Red Star Falling at-1, page 1
part #1 of Agents Temporal Series
Red Star Falling
( Agents Temporal - 1 )
Ian Hocking
In 2028, a mysterious group known as Meta begins sending agents back through time. Nobody knows who these time travellers are, or their purpose.
Exactly 120 years earlier, murdered agent Saskia Brandt opens her eyes in a Geneva mortuary locker. Medical technology from 2028 has given her a few more hours of life.
Completing her mission will take her to the north face of the Eiger—treacherous, unclimbed, enshadowed—and a reckoning with a Georgian outlaw, Soso: the man who killed her.
* * *
Red Star Falling is a thoughtful, character-based science fiction novella with a philosophical edge, written by the winner of the Red Adept Science Fiction Award.
Ian Hocking
RED STAR FALLING
An Agents Temporal Story
In the moment before Saskia Brandt awoke, she had a vision of red chrysanthemums falling. The flowers looked unreal. Their stems were too straight and their falls too slow. Their Gestalt was artful sadness.
Then the sky beyond them wintered and the dream faded.
She awoke to freezing darkness. Her throat was dry. She turned and coughed. The edge of her breast touched a cold surface and, with a shock that stopped her coughing, she understood that she was lying on a metal tray, naked but for a loose shroud. She raised her knees. They bumped metal too.
She passed her hands over her body. It was difficult to move them under the shroud. She found one injury: a deep cut high on the inside of her right leg.
She coughed again.
Saskia closed her eyes and tried to contact her computer agent, an Ego-class device that she carried disguised as a business card. There was no reply. It was the first time in years she had felt its absence. The computer was either nearby and offline, or too far away to contact.
Saskia reminded herself that she was the foremost in her Recruitment Clade. She would remain calm. She had scrambled through mud beneath plasma fire on the cold training field outside Berlin during the winter of 2024. She could cope with a metal box, a cut leg and a sore throat.
She did not know where she was, or how she had got here. The Meta Carrier Wave would remedy that. In the meantime, what did she remember? She would verbalise her story to herself. A mindful narrative. Just as she had been trained.
So I remember my name, Saskia Brandt, and I remember Meta. My designation: Agent (Singular). My training I remember, too. And Toaster, my Ego unit. I am nearing the end of a four-year mission. I left Meta at 4:55 p.m. on Monday, 15 June, 2026 and travelled through time to Siberia, 12 April, 1904. My mission is No. 11. I am following the money of the Yerevan Square Expropriation. She paused. I play Ms Mira Tucholsky, twenty-seven years old, crypto-anarchist …
At these words, Saskia stopped. She gave herself a first class mark for declarative memory. But there was something amiss with her mind. It felt slow and wrong.
Like any Agent Singular, her cranium carried electronic augmentation: a glass-covered chip connected to more than forty per cent of her grey matter by super-conducting carbon filaments. She did not know the details of its mechanism. A Meta doctor had explained that it added a third form of thinking. While the right hemisphere was dominant for parallel, holistic processes, and the left hemisphere was dominant for serial, detailed processes, the chip could coordinate both hemispheres and add a posthuman mode of thought that nobody could quite define. ‘Meta thinking’, perhaps. Saskia now felt the absence of this thinking in the same way she felt the absence of her Ego unit.
The chip spoke to her. An involuntary whisper passed through her dry lips and she heard: ‘Coda.’
CODA was a half-remembered acronym. It named a procedure in which the deceased–she deflated at that word–was granted a few hours’ activity post-mortem until the chip itself exhausted its power. Her chip would have spent the last few hours further infesting her tissues and hijacking her nerves until it could assume the role of physical puppet-master. As the chip was too small to contain a power source, it drew energy from something called Euler Space. It was the degradation of this energy bridge that determined the length of her CODA.
Saskia Brandt–ace student, her Major’s favourite–wanted to scream.
Agent Singular, she commanded herself, lead your fear.
