Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  I thought back to last night. We had been sipping red wine at one of the balcony restaurants overlooking the ’dam’s central airshaft. A string quartet played. Vines and creepers dangled from higher balconies, their pink and white blossoms scenting the air. Butterflies flapped and swayed. Glasses clinked and, for a delicious interval, basking in Adam’s adoration, I had managed to forget my past. The weight of my chains had loosened and, for the briefest of moments, I’d been allowed to enjoy the simple anticipatory pleasures of seduction.

  How far away that now seemed.

  All that now remained were the sounds of our footsteps in this barren place.

  * * *

  “You’ve changed,” Adam said. We had paused for a moment, at another fork. He had his hands on his knees. With my good hand supporting my wrist, I had been gently bending and straightening the elbow of my battered arm, trying to gauge the extent of the injury. So far, I was certain only that the bones remained intact.

  Thankfully, the painkillers were still working. “How so?”

  “Since I found you with that dead woman. You’ve been… different.”

  For a student and practitioner of poetry, he seemed to be having inordinate difficulty expressing his thoughts. Nevertheless, I felt a familiar unease at his concern—the fear an actor might feel at having inadvertently slipped out of character.

  “We’re both in shock,” I said.

  He put a hand to the small of his back and stood upright. “No, that’s not it. Not it at all.”

  My mind scrabbled back over the course of our flight from danger. Had I done or said anything that might have led him to suspect my true identity? If he had even the slightest inkling…

  My fists clenched.

  “Then, what?” I kept my tone deliberately neutral, wondering if I truly had it in me to kill him here in cold blood, with my one good arm.

  “I’m in shock,” he said, “but you’re not. Not really. Ever since I found you, right from the moment you took that dead woman’s shoes, you’ve been calm and methodical. It’s like you know what to do, like you’ve been in situations like this before.”

  “I’m just trying to get us out of here alive.”

  He shook his head. “It’s more than that. I didn’t see it last night, but now… It’s in the way you hold yourself and the way you speak. It’s like you’re a… a… soldier.”

  I turned my head to look back the way we’d come. There were still no signs of pursuit, but I needed a moment to quell the surge of adrenalin triggered by his suspicion.

  “You’re too perceptive for your own good.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Despite the sick, anxious feeling in my chest, fatigue and discomfort weighed on my shoulders like a heavy cloak. Slowly, I turned to face him. His eyes were wide and anxious. His forehead had been grazed, and dark whorls of grime smeared his cheeks where he’d tried to wipe away tears.

  I let out a ragged sigh. “It means you’re right. I’m not who you think I am, and I never have been; and once there was a time I’d have killed you to preserve that secret.”

  He started to back away. I raised my palms in a placatory gesture. “Don’t worry. These old hands have enough blood on them already. I don’t need any more.”

  Adam reached the canyon wall and stopped, fingertips splayed against the smooth stone at his back.

  “Who are you?” His eyes narrowed. “I mean, who are you really?”

  I held his gaze for a moment, and then shrugged and looked up at the pinpoint diamond stars.

  Ah, to hell with it, I thought. We couldn’t evade our pursuers forever. This time tomorrow, the likelihood was we’d both be in puddles of our own blood. And if I had to die, I wanted to unburden myself first. I wanted Adam to understand who I was, and why he also had to die.

  My mouth was dry. Even through the insulated soles of the suit and the thickness of the dead girl’s shoes, my feet were so cold I worried I might lose a toe.

  “I am Annelida Deal.” My voice faltered. I had not spoken my own name aloud in years. “Captain Annelida Deal, formerly of the Conglomeration Fleet.”

  His mouth gaped open and his voice quailed. “The Butcher of Pelapatarn?”

  He couldn’t have looked more horrified if I’d admitted to being the Devil himself, and, for a moment, I regretted telling him the truth. I exhaled, my breath a dispersing cloud in the frigid shadow of the canyon wall. All those years of running and hiding, all that cosmetic surgery, and here I was: standing in a hole with a teenager, admitting my sins to the uncaring sky.

  “Yes,” I said, resigned now to a full admission. “I ordered the jungle torched.” I kept my face raised to the stars. “I killed a world.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SAL KONSTANZ

  Alva Clay frowned. “Can we trust them?”

  “Childe and Petrushka?” I shrugged. “They just helped us out in a firefight.”

  “One they at least partially caused.”

  We were back on the Trouble Dog’s bridge, having left our new passengers in the infirmary. I was sitting in the command couch and Clay was leaning against one of the consoles, a booted foot resting on the arm of my chair as she cleaned and reloaded her gun. She wore a red bandana and a number of pendants and charms around her neck, and a standard-issue olive-green tank top that showed off the tattoos and scars on her sinewy arms. Each commemorated a different mission or posting. My least favourite was the one that honoured the Battle of Pelapatarn. It showed a blackened, tree-covered globe surrounded by a halo of hungry sulphur-yellow flame.

  Grunts came from beneath the main pilot’s console, where Nod was rummaging through bundles of optical cables, trying to trace a faulty circuit breaker.

