Call me, little sister. Let us put an end to all this.
Thien Bao said, “Grandmother said—you had a mindship—”
Lady Oanh laughed; genuinely amused it seemed. “The Carp that Leapt Over the Stream? It seemed senseless to hoard her services. She’s part of the fleet that will evacuate her. That’s where we’re going, in fact.”
Lady Oanh’s eyes focused on something beyond Thien Bao, and she nodded. “I’ll send a message to notify your kin that I’m helping you onboard a ship. That should alleviate their worries.”
If they didn’t all die first from rebel fire; if the remaining army ship held—if if if …
A gentle rocking, indicating the palanquin was moving forward again—to the waiting ships, to safety—except that there was no safety, not anywhere. Outside, the remaining army ship was trying to contain the rebel mindships; shuddering, its hull pitted and cracked. From time to time, a stray shot would hit the spaceport’s shields, and the entire structure around them would shudder, but it held, it still held.
But for how long?
“I hate them,” Thien Bao said.
“Who? The rebels?” Lady Oanh’s gaze was sharp. “It’s as much the fault of the Court as theirs, child. If the Great Virtue Emperor and the Lily Empress hadn’t been weak, more concerned with poetry than with their armies; if their officials hadn’t encouraged them, repeating that nonsense about adherence to virtue being the only safeguard the Empire needed…”
To hear her, so casually criticising the Empress—but then Second Aunt and Mother had done the same. “I wish…” Thien Bao sounded childish, she knew; like a toddler denied a treat. “I wish someone were strong enough to stop the rebel armies. To kill them once and for all.”
Lady Oanh’s face did not move, but she shook her head. “Be careful, child.”
How could wanting peace be a bad thing? She understood nothing, that old, pampered woman who didn’t have to fight through the crowd, who didn’t live with fear in her belly, with the litany of the family dead in her mind—
“Killing is easy,” Lady Oanh said. “But that has never stopped the devastation of war.”
“It would be a start,” Thien Bao said, defiantly.
“Perhaps,” Lady Oanh said. She shook her head. “It would take a great show of strength from the Empire to stop them, and this is something we’re incapable of, at the present time. The seeds of our defeat were in place long before the war, I fear; and—”
She never finished her sentence. Thien Bao saw nothing; but something struck the shields, wringing them dry like wet laundry; and going past them, a network of cracks and fissures spreading throughout the pillars of the spaceport and the huge glass windows.
Look out, Thien Bao wanted to say; but the wall nearest to them shuddered and fell apart, dragging down chunks of the ceiling in its wake. Something struck her in the back of the head; and everything disappeared in an excruciating, sickening crunch.
* * *
When she went silent, Vermillion Phoenix had had an officer of the Embroidered Guard as her only crew—not a blood relative, but a sworn oath-sister, who had been with the ship for decades and would never hear of abandoning her post.
There is no record of what happened to the officer. Being human, without any kind of augmentation, she likely died of old age, while the mindship—as ships did—went on, unburdened.
Unburdened does not mean free from grief, or solitude. In the centuries that followed, several people claimed to have had visions of the ship; to have heard her voice calling to them; or dreamt of battles—past and present—to which she put a brutal end. There were no connections between them; no common ancestry or closeness in space or time; but perhaps the mindship recognised something else: a soul, torn from its fragile flesh envelope and reincarnated, time and time again, until everything was made right.
* * *
Thien Bao woke up, and all was dust and grit—choking her, bending her to the ground to convulsively cough until her lungs felt wrung dry. When she rose at last, shaking, she saw the ruins of the palanquin, half-buried under rubble; and a few cut wires, feebly waving in the dim light—and the mob, further into the background, still struggling to reach the ships. She’d thought the wall would collapse, but it stood in spite of the massive fissures crossing it from end to end; and for some incongruous reason it reminded her of the fragile celadon cups Father had so treasured, their green surface shot with such a network of cracks it seemed a wonder they still held together.
Around her, chunks of the ceiling dotted the area—and the other thing, the one she avoided focusing on—people lying still or twitching or moaning, lying half under rubble—with limbs bent at impossible angles, and the stained white of bones laid bare at the heart of bleeding wounds; and spilled guts; and the laboured breathing of those in agony …
Those were the days of the dead, and she had to be strong.
At the edge of her field of vision—as faint as her paused game of Battle for Indigo Mountain, in another lifetime—the red characters of her dream hovered, and a faint sense of a vast presence, watching over her from afar.
“Lady Oanh? Mother? Second Aunt?” Her location loop was still running; but it didn’t seem to have picked up anything from them—or perhaps it was the spaceport network that was the problem, flickering in and out of existence like a dying heartbeat. It was nonsense anyway; who expected the network to hold, through that kind of attack.
The sky overhead was dark with the shadow of a ship—not the army ship, it had to be one of the mindships. Its hatches were open, spewing dozens of little shuttles, a ballet slowly descending towards them: rebels, come to finish the work they had started.
She had to move.
When she pulled herself upright, pain shot through her neck and arms like a knife-stab; but she forced herself to move on, half-crawling, half-walking, until she found Lady Oanh.
