by John Meaney
Across the battlefield, nobody moved.
Then finally, a stirring.
Tom, by chance, was one of the first to awaken.
~ * ~
67
NULAPEIRON AD 3423
Fireworks exploded along the boulevard’s length, starbursts along the golden ceiling: the welcome crack, and then the dying wheeze. Streamers and holos sprayed through the air.
Tom, in full nobleman’s regalia, stood to attention on the balcony.
‘Happy New Year.’ Avernon, at Tom’s left shoulder, used the ancient benediction.
‘To all of us,’ said Corduven, on Tom’s right.
All three wore formal high-collared capes, and kept their position while the victory parade passed by below, and the swirling crowds of revellers laughed and cheered and hurled up their thanks, and their blessings.
‘Lord One-Arm,’’ someone shouted. ‘All hail!’
There were answering cheers.
Tom’s ears were fully healed; everything sounded closer, more richly textured, than it had before. He grinned at the mass of people below.
It was a long time before Corduven touched Tom’s arm and said, ‘Let’s go inside.’
Tom had a silver cane to lean on, but his wounds were slight, and he limped only a little as they passed through the open archway, into a richly appointed chamber where Lords and Ladies from many realms were drinking, snacking on hors d’oeuvres delivered by lev-trays and drones—not servitors: an informality which some found gauche, while those with military experience appeared not to mind—and floating couches abounded. Corduven and Avernon watched, making sure Tom sat down, then fetched drinks for him and for themselves.
Their solicitude was beginning to wear him down, but he smiled his thanks all the same.
Next morning, a clap from outside Tom’s sleeping chamber woke him early, and he struggled to sit up in the big comfortable bed.
‘What— Oh, come inside. What is it?’
A servitor entered, swallowed.
‘Brigadier-General d’Ovraison, sir. Sorry, I know it’s early. But he’s here, in the breakfast lounge. Says he has something you must see.’
‘I’ll be right out.’
Bare-chested and barefoot, dressed only in training trews, Tom padded out into the lounge where Corduven was waiting.
‘Morning, old chap.’ He looked at Tom’s stump, but without revulsion. ‘I thought we could go on a little trip this morning.’
‘Fine.’ Tom rubbed his face. He had slept well, could do with some more. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see when we get there.’
In cloaks and heavy tunics, they walked along the boulevard, among the detritus of the previous night’s parade. In one alcove, two men still in uniform were singing quietly. Here and there, unconscious figures were slumped, on benches or against the main wall.
‘Premature, perhaps.’ Tom did not think they could afford optimism. ‘Perhaps the Blight’s in hiding.’
‘I agree.’ Corduven had better access to intelligence. ‘But the other occupied realms are fighting purely conventional battles, and there seems to be confusion among their upper echelons.’
The enemy officers appeared to be purely human. No-one had detected true Dark Fire activity since the War Between Gods.
‘I’ve another thought for you, Corduven. A nastier one.’
They walked in silence for a few more paces.
‘All right, I’ll bite.’ Corduven glanced at Tom. ‘What’s the sting in the tail?’
‘Two gods bumped against each other, and there was divine anger, and the dark one got burned. Isn’t that what people think?’
‘Don’t you?’ Corduven tapped Tom gently on the shoulder. ‘It was your idea.’
‘Not mine, not really.’
‘But—’
‘Dart, or the “system reflection” I talked to before, whatever—we used the Blight’s own energies to blast a signal into mu-space, to the processor I used before. The Blight attracted the Dart-entity’s attention, and they didn’t like each other.’
‘That,’ said Corduven, ‘sounds like an understatement.’
They stopped beside a floating bronze-encased levanquin, whose driver was waiting patiently, eyes ahead as though he could not detect Tom’s or Corduven’s presence.
‘What if Dart destroyed Nulapeiron’s Blight’—Tom’s voice was very quiet—‘but not before its signal got through to the original Anomaly?’
For a long moment, Corduven stood very still.
Then he stirred into life, but did not say another word as they climbed aboard, and the levanquin lifted and moved off.
They arced through a clear pale-yellow sky. Overhead, a tiny dark dot: a floating terraformer, spewing creamy heat-retaining clouds into the upper atmosphere, replenishing the storm-blown cloud cover.
Tom and Corduven sat behind the flight crew, looking out across the wild landscape. Mountains gave way to familiar heathland, and then the blasted muddy waste which had been churned up by battle.
None of it was Blight-held territory. Not any more.
They banked downwards, to the left, and Tom tried to look over Corduven’s shoulder, but Corduven held up a hand, blocking his view.
