Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  She was inside a jeweled, silver egg. The far wall was twenty feet away. The force that held her was still not gravity, not quite. It extended no farther than a few inches off the floor. Her hair swam in free-floating fronds in front of her.

  As she awakened, the lights changed color. They segued from a blue that was more shadow than light to a sunny yellow-green that someone who’d spent their lives without it might have mistaken for daylight. The nausea burbled up just from looking at them.

  As soon as she was aware enough to think again, she was gripped by a strange claustrophobia. She threw the sheet off. It tore as she wrenched it. It tumbled across the cabin, end over end, until it touched the curved wall. It stuck there.

  She stared at it, waiting for the nausea to go away. The sheet shimmered against the lights.

  She eyed the torn edges of the blanket with no small regret. A sheet of material like that could have paid for a month’s supply of wine for the company. She had once sold a wagon of stolen silk for enough moggias of wheat to keep her, Antonov, and their pages, servants, and slaves fed through the winter.

  She ought to have picked herself up, fetched the blanket. But that would have required standing, bobbing about. It would have been the old her, fighting for ways to make this all seem real. Her sense for wealth couldn’t be trusted here. Hell, this room was worth more than anything she’d taken to the company. If she could scoop it out from the belly of this vessel, take it back home, no price she could have put on it would have been high enough.

  There was not enough wealth in all of Europe to pay what this cabin was worth, never mind the ship.

  “Silver egg” was no exaggeration. “Jeweled egg” wouldn’t have been far off either. The lights gleamed differently from every angle, like facets in a gem. She reached away from her mattress, glided her hand along the metal. It was too hard to be silver – at least not just silver. An armor made of this would have been too good for a king. Nothing on Earth could have paid for all this.

  If wealth could not be paid for, could not be bartered, then it was not wealth. It was power. Raw. The people here – if she called them people – could have anything they wanted.

  This room was just a fragment of what she’d seen. And that was just a fragment of what she hadn’t seen. No one had told her how large this vessel was, but she’d seen its shadow against that domed window.

  There was so much power here, beyond the clouds.

  Unchained. Unharnessed. Unused.

  She would not have left it idle here.

  This was a fine position to meditate upon power. She could not even stand. She could force herself onto two feet, sure. That wouldn’t have been standing. That would have been wobbling in the air with her feet held to the floor.

  She crawled off her mattress. She held herself flat to the floor. This close to the ground, her gut did not feel so unmoored.

  Her inner voice would have had a lot to say about this. She could almost hear its words, underneath her ears, directing her. Just imagination. It was gone. She had understood, as far back as Siena, that it was manipulating her. But it had still felt like a part of her. It was an intruder. A tumor. Coping with that was still going to take time.

  With a tremor of horror that turned to disgust, she realized someone had changed her clothes. Her fur coat and tunic were gone. Instead, she wore a tightly fit brown tunic and matching pants. The fabric was smooth as air. The sleeves reached to her wrists and were perfectly sized and snug. The sleeves, leggings, and neck had gold bands around them.

  At least her hair was as matted and stringy as she remembered. Dirt painted the crook of her elbow. No one had washed her. There was, however, another of those metal patches, this one on her neck. No matter how hard she tried to pry her fingernails under it, she could not get either patch off.

  She eyed the walls. Judging from the way the blanket stuck onto them, they gripped just like the floor. There might not have been such a thing as a floor here. If she crawled onto the “walls,” it would be like rolling the room around her. That thought was enough to make her want to be drugged to sleep again.

  The walls were smooth, unvariegated, and cornerless. There were no holes or crevices. No windows. And no door.

  She’d been put in a cell.

  No sooner had she thought that than the far wall undulated. It rippled like a puddle. Meloku stepped through as if through a curtain of water.

  Meloku wore a tight-wrapped cloth. Hers had no sleeves, and the color and sheen of velvet. Her hair was bound in two rams horns behind her ears. So that it didn’t wave about, Fia realized.

