Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  ‘I’ll take control,’ Valentine said, seeing Commander Merelos’s ashen face as the man prepared to sink his hands into the pads of his chair and take over. He couldn’t ask anyone else to do that.

  ‘Sir, you’re the Emperor!’ Merelos protested. ‘And it’s my duty.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Aesonia said. ‘Mage Eritheina, protect Commander Merelos.’

  The formation of nine was almost on top of them now, and the remaining two of the original craft were breaking off to join them as they came straight for Sovereign, torrents of aether pouring into her shields above and behind the bridge, which flashed white into the water outside. Thankfully the light filters were active now, so it wasn't painful.

  ‘Aether chamber one is critical!’

  ‘Drop shields!’

  But it wasn’t Sovereign they were after. A second later, one of the craft dived straight at Sovereign’s hull, pulling out at the last moment but coming close enough to bang on the hull, a thud that echoed through the bridge. The main aether display had shrunk now to show the heart of the battle, and he saw the searay carrying a bright line of connection from Sovereign’s vanishing shields to its own, a spear of aether directly across the path of one of the magecraft.

  ‘Pull out!’ Aesonia shouted, but it was too late. The magecraft had nowhere to go but up, into more of the enemy searays. At least Aesonia and the others had time to break contact, forced to leave their fellow to die all alone. Tears were streaming to Eritheina’s face as she knelt behind Merelos, arms around his shoulders. The physical contact wasn't necessary, but it saved effort, and she needed all her energy at the moment.

  The first officer had cut the shields, but it would take a few seconds for the energy on the outer hull to be used up, and that was more than enough. There was another burst of incandescent light, and in a second the sleek sea-green craft had become a scorched, blackened framework. Two of their six magecraft were down. They’d lost as many in this engagement as in all the skirmishes and battles since Ruthelo’s defeat.

  Ruthelo who had made a point of destroying magecraft. Ruthelo who had attacked and almost destroyed Sarthes, towards the end.

  ‘Cancel the launch and destroy the harbour,’ Valentine ordered. He’d wanted the evidence, but far more important now was saving the lives of Sovereign’s crew and the remaining mages.

  To his credit, Merelos didn’t hesitate. A moment later two more spreads of torpedoes fanned out across the lagoon, firing at stationery targets which had no hope of avoiding them.

  The searay formation wheeled round, accelerating in a desperate attempt to get ahead of the torpedoes. All but two of them were too slow.

  Those two had enough wingspan to block six of the second spread of torpedoes between them, sacrificing themselves to save the harbour from destruction, vanishing in more gouts of flame. But they weren't enough. Moments later explosions flared across the intact sections of the undersea harbour, three of the four working gantries and the control hub.

  The gantries crumpled instantly, crushed by water pressure once their integrity was destroyed. The core of the harbour collapsed outwards in a slow cascade of rock and metal and steam, a pressure wave racing out across the lagoon.

  There went any tangible evidence, anything that Silvanos could sift through and work his black arts with to prove Jharissa guilt to those dithering fools in Vespera. But there, too, went the enemy’s forward base of operations, and hopefully any chance of rebuilding Corala in the future. If he had to tear the ruins down stone by stone, the city would never again give an enemy a foothold in Thetian territory.

  The enemy manta had managed to break free before the harbour exploded, was now turning and racing across the lagoon. The searays began attacking again, forcing the mages’ attention away from the only target big enough to destroy with ease.

  ‘Target the manta,’ Valentine ordered. They were in cannon range of it now, but the gouts of flame stippled harmlessly on its shields, and even another spread of torpedoes largely failed to hit as it dived and twisted at an unnatural angle. It fired back with astonishing force, pummelling Sovereign’s hull with heavens knew what.

  Valentine ordered every weapon brought to bear, too caught up in the battle to worry about anything more than attempting to destroy the other ship. But nothing seemed to make an impact, and as the other manta passed out through the lagoon entrance, the remaining searays abandoned their battle of wills with the Exiles, reluctantly it seemed, and formed a protective cordon behind it.

