by Alex White
“They really, really didn’t want someone investigating the lower levels of the mines,” said Boots, thankful they hadn’t tried coming in the front door.
Cordell laughed and pointed to the colony’s upper-level docking clamp. “What’d I tell you?” he said. “Boom.”
Boots took a closer look and saw that the docking tube was one giant lancer round. If they’d have clamped on, the spell would’ve impaled their ship. She swept her hand over the projection sparkling with deadly green traps. She grimaced. “It’s a good thing you wanted to cut your way in somewhere else, Captain. I think there’s a safe spot in the little maintenance closet on subfloor B.”
The air approach was essentially doomed, with every single docking point rigged to blow. The land approach involved a decent number of landmines and offensive spells, hidden just below the crust of ice. Near as Boots could tell, they could cut their way inside with a good enough fire mage, but that would leave them in a labyrinth of doom.
There was a tunnel between their location and the mining colony, but it was a nightmare: sieve grids, autoturrets, and more springflies. Even if they’d fought their way through the traps on the upper level, they wouldn’t have made one step of progress down the hallway on the other side of the guard station.
“They never mined a single crystal here, did they?” asked Armin.
“It’s pretty clearly a front, sir,” said Boots. “But Aisha said something that stuck with me: why hide a warship like the Harrow? From what I can see, this is a mission planning center, which could’ve easily been housed on Taitu, where it would be better defended and managed.”
“So what you’re saying is …” Cordell began.
“What if it actually had some clandestine purpose? We all assumed, based on the massive glyph disc, that it was a weapon … but maybe it’s something worse than sheer might.”
“Like what?” asked Armin.
Boots shook her head. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. There were a few more doors to check back there.”
They made their way back to the closest door, and Boots listened against it. The wood was cool to the touch, and she wasn’t sure what to make of that. Then she noticed an inscription above the door, cut into a gold plaque: IN GRATITUDE.
Cordell and Armin joined her and readied in formation. Cordell reached out and tapped the door plate, and it swung inward. Blinding blue light poured from inside, along with gusts of freezing air.
When their eyes adjusted, they found a graveyard.
Crystal clear ice filled this area, just as it consumed Wartenberg’s surface. The freezing process left it cloudless, and some magic, maybe the grenadier’s mark, had carved a perfectly round borehole through it like a tunnel. This place had once been a barracks, built from the same marble as the hallway outside, majestic and stepped like an amphitheater, lined with rooms.
Human bodies clouded the ice, their faces frozen in shock, their forms twisted as though a tidal wave had just thrown them from their feet. They’d been swept together like leaves on a breeze, and Boots could intuit which direction the floodwaters had come from. Bubbles gathered at their shocked faces. Whatever had filled their barracks with ice had done it quickly.
Ever mindful of traps, Boots followed her comrades inside. The deceased all wore matching uniforms—Taitutian military in appearance, but slightly different from the standard-issue. These were sleeker somehow, made from finer materials. The medals and insignia were strange variants on the known Taitutian patches, accented with heavier design elements. Their military seals were more akin to ancient escutcheons than modern ship equivalents.
Boots counted the ones nearest her, then estimated the distance: had to be over a hundred corpses in there.
“Marie Prejean had said something about a mutiny,” said Boots. “You think this is what she was talking about, Captain?”
Cordell put his hands on his hips and peered up into the icy dead. “I listened to that recording a few times after you brought it back. The Harrow mutineers used gas, remember?”
“Oh,” said Boots. “So these were some other people who got betrayed over the Harrow.”
“I think these are the people who helped the mutineers carry off their plans,” said Armin. “Their uniforms are different, and think about that turret in the planning and comms area; there are traps all over the colony, but only one inside the base. I’d wager that even these people weren’t allowed inside the room with the chairs.”
Cordell mulled it over. “So some of the Harrow crew mutinies. They get the ship. Then they come back here and kill everyone who helped them?”
