His Majesty The Accident

The Empire Thanks You

2008-02-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

His Majesty the Accident is shorter than my first stab at noveling, at only 88,906 words, and took far less time to complete -- a mere three months and two days, even with all the slacking. Alas, if only I could say it came out better, or would require less rewriting, than its predecessor. (=

If you're just now discovering this site, you can start from the first chapter.

Many thanks to everyone who read and endured -- enjoyed, I mean enjoyed -- the story, and to the family and friends whose feedback kept me writing. You've helped make this whole endeavor a very happy accident indeed.

28. The Man Behind the Tree

2008-02-02T14:07:00.000-08:00

Two turns passed. And, at least for Dent, surprisingly little changed.

“Kill you!” his older brother screamed, lunging forward at the boy with an axe as big as two Dents, and considerably deadlier.

Dent leapt to one side, out of the aisle and into Dhuei Decimal System codes 234.5 - 278.9 (venomous reptiles to maritime law). The axe blurred down and neatly halved a poor, unsuspecting library cart.

The stacks of Library Deck were an excellent place for Dent to retreat, slowed as he was by the weight of Captain Corsair’s saber. The space between shelves was just slightly narrower than the width of Pug’s shoulders, forcing his brother to shimmy himself into a less-than-ideal stance for axe-related murdering, and giving Dent a few precious extra seconds to gain some distance.

The boy leapt up to the nearest shelf and began to climb, disgorging large, heavy, incredibly expensive volumes (A Painstaking Study of The Biting Vipers of Malodorous V, Marmoset Hypnosis and You, So You Want to Dispute a Salvage Claim!) to rain with musical thuds against his brother’s helmeted head. With insufficient room to get a good swing going, Pug was forced to poke ineffectually at Dent’s retreating heels with the very end of the axe, which did far more damage to the bookshelves than to Dent himself.

Reaching the top, Dent took a moment to steady himself, then leapt perilously to the next stack over. Behind him, the shelf on which he’d just stood trembled as Pug flung himself against it, bellowing something about murdering Dent’s entire face.

Dent held the saber out in front of him for balance, like a tightrope-walker’s pole, and proceeded to jump three shelves more (Imperial history to unimportant non-Imperial history) before wobblingly climbing down the edge of the shelf. His brother had gone quiet, but Dent trusted that he could hear Pug’s heavy footfalls in time enough to avoid him.

A few shelves shy of the floor, Dent discovered that his brother had learned to walk quietly at some point.

“Face! You! Murder!” Pug roared, red-faced, still up on his tiptoes. Dent’s eyes widened as Pug charged into the stacks, holding his axe ahead of him like a pike. Quickly, the boy tightened his grip on the nearest shelf, tucked his legs up, and kicked into the books, squeezing himself through the gap in the shelves. He landed tailbone-first in the next stack over, just as Pug’s axe thrust through the gap in the books to batter a complete set of The Food-Related Poetry of Emperor Consumptious the Indigestive.

Dent scrambled to his feet and made for the next aisle over, hoping his brother would keep poking around with the axe. But no sooner had Dent skidded out into the open than Pug appeared, drawing a sword from the belt of his full combat armor. Pug wasted no breath on face-murdering-related utterances this time; he simply struck.

Dent brought the saber up in time, the shock of the blow wobbling through his arm and down into his boots (not unlike his experiences with The Young Gentleman’s Convenient Excuse for Electrocution Kit, come to think of it.) Pug swung again, and Dent ducked, thrusting the sword up at his brother. Pug dodged, just, and seized his brother’s sword arm with one massive hand. With the other, Pug brought up his own blade, and prepared to prune a branch from his family tree.

“Your Majesties!” Librarian Glew harrumphed, his arms overflowing with rare volumes he’d sought to save from the carnage. “That is truly quite enough.”

Pug and Dent hung their heads sheepishly as the Librarian advanced. “I seem to recall,” Glew continued, “that we currently occupy some sort of a palace, in which there are a great many rooms not containing the extremely fragile cultural treasures of the Imperium. I suggest you both go find one of them, and practice murdering one another there.”

“Sorry, Librarian,” Dent said, shuffling his feet.

“Got carried away,” Pug shrugged apologetically. “You know how it is.”

“Indeed,” the Librarian nodded, poorly concealing a smile. “By the way, Your Elder Majesty, I located those volumes you requested on etiquette. They’ve been delivered to your chambers.”

“Yeah,” Pug grunted. “Thanks.” It was his equivalent of squealing with excitement, and possibly doing a little dance. He turned to his younger brother, who looked up at him with earnest, serious eyes. “You did good, twerp.”

“Really?” Dent asked, wiggling his sword arm slightly. “This thing’s so heavy.”

“No, that was a good thrust,” Pug nodded. “Almost got me. But next time, don’t go for the armor, ‘cause that’s like, tough. Look for the seams. You, uh, sure I can’t get you a smaller sword just to start with? I got heaps of them.”

Dent’s face turned grave, and he shook his head quickly. Since Bosun Little had given the boy Captain Corsair’s sword, Dent had scarcely let it out of his grip, and his family had nearly learned to stop asking him about it.

“So, hey, did you like how I said I was gonna murder your face, when I totally wasn’t?” Pug beamed, lifting his helmet to wipe sweat from his brow. “That’s called subterfuge.” Pug had been studying.

“I was completely fooled,” Dent only partly lied.

“Okay, good fight,” Pug said. “I gotta go meet with Vestimaster Mezzure about some formal suits, and then see if I can get Maurice outta his room today.”

Upon his return from offworld, Pug’s titled had been switched from the Minister of Violence to the Minister of Conversation. This did not necessarily excude conversations that involved large, dangerous weapons, but nonetheless, Maurice was so crushed at his charge’s perceived betrayal that he’d spent the last turn and a half locked in his private quarters.

Ellentine, charged with delivering the grizzled old trainer a full container of sylvanbean ice cream each afternoon, reported soft, blubbery, despondent noises issuing from behind Maurice’s door.

“See you at dinner?” Dent asked, and Pug nodded, and punched him amiably on the arm. Dent found that he was still accumulating bruises these days, but they were at least more kindly intended.

Librarian Glew shooed the both of them out, asking Dent to send for a repair crew up when he next encountered Mechanic Doren, and the brothers parted ways in the corridor. As Pug clanked off, mentally reviewing the proper order for using one’s forks, Dent maneuvered the Captain’s blade awkwardly into the scabbard that hung from his Adventure Belt. If he angled it right, as Dent was learning to, it didn’t quite clunk along on the floor as he walked.

Dent spotted a tiny insect darting through the cool, slightly salty air of the hallway. Since neither Imperia nor the palace had any native insects, outside of Zoology deck, Dent waved amiably at the bug. A tiny camera transmitted his image invisibly through the decks of the balance, through a relay station, and neatly into the retinal overlay worn by his mother the Empress, who smiled, and kept at her knitting.

“That’s my son,” she confided to Mr. Gnash, her very favorite nightshark. Mr. Gnash gnawed futilely against the transparent flooring of the Empress’s chamber before thrashing off into the watery gloom, and the Empress turned her attention back to the rapidly dwindling political fortunes of the current Duly Elected.

As Dent waited for the pneumovator, he caught himself staring up at the ventilation duct, hoping for a flash of reflective eyes. That was silly, of course; by Imperial decree, Pebble was now entirely welcome in the whole of the palace (save perhaps the Empress’s deck, but a few more months of regular bathing on the girl’s part might prompt Her Majesty to reconsider.)

Pebble had only been gone a little more than a turn, and would only be away for a few turns more, but Dent already missed her terribly. But she deserved to spend time with her family, now that she’d helped Mechanic Doren and his men to unseal the linkages between the palace and his boilers, and reports from the Imperial Anthropological Corps indicated that the girl was proving invaluable in smoothing over any misunderstandings between the two divergent cultures. The boiler people had almost entirely stopped referring to Pebble as “the angel,” even.

In the interim, Pebble had taken to sending him notes via the palace’s newly reestablished pneumonetwork. Apparently, her parents and little brother were all quite keen to meet him, and Dent was pretty sure Pebble was joking when she’d warned him to wear body armor before letting her mother hug him.

On the way up from Library deck, the pneumovator stopped to admit a young woman. She was trailed by Scribe Third Class Nibbins, who nodded kindly to Dent as she boarded the carriage.

“… I mean, sure, OK, princes and ambassadors, fine,” the other young woman was saying. “That comes with the territory. All I’m saying is, could we maybe get some poets into the rotation? Maybe a painter? Some musicians? There have to be a few among the aristocracy.”

“I’ll pass along the request, Your Majesty,” Nibbins nodded, dutifully recording, and then cleared her throat and shot a glance in Dent’s direction. The young woman turned, and Dent realized with a mild shock that it was his sister.

“Hey, creep,” Lis smiled at him, and did a quick turn, showing off the diaphanous folds of her clothing. “Like the new outfit?”

“There’s… there’s so much of it,” Dent marveled, and compared to his previous experience with his sister, this was true.

Lis’s gaze fell briefly upon the saber dangling perilously from Dent’s belt, and for a moment her smile faltered, and sadness veiled her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Dent said quickly, and turned, trying as best he could to block it from her view. But Lis, with a small effort, only grinned at him, and sighed.

“It looks good on you,” she said, her voice catching a little in her throat. “You’ll make a great bandit yet.”

“I don’t know,” Dent said, studying the floor. He was reconsidering his banditry-related career plans. This week, he thought he might rather be an astronomer.

“Oh, come on,” Lis smirked. “Somebody’s gotta be the family disgrace.” Dent stuck his tongue out at her, and she responded in kind, and ducked out of the pneumovator on Recreation Deck, trailed by Nibbins, who was deciding whether blowing a raspberry was the sort of thing one transcribed.

The pneumovator rushed onward, and soon Dent found himself in the rarefied, gilded halls of Imperial Deck. A parade of ministers were shuffling from his father’s conference room, and each nodded and bowed to Dent, now that they were allowed to acknowledge his existence. He waved cordially to the guards at his father’s door, who half-bowed back, and knocked for admission. The door slid open.

His father sat behind the massive geode desk, paging through datascrolls, and did not look up when Dent entered his study.

“Accident,” the Emperor intoned, “I want you to go have a look at my model.”

“Yes, Majesty,” Dent nodded, a little bit fearful, and wondering what he’d done this time. He walked quietly over to the table, hands at his sides, and studied the frozen, miniature combatants on the scaled-down contours of Echo Hill.

“Do you notice anything odd?” the Emperor asked. “Anything… missing?”

Dent looked at the very edge of the model, to the empty, unpainted space just next to the tree, and swallowed hard. Things had been going so well, really, and now Dent feared he would slide back into being the annoyance, the obstacle, the obligation.

When Dent looked up, his father was crossing the room toward him, noble face stony and impassive. “I noticed one figure gone from the model several turns back,” the Emperor said. “During your… excursion. I suspect you know what happened to it.”

Dent had glossed over certain details of his escape from the prison cell on Sir Leslie’s shop, hoping to avoid just this sort of questions. Now he looked his father in the eye — turning his gaze anywhere else would have earned him a scolding — and nodded.

“Do you know who that figure represented?” the Emperor asked sternly. “Do you know why he was important?” Dent shook his head, setting his jaw, preparing for the inevitable lecture.

His father knelt down then, next to the model, on Dent’s eye level. It startled the boy, and he took a half-step back. His father knelt for no one, but here he was, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I didn’t either,” the Emperor said. “Not for a good two, three years after the battle, even. I might not have ever known, if Rendell hadn’t brought it up after consulting with the historians.” He looked at the empty spot next to the tree, and Dent saw again that strange distance in his face, that summoning back to the combat of the Emperor’s youth.

“His name was Merriwell,” the Emperor said. “Scout, Second Grade. His sergeants deemed him too small, too distracted for frontline combat. They made him a spotter, bringing up the rear guard. Hardly a position of honor.”

The Emperor pointed to his own tiny figure, leading the charge up the hill. “There I was, you see, about to break through the Armada’s lines.” He traced his finger across the map to a small, distant hill, covered with tiny model foliage, and for the first time, Dent noticed black, beetle-carapaced models of Dark Matter Armada troopers huddled there, all but invisible. “And here was an Armada sniper squadron, with a full complement of particle cannons, and a clear line of sight to my position.”

The Emperor sighed, and shook his head. “It was a trap, you see. I thought I was smashing their lines at the weakest point. But they were deliberately weakening their fortifications there, taking a chance to lure me in. And I never would have seen it. But Merriwell, it seems … Merriwell did.”

As Dent peered closer at the model, the Emperor traced a line between the Armada snipers and the empty space beside the tree. “It was pitch dark,” the Emperor recalled, “and the rain was pounding hard upon us. But Merriwell caught a flash of their dazzlescopes through the gloom, and trained his field glasses, and saw them. And when his superior refused to let him call in an orbital strike, Merriwell apparently stole the access codes and ordered it anyway. I remember the beam as it lanced down, brilliant, burning away the clouds, but it was just one of many things going on around me. I didn’t understand why it mattered, at the time.”

The Emperor looked at Dent now, and to the boy’s considerable surprise, his father’s features softened into something approaching kindness. “Had I known, I would have given him a medal. Gods, I would have given him a title, perhaps even a moon. But I didn’t. And he died the very next day — stepped on a hidden earthcharge while clearing out the fortifications. A sad end for a man who saved the Empire, don’t you think?”

Dent nodded, and the Emperor brought up a closed fist, and then opened it slowly. In his palm, Dent saw a freshly repainted replica of the soldier he’d stolen. “He saw what no one else was looking for. He cared about people who gave not a breath for him. And he did right, when even his own opposed him. That’s why he’s important,” the Emperor said. “That’s why I want you to help me put him back where he belongs.”

Hesitantly, Dent picked up the model Merriwell, and stuck him back on the miniature grass, next to the tiny tree. Then he frowned, curiously, and pointed to another lone soldier, charging up the hill at the Emperor’s flank.

“Who’s this?” Dent asked, always curious. The Emperor smiled.

“To explain that,” he said, “I’ll have to tell you how we got to Echo Hill in the first place…”

And peace, for the moment, abided among the Imperial family, and within their seashell palace, and across their private ocean planet, and throughout the whole of their fine and glittering galaxy.

And, as these stories are rightfully supposed to end, they all lived happily ever after.

… At least, until the the Dark Matter Armada returned.

But everyone already knows that story.

27. Endings, Some Happy

2008-01-28T20:50:00.001-08:00

In Story’s absence, there was no specific person designated to care for Dent on the Imperial flagship, as it made its way back to Imperia. Dent’s father, once he’d gotten past clapping his grimy, smelly, beaming son on the shoulder and smiling at him in a way that made both of them feel like they’d just conquered at least fifteen planets, found himself at a loss. As for the Empress, the idea wasn’t even broached.

To the Emperor’s considerable surprise, there was no shortage of volunteers to fill in for the boy’s care. Despite a rather earest bid from Mechanic Doren, Cook won out in the end — one does not wish to antagonize the person who prepares one’s food — and thus became the first person outside the royal family to hear the full tale of Dent’s adventures. It was a lengthy tale, told partly through a mouth full of cook’s sandwiches, and partly with glubby intervals of bubbles during the royal bath, and often with quick interjections of signings from the strange, lovely, silver-haired girl who Cook recognized at once, if only from her own imagination.

It took some doing with just her one arm, but somehow Cook got both the children safely bundled into a pair of spare bunks down in the guard quarters. Dent’s story petered out, and all his many adventures finally seemed to catch up with him, and he yawned loudly and relaxed into the rare comfort of a bed not designed to asphyxiate him.

“Will you leave a light on?” he asked Cook, and she smiled and nodded, remembering similar requests many years gone from Ellentine.

“And you?” Cook asked of Pebble, the girl’s eyes already drifting closed, slow and inexorable as cloudbanks. “Anything you need, little marzipan?” Pebble shook her head, a little warily.

The door to the cabin chimed, and slid open, and Cook snapped to attention. Several shadows that might or might not have been heavily armed guards passed across the light spilling in from the corridor, and then the Empress entered, slowly, in small steps.

“Thank you, Cook,” the Empress nodded, and Cook bowed and headed for the door, most definitely not deliberately stepping on the toes of any hidden guards on her way out, or smirking about it privately.

Dent sat up in his bunk, shucking the well-worn, wooly blankets. In her bunk below, Pebble drew back slowly against the bulkhead, and watched the Empress with wide, unblinking eyes.

“Accident,” the Empress said quietly. “Come down here.”

The boy did so, hesitantly. He’d thought that, after all his adventures, his mother no longer held any terrors for him, but this was not entirely true.

The Empress took a deep breath and looked her son in the eye. She made a small adjustment to a bracelet on her wrist.

“There,” she said. “I’ve turned off the alarms. You have thirty seconds.” She shut her eyes very tightly, pinched her lips shut, and held out her arms stiffly.

It took Dent a few seconds to realize what he was supposed to do here. And then, for the first time in his entire life, he stepped forward and gave his mother a hug. She smelled nice, actually; she smelled like flowers, and the front of her gown was as soft as he’d always imagined.

Even as her brain ran through all the decontamination and disinfection procedures she’d have to undergo as quickly as possible, the Empress realized that she did not entirely mind this thing she’d heard about, this business where children and parents sometimes made contact. Maybe she would try it again. Perhaps next year. But first, she would speak privately to her surgeon about the way it made her heart flutter so strangely.

Dent turned back and looked at Pebble, still huddled against her bunk. The memory of the face his mother had made, the way her right eye had started twitching, when he’d explained earlier who Pebble was and where she came from, and how his mother really shouldn’t kill her because of how she’d helped Dent save the entire family, was vivid in his memory. But Dent was in an optimistic mood.

“Come on,” he said to Pebble. “It’s all right.”

The Empress opened one eye, and fixed it on the little girl. Pebble shook her head quickly, and did not move. And the Empress smiled.

