The Fall of Sirius Read online

  THE FALL OF SIRIUS

  by

  WIL McCARTHY

  Produced by ReAnimus Press

  Other books by Wil McCarthy:

  Bloom

  Aggressor Six

  Murder in the Solid State

  Flies from the Amber

  ~~~

  © 2011, 1996 by Wil McCarthy. All rights reserved.

  http://ReAnimus.com/authors/wilmccarthy

  Cover Art by Clay Hagebusch

  Smashwords Edition Licence Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  ~~~

  To Alec Perry,

  who will spend his whole life in the future

  ~~~

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book comes into being without assistance. To all the unsung heroes at Penguin Books whom I've never met, I offer my gratitude. I would also like to thank J. Storrs Hall for his foggy ideas about nanotechnology, Shawna McCarthy and Amy Stout for helping this project to exist at all, NCWW for helping me start, and the Edge Club for helping me finish. Special thanks to Sean Stewart, whose energetic feedback came at just the right time. And as always, thanks to Cathy for soldiering on. Love you, babe.

  KEY TO SIRIAN CHARACTER NAMES

  In the Standard language as employed by colonists of the interstitial era, all vowels are sounded, with pronunciation as follows: u as in chute, o as in rose, i as in pita, e as in kept, and a as in wall.

  Proper names ending in e are feminine; all others are masculine. A silent apostrophe may be employed where spelling cues would otherwise be ambiguous or misleading.

  Characters are typically referred to by first name and patronym, by diminutive, or by full name. Thus, “Malyene Andreivne” (mal-YEH-neh an-DREH-eev-neh, i.e., Malyene: daughter of Andrei), “Malye” (MAL-yeh), and “Colonel Malyene Andreivne Kurosov'e” (i.e., born or married into the House Kurosov) all refer to the same person.

  CHARTS

  (Note: If you have difficulty viewing these charts you may download them in PDF format here.)

  HUMAN SPACE

  circa 5000 A.D.

  GATE SYSTEM (SIRIUS)

  circa 5000 A.D.

  “...they come from Orion, from the waist of Orion... radiant phenomenon is now identified as a propulsive maneuver involving a large number of...

  “...moved in on the second planet at approximately oh-seven hundred... The lunar surfaces are almost completely devastated. ...heard nothing from the Lesser Worlds in almost two days. Look, you probably know all this. You damn well should know all of this. I can't be the only one transmitting.

  “...can't even think how many people have died. Everyone is dead, do you hear me? The whole damn colony is dead.” “The question has been answered, yes? The Waisters are yes-damn-it a hostile force. It's...

  “I have to get below the surface now, but listen to me: Sirius has fallen. We are beaten, we are utterly smashed. I am Pavel Gremov, Entertainment Twelve, signing off. I repeat, Sirius has fallen...”

  —Sirius System, Final Transmission

  DCN 5328-551-5327-1839AR

  (Courtesy of the Uriel Archive)

  Keywords:

  CHAPTER ONE

  213::14

  PINEGA, GATE SYSTEM:

  CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON

  The first thing the monster saw when she opened her eyes was a man leaning over her. Blurry, doubled—her vision refusing to focus—and viewed also through the frosted, transparent arch above her. She lay naked before him in a coffin of glass.

  I'm freezing, she thought, but right away she knew that was wrong. She remembered where she was, remembered that she was in fact unfreezing.

  Shapes and colors sang across her tongue.

  With a pneumatic pop and hiss, the coffin lid rose.

  She vomited clear gel. Attempting to speak, she vomited again.

  “Reliaxu,” she heard the man say. “Paniku nin. Thest nin dangeris.”

  “My children,” she finally managed to say. Her voice a yellow croak, the sound like bubbles rising in oil. And desperate. “My children.”

  “Standard, late interstitial,” the man said to someone behind him, out of view. He spoke without turning, his breath warm in her face, smelling of nothing, of the hibernation jelly still clogging her nostrils. “Congratulations; dating appears consistent.”

  “My children! Elle, Vadim.” she pleaded. “How?” Too weak to rise, her limbs soft as noodles. Brain refusing her orders, still cold. How are my children, please?

  The man loomed over her, spinning off colors like music at high volume. “Deep cryostasis, madam, and the machinery is old. What can I tell you?”

  Another voice, from somewhere behind him: “Indications are positive, madam; there are ten bodies here, two of them children, and so far as we can determine, all of them appear safe.”

  Oh Ialah. Thank you, in all your names.

  Relaxing, she blinked her eyes.

  The world oozed into focus, her eyes finally clearing away the gel that had fouled them.

  The face above her looked much too broad at its top, much too narrow underneath, the mouth tiny, as if toothless. She thought this an illusion at first, but as he pulled away she noticed the eyes, staring back at her like blank copper mirrors, without iris or pupil or other visible detail. His hair was green, and very short, and clinging in strange patterns to his scalp. Another figure came up behind him, also green-haired, clad in strange, soft garments and moving in a ripply, loose-boned gait no more human than the canter of a horse. Their skins were gray-blue, their limbs unnaturally long.

  “Names of Ialah,” she croaked, “we lost the war.”

