Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

  NOVA BYZANTIUM

  MATTHEW RIVETT

  Dedicated to tomorrow’s children, whoever or whatever they may be.

  Copyright © 2014 by Matthew Rivett.

  Cover design by Rana Lagupa.

  Cover Art by Stokkete/Shutterstock and Sophie McAulay/Shutterstock.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-510-9

  Masque Books

  www.masque-books.com

  Masque Books is an imprint of Prime Books

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

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  He brings the living out of the dead and brings the dead out of the living and brings to life the earth after its lifelessness . . .

  —Qu’ran, Sura of the Byzantines 30:19

  After the massive climatic upheaval of the Post-Industrial Shock, pockets of civilization—and the not-so-civilized—survive in a new Dark Age. Nova Byzantium, the world’s last empire, struggles to push back those they consider barbarians from its borders. The empire contracts with the militarized city-state of Tiraspol, hiring its Alkonost mercenaries to defend its territory and interests.

  Above this terrestrial chaos, in the orbital city of Al Fadah Madina, the Islamic caliphate attempts to preserve mankind’s intellectual heritage and maintain humanity’s scholarly endeavor. To accomplish its ends, the celestial sheikhdom requires the services of “archivists”—agents who scour the dying Earth and collect technological artifacts for preservation and study. A former Alkonost mercenary, Uri Vitko, is one of their best archivists—at least as long as he can manage to please the caliphate, avoid the empire, and stay alive . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  July 2163 C.E.

  Uri propped the bipod on a railing of the India Tower and peered through the rifle’s telescopic sight. The archivist had no target, the scope merely provided a better view of Mumbai’s suffocating southern peninsula below. A dead zone had drifted in from the Deccan Plateau, carrying in the flashover remnants of an immense methane fog. Its vapor crawled through the city, asphyxiating any unprotected creature still at street level. The top floors of the city’s skyscrapers provided sanctuary from the oxygen-starved murk; the miasma was too heavy to reach the upper stories.

  Uri had taken refuge in the tower—once a four-star hotel—just north of the Colaba District. For a quarter ounce of gold, he’d rented the relatively safe space from the local Thuggee warlord: a few barricaded floors five hundred meters up equipped with a generator and water purifiers. An archivist, he spent most days reconnoitering, sifting through the city’s remains for relics and artifacts. At night, when the streets seethed with desperation, the place provided an oasis from the bedlam below.

  But he’d been there a month and the Kali phansigars were growing suspicious. Uri knew if he lingered much longer, they would sniff out the archivist in their ranks. Known agents of Al Fadah Madina were regarded with hostility and suspicion. Mumbai could soon turn dangerous.

  He took down the rifle, sat on the unmade bed, and sipped the last of his Laphroaig, a serendipitous acquisition from the ruins of the hotel’s bar. Fortunately for him, both the Thuggees and the scavengers who had come before him had missed the single bottle of fifteen-year Scotch.

  Uri pulled a box out from under the bed; symbols of Kali were inlaid on its surface in a mosaic of tropical hardwood. Inside lay an artifact of rare design, a ritual item the Thuggees used in their dark ceremonies: an elaborate “mask” resembling a desiccated cephalopod stranded by high tide. A set of ten notional arms, no doubt a reference to the Dark Mother’s Mahakali form, radiated from the translucent cerulean “face.” Blazing red eyes and small black lips completed it. This mask must mean something special to the Thuggees who saw Kali as their protector. Underneath was a set of tea compacted into domino-sized bars with what appeared to be Sanskrit writing on each. Were they used with hot water to marinate . . . clean . . . make an offering to the mask? Who knew?

  The object’s bounty was paltry in exchange for the risks Uri took to pilfer it. Insinuating himself into the Thuggee cult—masters of deception themselves—was an ordeal he did not wish to repeat. To do business, he had aided the brutes on one of their raids—an ambush of a local rival clan. Posing as a gun for hire was no problem for Uri, but concealing his identity from Kali’s disciples had proved challenging. An archivist—many would term him a thief—hiding among thieves was not as simple as he had envisioned.

  Now he was running on borrowed time; the phansigars would soon discover their object had been stolen from the temple and, as a stranger, he would be swiftly suspect. They’d be after him soon, garrotes at the ready.

