The Lesser Devil

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “That would explain the comms blackout,” Kyra said, wincing as another shot rattled the shuttle behind its shield membrane.

  “You think they’re jamming us?” Crispin asked. “If they’re jamming us,” Tracy said.

  “Can we divert the shuttle?” Sabine asked, leaning towards Kyra. “There are mining outposts all through these mountains. Father’s posted garrisons at them. One of the forts!”

  “We could push straight on for Artemia,” the copilot suggested. “Hard burn? Take us up to thi—”

  Boom!

  That last detonation went off directly beneath the shuttle, lifted them as easily as a child might a boat from the surface of a lake. The shields had eaten the brunt of the blast, but the shockwave pushed air up under them, expanding with the heat of the explosion, and the shuttle tipped up, nose pointed down at the distant mountains. A metallic sound resounded through the hull. Another. Clank. Kyra pulled them up out of their dive, banking left.

  “What was that?” “What was—?” Boom!

  Once more, Tracy was interrupted by an explosion that rattled Crispin in his chair. Sabine screamed. Alarms began to wail from the control console and the bulkhead door behind them slammed shut. Red light filled the cabin, and dimly—as though it were happening to some other person—Crispin felt his gorge began to rise. His feet lifted off the floor and through the windows to front and sides he saw the red mountains rushing, rushing by. They spun and the clouds and trees with them, and was pressed back into his seat.

  “We’ve been hit!” The man called Tracy yelled, and to Crispin it seemed his words came to him as if down a long tube.

  Through the shields? It shouldn’t be possible. He had seen the shield indicator on the console just seconds before. It had been blue. How had this happened? How? He tried to cry out—or thought he cried out. Hands went tight on the arms of his chair as the shuttle went spiraling down. More words rushed over him, though who said them Crispin afterwards could never say.

  “Lost a whole chunk out of the starboard side! Wing’s still there!” “Lost some of the soldiers!”

  “Damn it! Damn it!”

  “Hit rear stabilizers on my mark!” “Lost one of the repulsors, too!” “Go! Go! Go!”

  His vision blotted out as Kyra pulled the shuttle out of its vicious spin. How her merely plebeian nerves and sinews acted through all that force Crispin couldn’t say, yet act they did. The old captain sat calm as a stone in her seat, her teeth clenched, her chin tucked against her collarbone, her hands never leaving the controls. She snarled through it all, and teeth still bared she pulled the damaged shuttle out of its dive mere hundreds of feet before their aircraft smote the mountainside.

  Sabine cheered, and Crispin realized that his sister had been right. Kyra could fly through a hurricane. He thought about his sword concealed in a pocket of his cape. Some use he’d been in all this.

  Idiot, he thought, this isn’t over.

  “I’m going to have to put us down!” Kyra’s words came over top all the other noise in the world. “Shield’s holding … somehow! They must have bypassed it!”

  “There!” Tracy shouted, and pointed out and to the right.

  Something was bothering Crispin. Something hadn’t added up—he wasn’t sure what.

  Below them, the mountains flattened out, rising in levels around the broad face of a plateau. The signs of ancient quarrying were evident: stepped terraces descending along one face, the whole thing graded off and smooth. Once, perhaps five thousand years ago, there had been a mine here of some sort. Uranium? Maybe. Whatever had been there was gone, and there was nothing now but the wilderness: bare stone and the scraggy ground cover blown in the wind. Night was coming on, the western sunset bleeding beneath the lip of the clouds.

  It was almost beautiful—for a moment—if in a stark and unforgiving sort of way, if only for a moment. Then Crispin remembered: there had been two metallic noises before that crippling blast.

  Two.

  He didn’t remember until the second charge blew.

  If anyone screamed this time, he never heard it, For a brief moment, he thought that he was flying. The mountains and the plateau ahead seemed to rise, marching up the side of the window as the shuttle began to spiral. There were no sounds in all creation but for the rushing of the blood in his veins and a silent screaming like a wind through his soul.

  He was going to die. He was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it. And not only him: Sabine was going to die—and, if Father was right—their family would die with them.

