But Solace found she didn’t know. Probably, if she contacted Tact right now, she’d be told the secret must be kept for a few more days to give the Parthenon room to manoeuvre. Except the Parthenon seemed very far away and the Vulture and its crew were right here. And their ship was their entire livelihood, their home and everything they had.
“Do it. Let’s go,” she heard herself say. She was keenly aware of Idris staring at her. “If there’s Partheni trouble, I’ll field it, Captain.”
Rollo’s gaze bored into her and he nodded curtly. “Welcome to the crew, my daughter,” he said. She felt a spike of utterly misplaced pride, that she hated herself for only a moment later.
*
They finished the meal, because it was good eating. If you were Colonial, dinner invites didn’t happen very often. Nobody could get very drunk under the circumstances, but the mood certainly lightened. Rollo and Sathiel ended up swapping anecdotes at the head of the table.
Then, after the last platter had been sent back to the recycler, the hierograve stood. “Let’s go get your ship back,” he told them, “and spread truth to the universe.”
“Let’s do just that thing, my children,” Rollo agreed, pushing back his bench and nearly unseating Barney, who’d been sharing it.
Sathiel was obviously leery of his grandfatherly face being seen subverting station authority. Instead he sent his deputy to appease station security, heading up a little red-clad delegation. Rollo was at her heels, talking with Kit about the next job the factor had lined up. “Anywhere but here,” he was saying, and Solace wondered how much of the galaxy was out of bounds to the man.
“Hey.” It was Idris, unexpectedly at her elbow. “Going native on us?”
A sharp answer died on her lips. “I don’t know what I’m doing right now,” she admitted. “Let’s just get everyone out of here first, then we can reset to where we were.”
“I appreciate it, though,” he said implacably. “Helping us. Ship-family matters out here. More than cults, governments and what planet you come from. It’s only when you spend your life planetside that people lose their minds over that sort of thing.”
“And you don’t want to be part of anything that big,” she finished for him.
“I do not, no. No more of that for me, sorry.”
The cultists were at the bay access hatch now and signalling to be let in, but their friendly collaborators inside were apparently playing it coy. Olli just trundled her walker forwards and found a diagnostic socket she could plug into. An eyeblink later she had the door open, with a derisive sound that said absolutely everything about Lung-Crow electronic security.
There were three lifeless bodies on the other side. They wore station security uniforms and they’d been burned by beam weapons. The lead cultist let out a yelp and shrank back, but Rollo just bulled forwards, shouting, “Goddamn it, my ship!”
The door on the far side of the security check was open and they piled through. There hung the hideous-beautiful flower of the Oumaru, still clutched in the Vulture God’s grasp. There were more dead security on the catwalk, plus a couple of ragged-looking spacers—whose co-conspirators were even now at the Vulture’s open hatch.
“Bastards!” Rollo hissed and snatched up one of the security men’s guns, running for the cover of the railing. Solace was already moving, grabbing a weapon for herself, bitterly regretting that her armour and accelerator were inside the ship.
There were four men at the Vulture’s hatch, which probably meant some were already inside. Most were human, and their leader was mostly human too. The non-human part was that lobster-bee thing that had merged with his back. A Tothiat, Sathiel had called it, and now Solace was kicking herself because she hadn’t asked what that meant. She shot him anyway. The security guns were hardly Mr. Punch, so wouldn’t knock holes in the wrong walls. They punched a hole into the Tothiat easily enough though, right into the left side of his gut. He fell back against the Vulture God’s hull. Rollo tried a shot, too, striking sparks from his own ship. Barney had a third gun but was fiddling with it, and Solace had to yell how to disable the safety.
She risked a glance around. Kris and Idris were just taking cover, which was probably for the best. Olli was bustling forwards on her walker frame, her eyes fixed determinedly on the ship. Medvig’s tripod body stalked after her, their remotes corkscrewing through the air towards the hijackers.
