Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  The thought chilled my blood.

  Fists squeezed into tight balls, I watched as my floating prison approached the towering side of the stepped pyramid.

  How had all this gone unnoticed? Numerous alien races had scanned the Objects in the Gallery. None had reported so much as an opening on the surface, let alone this subterranean netherworld. Could it be this entire bubble existed outside normal space and time? It was certainly too gigantic to have been accommodated within the confines of the Brain, which was itself no larger than a moderately sized planet. Perhaps I had unwittingly passed through some sort of dimensional portal, into a kind of higher space—maybe even into the hypervoid itself? That would certainly go a long way towards explaining how the existence of a tiny star within a planet had gone unnoticed for so many hundreds of years.

  And yet, that being the case, how had I found my way in here so easily?

  The opening Adam and I had accessed would have been invisible from above, but that didn’t explain how nobody else had ever stumbled across it. In the past, expeditions had traversed the major canyons. Could it simply have been blind luck no one had explored that particular stretch of the maze? Or—and my skin prickled with the thought—perhaps some of them had found it. Perhaps they’d even ventured inside and found their way this far into the interior, only to have been destroyed by whatever awaited them in that huge, dark building.

  Christ, I wished I had a gun. Even a sidearm would have done, as long as I had something to grip and draw reassurance from. Yet, no matter how hard I desired one, no weapon appeared. All I had were my hands and feet, and the skills I’d learned in the military. But what use would hand-to-hand combat be against a race capable of building all this? What hope would my chimpanzee fingers have against creatures with the ability to fashion suns?

  As I drew inexorably closer to the ziggurat, I was able to discern the particular doorway at which the room aimed, and then watch it grow nearer. As far as I could see (and to my great relief), there didn’t appear to be anybody—or anything—waiting for me in the corridor beyond. However, dwarfed and humbled as I felt by the massive pyramid and the titanic cavern that formed its sky, this temporary reprieve proved to be of little reassurance.

  With no appearance of haste, my flying prison slid to an apparently effortless halt. The glass screen gently kissed an identical barrier covering the opening to the corridor. The light overhead changed from white to blue, and the transparent door and its counterpart swished aside, disappearing into the wall. The dried, crumbly smear of Adam’s blood went with them. I braced myself for a change in air pressure, but none came. I was still encased in my personal bubble, and it remained as resolutely fresh as it had since I first wriggled from the wreckage of the ’dam.

  The corridor ahead appeared identical to the one I had encountered three days before. It glowed with the same pearly light from its opalescent walls. Tentatively, hands gripping the edges of the doorway, I stepped from the room that had been my jail. I moved slowly, like a nervous butterfly pulling itself from the husk of its chrysalis. My legs were stiff, but the enforced inactivity had given them time to recover from their exertions.

  Adam’s death needled me like an uncomfortable splinter lodged in the back of my mind, but I knew I could process the grief later. Right now, my priority had to be to find a way back to the surface.

  As a cadet, I’d participated in a number of wilderness survival exercises. I knew how to live off the land, and how to find food in some of the most inhospitable and godforsaken climes. But those exercises had taken place outdoors, where plants, lichen and other sources of nutrition were readily available to those who knew how to look for them. Here, the sterile white walls and floor offered little in the way of hope. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and, unless I found a way out and contrived to be rescued within the next couple of days, I would start to lose the energy and willpower to carry on.

  As an experiment, I tried stepping in and out of the little room I had just left, half hoping the door would snap closed and return me to my starting point. However, after three tries, the blue light remained resolutely lit and the doors remained open, leaving me no choice but to follow the corridor and search for another exit.

  I took a couple of deep, steadying breaths, and then edged away from the door, one foot at a time, all the while keeping my right fist pulled back and ready to fly at the first sign of an attack.

  FORTY-THREE

  SAL KONSTANZ

  Acting on my orders, the Trouble Dog shut off its engines as it crossed the Gallery’s heliopause—that tenuous border region on the ragged edge of the solar system, where the outward pressure of the solar wind had attenuated to the point it could no longer hold back the winds from the surrounding stars, and interstellar space began. Still travelling at great speed but now unpowered, the ship began to drift down through the higher dimensions until it fell from the hypervoid altogether, and remerged into the universe.

  Falling into the system on a ballistic trajectory, the Trouble Dog kept only its most vital systems online, and only the most passive of its sensors in operation. Eighteen billion kilometres ahead of us, the Gallery’s sun resembled little more than a reasonably bright star against a backdrop of other stars, and the Objects themselves were specks rendered all but invisible by distance.

