“My hands are in the carcass,” announced Medvig, with that tinny edge of jollity that always tinged their artificial voice, no matter what the topic. Like many Hivers, they had accumulated a lopsided personality the longer they were separate from the wider hive mind of the Assembly.
Idris slouched down to the bay, feeling that even if he wasn’t doing anything, he should at least be where the doing was done. Towards the ceiling, Olli hung in her pod, eyes closed as her three remotes cleared the way for Medvig inside the wreck. She was a pale doughy woman, grown bulky through inactivity even on a spacefarer’s diet. Half obscured in her pod, the most obvious thing about her silhouette was her stunted, near-useless limbs. Her arms ended at the elbows with a tuft of half-formed fingers, one leg stopped at the smooth stump of her knee, the other absent altogether. Olian Timo—Olli—had been born so, and without any sense of proprioception—a stranger in her truncated body. But she’d been born to a colony where every single human being was a precious resource and they’d found where she excelled. Olli had trained with remotes of all kinds since she was three. Her mind could mould itself to any body shape, regardless of how its limbs and senses were configured. Three remotes at once was just another day at work for her.
The crew had set up an umbilical leading the three metres or so between hulls. It led “down” to the Vulture’s crew—though its direction was meaningless to the dead spaces of the Gamin. Medvig’s armless tripod frame was already squatting at the Vulture end, a metal assemblage of dull bronze and copper, their cylindrical body dominated by four square openings. Their long head was featureless save for a couple of mismatched yellow lights—humans liked to have something to focus on. Medvig’s “hands” could act as his own personal remotes and he had already sent these small spiderlike assemblages down the pipe and into the freighter to help Olli with the fine work.
Kris gave Idris a wave from where she sat on the floor, Kittering crouching beside her. The alien wasn’t much more than a metre high but was half again as wide, lending him a crab-like gait when he moved through their human-designed corridors. High-status Hannilambra back home might lavishly ornament their armoured backs and the shield-like surfaces of their protective arms, to show their wealth and status. Kittering’s were set with cheap screens that he used to communicate or rented out as advertising space.
“Suspension pods…” said Olli. Idris glanced up to the bay’s main screen, flicking from one drone feed to another. Here was the main cargo space of the Gamin, lined with suspension beds. Their irregular layout and lack of uniformity spoke of the haste of their installation. None of the drones were picking up any power signatures.
“Could be worse,” Kris said, and he could only nod.
“It will, of course, become worse.” Medvig’s cheery tones issued from their metal torso.
“Next cargo bay. I’m opening her up,” Olli reported. And then, “It’s worse.”
Idris stared dully at the screen, noting that the conversion of the Gamin from cargo to passenger craft hadn’t been complete by the time of its evacuation. That hadn’t stopped its crew from nobly taking on as many people as they could.
There were no suspension pods in the next chamber, just bodies. They were vacuum-withered, dried-up like sticks, many with ruptured eyes and self-inflicted wounds. A few desiccated hands clutched makeshift weapons. Idris watched a gun drift past, an old-model accelerator that could certainly have put a pellet through the hull; perhaps that had lost them their atmosphere.
The Vulture’s drones pushed in through the open hatch, sending rigid bodies spinning away. It looked as though there had been a couple of hundred people packed into this hold, and they had not gone peacefully. Idris could almost hear an echo, across time, of the dreadful all-consuming panic that had swept through the hold like a flash fire; the madness gifted to each one of them alone.
It wouldn’t have just been the knowledge that they were going to die. People could be remarkably sanguine when all hope was gone. It was that they had gone through unspace, awake. It was something he himself was intimately familiar with, but then he was an Intermediary. It was what he had not only been trained for but extensively engineered for. One of the lucky ones who’d survived the process.
