Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  But the ugliness of the world does not fade, and fear and grief are not made less by time. We are only made stronger. We can only float together on their tides, as otters do, hand in hand.

  Before it ends.

  Before it has to end.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE COUNCIL OF CAPTAINS

  “AND WE’VE NOTHING TO show for it!” Bassander practically screamed, leaning over the head of the long conference table. “Nothing! Unless you count four dead men.” The captain-who-would-be-king alone was on his feet. The others—the collected captains and their first officers of our little fleet and the survivors of the Rustam mission—sat about the long ellipse of the Pharaoh’s conference table. Eleven in all.

  The table itself was an artifact of Emil Bordelon’s that even Bassander—for all his spartan tendencies—could not bear to have removed. The surface was a two-inch slab of Mandari-printed marble, sable but for the veins that like white smoke suffused it, inlaid with a holography suite done in hair-fine wire. It must have weighed a ton. It certainly cost a fortune, when one accounted for the dragon-clawed mahogany legs. The old commodore’s tastes had tended to the gaudy, but here at least he had struck true.

  “So we are worse off than when we arrived?” asked Alessandro Hanas, Jinan’s swart, bearded second-in-command. “This is a disaster.”

  Bassander waved a hand at the lieutenant, underscoring what the Jaddian had said. His jaw worked as he swept his attention over Crim, over Ilex, Switch, and myself. I sat directly opposite him, at the far end of the ellipse, not speaking. “If you’d all managed to come away with the fat man at least we might have had something!” He directed these words at Switch, of all people.

  “You weren’t there,” my friend and lictor said. “All due respect, Captain Lin, but you’d have gotten out of there as fast as you could, too. Those things . . . they weren’t human.”

  “Not anymore,” Ilex said. “They’d been hollowed out. The Painted Man was controlling them. We walked into a trap. He knew we were working for your Legions, or guessed at any rate. The whole place was filled with those machines.” The dryad’s long face turned inward at that, and she looked down at the table, green skin flushing black.

  “SOMs,” Valka said, speaking for the first time in half an hour’s bickering. Her Tavrosi accent had a way of cutting across other speech. All eyes turned to her except mine. I had heard the term from The Painted Man, and at any rate was not surprised that Valka knew it, who knew so much about everything. “Surrogate Operating Medium. Media. They are human, or they were.”

  “Were?” Bassander asked.

  Valka’s bright-edged voice cut the air like fruit. “He would not ask that question, he who saw the things.”

  Switch shuddered. “You’ve seen them, doctor?”

  “I’ve been round,” she said, baring white teeth. “And, speaking as scientific advisor, ’twas wise of you to retreat when you did.” Valka looked down, those sun-bright eyes hidden behind her short fall of dark hair. “Nasty things, SOMs.”

  “They didn’t die when we shot them, Bassander,” Greenlaw said, clenching her jaw.

  “Well, the damage is done,” said Bassander Lin, sagging into his seat like the chief of a pride of lions after a starving night. “We’ve no choice, people.” His eyes narrowed as he took in the others gathered round the table. “We have our orders: we return to the 437th, regroup with the fleet and the war effort.”

  Jinan stopped fiddling with her braid, brows contracting. “We never left the war effort, Lin. What is this?”

  “First Strategos Hauptmann is mustering his forces at Coritani. We received a general order to return.”

  “What?” I said, unable to stop myself.

  “I did not sign up with this company to fight in pitched battle,” said Otavia Corvo, the third and last of our three captains, who had been uncharacteristically quiet until then. “The Mistral is not equipped for it, and I am not risking my men.”

  I think it was Otavia of whom the ancient Herodotus spoke when he wrote of the Amazons. Whether by design or by incident of nature, she stood nearly seven feet high. High as a palatine. Even sitting, she radiated the threat of the coiled serpent, arms crossed, broad shoulders hunched, betraying the corded muscle that hid beneath the crimson uniform. She was less dark than her ebon-skinned second-in-command, with long golden hair that tangled and defied the ship’s gravity and played about her face like mane. She alone of our captains was the true-blooded mercenary, and knew no oath to Jadd or to the Solar Throne. She was free and fierce, and her word was final.

