Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Hadrian! Are you all right?”

  Not alone after all. Valka had been behind me, appeared as I’d pivoted toward the wall. Wordless, numb, I held my hands to her, shaking my head furiously. “No. I . . . I . . . it wasn’t right. It wasn’t right, Valka. I didn’t. I didn’t.”

  Wordless, she reached into her jacket and drew out a red kerchief, the sort she was always wiping her hands with at dig sites and at meals. It was already stained, soiled from use, frayed at the edges, like the woman herself. Like me. I took it graciously, wordlessly as she had offered it, and wiped Nobuta’s blood from my hands. They still weren’t clean enough, never would be clean enough. I balled the cloth up in one hand when Valka went to retrieve it. “Thank you,” I said. It was all I could manage. “Thank you.”

  She pressed her forehead to mine. Even with my eyes shut, I felt those eyes on me, felt—I thought—as the ancient prophets must have felt beneath the eyes of their angry god. Small. So small. “Breathe,” she said, “just breathe.”

  Had I not been breathing? I wasn’t sure. I breathed then, long and slow, trying to force myself to calm. None of Gibson’s aphorisms came to mind, not one. I wasn’t even sure what feeling it was that haunted me, though I knew the name of the ghost. Nobuta Otiolo’s voice still played in my ear. Abassa, please. I clamped down on the sob before it could escape me, and I brought Sir William’s body back to my attention. Smythe’s. I saw the Cielcin all hunched over the corpses, stooped like vampires, like ravening dogs, like a murder of ravens upon carrion.

  Feasting.

  My tears died.

  Valka held me to her, fingers in my hair, not letting go. “You shouldn’t have done it,” she said, flatly, but her voice broke with the words. “’Twould have been better if Nobuta had lived. Now ’tis no hope of peace.”

  I wrapped my arms around her, holding her close as I could. “There’s no peace. You were there, Valka. You saw.” Smythe had been torn apart as if between four horses, the others cracked like lobsters in their shells. “You saw what happened.”

  She held me more tightly, her breath on my ear. She didn’t speak again, and I’ve no idea how long we stood there, ignoring and ignored. Long enough to quiet the tremors in me, long enough to dry my eyes.

  Long enough for the grinding to start.

  It came from everywhere, the noise of it conducted through the hull and superstructure of the ship, through struts and walls and bulkheads as the vibration plays in the air beneath the skin of a drum.

  “What the hell is that?” Valka asked, drawing away from me and looking round. The hall shook around us, the entire ship vibrating like a plucked string. “Are they trying to get inside?”

  She and I both looked round at Lieutenant Cartier; the woman had gone as pale as we had, and twice as quiet. I put a hand to the wall of the ship, felt the tremor there reverberating through my fingers. “They’re drilling.” I don’t know why, but I was put in mind at once of the fanged maws of the nahute and the way they chewed through flesh. “Come on!”

  I’d not been to the Schiavona’s bridge but once before, most often repairing to Smythe’s quarters, but I knew the way. I burst through the open arch into that broad, high-ceilinged place. The wall opposite was all a great curving window—the only true window on the entire ship—which looked back toward the door of the hangar, away from the carnage and the door back to the depths of Kharn’s Demiurge. Yet the carnage was there, displayed in still holographs and video feeds, reflected in the heart of every man.

  Like flames in clear glass.

  Commander Ludovico Sciarra stood with his arms crossed behind his back, taking it all in. How small he seemed beneath those images of horror, and how young when he turned, eyes wide as saucepans. Just how young was he, this upjumped palatine lordling? He had an almost Jaddian coloring, and wore his officer’s blacks like a man attending a funeral—which in a sense he was.

  “They’re drilling,” Sciarra said quietly. “All over. Drilling . . .” He laughed weakly. “I don’t think they know where the ramp is.” At the consoles fanning out to left and right, the remainder of his bridge crew was silent.

  “Can they get in, sir?” asked Lieutenant Cartier.

