The Solar War

by John French

  ‘Is that the hoist?’ shouted Mersadie. She could see a chevron-marked recess set in a wide opening fifteen paces down the passage between them and the spider-machine.

  ‘It is in the right place, but–’

  She ran, ducking low and aiming for the door to the hoist platform. Las-blasts scattered across the deck behind her. She reached the opening and darted inside. The hoist platform swayed under her.

  ‘Come on!’ she shouted back at the Navigator. The spider machine had paused, its gun tracking to get a clean shot at her. The Navigator glanced up and sprinted towards her, hands still held to his ears. The spider-machine pivoted its gun and fired. Las-blasts left glowing splashes on the walls. Mersadie jammed the key medallion into the hoist door controls, hoping that they still had enough power to function. The floor under her feet lurched and began to slide downwards. The Navigator gave a cry, rose and sprinted towards the hoist opening. Las fizzed in his wake as the spider-machine scuttled after him, firing wildly. He dropped onto the descending platform beside her, yelping with pain as he landed.

  The spider-machine reached the lip of the opening as the roof of the hoist came down. Its gun rotated down to fire an instant before the edge of the roof crushed it into the floor. Something in its body exploded. Bits of metal and rubber showered down onto Mersadie.

  ‘Whatever luck you bring seems to be holding,’ laughed the Navigator.

  ‘If the shuttle is there, can you pilot it?’ asked Mersadie as she gasped for air.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Navigator, ‘I can.’

  Mersadie coughed, and gulped breaths as the hoist juddered down through the dark. Every now and then she felt the shaft shake and the groan as the metal of the ship strained.

  The shuttle was there when they reached the bottom. Three shuttles, in fact, red and black, their wings swept forward, held silent in the cradles above the hangar deck. Everything else was carnage. Mangled servitors lay on the deck, crushed by machinery that had tumbled through the space and now lay in smashed heaps. The reek of fuel hid the smell of blood, and her feet splashed in puddles of promethium as they ran to the remaining craft.

  ‘No…’ hissed the Navigator, glancing at the first shuttle, and then moving on. ‘No…’

  He reached the last, gave a snort, keyed a rune on the cradle and pulled himself up onto the ramp of the machine. Mersadie followed. He was already strapping himself into the pilot cradle, muttering and keying controls.

  ‘I am going to need your help,’ he said, eyes moving over the console, as Mersadie strapped herself into the second cradle.

  ‘What do you need me to do?’

  ‘Hand on the controls and hold her steady,’ he said, his fingers moving over buttons and dials like a clavier player’s.

  The shuttle lurched, and then began to hum. Engine noise rose.

  ‘I don’t know how far this will get us,’ he said, ‘but so far our luck is holding… Now, hold steady.’

  She did not answer. Exhaustion had begun to fall on her like the blow of a hammer. Her head was throbbing with pain.

  ‘Nilus,’ he said.

  She raised her head.

  ‘My name is Nilus,’ he repeated and gave a smile. ‘Nilus of House Yeshar.’

  He keyed a control. The blast doors to the external void shook, trembling as power-starved systems fought to obey. A crack opened, grew wider and stopped. The air in the hangar drained out, rocking the shuttle in its cradle.

  ‘Mersadie,’ she said, eyes fixed on the doors. ‘I am Mersadie Oliton.’

  Nilus grinned. ‘Well, Mersadie Oliton, I am not sure this thing will fit through that gap, so I may have begun introductions prematurely.’ As the shuttle’s engines roared to life, the spilled fuel soaking the hangar deck ignited in the last of the air. Flames streamed past the shuttle through the open doors. Mersadie found her hands were gripping the controls hard.

  The docking cradle released, and the shuttle shot forwards, through the gap, fins almost catching the doors. Behind them, the chewed stern of the ship that had been their prison tumbled on through a cloud of its own debris.

  G-force punched through her, draining blood from her sight, forcing the breath from her lungs in a gasp. She had a brief image of smeared stars and flashes of white fire. Nilus had gone still, his long-fingered hands locked on the controls.

