Ditched (part 12, finale)

The flowers, the sun, the wrecked ship and the sea, none of them respond to my cry. A pit has opened up beneath me and I am plunging into a void at the centre of the world. There is nothing left, only an emptiness consuming me.

“Bill.”

A gnawing ache that has nothing to do with the poor state my body is in eat away at me.

“Bill.”

Everything has ended.

“Bill!” I open my eyes, Jimmy is crouched before me peering into my face. “I know it hurts. I know you've fallen into a black hole and can't get out. We've done this before.” I blink at him. “It was a long time ago, let it go. We have more important things at the moment.”

“I...” I trail off, not knowing whether to be angry or apologetic with Jimmy.

“Relax a bit, you're beat up, tired, stressed to hell, have no idea what is going on and have just found out that the love of your life disappeared because it was too dangerous for her to be around you. You have the right to have a freak-out, but it really doesn't help anything.” This is the voice that talked me down from numerous fights.

“Now, listen. You have a safe back-up memory and after severe brain trauma it downloads back into your rebuilt grey matter, which is why you feel like you're constantly reading from the wrong page of the book of your life. We set it up so that certain information come out in a certain order, Laura's name is the last thing you relearn, it lets me know that its now all back in that noggin of yours. You're going to have some very weird dreams for the next couple of weeks. As for all the emotions that dumps on you, well you're just going to have to bottle it up for now. Later we can regrow your legs and then find something and give it a bloody good kicking.” Jimmy parks himself cross-legged next to me on the grass.

“How many time have I done this before?”

“Half a dozen. Once when the New Humanists put a bullet through your head in Jakarta. Once when you were buried in a collapsed building in Mexico City, that was mostly your own fault. A shuttle crash in the asteroid belt, you weren't even piloting...”

“Okay, I get the idea, I die a lot and you rebuild me, repopulate my memory and off I go again.”

“Something like that. But the back-up isn't complete, there a lot of the later stuff that unless you retained it after the crash will be lost forever.”

“So, I'll likely never find out what I am doing here?”

“Well, answering that phone call might help.” I stare at the watch terminal, still blinking with an incoming message, the watch helpfully identifies the caller as 'The Boss'.

Jason Vicker's name is yet to be changed on the door to the stationmaster's office, his replacement is very corporate minded and has already done his best to drive a wedge between those of us who willingly submit to the company's tests and those of us who are not mindless drones. I thank my security escort, it is important to maintain friends where I can. The door opens smoothly and I enter without pause.

The room has lost its aura of military efficiency and now smells of decisions made for the benefit of the shareholders. I ignore the offered hand from a man with a pasty face and a weak chin and the introduction to the woman beside him with a face straight from the company brochures and head straight to the window. I thumb the opacity control and stare out at the rotating view of the Earth, such beauty out of my reach.

There is an embarrassed and stilted silence, I see them look to one another in the reflection off the window, then I catch my own strange visage. In many ways it is the same face that forms my mind's self-image, but it is not the face that used to look out at me from the mirror. The lines, earned and not given, are gone; the hair is no longer thin and grey; the scar in my eyebrow, evidence of childhood misadventure is missing; the scar on my chin, a missile hit that killed my co-pilot and very nearly had me plough into Tripoli is no longer there.

In my place is a young man, I could be my academy graduation picture, except photoshopped into an inhuman perfection. My hair is a shock of muddy-blond, the nose razor-sharp and never broken, the lips thin and serious. The eyes do not fit, the blue of the windswept sea, they have travelled too far, seen too much to belong to this face. Now I see the disconnect people have with me, I was full-grown before the others in the room were born, but I am young enough to be their child. I turn to face them.

“I have a wife down there.” Sitting in on years of corporate trade negotiations has honed the tactic of keeping off the script while pushing your own agenda. “She probably thinks I am dead.” My mind trips over her message and I let the emotion play across my face.

“I am sorry, but I think you know why we cannot you contact her.” Rosamund Buhari opts for a motherly tone, the slight tinge of her native Nigerian accent adding an authentic touch, but utterly wasted on a man older than her.

“So why are you here?”

“Captain Larkin, may I call you William? I have read the files, and it all seems utterly fantastic. I just wanted to hear it straight from someone who is at the centre of it all, so I can understand it from a personal point of view.” So she wants to be the human face of the company, I lose nothing allowing her to think that, but I know she has already met with Davis, Tseng and Patrick, the company minded part of our bunch of changelings.

“Where would you like me to start?”

“First off I would like to say that I do not blame you for disobeying company instructions, you did what you thought was right and maybe it turned out so, I respect that. Too many in management thought giving you the position was just pandering to the more traditional members of the board and to look good for PR, I believe you proved them wrong.” The delivery is perfect, but I doubt the sincerity.

“Thank you,”

“I watched the whole drama, your heroism, the ship breaking up and the alien craft drifting away. We thought the alien craft was dead, it didn't respond to anything, didn't communicate in any way and went into an orbit close to the sun for nearly two years, we were building a new ship capable of reaching it, but it came to us first. I tell you there were fingers on triggers when it approached Bayard Station , but mine was one of the voices saying 'Let it come'. What was happening those two years?” Her hands are as expressive as her face.

“I don't know, I guess the Angels were repairing their craft and rebuilding us. I don't have any memories until just before we entered the station, just a lot of vague impressions and things that could be conversations.”

“What are they like?”

“Different, they don't think like us and they stopped being fully biological a long time ago, now they exist in mainframes or any bodies they build for themselves. They don't really exist as individuals, they are more like a colony, each Angel is a group of specialised personalities, each with a different job that makes up a whole person. Its a bit like talking to a committee.” She smiles at this, thinking that I am warming to her.

“I read that when they rebuilt you they made you effectively two people in one body.” Jimmy leans against the desk, I send a mental message to him telling him to behave.

“They didn't really understand us, and couldn't make us work properly the way we were, so they added a second personality to control the nanotech.” Jimmy gives a little wave to my audience, as though he were not just an image added to my vision.

“I am told everyone has a version of themselves except you, you have Group Co-ordinator Mahdi as your, you term them a controller?”

“Yeah, he died before the rest of us and they weren't able to capture all of him, not enough to make him a complete person.” I let genuine guilt and sorrow play on my face, I would swap any of those resurrected just to get Jimmy back whole, to be able to touch him. “Somewhere a decision was made that he should become part of me, I may have made it myself, we share many memories.”

“Why did the aliens, Angels you call them, why did they just leave without saying anything? They came all this way and then just dropped you and accelerated off.” Everyone has asked this question.

“They don't think like us. They are trying to find others of their kind. Something went wrong, or they became sick or something, they are looking for a cure. They homed in on our signals, checked to see if any of their kind had ever been here and then left. They assumed we were message enough.”

“They came, they saw, they shrugged, they fucked off.” Jimmy interjects for my ears only.

“I suppose we can't complain if the first aliens we ever meet turn out to be so alien.” A warm grin that must have won over many in the past. “I hear all kind of wild tales about the little machines they put inside of you, can you tell me more about that?”

“As far as I can tell they will repair any damage short of complete destruction, but without the controller to instruct them they do not do they much quicker than the usual human repair systems. Some of the other talk about the system being hackable allowing severe bodily alterations, but that is something I really don't want to mess with, there's no telling what side-effects could arise.” There have been some ridiculous suggestions banded about, but no-one has risked anything yet.

“And outside your body, what would these machines do?” Now on to the big questions, how can we monetise this.

“Nothing good. Without the controller the best you could hope for is that they start rebuilding what they come across according to my own genetic structure, the worst, probably try to turn everything into themselves.”

“And if we could build our own controllers?”

“Forget about it. Our most sophisticated machines still do not live up to the moniker or artificial intelligence. The controllers are a system both capable of simulating a human brain and directly controlling a million tiny helpers at the same time, small enough to fit inside me without displacing anything major and efficient enough to run off my own power.” Jimmy grins. “why don't we get down to the crux of the issue?”

“Which is?”

“Can the company make money off us? I am sorry, but there is nothing in us that you can reverse engineer that is not going to endanger the whole human race. You can forget your dreams about providing eternal life to your paying customers and dominating the world in advanced nanotechnology We are getting fed up of being treated as lab subjects and company property, when is that going to be redressed?”

“For the very reasons you mentioned we cannot afford to let you loose amongst the general population. I do not know if you are aware of the current political situation on Earth, can you imagine the effects of a terrorist organisation getting hold of destructive alien nanotech?”

“Currently I have reasons to doubt the wisdom of letting such a thing fall into the hands of a corporation with designs on global conquest.” Jimmy covers his eyes, but I have just got started. “When I joined the war for company sovereignty, I thought I was liberating people from the yoke of ineffectual government, now I realise I just traded one set of uncaring slave masters for another. I don't belong to your company, I have fulfilled my contract, now let me go or be prepared to speak to my lawyer.”

“William Larkin is officially and legally dead. It is debatable that you are even the same person, you admit yourself that you are not really human. The contract states that anything recovered from the alien craft belongs to the company, and that, I'm afraid, includes you.” Now we have stripped off our disguises, I see the steel.

“Salvage law doesn't cover living beings.”

“But you are still stuck up here without outside knowledge of your existence.” She does not know how many holes there are in their security curtain, but I decide to keep the extent of the old boys network to myself. I half expect her to offer me a veiled threat about Laura, but she is too classy for that. Besides, she must know of Laura's disappearance, a report on it was 'accidentally' left open on a monitor when one of the security chiefs called me into his office for coffee.

“Look, call off any invasive tests on me and my crew and I'll co-operate more. That includes Peterson, no matter what he says. He hasn't taken to the transformation well, let's be honest, he's totally batshit, I don't think he'll ever be sane again, but that doesn't mean he can be a lab subject.”

“May I remind you of the massive cost of the project, if it does not bring any results the board my decide other action.” And now we have gone full corporate, I make a mental note to get the others on the escape committee to accelerate our plans.

I nearly take the watch off and throw it away. Suddenly the thought of talking with other, live people seems like a step too far, an intrusion into my little world full of little struggles. On top of that I do not feel at my best, tired with a deep down ache that I am certain Jimmy is keeping to tell me not to exert myself too much.

“Are you going to answer it or what?” Says Jimmy, I can see he is nearly vibrating with excitement, all this is a bit of a game for him, guess what mess Billy has got himself into this time.

“I'm not sure I really want to.” Some insect lands on my arm and takes a bite, I do not feel it and it flies off before I can rebalance myself to swat at it.

“C'mon, how could it make you situation any worse?”

“Just because your image is not real doesn't mean I won't find some way of strangling you when this gets me into even greater shit.” I press accept.

