Crashing Heaven

[ Very excited,] grinned Fist evilly. [ This is what I built them for.]

[ The hounds of hell, attacking Heaven.]

[Oo! I like the sound of that!]

Jack pulled out Mr Stabs’ handgun. It was a standard issue InSec weapon. He hoped that Stabs wouldn’t need it to protect himself against Grey’s maddened ex-employees. It hung heavily in his hands. He slipped the safety catch off. The lift snapped to a halt. Its doors creaked open. The Yamata chamber was a vast, domed space. There was a frozen moment of shock as its inhabitants turned and saw them. Then the night hounds leapt out of the lift, breathing fire. Fist floated behind them, a savage ghost bursting through the air. Jack moved more carefully, assessing the chamber for threats. Scaffolding held a transparent orb beneath the centre of the dome. It was about the height of a person. It glowed nanogel purple.

[ That’s Yamata!] hissed Jack.

Long cables hung down from it, plugged into four black server stacks, each about twice Jack’s height. They were perfect cubes, shimmering with red lights. Figures clustered around them, dressed in white boiler suits. Flat mirrors looked out where faces should be. Four dogs broke away from the pack. Each ran for a different cube. Some of the white figures turned to stare, some started running away, stumbling against each other in their panic. There were strange synthesised screams. One of the figures tripped and fell. Its face shattered against the ground. Smoke rose up as it shook convulsively.

Jack and Fist were halfway to the centre of the room. [ What are those?] asked Fist, pointing. Green, human-sized tubes were clumped together in groups around the room’s walls. Some were empty. Some were filled with a clear, green liquid. Some held bodies, floating in murk. [Must be where they grow the Yamata clones,] replied Jack. He aimed and fired, shattering one of the tubes. Liquid danced out of it and spilled across the floor. A white, boneless shape oozed out in its wake. [ Vat-grown organic AI husks? Lestak’ll love that. All on its own, it’s an excuse to raid.]

[ You’re recording?]

[Oh yes. And once I’ve cracked their security, I’ll be broadcasting, too.]

[Look at that one!] said Jack, pointing. One of the tubes held a much smaller body. [ Think it’s for you?]

[A body of my very own! Generous of them.]

[ We’ll take a proper look once we’re done.]

The four dogs that Fist had sent running forwards reached their destinations, pouncing simultaneously into the black cubes. Emergency lights panicked. Virtual fire roared round servers.

[ I knew it would be easy,] said Fist. [ But not this fucking easy.]

‘You were right,’ boomed Yamata, her voice echoing round the chamber. At first, she was just a silhouette of burning white light. Detail poured into the blank shape, and suddenly she was fully present. ‘I’m surprised you’ve got this far. I told Kingdom he should just kill you. Revenge is clearly a strong motive.’

‘I’m not here for revenge, Yamata,’ shouted Jack. ‘I’m here for justice.’

‘Justice?’ Yamata snorted. ‘There’s no such thing. There’s just power and what it can do for you. You should know that by now.’

‘We’re going to break you and we’re going to break Kingdom. Hit her, Fist.’

The three remaining hounds leapt forward as one. They moved quicker than thought, blurring as they went. Unreal jaws closed on unreal flesh. Flame blossomed, dancing across Yamata. She froze, locked in futile resistance. Gold-red fire became white hissing static, breaking down the shape of her body. The dogs shuddered as they broke her shielding.

That was when the first shot sang out towards Jack. There was a loud crack, followed immediately by a metallic clang as the bullet smashed against the lift doors behind them. [Shit,] said Jack, dropping to his knees. Human shapes shambled out from behind the servers. These were not the white-clad attendants. They were all Yamatas.

‘East’s flash mob broke three of my bodies,’ one of them called out. ‘Payback time.’ They moved relatively smoothly and were all armed. Bullets danced through the air.

Jack fled towards a cluster of clone tubes, hoping desperately for cover. [Shut ’em down!] he yelled.

[Give me a minute – they’ve isolated them from the main systems.]

[ Fucking hell!]

He reached the tubes and skidded in behind them. One exploded, showering him in warm, sticky liquid. The mass inside it was barely human. Shattered glass sliced pink-white chunks from it as it slithered to the floor. There was a metal control console. Jack dropped to his knees behind it, then peeked round the edge and snapped out a couple of shots. The drones advanced. Bullets rang against metal. Another container exploded.

[Shut those fuckers down!]

[ I’m going as fast as I can. Fucking fire back!]

Jack shot again. One of the Yamatas staggered. Floor tiles by Jack smashed. Shards bit his skin.

[ Hurry up!]

[ Thirty seconds. The pack’s deep in root servers. Full security access coming up – going to crash the firewall, open them right up to Ifor and Lestak. Got my own searches running too, we’re going to prove just what they’ve been up to here, and how it links back to Kingdom.]

[And my job, I suppose, is to keep us alive?]

[Pretty much, Jackie boy!]

[ THEN SHUT THE DRONES DOWN!]

[ Working on it. Firewall’s almost gone. And – oh you beauty!]

[ What?]

[One of the dogs has just copied all the files we need back to me. We’ve got a full timetable for all the terrorist bombings, plus a comms trail between Kingdom and Yamata agreeing and reporting back on each one.]

[Pretty conclusive. We still don’t know why he killed Penderville, though.]

[Details, details. I’m sure the pack’ll turn something up on that. And we’re about to be able to get it all to the outside world. A few more seconds …]

Jack squeezed out another couple of shots.

[ Firewall’s down! FUCK!] said Fist.

[ What?]

For a moment, Fist froze. He shook himself back into life.

[ I don’t know. Massive external data surge, and all security’s gone back up. No way in or out at all.] The shooting stopped. A hubbub of confused voices sprang up.

[ Ifor coming in? InSec?]

[ I don’t think so. Shit.] Fist sounded worried. Jack risked a quick look around the console. The Yamatas had dropped their guns. Some of them had fallen over.

[ It’s stopped them dead.]

[ Jack,] hissed Fist, [it went straight into Yamata. It came in through the portal that Harry used. Motherfucker, some of it’s still in me too.]

[ What? I thought you’d put countermeasures in place.]

[ I did.]

One of the Yamatas turned towards them, moving with an easy fluidity. ‘Hello Jack,’ she said, a strong Docklands accent now overlaid on her voice. ‘Fist did try and block me. But it didn’t work. Always told you he was sloppy.’

[Oh gods,] groaned Jack. [ Harry.]

[ He’s stopped the fucking dogs,] replied a deeply frustrated Fist, [and shut down all my other combat systems, too.]

Harry’s voice resounded in Jack’s head. [ It’s very good of you to help me get in here, but I think I’m going to take over now.]

All the Yamatas were laughing. A couple of them picked up guns and trained them on Jack. The ones that had fallen over were climbing back to their feet. ‘Step away from the birthing tubes, please,’ said the closest one.

‘Fuck you,’ spat Fist.

A shot snapped past Jack.

‘I don’t want to damage your body,’ said another Yamata, ‘but if I have to, I will.’

Jack moved out from behind the tube.

[ What’s going on, Fist?]

[ The fucker’s caged me.]

[Oh yes,] said Harry, a whispering intrusion in Jack’s mind, [from within].

The hounds were almost fully absorbed into the Yamata avatar, becoming inchoate black masses wrapped around her face, her throat and her body. They started to shake, then one by one they flowed away from her, spilling on to the floor to form dense, oil-like puddles. The flames flickering around the four server boxes died into nothing.

‘Time to appear in person,’ said the Yamata avatar. It shimmered briefly, became an outline filled with static, and then Harry was standing in front of Jack. He grinned with deep satisfaction. ‘I’ve been waiting to fuck that bitch up for years. I made her everything she is. I turned her from a sweat smuggler into a terrorist. I kept InSec off her back while her people set bombs off anywhere Kingdom wanted. All of that, and she really thought that if she killed me I’d stay nicely dead and she’d be safe.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Jack, astonished.

‘You still haven’t got it? Yamata worked for me.’

‘She didn’t capture you? And force you into it?’

‘Not at all.’

[ For fuck’s sake,] groaned Fist. [ I fucking warned you about him.]

‘Why?’ Jack gasped.

‘When my patron calls, I respond. Until that fucking idiot Kingdom started to lose the Soft War, and I realised the rewards he’d promised wouldn’t be coming my way. So, I decided to get myself a little leverage by reopening the Penderville case. He was always very sensitive about that. There’s something very dark indeed buried in there. I didn’t expect him to move so quickly against me, though. Oh, and that reminds me …’

For a moment, Harry looked distracted. And then, he smiled again.

‘Your little Fist opened the firewall, but I was there on the other side stopping anything from getting out. No one but you, me and him knows what’s just happened here. Nobody’s going to interrupt us. Very useful.’

‘What next, Harry?’

‘I’m impressed by your little puppet’s weapon set. Verrrry impressed! I think I’ll finally be getting my revenge on Kingdom. Might even mount a hostile takeover of my own. I always said I could run things better than that cunt. And as for you—’

Harry leant down, pointing a finger towards Jack. His face darkened, and rage shook through his voice.

‘—as for you, you little shit, you’ve been fucking my wife all these years. I’m going to cut out your mind, and take your body and wear it for my own. And I’m going to roll Andrea back to before she ever met you, and make sure she stays there for good, and she’ll be my fucking wife again, and I’ll live in your flesh and fuck her every day with it.’

Jack’s heart clenched with fear and guilt.

[ You stupid bastard!] shouted Fist. [ He fucking knew the whole time!]

Pain exploded in the back of Jack’s head. One of the Yamata drones must have circled round behind him and hit him. Harry laughed and the world vanished.

Chapter 44

Jack was lying on his back in hot, stifling darkness. A muffled mechanical snarling roared from somewhere above him. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. They were hemmed in by hard, rough surfaces. He tried to sit up, but bumped his forehead. The snarling noise came in short, rapid bursts, each one a little louder than the last.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Fist. Light leapt into being, dazzling Jack. ‘Oops!’ The light moved out of Jack’s eyes. Fist was holding a torch. They were squashed into a long, cramped, wooden box. There were gaps between some of the slats. Grey concrete had oozed through them and set hard. ‘It’s the best I could do, Jack.’ Fist was squashed into his chest. The noise started up again and he had to shout. ‘All this is virtual. We’re deep inside your mind.’

‘What’s the noise?’ Jack shouted back.

‘Drilling. Harry’s trying to break in.’

‘How long have we got?’

‘A few minutes. It’ll be enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘I’m sorry, Jack, I’ve got no choice.’

‘No choice but what, Fist?’

‘I have to do it. I’m not letting that cunt get his hands on my weapon systems.’

‘What are you talking about?’

The drilling noise was getting even louder.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Fist yelled. ‘It won’t hurt for long.’

He leant forward and clamped his little wooden hands over Jack’s nose and mouth. It took Jack a moment to realise what he was doing. He thrashed and flailed and tried to breathe, but the coffin was tight about him and Fist’s grip was firm. At last he had to give up.

Darkness shimmered and he could no longer feel the coffin’s wooden walls. He was hanging in infinite space. He thought of East’s cathedral. A great, soft rhythm surrounded him, the beating of mighty wings.

Then Jack died.

Chapter 45

The first thing that Jack felt was the cold. A bleak wind scythed through his wet clothes. There was a roaring sound. He remembered drills and a feeling that it was very important someone shouldn’t reach him. This noise was softer and more organic. He was lying on a yielding, frigid surface. The breeze gusted and a shiver shook him. Then something even colder splashed over and rolled around him, dragging him back to full consciousness. He opened his eyes.

Black sand stretched away. White foam danced up it, the sea’s softest touch. The beach seemed to carry on forever, curving away to left and to right. Water rushed back down it as the wave broke, then died back into the sea. Jack was soaked. He rolled over and sat up. Memories of the coffin’s hot closeness made the cold feel like a blessing. The grey sea stretched away to touch grey clouds at the horizon. Another wave rolled in. Jack scrambled to his feet, looking round for a little wooden body lying on the shore or bobbing in the waves. But there was no sign of Fist. The wind shook him again as he remembered an educational film he’d seen as a child, and realised where he was. ‘Fuck,’ he breathed. Fist had brought him to the outer edges of the Coffin Drives.

It took Jack a good ten minutes to reach the dunes that shadowed the beach’s edge. Every so often small gaps would open in the clouds. Bright beams of sunlight lanced through, some flickering briefly then disappearing, others burning softly on. He wondered if the clouds ever lifted. He couldn’t imagine clear skies opening up over this gloomy landscape. Thick clumps of scrubby green grass danced in the wind. Jack shivered as he walked. He hoped that his clothes would dry soon, or at least that the dunes would offer some shelter. The land of the dead lay beyond them, but no fetch was allowed to speak of it. Station people did their best to ignore everything but its most basic details, not wanting to imagine where their dataselves would spend eternity.

A shrill whistling danced towards him. At first he thought it was just the wind, but then he heard notes sketching out a simple melody. He wondered who was playing. Perhaps it was some kind of digital psychopomp, waiting to conduct him into the lands of the dead. But he’d arrived in such an unusual way. Fetches were normally very carefully constructed over a period of months. He’d broken in, a direct copy of a living mind. He wasn’t sure if the Coffin Drives would even recognise him as a functioning consciousness, if he’d be able to communicate with those others who lived within them. The thought of an eternity alone stretched out before him, and he shuddered.

At last he reached the dunes. He climbed towards the whistling, sand slipping away beneath his feet. He lost his footing and tumbled down the other side of the dune, swearing loudly. The fall winded him and it took a moment to recover. There was chuckling. A voice he never thought he’d be so happy to hear spoke.

‘That was quite some entry, Jacky boy!’

Fist was leaning back against black sand. He was dressed in white shorts and a rough, canvas smock. He held a tin whistle in one hand.

‘I knew you’d find me sooner or later. I pulled you out of the sea as far as I could, but I couldn’t wake you. And it’s cold down there.’

