A Conflict of Orders (An Age of Discord Novel Book 2) (19 page)

The steward walked the length of the corpse on the armoury’s decking, taking in details. Once he was at the head, he squatted, and gently prodded one cheek with a stiff forefinger.

“Been dead a while, ma’am,” he said.

Rinharte had already realised as much, but she remained patient. “How long exactly?” she asked.

“Not sure I can say exact. Mummified like this… well, ma’am, more’n a few weeks. Maybe as long as half a year.”

Rinharte squatted down beside Swarmi. “What about cause of death?” she asked.

“No obvious trauma.” He tried to pull back one of the body’s eyelids, but it had dried in place. “Maybe asphyxia. This place is sealed when the door is shut—right?”

Rinharte nodded.

“Probably ended up breathing his own carbon dioxide, ma’am, fainted away and then suffocated.” He bent sideways and pulled one of the cadaver’s hands towards him. The arm was not stiff. “See: ends of the fingers are torn. Been trying to get the door open.”

“I noticed a slight shortness of breath when I came in,” put in Kordelasz. He seemed ghoulishly fascinated by Smarwi’s revelations.

Rising to her feet, Rinharte said, “Right. Get the body moved to a store-room. We’ll need it to present to the Admiral when we reach Obok.”

Turning her back on the cadaver, Rinharte made her way up the ramp to the armoury’s upper deck. Kordelasz fell in step alongside her.

“What do you think she will do?” he asked.

“The Admiral? Have it out with
Puncheon
’s captain.” Rinharte gave a grim smile. “They’ll not dissemble with
Vengeful
’s gun trained on them.”

“I can’t believe we have a traitor in our midst, one of the Serpent’s ships in
our
fleet.”

Rinharte glanced at Kordelasz and was surprised to see the marine-captain was incensed. They passed out of the armoury, to be confronted by a crowd of marines and Winter Rangers. She swore under her breath. “See to them, Garrin,” she said quietly. “Have them back at their drill.”

He nodded absently, although his thoughts were clearly still on
Puncheon
and her captain. “What will you say to the Admiral?” he asked.

“There’s time yet to decide on that.”

“But you
will
tell her?”

Rinharte gazed at Kordelasz. “Of course. What purpose would be served by keeping it from her?”

“Maybe there’s more than one traitor in the fleet. Maybe we could watch
Puncheon
and see if any of the officers aboard her implicate other ships.”

They stood in the entrance to the armoury, while around them a semicircle of marines and Winter Rangers gazed silently at them, and wondered why it was she now found the concept of intelligence work slightly distasteful. She had been lieutenant of intelligence aboard
Vengeful
for many years. The realisation that she now shared most Imperial Navy officers’ attitude to the Intelligence branch kept her silent. She looked away from Kordelasz, across the crowd, past one of the barracks-blocks, to steel buttress against the hull…

She sighed. “I can’t think about it now, Garrin,” she said at length. “Get this lot back to their drills and ensure Boat-Sergeant Alus sees the body is stored. When we arrive in Obok, I’ll take a boat across to
Vengeful
.” She turned to the marine-captain. “It’s all I can do for now.”

She left him to his orders and marched off across the troop-deck to the ladder on the forward bulkhead.

Each and every night since leaving Kunta, Casimir Ormuz had tried to visit the nomosphere. As yet, he had not found the trick which guaranteed success. Some nights, he lay in his bunk, desperately willing himself to sleep. But it would not come. And when it did, it took him by surprise and he only learnt of its ambush when he awoke the next morning. Other nights, he would ride gently into oblivion, knowing he would not get to visit the nomosphere, but being so close to the borders of sleep he neither worried nor cared.

On those infrequent occasions when he did find himself in the nomosphere, he searched for information on the Serpent and his doings. Had any more ships or regiments been routed to Geneza? What was happening on Shuto? Whatever he learnt, he passed onto the Admiral the next morning. If he happened to be spending the night with her, he told her the moment she awoke. If he had slept in his own cabin, he had to make an appointment. Then, she was her normal forbiddingly cold self; and not the sensuous lover he knew from the times he shared her bed. Had she been the same, he wondered, with the Duke of Ahasz?

