WEED TOWERS BURNED. You had to use an accelerant to get them started, but now that the Organization had captured the Haravalding spaceport, they had plenty of spare rocket fuel. The mara had started the fires. It seemed idiotic to Colm, but he was not about to get in their way. They were avenging their lost homeworld.
Shablags scurried ahead of the mara arson squads, retrieving useful gear from the towers. The humans—comparatively few in number—had occupied the spaceport. Colm tallied and checked over the spacecraft on the ground. A nice little fleet of sub-orbital shuttles and orbital transfer vehicles ... if the sentrienza let them keep them.
“Another sentrienza ship just arrived in orbit,” Lee told him. “That makes eight. They’re bringing them in from all over the system.”
“Good thing we’ve got the hostages,” Colm said. They had a hundred or so sentrienza under guard at the spaceport. The Organization was holding another few hundred on the other islands. “They’re our insurance against rods from God.” He spoke confidently, but he remembered how the sentrienza had not hesitated to barbecue the customs post at Kevesingod, regardless of their own people trapped inside.
Lee grimaced. “I’d feel better if they didn’t have hostages, too.”
He meant the Hail Mary ships in orbit around Juradis. They were still occupied by humans who hadn’t made it down to the surface yet. And they were sitting up there in full view of the sentrienza ships’ guns.
“We have to get the negotiations moving,” Colm said.
“Where’s Meg? She’s the only one who can talk to the little gray fuckers.”
“I’ll go find her.”
But no one at the spaceport knew where Meg was. This wasn’t surprising in and of itself, given the ambient chaos. Maybe she’d gone out to rescue some more hostages. Colm tried to raise her on the net, but it was down again. He persuaded Dhjerga Lizp to come with him to look for her.
The city smelled of smoke, tinged with the odor of decomposing corpses. They crossed paths with roving bands of Ghosts. The Ghosts left the mara and shablags alone, and vice versa. They were all after different things. The mara, fire. The shablags, loot. The Ghosts, mainly food.
The covered market where Lee used to hold court had been ransacked, restaurants looted. Colm threw a chair through the sole surviving window in the arcade. The crash and tinkle of falling glass sounded loud in the empty space. “Meg?” he shouted. “Meg?”
“This island would be useless for farming,” Dhjerga said, scraping his boot over the bare rock underfoot. “Why do you build cities in places with no resources?”
“We didn’t build this one,” Colm said.
“I mean you—you know. Spaceship people.”
“Well, you see, equatorial orbits are cheaper in terms of delta-V, because rotating planets tend to be slightly fatter around the equator, so it’s logical to choose equator-proximal launch sites ...”
Dhjerga cut him off with an impatient gesture. He never had shown any interest in the technical details of spaceflight. “She’s not here. Let’s go.”
“So what’s in this for you?” Colm said as they walked on. It was a question he’d never asked the Ghost before. Great voids of mystery surrounded Dhjerga. Colm had only recently begun to feel they knew each other well enough for personal questions.
Dhjerga, however, answered this one readily enough. “I’d like to have a little farm of my own someday.”
“Not an empire?”
Dhjerga sneered. “An empire of slaves! I’ll leave that to the Magistocracy.”
“The Magistocracy?”
“Slave-owning bastards.”
“Slaves?”
“Like that lot.” Dhjerga jerked his chin at a band of Ghosts emerging from a corner shop further down the alley, their hands full of cookies and sweets. “They come to themselves and realize they’ve been had. But by then it’s too late.”
“Come to themselves?”
“Oh, you know. They start out like this.” Dhjerga made a twiddling woo-woo gesture. “But then they come to themselves.”
“So copies don’t stay copies.”
“Of course not. If they stay alive for long enough, they start to think for themselves. That always leads to trouble. So you slap shackles on them before they get their brains in gear. It’s actually easier on everyone if they get killed first.” Dhjerga made an ugly face.
“We used to have slavery on Earth, too,” Colm said.
“So I hear. Even the sentrienza aren’t dumb enough to enslave their own kind.”