‘You left me?’

‘I wanted to look around! And what are you going to do, Jack? Die again?’ He tootled out a few more notes. ‘The waves were going to wake you sooner or later. And if I kept playing this, I knew you’d hear me.’

Jack sat down next to him. ‘So we’re dead now?’

‘Out there, we are. I wiped your mind and then deleted myself. There’s no thought left in that body of yours, no memories, nothing.’

‘And we’re just copies—’

‘You’ve never been software, have you? It’s how things travel when they’re digital. New copy here, old copy erased. Are you Jack? Are you just a copy of Jack? Is there a difference?’ Fist waved his hands around mesmerically. ‘Spoooooky! When you were alive, you were flesh, but you were also a pattern of mind carved into that flesh. Now the flesh has gone, but the pattern remains, unchanged.’

‘Very metaphysical, Fist.’

Fist raised an eyebrow at Jack. ‘Dying does that to you.’

‘How long have we been down here?’

‘In real time? A few hours, at most.’

‘Shouldn’t it take months to reassemble us?’

‘No, Jack. Think about it. We’re totally different from fetches. They’re built from scratch out of a lifetime’s worth of data. We’re two living consciousnesses cut and pasted directly down here. No reassembly needed, we’re already complete. And the Coffin Drives’ bandwidth is vast, so the transfer’s pretty zippy. Dying’s much easier than you’d think. Who knew?’

‘We didn’t just die – we were killed.’

Fist looked away for a moment, suddenly less cheerful. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. I had to do it.’

‘Not your responsibility. Harry forced you. He killed us just as surely as he killed Yamata.’

‘That bastard. I always told you not to trust him.’

Jack sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Fist. You were right. But we did need him. And we wouldn’t have got as far without him.’

Fist waved a wooden hand at the barren space around them. ‘We wouldn’t be here without him, either.’

Jack laughed. ‘You’ve got a point.’

‘And he’s still got our body.’

‘Can he do anything with it?’

‘No. All my hardware’s wrapped around your spine, but there’s nothing left to bring it to life. It’s like having a gun without any bullets.’

‘So he can’t fire up your weapon systems?’

‘No. He’d need us, and we’re out of his reach now. Even if he did catch us, he can’t force us to do anything we don’t want to. Even if he could, my countermeasures would break him first.’

‘I thought they didn’t work?’

‘Plan A was the coffin. It protected us for long enough to get down here. And there’s a Plan B too. Ooh, It’s a beauty!’

‘Tell me.’

‘I couldn’t stop Harry from using me as a bridge to Yamata, but when he did key parts of him were inside me. In my memory. Accessible. Lots of security there, but—’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s some ninja code working its way into him. A few hours, it’ll have gone as deep as it can, and we can trigger it. It’ll cripple him, at least for a bit – and it’ll also ping us with a precise fix on his core servers. We’ll know where he is, and we’ll be able to go after him physically.’

‘Once we’re back in the land of the living.’

‘Well, yes, there is that, but it’s just a detail. I’ll get us out of here somehow.’ Jack found himself starting to feel irritated by Fist’s breezy overconfidence. ‘In the meantime,’ Fist continued heedlessly, ‘we’ve got Harry right where we want him!’

‘Indeed,’ said Jack sardonically. ‘But even if we put aside how we’re going to get out of here, there’s something you’re forgetting.’

‘What?’

‘Kingdom. If anyone can fire up your weapons, he can.’

‘Harry hates him. He’ll never hand your body over.’

‘Do you really think Harry can stand up to a god? Sooner or later, Kingdom’ll take the body off him. And he’ll find us too. He can force us to do things we don’t want to, and we don’t have any countermeasures against him.’

‘Oh yes we do!’ Fist bounced up happily. ‘Me! I’ll just have to kill him. With a bit of warning, of course, so that someone nice and powerful can step in and sort his people out.’ He winked at Jack. ‘I’ll be very ethical.’

‘If Kingdom catches us, he’ll wipe me and burn your personality out before he drops you back into our body. By the time you get your hands on your weapons hardware, you’ll be his creature. And he’ll be able to repair you properly, and point you at whoever he likes. And that means he’ll run the Pantheon.’

‘Bollocks,’ grumbled Fist, kicking at the sand in theatrical frustration. ‘It was all looking so good.’

‘Sticking to the plan is more important than ever. We need to expose Kingdom before he catches up with us. Though gods know how we’ll do it from here. You’ve still got the files that prove he was running Yamata?’

‘Oh yes.’ Fist turned a shoulder to show Jack a little rucksack, strapped to his back. ‘Safe in there.’

‘And we might not know how we’re going to get out, but at least we can find out the last piece of the puzzle.’

‘What other piece?’ asked Fist. ‘We know everything.’

‘No. We need to find out why Penderville’s so important.’

‘I don’t see why that matters.’

‘All of this began with him. His death was nothing to do with the bombings, he died before the Soft War even began. It was nothing to do with sweat smuggling, either. Yamata was very clear about that. There’s something deep and dark there – something that Kingdom’s very scared of. We’ll uncage Penderville and find out what it is. We might also be able to release some of the anti-war people too. They’ll back our story up.’

‘A jailbreak! I’m in.’

‘There’s just one thing we need to sort out.’ Jack waved his hand at the landscape around them. ‘You got us in here. How the fuck are you going to get us out?’

‘If I can kill gods, I’m sure I can bring us back from the dead,’ Fist replied in a tone too airy to be properly reassuring. ‘Weavespace is up there beyond the clouds. I’ve got a pretty good sense of how fetches work, I’ll have a look at one and reverse-engineer a way out, we’ll be fine.’

‘We won’t be fine. We’ll be ghosts. What about my body?’

‘Remember what Harry said about it? He was going to put one of Yamata’s control systems in it and wear it. If he can do that, you can too.’

‘If we can avoid Kingdom and get our hands on it.’

‘Details, details,’ said Fist. ‘Everything’s sure to sort itself out. Oh, and, talking of clouds, there’s a silver lining to all this.’

He paused dramatically.

‘Gods’ sake,’ said Jack. ‘Just tell me.’

‘Now I’ve killed you, I can’t kill you! Neither of us live in your body any more, so I won’t have to take it from you and you won’t have to die in it!’

‘Fucking hell, Fist,’ groaned Jack.

‘I thought you’d be happy,’ said Fist, sounding hurt.

‘I suppose it is good news. But it doesn’t mean anything if we can’t get out of here. And if we can’t find my body again and bring down fucking Kingdom.’

‘Gods, Jack, you worry too much. We’ll escape first, we’ll worry about the rest once we’re out. We need to find some fetches, I’ll take a look under the hood, if that doesn’t work something else will turn up, we’ll go from there.’

‘That’s not really a plan, Fist.’

‘And you want to jailbreak Penderville and his mates. So we need to go where the dead guys hang out. Where’s that? Not too many of ’em round here.’

‘Fucking hell.’ Jack grumbled for a bit, but in the end had to admit that Fist was right. ‘We’re on a big, round island,’ he said. ‘The dead live in the middle, beyond these dunes.’

‘Then let’s go find them.’

It took much longer to cross the dunes than it had the beach. Jack slithered up and down, straining to reach each peak then tumbling down the other side. His feet vanished in soft black avalanches whenever he put any weight on them. He found that half-climbing, half-crawling was the most efficient way of moving. His wet clothes hung heavily on him and black sand stuck to him, rubbing against his skin like so many small razors.

‘It’s a pretty convincing simulation,’ commented Fist cheerfully. ‘Very impressive.’ Being lighter, he was finding the going far easier.

‘Easy for you to say,’ Jack wheezed. He’d been panting for a while now, forcing himself to keep going as he felt unreal muscles become more and more tired. ‘You don’t get out of breath. Can you turn my physical presence off ?’

‘Sorry, Jack. You’re still very new to this virtual lark. Your subconscious expects physicality. Losing it all of a sudden would be too much of a shock. All sorts of bad things would happen.’

‘Can’t be worse than this.’

Fist didn’t hear him. He was already skipping down another sand dune. Jack half-ran, half-tumbled along behind him. Fist ran quickly up to the top of the next one, his rucksack bobbing perkily, leaving Jack sprawled at its base.

‘Jack – get up here! This is your last dune.’

‘Thank the gods.’

Jack dragged himself up to join Fist. The wind snapped at him. His clothes were nearly dry. ‘So that’s where fetches live,’ he said, looking down at the sight before him.

The dunes formed a vast circle around a deep, dusty, lens-shaped depression, several kilometres across. A river stretched all the way around the rim of the dip, a dark ring, leaden in the gloom. Four bridges crossed it, equally spaced at the four points of the compass.

Beyond the river, corrugated metal gleamed dully, sometimes almost silver, sometimes a rusted red, forming an uncountable rabble of small buildings and shacks. Hard, bright patches of colour blazed out where shafts of light broke through the clouds from the weave. A round, black lake lay at the heart of the ramshackle city, a pupil in the city’s lens. Its waters were perfectly still – a mirror, showing the sky back to itself.

At the heart of the shining waters was a higgledy-piggledy pile of something that at first looked like rubble. Looking closer, Jack saw that it was a mountain of small black cubes.

‘I never imagined it like this,’ he told Fist.

‘Can you see anyone?’ Fist replied.

‘I don’t know.’

Movement was visible throughout the Coffin Space, but it was difficult to tell if it came from people or from the wind snatching at loose metal. Jack couldn’t make out the geography of the city. There were no roads. He imagined tight alleys and passages squashed between rickety houses. Remembering the city’s inhabitants made him see it as a great, overfilled cemetery, graves and tombs squashed together, coffins tipping against each other where the earth between them had subsided.

Fist skipped down the dune. ‘Come on!’

Jack imagined all the dead he’d ever known, clustered in the squalor before him.

‘Come ON! Let’s go meet some fetches!’

Jack let himself slide down the dune and set off towards the nearest of the bridges.

‘That’s interesting,’ Fist shouted back at him. ‘They manage time differently on this side of the dunes.’

It was indeed difficult to measure its passing in that empty landscape. Jack had a sense of an endless march towards the bridge, between the river, the dunes and the shifting clouds above. Step after step jarred through his body, telling him that he was moving forwards, but nothing seemed to change. Fist paced beside him, for once silent. At various points Jack said something, but Fist said nothing in response, leaving him unsure whether he’d only imagined speaking.

Suddenly, they were standing on the bridge.

‘I didn’t realise we were so close to it,’ said Jack.

‘We’ve been here for an hour or so.’

‘But we’ve only just arrived.’

‘I suppose there’s not much point giving the dead a shared sense of time.’

Jack clutched the bridge’s handrail. It was hard and cold. He clung on to it, fearful that he was imagining this too, that he would suddenly find himself trudging again through the wastes of Coffin Space.

Fist peered over at the city. ‘I still can’t see anyone moving around. Slackers.’

They started walking across. The river was in full spate beneath them, but no sound rose from it.

‘Listen to that, Jack.’

‘There’s nothing.’

‘Exactly! The beach wasn’t bad, but this bit of the simulation’s really cheap. You’d think they’d treat the dead with more respect. No wonder they’re all still in bed.’

They crossed the peak of the bridge. Two figures were standing at its end, one short, the other tall. There was an empty space between them that implied a missing third.

‘Were they there just now?’ asked Fist.

‘I don’t know. I think it’s the first time we’ve seen them.’ Jack shook his head. ‘This is hard work.’

They continued their walk. Whenever Jack found himself becoming spatially confused, he’d watch the pillars that supported the handrail go by. He usually managed to convince himself that he was actually moving forwards.

‘I don’t know how they stand it, Jack.’

‘No wonder they always love coming out to visit.’

The two figures became more distinct. One was only about a third the height of the other. Both were bundled up in dirty rags. It was difficult to tell their sex. Jack wondered if they were just statues posed to ward off or welcome strangers. There was nothing else visible that could have been a person – or rather, as Jack reminded himself, a fetch. Again, he imagined being trapped here perpetually. He idly wondered when his sanity would leave him. It occurred to him that this environment might not allow that much change, that even the relief of madness would be impossible.

‘We’ve got to get out of here, Fist.’

They reached the end of the bridge. As they came closer to the figures Jack saw that they had white sheets draped over their heads. They did seem to be human, or some recreation of something human, for each was pointing down with one white hand. The hands shimmered oddly, never quite settling down into a final, fixed image of themselves. ‘Posers,’ said Fist.

The wind rattled through the streets of the city, dancing between the pillars of light that speared down from the clouds. Blank windows and empty doors stared out at Jack and Fist. Flickering lights lit some of them, as if a thousand televisions had been left turned on in a thousand empty rooms.

Jack walked towards one of the figures. It didn’t move. He found himself next to it. It was the taller of the two. There was a white sheet in his hand. A shimmer of a face was looking up at him. It contained all ages; sometimes a baby, sometimes a child, sometimes a young adult, sometimes haggard and old. It shifted between versions of itself so quickly that it was difficult to read, but then some sort of stasis was achieved and there was one face looking up at him.

‘Oh,’ breathed Jack. ‘It’s you.’

‘Hello Jack,’ said his mother. She was as she’d been when he left Station for the Soft War. He reached out and took her arms in his hands, testing the reality of her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, his voice full of grief.

‘I know.’

Without any movement she was holding him, and he her. Something within Jack broke and he wept. He kept on apologising. She held him close, her soft hands pulling his cheek against her soft hair. She held him close. At last he was able to talk.

‘How did you know I was coming?’ he asked her.

‘The waves tell us of new fetches. We send the right person out to meet them. We felt you coming in from the sea, but you’re so different from us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Let me show you.’

‘What about Fist?’

‘Oh – your puppet. Where’s he gone?’

Jack looked around for Fist, surprised that he’d been so silent for so long. Someone was giggling. Jack remembered the sound from life.

‘Issie?’

