A deep, pained sound ground out from Aklu, but apparently it was positive because the major-domo said, “Be brief.”
“Whoever’d think such enemies would cosy up,” Trine declared, in rough mimicry of the other Hiver’s rhythms. Their nest of arms spread and curled inwards, perhaps conveying something cutting to an Essiel, save that it brought the relics closer to their open body again. “Who’d think to find such daggers sheathed that formerly’d been drawn? Or something like that.” They abandoned the pose and forced metre for a moment, rolling ghostly eyes at all the room as though mortally embarrassed. “Or I mistake myself, but these robed dullards set themselves against your divine majesty.” The room was very quiet when he’d finished, and he gurned at them all. “Did I not do it right? Well excuse me, O my captors, but that’s the best you’ll get from me. They are enemies, is my meaning. The clown with the beard and his robed loons.”
Sathiel sighed. “You misunderstand, my friend. We are foes, yes, but on an abstract, philosophical level—”
“No. I’m talking about the Oumaru. That was the name of the ship, wasn’t it, old Hierograve, old sect-captain?” Trine swung back to face the Essiel. “For lo! The vessel ’pon which you had placed your treasures, all secured against the world, has foundered! Who’da thunk it’d go that way?”
Nobody seemed to know what was going on. Mesmon was obviously waiting for the signal to shut the Hiver up, but Aklu just watched, fidgeting without giving any apparent order. The major-domo paused, then pulled their limbs in, steepling all six hands together.
“The Architect of our misfortune came…” they tried, a questioning tone to their golden voice.
“I can’t be bothered with this nonsense talk,” Trine snapped. “Just tell your boss I am the foremost expert of the age… Or rather, I am the greatest scholar on Originator lore this side of the Hegemonic Sphere, and I used to analyse Architected wreckage for the war effort. Tell it that. I’ve gone over pieces of your Oumaru and I can tell you this for free. It wasn’t Architected.”
“You fucking what?” Olli barked out, wide-eyed.
“No Architect!” Trine declared. “Someone mangled it with a gravitic drive and a complex program. The subatomic signature you’d expect is completely absent. This was someone’s shoddy forgery. Someone who had no idea what the freighter contained. Because let’s face it, the one thing we do know about Architects is that they won’t go near Originator gubbins. Whoever perpetrated this little scam must have been hoping for unquestioning panic at the return of the Bad Times, so they would surely have picked another ship to ruin, if they’d known. Isn’t that the case, Menheer Hierograve Sathiel?” And their rack of arms made a rippling gesture towards Sathiel.
“You’re accusing me?” the cultist demanded. And Kris read his expression of outrage and knew for certain that Trine had landed it.
“It all makes sense, doesn’t it?” she spoke up. “You were the one desperate to get the Oumaru into the public arena. You probably told station admin about the missing ship. Then, when they hid the Oumaru, you manipulated us to break it out into the open. What were you trying to do? Get the Colonies falling over each other to sign up with your masters? And was that the Hegemony’s idea or just yours? Just a way of scoring points with your bosses?”
Sathiel’s face was completely composed now. For a moment the whole universe seemed to be hanging on his response. In the end, all he said was, “This doesn’t need to change anything.”
“Excuse me?” Kris felt outraged beyond all reason. “You’re not even pretending you weren’t behind this?”
“Why do you care?” Sathiel asked, maddeningly nonchalant still. “Surely whether worlds join the Hegemony or not is a little beyond your usual level of engagement with the universe? I’ve heard you talk, you and yours. You’re not Nativists or even Colonial loyalists. I’ll intervene on your behalf here, in return for the wreck’s location. That offer still stands and it’s all that matters to you, surely? Let the politics take care of itself. Joining the Hegemony is for the best, you know. You haven’t lived under their rule. Peace, harmony, a place for everyone, nobody goes hungry or cold. It’s better.”
“Except for the Oumaru’s crew, right?” Olli demanded. “I guess you just had to murder them all. Or they might have mentioned something inconvenient, next time they made port.”
“Listen to me,” Sathiel insisted. “This can still go very well for you. When you’re clear of Berlenhof, I’ll make sure you want for nothing. You do remember that you’re for hire, yes?”
