by Col Buchanan
The soaked and trembling rat was watching her when she finally hauled herself over the flexing side. Ocean flopped into the pool of water on the floor. She lay there for some time, next to her sodden carryall, unable or unwilling to move, snug enough in the self-warming layers of her skinsuit.
When she lifted her chin to look at Pip again, the rat squeaked loudly.
‘I hear ya,’ she replied.
Ocean planted a palm on the sagging floor of the boat and forced herself upright. She tried to stand in the tiny boat but almost fell over the side for her efforts. Her balance was way off. She gave herself a few moments then tried again, clutching at the inflatable wheel of the boat to right herself, swaying on her bare feet.
Whoah. Big world!
*
At least there was some shelter inside the three flexing, transparent walls of the wheelhouse. Pip huddled out of the gale beneath the wheel, watching Ocean as she stabbed at the boat’s power nipple until algae lights glowed to life across the instrument panel. Heat began to emanate from the veins running through the floor. At the back of the craft, a row of squid-jets started pushing out water against the swells.
She took a moment to catch her bearings, to centre herself, to bask in the weak light of the moons. Tatters of clouds trailed long and thin across the starry night sky. In all directions the far horizon was barely visible, even with the night vision of her Patched eyes.
My new home, she thought, knowing there was no going back now.
Strange, how normal it felt to be bobbing on the sea of an alien world. Yet Erēs was not entirely alien. Not even mostly so. It had been seeded long ago from the distant stars, just as the two moons above it had been seeded.
They were humans here just like her. And for all that this planet remained in quarantine, isolated from all the other worlds, they lived lives of hope and struggle just like everyone else.
Spray lashed across the wheelhouse. The boat’s prow rose high on a wave. Ocean took a device from one of her utility pockets, then turned it this way and that until a flashing light on its side started to blink faster. When she pointed it directly east, the light stopped blinking and stayed fully on – locked on the signal of a distant transponder.
The signal of Juke, her hired accomplice on the planet.
‘East it is,’ Ocean declared, turning the wheel to bring them about.
She could only assume their calculations for the launch timing had been precise enough – that she had landed in the Midèrēs Sea as expected, right there in the Heart of the World. Ultimately, she had aimed for the Free Ports themselves, but such precision with the Yukka seeds was a matter of luck more than anything else. She could only hope the islands of the democras were close by.
With a last, lingering glance at the smoking Yukka pod, Ocean fed more power into the squid-jets and aimed the boat east into the prevailing waves, flexing her knees against the lifts and dips of the swell. She looked back again, though this time to the sky where the twin moons gleamed high and pale. She focused on the blue one, sweet Shilos, and all she had left behind forever.
Ocean pulled a face, then set off into the blasting winds of her new world, headed for the Free Ports.
CHAPTER ONE
Nico
Through the night galloped a zel bearing a pair of riders on its steaming back, foam snorting from its muzzle and lathering the black and white stripes of its flanks. The animal’s lungs heaved like it was about to drop dead.
‘Yah!’ shouted the rider gripping the reins, whipping the zel for more speed. ‘Yah!’
They raced down the shoulder of a hill following a muddy track in the darkness, barely able to see where they were going. Nico Calvone clung on to the back of his father’s coat with a grip made icy from the winter cold, his clothes still soaking wet from the earlier rain, bouncing up and down so badly he was at risk of falling off. Snowy pine boughs lashed past his face. Clumps of mud and snow scattered from the animal’s hooves as steam jetted from its nostrils.
His father was going to run the animal into the ground like this. But since scenting what had seemed like rotten eggs on the wind, Cole had whipped the animal’s running lope into a full-out charge, and he showed no signs of slowing.
Over his father’s shoulder, Nico glimpsed the Reach stretching before them from the foot of the hill, speckled with the lights of imperial camp fires. And there was Tume glittering in the distance, the city floating in a steaming lake whose black waters reflected the sister moons hanging above. A Khosian city that now lay in the hands of the enemy.