She skipped into view, Fist dancing along with her. She shimmered with change too, but there was much less variety in her, for she’d lived barely a tenth as long as Jack’s mother.

‘I came down with Jack’s mummy. They said Fist would be here!’ she chirped happily.

Jack had never seen her true face, only the skull. It shimmered from child to baby and then back again, beaming with fresh, open joy.

‘I had so much fun playing with him! And now he’s here, and you’re here, and everything’s going to change! I might even get to go travelling like he does! Oh, wonderful!’

She skipped towards him. Jack readied himself for another hug. But then there was a bright, silent explosion. A sunbeam leapt out of the clouds, burning into being around Issie. Where she’d been standing there was suddenly only a transparent pillar of light.

Jack took a step back. Fist’s face mimicked shock. Jack felt his mother squeeze his hand.

‘What happened?’

‘Her mother called to her.’

‘Lestak?’

‘Yes. She had to go. Any one of us can be called, at any time. The light breaks through from the weave, and summons us into it, and we go to manifest in your world. To be your puppets.’

‘You’re not puppets.’

‘You find your favourite memories, and decide that that’s how you want us to be, and then we are forced to conform to that. What would you call it?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about it before.’

Fist was nervously skirting the sunbeam. He didn’t hear Jack’s mother. ‘This is heavy stuff, Jack,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think we can use it to get out. We could try and climb up one, but I think it would break us.’

‘Can’t we get someone to summon us?’

‘Nobody knows we’re here.’

Jack turned to his mother. ‘Can we send a message out with you?’ he asked her. ‘There are some files we need to get out.’

‘We can’t speak of life here when we’re up there,’ she replied. ‘And we can only travel out with what we remember from life, nothing else.’

Jack thought of Andrea. His mother’s voice was made of memories too, patchworked together from all the words she’d ever spoken.

‘It’s the same for all of you?’

‘Yes. I’ll show you. Fist, come here.’

She took him and Fist by the hand. All of a sudden they were overlooking the city from the top of a high metal building. Looking down, Jack saw a ragged jumble of shacks, the spaces between them never quite coalescing into streets or alleys. The soft flickering that he’d noticed on the edge of the city pervaded them all. Sunbeams danced at random around them.

‘You can see where we were standing,’ his mother told him, pointing. ‘There – the sunbeam by the bridge.’ It was a mile or so away. The bridge was a dark shape against the darker river. ‘And you see all the beams that leap into the city, pulling our minds away from here, just as we’ve begun to coalesce? I’ll show you what they do to us.’ Now they were inside one of the shacks. A flickering figure stood before them. It was naked, but there was nothing obscene about its nudity. It never fell into a single version of itself, so it was never defined enough for its flesh to be seen and properly parsed.

‘So many memories, Jack, to try and control. Sometimes we come close. Sometimes one of us approaches coherence, a final interpretation of all the data a life has left behind, but then the fetching light comes down from the weave and we fall to pieces again, broken by the nostalgia of the living.’

Jack thought of Andrea’s music. It was a focus for her memories, giving them a shape and narrative, pulling her back to a single, self-defined version of herself. His mother had no such resource to draw on.

‘How can you speak to me so clearly? Why aren’t you like – this one?’

Jack waved towards the shimmering figure. It seemed to be aware of his presence. A thousand ages of the same head turned towards him. Compound eyes tried to focus.

‘Your father’s never rolled me back, so I’m more structured than most. And the attention of all the rest of us is on me, holding me together. We’ve never had a visitor like you. If you can escape, you can tell them about all this.’

Fist had let go of Mrs Forster’s hand, and leapt on to the windowsill. While she’d been talking, he’d been scanning the city. Now, he turned back.

‘You mean – they’re all like this one? None of them ever resolving?’ he asked.

‘None of us ever can.’

‘Motherfucker.’ He turned to Jack. ‘It’s bad enough being yourself and then getting reprogrammed. This lot don’t even get that far. I wish I could give them all a feather like Andrea’s, without getting fried by the fucking Pantheon. I wish they could all become more than just puppets. The living really are a shower of cunts.’

‘But – nobody ever knew,’ said Jack. ‘The Pantheon never show us any of this.’

‘They wouldn’t,’ Fist shot back angrily.

Suddenly they were at the lakeside. There were maybe fifty metres of black, muddy earth between the city of the dead and the silent lake. Streams running out of the city and into the depths had carved soft lines in the mud. A richly stagnant smell hung in the air.

‘So many don’t even get to exist as fetches,’ said Jack’s mother. She gestured towards the great pile of dark blocks at the heart of the lake. They had a hard, rough texture to them, tumbled together as if by a child bored of its building blocks.

‘What is that?’ Jack asked her.

‘It’s the prison. Some come to the bridge, but are snatched away and enclosed before they can even find a word to speak.’

‘That’s where Penderville is,’ said Jack. ‘And Grey’s peace protesters.’

‘We met some of their children,’ Fist explained. ‘They’re locked away, too. Just not quite as finally as this.’

‘Each of those blocks holds a weave presence?’ continued Jack.

‘Yes,’ his mother confirmed sadly. ‘Each one’s labelled with name, date of decease – everything.’

‘So all we need to do is open them up. Fist?’

‘Fuck yes. It’s not a god, but it’ll do for now.’

‘And that’ll set alarm bells ringing. The Coffin Drive admins will run diagnostics, and they’ll need a two-way link for that. They’ll see us, and we’ll be able to talk to them. I think we’ve found our ticket out of here.’ Jack turned back to his mother. ‘Can you take us to the prison?’ he said.

Before she could reply, there was a dazzling shock. Light burned out of the sky and exploded around them, catching Jack within it. He felt that he’d been lifted out of himself. A shape that could have been a face hovered before him. It resolved and became deeply familiar. It was his father. He was crying. Jack had never seen him looking this vulnerable. He wanted to reach out to him, but there was nothing to reach with. He’d lost his body in the white light.

‘Get out!’ yelled his mother. ‘Quickly! Before it’s too late!’

Jack felt a huge strong push, and then heard Fist shout ‘Fuck!’ He stumbled backwards. A white pillar blazed in front of him. His mother’s rags lay scattered just by it, fading under the hard light. She’d been called away.

‘That was pretty fucking Oedipal,’ said Fist, picking himself up off the ground. ‘Knocked me over, too. No damage, though!’

‘I’m fine too,’ Jack replied. ‘Thanks for asking.’

‘Well, that’s all we’re going to get from her,’ Fist continued obliviously. ‘At least for the moment. And who knows what sort of state she’ll be in when she gets back!’

Joy and grief pulsed together in Jack. He’d found his mother and then lost her again so quickly. He so wanted to see her again, but to do that he had to escape the Coffin Drives and then best Kingdom. He pushed emotion to one side, forcing himself to focus on the practicalities of the situation.

‘We need to get to that island.’

‘But how do we get there now your mum can’t zap us over?’

‘We swim.’

‘For fuck’s sake Jack, I’m made of wood. I’ll swell right up!’

‘Fist, we’re in a simulation.’

‘That simulates real physics.’

‘Then you’ll float and you’ll be fine. Now, will the files be OK?’

‘More worried about them than me?’

‘Fist,’ warned Jack.

‘The rucksack’s completely waterproof. Unlike certain people I could mention.’

Fist clung to Jack as they squelched towards the black, oily lake, grumbling all the way. By the time they reached it they were covered in mud. Its cold, still waters stank of decay.

‘Can’t we find a boat?’

‘Can you see one anywhere?’

Fist sighed and wrapped his arms tightly round Jack’s neck. As Jack swam, ripples rolled away from him, the only movement on the lake’s dark surface. Fist’s head and upper body were above the water. Jack distracted him by asking about strategies for hacking into the prison cubes. ‘It’s going to take a bit of creativity,’ he said thoughtfully, then went quiet, fascinated by the problem.

Jack worked hard to keep his own head above water, but couldn’t help letting it dip below the surface. Bitter water slipped into his mouth. A confusion of memories assaulted his mind. None, he realised, were his own. He lifted his head up and spat. Other people’s lives receded. ‘This isn’t water,’ he said, his voice full of realisation. ‘It’s memory. It’s what happens to fetches when nobody comes looking for them.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Fist replied disparagingly. ‘It’s like the sea round the outside of this place – low bandwidth simulation. It’s cheap servers and lazy programmers. It’s not very nice, but that’s the Coffin Drives for you.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Bless you, Jack, you’re not used to being virtual. It’s easy to let your imagination run away with you in a place like this.’

‘Really?’ said Jack, and dived down.

For a moment Jack and Fist inhabited a thousand fragments of mind, individual life shards that had gleamed and then spun away from them with all the beauty of a shattering stained-glass window. It was impossible to pick out overall patterns, but here there was a soft kiss, there the touch of a raindrop, a sudden note of music or a glimpse of Station when it had been so much smaller. All these broken notes combined into a cacophony of consciousness that had its own dying beauty. The moment stretched out, because every individual memory was unanchored from time. And then they burst spluttering out of the water, and the riot of memory left them.

‘God’s shit!’ shrieked Fist. ‘You’re right. This lake is where fetches die.’

‘The Pantheon always said our memories were a resource too precious to lose. But if this is where they end up – so much white noise, and then I suppose they just fade away.’

‘Wow. More bullshit from the gods. Whodathunkit, eh?’

They reached the island and clambered on to the lower blocks. ‘Rucksack’s OK?’ checked Jack.

‘Files untouched. I’m rather good at luggage. Maybe I should do it professionally when all this is over.’

The blocks’ hard edges were decaying. The stone of each was soft, falling away where the water touched it. As Jack and Fist slithered over them, chunks slid off.

‘Fresh minds, melting away,’ said Jack. ‘They’re like sugar cubes in tea. I can’t believe they’d do this. They’re editing anyone who disagrees with them out of Station’s memory. Can you open the blocks?’

‘I’m building a programme that’ll crack them all. When it finds Penderville it’ll bring him straight to us.’

‘Ready to go?’

‘We need to get to the top. It’ll sink down into the pile from there.’

It was impossible to tell how long it took to clamber up the pile. The higher they went, the more individual blocks retained their integrity, until those at the peak were hard-edged and polished to a high gloss. It was hard to grip them. When Jack finally reached the highest one, he collapsed, panting. Fist scrambled up and sat down next to him.

‘All ready.’

‘Do it, Fist.’

Fist stretched his hand out, palm up. For a moment, it blurred. Jack peered at it, and thought for a second that it was covered in white dust. Then he realised that Fist had summoned hundreds of tiny versions of himself into being. He flicked his hand and the tiny horde dropped away, tumbling across the black surface of the topmost cube. As they touched it, they became so many shimmering flames. A few sank into the surface of the cube. The rest danced across it, flickering towards the others beneath.

‘How long?’ Jack asked him.

‘Here? Who knows?’

‘I wonder when they’ll notice topside.’

Lightning flared in the clouds above the city, then roared down in hard, jagged lines. Bolts ploughed into it, raising gouts of flame and clouds of smoke. There were maybe a dozen impacts.

‘They’ve realised someone’s digging up granny,’ said Fist, his voice full of glee, ‘and they really don’t like it. Pretty impressive diagnostics!’

‘That’s no diagnostic programme,’ replied Jack, sounding worried. ‘It’s an attack.’

Screaming drifted across the necropolis. The flames disappeared. Torn at by the breeze, the pillars of smoke they’d thrown up quickly lost integrity, falling away into nothing.

‘No it wasn’t,’ Fist told him confidently. ‘You’re getting rusty. That was just the insertion.’

‘And that’s what they’ve dropped in.’ Jack pointed at a small, dark mass, floating towards them across distant rooftops. As it came closer, he made out a bulbous head with a tiny body dangling beneath it. There was a single pale spot at the centre of the creature’s forehead.

‘Oh shit.’ Fist sounded genuinely shocked. ‘Fucking no.’

‘What?’

Shock became outrage. ‘It’s a puppet embryo. One of the six that survived. They really do exist. Get the fuck out of here. NOW!’

Jack was already slithering down the hard cubes, half in control, half-falling. Fist followed him, leaping from cube to cube like a small, brightly painted goat.

‘How can they hurt us?’ yelled Jack, surprised and worried by Fist’s reaction.

‘They’re like me before I merged with you. Code looking for content. They eat memories. They’ll suck the identity out of whatever they touch. And we’ve got more identity than anyone here.’

Three or four other figures appeared in the distance as they slid towards the water. ‘Fucking Kingdom!’ screamed Fist. ‘It took us a month to mesh, and the fucking doctors held me back every step of the way. Those things will do it in seconds. The overload’ll kill them, but they’ll eat us first.’

‘How do we stop them?’

They plunged into the water before Fist could answer. Fist grabbed Jack as he started swimming, hard. Holding his head up only slowed him down. Then he was underwater, and memories rushed over him. He felt that he was pushing himself through a thousand different lives. Random moments leapt through him, appearing as a broken kaleidoscope of centuries of Station life. It was impossible to find any coherence in them. He let each one leap up, then drift away.

Every few moments Jack broke out of the water, took a breath of his own coherent self, and plunged back down again. The past roared in his ears. He focused on holding himself together while moving in the right direction. He wondered how Fist was experiencing the waters of the memory hole. Every few seconds the puppet cried out, or his body shook.

At last they reached the dark shore. Jack stood and water fell off him. Memories drained away. Jack took a step and nearly slipped over. It was difficult to maintain balance on the lake’s muddy floor, harder still when the first of the embryos flew at them, screaming. Tiny limbs flapped excitedly. Its child body was a scribble of half-formed lines. The head tipped toward them. The pale dot in its forehead was a round, unclosing mouth, jagged with fractal swirls of teeth.

‘Don’t let it bite you,’ screamed Fist. ‘Get it into the water!’

Jack snatched it out of the air. The mouth grabbed for his hands, all hunger. He plunged the eyeless face down. A splash and it was deep in water. He imagined memories flooding the embryo’s little unanchored self. It quickly stopped struggling. Jack let it float to the surface. It was already losing form, black lines unravelling into dark water.

