Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  I looked round. “Switch, I . . .” My friend, my oldest friend. “I . . .”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” he said, cutting me off. “You look like the last hell. Earth and Emperor . . . Come on.”

  “It’s not so bad. I can walk.” And brushing him off I staggered to where Bassander’s sword had fallen. The blade still rippled, the bronze hand still closed around it. Stooping, I plucked the sword free, and turning to the fallen soldier I held it up. “Mine, I think.” Perhaps it rightly should have been Switch’s, but I wanted to cut Bassander one last time. It was petty. I knew it was petty, but I slipped the weapon into my coat and went with Switch down the ladder for the shuttle.

  He hurried on ahead, flitting from cover to cover, unshielded as he was. I took care, but moved more slowly. Stunner in hand, I did not shoot, and the shouts of the others were far away. I could see Valka and the rest in the shuttle bay ahead, but the light and the howl of the alarms crowded my sensorium as water crowds the lungs. I staggered, and might again have fallen if there had been no crates to fall against. I could see black-sleeved arms beneath the fallen Sparrowhawk, and red blood run black on the darkling floor. My vision blurred, and the blood came as thunder in my veins.

  Thus heaven gives its favorites . . . early death, I murmured, or I thought. What does that say of me, Byron? What does that say of me?

  The shot knocked me to my knees. No stunner blast, that round.

  “Ios di puttana!”

  Jaddian. The words were Jaddian, and sharp as a Maeskolos’s blade.

  You son of a bitch!

  I knew she was there, knew she had shot me. But I did not look back. Instead I threw myself forward, scrabbling for the landing ramp. On hands and knees at first, then again on my feet. The second shot went wide, cracking against the armored shuttle ahead of me.

  “Meta tutto che mararna!” she shouted, “Ti itantre mia qal!” After all we’ve been through . . .

  The third shot caught me in the shoulder, and this time I kept my feet, lurching onto the ramp. “Pilot!” I screamed. “Fly!” Only then did I turn, only then did I see her standing with bloody-faced Hanas and a coterie of Jaddian soldiers. Jinan. My Jinan. My captain. There were tears in her eyes, but no sorrow. The shuttle lurched beneath me, and Elara rose to steady me, and Switch. The ramp began to fold up into a hatch. She aimed her rifle again, and the muzzle of that barrel was the darkest black I’d ever seen. The weapon flashed, the bullet tagged me in the shoulder, crumpled as it broke against my shield.

  “Ti abatre!” she yelled. I loved you.

  Loved.

  The hatch sealed. Our shuttle tore out past the static field and into the long and silent Dark.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE OTHER EDGE

  AT WARP, SPACE IS a confusion of violets. The onrushing stars Doppler to azure and indigo, become delicate fingers of light, transformed thence by the contortion of spacetime to geometries without name. I stood upon the bridge of the Mistral, wrapped in a heavy blanket—still shuddering and fuguesick—and watched the wild weft of the universe flex about us at eight hundred times the speed of light. That was only an illusion, of course. We moved not at all, were buoyed in a bubble of space itself, carried as a gull is carried by a wave.

  Otavia stood above the center console, on a catwalk overlooking her officers in the control pit below, snapping orders and replies to her men with the casual grace of long practice. No one spoke to me, and so I was allowed to stand, barefoot and hunched and watching the glimmer of ionized particles caught in the membrane of rippled space at the edge of the warp envelope. How they shone! Like Cat’s faeries in the forests of Luin.

  “Thirty seconds to reversion, ma’am,” said one of the junior officers. I don’t recall his name.

  “Prime scoop for reversion. I don’t want a messy warp wake giving us away.” Otavia gripped the edges of her console, muscled arms flexing as they took her weight. “Heat sinks prepped?”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “You think they’ll attack us?” I asked, then clamped my jaw shut to stop my teeth from chattering.

  The captain only glanced at me. “I don’t want to risk my ship.”

  “Fifteen seconds, ma’am.”

  Feet scuffing the deck plates, I shuffled further along the catwalk. Otavia relayed a few terse orders to her people, but I held my silence again, watching. Unlike the Pharaoh or the Sollan-built Balmung, whose bridges were all technical readouts and holograph plates, the Mistral had proper windows on the sloped and arching canopy above and along the tapering length of her nose. Through these I watched, hugging my blanket to myself like a toga.