“That ship is priceless,” said Armin, “and it’d be smart to silence anyone who could lead someone to it. It might be worth cutting one of these people out of the ice to find any identifying marks.”
“You ever seen anything like this, Mister Vandevere?” asked Cordell.
“Magic this large, this tightly controlled?” said Armin, reaching out to touch one of the walls. “Never.”
Boots continued down the corridor, inspecting each of the bodies. The clear ice gave the chilling impression of being under the water with them, and when she’d made it about halfway, she could see that the passageway widened into a stone grotto. Marble pillars rose from the floor, past the lip of the tunnel, and she crept closer to get a better look.
Only they weren’t pillars; they were nine tall, robed statues—a central figure flanked by four on both sides. Their surfaces weren’t smoothly sculpted, like the fluted columns outside, but rough-hewn, as though they’d risen from the floor like stalagmites. Hoods hid their faces. Stony renderings of jeweled chains hung from their necks. Each one was indistinguishable from the next, save for the size of the central figure.
Boots poked her head into the larger room to see just how high the roof went, and found an impromptu chapel. The ceiling rose at least twenty meters, with lights drifting behind prismatic panes of glass or ice—she couldn’t tell from the ground.
“Cap,” she called back down the hallway, interrupting his conversation with Armin. “You’ve got to see this.”
Her companions joined her, eyes wide. Cordell moved to touch one of the statues, and Armin stopped him.
“Haven’t been scanned yet, sir,” said Armin. “Better safe than sorry.”
Boots spied a plaque inset into the ground, its letters obscured by a shadow. She pulled out her flashlight and knelt over it to read.
HERE, LAID BARE, ARE MY REMEMBRANCES,
A LIVING RECORD OF MY GREAT UNDERTAKING.
THIS WAS MY FIRST TRUE STEP.
THIS WAS MY ALPHA.
FROM HERE, I WROUGHT MY APOTHEOSIS.
I WILL RETURN WHEN THE STARS HAVE BOILED AWAY,
AND WE ARE POSSESSED OF AN INFINITE NIGHT.
I WILL LIGHT THE LAST LAMP HERE:
THE FINAL ACT OF THE CREATOR.
AND THEN TIME WILL PASS BEYOND ALL MEANING.
EVEN IN DIVINITY, I MUST NEVER FORGET,
THE STRIDES I TOOK, THE SACRIFICES MADE,
THOSE WHO CREWED MY SHIPS,
THOSE WHO DIED HERE,
THOSE ON CLARKESFALL.
Boots’s blood ran as cold as the corpses in the antechamber, and her eyes rose to the robed man looming over her. In her mind’s eye, blooming fireballs marched toward the coast of Arca, and Kinnard spoke his last words once more.
What, exactly, had the Harrow done on Clarkesfall? What clandestine part had it played in the Famine War? It certainly hadn’t fought on the side of Arca. Had the Harrow taken down their defense grid in the last moment? Was that the warship’s secret purpose?
She felt a hand on her back, and she flinched out of her thoughts. She turned to find Cordell reading the plaque over her shoulder, his face darkening with frosty anger.
“I was never sure,” he began, keeping his voice steady, “that we were going to find the Harrow.”
“And now?” she asked.
“I’ll never have another happy day until I
see its hull in the flesh. Whoever this Admiral Witts is, we’re going to get our answers.”
Chapter Eighteen
Overtake
Nilah had all the tools and the best design partner she could’ve asked for in Orna. The parts in the equipment cages were meticulously organized and brand-new. Fabrication inside the docking bay would’ve been a dream come true for Nilah—if she hadn’t seen what lay farther inside Alpha.
That’s what they’d come to call the Wartenberg base, and it’d given her a new set of nightmares to join her dreams of Mother. The “cemetery,” as the floating bodies had come to be known, terrified her to her core.
The crew had gone silent and ashen in the pursuit of their duties. The frightening mention of Clarkesfall had them all on edge, and Nilah could easily imagine what they’d been like in the closing days of the war: sullen, hungry, desperate. Orna was like a different person, and though she was a good mechanic, she’d become a terrible conversationalist.