“I like your little friend,” she told Dent, as he stepped away and her personal defense systems came back online.

“Mother?” he asked, as he climbed back up into his bunk. “How is Captain Corsair?” They hadn’t let him see the Captain since the doctors clustered around him in the hangar and carried him off, and Dent was beginning to grow worried.

The Empress paused, wetting her lips. “Our finest doctors are caring for him,” she said at last. “I expect we’ll know in the morning.”

And she left, accompanied by shadows. The door hissed shut, and the cabin was dark save for the light Cook had left on. Dent settled back into the bed, listening to Pebble breathing steadily in the bunk below, and fell slowly into sleep.

Anatomaster Cadeucus stepped through the disinfecting mist into the waiting room, and bowed first to the Emperor, and then to Pug and Lis in turn, and not at all to Bosun Little, Commodore Crestfall, or the armed guards attending both.

“He’s conscious and responsive,” the Anatomaster said, in a voice as resigned and colorless as his face. “For a little while yet.” He was thinking of something else suitably professional to say, but was spared the necessity when Bosun Little shoved him bodily aside and ducked through the mist and into the Imperial surgery.

They’d taken away his cloak and his jacket, his sword and his boots. He wasn’t a Captain anymore; he was just a very small, very pale man on a sleek white table, in the middle of a chilly, empty room. Lines fed into his arm, and the table pulsed with light in time to the rhythm of his vitals. The Bosun paused, and for a moment, gravity seemed to crush her. Then Captain Corsair turned and smiled at her, the same way he had the night she’d been about to physically hurl him from the bar where they’d met.

“Hello, my enormous friend,” he said, in little more than a whisper. “The Empire has kindly provided me with numerous, truly excellent drugs. You should request some for yourself.”

The Bosun’s cheeks speckled and danced. “See?” she said, kneeling down next to the table to rest a wide flat hand against his brow. He was burning up. “You go running off without me, and this is what happens.”

“I fear I will not collect the enormous riches we so thoroughly discussed,” the Captain said, and coughed. “You may, of course, have my share.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the Bosun shook her head, and felt her face pinching itself, walling off the tears, against her volition. “I wouldn’t know how to spend it, square? You’ve gotta advise me.”

“I am sure,” the Captain said, drawing in a rattling breath, “you will do admirably in my absence. But… if you were, in fact, to fill an entire room with emeralds, and then roll around in them, on my behalf… I would consider it an honor.”

“Funny little man,” the Bosun said, and sucked in a messy breath of her own, and shook a little. The Captain’s hand found hers, and squeezed, so frighteningly feeble. “You always made me feel ten feet tall.”

Captain Corsair shook his head. “Twelve,” he smiled. “At the very least.”

The mist parted, and Lis walked through, arms hugged around herself, and only partly because it was very cold and she was wearing one of her usual outfits.

“Ah, the lady,” Corsair smiled. “Bosun, if you would give us privacy?”

“Always you and the frails,” the Bosun grinned around her tears. “Don’t think I’m done with you, square? I’ll catch up in the Shadowlands, give me time enough. Bigger steps, see.”

“I shall keep a weather eye for you,” Corsair nodded, and coughed again.

Bosun Little got to her feet, and shouldered her way past Lis without looking at anyone, her cheeks a scramble of dots. Later, Lis would see the big round dent in the wall of the waiting chamber, and know exactly how it happened.

“You’re a terrible bandit,” Lis said, and tried very hard to smile.

“It is a great pleasure to see you, too,” the Captain replied. Lis sat on the edge of his platform, marveling at how very cold it was, and feeling it pulse in time with Corsair’s own ebbing life. She took his living hand; it, too, was far too cold, even as she saw the beads of sweat dribbling along the Captain’s brow.

“I have to know,” she said. “That last reason, why you gave me your cloak. I’m going to stay here, and not let you go anywhere, until you tell me.”

“Ahhh,” the Captain smiled. “How can I refuse Her Majesty?” He let his eyes slide shut, and Lis saw a light pulse beneath them. She’d seen this before — it was impressive, difficult work, very custom, very rare. Video screens, implanted on the inside of the eyelids, to play a certain loop of footage again and again. It was most frequently found among the grieving, the inconsolable.

“I gave you my cloak,” the Captain said with his eyes shut, his words trailing off into whispers, “because you look … just the tiniest bit … like her.” He smiled, and spoke a name that fell from his lips like music, and was not Lis’s name. Then he said nothing else.

Glissandra Voluptua sat there for a very long time, holding the Captain’s cold, cold hand, long after the light behind his eyelids had flickered a last time and gone away, long after the table on which she sat had stopped pulsing and faded from glowing white to a dull, listless gray.

She thought about bandits, and all the things they could steal.

Lis had not wished to join them on the observation deck, saying she was tired. Whether it was true or not, the Emperor let it pass. Bosun Little was forbidden, by protocol, from joining them; she would pass the evening in training with the Imperial Guard, after which neither she nor the twenty-odd guards matched against her would really feel that much better.

So it was simply The Emperor and Empress, and Pug, and their honored guest, Commodore Crestfall, taking light refreshment under a dome cut from solid diamond, and the twinkling stars beyond. The Commodore and the Emperor had traded war stories, and even laughed at times, remembering certain generals on both sides with strange facial hair or unusual tastes in music. The Empress sat with her knitting, and pretended not to notice Pug nibbling his way through entire plates of finger sandwiches.

“This one fought particularly well, Majesty,” the Commodore nodded at Pug, catching him halfway through a triangle of watercress and cucumber. “You should be proud.”

“Well fought, then, Pugio,” the Emperor nodded to his son. “We should have a proper spectacle for you, when we reach Imperia. Maurice tells me he’s procured three adult Ogodsnos for you; one of them has some sort of chafing, apparently, so he’s extra irritable.”

Pug flexed his thick fingers and stared at them thoughtfully. He looked at the sword resting next to his chair, and the half-demolished plate of sandwiches on the table next to him.

“Uh, Pop?” he ventured. “Yeah. About that…?”

Maurice would be so very, very disappointed.

And as Pug haltingly explained, and the Emperor sat silently in ever-growing disbelief, the Empress nodded toward Crestfall, who approached with his customary courtesy.

“May I be bold with you, Commodore?” she asked, and he nodded. In a single, deft movement, she spun a knitting needle in her hand and plunged it toward the center of his chest.

It wavered there, hovering, repelled by some thick, rubbery force.

“Ah,” the Empress smiled. “So nice to have one’s intelligence confirmed, then.”

“So nice not to be perforated,” the Commodore smiled. “No offense, Majesty.”

“An actual heart of gold,” the Empress marveled. “And those would be magnets, then, propelling the blood?”

“The Dark Matter Armada did a thoroughness on my ticker, yes, Majesty,” the Commodore said. Behind his spectacles, his eyes grew distant. “Now I serve at the pleasure of the Duly. And not a moment longer.”

The Empress smiled one of her little smiles. It was not in her nature to take an enemy into confidence, but then, she had never really liked the Duly Elected. Democracy made her skin crawl.

“As you may imagine, Commodore,” the Empress said, “my knowledge of the galaxy is… rather extensive. Reaching even into your own borders.” She leaned forward, smiling, thrilling just the tiniest bit to this wicked confidence. “Would you like to know a secret about that heart of yours?”

The Duly Elected were unaccustomed to visitors, even one as august as Commodore Crestfall. Especially when those visitors came unannounced, in the middle of the day’s discussion. The Commodore could not see their faces behind the one-way slabs of black transparite that concealed their identities, nor the lights that shone forth from the base of each of their pedestals, but the thought of their collective shock warmed his golden heart something mighty.

“Commodore,” the Duly’s voice chimed at last. “We did not summon you.”

“You did not,” the Commodore said, keeping his hands loose and steady at his sides. His traveling cloak hung still against him in the breezeless gloom of the Duly’s chamber.

“We would prefer that you made an appointment,” the Duly ventured. “Our registrar—”

“Was only too happy to make room in your schedule, right at this very time,” Crestfall said. “Especially for the great Commodore Crestfall, hero of the Third Galactic Conflict.”

“You… you look unusually presentable,” the Duly intoned, and the Commodore ran a hand over his newly shaven cheeks, and nodded. “We are grateful for the safe return of our craft. It would have been ideal if the Imperium had not been able to study it so, but…”

“I had little choice, sirs,” Crestfall said, with an audible absence of regret. “They were my obliging hosts.”

“We understand you have commissioned a second?” the Duly asked.

“Indeed,” Crestfall said. “A Corinthian, former military. She was in the Echo Hill campaign, and I saw her do some violence in this last adventure. She’s a good hand.”

“That’s… very good, Commodore,” the Duly said. “Now, if you will excuse us, we have important matters that need deliberation.”

“Indeed you do,” Crestfall said. If his heart could have pounded now, it would have, but he was resolute. “I’m resigning my commission.”

He took great satisfaction from the whispers of shock coming from behind the panels.

“That is unacceptable,” the Duly said, but with more of an edge of desperation than it might have wished. “You are a valuable asset to the FLAW. Your service is essential.”

“My service is good relations,” Crestfall said. “It keeps you all snug in your seats. But a man grows restless. I’ve done my time as the hero of millions, thank you.”

“We must remind you,” the Duly warned, their unified voice darkening, “of certain measures at our disposal.”

“Oh, I know about them,” Crestfall smiled. “All about them. You just go ahead and press that kill switch you’ve been holding over me these many years. Go on. I’ll be a mess somewhat on your floor when I go, but I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”

“We will activate the device,” the Duly rumbled. “Do not try our patience, Commodore.”

“I’m waiting,” Crestfall said. “Hmm. Must not have done it yet, then. I still feel my blood moving, and such.”

The Duly were silent, and the silence expanded, until Crestfall felt it appropriate to fill up the gap with words of his own. He swept aside his cloak and put a hand on the scabbard of Bad News.

“Bet you’re reconsidering the notion to give me armament about now,” the Crestfall said. “Let’s open a parlay, shall we, you all and I? Let’s talk about what it is keeps this blade in its scabbard. What say you?”

The Duly Elected had plenty to say indeed.

“Sit, Mr. Crouch,” the Empress said, to the sound of birdsong. “There’s refreshments, if you like.”

Quarrington Crouch was substantially more nervous than when he’d entered Foliage Deck. For one thing, when he’d entered Foliage Deck, he’d had a full complement of armed security. Somehow, they’d managed to all vanish along the garden path, leaving just him in his charcoal suit. But he had been to the Imperial Palace many times before, and it would not do to show fear now. This was just a discussion about munitions sales. That was what they’d told him. That must be it.

The Empress nodded again to the exquisite spread of tea cakes, and kept on with her knitting. Crouch studied them all, their exquisite frosting and jams, and remembered what he’d heard about other people who’d sampled refreshments in the company of the Empress.

“Apologies, Majesty,” Crouch demurred smoothly. “Some digestive troubles of late, my doctors tell me. I would not wish to be rude.”

“Of course,” the Empress said. “So. I wish to express my regrets about the tragic passing of your Dr. Grolescht. I understand he was quite invaluable.”

Crouch nodded, and refused to look surprised. No single soul outside his organization, and precious few within it, knew what had happened to Grolescht.

“We’ll manage,” Crouch said, and smiled, and crossed his legs, leaning back in the chair. “Thankfully, he left considerable notes behind.”

“I’m sure he did,” the Empress nodded. “Are you sure you won’t at least take something to drink? That decanter’s full of your favorite Shantaram.”

Crouch eyed the amber liquid uncertainly. “My doctors advise moderation of late,” he sighed. “The digestion, you understand.”

“Say no more,” the Empress said.

“If her Majesty is amenable,” Crouch said, “I’m happy to provide a full listing of our very latest munitions, each ideal to compound the might of the Imperial military.”

“One model in particular piques my interest, yes,” the Empress said. “The BHB.”

Crouch’s blood froze. Colder than its usual temperature, at least. “That’s not in our catalog, majesty,” he said. “Perhaps some misguided employee, through a spelling error…”

“Do not insult me, Mr. Crouch,” the Empress said. Her voice remained calm and mild, but she managed to make the “Mr.” sound like an epithet. “Let’s have some honesty, shall we?”

“I… I am given to understand that some rogue employees of mine may have appropriated a prototype device, and used it in some mad coup plot,” Crouch said. “If they were not already dead, I assure you, they’d be dealt with harshly. As a gesture of apology, I’m prepared to offer the Empire however many of the devices it may wish.” It was painful for him to add these next words, foreign as they were to him, but he felt it somehow necessary. “Free of charge.”

“Very generous,” the Empress nodded. “We shall take it under consideration. Are you quite certain you will not take refreshment, Mr. Crouch? We would be quite the poor host not to offer, at least.”

“Your Majesty’s graciousness humbles me,” Crouch smiled. Provided no armed men sprang from behind the topiaries, he might be able to chalk this up as yet another victory. “I must once more refuse.”

“Wise, Mr. Crouch,” the Empress said. “They were all poisoned, of course.” For the first time in their entire conversation, her eyes met his. “You underestimate me grievously, Mr. Crouch. I am only too accustomed to threats against my life — against the very Imperium. You cannot imagine that you are the first such soul to conceive of such ambition, can you? I expect such measures. I respect them, even.”

She rose from her chair to depart, and Crouch tried to follow suit. “Tried” being the operative word. His legs no longer seemed to obey him. Nor did any other part of his body, for that matter.

“But when such designs,” the Empress continued, her voice thickening, “threaten the life of an Imperial heir…” She stopped, as if the words were difficult to get out. “Threaten my son,” she said again, the look on her face suggesting that the concept was a revelation to her.

Then she turned her eyes again toward Quarrington Crouch, and he saw in them a fury whose depth and intensity he had seen only once, in his father’s eyes, as the outer airlock door began to cycle.

“The Empire will not abide that,” she spat. “You should be gracious, Mr. Crouch. The FLAW, I understand, wished to make a public end of you. We prefer your end to be private, and miserable, and uncelebrated.” She swept past him as the paralysis reached his lungs, and he could only stare straight ahead, listening to her voice as it retreated down the garden path behind him.

“You really should have eaten the refreshments,” the Empress said, without looking back. “Their poison would have ended you quite painlessly. The vapor in the air, however…”

The birds sang, and the artificial sun shone. Throughout the whole of Foliage Deck, the wind rippled, purring its way across arbors and hedgetops. But the man in the chair at the center of the garden sat very, very still, even as the attendants came in their heavy hazmat suits to clear away the refreshments, not one so much as sparing him a glance. Artificial day mellowed and goldened and sank into artificial night, and still the man in the chair did not move.

He was mere ornamentation now, no different from the grass or the statues or the hedges or the trees, and most certainly no longer the CEO of anything at all.

26. The Maw, The Moment, The Melody

2008-01-28T09:37:00.000-08:00

Clearly, Dr. Grolescht thought, this was all some amusing joke that would shortly be explained.

After all, he and his very good friend Quarrington Crouch had just concluded a wonderful dinner together, collectively demolishing an entire joint of Altaran acorn-hog, not to mention at least two bottles of very fine wine.

Dr. Grolescht could not remember how many bottles of wine, exactly, which did at least give him suggestions as to the quantity consumed.

As he shivered slightly in the dim, clanking cargo container, Dr. Grolescht realized he could not remember a great many things. The exact topics of conversation at dinner, for example. He remembered talking very excitedly to Crouch about some topic of great pride, and also Crouch saying something about the wine, and then they both went for a walk around the gardens…

For a moment, Dr. Grolescht panicked, thinking that perhaps he might have explained the secrets of the BHB to his employer. But that was simply ridiculous. Quarrington Crouch, being a notoriously tight-fisted leader of business, had gained a reputation of paying his employees handsomely, right up until the point at which he no longer had to. Dr. Grolescht had made a habit, then, of speaking of his highly technical work only in vague generalities, to ensure that he himself remained the invaluable element in their success.

It was hard to see in the cargo container, but as Dr. Grolescht’s round, watery eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to make out row after row of identical shapes on the shelves. They looked dimly familiar.

What was it Crouch had been saying about the wine? For some reason, Grolescht’s attempts at recall only led his thoughts back to the workings of the BHB. It was a highly technical topic, but in short, the device’s initial explosion created a very small star, even as a ruthlessly efficient containment field — powered by the same energy released in the star’s birth — contained and compressed that star. Crushed ever tighter, even as it strained to expand, the star was forced to collapse. Voila! Instant black hole.

Of course, black holes were something of a nuisance to have hanging around the galaxy, especially a sector of the galaxy that, say, you wanted to conquer. So the BHB’s containment field, established just beyond its event horizon, continued to crush and compress, accelerating millions of years of the black hole’s existence into a little more than an hour. The device’s deployer simply waited at a safe distance, watched any troublesome fleets or moons or planets get dragged into the pitiless gravity well, and moved in once the black hole had expired in a final belch of scrambled x-rays.

There was more to it than that, of course. Far more, all very technical and detailed. Dr. Grolescht would never discuss that sort of thing with his employer, especially over dinner. Except…

It got no warmer in the cargo container, and Grolescht began to find this particular joke less and less funny. He rapped gently with his knuckles against the reinforced steel door, expecting Crouch or one of his functionaries to open it, laughing. On the shelves behind him, small hummings and whirrings began to sound.

Dr. Grolescht began to recall Crouch seeming very proud of the wine. It was special somehow, yes… enhanced, Crouch had said, with some sort of impressive new protein. What had he called it?

Spillitol! That was it. An impressive new protein that made the imbiber entirely willing to… that…

Dr. Grolescht slowly began to remember what he’d spoken about with Crouch, in great detail, often with charts and diagrams. And come to think of it, there had been a great many waiters, hadn’t there? Not very good waiters, but certainly very attentive ones.

Panic welled in Dr. Grolescht’s barrel chest, and he began to pound on the door now, shouting, pleading. Unbeknownst to him, the cargo container had already been jettisonned from the Crouch flagship; there was absolutely no one, and nothing, outside to hear him.