  Too soon. It was all too soon.

  Crispin’s last thought was of Hadrian. Hadrian would survive, at least.

  Hadrian would avenge them.

  Chapter 5

  The Adorators

  Death felt a lot like pain.

  That wasn’t so bad. Crispin could handle pain. It was the blood rushing to his head that vexed him. Then he realized: he was not dead at all. Somehow. He was only upside-down, the roof of the cabin below him was just within reach. His head ached, and when he touched it his fingers came away red. But his vision was clearing, sharpening as the blood pounding in his head took on new and sharper definition. Like a blind man, he pawed at the ceiling below him, braced himself against it and undid his restraints. Despite his best efforts, he fell hard on his side. He lay there longer than he cared to say—longer than he could guess.

  The chairs and console looked very strange the wrong way round, the whole ship made suddenly alien. He was forgetting something, distracted by shock and pain. He was only glad that nothing seemed to be broken. What had he forgotten?

  “Sabine!” he tried to cry out, but his voice croaked, rasping like an old woman’s. How long had he been unconscious? “Sabine!” There she was, still strapped into her seat beside him, her long hair hanging almost to the ceiling beneath her. With a groan and a mighty struggle, Crispin pulled himself to his knees. Still repeating her name—as if doing so might wake her from sleep—he went to her side. Cradling her to protect her head, he let her free from her seat’s crash webbing and lowered her to the ground. He checked her pulse, held his ear close to her lips. Still breathing. Still alive. If anything, she seemed better off that he was—she wasn’t bleeding.

  The same could not be said for Kyra’s copilot. The windshield had shattered when the shuttle hit the ground—it was that glass maybe that had cut his head—and the impact had crushed the outer hull of the shuttle, caved it in and killed poor Tracy where he sat.

  “Lord …” a weak voice drifted in from his right. Kyra. “Lord

  Marlowe?”

  “It’s me. It’s all right.” The captain was still hanging in her seat. She’d managed to avoid being crushed by the impact by mere inches. “Your lieutenant’s dead. Are you hurt?”

  “Think I broke a rib or two … are you?”

  “I’m fine, just got cut a bit. Sabine’s unconscious, but I don’t think she’s hurt.”

  “And my men?”

  Crispin blinked. “What men … ?” He’d forgotten. Forgotten about the three dozen guards that had been riding in the back of the shuttle. Crispin felt the color leaching into his face and turned way. He didn’t want to see the peasant woman’s expression. “I’m not sure, I had to check on you. I … let me get you loose.” When that was done he stood, stooping just a bit.

  He tried the bulkhead door, stepping over Sabine. The system was dead. A small voice in the back of his head whispered, That means the shields are down. They were wide open if whoever had attacked them came back around. Images of black ships raining fire down on them filled his mind. Crispin hoped their attackers had been on the ground after all. That would give them time.

  “We’ll have to crawl out,” Kyra said, indicating the gap beneath the lip of the shattered windshield and the rusty earth. “We might have to dig a little to get Sabine out, unless your sister wakes up sooner rather than late, but …”

  A flash of blue-white light filled the c
lose space, and Crispin—who hadn’t been listening to Kyra at all—sank the point of his sword into the bulkhead door. The blade had appeared from nowhere, and its exotic matter edge cut clean through the metal. The particles in the blade arranged themselves so the cutting edge stood a single molecule wide, and so the thing slipped through metal and ceramic plating as easily as flesh. Moving steadily, Crispin cut a man-sized hole in the door and pushed it through.

  Warm air wafted in. Smoke.

  “Where did you get that?” Kyra asked, nodding at the sword.

  The blade vanished into a kind of mist as the young lord turned, “My father gave it to me before we left. He was expecting trouble, but not until we reached the city.” He stopped short of elaborating and stowed the sword’s hilt back inside the inner pocket of his cape. “Stay with Sabine in case she wakes up. I’ll see what’s going on.” And with that he ducked out through the hole he’d made and into the compartment with the luxury couches he had sat in not so long before. Sabine’s couch had come loose from the ceiling and scraped all around the chamber as the shuttle fell. She would have died if she’d not gone to the cockpit. He might have died, too.

