by David Ryker
Hess took the lead up the steps and felt his back creak and ache. There were thousands, winding all the way up into the clouds. It would take many exhausting hours to reach the top but he couldn’t turn back. He began to climb and, on the twentieth step, a rumbling sound behind caused him to turn. Everyone watched him from below. The step began to shake and he ran back to the party.
The group closed in tight around Saito, the guards waving their guns at any movement. All around them, a thin perimeter of the terracotta tiles began to vibrate so hard that they detached from one another and boxed them in. The tiles started to spin, so fast that they became a clay-colored blur. One of the guards raised his rifle.
“No!” Alison laid a hand on his arm. “Look!”
The perimeter of tiles had detached from the floating walkway and left them all standing on a square at the foot of the gigantic staircase. Alison walked to the edge as the mechanical sounds rumbled on.
“We’re not connected to anything,” she chirped excitedly.
Her tone seemed to calm the guards. Then, the entire platform jolted and Alison leapt back toward the group. She grabbed hold of Hess’s arm and he held her tight as the ground beneath them pulsated.
They began to ascend. Their isolated square separated itself from the walkway and floated upwards, silently, carried by no forces Hess had ever known. They travelled up the steep set of stairs swiftly, lifted higher than the birds and branches and up through the clouds, leaving the walkway behind.
The vapor touched Hess on the cheek and he felt young again, reminded of the thunderstorms which had hollered outside his window on his home world. Almost, he could feel his mother’s hand reaching down to comfort him and her fingers moving through his tussled hair as she told him his father was working late again. He sighed and breathed deep and felt the air cling to the inside of his lungs. The air here tasted so much sweeter than on Earth.
Saito and his people stopped complaining as the platform lifted them higher and higher. They’re as bewitched as me, recognized Hess.
Eventually, they burst through the clouds and found themselves standing before a city built on the sky, all glass and concrete and bright neon lights perched on the mountaintops which crested through the fog. These structures dotted on all the mountaintops as far as the eye could see, almost as though the Spartans had tried to raise their city up closer to the heavens and had got stuck halfway. Between these structures, smaller shuttles and bridges carried citizens from place to place and all below the birds sang and sang.
The edifices were made of flat and uncaring surfaces with corners and angles and brutal profiles. Vertical voids punctuated their unfeeling faces like the spaces between ribs, long thin strips of upright glass cutouts, lit in reds and purples and other unnatural colors from within. Even from far away, Hess saw people moving but there was no one near them.
A city built of warm lights and harsh concrete and quiet and open spaces. A city built on a birdsong foundation floating through the mountains and up past the clouds and all Hess could do was stare and listen and suck in the cool wet air and remember his home.
“Hey!” A shout punctured the awed silence.
A man walked along one of the bridges. He wore engineers’ clothes: heavy boots and a durable jumpsuit unbuttoned at the front. It was clean at least, but Hess still winced as he watched the man come closer.
“From the Senate?” he shouted, seeing a round of disgusted nods from the generals who had stepped in front of Saito, saving him the disgrace of talking to this interloper. “Come with me, then.”
He stopped and scratched at the heavy moustache which plagued his top lip and threatened to infect his cheeks and chin.
“Come on,” he repeated and began to walk away.
They had no option but to follow, even as Saito complained and groaned. Van Liden hushed him and Hess led the way, chasing the man through a tunnel, then the basement of one of the buildings, and then into a series of flat concrete corridors which snaked up and up. The man walked fast and never answered any questions, only chuckling and whistling to himself. Eventually, he brought them to an arching set of double doors and laid his hand flat on the ceramic surface, gave it the lightest of pushes, and ushered the guests through.
When they entered, they found a vast, well-appointed space. One wall was dedicated to a huge curved window which looked out across the shorter hilltops that pierced up through the fog. They were up high. Very high.
The room was arranged as a shallow crater. At the very center, the size of a swimming pool, was the lowest point. It was surrounded by a thirty-centimeter step made from the concrete. This continued out for another four meters, tracing a smooth rolling line. This layer then went up again and again. There were seven steps in all and the room was like a huge inverted mold for a step-pyramid that sunk into the floor.
Inside, a group of men and women sat and talked among themselves. Each of them had short cropped hair and wore plain, off-white overalls, contrasting with the exquisitely tailored traditional suits of the Senate delegation.
Van Liden broke from the ranks of the generals and guards and walked purposefully up to the gathered Spartans. “Which one of you is Ghoulam?”
They noticed him as one and their eyes turned to a man with light brown skin and a heavy stubble spreading across his face. He smiled, unfolding himself from his seat, patting his friends’ shoulders as he passed them and moved toward the visitors.
“General Van Liden, I presume. And this must be President Saito.” He accompanied the greeting with a flourishing, facetious bow as the other Spartans laughed. “I am Edison Ghoulam. Welcome to Sparta.”
Polite applause unfurled around the room like a poisonous flower. The president’s men shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot as they heard the thick-tongued, heavy syllables of the Spartan accent.
