Star Destroyers

by Tony Daniel

  That were when another loomed up out of the darkness, a long, white blade in its hands. I tugged my phase disruptor free from its holster, raised my arm. The thing hummed silent in my fist, and the energy current struck it blue in the chest. It went down spasming, long arms twitching as the disruptor burned out nerve channels and fried the creature in its own meat. Soren looked down at me. “Thanks.”

  I nodded, trying to find my wits. My first real fight. I wasn’t ready. Not for this. I should have been back on Aramis. Should have lived to death with Minah. I could still run. Thailles would have me whipped, but whipped ain’t dead, and the Shrike weren’t far.

  Thailles’s voice was filling my ears on comms, shouting orders that didn’t mean nothing anymore. Sounded like they’d found them too. It weren’t real. This were just some nightmare I wasn’t supposed to have. The hull around us shuddered like we was inside a metal drum. More Shrikes clamping on. More soldiers. Maybe that were the seals popping on cryofreeze. Maybe I was waking up.

  “Carax, stand the fuck up!” Soren screamed. In a lull, he fiddled with his burner—swapping from shot to torch mode—then turned and sprayed a great stream of plasma fire over the things.

  “Carax!” Larai added.

  I was so gone I thought it were Minah for a moment, and that got me standing. The disruptor had no kick to it like the burner, so I pointed one-handed at another of the monsters, leaning against the rough stone wall. The energy bolt found its mark on the side of its head, and it went down smoking. Think I shouted something, because Soren glanced back over his shoulder. “Nice shot!” I could hear the grin in his voice. He sounded normal. Maybe he needed to sound normal.

  Then it all went wrong. More wrong.

  The wall blew apart in a flash of light and Soren were . . . he were just gone. Him and the demons. One second he was standing there, looking back at me, then nothing. The wind blowing out howled louder than the explosion. My ears rang. I couldn’t think. I was ripped off the ground and thrown out the new hole. The wind froze around me and I spiraled out into the Dark. Something grabbed my leg. One of the demons, it had to be. I kicked, figured I’d smash its skull-face in. Only then the words screaming over my suit’s comm got through to me: “Carax! Carax it’s me!”

  Larai.

  You’re not going back to the ship now, farm boy.

  “It’s not real,” I kept saying. “It’s not real. It’s not real.”

  But it were. I tried to stop us tumbling, but as we got farther and farther away . . . I could see it. The ship—if it was a ship—was huge, so huge it vanished into the Dark, lit only by the running lights of a hundred Shrike cutter craft clamped on the outer hull. “Is that ice?” I remember it was the first coherent thought I’d had since the shuttle door opened.

  “What?”

  “Ice!” I tried to point. “It’s covered in it.” In the light of the shuttles, we could see pieces—just pieces—of a ship growing out of the Dark. Parts was metal, parts stone, all covered and glittering in a thick layer of ice. We was still getting signal fed in from the mapping drones on board, and I could see the full scale of the craft taking shape in the corner of my eye. It were huge. Bigger than the Valorous, bigger than any ship I’d ever heard of, so big it distracted me from the fact that Larai and I were careening out into naked space.

  “Oh-Four, Oh-Five! Report!”

  “Thailles?” I practically choked. “Soren’s dead. Got hit by something from outside.” Just then another explosion tore into the icy mass, and we saw flames spill out behind a blinding flash and fade to darkness. “Larai and I are . . . sir. We’re dead.”

  I weren’t scared. Maybe I didn’t have no scared left in me.

  “What?” Thailles said. “I’ll have none of that. You two get the hell back here and help us hold until the whole Chiliad’s on board this damn ship. I’m not losing anyone else. I—”

  “We got blown outside, sir.”

  The Decurion swore. “How?”

  “Something hit the outside,” I said, “hull defense, maybe? Or one of ours? Didn’t get a good look.” The words was just spilling out.

  Larai cut in, “You can’t send the shuttle for us?”

  Sounds of fighting over the line. The only sound in our world, except the breathing. I already knew what Thailles would say. Was thinking about Minah, about what it would be like to see her when the Earth comes again. And the boy. We’d be a family, right and proper. And there wouldn’t be no demons.

