Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “I’ll go, too!” Jinan said, stepping forward, striped blue and orange silks fluttering over chrome armor.

  Lin half-turned. “Very good. Everyone with me. Greenlaw, my kit.” He paused, as if expecting a reply. A snapped Yes, sir and a salute.

  None came.

  I felt the memory—or was it the realization?—slide into Lin’s mind like a poison. It was as if the air around him grew darker. Lieutenant Greenlaw was dead, lost in the Garden. He hadn’t known, or else he had buried it in the chaos of the chase. The way he stood there has never left me. His posture did not change: no folding or bending. His only movement was to close his mouth. But he collapsed all the same, collapsed in a way no man could really see but which all men understand. Collapsed inward. Slowly, he nodded to himself. “Everybody follow me.”

  “Captain!” I said, unable to stop myself. “What should I do?”

  He did not stop his swift exit, but waved a hand. “Talk to them. It’s the only thing you’re good for.”

  CHAPTER 70

  PLAY THE ORATOR

  “WHAT ARE WE GOING to do?” asked one of the helmed and visored soldiers, as if to no one. “We can’t just sit here while they try and blow their way on board.” A murmur of voices welled up to greet this question, as if they stood behind it, sheltered by and supporting its sentiment. Bassander had not answered it, as if he meant for us to endure the siege without a response, without action.

  And Bassander was gone.

  A muffled shout came up through the sealed ramp, and the ship rocked again. From the remoteness of the shouting, I imagined the Cielcin standing back, all afraid to come too near the ship, for fear that we might fire upon them, perhaps, or because they thought that we—like Ulysses and his brave Achaeans—might spill forth with fire and sword.

  In the uneasy, thunder-rocked calm of that moment, my eyes went to the captives. Ren and Suzuha both lay limp now, not yet escorted to the medica as Bassander had ordered. They might have been asleep, were it not for the awkward way their limbs lay tangled and their eyelids fluttered. I crouched beside Tor Varro where he knelt at their side. “Any change?”

  He shook his head. “They’re both alive, but I don’t know what’s been done to them. They could be brain-dead for all I know. There’s no telling how their implants work.” Here he rolled Suzuha’s head gently to one side, revealing a cap of bright metal—roughly triangular in shape, with the corners rounded and smooth—set on the spur of bone behind her ear. A blue indicator light blinked there, flickering very fast. “Maybe whatever’s been done to them isn’t complete.”

  “I wish we could have brought the golem,” I said. “It would know what to do.”

  “’Twould be surprising,” Valka said, appearing at my side, “if there were anything we needed to do for them at all.” She placed a hand on my shoulder, her shadow falling across the prone forms of the children. I took her hand on reflex. Her fingers were very cold in mine. “You saw the way Sagara kept them close? Like insurance?”

  The same blue light flickered behind Ren’s ear. “What’s taking so long?”

  “Remote synaptic kinesis,” Valka said.

  The scholiast squinted one-eyed up at her. “Nonsense.”

  Valka only shrugged. “Have you a better theory, counselor?”

  “Transferring the mind remotely?” He touched a hand to his mouth. “By radio? Tight beam?”

  Valka extricated her hand from mine and went to one knee beside me to get a better look at the implant node behind Suzuha’s ear. “Quantum telegraph. Radio would have an effective range.”

  “Why aren’t they awake?” I asked, an astonishingly illiterate question.

  The doctor’s fingers traced the contours of the girl’s implants, lips parted. When she spoke, it was perfunctory, as if she’d barely heard me. “I don’t know what the architecture of these implants is like, but I’m sure the mind needs time to install itself in the new hardware. To compile. My guess? Sagara transfers his consciousness from his old body to the implants in the new, that he runs off the machine core and grows into the new brain tissue. There might even be personality differences that emerge as a consequence of the new bodies.” She bit her lip, eyes alight with an unholy delight. “Fascinating.”

  “Differences?” I asked.

  “Well, take this one,” she said, speaking of Suzuha as though she were a sample on a slide. “Different sex. Different hormone culture. That would change Sagara’s thinking—I bet he does this on purpose, grows different bodies, I mean. For the novelty.”