Hess worried about the president. They’ve failed to show him respect. They haven’t let him rest. They haven’t made him feel important. They’ve done nothing to flatter him. He’s going to call off the entire conference. Instead, Saito gathered himself for a moment and then reached out a hand.
“Mr. Ghoulam.” Saito laced the honorific with scorn. “I am President Saito.”
The Spartan leader looked at the hand as though it were an alien object, viewing it from every angle. Eventually, he took Saito in a tight grip and squeezed while matching the president’s eye.
“Sure” was all he offered before turning back to his people.
And then, it was a party. Not a good party, Hess thought, but he found himself on familiar ground. People mingled among one another and talked, the guards lurked in the corner together, the diplomats on both sides seemed to find one another and inserted themselves into deep conversations concerning embargos and sanctions and trade deals.
It continued for a long time, hours after the delegation from Earth should have retired to bed. They don’t want to show weakness, Hess thought. But he felt tired, his internal clock struggling to reset since they had landed. He wished for the cocktail of drugs and technology which could be used to reset his weariness.
Saito slung back drink after drink, sitting and listening to the Spartans’ conversation. He had a knack for this, Hess ruefully admitted. He could entertain and talk and simply exist without doing anything consequential, the very embodiment of a diplomat.
Eventually, however, Hess noticed Van Liden nod toward the president. Saito picked himself up, flicked the side of a glass with the long nail of his little finger, and demanded everyone’s attention. He thanked them for their hospitality and launched into a meaningless speech which no one would remember in the morning.
But then the subject turned to war.
In fact, the president announced, the Fleet was lining up at this very moment and preparing for battle against this new and unlikely foe. The Spartans shifted in their seats; this wasn’t part of the script. As he spoke, Saito’s guards re-entered the room and brought with them a collection of projection equi
pment. They began to assemble it on the floor of the Spartan chamber. Ghostly holograms of thousands of Federation ships assembled together in space.
He’s going to make us watch, Hess realized. A bonding experience. A show of power to these backwards people. Mess with the Federation and this is what happens next.
But the Spartans did not seem to care. They drank their drinks and took seats on the concrete steps and cushioned benches, pleased their guests were providing some kind of foreign entertainment. Even as the Federation ships were lining up, Hess could hear them nudging one another and whispering. He only caught snippets and scraps as he moved through the darkened room, but he heard talk of the tactical arrangement and technical details which went so far above his head they might as well have flown through the trace gate and back to Earth.
As the people began to settle into position, taking up their seats around Saito’s stage, Alison began suddenly to tug at Hess’s arm.
“Acton,” she whispered loudly, “I have something. Acton!”
He was busy watching the scene. Not the projection, necessarily, but the way the people reacted. Saito is a fool, he told himself. This won’t strengthen his position. These people know how strong they are. All you’re doing is showing them how strong you are. You’re showing your hand. You better hope it’s a good one.
“Acton!” Alison used his given name but Hess was too distracted to care. “I have a message. It’s from an admiral out near the Pale.”
He waved a dismissive hand. He wanted to watch the room.
“It’s marked urgent!”
“How urgent can it be?” he hissed from the side of his mouth and gestured to the projection. “The whole damn Fleet there. What can be more urgent than that?”
“I don’t know…”
“Let me see, quickly.”
Hess turned and looked down at the page in the girl’s hand and he read the name Loreto.
That old fool, no one hear wanted to hear from him. But Hess felt his interest pique. It was addressed to plenty of top ranking people; the information inside could be important, perhaps valuable. As his finger reached out to open the message, a cheer sprang up.
“Now!” announced Saito. “We’re about to begin! Quiet please!”
He handed the page back to Alison. It would have to wait. How much more important could it be than this? Hess turned back to the battle. The first time a human military force had gathered to fight a foreign invader. And here he was, watching it live on a hostile planet.
The ghostly projected ships began to move across the room. The war was now.
15
Loreto
The Vela flew too fast toward the Pale and Loreto rubbed his temple harder and harder.
The crew pestered him with questions about the strange, burgeoning power of the ship but he had no answers. The gun calibrations, Cavs moaned, reset every few parsecs. The shields fluttered and the engines guzzled less fuel than expected, their output almost double the normal capacity. These did not seem like problems, Loreto lied to his crew. He knew they didn’t like losing control but he felt increasingly desperate.
Life was about sacrifices. He’d thrown his everything into his admiralty; the Vela was his ship, his concern, and she worried him. But such were the rewards, such was the speed they moved from Olmec to the Pale. He thrust aside his worries if it meant saving lives.
He examined the codex fused to his desk. If life was about making sacrifices, he’d made more than his fair share. Life was lonely in the Fleets, lonelier still out near the Pale. He and his wife had barely said a word to one another until he heard her separation request crackling over the comms. That oath had been hard enough to break, and now he was in danger of breaking another.
I will be the guiding light which shields humanity from the darkness.
