Gods of the New Moons

by J L Forrest

  More importantly, Avidità intelligence has reported little radio chatter around the Faen and, to our knowledge, no quantum telecommunications. From our own measurements, we know wireless technologies don’t work well here, not within a three-hundred-kilometer radius. We must have missed something?

  I wait for Cailín to continue.

  “This is the woman’s babe,” she says, “at your chest?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve brought him to place into our safekeeping?”

  “Yes,” I say, almost adding Your Grace.

  “What’s the child’s name?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You stayed with the woman, yet you don’t know?”

  “I was only at her farm a few days,” I explain. “Her name was Stephanie but, honestly, the kids’ names slipped right the fuck out my brain.”

  It’s an ironic lie, a clever one, for a Harque.

  Cailín says, “We’ll name him Alastar.”

  “Let Aur sit up,” Bettina says to the Horned Lords.

  They do, but the pistol remains at my head.

  Cailín gestures toward a bower, to a woman reclining in it. The woman’s sleeping space is decorated in French toile canvas and linen—as unique as every other bower. At least some of the time, many people live here, customize their corners of it, make it their own. This isn’t a court reserved for official proceedings, I realize, but an extended domestic arrangement. The dozens of witnesses here, they are the Queens’ adopted family.

  This woman slides from her bed. She wraps a robe around herself, comes forward, and stretches her arms toward me. Sympathetic eyes, short hair the color of dry savanna grasses, a soft roundness to her which belies a fortitude, something I intuit more than observe.

  I unstrap the baby, who fusses and squirms, and hand him up to her. He leaves my possession, no longer my responsibility, the first of my mission’s objectives discharged. The woman retreats with him to her bower.

  “Who do you serve?” Bettina asks.

  Sitting back on my heels, I push against the muzzle at my skull.

  “It’s all right,” says Cailín. “You can tell us.”

  “I’ve made it on my own out there,” I say, “for years. I don’t serve anyone but myself.”

  “Why make your way west now?”

  “I’m tired of making it on my own.”

  “Anyone can understand that,” the Irishwoman says, her brogue charming. “Whoever wants to be alone?”

  “You haven’t been out there for years,” says Bettina. “You haven’t been out there a month.”

  Pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth, I prepare my retort. “I—”

  “Oh, stop it,” she says, the hint of a laugh in her words. “Tell us the truth, Aur, or we’ll find out whether one Horned Lord can slit your throat faster than the other one can blow your brains out.”

  They know.

  “I serve Thomas Avidità,” I say.

  Bettina claps once. “Was that so difficult?”

  “How did you—?”

  “We weren’t certain,” she says, “but we knew you were lying.”

  “How?”

  “Like magicians, we’ve no obligation to reveal our secrets.”

  “Fair.”

  “Let me guess,” says Bettina, “Avidità dropped you somewhere in the Yukon, let you look like you’ve dragged yourself a few hundred kilometers?”

  “Yes.”

  “You happen across the mother’s homestead, see she’s preparing a spring sowing, maybe feel sorry for her two children?” Bettina swivels, more dignified in her throne, a chair striated in degrees of white which contrast her brown skin. “It slows you down, but you’ve actually got a heart and you agree to stay awhile.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  The raven caws, almost a cackle, then hops to Cailín’s throne.

  “The bandits,” Cailín says, “they must’ve surprised you.”

  “Why do you say that?” I ask.

  “You’re a black-ops soldier sent by the most powerful man in System. They were four desperate ruffians armed with second-rate guns and homemade ammunition.”

  “You’re not wrong.”

  “The best plans cannot account for every variable.”

  “Admirable,” says Bettina, “saving the baby.”

  “I’m not a monster,” I say.

  “That remains to be seen.”

  Bettina stands, her movements fluid. She’s short, about 163cm and stockier than her wife, but her presence fills the room.

  “Give him his gun,” she tells the Horned Lord behind me.

  My heart pumps a half dozen times before the muzzle pulls away. The Horned Lord holds the pistol, handle first, over my shoulder, but the second Lord keeps his spear at my neck.

