Sora’s calm evaporated.
“How many?”
“Four elements of the swarm; standard attack pattern; coherent-matter weapons at maximum range . . . novamine countermeasures deployed but seemingly ineffective . . . initial damage reports severe and likely underestimates . . .”
The floor pitched under her feet. The knee-high, androform proctors looked to each other nervously. The machines had no more experience of battle than Sora, and unlike her they had never experienced the simulations of warcreche.
Sora dropped the clipboard.
“What do I do?”
“My advice,” her familiar said, “is that you engage that old mammalian flight response and run like hell.”
She obeyed; stooping down low-ceilinged corridors festooned with pipes, snaking around hand-painted murals that showed decisive battles from the Cohort’s history; squadrons of ships exchanging fire; worlds wreathed in flame. The endgame was much swifter than those languid paintings suggested. The swarm had been chasing Snipe for nine years of shiptime, during which time Sora had passed through warcreche to adulthood. Yet beyond the ship’s relativistic frame of reference, nearly sixty years had passed. Captain Tchagra had done all that she could to lose the swarm. Her last gamble had been the most desperate of all; using the vicious gravity of a neutron star to slingshot the swallowship on another course, one that the chasing ships ought not have been able to follow, unless they skimmed the neutron star even more suicidally. But they had, forcing Snipe to slow from relativistic flight and nurse its wounds in a fallow system. It was there that the swarm attacked.
Near the end, the floor drifted away from her feet as ship’s gravity faltered, and she had to progress hand over hand.
“This is wrong,” Sora said, arriving in the pod bay. “This part should be pressurized. And where is everyone?”
“Attack must be a lot worse than those initial reports suggested. I advise you get into a pod as quickly as you can.”
“I can’t go, not without Verdin.”
“Let me worry about him.”
Knowing better than to argue, Sora climbed into the nearest of the cylindrical pods, mounted on a railed pallet ready for injection into the tunnel. The lid clammed shut, air rushing in.
“What about Verdin?”
“Safe. The attack was bad, but I’m hearing reports that the aft sections made it.”
“Get me out of here, then.”
“With all pleasure.”
Acceleration came suddenly, numbness gloving her spine.
“I’ve got worse news,” her familiar said. The voice was an echo of Sora’s own, but an octave lower and calmer; like a slightly older and more sensible sister. “I’m sorry, but I had to lie to you. My highest duty is your preservation. I knew that if I didn’t lie, you wouldn’t save yourself.”
Sora thought about that, while she watched the ship die from the vantage point of her pod. The Husker weapons had hit its middle sphere, barely harming the parasol of the swallowscoop. Bodies fell into space, stiff and tiny as snowflakes. Light licked from the sphere. Snipe became a flower of hurting whiteness, darkening as it bloomed.
“What did you lie about?”
“About Verdin. I’m sorry. He didn’t make it. None of them did.”
Sora waited for the impact of the words; aware that what she felt now was only a precursor to the shock, like the moment when she touched the hot barrel of a gun in warcreche, and her fingers registered the heat but the pain itself did not arrive instantly, giving her time to prepare for its sting. She waited, for what she knew – in all likelihood – would be the worst thing she had ever felt. And waited.
“What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I feel anything?”
“Because I’m not allowing it. Not just now. If you opt to grieve at some later point then I can restore the appropriate brain functions.”
Sora thought about that, too.
“You couldn’t make it sound any more clinical, could you?”
“Don’t imagine this is easy for me, Sora. I don’t exactly have a great deal of experience in this matter.”
“Well, now you’re getting it.”
She was alone; no arguing with that. None of the other crew had survived – and she had only made it because she was on punishment duty for her failings as a soldier. No use looking for help: the nearest Cohort motherbase was seventy light-years toward the Galactic Core. Even if there were swallowships within broadcast range it would take decades for the nearest to hear her; decades again for them to curve around and rescue her. No; she would not be rescued. She would drift here, circling a nameless sun, until her energy reserves could not even sustain frostwatch.
