’s work, with Commonwealth Chasmonauts closing on her position every second, and then the blessed disintegration. Re-entering the Void to see their dark, arrowhead flecks twisting and homing, sounding out for Isender and the others to cover her retreat.

  She was a veteran. Only nine other Abyssonauts had ever lived as long in active service. New recruits spoke in hushed tones of the beautiful Lady Sealight.

  She looked at her face in the mirror. Flat, heavy-browed, heavy-jawed, the eyes dull and murky brown, the hair lank, almost colourless. It had never mattered before.

  In the hotel’s restaurant she had a huge meal, which she put on the tab. Her mind scattered over the last two days, found no details concerning money. It didn’t matter. In a hotel, on an island, at a moment of local crisis, national tension, what were the odds the currency would last long enough to make any payment worthwhile? And tomorrow she would be gone.

  The restaurant was crammed with foreign nationals trying to get out. There was no way out. She heard no ships were docking at the port, that planes were being diverted from the airfields. Embassies were barring their doors. The island Eden readied itself for the wrath of God. She was crammed in, sharing a table, wolfing down her meal. She tried to make small talk with a spiky-haired musician who talked in high, strained tones of famous names he had once played with; with a calm-mannered government man whose grey eyes flicked once a minute to her hands.

  Outside, a demonstration was shouting out for revenge. If she looked past the musician’s bony shoulder she could see placards showing a Hispanic face dashed with red, with hand-painted logos. The police were at the fringes, in nervous clumps with their safety catches off.

  “I mean, they gotta let me on the plane,” came the shaky voice of the musician. “I got a gig in Montana, man, and they ain’t gonna let me miss that for anything. My agent, she’ll get on the blower to the embassy, you watch, and they’ll all just smooth the way, know what I mean?” She looked once at his red-rimmed eyes and knew there was no gig, no agent. The government man knew it too. She wondered which government he was with.

  That one fatal mission. The Minister had called them in, all the best Abyssonauts. There was an emergency. The Crown was at stake. The Commonwealth scientists had made an advance.

  The Minister had outlined the situation in steady tones, but behind them had clamoured the musician’s same nervous fear. The Commonwealth had found, or made, a prodigy: their secret weapon to end the war.

  “This man,” she could hear the Minister saying, “this new Chasmonaut of theirs, has a power. With the aid of a machine of theirs he can transport others through the Void.”

  “Others, Minister?” came the flat sound of Isender’s voice.

  “Soldiers, Captain,” the Minister clarified. “Warriors. The Commonwealth has trained a force of old-style soldiers, expendable killers, and this new man of theirs will carry them through the Void, right to us. Think! Not six or a dozen men materialising in the base, firing once and melting away, but a hundred or more surging through our command. They’d not leave a man alive and, if we beat them off, this man of theirs could ship a new load in. They call him Icarus, their new man. He will change the face of warfare forever.”

  There were cries of horror, of disbelief. The Minister nodded, and there were tears in the corners of his eyes.

  “I know, I know. Even the Commonwealth… Our spies assure us that it’s true, however. This civil war, the burden of which has rested on your shoulders only, and those of your counterparts on the other side, will now be opened up for every man, woman and child in the nation. This will be an old-style war, with innocent men and women being armed, being sent helpless to their deaths. Instead of a duel of experts it will be a massacre of amateurs.”

  “What can we do?” She remembered herself saying that, although perhaps it was someone else after all.

  “You must prevent Icarus from reaching us. You must cut through his escort and destroy him in the Void, at all costs. It is our one chance.”

  He turned away from them then, so that they could not see his pain. At all costs. They were all expendable then. The cream of the Commonwealth Chasmonauts would be defending Icarus. This would be the greatest battle of the war. If they lost, it would be the last.

  By the time the Minister had turned back they had walked or run or been wheeled from the room, already preparing for transit into the Void.

  When she passed back through the lobby people were talking in panicked voices of two men who had been shot dead in the tourist quarter. They had been spray-painting anti-government slogans, some said. They had been foreigners. They had been carrying a bomb. Feeling full, unwell, Eleanor trailed for the lifts, making her way through the conspicuous gaps that had opened between natives and visitors. As she flapped at the lift call, a government soldier came in and stood on the reception counter. There was nothing to worry about, he announced in harsh English. No people had been shot. It was all malicious rumour put about by a minority group. Nobody had been shot and nobody should worry. Distant gunfire underscored his speech but he did not seem to notice.