  I wish my pack weren’t strapped to my soldier. It’s still heavy, will slow me, but I make my choice.

  Bypassing the gun, I grab the spear haft, break it, and hit its wielder under the jaw. The blow lifts the man, tosses him, and splinters fly. The motion brings me to my feet and, as I’d hoped, the man behind me stood near enough that my pack knocks him off balance. Whatever the Horned Lords are now, they were born human-standard, and in taking the Walther from him I snap his wrist.

  By weight I assess my Walther—fully loaded—and I put one bullet each into the Lords nearest me, into the meat of their thighs, careful to miss arteries. The shots exact gasps and screams from onlookers. Three more Horned Lords attack. Dodging a thrown spear, I fire three more times, and the men stumble or fall.

  In the peculiar detail-rich perception of combat, I absorb the men’s expressions, not an ounce of pain in them or, more accurately, they dismiss their pain. They limp or crawl toward me, but I have at least earned a buffer.

  I swivel.

  Bettina Ukweli stands close enough for me to discern the hazel in her irises. My gun sights aline for the center of her forehead, but something about her reminds me of Imka.

  Poor Imka.

  Why would I think of her now?

  Have you ever experienced night terrors? You so desperately wish to move, to thrash about, to fight. Nothing whatsoever holds you except the sheets of your bed, but there you are, as if clasped in chains.

  I cannot make myself squeeze the trigger.

  “I’d hoped something better from you,” Bettina says. The dog barks. Where has the raven gone? “The world is brutish,” she adds, “but does that mean we’ve all got to be brutes?”

  The room darkens and shadows arise behind me. Several men and women prostrate themselves, and not for the Queens. Something hard strikes the back of my head, my occipital lobe, and I crumple onto the flagstones at Bettina’s feet. The gun bounces from me and spins across the floor.

  “Put him with the other offerings,” says Cailín, sounding distraught, “and get the injured to Dr. Falwell.”

  My vision tunnels and, for whatever reason, I focus on Bettina’s empty throne. It’s devotedly crafted from spliced bones—animal, human, hundreds of fragments. Some master builder had laminated them, planed them, and polished them, as if Charles Rennie Mackintosh had returned from the dead to design the chairs of barbarian royalty.

  “Other offerings?” I ask.

  The second blow lands behind my right ear—

  XX. Sacrifices (or, Intelligence, Part II)

  Unknown Time

  Unknown Location

  Alt 2m

  The back of my head hurts like a motherfucker. My sense of geography is like a century-old, crushed aluminum can; my sense of time, like the soda label once printed on it. You know the kind—until a few decades ago, Avidità Corporation was still mining them from landfills. I blink into a flat, gray sky. Seaspray tickles my nose, the odor of brine, and the rolling crash of waves and an incoming tide snaps me into consciousness.

  I’m in a lot of trouble.

  Knotted ropes scratch my wrists. My toes are numb, and I wonder how long I’ve been standing baref
oot on this platform, how many of its splinters are buried in my skin.

  It’ll take awhile to recalibrate my position and timestamp. Early morning, I estimate, not quite sunrise and I doubt I’ve been unconscious even nine hours. I’ve got a concussion but I don’t think it’s too serious. To my periphery extend dense pine forests, up and down the waterline, rising to an island peak behind me.

  Douglas Island? Probably?

  Someone is moaning in Chinese. Hard to focus on it, my head throbs.

  I could say I’m on a beach, but that isn’t right. There’re few oceanside beaches anywhere in the world. Most have been wiped away, are sixty meters down, will reform only after centuries or millennia of tidal scouring. This isn’t a beach, only a stretch where granite and alkali soils meet the sea.

  The ropes bind me to a post, a tree trunk stripped of bark and branches. Three or four meters beneath the platform, a field of seaweed-draped stumps reaches into the lashing waves. To my right, five more elevated platforms line this rocky verge, complete with five more tied victims. Five Chinese, not American born but obvious DPRC. One is carping on and on, and now my brain translates:

  “What have I done for this?” he cries. “Madam President, is there no hope? What will happen?!” He mutters, something quick, idiomatic, then he adds, “Please, Madam President, let me die without pain—”

  Prattling idiot.

