Greyblade

by Andrew Hindle

  “I wish I’d known that back in Axis Mundi,” Greyblade said. “It would have spared us the unpleasantness of drinking them.”

  Çrom smiled crookedly. “Actually, dying is absolute crap so if you could have kept me in the soup for another six months and eventually cured me rather than killing me–”

  “No, the prognosis was pretty certain,” Greyblade assured him, “which I suppose you knew yourself. Unless Lonesome Ice anti-spore mouth-bacteria has a seven-day lifespan and they were all just about to die suddenly…”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Good. That would have been very unfortunate.”

  Çrom’s grin widened. “Agreed.”

  “Anyway,” Greyblade added, “I needed you back at the controls, so six months of sweating and squirming and talking to people who weren’t there was not acceptable,” Çrom’s grin froze on his face. “Don’t worry,” Greyblade continued, “you didn’t say anything remotely intelligible and I am deleting it all from my memory banks forthwith.”

  “Damn right,” Çrom grunted, then squinted at Greyblade again. “You’re not deleting it, are you.”

  “No. My memory doesn’t have a conscious erase-function. That would be stupid.”

  “I guess it would.”

  “Although it does deteriorate normally like any organic or electronic system,” Greyblade added helpfully, “with sufficient additional information and in the absence of valid re-use of the existing–”

  “So the sooner I stop reminding you about it and start teaching you Dark Glory drinking ballads, the sooner you’re likely to forget?”

  “Correct. Should only take a few hundred years,” Greyblade started to help Çrom off the table, then felt faintly ridiculous since the man was clearly in perfect, albeit not very fragrant, health.

  “Right,” Çrom grunted, then cast about himself in alarm. “My bag.”

  Greyblade drew a momentary blank. “I dropped it on the floor next to the pilot’s console,” he said after a hurried replay. Çrom drooped in relief. “Apparently the bacteria didn’t remain inside your body when it was resurrected,” he went on, helpless to keep himself from asking, “but the sweat and odour particulates on the outside of your skin–”

  “I get it,” Çrom grumbled, peeling the wrap off and grimacing. “Shower.”

  “No, I was just wondering about the details of what stays and what goes,” Greyblade said. “Obviously any cause of death would be deleted, because if you were resurrected with a dose of abbro in your system – or your head separated from your shoulders – you’d just die again, same as you would have with the microscopic wilful still at large in your bloodstream.”

  “The microscopic what?”

  “But you still remember me,” Greyblade continued, “which means that the neural pathways in your brain and the chemical and synaptic composition that made up your memories in your last life was all carried over–”

  “Keep on wondering,” Çrom said, his bare feet slapping on the floor as he headed for his stateroom. “Open a file on me, I’m sure it’s not going to be the last time you get to see this little show,” he stopped, and looked back. “You’ve already opened a file.”

  “Of course I have,” Greyblade pointed. “I also put a tattoo on the side of your neck on the second day of your treatment. And it’s gone now. Which – before even raising the question of where the ink went – means that deeper dermal changes–”

  “You tattooed me?” Çrom exclaimed.

  “I did.”

  “What was it?”

  “Keep on wondering,” Greyblade pointed again. “And shower while you’re doing it.”

  NEVERBORN

  Greyblade soon realised that Çrom was not going to help him find answers, mostly in fact because he didn’t actually know many in the first place. And short of starting to dissect and experiment on him right there on the ship, there wasn’t much Greyblade could do about it.

  “What if you don’t die?” he asked. “By external means. Do you age? I detected normal cellular degradation and regeneration, it was basically the first thing I scanned for when you told me who you were. But … you don’t really seem any younger now that you’ve resurrected than you looked when we first met, and you’d been hanging around Axis Mundi for however many years before that, presumably aging. It seems like a weird coincidence – unless you died shortly before meeting me and haven’t had a chance to change yet.”

  “I don’t remember ever dying of old age,” Çrom admitted, “and I don’t generally get grey hair or a bad back or what have you. Weight goes up and down a bit,” he added, clearly digging deep for useful data points. “And I guess injuries and other issues have a way of adding up.”

