"A shear leaves only the arithmetic: two observers measuring the same metre, and neither of them wrong, and the distance between them infinite."
From MECN-7 Diagnostic Addenda: Field Notes on Non-Euclidean Localities, McGill University Press, 2124
At 14:12 the radios of Gu Yichen's survey team sent three identical packets of data, all stamped with the exact same microsecond, and then they sent nothing at all.
was at his MECN-7 terminal in the corner of Foundry Bay 4. He had spent the three days since left writing a report nobody had asked for. Now he watched the four green lines on his screen, one for each member of the team, go flat together. There was no fade and no static. The four lines simply stopped.
He called Command. Command had seen it already. The team was in a seep, the mildest kind of rupture, and the Stability Index there read 0.982, close to normal. The likeliest cause was a broken radio. If the team was not out by 15:00, the duty officer would request a recovery.
At 15:00 he called again. A heavy anchor team from Unit Four was coming from Shekou and would arrive at 19:00. Until then, all Unit Nine personnel were to hold.
He ran the stadium forward on the terminal. The standard gauge over the Old Workers' Stadium still said 0.982, green and calm. But MECN-7 measured the stadium its own way, and underneath the gauge its reading told a different story: space inside the stadium was bending more and more, slowly and steadily. followed the line forward in time. At about half past five it crossed the point where a fold stops being a passage and seals shut. Whatever was inside a fold when it sealed never came out.
He called Command a third time and read them the projection. The duty officer thanked him and said Unit Four had been informed.
When he put the handset down, was up the gantry ladder beside Atlas-0 with an impact driver in one hand and a power cable over her shoulder. Guan was at the control bank below her with every light on it lit.
"The left ankle seal is weak," said, without looking down. "The collar will hold, just."
"."
"And if you fire the shoulder dispersers more than three times in ninety seconds, the heat comes back into the cockpit and into your chest. You will smell like roasted lard, . I am not exaggerating the thermal load."
", get down off the ladder."
"I'm putting a stronger radio on the back of the collar. Without it, MECN-7 will lose you before you reach the concourse." She drove a bolt home with a crack that went round the bay. "And I'm coming. I'll fly the lanterns from outside the cordon. I don't send machines where I won't go."
" gave me an order," said. "She gave Gu command. And then she got on a plane."
"She's nine thousand kilometres away in a room full of grey suits arguing about fishing rights." looked down at him then. Her face was very calm, and he had known her long enough to know that this was what she looked like at her angriest. "Gu is dying in the dark. Bo is already halfway to the past tense. Are you getting in the metal, or am I going to have to figure out the leg servos myself?"
looked at his hands. They were steady. They always were, when things were bad enough. had laughed at him for it once, with the Kepler's engines venting white fire outside the port and his pulse sitting at sixty. It had nothing to do with courage. When the world began to fall apart, the only polite thing to do was count the pieces.
"Help me with the calf braces," he said.
It took seven minutes to close him in. Guan clamped the shin guards on and lowered the back plate against his spine. When he set his shoulders into the collar it fitted him the way it had fitted no one else, without a gap anywhere. Through the open chest he could see the corner of the bay where had stood and asked him for his word. Then the breastplate swung down over it, and for two seconds it was dark. Then the visor lit up, and the foundry came back as an outline drawn in thin green lines.
The bay doors ground open on rain, and walked Atlas-0 out into it. Three kilometres south, over the drowned edge of the city, the sky above the old stadium had gone the colour of a fresh bruise.
followed in an open truck with the lantern crates. At the cordon she climbed a gantry with a tablet under her arm. The Unit Four sentries stared at the suit and did nothing, because nobody had told them what to do about a suit. The yellow tape ran across a street of green-tiled blocks, silted up to their windowsills. stepped over it.
The standard gauge on his left screen did not move off 0.982. MECN-7, beside it, began to scroll.
"There's a pulse," he said. "Seven beats a second. Regular."
"I see it," said in his ear. Her voice was already breaking up. "The space in there... it has teeth, ."
