Slow Bullets Read online

  Praise for Slow Bullets

  “Alastair Reynolds is the world's best writer of space opera. If you have any doubts, then read Slow Bullets.”

  —Allen Steele, author of Coyote and Spindrift

  “Alastair Reynolds weaves a tapestry of dark, dystopian societies in a tense, colorful narrative.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Slow Bullets is classic science fiction, a space opera, a puzzle story, a character study, visionary science fiction, and a prayer for peace. I see no reason why you should not love it.”

  —Michael Swanwick, author of Tales of Old Earth and Dancing with Bears

  “The writing is tight, the characters are well developed, and the story itself moves along at a cracking pace.”

  —Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Corner

  Praise for Alastair Reynolds

  “Reynolds is one of sci-fi’s brightest stars. [He] writes Big Science Fiction. Enormous spaceships travel through space that feels galactic in scale, a feat of depiction that is still noteworthy in the genre.”

  —Keith Brooke, The Guardian

  “Reynolds (House of Suns) is a master of modern space opera. . . .”

  —Publishers Weekly

  For Galactic North

  “Dark, vicious science fiction.”

  —Starburst

  “The UK’s pre-eminent hard-sci-fi author of the past decade.”

  —Edge

  “The stories are written with real energy. Dark, satirical and frequently dystopian. . . . Reynolds ensures his taut narratives grip from the first sentence.”

  —Jonathan Wright, SFX

  “Dark, gothic and graphic, with tightly composed narratives full of shocks and jaw-dropping moments. Atmosphere and economically-drafted characters are as important as the big ideas.”

  —Dave Golder, BBC FOCUS

  For Redemption Ark

  “Reynolds occupies the same frenzied imaginative space as Philip K. Dick. . . .”

  —M. John Harrison, The Guardian

  “. . . a welcome return to the universe of Reynolds’ astonishing Revelation Space. . . . it takes a lot more than insider knowledge to create a work as incandescent as this.”

  —Starlog

  “As dark and daring as anything penned by Iain M Banks or Peter F Hamilton. Fabulous.”

  —SFX

  For On the Steel Breeze

  “Clever and creative with lots of twists, tense moments and a perfectly balanced structure. . .On the Steel Breeze is Reynolds in top form.”

  —SF Book

  “For SF fans, the possibilities and imagination that has gone into the book will remind them of the heady days of Asimov and Clarke, of an age where imagination and people were more important in telling the story of humanity and guessing about its future.”

  —British Fantasy Society

  “Few SF writers merge rousing adventure with advanced futuristic technology as skillfully as Alastair Reynolds.”

  —Toronto Star

  For Pushing Ice

  “. . . he has a genius for big-concept SF and fans of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and Larry Niven’s Ringworld will love this novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Alastair Reynolds, an astrophysicist and the author of six previous novels, including the critically acclaimed Revelation Space series (beginning with the title novel in 2000), has established a reputation as the purveyor of big ideas in science fiction, particularly in the space-opera genre.”

  —Bookmarks Magazine

  Slow Bullets

  Copyright © 2015 by Alastair Reynolds

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Cover art © 2015 by Thomas Canty

  Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story

  Author photo © 2015 by Barbara Bella

  Tachyon Publications

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  (415) 285-5615

  [email protected]

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  smart science fiction & fantasy

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Editor: Marty Halpern

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-193-0 ISBN 10: 1-61696-193-7

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-61696-194-7 |

  Mobi ISBN:978-1-61696-195-4 | PDF ISBN:978-1-61696-196-1

  Printed in the United States of America by Worzalla

  First edition: 2015

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  SLOW BULLETS

  Also by Alastair Reynolds

  Novels

  Revelation Space

  Revelation Space (2000)

  Chasm City (2001)

  Redemption Ark (2002)

  Absolution Gap (2003)

  The Prefect (2007)

  Poseidon’s Children

  Blue Remembered Earth (2012)

  On the Steel Breeze (2013)

  Poseidon’s Wake (2015)

  Other

  Century Rain (2004)

  Pushing Ice (2005)

  House of Suns (2008)

  Terminal World (2010)

  Harvest of Time (2013)

  Collections

  Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

  Zima Blue and Other Stories (2006)

  Galactic North (2006)

  Deep Navigation (2010)

  Novellas

  “Thousandth Night” (2005)

  “The Six Directions of Space” (2007)

  “Troika” (2010)

  alastair reynolds

  SLOW BULLETS

  tachyon | san francisco

  MY MOTHER HAD a fondness for poetry. When my sister died, but before the news of my own conscription, mother showed me passages from a work by Giresun. It was a poem called “Morning Flowers.”

  This was an illegal act.

