Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  I hadn’t received a call for so long that it took me a moment to identify the source of the sound. When it buzzed a second time, I pulled it out and activated the screen.

  The message was from headquarters, relayed via tight beam from a supply ship on the ragged fringes of the solar system. I read it three times, then shoved the pistol into the desk drawer and locked it.

  The chair thumped against the wall as I rose. I felt an urgent need to take a walk to the trading post at the far end of the airfield, where I knew I’d find the one person capable of understanding what the intelligence chiefs of the Conglomeration were asking me to do.

  FOUR

  SAL KONSTANZ

  The Trouble Dog showed me its telemetry log. George Walker’s vital signs had all tanked simultaneously, seconds after he’d been dragged into the sea.

  “I have footage,” the ship said.

  We were back on board now, and I was sitting in my command couch at the centre of the hemispherical bridge, surrounded by the soft blue glow of readouts and displays. Alva Clay had gone to the ship’s infirmary to secure the stretchers containing the injured and dead.

  One of the larger screens lit with a recorded image of the mostly submerged Hobo. I could see myself lying on the deck with my arms in the circular hole, in the process of hauling Clay from the water. Behind me, George Walker crouched beside one of the inflatable stretchers in his orange jumpsuit, his grey head bent towards the young man we’d just pulled from the flooded ship. His back was to the waves lapping at his heels, and he couldn’t see the questing, whip-thin tentacles feeling their way towards him, razor hooks glossy and wet in the last of the rusty sunlight.

  “Stop!” I didn’t want to see what happened next. Instead, I called for a real-time view of the crashed ship.

  The Hobo was a dark shape just beneath the surface. You could see the pattern of the waves change as they rolled across her and broke at the shallowest point, which was at her rear, just above the engines. She was completely submerged now, but she hadn’t fully sunk. She was still holding out.

  “There’s no chance he might be alive?”

  “None.”

  “His monitors. Maybe they got detached. Maybe—”

  “No.” The Trouble Dog sounded genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry.”

  I knuckled my eyes. I wanted to crawl into bed, pull the sleeping bag over my head and pretend this day had never happened.

  I had known George Walker for three years. In that time, he had been as much of a fixture of this ship as the continuous whirr of the air conditioning, or the reliably bad coffee in the mess. And now he was gone. He had died on my watch.

  The rules in these situations were very clear, and the captain always bore responsibility for the safety of his or her crew. Before we’d set foot on the Hobo, I should have ordered a deep scan of the surrounding water, and a full risk assessment of any species found. And then, when we were down there, I should have kept George in sight the whole time. It mattered little that the attack had been so swift that even the Trouble Dog had been unable to react in time to save him; when we got back to Camrose Station, there’d be an inquiry, and I’d be lucky to escape without a severe reprimand. In the worst case, if they judged the failure to conduct a full inventory of nearby marine life a contributing factor to his death, I might even lose my command.

  Right now, though, none of that seemed to matter. Walker was dead, and I felt the pain of his loss like an icicle lodged in my chest. The only bitter crumb of comfort to be had was that whatever had happened to him, the telemetry report indicated it had been quick.

  I glared at the picture of the Hobo. How the hell had it ended up in the sea in the first place? And how had it been allowed to flood? There were safeguards in place to prevent both airlock doors opening simultaneously. In order to flood the ship, those safeguards would have had to be overridden or destroyed.

  I tapped a fingernail on the screen, magnifying the image of the submerged vessel. “Could it have been sabotaged?”

  “Insufficient data.”

  I turned to a smaller side screen and pulled up a tactical view of the space surrounding the planet. “Were there any other ships in the system when the Hobo went down?”

  The main screen rippled and a face appeared. The Trouble Dog’s primary crew interface, or avatar, manifested as a simulated human visage of such average and symmetrical beauty it was almost impossible to tell if it had been designed to be either male or female. She had shaggy, shoulder-length black hair and dark eyes with just a hint of an epicanthic fold, and she wore a white shirt and a black tie.

  “I have no way to tell.”

  “No sign of anyone else while we were down there?”

  “None.” The Trouble Dog was being patient with me. If another ship had been present in this system, she would already have assessed it as a potential threat. The very fact she had not yet activated her defensive screens and countermeasures should have been enough to tell me that, so far, she had found nothing out of the ordinary.

  We had two survivors. If and when they felt able to talk, I would question them. Until then, my responsibility was to get the Trouble Dog back to Camrose Station. I activated the internal communications system. “Clay, are you ready to leave?”

  Her voice came back over my earbud. “All strapped in, Captain.”

  “Okay then, departure in one minute. Ship, set a countdown.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  We never usually bothered with the formalities, but I wanted to do this flight by the book, for George’s sake. I felt I owed him at least that much. I sat back and watched the timer on the main screen reduce itself towards zero.

  Twenty seconds in, the Trouble Dog paused the countdown.

  “I’m receiving a priority signal,” she said.

  I knew what that meant.

  “Another ship in trouble?”

  Three-dimensional representations of the stellar neighbourhood appeared on the main screens. A bright yellow circle flashed, indicating a small blue star a couple of dozen lights spinward of our current position.

