Once the carbon-fibre bones were in place and aligned properly, Preston moved around, tightening elastic straps and closing manual fastenings. The whole process took around ten minutes, and his hands shook the entire time.
Finally, he stepped back and left me standing by myself, buoyed by the rigidity of the suit alone.
“How do I look?”
He gave me a critical once-over. “How do you feel? Are you comfortable?”
“I feel like I got gored by a bull.” My eye jerked again. “Aside from that, it’s not too bad. Kind of weightless, like I’m being carried.”
“Try moving your arm. Do you feel any discomfort?”
I wanted to punch him. Instead, I tried an experimental swing.
“No, but it feels weird.” I clenched and unclenched my fist. I had been expecting the servomotors in the joints to buzz or whine with each change in posture, but the mechanism moved with firm, silent efficiency. I felt as if I could rip the bed in half, or tear my way through the bulkhead, into open space.
I turned to Laura. “What do you think?”
She rubbed her plastered thigh and sighed. When she looked up at me, her eyes were weary and disappointed. “I still think you’re making a huge mistake.”
“You would.”
A panel in the exoskeleton’s arms controlled the drugs it was able to feed directly into my system. These were drugs designed to help its wounded occupants in battle. Tapping through the menus with my index finger, I selected a combination of opiates for the pain, and added a shot of amphetamines to keep me sharp. I didn’t know much about drugs, and had to guess at the required dosage. But I figured if the morphine put me to sleep, the speed would wake me up again. The one would ameliorate the bad effects of the other, and I’d be pain-free and wide awake.
My reinforced fingers clicked against the glass screen.
I never even felt the mixture go in.
TWENTY-SEVEN
TROUBLE DOG
Cruising through the hypervoid, I pinged an enquiry to former pack-mates, requesting a discussion. Within seconds, thanks to the twisted physics of the higher dimensions, I received an acknowledgement of receipt, followed by an encrypted reply from Adalwolf.
The thin-faced, hollow-cheeked avatar he’d chosen to represent him had skin the colour of starlight and eyes that glowered in their sockets like cinders.
“Greetings, sister,” he said, his voice warped and scratchy with the distortions of the medium.
“Where are you?”
“Twenty-eight light years to spinward of your current position, and inbound under full power.” He sent a string of coordinates and a vector. “I expect to reach the Gallery within two days.”
“And Fenrir? I haven’t received acknowledgement from her.”
“She has other duties.”
“She’s running silent?”
“She’s on a mission.” He raised his hands. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“Oh.” I had always liked Fenrir, even though she was quiet and aloof and sometimes cruel. In the old days, I would always have known where she was and what she was doing. Being kept now at arm’s length made me feel excluded, no longer part of the family’s inner circle, no longer privy to their chat and gossip. I had become, through my own actions and choices, an outsider—a distant and disreputable cousin instead of a treasured sibling.
“Is she still under the command of Captain Parris?”
“She is.”
“What do you think of this?” I attached a copy of the signal I had received. “It was addressed to me personally, which means the sender knows I’m on my way to the Gallery. And that implies they are either privy to the internal communications of the Reclamation, or they have been tracking my whereabouts since I left Camrose Station.”
He cast an eye over the data. “Interesting.”
“Yes, but it makes no sense. If the purpose was to warn me away from danger, why not put out a general distress call to advise all ships in the immediate volume? Why contact me alone?”
“You are the nearest vessel.”
“It still seems odd. Unless…”
“Yes?”
“Unless the message came from the ship or ships that attacked the liner in the first place. Which would mean there was something about the wreck they didn’t want me to see.”
Adalwolf shook his head. “If that were the case, sister, they have already had five days to cover their tracks and make good their escape. Why would they have lingered at the scene of their supposed crime?”
“Could the Geest van Amsterdam still be functional and somehow eluding them?”
“I think it’s doubtful.”
“Then what do you think I should do?”
For a few seconds, I listened to the pops and hisses of the hypervoid. When Adalwolf spoke again, he simply said, “Heed the message.”
“What?”
Had his feed become corrupted? I sent a request for him to repeat his last transmission.
“Do what it says and stay away.” He sounded irritable. “Return to Cichol and wait. Should any survivors from the liner remain, we can call you in to deal with them once we are certain we have secured the system.”
“Return to Cichol and wait?”
His features rearranged themselves into the approximation of a kindly smile. He was used to being the leader of the pack, the one we had all listened to and whose suggestions we had followed. “I know you mean well, little sister, but you aren’t fully armed and this isn’t your fight. You’re not one of us any more.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
NOD
Ships all irritable.
Have served many ships since leaving World Tree.
Have served for six times four years.
All irritable.
All bad-tempered.
But none as irritable and bad-tempered as Hound of Difficulty.
None as sad.
I repair everything except sad.
I fix.
I work.
But sad remains.
Loss remains.
Some damage can’t be fixed. Some things stay broken.
Like grief.
Only fixed when we return to World Tree. When we die and become one with Tree.
Until then, I patch ship, and move on.