  Giresun was the official war poet for the Central Worlds. Her works were banned in the Peripheral Systems, considered propaganda. But Giresun had been famous before the war, and my mother had collected several of her anthologies. She was supposed to have handed these books in during one of the amnesties. My mother could not do that. One of them had been a gift from Vavarel, with an inscription in Vavarel’s beautiful flowing hand.

  My sister had always had better handwriting than me.

  “Morning Flowers” was about death and remembrance. It was about accepting the death of a loved one while holding onto the bright thread of their life.

  Giresun was a great comfort to me during that time. But I could never speak of her work beyond our home, and after my conscription I had no way of taking her poem with me. I tried to remember it, but even the few short verses of “Morning Flowers” were too much for me.

  Eventually, a ceasefire was declared.

  Many ships skipped into orbit around a neutral planet called Wembere. The military and political leaders agreed to their complicated and contentious terms. Before solemn witnesses they used things called pens to make markings on a thin, skinlike substance called paper, using a material called ink. They had been ending wars this way for thousands of years.

  You will have to take my word about these things.

  There was a problem, though. The skipships were the only way to send messages at faster than light speeds, so it took time for the news to spread. To begin with, not everyone believed that the ceasefire was real. Even when neutral peacekeepers came in to our system, the fighting continued.

  Near the end
of things I was on one of these patrols when I ended up separated from my unit. I was trying to re-establish communications and work out how to get back into our sector when I ran into an enemy sweep squad.

  There were four of them: Orvin and three of his soldiers.

  I knew a little about Orvin, even then. I had heard stories about this man who operated under the enemy’s flag but broke even their rules of war. It was said that when the ceasefire came, both sides would be lining up to put him to trial. He caught me, and took me to the bunker. It was a low, armoured building that had been blasted and abandoned. It was cold and full of rubble, there was no glass in the windows. A mottling of dark red blood on the walls and floor showed where Orvin had already killed people.

  His three soldiers held me down on a metal-framed bed that smelled of piss and death. Orvin used a knife to cut a gash in my trousers, running from the knee to the upper thigh. I tried to thrash and kick, but the soldiers were much too strong.

  “Hold her down,” Orvin said.

  He was a big man, taller and broader than any soldier in my unit. His skin was the colour and texture of meat. His face also seemed too small for his head. It was as if his eyes and nose and mouth were not quite in proportion to the rest of him, a too-small mask. He had white hair, cropped close to his scalp, and white eyebrows. The hair and eyebrows stood out strongly against the meat-colour of his skin.

  He had a trolley next to him. Very delicately he put the knife down onto the trolley. He had huge pink hands. His nail-less fingers were so thick and stubby that it made his hands seem babyish.

  “Haven’t you heard?” I asked, feeling the urge to say something. “It’s over. Peacekeepers are here. We’re not enemies now.”

  He produced from a lower shelf of the trolley a copy of the Book. It was a black rectangle, full of sheets of material like the paper I mentioned earlier, only much thinner. They had been marked with ink, but done using a machine rather than a pen. From the scuffed cover, I recognised the Book as the one that had been issued to me.

  “Do you believe this?” Orvin asked.

  “No.”

  “They say all you Peripherals read the Book.” He paged through the Book, having trouble turning the pages with his thick fingers. “We have our own Book, too. For the most part our people are too educated to attach any significance to its contents.”

  “Not what I heard.”

  It was a risk, arguing with this man. But agreeing with him would have brought no favours.

  Orvin began to tear pages out of the Book. They detached too easily, the way wings come off an insect. He crushed them up between his fingers and dropped them to the floor. He moved his leg as if mashing his boot on the pages.

  “It won’t work,” I said. “You can’t provoke me like that. I’m not a believer.”

  “Then we’ve that much in common,” Orvin conceded, allowing the Book to drop from his baby fingers, onto the rubble.

  He returned his attention to the trolley, moving his hand through different items. I thought for a moment he was going to pick up the knife again, but instead he came up with a thing shaped like a gun. It was made of white-coloured metal and seemed heavy in his hands.

  It had a large trigger, with a hose running to a pressurised reservoir.

  Orvin ran his hand along the barrel of the thing.

  “You know what this is?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know your name is Scurelya Timsuk Shunde,” Orvin went on. “I pulled your data from your slow bullet. Where you were born. Your family. That odd business with your conscription. Your subsequent military history. The skips that brought you to this system. The times you were hurt.”

  “Then you don’t need me to say anything.”

  Orvin smiled tightly. “Do you remember when they put the bullet into you?”

  “I’m a soldier. Who doesn’t remember?”

  He gave a little nod of sympathy. “Yes, we used them on our side as well, or a virtually identical technology.” He made sure I got a good look at the gun-shaped thing. “There’s a slow bullet in this injector, programmed and ready for insertion.”

