Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Baetan. The word acquired a new and special sharpness for me then. Baetan. Literally it meant a root. Not as trees have roots—to the best of my knowledge, there are no words in Cielcin for anything resembling trees—but as mountains have roots. Roots. Traditions.

  “You are . . . a priest, then?” Valka asked, using the Galstani word. We did not know if the Cielcin had a word for priest. She clarified quickly, saying, “You serve the gods, the . . . Watchers?” We had been a ways down this road before, Tanaran and I. The Cielcin had some sort of relationship with the Quiet, the ancient builders who had left ruins on a hundred worlds. What that relationship was I could not say, though I longed to understand. It was the answer to that same question that had bound Valka to our strange expedition.

  “I serve my people,” it said. “I remember what they were, and what they . . .” and here it used a variant of the pronoun I had not heard before, and used it with gravity, “made us.” Tanaran sat a little straighter, tucking its chin defiantly in a way that aimed its horns at Valka and myself. “If I am defiled, they are defiled.”

  Showing a species of that same exasperation she had used on me, Valka said, “This is a medical procedure.”

  “A door is many things,” Tanaran replied, speaking with the gravity of a proverb, “and once opened, many things may enter.”

  “Peace, in this case,” Valka said dryly.

  Tanaran tucked its chin, worried at the collar of its skin-suit beneath the gray wraparound it wore. I did not press it. Not about the blood, not about its people, not about the Quiet. I was quiet myself, done in by that long day clambering all over that strange and unpleasant city. Just as wordlessly, the xenobite bared its throat to me, turned its head away. There we stood, two pieces frozen on a chessboard while Valka looked on. I did not understand at first that this was a surrender. “Mnada!” Tanaran said. “Do it.”

  Shocked to motion, I stood, fumbling with the ampule. I screwed it into the needle and approached. The Cielcin’s vein was not hard to find. Its skin was translucent, like fine china, traced with delicate black lodes and beneath it all the faintly purplish stretch of muscle. I pressed the muzzle of the device against what passed for carotid on the creature—much farther out to the side than on a human neck—and squeezed the trigger.

  Tanaran winced, but offered no complaint.

  Blood black as ink—as water at night—filled the ampule. My task done, I drew the device away, snapped the ampule out of the injector. The stem of the phylactery was still hot where the injector had sealed the glass shut, and I placed the sample with care in the inner pocket of my coat.

  “You have my word,” I said, “that this will see you back to your people.” As I spoke, I watched the faint dribbling of blood snake down Tanaran’s neck. Valka approached and handed the xenobite a kerchief, helped it press the thing to its wound.

  Tanaran fixed massive eyes on me, black as space, and—imitating a gesture that perhaps Valka had taught it—nodded. “I believe you.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE PILOT

  FOLLOWING A DEPARTURE VECTOR given us by Antonius Brevon, the Mistral unclamped itself from March Station and fell away, at first using only gas jets, then the ion drives, then the big fusion torch as we peeled away from the station’s local space and out into the unquiet dark. The light of the sun and the accretion disk shone through the viewports to front and sides, and the bridge was alive with the soft back and forth of voices as the crew spoke updates to one another. I have always admired sailors, though I never learned their trade. The dizzying array of readouts and holographs dancing above and about their stations defied my understanding, though the progress map showing our plotted course was plain enough.

  “Where are they taking us?” Valka asked, craning her neck to look down at the navigation console beneath the captain’s platform.

  Otavia turned her head, hands not leaving her console. “Not far, but about straight down from the ecliptic, out-system.”

  “Strange place for a rendezvous,” Valka said. “I thought this Brevon character said this Exalted ship was docking with the station?” Otavia and I had already had this conversation the day before, when a message from Antonius Brevon had arrived via the station’s datasphere. It had contained only a string of coordinates and a time stamp.

  Ilex emerged from the hall, wiping her hands on a rag. “Exalted ships almost never dock with Extra stations. Too big.” The dryad had grown up on ships. On stations. Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that some of those stations might have been Extrasolarian, or have had dealings with them.

