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  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We know what they eat. We have tried to provide them with food, to get their attention—’

  Without warning a thread of ruby-red light snaked down from the hide of the Spline. Where the starbreaker touched, buildings disintegrated, panels and beams flying high into the air. From the heart of the old Qax facility came a scream of tortured air, a soft concussion, a powerful, blood-red glow. The ground shuddered beneath their feet.

  ‘It has begun.’ She grabbed Symat and tried to pull him towards her flitter. ‘Symat, please. You were my cadre sibling; I don’t want to see you die. This isn’t worth a life.’

  A blankness came into his eyes, and he pulled away from her. ‘Ah. Not your life, a pharaoh’s life, perhaps.’

  ‘I am not yet a pharaoh—’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘You see what a dreadful, clever gift this is? A long life makes you malleable. But my pitiful life - a few decades at best - what is the use of such a life save to make a single, defiant gesture?’ He stepped away from her deliberately. He closed his eyes, and raised his arms into the air, robe flapping. ‘As for you - you must make your choice, Luru Parz.’

  And from beneath Symat’s feet a bolt of dazzling light punched upwards, scattering debris and rock, and lancing into the heart of the Spline. There was a stink of meat, of corruption.

  A shock wave billowed over her, peppering her with hot dust. Luru fell back in the rubble, stunned. Symat was gone, gone in an instant.

  And the roof of flesh above her seemed to tip. The Spline sank with heavy gentleness towards the ground.

  And she was going to be crushed beneath its monstrous belly. She turned and ran to her ship.

  The flitter, saving itself, squirted towards the narrowing gap of daylight beneath that descending lid of flesh. Luru, bloody, bruised, filthy, cowered in her seat as immense pocks and warts fled above her head. A dark, steaming fluid gushed from the Spline’s tremendous wound; it splashed over the ground, a lake of blood brought from another star.

  Suddenly she burst into daylight. From the air she could see how the raking starbreaker beam had left a gouge in the earth like an immense fingernail scratching a tabletop. But the gouge was terminated by the dying Spline, a deflating ball, already grounded.

  The flitter, in utter silence, tipped back and lifted her up towards the edge of space.

  The sky deepened to violet, and her racing heart slowed.

  She tried to work out what had happened. There must have been a cache of the strange, ancient supernova creatures, she decided, drawn there by Symat’s superheavy-element bait. Perhaps the eruption had been purely a matter of physics, a response to the sudden release of pressure when the upper levels of the crust were stripped away. Or perhaps that great blow against the Spline had been deliberate, a conscious lashing out, a manifestation of the rage of those ancient creatures at this disturbing of their aeons-long slumber.

  And now, all around the sky, she could see more Spline entering the atmosphere: four, five, six of them, great misty moons descending to Earth. A fine dust pulsed from them in thin, silvery clouds, almost beautiful. The dust spread through the air, settling quickly. Where the glittering rain touched, the land began to soften, the valleys to subside, the hills to erode. It was shockingly fast.

  This was the wrath of the Qax. The overlords had learned not to hesitate in the face of human defiance. And this nanotechnological drenching would leave the planet a featureless beach of silicate dust.

  She took the translucent tablet from a pocket of her skinsuit. The scrap of Qax technology gleamed, warm. She thought of the wizened, anguished face of Gemo Cana, of Symat’s vibrant, passionate sacrifice. You must make your choice, Luru Parz.

  I am too young, she thought. I have nothing to remember. Nothing but what was done today.

  As the mountains of Earth crumbled, she swallowed the tablet.

  We endured another century of the Qax.

  When their reign ended it happened quickly, the result of an event far from Earth, the actions of a single human, a man called Bolder.

  For all our conspiring, I think we never really believed the Qax would leave.

  And we certainly never imagined we would miss them when they were gone.

  CONURBATION 2473

  AD 5407

  Rala knew there was something wrong.

  For days, all around Conurbation 2473 there had been muttered rumours. A cell of counter-Extirpationists had been found hoarding illegal data. Or a group of cultists were planning an uprising, like the failed Rebellion decades ago. Rala just wanted to get on with her work. But everybody got a little agitated.

  It all came to a head one morning.

  The room lights came on as usual to wake them up, But when their supervising jasoft didn’t come to collect them for work, Rala quickly got uneasy.

  Rala shared her tiny room with Ingre, a cadre sibling. The room was just a bubble blown in nano-engineered rock by Qax technology. There was nothing inside but a couple of bunk beds, a space to store clothes, waste systems, water spigots, a food hole.

  Ingre was a little younger than Rala, thin, anxious. She went to the door - which had snapped open at the allotted time, as it always did - and peered up and down the corridor. ‘Luru Parz is never late.’

  ‘We’ll just wait,’ Rala said firmly. ‘We’re safe here.’

