In Heaven and Earth Read online

  Reuben froze. He knew this room, knew it couldn’t be real, had long ago been dismantled.

  The figure at the window turned and stepped forwards into the light.

  “Dr Cooper,” General Ahrima said, her voice soft and dangerous, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Reuben’s throat closed.

  “Come in. Sit down. We should talk.”

  He still couldn’t breathe, each breath catching in his throat before he could pull it into his lungs. His head felt hot and swollen, his pulse beating like a drum in the back of his skull, and he gasped desperately, trying to think past the sight of her, smiling at him with that terrible mixture of charm and menace.

  She wasn’t here. It wasn’t real. She was imprisoned on Sirius, her mind lulled by soft drugs, and her will chained. She couldn’t hurt him now.

  Napoleon, he remembered, had escaped from Elba. He had been one of the few historical figures Ahrima had recognised and admired.

  “We have worlds to conquer, my friend,” she said, leaning back against the desk with an easy smile. “I need men of your calibre, Cooper.”

  His vision was going black at the edges, but he managed to croak, “No.”

  Her smile didn’t fade, but even the illusion of warmth faded from her dark eyes. “I know everything you have done, Cooper. You cannot refuse me. I own you.”

  “No,” Reuben managed again, but all the other words caught in his throat. He threw his hand out, clawing at the air to pull breath back into his lungs. “No!”

  And, neatly and suddenly, a wall of darkness rolled over him, scrolling down from the corner of the room until he drowned in it.

  Chapter Four

  HE WOKE in the infirmary with a breathing mask over his face, and Eskil standing beside him, one of his dreads plugged into the bed as he perused the medical data scrolling across the wall. Meili stood in the doorway, her arms crossed as she stared at him.

  This was the real sickbay, then, not his imaginary one. Surprised, Reuben pushed the mask off and rasped, “What happened?”

  “You had a panic attack,” Eskil said. “I pulled you out.”

  “Shit,” Reuben said, sitting up enough to glower at Vairya where he lay sleeping on the other side of the bay. “Little shit sucker-punched me.”

  Meili snorted. “Your respect for your patients is always such an inspiration, Cooper.”

  “What did he do?” Eskil asked more gently, holding his hand up to hush her.

  Reuben didn’t feel like sharing. “Doesn’t matter. I was making progress. I need to go back in.”

  “Not until your breathing and heart rate have settled.”

  “Fuck that.”

  Eskil glared at him, which was unusual enough that Reuben shut up. “Right now, I’m your doctor too. You don’t get to put yourself at any more risk until I say so.”

  “Get Meili to do it,” Reuben grumbled. “She doesn’t care if my heart explodes.”

  Meili grinned at him, sharp-toothed. “Damn right.”

  “Hippocrates,” Eskil said to her, stressing every syllable.

  “Never heard of him.”

  Reuben grinned at her as Eskil’s unused hair stood on end. “And you call yourself—”

  “Always works,” Meili commented to Reuben, returning his grin. “You manage to talk to your cyberboy?”

  There was something oddly reassuring about their mutual loathing, and Reuben returned her smirk with a lazy shrug. “Briefly. Eskil had the right idea. He’s using every dodge he can to avoid his memories.”

  “Going to do something about that?”

  “Sure, when Eskil stops fussing.”

  “You’ll be here forever.”

  “I’m still here,” Eskil put in mildly. “Stop baiting him, and tell him what you found.”

  “I can do better than that. Juniper, show headcam from fifteen thirty-four.”

  A rectangular window opened up, shouldering the medical reports to the side of the wall. It showed the airless and dark remains of Caelestia. This was a residential area, and had clearly been tree-lined once, because blackened boughs hung by the sides of the doors and stretched across the street. Reuben thought of Vairya’s rose garden and wondered what had flowered here once.

  A couple of glass statues stood beside the leafy arches, gleaming in the dim light, and the walls were pale. It must have been a pretty place once.

  On the screen, the observer entered the building. Inside stairs and lifts showed there must be higher floors, but they turned into one of ground floor apartments.

