by Paul Haines
The King reached for the quill in front of him. Andur held his breath. He felt sick. Just sign, make the necessary excuses of illness and lead the King away and it was done. They would have ended the war. That the King would die of his illness in a few day’s time would only add to the legend of his legacy.
King Monvald raised his quill as Qoh had before him. The crowd roared ever louder. As Monvald lowered his hand to the parchment he rocked back violently in his chair, dropping the quill as his arms spasmed. Cheering died into gasps and shouts as people saw a thick black crossbow bolt protruding from Monvald’s forehead. The Queen clapped her hands over her mouth, Qoh leapt from his chair.
Andur distantly heard sounds of scuffling through the rushing in his ears. Guards had fallen upon someone to his right. His knees turned to jelly as Monvald sat forward, his expression unchanged, and picked up the quill he had dropped. Paying no attention to the room around him or the bolt between his eyes he signed the Accord Of Diam and raised the quill once more, as screams rang through the throne room.
Colour drained from the Queen’s face, her skin instantly ashen. Qoh staggered backwards. “What foul sorcery is this?”
Monvald placed his quill back on the parchment and sat motionless, expressionless. Queen Sylveen turned to Qoh, her eyes pleading as he backed away in horror. “My Lord, the accord is the thing that matters. Peace in our lands is what matters!” Tears ran from her eyes.
Qoh continued to back away, his mouth working like a beached fish. “What barbaric sorcery?” he finally managed.
“Please, Emperor, let peace reign!”
Qoh shook his head. “There will be no peace.” He shot forward, snatched the parchment from the table, shredding it with disgust as he called out to his retainers. “Clear the way and prepare my carriage. We leave this instant. I will not spend another minute in this evil nation!”
Amid the screams and wails bouncing off the walls Queen Sylveen dropped to her knees, face in her hands, sobbing openly.
Andur felt as if he would pass out at any moment. His knees knocked, his hands shook. “What have I done? Oh, by the Six, what have I done?”
A large, dark bird landed on his shoulder, chuckling in his ear. “You played politics with magic, Court Mage. I tried to warn you.”
Dark Rendezvous
Simon Petrie
Tuonela’s last functioning shuttle was a cutaway, skinned on only one side. Lem climbed into the cage and spliced his suit into the shuttle’s air-circ system. The next breath was sharp, stale, unbelievably cold.
He kicked off from Tuonela’s open-space hold, into the dark.
The derelict lay about three kilometres to port, the closest Lem had dared to manoeuvre.
The shuttle pulled clear of Tuonela. Inspecting the scar-streaked hull of the ship as he moved out, Lem was shocked at the extent of the damage. He’d realised the shielding afforded by the ram-scoop had become degraded, but this looked bad. He hadn’t appreciated just how much dust was scything through to impact on the ship’s fuselage.
He located Tuonela’s running lights. Then he instructed the suit to pipe through a realtime projection of the lights onto his heads-up, for his own navigational purposes. This was perhaps paranoia. The shuttle’s many nano-gyros should serve to automatically maintain a safe attitude, keeping the shielding aligned with Tuonela’s prow. Nonetheless, Lem had learnt to distrust the ship’s nanotech systems. It was a characteristic of nanotech arrays that they tended not to fail completely, but to stealthily degrade in performance until some threshold was quietly passed, and death or disaster resulted. By monitoring the ship himself, Lem could independently ensure that the shuttle’s one-sided shielding stayed properly interposed against the cloud’s deadly sporadic sleeting of dust.
Lem hadn’t survived this long by blindly trusting the ship’s ability to safeguard its sole remaining passenger.
“No,” Lem replied. “But the opportunity’s too good. You got reason to believe this thing could still be dangerous?”
“Taboo?” Lem placed a derisive torque on the word.
The Voice’s response seemed defensive.
“And all this is giving you—what? Anything concrete? Or just a hunch?”
“Unless you got something better than that, we’re going,” Lem replied. “I’m going. To check it out. Which means you get to come for the ride. Like I said, too good an opportunity. For salvage, maybe, if nothing else.”
“My middle name, remember?”
The distance was down to two point eight kay. Lem resisted the urge to squirt off more thrust. Never burn more than an eighth of your fuel on the outward push, was the cardinal rule. Instead, he sat in silence punctuated by his steady breathing and heartbeat, and by the near-subsonic groan of the shuttle’s air-circ system. Sporadically, these sounds were themselves interrupted by the massively-amplified chink of a dust grain slamming into the shuttle’s side-shielding. Not for the first time, he wished to bypass that feature of the shuttle’s inflight diagnostics, but it was programmed deep into the vessel’s intellect. As if to emphasise his lack of control; to reinforce his status as passenger.
