by Tom Toner
The ring’s spokes sighed and whined upon his fingers, little flashes arcing between them. He slid the weapon off and gripped it in his fist while he looked into the night. Briefly turning back to the house, Lycaste glimpsed strange black shapes in the green light of the moon. Against the north-facing wall, from the highest windows on the first floor, hung three small figures. He stared. The children were arranged by height with a tiny body, a baby, dangling at the end.
Contract
Bonneville instructed the Melius closest to him to light their lamps as his striped zeltabra trotted to the stream’s edge. He remained in the saddle, his cloaks warm around him in the northern dawn light, waiting for an answering glow somewhere in the cloud. He had ridden five miles from the Sarine Palace along a road that wound through vast sculpted gardens and coloured topiary alive with strange creatures, the pleasure lands of sympathetic noble families. Bonneville had made sure to outbid any possible reward for their treachery, but remained on edge. He was required at Psalms to the Long-Life back in the painted vaults beneath the chapel in two hours; they’d better be on time.
A dim glow surrounded a bank of grey cloud to the south, solidifying as the vapour parted. He whispered to his Melius servant and the giant placed his hand across the lantern three times in quick succession. The light in the clouds responded in kind, lowering slowly towards them.
So the clipper relay had worked, taking his message beyond the Old World without anyone noticing. Or so he hoped. He remained seated on the skittish zeltabra, watching as the grey mists bulged and parted around the ichthyoid silhouette of the Vulgar ship—the privateer Wilemo Maril—its yellow-and-blue-plated hull screaming and shuddering like an injured sow as it fought the strain of gravity. The last of the cloud strands hugging its body burned away as it fired growling bursts of pale green flame from its aft superluminal exhausts, a crackle of thunder adding to the noise as it fell. The appalling wailing of the Voidship’s descent began to frighten the mount, and as Bonneville fought to regain control of it he worried that even out here they might be discovered. He yanked on the leather reins and leaned back in the gale of leaves to observe the chaotic landing.
The privateer dropped, issuing gusts of superheated air and steam from orifices set into its great rusted belly, yellow sodium lights flickering to life along its flanks. Its militarised design reminded Bonneville vaguely of an enlarged Threene-Wunse bomber, the kind that had laid siege to the outlying worlds of the Firmament during the Wars of Decadence, but adapted now for the absurd speeds and hardships of space—what the Prism called Voidfaring. Such adjustments were not so difficult for the Prism as they seemed: along with the discovery of superluminal travel was the revelation that, mechanically at least, the construction of an engine that could exceed the speed of light was an exceptionally simple endeavour. Indeed, a child in possession of no more than a bucketful of inexpensive equipment could make one in less than an hour. The Prism—lawless, greedy beyond words and now foolishly awarded such knowledge, travelled where they wished, pilfering and slaughtering to their hearts’ content.
He watched as a tile of hull plating sheared off and spun into the grass. The ship had likely passed through the hands of many Prism races since its construction, each owner adding and subtracting at their leisure. Its scraped and dented nose, buried among a bristling collection of forward cannon of various lengths like whiskered jowls, appeared to house the flight deck and was decorated with painted black symbols of conquest: Bonneville could just make out Quetterel and Lacaille ship names and numbers in the tally, with crude paintings of the species’ skulls daubed beneath. The hull, stretching streamlined behind the dozen heavy guns, had been replated in hundreds of places with coloured strips of salvaged metal like an ancient trawler, producing a patchwork-blanket effect of tropical yellows and blues stained crimson where rust had spread between the welding.
Bonneville glanced along to the broadside guns as the privateer completed its descent, taking in the three fins that angled up from its flattened body. A fourth had apparently graced the stern until not long ago, its remains patched over with bright silver plating like the smooth stump of an amputee. He saw the Voidship turn as he gripped the reins, feeling more than a little dismayed knowing that he had entrusted his contract, and a trip of many trillions of miles, to this contraption and its crew.
