That was when I knew we were outside the Waynet, dumped back into the crushing slowness of normal space. The stars outside were stationary, their colors showing no suggestion of relativistic distortion.
“Damage?” I asked.
“How long have you got?” the ship snapped back.
I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still functional—I touched it and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet—but that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn’t been buckled or blown or simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.
We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or months—however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it needed to fix itself—the search for my gun would be on hold.
That didn’t mean I was counting on a long stopover.
The ship still had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F or early G type. He thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close too.
“Tell me where we are.”
“It’s called Calliope,” Tyrant told him. “G-type. According to the last Cohort census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials, four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth—the farthest from Calliope—was supposedly colonized by humans in the early Flourishing.”
Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single moon.
“Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?”
“Difficult to say. A later Cohort flyby failed to make contact with the settlement, but that doesn’t mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves against the aliens.”
“So there could still be a welcoming committee.”
“We’ll see. With your permission, I’ll use our remaining fuel to reach Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?”
Merlin looked back at the coffinlike slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could skip over the days or weeks that it would take to reach the planet, but that would mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep hibernation of frostwatch.
“Pass on that, I think. I’ve still got plenty of reading to catch up on.”
Later—much later—Tyrant announced that they had reached orbit around Lecythus. “Would you like to see the view?” the ship asked, with a playful note in its voice.
Merlin scratched fatigue from his eyes. “You sound like you know something I don’t.”
Merlin was at first reassured by what he saw. There was blue ocean down there, swatches of green and brown landmass, large islands rather than any major continental masses, cyclonic swirls of water-vapor clouds. It didn’t necessarily mean there were still people, but it was a lot more encouraging than finding a cratered, radioactive corpse of a world.
Then he looked again. Many of those green and brown swatches of landmass were surrounded by water, as his first glimpse had indicated. But some of them appeared to be floating above the ocean completely, casting shadows beneath them. His glance flicked to the horizon, where the atmosphere was compressed into a thin bow of pure indigo. He could see the foreshortened shapes of hovering landmasses, turned nearly edge on. The landmasses appeared to be one or two kilometers thick, and they all appeared to be gently curved. Perhaps half were concave in shape, so their edges were slightly upturned. The edges were frosted white, like the peaks of mountain ranges. Some of the concave masses even had little lakes near their centers. The convex masses were all a scorched tawny gray in color, devoid of water or vegetation, save for a cap of ice at their highest point. The largest shapes, convex or concave, must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. Merlin judged that there must have been at least ten kilometers of clear airspace under each piece. A third of the planet’s surface was obscured by the floating shapes.
“Any idea of what we’re looking at here?” Merlin asked. “This doesn’t look like anything in the census.”
“I think they built an armored sky around their world,” the ship said. “And then something—very probably Husker-level ordnance—shattered that sky.”
“No one could have survived through that,” Merlin said, feeling a rising tide of sadness. Tyrant was clever enough, but there were times—long times—when Merlin became acutely aware of the heartless machine lurking behind the personality. And then he felt very, very alone. Those were the hours when he would have done anything for companionship, including returning to the Cohort and the tribunal that undoubtedly awaited him.
“Someone does appear to have survived, Merlin.”
He perked. “Really?”
“It’s unlikely to be a very advanced culture: no neutrino or gravimagnetic signatures, beyond those originating from the mechanisms that must still be active inside the sky pieces. But I did detect some very brief radio emissions.”
“What language were they using? Main? Tradespeak? Anything else in the Cohort database?”
“They were using long beeps and short beeps. I’m afraid I didn’t get the chance to determine the source of the transmission.”
“Keep listening. I want to meet them.”
“Don’t raise your hopes. If there are people down there, they’ve been out of contact with the rest of humanity for a considerable number of millennia.”
“I only want to stop for repairs. They can’t begrudge me that, can they?”
“I suppose not.”
Then something occurred to Merlin, something he realized he should have asked much earlier. “About the accident, ship. I take it you know why we were dumped out of the Waynet?”
“I’ve run a fault-check on the syrinx. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.” Tyrant sounded sullen. “I still don’t have an explanation for what went wrong. And I don’t like that any more than you do.”
Tyrant fell into the atmosphere of Lecythus. The transmissions had resumed, allowing the ship to pinpoint the origin to one of the larger airborne masses. Shortly afterward, a second source began transmitting from another floating mass, half the size of the first, located three thousand kilometers to the west. The way the signals started and stopped suggested some kind of agonizingly slow communication via radio pulses, one that probably had nothing to do with Merlin’s arrival.
“Tell me that’s a code in our database,” Merlin said.
“It isn’t. And the code won’t tell us much about their spoken language, I’m afraid.”
