Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  Two hellmoths tried to break through the Kel fangmoths, presumably under the impression that the Rahal were the real enemy. One hellmoth took a direct engine hit from a spinal railgun, while the other shuddered apart under a barrage of missiles that overwhelmed the anti-missile defenses.

  “You poor fools,” Jedao said, perusing the summaries despite the horrible throbbing in his left eye. “You found a general who was incandescently talented at calendrical warfare, so you spent all your money on the exotic toys and ran out of funding for the boring invariant stuff.”

  Menowen paused in coordinating damage control—they’d taken a burst from an exploding scout, of all things—and remarked, “I should think you’d be grateful, sir.”

  “It’s war, Commander, and someone always dies,” Jedao said, aware of Korais listening in; aware that even this might be revealing too much. “That doesn’t mean I’m eager to dance on their ashes.”

  “Of course,” Menowen said, but her voice revealed nothing of her feelings.

  The fangmoths curved into a concave bowl as they advanced up the Yellow Passage. The wrecked Lanterner hellmoths in the van were getting in the way of the Lanterners’ attempts to bring fire to bear. Jedao had planned for a slaughter, but he hadn’t expected it to work this well. They seemed to think his force was a detachment to delay them from reaching the false Kel swarm while the far terrain was hostile to the high calendar, and that if they could get past him before the terrain changed, they would prevail. It wasn’t until the fourth group of Lanterners had been written into rubble and smoke that their swarm discipline wavered. Some of the hellmoths and their auxiliaries started peeling out of the passage just to have somewhere else to go. Others turned around, exposing their sides to further punishment, so they could accelerate back up the passage where the Kel wouldn’t be able to catch them.

  One of Jedao’s fangmoths had taken engine damage serious enough that he had ordered it to pull back, but that left him ten to work with. “Formation Sparrow’s Spear,” he said, and gave the first set of targets.

  The fangmoths narrowed into formation as they plunged out of the Yellow Passage and toward five hellmoths and a transport moving with the speed and grace of a flipped turtle. As they entered friendlier terrain, white-gold fire blazed up from the formation’s primary pivot and raked through two hellmoths, the transport, and a piece of crystalline battledrift.

  They swung around for a second strike, shifting into a shield formation to slough off the incoming fire.

  This is too easy, Jedao thought coldly, and then.

  “Incoming message from Lanterner hellmoth 5,” Communications said. Scan had tagged it as the probable command moth. “Hellmoth 5 has disengaged.” It wasn’t the only one. The list showed up on Jedao’s display.

  “Hold fire on anything that isn’t shooting at us,” Jedao said. “They want to talk? I’ll talk.”

  There was still a core of fourteen hellmoths whose morale hadn’t broken. A few of the stragglers were taking potshots at the Kel, but the fourteen had stopped firing.

  “This is Lieutenant Colonel Akkion Dhaved,” said a man’s voice. “I assume I’m addressing a Kel general.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Jedao said. “This is General Shuos Jedao. Are you the ranking officer?” Damn. He would have liked to know the Lanterner general’s name.

  “Sir,” Menowen mouthed, “it’s a trick, stop talking to them.”

  He wasn’t sure he disagreed, but he wasn’t going to get more information by closing the channel.

  “That’s complicated, General.” Dhaved’s voice was sardonic. “I have an offer to make you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jedao said, “but are you the ranking officer? Are you authorized to have this conversation?” He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the direction of the conversation. The weight of collective Kel disapproval was almost crushing.

  “I’m offering you a trade, General. You’ve been facing General Bremis kae Meghuet of the Lantern.”

  The name sounded familiar—

  “She’s the cousin of Bremis kae Erisphon, one of our leaders. Hostage value, if you care. You’re welcome to her if you let the rest of us go. She’s intact. Whether you want to leave her that way is your affair.”

  Jedao didn’t realize how chilly his voice was until he saw Menowen straighten in approval. “Are you telling me you mutinied against your commanding officer?”

  “She lost the battle,” Dhaved said, “and it’s either death or capture. We all know what the heptarchate does to heretics, don’t we?”

  Korais spoke with quiet urgency. “General. Find out if Bremis kae Meghuet really is alive.”

  Jedao met the man’s eyes. It took him a moment to understand the expression in them: regret.

  “There’s a nine-hour window,” Korais said. “The Day of Broken Feet isn’t over.”

  Jedao gestured for Communications to mute the channel, which he should have done earlier. “The battle’s basically won and we’ll see the cascade effects soon,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “It’s not ideal,” Korais said, “but a heretic general is a sufficient symbol.” Just as Jedao himself might have been, if the assassin had succeeded. “If we torture kae Meghuet ourselves, it would cement the victory in the calendar.”

  Jedao hauled himself to his feet to glare at Korais, which was a mistake. He almost lost his balance when the pain drove through his head like nails.

  Still, Jedao had to give Korais credit for avoiding the usual euphemism, processed.

  Filaments in the feet. It was said that that particular group of heretics had taken weeks to die.

