Night Passage
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, Alastair Reynolds worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands for a number of years but has recently moved back to his native Wales to become a full-time writer. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major science fiction books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Century Rain, and Pushing Ice, all big sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new science fiction writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and a chapbook novella, The Six Directions of Space, as well as three collections, Galactic North, Zima Blue and Other Stories, and Deep Navigation. His other novels include The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, Blue Remembered Earth, On the Steel Breeze, and Sleepover, and a Doctor Who novel, Harvest of Time. Upcoming is a new book, Slow Bullets.
In the suspenseful story that follows, the crew of a ship who blunder into a strange cosmic phenomenon in deep space are faced with mutiny, betrayal, and double cross piled upon double cross.…
If you were really born on Fand then you will know the old saying we had on that world.
Shame is a mask that becomes the face.
The implication being that if you wear the mask long enough, it grafts itself to your skin, becomes an indelible part of you—even a kind of comfort.
Shall I tell you what I was doing before you called? Standing at my window, looking out across Chasm City as it slid into dusk. My reflection loomed against the distant buildings beyond my own, my face chiselled out of cruel highlights and pitiless, light-sucking shadows. When my father held me under the night sky above Burnheim Bay, pointing out the named colonies, the worlds and systems bound by ships, he told me that I was a very beautiful girl, and that he could see a million stars reflected in the dark pools of my eyes. I told him that I didn’t care about any of that, but that I did want to be a starship captain.
Father laughed. He held me tighter. I do not know if he believed me or not, but I think it scared him, that I might mean exactly what I said.
And now you come.
You recognise me, as he would not have done, but only because you knew me as an adult. You and I never spoke, and our sole meeting consisted of a single smile, a single friendly glance as I welcomed the passengers onto my ship, all nineteen thousand of them streaming through the embarkation lock—twenty if you include the Conjoiners.
Try as I might, I can’t picture you.
But you say you were one of them, and for a moment at least I’m inclined to give you the time of day. You say that you were one of the few thousand who came back on the ship—and that’s possible, I could check your name against the Equinoctial’s passenger manifest, eventually—and that you were one of the still fewer who did not suffer irreversible damage due to the prolonged nature of our crossing. But you say that even then it was difficult. When they brought you out of reefersleep, you barely had a personality, let alone a functioning set of memories.
How did I do so well, when the others did not? Luck was part of it. But when it was decreed that I should survive, every measure was taken to protect me against the side effects of such a long exposure to sleep. The servitors intervened many times, to correct malfunctions and give me the best chance of coming through. More than once I was warmed to partial life, then submitted to the auto-surgeon, just to correct incipient frost damage. I remember none of that, but obviously it succeeded. That effort could never have been spread across the entire manifest, though. The rest of you had to take your chances—in more ways than one.
Come with me to the window for a moment. I like this time of day. This is my home now, Chasm City. I’ll never see Fand again, and it’s rare for me to leave these rooms. But it’s not such a bad place, Yellowstone, once you get used to the poison skies, the starless nights.
Do you see the lights coming on? A million windows, a million other lives. The lights remain, most of the time, but still they remind me of the glints against the Shroud, the way they sparked, one after the other. I remember standing there with Magadis and Doctor Grellet, finally understanding what it was they were showing me—and what it meant. Beautiful little synaptic flashes, like thoughts sparking across the galactic darkness of the mind.
But you saw none of that.
Let me tell you how it started. You’ll hear other accounts, other theories, but this is how it was for me.
To begin with no one needed to tell me that something was wrong. All the indications were there as soon as I opened my eyes, groping my way to alertness. Red walls, red lights, a soft pulsing alarm tone, the air too cold for comfort. The Equinoctial was supposed to warm itself prior to the mass revival sequence, when we reached Yellowstone. It would only be this chilly if I had been brought out of hibernation at emergency speed.
“Rauma,” a voice said. “Captain Bernsdottir. Can you understand me?”
It was my second-in-command, leaning in over my half-open reefersleep casket. He was blurred out, looming swollen and pale.
“Struma.” My mouth was dry, my tongue and lips uncooperative. “What’s happened? Where are we?”
“Mid-crossing, and in a bad way.”
“Give me the worst.”
“We’ve stopped. Engines damaged, no control. We’ve got a slow drift, a few kilometres per second against the local rest frame.”
“No,” I said flatly, as if I was having to explain something to a child. “That doesn’t happen. Ships don’t just stop.”
“They do if it’s deliberate action.” Struma bent down and helped me struggle out of the casket, every articulation of bone and muscle sending a fresh spike of pain to my brain. Reefersleep revival was never pleasant, but rapid revival came with its own litany of discomforts. “It’s sabotage, Captain.”
“What?”
“The Spiders…” He corrected himself. “The Conjoiners woke up mid-flight and took control of the ship. Broke out of their area, commandeered the controls. Flipped us around, slowed us down to just a crawl.”
He helped me hobble to a chair and a table. He had prepared a bowl of pink gelatinous pap, designed to restore my metabolic balance.
“How…” I had too many questions and they were tripping over themselves trying to get out of my head. But a good captain jumped to the immediate priorities, then backtracked. “Status of the ship. Tell me.”
“Damaged. No main drive or thruster authority. Comms lost.” He swallowed, like he had more to say.
I spooned the bad-tasting pink pap into myself. “Tell me we can repair this damage, and get going again.”
“It can all be fixed—given time. We’re looking at the repair schedules now.”
“We?”
“Six of your executive officers, including me. The ship brought us out first. That’s standard procedure: only wake the captain under dire circumstances. There are six more passengers coming out of freeze, under the same emergency protocol.”
Struma was slowly swimming into focus. My second-in-command had been with me on two crossings, but he still looked far too young and eager to my eyes. Strong, boyish features, an easy smile, arched eyebrows, short dark curls neatly combed even in a crisis.
“And the…” I frowned, trying to wish away the unwelcome news he had already told me. “The Conjoiners. What about them. If you’re speaking to me, the takeover can’t have been successful.”
“No, it wasn’t. They knew the ship pretty well, but not all of the security procedures. We woke up in time to contain and isolate the takeover.” He set his jaw. “It was brutal, though. They’re fast and sly, and of course they outnumbered us a hundred to one. But we had weapons, and most of the security systems were dumb enough to keep on our side, not theirs.”