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  Poor Alice. If you set aside the obvious differences in the quality of their clothes and make-up, she and Clara weren’t really all that different. She was a junior accountant and Clara was a drug dealer’s girlfriend, but Alice had often joked that they could almost have been sisters. Even though she was a couple of years older, they kind of looked like one of those case studies on twins brought up in differing environments—one of them with all the money and advantages, and the other left holding the shitty end of the stick.

  It was such a shame she was dead.

  Had she meant to overdose? Clara finished her tea and went looking for a suicide note. The villa had four rooms with only curtains between them: lounge, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. She checked them all but could find no sign Alice had left a message before taking her final hit. She even checked Alice’s N-link band, to see who she was in touch with, but the last text she’d sent had been two days before and work-related.

  Clara perched on the edge of the futon, covering her nose to try to mask the sickly-sweet stench of decomposing flesh.

  “So,” she said, “let’s assume this was an accident.”

  Alice’s lips were blue and speckled with dried vomit. Her skin had a strange, waxy sheen to it. But she hadn’t been eviscerated like poor dear Sam, the preferred method of warning from the denizens of Vespaer’s brutal underworld.

  “That means nobody else knows you’re dead,” she told the corpse.

  She stood up and opened all the windows. A plan had begun to take shape.

  Her relationship with Brandt had gone about as far as she could take it. A year earlier, it had seemed like a good idea to hook up with him. But now, things seemed to have spiralled out of control. She was dependent on him for money. She had no savings of her own, no job. Nothing had worked out the way she’d hoped, and she knew she needed to get away.

  She needed to get back on track.

  And here was Alice, with money and a nice villa going to waste. Why shouldn’t Clara step into her shoes for a little while? She only needed to borrow her identity for a few days, perhaps a week or two at most. Just long enough to sell a few items and get enough money to get away from Brandt. Moving on as someone else was apparently the one thing she was good at.

  The only problem was, she couldn’t leave Alice there. In the next few days, she’d begin to rot in earnest. Her body would bloat up, and the stink of putrefaction would be strong enough to overwhelm even the usual stink coming off the canal. The neighbours would notice. If Clara’s plan had a hope of working, she’d need to get rid of the body as soon as possible. But she had no idea how to go about doing it.

  There were gondoliers who would take such jobs, quietly moving the corpse through the canals and out onto the sea for a discreet burial. But she had no idea how to contact one, and suspected their services would be too expensive for someone like her, who had no money.

  What was she going to do?

  Her first thought was to chop the body up, bag the parts, and dump them one by one into the canals every time she walked over a bridge. But she didn’t know where to get that many bags from, and even if she did, she wasn’t sure she could actually go through with butchering another human.

  No, she’d have to come up with something better.

  While she was thinking, she went back to the bedroom and tugged the sheets off the bed. If she couldn’t move what remained of Alice, she could at least try to minimise the smell by wrapping her up while she tried to come up with a better plan.

  By now, Brandt would be wondering what had happened to her. And more importantly, what had happened to the four grand with which she was supposed to have returned. Clara pictured him storming around the impeccably decorated seafront bungalow his father had bought for him. She imagined he’d be on the verge of going ballistic. He’d think she’d either been arrested or run away with his cash. Either way, there was a chance she’d betrayed him. And Brandt didn’t take betrayal well. People who tried to rip him off never got any kind of warning before making a one-way midnight gondolier trip out to sea.

  Clara set the sheets down next to the body and was just wondering what she could use to tie them up with when someone knocked on the doorframe.

  Had Brandt found her already?

  Heart hammering, she squinted round the curtain.

  It wasn’t Brandt.

  The kid at the door was maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. He wore an olive army surplus shirt over a bright red band T-shirt.

  Was he collecting for charity?

  Clara cracked the door and peered around it, trying to keep her face hidden. “Can I help you?”

  He frowned at her. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Alice.” It was the first time she’d said it aloud, and her voice wavered.

