by Neil Clarke
Officer class, Merlin thought.
The man spoke to them. His voice was soft, undemonstrative. Merlin still did not understand a word of it, but just the manner of speaking conveyed an assumption of implicit authority.
“His name is . . . Baskin,” Teal said, when the man had left a silence for her to speak. “Prince Baskin. Havergal royalty. That’s his own personal cruiser out there. He was on some sort of patrol when they picked up our presence. They came at full thrust to meet us. Baskin says things come out of the Way now and then, and it’s always a scramble to get to them before the enemy.”
“If Locrian’s spoken to him, then he already knows our names. Ask him about the syrinx.”
Teal passed on Merlin’s question. Baskin answered, Teal ruminated on his words, then said: “He says that he’s very interested to learn of your interest in the syrinx.”
“I bet he is.”
“He also says that he’d like to continue the conversation on his cruiser. He says that we’ll be guests, not prisoners, and that we’ll be free to return here whenever we like.”
“Tell Prince Baskin . . . yes, we’ll join him. But if I’m not back on Tyrant in twelve hours, my ship will take action to retrieve me. If you can make that sound like a polite statement of fact, rather than a crudely worded threat, that would be lovely.”
“He says there’ll be no difficulty,” Teal said.
“He’s right about that,” Merlin answered.
Part of Prince Baskin’s cruiser had been spun to simulate gravity. There was a stateroom, as grand as anything Merlin had encountered, all shades of veneered wood and polished metal, with red drapes and red fabric on the chairs. The floor curved up gently from one end of the room to the other, and this curvature was echoed in the grand table that took up much of the space. Prince Baskin was at one end of it, Merlin and Teal at the other, with the angle of the floor making Baskin seem to tilt forward like a playing card, having to lift his head to face his guests. Orderlies had fussed around them for some time, setting plates and glasses and cutlery, before bringing in the elements of a simple but well-prepared meal. Then—rather to Merlin’s sur-prise—they had left the three of them alone, with only stony-faced portraits of royal ancestors and nobility for company. Men on horses, men in armour, men with projectile guns and energy weapons, both grand and foolish in their pomp.
“This is pure ostentation,” he said, looking around the room with its sweeping curves and odd angles. “No one in their right mind puts centrifugal gravity on a ship this small. It takes up too much room, costs too much in mass, and the spin differential between your feet and head’s enough to make you dizzy.”
“If the surroundings are not quite to your taste, Merlin, we could adjourn to one of the Renouncer’s weightless areas.” Prince Baskin had spoken.
Teal cocked her chin to face him. The curvature of the room made it like talking to someone half way up a hill. “You speak Main.”
“I try.”
“Then why . . . ” she began.
Baskin smiled, and tore a chunk off some bread, dipping it into soup before proceeding. “Please join me. And please forgive my slight deception in pretending to need to have your words translated, as well as my rustiness with your tongue. What I have learned, I have done so from books and recordings, and until now I have never had the opportunity to speak it to a living soul.” He bit into the bread, and made an eager motioning gesture that they should do likewise. “Please. Eat. My cook is excellent—as well he should be, given what it costs me to ship him and his kitchen around. Teal, I must apologise. But there was no deception where Locrian and Balus were concerned. They genuinely did not speak Main, and were in need of your translation. I am very much the exception.”
“How . . . ” Merlin started.
