eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The first half of The Fall Revolution, Ken MacLeod's landmark modern science fiction series, this volume comprises The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal.
In a balkanized future of dizzying possibilities, mercenaries contend with guns as smart as they are, nuclear deterrence is a commodity traded on the open market, teenagers deal in "theologically correct" software for fundamentalists, and anarchists have colonized a planet circling another star. Against this background, men and women struggle for a better future against the betrayals that went before. Death is sometimes the end, and sometimes something altogether different…
Both The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal won the Prometheus Award on their original publication. They are followed by The Cassini Division and the British Science Fiction Association Award-winning The Sky Road.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429965521 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2008 |
| Series: | Fall Revolution , #1 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 640 |
| File size: | 792 KB |
About the Author
KEN MACLEOD's SF novels have won the Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, and been shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ken MacLeod is the multiple award-winning author of many science fiction novels, including the Fall Revolution quartet, the Engines of Light trilogy (Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, and Engine City), and several stand-alone novels including Newton’s Wake, Learning the World, and The Restoration Game. Born on the Scottish isle of Skye, he lives in Edinburgh.
Read an Excerpt
Fractions
The First Half of the Fall Revolution
By Ken MacLeod
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2008 Ken MacLeodAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6552-1
CHAPTER 1
The Star Fraction
1
Smoking Gunman
It was hot on the roof. Above, the sky was fast-forward: zeppelin fleets of cloud alternating with ragged anarchic flags of black. Bright stars, miland comsats, meteors, junk. Moh Kohn crouched behind the parapet and scanned the band of trees half a klick beyond the campus perimeter. Glades down, the dark was a different shade of day. He held the gun loose, swung it smoothly, moved around to keep cool. The building's thermals gave him all the cover he could expect, enough to baffle glades or IR-eyes that far away.
'Gaia, it's hot,' he muttered.
'Thirty-one Celsius,' said the gun.
He liked hearing the gun. It gave him a wired feeling. Only a screensight read-out, but he heard it with his eyes like Sign.
'What'll it be tonight? Cranks or creeps?'
'Beginning search.'
'Stop.' He didn't want it racking its memory for an educated guess; he wanted it looking. As he was, all the time, for the two major threats to his clients: those who considered anything smarter than a pocket calculator a threat to the human race, and those who considered anything with a central nervous system an honorary member of it.
He'd been scanning the concrete apron, the perimeter wall, the trees for three hours, since 21.00. Relief was due in two. And then he wouldn't just be off-shift, he'd be off-active, with a whole week to recover. After seven nights of staring into the darkness, edgy with rumours, jumpy with hoaxes and false alarms, he needed it.
Music and laughter and noise eddied between the buildings behind him, sometimes loud when the speeding air above sent a blast down to ground-level, sometimes – as now, in the hot stillness – faint. He wanted to be at that party. If no attack came this watch ... dammit, even if there did. All he had to do was not take incoming fire. Shelling it out was something else, and it wouldn't be the first time he'd dissolved the grey-ghostly nightfight memories and the false colours of cooling blood in drinking and dancing and especially in sex – the great specific, the antithesis and antidote for violence – to the same night's end.
Something moved. Kohn chilled instantly, focusing on a point to his left, where he'd seen ... There it was again, where the bushes fingered out from the trees. Advance cover. He keyed the weapon's inertial memory and made a quick sweep, stepping the nightsight up ×3. Nothing else visible. Perhaps this was the main push. He turned back and the gun checked his hand at the place it had marked.
And there they were. Two, three – zoom, key to track – four, crouching and scurrying. Two with rifles, the others lugging a pack. The best-straight-line of their zigzag rush arrowed the Alexsander Institute. The AI block.
Cranks, then. No compunction.
'Do it for Big Blue,' he told the gun. He made himself as small as possible behind the parapet, holding the gun awkwardly above it, and aimed by the screensight image patched to his glades. His trigger finger pressed Enter. The weapon took over; it aimed him. In a second the head-up image showed four bodies, sprawled, stapled down like X-and Y-chromosomes.
'Targets stunned.'
What was it on about? Kohn checked the scrolling read-out. The gun had fired five high-velocity slugs of SLIP – skin-contact liquid pentothal. It had put the cranks to sleep. He could have sworn he'd switched to metal rounds.
