Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  I cast a wary glance at the horizon. I didn’t like the look of those clouds. “I’ll do my best.”

  By the time Clay’s circle was complete, the wreck had settled lower in the water and the wavelets had advanced another half a metre up the deck. The breeze had begun to pick up. Time was running out and we all knew it. We weren’t carrying the equipment necessary to operate below the surface. If we could get these two out, they would be the last survivors pulled from the Hobo before it took that long, final spiralling fall into darkness and silence. The rest, if there were any, would be lost.

  We had done all we could.

  Clay switched off her torch and laid it aside. “Captain,” she said, “do you want to do the honours?”

  Thunder growled in the distance. Those clouds were the leading edge of the oncoming storm. The circle’s molten outline burned like an ember. I raised my right boot and stamped down on its centre. Metal cracked and scraped, and the entire section fell away, splashing into the seawater flooding the compartment below. For a moment, we stood paralysed, waiting for movement, a voice, anything. Then Alva Clay swore, and slid through the hole, boots first.

  When she reappeared, moments later, puffing and blowing air and water from her lips, she had her arm clamped around a young man’s neck. They were both kicking to stay afloat. I lay on the wet deck and reached down and, with Walker’s help, managed to pull the kid up into the sunlight.

  We rolled him onto a stretcher.

  “Is he injured?”

  A sudden wind blew across the deck, chilling my exposed skin. Walker checked the kid’s pulse with one hand, waved me away with the other. “Go on, I’ve got this.”

  I left him bent over the stretcher and slithered back to the edge of the hole. Lying with my head and shoulders hanging over the rim, I could see Clay’s flashlight cutting this way and that through the shadowy water below. Her movements stirred up clouds of junk. I saw objects whirl through the circle of daylight thrown by the hole: a plastic fork, a comb, an empty cup, a loose shoe…

  Another clap of thunder rolled in from the horizon.

  If we’d had more time, I would have sent a drone in to help her. As it was, we were already pushing our luck.

  When Clay reappeared a second time, her dreads were sodden and plastered to her head, and her goggles were missing.

  “There’s something in here.” She lunged upward and grabbed the lip of the hole. “Get me out.”

  I took hold of her wrists.

  “What are you—?”

  “I’m not kidding, Sally.” She tried to pull herself up. “Get me the fuck out!”

  I didn’t argue. In the three years I’d known her, I’d never seen Clay this rattled. I’d seen her tense and anxious, maybe, but never actually afraid. I dragged her up with all the strength in my arms. Then, when she was halfway out and levering herself up on her elbows, I reached down and grabbed her by her tool belt. I pulled back hard and she slithered up on top of me. Her clothes were soaked, and I tasted salt water. We rolled apart and sat panting on the wet deck while lightning danced like fire among the clouds and the quickening wind delivered the first spots of rain.

  “Where’s the other one?”

  Clay swallowed, trying to control her breathing. “Gone.”

  I climbed to my feet and scrutinised the circle of darkness. “But there were two…”

  “Something took him.” She wrapped her arms across her chest.

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know.” Her chest rose and fell. “But it was big, and fast.”

  “Like a shark?” With one of the submerged airlocks left open, I could see how a big fish might have wormed its way into the Hobo’s drowned interior.

  “No.” Clay shook her head. “No, it had tentacles.” She stood up and drew her pistol, and backed away from the hole. I took one last look into the depths of the flooded cabin and then did likewise.

  Another peal of thunder split the sky. Although the clouds were still some distance from us, the rain rode ahead of them, blown like spittle.

  “We need to leave.” Clay had her gun trained on the hole in the hull, seemingly expecting some aquatic horror to rise up from within. She was scared, and she was right to be. The weather was closing in and the Hobo was in danger of dropping out from under us at any moment. We were out of time and we needed to evacuate the survivors, pronto.