And on the shelves, around Dr. Grolescht, dozens upon dozens of adorable bright blue eyes snapped open. Soft plush heads swiveled in unison toward the only human being in range. Countless fluffy-wuffy limbs began to stir.

“Hello!” said row after row of Crouch Cuddly Cub Mark I models. Defective Mark I models. It seems the engineers had overestimated the adorable robo-bears’ grip strength, and the programmers had failed to adequately nuance the Cuddly Cub’s personal definition of love.

“I want to snoogle-woogle you to bits!” the bears cooed in carefully focus-grouped voices. “Will you be my friend forever and ever?”

No matter how loudly Dr. Grolescht screamed, no matter how he pleaded, the bears did not stop climbing from their packaging, did not stop making their way in adorable lopes down the shelving, did not stop bobbling along the floor toward him in a wave of chirpy synthesized phrases…

Somewhere far beyond this life, a table had been prepared especially for Dr. Grolescht, and fitted with large, heavy restraints. A multitude of pale, spectral figures gathered around it, all with very good reason to await the Doctor’s arrival, and watched his final moments of life.

They wound up wincing a lot, and at least one of them, in defiance of the basic principles of metaphysics, may actually have fainted.

“Status, Rendell!” the Emperor barked, amid the soft chiming of the Dreadnaught’s peril alarms. (The Empire’s engineers had long since realized that if you were aboard a ship that was in some sort of danger, you probably knew that very clearly, and having loud klaxons blaring in your ears did nothing to calm you down.)

“Pluslight at maximum, Majesty,” Rendell said, gripping the edges of the helm console until his knuckles turned white. “Energy drain’s increasing — three point two clicks until they hit burnout.”

The Empress sat silent and fascinated in her chair behind the Emperor, knitting steadily, gazing at the great black void in the forward viewport into which bits of the very ship she occupied were steadily tumbling. She had always considered death an invisible, inexorable, pitiless force, and it was somehow a strange and quiet comfort to her to be proven right.

“Sir,” Wavesmith Second Class Juniper said to Rendell, from the communication station. (She was not important enough to speak directly to the Emperor, nor indeed for the Emperor to know her name.) “We’re picking up a transmission.”

“From the FLAW?” Rendell asked.

“No, sir!” Juniper said, retreating from his own overwhelming terror into the familiar comfort of his training. “Point of origin unknown — the anomaly’s scrambling the readings.”

“Put it through!” Rendell barked, and Juniper obliged.

A voice crackled through the bridge, punctuated by static, and for a moment it seemed even the imminent-death chimes fell silent.

“Father?” Dent’s voice said. “Mother?”

The Empress, for only the fifth time in her entire life, missed a stitch.

“Accident?” the Emperor asked softly, all protocol forgotten.

And in the cockpit of Captain Corsair’s stolen ship, a wave of relief flooded over Dent. He forgot to be angry at them, he forgot that they didn’t care about him. It didn’t matter.

“A noble kidnapped us and tried to eat us, and now I’m flying a ship, and I think that’s a black hole.” he said. “Are you mad at me?”

There was a long, long silence on the other end, and just as panic once more began to well up in the boy, his father’s voice reached him again.

“Accident, where are you?” Dent had never heard his father sound afraid before. He almost didn’t recognize the sound. “Does the black hole have you?”

“We’re… we’re close, but I think we can get away,” Dent said. “The ship can kind of slip around space. I think that’s how it got past the satellites.”

“Accident,” his father said, “you need to listen to me. Run.”

“But you and Mother—” Dent began. His father didn’t yell. His voice didn’t peak and sharpen, like it usually did. That was what frightened Dent the most.

“We can’t escape, Accident,” his father said. “We’re too close, and soon the pluslight will fail. You have to run. You’re the last of the line now.”

“No I’m not,” Dent said, in a panic. He felt the weight of an entire Empire looming just above his shoulders. “Pug and Lis are—”

“Pug and Lis are here, too,” the Emperor said. “It’s just you. My son.”

Dent’s throat got all thick and prickly, filled with a sadness too big to swallow. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

“You have to,” his father said. Still calm. Still quiet. “And I know you can. Yours is Imperial blood. It served me. It served my father, and his father before him. Be good. Be wise.”

“Don’t drink anything you haven’t tested on an underling,” his mother added, with perhaps a bit more of a quaver in her voice than she might have wished.

“No,” Dent pleaded, “no, no, no, I don’t want to — you can escape, I know you can!”

“Do this for me, Accident,” the Emperor said. And then he used a word Dent had never heard him say, at least not in this particular context. “Please.”

On the bridge of his flagship, the Emperor’s hand wavered for a moment, then pressed the pad that ended the transmission. The deck officers turned away, out of respect, so that only the Empress would see his grief.

And in the cockpit of Captain Corsair’s ship, Dent sat at the controls, very alone. He thought long and hard for nearly a minute, and then he came to a decision.

He’d spent most of his life very pointedly not doing what his father told him to. This was no time to change his ways.

On the bridge of the mercenary ship, the four unlikely allies sat in silence, caught fast in the pull of the black hole, and surrounded by the dead.

“Grontarian Thrallbeast,” Pug sighed. “Never fought one of those.”

“They’re extinct, aren’t they?” Bosun Little asked.

“Yeah, but, you know, I was hoping I could clone one,” Pug said, his thick, calloused fingers knotted. “Maybe for my birthday.”

“You ever tangle with a Tendril Vine?” the Bosun asked. “Back during the Conflict, in the Argos campaign…”

“Yeah, those are the worst,” Pug said, but did not look up from his hands. “I had to kill like three of those one time.”

The pixels on the Bosun’s cheeks flowed in straight lines down from her eyes, and she put one massive hand upon Pug’s shoulder, and left it there.

At the forward viewscreen, Lis and Crestfall watched the ever-advancing wall of nothing.

“Least we managed to slingshot that other ship past us,” Lis said. “Whoever grabbed Dent, he deserved to go first.”

“Buys us some time, yes,” the Commodore nodded. “From what they tell me, that stolen ship could escape everything short of absolute event horizon. If that’s your brother on it, he could have a chance.”

Lis smiled. “Gods save us all. My little brother, the Emperor.” She looked at the Commodore. “So, we’ve probably got a few clicks. You want to—?”

The Commodore shook his head. “I just don’t lean that far familiar, Majesty,” he said, smiling sadly. “No offense.”

“Force of habit,” Lis shrugged. She stared back out the viewscreen, at the tiny ship floating there, and tried not to think of the Captain.

All through the corridors of the dark ship, littered with constellations of broken mirrors and frenzied, scrambling Wee Ones, the curses of Sir Leslie Murther echoed.

The narcotic gas had given him a terrible headache, and his stomach was both painfully empty and a little upset, and he’d apparently been outwitted by a pair of small children and a shabby social reject with a fatal stomach wound. It was not, Sir Leslie reflected as he staggered groggily toward forward command, his most accomplished day.

But there would be others, he was certain. The BHB was launched, so Crouch would surely have to pay him for those services rendered. And even if they’d managed to escape, his former prisoners would doubtlessly flee right toward the Imperial fleet, and that would settle that account rather nicely.

If only he could figure out why the Wee Ones were in such a fret.

He reached the thick black doors to forward command, kicked and swore at them until they opened, and stepped inside. The bridge’s original fixtures seemed not quite at the right proportions to accomodate a human being, but Sir Leslie had liked the dark, swooping curves of them, and kept them as is. He called up the viewscreen, and cursed again, wondering why he wasn’t getting a picture. Then the ship began to shudder, and alarms began to blare, and he noticed a few faint stars around the edge of the screen, vanishing quickly.

Sir Leslie slowly sat down, staring at the screen, into a hunger as black and terrible and all-encompassing as that which had boiled in his gut from childhood onward. It felt more like his reflection than any mirror into which he’d ever gazed.

Sir Leslie cinched up the fastenings on his Special Device even tighter, and straightened his hair as best he could. As Mother had said, one must always look his best, even in the worst of circumstances.

The dark ship passed beyond the event horizon.

Sir Leslie had always wanted to be thinner, and to look young forever. Depending on how you looked at it, and which physicists you talked to, both his wishes were granted.

“Captain,” Dent said gently, shaking Corsair’s arm. “Captain, you need to wake up.”

The coral sparked and flickered, reduced again to dimness by the power expended in jumping out of the black ship. In the intermittent light, Pebble’s eyes strobed reflectively as she kept her hands pressed against the Captain’s wound. No matter how Dent prodded and pleaded, the Captain would not wake. He breathed shallowly, and with effort, and behind his closed eyelids, the light pulsed and stuttered.

“Please, Captain,” Dent said. “I can save us. I know it. But I need you to sing. Please wake up.”

The Captain coughed, and stirred, but did not wake. Dent bowed his head and told himself, again, that a child of the Empire did not cry.

Pebble looked at him, her hands warm and sticky with the Captain’s blood, her arms slowly growing numb from pressing against Corsair’s wound. In her heart, an egg that had been slowly warmed and incubated over the past two years cracked open, and shed its shell, and fluttered brightly colored wings.

Dent heard music. Not the Captain’s songs, but a high, quavering, unearthly voice. He looked up.

Pebble had heard many songs in her time in the palace — court songs, working songs, even the sort of randy musical tales of calculation that Imperial accountants are careful never to sing in front of their children. (They are mostly about columns adding up, and accounts receivable, and that sort of thing.)

But she only knew, truly knew, one song. The same song her mother sang to her each night as an infant, a song that bypassed her ears to seep itself into Pebble’s blood and bone and muscle. She sang that song now.

It started softly, hesitantly. But as Pebble sang, Dent saw rainbow arcs begin to leap off the surface of the coral. The glow spread across the whole surface of it, brighter and brighter, as Pebble sang her song louder and louder. The light became dazzling, and panel by panel, light by light, the entire ship shook itself and came fully to life again. It seemed to Dent that he could feel Pebble’s song pulsing through the deck plates, humming all inside the ship.

He gave Pebble a great big hug, crushing her to the best of his ten-year-old strength, until she pushed him away, and signed, I’m busy. Don’t you have something to do?

Dent got to his feet and ran, skipped, leapt away through the corridor, threw himself into the seat as if it had been made for him. It seemed the switches all threw themselves the moment before he could touch them.

And with the sole potentially surviving heir of the Grand Galactic Imperium at the controls, the tiny stolen ship shot into motion — directly toward the black hole ahead.

“Majesty,” Guard Captain Rendell said, from the bridge of the Imperial flagship. “Your son’s craft — it seems to be—”

“No,” the Emperor mourned, watching the tiny ship zip toward the black, devouring malestrom. “No! Damn the boy!” He had always thought he wanted a warrior child, ready to lay down his life in service of the Empire, right up until the moment when it seemed that would actually come to pass.

“Accident is a clever boy,” the Empress said slowly, thoughtfully. “He’s always been very good at staying alive. I should know.” With a strange sort of confidence, she picked up her needles, and resumed her knitting.

The stolen ship began to shudder as the hungry, invisible gravitation of the black hole drew it closer. Alarms in the cockpit began to nag, and then, pester, and then shout. Just before they began to shriek in panic, Dent made a hard turn, pointing the slender nose of the craft directly away from the black hole. He took a deep breath, and made quick child’s prayers to every god he could think of, and a quick hello to Story in Hypotethical Robot Paradise.

Then he called up the jump computer and told it what he wanted. If the computer had thought his requests baffling before, it would have judged them completely insane now. But Dent insisted, and the computer obeyed, and somewhere deep in its circuits, it figured it had enjoyed a pretty good life for a computer.

Dent punched the button to activate the jump.

A black hole drags space down into a sort of pit, squeezing it shut. Dent’s craft, at least at the rear, expanded that same space, pulling it taut at the edges like a blanket. And when Dent hit the jump, at maximum power, the crushing containment of the BHB met the insistent expansion of the Quantum Coral drive.

The laws of physics had an epic tug of war.

The alarms in Dent’s cockpit moved swiftly past panic into outright hysteria, as the whole ship shuddered around him. In the engine room, Pebble saw the light of the coral begin to dim. And though she was getting red in the face, and more than a little dizzy, she sucked more air into her lungs and sang louder, shouting over the rumbling of the ship itself.

Space itself flashed and crackled in an expanding web behind the stolen ship, bursts of radiation sparking from the black hole. Crouch Industries could turn out fine engineering when it had a mind to, and the BHB fought valiantly.

It lost.

In a final burst of despairing X-rays, the artifical black hole exhausted its hunger, and was no more, and went back to being just plain space. At the same moment, both Pebble’s lungs and the quantum coral drive gave out. The stolen ship drifted, end over end, past the bridge of the mercenary ship, upon which the four still-living inhabitants would have been wildly cheering if they weren’t busy gaping slack-jawed in various states of amazement.

Dent realized he had been holding his breath the entire time, and collapsed in the chair, sucking in air, spots dancing before his eyes. Pebble, in the engine room, had similar issues.

Captain Corsair continued to miss all the excitement, but then, whatever played out on the inside of his eyelids was probably just as compelling.

In the black depths of space, all was still and silent again. The tattered, considerably shabbier fleets of the Grand Galactic Imperium and the FLAW cut their pluslight drives with mere instants to spare, and breathed collective sighs of relief.

When the Emperor could speak again, his words finding a path around the strange, swelling pride filling his chest, he said, “Status, Rendell.”

“We have power, Majesty,” Rendell nodded, his knees still shaking. “And… we’re not destroyed.”

“Good,” Emperor Impromptu I said, standing up straighter, feeling less like an old man, and more like the leader of a dynasty. “Overtake the smaller ship and bring it aboard. I want to see my son.”

25. Breaking Out

2008-01-20T15:34:00.001-08:00

Across the galaxy, billions of citizens of two mighty factions watched the live feeds of the two great fleets hanging motionless among the stars, and collectively held their breath.

Oh, sure, they might spend their end-of-turn nights in the pub, hollering for the blood of those damned Imperials. And they might make grumbly noises over the morning news scroll, cursing those arrogant prods in the FLAW. But the memory of the Third Galactic Conflict remained fresh in everyone’s minds, and only the craziest of zealots — the kind unceremoniously hucked out of the pubs, or glared at over their scrolls — actually wanted anything like a war.

So the galaxy waited, and watched, and wondered exactly what sort of perilous, high-powered negotiations were taking place.

“Is that the one with the dogleg on the 27th hoop?” the Emperor asked, looking up from a writing pad covered with unprofessional doodling. “I quite liked that one. Good view of the mountains.”

“Yes, exactly,” said the Duly Elected in a twelvefold pulse of light from the screen of his conference suite. “So did we.” There was a pause, as if some private discussion were taking place. “Most of us did,” the Duly amended.

“Right,” the Emperor sighed. “Since it’s—” he checked the chronometer on the wall — “ten clicks until lunch, are you amenable to summing up?”

“What are you having?” the Duly asked.

“Octopus, I think,” the Emperor said, his stomach rumbling. “Cook does a lovely dish with pepperfruit jelly. I could send some over.”

“Acceptable,” the Duly chanted. “Yes, let us sum up. You do not have our craft in your possession?”

“I do not,” the Emperor said. “And you do not have my child?”

“We do not,” the Duly replied. “Our agent has yet to report.”

“As have my contingent,” the Emperor said. Diplomacy might lack something in glory, but it was much easier to prevent misunderstandings without all those swords and guns lying around. The Emperor felt somewhat ashamed to realize this, and decided he must be getting old.

“We should spend the afternoon coming up with suitable threatening statements,” the Duly proposed.

“Sounds sensible,” the Emperor nodded. “I was thinking of something like, ‘intractable hostilities,’ or perhaps—”

“Majesty,” Guard Captain Rendell’s voice came over the intercom. There was an edge in his words, an energy, that the Emperor hadn’t heard since that long-ago night on Echo Hill. “We have an unregistered contact on the scanners.”

“Is this you?” the Emperor asked the Duly, sitting up straighter in his chair, his fingers tightening on the glossy seashell surface of the conference table.

“It is not,” the Duly responded, hesitantly. “We have just been informed of a similar contact.”

“Captain, pipe the footage in here,” the Emperor said. “And elevate the fleet’s readiness.” He glanced at the flickering circle of lights on the screen, and added, “No offense.”

“None taken,” the Duly agreed, and the screen flickered to reveal external footage of a small, merchant-class freighter trawling slowly across the black. The tiny gray ship itself did not cause the Emperor’s heart to pound, or his breath to quicken. But the faint, almost invisible silhouette it towed, blacker than space itself, stood out sharp and clear, seared into the Emperor’s memory.

“The Dark Matter Armada,” he breathed.

The Emperor burst forth from the conference suite to find the entire bridge frozen, staring at the image on the screen. Even his wife had momentarily ceased her knitting, and beneath her layer of ceremonial makeup, her face seemed another shade paler still.

“Shake yourselves,” the Emperor barked. A thrill of adrenalin raced through his blood. “Rendell, weapons to full. Target that ship and make ready to fire. Are we still on with the Duly?”

“Yes, Majesty,” Rendell said, his voice not quite shaking, as he forced himself to look down at his console and make the adjustments.

“Our fleet has similar targeting,” the Duly’s manifold voice droned through the bridge. “Except…”

“It’s signaling,” the Emperor said, squinting at the image onscreen, watching lights flare in rhythm along the hull of the small lead ship. “That’s Imperial flashcode.”

“And standard FLAW pulse signals on the side facing our craft,” the Duly affirmed.

“Extreme… danger…” Rendell began, watching the signals. “Unknown… threat… evacuate…”

He would have finished, except for the inconvenient flare of unimaginable light that blew out the visual circuits on both fleets’ external feeds.

The BHB, having maneuvered itself unnoticed between the two fleets, like any other piece of space junk, detonated. And things only got worse from there.

It never occurs to anyone, really, that they might at some point have a knife driven into their vitals. So Captain Corsair could be forgiven for looking as surprised as he did.