  I couldn’t help but remember the flesh market on March Station, the way memories and personality were sold like cloves and onions: bodies resculpted, sex and intelligence alterable at low and competitive prices. All that freedom, all that chaos. How could anyone not but drown?

  The only thing Theseus could not replace was Theseus himself.

  Well, Kharn Sagara was not Theseus, and had done even that.

  Whatever awoke in Ren and Suzuha would call itself Kharn Sagara, but would no more be the silent king whom Bassander had murdered than I am my children. Rather a different creature would walk away from this, bearing his name, his memories, perhaps the core and kernel of his personality, but they would grow differently, and when they in turn were old and machine-riddled, sitting on their thrones at the end of their lives . . . they would have diverged further from where they were, lost in the currents of their own bloated humanity.

  Valka was still speaking. “He must have had a backup implanted somewhere in his body, a parallel transmitter mirroring his brain in real time . . . Bassander’s shot would have fried anything in his head . . .”

  “But why two?” Varro asked. “Why both of them?”

  “Double his chances of getting out alive?” I suggested. “Or maybe something went wrong when Bassander stunned the boy?”

  The scholiast opened his mouth to reply, but at that precise moment our third prisoner began to stir, as if prompted by some unseen choregus from off-stage. “Eka . . . ?” Nobuta asked. “Eka ti-perem gi ne?”

  “You’re on our ship,” I said, folding my legs under me so that I could sit properly and make myself as non-threatening as I could. Switching back to Galstani, I said to Varro, “We really ought to get these two to medica.” The scholiast agreed and began calling for a medtech.

  Nobuta was trying to form words. “Aba . . . Abassa . . .”

  “Rakayu abassa ba-okarin ti-saem gi,” I said, leaning in. Your father isn’t here. Or was it mother? I didn’t know anymore. Someone had bound the Cielcin child wrist and ankle. That upset me, but I understood the wisdom there. Young as it was, the Cielcin juvenile was larger than any of us. I massaged my eyes with the heel of my hand. Around us, Lieutenant Cartier and Tor Varro worked to get Ren and Suzuha carried out, and those soldiers who had not left with Bassander Lin milled about, listless, listening to the sound of thunder through the ship’s hull.

  “What are you going to do with me?” Nobuta asked.

  A comforting smile tried and failed to come to my face. I felt sure I looked only pained. I didn’t have an answer, only vague, half-formed ghosts. Another blast rocked the ship, and as if from a great distance I heard the lieutenant say into her terminal, “Commander, we should get the third and fourth centuries down here. I don’t like the sound of whatever it is they’re doing out there.”

  When she’d finished speaking, I scrambled to my feet, leaving Valka and Nobuta on the floor, and hurried to follow her. “Lieutenant, are internal comms still working?”

  “Comms are still online period, my lord. It’s only that we can’t get a signal through whatever this big ship’s made of.”

  “So do we have a way to communicate with the outside?”

  “Well. No.” Cartier blinked—the expression of a plebeian trying to find a politic way to tell a palatine she thought he was being stupid. “As I
say, my lord, we can’t communicate with the Mistral or the fleet.”

  Smiling a razor’s smile—knowing exactly the mocking thoughts running through her head—I said, “I hear you. I mean, can we communicate outside?” I made a gesture with my hands like I was holding a small box between them. “With the Pale?”

  “Oh!” The lieutenant brightened. “There’s the public address system.”

  The projection booth was large enough for myself, Valka, and the two legionnaires holding Nobuta between them. I remember all of it. Every detail. The round walls padded with black foam, the bright recording instruments gleaming in the ceiling, the projection equipment in the wall sketching its own image of outside in an arc before us. The way the air smelled close and much-used. The oppressive quiet. The way every made sound fell away at once, vanishing forever from the world. And the dark, the dark most of all. So dark that our Cielcin captive could stop its squinting.