Unspace travel while awake wasn’t a death sentence; it wasn’t guaranteed to drive a person into a stage of permanent madness either. But both outcomes were entirely possible. Unspace was different. Things from real space—such as humans—had a tenuous existence there. It was a terrible, lonely place, until you sensed something… other. Then being alone became preferable to the alternative. Regular navigators retired to their suspension beds after setting a course along the Throughways, and their ships woke them when they were ready to exit unspace at their destination. It was only when you went off the beaten track that someone had to keep the lamps burning, gazing into the abyss and having it gaze right back. That was what Intermediaries did. That was the invaluable service people like Idris provided to the post-war world, for as long as their minds held together.
Things went further downhill after Olli found the Gamin’s lone power signature, the one system still working in the whole ship. She tracked it down to one corner of the hold, finding an antique mediotype projector bolted lopsidedly to the wall. It was looping through an array of entertainment, brightly coloured figures that were partway between human and extinct Earth animals. They were still capering about, having adventures, teaching vacuum-silent lessons about space safety and friendship and making do. Because someone had wanted the children to have something to take their minds off the journey when they left their homes and went into space. Because of course there had been children here. Because of course.
After enough time had passed, Rollo’s rough voice came through to them. “All right, my sons and daughters. Olli, Medvig, bring in anything loose that’ll fetch a price. Then let’s get this tomb back to Roshu. Soonest started, soonest finished. And Barney?”
“What now?” the engineer demanded from wherever he was in the ship.
“Run some component comparisons. I know she’s old, but there’s probably something on that ship that we could reuse on this one.”
3.
Idris
Back Before, nobody came to Roshu for their health. It was a poisonous planet, the atmosphere full of sulphur, chlorine and arsenical compounds, the ground heavy with selenium and cinnabar. The external temperature could cook eggs even near the poles, which was where all the habitats were. The initial Roshu colony had been a small mining concern. After Earth, a lot of refugees ended up there. They lived out of their failing ships for a generation, while people built makeshift shelters on the ground or in orbit. Some ships failed, some shelters did too, yet people kept arriving. Roshu had been one of the few colonies that hadn’t needed to encourage refugees to leave, but it was never going back to being a little mining colony. Enough people stuck from the Polyaspora, and the same Throughways that brought the refugees also made Roshu a stopover for merchants and haulers.
The Vulture God erupted out of unspace, close enough to set Roshu’s traffic control systems complaining, and Idris began bootstrapping the ship’s systems and waking the others. Roshu wasn’t his favourite place in the galaxy, frankly.
Just about all human colonies had an AI kybernet to standardize legalities and trade within human space. At Idris’s request, Roshu’s version confirmed docking privileges at the planet’s single groundbound spaceport, Roshu Primator, and he began their approach.
Rollo strolled in, wearing nothing but white long johns and munching on a stick of something purple-flavoured. He scratched idly at his paunch. “You fucked up the approach again. Careless, boy, careless.”
Heritage had hailed them by then, wanting to take the Gamin out of the Vulture God’s claws. Money changed hands in the ghostly ether where the computer systems meshed. Job done, and Idris was happy to be rid of the wrecked freighter and all its grisly contents, even happier to count the Largesse added to the Vu
lture’s account.
Some of the older colonies still ran their own currencies but the Polyaspora had wrecked any wider human economy. The entire fugitive culture had been living from day to day for decades on a barter-economy. Largesse had started when people began swapping skills and services for whatever necessities could be gleaned. Colony kybernets had formalized it into a credit system, at least nominally backed by Hugh. It remained rough around the edges, intentionally shadowy, a cobbled-together system for a cobbled-together civilization.
“Well now, my happy little family,” Rollo announced to the crew, as they levered themselves groggily from the suspension pods. “I would love to tell you all we just got rich, but take docking fees, repair costs and the usual bribes out of it and we’re all just very slightly better off. Kit, Kris, Barney, Medvig: shore leave, one day. Idris and Uncle Rollo are going to see a man about putting bread on the table. Mesdam Olian, dearest of all my surrogate daughters, has drawn the short straw. She will be minding ship for the first day, during which she will doubtless attend to various niggling matters of maintenance. Those that do not require Menheer Barnier’s technical acumen.”