The alley ended at the seafront promenade. In contrast to the streets in the middle of the island, the seafront looked unscarred, apart from being deserted. Fancy sentrienza residences lined the promenade, behind walls molded in the shapes of stone dunes. Sea birds clustered around things hanging from the eaves of the delicate pavilions. Colm realized with a sick lurch that the things were sentrienza corpses. The mara had been this way.
Out to sea, the view was prettier. A line of prison ships waited in the haze for it to be safe enough for their passengers to go ashore. The salty breeze blowing onshore cleansed the air. Man and Ghost walked side by side towards the harbor. They passed a group of Ghosts turning over an abandoned food stall, who snapped to attention when Dhjerga hove in sight.
Colm remembered what Gil had said about the impossibility of galactic conquest. No species could build a galactic empire, given the limits on FTL speeds ... but the Ghosts could.
He turned to Dhjerga, suddenly excited. “What if we could build a better empire?”
“Famous last words.”
“I’m not joking. Us and you. We’ve got so much in common.” He pivoted in front of Dhjerga, forcing him to stop. “We even look alike ...”
Dhjerga raised his hands, as if framing Colm in a picture. They looked at each other through the imaginary frame. The picture was a mirror. To a human observer, the two of them would look nothing alike, but an alien observer would not hesitate to say that they must be the same species. Dhjerga’s face creased in a wondering frown.
“If we joined forces, no one could stop us.” Colm slung his arm around Dhjerga’s shoulders and hauled him over to the seawall. They leaned on it, side by side, looking out to sea. “Maybe that’s exactly what they’re all afraid of. That’s why they’re playing us off against each other.” The words tumbled out. “First we save Earth, and then—”
“Yeah, that’s the hard part,” Dhjerga said.
“Oh, I’m not saying it will be easy. But if we can grab those spaceships up there, and you provide reinforcements, we’ll have a fighting chance.” He waved at the banners of smoke streaming from the city behind them. “This is our test run. In the Fleet they’d call it a proof of doctrine. If we succeed, we’ll move on to Noom, to Barjoltan, and then back to Earth! Then we’ll liberate the rest of our colony systems, free your slaves ...” The vision unfurled in his mind’s eye, bright and beautiful.
“What’s that?” Dhjerga said, pointing.
A winged speck was crossing the sky.
“An airplane?” Colm shrugged. “Or a spaceship.”
“It just dropped something.”
“It dropped ...” Colm took a second to think about that. Another second to wonder if Dhjerga’s sharp eyes could have been mistaken. He decided safe was better than sorry. “Run.”
*
THE NUKE WENT OFF AS they tumbled into the basement of a sentrienza waterfront home. The sentrienza liked to build down rather than up, and now Colm was grateful for it. His training and instincts told him to get underground, as far underground as possible. That was what saved their lives.
Survivors of the blast told him later—before they went limp, and started drooling and twitching, and died—that it had been an airburst. The sentrienza, ever practical, didn’t want to destroy their own city. So they’d exploded the nuke half a mile up. For a few seconds, it had shone brighter than Betelgeuse.
CHAPTER 49
MEG LOOKED DOWN THROUGH the blister of the sen
trienza capital ship Ruddiganmaseve—which meant, in English, the Radiant Javelin of Imperial Reason. Juradis’s planet-girdling ocean, with its sprinkling of islands, no longer seemed peaceful. That was the stillness of death down there.
She leaned her forehead on the glass. Of course, it wasn’t really glass. It was a high-tech screen, with a panoramic view of Juradis projected on it. The blister was a cave deep within the Ruddiganmaseve. But the screen felt cold and hard like glass, and her tears left streaks on it.
A small, high voice behind her said, “May we talk, Meg-sensei?”
Meg blinked away her tears. She casually wiped the screen with her sleeve as she turned. Her life depended on not showing a moment’s weakness to Emnl ki-Sharongat.
Princess Emnl, she reminded herself as she bowed to the small sentrienza.
