Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

  Uri was in the body of a child, a boy. Men and women, young and old, filled the square, jostling stones in their eager hands. This was a public stoning, and he was to be one half of the cruel spectacle. He screamed in Russian but was overwhelmed by the crowd’s taunts. One of the grizzled men slipped a muslin bag over his upper body and cinched it tightly with a rope. The moldy cotton reeked of ammonia.

  Someone pushed him. The boy stumbled helplessly backwards into the waist-high pit. Forceful hands stood him upright as the men shoveled rocky earth in and around his legs. The ground felt cold and constricting, until at last, warmth bled out from his crotch as he pissed himself. The girl wailed hysterically.

  The crowd ceased their rabid antagonism. Quiet gave way to hollow thumps. The boy peered through the muslin’s loose weave but saw only shadow. He heard another thud, then a sharp scream from the girl. The stones sailed in from all directions. Sharp edges tore away fabric as rocks bruised and battered his trunk. Each blow to the head rang his skull with blinding pain.

  In agony, the boy let loose a throaty scream. He struggled, desperate to free his hands, but the cord cut deeper with every twist. More stones smacked his temples. His forehead burned with skin peeling away from bone. He struggled but fell face-first to the ground. Blood poured into his eyes, blurring the world with crimson. He cocked his head and looked at the girl again. She was silent now, her head deformed by the barrage. She gazed through him with dead eyes.

  Among the crowd, the Uri-part of his mind noticed four Alkonost mercenaries idly watching the spectacle. The soldiers were dressed in blue-gray fatigues, eyes sealed behind eyeshades and military head shrouds. They were under contract from Nova Byzantium to guard the interests of Dagestan’s failing junta, Uri remembered. With a slim mandate, the platoon could do nothing but casually observe the Tindi execution.

  Unknown to the mercenaries, Tiraspol’s ill-fated operation would become an ordeal by winter. Malnourished and exhausted, they would wait endlessly for delinquent supply flights, the campaign one of attrition. Through the boy’s dying eyes, Uri recognized one of the mercenaries smoking a cigarillo, his head shaved and scarred—himself.

  Uri always preferred the tightly rolled leaf to cigarettes; the smolder of seasoned Turkish tobacco was mellower, more urbane. The cigarillos always tasted better with good single malt. But procuring a decent bottle of Scotch in Dagestan was next to impossible.

  Another rock flew in fast and hit its mark. A loud crack turned his boy-brain to static.

  The mask released him.

  Uri desperately gulped breath into his burning lungs. The terror was over; the liberation was so sharp and freeing, the euphoria was extraordinary. Years spent roaming Central Asia had exposed him to a wild assortment of opium pleasures, but this was like nothing else. He struggled to embrace and sustain the experience, but the harrowing dreamscape slipped away like dust through his fingers.

  Outside, the Soqotran sky glowed in swaths of green and gold as evening faded to twilight. Below, the goat herder watered his small flock near a palm-lined wadi. The incident had been brief, just a few minutes.

  Color and smell took on enhanced dimensions, the tactile weave of the Persian carpets, the visual intricacies of the transoms’ fretwork, and the smell of frankincense . . . His eyes welled with emotion as the high continued. It was a clarity no narcotic could deliver. Life, in all its richness, engulfed him.

  The mask fell limp. Uri carefully set it back inside the box and watched it contract and wilt. Beads of oily water condensed on its bruise-colored flesh, the miniscule hydraulics expelling their essence. Death had left its stain. Perhaps in sacrifice?

  Was this the euphoria the sheikhs of the Al Fadah Madina sought, a high derived from vicarious death and resurrection? Uri was at a loss as to how the Thuggees had collected such a diabolic experience, let alone encapsulated it into the arcane engineering of the mask’s viscera. Maybe they hadn’t; perhaps the mask was just a catalyst for reliving wartime traumas. Uri could only speculate. It seemed unlikely that coincidence could be so finely choreographed.

  Uri clearly recalled the Tindi stoning. He didn’t need the shadowy world of the mask’s embrace to remind him of its horror. Though he witnessed it years ago, the incident’s brutality still haunted him. He had a vague notion the stoning had something to do with a violation of tribal honor, or some such barbaric notion of justice. Much to Uri’s shame, he’d done nothing to halt the atrocity. But, at the same time, he knew there had been nothing he, an outsider with no authority, could have done.