  Walking on the ceiling, he moved towards the rear of the ship and the next bulkhead. The failing sunlight fell in through a hole in the roof above—the floor—and by its radiance he saw the bulkhead was open. Crispin drew out his sword again, but did not activate it, resting his off hand on the switch that would trigger his body shield at the first sign of danger.

  Danger never came, though Death had clearly come calling.

  There were not many bodies left in the rear compartment that had not been blown out when the explosives went off. A few remained strapped to their seats: arms and the remnant of arms hanging down. Nearer the points of impact there were men who were no longer men at all, but rather masses of flesh or bright stains on the walls and carpet. Crispin had seen that color before on the sands of the Colosso. He had put it there killing slaves in mock combat.

  It looked different somehow. Brighter. More alarming. He clenched his teeth.

  “Is anyone there?”

  No word, no cry rose to answer him, and for the moment the only sound was the faint hiss of some damaged electrical conduit.

  “Anyone?” Crispin called again. Sir Felix’s lessons—long turned to instinct and spinal reflex—made him take a step back, facing the rear compartment with his left side, the hand with which he would have held a shield. “Hello?”

  They could not all be dead. There was no way that only he and the two women in the cockpit had survived. It just didn’t seem possible. “Is anyone alive?”

  “Lord?” a thin voice, quavering. “Lord Marlowe?”

  “Soldier!” Crispin relaxed his posture, hearing the strain the other man’s voice. “Can you stand? Is there anyone else?” As he spoke, Crispin clambered forward, careful not to step in or under any of the bodies. He couldn’t see the speaker. Some impulse told him he ought to keep the fellow talking. “What’s your name?”

  “Lud, lord.”

  Despite the horror of the moment—or perhaps because of it—Crispin snorted, “That’s a bad name.”

  “Aye, but it’s better than Ludwig, sir, which is my proper name. My dad gave it to me.”

  “Well, he sounds like an idiot.”

  “He was, lordship.”

  “Would you stop agreeing with everything I say and put up a hand or something?” Crispin snapped.

  There. A gauntleted hand emerged from beneath a pile of debris. The young lord hurried over, slipping his sword back into his cape pocket. Part of the fuselage had fallen in and landed on the man. From the look of things, his armor had taken the worst of it: he was only pinned. It took a great effort to lift the metal off of Lud, and the soldier crawled out.

  “Think I’m just bruised,” he said, sitting with his back to the wall. “Don’t seem right, being bruised when the others…” His words failed. He had his helmet on, and his visor was an opaque arc of black ceramic, totally featureless. It didn’t matter. Crispin thought his face must look like his own. He had seen his thin reflection in the surface of the ruined fuselage: wide-eyed, tight-lipped, the face paler even than usual. Half a ghost he’d seemed, or at least to have seen one.

  “You can’t be the only one …”

  Lud massaged his neck, “Some guys got sucked out when the charges blew. If they didn’t end up like …” he looked round at the carnage, hung his head. “… well, they might be alive. Their suits’ impact layer should eat most of the crash, save them the broken bones.” His head turned up so that he looked at Crispin, “Did—is Captain Kyra all right? And your sister?”

  A flicker of irritation twanged across Crispin’s jaw to hear his nobile sister referred to thus. Comrades they were in extremity, but Lud was still only a peasant. “They’re both alive. Your lieutenant wasn’t so lucky.” A groan came from further back down the compartment. Another man had survived.

  • • •

  At length, Lud and Crispin found another six survivors. Of those, Van had broken an arm and Ored lost a leg below the knee that his suit had patched as well as it could. When the worst of them had been pulled from the wreckage to the chilly plateau outside, Crispin went back for Kyra and his sister. Sabine was sitting up, the older woman crouched at her side, supporting her in the dimness of the cabin. Crispin knelt beside her, “Are you all right?” He’d wished now that he’d had the foresight to pull her out of the ship while she was still unconscious. He did not want her to see the mangled corpses.