  But now there was a tread, steadily approaching along the corridor. It was too heavy for Luru Parz, their controlling jasoft, who was a slight woman. Some instinct prompted Rala to take Ingre’s hand and hold it tight.

  A man stood in the doorway. His skin seemed oddly reddened, as if burned. He wore a skinsuit of what looked like gold foil. And there was a thick thatch of black hair on his head. Nobody in the Conurbation, workers or jasofts alike, wore hair.

  He wasn’t Luru Parz. He wasn’t from the Conurbation at all.

  The man stepped into the room and glanced around. ‘All these cells are the same. I can’t believe you drones live like this.’ His accent was strange. Rala thought his gaze lingered on her body, and she looked away. She had never heard the word ‘drone’ before. He pointed at the panel in the wall. ‘Your food hole.’

  ‘Yes—’

  He smashed the transparent panel with a gloved fist. Ingre and Rala cowered back. Bits of plastic flew everywhere, and a silvery dust trickled to the floor. To Rala this was literally an unthinkable crime.

  Ingre said, ‘The jasofts will punish you for that.’

  ‘You know what this was? Qax shit. Replicator technology.’

  ‘But now it’s broken.’

  ‘Yes, now it’s broken.’ He pointed to his chest. ‘And you must come to us for your food.’

  ‘Food is power,’ Rala said.

  He looked at her more closely. ‘You are a fast learner. Report to the roof in one hour. You will be processed there.’ He turned and walked out. Where he had passed Rala thought she could smell burning, like hot metal.

  Rala and Ingre sat on their bunk for almost the whole hour, barely speaking. Nobody came to fix the smashed hole. Before they left, Rala scooped up a little of the silver dust and put it in a pocket of her robe.

  From the roof the Conurbation domes were a complex of vast, glistening blisters. Rala had been up here only a handful of times in her life. She tried not to flinch from the open sky.

  Today this dome roof was full of people. The Conurbation inhabitants, with their shaven heads and long robes, had been gathered into queues that snaked everywhere. Each queue led to a table, behind which sat an exotic-looking individual in a gold skinsuit.

  Ingre whispered, ‘Which line shall we join?’

  Rala glanced around. ‘That one. Look who’s behind the table.’ It was the man who had come to their cell.

  ‘He frightened me.’

  ‘But at least we know him. Come on.’

  They queued in silence. Rala felt calmer. Living in a Conurbation, you did a lot of queuing; this felt normal.

  Around
the Conurbation the land was a plain that shone silver-grey, like a geometric abstraction. Canals snaked away to the horizon, full of glistening blue water. Human bodies drifted down the canals, away from the Conurbation to the sea. That wasn’t unusual, just routine waste management. But there did seem to be many bodies today.

  At last Rala reached the front of the queue.

  The stranger probably wasn’t much older than she was, she realised, no more than thirty. ‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘The drone who understands the nature of power.’

  She bristled. ‘I am not a drone.’

  ‘You are what I say you are.’ He had a data slate before him, obviously purloined from a Conurbation workstation. He worked it slowly, as if unfamiliar with the technology. ‘Tell me your name.’

  ‘Rala.’

  ‘Rala, my name is Pash. From now on you report to me.’

  She didn’t understand. ‘Are you a jasoft?’ The jasofts were human servants of the Qax who, it was said, were granted freedom from death in return for their service.

  He said, ‘The jasofts are gone.’

  ‘The Qax—’

  ‘Are gone too.’ He glanced upwards. ‘At night you can see their mighty Spline ships, peeling out of orbit. Where they are going, I don’t know. But we will go after them one day.’

  Could it be true - could the centuries-old Occupation be over, could Luru Parz and the other jasofts really have melted away, could the framework of her whole world have vanished? Rala felt like a lost child, separated from her cadre. She tried not to let this show in her face.

  ‘What was your sin?’ It turned out he was asking what job she did.

  She had spent her working life in vocabulary deletion. The goal had been to replace the old human tongues with a fully artificial language. It would have taken a few more generations, but at last a great cornerstone of the Extirpation, the Qax’s methodical elimination of the human past, would have been completed. It was intellectually fascinating.

  He nodded. ‘Your complicity with the great crime committed against humanity—’

  ‘I committed no crime,’ she snapped.

  ‘You could have refused your assignments.’

  ‘I would have been punished.’

  ‘Punished? Many will die before we are free.’

  The word shocked her. It was hard to believe this was happening. ‘Are you going to punish me now?’

  ‘No,’ he said, tiredly. ‘Listen to me, Rala. It’s obvious you are smart, you have a high degree of literacy. We were the crew of a starship. A trading vessel, called Port Sol. While you toiled in this bubble-town, I hid up there.’ He glanced at the sky.

  ‘You are bandits.’

  He laughed. ‘No. But we are not bureaucrats either. We need people like you to help run this place.’