  “I still don’t like this, captain,” said Bastien Durand. The First Officer sat at the console immediately to the right of and beneath Otavia’s platform. “Ships get captured this way, and this whole thing’s been too easy. Passage for a vial of blood? It’s a bit storybook, isn’t it?”

  “Storybook, commander?” I asked, leaning against the rail of the captain’s platform.

  “A bit.” Durand pushed his spectacles higher up his nose. “When we were with Whent, we dealt with the Extras all the time. I know their reputation as cloners and natalists, but this?” He made a dismissive gesture.

  I was spared the need to argue with him, for Captain Corvo said, “Keep the warp drive primed. I want us ready to make the jump plus-c at the first sign of trouble.” She keyed a button on her console. “Lieutenant Garone”—it took me a moment to recall that this was Crim—“have our security team readied. I’m not expecting trouble, but these are the Extras we’re dealing with.” If Crim replied I could not hear him, but Otavia said, “Acknowledged. See it done.”

  “They’d not try something so close to the station, surely,” I said, compulsively checking that Sir Olorin’s sword yet hung from my belt.

  Even with her back to me, I could hear the frown in Otavia’s voice. “Why not? This isn’t the Empire, Hadrian. There’s no ODF, no patrols. So long as they leave the station alone, the Extras can do whatever they like.” She half-turned to continue speaking, but an indicator light on her console drew her attention, and she turned away.

  Far away and above us, I could make out the violet glow of other fusion drives in the accretion disk above. I put two fingers on the window glass, spread them apart. The image magnified, showing me a vessel with great wings and blue-glass sails standing high on masts perfectly still in the airless stellar winds.

  “I worked a rigger like that when I was little,” Ilex said. “We dryads are meant for Dark-work. That’s why we were made.”

  “I’d read that,” I said, glancing at her. There was something distinctly fey about her, as if she or someone very like her had tended the infant Zeus in Rhea’s cave. Would that it were so. The dryads had been designed as slaves, meant to sup on air and sunlight instead of encumbering their masters with the cost of shipping food on long, early expeditions in the bright Dark of space. One of the Emperors—Titus III, I believe, or Titus V—forbade the creation of new dryads as slaves. Not from any warm feeling toward the homunculi, but because their use had put honest citizens out of work. Realizing that I’d been quiet for an uncomfortable period, I said, “What was it like? Growing up out here?”

  Ilex thought about this a long moment, blue-green lips pressed dark together. “Quiet,” she said at last. “Except for the stardrives. Ships I grew up on were in worse shape than this. Used to shake.” She mimed shaking with her hands. After another moment, she added, “You’ve never met the Exalted, have you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Have you?”

  “Mm.” She bobbed her head. “Once or twice.”

  “Is it true they’re like the Mericanii were of old?” I asked, conscious of the eyes of the bridge crew that might be on me—and of the ears that certainly were.

  The dryad shrugged slim shoulders. “I’m not sure what that means, but Crim says you saw chimeras on March Station?”

 
“Chimeras?” I asked, thinking of the hybrid creatures that so frequently battled gladiators and slaves in Colosso.

  “The augmented. Men with machine parts,” Ilex clarified.

  I chewed my lip, looking back over my shoulder to where Valka and Otavia were speaking in close tones, the latter hunched over the console, the former in her low seat at the center of the platform.

  The dryad continued. “The Exalted are worse. They barely leave their ships. They’re barely even human anymore.”

  “I’ve heard,” I said slowly, angling away from her to look out the window again. The zoom I’d initiated had reset, the image out the glass reset to one of the rosy light of the accretion disk orbiting that distant blue star. “But they are human.”

  “More than me,” Ilex said, and though I did not look I sensed her duck her head.

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said, thinking of Eva. “You’re as human as the rest of us.” Ilex had a freedom of will Brevon’s slave never could, as free to make her own choices as any natural-born person. She was hampered, hindered, crippled by her very genes.