  “So you heal and degenerate normally…” Greyblade attempted to summarise.

  “Except when I don’t,” Çrom clarified. “More than a couple of hundred years like this and I do get forgetful, though,” he added. “I make mistakes, I get stupid. Then I get dead. I suppose you could say I die of old age but I just look young while I’m doing it.”

  “So on a lifespan level you don’t really change, but by evolutionary timescales you’ve gradually shifted from something like Gabriel, to the contemporary human you are today.”

  “I guess. I don’t exactly remember the entire span of my existence with any sort of coherence or clarity. My brain’s still just the regular meat.”

  “But you remember the first stages of this mission.”

  “Of course,” Çrom snapped his fingers a few times and pointed at Greyblade. “You’re Gabriel, right?”

  Greyblade sighed. “What can we expect at … Dûl, was it?”

  “Dûl is a nice enough place. Cold and dark, of course.”

  “Get out.”

  “I know. But we can stop there for another day or so, and I don’t think any of the locals are venomous, so it’ll be a nice change of pace.”

  “And we get rid of the mordite.”

  “Right. We offload the mordite and accept a token of appreciation from the consortium, and then–” he whooshed his hand dynamically. “Off we go again.”

  “What sort of a token are we talking about?”

  “Generally speaking, more of the same sort of stuff as usual,” Çrom replied. “A bit of hospitality, some local delicacies, a berth for the ship. But the main thing I’m hoping to get is a … sort of an admittance pass through our next stopover.”

  This one, Greyblade had already noted with considerable interest. “The one you’ve labelled as ‘The Falling Damned’ on our little travelogue,” he said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “And consistently neglected to elaborate upon,” Greyblade pressed.

  “The Falling Damned is alright,” Çrom said in what Greyblade recognised as far too carefree a tone. “Even without the pass-thing I’m planning to pick up at Dûl, we’ll get through there. It’s just that The Falling Damned is the gateway to our main shortcut, and that is going to fall on its face if we don’t get the pass.”

  “At which point we … ?”

  Çrom spread his hands. “Shake hands, tell each other it was an honour, and hurtle recklessly into the shortcut anyway?” he suggested.

  Dûl, as advertised, was cold and dark. The world, if world you could call it, took the form of a great dull silvery sphere about the size of a standard galaxy like Cursèd’s Playground. They came out of relative speed shortly beyond the local Portal, still some hundreds of thousands of light years away from the behemoth, where a set of strange spidery constructs formed an intermittent relative suppression field. These, Çrom explained, were ‘the gates’. A mere formality, particularly for mordite haulers – but it was useful to show willing, especially since they had this ‘token’ they were interested in acquiring.

  Dûl, Çrom explained as if such exposition was anything but infuriatingly unsatisfactory, was some form of null-energy star – or star cluster, or greatstar, or something similar – possessed of the theoretical mass and matter,
but unable to fuse and ignite in the dead universes Beyond the Walls. Mostly iron, or the closest Beyond the Walls got without committing to an element, Dûl was just one of several million of the great frozen globes in the local void.

  “If this Dimension ever gets a jolt of physical law, there’s going to be one Hell of an explosion,” Çrom said happily.

  Greyblade looked at the vast gleaming grey thing suspiciously through the window while Dora exchanged pleasantries and lexicon packets with the gate systems. He knew better than to ask why, in a universe devoid of actual stars, Dûl was even visible. For all he knew, a great big bright something had flown through here half a million years before, possibly after digging a fifteen-light-year-deep cave in Lonesome Ice, and the light had just reflected back to this point. Dûl might not even be there anymore. It didn’t really bear thinking about.

  “Isn’t Zentar meant to be a neverborn star like this?” he asked, when his mythological database tossed up a flag.

  “Similar,” Çrom replied, “smaller, though. Just a regular solitary star, in a whole different universe. Believe me, if we start running into Fweig, we’ve definitely gone off-piste.”

