by Tom Toner
He dropped his eyes from the view, lifting his bejewelled sleeve to inspect the emeralds on the cuff, suddenly thinking of the two mummified dinosaurs found in the rings of Saturn, now cut from their suits and on display in the Sea Halls of Gliese along with the remains of their vehicle. Sauronauts, they’d been named, the two female corpses affectionately known as Thelma and Louise by all those who’d studied them over the years, after some reprinted slide in the archives that Bonneville hadn’t studied. The beautiful specimens officially belonged to the Most Venerable Sabran, but Bonneville supposed when it was all over he might ask whichever Prism species ended up taking Gliese if they would sell them to him. The two Caudipteryx alone were worth all the Ducats in a Vaulted Land, but nobody from the Investiture would know that. They would likely give the rotten monsters away, providing marauders hadn’t eaten them first. Once he had the two Caudipteryx and their otherworldly vessel, he might begin to indulge his fascination (a hobby he had successfully hidden from all but a few of his fellow Amaranthine) with where the rest of the dinosaurs went to, where they were now.
Nothing but a thin scraping of fossils had ever been discovered in the rock strata of the Old World, no tools or metals or structures that might suggest civilisation buried with them, and nothing like the craft and its occupants had ever been found on any other world within the limits of the Firmament. Those things had fled from something and died in freezing, lonely circumstances that nobody could understand. Perhaps somewhere their descendants still lived, warped by millions of years of extra evolution, but Bonneville didn’t really think so, despite his hopes. What they had discovered in the rings of Saturn-Regis was failure epitomised, a monument to the unhappy fate of a species. But there had to be an answer to the question of what happened to the rest of them; and if by some fluke of chance the creatures’ successors endured, Bonneville was determined to find them. The riches an eighty-million-year-old civilisation might confer upon him were not something he was prepared to forget about once he had taken the Shell and its full potential for himself. With the Caudipteryx, wherever they were, was the prospect of godhood. A lasting immortality that he might use the Shell and all its wonders to find. An escape within an escape, a freedom only released when all the Firmament crumbled and toppled around him.
Bonneville counted to a hundred, breathing very slowly as his heart chugged within him, swelling timeworn capillaries with syrupy blood. He counted and waited, soothing himself, hushing his mind until he was able at last to leave the balcony and walk calmly down the many glittering steps.
The Last Harbour
Tau Ceti, known as the last harbour, had once been the Twenty-Fourth Solar Satrapy and the border of the Firmament. It was a huge system of fourteen planets: four of them hard little globes of stone pocked with mine-shafts; three completely liquid water-worlds like suspended raindrops; and a collection of sixty-nine moons shared between seven vast, multiply ringed and splendidly coloured gas giants towards the system’s edges.
It had been lost, spectacularly, by the Amaranthine during the Age of Decadence, the Prism flooding in when they and their sympathisers had departed. It was now colonised by a handful of secretive hominid races known to be particularly unwelcoming to visitors.
Maril flipped through the stack of charts, sitting in his quarters in a large baroque chair, its arms painted with gold leaf. He’d stolen it in a raid some years ago on the ex-Amaranthine planet of Zeliomandranus, the second of Tau Ceti’s rock worlds, and hoped they weren’t still missing it. The chair was far too big for him, making him look like a particularly ugly child clothed and waiting for a fancy-dress party as he pored over the papers. He had already decided they were going to bypass the system; it was a dangerous route out of the Firmament—part of an enormous gateway along with a second system under the control of the Zelioceti, the predominant Prism influence in the volume. The Zelioceti Empire was loosely affiliated with the Vulgar, but schisms within it resulted in kingdoms that recognised no kinship with such a different race, and the particular breed that lived on Tau Ceti were cut off from the workings of the Prism Investiture entirely. Maril wanted to stay close by, however, until the minute they left the Firmament itself, just in case. A five-day detour over the systems could avoid the toll required to pass through them, but Maril had begun to suspect that, no matter how unlikely in such a vast region of emptiness, there could be traps lying in wait for him. Getting away from Port Elsbet unseen had taken every ounce of cunning; they’d been forced to continue to corkscrew and weave for another three days to make sure they weren’t being followed. Once again, Maril reflected on the surprising numbers of Lacaille they’d encountered on Steerilden’s Land, not to mention their battle-readiness and provisions. The white vacuum suits they’d been wearing were some of the finest Maril had ever seen, beautiful examples he should have tried to get his hands on, and the Nomad was an exceedingly rare class of schooner. That sort of armament was a step up for the Lacaille, usually a rag-tag bunch at best, and Maril had begun to feel the paranoia setting in.