The image that appears is too small and too poorly lit for me to work it out. A pair of lips, but the eyes appear to be too wide apart and too large. There is something instead of a nose, but I cannot tell what. The whole background moves, but the movement seems too regular to be biological. I open my mouth to utter a greeting but the caller gets in first.

“How dare you!” It splutters in rage. The voice is as though it it not squeezed from a pair of fully human lungs, the resonance is strange, but the English is clear. “How dare you defy me so greatly and live? How can you survive when I had disabled the safety measures? How dare you destroy my property and think you can live?”

“You've got a live one there.” Jimmy deadpans.

“Alive! Take them alive, I said, not ram them out of the sky! You think that shuttle was cheap?” I cannot work it out at all, the voice ranges from a low grumble to a shriek, sometimes both at once. “And you killed Jun, do you know how much she cost me? And my babies, my poor, poor babies, you murdered them all, all my beautiful crabs, you despicable, heartless...”

The sound cuts out suddenly. The indiscernible figure remains, ranting silently, but a new voice replaces it.

“He'll be ranting for a while, so I am hijacking this transmission. Shit, Bill, what happened to the eye?” The voice is calm, level and female.

“Slight accident.” I reply, wary.

“Look, I don't know how you survived what you yourself called a suicide run, but I'm glad to see you alive.” She does not sound ecstatic, merely suffering from a mild case of non-disappointment. “I could really do with you up here, how extensive are your injuries?”

“Some locomotive problems, fairly severe head trauma. I'll be honest, I'm having some difficulties remembering some stuff.” I decide to downplay the details a little.

“Oh, I'll send something down to pick you up. You might have a wait before we can secure the medical facilities, but we might be able to patch you up a bit. Did you damage anything down there?”

“Might have squashed a few daisies, but nothing that won't grow back.”

“You must have hit your head hard if you've suddenly gained a sense of humour. We don't know how robust the planetary bio-network is, you could have ruined an essential system, or computational node.” It strikes me that it would be just like Liefman's mania to turn a screensaver into a planetwide computer system, she would probably have a good reason for it, too, not I just cannot fathom it.

“I think it is much more robust than you give it credit for.”

“Since when have you been an expert on anything but killing stuff? Did you manage to release the bees?”

“I think they are still on the shuttle.”

“Damn, we'll have to sort that after all the action. Listen, we're still moving into position to sever the dorsal root ganglion, but with virtually all the crabs gone it should be quite easy, Daddy will not know what hit him. Your plan has been invaluable.” The figure on the screen, Daddy, I assume, becomes even more agitated, the indistinct features thrashing about.

“Cheers, I...” ...really have no idea what is going on, but it sounds like a fun revolution.

“I'll patch you back in before he notices I've hacked the video, pretend you'll just listened to a fuckload of vitriolic mouth pissings. Shit, he's just targeted the shuttle and your wrist pad. Throw the pad away and get the hell away from it, hurry.”

“...never have spent good credit on a such a second rate hack job as you, no matter how unusually you were wired up. Well, have you got anything to say for yourself, you disgusting, semi-evolved ape?”

“Sorry, you must have the wrong number.” I rip the terminal from my wrist and summoning up the strength, hurl it over the edge of the cliff into the surging water below.

“Just move,” suggests Jimmy. “I'll deal with the hurting bits.”

The majority of my aches and tiredness just drop away as Jimmy works some kind of magic on my much abused body. The method of locomotion is now familiar, I do my best to increase my rate, straightening my arms more and attempting to walk on them. Flowers cease their singing as I crush them beneath my body. It feels like running but the ground passes at a depressingly slow rate.

There is nothing in my vision that announces the weapon strike, just a tearing of air as several somethings burn out of the sky impacting the shuttle, cliff and ground behind me. I embrace my head in my arms and attempt to merge with the ground as fire fills the world.

The flare cuts abruptly, the visor on my helmet adjusts to the return of darkness and all the stars come back. The Betsy-Mae, a hundred metres of engine, crew cabin, fuel tanks and other components that appear to have amalgamated together by themselves rather than have been built that way, drifts slowly away from the ball of rock and ice I am anchored to.

“That looks fine, I think we've fixed the problem” I say into the general radio channel. “Slow her and bring her back onto position.”

“Copy. Don't worry, Art, we aren't going to leave you sitting on that rock.” The manoeuvring jets, fired to balance the main engine slowly win their battle against the forward momentum.

“Take your time,” I mutter to myself. The others think I am slightly crazy, taking what opportunities I can to spend time space-walking outside the ship. There are five of us in that glorified tin-can that serves as a loosely affiliated asteroid prospecting vessel, even with our individual bunk/coffins it becomes somewhat crowded at times. “No whistling.” I add for Jimmy's benefit, he is ever amused by appearing suitless in a vacuum.

Betsy ponderously returns to to its position parked next to the rock, with far too much fussy use of the motors. The rock has time to rotate nearly twice over before they are finished, giving me a full view of the heavens. The sun seems too small, too far away.

“Amateurs.” Opines Jimmy. “Just think, this is what we trained for, all those years ago. Same ship, probably, too.”

“Hey, Art, you've got to see this when you get back to the ship.” The jagged accent of one born of here in the asteroid belt reminds me that I have forgotten to turn the radio off.

“If it is more shots of girls fitted with extra pairs of breasts then I am not interested, Dozer.” I get ready to make a leap for the Betsy-Mae, four hundred metres away.

“No, no, its something that happened in the Nano-wars, like something real big.” Wait, wait, and push. My strength is more than enough to break the weak pull of the asteroid, but my aim is slightly out.

“If you have found more of your evidence that all the nano-plagues and outbreaks were engineered from the blood of ten people who hitched a ride with some aliens, then I don't want to hear it.” A very short blast from my suit thrusters puts me into the open airlock door

I stow my suit carefully, staring at the picture I keep in the locker door. A man stares wistfully into the distance. Behind him stands an empty house, a sign offering it for sale. If you look closely you can see that there is no baby grand piano in the conservatory, no sign of the woman who once lived here, nothing to tell you of her child, no clue to tell you where she went.

The crew have been told that it is a picture of my father and leave I it as that. Many out here have reasons why they left the heavily controlled Earth of the Weathered Sun Reclaimationists and their successors. We do not talk about why we came to the new frontier.

There is a knot of fearful anticipation in my stomach as I see the others clustered around the main screen in the rec area, a tiny space that serves as a lounge, dining-room and gym, the ship's only real concession to human comfort. Monica does not react as I put my arm around her waist to anchor myself in the lack of gravity, engrossed in some footage of Mars and its moons. Except it is not Mars, the Sun's light is too bright, the moons show the signs of human habitation and there are three of them. The announcer starts a new sentence and I begin to make some sense of it.

“It has been independently tested that the signal does indeed emanate from outside of our solar system. The three artificial moons have been confirmed to match the shapes of three asteroids believe to been destroyed or mined during the turbulent and uncontrolled times of the Nano-wars. More incredible are the scenes depicting life both inside the moons and down on the planet itself...”

“Holy fuck!” Spouts Jimmy. “We did it, mankind went to the stars!”

“At least some people had the good sense to run away from our mess.” I tell him.

There is a smell of things burning, I think some of it is me. The singing meadow is now a scorched mess of smouldering wreckage and blasted foliage. A slight hollow has saved me from the worst of the explosion and luck has saved me from falling debris.

“Tell me the worst.” I ask Jimmy who is the only unscathed object I can see from my vantage point.

“The baby back ribs are done, but we're all out of the barbecue sauce. Seriously, there's nothing that's going to kill you more that the damage you've already done, you're just going to have to lie on your front for a while.”

I glance over my shoulder. My carefully and artfully crashed spaceship is now a blackened and burning hulk, part of the cliff has collapsed and taken the rear end of the craft with it. With nothing better to do, I start to drag my way out of the ashes and into a less ruined area. What is left of my clothes interferes with my locomotion, so I discard them. I might as well be naked in this garden of trippy Eden.

“So did you get anything out of that phone call, Jimmy, or are you waiting for the movie version?”

“Sound's like you're off Daddy's Christmas card list and I'm guessing that woman is 'J', but you probably haven't told either of them the true story.” I skirt around the big chunk of fuselage.

“Which is?”

“You are secretly the prince of Atlantis and you plan on dominating the Universe with your chain of fondue restaurants.” Sharp things are probably sticking in the part of my body the drags along the ground, I find the thought does not faze me in the slightest.

“What is a dorsal root ganglion anyway?”

“I'm not sure.”

“You're in charge of rebuilding my body, you should know.”

“The parts don't come labelled, I just know where the bits go. I think it might be the bit of flesh that attaches your testicles to your body.”

“Ouch! If I hadn't already lost that part of my body I would feel sorry for Daddy.”

This far from the explosion some of the flowers are still standing. Looking closely I see some have holes in their stems that whistle in the breeze, others have small sacks which contract and expel out a note with a small puff of air. The nearest tulip suddenly makes a noise that sounds to my ear like it is saying “Bill!”.

I laugh, carefree, confident that the Universe has done its worst to me today and I have survived. Other tulips take up the cry and I find I have dragged myself into a glade sporting my very own floral fanclub. I lie there until my fit of giggles subsides.

“I understand taking up a hobby to get you through those lonely hours, but maybe it would have been better if Liefman had just got a cat.”

“Judging by what has happened to crabs, I'm not sure I want to meet a modern cat. Besides, building a planet into a living computer is quite an achievement, don't knock it. It must have tasted your genetic material.” Jimmy reasons. “Hang on, the singing has changed, seems like she left you a message. Probably pissed off that you never call her.”

“Call him!” The gloved hand thrusts the comm unit against my ear, waiting for my spoken command to make the connection.

“More people will die if you don't.” Jimmy adds, pretending to inspect the bonds holding my arms to the chair. “They've just upped the pain another notch.”

“Keep the pain at its current level.” Jimmy is allowing enough though to let it show on my face and not make them suspicious. “I don't care about more people, I care about him.” I shake my head to let them know my answer.

Like most of Cellinos the room is lit by the bare minimum of light, a dim, sickly green glow that leaves people as outlines. Jimmy's half-hearted effort to improve my vision means that I am still mostly blind, unlike the enforcers and their modified eyes. There are three of them and I am restrained, but their reliance on the implants means they are only lightly armed and their ignorance of exactly what I can do evens the odds.

“Call him!” A slap across the face that I do not feel. It is obvious that they have no idea who he is, and so he is safe as long as I keep silent. The shadow at the console makes some adjustments. “Sergeant, kill five more.”

“Bill, I don't like what the implant is doing, if this goes on much long I will have to destroy it.” All the colour drains out of Jimmy's image, his voice sounds strange.

“Do that and the game is up. You're just jealous, jealous of sharing my head with the implant, jealous of me sharing my body with Maffierre.” On the screen five people are segregated off from the contained crowd.

