And behind them, the corpse of Argyle Trent was silent on the hot Esther sands.
7
Eliard, It Watches
The pirate captain didn’t manage to find the things that his body needed—thanks, no doubt, to the trashed state of the medical suites—but in a short time, he had managed to find some old service rations stashed in one of the many storage lockers his father had dotted around the palace and some filtered water.
Which was annoying, because what he really craved was some painkillers or stimulant cream for the shivers of pain that still swept through his body—either from his impossible warp jump or from the Device slowly eating up his bodily resources, he didn’t know.
As it was, however, the food and the water went a long way in restoring his faith in himself. He even found himself stirring awake, half-wrapped in one of the Martin tapestries—eagles flying over some sea ship somewhere, machine embroidered in the finest of detail—and feeling a little more rested, but not particularly happy.
I fell asleep!? He struggled out of the heavy tapestry and flung it to one side. I’ve got no time to sleep! He had to get back to Esther. He had to get back to Cassie, and the others.
Which meant that he had to find a ship.
Making his way through the deserted corridors of his childhood home, his feet led him down the quickest paths to his new destination even though his mind was full of memories.
Here was where he had a blazing row with his father about going to Trevalyn Academy. He hadn’t wanted to, preferring instead to spend his time taking part in the illegal jet races that screamed their way across the deep canyons and plains of Branton’s wilds.
This window was where he had first caught eyes on the elegant flight of space-yachts when he had only been about five. The image of their long nose prows and their twin-hulls was imprinted on his memory, as he remembered seeing how sleek and graceful they were. The three vessels flew in a wing formation as they came screaming out of the distant atmosphere, shedding clouds and flames at first so they looked like comets or meteors come to earth… And then they had slowed, raising their sharp noses as they lowered, turning in a wide arc over the bay that the city sat around and sending up furrows in the water as they sped to the landing ports.
Eliard didn’t remember who the yachts had belonged to—probably some other diplomat from an allied noble house, or a trade delegation of some kind—but he remembered seeing them and thinking: Wow. All that speed, and power. All that freedom.
That night, he remembered that he had rabbited excitedly at his mother over dinner, who had appeared tense and distracted through most of it. I made up stories of where they had been and what they had seen. Eliard half-smirked to himself, thinking of how young he had been.
Have they seen the Eta Carina Nebula up close? he had asked. The Eagle Nebula? The Swainson Black Hole? The Helion generator?
His mother had been preoccupied, but she’d done her best to pacify her excitable child.
And then she had said the thing that made me, Eliard thought.
‘Eliard, if you’re really determined about knowing all this stuff, then why don’t you see it for yourself?’ Looking back at the conversation now as a young man, Eliard rather thought that his mother had finally lost her patience with her restless and reckless son, but at the time, he remembered thinking that those words weren’t a challenge but an opportunity.
‘The stars are ours, Eliard,’ his mother had explained, making a quick gesture over her head. ‘Anything you can dream of, and far more that you can’t, is up there.’
‘The stars are ours.’ Eliard now wondered if his mother had been trying to tell him that there was no hurry, but it was that second bit of the conversation that had really intrigued him. Far more than he could dream of. Now that was a challenge, because the excitable Eliard could already dream of quite a lot.
“But I had never in my wildest dreams imagined anything like the crap I am in right now.” Eliard’s mind soured, shaking his head from the image of the bay outside the city as he once again saw the ruined craters and collapsed buildings. He wondered where his mother was, and he tried not to think of the inevitable conclusion.
“The stables.” Eliard turned abruptly on his heel and took the stairs that led out of the more official rooms and apartments of the palace, and into the more workaday areas.
This section, the rear of the Martin Palace, was split onto lower terraced levels, with different halls given over to gymnasiums, laboratories, and engineering workshops.
All of which were totaled. Eliard growled as his booted feet crunched on machine components. Once again, it was the exercise machines and the doors and every seeming bit of drone manufacture that had been demolished by someone. It was unsurprising that it was the workshops and the laboratories that seemed to be the worst affected, a sea of twisted and shattered debris that could once have been computers or drones or production machines…or anything, really.
Again, the walls of what had once been a workshop declared the same message:
It Watches… Sitting next to the same Ponos eye in the triangle.
“This is starting to give me the creeps…” Eliard muttered, thinking that he just wanted to be out of here as soon as possible. He turned hurriedly away from the workshops and took the steps that went past a sculpted garden, down to where his father’s stables sat.
The House Martin stables were an affectation really, or a hobby, Eliard considered. Set below the main building of the palace and with the outer wall running along the top, they were a series of stone arches built into the side of a cliff that overlooked the rolling foothills of the mountains behind the city of Branton. A wide, gravel-crunched driveway led to a cut-in set of double-doors, unsurprisingly ripped from their moorings, that were wide enough for the flatbed service drones to pass in and out of to load and repair the elite craft that Eliard’s father had collected.