  “Five seconds,” said the junior officer. Violet light poured through those windows, rippling as sunlight does through deep waters. “Mark.”

  Darkness.

  The light was gone, replaced by the star-dusted vastness of space, and distant could be seen—below and away—a frigid blue sun, a supergiant. The windows cut the solar glare to manageable levels, and beneath that glow I beheld the gleaming nimbus of the accretion disk. Planets yet to be formed circled in the dust of that star. Dust motes vast as empires—as moons—orbited and impacted, growing and shattering in turn. I had never seen such a thing before in all my life and travels. The birth of worlds. Long would that star—that titan—labor to craft his children of clay, but in a billion years or three perhaps out of all that chaos might march stately worlds: planets fiery and unfinished.

  We had the precise frequency for communicating with the Extras. It had been on The Painted Man’s terminal with the coordinates for March Station. Otavia went about preparing the signal, using the precise message I had written her before we went into the freeze after we escaped the Balmung. That had been nearly seven years before.

  I did not hear her.

  I leaned against one window at the starboard side of the ship, looking out and down at the red churning and cosmic nursery of the disk. The birth of worlds, I thought again, feeling that sense of wonder I had known in the black tunnels of Calagah. Four hundred billion suns drifted in the galactic Dark. And though the Empire filled an appreciable volume of that space—millions of such star systems—we covered the galaxy only as a spiderweb blocks a window. We were so small.

  Quite by chance I saw a blue spark leap out from the disk below. Had our window been a holograph plate I might have zoomed in, but as it was I squinted. “There’s something there,” I said over my shoulder, not taking my eyes away. How I’d seen it I cannot say, so remote was it, as an insect atop a distant hill. It sparked again, flaring against the blackness. The drive-glow of a fusion torch. A ship.

  “We’re picking up multiple contacts in the disk below!” one of the junior officers said.

  “Are they moving to intercept?” Otavia asked, defensive. I glanced back at her where she stood, a bronze goliath hunched at her controls, bleached hair drifting.

  “No,” I said, and again from the officer.

  “No, they don’t care about us. They’re sticking to the ecliptic.”

  “They’re mining,” I said, recalling holographs my father had shown me as a boy of our mining operations in Delos’s asteroid belt. “Trawling the disk for heavy elements, I imagine. It must be easier than planet-cracking.” As I watched, more blue sparks rose from the disk, from the deep-cut shadows cast by planetoids in the light of that frigid sun.

  Otavia had called up images in the air before her, relayed from cameras on the ship’s outer hull. “Looks like, aye. Word from this station?”

  “No ma’am,” the comms officer said. “Send again?”

  “Send again,” Otavia confirmed. “But stay on course.”

  I nearly tripped on my trailing blanket as I turned from the window. “I’ll go check on the others. Okoyo should have everyone awake by now.”

  I found Siran and Pallino still shivering in the medica, wrapped in therm
al blankets and drinking the customary post-thaw glass of orange juice. Ilex was with them, and Crim. “Where’s Switch?” I asked, checking to make sure my collar lay flat. With the Red Company disbanded, I’d donned simple black shirt and trousers again, the side-closure hanging open to expose the paisley lining.

  Pallino fixed me with his one blue eye. He’d not yet donned his leather eyepatch and the scarred ruin of his eye socket yawned at me. “Coming out of thaw now.”

  “And the Cielcin?”

  The old myrmidon shrugged. “Not here.”

  “Been awake a couple weeks,” Ilex put in, helping Siran to stand. “It and Doctor Onderra. She’s been speaking with it.”

  My head must still have been fuguesick and fuzzy, for I said, “I’m sorry?”

  The dryad jerked her head. “In one of the holding cells. Otavia’s had it done up like a proper room.” She moved Siran toward the showers, ensuring the blanket stayed on. The homunculus always seemed to come out of fugue more readily than us mere mammals. Some trick in her blood chemistry, I didn’t doubt.

  Hands on my hips, I nodded and turned to go.