“No. Shush now.”
It was odd, the way the solitude struck. More intensely, always, on an EVA, despite the closeness of the suit’s wittering Voice. Aboard Tuonela, he could always conjure the illusion that other passengers still survived, had not succumbed to the years of deprivation, the tainted cultures, the nanosystems’ dumb mistakes, the reckless despair. And maybe there’d be some prospect of revival when they reached C, with its hint of new beginnings and a wealth of easily-mined resources. He doubted it, though. Best to think of them all as cleanly dead, best not to hold false hope. The revival crypts were thick with nanotech, not to be trusted. Waste of carbon, to even try. No, if he wanted companions, he’d build them up from the cryo-banks’ embryos.
At least those systems, so far as he knew, weren’t corrupted.
Two point five kay.
He tried illuminating the derelict, to better gauge size and composition, but the shuttle’s lights were feeble—more nano shit, he’d have to replace them once he’d returned. The best he could manage was a heavily pixellated image suggesting the alien ship was ovoid and riddled with indentations or fissures.
There’d been other derelicts—four, if Lem remembered correctly—on the long years Tuonela had been pushing out from base camp at core D, towards core C. But all had been sluicing through the cloud on headings which had been impractical to match. They’d sent probes to approach two of them (back when there was still a ‘they’, not yet merely a ‘he’, aboard Tuonela). The probes had netted a few grainy, inconclusive images before their feeble transmitters died. Aside from those scant glimpses of pockmarked, ragged hulls, they’d learnt essentially nothing about the derelicts. No signatures of life, no warm spots, no trace of confined gases. As dead in infrared and microwave as they were in optical. They might well have been drifting for thousands, more likely millions of years. In one view, there’d been the suggestion of a heavily-abraded ramscoop at one end, but it wasn’t what could be called unmistakable.
This time, though, he’d chanced on a ship on a near-identical velocity. So near, in fact, that Tuonela had been measurably closing on it for sever
al months. It was an opportunity too good to pass up. Quite aside from the benefits of salvage, he might just learn something about the ship’s origins, or the race that had built it.
A heavier thud brought him from his reverie, an impact, apparently, of a larger grain barely sub-micron in size. Such grains were rare, even in the comparatively dense skein of material stretching between clumps D and C, but the shuttle’s shielding was designed to withstand it. At this relative velocity, at least. That likely would no longer hold true, however, if Tuonela ever reached her intended cruising speed of point one c. Even at the vessel’s current velocity of around point zero two c, a dust grain massing only a few milligrams carried the punch of a cannonball.
In the tinny silence following the impact, he was again aware of the sound of his own breathing. Quick and uneven.
Closer now, under two kay.
Lem tried the lamps again. The illumination was still shit, but there was now some definition, something for the enhancement programs to get their teeth into, without just blasting the imagery to snow and static.
The thing was big, but what struck him was its insubstantiality. There were large breaches all over the hull. He revised upwards his estimate of how long the thing must have been drifting out here, abandoned.
For a time—he could not say how long—the sound of the cloud’s shrapnel hitting the shielding passed unnoticed.
It was bizarre to think that his might be the first human eyes to ever properly gaze on a vessel constructed by another race.
Other colony ships, sisters to Tuonela, had also sent report of occasional sightings of derelicts. Yet so far as he knew those observations had been, like his own earlier encounters, mere glimpses. Interludes on their own long flights of diaspora from the seedship-spawned factories and nowcrowded habitats of Clump D. Ships in the long, long night.
Avoided crossings.
He felt a hefty kick of anticipation.
One kay now, and he couldn’t see from one end to the other without switching to wide-angle. He started to finesse the verniers. He’d need to track backwards towards the rear end of the hulk, to remain shielded while he exited the shuttle.
“You mean the holes? Yeah, I saw them.”
“Who sets out in a paper spaceship?”
“Yeah, you said already. Your premonition.”
“What, you think the braking burn could tear it apart?”
“Great. Good thing I didn’t pile on the juice to begin with.”
“Idiom. Now shush, and let me brake.” He began to burp propellant obliquely from pairs of the shuttle’s small attitude nozzles.
Mooring, too, was going to be a problem. He hadn’t been expecting to use magnetic clamps, and of course the vessel wasn’t going to have a standard docking port, but he wasn’t even sure there was enough substance to any part of the structure to take a grapple. Maybe it was just going to be a matched-velocities job.