  Then Sovereign was alone again, bleeding but intact in the dark waters of the lagoon. Another ship, fewer Exiles, and they’d never have made it.

  ‘Follow them,’ Valentine ordered.

  ‘Is that wise?’ Aesonia asked, quietly, because they couldn’t be seen to disagree in front of the crew.

  ‘We have to find where they’re going. If they have another base here . . .’

  ‘Then they can regroup and destroy us, and the evidence will never reach Vespera.’

  ‘I won’t give up,’ Valentine insisted. ‘We’re the only ship that has a hope of catching them. Unity will send word back. They’ll find the wreckage and realise something of what we’re up against. But if we don’t follow, we lose the advantage we gained by surviving.’

  ‘My mages are tired.’

  ‘And so are my crew, but they’ll keep working,’ Valentine said, with finality. ‘See if you can stand some of them down for a bit.’

  ‘Only if you want us to go the same way as Defiance.’ Aesonia insisted. ‘Valentine, we’ve done enough.’

  ‘Enough did not defeat the Crusaders,’ Valentine said. ‘I and the crew of the Sovereign swore to serve the Empire to the best of our abilities. Whatever we find out there, wherever those searays are going, we have a chance, and a duty, to capture it on recorder and escape. Our reinforcements don’t. By the time help gets here, they’ll be long gone.’ He raised his voice. ‘Pursuit course!’

  ‘Aye, captain.’

  ‘And what service will you be doing the Empire by taking our most powerful warship and the remainder of the squadron’s magecraft down with you in a futile attempt to engage a much stronger enemy? Is that the legacy you want?’ She was on edge, he could tell that. Experienced and brilliant Aesonia might be, but she hadn’t seen battle like this for decades. Hers was the world of political manipulation, of magic and religion and threads of power.

  ‘We’re not engaging a much stronger enemy,’ Valentine said. ‘Take some of your mages into the chartroom and see if you can come up with some new ways to deal with their Tuonetar technology. I only need long enough to record and get away unscathed with the recorder intact.’ Here on this ship he was admiral as well as Emperor, and no-one could contradict him.

  ‘What will that gain us?’ she demanded, standing up.

  ‘We surprised them,’ Valentine said. ‘We know things they never wanted us to know, and the more we can find out, the more of their advantage they lose.’

  She gave him a long, unreadable glance, then collected her mages and went aft.

  ‘Get me the observation deck,’ Valentine ordered the comm officer once Aesonia had gone. A moment later the aether message pad in front of him flared into life, showing the engineer captain who’d worked on Monarch.

  ‘Captain, you have that recorded?’

  ‘Yes, sir. All of it.’

  ‘Two copies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long will it take you to put in fresh recording sheets and transfer the old ones to the launch?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  No joy there, then. ‘In which case, just make sure you keep recording. You’ll have everyone I can spare to make sure the equipment isn’t damaged. Any casualties up there?’

  ‘A broken arm, nothing worse.’

  Evidently the enemy hadn’t thought the observation deck worth targeting, perhaps because aether recorders didn’t seem to be a danger. He’d send one of the mages up there, just in case. He’d neve
r known mages were susceptible to concentrated aether discharges – why hadn’t the Exiles mentioned it?

  ‘Enemy force is turning to port, sir,’ the comm officer reported. The physicians had come in while he was talking to the engineers and were gently lifting the dead Captain Aldebrando out of his chair. Some of the younger officers and ratings looked away from the blackened, eyeless face.

  ‘Maintain pursuit course. Are there still the same number of them?’

  ‘Yes, there seem to be.’

  He couldn’t be sure of that, but at least they hadn’t decided to split up. Of course, it depended how far away their nearest remaining base was. Fighter searays rarely had a range of more than fifty to sixty miles in combat conditions. It was better than the earlier models, which had barely been able to go out of sight of their parent ships, but it still limited them.

  And it suggested the enemy base was far enough away they couldn’t afford to waste fuel on diversions getting there.

  ‘Hand over the watch, and have your replacement keep me posted,’ Valentine ordered, unbuckling the straps that held him in the chair. ‘All tactical officers to the conference room.’