  They were ten minutes at the gates, then it was a short hop to Dûl airspace.

  “What’s the gravity like down there?” Greyblade asked, calling it up on his console. “Five times Centre normal,” he muttered. “That’s more than I expected, although still far less than an object the size of a galaxy should–”

  “You are such a Corpie.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Greyblade said, “but my armour can handle five gees quite easily. What are your ankles going to say about this?”

  Çrom had risen from his chair and made his way aft.

  “Prep the cargo sling to drop off,” he said, “and bring us in at the Barthanq consortium. I’ll be getting into my exo.”

  “I assume it’s that place with the scale model of the holy uvula,” Greyblade said, “and the fence that looks like teeth.”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “It’s tacky,” Greyblade called after the retreating human. “And what exo? Since when do you have an exo?”

  Çrom’s exo, as it happened, was more than just a series of reinforcing rods and motors. It was practically a costume, converting the human into a Molran-sized, four-armed, flat-skulled…

  Greyblade stared at the contraption as Çrom finished unfolding it around himself and sealing it off. “That,” he said, “is designed for a Molran.”

  “Retrofitted for human use,” Çrom confirmed, his voice tinny somewhere behind the burnished chestleaves. “The second pair of arms are remotely controlled through the gloves and have sensor-based intuitive … oh right, there’s something else about Dûl I forgot to tell you.”

  “That they’re way more anti-humanoid than anywhere we’ve been up to now,” Greyblade said patiently. “I read the info package. So what, are you going out there alone or should I be sticking some fake limbs on myself?”

  “Well–”

  “If only we’d had six weeks to get ready for this moment.”

  “Five weeks,” Çrom said in a dignified voice. “You spent a week medically torturing me, remember?”

  “The other five weeks were a waste of time, though.”

  “Ouch.”

  THE MORDITE DEALERS OF DÛL

  They set down, and Çrom clanked happily off out of the Highwayman’s gravity and into the Barthanq consortium to conclude their mordite delivery. Greyblade ran through a few armour augmentation or removal scenarios, but the simple truth was that Burning Knights weren’t designed to conceal what they were. They were sort of designed for the opposite, in fact. He’d never felt disadvantaged by that before.

  He did, however, have a low-visibility crouch posture into which he could reconfigure for climbing and covert motion. It wasn’t particularly dignified, but it essentially realigned his joints, tilted his head and reset his torso horizontally, turning him into a passable quadruped that was actually also good for high-gee motion. For a Burning Knight, high-gee was normally more than five times Centre-normal, and he was still anatomically humanoid … just humanoid on all fours … but it might be enough to pass for some kind of exotic armoured buddy to the exotic armoured almost-Molranoid who flew the ship.

  Shrugging to himself – figuratively speaking – he lowered the ramp and scuttled out into the chilly, oppressively leaden darkness of Dûl.

  The native species here were classic high-gee creatures, hemicylindrical serpentine things sheathed in interlocking plates of dark silvery material very similar to the mysterious Dûl-rock. Their domed fore-segments were clustered with tough, nimble palps and manipulators in constant crustacean-esque motion, and they looked directly at Greyblade in his new low-slung configuration with double rows of inky black eyes like beads of zirgox. Their translation system was more complex than those of other places the Highwayman had stopped at, enabling only the expression of basic concepts until physical interaction or some predetermined need unlocked context-dependent offshoots that were practically whole new languages. This separation occurred over and over at numerous levels, making a fractal stack of different dialects and Greyblade had only taken on the highest-level set. Still, he was able to greet them, express peaceful intent, and was able to acquire directions to where Çrom had gone.

  It was, unsurprisingly, a watering hole that somehow managed to look seedy and disreputable even though it was built on the surface of an unfused galaxy outside the charted urverse and its primary clientele were waist-high armour-plated crustacean-snakes. Çrom, folded awkwardly inside his combination gravity support and non-humanoid disguise, turned his sensor-dotted headpiece in Greyblade’s direction when he crawled through the door. Greyblade was amused at the familiarity of the charade: although Çrom’s head was inside the exo’s chest, he turned the helmet to pretend he was looking around. Greyblade’s automatic motion system did something pretty similar.