  I’m struck by how he’s speaking to the Party Leader, who almost certainly cannot hear him and who most definitely cannot help him. He’s talking to himself really, projecting, entreating a mortal leader he’s always thought omnipotent.

  His four compatriots, two men and two women, wait in silence for whatever’s coming. All six of us face the sea, and behind us several ravens caw and chatter.

  Cailín Byrne’s voice: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

  The words from my dream, spoken not by the boy but by her. I’m not sure where she’s standing, can’t turn my head far enough. The world shifts a degree, a lurch of vertigo, and I’m scouring my memory for where I might’ve heard those words before her, before the dream, some other waking memory. None.

  Their identicalness is impossible. Yet—

  “Intinn Domhain,” she says, “take these sacrifices, our offering of good will.”

  The last eight words, though, I understood. I test my bindings, cannot help but notice my rope is thicker, stronger than that which binds the DPRC nationals.

  Fog slithers across the choppy, white-capped, sharp waters, veiling other tree-covered islands, their shapes indistinct. Surf licks the posts and gusts fling the water to dapple my face. The sky lightens, the sunrise behind me, blocked by the island.

  Cailín continues to speak, but her language shifts, the same tongue spoken by the Horned Lords after my arrival in New Juneau. The intensity of her words rises, almost a song, and other voices adopt the melody. A chorus.

  How many people are behind me?!

  Their chorus ends, “—a Reckoning.”

  A dozen meters beyond shore, the sea froths and bubbles. The churning water brightens from slate gray to mesmerizing hues of green and purple. It develops a gargantuan back, a spiny dome swelling, and the displaced waters roar.

  Bursting from the tidal waves, an elongated mass wraps itself around the closest UPRC man and, as quickly, it returns to the sea. The man is gone, along with the platform he stood on and most of the post which held it.

  I try breaking my bonds, straining until the hemp cuts my skin. I might be crying out, might be screaming what the fuck, what the fuck, but my body keeps moving, keeps fighting. My wrists are bleeding.

  The sea erupts with powerful, leathery, acrid flesh. Protuberances, pseudopods, amorphous limbs.

  The DPRC sad-sacks are screaming their lungs out, all but one, an old man who’s a better stoic than I am.

  Crack!

  His entire post vanishes and he with it, whipped into the sea. Another log-sized appendage slaps one of the women, sticks to her, slimes her. Her shriek pains my ears. She burns, the slime caustic and heinous, then she’s torn from her platform. Her bloodied right arm dangles from its bonds.

  Crack!

  Crack!

  Down to me. The ocean convulses, bursts with pseudopods, growths of leather and muscle large around as hippos. Their tips curl near my face. One flares, unrolling tentacles from tentacles, and a dozen tiny eyes open along each. A reek of ammonia and mucus forces a gag from my throat.

  Sapient.

  Thick with palpable intelligence, the air chokes me, infiltrates me, makes me feel as if my brain is outgrowing my skull, like meningitis, like the promise of death.

  And age.

  Such age! Timeless, it’s so old that Mr. Avidità’s lifespan is nothing to it. The ages of Biblical patriarchs, nothing. Old when the Roman Empire—the meningitis of Europe—outgrew its bounds. Old when the Egyptians constructed their pyramids. Old when humans built the first cities. Old when hominids still hunted mammoths. Old when apes climbed from the trees to wander the grasslands. Old now when humanity out-swells the Solar System—the meningitis of the Milky Way.

  Guzzling up all the milk Hera has to give, drinking her dry, leaving nothing.

  Sapience.

  So much more intelligent than I, the Thing in the Water hates me the way a buffalo hates flies. I’m nothing to it, yet, yet—

  Curiosity.

  Its pseudopods flare, like nostrils taking in a outsized breath. Membranes open. A hundred beady, black, shark-like pupils consider me.