  “Had.” Pallino’s voice coiled out and turned me round. “You all right?”

  I looked down at my boots, unsure whether looking at Pallino’s empty socket or his piercing eye was the harder task. I could still hear Jinan screaming at me as I staggered onto the ramp, could still see the tears in her eyes, the fury. Seven years we’d been frozen, but it was only yesterday. Time, Ever-Fleeting, forgive us . . . I thought. It was not one of the scholiasts’ sayings. It was a prayer, dredged out of childhood. At once I inhaled sharply, stood a little straighter, a little taller. “Yes, Pallino. I’m . . . I’ll be fine.”

  The empty eye and the blue both narrowed in suspicion, but he smiled—baring yellowed teeth. “Aye then. You be on your way. I’ll tell the kid where you’ve gone.”

  I saluted the old centurion, pressing my fist to my chest, and hurried smartly from the medica. I passed beneath the battle standards where they hung limp from the mighty bulkhead. No one troubled me, not even the two Normans Otavia kept posted on the stair or at the door to the brig. They only bowed their heads and murmured, “Commandant.” I longed to correct them, to tell them that dream was over, but I did no such thing. They keyed the door at request, despite my lack of a bodyguard, and I stepped over the threshold.

  For all the talk of its being a cell, the chamber was cheery enough. The walls were of the same padded white as the round halls, the ceiling too low for the tall xenobite, the bed too short. But there was a bed, and indeed a toilet and a sonic wash closet. The lights were low, were tuned far into the red spectrum to protect the Cielcin’s delicate vision. Tanaran itself sat on the edge of the bed, its head bowed. Its queue of white hair had started growing back and hung draped over one shoulder, and its dark robes looked clean and good as new—so much so I wondered if someone had ordered new clothes printed while we were dreaming. It turned as I entered, breaking off its conversation with . . .

  “Valka!” I said, feigning surprise.

  The Tavrosi xenologist smiled and in perfect Cielcin said, “Hadrian! Glad to see you up and about. We were just talking about you.”

  Tanaran bared its glassy teeth in what passed for a smile among its kind, but said nothing.

  Valka smiled at me as the door cycled closed. The expression faltered as her eyes lighted on the sword clipped to my belt, and she said, “Did you just wake up?” She didn’t have the hangdog look of fuguesickness about her.

  “I . . . yes,” I said in Galstani, clasping hands behind my back. “You?”

  She shook her head, replied in the Cielcin tongue for the benefit of the xenobite. “Tanaran and I have been out for a couple weeks now. I’ve been practicing my Cielcin.”

  “She speaks it well,” Tanaran said. “Better than you.”

  “Indeed.” I did not have the energy to smile. “The second freezing was not too bad, I trust?”

  Tanaran let out a rush of air that I realized too slow was the alien word for yes. We’d had to improvise, modifying the medica’s rejuvenation tank to work as a fugue crèche. It had been risky, but it had been our only choice. None of the fugue crèches were large enough to hold the tall Cielcin. “Yukajjino-do uledatolomn yumna ti-ereshinan gi buradi.”

  “Yes,” I said, adding the air-rushing sound belatedly. “We have to freeze ourselves for long journeys.”

  Did I imagine it, or was that fear in the xenobite’s eyes? The impression passed, and I was left again with a face whose gross musculature was wholly unreadable. “Okun’ta naddimn,” it said at last.

  You are insane.

  I snorted.

  “But perhaps your ships are slower than ours,” Tanaran said.

  An objection snapped to the tip of my tongue, pushed there by two decades’ aristocratic upbringing and a native human and imperial pride I felt like a knife at my back, but I said nothing.

  Valka spoke instead. “Did we find the . . .” She switched to Galstani: “. . . the Extrasolarians?”

  “We did,” I said, replying in kind. “At least, Otavia thinks so. There’s something here, at any rate.” And briefly I told her about the mining ships I’d seen away and below us.

  By the end, Valka was nodding. “’Tis them. Or sounds like them.”

  “No sign of the station, though.”

  “Sta . . . tion?” Tanaran said, in halting Galstani. “What . . . is . . . sta . . . tion?”