  Bassander felt it, too, for he changed tactics, saying, “We found nothing on Rustam. We have nothing. And how long before the provincial government links these . . . SOMs to us?”

  “A hundred years at least,” Crim said, chewing another of his gels. He extended the bag to Ilex, who sat beside him. “This system’s a damn mess. Machines or no machines, Commodore, the Imperial Chantry doesn’t have the resources here for an Inquisition. They’ll be too busy on damage control to be worrying about who it was the beasts were fighting.”

  Jinan’s first officer, the square-faced, bearded Lieutenant Hanas held up a finger. “The city must be surveilled.”

  “It is,” said reedy Bastien Durand, Otavia’s second. He had the same juddering, strange accent as our Doctor Okoyo—they shared a homeworld—and a scholarly affect. He was the sort one could easily imagine as scholiast back in the old Imperium. In truth, he reminded me in no small part of Tor Alcuin, my father’s principal advisor back home. “But you Imperial types give the review of that footage over to human beings, and human beings are not so good at sifting through thousands of cameras and tens of thousands of hours of footage to find a pattern.”

  “Besides,” Valka put in, glancing briefly at me, “we’ve no way of knowing if The Painted Man hadn’t altered the cameras near to himself. He must have . . . have had the technology.”

  An image of the homunculus seated on its couch with the terminal wired into its head swam up behind my eyes. I shifted my sabretache in my lap, feeling the weight of the strange device.

  I was about to pull it out when Bassander plowed ahead. “Then we should be able to leave the system unmolested. This discussion is academic.”

  “Leave the system?” Otavia said. “Just like that? You’re . . . running home?”

  Bassander leaned forward and tapped the tabletop, triggering the holography suite. “I’m not running anywhere,” he said, looking directly at me. “I have a duty as a soldier of the Empire to return to the front, to my commander.”

  “Then you go alone,” Otavia said, too sharply, too proudly, thrusting out her chin.

  “Not alone!” Jinan said, for she too was a soldier.

  The Norman Amazon shook her head. “My people will not go with you.”

  Bassander stood so quickly I thought he might knock his chair over, hands planted flat on the tabletop. “You have a contract.”

  “Which does not extend to the sacrifice of my ship and all my people in your fool crusade!” Not to be outdone, Otavia stood as well, and for her the effect was far greater. Bassander was only patrician, and next to Otavia’s freak height he seemed small indeed. I almost pitied Lieutenant Greenlaw, who sat between them, staring fixedly down at her hands.

  “Fool crusade?” Bassander echoed. “Fool crusade! What exactly is it that you think we’ve been up to since your lot signed on?”

  “Fighting to end the damned war! Here. In Norma,” Otavia Corvo replied, shaking her head so that the knot of flyaway golden hair at the back of her head drifted as in freefall. “It’s our worlds that are burning, captain, not yours. That’s what Hadrian sold me. Peace!” I shut my eyes a long moment. I’d been starting to wonder when my name would be dragged into this.

  “Hadrian,” Bassander said, emphasizing the use of my first name, “does not run this com
pany. I do.” There it was, the crux of Bassander’s complex. I said nothing, hand on the terminal in my sabretache.

  This is not your moment, the part of me that thought in Gibson’s voice admonished.

  “You want to talk of peace, Corvo?” Bassander asked. “Peace? We finished compiling the data from the last telegraph transmittal we received from my fleet along with Strategos Hauptmann’s orders. Do you know what it said?” The Commodore’s eyes fixed sharp and bright as lasers on Captain Corvo’s face, and a murmur went through the room as Lin paused for breath. I sat a little straighter, glanced sidelong to Jinan—who did not see me—and to Valka, who shook her head. I knew we’d received another entangled burst shortly after arriving in Rustam system, and guessed the news could not be good. “We engaged the Cielcin at Tyras. Let me share with you the details,” he said, and counted on his fingers. “It wasn’t like it was here. We lost the planet completely. House Jurnau. The primary cities. The orbital factories. Seven million people, captain. Seven million. Now, say of me what you will, but I tend not to sleep well at night knowing that it happened, and that it’s happened again while we’re dancing about the ass end of the universe chasing fairy stories because my commander saw fit to countenance the outlandish notions of this palatine lunatic!”

