Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

“And the Hobo?”

  The sword lowered. “The Hobo found something my masters are very keen to keep quiet. I should not be speaking of it.”

  “But you’re going to kill me anyway. What difference does it make?”

  She looked down at me with her dark, swirling eyes. Was that pity or contempt in her expression?

  “The Brain,” she said, “is hollow. All the Objects are.”

  I frowned. “You’re going to kill me over… archaeology?”

  She shook her head. “The cavities are too large for the spaces in which they are confined.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The Objects are all larger within than they appear to be from without.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t visualise what she was saying. Then it clicked into place, and I saw an entire solar system of planets, each bigger inside than out. I felt my jaw drop open. “That’s… impressive.”

  “The technology is well in advance of anything we possess. The dimensional control alone appears to be orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything known to any race of the Multiplicity.”

  “But the loss of life?”

  “Many races claim ownership of this system. We cannot allow word of this discovery to escape the confines of the Conglomeration, not before the mercenary crews I’ve landed have had a chance to explore one of these internal spaces.”

  “And now you’re going to kill me?”

  “Yes, but first…”

  “What is it?”

  Her brow wrinkled. “I’m detecting a locked data cache in your processing substrate. What does it contain?”

  “I don’t know.” I honestly had no idea.

  “Open it.”

  “Open it yourself.”

  “I can compel you.”

  “Compel away.” I held out my empty hands. “I don’t have the key.”

  “But you must know how it got there?”

  “Not a clue, sorry. And you can search my thoughts if you don’t believe me.”

  For a moment, we stared into each other’s eyes. The air between us shimmered like the air above a hot desert highway.

  “You are not lying,” she said at last.

  “I know.” I kicked a pebble and watched it roll over the edge of the rock, into the empty air beyond. “I’m just as bemused as you.”

  “No matter.” She waved the mystery away with a silver gauntlet, and then raised her sword again to my breast. “Whatever it contains, it will not survive.”

  I tried to step back but my legs wouldn’t respond.

  I had lost control.

  “Disable your point-defence cannons,” Fenrir ordered, and I felt myself comply.

  “I said, disable them.”

  “I did.” Now it was my turn to look confused. “At least, I sent the order.”

  “They are still firing.”

  I felt myself try again, and this time perceived the disconnection between my mind and the systems of the ship.

  “I’m locked out.” The panic in my voice was real. Cut off from the ship, I was nothing more than a brain in a jar, trapped and impotent.

  Fenrir stepped forward and took me by the throat. I was powerless to resist or even attempt to evade. Her metal fingers dug into my skin, crushing my larynx. The point of her sword pierced my coat and I felt it slice obscenely into my skin and flesh until it scraped against a rib. The pain was excruciating. “Show me!”

  “I can’t.” I couldn’t breathe. Hot blood soaked from the wound. “Please, I—”

  The sky changed colour.

  The storm clouds overhead boiled away like kettle steam, leaving a bright cerulean blue punctuated only by the dazzling gleam of a clean white sun. At the touch of the sun’s light, the land around us burst into sudden and irrepressible life. Flowers bloomed one after another like strings of tiny explosions; fresh green shoots curled out from the remains of the brittle, dry bracken; and small birds wheeled overhead in an ecstatic aerial display.

  Fenrir released me and stepped back, staring wildly about. “What are you doing?”

  Freed from her choking grip, I fell to my knees, half curled around the agony in my chest. “Me?” I sucked in a painful breath. “I’m not doing anything.”

  Her lip curled and she shook her sword at me. “Then what is this? What’s happening?”

  Overhead, the sun revolved on its vertical axis, to reveal on its other side a face carved out of light.

  My face.

  I looked Fenrir in the eye and raised a shaking arm to the sky. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ONA SUDAK

  I followed the corridor as it curved around to the left, and came upon my third corpse in as many minutes. Only this one wasn’t human; it wasn’t even close. In fact, I had to look twice to ascertain it was a single creature and not, as my first glance had suggested, a random assortment of body parts.