  I opened my mouth to order the Trouble Dog’s shuttle to come pick us up, but stopped as I heard a splash behind me. I turned in time to glimpse something orange being pulled beneath the waves. At the same moment, an alarm pierced my ear as the Trouble Dog clamoured for my attention. Clay heard it too. She risked looking away from the hole for an instant.

  “Hey,” she said, her face mirroring my confusion. “Where’s George?”

  TWO

  ONA SUDAK

  Despite being kept awake for most of the night, I forced myself to get out of bed at 0600 hours, same as every other morning.

  Without waking Adam, I slid from the sheet and pulled on a robe. His gently snoring body lay like a bony xylophone. Loosened from its ponytail, his hair spilled down across his youthful face. His faux leather trousers had been carelessly tossed across the back of one of my chairs, and one of his boots, having been kicked away in the impatience of passion, now wallowed upended in my metal sink. I thought about kissing his forehead, but didn’t want to wake him. I had my morning routine, and I didn’t want him getting in the way. So I stepped out of the cabin and closed the door as quietly as I could.

  The corridor outside opened onto a deep shaft, maybe fifty metres from top to bottom and half that again in width, bordered on all sides by balconies and hanging gardens. The air was sweet and pleasantly warm, and smelled of roses and rich, mossy soil. Birds and butterflies flittered through the empty spaces. Bees fumbled among the flowers. I stood for a few moments, drinking all of it in. One day, I intended to write a poem about life on the ’dam, or one of her pen-shaped sister ships.

  One day, but not today.

  Fastening the robe’s sash in a loose knot, I made my way to the nearest transport tube and descended half a dozen decks to the gym. Every morning without exception, I did an hour’s exercise before breakfast. It was a habit ingrained after long years in the—

  I caught myself before completing the thought, and turned my attention instead to the waiting treadmills and weights.

  * * *

  By 0700 hours ship’s time, my muscles were cooling after a strenuous workout, and I was recovering in the pool, contemplating the distant glimmer of the dusty stars beyond the large picture window occupying the whole of the gym’s back wall.

  In a couple of hours’ time, we would make a close approach to the Brain—the first of the Objects we were to encounter.

  The Geest van Amsterdam hadn’t wanted to linger in the Gallery a moment longer than necessary, but the other passengers and I wanted to get a closer look at the Objects, and we had been most insistent. Quite apart from the fact that the Gallery lay in a disputed tract of space, the ’dam had its itinerary to consider, and strict adherence to schedule had always been a matter of much pride among such vessels. Nevertheless, when Captain Benton finally interceded on our behalf, the ship reluctantly agreed to extend our presence in the system long enough to perform a close flyby of the Brain, the Inverted City, and the Dodecahedron.

  We were overjoyed. Like most of humanity, I had only seen second-hand footage of the Objects, so the chance to see three of them with my own eyes seemed like the kind of opportunity that strikes only once in a lifetime—the kind of experience one might relate to a grandchild. When the ship made its announcement, I was delighted by its concession. After seven weeks of careful flirtation, I had finally allowed myself to be seduced by the young poet Adam Leroux, who had been pursuing me with a gauche and tragic fervour for the duration of the cruise, and I looked forward to viewing the mysterious sculptures in the company of my youthful paramour. I wanted to see them thro
ugh his eyes. His delight would be purer and more childlike than anything I felt capable of mustering, and I would use it in the poem I intended to write about the encounter, recycling his sense of innocent wonder as my own.

  * * *

  Adam was eighteen and a half years old, with the gangly awkwardness of an adolescent, yet he affected a world-weary disdain for what he termed the “mundanity of ordinary existence”. He had been born and raised on the ’dam, and had seen many worlds during his short life—but mostly through the windows and view screens of his suite. He had little experience beyond the safe environs of the ship, and even less experience of women. He was very different to the men I had known, and I guess that novelty was one of the things about him that attracted me. It certainly wasn’t his poetry, which was execrable, full of extremity and unnecessary drama and lacking the subtlety an older mind might have brought to its subjects. Had the cruise been shorter, I would never have allowed him into my bed.