“Give him up, Bill, he can escape. There are innocent people being killed there as well as the rebels. The rebellion needs those people alive.” The sergeant signals the enforcer with the implant control box.

“Screw the rebellion. I don't want yet another person vanishing out of my life, they all disappear, Jimmy, only you stay and you're dead.” The five clutch their heads, subjected to incapacitating pain. One falls to the ground, another wets himself.

“Its the implant talking, Bill, take hold of yourself. If I destroy it the game is up and they'll massacre everyone there. Two hundred people, Bill. If you escape they'll do the same. Let him go, he will escape and then eventually we can get away, you might see him again.” Enforcers step forwards and despatch the helpless people with the knives that are the symbol of the Cellino Dominion. Another adjustment is made at the console and Jimmy's image vanishes completely.

“Still holding out? Remarkable, a new record.” My captor leans close, too close.

Jimmy has not completed the preparation but the weakness is there. I strain against the binding on my right hand, relax and then wrench my arm back. The flesh on my forearm separates with an audible tear, the bones breaks along a prescribed line. I plunge this living weapon into his exposed throat. The spikes of the radius and ulna pierce deep, a rich flow of his blood joins mine, painting me with black in this green dimness.

His compatriots start to react, but where the straps holding my legs have touched up against the cuts in my skin they have been eaten away and now snap as I stand. I club one man awkwardly with the chair still attached to my left arm. Jimmy has kept my body tuned to the Earth's gravity, twice what is felt here and so the blow is enough to knock the man off his feet.

The chair becomes a shield as the third man opens up with his shard gun, the sharp projectiles tearing holes in the seat and a couple of chunks out of my legs. I leap the console, pin him against the wall with the remains of the chair and thrust my arm/dagger repeatedly into his flesh.

The second man is still breathing, but knocked senseless by my attack, I stalk over and make sure he does not get up again. It takes me a couple of minutes to free my left arm, during which Jimmy is strangely silent. I recover my severed right hand and slide it back onto my arm.

“Jimmy, reattach that, I don't want it coming off again.” There is a slight tingling as the nano-machines get to work.

“Bill..., the console...implant.” We had thought the brain implant, used to control the population was crude and easily circumvented, seems we have underestimated it.

I do not understand most of the functions of the console. The pain control is easy to spot and I turn that off, thinking becomes a little easier, but there is still an odd feeling in my head, almost a taste of something. Carefully I adjust a couple of settings that look like that have been used on me. Nothing, maybe the air grows colder. None of the labels make much sense to me. A tone down something that seems to have been turned most of the way up.

“That one...more.”

I pause, my hand holding station above the console. The Jimmy control. Forever linked with his consciousness, closer than marriage, never able to be alone. I recall the talk of the fallback mode of our nano-technology, capable of sustaining us, but without direction not much quicker than the natural repair systems of the human body. It seems a worthwhile sacrifice to gain my own life back. I turn it up to the full.

“Bill...”

On the screen the sergeant realises something is up, an alarm sounds and people start dying. I do not care, suddenly I am alone in my head for the first time since my resurrection.

“Fuck. Jimmy, am I really such a bastard?”

“Its more of a set of co-ordinates than an insult.” Jimmy says.

“Not that. I remembered what happened. What I did to you.”

“You were under the mind altering effects of a nasty piece of technology.”

“It was still me in there, I shut you off. I kept you off until the crash broke it, I could have turned you back on at any time. I killed you for a second time.” The injuries, the emotions, the whole damn weight of it all, it presses me into the dirt and I lie there, not even having the energy to cry.”

“I forgive you.”

“You can't.”

“You can't stop me. You are my friend. We grew up together, we died together. And then we did other stuff. Together. Forgiving you is not the hardest thing I have ever done for you, I even learned to appreciate Jazz just for you.” Jimmy seats himself and leans back, basking in the sunlight. “Just. Don't. Ever. Fucking. Do. It. Again. Arsehole.” I can tell he is going to hold it against me, but I do not care, just happy to listen to his voice.

“Good morning, Doctor Diaz.” The voice is different, but the tone is the same, it grates on my ear sending a spike of revulsion through my mind.

2017RT, like many things, has been a casualty of the conflicts on and off Earth. Moved out of the asteroid belt and parked neatly in the Earth's L5 Lagrange point it was intended to be turned into a sparkling new habitat, the pinnacle of human engineering. Hostilities between the various partners and then the predations of designed diseases had left it an orphaned and forgotten rock a long way from home. Mostly forgotten.

“Good morning.”

The construction here is no longer secret, but the traffic to and from this little moon is strictly regulated. You would have to be not only capable of mimicking one of the few people cleared to approach, but also capable of passing a blood test or at least faking it. In short it would take determination, resource, some unusual abilities and a traitor from within. These things have taken time.

I pull myself along the handholds of a white-walled cylindrical corridor, the door ahead irises open, allowing me into the lab. I float up through the centre of the cubic room and come to a rest holding onto a handle, unsure of what exactly to do next.

“Do you really think you can fool me, Captain Larkin?” I breathe sigh of relief, happy to drop the pretence.

“No. But it was worth a try, Davis.”

“Even if I had not been tracking you ever since you boarded Jefferson Orbital, your ease of movement in micro gravity gives you away. Doctor Diaz is ungainly.” The voice is playing over hidden speakers, I know Davis is close, but really want visual confirmation.

“I should have known it was too easy.”

“Of all people we should know nothing is ever easy. I will admit that you have been a thorn in my side for longer than I would have liked, but you have only ever slowed my research, not stopped it.” I smile at the thought of the gleeful I have destruction wrought for that end.

“What can I say, I enjoy killing your clones, they remind me of you.”

“Quite. And now you are here, I suppose you had some daydream about beating me to death with an iron bar and then making your escape to the sounds of sirens and explosions. You can forget about that, you are in a sealed room and you will stay there until you wither and shrivel up if that is my wish. My apologies to mister Mahdi that he has to share your fate.” I nearly curse myself for not thinking of bringing an iron bar, it would have made a nice gesture.

“He has some choice things he would share with you, do you understand swearing in Arabic?”

“False bravado. I left the door open and you have come scurrying in here like a rat, too enticed by the prospect of a free meal to worry about a trap.” No matter what has happened since we last properly met, Davis has not managed to get over himself.

“Maybe I got tired of running away all the time. Tell me, did you ever manage to solve the problem of fragmenting personalities or are you still growing clones to shunt the fragments into?”

“I found a solution of a sorts. Am I to believe you are the only one who never suffered it?”

“Me and Jimmy very happy just being a couple. Liefman was stable, too, but then she never did suffer from all your self-loathing. So what happens now?”

“I take you apart and use your pieces to complete my plan. But no hurry, make your self comfortable.” I glance about, looking for the mini-bar.

“Yeah, your plan. I admit that it took us a while to realise that amongst all those nut jobs with a bootleg vial of our blood, a rough knowledge of how to reprogram the nano-machines and a grudge against someone else there was someone with a real aptitude and an aim.”

“By the time we found out the Hseng was leaking materials it was too late. But you don't realise how useful you were cleaning up our failed experiments and dead end research.”

“And do you know how many people died when your dead end research found its way into the wrong hands?”

“Acceptable losses, less than our projections of a conventional global war and the plan means it will never happen again.” I think back to all the people I have seen die, on the news and on the street, by conventional weaponry, constructed virus, overt nano-restructuring or my own hands, it does not seem that acceptable to me.

“You know, I never did work out your plan, I am sure someone explained parts of what you were doing, but if you start talking about neuro-transmitters and shit like that I tend to switch off.”

“You're too old school, I suppose you still use the Angel's gift just for repairing your own body and making cosmetic changes? When I realised I could grow a duplicate from my own body and populate it with a fragment of my own mind I realised that I would never have to rely on another person ever again, I could create a clone and then engineer the clone to replace any person. The company quickly became mine.” He loves himself so much that I start to wonder if he ever tried it physically.

“But the clones are even less stable than you, we watched them fall into psychosis.”

“There are limitations, they are not fully rounded minds, but they are infinitely preferable to the infighting of normal humans. No, I needed something more robust, simpler and quicker to manufacture. I didn't need to replace humans, just make sure they behaved in the manner I require. The solution, of course, is not direct control, but an additional organ within the brain capable of dampening unwanted desires and receiving a signal reinforcing desired behaviour.” I try to recall if he was such a monomaniac before we met the Angels, but in my mind he has always been someone I hate.

“So the virus that made people grow extra livers was your fuck up?”

“You still don't get the scope of my plan.” And he does not get the scope of his own madness.

“Oh, I do, you're such a raving egomaniac that you believe everyone should think like you do.”

“You're such a throw-back, Larkin. Imagine a world united, working together without fighting, everyone reaching their potential.”

“Without any free will or self-determination? They would not be human.”

“And what good has being human ever been? Humans go around killing each other and making a mess of everything. You've had the chance to be more than human yourself and you have squandered it, don't mock me for seizing the opportunity.” Making a mess of everything has always been my speciality, killing is a recently acquired skill and not something I ever want to become good at.

“But even with your advanced intellect, one man cannot control everything.”

“You still don't get it, I am no longer a man.”

The wall loses its opacity, becoming a window. Beyond is a large space filled with medical equipment, a life-support system. The bloated body lying in the middle of the machinery, a flabby bag of organs with atrophied limbs, is Davis. His features are just recognisable on his distended face, his head is far too large, with fleshy pipes connecting to a large collection of pods, like melons with human skin. Tubes and cables plug into meat everywhere.

“You've let yourself go, Davis.”

“I've advanced myself, you are looking at the greatest intellect the human race has ever seen, forty brains working in perfect parallel synchronisation.” His face moves in time to the voice, but I doubt that the sound comes from the human windpipe at all.

“Forty brains, but never heard of hubris.”

“You've carried some virus in here? I am in a hermetically sealed environment and there is no way you can break through that glass.” Again I bemoan my lack of iron bar.

“I've lived more than long enough to know when I am walking into a trap. Once I got into orbit it was obvious that your employees were trying to ease my passage here, so I took a few precautions.”

“You're still not getting away from here.”

“I don't need to. You are not the only one who can grow himself a second body, okay, so I can't do the brain, but I know still know an expert in prosthetics who can wire up a human nervous system to a remote control rig. You get used to the slight lag eventually.”

“I don't want you, just your body.”

“You're not my type. You might remember that Jimmy used to work in orbital traffic control, one of their jobs was defence from rogue asteroids. When they became defunct some of their inventory became unaccounted for. You probably have not heard of the HT193 rock-killer, its capable of breaking something the size of this place into tiny, manageable pieces, and is roughly the size of my abdominal cavity. Guess what?”

The link breaks, but not before I see his body spasm in panic.

