Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “Welcome to Gododdin, Lord Marlowe,” Sir Amalric said, and knelt—though propriety only asked that the castellan bow.

  “We’re happy to be here,” I said, and though the fellow expected me to offer my ring, I did not. Aranata’s ring was no lordly signet, and though I had a new one to replace the one I’d thrown away on Emesh, I did not wear it. Though the Emperor had re-legitimized me as a member of the palatinate and his peerage and established me as head of a new and separate House Marlowe, I did not feel a lord in the truest sense. “Please, stand.”

  Osman did.

  “May I introduce my lady, Doctor Valka Onderra Vhad Edda, scientific advisor to the Red Company.” I turned, permitting Osman to kiss Valka’s hand. “And this is Tor Varro. And this,” I stepped aside so that Alexander might step forward, “is my squire, Alexander.” I pointedly did not use the boy’s full name. It was not that I wished to keep Alexander’s Imperial lineage a secret, only that it would do the boy good not to be lording his blood and name over everyone in the vicinity.

  “Well met, all of you,” Sir Amalric said, saluting my squire and the inspecting my guard with a cursory glance. He ran a hand over his bald pate and asked, “Would you like to see your quarters and take a meal before we begin?”

  I shook my head. “We’ve rested enough on the ship. If your men will see that our effects are taken to our quarters, we may begin at once.”

  CHAPTER 8

  DREAM EVIL

  I DO NOT NOW recall much of the room itself, though I do not have to remember to tell you that it was dull: gray-walled and darkly carpeted, the furniture cheap and utilitarian, the chairs wheeled. I do not need to remember the pitchers of water sweating on the table to know they were there, or recall the face of the junior officer to know one stood in a corner ready to refill one of his betters’ glasses should it empty. I have seen a thousand versions of that room on a thousand worlds, and they are all the same.

  But I remember the view of Catraeth’s white streets and fountains and the brightly painted faces of shops and homes. The way they ran out to the edge of the uplands and down the slopes to where the Green Sea rushed up against the mountains. From our great height, I could see for miles until the curve of the world veiled all that was beyond the horizon from sight.

  “Lord Marlowe?”

  I blinked, returning my attentions to the room and the people in it. “Yes, yes. Proceed.”

  Presently the lights dimmed and the horizontal slice of window polarized, casting us into premature gloom.

  “The convoy we sent to Nemavand comprised five vessels: the Valiant, the Old Iron King, the Emperor’s Hand, the Red Defender, and the Merciless. We’ve heard nothing from the Defender or the Hand, but the other three managed to get off distress calls before they went dark. There wasn’t much, which tells us that whoever attacked them went for their comms arrays first.” The speaker was a reedy plebeian woman in dress blacks with the silver shield of a data analyst pinned to her arm. “All three signals were picked up by the datanet relay here.” She indicated a point on the starchart that appeared projected above the table that very moment.

  “That’s what? About fifty light-years from Dion Station?” Durand asked, removing his false spectacles to get a better look at the holograph before us. “You said the signal arrived three years ago? That’s . . .” He trailed off, trying to calculate the volume of space that left us to search.

  He needn’t have bothered. “That leaves us with anywhere between three thousand fifty-three cubic light-years and twenty-four thousand four hundred twenty-nine cubic light-years of space to explore,” Tor Varro said, so quickly I had to remind myself that arithmetic was the least of a scholiast’s applications. Varro had taken the amount of time it had taken for the signal to reach the datanet relay satellite, converted it to light-years, and doubled it, because the missing fleet must have disappeared somewhere approximately nine light-years from the relay sat and he needed to account for drift, assuming the vessels had been attacked at warp. Practically speaking, the real number was closer to the smaller number, with the convoy most likely lost along that thin sphere nine light-years distant from the relay sat in question.

  Even so, my heart sank again.

  It was still an enormous volume, one we might search for decades and find nothing but trace gases and the odd rogue asteroid. It would be like trying to find a tiny coal in a pot of ink with a sieve the size of a thimble while blindfolded and wearing thick gloves.