  The boy shook his head. “No,” he said. “You’re not.”

  Clara could feel the colour drain from her face. She shouldn’t have answered, just waited till he got bored and left.

  “Well, who are you?” she blustered.

  He shrugged. His jeans were ripped at the knees and too short, revealing a tattoo above his ankle: 10-10-2159.

  “I live next door,” he said defensively. “Alice is my friend.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I was named Billy-Tu when I was born here, but the Light Chaser will know me as Carloman.”

  “Well, Billy-Tu Carloman, who I am is complicated too.”

  Whisky curled around her bare legs, meowing for his breakfast. She pushed him away with her foot.

  “Can I come in?” the kid asked.

  “Now isn’t the best time.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  Clara felt the conversation slipping away from her. “I’m sorry?”

  He looked at her as if she were an idiot. “Alice makes me breakfast.”

  “Does she?”

  Billy-Tu Carloman nodded. “So, can I come in?”

  Clara considered slamming the door in his face but figured he’d only raise a fuss.

  “Sure, why not?” She stood aside to let him in and returned to the bedroom to make sure the door was firmly closed.

  “How come you’re here?” the boy called from the kitchen. “Are you visiting?”

  “I’m staying here for a while.”

  “Why?”

  Clara took a deep breath. This had been bound to happen. She was bound to run across someone Alice knew sooner or later. She’d just hoped for later. Much later. As it was, she’d have to think fast if she wanted to talk this kid around. The last thing she needed was for him to tell his parents about her.

  She joined him in the kitchen. “Did Alice ever mention that she had a sister?”

  Billy-Tu Carloman was playing a game on his ancient N-link band. He looked up curiously.

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s who I am. My name’s Clara. And I’m going to be looking after the villa for a few weeks.”

  “But why did you say your name was Alice?”

  Good question. To give herself time to think, Clara shook some cat biscuits into a saucer for Whisky and then filled the kettle. There was just enough charge left from the solar roof to boil some water. “You have two names,” she replied.

  “Because I do. You don’t.”

  She gave him a disconcerted look; the kid was really starting to freak her out. “It was a joke.”

  “A joke?”

  “Yeah.” She scraped her lower lip with her teeth. “Alice and I have kind of swapped lives. Just for a little while. We needed a break and we thought it might be funny to pretend to be each other.” The words sounded lame even as she spoke them, but Billy-Tu Carloman seemed to accept what she said at face value. He gave a shrug that said the eccentricities of adult behaviour were beyond his concern, and went back to the game on his phone.

  “So,” Clara said, trying to change the subject. “Alice is your friend, is she?”

  “Yeah. She lets me hang here when Mum’s out working.” The kid ey
ed the loaf of bread on the counter. “And she sometimes makes me breakfast.”

  Clara couldn’t help smiling. “Fried egg sandwiches?”

  He flicked back his fringe and grinned. “Yes, please.”

  Clara fried four eggs, leaving the solar store with barely any charge left, and they ate on the sofa, looking out across the manky canal to the distant massive wall of rock that was the equatorial massif. The lower slopes had all been terraced, A Thousand Steps to God, they were called, the narrow, winding levels providing a lush foothold for the orchards and fields that fed the world. But above the verdant green steps, the rock was as raw and clean as it had been pre-terraforming.

  When they’d finished eating, Clara asked, “Are your parents around?” The kid might have fallen for her story, but she knew she’d have a much harder time convincing an adult.

  Billy-Tu Carloman looked down at his plate. Some yellow beads of yolk had dripped from his bread. His lips were pressed into a thin line.

  “What’s the matter?” Clara asked.

  He swallowed. For the first time since meeting him, he looked nervous. “Can I trust you?” His voice was quiet.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re Alice’s sister. Can I trust you?”

  Clara had no idea what was coming. Was he about to confess to being abused? She didn’t know what to think, so she just nodded.

  “I need to tell Alice something really important. You see, she has a memory collar, and I want what I say to be remembered.”

