Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  “Who, Captain?”

  “George Walker.”

  There was a slight pause. “He is dead.”

  “Yes, but do you miss him?”

  “I regret the loss of his expertise and his company.”

  I picked at my thumbnail. “Has the ambassador been in touch?”

  “I spoke to Ambassador Odom while we were berthed at Camrose.”

  “And he asked you for your opinion on my guilt.”

  “He did.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him the oversight was mine.”

  Startled, I pushed myself up onto my elbows. Overhead, the dull orange glow of the raft’s emergency beacon pulsed through the tent material.

  “You did?”

  “I failed to remind you of protocol when you judged the situation urgent enough to dispense with standard operating procedure. I also told him that you were a good captain, that ground operations are seldom straightforward, and that, in combat, mistakes are often made.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He thanked me for my candour.”

  I sat up, a blanket draped across my shoulders. The ambient temperature in the hangar was brisk, but I preferred it that way. “So, you don’t blame me?”

  “Sometimes good officers make poor decisions. Sometimes, even in the most meticulously planned of operations, losses are suffered.”

  I frowned in the gloom. “Is that a yes or a no?”

  The ship tried a different tack. “The blame is not yours to shoulder alone, Captain. At the time in question, I agreed with your decision. The Hobo was sinking and time was scarce. Sometimes the needs of the mission outweigh the requirements of the rulebook, and no single set of regulations can be fully applicable in every conceivable situation. And besides, even if everything had been done according to procedure, casualties may still have been sustained. The creature in the water moved faster than even I had anticipated, and it kept its tentacles concealed until they were ready to strike. Even if you had been watching George Walker when the attack came, you would not have been able to save him. No human could have reacted quickly enough.”

  I dipped my head. “Thank you.”

  I pulled the gin bottle from my pocket and unscrewed the cap.

  “I simply told the truth,” the ship said. “I also informed the ambassador that by the time I was in a position to fire upon the creature, to do so would have been to fire also on our captured crewman.”

  “It was that fast?”

  “Had my former weaponry still been in place, I would have been faster.”

  I felt my lips twitch in an unrealised smile. “You asked him to re-arm you?”

  The ship was silent for five seconds—a long time for a creature capable of thinking many times faster than a human being. I lifted the bottle to my lips and took a slug. Made a face.

  “I simply recommended an urgent re-evaluation of defensive operational parameters vis-à-vis the interactive proficiencies of front line Reclamation Vessels.”

  I wiped the top of the bottle on my sleeve and refastened the lid. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  The Trouble Dog gave a credible impression of an indignant sniff. If she had been a child, she would have been pouting. “I told the idiot to give me back my guns.”

  SIXTEEN

  ONA SUDAK

  Thanks to the skill of her crew, the Geest van Amsterdam had put down on the nearest habitable surface: the etched terrain of the Object known as the Brain. Already cratered and on fire in a dozen locations, this final, grinding collision had been enough to shatter her spine, snapping her all along her length, scattering flaming debris into the sculpture’s nested chasms and crevasses. Happily for me, the human sections—which were designed to withstand such abuse—fared better than the ship’s more utilitarian modules; and yet very few of the passengers and crew seemed to have survived. My particular segment, the cylindrical, donut-shaped fragment based around the deep airshaft at its centre, seemed to have become wedged between the walls of a ravine.

  As I’d hoped, the infirmary had provided me with pain meds and clothing, in the form of an injection and a set of green surgeon’s scrubs. Now, as I scrambled through the downed ship, I passed a lot of dead bodies. Some had died from the initial impact, some from the resulting conflagrations and breakdowns, and the rest from the force of our landing. With the gravity off, they had been hurled against walls and furniture. They lay alone and in untidy heaps; some were little more than smashed and twisted splatters of blood and gore, while others remained almost miraculously untouched, their cause of death unknown.

