Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “That’s much better.” I gave what I hoped was an encouraging smile. “Now, regarding your sleep problems.” I gestured to the ceiling and the metal walls surrounding us. “The Dog monitors everything. It’s always there, always watching over us. If you wake up in the night, you can talk to it. It might not be very sympathetic, but it will be there, and it will listen.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” Preston stood as if to leave, no doubt wanting to scurry away from his embarrassment. I stopped him with a raised hand.

  “But I still need a qualified medic,” I told him sternly. “So you have a lot of work to do. The Dog has all the medical texts you could ever need. I want you to study them. Every free moment you have, I want you at a screen or in the infirmary, studying.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “And don’t mistake any of this for softness on my part. If I think you’re skimping on your studies, I’ll dump you on the first world we come to.” I leant towards him and lowered my voice. “Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Good.” I sat back and brushed my hands together. “Now, go and get me some coffee.”

  * * *

  When he’d gone, I let my head fall back against the couch. I was fairly certain that I was doing the right thing for Preston by letting him stay, but it would probably turn out to be a mistake for me in the long run. The last thing I wanted was to fly with an unqualified medic. And yet, there was no way I could have turned the kid away. His plight reminded me too acutely of my own sorrows. However, by allowing him to stay, I knew I had given Alva Clay ammunition against me, should her resentment ever boil over into actual hostility. On the other hand we had Laura Petrushka on board, and I was fairly confident she could handle any medical emergencies that arose. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t putting the crew in danger; but she wasn’t an official medical practitioner, and that distinction might be enough to end my career.

  I stretched my fingers and toes, trying to dissipate my fatigue. Then I hooked open the neck of my t-shirt and sniffed. I had been sleeping in these clothes for two days, and badly needed a shower. With a groan, I got to my feet and climbed up into the main corridor.

  When I reached my cabin, I found Laura waiting by the door.

  “Have you come to beg for clemency?” I rubbed my jaw, where Childe’s fingers had bruised the skin.

  To my surprise, she shook her head. “I have some information you need to hear.” Her voice dripped with painkiller-induced weariness. I could even see it in the set of her shoulders. Slumped in the wheelchair, she looked ten years older.

  I leant against the corridor wall. “What kind of information?”

  “I’ve been looking at the Geest van Amsterdam’s distress signal,” she said, “and there’s something weird about it.”

  “Weird?” I uncrossed my arms. My own tiredness gave way to professional interest. If there was anything that might negatively affect the success of our rescue attempt, I needed to hear about it.

  Petrushka flicked lint from the blanket covering her knees. “A ship that size doesn’t have one comms array,” she said, “it has half a dozen, spread out across its hull.”

  I knew this. “So?”

  “So, in order to silence the ship, you’d need to knock out all six arrays simultaneously. But no torpedo’s that accurate, and the ship has its defence cannons. The odds are at least one of those arrays should have survived and been functional after the first attack.”

  “The ship shut itself down, like the Hobo.”

  “The Hobo?”

  “It was a scout ship that ditched in the sea on a world twelve light years past the Yellow Sky Relay. The data we pulled from its black box suggested its mind had deliberately turned itself off.”

  Petrushka leant forward in her chair. “When was this?”

  “It crashed a week ago, on Thursday.”

  “Four days before the attack on the liner?”

  “We were trying to rescue the crew when we heard about the Geest van Amsterdam.” I pushed away from the wall. “Why? Do you think there’s a connection?”

  She let out a long breath. “Two Outward vessels downed within days of each other, having both apparently turned themselves off?” She shook her head as if unable to calculate the odds of such a coincidence. “What’s the flight time from Yellow Sky to the Gallery, as the crow flies?”

  “Six days.”

  “But a warship like this, at maximum burn?”

  “You could maybe shave a third off.”

  “So, theoretically, the same ship could have targeted both vessels?”

  “I guess.” It would have been possible. We were completing the same trip in a similar time, including stopovers at Camrose and Cichol. “But how could one ship convince two others to voluntarily commit suicide?”

  Laura Petrushka sat back and drummed her fingers on the wheelchair’s armrest. “There is a way.” For a moment, she was silent, seemingly debating with herself. “At least,” she continued in a low voice, “I’ve heard rumours of something that can do it. Some sort of alien weapon that can infiltrate and confuse a neural matrix.”

  I flicked a hand. “That’s just talk.” If you hung around spaceports long enough, you’d hear all sorts of fantastical and paranoid tales—magical relics, hypervoid monsters, lost cities of gold…

  Petrushka shook her head. “The person I heard it from is reliable, even if he is a Conglomeration agent.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How can you be so sure?”

  Her eyes fixed on mine, evaluating, challenging, imploring. “Because he says they have one.”

  All the breath seemed to evaporate from my lungs. “The Conglomeration has a weapon that can remotely disable a ship’s brain?”

  Petrushka maintained eye contact. “That’s correct. And I’m only admitting to knowing that now because, as captain, you need to know what we might be up against.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ONA SUDAK

  We tried to move as silently as possible, desperate to stay ahead of our pursuers. For the moment, we were hidden by several curves of the spiral staircase. Their voices and footfalls came to us as echoes. However tired we were, we could not afford to pause. To do so would be to squander our head start and risk capture, or worse. All we could do was keep lowering ourselves from one oversized step to the next as we slowly corkscrewed our way into the heart of the Brain.

