Crashing Heaven Read online

  Then Grey stepped back into his temple. A stone door closed behind him. Jack sat for a long time, staring at the gift his patron had left. At last, as the dawn light palely frosted the temple and the hill, chasing long shadows through the gardens, he reached down for it. Fist stirred and grunted in his sleep. Dew had moistened the card. Jack turned it over in his hands and tossed it away, before starting off downhill. A few minutes passed and Fist awoke. He stood and yawned, scanned through Jack’s available memories to see what had happened while he’d slept, then followed his master off the hill.

  The broken temple stood alone, overlooking broken gardens. Then it disappeared. There was nothing but a small bare room where an empty whisky bottle stood on a table, a man was climbing into a bed and the floor was made of stars.

  As sleep took Jack, he looked down at the void and thought about light years of travel, the history encoded in each point of light. Starlight holds memories that can never be changed. Station throbbed alive around him, constantly moving onwards in time, remaking itself as something new with every passing second.

  Chapter 18

  Jack woke with a savage hangover. Fist was still passed out in his mind, his buzz-saw snoring jagged in Jack’s thoughts. Jack muted the puppet. Hunger gripped him. He needed something hotter and greasier than the bread, caffeine and juice combination that the hotel offered. Clothes were scattered around the room. A few minutes of fumbling and swearing and he was dressed. Another desk clerk was on duty. Seeing Jack he said: ‘So Charles took care of you last night?’ Jack grunted in reply.

  Outside, a sweathead lay against the hotel frontage. It was almost noon. Harsh spinelight cracked down, making the sight of the reddish black void where her nose had been even more disturbing. She opened her eyes and looked up at Jack. Noticing him start, she realised that he could see her and stretched out a hand. Her sleeve fell back, revealing blotched track marks. Sweat was only ever taken orally. Jack wondered what other drugs had caught her, when she’d be staggering back into hiding to trip again.

  He turned away and started walking, feeling guilty that he had nothing to give her. Andrea had always been appalled by sweatheads, so she never used her weaveware to block them out. It was hard to imagine anyone who’d known her accepting that she’d died of an overdose. He imagined her wake – friends gathered together, talking carefully around the fiction that explained her death, afraid to speculate on the truth. He hoped that, if he’d been there, he’d have had the courage to question the official version of events.

  The smell of frying food leapt out of a doorway and tugged at him. He’d never needed the weave to find a good café. A bell rang as he pushed through the door. The staff were friendly until he told them how he’d be paying. He had to try two more places before he found somewhere that would accept InSec cash.

  A server led him to a small table, set with two places and two chairs. The room was about half-full. Other customers were dabbing bright pink meat in red sauce or pushing brown fried bread round plates to catch vivid yellow smears of egg yolk. The server took Jack’s order, almost managing to hide a combination of pity and contempt. The coffee came instantly, food a little later. Without flavour overlays, the brightly coloured meat, bread and egg scarcely tasted any different from each other.

  Fist shimmered into being, sitting in the chair opposite Jack. He had his head in his hands. Non-essential communications were still muted. It looked like he was groaning and swearing. Jack enjoyed the silence as he ate. He was about halfway through his meal before Fist realised.

  [ YOU MUTED ME, YOU BASTARD. I’M GOING TO TAG EVERYTHING AS ESSENTIAL FROM NOW ON.]

  Jack laughed. [ You’re lucky I let you out at all, after last night.] The tasteless food was at least filling him with calories, leaving him feeling generous. He unmuted Fist.

  [ That wasn’t me, Jack. That fucking patron of yours left a trigger in me. I had to take you to him.]

  [ You mean you aren’t normally an annoying, aggressive little wanker?]

  [Shut up and eat, meatbag.] Jack used a piece of bread to mop up the last greasy remnants of an egg. [ You don’t know how lucky you are,] Fist continued. [ Nobody can reach into your head and rewrite you.]

  [ They put you in my head.]

  [ You’re still you, Jack, even when I’m here. That never stops.]