Drekk. Eliard paused as he looked out across the view that the entrance to the stables should have afforded him. Instead of the rolling foothills with its blanket of grasses and heathers, studded with the gnarled stands of Mediterranean trees, he was looking at a vast landslip from the impacted mountains behind.
I used to roar out of here as if all of the hounds of the void were after me. Eliard remembered the thrill of forcing whatever craft he could beg, borrow, or joyride from his father to leap out over the cliff—that dizzying, gut-wrenching moment of gravity as the craft’s belly fell towards the hills below, then the triumphant kick of the engines as they roared out across the distant plains, burning and tearing the air as they moved.
Now, however, he was looking at what looked to be the after-effects of an earthquake underneath the cliffs of the stables. The mountainside was broken into drifts of rubble and scree, churned and ugly. Gone were the joys of his youth.
“Just so long as there is a damn ship inside there…” he grumbled to himself as he moved on quicker feet into the darkened, vaulted hallways. The lights should have automatically come on as he entered, but the pirate was unsurprised when no electric overheads or gleaming LEDs met his pace along the paths that moved from one bay to another.
What he was surprised about, however, was the fact that most of the bays were empty.
My father had almost thirty elite and collectible craft in here at one time. Eliard felt the pang of loss as he moved past one empty stall after another. Each ‘stall’ was the size of a small house, with gantries, moorings, and loading arms that would secure the ships in place and allow the pilots to enter.
However, just as in the main palace itself, every bit of automated machinery was rent and mangled horribly out of shape.
“This isn’t the work of looters,” Eliard realized—he might have been quick-witted, but he was a slow learner—as he passed one empty stall to the next.
He had been under the impression that in the aftermath of whatever had attacked his home world, perhaps some raiders or looters had made planetfall, and after finding lit
tle of value, they had decided to take whatever scrap that they could find. However, in these prized stables of his father—the very place that had once been home to the Mercury Blade itself—Eliard saw that there was still loads of spare metal in the form of the wrecked infrastructure.
“I mean, if you’re just interested in scrap value,” Eliard reasoned to himself as his boots echoed in the silence, “and you’re already willing to take drekking doors off of their hinges, then the scrap value in here alone would be worth thousands of Imperial Coalition credits…”
Which meant that these weren’t looted. The pirate captain stopped in place. They were vandalized.
A systematic vandalization of every bit of machinery in the Martin Palace…
And only the automated machinery…
A suspicion started to form at the back of Eliard’s mind, but one that even his own subconscious didn’t want to admit to him yet. It Watches…
He took up his pace once again, moving away from the strangeness of all this as he concentrated on what he needed to do, not what might have happened. He mourned the loss of the ancient collectible Viper-craft that his father had a full set of, as well as the Eagle, a tri-hulled craft that had been presented to Lord Martin as a gift for some successful peace treaty or something.
Ships had been my father’s life… Eliard thought with a shiver of embarrassment. He felt embarrassed because it was the same for him, too. Did that mean that he was more like his father than he cared to admit?
I wonder where the Mercury is right now? Eliard felt what could only be described as heartbreak and longing for the stolen craft that had been his and Irie Hanson’s home for all the years since he had last left this world.
He was, in fact, so deep into his morose thoughts that he almost walked straight past the one thing that he was looking for: a humped shape at the far corner of the stables, alongside other shapes covered in tarpaulins.
“Hang on a minute…” The captain rushed over to the shapes, and the Device turned into a cruelly-curved knife to allow him to slice through the tethering straps with ease. It looked like the vandals had either missed these shapes back here in the occluded dark, or perhaps they hadn’t been interested in the modular parts of the craft that Eliard exposed.
A drekking, stars-damned kit-craft! Eliard whooped in joy, looking pleased once he had cut through and dragged the tarps from their forms.
His father had been an avid collector of the elite, unique, and collectible spacecraft, usually only 4-8 men size. The Mercury Blade had been the one exception, as a larger and more powerful racer that could be piloted by one person but could comfortably carry twenty. Into these categories, the lord general also included the most expensive, one-off designs of kit-craft: modular space and aerial vehicles that were somewhere between drones and full spaceships, designed to be ultimately flexible and changeable to ensure that you could create the unique vessel to your needs.
“A two-person Aeon Design…” Eliard walked around the various components, pleased with what he saw.
The Aeons were considered one of the top models in their range, which meant that it had all of the latest and updated systems. Nano-mechanization meant that systems that had taken up valuable space had been miniaturized, which also had a knock-on positive effect on the energy use—thus freeing more of the engine’s capacities for other things, such as navigation or warp.
And the thing has a small warp drive! Eliard cackled with glee. It was only large enough to make small hops, designed for inner-system use really, but Eliard knew that it would get him up into the void above his ruined home world, and from there, he would either be able to make multiple small jumps to where he needed to go, or at least take him to the next nearest place to hitch or steal another ride.
The body of the Aeon was nothing much more than a large cigar-shape, about six times the length of Eliard’s body, and only a little over his head height. It was designed as a small, fast courier in between stations in a singular solar system, with space enough inside to lie or sit down at the controls and that would be about it.