  “Just a little more tree than the rest of you.”

  A short laugh escaped me. “As you say.”

  Hours passed before we made Brevon’s rendezvous. According to ship’s telemetry, we’d traveled some three hundred thousand miles—more than the distance between Old Earth and her Moon—but the accretion disk seemed no farther away above us. March Station was lost in the glow. I never saw it again, nor wished to.

  All was quiet on the bridge; even our breathing was stilled. Space travel, I’ve often found, is a hushed experience. Not only for the great quiet of the endless Dark, but in the way that quiet oppresses you, impresses you to silence. To stand beneath the bottomless sky and above and among its stars is like standing amidst the pillars of a great cathedral—afraid to speak, lest God may hear.

  Or devils.

  “Initiate deceleration burn, bump inertial dampeners to compensate.” Otavia stood again on her platform like a maestro at her orchestra, hands on hips, back straight. Her low chair sat behind her, forgotten. Forgotten as well, I stood at the back of the bridge with Valka, quietly out of the way. “Scanners?”

  “Nothing, ma’am,” said one fresh-faced ensign. “No sign. Shall I deploy light-probes?”

  “See it done.”

  A wire-frame schematic of the Mistral drifting in the air to the captain’s right flashed, showing the deployment of half a thousand tiny sensors from an array clustered along the ship’s ventral hull. Pushed by a rapid spray of laser fire to tremendous speed, they spread out from the Mistral in a growing cloud, relaying signals back to the ship in as close to real time as that growing distance and the stubborn speed of light allowed.

  “Big as these ships are meant to be,” said Bastien Durand, removing his ridiculous glasses to rub his eyes, “we should see it from half a system away.”

  “There’s nothing,” the ensign said. “Nothing on light-probes. Nothing in infrared, no reactor leakage, none of the usual telltales.”

  “It’s a trap,” Durand hissed. “I told you, that bonecutter set Marlowe up.”

  “We don’t know that,” Valka put in, oddly leaping to my defense.

  “Stay vigilant,” Otavia snapped, pivoting toward a different set of consoles at her left. She tapped at a few controls, head bent over the display.

  The whole ship bucked in that moment, and a great roar carried through the metal and carbon superstructure of the old Uhran starship. Old supports groaned, rattled like an old tramline barreling into station, like the damned out of some hell. Caught unawares, I stumbled into Valka, who might have fallen but for the wall at her back. I tripped my way through an apology and turned just in time to hear the helmsman say, “Decel burn initiated.”

  As always, I tried not to think about the crushing force of that acceleration. Were it not for the inertial dampeners, every one of us would be a smear of bloody pulp and bone paste plastered against a bulkhead or the outer hull, so rapidly had we bled speed. I hadn’t felt anything but the initial shock as the Mistral’s retro-rockets engaged, working opposite the primary fusion torch. We’d been delivered by forces less substantial than the wind.

  I shuddered.

  “Keep that warp drive primed,” said Captain Corvo to the helmsman. “First sign of hostile contact you micro-jump.” She looked down at First Officer Durand where he sat just below and beside her platform. “Bastien’s not wrong, there should be something here.”

  As if on cue, the ensign spoke up. “Still nothing from the light-probes or primary sensors. I’m not even picking up anything on gravimetrics.”

  A blue light flared on Otavia’s console, and she slapped at it at once. “You’re go, Centurion.”

  A holograph panel sprang into being above the arc of Otavia’s console, showing an image through one of the ship’s internal cameras. The holograph was slightly blue where the projector hardware had degraded over time, but it was clear enough. It showed one of the lateral airlocks near midships, a low-ceilinged, round corridor, padded as the others were padded. Pallino stood there, one hand to his ear, dressed in full combat kit: black ceramic armor done Imperial fashion in the shape of a sculpted torso, segmented shoulder and arm guards. He kept one hand on his holstered nerve disruptor as he spoke.