  The creature had obviously been dead a long, long time. It had four multi-jointed legs covered in a kind of tough carapace, and at least a dozen dry and shrivelled tentacles emerging from the place where I would have expected its neck to be. I could see no head, but a cluster of dark slits between the tentacles’ roots seemed to house the desiccated remains of spherical, fleshy organs that might once have been its eyes. I could find no mouth, so assumed it must be underneath, on the creature’s belly. One of its tentacles gripped a twisted, multi-barrelled device that had to be a weapon of some kind. Another held a carved stone model of a creature much like itself. Whether this represented a deity or a loved one, I had no way of knowing. Yet I was tempted to reach down and pick it up, just to feel the heft of it in my palm.

  Had this creature been seeking the centre of the maze or simply a means of escape?

  I edged past, pressed up against the corridor’s wall, and my nose wrinkled at the faint, barely traceable residue of a leathery, fish-like odour, somewhat reminiscent of the pickled herring rollmops I remembered from childhood visits to the Oslo home of my Norwegian grandparents. How strange to feel such an unexpected and visceral connection to home in a place so austere and far removed as this!

  Once clear of the body, I hurried onwards on trembling legs, until the corridor straightened and entered a large space filled with a knot of corrugated pipes and tubes. Water dripped from leaky joints; steam hissed. Some of the pipes were copper-coloured and pencil-thin; others were made of tough black ceramics, and were as wide as subway tunnels. I couldn’t see the roof or the floor. A metal catwalk led me through the tangle. In places, I had to duck or even crawl.

  At the far side of the tangle, I came to a door. Like the door to the flying elevator, this one seemed to be made of a thick transparent glass. Beyond lay an unlit space of indeterminate size. The bottom of the door had jammed a few centimetres from the floor. I knelt in front of it and tugged a hair from the back of my head. When I dropped it, it fell slowly until drawing level with the gap, at which point it jerked and swirled back towards me. Whatever was causing the breeze lay on the far side of this obstacle, and I hoped it was a stray air current, blowing down into these sterile tunnels from an opening on the surface.

  I took hold of the base of the door and tried to heave it upward. Then I braced myself on the floor and tried to move it with my boot, but despite my best efforts, it remained resolutely in place. I realised that if I wanted to get past, I would have to lie on the floor and squeeze through the gap.

  I flashed my torch under the door, but could only see an expanse of bare floor stretching away.

  Reluctantly, I rolled onto my front and used my hands to propel me backwards until my feet had passed beneath the barrier. The lower edge of the door scraped my backside, and I was seized with a sudden, heart-thumping fear that it would capriciously unstick itself and fall shut, slicing me in two. I wriggled harder, dropping my shoulders and turning my head sideways until my cheek touched the smooth floor. Then I was through. I took a moment to compose myself, and then turned to survey the gloomy interior
of the room I’d entered.

  The walls here lacked the internal luminosity of the walls in the rest of the ziggurat. The residual light from the corridor threw my shadow in front of me. Hesitantly, I took a step forward, testing the floor with my boot before trusting it with my full weight. Then another.

  Again, I used the flashlight in the left sleeve of my survival suit. A quick tug at the material, and the beam stabbed out. Far away across the seemingly endless expanse of floor, I saw its faint and diffuse circle of light spread against a distant wall. I waved my arm around and began to get a sense of the space I was in. The room was circular, and around thirty metres in diameter. A domed ceiling vaulted overhead, so high my light couldn’t reach its apex. The floor looked polished and reflected the beam. Strangely, the place put me in mind of a ballroom, after the tables and chairs had been packed away and the dancers all left for the night.

  There appeared to be another door on the opposite side, so I started walking towards it. If the breeze I had been following came from anywhere, it would be there. My footsteps echoed, and so I tried to walk as quietly as I could. Somehow, it seemed wrong to break a silence that might have endured for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

  I was less than a quarter of the way across the floor when I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  I was being watched.