“I…” Kris said slowly. For a mad moment she’d imagined a triumphal confrontation with malefactors brought to justice, like an old-Earth murder story. But the only authority here was a criminal alien, and why would it care?
Solace took two steps, ending up standing protectively by Kris and Kittering.
“You intervene?” The clear voice of Aklu’s Hiver rang into the silence. “There are no words for those who meddle with the corpus of the gods. Such hubris!” For a moment, nobody seemed to understand what the proclamation meant. Then Sathiel’s calm facade cracked.
“Unspeakable… Razor and Hook… there was never any intent to act against you. I merely sought to advance the agenda of the Essiel. An action in everyone’s best interests.” His eyes swivelled to the prisoners, as though to recruit them as allies.
“Ready yourself,” Solace murmured in Kris’s ear, making her shiver. Then the whole ship shuddered around them. A low moaning seemed to issue from all the white walls at once, gleaming patterns chasing each other back and forth in shifting hues. Kris just stood there dumbly, but Aklu’s people were abruptly in motion. Heremon was shouting orders, and the bulk of the pirate court abruptly dashed out of every available exit. Somewhere on the ship, a musical voice was announcing an alert in perfect couplets.
The ship was under attack, Kris realized numbly. There was a shuddering detonation and she felt the distinct shift to the air that meant a breach somewhere. Boarding? Almost immediately the sound of weapons fire came to them: the high searing song of accelerators, the rattle and bang of projectile guns. Someone was crashing Aklu’s court with extreme prejudice.
25.
Solace
Solace had heard, through her implant, a harsh tck-tck. It wasn’t repeated and it was easy enough to mistake for static, had anyone been listening in. Long conditioning set her pulse racing. The rescue party had arrived.
Monitor Superior Tact had said they were putting a team together; there must have been a picket ship closer than she’d thought. Now she sent out her own recognition code, just a stuttering of ticks, receiving bounce-back from two separate infiltrations. The ships would have ghosted up to the Broken Harvest under dead momentum, gravitic drives stilled so as to dampen any ripples that might alert the target. Everyone was so reliant on the wonders of gravitic sensor arrays. People forgot there were old-fashioned ways to do things.
Then the fun would have begun, cutting into the bigger vessel’s hull the moment they were clamped to it, knowing discovery would be inevitable and soon. She had no idea how many of her sisters had come for her, but likely it wasn’t much more than half a dozen.
Solace was shoving Kris even as the gangsters became aware of the infiltration, pushing the woman towards the closest signal. She tried to scoot Kit along with a foot, too, but the Hanni skittered away from her. They were unaware of what was going on and, reasonably enough, didn’t trust her judgement.
“Trine!” she shouted. “Here!” Her voice was almost lost in the general commotion, but the Hiver picked it from the air and limped towards her. They still had the regalia, Solace saw, their arms carefully folding the pieces back into their body.
“Go! That way!” Solace shoved Kris onwards, seeing the next few moments unfold in her mind. Heremon had gone to order the defence but Mesmon was right there and off the leash. He was going for Trine to get back their precious relics, punching down an out-of-place cultist and shoving one of his own people
aside to do so. Solace, unarmoured, unarmed, went for him anyway. A human gangster got in the way and turned a magnetic pistol on her. Or offered it to her, as far as she was concerned, because he was far too close and a knife would have served him better. She got a hand on the barrel and twisted it against his thumb until he wasn’t holding it anymore, then slammed a shoulder to his chest and a heel onto his instep, knocking him onto his back as she turned the gun on an incoming Castigar. She was also too close to really be relying on ranged weaponry, but she was just quick enough to chew the thing’s blockish head off with half a dozen high velocity flechettes. All of which left her too late to help Trine.
Trine was still coming, though. Solace saw that Olli had rammed Mesmon with her walking frame again, hard enough to stagger him. Even as he recovered, glaring murder at her, the specialist yelled some kind of war cry. A section of her frame shot forwards, turned into a makeshift metal javelin. It lanced through Mesmon’s chest and pinned him to the far wall, writhing and howling. For a moment Solace dared to hope that it might have destroyed the symbiote at his back. Then of course he was working his way off the shaft, bloody foam at the corners of his mouth. She put seven flechettes into him to slow him down, but reckoned their effect would be minimal.