  “You said you sent outriders?” Varro asked, laying one hand on the tabletop to claim the proverbial floor.

  “That would be me,” said the patrician, serious-looking fellow with dark eyes and a mass of close-cropped black curls, whom Osman had introduced as Commodore Mahendra Verus, captain of the Mintaka. “Dispatched one of my courier ships to investigate. They should be there within the year.” The courier ship would have been smaller, with an outsized warp drive. Like the Schiavona, the ship Bassander Lin had used to pursue us to Vorgossos, it would make better time than a proper warship.

  “So no data yet,” the Chalcenterite scholiast mused. Varro was an exemplar of his order and trade. His face, which by its pointed features and darting eyes ought to have been furtive and satyr-like, was instead smooth and unfeeling as stone. I had watched the man receive battle reports or assist the doctors in triage with the detached grace of a machine. It is a common misconception—one that I have doubtless fallen into in writing this very account—that the scholiasts do not feel. They do. They merely attempt to put their feelings in their place, to compartmentalize them and lay bare the remarkably flexible, parallel processing mechanism of the human mind, which, properly trained, could perform the functions of the daimons forbidden by the Chantry’s holy law.

  But Varro was as perfect an exemplar as I have ever seen. Dispassionate was too soft a word. And he was in his element. “Is there more?”

  The reedy analyst cleared her throat. “Not much. What we have of their telemetry indicates they were at full warp when they were attacked, and time stamps indicate there were no more than forty minutes between the initial distress call—from the Merciless—and the last, from the Old Iron King.”

  “At full warp?” Durand repeated, his glasses still in his hand—a sign the bookish officer was paying full attention.

  Sir Amalric spoke up. “They must have used some kind of gravity net. Whoever they are.”

  “A magnetic grapnel would work as well, if they knew where to aim it,” Verus offered.

  “Do we know which it was?” I asked, directing my words to the analyst where she stood holding the remote in white-knuckled hands. Was she nervous? She was young, certainly, and those are much the same thing.

  She glanced at Osman before answering, “No, my lord. The transmissions were fragmentary, which would indicate the vessels were each taken offline before they could transmit more than the initial burst.”

  “A grapnel could do that, could it not?” Valka asked from her place beside me. “Knock out a ship’s communications?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Osman replied.

  “If it was a grapnel,” Tor Varro mused, “then it is far more likely the attack was carried out by Extrasolarian agencies.”

  One of the junior Fort Din officers leaned in. “What makes you say that, counselor?”

  Varro turned his narrow eyes on the woman and answered in his usual calm, disquieting way, “The computational power required to time and aim a magnetic pulse at a target traveling at superluminal velocity would require artificial intelligence. Nothing we know about the Cielcin suggests that they have the technological capability for such things.”

  The Extrasolarians. I felt my stomach turn over.

  I had fought the Cielcin on a dozen battlefields by then: Emesh, the Demiurge, Cellas, Thagura, Aptucca, and more . . . seen what it was they could do firsthand. The cities burned, the people butchered, ea
ten raw, the heads mounted on spears, the bodies mutilated. I remember one woman had been pinned open like a biological sample and mounted to a pole like a battle standard, and the way the ichakta commander who held it laughed as it ordered its troops forward. I remember the way Raine Smythe and old Sir William Crossflane had been torn to pieces by Prince Aranata’s scahari. The Cielcin were evil, but they burned like fire.

  Ice was the more insidious threat.

  I remember also the Garden of Everything and the way the merchants on March Station had sold flesh by the pound, bottling dreams and carving off limbs to be replaced by machines. I can still see Kharn’s clone children slumbering in amniotic sacs in the dungeons of Vorgossos and hear Father Calvert singing his macabre rhyme. I remember that cold room beneath the mountain on Arae, the dead wired into the machine that had ripped their minds from their bodies and the army of computer-possessed men charging downhill at our line. Bad as the Cielcin were, it was from evil dreams of the Extras that I awoke sweating in the dead of night.