  “The Geest van Amsterdam.” A peripheral screen lit with the schematics of a long, streamlined cylinder. “She’s under attack in the Gallery. She’s a medium-range passenger liner registered out of Glimmer Holme. Two hundred crew, four hundred passengers, three hundred permanent residents.”

  “Shit.”

  “And we’re the nearest vessel.”

  I sat back and huffed. “We don’t have room for more than three hundred.” And even then, we’d be packing them in like sardines in a can.

  “Nevertheless, we’re the closest by several days.”

  “Even taking into account our need to refuel and resupply?”

  “The second nearest RV is the Staccato Signal, and it’s currently tracking a missing cargo hauler on the edge of the Penguin Nebula.”

  “That’s at least a fortnight away.”

  “At least.”

  I sat up. “You say they’re under attack?” I knew the Gallery lay in disputed territory, on the bloody intersection of several political factions, both human and otherwise.

  The Trouble Dog’s avatar shrugged. “Assailants unknown. But their last signal seems to indicate the ship’s AI has shut itself down, leaving them defenceless.”

  I felt a prickle run up the nape of my neck. “Like with the Hobo?” Could the scout ship’s seemingly inexplicable ditching have been the result of a similar assault?

  “The coincidence is remarkable.”

  I looked at one of the screens still projecting a view of the Hobo’s slowly disappearing wreck, and the storm now mauling it. “How quickly can we get there?”

  “Assuming emergency resupply times at Camrose Station, seven days.”

  I made a face. “In seven days it’ll all be over. Can’t you get there any faster? I thought you used to be a warship?”

  Lightning danced overhead. Below, the waves were getting up.

  “We could r
educe it to five,” the Trouble Dog said, “if you’re willing to risk significant engine degradation.”

  “How significant?”

  “Twelve per cent chance of malfunction, seven per cent chance of total failure.”

  Although she spoke in neutral tones, I fancied I caught an edge of excitement behind her words. It seemed my professional crucifixion would have to wait.

  “Okay, let’s do it.”

  “Full speed for Camrose Station?”

  “Give it everything you’ve got.”

  * * *

  I settled deeper into my couch as the Trouble Dog rose through the hail and winds. Lightning crackled around us, skittering off the hull, reflecting back from the waves below. Rain blurred the external cameras.

  The chances were good that at least some of the passengers and crew of the Geest van Amsterdam had survived. Most ships were designed with failsafe pressure seals to close off damaged sections and trap as much air as possible in the remaining structure. Some larger vessels were even capable of fragmenting into smaller “lifeboat” segments. Occurrences of single micrometeorite strikes emptying an entire ship of its air were mostly confined to history books and entertainments. In reality, the possibility of such events had been taken into account across centuries of ship design and, even if a missile or a speck of interstellar detritus did manage to evade the anti-collision cannons carried by most modern craft, it would be highly unlikely to knock out more than handful of internal compartments. Space travel would always be a dangerous undertaking but very few ships were now lost with all hands.

  Hanging over the wild ocean, the Trouble Dog raised her pointed snout to the evening sky. Sensor arrays retracted into the hull. Power built in the engines. All the readouts tripped into the red, and the old warship threw herself at the firmament.

  FIVE

  TROUBLE DOG

  When we were far enough from the planet’s gravity well, I began to oscillate, skimming the membrane of the universe like a pebble flicked across the clear waters of a tropical bay. I could feel the faint touch of raw starlight on my hull, and hear the tortured howls of the solar wind. I heard the faint overspill of comms chatter from other ships in nearby systems, the echoes of their signals cast across the intervening light years by the peculiar physics of higher-space. Some of these ships were from the Human Generality, some from the other races of the Multiplicity. My hull rippled in response to each of those distant data bursts as—now free from the drag of the atmosphere—my sensor suites stretched outwards to glean more intelligence, and long-disabled weapons systems swung into place, impotently tracking potential threats.

  I was designed to annihilate. Before I was decommissioned, I carried an arsenal with the potential to ruin worlds and incinerate hostile armadas. When I later grew a conscience and became a ship of the House of Reclamation, I was permitted to retain a range of defensive weaponry—ECM missile screens, chaff launchers, point-defence cannons—but the inability to kill, to inflict terrible and decisive damage, itched like a severed limb. My combat reflexes were hardwired. They couldn’t have been removed without fundamentally altering what or who I was—and I had not been about to agree to that. Instead, I found a way to put my skill set to good use. Flying search and rescue for the House of Reclamation, I needed to be fast, sharp and fearless. I needed every scrap of guile and tactical experience I had gleaned in the navy. To effectively perform my duties, I had to be willing to enter dangerous environments and situations that had already wrecked at least one other ship; and, if that ship and its crew had been lost to piracy or enemy action, I had to be prepared to defend myself. For these reasons, decommissioned military vessels like me were particularly suited to service in the House of Reclamation. Instead of belonging to individual governments or corporations, we now served the whole of the Human Generality, and our duties brought us challenge, risk and the occasional chance to engage with hostile craft—although without being able to bring to bear the bite we could once have inflicted.