"Not teeth," said. "Pores." The stadium was breathing through them.
The street bent. He let it. After the second bend the road ended against the stadium's outer wall, and he followed the wall to gate four. Gate four had been a steel shutter twelve metres wide. Now it was a slope of black glass that had melted down into the gutters and set in ripples. In front of it lay three of the battery packs Unit Nine carried in their rifles, crushed perfectly flat, on concrete that was not even scratched.
"Shear stress," he said. "Not mass." Nothing heavy had fallen on those batteries. The space they lay in had twisted them flat.
He lifted his left arm and thumbed the switch on the gauntlet. "First flight. Twenty. Fan."
Twenty lanterns left the pods behind his shoulders with soft coughs, unfolded their rotors in the rain, and lit. They burned at two thousand two hundred kelvin, hotter than a furnace; had fought for that number in three procurement meetings. They spread through the gate. Where the ground under them was solid they hung a metre above the rubble and burned steady gold. Where it was sliding they flickered red. In thirty seconds they had marked out a safe road for him.
"Corridor width zero point eight metres," he said. "The stadium isn't broken. It's digested."
The radio coughed twice and went quiet. 's readings came through five seconds late, and then stopped coming at all.
He walked up the tunnel into the bowl alone, with only MECN-7 for company.
It was night inside. He had left daylight at the cordon, and here the sky was black and the rain came across it sideways, lit by a single floodlight on the south tower. The pitch was under water. In the water the hive turned in rings, and at its centre stood a spire of grey cable and grey bodies thirty metres high. It narrowed as it rose, and it pointed at a spot in the clouds that the clouds were slowly circling. Every plastic seat in the stands had gone clear, the colour of boiled sugar. The whole place clicked, a dry noise from tens of thousands of jointed legs at once.
", if you can hear me, log it. Collective Boundary Organism, Type One."
Nothing came back.
High on the northern side, on a catwalk under the dead scoreboard, his heat sight found four warm shapes. One of them was propped against the wall with a cold blue patch spreading through its left shoulder. Another was firing single shots down into the stands.
looked at the rest of the stadium. The bodies on the northern tier were climbing the pillars under the catwalk.
"Gu," he said on the radio. ". Heads down."
No answer. The noise between them blocked everything.
"Twenty-one to sixty," he said. "High density. Fence."
He brought his left gauntlet down across the control plate. Forty lanterns rose out of the pods in a long spiral, up through the rain and across the bowl. They dropped into the air ten metres under the catwalk and locked into a six-sided grid. Each one put out three prongs and fired into the air at once.
The air under the catwalk went flat. The violet went out of it and it turned an ordinary grey. The bodies swarming up the pillars hit that flat air at full speed. Whatever they were made of could not hold together in ordinary, unbent space, so they burst, one after another, into dry white chalk that drifted down over the pitch.
A shriek went through the bowl. heard it in his teeth and the bones of his face more than in his ears. On the catwalk, two of the four warm shapes flickered and were gone.
stood very still in the rain.
The radio stuttered, and five seconds of arrived at once. "...the fence broke their loop, there's a hole in the fold... , two of them just came out at the cordon. and . They're on the tape. They're outside, they're..."
Then the delay swallowed her again.
On the visor, a red arrow came up from the pit. A second mass of bodies was moving fast through the stadium drains toward gate four, the only way out.
"You're late," said, and stepped over the low wall at the front of the stand.
He fell six metres to the lowest terrace, and the suit's hip shocks slammed against their stops with a crack he felt in his own hips. He raised the right arm and locked the kinetic dispersers, the suit's guns. The first burst shoved the whole suit back half a step. The darts went into the leading bodies, and the bodies lost their timing with each other and thrashed on the concrete like landed fish. He fired twice more and stopped, counting, because had said three.
Something came out of a service door on his left. It was three of the bodies fused into one, a pale jointed trunk with three blind ends and forelimbs tipped with black glass. The glass glowed the same cold violet he had seen in Bo's shoulder.
