by Neil Clarke
“We have several options here,” says Maker Lupin.
New Leseum’s chief engineer is a thoughtful man and of few words—except when his pride is dented. The Vierendelen finds him pompous, which Sephine thinks is a rather facile observation coming from a machine of its intelligence.
Sephine is de facto leader of the Makers, the seven charged with building the city. She is a go-between for the Makers and the ship because she is the only one that possesses a neuroweb. They’d never admit it, but Sephine thinks the Makers are somewhat jealous of the technology she and her brother have laced into their brains. Through it they have the potential to wield a large amount of power over the citizens of New Leseum—but they know that power would never be exercised. They all there for a common purpose: to build the new home.
The Makers and Sephine are sat around a dull steel table, in the committee building in the northwest corner of the city. Moonlight sails in wisps through the glass ceiling, and orange plasma torches in shallow sconces provide extra light. Bowls of broth make the air thick with the smell of vegetables, though Sephine isn’t hungry.
Lupin continues.
“We could try to establish contact,” he says, stroking his thinly bearded chin.
— He knows how many times I’ve tried that, the Vierendelen says.
Sephine interjects. “That’s hopeless. Plus, the message is empty. The key to the message is the message. Rokri is trying to contact me. The ship lost contact with him after the Leviathan last passed over. I think . . . ” She pauses, biting a fingernail, “I think he’s found a way to reach us, and he’s asking for help.”
“We have to realize sending a message might draw unwanted attention,” Maker Gelgher says, the brow below his bald head wrinkled into a reflective frown. “Or, this is a trap.”
“A Fractured fleet attacked the Farside Basin not a few hours ago. I know I’d rather not risk it.” Lupin adopts a sage expression.
“But if the Fractured were to attack, they’d have done it by now.”
— Here we go . . .
“I doesn’t matter, Gelgher. We can’t risk the city.”
“We live in risk—”
“I’m going up.” Sephine says, with exasperated conviction. “I’m going to the Leviathan.”
— That’s the spirit.
She doesn’t wait for the stunned Makers to reply, and leaves them to battle it out.
The Makers debate without her for four interminable days, during which Sephine spends hours out at Pod Country, thinking, watching the horizon from the towers, like Rokri had done this time a year earlier. A dark shape blots the distant clouds: the Leviathan making its annual pass. Time is running out.
The Vierendelen has responded to Sephine’s wish with alacrity, and on the fifth day has something it wants to show her, so it summons her back to the atrium.
The ship presents her with what looks like a blueprint for a pair of wings. Together they span about ten feet, and will be made of a malleable, fibrous compound separated into filaments, which the ship tells her has been salvaged from a previously unknown store of exotic materials used in the war.
— Thought these might help. When Rokri went up, I thought afterwards if he’d just had some extra oomph, it would have been less hairy. Anyway, if they approve of you going up—not that it matters either way—then I want you and me to supervise him making these babies. There’s no room for error.
Sephine scoffs. “Good luck with that.”
She examines the wings. It appears they will attach themselves to her spine with thousands of tiny hooks. “They look painful—but beautiful,” she adds hastily (the ship is a proud creature).
— Oh, pish. I’m sure the infirmary can spare some anesthetic. Failing that you can Enlink and I can tinker with your web, but I’d rather the former—less risk. You know what I mean.
Sephine knows exactly what it means, and agrees.
Delinking, Sephine is surprised to find a woman standing by the nearby rockery, flicking pebbles into the pool.
“Maker Sensra,” Sephine says, and takes a step towards her.
The Maker does not reply at first.
Sensra was an architect back in Leseum Blue, and is the Maker in charge of city planning. She is in her mid-forties, and wears her hair in a short, choppy cut.
“We took a vote,” Sensra says eventually. “I voted against, just to let you know. But in the end, I was the only one.” She flashes Sephine a brief look of resentment. Sephine ignores her.
