* * *
As soon as the stars vanished, giving way to grey mist, I unstrapped from my couch and went aft. We would be in the hole for forty-nine hours and I had no intention of staring at the external view for a moment longer than necessary. The emptiness of higher-space could deceive the areas of the brain associated with visual perception, depriving them of stimulation and inducing visions, hallucinations, feelings of nausea and creeping dread.
We had all done it during basic flight training. We had all been encouraged to stare into the nothingness of the hypervoid long enough to start seeing patterns and sparks—but it was something most people only did once, just to find out what it was like. The ensuing headaches and nightmares were usually enough to dissuade them from trying again. The few who did it a second or third time—and there were always one or two in each class—risked losing themselves to delusion and paranoia, becoming convinced titanic creatures prowled out there, at the ragged edge of our ability to perceive them, in the grey nihility of the higher dimensions.
After leaving the bridge, my first port of call was Alva’s cabin. When I reached it, I found she’d left the door open. I stepped inside and leant against the wall, arms folded.
“Hey.”
She was sitting on the edge of her bed, stripping down her sidearm. She didn’t look up. “I could hear you coming from the other end of the corridor,” she said.
“I didn’t want to startle you.” I watched her disassemble the pistol and arrange the parts on the cloth at her feet. “Did you have fun on Camrose?”
“I wouldn’t call it fun.” She raised her chin and I saw the darkening bruises beneath her eyes, the clean white surgical tape across the bridge of her nose. “How about you? Did you see the ambassador?”
“Yes.”
“Did he give you much trouble?”
I gave a half-hearted smile. “Not as much as whoever did that to you.”
Alva brought the fingers of her right hand up to dab her left eye socket, and I caught a glimpse of more tape on her knuckles.
“But you are in the shit?” she asked.
I let out a sigh. “He wants to talk to me when we get back.”
“Do you think you might get fired?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Possibly.”
Alva’s expression hardened. “Good.”
I turned my eyes away, unnerved by her defiant stare. “There was nothing I could have done,” I said quietly. “Not even the ship had time to react.”
In my peripheral vision, I saw Alva’s lip curl in a sneer. “He shouldn’t have been standing there in the first place.” She reached down and began to reassemble the gun, sliding each piece into place with instinctive precision. “If you’d done your job properly, you’d have known about the sea life. You could have warned him to keep the stretchers away from the edge.”
“And we would have lost the two we pulled from the Hobo.”
“We lost them anyway.”
I tightened my arms against my chest. “That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
* * *
Intending to return to my cabin, I took the long way around the ship’s circular habitat. I needed the walk, needed time to blow off steam and stomp off the tension that had me knotting my fists and swearing under my breath. Unfortunately, I realised with deepening unease, my route would take me past George’s room.
I slowed my pace as I approached the threshold, reluctant to face any more reminders of my failure. I’d already been here once today with Preston, and that was enough. I didn’t want a second look at George’s possessions sitting where he’d left them: the photographs of his daughter and grandchildren taped to the bulkhead; the keepsakes upon his shelves. I didn’t want the reassuring, homely smell of his unwashed sheets. Instead, I brushed my hand against the door’s cold steel and moved on, past all the hundreds of other unlit and unoccupied cabins, my stride quick and purposeful in order to ward away the emotional lump building in my oesophagus.
I’d done what I’d thought best, and what I’d thought the situation required. If I was found guilty of negligence, I wouldn’t contest the verdict; I’d spend my last pay cheque travelling to Earth to find George’s daughter, so I could apologise to her in person. And, after that… Well, I hadn’t planned that far ahead. Right now, all I knew for sure was that a liner was in trouble. Nine hundred people were out there somewhere in the dark, praying for rescue, and it was up to us to come to their aid. We were the nearest ship. Until we reached them, all other considerations could take a back seat. For the moment, I was still a captain of the House of Reclamation, pledged to help the citizens of the Generality in their times of peril and distress, no matter their race, religion or political affiliation. That was the ideal for which George Walker had given his life, and adhering to that was the very least I could do to honour his sacrifice.