The old woman lay in the rubble, staring at the torn dome of the spaceport. For a moment, an impossibly long moment, Thien Bao thought she was alive; but no one could be alive with the lower half of their body crushed; and so much fluid and blood leaking from broken tubes. “I’m sorry,” she said, but it wasn’t her fault; it had never been her fault. Overhead, the shuttles were still descending, as slowly as the executioner’s blade. There was no time. There was no safety; not anywhere; there was no justice; no fairness; no end to the war and the fear and the sick feeling in her head and in her belly.
A deafening sound in her ears, loud enough to cover the distant sounds of panic—she realised that it was her location loop, displaying an arrow and an itinerary to join whatever was left of her family; if they, like Lady Oanh, hadn’t died, if there was still hope …
She managed to pull herself upwards—staggered, following the directions—left right left going around the palanquin around the dead bodies around the wounded who grasped at her with clawed hands—days of the dead, she had to be strong had to be strong …
She found Grandmother, Mother and Second Aunt standing by the barriers that had kept the queue orderly, once—which were now covered in dust, like everything else around them. There was no greeting, or sign of relief. Mother merely nodded as if nothing were wrong, and said, “We need to move.”
“It’s past time for that,” Second Aunt said, her gaze turned towards the sky.
Thien Bao tried to speak; to say something about Lady Oanh, but no words would come out of her mouth.
Mother’s eyes rolled upwards for a brief moment as she accessed the network. “The Carp that Leapt Over the Stream,” she said. “Its shuttles were parked at the other end of the terminal, and there’ll be fewer people there. Come on.”
Move move move—Thien Bao felt as though everything had turned to tar; she merely followed as Second Aunt and Mother elbowed their way through the crowd; and on to a corridor that was almost deserted compared to the press of people. “This way,” Mother said.
Thien Bao turned, briefly, before they limped into the c
orridor, and saw that the first of the rebel shuttles had landed some way from them, disgorging a flood of yellow-clad troops with featureless helmets.
It was as if she were back in her dreams, save that her dreams had never been this pressing—and that the red words on the edge of her field of vision kept blinking, no matter how she tried to dismiss them.
Mother was right; they needed to keep moving—past the corridor, into another, wider concourse that was mostly scattered ruin, following the thin thread of people and hoping that the shuttles would still be there, that the mindship would answer to them with Lady Oanh dead. By then, they had been joined by other people, among whom a wounded woman carried on the shoulder of a soldier—no introductions, no greetings, but a simple acknowledgement that they were all in this together. It wasn’t hope that kept them going; it was sheer stubbornness, one foot in front of the other, one breath and the next and the next; the fear of falling behind the others, of slowing everyone down and ruining everything.
Ahead, the mass of a shuttle, seen behind glass windows; getting agonisingly, tantalisingly closer. “This way,” Second Aunt said; and then they saw the yellow-clad troops in front of them, deployed to bar the passage across the concourse—and the other troops, too, blocking the passageways, herding people off the shuttle in the eerie silence.
Mother visibly sagged. “It will be fine,” she said, and her voice was a lie. “They’ll just want to check our identity and process us—”
But it was the soldier with them who panicked—who turned away, lightning-fast, still carrying his wounded charge—and in the dull silence that followed, Thien Bao heard the click of weapons being armed.
“No!” Mother said, sharply. As if in a dream Thien Bao saw her move in front of the yellow-clad soldiers, with no more apparent thought than if she’d been strolling through the marketplace—and she wanted to scream but couldn’t, as the weapons found their mark and Mother crumpled, bloodless and wrung dry, her corpse so small it seemed impossible that she had once been alive.
Second Aunt moved at last, her face creased with anger—not towards Mother or the soldier, but straight at the rebel troops. “How dare you—”
There was the sound again; of weapons being armed.
No.
No. No.
Everything went red: the characters from her dreams, solidifying once more in front of her; the voice speaking into her mind.
Little sister.
And, weeping, Thien Bao reached out, into the void between stars, and called to the ship.
* * *
When the child named Thien Bao was born on the Sixth Planet, there were signs—a room filled with the smell of machine-oil, and iridescent reflections on the walls, tantalising characters from a long lost language. Had the birth-master not been desperately busy trying to staunch the mother’s unexpected bleeding, and calm down the distraught father, she would have noticed them.
Had she looked, too, into the newborn’s eyes as she took her first, trembling breath, the birth-master would have seen the other sign: the hint of a deep, metallic light in the huge pupils; a light that spread from end to end of the eye like a wash of molten steel, a presage of things to come.
* * *
She was vast, and old, and terrible; her wings stretched around entire planets, as iridescent as pearls fished from the depths; the trail of her engines the colour of jade, of delicate celadon—and where she passed, she killed.
She disintegrated the fleet that waited on the edge of the killing field; scoured clean the surface of the small moon, heedless of the screams of those trapped upon it; descended to the upper limit of the planet’s atmosphere, and incinerated the two mindships in orbit, and the fragile ship that still struggled to defend against them; and the tribunal where the militia still fought the recently landed invasion force; and the magistrate in his chambers, staring at the tactical map of the planet and wondering how to save what he could from the rebels. In the spaceport, where the largest number of people congregated, she dropped ion bombs until no sign of life remained; until every shuttle had exploded or stopped moving.
