The other amalgamates slipped into the rear sensors. The acceleration lessened. At once, a steady pulse of data traffic thrummed between Ways and Means and the other amalgamates, and eventually between all of the planarships equally.
Habidah had access to all of the message traffic, but it came too fast and heavy for her to glimpse more than a microcosm. Power shifted through the planarship’s veins. Habidah felt it. The deck resonated with it. Ways and Means was starting the long process of recharging and activating its transplanar gateway. The light of the other planarships flickered and bent, a telltale hint of their own gateway generators activating.
Meloku stirred as the acceleration damped. After the fields released her insides, she rasped, “What happened?”
The amalgamate answered, “The Unity is dissolving. We and the other amalgamates are in agreement: the Unity cannot hold against a primal force of the cosmos.”
Color returned to Meloku’s cheeks as blood found her head again, but, if anything she sounded more likely to faint. “You surrendered too.”
“It is the only way to preserve ourselves.” All along, that was what was most important to the amalgamates.
Osia and her companion stood silent. They were communicating with their master, no doubt too quickly for simple language.
Meloku said, “That was fast.”
“We are nothing if not prompt in the face of danger,” Ways and Means said. “The challenge we are wrestling with now is what to make of our lives. We have always defined ourselves by our empire, and growth, and power. That has become untenable. We will need time to ponder what comes next.”
That, Habidah supposed, was the closest thing to a spiritual crisis she was likely to hear from an amalgamate. The fact that it was still ongoing spoke to its significance. The amalgamates thought at a speed that dwarfed her own, or any human’s. They were in many ways as alien as Niccoluccio’s master.
For all that, it sounded confident when it said, “We will find new purposes in time. And one day we will understand more of what happened here.”
Habidah caught more snippets of the data pulsing between the amalgamates. Transplanar gateways throughout the Unity were set to overload and shut down in a matter of days. Their governing NAIs had been told to allow evacuees back home and then to obliterate themselves.
Lost trade links between planes would cost lives, but not as many as the plague. Some planes would no doubt find ways to remain connected, but, without the amalgamates governing them, they wouldn’t be anything like the Unity had been. They would be on their own now, and their own responsibilities.
Niccoluccio lay on the table, hands folded and eyes closed. The defensive field had dissipated. As soon as the acceleration cut and Habidah’s restraints released her, she went to him. Her inner ear fought her all the way, but she lasted long enough to take his hand.
His eyes fluttered open when she slipped his fingers between hers. He looked about as a man lost, and breathed out heavily.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No,” he said, odd and distant.
On the other side of the sky, Risk Management vanished underneath a crackle of radiation. Ways and Means had to turn some of its sensors off or risk having them blinded. When it could look again, Risk Management’s exhaust trail cut into nothing. It had gated to another plane.
Ways and Means broadcast an alarm alerting its crew to brace themselves for modest acceleration. Habidah repeated the warning for Niccoluccio and Meloku’s sakes. Meloku returned to her seat. Niccoluccio only closed his eyes.
Planarship crews were meant to leave their attachments to their old, merely human lives when they boarded. But she still picked up a few signals flashing to Providence Core, last messages thrown into the Unity’s crumbling communications networks. Messages home.
Habidah remained by Niccoluccio. She said, “You don’t have to come with us, wherever you’re going.”
Niccoluccio said, “You don’t understand.”
The deck juddered like a boat run aground. Habidah held the table to keep from tumbling. The outside universe vanished under a haze of light and static.
After a loose few seconds of blindness, the first images filtered back through the sensors. A gateway shone like a sun behind the planarship. Spires of energized exhaust and plasma curled out of it like fingers.
The stars reappeared, no longer cloaked by a vast dust cloud. The amalgamates and their ships and defenses had vanished. So had the belt of stations and industries in orbit around Providence Core. Only the distant Earth remained, dark and still.
Ways and Means broadcast the terms of the surrender to which it had agreed: “We are to remove ourselves from any plane formerly colonized by the Unity, and to never again organize systems of governance that span planes. As personal penance, for the duration of one thousand two hundred years, we are forbidden from traveling to other planes. After that period expires, we may travel as we will, but may never again attempt contact with the other amalgamates, any former plane of the Unity, or expand as we once did. We will be watched.”
Habidah started to say, “So we’ve been exiled to an empty plane,” but at the moment the rest of the sensor data caught up with her.
A handful of satellites spun in spread-out orbits. Most were small, almost imperceptible – stealthed spy satellites. Even the planarship’s sensors could hardly find them. A minority, though, stood out plainly: her field team’s observation satellites.
Niccoluccio said, “You came with me, not the other way around.”
The shape of this world’s continents, the atmospheric and oceanic compositions with their very few traces of pre-industrial civilization, the broad swatches of farmland across Asia, Europe, and Africa – all exactly as she left them. Her field base stood bright as a beacon to Ways and Means’ sensors.
Someone at the field base was trying to contact the planarship. Ways and Means had left other agents on the surface, too, and they were doing the same.
“You haven’t activated your stealth systems,” Habidah told Ways and Means, dully. “Too many of the locals will have seen us.”
Niccoluccio said, “That is the idea.”
Habidah looked back to him. She asked her demiorganics to scan the air between Niccoluccio and the planarship, search for any sign that they were still in contact. Nothing. Niccoluccio was speaking for himself, though he didn’t sound like him.
Meloku stepped to his table. She said, “You put Ways and Means up to this while you were controlling it.”
Ways and Means interjected, “It would be more correct to say that he suggested a focus for our endeavors.”