“Happy?” Jimmy asks.

“No, mostly tired.” I start to remove suit which has been giving me feedback from the remote body, the movements seem heightened by the suddenly loss of the slight transmission delay. “Okay, maybe slightly happy.”

“So what do we do now?” I ask Jimmy, not really wishing to do anything.

Jimmy lies on his back, hands behind his head. I get a sudden spike of memory, another sunny day far, far away in both space and time, lying on a lawn. I push it back to the murky depths, intent to stay in the now for a while, at least.

“We wait for our rescue, beg some suppliers so we can rebuild your body, get a shower, hopefully a drink, wait for whatever is happening up there to finish and then convince the victors to take us to wherever Liefman's co-ordinates turn out to be.”

“That easy, eh?”

“Turn on the old Larkin charm, you've still got it.”

“And what about us?”

“We're friends, let's try to stay that way this time.”

“And when things get bad again?”

“Listen, I've flown with you since you got your wings. Every so often you make a mistake, or have a rough run of luck or lose a fight, and then you crash and burn. But every time you end up ditched, you pick yourself up and find something else to fly. Being your co-pilot is always interesting. So get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.”

“You know I hate it when you say that.”

“Why do you think I say it?”

“You're a fucking bastard, Jimmy.”

“I'm your fucking bastard, just remember that.”

I lie there and feel sleep overcoming me, it seems like I have an entire life in one day, maybe several lives. I make a promise to myself to be a better person, but after all this time can I really change?

Ditched (part 11)

I have not choked from lack of a suitable atmosphere, seems like my luck is turning. Jimmy urges me on with boyish excitement, he never was one to leave the wrapping paper on a present for long. The light flooding in from the open hatch displays how dim my surrounding have been up to now.

“C'mon, I want to see this!” Jimmy is nearly dancing in his eagerness.

“Then either go ahead, or give me a push.” While I have gotten the hang of legless locomotion it is still hard work.

My first glimpse of the outside world is a shot of a blue sky dotted with cloud, it feels so out of place I stop there and nearly turn around. A wash of sounds sweep through the opening, but I can't make sense of them.

We lie on our backs and watch the clouds ease their way across a perfect sky. After months of intensive training it feels odd to have nothing to do, but there is break in the academy schedule and everyone is scurrying home to their families dotted around the globe.

“You're just going to stay here? There's nothing to do.” There is nothing to do that we have not already done and been banned from repeating.

“With the unrest and all that its better I don't go back to Cairo. I'm not sure I want to see all my family, anyway, we don't really get on.” I do not understand Jimmy's family, even though we tease each other daily in electronic communication, I cannot wait to see Imogen.

“Then come home with me.” We have only known each other three months, but now it seems we are never apart.

“Won't your, er, none parental guardian mind?”

“Brian? No, he'll be happy there's someone there to keep me out of trouble. You can help me work on my orbital rates calculations, I'll not have Irena Ivanov beating me in the sims again. I bet I can even get him to spring for the ticket.” He will just sign it away when it appears on his credit card statement.

“You do that and I'm there. I might visit my old boarding school while we're over there.”

“I always forget you're such a posh twat.”

“Not posh, just one of your betters.”

“You can call yourself better when you can open an airlock without outside help.”

“Hey, it was broken!”

The breeze which blows through the broken airlock is delightful, fresh, clean and carrying scents which remind me of Earth. It spurs me on and I manage to reach the speed of an arthritic tortoise carrying a heavy load.

“What do you reckon we'll find?” Asks Jimmy, nearly bouncing up and down with anticipation.

“A jungle full of giant, man-eating hyenas with laser eyes,” I reply, once again aware that I am the one doing all the work. “Or worse, a massive tea party, full of excitable imaginary friends who want me to eat pretend cakes with them.”

“Mister spoilsport isn't allowed any cake because he is too grumpy.” Says Jimmy in a sing-song falsetto.

“You know, I'm so glad that I have not crash landed on an unknown planet with you as my only companion.” I get back to the task in hand, actually making it to the opening. The crashing, warbling, wailing, whistling sound continues to confuse me.

I close in on the opening, a sweat covering my body at the exertion. The cowl and exhaust of an engine juts out below the hatch, covered in a grey and slightly scorched heat-resisting material. The thought occurs to me that, being upside-down, the ship is probably not very easy to alight from, but the promise of being able to escape this topsy-turvy wreck draws me on.

Another push and I can finally see the outside world properly. I scan my eyes across the vista, the sweat on my body turns to icy, I start to shiver and shrink back into the ship. The ship lies teetering on the edge of a cliff, below us is a churning, seething, angry ocean, threatening to seize me and drag me into its choking, pressing, dispassionate fathoms.

The arm around my neck presses heavily on my windpipe. The embrace is suffocating and a part of me wants to panic. I ignore that part of me and listen to what Jimmy is whispering in my ear.

Around me there is confusion. One of my assailants lies on the floor groaning, apparently unaware of the low gravity self-defence training they put us pilots through and exactly what strength I have in my new leg. Saunders, who burst through the door behind me stands mouth agape considering whether he should get involved. The technicians are trying to protect their equipment and selves from the melee. The regular security are too friendly with me and too afraid of the interlopers to join in on either side. Peterson crouches in the corner, babbling to himself about how he is not real and watching in horror as his finger slowly rebuilds itself.

The asphyxiation has gone on for long enough, I go limp. The arm remains for a while, enough to make sure I am truly unconscious and then lets me slump to the floor. I make my move. I grab an unsuspecting arm, twist and and use the leverage to slam his head into the nearest solid object.

There is a shout from the door, a voice long used to giving command and long ago drilled into my psyche as one to obey. Vickers enters the room as though he has found his cadre of cadets up to their usual tricks. Keeping my eye on my opponent, I lower the large blunt item that has found its way into my hand.

“There will be no brawling on my station. Anyone care to explain?” He has gone bald and the company uniform is no longer so overtly military, but every nuance is the same. Jimmy, seen only by myself, mimes quaking in fear.

“A member of my crew has been taken without my knowledge, experimented on and apparently injured.” I face him like a completely rational man who was not just about dash someone's head open with an improvised mace.

“You two,” he indicates my attackers. “You can get yourself to quarters, or I can get you to the brig. I'll have someone come along to check out any injuries. I know you are not under my command, but you are on my station, we can argue jurisdiction later. Now, Bill, you come with me. Everyone else, clean this mess up.” He turns and does not wait to see if anyone will obey.

“Saunders, look after Peterson,” I say on my way to the door. Behind me Peterson starts screaming about how he is dead and no-one else can see it.

A third of the way around the outer wheel there is a little cubbyhole, a wasted space due to the removal or displacement of some system during the last refurbishment. It also acts as a hole in the security camera coverage, unless there are cameras that do not tie into the main security grid. Jason Vickers stops me here.

“Listen Bill, you're going to have to be very careful. The company we fought a war for doesn't exist any more. Those thugs report directly to the top management and the management wants results. You're not an employee now, you're an asset, and if half of the things I'm told about your new bodies are true, then they will do anything to unlock those secrets. I know all you wan tto do is get home to your wife, but that isn't going to happen any time soon. So play nicely, fairly soon I expect them to offer me a very generous retirement package and I intend to take it. You tell me that you carry a version of Group Co-ordinator Mahdi in your brain, he was always the level headed one, pay attention to him, you're not hacking the autopilots on RZ320s just because they dock too slowly now.”

He leaves me standing in the cubbyhole. Since the Angels left us everything has been too strange and new for me to fully comprehend just where I stand, suddenly any new abilities I have gained seem like small change in a big money world.

“See,” Says Jimmy. “I told you he knew about the autopilots.”

“Bill, listen to me.” I don't know how long I have been clinging to the edge of the hatchway, my fingers ache slightly.

“Bill, you can't sit there all day. Fucking hell, man, wake the fuck up. I'd slap you if I could.” Jimmy is frantic. I blink at him. “Listen, the cliff is slowly crumbling, the ship will drop into the sea. Now I know you don't want that. I know you don't like the sea. But we have to get off the ship, you have to move.”

With effort I manage to prise my fingers from the metal. A tremor passes through my body, I have no idea whether it is me shaking or the ship sliding further.

“That's good. Shit, I've not seen you like this since, where was it you made that aquatic landing?”

“Martinique. I didn't realise we had settled on the bottom, I thought we were going to sink,” Jimmy had reported in that I had suffered a head injury in the emergency landing, I was still shaking the following morning.

“The nasty, horrid sea didn't get you then and it probably won't now, so get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.” I could hate Jimmy for pushing me on this, but he is right, I did not make all this effort just to stop now.

“Sorry, its been a stressful day, it just sort of overwhelmed me for a minute.”

I force myself to look out, mentally blanking out the waves, telling myself the deep blue is just more sky. Edging out a bit I see that the cliff is topped by a strip of inviting green meadow. This means nothing if I cannot get there. There is no handy disembarkation ramp, I get the feeling it fell off into the water when I tried to open the door.

There is no way to climb up the craft and across the skyward facing underside short of ferrying out more cargo cannisters and building one, a task that would take far too long. The engine I am sat on is the only ledge sticking out and it is facing the wrong way. The rest of the ship from this angle looks like the stern of an upturned flat bottomed boat, all smooth curves and slippery surfaces. Looking towards an edge I do not really want to contemplate I see some panels are missing, exposing some of the guts of the engine.

Carefully, I slide myself for a closer look. It is difficult to judge whether this is over solid ground or something I do not want to think about, but it looks like it might make a serviceable ladder. It is certainly my best bet.

I grab a pipe of unknown use, shake it to see if it is solid and then gingerly ease my body past it so that it starts to dangle over the curve of the cowling. My torso slides slightly and then I am supported entirely on my arms. My legless weight less than it might have once been, but instinctively I scrabble for purchase with my feet. There is another pipe below the first, a near-ladder of five pipes, easy going with gravity on my side for a change.

It gets a little trickier after then; a box containing some sort of sensor; a hole whose edges I have to grasp; some sharp shards that are part of a something that has been mostly ripped away; some hoses that feel loose. I realise that I have rounded the curve of the engine and my body is now hanging freely.

Then it happens, the ship judders before me, the hose supporting my weight moves a little and there is a ripping noise. I fall for maybe a metre, the hose jerks, trying to pull itself from my hands and my grip slips, only desperation arrests my movement. Against all sense I look down. I am swinging, first over land and then water, back to land and water again.

My heart hammers. The noise of the wave sings to me a welcome. Something approximating a whimper escapes from my mouth. I take a few seconds to learn the timing of my pendulum world. Then I drop.

