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

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Sentries told me Lord Zane was climbing his way back to Habur Mell’s Chapel,’ said Arto Jagg. Our guide wasn’t in much of a physical state to be on his feet, but nobody seemed able to stop him. Least of all me. Still, Arto should have been keeping Simenon company in Hebateen’s poorly provisioned hospital facility. ‘My son was helping Lord Sarlee inside the deep mines, overseeing a final burn.’

  The worker shook his head while other families rushed in, desperately seeking news of their loved ones. ‘Sorry, Arto. Much of the deeps have collapsed. Lord Sarlee, your Rauf, they were crushed by subsidence. Plenty of warriors and our workers in the passages running up to the chapel, too. This machine man’s the only one we found limping out of the tunnels,’ said the grim-faced miner, stepping back to reveal a robot among the mob. Mozart, helping the rescue party carry canvas-wrapped corpses out!

  My heart leapt. Thank Modd. Moz strode forward towards us. I take my miracles where I find them.

  ‘We’ve recovered bodies, none of them recognizable,’ added the rescue worker. ‘We’re working carefully, mind, in case there’s any more faulty blasting charges downside.’

  ‘Keep digging, you keep checking,’ pleaded Arto.

  I said nothing. I feared Master Jagg’s last desperate hopes were about to be fatally crushed, too. How can it be otherwise?

  ‘Old ruster,’ I said, by way of greeting to my robot. ‘Still intact, I see.’

  ‘Benefit of not having lungs to fill,’ shrugged Mozart, unembarrassed for having survived when so many others hadn’t. Being buried by rock slides no doubt a minor inconvenience to my steel-armoured companion. Surviving is what the two of us were best at.

  Mozart reached out to squeeze Arto’s shoulder with one hand, a very human gesture as he signed at me with his other. We need to talk.

  I led the robot aside, making sure nobody else stood close enough to overhear our conversation. ‘How bad was it?’

  ‘I clocked a line of blasting charges drilled into the tunnel a few seconds before they popped. Faulty explosives my steel arse. That collapse was no accident. Someone meant to bring the mine down on top of us.’

  I sighed. Bad enough Lord Blez’s assassins had tried to murder me inside the forest. Now, they’d attempted to slaughter our entire party. Sweet William still stood, but plenty of others had picked up the butcher’s bill intended for him. Master Jagg’s son, the gods know how many innocent miners as well as the Derechor forces on the hunting expedition.

  ‘There’s a lot more,’ Mozart said. He told me, and my eyes narrowed as I listened to everything my robot friend had to say about the incident.

  ‘We need to get ahead of this,’ I spat.

  ‘You got an idea, doc?’

  Yes. Our enemies had taken their toll. Long past time to reply with a little mischief of our own. But how?

  ***

  I waited inside one of Hebateen’s ore mills, its floor covered with human remains, each crushed mess mercifully concealed by a cheap woollen blanket. I wasn’t the only occupant. Hundreds of wailing family members searched for missing parents, sons, wives, daughters; all wandering blankly among the corpses. Clothes torn, miners’ bodies mangled beyond recognition – trying to locate relatives for burial had become a near-impossible task. At least, using simple sight.

  Jenelle stood grim-faced by my side watching the grieving mining families. ‘This never changes. Always the same after a major cave-in.’

  ‘Did you ever recover your family’s bodies from the mine?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Jenelle said, bitterly. ‘But then, there wasn’t a couple of Lord Derechors lying among the fallen to make digging corpses out politically profitable for the Mine Master and his courtiers. They just closed that section of the mine and dug into more profitable territory.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the life. That’s the bargain people strike, here.’

  A demon’s bargain. I wondered how many idiots Jenelle had killed in her feud before the Mine Master found it expedient to export his difficulties? I sighed, unable to stand the scene of collective human suffering any longer. I turned to Mozart. ‘Be so good as to retrieve my medical case from our quarters.’ I climbed up onto a horse-driven treadmill to attract the crowd’s attention. ‘Listen to me, everyone! Go back to your homes and return with any sheets and items of clothing used by your missing loved one. Dirty, if you please, not clean. The filthier the better. I shall run medical tests that will use your items to help you identify each and every body lying here.’