“What about the enemy?” Sora said, seized by an urge to gaze upon her nemesis. “Where are the bastards?”
A map of the system scrolled on the faceplate of her helmet, overlaid with the four Husker ships that had survived the slingshot around the neutron star. They were near the two Ways that punched through the system; marked on the map as fine straight flaws, surrounded by shaded hazard regions. Perhaps, like the Cohort, the Huskers were trying to find a way to enter the Waynet without being killed; trying to gain the final edge in a war that had lasted twenty-three thousand years. The Huskers had been at war with the Cohort ever since these ruthless alien cyborgs had emerged from ancient Dyson spheres near the Galactic Core.
“They’re not interested in me,” Sora said. “They know that, even if anyone survived the attack, they won’t survive much longer. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“They’re nothing if not pragmatic.”
“I want to die. I want you to put me to sleep painlessly and then kill me. You can do that, can’t you? I mean, if I order it?”
Sora did not complete her next thought. What happened, instead, was that her consciousness stalled, except for the awareness of the familiar, thoughts bleeding into her own. She had experienced something like this stalling aboard Snipe, when the crew went into frostwatch for the longest transits between engagements. But no frostwatch had ever felt this long. After an age, her thoughts oozed back to life. She groped for the mental routines that formed language.
“You lied again!”
“This time I plead innocence. I just put you in a position where you couldn’t give me the order you were about to. Seemed the best thing under the circumstances.”
“I’ll bet it did.” In that instant of stalled thought, the pod had turned opaque, concealing the starscape and the debris of the ship. “What else?”
The pod turned glassy across its upper surface, revealing a slowly wheeling starscape above filthy ice. The glass, once perfectly transparent, now had a smoky luster. “Once you were sleeping,” the familiar said, “I used the remaining fuel to guide the pod to a cometary shard. It seemed safer than drifting.”
“How long?” Sora was trying to guess from the state of the pod, but the interior looked as new as when she had ejected from Snipe. The sudden smokiness of the glass was alarming, however: Sora did not want to think how many years of cosmic ray abrasion would be required to scuff the material to that degree. “Are we talking years or decades, or more than that?”
“Shall I tell you why I woke you, first?”
“If it’s going to make any difference . . .”
“I think it makes all the difference, quite frankly.” The familiar paused for effect. “Someone has decided to pay this system a visit.”
Sora saw it on the map now, revised to account for the new relative positions of the celestial bodies in this system. The new ship was denoted by a lilac arrow, moving slowly between Waynet transit nodes; the thickened points where the Way lines interecepted the ecliptic plane.
“It must have a functioning syrinx,” Sora said, marveling, and for the first time feeling as if death was not the immediately preferable option. “It must be able to use the Ways!”
“Worth waking you up for, I think.”
Sora had eight hours to signal the ship before it re
ached the other node of the Waynet. She left the pod – stiff, aching, and disorientated, but basically functional – and walked to the edge of a crater; one that the familiar had mapped some years earlier. Three thousand years earlier, to be precise, for that was how long it had taken to scratch the sheen from the glass. The news had been shocking, at first – until Sora realized that the span of time was not in itself important. All that she had ever known was the ship; now that it was gone, it hardly mattered how much time had passed.
Yet now there was this newcomer. Sora crisscrossed the crater, laying a line of metallic monofilament; doubling back on her trail many times until a glistening scribble covered the crater. It looked like the work of a drunken spider, but the familiar assured her it would focus more than satisfactorily at radio frequencies.
As for the antenna, that was where Sora came in: her suit was sheathed in a conductive epidermis; a shield against plasma and ion-beam weaponry. By modulating current through it, the familiar could generate pulses of radio emission. The radio waves would fly away from Sora in all directions, but a good fraction would be reflected back from the crater in parallel lines. Sora had to make gliding jumps from one rim of the crater to the other, so that she passed through the focus momentarily, synchronized to the intervals when the other ship entered view.
