Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  As a child, we believe the world enchanted because age has not killed the magic we are born with. As we grow, the simple spells of new sights and far-off places no longer work on us, and we grow cynical and cold. But I was old even then, a young man of one hundred ten—one hundred fifteen years? I no longer recall. But in age once more the magic returns, if you are willing and open to it. Though young wood does not burn for the moisture in it, as a lonely cinder may catch in old, dry wood and spark a great burning, so do such small things kindle the hearts of those with eyes and time to see.

  And if you burn long enough and bright as I have done, you come back to that simple truth of childhood: the world of the scientists, of engineers and mathematicians, does not exist. We live in stories, in the demon-haunted world of myth. We are heroes and dragons. Evil and divine. I felt almost that Simeon stood beside me, as I stood beside Kharn Sagara in the halls of the Undying and in the perverse ark and Eden he kept bottled beneath his hanging pyramid.

  How wondrous it is that we walk the same universe as such legends! That a man on Earth might breathe the same air as Alexander. As the first Caesar. As the God Emperor and the Mericanii he destroyed.

  “My lord?”

  “Forgive me,” I said, “I was woolgathering.” In truth I had been admiring the beauty of the world beneath us. Catraeth shone like alabaster in the sun, and the sea of grass beyond glowed green and golden in the light of day. In the middle distance a great combine marched beetle-like across the fields, and the silver points of overseer towers glittered like swords. I was remembering standing on another curtain wall. At another time. As another Hadrian.

  But even when the world is at its most violent, Hadrian, focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. There’s no avoiding it.

  The ugliness of the world certainly had come for old Gibson in the end, but the beauty was still there. Beauty and truth and goodness too, beyond the power of men to destroy. Or so I thought at the time, for the day would come when that white city, that Green Sea, the people and machines and silver towers would burn and perish and pass away.

  For there are greater truths than beauty, and higher goods.

  Barda was watching me intently with those jewel-bright eyes. “What is . . . to become of us?”

  Coming back to myself, I answered him. “You will travel with us to Nemavand, help us to locate this lost legion, and you will fight with us should we come under attack.”

  Barda shook his head. “No, no. After.”

  “He’s asking what you mean to do with us after all this. We were expecting assignment to the front,” said Gaaran, a younger Irchtani even more brightly green than Barda was. He was one of the soldiers scourged alongside Udax, one of the Irchtani who had attacked Pallino. “We were promised a fight, devil man.”

  “You may get one sooner this way than you would have had you been shipped to the Veil,” I replied. “I’m not sure what will happen to your unit once we reach Nemavand. That’s a question for another day.” Returning my attention to Barda, I said, “Most of your men will be put into stasis down here and transported up to my ship over the next several days. But you and these here will come with us in our shuttle.” We were not likely to be overheard up on the wall in the open air, but I was still cautious. I had no notion of who was my enemy and who was not. I scanned the sky above for camera drones, saw none. “There is still a chance that whoever hired your men for their little game will try something.”

  “You’re trying to protect us?” Udax asked, astonishment plain in his alien voice despite the gap between our species.

  I turned away from the Irchtani and regarded my own people: Crim and Alexander and my guards. “Oh no,” I said. “I’m taking you to war.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THE SHADOWS OF ARAE

  GODODDIN.

  How many times did I pass by Gododdin again before the last day? A dozen? More? How clearly I see her hanging there in the night, snow-crowned and garlanded in flora, her clouds like the veil of a young bride in springtime. Beneath and behind me, the bridge crew busied itself preparing for our departure. The sun was rising, cresting over the green limn of the world.

  My sun.

  Ahead, the massive Legion station reared up, a castle without foundation or summit reaching out across the night between Gododdin and its lonely silver moon. We flew inverted, so that it and Gododdin seemed both to hang above us, though as we pushed for higher and higher orbits—climbing through the crystal spheres of heaven—it was we who rose.