Had Meg known the first thing about the sentrienza, she’d have realized who Emnl was long ago. It was right there in the girl’s name: ki-Sharongat, the prefix denoting something like “Her Highness,” Sharongat a royal house. The sentrienza of Sakassarib were hiding from the Ghosts, as Emnl had told her when they first met. But that was because Emnl was royalty, the heir to the Betelgeuse system, so her parents saw fit to keep her wrapped in cotton wool millions of miles away.
Emnl had prevailed on them to let her come to Juradis so she could rescue her sensei.
A pack of specialized Walking Guns had snatched Meg off the wharves at Haravalding, just a couple of hours before the nukes were dropped. These Walking Guns doubled as Swimming Guns. The pack leader was the size of a rhino. They had tracked her down by satellite-based facial recognition, maybe some fancy DNA sniffing—she must have left plenty of DNA traces in the mound on Sakassarib. They’d bundled her into the pack leader’s survival compartment and boosted her into orbit. She’d blacked out from shock and launch gees. When she came around, the first thing she had heard was Emnl’s little voice: “Meg-sensei, are you all right?”
Am I all right? You rescued me but left my friends to die, so what do you think, Your Highness?
Emnl came to stand beside her. She was wearing one of her princess outfits: a floor-length gown that looked like it was stitched together from rags and dead leaves splashed with fluorescent paint. Her lavender hair hung down her back in a braid thicker than Meg’s wrist. Looking down at Haravalding, she said, “The nuclear explosions were harnessed into blast cones, tightly targeted on the rebel-held areas with laser target designators and custom fins on the bomb casings.”
No innocent fish or other native wildlife were harmed in the making of this massacre, Meg thought. “Could anyone have survived the blasts?”
“I don’t think so,” Emnl said. “These are enhanced radiation bombs. The neutron spectrum is designed to peak in the energies that allow maximum absorption by sodium-23, an isotope widely used in the nerve cells of living beings. The neutron emissions transmute sodium-23 to magnesium-24. That prevents the nerves from firing, and rapidly results in death.”
Meg studied the fragile little princess. She had an urge to administer a jugular chop which would rapidly result in death. “So there’s no chance anyone could have survived?”
“Well, of course, if they were underground, or sufficiently shielded otherwise from the neutron emissions, they could have.”
Meg seized on the sliver of hope. “If there are survivors, what will happen to them?”
“My mother will dispose of them according to their culpability.” Emnl glanced around, hunching her shoulders. In the middle of the blister stood a huge, grotesque throne. At the moment it was unoccupied. “The Ghosts, of course, will be liquidated. Any humans, queazels, mara, and shablags who remained loyal to us will be spared.”
“Thank you, your Highness.” Meg forced the words out, knowing how important it was to appear grateful. Humanity’s spontaneous gratitude to the sentrienza, more than anything else, had won them the status of a favored client species. The sentrienza Emperor, far away, had turned against Homo sapiens, but Emnl’s family still had a soft spot for humanity, as proved by the way they had let hundreds of thousands of refugees into the Betelgeuse system.
And then the refugees had turned around and bitten the hand that fed them.
For the sake of her own species, Meg had to prove that not all humans were ungrateful SOBs.
“My mother wants to know if you will help,” Emnl said, lowering her voice as if the queen might hear her.
“Help with what?”
“We must find the ssguriybat. Dead or alive.”
Meg had heard that mush of syllables before, on Sakassarib. She had not understood then what it meant. Now she did.
She translated, numbly, “The magician.”
*
COLM KNEW THAT NEUTRONS had a 15-hour half-life. He and Dhjerga spent 20 hours hiding in the basement of the sentrienza house on the waterfront, checking each other for symptoms of radiation poisoning, surviving on tepid fruit juice from a fridge that had lost power. Eventually they ventured out. Colm had a single immediate need: to find survivors. Dhjerga had a single immediate need of his own: to surround himself with reinforcements. The two things dovetailed. Colm needed to know, above all, if the Tans had made it. They’d been on the Vienna. And for Dhjerga, the prison ships meant power. Their solar arrays stored energy in high-density batteries, usable even when their reactors were down.
The two men tipped some fresh corpses out of a water tender and piloted it across the harbor. The engine made an obscene racket in the silence. Nothing moved except the waves. The bodies of sea birds bobbed up and down like rubbish.