  The two figures exchanged knowing smiles, and in a moment the cryostasis ward echoed with their laughter.

  “You remember the war, then?” the nearer man said to her eventually. He spoke carefully, as if Standard were a language well known to him, memorized though not often employed. “We hoped you might; it seems our risk investment has been a wise one. But a long time has passed, much longer than you perhaps suspect. The war is over, the Waisters long gone.”

  “Wh... wh...” Where? How?

  Who are you, she wanted to know. What's happened here? How did the war end, and how long ago? Her blood, still cold, felt as if it would never warm again. No green-haired people had dwelt in Sirius system, in her time or before. Nor elsewhere in human space, so far as she knew.

  “We are as human as you,” the man assured her, his copper eyes glittering.

  And the monster knew right then and there that he was lying, and that he was comfortable lying, and that the truth would be a difficult thing to get out of him. But not impossible, no.

  She favored him with as steady a gaze as she could muster. Cleared her throat, still slick with gel. “My name is Malyene Andreivne. With whom am I speaking? Plainly you are not Waisters, but what you are I cannot guess.”

  Her forwardness seemed to catch them off guard. They exchanged glances.

  “In your language I would be called Crow,” the nearer man said carefully. He nodded his head at the other. “This one is Plate.”

  She held his gaze.

  Held it until he spoke again: “We're from Finders ring, Wende's six, both of us Workers. The Gate colony has...” He stopped, blinked. Forced a smile. “Let us not be h
asty. There is much you do not know—”

  “But I will know it,” she told him. Shivering, she tightened her back muscles, hauled her nude, numb body upright. Cool slime ran off her in rivers. Her eyes held them both. Few secrets could be kept from her, had ever been kept from her, for she was Colonel Malyene Andreivne Kurosov'e of Central Investigations.

  The monster.

  She swung her head around in a slow, purposeful arc, taking in everything. The cryostasis ward had scarcely changed, its dozen coffins inclined, as ever, against the spinward wall. Equipment lockers all around, dead light fixtures above, a floor of bare, textured metal. But: three spheres of hazy white light hung motionless in the air, connected to nothing and yet providing illumination, and the wall which should contain the exit hatch had been replaced with a gray-white... membrane, it looked like.

  The two men had begun to get upset, she noted. Not angry, precisely, and not intimidated either, but she had the sense that they were distracted, annoyed, finding her less convenient than they'd expected. Convenient for what?

  “How long have you been at Sirius?” she demanded.

  Crow frowned with his tiny mouth. “Sirius? Ah. We, that is, our people, arrived here some sixty essey past. Sixty Earth standard years, I should say. But madam, this star system has been called Gate for over two millennia.”

  Malye froze. Two millennia?

  Barely an hour seemed to have passed. Into the coffin, and then the choking fluid and the awful cold for a while, and then the awakening... A few weeks, she'd thought, they'll come for us in a few weeks if they come for us at all. Names of Ialah, two thousand years?

  “I expect this comes as a shock,” Plate told her gravely. He held a red, glittery, translucent object in his hand, like an eyeball-sized ruby or a piece of cut glass, and as he spoke he pressed this against the side of his head, and then withdrew it.

  “My people?” Malye asked, feeling faint, resisting the urge to lie back again in the inclined coffin and ignore all this.

  Crow looked troubled, hesitant. His bedside manner nonexistent, but at least he had the good grace to be embarrassed about it. “Madam, the Sirius colony was destroyed, and was quite empty when we arrived. Until we located this facility fifty months ago, it had always been assumed there were no survivors at all.”

  “There are a billion people in this system,” she protested. “Were. A billion people. Two planets' moons crawling with people, and a thousand hollow rocks.... It was a thriving civilization.”

  “Yes,” Crow agreed. “Waisters are very thorough.”

  Oh, Ialah. Grigory, her husband, twenty centuries in his grave? Along with her whole world, yes, along with all the worlds of Sirius? She had somehow saved herself, and Elle, and Vadim. Had no one else managed to save anything? Damn them, damn them all!

  “Madam,” Plate said, “we have awakened you in the hope that you can assist us. You're an eyewitness to something we can only conjecture at. You have seen the Waisters in confrontation.”

  “I never saw them,” she said.

  “But you saw how they behaved? You know the sequence of events? The Fall of Sirius is a matter of no small importance to us.”

  Her eyes narrowed. The colors in the room began once more to sing. They were holding something back, still.

  “Tell me why you need my help,” she commanded.

  Crow put a hand to his brow, looking deeply troubled, looking... scared? “Because, Madam, the Waisters have returned. An armada of at least seventy large ships, not responding to any attempts at communication. They will be in system just over a hundred hours from now.”

  The world swam, shimmered. “Oh. Oh, I see. Yes, well, I will do what I can to help you, of course.”

  Of course.

  Only now did the monster think to cry.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TYUMEN, SIRIUS SYSTEM:

  JANURY 29, YEAR OF OUR LORD 3125

  They swept through the crowd like ghosts, the three of them: Malyene and her staff, come to cleanse yet another world, to locate and haul away the very worst of its garbage. The ferry port's exit spilled out into a vast, illuminated cavern, the crowd flowing out like water across the floor of it. Nobody looking up around them at the great Atrium of Tyumen, whose floor and ceiling were separated by no less than a kilometer. Nobody except Malye's staff.