After two hours of light-transit time, the newcomer vectored toward the shard. When it was much closer, Sora secreted herself in a snowhole and set her suit to thermal stealth-mode. The ship nosed in; stiletto-sleek, devilishly hard to see against the stars. It was elongated, carbon-black, and nubbed by propulsion modules and weapons of unguessable function, arrayed around the hull like remora. Yet it carried Cohort markings, and had none of the faintly organic attributes of a Husker vessel. Purple flames knifed from the ship’s belly, slowing it over the crater. After examining the mirror, the ship moved toward the pod and anchored itself to the ice with grapples.
“How did something that small ever get here?”
“Doesn’t need to be big,” the familiar said. “Not if it uses the Waynets.”
After a few minutes, an access ramp lowered down, kissing the ice. A spacesuited figure ambled down the ramp. He moved toward the pod, kicking up divots of frost. The man – he was clearly male, judging by the contours of his suit – knelt down and examined the pod. Ribbed and striped by luminous paint, his suit made him seem naked, scarred by ritual marks of warriorhood. He fiddled with the sleeve, unspooling something before shunting it into a socket in the side of the pod. Then he stood there, head slightly cocked.
“Nosy bastard,” Sora whispered.
“Don’t be so ungrateful. He’s trying to rescue you.”
“Are you in yet?”
“Can’t be certain.” The familiar had copied part of itself into the pod before Sora had left. “His suit might not even have the capacity to store me.”
“I’m going to make my presence known.”
“Be careful, will you?”
Sora stood, dislodging a flurry of ice. The man turned to her sharply, the spool disengaging from the pod and whisking back into his sleeve. The stripes on his suit flicked over to livid reds and oranges. He opened a fist to reveal something lying in his palm; a designator for the weapons on the ship, swiveling out from the hull like snake’s heads.
“If I were you,” the familiar said, “I’d assume the most submissive posture you can think of.”
“Sod that.”
Sora took steps forward, trying not to let her fear translate into clumsiness. Her radio chirped to indicate that she was online to the other suit.
“Who are you? Can you understand me?”
“Perfectly well,” the man said, after negligible hesitation. His voice was deep and actorly; devoid of any accent Sora knew. “You’re Cohort. We speak Main, give or take a few kiloyears of linguistic drift.”
“You speak it pretty well for someone who’s been out there for ten thousand years.”
“And how would one know that?”
“Do the sums. Your ship’s from seven thousand years earlier than my own era. And I’ve just taken three thousand years of catnap.”
“Ah. Perhaps if I’d arrived in time to waken you with a kiss you wouldn’t be quite so grumpy. But your point was?
“We shouldn’t be able to understand each other at all. Which makes me wonder if you’re lying to me.”
“I see.” For a moment she thought he heard him chuckling to himself; almost a catlike purring. “What I’m wondering is why I need to listen to this stuff and nonsense, given that I’m not the one in current need of rescuing.”
His suit calmed; aggressor markings cooling to neutral blues and yellows. He let his hand drop slowly.
“I’d say,” the familiar said, “that he has a fairly good point.”
Sora stepped closer. “I’m a little edgy, that’s all. Comes with the territory.”
“You were attacked?”
“Slightly. A swarm took out my swallowship.”
“Bad show,” the man said, nodding. “Haven’t seen swallowships for two and a half kiloyears. Too hard for the halo factories to manufacture, once the Huskers started targeting motherbases. The Cohort regressed again – fell back on fusion pulse drives.
Before very long they’ll be back to generation starships and chemical rockets.”
“Thanks for all the sympathy.”
“Sorry . . . it wasn’t my intention to sound callous. It’s simply that I’ve been traveling. It gives one a certain – how shall I say? Loftiness of perspective? Means I’ve kept more up to date with current affairs than you have. That’s how I understand you.” With his free hand he tapped the side of his helmet. “I’ve a database of languages running half way back to the Flourishing.”
“Bully for you. Who are you, by the way?”
“Ah. Of course. Introductions.” He reached out the free hand, this time in something approximating welcome. “Merlin.”
It was impossible; it cut against all common sense, but she knew who he was.