It was time to leave. He had found what he had sought here in the nomosphere. From the reports from the capital world, the Serpent’s attack had bogged down. The Emperor and Imperial Family remained safe in the Imperial Palace, but they were under siege. The Serpent’s army had built a system of trenches in the Imperial Household District. Neither side appeared close to victory.

Ormuz realised he should have expected this. The Imperial Palace was not so poorly defended it could not withstand an attack. Nor was the Serpent likely to launch one unless he felt he might succeed. A stalemate was the natural outcome.

He willed himself to depart. The black suns splashed across the nomosphere’s white heavens blurred and faded to a formless grey on which he could not focus. Ormuz screwed his eyes shut and prepared to awaken. In a moment, sensation would steal into his body, giving him awareness of his location—the scratchy linen of his sheets; the downy cotton of his night-gown, its material bunched up behind his knees, as it always did. The mounds of the pillow either side of his head, and the scent of freshly-laundered bedding in his nostrils. Above his bed, the ceiling of his cabin aboard
Vengeful
, its wooden joists and planks polished to a time-worn dullness —

Warm.
Too
warm.

Curled up.

Arms wrapped about legs.

No. This was wrong. He felt himself surrounded by a low liquid heat, lapping softly over and about him. He could feel the hard lengths of his shins against his forearms, and his fingers wrapped about his elbows. He tried to straighten, but found himself constrained by something which gave like rubber. His eyes were still shut. He opened them, but saw only blackness. His mouth… He opened that too—and suddenly realised he was immersed in water.

He couldn’t breath.

His lungs were filled with liquid. He began to panic and thrash. In the back of his mind, he wondered what had happened to him. Had someone stolen him from his cot while he lay dreaming in the nomosphere? And put him…

Where
?

His thrashing must have triggered something. The walls about him relaxed and one side of his prison gave way. Ormuz found himself forced into the wall, squeezed into a narrow tunnel which gripped his body with muscular strength, pushing his elbows into his ribs, pressing his knees together, gripping his head so tightly he felt the skin of his forehead being pulled up to his crown.

He burst into the air. Expelled by a valve or sphincter onto a cold stone table. Water splashed across him and off the table, leaving a thin film on the surface about him. He coughed up the water from his lungs, spat it out as it filled his mouth, and drew in a shuddering breath. It
hurt
. He inhaled again and began to cough. Great, wracking coughs that made his ribs ache and his diaphragm throb. More liquid dribbled from his mouth. He raised himself on his arms, hands flat on the table-top, head hanging down. For long moments, he spat and coughed, coughed and spat. Until each breath no longer sent a searing pain through his chest, and he began to feel light-headed from the influx of oxygen.

At that point, he raised his head. There was something wrong with his vision. Ormuz could see clearly what lay directly before him, but his peripheral vision was blurred and indistinct. And more, he felt disconnected, not quite fully inhabiting his body. As if he had just woken from a dream and had yet to click into full consciousness; as if this flesh he wore were nothing more than a suit, and an ill-fitting one at that. Screwing up his eyes, he concentrated on the sight before him:

A vertical opening clamped shut. It appeared half-biological and half-mechanical. Sheets of glistening muscle were pinned in place by steel brackets and hinged upon steel joints; and the whole edifice was supported by a metal framework. Behind the part-flesh structure lay a deflated sac. Ormuz thought he saw something beyond, and attached to, the sac but the detail eluded him.

He shook his head but his senses refused to sharpen. Almost drunkenly, he inspected his surroundings. He lay on a grey stone table in a blurry square room of the same material. The entire ceiling was lit by a diffuse glow. In one wall, a doorway cast a rectangle of fuzzy gold into the room. He glanced down at himself. He was naked but he ambient temperature was comfortably warm. He slid from the table-top, slipping in the thin layer of water and throwing out a hand to remain upright. The floor beneath his feet also felt warm.

Where was he
?
Why did he feel so confused
?