  Raphael swung round, almost slipping into a landressa plant, whose fragrant white flowers hid vicious barbed spines. Leonata was standing a few feet away, at the edge of the forest. She’d discarded her High Thalassarch’s formality for a loose shirt and trousers in dark colours, perfect for stealing around an island at night. Which was the last thing he’d expected of a senior Vesperan in her mid-fifties.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded, shaken. He’d missed the landressa spines only by a inch or two, and their wounds had a nasty tendency to become poisoned. Long-dead Empress Landressa had been commemorated appropriately, if not exactly as she might have wished.

  ‘I thought you’d do this,’ Leonata said. ‘It wasn’t enough to come here and threaten them? You had to spy on them as well.’

  ‘I’m doing what any intelligencer with half a mind would do inside an enemy stronghold.’

  ‘But you’re not an intelligencer. Intelligencers have something that might qualify as loyalty, a cause they serve.’

  ‘Have you come here only to accuse me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t waste my breath,’ she said. ‘I came to tell you that they’re expecting you, that if you go out there, I won’t lift a finger to help you.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you to. This is my part of the investigation, not yours.’

  ‘Don’t pretend we’re co-investigators any more,’ she said. ‘No-one even cares that we’re still investigating. It’s so transparently obvious who killed Catiline.’

  ‘What’s less obvious,’ he said, moving away from the landressa plant, but careful to stay in the shadow of the rocks where he wouldn’t be outlined against the white sand and visible to anyone watching from the walkways out in the lagoon, ‘is what your interest is. You’re protecting Iolani, endangering your clanspeople into the bargain, and you’re carrying out your own investigation in waters I thought you wouldn’t want to disturb.’ Raphael had got that from the historians at the Museion, who’d let slip a High Thalassarch had come to visit a few days earlier. It hadn’t taken him long to work out which one.

  ‘Who are you doing this for?’ he went on. ‘Yourself? The Clan? The City? Thetia? Something else that I’ve missed out? You said, back in the City, that I’d been away from Vespera too long to understand. What have I missed?’

  ‘Why the sudden curiosity?’ she asked.

  ‘This may be the last time we speak, if you’re right, and they’re waiting for me. I know what drives Valentine, and Iolani, and probably Aesonia, but I don’t know why you’re doing this.’

  ‘For the City,’ Leonata said, surprising him with a genuine answer. How different from Silvanos, even with this current hostility.

  ‘You live to serve Vespera?’ It was still a politician’s answer. He’d expected more from her.

  ‘You really don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You must have had friends from military families. The kind whose family tree is encrusted with generation after generation of captains, lieutenants, the odd admiral, people who really belong to the Navy from the moment they’re born?’

  ‘A few,’ he said, starting slightly as something rustled in the trees behind them. He relaxed a moment later as a pair of birds burst out of the canopy with a round of indignant squawking, beating at each other with vari-coloured wings.

  ‘That class is as old as Thetia, and we’d never have survived without them. Thousands of families scattered across the islands. Not aristocracy, and not many of them ever make it to the top. Admiral Cidelis, who helped save the Empire from the Tuonetar, was one who did.’

  ‘But where do you come into this?’

  ‘You never really understood, because Silvanos has always been an outsider, by his own choice. Vespera has a similar tradition. We’re brought up to serve the City as our parents were, and their parents, and so on back into the mists of time. If you come from one of those families, you’re marked from the moment you’re born.’

  That much, he understood. All your life you served the City. Merchant, sailor, clan official, City official, shipwright – all of those counted, all protected the City, made it wealthier and greater. Even artists and musicians, if they enriched the City, though they were never considered quite as respectable. It was as much of a duty as service in the legions or the Navy for military families.

  The orators and writers of the original Republic had known it, as had the thousands of men and women who’d devoted their lives to the Republic’s service. And died for it, particularly in Doge Umbera’s generation. The Republic was a dream which deserved better than to be tainted by the tragedy of Ruthelo Azrian and his short-lived revival.