  Then retreat into the sea, extensions withdrawn, the mass settling into the waves, submerging, quieting, deepening, stilling. Gone. The waves lap as before and the breeze persists as before, save warmer and somehow sweeter.

  “Cut the spaceman down,” says Cailín, “help him walk.”

  I’m whispering, “Thank you, thank you,” though to whom I’m not sure, and I’m sure no one can hear me. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “If he causes any trouble though,” comes her Irish lilt, “don’t hesitate to put a shotgun to his head and pull the trigger.”

  XXI. Victories Are Temporary

  Recollected

  2119.9.9.4:11 GMT

  1.26au from Sol

  Nesteler Martian Window 42

  Operation Barrel Fish

  Over the years I tried to forget the killings I made in Avidità Corporation’s name, but a Harque seldom forgets. I’ve tried not to think of them as murders, too, but the more I pondered them, the more murderous they’ve felt. After the Battle at Africa IV, I participated in seven off-Station combat missions between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter. These racked up more than seventy-eight confirmed kills.

  Not as skilled a murder-squad soldier as my brothers, but no slouch either.

  As I’ve aged, the more ridiculous it seems that my life should account for seventy-eight others. Eighty-three since my arrival to Earth, including the poor bastard on the stake.

  In the heyday of Mars’s colonization, a hundred nation states and corporations divided the Red Planet. Nesteler Group made the biggest initial investment, and it engineered the re-firing of Mars’s iron core. The spin-up took twenty-seven years, during which Nesteler intimidated, sued, or outright slaughtered every other competitor for Martian territory. As of 2019, there were eight hundred eighty-four Martian colonies—only industrial or scientific operations remained—but in fact eight hundred eighty-two had become either vendors to or wholly owned subsidiaries of Nesteler Group. The remaining two were South Pole operations of the UPRC.

  Mars itself became unassailable Nesteler territory. Its supply lines, though—

  In the intervening years, Nesteler established regular shipment windows between Mars, its Earthbound Stations, and its other operations around System. Operation Barrel Fish required ninety-two Avidità bombers and strikers on a stealth run to intercept Nesteler’s Window 42. Forty-four ships from the UPRC joined us, because in unending warfare the enemy of my
enemy is my enemy but sometimes we join forces anyway because on that particular day the third party frightens the shit out of us.

  In the final approach we ran silent, every ship powered down. Operating this way, ships bleed heat and crews can freeze to death long before they pollute their air with carbon dioxide. Yet running dark minimized the chances the Nesteler caravan would detect us.

  Zeroing on Nesteler’s active pings—stealth was not their strategy—we allowed Newton’s first law to do its magic, carrying us in a precise arc defined by the gravitational tug of Sol, moving at 3600km per second. The trajectory brought us across the caravan at a comparative speed of 780km per hour—so slow our systems could power up, target every Nesteler vessel, and strike.

  The caravan contained a mix of defenders and transports. Nesteler depended on AIs and robotics—there’d be few humans on their ships. Like most strikes in space, this one happened in a blink, no dogfighting, no rerouting, no second chances. Post-strike, our active pings reported a ninety-one percent destroy rate. In four seconds, Nesteler fired more than three hundred missiles and eight thousand laser pulses. Twenty percent of Avidità’s ships ceased to exist, evaporated. The UPRC’s losses were similar—

  Until Avidità’s second strike intercepted us, annihilating every remaining UPRC vessel. We lost only seven more. Once I’d returned to Station, Mr. Avidità explained the deceit to me:

  “Between us, the UPRC, and Nesteler,” he said, “there can exist no such concepts as truth or lies. We know we’re lying to each other. So instead our calculations depend on what the lie happens to be this time and how confident we are that our lie is more convincing than theirs. Next time, perhaps, we’ll side with Nesteler against the UPRC, and perhaps Nesteler will guess better than we and our side will suffer the devastating losses. When we gain too much power, we’ll find the UPRC will side with Nesteler against us. This pattern will continue ad infinitum.”