He bent over the maps again, scribbling little notes. Taking a short cut anywhere near the outer gas giants or their moons in a bid to avoid the toll was incredibly unwise. Ships that strayed near those planets usually never returned, but it might be his only choice.
Receding behind them lay the Gulf of Cancri, the last light-year of empty Firmament forming a barrier between the Amaranthines’ decadent existence and the sweep of grindingly poor worlds belonging to their Prism cousins. The Wilemo Maril was due to cross the barrier between the Firmament and the Prism Investiture in a matter of minutes. He looked at a glowing display in his pointed helmet, sitting next to the charts on his desk. Six minutes and twenty-eight seconds, to be precise. He got up from the seat, swinging his legs and jumping to the equally ornamental foot-rest and then to the floor, and made his way along the dark corridor to the operations capsule. He ran a stock check of the ship’s ordnance in his head as he walked, nodding occasionally to an engineer as they passed; they had depleted about a third of their varied missile stocks on Steerilden’s Land, one hundred and seventeen out of a thousand hollow hull-piercing rounds as they chased the Lacaille Voidship, and ninety-one out of one hundred incendiary bombs. As per his design, the Wilemo Maril’s cache of five hundred thousand micro-mines remained untouched, essential to the privateer’s survival if things went wrong at the last minute.
He entered the crowded capsule, ducking through the circular opening and depositing the maps to a chorus of greetings and salutes.
“Readiness, please,” he said calmly, watching them return to their listening posts and the throbbing scream of Tau Ceti’s various worlds being relayed by the forward-wave antennas. He nodded, leaving the capsule and making his way up a series of ladders and along another corridor, past the huge battery compartment and forward superluminal engine chambers to the cockpit, taking his familiar seat among the gaggle of pilots talking quietly to one another.
Forty seconds. Still nothing. He sat buckled into his seat, watching Tau Ceti, a shadowy disc slowly brightening as the ship decelerated from superluminal speeds, ready to give the order. All was quiet, the radio link to the operations capsule grumbling with gentle static, the soft ticking of the antique odometer counting down to nothing. This time he hadn’t kept his concerns from the men, and all knew to be on high alert once they crossed the border. Such caution in a huge, empty region of space was incredibly, vanishingly unusual, but these were unusual times. He had felt political and martial winds changing ever since the Lacaille-Vulgar Treaty of Silp had crumbled with the disastrous siege at Nilmuth, to the great shame of the perpetrators. Maril had believed in the treaty, as had many privateer and Grand Company captains. There was too much trade at stake for the war to go on, engulfing ever more territories and kingdoms. Those winds, mysterious and dangerous, were blowing slowly inwards now, away from the Vaulted Lands and right to the epicentre of the Firmament, the Prism interest that had been following loosely behin
d now opening their sails to it. The Old World, or the Dominion Meliose as it was known to the Vulgar, would not remain sacred for long.
He held his breath, unblinking. A small dial on the polished brass odometer clacked and turned; they’d passed the border. The pilots waited another thirty seconds before turning in their seats to look at him, the master-at-arms unbuckling his harnesses and removing his helmet.
Maril looked at his second-in-command’s gleaming, sweat-shiny white face and began to do the same.
