Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  There was no one there to greet us.

  “Are they not open?” Switch asked, visibly tense.

  “I don’t know . . .” Crim said, drying his hair on a kerchief produced from a pocket in his quilted kaftan.

  “Welcome!” a bright voice interjected, speaking in perfect Galstani. “Here at Cento Biotechnic, the number one leader in genetic recombination therapy and organic implant technology, we pride ourselves on—”

  “Hello?” I said, speaking over the artificial voice, which dropped its volume in response to my voice—though the message kept playing. “Hello, is anyone here?” Crim had been acting as my herald, but the lack of any human person wrong-footed me, and I’d spoken out.

  “Someone will be with you shortly,” the voice replied, not changing its cheery tone. “If you do not have an appointment, or are here for one of our free consultations, kindly seat yourself by the dispensary. Someone will be with you shortly.”

  Looking round, I caught sight of the beverage dispensary. We’d not made it halfway to our seats before another, rougher voice called out, “Dobra! Dobra dovarishka! And welcome!”

  The speaker was a small, rat-faced little man with a pigeon chest and round shoulders. Not a visage to inspire confidence in a genetic surgeon, though I supposed the strange man had his reasons. He wore a device like a jeweler’s glass over one eye, though whether it was only a device or part of him I could not say, and when he smiled—which was constantly—it was to reveal teeth the color of gunmetal. Seeing me, he stopped. “Solnech?” he asked aloud. “This is Imperial, yes? No mistaking it. The height of this!” He raised a hand above his head to indicate how tall I was. “Patrician? No no. Palatine!” His one visible eye widened. “What is bringing palatine to Cento?”

  I flashed Crim a look. No use trying to hide what I was from a geneticist, after all.

  “You’re Doctor Cento?”

  “Yevgeni Cento, geneticist.” He thrust out a hand, and it was only after I’d taken it that I realized the skin there was smoother and more pink than the weathered dun of his face. Younger. “What is it the palatine wants?” He was clearly Lothrian, or had been, and had that disconcerting Lothrian habit of eliding pronouns from his speech. “And is the palatine having a name?”

  “Gibson,” I said at once. “Just Gibson.”

  Cento’s eye narrowed, but his expression did not falter. “An honor! An honor, sir. Few palatines come so far from home.” He leaned forward, a conspiratorial hush overtaking him. “But what can Cento give man who has everything Empire can give?”

  “I was told”—I did not say by whom—“that you might be the man to help me.” I took a step closer to the short little man, tipping my head so that I spoke to him from the corner of my mouth. “There are things the Empire cannot cure.”

  “Eh?” Cento looked at me more closely, and I saw the lens in his monocle focus as his brows furrowed. “The palatine is not intus, yes? This can be cured, but . . . is costly. Intus . . .” He waved a hand. “Complicated.”

  Trying not to think about Gilliam Vas and his mismatched eyes, hunched shoulders, and twisted back, I suppressed a shudder. “No, no I’m not.” The inti were palatine bastards, born without the intervention of the Emperor’s High College, damned to a life of disease and mutation by engineered genes so complex the fetus required constant medical intervention to ensure proper development. Development I had received—as all trueborn palatines must—by medical technicians while I grew in my father’s tanks.

  “Then . . . is children?” He paused a long moment, pointed at me. I could almost see his brain seizing on the difficult word: “You. This woman?” He pointed at Siran. “High College makes children difficult for palatines, yes? Makes intus?”

  “What?” I practically blurted the words out, glanced in horror at Siran. “No!” My myrmidon friend smiled wryly, making me feel a little safer. “It’s nothing like that.”

  Cento frowned. “Nothing like that . . .” His voice died off into vague mumbling. “Cento sees. Yes. What is thing Cento can do for the palatine?” Here he affected a mocking bow. “Assuming the palatine can pay, this is.” His human eye and the monocular swept over my scant escort, as if to criticize them for not being a proper guard. I wondered how often—if ever—a lord of the Imperium had been in his grungy little shop. We’d had similar experiences in the other clinics we’d entered, and on the docks before that. It was disarming, being doubted. Here, it seemed, blood meant nothing at all, and it was only my coin that mattered. It was almost refreshing, being treated as a man among men and not a lord at all. In the Empire, my credit had been assumed good on principle—it was how I’d nearly bought a spaceship with no income by merely flashing my ring.