Loreto scoffed at his sacrifices but he couldn’t kid himself. He’d thrown everything into this ship, into protecting people. Break this oath and he’d have nothing else. That was why he drove his crew hard, why he cultivated bright protegés like Cavs and tried to turn them into the best they could be. The crew were proxies, substitutes for the family he’d left behind. An ex-wife and an empty heart; it wasn’t much to show for a life, but he still had his ship.
The area of the desk around the alien codex had turned black. Loreto remembered the bot he’d encountered on Olmec, a corrupted piece of machinery turned against its masters. He covered the device with his hand whenever anybody entered but the latticed corruption spread across the surface and made it look like the interior of the Exile ship.
Deep down, the guilt ate at him far faster than the infection chewed through his desk. Guilt at letting the Symbiot through, guilt at letting Eddie Pale die, guilt for all the dead and the living yet to die. Guilt—the worst guilt of all—because he felt reinvigorated. Guilt at feeling alive, at finally having a real purpose again. The Vela had a new lease on life and so did Loreto. Minor fluctuations and oddities were to be expected; the stakes were so high.
This is my second chance, Loreto told himself, and I’m not going to let some tiny errors in the calibrations interfere. Failure was, after all, a dirty word.
They reached the Pale and the atmosphere onboard creaked with nervousness. The crew had noticed their ship changing and they’d noticed their admiral coming to life. Nonetheless, they readied the shuttle when Loreto asked.
He sat in silence during the flight. Hertz, nervous, rubbed knots into his beard. Cele stood by the bay door, eager to jump out. Menels crouched in the back, still wrapped up in his sums. Loreto did not know the others well enough to have learned their tics and tells. He wondered whether they knew his as he massaged his forehead, trying to rub out the guilt. He’d told them to leave their weapons on the Vela; this wasn’t going to be a firefight. More importantly, he wanted to show he wasn’t Fletcher.
When the doors opened, Loreto was first down the ramp, Cele close behind. He didn’t wait for his crew and marched through the piles of machinery, his feet cutting through the mist, and found himself in front of the doorway to the rest of the Exile ship. This time, it was open.
“Ad-mir-al,” croaked a synthetic voice, dragging the first syllable until it was almost another language.
Loreto stopped and saw the figures emerge again, their silhouettes thrown against the mist. He could hear his crew marvel but he didn’t have time to dwell.
“You’re getting better,” he stated. “You’ll speak better than Hertz, soon enough.”
“Ye-s.”
An Exile stepped forward and Loreto recognized it from their first meeting, their leader. They’ve realized I’m an admiral, he told himself. Is that because they heard Hertz talking or because they’re already inside our networks? It could be both.
“O-ur mach-in-es,” the Exile continued, “cou-ntless hours de-voted to-the li-terat-ures.”
“Yeah, you learned to talk. I can tell.”
Hertz and the others caught up with Loreto and flanked out behind him. The Exile was joined by others.
“Sus-picion haunts the guil-ty mind, Ad-mir-al.” The rough texture gargled from the back of a synthetic throat.
The voice was detached and distant. Not just because it came from a small speaker placed on the Exile’s chin. But an uncanniness struck him and made him feel uneasy. Talking to a human was never normally this clinical or disconnected.
“That sounded like an accusation,” he told the lead figure. “I have questions.”
“Te-mpt not… and ask… Ad-mir-al.”
The Exiles turned as one and walked away into the corridor until they could not be seen.
“Come on,” Loreto told his crew. “I’ve been with them before.”
They wore worried faces.
“You can stand and stare or you can come and listen to whatever they have to say.” Loreto raised his voice. “Whatever suits you best.”
He turned and followed the Exiles down the corridor, knowing the crew would follow. They were like him, too
curious to turn back, too desperate to stay behind. Together, they walked through the tight, labyrinth organs of the great alien ship. Twisted, turning hallways which wrapped their heads in knots. To Loreto, it seemed as though they were taking a different route and he could not shake the sensation of being watched.
Eventually, they came to the same room as before, the large chamber with two benches on either side. After he encouraged the crew to take a seat, he marched up and down, unable to make his thoughts sit still.
“Ad-mir-al.” The leader addressed him as the door closed.
It had to be their leader, Loreto assured himself. It did all the talking.
“We solved your puzzle,” he announced. “What did you do to my ship?”
With his crew sitting along the benches, Loreto stood at the end of the chamber, at the farthest point from the door. The mist swirled thicker and faster in this room and he could no longer see his feet. The Exiles assembled in a rank opposite him, their leader moving into the center of the room, always dipping and bobbing as it moved.
“Thy anger doth set-tle serene Ad-mir-al, we,” it rasped. “To di-scover great… enjoy-ment in your cha-rac-ter.”
The speech had a slow, dreadful rhythm to it. Loreto’s mind raced, trying to tie together the first syllables while he was still listening to the rest.
“Yes,” he managed to reply. “Well… I’m glad to be of service. But what about my ship?”
“We speak… your voices.”
The Exiles at the far end of the room had gathered into a crescent, their claw-like hands crafting and gesturing. Working the mist, Loreto told himself and walked into the center of the room. The leader approached him and the mists began to move even faster, the vaporous currents snaking around his feet.
