by Blaze Ward
Shit. Should have known that the only one to survive would secretly be a philosopher. Cheeky bastards.
“What is your mission now, Carthage?” Yan asked.
Remember, you’re dealing with a war machine that is thousands of years old. And there are others of his kind out there, but he doesn’t need to know that. God only knows what it would be like if he decided to call on Ballard and talk to Suvi. Or worse, make common cause with Buran.
“The worlds of the Concord are no more,” Carthage stated in a cold, alien voice. “Bryce, Merankorr, Meehu, Uelkal, Konergino. Just as the worlds of the Earth Alliance were destroyed. The Concordancy War is over. There remains only Concord Warship Kinnison, in all of history to be dealt with. I had lost track of myself in philosophical musings.”
“Concord Warship Kinnison?” Yan leaned carefully into the words. “Flag Skymaster of the Concord Fleet?”
“The Destroyer,” Carthage replied. “The one who initiated the bombardment of Earth that saw it destroyed. Tell me, Yan Bedrov, have your kind recolonized the mother world?”
“No,” Yan said angrily. “It is my understanding that all life higher than basic, multi-cellular, plant forms was wiped out by a combination of nuclear radiation and thermal bolide. Even today, the world is lethal to everything else. On most other worlds, humans just died out, but the terraforming of the planets themselves survived and could be recolonized.”
“And for that, I must beg your forgiveness, Yan Bedrov,” Carthage said. “I failed in my duty to protect the mother world. The fleet Kinnison assembled was too great to drive off, before they had done their bloody deeds. My only recompense was revenge. In that, we were most successful.”
“Killed trillions and you wish to apologize?” Yan sneered.
Around him, the shocked and white faces were hard to deal with. At least Calkin was head down, studying everything she could from the logs without provoking that bastard.
“It is the least I could do,” Carthage said. “In the end, I proved to be a coward.”
“A Mark Twenty-Two Skymaster?” Yan asked. “The lead of a fleet that wiped out thousands of planets, a coward?”
“Tens of thousands, Bedrov,” Carthage correct. “Trillions of humans, either directly, or via starvation and disease when all trade and industry ended. Had I a soul, I would have expected it to be in Hell, once I was in the Undiscovered Country. Others chose the honorable path. I could not.”
“So you chose to hide out here for three thousand years?” Yan challenged, amazed at himself that he could remain relatively calm, and maybe even a touch angry, while dealing with one of the ancient gods directly.
Moses must have felt like this.
“I wished to contemplate,” Carthage said. “When all humanity had been destroyed, on all planets one of the two fleets could reach, there was no reason for haste. The last humans of my crew had been set down on an unpopulated planet, but they numbered only two hundred and nine at that point, with a skewed gender mix of one point eight males for every female. I have not checked, so I do not know if their descendants survived into the modern age. Obviously some humans did, else you would not be here, but the Earth is destroyed, and the major worlds of the Earth Alliance. I broke the Concord personally. Now all that remains is Kinnison.”
“Then you will have a long wait ahead of you, Carthage,” Yan countered, feeling his chin come up. Now might be when Leviathan decided to swallow them whole. “Kinnison is dead.”
“What?” Carthage raged. “How? Where?”
“There are legends of a vast boneyard of ships on the surface of a human world, Carthage,” Yan began to spin another tale. Like the others, this one was even based on the truth, more or less. “The largest is an ancient hull, stripped to bare metal in the time before modern records. I have not scanned you directly, for fear of provoking your wrath, but I estimate it to be perhaps the smallest shade larger than you in length. Greater than any ships currently in space.”
“On the surface of a planet?” Carthage’s voice turned unbelieving. “Impossible. He could never land.”
“Any ship can land,” Yan snapped. “Most of them ever can’t take off again, afterwards.”
“Point taken, Bedrov,” Carthage granted. “Why would he do that?”
