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

by Stephen Hunt

  A trial by Alice’s peers, at the very least, ensued. With her confession on record there was no alternative, not even for Alice’s most ardent supporters and sucklers of her bounty. The grand assembly passed unanimous verdicts in record time on Lady Blez and her eldest son. Breaking by wheel for the crimes of multiple murder, sedition, treason, insurrection, and rebellion. The court’s sentence to be carried out immediately.

  And of course, the proposal for Hexator to petition the Melding for membership was tossed to the wind. All foreign forces commanded to depart the moon in haste. I suppose that included myself and my spartoi as well as all the filthy wurms on the world. Well, I would doubtless receive a warmer welcome in the Humanitum than the thwarted ambassador when she was recalled by the Melding. Failure wasn’t an attribute the wurms bred for inside their gene-pool.

  Finally, the motion passed for Rendor Blez to be married off to Nie Trabb’s niece under the protectorship of Lord Derechor. A dividing of the Blez spoils which Solomon himself would have approved of. That Lady Blez’s youngest son was deemed innocent of complicity in his mother’s crimes seemed of little comfort to Alice. I watched Lady Blez pulled red-faced and trembling through the temple chamber, her destination the canals and death.

  It took six large warriors to forcibly remove Daylen Blez, struggling every foot of the way. ‘Blood on all existing social conditions! I don’t recognise the authority of this fucking court! The axe’s kiss will arrive for every noble leech’s neck here!’

  Alice threw her arms towards the retainers inside the chamber as she was dragged backward. ‘I cared for the people! I’m the only one! I would have saved you all!’

  There was more virtue in Lady Blez’s signalling than her eldest son’s, but her body would still be twisted apart and broken by the waterwheels.

  Should I feel pity for Alice? A heathen-loving dreamer born into a position she’d abused to plot and subvert. I did feel compassion for my misguided lady, but perhaps I shouldn’t. Not for Simenon’s killer. Not for a heretic wurm lover. It was devolved idiocies such as Alice’s which had collapsed this world’s civilization in the first place. Ape Alpha barbarism causing darkness to descend until the very gods themselves had abandoned Hexator in despair. How many innocents had lived and died during that long night; sacrificed futures for their rulers’ sins of pride, envy, and avarice? So easy to love the woman; so hard to love her schemes.

  Sun of Clatch Rising slithered over to me, my three self-appointed spartoi bodyguards wobbling into position as they dipped kinetic gun heads at the disgusting creature. It wasn’t going to try anything, though. I read its loathsome species’ body language well enough to know that. Thoroughly defeated, I should say.

  ‘Good game played by William Roxley,’ hissed the wurm ambassador. ‘Clever, clever.’

  ‘Is that what you call what the two of us did to this damned world?’ I asked angrily. ‘A game? Tell that to the hundreds of dead we’ve left strewn across Hexator.’

  The wurm reared up threateningly. ‘How humans think.’

  ‘The fallen here, perhaps. You might have visited the righteous inside the Humanitum for a fuller perspective on the race of man.’

  It made a retching noise as though it was choking on its intestines. It seemed to physically deflate in front of my eyes, ‘Such visits not for Sun of Clatch Rising. Sun of Clatch Rising must end her life.’

  I shrugged. ‘Yes, your kind’s tradition. That’s the trouble with summits, they’re so often followed by a sharp cliff edge.’

  ‘Sun of Clatch Rising glad for final ending. Corrupted mind, filthy deviant-form dirtied with human-DNA. Thinking like human filth. Sun of Clatch Rising fearing her own death like human filth!’

  ‘You almost make me sad to see you go, madame ambassador. I’m sure the Melding will send another replacement soon enough to deal with the Empty. I’ll be there to frustrate your replacement’s evil heresies as long as I draw breath. Humble servant of Arius that I am.’

  ‘Servant,’ the wurm hissed raggedly in a foul mimicry of laughter. ‘William Roxley acts as slave of cold machine monsters created by self-kind. Clever, clever slave, but William Roxley still vassal-slave.’

  ‘Allow William Roxley to leave you to enjoy the freedom of your imminent euthanasia, then, madame ambassador.’ I bowed to the foul thing and left.

  I should have felt happy, victorious. But I found I couldn’t. All I could think of was Alice and her fate.

  Dark moon lost in the Empty; melancholy was her gift.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Sublime in the slime

  Jenelle Cairo appeared outside the old cathedral to escort me to the port. Her honour guard of Watch thugs hung back at a discrete distance. I could almost imagine we were two old friends out for a stroll in the warm evening air. In a way, I suppose we were.