  “No.”

  Larai’s hand tightened on my leg where she still held on. She swore. I had to shut my eyes, the spinning were making me sick, watching that impossible big ship get farther and farther away. I tried to guess the distance. We might have only been a thousand feet out, but that were good as light-years, unless . . .

  Unless . . .

  Unless I did something very stupid.

  “You still got your burner?”

  “What?”

  “I lost mine when that . . . that thing grabbed me,” I said. “Do you have yours?” I looked down at her where she held my ankle, and it were like I could see through her visor and feel her eyes watching me.

  “What are you . . . ?”

  “Just give it over!” I snapped, head going clear. Minah would wait. The Earth had not come back to us today, and even if the priests was wrong and the universe weren’t made for us . . . I didn’t think Soren would want me giving up. I’d already betrayed the old bastard’s memory with my coward’s thoughts, but I wasn’t going to just let us die. We’d have to find our own way back to the ship.

  It were harder than I thought getting the gun from Larai—without losing it or her in the Dark. Took longer, the stars all around, cold like eyes watching. I had both my hands free, and fed a cartridge into the side of the weapon.

  I remembered that in orientation right before the freeze a couple of the others—I forget what decade they was—got busted racing in one of the null-G parts of the Valorous with fire suppressant tanks, using them to fly around one of them big storage bays. Got dressed down direct by the captain herself for that shit, rest of us had a laugh. This were the same thing, only the burner had a little more kick to it.

  No air to pull out there, nothing around us but our suits. I switched the burner to torch mode and squeezed off a couple short bursts. The violet plasma streams slowed our roll enough that I could point the thing straight away from the ship. Larai got the idea and held on with both hands. I were not going to die out here, choking on my own fumes. I weren’t going to let Larai go the same way. No.

  Just had to get back to the ship. I tried to keep that in mind. We just have to get back to the ship. I tried not to think about the demons, about their white hands and those black eyes.

  I fired, squeezed the trigger down for a good five seconds. “You all right?” I asked Larai, shouting despite the comms tying us. She nodded, but didn’t answer. Maybe she thought she were going to be sick. I get that. We wouldn’t be the only ones thrown out into the Dark. I tried not to think about that, about our brothers and sisters dying out there. Or about what else were dying with us.

  The frozen ship got closer, flickering in the running lights off our shuttles clamped to its surface. I fired again. A good, long burn. The ship must have gotten closer, but it didn’t seem to. A note blinked in my suit helmet, and I expelled the burner’s plasma reservoir with a click that went all the way up my arm.

  “Damn torch mode burns through the packs fast,” I said, and slotted one of the replacement reservoirs into the gun. Fired.

  Fired.

  Fired.

  “This the one we got blown out of?” Larai asked, pointing down into the hole. The ice around it was cracked, whiter than elsewhere in the light off our suits. The metal beneath tore inward, stone shattered. Debris drifted there, like it was floating underwater.

  Peering over the edge of the hole, I shook my head. “No, don’t think so. Don’t recognize it.” Not a hall inside. Looked like some sort of car
go hold. Red lights hung from what I guessed were the ceiling, faint as old coals. I wondered if these demons saw in the dark, or if they was blind. My da used to tell me things what live in space go pale over the years, living in the dark of their ships. Hadn’t happened to me so I figured he was full of it, but I can’t stop thinking about that white hand on my throat.

  “Decurion?” I tried my comms. Nothing. “Decurion Thailles, this is Oh-Four. I have Oh-Five and we’ve made the ship again. Repeat, we’ve made the ship.” I looked at Larai, tried to imagine her face through the visor of her helmet; those big eyes wide or narrowed. Were she scared? Or did she set her jaw that way she had? Seemed like she was taking this whole situation better than me.

  She tried Thailles on her comms, then toggled over to the main channel.

  Nothing.

  “They jamming us?” I asked, not wanting to think about the other option.

  “Must be, reckon we can only hear each other because we’re right here. Give me my burner back, eh?”

