The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  He slapped the Vulgar-Wulm pilot’s shoulder. “Zeliolopos, Ribio.” Ribio nodded his unusual crossbreed face, banking the controls while the other pilot unfurled the sun chart on his lap. The sand grain colours of thousands of visible stars began to blend to chrome, moonlit silver as the privateer picked up speed again, edging into the superluminal.

  Maril unbuckled the master-at-arms’ belt. “Jospor, with me.”

  The captain waited for his second to follow, grabbing at the handholds on the side of the cockpit to pull himself out. He took the nearest ladder to the forward battery compartment, already able to feel the heat from the recently fired heavy cannon radiating through his thin—and probably useless—Voidsuit, which he had not yet tested in open space. Once inside the dark compartment, he paused, watching the gaggle of small, naked Vulgar steadily pouring ladles of water over the sizzling guns. They noticed him and paused in their work, one knocking over his vat in a fit of clumsiness.

  “They’re cooled enough—be ready to fire all batteries,” he announced, stepping to one side of the gushing water and turning back to the gangway, reaffirming his reputation among the crew as a captain of few words. The master-at-arms, bumblingly resplendent as he fitted his stolen Quetterel helmet, caught up with him at last. They approached the ladder together through the fog of steam.

  “We’ll be overtaken,” Maril said to him as they climbed down past huge wooden lockers piled with tins and supplies. “Fall back the moment we are.”

  “What if they aren’t interested in boarding?” his second-in-command squeaked in reply.

  “We’d all be dead by now if they weren’t—”

  Just at that moment, the lockers flew open under a heavy jolt, scattering their cargo down the shaft. Maril and the master-at-arms ducked as barrels and cans and heavy sacks thudded past and knocked them from the ladder. They fell together to the bottom of the shaft, Maril striking his helmet against the scullery hatchway with a crack. Gallons of water, presumably from the vats in the forward battery, came pouring down the ladder shaft after them, splashing the banded iron and wood of the floors and running in a river into the scullery. Helped by Jospor, the captain climbed blearily to his feet, the crude internal systems inside his helmet apparently dead or frozen, and stumbled through the water into the scullery. The walls and floor were trembling as frying pans and pots fell rattling into the torrent. Maril was struck again on the side of the helm, but waved the master-at-arms away and continued on. An oaken dresser shed its load of iron plates as the ship received another battering, each blow to the hull rippling through Maril’s body with the adrenalin of a real, tangible slap. The water was coursing into forward operations, and by the groaning of the hull Maril could already tell that his privateer had taken a crippling shot. He grabbed Jospor once more and sent the master-at-arms back the way they had come, dragging his boots through the water as he tried to run to operations and swearing softly inside his battered helmet.

  The water followed him, flowing between his legs and almost knocking him over. Maps and sun charts floated, washing past him as he stooped to enter the capsule. The squabbling Vulgar crew were busily trying to shut off the electrics in the chamber, but so far with no success. They wailed and scattered as sparks and flame erupted suddenly from some equipment they were working on.

  “Voidsuits on!” he yelled, as loudly as he could so that his voice would carry from the dead helmet, and as the flapping crowd of Vulgar made their way to their bunks to find their suits, Maril glanced around, pushing on through the soggy mass of charts and scattered equipment.

  Another trembling bang shook the Wilemo Maril as he made it through to his quarters, sending him crashing into his desk. The water had drained off into a side corridor, where it ran gurgling to the site of the damage somewhere at the rear of the privateer, possibly in the aft superluminal compartments. An unusual breeze was tugging the loose papers and maps in his chamber so he slammed the door, pulled off his helmet and searched the mess for his ceremonial sword and pistol, locating both on the rug under a pile of books and a tipped globe of the Firmament. He went to the shelf and flicked open a golden case, collecting a gloveful of shigella-poison-tipped bullets before clipping the pistol into its holster and tucking the rapier into his leather bandolier. As he did so, he caught sight of his reflection in the greasy, gilded mirror that still hung on the wall.