Fist was sobbing. ‘That’s me,’ he choked out, ‘before I was born.’

‘Are you all right?’

Another embryo appeared.

‘Fuck’s sake. RUN!’ screamed Fist.

They were hurtling towards a tiny alleyway.

‘How do we stop them?’ yelled Jack, staring wildly around. Fist howled as a shack wall dissolved into nothing and a third embryo attacked. Behind it, a shuddering figure collapsed, black liquid memories bleeding away.

‘They’re breaking fetches!’ Fist’s voice was full of grief and rage. He leapt off Jack and charged the embryo. Using a brick as a club, he smashed its body. Scribbles of darkness shimmered, then died away. The ravenous, broken head disappeared last. Fist wouldn’t stop slamming the brick down. Jack tore it out of his hands.

Then there came the sound of music, soft and distant and full of memories. ‘Can you hear that?’ said Jack. Fist didn’t answer, tormented by what he’d just done.

Jack snatched him up and set off again. ‘Where now?’ he asked. Fist didn’t reply. He half-recognised the music and ran towards it. It became louder and louder as they neared it. Fist wept on Jack’s back as he took the next two embryos, stamping one into an explosion of dark lines and smashing the other against a wall. Both were soaked in broken fetch-blood.

‘Why aren’t they hurting us, Fist?’

‘Your hands.’

Jack looked down and saw bruises, leaking black liquid. His fingers were nearly transparent. Fist too was becoming a ghost.

‘The files?’

‘Safe. They’re inert. Not like us.’

Memories bled out of Jack. Time spun and it was hard to know why he was running, what he was running towards. The music was an anchor, holding his identity in place. Andrea burned in his mind, but he often forgot her significance. He feared he was losing himself.

There was more screaming behind them. ‘No,’ Fist moaned, ‘not another.’ It darted forward but Jack ducked and it missed them. It cut through a wall, then a fetch. Memories crumbled instantly to nothing. The embryo fed and died. Jack ran. They burst out of the alleyway, into open space.

‘GO!’ screamed Fist. One final small figure was closing on them. There was a shining light ahead, a self-contained orb. The music throbbed with grief and anger and triumph. Jack felt himself beginning to lose coherence. Sound triggered memory cascades. A voice screamed ‘JUMP!’ He threw himself forwards. A circular jaw ground against his leg. He could barely breathe. Teeth cut into his skin and he felt a great, devouring appetite hammer at the gates of his mind.

Then the light took him, and for a moment nothing existed.

There was a woman in front of him, hanging in midair on wings made of song. They shone like an angel’s, but the feathers they were made of were barbed and spiked like a demon’s.

‘Hello, Jack,’ said Andrea, her voice full of care. ‘And Fist. You’re safe now. Thank you for the present.’

The wings surrounded him and there was a kiss. A new music at once exploded from and reasserted every memory he had. With a shock that stole the last of his energy he became himself again.

‘It was Kingdom,’ he said.

‘I know.’

And then there was nothing at all.

Chapter 46

When Jack awoke, he was surprised and not a little relieved to find that he remembered who he was. He was lying on the cold earth, and there was a weight on his chest. He opened his eyes and saw Fist sitting on him. The puppet had his head in his hands and was shaking. The undamaged rucksack was strapped safely to his back. They were on the edge of the city of the dead.

In the air above them hung a snowflake.

Jack sat up, cradling Fist as he did so. The puppet let himself be held, falling limply against his chest.

The snowflake was floating directly over the centre of the city of the dead. Its lowest point brushed the top of the dark pile at the heart of the lake, which was substantially smaller than it had been. Jack saw shades swimming through memories to reach it. Others were clambering up the pile or clinging to the pure white of the snowflake, climbing slowly towards the sky. The snowflake’s peak broke through the clouds and into the weave. The dead were pulling themselves back into life.

Jack was awed at the sight. He wondered how the living would receive both the unadulterated dead and the fact of such direct Totality interference in Station matters. It was, he supposed, an act of war.

Fist kicked feebly against him, reminding him of more immediate issues.

‘Are you OK?’ Jack asked him.

‘Go away!’ Fist’s voice was at once aggressive and broken. Looking round, Jack saw why. The wind played at dying fragments of code, the lines that had defined the embryos. ‘They’re all dead,’ spat Fist. He’d stopped leaking memories. Jack assumed that Andrea had stabilised him too. He wondered where she was, if they’d now actually won. It was clear that Fist didn’t perceive the battle’s climax as a triumph. ‘They hadn’t even been born,’ he said hopelessly.

Jack held him close. ‘We didn’t have any choice,’ he reassured him.

‘So much waste.’ Fist was silent for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was low and quiet and hard with fury. ‘I’m going to kill Kingdom. I’ve got everything I need to break him and I fucking will. If I have to die I’ll fucking do it.’

Dormant machinery sighed and creaked in the depths of Jack’s mind. He was very glad that, for the moment, Kingdom was out of their reach. He tried to soothe Fist, but the puppet wouldn’t let himself be consoled. Jack gave up and asked about Andrea and Penderville. Fist said nothing, consumed by his own thoughts. For a moment, Jack wondered if Penderville too was climbing up the snowflake, if Andrea had used her wings to rise up and find him. But Fist had said that the search programme would bring Penderville directly to him. The thought that he might have melted into the memory lake hit Jack like a punch.

And then a fetch shimmered into being. It was barely coherent, lying like a man-shaped mist on the grey ground.

‘Look, Fist. It must be Penderville.’

Fist turned his back. ‘Fuck off.’

Jack left him to his pain and walked over to Penderville. The fetch was shuddering silently through multiple versions of itself. Child, teenage, adult selves sketched themselves across the opaque materials that life had left behind, emerging for a moment into clarity and then vanishing. Jack even recognised the vacuum-frozen corpse face he’d seen out in Sandal’s docks. Everything flowed in constant gouts of change, except for the mouth. It was always a gaping O, howling pain and loss. After Penderville’s death, his existence had become a perpetual scream.

Jack sank to his knees by the fetch, wondering whether it could ever have anything coherent to say. Andrea could help, but he didn’t know how to reach her. He stretched out to touch a shape that might have been a shoulder. There was nothing but pity in him. The silent scream continued as his hand sank into Penderville’s body. Cold bit into Jack, and then depression enclosed him. He’d never imagined that such density of guilt could be possible. He snatched his hand away, and immediately the pain was gone.

‘Needs stabilising,’ said Grey in a calm voice. Jack turned. Grey’s presence was shock enough. He was even more surprised to see his patron arm in arm with East.

‘What the hell are you two doing here?’

‘Not quite hell,’ replied Grey breezily. ‘Just the Coffin Drives. And we’re here because of the Totality, just like Andrea. They opened a path down here. We all followed them in.’

‘You weren’t just looking to avenge Corazon’s death,’ said Jack to East. ‘This goes far deeper than that. You’re in partnership with Grey.’

‘Why do you think I looked after little apostate you?’ purred East. ‘You were working for my lover, setting him free.’

‘I’ve been working on my own. For my own purposes,’ declared Jack, with as much conviction as he could muster.

East’s laughter rang out in the dead air. ‘Of course you have.’

‘Don’t tease the poor man,’ Grey told her. ‘He’s been through enough.’

‘Not as much as Penderville,’ replied Jack. He turned back to the broken ghost beside him. It screamed on. ‘We need to help him.’

‘Fascinating,’ said East, peering down at the fetch. ‘He’s all crisis. I wish my news producers were this focused.’

Jack turned to East. ‘You disgust me,’ he spat.

‘If you were onweave you’d be watching me, along with all the rest of them. Now,’ she said, turning to Grey, ‘where’s Andrea?’

Jack wished that he had a way of, for a moment, forcing them both out of existence. Their presence had polluted his determination to help Penderville, reminding him that it was driven by specific motive rather than pure altruism.

‘Andrea’s with the Totality,’ Grey replied. ‘Helping stabilise all those fetches before they reenter the weave.’ He turned to Jack. ‘That feather’s a pretty powerful tool,’ he commented. ‘She’s giving each of them an individually customised copy of it.’

‘Ask them if they can spare her,’ East told him.

Grey closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘They say yes,’ he said.

When Andrea appeared it was without any fuss. One moment she wasn’t there, the next she was walking towards Jack. The air around her vibrated with the faintest suggestion of wings, folding themselves away. Her appearance had none of the dancing imprecision that Jack associated with fetches manifesting in the Coffin Drives.

‘We need you to stabilise Penderville,’ East said.

Andrea ignored her. ‘Hello Jack. It seems I’ve made a bit of a splash.’

‘What happened?’ asked Jack, reaching instinctively for her hand. Andrea took it. At last the matter of their bodies was identical. They could touch as equals. The gods were suddenly so unimportant.

‘Harry came to me, furious. He told me everything. He thought he was taunting me, that he’d be able to roll me back and I’d forget it all. I told him to fuck off, and then I came to find you. He couldn’t do anything to stop me.’

Jack smiled with relief. ‘The feather worked,’ he said.

‘It was a wonderful starting point.’ She drew in close and kissed him. For a moment, they lost themselves in each other. Then she pulled back and asked: ‘Where’s Fist?’

‘Over there.’

He was gaping at her. [God, Jack, if you could see her as I do.] All the rage had gone from his voice.

[ What do you mean?]

[Such coherence. Far more than I gave her.]

‘Your understanding of fetch data structures is remarkable,’ said Andrea, giving him a broad smile. ‘But you hardly know me at all. I had to restructure the feather to fit myself.’ Her wings pulsed in and out of existence. ‘And then I found I needed more than one.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Fist replied bashfully. It struck Jack that the puppet had never received such clear, unambiguous gratitude before. ‘I didn’t have much time.’

‘You did a beautiful job,’ Andrea reassured him. ‘Now I have complete control over every part of myself. I can travel anywhere in the Solar System. And now the Totality have opened the way, I can come and go from the Coffin Drives at will. We’re using my rewrite of your feather code to stabilise all the other fetches, so they can do the same. You’ve freed us all.’

‘What are the Totality up to?’ said Jack. ‘All that’ll restart the Soft War.’

‘They want the caged fetches on the streets of Station, telling everyone what Kingdom did to them. And they’ve always hated the Coffin Drives.’ Penderville caught her attention. ‘Poor man,’ she sighed.

‘Can you do anything for him?’ asked Grey. ‘It’d help us a lot.’

‘Oh, I can stabilise him. But not to help you, Grey. To help him.’

Penderville’s body was a manic scribble. Andrea knelt down by his head and placed her hands on his forehead. Jack was surprised to see that they didn’t sink in, as his own hand had done. She leant forward, putting her mouth close to where Penderville’s ear should be, and began to whisper. Jack had an impression of music, playing a slow, stately tune a great distance away. Fist watched, fascinated. Jack wondered what deep processes he was witnessing.

Penderville began to fall into something approaching definition. The speed of shift between selves slowed, until the changes matched the music’s slow, deliberate rhythm. His mouth still gaped open in a scream, but it shifted less and less between different versions of itself. At last, he was mostly his final self – a pale-skinned man in his late twenties, dressed in a vacuum suit that was only missing a helmet.

Andrea reached up and over her shoulder. When she brought her hand back there was a feather in it. She took it and, ever so gently, placed it in Penderville’s mouth. A convulsive shudder ran through him. He screamed like a newborn. His limbs flailed. Andrea’s hands were on his cheeks, her gaze steady on his own.

‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all right. You’re dead now. Nothing can hurt you.’

She slowly soothed him through aching moans and then sobs and then just whimpering until he was lying silent, curled around himself. At last she looked up at Jack.

‘He’s ready,’ she said. Then she turned back to Penderville. ‘Stand up,’ she told him gently, ‘it’s time.’ She helped him climb to his feet. The vacuum suit made his movements awkward. Penderville wiped tears away from his face with a heavy gloved hand, leaving grey dust smeared across his cheeks. ‘This is Jack,’ said Andrea. ‘You need to talk to him.’

Then, she turned to Jack. ‘I have to go now. I’m working with the Totality to stabilise all the other fetches.’ Her wings unfurled. For a moment they seemed to be the size of the sky. There was a jagged blast of music, and all the best times they’d shared pulsed in Jack’s mind at once. ‘I’ll see you soon, my love,’ she said. ‘You too, Fist.’

‘If we make it,’ replied Jack.

Andrea laughed. ‘Fuck’s sake, Jack, enough with the self-pity. Didn’t I tell you not to get in too deep? You’ve only got yourself to blame.’ She winked, suddenly so truly herself. ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said, ‘I’m sure of it.’ And then she was gone.

Jack took a moment to pull himself back to the present. He turned to Penderville.

‘Hello. I’m Jack Forster. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.’ He wasn’t sure what else to say. ‘I’m sorry that Yamata killed you.’

‘There’s no need to be,’ Penderville replied hopelessly. ‘I wanted her to. But it didn’t change anything.’

‘What happened to you?’ Jack asked him. ‘Why?’

Guilt and pain had written themselves across Penderville’s whole body. He’d been a young man when he died, but now his hair was grey. Wrinkles scarred his face. The vacuum suit, a little too big, hung awkwardly on him. When he spoke, his voice was soft and sad.

‘I was glad when she killed me,’ he said, his voice bleak. ‘I knew I was going to be caged. I thought at least I’d never have to think about it again. I was wrong about that. I was only sad that nobody knew.’

‘Nobody knew what?’

Penderville put his face in his hands, and moaned. ‘Tell us,’ said Grey, softly. East cut in too. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Confess. It’s so much better to share these things.’

Penderville choked words out. It was difficult to make them out. He was looking down at the ground. There was such passionate shame in his voice. ‘I thought it would be nothing,’ he sobbed. ‘Yamata lied to me. She told me that the rock would just hit one of the abandoned moon bases, that it would just look like Totality sabre rattling. She said that Kingdom would use the incident to justify a fresh round of legislation against them. I didn’t know they’d aimed it at the summer camp.’