“Fuck off, Unca Rollo,” from Olli, not best pleased at sitting out the first round of shore leave.
“Oho, yes indeed,” Rollo twinkled, cranking the avuncular up to eleven. “For the rest of you reprobates, we will be on the ground two days maximum. Whoever fucks up the worst on day one gets to mind the ship on day two.”
Rollo took oversight of their landing approach into the docks at Roshu Primator—“The Primate House” as the city had somehow become known. The docking ring was set around the very apex of the covered city’s outer bubble as if the place was wearing some kind of hat. Under this encircling platform was a gravitic drive, whose ministrations maintained atmosphere over the landing pads, supported ships during the last few hundred metres of their descent and, not least, held up the whole unlikely city’s structure. Idris could only imagine the maintenance schedule this demanded, and what might happen if someone cut corners.
With the surly exception of Olli, the crew assembled at the hatch, dressed for shore leave. For Idris and Barney this didn’t require any changes to their printed ship gear. Idris liked not standing out, and Musoku Barnier had probably accepted he wasn’t going to win any beauty contests. He’d been caught in some engineering-related mischance long before he joined the Vulture God’s crew. Wherever he’d been, the medical facilities had been efficient but utilitarian. Half his face was craggy bronze-brown and deeply lined. The other half was greying pink, smooth as youth, the eye a milky marble. Kris said the true root of Barney’s ill temper was that the grafted side looked better than the original.
Kris had donned her fancy clothes: the long tunic with wide sleeves, the artfully draped poncho. On her slim frame, all that unnecessary cloth served to at least mimic the impression of wealth and good living. The red scarf around her neck was vivid as a murder scene. Anyone seeing them stepping off the ship would take her for a passenger, slumming her way across the galaxy before taking up a position in her parents’ company.
Medvig didn’t dress up. They were a three-legged armless frame, with a head purely for the convenience of dealing with humans. However, the crew’s other non-human member had made his own planet-appropriate arrangements.
Hannilambra weren’t really like crabs, because crabs came from Earth. Yet to any human who’d seen a shellfish farm, the comparison was unavoidable. Evolution had designed the Hanni to present their armoured backs to predators, protecting a broad body set on three pairs of legs that let them skitter in just about any direction. Kittering’s focal point was a fork-shaped prong jutting from under the butterfly-wing curve of his shell. Five round amber eyes stared unwinkingly from this, with the bellows of his two breathing membranes rising and falling on either side. The sagging sack of his belly was mostly hidden by his shield arms, evolved for defence but co-opted for display. Above the arms, a cluster of mouthparts was in constant fidgety motion. Kittering’s eye-crown didn’t come much past Idris’s waist, but the little accountant pushed through his human crewmates with perfect assurance. The screens set into his back and shields displayed a lurid advertisement for some no-holds fight match. Kittering was always on the lookout for a little extra Largesse.
Rollo himself had slung a reinforced jacket over his ship clothes. Old miners’ gear, his one concession to a night on the town. None of them were carrying obvious weapons, because Roshu had strict regulations about anything that could punch a hole in the dome.
As the hatch opened, revealing a quicksilver-coloured sky dotted with toxic clouds, Kris rapped Idris on the shoulder.
“Eyes open.”
“Like they cut off the lids,” he agreed, and then the crew were going their separate ways.
“Got a call from a Cheeseman,” Rollo explained to Idris. “Deep void work. Wants to see if we’ve got what it takes.” Cheesemen were fixers who matched jobs to skills. They claimed the name came from “chessmen,” after their legendary logistical skills. Everyone else said it came from “cheese-paring” after their legendary tight-fistedness.
Idris nodded glumly. Intermediaries were rare, so being exhibited like some human curio was part of the deal.
They were pushing down a narrow corridor, cluttered with spacers, miners and colony staff. Here tawdry establishments sought to bilk the impatient of their currency before they reached the main dens of vice on the lower levels. And Idris had an itch between his shoulder blades. His paranoia told him someone was following them, but then paranoia was one of the things you ended up with if you kept your eyes open through unspace. He shook off the feeling irritably.