  As a heavy cruiser, I had been an instrument of hard diplomacy and destruction; in the House of Reclamation, with my talents intact but my usefulness as a killing machine at an end, I had become instead a means to save lives.

  It was almost enough.

  * * *

  As far as I could tell, human beings were only really capable of thinking about two or three different things at once, half a dozen at most. My attention swathed the entire structure of the ship, encompassing and supervising the functionality of power circuits, plasma chambers, navigation systems, backup generators, cryogenic fuel containment systems, long- and short-range sensor packages, and the other million or so components essential to my continued operation. I also monitored the human quarters. I watched my inhabitants grieve for their lost comrade and searched my own feelings for a corresponding reaction. However, I struggled to locate anything more acute than passing regret. George Walker had served as a member of my crew for many years, but I wasn’t built to mourn. I could be concerned about the welfare of my inhabitants, but not crippled by their passing. I had lost personnel before. Their ghosts walked the empty corridors of my barrack decks. During active service, I had been home to three hundred and seven men and women of the Conglomeration Fleet. Now, with the loss of the medic, my remaining complement (not counting the two survivors from the Hobo) consisted of Captain Sally Konstanz, Rescue Specialist Alva Clay, and the engineer, Nod. Three people rattling around a ship designed to hold a hundred times that number.

  Konstanz and Clay were fairly ordinary humans, although they hailed from different cultures within the Generality, and Clay still carried a number of augmentations left over from her days as a marine. Nod, on the other hand, was a blue-skinned hermaphroditic Druff from the planet Lestipidese.

  Short, solitary, cantankerous and apolitical, the Druff possessed a natural aptitude for mechanical and electrical engineering that placed them in high demand across the Multiplicity, and, in the last two hundred years, few ships—human or otherwise—had flown without numbering at least one member of the species among their crew.

  A tingle in my ventral and dorsal antennae informed me that, during the last oscillation, fully three-quarters of my mass had dipped into the howling void of higher-space. The time had come to make the full transition. Captain Konstanz was at her station on the bridge, so I signalled my readiness and she assented to the immersion.

  The jump alarm echoed through the rooms and corridors of the crew’s accommodations. In the infirmary, Alva Clay checked the survivors were securely strapped to their beds, and then fastened herself into the nearest chair. In the cramped, ill-lit and complicated depths of the engineering decks, Nod curled into a makeshift nest of plastic tubing and copper wire.

  They all knew this would be rough.

  I could jump further and run faster than most civilian vessels, but even I was going to struggle with the effort required to reach Camrose Station within the time frame demanded. I wouldn’t have time to finesse the transition between normal space and the hypervoid. Instead of a graceful leap, I would have to crash through like a breaching whale.

  “Five seconds,” I announced over the internal speakers. The captain clung to the arms of her chair. Her knuckles paled.

  “Four.”

  Alva Clay kissed the ceramic pendant that hung around her neck, and muttered a prayer in the language of her ancestors. Down below, the Druff whimpered in its nest.

  “Three.”

  For a second, I pulled back from the shimmering boundary between realities and gathered my energies like a fish preparing to leap into sunlight.

  “Two.”

  Non-essential systems and peripheral apps slowed as I redirected power to the jump engines.

  “One.”

  SIX

  SAL KONSTANZ

  The ship reared and bucked as she pierced the membrane between our universe and the whistling emptiness of higher-space. The deck surged and my stomach went weightless. In order to jump into the hi
gher dimensions, the Trouble Dog’s engines had to drive a wormhole through the fabric of space and time. The process involved some stupefying physics that I didn’t pretend to understand. All I knew—all I needed to know—was that hurrying exposed the ship and its crew to unpredictable gravitational effects, making a wormhole’s maw a dangerous place for all concerned.

  This time, we were lucky. I felt invisible fingers claw at my clothes and cheeks. The ship shuddered like a gut-shot dog. My vision blurred like the view through a rainy window. Then, with a final lurch, everything crashed back into place. The views on the external screens changed from star-scattered black to formless grey, and we were through. We were ensconced in higher-space and being swept back to the Camrose System like a paper plane riding the outer edges of an oncoming cyclone.

  * * *

  Two days later, we dropped back into the universe a few thousand kilometres from our destination. By that point, both the young men we’d pulled from the wreck of the crashed scout ship had died—one from internal haemorrhaging and the other from some sort of infection picked up from being in the water with open wounds. With George gone, we had neither the expertise nor the equipment to save them.

  “The whole fucking thing was a waste,” Alva snapped. I was on my way to my cabin, bone tired after hunching over navigation displays for the best part of a day and a half; she was on her way back from the gym, with a white towel hooked across her shoulder and a half-empty bottle of water dangling from her fingers. It was the first time we’d seen each other in thirty-six hours, and the longest conversation we’d had during the entire flight. “We’re never going to know why they crashed.”

  “They were out there a long time.” I shrugged. “Maybe it was mechanical failure. Maybe they got sloppy.”

  Alva’s eyes narrowed. “You were pretty sloppy yourself.”

  I felt a tightening knot of resentment. “Do you think you could have done better?”

  “Maybe.”

  My cheeks burned. “You haven’t commanded a ship in your life.”