The men at the hatch were scattering for cover and Solace drilled another through the leg so that he landed hard on the gantry, howling in pain and distracting his friends. Barney and Olli pushed forward at that, clattering up shaky metal steps to a higher railing where they’d have a vantage point. The engineer was grimacing furiously but hadn’t fired a shot yet. What the unarmed Olli felt she could contribute, Solace couldn’t guess.
A figure appeared within the Vulture, not a human but a crablike Hanni—and it was tracking Barney with some kind of weapon mounted atop its shell. Solace shot it over the rim of its half-raised shield arms, hitting the clutch of limbs and mouthparts below its eyes. The creature’s many legs jerked and it toppled limply out onto the gantry.
“Go!” said Rollo, taking his own advice and making a run for his ship. Solace registered a growing shudder throughout the bay and realized that someone on board had engaged the Vulture’s mass drives, ready to rip the vessel—and its salvage—free of the station’s hold.
The hijackers in the hangar opened fire upon Rollo, then Medvig’s remotes were on them, slapping, gouging and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The Hiver’s body-frame was motionless, worryingly out in the open, as they devoted all their concentration to the task. Solace ran to back up Rollo, then shooting erupted behind her.
She whirled and saw that the hijackers had friends who’d been elsewhere, probably dealing with the docking controls. They’d just unloaded their weapons into the knot of cultists and cut them down. Worse, they had Idris. Kris was facing the human newcomers, her knife out against their guns. What had Idris was a Castigar, though. They came in all shapes, both natural and engineered, but this one looked the standard model: a four-metre black leech whose body terminated in a host of squirming eye-tipped limbs. It also sported a metal hood, equipped with pincers and weapon barrels. The pincers had closed about Idris’s body, lifting the Int partway off the floor.
“Bring him! Get in the ship!” someone yelled, and Solace saw numbly that the Tothiat was back on his feet, despite the lethal hole she’d put in him. He wasn’t even favouring his unhurt side, as he grabbed his comrade with the shot leg and practically threw him on board the Vulture. “Stand down or your man gets torn up” he yelled at Rollo, facing down the captain’s levelled gun with equanimity.
“You get off my ship,” Rollo roared back furiously, gun shaking but not lowering an inch.
The Castigar surged forward. Rippling muscular waves swept down its body, sending it eeling along the gantry at the speed of a running man. Idris went jolting along in its vice-like grip. Solace had her weapon levelled at it, but it was deliberately keeping its victim between it and her. She didn’t know enough about Castigar physiology to be certain of taking it down. Medvig’s remotes hovered about it like flies, not daring a landing.
“My employer regrets this,” the Tothiat boomed, “but we need your ship to move that piece of junk. Maybe we’ll sell it back to you.” His confederates had left cover to scurry over to the Vulture. Rollo took another frustrated step forward, right out into the open, his face purple with rage. The Tothiat levelled his gun as the Castigar and its fellows raced up a parallel gantry with Idris still jerking about like a doll.
“Fuck you,” Barney suddenly shouted from on high, finally getting his gun to work. His shot clipped the Tothiat’s temple, almost spreading the symbiont’s brains across the Vulture’s paintwork. Solace’s gun took out one of the men at the hatch as the others returned fire. She heard Olli’s cry of grief and froze, then Barney toppled over their walkway’s railing, buckling the gantry b
elow with his dead weight.
All hell broke loose.
The Castigar and friends were entering the ship now, the Tothiat gesturing frantically for them to hurry. Then something burst out of the hatch, a thing of legs and arms with a whipping, saw-edged tail. The sight was sudden and monstrous enough to even startle a yell from Solace. It was Olli’s Scorpion frame and it moved like monkeys and spiders, claws and saw tearing into the nearest hijacker and ripping him apart. Up on the high gantry, Olli was slumped back in her walker, eyes closed as she remotely wrangled the Scorpion into a frenzy of destruction. Then the Castigar’s headmount jolted as it unleashed a searing beam of energy against the Scorpion, followed by a rattle of accelerator pellets. They punched a dozen holes in the frame without slowing it but the distraction allowed Idris to twist out of its grip and run for his life, heading back down the walkway towards the crew. One of the other hijackers tried to retrieve him, and Solace put a bullet in the man’s head on her second attempt.