  Fuck dignity. Jedao hung on to the arm of the chair and said, as distinctly as he could, “It’s a trick. I’m not dealing with Dhaved. Tell the Lanterners we’ll resume the engagement in seven minutes.” His vision was going white around the edges, but he had to say this. Seven minutes wouldn’t give the Lanterners enough time to run or evade, but it mattered. It mattered. “Annihilate anything that can’t run fast enough.”

  Best not to leave Doctrine any prisoners to torture.

  Jedao was falling over sideways. Someone caught his arm. Commander Menowen. “You ought to let us take care of the mopping up, sir,” she said. “You’re not well.”

  She could relieve him of duty. Reverse his orders. Given that the world was one vast blur, he couldn’t argue that he was in any fit shape to assess the situation. He tried to speak again, but the pain hit again, and he couldn’t remember how to form words.

  “I don’t like to press at a time like this,” Korais was saying to Menowen, “but the Lanterner general—”

  “General Jedao has spoken,” Menowen said crisply. “Find another way, Captain.” She called for a junior officer to escort Jedao out of the command center.

  Words were said around him, a lot of them. They didn’t take him to his quarters. They took him to the medical center. All the while he thought about lights and shrapnel and petals falling endlessly in the dark.

  Commander Menowen came to talk to him after he was returned to his quarters. The mopping up was still going on. Menowen was carrying a small wooden box. He hoped it didn’t contain more medications.

  “Sir,” Menowen said, “I used to think heretics were just heretics, and death was just death. Why does it matter to you how they die?”

  Menowen had backed him against Doctrine, and she hadn’t had to. That meant a lot.

  She hadn’t said that she didn’t have her own reasons. She had asked for his. Fair enough.

  Jedao had served with Kel who would have understood why he had balked. A few of them would have shot him if he had turned over an enemy officer, even a heretic, for torture. But as he advanced in rank, he found fewer and fewer such Kel. One of the consequences of living in a police state.

  “Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”

  “I don’t imagine that makes you popular with Doctrine,” Menowen
said.

  “The Rahal can’t get rid of me because the Kel like me. I just have to make sure it stays that way.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Then you have one more Kel ally, sir. We have the final tally. We engaged ninety-one hellmoths and destroyed forty-nine of them. Captain-magistrate Korais is obliged to report your actions, but given the numbers, you are going to get a lot of leniency.”

  There would have been around 400 crew on each of the hellmoths. He had already seen the casualty figures for his own fangmoths and the three Rahal vessels that had gotten involved, fourteen dead and fifty-one injured.

  “Leniency wasn’t what I was looking for,” Jedao said.

  Menowen nodded slowly.

  “Is there anything exciting about our journey to Twin Axes, or can I go back to being an invalid?”

  “One thing,” she said. “Doctrine has provisionally declared a remembrance of your victory to replace the Day of Broken Feet. He says it is likely to be approved by the high magistrates. Since we didn’t provide a heretic focus for torture, we’re burning effigy candles.” She hesitated. “He said he thought you might prefer this alternative remembrance. You don’t want to be caught shirking this.” She put the box down on the nearest table.

  “I will observe the remembrance,” Jedao said, “although it’s ridiculous to remember something that just happened.”

  Menowen’s mouth quirked. “One less day for publicly torturing criminals,” she said, and he couldn’t argue. “That’s all, sir.”

  After she had gone, Jedao opened the box. It contained red candles in the shape of hellmoths, except the wax was additionally carved with writhing bullet-ridden figures.

  Jedao set the candles out and lit them with the provided lighter, then stared at the melting figures. I don’t think you understand what I’m taking away from these remembrance days, he thought. The next time he won some remarkable victory, it wasn’t going to be against some unfortunate heretics. It was going to be against the high calendar itself. Every observance would be a reminder of what he had to do next—and while everyone lost a battle eventually, he had one more Kel officer in his corner, and he didn’t plan on losing now.

  A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones

  Genevieve Valentine

  There’s a cloud across Europa.

  Every time Henry looks out at the flat, gray disc, he tries to think what you’re meant to think: We’re almost there, soon you can breathe, it’s nearly rain.

  He tries.

  Henry knows, every time he goes out on the ice in a crawler to fix a transmitter, that he’s driving over the work of generations.

  They’ve been here for centuries: drilling through ice until they hit water, sending drones to scoop molecular mess from the Storms planetside, spreading kilometers of fertilizer to bleed nitrogen, cultivating native algae and some bacteria they’d carried with them, bright little soldiers for hundreds of years, kept inside until there was enough atmosphere for any of them to survive on their own.

  A few did, these days, in little patches gripping the ice; they were well-marked, so you wouldn’t run over them.

  (The biologists promised that if all went well, there might be hydroponic gardens on the surface, someday.

  That was all they could promise. There wasn’t any rock to rest soil on; there would never be trees, here.)

  They’re trying, though, trying for any life they can make or build or find. None of them is ever going back home again. They’re determined to find everything here that’s worth finding.

  These days, when he goes to the far side, the bio team sends him with sonar in case there’s sea life that won’t come near the equator, where the pull from Jupiter is so great that the ice stretches and cracks. It makes sense, says the bio team, that some species would find a less volatile home.

  Henry doesn’t blame them. He prefers the quiet, too.