‘Simmer Lake,’ rasped Cole. ‘We have to hope your mother hasn’t reached Tume yet.’
‘You’re going to kill the zel like this!’
‘No choice!’
It was fear that drove his father’s breakneck pace down the hill. Fear of what would happen if they didn’t reach her in time.
Days had passed since they had come across the belongings of Nico’s mother on the road leading to their wild farm, way back on the southern coast. Reese’s things had been scattered around a deserted handcart, and tracks of slavers had headed off towards the enemy-held north. Riding a pair of zels, Nico and his father had raced all the way to the Reach following their trail, losing one mount to exhaustion along the way. Now the other zel was about to drop too.
A ravine flanked the track on their right-hand side, dark and wide, flashing past dangerously close at times as the trail wound its way through the trees. As they rounded a turn Nico peered ahead, spotting something in front – a fire, burning brightly by the side of the trail, surrounded by the silhouettes of seated figures. Behind them he glimpsed a blackened cottage and a flag fluttering from the ruins of its porch, sporting the red hand of Mann.
‘Imperials!’ he hissed. ‘A guard post!’
Cole lashed the zel even harder, leaning right over its neck so that Nico had to crouch forward too. In a full charge they thundered along the track towards the bonfire, where heads were turning now, a cloaked figure rising with a bottle in his grasp.
The cloaked soldier stepped out onto the track and held up a hand to stop them.
‘Yah! Yah!’ urged Cole, but it seemed that the sight of the soldier standing in their way was the last straw for the poor zel, for just then she cried out and faltered.
Nico nearly fell off as their mount reared up on her hind legs. He clung on as she collapsed to the earth beneath him, right there before the feet of the startled soldier.
In the rising steam of the animal’s last breath, Cole and Nico sat in the saddle unmoving, like two fools trying to ride a dead zel. ‘Gods damn son of a bitch,’ panted Cole.
‘Well what do we have here, boys?’ cried the soldier in accented Trade, standing there gripping a bottle of wine, his other hand resting on his sword hilt beneath his thick grey cloak. Around the nearby fire sat his two companions. One was staring with drunken eyes while the other snored softly.
‘You have any zels hereabouts?’ snapped Cole impatiently as they climbed to their feet, looking about him. The imperial soldier tilted his head to one side, not liking Cole’s tone. The soldier was middle-aged and overweight, his double chin bulging beneath his bearded scowl.
‘Not since we ate them. What brings you out here in the middle of the night, then? Doing some scavenging?’
Hearing the suspicion in the man’s voice, Nico joined his father’s side with stiffened legs, his sodden clothes sticking to his skin. A pair of dogs were growling under a nearby tree. He could see something hanging from one of its boughs.
Nico observed the burnt-out cottage beyond the roaring fire, and behind it the black gulf of the ravine. He looked back towards the dogs that were jumping about under the nearby tree. His blood froze. From the boughs of the tree hung a pair of corpses – an old man and woman with whitened hair.
The dogs were leaping up to take bites from the spinning corpses’ feet, which dangled as bloody strips of flesh.
‘Just stragglers,’ he heard his father say t
ightly. From the tail of his eye, Nico watched Cole slowly unbuttoning his longcoat for easy access to his blades. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen any slavers come through this way? We ran into some trouble back there. Got separated.’
‘A team came through this afternoon,’ piped his seated companion, a younger fellow swaying on a varnished dining chair. ‘Had some fine women with them too.’
‘Did you see a red-haired woman amongst them?’ Nico blurted. By his side his father sighed.
‘Red hair? Sure. Best looker of the lot. They wouldn’t let us have a taste of them though, the bastards. Precious cargo.’
‘How long ago?’ asked Nico.
‘I suppose that would have been this afternoon sometime.’
‘You say you were with those fellows?’ asked the overweight soldier, studying them closely. It was Cole he didn’t like the look of. Something about the way Nico’s father was leaning over the saddle of the fallen zel.