  ‘Sweet blood of the ancestors…’ he breathed. Then the world went black and she could feel the burning void reaching out to greet them.

  Burning heaven

  Prisoners

  The Falcon and the cage

  Cordelia Void Habitat, Uranus high orbit

  The stream of plasma flicked across the domed viewport, touched the next dock spar along from the Antius, and cut it from the habitat in a silent burst of fire. A kilometre-long arm of stone and metal hinged free of the station, then began to tumble away, scattering molten debris. The ships locked into the docks on the severed spar fell with it. One ship fired its engines to try to get free and ripped the skin from its hull. It flew into the void, spinning, scattering its guts to glitter against the light of the planet. A blast wave of micro debris hit the Antius a second later. The hauler’s hull rang as though it were a tin roof in a hail storm.

  Cadmus Vek saw cracks spread across the dome as pieces of shrapnel struck it. The ship was shaking in its dock clamps.

  ‘Get us loose!’ he shouted.

  ‘We have to wait for the captain,’ called Sub-mistress Koln. ‘She was on the main dock limb.’

  ‘You are the captain now – get us free!’ he shouted.

  ‘But–’

  ‘Now!’

  Koln hesitated. Her lined face was pale, eyes wide with growing panic. Some of the crew around her had stopped; some even looked like they were about to make for the bridge doors.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ began Koln. ‘The captain–’

  Vek pulled the pistol from his gown. It was small, but it felt heavy and strange in his hand. Koln looked at the pistol as he levelled it at her. Shock pulled her mouth wide.

  ‘Cast off,’ he said. He saw anger flush red into her face.

  Something huge exploded in a starburst of blue and white beyond the dome above. Koln flinched, and nodded.

  ‘All stations, make ready to cast off. Begin the count.’

  ‘There are still people crossing in the dock limbs,’ called one of the junior officers.

  ‘Sound the disconnection alarms,’ said Koln, ‘they will run if they want to live.’

  Vek could see anger hardening in Koln as she gave the orders. She would never forgive him for what she was having to do. If she found the courage, she might one day try to kill him for it. If they survived the next five minutes, he could live with that.

  ‘Reactor output rising to sixty per cent,’ called Chi-32-Beta. Out of all the crew, the enginseer seemed the least concerned about the events unfolding around them. Hunched and swathed in her robes of patchwork red and dirty-white, she moved between the bridge systems as though there was no hurry in the world. The rest of the crew were scrambling to get wired into their posts, shouting orders or questions.

  ‘All systems confirm ready to cast off,’ called Koln. The replies came, rattling off loud, tension finding an outlet in noise.

  ‘Engines, aye!’

  ‘Helm, aye!’

  ‘Auspex, aye!’

  On and on. The hull was vibrating now as cold machines woke in its guts. The Antius was a small ship, barely a third of a kilometre from stern to prow. Most of its bones and skin had been hauled from a wreck-drift and remade by skilled hands now long dead and forgotten. It was neither fast or slow, but it had reliably moved indentured labour and ore between Uranus’ moons and asteroid belts for centuries. It had stood up to pirates and survived a conquest that had been renamed ‘compliance’. Now Vek hoped she would prove to be the survivor again.
>
  Koln turned.

  ‘There are still people running along the dock limbs towards the ship. We can’t cast off.’

  ‘Give the order,’ snapped Vek. And if you truly listen, Lord and Master of Mankind, he said in his thoughts, have mercy on me for this.

  Sweat beaded on Koln’s sagging cheeks and hung from her chin.

  ‘Seal all doors and hatches,’ she said. Lights flashed on consoles. Quiet had fallen across the bridge as suddenly as the falling of an axe. A junior officer looked up at Koln and nodded. ‘Release anchor cradle, release docking limbs.’

  Koln looked back at Vek, fire in her eyes again, lips pulling back from teeth to spit whatever she was about to say.

  A glint caught Vek’s eye. He began to look up at the dome in the roof of the bridge. Something huge was moving across the pale ­circle of Uranus’ light.

  A flash.