  “Lunatic?” Sensing that things would only get worse, Jinan stood, coming to my defense. “I’m thinking that is quite enough,” she said, and her dark eyes were hard as glass. It was easy, sometimes, to forget that Jinan was nearly twice my living age—her breeding was such that she looked no more than thirty—but it appeared from time to time: the reminder that she had been a soldier before I was born. “We can discuss what will become of our Norman friends when we return to the fleet—” Otavia showed signs of interrupting, but Jinan finished anyway, “—if returning to the fleet is what we are doing.”

  The air felt almost like it did before a thunderstorm in the desert: every molecule thick with static charge. My father’s council meetings were often such. He would let his attendants, his logothetes, his scholiasts, and the representatives of the Chantry dicker and wheedle and wring their hands and rattle their sabers until all their energies were spent and their sympathies laid bare. Whatever else he was, my father was a patient man, and a more effective administrator I had never seen. It was just such a moment as I’d wanted, just such a moment as I’d been waiting for.

  Without a word, I drew The Painted Man’s terminal from my sabretache and set it before me. Only Switch and Valka took notice, who sat to my either side. So I raised a hand and struck the table as hard as I could. The bang attracted the three captains’ attentions and the attentions of those as watched them. Ten sets of eyes focused on me, shocked by the violent interruption where before I had been an inert feature of the environment.

  In a voice barely more than a whisper, I said, “I can’t listen to this. I can’t.” My quietness drew them in, as I had seen from my father with his councilors on more occasions than I could count. I had a brief window of shock in which to speak, and no time for the logical appeal. “We’re not chasing a fairy story, Lin. Just today, we met a . . . man, who could change his face. He commanded an army of dead men and he claimed to come from Vorgossos. Besides”—I rocked back in my chair, raising my eyebrows— “on Emesh, the Cielcin knew of the place. I’ve said it before, and I will keep saying it until it penetrates: How would a xenobite, an alien, know of a human world that even the Empire cannot locate unless it exists? Do you imagine those creatures we have frozen in our hold are chatting with the prisoners they carted off from Tyras? From Rustam?”

  I made a disgusted sound and looked down at the terminal sitting on the edge of the table before me. Almost I could feel the tattooed eyes and grinning mouths of the homunculus hovering at my shoulder. Despite them, I persevered. “You call me a lunatic. If it is lunacy to want to end this war as quickly as possible, then you can call me whatever you wish. I don’t care, because whether you accept it or not, Bassander—or whether any of the rest of you accepts it—I know we need this.” Here I paused, patting the Extrasolarian terminal with one hand, my eyes never leaving Bassander’s face. Any who saw us then must have seen the struggle between us: like a line of smoldering fire drawn eye to eye.

  “What is this?” Greenlaw asked, meaning the terminal.

  I ignored her. “And you would have us what? Go back?” And here I raised my voice. “For what? To fight and die among the others? To add your name to the list of names? Please . . .” I looked away, shook my head. “We’re not dancing at the edge of the galaxy. This is center stage.” Judging the moment right, I stood, that I might align myself as equal and opposite to Bassander in that instant. “Emesh bled to give us this chance. Tyras burned. And Lycia. And Bannatia. Millions of people. Maybe more.” Bassander was marshaling, I could see. Otavia and her Lieutenant Durand were nodding. Jinan’s lips were pressed together, her face a paper mask I could not read. The rest I did not see. I did not need to see. “This is our best chance to do the most good. Here. Now.” I rapped my fist against the table. “Now.”

  “Hadrian,” Jinan said, a frown folding that loved and familiar face, “is that . . . ?”