I fix ship’s hull.
Fix systems.
But ship still damaged.
Bits missing.
Bits taken.
I patch and move.
Always something else needs fixing.
Always work.
Work, then sleep.
But can’t fix sad.
Can’t grasp sad.
I work.
I know World Tree waits.
And dead wait in roots of World Tree.
Wait for us.
We leave Tree and we serve.
We have always served.
We fix, and we move on.
Nothing is ever lost.
Nothing gone forever.
Will see again.
After work.
After serving.
After sleep.
TWENTY-NINE
ONA SUDAK
As we followed the canyon, I watched the shadows chase each other up and down the cliff-like walls. Days on the Brain were around seventeen hours in length. When the sun was directly overhead, the base of the canyon was a bright marble path stretching away before us. The rest of the time it lay in the shade.
We had been walking for two days, surviving on sips of recycled urine and sweat, and drawing sustenance from the high-energy survival tablets in the suits’ equipment pouches. The water was bland and cold and, despite being packed with vitamins, minerals, stimulants and glucose, the tablets weren’t enough to fill our bellies. I had been trying to keep track of the distance we had covered, but had given up some hours back. My best guess was that we had walked somewhere in the region of twenty-three kilometres, give or take.
During all that time, Ada
m had seldom spoken. He had been quiet since my confession, trying to digest the revelation of my former identity. We walked in silence, but I didn’t mind his reticence; I didn’t want to talk either.
So wrapped up were we in ourselves that we failed to notice the aperture until we were within a few hundred metres of it. We had grown used to the stark, uniform lines of the canyon walls receding away ahead of us like an exercise in perspective. We were mites caught between the pages of a book. Coming suddenly upon a break in this geometric precision jerked us both to a halt.
Adam used a hand to shade his eyes. “What is it?”
The hole was a black rectangle set into the left-hand canyon wall.
“It looks like an opening of some sort.”
“Do you think it’s safe?”
My gaze flickered upwards to the strip of star-speckled night above our heads. “There are degrees of safety.”
“Meaning?”
“We’ve been running for two days. We need somewhere to hide, somewhere to rest and sleep.”
I started walking again, aware that our feet were probably the first human feet ever to have walked the base of this particular canyon, and our eyes maybe the first to behold this aperture. Due to the narrowness of the canyon, it certainly wouldn’t have been visible from orbit, and ground expeditions were strictly prohibited.
By the time I reached the foot of the wall beneath the opening, I realised my sense of scale had been way off. It was difficult to judge the size of things against the two-kilometre vastness of the slab-sided canyon walls. The hole, which I had initially thought to be fairly small and close to the ground, turned out to be at least two metres in height and five in width, and almost two metres above the ground.
A pattering noise echoed up the canyon from the direction in which we’d come. For a moment, it sounded like distant rain. Then I recognised it. Hundreds of steel claws were skittering towards us.
“They’ve deployed crawlers,” I said.
“What?”
“Drones shaped like millipedes. They’ve probably released a swarm of them into the labyrinth.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Lethal.” I glanced up at the hole above our heads. “But if we can get in there, we might be able to hide.”
“How are we going to get up there?”
I stood on the tips of my toes and tried to see what was inside, but saw only further shadow.
“You’ll have to throw me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I interlaced my fingers and mimed pushing upwards. “You need to give me a boost.”
Adam frowned and, just for a second, I pitied him. For all his attempts at poetic sophistication, he’d grown up in a maze of corridors and greenhouses. He’d never run wild beneath an open sky, never had to boost a friend over a wall or pull them out of a muddy stream bed. Where I felt suffocated by the claustrophobic bleakness of the canyons, he probably found comfort. Buddha only knew how he’d react if he ever found his way onto the naked surface of a normal planet.
“Put your hands like this,” I said, fingers still interlaced. “Cup my boot and push me up.”
He looked up at the lip of the opening. “Okay, but how will I get up there?”
“I’ll reach back down and pull you up.”
“Really?” He looked me up and down, and raised an eyebrow in a way that made me want to punch it from his face. I spoke through my irritation.
“I’m stronger than I look.”
He thought about that. Eventually, he clasped his hands and braced his legs. I put my hand on his shoulder and stepped up.
For a skinny poet, he was surprisingly strong. But then, I already knew that. I just hadn’t expected to be propelled upward with such force. As soon as my trailing foot left the canyon’s floor, Adam heaved with all his might and I found myself slithering up the marble-smooth wall, my outstretched fingers straining for the lower edge of the hole. In the small planet’s weaker gravity, his scrawny muscles combined with my own upward leap to hurl me higher than I could have reasonably expected. I bruised my knees against the wall, but managed to hook my forearms and elbows over the edge of the hole. He gave the soles of my suit a final push, and I swung a foot over the edge.
One last pull, and I rolled into shadow.
For a few seconds, I lay looking up at a dark ceiling, panting from the exertion. And I smiled. For the first time since the crash, I had a roof over my head. For the first time, I was hidden from the prying eyes of orbital ships.