  So dark that when the holograph image of the outside appeared it seemed solid as any material thing, as if the hangar outside the Schiavona had been brought inside. The illusion, I remember, was almost total, so much that my mind deceived me, and brought in the heat of flames and the smell of men burning. That my mind needed no help in conjuring that smell sickens me to this day.

  “Raka Aeta Aranata ti-perem gi ne?” I demanded, stepping alone into the painted circle that marked the target area for the holograph pick-up. The Cielcin all jumped, and I suppressed a thrill at their surprise, knowing I must have appeared from nowhere like a bolt of lightning, words rebounding like thunder in the echoing vastness of the hall without. Where is Prince Aranata?

  The xenobites ceased their milling about and drew back far enough to have a clear image of me. Some stood with swords drawn beneath, still others fingered nahute at their belts and snarled while yet more gathered the bodies of our slain and dragged them back toward the blasted sculpture of the hangar door. I asked again, “Where is Aranata?” and was greeted by a chorus of hissing.

  Snakes in the Garden, I thought, though this had only begun in the Garden—that it would end there, too, I had as yet no idea.

  “Here, yukajji!” And there he was. She was. It was. Prince Aranata Otiolo emerged from the parting ranks of its soldiery. Darker. Taller. Mightier and more terrible than the rest it stood, crowned with horn and silver, and the way its men folded back and shied away was like the bending of light about the greatest stars. “Belnna uvattaya ba-kousun ti-koarin!” Give me back my child.

  “Give me back our dead!” I countered.

  “Abassa-do!” Nobuta cried out from behind me, words caught up by the booth’s microphones.

  “Nobuta!” Aranata took a half-step forward, as if it might leap through the holograph it saw outside and save its young. I felt pity tug in me, recognizing this sign of parenthood for what it was: one of those precious few things our two species shared. Red-Handed Evolution had crafted us both to the same purpose: to survive. To be fruitful and multiply. And whatever our differences in behavior, in feeling, morality, or cause, we were the same in this, both K-selection creatures dedicated to their children. Because we must be.

  “It’s unharmed,” I said. “One of our men stunned it while you were chasing us through the Demiurge, but no other damage has been done—which is more than you can say of Raine Smythe.”

  Behind the figure of Aranata Otiolo, I saw the smaller form of Tanaran appear, dressed in its customary wraparound of dark green and black, almost as though it were some fiendish mockery of the scholiasts who stand at the shoulders of great lords. “Show Nobuta to me!” the Aeta demanded, claws flexing from its fingertips like so many black-enameled nails.

  “In a moment,” I said, trying to hold my calm, to remind myself that the image before me was only an image, that the xenobite chieftain could not tear me limb from limb as it so clearly longed to do. “First things first: have you taken any of our people alive?” Aranata didn’t answer. If it had taken no prisoners, there would be reason to deny it, so I said, “You did. How many?”

  “Sim lumare,” it said. Not many.

  “More than six?” I asked. “More than twelve?” In a human being I might have hoped to catch a facial tic, some minute tremor or shiver in the eyes. Some small self-betrayal. There was nothing clear in those alien eyes, no light that men might read by. “I want them back, Aeta. I want them all back. We still have other hostages. Tanaran’s companions. If you want them and your child, you will return everyone you’ve taken and the bodies of our dead. Then you will take your screamers and go.” I pointed for emphasis, the other hand going involuntarily to my sword. My thoughts ran at once to Bassander, to Jinan, and their little band. Had they made it to the Mistral yet? Had they been found and captured?

  “Show me my child!” Aranata said, not debating.

  “I’ll show you yours if you show me mine,” I said.

  The Aeta did not move. Neither did I, unless it was to finger the pommel of my sword at my right hip, eyes narrowed to slits. The prince was used to getting her way, used to the authority and the power of her station atop the predatory hierarchy of her kind. The Cielcin knew nothing of reciprocity, of responsibility, of competence—only of power and the dominion of force, like an idiot’s mockery or a child’s copy of man. How they had climbed their fumbling way up from the mud of their birth I cannot say. Perhaps they were right, and the Quiet aided them. Perhaps they were lucky, or perhaps it was only that instinct for subordination and obedience ran in them as strongly as the impulse to dominate. Perhaps they lacked free will, or like the pagan emperors of old believed free will the province only of those great ones—like Alexander—they named gods on Earth. Who now can say? There are so few of them left.

