Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  With regret, I abandoned my attempt to scale the stairs, and began instead to ease myself downwards, sliding from step to step. The lowest deck held an infirmary, which would hold the painkillers and anti-shock treatments I’d need to get through the next few hours. After that, I suspected it would be every citizen for him or her self. If Adam were still alive, he would have to wait. In my own brusque way, I had loved him, but I had never loved him enough to override my innate pragmatism. Ultimately, his death meant less to me than my own.

  Already, I had started to think about him in the past tense.

  TWELVE

  SAL KONSTANZ

  I found Nod in a crawlspace between two engine blocks, using an access hatch to install a replacement component in one of the secondary power buses.

  Although it was late, Nod didn’t mind me being there. I could have curled up in its nest and it wouldn’t have challenged me. Although famed for their grumpiness, the Druff possessed little in the way of territorial jealousy. As long as I didn’t get in the way of its work, it would quite happily tolerate my presence.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  Nod didn’t look up with any of his faces. “Much sadness.”

  “You’re sad?”

  In the dim light of the engine room, the dark blue scales on its back seemed to glint like oil on water. “Not me, ship. Hound of Difficulty sad.”

  Nod backed out of the narrow gap, supporting its weight on all six of its twelve-fingered hands. The Druff didn’t stand in the same way that humans did. All their limbs functioned as both arms and legs, and each “hand” contained sense organs that allowed it to double as a face. They’d use two, three or four of these faces to brace against a wall or floor while they used the remainder to work on the task at hand, and they were equally happy upside down as they were upright. To the squeamish, it made them look like giant, scaly blue spiders, but it also gave them a hell of an advantage as starship engineers, being able to secure themselves in free fall or under thrust, and being able to bring to bear two, three or four hands, each sporting a dozen slender and opposable digits, and the senses of sight, smell and taste to supplement that of touch. This sensitivity and dexterity were why the Druff were employed to tend the power plants and jump engines of our space-going vessels—ours, and those of every other spacefaring race we knew of.

  “What do you mean, the ship’s sad?”

  Nod shrugged—a non-verbal signal learned from humans, but rendered complicated due to the involvement of at least four of its shoulders. “Ship sad.”

  “What’s it got to be sad about?”

  “All things.”

  “George?”

  “George and all things.” Nod pulled a screwdriver from its tool belt and began tightening the fastenings on a hatch in the floor.

  I looked around the metal chamber, feeling that I stood in the heart of a wounded beast. How could a warship feel sad? It was supposed to be immune to grief and post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “And how about you?”

  The faces closest to me opened and closed like a flower—the Druff equivalent of a surprised blink. “Sad and not sad.”

  “How so?”

  Nod looked at me quizzically, the way it did when I failed to grasp an arcane technical detail in one of its reports. “George gone and not gone. Nothing ever lost.”

  I looked at Nod questioningly. If it could have sighed, I got the impression it would have done.

  “We serve.” The words were recited as if by rote. “Leave World Tree and serve. When we return, we find mate. We build nest for offspring, and tend World Tree. Serve Tree, then die. Serve ship, then serve Tree. Then die, and become dirt. And become one with Tree. George now one with Tree. Nothing ever lost, as long as we serve World Tree.”

  * * *

  I left Nod to its ceaseless labours and returned to my own cabin. The time, according to the clocks back on Camrose Station, was around four in the morning.

  I opened my cabin door and stepped inside, discarding my jacket over the back of the room’s solitary chair. The metal desk before it held a pile of drawings I’d done—pieces of paper covered in stark, uninhabited charcoal landscapes. Some were places I’d seen, others images from dreams or nightmares.

  I ran a hot shower and opened a bottle of gin. Nothing warded off loneliness like alcohol and steam.

  Half an hour later, I was on my bunk with a glass in my hand and a towel wrapped around my midsection. My skin glowed from the heat of the shower. I felt clean and fresh and more than a little tipsy.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Preston.”

  I sat up, pulling the towel up to my throat. “What do you want?”

  “Can I come in?”

  I looked around at the clothes strewn across the cabin floor, the drawings on the desk, the pictures of men taped to the bulkhead above my headboard.

  “No.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Take a pill.”

  “I can’t.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m scared.”

  I got up and found a robe. “Scared of taking a pill?” I knotted the robe’s belt around my waist and kicked some of the worst items of forgotten underwear beneath the bunk. I opened the door and he flinched back.

  “No, that’s not it.” He rubbed his throat with his fingertips, plainly nervous. “I can’t sleep by myself.”

  He was a child in the body of an adult—but then, aren’t all men?

  “Well, you can’t sleep in here.”

  “I’m not asking to, it’s just…” He tailed off, unable to articulate what he really wanted, which I assumed was simply some company.

  I set my jaw and raised my chin. I was his captain, not his babysitter.

  “You need to return to your room,” I said.

  “But—”

  “I only need to hear two words from you, Officer Menderes.”

