by Stephen Hunt
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Moths.
It was a five-day trip to the Blez plantation. By the fourth day, I thought we were out of the woods – at least figuratively speaking. Optimistic fool that I am. Lights began to appear soon after morning. Or at least, what passed for morning on Hexator … a mechanical clock ending our sleep where we’d camped in the road. There was a faint illumination, however. Not sunrise’s first gleaming. Setting aside my breakfast I looked closer. Blue fireflies darted in and out of the forest of thick towering mushrooms.
‘Kodama!’ groaned our driver as he stopped feeding the horses. ‘Playful spirits.’
I glanced at Moz. ‘There’s must be a residual network running between the capital and the abandoned cities.’
‘Probably powered by an old geo-thermal tap,’ agreed my robot friend. ‘Ain’t any bleeding solar array worth a damn working in this murk.’
‘Don’t antagonize the Kodama,’ said Simenon, watching the lights flit above our head. ‘They’re full of mischief.’
That last part was at least true. It must have been hard for the Kodama. Symbiotic software – rogue viruses, fey hacks, high-level routines and autonomous agents. Avatars which clustered around gods like the billions of prokaryotic microorganisms inhabiting a human gut. But Inuno had abandoned Hexator, leaving nowhere for her Kodama to go. Most would have died out. But some persisted. They caused problems even inside the Humanitum – where the gods they colonized could moderate their behaviour. But out here? Godless. Abandoned cities to infest. Forgotten long distance comms network. Breeding imps and goblins to tease the locals. Ironically, the Kodama could no longer plague the capital. There, the technological base had been over-used by mankind far beyond the point of ecological breakdown. With anything imported firewalled and resistant to their thievery, of course.
These Kodama seemed fascinated by Mozart, circling at a safe distance, occasionally buzzing down to harass him. ‘Little blighters. If I find the printer they’re using to run solid, I’ll smash it.’
‘Probably hidden far in the forest, part of an ancient wireless mast’s maintenance system,’ I assured him. ‘Just let them be.’
He reached out and tried to seize one of the lights, but it pulled away, revealing its true shape as it diverted power away from its dazzling illumination strip. A dodecahedron mesh filled with tiny rotors and a collection of photonic chips revolving inside. ‘I’ll leave it out after I’ve pulled one apart, doc. Manners maketh the machine, as you always say.’
I do. But normally only to encourage Moz not to break someone’s kneecaps. A couple of Kodama teamed up to try and lift away a lantern tied to our wagon. The driver cursed and flicked at them with his horse whip. The Kodama dipped to the side and varied their rotor’s torque to growl unpleasant noises at him. Simenon moved to the side of the wagon and managed to shoo the wild machine-life away with a lantern pole. Eventually, the convoy began moving again with our fey visitors circling above, an unwanted aerial escort for the journey’s remaining leg.
Simenon had the look about of him of a man with much on his mind. ‘Where will you and your ship set out for after the spore-spice auctions finish, sir?’
‘Wherever the foldship in orbit goes,’ I said. ‘My freighter is far too small to be able to travel independently. The foldship’s route across the stars will carry her back to Arius, eventually. The systems around Arius form a sector known as the Citrine Jewel. Rich worlds, wealthy and long-established. That’s where the best spore-spice prices are commanded.’
‘How long will that journey take, Master Roxley?’
‘Seven months or so, give or take a few weeks. Journey time always varies.’
‘Because of pirate attacks?’
Hah. The boy had quite an imagination. ‘You need a foldship to catch a foldship, Simenon. And anyone with a fold-drive can make immensely more money in legitimate trade, transporting passengers and cargo as a mothership.’ Of course, there was always the occasional marauder ambush in orbit. But rarely inside the Humanitum where our competent navy patrolled the home ground. ‘No, laddie, transit times vary with the ebb and flow of dark matter underpinning our universe. Foldships take advantage of dark matter’s unconventional quantum properties in the field of retro-causality and entanglement to circumvent the light-speed barrier. Dark matter’s substrate possesses tides and channels which our foldship must follow. Such currents change over time in ways which are difficult to predict, but which my foldship must navigate, nevertheless.’