I land straight on his head with both feet and we both tumble to the ground. Gaining my feet quickly, I do not bother to check if his neck is broken, just plunge my knife into his chest to make sure he is dead. No-one comes to investigate, so a quick search of his body yields a small pistol. There is no insignia on his clothing, no clue as to whom has penetrated our defences.

I have arrived back at our hideout too late, just as we are getting close to tracking Davis down someone has manage to pull the same trick on us. My mental list of things that I need to rescue runs to two items, Liefman and our research, everything else and everyone else can burn.

Two corridors prove empty, I do not waste time with the abandoned offices of this partially ruined factory. The doorway through to the production hall has the silhouette of one person guarding it, I edge closer, sticking to the shadowed side of the hallway. My foot nudges a stone, but I am close and lunge forward, connecting with my knife and then the weight of my body before they manage to complete a turn in my direction.

As we hit the ground I roll away, aware of the easy target I am making, taking refuge behind some derelict machine. No movement. I risk peeking from behind my shelter. The hall is lit by the holes in the roof, a play of brightness and dark create a scene that would be deemed moody and atmospheric if I had not just killed two people in cold blood and was scanning for more targets. There is evidence of prior violence, walls showing the scars of gunfire, a couple of piles that look likely to be bodies.

At the sound of incautious footsteps and I withdraw my head. Someone calls out. Not getting an answer, they call again, followed by a stream of syllables that make no sense to me.

“They've got what they came for and are ready to leave.” Jimmy tells me “You should really learn Arabic.”

The footsteps get closer, pause and then there is an almost audible sense of alarm as my second victim is discovered. Knowing caution and stealth have played their parts, I leap up and let loose three shots with my stolen pistol. One of them connects, spinning my target around. Half a dozen steps gets me close enough to issue a coup de grace with a forth bullet to the head. I stop long enough to claim a machine pistol and spot the tattoo of a rose on the woman's neck, the Riding's Alliance, a militia with no clear agenda other than hostility to others.

The shots bring a quick response, I use the new gun to dissuade several people from rushing through a doorway, but I am outnumbered and it will only be a matter of time before they co-ordinate their efforts against me. Back into cover I rack my brains for a better solution than anger and desperation.

Liefman has yet to set up her usual array of defences, which is why this attack has caught us off guard. Still, some countermeasures are less subtle and take less to set up than others. Keeping an ear for sounds of an impending rush, I open then networks menu on my watch. Our private network is still up. I fire off a couple more shots and then dig into the drone section of the device menu. A trio of defence drones are still active, dormant for some reason I cannot fathom. A couple of selections enables the emergency code that makes them hostile and lethal to anyone except Liefman and I.

I start moving before my new allies are discovered. A cloud of dust rises as automatic fire trails my sprinted steps. I reach cover again, pause a few seconds and hear the unmistakable scream of a miniature anti-personnel rocket, followed by a human scream. I wince, having been on the wrong end of that type of ordinance more than once, but unlike me the victims will not be putting themselves back together.

I flatten myself against the wall and edge towards the doorway. There is a series of shouts and shots as my machine allies come to my aid with deadly intentions. Risking my head in the opening, I take a peek, three fresh bodies and a drone that chirps in greeting at me and then heads off. I take a different corridor than my new best friend, towards Liefman's new lair.

At the top of a staircase I recoil as someone puts a shot over my head, squashing myself into a small recess in the wall. The sound of movement suggests more than one person, but I decide to let fortune favour the bold and take a dive through an open doorway. Gunfire assaults my ears and I empty the machine pistol at the movement I see. Two people fall to the floor, riddled by bullet wound, I breathe a sigh of relief at the unequal exchange.

“Graze to the left shoulder, bullet through the right calf and one still lodged in your abdomen, didn't hit anything vital.” Jimmy tallies up for me, not such an unequal exchange. “I'm keeping the pain off, but don't put too much weight on that leg.”

Liefman's room is messier than usual, parts of her equipment have been trashed. Three screens are still running; an exterior feed showing armed people retreating on various vehicles; a repeating loop of video shot inside this room, Liefman is grabbed and then someone in a mask shoots the camera; Liefman's flower meadow.

“Fuck! What do I do without you, Liefman?” The bottom of my stomach drops out and my innards fall into a pit.

Over my shock the flowers sing, a minute passes and then their message in the language of the Angels managed to pierce my comprehension.

“Davis,” they sing. “He's on 2017RT.”

The ground is solid, stable and hard. For a moment to pain is too great for me to open my eyes. Whatever I have left in my body is now probably broken. The pain abruptly switches off. I open my eyes and watch in wonder as the ship completely fails to slide off the cliff into the sea and sink into the briny depths.

“You might want to take your time when you next need to dismount from an inverted spacecraft.” Jimmy tells me. “I am doing what I can but you've made quite a mess of your insides.”

“Sorry, I panicked. Never did quite get that whole sea thing under control.” I think of all the money I wasted on a psychologist.

“I thought we had the conversation about not panicking.” Something in the scar where the ship disturbs the ground is moving.

“Its my first day at the job, cut me some slack.” I peer closer.

“Its certainly not your first day at being a complete arse and not listening to a word anyone else says.” Insects and worms, swarming at the point where the ship touches the ground. I recoil and start pulling myself away. “Woah, that's nasty.”

A breeze starts up as I drag myself into calf-length grass and knee length flowers. Something plays on my mind and then I realise.

“Its Liefman's bloody singing meadow!” The wind brings the song of a million flowers, subtle variation of tone lend different voices to different tones.

“Holy fuck! The whole ecosystem must have been altered or bio-engineered from scratch.” Jimmy dances a little jig of amazement. “Might take a while to decode a message, if there is one, though.”

I look back at the ship, seeing it for the first time from the outside. It is a streamlined, almost fish shaped vehicle, sporting the remains of stubby wings and with an engine pod sticking out of the rear. Damage is heaviest at the front and on the bottom, which indicates it was probably brought in shallow and rolled on landing. It is remarkably intact, considering, but unlikely to ever fly again. It is a good deal bigger than anything in my memory.

I imagine our descent, trying to bring it in slow and shallow, but rapidly running out of room before the ocean. An aquatic landing might have saved the ship and crew, but I cannot guess whether I decided against it due to fear of water or some less obvious reason. Beyond the ship a column of smoke implies further action, likely the result of the interception as detailed on my wrist terminal.

I glance at the terminal and see it blinking the message that network links have been restored. As my fingers reach to query it and get some location information it trills, asking me whether I wish to accept an incoming communication.

Officially we are banned from the communications grid, but people transit to and from the station

on a continual basis and we have many friends, colleagues, sympathisers and people willing to turn a blind eye within the company. Brian from the security team hands me a memory stick surreptitiously as we pass in a corridor, neither of us acknowledges the exchange.

Back in my room Jimmy urges me to browse the contents immediately.

“It might be private,” I tell him.

“We're the same person now, or at least I'm kind of a part of you.” He reasons.

“You control the Angel's nano-machines in me, I make the decisions.” We have argued this on and on. On one hand it is comforting having my dead best friend on twenty-four hour call, on the other it is odd feeling to never be able to be alone. “Sorry, Jimmy, I know it was my fault we all died and the Angels couldn't save you completely and I am sorry that the best they could do was make you my conscious and health consultant. Its been a long day and I would appreciate a little space for a while.”

“Are you asking me to switch myself off for a while?”

“No, I'm just asking that you be discrete for a bit. I appreciate your opinion and insight, I would just like a little quiet time.”

“Sure thing, captain.” Jimmy gives me an ironic salute and his image fades from my vision.

I link the memory stick to my personal tablet, there is just one file, a short video. I tap to play it and sit down on the edge of my bunk.

The video opens fading in with a piano piece playing, my heart leaps on recognising the notes played and the hands playing. She sits at the baby grand that nearly fills the conservatory, the light of a summer afternoon floods the windows and the large potted geranium is in full bloom despite our best efforts to neglect it. The tune ends on a sombre note and she turns towards the camera.

“Will,” Her voice is a salve for my soul. “Some friends of yours have leaked me some footage and so I have asked them to get this to you. The company were very close-mouthed about what happened, your survival is a miracle, a miracle that I have only just learned of. I saw footage of your death, I watched you die, Will, and it broke me in a way I cannot describe.” She pauses to swipe the stray strand of hair out of her way and wipe away a tear.

“And that was it, there were empty condolences from the company and the most amazing support from everyone else, but you were dead and that was the only thing that mattered. I went completely to pieces. I've watched you go off and do some utterly stupid things in our time together, but you have always come back to me, if not always in one piece. This time you didn't.

“I don't know if you remember, but when we married you had a, erm, sample frozen, just in case you never made it back from a mission. Then I discovered I couldn't have kids. I was watching something on ex-utero births and something snapped, I missed you so badly it was like being encased in ice. I still do. I took your sample and part of the settlement from the company to a clinic and...” She pauses again to brush hair out of the way.

“We have a daughter, Will.” She reaches out and takes hold of the camera, turning it to look upon a cot, in the middle something pink squirms. “This is Imogen.” It seems all the old human emotional responses still work, tears drip unbidden down my cheeks.

“This is hard for me, Will. I know it is the right thing to do, which is why I have to take the coward's way and do it long distance. You don't know what it is like down here on Earth, you've been away two years, there is war about to break out all over the place. The corporations want what the aliens have your company, that means you, Will, and that means that I am in danger and so is Imogen.”

“I never minded the closeness you shared with Jimmy, but they tell me he is part of you now. You are no longer quite the man I married. I saw the footage and there you were, you look like our wedding video, so young, so handsome, all your hair! We grew older together, Will, but now I'm old and you are young again. I'm sorry, Will, I don't want to, but I have to leave you for my own sake. Don't try to find us, Will, we have some people to help us disappear. There are storm clouds gathering and I don't want to be caught in the rain.” She wipes her face with her hand and puts her hair into complete disarray.

“Will, I..., I...” She breaks down and fumbles to camera off.

I sit there for a moment, the tablet asking if I want to repeat the video.

“Laura!” The scream is ragged, torn from my throat. “Laura!” I scream and pound helplessly at the wall until the guards come running.

Ditched (part 10)

  “You know, if I manage to get that door open this whole ship will probably slide off whatever precipice it is perched on and we will fall to our deaths.” I tell Jimmy.

“That's the spirit, a positive mental attitude.” I grin and focus on getting close to the door.

“Its not my attitude that's the problem, its the attitude of the universe to me.” Elbow forwards.

“I'm sure you're just its temporary plaything, sooner or later it will forget about you and you can go back to doing whatever it was you were up to when you brought all this down on yourself.” Ignore the sudden pain of a metal shard sticking into the arm.

“Which was what?” Heave.

“I haven't a fucking clue, but its going to be hilarious watching you figure it all out.” Other elbow forwards.