  His gaunt, pale face was stern, eyes creased with worry, long ear-tips grizzled and bent with age. Where his weak chin sank into his neck, a few whiskers of Vulgar beard, white and bristly, had grown over the last month or so—his attempt at appearing distinguished. Now, in a rattling ship under siege, such affectation looked weak and stupid, perhaps the traits of a sightless vanity that had succeeded in getting them caught after all. Maril glanced back to the eyes of his reflection, the sword weighing heavily against his hip. If I’m to lose this fight—if it is to be my last, then at least it’ll be quick. Such was the blessing of Voidfaring, he sometimes mused, that in death there simply wasn’t time to lament one’s mistakes.

  He wrenched open the door against the strengthening gust that was trying to pull it shut again and stamped out into the passageway just as the whole privateer rolled at forty-five degrees. The strips of lighting wire that followed the curve of the passage had begun to dim, so as he braced himself he fumbled for his suit lights, still swearing softly and continuously under his breath while he clipped the unresponsive helmet back on.

  The enormous planet they were aiming for—Maril was sufficiently experienced in the maintenance of his own Voidship to realise that they were no longer in full control any more, their progress across the system more akin to a thrown rock than anything resembling powered flight—held within its thrall a string of forty-three moons, many of them separate and ancient kingdoms in their own right. Plunging to one at random would be their only chance of survival, where with luck they could evade the attentions of the Nomad and make repairs. The captain understood—as would any of his crew possessing knowledge of the Zelioceti, the local Prism—that even if they did manage to set down on one of the moons, their troubles were far from over.

  He slid the handful of bullets into the bandolier, dropping one as another slap shook the hull and watching it roll away before he could bend to catch it. Another blow dislodged the piping from the bulkhead around him and he ducked as it clattered into the passageway, spilling sewage and filthy water across his suit. Wiping at his forearms, Maril could feel his ship slowing. Vague forces from which the privateer was supposed to be protected were compressing the hull like an accordion.

  He ran at a crouch, trailing his gloved hand along the corridor’s wall until he got to the junction at the privateer’s central passage, the walls boarded with slats that had served as beds for the extra crew he’d hired on Drolgins. Figures huddled in their worn blankets in some of the bunks stared down at him in the weak, flickering light. He thought of saying something to them, but there was no time. He steadied himself and ran on, slamming into the scullery ladder at the end of the passageway as the ship rolled again, his sword rattling against the riveted iron panels and almost getting jammed in the grille of a radiator column. He pulled his pistol free as he prepared to climb, kicking aside smashed barrels that had rolled and plunged down two levels from the larders.

  By now the privateer had begun to pitch from one direction to the other, more hits hammering the fuselage and likely deforming the hull. Maril held tightly to the ladder’s rungs, his small body swaying from side to side, and clawed his way up into the scullery. The cooks were trying to salvage what was left of the supplies, dodging falling crockery and waving away smoke pouring from the clogged ovens, taking no time to stop and acknowledge his presence when they saw him.

  The cannon began firing before he reached the forward battery, the privateer still weaving and banking. Popped shell casings like barrels sprang and bounced from the rear of the guns, flipping into piles that rolled with the motion of the ship. Maril jumped over
a spinning casing and ducked against the roaring heat, swinging quickly into the cockpit beneath the battery chamber. Nobody turned to him as he fell into his seat, their eyes fixed on the blazing image ahead of them.

  Pieces of wreckage illuminated by popping blasts of light tumbled and whipped past almost too fast to catch, the afterglow staining Maril’s eyes a muddy, streaked blend of colours. Ahead of them the Nomad traded fire, veering and twisting and spinning, as the haunting, glorious bulk of Zeliolopos—the largest of Tau Ceti’s gas giants—swelled rapidly before them.

  Amid the bolts of light, Maril could see that the schooner had been modified, with large-calibre guns now ruining the sleek lines of its exterior. Its pristine outer paintwork had been similarly despoiled with a bold new insignia that was hard to miss.