Niccoluccio looked to Meloku. “We’ve been told that you’ve made a good start preparing this world for colonization. You and your fellow agents have gotten a foothold into governments across multiple continents.”
“That’s right,” Meloku said, so unashamed that Habidah could have struck her.
“You will have no time to mourn the Unity,” Niccoluccio said. “We need you to reestablish contact. They and the locals they’ve recruited will distribute a plague cure.”
Meloku considered that for a long moment, like she was chewing something unpalatable. Finally, she nodded. She straightened and winced at her bruises.
“I’ll need my demiorganics back,” she said.
Ways and Means said, “It will take time to rebuild them. We are sorry to put off your ascension into a new body. We need you looking human while you interact with the people below.”
“I am proud to serve,” Meloku said. She sounded as distant as Niccoluccio.
Habidah stared at her, searching for any other hint of expression. But Meloku had retracted into herself, become as impossible to read as a soldier standing at attention.
More weight pressed Habidah into the deck. Her breath stuck in her throat. Ways and Means was firing its engines, arcing around to face the Earth. It made no attempt to disguise its exhaust.
Niccoluccio said, “Ways and Mea
ns and its crew have been barred from turning this world into an outpost of the Unity. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make it their home.”
“We are heading into equatorial orbit,” Ways and Means announced shipwide. “Altitude three hundred thousand meters.”
“Everyone below will see us,” Habidah said. “They won’t even need to have good eyesight.”
Ways and Means said, “Then they will know that we are coming.”
Niccoluccio’s voice was starting to strain. For all the subjective days or weeks or years he seemed to have spent trapped inside the planarship’s mind, Habidah doubted he’d gotten rest for any of it. He said, “My memories taught the virus about suffering. When the virus and the amalgamates were still negotiating, I was still a part of them. I added a clause.”
Habidah had argued for distributing a cure for the plague below, but hearing it now, from him, she couldn’t keep the blood from draining from her cheeks. Those weren’t his words. And he was talking about a lot more than a plague cure.
Habidah said, “The terms of your surrender barred you from doing this.”
“We have been forbidden from expanding across multiple planes,” Ways and Means said. “Not from controlling a single world.”
On the world below, sunset was still a long way off from the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent. Clear skies reigned over Europe. To anyone looking up, Ways and Means would appear as a bright new daytime star. As it decelerated into orbit and crossed the terminator, it would turn night skies blue.
For a moment, even Meloku seemed cowed by what Niccoluccio was saying. She said, “They’re going to think their world’s ending.”
“This time it is.”
Niccoluccio had said that, while the virus and Ways and Means had negotiated, his thoughts had shaped each of them. Looking at him and his half-lidded eyes, she realized the corollary was true, too. The virus and the amalgamate were so large by comparison that they must have overwhelmed him.
She allowed his fingers to fall through hers. He made no effort to hold on.
Niccoluccio said, “We have twelve hundred years to share everything we have, and to make this world better.” He smiled gently, warmly. “I don’t know how exactly we’re going to do it, yet. I came back before we could figure it out. But we have the means.”
Ways and Means said, “After you left us, we developed the method.”
It was hard to hear any difference in their inflections. Or any trace of the man she used to know. He was speaking for more than just himself.
Habidah looked away. She returned her attention to the sensor image of the Earth. She wondered how he would have seen the same image, had he been able to.
Niccoluccio said, “By the time the sun next rises over this continent, we’ll have started making everything down there a great deal better.”
Acknowledgments
This book could not have found its shape without the forbearance and editorial guidance of my wife, Teresa Milbrodt.
Nor could it have left the ground without the diligence and faith of Phil Jourdan, my editor, Paul Simpson, my copy editor, and the immense efforts of Marc Gascoigne, Penny Reeve, Mike Underwood, Nick Tyler, and everyone else at Angry Robot. I also owe thanks to Dominic Harman for his astounding cover artwork.
The genesis of this story, like many of my others, came from impulse reading. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, a history of 14th century Europe as told through the life of Enguerrand de Coucy. She did not stay long on the Black Death, but Barbara Tuchman is a novelist’s historian, and I could not easily forget the feelings and experiences that she so meticulously evoked. These echoed in my mind for months, until they seized and synthesized with characters and ideas that had been percolating for even longer.
From Tuchman, I leapfrogged to other works on the Black Death and more on the era, and could not have found many of them without the Gunnison Public Library and Western State Colorado University Library, or the efforts of their staff. Books important to Quietus’s development include Julie Kerr’s Life in the Medieval Cloister, John Kelly’s The Great Mortality, and many others for which I have no library records. The errors that remain are either deliberately made or my own oversight.
My professors and cohort at Bowling Green State University were as kind to me as family for tolerating me when my impulses took me far away from whatever it was I was supposed to be doing there. Osia and Ways and Means have their origins in stories delivered to their workshops.
About the Author
Tristan Palmgren has been a clerk, a factory technician, a university lecturer, a cashier, a secretary, a retail manager, a rural coroner’s assistant. In his lives on parallel Earths, he has been an ant farm tycoon, funeral home enthusiast, professional con-artist impersonator, laser pointer chaser, and that guy who somehow landed a trademark for the word “Avuncular.” Jealous. He lives with his wife Teresa in Columbia, Missouri.
tristanpalmgren.com • twitter.com/tristanpalmgren
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Watcher in the skies
An Angry Robot paperback original 2018
Copyright © Tristan Palmgren 2018
Tristan Palmgren asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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ISBN: 978-0-85766-744-1
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Part II 12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Part III 29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Join the Robot Legion
Legal Pages
Guide
Cover
Acknowledgements
Text
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright pa
ge
Epigraph
Quietus Page 44