I didn’t tell Simenon about the risk of being on-board a foldship riding currents that suddenly dried out mid-voyage, leaving the vessel stranded in the dark. Centuries of sub-light travel away from the nearest world or foldable concentration of dark matter. Foldships were sentient, the radiant angels of our gods. We sheltered under their wings and trusted them not to take undue risks by riding fast, thin currents liable to vanish. Thick currents of dark matter with their attendant slow-and-steady were the order of the day when it came to interstellar travel. Besides, these days, a stranded foldship was more of an inconvenience than a death sentence. Nobody wanted the irritation of arriving late after unplanned centuries in cryo-suspension, however engaging the virtual world offered by the ship. And as for playing generation ship, William Roxley would rather not arrive at his destination with several new additions to an unplanned family.
‘Perhaps you might need a cabin boy for such a long voyage, sir?’
Hah. And who, I wonder, did Simenon have in mind for that position? ‘Whatever have you been reading to give you such notions?’
Simenon tapped his worn leather satchel, indicating he carried his entertainment with him. ‘It’s called Treasure Island, Doctor. Have you read the book?’
Well, that explained much. I shouldn’t sneer. Simenon had taught himself to read on the streets. If our positions had been reversed, I dare say I would be as illiterate as the fungi here. ‘Indeed, when I was as young as you. If you ever want to conjure a family name for yourself, Master Simenon, you might do worse than Hawkins. But I suspect the foldship in orbit above would take it as an insult to her thousands of drone sub-units if I brought a human valet on-board. Ships act cursed funny when it comes to demarcation lines.’
Simenon tried not to appear too disappointed. Would I take him up on his offer? Well, I had a few good suspicions about his motivations for such job-seeking. I could turn those to my advantage.
‘I shall give some thought to the idea,’ I explained. ‘Indentured apprentices on-board honest free trader vessels such as mine need to be duly enrolled with the Humanitum General Register and Data Office of Voidmen.’
‘That requires a lot of paperwork?’ he asked, a trace of hope in his question.
‘True-death might be optional inside the Humanitum, laddie, but taxes, paperwork and bureaucracy are still a universal constant.’
‘Really?’ noted Mozart after the boy scuttled out of earshot.
‘A good yarn benefits from a few props.’
‘Crapped-out landing ship and patched cloak not doing it for you?’
‘How about a crapped-out robot, Moz?’
‘Give it a flipping rest.’
Mozart made a valid point. Would I be doing Simenon a favour, removing him from his guide’s role and all that was familiar to him? Even if said familiarity mostly encompassed the dictionary definition of “dirt-poor” and “hopeless”. Back in the Humanitum, Simenon would be regarded as a curiosity at best. Would I be vain Captain Smith, presenting Pocahontas to English society as my civilized savage? But Odd’s fish, just because you can’t save everyone doesn’t mean you can’t save at least one. And there were hundreds of worlds where having Simenon blundering around would prove an artful misdirection from my real purposes. But did I have hundreds of worlds left in me, anymore? Perhaps not. Mostly I just felt dog-tired these days.
We continued our journey in contemplative silence. Would that it had lasted all the way. When clouds of crossbow bolts began to
bury themselves inside warriors and wagons, I could only admire our attackers’ timing. Close enough to the Blez plantation that our escort’s guard was starting to lower. Not close enough that a scout could ride hard and make it back in time with reinforcements. Mozart grabbed me and shoved me down to the wagon’s empty flatbed with his left arm, using his right to push Simenon out of harm’s way. Their bolts’ fletchings were made of something combustible and oil-soaked. Volleys came in as flaming scratches which overwhelmed my low-light visor. I was left blinking, my visor’s primitive night-vision system a mess of flaring suns. Obviously, the point. Although it rather begged the question how our attackers coped, showering fire-bolts into our ranks with such vigour?
Hardened professionals to a man (and woman), the warriors’ shields hummed into life in response to the ambush. Circular energy fields extended from plate-sized projectors. Wolf’s eyes glowed in each plate’s centre, golden yellow given they were still fully charged. When I saw a sea of crimson reds I knew we’d be in deep trouble. Bolts began to ricochet from the shields, a rapid thwack-thwack sound, once for the strike, once for the kinetic repulse. Our escort didn’t bother aiming their response. Weapons barked up and down the convoy. Smoke and gunfire emptied into the night. Many of our warriors’ carbines possessed sawn-off barrels, perfect for forest clearance against a concealed enemy. An eerie clicking returned from the forest, as though our attackers were tutting back in anger.