“All right, Jospor,” he began, readying his reluctant apology. They had wasted time; the Amaranthine Bonneville was sure to bleed his second sack of Ducats for every delay.
He had the helmet half off his face when the ship lurched and spun with a colossal, ringing bang, throwing the master-at-arms to the ceiling along with everything that wasn’t bolted down as if a giant foot had kicked them violently from beneath. The cockpit radar awoke, screaming, as tinny Vulgar voices babbled over the communications. Maril swore, snapping his helmet back on while the privateer twisted viciously through space, the master-at-arms flung this way and that, little arms waving. The pilots corrected the course, immediately locating and swinging the craft towards Tau Ceti at his command, its light filling the cockpit.
Maril growled through gritted teeth, clicking back the trigger-guards on the weapons array in front of him and releasing fifty thousand of the micro-mines in a controlled sphere around the fleeing privateer, counting to eight and releasing another fifty thousand behind them. Calls from the engineers registered detonations, uncertain whether they were from contact with any pursuing craft or just impacting enemy ordnance. A metal shield groaned and thunked across the thick windows of the cockpit, obscuring the huge star they were diving towards just as they were pummelled again by a sustained barrage of ordnance that had made its way through the wall of mines. Maril released another hundred thousand as the pilots corkscrewed the ship, the master-at-arms still clawing at the equipment dangling from the ceiling of the cockpit, his little body suspended upside down.
“Rear battery chambers!” Maril yelled into his flimsy microphone. His voice sounded gasping and desperate inside his helmet. “Loose all vacuum-ordnance! Now!”
He leaned back in his seat, feeling the ship groaning and twisting around his tiny body, hoping the trail of motor mines, flash canisters and torpedoes would encounter anything that had made it through the concentric shells of mines to follow them, but knowing they’d only punch holes in the defence if there was nothing far enough in to absorb their fire.
The Wilemo Maril released shell after shell of blossoming, glittering mines as it dived through the brightening blackness towards Tau Ceti, whatever was following Maril’s ship making it through each chandelier of expanding detonations. The privateer tipped and aimed straight for the star, screaming towards the light in the hope that anyone coming up behind would be blinded in their wake. By the time they reached it they were totally blind, operating solely on radar and wave as they whipped through the boiling volume close to the star, a bright comet trail following them like exhaust along with the thrown sparkle of exploding mines. They would have to lift soon or they’d vanish like an ice cube in a bonfire, but Maril wanted to see if his opponent could take the heat. He loosed a slim stream of mines and detection apparatus, listening to the shouted readings as they spun, only the red glow of the emergency lighting illuminating the cockpit.
His master-at-arms slid and rattled across the ceiling, eventually finding purchase and trying to drop his legs to the seat. Whatever was chasing them was more than twenty-five thousand miles out of range, their instruments blind to it. It had most likely lifted away from the sun, perhaps in an attempt to outpace the privateer, indicating arrogance, fantastic raw power or a terrible combination of both. Maril had to make a choice while they dashed across the sun’s face, the structure of the ship warping and protesting.
He listened hard to the engineers, flicking switches so he could hear the read-outs for himself. They were changing, the pops and screams mingling with the shouting from Operations. He smacked the dented auditory node on his helmet, refusing to believe it was working properly. A warbling, pained squeal announced a storm of new information as the radar and wave signals bounced from incoming objects, wailing louder as more entered the scope of the sensors. There must have been over two thousand of the things, each roughly the size of the privateer, and they were converging on his position.
Illness
Impatiens reached the crest of the hill and stared down, breathing heavily. He wasn’t interested in the view or the scudding clouds—though there were more than usual—but the slope of his stomach; it was definitely getting bigger. He scooped some overhanging flab and jiggled it, appalled at the motion, then breathed in sharply despite his exertions and straightened his back. Even like that it stuck out. He would have to do something about it.
