by Blaze Ward
It had been a long time since Glaxu had known a worthy opponent.
21
Athanasia
“Thoughts?” Athanasia asked as she reclined on the sofa in her salon.
Stephaneria remained with her, once she had sent the two men to their stations. Iulianus was at least close at hand if she felt ready to trigger the confrontation that would bind that man to her.
Or alienate her one, truly dangerous ally.
The Librarian was preparing stronger drinks than they had allowed themselves earlier.
“Landing the Mondi is a coup that perhaps eliminates the need for the M’Rai,” Stephaneria said carefully. “Or reduces the man to a bulldog you can sic on Tarasicodissa to maul him to death.”
“But?” Athanasia heard the tones in her pupil’s voice.
“I find the setting to be too coincidental,” Stephaneria continued. “Yes, the bird could have flown here in tandem with Longshot Hypothesis, when our target fled Kryuome, and then fallen out later. If I wanted to plant a mole in your organization, or a trap, it would look remarkably like that.”
“And yet, we cannot know,” Athanasia concluded the thought. “Certainly, I would not want to build the Mondi a flight deck and allow him aboard this ship if I wasn’t sure about his loyalties, but there is no way to test that now.”
She watched Stephaneria with undisguised appreciation as the woman approached. The librarian had reinvented herself completely under Athanasia’s touch. Transformed herself into a younger version of the Widow, plagued by the same fires and rage that could only be quenched in the blood of two men that would be taken together.
Athanasia accepted one glass and watched Stephaneria curl her legs under her on the floor at her master’s feet, leaning lightly against Athanasia’s leg for warmth and comfort.
“I am inclined to keep Vidy-Wooders in harness,” Athanasia decided after a gulp of the stiff drink. “Redtip can be hired for flying muscle, as he offered. We just won’t tell him anything more than we would any other mercenary thug we brought aboard. If Tarasicodissa hasn’t sold Longshot Hypothesis by now, he most likely won’t because Chatosig is one of the best places in Wildspace to make such a trade, at least according to our M’Rai and a few others I have investigated.”
“And if he escapes us?” Stephaneria’s tones had a dark current that ran under them. The kind that warmed Athanasia’s soul to hear.
“When we own a few planets, or pirate strongholds, we’ll just put out a bounty on the men that’s high enough to draw in the right sort of folks to claim it,” she purred. “When you have planetary budgets to play with, such funds become rounding errors, while at the same time more money than most of those killers make in a decade.”
“So we might not kill them ourselves, but we’ll still be delivered the heads?” the Librarian turned and looked up at her like a newly hatched bird looking for a meal.
“Indeed, my dear,” Athanasia reached down a hand to run it through Stephaneria’s hair, luxuriating in the feel and the purrs that emanated from the woman.
It could all still be a trap. She had no way short of betrayal by the little birdman to determine, at least until they had Longshot Hypothesis under their guns and she watched the Mondi annihilate the transport for her.
Or if he tried to stop her, and she had him splattered across space.
The new vessel was a purpose-built warship, designed and built by a species of berserker warriors for their specific needs, rather than an armed courier intended for transporting high lords and ambassadors in comfort. Even the Mondi’s slayership wouldn’t be able to do more than irritate her before he died.
In fact, she almost hoped that Redtip did betray her at the end, just so she could see how well his kind went against her, in case she needed to perhaps conquer a few of those sectors, or perhaps recruit squadrons of his kind to serve her.
Athanasia planned to become a Queen before she was done. Whatever men had to die now, or later, would just serve that purpose.
And she could include birdmen in the cause.
22
Valentinian
He had never really been a reader, but it turned out to be a good way to escape the others for a few hours after dinner. Valentinian had only had Artaxerxes as crew before, and keeping a ship in tune kept them out of each other’s hair most of the time.
Now, he had three others, instead of just the one, and they were all contributing to maintenance, so things got done quickly. Plus, he had been spending five to eight hours a day around everyone, more than half of it with the gravity turned off so they could get the big beams welded into place and then put down solid decks.