The Tothiat rolled his shoulders then laid hands on the Scorpion’s far greater bulk. Before Solace’s incredulous gaze, he crouched and just tipped the half-tonne of machinery over a broken rail, leaving it flailing and clinging to the twisted metal with half its limbs. Then he leapt inside the Vulture, perhaps about to abandon his comrades and make off with the prize.
Medvig’s remotes grabbed him, all three of them, latching on like hands. As they jetted away, they dragged him halfway out of the ship. The Tothiat shouted and tried to bring up his gun, but they wouldn’t let him, yanking him left and right and spoiling his aim. Then the Castigar had lumped its long body up to the hatch, despite Solace putting a bullet into some part of it. Its weaponized hood swung round until it found the Hiver, and its beam lashed out again. Medvig’s chest unit glowed red as their outer layers ablated away. Something inside them blew, showering molten metal and sparks. In the aftermath, Solace saw blazing insectoid bodies crawling frantically out from the hole, dropping to the ground and spinning on their backs as they crisped and died.
The Tothiat and a handful of his followers were aboard the Vulture now, and the Castigar snaked aboard after, turning to spray the bay with a salvo of accelerator shots. They drilled through walls and stanchions without significantly slowing. Solace felt the familiar shudder of an atmosphere bubble contending with unplanned apertures.
Then the Vulture’s hatch closed and the ship was on the move. It slid sideways out of the bay with a roar of thrusters, pulling its terrible cargo, forcing Rollo and the rest back. Solace instinctively tracked it with her purloined gun, but it wasn’t designed to puncture a ship’s hull.
A moment later and they were left in the ravaged bay, staring at Barney’s corpse and Medvig’s burnt-out shell.
9.
Havaer
Havaer Mundy, of Hugh’s much-feared Intervention Board, wore clothes badly. It was as though they weren’t quite right for his size or shape. It was a common Colonial problem born of too many generations of malnourishment and unreliable manufacturing. Make do and mend. Even with an orbital office over Berlenhof, Havaer’s tunics still seemed as ill-fitting as an itinerant spacer’s.
That he had a face designed by evolution for suspicious and mistrustful expressions had perhaps exercised some form of determinism, because he had ended up in a suspicious and mistrustful job. His features were gaunt and hollow, hung off big slanting cheekbones. Above them, his narrow eyes seemed to question everything. In his career at the Intervention Board—familiarly known as “Mordant House” because of the planetside district their office had once inhabited, and because it sounded just sinister enough—he had driven three subordinates to confess misdeeds he hadn’t even guessed at, just by sharing a room with them.
Today, Havaer wasn’t feeling too sinister. He was looking forward to getting to grips with some unchallenging intel reports on a smuggling operation. A cartel had been bringing the Hegemonic drug Esh into a handful of colony worlds, and he suspected preventing it was a lost cause. Still, his job was to do, not to set policy, and current policy was to draw a hard border and try to control access to the stuff.
Midway through his morning, though, he was called in by Chief Laery. She was hunched like a spider in an a-grav chair behind her desk. Her brittle-boned limbs were like narrow pipes, slightly thicker at the elbows and knees. Her neural link threw images and holograms across her desk as she addressed him.
“Might have a problem. At Huei-Cavor.”
Havaer gave his chief a look. “The Hegemony takeover isn’t news, surely. And we can’t do anything about it. Unless we really do want to butt heads with the Essiel?” Some of the more Nativist in the department had been pushing for just that: Hugh should take a stand against these damn aliens poaching their colonies.
“It’s not the Hegemony, believe it or not.” Laery’s head shifted on her fragile neck and more information began to appear over the desk. “A ship just brought in a packet from a Huei-Cavor informer. Supposedly something special docked at an orbital there. Under cover, but someone reckoned they could make a little Largesse by selling us the news.”
Havaer was scanning through the report. “More Architect gossip. This is nonsense.”
“Almost certainly. And not the first time someone’s tried to spread this particular rumour,” Laery agreed, then paused expectantly.