  He opened his mouth to shout…

  White light…

  So bright it swallowed sense and sound…

  Blindness…

  Gasping…

  The metal deck beneath his hands and knees.

  Then a roaring, shouts filling his ears as he rose, neon scars swimming in front of his eyes.

  ‘Full power to engines!’ shouted Koln. She was clinging on to her command console, her face drained of colour. Something struck the ship and the deck pitched. Beyond the viewport, the void was on fire.

  Cordelia Habitat was gone. Chunks of debris rode a silent wave of destruction, spinning like pieces of shattered rock. He could see the shapes of habitation clusters, and the long tines of a dock spur with ships still locked in place, their hulls holed, fuel and air trailing after them. The Antius lurched and the view slid, and he saw streaks of light slicing across the stars, flashing the colours of ­jewels – burning topaz, ruby fire, cold sapphire. Ships moved across his vision then, either so vast or so close that he could see their jagged outlines with his naked eyes…

  Hundreds of them…

  Thousands of them.

  It was almost beautiful…

  The ship bucked forwards. Pitted metal plates began to slam shut over the view. Koln was shouting orders.

  ‘Drop us down fast, then cut power.’

  ‘If we do that we’ll lose manoeuvrability,’ called one of the other officers. ‘We won’t be able to get–’

  ‘You want to look like a threat to whatever just cooked the whole habitat?’ Koln yelled. ‘Follow your orders or you can go and join those we just left behind.’

  Those we left behind…

  Vek found that he still had the dead weight of the pistol in his hand. He looked down at it. He was shaking.

  ‘Sir.’ The voice was low, pitched to draw attention from him but no one else. He looked up. Aksinya stood just by his shoulder. He felt a wave of relief at the sight of the lifeward.

  She had served his mother before him and his grandmother before that. Tall, with the willowy thinness of the void-born, she looked as though she would break at a touch, an impression enhanced by the signs of her age. Ash-white skin clung to skeletal limbs, dotted with dark liver spots. A crest of false, carbon-thread hair sat atop her head, and she held herself straight and stiff. The grey-and-black mesh-woven fabric of her long coat, and the white lace at her cuffs and throat completed the impression of a noble’s tutor, or widow-matriarch, an impression that was utterly false. She was old, that much was true, but he had seen her move so fast you could blink and miss it, and break plasteel with a blow from her open hand.

  He caught a reflection of himself in her implanted optic lenses: a man running to fat, swathed in a heavy silk and brocade gown, dark skin sheened with sweat, a gun that he was not sure how to use hanging in his hand. The contrast with the woman who guarded his family was so stark in that moment that it might have made him laugh.

  ‘Are they safe?’ he asked.

  ‘In the captain’s quarters with Nikal and Coba standing guard. It might be too much to hope that they sleep, but they are quiet at least.’ Aksinya gave a small smile and the wrinkled skin of her face creased beneath the black lenses of her eyes. ‘Oh, if we all had the strength of the young.’

  ‘Thank you, Aksinya,’ he said, and heard the crack reach into his voice. ‘For everything.’

  Aksinya gave a small shake of her head, still smiling.

  ‘It is my life and my service, sir.’

  He nodded, not sure what else to say. She was the reason he, his daughter and his son were alive. It had been her who had picked up the threat alert on the habitat’s command comms channels before the alert sirens were triggered. That had given them enough time to alert the Antius and reach the dock. Barely…

  ‘How many…’ he began, his eyes pulled back to the gun in his hand.

  ‘About a thousand made it onto the ship,’ said Aksinya, replying to the question as it caught on his tongue. ‘Most of them are in the cargo holds. I took the liberty of ensuring that the bulkheads to the rest of the ship were sealed. They are in shock for now, but that won’t last, and shock and grief can change to anger as reality sinks in.’