  I passed the gun to her. “Could try raising the Valorous.”

  “Done that,” she said, swinging herself down through the hole. “We’ve got to find a unit. Any unit.”

  I followed on after her, stomach lurching as the gravity field inside the ship snagged us out of null G and dropped us to the floor. Storage containers and bits of trash and broken hull filled the hold—and more than a few bodies. None of them was ours, though. Just . . . them. I stopped a second, mindful again of the breathing in my own ears. “The hell’d they not tell us for? What we was getting into? Scaring the shit out of us don’t make sense.”

  “Bet they didn’t want us panicking aforehand,” Larai shot back, checking the charge on her plasma burner. I wished I hadn’t lost mine. “You imagine? Ship full of two thousand Legs learn they’re walking into this? Captain don’t want that.”

  That didn’t sit with me, still don’t. “You reckon they were afeared of mutiny?” Then another idea hit me, and I said, “You reckon this is first contact?”

  I could see her shake her head. “I bet that happened while we were icicles, Carax. The world changed while we were getting our beauty sleep.”

  Tried raising Thailles on the comms again as we crossed the floor of the hold toward what looked like doors. Faint blue lights pulsed next to them, and I wondered if they was sealed up against the vacuum. They was, and Larai used her burner to cut through the black metal. Wind started whistling out—you could see it cooling the red edges of the hole she’d made. We forced our way through. I never heard such noise: the wind screaming out, weird alarm howling like a stuck pig, and us only still on our feet because of the rail inside the hall we pulled along.

  “. . . rendezvous at . . .”

  “They’re coming out of the walls!”

  “—all back! Fall back!”

  Snatches of comms chatter broke through as we pulled ourselves down the hall. Up ahead, I could see a massive bulkhead beginning to close. The blue lights flashed ahead even as the ship rocked under what I guessed were more collisions from Shrike fliers clamping on. I had to turn down the audio relays in my helmet—the static kept snapping in my ears. “Come on!” I shouted, doubling back to haul Larai past me and up the rail. The door was closing slow—way slower than they did on our ships during drills. Maybe it were old, maybe it were broken, maybe all those prayers I said in Chantry as a boy was worth something. We made it to the other side.

  The alarm were still going, all high and thin sounding. Reminded me of the whistle Crazy Hector used to control his dogs back on Aramis, like there were more sound we wasn’t hearing.

  “The hell are we?” Larai asked, and I saw the problem. The mapping drones had done a merry job sketching halls and chambers in all kinds of details—but we wasn’t on it. Whatever were jamming the comms were jamming our suits’ telemetry, too.

  “No idea,” I said, more comms chatter crackling in my ear. None of it made sense. I went a ways up the hall, disruptor held straight-armed and ready. Couldn’t hear nothing, couldn’t see a thing outside what my suit lit up. Bits of cloth hung from the walls, black and blue, painted with these round symbols in white and red and pale yellow. They fluttered in the air—still not settled from the venting. Passages opened behind some of them. That scared me. Whatever these things was, they didn’t seem to need their eyes much as Larai and me.

  “Looks like we have to find a way up—” I broke off, the next thought hitting me like a tram. “I wish Soren were here.”

  Don’t know why that didn’t settle in sooner. Maybe it were because we were only just then getting time to breathe. There hadn’t been time to really think about it until then. The old bastard hadn’t even seen it coming.

  I didn’t get time to keep thinking about it.

  “You cage!” something screamed. Or something like that. “You cage! You cage!” Then a bunch of sounds that made no sense. Then Larai shouted. One of the . . . things had emerged from a side passage and grappled her. It happened so fast. She hit the ground and it stooped over her like a revenant in the stories they used to tell us as kids. I didn’t see a weapon, but it had its hands on her face. Them long fingers found the hardware clasps there and worked them free. I heard Larai gasp as the seals vented, could hear the air hiss out as the pressures balanced. The faceplate of her helmet fell away, and the creature lowered its face to hers. She screamed.

  I fired.