  “This attack is more consistent with Extra methodology,” Verus conceded, leaning back in his seat. “They’ve been known to prey on the major shipping lanes.”

  Sir Amalric rapped the desk with his fist for attention. “Lord Marlowe, I’ve read your file . . .” I very much doubted that; rather I suspected Osman had read the official version, the one Legion Intelligence had scrubbed clean. “Do you think it could be Vorgossos?” The man looked sheepish asking. I understood him. I had thought Vorgossos a myth, a story like lost Atlantis, like Lemuria and forgotten Sarnath.

  “No,” I answered, and repeating the official story, added, “Vorgossos was destroyed.” I held my face impassive, relying on the same scholiast training that kept Tor Varro so composed.

  “I read that file, too,” Amalric said, but there was something in his eyes that told me he knew well as I the files were only that. Had I underestimated this man? He was right to doubt. That file he’d read claimed that First Strategos Titus Hauptmann had directed an entire fleet to Vorgossos following the defeat of Prince Aranata’s forces and destroyed it. Fragged the entire planet from orbit and left it a smoldering pile of rubble to collapse into a thin ring of rock and dust about its undead star. But I knew better. Hauptmann had sailed for Vorgossos, but when he’d arrived at those dread shores, the planet was gone.

  Vanished.

  Vorgossos will survive, Kharn Sagara had told me when last I saw him. Them, for there were two of him then. I should not have doubted him. What sort of power could move an entire planet? Bassander Lin had been there, and told me the men came away from the ordeal shaken and confused. The brown dwarf had remained, alone in the Dark between the stars with no planet surrounding it.

  Kharn Sagara had not lied.

  They had survived.

  Osman was still waiting on my answer. I shook my head. “Even if there were survivors of the sack at Vorgossos, that was thousands of light-years from here. There are other Extra factions, hundreds of Exalted ships, freehold colonies, station cities . . . it could be any of them.”

  “And it could still be the Cielcin,” Valka interjected, quite correctly.

  “It could,” Varro agreed. Those furtive eyes found mine as he spoke. I knew what he was thinking, what he couldn’t tell these men. That it might be both. That on Arae we had found signs of an alliance between the Extras and the Pale. The unholy matrimony of Cielcin and machine. I had killed such a creature, a reject left unfinished in its storage tank, its brain not fully connected to the machine body the Extras had built for it. “We have no way of knowing, of course.”

  “Our latest report from central intelligence said this new prince of theirs—the one that attacked Hermonassa—has a taste for more military targets,” Osman put in.

  I let out a long, slow breath—nearly a sigh. “Syriani Dorayaica.” I had not said the name aloud in a long time. Not since we’d left Forum, perhaps. It hung dark on the air. Like incense. Like smoke. And the tang of it was almost familiar, as though it were the name of some old acquaintance. Had I heard it before Hermonassa? Had Tanaran mentioned the Cielcin chieftain perhaps, or had Uvanari? I elected not to dwell on it, and continued. “The Cielcin have begun to understand they can’t fight us like they fight one another. I think part of their burning our colonies comes from the way they have to destroy their rivals’ fleets completely. When they fight, it’s not just warships, it’s homes. Cities. They risk everything and they can’t risk letting anything survive. I think this Dorayaica has realized that annihilating a planet’s population the way they do is a waste of time and resources.” I steepled my fingers and paused, surveying the men and women gathered round that long table. “I will tell you this in confidence, gentlemen and ladies. The Emperor and the people in Legion Intelligence believe that the war is changing. That this Dorayaica is the first in what may be a new generation of Cielcin princes dedicated to their war with the Imperium, and that we may be facing hard days ahead.” I paused and glanced at Alexander where he was seated in the corner, not speaking, as I had instructed him. “I agree with them.” I saw the color had gone from Osman’s face and Verus’s, and that many of the others sat staring. “But we have no reason to suspect that Dorayaica is behind this attack, though it is a possibility. At this juncture we have no way of knowing if it is this prince or the Extrasolarians or some other agency. But there are men missing, men whom His Radiance has tasked me with finding. We must devise a strategy to do so, and until we have that, the rest of this is navel-gazing.”