My driver retrieved his repeating carbine from under the wagon’s seat, working its lever-action trigger as fast as he could reload, ejected casings rattling across our wagon. Nobody with time to ask the obvious question. Why were bandits attacking an empty convoy before it rolled back out loaded to the brim with a priceless spore-spice cargo? There were less obvious questions, too. Moths were attracted to bright lights: these ones seemed to be trying to overwhelm us with incendiary bolts. Did nobody understand the inherent irony?
There was a thud of flaming arrows striking our wagon’s side. Mozart swore and bent over to pull the bolts out, the oily inferno hardly oxidizing his heavy metal fists. He didn’t have enough purchase to remove them all. Fire began spreading across our vehicle. Mozart leaped out to beat the flames down. That was when our attackers abandoned their concealment inside the forest. Perhaps sixty savages emerged, screaming and sprinting full pelt for the convoy. What a queer sight they made. Long flat masks carved into beast-like muzzles, blue-woad dyed skin bare below hundreds of small plates of wooden armour tied together with cord. It was as though the howling horde wore crocodile-scales. Archers hung back in the forest, keeping up a rain of projectiles while artfully managing not to skewer their own advancing forces. Never mistake primitive for unskilled. And a crossbow bolt through the skull would do for Sweet William as well as a gauss rifle pellet magnetically accelerated to Mach two.
Spears seemed the order of the day among those charging, along with wooden clubs surrounded by razor-sharp stone blades. A group of savages made the mistake of testing them against Mozart. He pulled out fire arrows from our wagon and punched them into the howling mob. When the robot grew bored of that, he yanked one of the savages off his feet and whipped his body around, sending the ambushers flying back towards their forest. Our brave driver had less armour and even less luck. A spear drove into his stomach, lifting him off the footplate. A pair of savages vaulted into our wagon from the opposite side of the road. One immediately hurtled back off the wagon. I had a fraction of a second to see the revolver clutched in Simenon’s shaking hand, the boy standing up to aim his shots. No time for Simenon to draw a bead on the savage’s compatriot. That warrior swung his club at me and I only avoided the blow by stepping into the attack, throwing myself at him in a sport’s tackle. Both of us tumbled, intertwined towards the hard ground. The thought of the pistol belted to my waist briefly crossed my mind while the flames along the wagon’s sideboard burnt my face. I would be clubbed dead before I could upholster it, though. Cursed difficult to shoot a determined assailant in close quarters combat, even with a small pistol. The gun is never the weapon. Only the hand that holds it.
Dirt’s embrace winded both of us, Mozart’s stomping steel feet nearly cracked open my head as he fought off a second wave of savages. From my assailant’s yell, I believe Mozart actually trod on him. Not hard enough to end our duel, however. We both rose to our feet at the same time. My unkind friend spun his razored club as he sized me up. I splintered the wagon’s lantern pole with my right hand, catching my improvised Bo staff as it fell.
Mask-face went for a side blow that would have left my brain embedded with sharp splinters of stone. I dislocated his wrist using a Tsue Sho No Kon form, then gave him a further lesson in Shuri-ryū style by breaking his arm in two places with my Bo staff. He was probably wondering why he’d dropped his club from his numb fingers when I stepped into his fighting stance and flipped him into the wagon. The wagon’s flaming sideboard met his fierce face mask and for this savage, his war was over.
Mozart’s presence was enough to tip the battle’s balance in our convoy’s favour. It didn’t take long for the savages to grow tired of spending lives attempting to bash in his metal head, attackers turning tail and vanishing into the forest’s embrace. Ox horns sounded from within the forest, making the retreat official. Our mounted escort drew wooden spheres from saddlebags, each globe held on a dangling chain. They lit fuses on the spheres before whirling them around their heads like competitors in a shot-put event. Off the spheres flared into the forest. Detonations followed, and soon the thick undergrowth on both sides of the road was ablaze with crackling explosions. Any surviving savages desperately fleeing the conflagration.