  I watched in silence, brooding on the stars beyond. The lost legionnaires were almost certainly dead, and our quest almost certainly failed before it had begun. The memory of my mission to Arae was like an albatross at my neck. I had been sent to find men then, too, and had. But the men I’d found were worse than dead, changed into machine puppets. SOMs to serve the Extrasolarians. We had recovered a few hundred survivors, men and women awaiting conversion. So few. Despite the specter of Syriani Dorayaica spreading its white hand across the Empire, I suspected Extrasolarian hands behind the disappearance of these men. Kharn Sagara had been paid in flesh for his services to Aranata Otiolo. He had acquired the flesh he needed to outfit two legions of chimeric slaves, and the company on Arae—MINOS, they called themselves—had been working to perfect machine augmentation for the Cielcin. For Syriani? Or was the Scourge of Earth not the only one of the Cielcin princes in play? So many in the Empire liked to pretend they were playing chess or Druaja with the Cielcin, directing knights and pawns and castles. But there were more than two players in our game, that much was certain.

  “We have clearance to break orbit, ma’am,” said comms officer Pherrine from the pit behind me. I did not turn, only watched Gododdin and my sun rise above us.

  “Very good,” came Captain Corvo’s tight, controlled voice. “M. Koskinen, take us out. Chart a course past lunar orbit bearing forty degrees. Hold to the ecliptic.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “M. White, you have the coordinates for our jump to warp?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Very good.”

  Though the window in front of me was false, it simulated what the view out a porthole from this part of the ship would look like. The Tamerlane’s bridge lay far forward on the ventral side, almost at the nose, shielded above by the heavy armor of the dorsal hull and beneath by the primary weapons cluster. Thus I peered out through a forest of gun emplacements and shield projectors like grasping hands. It made me think of the Gothic horror of the Demiurge, rank upon rank of iron soldiers standing like the statues of saints and gargoyles upon the ramparts of some lost temple.

  The Legion station, by contrast, was white and clean. There is something special about sunlight in the black of space. Without the air to bend and soften it, the light shone hard and bright as laser fire. It lent the shipyard an air of unreality where it twisted above us like the etching of some improbable city. From our high orbit I looked up—down—upon battle cruisers and frigates, troops carriers and destroyers and rapid attack ships, each blacker than the space they moved through and shining in the light.

  “Is that the rest of the convoy?” Alexander asked, speaking from his place at my elbow. He pointed, indicating four vessels rising downward from the station ahead, accelerating toward our higher orbit. We would overtake them before they reached our orbit, and so they would fall into step behind, following us for one last circuit of Gododdin and the hard burn up the gravity well into the rushing Dark and whatever future out there awaited us.

  I knew their names: the Pride of Zama, the Androzani, the Cyrusene, and Captain Verus’s own Mintaka bringing up the rear, a heavy battleship more than five miles long. How small even it seemed measured against the face of the world above it and the blackness beyond.

  “Aye, that’s them,” Crim said. As security officer, he had little enough to do during a v
oyage, and so had joined us on the bridge to watch the jump to warp.

  I was glad to see the prince and my lictor were on speaking terms again, and acknowledged Crim’s approach with a nod.

  “From little towns in a far land we came, to save our honour and a world aflame,” I intoned, watching the other ships descending, rising to meet us.

  “That’s . . . Classical English, isn’t it?” Alexander asked.

  “Not that Shakespeare fellow you’re on about?” Crim put in.

  I shook my head. “Kipling.” I told them what it meant, though of the three of us only Crim had come from a small town. A beat passed. “The Irchtani are all in fugue?”

  Crim crossed his arms, kaftan fluttering about him—he never had taken to the official uniform. “Aye. And Okoyo’s overseeing the rest. We should be down to essential personnel not long after we make the jump. You going in the ice?”