  Preston swallowed and looked at his feet. His ears were burning a shade that might have been humiliation. “Yes, Captain.”

  “Good.” I put my hand on the door, ready to close it. “Now get back to your cabin before I have you up on a charge.”

  He dithered. “Captain, I hope—”

  “NOW, SOLDIER!”

  I slammed the door and stalked back to my bunk. I knew sleep would be impossible. Even before he’d knocked on my door, I’d been on edge due to the impending rescue and my probable—perhaps inevitable—dismissal from the service. I had to restrain myself from pacing the floor, from rubbing nervous palms against each other.

  “Ship?”

  “Yes, Captain?” The Trouble Dog’s avatar appeared on my wall screen. Her face remained the same, but now she appeared to be wearing a black silk kimono.

  “Was I too hard on him?”

  “I’m not sure I’m qualified to judge.”

  “You must have had to deal with inexperienced crewmembers, surely?”

  “That depends on your definition.” The Trouble Dog lowered her voice. “There was one time during the infiltration of the Messianic Cluster, when I had to deploy six short-range nukes just to scare away a pair of—”

  “No, that’s not quite what I meant. I meant deal with on a human level.”

  For three full seconds, the ship seemed to consider the question. When she answered, her voice came out flat and devoid of expression. “I am not human.”

  “But you do contain human components, don’t you?”

  This time, the pause felt longer. “You are quite aware,” the Trouble Dog said, frowning, “that sections of my central nervous system were extrapolated from harvested stem cells.”

  “I am.”

  “Then what is your point, Captain?”

  I shook my head. I’d forgotten where I was going with this. Instead of answering, I got up and paced to the bathroom.

  I had been at college when my parents were killed. They were on board the survey vessel Green Fuse when it explod
ed while charting the accretion disk of a black hole. By the time a follow-up mission detected their remains, tumbling slowly through the disc with the rest of the debris, dust abrasion had stripped their bodies down to pockmarked skeletons. I had been nineteen years old. When the war came a year later, I elected to serve on a medical frigate.

  Now, ten years and half a galaxy later, I leant on the sink and glared into the merciless bright lights around the foggy bathroom mirror, noting the lines around my eyes, the scattering of premature white hairs at my temples.

  “It’s possible,” I told the ship, “that I’m feeling lonely.”

  THIRTEEN

  TROUBLE DOG

  It was possible she was feeling lonely?

  What did she know about being lonely? I had flown away from everything I held dear, resigned my commission and dedicated my life to the service of humanity. I was, according to any objective test you might want to run, almost as human as Captain Sally Konstanz. My implants may have been better, my mental acuity faster and more fluid, my weaponry a billion times more potent—but I remained essentially a person. My original stem cells had been harvested from a dying soldier on a battlefield so far from here that the sunlight that had warmed her face wouldn’t reach this part of space for another twenty years. They’d also blessed me with a scattering of canine genes designed to promote tenaciousness and the desire to savage anyone foolish enough to threaten my pack.

  I was alive. My shell may have been the bonded carbon exoskeleton of a killing machine, and the organs that sustained me naught but plastic mechanisms, but—deep in the core of my “brain”, wrapped in layers of silicon and light—there lay a few kilograms of greasy, organic neurons. I wasn’t a machine; I was a creature, part-human and part-animal. I could trace the lineage of my DNA spirals back to the amniotic swamps from which all life on Earth arose. I was kin to the pterosaurs, hawks and wolves of antiquity. Many of my genes were identical to those carried by my crew; the thoughts crackling through my distributed cyborg consciousness were no less valid than those echoing within their fragile, calcium eggshell skulls.

  I loved them.

  I pitied them.

  I could never be one of them.

  I had been built to accept casualties among my human charges, to easily adapt to changes in the command structure. Forming attachments was not meant to be one of my primary skills; it was something that had developed slowly over time. An unanticipated side effect of my heritage.

  Now, I was human in every respect that really mattered.

  I was a wolf.

  I was a fourteen-year-old girl in the guise of a missile.

  FOURTEEN

  NOD

  Fixed machines then slept.

  Humans talked.

  Ship talked.

  I listened, and fixed.

  Then slept.

  Dreamed of nest high in branches of World Tree, and of intricate fibres beneath bark, each with a specific function, each susceptible to most delicate manipulation.

  Dreamed of maintaining World Tree. Knew Tree used my people as its hands. Used us to keep it healthy, keep it functioning. Rejoiced in complexity of task. Rejoiced in gentle caress of photons that had spent a million years working free of home sun. Felt them fall like rain across home tree’s leaves.

  Dreamed of Pelapatarn. Remembered hearing agony of dying world through walls of starship. Felt its pain. Mourned for its trees, so much like own World Tree. Mourned for loss of tree sprites and undergrowth a million years deep. Mourned for humans and their stupidity.

  Then dreamed of starship.

  Hound of Difficulty.

  Wires and pipes behind its walls. Gurgle of fake digestion, pump of fake blood. Its systems like fibres beneath bark, dancing to my fingertips.