Up close, the broken edges of the floating mass soared as tall as a cliff. They were a dark, streaked gray, infinitely less regular than they had appeared from space. The edge showed signs of weathering and erosion. There were wide ledges, dizzying promontories, and cathedral-sized shadowed caves. Glinting in the low light of Calliope, ladders and walkways—impossibly thin and spindly scratches of metal—reached down from the icebound upper reaches, following zigzag trajectories that only took them a fraction of the way to the perilous lower lip, where the floating world curved back under itself.
Merlin made out the tiny moving forms of birdlike creatures, wheeling and orbiting in powerful thermals, some of them coming and going from roosts on the lower ledges.
“But that isn’t a bird,” Tyrant said, highlighting a larger moving shape.
Merlin felt an immediate pang of recognition as the image zoomed. It was an aircraft: a ludicrously fragile assemblage of canvas
and wire. It had a crescent moon painted on both wings. There’d been a machine not much more advanced than that in the archive inside the Palace of Eternal Dusk, preserved across thirteen hundred years of family history. Merlin had even risked taking it outside once, to see for himself if he had the nerve to repeat his distant ancestor’s brave crossing. He still remembered the sting of reprimand when he’d brought it back, nearly ruined.
This aircraft was even flimsier and slower. It was driven by a single chugging propellor rather than a battery of rocket-assisted turbines. It was following the rim of the landmass, slowly gaining altitude. Clearly it intended to make landfall. The air on Lecythus was thicker at sea level than on Plenitude, but the little machine must still have been very close to its safe operational ceiling. And yet it would have to climb even higher if it was to traverse the raised rim.
“Follow it,” Merlin said. “Keep us astern by a clear two kilometers. And set hull to stealth.”
Merlin’s ship nosed in behind the struggling aircraft. He could see the single pilot now, goggled and helmeted within a crude-looking bubble canopy. The plane had reached ten kilometers, but it would need to double that to clear the upturned rim. Every hundred meters of altitude gained seemed to tax the aircraft to the limit, so that it climbed, leveled, climbed. It trailed sooty hyphens behind it. Merlin could imagine the sputtering protest from the little engine, the fear in the pilot’s belly that the motor was going to stall at any moment.
That was when an airship hove around the edge of the visible cliff. Calliope’s rays flared off the golden swell of its envelope. Beneath the long ribbed form was a tiny gondola, equipped with multiple engines on skeletal outriggers. The airship’s nose began to turn, bringing another crescent-moon emblem into view. The aircraft lined up with the airship, the two of them at about the same altitude. Merlin watched as some kind of netlike apparatus unfurled in slow motion from the belly of the gondola. The pilot gained further height, then cut the aircraft’s engine. Powerless now, it followed a shallow glide path toward the net. Clearly, the airship was going to catch the aircraft and carry it over the rim. That must have been the only way for aircraft to arrive and depart from the hovering landmass.
Merlin watched with a sickened fascination. He’d occasionally had a presentiment when something was going to go wrong. Now he had that feeling again.
Some gust caught the airship. It began to drift out of the aircraft’s glide path. The pilot tried to compensate—Merlin could see the play of light shift on the wings as they warped—but it was never going to be enough. Without power, the aircraft must have been cumbersome to steer. The engines on the gondola turned on their mountings, trying to shove the airship back into position.
Beyond the airship loomed the streaked gray vastness of the great cliff.
“Why did he cut the engines . . .” Merlin breathed to himself. Then, an instant later: “Can we catch up? Can we do something?”
“I’m afraid not. There simply isn’t time.”
Sickened, Merlin watched as the aircraft slid past the airship, missing the net by a hundred meters. A sooty smear erupted from the engine. The pilot must have been desperately trying to restart the motor. Moments later, Merlin watched as one wingtip grazed the side of the cliff and crumpled instantly, horribly. The aircraft dropped, dashing itself to splinters and shreds against the side of the cliff. There was no possibility that the pilot could have survived.
For a moment Merlin was numb. He was frozen, unsure what to do next. He’d been planning to land, but it seemed improper to arrive immediately after witnessing such a tragedy. Perhaps the thing to do was find an uninhabited landmass and put down there.
“There’s another aircraft,” Tyrant announced. “It’s approaching from the west.”
Still shaken by what he’d seen, Merlin took the stealthed ship closer. Dirty smoke billowed from the side of the aircraft. In the canopy, the pilot was obviously engaged in a life-or-death struggle to bring his machine to safety. Even as they watched, the engine appeared to slow and then restart.
Something slammed past Tyrant, triggering proximity alarms. “Some kind of shell,” the ship told Merlin. “I think someone on the ground is trying to shoot down these aircraft.”
Merlin looked down. He hadn’t paid much attention to the landmass beneath them, but now that he did—peering through the holes in a quilt of low-lying cloud—he made out the unmistakable flashes of artillery positions, laid out along the pale scratch of a fortified line.