Boots pushed a crate of data cubes past Nilah, toward the Capricious’s cargo ramp. Nilah recognized the dusty cubes from the “library”; Kin said they were collections of art from across the galaxy, but mostly Taitu. According to Boots, the reproductions weren’t just archival quality; they were like the culture arks Arca had launched in its final days. It was like someone expected Taitu to be wiped off the map, and wanted to keep what they could.
Boots gave the racer an idle wave as she passed, but kept her head down. Even Boots was too preoccupied for her usual saltiness.
“Miss Brio,” called Cordell, striding up to the platform where they were welding a new armor panel onto the Runner.
“It’s okay to call me Nilah,” she replied, hoping to get a smile out of him. “We’re friends now, you know.”
He did smile, though she sensed it to be a front he put on for her. “Apologies, Nilah. You never stop being an officer. Anything interesting?”
“Boots ought to be pleased to know that we found a small cache of missiles with seeker heads.”
“Enemy materiel, huh? What kind of ordnance are we talking?” asked Cordell. He gestured to the missiles, which Nilah and Orna had mounted to the stub-wing weapons hardpoints.
Nilah shrugged. “Not sure. We had to hack the hell out of security to get them. Some kind of high-explosive, nonfragmentation. Orna couldn’t understand them much better than I could, but they appear quite well made—bespoke, perhaps. There’s a binary mixing chamber, but we can’t be sure of what chemicals are inside without cracking the—”
“And you want to bring these things onto my ship?” asked Cordell.
Nilah swallowed. “The, uh, quartermaster said they were safe. I thought that’s what quartermasters did.”
The captain put his hands on his hips. “Uh-huh.”
She gave him a nervous smile. “We also found a whole lot of unused ordnance. She, um … she wants to take all of that, too.”
“Of course she does,” said Cordell, snorting. “I’m going to need you for something that’ll take you off the Midnight Runner for the remainder of our time here.”
“And how long is that?” she asked.
Cordell scratched his chin. He’d developed a bit of scruff since he’d been so busy all the time. “My first mate tells me he and Kinnard are on the verge of a breakthrough.”
“That’s good. You shouldn’t shave the beard, by the way. It looks good on you.”
His grin grew a little more genuine. “Nah. A clean ship and a clean face for me.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. If we live through this, I know a few designers who might enjoy working with you.”
He chuckled. “I guess we’ll just have to stay alive so I can find out what you mean.” He nodded to the fighter. “How close are we on the Runner?”
“Got some new skids on him. Redrilled the thruster ports and swapped out some busted armor plating. Orna is recalibrating the guns now. That thing is tough, not like a monocoque race car. If you get so much as a dent in one of those—”
Cordell raised his eyebrows. “You know I’m too stupid for the technical details, right? Just an old starship captain.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I tend to get a little carried away. So what did you need from me?”
He gestured toward the creepy hallway with its marble columns. She didn’t want to go back after seeing the graveyard. Its architecture reminded Nilah of the design of Claire’s office on the Lang yacht: overwrought wood and ancient expressions of wealth. She’d never be able to meet in Claire’s office again without thinking of bodies trapped in ice.
“The traps upstairs report to the guard shack down here,” he said. “Is that a two-way thing? Can we send them messages?”
“I’d imagine so,” she said. “What’s your thinking?”
He led her farther out of earshot from Orna, who watched them with idle curiosity as she worked. “When you first came aboard my ship, you tore up my defensive software. Then you hacked Ranger apart.”
Nilah winced as he said that. She didn’t like to think of it as an achievement.
“Sorry. I’m not trying to get you down,” he said. “I think you’ve got a real knack for ripping up software, and I want your help with the techie stuff upstairs in the mining colony.”
“Captain Lamarr, for me to take out all of those traps would be impossible.”
He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Oh, I agree with you there. See, I just want one of the traps.”
Cordell’s wrist comm pinged, and he tapped it. “Go ahead.”