  Fixed ship then slept in nest.

  Hum of machinery like buzz and slap of twigs and branches. Cardboard and bubble wrap as comfortable as leaves and moss.

  Did work then slept, most content.

  In a hundred, thousand years, the jungles might grow again. The tree sprites might return. All might be as it once was.

  Nothing stays damaged for long.

  Everything fixable.

  Except people.

  FIFTEEN

  SAL KONSTANZ

  A little before dawn, Preston knocked on my cabin door again. Despite my better judgment, I opened it. He seemed flustered and angry.

  “I’m sorry I embarrassed myself, Captain.”

  I held on to the edge of the door, unwilling to invite him over the threshold, and too tired for his self-justification.

  “Listen, it’s late…”

  Preston ran a finger around the collar of his orange jumpsuit. “I never wanted to join the House of Reclamation,” he said. “But I guess that’s what happens when you’re the family embarrassment, when you can’t get through your first night at the Academy without crying in your sleep and wetting the bed.” He bunched his fists and looked away, down the silent corridor.

  “My father’s a general in the Conglomeration Fleet,” he said quietly. “He fought in the Archipelago War.”

  I scraped my front teeth against my lower lip. During the war, I had served with the Outward Faction. The Conglomeration despised us because they thought we cared nothing for the traditions of Old Earth. They thought we were reckless and naïve in our openness to alien ideas and influence, and the way we embraced new philosophies, new arts and new gods. We believed in universal healthcare and common ownership of resources and infrastructure, while they worshipped the free market and the individual accumulation of wealth and power for its own sake.

  The war had been as brutal as it had been pointless, stuttering to a stalemate following atrocities on both sides.

  “He was?” I managed to keep my tone neutral. In theory, we were no longer enemies. Such concerns were in my past, left at the gate when boarding my first Reclamation Vessel. Clay and I had both been Outwarders, and the Trouble Dog had been a Conglomeration warship. We were all outcasts and exiles. Like every other member of the House of Reclamation, we had renounced our homes and nationalities, and would live the rest of our lives without history or state, doing our duties shoulder-to-shoulder with our former adversaries.

  “When my father realised I’d lost the respect of my fellow cadets, that they were bullying me and making me a laughing stock, he withdrew me from the Academy and enrolled me in the House of Reclamation.”

  “What about your tour on the Happy Wanderer?”

  “It never happened.” Preston looked embarrassed. “My father falsified the data.”

  “So you’ve no experience?”

  “Only what I learned at the Academy.”

  “And how long were you there?”

  His gaze fell to the deck. “Six months.”

  I felt a sudden, overwhelming need to fall onto my bunk and bury my face in the pillow.

  “Go to bed, Preston.”

  “But—”

  I closed the door on his wide eyes and open mouth.

  * * *

  After he had gone, I waited until I heard his cabin door close. Then, having pocketed the gin bottle, I slipped out into the corridor and made my way into the main body of the ship, to the hangar near her stern.

  During the ship’s military service, the hangar had housed two-dozen single-pilot fighters—small, agile craft designed to strike at enemy vessels and ground targets, and intercept and destroy incoming ordnance. Now, all the cavernous space contained was a pair of well-used shuttlecraft, their heat shields scorched from atmospheric entries on a score of worlds, their faded black and white tiles and blade-like wings giving them the appearance of ageing killer whales. We used them for transferring equipment and personnel to and from planetary surfaces, sparing the Trouble Dog the effort of lowering her vast mass all the way to the ground.

  At the back of the room, behind the shuttle farthest from the door and sheltered behind a stack of crates and other equipment, I had left an inflatable covered life raf
t wedged into a corner of the deck. Its orange distress beacon threw eerie moving shadows across the walls. Bending low, I pulled back the canvas flap and stepped into its darkened interior. The air inside smelled musty and rubbery, like the interior of a seldom-used tent, and contained a pile of old survival blankets that I had left heaped in the middle of its floor. Kicking off my boots, I lay down and pulled them over me.

  I wasn’t angry or upset, merely depressed, having been gripped during Preston’s monologue by the sudden, melancholy realisation that this could be my final flight, on this or any other ship.

  Disgraced captains were pariahs. I would never serve on another Reclamation Vessel. If I was lucky, I might find a job in administration. Perhaps I’d end up as a quartermaster on a distant supply depot—maybe an asteroid or small moon—where I’d at least be able to enjoy the relative solitude. The only other alternative would be to retire completely. In which case, these passing minutes might number among the last I would ever spend in space. I should have been savouring them, yet felt no inclination to do more than burrow into the comfort of those dusty-smelling blankets and listen to the creak and flex of the hull, the clang and gurgle of pipes.

  “Ship?” I spoke into the darkness.

  “Yes, Captain?” There were no screens down here on which she could project her image; instead, her voice came from a speaker somewhere in the hangar beyond the life raft’s waterproof fabric walls.

  “Do you miss him?”