The crowds had blinded Idris and Rollo to trouble, so they practically bounced off the two large men who stepped in front of them. Idris was just making apologies when one of them said, “Idris Telemmier. You come with us now.”
He froze. Strangers knowing his name was never auspicious, especially when it preceded an order and not an invitation. The voice wasn’t the nasal Roshu twang either, but something heavier with rolled consonants, from a planet less cosmopolitan than this.
“He’s going nowhere with you, friend,” Rollo started and got slammed against the corridor wall for his trouble, with a whoof of lost breath. The other man seized Idris’s arm in a vice hold. The two heavies were just that. Most people who’d come out of the lean war generations were small, clawing to their majorities out of half-starved childhoods. This pair’s ancestors hadn’t had any worries on that score. They were each a good two metres tall and broad across the shoulders. They wore bottle-green uniform jackets, busy with gold trimming about the shoulders and cuffs. Their long faces had bristly moustaches, and hair worn in wire-bound braids that reached to their chins. Everything about them screamed money and casual violence, and there was only one place that really did the two together so well: Magda.
“We don’t need any trouble!” Idris proclaimed loudly. But everyone was just rushing past, in a hurry not to see any trouble either, in case it was contagious.
“Detaining you under ‘Liaison Board Order Three, Rogue Intermediaries,’” one of the Magdan heavies grunted, like someone reading the words with difficulty from a book.
“Kris.” Idris tried the radio, but they’d hit a complete dead zone. Worse and worse.
“Whose authority?” Rollo choked out, more for the form of it.
“Our lord desires justice,” one of them said. “A fugitive Intermediary. Very dangerous. To be repatriated to Colonial service. And you talk too much, fat man. Accessory, we think.” His friend flashed a slate that might or might not display some manner of permit.
Idris got as far as “I’m not—” before his arm was wrenched behind his back, hard. Then he and Rollo were being frogmarched away.
Solace
Partheni weren’t renowned for travelling incognito. When she stepped off the passenger-hauler at Roshu, Solace was followed by a fair-sized a-grav trunk that he
ld her armour and weapons. The sight of her Parthenon greatcoat put a good metre of clear space around her, which had its pluses and minuses. The long military coat, marked with her company badges and rank, attracted a lot of foul looks these days. The last few decades had seen the rise of an ugly subculture of “Nativists” in the Colonies, who were dead against anything except “natural-born humans” on their worlds. At the same time, the uniform was notorious enough that nobody dared to give her any trouble. Worst came to worst, the intimidation factor might just start opening doors for her purely so that their owners could get rid of her more quickly.
It struck her that the phrase Parthenon diplomacy might become Colvul parlance to describe exactly the way she was behaving, and she wasn’t sure if that was funny or not.
There weren’t many places on Roshu for high-profile guests, but the Aspirat—the Parthenon’s covert ops division—had an account with the Orrery of Man. It was part hotel, part monument to poor taste and gold paint, but at least it was in a “good” part of the moneyed upper dome. More scowls were evident as she entered the lobby, and that concerned her a little more. The Partheni were always going to be anathema to the grass-roots “real humans for real humans” movement within Hugh. By Nativist lights they were vat-grown genetic freaks, and they’d become a military threat when they left Hugh’s control thirteen years ago. Hostile stares from snooty staff and the cosseted rich, even in this hellhole, didn’t bode well for the future. Fear not the gun but the finger on the trigger, as the saying went.
Soon after, a very different Solace slipped out of a staff exit, dressed in olive-coloured ship clothes and sandals. She retained the bleeding wing tattoo under her left eye, but Roshu’s underside was rough, diverse and full of transients of all descriptions.
The Parthenon’s Aspirat section maintained a sympathizer in the city administration—a grey-haired woman with the stern demeanour of a vengeful librarian. Solace only needed to say, “Show me the Vulture God,” and she received a packet of information, delivered hand to hand—the old way, so nobody could pluck it from the kybernet in transit.
Shards of Earth Page 4
