“And we’ll still be moving toward Nemavand,” Yanek pointed out, “which should satisfy the good captain of the Pride of Zama.” He turned hooded eyes on Eldan. I could practically feel the class resentment smoldering in the man. Eldan had been counting on his palatine blood to browbeat the others—even Verus, who, though patrician, was his military superior.
“We can rendezvous on the far side of the volume,” Corvo said, “take stock of what new intelligence we have, and make a determination then.” She crossed her arms, a gesture which served only to further emphasize her height and powerful build. To someone like Eldan, who saw such things as signs of virtue, it was a clear statement, as clear as my outright threat had been.
That’s that.
“It makes us a big ugly target streaking across space,” Eldan said.
I hooked my thumbs through my belt and stepped forward. “Precisely.”
* * *
The silent stars rushed by, turned by the roil of our passage from pinpoints to luminous whorls—their light smeared across the manifold wave-front of the Tamerlane’s warp envelope. We’d been at it for days, weeks, and the attitude of the men was one of pregnant expectation, the sort of tense silence that feels the same as a scream. The dome above my head was one of the few places along the Tamerlane’s dorsal hull where one might look out at the stars. The dome served no practical function, had only been installed by the conscientious architect in the full knowledge that life aboard starships was so often claustrophobic. The dome could be sealed at an order, concealed beneath a layer of armor like the lid of a mighty eye.
I was alone then, trying to clear my head after another meeting with Corvo, Varro, Durand, and Aristedes. I was not particularly worried about Cornelius Eldan. Men and officers like him were common as sand. Though cowardice perhaps motivated his desire to make for Nemavand with all due haste, cowardice is only a kind of prudence, and prudence would see him fall in line. Men like Eldan were truly strong only when pitted against their social inferiors. He would not have the spine to resist opposition from Verus, Corvo, and myself.
An image of the four captains was taking shape on the folio page before me.
White charcoal on black paper.
I had taken to such inverted images only recently. One had to sketch not the shadows—as was the case in traditional charcoals—but the light. My image of Verus, Eldan, Yanek, and Adina shone as they had like ghosts from the projector. I blew dust from the page and admired my work. Adina’s eyes were perhaps not so closely set as I’d portrayed them, nor Yanek’s nose so large, but their slight caricature portrayed the spirit of each, I decided. Good enough. Setting my pencil aside, I turned the inky pages in my hands. There were the Irchtani flying with their zitraa, there Catraeth on Gododdin in all its pale beauty. One single page was devoted to a still life of the Galath blossom, which still had not withered and dried even after all the years away from Forum. Another page showed Valka dozing—as she often did—in her armchair in our quarters, dressed in naught but a blanket.
Smiling, I shut the book. But for three off-duty crewmen, I had the observation dome to myself. The men—two men and a woman—laughed quietly and spoke among themselves, the remnants of some holograph game between them. I did not know their faces, and so guessed they were from one of the lower cohorts, soldiers who only rarely came out of fugue to do their duty. I took them for a trias, the smallest, humblest unit of legionnaires there was. Three common soldiers.
It is good that we are reminded the soldiers we command are men. We are not the Extrasolarians, not the Mericanii of old. They are not machines. We do not spend men’s lives like coin, but as sacrifices freely given, offered as our ancestors burned their best on altars to please the uncreated gods. That is why the best commanders, the best captains and kings, make themselves known to their people—that their people may be known to them. That we might not betray their trust and obedience when the critical time came.
As come it must.
Light flashed brighter than the sun, and the whole of the Tamerlane lurched. Gone were the violet fractals and streaks of distended stars. As my vision cleared and I struggled to my feet, I looked up and saw the naked stars.
Unmoving.
The alarm sounded a moment later.
Vwaa! Vwaa!
The same alarm I had heard ten thousand times. And Corvo’s voice on the comm, “All hands! Battle stations!”