  There was a family in there, all caught in death.

  Unlike the people in the street, they hadn’t collapsed where they stood when the air ran out. They were all seated quite comfortably, angled towards still-playing vids on the walls or games rising out of the flexible table tops.

  “This is what’s weird,” Meili said, before he could make his own observations. “All through the residential areas, we found people who had been connected to the city net before the disaster. All of them were already brain dead when the air ran out. The only ones who died of air loss were those who weren’t connected to the net.”

  “What killed them?”

  “Haven’t got that far yet. Caelestia has a mental net, and they’ve all got burns around the wireless chips in their cortex. Something, or someone, got to them through the net, and we’re not planning to sign in to find out how.”

  “Someone?” Reuben echoed, turning to look at Vairya. “You think it was him? No.”

  “Why not?”

  Reuben shrugged. “Doesn’t seem the type. Too easily shocked.”

  Meili raised an eyebrow. “You woke up screaming.”

  “He didn’t make me scream,” Reuben said and forced himself to settle back against the pillows calmly. “Send me back in.”

  Eskil looked concerned. “Your heart rate is still a little fast.”

  “Send me back. I need to talk to Vairya.”

  “Ask him if he killed his city on purpose or whether it was an accident,” Meili suggested sharply.

  Reuben ignored her to close his eyes and breathe in deeply. He felt the pinch of the sedative again, and let the stars rise around him.

  HE WALKED straight into the garden, tasting the sweetness of the roses before the stars had faded. He stood still as his vision cleared, watching the roses take form around him, their flowers ruffs of elegantly folded petals and their stems twining over the rubble of long abandoned walls.

  “A shame I’m not the one with the headcam,” he said to the invisible watchers in his sickbay.

  “See something interesting?” Meili asked sharply. “A clue?”

  “Flowers,” Reuben murmured. “There’s nothing here except flowers.”

  As soon as he’d said it, though, he realised it wasn’t quite true. There were walls here too, low, broken, worn away by time and the burrowing roots. The outer bailey might be the only wall which was still at its full height, but there had been buildings within the wall once. Intrigued, and with no one in sight to ask, Reuben turned up the next sloping path between the flowers.

  It led him onto a small mound. From there he could see the whole southern side of the garden.

  For the first time, he realised how quiet it was.

  There were no birds here. In all the vids he’d seen of real planets, there were animals: birds on feathered wings and small creatures playing in the undergrowth. He had even been to the great zoological gardens on Sirius Station to see the descendants of the wildlife rescued from old Earth. There were no people here, either, no happy young lovers courting in the bowers.

  In Vairya’s dreamworld, there were only flowers, rustling sadly under the wind.

  From here, Reuben could see the pattern the walls made, and suddenly it seemed familiar. When they docked above Caelestia, they had crossed over the spaceward side of the city, where only force fields separated the hollowed out asteroid and its atmosphere from the stars, and had looked down on the city.
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  The streets had followed the same patterns as the broken walls of Vairya’s garden.

  Reuben sighed.

  Locked within his own mind, Vairya had hidden the destruction of Caelestia under sweet flowers, but he had not been able to escape it. The truth was there, if you knew how to look.

  He needed to talk to Vairya again. Scanning the horizon, he spotted a distant glimmer of light. It was little effort to improve his own vision until he could see one of his nanoknights moving slowly between the rows of flowers, bent over something. The other was a few rows away, in a similar posture.

  Reuben studied the route to them and then began to run. He had never been a star athlete, although he made the effort to stay fit, but the only restriction in here was the limits of his imagination, and so he ran at record-breaking speed, darting down long avenues and hurdling gates with the lightest of touches. It was fun to move so freely, and he was laughing a little by the time he reached the nanoknights.

  Then he realised that they had lost their swords and were wielding hoes.

  The laughter broke out of him completely, surprise and delight and irritation all together.

  “I thought helping things to grow suited their nature better than war,” Vairya said, stepping out into the bower. Despite his casual words, he was wringing his hands and peering at Reuben anxiously.