He growled and sat, his breath still labouring to leave his body. He would wait a while longer before attempting the path to Elcholtzia’s. Eranthis had been badgering him to cut down on the after-dinner wine, and now that fleshdoctor treating Callistemon had told him the same. A third opinion couldn’t hurt.
It had been another bad morning. Callistemon couldn’t have long left—even Eranthis concurred; his agony was changing pitch, the prescribed salt solutions weren’t working any more. Callistemon had offered to move, with Pentas of course, but Impatiens wouldn’t hear of it. They were now sleeping in the largest chamber in the house, the topmost landing given up entirely to them. They had their own back garden and necessarium, their own study and solar, though Briza spent most of his time in there with them, too. As far as Impatiens was concerned, it was their home as much as it was his. The Plenipotentiary—though Impatiens wondered if that word had any meaning anymore—was part of their strange, mongrel family now; even Pamianthe fussed over Callistemon as if he were her own son.
It was becoming painfully clear as they all noticed Pentas’s growing bump that Callistemon’s child would arrive just as his father left them, and Briza would soon have to content himself with a smaller copy of his new brother. The paralysis never lasted more than a Quarter, but Callistemon had still been confined to his bed when Impatiens left the house this morning. The boils and lesions were beneath the skin now, too, and the yellow man’s face had taken on a misshapen, drunken leer. Eranthis, though she had her theories as always, freely admitted that the illness was beyond her understanding; it was beyond anyone’s. The fleshdoctor they’d sent for from Manavgat was equally flummoxed, admitting wryly that his area of expertise lay chiefly in surface wounds rather than things nobody had ever heard of and which shouldn’t exist. He had recommended a cheaper doctor in Mersin, but Impatiens hadn’t bothered to make enquiries.
Impatiens laid a hand over his chest and felt his heart rate slowing. That was better. It would take more than some useless doctor pronouncing him absurdly and shamefully fat to make him feel unwell.
Despite Callistemon’s illness, which troubled all of them for most of their waking hours, he appeared to have undergone a remarkable change since Lycaste’s disappearance. Vanished was the pride with which he spoke of the First and Second, the subject of his parents and family—something that had usually generated unbearable anecdotes of their importance and good taste—now glossed over with something like shame by the man during dinner conversation. Something had happened to him internally besides the bizarre affliction; he’d become almost humble in recent weeks, and Impatiens had begun to realise with a startling, genuine pain that he had come to like Callistemon very much. The Vasar-day before last he’d taken Callistemon to Mer-sin to collect Lycaste’s family, stopping at the port a week before they were due to arrive. The old couple had come to catalogue their missing son’s possessions and put the house up for sale. As it would be a depressing business for everyone involved, Callistemon and Impatiens had quartered themselves with the jolliest man in town, Phalaris, self-proclaimed Master of Mersin. They’d s
pent the week thoroughly intoxicated, with Callistemon speaking nonsense Tenth to any new arrivals at the water-front until they hurried off to buy phrasebooks and maps, thinking they’d landed at the wrong port. Though he was still quite obviously unwell, Callistemon had made an effort with all the new people he met, and when at last it was time to meet their guests at the boat he was effervescent and courteous, helping Lycaste’s mother and father from the wooden gangplank and carrying their belongings. He’d never once, to Impatiens’s knowledge, mentioned his title among them, and they’d assumed he was just an unusual-looking but pleasant porter, down on his luck and forced to travel the Nostrum.
Impatiens caressed his foot, staring at the earth without observing a thing. He wondered what Lycaste would think if he could see them all now. He was certain somewhere inside himself that his old friend (though hopelessly naïve and delicate and perfectly unsuited to the Big Bad World) still lived, and was somewhere out there in the blue distance doing who knew what. Impatiens could only wait and hope for news someday—the small stipend from the sale of the house given to him by Lycaste’s parents in gratitude for his friendship still lay unopened and ready for Lycaste, should he ever return wishing to build a new life back in the cove he’d loved.