  ‘What were you doing inside the hall?’ Jenelle questioned me, an interrogator to the end.

  ‘Clearing the central temple’s well,’ I said. ‘It’s state of repair bothered me, but I discovered it needs a better caretaker than I.’

  ‘Is that all you’ve been doing, cleaning?’

  ‘Of course, why do you ask?’

  ‘My officers couldn’t find Link’s body or head after the grand assembly ended.’

  I smiled at Jenelle. ‘How very curious.’

  ‘Also, Melding transports have been coming and going all day at the landing field,’ said Jenelle. ‘I haven’t spotted your shore traffic, but—’

  ‘—but the Legion seems to have disappeared anyway? They do that, you know, captain. They’re a queer little crew.’

  ‘Actually, it’s commander general, now. I hope you’re not disappointed by my promotion.’

  ‘Why should I be, m’dear? I dropped a word on your behalf with Nie Trabb and the Lord Derechor.’

  ‘You?’ I enjoyed the confused look of shock crossing her face. ‘But why?’

  ‘Better to ask why hold grudges at my age? There’s nothing wrong with wanting change for your people, Jenelle. What’s the point of life, if not to strive for noble causes? To make your muddled moon a better place for those who’ll walk it after you’re gone. But such causes are preferably accomplished in deed and in truth.’

  We turned a corner, heading down a lantern-lit shopping street. Hexatorians were out in numbers again inside their city. The storms had passed, both natural and sentient-stirred. There was shockingly little physical sign of the people’s revolt against their rulers, the brief civil war’s bloodletting or the Legion’s brutal brush with the Melding forces. I wondered to myself what I was leaving behind, here. How much of an impact I had made and what it had cost me. The price Hexator had paid.

  ‘And who decides on what’s the truth…?’ asked Jenelle.

  I thought of the Legion’s bizarre children eviscerating the hideous wurm commandos. Our eternal clash of cultures and worldviews. I gave the only answer I had. ‘Evolution.’

  Better to ride the tiger, even as fleas in its fur, than oversee the tiger’s torment as zookeepers. How far we will travel and what glories might we see.

  Jenelle seemed to accept my answer at face value. ‘I sought you out first at your tavern lodgings. Your bag had packed itself. It ran off as I arrived, but these were inside your room.’ She produced the marble-sized courier ball passed to me by Varnus Afrique, as well as my concert flute.

  I noted there was a little green light flashing on the courier ball’s shell. I had to smile. Yes, I know, I am due a major pecking from Rena. How irked would she be I had nominated her as Simenon’s guardian and guide inside the Merge? Highly, was the best response to that. Modd did answer and Rena will just have to get used to it. Someone new in the afterlife for my dead wife Rena to fuss over and distract her from Sweet William’s nag-time. Win-win was the ancient phrase for that, I believe. I am fairly sure I owed Simenon an apology, though, the first time we spoke through heaven’s gate.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I was planning to leave
the ball behind, but my flute almost has a mind of its own. I never know where I’m going to find it from one day to the next.’

  ‘I owned a necklace like that, once,’ said Jenelle.

  Hah, I very much doubted it. I lifted the sphere and flute from her hands. The courier ball I slipped inside my carry bag for later. My flute had reappeared slightly burnished. I polished it with my sleeve until the maker’s mark gleamed. Gemeinhardt Musical Instruments had been producing flutes back when humanity was confined to a single world and its Die Zauberflöte model was top-of-the-range.

  ‘There is one small favour you can do me,’ I said.

  ‘A bribe in return for my new position, doctor?’

  ‘You earned that job on your own merits.’ I passed Jenelle a small canvas-wrapped package. ‘Next time your airship calls at Hebateen, kindly make sure that this is passed into Master Arto Jagg’s hands.’

  Jenelle stared suspiciously at the package.

  ‘Don’t worry, nothing illegal. Your rulers are the drug dealers here, not me. It’s a recording and projection orb containing Alice and Daylen Blez’s execution. It’s activation keyed to Arto’s biometrics and I pray it brings the poor man some small vestige of peace.’

  ‘You were at the execution?’ Jenelle sounded surprised.