  “Ahoy there,” Çrom called hollowly, and raised one of his remote-controlled arms to point at Greyblade. “It’s my trusty tactical officer and noble steed–”

  “What are you drinking?” Greyblade asked, as the nearby Dûlians rattled aside for him politely. He clanked up to the bar and pulled himself almost-upright, much as he noticed the natives pulled their fore-segments upright against the blocky arc of metal sheeting.

  “It’s called grunk.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “No, it honestly is,” Çrom said, raising the little ridged bulb of viscous yellow-brown liquid. The container was designed to be held and consumed in Dûlian appendages. “They named it after the goo they spray around on Lonesome Ice. Lot of commerce between the two places, see. Especially as part of the big mordite route.”

  “Fine. I assume it’s not actual grunk, and that it won’t kill you,” he said, gesturing politely to the three casually tangled Dûlians behind the bar who he guessed were staff, “although I’m not going to lie, a lot of my concern about that has faded lately.”

  “Hey,” Çrom put the container to the hollow of his exo’s throat and masterfully drained it without revealing himself. “It’s still really shit to die, alright? You’re not in possession of all the facts.”

  “Are we offloading the mordite?” Greyblade asked. One of the locals deposited a container of grunk in front of him. He scanned it out of habit, and sighed as the results came back as a long list of contextless unknowns.

  “Yep,” Çrom said. One of his mechanised arms came up, and the palm popped open to reveal a cluster of gleaming metal tubules. “Straw?”

  “Your foresight is as uncanny as it is specialised.”

  “I told you my dependability in a bar-room context would more than make up for my other deficiencies,” Çrom said, and pointed at another pair of Dûlians. “Those are our mordite guys. They’re authorised to complete the offloading and delivery to the consortium storehouse. It’s actually better if we’re in here, because from here on in they don’t li
ke the delivery boys to see what happens with the product,” he tapped on the bar and another bulb of grunk was duly delivered. “They could be building a new invasion fleet for all we’re ever going to find out.”

  “So why are they in here instead of out unloading the plates?” Greyblade asked. “I unhooked them from the sling like you asked,” he picked up his bulb, took one of Çrom’s straws, and sipped at the stuff. It was like drinking cold liquid wax, but it had a characteristic burn of something passably similar to alcohol. If its bite was anything to go by, more than three or four of them would render Çrom paralytic.

  “They’re probably doing it already,” Çrom replied. “You see their innermost sets of doodads?”

  “I’m trying not to make a habit of staring at doodads,” Greyblade replied, although of course he could see the appendages in question without having to turn his head. He took note of the slightly shinier metallic objects the creatures were manipulating in their silvery palps. “Some sort of remote handling machinery?”

  “Correct. They can take their precious mordite down to the great secret Dûl war machine, and get grunkfaced at the same time.”

  “It’s delicious,” Greyblade said. “Do they have literally anything else we can digest?”

  “Who said anything about being able to digest this?” Çrom said happily. Greyblade turned his visor flatly towards Çrom’s featureless mask, and Çrom cackled at the little charade. “Anyway, the important thing is that with the consortium guys in here with us, we can take care of our other business instead of having to wait while they finish the delivery.”

  “Are they the ones who have this token you were talking about?” Greyblade asked. Çrom nodded. “So why are we sitting here drinking grunk when we could be closing the deal?”

  “They come to us,” Çrom said. “That’s the deal.”

  Greyblade sighed lightly, but deferred to his guide. He sipped his grunk politely and waited for the Aliens to come to some sort of conclusion with their remote manipulators. After almost an hour, and a couple of half-hearted attempts on Çrom’s part to order a third drink for himself which Greyblade vetoed firmly, one of the Dûlians peeled off and clicked over to them.