  “They’re both trained medics,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And we’re going to be picking up casualties at the crash site. Without these two, all we’ve got is Preston.” I lowered my voice. “And personally, I wouldn’t trust him with anything more complicated than handing out aspirin.”

  While I had been prepping the ship for interstellar flight, I had allowed Preston to cut away the sleeve of my jumpsuit and bandage the wound gouged by the shotgun pellet. He’d done a passable job, but his hands had shaken throughout the procedure and his temples had been wet with sweat.

  The good news was that, although the lesion had been deep and would leave me with a finger-thick scar, I’d only lost skin and meat; the muscles were almost entirely unaffected and, although my arm hurt, I could still use it.

  At the mention of Preston’s name, Clay made a face and looked away. “He’s useless.”

  “It’s worse than that,” I told her. “His daddy’s some bigwig general, and pulled strings to get his son into the House. The brat didn’t even finish his first year at the Academy.”

  Clay’s head whipped around. “You are shitting me.”

  I held up my palms, showing her that I was concealing nothing. “Straight up. Without Childe and Petrushka, we’re flying without a qualified medic.”

  “Damn.” Clay stretched the word out to two syllables. “Well, I guess that puts a new slant on things.”

  Something sparked beneath the console. Nod growled. One of its faces came back and pulled a wrench from its tool belt, and proceeded to bludgeon whatever had caused the short circuit. I raised my voice over the sound of its hammering.

  “Preston admitted it to my face, which puts me in a tricky position.” I drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair. “If I know he’s unqualified and anything goes wrong, I’m culpable.”

  “So, instead of turning back to get a new medic…”

  “We use these two.”

  Clay scratched her eyebrow. “I have concerns.”

  She always did—but this time, I knew what she meant. Our guests were professional liars and maybe even professional killers. They had served on opposite sides of the most recent schism to tear a hole in the peace and accord of the Generality. They might think they were
working together right now, but what would happen when one gained a political or strategic advantage over the other?

  “For now, they’re the best we’ve got,” I said, dismissing the thought. “If we want to reach that wreck within a realistic timeframe, we don’t have a lot of choice. But we can kick up hell when we get back to Camrose.”

  Clay drew back, her auburn eyes appraising me with barely camouflaged disdain. “Okay,” she finally conceded, “they can stay. But I’m not happy about it.”

  I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. “I didn’t think for a moment you would be. But I’m the captain here, and it’s my decision.”

  Clay flicked her gaze to the ceiling. “What about the Trouble Dog? What’s she got to say?”

  I tapped the comms button on my console. “Ship, are you listening?”

  “Of course.”

  The ship’s avatar appeared on the wall screen. She wore a charcoal-grey military tunic without insignia.

  “Do you have an opinion on our new passengers?”

  “Insufficient data.”

  “You mean you have insufficient data to form an opinion?”

  “No.” The Trouble Dog looked down her nose at me. “I mean I have, as yet, insufficient data to justify ejecting them into the vacuum.”

  Her virtual features were based, I knew, on the facial appearance of the dead woman whose harvested stem cells had been used to culture the Trouble Dog’s organic brain. In the past, I had served on other ships with other faces and genders, but none that had kept their avatar’s appearance so slavishly close to its original template.

  Unbidden, I remembered the day I first encountered the Trouble Dog. It had been just over three years ago, in the aftermath of the Archipelago War. I hadn’t commanded a ship since the final battle at Pelapatarn, and the Trouble Dog hadn’t flown with a captain since resigning her position in the Conglomeration Fleet. So, at first, we were naturally a bit wary of each other.

  “You should be conscious,” she had said that day, her virtual chin held high and proud, “that I will not be party to another massacre.”

  Surprised by the statement, I asked, “And what do you consider a massacre?”

  I knew there would be times during the next few years when we would have to defend ourselves, and those we were rescuing, from pirates and other unfriendly forces.

  “I will not fire on unarmed civilians.”

  “But you would engage armed personnel?”

  “If the situation called for it.”

  “Without qualms?”

  On the screen, her lips had twisted in a wry smile. “I have been designed to carry out my duties without doubt or reservation.”

  “And yet you will not fire on civilian targets?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you don’t see a contradiction there?”

  Her face grew solemn. “I was built for war, Captain, not for butchery.”

  I tried not to think about the final days of the Archipelago conflict, and the atrocities I’d witnessed.

  “I have a feeling,” I said, lowering myself into the command couch for the first time, “that you and I are going to get along just fine.”

  Now, three years after that first meeting, I stretched back in the same chair and looked out at the town of Northfield. We were still wedged in the main thoroughfare, and I could see the hunched figure of Mulch, his weight resting painfully on the rail at the front of the saloon, the gun still in his hand. Most of the rest of the inhabitants had turned out behind him. They stood in the street or on their porches, their angry, novelty-starved faces like flowers seeking nourishment from the sun. Sad to say, but this far off the beaten track, on a planet most people avoided because of the prolonged and vicious civil war on its southern continent, our visit had probably been the most interesting thing to happen here in months.

