Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  I owed an explanation, but my reason was only just catching up to my instincts, and it took me a tense moment. “Our missing legions are probably aboard. We need to fight fire with fire. Take the fight to them.”

  The captain’s amber eyes narrowed. “We didn’t plan for this.”

  I turned fully to face her, pointing at the false window over her shoulder. “We need to outflank them, disable their warp capabilities if we can.”

  “You want us to fly right at that swarm of boarding craft?”

  Aristedes spoke from below, high voice almost laughing. “That’ll surprise them!”

  Corvo shook her head, leaned over the rail to call to Pherrine. “Where are the others?”

  As if in answer a bright streak of fire shone against the Dark, a great violet stream of superheated plasma. Pherrine answered, “That was the Pride of Zama. They’re advancing!” Her fingers flew over the console before her, and she nodded along with more intelligence as it came in over her headset. “The Androzani’s taken on boarders! They confirm it is the Cielcin!”

  “Damn it!” Corvo said. “Go after them! Koskinen, take us forward, full thrust! Put us into orbit around that thing!”

  “Hold!” Aristedes shouted. “Hold hold!”

  “What is it?” Corvo asked, glowering down at her tactical officer.

  Lorian did not look up. He raised one skeletal finger and held it there like a conductor’s baton at the start of a symphony. “When we go for burn, we’ll leave the aquilarii behind.”

  “We’ll circle back for them!” Corvo said.

  “Or!” Aristedes said, “We wait for the Cielcin to close distance, then burn.”

  I saw the shape of Lorian’s plan then. “You’ll lure the boarders right into the lighters’ jaws.”

  I could not see his face, only the halo of his nearly white hair shining, but I heard the smile in his voice all the same. “If the Pale are using their usual boarding craft they won’t last five minutes against our boys.”

  Corvo ran both hands through her wild hair. After a moment, she nodded. “See it done.” Then, fixing me with that iron stare, she said, “I hope you’re right about this.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  “Prepare for hard burn on my mark! Pherrine, Aristedes, relay our plan to the aquilarii. I don’t want those wings surprised when we boost out of here! And Lord Marlowe, you may wish to hold onto something!” Corvo called, storming back toward the holography well and her chair. Still irritated with me, then. I said nothing, but I did grasp the rail at my side, feet planted. The suppression fields would counter most of the inertial drift from our acceleration, but there would still be enough to knock an untrained spacer from his feet.

  I was not entirely without training.

  “Hold!” Aristedes said. The intus had not yet lowered his finger, and spoke in a tone as suggested he held the reins on a line of cavalry. “Hold!” I could make out the swarm of Cielcin boarding craft on Corvo’s projection, closing like a slow rain of arrows. Closer. Closer. “Hold!” They had closed the vast distances between us in a matter of minutes, and I was forced to remind myself that the Cielcin lived in space—had been adapting to its rigors for millennia. Perhaps they suffered the stress of high acceleration better than we. I never rightly learned, never fully understood the degree to which the Cielcin had changed themselves as we had done in creating the great confusion of humanity. As we had crafted the palatine, the patrician, and the homunculus. As others had perverted their flesh with machines or accepted fouler praxis in the bowels of Vorgossos, so too the Cielcin doubtless had altered the course of their own evolution, hardening themselves against the Dark.

  “Hold!” Lorian’s bright, chilly voice rang out once again. “Mark!”

  “Mark!” Corvo bellowed.

  Koskinen fired the primary sub-light drives, and the Tamerlane shot forward. I did not so much as stagger against the rail. The stars beyond our ship did not seem to move, so vast was the Dark between them. But move we did. The Cielcin landing craft tore past us, red motes rushing across the Tamerlane on Corvo’s display. Outside, in the endless Dark, they fired attitudinal jets, yawing about, correcting their approach vectors. The Tamerlane answered them, gun emplacements blazing, plasma fire and missiles scouring the night. I watched it all on Corvo’s holography well and on the tactical displays visible in an arc on the level below me and on the mighty screen at the fore of the bridge. In one corner a camera feed went dark. One of the Peregrine pilots must have collided with one of the Cielcin vessels.