  At length, I came to a torn section of the external hull. Clambering through the narrow and jagged opening, I dropped a couple of metres to the smooth floor of the gorge. My damaged arm flared in protest and the colour drained from my vision. When it returned, I found myself on my back, looking up at an impossible weight suspended above my head. The accommodation section—roughly the size and weight of a medium-sized village—lay jammed between walls five hundred metres apart and at least four times that in height. It was only good fortune it had come to rest within a couple of metres of the bottom rather than a kilometre or two higher up. If it had, I would have found myself stranded up there, unable to jump to the ground.

  Feeling no overwhelming need to hurry, I remained prone. Chunks of debris littered the floor around me, some the size of boulders and houses. Among—and crushed under—them lay the bodies of my fellow passengers. Some were obviously dead, others simply motionless. A few stirred; some were even mobile. None seemed to be questioning how or why they were able to breathe comfortably. Perhaps it simply didn’t occur to them to ask, or maybe they were afraid to. Most were probably still in shock from the crash.

  I knew, though. I had done the reading and scoped out the terrain during our approach. According to the guidebooks, all the Objects retained attenuated atmospheres comprised mostly of nitrogen. These were far too thin to sustain human life. However, each and every visitor was supplied with their own personal air supply, tailored to the biological needs of their specific species. Again, nobody really knew how or why, but it was an endearing and hospitable quirk. Those of us who were still alive were now each encased in invisible, human-shaped bubbles of air, held in place and kept fresh by machinery presumably buried deep within the stone depths of the Brain. I had heard many theories to explain this accommodation on the behalf of these ancient monuments—that it was a service designed to welcome pilgrims; that it facilitated inter-species interaction; that the Objects themselves had been created by a benevolent deity of some description—but none of those explanations had convinced me and, at that precise moment, I cared little for any of them, simply being profoundly grateful that, upon emerging from the ship, I had not suffocated.

  Biting down hard against the pain in my arm, I crawled over to a young woman sprawled on the smooth canyon floor a few metres from where I had fallen. She looked to be somewhere in her late teens or early twenties, with glistening black hair and a bright summer dress festooned with red and yellow butterflies. A solid, wardrobe-sized hunk of machinery had crushed her chest and pelvis. She couldn’t move and her eyes were wild with panic. Her breaths came in short, agonised sips. Her eyes begged for salvation and deliverance, but all I could offer in that dark, lugubrious chasm was my companionship. Not knowing what else to do, I held her hand and stroked her hair, and tried to comfort her as she passed.

  SEVENTEEN

  SAL KONSTANZ

  On the second day of our flight from Camrose Station, we dropped back into the universe. Operating well beyond her safety limits, the Trouble Dog had already burned through an unacceptably high percentage of her fuel. Ordinarily, the ship could have made the entire trip using her on-board reserves. Under normal conditions, a little antimatter could power the ship for weeks, but a velocity increase of fifty per cent required double the amount of fuel; an increase of seventy-five per cent demanded quadruple. The faster we t
ravelled, the more reserves we consumed, and we didn’t want to get to the crash site without enough in hand to haul urgent casualties straight back to civilisation. The Dog needed to eject the antimatter cores it had used and replenish what it had spent. In order to do that, we’d been ordered to make landfall at Cichol, an out-of-the-way planet close to the ragged edge of human-controlled space. Better to stop there and top up now than be forced to do so on the way back, when our infirmary might be burdened by several hundred wounded.

  Cichol was too insignificant and too far from the main shipping lanes to warrant the construction of an orbital dockyard. Instead, the Trouble Dog would have to descend through the atmosphere to the main ground-based facility, situated on a rocky plateau above a wide river valley on the planet’s northernmost continent.

  “Savages,” it muttered. I didn’t reply. I was still stiff from having slept in the inflatable raft. Instead, I watched from the bridge as we drifted across the landing field and sank towards a section of tarmac adjacent to a row of condensation-laden hydrogen tanks. Two parallel rows of improvised buildings stretched away at a right angle to the main runway, forming the settlement’s main street. A few were prefabricated or printed from recognisable templates, but the rest had been constructed from whatever materials had come to hand, be that metal, stone, wood or plastic. Some were accommodation blocks; others sported frontages that marked them out as workshops, stores or saloons.