  She looked at Fia, eyebrow raised. Fia glared at her, unwilling to try to stand, no matter how pathetic she looked right now.

  Meloku said, “I gave you the chance to stay.”

  Throughout her career, Fia had tried to weaponize her stare, to make it feel as deadly as her sword. She tried to compress the emotion of every battle she’d fought, all the blood she’d ever tasted, into tautness of her lips. If she could have killed Meloku with it, she would have. She could almost hear her inner voice telling her to spit, to refuse.

  Nevertheless, she accepted Meloku’s hand.

  At the same time that Meloku levered her up, the wall rippled. A man stepped through. He was another real person, not a golem or automaton, and older than either of them. His head was shaved clean. Even his eyebrows were gone. He stepped with an odd gait, one foot flat while the other advanced.

  He had not even a shadow of a beard or hair. He was thin to the point of being bony. His brow and cheekbones were stern with age. Fia suspected that his hair, if he’d had any, would have been white. She got a disquieting impression that he wore his face like a mask. There was something unreal in his eyes, a coldness, a distance. She had not seen that even in her most hardened soldiers. Something more than experience had affected him. An injury, maybe.

  His outward placidity did not look comfortable on him. Rather, like a man resigned to death, he seemed like he had only gone numb.

  He wore a wrapped tunic like Meloku’s, although his was violet. Whoever had picked Fia’s clothes had done well, at least. Brown and gold, the colors of her life. Mud and lucre.

  “This is Niccoluccio Caracciola,” Meloku said. “An Italian like you. He used to be a monk.”

  Fia looked to her. “Do you expect me to say I’m happy to meet him?”

  “Niccoluccio came to live with us many years ago. Besides you and I, he’s the only other unaltered human aboard. Ways and Means thought it would be best if you were to learn from a man more like you.”

  Fia looked squarely at him. “I am nothing like a monk.” When she’d been with the company, monks had been among her favorite hostages. The church paid reliable ransoms.

  Niccoluccio was curt. “Neither am I. Not for a long time. That gives us a common ground from which to start.”

  Of all the bizarre and alien ideas she’d found here, the fact that these people spoke as though their ship had a mind and soul had been one of the easiest to grasp. Sailors thought their ship had a spirit. She asked, “Why would Ways and Means think you have anything to offer me?”

  Niccoluccio said, “The first thing I’ll teach you is not to ask questions like that. Ways and Means is not human. It is not an animal. Or a god. There’s no point in trying to understand the motives of something so alien to us.”

  His name struck a dim memory. Saint Niccoluccio’s – the boys’ orphanage on the ridge above Saint Augusta’s. Saint Niccoluccio, one of the patron saints of Florence. Beaten to death by a mob and saved by a burning angel. Same last name.

  Couldn’t be. There were a lot of Caracciolas in Italy. And this man had no kindness in his face, no warmth or wisdom. Sure as hell no halo.

  His eyes were open windows, looking into a burned-out house. He offered her an arm. Antonov’s words resonated in her ears: “A martyr before a saint.” Fia looked to the wall they’d stepped through. She had no doubt that, if she pressed her hand to it, she’
d find no exit.

  Niccoluccio stepped beside her, nodding to something behind her. She glanced that way and froze. Where there had once been a smooth, curved wall, a rectangular protrusion had emerged. It had a flat surface, four rounded corners, and the shadow of an indent on the side.

  A desk. Faerie lights played over its top, truncated glimmers of every color. It had emerged in silence. “What the fuck?” Fia asked.

  Niccoluccio said, “Now you’re asking the right question.”

  Meloku still held Fia’s other hand. Niccoluccio looked to her. “Thank you, Meloku.” Sharp, cold. A dismissal.

  Meloku wavered. Even she could be struck by this man’s attitude, it seemed. Fia had not seen her struck by much. At length, she let go. By reflex, Fia grabbed Niccoluccio’s arm.