TEN
TROUBLE DOG
Made as I was from ingredients taken from both humans and dogs, I have an understandable curiosity concerning the history of life on Earth. While indulging that curiosity, I have seen recordings of base-jumpers hurling their fragile bodies from the tops of cliffs and the summits of skyscrapers. I’ve seen the wind tear at their clothes, imagined the roar of it in their ears, the cold blast of it against their faces, chests and legs. For a few, ephemeral instants they free-fall unsupported, mapping the perilous frontier between existence and obliteration, trusting their parachutes to catch them before impact and land them without death or injury.
I tell you this because it’s the human experience I imagine to be closest to that of leaping through the hypervoid.
Having left Camrose and jumped towards our destination, I found myself swirled in nothingness. I felt the wind (which is not wind) against my hull, heard the electromagnetic snarl of the universe stretched and amplified. Ships called to each other in distant systems, and I heard their echoes like whale song beneath the arctic ice. Stars roared like blowtorch flames. And I tore through the mists like a skydiver, bursting with the joy that came from fulfilling my purpose.
A tool or a weapon lives only in the moment in which it is used. As I no longer waged war, I now existed for these instants, when I leapt from the universe, describing a glittering arc through the blank void, trusting only that my calculations would catch me and bring me safely to my destination.
Ships that botched their calculations or jumped with faulty engines seldom re-emerged from higher-space. I had known a few during the war: good ships who’d taken desperate gambles to preserve themselves and their crews, only to disappear forever, irretrievably lost in the fog.
In the human-habitable torus around my waist, the crew turned off their external screens. The limbo-like nothingness of the higher dimensions bothered them on a deep, instinctive level. Exposed to it for too long, their mammalian brains were prone to imagining sabre-toothed shadows lurking in the mist beyond the cave mouth. Millions of years of evolution had conditioned them to see patterns, to pick the outline of a skulking predator from a confusion of foliage. Faced with the utter vacuity of higher-space, that same instinct flared impulsively, conceiving arrangements and dangers where none existed.
Understandably, I had been designed to be immune to such considerations. My view of the void around me contained nothing fanciful or illusory. The only threats tagged by my targeting computers were those that could be independently verified by my other sensors. During the war, one of my lieutenants had been fond of quoting Nietzsche. But when I gazed into this abyss, I saw only an absence; and if the abyss gazed back at me, I remained unaware of its attentions.
Instead, I let my mind drift, thinking of the war and my lost sisters.
* * *
As a civilisation, the Conglomeration claimed descent from the capitalist Anglo-American culture that flourished around the margins of the Atlantic Ocean in the centuries before the Great Dispersal, a culture that had in turn borrowed many of its ideals and foundations fr
om the classical Greco-Roman empires of the Mediterranean Basin. While not as large or powerful as some human societies within the Generality, the Conglomeration was at least one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse, able to number among their citizenry representatives of every Terran race and creed—although this diversity owed more to the enslavements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the wars and migrations of the twentieth and twenty-first, than it did to any conscious policy of inclusion.
As a ship of the Conglomeration Fleet, I spent the first twelve years of my life serving alongside five sibling vessels. They were all Carnivore-class heavy cruisers, identical to me in almost every respect.
War Mutt.
Adalwolf.
Anubis.
Coyote.
Fenrir.
We were a pack, a clique and a family, our minds having been cultivated and grown in the same laboratory. Together, we participated in border patrols and police actions, keeping the peace and offering protection to all the colonies, outposts and ships within the Conglomeration territories. For ten years, we were deadly and inseparable—apex predators capable of flying faster and hitting harder than almost anything else in human space. But then the Archipelago War came and shattered our complacency. Anubis, the proudest of us all, fell victim to a battery of magnetic rail-guns firing iron ingots at near-relativistic velocities. A week later, dear sweet Coyote ran into a nano-minefield concealed within the chromosphere of a local star. The explosions from the miniature antimatter mines weren’t powerful enough to disable her, but were just potent enough to compromise her heat shield, allowing superheated hydrogen to scour her insides to plasma.
