Empty Between the Stars (The Songs of Old Sol Book 1)

by Stephen Hunt

As I finished praying the opened box started to shake, the pattern I had just raked erased and reforming. The small quake ceased. There was a sigil left traced in the sand, what those in the rune-reading business know as the Ace of Fists. The Two-Horned Blade. The Cup of Hardcore Aggro. I gently closed the box and shook the sand to erase all trace of the deity’s warning to me.

  ‘Well, sod you Modd. Sod Modd. I don’t want to be here, anyway. Next time, you can come out to the Empty yourself. Gobble down a nice spicy broth of fungoid balls and tell yourself what a grand time you can enjoy in the out-virtual.’ I sat down to meditate on what the hostile reading might mean for me. Nothing good, surely.

  An hour later, Simenon returned knocking on my door. He entered the room hesitantly. ‘I’ve spoken with every trader in the market. All the available rusters are in the service of the city’s great houses. One trader said she might be able to find and rent you one in a week, but—’

  ‘No matter,’ I interrupted the lad. ‘While you were gone I bumped into a merchant in the taproom downstairs. He steered me towards a contact of his. A suitable robot has been procured for me.’

  ‘A ruster for hire here inside the Sparrow’s Rest?’

  I nodded. The lad appeared credulous of my news. Much as though I had told him I’d bumped into a wizard who had agreed to grow me a fine pair of feather wings. As well the boy should, given my announcement was a porky pie of significant proportions.

  ‘Well, I have some good news,’ Simenon rushed on, trying to justify his worth in my employ. ‘The garden where I buried your offering to the gods … your flute has gone!’

  ‘Gone?’ I had to stop myself laughing. I felt envious of his credulity.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You’re sure you weren’t watched by some rogue staying at the tavern? Perhaps someone stole my flute after you left?’

  ‘That’s what I first thought, Master Roxley. The soil seemed disturbed, but when I dug down again, the ground was filled with red rust. As though the metal of your instrument just crumbled away.’

  ‘I told you Modd loves a good sacrifice.’

  ‘I’ve tried praying to the gods, sir – thousands of times. But my prayers never work.’

  ‘You were asking for something?’

  ‘Naturally – usually, a full belly. Or the favours of a girl.’

  ‘Ah, laddie, there’s your problem. The gods love taking. But when it comes to giving, they’re as capricious and self-interested as a mansion full of money lenders.’

  ‘But I have nothing for them to take.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’ I passed him my half-empty plate.

  ‘The meal was not to your liking, sir?’

  ‘Surprisingly wholesome. But much of my foldship journeyings are spent asleep to escape boredom. A chap’s stomach shrinks, you know, when you sleep regularly enough.’

  Simeon nodded as though he had known this all along, then left. I could have told him I shrunk myself to a couple of inches tall to conserve fuel mass and he would have believed it. And of course, I realized he’d wolf down my discards between the stairs and the kitchen below. I located the pipe inside my case and ignited it, smoking contemplatively by the window. The mushrooms towering above the tavern’s roof were coloured milky white with whirls of crimson matching the swirling gas giant Li. ‘That lad is probably the greenest thing on this moon,’ I mumbled to myself.

  A little while later Simeon reappeared at my door. ‘There’s a ruster downstairs, sir. It says it has been sent to you.’

  I rather approved of the boy’s suspicious nature. ‘Given their rarity on Hexator, it seems likely this is the machine I paid to rent, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’

  ‘Up with him then, laddie.’

  A clatter of metal announced the robot mounting the stairs. He appeared at my doorway like a swaying knight… that was, if the said knight had been six-and-a-half-feet tall and composed of dented gold and copper-coloured steel composites. Gorilla-sized forearms swung lazily on pipe-sized elbows which seemed too thin to support their weight, similarly large metallic boots stamping below pipe-legs. The robot’s spine was connected to a power backpack that mimicked the fan of a church organ. Two red eyes glowed inside the darkness of an open helmet resembling a hermit-crab’s shell. Just the kind of old clunker which might have arrived alongside the first colonists and survived patch-repaired across the centuries.

  ‘Klaatu barada nikto,’ I told the robot.