  [ It will soon.]

  The server cleared Jack’s plate away and refilled his cup of coffee. A small group of people came in, clattering noisily as they found seats and debated breakfast choices. The noise would have pained Jack before he’d eaten. Now it created a soft, almost comfortable ache in his mind.

  [ You’ve got free will,] said Fist. [ They can’t turn you into something else without you even knowing.]

  [ We get told what to do. And sometimes we lose out if we don’t do it.]

  [ That’s different. You don’t have to do it, not if you really don’t want to. I’ve never had that.]

  [ That’s just self-pity.]

  [ Really? When do I ever get to decide anything? It’s always you, Jack, whether we’re surrendering to the Totality so you can feel better about yourself or getting ourselves tortured so you can impress a ghost.]

  [ There’s more to it than that, Fist.]

  [ Not from where I’m standing.]

  [So we should just walk away?]

  [ Yes. Grey was right. Leave it all to Harry. To someone who actually knows what he’s doing.]

  Jack sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Its heat bit at his tongue. The windows of the little café burned with midday spinelight, but he was in a shaded corner. Its gentle cool soothed him. The group at the table were laughing together. Others were chatting or just tucking into their food. Behind the counter the cook was flipping eggs on a hot cooking plate. The server was taking an order from an attractive young man, flirting a little as she did so.

  Jack was offweave, irretrievably distant from these people, but he found himself suddenly struck by an exquisite sense of deep kinship with them all. Hunger could never be virtually satisfied. There were so many human needs that the weave could never meet.

  [ Well fuck all this,] grumbled Fist. [ I’m going back to sleep.]

  Jack felt the same sudden contentment as the night before, when he’d told his patron that he wouldn’t allow himself to be used as a weapon. He wondered if Fist was right. Perhaps this was how he should spend his last few weeks, enjoying small pleasures, watching people in cafés and bars, feeling a subtle closeness to all around him. Then he thought of his father. His hangover blunted emotion, allowing him to consider the pain of their meeting with something approaching detachment. Without fresh evidence it would be impossible to change the way he understood the past. He imagined the old man tottering into age, only able to see his absent boy as an unresolvable problem. Hurt shimmered over peace like silent lightning over a summer sea.

  As he sat there, a message flag pinged in his mind. [Get it yourself,] muttered Fist. It was Corazon. ‘We need to talk. Call me as soon as you get this.’ A memory of Harry appeared in his mind, forbidding all contact with her. But Jack trusted Corazon, and Harry was no longer his boss.

  [Come on, Fist. Let’s go back to the hotel. We’ve got a call to make.]

  Chapter 19

  Jack thought it would be hard to reach Corazon. To his surprise, the call went straight through.

  ‘I followed your suggestion,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking at the files. There is something strange there. I think – I think I’m beginning to believe you now.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. And there’s something I want to ask you too.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I need you to find someone for me.’

  ‘Let’s discuss that in person.’ There was fear in her voice. ‘This call might not be safe.’ Jack wondered how much of a leap it had been for her to realise that. ‘We need to meet as soon as possible.’

  A couple of hours later she sent Jack a one-off Homelands entry permit. It
specified time and place of entry and exit, but no particular user. That helped calm Fist down a bit. [She doesn’t want anyone tracking you,] he said. [At least we won’t be drawing too much attention to ourselves.] Jack was to take a train through the Wart to Chuigushou Mall, changing once at Vitality Junction. Corazon would wait for him in a particular coffee shop, wearing civilian clothes.

  [ I think we should sell the travel pass to a sweathead, and let them go begging in Homelands. Or find those little bastards that were attacking your squishy friend and give it to them. They’d find some good victims in the malls.]

  Jack presented himself at Wound station gate and entered the ticket’s code in a manual terminal that looked like it hadn’t been used for decades. Soon they were trundling through the darkness of the Wart on a nearly empty train.

  [Going after the Pantheon traitor,] said Fist. [ You’re turning into Grey’s weapon after all.]

