Howling Dark (Sun Eater)

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “You still think so, do you?”

  I started. Turning, I beheld the woman, but not the one I’d been expecting. Valka Onderra Vhad Edda stood in the door to the hall. I still felt a pang on seeing her, despite all that had happened to us since Emesh . . . and indeed because of it. She was like a glass image of a woman: hard-eyed, thin, pale. Do not mistake me. I do not mean that she was fragile. Rather that one could not encounter her without being cut. Thus it was for me. She was Tavrosi, of the blood of the old Travatskr people who fled the Norde colonies on Ganymede.

  The bonecutters who had shaped her genetic makeup had fashioned a creature remote as Pallas. Tall she was, and beautiful, and severe. Her hair was black almost as my own, so black it was almost red, with highlights like deep fire that contrasted with the frost of her pale skin. She smiled, though her golden eyes did not, and said, “I’m not so sure.”

  I chafed my arms to warm them, took a couple mincing steps toward her. “Not you too . . .”

  She raised those winged eyebrows. “I’m sorry?”

  “I just had this talk with Lin. He still thinks we’re wasting our time.”

  “Ah.” Valka seemed not to feel the cold, dressed as she was only in trousers and a long shirt printed with a pattern of skulls and Tavrosi writing I could not read. She pushed a curtain of dark hair back behind one ear and said, “I’m not so sure he’s wrong, Hadrian.” I compressed my lips and moved past her, back into the hall. The Balmung was darker in design than the Pharaoh, all black gloss and brass and polished angles. The Imperial style. It had been a Legion destroyer once upon a time—in a sense it still was. It was by far the oldest of the three vessels the Red Company claimed as its own. Valka followed me, still speaking. “I have my own research to think of, you know? Lin won’t even let me decant one of the Cielcin to speak with.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not one shred of new information, not in years, I—”

  “I know, Valka.” Why was she bringing this up now? Right after I’d awakened from fugue? I pressed my palms to my eyes, turning to keep my back toward her. “I just woke up. Can we . . . can we talk about this later?”

  Her eyes were like guiding lasers on the back of my head. I thought I felt my hair crisping. “Later? ’Tis been years.”

  “I know that, too.” I turned to face her. They had been good years, for the most part. Valka had spent fewer of them conscious than I had, had spent longer periods in fugue. We’d made a respectable mercenary outfit. But the road toward Vorgossos was long, and we did not then know for certain if the place even existed. I cannot now blame Valka for doubting, or for her frustration. I could not blame her then. I took her aside, into an alcove off the hall containing softly glowing monitor equipment. “We have something.” She was about to object, but I overrode her. “Bassander woke me himself. He says Otavia sent Crim down to the planet, that he found someone who can take us to the Extrasolarians.”

  Valka’s face changed almost at once, the faintest smile pulling those lips. “You’re serious?”

  “Why else would I be awake? Lin wants me on the away team.” She made a face. “Well, Lin knows he needs me.”

  “That sounds closer to the truth.” She did smile then. Properly. That was something. I was back on solid ground. Negotiating the waters around Valka was never an easy task, made harder by the affection I still held for her, coiled snake-like about my innards. “Did you sleep well?”

  We were back on surer footing. “It’s not the being frozen that’s hard.” I knew what she meant, though, and shook my head. “More nightmares. Waking up.” It was normal, Doctor Okoyo had said, for people to experience visions when they came out of fugue. Something about the way the brain’s sub-cortical structures came back before the heavy apparatus of consciousness. Amygdala. Hypothalamus. The machinery of memory and motivation. Of fear. “I saw Bordelon again. Dying again. Gilliam. Uvanari.” Those last two had died by my own hands: Gilliam in a bone-grass field in Borosevo, Uvanari in a dark cell of the Chantry’s bastille. Bordelon was different. I’d had control of the Pharaoh then. I’d burned his ship from the skies. The way the holograph feed went white, then dead . . . there were weeks when I couldn’t stop seeing it.

  Valka cocked her head, lips pursed in . . . pity? She put a hand on my upper arm, squeezed. Concern. It was concern, not pity. “The thawing process dredges up old memories. Junk data. ’Twill pass.”

  “You too?”

