Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  “I take it that you’re coming along,” I said as I hauled a spacesuit out of a locker.

  “I will need to report to the Council.”

  “Chalking up another human atrocity,” I said with black humor.

  “It’s what we do,” the creature said shortly and she removed her suit from its locker. Isanjo suits always looked strange. They were equipped with a tail because the aliens used their tails for their high-steel construction work.

  “And what happens when the ledger gets filled?” I asked as I stepped into the lower half of my suit.

  “We will act,” she said, and I knew that she was speaking of all the alien races. “There are a lot more of us than there are of you.”

  “Yeah, but none of you are as mean as us.” I shrugged to settle the heavy oxygen pack onto my shoulders.

  “But we’re more patient.”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  I reflected that Isanjos now built our skyscrapers and our spaceships. Under human supervision, of course, but my God, there was so much opportunity for mischief if the aliens decided that it was time for them to act! I had a vision of skyscrapers collapsing and ships exploding.

  I thought about the Hajin who worked as servants in our households. How easy it would be to poison a human family.

  And the Tiponi Flutes did our accounting. They could crash the economy.

  Humans were fucked. Good thing I worked on a ship crewed mostly by aliens. Maybe they liked me enough to keep me around.

  We secured each other’s helmets, and headed for the Wasp, which sat in the middle of the bay. Even sitting still, it looked like it was moving a million miles an hour. The needle nose and vertical tail screamed predator.

  I took the front seat, and Jahan settled into the gunner’s chair. The canopy dropped, I flipped on the engines, instruments, and radio, and called to the bridge. “We’re ready.”

  For a few seconds, we could hear the air being sucked out of the bay and back into the rest of the ship. No sense wasting atmosphere. It cost money to make, as Jax frequently pointed out. Once the wind sounds died, the great outer doors swung slowly and ponderously open. Our view was dominated by the curving rim of the planet. Green seas and a small continent rolled past us. Beyond the bulk of the world, the stars glittered ice-bright. I sent us out into space, and immediately dodged a piece of broken ship.

  “Do mind the trash,” Jahan said.

  Something was niggling at me. Something missing in the orbital mix—but I was too busy negotiating the floating debris to figure it out. Instead of heading directly to the planet, I took the time to explore the expanding circle of debris that had been the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción. We soon saw bits of floating detritus that had once been people. I studied each frozen face haloed with crystals of frozen blood.

  “She’s dead,” Jahan said.

  “I know,” I said. But I couldn’t accept it. She was the heir to the League. There may have been added protection for Mercedes. There had to have been. She could not be gone. Twenty minutes later, I admitted defeat, took us out of the debris field, and headed toward the planet.

  We were passing relatively close to a small moon—Kusatsu-Shirane had five but the others weren’t presently in view—when I heard it. A distress beacon, sending its cry into the void. We locked on and followed it. The life capsule had clamped itself limpetlike to the stony surface of the moon. The tiny computer brain that controlled the capsule had rightly figured that it was safer for the occupant not to be floating in a battle zone, and found refuge.

  I landed the Wasp, popped the canopy, and pushed out with such force that I almost hit escape velocity from the tiny planetoid. Jahan’s tail caught my ankle, and pulled me back.

  Moving with a bit more caution, I approached the body-shaped container resting in a small crater. The black surface was etched with messages in every known League language, urging the finder to contact the navy headquarters on Hissilek. There was also a dire warning to any that might stumble upon the body that the DNA of the human inside was not to be harvested or touched in any way.

  I brushed away the layer of fine dust and ice that covered the faceplate of the life capsule. It was Mercedes. Placed into a deep coma by drugs injected by the capsule. Her long dark brown hair, streaked now with silver at her temples, had been braided, and the braid lay across one shoulder. A few strands of hair had come loose, and caught in her lips at the moment that the capsule had slammed shut around her. I wanted to reach out and brush them away. I studied the long, patrician nose, the espresso-and-cream-colored skin. She was so beautiful—and she was alive.