Then there was silence; and lack of strife; and then there was peace.
And then she was merely Thien Bao again, standing in the ruins of the spaceport, in the shadow of the great ship she had called on.
There was nothing left. Merely dust, and bodies—so many bodies, a sea of them, yellow-clad, black-clad, civilians and soldiers and rebels all mingled together, their blood pooling on the cracked floor; and a circle around her, where Mother lay dead; and the soldier, and the wounded woman; and the rebels who had shot her—and by her side, Second Aunt and Grandmother, bloodless and pale and unmoving. It was unclear whether it was the mindship’s weapons they had died of, or the rebels’, or both; but Thien Bao stood in a circle of the dead, the only one alive as far as she could see.
The only one—it couldn’t—couldn’t—
Little sister. The voice of the mindship was as deep as the sea. I have come, and ended it, as you requested.
That wasn’t what she’d wanted—that—all of it, any of it—
And then she remembered Lady Oanh’s voice, her wry comment. Be careful, child. Be careful.
I bring peace, and an end to strife. Is that not what the Empire should desire?
No. No.
Come with me, little sister. Let us put an end to this war.
A great victory, Thien Bao thought, hugging herself; feeling hot and cold at the same time, her bones chilled within their sheaths of flesh, a churning in her gut like the beginning of grief. Everyone had wanted a great victory over the rebels, something that would stop them, once and for all, that would tell them that the Empire still stood, still could make them pay for every planet they took.
And she’d given them that; she and the ship. Exactly that.
Come. We only have each other, the ship said, and it was the bitter truth. There was nothing left on the planet—not a living soul—and of the rebel army that had entered the solar system, nothing and no one left either, just the husks of destroyed ships drifting in the emptiness of space.
Come, little sister.
And she did—for where else could she go; what else could she do, that would have made any sense?
* * *
In the old days, the phoenix, the vermillion bird, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a virtuous ruler under whom the land would thrive.
In the days of the war, it is still the case; if one does not enquire how peace is bought, how prosperity is paid for—how a mindship and a child scour the numbered planets, dealing death to rebels and Empire alike, halting battles by bloody massacres; and making anyone who raises arms pay dearly for the privilege of killing.
Meanwhile, on the inner planets begins the painful work of reconstruction—raising pagodas and tribunals and shops from the ashes of war, and hanging New Year’s Eve garlands along avenues that are still dust and ruins, praying to the ancestors for a better future; for a long life; and good fortune; and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.
There is no virtuous ruler; but perhaps—perhaps just, there is a manner of peace and prosperity, bought in seas of blood spilled by a child.
And perhaps—perhaps just—it is all worth it. Perhaps it is all one can hope for, in the days of the war.
The Burial of Sir John Mawe at Cassini
CHAZ BRENCHLEY
Here’s a retro–SF story about a habitable (and inhabited) Mars that has been colonized by a Victorian-era British Empire in an alternate world, a strong, bitter, and melancholy story that follows the aftermath of the enigmatic death of a Colonial leader …
Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two fantasy series, The Books of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. As Daniel Fox, he has published a Chinese-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains; as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy series beginning w
ith Desdaemona. A British Fantasy Award winner, he has also published books for children and more than five hundred short stories. Brenchley recently married and moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear. In 2014 he published a new novel, Being Small, and a collection, Bitter Waters.
Never did a man hanged see such a funeral. Old Cobb leaned on his spade to watch the barges come down the canal in caravan, in smoky procession, each decked out with black solemnity. Crowds lined the bank, quality and commoners all intermingled, while open carriages and charabancs blocked the roadways behind. Gentlemen and coolies removed their hats as the cortège steamed slowly by; ladies bowed their heads, while their maids dropped a dutiful curtsey. Soldiers saluted, officers and troops together. They were not—quite—a formal muster, but a great many had chosen to turn out in full parade dress today, a scarlet glory against the green.
Flags were everywhere, at half-mast every one. Poles had gone up overnight at every measured furlong to ensure it. That had been a job of work. Cobb knew; he’d had the navvies in his bothy before dawn, drinking tea, smoking, grumbling. Now they too were beside the water, clean shirts and a shave, grouped around the last pole they raised, just opposite the cemetery’s watergate. Proud of their achievement, showing their respect. Mute before their betters, awkward in any society other than their own, standing their ground today. Cobb knew them intimately, them and their kind. Perhaps he admired them, though he would scorn to admit it. Admiration was for the idle classes who had time to compare this to that, others to themselves. He was a navvy himself, in all but name. But for an accident of birth, unless it was the grace of God. His mother had said the one thing, parson the other. He needn’t believe either. He was just glad of the red stripe on his blue passport—red, red, white and blue—that said he was a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, and Mars-born. This and that together: the best of both worlds, as they liked to say. And give Venus never a mention, they liked that too. Venus was in Russian hands, and the Czar no friend to the Queen Empress.
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