  Sciarra shook his head, broke composure long enough to smooth his very short hair. “I don’t know. Probably.” Images flashed on the window from external cameras, and I saw I had been right to imagine the nahute. Hundreds of the little machines clung like limpets to the bottom of the ship, boring their way inside. They marched in little circles, wide enough the Cielcin could climb through, moving slowly, each pass grinding away the hull by inches. “That hull’s four inches of titanium. No telling how long we have.”

  “At least they haven’t brought plasma cutters,” Valka said, darkly.

  “Has there been any sign from Bassander Lin and the Red Company?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

  “None, Lord Marlowe,” Sciarra replied. “The captain left at thirteen past seventeen hundred. That was forty-eight minutes ago.” He indicated the blue shine of a countdown clock gleaming at the corner of the massive window display. “Comms are still down. There’s something about this filthy big ship. We’ve tried quantum telegraph, too. No way to know if it’s gotten through, or what things are like with the fleet out there.”

  “We have more immediate problems,” Valka said. “Can you do anything to stop the drills?”

  Sciarra’s frown cut deep lines to either side of his face. “Not without compromising this ship worse than the drills have.”

  “Then we need to stop them before they get inside, Commander,” I said, a shade too sharply. Despite my stint with the Red Company and my time in the Colosso, I was no soldier. Who was I to tell these men what to do? To lead? And yet I could not stop myself talking. You see, I had had the seed of an idea. An old idea, one that had worked so very well in the tunnels beneath Calagah. “You have spotlights on the ventral hull, yes? Big flood lamps?”

  The man nodded. “For salvage and such, sure.”

  “It won’t stop the drills, but it’ll stop the Cielcin. Maybe not for long, but it will help us.”

  “Help us to what?” I pushed past the young commander and moved toward the window screen, pacing back and forth in front of the holographs where they glittered in the glass. Aranata had gone, withdrawn I knew not where. The rest of the Cielcin prowled beneath the hull looking up with eyes like the hollow pits of statues. Blood on their faces. Their hands.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  “Lord Marlowe. Help us to what?” Sciarra repeated.

  Valka hushed him, and I saw her raised hand reflected in the window. “Don’t. Not when he’s like this.”

  Forward.

  “We have to attack them,” I said, not turning. “We have to attack them before they get in here. Can you aim those lights down and toward the doors? There.” I pointed to the place where the xenobites still gathered in the shadow of that shattered face sculpture.

  Sciarra paused, then said, “I . . . yes. Yes, of course we can.”

  “I’m not sure how much time the light could buy us. I think some of the Pale have implanted lenses.” I tapped my cheekbone with a finger, then brushed my hair roughly back. “We’ll have to move quickly. How soon can you have two hundred men ready?”

  The commander and lieutenant both exchanged glances. “We’ll be torn apart. There are more than twice that many of the Pale out there.”

  “Vent the coolant on the warp drive’s fuel containment,” Valka said. All eyes turned to her, and for a moment no one spoke. The comment had come from nowhere, and so surprised us all.

  So without context was it that even I turned back, staring at the woman. “What?”

  “The antilithium we use to fuel the warp drive is kept in magnetic suspension, but those magnets have to be kept cool.” She pivoted toward Sciarra. “Wha
t do you use? Standard helium reservoir?”

  Taken aback, he nodded. A beat passed, and he said, “Forgive me, ma’am. Aren’t you a . . . linguist?”

  “She was a ship’s captain in the Tavrosi home guard,” I said.

  Sciarra’s and Cartier’s eyebrows shot up at this piece of news, and Sciarra said, “I don’t follow. Why would we do this?”

  Valka’s face took on that irritated cast I knew so well, lips curling, nose wrinkling with disdain. “The gas is extremely cold. When it hits the air, the water in it will freeze. You’ll get snow. Vapor. A cloud.”

  A smoke screen.

  I could have kissed her then and there.

  “It might kill them, too,” she said and crossed her arms, hugging herself, as if to console her for what she said. “The cold. Or the gas. ’Tis enough helium to flood the whole hangar bay.” And more. The gas expanded rapidly as it warmed, one liter becoming hundreds as it lost density, displacing the breathable air. It wasn’t toxic, but it wasn’t anything the body could use.

  “Kill them?” Sciarra brightened, composure slipped. “Without a fight?”