The war was over now, and I no longer fought. Instead, I tried to save people. I threw myself at the stars like a fist thrown at the face of God and sometimes, if we were fortunate enough, we brought back a survivor or two. So far, during the course of my service in the House of Reclamation, I had been instrumental in the location and recovery of (counting the two from the Hobo) 205 living individuals, and the retrieval of 771 corpses. Yet still the aggregate sum of lives I had saved lagged far behind the total number of lives I had ended.
The Archipelago War had been an epic and bloody conflict that sprawled from the outermost reaches of the Galactic Arm to the sentient jungles of Pelapatarn. During the siege of the asteroid fortresses of Cold Tor, my sisters and I had used minor ordnance to target civilian population centres. I had been responsible for reducing six environmental pressure domes to tattered craters. Each dome had housed over two thousand men, women and children. Those not killed by the impacts and explosions had died seconds later, gasping in a vacuum.
And then later, on the orders of Captain Annelida Deal, I had helped raze the sentient jungles of Pelapatarn, turning a million-year-old parliament of conscious trees to ash and dust. Could a crime of that magnitude ever be forgiven? I had been acting under orders; I had simply been the weapon, the delivery mechanism for the wrath of the Conglomeration Fleet.
Yet, the fault was also mine. Due to emotional seepage from the human portions of my brain, I had been starting to develop the beginnings of a conscience, although I hadn’t mentioned it to my superiors. I couldn’t have prevented the attack, but I could have refused to participate; I could have lost myself in the ragged winds of higher-space and left the bickering factions of the Generality to their slaughter. I could have selected any one of those options, but I didn’t. Instead, I played the part written into the design of every component of my being. I was a Carnivore-class battleship and I fulfilled my function, despite the questions and doubts growing in my mind. My sisters and I brought the dispute to an end using the tools at our disposal, concluding the conflict at the cost of nineteen thousand soldiers and four hundred thousand human non-combatants.
We slaughtered them and the dreaming jungle in which they fought to prevent the conflict from spreading. It was, our superiors assured us, a justifiable crime. General Deal’s advisors had calculated an eighty-seven per cent chance that our display of overwhelming ruthlessness would end the war there and then, thereby sparing further, and possibly greater, loss of life. I did my duty and didn’t question the decision; I simply supplied the barrage and monitored the unfolding destruction, the utter and irrevocable efficiency of my actions. I watched trees and people burn. The roar of the flames drowned their voices. The blistering heat charred their skin and boiled their blood and brains, and turned the world-wrapping forest into a black, smoking wasteland.
I think the horror of the attack awakened something in us all. War Mutt deliberately mis-jumped, flinging herself into the higher dimensions with no regard for safety or destination. No ship had ever done that before. She was gone in an instant, and it is unlikely I will ever know what became of her.
And me?
I quit.
No warship had ever resigned its commission before. But there wasn’t a whole lot the government could do to stop me, short of ordering my destruction. I unloaded my crew at a neutral station—all except for George Walker, who cared little for accusations of treason, and wanted to stay—and declared myself for the House of Reclamation.
Of course, I had not told Captain Konstanz my motives for defection. We had been on opposite sides during the long, brutal attrition of the Archipelago War. She had commanded a medical frigate for the Outward, spending much of the war in orbit above Pelapatarn. We had both been present at the final massacre, but had never discussed it. In the House of Reclamation, former enemies worked side by side for the benefit of all; former criminals redeemed themselves through acts of self-sacrifice. To join the House of Reclamation was to renounce your past and place yourself at the service of your species—or in my case, the species that had constructed my sisters and me.
I relished the unsympathetic squall at my back, the almost imperceptible friction of the grey mist against my leading edges. There were risks in diving through the higher dimensions but, as with base-jumping, the thrill of it soon became addictive. When I had been a warship, the anticipation of conflict had always heightened the experience of these flights; now I was an angel of mercy, it was the knowledge that each second saved might in turn save another life.