He swung the left gauntlet. The ram in the wrist went off like a pistol and the thing came apart against the wall, and the backwash went up his forearm.
The Stability Index inside his left arm fell to 0.18. Normal was one. On the display, the hydraulic lines in the arm went black one after another, because the fluid in them had stopped flowing like a fluid. Cold came through the lining into his fingers, like plunging his bare hand into liquid nitrogen and leaving it there. The visor flickered, lost half its lines and threw up an error he did not have time to read. He hit the release with his chin. The faceplate swung up, the rain came in on his face, and he could see the stands with his own eyes.
"Anchor point," he said to nobody. He needed one patch of solid, steady ground. "Somebody tell me there's an anchor point."
A line of text came through on channel three, letter by letter, at the bottom of what was left of his display.
`STANCHION 4-B. STABLE. MOVE YOUR ASS, PROFESSOR.`
It was , safe outside the tape, telling him which support post still stood on solid ground. laughed once, out loud, which hurt. Then he dragged the dead arm round and ran.
The suit did not want to run with half its hydraulics frozen. He had to throw his whole weight into every step to force the joints through. He reached the foot of maintenance tower four. Its ladder had rusted away decades ago. The fire escape hung folded up, three metres above his head.
"Payload flight. Twenty-eight."
Twenty-eight lanterns came out of the pods. They flew in a tight gold line straight at the concrete under the fire escape's hinge and dumped all their charge at once. The flash was blue-white. The rusted pivot pins sheared through, and the iron stair came down with a scream and hit the terrace a metre in front of his chest. Rust rained across his face.
He got his right hand on the rail, locked the grip, and climbed. The leg motors whined at a pitch he had never heard from them, and the cockpit filled with the smell of hot metal, but they held. The stair buckled under each step and held.
At the top, behind an overturned locker on the catwalk, Gu Yichen was on one knee with his pistol in both hands. His cap was gone, his left eye was swollen shut, and the pistol was shaking. When the suit filled the end of the catwalk, he did not lower it.
"?" he said.
"," said. "You are five minutes behind schedule."
Gu made a noise that started as a laugh and turned into coughing. "The gate melted. Things were not following the manual."
"The manual was written by people who think the world is flat."
He went past Gu with the suit scraping both rails and knelt by Bo Han. The suit's knee rang on the mesh.
Bo was grey. His teeth were chattering hard and steadily. The cold blue had spread over his collarbone and up the side of his neck. As watched, the edge of Bo's shoulder flickered, and for an instant could see the dark stands through it.
Bo's eyes found the open helmet and focused. "Hey, ," he whispered. "Brought the kitchen sink, huh?"
"I brought the whole shop, Bo. Hold still. This is going to be extremely unpleasant."
unclipped the anchor from his hip. It was a tungsten rod with three spikes and a core that held space flat around it, the only prototype had finished, after four days of tuning and three burned generators. He drove it into the catwalk frame between Bo's boots and brought his right palm down on the cap.
A circle of white light opened round the rod, three metres across, and inside it the light ran straight. The violet sheen went out of the air. Bo's teeth stopped. The flicker in his shoulder stopped, and the shoulder was suddenly solid and bleeding, ordinary red. Bo screamed once, short and high, and his head went back against the wall.
"He's stable," said. "The gradient is zeroed inside the ring. But the anchor's battery has five minutes. Six if 's math is lucky."
Gu was holding himself up on 's shoulder plate. "And then?"
"Then the whole stadium seals shut," said, and looked down at the pitch.
The spire had grown. The whole grey column was bending toward the catwalk now. At its tip there was a small black hole in the air, and out of the hole came a silence so heavy that the fans in the suit dropped in pitch.
knew that silence. He had heard it once before, through glass, with 's fists on his harness. Something was on the other side of that hole. Its attention was on the catwalk, the way it had once been on a small ship, and he felt it find him.
I know you, thought. You were at the Moon.
"Gu," he said. "Strap Bo to my chest. Then get on my back."
"You can't carry both of us. This catwalk won't take the frame and three men."