It was not that they had ever met. But everyone knew of Merlin: there was no word for him other than legend. Seven, or more properly ten thousand years ago, it was Merlin who had stolen something from the Cohort, vanishing into the Galaxy on a quest for what could only be described as a weapon too dreadful to use. He had never been seen again – until, apparently, now.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” Sora said, when he had shown her to the bridge of the ship he called Tyrant; a spherical chamber outfitted with huge black control seats, facing a window of flawless metasapphire overlooking cometary ice.
“Don’t overdo the gratitude,” the familiar said.
Merlin shrugged. “You’re welcome.”
“And sorry if I acted a little edgy.”
“Forget it. As you say, comes with the territory. Actually, I’m rather glad I found you. You wouldn’t believe how scarce human company is these days.”
“Nobody ever said it was a friendly Galaxy.”
“Less so now, believe me. Now the Cohort’s started losing whole star-systems. I’ve seen world after world shattered by the Huskers; whole strings of orbiting habitats gutted by nuclear fire. The war’s in its terminal stages, and the Cohort isn’t in anything resembling a winning position.” Merlin leaned closer to her, sudden enthusiasm burning in his eyes. “But I’ve found something that can make a difference, Sora. Or at least, I have rather a good idea where one might find it.”
She nodded slowly.
“Let’s see. That wouldn’t be Merlin’s fabulous gun, by any chance?”
“You’re still not entirely sure I’m who I say I am, are you?”
“I’ve one or two nagging doubts.”
“You’re right, of course.” He sighed theatrically and gestured around the bridge. In the areas not reserved for control readouts, the walls were adorned with treasure: trinkets, finery, and jewels of staggering artistry and beauty, glinting with the hues of the rarest alloys, inset with precious s
tones, shaped by the finest lapidary skill of a thousand worlds. There were chips of subtly colored ceramic, or tiny white-light holograms of great brilliance. There were daggers and brooches, ornate ceremonial lasers and bracelets, terrible swords and grotesque, carnelian-eyed carnival masques.
“I thought,” Merlin said, “that this would be enough to convince you.”
He had sloughed the outer layer of his suit, revealing himself to be what she had on some level feared: a handsome, broadshouldered man who in every way conformed to the legend she had in mind. Merlin dressed luxuriously, encrusted in jewelry which was, nonetheless, at the dour end of the spectrum compared to what was displayed on the walls. His beard was carefully trimmed and his long auburn hair hung loose, evoking leonine strength. He radiated magnificence.
“Oh, it’s pretty impressive,” Sora said. “Even if a good fraction of it must have been looted. And maybe I am half convinced. But you have to admit, it’s quite a story.”
“Not from my perspective.” He was fiddling with an intricate ring on one forefinger. “Since I left on my quest” – he spoke the word with exquisite distaste – ‘I’ve lived rather less than eleven years of subjective time. I was as horrified as anyone when I found my little hunt had been magnified into something so . . . epic.”
“Bet you were.”
“When I left, there was an unstated expectation that the war could be won, within a handful of centuries.” Merlin snapped his fingers at a waiting proctor and had it bring a bowl of fruit. Sora took a plum, examining it suspiciously before consigning it to her mouth. “But even then,” Merlin continued, “things were on the turn. I could see it, if no one else could.”
“So you became a mercenary.”
“Freelancer, if you don’t mind. Point was, I realized that I could better serve humanity outside the Cohort. And old legends kept tickling the back of my mind.” He smiled. “You see, even legends are haunted by legends!”
He told her the rest, which, in diluted form, she already knew. Yet it was fascinating to hear it from Merlin’s lips; to hear the kernel of truth at the core of something around which falsehoods and half-truths had accreted like dust around a protostar. He had gathered many stories, from dozens of human cultures predating the Cohort, spread across thousands of light-years and dispersed through tens of thousands of years of history. The similarities were not always obvious, but Merlin had sifted common patterns, piecing together – as well as he could – an underlying framework of what might just be fact.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 12