House of Suns (15 page)

‘There must be a way for me to become Count Mordax,’ the boy said.

‘He’s the baddie,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Why would you want to become him?’

‘He’s the baddie to you. But I bet he doesn’t think of himself that way.’

‘He kidnapped my lady-in-waiting. He won’t let her go until he finds out where Calidris is.’

He asked me what I had done to free the lady-in-waiting. I told him about Calidris and the futile attempts to take the Black Castle.

‘Then you need to try something different. If I became Mordax, I could set her free, couldn’t I?’

I tried to tell him how Palatial would twist his mind once he was in it, to make him think and feel like Mordax, but it was difficult to explain. In any case, he waved aside my point with feigned indifference.

‘I still want to be him.’

‘You can’t - he won’t come near the Palace of Clouds, and he won’t let any of us near the Black Castle.’

‘What about a messenger?’

‘He’ll kill you.’

‘I shall ride as a spy and claim to have knowledge of the sorcerer. He won’t kill me then, at least not until he’s spoken to me. Then I can become him.’

‘He might not see you in person.’

‘Then I’ll become his interrogator, and work my way to him gradually.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said doubtfully. So far, Palatial had been mine, and no one else’s. When I played with it, the only other mind shaping the flow of events had been the dim but cunning intellect of the machine itself, working its way through endless schemata. If the little boy entered the game and took on the persona of Count Mordax, the landscape of my imagination would have changed. There would be another human mind affecting the outcome. It was one thing to be beaten by a machine, but I was not sure how I would take being beaten by another child.

But I did so want him to share my secret world.

‘We can go into it now,’ I said, ‘but everything takes a long time in Palatial. There won’t be time for you to ride out to the Black Castle before you have to leave.’

‘I can still look around,’ the little boy said. ‘I can still make plans, can’t I?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Make all the plans you like. But it won’t make a blind bit of difference in the end.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m still going to win.’

Campion was doing a bad job of masking his fear. It was in the tightness of the muscles around his mouth, in the set of his jaw, leaking through his eyes and pores.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said, slurred as a drunkard. ‘I was going to whisk over to you, not the other way round...’

But before he had a chance to answer, Silver Wings told me herself, whispering information into my head: our two ships had run into the Gentian emergency signal, an event sufficiently ominous that both vehicles had taken the decision to awaken their occupants. We were still travelling at maximum speed, still more than a dozen years from our destination.

‘I came out first,’ Campion said. ‘The advantage of just being in stasis.’

‘I don’t like stasis,’ I said testily, although of course he knew this.

He helped me out of the upright box of my cryophagus casket and gathered me in his strong, warm arms. I felt cold and fragile, like a flower that had been dipped in liquid nitrogen: something that might shatter into colourful brittle pieces at the least provocation.

‘How are you feeling?’ Campion whispered into my ear, nuzzling his face against mine.

‘As if I want to go back to sleep again. As if I’d really prefer it if this was just a bad dream.’

‘Silver Wings
pulled you out fast because of the emergency. You’re going to be a bit groggy.’

I pulled myself tighter against him. He felt fixed and solid, an anchor I could tie myself to.

Hesperus, who was standing behind Campion, said, ‘You have been apart for some time. If you wish to copulate, I can retire to another part of the ship or simply disable my attentive faculties for an agreed interval.’

I did not want to copulate; I just wanted to hold Campion tightly and let life seep back into my bones and muscles and nerve fibres.

But Silver Wings was still speaking into my skull. ‘The embedded content,’ I asked. ‘What did it say?’

Campion pulled back a twitch. ‘What embedded content?’

‘You didn’t look?’

‘It’s a distress code, that’s all. There isn’t meant to be any embedded content.’

‘Silver Wings
says there is. Maybe
Dalliance
didn’t pick up on that, but it’s there.’

‘That’s not protocol. We’re supposed to connect to the private network, find out what the storm’s all about.’

‘Something’s obviously changed.’ More exasperated than cross, I said, ‘I can’t believe you missed the content, Campion: what would have happened if I hadn’t been around?’ Then I grimaced. ‘Ignore me - it’s just brain chemistry.’