'HED detected. Timer functioning. Reads: 8.05 ... 8.04 ... 8.03 ...'
'Call Security!'
'Already copied.'
Kohn looked over the parapet. Two figures in hard-suits were running across the grass towards the unconscious raiders. He thumbed the Security channel.
'Lookout Five to Ready One, do you copy?'
('7.51.')
('Yes, yes.')
'Ready One to Lookout. Receiving.'
'They've got a time-bomb with them. Could be booby-trapped.'
They stopped so fast he lost sight of them for a moment. Then an unsteady voice said, 'Hostiles are alive, repeat alive. Our standing instructions —'
'Fuck them!' Kohn screamed. He calmed himself. 'Sorry, Ready One. My contract says I override. Get yourselves clear. No dead heroes on my call-out. Shit, it could be dangerous even from there, if it's a daisy-cutter ... Hey, can you give me a downlink to the UXB system?'
'What hardware you got up there, Moh?'
'Enough,' Moh said, grinning. The guard took a small apparatus from his backpack and set it on the grass. Kohn adjusted the gun's receiver dish-let, hearing the ping of the laser interface. The screensight reformatted.
'OK, you got line-of-sight tight beam, user access.' The guards sprinted for cover.
Normally Kohn couldn't have entered this system in a million years, but there's never been any way around the old quis custodiet (et cetera) questions. Especially when the custodes are in the union.
Fumbling, he keyed numbers into the stock. The gun was picking up electronic spillover from the bomb's circuitry (no great feat; AI-abolitionists didn't really go for high tech) and bouncing it via the security guard's commset to British Telecom's on-line bomb-disposal expert system.
'2.20.' Then: 'No interactive countermeasures possible. Recommend mechanical force.'
'What?'
In a distant tower, something like this:
IF (MESSAGE-UNDERSTOOD) THEN; /* DO NOTHING */ ELSE DO; CALL RE-PHRASE; END;
'SHOOT THE CLOCK OFF!' relayed the gun, in big green letters.
'Oh. All right.'
The gun lined itself up. Kohn fired. The screen cleared and reverted to normal. The gun was on its own now.
'Status?'
'No activity.'
He could see that for himself. The pack containing the bomb had jerked as the bullet passed through it. So had one of the bodies.
Kohn felt sick. Ten minutes earlier he'd been annoyed that these people weren't dead. No one, not even his true conscience, would blame him, but the twisted code of combatant ethics revolted at pre-stunned slaughter. He stood, and looked down at the prone figures, tiny now. The one he'd hit had an arm wound; at the limits of resolution he could see blood oozing rhythmically ...
Therefore, not dead. Relief flooded his brain. He talked into the chin mike, requesting medicals for the injured hostile. What about the others? Campus Security wanted to know.
'Put them in the bank,' Kohn said. 'Credit our account.'
'Lookout One? What's the name of your account?'
Disarmed, waking from their shots, the attackers were being handled gently. They'd gone from hostile to hostage, and they knew it. An ambulance whined up.
'Oh, yeah,' Kohn said. 'The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers' Defence collective. Nat-Mid-West account 0372 87944.'
'Uh-huh,' muttered the guard's voice. 'The Cats.'
'Hey!' another voice broke in, ignoring all comm discipline. 'We got one of your exes!'
'Lookout One to unidentified,' Kohn said firmly. 'Clarify message.'
'Red Crescent truck to Lookout, repeat. Patient Catherin Duvalier has employment history of work on your team.'
Catherin Duvalier. Gee Suss! 'One of your exes', indeed.
'She was freelancing,' Kohn lied. 'Where are you taking her?'
'Hillingdon Hospital. You want her released on recovery?'
'Like hell,' Kohn choked. 'Don't even put her in the bank. We're keeping her this time.'
'Secure ward, got you.' The medics slammed the rear door and leapt into the ambulance, which screamed off round the perimeter road like they had a brain to save. Fucking cowboys. Subcontractors for the Muslim Welfare Association in Ruislip. Probably trained by veterans of Cairo. Always assume incoming ...
Behind him he heard a heavy, dull crump and the song of falling glass. 'You missed the backup fuse,' he snarled at the gun and himself as he flattened to the roof. But then, in the sudden babble in his phones, he realized it was not his bomb.