  Even now, wallowing in the warm water, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t made an embarrassing mistake. He was so much younger than me, for a start; and he wanted me to teach him everything I knew about poetry.

  I could have done that in about half an hour.

  Over the past three years, I had published a handful of epic poems to somewhat rapturous and unexpected applause. But none of them were what I’d consider to be masterpieces. They weren’t poetic. On the contrary, the language I had used was almost clinical in its plainness, and the poems themselves were stark and guilt-laden, and not written for mass consumption. And yet, their simplicity and lack of pretension seemed to catch something in the mood of the post-war public, giving voice to all their lingering feelings of loss and remorse. And, quite to my surprise and dismay, I found my artless words celebrated across the Generality, and acclaimed as the voice of a lost generation.

  Looking back now, I knew I should never have published, not even privately. But I could not have known that a well-meaning friend would post my poetry to a system-wide literary server, or that those words would have such appeal to the readers of the Generality. I had meant them as a small, private tribute, like funeral ashes scattered into the ocean of culture. Instead, my unanticipated readership saw in my retelling of old works a new political hope, and a rejection of the territorial posturing that had led us to the Archipelago War. Quite by accident, I had become a figurehead, a symbol of regeneration.

  But all I really wanted to do was disappear, and forget the war. I didn’t want to keep talking about it in interviews. I was sick of seeing my face on newscasts and literary feeds. All I wanted was to forget the whole thing.

  Which is why I was looking forward to seeing the Objects.

  * * *

  Ten thousand years ago, the solar system we now know as the Gallery had been a remote and unremarkable place: just a small yellow sun with seven perfectly ordinary planets. Then, some time around ten thousand years ago, those planets had been carved into seven immense sculptures, and nobody knew why or by whom.

  Arriving on the scene six thousand years after their fashioning, human explorers had named the carvings according to their shapes. Counting outwards from the sun, they became known as the Teardrop, the Jagged Bolt, the Brain, the Inverted City, the Dodecahedron, the Flared Goblet, and the Broken Clock.

  Even now, their significance remained a mystery. But, as they had endured for so many millennia, I hoped I would be able to find among them a way to throw my personal history into some sort of perspective. Through contemplation and the act of writing, I intended to stack my handful of days against the vastness of ten thousand years, and thereby exorcise their pain; and maybe, by seeing the Objects through Adam’s young eyes, I could achieve that.

  The first Object we were to approach was the Brain. It is a fat ovoid the size of Mars. Like the other objects, it started life as a reasonably commonplace globe. Then the sculptors, using some unimaginable technology, reshaped it, etching deep and convoluted designs into its surface. The largest lines are the size of canyons, the smallest no wider than a few centimetres. Together, they form an intricate, planet-sized labyrinth of exquisite complexity, with no identifiable beginning or end, no entry point or centre.

  My plan was to remain in the pool for another half an hour, watching our progress towards the Brain through the window. I hoped the water would soothe the remaining tension in my neck and shoulders, and rinse away the fatigue from my workout. When we got closer to the Brain, I’d return to my cabin to wake Adam. We’d get dressed and take tea and sushi on the observation deck at the front of the ship, where most of the crew and passengers would be gathered beneath the transparent dome to witness our closest approach.

  * * *

  I had begun to drift off to sleep when the water quivered around me. At first, it was a pleasant sensation, like being rocked in a parent’s arms. Then a second, stronger shudder wrenched me from my doze, and I gripped the side of the pool. The lights flickered. Beyond the window, I glimpsed a swarm of firefly sparks.

  Torpedoes!

  We were under attack, but by whom? And why weren’t the alarms sounding? Why weren’t we retaliating?

  The engines were off, and even the air conditioning had stopped. The resulting silence was eerier and more terrifying than any amount of noise could have been.

  I surged from the water and grabbed my robe. A couple of teenagers emerged from one of the saunas looking perplexed, but I pushed straight past them, shoving my way towards the corridor. There was no time now to think. No time to warn anybody else. It was entirely possible, likely even, that I only had a few minutes of life remaining, and there were things I needed to do.