“The Leviathan is making a pass in the next two days. Can we be ready by then?”
Sensra makes a scoffing noise. “You got your arrogance from your mother—but at least she had foresight. What happens if you don’t come back either, hmm? What then for the rest of us? Stuck here? On this gods-forsaken rock, bait for the Fractured?”
Sephine is saddened by the Maker’s viciousness, but really it just makes her more resolute.
“Well, I will come back. He’s alive up there, Sensra, and I’m going to find him. There could be anything up there. Maybe even . . . maybe a way home.”
Sensra turns on her heel and mutters, “Fool.”
Sephine tries not to betray her frustration, but can’t help it, and kicks at the ground. A flurry of pebbles arcs through the air and rains down onto the pool.
As Sensra goes to leave, she turns her head and says, “The cannon will be ready tomorrow. If you do find Rokri, then . . . ” she hesitates, then stops short and slips out the door.
Sephine frowns.
“Er, Del? What cannon? What did she mean by that?”
— Ah. About that.
CHAPTER 1/6: DOWN
The day the ship was downed its human cargo went to Pod Country.
It took just a few well-timed q-missiles from the Fractured fleet; the effect of the shots was like blowing up the two nearside tires of a vehicle as it powered along a tilted highway.
The Vierendelen had been hugging the planet’s gravity well, pouring its energy into staying poised on its edge. Its plan was to catch the oncoming Fractured off-guard, meet it head-on, slalom through the myriad ships, and escape into deeper space, where it could ‘fold and escape back to Leseum Blue.
The feint failed. The q-missile burst hit as it encountered the first line of nimble bladeships, and the Vierendelen tumbled into the pull of the gravity well. Apparently sure the crash would be fatal, the Fractured retreated and left the ship to its fate.
But while the ship set about rearranging much of its engine configurations, the crew on the Vierendelen’s command floor worked feverishly to level out the descent.
Each knew they were about to die.
But that was nothing; it was the ship’s cargo that mattered: fifty thousand souls had made it safely to Pod Country before the skirmish, and the ship protected this massive complex of stasis modules with every resource available (— Trust me, it would take a hundred q-nukes to penetrate this baby, of which the Fractured have zip.).
Deep within the belly of the ship, lockdowns took place. Giga-sized machines enfolded the massive network of amniotic sacs within an impenetrable womb.
On the command floor, the doomed few that remained all but ignored the rapidly approaching surface. With the help of the ship’s AI, they secured a location, an angle, a trajectory for the crash landing. And to their amazement, cloud-scanners revealed they were headed toward a flat, open plain of desert and scrubland.
The Commander thought, for a moment, I think we might actually make this . . . as the ship sunk through the cloud barrier, and the desert stared up at her with dusty indifference.
But they had never expected the dark shape that met them beneath the clouds. A menacing specter of a thing, the Commander likened it to diving into the sea, and encountering an impossibly large monster—a huge, black smudge in the haze of the lower atmosphere.
And the monster’s reaction was quick.
The Vierendelen couldn’t act in time, and the object—which would be later r
eferred to as the Leviathan—had locked onto the beleaguered ship and fired.
The Vierendelen registered a femtosecond of reluctant admiration: the Leviathan had fired a single needlehead at precisely the right place, up through an exhaust shaft and rupturing a crucial tangle of fuel injectors in its lower bow.
The Leviathan had known how much it would take to bring the ship down.
The Vierendelen—highly impressed with its attacker—tried to secure its own survival by hijacking a handful of Pods and flooding them with its data, and accepted defeat not ungracefully.
But just as the front engines reached critical mass, the ship received a deeply worrying piece of information.
The last thought that had gone through the Commander’s neuroweb was of her twelve-year-old children, the twins that would have one day taken the helm of the great ship. Just before the Vierendelen’s fuel injectors ignited, the Commander Enlinked, and with her last breath felt the ship create a neuroweb linkup—Sephine and Rokri were alive, in the womb of the ship. In Pod Country.