Though I was safe for the moment aboard my own ship, my hand went anxious to my sword. It seems a strange thing to say, but I felt my heart grow lighter and I turned toward the door. But the path had straightened before my feet once again. Forward. Always forward. I hurried from the dome, blood quickening in my veins, heartbeat coming like the martial drumbeat in time with the blare of the alarm.
The enemy had found us at last.
CHAPTER 20
THE AQUILARII
I BURST ONTO THE bridge like the tide, black coattails flowing in my wake. “What’s happened?” I demanded, mounting the arc of steps that brought me up from the officers’ pit to the captain’s platform, bootheels ringing against dark metal.
Otavia Corvo stood hunched over the display well, fingers gripping the rim. A schematic of the Tamerlane glowed in the air before her, critical systems highlighted green and red against the blue of the hull, data flickering in square panels all around.
“Not sure,” she said.
“Some sort of gravity net,” Tor Varro said. He sat strapped into one of the crash couches to the side of the central console, hands wrapped about his restraints. From where he was, he had a clear view of all the data coming in through Corvo’s holography well. When he caught me looking to him, he said, “Conjecture. But all our electronics are still online.”
“Have we got anything on sensors?” I asked. It had only taken me three minutes to reach the bridge from the dome, and the atmosphere among the officers about me was one of confusion and rapidly cooling panic.
Apropos of nothing, Commander Aristedes said, “Shields are primed and holding.”
“Has anyone opened fire on us yet?” I demanded, leaning over the rail to look down over Aristedes and his junior officers at the tactical station.
Right on cue, an indicator flashed on Corvo’s display.
“Think that was a MAG round!” said one of the junior tac officers from her station. “Shields holding.” Someone had fired a magnetically accelerated bolt of tungsten more than a yard across from tens of thousands of miles away.
“Do we have a read on them?” Corvo demanded, zooming her projection out so that the ghostly Tamerlane seemed little more than a mote in the center of infinite shadow.
“Heat signatures!” the junior officer said again. I leaned further over the rail, watching the tactical station below. Aristedes and his lieutenants were tracking three tightly clustered points of light some hundred thousand miles off.
Aristedes himself said, “I don’t recognize the configuration. It’s massive.”
Memory of the Demiurge rose in me, the vast ship of Kharn Sagara hundreds of miles long—and of the Enigma of Hours, the mighty Sojourner that might have fit eight vessels the size of the Tamerlane within its central hold stacked end-to-end. I thought too of the great vessel of Prince Ulurani at Aptucca, which had been larger than many a small moon.
The shield indicator pulsed again from the console at my back.
“These are just probing shots,” I said, almost to myself. “They know we’re shielded.”
“Do we have visual?” Durand asked, hurrying from the upper level to join Aristedes in tactical.
“Where are the other ships?” Corvo demanded. “I want eyes on the hostile!”
My hands tightened on the rail as Koskinen and White scrambled a seeker probe and fired it toward our assailant. I had a sudden, awful thought that the other ships had left us, that we alone had been snatched out of war
p and that the others continued their super-luminal career toward Dion Station, unaware of our predicament until it was too late. Whatever had pulled us out of warp had wrenched us into a lazy spin, and the target Aristedes was tracking on his console appeared to hover high above us, looming like Damocles’s cursed sword.
I felt terribly useless standing on that bridge. I am many things, but I am no true spacer. I could do nothing but stand hard by as my people did their jobs—did what they were trained to do, what I depended on them to do. My fears evaporated in the next instant as Pherrine said, “I’ve got contact with the Mintaka and the Cyrusene.”
“Multiple contacts!” said another of the junior tac officers. A thousand points of light flared across the space between us, accelerating at rates no human being could bear without suppression fields.
I knew that pattern all too well, and Lorian confirmed it a moment after. His high, aristocratic tenor filled the bridge at once like a trumpet blast. “Incoming!” You would not think to look at him that the small intus was capable of so great a noise. A hundred things must have happened at once, running through the minds of my officers. Incoming could mean any of a dozen things: missiles, plasma bombardment, probes, lighter craft, boarding shuttles. We had no way of knowing at this distance.
