It is the only way we can fulfil your wishes.
“I never wished for this.”
You told us to prevent another conflict on the scale of the Archipelago War. Without interstellar travel, there can be no interstellar war.
“That’s ridiculous.”
We cannot risk doing otherwise. Your species is quarrelsome. Left to your own devices, your clashes will draw the attention of the enemy.
“What enemy?”
Beasts prowl the dimensional void. They are drawn to destruction and death.
“And so you’re killing people and ships to prevent them killing each other?”
We are doing that which we deem necessary to preserve life.
“But you’re going to spare me, if I agree to surrender?”
Yes.
“Why?” If they were destroying every armed vessel they came across, I couldn’t understand why they were offering me my life. I didn’t have them pegged as sentimental types.
Our enabler requested we not kill you.
“And Ona Sudak is your ‘enabler’?”
You know her.
“I do. Please convey my regards. And a short message.”
What message?
I stepped back and, employing a gesture I’d learned from Alva Clay, clapped my left hand to my right bicep while raising my right fist with the index finger sticking straight upwards.
“Get fucked.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
SAL KONSTANZ
Things weren’t looking good.
“I should get back to the ship.”
Alva shook her head. “By the time we get back to the shuttle, whatever’s going to happen will have happened already.”
“But I should be on the bridge.” I took off my baseball cap and raked fingers back through my hair. “I should be with her.” I couldn’t stand the thought of the Trouble Dog riding into battle without me.
“She’ll be fine. She knows what she’s doing.”
“I know, but still…”
Alva gripped my shoulder. “You know how fast those ships think,” she said. “Even if you were up there, there’d be nothing you could do to help. You just have to trust her.”
“But she’s alone.”
“She’s not alone, she’s got Nod and Preston.”
“Both of whom I’m supposed to be responsible for.”
Alva released me and I tugged the cap back into place. I knew she was right, but that didn’t make me feel any less helpless.
“I couldn’t bear to lose her,” I said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without her.”
Alva fiddled with her gun. “It’s small consolation, but if she goes, we won’t be far behind.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. We stood looking at each other in the middle of that vast stone tunnel.
“It’s your call, Captain. We can go back or go on. At this point, I think it probably makes very little difference. Whichever way, we’re boned.”
We had come here to rescue the stranded crew of a freighter, but now we were also about to be marooned. I glanced back the way we had come. And then forward, at the far end of the tunnel. And then I felt my eyes widen.
Boned?
The breath caught in my throat.
“No way.” I looked up at the vaulted ceiling, then at the walls on each side, trying to estimate the volume of the contained space. “No fucking way.”
My heart thumped in my chest.
Alva looked at me as if I’d gone mad. “What’s the matter?”
I straightened the brim of my cap with a shaking hand, and smiled. “I think I’ve got an idea.” I peered around again, checking my estimates with narrowed eyes. “But first, you and I need to get the hell out of this tunnel.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
TROUBLE DOG
Above the crest of the Restless Itch, the first of the white ships rose like a splinter of bone bullet-chipped from a soldier’s thigh. At the same instant, alarms sounded through my internal spaces, warning Preston to brace for combat, and Nod to mobilise his home-grown damage-control teams. The actual confrontation, when it came, would be fierce and—from a human viewpoint—blindingly fast. Against one ship, I may have stood a chance. Perhaps even against two. But with three of them in play, there could only be one sure outcome.
My only regrets were that I’d take Preston and Nod with me, and abandon the captain and Alva Clay on the alien derelict. But compared to the chaos unfolding around us, these were minor and subjective concerns. Larger forces were at play.
I braced, and prepared to launch torpedoes, but the attack didn’t come. The second ship swung into sight, and yet still no one fired. Eventually, after the seeming eternity of three whole seconds, I received a signal from 88,573.
“Trouble Dog, this is Ona Sudak. You are outnumbered and outgunned, and I require you to stand down. You will not be harmed.”
I sent back a projection of my avatar, bedecked in jewels and golden thread.
“Sorry, Ms Sudak,” I purred. “I simply cannot comply.”
“May I speak to your captain?”
“I’m afraid not. She’s currently otherwise engaged.”
The poet looked sad. “I have no wish to attack you,” she said. “You brought me home from the Gallery.”
“Home to a firing squad.”
Her expression hardened. “You gave me the opportunity to account for my crimes,” she said, “and I remain grateful.”
I drew myself up, causing strings of precious stones to flash and sparkle on my bare shoulders. “And have you accounted for them? Have you paid the price for Pelapatarn?”
“Have you?” Sudak stabbed a crooked finger at my image. “I may have given the order for the attack, but you carried it out. You and your little pack actually dropped the bombs.”
Her words were splinters of glass in my chest. “We followed the orders we were given.”
“And I followed mine. So, excuse me if I fail to see the difference between us. To see what gives you the right to be so judgemental.”
I felt my temper rise, but kept my voice low and calm. “The difference is, I learned from the experience. But you’re doing it again. Killing thousands in the name of the greater good.”