He stood there, his sword beginning to wilt from his fingers, and stared quizzically down at Sir Leslie’s blade, plunged to its hilt into his stomach. He shuddered slightly when Sir Leslie gave the knife a particularly vicious twist, and again when it was plucked out, but his expression of surprise and curiosity did not change. At last, the sword fell from the Captain’s hands, rattling dully on the onyx plating of the deck, and the Captain sank to his knees as if being lowered to them, a dark red stain spreading over the front of his jacket. The slow, half-hesitant way he did so would haunt Dent’s nightmares for years to come.

Sir Leslie dropped Pebble without much ceremony, leaving her to gasp the color back into her cheeks. But Dent was too stunned to even look at her for a moment. He kept staring at the Captain, who, in turn, kept staring at his own injury.

“Pardon me,” the Captain said at last, faintly, and with an unpleasant gurgle just beneath the words. “I seem to be bleeding on your deck.”

Sir Leslie turned, still kneeling, and sized the Captain up like a freshly bled calf. His eyes fixed upon the Captain’s metal hand, and sparkled with greed.

“I have a collection, you know,” Sir Leslie purred, picking up the Captain’s limp, unresisting arm, and studying the metal hand attached to it with an enthusiast’s eye. “This piece… the customization is exquisite. Would you mind terribly if I displayed it?”

“Not at all,” the Captain coughed. “Please, feel free to look closer.”

Sir Leslie peered at the hand’s weathered components. “These channels here, with the filigrees,” he said. “Are they merely decorative?”

“Far from it,” the Captain smiled weakly, and twitched his wrist. Three different-colored clouds of gas jetted forth from concealed compartments in the hand, wreathing Sir Leslie’s head. His hungry black eyes crossed, and he began to slur out what might have been an oath before sliding sideways to the deck, unconscious.

“I wish I had thought of that sooner,” the Captain said, and slid ever so gently backward himself.

“Captain?” Dent asked. He crawled, hands and knees, over to Corsair, and shook him. “Captain, please!”

The captain’s closed eyelids glowed, but the light was uneven, flickering. At last, his eyes slid open again, to fix wearily on Dent’s.

“You are quite right,” the Captain coughed. “This is no place for a gentleman to die. I do not know what I must have been thinking.”

The whole ship rocked again, and for a long second, brilliant light leaked in, even through the seams in the hangar’s blast doors.

“What was that?” Dent asked, as a slightly woozy Pebble signed something similar. The girl crawled over, sized up the blood on the Captain’s shirtfront with wide, serious eyes. She pressed her hands together over the wound, as she’d seen her father do long ago.

“That was nothing good,” the Captain said. “Your majesty, if you would kindly drag me to my very fine ship?”

It took both Dent and Pebble to drag the Captain across the deck, up the airlock ramp, and into the darkened central corridor of the twice-stolen ship. A wet and steaming trail of red followed in the Captain’s wake, but though he often winced at the bumps and jolts of the journey, he made no cry of pain.

“The coral’s dead,” Dent mourned, in the gloom of the corridor. “Sir Leslie hit us with some noise thing.”

“Do not despair, my friend,” the Captain smiled gently. “I would ask if you had tried to sing to it, but perhaps it is better that you did not. Please, if you would convey me to the engine room?”

Another slow, agonized minute of dragging led Dent, Pebble, and the Captain into the barely visible contours of the engine room. The whole of the ship was dark and still inside.

Captain Corsair coughed wetly, closing his eyes. The light beneath them flickered to life, and for a moment, it seemed to glow brighter than it had before. And with his eyes still shut, the Captain began to sing.

Dent and Pebble had never heard this song before. They would have remembered it if they had. Anyone would have. And though the Captain did not have his ninestring, both the children would forever remember the song as if it had been there.

And from deep within the cluster of coral, a single spark flared, and kindled, growing with the Captain’s song. Light began to dance, faint but persistent, over the surface of the cluster. At last, weakly, the ship’s lights and systems flickered and hummed to life.

“Ah,” the Captain sighed, gratified. “You see?” His eyelids drifted southward, and shut, and behind them a soft glow began to flicker.

“Captain?” Dent asked, and reached down to touch Corsair’s shoulder. Pebble scowled and swatted at Dent, leaving a wet red stain on the boy’s sleeve. With hands covered by the Captain’s blood, she signed: He’s alive. Get us out of here.

Dent backed away uncertainly, then turned and scrambled toward the cockpit. Pebble, left behind in the engine room with the Captain’s shallow breathing and the faint coruscation of the mass of coral, kept pressing against the Captain’s wound. She felt it pulsing back against her palms, and tried to remember what else, if anything, she’d ever seen her father do in circumstances like these.

Dent reached the cockpit and clambered awkwardly into the pilot’s seat. The grid of lights enveloped him, each button an individual tooth in some terrible mocking smile, and for a moment, everything he had learned in his time on the ship went tumbling out his ears.

“I can’t do this,” he said to himself, and wanted very badly for Story to be there, or the Captain, or someone, anyone, to tell him exactly what to do. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and wished himself far, far away.

And in the exploding colors behind his eyelids, the faces of his mother and father and sister and brother appeared. They were not angry, not even disappointed. They were looking at him exactly like they always did. Not surprised in the slightest. The family’s little Accident, helpless and useless, as ever.

Dent opened his eyes and forced himself to find just one button on the panel that he recognized. There. The thrust control. He knew that. And right next to it, the jumpdrive initiator, and the docking controls, he knew them, and… okay, he’d never been told what the triangular one above them did, but right above that was the pitch adjuster…

Dent gripped controls that were nearly too big with his hands, and took a deep breath to quiet the flying fish flopping to and fro in the pit of his stomach. He flipped three switches, and felt the ship shudder and rumble around him. The world wobbled slightly as the antigrav came online; the ship pulled away from its magnetic moorings, and floated just a few feet off the obsidian deck of the hangar bay.

Carefully, awkwardly, Dent nosed the ship around, until its sharp, slender nose pointed directly at… the firmly sealed blast doors. Ah, yes. Dent had forgotten this detail up until now.

He could blast the doors wide open, blowing the entire bay out into space. That might have unpleasant effects for the still-unconscious Sir Leslie, out in the bay, but Dent was not exactly worried about that. He was more concerned about the ship’s absolute lack of any sort of guns with which he might do that hypothetical blasting. (Every good ship, by Dent’s ten-year-old standards, had guns. Despite the life-or-death stakes now facing him, the boy remained somehow quietly disappointed that he finally got to fly something, and it lacked the ability to shoot anything.)

Dent cast his mind back to the hours he’d spent reading the ship’s manual. He remembered a curious fact about the ship’s operation. It was the sort of curious fact that might get them all killed, if applied improperly. But Dent, given the ship’s regrettable absence of shooting-stuff capabilities, had no choice.

He called up the jump computer, as he’d watched the Captain and Bosun Little do several times before, and entered a desired distance. The computer, unnerved by this, checked to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake. And then again, just to be extra double sure. Dent confirmed both times.

The computer had not been programmed to shrug its shoulders and say, “Your funeral” — it had not been given shoulders in the first place — but if it had, it most certainly would have.

“If we all explode and die,” Dent shouted back to the engine room, “I’m really, really sorry!”

Pebble’s head snapped up; owing to the noise and the distance, she had only heard “explode and die” and “really really sorry,” neither of which were comforting phrases. But before she could really get properly frightened, Dent hit the jump activator.

It was not so much that the ship passed through the blast doors in front of it, en route to the empty space beyond. It was more that the coral, using nearly every jot of what little power the Captain’s song had lent it, squeezed space down in the front of craft, and stretched it out in back, and the universe very obligingly stepped aside and let the ship pass around the doors, and on its merry way.

It happened so quickly, that the windshields ahead of Dent were already full of stars before his finger had left the button, and it took him a few extra seconds to realize that nothing of the explode-and-die variety had, in fact, happened.

He whooped for joy, pumping ten-year-old fists into the air. Pebble, in the engine-room, initially mistook this for horrible screams of agonized death, and was somewhat less than comforted until she figured out what was going on.

Behind them, the black ship drifted on, and ahead of their ship, Dent could see another craft, modestly sized and gray and boxy, not too distant.

Oddly, it had its pluslight drive on, at full burn. And yet, it was standing entirely still in space.

Now that Dent thought of it, his own ship seemed to be most definitely drifting in a certain direction. He took the controls and wheeled the ship around.

On opposite sides of a stellar divide, the fleets of the FLAW and his family’s familiar Imperial Dreadnoughts seemed to be trying to back away from one another, as quickly as possible. And failing utterly. As Dent watched, he could see bits of the ships on either side peeling off, as if yanked by an army of invisible hands, and tumbling into an absolute void of black that blotted out the stars between them.

The darkness flared blue at odd intervals, in crackling bursts of radiation, and Dent thought back to his lessons with Story with realized: Black hole.

Then he remembered what black holes did, especially to little tiny ships like his, and though he did not think it possible for a ten-year-old boy alone at the controls of a stolen spacecraft with a dying captain and a narrow escape from a mad cannibal in its recent past, he somehow got even more scared.

24. Dear and Costly

2008-01-01T13:37:00.001-08:00

Captain Mayweather of Pacification Services Intergalactic was very well-trained and very well-paid, and more importantly, he was employed by people who knew where all of his relatives lived. Even the illegitimate ones.

Mayweather didn’t care much for most of them, and would gladly have left them to his employer’s tender mercies; it was part of the reason he’d thrown himself into the military life to begin with. But at his last performance review, the large man on the other side of the table, with the clipboard and the six-inch scar criscrossing his face, had casually, conversationally mentioned his maiden aunt. The one who’d brought Mayweather up, the only one of his twisted, rotted-out family tree to give a toss about him. The one he deliberately hadn’t mentioned to anyone at the company, ever.

So when the intruders closed in on the bridge, Mayweather didn’t hesitate for a moment in turning his pistol in turn on each of his fellow shipmates. (You can’t give useful information to your captors if you’re no longer alive.) The door smashed open before he got around to finishing himself off — or the navigation systems, for that matter — but he did manage to destroy the comms array. That was something, he told himself, facing down the intruders. The company couldn’t say he hadn’t tried. They couldn’t take it out on Auntie.

“I’ve been trained,” he said. “I can’t be bribed, I won’t be tortured. This—” he waved a hand at his former coworkers, scattered around the deck — “is my doing. Whatever you think you can stop, you can’t. Wherever you think you can go, you can’t. The owners of this ship have long memories and a longer reach. I want you to realize that.”

“Are you about finished?” said the man in the lead, with the gray traveling cloak and the little round spectacles.

“I’ve said my piece,” Mayweather shot back, and waited for his own end.

“Do you know my face?” the leader said.

Come to think of it, Mayweather did. It took him a minute, on account of the scruff, but he did. He paled a little.

“And these folk here,” the leader continued, indicating the beautiful, barely dressed woman to his left, and the roughly man-shaped pile of muscle to his right. “You know them?”

Now that he’d mentioned it, their faces did seem disconcertingly familiar to Mayweather.

“Good,” Commodore Crestfall smiled, watching Mayweather’s Adam’s apple quickly rise and fall. “Now, what say we have us a civilized conversation about long memories and longer reach?”

Mayweather thought of his aunt opening her front door, and finding the large man with the scar and the clipboard waiting.

“Not gonna happen,” he said.

Commodore Crestfall sighed, and Mayweather was surprised to see real pity in the man’s eyes.

“I’ll make sure it gets back to your people you did right by ‘em,” the Commodore said. “On account of anyone you might be afraid for.”

“My thanks,” Mayweather nodded, and shut his eyes. He felt a ripple of air brush his face. “Go on and do it, then.”

He opened his eyes and saw Crestfall withdrawing an empty hand from the folds of his cloak. “Already did,” the Commodore replied.

“Oh,” Mayweather said, feeling a small stinging sensation. He looked down at his midsection and saw something truly remarkable happen. Then neither half of him saw anything at all.

Lis, who had seen her mother feed people to her nightsharks for a broken teacup, felt a curious unhappy sensation in her. Later, after talking to people who knew a lot about these sorts of things, she would learn it was called “sympathy.”

“Huh,” Pug grunted, as Crestfall stepped over Mayweather’s remains to inspect the controls. “That’s some cunning technique.”

“Style, Majesty,” Crestfall sighed. “Although there’s something to be said for your approach.” Indeed there was, as the dozens of mercenaries they had encountered on their way from the cargo bay would attest, once they got out of the hospital and got a note from their doctors. “Hey, Tiny!”

“Little,” Bosun Little growled, triangles strobing on her cheeks, as she ducked her way onto the bridge. She set her Whomping Stick down against a ruined console and wiped trails of dark blood — not hers — on the midsection of her coveralls. “That rear guard problem we had on the way here? We don’t have it anymore. What’s your tizzy?”

“Comms are dead,” the Commodore told her, signaling her over to the half-blasted control deck. Through the viewport ahead, the ridges of the dark ship prickled out of the shadow of the nearby moon; bright, twinkling clusters in the distance, like schools of platefish, marked the opposing Imperial and FLAW fleets. “You familiar with the maneuvering on this sort of boat?”

“Might be,” the Bosun said, thick fingers trailing over the controls.

“We fly out there without comms, bearing no colors, I doubt the fleet’s going to pay us any mind,” Pug offered. “Until we try to dock. Then they’re going to, you know, kill us.”

“Look,” Lis nodded, pointing out the viewport. Tiny flecks of debris scattered out from the dark ship into the starlight. One in particular blinked, readjusted itself, and curved off toward the two distant fleets. “Oh, Gods. Do you think that’s the bomb?”

“Most like,” Crestfall nodded. “Bosun, you think we could intercept?”

“Yes, I completely want to die for the sake of both your slop-rigged sets of politics,” the Bosun snapped. She took a deep breath. “Probably, but if we just show up, there’s that whole problem of them ignoring us.”

“Or killing us,” Pug reminded.

“We need something to get their attention,” Lis said. “Something big.” Her eyes flitted to the controls. Weapons dead; communication dead; scanning dead…

Lis had once had a very wearisome diplomatic meeting with the head of the private army of Kwostell. He’d insisted on giving her a tour of his flagship; she would later return the favor with regard to an entirely different sort of geography, albeit with no greater enthusiasm. She tapped one panel, and watched the lights of its instruments flicker, then spring to life.

“Is this what I think it is?” she said.

Consciousness returned to Captain Corsair in a precise sequence.

First, taste. That was pretty much normal, really.

Then, temperature. Complete numbness slipped gently into agonizing cold, which then passed matters gracefully off to a sort of warmth that would be pleasant once the agonizing cold finally decided to stop lingering.

Then, sensation. His living hand around the haft of his sword. The cloak shifting against his shoulders. The children encircled in his arms, breathing raggedly but steadily, shivering with cold.

Next, smell. Given the children’s long incarceration, the Captain would have been happy to have skipped this part.

After that, hearing. The heavy clang of the blast doors as they finished sealing back into place. The slow clomping and squeaking of tall, heavy leather boots.

And lastly, sight, which was perfectly clear to the Captain except for all those dark spots swimming around in the air. He tried to swat them away, but his progress in that regard was frustratingly slow.

“Look at you, then,” he heard a low, sharp-edged voice purr, growing louder, heading toward him. “I’d heard one of the quality was slumming it as a pirate, but honestly.”

The Captain blinked again, and in a very loose definition of the term “saw,” saw Sir Leslie Murther striding across the deck, cutlass flashing in his hand. Uneven bits of Sir Leslie’s lustrous locks were missing, and half his mustache had been scorched away, but he’d taken the time to go and get himself properly dressed again, once more snug in the embrace of a spare Special Device.

“Excuse me,” the Captain managed to say, through still-chattering teeth. “Which of you am I meant to be fighting? Or is it perhaps the both?”

“You probably don’t remember me,” Sir Leslie tutted. “You’ve come a long way since then. Most of it downward, I see.”

Sir Leslie drew back his arm, and swung the cutlass.

Most of the time, this procedure resulted in a satisfying (to Sir Leslie, anyway) sound somewhere between a squelch and a crunch. This time, to his surprise, it instead produced a clang.

“I must apologize,” Captain Corsair panted, regaining his breath. In the space of a moment, he had drawn his sword from its berth in the floor and lifted it to block Sir Leslie’s swing. “My arm, it is very well-trained. When attempts are made to kill me, it sometimes reacts on instinct.”

Sir Leslie snarled, and slashed again. Again, a clang.

“You see?” Corsair shrugged. “It is hopeless.” With his free hand, he gently set the two groaning, stirring children on the deck. Then, bracing himself, he rose on unsteady legs to face Sir Leslie.

For all of two seconds, anyway. At which point the Captain wobbled and fell over sideways.

“I seem to be having difficulties,” the Captain said, from the floor. “Permit me a brief moment to resolve disagreements with my legs, yes?”

“I’ll spare you the trouble,” Sir Leslie said. He raised the cutlass a third time.

And promptly fell over himself. He had an excuse, at least; the entire ship pitched and roiled, caught in the thrall of some outside force, and it took a few moments for the gravity compensators to keep up.

“Ah,” the Captain observed, making a much more successful second attempt at rising. “I see you have difficulties as well.”

Slung in an invisible web of attracting forces, Sir Leslie’s ship was slowly towed out of its orbit, toward the two opposing fleets of Imperial and FLAW craft. At the opposite end of its tether, the mercenary ship — now under entirely new, if not entirely cohesive, management — chugged slowly but steadily along.

Sir Leslie scrambled to his feet, boiling out a torrent of black, curdling curses that made the Captain wince.

“Please, good sir!” Corsair protested, nodding to Dent and Pebble as they slowly regained consciousness on the deck nearby. “There are delicate ears present!”

“I’ll reserve them for the appetizers,” Sir Leslie snarled, and charged. Swordsmanship, alas, had never been his forte. His swings were wide and clumsy, a butcher’s work. The Captain, shaky but recovering quickly, parried each stroke of the cutlass with tiny, precise adjustments of his blade and his stance, like a painter adding the final touches to a sunset.