The crank raid had been a diversion after all.
Janis Taine lay in bed for a few minutes after the diary woke her. Her mouth was dry, thick with the aftertaste of ideas that had coloured her dreams. Just outside her awareness floated the thought that she had an important day ahead. She kept it there and tried to tease the ideas back. They might be relevant.
No. Gone.
She swallowed. Perhaps, despite all precautions, minute traces of the hallucinogens at the lab infiltrated her bloodstream, just enough to give her vivid, elusive but seemingly significant dreams? More worryingly, she thought as she swung her legs out of bed with a swish of silk pyjamas and felt around for her slippers, maybe the drugs gave her what seemed perfectly reasonable notions, sending her off down dead ends as convoluted as the molecules themselves ... Par for the course. Bloody typical. Everything got everywhere. These days you couldn't keep things separate even in your mind. If we could only disconnect –
She heard the most pleasant mechanical sound in the world, the whirr of a coffee-grinder. 'Pour one for me,' she called as she padded to the bathroom. Sonya's reply was inarticulate but sounded positive.
It was an important day so she brushed her teeth. Not exactly necessary – she'd had her anti-caries shots at school like everybody else, and some people went around with filthy but perfect mouths – but a little effort didn't hurt. She looked at herself critically as she smoothed a couple of layers of suncream over her face and hands. Bouncy auburn hair, green eyes (nature had had a little encouragement there), skin almost perfectly pale. Janis brushed a touch of pallor over the slight ruddiness of her cheeks and decided she looked great.
Sonya, her flatmate, was moving around in the kitchen like a doll with its power running down, an impression heightened by her blond curls and short blue nightdress.
'Wanna taab?'
Janis shuddered. 'No thanks.'
'Zhey're great. Wakesh you up jusht like zhat.' She was making scrambled eggs on toast for three.
'Gaia bless you,' said Janis, sipping coffee. 'How much sleep have you had?'
Sonya looked at the clock on the cooker and fell into a five-second trance of mental arithmetic.
'Two hours. I was at one of your campus discos. It was phenomenome ... fucking great. Got off with this guy.'
'I was kind of wondering about the third portion,' Janis said, and immediately regretted it because another glacial calculation ensued, while the toast burned. The guy in question appeared shortly afterwards: tall, black and handsome. He seemed wide awake without benefit of a tab, unobtrusively helpful to Sonya. His name was Jerome and he was from Ghana.
After breakfast Janis went into her bedroom and started throwing clothes from her wardrobe on to the bed. She selected a pleated white blouse, then hesitated with a long skirt in one hand and a pair of slate calf-length culottes in the other.
'Sonya,' she called, interrupting the others' murmuring chat, 'you using the car today?'
Sonya was. On your bike, Janis. So, culottes. She eyed the outfit. Dress to impress and all that, but it still wasn't quite sharp enough. She sighed.
'Sorry to bother you, Sonya,' she said wearily. 'Can you help me into my stays?'
'You can breathe in now,' Sonya said. She fastened the cord. 'You'll knock them out.'
'If I don't expire myself ... Hey, what's the matter?'
Sonya's hand went to her mouth, came away again.
'Oh, Janis, you'll kill me. I totally forgot. You're seeing some committee today, yeah?'
'Yeah.'
'I just remembered. Last night, at the disco. There was some fighting.'
'At the disco?'
'No, I mean there was an attack. On a lab somewhere. We heard shots, an explosion —'
'Oh shit!' Janis tightened her belt viciously, stepped into her shoes. 'Do you know what one it —?'
Sonya shook her head. 'I just overheard some guy later. Sitting at a table by himself, drinking and talking – about, uh, bloody cranks, I think.'
'Oh.' Some of Janis's tension eased. She smiled quizzically. 'This guy was talking to himself?'
'Oh, no!' Sonya sounded put out at the suggestion that she'd been eavesdropping on a loony. 'He was talking to his gun.'
The night's muggy heat had given way to a sharp, clear autumn morning. Janis pedalled through the streets of Uxbridge, slowly so as not to break sweat. An AWACS plane climbed low from Northolt, banked and headed west, towards Wales. The High Street looked untouched by the troubles, a cosy familiarity of supermarkets and wine bars and drug dens and viveo shops, vast mirrored frontages of office blocks behind. Around the roundabout and along the main road past the RAF barracks (DANGER: MINES), swing right into Kingston Lane. Usual early-morning traffic – a dozen buses, all different companies, milk-floats, water-floats, APCs flying the Hanoverian pennant from their aerials ...
