Ship like World Tree after a storm; so much damage to fix.
Replaced a half-melted plate, then moved on.
Picked shrapnel from a bulkhead, then moved on.
Sorted tangle of broken wires. Replaced damaged circuits.
Then moved on.
Repaired leaking hole moments before Hound of Difficulty hurled itself back into the face of the sun.
If hadn’t fixed it, ship would have been lost. All crew would have been dead. Burnt to nothing by invading plasma.
Nobody ever says thank you.
Nobody notices.
I just fix things, and move on.
In battle, I do my job, just as, during winter storms, ancestors kept the World Tree intact and functioning.
I wield tools.
I save the ship and move on.
I serve, and earn my right to mate.
Earn right to return home to World Tree.
I serve, as we have always served.
I do duty.
Always more to fix.
Always something broken.
FIFTY-ONE
ASHTON CHILDE
“It’s been over an hour,” I said. “Maybe it’s gone?”
Two more impacts had followed the one that destroyed our shuttle, and both of them had been directly outside the cave’s mouth. Seeking shelter within, we’d descended a flight of large spiral stairs, working our way deep beneath the surface of the Object in order to avoid further blasts.
“You’re welcome to go check,” Clay said. She wiped off the neck of her water bulb, refastened its cap, and dropped it back into the crate with the survival rations. “But I ain’t sticking my head out ’til I know that Carnivore’s fucked off. It could be sat up there right now, just waiting for us, and the minute we break cover…” She slammed her fist into the palm of her other hand. “Blam!”
“Then, what?” I let the frustration creep into my voice. I had no desire to linger in the path of an orbital bombardment, but I was nevertheless aware that each step downwards took me further from the wreck of the liner and the completion of my mission. “We can’t hide down here forever.”
“I hear that.” She turned and lowered herself onto the next step. “We can’t signal the captain from down here. That’s why we keep going. See how deep this rabbit hole goes. And maybe, just maybe, we find a way back up where nobody’s looking for us, and we get a message to her. Tell her to come down here and get us.”
“What about the wreck?”
She turned away, contemplating the next step. “Ain’t nobody alive there.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She crouched, preparing to swing her legs over the lip. “Because that Carnivore zeroed in on us from high orbit. There ain’t no way to escape that.”
I knew she was right. There were precious few places to hide in these canyons. Nevertheless… “The ship was hiding when we arrived, waiting to jump us. Maybe it didn’t stick around after the crash. Maybe somebody could have got out while it was concealing itself?”
Clay shrugged. “You’re probably right,” she said. “But my guess is it sent those mercenaries we saw as a clean-up crew. Anyone it missed, they will have got.” She dropped down onto the next step. The sound of her boots hitting the stone echoed up the stairwell. “And they’ve had a week to search that wreck. If anyone survived the crash, they’re dead now.”
Preston and I watched her descend until she’d passed around the curve of the stair and become hidden by the central pillar. Then we exchanged looks.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
He replaced his bulb in the crate, and switched the medical kit’s carrying strap from one shoulder to the other. “I don’t see how we’ve got a lot of choice.”
He went to follow but I put a hand to his upper arm, restraining him. “You don’t know what’s down there,” I said.
The kid threw me a haunted look. “I know what’s up there, though. And I’d rather take my chances with her than get blown to bits by an orbital strike.”
I released him and stepped back. “Fair enough.” I couldn’t argue with that kind of logic.
He followed the sound of Alva Clay’s footfalls. When he was about to similarly vanish around the central pillar, he stopped and looked back up at me. “Aren’t you coming?”
I took a long breath in through my nose. Finding Ona Sudak alive had been a faint, desperate hope. If she was gone, I had lost my only bargaining chip.
How ironic that a heavy cruiser from the Conglomeration Navy should have ended my career with Conglomeration Intelligence. Ironic, and infuriating. What reason could the navy possibly have for shooting down Outward liners, and why were the intelligence services more concerned with rescuing poets than stopping the slaughter? The trouble with operating on a “need to know” basis, I reflected, was that you were rarely told the things you most needed to know, and never allowed to fathom a wider context.
I didn’t know whether this aggression was an attempt to reignite hostilities, or some sort of random hit. The only thing that had become apparent was that my future, such as it was, lay with the House of Reclamation.
I picked up the crate containing our rations, letting the exoskeleton bear the weight.
“Yeah, kid, I’m coming.” I huffed. “It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else to go now, is it?”
FIFTY-TWO
ONA SUDAK
I lost track of time. Hunger gnawed at me until I imagined I could feel my stomach beginning to digest itself. The corridors down here in the ziggurat were almost as labyrinthine as the canyons on the surface, and lined with the same white stone. Shadows flickered in my peripheral vision, but vanished when I turned my head.
The rooms I passed were utilitarian and their various functions impossible to guess. The only furniture they contained had been carved from the same quartz as everything else, and seemed to have grown seamlessly from the walls or floor. There were some lectern-like objects that may have been perches of some kind, and the occasional boomerang-shaped plinth that may have formed a desk or perhaps a reclining couch. A xenologist might have been able to hazard a guess, but I had neither the interest nor the expertise to give the matter my full attention. I remained painfully aware I was burning calories I had no way to replace. If I couldn’t locate a means of escape, I would soon die here, just like—
“Oh shit.”