  Superstitious rumblings sounded from the families, signs invoked for their hollow spirits’ protection. Poor lost wretches. I explained what I proposed to the Mine Master and he finally understood my scheme, managing to chivvy families home to do as I had asked. Mozart returned with my case and I set up my STR profiling analyser. It took six hours to recover DNA samples from the personal items of all the dead, create a profile index and likewise sample the corpses.

  Harder yet to assuage the grief of those with no corpses to bury after I ran the last of the matches. How many lost forever under the rockfall? One is a loved one too many.

  Arto Jagg’s child, at least, was not among those forever buried. I led the man gently over to the bundle I had identified as his son. Miners uncovered Rauf Jagg’s remains lying buried next to Sarlee Derechor. Noble and commoner, indistinguishable from each other in death, if not in the quality of their living.

  ‘It should have been me,’ sobbed Arto, kneeling by the ruins of all he loved.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I thought much the same when I stood where you do, now. Better if the old fool went first, instead.’

  ‘How do you bear it? How do you stand it?’ he wailed.

  I crunched the burnt-out prayer mat as though wringing a wurm’s neck. ‘Revenge, mostly.’

  ‘Who do I have to take revenge against?’ he cried.

  I lent in, speaking low, ‘I don’t believe the collapse was a blasting charge accident. None of the nitroglycerin charges I saw on your warriors’ belts were sweating.’ I wanted to tell Arto more. I ached to. He deserved as much of the truth as I possessed. But it was hard to say which of the two of us that knowledge would prove more dangerous for.

  ‘Who, then?’ Arto snarled.

  ‘Enemies who hated the Lords Derechor, the same people who loathed Lord Blez.’

  ‘That’s almost everyone!’

  ‘I will find them,’ I promised Arto. ‘And I will be their end. Not for Lady Blez or the Watch or the House of Derechor, but for Rauf Jagg.’

  He gripped my hand as tight as a vice before swaying off back through the maze of bodies, dazed by a lesser form of madness. One I knew all too well. Had I done the man a favour by giving him something to live for? A drop of hate, the tincture of Sweet William’s existence. Arto had his son to bury, everything else must come later.

  I crossed the hall to where Jenelle stood over the mounds identified as Zane and Sarlee Derechor, supervising the Mine Master’s staff as they rolled the nobles’ remains into a stretcher for removal on her airship. I hoped these people could also produce a few blocks of ice to hold back decomposition. Either way, our flight back to the capital wasn’t going to be a happy one.

  ‘There will be trouble brewing over this,’ murmured the captain to me.

  ‘Are there no obvious successors inside the Derechor’s house?’ I asked.

  ‘Only about twenty cousins who all believe they’re an ideal fit for the role of Lord or Lady Derechor, most of whom loathe their kin’s claims with a passion reserved for spectators betting on a rat fight. They’ll be knifing each other before we make dock at Frente when word leaks out. Hell, the noble-born fools will probably be nobbling rivals just for a chance to bury these two at their graveyard’s plot.’

  On such shallow ground are claims to one’s birthright established, it seemed, out in the Empty.

  ‘You did a kind thing for these families,’ said Jenelle.

  ‘Done to them
or by them, it’s never wasted.’ I tossed my destroyed mat on the pile of abandoned possessions used for DNA testing.

  ‘Don’t you need it to pray?’ asked Jenelle.

  ‘No. Not any longer.’

  It was the killers behind this slaughter who needed to do that. Pray to their hollow heathen spirits screaming and twisting at the sky. They had buried the simple trader, here. Let us see if they liked what had clawed its way out of the darkness heading their way.

  ***

  I rested on Hebateen’s rocky mountainside, sitting cross-legged under the spaceport’s ruins. It was proving far harder than I expected to clear the images and memories of the cave-fall from my mind. Hard work, but I needed to tackle them now. If I left such grim fare festering much longer I would end up with a post-traumatic stress disorder. I’d return home to the foldship and find myself unable to traverse a narrow corner, let alone brave a hyperloop back on any civilized world.

  My meditations were soon to be interrupted, however. Jenelle Cairo appeared, climbing the slopes towards me. She set her lamp next to me and stared down at the dark ruins of the abandoned pleasure city below.