Jack looked from Penderville to Grey and East. ‘No,’ he breathed, profoundly shocked.

Words tore out of Penderville. ‘It’s true. I made the rock invisible to anyone on Station. They’d only see it when it actually hit the moon, and then they’d be terrified because they’d think that the Totality could bypass our defences so easily. I killed all those children. And I let Kingdom blame the Totality and start the Soft War, but then I couldn’t live with it – and I was going to tell – but Yamata killed me first.’

Jack swung round to Grey. ‘Did you know about this?’

‘I knew nothing, Jack,’ he protested. ‘I’m appalled. Those poor children—’

‘Oh, for gods’ sake.’ Jack turned back to Penderville. ‘So Yamata dropped the rock on the moon? On Kingdom’s orders?’

‘Yes. I met her when it was all being set up. I was worried about what would happen if I was caught. She told me that it would all be fine. That Kingdom knew. That it was his plan and that it had his full approval.’

‘They would have killed you whatever you’d done, once you knew that.’

‘We’re all tools of the gods. When they call we have to obey. Once I knew that it was Kingdom I couldn’t say no. He was my patron. I owed him everything.’

‘Oh, no.’ Jack stepped towards Penderville and put a hand on his shoulder. This time, it didn’t sink in. ‘That’s what you all do, isn’t it?’ he said to Grey accusingly. ‘You make us puppets.’

‘We’ve got your best interests at heart. We always have done.’

‘Grey and I had nothing to do with this, Jack,’ added East, stepping forwards. ‘We’re as shocked by it as you are. And we’re working with the Totality now. That’s why that snowflake’s here, that’s why we’re not stopping the dead from rising. We want people to know about all this. We want a fresh start.’

‘You want to bring down Kingdom and reinstate Grey. All this is a power play, nothing more.’

‘I was framed and I fell from power,’ said Grey, sounding offended. ‘I’m a victim too.’

Jack snorted dismissively.

‘And we’ve still got work to do,’ Grey continued. ‘Kingdom’s pushing for a resumption of hostilities against the Totality. He’s seen that I’m active again, so he’s hitting me hard. My headquarters are under attack. People are beginning to notice all this’ – he waved at the snowflake – ‘and everyone will know about it once Andrea and the Totality have released all those fetches on to the weave. We need to make sure there’s no way Kingdom can turn it all to his advantage.’

‘How could he?’

‘He’s very powerful and he’s very afraid, which makes him very dangerous. We need to make sure that there’s no way he can cover up any of his crimes. East needs to make sure that people hear the right side of the story. I need to reawaken my board, so I can defend myself properly. You need to get everything you know in front of the Totality and the Pantheon. Now, you can stay here and discuss the niceties of morality, or we can get moving. Which is it going to be?’

‘Fist and I don’t have a body to go back to,’ said Jack. ‘We’re much more vulnerable to Kingdom without it.’

‘Oh yes you do,’ replied Grey confidently. ‘It’s in my headquarters, with Lestak. And Harry upgraded it. Easy to access, more efficient and lots of room for you both.’

[ I told you so!] crowed Fist.

‘Gods,’ said Jack, shocked. ‘How?’

‘He filled your skull with nanogel in Yamata’s medical facility, just like she did with her clones. Then he dressed himself in your flesh and used her security codes to walk out of Kingdom’s HQ. Lestak intercepted him on his way back to Homelands and he fled, leaving your body untenanted. By then Kingdom had realised that Yamata was dead. He mobilised, Lestak came under attack by his forces and she fell back to my headquarters, taking your body with her.’

‘Is Fist’s hardware still installed?’

‘Harry left it all in there. He tried to activate Fist’s weapon systems, but he didn’t get anywhere.’

‘Then let’s go back and break Kingdom. But not for your benefit, Grey, not for the Pantheon. We’ll do it for humanity, and for the Totality.’

‘Fuck that noble bullshit,’ spat Fist. ‘I’m going to do it because it’ll make me very happy indeed.’

Jack wondered for a moment how he’d restrain him once they were back on Station.

‘Jolly good,’ said Grey, not really paying attention. ‘Now, I’ve got a direct link to Lestak set up. It’ll route us through the snowflake and then straight to her.’ He closed his eyes and the world changed.

They found themselves in a high, round room, its concrete floor and walls softened by gentle light from above. Twelve sarcophagi hovered round it, equally spaced from each other. Each pointed in towards a control area at the centre of the room. There was also a stretcher, covered with a white sheet. Something that was probably a human body lay beneath it. Lestak was bent over it, prodding at a control panel. A sound that could have been gunfire rattled up out of the staircase.

‘Welcome to my boardroom!’ said Grey, throwing his arms out theatrically.

Lestak turned to him. ‘About bloody time! You promised you’d be here an hour ago. We’re barely holding off Kingdom’s forces. Nearly half my men are dead. Many of your employees, too.’

‘You’ve done a grand job to keep this room safe for this long! And now, we only need a few more minutes. Jack – you’d better go and take a look at your body. See how it’s getting on.’

Grey moved over towards a control panel. East followed him, positioning herself in front of a screen. It flickered into life as she gazed at it. ‘I’ve got a line out,’ she beamed. ‘I’m going to go and get everyone ready for our new media star. Everyone on Station’s going to be watching! Oh, and Jack – make sure you take a second to enjoy being virtual!’

She winked at Grey, then vanished. A second, and Penderville was gone too.

Jack looked down at himself and gasped. He’d assumed that he’d jumped straight back into his body, but soft pixilation was smoothing the hard edges of his visual presence. He was a simulation, running onweave rather than in his own flesh.

Fist stepped into view. ‘Now you know what being unreal feels like,’ he grinned.

Jack could see and hear, but realised with a shock that he could feel nothing else. He didn’t know if the room was hot or cold and he couldn’t smell anything. He opened his mouth and stuck his tongue out. He couldn’t sense or taste the air. He closed his mouth and tried to roll his tongue around inside it, but there was nothing there. When not visible, his tongue disappeared.

Fist laughed.

‘What is it?’ Jack said.

‘I always thought I’d become one of you – but look! You’re one of us.’

‘I’m still me, though.’

‘You seem to be. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? There’s not much difference between us after all.’

‘Enough philosophy,’ shouted Grey from a control panel. ‘We need your help. Get over there and see if your body will accept you. You need to be running on a secure physical platform when you’re in front of the Pantheon, anything less and Kingdom will just squash you.’

Jack joined Lestak by the stretcher.

‘I shouldn’t be helping you at all, after what you did to Issie,’ she said angrily.

There was more gunfire from below. Shouting and smoke rose up the stairwell.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She told me about the snowflake. She thinks she can climb out of the Coffin Drives for good. She’s not strong enough. It’ll break her.’

‘She’s got Andrea and the Totality to help her. And she’s not a four-year-old girl any more. She’s something very different.’

Lestak sighed. ‘Who are you to tell me what she is? You don’t even know what you are.’

She pulled the sheet back from the stretcher. Jack looked down at his own corpse. Its skin was a soft, neutral grey. Purple shimmered out of two staring eyes. The mouth had been strapped shut. It was wearing a white, papery hospital gown.

‘Come on!’ shouted Grey. ‘The board’s waking up.’ The sarcophagi hissed softly, venting coolant. White liquid bubbled out of exhaust pipes, exploding into a ferocious boil as soon as it touched the floor. Small gouts of steam-like smoke sprang up and disappeared. ‘Another few minutes and I’ll have full control again.’

Jack stared down at his body. The shock was profound. Here he was and yet, there he was. He wondered how much of his self the flesh beneath him retained.

[ Nothing at all,] snapped Fist, striding past him and up to the body. He gave one of the arms a kick. His foot sank briefly into it. The rucksack wobbled on his back, but the body’s arm didn’t move. [ I’ve just been checking gateways. It’s been cored. Nothing in that skull but nanogel, waiting for your imprint.]

[ How do I get in there? And what about you?]

[ They left all my hardware, like Grey said. There’s lots of room for both of us. And, if you want to get in – well, you have to ask me nicely.]

[ Fist …]

[ I’m kidding! The gate’s open!]

A shimmering oval opened up on the forehead of Jack’s body, looking something like a burning white eye.

[ You just need to touch it, Jack. I’ll follow you in.]

Jack reached down. There was an instant of void, then he was occupying his own body again. His senses flooded back – the cold of the room sharp against his skin, the acrid tang of gun smoke cutting into his tongue. The sensations were surprisingly intense. He opened his eyes. Jagged light smashed into them. Gunshots sounded in the distance, battering him. He squeezed both eyes tight shut, tried to jam his hands over his ears. The weight of flesh and bone made both arms immovable. He felt the body’s heart rate rise. His own panting rasped in his ears.

[Stop trying to move,] said Fist. [ We’re meshing with the new systems. Takes a moment or two. Just stay calm.]

Jack felt panic build. He tried to regulate his breathing, reaching into the muscles of his chest and throat, forcing them into a softer, slower rhythm. At first there was no response, but then he heard his panting breaths slow to a more normal pace.

[Good job,] said Fist. [Control systems pretty much fully online now. Try a basic movement.]

Jack’s arms seemed much less heavy. He brought his hands up to his face, then slowly crossed and uncrossed his legs. His body was beginning to feel more like a part of him again. He opened his eyes cautiously. The light was no longer so brutal. There were more distant gunshots, but his hearing was properly calibrated now so their sharp rattle was bearable. The world was becoming something to interact with rather than be overwhelmed by. Muscles felt more responsive. Reports pinged in his mind as his consciousness integrated new corporate sensors. Pulse, blood pressure, pain levels – all were suddenly easily accessible and controllable.

[Pretty good, eh?]

[ What have they done to me?]

[ Nothing. But Harry’s upgraded your mind/body interface. I think you’ll find you’re more in control of your flesh now.]

Jack sat up.

There was a sudden explosion from the stairwell, followed by enraged shouting from below. ‘We can’t let them get near the board!’ yelled Grey, sounding stressed. Jack stumbled to his feet. The Yamatas had found it difficult to move in their newly possessed bodies. He was lurching in the same way.

‘I won’t be good for a few minutes,’ he shouted back at Grey. His tongue felt awkward in his mouth.

[Oh, for gods’ sake,] grumbled Fist. [Do I have to do everything?]

[ Wait,] said Jack, but it was too late. Fist had bounded away from him, leaping over the control panel and down the stairs. [Don’t worry,] he told Jack. [ It’ll do me some good to take on Kingdom’s people. Almost like attacking him.]

[ The files’ll be safe?]

[Oh yes.]

[ You don’t have to.]

[ But I fucking want to.]

At first, there was no difference to the sounds coming up the stairwell. The battle continued unabated. Then, there was shouting. Where machine-gun fire had been disciplined, it was now coming in wild bursts. There were more explosions. They seemed to be further away. The screaming became more distant. Kingdom’s people seemed to be retreating in disarray. Jack wondered how many minds Fist had had to reach into to cause such panic, and what he had made them see.

[ You don’t want to know,] whispered Fist.

‘Fantastic!’ said Grey cheerfully. ‘Awake at last.’

The coffins had finished venting. The groups of flashing lights that danced across them shifted into new formations. Apart from that, there was no change.

‘Is that it?’ said Jack. His mouth was starting to feel more like it belonged to him.

‘I can’t bring them all the way back. The locks on them are too strong, but they’re aware enough now for me to take control of my remaining head office personnel again. In a basic way.’

‘Turn them back into drones, you mean.’

‘You saw how far they’d fallen. And right now, they’re getting cut to pieces. They need organising.’

‘I hate to say it,’ Lestak chipped in, ‘but he’s right. For now, at least.’

‘You’re going to have to let your people go once you’re done,’ Jack told Grey. ‘Gently, this time.’

‘Jack, you’re right. I give you my word that I will. Now, can you move around yet?’

Jack took a couple of experimental steps. He almost felt comfortable doing so.

‘That’s good enough. You and Lestak – get going! Head for the flyer pad. I’m going to stay here. My people will direct and protect you. With Fist and a bit of luck, you’ll get through.’

Jack never remembered too much of the frantic race through Grey’s offices. He shielded Lestak and her people from his Eastware and let it run as high as he dared. There were looks of adoration. There were bullet howls and explosions. There were Grey employees, suddenly energised, shepherding him and Fist and Lestak through the struggle. When he thought back on it, it was always the details that stood out: broken glass in windows, a smashed photocopier, a blood-slicked whiteboard. The daily essentials of office life had been pulled out of their routine identities and remade as witnesses to warfare.

At last, they reached the flyer pad. A man in a blue boiler suit was waiting for them. For a moment, Jack thought he was Mr Stabs, but then the man moved with fluid ease, ushering them towards a flyer. They were on top of a tall building; below, there were gunshots and explosions, above, the oblivious stars. ‘I’m driving,’ said Lestak. Jack didn’t argue. He let the Eastware fall back to zero. They threw themselves into the flyer and were skyborne. ‘I hope nobody gets in a lucky shot,’ she continued, as she flicked switches and went through pre-flight checks. Nobody did.

Jack wasn’t sure if anybody even noticed them. They were away, and for a moment – the first in a very long time, it seemed – there was peace.

Chapter 47

Jack had to grab Ifor’s hand four times before the mind responded.

‘Grey told me about Penderville’s confession,’ said Ifor. ‘You saw the snowflake in the Coffin Drives?’ Jack nodded. ‘We had to rescue the two of you, and make sure that the caged dead could get the news about Kingdom out. Now we’re dealing with the fallout. Be quick!’

‘We’re on our way to join you. We’re about to release the news cross-Station, but the Pantheon will need more than just media reports. I’m bringing the proof of Kingdom’s corruption directly to you.’