‘Shall I retire while you examine the message?’ Hesperus asked tactfully.

I shook my head. ‘Whatever this is, we’re all in it now - including our guests. You’d better brace yourself for some bad news. Whatever this is about, it could mean a delay in reuniting you with your friends.’

‘Thank you for thinking of my welfare when you must have so much else on your minds. With your permission, I would consider it a privilege to be privy to the embedded content. May we examine it here?’

‘I think I need a drink first,’ Campion said, eyeing me guardedly. I felt the same, torn between wanting to know the news, however bad it might be, and at the same time wanting to do anything to delay the moment of revelation.

‘We’ll take it on the bridge,’ I said, closing the door of my casket.

‘There’s something else you need to know,’ Campion said to me quietly, while we were on our way to the nearest whisking point.

I squeezed his hand and asked, ‘What?’

‘We’re down a passenger.’

My brain was still mush. ‘One of the sleepers we picked up from Ateshga?’

‘No—it’s Doctor Meninx. We won’t be having the pleasure of his company again.’

‘What?’
I asked again, aware of Hesperus only a few paces behind.

‘He died. His casket broke down. Hesperus says he tried to fix it when he saw something was going wrong, but Doctor Meninx had put in too many safeguards.’ Campion had put emphasis on that ‘says’, letting me know he only had our guest’s word concerning what had really happened.

‘My God.’

‘Any other time, it would be the only thing on my mind. But now that this has happened as well...’ Campion trailed off.

‘I can’t say I’m going to miss the old bigot, but—’

‘You’d still rather he hadn’t died. Yes, that’s sort of how I feel. They’re going to lap this up, aren’t they?’

‘Give them half a chance. But if it wasn’t really your fault...’ Some impulse caused me to glance back at Hesperus, though I was doing all in my power not to act awkwardly.

‘He says he didn’t do it,’ Campion said under his breath. ‘For now I’ve decided to take him at his word.’

 

As we whisked through-ship to
Silver Wings’
bridge, my thoughts veered between anxious anticipation of the embedded content and dark speculation as to Hesperus’s innocence. I was still prickly and tense when the bridge lit up in welcome as we entered. Anticipating our arrival, the ship had arranged three seats around the plinthed glass hemisphere that was the main displayer. Although
Silver Wings
could have swallowed Campion’s little ship fifty times over, what passed for a bridge on my own ship was about a twentieth the size of his, with configurable walls that were always set to a dull pewter, a low, dimpled ceiling gridded with lights and only the very minimum in terms of visible instrumentation and control interfaces.

‘I presume you were serious about that drink,’ I said, pausing at the bridge’s maker while it fashioned and filled two glasses. Campion’s was alcoholic; mine a cocktail of neural restoratives, to assist my recovery from the cryophagus.

Campion took the glass. ‘Thank you.’

I indicated to Hesperus that he should take the sturdiest seat, while Campion and I lowered ourselves into the other two. ‘No point in delaying this any longer, is there?’ I asked, with a nervous catch in my voice. ‘State the nature of the embedded content,
Silver—
for everyone’s benefit.’

The ship spoke aloud. ‘The embedded content is a non-interactive audio-visual recording with a playback time of one hundred and thirty-five seconds. If there are deeper content layers, I cannot detect them.’

‘Can we assume it’s safe?’

‘I have scrutinised the message to the limit of my abilities and found no dangerous patterns.’

I ran my tongue along the dry edge of my lip. ‘You’d better run it then. Ready, everyone?’

‘As I’ll ever be,’ Campion said. He chose that moment to reach around for my hand, our fingertips only just touching.

The upper half of a man appeared in the hemisphere, rendered life-size. It only took me a moment to recognise him as a fellow shatterling of Gentian Line and to put a name to the face.

‘Fescue,’ I said softly.

‘What would he want—?’ Campion began, before Fescue spoke over his words.

‘If you are in receipt of this message, then I’m assuming that you are latecomers for the reunion. Ordinarily you would deserve the sternest censure... but these are not ordinary times. Now you deserve our blessing, our thanks, and above all our heartfelt wishes for your own continued survival. You may be all that is left of Gentian Line.’ The imaged figure nodded gravely, leaving us in no doubt that we had understood his words.

