Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  One of the ghosts, a tall woman in grey, shifted restlessly. She spoke in turn, pointing towards the mountain ridge that lay ahead of us. Here, if I had got my directions right, lay the Noumenon.

  They turned and began walking. I hesitated, then followed. They were, at least, likely to lead me to where I wanted to go. Yet they were ghosts, and the woman moved with a lithe stride that suggested danger to me; she was clearly armed. And there was something familiar about her . . .

  The armed woman stopped and paused. She pointed, into the sky. Concealed behind an outcrop, I couldn’t at first see what she was gesturing at. Then I noticed a tiny speck against the mountain wall, twisting and turning as it descended. It was coming in fast: seconds later it resolved itself into a familiar shape. It was the dreadnought that had stolen away the Centipede Queen.

  NINETEEN

  Hestia — Crater Plain

  Rubirosa’s armour was cumbersome at first, but I rapidly got used to it. In the old days, so I’d heard, haunt-armour was haunted indeed, but this simply whispered to itself, then fell silent, as I stripped it from its mistress and put it on. Then Shorn and I strapped the unconscious marauder to a passenger chair.

  ‘What if you don’t come back?’ Shorn asked. ‘I never learned to fly a ship.’

  ‘If I don’t come back,’ I said, ‘then it’s over for both of us. Give me three hours. After that – make your own way, Leretui. I’ll have done what I can.’

  After a moment, she nodded. ‘Fair enough.’ I left her staring dubiously at Rubirosa and left the ship. I hoped she wouldn’t take it into her head to do anything drastic while I was gone, like dispatching Rubirosa. It wasn’t that I had feelings for the marauder, I told myself. She’d be a valuable source of information, that was all. I was trying not to think about Gennera, aware of how far I’d already crossed the line. Shorn might not have been telling the truth, after all, but I’d gone ahead and acted on it anyway. If what Shorn had said was true, I’d have gained a lot of kudos from turning her in to Gennera.

  Fuck that, I thought. I might have a duty, but Shorn was my cousin and Gennera had distrusted me enough to send a spy after me.

  Besides, I needed to know what was going on: who, or what, Mantis really was. Who had engineered the attack on the Noumenon. What the weapon was that I’d delivered from Caud. I was sick and tired of acting from ignorance. So, moving fast in my borrowed armour, I headed towards Mantis’s turret. I kept expecting to turn and see the Library striding alongside: I missed her. I wondered whether we’d left her marooned in the past, or whether temporality had any meaning for someone who wasn’t even real in the first place. But the sky was starting to darken over the mountains, highlighting the faint lamps of the Noumenon and causing the column of smoke that still spiralled up from the chasm of the city to become thinly etched against the clouds. I was still high up, climbing through rocks that looked as though they’d never known terraforming.

  And there was the turret of Temperire ahead. Three hours, I’d promised Shorn, and it might be a promise I could keep. I didn’t want to be another one who’d let Shorn down, but I might have to, even so.

  On that fateful night of Ombre, I had not been in Winter-strike, but down in the south, near Tharsis. But I hadn’t tried to rescue Shorn either, although I’d tried to negotiate with my aunts, who had proved predictably obstinate. Alleghetta was furious about the council post, of course, and in any case disinclined to listen to me. Talking things through wasn’t the same as getting the girl out of there, however. It struck me again with some force that what I might actually have done was to save Shorn from the wrong enemy. Mantis has been kind to me. I repressed a shiver.

  Whatever the situation, it had left me with a spy mistress whom I could no longer trust. I could have felt betrayed, but instead I felt like a free agent for the first time in a decade, and now Temperire was towering over me again, the haunt-armour revealing flickering shapes along its ruined battlements. I headed for the rocks around its base and hoped the haunt-armour would protect me.

  At least our previous adventures had given me some idea of the layout. I avoided the lower reaches of the turret, vulpen-thronged as they were, and headed back up the stairs. The haunt-armour kept talking to itself, murmuring and muttering, occasionally tingeing my vision with crimson flashes. It unnerved me until I realized that the armour was trying to mesh itself into the haunt-arrays of the turret itself, rendering me unseen, and then I was grateful. I had no idea whether it had achieved it, however, when it finally fell silent.