  “Hmm, I thought a princess would be prettier,” Jahan said.

  “She’s beautiful!” I flared.

  “Ah, I see now. You’re in love with her.”

  We returned to the Selkie. There was no way to fit the capsule inside the Wasp. I reprogrammed the clamps and secured Mercedes to the hull. It made me uncomfortable treating her in such a disrespectful way, but I couldn’t open the capsule in vacuum and I had no suit for her.

  “That was a quick trip.” Baca’s voice filled my helmet.

  “We found a survivor,” I radioed back as I brought us in through the bay doors and dropped the Wasp onto the deck.

  It was the work of minutes to unclamp the capsule from the side of the Wasp, and blow the seals. I eyed the tangle of IV tubes and the pinpricks of blood that stained her arms and legs where the needles had driven through her clothes and into her veins. While I was trying to figure out how to remove them without causing her pain, the capsule sensed warmth and atmosphere, and withdrew the needles that kept her in a deathlike coma.

  I slid my arms beneath her and picked her up. I’d like to say that I swept her into my arms, but at five feet eight inches tall, she was not much shorter than me, and I had to work to carry her.

  “You could have waited for a stretcher,” Jahan said as she listened to my panting breaths, and noticed the way I braced myself against the wall of the lift. I shook my head, not wanting to waste the air. “And have you considered that you have put us all at grave risk by bringing her aboard? We were smuggling to a Hidden World. The League will not only imprison us for that, they will assume we know the location of other such worlds, and they won’t be gentle in trying to elicit that information.”

  “I couldn’t just leave her there.”

  “Because you’re in love with her.”

  I summoned up a glare. I didn’t have the breath for a response. We reached the fourth deck level, and I carried Mercedes into our small, but well-equipped, sick bay.

  Dalea was waiting for us. I wasn’t sure if Dalea had a medical license, but whatever her training was, she was very good. There had to be a story about why she’d signed aboard a ship, because she was Hajin, and the herbivores weren’t common in space, but I hadn’t managed to worm it out of her yet.

  Her coat was white with streaks of red-brown, and a thick shock of chestnut hair curled across her skull and ran down her long neck and even longer spine to disappear beneath the waistband of her slacks. Somewhere along the evolutionary chain, a creature like a cross between a zebra and a giraffe had stood upright, the front legs had shortened to become arms, and the split hoof that passed for feet developed a third digit that served as a thumb.

  I laid Mercedes on the bed, and Dalea began her examination. I was jiggling, shifting my weight from foot to foot, waiting. Finally, I couldn’t contain my anxiety any longer.

  “Is she hurt?”

  “Bumps, bruises.” Dalea filled a hypodermic. “She took a pretty good dose of radiation, probably when the flagship blew. This will help.”

  She gave Mercedes the injection. A few moments later there was a reaction. Mercedes stirred and moaned. I laid a hand on her forehead.

  “She’s in pain. What was in that shot?” I asked, suddenly suspicious of my alien shipmate.

  “Nanobots that will repair her damaged DNA. That’s not why she’s moaning. She’s coming o
ut of a rapidly induced coma, and she’s got that feeling of pins-and-needles in her extremities.”

  Dalea exchanged a glance with Jahan, who shrugged and said, “He’s in love with her. What else can you expect?”

  “Would you stop saying that,” I said, exasperated.

  “So stay with her,” said Dalea. “I’m assuming that if you love her, you must know her, and she should wake up to a familiar face.”

  The two alien females left the sick bay. I broke the magnetic seal on a chair, pulled it over to the bedside, and sat down. I took Mercedes’s limp hand where it hung over the side of the bed, and softly stroked it. It was her left hand, and the elaborate wedding set seemed to cut at my fingers.

  She should wake up to a familiar face. What would that have been like? To sleep next to this woman? To have her scent in my nostrils? To have her long hair catch in my lips? Once, twenty-two years ago, I had experienced only the last of those fantasies. We had violated lights out at the Academy and met on the Star Deck. We had kissed, and her hair, floating in free fall, had caressed my face.