Relieved, she died.
But the Vierendelen had had no time to tell her just what the Leviathan had done.
It has been six years.
The girl called Sephine awakens—from a dream about a room and a box, and a man and a bird—to find her brother gone from his bed. He has always been apt to wandering off (much to Maker Sensra’s chagrin) but never at night.
It’s four o’clock. She gets out of bed to look for him.
Leaving their fairly ramshackle home in the shadow of the Vierendelen, she looks to the east, and sees the first veins of sunlight bleed over the horizon. The once-mighty warship is silhouetted against a pink dawn streaked with silver-edged clouds.
She looks up at the ship. As if reading her mind, she feels it connect—the handshake protocol feels like waking up all over again.
— He’s over at Pod Country, if you were wondering.
She furrows her brow, tugs her coat around her against the chilly breeze, and sets off in the direction of Pod Country, beyond the wreck.
“What’s he doing there?”
— Thinking, I’ll bet. That queer pastime of the flesh . . .
“What else is there to do, space-trash?”
— Ouch.
She giggles and heads through the city.
The towering grids of Pod Country are the tallest structures in New Leseum (save for the Vierendelen itself), and comprises of four blocks twelve stories tall, each housing just under 12,500 dormant souls.
After the ship crashed, a few thousand people had been resurrected: people with essential skills; leaders; the stronger menial workers; teachers; doctors; some scientists; architects; and a few military personnel, once it became apparent the planet was some sort of hub for Fractured activity. The ship had seen fit to resurrect a few hundred civilians too, to add some normality. These people had been traveling on the ship when war broke out—they had intended to transfer to another vessel once clear of Fractured space.
Sephine stands at the intersection between the four towers, above which the sky describes an azure cross.
The pods glow a bright cyan—it’s dark between the towers, but the stasis bubbles’ glow is comforting. The bodies inside are still and pale.
For a while she was jealous of them, lying in cold, blissful oblivion for these six years, some even longer. She wonders if they know anything of what has happened. Some soon will; the Vierendelen plans to awaken another clutch of people in the coming months because of the swift progress on the city—although it has said this since the beginning (perhaps it’s getting possessive of those already awake). Either way, it may soon have to—Fractured attacks are getting closer by the month, and defense may soon be needed.
Enlinking, Sephine spies Rokri at the top of the tower to her right, lying on the circular platform capping the tower.
“The hell is he doing up there . . . ?”
She makes her way up through a series of cross-hatched gantries and stairwells, her hand always gripping a railing—she’s uneasy with heights.
She finds Rokri lying with his hands behind his head. His dark hair is bed-messy and he’s wearing a fur-lined coat and his pajama bottoms.
Sephine giggles. “You look a right sight,” she says, and sits beside him. He appears deep in thought, though he’s not Enlinked; his eyes are their usual icy-gray.
“That time of year again,” he says wearily.
She wonders what he means, then follows his gaze to the horizon, and feels a little swell of dread in her belly. She says nothing.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, in a tone Sephine can only describe as ominous.
— Knew it!
Rokri sits up. The breeze ruffles his hair. “There’s an old flier I found. In one of Del’s old hangars.”
“Rokri, I—”
“And I think, with Lupin’s help, I could get it to work.” Now he turns to her.
A year ago, probably to the day, he had looked up to the Leviathan and raged that it was all just so unfair. It was unfair that the war still went on far away, that they were stuck here with a crippled ship, unable to help, barely able to help themselves.
He wants to fight. Sephine does not—she just wants to go home.
“I’m sick of it, Seph. Sick of building. Sick of boredom. I’m sick of all this fucking dust. But you know what’s worse? I’m sick of seeing that thing.” He jabs a finger towards the horizon. “Taunting us. Mocking us. Every signal blocked, every distress call. We’re hopeless as long as the Leviathan looks down on us.”
Every signal. Every distress call.