  The year before Henry and his parents reached it—while they were in that long, heavy sleep around the sun—there had been the first discoveries of animals under the ice, eyeless and white and in numbers.

  That was the first generation of people who began to call Europa, home.

  Not that the name really takes; there are a lot of names on Europa, and the more you think about them, the harder things get.

  The whole place is chaos.

  The ice itself is pulled and scratched and pockmarked with so many things that needed naming that they ran out of just one sort, and now you start a speed-test marker in Greece and finish it in Ireland, mythologies piled on top of one another, linae and maculae and craters.

  They all mean something—this is where a foreign body hit, this is where the surface fractured as Jupiter’s gravity pulled the water close, this is where the ice has sunk deep enough you can’t get a sledge out of it—but the longer you’ve lived in the base, he thinks, the more you realize this moon has been slapdash from the beginning.

  The base is between Cadmus and Minos, north of the pole, on a plain of ice that’s thick enough and calm enough to build on. They use other linae for distance markers, or for transport. Pryderi goes almost down to Rhiannon, near the south pole, and whenever there’s something that needs testing on the far side of the cloud, that’s the trench they set the drone into.

  Pryderi was the Welsh myth. That had been his second name (the one his true parents gave him after he was found, with meanings that must have been like scrapes—worry, care, loss). It was what they gave him after they realized what he really was, a name piled on top of his other one.

  The Gliese 581 probe team works on the far side of the base, where there’s the least interference and they can actually run their machines.

  (They’re left to themselves. There are thirty nations here using the halting translators on their comms just to get by, but they haven’t invented the tech yet to get you to understand the interior jargon of a Gliesian. That’s a fever all its own.)

  The first probe’s already gone up. They’re building another one. This one’s supposed to hold two people.

  There’s a big signup where you can volunteer, if you want to go.

  The first-gen arrivals from Earth don’t go near it, like they’re afraid proximity triggers acceptance. They’re still adjusting to artificial gravity (70% of Earth g, but that 30% keeps you off balance a good long time), to nutritional yeast pills, to eternal day underneath the Storm. They’re not going one inch into a place stranger than this one.

  Everyone from the Gliese team signed up. That crew has only ever looked at this place as the launchpad to where they’re really going.

  Henry stands across the hallway from the sign-up sheet, sometimes, but never puts his name down.

  His parents brought him here. That should be enough to keep him here.

  (If it isn’t quite, he’s not sure anywhere else would be better.

  Earth must not have been; his parents left.)

  He takes the graveyard shift at the comm, when they’re on the far side of the planet or occluded by the other moons, and nothing interesting ever comes through.

  He’d just as soon be alone. This place is too full of strangers; he’d rather keep out of the way.

  It’s easier just to watch the blips of the open comm pinging itself in a loop for hours than it is to look up and see the cloud.

  Earth launches a civilian transport.

  It’s nearly five years behind schedule; rising water means that a lot of countries are falling apart by inches, to disaster and disease, and it’s harder to get by even in places where the grid’s holding steady.

  Mainland space programs got popular in a hurry.

  India had won the bid to build the latest ship, and the right to 40% of the passenger manifest, so after the scientists and engineers and psychologists and adventurers had their slots, India could rescue some of its own.

  (It’s a refugee ship, but that was a name no one wants to give it, not even Henry.)

  When the notice comes in from Bangalore Ground Contr
ol (on a 51-minute delay—they’re on the far side), he sees that alongside the ISI numerical designation, they’ve given it the name Manu.

  He’s the only one in the comm room, just him and a bowl of bright yellow algae the bio team’s put in for morale, and he has time to look up the name and see the myth behind it—he was the first man, who built a ship to escape the cleansing flood.

  It’s almost enough to make him laugh.

  He tags the transmission alongside his name in the database, and repeats the ISI sig and launch time, and says, “Roger that, Hammond and Preetha at Bangalore Ground Control, good night and godspeed.”

  Then he sits back and sighs, “Why would you name a ship after a flood story if it’s headed to a warming ice planet?”

  Bad luck or desperation. Neither one is good.

  He wonders how bad things are, back there; if the house he remembers has been swallowed by water.

  He wonders how soon it will be before the surface is as blue and unbroken as Neptune.

  (It’s something the counselors remind newcomers, over and over, to accept.

  The trips these ships make are only ever one way.)

  Two hours later, just as he’s headed to sleep, he gets a message on a private channel.

  For the record, I objected to the name. Also for the record, close your channels when you’re being rude.

  Kai Preetha, ISI Bangalore.

  Henry’s never had a message before.

  (His parents were here with him, so there was no need, and there was no one back on Earth to miss them—if there had been, they might not have left.)

  For a week, he looks at it every night before he goes back on shift.

  He wonders what Bangalore looks like, now that the waters have nearly reached it.

  After some flashes of pride he can hardly bother defending even to himself, he writes back, Sorry. You get superstitious here, but you’re not supposed to get rude. I’ll keep an eye on them for you.

  They can see its slingshot around the sun, from where they are. It’ll be gone to Earth’s eyes, soon, and out of range for weeks.