Bayjy had pronounced herself satisfied with the results today. Everything would hold weight even in landing maneuvers. Tomorrow, they could start running ducts for power, water, and air while leaving the gravity on all the time again.
Valentinian hadn’t bothered with purchasing hatches and such yet. They would get the space enclosed and then could add in walls to break things up. Closing off doorways would be the last thing they did before they called it good.
So he was forward, down in his own cabin. Dinner had been exciting, as they all realized how far they had come, but he was tired of people right now. Close the hatch, stretch out on the rack, turn on the overhead lamp.
He had picked up this book from Marduk when they first hit Kryuome. At the time, Valentinian had been looking for a way to baseline the surface of a planet that had been knocked a little sideways in its orbit by someone mad enough to throw a small moon at it. He hadn’t been able to read the Urlan hardly at all, but Bayjy had found a translation guide for him, so he had spent the last few weeks working on understanding more than just the maps.
It helped that most written languages these days had descended from Urlan, so he could frequently sound something out and make sense of it.
Valentinian sat bolt upright in surprise, numbly happy that his bunk wasn’t tucked into a small space on the wall, or he would have bashed his head against something. He went back and reread several paragraphs to make sure that he had not misinterpreted or mistranslated.
Nope. Shit. Maybe. I don’t know.
He didn’t bother with shoes. His socks were good enough for now, and the ship was warmer than he liked to keep it, so he didn’t need a jacket inside like he used to.
Valentinian emerged from his cabin with the book in one hand. He and Dave’s rec room downstairs was normally the crew space, when he was carrying passengers, but that had gotten a little awkward with Kyriaki and Bayjy taking up the two cabins above him. Another reason they were adding more space aft.
He went up the four steps into the main corridor, turned, and walked up the stairwell, following the pivot midway. He never took the elevator, unless he had something too heavy to carry, like frozen food boxes for the kitchen.
Upstairs, nobody was in the kitchen area, so he looked into the lounge to port-side and found Dave watching something on the big wall screen. Looked like a kid’s cartoon, except that everything was in a language Valentinian didn’t speak. Wasn’t Urlan, so he wasn’t interested in learning it today. He crossed back to starboard, where the two women bunked.
Both doors were closed. Hopefully Bayjy was still awake, because he didn’t want to leave this until breakfast if she was. Valentinian rapped on her hatch with the back of his knuckles. A moment later she opened it.
Bayjy was Pranai. A little taller than him. Broader in the shoulders and hips. Stronger. Probably outweighed him, but that wasn’t a question you asked a woman. Skin a little darker than lavender, but not purple, except in the right light. Bald, but a perfectly shaped skull.
Her kind had been engineered for hot planets. Places where the temperature was over thirty degrees at night, and might get up to fifty during the day. Even keeping Longshot Hypothesis five degrees warmer than normal didn’t really impress her. Instead, she wore her heatsuit almost all the time.
It was a compact spacesuit, depen
ding on how you wanted to look at it. Covered her to wrists and ankles and neck and kept her body temperature high enough that she was comfortable. It also fit her like a second skin, which was why she normally wore clothing over it. Wasn’t technically necessary, except for the effect that her clad nudity had on other people.
Like Valentinian.
“Got needs tonight, Captain?” she asked with a lascivious grin and a twinkle in her eyes as she stood in the doorway. That heatsuit didn’t really leave anything important to the imagination.
He hadn’t touched Kyriaki. He hadn’t touched Bayjy. Hell, he hadn’t even touched that librarian back on Bohrne Station, Stephaneria. He couldn’t see a positive outcome to any of those encounters in the long run.
Wasn’t going to try finding one. He had enough craziness in his life without it, thank you very much.
Valentinian held out the book like it was a stake that might keep a vampire at bay. His finger still marked the spot.