  The disruptor burst caught the creature full in the back, and it slumped where it crouched over Larai. Thin gray coils of smoke rose out of my suit lights and away into darkness. I lowered the disruptor, stepping forward to look down at the beast. Only then did we see it were different, not dressed in the black armor the ones up top had been, but in simple gray clothes. There were a hole in the back of the shirt where the disruptor had taken it, smoking and black where the nerves had burned away.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, crouching to hand Larai back her faceplate.

  “It stinks in here,” she said, taking the mask back. It took her a moment to shake herself free. Dead, the creature was all a tangle of limbs. Larai kicked it, ran a hand over her face. Took me a second to see she was shaking. “Its teeth . . .”

  “I seen them,” I said, checking behind one of the hangings.

  “They go all the way back . . .”

  “I said I seen them.” Talking about it only made it worse. I couldn’t listen anymore. All I could think on was getting back. Getting up. I decided I wasn’t going to go out like Soren. It didn’t matter if Minah was dead back home. Her and the boy. I were still fighting for them. For Aramis. For Earth and Empire—even if the Empire didn’t give a shit about me. Even if all they do is tax me and ask me to die fighting their wars. Shit, they’re better than these monsters. Anything was. And I weren’t fighting for no Empress anyhow. I were fighting for home, for whatever family I had left—even if they didn’t remember stupid old Carax who flew off to be a soldier. Wherever they were, whatever had become of them, I am still me. Still alive. I had signed up for them. I was still fighting for them. That hadn’t gone anywhere, that hadn’t changed—whatever else had.

  Larai tried to get her mask back on.

  “Black Earth! Bastard broke one of the seals.” Still swearing, she tripped the catch at the base of her jaw and pulled the rest of the helmet off by the neck flange.

  “Tiny gods, it’s rank in here.” She sniffed. “Smells like ass.”

  “I’ll keep my helmet on, then,” I said, forcing a laugh that failed to reach her. I was trying not to think about what her losing her helmet meant. About how vulnerable it made her. We hurried on, checking behind the hangings and around corners that branched off and wandered down into darkness. Off the hall, the rooms were more like little caves than real rooms. Here and there the natural stone would give way to a dead or blinking console, the screen so faint I couldn’t see anything on them, even in the full light of my suit lamps. Once or twice we thought we heard something in the dark, but it w
ere nothing. Larai stuck close.

  After Earth knows how long like this, at last we found a passage leading up. It weren’t no stair, but a sort of ramp spiraling up and out of sight.

  “Smells like plasma burn in here . . . all cooked,” Larai said. Without her suit, her voice sounded thick and muddy in the air. “Where is everyone?”

  I spoke through my suit speakers. “Maybe they’re higher up? Fighting the others.”

  We’d gone into a side room then, a series of small rooms behind a black hanging. Food—some kind of raw meat, looked like—lay on a table high as my chin. Storage cabinets in the walls made of some sort of flow-mold plastic. “I don’t think this is a military ship, Larai.” I’d found a tiny figure—bits of carved bone and metal pegs—shaped like one of the monsters. There were a faint blue flush in its hollow cheeks, and it had this sort of black robe. Dress. Thing. It were a toy, or I felt sure it must be. I put it in my sabretache with my extra air cells. It had a long knife in its hand, like the one I’d almost been stabbed with.

  “Carax, come here.”

  I moved to stand by her. She’d climbed up onto a step by the table to get a better view of the food there. I swore. Meat, a huge piece of it, bones pulled apart and yellow-brown from the oven. When she spoke, her voice went all kinds of distant. “I recognized the smell.” She reached out, turning the food a little on its tray. It had been roasted in its skin, the flesh crackled and leaking juice. As she turned it, the lines of a tattoo—some Mandari symbols—came into the light. She said again, “I recognized the smell.”

  I swore, “Earth and Emperor.” From the size of it, she had been a woman. Once. Pieces of her were set on smaller trays about the table, half-eaten. “We interrupted their meal.” I thanked Earth I couldn’t smell, not through the suit. I wanted to throw up. To cry. To kill something. I staggered back, vision blurring a little. “Where did they get the . . . the body?”