  The lift attendant, who had been dressed up like a performing monkey in red and gold, was absent. Perhaps he had gone to wave a gun and join the revolution, to charge into death like last century’s toy soldier. Eleanor fingered the buttons, reaching for her floor. She found it hard to focus on the numbers, or anything else. As the lift doors closed she was already thinking of food again, needing something to stop the Void within clawing at her. She felt sick, stuffed. She wondered if she made herself throw up, whether she could force more food in.

  I’m going mad. There must be something else.

  A bath. She would have a bath. She would fill it right to the top and float there, and pretend…

  Her door clicked locked behind her and she let the Assumptor’s field die, casting off the images that had hidden her. She released the buckles of her armour and let it fall backwards off her onto the bed like a corpse. Her body, seeming heavier, more ungainly when naked, slumped itself to the bath and fumbled with the taps. For one brief, unbearably b
right moment, she considered taking a razor to her wrists as she lay in the water. She had been exiled from the Void, her wings had been torn away, what else was there to live for?

  She could not see a razor to hand, and her own knife was still scabbarded with her armour. The thought passed her by, leaving only the acid aftertaste of Would I really have had the courage?

  She could feel the hotel around her. It was a latticework of fear, stacked anxieties. People lying to themselves about their futures and their chances. Through the walls she could dimly hear prayer, weeping, a couple making love. The thought made her hurt and sad. That was what people do, she supposed. That was what the flesh did. Raised in the Void from the age of four, what would she know about how to live in these meagre dimensions?

  She had discovered, once, whether Isender was physically capable of that act. It had been more an exercise in genetics than anything else. A duty they had towards the next generation of the Crown’s soldiers.

  Twenty-seven of them had vaunted into the Void. Every Abyssonaut not already flying had been sent into the aether to stop Icarus.

  Lying back in the bath, water sloshing over the sides, she remembered with a clarity she could not apply to anything more recent.

  Isender was calling muster, stringing out their company name by name at his command, and she had thought We are nothing but names here, in the Void. At the far end of the line (and “end” and “line” had no meaning there, outside of the mind), Chertsey Vaults opined that Icarus was just a myth, that this was just training, keeping them in shape.

  Her voice, as Lady Sealight’s mind constructed it, had the same raw edge as the musician in the hotel bar, as the Minister at the briefing.

  There was no distance in the Void, but they plotted a course that would make them be where the Commonwealthers were, driving through the chaotic densities like men hauling hand over hand up a rope; falling through its vacant expanse like high-divers waiting for the water’s iron impact. The Lady Sealight soared and danced through the green-blue abyss bounded at each infinite edge with twisted walls of coral. None of the Minister’s speech had been lost on her but she knew no fear. She was home. She had been born to this. She could feel Isender laughing with her as he sped through his golden heaven towards the foe.

  The mind’s hemispheres colluded, spinning lies. They calculated and guessed their way across layers of tissue-thin reality, aiming themselves at the null-point where the waveform would collapse and they would be instantly amongst the enemy. Their minds and eyes judged the odds, the time remaining, and gave them dots to home in on, gathering stormcrows in Isender’s heaven, sharks in Sealight’s sea.

  In the mind it had been eleven minutes. In reality there was no way of measuring time nor time to measure. They were upon the enemy like hawks.

  Memory broke apart, shards all that remained of the Battle of Britain.

  She was strafing down on a Commonwealth man who had been arrowing in on Chertsey Vaults. Her mind slammed into his, unguarded and unwary, like a sledgehammer. He dissolved away into the non-stuff of the Void, leaving a cloud of dark in the sea of her mind. Chertsey made half of a panicked vote of thanks before someone else, something else, got her. Lady Sealight doubled back, circled, looking for Icarus. The name of her slain opponent bobbed once in her mind. She had clashed with him twice before.

  Isender was storming through, golden and beautiful, the very force of his motion scattering the Commonwealthers every which way. One dogged him, tried to pin him down. He reversed instantly: they wheeled and spun around each other, fighting ace to ace, minds trading thrusts and parries with the dexterity of fencing masters.

  The game of Abyssonauts and Chasmonauts, the civil war to date, had been a formal duel of gentlefolk, respect and quarter given on all sides. No more. Icarus had changed all that. Now they were knife-fighters in a street brawl, mad for blood. All around the Lady Sealight, pairs and trios gyred and danced and tried to kill each other. She had lost track of friend or foe, of Isender, of all. Someone plunged past her, clawing wildly at her brain, and it was only after her lacerating riposte that she was sure it was an enemy.