Adam called up. “What can you see?”
I turned my head away from the entrance. “Nothing.”
“There’s a flashlight built into the wrist of your suit.”
“I know.”
Silently cursing my forgetfulness, I gripped my left sleeve and the light came on—a white torch beam in an echoing cathedral.
“Holy fuck.”
“What is it?”
“I…”
The interior of the cavity fell away downwards in a grand gothic sweep quite at odds with the stark minimalism of the planet’s exterior. I merely lay on the top step of a vast spiral staircase. The individual steps were the size of coffins. They had been carved from semi-translucent quartz and then splayed like the feathers of a swan’s outstretched wing. The ceiling overhead was also white, and ribbed like the gullet of a fish.
I leant out of the fish’s mouth. Adam had to jump to reach my hand. I hauled him up beside me and we sat looking at the giant curving staircase.
“How far down do you think it goes?”
I stood and brushed dust from my suit. “If we want to stay out of sight, we’re going to have to find that out for ourselves.”
His eyes widened. “We’re going down there?”
“What choice do we have?” I rubbed my palms together to hide my own apprehension. “The deeper we go, the less chance anyone will come looking for us.”
Adam’s head turned back toward the canyon, and the sound of metal claws. “Do you think they’re still after us?”
“I don’t think they’re after us.” I rubbed the back of my neck where the suit’s neck seal had chafed the skin. “I think they’re after me.”
“Because of Pelapatarn?”
“Why else?”
The noise grew closer.
“Do you think they’ll reach us up here?”
“Hopefully the walls are too smooth for them to climb.”
“What if they’re not?”
Hauling him up by the scruff of his neck, I propelled him towards the edge of the first step.
“We go down.”
THIRTY
SAL KONSTANZ
I found Ashton Childe standing in the ship’s galley drinking coffee. The exoskeleton clung to him like a parasite. He looked up as I approached.
“Hello, Captain.”
“How is it?”
“The coffee?”
“The skeleton.”
“How do you think?” He looked pale and distracted, like a man trying to hold a conversation while defusing a bomb. He glanced down at his free hand and flexed the fingers. “It takes some getting used to.”
“Preston tells me you’re taking a hell of a risk wearing that. With your injuries, you should be in bed.”
“Needs must, Captain.”
The coffee smelled good and my stomach rumbled.
“Is your mission really that important?”
The left side of his face jerked as if stung. The eyelid fluttered. When he spoke, he over-pronounced each word the way Clay sometimes did when she was very drunk.
“It’s not for me to know the significance of an assignment, merely to complete it as ordered.”
“Even if it kills you?”
“You were in the military, Captain.” His hands kept fidgeting, and I wondered how much coffee he had drunk. “You know about duty.”
“Surely there’s a difference between duty and blind, unquestioning loyalty?”
He scowled in
response and his face twitched again. The hand he’d been flexing clenched into a fist.
“Perhaps that attitude’s the reason the Outward lost?” His voice was suddenly belligerent. He glared at me, daring me to take offence. Instead, I turned to the coffee pot and poured myself a cup.
“We didn’t lose,” I said over my shoulder, keeping my tone even, suppressing the flush of indignation his words had stirred. “After Pelapatarn, we just stopped fighting.” I inhaled steam from the cup and deliberately relaxed my posture. Then I turned to him. “And don’t let Clay hear you talking like that. Exoskeleton or not, she’ll kick your ass and flush the remains out the airlock. Do I make myself clear?”
We stood looking at each other for a long moment.
“Perfectly clear, Captain.”
I felt the tips of my ears redden. I took a sip of coffee to cover my annoyance.
“Why are you here?” There was an edge to my voice, as thin and sharp as a blade.
Childe looked around at the bulkheads. “I told you, I need a ride.”
“I know that’s what you said.”
I watched his eyes narrow, the skin at the corners wrinkling like old leather. He seemed to be having trouble marshalling his thoughts. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I can’t figure out why you’re here.” I drank some more coffee. He watched in silence, waiting for me to continue. When I started talking again, I spoke slowly, putting shape to my doubts as I expressed them. “I can understand the other one, Laura, being here,” I said. “An Outward ship went down and she’s an Outward agent. It’s you I can’t figure. You’re from the Conglomeration; what’s a crashed Outward liner to you?”
His jaw tightened. A drop of sweat ran down his face. “I told you, I’m looking for a specific passenger, one of our citizens.”
“But why rush to get there?” I took a step towards him, trying to sound conciliatory. “If there are any survivors, we’ll bring them back. We always do. It’s our job. Why do you need to get involved?”
Childe clicked his tongue. His pupils were dilated, and the sweat on his face made him look feverish.
“That’s my mission,” he said. “And in order to complete it, I need you to fly this ship for me.”
“She flies herself.”
“But she takes orders from you.” His voice had taken on a worrying edge of barely suppressed hysteria, and his fingers scratched at the drug panel set into the left forearm of his exoskeleton.
Embers of War Page 13