Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  I rubbed my side where Konstanz’s fingertips had jabbed into the wound, rupturing the sutures. “I said I was sorry for that.”

  “And she forgave you.” Clay hooked the pistol to her belt. “But then, I guess she’s a better person than I am. Me, I like to harbour a grudge for a good long time.” She turned to Preston. “You,” she said, as if addressing a marine recruit, “look in the emergency locker. We’re going to need as much food and water as we can carry.”

  The young man squirmed to his feet. His hand fluttered, unsure whether or not to salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And no, before you ask, you don’t get a gun either.”

  “W-why not?”

  “Because you’re a fucking idiot.”

  * * *

  We debarked the shuttle via the main cargo ramp and started walking. The floor of the canyon was smooth and hard like polished rock. Preston carried his medical bag slung over his left shoulder and a wilderness survival kit over his right; Clay’s rucksack held spare ammunition clips and additional weaponry; and, because my exoskeleton gave me added strength and increased stamina, I had been saddled with a bulky crate containing three days’ worth of water and two days’ worth of dehydrated ration packs. We wouldn’t starve or die of thirst. If all went to plan, the Trouble Dog would be back to collect us in a few hours; if not, we were dead anyway. Whatever downed the heavy cruiser would be back to finish us off long before we started to get hungry.

  Clay took point, her pistol clasped in both hands, ready to respond to the first hint of danger. Preston shambled along a few metres behind her, looking hunched over and scared, his head turning to interrogate every patch of shadow. And I brought up the rear, clomping along with my robotic gait, the crate held out before me like a sacrificial offering to the god of lost causes.

  I didn’t know if it was emotional exhaustion or a side effect of the painkillers Preston had given me, but I realised that I felt strangely and unexpectedly calm. There was a good chance I might die in this pitiless canyon, and yet I couldn’t seem to get worked up about it. If it happened, it happened. I was out of that sweaty hellhole of a jungle, and nothing else seemed to matter much any more. My whole adult life felt like a distant dream, and now all that was left of me was a raw, slightly disconnected civilian who was wondering how everything had collapsed around him with such rapidity, and whether he could build anything from the wreckage.

  I was certain my former masters would still demand some form of retribution for my failure. Despite my request to join the House of Reclamation, I wouldn’t officially be a member until my application was approved and I’d completed my training and orientation. Until then, the Conglomeration could still legitimately claim me as a fugitive. If we were cornered here and I wanted to buy myself time, I’d need something to trade. Perhaps, if I completed my missing persons case and recovered Ona Sudak, that one success might go some way towards ameliorating matters? I had no idea what made the poet so valuable, but if the Intelligence Service was keen to get its hands on her then perhaps I could use her as a bargaining chip. I’d never work for the Conglomeration again, but at least I might be spared jail, and allowed to pursue my self-imposed exile in peace.

  “I should have stayed a cop,” I grumbled aloud. “It was crap, but it was better than this.”

  Neither of the others turned around at the sound of my voice, but I saw Preston’s shoulders twitch and guessed he might be having similar thoughts of his own, trying to fathom how he’d ended up here. The poor kid. He didn’t look much older than nineteen or twenty, and here he was laying his life on the line for a bunch of strangers in the most sterile and unforgiving landscape I’d ever had the misfortune to encounter.

  * * *

  We had been walking for an hour when Clay stopped us with a raised hand. “Movement,” she whispered.

  I peered ahead, seeing only the straight lines and razor-sharp shadows of the canyon. “Where?”

  “On the left wall, about two hundred yards.” She stepped into the shadows at the base of the same wall, and Preston and I followed her.

  “Is it them?” the kid asked.

  Clay shook her head. “I don’t think so. Doesn’t look like people.”

  I still couldn’t see anything more than a deep shadow, with a deeper blackness at its centre. “Drones?”

  “No.” Her brow furrowed. “I only caught it from the corner of my eye, but it looked like a hole opened in the wall.”

  I placed my palm against the smooth, cold stone. It towered two thousand metres above me, a solid vertical slab of quartz.

  “How could a hole open in stone?”

  “I don’t know, but it did.” She sounded cross. “Like an eye, or a mouth.”

  We edged forward, staying pressed into the shadows. Clay held her pistol at the ready. Detail resolved with each step, and it soon became easier to see that the darker patch of shadow was in fact an aperture of some kind.

  When we were closer, Clay made us wait while she reconnoitred the situation. Preston and I crouched in the angle between cliff and floor, and watched her.

  The hole appeared to be a cave mouth, set into the smoothness of the wall, around two metres from the base. Clay hauled herself up to take a peep inside, and then dropped back.

  “It’s empty,” she said, “but there are stairs leading down.”

  I walked forward.

  “Stairs?”

  “You can see them by the light from the walls.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Should we take a look?”

  “Nah.” She flicked the suggestion away with her fingers. “We should press on to the crash site. There might still be someone there.”

  Preston looked dubious. “If there were, those gunmen would have found them.”

  “Not necessarily. The Geest van Amsterdam was a big liner. Plenty of places to hide in a wreck that size.”