  “Won’t it drift toward the ceiling?” I said, thinking of the massive vaults above our parked ship. “Helium’s lighter than air.”

  “’Tis why I said it might kill them,” Valka said, “but the water vapor is heavier, particularly when ’tis cold . . . between that and the light, you’ll have a distinct advantage.”

  That wild Marlowe grin stole over my face, lopsided and leering. “Can it be done?”

  The armor they had found for me was an unfamiliar weight, and I chafed to wear it. It was the kit of an ordinary legionnaire, a spare taken out of mothballs in the ship’s armory. In it I looked half a soldier indeed, the overlapping segments of the shoulder proceeding in Roman fashion down my right arm to the wrist, my left gauntleted, the black skin-suit underlayment hidden beneath my black tunic and high boots in lieu of the traditional red tabard.

  I felt half a fool mounting the crates as Bassander had done to speak to the soldiers amassed for the attack. Sciarra was holding his fifth century of troops as a rear guard with what remained of the first and second—those who had survived the long chase back from the Garden—leaving the third and fourth to comprise the force for my abortive defense of the ship. Two hundred men. Four hundred Cielcin.

  Bassander, I thought, Jinan, don’t be long.

  For a split second, no one seemed to notice me standing there, looking down at them all. For a moment, it was only Valka standing beside Tor Varro at the rear of the broad, low hold, her red jacket and his green robes unique in a sea of white-armored faces. Bright eyes. How had I found myself standing there? Upon those stacked munitions? I was no soldier, not truly. No man-at-arms. I was a fighter, but that is not the same thing, and no true leader of men. My time as Commandant of the Red Company had been a farce, a lie, a kind of masquerade, and what action I had seen was only that of necessity, of chance, and accident. But young Commander Sciarra had his ship to die on and, it seemed, no stomach for the fight. He was a technician, after all, a junior officer aboard a courier ship slated for a diplomatic mission. And Lin was gone for reinforcements, or gone beyond recall. I tried not to think too much that he was dead, and Jinan with him—tried not to think that help would never come.

  Who must stand when those whose duty is standing have gone?

  Those who can.

  “Do you hear that?” I said, digging deep, drawing on every scrap of the speech and rhetorical training Gibson and my father had given me. I pointed the dead hilt of my sword at the sloped wall of the closed ramp. “That is Death, ladies and gentlemen! Death coming for us all! They’ve taken Smythe. Crossflane. Your friends and comrades. They are coming to take you, to take us all. We must not let them. We must stop them here. Now. Captain Lin has gone for reinforcements, but we cannot wait here to die any longer.” I lowered my sword, my voice. I had not activated the speakers in my suit, relied instead upon the low ceiling and my own two lungs. So when I quieted, I felt the crowd lean in, the farthest straining then to hear me. “Mark my words: this is the end. But is it our end or theirs? I don’t know. But I do know that this is our moment. Our moment to choose.” I made a fist, and heard the words resounding in me as I spoke them aloud. “Not whether we live or die. No man chooses that. But we can choose to fight now. If we are to die, we will not do so cowering like children afraid of the night! We will not die trapped here like rats! We are men! We will fight the demons to the last! We will show them the sons and daughters of Earth are a power to fear! We will show them we are not afraid, and we will teach them fear before the end!”

  To my blank amazement, a cheer went up, lances raised and fists, and my heart went up with them, buoyed on that wave. I dared to smile, and to hope. Hope. Hope is a cloud, that tiny voice said within me.

  Was it not a cloud that was saving us? Valka’s cloud?

  My smile widened, and for a moment my smiling with the crowd’s yell drowned the vision of Aranata tearing out Sir William’s throat and the noise of bloody feasting. As the cheering faded—cheering such as had not come for Bassander Lin—one man, a common legionnaire by his dress, called out, “Who are you?”

  “Only a man!” I said, not wishing to lord my birthright and name over him. It did not matter then. Nor there. “A man who bleeds red as you, and one who will not die this day!”