  He nodded. People had swarmed towards the docks as the sirens had wailed, driven by raw terror. He could remember, years ago, when the news of the Warmaster’s rebellion against the Emperor had arrived. There had been riots. Peace enforcers had been brought in. There had been deaths, arrests. After that, the hand of the Praetorian had fallen firmly on everything and had not let go. Harsh order and unforgiving rule had settled on them – uncomfortable at first, but then familiar. Vek had seen some of his assets seized, stores of metal ore requisitioned under edict and two of his family’s hauler-ships pressed into service as troop transports. Others had suffered worse, too, but discomfort was not loss.

  Time had passed, and the fear that war would come to the Solar System had become a promise that would never be fulfilled. There had been incidents – the Ariel mining operation shutting down, the alert and lockdown, a wave of detentions – but the lies put out to explain them had been enough to return people to the comforting sense that the conflict was a long way away. That state, like the warships passing through orbit, the checks on movement and the ever-watching eye of authority, had just become the way things were. Life had gone on.

  When Aksinya had woken him a few hours ago and said that he and his family needed to get to a ship now, he had wanted it to be a lie.

  ‘And how many… how many were in the dock when we cast off?’ he said.

  Aksinya shook her head. ‘I don’t… Sir…’ She paused. ‘That is not a wise question to ask.’

  He looked at her and was about to reply.

  The ship pitched.

  Lights flashed across consoles on the bridge. Warning chimes sounded.

  Vek looked around.

  ‘Blast wave,’ said Koln, without looking around. ‘Calis Station just detonated.’ Her voice was cold, shuttered with control. ‘There are a lot of big energy and mass signatures out there. A lot…’

  ‘Warships?’ Vek asked.

  Koln shrugged but still did not turn to him. ‘We only have basic navigation sensors – how am I supposed to know?’

  ‘Signal incoming!’ shouted one of the deck officers.

  ‘Source?’ called Koln.

  ‘Small craft. It’s close. Maybe a shuttle. The message is in clear,’ said the signal officer. ‘It’s a distress call using Solar void-cant.’

  ‘Cut it,’ said Koln. ‘We can’t–’

  ‘No,’ said Vek. The sound of his own voice surprising him. Koln looked at him, and he could see the anger rising up her neck, flushing colour into her face.

  ‘They could be anyone,’ said Koln. ‘It’s a military craft. Picking it up makes us a target.’

  ‘Everything out here is a target,’ snapped Vek.

  ‘You order us to leave thousands of p
eople behind and now you want us to–’

  ‘We would have died with them,’ shouted Vek, his own anger ­rising. ‘This is someone we can save.’ He shook his head, exhaustion quenching the rage as quickly as it had ignited. Koln was looking at him, confusion plain on her face. ‘This is someone we can save…’ he repeated, turning and dropping into an empty seat beside a console.

  Koln looked at him for a long moment and nodded.

  ‘Answer the distress call,’ she said.

  The shuttle’s rear hatch released with a hiss. Mersadie unfastened her harness, and then paused. Nilus was already up out of his seat and moving towards the opening hatch. He looked back at her.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. She did not move. ‘What in the name of the stars could be keeping you there?’

  Mersadie shook her head. A sudden feeling had flooded her, drowning the relief she had felt when the ship had answered their distress call. She had come to as the shuttle spun through a void filled with the flash of explosions, racing towards the promise of a sanctuary. Now the sudden quiet of the hangar after the outer doors had closed on the fire-touched void somehow felt more threatening than the light of battle and the flare of dying ships.

  Nilus frowned, the expression creasing around the metal plate riveted to his forehead.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  The hatch touched the deck outside.

  ‘Out!’ came the hard command. ‘If you have weapons in your hands, we will shoot. If you do not comply, we will shoot.’

  Mersadie took a deep breath, raised her hands and walked out into the light.

  The hangar outside was small, a box of weathered metal just large enough to take the shuttle and leave space for the group of figures that waited for them. There were five: two nervous-looking troopers in blue-and-silver uniforms, which were too clean for them to have seen much use; a very tall woman in black and grey; another woman in a blue and gold-braid uniform Mersadie could not place; and lastly a heavy-framed man with polished-walnut skin. Bonded opals dotted his forehead, and his eyes were cautious. One of the troopers shifted his grip on his shotgun.