  The town was called Northfield. It was situated on the edge of the planet’s arctic circle, far from the humid jungles that ringed the equator. Gritty snow lay in the shadows the sun couldn’t penetrate; the streets were a mush of mud and slush. Wrapped in thick coats and wide-brimmed hats, the townsfolk watched from their doorways and balconies as we slowed to a halt in the air. The edges of the landing field’s concrete apron had grown cracked and mossy. I guessed ship visits were few and far between, and the sudden appearance of a Carnivore-class fighting machine—even a defanged one—would be something of a novelty.

  The Trouble Dog lacked landing gear in the conventional sense of the word, but her gravity generators—the same ones that provided us with a comfortable downward pull in her cabins and corridors—were perfectly capable of holding the ship aloft for the time it would take her to refuel. With a peevish whine, she settled to within ten metres of the apron and stopped. A circle of dust and dead leaves blew out from beneath her and tumbled away, only to fetch up against the sagging chain-link fence at the port’s periphery.

  “Are you going ashore?” the Trouble Dog’s avatar asked from the bridge’s main screen.

  “Yes.” I picked up my hooded fleece jacket from the back of my chair. “I believe I might take the air.”

  “And the rest of the crew?”

  “They can do what they like, as long as they don’t keep us waiting when it’s time to leave.” I pushed my arm into a sleeve. “Because the mood I’m in, anyone that’s late will be liable to find themselves marooned.”

  Pulling the jacket around me, I walked aft, towards the cargo lock.

  “You should have around sixty minutes,” the ship said. “Assuming there’s anyone even remotely competent on this backwater.”

  “Perfect.” I pulled the zipper to my throat and flipped the fur-lined hood up to cover my head and ears. “Just enough time for a stroll.”

  * * *

  As we were only ten metres from the ground, there seemed little point in breaking out one of the shuttles. Instead, the Trouble Dog lowered us on a cargo pallet—the same one it had used on Camrose to welcome Preston aboard.

  The three of us descended in silence. Preston stood huddled in a double-breasted black coat, an Academy scarf cosseting his pale neck, his thin hands scrunched in his pockets. His expression, as I watched him from my eye’s periphery, resembled one of appalled fascination, as if he couldn’t quite believe his surroundings or the chain of events that had led him to them. Beside him, Alva Clay stood with her arms wrapped across her chest and her face set in an intransigent scowl. Her loose bootstraps flapped in the sullen wind. At her thigh, she carried a solid-looking Archipelago pistol—a personal sidearm capable of punching an explosive slug through fifty centimetres of armour plate. Whatever threats she might anticipate facing in Northfield, this relic would certainly be more than a match for them. I had no doubt that, if she’d been so inclined, she could have massacred the entire population of the town without exhausting the weapon’s charge. She caught me looking at it and her eyes dared me to challenge her for carrying it. I think she wanted a confrontation in order to make a point about the security of ground operations, but I was too weary to take the bait. Instead, I shrugged and turned away.

  The air felt fresh and cold and natural against the planes of my face. The platform touched the ground and I stepped off without waiting for the others. “One hour,” I called over my shoulder. Neither of them answered, but I didn’t care. After the tense atmosphere aboard the Trouble Dog, the wide horizon and ramshackle settlement were hitting my soul like a tonic, and the touch of the sunlight felt like a blessing.

  Lacking a better direction, I set off through the main thoroughfare, taking care to avoid the muddiest stretches of boot-churned ground. The locals appraised me from their doors and windows. This was, I imagined, exactly the kind of out-of-the-way craphole in which an unwary trader might find herself knifed and robbed before she’d taken two-dozen steps. Chin high and eyes narrow, I returned their stares, confident that nobody would try fucking with me. Traders were one thing, but the personnel of a Carnivore were another prospect altogether. The class had a ferocious and well-earned reputation, and even though she now wore the colours of the House of Reclamation, these hicks had no way of knowing how much of her original weaponry had been retained.