  I have said before, only rarely does the universe match my capacity for melodrama. If there is a god of such occurrences, a lord of poets and fools, he was with me that day. For in that moment, the overhead lights thudded to black, if only for a moment. Warning lights slammed on, red as flame, as the eyes of my father’s funeral bronze in my oldest dreams.

  A clear, recorded voice—the voice of some beautiful woman—spoke over the Schiavona’s public address system. “Fuel containment quench in progress. Emergency systems online. Fuel containment quench in progress.” The soldiers all shuffled about, confused, muttering. They all knew what it meant, knew the kernel of antilithium in the ship’s warp drive was now held in magnetic suspension by a series of battery-powered electromagnets and not the massive superconducting one that was the stable norm. It would hold for days, long enough to reconvene with the fleet and restore the containment system to its full function—if the Demiurge could not restore the thing itself. But still, the thought of so much antimatter so nearly unchained was a horror, as though we crouched within the shell of a million hydrogen bombs.

  I tapped a switch on my suit’s gauntlet terminal, then slammed the hard switch on my breastplate. The suit’s helmet unpacked itself from my gorget, folding about my head like some eccentric puzzle box, shards linking, leaving together to form one coherent whole, seals whining as the suit’s internal air supply and recycling systems came to life.

  For a brief instant, all was dark. True Dark. The helmet had no visor, only a solid arc of ceramic where my face should be, blank white as all the others. I had no crest, no rank markings, nothing but sword and the black of my tunic to distinguish me from any odd legionnaire. Half a second later, the entoptic projectors within the helmet mask projected twin cones of light directly onto my eyes, and it was as if I wore no helmet at all, but saw again the crowd of identically masked faces staring up at me.

  Voice amplified now by the speakers in my suit, I spoke over the repeated warning. “With me now! Not for Earth or Emperor, but for yourselves!”

  A cry went up to shake the very ship about us, and for a moment the noise of those alien drills was drowned. I leaped down from the boxes, swept my sword out beside me, blade gleaming in the stark light of the hold. My shield shimmered about me as it thrummed to life, and turning I saw Valka watching me through the crowd, Varro beside her.

  I raised my sword in salute.

  The ramp opened, and a moment after . . . all there was, was light.

  CHAPTER 72

  THE PI
T

  MY FIRST IMPRESSION OF the world outside was only whiteness. White fog, white light, a cold so deep that even through the suit it drained all thought of color. The helium gas venting from the Schiavona rose quickly, lighter than the air around it. It expanded rapidly, rising as it warmed, forcing the air down and turning the water in it to a thick mist that fell upon us like grave fog.

  The suit’s entoptics compensated for the glare of the flood lamps, shifting from visible light to infrared. The white all turned to blue, and the Cielcin emerged from the cold, faint red flames flickering against all that cold. Fading. I nearly tripped over one lying dead on the ground as I led the charge. It had asphyxiated, choked on the airless air. Dwelling on that put me in mind of the suit around me, on the millimeter-thick membrane of advanced polymer that insulated me from the subarctic chill and the casement of ceramic, of metal and glass that prisoned my head and kept clear air pumping toward my lungs. A sensor pinged in my ear, and I turned back to see the swarming nahute disengaging from their work on the Schiavona to come for us. To take the path of least resistance.

  With a wordless cry I turned for true, directing those behind to follow. Plasma flashed, the violet of it transformed to deepest crimson by my suit’s entoptics, redder than blood. The evil little machines fell like locusts, like cicadas at the end of their brief summers, cut to ribbons against that wall of purple fire.

  High above, great turbines started to whir. Dead the Demiurge might be without her master, but the emergency systems still functioned, great ventilation fans turning to pull the helium up and away. I turned back, no longer concerned for the swarming drones. There were larger problems, and nearer to hand.

  Perhaps the Cielcin do not suffer cold as we, for those that still stood hurried forward—red shapes like flames bright against the frigid blue of the world. Many of them—those who were masked—seemed as unaffected by the gas as they were by the cold. These charged forward, swords drawn. The bulk of our lancers were tied up with the nahute swarming above and behind, and they cleared the floor between their line and ours, leaping over the bodies of their dead and ours, a terrible sound going up like the shrill crying of birds.