  “For a week?”

  “I don’t see why not. We’ve pulled people out of wrecks after more time than that. As long as you’ve got water, you can survive for two, maybe three weeks without food.”

  The boy turned to me for support. “What do you think?”

  I looked at the cave’s darkened maw, and it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust enough to make out the pearlescent glow of its walls.

  “I think we should press on to the wreck.” If Sudak lived, the chances were she’d still be close to the crash site. Only an idiot would have wandered into this maze-like jumble of canyons through choice.

  Preston looked disappointed. “Well, I think we should go back to the shuttle and wait for the Trouble Dog,” he said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  He took a pace back along the canyon in the direction from which we’d come. The shuttle lay around four kilometres behind us, lost to sight around several corners. We had left it sitting in a shaft of sunlight like a housefly warming itself in a gulley. And afraid of being unable to find our way back through the maze, we had left the power switched on so we could home in on its transponder. Compared to the alien landscape we stood in, the idea of the shuttle’s warm cabin seemed safe and inviting, and I could understand why the kid wanted to retreat to its cramped familiarity.

  “We shouldn’t split up,” Clay said. “And besides, you’re supposed to be the medic. We need you.”

  Preston turned to her. “I’m not a medic.”

  “You’re more of a medic than I am.” She jerked a thumb in my direction. “And you’ve got this guy to help you.”

  “That’s ridiculous! I—”

  A bright light stabbed down from above. Clay yelled, “Get down!” and pulled us both into a crouch against the wall. A moment later, the ground trembled.

  When I thought it might be safe to look up again, nothing had changed.

  “What was that?”

  Clay tapped her earbud. “They hit the shuttle from orbit. Kinetic weapon fired from that Carnivore we’re fighting. The transponder’s dea
d. I think the shuttle’s gone.”

  We brushed ourselves down.

  “What do we do now?” Preston’s voice trembled on the edge of hysteria. He glanced upward, as if expecting to see the heavy cruiser bearing down on him.

  Clay took him by the scruff of his neck and marched him to the mouth of the cave. “We get out of sight.” She pushed him up the wall. “And we do it quickly.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  TROUBLE DOG

  I hit the dimensional membrane with a slap that would have pancaked a less robust craft. Hull plates buckled. Alarms went off on every console. Plates smashed in the galley, and one of the remaining shuttles broke loose from its moorings and slewed across the internal hangar, wrecking itself and another craft before fetching up against the bulkhead.

  Captain Konstanz and the Outward agent were alive but unconscious. Not that it mattered. Let them rest. The captain had given me licence to play this conflict out as I saw fit, and that was exactly what I intended to do.

  Two minutes after entering the hypervoid, I dropped back into the universe. My screens turned white. Proximity alarms shrilled, and the external temperature went up so quickly the numbers on the readouts blurred. When they stabilised, they registered a fluctuating value between 3500 and 4000 degrees centigrade—about halfway to the maximum limit of my tolerance.

  Metal creaked as it expanded in the heat, and I allowed myself a moment of self-congratulation. My calculations had been correct, and I was now deep within the photosphere of the local sun—a feat of precise navigation to rival any I’d ever heard of.

  Plasma raged around me, welling up from the star’s interior in plumes large enough to swallow a dozen planets. Convection cells trembled; lines of magnetic flux whipped and crackled through the miasma, pulling tides of fire in their wake. And all of it burned with an excoriating, cacophonous roar.

  My good mood faded as I remembered my sister, Coyote, and the way she’d died—her insides scoured to nothingness by the superheated internal fabric of a star. I hoped I wouldn’t share the same fate. My hull armour had taken a beating—first from the Fenrir’s nuclear torpedo, which had for an instant produced temperatures hundreds of thousands of times higher than I was currently experiencing, and then from the precipitous jump into the higher dimensions. However, I was reasonably confident it’d hold, barring further injury. In the meantime, I switched my internal fabrication priorities from ammunition production to damage control, and used the medical interfaces in the command couches on the bridge to check on the unconscious women. My battlefield diagnostics found no serious injuries—at least, no new ones—and so I injected them both with a combination of analgesics and mild stimulants. Within a few minutes, they were both awake and blinking around at the bridge in a mixture of confusion and surprise.

  “I thought we were dead,” the captain said, her face orange with light reflected from the external screens. She frowned at the surging sea of plasma (I had filtered the light to a tolerable level, to avoid blinding her).

  “Where are we?”

  I projected my avatar onto the screen and arranged its features into their most reassuring configuration.

  “We are inside the sun.” I had to raise my voice to speak over the boiling roar of the cauldron in which we were immersed.

  She groaned and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She rolled her head and sat up straight. “And how did we get here? The last I remember, the Fenrir had us dead in her sights.”

  “We jumped.”

  “Jumped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Into the sun?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed, but there was an edge to it. “You are fucking insane.” She shook her head, still smiling, and leant towards the tactical display. “Can the Fenrir find us in here?”

  “Negative. The plasma masks our heat signature, and the star’s electromagnetic output will interfere with her sensors. She’d have to be right on top of us to stand a chance of detecting us.”