  Then it was before her. The thing that was Icarus.

  The Void bent around it, buckled and warped with the unnatural gravity. Icarus and his five hundred. Her eyes, which for two decades and more had read the Void as seascape and sunlight, could not interpret it. There was no precedent. There was just a towering blot, a hideous, bloated mass of wrongness. And somewhere at its centre, a man. Icarus.

  No hesitation. She was at him before she even knew. She took the might of her mind in both hands and lanced the monstrous boil through. Instantly she felt his defences steel themselves. He was strong, massive, armoured with the fragile minds of his cargo. He reached out for her, and ten of his people gave up their souls to fuel his brutal assault. She was sent reeling, ringing with the force of his near-miss. Power, but no finesse, she had thought then. And Icarus gobbled up another dozen hearts and minds, and his reaching hands filled the sky in his attempt to swat her.

  He will catch me, now or the next time. She had been calm. Always, in the Void, she was calm. Time loved her and slowed for her, so she could think. She saw the gaps in Icarus’ attack that would let her slip through, another close call. She saw the other gap, too, at the heart, where the twisting coils of his assault were landing lights letting her know exactly where he was. Follow the tentacles to the brain.

  One single slice of no-time in which to make the decision that was no decision. She dived for him, the spear of her mind held out before her and. as his grasp closed on her. she pierced his mind and knew that she had won.

  In her sight, then, he was a kraken, with the obscuring cloud of his ink ripped away. A kraken with its eyes transfixed by her lance. She felt, individually and collectively and in great detail, five hundred Commonwealth soldiers die in terror, each one alone.

  Icarus’ coils convulsed and crushed her then, and flung her far away. She was falling through the Void, suddenly, a hundred tiny voices in her ears as her equipment screamed at her. She reached out, but the Void betrayed her at last and she could gain no purchase on it.

  She felt herself blink in and out. It was touch and go, in that moment, whether she would exist at all. Would it not have been better if that had been the end?

  And then she was in another place and it was cold.

  Through the floor, through the bathwater, she felt a vibration, more mental than physical. A stuttered shudder that stopped almost as soon as it had started and left her in no doubt. Gunfire. The thought brought a strange calm to her, in knowing that the stormclouds had broken open at last, that the guillotine had dropped.

  The flesh surprised her. She found it standing before the bed, naked and dripping, staring down at her armour. With careful, practised speed she shrugged into it and clasped the buckles together.

  She would not get involved, she told herself. She would leave by the most direct route. None of this was her fight. Her fight was on another Earth, beneath unreal and unbounded skies.

  She could barely concentrate on the solid things around her. The stairs, she decided. Down the stairs and out. Only at the head of the stairs did she realise that she had no mental image of the hotel, where the fire exits were, where the stairs came out. Her mental map had been shattered and she could not piece it back together in the time she had. For what could have been a whole minute she stood at the stairwell’s top, mouth open, feeling her grasp of the situation slipping further and further from her.

  This is it. I’m going. I’ve lost myself. I can no longer cope.

  A heavy-footed woman in khaki shorts and shirt blundered into her from around the corner, pug-nosed face pink with annoyance. Tourist khakis, not soldier khakis. The woman rebounded from her, stared at her sharply. Her eyes were dragged to Eleanor’s hands, back to her face. She had a detached look, like a woman calculating the savings at a sale, as though she, too, had lost touch with events.

  The str
anger thumped down the stairs grimly, armoured in the assurance that some tourists have, that whatever is going on is somebody else’s problem. Eleanor staggered after her, caught up in the other woman’s blind purpose. She had, in that moment, lost all track of what she had intended to do.

  A man with a beret and a gun waited for them at the foot of the stairs. Beyond him was only the lobby, a dozen other gunmen looking out, hostages crouching on the floor, facing the great glass doors and windows of the hotel. There were other soldiers beyond the doors, government soldiers. They had a tank.

  One man stood on the hotel’s reception desk, shouting “Nobody move! This hotel is now under the control of Revulotionary Moderist Party! Nobody must move.”

  The revolutionary facing Eleanor and the tourist barked something, too swift to follow. Eleanor’s mind flickered over the weapons in her suit. She had never had to face guns in her right and proper place. They belonged to the past and to this twisted hell she had found herself in. Even as she recoiled, her companion from the stairwell tried to march across the lobby, and a revolutionary laid hands on her. She slapped the man across the face indignantly. It was a move of such practicality and simplicity that it left Eleanor, too, reeling.