  I lay on my command couch with the visor of my spacesuit thrown back, my face lit only by the light of the bridge’s display screens. I had ordered the crew to don pressure suits in case of a hull breach. It was standard procedure, but almost certainly a useless gesture. Anything powerful enough to crack the hull of a Carnivore would most likely liquefy anything within. In that scenario, the only crewmembers with any hope of survival would be those secured inside the doubly armoured bridge at the centre of the ship. And at that particular moment, that meant Laura Petrushka and me. She sat across the room from me, hunched over the tactical weapon displays with her wounded leg braced beneath the console—not because the ship needed her (it was perfectly capable of conducting a battle by itself), but because I did. When the engagement came, things would be happening too quickly for me to keep pace. Carnivores thought faster than we did, and were capable of making multiple decisions simultaneously, engaging targets on a number of fronts. The reason I needed Laura in place was to help me stay abreast of our status. She was a trained tactical analyst and, without a direct neural link to the ship’s sensorium, I wouldn’t be able to follow everything that happened. I needed an experienced tactician to help me keep track of our progress.

  At least, that’s what I’d told her.

  In reality, the Trouble Dog’s avatar would be more than capable of interpreting the battle for me. That was, after all, its primary function. I’d told Laura I wanted her as a backup and a second pair of eyes, when the truth was, I simply wanted her company. I needed somebody else in there with me for reassurance. I had rarely been as nervous as I was now, and it helped to have another human being in close proximity—especially an older woman. In the meantime, I told myself with a kind of grim pragmatism, the real reason she was here was that if I had to die, I really didn’t want to have to die alone.

  “Nothing in range,” she said, scanning her instruments.

  The Trouble Dog’s face gazed from a window set into the main forward view. It looked amused. “As she says, I can detect no sign of the Fenrir from this distance.” The avatar looked concerned. “At least, not without deploying active sensors. However, I can confirm that none of the Objects has acquired an anomalous moon, and there is no sign of the Geest van Amsterdam in orbit around any of them. I have detected a metallic signature on the Object known as the Brain, which might represent debris from a crashed vessel. If the Fenrir is still somewhere hereabouts, she is either on the surface with that wreckage, or on the other side of the sun. Wherever she is, I fully anticipate her to be operating with extreme stealth, and therefore almost impossible to detect until she moves—or until we get a lot closer.”

  I gav
e a grunt of assent. So far, things were proceeding as we had anticipated. Drifting into the system without power, we would be very hard to detect, and difficult to distinguish from random space debris. If the Fenrir wanted to tell whether we were more than just rock, she’d either have to sidle up close enough to make a visual confirmation, or bounce a signal off our hull. Either way, she’d be revealing her position. Unfortunately, the converse was also true, and we couldn’t detect her without announcing our arrival. We were like armed opponents circling each other in a darkened room, each afraid to turn on their flashlight for fear of giving the other a target.

  “What are your orders?”

  At the speed we were falling through space, it would take several months to get within striking range of the Objects. The only way to arrive within a timescale that gave us any hope of finding survivors was to jump across the intervening distance, but the acceleration needed would certainly alert any observers to our presence.

  I took one final look at the distant sun, and shrugged. “We’ve come this far and had a look around. We didn’t expect to see the Carnivore, and we haven’t. But we have got a likely location for the liner, and that’s something. Now, we need to get closer and start looking for survivors.”

  I reached for the intercom and opened a channel to the main hangar, where Alva Clay, Preston Menderes and Ashton Childe were standing by in one of the ship’s hardier ground-to-orbit shuttles. Alva answered the call.

  “Everything looks clear so far,” I told her. “And it looks as if the liner’s on the Brain. We’re going to advance cautiously and then jump in as close to the surface as we can.”

  “Understood, Captain.” I could hear the tension in Alva’s voice. While we held off the Carnivore, she was going to lead her improvised team on an expedition to locate and retrieve survivors on the ground. “We’ll be ready to go on your word.”

  “Standby.”

  I killed the connection and took a moment to steady my breathing. Around me, I heard the familiar sounds of the bridge: the almost subliminal purr of the air conditioning; distant creaks and groans as different parts of the hull cooled and adjusted to the sudden lack of thrust; and the quiet chimes and bleeps as the ship’s various systems reported routine changes in their respective statuses. It was a soundtrack I had fallen asleep to a hundred times. Now, though, there could be no question of sleep. My breath came in short, shallow gasps, my hands tingled, and my heart thumped so loudly in my ears I worried Laura might be able to hear it. My one and only command before this had been at the helm of a medical frigate, and my job then had been to arrive in the aftermath of a battle and pick through the debris, not order my ship into the heart of one. Still, in accepting command of the Trouble Dog, I had always known it might come to this—that one day I might be called upon to fire upon a pirate vessel or similar—and I knew I could do it, despite the weightless panicky feeling in my stomach and chest.

  As a team, we had been able to deal with the challenges we’d so far faced, from the would-be hijackers at Northfield to Ashton Childe’s “episode” in the galley. But neither of those parties had been actively trying to destroy the ship, and neither had possessed the firepower to do so. I may have been personally threatened. I may have been shot and strangled, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter as much to me as the idea of losing the ship.

  My home.

  This time, everything would be on the line. With one Carnivore loose in the system, and according to the Trouble Dog, another—Adalwolf—due to arrive in a few hours, we were hopelessly outgunned. All we could try to do was deliver the shuttle to the crash site and then attempt to stay alive long enough to pick it up again when Alva and her team had finished.