“Solace!” It was Kris’s voice, and she glanced over to see the woman standing by an armoured Partheni myrmidon.
“Trine, that way!” The Hiver had already gathered as much and was hobbling towards Kris accordingly. Solace looked about for Kit, but the Hannilambra was nowhere to be seen. “Olli—!”
The specialist was already scurrying in the other direction. She cast a baleful glance over her shoulder as she yelled “No!” A gunman tried to get in her way and she rammed the tip of one of her walker’s legs into the man’s knee. Solace heard the crunch from across the room.
“Olli… Timo, please.” Solace ran after her. “We’ll get to the Vulture. We’ll get Idris.” Solace glanced about, seeing that the throne room was almost empty, though she could still hear shots outside. A group of thugs had formed up around Aklu to escort the Essiel elsewhere. Sathiel and the cult had already left by another route. The chief remaining threat was Mesmon, still nearby and almost free. She shot him another three times just for the hell of it, emptying the magazine, then took up the projectile rifle dropped by the man with the smashed knee. She headed after Olli at a run.
“Just leave me alone, Patho.” Olli had taken one of the circular corridors out, following some indicator on the walker’s board. She wasn’t headed towards the Vulture. “I’ve business to take care of here. Something of mine to get back.”
“Is it your suit?” Solace demanded. “Olli, it’s not worth your life.” And it’s not worth mine and I should leave her to it. She hates me anyway. Yet Solace carried on running, barely able to keep up with the skittering of the walker. At least Kris and Trine were with her sisters.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Olli shouted over her shoulder. One of the Harvest’s crew crossed her path, perhaps just some perfectly innocent technician on his way to repair something. Olli ran the man over, trampled him and barely slowed. “You don’t know how long it took me to make it mine.” She looked at her instruments and took a sudden left-then-up, the walker scrabbling at the gradient, slipping a little. It gave Solace the chance to catch her. And then they had broken out into a spherical room. Someone’s quarters, no need to guess whose.
There was a bed suspended in a-grav in the room’s centre. A big one, too, suggesting that Mesmon either liked company or was a very restless sleeper. Several tanks and hoses were set into one wall, some concession to his hybrid biology. Maybe the symbiote liked to detach and go for a swim every so often. And there was the Scorpion, already mounted on one wall with its arms spread. Plenty of room for it, here; Mesmon’s quarters were bigger than the Vulture’s drone bay. He wanted a trophy, he’d said. And, despite all the Scorpion’s threat and power, here it was no more than a specimen pinned to a card.
The rest of the room was a mosaic of faces, and that was what had stopped Olli just inside the doorway.
They were virtual images, larger than life-size. Probably there were more than a hundred, though Solace had no wish to count them. They were almost all twisted in pain, fear or desperation, where those emotions applied. Most were human: men and women both, and at least a handful of Partheni. There were some Hanni too, a few knots of eye-tipped Castigar tentacles and a beautiful metal mask, probably from a Hiver frame. And all these beings were dead, Solace knew. She knew because she saw Rollo’s likeness there, his last moments from Mesmon’s point of view. The Tothiat apparently liked to record mementos of his work. They were standing within his resumé.
She heard Mesmon coming just then, the soft scuff of him as he loped into the room behind them like a beast. He still managed to throw a solid punch into her ribs and took the gun from her, sending her tumbling down into the shadow of the floating bed. Olli spun the walker to face him but he just flipped her over, rolling the frame onto its side and half spilling her out of it.
“I should be killing your friends now,” he told Solace flatly. “But my sister will deal with the mess. She’s the homebody. I’m the people person.”
He stepped down into the curve of the room, the gun held loosely in his hand. “I will be made to suffer, for my failures. The Razor will cut me for how I’ve handled things. But I will remember then how I made you two bitches suffer, and that will warm me when my guts are out on wires again.”