“Read this page,” he said as she took the book from his hand. “Then put some clothes on and join me in the wardroom in a few minutes.”
He could have made it sound like a request, but his head really wasn’t there right now. Instead, he stepped back, nodded, and walked away.
Kyriaki was standing in her doorway when he passed. She was still fully dressed, which happened to include an oversized dark blue Henley shirt that had vanished out of his trunk at some point.
“News?” she asked simply as he approached.
“Maybe nothing but paranoia,” he offered, but didn’t stop walking.
Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when she emerged in his wake. Dave was standing in the doorway from the kitchen when Valentinian stepped into the lounge.
“What?” Valentinian demanded in a quiet tone.
“Look on your face, young man,” Dave replied with deadly seriousness. “Can’t be good.”
“Whatever it is has been dead for two thousand years,” Valentinian replied tiredly. “And I’m reasonably confident that it’s still there.”
“What is?”
Kyriaki had joined him, so Valentinian pulled out a chair against the magnets holding it in place, and plopped down on it. Dave ended up across the table, and Kyriaki left a seat between them.
Valentinian grimaced, tried to make it look like a smile, and sat, stewing in his juices. Dead silent.
The other two joined him.
“Holy shit, Vee,” Bayjy came barging into the room, book in one hand. At least she had taken a moment to pull on pants and a baggy enough shirt.
Small victories.
Valentinian smiled as Bayjy clattered to a halt, surprised to find everyone waiting for her. Rather than sit right next to him on either side, she apparently decided to play it safe and ended up one down from Dave. She took a deep breath and laid the book open between them, spinning it around so the words pointed at him.
“One: how the hell did nobody notice this until now?” she demanded. “Two: did they strip the place in the ancient era and then close it back up afterwards?”
Valentinian shrugged.
“I would expect…something,” he said. “The muties certainly don’t know what’s under their feet. Not if they’re praying facing the other direction.”
“Uhm, question?” Kyriaki spoke up. “What the hell are you two talking about?”
Valentinian forced himself to take a breath. Deep and slow. Presumably calming, but his heart was racing right now.
“I bought the book because I needed maps to get us to the site where the treasure map pointed,” he said simply. Slowly. Almost painfully. “Didn’t really read it all that close other than that, because I still don’t read Urlan that well. Teaching myself, so I can help Bayjy with research going forward, since she’s already fluent.”
“Still not making sense,” Kyriaki tapped a finger on the tabletop at him like a mother with a recalcitrant child.
“Kryuome was a sector capital when the war broke out,” Valentinian refused to be hurried right now. “Big naval bases in orbit, and a few on the ground. You can plot those by the radiation signatures where the human armies dropped the biggest, nastiest nuclear bombs that they could make onto ground targets. Then they deorbited the stations. From the descriptions in another chapter, they didn’t bother evacuating them first, just shot them to pieces and watched those burn in the atmosphere. Except most of the pieces were too big to burn up, so they hit the ground. Then the fleets somehow hit the place with a small moon. Or a bunch of them. That story’s largely apocryphal, I think.”
“Got it,” Kyriaki nodded. “Serious orbital bombardment. Why are you fidgeting?”
“The treasure map is not in Urlan,” Valentinian replied. “I’m guessing prisoners told prisoners. Fathers told daughters. That sort of thing. Eventually, someone wrote it down. Maybe several times, but I’ve got no clue right now, and won’t until we get back there and open the place up with Dave’s new key he built.”
“What’s there, Vee?” Dave asked in a calming, quieting voice that Valentinian really appreciated right now.
“Those remains are, were, the city of T'Ilard,” Valentinian said. “More specifically, an Imperial hunting lodge and palace, on the shores of a lake that used to exist there before the place dried up.”
“That basin was a lake?” Kyriaki asked, turning back and forth between him and Bayjy.