“I was a sickly child, I suppose you might say. I had many hours to myself, and in those hours—as one does—I sought my own entertainment. I used to play at war, but toy soldiers and tabletop campaigns will only take you so far. So I developed a fascination with languages. Many centuries ago, a Cohort ship stopped in our system. They were here for two years—two of your years, I should say—long enough for trade and communication. Our diplomats tried to learn Main, and by the same token the Cohort sent in negotiating teams who did their best to master our language. Of course there were linguistic ties between the two, so the task was not insurmountable. But difficult, all the same. I doubt that either party excelled itself, but we did what was needed and there was sufficient mutual understanding.” Baskin turned his head to glance at the portraits to his right, each painting set at a slight angle to its neighbours. “It was a very long time ago, as I’m sure you appreciate. When the Cohort had gone, there was great emphasis placed on maintaining our grasp of their language, so that we’d have a head start the next time we needed it. Schools, academies, and so on. King Curtal was instrumental in that.” He was nodding at one of the figures in the portraits, a man of similar age and bearing to himself, and dressed in state finery not too far removed from the formal wear in which Baskin now appeared. “But that soon died away. The Cohort never returned and, as the centuries passed, there was less and less enthusiasm for learning Main. The schools closed, and by the time it came down to me—forty generations later—all that remained were the books and recordings. There was no living speaker of Main. So I set myself the challenge to become one, and encouraged my senior staff to do likewise, and here I am now, sitting before you, and doubtless making a grotesque mockery of your tongue.”
Merlin broke bread, dipped it into the soup, made a show of chewing on it before answering.
“This Cohort ship that dropped by,” he said, his mouth still full. “Was it the Shrike?”
Teal held her composure, but he caught the sidelong twitch of her eye.
“Yes,” Baskin said, grimacing slightly. “You’ve heard of it?”
“It’s how I know about the syrinx,” Merlin said, trying to sound effortlessly matter-of-fact. “I found the Shrike. It was a wreck, all her crew dead. Been dead for centuries, in fact. But the computer records were still intact.” He lifted a goblet and drank. The local equivalent to wine was amber coloured and had a lingering, woody finish. Not exactly to his taste but he’d had worse. “That’s why I’m here.”
“And Teal?”
“I travel with Merlin,” she said. “He isn’t good with languages, and he pays me to be his translator.”
“You showed a surprising faculty with our own,” Baskin said.
“Records of your language were in the files Merlin pulled from the wreck. It wasn’t that hard to pick up the rudiments.”
Baskin dabbed at his chin with napkin. “You picked up more than the rudiments, if I might say.”
Merlin leaned forward. “Is it true about the syrinx?”
“Yes,” Baskin said. “We keep it in a safe place on Havergal. Intact, in so far as we can tell. Would that be of interest to you?”
“I think it might.”
“But you must already have one, if you’ve come here by the Way.”
Teal said: “His syrinx is broken, or at least damaged. He knows it won’t last long, so he needs to find a spare.”
Again Baskin turned to survey the line of portraits. “These ancestors of mine knew very little but war. It dominated their lives utterly. Even when there was peace, they were thinking ahead to the moment that peace would fail, and how they might be in the most advantageous position when that day came. As it always did. My own life has also been shaped by the war. Disfigured, you might say. But I have lived under its shadow long enough. I should very much like to be the last of my line who ruled during wartime.”
“Then end the war,” Merlin said.
“I should like to—but it must be under our terms. Gaffurius is stretched to its limits. One last push, one last offensive, and we can enforce a lasting peace. But there is a difficulty.”
“Which is?” Teal asked.
“Something of ours has fallen in
to the wrong hands—an object we call the Iron Tactician.” Baskin continued eating for several moments, in no rush to explain himself. “I don’t know what you’ve learned of our history. But for centuries, both sides in this war have relied on artificial intelligences to guide their military planning.”
“I suppose this is another of those machines,” Merlin said.
“Yes and no. For a long time our machines were well-matched with those of the enemy. We would build a better one, then they would, we would respond, and so on. A gradual escalating improvement. So it went on. Then—by some happy stroke—our cyberneticists created a machine that was generations in advance of anything they had. For fifty years the Iron Tactician has given us an edge, a superiority. Its forecasts are seldom in error. The enemy still has nothing to match it—which is why we have made the gains that we have. But now, on the eve of triumph, we have lost the Iron Tactician.”
“Careless,” Merlin said.
A tightness pinched the corner of Baskin’s mouth. “The Tactician has always needed to be close to the theatre of battle, so that its input data is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. That was why our technicians made it portable, self-contained, and self-reliant. Of course there are risks in having an asset of that nature.”
“What happened?” Teal asked. “Did Gaffurius capture it?”
