Context

by John Meaney

  Someone cleared his throat.

  ‘There’s been an official apology.’ It was the young UN officer, FO Neil, who had accompanied her at the Flight School. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. ‘Conspiracy among the Zajinets. The ones who tried to get you have been punished. Several ambassadors have been replaced.’

  No-one knew for sure, but the renegade might well have kidnapped Ro to protect her, hiding her in Watcher’s Bones from the official delegation who wanted her dead.

  Who cares?

  Ro shrugged.

  Everything was different...

  ‘Gramps?’ She looked over to where a crane, like a black scorpion in the gathering gloom, plucked the Pilot’s cabin from the ship. ‘You know how the Pilots regard my father?’

  Whatever else he might be, Grandfather was still a Jesuit priest:

  ‘Are we going to debate the nature of superstition out here?’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  Dart Mulligan, subsumed in mu-space. Everyone knew that tale.

  Thank you, Father.

  ‘Good.’ It was Mother, Karyn, who hooked her arm inside Ro’s. ‘Let’s go inside and get warm.’

  The cold air felt good, but she was beginning to shiver. Ro and Mother walked on together, with Gramps, big and burly, protectively beside them.

  Flight Officer Neil trailed behind. Would he have anything to report to Frau Doktor Schwenger?

  I have my own goals now. Not UNSA‘s.

  But to carry them out she would need help.

  If I have the strength...

  At the terminal building’s entrance, Ro stopped and looked back across the night-shrouded space-field, at the great vessel which crouched like a bird about to leap into flight—a tenebral raptor in an umbral world—and wondered at everything that had occurred.

  ‘He was a good man, wasn’t he? My father?’

  They answered her with hugs, and led her inside to a place of human cheer, where hot glasses of tea and clear strong spirits were imbibed with laughter, while orange flames danced in a fireplace which looked real, smelled true, with its crackling warmth and hint of raw smoke tasted upon the air, where the furniture was old, dark wood grown iron-hard with age, with soft cushions of maroon and chocolate brown, and where trays of pungent fish dishes were passed around with a gentle invitation or a witty joke, among people relaxing at the end of a day’s work well done, celebrating their life near the axis of the world, unaware of the greater universe which lies beyond: that place where the stars are black and spiky, like negative snowflakes formed of darkest ink, where crimson nebulae like streamers of spilled blood in warm salt water gently elongate themselves and drift, where the stuff of space itself shines gold or amber, endless and forever, and the natural laws which govern humankind can hold no sway, and where even the miraculous can occur; a place which, once glimpsed, lures the spirit with a soft but all-pervasive siren-song, always tempting, never to be escaped.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  60

  NULAPEIRON AD 3422

  Death train.

  He was a tiny clinging insect, buffeted by the crushing slipstream, held by gekkomere-clingrope to the brushed-brass hull. The cylindrical train powered its way through arterial tunnels, riding the shock wave of its own passing.

  Just hang on.

  Deep into trance, locking his body in position, an unthinking animal with only one objective.

  Hang on.

  And then the slowing, the welcome deceleration, and the urge to laugh as it shrieked to a halt, in a titanic hall arched with steel and stone, where red-badged soldiers were massed everywhere—on platforms, on raised walkways and balconies—and floatglobes trained their weapons ceaselessly on the people who passed beneath.

  It was the heart of Dark Fire territory, a lifetime away from freedom.

  There were no alarms, no spitting graser fire, as Tom slid slowly from the hull, gasping, and dropped to the safe side of the train, away from the disembarkation platform.

  He crouched there, sunk deep inside himself—closed his eyes, but just for a moment—hearing as from a distance the clang of metal (not membrane) carriage doors lowering, forming ramps; the guards’ shouted orders and the stunned absence of protest from the thousand ragged prisoners who shuffled from packed cargo holds onto the platform’s breadth, and stood in starved and dehydrated fright: waiting for whatever Fate was going to throw at them next.

  Tom shivered—and continued to shiver, unable to stop—remembering the Grand’aume’s dungeons, afraid to move into the open.

  This is insane.

  But the edicts of the Blight assumed no notion of human normalcy, or showed any sign of treating individuals as anything more than meat.

  It had taken three tendays, a massive trek through wilderness, and Tom looked as gaunt and starved as the prisoners. To any watching guards, he would seem as weak and dispirited as other captives—for lack of food stuns the mind into a state of sleepy helplessness, even as the body begins slowly to digest its own tissues.

  But in his case the appearance of weakness was a deception.

  The nearest he had come to death had been at the mission’s start, as his arachnabug hurtled through friendly territory and a startled sentry had fired, graser beam missing by centimetres as Tom threw the ‘bug through evasive spins, found an exit, whipped into it and was gone, the small vehicle’s tendrils a fast-moving blur.