  THREE

  ASHTON CHILDE

  The electric fan rattled. The air was hot down here by the equator. Humidity plastered my shirt to my ribs, and I envied the residents of the planet’s more northerly, cooler climes. Even with the office door closed, I could smell the creeping reek of the jungle beyond the airfield’s perimeter. I contemplated the gun on the desk before me. It was small, compact and efficient-looking: a black metal L-shape with a touchpad trigger and a small aperture at the business end. If I had to spend one more day in this stinking craphole, I worried I might snap and use it to shoot somebody. And I worried that somebody might be me.

  My tie was loose. With shaky hands, I pulled it off altogether and stuffed it into a drawer. On the wall beside me, a two-dimensional map showed the surrounding terrain, with pins and coloured stickers to mark troop positions and major strategic targets—nearly all of them guesses based on observations by our pilots. Everything here was so low-tech. I would have given my left nut for a decent satellite overview of the front lines, but every time we put one up, the government knocked it down. And it wasn’t as if I had resources to burn. Even replacing one of the rattling, aluminium-sided supply planes could take four to six weeks, during which time our allies in the mountains would have to ration their ammunition and tighten their belts over empty bellies.

  The hard truth was that as far as Conglomeration Intelligence was concerned, this civil war simply wasn’t a priority. Viewed from a hundred light years away, it was scarcely more than a nasty provincial scuffle. We were covertly supplying arms, food and medicine to the guerrillas opposing the government, but that was the extent of our involvement. The top brass could have sent a couple of Scimitar warships and a few thousand ground troops to end the conflict in a matter of hours. Unfortunately, this planet lay on a political fault line between the Conglomeration and the Outward Faction, and so we were reduced to acting through civilian front organisations. As far as the universe beyond this mud ball was concerned, I was the proprietor of a charitable aircraft haulage company employing seven pilots and two-dozen mechanics, shipping humanitarian supplies to refugees displaced by the fighting. In reality, our materiel drops only prolonged the insurgency, destabilising the entire region.

  I wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I hadn’t felt clean since I’d been here. Even cold showers were effective on
ly as long as I remained beneath them. Seconds after emerging, I’d start to sweat again.

  I tapped the pistol with an unsteady fingertip, setting it spinning. It made a grinding noise on the pocked and dented metal surface of the desk.

  The drawer that now held my screwed-up tie also held a clear plastic bag containing three sticks of barracuda weed, a mildly addictive local root. I stuck one in the corner of my mouth and squeezed it between my teeth, allowing its bitter sap to mix with my saliva.

  Chewing barracuda weed took the edge off. It stopped my hands from shaking, but couldn’t completely numb me to the endless days of administrative tedium punctuated by the occasional interruptions of searing terror—such as last week, when a government drone strafed the airfield and I’d had to take cover beneath this very desk. As an assignment, this had to be the worst I could have been given. The only mystery was what I had done to deserve such treatment.

  On the desk, the pistol slowed to a halt with its barrel pointing at my stomach. For a second or two, I imagined it going off—maybe as the result of a malfunction or jarring caused by the spin. Before recruitment into the intelligence community, I had been a cop and seen my share of accidental and self-inflicted gunshot wounds. I could easily picture the weapon flying backwards across the room, propelled by its own recoil, the muzzle flash scorching the damp curtain of my faux-cotton shirt, the bullet punching through skin and muscle, and my head snapping back against the chair while the chair itself rocked on its casters.

  My left eye twitched.

  At least it would be an escape. The only question in my mind was how long my corpse might moulder in this chair before somebody thought to come and check on me. In this heat, it would rot quickly. The pilots had their schedules for the week; unless a problem cropped up, it might be days before they found me.

  I sucked on the root, and set the gun spinning again. I was still turning it an hour later, when the terminal in my pocket buzzed.