“My guess is that I as looking for a priest, I need someone to exorcise this bothersome ghost I've been saddled with.” Progress is graduate but definite, I wish I could say the same about my memory.

“Meanwhile, think you could stack enough of this junk up so that you can reach the door release?” Jimmy brings me back to the job in hand.

“Manual labour, just what I need, I was hoping for a management position.”

“No, I've check all the relays for faults, the result is correct.” Liefman confers with Fernandez about the gravimeter readings, we have been convinced that the instruments were giving false readings. We have been taking advantage of the break in deceleration to conduct drone flights and take as many instrument readings as we can. “The back-up unit concurs.”

“But that means its so dense, no wonder we can't even scratch the surface of its hull.” Fernandez has been disappointed by our lack of progress in making any sense of the object and it shows in new lines on her face. “What could they have made it out of?”

“Some kind of super-heavy stable element that we have yet to synthesise, or maybe even a shell of collapsed matter protecting a more conventional interior.” Interjects Davis, happy to see the conversation wander into his area of expertise.

“The song just gained a new element.” Peterson has been working hard on the signal the artefact broadcasts, so hard with so little result that I am going to have to get Tseng or Patrick to convince him to take a rest.

“There does seem to be some kind of repair going on.” Jimmy shunts two pictures to my screen, one of the initial damage, the second timestamped a couple of minutes ago, changes are circled like a spot-the-difference puzzle. “The thing is still alive, but its not going to be quick enough to avoid hitting the Earth and making lots of people very unhappy.”

“Someone do the calculations, how much thrust would it take to shove it out of its collision course with the Earth? I'll talk to the folks in mission control.” The cessation of the artefact's drive has brought communications with home back on line, allowing a sharing of data but bringing its own complications.

Ten minutes of talking with Bayard station, the signal lag both mercifully and terrifyingly short, gets me nowhere. The accident has been digested, regurgitated, dissected and finally taken out and buried, bad press the company does not want, now they will not agree to anything without a full committee hearing. Meanwhile they have missiles on standby, ready to take out the alien device before it causes damage. If they are lucky they might be able to grab one or two of the left-overs.

The figures tell me it can probably be done, depending on the accuracy of our mass reading, which has been called into doubt and whether our hull can take the stress of being used as a bulldozer, but we have to start now. I feel the urge to call my wife, but we spoke an hour ago, there is nothing I can add and it is just procrastinating, so I just write a three word message and mail it.

A message flashes up onto my own screen – You're the captain. Vickers.

“Right, we're doing this. You have two minutes to dock the drones, park the instruments and get fully suited up.” I made this mess, I am solving it.

“Hey, you can't go against the orders of base control.” Davis with the first objection. “The ship can't handle the stresses.”

“I don't want to die out here.” Peterson with the obvious.

“I am in command of the mission, if you don't like it feel free to file a complaint with H.R.” I have been wanting to use that line for ages.

“At least put it to the vote. We should all get a say.” Davis continues. I see Patrick in deep conversation over the radio and signal Liefman to instigate the procedure to break communications links restrict control access, something that was not installed when we left the station.

“A quick show of hands, then. Everyone for?” Saunders, Liefman, Ikaro and Jimmy all raise their hands alongside mine as I expected, Fernandez wavers and then joins us. “Motion carried, fasten your seat belts, people, this is going to be a bumpy ride.”

Moving stuff without legs is difficult. I grab the handle of an intact cargo cannister, a stackable box a metre long and half as wide, and pull it towards me. My effort succeeds in moving myself towards it. Bracing a hand on the ceiling gives better results, but its going to take far too long to drag it into position like that.

The cannister is locked electronically, I take a guess and put Peterson's terminal close to it, the option to open appears on the screen and I confirm it. The lid hinges back automatically revealing neatly stacked plastic boxes, each with a sculpted handle and a sealed lid. The terminal, taking a cue from some chip in the cannister displays the identity number and inventory.

SUDU887654-6 Contents: 16 Jars of Bees.

“That's a handy way of carrying your bees, I'm surprised no-one thought of it before.” Jimmy imparts.

“You know, I think I'm having one of those days where suddenly discovering sixteen jars of bees is not the pinnacle of weirdness.” This is a mystery that I just do not have the energy to fathom. “Still, they should make handy building blocks.”

“Are you not even tempted to open one just to see?” Jimmy implores.

“If I had a field full of flowers crying out for pollination, then maybe. Do you see a field full of flowers?”

The flowers sway in a simulated breeze, an entire meadow of digital daisies soaking up the electronic sunlight and vying for the attention of coded insects. Of the three screens Liefman has set up in the back of the truck two are dedicated to this picture, the other is showing the displays from a mix of local traffic and surveillance cameras. Again I glance at my watch, showing the feed from the truck's reversing camera, no sign of pursuit.

“Pack it in, Bill. There's nothing you can do at the moment.” Liefman says without looking up from her screens. “Rachel and Idira know where we are going and are not going to attract any attention. You're just not very good at doing nothing.”

“Never had much practice.” I switch my watch to a local news channel and catch live pictures of our hideout billowing smoke while soldiers maintain a perimeter. A tap sends the feed to my glasses, the better screen allows me to pick out the insignias on their uniforms, a mix of local militia and the circled man of the Weathered Sun Alliance. I pull my glasses from my face in disgust. “Fuckers.”

“Do you mind? I'm trying to listen to twelve different channels simultaneously.” She hits a switch and suddenly a host of people speaking over each other is audible over speakers.

“And you can hear anything in this racket?” She sighs, shakes her head, flicks a couple of controls and the audio changes to a slightly atonal procedurally generated song, the sounds of the meadow, flower jazz.

“Its the way the angels listened to stuff, a thousand voices, all talking at once. They gave us the capacity, I've been teaching myself to use it.” While I have spent my time chasing down clones of a maniac and hiding from authorities.

“I let Jimmy handle that, I can barely pay attention to one person speaking at a time. So what's with the flower screensaver?” The dancing flora is beginning to get on my nerves.

“Its a combination of monitoring program and simulation of the angel form of consciousness, combined with my own theory on ecosystem management.” I blink at her. “It reads and listens to a lot of things and then sorts out trends and anomalies.”

“And the flowers?”

“Its a visual interpretation of the infosystem, and a simulation using the noise of the data as a kind of random number generator.” I give her my best blank look. “I like flowers, okay.” I never buy her flowers.

“So, is it actually useful?”

“Its what has been tracking Davis and his activities. Gone are the days when we could rely on sympathisers and moles in his organisation, he's become so secretive. Nowadays its all pattern recognition on signals, freight traffic movements and posts by worried citizens on forums.”

“I see. Say, when was the last time you had any actual fun? You know, with another real person?” I ignore Jimmy's raised eyebrow.

“Last year, with that biologist in Oslo.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember that. Whatever happened?”

“She joined the Weathered Sun Alliance.”

“Ouch.”

“No, I persuaded her to take her work to them.”

“What? Are you losing it? Remember what happened to Ikaro? Who do you think the New Humanists are working for now?” The truck brakes suddenly and there is a second while we regain our balance.

“The WSA have weeded out the radicals and terrorists, they are the one group that seems to be doing any good. Have you seen the progress they have made on the Californian blight? They have a working counter-agent for the Ivory Coast pathogen and rumour is that they are looking for money from the orbital consortiums for a serious effort on India.”

“You seem to have a very short memory for whom is trying to chase us down at this very minute.” I flick my watch back to the feed from the rear-facing camera, nothing but Seville's ruins and construction traffic.

“Bill, we're the terrorists nowadays. We don't ask for permission, we just go in and smash things, then get out and hide. All this crap is down to us, it all came out of our blood.”

“I am just frightened that they might get whatever Davis is working on before we do and conveniently forget their saviours of the world stance.” And deep down I worry whether Davis is right, should we unlock the full horrors of the Angel's gift?

“Don't worry about that. You might have notice how focussed we are nowadays.”

“Yeah, our hit rate on Davis is fantastic, I didn't think it was just down to luck.” I am just not that lucky.

“I have friends in the WSA, we share intel. They get all the nano chop-shops and gene butchers, we get Davis.” I decide she was waiting for the right time to tell me this, my temper has not been at its most level recently.

“And this raid?”

“Notice that we got out in time? I couldn't warn you, you would have tipped off Ashley. We won't be working with him any more.”

“Another of my friends turned dirty, I should have guessed.” I sit back and decide to take a snooze, more and more it seems my life is not in my own control.

“I bet you never even played with building blocks as a toddler.” Jimmy watches me drag to cannister up to the wall and then start to pile up jars to form a rudimentary staircase.

“I guess I was always more into smashing things than building them.” The jars are sturdy and do not rattle when you shake them, something tells me that you should not shake jars of bees, but if they have not been shaken by the crash then there is no shaking these bees. This is what it feels like to finally give in to your madness.

“That figures.” There is another slide, the craft vibrates around me and my makeshift tower vibrates but does not fall.

“Do you think anyone would mind if I ignored the safety aspect and forgot the handrail?”

“Lets just get this over with, quickly.” Jimmy agrees.

She is not in a good mood. She hates these corporate hospitality events more than I do, but it fell on the one night she could not legitimately be otherwise occupied and she owes me for attending some awful modern jazz award ceremony. At least I can do business here, she has to be sparkling and witty and the perfect trophy wife. The best I am hoping for is sarcastic and snappy and the perfect drunken strife.

Outwardly her mood only shows in the way she grips my arm, otherwise she is a shining star. The long, tight dress glitters in the lights, showing that she has gained precisely no weight since the day we married. There may be a few lines on her face but they were earned with smiles and laughter. Her make-up is minimal, an honest lack of vanity. Her hair is rebellious, full, streaked with grey and, as ever, doing its own thing.

The lawyers are still ironing the creases out of the contract, but everyone acts as though the deal is done. Even Birgit Hausmann has dropped the stern disapproval she customly wears as Benexwell's head of procurement and greets us dressed in a smile. The result is a bunch of high powered aerospace industry executives making small talk and trying not to be caught eyeing up the buffet, while a string quartet plays something classical, elegant and dreary.

“This is all very....tasteful.” She comments, knocking back her drink and waving embarrassingly at the waiter for another.

“The epitome of high class living,” I agree. “I bet the crab cakes are from some endangered species.”

“Exquisitely killed with a diamond headed hammer.” Glancing around she spies the grand piano sitting unused by the musicians. “Check out baby! I'll just...”

“Remember look but don't...never mind.” She is gone before I can warn her not to do anything that may jeopardise my chances of being called in as a consultant on future deals.

I turn away and join in a discussion about the increased tension between companies and the trend for branching out into a more self-reliant model. The waiter has just about recognised me signalling for a refill when I hear the open bars of Whiskey Shack Shindig played on piano with the unusual accompaniment of a string quartet. All eyes turn towards the sound except my own which I bury in my hands.