  He had journeyed high, keeping to Primum Stratum-equivalent through the abandoned territories, then finally using a vertical shaft to ascend all the way to the surface.

  Wide open skies.

  The arachnabug functioned on the ground, moving swiftly across the landscape. It would have been faster to remain in habitable tunnels, but avoiding detection had become the primary factor.

  And, finally, it had burned out totally, and Tom had left the ‘bug collapsed and smouldering, as he tugged his sled behind him—smoothplate underneath, but still heavy, and hard to manoeuvre across the shale—and began the long trek on foot towards his destination.

  The planet’s surface had not featured yet during the war, but Tom knew its use was inevitable: if the allied forces did not use it first, the Dark Fire’s would. And the Enemy’s people could more easily lose their normal mental conditioning, for human restraints within their minds had long since been snapped by the power which had overwhelmed and then subsumed them. For Tom, it was a journey through mankind’s history on the homeworld. Surely nomad wanderers, hauling their few belongings with them, had travelled and lived off the land like this. On Terra, they would not have needed a lab-kit for converting transplanted vegetation into food; luckily the apparatus was low-tech, unlikely to alert whatever surveillance systems the Blight might have in place above the surface.

  One tiny being, in this wild and endless landscape, was effectively invisible.

  There had been heathland, with long grasses whipped like waves by the wind. A range of low purple hills, harder to cross than Tom had thought; he lost half of his supplies down a ravine when the sled tipped and strapping tore.

  Finally, he was reduced to carrying his dwindling food supply in a cloak tied packwise behind his back.

  His body fat, already low, melted away with the long endurance exercise. Soon, he was sinew and bone, a starvation victim to anyone who looked—had there been anyone, in this lost, forgotten world.

  But it was partly an illusion, for the figures went like this: his daily energy deficit was huge—a deficit which would match that of any dying famine victim—but those victims (ipso facto, as his tutor, Mistress eh’Nalephi, would have said) neither ate nor exercised.

  But Tom’s energy expenditure grew to twelve thousand kilocalories a day, and two-thirds of that was replenished by his ration bricks. He could survive drops in blood sugar and body fat which would kill someone who was eating nothing.

  He was not in the peak of health; but he was nowhere near as close to death as his fat-stripped appearance might s
uggest.

  And, in extremis, it is the mind which rules.

  Tom’s will—forged in hate, now focused on his lost love—had grown implacable.

  There were clear, pale-yellow skies; there were days when creamy clouds covered the sky’s vast dome from horizon to horizon. And once, amid the cloud cover, he glimpsed a high dark shape, tiny at that altitude, which might have been a floating terraformer.

  But he trekked onward at ground level, alone and undisturbed.

  And finally, starved and exhausted, he came to the green and purple dell which he had been aiming for, where the membrane covering the abandoned vent shaft had denatured to milky stringiness, unravelled by its own chemical decline. It revealed a shadowed opening which led to Nulapeiron’s habitable depths, in the heart of Blight territory.

  Slowly, shaking, Tom began his downwards climb.

  And now the death train.

  Time to take his place among the prisoners.

  With no other access into the death camp itself, this was his only plan. He climbed through a gap between carriages, up onto the platform, and shuffled into the group’s centre, inserting himself amid starved-looking children and adults who had aged decades in a matter of days: gaunt, emaciated and grimy. An air of hopelessness hung over them, heavy and unbreakable.

  Tom’s clothes, too, were torn and ragged, and his cheekbones, like theirs, showed gauntly through stretched skin. Even so, there was a minute ripple of motion away from him, as though they sensed that he was different.

  Soon they would be too weak to care even that much.

  Guards stood overhead on lev-platforms, and surrounded them on ground level, armoured and with graser rifles held at port-arms: on armed watch everywhere. The rows of prisoners moved slowly forwards, half stumbling towards a square black tunnel mouth, where even the air seemed too thick and solid to breathe.

  ‘Faster, animals!’

  Crack of nerve-whip, and someone fell, but no-one helped. Already they had learned that the price of humanity was death.

  ‘Come on.’

  Beside Tom, a little girl stared straight ahead, her eyes big and round and grey. Her lips parted slightly, but she neither turned around nor looked up at Tom. A child, but nearing her life’s end.

  Another crack and another. The fallen man would never rise again.

  ‘Move!’

  They shuffled into darkness.

  They found themselves in a long grey cavern divided into open barracks by toxin-laden membranes which glistened with putrescent, liquid malevolence. There were graser-blasted slit-trench latrines, their foul smells hanging heavily upon the fetid air.

  Blood-red drones, armed and armoured, circled overhead, beneath the jagged ceiling.

  The prisoners were segregated by gender, and Tom moved with broken gait amid a group of fifty men whose hopeless stares tracked the progress of their wives and children into other parts of the camp.