  I was lost in a daydream, tending toward an actual dream, when Mercedes sighed and her fingers tightened on mine. My eyes jerked open, and I shot up out of the chair. She looked up at me, smiled, and murmured,

  “Tracy. I dreamed I heard your voice. But you can’t actually be here.”

  “But I am, your highness.”

  She frowned, and reached up. I leaned forward so she could touch my face. She looked around the tiny space, and she accepted the truth. “Once more you rescue me,” she murmured.

  Walking onto the bridge, I was met with three conversations all taking place simultaneously.

  “Why are we still here? No trade, no money,” from Jax.

  “Are you going down?” from Baca.

  “I think I know what killed the Imperials,” from Melin.

  I answered them in order of complexity. “Because I say so. Yes. What?”

  Melin picked the question out of my surly and laconic reply. “Kusat-su-Shirane only has three moons now.”

  I sat down at my post. “They blew up two of their moons?”

  “Yep. Apparently, the Imperials closed with the planet in their normal arrowhead formation. Given the regularity of the moons’ orbits, the folks on Kusatsu-Shirane picked the two moons closest to the ships to destroy. The resulting debris went through the ships like shotgun pellets through cheese. Boom!” Melin accompanied the word with an expressive gesture.

  “That would imply that the other three are booby trapped too.”

  “Most likely.”

  “Madre de Dios! I landed us on one of the remaining moons.” I wiped away the sweat that had suddenly bloomed on my upper lip.

  “I think it took a person with a finger on the trigger to set off the explosions,” Melin offered. It was comfort, but not much.

  “New plan. Let’s stay away from the remaining moons,” I said to our navigator.

  “Good plan,” she said, and turned back to her console.

  Baca spoke up. “Then why the dirge from the planet? They won a mighty victory.”

  “But short term,” Jahan said. I jumped. Damn it, she’d done it again. Her fur tickled my left ear.

  I nodded. “What Jahan said. The battle group’s course was filed with Central Command on Hissilek. When they neither call home nor come home, the League will come looking for them. Kusatsu-Shirane is going to be discovered.”

  “Tracy’s right.”

  Mercedes’s voice had always had this little catch in it. Very endearing and very sexy. I stood and turned around. She was on the platform lift, and she looked shaky. I hurried to her side, and assisted her into the chair Baca hastily vacated. He was staring like a pole-axed bull. I couldn’t blame him. How often did an ordinary space tramp meet the heir to an empire?

  “Uh . . . hello, ma’am, Luis Baca, communications. I’ll get a message off to Hissilek.”

  “Where are you bound for next?” she asked me.

  “Cuandru.”

  “A message won’t reach League space faster than this ship. There will be military ships at Cuandru.” She was right about that; Cuandru was the largest shipyard in the League. Mercedes smiled at me, but I noticed that the expression never reached her eyes. They were dark and haunted. “You’re the captain.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Congratulations. You finally made it.”

  “On a trading vessel.” I hoped that the resentment didn’t show too badly.

  “Believe me, it’s better than being an admiral,” Mercedes said softly.

  “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “So why are you still in orbit?” she asked.

  “We have no communication from the planet,” Jax trilled. “We are uncertain if there is anyone to trade with.”

  “Tracy was on his way to the planet when he picked up your distress signal,” Melin said.

  “Did they evacuate?” Mercedes asked.

  “It’s possible, but not likely. There were close to a million people on Kusatsu-Shirane,” I said.

  Mercedes stood. “Then let us go and find out what has become of them.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “I’m not asking. You’re still my subject.”

  The final words came floating back over her shoulder. I followed her onto the lift.

  The wind whispered down the deserted streets of Edogowa. There were no vehicles parked on the streets. It was all very tidy and orderly. It was near sunset, and to the west magnificent thunderheads formed a vibrant palette of blues, grays, reds, and golds. Two long but very narrow bands of rain extended from the clouds to the chaparral below. The bands looked like sweeping tendrils of gray hair, and where the rain hit the ground, the dust on this high desert plateau boiled into the air like milk froth.