Blistered gun turrets on the fins swivelled with a groan to settle on him, while a second pair in the nose angled outwards to scan for any danger from above while it landed. As he watched, a section of the craft’s curved belly opened above the neat lawns to disgorge a stepped rectangular platform bathed in yellow light, some rogue piping falling from the hull. Inside he could see a glowing hangar strung with fluorescent tubing. A few tiny silhouettes came to the edge of the platform, waving it down until the scarred metal ripped into a rectangular hedge with a shudder, then stepped aside to let three bullsized tanks and a convoy of troops trundle onto the grass through the steam.
A whining alert switched off, as did most of the lights, and a large hatch in the rump of the vessel hinged open. All of the little figures glanced upwards, waiting. A hot-air balloon attached to a chain rose out of the hatch, ascending quickly on a burst of flame and dragging the chain with it. Bonneville could just see a figure with a long scoped rifle leaning from the basket and looking out over the labyrinthine garden, the early-morning wind tugging at the flame. He smiled, enjoying the Vulgars’ pompous sense of security, and waited for the captain to approach. The small tanks bellowed into life, their engines idling, while more Vulgar and equipment issued from the settling hull of the ship, some climbing into turrets on the sides of the tanks. Two soldiers went to the amputated back fin and busied themselves with unscrewing a heavy metal cap. They stepped aside as the hole spluttered and began to pour out waste and sewage onto the lawns.
The Vulgar captain stamped up to Bonneville’s zeltabra, escort at his side, and stood waiting for the Amaranthine to dismount. Instead, Bonneville covered his nose delicately and remained in his saddle, making sure the tiny people knew their place.
“You have my contract, Captain Maril?”
The waist-high gnome nodded briskly, taking a rolled paper from his belt. He looked cautiously up at the Melius, almost three times his size, and handed it to Bonneville with a grunt. The Amaranthine unrolled the paper, delighted to notice the elaborate wax seal dangling from its end that completely failed to serve a purpose. He began reading, very slowly.
The Melius growled at the Vulgar captain until he stepped briskly away from the zeltabra’s side, which looked down dubiously at him before finding some grass to crop. Maril was of no importance within the jumbled ranks of the Vulgar, just another opportunist privateer captain, the first to have a ship ready when word of a large commission reached the ports of Drolgins. His pinched face was that of an elf from a fairy tale, white as the skin on Bonneville’s scalp. The orange Voidsuit he wore was patched and resewn, in just as much disrepair as his ship. The pointed helmet in his hand squeaked to him and he replaced it to listen carefully. The radar operator was no doubt informing him of the location of enemy privateer ships over the hemispheres of the Old World, though Bonneville didn’t expect any this close to the Amaranthine-protected First.
Bonneville finished reading, noting that the contract was in fact a warrant for his own death, should he betray the Vulgar. He took a pen and scratched his full name at the bottom, then smiled at the captain and handed it over, noticing work was being done to the privateer as the light improved.
“I want you to be away as soon as I leave, Maril, so stop your men tinkering.”
“Yes, Amaranthine,” the captain said in a helium voice, tapping his helmet and speaking into it. Vulgar with huge plastic water barrels were making their way down to the river and filling them, passing a group just returned from the garden’s maze towing a protesting hedgehog in a net.
“They can’t do that on the viscount’s land!” grumbled a Melius in Bonneville’s
retinue. “Amaranthine, please, send these goblins on their way!”
Bonneville sighed and put a hand to his eyes. “Maril, we’re going now. It’s time you did, too.”
More of the Prism passed with a saw, some cords of wood and piles of salvaged metal hacked from the sculpted foil trees. They heaped it all on the back of a tank and drove it into the belly of the ship, leaving one of their member behind to pick up pieces that had fallen off. He strayed too close. The Melius closest snarled and jumped from his heavy mount, lashing out to grab the little man and shaking him. The Vulgar squealed, helmeted head swinging and clattering against his armoured collar. Captain Maril turned, reaching for his pistol but not unclipping it from its holster.
Bonneville had begun to climb down from the zeltabra when the Melius ripped the struggling Prism in half, roaring and hurling both pieces in opposite directions. The small men in the garden stopped, their weapons raised. The giant looked apologetically back at Bonneville, ears flattening.