  [ I’m doing this for me. And Andrea. And you, come to that.]

  [ You’re endangering my future,] snorted Fist.

  [ I’m making sure you have one. Those bastards want to use you up and throw you away.]

  Outside, darkness rushed by. Homelands was a sudden blaze of light. Jack wished he had some sunglasses. His eyes had hardly adjusted when the train pulled in to Chuigushou Mall station. Large escalators led down from the platform into a perfectly circular piazza. It was at least five hundred metres across. The open space was defined by two white marble colonnades, which encircled it like hugging arms. They came together in a pointed arch directly opposite the escalators. A glass façade loomed up behind it, several storeys high – the main body of the mall.

  Jack remembered a hectic commercial bustle. The piazza’s serenity was a shock to him. There were no colours but white marble and black weave sigils; no sound but the hushed bustle of feet on stone and the excited susurrus of shoppers anticipating purchases or taking joy in new goods. Most of the colonnade arches had restaurants set into them. Waiters bustled between tables, sometimes shouting, sometimes stopping and staring into space as customer management systems fed new commands to them. Diners busily forked food into their mouths. Almost all were staring up as they ate, barely registering each mouthful.

  Entertainment must be dancing merrily through each restaurant. Jack wondered what he would be seeing if he were onweave. Presumably it would be something far from this classically elegant space. The latest musics would be pounding through his mind, personalised advertising displays bursting in front of him like small fireworks. Years ago, he’d been a reasonably frequent mall visitor. He remembered little of those visits, beyond a certain strained excitement that had tipped too easily into sensory overload.

  He reached the arch and stepped on to a moving walkway. It pulled him up into the western end of the mall. Spinelight shone through the mall’s peaked glass roof, high above. Its floor stretched away into the distance. Walkways crisscrossed its great central nave, connecting its side walls. Each one was segmented into seven or eight floors of shopping space. Balconies alternated with advertising hoardings, painted with great, multicoloured sigils that ran from floor to ceiling like brilliant windows.

  Two arched voids opened up halfway down it, leading to smaller north and south wings. The nave continued beyond the crossing, its eastern space holding the more expensive and exclusive stores. Only the elite could visit them. Jack had been taken into one of them once by an advertising executive he’d briefly dated. The lunch he’d bought her had cost him the best part of a month’s wages. Even then, he could only afford half an hour’s worth of flavour. They’d had to eat quickly to enjoy it.

  The mall ended with a great sunwards-facing logo carved into its final, eastern wall. Light poured in through it, turning it into a brilliant tribute to the bounty of Silver and of the Pantheon as a whole. The fulfilment that Chuigushou Mall provided was their gift to the people of the Solar System, the highest aspirations of post-Terran man made concrete and consumable. Its blaze was blinding. After a moment, Jack had to look away.

  [ This place is full of wankers,] said Fist.

  [ I know.]

  [And it’s far too loud! I’m going to climb back into my little box till we’re out of here.]

  [ No skin off my nose …]

  [ We shouldn’t have come here, Jack.]

  Jack was surprised to see that a couple of shops seemed to have been attacked. Workmen were replacing the glass windows and carrying broken furniture out of one of them. The frontage of the other had been entirely boarded over. He wondered how and why the damage had been done. It implied a chaotic violence that jarred with the commercial serenity of the rest of the mall, and the wider world of Homelands.

  Corazon hadn’t reached the café yet. Jack waited for her just outside it. A small, dirty child ran past, ragged clothes fluttering behind her, a younger version of Ifor’s attackers. She was carrying something heavy, but vanished before Jack could see what it was. She too seemed so out of place. For a moment, he wondered if she was a glitch – but of course, he was offweave.

  ‘I don’t know how you can look so relaxed in here,’ shouted Corazon when she emerged from the softly bustling crowd. She was dressed in loose white clothes that drifted endlessly around her. Black sigils danced across expensive fabrics. ‘It gets so loud. That’s why I thought it would be a good place to meet.’