“You see there?” the Captain offered helpfully. “Your stance, it is incorrect. Set your feet slightly wider, and — ah, yes, good! Your swing has greater energy.”

“Damnable popinjay,” Sir Leslie growled, beginning to sweat beneath his heavy velvet jacket. The Special Device, for all its admirable features, did not yet incorporate climate control. “I see your manners are all you have left.”

“I begin to remember you, I think,” the Captain mused, ducking adeptly. “You were… how shall I put this delicately… amply proportioned, yes?”

“I was big boned!” Sir Leslie roared, lashing out with a boot that caught Corsair square in the chest. “It was glandular!” The Captain stumbled backward, smacking hard into the hull of his anchored stolen ship.

“I must hesitantly question your use of the past tense in that statement,” the Captain sighed, knocking aside Sir Leslie’s blade with his own. The cutlass screeched sparks in a line across the hull of the ship. “Have you perhaps consulted physicians?”

Sir Leslie’s left eyebrow twitched. His clenched teeth hummed briefly. And then, with a bellow, he thrust his cutlass toward the Captain.

“You seem to have missed,” Corsair noted, casually glancing at the blade embedded just over his shoulder in the steel skin of his stolen ship. “Have I perhaps made you angry?” He cleverly feinted to one side.

Well, he attempted to. Something tugged him back into place, and a second, more thorough look revealed that Sir Leslie’s stab had neatly pinned the Captain’s jacket to the ship behind him.

“This is regrettable,” the Captain said, moments before Sir Leslie’s skull collided with his own. It was a trick Sir Leslie had learned early in childhood, and it never failed to serve him well. Corsair’s head slammed back against the ship behind him, and the Captain sagged, dazed.

Sir Leslie smiled. He opened his mouth, and his teeth began to sing.

Then something small but surprisingly heavy leapt on his back, and Sir Leslie experienced pain in stereo.

Dent remembered the way his brother had scaled the nose of the mighty Ogodsno to deliver the final blow. He applied the same strategy to Sir Leslie, then grabbed both of his would-be captor’s ears and yanked, hard.

Sir Leslie roared in agony, stumbling backward, his arms flailing and wheeling, trying to swat the boy off. Dent, still shivering, the whole of his skin stinging from the intense cold of vacuum, just tugged harder.

And when Sir Leslie flung out one hand, Pebble grabbed hold of it, found the meatiest part, and bit down hard.

One would think that, having subjected others to the same treatment, Sir Leslie would be somewhat understanding in the event that someone else tried to see how he tasted. (Not very good, in Pebble’s estimation — all sickly-sweet and perfumey, with an edge of sweat and rancid fat.) But he did not take it well at all.

It took him a few incredibly agonizing shakes of his arm before Pebble flew off, tumbling across the deck, reflexively spitting out the terrible taste in her mouth. Sir Leslie flung a closed fist back above his head, conking poor Dent squarely on his royal skull. The boy saw stars, and did not realize he had actually let go until the deck came up to thud against his back.

Wincing, Sir Leslie sucked at the neat, child-sized teethmarks reddening the palm of his left hand, glaring black murder beneath his bristly eyebrows at Dent. The boy tried to scramble backward across the deck, but it was a very large and empty bay, and there was absolutely nowhere to hide.

“I have had problematic meals,” Sir Leslie growled. “I have had meals I regretted undertaking. But I have never, ever endured such frustration for the sake of a suitable supper.” Pebble ran at him, but he was ready for her this time. His thick, ungentlemanly hand closed fast against her small pale neck, and he swung her up into the air in a whirl of kicking legs and long silver hair.

Sir Leslie knelt down, resting his free hand on his knee, just above the opening of his boot, to look Dent in the eye. At the end of his outstretched arm, Pebble began to turn blue, clawing at the velvet of his sleeve.

“You’d better damn well be delicious,” Sir Leslie said. Dent could smell the carnivore stink of his breath, overlaid with notes of grape-onion and soot.

The boy looked beyond Sir Leslie, to see Captain Corsair approaching, his blade raised high. And he smiled, and knew that somehow, everything would work out right.

In later days, and months, and years, he would remember this moment of deadly happiness. And he would smile only in guarded, trusted company, and then rarely, and never more than he had to. It was a terrible thing to learn, and a terrible way to learn it.

For Sir Leslie, who might otherwise have been distracted by the dictates of his ravening stomach, saw Dent smile. He heard the movement behind him. From its concealment in his knee-high black boot, Sir Leslie drew a long, serrated knife.

And as Captain Corsair prepared to bring his sword down, Sir Leslie turned and drove the knife deeply and upward into the Captain’s stomach.

23. Out of the Frying Pan

2007-12-16T18:11:00.001-08:00

All through the long clicks in which they sailed together across the freezing dark of space, Captain Corsair could feel the robot’s steel skin pinging and singing with the formation of a thousand tiny fractures. It was not, as one might imagine, the most comfortable feeling, even through the reassuring thickness of a Crouch Industries Insta-Fit ZeroSuit (“99% Guaranteed Leakproof!”). The miles-long shadow toward which Story steered them, a deeper shade in the umbra of the moon it orbited, did nothing to ease the tension.

It was fortunate, then, that Captain Corsair had been raised a gentleman. And gentlemen did not sweat.

Even after they touched down on the hull, the Captain’s magnaboots kissing softly against a spire of black, it took more time still to find anything resembling a hatch. The ship’s owner, perhaps expecting visitors, perhaps expecting none at all, had left this particular airlock unlocked.

As the pressure normalized, and heat and air returned, the Captain heard with rising volume the sharp, swift cracks of Story’s frost-rimed chassis adjusting poorly to the sudden change in temperature.

“Are you well, my shiny comrade?” Corsair asked, peeling the zerosuit off his clothes beneath, and reattaching his scabbard to his belt. He looked with some concern at the fissures running up the sides of Story’s torso, the metal curling with mist and swiftly beading with condensation.

The robot simply nodded, but Corsair saw its eyes flicker uncertainly. And when it moved to open the inner airlock, there were glitches, erratic tics, in its motion that had not been present before.

“I can no longer locate the young master,” Story said mournfully, as they emerged into a dim, mirrored hallway. In the war, Corsair had heard wild tales of Dark Matter Armada craft; this one looked much like he’d imagined it, and nothing at all.

“Does the ship perhaps have a network you might access?” the Captain asked, drawing his sword. There might well be people here that regrettably required stabbing. Or other things. Captain Corsair wished to be prepared for any and all stabbing-related challenges that might present themselves.

“I am not—” Story began, and then his eyes pulsed subtly. “Ah. Very strange. There is a layer of familiar coding over … something much stranger. It speaks to me with an accent.”

Corsair stopped to quickly adjust his jacket and tunic in one of the convenient mirrors. Gentlemen and bandits alike must always look their best. “What sort of security do we face? Ordinarily, I would plan these matters beforehand, but I find myself regrettably pressed for time.”

“I can … persuade the ship not to notice us,” Story affirmed. “Provided we do nothing to provoke its attention.”

The ship rumbled then, a short sharp shock, distant and low.

“It seems something else is doing so for us,” the Captain mused.

“Two decks down, and not far from there,” Story said, head tilted to catch the silent song of the ship all around it. “Someone is making a lemon-tree cake.”

“I beg your pardon?” the Captain asked. The robot looked at him blankly.

“There is a stairway just ahead,” Story continued, blithely. “We should hurry.”

“The children?” Corsair asked, but the robot had already expanded its treadball and rolled past him. The Captain noted a hitch, a hiccup, in the robot’s once-steady clack-clack-clacking.

Down they went, spiraling around curiously spaced steps that seemed to the Captain at once too large and too small for comfortable human strides. Story rolled ahead without waiting for the Captain, and Corsair broke into a run to keep up. They veered around corner after corner in the seemingly endless maze of mirrored corridors, and from time to time, Corsair could catch Story humming snatches of something that sounded like bits of three different songs all at once.

The thought occurred to him that his guide in this endeavor might not be entirely reliable. But the Captain, lacking better alternatives, plunged ahead anyway. Such was his way.

He had a few seconds’ warning before the mirrors exploded — just enough time to duck and cover his eyes. He rose, shaking glass off himself, to see Story stuttering in place, his treadball seizing and beginning to grind.

“A minor malfunction,” Story said. “Pickle in the sight. I am attempting to fix.”

“Do not trouble yourself, my shiny friend,” the Captain said, offering the robot a reassuring pat on the shoulder. The plating wobbled and creaked at his touch. “I shall scout ahead while you gather your wits.”

Corsair had neared the junction of the next corridor when he heard them — footfalls crunching through the broken glass, and distant howls, as if from some terrible beast. He pressed himself against a wall, quickly kissed the shining blade of his saber for luck, and sprang out into the corridor, sword at the ready.

The children plowed into him. The Captain had been well-trained at maintaining his composure in expected situations, and also not looking like he was in any way pained or inconvenienced; this experience now served him well.

By the time he had regained his wits, he realized that Dent had finally stopped speaking and taken a breath, and Pebble had quit signing long enough to work out the cramp in her fingers.

“Your adventures sound most fascinating,” he lied politely, reassuring himself that he could always catch up when none of them were in mortal peril. “Shall we perhaps now look for my most enviable spacecraft?”

But the children had already rushed past him to dangle joyously from the still-immobile Story, Dent in particular hugging the robot for as long as its still-chilly metal skin allowed.

“Are you okay?” Dent asked, in mid-hug. “You’re all cold and cracked up.”

“My condition is excellent, Young Master,” Story replied, a faint warble in his even voice. The glitch finally worked out of his treadball, and he rolled a short distance forward before bringing himself to a half. “But goodness! Look at you! Your mainspring’s got gophers.”

The boy looked at the robot strangely, and then at Captain Corsair, who could not quite disguise his look of concern quickly enough to be reassuring.

“We must clip all your toenails and mend your aelerons,” Story fussed, plucking at Dent’s tunic gingerly. “The sergeant will be most displeased.”

“Your metallic friend, he was very brave,” Corsair endeavored to explain, as gently as he could. “He carried me all the way here, through the cold of zero. The extreme cold.”

“Manufactured for guaranteed kills in all weather conditions,” Story blurted, then burped static. “Pardon me. Did I just say something?”

“We’ll get you fixed up,” Dent said, patting the condensation-beaded steel of his best friend’s chestplate. “Nothing but the best.” Pebble took the robot’s hand gently, and gave it a squeeze.

“I do not wish to hurry along this reunion,” the Captain offered, “but I find the lack of resistance we have thus far encountered somewhat suspect. And I am, as I have said, eager to once more claim possession of the fine spaceship which is indisputably my own.”

Story listened intently to the dark ship’s network for a moment, eyes pulsing, and then turned — first one way, then the entirely opposite direction. “This way,” he said. “But I must advise you— advise you— advise you—”

“Advise us what?” the Captain asked.

Then the ceiling fell upon Story in a pile of spines. The robot flailed, and the mirrored faces of the Wee Ones dug into Story’s chassis turned to reflect Dent, Pebble, and the Captain.

“Story!” Dent cried, rushing forward. The Captain only just managed to pull him back out of range of a swiping Wee One talon.

“If I may, Your Majesty,” the Captain offered, and stepped forward with his blade flashing. It struck sparks as it clanged against the black hide of the Wee Ones, dashing them off Story with surgical precision.

“Are you functional, my friend?” the Captain asked, as Story seized one straggler with his pincer arm and flung it into the nearest wall.

“Yes,” the robot nodded, looking past the Captain’s shoulder, his laser eyes beginning to charge up. “But conditions appear suboptimal for our remaining so.”

A black, scuttling tide of Wee Ones surged down the corridor behind them, mirrored faces reflecting dozens of tiny Dents, Pebbles, Stories and Corsairs.

The Captain turned, relaxing into a well-studied fencing crouch, as Story readied his laser arm. “Permit me, if you would,” the Captain said in a low, calculating voice, “to deal with the advance wave. If you would then do me the courtesy of—”

Story’s trio of lasers erupted, raking in a precise zigzag pattern across the leading edge of the Wee Ones, slicing them to bits.

“That is fine as well,” the Captain conceded, and hacked a leaping Wee One out of the air. “Children! Kindly remain behind us, that we may better prevent your deaths!”

There seemed no end to the waves of Wee Ones that came at them. Dent and Pebble hung back, lobbing bits of broken class over the heads of the Captain and Story at the charging mass. Corsair’s blade danced and looped, battering away the few Wee Ones able to dodge Story’s lasers. But onward ever the black spiny monsters came, clambering over the fallen bodies of their comrades, until the sword grew heavy in Corsair’s arm, and Story’s laser pulses began to stutter ominiously.

“Ha ha!” the Captain laughed through his own labored breathing, as at last the Wee Ones seemed to back away. “We are both victorious and unmutilated!”

“The latter, yes,” Story nodded. “But the vicar’s onion jam is uncertain of the former.”

It took Corsair a moment to parse that, and then he heard the scrape and clatter of Wee Ones reassembling themselves.

The mass of tiny bots had drawn back indeed — but only to surge together, folding, interlocking into a single figure whose squirming bulk filled the whole of the corridor. Dozens of mirrored faces formed a short of shield on one arm; a multiplicity of razor talons formed sharp claws on the other.

The Great Big One, fully assembled, shook its headless torso to work out the kinks and took one step forward. The corridor trembled and creaked.

Story unleashed a laser salvo, but the thing’s mirrored shield lifted, deflecting the blast back to sizzle across the arched ceiling. One huge black claw raked out, tearing jagged fissures in Story’s chestplating, and sending the robot skidding backward along the hallway.

Dent screamed, and once more the Captain had to hold him back. Pebble ran toward the fallen robot, but he waved her back with a snapping pincer arm.

“Core containment breach,” the robot warbled in a waning voice. Steam issued in hisses from the holes in its chest, along with an ominous flicker of blue light. “The tart seems thoroughly ruined.”

Captain Corsair raised his blade again as the Great Big One turned toward him.

“I had hoped to die beneath a pile of beautiful, angry women,” he sighed. “But one must accept such disappointments with grace.”

Story’s treadball whined, grinding its mechanisms. In a bolt of silver, the robot shot forward up off the floor and smashed squaredly into the Great Big One’s midsection, knocking the behemoth off its feet.

“Young Master,” Story said solemnly, his head swiveling completely around as his limbs flailed against the struggling Great Big One. “You must run now.”

“No, Story!” Dent sobbed, the awful realization driving itself like a fist into his gut. “No, we can fix you up.”

“The damage is too great,” Story said, his voice warping and stuttering as bits of the Great Big One detached themselves to tear at him. “Go, Young Master. I can do this for you.”

“But…” Dent sniffled, “but we’ll never know how The Caravan’s Escape ends.”

“They escape, of course,” Story said gently. “As will you, Young Master. Straight ahead, right at the third juncture, down two decks. Goodb—”

And then his silver hide disappeared beneath a writhing pile of Wee Ones, and Pebble tugged at Dent’s arm. The Captain slung Pebble up onto his shoulders, and lifted Dent off the ground under one arm, and ran all perdition away down the hall. Flashes of blue light from behind made the world strobe around them, capturing strange half-moments of time.

Two corners distant, a wave of absolute silence and blinding blue caught up with them, lifting the Captain off his feet. By reflex, he rolled onto his back, cradling the children to his chest, and skidded in a wave of glass across the onyx floor until the shockwave subsided.

“Well,” the Captain said at last, beneath the weight of two stunned children. “That was spectacular.”

Dent sat up, helping Pebble clamber off the Captain, and looked back the way they had come.

“I would not advise it,” the Captain told him softly. “You should remember him as we was — not as he may be now. He had a good end.”

“Do you think robots get a paradise?” Dent asked him, all seriousness.

“I had not thought of it before,” the Captain said. “Did you know that he was made for war, originally?” Dent nodded, smearing a forearm across his sniffling nose in a way that would have appalled his mother. “I saw others of his model in action,” the Captain added. “During the war. Theirs was not a happy lot. I think… to have some new purpose, to care for you, as he clearly did… that was in itself a paradise for him.”

“He never did get to kill me, though,” Dent smiled, tears drying up.

“I find that a most fortunate turn of events,” the Captain said. “And I am certain he did as well.”

Then Pebble tugged at his sleeve, nervously looking back in the direction they had come, and it was time to be off again.

Story’s directions proved as true as the robot himself, and with some judicious tinkering on Captain Corsair’s part at the entry lock, the three escapees found themselves entering a huge, echoing cavern of a docking bay. Before them, dimly lit by spotlights shining up from the floor, was the familiar pointed silhouette of the Captain’s stolen ship, outlined against the heavy blast doors that separated the hangar from hard vacuum without.

“You see?” the Captain exulted. “My daring plan has entirely succeeded. Soon, we may resume the getting-incredibly-wealthy portion of my original stratagem, yes?”

Pebble signaled to Dent, and when he saw it, too, he nudged the captain. “Is that thing part of your plan?”

It sat unsecured on the hangar deck, next to the gravlocked ship: A fat, nearly featureless silver cylinder, nearly as tall as the captain, laid on its side in a launching track that pointed toward the blast doors.

“It is most assuredly not,” the Captain mused. “But perhaps it could be — depending, of course, on its value?”

Captain Corsair had no further time to speculate on this, alas. For at that moment, a harsh klaxon rang through the bay, and beneath their feet, the three escapees felt heavy machinery grind to life.

“What’s happening?” Dent tried to shout, his words batted away to nothingness by the solid wall of shrieking noise.

The Captain barely had time to gather the children in his arms, plunge the point of his blade deeply into the deck in a fount of sparks, and hold on tight. Then the heavy blast doors opened, and all the air rushed out of the chamber at once.

All three of the people trying very hard to stay inside were too busy suffocating to notice the curious metal cylinder launch itself out into the deep black of space.

