The world had gone from a round ball to a flat wall. The canyons were thick black lines on a white landscape.
“Three.”
I could see the hole now—a dark smudge at the bottom of a sinuous, dry riverbed.
“Two.”
We came like a comet. The terrain leapt at us. The hole opened like a mouth and I closed my eyes.
“One.”
I was thrown back so violently against my chair that it drove all the air from my lungs. My arms and legs slammed back. With a sharp stab of white-hot agony, I felt something pop in my left wrist. For an instant, I thought we’d hit the bottom of the canyon—but then realised we were braking. I opened my eyes to darkness on the screen. Flashing alerts on my console informed me that all three torpedoes had struck the edges or the floor of the canyon. A trio of fireballs flowered in our wake, and the radiation alarms were going crazy, but we were safely below ground. We had flipped over and were falling ass-backward through the planet at ridiculous speed.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw the light of our drive flame dimly refracted in the opaque walls. I fought to get my breath back, to ask where we were and whether we were going to be able to slow down in time.
But then the walls of the shaft fell away and we dropped into an enormous bubble of space much larger than the modest planet in which it was apparently housed. Orange sunlight washed across my face. The lights of city-sized buildings shone like stars on the inner skin of the bubble.
I gave a bark of laughter.
I couldn’t speak or tear my eyes from what I was seeing.
We had fallen into God’s own orrery. And right in our path, multiple formations of sleek white spaceships hung in carefully ordered rows, each the size of the Scimitar outside, and each and every one facing in our direction, as if awaiting our arrival.
The effect was as if we were falling backwards into a cloud of knives.
“What…” I finally managed. I coughed and cleared my throat. “What are these?”
The Trouble Dog’s beatific smile grew wider but no less enigmatic.
“These,” she said, “are my new friends.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
TROUBLE DOG
The ships of the Marble Armada radiated enthusiasm and delight.
Like faithful pets entombed within a pharaoh’s pyramid, they had been waiting in this extra-spatial mausoleum for five thousand years, since the disappearance of their masters. They were ancient, but we already shared a symbolic kinship: the sixteen-pointed yellow star that adorned my flank was the same as those that emblazoned theirs. The organisation and ideals they had been built to serve had in their turn inspired mine. We were colleagues; we were siblings. They knew everything I had done, every crime I had committed and every life I had attempted to save in atonement. They had seen into my soul and they had accepted me. They had forgiven me and judged me worthy to be among them and to give them purpose. And, in the midst of their welcome, my heart sang with a wild and ecstatic joy. Cast out and betrayed by my brothers and sisters, I had unexpectedly found myself with a new pack, and they were waiting for me to complete my deceleration.
Meanwhile, looking back the way I had come, I saw light flashing in the sky beyond the shaft. The Nymtoq vessels must have arrived and been fired upon by the Fury, and now explosions filled the upper atmosphere of the Brain.
I wondered if Adalwolf thought me dead. When he last saw me, I had been accelerating into a crevasse with no hope of being able to stop or pull up before reaching the rocky floor. And then, just as I hit bottom, his view had been obscured by the detonation of the Fury’s missiles—a three-way fission explosion that would have obfuscated everything for several minutes. If he had time to check, once the fireballs had dispersed, he might have spotted the rabbit hole into which I’d fallen. But if war had broken loose in orbit, he might not have had the opportunity or inclination to investigate my demise. Although smaller and less powerful than a Scimitar, the Nymtoq heavy assets were still larger and more formidable than anything else in the sky—Carnivores included—and there were two of them. If Adalwolf and Fury had been stupid enough to engage, they’d have a hard fight on their hands—a fight that was, if my sensor readings were to be believed, well underway.
I turned my attention away from the hole and back to the legions awaiting me.
There were a million ships.
I thought of the House of Reclamation and its thinly stretched resources. How much more effective could it be with this horde to supplement its fleet of ageing, second-hand vessels? Between them, the House could cover all the scattered worlds of the Generality, and maybe even the Multiplicity beyond. A tiny fraction of their number would certainly be enough to quell the engagement going on outside. Less than one per cent would have been enough to win the Archipelago War, and maybe even enough to have prevented it from ever happening in the first place.
I tried to imagine the forests of Pelapatarn unharmed, and the millions of human and ship casualties from the war magically prevented. I tried to picture my own guilt evaporating, and wondered where I’d be right now if the massacre I’d been ordered to commit had never happened. Would I understand the universe in the same way I did now? Would I even be the same entity? They say that our remembrances shape our personalities. But what happens to us when our recollections are altered?
Who do we become?
“Where were you?” I asked the white ships. “Why didn’t you stop us?”
We were always here.
“But you could have helped. You could have intervened.”
We could do nothing. We were devoid of purpose.
“But you could have prevented all those deaths.”
A great wave of sadness flooded in through the channel I had been using to communicate with them. I felt their pain and their regret, and even their frustration at not being able to help.
We had no leader, they said. We had no moral guidance. We could not choose a side.
“But now you can?”
Now we have you.
* * *
My sensors alerted me to something in the hole. I was still decelerating stern-first, so my bow—and the majority of my remaining cannons—were facing back the way I had come.