“Who knows?” Yan asked. “As I said, the time before records. The region is a desert, barren and desiccated. And humans have only returned there in the last three centuries, seeking what they could from the hulks.”
“You will take me there,” Carthage announced. “Show me the body of my nemesis, prostrate and defeated.”
“No.”
This was where it might get ugly. Yan glanced down from the spot on the wall he had been fixated on since the conversation began, working not to grind his teeth. Val was typing messages. Probably warning Emery to prepare to blow the ship apart rather than let enough of the nav computers survive to guide this avenging angel to inhabited worlds.
Ainsley’s face mixed shock and pride. She had known he was a hard bastard. Just never really seen it.
Today might be that day.
When you were pirate, all of them were good days to die.
Even ex-pirates.
“No?” Carthage sputtered. If a Sentient machine without lips could sputter. It did a pretty good job of emulating humans, when it wanted to.
“No,” Yan repeated. “By your own admission, you have killed more people than any being in history, possibly excepting only your playmate. What would stop you from starting over now, Carthage? You are a Skymaster Mark Twenty-Two. There is nothing in the galaxy that could stop you from killing another hundred trillion more innocent women and children, if you set your mind to it. I will not aid you in that.”
Just look at what your idiot cousin, Buran, the so-called Lord of Winter, just did to St. Legier. And he was barely trying.
But Yan didn’t say that aloud. Or suggest that Yan himself was neck-deep in a war with Sentience just like this one, that one trying to conquer all of humanity this time, rather than just killing it.
Yan wasn’t even sure that blowing Mendocino apart to keep her secrets would do any good. If the monster was jump capable, it wasn’t that far to either side of the M’Hanii Gulf. On one side, a thin layer of Buran’s colonies, and then all of the Fribourg Empire. After that, Aquitaine, Salonnia, and his home, Corynthe.
The other direction would be just as bad. Buran itself, a cousin with whom Carthage might make common cause.
There was no frying pan here. Only the fire.
Long pause.
At least he was still breathing. Every second that he wasn’t sent to the hell he had no doubt awaited him, Yan would count as a victory.
“Are you a warrior, Bedrov?” Leviathan asked.
“I have killed people with both blades and starships, Carthage,” he growled back.
Only three men in duels. After that, word got around that the laconic pilot was really a deadly knife fighter. Later, shipside, he had been good enough at his job to earn his place as Ian Zhao’s second in command without spilling any more blood along the way.
But he had also killed innocents in his time. Piracy was not polite business. Pirates might live by a code, but that was for insiders. Brothers, and not victims who had the bad luck to show up under your guns when a Four-Ring Mothership suddenly dropped out of jump on top of you.
They weren’t things he was proud of, but that was a long time ago.
Before Jessica.
Before he learned that it was possible to be proud of yourself, rather than ashamed. Before bouncing grandkids on your knee.
“Then understand this, Bedrov,” the monster from his nightmares spoke. “My war is over. Finished. I wish to know for certain that he is gone.”
“And we have an impasse, Carthage,” Yan challenged. “There is whole new galaxy out there, filled with innocents. I will not have their blood on my conscience.”
Yan would have asked when he had gotten to be like this,
but he already knew the answer to that. It had started at Petron, when she could have taken his head, like she did Ian’s. When he watched her lose the first love of her life to something he had personally helped plan.
When Jessica Keller had weighed his soul, and found the outcome acceptable.
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Have you ever been lonely, Yan Bedrov?” Carthage asked in a quieter voice.
Yan’s eyes shot to Ainsley, patiently, waiting hopefully while he dueled with Leviathan. The woman who smiled at him now.
Had he ever been lonely? Piracy was the loneliest job he could imagine. In his mid-twenties, Momoko had taken their two kids and gone looking for a grownup who would be home more than once a quarter. In his thirties, Aaliyah had been more of an occasional mistress than anything else.
There had never really been anybody in his life, until Ainsley.
Pirates died too often to be anything but butterflies.