Solace went for him before he’d finished speaking and he looked gratifyingly put out at that, a man who liked his own monologues. She slapped the gun barrel aside so he couldn’t just shoot her, then her thumb went into his eye. She struck hard enough to hook the rim of his socket and rammed his face into the hard plastic of the bed.
He grabbed her throat with one hand. His un-gouged eye stared at her, wide and mad. He grinned.
“They don’t tell you about the pain,” he explained conversationally, incrementally tightening his fingers. “When the blessing comes to live within your flesh, you know you’ll live forever, but they don’t tell you how these cuts and bruises still hurt. But the Unspeakable understands. He hurts you until nothing hurts anymore. Then you can really reach your full potential.” He tried to snap at her fingers with his teeth where her hand gripped his skull, and she yanked it away, trailing blood and viscous jelly. She could look into the ruined pit of his socket and see the tissues busily mending themselves. But not for long, because there were black spots dotting her own vision and her breath was failing.
“One day a legion of my people will make your precious angels extinct,” he told her. “We are better than you’ll ever be.”
The sound of the Scorpion wrenching itself off the wall and crashing down behind him was like thunder.
Mesmon threw Solace across the room but she bounced off the bed, landing up against the rounded wall, surrounded by the faces of the dead. How did Olli climb up to her frame? she wondered. But of course Olli was still lying in the overturned walker, eyes closed as she linked into the Scorpion’s systems remotely. Mesmon came to the same conclusion and went for her, but the big frame caught him with one boathook arm and slung him across the room. He hit hard enough to crack the nacreous wall on the far side, extinguishing a dozen dead faces. Blood, tears and nameless alien ichor ran down his face as he straightened up.
“It won’t help,” he barked. He raised the gun to shoot at Olli past the Scorpion. Two bullets sparked from its casing, then Solace tackled him and grabbed the weapon. She kicked away from the Tothiat and shot him in the arm, an event he barely deigned to notice.
“Kit, you there?” Olli said. It would have been a non sequitur, except Solace saw she was speaking into the walker. “Kit, come on now!”
The Scorpion went for Mesmon, who did his best to vault over it. Blades and drills made a mess of the wall he’d fallen against. Then the tail clotheslined him across the chest, knocking him sideways. The frame tr
ied to pounce and pin him, but he rolled out from beneath it. Instantly he was up again and made it to the fallen walker, ripping it aside to get at its passenger. Olli was desperately shrugging her way backwards across the floor, face locked in a snarl.
Solace rushed Mesmon again, kicking at his knee. She felt it grind, saw it snap back into shape a moment later. She rammed an elbow into the centre of his back, the articulated spine that was the symbiote. Maybe it didn’t share in the unnatural resilience with which it had gifted him?
It was like striking stone and she felt something fracture in her own arm, a shock of pain up to the shoulder that startled a scream out of her. Mesmon, never one to miss a chance, had that arm in his hands a moment later, using it as a lever to throw Solace at the oncoming Scorpion. She bounced off it, narrowly avoiding being impaled on its drill. It reached Mesmon a heartbeat before he could stomp on Olli, half severing one arm with its cutting claws and impaling him on its hook.
Using his other hand, the Tothiat took hold of the Scorpion’s pincer arm at its base and twisted. One foot on the frame for purchase, he contorted his whole body, muscle against muscle. With a convulsive heave he ripped the Scorpion’s limb clean out of its socket, leaving it dangling from a handful of cords and ducts, the claw still snapping feebly. He went for the bubble next, finding the catch and wrenching it open before casting the armoured casing aside. Olli was screaming in rage and Solace staggered over to try and haul him off it. She took a foot to her solar plexus for her trouble and sat down, abruptly unable to breathe.
She couldn’t have said when Kittering actually made his appearance. The little Hanni was abruptly there on the Scorpion’s back, clinging tight with his six legs. The Scorpion’s tail arched over him, until its tip was within range of his reaching mouthparts. Mesmon spotted him a moment later and lost a valuable moment staring, not sure what was going on. Then he decided it was nothing he wanted to permit and swatted Kit off the frame, sending the Hanni tumbling across the room.
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