  “Not at once,” I said. I’d long ago made it a habit not to freeze myself again until I had spent at least six months awake and conscious. Entering cryonic suspension repeatedly in rapid succession was a recipe for brain damage and cryoburn. “I’ve work to do.” In truth, I was only looking forward to having a goodly stretch of time away from bureaucrats and great lords. I used to wonder often if our ancient forebears made a mistake extending our lives by so many hundred years, for young as I was I was too old to long tolerate such things as politics.

  I do not wonder anymore.

  “That makes two of us,” Crim said. “I’ll be up a while yet, and first up when we get close to the mark.” As things stood, the plan was to awaken all hands as we approached the region surrounding the datanet relay. As chief of security aboard, Crim would need to be on hand to keep the peace between over ninety thousand human crewmen and a thousand Irchtani—not that we expected much trouble from our own people.

  “Thirty seconds to primary sub-light burn,” said Lieutenant Koskinen.

  “Take a seat, your worship,” Crim said to the prince, leading the younger man away. “Suppression field’s on but this mule still kicks.”

  The helmsman’s voice chimed in again. “Twenty seconds.”

  I watched the other ships above—below—us and did not follow the others. I’d had practice enough keeping my feet aboard starships not to be much concerned for my footing.

  “Received confirmation from the Mintaka,” Pherrine said. “They’re prepared for burn matching our trajectory.”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  I took half a step back, nearly sliding into a fencer’s guard.

  “Ten seconds to primary sub-light burn.”

  Gododdin still peered peacefully down at me, changeless and untouchable as planets always seem. I remember thinking suddenly of Rustam in that moment, the Imperial colony where we had at last found our link to Vorgossos. I remembered the weeping black scar on the planet’s face where the old city had been. Not changeless at all.

  Not untouchable.

  “Five seconds. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

  The Tamerlane lurched beneath my feet, and conducted through the mighty vessel’s superstructure I felt a roaring as the mighty engines flared, fusion torches blazing like the sun. I pictured some peasant on Gododdin below looking up—day or night it did not matter—and seeing for a moment the flowering of a second sun as we streaked across his sky. I did not lurch with the ship, but stood stolid by the window, watching Gododdin slide away.

  Then it was behind us and the sky ahead was Dark. With nothing left to see but stars I turned and strode down the central walk toward the captain’s holography well. A wire-frame model of local space hovered ghostly blue in the air, depicting Gododdin, its moon, and the shipyard station. The Tamerlane showed as a red mote in the center, following its arc past the moon.

  I stopped beside the well opposite Corvo. “Glad to have all that behind us,” I said.

  “You know, I’m starting to agree with Valka,” Corvo replied, gripping the rim of the holography suite, a sardonic smile on her hard face. “The more time we spend with Imperial bureaucrats, the more amazed I am any of it holds together.”

  Suddenly defensive, I said, “We got everything we needed, didn’t we?”

  “You should have seen the scramble loading the Irchtani,” she said darkly.

  I shrugged. “They managed it, though. And got our new legions together.”

  Corvo made a face. “I can’t help but figure those legions are a bunch of shell-shocked brats and old men. Whatever’s out there . . . I hope they hold together.”

  “Some of them are survivors from the siege at Bargovrin,” I said. “But they are proper soldiers. They’ll do all right.”

  “I don’t like this,” the captain said, drawing herself up once more to her full height. She was no palatine—wasn’t even an Imperial citizen—but she was taller than me. She never said, and I never asked, but I suspected that if she was not a homunculus herself, then one of her parents certainly was. Such half-caste children were common beyond the borders of the Empire, where gene sequencing was available for anyone who could pay. “We’re walking straight into a trap.”

  I shrugged, began fiddling with my rings. “If we’re walking into anything. It could be we get straight through to Nemavand and find nothing. It could be Osman’s scouts turn up nothing.” With each nothing I twisted the ivory band on my third finger, scowl deepening. “But we know something is out there, and with any luck they don’t know we’re coming.”

  “You think it’s pirates?”