  A few campfires burnt in the ruins. Ferals, I supposed, making a home out of some crumbled casino. ‘I always feel sadness coming back here,’ said Jenelle.

  ‘A reminder of your previous life in the mines?’

  She sat down next to me. ‘Yes. All I lost out here.’

  ‘I know exactly how you feel.’

  ‘How many things have you been over the centuries?’ asked Jenelle.

  ‘A surgeon, a magistrate, a priest, a trader.’

  ‘Anything ridiculous. Anything to make me smile?’

  Would I dare attempt that? ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything other than ridiculous across of all my careers.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ insisted Jenelle, ‘that’s not even an answer. You must have done something …?’

  ‘Well, I briefly served as an ensign with the Humanitum Fleet.’

  I tried hard to forget those years and the follies of my youth. Not my finest hour, serving on the There’s Something Behind You.

  ‘Only an ensign? You didn’t end up as an admiral or at least a captain?’

  I smiled. ‘Of the two of us on these slopes, I’m afraid you are the only captain here. I was cashiered before I could rise any higher.’

  Jenelle’s curiosity had been piqued. ‘For what?’

  ‘A philosophical difference over the value of human life. I seemed to place it somewhat higher than my superiors.’

  The good captain nodded. ‘I can see you having terrible trouble taking orders.’

  ‘One last position,’ I remembered, ‘a deputy in the Watch on this awful moon at the waesucks end of the universe.’

  ‘I don’t see you lasting at that, either.’

  A bright light burned through the starfield above us, descending almost too fast to follow before it was lost behind the curve of our mountain.

  ‘A falling star,’ laughed Jenelle. ‘Do you still make wishes inside the Humanitum when you see one?’

  ‘What exactly should I wish for?’

  ‘This!’ said Jenelle, leaning over to kiss me. ‘Feel free to return my favour.’

  ‘Is that an order, captain?’ I asked, wondering just where this ambush had come from?

  She flipped me over, sliding on top. ‘Well, you are serving under me…’

  ‘I thought that was under sufferance?’

  ‘Oh, I’m still planning on making you suffer,’ she said, sliding her nails down my chest.

  I relented, realising I had been wrong about one thing. There might be a few good positions left to me, yet. Arto proved correct, his people were cut from granite. Jenelle’s body felt rock-hard to my touch, an athlete’s form that put the extra weight I carried on my body to shame. Tough grind toil and a low-calorie diet came free on Hexator. Jenelle slid her clothes off, her muscled alabaster form as dense and polished as marble, before she took care of mine. So many small scars that complemented my own. I didn’t ask where she had suffered her wounds. Dagger duels deep underground, rockfalls, a criminal’s quick blade? They weren’t mine to inquire about and Jenelle gifted me with the same courtesy, which was just as well. No honest trader should have come by so many.

  ‘I don’t want kindness from you,’ Jenelle whispered, fiercely kissing me, ‘I need you to punish me.’

  I obliged her, as a gentleman should a lady, making her nipples as hard as the surface we shared for our bed, turning the garden of her passion as hot and feverish as this moon’s dark night. A flint is made to be struck to sparks, and I rubbed her stone smooth as fiercely as she demanded. The locals had detected a devil inside Jenelle Cairo and tried to murder her for it, before her final banishment. They feared the woman like a breach in a magma chamber. They did, as I discovered, have a point. Jenelle ground against me, her hair crimson fire as I found her magma chamber and she showed me the depths of her heat. Fires twinkled down in the abandoned city, misted by the sweat rolling into my eyes. I doubted if they lit anything as feral as this night’s work on these slopes.

  I sensed Jenelle needed to fill the loss she had suffered here, and I obliged as best I could, finally resorting to glanding a cocktail of chemicals to match the seemingly endless energy of her vigour. I am a little ashamed to say that I finally resorted to an old mixed reality m-brain trick: overlaying Jenelle’s face with Alice’s, recreating the officer’s hot throbbing form as that of Lady Blez’s. Although, concerning current matters, Alice’s peccadillos ran more to dishing out amercement rather than seeking it; which rather disrupted my illusion.

