I didn’t even stop to think about it.
Joining the CIS was the single most fulfilling thing to happen in my life—and the first thing I did was go back and arrest every bastard in my old precinct. A decade later, the memory of their outraged faces still gave me a warm, satisfied feeling.
Unfortunately, little else did.
“Okay,” I said, having observed the weird, unspoken preliminaries of our relationship. “Do you want to know or not?”
Petrushka kinked an eyebrow, inviting me to continue.
“I’ve been ordered to report to the spaceport at Northfield,” I told her.
She sat up a little straighter. Northfield was halfway around the planet, on another, much chillier, continent altogether.
“Why?”
I took a breath. By sharing the information I was about to divulge, I would be committing treason—but, after all these months, I no longer thought of Laura Petrushka as an enemy. As far as I was concerned, she was the closest thing I had to a friend on this rotting ball of mud.
The ceiling fans squeaked. I took a sip of beer and cleared my throat. I felt shaky. After all these months, there might be a light at the end of the hot, dismal tunnel my life at the airstrip had become.
“There’s a ship coming. I’m going to hitch a ride to the Gallery.”
“The Gallery?”
“Yes.” My voice wavered, and I took a pull from my glass. I didn’t want her to see how shaky I was. I didn’t know if the butterflies in my chest were due to excitement, apprehension, or the barracuda weed. Perhaps they were a blend of all three. “There’s someone there they want me to find.”
EIGHT
SAL KONSTANZ
After leaving the embassy, I wandered the dockyard at Camrose Station. I had no need to hurry back to the Trouble Dog. The ship was more than capable of interfacing with the station to take care of her needs, and would alert me when she had been serviced and was ready to depart. In the meantime, I walked. The people I passed—those walking rather than taking one of the travel tubes—seemed drawn from every world and faction of the Generality. The locals affected loose, ankle-length kimonos, while visiting space crews wore fatigues or uniforms. Dressed in the regulation blue overalls of the House of Reclamation, I passed unnoticed.
To either side of the dockyard concourse, windows opened onto vast bays, some holding ships. I saw a scout craft similar to the Hobo, sitting on the floor of one of the hangars like a moth on the floor of a gymnasium. In the next bay along, mechanics were in the process of reassembling a bulk cargo hauler fully a kilometre and a half in length. Maintenance drones flew through its superstructure, pausing here and there to weld a patch or install a new component.
Ship minds were assembled in virtual nurseries according to strict regulations intended to prevent the emergence of machines capable of upgrading or replicating themselves. The more sociable were assigned to cruise ships; those with a tendency towards curating were assigned to manage orbital stations like Camrose; and the loners with the most solitary and reclusive personalities were installed on scout ships and long-distance cargo haulers.
If questioned, the Trouble Dog would try to convince you she had become a battleship because of her strict morals and scholarly demeanour. She saw herself as a kind of warrior poet in the vein of a seventeenth-century Japanese samurai; however, having captained the beast for two years, I regarded her personality as being more akin to that of an exceptionally smart Alsatian: loyal, energetic and prone to snapping at strangers. The ship wasn’t supposed to have a refined sense of right and wrong. Heavy cruisers couldn’t afford to be crippled by remorse, nor Reclamation Vessels preoccupied with failed rescues. Both had to be able to make instantaneous life-or-death judgments, and live with the results. However, an unintended side effect of using cloned human cells in the construction of ship minds was a tendency for unwanted emotions to seep into their personalities. Hence the Trouble Dog’s decision to resign her commission and enrol with the House.
* * *
Although I never walked the sentient jungles of Pelapatarn, I did once fly over them on a cargo dirigible, as we were ferrying medical supplies from one port to another. It was three weeks before we suffered the final attack, and I was overseeing the restock of the medical frigate. For six hours, I had nothing to do but dangle my legs through the railings of the gondola’s observation platform, inhale the flowery scent of the canopy, listen to the squawk and gibber of flitting bird-lizards, and wonder at the ponderous creaks of the trees as they engaged in their dreamy, decades-long discourse.
By the time the Conglomeration attack came, I was back on board the Nightingale, and we were in a higher orbit, well outside the scope of the battle. From up there, the planet resembled a jewel set against the velvet cushion of space, its single continent a vivid emerald sliver in an ocean of glittering cerulean.
After the strike, all that was gone. Clouds of smoke and ash obscured the surface, transforming the globe from a shimmering precious stone to a rheumy, cataract-choked eyeball, and we watched from our vantage in horror, more shocked by the desecration than by the slowly dawning fact we had lost the war.
In the hours following the strike, rescue shuttles pulled a depressingly low number of survivors from the radioactive hell-scape. All our senior commanders were dead, as were thousands of soldiers from both sides. The only ones who made it out alive were those who had been fortunate to be in deep bunkers near the coast, on the fringes of the holocaust.
One by one, they were carried aboard, bodies blackened and eyes unseeing, skin charred and blistered, clothes and hair burned away, their bodies riddled with near-lethal doses of radiation. In most cases, it was impossible to tell on which side they had fought—and it hardly seemed to matter in the face of such overwhelming horror. All we could do was try to patch up the ones who could be saved, and make comfortable those who couldn’t.