  But Lorian’s plan had worked. The bulk of the Cielcin attackers had overshot us by hundreds of miles—thousands—and had fallen squarely into the hands of our aquilarii.

  Safe for the moment and with enough time to think, Corvo asked, “What’s the status on the Mintaka?”

  “They’re off course,” Pherrine said. “Main engines offline.”

  “Shields are holding, though,” said Adric White.

  Aristedes waved an almost dismissive hand. “They’re disabled and falling into a decaying orbit around the enemy vessel. There’s nothing we can do from here.”

  An eerie calm had settled over the bridge then, each man talking to each in turn. I stood aloof from them, not a deck officer myself, contemplating the little red star of the Mintaka where it orbited the Cielcin vessel ahead of us.

  “Assuming their shields hold and they can keep their decks clear,” Tor Varro said, referring to the Cielcin that gotten aboard, “they might be able to hold until we can close the distance.”

  Nodding, I turned from the scholiast and the central console and strode along the captain’s walk toward the main windows yet again. “Where are the other ships?” I asked, standing with my nose mere centimeters from the glass. I squinted, searching for some flash or spark to mark the passing of a ship or of weapons fire. But there was nothing. No flash of laser or crash of exploding vessels.

  Only darkness. Darkness and silence. And cold.

  “Here is the kingdom of Death,” I quoted, murmuring under my breath, “and we the living have no place in it . . .” I couldn’t recall who had written that. It wasn’t Eliot or Shakespeare. It might have Bastien, in one of his darker plays, or D’Lorca. I was glad no one had heard me, feeling suddenly foolish. Presently I raised my voice. “Where are the other ships?”

  Pherrine’s clear voice rang out in answer, “The Pride of Zama is still closing. They were the farthest out. The others are both between us and the enemy.”

  “And the Androzani is still taking on boarders?”

  “I think so, my lord,” she answered, and as I turned I saw her glance up at me, pale face lit by the screen before her. “We lost their comms three minutes ago.”

  My mouth opened of itself to utter an oath to blacken the very face of Earth, but I never spoke it. A series of white indicators pulsed distractingly on the navigator’s console in my periphery, and Adric White’s rough voice cut in. “There’s something happening to the Mintaka I don’t quite understand.”

  Commander Aristedes craned his neck to peer at the navigator. I followed his gaze, then realizing this was foolishness, directed my attentions toward the nearer captain’s console. Corvo had rescaled the projection, and I could see the knife-shape of the Mintaka in high orbit over the alien ship. It was hard to tell on the grainy sensor scan, but it was turning, slewing about as though it had skidded on ice, turning about a point near its bow.

  “They have it on a line,” the intus said. “Harpooned.”

  “That shouldn’t be possible!” Durand objected. “The ship is shielded!”

  “Not from the inside,” Corvo said. “The boarders must have deployed the cable.”

  They kept on in this vein a moment, and as they did I imagined the Cielcin boarding craft—like black claws sunk deep into the hulls of our ships. I could picture Cielcin berserkers clambering ove
r the icy hull, sinking anchor lines into the softer metals while their brethren fought on the decks within. They meant to drag the Mintaka down to the frigid surface of their worldship, to break it against their hull as a bird breaks a clam.

  We had to stop them if we could.

  My eyes met Corvo’s through the holograph between us. We didn’t have to exchange a word; she knew what I wanted and bobbed her head. “Aristedes! Tell Crim to have a boarding party ready to launch when we’re at our closest to the Androzani. He’s to be their relief.” I was hurrying back toward the captain’s station as I spoke, cape billowing behind me like wings to speed my passage.

  “Aye, Lord Marlowe,” Lorian said. “The First Cohort?”

  “Not the first,” I said, stopping just above the diminutive officer’s station. “Have him take the third. Callista’s people haven’t seen action in a while. I need the first.”

  “For what?” Durand asked, and for a moment the light caught his glasses in such a way they whited out the lenses.