  “All right,” Meloku said. She added, “I’ll be watching.”

  She had directed the warning as much at the walls as at Niccoluccio.

  As Meloku submerged in the liquid wall, Niccoluccio guided Fia forward one step at a time. She expected him to yank her, but he was patient. His eyes, when she looked at them, were foggy windows, looking out onto a lifeless tundra. It did not match the care with which he guided her.

  He steered her to the desk. The lights atop the desk changed. The intervals between their flashes grew longer, their colors sharper and better defined. Shapes stood out. It was as if she were focusing on them. Or they were focusing on her.

  The desk was not very high. It reached her waist. There was no chair. She stood, confused, until Niccoluccio pushed on her shoulders. She resisted an automatic reaction to kick him. She kneeled.

  She folded her legs in the indent under the desk. In the world she’d come from, the real world, she would have been uncomfortable kneeling for long. Not with all the aches and injuries she’d accumulated. Here, only her legs and ankles were held to the floor. The rest of her floated weightless. She could have stayed like this forever.

  When she looked to the desk from this angle, the faerie lights coalesced. They congealed into a sphere. Blue, white, brown, and green.

  Had she not already seen the sphere, she wouldn’t have recognized it. This was her world, viewed from so far a distance that it made her sick with vertigo to think about. It spun like a glass bead.

  She could not look at it for long. She turned to Niccoluccio. Again, his eyes seemed like open windows. They looked out onto desert sands. Dry, scalding.

  They cooled again as they watched the globe turn.

  “What did they do to you?” she asked, now that they were alone – or as close to alone as they could be in this place.

  “They devoured my mind.”

  He had said that as lucidly as anybody she had ever heard. She stared. She had said it as though he had not cared at all.

  She’d been asleep for ages. She wondered what else these people might have done to her without her knowing. That tri-legged surgeon had said he would remove something. Maybe he already had. There was no blood, no soreness, but these people could do worse and leave less. They could have done anything.

  They could’ve started making her like him.

  Niccoluccio was already changing the subject. The desk was going to be his teaching aide. She’d only learned a sliver of the truth so far.

  “We’re going to keep things simple to start, to help you understand.”

  “Simple,” she said. “Good enough for an idiot.”

  He said, “If that’s how you want to see yourself.”

  She snapped, “Why are you bothering to teach an idiot?”

  “It’s important that you understand,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. Important to me. If I were you, if I were anybody else here, I wouldn’t care what someone like me thought.”

  Niccoluccio said, “Ways and Means is going to make a decision. Soon. It puts a great deal of weight on examining its problems from every possible perspective, including a perspective from Earth. I am no longer fit to provide a voice for the natives.”

  “Why is it important to Ways and Means…” She stopped herself. Wrong question. “Why is it important to you that I understand all this?”

  This time the windows opened onto the tundra. There was just darkness and ice. Nobody home. Not even a home to speak of.

  He said, “I don’t know why anything I do is important.”

  She tilted her head. After a moment, even he seemed to realize that demanded further explanation. “That was all taken from me.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t catch herself in time before she said, “I don’t understand how I’ve survived everything that’s happened so far. I don’t know how much farther I can go before I give.” As she spoke, her cheeks heated. She couldn’t have opened up so much to this monk. She couldn’t have just made herself vulnerable. Maybe they had already started to change her.

  Losing her inner voice had done a lot. She really had thought of it as a part of her. Maybe to the point where it actually had been.

  Niccoluccio studied her. Then he said, “Let’s start by learning a little bit. We’ll find out when you stop.”

  So she learned. A little bit, at first, like Niccoluccio had said.

  Then she kept going.

  She learned about the Unity – an empire larger than she could comprehend in a lifetime of effort. It was so large that even its citizens didn’t understand it. She learned about its immense and multifarious worlds, moons, stations, celestial spheres.