He began to understand why the airship dared not stray too far from the side of the landmass. Near the cliff, it at least had some measure of cover. It would have been far too vulnerable to the shells in open air.
“I think it’s time to take a stand,” he said. “Maintain stealth. I’m going to provide some lift support to that aircraft. Bring us around to her rear and then approach from under her.”
“Merlin, you have no idea who these people are. They could be brigands, pirates, anything.”
“They’re being shot at. That’s good enough for me.”
“I really think we should land. I’m down to vapor pressure in the tanks now.”
“So’s that brave fool of a pilot. Just do it.”
The aircraft’s engine gave out just as Tyrant reached position. Taking the controls manually, Merlin brought his ship’s nose into contact with the underside of the aircraft’s paper-thin fuselage. Contact occurred with the faintest of bumps. The pilot glanced back down over his shoulder, but the goggled mask hid all expression. Merlin could only imagine what the pilot made of the sleek, whale-sized machine now supporting his little contraption.
Merlin’s hands trembled. He was acutely aware of how easily he could damage the fragile thing with a miscalculated application of thrust. Tyrant was armored to withstand Waynet transitions and the crush of gas giant atmospheres. It was like using a hammer to push around a feather. For a moment, contact between the two craft was lost, and when Tyrant came in again it hit the aircraft hard enough to crush the metal cylinder of a spare fuel tank bracketed on under the wing. Merlin winced in anticipation of an explosion—one that would hurt the little airplane a lot more than it hurt Tyrant—but the tank must have been empty.
Ahead, the airship had regained some measure of stability. The capture net was still deployed. Merlin pushed harder, giving the aircraft more altitude in readiness for its approach glide. At the last moment he judged it safe to disengage. He steered Tyrant away and left the aircraft to blunder into the net.
This time there were no gusts. The net wrapped itself around the aircraft, the soft impact nudging down the nose of the airship. Then the net began to be winched back toward the gondola like a haul of fish. At the same time the airship swung around and began to climb.
“No other planes?” Merlin asked.
“That was the only one.”
They followed the airship in. It rose over the cliff, over the ice-capped rim of the aerial landmass, then settled down toward the shielded region in the bowl, where water and greenery had gathered. There was even a wispy layer of cloud, arranged in a broken ring around the shore of the lake. Merlin presumed that the concave shape of the landmass was sufficient to trap a stable microclimate.
By now Merlin had an audience. People had gathered on the gondola’s rear observation platform. They wore goggles and gloves and heavy brown overcoats. Merlin caught the shine of glass lenses being pointed at him. He was being studied, sketched, perhaps even photographed.
“Do you think they look grateful?” he asked. “Or pissed off?”
Tyrant declined to answer.
Merlin kept his distance, conserving fuel as best he could as the airship crossed tens of kilometers of arid, gently sloping land. Occasionally they overflew a little hamlet of huts or the scratch of a minor track. Presently the ground became soil-covered, and then fertile. They traversed swaths of bleak gray-green grass, intermingled with boulders and assorted uplifted debris. Then there were trees and woods. The com
munities became more than just hamlets. Small ponds fed rivers that ambled down to the single lake that occupied the landmass’s lowest point. Merlin spied waterwheels and rustic-looking bridges. There were fields with grazing animals, and evidence of some tall-chimneyed industrial structures on the far side of the lake. The lake itself was an easy fifty or sixty kilometers wide. Nestled around a natural harbor on its southern shore was the largest community Merlin had seen so far. It was a haphazard jumble of several hundred mostly white, mostly single-story buildings, arranged with the randomness of toy blocks littering a floor.
The airship skirted the edge of the town and then descended quickly. It approached what was clearly some kind of secure compound, judging by the guarded fence that encircled it. There was a pair of airstrips arranged in a cross formation, and a dozen or so aircraft parked around a painted copy of the crescent emblem. Four skeletal docking towers rose from another area of the compound, stayed by guylines. A battle-weary pair of partially deflated airships was already tethered. Merlin pulled back to allow the incoming craft enough space to complete its docking. The net was lowered back down from the gondola, depositing the airplane—its wings now crumpled, its fuselage buckled—on the apron below. Service staff rushed out of bunkers to untangle the mess and free the pilot. Merlin brought his ship down at a clear part of the apron and doused the engines as soon as the landing skids touched the ground.
It wasn’t long before a wary crowd had gathered around Tyrant. Most of them wore long leather coats, heavily belted, with the crescent emblem sewn into the right breast. They had scarves wrapped around their lower faces, almost to the nose. Their helmets were leather caps, with long flaps covering the sides of the face and the back of the neck. Most of them wore goggles; a few wore some kind of breathing apparatus. At least half the number were aiming barreled weapons at the ship, some of which needed to be set up on tripods, while some even larger wheeled cannons were being propelled across the apron by teams of well-drilled soldiers. One figure was gesticulating, directing the armed squads to take up specific positions.
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