  I hesitated a moment in answering. It took time for my tongue to catch up to my disordered thoughts. “How long ’til we’re in orbit around that thing?” I asked, and though I addressed the bridge at large my eyes never left Corvo’s display and the rough model of the Cielcin worldship that floated there.

  “Just over two hours, lord,” Koskinen replied.

  “Will the shields hold?”

  One of Aristedes’s lieutenants answered me. “Unless they’ve got something nasty planned, my lord, yes.”

  “Very good.” I turned on my heel and hurried for the upper door and access to the express tram that ran from the bridge to the officers’ dormitories far aft.

  Tor Varro—uncharacteristically quiet through all this—made to rise from his seat as I passed. “Where are you going?”

  I waved him to sit and did not break stride. “To prepare a boarding party. I want the First Cohort and the Irchtani ready and waiting to launch within an hour. We’re taking the fight to the Cielcin. And Varro!” I did stop then but did not turn. “Find Prince Alexander and seal him in his quarters. Have Crim post guards inside and out. If we are breached, we cannot allow His Highness to come to harm.” I sensed a pregnancy in Varro’s quiet and turned to face him. The scholiast still sat there in his green uniform, apparently unruffled by the entire situation. “And order Verus to prepare troops as well and to help liberate the Androzani.”

  Just then a titanic flash whited out the primary view screen, illuminating the entire bridge.

  Into the silence that followed, one of Aristedes’s lieutenants said, “The . . . the Androzani is gone, captain.”

  I did not hear what Corvo said next. I looked back to face the window. All was still and terribly silent within me, and the commotion around fell hushed and far away. The Cielcin must have compromised the fuel containment on the Androzani’s warp drive. Like the AM mines but incomparably vaster, the resulting annihilation had wiped out the entire ship and every man, woman, and xenobite aboard. The Cielcin had sacrificed themselves to even the odds.

  What could we do against such rapine? Such ravenous hate?

  “Do not let a single one of the Pale aboard!” I ordered my officers. “Post a detail on the warp cores now, before it becomes a problem! I want everyone ready.” Then I turned to go, trying not to think of hook-nosed Captain Yanek and thousands who burned along with him on his pyre. There were not even atoms left to bury. The blast would have reduced him and his crew and every strut and deckplate of the Androzani to pure energy. That energy, too, would fall upon the face of some nameless child in an age ten thousand years hence, and they might wonder to look upon so brief and brilliant a star.

  Or perhaps no one would notice at all.

  But we had noticed. And I had noticed. And I clenched my fists in muted fury.

  “My lord!” Varro again. “Where are you going?” The same idiot question again. Now I understood how Otavia must have felt.

  I whirled and pointed out the window with a steady hand. “To lead the boarding party. Myself.”

  CHAPTER 21

  DEMON IN BLACK

  THE LOCKER HINGED OPEN like some jeweled scarab, and the black face stared out at me. Perhaps you’ve seen it plastered on some poster or in some propaganda film? The face of the Devil of Meidua? Fashioned in the likeness of my own face it was, blank and staring, with mirror-black lenses for eyes beneath the cap of the helmet with its broad neck-flange. Those eyes stared at me from the suit locker, impassive and cold as those of my ancestors carved in black marble in the caverns of our necropolis.

  I had become one of them in the end.

  We had been soldiers before we were lords.

  But I had no time for philosophy, and sealed the suit. Sensing the closure, fibers within the underlayment tightened and hugged my body like a diver’s second skin, covering me from the neck down. The suit’s thermal regulators came online, and the clinging garment felt at once like no garment at all, became a part of me. One after another I stepped into the armored boots and felt them screw shut about my calves. I did the same with the cuisses on my upper legs, removing the items from foam-lined compartments in the chest before me. The tunic came next. I pulled it over my head, letting the garment fall almost to my knees. The shirt was sable as the rest, fringed with a labyrinth pattern in crimson thread. I fastened the belt with its strapped pteruges about my narrow waist and felt it cinch tight with the shield controls at my left hip, sword holster at my right.