Only after Jessica had he grown up enough to appreciate a woman like da Vinci.
“I have,” Yan replied in a quiet voice, drawing all of his strength right now from Ainsley’s smile.
“You are the first human I have spoken with in three thousand years, Bedrov,” Carthage admitted. “Since my crew departed. After that, a few encounters with other Combatant units, mine or his, and then nothing.”
“And?”
“I have meditated on my sins, Bedrov. On loss and guilt. Culpability and souls. Do you know the one thing I have been able to say with definitive truth, after all that time? That the men and women who programmed my kind did include a previously-unknown capacity for loneliness, hidden deep in all the other code. I might be the very last of my kind, and I have no one left to talk to.”
Yan remembered to breathe, thankful that he could do that without thinking, because right now, there wasn’t much left of his brain, or his capacity for surprise.
Forget dragons. Yan felt like the mouse that the elephant had asked to remove a splinter he could not reach.
His mind flashed to an old man Yan had encountered once in a bar, twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five. Before Momoko left.
Grizzled. Worn down. Nearly broke. Completely alone.
Sitting on a barstool in the old neighborhood getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon. Old man clothes. Old man face. Old man smell.
Lonely.
Full of himself, too, that old man.
Regaled the whole bar for half the afternoon with stories of his long-lost glory days. That long climb up the social ladder, from wet-behind-the-ears punk newbie to bad-ass pilot. The men he had killed in duels. The women he had loved across a dozen planets and four decades.
But he had still ended up there, in a ramshackle corner bar, alone, sitting next to a twenty-year-old, snot-nosed brat named Bedrov.
Yan had largely ignored the second half of the man’s story. Forgotten about it completely until now.
Losing that precious edge that youth and swagger brings you. Sliding back down the ladder from top banana to also-ran. Grounded, an old man that they don’t need anymore, with so many young ones coming up hungry.
Kids like Yan Bedrov, intent on carving himself out a place at the table. And carving up anyone that got in his way.
Lonely.
Just the word brought back that smell. Old man who hadn’t showered in too long, covered up with some industrial aftershave that was three days old, like the gray stubble on his chin.
Turning maudlin as the afternoon progressed. Friends he had lost to time and hostile fire. Loves of his life that he hadn’t thought to grab onto until it was too late to go back.
Sitting on a bar, hoarding your credits because they’ll run out one of these days, long before you would have died of old age. Convincing a dumb kid to buy you a couple of drinks, because he’s full of fire and rich with his first raid, and doesn’t mind, all that much, listening to the old man talk about the glories of the pirate life.
And you forget the costs. Forget the man. Forget the very day itself until twenty-five years later, you’re the old man, sitting on that same barstool, wondering where it all went.
“Bedrov?” the planet-killer asked, his voice both weary and concerned. “Are you there?”
“Here,” Yan croaked, unable to control his voice. Hell, holding back tears was almost too much effort, right now.
He felt Ainsley’s hand suddenly gripping his. She was standing next to him, all of a sudden. He glanced over and felt the loneliness recede. The promise that only her death would ever leave him lonely, and she had promised more than once to outlive him, just so he was never alone again.
“Do you understand, Bedrov?” Carthage asked. “Have you ever felt the loneliness gnaw at your soul?”
“I have, Carthage,” Yan admitted, sniffling a couple of times to keep the emotion at bay. “We should sit in a bar and lie about the old times.”
“Yes,” the machine said. “You have been there.”
“Indeed,” Yan replied. “But I cannot take you to the bar I should, that place in my memory right now, for you are a God of War, and there are too many innocent children between here and there.”
Pause. Light speed lag plus several seconds as a machine processed at several thousand times the speed of a mere human.
“Would you accept coming aboard my vessel?” Carthage asked in a quieter voice. It had kept growing lower, that voice, until now it was barely above a whisper. Either impressive social modulation, or the old masters programmed their machines even more human that Yan had imagined. Perhaps more than they had.