Towards the end of the second day following the bombardment, I volunteered to go down with one of the shuttles. Our flight crews had far exceeded their limits in terms of flying time and radiation exposure. If others like me hadn’t stepped forward, the rescue operation would have had to be abandoned.
I don’t remember much about the descent through the upper atmosphere. I think I kept my eyes closed the whole time. It was only towards the end, as we were spiralling down to land, that I looked over the pilots’ shoulders at the smoking ruins of a once-verdant world. Ash pattered against the shuttle’s leading edges, threatening to choke our engines. Embers swirled like fireflies. And everything on the ground was black and burned. In places, the soil had been scoured back to bedrock; in others, the charcoal stumps of once-mighty trees stood against the smoke like crudely vandalised grave markers.
Our target was a supply depot set into the base of some cliffs on the side of the continent facing the prevailing winds. We had received radio signals from survivors, and had high hopes that the winds would have carried the majority of the fallout inland, away from the rocky beach that housed the bunker’s camouflaged entrance. Nevertheless, we were all wearing protective suits, and armed in case of trouble. We had heard reports of deluded or deranged soldiers firing on rescuers, unwilling or unable to accept the end of hostilities.
This time, though, we were lucky. The squad of marines huddled beneath the cliff were Outwarders like us, and they were in no mood for a fight. They knew what had happened, and they were just as shocked as we had been. More so, I guess, having felt the force of the explosions through the rock beneath their feet, and felt the world itself convulse with the fury unleashed against it.
They were sick and injured, and desperately in need of decontamination. Their gratitude at our arrival was tired and mostly unspoken, but it was there and it was sincere.
We took them back to the Nightingale for treatment—the single largest group of survivors so far recovered. And over the weeks that followed, I got to know some of them. And then later, when I left the service to join the House of Recl
amation, one of them came with me. She said that she’d follow me anywhere, that she owed me her life, that if I hadn’t kept the shuttles running she would have died in that bunker. We often disagreed, but I was glad of her company.
Her name was Alva Clay.
* * *
When I returned to the Trouble Dog, I found a young man standing uncertainly at the bay door. He had a heavy bag slung over his shoulder and a suitcase by his feet.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Are you Captain Konstanz?”
I looked at his bright orange overalls. “You’re the replacement?”
“Preston Menderes.”
“How old are you, Preston?”
“Twenty-four.”
“When did you graduate from medical school?”
“Last year.”
“Do you have any field experience?”
He blushed and rubbed his eyebrow with his thumb. “Six months as an assistant on the Happy Wanderer.”
“A liner? What were you doing, curing headaches and hangovers?”
He stiffened. “There was a little more to it than that.”
“I’m sure.” I turned to the door. “Well, come on then, if you’re coming.”
I stepped over the threshold, from the relative confines of the station’s corridors to the echoing vault of the maintenance bay. The walls to the left and right of me were each half a kilometre distant, and the far wall, which housed the main doors, twice that distance. Overhead, the lights in the ceiling were like stars in the sky.
The Trouble Dog hung in the horizontal and vertical centre of the room. The air shimmered beneath her. Spotlights threw bright circles across her prickling bronze-coloured hide. From where I stood, I could make out the silhouettes of various disabled systems, and the empty weapon flats where the more offensive ordnance had been removed. Behind me, Preston Menderes paused and shaded his eyes as he looked up at the projectile-shaped fuselage.
“Christ,” he breathed. “What an antique.”
I gave him a sharp glance.
“Careful,” I said. “She has feelings.”
We walked into the shadow of the Trouble Dog, to where a platform waited for us.
“Hold the rail,” I advised Preston, knowing the Trouble Dog’s penchant for the theatrical. Not to mention its partiality for revenging slights.
As it happened, though, we were ferried up into the belly of the brute without so much as a single jolt. I looked across at the kid’s disdainful expression and thought, Sneer while you can. I knew this ship, and I knew she couldn’t let his comment pass. She’d get even with a prank of some kind; I just didn’t know how, or where, it would happen.
* * *
Aside from a few access panels, crawlways and maintenance hatches, the majority of the human-habitable portions of the Dog lay in a torus wrapped around her thickest point. Sensors and armament filled the tip of her pointed nose; engines the rest, from just behind the bow to the end of her gently tapering and flat-edged stern. The human quarters were like an inflatable rubber ring caught around the waist of a shark.
We came in via the embarkation lounge. As we entered the ship’s internal gravity field, my stomach did its customary flip. No matter where you were on the Dog, once you were inside the hull, “up” always lay in the direction of the ship’s core. In the main corridor, the floor seemed to slope upwards ahead and behind you, as if you were at the lowest point of a gentle valley.
The air from the ceiling vents was cool and smelled of compost, but you soon got used to it. Once, long ago, the riveted metal walls had been given a coat of white paint, but the paint had yellowed over the years to scuffed and grimy sepia, into which generations of naval personnel had scratched their initials and grievances. Only Alva Clay had bothered to decorate the corridor walls around her cabin. Walker and I had never taken the time to personalise the corridors outside our rooms, preferring to keep our decoration within. By common agreement, our cabins had been located at equidistant points around the ship’s circumference, as far from each other as we could get while still remaining within the main crew section.