“Is that your wife? She's something else.” Birgit Hausmann homes in on my distress.

“She is that. Fancy a dance?” It appears we are playing the embarrass each other in public game again.

“I'm afraid I don't dance very well.”

“I only have one leg. Fancy a bad dance?”

“Ah, a long stick, and excellent choice of implement, classic lines, elegant design, truly a prince in the world of poking stuff.” Jimmy applauds my selection of part of a shattered composite rod. My hastily piled construction is still not tall enough for me to reach the door release so I have decided to resort to the old stand-by of hitting it with a stick.

“Shouldn't you be warning me about my heart rate and not trying to raise my blood pressure with your commentary?” I lean the stick against the wall so that I can reach it from the top of my tower and start to lever myself up the first step.

“Don't worry, I'm just remembering some old tricks, although we might have to find you some sustenance soon.” Taking another though, I turn around and pull myself up backwards, supporting my weight on the stump of my torso and then sliding it up to the next step.

“Food? That should be interesting. You realise that I don't actually have an arsehole, present company excepted.” It is heavy going and my breathing get heavier, but there is little of the crushing tiredness climbing the crab brought.

“You'll just end up full of shit as always.” A slight wobble makes me slip, I teeter on the brink of crashing back down to the ceiling and then regain my balance. I try an experiment.

“A tenner says I manage to open the door without falling off.” I form the words in my mind without saying them aloud and push them to Jimmy.

“My tenner says you crash and burn and the door stays shut. Hey, you're relearning old tricks, maybe you're not a dead loss, after all.” Another push and I am at the top, I prop myself up against the wall and retrieve my stick.

The door catch is covered by a little door, it takes a couple of swipes of my stick to open that, all the while feeling my balance. My perch is not as stable as I would have liked and leaning against the wall makes it less so. I prod the revealed button a couple of times to no avail, it is difficult to see it from this angle. Stopping to steady myself, I take the time to study it.

“Looks like you flip open that handle and then pull it.” Jimmy decides to be helpful for once.

The end of the rod has broken into a rough point, it takes me several goes to insert it under the handle and then it slips out when I apply leverage. I swear at it.

“Slow and steady, Bill.”

“You want to do this yourself?”

The point trembles as I push it in again, the motion hampered by my position.

“Nice one, now...” Jimmy is cut short as a shudder passes through the ship's hull. The cannister shifts underneath me and I feel it parting from the wall. Pushing with what strength I can apply I feel the switch move, but gravity has won this round. My balance is suddenly lost and I am perched on thin air.

Crashing down heavily, I lie winded for a few seconds, expecting to feel the stabbing pain of broken ribs and see a blood-covered metal spike sticking through my body. It hurts, but I am lucky. There is a continual grinding noise. I swivel my head expecting the worst, but it is only the door jerking open, fighting against its own damaged mechanism.

I pull myself from my demolished pile of jars and towards the aperture, peering through the opening. A short corridor ends in what has to be the outer door, it makes sense that a space-worthy vessel would have a airlock, I just had not considered it. I sigh.

The door keeps grinding until it halts, there is a gnashing sound and it halts, leaving a slight burning smell. A faint whirring gets louder and louder, culminating in a bang. Something falls and the room floods with light.

I awake with no remembrance of having slept. There is no grogginess, no phantom ache from my lost leg, no clutching for the alarm. The after-image of a dream floats away from me and there is something I should recall, something important.

The room is small, nothing more that a six foot cubicle with no door or furnishings, the walls are a dark grey, slightly soft to my touch. I am already standing, as though I slept that way. Jimmy stands opposite me, but not Jimmy, young Jimmy, looking and dressed as he was on my wedding day, all those years ago. I open my mouth to ask him what is happening but his puts his finger against my lips and then taps it on the side of my head.

Everything floods back and I am danger of drowning in a torrent of memory. The desperate rescue; fighting for control of the ship; the stresses, strains, breakages; Jimmy's death, my own; victory? I sink down to the floor under the weight of it and hug my legs like a child. Two naked legs, I do not appear to be wearing clothes.

The wall of the cubicle fades away as though it was never really there. I scramble to my feet, determined not to be seen in a state of weakness. Replacing the wall is a depth of inky darkness, somehow I know I cannot enter it. Motes of light swim in the murk, as though tiny organisms deep beneath the surface of the sea and I sense that something huge lurks just out of my sight.

Just as I start to turn to ask Jimmy what it means, a being floats up in front of me. Its head is featureless, its body emaciated and tapering down to a flat tail. Three pairs of long, thin arms emerge from either side of its chest, they each end in six many jointed fingers with barely any hand. Jutting from its back is a pair of large, translucent wings. Its skin is a deep maroon, but studded with many little points of white light, so that it shines like a delicate cluster of stars in the night.

It is an angel, it sings to me. Many small orifices open in its chest, each with its own voice, a choir of one. I start to protest that I cannot understand, but realise that I can, each voice is another aspect of the message, they flow together to produce a picture of the whole. It is too much for me to take in at once, but Jimmy helps me with the translation.

“You gave your lives for ours. We return them to you. The one we could not fully save is now the other part of you. As you wished. Go now back to your people. We are old and become more of us. We just find those who can repair us. Goodbye. Grow and become fuller.”

The walls all fade away. There are eight others, all naked like me, all staring at the angels. We stand in a larger space. The angels swim away and we are left looking at bright motes floating in darkness again. Some of us murmur to ourselves, some are silent, one whimpers and pleads that he is dead. With nothing better to do we file slowly through an opening, an incongruous doorway into a station airlock.

Ditched (part 9)

Despite my surroundings, my body relaxes. I can ignore the smell, my bisected body and all the horrors this day has brought. Sleep almost claims me when the ground once again decides to shift itself. The floor rumbles, the walls vibrate and the crab almost seems alive. I look up at Jimmy.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Nap time is over.”

The ship balances again at a slightly different angle and some loose items fall somewhere in the cargo chamber. Clambering over the rearmost legs, some of which seem to be armed with tin-openers or some kind of vicious bladed anchor, I get a look at the back of this space.

The bay should open out wider, but the floor has collapsed in, squeezing the room into a corridor. A couple of severed crustacean limbs poking out from the wreckage gives a hint as to what was once housed here. I look across a space covered in debris and what I assume to be items of crab-care, and there, as promised, is a cargo hatch. Closed, of course.

“Why is nothing ever easy?” I ask Jimmy.

“Plenty of things are easy, but you always choose the difficult options.” Replies Jimmy, shunting the latest fuel predictions across to my screen, they are not good.

We are so close to the artefact that the external cameras can resolve its image without much help from the computers. Only hundreds of kilometres of nearly empty space separate us, nearly empty because we have lost the race. Sino East's craft, the Emerald Challenger has beaten us to the prize, their gel-filled design has allowed them to survive greater forces of acceleration and now they sit between us and our goal, completing final manoeuvres to bring them alongside the alien ship.

My mood is a little bleak, due to the toll the constant acceleration on my body which is not as young as it used to be and due to having to sit a psychiatric evaluation a couple of hours ago. This is not the first time I have had to submit myself to such a test during this mission, and due to Liefman hacking into the program and leaking me the optimal answers certainly no hardship, but the implied mistrust of the company weighs on my mind.

On the positive side, our communications with home base are being disrupted. Some of this was electronic warfare from the Emerald Challenger, part of an ongoing cold war between the various missions vying for the same prize, this has seen some craft forced to abandon the chase and limp home, suddenly the reliance on human beings in our set up makes more sense. We suspect the majority of the interference is coming from whatever exotic particle reaction is powering the artefact's own drive, magnetic fields deployed imply it is using some sort of ram-scoop, but other than that our physicists have yet to agree on anything.

“Any suggestions?” I ask the crew.

“Open the window and throw someone at them.” Saunders says.

“Or use a drone as a guided missile.” Adds Jimmy.

“Too expensive, but not without merit.” My brain adds a few things up. “Number seventeen fuel tank is nearly dry, if we shut off engines for a minute or two and kick the tail out we can send it their way. They will be able to dodge it, but it should waste some of their fuel and give them a scare.” I start inputting the data into the system to create a simulation, Jimmy, Ikaro and Fernandez do likewise.

With no real objections from the crew, and four simulations giving similar results I let the computer do all the work. We get a brief period of blessed weightlessness, a quick sideways shove from the manoeuvring thrusters first one way, the other, and then the first again. The shuffle complete, the main engines turn back on. A camera tracks the ejected tank as it appears to drop away from us and towards its target, an illusion caused by by our deceleration.

Our craft, the Emerald Challenger and the artefact are strung our in roughly a straight line, all headed towards the Earth and all decelerating at different rates, with the artefact leading. The tank, tumbling slowly, free from any outside force takes nearly a minute to close the distance to its target. The camera, out on a boom and with the computer removing our exhaust's glare from the picture, zooms in.

“They're not reacting.” Jimmy observes, nervously.

“Dodge it, damn you!” I call, as the Emerald Challenger finally begins an emergency avoidance manoeuvre.

Too late. The tank clips the side of the ship at a closing velocity somewhere in the region of a kilometre and a half per second, there is a spray of debris and then something in their engines lets go, sending the ship out of control and causing it to fall towards the artefact. We watch in horror as the ship encounters the field of the artefact's ramscoop, which shreds it, scattering engine parts, communications equipment and crew into the vacuum.

“You reckon we can get it open?” I ask Jimmy as I begin to pull my way towards the hatch.

“Something is powering the emergency lighting, so there's a fair chance the door release might work on what remains in the batteries. Besides, have you got anything better to do?” Jimmy has a point.

“I'm just a little worried we'll open the door and find out we're somewhere without a breathable atmosphere.” It has struck me that all my effort may be for nothing, prolonging the inevitable.

“I think you'll be fine, this boat must have been leaking its air since we crashed. I have not detected any problems with your lungs and air pressure seems fine.” Optimism, the refuge those just about to be unexpectedly shit on from a great height.

“A non-Earth planet with a compatible atmosphere? Now we've entered the realm of kids stories.”

The crush of adults wearing black, the ruffled hair and words of sympathy from people I do know know, I leave it behind me as I walk carefully and quietly down the strange corridor. In one of these rooms Imogen is sleeping, I should find her, make sure she is okay with all these strangers around. Finally I manage to undo the tie around my neck and throw it on the floor, ties are for grown-ups and they can keep them.

A couple of open doorways lead into rooms full of furniture and adult stuff, I briefly hide inside one to avoid someone leaving the party to go to the toilet. It is an adult party, boring snacks, horrid smelling drinks and all talking, no games. The day has lasted forever and there has been no fun in it, maybe there will never be fun again. I hold back a snivel, I promised myself, no more snivelling.