  “Thanks, but I already have one.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then you should also know about the transponder signal. My side will be zeroing in on it as we speak.”

  “I could always cut the bullet out before they get here,” Orvin said.

  “And kill me in the process.”

  “That’s true. And you’re right—there wouldn’t be any point putting a second slow bullet into you. This one’s had a few alterations, though. Shall I tell you what they are?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Normally there’s not much pain. The military medics use a topical anaesthetic to numb the entry area, and the slow bullet puts out another type of drug as it travels through your insides. It goes very slowly, too—or at least it’s meant to. Hence the name, of course. And it avoids damaging any vital organs or circulatory structures as it progresses to its destination, deep enough inside your chest that it can’t be removed without complicated surgery. But this one’s different. It’s going to hurt like the worst thing you’ve ever known and it’s going to keep burrowing through you until it reaches your heart.”

  “Why?”

  Orvin let out a little laugh. “Why not?”

  I tried to fight—I had no control over that—but I always knew it was useless. The soldiers had me held down too well. Orvin leaned in and pressed the nozzle of the injector against the skin of my thigh where he had already cut away my trousers. I watched his hand tighten on the trigger, and heard a sound like a single whip crack. It was the air going through the gun.

  The bullet entered me. It felt like a hammer blow. The gun made a sort of slow, satisfied sigh as the air went out of it.

  For a second, maybe less, the pain was less than I had feared. Then it hit, and I screamed. It was what they had been wanting, and I hated myself for it, but there was nothing I could do about that.

  “Can you feel it in you?”

  Orvin pulled the injector away and cleaned the end of it on a scrap of rag. He put the gun down on the trolley.

  “Fuck you.” I said.

  “This is just the start, Scurelya. In an hour or two it’ll hurt much more than this. By then, you’ll be begging for me to make the bullet explode, so that it kills you instantly.”

  “They’ll find out,” I said, fighting hard to get the words out. “They’ll find out and find you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. It’s a big universe out there. Lots of systems, lots of chaos and confusion. I have my plans.”

  Where the bullet had gone in was a small hole, no wider than my little finger. I could feel the bullet moving itself, contracting and extending like a mechanical maggot. A little bump in my skin signalled where the bullet was pushing through underneath.

  I was certain as I could be that I was going to die in that place. It would either happen when the bullet reached my heart (or some other vital part of me) or when I managed to persuade Orvin to make the bullet explode, as all the bullets were capable of doing. If it blew up now, it would probably take my leg off and leave the rest of me alive, at least for a while.

  Obviously I did not die in the bunker.

  If you have seen the drawings of me (they are not very lifelike, but they did their best) you will know that I did not lose my leg, or any part of my body. I may not be pretty, but all of me is there.

  What happened was this.

  There was a noise, some kind of air transport passing slowly overhead. I thought it might be soldiers of the Peripheral Systems coming to extract me (if I was worth that much trouble) or possibly the peacekeepers, or even Orvin’s side looking for him.

  Whatever the cause, it was enough to have Orvin break off from his entertainment and send one of his soldiers outside. Up near the top of one wall was a square hole where there might once have been a window or some kind of air circulator. I saw a machine cross the
sky, then double back again. It was slowing down, making a louder sound than before.

  “You’re fucked now,” I said.

  Really, though, I did not know what to make of the transport, whether it was good or bad for me. I was in too much pain to think with any kind of clarity. All I knew was that Orvin seemed surprised by it, and I was glad to see him discomfited.

  The soldier came back into the bunker and whispered something in Orvin’s meat-coloured ear. Orvin scratched a hand across the bright white bristles of his scalp.

  “We’ll leave her,” he decided.

  “We could kill her now,” one of the soldiers said.

  “Now, an hour from now, it’ll make no difference,” Orvin said, speaking loudly enough for my benefit. “That transport isn’t closing in on her transponder signal—if it was, it’d be much closer.”

  “You should kill me,” I said.

  “And why is that?”

  “If you don’t, I’ll find you.”

  Orvin smiled at the emptiness of my threat. “See how far you get without a heartbeat. If you’re really insistent, though, I will have that bullet detonate. Your choice.”

  “Fuck you,” I said again. “And it’s Scur. My name is Scur, not Scurelya. I want you to hold that in mind. I’ll find you again, Orvin. I’ll find you and make you remember this.”

  “Scur,” he said, musing on the sound of it. “That’s not a very nice name. It sounds like an insult, a word for a bodily function.”

  “It works for me.”

  They left quickly after that. For a minute or two I heard voices outside the building, but they soon left. There was no sound of a vehicle, or even the transport. But whatever it was had convinced Orvin to be on his way.