His hand was going slowly for his sword when Cole swung back with the longrifle and aimed it square between the man’s crossed eyes. ‘Easy,’ Cole suggested. ‘No sudden moves now. Nico. Grab his sword there.’
Nico drew the blade from the man’s scabbard. The alcohol on his panted breath washed over him, hot and rancid.
By the fire, the younger fellow was still sitting there, blinking in confusion.
‘On your feet, soldier!’ Cole snarled at him and he jumped up like he’d been struck by lightning, toppling the chair behind him. The young man looked sober all of a sudden as he stared at the sword in Nico’s grip and then at Cole’s rifle.
‘What do we do with them?’ whispered Nico to his father.
‘What do you think we do with them?’
‘You don’t have to do this,’ said the big man with the rifle at his head.
‘You really don’t!’ wailed his companion. ‘Take what you want.’
‘You think you deserve our mercy?’ snarled Cole. He was truly angry now. ‘You come here to enslave our people, and you think you deserve our mercy?’
For a moment they all just stood there, gasping their steamy breaths into the night. Their companion snored away on his chair.
The dogs were still snarling and leaping up at the corpses. The sight of them hardened Nico’s heart. He knew what needed to be done. He grabbed at the younger man’s cloak and shoved him towards the tree. ‘You too!’ he snapped at his companion on the track, jabbing his sword at him. ‘Cut down those bodies. Give them a proper burial like they deserve. Maybe then, my father here will go easy on you.’
‘Easy?’
‘Maybe he’ll make it quick.’
People will do anything, Nico reflected, if it means tasting a few more sips of air before their end. Working slowly, the drunken shambling pair of soldiers hacked down the bodies from the tree then kicked the dogs away with their boots.
‘We don’t have time for this, Nico,’ grumbled his father, keeping his rifle aimed at them.
‘We’ve time.’
They stood there watching in silence as the soldiers heaped rocks onto the two bodies stretched out side by side: someone’s parents and grandparents. By the time they were finished they were both slick with sweat. The younger fellow bent over to vomit, moaning and shaking with fear. Cole marched up to him. He pressed the rifle barrel to the fellow’s temple until he straightened, then planted it on his forehead and jabbed it hard so the soldier stumbled backwards, headed for the ravine behind the cottage.
‘Please, you don’t have to do this!’ the young man pleaded, for he could see over his shoulder what they were headed for.
‘Keep an eye on the other one,’ Cole growled, leaving Nico standing there with his blade pointed at the fat man’s armoured belly.
The big man licked his dry lips, eyes flicking this way and that.
‘I have a wife, I have children!’ hollered his companion through the gloom. They had stopped now at the very edge, and the man looked down and sobbed with fear.
‘Yeah? So do I,’ rasped Cole. He still had the end of the barrel pressed against the man’s forehead. ‘Now jump.’
‘Hist!’ cried the young soldier. ‘Do something, will you?’
‘Like what, Tylen? The lad has me at the end of a sword.’
‘Please,’ he called out to Cole, and Nico saw the fellow flinging off his cloak before fumbling to take off his armour. ‘I’ll take it all off. I’ll walk away, I’ll desert! Just please, please, let me get back to my wife and my children.’
‘Jump,’ said Cole with steel in his voice, and he prodded the rifle so the man tottered backwards over the edge.
‘No!’ he wailed as he toppled into the ravine.
Nico’s heart was hammering away. His throat was dry. He looked to the remaining soldier standing before him. The man glanced down at the sword gleaming between them.
He’s going to jump me. I should finish him now!
Nico had killed a man before, but that had been in the midst of action; not like this, in cold blood against an unarmed opponent. In his hesitation he saw the fellow’s stare harden, and in a moment of slowing time Nico watched dumbly as the soldier knocked the blade aside and went for him, his hands grabbing for his throat. He was twice the bulk of Nico and they both went down hard, his foul breath pouring over him. Nico grabbed wildly for the knife in his belt.
A loud crack sounded above him as Cole rapped the man’s skull with the butt of his rifle. The soldier slid off him, unconscious or dead Nico couldn’t tell.