On our side, panicked horses were calmed. Wounded tended to. The convoy’s order was rapidly reestablished to finish its journey,
‘Who are they?’ I asked a warrior kicking bodies, checking for signs of life; short-barrelled gun at the ready to finish off survivors. ‘Bandits?’
He tapped one of the wooden masks with his foot. ‘These buggers? Ferals. Only forest savages wear clickers.’
So, our assailants had crawled out of one of the colony’s fallen cities. I didn’t point out to the warrior that after the capital collapsed, his descendants’ lifestyle wouldn’t be any different from these poor benighted souls. I lifted the mask off the corpse to examine it. Wooden-analogue carved into a beast’s snarling muzzle and daubed in garish colours. A cult of nature being worshiped here. Well, why not? They only had nature left to offer them succour. On the mask’s inside face I discovered a fascinating clockwork mechanism. A hand-cranked echolocation system. So, that was how they could set us ablaze and still see to attack in the forest darkness. The source of that strange tutting sound, too. Not all technology abandoned, yet. It was almost enough to make me feel a vestige of hope for the degenerated settlers.
Something glinted underneath the body. I rolled the Feral over and discovered something I never expected to find. The handset of a radio receiver and transmitter backpack strapped to the savage, its antenna broken in the fall. There hadn’t been a radio station active on the moon for centuries. Such technology as rare as virtue here. I ran my hands over it. Primitive and locally manufactured. And my guess was not by these Ferals. Who are they talking to? Who gave this to them? And more to the point, what are they saying? This put a rather different complexion on matters. I needed to question a savage. I went to check the fellow whose face I had introduced to the side of our wagon, but our vengeful escort had already given him a lead farewell salute. All the other fallen, too, when I checked them.
Thoughts of interrogation flew from my mind when Mozart yelled across to me. I saw what had caught his attention as I sprinted over. Simenon lay on his back, sprawled across the wagon. His pistol dropped, its cylinder full of spent casing and useless now. Two crossbow bolts had found their mark inside the lad’s chest. One should have been enough to kill him, but somehow the boy clung tenuously to life. His eyes fixed on the star-scattered heavens, a faint mo
aning escaping from his lips.
‘He’s dying,’ growled Mozart. Moz lifted the boy out of the wagon and laid him gently on the ground for me to examine.
I didn’t need a bioscanner to know that he was only minutes from expiring. Simenon had suffered what’s colloquially known as a sucking chest wound. Air sucked as a death-rattle into Simenon’s thoracic cavity through his chest wall, rather than through the airways into his lungs where it belonged. I had my medical bag with me for the journey, but a handheld laser cauterizer wasn’t going to cut it. Quite literally. I needed a full state-of-the-art surgical theatre for a chance to stabilise him.
‘I can save him on board the Expected Ambush. We need to get him inside the medical bay,’ I whispered, kneeling down for a closer inspection of his ruined chest. My ship would need to drop like a bat. Simenon was fading away in front of us.
‘You call the old girl down from orbit you flush our cover away. End everything we came here to do.’
One life balanced against how many more? Mozart, my cold steel conscience. ‘How can I let him die?’
‘You can’t blow our mission, doc.’
But I had to do something. ‘Get me my prayer box, Moz. Inside my bag on the wagon.’
‘You expect Modd to save Tiny Tim? You’re having a laugh.’ But Moz went to retrieve my box, all the same.
I dipped into my prayer box, removed a handful of Martian sand and scattered it across the crimson bubbling wound in Simenon’s chest. Then I began to pray with all my heart. ‘Modd, you ungrateful wretch, save this worthy servant of your Will now dying in your unappreciative name. Let the blessed rust of your mainframes mixed with your temple sands reach out to you via entanglement’s action at a distance. By superposed states and the violations of Bell’s inequality, manifest your blessed gifts here.’
A crowd of warriors gathered behind me, curious to see if I was mad or just deluded. I heard uneasy laughs. Let them gather. Let them witness the power of the gods. Let them see all they had thrown away with their monkey squabbles and shortsighted squandering of civilization’s precious legacy. They began to murmur and make superstitious wards. In their mind, they were knights serving their lady. But they had never met Merlin. Not until now.