Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t charge you, threaten to charge you?’
    ‘He didn’t need to. He confiscated my shit, and sooner or later he’ll offer to give it back if I tell him what I know about Willie’s jackpot. And the thing is, while I don’t know anything but what Sheriff Bell told me, I’m definitely tangled up in it.’
    ‘Because of your seizure.’
    ‘Exactly. Listen, I was sort of wondering if you could maybe do me a favour or three.’
    ‘You only have to ask, honey.’
    ‘First, I have a feeling I might need a lawyer.’
    ‘Of course. I have a good man on retainer.’
    ‘The second thing, I thought I’d ask around in the Alien Market, tap into any gossip about Willie’s jackpot. And while I’m doing that, maybe you could find out if he did the right thing for once in his life, and registered a claim.’
    ‘Is that all? It doesn’t seem like much.’
    ‘Also, I need you to help me redeem my truck from the parking garage. I bought this piece-of-shit phone to replace the one Nevers took, and I can’t figure out how to get it to interface with the payment system.’

6. Serious Throw-Weight
    A hundred and fifty years ago, not very long after the Jackaroo made themselves known, human explorers found the entry point to a vast, multi-stranded wormhole network that spanned the outer arms of the Milky Way. Despite the discovery of a dozen or more Ghajar navigational datasets, despite the efforts of scholars, wizards and amateur obsessives who had broken their minds trying to find patterns in the clustering of mirrors and links between mirror pairs that might span a dozen or ten or fifty thousand light years, the network was still mostly unmapped. It had been called the New Frontier at first, but then an empire jacked itself up from its first settlements, ruled by a warlord, Truman Johnson I, whose fleets controlled choke points in the network of mirrors, taxed every ship that passed through them, and attacked worlds which refused to acknowledge his primacy. Only Earth and the fifteen gift worlds were spared, protected by the UN’s navy and separated from the nearest wormhole mouth in the New Frontier by a gulf that made it impossible to mount a sneak attack.
    Eventually Truman Johnson was assassinated by his eldest son, Able Truman Johnson, whose brief reign, the so-called Second Empire, was even more brutal than his father’s. When he executed a general who refused to carry out his order to use nuclear weapons against the only city on the desert world Karnak V, officers loyal to the dead woman became the focal point of a rebellion that spread through the empire’s navy, spanning four years and much of the wormhole network, and ending with the disappearance of Able Truman Johnson. A rumour that he had been murdered by two of his younger brothers was never substantiated; neither was the story that he had discovered a ship with a version of the fabled faster-than-light Alcubierre drive, and had set out to discover the location of the Jackaroo’s homeworld.
    After his disappearance, Able Truman Johnson’s empire fragmented into squabbling apanages that were swiftly subjugated by elements of the rebel navy. The victors formed a loose commonwealth that acknowledged the power of a security council and its police to referee disputes and patrol the volume of the wormhole network, but after eighty years its stability was as fragile as ever, threatened by territorial disputes, civilian rebellions and breakaway groups that attempted to set up independent principalities on fringe worlds or turned pirate, preying on merchant traffic and staging quick raids on the worlds and resources of the Commons.
    Tony Okoye believed that he had been claim-jumped by one such rogue group, maybe his family’s old nemesis the Red Brigade, maybe someone else. And although he had escaped their trap, his ship was half-blinded by its own countermeasures and he was still a long way from home.
    As soon as
Abalunam’s Pride
passed through the mirror,