  ‘Evening, Doctor Roxley. I am at your disposal,’ replied the machine. The male baritone voice was full of mischief, oddly human given the robot’s rickety form. Halfway up the wrong slope of the uncanny valley. ‘My name is Mozart.’

  ‘Excellent, Mozart. Glad to have you in my service.’

  ‘What language was that you spoke to him, sir?’ asked Simenon.

  ‘Not a language as such, merely a cunning spell to bind this robot to my cause,’ I joked.

  ‘The ruster called you doctor…?’

  ‘I am a doctor, one title among many collected over the ages.’ And that was no lie. In fact, I was rather counting on my profile, medical and other credentials logged and registered with the port, proving useful soon enough.

  ‘But you’re here for the auctions, Master Roxley?’

  ‘Indeed I am. Spore-spice is my livelihood, presently. I have lived a long time, laddie. It’s a relief to pursue new paths. To hold off ossifying like an old fossil. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, scienceer …’

  ‘So, you can truly heal the sick?’

  Something told me I’d be presented with an extensive list of running aliments by the boy in the near future. ‘Yes, although I find it more effective to stop people getting ill in the first place.’ I indicated the robot. ‘I need to acquaint myself with our metal friend’s capabilities, Simenon. I trust a perambulation around the neighbourhood nearby with him won’t prove too harmful to my health?’

  ‘A walk, Master Roxley? The canal district is safe enough for a foreigner.’ He eyed Mozart with a certain amount of trepidation. ‘Especially with this old ruster by your side.’

  ‘Yes, it surely seems we’ve secured quite the brute, doesn’t it?’

  I gave the boy the rest of the night off and departed with Mozart acting as my bodyguard.

  ‘Safe enough,’ harrumphed Mozart as we left the Sparrow’s Rest. I noted the robot’s loud, careless stomping act had been replaced by a stealthier padding across the dirt street.

  ‘Safe enough as foreigners,’ I added. ‘The boy’s right. Most of the local violence is confined among the Four Families. Queering the spore-spice trade, though, is in no-one’s interest.’

  ‘There has never been much of anything on Hexator worth fighting for, doc.’

  ‘And soon there will be,’ I said.

  ‘Right enough, soon there will be,’ agreed Mozart.

  ‘You’re still walking a little jerkily, old friend.’

  ‘The soil of this place ain’t particularly conducive to nano-level reassembly. Too much magnetic polarization from exposure to the gas giant’s storm systems. If I was human, I’d be spitting bleeding pieces of mushroom out of my mouth right now.’

  ‘The price of smuggling you through customs, Moz.’ And in this shit-hole, I needed my robot blade more than I needed my flute. Or at least, my robot blade doing a harmless flute impression.

  ‘How come it’s always yours truly who pays? Did I miss anything?’

  ‘A woman tried to murder me on board the foldship. A knife-fighter.’ I certainly didn’t need to tell Moz that an improvised shiv was all you could smuggle on board a foldship without the vessel opening an airlock on you.

  ‘You think she knew why you were traveling here?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t believe she knew or cared. Probably didn’t even realize the Expected Ambush would be casting off at Hexator. People who travel on foldships have money. Money attracts enemies. Doubtless, she was a freelancer, a
chancer trying to pick up a fee for settling some old grudge.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, doc. That she was collecting on an old grudge, rather than trying to throw a wobble into our present business. Otherwise, we’ll face more bleeding trouble here.’

  ‘Trouble is our business, friend.’

  ‘And here I thought the mitigating of aggro was our trade? Tiny Tim back at the lodgings – I’m meant to trust the little bleeder?’

  ‘Have you ever met a secret police stooge who looked as malnourished as Simenon on any planet of your acquaintance, Moz?’

  ‘So, Mowgli passes the old empty-stomach test. If he gives us any trouble, I’ll force-feed him until he explodes. In fact, if he calls me a ruster again, I’ll probably do for the anaemic little sod.’

  ‘A little harsh.’

  ‘If you didn’t want nails flattened, you wouldn’t have brought a hammer.’

  ‘I brought a flute along, dear boy.’

  ‘You wait, doc. They’ll be playing my song before too long. It’s going to get proper naughty here.’