"This catwalk will be gone in three minutes." He kept his eyes on the battery count. "Get on the harness, . That is not an academic suggestion."
Gu looked at him for two seconds. Then he did it, fast and without a word: Bo's arms through the load straps, Bo cinched hard against the breastplate, Gu up onto the rear rack with his boots in the calf guards and his hands locked on the neck ring.
"Secure," Gu said. "Gate four's three hundred metres of teeth."
looked at the gauntlet. Eight lanterns were left in the air, hanging out over the pit, small and worn and half blind. He thought of three hours ago at the bay, pointing a torque wrench at his chest: If you dump the reactor through the disperser capacitor, it melts the busbars. You'll be a four-hundred-kilogram paperweight.
"Then we'll be a very heavy paperweight," he said.
"What?"
"Nothing. Hold on to your tongue."
He locked the boot clamps into the catwalk, sent the reactor's power through the dispersers, and fed the whole charge to the last eight lanterns at once.
They fired together and burned themselves out in one blue flash. For a fraction of a second the space over the pit bent past flat and the other way. The spire folded in on itself. It went down into its own cone the way water goes down a drain, all of it at once. The black hole at its tip flared violet and tore with a sound like ripping canvas, and was gone.
The shock reached the catwalk a heartbeat later. The steel came apart. Cables snapped in a run of cracks like rifle fire, and the catwalk pitched forward into the air with all three of them on it.
"Jump!" Gu shouted.
The suit could not jump. leaned into the fall with his good arm across Bo's head and aimed the chest at the terrace six metres down. As the stands came up at him, he heard Bo's voice from the first morning in the dry dock, Out, never drag air in, and he let his breath go.
The right leg sheared off at the hip on impact. The displays went black. They rolled, the three of them and four hundred kilograms of steel, down forty metres of shattered seats in a blizzard of plastic, and stopped against the brick wall of the lower concourse.
Then there was only the rain coming through the roof, and the slow tink, tink of the armour cooling.
lay on his back. His left arm had no feeling in it from the shoulder down. Two ribs on the right had gone. Bo was still strapped across his chest, breathing in short rough pulls, and the blue was gone from his neck. He was bleeding ordinary dark blood, and some of it was running down onto 's face.
Gu rolled off the back rack onto the tiles and lay looking at the sky through the broken roof. After a while he got onto his hands and knees and spat blood.
"Neumann."
"I am currently reviewing my life choices," said. "Most of them appear to have been errors."
Gu crawled over and put two fingers under the angle of Bo's jaw and held them there with his eyes shut.
"He is here," Gu said. "He's still here."
Through the gap where gate four had been, past three hundred metres of wet road, could see the red and blue lights of the cordon.
He tried to stand. The left leg pushed, the stump of the right ground against the brick, and the suit lifted ten centimetres and fell back.
"Leave the metal," Gu said, reaching for his cutters to free Bo.
" will murder me if I abandon the frame. It cost more than my pension."
Gu stopped with the cutters on the strap and looked down through the open helmet at 's face.
"All right," he said. "Then we drag it."
It took them forty-two minutes to go three hundred metres. Gu carried Bo over his shoulders and stopped every twenty paces to curse Coalition supply officers in three dialects. crawled the suit along behind him on one knee and his right arm, and the ruined hip left a bright scar down the road the whole way.
When the iron foot crossed the tape, a dozen people came out from behind the carriers. Medics got to Bo first. Two Unit Four operators went for the release toggles on 's collar.
"Don't touch the collar." came through them on her knees in the gravel, her hair down in wet ropes. "The seals are fused. Turn that ring and the release bolts fire into his collarbones." Her hands found the maintenance panel without looking. She did not look at . She looked at the blinking display under the rim. "You blew the busbars."
"The busbars were badly rated."
"Eighty-four lanterns." Her thumb raked three breakers. "I have twelve. Out of ninety-six."
"They held the seam."
"You are an idiot, Neumann." The hex key turned. The latches sighed, the chest swung open, and the air hit his skin like cold water. "An arrogant, calculating idiot."