It’s not that we particularly disliked each other; it’s just that nobody joins the House of Reclamation because they have a happy home life. I can’t speak for the others, but my reasons for removing myself were the same as those that had compelled me to join the service in the first place: a need to get away from the people around me, from the things I’d done and the things I’d seen; a craving for the seclusion necessary to evaluate my feelings and experiences, and determine my place in the chaotic flow of events; and when it came to the placement of the cabin, if I’m being brutally honest, the need to be able to cry in peace, without worrying about being interrupted. Ninety-nine per cent of the accommodations were bare and unoccupied; it seemed natural to me to put as many of them as possible between my nearest neighbour and myself—and my neighbours seemed to share my sentiments. The ship wasn’t overly needful of the company of her own kind, and neither were we. At any time of the day or night, we could wander at will among the empty cabins and imagine ourselves almost perfectly alone.
But these weren’t the concerns uppermost in my mind as I directed our newest young recruit to Walker’s old cabin. I assumed he’d take the berth vacated by his predecessor. It never occurred to me he’d want to sleep anywhere else.
* * *
“Night terrors?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you want to knock on my door every time you have a nightmare?”
I swear his cheeks flushed. “No!”
“Then what are you asking me?”
His eyes glanced around the deck, unwilling to meet my own. “It helps,” he mumbled.
“What does?” I’d seldom seen a young man look so uncomfortable. He screwed up his face and rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes filled with glittering embarrassment.
“To have somebody nearby.”
We regarded each other for a while and I thought I understood. I still left the bathroom light on when I went to bed, so as not to have to sleep in an entirely dark cabin, so I could make-believe a safe and everyday space; a place where the ghosts of my time on the medical frigate were impotent and where I could sleep in peace.
“Okay.” I turned on my heel and led him uphill, around the curve of the main deck. Burdened with luggage, he stumbled to keep pace.
“Captain?”
I didn’t look around. I didn’t know this kid, and I had no reason to care how he slept. “Look,” I said awkwardly, thinking of George—thinking he might still have been alive had he been less tired, more rested and alert—“if it helps, perhaps you can take the cabin across the hall from mine?”
Preston looked up hopefully. “Really?”
“Just don’t expect me to hold your hand every time you get scared.”
The kid gave a nervous smile. “I won’t, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” I led him to a vacant cabin on the other side of the companionway from mine. I opened the door for him and switched on the light. “I’m not doing it for you.”
He gave me a quizzical look—the look of a young man baffled by an older woman. “Then, who…?”
I stepped aside and gestured him into the room. I wanted to say I was doing it for George but, in reality, I knew I was doing it for myself, to help quell the guilt that had—since his death—begun to growl in my ear whenever I found myself alone, whenever the noises quietened and the lights dimmed.
“Just don’t make a nuisance of yourself,” I told him.
He gave me a grateful smile. “I won’t, Captain, I promise.”
He seemed sincere, but I already had misgivings about the proximity of his personal space to mine.
“See that you don’t.”
NINE
SAL KONSTANZ
As soon as her fuel cells were charged and her holds replenished, the Trouble Dog slipped her moorings.
I was on the bridge, strapped into my command couch. Alva Clay was
below, in her cabin; Preston was in his, and I assumed Nod was in its nest.
The Dog had been in constant contact with Camrose Station during the refuelling process, and both had planned the exact moment of departure down to the last second. The bay doors were already retracting as the Dog swung her nose, seeking the vacuum of empty space. The point of her bronze-coloured bow caught the sunlight, and I felt the deck shudder as she engaged her primary thrusters.
We surged out of the station and punched through local traffic like a speedboat through a flotilla of yachts, leaving them scattered and squawking in our wake—something I knew the ship took a perverse delight in doing. Not that anyone would complain, of course. We were riding under the colours of the House of Reclamation; the next time we set forth at such speed, the lives we were racing to save might be theirs.
On screen, I watched Camrose Station grow smaller and smaller. Behind its interconnected rings and twinkling lights, I could see the rusty continents and blue oceans of the planet Camrose, home to two billion people.
How strange, I thought, that the human race had once been entirely limited to a solitary and similarly fragile planet. It seemed absurd. How could we have survived such confinement? By the time the Multiplicity came calling—in the disreputable shape of a battered old trading vessel from the Goblet Cluster—humanity must have been clawing at the walls of its prison. According to family history, my maternal great-great-grandmother had been born on the Moon, in orbit around a dying Earth. Her name was Sofia Nikitas. She had been sixteen years old when the trading ship set down on the Sea of Tranquility. By the time she disappeared, at the age of forty-five, she had travelled more than a thousand light years and left footprints in the dust and soil of more than a hundred different worlds. And, along the way, she had become the founder of the House of Reclamation.
I had requested no additional advantage in the House because of our connection. I hadn’t wanted to measure my career against hers. But even so, as I sat on the bridge of the Trouble Dog, preparing for the plunge into the wailing nothingness of the hypervoid, I felt I had disgraced her legacy.
Embers of War Page 5