She closed her eyes and recalled her last memory. She had been standing on the polished floor of the Amber Room in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars, south of St Petersburg. It had been a warm spring night. Ripe for the recovery of half a million roubles stolen from the State Bank the year before. Saskia had played a central role in the robbery. Indeed, she had inhabited her revolutionary part with a relish that only one like her, knowing the greater story had already been told, could bring. When those agents transporting the money north to Finland had betrayed the Party and stashed the money somewhere in St Petersburg, it had been Saskia who had led the recovery.
Last memory: She had been standing on that polished floor. The handsome Georgian revolutionary, Soso, had approached the statue of Frederick the Great, the base of which hid the satchels of cash, and put his hand on the leg of the horse. Soso: poet, Marxist, murderer, a man who collected aliases like dandies collected handkerchiefs. The Milkman. Soselo. The Pockmarked One. Koba.
She had been standing, waiting, on that polished floor, quite ready for Soso to congratulate her on the recovery of the monies.
His eyes. Those honey-coloured eyes had turned cold as he smiled. They had set to amber. Then he had given the slightest nod to someone over her shoulder.
In her cold metal box, remembering, Saskia hissed at the darkness. She saw red chrysanthemums tumbling through a wintering sky.
Last, last memory: She had been standing in the Amber Room when, in the setting eyes of Soso, her augmented perception had revealed the reflection of his henchman, Kamo, raising the butt of his revolver.
And now she was here.
I will lead my fear.
Saskia turned her head to tighten the shroud against her face. She bit the fabric. Snarled and jerked her mouth. The linen ripped. She slid her hands to the hole and forced it wider until the shroud split like a second skin. It sloughed from her body.
There was a hairline gap where the lid of the box met the side at her head. She pushed her fingers into it. Only the tips would go. She felt around the edges until she discovered that it was a hatch, hinged on one side and latched on the other.
She curled into a ball and reversed herself inside the locker until her feet were against the door. A label had been tied to her big toe and it fluttered against her sole. Thinking of Soso’s honey-coloured eyes, she braced herself against the sides. There was no quiet way out. She kicked and kicked. The top latch of the locker was already open, and this gave her leverage to break the lower one.
She slid out and fell to a crouch. A tear of blood dropped from her wound onto the tiles of a well-appointed autopsy room. The lights were off, but shuttered windows on the far wall bled halos of wan gaslight. Night, then. She smelled carbolic acid. All the work surfaces were empty and the drawers closed. The buckets were stacked.
The impression was not Russian. Where was she?
She crossed to the metal work-table that ran the length of the wall. The drawers beneath it were unlocked. In the topmost, she found a lancet. Holding this like a dagger, she retreated into a cavity beneath the bench and remained there for a moment, looking out. The mortuary was still. Nobody had come to investigate the sound of her escape.
There were double doors to the left of the lockers. She strained to hear breathing, or perhaps a fearful swallow.
Nothing.
Strands of her loose, shoulder-length hair swung in front of her face. She sniffed. There were traces of propellant, something smokeless with a low brisance. Cordite? If so, she had recently fired a rifle.
Saskia took the lancet in her teeth. She emerged from the cavity and looked through the drawers until she found sutures, needle and scissors. With care, she put the thread through the lips of her leg wound. The pain that she felt when tying it off was distant, a satellite below the horizon. Then she used the lancet to cut the string of her toe tag.
The installation of the ceiling lights had left a scar in the plaster that she traced back to the switch near the closed door. She walked to the switch and flicked it.
The room gushed with burning tungsten. Saskia glanced at the window shutters, decided they would serve for blackout, and climbed onto the nearest of the two examination tables.
She stood on tiptoe and raised her hand to the hot filament. The light reddened through her flesh. Retinal-embedded augmentations isolated the Meta carrier wave, a trilling note of information in the electrical cacophony comprising luminance changes too fast for the technology of 1908 to detect. Saskia waited until a sample with sufficient fidelity had been obtained. Then she dropped from the table and turned off the light. She took the lancet from her mouth and retreated into the cavity beneath the long workbench, mind crowded with afterimages and the knowledge she had obtained from the carrier wave.