  She learned about the amalgamates. About their planarships. About the power that lay dormant behind the walls all around her.

  About this ship’s weapons. Its projectiles and automaton drones and beams like bolts of lightning.

  About its sensors. About the satellites that could have tracked all of the company’s enemies, fed the data to her. About the wealth of knowledge it had accumulated about every corner of her world.

  Her head grew clearer every minute.

  She learned about the death of the Unity, and about Ways and Means’ exile at the hands of an angry, impossible god.

  After she had spent too long a time staring without blinking, Niccoluccio asked, “Do you want to go on?”

  She didn’t answer. She just repeated the hand motion he had taught her to make the images go forward.

  She could not help but dream of plans.

  33

  Meloku projected a sensor image of the Earth on her cabin walls. She could not perceive any movement. Yet every hour, when she looked back, the Earth had grown farther away.

  Ways and Means was limping away from the Earth. It had no particular destination or orbital path in mind. The intruder’s combat drones had destroyed every satellite they could reach. Now Ways and Means only had a few left in far orbits, mostly the geostationary belt. It could resolve the weather, but little else. The rest of the Earth was lost to it.

  The enemy’s drones had parked in orbit. Watching.

  They had not stopped the shuttles Ways and Means had dispatched to the surface. The intruder had demanded Ways and Means pull its crew off the surface. Ways and Means seemed to be complying – for now.

  The evacuation had three stages. The first flight of shuttles had already pulled a third of its agents out, and were on their way back.

  Meloku’s cabin was in one of Ways and Means’ rear-facing hull segments. The segment abutted one of the antimatter production hoops. When she planted her hand on the cabin wall, she could feel them rumble. The hoops were overstressed, churning out more and more fuel. It still would not be enough.

  Meloku paced her cabin’s walls. No amount of chemical management could stay her restlessness. She stepped out. The corridors all looked the same: softly lit wormlike tunnels, lined with identical doors. One of the aesthetic drawbacks of Ways and Means’ movable cabins and modular topography.

  Ways and Means had encouraged Meloku to stay in her cabin, remain unobtrusive. But it had not ordered her. The perm
ission had been implicit.

  Hulking, serpentine crewmembers shouldered by her. Meloku stayed away from the damage control efforts. It was not her place. She would not have been able to do anything, anyway. Most of the damaged compartments were in vacuum. Ways and Means had flooded others with toxic chemicals and sealants.

  She did not belong here.

  It had been so long since she’d been aboard. She knew a great deal had changed, but had not realized how much. There had once been parklands, spiraling and sunny, with plants from all over the Unity. Each ecosystem had been engineered, a mix of species that couldn’t exist anywhere else.

  Dead now. The old parks had been moved toward the ship’s edges, out of the way. She’d stepped into one and found a vast, dark, empty space. The deck was clean metal. There was not a layer of soil left behind, not a smudge of dirt. The nitrates and organic compounds had all been recycled. She was probably breathing them now.

  Ways and Means’ crew had once used intraship gateways to travel between hull segments in minutes. Those were gone. Yesterday, it had taken the last emergency response teams half an hour to reach the site of the beam strike.

  Each hull segment stood well apart from the others, a quarter-kilometer away. They were joined by support struts. The passageways lining them made for long, cold walks. Heating and proper circulation had been afterthoughts.

  Meloku was not allowed onto the damaged segment.

  The death toll had been finalized at fifty-three. Fewer than Meloku would have expected. Demiorganic bodies were durable. All fifty-three crewmembers had had recent memory backups, but Ways and Means could not produce the bodies to house them. It would have to reconfigure its factories to start producing them. Not a priority.

  The death toll did not include Dahn, yet, but it almost certainly would. Ways and Means had not been able to reestablish contact with him. He was officially listed as missing, but everyone knew he would not have hidden himself away. One of the enemy’s agents must have intercepted him, and killed him, like they had almost killed Osia.