  “Extras, you mean?” I glanced up through the holograph in time to see Bastien Durand emerging from the steps down to the lower level. He carried a terminal tablet under one arm and acknowledged the captain and myself with a quiet salute. “I’ve never heard of Cielcin picking off troop convoys at warp.”

  Durand’s measured tone wedged itself into the conversation like a lever beneath a heavy stone. “You’re thinking about Arae, aren’t you?”

  “What’s Arae?” Prince Alexander had evidently vacated his chair and had come over to join us. Had he been any other person—had I had any other squire—I’d have ordered him off the bridge, but despite my nominally superior position, I was not wholly comfortable ordering the prince about like some common boy.

  I looked at him a moment, kneading the false bones of my left hand with my right. “It was a mission we ran seventy years ago. The 378th Centaurine vanished on a relocation run like this. We tracked them to an Extra base on a planet called Arae. Abandoned Norman mining colony. The place was well defended, but we made it in, captured the commander of the mercenary outfit the Extras had paid for security . . . a company called the Dardanines. The Extras got away.” Alexander stood watching me intently, soaking in every word. “Do you know what the Exalted are?”

  The prince swallowed. “They’re real?” He looked from Durand to Corvo to Crim in naked horror. I understood him perfectly. The Exalted were horrible. They were the monsters peasant children imagine when they awaken screaming in the dead of night. The unholy mixture of man and machine taken to its uttermost extreme. They discarded their human bodies like a butcher discards the fat and bones, retaining only those parts that pleased them.

  “I met a child once—I think it was a child—that had nothing left except his brain,” I said, holding my hands up about a foot and a half apart. “It had a metal body about this big around and metal tentacles long as you are tall.” I suppressed a shudder, held myself to a scholiast’s stillness, not breaking eye contact with the prince. “The Extras who ran the base on Arae build them. Design bodies for barbarian warlords and Norman oligarchs and so on. Call themselves MINOS.” I let the silence drag long enough to take a seat on one of the crash couches that backed up against the rail. Hands folded between my knees, I leaned forward. “Near as we can tell, they’d been contracted by the Cielcin.”

  “What?” Alexander’s eyes went
wide. I could see his mind racing as though his retinas projected his imagination against his corneas. “A Cielcin alliance with the Extras? You’re serious?” Once again he looked to all the others. For confirmation? For reassurance? But none was coming. “But you got them? This . . . MINOS?”

  Our silence was all the answer he needed, but I said, “They got away.” I did not add that they had uploaded their minds to a radio burst and left their bodies to die beneath the mountain on Arae, or that I had fought a Cielcin-machine chimera in the bowels of their research facility.

  “And you think they’re behind this disappearance as well?” Alexander asked. “Why didn’t you mention any of this with Sir Amalric?”

  Bastien cut in, “Events on Arae were classified by the Ministry of War.” He pivoted. “Otavia, Okoyo wanted me to tell you the new flight crew will be ready by tomorrow at oh-eight hundred standard.” He offered her his tablet. “Those stats you requested.” And then he returned the way he came, back about his business as ever, though what that business was I could not guess.

  “Classified,” Alexander repeated. “But you think this was an Extrasolarian attack? Not the Cielcin?”

  “If I were a betting man, yes.” I draped my cape across my body, adjusted the clasp at my shoulder. The aristocratic garment fastened at the left, impairing my right arm to demonstrate a kind of superiority. Why use my own right hand when I might as easily order another to use theirs? I found it utterly galling in the moment and briefly considered removing the cape, but I had an obligation to maintain appearances, and it was not truly so great an inconvenience as all that. “If the Cielcin want food there are easier ways to get it. They’d just raid another colony. But it is not impossible that the Cielcin are working hand in glove with the Extras now, and if they are using the Exalted to ambush our supply trains and block our reinforcements . . .” I stood, surveying the few gathered round the projection well: Crim and Corvo and the prince. “Mark my words,” I said, “the game has changed.”