  “It’s The Painted Man’s personal terminal,” I said, resuming my seat with a crooked smile. Leaning over the device, I cupped my hand in my chin. “I don’t know what’s on it or how to use it, but there must be something on here relating to The Painted Man’s business operations. That means ledgers, that means locations. Ilex?” I shoved the heavy device across the table to the dryad before Bassander could gainsay me.

  She caught it with one green-fingered hand, turned it over, a deep furrow forming between hairless brows. “I haven’t seen anything quite like it,” she mused, scratching behind one ear. “Reminds me of some Tavrosi models I’ve seen. I’ll take a look.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it sooner?” Bassander scowled at me across the table. The laser line between us redrew itself. “Were you waiting for an invitation?”

  Ignoring him, I spoke to Ilex. “The Painted Man mentioned a place . . .” I struggled to remember the strange name. “March Station, I think it was.”

  “What’s that?” asked Lieutenant Hanas in his thick Jaddian accent.

  “A trading post,” said Otavia Corvo, surprising us all. She had not resumed her seat, but stood—arms crossed—surveying the rest. “You hear tell of it, time to time, but I’ve never been there.”

  “Do you know where it is?” I asked, turning to her.

  Otavia shook her floating hair back from her face. “No. You know how it is with these Extrasolarian black sites.”

  “It’s supposed to be somewhere in the Veil,” Durand said, glancing nervously at Bassander Lin. “Between the stars . . . but without coordinates . . .” He shrugged. I took his meaning. Without coordinates, we could spend a million years combing the Dark without finding so much as an asteroid.

  “Enough!” Bassander said. “We have chased this fantasy for long enough. Whatever intelligence is on that terminal you recovered, I say we deliver it to the fleet. Let Hauptmann and Knight-Tribune Smythe decide what to do.”

  My teeth groaned as I clamped my jaw. It took all my strength not to say, “You can’t be serious!” Gibson’s voice rose up instead, deep and quiet, and murmured—as it so often did—Rage is blindness. I shut my eyes a moment, opened them. “That wasn’t the mission.”

  “The mission has changed, Marlowe,” Bassander said. “We’ve been gone too long.”

  “But we’re this close,” I said, gesturing with thumb and forefinger an inch apart, “this close!” I looked round the table, seeking support. From Valka. From Switch. From Otavia and Lieutenant Durand. From Jinan.

  Jinan.

  My dear captain would not look at me for a long moment—had looked away, down at her hands clasped against the black marble. Her braided hair hung between us, hiding h
er face. All was quiet for less than a second. It might have been eons. She shook her head, twitched the braid back over her shoulder. “And then what, Hadrian?” Her lips pressed together, and she glanced to Captain-Commodore Lin. “Another clue? Another step? We can’t keep chasing after ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?” The word came out, but it sounded lost, as if it and I had stumbled into the wrong conversation, unformed and rudderless. “What?”

  “Maybe . . . maybe Captain Lin is right. Maybe we should turn back.” There must have been something in my face, for she faltered and—looking away—said, “Perhaps if we were to telegraph the data and await orders before returning.”

  I’d fallen out an airlock. That was it. That was why I couldn’t breathe. That was why I couldn’t hear Otavia Corvo shout at Jinan, though her face darkened with rage. Bassander was nodding. And Greenlaw and Alessandro Hanas. Even Switch looked relieved. Somewhere along the way I had lost something. Control maybe or . . . vision? The thin ice beneath my feet had cracked and given way to admit me into the ocean of chaos that dwelt forever beneath the world.

  Jinan, who had been solid as the Earth herself and always, always there . . . Jinan had shifted. I looked at her, at the arched brows, the full lips, the azure ribbon threaded through her braided hair. I saw a stranger, a soldier of the Prince of Jadd. I felt as though a mask had fallen away—though whether it fell from her face or my eyes I cannot say.

  I shoved my chair back from the table, straightened my short jacket roughly. Everyone stopped for just a moment, even Otavia, who had a finger in Bassander’s face. The words would not come. Jinan had taken them with her . . . leaving me drowning in the cold. My mouth opened but what was left of my rationality shut it again, shutting out and down the reptilian urge to bite and scream.