Ifor stilled for a moment, digesting the news. Jack imagined him sending it out into the Totality; a mass of voices discussing options. ‘That’s good to know. When’s East going live with Penderville?’

‘I’m not sure. Soon. You need to stop anything bad happening before then. And make sure that we get into the negotiating room.’

‘It’s chaos here. We’ll send minds to meet you at the landing pad, and bring you in as diplomatic representatives.’

‘How are the negotiations going?’

‘We’re twenty minutes from war. Kingdom’s forces are deploying against us. He’s realised we’ve opened the Coffin Drives. He’s ranting about the violation of sacred space. It’s looking bad.’

‘We’ll take care of it.’

‘I hope so. See you in a moment.’

The call ended.

[ Very interesting,] said Fist.

[ The Totality?]

[ No, it’s Harry. He’s just tried to use his back door to access me.]

[Shit. Don’t let him in.]

[ No danger of that, I’m wise to him now!]

Fist was silent for a moment. He cocked his head, as if listening. [ He’s like a little enraged fly,] he said gleefully. [ Buzz, buzz, buzz.] He giggled. [Oo! The ninja code’s up and running too!]

[Keep him out! No more slip-ups.]

[Oh, don’t you worry about that. He’s going to do exactly what I want him to. He’s working for me now.]

There was no time to find out what Fist meant. They’d reached Sandal’s headquarters, landing so fast that they nearly crashed. The flyer’s landing gear buckled. They were out of it before it stopped moving. Armed guards stalked towards them, guns raised. A delegation of Totality minds emerged from the building, led by Ifor. They ran towards the guards, shouting. Jack hit them with his Eastware. Guilt lashed him in return. But the guns didn’t waver. The guards must be shielded against any sort of virtual influence. The minds flashed up diplomatic credentials. Disappointed muzzles drooped towards the ground. One of the guards radioed a superior, requesting clarification. It was difficult to know what he’d be told. The small party ran for the doors. A shout of ‘halt’ came too late. They were through the door, racing down corridors.

[Slow the guards, Fist.]

[Shielded. Not much I can do.]

[Shit.]

One of the minds turned and tossed a small metal ball back down the corridor. There was a blinding flash of light behind them.

[ Blind ’em,] said Fist. [ Nice one.]

After a moment, the shouting started again. Then there were bullets. Jack looked back. A sharp burning scored the side of his face. He stumbled for a moment, then found a switch in his mind and turned pain off. They turned a corner.

[All right?] asked Fist.

[ I’ll keep going.]

Now he was slightly behind Fist and Ifor. There was a pair of double doors ahead of them, guards on either side. They wore body armour and carried assault rifles. Jack let the Eastware rise up. These guards sunk to their knees. Jack wondered how he appeared to them – a shining god, divine enough to obey, human enough to be panting and bleeding. ‘Let us pass!’ he yelled. They leapt to one side. One of them reached up with a security pass, and the doors slid open. They led into a lift.

‘It’s the way to the conference space,’ said Ifor.

They slammed into the lift. There was a bloody smear where Jack had cannoned into its back wall. He wondered how badly he was hurt. Not enough to slow him down. Their pursuers were rounding the corner, rifles up and ready to fire. Ifor, Jack and Fist were easy targets.

‘Stop them!’ screamed Jack, and the enamoured guards opened fire. The lift doors started to close. The first pursuer to round the corner collapsed. Momentum kept the rest coming forward. One of them threw a grenade before he was cut down. The doors shut and the lift began to rise. An explosion shook it, but it kept moving. Jack and Ifor slumped back against the wall. Fist was stock still.

[Are you OK?] Jack asked him.

[ Breaking Sandal’s security systems. Making sure he doesn’t stop the lift.]

[All ready with the Yamata files?]

[ Yes. They’ll all be able to access them. I’ve chucked in a recording of Penderville’s confession for good measure.]

[Excellent.] Jack turned to Ifor. ‘And are you all right?’ he said. A bullet had struck the mind too. Purple plasm leaked out of a gash in his chest. Ifor put his hand over it. ‘I’ll be fine.’

The lift doors hushed open. Ifor limped forward. Fist looked past Jack, and his jaw dropped. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, forgetting to mask his words, ‘so this is how the other half live.’

Jack turned too, and was awed. He’d always understood Heaven to be the land of the gods, but realised suddenly that he was wrong. Heaven was merely where humanity was able to most closely approach them. This room was their true home, and the whole of the Solar System was encompassed within it. He took a step forward. The lift doors started to close, and then the weave overlaid them and they vanished.

Jack was floating before a tiny image of Station. All around it, there was space – or rather, an abstract representation of space. Jack was at the heart of a real-time map, overlaid with dense thickets of information showing all human activity. White loops arcing through the void, defining planetary orbits. A shimmering globe moved along each one, alive with colour and data. Finger-sized images of moonbases and space stations and chainships and asteroid mines hovered everywhere, representing every single outpost of humanity. Numbers danced through the emptiness, scurrying up or down or just staying the same, as the realities they measured shifted with each moment. The outer reaches of the map were dotted with bright pinpricks of light. They were embedded in barely perceptible clouds of soft, pearlescent grey.

Jack assumed they represented the Totality’s sphere of influence. The clouds shimmered across the whole of the region beyond the Kuiper belt. They’d also made substantial inroads in-system, stopping only on the near-side of Mars’ orbit. Only Station and the orbital areas surrounding it were untouched by Totality influence. Tiny patches of colour represented the different zones that each Pantheon member controlled. Jack had always known that the Totality had become by far the widest ranging corporate body in the Solar System, but until he saw this representation of its reach he had never understood just what that meant.

‘Look at the population density,’ said Fist. ‘Most of humanity’s in Station – and the Pantheon still holds that.’

‘And that’s the jewel we’re all fighting for,’ cut in a deep voice, resonant with the heaviness of industrial machinery. Jack had last heard it in a propaganda film, inducting new puppeteers into the Soft War.

‘Kingdom,’ he hissed.

The Pantheon shimmered into being around him, security protocols falling away. Those closest caught his eye first. There was the Rose in full combat armour, Sandal’s shimmering cube, the Twins holding hands but looking away from each other. Together, the six formed a wide circle, centred on the image of Station. The scale of the simulation made them far larger than planets, larger even than the Sun. Soft lines came into being between them and divided the sky into segments, forming something like a corporate zodiac. Those gods with eyes stared at Jack. East waved cheerfully. A blindfolded, hobbled raven did its best to snap its beak. There were four snowflakes too, hanging in the void.

Kingdom was the last to appear. The shadows fell away from him like oil until he was fully revealed. He manifested as a tall man with a shaven head and a face as functionally beautiful as an industrial diamond. His skin glowed gold in the light from the god-dwarfed sun. He was dressed in a loose black shirt and trousers. His feet were bare. Jack took a step back, awed and afraid. Here was the infrastructure that gave humanity life; here was the corruption that devoured its children.

‘How do you dare break into this council?’ asked Kingdom. ‘And with the help of a Totality mind. What do you all have to say to this act of naked aggression?’

The snowflakes shuddered with multicoloured light. Jack looked back to Ifor. His head was bowed and he was silent, deep in communion with his fellows.

[ You’d better say something, Jack.]

Jack gulped, then spoke. ‘We come to accuse you, Kingdom, of crimes against humanity and the Totality. We come to lay proof of those crimes before this council. Fist – the files.’

Fist shrugged off the backpack and tossed it towards the middle of the room. It fell among the virtual stars and skittered along the real floor for a couple of metres before coming to rest. ‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘Dropping a rock on the moon, prolonging the Soft War. Just take a look.’ [ That was quick,] he added. [Everyone in the room’s already downloaded it.]

‘That is absurd,’ said Kingdom, his protest tolling out like a great, slow factory bell. ‘A ridiculous, self-evident fabrication from two servants of a discredited god. A transparent attempt to distract us from the Totality’s most recent provocation. We protect humanity. We are humanity. We would never harm it in this way. It’s a profoundly offensive suggestion.’

The cube that represented Sandal grew in size. Images of hard working dockers flashed across its faces, pulsing rapidly to show his anger. ‘Silence!’ he snapped. ‘As chair of this conference, I must insist on silence.’ The cube turned towards Jack. ‘This kind of discussion is not on the agenda.’

Kingdom gestured towards Jack. ‘This man is a well-known Totality sympathiser and Grey agitator. He was returned to Station at the specific request of our common enemy. His presence here at this very crucial point is clearly a Totality ploy. I’m sure they furnished him with these remarkably convincing fake documents. Forster and his puppet should be terminated immediately.’

‘Please,’ said Sandal. ‘My security people have been summoned. They will be here soon, and—’

Ifor interrupted him. ‘This man and his puppet are accredited Totality diplomatic representatives, and thus under our full protection,’ he announced. ‘Any action against them would be interpreted as action against us. We would regard it as a direct declaration of war.’

‘The Totality feels itself to be the victim here?’ asked Kingdom. ‘A corporate entity that has breached our Coffin Drives, thus illegally attacking the deepest roots of our heritage as humans? There is nothing more to discuss. Mr Chairman, I submit that we are already at war with these false minds – a war once again provoked solely by them. First, they struck at our children. Now they’re striking at our dead. And now their agent is accusing me of terrible, terrible crimes. We need to shut down all non-military activities and hit back with everything we have. Now.’

One of the snowflakes spoke. Its calm voice had a resonant depth to it, as if it were made up of a thousand whispers coming together as one. ‘We have already demonstrated that your forces do not match ours. We halted our advance at Mars by choice, not out of necessity.’

‘You have attacked all that is most sacred to us. Even those humans who’ve gone over to your side will turn against you when they understand that. And that will tip the balance of power in our direction.’

‘All of this is irrelevant,’ protested Jack, his voice full of frustration. ‘None of you are thinking about what’s important, about why you’re going to war in the first place. It’s nothing to do with the Totality; it’s because of Kingdom. War is in his interest. Breaking the Totality is in his interest. And so he’s making it happen. He’s fooled you all, and he’s done it before. These documents prove it.’

Kingdom laughed. ‘Absurdities. I wish I had that much power.’

‘Kingdom both started and prolonged the last war,’ replied Jack, ‘and his actions are going to set this one off too.’

‘I move we vote on a response to the Totality’s obscene provocation,’ pronounced Kingdom, speaking over him. ‘And that this intruder is silenced.’

‘No!’ shouted Jack.

‘Mr Chairman?’ asked Kingdom, a soft undertone of menace in his voice.

‘We will proceed with the vote,’ Sandal decided, shimmering nervously.

‘Wait.’ East stepped forward. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

‘Really, East,’ scolded Kingdom. ‘This isn’t the time—’

‘Breaking news. Look.’

She waved a hand and screens sprung into being around the circle. Some showed wide shots of Station; some were closeups of individual streets; some showed one man, talking. Jack recognised this latter immediately. It was Bjorn Penderville.

His voice echoed out, caught in mid-sentence.

‘—responsible for the destruction on the moon. I confess to masking the meteor myself, ensuring that it could strike the moon without being detected. I used software adapted from sweathead blanking protocols. I did so at the instigation of Aud Yamata, leader of a criminal gang controlled by Kingdom. InSec operative Harry Devlin later joined the Yamata gang.’

[Oo, I bet Harry’s ears are burning! Though he’s probably concentrating too hard to notice. Little fly.]

[ He’s still out there?]

[ He thinks he’s almost hacked into me. Into my web! My lovely little web! Ah, the ninja code’s reporting back.]

[ What are you up to?]

[All my plans are paying off. You’ll see.]

[ Fuck’s sake, Fist.]

On the screens, Penderville continued his confession. ‘I understand that, after my death, Devlin helped the Yamata gang create a series of false flag attacks that were blamed on terrorists and used to justify the execution and fetch-caging of a number of key anti-war activist groups. These activists were for the most part allied with or supported by Grey, hence the attacks on him.’

Shouting broke out across the room. Penderville’s words were lost in the melee. Kingdom’s voice became a high-pitched scream, the sound of metal grinding on metal. ‘Can you not see that this ridiculous conspiracy theory is a lie?’ he was yelling. Other Pantheon members were shouting, too, some in support of him, some against him.

Despite the ferocity of the onslaught, East was unruffled. ‘Now let’s hear from the dead,’ she said, speaking with a news anchor’s dispassion.

The screens showing Station increased in size. The images each held shifted, zooming in on individual streets. Jack realised that they were closing in on void sites. Crowds had gathered round each one. Images of children hung over each void site. They were still broadcasting their messages of grief but beneath them, the dead had returned. They stood in shimmering rings, fetches who had climbed out of the Coffin Drives and, through the omnipresence of the weave, found themselves able to manifest in the streets of Station. It was an apocalypse, of sorts.

‘Bringing in audio,’ said East calmly, and each screen was suddenly roaring out the voices of the dead. They were speaking as one. ‘ … working for peace, and we found ourselves under attack. Every single one of us was killed by one of Kingdom’s operatives. Every single one of us was caged in the Coffin Drives, unable to speak of this. They told you we were terrorists, but none of us were; they told you that we were threats, but none of us were; they told you that we hated humanity, but really we love life. Kingdom made you afraid so that you would agree to war with the Totality, but he has always been the real enemy. Reject him!’

The last two words of the speech were a great, triumphant roar.

‘Now they’re starting the speech again,’ explained East. ‘Others have risen, too.’

The screens shimmered, becoming a kaleidoscope of many different views. They danced through streets and houses, parks and shops. Some even showed the darkness of space or the cramped confines of chainships. Fetches were everywhere, drifting like angelic ghosts, tightly embracing the living or just standing, looking round in wonder and disbelief, at last free from the Coffin Drives.

None of them had skulls for heads.

‘They’re free,’ said East. ‘Nobody controls them any more.’

‘But – this is a disaster!’ shouted Kingdom. ‘If nobody controls them – that means artificial intelligences are loose, everywhere! It’s a direct threat to us! Remember how we lost our homeworld!’