  So few who survived me.

  Many times I have wrestled with ideas I cannot understand. Each of us does, for even the brightest scholar has limits on his competency. I saw a version of that struggle playing on the Aeta’s inhuman face. It could not understand that I refused it, so used was it to command. I have seen similar struggles writ in the faces of autocrats—in a certain prince, most notably—but there always was it tempered by frustration, with annoyance that we the underlings would not know our place. Here there was only blindness and deep confusion.

  But I had not stuttered, not blurred my words, and at last the Aeta blinked, nictitating membranes and lids flicking closed and open again in sequence. “Bring them here, Tanaran.”

  The baetan lowered its head, hands out before it. “At once, my master.”

  It was not long before it returned, leading a line of its kind and their prisoners—perhaps a dozen, perhaps so many as twenty. Their number has blurred with time, obscured by the moment that followed, for bringing up the rear, battered and bleeding from his head, was Sir William Crossflane, and there—on a bier beside him, whether dead or only unconscious I cannot say—was the charred form of Raine Smythe.

  I stopped myself from crying out, fingers tightening on the hilt of my sword, as if I meant to draw it and leap forward through the holograph to save them as though I were some Maeskolos or hero of legend and not a foolish boy gone so, so far beyond his depth.

  “Your masters, I believe,” Aranata said, stressing the term beletarin, masters. I wondered if it believed that I was under some compulsion cousin to that which Tanaran had felt to do whatever was necessary to return to its master. To serve them. Perhaps I should have been, or perhaps it was providence that Bassander had gone and they were left with me. “Now, show me my son.”

  With a gesture to the legionnaires holding the young Cielcin, they advanced, holding Nobuta between them by its bound wrists. One—more vindictive than the other or perhaps driven by the sight of his captured tribune and her first officer—shoved Nobuta to the ground at my feet. I heard an angry rush of air escape the Aeta, saw Tanaran take a half-step as if to help its young lord back to its feet. I knelt instead, and speaking in my softest
tones said, “On your feet, Nobuta, there’s a good lad. Your abassa is watching. Be brave.” It didn’t respond, and I looked up—not at the holograph of the Aeta and its people standing above our kneeling prisoners, but at Valka. I’d felt the press of her eyes on me, different than the press of any other eyes: the cold concern, the discomfort, the disgust for the situation moved so very close to fear. For me? For all of us? Or because of something she feared I might do?

  I wonder now if Valka were not touched by some form of prescience—a witch in truth as well as accusation—for the fear I saw in those eyes and remember there seem in memory more appropriate a response to what came after than had happened before. But I smiled at her, not knowing my own future and so unafraid, and helped Nobuta regain its feet.

  “Raka ti-saem gi!” I said. Here it is.

  “Nobuta!” Aranata advanced, looking for all the world as if it might leap out of the projection into the suite in front of us, hands outstretched. “Are you all right? Have they hurt you?”

  The younger Cielcin did not move, only hunched its shoulders. “Veih,” it said. No.

  Prince Aranata’s black eyes narrowed. “Marlowe, if you’ve hurt my child, I swear by all my ancestors I will use you as a replacement for that slave you cost me.”

  I fancied I could hear the slow crunch of ice in my veins, as though boots trod the surface of some frozen lake within me. Another voice was lifted up, rougher and more strained. “Marlowe?” She had only caught the first word of what Aranata had said. “Marlowe, is that you?”

  It was Smythe. I could see her lift her burned face from the bier. Sir William turned, shuffling on his knees to her side. His Cielcin guards made to stop him, but Tanaran permitted it with a gesture.

  “Yes!” I said, voice breaking. “It’s a relief to hear your voice, ma’am.” My own voice choked, strangled by shame. I had not gone to check on her after the blast. I could have saved her. I could have brought her back with me. She was alive, by Earth! And I had abandoned her.