It was definitely Fescue, but not as we usually knew him. The haughty, supercilious demeanour was only visible as a ghost of itself. His face was drawn, his hair dishevelled, clinging to his forehead in damp curls, his eyes weary, frightened slits. There was even something on his cheek that looked like a burn or bruise or a smudge of oily dirt.

‘We were ambushed,’ he continued, prolonging the syllables of the word with lingering distaste. ‘The Thousand Nights were yet to begin - a dozen or so ships were still to arrive, even though we had already been waiting more than fifteen years. Hundreds had already come, of course - more than eight hundred in orbit. Most of us were already on the world, awake in the carnival cities or waiting in abeyance for the celebrations to commence. When the weapons opened fire, we had no practical defence: the world’s impassors were too feeble to counter the assault, and our ships were annihilated before they could aggregate into an effective counter-force. They used Homunculus weapons against us: horrors we hardly dare speak of, exhumed from the deepest, most pathological vaults of history. After they had reduced our ships to clouds of ionised gas, even the largest and strongest of them, they turned on the reunion world and pumped energy into it for a hundred hours. It was a business of minutes, a mere preamble, to boil away the atmosphere and oceans and render that world as sterile as it had been before our arrival. But the attackers didn’t stop there. They continued to pour energy into the planet, melting first the crust and then the mantle... turning the entire world into a molten ball that glowed first orange and then furious gold, until it began to break up, its own gravity insufficient to hold it together. Over four and a half days, the energy output of those weapons exceeded even that of the sun the world orbited. And when they were done, nothing remained. That was eight years ago, by my reckoning - still more time will have passed when you intercept this signal. Concentrate your sensors on the target system and you will soon see not a sun and its family of worlds, but a new nebula, a roiling dark cloud of rubble and dust and tortured gas, now bound only by the gravity well of the star itself. It will endure for centuries, thousands of years, significant fractions of a circuit. Planets and moons plough through that cloud, but not the world we hoped to make our temporary home. It’s gone, and so has most of the Line.’

Fescue paused and stroked a finger against a puffiness under one of his slitted eyes. It occurred to me then, as it had not before, that he might very well be blind: at no point had I sensed his attention focused in any particular direction.

‘Some got out,’ he said. ‘Those with the fastest ships, the best camouflage or countermeasures ... but few were so fortunate. It will come as no surprise to hear that I have initiated the Belladonna protocol. You must deviate immediately from your present heading. Under no circumstances attempt to enter or approach the reunion system, for even now - eight years after the ambush - the aggressive elements are still loitering, waiting to pick off latecomers. Even once you have obeyed the Belladonna protocol, you must be watchful for pursuers: complete your turn stealthily, and use misdirection as appropriate. If you sense you are being followed, you must sacrifice yourselves rather than lead the attackers to the Belladonna fallback.’

Again Fescue fell silent, looking to one side as if he had seen - or perhaps heard - something that merited his attention. When he resumed speaking, it was with a renewed haste.

‘I chose to embed this message because it was too risky to convey this information via the private network: the nature of the ambush implies that our security is not as tight as we had imagined, and any attempt to tap into the network may be detected and acted upon by those who would seek to exterminate our Line. Concerning the nature of our attackers, and their reasons for doing this ... I regret to tell you that I have no information.’ Fescue shook his head forcefully. ‘Nothing: not even the tiniest flicker of intelligence. But I know this. Unless one has arisen in the last circuit, no galactic civilisation—not even the Rebirthers or the Machine People - is known to possess the sophistry in vacuum manipulation necessary to duplicate Homunculus-level technology. Those weapons must therefore be the original instruments, despite the fact that Marcellin Line was charged with their disposal four and a half million years ago. The question therefore begs itself: did Marcellin Line betray their promise to the Commonality and conceal those weapons when they should have decommissioned them? I cannot believe they would have done so ... but then neither can I believe that Gentian Line has enemies who would wish this upon us. Therefore tread carefully, for if the Marcellins cannot necessarily be trusted, then neither can any other Line in the Commonality. After thirty-two circuits and six million years, we may finally have run out of friends.’