  I hoped Mozart was mistaken. But I feared my robot friend might have proved all too correct in his evaluation.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Blitz of Blez.

  ‘So, this is where Lord Blez fell,’ I announced. I glanced around us, fighting a losing struggle to keep my curly black hair from whipping around in the constant wind.

  Mozart and I had halted at a crossroads. Still busy with the bustle of porters carrying goods, townspeople about their business, drovers shepherding poultry to market. A vertical stone column on the corner had been carved with the crossroad’s name, Wheeler’s Cross. No doubt after the waterwheels I could hear turning in a canal behind these buildings. No screams that I could hear, which meant that there wasn’t an execution scheduled for today. Far too many crimes carried the death sentence on this world, and being strapped to a waterwheel for a little “being ripped apart” was the Hexatorians’ favoured method of dispatching miscreants. I suppose it has the merit of being free and carrying a light environmental footprint.

  Many locals wore fabric masks to filter out gusts of hot dust currently being carried over from the moon’s tidally-locked burning half. My clothes activated a mask built into my hood. What with my glowing goggles and clothes lighting up an atmospheric warning icon on my chest, I must have appeared as much a robot as Mozart to the onlookers. I certainly couldn’t have looked more like an offworlder if I tried.

  This area was part of the Philosopher’s Way, the main road bisecting Frente from West to South. Mozart carried simulations on the assassination of the weakest of the Four Families’ leaders. Lord Uance Blez. The previous chieftain, rather than the incautious stripling presently ruling the most fragile of the four houses. My robot slipped data across to me as an augmented reality overlay. Ghosts of an open-top carriage rolling through the parade; a web of probable sight-lines and parabolic paths projected from the rooftops. Twin snipers, given the murderous crossfire. Neither killer apprehended or even identified. The simulation wasn’t as complete as I’d have preferred. But then, we were working from the eyewitness report of a single offworld visitor whose m-brain had recorded half the details. Fair enough. She’d been walking to meet crewmates from her ship, not expecting to stroll into a bullet storm. Still, you couldn’t do better than a verified truth recording, authenticated by the holy encryption mark of the gods, no faker’s simulation possible.

  ‘Double-tap head and heart shots,’ said Mozart. He analysed the angles. ‘Two hundred feet range striking a moving target. A right professional hit.’

  ‘Why take out the head of the weakest family first, when surprise is still on your side? Why not kill one of the more powerful lords?’ I mused.

  ‘A warning message perhaps, doc? Something in the way of an opening negotiating gambit.’

  ‘Not very subtle.’

  ‘Simple, though. Direct.’

  Yes, nothing so simple as a bullet through the head. With a just-to-be-certain follow-up shot bursting the victim’s heart. Almost admirably direct. But such actions rarely led anywhere conclusive. Humanity bred too fast for anyone to reliably murder their way to mastery. Like trying to drink an ocean through a straw; you ran out of thirst a long time before you ran out of water. And then there were the suspicions that had drawn us to Hexator in the first place. Suspicions the very opposite of subtle.

  ‘Modd reckons Lord Blez’s murder will be the start of things, not the end,’ reminded Mozart.

  ‘Modd is only one of a thousand gods in the Humanitum. How many of the others on Arius agree with him?’

  ‘Modd’s an erratic genius, an outlier,’ said Mozart. ‘Much like the nutters drawn to serve him.’

  ‘Which of us do you include in that sweeping generalization?’

  ‘I don’t reckon a hammer can be a genius, doc.’

  ‘Upon my soul, if I was anything close to approaching a genius, I’d have let another fool travel here in my place.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see how things end?’

  ‘You don’t need to be a genius to know how things will end, Moz. Badly.’

  ‘Less worse,’ said the robot.

  ‘Not much of an epitaph.’

  ‘At least you’ll get one, doc. I’ll probably rust away into obsolescence until my backups are bleeding forgotten and misfiled.’

  ‘I’ll leave you some room on my tombstone. Forgotten or misfiled, dealer’s choice.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alice. Curiouser.