The Eighth Rule of Banditry (Part 2)

2007-12-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

The medallion, on the third try, looped dizzily around a jutting swirl of black on the opposite side of Dent’s prison, and came to rest with a dull clunk. There’d been just enough silk for it to reach, and when Dent reached up to pick at the thread now sloped downward from one side of his cell to the other, from the gold medallion with the lopsided hole melted into its center to the silver spoon, it twanged taut.

Slowly, careful not to unbalance the platform, Dent knelt beneath the glimmering line of psuedosilk and peeled off the formal blue dinner jacket, still bearing spatters of whale-juice from that dinner endless days ago. Dent had never been the biggest fan of baths, especially the ice-cold, Story-assisted variety he usually received at the palace. But in the absence of personal hygeine, he was beginning to understand its virtues; if the Wee Ones had noses, Dent could surely have chased them away with his jacket alone.

His mother would have been furious at him for cutting up any of his clothing, not for the waste of it — waste was practically an obligation for the Imperial family — but for the impropriety. It was too much like work. So Dent, even in the terror of his predicament, smiled as the sonic knife neatly sliced the sleeves off his jacket. Misbehavior was somehow sweeter when it could be entirely justified.

Dent set the sleeves aside and picked up the crystal vial. The top unsealed with a soft pop, and Dent dabbed a finger on the lip of the bottle, where tiny beads of fluid glimmered. He rubbed thumb and forefinger together — or tried. They kept slipping right off one another. As Dent peered closer, he could see the pink liquid expanding, almost replicating itself, until it had gone from a single drop to a thin coating on the tips of his thumb and forefinger alike. It smelled weird and fruity, and Dent wiped it on his pants and wrinkled his nose. He guessed his sister must keep it handy for those times when she and her friends got stuck. His sister did so many really weird things.

(If the designers of the vial and its contents, the Singing Sisters of Our Lady of Applied Nanoengineering on Orotund, had not already taken a vow of silence, attempting to answer Dent’s questions regarding the nature of the substance would surely have driven them to one. There were certain corners of the market even Crouch Industries had not yet occupied, and the Sisters made a tidy living filling one or two of them. Lis’s commissions alone could have made them all wealthy as queens, if not for the small matter of their vow of poverty. The Sisters didn’t mind. They liked a challenge, as their habit of singing silently demonstrated.)

Dent tucked the vial back in his belt, and made a few quick cuts to his severed sleeves; the rising, increasingly strained whine of the sonic knife told him the batteries were dying. Shutting off the knife, he slipped the hasty gloves — more like fingerless mittens, Dent’s crafting skills being as lacking as his knotsmanship — over each hand, and wrapped the remaining fabric in tight bunches around each palm.

Dent’s heart pounded, and the bits of puffcake he’d involuntarily swallowed churned in his stomach, splashing sour acid up the back of his throat. He’d done this sort of thing before with the Imperial Acrobats of Cleanliness. But they had antigrav harnesses. Dent had a very thin thread and a very long drop.

He thought of Pebble’s scream, and while that did nothing for his queasy stomach, it at least helped him make up his mind.

Moving with muffled, cloth-wrapped hands, Dent took the rest of his mutilated jacket and twisted it into a tight knotted braid. Carefully, he reached up and looped it over the line of pseudosilk. He could feel his pulse all but rattling his bones, and every breath he took felt like it just wasn’t enough.

In tiny, hesitant motions, Dent got both his feet underneath him. He gripped his jacket, feeling the string wobble under his weight.

Dent stepped forward.

The platform reeled and spun beneath him. Dent cried out as his feet jerked down into empty air, nearly losing his grip. But the psuedosilk held, and slowly, inches at a time, Dent began to slide down the inclined thread, toward the spikes on the opposite wall.

Had Janos of the Midnight Guard known that the selfsame material in his favorite new garotte was currently being used to save a life, he would surely have chuckled.

Of course, he would have found it even funnier that Dent’s weight had pulled the string down at the end attached to the silver spoon, against the razor edge of one protruding blade. It sawed against the edge as Dent wriggled ever closer to the wall, and thread by thread, it began to fray.

Dent’s arms were beginning to burn. Clambering through the palace to get away from Story had made him strong, but only to a point. He swung his feet beneath him, each swing lurching him just a little further toward the wall.

The string began to stretch itself ever thinner against the razor edge, more and more gossamer filaments twanging and curling away with each passing moment.

Dent swung his feet again, sliding another precious inch toward the wall. The soles of his boots just barely touched a protruding swirl of sharp black material.

He looked up and saw the thinning thread of silk, the swirling tangle of frayed threads. Dent’s stomach seemed to fall away inside him, clenching up on itself. He swung violently, slipping the last few inches toward relative safety—

The thread snapped.

Dent began to fall. He let go of one end of his bunched-together jacket, felt it slipping off the slackening cord, and lashed it out toward the wall.

The jacket snagged, pierced by a jutting spire. Dent swung forward, the spikes looming toward him, and just managed to tuck his feet up and under him to brace against the wall.

He reached out with one shaking hand and carefully gripped a swirl of black material. Even through the fabric swathing his palm, he could feel it cold and sharp. He dug his feet in, finding footholds on lower spires, and at last let go of the jacket and grabbed ahold of another spire with his remaining hand.

Dent clung to the wall, exhausted, the muscles of his arms and legs jumping and shuddering under his skin. For a moment, he shut his eyes, just glad to be somewhere steady and stable. Below him, the Wee Ones clacked about angrily, the spot beams reflected from their mirror faces dancing off the ceiling. But they were far below, and he was, for the moment, safe up here. He had time to think.

And then, unfortunately, the whole of the wall to which Dent clung began to move. To crawl, more precisely. What had looked to Dent like particularly nasty ornamentation unfolded itself, revealed as one giant mass of featureless, spike-limbed black drones. None of which were particularly happy to have someone grabbing at them.

As Dent began to scream, the lattice of drones to which he clung peeled away from the wall, curling like a wave toward the unforgiving floor below.

“Ha!” Sir Leslie bellowed in triumph, and plunged the barb-ended spit into the crevice behind his cabinetry. Its wicked point hit home, sinking deep into what, unfortunately for Sir Leslie, was not even remotely Pebble.

He saw this for himself just a moment later, when light flooded into the gap behind the stove. It came in through the cabinet door Pebble had just emerged from, and the hole she had torn in the flimsy backing of the cabinet — Sir Leslie had never quite realized that eating one’s contractors leaves certain gaps in the realm of quality control — and illuminated the pit of his pike stuck fast into the dark material of the neighboring bulkhead.

The scrambling flap of small bare feet sounded in the low, dark kitchen, accompanied by the clatter of the cookware Sir Leslie had scattered across the floor in his search. But by the time he let go of his end of the thoroughly stuck spit, and lifted his shaggy head above the edge of the counter, the girl had once again vanished.

Sir Leslie failed to notice that the air in the kitchen, particularly above the stove, had begun to shimmer faintly.

With a low growl, he took up his cutlass in one hand, and the cleaver in the other, and listened intently. Not a sound. Not a peep. Sir Leslie took a deep, cleansing breath, like that pleasantly meaty monk he’d hired had once taught him, and tried to make the best of his growing vexation. This was exercise. He was burning calories. He thought of it that way.

“Little girl,” he sang out softly, letting the tip of his cutlass ping musically off the scattered pots and pans upon the floor as he passed each one by. In the quiet, his leather boots creaked with each slow, steady step. “Where might you be hiding, now?”

Through a slender crevice, from behind a door, reflective eyes watched him.

He made a full circuit of the island, stepping around the archipelagos of gleaming sterlisteel saucepans and five-in-one stewpots, before he spotted it. A thin curl of vapor from the door of the chillbox, just so slightly ajar.

Sir Leslie had ordered a larger model, the Crouch Industries PermaCold XL, owing to his special diet. The gleaming silver door sitting smugly in the wall of the kitchen, exuding its own unnecessary massiveness, could swing wide enough to accomodate at least one child in its frosty, spacious interior. Sir Leslie could testify to this personally.

Quiet as a whisper, quiet as the tiniest of mice, Sir Leslie crept toward the chillbox, cutlass raised. He hooked the tip of his cleaver into the handle of the door, and with one quick motion jerked the door open. Light sprang forth, flooding over him.

He very nearly, but did not quite, stab the life out of two neatly arranged six-packs of CrouchFood Nutri-Water, a withered bunch of celery, and a half-empty jar of gourmet ganderberry mustard. It had been a while since Sir Leslie had done the shopping.

Then a pot sailed through the air and smacked into the back of his head. Sir Leslie’s head jerked forward with the impact, clunking into the cold steel door of the freezer compartment, which gave his skull expanding clouds of pain, in stereo.

He turned, a roar rising on his lips, only to have it truncated by the prompt arrival of another pot.

Pebble, leaning out of the emptied-out lower cabinet in which she’d hidden herself, picked up a collander and drew back to throw it. She had an excellent arm.

Sir Leslie, seeing spots from the last pot’s collision, managed to clumsily swat this one away. A skillet caught him in the solar plexus, staggering him back a bit. Pebble waited, courteously giving him a moment to recover. And when he rose up, thundering black hatred in a torrent that fairly flowed down his beard, she picked up the biggest, heaviest saucepan within reach, and heaved it at him.

The saucepan whirled toward him, and as Sir Leslie lashed out with his cutlass to bat it aside, he noticed two curious things.

First, and this might just have been his recent cluster of minor head injuries, the air between him and the ever-advancing pan seemed to shimmer ever so slightly.

And second, the little girl was ducking back inside the cabinet, closing the door behind her.

Sir Leslie had a fair arm himself, and his cutlass swing connected with the flying pan. Steel clanged against steel. Sparks ignited.

So did the methane gas filling the kitchen.

The shockwave hit first, lifting Sir Leslie from his feet and flinging him bodily against the nearest wall. He was fortunate for this, as the gas had not quite concentrated enough in the far corners of the room for the ensuing fireball to reach that far. Instead of being charbroiled, Sir Leslie was merely lightly seared. Had he been conscious at the time, this would have been small consolation.

Pebble experienced the blast as a sudden square of intense blue light around the outline of the closed cabinet door, and a rush of sudden heat, and a moment of panic as the entire frame of the cabinetry around her creaked from the sudden pressure. The breath was torn from her lungs, and for several frightening seconds, she gasped, trying to suck it back in. Then air returned, and Pebble sucked it in eagerly. She listened carefully for sounds outside, and heard only the crackle of small, isolated fires.

Pebble opened the door to find the kitchen wrecked and steaming, the pots and pans on the floor all shoved against the far wall. Sir Leslie lay in a great black heap, trailing wisps of smoke. As Pebble watched, that heap began to stir, and groan.

She found her feet and ran, out the now open doorway, over the slightly bent metal of the door, blown from its hinges, and still squirming a bit from the death-throes of the Wee One flattened beneath. She ran into the endless maze of corridors, and behind her, Sir Leslie’s cry of pain, humiliation, and ravenous fury made the very glass of the mirrors tremble.

It would be easy to say that Dent had abundant experience in not dying, but then, most likely so does anyone reading these words. (If not, please see a doctor immediately. Or perhaps a talent agent.)

Instead, it may be more accurate to state that Dent had become quite adept at not being killed when the opportunity presented itself.

And now, as the squirming, slicing lattice of black robot drones buckled away from the high dark walls of his prison cell, Dent saw a gap open in the writhing mass of sharp forms above him, and hauled himself up through it. The edges of the drones’ limbs — one could possibly call them Wee Ones, but these unaltered models lacked their mirrored faces — gashed at Dent’s arms and legs, raising thin lines of bright crimson royal blood. But he struggled onward, through a nightmare thicket of shadows, and finally popped through to the upper side of the tumbling wave. For a moment, his balance seemed like it might hold. But then his footing gave way, and he bounced roughly down the top of what was now an ever shallower slope of drones. The black bots crashed in a heap on the floor, individual members springing up in the air from the impact to clatter against the walls. Dent’s momentum flung him away from the chaos, hard against the black wall, and he lay there dizzy and bruised for a moment, the breath gone from him, ears full of angry scrabbling.

The Wee Ones and the unaltered drones had tangled together in a pile in the middle of the cell, flailing for freedom with insectile limbs. The few that had managed to extricate themselves were scrambling around and butting heads in the artificial intelligence equivalent of a violent sneezing fit. Then Dent, unfortunately, sucked in a particularly loud gasp of air, and sat up. And suddenly the drones remembered which of the various moving entitites in the room did not technically belong there.

Mirrored faces, and appendages that could easily have been faces, all turned toward Dent in unison. The pile of robots began to chitter and scrape eagerly, individual members plucking themselves out of the mess and scrambling toward Dent. Insofar as any of the Wee Ones had minds, they had nothing good in them where Dent was concerned.

Dent, still dizzy and dazed, fumbled in the pouch of his Adventure Belt as a trio of Wee Ones converged upon him from over the top of the pile. His hand closed around the pink crystal vial and he threw it as hard as he could at the reflective face of the lead bot.
The thing’s mirror-eye cracked upon impact, and so did the vial, throwing bright sharp snowflakes of crystal glittering into the air. A brief cloud of pink liquid flowered, splattering all over the drone and its neighbors. And then, with increasing speed, it began to spread.

A thin pinkish sheen of oily liquid spread outward from where Dent had thrown the vial, covering everything it touched, and dispensing almost entirely with the petty concept of friction. The Wee Ones advancing over the top of the pile suddenly lost their footing, slipping and skidding helplessly, wobbling around and falling over sideways.

His head still spun, but Dent recognized an opportunity when he saw it. Lurching to his feet, leaning against the wall for balance, he edged sidewise along the now slightly rosier mass of flailing robots, careful not to slip on the faint trails of pink liquid leaking out onto the floor. The door to the corridor was shut fast, impassable and black and seemingly without a seam. But on the wall beside it, Dent saw a crudely attached box riveted into the black material, oddly out of place.

(The contractor Sir Leslie had hired to refit the cells, having heard surprisingly little from others rumored to have worked on this particular assignment, had decided to add the finishing touches to the locking mechanism only after he’d been paid. Alas, his payment, such as it was, ruled out the chance of any further refinements to his work.)

The sonic knife bleeped a warning as Dent thumbed it on. Its charge was swiftly waning, but it had enough juice yet to shear off the simple bolts on the side of the black case, revealing to Dent the tangle of wires that lay between him and relative freedom.

It would be nice to say that young Dent had a keen mastery of such complicated systems, and knew exactly which wires to snip to open the door. Sadly, his only previous experience with the subject had been his mother’s gift of the Young Gentlemen’s Convenient Opportunity for Electrocution Kit at the age of seven. After his arm stopped wiggling of its own accord, and his hair began to lose its charge and droop back to its normal state, Dent swore off further experiments entirely, and not even Mechanic Doren could rekindle his interest.

The tangle of wires, like a split spaghettifruit pod, seemed to spill from the box and ensnare Dent’s very brain. If he cut the wrong ones, perhaps the door would not open at all. Perhaps he’d be stuck here forever. He froze, the sonic knife in his hand.

Say what you will about imminent death, but it has a wonderful way of clarifying the mind.

A particularly resourceful Wee One, at the periphery of the hopelessly slip-sliding pile of waggling drones, managed to regain its balance. Its reflective face turned to zero in on Dent. With cautious steps, slow at first but ever faster as its motion mechanisms adjusted, it began to move toward him. Then it began to bound.

Dent dug into his Adventure Belt, finding the tin soldier from his father’s model. He looked into the tangle of wires, and saw a place where the insulated coverings of the wires gave way to metal contacts.

The Wee One scrambled closer, nearly stumbled, but kept coming.

Frantically, fingers slick with his own blood from countless cuts, Dent rewrapped his cut-off sleeve around the whole of his right hand, then placed the tin soldier in this mitten of fabric. He took a deep breath.

The Wee One tripped on a protruding limb of one of its comrades, mere feet from Dent, and began to get back up.

Dent turned his face away and shoved the tin soldier into the gap in the wires.

Sparks flew from the box, the force of the shock knocking Dent to the floor. The door slid open halfwise, erratically, leaving a gap just big enough for Dent.

Eyes still dancing with sparks, the fabric on his right hand blackened and smoldering, Dent stumbled toward the door. The Wee One shifted course, feet skidding beneath it, and headed for him again.

Dent threw himself into the gap in the door. To his horror, it smacked shut around him, squeezing painfully around his ribs. For a terrifying second, he could not breathe.

Then the door mechanism hiccuped again, opening wide enough to spit him head over heels into the corridor.

The Wee One saw him and sprang. Dent saw the points of its forward limbs shearing at him through the gap in the door.

With a last, triumphant twitch, the door slammed shut on the Wee One, trapping it. Its pointed limbs flailed and scrambled angrily, gouging scrapes in the onyx flooring. But it could not reach Dent.

Dent lay there for a second, bruised and bleeding and dizzy, just out of the reach of something that wanted very much to poke him full of big bleedy holes. Banditry had not sounded nearly this painful in his bedtime stories.

Then, far down the corridor, he heard a sudden loud thump. The mirrors on the walls bounced a flare of reflected light skittering through the halls. Dent thought of Pebble, and found his feet. The Wee One clawed at him, and Dent blew his own reflection a raspberry, and set off at a stumble toward the source of the sound.

The corridors were no less mazelike, but the thump sounded not too distant. Dent followed it, and other sounds — crashing and bellowing and clanging, as if someone were stumbling around. It occurred to him that those sounds were likely made by Sir Leslie. It occurred to him that Pebble might not still be alive. He kept going anyway.

At last he heard footfalls padding toward him, from around the corner of the intersection ahead. They did not sound like the clomp of boots or the tick of Wee Ones’ limbs. They sounded very much like the relatively tiny, calloused feet of Pebble. He opened his mouth to give a shout, and then she crashed blindly around the corner and knocked him down.

She screamed, and started to hit him, and then stopped to actually look at who she was hitting.