  The weight of the mines had been Jenelle’s manacles once, now she urged and shaped my hands into their replacement. If reincarnation was the fate of those who spurned the Merge, I wouldn’t wish to return as a pit pony under this one’s care. She fair rode me to destruction, as careless of my body as she wished I be of her’s. After what seemed a lifetime of chastening, I spent myself inside Jenelle as she matched me with her pleasure, a stunned look on her face that her joys could be thus extended. Well, augments are a wonderful and flexible technology.

  And that is when it happened. All around us, Hexator exploded into life.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Renewal.

  Spore-blossom Season occurs once every five years on Hexator, its cycle matching a shift in the gravitational gradient between Hexator and the angry gas giant embracing the moon. A blip in orbital eccentricity and obliquity which generated fierce storms to energize and nourish the spores. In the distant past, when Hexator had been a jewel in the dark rather than a dark hole in a pit, travelers from the Humanitum had deemed the alien sight worthy enough to tour here. Every giant spire of vegetation in the forest simultaneously opened its gills and spouted showers of spores into the air. The higher the better, to catch thin, fast atmospheric currents that would carry spores across the uninhabitable furnace of Hexator’s far face. Fed with energy, ready to return to the deep forests on the dark side of the moon and become new life.

  Jenelle had laughed and cried at the explosion, a sight as rare as spore-blossom season, I suspected. White clouds. Pink clouds. Yellow clouds. Spores as large as plates and spores as small as dust. An evolutionary arms race of nature’s designs. There would be little celebrating at Hebateen as the mining clans buried their own, but everywhere else there would be feasting, frolics and picnics as far deep inside the forests as the locals dared venture. In the capital, certainly. For the great and minor houses, they had good reason to celebrate. The Four Families and the minor houses that would rise to their ranks had carefully gathered their spore-spice harvest before it spewed into the atmosphere. The warlords had treated it and stored it. Very soon, the spore-spice auctions would begin. I needed to attend and bid against the other offworlders if only to make a good show expected of an honest freetrader.

  Flying back to the capital you might have mistaken our airship for the ornament inside a snow-g
lobe. Propellers stirring currents of spores as we left the mountains and passed over the forests. Organic matter spattering across our portholes, falling like frost across the old salon’s viewing gallery. It seemed unreal to me. But not as strange as the atmosphere of bacchanalia and madness pervading Frente on my return. Not from natural high spirits. I wore a white fabric filter mask to hold the forest’s wild bounty at bay, as did Simenon. Mozart, of course, needed none. Few of the locals showed such restraint. The poor ran maskless through the streets around the airship docking tower, holding their hands up to the dark as swirls of “blossom” rained down around them. Snatching random hits and random highs. Only the rich clutched filter masks, not willing to expose themselves when they could afford to pay for cultivated narcotics anytime the desire struck them.

  ‘There’s not going to be barricades in the streets now, surely?’ I suggested to Jenelle, watching a pair of women and a man who had inhaled far too many aphrodisiac spores shed their clothes and inhibitions, before beginning the goat’s jig in a nearby alley.

  ‘Give it a few days. When the poor start to develop a tolerance after too much snorting. When the spore clouds thin out and the mob begin to comedown. There’ll be trouble like you wouldn’t believe.’ Jenelle turned to some of her crew coming off the airship. ‘Masks on! I’ll cashier any officer of the Watch found without a mask over the next three days!’

  A torch lighter came wobbling up to us, jabbing the tool of his trade in the air like a spear. He nearly walked straight into Mozart. ‘I’m a hoddy doddy man, today! How about you?’

  ‘Wrong species, mate. I’m naturally jolly. Now jog on.’

  I watched the wick on the end of the worker’s lighter clumsily trying to connect with a hanging lantern and prayed the capital’s firefighters wore masks for the duration of their insane festival.

  We left Jenelle to pass on the caskets containing House Derechor’s dead. Send them back to their squabbling kin. I would be happy to return to our lodgings. I hadn’t slept well on the airship. My prayers to Modd had received vague auguries leaving me uneasy; the bloody murder in the mines making me even more troubled. Not only for myself but how ill this promised for Alice’s future here. Walking into a wall of near hysteria on the streets amplified the feeling that this was Hexator’s fin de siècle.