Free Ragnarok 03 - Resonance by John Meaney Page A

planet’s surface, thirteen of them fully or partly visible, covering land or sea without distinction, then stabilising as unmoving dots.
    Kenna stepped onto the balcony.
    â€”The Diaspora has been a long time coming. Its execution is fast .
    Gavriela asked:
    â€”Humanity’s leaving Earth?
    â€”You could say that .
    Whatever craft they used would be invisible from here.
    â€”And do Pilots like Roger still exist?
    â€”I dare not learn the answer to that myself .
    Roger was about to ask a question concerning the future, but Kenna forestalled him.
    â€”We should wait a century for things to settle. Perhaps two centuries .
    â€”Before doing what?
    Starlight reflections painted Kenna’s crystal smile.
    â€”Making Earth ready for the warriors to come. Our very own Einherjar .
    They were perfectly adapted to vacuum; yet Roger and Gavriela shivered.
    Perhaps a part of them had hoped that Ragnarökkr could yet be avoided.

TWELVE
    VIJAYA ORBIT, 2604 AD
    Since its construction in the decades following first contact with the Haxigoji, the orbital called Vachss Station had become a floating city, kept in geosynch orbit above Mintberg (once Mint City, its renaming a xenosemantic subtlety), one of the hubs of global Haxigoji culture. Up here in orbit, the architecture was a complex embellishment of the station’s original cage-like design, with polyhedral nodes, some the size of a single cabin, others the size of a thousand-room hotel, linked by giant spars, some of which were important thoroughfares, their corridors busy. Much of it glittered gold, due to the use of an exotic 2-D sulphur allotrope in its construction.
    Everyone said the Haxigoji were a fine species, which was an anthropomorphic slant on things: their behaviour paralleled the best of human virtues, even the self-sacrificing pain involved in child-rearing, in the passing-on of knowledge. Only the manner of that sharing disconcerted human observers.
    â€˜I find cannibalism hard to swallow,’ Jed said in Spanalian.
    He was in his control cabin, on slow approach to the orbital, its image rendered in sharp-contrast chiaroscuro in the holoramic display. A secondary volume showed Clara’s face, her expression neutral. She was on board the orbital, having made things ready. Waiting for him.
    â€˜Spanalian is not the only human language that talks about digesting knowledge,’ she said. ‘And while Faraday used the concept of “field” as a metaphor to help understand electro-magnetic phenomena, Einstein said that physicists of his day “imbibed the concept with their mother’s milk”, considering fields as real things.’
    â€˜You’re saying Einstein was one of the Haxigoji? Never saw antlers in any of the old holos.’
    â€˜Food absorption, potentiation at the molecular level, and neural connection formation: it’s all biochemistry, and languages reflect that. Metaphor from intuition. The human brain is basically a structured lump of fat.’ Still no trace of a smile. ‘Some more so than others, wouldn’t you say?’
    â€˜I have no idea why I put up with this,’ said Jed.
    â€˜Because you love me.’
    He looked at her lean, endurance-athlete features in the holo. Now she was smiling.
    â€˜That must be it, then,’ he said.
    â€˜Good.’ For a second, they stared at each other. ‘All right, we’re ready to receive them both. Check their autodoc status?’
    Still lightly conjoined with his ship, Jed knew the answer without checking the tertiary holo floating beside him: like bodily sensations, he felt the signals inside the passenger hold.
    â€˜Check,’ he said. ‘Both passengers fine and healthy, the autodocs say.’
    â€˜Healthy.’
    â€˜Yeah, until they wake up and remember everything.’
    â€˜Shit,’ said Clara.
    Never mind all that stuff about fields and metaphors and cannibals, keeping them occupied while the