  ‘Why should I work for you?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Because food is power.’

  ‘Very good.’

  The traders tried to rule their new empire by lists. They kept lists of ‘drones’, and of their ‘sins’, and tables of things that needed to be done to keep the Conurbation functioning, like food distribution and waste removal.

  For Rala it wasn’t so bad. It was just work. But compared to the sophisticated linguistic analysis she had been asked to perform under the Occupation, this simple clerical stuff was dull, routine.

  Once she suggested a better way to devise a task allocation. She was punished, by the docking of her food ration. That was how it went. If you cooperated you were fed. If not, not.

  Her food was the same pale yellow tablets she had grown up with, the tablets produced by the food holes, though less of them. They came from a sector at the heart of the Conurbation where the food holes had been left intact - the only such place, in fact. It was guarded around the clock.

  After the first month or so, the battles started in the sky. You would see glowing lights on the horizon, or sometimes flashing shapes in the night, threads and bursts of light. All utterly silent. All these ships and weapons were human. The oppression of the Qax had been lifted, only for humans to fall on each other.

  Actually there was a lot of information to be had from the traders’ lists, if you knew how to read them. Rala saw how few the traders really were. She sensed their insecurity, despite the gaudy weapons they wielded: so few of us, so many of them. And now there were challenges from the sky. The traders’ rule was fragile.

  But though people muttered about the good old days under the Qax, nobody did anything about it. It wouldn’t even occur to most drones to raise a fist. Besides there was no place else to go, nothing else to eat. Beyond the city there was only the endless nano-chewed dirt on which nothing grew.

  There was never enough to eat, though.

  In a corner of her cell, away from prying eyes, Rala examined the silvery Qax replicator dust. This stuff had made food before; why wouldn’t it now? But the dust just lay in its bowl, offering nothing.

  Of course the food hadn’t come from nothing. A slurry of seawater and waste had been fed to the dust through pipes in the wall. Somehow the silver dust had turned that muck into food. But in the pipes now there was only a sticky, greenish sludge that stank like urine. She scraped a little of this paste over the dust, but still, treacherously, it sat inert. She hid it all away again.

  She had been aware of Pash’s interest in her from the first moment they had met.

  She built on that tentative relationship. She talked to him about her work, and drew him out with questions about his background. He told her unlikely tales of worlds beyond the Moon, where humans had once built cities that orbited through rings of ice. Perhaps she was developing an instinct for survival; Pash’s interest was something she could exploit.

  Eventually he began to invite her to his room. The room, once owned by a jasoft, was set beneath the Conurbation’s outer wall. It had a view of the sky, where silent battles flared.

  ‘I don’t know what you want here,’ she said to him one evening. ‘You traders. Why do you want a Conurbation? You aren’t very good at running it.’

  ‘There are worse than us out there.’

  ‘It isn’t wealth you want, is it?’ She had struggled to understand that trader word, long expunged from her language; for better or worse the Qax had for centuries imposed a crude communism on mankind. ‘There’s no wealth to be had here.’

  ‘No. There are only people.’

  ‘Yes. And where there are people, there is power to be wielded. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  He fell silent, and she wondered if she had pushed him too far. She sighed. ‘Tell me about Sat-urn again—’

  The door slammed open. Somebody was standing there, silhouetted by bright light.

  Instinctively Rala stepped forward, spreading her arms to hide Pash. A light shone in her face.

  The intruder said, ‘I represent the Interim Coalition of Governance. The illegal seizure of this Conurbation by the bandits of the GUTship Port Sol is over.’

  ‘We are both drones.’ She rattled off details of her identity and work assignment.

  ‘You must stay in your cell. In the morning you will be summoned for new details. If you encounter the Port Sol crew—’

  ‘I will report them.’

  There was shouting in the corridor; the Coalition trooper, distracted, hurried away.

  Pash murmured, ‘Lethe. Look.’

  Beyond the window, in the reddening sky, a Spline ship was hovering, a great meaty ball pocked with weapons emplacements. But this was no Qax vessel; a green tetrahedral sigil, a human symbol, had been crudely carved in its flank.

  ‘Things have changed,’ Rala said dryly.

  Pash asked, ‘Why did you shelter me?’

  ‘Because I have had enough of rulers,’ she snapped. ‘We must be ready. You will have to shave your head. Perhaps one of my robes will fit you.’

  The Coalition had its own, different theory about how to run a Conurbation.

  They wer
e all evicted from the city. The people stood in sullen ranks - mostly Conurbation drones, but with at least one trader, Pash, camouflaged among the rest. They had been given tools, simple hoes and spades. The walls of the Conurbation loomed above them all, scorched by fire.

  The sun was hot, the air dry, and insects buzzed. These were city folk; they didn’t like being out here. There were even children; the new rulers of the Conurbation had closed down the schools, which even the traders had kept running.