  Uri slipped his console from his pocket and scrolled through his communiqués from the caliphate, safely orbiting above the ruin of Earth. There was no name associated with this particular procurement request—a fetishist perhaps? Despite their piety, Al Fadah Madina was known to harbor a few hedonists. The sheikhdom’s love for the world’s rapidly diminishing Cognac was proof enough of that.

  Taking a closer look at the mask, small intricate patterns emerged from its cartilaginous skin. The object possessed a technology Uri recognized but couldn’t place. Small geometrical webs of articulated hydraulics spiraled from its red eyes like a tangle of nerve fibers. Held to the light, the web of circuitry permeated the translucent artifact. He could see why the Al’ Madina sheikhs might want it. The mask was a rare example of fractal bioengineering—grown, not fabricated.

  Uri closed the wooden box, slid it into his backpack, and checked his console again. He needed to get moving. After receiving his last transmission, Al Fadah Madina started readying a logistical drop. Touchdown was somewhere off the coast, seventy-five kilometers. Uri had already hired a dhow to bring him to the intercept point, and the boat would be waiting at the Gateway of India in a few hours.

  He folded his rifle and activated his enrichment hood, a bellowed mask capable of filtering and collecting oxygen in jowl-like bladders. With carbon dioxide partial pressures measuring above critical threshold on the streets below, he’d need the headgear to make it the few kilometers to the boat.

  From the penthouse deck, Uri surveyed the listless metropolis one last time. The sun’s iodine rays struggled to penetrate the atmospheric turmoil. Like a cypress swamp, the inversion layer lapped at the skyline’s base. The archivist plotted his route: a quick jaunt down Marine Drive, east past Nariman Point, beyond the long-abandoned arabesque of the Maharastra police station, and then Mumbai Harbor, where—he hoped—the dhow would be waiting.

  Nothing moved. The jaundiced city was a primordial morass, inching backward toward the Triassic. Its misery was Uri’s fortune, however, the city’s fetid avenues too anemic to molest a lone archivist.

  Street level was a grueling ordeal, gripped by a feverous heat. Uri adjusted his enrichment hood and checked his console: five more kilometers until the rendezvous. He walked slowly, trying to avoid taxing the bellows of his overused filters. Anything faster would exhaust his reservoirs, choking him.

  Marine Drive skirted the Indian Ocean, the ragged shoreline a tumult of heaped asphalt, rank seawater, and withered toddy palm. His route took him past the decay of once-beautiful apartment towers and boutiques, their swollen facades sagging with watery weight.

  Uri checked his console again. The oxygen level read fifteen percent, too low for human beings but adequate for seabirds. They swirled the eddying murk, hunting for weakened vermin. Crossing a flooded intersection, choked with rusted Fiat taxis, he stumbled over the rotting husk of an oil palm. There was something fleshy commin
gled with the pulpy decay. Leaning in to inspect, Uri realized he’d stepped on a body, its flesh a pale blue. The Thuggee corpse was relatively fresh, brought down by the creeping anoxia. The promise of an empty city had been fatally seductive.

  He trudged through Narimar Point.

  A pathetic Gandhi gazed down at him, bronze eyes silently observing his slog through the overgrown park. Mumbai was not going to give him up easily. The turbocharged atmosphere, thick with carbon dioxide, gave the plants an otherworldly gigantism. The Colaba District was impenetrable jungle, putrid and overrun with waterweeds. The once-ubiquitous rain trees and banyans were dying, the hyacinth smothering their waterlogged roots.

  Uncomfortable in the dense, claustrophobic air, Uri tugged at his fatigues, the wet filth they’d accumulated itching his skin. He longed for cooler landscapes, the lush pastures and percolating lakes of his Transnistrian homeland. It had been eons since he had been there; those days now felt like injected memories, someone else’s life abandoned and unclaimed.

  His console beeped.

  He stopped in front of the gutted Prince of Wales Museum to read his communiqués. Al’ Madina was transmitting the orbiting pod’s inbound trajectory: splashdown estimate was in fifty hours. Uri hoped the offshore winds would hold. Time was short and he didn’t have the gold reserves to pay the crew extra to search for a drifting reentry pod.

  Something moved at the edge of his peripheral vision.