“Thankfully, no,” Baskin answered. “But it’s very nearly as bad. The Tactician has fallen into the hands of a non-aligned third party. Brigands, mercenaries, call them what you will. Now they wish to extract a ransom for the Tactician’s safe return—or they will sell it on to the enemy. We know their location, an asteroid holdout, and if we massed a group of ships we could probably overwhelm their defences. But if Gaffurius guessed our intentions and moved first . . . ” Baskin lifted his glass, peering through it at Merlin and Teal, so that his face swam distorted, one mercurial eye wobbling to immensity while the other shrunk to a tight cold glint. “So there you have it. A simple proposition. The syrinx is yours, Merlin—provided you recover the Tactician for us.”
“Maybe I still wouldn’t be fast enough.”
“But you’ll be able to strike without warning, with Cohort weapons. I don’t see that it should pose you any great difficulty, given the evident capabilities of your ship.” Baskin twirled his fingers around the stem of his goblet. “But then that depends on how badly you want our syrinx.”
“Mm,” Merlin said. “Quite badly, if I’m going to be honest.”
“Would you do it?”
Merlin looked at Teal before answering. But she seemed distracted, her gaze caught by one of the portraits. It was the picture of King Curtal, the ancestor Baskin had mentioned only a little while earlier. While the style of dress might not have changed, the portrait was yellowing with old varnish, its colours time-muted.
“I’d need guarantees,” he said. “Starting with proof that this syrinx even exists.”
“That’s easily arranged,” Prince Baskin said.
Tyrant had a biometric lock on Merlin, and it would shadow the Renouncer all the way to Havergal. If it detected that Merlin was injured or under duress, Tyrant would deploy its own proctors to storm the cruiser. But Merlin had gauged enough of his hosts to conclude that such an outcome was vanishingly unlikely. They needed his cooperation much too badly to do harm to their guest.
Locrian showed Merlin and Teal to their quarters, furnished in the same sumptuous tones as the stateroom. When the door opened and Merlin saw that there was only one bed, albeit a large one, he turned to Teal with faked resignation.
“It’s awkward for both of us, but if we want to keep them thinking you’ve been travelling with me for years and years, it’ll help if we behave as a couple.”
Teal waited until Locrian had shut the door on them and gone off on his own business. She walked to the bed, following the gently, dreamy up-curve of the floor. “You’re right,” she said, glancing back at Merlin before she sat on the edge of the bed. “It will help. And at least for now I’d rather they didn’t know I was on the swallowship, so I’m keen to maintain the lie.”
“Good. Very good.”
“But we share the bed and nothing else. You’re of no interest to me, Merlin. Maybe you’re not a traitor or a fool—I’ll give you that much. But you’re still a fat, swaggering drunk who thinks far too much of himself.” But Teal patted the bed. “Still, you’re right. The illusion’s useful.”
Merlin settled himself down on his side of the bed. “No room for manoeuvre there? Not even a little bit?”
“None.”
“Then we’re clear. Actually, it’s a bit of a relief. I meant to say . . . ”
“If this is about what I just spoke about?”
“I just wanted to say, I understand how strange all this must be. Not everyone goes back to a place they were thirteen hundred years ago. In a way, it’s a good job it was such a long time ago. At least we don’t have to contend with any living survivors from those days, saying that they remember you being on the diplomatic team.”
“It was forty three generations ago. No one remembers.”
Merlin moved to the window, watching the stars wheel slowly by outside. There was his own ship, a sharp sliver of darkness against the greater darkness of space. He thought of the loves he had seen ripped from by time and distance, and how the sting of those losses grew duller with each year but was never entirely healed. It was an old lesson for him, one he had been forced to learn many times. For Teal, this might be her first real taste of the cruelty of deep time—realising how far downstream she had come, how little chance she stood of beating those currents back to better, kinder times.
“I’d remember,” he said softly.
He could see her reflection in the window, Tyrant sliding through her like a barb, but Teal neither acknowledged his words nor showed the least sign that they had meant anything to her.