  One of the women dropped, suddenly, like a pile of sticks. A beefy guard laughed, putting his micro-graser back into his pocket, while the other prisoners moved on, avoiding the corpse: now merely an obstacle in their path, a discarded object whose human spirit had been shorn away long before this moment of physical death.

  Ignore it.

  Tom was trembling, but that was so very dangerous when he was among captives too stunned to care, too hungry to think, too battered to feel emotion. If the guards spotted one who was different, they would single him out immediately, and that would be the end.

  That could not happen now. Not with Elva so near, after all this time.

  Slowly, he turned, head drooping forward with feigned weakness, disguising his careful scan of the surroundings. Far back from the newly arrived prisoners, the incumbents—captives who looked as if they had been here for decades, though it might only have been days—stood or sat upon the hard broken ground, their faces sunken where flesh had collapsed, their eyes too big and dull within prominent sockets. The skull behind each human face was obvious, an indication of the state to come.

  Ignore...

  Beneath their torn, ragged clothing, their limbs were narrow rods or sticks, and their shoulders were sharp corners, devoid of tissue.

  One figure moved a finger, made a rattling sound in his throat before lying still. Tom knew he was looking at another corpse, a carcass.

  ... but don’t ever forget.

  The allocation of barracks by gender was arbitrary, designed to sunder remaining family bonds. The prisoners themselves were sexless, in that their wasted, skeletal bodies could no longer generate or accept desire; only an aching dullness, which drew fatigued eyelids down over too-prominent eyes, and a deadened memory of hunger survived in their moribund nervous systems. They were shutting down, accepting the inevitability of death because it takes energy to believe in life, and they had none.

  ‘There.’ A grey-haired man with tangled beard raised a thin, trembling arm, pointing to the next barracks. ‘A way out for... some.’

  At the rear, near the wall, a queue had been picked out by the guards. They waited before a black opening into the solid rockface. From inside—Tom sensed it, even at this distance—came a strange hot sulphurous smell, like some titanic animated cadaver’s rotting breath as it swallowed the hopeless human victims one by stumbling one.

  ‘Where—?’

  But the man had already dropped his arm to his side, and turned to shuffle away, exhausted beyond measure by that last pitiful spurt of communication. It came to Tom that perhaps they would be the poor devil’s final words before he died, and even the vengeance anger smouldering inside seemed inadequate to answer the outrage perpetrated on these people, in a world that was supposed to be civilized.

  Tom looked on as another near-dead woman moved into the dark opening, and then another, and then he too could watch no longer, and turned away as though he had lost the will to care.

  Night was a time of quiet despair, when the fluorofungal colonies upon the cavern ceiling grew quiescent, shrouded in shadow as they replenished their energies from autotrophic bacteria within the solid rock.

  Drones, the colour of an open wound, still circled overhead, weapons trained on prisoners who were barely strong enough to stand.

  Tom shifted painfully on his threadbare mat which did nothing to cushion the rough stone surface underneath. Then there was a whisper of cloth, a slight grunt and a stink of hot breath as a big man tried to lie down beside Tom, insinuating himself onto the mat—but Tom stabbed lightly against the eyeballs, pivoted up onto one knee, and slammed the edge of his hand down hard.

  There was a snap, then a soft cry of pain.

  One hand clutching his now-broken collarbone, the big man crawled away. In the darkness, wide eyes seemed to glisten as the other prisoners watched his retreat.

  Tom lay back down, and pretended to drift straight into sleep. But he listened, all senses alert, in case another attack should come. But there was none; nor could he hear any trouble coming anyone else’s way: few of the inmates had sufficient energy to abuse their fellows.

  Somewhere, in the next camp section, a child began to sob. Then a sweet woman’s voice, soothing, drifted through the night air, and men opened their eyes, wondering whether they dreamed this angel’s presence or had in fact passed beyond life’s end.

  So fluid, so gentle—

  There was a crack, the sizzle of graser fire, and the black night fell silent.

  Sometime during the second day there was an inspection, with senior officers whose cravats and epaulettes shone crimson, trailed by heavily armed guards whose aggressive posture was for the sake of form. No-one expected the prisoners to rise up in revolt; had they tried, all would have died in seconds.

  Tom, standing among his ragged fellow captives, weighed his chances of escape and found them to be zero.

  ‘Very efficient.’ One of the officers congratulated a subordinate. ‘Minimal supply usage. Good work.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  They walked
on, past the standing, starving men who might as well have been inanimate rock for all the attention the officers and guards paid them.

  After they had left, an air almost of anticlimax settled upon the prisoners. No-one had been killed; no-one had been granted the only release possible from this ongoing hellish punishment for crimes whose nature no-one could remember or imagine.

  Third day. Fourth ...

  Lethargy weighed down upon him in a blanketing fog. Had all his vaunted plans boiled down to this? Starved into submission.