  He mouthed the word before he said it, knowing how ill the crew would take it despite those who sat with him in the cockpit knowing full well by now who their pursuers were. The insignia blazed across the Nomad’s sides was of three pan-Prism fingers stencilled in red. A famous warning, known and feared all across the Investiture. The Bult.

  Maril and his crew were being hunted by cannibals.

  The privateer’s cannon reloaded and fired into the curve of the Nomad’s hull before it could release countermeasures, smashing away a flurry of protective plating. The schooner swerved, discharging a round of glittering, explosive-tipped needle rounds that the Wilemo Maril twisted to avoid, the sudden force jamming Maril’s bones into the side of his suit and squeezing his face up against the inside of his helmet. The schooner was trying to slow, flaring retro engines as a snowstorm of shattered plating spattered the privateer. Maril saw his chance, tearing open his visor plate.

  “Full battery!” he screamed into the forward compartment above them, unclipping his belt to lean back as far as he could. Twelve guns situated in a halo around the bulge of the cockpit bellowed into life, shredding the rear of the Nomad with a flash that blinded them all for the best part of a minute. When their eyes had adjusted, they saw that the schooner had managed to deflect only one shell, the material of its hull sloughing away like shed skin, white-hot and sparkling.

  “Make full speed, Ribio,” Maril said, unclipping the jaw of his helmet to feel his bruised chin through the beard. He peeled a chart from the wall, turning it this way and that and ripping it in the process. “Anti-Zelio-Coriopil,” he said, tracing the concentric red lines with his shaking finger and tapping a red dot the size of a full stop.

  The privateer swung beneath the sleet of debris and outdistanced the Nomad once more, sailing like a broken leaf in a hurricane towards Zeliolopos.

  The giant planet was nine times the size of Jupiter, banded with fourteen hundred atmospheric belts of turbulence; all but one subtly different shades of green and gold, the last like a blood-red paper cut across its lower middle, speckled with lighter storm systems. The Wilemo Maril plunged on towards the swirling current of the storm until the details of its flowing clouds became visible, coiled and wound around a central gaping eye. To Maril it looked like a filthy, deep wound on the verge of turning septic, a rancid, infected crimson gash on such a vast, violently beautiful wall of colour. The privateer angled slightly while the tempest grew before them and eventually lost its form altogether, the miniature blotches of surrounding storms taking on their own sublime intricacies. Maril knew that each of the hundreds of weather systems that rolled around the giant eye were themselves bigger than the Old World, wider even than any of the moons that circled the planet. He looked into their dirty red sockets while he listened for the return of the stricken Nomad, his thin body still trembling every now and then inside the suit, and thought of all the ships and souls that had lost their way inside those storms over the centuries. He would not make the same mistake.

  As if in confirmation of his cunning, a speck rose to port, doubling in size with every heartbeat. The cockpit crew strained their damaged eyes, the pilots leaning forward. Maril sat back at last, listening to the ragged coughing of the master-at-arms and the similarly ill-sounding grumble emanating from somewhere in the superluminal compartments.

  The dot was as large as his outstretched thumb now, a hot, salty glob of viridian suspended like a teardrop against Zeliolopos’s tawny golds, greens and reds. The moon, Anti Zelio-Coriopil, was almost entirely ocean but for a chain of islands circling its equator—it was to them that he and his crew would fall. Maril knew little of what lay there besides information gathered from drinking songs, notably the Songs of Lopos, many of which he knew by heart. He did not sing—of course—but he deigned to sit and listen while his crew relaxed in whatever port they found themselves in, tapping a finger to their carousing if the drink got the better of him. He knew the soldiers called his finger-taps “the Marillion waltz,” and smiled secretly at the thought.