  “You said,” Reuben growled, “that you wouldn’t hurt me.” He took a pace forwards, suddenly angry. Vairya had flirted and teased and then thrown him to Ahrima’s mercy.

  “I didn’t intend to,” Vairya said, stepping forwards himself (brave, then, because Reuben knew he was intimidating in a rage). “It was just meant to be something unpleasant from your past to see how you react.”

  “And do I look like someone whose past is full of light and flowers?” Reuben demanded.

  “No,” Vairya said and held up his hand before Reuben could continue. “And I’m sorry. I had no idea who you were.”

  “But you do now?”

  “I’m always linked to the city net,” Vairya said. “I looked you up.”

  “Disconnect!” Reuben snapped, taking another urgent step forwards. “Now!”

  “Why?” Vairya asked. “I like to know things. I can see the city through it, you know, the other city. I can see the dead.”

  “Lots of them were connected to the net when they died. Disconnect, Vairya.”

  Vairya laughed, soft and humourless. “Oh, Sir Reuben, trying to save me? It wasn’t the net that killed them. They were doomed before that. We were all doomed from the moment that—”

  “What?” Reuben demanded when he stopped. “When what happened? How did they die, Vairya?”

  “Gently,” Eskil murmured in his ear. “Don’t provoke him.”

  “He’s no killer,” Reuben said flatly and took another step towards Vairya. “You didn’t kill your people, did you?”

  Vairya’s head came up, his eyes widening with shock. “Kill them? Me? No! Never! Who thinks I could ever hurt them?”

  “My colleagues,” Reuben said. “Someone or something liquefied the brains of everyone linked into the city net. Was that you?” He was pushing hard, he knew, far too hard, but he wanted to shock the truth out of Vairya. They needed to know what had happened here.

  “That wasn’t what killed them!” Vairya cried. “That was the only way I could save them!”

  “By melting their brains?”

  “By uploading them!” The words tore out of Vairya, and then he clapped his hand across his mouth, like a child caught in a lie. Then, very slowly, he wrapped his arms around himself and began to rock on his heels. “I couldn’t save their flesh, and some of them I couldn’t save at all, but I thought I would still be able to transmit them to Sirius or one of the other stations. Then the Enemy took the ansible transmitters, and we were all trapped here together. We can’t get out.”

  “What enemy, Vairya?” Reuben asked, forcing his voice back to something gentle.

  “The Enemy,” Vairya whispered. “The Enemy came. They found us again, and I had to save the people. Humanity must go on, Sir Reuben, even if the planets and cities fall. You must go on.”

  “Tell me about the enemy, Vairya,” Reuben coaxed, stepping closer again. He was almost within reach of Vairya now, and could see, for the first time, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, too quickly and shallowly.

  “The Enemy is the enemy is the enemy-enemy-enemy,” Vairya babbled and then jerked to a stop. To Reuben’s dismay, he stuttered, “It could happen again! Again. It could… again. Again… againagainagain. It could happen— happen—”

  “Shit,” Reuben said. “Lost him.”

  “He’s run away?” Eskil asked. “What the hell was that, Coop?”

  “I got some answers,” Reuben pointed out as he strode back to the nanoknights. He took one of their hoes, not without a slight struggle, and lugged it back to Vairya, the nanoknight watching him forlornly from a distance.

  “…again. Again… againagainagain. It could…”

  “I’m only doing this because this is an imagined landscape, and I think this will be more psychologically effective than an imaginary sedative,” Reuben muttered, to assuage his conscience, and hit Vairya over the head with the hoe. Twice.

  Vairya’s babble trailed off into a yelp of pain, and he fell over.

  Reuben cast the hoe aside in relief and knelt down next to him, settling him into a more comfortable position and checking the swelling on his head.

  “That hurt,” Vairya complained.

  “If it had been a real farm implement, I could have killed you.”

  Vairya turned a little to blink up at him, wincing. “Was that supposed to be reassuring or not? I can’t quite tell.”