This was no place he recognised—despite his poor vision, his thick head. It was no place he could even imagine. He staggered toward the doorway, his balance shot. Reaching the jamb, he held onto it for a moment but felt no more secure on his feet. Deep breaths did not bring clarity. Motion behind startled him and he spun dizzily about. The sac from which he had been birthed was being lifted away from the table and swung through a hatch which had opened in the wall. He staggered across to it—the machinery moved slowly and jerkily, and it would be several minutes before the sac and its sphincter mechanism fully exited the room.

The area through the hatch was dark—No, was tinged by blood-red light. Ormuz looked through but could not make sense of what he saw. He blinked repeatedly, brought a hand up to rub his eyes. And the view before him suddenly receded vertiginously away. A bolus of bile shot up into his throat. He swallowed it hastily.

The hatch looked into a vast chamber. Ormuz could not see its bottom. It was filled with rack upon rack of sacs, such as the one which had disgorged him. Shapes twitched and slithered in them, dark shapes of red, shapes which revealed themselves as flesh slid across flesh. People. Many thousands of them, too many to count. A vast orchard of human fruit.

Ormuz’s mind could not hold onto what he had seen. He stumbled backwards in horror, stopping only when he fetched up against the table.
People.
Their end beyond sight, their number beyond comprehension. He screwed his eyes shut and the image of that vast red field of pulsating sacs rose unbidden into his mind. He shook his head and hammered the heel of his hand against one temple.

Turning clumsily about, he made for the blurred rectangle of light that was the exit from the room. Once through it, he found himself in a corridor. It stretched to left and right, indistinct and formless beyond twenty or so yards. One direction was as good as another. He chose right. And began to stumble forward, one hand to the wall.

He soon realised that the corridor curved gently to the right, as if tracing a great circle. Dark openings led into rooms similar to the one in which he had appeared. All were empty—although if a figure hid in the shadows in each room, he could not see it. He could barely make out the tables in the rooms.

His body had found a rhythm which suited it, and he marched on. He remembered nothing for a period. It might have been hours. A dull ache throbbed in his legs, so it had certainly been more than a few minutes. He continued to follow the corridor, which began to curve in a tighter circle. The corridor too was no longer level, but climbed at a gentle gradient. It made walking more difficult and this brought him back to himself.

He met no one; he passed no one. The only sound he heard was a faint hum, shifting up and down in frequency but not loud enough to be identifiable.

And then he was there. The end of the corridor. An archway stretched from wall to wall. Beyond it, he saw a great chamber filled with shadows and indistinct shapes which flickered and slid about. He marched stiff-legged through the arch, but even within the chamber he could not understand his surroundings. He peered to left and right. It was as if he were underwater—that same shifting, deceptive sense that what he saw was not what
was
. Figures flitted to and fro, moving too quickly for his poor vision to capture and identify. He staggered forward a few more steps, reeled to one side and fetched up against a wall.

No, not a wall. At knee-height, there was an opening some ten feet wide and ten feet high. One of several, he could just make out. It was a gallery of some kind, looking onto… an open space? a shaft? Ormuz could not see the other side, although the curvature of the wall to left and right suggested a great circle. And it was too dark up above to be open to the air. Looking down, he saw a deeper darkness. The shaft could be bottomless for all he could tell.

Turning back into the chamber, he screwed up his eyes and tried to make sense of the view before him. Those darting shapes were clearly people, busy about tasks. And that large and imposing shape over there—

It
moved
.

The shape, a looming blurred shadow, shifted and changed aspect. Ormuz concentrated harder, the better to see it, to understand it.

A throne, a great throne.

And seated upon it a creature too large to be human.

He could make out some detail now. A head, with plates of bone curving out from the cheeks and up into a pair of tined horns above the head. There was no mouth, no nose, just more bone plating. And a pair of eyes, glowing a baleful red.

Hoses and pipes were attached to the creature, to its shoulders, its ribs, along the length of its long legs. Clawed hands gripped the armrests of its chair. One hand rose and pointed a taloned finger at Ormuz. Not a word was spoken.

Others in the chamber—mostly young men, Ormuz now saw, as they drifted in and out of his field of clear vision—turned to Ormuz and began to move closer. Like himself, they were all naked.