East just smiled. ‘I think your terrorists have something more to say.’

The screens flicked back to show a single void site. The fetches ringed round it were chanting. Jack saw that they’d been joined by a number of scrappily dressed, happy looking children. Their words were clear.

‘Shut down Kingdom! Shut down Kingdom!’

‘No!’ howled Kingdom.

The chanting became louder and louder. The camera pulled back. The chant had been taken up by the crowd that had formed round the void site. The camera pulled back still further. There were crowds across the whole of Homeland, shouting against Kingdom. The view flicked to Docklands. There too, the streets echoed with voices.

‘Shut down Kingdom! Shut down Kingdom!’

‘These terrorists will break Station. We need to shut down East’s media networks. If their message is heard, they’ll destroy everything we fought for,’ gasped Kingdom, his rich voice shattered by panic.

‘Good,’ said Grey. The blindfolded raven was gone; now the man stood there, smartly dressed and looking very relaxed.

‘You!’ gasped Kingdom. ‘You dare to come here!’ He turned away from Grey to address the group. ‘This criminal is manipulating you all,’ he snarled. ‘We must freeze Grey and close down East. It’s the only way to protect us from their lies. There is no alternative.’

‘The evidence against you is strong, Kingdom,’ said East implacably. ‘And we can’t stand in the way of the people. As you’ve said yourself, many times.’

Sandal’s highly stressed voice rang out like a power drill. ‘We need to debate this properly. It’s not what we’re here for now.’

A snowflake weighed in. ‘The Totality has always claimed that we were not responsible for the lunar atrocity. We have already been able to confirm some aspects of this interpretation of the facts. We believe that Penderville and these other freed minds are telling the truth.’

‘Perhaps Sandal has a point,’ said Grey smoothly. ‘We should be fair to Kingdom. Should we take steps to protect him? If we isolate his board from his key subsidiaries then the shock of this sudden crash will be lessened. We can then call this meeting to a halt, and investigate in more depth, at our leisure.’

[ Fucking gods,] said Fist. [Protecting their own.]

[ What?] replied Jack.

‘No! No!’ said Sandal, his voice almost a scream. ‘As chair I insist we complete voting on our original motion. We must decide whether or not to attack the Totality.’

‘I think a little patience might be in order,’ soothed Grey.

[ Right, fuck this,] snapped Fist. [ Where’s Harry? Aha!] He shook, and then staggered a couple of paces forward. He looked suddenly drunk.

[ Fist!] shouted Jack. [Come back here! What are you doing?]

‘Oh no!’ Fist shouted, theatrically. ‘Oh no!’ He took another uncertain step, then swayed round till he was facing Jack. He raised his hands to his head, so nobody else could see his face. He gave Jack a slow, confident wink. And then, he arched his back and threw himself down, hitting the ground with a clatter. Patches of overlay disappeared around him, revealing a white-painted concrete floor. ‘He’s possessing me!’ he yelled. ‘I can’t stop him!’

Grey peered over, mild worry on his face. ‘Jack, this is a very serious moment. You really should keep him quiet.’

Jack barely heard. He could feel system after system tumbling out of his control. [ Fist?] he called out, but there was no reply. The puppet was no longer a presence in his mind.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Ifor.

‘I think he’s let Harry come through,’ Jack replied.

Fist’s limbs smashed themselves against the ground, again and again, a small blur of fevered movement. Jack couldn’t understand what he’d been trying to achieve. Whatever it was, it seemed to have failed. His thoughts clouded over for a moment, as if a great shadow had passed across them.

‘Is he all right?’ said Ifor.

‘It looks like he’s lost control.’

‘Oh yes,’ said a voice with a strong Docklands accent, speaking out of Fist’s mouth. ‘OH FUCKING YES!’ Fist’s whole body was shaking. It began to grow.

‘I warned you both so many times about carelessness,’ said Grey, sounding a little less relaxed.

‘Security! Security!’ squawked Sandal. His six square sides showed images of burly men and women in riot gear.

Kingdom was trying not to look worried. He took one step back, and then another. There was a sharp hissing sound. The shape that had been Fist’s body was the size of a full-grown man. The shaking began to slow. First his torso and then his limbs returned to clear sight. He was someone different now. He rose to his feet. He was wearing a jaunty fedora, a raincoat that billowed around him and a sharp suit and tie. He had a smile on his face that was at once triumphant, lethal and irresistibly charming.

He was Harry Devlin.

‘So,’ he smiled. ‘Which one of you cunts is up for a hostile takeover?’

‘SECURITY!’ bellowed Sandal.

‘They won’t come,’ Harry told him. ‘Fist was still plugged into the lift. I killed it. Comms too. You’re all locked in now. With me.’ He turned, looking around the room. ‘Well, well, well. All of you here together. And the Totality, too. So many birds to kill with one stone.’

There was a wall in Jack’s mind where Fist should be. He beat against it, but it was impossible to break through. He heard sounds from behind it. Combat machinery was grinding into life, complaining like a broken giant slowly waking from a deep, concussed sleep.

‘Do something!’ said East, the anxiety in her voice sounding subtly forced. ‘Won’t somebody do something?’

The Rose leapt towards Harry, scarlet clothing becoming brutally functional combat armour. Harry laughed, and clicked a finger. There was a dog at the Rose’s neck and the weight took her balance from her. She skidded and fell, a flailing tumble of limbs. The dog fell with her. As they both hit the ground it became something both more and less than itself. Losing all definition, it flowed over her, a tide of darkness covering her completely. For a moment, it was possible to make out the shape of her body. She screamed. The scream was suddenly and completely cut off. Then there was nothing where she’d been but another empty patch of concrete.

‘He’s locked up all her non-essential systems,’ gasped Ifor. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘No,’ said Jack wearily. ‘Not for Fist. And Harry’s controlling him.’

Harry staggered and put a hand to his head, then recovered himself. Now all the Pantheon were shuffling back, trying to put as much distance between themselves and him as possible. Only the snowflakes didn’t move, pulsing with unreadable colours.

‘I just force-triggered a full internal self-audit,’ explained Harry. ‘It’s a vast resource drain, she’ll be out of action for the next hour or so.’ He was a little paler than he had been. He controlled his shaking voice. ‘Just like that.’ He chuckled, once again in control of himself. But his hair was a soft grey, where before it had been black. ‘So it’s true. Accountant plus puppet equals Pantheon gun.’ He turned to Jack. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw Fist’s weapon systems. Crying shame, giving all that power to you. What the fuck would you ever use it for?’ He turned back to the Pantheon. ‘All this Homelands wanker’s good for is fucking other men’s wives. But I’ll deal with him in a moment. I’ve got you lot to sort out first. You screw us all, every single day. And I’m going to start with the biggest cunt of them all.’

He pointed at Kingdom.

‘You.’

‘No. Please. You don’t know what you’re doing,’ begged Kingdom, his voice thin with fear.

‘Oh, I know all right. I know exactly what I’m doing.’ Black dogs appeared, lined up on either side of Harry. They tensed, ready to pounce, snarling out anger and threat. ‘You promised me so much, Kingdom. But you didn’t deliver any of it. So I’m not going to fuck around with an audit. It’s hostile takeover time. And I’m going to take everything you’ve got.’

Kingdom cowered backwards as the seven dogs leapt. They lost form as they flew towards him, stretching out to become long, hard shadows, staining the air with darkness. When they hit him their black liquid mass slicked across his body. He screamed until the darkness covered his face. He stopped struggling very quickly, becoming a dark, inchoate statue.

Harry strolled towards him. ‘All ready for me now, aren’t you?’ he said triumphantly, and then turning to the Pantheon, ‘None of you got the balls to try and stop me? No?’

‘I’ll never let you get away with this, you bastard,’ spat East. ‘I’ll have every journalist of mine exposing you!’

‘I’ll be a hero,’ replied Harry confidently. ‘I killed the entity that dropped a rock on the moon and started the Soft War. That’s what your journalists will write, or I’ll have them looking for sources outside an airlock, and I’ll put you in a closed audit loop for the rest of time.’

And with that, he reached out and touched the dark figure that had been Kingdom. His body disappeared into it. His clothes, suddenly empty, dropped to the floor. There was a moment of silence.

‘Shit,’ said Jack, stunned. ‘I think we just lost.’

‘We have to get out of here,’ gasped the Twins.

‘We can’t,’ stuttered Sandal. ‘The lift’s still locked.’

Powerlessness was a new experience for the gods.

‘What are we going to do?’ whimpered one of the Twins. ‘I don’t want to be lost in my own accounts forever!’ The other Twin sat down with a thump. ‘Our lovely hotels!’ she wailed. ‘Our medical centres! Our agri-sites! Who will care for them if we can’t?’

Only Jack noticed a little hummock suddenly appear in Harry’s clothes. It was somewhere under his waistcoat. As the gods sobbed, or just stood in shocked silence, it moved towards the neck of his shirt, where a familiar face popped out.

[ Well,] beamed Fist [ That went about as well as it could have done. How fortunate for Harry that I carelessly left such a clearly signposted route into Kingdom’s core systems when we broke into his headquarters.]

Jack couldn’t find any words to say.

Fist clambered to his feet and addressed the assembled divinities. ‘Thank fuck Harry was SO excited about becoming a god that he left my cage door open,’ he chirped, before forcing a little pain into his voice. ‘It was agony watching him attack Kingdom. Agony!’

‘You saw it all, then?’ asked Sandal nervously.

‘Oh yes,’ replied Fist. He stifled a pretend sob. ‘All of it. The horror! Oh, the horror.’ He was clearly enjoying himself hugely, despite the fact that his hair too had turned grey.

[ You’re play-acting,] said Jack. [ Harry’s damaged you. And what about all the people who rely on Kingdom? You’re playing with their lives.]

[ There’s enough of me left to finish the job,] replied Fist. [And they’re all taken care of. Like I told you, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about consequences. Sit back and watch a master at work.]

There was a mature confidence in his voice that Jack had never heard before. Fist switched back to speaking out loud. ‘But, looking on the bright side, most of my weapon systems are still largely intact. Even after such terrible misuse of them. Misuse over which I had no control whatsoever. Misuse that even damaged me!’ He pointed at his newly aged hair.

As he spoke, the darkness that had covered Kingdom fell away. The takeover was complete. Now Harry stood there, his eyes closed. His skin glowed gold. He was wearing Kingdom’s dark shirt and loose trousers. His battered face was wreathed with the numinous. Despite himself, Jack felt awe touch him. Harry opened his eyes, and looked down.

‘You?’ he boomed. ‘LITTLE YOU?’ His voice echoed around the conference chamber. He threw back his head and laughed. Virtual stars rang with mockery.

‘Oh yes,’ said Fist, his voice low and menacing. ‘Me. Little me. And I’ve got a bone the size of a planet to pick with you.’ He rose into the air, and floated towards Harry. ‘Do you remember what I said, that dark night in the garden?’

‘I’ll shatter you, puppet, if you come any closer,’ warned Harry.

Fist closed on him regardless. Jack felt his weapon set grind once again in his mind. The sound of its awakening went so deep, far beyond anything Harry had been able to summon. Jack slumped. Fist was boosting his offensive power by drawing on Jack’s resources. Harry hadn’t been able to do that either.

‘Are you OK?’ worried Ifor. Jack felt soft hands at his shoulders, holding him up. He found that he couldn’t move his mouth. Those parts of his mind were running other, more brutal systems.

[ I’m sorry,] Fist told Jack. He was controlling his voice so carefully, but still a wild, abandoned rage broke through. [ This is going to hurt. Him more than you, though.]

[ What are you doing?] The deep structures of Jack’s own mind groaned in protest as Fist snatched even more resources. [ I can’t let you,] he continued. He tried to call Fist back.

The puppet laughed. [ You can’t do that any more. Not since we were rebuilt. All you can do is watch. And trust me. You’ll never see me like this again. You might never see me again. But it’ll be worth it. Oh fuck yes. WATCH!]

Jack wasn’t sure if it was his own will or Fist’s that made him turn his head and reopen his eyes.

‘Jack,’ said Ifor. ‘You’re conscious.’ He followed Jack’s gaze, and then he too was silenced. Fist was drifting towards Harry, his body changing as his attack systems fired up.

‘I said I’d broken minds like yours before, and I’d break you too.’

His arms stretched out of his sleeves and his legs stretched out of his trousers. His torso grew. Piece by piece, his clothes ripped off him. A snapped bow-tie, fragments of dress shirt, a tattered tail coat, a pair of shredded black trousers – all fell away as he slowly advanced on Kingdom.

Each wooden body section exuded strands of attack code, coiling together to define Fist’s new, expanding self. It manifested as silver-grey barbed wire, growing into the shape of densely muscled arms and legs, vast shoulders and a squat, powerful neck. Fist’s hands and feet had grown too, fingers and toes stretching out into jagged claws and talons. Jagged wire sprang up and danced around them, then around Fist’s whole body. It leapt up to cover his now entirely white hair and he laughed.

Now his face stretched out and began to change too. His cheerful painted eyes fell back into his head, and there were two shadow pits where they had been. His little pointed nose fell in on itself, becoming a jagged slit in the centre of his face. He smiled, and his smile was an axe cut, ripping back into his cheeks. There was a loud crack, and his teeth broke through his jaw – uncounted sharp grey barbs, waiting to rend and tear.

Nothing remained of the well-dressed puppet that had been built to charm children. This was the elemental Fist, a deep and focused savagery unleashing itself on the world.

Harry stumbled backwards. ‘What are you?’ he breathed.

‘Death,’ hissed Fist, smiling his barbed-wire smile. His wooden face was a flat, dead mask on a thorned metal head. The wire filled his empty eyes and the slit that had been his nose. He brought his arms up from the side of his body, extending each metal-wrapped wooden finger. Blue sparks flickered round them. Harry gestured with his hands. Nothing happened. Fist kept coming.