Saskia could not query the carrier wave any more than a sailor could query the constellations. The wave contained only points of reference. First, she was no longer in St Petersburg. This mortuary was in Geneva. Somehow, she had left Russia. Had she been drugged or coerced? Or had she travelled willingly, only to suffer a lacunar amnesia of the past few days? The local time was just after sunset on the evening of 11th June, 1908. Her last remembered moment
For now, Saskia settled on the explanation that she had regained consciousness in the Amber Room and pursued the Bolsheviks to Geneva. At some point thereafter, she had been involved in a fatal confrontation that had also interfered with the recent memories on her chip.
The final secret of the Meta carrier wave had the greatest practical importance. Her organisation kept single-blind agents throughout the world on generous retainers. These agents were locals, or ‘intemporals’. Often, these were young men with a gambling or drug problem that could be leveraged. Some were unknowingly modified for strength, speed or intelligence. Many believed that they worked for a foreign state or a clandestine branch of their own government. Saskia had been given instructions to use Agents Intemporal in extraordinary circumstances only. Standard procedure was to engage their services once and pay them off with valuables from the nearest Meta cache.
Saskia now knew the identity of her local Agent Intemporal.
She left her hiding space and walked to the double doors. She put her ear against one. Hearing nothing, she ramped up the sensitivity of her vision, opened it and passed into an anteroom gloomy with sinks. Doors led in all directions. The sign above one said ‘Cloakroom’. Saskia pushed through and found a bank of lockers. They were shut and secure. There was a rack of lab coats on the opposite wall.
As she donned one of the coats and inverted the collar, she thought about the physical tendrils that had been extended into her retinas. She had seen the eyes of uncollected corpses in the gutters of Tiflis, the Georgian capital, when running with Soso’s gang. Dead eyes were the same; but they were not the same. They were the clock unwound and the waveless shore.
When a person looks at my eyes, she thought, they will see how dead I am.
She felt a thickness in her throat, but no tears came. Perhaps that part of her biology had not survived her death.
When she had joined Meta, she had lost her biographical memory and taken the name Saskia Brandt. There was a rumour that all the Singular Agents had been criminals before their recruitment. That was why they were Singular.
Particular. Special.
One-shot.
Concentrate, she thought. Lead your fear.
She entered a through-office. The wall behind the desk held pigeon holes. Saskia searched through them and saw all manner of paperwork, but no death certificates. She was about to break into the desk drawers when she was touched by a sensation whose analogue was dizziness, but whose origin had to be the chip, not her body. She understood that an important routine in her artificial mind was about to fail.
Slow as a snake around a mouse, involuntary as a yawn, her mouth enunciated a word.
‘Fffff… ooooh… ddddddd-uh.’
Food. Saskia nodded. Message received.
With that, she returned to full awareness. She abandoned her search for paperwork and passed through the office, finding herself in a reception room.
An elegant but impractical desk occupied the centre of the room. Pastoral paintings had been hung on the walls. The room was deliberately perfumed and somewhat in disguise. It was the made-up face of the mortuary.
Saskia lifted the speaker of the candlestick telephone and waited for the operator. As she did, she looked at her fingertips. They were ashy with cyanosis. Again, she wondered how her eyes would make her look. Unseeing, like the blind? Inhuman, like a shark?
‘Hello, this is your operator,’ said a French-speaking woman. There was a note of surprise in her voice. Saskia wondered why this might be.
‘Hello, this is Ms Maxine Friedrich,’ replied Saskia. She affected the bad French of a young woman accustomed to speaking Swiss German. ‘Working late on my first day, as you can see.’
After a pause, the operator laughed. ‘You are a brave girl. I couldn’t bear it, I’m sure.’ Saskia relaxed. That explained the operator’s initial surprise. Saskia’s location must have been visible on the switchboard. The operator continued, ‘Your party, please?’
Saskia gave the number for the Agent Intemporal.