  “My memories are not in my brain, anaryan,” she said, tapping her temple knowingly.

  I swallowed. Valka was not of the Imperium. She did not have the same terror and disgust of machines I had. She was—in the eyes of the Holy Terran Chantry—a demoniac. She had permitted machines to cloud her flesh and her mind. In Tavros, whence she came, such was commonplace. Here—to me—it made her a sorceress like those in the operas my mother used to write. Still, I did not fear Valka. Her penchant for forbidden machines and technical expertise had proved invaluable in the past: on Emesh first, and later at Ardistama and Pharos. It would prove so again.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said, eager to change the subject from the things I’d done. Valka was Tavrosi, and the Tavrosi did not approve of violence. They’d evolved another sort of warfare where she came from: detente. An old form of war, and an insane one. The Tavrosi clans each held an arsenal capable of destroying the others, so that any act of violence might destroy their entire confederacy. And it was we who were the mad ones . . . “Look, if Crim’s lead turns out, I’ll talk to Lin again. I’ll try and get him to let me thaw out one of the Pale.”

  “The leader,” Valka said, prodding me in the chest.

  “I’ll try.”

  She smiled at me, but I could feel the strain in it. She was tired. Gods in hell, we were all tired. Even in fugue, forty-eight years was a long time, and I’d spent twelve of those awake. When I’d left Sir Olorin Milta on the strand at the Borosevo starport, I’d imagined my mission accomplished in conscious months. How little I’d known of the nature of space travel. “It’s been a long journey, Hadrian.” She stepped back, leaned against the far wall. “I’m an academic, not a . . . soldier. This is soldier’s work.” She smiled sadly.

  “It won’t always be that way,” I said. “When we find the Cielcin, you and I will have plenty to do.” I had taught Valka much of the xenobites’ alien tongue when we started out from Emesh. She had proved a too-adept student, acquiring tenses and declensions and the language’s complex gender-voice system with a speed that astonished and confounded me. I supposed it was the fault of that machine daimon wired to the base of her skull.

  She dismissed this with a wave. “I know, Hadrian.”

  I tried to lighten the mood. “Look, you’ll be speaking to them better than I can before long. I haven’t had practice in years.”

  That worked, for she flashed her white teeth and chuckled softly, teasing. “I’m already better than you. But perhaps ’twould be good if we put some time in before long.”

  I allowed that that was so and we peeled out of the alcove, proceeding down the shimmering dark of the hall. Distorted reflections of ourselves shone in walls and floor, cast by the stark white lighting overhead.

  “Switch brought you over, didn’t he?” Valka asked as we exited the hall into a low-ceilinged gallery that followed the Balmung’s arrowhead design. Slit windows barely as wide as my chest punctuated the outer wall, heavy alumglass looking out onto Dark. In the distance, some miles hence, I could make out the dark shape of the Pharaoh like a knife with a too-large handle, the bridge and conning spire an angled knuckle-guard. “I passed him in the hall.”

  I stopped, looking across the blackness to the other ship. “Yes, he did.” Almost I pressed my face to the glass, looking back and forth. “Where’s the Mistral?”

  “Low orbit,” Valka said. “I knew Corvo had sent a team down to Arslan, but ’
twas the last anyone said to me.” She looked sharply up at me, cocking one eyebrow. “I’m not so sure Jinan trusts me.” Arslan, I later learned, was the new city the surviving colonists had built on the planet below in the wake of the Cielcin invasion.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked, turning fully from the window. I knew full well that Jinan didn’t trust Valka. Jinan was Jaddian, as dubious of machines as any pious citizen of the Empire. But I suspected it was something more than that. Something deeper, older. They were both women, after all.

  “Nothing in particular,” Valka said with an ineloquent shrug. “It’s just that—”

  “There he is!” a heavy, masculine voice cried out. “Didn’t get any freezer-burn, did you, Your Radiance?” Two men had appeared round the corner, each dressed in the deep burgundy of the Red Company uniform, each with the triple stripes in gold on the left arms of their tunics to mark them as centurions. Of the two, Pallino was the elder: a grizzled, forty-year veteran of the Imperial military service with a scuffed leather patch over one eye. Ghen was younger, taller, built like a heavy armored drop-shuttle, dark-skinned with jug ears and a permanent subcutaneous beard. It was he who’d spoken, his voice like the smashing of mighty stones.