  I tipped back my head and exhaled. Laura Petrushka glanced at me. “Are you okay?”

  The white streak in her hair seemed to glow in the light from the screens. I wanted her to put her arms around me and stroke my head. Instead, I wiped my face with my hands and pulled myself up into a straight-backed sitting position. “Have you ever ordered anyone into combat?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Does it get any easier?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “No,” she said, “I don’t believe it ever does.”

  I sighed, envious of her quiet self-assurance. The last time I’d commanded a ground action, George Walker had died, ripped apart by the razor-sharp barbs of beasts whose existence I hadn’t thought to determine in advance.

  “Do you have any advice?”

  The older woman’s shrug was eloquent. It spoke of duty and sacrifice, and the ineluctable futility of trying to second-guess fate. “Just try not to get us all killed.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  NOD

  Prepare for combat, they say.

  Prepare for damage.

  So I gather tools.

  Wear armour.

  Breathing masks for all my hands.

  Fire extinguishers.

  Druff fixed ships before humans tamed fire.

  Druff always serve.

  Druff serve everybody.

  Always more to fix.

  Always more work to be done.

  Work, then sleep.

  Sleep, then work.

  Nobody else fix fusion tubes. Nobody else keep gravity working. Nobody else keep air flowing through ship. Water flowing through pipes. Fuel flowing through reactor.

  Work, because work is what we have.

  Sleep, because sleep is what we earn.

  Work, then sleep.

  Dream of World Tree.

  Dream of George.

  We serve ships as we serve World Tree.

  We serve because we always serve.

  In peace, in battle.

  We work because we always work.

  Keep everyone alive by keeping World Tree alive.

  Keep everyone alive by keeping ship alive.

  We serve, then rest.

  Rest forever in roots of World Tree.

  FORTY-FIVE

  TROUBLE DOG

  As soon as Captain Konstanz gave the go-ahead, I calculated a vector that would take us within a few hundred kilometres of the surface of the Brain—close enough to drop the shuttle and cover it during its descent, while still retaining enough altitude and velocity to evade incoming fire.

  I brought my engines online and began to accelerate, knowing the fusion-bright glare of my exhaust wouldn’t reach the inner system for another five and a half hours—long after I’d arrived in person.

  Strange to think that, when I arrived, I’d be able to look back with a telescope and see myself here, in the past. Strange, but not a matter for concern. There would be no paradox. Observation of visible light didn’t violate causality any more than rewatching a movie affected the lives of the actors involved, or taking a photograph robbed the subject of their soul. Only an idiot would think it would. Planes didn’t cease to exist when they outpaced the sound of their engines, and starships didn’t break the universe when they overtook their own image.

  Fenrir would almost certainly be loitering in the shadow of one of the Objects. She knew I was coming, and knew my objective; all she had to do was lie in wait. The instant I appeared, she’d light me up with her targeting lasers and let fly with her torpedoes. I’d have maybe ten or fifteen seconds to deploy the shuttle, depending on her range at the point of engagement, and then I’d need to devote all my attention to the defensive cannons.

  So far, the fabricators in the automated spaces of my engineering section had produced four torpedoes, each armed with a fifteen-megaton fission warhead, and enough ammo to run the cannons continuously for up to three hours. In order to find the material to do this, they’d torn out every non-essential piece of equipment and recycled two of my six shuttles. If I made it back to Camrose, I’d need a complete refit and overhaul. In the meantime, four torpedoes were the best I could do with the material at hand, and in the time available. In contrast, assuming she’d rearmed after her attack on the Geest van Amsterd
am, Fenrir would be carrying up to sixteen torpedoes—four of which would be tipped with antimatter.

  I took note of a worrying fluctuation in one of my engines. In order to get here, I’d pushed them harder than they were supposed to be pushed. Although the chances of a catastrophic failure were relatively small, any hard manoeuvring would heighten the risk of damage and degrade performance.

  Slowly, I began to dip in and out of the higher dimensions, moving like a small boat cresting a series of waves, each crest greater than the last. Finally, when my largest oscillation took me almost completely out of the universe, I fired the jump engines. Like a flick of a dolphin’s tail, they broke the surface tension between the realms and hurled me up and into the tearing squalls that lay beyond.

  * * *

  Contrary to what many humans believe, there are no monsters in the higher dimensions. At least, none I’ve ever seen. However, there are ghosts, of a sort. You can hear their voices in the roar of the stars; in the emission shells of long-dead civilisations; in the cries of ships in the far-flung reaches of the galactic swirl; in the chirps of closer craft; and, behind it all, in the ever-present fourteen-billion-year-old grumble of the Big Bang, which still echoes around the hyperspatial vaults, borne on the impossible breeze.

  Within a few seconds of total immersion, through the fragmentary rain of old signals and the ongoing thunder of the universe, I received a priority transmission from Adalwolf. He had been trying to contact me for half an hour. My layover on the edge of the system had confused him. He had been expecting me to dive into the Gallery with all weapons ablaze. Now, I suspected he was starting to wonder at my tactics.