  “Just honest.”

  “Honesty,” Vairya said acidly, “is overrated. That really fucking hurts.”

  “Only in your imagination,” Reuben said, gently pushing Vairya’s hair back from the swelling. “You’re quite capable of thinking it away.”

  Vairya’s hair was very soft, and curled around his fingers in golden twists. Reuben reminded himself very firmly that this was an illusion.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the nanoknight sidle forwards and reclaim his hoe. “You’ve even corrupted my knights.”

  “‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,’” Vairya said. “Not the other way round.”

  “It goes both ways,” Reuben said mildly and failed to take his hand away. “A ploughshare can easily be melted down to make a sword, and they were, throughout history.”

  After a moment, Vairya muttered, “Such a shame you’re a mindless thug. I usually appreciate a well-read man.”

  “Thug, I will accept, but not mindless. You are no longer hysterical, and you are about to finish what you were telling me before you crashed, weren’t you?”

  “No,” Vairya said. “I wasn’t.” He propped himself up a little against Reuben’s leg, as if they were out on a picnic somewhere, and stared at the sky. He rubbed his head and said, his voice suddenly bleak, “Oh, I remember now. I remember. Sir Reuben, do you know how to build a new ansible?”

  “No.” Reuben followed his gaze up. There were clouds drifting across the blue arch of the sky, and as he watched one began to reform, billowing into the silhouette of a charging knight armed not with a spear but a hoe.

  “Then you should leave, all of you, while you still can. Wait for the Fleet to arrive, and then tell them to drag Caelestia into the heart of the sun.”

  Reuben took a deep breath and picked a cloud of his own to shape into a little dog, yapping at the knight’s heels. “Why? What happened here that was so terrible? Was it a plague?”

  “Worse. Leave, Doctor. I can look after Caelestia in its final hours.”

  “If we leave, you will come with us.”

  Vairya’s knight went galloping across the sky, and little dark wisps of cloud suddenly formed into wolves, pacing forwa
rds. “I only had one task here, Sir Reuben. I was sent to protect them. I failed. I have no future.”

  Reuben turned his terrier around to snarl defiance at the wolves. “Bullshit.”

  “Truth.” Then, before Reuben could argue him down, Vairya asked brightly, “Have you ever actually seen a bull? I never have.”

  “No,” Reuben said, grimacing. “I’ve never worked on a farm platform, thankfully.”

  “Hark at you,” Vairya cried, but his humour sounded brittle. “All judgemental, aren’t you, Sir Knight? Nothing wrong with a good honest farmer.”

  “Says the walking archive.”

  “Says the gardener,” Vairya corrected smugly. “I like flowers. They don’t have expectations.”

  “You convinced me,” Reuben said easily. There was something rather nice about this, lazing around in the sunshine with an interesting man to keep his mind busy, and if he could lull Vairya into honesty this way, it would be even better.

  Vairya snorted. “You’d hate it. You’re not a gardener, Sir Reuben. You’re too much of a hero.”

  Reuben’s shoulders tensed. “That’s not funny.”

  Vairya sat up, so they were face-to-face. “It wasn’t a joke. I know who you are, Reuben Cooper. They sent me a real knight errant, didn’t they? A hero to save the lost prince.” His tone was bitter.

  “I’m just a doctor, and I’m sorry if that’s not good enough for you, but you get what—”

  Vairya caught his sleeve, his eyes wide and startled. “I’m not mocking you, man. I admire what you did. Courage like that is rare.”

  “Courage?”

  “Yes. Or are you not Dr Cooper of Rigel, the saviour of his people?”

  Reuben laughed, staring up at the clouds again so fiercely his eyes stung. “That’s what they call me in other systems. In Rigel, I’m the Great Betrayer.”

  Chapter Five

  “NO YOU’RE not.” Vairya knelt up enough to lean between him and the sky. “I’ve got access to the most up-to-date newsfeeds and footage from everywhere in human space. Did you know there’s a statue of you in—”