We did not have the luxury of waiting to find out. Corvo could see on her console what Aristedes saw on his own; she had to act. Veteran that she was, she knew the primary threat to a vessel armored and shielded as ours came not from long-range weaponry. Even unshielded, it would take antilithium or highmatter to cut through the adamantine plate on the dorsal hull. Our greatest threat came from boarding shuttles, cutter-craft that would limpet themselves to the outer hull where it was common steel or carbon composite. It was to that threat we needed to first respond. “Launch the aquilarii!” she cried. “Ten wings, hold the others in reserve.”
“Aye, captain!”
I did not hear Aristedes give the order, nor hear the alarm blaring in the pilots’ barracks levels above us, but I saw them all the same. Two hundred men hurled from their rest to their duties, scrambling to pull on padded pressure suits and helmets, rushing to the lifts that sent them rattling down to the equator and the ladders that brought them to their ships. I felt the resounding bell-like clang as docking clamps disengaged and the Sparrowhawks and Peregrine fighters shot from their launch tubes like missiles. I had ridden in them before—though I am but a poor pilot myself. How well I remember the silent dark of the tube rushing past—the only sound the faint beeping of instruments and the ragged rasp of breath! How clearly I recall the flash and the sudden shimmering of stars as we turned and soared over the dark curve of the dorsal hull or down to thread the hanging towers. I watched them deploy on the tactical displays. Two hundred lighter craft that fell into tight formation about the Tamerlane, keeping just outside the limit of our shields. They would assist the Tamerlane’s gunners in fending off the boarding vessels while we returned fire on their ship.
“Should have visual in a moment, captain!” said White, the navigator, his voice low and terse as ever. “The commander’s right. It’s massive.”
“How massive?” I asked. He told me. “That’s the size of a small planet!”
“Aye, my lord!” White said.
I advanced along the catwalk so that I stood above the navigator’s station. “Is it the Extrasolarians?” No sooner had I asked the question did a chime sound at White’s console. Images from the seeker. “What is it?”
White did not reply.
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
The man’s numb fingers found the right controls and relayed the video feed to the false window at the front of the bridge. The star field vanished in a snap, replaced by another. A dark shape moved against the black, masking the unfixed stars.
It was the size of a dwarf planet, as I had said, and once perhaps as round. The seeker probe had passed it already, propelled by a shipboard laser already to twenty percent the speed of light. It still looked like a planet from the front end, a great cap of ice and stone that shone faintly in the starlight and by a light all its own. But behind? Behind it trailed the gutted remnants of a world converted, extruded into halls and towers and warrens like the warrens of ants. A termite-chewed worldship large as any I had seen. Large as the ship I’d shattered at Aptucca. Large as Prince Aranata’s palace that Titus Hauptmann had destroyed.
The Cielcin had come.
“I’m tracking clouds of boarders approaching the other ships, too!” White exclaimed, having regained his senses. “The Mintaka is breached! Captain Verus has sealed the bridge!”
My hand went uselessly to the sword at my hip. “We’re next,” I said. “They’ll try and get a team aboard to take our shields and engines offline.” I hurried back toward Corvo. “Give me the comm.”
She stepped sideways just enough to permit me access to the ship’s internal broadcast. I drew the remote out and held it to my mouth. “Attention all, this is Lord Marlowe.” I could feel the silence in my chest filling the ship around me as I spoke. “All hands to battle stations. Repeat. All hands to battle stations. Prepare for boarders. We have engaged the Cielcin. Repeat. We have engaged the Cielcin.” I paused a moment, never sure what else to say if anything. I swallowed, and though I did not believe I added, “May Earth keep and protect us. Marlowe out.”