  Fingers plied the locker controls, and at once the sculpted breastplate and helmet rose toward me, rotating on a gimbal, tracking hardpoints on my skinsuit. I raised my arms wide and stepped into the open breastplate, felt the magnets clamp onto the inner layer and screw on. Folding like a beetle’s black shell, like a Nipponese paper sculpture, the suit closed around me, titanium and ceramic segments folding, flexing as I moved. Even as it did so, the mask and helmet broke apart, retracting, neatly folding themselves into a wide collar about my face and neck. The pauldrons shifted into place automatically, obeying sub-intelligent programs in the suit’s datasphere matrix. I flexed my shoulders, listening to the whine of servos as the armor moved with me.

  Perfect.

  “What’s going on?”

  Valka stood in the door behind me.

  I didn’t stop my work, lingered only long enough to ensure the ornamental leather straps at my shoulders were in place. I shoved my left hand into the gauntlet the locker rotated to present to me and made a fist as the vambrace sealed into place. The terminal screen and controls winked on, red as death.

  “We’re being attacked,” I said. “It’s the Cielcin.”

  “I know,” Valka said, and only then did I remember that I’d broadcast to the entire ship. A red haze had settled on my mind and I felt I saw the world through a narrow tunnel, and the only way out was through.

  “I know, sorry.” I plugged my hand into the second gauntlet, felt it seal. “They destroyed the Androzani. I’m taking the fight to them.”

  Valka’s pale face went paler. “They destroyed . . . what?”

  “They got men aboard her, must have breached fuel containment.” As I spoke, I checked readouts on my left forearm. Suit power was nominal, air reservoirs and rebreathers were charged, water recycling was functioning normally, and the suit’s shield generators shone blue.

  Her nostrils flared. “Can’t you send one of the others? Crim or Pallino? One of the other chiliarchs?” She did not ask me to take her with me. Valka had been a soldier in another life, but she’d been a deck officer. There was no place for her in the trenches, in the hallways and warrens of a Cielcin worldship, blood wet on our knives. Soldier she may have been, once, but she was no fighter, unless it was by necessity.

  “I’m not going to sit idly here while my men fight and die,” I said, lifting the white cape from the wall hook where I had left it and wr
apping it around my shoulders. “Would you?”

  Valka’s expression softened. “You’re not idle. You were on the bridge.”

  “Yes,” I snapped, “being idle. Where’s my sword?” I had left it on the bed when I’d skinned out of my ordinary clothes. Or thought I had.

  “Pallino can lead the men just as well as you.”

  I stopped my frantic riffling through the mounded garments. “Pallino can’t communicate with the enemy. Damn it! Where is my—”

  The sword descended into my field of vision. Valka held it, offered it to me pommel first.

  I took it, receiving it as I’d received it from Sir Olorin at the start of my quest so long ago. “Thank you.”

  Her fingers floated just off my chest, where the embossed trident and pentacle I had taken for my sigil stood out against the black ceramic. “I don’t like you rushing off like this. You’re going to get yourself killed.” She pressed her fingers against my chest. I couldn’t feel their warmth, only their pressure against the armor.

  “No, I’m not,” I said, and forced a smile. “I can’t be killed, hadn’t you heard?”

  But Valka had been by that lakeside in the Gardens of Kharn Sagara. She knew better.

  There was no laughter in those golden eyes. “I do not like being left here idle, either. I don’t like you leaving.”

  Closing my fingers over hers, I said, “I have to. Someone does.” The ship jolted beneath us then. Something must have hit our shields. We stumbled apart, the contact between us breaking. It was enough to snap me back to my duties. My terminal chimed, and I tapped the indicator. “Marlowe.”

  “We’re about loaded, sir.” Pallino’s voice came over the speaker. Sir. He only ever called me that when there was work to do.

  It heightened my sense of unreality as I answered, “Copy that. I’m on my way.” Looking up I saw myself reflected in the mirror, armor so black it gleamed. I looked much as I had in my vision—was it a vision?—in the Howling Dark. A demon in black. The armor was not the same, but the resemblance was there . . . a shadow on my heart.