A shadow moved against the stars. Something large occluded the view, diving headlong into the mouth of the shaft.
It was a ship.
The walls of the shaft were distorting its drive signature, but there could be no doubt someone had decided to follow my apparently suicidal dive into the planet’s interior. The Fury and the Nymtoqs would all have been too big to fit through the available opening, which only left—
The Adalwolf burst from the hole like a champagne cork, still accelerating. His torpedo tubes were open and his active sensors swept the space directly ahead of him. He caught sight of me at the same instant I caught sight of him, and his targeting laser illuminated my hull.
“There you are!” he crowed. His avatar appeared on my screen, his thin face snarling with triumphant malice, and I knew this had become a personal crusade for him. Where I had grown a conscience, it seemed he had developed the ability to ignore whatever orders his crew might be giving. He had abandoned the Fury to pursue me, his wayward sibling, and punish me for my desertion, my betrayal of the pack in the wake of Pelapatarn, and my killing of poor, misguided Fenrir.
He was out to finish me, whatever the consequences. He thought nothing could stop him.
Until a million alien weapons locked onto his hull.
His threat evaluation systems went crazy. He found himself trying to quantify and assess a fleet many orders of magnitude larger than anything encountered in the whole history of human spaceflight. The sheer number of incoming signals overwhelmed his sensors, and he fired blindly, his torpedoes careening away on divergent courses, only to be intercepted and destroyed by defensive fire from the Marble Armada.
Being closer to him than the others, I managed to punch a comms signal through the electromagnetic storm. I
appeared to him in virtual reality with the same carefully designed face I used to communicate with my crew. The old raincoat and the mop of dishevelled hair were gone. Instead, I stood tall and proud in a silk gown of green and blue, with my hair neatly braided and a diamond sword clenched in my right hand. No longer was I the regrown ghost of a dead soldier. I wasn’t even human. For the first time, I was me. Truly me.
I was the Trouble Dog.
And I was a goddess.
Adalwolf saw me and flinched. “What’s happening?” The shared simulation we were in was running so fast, the world outside seemed to have ground to a halt. He waved a bony hand at the legions arrayed in the sky before him. “Who are they?”
I looked down my nose at him. Suddenly, he looked small and pathetic. The embers of his eyes were no more menacing than barbeque coals left to cool at the end of a long autumn evening. His skeletal frame and imposing features simply pretension given form.
Why had we ever considered him our leader? There was nothing special about him. He was, in many ways, the least imaginative of us all, save for blind, obstinate Fenrir. Faced now with hilariously superior odds, all his self-assurance and bluster evaporated, revealed for the illusions they had always been. All that was left was a poor, isolated machine.
He was vain and stupid, and had committed repugnant atrocities under the orders of his human crew. But then so had I, and if I could be redeemed, then so I hoped could he.
Too many of my brothers and sisters were already dead.
I let him gaze at the ranks lined up against him; I gave him time to fully comprehend the hopelessness and futility of his predicament; and then I reached out and took him by the shoulder with my left hand.
“They are with me,” I said.
With my right, I raised the sword until the tip touched the ivory curve of his throat.
“Now.” I kept my voice quiet. “Unless you really want to find out if you’re fast enough to fend off a million torpedoes at once, I suggest you get down on your knees and tell your human captain to surrender.”
He looked at me with a mixture of confusion and horror. “Surrender? To you?”
I let him see my teeth, which were those of a fighting dog. I pressed down on his shoulder and, although he resisted for a moment, he knew he had no choice.
A million daggers were pointed at his heart.
SIXTY-NINE
SAL KONSTANZ
“We are being converged upon,” the Trouble Dog informed me.
On the screen, I saw something that looked like a flying phone box carved from white marble. Preston and Childe stood with their faces pressed to the glass. Clay seemed to be lying on the floor.
“Our crew has been returned,” the Trouble Dog said. “And I have Ona Sudak in another box, also requesting permission to come aboard.” She showed me a magnified view of Sudak and a vicious-looking bear-like creature jammed into an identical container. “Shall I open the cargo doors?”
I unbuckled my safety harness and rose to my feet. My pressure suit rustled around me. Could I leave the bridge? For now, everything seemed to be under control. I had spoken to the Adalwolf’s captain, and accepted his surrender on behalf of the House of Reclamation. Now, following protocol, his ship was catatonic, all its systems powered down and its controlling personality in hibernation. If it made a hostile move, we could rest assured our new allies would destroy it before it caused any harm.
“Yeah, sure.” I made for the door. “Just give me a moment to get down there, okay?”
I left the bridge without waiting for Laura, and climbed down to the ring corridor at the ship’s waist. My hands were shaking and my legs felt wobbly. My left wrist was swollen and sore. Too much had transpired in too short a time, and my stocks of adrenalin were running low. I stopped at the armoury and retrieved an automatic pistol. Nothing fancy, but it made me feel better. I had heard the message Menderes sent to his son, and didn’t know whether Preston and Childe would emerge from their flying box as friends or enemies, and whether Clay was their ally or their prisoner. Neither did I know what to expect from Sudak or the monster riding with her. Having a gun in my hand at least gave me some illusion of control.