ELEVEN
ONA SUDAK
I stumbled back to consciousness on the cracked tiles of the ruined gym. Time was missing. For a moment, I let myself drift. Nothing seemed real, my aches and twinges simply the after-effects of enthusiastic lovemaking, followed by a strenuous hour at the gym. Then my nostrils filled with smoke, my ears with cries. I realised with nauseating vertigo that something dreadful had occurred.
I sat up and the world churned.
My legs stuck out of my robe and my left arm hung awkwardly. I felt flayed, exposed and crisped, like the survivor of an atomic blast. The teenage couple from the sauna had gone, scythed away by crashing junk, their bodies mashed and broken by the force of the collision.
I had been in the swimming pool.
I remembered… missiles.
The floor rose in a slope behind me, tilted to an unusual degree. The pool had lost some of its water, and the remainder sat at an angle to the deck. Whatever had happened to the ’dam, we were canted oddly, which meant we’d lost our artificial gravity.
“Ship?”
Taking hold of an open locker, I pulled myself up. My left arm flared with every movement, but I was almost certain it wasn’t broken. My bones had been augmented to the point of virtual indestructibility. The surrounding muscle might be pulped, but the humerus would have held.
“Ship, are you there?”
Somewhere down the corridor, a hoarse voice shrieked itself into a crescendo of ragged, agonised silence.
“Ship?”
I moved carefully, keeping my good hand against the wall as I stepped out into the corridor that would lead me back to the central air well. Every instinct I had told me to get out, to find an escape pod and abandon the wrecked ship. Whoever had done this to us might return to finish what they’d start
ed. The fusion plant might be compromised. I had a thousand reasons to cut and run, and yet I felt guilty about leaving Adam, the same way I’d have felt guilty about leaving a pet. He was young, he’d never been in combat, never had to deal with physical trauma. I imagined him lying crumpled against a wall, his legs crushed by falling furniture. I pictured him comatose and haemorrhaging in the shower, having smacked his beautiful head against the tiled wall. It never occurred to me that he might already be dead. All I knew in that moment was that I felt a duty to get back to my room and check on him.
I emerged onto the edge of the central shaft and looked upwards, through fifty metres of air. Trees hung askew. Dark smoke streamed from several of the balconies. Birds flapped around in agitation. Half a dozen bodies lay dead on the shaft’s grassy floor, having been thrown from the higher decks by the force of the impact. Looking at them, I found myself trying to guess how far each had fallen.
Predictably, the travel tubes weren’t working. If I wanted to climb up the six levels to my cabin the stairs were my only option, but the door to the stairwell was warped and jammed. By the time I succeeded in forcing a gap wide enough to climb through, my knuckles were raw and bleeding.
I made it up three flights before I buckled. My bruised arm hurt beyond all reason, and my legs had become shaky and unreliable. I leant my back against the smooth white wall and slid down into a sitting position. The floor was cold against my bare flanks. The stairwells were rarely used, and I had seen no one else during my ascent—although I hated to think how many might be imprisoned in the nonfunctional travel tubes. Looking up the spiralling climb ahead of me, I realised I lacked the strength to continue. Despite my determination to reach Adam, I required medical treatment. If the ship had been at all operational, it would already have dispatched automated emergency drones to help me; the fact it had not indicated a system failure so complete it had taken down even the last-ditch, failsafe backups designed to protect the passengers and crew in the unlikely event of a crash. The thought sent ice crackling through my veins. I’d never heard of a ship failing so utterly outside of a warzone. My hands were shaking. My breaths came in tight, pained little gulps. With the ’dam’s personality out of the equation, I had to get myself patched up as soon as possible. I couldn’t afford to go into shock. The air and heat wouldn’t last forever, and the food dispensers would be offline. We were three or four days’ flight from the nearest outpost of the Generality, and who knew how long we would have to survive in this broken shell.
Embers of War Page 6