New Leseum is coldly, profoundly alone out here.
“Rokri . . . ” Sephine begins, and struggles to find the words. “This flier—it won’t work. Del can’t even get tracker drones past—”
“Those things are big, ancient, and clumsy. That’s the only reason they survived the crash.”
“And how is a flier any different?”
“A flier has an ejection system.” His eyes flash. “There’s no way the Leviathan could hit a target as small as a person, surely. And no one else is prepared to go. If I managed to get the flier high enough, get Lupin to make some . . . I don’t know, boosters or something I could wear, I think I could get there.”
Suddenly he looks on the verge of tears. He’s rambling. “There’s answers up there, Seph. Maybe a way to bring it down, maybe Del could even harvest its engine, somehow. There might be a way home.”
He’s right. They have no ship, but the route to Leseum Blue lies within her and her brother. They don’t know them exactly, but the route lies encoded somewhere deep in their neurowebs, and even the Vierendelen can’t access them. Only they can. They protect their people’s secret, the responsibility Leseum placed upon their mother now split between them—a vulnerable failsafe made in the haste of war.
Without Sephine and Rokri, the people are doomed.
“I won’t come with you,” Sephine says softly. “I won’t.”
She almost regrets having said that as the words meet the air. Rokri looks utterly crestfallen.
They sit in silence for a long time. The ribbons of morning eventually burst into full daylight, daylight blighted by a dark shape creeping along the sky.
Sephine wonders if Del is talking him into it. She knows full well the ship is keen to get up there—it probably told him about the flier in the first place.
Eventually, bereft of anything else to say, Sephine says, “Please don’t.”
He turns to her now, and she sees there is determination in his hard features. His eyes seem icier now, gleaming novae in olive skin. Sephine realizes she has reduced herself to outright begging, and feels ashamed.
He has made his decision.
Sephine hates him then. She hates him more than she’s hated anyone—but that’s not entirely true. She hates Del, too, for all the part it’s played in this.
When the day comes, Sephine is nowhere to be seen. Her neurow
eb has activated its privacy settings. Even Del can’t get through to her.
He feels like vomiting. The flier looks like a mashed-together tangle of components, its cockpit just identifiable: a carbuncle at the craft’s nose, and it’s large enough—just large enough—for one person.
He triggers a dose of anti-emetics for the nausea, and serotonin to keep him calm.
The Makers stand at the edge of the crowd that has gathered to watch. Some look excited, because they don’t know how important he is. Surely if they did, they would lock him and his sister away.
But most wear worried expressions.
Maker Sensra looks like stone. She has always been a hard woman, stern with Rokri and Sephine, but protective—they are her late Commander’s children, after all. But more recently it’s seemed as if she’s drifted away from them. Rokri suspects it has to do with the coordinates in their ‘webs: knowing the way home lies somewhere in their heads but being completely unable to unlock them must be infuriating. Rokri knows the feeling—better than most, probably.
He tries to stop himself feeling angry at everything, to focus on the mission, on surviving.
— I’m so sorry, but it really is time now.
Rokri nods, and lets out a humorless chuckle. “Thought we’d have time for one more game.”
— Grief, what the hell made you think that would be a decent goodbye?
“Come on, Del. Don’t tell me she’s bored of Spite.”
— I don’t blame her! You let her win every time, I told you, if you want to win—
“Shut it. Let’s go.”
Rokri loads into the flier. His hands shake violently as he fumbles with the control module, powering the engines up. Dust plumes around the little craft, its metal feet, while Rokri makes some final checks on the ejection system.
It all works fine. He doesn’t know how to feel about that.
High above, the Leviathan has partially blocked the sun, and New Leseum sits in a counterfeit eclipse.
Soon, he’s in the air. But he’s hovering over the crowd, hesitant. The Vierendelen warns him not to waste fuel, or power, but when he took off, Rokri had a final, acute yearning to see his sister one last time.