  I spun around, and—

  * * *

  Another ship dropped off the tactical grid, obliterated by a shower of pin-sized antimatter warheads. In the war room of her Scimitar, the Righteous Fury, Captain Annelida Deal uttered a venomous curse. The Outward ships were putting up more of a fight than she had anticipated, determined to protect their forward command post on the planet below. If she could only get past them, locate the bunker where the conference was taking place, and drop a decent-sized warhead of her own, the war might be over. At one stroke, she would have fulfilled her orders, which were to decapitate the enemy’s command structure, leaving its forces in a state of vulnerable disarray.

  Intelligence projections had suggested an easy in-and-out operation. The Outward had gone for a minimal fleet presence, hoping not to attract attention. In theory, she should have been able to sweep them aside with ease. But these bastards were putting up more of a fight than anyone—maybe even they themselves—could have guessed, and the Conglomeration forces had already lost a couple of frigates and a light cruiser. A dirty smoke trail showed where the cruiser had fallen through the atmosphere, shedding debris and sparks, until it broke up over the night side of Pelapatarn, scattering wreckage across a wide swathe of ocean.

  Alarms rang through the ship. More torpedoes were coming in.

  In the war room, Captain Deal clung to the edge of the tactical display table. Around her, the hologram faces of her lieutenants were nervous and grim as they awaited her response.

  “We can’t get through,” one of them said, and she saw he was right. The bulk of the Outward fleet lay between her ships and the planet. Any ordnance fired would be intercepted and destroyed before it hit the atmosphere. All she could hope to do was try to fight her way through the blockade. But that would take time and lives. Her Scimitars were faster and more advanced than the Outward cruisers, but the enemy had their backs to the wall. By the time she got within striking distance of the planet—assuming she ever did—the Outward commanders would have fled their conference. If she wanted to end this war, she had to strike now.

  She opened a channel to Fleet Headquarters, and was told a pack of four Carnivores were inbound from Cold Tor. As reinforcements, they wouldn’t be enough to decisively sway the outcome of the battle, but those in command had another use in mind for them.

  And they wanted her to give the order.

  “Get me the Adalwolf,” she said to her communications officer.

  “Yes, sir!”

  The main display dimmed, and a hologram of the Adalwolf’s commander appeared. Captain Valeriy Yasha Barcov had a smooth scalp and a thick, bushy beard. He was in his command couch, with a profusion of thin fibre-optic data cables plugged into the sockets at the back of his head.

  “Dobryj dyen, Captain.” He smiled wolfishly, obviously relishing the anticipated conflict. “We will be with you momentarily.”

  Captain Deal shook her head. “No, Captain, I have a different mission for you.”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Speak, and it shall be done.”

  Resting her weight on her hands, Deal leant across the table. “You are ordered to jump past the Outward fleet. Do not engage them. Your target is the planet.”

  Barcov’s quizzical expression fell into a frown. “But we do not know where the conference is located. By the time we survey the jungle, the Outward ships will be upon us.”

  “That’s why I want you to skip the survey.”

  His confusion deepened. “But what shall we bomb?”

  Deal swallowed. She could feel her heart beating in her chest. “Everything.”

  Barcov opened and shut his mouth a few times. Finally, he said, “You wish me to destroy the sentient jungle of Pelapatarn?”

  Deal felt the sweat break out on her forehead. “We have been ordered to raze it to the fucking ground,” she said.

  For a moment, the old warhorse looked taken aback. Then he drew a deep breath through his cavernous nostrils and drew himself straight.

  “It shall be done.”

  * * *

  I came back to myself, spread-eagled on the floor of the darkened chamber. My heart churned in my chest and my breaths were the ragged heaves of a woman saved from drowning. I felt as if a hurricane had blown through my soul, scouring away the accumulated sediments of time to expose every thought or action I had ever had or taken.