  And then, just as I was starting to think the rest of my days would be spent negotiating the interminable curve of this stairwell, the steps ended. We came around the final bend to find ourselves looking at a long, softly glowing corridor approximately three metres in height and two in width. For a couple of seconds, we dithered. The stairs had been torture, but the corridor—while seemingly flat and featureless—represented the unknown.

  Adam glanced back over his shoulder. “Do you think we can make it to the end before they see us?”

  I took him by the wrist. “Well, we can’t stay here.”

  Ahead, at the end of the corridor, I could see a black rectangle—an open doorway leading into a darkened area beyond. If we could get to it before the first of our pursuers reached the bottom of the stairs, we could remain hidden—at least, for a few more minutes. We began to run, our legs shaky with hunger and fatigue, our hearts hammering against our ribs, lungs burning.

  Adam had a long, loping stride that had been learned and perfected on a treadmill, whereas I was struggling along with ageing leg muscles that had once known military levels of fitness but had since waned in strength and stamina. Only fear and bitter determination kept me moving, my thighs and calves exerting harder than they had been called upon to in years.

  As if in a nightmare, the corridor seemed to recede ahead to infinity. We were running but not getting anywhere. My back itched with the anticipation of discovery, cringing against the expectation of bullets…

  And then we slammed into the walls at either sid
e of the black doorway.

  My chest heaved. Shadows thronged the edge of my vision. My head felt light and I couldn’t catch enough breath to speak. I watched Adam stick his head around the opening, peering into the gloom.

  “After you,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulders and I felt the warmth of his chest through the fabric of his shirt. In this sterile alien corridor, it was an absurdly comforting human intimacy.

  “It doesn’t look very big.”

  “Maybe there’s another door? They wouldn’t have put in all those stairs just to reach a closet.”

  I shrugged. The creatures that had built this place had carved an entire solar system into a series of bizarre and undecipherable sculptures. Who knew what other eccentricities they might have indulged in?

  Standing on the threshold, I slipped from beneath Adam’s arm and turned to face him. “Look, Adam, I—”

  A shout came from the stairs. Two figures stood on the penultimate step, both clad in mismatched and heavily scuffed combat armour and carrying heavy-duty bolt-throwers.

  We were caught.

  Without a word, Adam shoved me backwards, into the darkness of the small room beyond the door.

  I cried out as I hit the floor. At the same instant, the walls of the chamber lit up and a transparent barrier hissed down like the blade of a well-oiled guillotine, sealing the doorway.

  Adam was still outside, in the corridor. His hands were splayed against the clear material, trying to find a way to open it.

  I struggled to my feet.

  His fists battered soundlessly against the door, then stopped as he realised it was useless. Behind him, the soldiers raised their weapons. I called his name but he couldn’t hear me. For a frozen, helpless moment, all I could do was stare into his eyes.

  He started to mouth the words, “I love you.” But the guns spat before he could finish. He slammed up against the see-through door, twitching and flailing like a man caught in the teeth of a lion. I saw his right shoulder explode and his arm come loose, the exposed bones appallingly white in the wan light from the walls, the blood sickeningly red. And still they fired. They riddled him until long after he was dead, until it was only the smack of the bullets that held him upright and pinned to the barrier between us. Only when there was almost nothing recognisable about him and no chance that even a flicker of life remained did the firing stop. He slid awkwardly to the floor, leaving a thick slaughterhouse smear on the impenetrable glass. I stared at the bloody clumps of hair, the unidentifiable pieces of gristle and sharp little chips of bone, and I screamed. But it wasn’t a scream of fear; it was a scream filled with grief, guilt and rage, and an almost uncontrollable urge to break through that door and rip the armoured soldiers apart with my clawed fingers, to tear off their helmets and gouge out their eyes, to throttle them, and crack their heads against the floor until there was nothing left. To obliterate them as thoroughly as they had obliterated Adam.

  As they advanced towards me, I railed and swore and slapped the glass. I had been running for two days—I had been running for years—and now I had had enough. A line had been crossed. Something snapped inside, and I didn’t even care if they killed me too, as long as I got the chance to fight back, to punish the men that had murdered my friend, and kick against the pricks that had skewered my soul since the burning of Pelapatarn. If I had known how to open the barrier between us, I believe I would have charged them.

  Instead, before they had covered half the distance to where I stood, the little room I was in began to move backwards. It pulled away from the corridor—and Adam’s shattered body—and gradually withdrew until all I could see of the corridor was a tiny oblong of light adrift in a vast and impenetrable darkness.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ASHTON CHILDE

  Looking up at the galley’s ceiling, I knew with an aching and stone-cold certainty that I had failed in my mission. I couldn’t continue, not now. The medic, having operated on my already battered internal organs with the help and guidance of the ship, had done his best to repair the additional damage caused by flailing around in the powered suit, and by Captain Konstanz’s fingers. However, there was a limit to the miracles that could be performed on a ship like this. I could be patched up, but not healed. We were due to arrive at our destination in a few hours, but a full recovery would take weeks, or maybe months, of rest. In addition, my elbows, wrists, hips, knees and ankles were still welded to the floor, and the only person I could really blame was myself.