  By this time we were on an upper landing, close to the chamber where I’d found Shorn. I could hear conversation and drew closer.

  ‘She’s scared,’ Mantis was saying. ‘You can’t blame her.’

  ‘You need to find her.’ An unfamiliar voice, deeper than Mantis’s, and weirdly accented.

  ‘Of course I need to find her,’ Mantis snapped. ‘For her own sake. If our maker catches up with her, she’ll be put back in a laboratory. Don’t you think I don’t know what that’s like?’

  ‘I know you know.’ The voice, caressing, sympathetic. And I thought to myself, without understanding how I knew: that’s a male voice. I edged closer to the chamber door and looked through the crack.

  Mantis was sitting on the bed, straight-backed, like a skin-and-bone doll in her leather harness. Her coiling hair was tightly braided and haunt-energy flickered over her skin like lightning. I’d seen her as an ancient warrior, and also as one of the Changed, and now I saw her for the first time as an excissiere. Whatever Gennera had done to her – if she had – she’d been designed as a warrior.

  A vulpen sat at her feet. It – he – wore a billowing black robe, pooling out over the floor like ink. All hollows and shadows, I thought, almost too fascinated to feel repelled. Almost. His head was more like a beaked skull, as though the engineers of the Changed had decided to dispense with the soft flesh, paring down to edge and blade. His long fingers held Mantis’s hand, gripping tight, their curving nails meshing together.

  Lost children, and deadly.

  ‘Have you spoken to the Queen?’ the vulpen said, and my ears pricked up.

  ‘Not yet. She’ll be a valuable ally if I can persuade her to join us.’

  The vulpen hissed. ‘I told you. Why are you wasting your time with her? She’s not the same as us: she is many, we are one.’

  ‘She has a matriarchy of her own. She is Changed, so are we.’ Mantis sounded stubborn.

  ‘Her kind have always gone their own way. Besides, they’re not even Martian.’

  Mantis said stiffly, ‘She came here to find us, didn’t she? She came after Leretui.’

  ‘She came to take her back to Earth. Your Gennera experiments on demotheas. So does the Queen. Why else are her people hiding in the marshes of Ropa, looking for your kindred?’

  ‘Looking for alliances, I’m sure.’

  ‘Mantis – you are so loyal,’ the vulpen said, and there was definite affection in his voice. ‘You believe we’re all the same, that we can all be one happy clan.’

  ‘I think we can,’ Mantis insisted.

  I hadn’t moved, but Mantis’s head went up all the same.

  ‘What was that?’

  Time for me to go, I thought. I slid away from the door. The haunt-armour kicked in at once, whispering advice. There was a room around the corner, in which I could hide. I wasn’t going to turn down free information. I dodged behind the door as Mantis and the vulpen strode by, and then I made my way out of the turret and into the night.

  Ropa. That was on Earth, one of the drowned western continents. A long way from Malay – because I had no doubt that the Queen to whom Mantis had referred was the Centipede Queen herself. And it had sounded as though Mantis had access to her: was she out on the Plains still, or here in the tower?

  When I got back to the ship, I found that Rubirosa had regained consciousness but not her freedom. And even though I’d locked the craft up, Shorn was nowhere to be seen.

&nbs
p; ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Rubirosa said, very sour. Any chance of setting me free?’

  She’d obviously been trying to escape her bonds, from the state of her wrists. I grinned.

  ‘I don’t think so. Where’s Shorn?’

  ‘I don’t know. She was speaking to someone, in the back. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then she got the door lock open and bolted. I don’t suppose it would be too much trouble to give me my armour back?’

  ‘Yes, it would. Sorry.’

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s something you’d better know. When I told you about Gennera, I wasn’t being entirely honest.’

  There’s a surprise.’