  “Captain, we’ve something strange down at the port airlock.”

  “Strange, Centurion?”

  The old man looked right up into the camera. “Aye. It’s—”

  Bang.

  The men around Pallino jumped, but the veteran’s alarm was confined only to a turn of his head, as if to reproach the sound.

  Bang. Bang.

  “It’s coming from outside, ma’am. Took us a moment to realize it wasn’t the ship settling from that burn.”

  Bang. Bang.

  “It sounds like someone’s knocking,” I said, moving up behind Corvo.

  The Captain called up another holograph, cycling through camera feeds. The ensign running the sensor suite spoke up. “That’s not possible. I’d have detected anything larger than a rations can on approach.”

  “Unless it were cloaked somehow,” another voice suggested.

  “There’s no heat sink small enough to mask a person.”

  “You’re assuming it’s a person,” Ilex suggested, voice cold.

  Corvo had found the camera feed she wanted, pointed back at the round swell of the airlock from where the wing section began to swell along the Mistral’s vaguely deltoid profile.

  There was nothing. Only gray metal and white ceramics pitted and scored. Nothing.

  Bang. Bang.

  “Can we get eyes out that airlock?” the captain demanded, knowing full well the answer was no. The interior doors had windows looking in on the airlock itself, but the exterior doors were titanium, without slit or porthole.

  Pallino’s voice crackled over the internal comm. “No ma’am. Not without opening the outer door.”

  Bang.

  Had she been born in the Empire—no matter her caste—I felt certain that Otavia Corvo would have retired a Strategos of the Legions. Faced with this situation, with data that made little sense and less, she wasted no time. “How many men are with you?”

  “Two decades, ma’am.”

  “Take defensive posture, I want clear lines of sight on that inner door. Hoplites in front, I want shields up and NDs set to stun. Then open the outer doors.”

  “Ma’am.” Pallino thumped his chest in salute and turned to go about his business.

  Bastien Durand rose from his seat and, turning, gripped the lowest part of the rail on Otavia’s platform. “I don’t like this.”

  Corvo acknowledged this with a curt nod, but spoke to her other officers. “Why are our cameras showing us all clear on the airlock exterior?”

  Ilex was th
e first to respond, craning her neck from her station in the pit below. “Could be some sort of virus showing us a looped feed.”

  Before this conversation about the defense of the ship’s datasphere got too far along, Pallino’s voice came back in over the bridge’s sound system. “Everyone’s in position, ma’am. Shall I proceed?”

  “See it done.”

  “Wait!” I said, shrugging out of my coat. “Hold for five minutes. I’m coming down. Is Switch there?”

  “Aye!” Switch called over the same feed—I couldn’t see him on the internal camera.

  “I’d rather you stayed here, Hadrian,” Corvo said, turning to look at me, one hand still on her controls. “God knows what’s making that . . .” Bang. “That sound.”

  Tossing my coat onto one of the crash seats at the rear of the bridge, I said, “Those are my people down there, too. I’ll be damned if I’m up here sitting on my hands and something happens, captain.” I didn’t wait for an argument, but turned and promptly hurried from the bridge, thumbing my shield on as I went. The light distortion and static cling of the shield curtain collapsing around me was like putting on an old suit by then. I could feel my mindset change, feel my walk change from its usual cadence to the conscious tread of a man at war. The hall—invisible to me a moment before as a familiar place, an artifact of memory and my everyday life—transformed into a theater for action. I was acutely aware of the rounded walls and the way the grated metal floor gave just so with each footfall.

  “Hadrian, wait!”

  “Stay on the bridge, Valka!” I said, hurrying on.

  She followed. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Please stay on the bridge!”

  I could still hear her feet on the decking behind me. “I can handle myself!”

  “I know you can handle yourself. You don’t have a shield!”

  Her footfalls stopped abruptly. I did not.

  Pallino and his twenty men lined the hall approaching the starboard airlock. They knelt in side doors, stunners trained on the heavy door.