  My ring. Thinking of it drew my hand to my left thumb, to the wheal of burn scar that wrapped its way around it. I’d thrown the old thing away after my father stripped me of my title and holdings. I had gone into exile with it on my finger, into cryonic fugue. The metal had burned my skin in suspension, and the thick scar shone waxen in the harsh light of the clinic. Cento saw the gesture and darted forward. “Cryoburn,” he noted, taking my hand. Something in the shift of the light revealed the faint spots of other scars on the back of my hand, relics of my battle with the Cielcin captain, Uvanari, after it escaped on Emesh. “More burns.” His human eye darted up, inquiring, even as the machine stayed focused on my hand. “Cosmetic, then? Cento can grow new skin—entire new skin! Twenty thousand marks!”

  “No!” I said, tugging my hand away. I cannot say if it was a fighter’s sentimentality or the same disgust I’d felt of the street outside, but the thought made my skin crawl, as if the skin itself feared to be replaced. Summoning then a portion of my lordly hauteur I said, “Instead of pawing at me and guessing, doctor, you might allow me to answer your original question.”

  Cento stepped back, smiling to reveal his gray metal teeth.

  Tired by my failures with the other clinics and by all that strange day and place, I said, “It’s life I’m after, doctor.” I felt suddenly foolish, standing there.

  “Life?” Cento frowned. “The palatine is young, yes? Cento can lengthen telomeres, regenerate organs, remove plaque from brain, but so soon? We . . .” He paused again, pointing from himself to me and back again. “We can take look, yes?” He made an expansive gesture, indicating that I should follow him down the hall. “Guards wait here. Clinic very safe. No one bother Cento . . .” His words devolved into a patter of indistinct Lothrian, thick and guttural.

  Switch pulled a face that seemed to say he’d rather leave me alone with a foaming azdarch than with the chiromancer, but I waved him back. “Watch the door,” I said, allowing myself my crookedest smile as I patted the hilt of my sword through the coat, reminding both Switch and myself that it was there.

  Cento led me into an exam room. A doctor’s bench stood against one wall, and a round platform stood in another corner, an array of sensory apparatus hanging from the ceiling like the legs of some waiting, pregnant spider. A console stood at the far end of the room, screens a quiescent black, indicator lights blinking a pleasant blue-green.

  “Palatines already have life. Much life,” Cento said, gesturing that I seat myself on the bench. I leaned against it instead, not removing my coat. If the gesture annoyed the doctor, he made no sign. “Sometimes Cento can do much, sometimes little. Human genes only stretch so far. May be the client need seek abstraction.”

  “Abstraction?”

  “Machine!” Cento said, tapping his monocular implant. “Kidney fails, say. Can replace this. But as get older, humans begin fail systematically. On cellular level. Cancer happens. Palatines age less. Less plaque on brain, in blood. Less organ failure. More cancer. Die quickly at end. Machines . . . no cancer. Other problem, maybe. But no cancer.”

  I shook my head. “No machines.”

  “No machines!” Cento repeated in exasperation. “O
f course. Solnechni. Already breaking law coming to Cento but not break this law.” He snorted. Approached me with a needle. On instinct, I backed away, pressing myself against the bench. “Is only sample. Cento must see what is working with, know how can help.”

  Old stories returned to me, tales of how fools and desperate men seeking life or knowledge had traded for it with a cupped handful of their own blood. I had to remind myself that however like an ordinary medica this place seemed, I was among the Extrasolarians, and the Extrasolarians were little better than demons. I was too well-educated to believe that giving Cento a vial of my blood gave him power over me, the way one might overpower a demon with his name, but I could imagine other things. A virus designed to kill only me; clones of myself made and sold into slavery, sold as soldiers or catamites; pieces of my genome cut up and turned into products—those Marlowe eyes shining out of other faces, that Marlowe smile grinning with other delight.

  The commodification of the flesh.