  Uri slid his thumb over the reader and waited for the blue “go light.” The wheeled sled clattered as he pushed it into Burj Babil’s lift lobby. A sergeant greeted him and verified his procurement authorization. He knew the crew, ex-Alkonost and veterans of Moldova, now employed as Al Fadah Madina’s paramilitaries. They exchanged pleasantries. Uri promised to keep his eyes peeled for Polish vodka on his next jaunt into the shambles of Western Europe.

  The lift hummed like a droning viola, the monofilament spinning through the Burj’s hulking concrete-iron anchor. Engineers checked the crate seals and scanned Uri’s inventory list. The LED read “classified.” Their curiosity piqued, the guards whispered among themselves. Black shipments destined for Al Fadah Madina were rare. Uri relaxed on a sofa in the lounge, waiting for the next car to arrive. The lift engineer nodded in Uri’s direction.

  “Who ordered this procurement? Has it been vetted?”

  “Sheikh Sayyid, check the courier paperwork. I assume it’s cleared.”

  “Who is it for?” continued the lift engineer.

  “Not sure, really. Regardless, I’m not at liberty to discuss it. But you knew that already.” Former mercenaries were still hired guns, easily bribed. Information was always for sale, but Uri didn’t feel like biting.

  “Of course. Don’t want us catching wind of what they’re hoarding up there, eh? Worried the rats will start crawling up the anchor-line,” the engineer joked, gazing up at the filament’s endless hairline fracture.

  “Demitri will be your escort,” the lift sergeant spoke up, jerking his thumb toward a scowling lift guard.

  Uri exchanged pleasantries as they walked up the loading ramp and stepped into the silvery pod. They strapped themselves into the cushioned high-G seats. The airlock sealed shut as the cabin lights flickered to life. The lift guard eyed the containers.

  “Quite a consignment—whatever it is. This shipment’s been redlined. What’s in it?” Demitri asked.

  Uri didn’t answer.

  The car’s hydraulic clutch squeezed the supersonic monofilament. With a sharp grinding, the car jolted into the sky, beginning its twenty thousand kilometer ascent to the caliphate’s orbital dominion.

  “I asked you a question,” Demitri persisted. “I need to know what’s in the box.”

  “No you don’t. It’s classified; I told you that. Let it go.”

  “If I did let it go, I wouldn’t be doing my job, would I? You could be sneaking a weapon up there.”

  “I’ll promise you two bottles of the Crocovia to forget about it—I may’ve a bottle on Soqotra even.”

  Demitri shook his head sternly.

  “Don’t make me, Demitri.”

  “Open it.”

  “You really don’t want me to . . . ”

  “Open it!”

  “All right, brother.”

  Uri got up from his seat and opened the electronic locks. Curiously, Demitri leaned forward for a closer look. His bloodshot eyes widened as Uri deftly removed his rifle from the box and aimed it at the guard’s head.

  “No firearms on the lift! Weapons are forbidden in Al’ Madina,” Demitri protested.

  “This isn’t for Al’ Madina.”

  Guarding Demitri was exhausting. Uri hoped his captive would eventually relax. At one point, he even offered him a swig of his precious Johnny Walker, but the gesture was futile. Demitri was too uptight, answering Uri in one-word replies as he glanced nervousl
y out the pod’s sunshield. The seven-hour ordeal was more stressful than necessary.

  Howls and barks greeted Uri when he arrived. The concourse pulsed with blue strobes, klaxons squealing. The sterile white of the nexus geodesics were typically a warm welcome after hours spent in a sweaty lift pod. Not his time. A swarm of lift guards hovered inside the chamber’s dodecahedron, eager to pounce. The unreturned radio-checks had triggered the alarm, but Uri was ready.

  In haste, wayward cargo had been left to drift unsecured inside the concourse. Most of the exits were cordoned, the hornet-hash of the nexus airlocks automatically sealed shut from the current unpleasantness. Uri motioned a weightless Demitri out of the car, letting him go. This wasn’t a hostage situation; there was no need for Uri to escalate the crisis. The bulky mercenary bounced through tumbling crates as he flailed toward the geodesics’ triangular walls.

  “Stand down, archivist!”

  Uri said nothing, panning his rifle from one bulky mercenary to the next. Like a murder of crows, they surrounded him on all sides, above and below, left and right, a spherical standoff.