  ‘Gennera thinks I’m working for her.’

  And are you? She sent you to spy on me, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m reporting back to someone who’s watching her. Someone in the Matriarchy.’

  And who would that be?’

  ‘Her name’s Sulie Mar.’

  ‘My mother?

  Your mother’s a powerful woman, Hestia.’

  ‘I’m not doubting that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think she was that worried about me.’

  Rubirosa snorted. ‘She’s not worried about you. You were incidental to all this. She’s worried about what Gennera’s up to.’

  You can prove this, can you?’

  ‘Talk to your mother.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And in exchange, how about some information from you?’

  ‘Very well. Gennera’s been breeding demotheas,’ I said.

  ‘What? They don’t exist.’ Her look of surprise could be genuine, or it could not.

  ‘It seems I just left you locked up with one.’ I hesitated. ‘How would you like a trip to Earth, Rubirosa?’

  ‘I think you’d better explain,’ she said.

  So I did.

  Interlude: Shurr – Mars

  Segment Three was nipping at her wrist. She felt a sudden cool surge through her body, memories and images flooding in along with antiseptics, rejuvenators, anti-spasmodics, as the bioengineered segment did its medicinal work.

  ‘Shurr! Are you all right?’

  She raised her head. The Martian sky wheeled above her and the odours of sage and cold came as a shock. The wagon stood a short distance away and her companions crouched by her side. The Queen was not among them. They were alone on the plain; the refugee convoy had moved on.

  The woman – Essegui—’

  ‘She’s fled,’ Mhor said.

  ‘She attacked me,’ Shurr said, sitting up. She was aware of an all-encompassing sense of failure. ‘Ghuan—’

  ‘Ghuan is dead. We’ll grow another one,’ her companion, Mhor, said reassuringly. She put out a hand and lightly touched Shurr’s head.

  ‘But the Queen—’

  There’s been a message. Come inside.’ Mhor helped her to rise and led her back inside the wagon. The Queen’s perfume hung heavily in the air: Shurr might almost believe that she was still there. The pheromone-enhanced scent soothed her.

  ‘Sit,’ Mhor instructed. Shurr did so, and Segment Three slid onto her lap. Shurr held out her wrist and the centipede bit. The Queen appeared, superimposed over the empty couch, and smiling.

  ‘Shurr. If you live. I hope so. Don’t come after me. Our enemies have found me now, but don’t be concerned. They won’t hurt me and even if they do, I have left instructions at the palace. A new queen’s being grown.’ The Queen leaned forward, her beautiful, empty face compassionate. ‘Don’t be angry with me, Shurr. I’m where I need to be.’

  Then she faded, shimmering against the air. Shurr made a small, inarticulate sound and immediately Mhor was there, an arm around her shoulders. Segment Three coiled about her wrist.

  ‘She’s left instructions,’ Mhor said. ‘She’s recruited locally, she said. We’re to return to Earth without her.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘All will be well.’ Mhor’s face was serene, but Shurr could not sustain that level of faith, even though she knew it to be a betrayal.

  They’re not like us,’ Mhor said, when she voiced this thought. ‘They work from a different perspective.’

  ‘I know that, but all the same—’

  ‘You know the Queen isn’t as you see her,’ Mhor said. ‘Remember, when the old Queen died?’

  And Shurr did remember, how could she not: the lovely face and perfect body cracking open, the shell breaking to reveal the mass of squirming symbiotes within, tiny organisms except for the massive central spine. Remembering how Khant had reverently picked up the fragments of the spine as it came apart, placing each one in frozen stasis apart from the pincered head with its faceted diamond eyes, the processing core which would form the memories of the new Queen.

  ‘We’re here to do their bidding,’ Mhor said, with only the slightest hint of reproof.

  ‘I know.’ And Shurr was a little more content then, though a trickle of forbidden thoughts tugged at the very edges of her mind: who put us in thrall to this organism, this hive mind? Where does it come from? Did it evolve, or was it made, or did it come – as she had heard whispered – from the far stars? But those thoughts were not permitted and they soon faded, like dreams, or like the smiling image of the Queen herself, gone into the shadows of the alien day.