  ‘Do you have a choice?’ he asked, which even produced the beginnings of a smile.

  ‘I was born a Vesperan,’ Leonata said, standing up and walking across the sand where the trees hid her from view. She reached down and felt at the edge of the rocks for some flat stones. ‘I could have been born on some godforsaken corner of the Continents, spent my life a concubine confined to some Halettite’s harem, or breaking my back in the fields until I had one baby too many. The world outside is a little kinder to men, but it’s still barbaric.’

  Raphael tensed as Leonata picked one of the stones up, ready to skim it across the small, plashing waves, but then she saw his expression and put it down.

  ‘Instead, I’m a Vesperan, and I’ll have a life that most people could only dream of. But with that comes duty, to clan and City. I can’t sit back and expect other people to look after them. The oaths we take to bind ourselves to our clans are to the City as well. To prosper with the City is commendable, to prosper at the expense of the City is the worst of sins. Of course, some people do, but as long as we serve, there will always be enough to protect the City. So, you see, I’m bound every bit as much as the most dedicated naval officer.’

  ‘So finding the truth is your duty to the City?’ he said, after a moment’s pause. He hadn’t expected that, an indication of how much of the bone-deep conditioning he’d simply missed. ‘Or part of your scheme for the City?’

  Thetis, what had he been thinking of? He’d been such a fool not to have realised what she was doing, blinded by his own brilliance in connecting Corsina and the shipyard to Clan Azrian. He hadn’t stopped to think whether maybe Leonata had overlooked their alliance with the Jharissa for reasons of her own.

  Or because she had an agreement with Iolani that was more than simply keeping out of each others’ way. Their agreement wasn’t armed neutrality, it was alliance, an alliance concluded in secret and cemented by their joint interests in Aruwe. Which was arming the ships of Leonata and her allies just as strongly as those of the Jharissa, and quite possibly building more in secret.

  He stared down at the sand for a moment, his mind racing through all the implications, of what this meant for Vespera, and Thetia, and what it would me
an for him. He’d overstepped, and now he would pay for it.

  ‘You’ve realised,’ said Leonata, more relaxed now. ‘You would have done, once you got out there. Or, at the latest, when we didn’t let you leave.’

  ‘Were you part of her conspiracy from the beginning?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I know better than to tell you. There’s always the unforeseen escape, something out of my control.’

  ‘But Iolani gets her revenge and you get a truly independent Vespera, your Republic or Thalassocracy or Commonwealth or whatever you’re going to call it,’ Raphael said, and Leonata nodded. ‘Why?’

  ‘Petroz as good as told you, that first night in the City,’ she said. ‘We lost so much, his generation and mine. So many dead, such a waste of life, such a blight on those who survived. All because of the chaos. We can’t trust the Empire not to kill its own people, so we make a Thetia of our own. Something that will last, and protect its people, and be what Thetia ought to be. The Council won’t last, everyone knows that. Valentine wants it to give the City to him; I don’t intend to let him take it. Nor do most of my colleagues.

  ‘And because I want my daughter never to endure what I have, what Iolani has, what Petroz has. She’s brilliant, Raphael. Her mind can grasp in a second concepts I still can’t understand, she can come up with inventions without even thinking about them. She was always like that, and the other shipwrights say she’s probably the best Aruwe has had in generations. But none of this is as important as the simple fact that she’s my daughter. I do this for the City, and for her.’

  Leonata’s face had softened again, enough that Raphael could see she was telling the truth. She had no more need to be angry, because she’d won. No report of what happened here would ever get back to Valentine, and doubtless Leonata’s and Iolani’s plans, made together in secret, were already in motion.

  For a brief second he considered taking her hostage, but realised just as quickly he wouldn’t accomplish anything, because he wouldn’t harm her. She knew that, and so did the shipwrights.

  To have come so far, and been trapped to his own overconfidence! There was no way out of Aruwe unless the shipwrights chose to take him, and he wasn’t some legendary warrior from the Heroic Age who could fight his way out, even if he wanted to kill all these shipwrights.