  The chamber’s intercom hissed with muffled Arabic. Working the Burj Babil required fluency in the classical Koranic tongue, Al Fadah Madina’s lingua franca. Uri never bothered to pick up the language’s colloquial nuances. After dabbling in Turkish and Azeri, he’d limited his quotient of middle-eastern phraseology to one-word expletives. From the tone of the intercom’s disembodied voice, Uri guessed it was a stand-down order.

  “Sheikh Sayyid!” Uri called out.

  “On his way, archivist.”

  Someone silenced the sirens. The anxious clamor gave way to quiet, the rhythmic hum of the Burj’ filament lulling the belligerents. Uri relaxed his rifle grip and released the Kevlar straps used to bind him to the car floor, an attempt to avoid Newton’s third law.

  Al’ Madina’s “no weapons” rule—which Uri had violated in spectacular fashion—was in effect for a good reason. The colony’s membrane-thin skin was easily penetrable by a rifle round. A pinprick, no matter how small, was capable of hemorrhaging the colony, siphoning off its air supply like a black hole. As a sign of good faith, Uri pulled the magazine and ejected the chambered round, its brass twinkle cartwheeling into space. The guards followed, lowering their chemical weapons and holstering non-lethal pistols.

  A wreath of vapor escaped from a pressure door as a hydraulic arm pushed it aside. Uri’s agent floated at the threshold, his kafiya—specially designed for weightlessness—hovered around his head like a red-checkered halo. Sheikh Sayyid, like his caliphate brethren, wore the traditional white thobes of Old Arabia, the loose ankle-length garments somehow defying Al’ Medina’s weightlessness.

  “Quite the entrance, Uri,” the sheikh said at last. “But completely unnecessary.”

  “You left me strict instructions, Sayyid. No one was to interfere with the payload, absolutely no one. It was either this—” Uri patted then slung his rifle on his shoulder. “—or pull the brake and head back down.” He nodded at the silver lift pod. “Demitri was a little too curious on ascent, so I got nervous. Looks like I started a chain reaction, huh?”

  “He was only doing his job, trying to protect us,” Sayyid smiled. “You can trust them. They’re Alkonost veterans like yourself, no?”

  Uri smirked, “You don’t know mercenaries very well, do you?”

  “It’s all right,” said Sayyid, ignoring Uri to address the suspended guard swarm. “Uri is operating under my orders—please.”

  “There are two totes—your atomic playthings and my other commissions.”

  “Splendid. I’ll have them delivered to my manzil. Please surrender your firearm to the lift sergeant and we’ll be on our way,” Sayyid said, daintily gesticulating.

  Uri handed over his Spetsnaz rifle to one of the guards and tried to shake the resulting nervous, naked feeling.

  Lift operators and load detail filtered back through pressure hatches to quickly resume their work, corralling and stowing the floating cargo. Freight specialists crawled into the lift car, unbuckled Uri’s cargo, and brought it to Sayyid, the ordinary-looking totes belying the world-ending objects within. The sheikh signaled to an assistant, and the warheads were quietly shuttled from the concourse.

  Sayyid escorted Uri from the lift nexus to the toroidal hubs and corkscrew spindles of the orbital colony’s truncated arc. Self-propelled hand-lines slinked through the heaving axle-works, providing locomotion. Uri and the sheikh navigated the topological interchanges like corpuscles pumping through twisted veins. They drifted through greenhouses filled with tethered islands of billowing green—large rounded spaces doubling as both park and garden. Bats sailed through the dim celestial forests, the mammals bizarrely adapted to the gravity-free disorientation.

  Sayyid noticed Uri’s gaze, “They grow fat here. They don’t have to work as hard. Some just sleep in clusters suspended in space. It’s beautiful.”

  They let go of the hand-lines and drifted down to a nearby platform, a polished geometric oasis in the twilight of tangled terrariums. The sign above the portal was in Arabic. Uri assumed it read “Azraq Hawat,” the name of the sheikh’s home toroid. Inside, an elevator awaited them. Uri felt the mock gravity push him into the seat as the elevator crawled out along the hawat’s spokes. Sayyid explained the ride would take a few minutes, deliberately slow as to not jar its occupants.

  Arriving at a small lobby, Uri peered up through a blister dome and gazed at Al Fadah Madina’s panorama. Its intricate yet massive wheels rotated about the centrifugal hubs as mite-like maintenance spacecraft lingered. Beyond, the setting sun suffused the Earth’s murk with a vaporous limb, a sickly brushstroke marking the end of another celestial day.