“I’m preventing another war.”
“No.” I shook my head emphatically. “You claim to be fighting for peace, and God knows I can sympathise with that. But I cannot condone the spilling of innocent blood. I will not stand idly by and watch as you slaughter civilians.”
“So you won’t step aside?”
I made a cutting gesture with my hand, and a hundred rubies caught the light. “I refuse to purchase my own survival at the cost of thousands of dead ships and hundreds of isolated, dying outposts.” I rose to my full height. “I have no idea if my course is righteous. For all I know, you might be correct and these sacrifices will turn out to be necessary, in a calculated, utilitarian assessment of history. The trouble is, I just don’t care. I have more than enough blood on my conscience, and I refuse to add to it. If I have to die here and now to register my disapproval of your actions, then so be it. My death won’t alter your plans. Even if by some small miracle I kill the three of you, there are still almost a million more of your ships out there, stamping their enforced peace across the width, depth and breadth of the Generality. All I can realistically hope to do is placate my own restless guilt. But better to be ground underfoot and buried in the foundations of a dictatorship, I think, than to capitulate in order to save my own skin.”
Sudak raised an eyebrow. “That’s some speech.”
“Thank you. I have been thinking on this matter. I followed you once, and ended up decommissioned and declawed. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
Sudak regarded me with a tired exasperation. “You do understand this is your last chance, don’t you?”
“I do.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Then so be it. I’m sorry.”
“As am I.”
* * *
I didn’t wait for the connection to go dead. I flipped over and fired my engines. Energy beams raked the space in my wake. Torpedoes burst forth from the other ships like seeds from a pod. But I was running, moving fractionally faster than they’d anticipated—and in a hopefully entirely unexpected direction.
Instead of running for clear space and the chance to jump away from the conflict, which would have exposed my stern and engines to their combined attack, I dived towards the rocky surface of the Restless Itch, aiming to pass between it and the lower of my two assailants. It was a risky move, which exposed me to attack from above, but also one I hoped would bring some advantage. By sticking close to the surface of the repurposed asteroid, I’d be shielded from the farthest ship by the tight curve of the horizon. In addition, I hoped the closer one—the ship above me—might refrain from deploying some of its heavier weapons, for fear of damaging the flying monument and precipitating a war with the Nymtoq.
Of course, once I’d cleared the edge of the asteroid, I’d be flying into the waiting sights of Sudak’s ship on the far side of the rock—but that wouldn’t be for several seconds yet, and I was sure I’d have time to think of something.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
JOHNNY SCHULTZ
We crawled out of the duct and made our way along the corridor, away from the shaft and the remains of our lost comrades. Addison took point, cradling her plasma rifle with the barrel pointed at the deck. Lucy and I, both unarmed, brought up the rear.
“Not far now,” Lucy said. She gave a brave little smile and I squeezed her hand.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m going to get you out of here, I promise.”
The tension in her eyes relaxed. “I know you will, dearie. We’ve been in tight spots before, you and I.”
“Maybe not as tight as this one.”
“Maybe not,” she conceded. “But you’ve always come through in the end.”
“I’m glad you have faith.”
“Somebody has to.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes. Our footfalls echoed from the dark stone of the walls and ceiling.
I asked, “Where will you go, now you’re human?”
Her little face frowned. “I hadn’t really considered that. I guess I was assuming I’d go with you, wherever you’re going. Same as always.”
“But—” I was about to say I couldn’t look after a kid. It was almost a reflex. After everything that had happened, the last thing I wanted was to take on any new, long-term responsibilities. But then I reminded myself this wasn’t a normal human child, not by a long chalk. The intelligences peering out from behind those young eyes—one a ship grown from the cells of a little girl who’d been dead since my grandparents were young, the other a centuries-old alien supercomputer—were both far older and more experienced than I. And together, they had both saved my life several times in the past forty-eight hours. The very least I could do when we got back to civilisation was take them under my wing.
If we got back.
A long time ago, a teacher gave me a piece of advice. It was in drama class. We were doing a performance of King Lear. I was playing the Fool, and knew my lines by heart, but when I found myself scared to go out on stage in front of an audience of my peers, my teacher advised me to forget about how Johnny Schultz felt. Instead, she told me to imagine how a successful actor might feel, and react accordingly. She got me to pretend to be the kind of person who would be able to deal with that situation.
“Fake it,” she said, “until you make it.”
And that’s exactly what I knew I had to do now. It was what Lucy and Addison needed from me. For their sake, whether I believed it or not, I had to roll up my sleeves and pretend to be Lucky Johnny Schultz, the man who always came out on top no matter the odds stacked against him. I had to act as if I truly believed we were getting out of here.
“Of course you can,” I said. “Whatever happens, wherever we end up after this, you’ll be more than welcome.” I forced a smile. “We’re a team.”
Lucy leaned on my arm. “You really mean that?”
“Of course I do. We’ll find a planet somewhere, with clean air and a pleasant climate, and we’ll settle down.”
“We’ll be like a proper family?”