“I’m sorry, Sire—” he began, a rifle crack from the balloon severing his head from his shoulders before he could finish his sentence. Bonneville watched the bloodied body slump, its head rolling away across the lawn. The other Melius struggled to control their whinnying mounts, some bolting with a thunder of hooves back down the path.
Bonneville watched them go, finally dismounting from the zeltabra and walking up to the Vulgar captain, wondering if his missing Melius servant would be his undoing. Perhaps he would have to dispose of the others, too, when they got him back.
“Bring your sniper down,” he commanded.
Maril spoke into his headset uncertainly and they waited for the balloon to descend. The small sharpshooter, armoured in a coat of painted mail, came trudging to meet them, not looking at the dead Melius. He began to remove his helmet until Bonneville held up a hand for him to stop. He stared at the armoured soldier, everyone in the garden watching.
At first, nothing happened. The Vulgar stood looking at him, bowing delicately. Then smoke began to rise from the sniper’s cuirass, coiling and wafting across the grass. Bonneville continued to stare, casual as a man reading a newspaper. The sniper hopped from foot to foot, staggering into the captain. He tried desperately to get his helmet off but the metal had fused, and black smoke was now pouring from the binocular eyeholes. The smell of overcooked flesh filled the garden and the sniper crunched to his knees, gauntlets at his helmet, red-hot metal hissing and popping. Captain Maril withdrew slightly, shielding his little face as the armour around his sniper melted, crumpling inwards into a small, screaming ball. The jagged metal sphere became white-hot, burning the neatly cropped lawn around it, then was still.
The captain and his men watched wide-eyed as Bonneville walked to the glowing ball and picked it up.
“Remember your loyalty, Maril, as shall I.” The Amaranthine turned and threw the sphere into the stream, where it splashed with an angry cloud of steam. “Now get out of here.”
Wilemo Maril
The Vulgar privateer Wilemo Maril departed the Old World after two days spent submerged deep within a jungle of the Thirteenth Province, its pumps recirculating fresh water from a gushing river while much-needed repairs were carried out for the long voyage ahead. Large, strange-looking fish were caught, gutted, chopped and frozen, small mammals skinned and salted. On the second day it tested its motors, expelling a burp of thick, noxious smoke over the running waters, and heaved into the sky, exhausts roaring like a monstrous animal in pain. As it climbed through driving rain, it tested its communications and radar, listening hard for enemy traffic and finding none within the three-hundred-mile range of its terrestrial antennas. The rain grew softer; the Old World’s horizon became curved, indistinct, blotched with geography and the haze of encircling atmosphere. Portholes froze over, the foot-thick plastic useless as it escaped the fog of particles and headed for the void in which it belonged.
After a couple of minutes, the Greenmoon—a place the Amaranthine masters of the Old Satrapy still called Yanenko’s Land—passed by below to starboard, a coloured, far-off dot sweeping below the demisted portholes. The privateer’s course was plotted in the red-lit tunnels deep inside the Voidship, tiny Vulgar bent over sheaves of thick, unrolled maps. Their route would take them—as usual—on a trajectory that avoided most of the Solar Satrapies, minimising contact with both Amaranthine influence and the interest of other, less civilised peoples.
The superluminal filaments were running at just over two thousand miles a second as Mars-Gaol, a blasted, orange speck of no-man’s-land, passed by high and far to port, the routine of the privateer settling into its long journey, finally switching on its wave antennas to listen for anything within a twenty-seven-thousand-mile volume around it. The tiny Voidship whizzed far from Jupiter’s Amaranthine-inhabited moons and flicked under Saturn-Regis, correcting its course through the hail of asteroids that flew past in the crackle of its radar. They were burning at just over seven million, five hundred thousand miles an hour when they passed Neptune—the electromagnetic vibrations of its rings tinkling like a bell—climbing up to the edges of interstellar space until they were outside the heliosheath of the sun altogether and bolting at one hundred and eighty million miles a day towards the next Solar Satrapy in the Firmament, the starlight beginning to blend together into a silver glow that sparkled through the portholes. Had the septuplet engines not increased rapidly in efficiency with almost every mile, the journey just to the fringes of the Solar Satrapy would have taken them over sixty days, and they could not reasonably have expected to enter the next for another three hundred and eighty years. But as it stood they were due to pass Proximo, the nearest Satrapy to that of the Old World’s star Sol, in just under fifteen days’ time.