  Uri hadn’t been to Sayyid’s office before, let alone his manzil. Like most of the princes’ domiciles, his spacious salon was furnished in Old Arabian fashion. His family was originally from Jeddah’s Al’Balad District, and much of the room was a reproduction of the old city’s interiors. A recreation of the classic Jeddah mushrabiyahs lined a long wall, intricate lattice-covered wood windows filtering synthetic light from places unseen. Uri inhaled deeply: frankincense, a soothing aroma and welcome departure from the clinical smells of the toroid hubs.

  Sayyid invited him to sit. Uri slumped back into the satiny cushions of the floor pillows, indulging in the orbital comfort. A servant entered carrying a dallah and two small cups on a silver tray. Setting it on a low table, he tipped the long-necked Arabic coffee pot and poured them both a small cup of the cardamom-infused beverage. Uri took a sip and closed his eyes.

  Sayyid spoke at last, waking Uri from a catnap. “As-salaamu alaikum, my friend—a formal welcome. I apologize for the confusion. My orders were too strict—but it is such an important consignment. You understand.”

  “Wa alaikum as-salaam,” responded Uri in kind. “Bandwidth’s cheap. Your communiqués are ambiguously brief. I’m sure you have your reasons, but . . . ”

  The sheikh leapt up and crossed the salon to a large, antiquated machine typical of Al’ Madina’s technological artifacts. Suddenly animated, he explained it was a working PDP-8, an early commercial minicomputer; its Teletype keys and paper-tape readers tricked by holographic data crystals and neural taps. Sayyid projected the computer’s clumsy text onto a wall display and scrolled through pixilated Arabic. The crude machine was the hub for Sayyid’s dispatches to all terrestrial archivists under his employ, messages logged and transmitted archaically.

  “You see, the twelve-bit processor and thirty-two kilobytes of memory take time to encrypt even a small message.”

  “I’m painfully aware,” Uri sighed.

  The sheikhs, in their insular world, thrived on Earth’s vestigial scientific pursuits. Their monastic obsessions had led them to an Islamic renaissance not seen since the centuries succeeding the Prophet’s revelations. Sayyid described it as a “jihad” and a holy duty, jokingly calling it Islam’s sixth pillar. Uri was unenlightened.


  On Earth, the caliphate was the custodian of Mecca, a duty inherited after Nova Byzantium’s failed invasion of the Hormuz Emirates. Besides the island of Soqotra—the base of Burj Babil—the Holy City was the limit of the sheikhdom’s on-world territory. Sayyid had made the requisite Hajj to the Holy Mosque but once, his only descent down the Burj. His complexion was unblemished and free of Earth’s causticity, eyes lacking the bleached squinty stare. Well hydrated, Sayyid was immune to the constant emaciation and sickly wobble of most living on the planet. Uri supposed it was how earthlings themselves used to look prior to the Post-Industrial Shock.

  “At last!” Sayyid exclaimed. Two technicians brought the totes into the salon. “So much bureaucracy with this particular procurement. You wouldn’t believe it.” Sayyid deactivated the locks and unclasped the lid on one container. Inside were the two nuclear warheads.

  “I thought weapons were forbidden on Al Fadah Medina. Unfamiliar with caliphate tenets as I am, I would think this violates that particular rule rather egregiously,” Uri said, lighting a cigarillo. He knew Sayyid disapproved; that was one reason he smoked in his presence.

  “You’d be right. But this is not meant for Al Fadah Medina.”

  Uri raised an eyebrow. “An itchy trigger finger? Who’s getting the business end of these beasts?”

  “Come again?” Sayyid said, confused. “You misunderstand, my friend. We’ve no intention of detonating these. We’re going to modify their nuclear ordnance in order to archive them on Earth, insha’Allah. And you are correct; we are violating Al Fadah Madina sharia, but Azraq Hawat’s imam has allowed us a temporary exception. Of course, they cannot stay. I’m sure you’re curious.”

  Uri gazed at the warheads’ rust-pocked carapaces. They looked like a pair of massive bullets ready to be loaded into a mythic revolver. Archivists weren’t paid to ponder the esoteric positing of Al’ Madina’s philosophies; they were paid to deliver. Weeks spent alone on the tumultuous Indian Ocean with “The Left and Right Wing of the Apocalypse”—”Zliva” and “Pravo,” as he’d nicknamed the bombs—piqued his interest.