On board the Vienna, they waded through another panorama of death. Bodies littered the decks. Some of them were still—barely—alive. Colm gave them water. Over and over he heard the story of the airburst. He figured the sentrienza had nuked all the equatorial islands at the same time. His premonitions of disaster had been correct. But he’d never imagined a slaughter on this scale.
The Vienna had served as a secondary headquarters for Lee’s people. Colm found Jenny on the bridge. Sweet Jenny from the Sudan. Near death now, fading in and out. Colm gave her water.
“Make the fuckers pay for this,” she whispered.
Colm nodded wordlessly. Just a few hours ago, he’d been fantasizing about saving Earth. He hadn’t even been able to save the humans on Juradis.
“Promise me, Colm!”
“I promise.” Empty words.
She gripped his hand feebly. “You don’t, I’ll come back and haunt you.” Those were her last words. A few minutes later she died.
Colm was closing her eyes when a phalanx of Ghosts came and urged him downstairs to the factory deck.
Like all the prison ships, the Vienna was a converted krill fishing factory vessel. The factory deck, right above the reactor room, still contained all the equipment for cooking, drying, and grinding microscopic sea beasties. The factory had continued to operate in a small way while the ship served as a refugee camp.
Here Colm found the Tans, with about fifty other survivors. He hugged Sully and Bella. Crystal and Zainab hugged Dhjerga. The other survivors were zombified with shock.
Tan said, “We were down here when it happened. I guess all the decks and equipment shielded us. People started coming down, crying, shaking ... dying.” He gestured to the closed end of the deck, which had been turned into a morgue. “Safe to go above decks?”
“I suppose,” Colm said. “I’ve been outside, and I haven’t started puking yet.”
Tan headed up to the bridge to try to make contact with the other prison ships. Colm attempted to organize the most functional survivors into work parties to dump the corpses in the sea. It was a grim task, but had to be done before the dead began to decompose in the heat.
A sudden thump ran through the ship. Colm froze. No one else even seemed to notice. They were too numb.
Dhjerga left the factory deck and came back a few minutes later at a run. “Walking Guns. Get the civilians to safety.”
; What safety? They were trapped below decks. There was only one way out. Colm picked up Crystal, Bella picked up Zainab. They ran to the end of the factory deck, where the trawlers used to offload their krill catch straight onto the vast conveyor belt. Colm had already opened the loading door for his corpse-dumping operation. The light of Betelgeuse blazed in. Shots pattered above decks, no louder than firecrackers over the susurration of the waves. Colm pointed along the side of the ship to the water tender he and Dhjerga had come in. It was moored to a ladder a hundred meters away. “You’ll have to swim for it.”
“Got it,” Bella said. Colm had never seen such ferocious resolve on a human being’s face.
“I’ll pull Sully’s ass out of this. We’ll catch up with you later.”
Bella nodded, and jumped with Zainab in her arms. They hit the water with scarcely a splash. Colm held his breath until he saw them come up. “Ready?” he said to Crystal.
“Daddy,” she whispered.
“I will find him. He’ll be OK, I promise, Crystal. Hold your nose when you hit the water.”
Of all the things he’d done in his life, nothing had been as hard as throwing a child into a sea filled with corpses.
He waited until Crystal surfaced. It looked like she was doggy-paddling strongly, following her mother to the tender. Life on the Vienna had taught her at least one useful thing: how to swim. “Lord Jesus,” Colm muttered. He turned back to the factory deck, drawing his useless .38.
Gunfire sounded close. When he looked out into the corridor, a volley of small-caliber rounds forced him back inside, but not before he saw several dead Ghosts at the foot of the nearest ladderway.
The howl of a Walking Gun pealed down the corridor as he slammed the door.
“Dhjerga!” Colm yelled. He clambered up the ladder to the top of a big tank where krill oil had been separated from residual water. Dhjerga was sitting there, swinging his legs. “What the fuck? Your guys are losing!”
The door burst open. A Walking Gun loped in and sat down on its haunches, so that its forelegs formed a tripod. It started to pick off the survivors, one by one.
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 30