  Warily, Uri unfolded his rifle and panned the green decay. He heard a splash and a howl. Taking cover, he squatted near an overturned auto-rickshaw. The sound came from the entrance of a looted Bollywood theater. With a sigh, he lowered his rifle and relaxed. A dog splashed and struggled to stand up in the brackish water. Dumb, it fought for control as its metabolism succumbed to hypoxia. Uri approached and stared at the suffering animal. It panted relentlessly, the dog’s chest pulsing frantically. Curious, he waved his hand over its clouded eyes. No reaction. The mongrel was blind. Uri cocked his rifle, dropped the muzzle, and fired. The purple blood mixed with the black water, swirling around his boots.

  He slogged on.

  Jutting from behind the ruins of a train station, Uri saw the Gateway of India’s crumbling arch, and beyond, the hazy outline of Elephant Island. Once the pride of Mumbai, the Gateway’s minarets and central dome were now reduced to heaps of yellow basalt, half-dissolved by atmospheric causticity. He trudged over to the submerged parapets, marking the former border of the city and the sea.

  Moored to the harbor’s creosoted pilings was the dhow. The baghlah was rigged for the open ocean, and he had been assured the crew was competent. He peered through his rifle’s sighting scope to inspect the boat. A few crewmembers milled about on deck, clad in water-stained dhotis, oversized enrichment hoods over their heads. Uri noticed something odd: their movements were lurching and uncoordinated, almost childlike, lacking fluidity.

  One of the Thuggee’s Kali lieutenants had set up the rendezvous, and Uri was wary, but he’d had few options. Sheikh Sayyid had ordered this detour prior to his journey back to Soqotra. It was a procurement of high importance, more so than the typical scientific data cartridges, museum artifacts, and other odd luxuries he was sent to fetch. In fact, it was so important the dispatch coordinators were willing to double his gold stipend.

  Uri pulled a magnesium cartridge from his webbing, loaded it onto the rifle muzzle, and pulled the trigger.

  The flare traced a magenta arc over the glassy water, catching the attention of the juvenile crew. A belch of oil smoke burped from the boat’s clunky diesel as it came about. Pacing the crumbled dock, Uri waved them down. He folded and slung the rifle, careful to look as unthreatening as possible. Parley was an archivist’s currency, every new encounter a potential powder keg.

  Khalid introduced himself as the dhow’s captain. Uri guessed he was about thirty—his sun-worn skin, gold teeth, and gray hair betrayed his age. His crew was composed of adolescents, hardscrabble orphans scarred by the trauma of a dying world. Rishi, the first mate, showed Uri to his cramped cabin. A concentrator labored to oxygenate the small space, allowing him to remove his sour enrichment hood.

  Exhausted, Uri lay down on the bunk’s thin mattress, the gentle roll of the waves lulling him. Lingering in the doorway, Rishi cleared his throat. Eyelids heavy, Uri raised himself on his elbow and reached into his pocket, pulling out two cigarettes. He lit them both, handing one to the boy. Rishi took the cigarette and handed Uri a sealed bottle of purified water in exchange.

  “Two ounces for the crossing.” The boy held out his grimy palm.

  “I was told one and a half. That was the deal; it was prearranged.”

  “There’s been added costs,” Rishi shook his head firmly.

  Uri paused, then exhaled slowly. “All right, if that’s how it has to be.”

  The boy nodded.

  Uri pulled out his console and scrolled through the communiqués. Decrypting the code, he wrote down the latitude and longitude for the logistical drop and handed it to the boy along with the ingots. Rishi shut the teak hatch, leaving Uri alone.

  The dhow crept out of Mumbai Harbor and into the Arabian Sea. The monsoon winds picked up, pushing the dead zone’s anoxia landward and away. Uri pried at the corroded hinge and opened his porthole. He filled his lungs with the fresh air and lay back down. Idle thoughts drifted through his exhausted mind, reflections on Mumbai and the origins of the Thuggees’ mask.

  Why did the sheikhs want such a thing, whatever it was? He knew Al Fadah Medina’s eccentricities, the bored sheikhs and their ability to afford strange luxuries, but this . . . Despite their fanaticism, the cultists were incapable of such a sophisticated design; the artifact was of a foreign, possibly imperial, manufacture.