  TWENTY

  Essegui — Crater Plain

  There wasn’t time to run, from where I was hiding amongst the boulders. The ship glided over us, coming low, just as it had over the Caud refugee camp. I felt, impossibly, my shadow snatched by the shadow of the dreadnought, as though it was a physical extension of my own body. I was pulled in its wake, like someone caught in a riptide. I had a swimming, incoherent view of the landscape below me, then a moment of blackness as if I’d passed out, though I didn’t think I had. My feet touched metal and I staggered back against a wall, banging my elbow. The pain gave me clarity. I was in a hold, a huge arching chamber beneath metal struts like the ribcage of some mechanical beast. My elbow hurt but this wasn’t all: my soul felt bruised, as if it had been beaten with some unnatural hammer, and even the geise seemed to crouch, whimpering, in a corner of my mind. At the end of the chamber, a wind was roaring in and I saw the tips of the red mountains, parallel with the doorway: we were rising. The floor tilted as the ship lurched, sending me onto my knees; I grasped at a strut and only just stopped myself from rolling out of the hatch. Steely fingers closed around my wrist. I tried to wrench my hand away and failed. I looked up and to my horror Mantis was standing over me. Something stung my arm and the world blurred. Mantis said something I didn’t understand, but I suspected it was: You’re coming with me.

  In the cell, I passed the time by counting the number of people who had now attempted to kidnap me. So far, I made it about a dozen, including the excissiere who now sat hunched on a chair outside the cell, filing nails that were more akin to talons. Occasionally she glanced up, rarely in my direction, apparently focusing on something I could not see and speaking to someone I could not hear. Spirits, or something in her head? Impossible to say. I asked for water and was ignored. Eventually one of the red-robed women came in and spoke in a low voice to the warrior, who rose and strode out. I was left alone in the cell, but not for long.

  ‘Essegui Harn?’ someone said. I spun around. Another ghost stood behind me in the cell: a woman with a flayed, grinning face. The image was so ghastly I took a step back.

  ‘I’m a friend of your cousin’s,’ said this thing. ‘I’m the Library.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Hestia?’ the ghost said, patiently. ‘Your cousin? We met in Caud. I tagged along.’ She tried to look self-deprecating and failed.

  ‘What are you?’

  Well,’ the ghost said, sitting down on the bench that served as a bed. ‘Technically speaking, I’m not the whole Library. I’m a particular archive. Don’t need to go into that now.’

  ‘So what’s an archive and a friend of my cousin doing here? And what is this thing we’re in?’

>   ‘It’s a relic. Like me, I suppose. Have you heard of Mantis the Mad?’

  ‘I’ve met her.’

  ‘She used to be a figment of fairy stories. In the country districts, people used her to frighten their kids. They were right. This is her ship.’

  ‘But she can’t be that old.’

  The Library inclined her ravaged head. ‘She’s a clone. I met the first version, long ago.’

  ‘But you said you were a Library.’

  The Library frowned. ‘Yes, and yet, I have memories . . . Mantis and I were contemporaries. I think.’

  ‘Caud wasn’t more than a – what? A settlement, at that point?’

  ‘Caud started as a library,’ the warrior said. ‘A building in the secret hills, holding texts rescued from the cities of the plain when society began breaking down.’

  ‘I’d never heard that.’ I shot a look at the chamber beyond the cell. The stanchions bore the metal faces of demons, only subtle distortions from the faces of the Changed themselves, probably a superstitious attempt to protect the ship from whatever waited for it in haunt-space. I couldn’t even remember whether they’d had haunt-tech in Mantis’s day.

  ‘So why are you here? What have you got to do with Mantis?’

  A vested interest,’ the Library said. Her image flickered. ‘Your cousin’s in trouble.’

  You know what Hestia’s doing?’ Realizing that the Library might in some way be connected with my cousin made my spirits rise.