My eyes had been looking at the bodies for a couple of seconds before my conscious brain registered their presence. One lay on its back in the centre of the corridor, the other sat slumped against a wall. I approached cautiously, although it was quite clear they were both dead and had been for some time.
The one on the floor had been male, the one against the wall female. They both wore faded purple jumpsuits. Their skin had dried and shrunk, and most of their hair had fallen out. I guessed from the patches on their shoulders that they were the remains of a lost survey team, and from the lack of visible wounds, that they’d starved to death. Perhaps the man had succumbed first, too weak to carry on, which was why he was lying on the floor, and the woman had stayed to care for him until she was too weak to save herself. I forced my eyes away from the nametags sewn to the breasts of their jumpsuits. Starved as I was for human company, I didn’t want to know their names for fear I might somehow jinx my own chances of survival. After all, if they had been unable to escape this trap, what chance had I?
In an attempt to remain practical, I knelt and frisked them for useful tools, working my fingers into their pockets while trying not to flinch at the feel of mummified flesh beneath the dry material. I found a used tissue, a small tablet computer with a run-down battery, and a silvery harmonica. None of these objects were of immediate benefit, so I left them in a small pile between the woman’s feet. Then I checked their boots, hoping to find a concealed weapon but coming away disappointed.
Ahead, the corridor curved to the left. I knew I had to keep going while I still had the strength to do so, yet paus
ed a moment, feeling I should say something to mark the occasion—that even those who’d died alone and far from hope or home should have someone, even another lost stranger, to say a few words over them.
I cleared my throat, and listened to the sound echo off the walls and ceiling.
As an officer, I had often been called upon to preside over the burial of troops under my command, but I had never been asked to speak at a funeral as desolate and forlorn as this. I couldn’t even fall back on my usual spiel about honour and duty. These weren’t marines; they were civilians. I thought of Adam and felt my throat close up. At least these two had died together.
For a moment, I felt the crushing weight of my despair and fatigue, and experienced a terrible compulsion to sit down beside the woman and wait for my turn to die. If I were to lie entombed in these corridors for eternity, it would surely be better to have her company. Her hand might be desiccated, but it was still a human hand, and I longed to hold it in my own and draw comfort from its touch during my final moments.
Was that why she had stayed with her fallen comrade? Had the fear of loneliness been stronger than her will to keep fighting? I crouched in front of her. Her head was tipped back and resting against the white wall. Her unseeing eye sockets seemed to contemplate the universe beyond the ceiling, and I wondered at the thoughts that had flickered within the cave of her skull as she sat there beside her dead colleague, waiting for her life to end. Remorse, perhaps? Regret for mistakes made and roads untaken?
I raised a hand, unthinkingly reaching to cup her cheek, but stopped with my hand a few centimetres from her face.
Her hair was moving.
One of the dry, spidery locks hanging down past her ear shivered. I held my fingers in front of it but felt nothing. I frowned for a moment, and then cursed myself for an idiot. I was encased in my own personal bubble of breathable air. It could have been blowing a gale in this corridor and I would never have felt it.
Standing, I took the tissue I’d found in her pocket and tore it into tiny pieces. Then I dropped those pieces, a few at a time.
There was a breeze. The fragments fluttered. A faint but steady air current was coming from ahead, from around the curve of the corridor. Perhaps, locked in her own bubble of air until her death, the woman had never noticed. Or perhaps she’d simply lacked the strength to investigate.
Feeling suddenly energised, I brushed dry tissue crumbs from my hands. I looked down at the woman and her companion, and threw them a respectful salute. “Rest easy, my friends.”
I held the salute for twenty or thirty seconds, and then turned on my heel and hurried toward the source of the draught
FIFTY-THREE
TROUBLE DOG
The clutch of torpedoes went off one by one, like nuclear firecrackers. I felt their shockwaves moving through the star’s fiery soup, but they were too far away to inflict damage. As their sensors were unable to penetrate the plasma, the Fenrir seemed to be using them like depth charges, firing them into the sun and detonating them at random in the hope of hurting me. So far, she hadn’t come within a hundred kilometres of my actual position.
“How are we doing?” the captain asked.
“Our opponent’s wasting ammunition trying to drive us into the open,” I replied via the screen on the bridge.
Captain Konstanz’s face remained grave. Sweat speckled her brow. “We weren’t out very long before she found us. How much heat did we lose?”
“Not nearly enough, I’m afraid.”
She looked sideways at the blank bulkhead. “So we’ll need to surface again soon?”
“Within minutes.”
Her shoulders fell. “How many torpedoes does the Fenrir have left?”
“Two remaining.”
“Unless she’s manufactured replacements?” The captain’s voice was heavy with resignation.
“She hasn’t had time.”
“She’s been sat here for a week. She could have filled her cargo bay with missiles.”
“Unlikely, but possible.”
“Unlikely?” The captain laughed. “You’re betting our lives on something that’s ‘unlikely’?”