“Ow,” winced Dent, lowering his arms from where they’d been protecting his face. “What did I do?”

A huge smile illuminated Pebble’s face, and she all but crushed Dent and his bruised ribs with a hug.

“Easy, easy, slow down!” Dent said, trying to follow her flying fingers. “What happened?”

Pebble’s exciting and thorough explanation was cut short by the hand that closed around her long silver hair and yanked her shrieking up into the air.

“Tell me, Your Majesty,” Sir Leslie growled, each word wobbly and singing as his diamond teeth shimmered in his mouth. “Do you think you’d taste good as a tartare?”

He was missing one boot, standing lopsided on a bare and hairy foot, and his face was scorched bright crustacean-red. Wisps of reeking smoke trailed from his eyebrows and the tips of his mustache, and small patches of his shaggy, loosened mane of hair still seemed to be on fire. He clutched the screaming, wriggling Pebble in one hand, and the fat haft of his shining silver cutlass in the other.

“Let her go!” Dent shouted, scrambling shakily to his feet. He was more scared than he’d ever been — and not, he realized, on account of his own peril.

Sir Leslie laughed, and the harmonics of his gleaming teeth wobbled up and down the scale.

“You’re a long way from home, boy,” he said, stepping forward, Pebble still flailing and kicking in his grip. “And in these halls, you’re the Emperor of nothing. Except, perhaps, my dinner table.” Bits of saliva glimmered and danced at the corners of Sir Leslie’s mouth. “Now, shut your eyes and show me your neck like a good lad. It’ll go faster if you don’t squirm.”

Dent plucked the sonic knife from his belt and drove it forward. His thumb hit the activator button, and the blade, bleating urgent warnings, shimmered to life for a second, splitting a line open across the front of Sir Leslie’s waistcoat. Then the knife warbled apologetically, and became just a useless handle.

Sir Leslie barked out another laugh, distorted around the edges. “My, but you’re a spicy one!” he gloated. “Or was that actually supposed to do something?”

And then the hum of his teeth died away, as Sir Leslie felt strange twangs and vibrations about his midsection.

In the silence that followed, even Pebble stopped kicking, listening to the escalating cascade of plinks and creaks and snaps emanating from Sir Leslie’s waistcoat.

“Oh, no,” Sir Leslie breathed, his eyes widening. “Oh, no, no, no.”

Sir Leslie’s Special Device was, when whole and undamaged, a marvel of engineering, able to resist the most persistent of pressures. But when enough of its elaborate filaments were severed, as Dent’s brief swipe had done, the rest of it began to try vainly to adjust, to compensate. And a catastrophic sequence of failures, the kind the manufacturer advised about only in small print at the very back of the manual, began.

Springs and coils began to burst loose from the Device, poking out the contours of Sir Leslie’s jacket. He dropped Pebble and placed his hands desperately about his midsection, whimpering, trying to hold the Device in place. But it was too late.

In a spectacular burst of elastic and fabric, the Special Device snapped completely, and Sir Leslie’s immense, food-fueled, flabby white gut bulged out from beneath his trim and tailored shirtfront.

Sir Leslie wailed in horror, looking down at this pale, hated nemesis, this accumulation of his own failures. Then he heard the mirrors on the wall begin to shimmer, heard the strain of overtaxed motors, and looked up at his reflection in even greater terror.

The mirrors were programmed to adjust Sir Leslie’s reflection, presenting him in the most flattering light. They were having a hard enough time compensating for the damage he’d sustained in the kitchen explosion. And when the entire profile of his body changed, beyond any parameters to which they’d been programmed, the mirrors quite simply went berserk.

Thousands of micromotors, usually working in tandem to reshape each mirror, each began moving in individual and conflicting directions. Cracks grew, splitting the surface. Dent and Pebble huddled together on the floor, covering their heads. Sir Leslie watched his own reflection, his hideous and portly self, further uglify and multiply with each new fissure.

The mirrors, quite understandably, exploded. And as the catastrophic logic failure cascaded throughout the ship’s systems — once again, something that might have been prevented, had Sir Leslie not consigned his hired programming team to a series of individually wrapped parcels in the deep freeze — every mirror on the ship followed suit. The whole ship rang with the crash and clatter of shattering glass.

In the midst of it all, Sir Leslie still stared at the blank black wall, ringed with jagged teeth of broken mirror, and wailed, and wailed, and wailed.

He was still shrieking when Dent and Pebble stood up, edging away across a sea of shining broken glass. Still shrieking when Dent unwrapped the cloth from his hands and bound it around Pebble’s bare feet for protection. Still shrieking as they ran, in no particular direction, away down the corridor of the suddenly much darker ship, past endless rows of broken mirrors — approximately 7.29 millennia of bad luck, all told.

And they could still hear Sir Leslie’s distant, ghostly wails when the two children rounded a corner, crashed hard into something that was not a wall, and jumped back screaming themselves.

“Ah! Children!” Captain Corsair beamed, bowing politely. “You remain unmurdered! I find this a most welcome turn of events!”

22. The Eighth Rule of Banditry (Part 1)

2007-12-01T20:59:00.001-08:00

The Wee Ones flung him from the chair, unkindly, and Dent’s world went tumbling around him. Something cold smacked hard into his back and his head, and then an upside-down Sir Leslie was smiling his diamond shark smile.

“We’ll let you keep a bit,” Sir Leslie said. “While I sharpen the knives.”

Dent couldn’t see Pebble, but somewhere she was shrieking in fear, and then the cage pressed gently against his head, and upside-down Sir Leslie slid upward out of view, and all around were the prongs and spires of the dark ship’s architecture. A door slid shut, latching with a heavy clang, and Pebble’s shrieks faded, and were finally gone.

Dent scrambled to right himself, and the floor wobbled perilously; he realized in one sickening instant’s rush that there was nothing around him, nothing but air, and clung to the edges of the disc on which he found himself until the wobbling stopped. He was suspended a far and frightening distance in the air, the walls of the chamber arcing up around him in curling spines and filligrees to a ceiling well beyond his reach. The walls were too far to jump, even if he’d been brave enough to try standing up. And when he peered carefully over the edge, he saw Wee Ones moving below in the semidark. Their faces turned up to his in glints of menacing light, and they paused their clacking patrol of the floor, rooted on him.

Slowly, shakily, Dent rolled onto his back. He felt terror and despair rise in a wave in him, squeeze his chest tight and crawl out in salt tears through the corners of his eyes. An Imperial heir did not cry, but then, Dent was no longer an Imperial heir. He was a bandit now, and not a very good one, and soon he would be dinner.

So Dent cried, and understandably so. He cried for the pain slowly ebbing from his back and the back of his skull, and for Pebble screaming off into the distance, and for being a very small boy alone and friendless in a strange and terrible place.

He shut his eyes and wished that this whole adventure had been nothing but a dream. And he shouted, loud as his voice could carry, for himself to wake up. But no miraculous rescue or awakening came.

A small thing, a very ordinary thing, happened instead. But in the grand scheme of things, it was almost as good.

As Dent shouted, the contents of his belt shifted, rattling from one end of their pouches to the other.

Dent, still sniffling, remembered that was alone — but not without resources. And he remembered what Captain Corsair had told him, just before they parted.

“A bandit always has a plan,” Dent said to himself, sounding brave so that maybe he would feel brave. It worked, a little.

Cautiously, the platform wobbling beneath him, Dent rolled over and began to take inventory.

“Food safety,” smiled Sir Leslie, as he finished tying his long hair back. “Very important.” He peeled off his black velvet jacket, undid his ruffly cuffs, and rolled his sleeves up to the elbows for the washing-up.

Sir Leslie had culinary bots to handle most of the tedious fare he usually had to subsist upon, and to prepare the occasional confectionary indulgence. But for the true gourmet meals, the ones Sir Leslie lived for, he preferred to do the cooking himself. He’d had a special kitchen fitted in the ship, adjacent to the wine cellar and his private dining chamber. Most of the cooking was done with lasers and infrawaves these days, but Sir Leslie was a purist. He’d paid extra to cook with fire, fueled by harvested, purified methane from the ship’s waste systems.

Well, he would have paid extra for it, had he paid at all, in any fashion other than several bad bouts of indigestion.

Sir Leslie liked to talk while he cooked, but in most cases, what he considered his sterling conversation was always lessened by the other party or parties’ tendency to scream, whimper, or beg for their lives in a truly unbecoming fashion.

There had been some screaming from the girl earlier, and a little crying, and he’d had to stuff an apple in her mouth the second time she tried to bite him. But now that she was sitting on his countertop, securely tied with excessive amounts of food-grade butcher’s twine, she had settled down to stare at him with those wide, strangely reflective eyes of hers. (Sir Leslie had resolved to retain those, and pickle them separately — their doubtlessly delicate flavor would be utterly lost in a stew.)

She was propped on the island in the midst of Sir Leslie’s pleasantly dim kitchen, flanked on one side by the spice rack, and on the other by the large porcelain basin, just large enough to hold a child. The edges of the drain around the bottom were flecked with bits of something dark and rusty-red.

“There we are,” he grunted, satisfied. “Clean hands.” Turning from the washbasin next to the stove, he toweled his black-thatched forearms dry. Sir Leslie picked up a gleaming steel mallet, studded with little spikes on its face, and tested its weight. “Now, it’s important to tenderize the tougher, stringier cuts of meat before you cook it,” he explained to Pebble, savoring the tremors of worry he saw flitting across her face. “I personally find that a bit of tenderization before one even begins the carving is also useful.”

The mallet lingered in his hand for a moment … and then he laid it back down on the wooden cutting block. “But I’m getting ahead of myself! Must do the prep work first.”

With thick hands — far rougher than a gentleman’s ought to be, despite his daily regimen of softening creams and dermabrasion — he plucked two fat grape-onions and a paperskinned tumus root from the countertop, setting them down in a solid thwack on the cutting block.

“I find it often saves time to prepare the veg in advance,” Sir Leslie said cheerily. “The meat can get a mite messy.” He reached up to the floating knife rack, listening to the blades chime as he swept a finger across the row of their handles, and neatly plucked a utility blade off.

Pebble listened to everything, her mouth cottony-sweet with overripe apple, her jaws pushed painfully open to accomodate it. Behind her back, in small, cautious movements, she peeled one of the stuck-on seashells slowly from the sleeve of her jumpsuit.

“I learned this when I was but a wee boy,” Sir Leslie said, the knife gliding through the tough skin of the first grape-onion with barely a whisper. “We’d had servants once, I remember that. Remember a Winter Ball dinner, with a lovely great pudding. Then Father had that trouble with his holdings, and mother took ill —”

He abruptly slammed the knife down on the block, jerking Pebble’s gaze back from the stove to him. “The cooktop isn’t speaking to you, miss,” Sir Leslie said slowly, and no less sharply than the knife in his hands. “I’m speaking to you. You’ll show me the courtesy of looking at me. Or it’s worse than the stew for you.”

Upon the word “worse,” his diamond teeth briefly sang out, then stilled themselves. Pebble’s eyes widened, and from then on fixed on him. But in her hands, the seashell’s sharp edge began to work its way through the layers of twine, thread by slender thread.

“That’s a good lass,” Sir Leslie purred, turning back to the grape-onion. “See here?” he said, holding up a neatly cleaved segment. “The purple veins between all the layers. That’s how you know it’s fresh. Good and fresh. Very important, fresh food.”

He set down the onion and finished the chopping in a few deft strokes, then turned to the tumus root. “I learned that as a boy, too. Couldn’t get much fresh, with mother’s illness, and the doctors. Just that packaged, processed glob they try to pass as food when you’re — when your circumstances are reduced. Makes you fat, it does. All fat and wobbly.”

He stopped, looking up at Pebble from the neat stripes of skin he was carving off the root. Beneath, its flesh was a firm, wet indigo. “Not that you’ll ever have that problem, eh? Skinny little scrap like you. Bet you’re half gristle.”
He chuckled, as if this was the sort of thing both of them would find very funny, and went back to work.

“Tumus root — full of vitamins,” Sir Leslie grinned, the blade crisping and snacking as it divided the root into broad chunks. “Good low-calorie snack. Not that I’m watching my figure, mind. And it’s simply divine with just a dash of —” his free hand loomed over the spice rack, fingers waggling, and plucked out a vial “— powdered sparkpepper.”

Pebble watched as Sir Leslie slid the catch, the container’s lid opening to reveal a mound of spicy-smelling fine red powder. He dabbed a finger in, and waved it under Pebble’s nose, grinning as her eyes began to water. He picked up a slice of tumus root from the counter, dusted it with a pinch of sparkpepper and let it crunch between his teeth.

“Mmh,” he exulted, when at last he swallowed. “Divine.” He opened his eyes.

Pebble, her hands freed, dashed the entire container of pepper into his face.

Sir Leslie roared, swinging blindly with the utility blade, cleaving only the air. He dropped the knife and stumbled backward in a cascade of oaths, the pepper searing his eyes, until he found the washbasin. It took nearly a click for the water to soothe and clear his swollen, tender eyes, and half a click more until he could keep them open well enough to see.

“Sashimi it is,” he snarled, swabbing his eyes clean with towel, and turned back to the island.

But only a pile of butcher’s twine, a once-bitten apple, and a single seashell, remained of the girl.

Once, the Dark Matter Armada had left its prisoners in the cell where Dent now sat, left them for days floating on the platform in the middle of nothing. The platform was unstable, deliberately; too great a motion in one direction or the other could send them pitching off to the pitiless floor far below. Sometimes, after days and days, they’d simply let themselves slide off. Some, if their balance was good enough, would find their feet enough to jump. Some managed to reach the walls on their way down; if, by cruel luck, they did not manage to have their soft tissues forcefully introduced to one of the jagged protrusions, their lacerated hands and feet would begin to bleed, and they would slip…

And if, by even crueler luck, they survived the fall, still clung to life in a shattered heap on the onyx floor far below, the drones that Sir Leslie would later dub his Wee Ones would be waiting for them.

No prisoner had ever escaped from a Dark Matter Armada vessel. But Dent knew none of this. So he did not give up.

Dent had certain advantages, of course. Clothing, for one — a luxury the Armada had never allowed its prisoners. And of course, the contents of his Adventure Belt.

His brother’s silver spoon.

His sister’s weird little vial.

His mother’s ball of pseudosilk.

His father’s tin soldier.

The Captain’s gold medallion.

These, and his sonic knife, were all the tools Dent had.

He looked up; the ceiling was smooth and featureless, offering no anchor. He looked down again; the pseudosilk might reach all the way down, but while it was strong, it was too slender to grip well. Dent saw himself slipping and falling, and the Wee Ones waiting with their sharp, merciless limbs. Besides, there was nothing on the platform with which he might anchor himself.

The walls had handholds and footholds aplenty, if Dent could have jumped that far. But the prongs and swirls of jagged black material reaching out from the walls looked cruel and sharp.

Cruel, and sharp, and useful.

It took Dent a few tries to tie one end of his mother’s pseudosilk to the silver spoon. (Knots had never been his forte.) It was stronger than steel, by tensile strength; resistant to fraying or cutting, as far too many of Janos of the Midnight Guard’s briefer acquaintances had discovered.

When he was sure the spoon had been tied on good and tight, Dent carefully began to twirl the silk, the spoon at its end, above his head. The platform wobbled, but did not tilt. He threw; the spoon fell far short, and began to plunge.

He hastily tugged on the string and drew it back in. Below, he heard a sudden scraping of pointed appendages. The Wee Ones had taken an interest.

Another throw, this one strong enough, but not accurate — the spoon pinged off the wall and fell again, and the thread nearly slipped from Dent’s fingers before he could pull it back in.

Sitting down was no good. He scooted himself as close to the center of the platform as he could, and tried to slide one knee beneath him.

The platform wobbled wildly, and for one perilous moment, Dent felt himself about to fall. He hunched into a ball, on reflex, and the platform stilled. Slowly, slowly, Dent rose to one knee. The platform quivered beneath him, yet still it held.

Dent closed his eyes and tried to picture himself among the sageriders of one of his favorite stories, The Lariateers of Floating Gulch. Story had acted out the motions as Dent huddled, rapt, at the entrance to his tent.

It felt so long ago to Dent.

The spoon swung in circles above his head, the give of it pleasant to the muscles of his arm, and Dent opened his eyes and let it fly. The spoon arced through the air, trailing silk from the unraveling ball, and plink-tinged itself into the thorny snarl of prongs on the distant wall. Dent pulled, and the spoon wedged crosswise in the gap between two protrusions, and held.

Thumbing on his sonic knife, Dent picked up the captain’s medallion and began the arduous process of cutting into its center.

Eyes still burning, edges of his vision smudged with tears, Sir Leslie Murther threw open the kitchen’s single, heavy iron door. No child awaited him — just the Wee One he’d stationed there as guard. It clicked its legs expectantly, and greeted him with his reflection.

“Well?” Sir Leslie growled. “What’s there to be looking at?” He slammed the door in its face, and his own.

So the little morsel was still here somewhere. Sir Leslie drew his cutlass with one hand, and picked up the tenderizing mallet with the other. Then he put the mallet down again, and picked a fat, gleaming cleaver from the rack. No point in bruising the meat, really — not if he was planning to eat it straightaway.

The kitchen had many crannies and cupboards and hiding places. Sir Leslie threw them all open, poking inside with his cutlass, clanging it against pots and pans, scattering jars and preserves, and doing irreperable harm to some of his cheesecloths. But no little girl.

He stopped, stock still, the cabinets all open, crockery and steelware spilling out around his ankles. Sir Leslie sniffed the air. The child was still here. He could have smelled her even if she hadn’t, by this point, gone a full turn and then without a bath. And he could hear something, rustling around in some dark hidden place. In the gloomy family kitchen of his youth, he might have thought it a rat, nibbling about in the sawdust. But there were no rats on Sir Leslie’s ship. Not for very long there weren’t.