  “Where is everybody?” Baca asked. His eyes darted nervously from side to side.

  Jahan came scrambling down the wall of a four-story office building. “Nobody’s there. Lights are off. Computers shut down. It’s like everybody’s taken a holiday.”

  Mercedes shivered. I started to put my arm around her shoulders, but thought better of it and drew back. “Let’s go to a house,” she said.

  “Why?” Jahan asked.

  “When you think something terrible is about to happen, you want to be with your loved ones,” Mercedes answered.

  We had ended up landing the Selkie at the small spaceport. The Wasp could only comfortably carry two, and the melancholy music and the lack of human voices had me jumpy. I wanted backup. Jahan radioed our plan back to Melin, Jax, and Dalea.

  Our footfalls echoed on the sidewalk and bounced off the sides of the buildings. I realized that something else was missing besides the people: the smell of cooking food. There were hundreds of restaurants in Edo-gowa. Most business was conducted over a meal, and deals were sealed with alcohol. Food was a ritual on Kusatsu-Shirane. But now all I smelled was that pungent mix of dust and rain and ozone as the storm approached.

  The business district gave way to small wood houses with shoji screens on the windows, and graceful upturned edges on the roofs. Now we found vehicles, carefully parked at the houses. The clouds rolled in, dulling the color of the flowers in perfectly groomed beds. Overhead, thunder grumbled like a giant shifting in his sleep.

  We picked a house at random and walked up to the front door. I knocked. Silence. I knocked again. Mercedes reached past me, grasped the knob, and opened the door.

  “Trusting kind of place,” Baca muttered.

  “They want us to come in. To see,” Mercedes said in a hollow tone.

  No one asked the obvious see what question. It had taken me longer, but I had finally come to the same point as Mercedes in my analysis. Japanese-influenced culture, imminent loss of their children and their way of life—for the people of Kusatsu-Shirane there was only one possible solution.

  The family was in the bedroom. The children lay in their moth
er’s arms. Her lax hands were still over their eyes. She had a neat hole in her forehead. The children had been shot in the back of the head. The father slumped in a chair, chin resting on his chest. Blood formed a bib on the front of his shirt. The pistol had fallen from his hand.

  Mercedes remained stone-faced as we toured more houses. It was the seventh house before she finally broke. A sob burst out, she turned toward me. My arms opened, and she buried her face against my chest. She was crying so hard that in a matter of moments, the front of my shirt was wet. It made me think of the father in the first house, his shirt wet with blood. I closed my arms tight around Mercedes, trying to hold back the horror.

  “Why? They would have had a good life! Especially the children. Why would they do this? They’re insane!”

  “Because the life we offered wasn’t the life they wanted,” I said softly. “This was the last choice they could make for themselves, and they made it. I’m not saying it’s a good choice, but I can understand it.”

  “They killed their children,” Mercedes whispered. “Thousands of children.” She broke out of my embrace, dragged frantic fingers through her hair. “Why? To keep them from us? We’re not monsters!”

  “That depends on where you’re sitting in the pecking order,” Jahan said in her dry way.

  There was a silence for several long moments. Mercedes stood in the living room, surrounded by the dead. She looked lost and terribly frail. I stepped to her side and put my arm around her.

  “Let’s go,” I said softly. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Ghosts,” she whispered. “They’ll be here.”

  Melin plotted our course for Cuandru, the Isanjo home world. We boosted out of orbit, heading for open vacuum between the planets before we entered the Fold.

  I left the bridge and went to visit Jax in his office/cabin. He was standing in a wading pool of water rehydrating his leaves, and holding a computer while he ran figures. Nervous whistling emerged from the sound valves that lined his sides. Each valve emitted a different, discordant tone. It was like a dentist drilling.