“A humungous, enormous lake,” Bayjy said. “Two hundred kilometers long and forty wide. Pretty shallow, but a lovely, blue thing surrounded by an emerald paradise, once upon a time. Vee, you think the T’Brask are the descendants of the city dwellers? We know they aren’t Urlan.”
“T’Brask?” Kyriaki asked.
“The muties Basuk was talking about,” Valentinian said. “The desert folk who still return to those remains, in spite of the place being too hot with radiation for people to survive there longer than a little while, even with good medicine.”
“So we might have an Urlan palace to loot?” Dave whistled.
“No, that was destroyed,” Bayjy said. “One of the nukes was dropped right on top of it and exploded at low level like a bulldozer.”
“So what are we looking at here?” Kyriaki asked.
“An Urlan military depot if I read that right,” Valentinian replied. “And maybe the place they stored things too valuable to keep out in the palace itself where any servant could just steal them.”
“Oh, shit,” Kyriaki whispered. “And you think it’s still there?”
“I don’t think you can close up the vault door we found without some specialized tools,” Bayjy said. “That was an old Urlan trick, to keep you from hiding that you had stolen anything. One of the reasons we tend to cut through bulkheads, since important doors tend to do stupid things when you don’t open them with the right key.”
“Do we know what’s actually down there?” Dave asked.
“No,” Valentinian said. “Could be anything, considering the state of the craziness just before the human fleets arrived to bomb everything. But whatever it is has most certainly been there for two thousand years.”
23
Iulianus
As vessels went, Iulianus wasn’t all that impressed by the aesthetics. The spaciousness wasn’t all that different from Dominion-427, but the courier was designed to be open and airy, since it wasn’t expected to look for trouble, merely to shoot its way out. The old M’Rai ship had probably felt a little cramped to them, even with ceilings that tended to be four meters high.
It was the brutalism of the naval architecture that offended him, if he had to put too fine a point on it. Dominion warships were generally sleek and elegant, inside and out, with long curves and sweeping lines uninterrupted by anything.
This ship reminded Iulianus of a series of boxes welded together in spacedock. Cubes of varying sizes, with the largest ones running in parallel lines down the spine and both flanks, with smaller ones in between. From above or below, the hull of the ship looked vaguely like a
blanket that had been pressed together to create three, linear folds.
But even then, the builders hadn’t bothered with the extra step of smoothing out the ripples, so it was a set of steps up and down. With antennae attached apparently at random.
The edges of the ship stepped back up again to house three turret emplacements on each side. Light ones, designed to pummel small craft like that Mondi’s fightership, or a transport like Longshot Hypothesis. Centerline, fore and aft, top deck and bottom, were four heavier turrets, the kind designed to engage other ships in this class.
A team of such ships might have been assigned to escort something like a Dominion ZoneWatcher into battle, or maybe a ZoneStriker. Even a pack of such ships wouldn’t last very long against a line of SkyStrikers by themselves.
Luckily, nobody but the Dominion had such formidable vessels, at least as far as Iulianus had been able to determine. If the Widow was intent on conquering a few planets in Wildspace and carving out a pocket empire for herself, this hull would be an adequate starting point.
At least until they needed to commission one of the yards at someplace like Chatosig-Five to build them something the next scale larger.
Iulianus wondered how much trouble could he get into, if he could eventually build a SkyWatcher-sized ship, and recruit several divisions of M’Rai instead of the Dominion’s Caelon Assault Cavalry.
Like so many of the Variant Humanities, M’Rai had no homeworld. None that had survived the ancient revolt that broke the Urlan and destroyed so many of the overlords’ planets, at least. You found various folks mixed in with other mongrels on the Wildspace planets and stations, perhaps clustered in obscure tribes. Nowhere that the Widow could just appear with money and adventure and recruit herself an army.
Still, it was an impressive ship. Expensive to update and maintain, as none of the systems around here had been organized enough to support such a vessel for perhaps the fifty years since it had been laid up. Workers had already been through the bridge, as he looked around him and considered his future.