The Orphaned Worlds by Michael Cobley Read Free Book Online Page B

At one point it looked as if great red and gold banners were streaming out above it until I realised that the city was burning as it fell.
    ‘I remember watching it plunge past less than half a mile away, with the hawsers trailing in its smoky wake and the veils of snow swirling and eddying in the force of its passing. Ever since I have been aware at all times what our lives hang from.’ The Gomedran grinned. ‘I was an anxious cub who became an anxious adult. But a surfeit of time passes for those who tarry, Seeker Horst – I must return to my shop to make further eye-way enquiries after our wayward Bargalil.’
    Bows were exchanged and after Ku-Baar left the observatory Robert waited a minute or two before retracing his own steps back to the Artisans Deck, closing the D-shaped hatch on the icy winds. Inside it was cold and dim. This level of Malgovastek consisted of six main floors and innumerable refurbished and retailored subsections, silos and chambers. Lighting was intermittent, bioglobes and battery strips mainly, and the air had a dank, fetid quality. A busy stairwell led up to a curved passage of entrances leading into the top balcony of the Swaydrome. There were a few locals about, mostly Keklir, a bipedal race with short, powerful limbs and faces dominated by a wide, tapering snout with two mouthlike openings. Other species included Gomedrans, a few Hodralog, and the occasional Pozu.
    Pushing through heavy curtains, he entered the deafening cacophony of the Swaydrome, a full-throated roar that surged along in time to a heavy, metallic hammering coming from down on the drome floor. The upper balcony was a U-shape of seating carrels, then rows of ordinary benches and bucketchairs, then crowded shadows dotted with the lamps of gaming tables and the amber glows of the kiosks and stalls that lined the back wall. Out of curiosity Robert sidled through to the front of the balcony and peered down through the bowed layers of netting. A large, tracked mech was holding down a spindly droid with one articulated claw while pounding its armoured midsection with the other. Bright spotbeams picked out the two combatants while spectators chanted and howled. Just as the underdog’s plating gave way in a burst of sparks, Robert felt a touch on his shoulder, and a voice.
    ‘Daddy!’
    It was Rosa, his daughter, or as good as. His wife had sent him a holosim projector of their dead daughter before he came to Darien as Earthsphere’s special ambassador. But when intrigue, deadly peril and chance encounters led him down into hyper-space, to a strange citadel called the Garden of the Machines, he could not have predicted what was to come. His daughter returned to life as a simulant based on the holosim’s data, and his own physical form rejuvenated by decades. But the Construct, the AI ruler of the Garden of the Machines, had also removed Harry, his AI implant, then given it free imperatives before releasing it into the tiernet, the omnipresent interstellar infoweb. Amazed and gratified by Rosa’s new existence, he had agreed to help the Construct establish contact with the Godhead, hence the necessity to meet the intermediary known as Sunflow Oscillant.
    ‘Where’s Reski Emantes?’ he said loudly, above the crowd noise. ‘I would have thought it would be interested.’
    ‘It says that if it wanted to see dumb objects hitting each other, it could go and watch an autoforge stamp out cutlery for half an hour.’
    Robert nodded. ‘Understandable.’
    By now they were away from the mass of spectators and gamblers, strolling along the line of stalls from which he caught an occasional appetising whiff. Then Rosa stopped him, hand on his arm.
    ‘You’re not exactly bursting with news so I guess that good old Ku-Baar had nothing to report.’
    ‘Same as before, my sweet, no sign of our mysterious mystic, although Ku-Baar insists that he still has other enquiries to make.’
    ‘Perhaps we should engage the services of someone