  I nodded, sadly. No easy task to make the recording given the size of the mob turned out for the execution. Thousands of citizens sobbing, those grown-up saved by Alice’s street sentries from drowning. There had nearly been a riot between would-be revolutionaries baying for blue blood and everyone fed and protected by Alice’s charity. Even Daylen had looked shocked at that; how eagerly the revolution turned and ate its own. It had taken the angry threat of my Spartoi murmuration appearing, machine tornado of the gods, to lower the mob’s boiling point.

  You can’t save everyone, doctor, you must have learned that. You shouldn’t even try. Is that why Alice spat at me when I snuck past the Watch thugs strapping her to the waterwheel, fastening her limb chains. Is that why Alice rejected my offer to her for the Merge? Beautiful fire to the end. It was easy to love a woman like Alice Blez, even as she was torn apart. She found me there in her last moments, locked eyes with me in the crowd. I’m not sure why she did that. I had nothing left to offer her; certainly not salvation from my rejected gods. Yes, I had watched the damnable barbaric spectacle from start to end. A hypocrite’s tears rolling down his irrational human cheeks as two murderers were ripped apart on the canals’ waterwheels.

  At least they were both executed together: Alice and her vicious eldest pup. Alice’s false future for Hexator dying with my fair lady, as easily as Falt’s foolish dreams of a perfect humanity.

  Alice Blez had been wrong about so many things, yet right about at least one. Kitten to my tiger, indeed. Alice had murdered plenty. But me? I could pile all my victims up starting on Hexator’s surface and not stop until I reached this system’s star. I could fill the Empty with my sins and barbarities. Why the hell do you think my ship coos Sweet William at me? Did you also believe Little John was a midget, you dumb fuck?

  As the two of us strolled to our destination I spotted something Jenelle hadn’t noticed: a small street shrine built into a wall attracting a crowd on the opposite side of the street. Amazed peasants queued up to jostle around the shrine. I surmised that Goog, God of the Small Journey, had already starting interacting with supplicants. Not all the spartoi had returned to the soil. Repurposed as a seed crop, because the gods surely hate waste.

  Jenelle served me with a heavy wax-sealed document roll as we reached the port complex. ‘Doctor William Roxley, free citizen of the Humanitum, by order of the Grand Assembly your entry visa to Hexator is permanently cancelled. You are banned from conducting any and all trade here. You are barred without appeal from returning to this realm for the rest of your lives, both natural and synthetic. This order shall be breached upon pain of torture and execution.’

  I kissed the commander general once on each cheek. ‘Don’t worry, Commander General Cairo, I’m rarely needed twice in the same place. May Modd’s grace envelop and lift you in my absence.’

  ‘What exactly is your Modd the god of, again?’

  ‘God of Balance,’ I said, ‘Divine Justice and Shenanigans.’

  I climbed the steps to the port building, halting to glance up at nebulae filling the night sky. I’ll say this about Hexator, it gives a cursed fool a clear view over the constellations. Each of those spears of distant starlight far older than me; although I had travelled further. I was almost eager to see where the You Can’t Prove It Was Us would carry me next. Exy had already sent me word that she had docked with the vast mothership, one among dozens of smaller merchant vessels, successful or otherwise, at the spore-spice auctions.

  I left Jenelle Cairo standing there, scrupulously ensuring I departed, much as I had first encountered the woman. A dangerous vision; the promise of something rash and fresh.

  I hadn’t told Jenelle that Master Jagg’s recording also contained details of who had had laid blasting charges to collapse his mine. I owed Arto Jagg the truth. Whether Jenelle survived her next trip home would depend on Master Jagg’s feelings about matters of family, faith, flag and forgiveness. Where Arto stood in the feud and evils the Derechors had worked against Jenelle’s clan. I prayed Arto might forgive Jenelle, as I could never forgive my son’s butchers.

  Billy Bones slipped past the legs of merchants and hustlers to join me as I approached the corridors feeding into the port. The hound had foreseen the generosity of the meat synthesizers on board the Expected Ambush. I foresaw Exy making me clean up every resulting turd pile sooner than deploying any of her maintenance drones.

  No heavily armed harbour guards and shakedowns waited for me here. Anyone who could afford to leave Hexator was welcome to become someone else’s problem.

  ‘A profitable auction for you,’ the elderly port official on the entry corridor peered inside my passport, ‘Master Roxley?’

  ‘I saved every soul on Hexator.’ I pointed down at the bloodhound. ‘My payment.’

  The official took my words for a touch of parting horseplay. ‘I dare say it could have been worse.’

  I shrugged. ‘You’re undoubtedly right.’

  Departing Hexator was easy. Only arriving was hard.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

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