  Halfway along the street, a few dozen metres from the edge of the landing apron, I came upon a saloon. The walls had been built from stacked chunks of local rock, thick turf sods covered the sloping roof, and smoke issued from a chimney made of old tin cans. A wooden sign propped beside the door advertised the bill of fare. Inside, I found a rough flagstone floor, chairs and tables long ago printed from a generic pattern, and a long wooden counter, behind which the barman stood cleaning a ceramic mug with a once-white rag.

  The strip lights on the ceiling were bright. The only thing they weren’t short of here was energy.

  The local drink was lichen-flavoured ethanol. It cost three times less than fruit juice and half as much as clean water, and smelled like mouldy laundry. The first sip had all the fetid charm of dung mushrooms, and, when swallowed, felt like bleach scouring my oesophagus. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve.

  The barman smirked. “It can take a while to acquire the taste,” he said.

  I pushed the glass across the counter for a refill. “I don’t plan to be here that long.”

  The back door led out onto a wooden veranda. The clarity of the winter sunlight slanting across the planks made me want to reassess all the choices in my life. I perched on the rail and nursed my second drink, staring out at the plateau’s flat horizon.

  I hadn’t always been this lonely. I had been in love once, and been loved in return.

  His name was Sedge. He was a hydroponics technician from one of the Rim Stars. Before the war, we spent three months living together in a quayside villa on the Greek island of Naxos. He had long, sand-coloured hair and cobalt eyes as fresh and vivid as the wind-ruffled ocean. During the day, we had the beach and the harbour, and long walks among the olive groves above the whitewashed buildings of the town. At night, there was music from the tavernas, and strings of cheerful lights in the trees. I thought that if I held him tightly enough, we could stay like that forever. But we lost touch during the long years of conflict that followed. With turmoil raging across human space, communications between systems were patchy at best. The last I heard, having been mistakenly informed that I had died in the final confrontation at Pelapatarn, he had joined an expedition to the Andromeda galaxy, having been c
hosen as one of a hundred human representatives to be carried aboard a ship owned and outfitted by the Hoppers, a race of metre-tall locust-like explorers from the other side of the Multiplicity. It was a one-way trip of two and a half million light years. Even burning through the higher dimensions, manufacturing its own fuel as it went, it would take the Hopper’s ship millennia to reach its destination. Thinking I was dead, Sedge lay, along with the other humans, in suspended animation. Barring accidents, he would persist in his ageless, dreamless hibernation until thousands of years after my actual death.

  The thought was almost intolerably sad.

  I drained the mouldy-tasting liquor and sucked frigid air through my nostrils. Goats nosed the plateau’s dry grass, bells clanking. I heard the squeak of hinges, and a thickset man stepped onto the veranda beside me. He wore a shabby business suit over a grey shirt and dirty yellow cravat. The timbers creaked beneath his weight.

  “Don’t trouble yourself to get up, Captain.” He gripped the rail, stared out at the grassland and inhaled deeply through his nose. “Ah,” he sighed.

  I stared into the bottom of my glass. I didn’t want to be impolite, but neither was I in the mood for companionship.

  “Can I help you?”

  Without relaxing his hold on the rail, he turned his sepia-coloured eyes to mine. “Forgive the intrusion.” He gave a slight nod. “I merely wanted to welcome you to our town. My name is Armand Mulch.” He wiped a fleshy hand against his trouser leg, and then held it out for me to shake. “I’m the CEO of this little settlement.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr Mulch?”

  “I see you’re enjoying our view.”

  “It makes a change from the inside of a ship’s cabin.”

  “I’m sure it does.” He leant an elbow on the rail. “Can I freshen your drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “How about some food?”

  I slid down from the rail and stood facing him. “You’re very kind, but I won’t be staying more than a few minutes.”