  Jack followed her to an empty table. All he could hear were variations on near-silence. Corazon flicked a hand around her head, banishing a hubbub of datasprites. Her voice dropped to a more normal level. ‘Gods, I need a coffee.’ She waved at a server to catch his attention. He nodded as he received her request. When he brought the cappuccino he looked questioningly at Jack. His expression switched from surprised to worried as the café’s ordering systems found no weave presence to mesh with. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Corazon then, turning to Jack, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘Plain black,’ he answered.

  ‘On my tab,’ she told the server. He whispered to a colleague as he poured the coffee out. The colleague brought the coffee over, suppressing a nervous giggle as she put it down.

  ‘Probably never met a long-term offweaver before,’ said Corazon.

  ‘I’m not about to start throwing tables around. Now, what have you found?’

  Corazon leant in towards Jack, talking quietly but urgently. ‘Too much missing from the Penderville file. Your investigation into the Panther Czar’s finances for starters. There’s a full datacomb reference for it, but nothing stored at that address. Someone’s wiped it, the backup’s gone too.’

  ‘That should be impossible.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me that. And most of Harry Devlin’s interviews have been deleted – including Aud Yamata’s.’

  ‘She was the only real suspect. They must have got rid of the rest to avoid pointing too obviously to her. What about Penderville? Did you manage to talk to his fetch?’

  ‘He was tagged as a terrorist. His fetch is frozen. Nobody can reach him.’

  ‘Ah.’ Jack sat back in his seat, wondering how much to tell her about Harry. ‘Unusual.’

  ‘Freezing a fetch is very serious. There should be a lot of evidence to justify it. But there’s nothing.’

  ‘Deleted too?’

  ‘There’s no record that it was ever there, that any sort of due process was followed.’

  ‘Pantheon.’

  Corazon looked down into her coffee. ‘That’s not something I wanted to believe.’

  ‘There’s no belief about it. It’s fact. Only a god could wipe files and backups, and cage a fetch with no evidence at all.’

  She looked up at him. There was a terse, defensive anger in her voice. ‘I hoped I wouldn’t find it. It confirms everything you said.’

  ‘The fetches in particular – Penderville’s not the first to be interfered with. I’m surprised you didn’t try to talk to Harry Devlin. You wouldn’t have been able to.’

  ‘They froze him too?’ Disbelief and fear jost
led in Corazon’s voice.

  ‘They corrupted his dataself,’ said Jack.

  [Liar …] whispered a quiet voice from deep inside him.

  ‘Shit. So one of them really is smuggling sweat and going all out to cover it up.’

  ‘They’re after Fist now,’ replied Jack.

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘They want to use him when I’m gone.’

  Corazon clutched at her coffee mug, her firm grip whitening her knuckles. She laughed bitterly. ‘I feel like such a fool. Even when East told me that I couldn’t choose my own career – I thought they’re all good, they’ve got our interests at heart. She knows what’s best for me.’ A moment of moving through her own memories, of letting her new knowledge roil in her, and then she snapped herself back into focus. ‘And I may be pissed off with her,’ she continued, ‘but I still hope she’s got nothing to do with this. And that’s what’s next, isn’t it – find out which one it is?’

  ‘Yes. And we’ll do it through Yamata, and her skinner.’

  Corazon looked round then whispered ‘David Nihal.’

  ‘That’s him. How did you know?’

  ‘I looked back to see what Yamata was up to around the time of the murder. Sometimes she was there, and sometimes she wasn’t.’

  ‘We’d started to look into that ourselves. How did you work out it was him?’

  ‘I ran a full search on her links with known skinners. For a while, he was a regular face in her life. Once every couple of months, there he was – standing at the door of a nightclub she’d just gone into, or walking in a park that she’d just left. No traces of them ever meeting, but …’

  ‘They must have wiped the weave surveillance.’

  ‘Yes. But only when they’re actually together, not when they’re arriving or leaving.’

  ‘Lazy.’

  ‘Or overconfident. And that’s something too – if you can wipe surveillance data like that then—’