‘Putting you through now.’
‘Thank you, and good evening.’
‘Good evening.’
In the silence that followed, Saskia’s gaze idled over the desk drawers. Some of them were open.
A young man said, ‘Hello, Mr Gausewitz speaking.’
‘This is your particular friend,’ said Saskia. ‘Do you remember me?’
‘How could I forget?’ replied the man. His voice was too casual, and Saskia worried that he might overplay his part. However, the question was the correct response to hers.
‘Would you collect me, please? I’m at–’
Saskia stopped. She was staring at a broken vase on the floor. She had not noticed it before now. The red chrysanthemums it had once held were surrounded by shards of glass.
She seemed to step back from herself.
‘Hello?’
Saskia tried to reconcile the chrysanthemums on the floor with the vision that had accompanied her resurrection. She understood that the sound of the vase shattering against the floor had awoken her. But she did not understand how she could have pictured these same red flowers without seeing them first. Local time followed physical law, even for the extemporal Agents Singular. Her training had never covered such a timeslip.
Less haste, she thought. The scenario was not practised, but the lessons of other scenarios might still apply.
‘Chambésy,’ she said. The words came with the ease of over-learned patterns: ‘Oh, and let me show you the outfit I saw.’ That told Gausewitz she needed clothes. ‘You remember the restaurant on Alfred-Vincent? I bought it from a shop near there.’ That told him to bring food.
‘I remember. What about Bernhardt?’
He was asking if he needed to bring a gun.
‘He always complicates things.’
‘Very good. I will see you directly.’
The operator said, ‘Ms Friedrich, your caller has rung off.’
‘Thank you. And goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
Saskia replaced the receiver. Alone, part of the black, she waited as clocks clicked away the quarter hour. Silence grew like a frost. Saskia remained inert. Her eyes closed. She was meditating on the noises beyond: passing carriages; the footsteps in puddles; the cry of a baby. She hoped that the answer to the riddle of the chrysanthemums would come to her. It did not.
Why are the chrysanthemums tumbling? Have they been thrown? Scattered by something or someone? Have they meaning?
The baby cried again.
Local time should follow physical law, she thought. I was taught that. It was a lesson from a scenario. She looked at her bare feet and wondered whether it would hurt to walk on the broken glass. The lessons of other scenarios still apply. They still apply.
When she looked up, there was a man on the other side of the desk. She did not know how long he had been standing there. His expression was deliberately neutral and fixed on hers, anchored there with what she soon took to be embarrassment. She noticed the rain jewelling his eyelashes. With that, Saskia Brandt returned. She forgot about the chrysanthemums. She wound the clock inside herself.
He was carrying two canvas bags.
‘Put them on the desk,’ she said, buttoning her lab coat, ‘then go and close the door.’
‘Very well.’
As the man turned, she considered him. He wore a beige, double-breasted suit and a bowler hat. He was no older than twenty-three. His gait was relaxed and his shoulders were wide. He was a mountain climber, perhaps. Shorter than average. Certainly shorter than Saskia.
He had left a storm lantern and a doctor’s bag near the hat stand.
‘Stay there,’ she said, when he had closed the door. ‘And don’t turn around.’
‘I do apologise for walking straight in,’ he said. His hands were clasped behind his back, at ease. ‘I didn’t know if the location was secure.’
Saskia pondered his words. No mention of his lock-picking skills. Then she caught sight of a baguette in one of the canvas bags. It rekindled her hunger, which was deeper than any she had known before. She gripped the bread with both hands, twisted away a piece, and stuffed it into her mouth. It tasted good but was difficult to chew. She had little saliva. She turned the bag upside down on the desk and clawed through the food: a jar of Cornichon pickles; paté in a twist of greased paper; a wooden box containing cheeses; aioli in a jar; and punitions, or shortbread biscuits. She swallowed the bread and undressed the paté, halving it in two bites. Duck. Then she opened the jar of aioli, scooped some in her fingers, and pressed it into her mouth.