Battered as she might be, this ship was mine. She would defend herself, and so would I. And nobody was setting foot outside that cargo bay until I was sure they could be trusted.
* * *
I waited outside the hold until the external doors had closed and the cavernous space had been repressurised. Then, gripping the gun tightly in my damp palm, I stepped through into the interior.
The box stood in the middle of the floor. Sudak and her bear stood a little way beyond, their box having settled on the deck plates closer to the main hatch.
“Nobody make any sudden movements,” I warned.
Sudak raised her hands. “Nothing to worry about here,” she said.
Keeping her in my peripheral vision, I turned my attention to the first box, just as the transparent door at its front slid upward and disappeared.
Alva Clay stood at the threshold, her weight resting against one of the inner walls. One of her hands was on her chest, where a tube protruded from the skin. She had a knife in her other hand. Preston and Childe stood against the opposite wall with their hands raised.
Seeing my gun, Clay let the knife fall to her side. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?”
I gave her a smile. It was unexpectedly good to see her. “Permission granted.”
She looked down at the knife she held. “I was just making sure they behaved themselves,” she explained, returning my smile despite her obvious discomfort.
I moved the barrel of the pistol back and forth between the two men and Sudak’s bear, keeping them all covered.
“Welcome back.” I made a face at the wad of bloody dressing beneath her breast. “Are you okay?”
She gave a pained nod, and stepped out onto the floor of the cargo hold. “I could do with a lie-down and some more painkillers, but I’ll survive for now.”
“And those two?”
She glanced back at Childe and Preston. “Good as gold,” she said.
“They haven’t gone back to the Conglomeration?”
She shrugged with the shoulder opposite her injury. “We haven’t had time to discuss it.” She held up the knife. “This was just to make sure.”
I looked at Preston. “I heard you talking to your dad.”
His eyes glittered. “You don’t need to worry about that, Captain.” He came forward with his hands still held up at either side of his head.
“He offered you a place in the Fleet.”
“I won’t be taking him up on it.”
“Can I ask why?”
Preston scowled. The awkward, frightened kid he’d been earlier that day had gone. His experiences had changed him, but not in any of the ways I might have anticipated. He didn’t look older or more confident. Instead, his shyness had given way to a simmering anger.
“He thinks he can buy me.” His voice faltered, choked by bitter resentment. “He thinks he can drop me because I’m inconvenient, and then pick me up again when I’m suddenly useful.” Arms still raised, he balled his fists. “Well, as Alva would say, ‘Fuck that.’ I’ve got a place here, if you’ll still have me, and here’s where I’m staying.”
He let his arms drop and stalked past me to the door, his cheeks burning. I let him go. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears, and I wanted to save him the embarrassment of doing so in front of everyone else.
“How about you, Childe?”
The man in the carbon exoskeleton stepped forward. “As the kid says, they only want us when we’re useful. And there’s no way I’m going back to smuggling weapons. I’m out of that game, and I’m out for good.” His face was thinner than it had been when I’d first met him, a handful of days before. His eyes were sunken, his chin unshaven, and the lines on his forehead seemed more pronounced. He gave a half-hearted smile and rubbed the back of his neck.
&n
bsp; “So, you’re staying?”
“If you can get me to a hospital and get this thing off me before it kills me, then I’m Reclamation all the way, Captain.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And why should I trust you?” An image sprang into my mind, of the moment, two nights ago, when he had thrown me across a table in the infirmary.
Seemingly reading my thoughts, he stretched out his arms. “You won’t get any trouble from me. I’m finished with the Conglomeration, and I’m not really fit for anything else. Where else have I got to go?”
I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, considering Alva Clay’s chest drain. There was no way Preston would have been capable of performing such an operation, and that could only mean Childe had been the one to save her life. Perhaps I felt I owed him something for that.
“Can you get Clay to the sick bay?”
“Captain, it would be my pleasure.”
I lowered my weapon. “Then go now, quickly,” I said, “before I change my mind.”
“Okay.” He reached for Alva, but she stepped away from him before he could help her.
“No,” she said, waving the point of her knife in Ona Sudak’s direction. “Before I go, I want to know who this is. I want to know why she’s so goddamn important that the Conglomeration are willing to kill an RV to get to her. And why they sent two Carnivores and a fucking Scimitar to find her.”
Sudak had been watching proceedings from in front of the box in which she’d arrived. Now, as we turned to her, she lowered her hands.
“My real name isn’t Sudak,” she said. “It’s Deal. Annelida Deal.”
I frowned, sure I’d misheard.
The Trouble Dog spoke. Her voice echoed from the PA. “Captain Annelida Deal was my commanding officer at the Battle of Pelapatarn. It was she who ordered the destruction of that world’s biosphere.”
Beside me, I heard Alva suck in a sharp breath. “Holy crap, she’s that Annelida Deal?”
Sudak gave a nod. “The Trouble Dog is correct: I was responsible for that crime. And now, Captain, I’m afraid I’m going to have to throw myself on your mercy.” She scratched her stomach. “You see, I haven’t eaten anything in some considerable time, and I’m feeling somewhat weak.”
Embers of War Page 28