  Suppressing an instinct to smash the man and flee, I said, “You misunderstand me.” And here I reached out a hand to stay the doctor’s own. “It is not more life that I seek. It’s another life. I am a foederatus, doctor. A mercenary. Mine is dangerous work. I might die any number of ways. I have heard among the Extrasolarians that there are ways to cheat death. That even if my ship were lost I might survive.”

  Cento frowned, stopped. “This Cento cannot do.”

  “Who can?”

  “On March Station? No one.” Cento closed his hand around the needle and drew away. Only then did I release his hand. “This thing cannot be done. Not by Cento. And if Gibson not pay Cento, Cento not work for Gibson.”

  I reached into my coat, hand gliding over the sword hilt there for the zippered pouch in the lining. My fingers found the universal card and waited there. “I’d be willing to pay for a referral. I understand if there is no one here, but I hear that on Vorgossos—”

  “Chern zashich nme!” Cento swore in his native Lothrian. “Say no more!”

  “You’re the fifth clinic I’ve been to today,” I said coolly, expecting this reply and no longer impressed by it. “None of the others could help me.” I drew out the black universal card with the three golden helms of the Rothsbank glittering on its surface. “I am willing to pay for information, doctor.”

  The doctor put his syringe into a pocket of his gray smock and stood silent a long moment. He seemed to deflate, to sag to the polished white floor. “You do not know what it is you ask.” His accent, which before had been thick almost to the point of opacity, slipped. After the spirited performance of minutes before, the man seemed almost undressed. He used Galstani pronouns without hesitation. Understand, it was not that he was not one of the Lothriad, but that some exaggerated performance of his slipped away. Seeming at once very tired, he reached up and unscrewed his monocular. The lens housing came away, revealing a naked socket that sank deep into his face. Dark metal glinted there, and a red light pulsed far back in the recessed hole. Cento drew a dirty kerchief from another pocket, polished the lens before screwing it back into his face. “Vorgossos . . . no one gets to Vorgossos except through his Exalted.”

  “His Exalted?”

  “The Undying who rules Vorgossos,” Cento said, pressing his lips together. “This is the story you hear, yes? The Undying who shares his gift to those who pay for it. A cure for death. This is why you seek Vorgossos?”

  A cure for death. That was true, in a sense. Only it was not my death that concerned me, for I was young and not then afraid of my fortified mortality. Unbidden, the black scar on Rustam’s surface filled my vision, that aching ruin of a city. I heard again Uvanari screaming under the cathar’s knives, and saw men writhe in the dark as Cielcin stooped over them, blood on their faces like vampires.

  A cure for death.

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing. “I was told you Extrasolarians had such a thing.”

  “Extrasolarians . . .” Cento almost laughed. “We are not a people, Gibson. We are people. There are Extrasolarians and Extrasolarians. I am only a doctor. The Exalted . . . you have heard stories.”

  I had. My mother was fond of them. The Exalted had appeared as villains in some bad Eudoran masques, in so many great operas. It was against them that the legendary Kharn Sagara had fought after they destroyed his home. They were beyond humanity, it was said, creatures who had given so much of themselves to their machine daimons that almost there was nothing left. The very word conjured impressions of bloody fangs in metal jaws, of eyes dead as old metal, and vague shapes lurching about the dark corridors of the mind.

  “The Exalted serve Vorgossos?”

  “Some of them do,” Cento said. “They are not an order; they are not a people. Some of their captains answer to the Undying, but not all. Only they know where the world is.”

  “How is that possible?” I said. “It’s a planet, isn’t it? How does one hide a planet for . . . centuries?”

  Cento’s human eye wrinkled in amusement. “No one knows, and yet no one will tell you where it is.”

  “You know, then?” I took a step forward, emphasizing as I did so my height advantage. I towered head and shoulder over the little Lothrian, and the gravity on March Station was not so strong as on Emesh. I might have lifted him with one hand if I wished it.

  “No! No!” Cento raised his hands. “You need to ask right people. Vorgossos has contacts. Traders. Men who know right ships. Cento is not one of them. Cento does not know. You have to go to the traders. To the docks. Not ships captains. Shipping companies. The Exalted have people on March Station. Some are Vorgossos. Some not.”