On the floor around it were other, smaller components. Eliard saw the three contained valves that, when hooked up to the thing’s outer chassis and powered, would together form the strength of a singular warp core.
“If only there were some more of those lying about,” he thought aloud. If he found five or six of the plasma-valves, then he might be able to even use this tiny craft to jump all the way to Esther in one shot, but no such luck.
Not that I am going to beg or borrow bad luck… The pirate started working feverishly. The Aeon had flight and void and space capability. That was good enough for him.
With his newfound confidence, the pirate jogged here and there across the stables, finding at last a small mechanical loading trolley without any computerized parts that was little more than a lever on wheels, which he used to maneuver the awkward and heavy plasma valves into place. It was tiring work, but Eliard didn’t stop until he was sure that he had all three in their correct positions, and with the appropriate wires and hoses in all of the appropriate places.
“Stars, I wish I had Irie here right about now.” Eliard finally lounged back against the stone walls of the stables and took a deep breath. It was darker in here than it had been before as night had fallen over the Martin home world.
A day. I’ve been here a whole drekking day! Eliard grimaced, cursing his slow progress. Maybe he should have tried to go back to the warp gate that he had found underneath the palace, but no.
The pirate captain shivered where he sat, although his body was still warm from all of the heaving and scrambling that he had been doing for the last couple of hours.
It was the thought of that warp gate, the way that he had got here. Somehow.
It shouldn’t be there… He stared out of the nearest large archway opening to the glitter of the Branton stars appearing in the murky blue outside. It wasn’t that he knew what should or shouldn’t have been down that forgotten stairwell and corridor in his own home. He dimly remembered that had just been one more of the many permanently locked and restricted doors that he, as an irresponsible youth to the lord general, had never been given the access codes to. It was something that he was used to, given his austere upbringing.
“But why didn’t Father at least say that we had one of those Valyien warp gate things right there underneath the palace?” Eliard shook his head as he shivered once more. The very thought of it being there all the time through his childhood, pregnant with whatever strange ab-dimension and plasma forces that the Valyien had access to, made him wince.
Maybe his father hadn’t known it was even there… He considered. Impossible. But it was certainly older than the palace was, as it had been a cavern of rock that was deeper and older than the corridor it had broken into.
And the corridor had been back-filled with rubble, Eliard thought. Maybe his father really hadn’t known that it was down there, but that some much earlier generation of Martin had discovered it and decided to block it off?
“Well, moping about my dead ancestors won’t do anything to save my friends now…” Eliard said as he forcefully turned his mind away from even considering attempting to use the warp gate again.
For one, it had been a horrible, nightmarish experience. He had felt his body disintegrating, and after it was over, he was sure now that he had been as close to collapse and death as it was possible to be for a human.
And for another thing… Eliard argued to convince himself. I have no idea how to operate it. It certainly wasn’t glowing with that stable or not-stable warp light that he had seen from the larger gate on Esther. Maybe it was a one-way journey?
But why here? His thoughts pricked at him, but he refused to acknowledge them.
Esther. Cassie. Irie. The Mercury. He turned back to the Aeon craft to climb up one of the outer ladders and winch open the outer porthole seal.
Creeeeak! The metal protested but gave way, revealing the thick rubber
and plasti-crete seals that kept the boat pressurized. Dropping himself in, Eliard found that the insides were just as he had expected: a narrow cylindrical tunnel that he had to hunch down in to clamber through, with sleek inset instrumentation along the interior walls. No bunkbeds or canteens or medical bays or cargo holds or even washing facilities for this tiny boat, as its purpose was so specific.
People weren’t meant to be in here for longer than forty minutes or so, Eliard thought as he sat down at the ‘head’ of the craft in a low-slung chair and pulled on the ship’s wheel to position it in front of him.
“Computer?” Eliard said, before realizing that the thing hadn’t been in the automatic standby mode of resting intelligence. No, he would have to do all of this manually. Which meant he had to climb outside and physically release the plasma from the warp valves so that tiny, almost atomic pieces would be drip-fed into the conduction tubes, which would then create a faster and faster reaction as electrons and protons sped around in a miniaturized particle-accelerator before smashing together to produce the energy that the ship needed.
It was a lengthy process—and it was also a pain in the butt, the captain thought—but he still got up out of his seat and crabbed and scrabbled back to the singular porthole, released the door winch to break the air seal, and wound the porthole open to once again clamber out, and along the body to the first of the plasma valves.
Not for the first time in this journey, Eliard wished that Irie was here as he used the low LED lights of his own still barely-intact encounter suit to determine which of the nozzles and valves he had to move, push, or twist.
She would have already figured out a way to make this tiny boat go ten times faster on half as much energy… Eliard admitted, checking and rechecking that he had the right procedure in place. The pirate captain was no engineer, and barely a mechanic at the best of times, but growing up in the Martin Palace had at least instilled in him a passion for spacecraft, which luckily meant that he could identify his plasma conduction cabling from his water coolant hose.
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