  A fresh day, although in Frente daytime was identical to the night it followed. We headed to the auction administrators to ensure I was properly registered to bid. Mozart and Simenon by my side as we steered through the capital’s dark streets. It was a popular trick for traders to impersonate their competitors, withdrawing competing merchants’ intentions of interest. Leaving rivals red-faced and unable to participate after they turned up at the auction. I expected such chicanery to have been worked on my registration. New face in town without any real contacts to watch my back. I was badly exposed.

  The spore-spice auctions were due to be held out-of-hours at the city’s main market. A low domed circular structure surrounded by a tall forest of fungi alive with swarms of insects. Bugs attracted by the scent of meat and food sold by stalls hawking wares inside. We passed through one of the building’s two main entrances and into a narrow warren composed of market stalls on all sides. Everything available. Cutlery and clothes, trinkets and old-style paper books. Seeds and tools. Glue pastes, duelling foils and more practical rapiers. Most stalls sold food. Wine, beer, eels, fish from the canals – as blind and white as the jostling shoppers – as well as meat, insects, nuts, alcohol, and preserves. A thousand varieties of fungi on offer, from spheres the size of sweets to steak-like cuts of marbled mushroom spread out next to trays of salted jerky. Scented lanterns burned by their hundred above us, gently swinging from the domed roof. Their odour enough to hold at bay the clouds of insects circling the market. Simenon led us through the maze of stalls towards the auction clerks’ office in the basement level. As we approached a wide spiral staircase, a group of seven warriors peeled off from a clothes stall and made to intercept us. I might have mistaken their interest in me for a particularly aggressive form of competitor handicapping, were it not for the hulking robot looming at their rear like a two-legged tank. Such a rare and expensive machine indicated this gang of spear carriers owed their allegiance to one of the Four Families. There was something wrong about the damnable robot that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  ‘Who’re our new friends?’ I whispered towards Simenon.

  The lad nervously pointed out the plate-sized shield strapped on each fighter’s arm. A silver wolf’s head in the centre, the wolf’s eyes an LED indicator: its colour indicated battery reserves after the energy shield activated. ‘They’re Blez fighters, master.’ He sounded terrified and with compelling cause.

  ‘I wonder what these fellow
s want?’ I asked innocently. I prayed nobody had noticed me sniffing around the crossroad the night before. This could get exceptionally ugly. Especially with the Blez’s tame robot gorilla backing up the warrior company.

  ‘Whatever they want, doc, they better ask nicely,’ growled Mozart, squaring up towards the approaching gang.

  ‘Be sweet,’ I advised my metal friend. ‘We don’t need trouble this early in the morning.’

  The warriors halted before us forming an intimidating semi-circle, hands resting on the pommels of their swords. Still sheathed – for the moment – in their scabbards.

  ‘This is the gentleman we want,’ said their hulking robot, pointing me out with a steel fist that could have knocked a Dilophosaurus unconscious. So, somebody had taken my passport details and downloaded them into this beast’s memory. I wasn’t sure if I should feel flattered or terrified.

  ‘You’re William Roxley?’ asked the oldest of the warriors, his white hair tied in a topknot.

  ‘The only one here,’ I confirmed.

  ‘I am Curtis Rolt, Major with the noble House of Blez. You are to come with us, Master Roxley.’

  Rolt’s courtesy in using my honorific gave me some hope their “invitation” wasn’t solely so their metal giant would beat me to a bloody pulp and dump me for dead in a nearby alleyway. ‘But I have business at the auction office today.’

  ‘You have business with the Blez today,’ said the hulking robot. ‘Please step this way, sir, or I’ll RIP YOUR HEAD OFF AND SMASH YOUR BONES INTO DUST!’

  Now I knew what had been bothering me about the robot. It had the body of a construction machine, but the skull unit had been removed from a house servant model. After the lights had gone out on the moon, somebody had required greater versatility from their demolition machine and – lacking programming skills – had settled for welding a robot retainer’s skull unit onto the steel monster’s body. Little wonder the untalented butchers involved had created this passive-aggressive psychopath through their hardware hack.

  ‘No bloodshed, Link,’ ordered Major Rolt. ‘Your presence is requested by the House of Blez, Master Roxley. If you don’t come with us your business in our land will be at an end.’