  Curious, Uri sat up and pulled the box from his rucksack. He removed the object and admired the ethereal craftsmanship. The pupil-free eyes gazed at him from the disembodied head of the black Durga, haloed by its crown of symbolic arms. The face was both mesmerizing and maddening. The tea-bars were black and chalk-like. Sanskrit, of which Uri was illiterate, labeled the bars. Sated, he put the box back in his satchel and fell asleep.

  Uri woke to a commotion on deck. Rishi knocked on his door then led him outside. The flicker of Al Fadah Madina’s celestial necklace filled the night sky, a swath of shimmer dappled with starlight. Khalid switched on a flood lamp, illuminating the cobalt waves with its ghostly cone. Uri toggled the orbital receiver’s beacon. They were close, maybe a few hundred meters from the transponder. One of the boys shouted and pointed starboard. The lamp swung to highlight the pod’s deflated parachute. Fishing it from the sea, Khalid heaved the keg-sized capsule on deck, blackened and streaked from reentry. The crew huddled around as Uri broke the seal and inspected the contents.

  The payload was a standard logistical cache, insta-paks, fresh hood filters, ammunition, and cadmium-polymer batteries. He cracked a hermetic pack and retrieved a memory stick, along with the stack of flat quarter-ounce gold ingots. He popped the data cartridge into his orbital console and pressed his thumb into the ID scanner. Double-layer encryption, Sheikh Sayyid and Al’ Madina’s specialists were taking no chances. This procurement was redlined.

  “Diego Garcia, fifteen hundred kilometers from here, south of the Maldives. You and your crew will be paid ten ounces of bullion via drop, an additional twenty if you take me back to Soqotra,” Uri said.

  “Why, archivist?” Khalid asked. “Who is this Diego?”

  “Diego Garcia’s not a man, it’s a place.”

  “Probably far-flung and dangerous,” Khalid said slyly. “We need to renegotiate the price.”

  “It’s not negotiable. Take it or leave it,” Uri replied.

  Khalid paused then spoke. “What if we leave you?”

  He was at Khalid’s mercy. The crew knew Uri was an archivist. Anonymity no longer shielded him. If the Thuggees had gotten word to Khalid about their missing mask, Uri would be debris in the ocean’s briny current. Rea
ding the encrypted mission order, he was to recover a derelict warhead from the atoll’s ruined airbase. Once retrieved, Uri was to make for Burj Babil on the Arabian island of Soqotra.

  “I’ll see what can be done,” Uri replied calmly. “I’ll try to connect to dispatch and renegotiate. Sayyid’s encryptor is slow; it’ll take time.”

  That seemed to be enough to pacify the captain. The crew raised the sails and tacked southward. With a sigh, Uri reached into the pod and handed out his cigarette rations to Khalid and the boys as a sign of good faith.

  Khalid was a decent navigator and accepted an only slightly outrageous fee. With a quick stopover in the Maldives for salvage, the dhow made it to the abandoned airbase after fifteen uneventful days.

  Uri located the designated aircraft. He found a package of glow sticks in the plane’s survival kit and strung them like holiday lights inside the bomb bay. The vehicle’s batteries were too old to jury-rig, and he needed light to work. Out of the five sub-orbital bombers on base, only one remained intact. This was the objective the sheikhdom was after. The bomber possessed two hypersonic missiles, both nuclear armed, bolted to hydraulic deployment arms.

  Along with the warheads, he salvaged an ejection system from the bombardier’s station, the release cords and climate control still intact. The fully functional pressure suit—helmet, high-altitude chute, and heat shielding—was designed to protect pilots in a Mach 10 jet wash. With any luck he’d be able to barter it in Al Fadah Madina.

  He managed to find a tool chest in a rusted Quonset and was close to extricating the warhead from the missile chassis. The fusing batteries were a delicate maneuver, and Sayyid’s schematics were cryptic. One misplaced clamp and the cells would short and melt, heating the weapon housing like a blast oven. Using parachute cord and tie-straps, he built a makeshift block and tackle to manhandle the awkward payload. After a day spent in the stuffy fuselage extricating the payload, he gently swung the warheads from the bay and lowered them down through the pried-open drop doors into the boat below.