  Valka broke off speaking abruptly, turning as I did. I moved forward and embraced the big ox of a man. “If I did, I’d still be a damn sight prettier than you, Ghen.”

  Ghen grinned and affected an expression of false fury. “If you didn’t think you were Emperor of the known universe, I’d thrash you for that one.”

  “You’d try!”

  Everyone laughed, even Valka. “Thought Switch would be with you,” I said. “I sent him on to Jinan when I stopped in to check on our . . . our cargo.”

  When Ghen finally moved out of the way, Pallino grasped my hand, keeping that one blue eye fixed on me. “Captain wanted you in the ventral observatory; the ox here and I thought we’d come get you.” He seemed to notice Valka for the first time—she’d been standing on his blind side—and he bobbed his head, “Doctor, ma’am.” She returned his greeting and his nod. “Didn’t see you there.” He turned his attention back to me. “How’s that Mandari son of a bitch?”

  “Lin?” I made a dismissive gesture. “The same. Says we ought to turn round and rejoin the fleet. Figures this whole thing’s pointless.”

  Pallino chewed on his tongue for a moment, said, “I know his type. Man puts his principles before duty. Ain’t the worst thing in the world, but it’ll get folk killed.”

  “Not today, though,” Ghen interjected. “No one’s making planetfall til we get word from Crim.”

  Valka blinked, folded her arms. “You knew about it?”

  Ghen shrugged. “I was on the bridge when Corvo called, didn’t think it was a big secret. That’s why we’re here, ain’t it?”

  I waved both of my hands for quiet. “You said the captain was in the ventral observatory?”

  Ghen looked a bit affronted to have been cut off, but he spread his hands, palm up. “Yes sir. Going over some reports.”

  “I’ll head down that way at once,” I said, and started toward the hall.

  “We’ll come with you!” Ghen said. Without Switch around, I supposed I needed a guard, but the Balmung—the Meidua Red Company—was home. I was home.

  Laughing, I turned back and said to the three of them, “No, thank you. I know the way.”

  The ventral observatory was a small room built far to the rear of the Balmung and against the outer hull, amid a series of armored panels that, when opened, allowed its occupants to peer through a glass bubble that looked out onto the deep, bright Dark of space. It was meant for conferences, but for the moment it was nearly empty. Captain Jinan Azhar of the Red Company, Lieutenant Jinan Azhar of the armies of Jadd—and my captain most of all—sat alone at the round conference table with her back to me.

  Below, through the glass geodesic beneath the observatory platform, I could see the umber eye of the planet. Rustam was in full daylight below: fields of ochre, brown mountains touched with ice, yellow seas with here and there a patch of green. Not the most beautiful of worlds, but beautiful in the way that only planets can be. Immortal, changeless, uncaring—the nearest thing to a material god. Only that wasn’t quite right, was it? There again was the scar, the half-a-hundred-mile-long rent in the face of the planet, as if someone had dragged a branding iron across the planet. Briefly I imagined the forces required to leave such a wound: the plasma cannons, the rods. All the unholy force and fire of Destruction.

  I took a step forward. Jinan twitched. “You are thinking of sneaking up on me?” Her slim shoulders looked tense beneath her epaulets.

  I had been thinking just that. How she had heard me I could not guess. “Of course not!” I lied. I pressed a hurt hand to my chest in mock-offense. “I would never.” I would. And had. She fiddled with a stack of crystal paper reports, pushed a holograph projector back and away before she stood. “You know,” I said, “ship’s captain shouldn’t be sitting with her back to a door like . . .”

  She turned around, and her smile stole what little wit and few words remained to me. My migraine seemed to lessen almost at once, and an idiot smile possessed me.

  She hadn’t changed while I slept. Not an angstrom. Jinan was taller than I—testament to her high breeding—with the copper skin and dark coloring endemic to the higher castes of Jaddian society. If I were a poet, I might say that she was built like a dancer, slim and compact. But that would be a lie, as is all poetry, in part. Slim she was, with scant curves and a soft, oval face, but those large black eyes and the azure ribbon braided through her shadowy hair gave the lie to her truth.