“Captain,” came Armin’s tinny voice, “we’ve cracked their satellite surveillance footage from the last time the Harrow jumped out of here. I’ve got the next set of coordinates.”
“Get back to the Capricious and get him prepped,” said Cordell. “Miss Brio and I have some business to attend to before we can leave.”
“Miss Brio,” said Cordell, “everything green?”
Nilah sat on the darkened bridge of the Capricious for the twelfth consecutive hour, her clothes rumpled and itchy. Boots had once told her about the “hurry up and wait” mentality of ship life, and Nilah finally understood what she meant.
“All good here,” she sighed, stifling a yawn. Her breath fogged in the frosty air, and she wiped her nose.
Once Armin had secured the Harrow’s coordinates, the crew lit out of Alpha and up to the top of the trench, where they’d prepped the surface of the glaciers with the few supplies they could find. The Capricious then flew a good distance and settled down into a flat spot in the base of another trench.
Cordell ordered every system in the ship to be placed in its most passive mode; electrical, climate control, and gravity were on minimal power so they’d be nigh undetectable. Their long-range scanners had been shut off: no pinging, only listening. They’d be able to detect a jump entry, but little else.
Nilah had been excited to take a turn at Orna’s station, but now that she understood the reality of watching a dozen cameras for a day, the glamour had worn off.
“You want me to wake Miss Sokol so you can swap out early?” he asked, and she shook her head no. “Okay. Just another hour and they’ll take a turn.”
Nilah looked over to the other bridge crew, sacked out on the ground by their stations in hibernation bags. They didn’t look comfortable, but she would’ve happily traded with one of them for a chance to shut her eyes.
Two more shift rotations. If Mother hadn’t chased them to Wartenberg by then, they’d make for the jump gate.
One eyelid went down, and the bridge blurred. Her eyes fluttered with coming unconsciousness. The light strobed with the twitch of sleep.
Except it was a warning light blinking.
Boots perked up in her chair, startling Nilah awake. “Captain! Jump detected! One bandit, Sparrow five-four-five, sixty thousand ASL and dropping fast.”
Cordell leaned forward in his captain’s chair, a sudden ball of energy. “Yes, ma’am! That’s what I’m talking about! R
ise and shine, everyone!” He clapped his hands, and the others roused instantly. “Battle stations, people! We’re live! Let’s go!”
Armin returned to his place at the aggregator, tracing his glyph and resting his palms atop the crystal sphere. Aisha carved her spell and took hold of the flight stick in one hand and the keel slinger in the other. Orna took a seat beside Nilah, and together they drew their mechanist’s marks, psychically connecting to the console—and the set of hidden cameras resting on a pile of ice outside Alpha’s doors.
“Miss Sokol, relay the feed to the aggregator,” said Cordell.
“Yes, sir,” Orna replied, and Nilah felt her sculpt a connection between the cameras and Armin’s data sifter.
“It’s coming down fast, sir,” called Boots. “No atmosphere to slow him.”
“You’re going to need to tune this thing for maximum speed, Miss Brio,” said Cordell.
“Of course,” she started, and feeling out of place, added, “Captain.”
“Odds of scanner detection,” said Armin, “fifteen percent.”
Nilah couldn’t help but hold her breath. The Capricious lay dormant in a trench fifty kilometers from Alpha, but if they were detected, they’d probably be blown out of the sky. Two things gave her solace: much of the planet was opaque to conventional scanning, and if Mother caught them in her spell, Nilah could overload it again and cause an accidental teleport.
However, they might teleport straight into Wartenberg’s core, so the comfort was cold at best.
The shadow of Mother’s ship rolled over Nilah’s hidden cameras, and she shivered. She had to hope that the ice dust across her lenses would make them harder for metal scanners to detect.
Mother’s battle cruiser slowed and turned, aligned to Alpha’s hidden door, and began to descend into the trench. Nilah could feel its scanners turned to full power like a hot spotlight. She couldn’t shake the thought from her head: They’re going to see us.