‘Not yet.’
The flyer whispered softly into land.
Tom jumped down into the wild grasses, took a deep breath of pure fresh air, and walked up to the ridgeline. Trying not to remember the battle-Chaos of the last time he had been here.
He was puffing a little when he reached the top, and looked down.
With amazement.
Where the great crystalline structure had stood, everything now was flat—and softly shimmering.
A lake of glass spread wide before him, cupped in a kilometres-wide natural depression, smooth and shining beneath the morning sun.
‘Take your time,’ said Corduven.
A soft breeze caressed Tom’s face as he descended to the glass lake’s edge, and stood there.
For a long time.
Then he tapped the glass with the toe of his boot, satisfied himself that it was solid, and threw back his cloak over his right shoulder.
He stepped out onto the glass.
And walked.
Out across the smooth lake, taking careful paces so he would not slip, Tom did indeed take his time. Eventually he reached a point, smooth and perfectly flat like any other, which he judged to be the glass lake’s centre.
Taking care, he went down on one knee, and leaned forward to splay his hand against the surface.
It was not heat, he decided, which had turned the glass structure to liquid, but some other force which had dissolved the molecular bonds only of that substance. He knew that, because the proof was visible, beneath him.
The girl was young, eleven SY perhaps, and she was frozen in the glass, hair trapped in a swirl which would remain in stasis. None of the bodies had burned: every one was intact, trapped forever at the moment of death.
Had there been children among the multitude? Tom had not realized.
She died, they died, to save us all.
But that was scant comfort.
Tom stood up, walked a little way, and stopped.
Lemon skies and creamy clouds, and air fresher than he had ever breathed.
But down below his feet, held frozen for eternity, were more intact people, hands raised upwards as though in helpless supplication, and it was at that moment that the enormity of his actions was made clear to Tom.
So many...
In there, down inside the vast lake of glass, frozen, were two hundred and fifty thousand bodies, every one a victim who had known what it was for a higher power to enter their minds, rape their humanity and take possession of the remnants, and each of those quarter of a million souls had once been a child, perhaps was one still at the end; had known life, their parents’ love or society’s cruel indifference, fallen in love, betrayed or been betrayed, bereaved, found happy fulfilment, hard work or in
dolence . . .
Each was a real, complete life.
An entire universe, if the truth be told, which ceases to exist when each person dies, with their perceptions, their thoughts and innermost untold fears and highest dreams—all turned to insensate dust.
For what can possibly matter, save people... people, and time, and love?
Tom knelt down, carefully, upon the smooth glass surface.
And bowed his head.
Oh, my brothers and sisters.
The magnitude of it all.
I am so sorry.
And wept for the frozen dead.
~ * ~
68
TERRA AD 2143
<
[21]
Epilogue
Its slender body was silver; the delta wings were of shining copper, crossed with silver to match the fuselage. It hung, the mu-space vessel, high above a startling green meadow in the pure Alpine sky. White buildings shone beneath it.
A tiny drop-bug disengaged, floated downwards from the ship like a dandelion seed upon the soft spring breeze. Slowly, until it touched down lightly in a courtyard.
Its hatch puckered, opened, and a lithe dark-suited figure jumped out.
‘Admiral.’ A young boy, also clad in black, was there to meet her. ‘Welcome, ma’am.’ He saluted, and looked up at her with his black-on-black eyes.
‘At ease.’ Ro grinned, then tousled his hair. ‘How ya doin’, young Carlos?’
‘Great, ma’am.’ He grinned, revealing a gap where a front tooth was missing.
Then he turned and scampered inside.
Ro followed.
A passing nun nodded, walking swiftly by. Behind her, two Asian lay-helpers, their faces strained, hurried to keep up. Seven years before, they had come here as refugees, at the height of the Changeling Plague.
They look more worried, Ro thought, every time I’m here.
She walked from the courtyard to the meadow’s edge. Beneath a spray of varicoloured flowers, a small grey headstone stood.
Father Michael Aloysius Mulligan, FSJ, PhD, DSc
13th April 2076—10th August 2154
Father of Dart and Ticky, husband of Angela.
Latterly a Jesuit priest and scholar.
Requiescat in pace.
So many deaths; so many family she never knew.
Gramps had died nearly a year ago, just before Ro’s thirty-fourth birthday. She thought of Dart, the father she had never known, and wondered what it was that survived in mu-space. His soul? It was nothing she would ever discuss, here or anywhere.
Ticky was the younger son: the uncle who had never been, killed with his mother when he was very young; it was that tragedy, or Gramps’ recovery from it, which had led to his ordination.