I push open another door, no Imogen, but there is a screen in this room. Maybe no-one will mind if I watch a show for a while, if I shut the door behind me then the noise will not disturb anyone. The remote control is lying on the sofa, so I climb up next to it, lift it carefully in my hands and concentrate on pressing the right buttons to bring up my favourite channel. The screen rewards my actions and comes to life.

The spacemen on the screen explore a fantastic alien world, full of adventure and mystery. It is a colourful world, far, far away from having adults constantly ask if you are okay, from being told it was fine to cry, from no-one telling you what was going to happen now, far, far away from wanting your parents but being told that they now live with the angels.

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the route to the cargo hatch is paved with sharp objects, hanging cables and pieces of structural support that have done their job and are now having a peaceful retirement. The floor is nicely surfaced to allow good traction, but it is a shame that the floor is three metres above my head and I have to make do with the decidedly less tractive ceiling. It could be worse, I tell myself, but right now ravenous space vampires would be welcome company.

“Jimmy, what did I do that was wicked enough to deserve this?” I ask my companion.

“You want a list? I admit that while you have made many bad decisions, most of those were made with the best of intentions, however you do make exceedingly poor choices when you are bored, annoyed or have not had your morning coffee.” I admit that does sound like me.

“And I did something bad enough to get on your shitlist, too, but you're not going to tell me about that, I must remember it.”

“Yeah, well, we'll talk about that later, if you don't get out of here then its really not worth arguing about. Right now you need to get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.”

“That would be a little easier if I still had my main engines.”

There is something wrong with the artefact, the output from its engine varies wildly, forcing us to constantly alter our own thrust to remain alongside. We can only assume this is due to damage sustained from parts of the Emerald Challenger passing through whatever mechanism lies inside the enigmatic craft.

The ribbed back surface bears no clues as to its origin, there are no visible openings and it defies our attempts to stick something to it. Radio channels suffer from both the interference from the engines and from some signal coming from inside the craft. Our computers decode this latter signal as an audio stream that sounds much like choral singing, a hundred voices all nearly singing the same song but with slightly different words. At times it almost makes sense and I find myself humming along.

Peterson has been working at decoding or translating the song non-stop, but has likened to so watching waves in the ocean, they all look similar, there seems to be a pattern, but really it is a chaotic system with no meaning. The artefact has not made any meaningful response to any signal we have sent it. Even without seeing his evaluation scores I know the stress of the mission has got to him and his failure to make any headway at the one task appropriate to his skills is bringing him close to breaking point.

Fuel usage is still an issue, we believe that base will have to capture us like a mis-thrown rock from the asteroid belt mining operations. All-in-all things are not going well.

“I'm registering some kind of oscillation in the artefact's drive output.” Fernandez breaks into my reverie. She sends data to everyone's screens. “Looks like its getting worse.”

I glance at the graphs and the output projection, make a quick mental calculation and come to the conclusion that it can only spell disaster.

“I'm moving us away,” I make a couple of adjustments to the controls and feel the additional force as our engines give us more power and the artefact begins to slide to our stern. Flickering light in now visible in the views of the cameras, we still have little idea how the drive works, but this is certainly not a good sign.

The readout gives our distance as fifty kilometres when there is a sudden brightening of the light. It goes out just as quickly. I turn to Fernandez.

“Was that...” There is a huge burst of incandescence and the picture from several cameras goes out. Several alarms go off and we have out hands full with damage reports from a variety of systems. Another display shows the artefact from an undamaged camera, the engine section looks slightly mangled and now that it is unpowered it is heading straight on a collision course with the Earth.

The door release is about a metre and a half from the floor, which takes it way out of my reach, fortunately there is an emergency release at floor level, unfortunately we are upside-down.

“Maybe it is voice activated,” suggests Jimmy, brightly.

“Door, open,” I call without expectation. “Let me fucking out of here.”

“Maybe not.”

“If there is one thing working properly on this thing then it will not be anything useful.” I pause to catch my breath, looking over my shoulder I see a clear path amongst the debris, my snail-trail.

“You never know, you might find a fully functional cocktail bar.”

“My doctor has advised me against drinking, excess exercise and chasing ass, sorry.”

I nearly lose Davis in the maze of corridors. The others are clearing up in the lab, but we are having to move carefully to avoid tipping off the authorities to our presence, while I pursue what has become an increasingly personal vendetta.

Rounding the corner into another near-identical painted concrete access-way, I just catch the movement of a door swinging to. My sprint takes me to it before it closes fully and I catch a glimpse of the harsh sunlight, a fire exit. I quickly divest myself of any incriminating equipment, our presence here is covert and would not at all be welcomed, but retain a pistol and taser, what the discerning citizen is carrying nowadays. Pushing through the door I try to look as though I belong there while scanning the street for my quarry, I spy him half a block away, walking quickly whilst trying not to look as though he is in a hurry.

This side street is anonymous, flanked by the backs of buildings and intended for deliveries and refuse collection, but it still carries the monitoring equipment that is the price of living in such an enclave. Computer systems watch cameras for suspicious activity, atmospheric sniffers warn of airborne nano-virus threats and a private army protects the privileged from the nastiness that the world has sunk to, paradise for the few.

My glasses darken against the midday sun, and bring up the map of my surroundings. I am surprised to see how far from our entry point I have strayed, access tunnels and storm shelters linking in a labyrinth under the enclave's surface buildings. There is no evidence of a security response to our incursion, but I do not hold up hope of that lasting.

My stride lengthens, a man with a purpose, business to conduct and no time to hang about. My face has been altered and is stored in the local system; paramilitary styled clothing never fully goes out of fashion so I fit right in with the locals. I tell myself I belong here, but deep in my mind I know I am just building an ever taller tower of lies.

Davis turns onto a major street, taking him out of my view. I resist the temptation to hurry after him, the map shows there is nowhere for him to hide effectively before I reach the corner and my longer legs are slowly closing the distance. The map suggests he is fleeing towards a shopping mall, plenty of places to hide and people to get in the way.

“Bill, status, please.” Liefman's voice comes through the earpieces in my glasses “You've strayed from the area.”

“Don't worry, I've run into an old friend and I'm just heading for a little meeting. I'll make my own way home, you go on without me.” I am probably being paranoid worrying about lip-reading software, I imagine Liefman rolling her eyes and giving me up for a lost cause.

I round the corner, joining a trickle of people on a shaded boulevard. Davis is ahead of me, threading his way between strolling families and trying not to look over his shoulder. It is a comedy chase scene, neither of us wanting to attract attention by running but both trying to go as fast as possible. Ironically, the best thing for him to do would be to stand still, there is little I could do that would not end up in my detention, but he knows what has happened to the other clones and has let fear override his logic.

The rotating glass door of the mall swallows him up, but it is a matter of seconds before I following him inside. My glasses adapt again to the change in lighting, bringing up a map of the mall as well as links to special offers, a touch from me cancels this distraction. I take advantage of a knot of people, crouching slightly as I edge around them, trying to avoid being seen whilst keeping lookout for Davis. I pretend to look in a shop window, scanning reflections and side glances.

“Nice cut, but not your colour,” opines Jimmy. “Stick to something darker to match your expression.”

As I relax my face I catch sight of Davis, not scuttling for the far exit, but browsing jackets, maybe hoping to disguise himself and double back on me. I take a circuitous route towards him, but I am spotted and our slow motion chase begins again. As we had back towards the entrance there is a ripple of noise that passes through the shoppers, gasps of shock and horror.

A man in a long black coat is standing in a ring of free space, he seems confused and a little desperate, his eyes imploring, his skin wan and sweating. The coat has fallen open revealing a bare chest. A deep red mass, the size of two spread hands clings to and enters the skin, purple tendrils snake off it, entering his body at other points, the whole thing pulses rhythmically with his racing heartbeat.

There are screams in the crowd as containment shutters drop down and then the sharp, flat smack of a handgun as someone chooses to protect themselves with reactionary violence. I use the confusion to get close to Davis, his hand nervously toying with something in his pocket, entranced and repulsed at the same time. For all his being at the centre of things, he has had little exposure to to results of his work.

A voice over speakers asks us to remain calm, explains that we will submit to tests and decontamination and that there is nothing to worry about. Small flying drones arrive, separate us off into small groups and begin shepherding us through an unmarked door. I manage to stay close to Davis.

“Looked a lot like the Indian outbreak, is that what they were working on here?” Jimmy ponders. It did indeed look like the infection that had destroyed the population of the subcontinent and had only been brought under control by drastic measures.

“Davis was too startled, if it is related then it must be something much subtler.” I think back to him. “And we still don't know what their goal really is.”

We are held in a small room while men in biohazard suits run portable sniffers over us. Jimmy assures me we have nothing to worry about until they take a blood test at which point all the alarms will go off. The technicians give me disapproving looks as I use my glasses to call Liefman, but I am not the only one making a call.

“Could you try making things easy for me once in a while?” She asks. “The game's up when they take a blood test, use the confusion to try and get out, I'll see how I can help you.”

“Just caught up with something that wasn't my doing again, honey. Shouldn't take long, see if you can book me an air taxi and I should be able to make up to time. Missing you too.”

Scenes like this are common enough in the enclave that everyone submits to the blood test without discussion and no moves are made to search us for weaponry. I exchange a surreptitious glance with Davis, a shared memory and common knowledge of what will happen next. The blood samples are fed one by one into a device, the results come up on a screen and the next candidate is let out of a door with advice on his cholesterol level and a thank you for his co-operation.

The screen flashes up an message in red and an alert sounds, the technicians start to react, but I am ready, drawing my pistol and putting a shot into the screen to distract them from sounding the alarm. People recoil from me and I step forwards and grab Davis by the arm, hustling his surprised form out of the door pointing the gun at anyone looking like they might make a move.

“You can't escape, we're both trapped here.” He tells me.

“I don't care, taking you out is my only goal.” I reply. I pull his arm from his pocket, in his grasp is a stubby ten centimetre vacuum flask, a containment vessel for something nasty, I rip it from his fingers. “What are you working on? Why do you need a lab in a city?”

“Its the big picture, its nearly here, you can't begin to realise how important this is, this could make it all worth while.” Typical Davis, he flaunts his superiority while quaking in his boots.

“All those deaths? The only thing worthwhile now is stopping whatever it is you are after, and this is a big clue.” A siren starts to remind me of the urgency of the situation.

“The golden age is c-.” I use the remains of my gun's clip to paint his brains onto the wall, pocket the vial and start to run.

“Definitely a clone,” adds Jimmy. “An old one, all the signs of deterioration were there.”

“Shame. Can you get me my hearing back? I might need it.”

“Sure, I'll do that, you find us a way out.”