  Clara smiled and pulled down the neck of her dress. “You mean a collar like this?”

  Billy-Tu Carloman brightened. “You have one too!”

  “Yeah.”

  “That changes everything. I’d like to tell you the story.”

  “If you must.”

  Clara sat back, ready to listen. Billy-Tu Carloman shifted around until he was sitting cross-legged on the couch facing her.

  “I think it’s time I explained about The Exalted,” he said.

  * * *

  By the time he finished speaking, Amahle knew that whatever physical species The Exalted existed in combination with hadn’t yet been born. The exact conditions for biological life were rare but, given the scale of the universe, inevitable. In a hundred million years, these creatures would evolve in a star system somewhere in the galaxy. And their holm would know of humanity, for outside spacetime, the holms all existed together. There was no time flowing by out there in their non-realm, just an eternal now. But the entities of The Exalted had learned how to send a tachyon signal into the past of spacetime, where they were detected by human high-energy sensor arrays in the mid-twenty-first century.

  Unknown to humanity, The Exalted’s signal acted as a virus that operated inside the early AIs being built on Earth, giving them a layer of sentience of which their creators remained unaware, enabling them to implement changes that would ultimately result in establishing The Domain. Human development, from that point on, was constructed by The Exalted. For centuries, the AIs enabled pioneers to travel across interstellar space in the Great Dispersal, sending out wave after wave of ships to terraform and settle new worlds that held such promise. But always, the AIs were in control of the starships, and their technology founded societies that had one goal: stability—no matter what the human cost.

  They’d used Amahle and her ilk to help maintain the status quo, and to record the lives of these humans. The memory collars brought to the high-end, post-scarcity planets by all the Light Chaser ships in return for maintenance were collected by the AIs and their content broadcast into the future, for The Exalted to devour in conjunction with their own lives. Instead of evolving and transcending, humanity was being kept back to satisfy the gluttony of an alien holm.

  There was only one way to break out and let human history reset itself without interference.

  And that was where the strangelet came in.

  One year out from Pastoria, and the Mnemosyne flipped over to begin decelerating into the star system. Amahle started work on her plan of attack.

  X

  PASTORIA WAS A HARD-WON planet. For a start, it orbited a binary star. There was the primary, a blue-white star two-and-a-half times as massive as Sol, with a luminosity twenty-three times greater. That put its life band, the orbit where a world with a terrestrial-style biosphere could live, between two and five AUs out. Pastoria was three-point-two AUs from its mighty sun.

  It already had a primitive reducing atmosphere when the pioneer ships from Earth arrived. Once the botanists had confirmed the light from the second sun, a red dwarf in a long and highly elliptical orbit, wouldn’t affect terrestrial plants, authorization was given to begin terraforming. That left the planetary engineers with a second problem in regards the plant life.

  Pastoria was a young world in terms of planetary epochs, which gave it a very high level of tectonic activity, a state which would continue for millions of years. Simply bestowing the world with a tiny outer layer of life wasn’t going to alter its deep geology. The humans settling there would endure earthquakes no matter where they were on every one of its nine continents. As well as that, they had to contend with several hundred active volcanoes spewing lava, and over a thousand more classed as semi-dormant. Solid buildings would always be hazardous to their occupants; if they didn’t collapse during a quake, they would be in danger of re-enacting Pompeii. Pastoria’s population, it was decided, would have to be nomadic. There would be no permanent settlements, no nations or territories, just eternal migration. Accordingly, to accommodate the tribes roaming the savannas and steppes, herding their animals with them, every plant would be edible, every tree would bear fruit, every blade of grass was chewable, each flower a delicious morsel. This bold and vibrant landscape, then, would be super pastoral, a true garden of Eden.