  Bastien Durand grunted his agreement. “This is all academic, yes.” He replaced his spectacles on his broad nose. Rounding on Verus, he asked, “Do you know when your scouts will arrive, sir?”

  The captain frowned and checked his terminal, which projected panels like sheets of paper into the black of the tabletop. He shuffled through them. “Not for two months.”

  “And several years to adequately probe that volume.” Varro pointed at the projection. He was referring to the tiny sail probes that could be accelerated nearly to light speed with a single pulse from a ship’s targeting lasers, so small were they.

  Valka tapped the table with her fingernails to draw attention to herself and to stop the scholiast before he could continue thinking aloud. “’Twould take us nearly so long to get there from here. Much of the scanning could be done.”

  I pictured the sail probes spreading out to fill the sphere like pollen one spring evening, taking decades to float away. “Yes . . .” I said, idly cracking my knuckles. It was certainly the most time-efficient solution.

  “You’re leaving?” Osman asked, sitting forward. “You only just arrived! We’ve not finished our attempts to recover the damaged data from the transmis—”

  I raised a hand for quiet, and the man’s objections fell to silence almost at once. I had not grown familiar with or to love the trappings of rank and power, but being able to silence such men as Osman at a gesture was delicious. “Not at once, castellan. Never fear. We have two months before your scouts arrive and begin their work. Given the margins we’re working with, two months won’t change much. Besides, that will give my people and yours an opportunity to work together. It may be that we can be of some assistance.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE DEVIL’S COHORT

  “WELL, IT COULD BE worse,” Valka said. “There might have been no distress signal sent at all.” She rested her head against the glass and pulled one knee to her chest where she languored on the deep windowsill.

  “Maybe their scouts will turn something up,” said Pallino from the door.

  Our whole landing party had gathered in the suite Sir Amalric’s people had set aside for me. They were low-ceilinged, unimpressive chambers, but spacious enough, with a large sitting room, the bedroom complete with the full bathing suite—a curious luxury on a military base—and a broad balcony overlooking the city of Catraeth below. Gray-walled and white, the onl
y decoration in the room except for the odd mirror or two was a map outlining the emergency protocols for evacuating the spire should Fort Din come under attack. Like so many Imperial fortifications, Fort Din was built upon a network of bunkers that honeycombed the mountain beneath it for miles. They were built to withstand an orbital bombardment, designed for the days of interhouse warfare and rebellious lords, intended to shelter the fort’s staff for months and even years using starship-grade life support, hydroponics, and doubtless the planet’s plentiful supply of protein-base from the bromos crop.

  “And they may turn up something if they can reconstruct the corrupt portions of the beacon files,” Durand added, fidgeting with his terminal in his lap. The fellow did not like to be away from his ship, I think. Durand was a born spacer, and spent most of his life aboard starships. Perhaps the open sky frightened him?

  Crim spoke up from the window near Valka. “Should we send to the ship for Ilex and some of the data techs?”

  “Lonely already?” Valka teased, nudging the Norman-Jaddian with her toe. “You haven’t been apart for a day yet.”

  Crim scratched the back of his head, tearing his eyes from the window to look round sheepishly at the rest of us. “It’s just a thought.”

  “You’re with that homunculus?” Alexander said, face wrinkled in disgust.

  I felt a twinge of anger tighten my throat, but Crim was faster. “Her name is Ilex, Your Highness.” Anger faded to sympathy as I saw the young prince recoil. Alexander—like a certain young man I’d known—had much unlearning to do. There was a time I’d have asked the same question in the same tone, when I too was just a boy fresh from my father’s castle.