Corvo was staring at me, but when I noticed, she nodded and returned to her work, relaying orders over the bridge’s sound system to save herself from shouting. She looked like she was about to say something, but she never had the chance. A bright light flared across the massive screen, and a moment after Pherrine said, “The Mintaka just accelerated toward the enemy ship!”
“What is Verus doing?” Corvo leaned over the projection well. “He’s flying right at them!”
Arms crossed, I watched the tactical display. The Mintaka had shot toward the Cielcin worldship, but at a high angle. “Is he trying for orbital insertion?” I asked. The bigger Cielcin ships were so massive the most practical way to assail them was to fall into a low, fast orbit. To treat them like a planet.
“Get Verus on the comm!” Captain Corvo exclaimed.
No image of the haggard captain appeared, but a voice panel opened in the air by Corvo. “Verus.” There was a tightness in his voice that undercut his calm. The man was a professional.
“What’s your situation, captain?” Corvo asked.
“They took out our lighters. Some of the demons got aboard. I’ve sealed the bulkheads. It’s under control.”
Corvo didn’t miss a beat. “How many of them?”
“Couple hundred. It’s under control.” He said those last words like a mantra. Like a prayer. We heard shouting behind him.
Then the connection died.
Corvo keyed the console. “What happened? Pherrine, bring him back.”
“Communication’s down, ma’am. Ship’s still there, though.” The communications officer’s own voice had gone tight as a coiled spring.
Aristedes’s clipped accent cut in. “But they’re not under thrust. Something’s happened.” What that something was had to wait. A warning light blinked on the tactical consoles below, and the intus raised his high voice. “Hostiles accelerating! Still on intercept course!”
Boarding craft.
I turned my attention to the window, squinted out into the Dark, willing the enemy to reveal itself, though they were as yet thousands of miles away.
From his place below, Lorian Aristedes said, “Prepare to deploy AM mines on my mark.”
He had not waited for orders, knowing all too well his duty.
“Mark.”
A spray of red points fanned out across the space between us and the Cielcin ship on the holograph in front of me, the AM mines expanding into a flat sheet between us and them. They were simple enough machines, each a hollow sphere containing a few grains of anti
lithium in magnetic suspension. Proximity would trigger them to end that suspension. The antimatter would collide with the material of the mine itself and the resulting fireball of matter-antimatter annihilation would destroy anything unshielded within its effective radius.
Even adamant.
I pivoted my attention back to the false window, and as I turned, one of the junior techs switched the view from the Cielcin ship to better capture an image of the approaching swarm. The Cielcin attack craft were barely visible against the Dark, even magnified a thousand times. We could see them only backlit by the fire of their drives as they howled toward us. Other views out other cameras played in tiles along the edges of the mighty window-screen, and here and there I caught glimpses of a gray Sparrowhawk or white Peregrine streaking about the Tamerlane. I gritted my teeth and held the edge of my cape in one fist, waiting, counting down to a zero I could only guess at.
“Any second now,” Durand said.
Light brighter than a dozen suns flared out across the darkness. Light!
And silence. No sound nor shock of air was there to disturb that bottomless calm. Ten thousand years hence perhaps the light of that explosion would reach some distant world and spark like lightning across its foreign sky. And in that distant age perhaps some shepherd would look up and gasp in wonderment and alarm, but until that day no other fanfare would mark that first destructive salvo, unless it was Lorian’s dry remark from the tac officer’s seat. “Got them.”
But he had not got them all. The boarding craft were stretched out in waves across hundreds of miles of space, and the rest came screaming in faster through the haze where once the mines had been.
Corvo strode past me onto the catwalk, full voice thundering. “Concentrate main dorsal batteries on the Cielcin mothership!”
“No! No!” I said, stepping in. “Belay that!”
Otavia rounded on me. “This is my ship, Hadrian! What the hell are you doing?” I must have made her angry; she never called me Hadrian on the bridge. Her jaw was clenched and her amber eyes had crystallized.
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