Addison was listening. She glanced back and raised an amused eyebrow, but I chose to ignore it.
“Sure thing,” I told Lucy. “We’ll buy a house and get some cats, and have friends over for dinner.”
“How many cats?”
“How many would you like?”
“At least fifteen.”
“Okay, that’s settled. Fifteen cats it is.”
“And Riley will come with us, won’t she?”
A few paces ahead of us, I saw Addison’s shoulders stiffen.
“How about it?” I asked her. “Do you want to come and live with us?”
Addison stopped walking and turned. “With you two, and fifteen cats?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at us both in turn, as if trying to gauge whether we were mad or joking. Then, without seeming to reach a particular conclusion, she rolled her eyes and started walking again.
“What the hell,” she said over her shoulder. “You get us out of here and I’ll come and play happy families with you.”
Lucy gave an excited squeak, but Addison hadn’t finished speaking. She held up a hand.
“There’s one condition,” she said.
“Name it.”
The hand came down and resumed its grip on the barrel of the plasma rifle.
“I won’t be the one changing the kitty litter.”
* * *
We carried on walking for a few hundred metres, until the corridor reached a bowl-shaped room, and became a suspended walkway. On the far side lay a door, which Lucy said would lead us to the hangar where we could rendezvous with the team from the House of Reclamation. All we had to do was walk across the bridge.
Unfortunately, the floor was a good twenty metres below the bridge, and the walkway had been constructed from a hard, transparent material that allowed us to see the drop beneath our feet. Apparently, the winged Nymtoq didn’t suffer from vertigo. In fact, now I thought about it, I wondered why they’d even gone to the bother of building a bridge at all. Perhaps they had to walk if they were carrying stuff?
“Try not to look down,” Addison said.
I glanced over the edge, steeling myself. The lighting wasn’t particularly good down there. I’d been expecting the floor to be smooth black rock, like the rest of the interior, but it wasn’t. For a moment, my brain tried to make sense of the lumpy metallic shapes covering the lower half of the depression. Then my primate brain—evolved for deciphering patterns and detecting predators in the long grass—realised what it was looking at, and I felt my blood turn to ice water.
“Stop,” I hissed.
Addison turned, her mouth opening on a question—but I held my finger to my lips and glared at her.
Silently, I pointed downwards. She looked puzzled, and then realisation dawned. Her eyes went wide, and she caught her breath.
Below us, the floor was covered in dozens, maybe hundreds, of newly hatched alien crawfish. They weren’t as large as the others we’d faced, but each was still the size of a manhole cover with legs. Fragments of eggshell lay around them like discarded razors.
“Why didn’t you mention this?” I whispered to Lucy.
She shrugged. “They weren’t here when I downloaded into this body. They must have been laid and hatched in the last couple of days.”
“That’s fast.”
“Perhaps I should refresh my download, just to check for other surprises.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”
The creatures had apparently been sleeping when we entered—or maybe waiting for their shells to harden after hatching. But now, as they became aware of us above them, they started to stir. Beady eyes swivelled in our direction. Ja
ws flexed wetly; tails thrashed. And a forest of hungry, sickle-like pincers hinged slowly open.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
TROUBLE DOG
Captain Konstanz told me her idea. By the time I’d finished listening, I’d already entered Sudak’s fire envelope. At first glance, the captain’s plan seemed suicidal and bat-shit insane. But after running it through a tactical analysis, I couldn’t deny it held a certain unhinged merit. There was even a very small chance I might survive for longer than the minute and a half those same tactical algorithms expected me to endure in a straight-up fight against the three white ships.
Sudak’s vessel launched a spread of torpedoes, trying to drive me back into the sights of her two companions, who were rapidly closing from behind. I checked the crew. In the infirmary, Preston had strapped himself safely into an acceleration couch. Nod and his progeny were braced in crawlways and ducts, their six legs splayed against the walls to hold them in place. They were as ready as they’d ever be; nevertheless, I let the acceleration alarm whine through my internal spaces for a good two seconds before firing my manoeuvring thrusters.
Watching me flip end for end, Sudak must have thought her plan was working. But if she expected me to move backwards, into the closing jaws of her trap, she would be disappointed.
I fired my main engines as the Restless Itch swung before my bow, stabbing downwards at ninety degrees to the plane of the confrontation. Behind me, the torpedoes twitched in response as they recalculated their intercept vectors.
Below, the forward section of the Restless Itch spread out like the face of a barren moon—a pockmarked gnarl of rock leftover from the formation of some far-off solar system. Yet among the outcroppings and impact craters, between the deep, shadowed ravines, lights shone. Docking bays stood open. And there, in the centre of it all, the bay through which the captain’s shuttle had entered the behemoth.
Seconds had passed, during which the white ships had doubtlessly analysed and extrapolated my course. But all three were too far away to catch me before I reached the opening. Even the torpedoes would be hard pressed to close the distance in the remaining time—although they could still cause significant damage if they exploded on the surface of the Itch. If I wanted to get away from them completely, I’d have to bury myself deep in the innards of the beast.
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