The ship arced, curving away from the Satrapy of Proximo—its Vaulted Lands heavily occupied and guarded by great shoals of Prism Voidcraft loyal to the Amaranthine—and roaring through the empty gulf in the direction of the Fourth Solar Satrapy of Port Elsbet, once named Barnard’s Star.
Maril studied the thick pile of maps in the dim emergency light, the continual cries of radar operators verifying accurate distance and wave-signal checks piped into the small operations capsule. Port Els-bet was a chain of five planets, only one of them Vaulted, modestly populated. Their unusual route dictated that they would have to stop there before resuming their journey out of the Firmament, despite the increased Prism activity of late. Any of the dozen other hominid breeds could obstruct his mission, even supposed allies of the Vulgar, and all were to be avoided. The Prism usually lurked around the borders of the Firmament, feeding on the scraps from the Amaranthines’ table, squabbling, warring, creeping into the light only to steal, but sometimes they swam closer in, just to see what there was to be seen.
He wondered exactly what might be happening—certainly something unprecedented in his thirty-six years as a privateer captain. The usually sedate Amaranthine were now Bilocating between their realms more often, their trailing gaggle of subservient Prism droning behind, transporting them where necessary. With Virginis scoured and dead, any Prism who weren’t so loyal (the majority, Maril found) had seen in the Immortals’ appalled silence how the Firmament might be wrested from its owners’ hands, how the Ancients might be overwhelmed. Losing his sniper to that greedy Immortal had been the tip of some kind of unspeakable iceberg on the Old World, he knew it. There was something in the Old Satrapy, something terrible, and from its mouth blew the first chill winds of a new age.
Utopia
Lycaste suspected the broken finger hadn’t healed properly. He flexed it, watching the many-jointed knuckles slide around beneath his skin, but it wouldn’t stretch any more. There was no pain, but the realisation was enough to distract him from what the tiny bird had said. He looked up and scratched his wiry beard, trying to concentrate on the creature as it perched on the branch of a slim, red-skinned sapling.
“Did you wish to attend?” it squeaked. “The speech is at midday.”
Lycaste tried to recall what they had been talking about. The drowning of the Immortal.
“Ah, yes. Yes, I’d like to come,” he said in careful Third. It was the only language spoken in the Amaranthine Utopia that he could understand perfectly, being the closest to his own.
“It’s very sad. Some of us knew her for a long time,” sang the bird, no bigger than the final joint of his thumb. It was a wonder, he thought, that the animal could think and speak at all, its brain must have been the size of a peppercorn. Its body was a feathered white ball surrounded by iridescent red fronds. Twig-like legs poked from beneath to grasp the tree, and a set of beady black eyes studied him as it warbled. The bird’s tongue flicked to lick the end of its stubby beak after each word, leaving thoughtful pauses.
“How old was she?” he asked it.
“Old enough to qualify as Perennial, I think. My Great Mothers knew her well, but she would’ve been here long before that, of course.” The bird cocked its head suddenly and whistled shrilly as another flitted and landed in a nearby tree. “Excuse me,” it gasped, springing nimbly into the air. Lycaste watched it go. “Midday on the lake,” it called back, surprisingly loudly.
Lycaste sat cross-legged on the red grass and gazed out through the coppices of cultured trees at the perfectly circular lakes beyond. In the haze of blue and pink he could barely see the furthest ones, their muddy beaches crammed with a multicoloured, babbling throng of socialising birdlife.
There were dozens of lakes—how would he know which to go to? He’d have to ask, though he wouldn’t get a decent answer out of any of the Amaranthine. He bet that not one of them knew, or cared.