And he had been Mother’s sensei.
I miss you, Gramps.
She bowed to the gravestone.
In the dojo, a small white-haired woman, in gi and split-skirt hakama, moved at the centre of a maelstrom. Beefy UNSA officers tumbled in every direction, and Ro winced as the tiny blind woman altered momentum and two heads collided with an audible crack and both men fell, stunned.
In a gallery, ten youngsters clad in black jumpsuits watched silently.
Mother. You just get better with age.
After she had led the cool-down and meditation, Karyn -Mother—bowed formally from the kneeling position, forehead to floor, as her trainees did likewise. Then they shuffled off the mat, covered in sweat, faces drained.
‘Mom!’ Two children ran towards Ro.
She caught them around her waist.
‘You’re back.’ Karyn smiled, silver eye sockets catching the sun. ‘For how long?’
‘Long enough’—with a rough hug—‘to put these two through their paces.’
‘Ha. If you can keep up.’
Towelling off, Karyn headed towards her quarters.
‘Ten minutes, and I’ll be showered and ready for lunch.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘And they haven’t seen their father.’
‘Good. And we don’t need his money, either.’
They both knew that Colonel Neil was a father in name only, and that his and Ro’s disastrous liaison was long over. Anyone who performed a DNA check on the boys would soon find that out: they were twin one hundred per cent McNamara clones, natural-born, with only the gender chromosome altered.
They waited for Karyn to leave the dojo, then exchanged mutual grins.
‘Colonel Neil’—Dirk imitated his grandmother’s voice—‘is chasing lady officers in Pasadena. And we better not—’
‘—grow up to be like him,’ finished Kian. ‘Of which there’s fat chance, right?’
‘Right.’
Ro could tell them apart, but only just. To everyone else apart from their grandmother, the twins were indistinguishable, looking twelve years old though they had just turned ten.
‘So what have you two learned?’ Ro glanced at the dojo mat: teal green, holding the sweat of all that striving.
The twins slipped their shoes off.
And then they were into it, a sudden shift from stillness to blurred motion: jumping, rolling, using kicks and elbows, moving in for body-throws—a wrist-throw, begun but deliberately released (for both Ro and Karyn had decreed that locks and throws against the joints were too dangerous for growing bones)—and the use of confusion, attack-vectors which most fighters would never imagine, would have no reflexive defence against.
Dirk and Kian stopped, small chests heaving, and bowed in one motion towards their mother.
‘Very good, my warriors.’ Ro bowed in return. ‘Very good indeed.’
There were six hundred children seated in the assembly hall, wearing black jumpsuits, looking up at Ro. There was a lectern, but she ignored it. Instead, she stood with hands clasped behind her back, looking down at them all.
‘Ma’am?’ It was young Carlos, speaking from the wing offstage. ‘All clear, ma’am.’
‘Thank you, Carlos.’
The nuns’ surveillance cameras were now seeing images of Ro’s devising: a pep talk just scandalous enough—by their standards—to stop them looking for a deeper truth.
Before Ro, the children waited. They were aged between seven and twelve, but even the youngest sat attentively, hands on knees, staring up at their leader with jet-black eyes totally sans whites, like Ro’s own.
Pilots’ eyes.
Only Dirk and Kian were her own progeny, but every child here bore a fragment of her DNA, her mitochondria, and the unique organelles collectively termed fractolons. Each child had been born in mu-space, to a host mother who had already signed her offspring’s parentage over to UNSA, in the guise of a foundation headed by the still redoubtable Frau Doktor Schwenger.
UNSA trainees were still being virally rewired and stripped of their eyes, but the numbers per annum were diminishing, and in a few years the first of these new Pilots would be ready to take their place in the continuum they would make their own, at home in mu-space as no ordinary human beings could ever be.
Would they be alone there? No-one had seen a Zajinet for years: all ambassadors to Terra had been recalled, and the world of Beta Draconis III was devoid of life; no-one believed any more that it had been their homeworld. Among the higher echelons of UNSA, they knew only that the aliens—the faction in power, at least—had not wanted true Pilots in mu-space; and that encouraged them to back Ro’s plans.
‘Hello, everyone.’ Ro’s voice carried clearly.
Above the ceiling, high above the buildings, her delta-winged vessel hung huge and silent, waiting. Though there were no skylights, Ro could sense its presence always.
‘Today, we’ll consolidate skills which we don’t’—with a gentle emphasis—‘ever practise in public. Understood?’
Six hundred heads nodded in unison.