  “Sore,” she said, looking up at him. “How many of the men survived?” Crispin swallowed. That should have been his first question. It would have been Hadrian’s first question, too. “Six, we think.” Kyra swore.

  “Six?” Sabine echoed, voice hollow. “There were three dozen men.” She turned to look through to the rear compartment, but Crispin stopped her. “Let me look, Crispin!”

  “No.”

  “Let. Me. Look.” He did, and saw her face turn white. Presently she shut her eyes. “Men will die for this,” she said. And she was her father’s daughter in that moment. Marlowe to her bones.

  Silence. Crispin didn’t want to say what Lord Alistair had told him on the tarmac. To name their aunt the villain aloud was to make it real. Crispin snorted at the thought. It was almost something Hadrian might have said, or Tor Gibson. Perhaps he had paid more attention at his lessons than he thought.

  Kyra spoke up. “Whoever they were, they must think we’re dead. Or they were on the ground like we thought, else they’d be on us by now.” She stood, wobbling a bit on tired legs. “We should get moving. Leave the shuttle at least. Is your terminal working?” Crispin shook his head; he’d tried it while the peltasts had been busy scavenging equipment from the ship. Kyra’s frown deepened, the age lines sharpening on her leathered face, “Mine neither. But that’s the mountains for you. Even satellite coverage is bad up here. It’ll get worse in the valleys.”

  And if it is Aunt Amalia, then everything’s against us, Crispin thought.

  House Kephalos owned the entire planet. All of Delos and Delos’s datasphere would be under their control. Even if they weren’t jamming communications in the local area, they might have ordered the service operators to turn a blind eye to anything flagged with House Marlowe code.

  “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “We need to move.”

  With Kyra’s help, they pulled Sabine to her feet and went out through the ragged hole in the shuttle the explosion had made. As they passed beneath that ruinous arch into the growing dark, Sabine asked, “How did they do this? We were shielded.”

  “Might have been a trailing mine, ladyship,” said Lud, approaching ahead of the others. He knelt, movements only a little unsteady. “Smart bombs. Get shot out ahead of a target, then slide over a shield’s curtain, use the friction to slow down until they’re slow enough to pass through. Then they clamp on and …” He shrugged.

  “They’re expens
ive,” Kyra said.

  “Definitely not smugglers, then,” Sabine said. Then she asked the obvious question. “Where do we go?”

  A moment passed before Crispin realized that everyone was looking at him, but he little knew this country, and turned to Kyra, who said, “Down into the valley, for a start. It won’t take long for whoever is out there to find us up here—if they haven’t already.”

  “Ored can’t walk, captain!” one of the soldiers said.

  Kyra brushed past Crispin to stand before her men. The man Ored, the one who had lost his leg, sat on a stone with one of the others. The elderly captain stooped so that she looked the man eye-to-eye, and placed a hand on his shoulder. He’d removed his helmet, and his swarthy face was drawn tight with pain. “Can you stand if two of the others carry you between them?” she asked. “Or do we have to leave you here?”

  Crispin hadn’t thought it was possible for Ored’s face to become any more bloodless than it was, but it did. He swallowed and in a small voice said, “I think so, ma’am.”

  “Because we will have to leave you if you slow us down. We’ve the lord and lady with us.” There was a flash of metal in her hands, and Crispin realized she was holding her sidearm, her finger very near the trigger.

  Ored must have seen it too, for the whites of his eyes widened in the night and he said, “Yes ma’am. I understand. I can move.” The strain in his voice was almost tangible, like a harpstring pulled between his teeth and the ears of all who heard him.

  Kyra straightened, sucking a deep breath in through her nose. She seemed suddenly very tall to Crispin, not a plebeian at all, but some nobile lady cast down from some forgotten great house. Pointing to two of the survivors who were uninjured, she said, “You two, carry him between you and get your shields on. We’re heading out!”

  No sooner had she said this than a low whine filled all the air around them, and Crispin recognized the sound of repulsors. “Shields up!” he called, thumbing his own shield to life. The Royse curtain crackled as it sprang into being, folded tight around him, fractal patterns gleaming briefly and then fading to invisibility.