‘CHILD!’ he shouted, the word rasping out from a hard metal tongue. ‘You’re five minutes old. I’ve been killing angels for seven years.’

Harry took a step back. He had his arms up in front of him. His own fire leapt to his hands. Fist continued speaking. There was no longer any trace of the toy he’d once appeared to be. Jack wondered if this was what the Totality had seen when Fist attacked them.

‘You dared – YOU DARED – to break into me, and force your way through me, and use me as a router. A FUCKING ROUTER! To get to that bitch Yamata.’

A few words were shouted. Most were spat out in a vicious, barbed whisper.

Fire leapt from Harry’s hands. It didn’t reach Fist. The puppet’s feet had touched ground. He was walking. He was a foot or so taller than Harry. Wire dragged behind him, leaving a path of sparks. ‘You thought there’d be no comeback.’ He brought his hands up to his face, and looked at them appraisingly. He teased out a strand of wire from his left hand with the finger and thumb of his right. ‘Look at my strings now. You thought you were pulling them, didn’t you? But they bit into you, little god. So deep.’

There was a roaring in Jack’s head. He could watch, and he could think, and that was it. All through his mind, core structures were shaking themselves to pieces as Fist seized the capacity he needed to break a god. Jack could feel his own systems rushing to compensate for the chaos. Had he not become a digital version of himself, he would by now have been irrevocably shattered. He wondered if either of them would survive Harry’s death.

Harry laughed nervously. ‘You can’t hurt me, puppet.’

Fist snapped his fingers, and a barbed explosion of code leapt out of him. For a moment it hung in the air, and then it pulled itself round Harry, snapping his arms to his sides and his legs to each other, charring clothes black and scoring blue lines where it touched bare flesh.

Harry howled. Subroutines knifed into his mouth, his throat. His scream had a gurgling, half-broken quality to it. Fist snapped his fingers again. More wire leapt at Harry and bit at him, tracing hard symbols of pain across his skin and then dancing deep into his body.

‘ARE YOU IN POSITION, TOTALITY?’ he yelled.

‘Yes,’ said one of the snowflakes. ‘One of our craft is at the co-ordinates you gave us. A squad of minds have penetrated Devlin’s physical security systems and are ready to reoccupy the stolen servers he’s running on. They’ll use the link he’s established with Kingdom’s core systems to follow him there too.’

‘NO!’ screamed Harry. Wire poured into his throat, silencing him. He writhed, collapsing to the floor.

Fist sunk down so that he was right next to him. One hand touched Harry’s forehead. There was a tiny puff of smoke, a smell of burning flesh and then the black print of a wooden hand was branded in Harry’s flesh.

‘You’re the careless one, Harry. You never bothered looking deeper than the puppet. There’s so much more to me than that.’

Harry groaned. Jack was barely conscious. Fist took Harry’s head in his two barbed hands and pulled it from his shoulders. He roared with triumph. It was his last great effort, and it broke him. He shimmered and vanished. Harry’s broken corpse vanished with him. Code howled in Jack’s mind. Through it all came Fist’s voice, surprisingly quiet and controlled.

[Let yourself go, Jack. I’ve broken my weapon systems killing Harry. Now’s time to reboot and rebuild.]

Unconsciousness took Jack. It was kinder than death had been, but only a little.

Chapter 48

The spinelights were dimming over Homelands. Towers faded into the gloom as lit windows shimmered into being, a thousand tiny protests against the dark. Snowflakes hung above them all, now fully integrated into the weave and so into Station’s day-to-day life. Jack turned away from the window. Fist was sitting on a chair, knocking his hand against a conference table, making a loud, sharp, repeated tapping. He was four foot tall again, with a little painted face and a little painted body. He was wearing black tie, topped off with a rather natty monocle. His body was entirely physical.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can’t get over how this feels. This is a real table; here’s a real me; and here I am, hitting it. Who would have thought a meat body could fit little Hugo Fist so well?’

‘You’re a real boy at last.’

‘I’m not a boy, Jack, or a man. I’ve seen enough of people not to think I’m human any more. I’m an incarnate artificial intelligence. But then so are you, now – a digital pattern, running on a nanogel soup. Most of you isn’t even in that head of yours. It’s distributed across Station’s weaveservers. I don’t think there’s really any difference between us. You’re alive, but artificial – I’m artificial, but I’m alive.’

‘Things have got a lot more blurred lately,’ agreed Jack. ‘All these new ways of being alive. I suppose that’s one good thing to come out of it all.’

‘It’s just a shame it had to happen the way it did.’

‘Well. That’s a fight that’s not over yet.’

‘That sounds worryingly like sedition,’ said Lestak, appearing at the door.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Fist smoothly. ‘It’s just his grumpy way. And besides, it’s much harder to be seditious these days. Now that the Totality sits on the Pantheon as an equal member, and fetches have pretty much the same rights as the living, there’s no them and us any more. There’s just us, and plotting against us, rather than them, is pretty pointless.’

‘You make it sound so simple,’ replied Lestak. ‘Not everyone sees it like that. It’s created a lot of work for us.’

‘And what about the divinities who supported Kingdom?’ asked Jack. ‘Any work gone into finding them?’

‘They’ll have covered their tracks by now. We wouldn’t be able to prove anything.’

‘So the gods are too big for justice?’

Lestak sighed. ‘There’s been enough change, Jack. People have lost so much faith in the Pantheon. Keeping a lid on it all is a big challenge. If another god fell – well, who knows where it would end.’

‘Very sensible,’ interrupted Grey, shimmering into being. ‘Humans, gods – we’re all so fragile. Too much change, too suddenly, could overwhelm us all.’

‘We’d survive. Even if the whole Pantheon fell.’

‘But not all of us would go down. And those of us who remained would be even more powerful. Even fewer checks on our behaviour. Remember what Harry was like when he thought he ruled Station. Power corrupts, and you’d be feeding us more of it. Think about that, Jack, before you start toppling gods.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Of course, factually you’re quite right. At least one of my colleagues did support Kingdom. Perhaps more. Covertly, of course.’ His voice took on a forced cheerfulness as he swept his arm out towards the peaceful city. ‘And now, I think, looking at all this, they’re very much regretting doing so.’

‘You won’t tell us who they are, though, will you?’ asked Jack. His voice was weary.

‘We’ll be late for the ceremony if we stand here talking,’ replied Grey jauntily. ‘Won’t we, Lestak? Hadn’t we better head for the main hall? Don’t want to keep people waiting.’

‘There’s not going to be any ceremony, Grey. Jack’s refused it,’ Lestak told him.

‘Rejecting the thanks of the gods?’ said Grey. ‘Some would call that ungracious.’

‘Fist’s been granted full citizenship. The Totality helped build him a body. My record’s been cleared. There’s nothing else either of us wants from you.’

‘You’ve really got to stop focusing on the downside,’ chided Grey. ‘You’d be so much better off if you let yourself enjoy what you’ve achieved. You and Fist are heroes. You purged Kingdom and you protected all of us from Harry. And as we’ve just agreed, anyone who can bring down a Pantheon member is a threat to us all.’ He shot Fist a pointed look.

‘Oh, I know that very well,’ said Fist. ‘I’m only sorry that I couldn’t stop Harry before he destroyed Kingdom.’ He almost sounded as if he meant it. ‘It’s Jack who’s the pessimist, not me.’

Jack glared back at Grey. ‘Harry kills Kingdom, Fist kills Harry, problem solved, all done and dusted,’ he spat. ‘Nice and easy and resolved. That’s how East’s spinning it too, isn’t she? Let the blame fall on the dead, don’t dig into the crimes of the living.’ He sighed. ‘All we’ve really done is enable a whitewash.’

‘Nonsense,’ exclaimed Grey. ‘Think about the bigger picture. You’ve enabled peace. Your actions brought the Pantheon and the Totality together. When Fist killed Harry, it left a space they had to fill. Their immediate takeover of his corporate structure saved tens of thousands of lives. The revelation of Kingdom’s crimes offset their opening of the Coffin Drives and paved the way for their acceptance into Station. Without you two, the peace negotiations would never have led to such a positive outcome. And now we’ve got that peace, we really can’t do anything to risk it. Which is why we’re all going to look forwards, not backwards, from now on.’

‘If it’s built on a lie,’ replied Jack, ‘it’s not really peace at all.’

Grey said nothing. Jack turned away from him. The dusk outside had turned to night. The windows had become great dark mirrors, showing all in the room back to themselves. Jack found that he could meet his own gaze. Lestak finally broke the silence. ‘If that’s it,’ she said, ‘I need to escort you out.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Grey. ‘I can show him the way.’

‘Wait,’ Fist cut in. ‘Before you go – will you be seeing Issie soon?’

Lestak smiled sadly. ‘Perhaps. Sometime in the next couple of weeks. She’s exploring the servers of Titan just now, I think. I haven’t talked since she left for out-system. She sounded very excited.’

‘Say hello to her,’ Fist told her. ‘Send her to see us. When she’s back!’

‘I don’t know when that’ll be. But yes, I will do.’ There was something approaching desolation in her voice.

‘Goodnight, Lestak,’ said Grey, with the soft, final force of a dismissal.

‘Goodnight,’ she replied abstractedly. Then she gathered herself. ‘Goodnight, Fist. And Jack. Think about what Grey’s said. Remember who I serve. I’m sure I’ll see you again. Please don’t let it be in my professional capacity. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.’

And then she was gone, and it was just the three of them.

‘What are you going to do now, Jack?’ asked Grey.

‘You’ll find out, won’t you? Even if I don’t tell you.’

‘No, Jack. I’ll let you be.’

‘Really? That’ll be a first.’

‘You deserve some peace of your own, Jack. You always have done. If it wasn’t for – everything – I wouldn’t have found you again when you came back to Station. I was a victim of circumstances as much as you were; and you were the only tool I had to hand. I’m sorry for that.’

‘Sorry for using me?’

‘Sorry I was placed in a position that forced me to.’ Grey put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘Let it all go. We’ve got the best world we can have, for now – and new lives for you and Fist. I’m glad that this is how it is, glad that all’s settled down.’

‘Glad that you’re back in power. That the people of Station have accepted it all so easily.’

‘East is managing her audience wonderfully.’

‘Always one more string to pull.’

‘We’re all more likely to survive now we’re working together, not against each other. That’s all we ever wanted. But I’m not going to convince you, am I? So it’s time for us to go, at last.’

‘I’ll find my own way out.’

‘All right, Jack. And really – this is as perfect a world as we can ever have. This is a heaven, of sorts. Let it be.’ Another soft touch of his hand, then he was gone.

‘I can breathe again,’ said Jack, letting out a long sigh. ‘I always so want to believe him, you know.’

‘That’s hardly surprising.’ Fist hopped off his chair. ‘He did do a lot for you, over the years.’

‘Always on his terms. Perhaps that’s all that gods can ever do.’

‘Well, he’s gone now.’ Fist sighed. ‘No more battles to fight.’

‘No one shooting at us, at any rate. And very little left to fight back with. Everyone saw you burn your weapon systems out killing Harry, and East’s taken back most of her gifts to me.’

‘You’re going to ignore everything Grey and Lestak said, aren’t you?’

Jack stood up. ‘Come on, Fist. Let’s go.’

‘Seeing Andrea tonight?’

‘If her fetch stabilisation work lets her. If not, there’s my father.’

‘Assuming of course your mum’s persuaded him that you’re not a complete shit. And we’ve got to track down Mr Stabs.’

‘I do hope we can get him rehoused in a better body.’ Jack bent down and put his arms out. Fist hopped into them, nestling snugly in the crook of his elbow. ‘You’re a lot heavier now, Fist.’

‘Well, I’m real, aren’t I?’

‘You always have been.’

Fist laughed. ‘I suppose so. And for all that he’s a manipulative old shit, Grey was right about one thing. We might not have entirely won, Jack, but we certainly didn’t lose. Kingdom was the bad guy, and Harry was pretty fucking evil too. We stopped them both. And you’re the big Totality fan – we helped them, and the dead too. You should take some pleasure in that, at least.’

‘Maybe.’ He half-smiled. ‘It does sound better coming from you than it did from Grey.’

They were at the door. The lights in the room hushed to darkness. Jack turned, and with Fist looked out over the city.

‘Home, at last.’

The ghost of a hunting dog nuzzled at them, before blurring and vanishing. Then Jack and Fist were gone too. The dark room was silent, and the city beyond it seemed to be at peace.

Acknowledgements

This book was redrafted many times, and along the way benefited hugely from some great early readers. So, first of all deepest thanks to Alys Sterling, Dave Clements, Neil Williamson, Nick Moulton and Zali Krishna for your very thoughtful and profoundly practical critiques.

An early version of the opening

Chapter s went through the Milford SF Writers’ workshop in 2010 – a particular thank you to Liz Williams, an inspirational presence over the years, and everyone else who was there. Huge gratitude also to everyone who’s been part of the London Cat Herd writers’ group who, over almost a decade, have taught me so much.

This wouldn’t be the book it is if I hadn’t played with the Stella Maris Drone Orchestra and Graan, who together helped me learn how to take advantage of the moment and improvise as I was going along. Danke schön, dröën böys! Thanks to Lloyd Davis and the Tuttle Club for so many excellent digital conversations. And – of course – all the inspiration from Andy Cox and all at TTA Press has been absolutely invaluable.

I couldn’t have pulled Crashing Heaven into its final shape without the help and support of my most excellent agent, Susan Armstrong at Conville & Walsh, and editor, Simon Spanton. And without my wife Heather Lindsley – who was there from start to end with everything from nice cups of tea to ferociously insightful critiques, always at just the right time – Rory and the rest of my family, I wouldn’t have been able to write it at all.

Thank you all.

Copyright

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Al Robertson 2015

All rights reserved.

The right of Al Robertson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2015 by Gollancz.

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

ISBN 978 1 473 20342 6

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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 permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.allumination.co.uk

www.orionbooks.co.uk