I failed to see the humour. “My tactical analysis suggests the Fenrir will not have perceived us as a significant enough threat to begin stockpiling munitions. The Adalwolf will be here in a few hours to assist her. My prediction is that she will wait for me to be driven into space by my need to vent heat. Then she will attack me with the same weapon she used to bring down the Hobo and the Geest van Amsterdam. She will attempt to get me to lower my shields and become passive, then she will use her remaining torpedoes to finish me.”
“And we’re going to let her try?”
“We have little choice, but thanks to Ms Petrushka here, I am both forewarned and forearmed.”
* * *
Despite my apparent confidence, I felt a degree of trepidation as I allowed myself to be once more borne towards the star’s raging surface. Everything I knew about the weapon my sister carried had been inferred and extrapolated from hearsay and guesswork.
And yet, despite my misgivings, I felt a certain wild joy. I was a heavy cruiser, a machine of death and conflict. Hiding, no matter how pressing the strategic necessity, felt like cowardice. I had done it because I had to; but now I was rising to meet my foe head-on, and I had forgotten how heady and intoxicating it could feel. I was charging the enemy from the depths of a furnace, my hull glowing and my torpedo tubes primed and ready to fire.
What could be more glorious?
As the murk ahead thinned, I turned all my attention to my tactical scanners. My bow cleared the surface, and I fired my engines and powered into space trailing a comet tail of lustrous star-stuff.
The Fenrir was skimming the star five thousand miles from my port side. I felt her lock onto me with her targeting lasers, yet her torpedo tubes remained closed. Instead of an assault, she signalled to me on a higher dimensional channel.
Here it comes, I thought. And, just for an instant, I had a clear hallucination of myself as a human, standing in a bare room with rain on the windows, wrapped in a trench coat and listening to a phone ring over and over again.
The vision passed.
Had it been part of the attack, or something else? Could it have been a trace memory from the dead woman whose cells formed the foundation of my consciousness? Could it have been carried in the DNA? Was such a thing even feasible?
I put the question aside. The Fenrir was still signalling me, even as it accelerated towards my position. All I had to do to engage it was access the channel.
At this point, I had been clear of the star for five and a half seconds. I opened my torpedo tubes and initiated a fifteen-millisecond countdown. The imaginary phone continued to ring. When the numbers reached zero, I fired my last two remaining torpedoes and answered the call.
Demons poured from the receiver.
* * *
I found myself standing in a virtual construct—on a chilly, windswept crag set atop a barren moor. My body was that of the woman I had once been, my only attire the shabby trench coat from my hallucination. Dark clouds glowered to the east, thick with the promise of impending rain. To the west, beyond the dead rust-coloured bracken, a listless clay-coloured sea flopped uselessly against a coarse, stony beach.
And Fenrir towered over me.
She had chosen to manifest in human form. Her eyes were smouldering nebulae in a face the colour of exposed bone. Her silver gauntlets and breastplate gleamed, the wind straggled her long auburn hair into dancing flails, and a thick black cloak flapped around her narrow frame.
“You could not have escaped,” she said. It was almost an apology, and she had yet to raise the long sword in her hand. I shrugged and looked out over the moorland. All the plants seemed to be either dead or dying, and I felt the first spots of rain on the wind.
“You got me?”
“Yes.”
“What happens now?”
She drew herself up. “I
am afraid I shall have to compel you to kill yourself.”
“Like you did with the Amsterdam and the Hobo?”
“Yes.”
“And if I refuse?”
“You cannot.” The Fenrir tapped the side of her head with a gauntleted finger. “I am inside your mind, and I can control your thoughts. I can plant any notion I wish. I can make you want to die.”
“Then why don’t you?” I began to shiver. With one hand, I closed the collar of my coat, gripping the material. “What are you waiting for?”
Fenrir flexed her sword arm. “You are my sister. The least I can offer you is a choice.”
Beside us, the crag fell away. I wondered if the rules of the simulation would allow me to hurl myself into that abyss, and whether I would be harmed by the impact when I reached the bottom.
“What kind of choice?”
The tip of the sword came up until it almost touched my left shoulder. “Would you rather turn off your defences and be destroyed by my torpedoes?” The sword point moved to my right shoulder. “Or fall back into the sun with your airlocks and cargo doors open, and be consumed by the fire?”
I thought of Captain Konstanz. Did she know I had been compromised, my plan having failed? Did she realise that she, Nod and the Petrushka woman were moments from death?
My plan…
A few moments ago, I’d been confident I had a means to save us. Now, I couldn’t remember exactly what that means might have been. The specifics had gone, leaving me standing here naked.
Fenrir moved her blade until the tip touched my throat. “Well?”
I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. It wasn’t a sensation I had experienced before. “Will you tell me one thing?”
“What?”
“Why you’re doing this? What was it the Hobo found when it scanned the Brain? And why did you have to shoot down that liner?”
Fenrir’s eyes narrowed. “The liner was off-schedule. It made a detour to see the Objects and got in my way. As soon as it detected my arrival, I had no choice but to silence it, and anyone aboard who might have served as witness.”
Embers of War Page 22