  I had been sloppy. I had let myself get shot by a nervous barman in a nowhere town, and then I had worsened the situation through my own stupidity. I had let the stress of my job almost destroy me. Laura had been right; I could see it now. After months of sweating my life away in a filthy jungle, I had cracked.

  Mercifully, nobody had been seriously hurt.

  Unfortunately, my attempt to commandeer the Trouble Dog had violated several important treaties. When word of it leaked back to the House, the least that could be expected would be a serious diplomatic incident. Through my actions, I had proven myself unfit for duty and become a source of embarrassment for my superiors. In all likelihood, the next twenty years of my life would be spent staring at the walls of a military jail cell. The only reason I hadn’t already been summarily discharged from duty was that I was being held incommunicado, with no access to the ship’s communications array. Reprimand and censure lay ahead, but I would have to wait to receive them, and somehow the waiting made it worse. I felt like a condemned man. I was a quantum particle caught between two states of being: no longer an agent of the Conglomeration, but not yet fired. A criminal detained but not yet convicted.

  Lying there, looking up at the ceiling, I had a strong visceral memory of the time when, as a child, I had been caught fighting with another boy. I didn’t even remember the other kid’s name, but I knew he had to go and see the nurse while I was sent to the head teacher. For three long hours I sat in the corridor outside that woman’s office, waiting for the punishment I knew must surely follow. There would be detention and a phone call to my parents, but somehow none of that was as terrible as the feeling of fearful anticipation, of sitting there alone and listening to the clock ticking, with nothing to do but think about the inevitable recriminations to come. It was like waiting for a bomb to go off. I found myself becoming impatient to face the consequences of my actions, just so I could get them over with.

  From my current perspective, my juvenile years seemed impossibly distant, almost as if they had befallen another. And yet somehow, that particular memory—of wincing in horrible, powerless anticipation—had managed to retain its sting, whereas all the happy days of my childhood had been leached from me by the jungle’s tyrannical heat. All the optimism and resilience of my youth had drained from my pores, leaving my hair wet and my skin feverish. I couldn’t even picture the faces of my parents. They were like strangers from a half-forgotten dream; the partially submerged flotsam of a half-lived life.

  I was feeling sorry for myself, and it disgusted me. I’d always loathed self-pity in others, and seen it as a weakness of character. Yet here I was, stewing in it. I realised I had given no thought to escape, or to completing my mission through alternate means. But how could I? The only way to escape would be to renounce my Conglomeration citizenship and disappear among the stars—but to do so would also be to renounce the career that had shaped and defined my adult life, the society I had sworn to protect, and a huge part of my identity.

  I surprised myself with a cynical chuckle.

  Some career.

  I had been recruited as a rookie cop with potential, but twice failed to make the grade as a field operative. Because I was their informant, they let me spearhead the operation to root out corruption on my old precinct. But it was only after I’d managed to piss off my supervisors that I was given my first proper assignment. I was sent to Cichol not as a true field agent, but more as a kind of glorified warehouse manager, taking in shipments of arms and ammunition, an
d then arranging for them to be delivered by plane to the rebels in the hills. I might as well have been distributing tins of beans for all the difference it made. I carried myself like a full agent of Conglomeration Intelligence, but the truth was I spent more time grappling with inventory spreadsheets and flight schedules than doing anything that might be considered spy work. I had been trained in hand-to-hand combat, field medicine and the use of small arms, but everything else was bullshit. I saw that now. I had the objective clarity of a condemned man. I had never been cut out for fieldwork, and the strain of faking it almost broke me.

  I cringed at the memory of my hand squeezing Konstanz’s face, and the shameful feeling of power it had given me. I had let macho posturing take over, when, deep down, I was still that kid sitting outside the head teacher’s office, struggling to come to terms with the way fear and anger made him lash out at those around him.

  If I ran now, I would be running from myself. I would have to leave everything I’d worked to be, every ambition I’d ever nursed. Everything that made me who I was in the eyes of the universe, everything that described me as an adult, would have to be jettisoned. And I had no idea how or if it could be replaced.

  That was, until Captain Konstanz came to see me.

  * * *

  The captain’s hair was damp from the shower. She was wearing a fresh green jumpsuit at least two sizes too large. The suit’s zip was open to her stomach, revealing a faded but clean-looking t-shirt, and she had squashed a frayed baseball cap onto her head.

  “Okay,” she said, crouching beside me. “We need to talk.”

  I blinked up at her from the abyssal depths of my despair. “You’ve got me welded to the floor. I’m not going anywhere. What’s left to discuss?”

  Absently, she reached out and gave the carbon-fibre struts supporting my forearm an experimental prod.

  “I’ve been talking to your friend, Laura.”

  “And?”

  “And she told me the Conglomeration has a weapon that can remotely hack a ship’s brain.”