  “But it cuts both ways, I guess?”

  “If you’re asking whether my sensors are similarly affected, I’m afraid the answer is yes.”

  Captain Konstanz gave a thoughtful nod. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “but I did have a sister who tried it during the war.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She died.”

  “Great.” The captain slumped back. “So, what do we do now? Just sit here and wait?”

  “Fenrir will come to us. She’ll have seen my heading and velocity. She’ll know where I am, and she’ll come looking.”

  “And then?”

  I narrowed my avatar’s eyes.

  “And then, we kill her.”

  FORTY-NINE

  SAL KONSTANZ

  The ship rocked on the upwelling plasma, creaking like a wooden galleon. At one point, it let forth such a titanic moan that Laura and I froze, fearing the hull was on the verge of implosion. When nothing further happened, we exchanged uneasy smiles.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a few minutes. Let me get you down to the infirmary.”

  She rubbed the cast protecting her bullet-injured thigh. The wound was obviously troubling her.

  “No, thank you,” she said. Spidery, bruise-like blotches speckled her cheeks where capillaries had burst beneath the skin, and her left eyeball had turned a livid red, the blood vessels having ruptured due to the pressure of our recent manoeuvring.

  “We should let the ship take a look at your leg.”

  “No. This is the safest place on the ship, right now. I think I’ll stay here.”

  “Are you sure? There’s much better equipment down in the infirmary.”

  “Yes.” She tapped her fingertips against the arm of her couch. “The ship can give me all the painkillers I need, right here. No need to traipse all the way down there.”

  “Suit yourself.” I shrugged. The likelihood was that we were both going to die in the next few minutes, anyway. I turned instead to the Trouble Dog’s avatar. “How are we doing?” I asked it.

  “Holding steady,” the ship replied.

  “How long can we remain here?”

  “An hour at the most.” Her face took on the expression it used when explaining something technical. “At the moment, the hull can just about tolerate the temperature of the surrounding material, but there’s no way to vent waste heat from any of our systems. In fifty-seven minutes, we will have to emerge in order to deploy the thermo-dump panels.”

  “And the Fenrir knows this?”

  “She will be able to extrapolate the timeframe based on her own capabilities, and an assessment of the damage I’ve already sustained.”

  “So, she could just wait in a low orbit, and ambush us when we come out?”

  “That would be her best strategy, yes.”

  I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. “Then how is being in here helping us at all? You’ve hidden us in a burning building.”

  The Trouble Dog remained unruffled. “I told you,” she said, “we are going to kill her.”

  “How?”

  “By getting her to deploy her secret weapon.”

  Across the room, Laura stiffened. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  The Trouble Dog turned its gaze on her. “Torpedoes are useless in this medium. If I rise from the plasma and the Fenrir targets me, all I have to do is sink beneath the surface and move position. The plasma will disrupt the torpedoes’ sensors, and they will be unable to track me through the photosphere. The Fenrir will then have no choice but to employ her primary weapon: the one she used to down the Hobo and disable the defences on the Geest van Amsterdam.”

  “Then what happens?”

  The avatar smiled. “Then, we’ll see.”

  “See what?”

  The smile broadened. There was something feral about it.

  “Whether,” the Trouble Dog said
, drawing out the word, “I’m half as clever as I think I am.”

  * * *

  The Trouble Dog lingered until we were in real danger of roasting in our own waste heat, and I could actually hear the cooling fans labouring to keep the cabin temperature within acceptable bounds. Then, suddenly, she exploded from the murk. Coming up on the crest of an infernal plume, she burst into clear space with her hull glowing like an ember and scattered chunks of plasma radiating out around her like molten shrapnel.

  Immediately, everything on the tactical display went red. We were being targeted.

  Fast work, I thought, cursing the Fenrir and all who sailed in her—especially Parris. A quick browse of the Trouble Dog’s files had given me all I needed to know about the man. A career officer, he’d served on the Fenrir during some of the more questionable actions of the war. He was loyal, unimaginative, and almost completely devoid of scruples. His hair was fair and thinning, a pale beard clung to his chin, and his eyes were a blue so pale and washed out that they bordered on grey. I couldn’t guess why he’d been ordered to destroy two civilian vessels, but got the distinct impression he was just the kind of small-minded, ruthless bastard to follow those orders without hesitation or compunction.

  “Torpedoes incoming,” the ship informed me. “Taking evasive action.”

  The view flipped. My stomach did a cartwheel, and we began to accelerate back towards the sun’s churning surface. The torpedoes—three of them in a wide spread—raced towards us, trying to close a fifteen-hundred-kilometre gap. Each carried a hundred-megaton antimatter warhead. But, before they’d covered half the distance, we were already diving back into the burning ocean.

  FIFTY

  NOD

  Pushed through crawlspaces between inner and outer hull. Heat intense. Wished for shelter of World Tree’s branches.

  Breathing gloves on all six of my faces.

  During battle, ship rang like gong.

  Used torch to weld loose seams, did what could be done to straighten buckled hull plates.