  Jinan was a soldier, and had been one for more than thirty years. She was the commanding officer of all the Jaddian soldiers who had been loaned to us for this expedition by the Satrap Governor Kalima di Sayyiph. She deferred to Bassander as commodore of our little fleet, but the two were equals in any formal sense. But she was more than that to me.

  There were scars in places none but we two ever saw: an old knife-wound on her ribs, a thin sheet of plasma burn on her left side, an old bullet wound high—very high—on the inside of one thigh. “What is wrong?”

  I realized I’d not spoken for perhaps ten seconds. I couldn’t, and so took her in my arms instead. It was like embracing a steel sculpture wrapped in velvet. We stood there a long moment, neither speaking. I might have ceased even to breathe, were it not for the scent of jasmine wafting gentle from her hair.

  “I missed you, mia qal.”

  “And I you, dear captain.” I held her at arm’s length a moment, peering up at her. “How long have you been out of the cold?”

  Jinan looked off to the side, biting her lip. “Two months, I think? Alessandro woke me when we came out of warp.” She wrapped a hand around the back of my neck and pressed her forehead to mine. Her voice came soft and breathy, almost husky to my ears, “I had wanted to wake you sooner, but Lin was not hearing of it.”

  “I’m here now.”

  She’d noticed that, as it happened, and stifled my words. She kissed me for an unprofessional length, fingers tight in my hair. My own hands wandered by long acquaintance, and so I held her close in turn, and we two banished the unquiet Dark and the grim reality of our mission and of the wounded world beneath us—if only for that limitless instant. You have heard that the Jaddian God is a God of Fire? It is true, and a spark of that secret flame was in her, as it is in all the women of that strange country. I loved her for it, whatever else is said of her in your stories . . . whatever else became of us.

  The Mandari have a saying: One lover is many who is seldom seen. I forget which of their poets it was as wrote it, but like all poetry, it was a little bit true.

  After a while—I cannot tell you how long it was—Jinan and I broke apart. She’d been leaning against the rail at the edge of the platform, the planet Rustam be
hind and beneath her. I was unspeakably glad not to be on the Pharaoh. I shudder to think what Bassander might have said to see us.

  “You have been practicing!” Jinan said, accusing, playing with the tassels at the end of the blue ribbon in her braid. “Udhreha! Who is she?” But she smiled, eyes darting away from mine.

  “You wouldn’t know her,” I said teasingly, settling myself down in the chair beside the one she’d been in when I arrived. “She’s foreign.”

  Jinan snorted and sat next to me, pulling her chair close. She rested her head on my shoulder. I leaned into her, and we sat in silence for a long moment. My fugue-sick migraine—momentarily forgotten—surged back with a sick vengeance. I shut my eyes. “I think Okoyo was right, I needed to spend a little more time on the slab. My head’s killing me.”

  My captain reached up and scratched me behind the ears. It helped. “You are always dashing off too quickly. The Cielcin are not going anywhere.” She spoke the standard well, but after a slightly stilted fashion that served her heavy accent well.

  “That’s the truth.” My eyes wandered over the table, taking in the astrogation chart of the Rustam system gently rotating from the projector, the local reports detailing the Cielcin invasion—extracted from the local datasphere. “Is this our man?” I pulled a dossier out from where it lay hid beneath a map of the city of Arslan. It showed a round-faced, utterly hairless little man with gimlet eyes and a wet smile. The image was blurry, badly lighted, as if taken from a distance. I wondered if our man, Crim, had been behind the camera, or if we’d pulled the data from what was left of local law enforcement databases.

  Jinan craned her neck. “That is Samir, yes. He looks like a homunculus.”

  “Might be,” I said, frowning. “We’re far out in the Veil now, Jinan. I’m not sure it’s so easy to tell which is which out here.” I shook my head, regretted it instantly. “Ugly bastard, though. Crim’s sure he’s who we want?”

  “Karim,” she said, using Crim’s right name, “is fairly confident that Samir knows where we can find our Extrasolarian. He has met with him a few times now. The bastard is—how is it you say? Afraid but . . . like a mouse?”