  I brandished the universal card again. “A name, Cento. I need a name.”

  CHAPTER 21

  A MATTER OF PRICE

  GREEN WATER LAPPED AT concrete pilings, the waves generated not by the pull of some moon, but by huge pumps deep in the vast fishery. The algae stank, and the fish disturbed that verdant surface only sparingly, afraid—perhaps—of the hunting gulls. Gulls. I had not seen a true terranic gull since I’d left Delos, nor heard their cries. How strange to find them in that grim city, on that dark station so very far from the light and silver sky of home. The rain had fallen, and the misty clouds had gone, leaving only thin tendrils of fog crawling over the waters and among the utilitarian ugliness of the dark buildings.

  What must those birds be thinking, wandering those sunless airs? I imagined them striking the ceiling of the ring station, or confused by the pseudo-gravity of March Station’s spin. I felt for them, who was himself very far from home. Peregrines were we, and not gulls at all.

  The azure lenses of camera eyes watched from crooked pillars, hung from cables threaded on the causeway that ran out over the green waters toward the freight lift tower and the warehouses that clustered like limpets about its base. Even here there were holographs. An advertisement for T-free cigarettes blew imitation smoke across our path from lips too full and too red. A bearded man with a mace battled a massive, green-skinned homunculus in a bas-relief hawking some Colosso match. Food vendors lined the row, selling kebabs and fish rolls and sandwiches wrapped in colored paper.

  “This the place?” Switch asked, voice close behind me.

  “Looks like,” Crim replied, pointing.

  In huge block letters—white against gray—were the words: FREIGHT LIFT 013.

  Ships docking with the station did so by clamping onto the outer hull, and so ascended through a lift umbilical to platforms like the one from which we’d entered the city. Most of these were small, passenger conveyances, but some were larger. Freight exchanges meant for the loading and offloading of bulk goods. Many goods were destined for the markets in March Station’s one, long city, still others for her manufactories, still more for other ships. I dared not imagine what foul contrivances might be traded in a place like March Station. Not merely food and mineral wealth, not only livestock, hard
ware, and media goods, but things not dignified in the light of Sol. I tried not to think about the street outside Doctor Cento’s medica, about the grafts and body augmentations on offer. I tried not to imagine that in those warehouses ahead of us might sleep thousands of human fetuses, awaiting sale into slavery or transformation into SOMs.

  I walked on instead, pressing between two men nearly ten feet tall, their bodies encased in suits of armor. One swore at me in a language I did not know, but we kept on past a group of green-skinned dryads in the orange jumpsuits of some work crew and into the warehouse complex.

  The office whose name Cento had given me was not hard to find. The round door rolled open as I approached, admitting the four of us into a low-ceilinged chamber. It was less a formal lobby than it was a private office, but there was a desk opposite with a receptionist smiling prettily—too prettily—at us.

  “Good afternoon!” she said, settling some private guess I’d had about what the local time exactly was. “Did you have an appointment with M. Brevon?”

  Glancing sidelong at Crim, I smiled. I was playing the part of the Imperial palatine, of the mercenary commandant. Better to have a herald.

  “I am afraid not,” Crim said, affecting his deepest, most respectful bow. “But his services come to us highly recommended.” Straightening, he executed a half turn, indicating my person with an expansive gesture. “I have the honor of representing Lord Hadrian Marlowe, formerly of the Sollan Imperium, Commandant and Captain-Owner of the Meidua Red Company, operating out of Monmara.”

  The woman stood primly, moving with almost clockwork precision. She wore a pinstriped suit of some synthetic material cut so tight I marveled that she could breathe at all. “It is an honor,” she said, smoothing down her wine-colored hair with a gesture. She wore it up, coiffured into a severe style pinned at the back of her head. “Might I inquire as to the purpose of your visit?”

  Her eyes were too large. Too green. The nose and chin too small. She was a homunculus, I realized too slowly—a fact which explained the hypertrophy of her shape and the mincing way she moved. She’d been made that way, designed like some sort of living sculpture. Docile, obedient . . . unable to run even if she wanted to.