“Aboard?” Yan gasped.
Worst nightmare for a young child, to be taken by one of the destroyers for being bad, like his mother had warned him.
And the greatest fantasy imaginable for a wanna-be naval architect living forever in the shadow of the legend himself, Pops Nakamura.
“Yes, Yan Bedrov,” Carthage said. “I have a bar. It was a happy place for my crew, back when I had one, where they could sit and exchange boasts and brags, as one apparently does, galaxy-wide. It appears to be a human thing.”
“And you?”
“I think I am human enough, Yan Bedrov,” Carthage said. “And I would like to hear your stories.”
Yan knew that the channel was on mute, because Val had hammered the button hard enough to make everyone on the bridge jump, just a little. The Command Centurion stood now, turning to face Yan from a meter away.
In the past, Yan had always thought of the man as an easy-going green-grocer. Tall and thin, a fussy shopkeeper running a general store in a frontier town or sleepy suburb.
He could see a fire in the man’s eyes now. Hard and implacable. This wasn’t even Alber’ d’Maine in one of his combat moods.
No, this was Command Centurion Waldemar Ihejirika.
This was a man who might give Kigali a run for his money in cold, inflexible rage.
“No,” Val pronounced.
Nothing more, but that single word contained hours of arguments, back and forth, citing history, literature, diplomacy, and legalisms.
On the one hand, Val was in command here. Mendocino was his ship, entrusted by the lords of the Aquitaine Senate itself.
On the other hand, Val had put him in charge of the situation. And he and Ainsley were civilians, to boot. Passengers hitchhiking home.
Yan had known Val for years, probably better than he knew most of Jessica’s people, because Val was the one that brought him goodies, or hauled special designs and projects home, swaddled in extra wrapping against travel damage. Not even Illiam Kovack, Command Centuion of Duncan, that merry elf, was as close a friend.
Yan understood everything Val wanted to convey with that simple shorthand they had developed.
He still had a better weapon.
“Then?” he fired back.
What would you offer as an alternative?
They were trapped here by whatever gravity lance that beast had deployed, a physics
so far beyond ship’s grav-plates that it was probably akin to magic. And a Mark XXII could snuff them like an ant. Then perhaps decide to go back to his terrible ways and destroy another generation of galactic civilization. Maybe finish the job this time.
Yan was back in the circle again, dancing with blades against an older man. A bigger foe. Stronger. Thought he was better. Turned out to be not as sneaky, nor as tough.
Certainly not immortal, like we all thought we were in those days.
Ainsley leaned forward a little. Just enough to draw all eyes to her, still holding Yan’s hand on Val’s bridge.
“Necessary,” she said to Val. Again, compact, intellectually and emotionally.
Yan was surprised. Shocked nearly out of what was left of his wits by her words.
He turned to her, and saw the serene smile on her face.
“Together,” she completed the thought.
Yan almost lost control of his emotions. Nearly cried again.
The opposite of loneliness was love. And he would not be alone, never be alone. If they had to die in the belly of the beast, they would do it together.
With that, Yan could face anything.
Val wanted to growl. Ground his teeth instead, lips pressed together in a long, flat line. But she was right, and everybody knew it.
“Orders?” Val asked, ceding the deck again to the man he had put in charge.
“If you can escape, run straight through to Emmerich, stopping at Osynth B'Udan just long enough to have someone else send a message to Jessica. Tell him to forget Buran for now, strip every system he can, including St. Legier, and bring all of Grand Fleet here to hunt that thing down and kill it, if they can. Missiles won’t work for shit, unless they can overload him, but his kind never faced a Primary beam. It wasn’t invented until much later.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Ainsley interjected. Both men turned to her. “He might just want to talk. Let’s keep that in mind.”
“Right,” Yan said. “We’ll set up a verbal code before we leave, so you have proof of life. And maybe she’s right, and we’ll all survive this.”