He was close enough now to get a detailed, well-lit view of the vessel’s fuselage. There appeared to be a badly buckled ramscoop at its prow, and what must be its primary exhaust nozzle at the stern. Standard enough, although exotic in appearance. But where the rangefinder’s intelligent deconvolution had sketched in, from barely-seen detail, an otherwise uniformly smooth hull perforated by a few large and regular cavities, he now saw that the derelict’s outer skin was rough, and punctuated by a continuum of fissures and craters. There were sections of it, indeed, to which the term tattered might almost be applied. And yet these rents and voids in its surface covering were clustered principally amidships. Not at the prow, which would have seen much greater exposure to impact by high-relative-velocity dust grains and other cloud debris.
Pondering this, it struck Lem belatedly that the derelict was not tumbling. Instead, it merely spun, axially, in a leisurely and orderly fashion.
What possible gyroscopic mechanism might have remained sufficiently intact, across the evident millenia or longer, to have enabled the broken vessel, against all reasonable probability, to have retained a prow-forward attitude?
Ten metres, and matched at last. He’d EVA across, it was going to be more practical than attempting to move the shuttle closer.
“What?” he snapped. The vessel loomed large, close, darkly threatening.
“What in hell’s name do you mean by that?”
“Thought this was the first time anyone got a good look at one of these things. You telling me you’ve seen this thing before?”
“When?”
“You mean from your dim dark past as a seedship brain?”
“I didn’t traverse this distance to be scared off by one of your premonitions. You got something concrete, give it now. But if we turn back now, who knows when we might next get the chance to explore one of these?”
The Voice didn’t respond.
He waited for more than a complete revolution of the ship’s stern across his field of view (it took almost three minutes), mapping in his mind the pattern of openings in the rear of its hull, before he unlatched himself from the shuttle’s cage.
There was, of course, the continual danger from dust grains, but here he was ostensibly in the shadow of the derelict’s own ram-scoop. It should be safe enough. He worked his suit’s verniers to nudge free of the shuttle.
Inside, the ship was blackbody black. The suit’s own portable rangefinder didn’t help measurably either.
He swept his surroundings with the glove-mounted torch beam.
If he’d been expecting corridors, chambers, some traces of any shipboard apparatus, he was initially disappointed. So far as he could establish, the ship’s outer skin was wrapped very loosely about an almost identically-curved inner skin, like layers of over-puffed pastry, brittle and blackened. There was, in most places, sufficient space between the layers for him to maneuver, but it would be tiring to explore the entire ship in this fashion.
The inner skin seemed no more substantial, nor more intact, than the outer, and he thought he glimpsed at an analogous layer, incrementally less dark, beneath that, also.
He had entered near the stern; it seemed natural to explore forwards, moving towards the vessel’s prow. Looking for—what?
“This trigger any memories?” he asked. His voice felt strained, as if speech was inappropriate in this place.
“You can say that again.”
“Idiom.”
He began deploying glowpatches along the path he was traversing. Fortunately, the patches’ vacuum-adhesive attached tolerably well to the rough, flaked skin of the ship’s interior.
Placing the third patch, Lem consulted his suit’s heads-up. Oxygen for two hours yet, if he needed it, but he didn’t wish to spend that long in here. Moving by vernier was tiring, and the low albedo of the inter
ior surfaces meant that, even on full illumination, the torchbeam showed nothing more distant than about six metres. He suspected some clear lines-of-sight to be much longer than this, though for now they terminated in darkness.
It would take much more than two hours, at this rate, to reach the prow. He should return to the shuttle, move forward along the outside of the hull, and re-enter at a different point. The region he was exploring here wasn’t telling him much. This notion firming in his mind, he was about to turn back when a movement snagged in the corner of his visor.
The movement was ragged, small, and near the limit of his torchbeam, but nonetheless distinct. A fragment of the interior wall fell away ahead of him.
Fell away, or ceased to exist.
“You see that?” he asked, his voice sounding too loud.
“Not until I find out what that was.”
Lem plugged another glowpatch against the wall beside him and moved toward the site of the apparition. In all likelihood, some trace of physical disturbance—it could well have been the cold jetting of propellant from his suit’s verniers against a section of the wall behind him—had propagated a shock, slight but sufficient to shake some barely-attached shred of the wall’s skin.
Except: fell away? The ship’s spin-gravity was negligible. And, in the vessel’s internal vacuum, there was little enough substance to propagate and focus any shock front. There was something wrong here.
He noticed, now, also that the fabric of the interior wall at this point appeared to be lighter in colouration and more durable than the region he’d first encountered on entering the vessel. Grazing the wall lightly with gloved fingers, he dislodged a powdery residue that, cloudy, suspended briefly in the vacuum quietude around him. A few fragments of powder clung to his glove. Illuminated by the torch, they dwindled into nothingness within a few seconds. Interstellar frost, subliming against his glove-heat or under the mild intensity of his torch-beam. Most likely frozen hydrogen, nitrogen, or carbon monoxide.