  The green globe’s faint string of islands became minutely visible and his smile stiffened, the feeling returning to his bruised face and battered limbs, still reeking with the film of sewage that had leaked from the pipes. The privateer began to judder as it hit the moon’s thick atmosphere, soft as smoke where the shadow formed its crescent.

  Maril flicked a switch, broadcasting through the only remaining internal channel.

  “Men: scuttling drill. Secure yourselves where necessary.” The pilots busied themselves in the front seats. Jospor turned to him, thrice buckled. His helmet stayed on, so that all Maril saw was a faded reflection of his own worn face peeping from its layers of Voidsuit.

  “Wilemo, you are sure of this? We might still have some strength—the damage crews are not done reporting in. There may be a chance of reaching Anti Zelio-Slaathis.”

  “I am sure,” he said, hinging up the jaw of his helmet. The internal workings looked reinvigorated, if still weak, as glowing, stolen Amaranthine automation lit up to either side of the faceplate. The moon became red in his helmet display, criss-crossed with symbols and representations of weather fronts. Jospor’s suited body flashed X-ray through the chair, his bones jumping out before the wavelengths of the helmet’s vision settled. “Descend,” Maril’s voice said clearly into the other helmets in the cockpit, their mumbled assent reaching his ears as if they were sitting beside him, and the ship began to fall.

  The green moon grew, its face wriggling across the windows as the privateer fought to remain level. Rivets rattled in their sockets, the plastic of the portholes to Maril’s side whitening with the smashing strain. He watched with dismay as his beloved Voidship took steadily increasing injury, the cockpit itself feeling loose in its housing beneath the forward battery. The tip of the nose, just visible beyond the hazing windows, was glowing and loosing sparks that splattered the view.

  The whole ship kicked upwards suddenly, jarring their bones, and the Nomad roared beneath. It fell in a scream from the radars, which had failed to anticipate its approach, spinning sideways for a moment before them and breaking in half above the clouds in a ruptured burst of flying pieces. The pilots of the Wilemo Maril shrieked, grappling with the turbulence of the enemy ship’s descent, and bounced through the flying white-hot debris and smoke trails. Maril saw the piece of shredded hull gliding towards them in his suit vision, its probable trajectory calculated and drawn across the view. Warnings flashed at the bottom of his sight, displayed with a multitude of arrows and excited Unified exclamation marks. The debris darkened the window, blocking the view of the entire moon. The helmet screamed in a tinny, synthesised voice, strobing the oncoming piece of hull in case he hadn’t noticed.

  “Battery!” he shouted again, spittle dampening his bristly beard, just as the white trails of a dozen shells slammed from around the cockpit.

  The piece of hull detonated into a thousand glowing shards, the splinters whickering past the cockpit in a blooming star of grey smoke tails. The Wilemo Maril dived through, the window hazing in one corner where wreckage had struck it. More thunks and bangs signalled their descent through the comet trail of debris from the Nomad, a ragged hole appeari
ng in the nose where something had shot through it. Maril watched his Voidship begin to unravel, the rivets popping at last from the tip of the nose and pinging away, plates of metal loosening and flapping and tearing in the gust of their fall. The green sea, hot and smooth like a worked slab of sun-baked jade, tipped to meet them.

  “Cut them,” he said to the pilots. The nose disintegrated, battering the forward windows as it spun away. The growling superluminal engines screamed once and were silent, only the shriek of a foreign wind coursing past and catching on the angles of the ship, all flaps and wings now extended to increase drag. Maril crossed his padded arms over his chest, hearing the moaning ship losing its momentum. Pieces of the enemy Nomad still rained through the haze of lemon-yellow sky in spears of black smoke, dashing white into the hot sea, the main bulk having already scuttled somewhere behind them.

  Jospor flicked off the last of the electrics, turning in his seat. He clapped a salute, followed by the pilots. “Captain.”

  Maril nodded back, his eyes drawn once more to the wall of emerald green rushing towards them.

  Trial

  “Wake up, Lycaste.” The words were spoken just before the water hit his hot, dry skin.