‘Give me a hand here,’ heaved Cole, and together they dragged him over to the ravine and rolled him over the edge.
Nico stumbled back towards the fire. It was like some awful dream of murder that he couldn’t awaken from. The third soldier was still snoring drunkenly next to the flames. They grabbed him by the arms too and dragged him to the ravine, where they tossed him in after his companions.
Sweat was beading Nico’s forehead. He walked back to the track without looking back; without looking at his father.
He could see clouds forming overhead, bringing with them a sudden breeze, stirring the pine trees all around him. Nico felt a few cool spits of rain.
Great, he thought, more rain; as though he hadn’t just helped cast three men to their deaths.
His father grimaced as he looked to the north towards the lake and the distant lights of Tume.
‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER TWO
Bahn
So tired was Bahn Calvone that dream time and waking time seemed to have converged into one bleak continuum, in which he existed in some kind of twilight world between them both. Phantoms played at the edges of his vision, thoughts twisted and crawled in knots of endless obsession.
He couldn’t recall when last he had slept properly. Whenever Bahn tried to rest he was tossed this way and that by dreams that were as bizarre as they were disturbing. Dreams of leering monsters. Dreams of torture and breaking points. Dreams of a violent father, who in real life had never been anything but gentle.
No longer could he close his eyes without fearing what was to come. Even sleep, the final refuge, was now denied him.
Up here on the edge of the cliff the sea breeze blew at Bahn in fierce gusts, scouring his narrowed and red-shot eyes with frigid blasts. Yet his tears were mostly of his own making, cast from despair and exhaustion, fat drops spilling down his face and plummeting into the gulf of air below his feet.
Bahn was sweating slightly despite the breeze cooling his skin, as though he was still touched by lingering fever from his recent bout of dysentery. His Red Guard armour felt heavy today, his sword, his hobnailed boots, even his head with its dark moods and even darker thoughts, all bearing him down. Behind him swept his cloak, barely fastened at his neck, tug-tugging him back from the edge even as he leaned over it, swaying above the high and pitiless fall.
Down there, at the very foot of the cliff, were the countless tilted roofs of the Shoals, that notorious shanty-town clinging to the thin coas
tal fringe of Bar-Khos; shacks on stilts with planks strung between them, necessary for the tides that flooded the rocks during every storm surge. Smoke tussled amongst streaming clothes drying from lines. White water crusted the rocks along its edge.
It was hard to see anything with the tears smearing his vision, though Bahn was well past stopping them.
Let them flow, let him weep, demanded his shaking body.
Still, he had a hunger to see the world around him just then. A hunger like never before in fact, trembling here so close to the edge and the end. It was all he could do to keep clearing the endless tears from his eyes, like a field medico wiping desperately at a pair of arterial, bullet-sized wounds in his face.
He’d never understood those enemy prisoners who chose to be blindfolded before the firing squad; perhaps because Bahn had always held a slight fear of the darkness. To him it made more sense to want to see it all at your very end, turning your eyes to the sky and your heart to times worth remembering – not the premature blindness of your impending death.
Bahn blinked fast to take in the Lesser Bay of Squalls, and the squadrons of warships manoeuvring against each other in a prelude to battle. From the eastern harbour another Khosian convoy was making a break for it on the long Zanzahar run, several dozen ships headed for their sole remaining trading partner beyond the Free Ports, and their only source of black powder.
Turning his head, he looked westwards to the other side of the Lansway and the Bay of Calm, where skyships were circling each other in the air, cannons booming. Strings of enemy Birds-of-War swooped in over the more sheltered western harbour, dropping bombs amongst those vessels heading out to safety or fast returning from elsewhere in the Free Ports. A few enemy skyships circled the Mount of Truth, and the building on its flat summit that was the Ministry of War, where Bahn worked as a field aide to the Lord Protector, General Creed. Shells burst around the ships from the Ministry’s defences, leaving puffs of dirty smoke that studded the air as they thinned into haze.