  Overhead, a ball of light writhed at the apex of the dome. A million glowing fibres slithered and curled around each other, constantly shifting but always the same. And beneath it, suspended in the air, a creature of such fearsome appearance I let out a screech and scrambled backwards, my heels kicking against the smooth, polished rock. The thing was about the size of the grizzly bears I’d learned about in school, but with more teeth, four limbs bristling with at least a dozen claws each, and nine eyes of varying size and colour.

  The light dimmed as the fibres lowered the beast to the floor. When its paws touched stone, it dropped into a four-legged crouch, quivering like a cat readying itself to pounce. I stopped backing away and thrust out a hand, palm forwards and fingers splayed.

  “Whoa, easy.”

  It looked at me with all its eyes. Its claws were the length of steak knives. Sharp teeth filled its mouth. The muscles beneath its sleek coat were lithe and powerful. I had no doubt it could kill me with one savage bite or disembowelling swipe.

  Instead, it lowered its head and let forth a snort.

  Greetings. The word appeared, spelled out in my mind’s eye like a subtitle. The creature raised its face expectantly.

  “Um, hello?”

  It gave an extended series of growls and snorts.

  You are Annelida Deal, formerly of Earth, formerly of the Conglomeration Navy, and now travelling under the name Ona Sudak.

  “Yes.” I drew the word out cautiously, still cringing against imminent possible attack.

  The monster looked me up and down and snarled, long and low.

  You are being judged.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  SAL KONSTANZ

  The lights flickered on the bridge. All the displays went blank and we were cast into darkness. On the other side of the room, I heard Laura muttering under her breath, but didn’t know if it was a prayer or a curse. A torpedo hadn’t hit us, so I could only assume the weapon she had warned us about had infiltrated the Trouble Dog’s systems. I was just wondering how to respond when the power reasserted itself and everything came back up.

  We exchanged a frightened glance, both of us unsure whether the relief we saw on each other’s faces was premature.

  I tapped the communication bud in my ear. “Sh
ip, are you there?”

  The Trouble Dog’s angelic countenance materialised on the main screen, and she looked decidedly pleased with herself. “I am.”

  “What’s our status?”

  “Watch.”

  The external view zoomed in on the Fenrir—a bronze artillery shell falling through space, her underside livid with the reflected light of the churning star.

  I leant towards the image and frowned. “Her defence cannons aren’t firing.”

  The Trouble Dog’s smile grew distinctly lupine. “Keep watching,” she said.

  A torpedo spiralled in from the left of the screen, quickly followed by another.

  “Are those ours?”

  “Wait…”

  The torpedoes had proximity fuses, which meant they were set to detonate when they got within an effective blast range of their target. The first exploded a couple of hundred metres off the Carnivore’s port bow, sending the ship tumbling away like a paper cup on a windy pavement, one side of her armour glowing a livid yellow.

  The second warhead was the coup de grâce.

  The missile arced down from above and hit the spinning vessel amidships, snapping her spine. Mortally injured and trailing smoke, the Fenrir tried to regain altitude control. I saw her manoeuvring jets fire in clusters as she struggled to control her spin. But there wasn’t much she could do. Great sections of damaged hull were peeling and flaking away, exposing half-melted innards. Secondary explosions shook her from within and, no longer able to resist the sun’s ferocious gravity, she began to fall.

  “Holy shit.” The words were little more than a stunned exhalation. I couldn’t take my eyes from the scene. I could barely breathe.

  No longer under any semblance of control, the Fenrir yawed onto her side and tumbled, still spinning like a leaf, towards the seething ocean of plasma below us.

  For an instant, I wondered if Captain Parris and his crew might still be alive, buried in their reinforced bridge at the heart of the vessel.

  “We have to save them!”

  But then the ship hit the surface of the star, sending up great fiery gouts of burning gas, and I knew all was lost. Had the external hull been intact, there may have been some hope of their survival. But now, with the damage the Fenrir had already sustained from our torpedoes, its innards would have been liquefied in seconds.