Five days was indeed ample time to prepare Merlin for the recovery operation, but only because the intelligence was so sparse. The brigands were holed up on an asteroid called Mundar, an otherwise insignificant speck of dirt on some complex, winding orbit that brought it into the territorial space of both Havergal and Gaffurius. Their leader was a man called Struxer, but beyond one fuzzy picture the biographical notes were sparse. Fortunately there was more on the computer itself. The Iron Tactician was a spherical object about four metres across, quilted from pole to pole in thick military-grade armour. It looked like some hard-shelled animal rolled up into a defensive ball. Merlin saw no obvious complications: it needed no external power inputs and would easily fit within Tyrant’s cargo hold.
Getting hold of it was another matter. Baskin’s military staff knew how big Mundar was and had estimates of its fortifications, but beyond that things were sketchy. Merlin skimmed the diagrams and translated documents, but told Baskin that he wanted Teal to see the originals. He was still looking out for any gaps between the raw material and what was deemed fit for his eyes, any hint of a cover-up or obfuscation.
“Why are you so concerned?” Teal asked him, halfway to Havergal, when they were alone in Baskin’s stateroom, the documents spread out on the table. “Eating away at your conscience, is it, that you might be serving the wrong paymasters?”
“I’m not the one who chose sides,” he said quietly. “You did, by selling the syrinx to one party instead of the other. Besides, the other lot won’t be any better. Just a different bunch of stuffed shirts and titles, being told what to do by a different bunch of battle computers.”
“So you’ve no qualms.”
“Qualms?” Merlin set down the papers he had been leafing through. “I’ve so many qualms they’re in danger of self-organizing. I occasionally have a thought that isn’t a qualm. But I’ll tell you this. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. They have an item I need, and there’s a favour I can do for them. It’s that simple. Not everything in the universe is a riddle.”
“You’ll be killing those brigands.”
“They’ll have every chance to hand over the goods. And I’ll exercise due restraint. I don’t want to damage the Tactician, not when it’s the only thing standing between me and the syrinx.”
“What if you found out that Prince Baskin was a bloodthirsty warmonger?”
Merlin, suddenly weary, settled his head onto his hand, propped up with an elbow. “Shall I tell you something? This war of theirs doesn’t matter. I don’t give a damn who wins or who loses, or how many lives end up being lost because of it. What matters—what my problem is—is the simple fact that the Huskers will wipe out every living trace of humanity if we allow them. That includes you, me, Prince Baskin, Struxer’s brigands, and every human being on either side of their little spat. And if a few people end up dying to make that Husker annihilation a little less likely, a few stupid mercenaries who should have known better than to play one side against the other, I’m afraid I’m not going to shed many tears.”
“You’re cold.”
“No one loves life more than me, Teal. No one’s lost more, either. You lost a ship, and that’s bad, but I lost a whole world. And regardless of which side they’re on, these people will all die if I don’t act.” He returned to the papers, with their sketchy ideas about Mundar’s reinforcements, but whatever focus he’d had was gone now. “They owe you nothing, Teal, and you owe them nothing in return. The fact that you were here all those years ago . . . it doesn’t matter. Nothing came of it.”
Teal was silent. He thought that was going to be the end of it, that his words had found their mark, but after a few moments she said: “Something isn’t right. The man in the portrait—the one they call King Curtal. I knew him. But that wasn’t his name.”
As they made their approach to Havergal, slipping through cordon after cordon of patrols and defence stations, between armoured moons and belts of anti-ship mines, dodging patrol zones, and battle fronts, Merlin felt a sickness building in him. He had seen worse things done to worlds in his travels. Much worse, in many cases: seen worlds reduced to molten slag or tumbling rubble piles or clouds of hot, chemically complex dust. But with few exceptions those horrors had been perpetrated not by people but by forces utterly beyond their control or comprehension. Not so here. The boiled oceans, the cratered landmasses, the dead and ashen forests, the poisoned, choking remnants of what had once been a life-giving atmosphere—these brutalities had been perpetrated by human action, people against people. It was an unnecessary and wanton crime, a cruel and injudicious act in a galaxy that already knew more than its share.