“I thought they were going to repeal Standing Order Four,” Havaer complained eventually, when he saw which way this was going.
“Still in committee,” Laery agreed with a thin smile. “Likely it’ll be done by the time you return from Huei-Cavor. Then they’ll use it as a reason not to pay you overtime.”
Standing Order Four came out of the period when any rumour of the Architects’ return had caused immediate panic. Whole teams of Mordant House agents had been dispatched by the swiftest routes at vast expense. But those days were past, and Hugh was seeking to cut back on costs. Crack squads of veterans, led by hard-faced people like Havaer, cost money. Especially when they kicked in doors, kidnapped and interrogated witnesses, boarded ships and almost set off whole chains of subsidiary wars in their fervour.
Apparently someone had seen a salvage crew drag in a wreck that looked like it had been Architected. Havaer shrugged inwardly. A ship could explode in a variety of ways. You could get some pretty spectacular effects if a gravitic drive went wrong in the instant of transit. And these days, who’d even seen an Architect’s handiwork first-hand? He already had his final report half composed in his head before he stood up. On Laery’s desk, the details of his berth to Huei-Cavor flashed up. He frowned.
“This… looks a bit roughshod,” he said uncertainly. “Roughshod” was an old operational term combining the word’s actual meaning with “rough” and “slipshod.” It was the way the service used to operate back in the old days: you got things done however, and lived with the discomfort. They were shipping him out on a Castigar vessel which made scant concessions to human passengers. It was definitely the quickest way to Huei-Cavor, using one of their near-mindless Savant-caste navigators to speed them through the deep void. “Chief, is there… something I’m not seeing here, about this job?”
Laery held his gaze, expressionless. “On paper, of course not. Just another nonsense fire we need to stamp out. Just come back and tell us we don’t need to worry about it, Havaer.”
“And off paper?”
She shut off the holographic display, and he knew that she’d also killed the recording of their meeting. “The Harbinger Ash is involved,” she said.
Havaer wasn’t important enough to have met Ash, but he knew it was still around, ageless and pointless in equal measure. Yet it kept turning up, and sometimes it said something. When it did, you listened.
“I didn’t need to hear that,” he muttered.
“You haven’t. Not officially. Just a routine mission.”
His heart was speeding and he had his internal dispenser give him a shot for it. “I’ll go pack then, Chief.”
&nb
sp; *
The Castigar woke him at Huei-Cavor, just in time for him to discover everything had already gone mad. Even being shipped roughshod through the deep void hadn’t been quick enough for him to get ahead of this.
The Castigar ship’s bridge was a tube, inclined at forty-five degrees and half submerged in milky liquid. The worm-shaped aliens lounged in fat loops on the slope, their many-limbed heads buried in their instrumentation. A human-style display was set towards the high end of the space for his benefit—because Industry-caste Castigar tended to be helpful to a fault.
The Huei-Cavor system was in uproar, the Hegemony takeover almost forgotten. Havaer’s target had arrived unnoticed, the ship hidden within a Coffin transport. However, when the Vulture God left Lung-Crow station at speed, it had apparently been towing an Architect’s leavings, there for all to see. Further investigation revealed that the ship had used force to escape the station, leaving a wake of deaths behind it—including station staff and the ship’s own crew. Nobody was sure who controlled the vessel now. Speculation abounded.
He looked at the recorded Vulture God and its twisted cargo, cross-referenced the images on his slate to wartime wrecks.
He gave himself another shot to slow his heart.
All around him the Castigar were flashing warning colours across their slick, segmented bodies, twining their tail-tips together in agitation. The air stank with the acrid scent of their worry. He was entirely in agreement with them. He contacted the handful of Hugh and Mordant informers on Lung-Crow and sent them his credentials, requesting full cooperation and an introduction to station admin. He’d have to hope that Hugh writ still carried some weight, despite the recent regime change.
Then the Castigar craft was spiralling in towards the station, its speaker-delegate requesting docking permission.
Shards of Earth Page 11