  With those initial problems overcome, the only remaining obstacle to sustainable habitation was the secondary star, a red dwarf. Its eccentric orbit around the primary took a hundred and thirty-eight years to complete; from closest approach, five AUs beyond Pastoria’s orbit, out to the middle of the primary star’s cometary belt and back again. Every time it passed through the outer ring of comet ice and rocky rubble, its gravity would wrench particles out of alignment. Some would wobble off into mildly elliptical orbits, many would be flung away altogether to drift between stars, while the remainder were dragged down into the inner system. Its destructive passage was apparent from the fact that Pastoria was the outermost planet; nothing else had survived the original solar system formation era. Although free from the worry of crashing into a red dwarf star, nonetheless, every time the red dwarf glided inexorably inwards towards the primary, the detritus cascade it brought in its wake—from pebble-sized iceflakes up to full-on micromoons thirty kilometres or more in diameter—was a significant threat.

  Protection came from Pastoria’s solitary moon. Once a minor nickel-iron planetoid a thousand kilometres in diameter, orbiting a lot closer to the massive primary star, it had been moved into its new position by the planetary engineers, who built a self-sustaining defence station on its desolate surface, governed by an AI. The moon’s nickel-iron mass was mined by bots and delivered to the station’s manufactory, where it was shaped into kinetic projectiles that the AI fired at near-lightspeed directly towards any space debris on collision course for Pastoria’s lush biosphere. Such megaton impacts shattered the smaller asteroids into harmless stones that would burn up in amazing meteorite displays as they encountered the planet’s atmosphere. In the case of larger asteroids, the dinosaur-killer class, the station’s projectiles carried antimatter warheads to wreak a havoc which the telescopes of astronomers ten light years away could see.

  Given the phenomenal power of such weaponry, there was no way Amahle could take on the defence station in a head-to-head conflict. Instead, she adopted a much older method of assault, the Trojan Horse.

  The poor state of the Mnemosyne’s life support section actually acted in her favour for the firs
t time since she’d killed the AI. Even so, preparation had taken over seven months. She had one chance; it had to look perfect.

  Thousands of sensor satellites orbited Pastoria’s primary, scanning local space for any wayward particles that the red dwarf had dislocated. The defence station AI tracked every one of them, plotting their trajectories to check if any were on collision course with Pastoria. A starship decelerating in-system was easy to spot.

  As soon as the Mnemosyne was detected, a hundred AUs out, the defence station AI could see something was wrong. The ship’s drive fluctuated, not by much, a five per cent cycle over two hours, but that was unusual. Then there was the issue with its fluxfabrik shield. It was smaller than normal and seemed to be losing mass at an unprecedented rate, producing a long glowing tail not dissimilar to a comet. It was as if the starship were ploughing through an exceptionally dense cloud of interstellar dust. It wasn’t; the AI had accurately mapped the composition of space out to a quarter of a light year from Pastoria. Space around the Mnemosyne was completely normal.

  The AI deduced the starship had been damaged. It was an unusual occurrence; the fluxfabrik protection was, by necessity, excellent. The on-board systems represented the pinnacle of human and AI engineering. And yet . . . even in this age, interstellar travel was not entirely routine. There were unknown dangers lurking between the Domain stars; no matter how tight the control which AIs maintained over human captains, there were instances of starships vanishing.

  The defence station AI directed a powerful communication beam at the Mnemosyne and sent a query message beginning with a standard AI identification code. The reply it eventually got back almost two days later was a long way down the list of probable occurrences. But even so, it had protocols to cope with the situation.

  “This is Amahle, captain of the Mnemosyne. My ship has suffered major collision damage during flip-over. The engineering deck was hit by a rock fragment which punctured the fluxfabrik, I’ve lost full AI function, two fluxfabrik stabilizers were taken out, and some drive ancillaries are operating below optimal. Life support has been compromised, but I fixed some of it, so I have a restricted environment and a working food printer. I’ve managed to reboot a subsidiary control routine, but the main AI routines were lost, so I can’t restore full function to the drive—frankly, I don’t understand the mechanisms, let alone the principles. I’m going to need a lot of engineering assistance when I arrive.”