  “Okay,” I said. Nod had stopped battering beneath the main console, and was now tidying away its tools and muttering to itself. “Let’s give them a show.”

  * * *

  Riding the upward thrust of her AG units, the Trouble Dog rose into the evening sky. She went up, as my dad would have said, like prices at Christmas. Then, at five hundred metres, she paused, giving me a view of the entire settlement, right out to the end of the main street, where the houses simply petered out into the prairie lands. With deliberate slowness, she tipped back onto her stern, and pointed her tapering nose at the zenith.

  “Why are they travelling together?” Alva Clay asked, still talking about our two new passengers.

  “They both want to see the wreck.”

  “Yeah, but one’s Conglom’ and the other’s an Outwarder. And it was an Outward liner that went down. What happens if Childe finds out Petrushka’s side sabotaged it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Her face grew conspiratorial. “Do you think they’re doing it?”

  “What?”

  “Having sex.” Clay grinned. “It would explain why they’re together.”

  Via the secondary screens on the bridge, I watched the town continue to dwindle away beneath us, shrinking until its lights were distant embers in the gathering twilight.

  On the main screen, the Trouble Dog spoke. “Nineteen kilometres,” she said.

  We were just high enough to engage our primary drives without causing damage to the buildings on the ground.

  I smiled.

  Look out, Mr Mulch.

  On my order, the main fusion motors cut in. Although the AG field protected us from most of the effects of the thrust, I fancied I felt the ship flex. A split second later, the view below flared white, the cameras washed out by the glare reflected back from the rock and snow. To those on the ground, we would be roaring like an angry new star in the firmament, bright enough to sear unwary retinae, hot enough to burn unprotected skin.

  With luck, the town of Northfield would long remember the lesson it had learned this day: that if you wanted to live, you refrained from fucking with ships from the House of Reclamation, and especially from fucking with Carnivore-class heavy cruisers.

  To be honest, the townspeople were lucky to have escaped with the relatively small number of casualties they had sustained. If Mulch or his cronies had killed me, I had no doubt the Trouble Dog would have killed those responsible. The ship might be almost incapable of mourning individual crewmembers, but she had the loyalty of an Alsatian, and I was certain that if things had gone differently, she would therefore have done her best to avenge my death.

  And there was a certain comfort in that.

  * * *

  Once clear of the atmosphere, the Trouble Dog began to oscillate like a flying fish skipping between waves. With each bounce, her hull sank further through the membrane separating our universe from the whistling hurricane of the hyperspatial realms. And as she sank, she began to pick up transmissions echoing across the intervening light years like voices carried on the wind. Some of these broadcasts were incomplete, corrupt fragments of ancient message shells; some were idle chatter or routine communications between ships and stations; but one stood out sharply against the background noise. It was addressed to the Dog herself, but had been sent anonymously. All the usual header data had been stripped from the signal, leaving only its point of origin—which appeared to have been on the fringes of our target system—and the stark warning comprising the body of its message: Stay away.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TROUBLE DOG

  Later, when the lights in the human quarters had been dimmed, the rest of the crew and passengers were settled and the captain had retreated to the inflatable life raft in the hold, she asked me to tell her a story.

  “Tell me about my great-great-grandmother,” she said. “Tell me about Sofia Nikitas.”

  She knew I had the data in my files. It was a story known to every member of the House of Reclamation, and one I had told her many times before. It was our origin story, our creation myth. As members of the House, it was an integral chapter in our shared his
tory, and it went like this:

  * * *

  Sofia Nikitas was born on the Moon. Her mother was English, her father Greek. She grew up playing in the dormitories and agricultural domes of a base constructed beneath the regolith of the Sea of Tranquility. In early adolescence, she began taking her turn tilling the soil and tending the sewage-recycling plant. Supply packages from Earth were rare and infrequent. The home planet had its own share of troubles, and little to spare for its outposts. What the base lacked, it had to acquire through trade with the other settlements and stations scattered across the lunar surface. Life was hard, but it was possible—at least in the short term.

  However, as Sofia completed her first decade and a half of existence, it became apparent to the inhabitants of her home that the human presence on the Moon was doomed. The smaller science stations began to founder as they ran out of the materials necessary to sustain life. When an essential piece of equipment broke and a replacement could be neither obtained nor printed, the inhabitants had little choice but to move elsewhere. And so refugees from failed outposts began to arrive in leaky rovers, having driven hundreds of miles across the unforgiving terrain, their presence putting additional strain on food production and air recycling systems already operating well beyond any margin of safety—systems that simply hadn’t been designed to be indefinitely self-sustaining. People slept in corridors. Water was rationed. Nobody had enough to eat.

  On Sofia’s fifteenth birthday, her mother wept openly, afraid her daughter wouldn’t live to see her sixteenth.

  But then, when things were at their lowest ebb, the Multiplicity came calling.

  For a century and a half, humanity had been carelessly leaking radio and television signals into the cosmos. At the height of human civilisation, the planet blazed across the radio frequencies like a miniature sun. And at the bitter end of the doomed twenty-first century, a trading vessel from the Goblet Cluster clipped the edge of this emissions shell and decided to investigate.