  “I just don't see why Fraud gets a higher travel allowance than we do,” Elye was saying, her eyes everywhere except on the causeway in front of her. “I mean, yes, they have more people, but it's not like the local greenbars are helpless without their physical presence.”

  “We're lucky to get anything at all,” Kromov agreed, chuckling as he took in the view. “Next year they'll probably just ask us to put a sign out: VIOLENT CRIMINALS, PLEASE SURRENDER HERE.”

  “That's enough,” Malye told them both. Tyumen's architecture, even what little of it they'd seen since debarking from the ferry, had put her staff in an expansive mood, from which they had difficulty focusing on their own jobs and must, of necessity, discuss everyone else's. The Atrium was impressive, mammoth pillars alternating with shafts of white light along an avenue wide and long enough to hold an entire city, easing upward in the distance so very gradually that it was easy to forget this was a spin-gee world at all. The Tyumenae certainly knew how to build.

  But Tyumen was the eighth largest of the Thousand Lesser Worlds, a hollow planetoid crammed pole-to-pole with wonders, and gawking at the view would be a poor habit to develop, one that would certainly not get Kiril Gostev into custody any sooner. And anyway, right now they were late.

  “Solzehn has cleared an office for us,” Malye reminded the two. “If we miss this tube and arrive after he's gone off shift, you will neither of you have liberty tonight. I hope this is clear.”

  “As vacuum,” Kromov assured her.

  Alas, Malye herself was fighting a distraction of a different sort, an uneasy feeling she could not quite dispel. Her husband, Grigory, had been acting peculiarly these past few days, pacing and muttering and generally showing signs of an anxiety to which he was not accustomed. Something is going to happen, he'd said mysteriously, but had refused further comment. Something good? Something bad? Grigory managed a group of astrometers and chronicians, well known and respected within their field; could he be facing a promotion, or a transfer, or perhaps something less pleasant? She wasn't going to interrogate him over it, not her own husband, but how had this distance between them arisen? Slowly, quietly, as if their two worlds were not on the same orbit after all. She wished he'd confided in her before she was called away.

  The tube station now ahead of them appeared far less elaborate than the ferry dock, really just a track and a platform and a blue-tiled tunnel mouth in the wall there, matching another tiled and arched opening just barely visible on the antispinward wall at the far end of this grand, curved, columned avenue. The tube and ferry stations stared right across at one another, barely six hundred meters apart, and so Malye and her staff moved perpendicular to the main flow of pedestrian traffic, across the avenue rather than along it.

  But the crowd was light, and they moved through it swiftly, not hurrying but striding beam-straight through the path their burgundy uniforms cleared ahead of them. C.I. top silver, get out of the way. No one would wish to be the cause of their inconvenience.

  As if the monster could actually do anything to them, write a ticket or issue a summons. As if she would waste the time, if she could. As if they mattered to her at all, these ordinary citizens on their ordinary errands. Well, as a public to be protected, yes, but if Malye and her assistants were running late it was their own damn problem, yes?

  Still, these were peaceful people, unaccustomed to physical, personal manifestations of Authority. To them, law enforcement meant greenbars to shoo loiterers out of the shops, and Central Investigators meant...something else. That there was trouble, danger. That they should get the hell out of the way. Though occasionally embarrassing, the mystique was useful, and for t
his reason Malye encouraged her people to encourage it. Fear was not a tool she liked to be without.

  Their train lay just ahead, and the crowd parted away from the train's nearest door, which slid open for them as if equally cowed. They boarded and found seats at the rear of the car, against the aft bulkhead, as far as possible from the curtained enclosure of the shitter at the car's front. Generally, nobody liked to sit near the shitter, preferring to avoid the smell and the traffic, but they liked sitting by Central Investigators still less—Malye and her staff had the rear half of the car almost to themselves. Those passengers who sat nearby cast furtive glances at them, obviously wondering: what's wrong, what's going on? The burgundy uniforms, so rare in their experience, at once drawing their attention and repelling it, like the scene of a nasty accident. In this case, an accident that had perhaps not yet occurred.

  Just wait, citizens.

  “We could have boosted directly to the capital,” Elye said. They could have, she meant, if they'd had the budget. Ah, Major Elyene Izacne Boltsev'e, always ready and willing to state the obvious. In police work that could occasionally be a useful habit, but here on the tube it was simply annoying.

  “Yes,” Malye told her quietly. “And we would have missed this view which has so enthralled you. Comport yourself as befits your station, please.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” Elyene said, doing a poor job of hiding her smile.

  Silently, the doors slid closed, and the great Atrium of Tyumen began to move outside their windows, the huge columns sliding past, one by one. The acceleration, mild at first, climbed rapidly, until the columns were racing by, and then flashing, and then flickering in a steady blur. Malye began to feel lighter in her seat, and then lighter still, centripetal gravity partly canceled as the train shot faster and faster around Tyumen's outer circumference, against the direction of its spin.