In through the security gates, scanned and frisked by sensors. The sign above the games announced:
BRUNEL UNIVERSITY AND SCIENCE PARK PLC WARNING FREE SPEECH ZONE
She rode along the paths, steering clear of snails making suicidal dashes for greener grass. On one lawn a foraging party of students moved slowly, stooped, looking for magic mushrooms. Some of them would be for her. Janis smiled to herself, feeling like a great lady watching her peasants. Which the students looked like, in their sweeping skirts or baggy trousers and poke bonnets or broad-brimmed hats, patiently filling baskets.
In the wall of the ground floor of the biology block a three-metre hole gaped like an exit wound.
Janis dismounted, wheeled the bike mechanically to its stand. She'd half expected this, she now realized. Her hands flipped up her lace veil and twisted it back around the crown of her hat. Up the stairs: two flights, forty steps. The corridor tiles squeaked.
The door had been crudely forced; the lock hung from splinters. A strip of black-and-yellow tape warned against entry. She backed away, shaken. The last time she'd seen a door like this it had opened on smashed terminals, empty cages, shit-daubed messages of drivelling hate.
Behind her somebody coughed. It was not a polite cough; more an uncontrollable spasm. She jumped, then turned slowly as reason caught up with reflex. A man stood leaning forward, trying to look alert but obviously tired. Tall. Thin features. Dark eyes. Skin that might have acquired its colour from genes or a sunlamp. He wore a dark grey urban-camo jumpsuit open at the throat, Docs, a helmet jammed on longish curly black hair; some kind of night-vision glasses pushed up over the front, straps dangling, phones and mike angling from its sides. He looked about thirty, quite a bit older than her, but that might just have been the light. A long, complicated firearm hung in his right hand.
'Who are you?' he asked. 'And what are you doing here?'
'That's just what I was about to ask you. I'm Janis Taine and this is my lab. Which it seems was broken into last night. Now —'
He raised a finger to his lips, motioned to her to back off. She was ten paces down the corridor before he stepped forward and scanned the door with the gun. His lips moved. He put his back to the wall beside the door and poked it open with the gun muzzle. A thin articulated rod shot out of the weapon and extended into the lab. After a moment it came back, and the man stepped forward, turning. He swept the tape away from the door and shook it off his hand after several attempts. He glanced at her and disappeared into the room.
'It's OK,' she heard him call; then another bout of coughing.
The lab was as she'd left it. A high-rise block of cages, a terminal connected to the analyser, a bench, fume cupboard, glassware, tall fridge-freezer – which stood open. The man was standing in front of it, looking down at the stock of his gun, puzzled. He coughed, flapping his free hand in front of his mouth.
'Air's lousy with psychoactive volatiles,' he said.
Janis almost pushed him aside. The test-tubes racked in the fridges were neatly lined up, labels turned to the front as if posed for a photograph. Which they might very well have been. No way had she left them like that. Each – she was certain – was a few millilitres short.
'Oh, shit!'
Everything gets everywhere ...
'What's the problem? The concentrations aren't dangerous, are they?'
'Let's have a look. Where did you get this? No, they shouldn't be, it's just – well, it may have completely fucked up my experiments. The controls won't be worth a damn now.'
She suddenly realized she was cheek-to-cheek with him, peering at a tiny screen as if they were colleagues. She moved away and opened a window, turned on the fume cupboard. Displacement activity. Useless.
'Who are you, anyway?'
'Oh. Sorry.' He flipped the gun into his left hand and pulled himself straight, held out his right.
'Name's Moh Kohn. I'm a security mercenary.'
'You're a bit late on the scene.'
He frowned as they shook hands.
'Slight misunderstanding there. I was on a different patch last night. I'm just dropping by. Who's responsible for guarding this block?'
Janis shrugged into her lab coat and sat on a bench.
'Office Security Systems, last time I noticed.'
'Kelly girls,' Kohn sneered. He pulled up a chair and slumped in it, looked up at her disarmingly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fractions by Ken MacLeod. Copyright © 2008 Ken MacLeod. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.