  I blinked in astonishment. Eyes darting to Valka I said, “You’ve been teaching it?” She shrugged.

  “’Twas a fair trade,” she said. “We have been talking of its gods.” The Quiet. I supposed I couldn’t blame her. Valka had traveled with us for decades—spending much of that time awake, waiting for an interview with the alien baetan. Tanaran was some sort of priest or . . . historian. If its people did worship the Quiet—as indeed seemed to be the case—Valka could not afford to squander such an opportunity. To be the first human to interview one of the Cielcin noble-born about their religion and gods . . . it was an honor and dream.

  Not knowing what to say or how to react to this piece of news, I said, “Oscianduru,” using the word the Cielcin used to refer to their great worldships, though I had no notion what to expect from the Extras. Mother’s operas led me to suspect some dim industrial hell, a place of grinding machines and shadow. Still other tales spoke of crystal palaces, like those on Jadd. Vorgossos itself was meant to be a palace of ice and diamond, a faerie city peopled by demons such as the legendary Kharn Sagara had tamed when he cast out the Exalted.

  My terminal chimed. Turning away from the woman and the xenobite I tapped the conduction patch beneath my right ear to accept the call. “Marlowe here.”

  Otavia’s voice ran through the bones of my head, making it sound like she was in the room with me. “We have contact.”

  “With the station?” I asked.

  “Aye. You should see this.”

  “Very good,” I said crisply, “I’ll be along in a moment.” I turned, glancing back at Valka and the Cielcin. “And alert the bridge I’ll be bringing our guest.” Not wishing to be rude but not wishing to argue either, I terminated the link.

  The bridge fell silent as we entered. All work and chatter ceased—even among the flight officers in the tactical pit beneath Otavia’s catwalk and central chair and console. It was no matter. Though I did not know it, we were locked into our approach vector, and the Mistral was under the control of the port authority . . . or of what passed for port authority in these trackless wilds. One might almost have heard the sweat beading on Bastien Durand’s upper lip.

  He brushed it away, adjusting his cosmetic spectacles to hide some paroxysm of fear. He needn’t have bothered. He might have been a ghost, despite his Norman complexion. He was not alone. The Norman officers all eyed the eight-foot xenobite with s
uspicion as it entered—bracketed by two guards with stunners drawn, seeming more lictor than gaoler.

  Whatever fear was in them, it was not in Otavia. I do not think that she had seen one of the Pale before, but you might not have known it to look on her. Arms crossed, chin up, the captain strode straight toward Tanaran, biting the inside of one cheek. She advanced well within arm’s reach. Standing at her full height she was nearly so tall as the creature, particularly as Tanaran had taken to stooping in fear of the low bulkheads we had passed.

  “You’re the one, then, eh?” she asked.

  “Raka ichaktan,” I said.

  “Cap . . . tain?” Tanaran repeated, speaking its broken Galstani. “You are captain?”

  Corvo’s eyes did not widen. I supposed she must have been watching the Cielcin’s conversations with Valka since the beginning. Monitoring them through the ship’s internal comms. She’d grown used to the idea of the alien thing on her ship in ways her officers had not. Ye Gods, there was iron in the woman. And more than iron.

  “Corvo,” she said, “Otavia Corvo.” And I swear by Earth’s stone she extended her hand.

  In its halting human speech, the creature said, “I am Casantora Tanaran Iakato, Baetan in . . . Baetan of Itani Otiolo, of Aeta Aranata.” It did not offer its hand. I cannot say if it understood the gesture—as I had not, being born palatine—or if it did and spurned it.

  Otavia let her hand fall and—not to be outdone—added, “I am captain of the starship Mistral and . . .” and here she glanced at me, “and ranking Commodore of the Meidua Red Company.” I almost smiled. I supposed she was Commodore now, such as it mattered. Sham though the Red Company was, it was legally recognized on Monmara, Pharos, and several of the Norman Freehold worlds. It remained a legal entity. If Otavia wanted the name, so be it.

  Valka softly translated this for Tanaran, whose human speech went only so far.

  I could feel the eyes of the others shifting to me, and I stepped forward, one hand on Olorin’s sword to keep it from swinging. “What is it?”