Then she did look at him, with rain running off her chin.
"You brought them out," she said.
By the tailboard of an ambulance, was leaning on a spare wheel with a cigarette going soft between his fingers, and stood beside him with a sample case hugged to her chest. When found them, lifted two fingers to his eyebrow in a crooked salute and could not stop grinning.
A staff surgeon was waving orderlies toward . "Load him for the regional hospital."
"No." Gu was on the step of the command carrier with a foil blanket round his shoulders and his head down between his knees to let his nose drain. "Not the municipal hospital. BOC third-floor trauma ward. Unit Nine stays in its own perimeter."
", contamination above grade three goes to the provincial..."
Gu raised his head. One eye was swollen shut. The other was enough. The surgeon looked at the blood on Gu's collar and at the wrecked suit in the road, and let his hand drop.
"Load the 's team," he said.
At the BOC trauma ward they taped 's ribs and wrapped his forearm from knuckles to elbow in a silver dressing that buzzed faintly against the skin. At three in the morning he walked out, because he could not sleep there, and went back to the foundry.
The recovery hauler had hung Atlas-0 in its chains, crooked, with the right leg gone at the hip and the chest still open. He climbed the gantry with one arm and sat down in the cockpit to pull the logs, because the logs would tell him which of his numbers had been wrong. The next thing he knew there was grey light in the high windows, and somebody was sitting on a crate on the floor below, watching him.
It was Colonel . She had a black coat on over her uniform, its hem dark with runway water, and her hair was still braided for the flight from Geneva. She had a flat leather case on her knee. When she saw he was awake, she stood up and came to the foot of the gantry and looked up at him in the broken suit.
He climbed down. It took a while. She did not help.
"Bo Han is off the critical list," she said. "The burn was stopped at the third vertebra of his neck. Three months with reduced use of the left shoulder, and then he's back." She looked at the dressing on his arm. "Gu has two cracked ribs and a fractured eye socket. He is asleep in the ward after threatening to throw an orderly out of the third-floor window for taking his boots."
"That sounds like the ."
opened the case, took out three data chips in yellow plastic, and put them on the gantry step between them.
"Core-sample and soil logs from Old Shenzhen. Taken six months before the first rupture in the bay. During the retreat, the Coalition classified them under the wartime weapons protocol."
looked at the chips, and at her. "Why are you showing me?"
"Because you were right." She looked past him at the suit. "When you came from Montreal I thought you were an academic with an obsession. A survivor who had made his grief into an equation, because an equation is easier to sleep next to than eleven dead friends." She turned back to him. "Now I know you are something worse. You are an academic with a weapon."
She went to the suit and put two fingers on the fused collar where the anchor had been clipped, as she had once put them on the breastplate.
"Command has issued three warrants for your arrest. Unauthorised use of an experimental frame. Destruction of provincial property at gate four. Disobeying orders in the field." She said it to the suit. " Gu has filed a counter-report. It states that Atlas-0 went in under his authority as acting commander. It also notes that if anyone tries to serve those warrants, every operator in this unit will resign."
"Gu did that?"
"Gu is very stubborn. And Bo Han's mother sends him five jars of fermented chili every New Year. Gu didn't want to tell her Bo had been turned into dust because an Accord professor followed the rules."
She turned round.
"You disobeyed my order, Dr. Neumann."
"Yes," said. "I did."
"If you do it again, I will shoot you myself."
" said you would."
She looked at him for a long moment, with the grey light behind her and the old scar white through her eyebrow.
"Thank you," said.
She said it the way she gave orders. Then she picked up the case and walked away across the floor toward the small door in the big one. "Get some sleep, ," she said over her shoulder. "We go back to work at noon."
"Colonel."
She stopped at the door with her hand on the frame.
"It wasn't an ant nest," said. "It was an ear. It was listening to us."
stood there for three seconds. Somewhere above them a crane cable creaked as the broken suit settled in its chains.
"Then we will have to be very careful what we say," she said.
She stepped through, and left the door standing open behind her, and the grey morning came in across the floor.