The stovetop rattled, ever so faintly, and Sir Leslie whirled. One by one, his smile revealed the points of his shining teeth. He stalked back around the island, toward the oven. The contractors had pushed it out from the wall by a measure, and the cabinets and countertops adjacent to run the mains in. Enough room for a skinny little child, one accustomed to tight spaces.

Sir Leslie, entirely forgetting his own insistence on a top-of-the-line Crouch Industries Speedi-Char Archaic Replica Stove, lashed out with the heel of his boot against the oven door. The entire stove tilted backward, smashing against the wall with a jangling clash, and thumped just as noisily back into place.

Sir Leslie had expected a cry, a whimper, something. But he heard nothing. No sobs, no howls of high, girlish pain.

Not even the steady hiss of escaping gas, odorless, colorless, from a torn-open methane line.

Sir Leslie scowled, and with slow, hunching steps, edged around the counter toward the door, to peer into the gap behind the cabinetry. Far back the darkness, back where the opposite cabinet sat flush against a protruding bulkhead, he saw reflective eyes glimmering back at him.

“There you are,” Sir Leslie purred, all sweetness and lamb’s wool. “Gave me quite a scare, you did. Come on out, won’t you?” He set down the cutlass and squeezed one arm into the gap behind the cupboards. Out of sight, he kept the cleaver raised, ready to bring it down upon the girl as soon as he’d pulled her free.

But the eyes in the gloom didn’t move. And Sir Leslie’s smile began to curdle into a sneer.

“Very well,” he said. “Won’t come to me, then? My, but we’re obstinate.” He rose, picking up his cutlass and tucking it hastily into his belt, and stomped away, careful to keep one eye on the gap leading from behind the cabinets. “I’ve a way of dealing with stubborn little children,” Sir Leslie grunted, opening a high cabinet.

He pulled down a long, gleaming spit, the one he used on occasion to slow-roast entire cattle — among other, more sentient meals — over the firepit he’d had installed adjacent to the engine room. It looked like the sort of thing one might find in the Forbidden Black Cookbooks of the Library of Despair. Indeed, Sir Leslie had mail-ordered it from one of the Library’s Catalogs of Sinister Sundries, and written a very polite thank-you note upon its arrival to express his satisfaction with the merchandise.

He hefted the spit like a pike, gave it a few exploratory thrusts through the air. Long enough to reach. Sharp enough to hold fast. Yes, this would just do.

“Draw near, my little morsel,” Sir Leslie smiled, pacing back toward the gap behind the cabinet. “I’ve a wonder to show you.”

The Empire Requests Your Patience

2007-11-28T20:42:00.000-08:00

To our humble readers...

Correction: To our humble reader. (The plural being something of a grand assumption in regard to this particular venture.)

It is a regrettable fact of human physiology that all but a select handful of individuals require fairly regular amounts of sleep. (Navy SEALS and the parents of newborn infants are among the notable exceptions to this rule.) Alas, the Imperial Scribes responsible for chronicling the adventures of young Accident, his speechless friend Pebble, and their somewhat talky and overly expositional gaggle of motley allies, are not among this select cadre of the sleep-immune. The Imperial Gengineers are working diligently to isolate the necessary chromosomes that will alleviate this problem; until then, the Scribes require rest.

Yes, even "Coffee Nerves" MacGillicuddy, seemingly tireless backbone of the Division of Spurious Punctuation.

Unfortunately, there has been some sort of contest taking place for the past several weeks, and the Scribes, equally motivated by a sense of duty and a desire to avoid summary execution, have been burning the Midnight Oil in order to meet the necessary allotment of words. (Midnight Oil fumes have been known to cause dizziness, improper use of semicolons, and convoluted plotting, the effects of which you may already have noticed.)

Much to the Scribes' relief, their diligence has paid off. The goal now met, the Scribes are under somewhat less pressure of imminent beheading, and are free to sleep, if not as much as they like, then certainly more than they have been. Imperial Statisticians have already noticed a 20% reduction in irritability, 30% fewer drooping eyelids during daylight hours, and a 100% drop in unauthorized snoring.

Alas, this newfound reacquaintance with the proverbial arms of Morpheus has led to a drop in productivity among the Scribes. Where they once prided themselves on the production of a new chapter each and every day, their attempts to catch up on their rest have left them lucky to hammer out 2,000 words a day. And with installments growing progressively longer as our story barrels toward its exciting conclusion -- yes, there will be a conclusion; yes, it will be exciting, or at least, we hope so; and yes, there may even be barrels involved -- the Scribes' chapter-a-day goal has proven somewhat less than reachable.

The Grand Galactic Imperium asks -- well, technically "demands," but "asks" sounds so much more pleasant -- your understanding during this time of weariness. The Scribes assure us that the next chapter is well under way, and involves a cooking lesson with the dastardly Sir Leslie Murther, and at least 50% of the Imperium's recommended daily allowance of excitement. Possibly more, depending on the reader's body mass and medical history.

Until then, we thank you for your patience, your utter failure to attempt to violently overthrow us, and those lovely taxes you send us every year. Walking seashell palaces don't pay for themselves, you know.

Sincerely,
Vociferous Interminabilius
Spokesmaster, Grand Galactic Imperium

21.5. The Horizon of Events (Part 2)

2007-11-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

Crestfall moved along the fireteam, passing his hands through the wisps of smoke rising from their uniforms, making the signs of prayer for them. At the edge of the scattered men he stopped, knelt down.

“I know you, soldier,” he said softly, to the ruined, gasping face that looked up at him.

The trooper choked out syllables through scalded lips. “Honziger, sir. Aide to the XO.”

“On the Crucible, yes,” Crestfall nodded, smiling down kindly at him. “You fought like a lion. Were you fixed to shoot me there, Lieutenant?”

“Wasn’t sure it was you, sir,” Honziger said. The words flaked like ashes from him. “You look different.”

“I could say the same,” Crestfall said. The funniest thing that could be said of Honziger was the way his eyebrows still trailed tiny gossamer wisps of smoke. The rest of him was not very amusing at all. “What’s your brief here, Lieutenant?”

Honziger gasped, struggled, mastered his breath for a little while longer yet. “Nothing official. They don’t tell us.”

“But there were rumors,” Crestfall said. “There are always rumors.”

“VIP,” Honziger said. “Got some kind of bomb. Big bomb. Rain all perdition on that powwow out there. That’s all I heard.” His eyes unfocused, and then sharpened again, just over Crestfall’s shoulder. “Yago?”

“Hello, Karl,” Captain Corsair nodded, bowing slightly. “I thought it was you. I regret we could not meet under kinder circumstances.”

“You know this featherhead?” Crestfall asked the dying man, genuinely surprised.

“Know him?” Honziger laughed. It was a terrible sound. “He owes me twenty coin.”

Corsair smiled, bleakly, and reached for his belt, withdrawing two solid, shining golden discs, each bearing a circle of twelve stars. He bent down and placed them in one of Honziger’s blistered hands, slowly closing the fingers shut.

“A gentleman pays his debts,” Corsair said. “For the ferryman, then.”

But Honziger was beyond all hearing.

“Did he say something about a bomb?” Lis asked, hovering at the edge of the fallen fire team. She had never seen anyone die before, except perhaps for that incident with the Viscount of Beauregard a few years back, and, well, she’d been preoccupied at the time. And he’d gone happy, by all appearances.

“We need to find a comm station strong enough for ship-to-ship,” Crestfall said, standing. “Can your Story dip a toe in their network?”

“Done,” the robot nodded, eyes pulsing and flickering as data streamed through the air and into his crystalline brain. “The rest of the crew has been alerted. Teams are on their way here.” Story nodded toward the small hatchway leading from the cargo hangar to the interior of the ship. “Communications are locked down, save for the bridge.”

“Then we fight to the bridge,” Crestfall said. “Be a change to lead this side of the charge, for once.”

The Bosun grunted, muscles straining, and tore the lid off a secure locker off to one side of the pile of crates from the Zephyr. “Found our weapons,” she called, hoisting her Whomping Stick and checking the blade end for nicks.

“Some of these aren’t fried,” Pug nodded, arms full of the fallen troopers pulse-guns. “So we’ve got artillery, too.”

“I have found the Young Master,” Story announced, head canted at an angle, as if listening for a distant sound. “The frequency of the Captain’s tracker — it is faint, but nearby. On the dark ship, I would estimate.”

“We’ve got no craft to reach it,” Crestfall said, plucking Bad News from the air as the Bosun tossed it to him. “We get to the bridge, raise a cry, and we’ll have your fleet and mine to get the boy back.”

“Assuming he’s alive,” the Bosun said darkly, handing Lis her repeater-pistol and lash. “Anyone flying the Dark Matter profile isn’t like to coddle him with tea and cakes.”

“And that ship had the bomb,” Pug nodded. “Dead guy said so. If the ship is the bomb — well, I don’t want to tell Mother I let the little stain get vaporized.” By someone outside the family, he did not add.

“I could get there,” Story said quietly. “I am fully equipped with jets to navigate in zero.”

“But you’re not shielded,” Lis replied. “The cold out there—”

“I accept the possibility,” Story said. “He is my responsibility.”

“And mine,” Corsair added. He was sealing up a black standard-gauge zerosuit, the helmet tucked under one arm. “I will find this ship and retrieve the boy.”

Crestfall drew Bad News and closed the distance between them in a matter of seconds. The Captain did not flinch as the blade glimmered an inch from his face. “That’s not happening,” the Captain said, even but firm. “You’re in my custody, or their custody, but you don’t go free.”

“Your voice is the only one the FLAW will recognize,” Corsair replied. “You will need the Bosun’s fighting skills to reach the bridge, and His Majesty’s. And while Her Majesty’s graces are many and splendid, I sadly doubt she has the sufficient experience in zero. Even if more suits were available to us than the one I wear.”

“All well and good,” Crestfall told him, the blade of Bad News not wavering in the slightest. “But I’m sworn to bring you back. It’s my duty.”

“Duty is done at the order of others,” Corsair said softly. “Honor is done for oneself alone. And this is a matter of honor.”

“Let him go,” Lis said, drawing the Captain’s cloak tighter around her shoulders. “He’ll come back. For his Bosun, if nothing else.”

“Damn well better,” Bosun Little smiled, but sadly.

“I will return with the boy — and with my very fine ship, whose ownership you contest,” Corsair grinned. “On this, I give you my word. And if we remain in disagreement then, we shall settle the matter as gentlemen do — with steel.”

Slowly, Crestfall swung the blade down and away. “You run out on me,” he said, “I’ll chase you thrice round the rim and back. Swear to say. And check the seals on your suit there — the generics tend toward the leaky.”

The Captain sealed the zerosuit’s helmet on, and Bosun Little stepped forward to hand him his saber. “Behave yourself while I am away,” he grinned at her from within the helmet. “Remember, you are among company of quality.”

“I could say the same,” the Bosun grinned, and punched him genially in the shoulder, light enough that he only staggered back a step or two. “You come back in a singular piece, square? Can’t collect my pay if you’re bifurcated.”

“I shall do my best,” the Captain nodded, as Story clack-clack-clacked toward the airlock nestled beside the docking bay door, and began to hack its seal.

The Captain turned to follow, but a hand encircled his arm. “Your Majesty?” he asked.

Lis’s mouth quirked, as if she were trying to spit something out. “I have to know,” she said. “I asked you before, why you gave me your cloak.”

Corsair sighed genially. “Majesty, I find your lack of concern for your brother entirely dismaying.”

“I’m not worried about him at all,” she smiled. “The great Captain Santiago Desdichado Dominguez y Corsair is coming to save him.”

And the Captain grinned back at her. “A fair point. I gave you my cloak because you are a lady, Your Majesty, and ever deserve to be treated as such. I gave it because you did indeed look cold.” He paused, and a strangeness, a shadow, stole for one moment across his features. “And for one other reason besides.”

“Yes?” Lis asked, wide-eyed, expectant. But the Captain just grasped her hand gently through the glove of his zerosuit.

“I would kiss Her Majesty’s hand, if I could,” Corsair smiled, and tapped the visor of his helmet, “but alas, the suit presents difficulties. Ask me again when you see me next.”

The airlocked opened with a hiss, and Story rolled inside. The Captain followed, Lis watching, and the door sealed shut behind them. Through the small window in the airlock door, she saw the Captain turn once more to her and wink. Then the outer door opened, and in a soundless rush, Corsair and Story tumbled out into the dark.

Lis stood there, staring through the tiny window out into the endless reaches of space, even as the door on the opposite side of the hangar exploded inward in rubble and smoke, and fire teams of black-suited freelancers began to pour into the hangar bay. Even as Crestfall began delivering Bad News, and the Bosun and Pug leapt into the fray, and began to make a great many of the opposing force wish they’d demanded better pay for this job, or at least more thorough medical coverage.

It was not the most considerate move, on Lis’s part, nor the most conducive to her long-term survival. But under the circumstances, it was entirely understandable.

21. The Horizon of Events (Part 1)

2007-11-25T21:00:00.000-08:00

If you’d asked Ludo Tisane why he’d signed on with the independent contractors of Pacification Services Intergalactic (a division of Amalgamated Facilitation, a branch of Magnacorp, a division of Yummi-Chow Pet Nutrition, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crouch Industries) after his tours in the Third Galactic Conflict, he’d probably say something about service and sacrifice.

In truth, however, Tisane just really, really enjoyed shooting people.

Not that he was one of those giggling maniacs you hear so much about, the sort who went around fondling their weapons of choice in ways that psychologists could build entire careers upon. Tisane kept his gun holstered at all times save two. First, when he disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled it every night, blindfolded and timed. And second, when he was actually doing some of that shooting he enjoyed so much.

At the moment, Tisane’s repeater-pistol was safely strapped to the holster on his thigh. But his deceptively casual posture, the way his eyes swept the room as if they were painting bullseyes on everything they saw, tended to give others the impression that those circumstances could change at any time. The two dozen armed men behind him, their pulse-guns raised and ready, did nothing to lighten the mood.

“Comfortable?” he asked the prisoners, around the toothpick dancing from one end of his mouth to the other. The mottled black fabric of his uniform fell in neat creases along the lean lines of his frame.

Lis raised her head as far as the shackles would allow, and gave him her sweetest, most insincere smile. “Aside from the itch on my nose? Mostly.”

The royals, Tisane knew by sight. He’d already heard snickers circulating from his men about the possible benefits of having the Ministress of Love aboard. As for the Minister of Violence, Tisane had him double-bound while he was still unconscious, just like that half-sized joke passing for a Corinthian. Tisane had seen the vids of Pugio’s spectacle battles; the kid was used to fighting animals too dumb to outthink him, or people too loyal to beat him. Tisane had ways to defeat that.

The robot must be the royals’, he figured. Leave it to the Imperium to take a perfectly good Kill-O-Tron and reprogram it to say please and thank you. He had it magnalocked, still, just to be safe.

The famous Commodore Crestfall, he knew — no one who’d so much as passed through the FLAW these past ten years could have missed the vids of that face. Funny how famous people looked so much smaller and worse in person. Tisane knew Crestfall’s name held water, even with some of his own men, but he personally had a name for a man who loses his ship and gets himself impaled for his trouble. It was not the sort of name one repeated around children.

The fop with the metal hand, and what Tisane assumed was his friend the little Corinthian, Tisane didn’t know. That was OK. Tisane had shot plenty of people he didn’t know. Especially when their manners were as excruciatingly good as this one’s.

His men had worked fast, gutting the Zephyr. They’d cut out the pluslight drive for parts — never know when those might come in handy — and stripped the precious stones and metals from the consoles. One of those occasional bonuses of freelance work. It wasn’t like its passengers were going to need the ship again, famous or not. Not with the orders Tisane had gotten from Mrs. Poole.

Tisane bit down on the toothpick and smiled. “Here’s how this is gonna work. I’m going to ask you questions. You’re going to answer them. Who else knows you’re here?”

“The whole of the Imperium,” Lis sneered.

“And the FLAW besides,” Crestfall added, unblinking.

Tisane laughed. “Sure they do. I suppose that’s why they’re all floating out there, nose to nose, and not coming anywhere near us. Clever little strategy of theirs, don’t you think?”

“No one knows we are here,” the robot chimed in. Tisane saw the royals, brother and sister both, shoot it a dirty look. Good old robot honesty. “Their Majesties were sent to retrieve an object of great value to the Imperium, stolen by Captain Corsair and Bosun Little.”

“That so?” Tisane nodded, walking toward the robot. The Minister of Violence tried to lunge at him, but the restraints held, gravitationally linking his wrists and his ankles and the deck of the docking bay. “This object of great value — they still have it?”

“No,” the robot answered, its red eyes softly glowing.

“Story, one more word and I’ll have you deactivated,” Lis hissed. Tisane looked at her for a second, smirked, and turned back to the robot.

“The prize was stolen from all of us, by the black vessel with which you seem to be aligned,” it continued calmly.

Tisane frowned. Poole had said escort and containment duty; show up, protect the VIP — whoever he was, in that shudder-skinning ship of his — and bag anyone else who got close. Nothing about a treasure. He’d have to make sure he got his cut of that.

“However,” the robot said, “we do have the ransom we were bound to deliver.”

At this, the fop began to struggle. Tisane would have found it cute, if he’d allowed the word in his vocabulary to begin with.

“You wretched steel dog!” Captain Shorthair or whatever his name was seethed, wriggling around like a mudcrawler on a hook. “The treasure is ours! I swear, by all the stars—!”

“Stow it, greasy,” Tisane said mildly, doubling the fop over with a kick to the guts. He saw the Ministress of Love flinch at this. Interesting, if not especially useful. “Talk on, tin man.”

“As a functionary of the Imperium,” the robot said, “I am prepared to offer you the entire ransom in exchange for the safe release of Their Majesties. Whatever you are being paid, I guarantee, the ransom exceeds it.”

“You’d be surprised,” Tisane chuckled. “Where’s this ransom hiding?” The robot swiveled his head to the pile of cargo crates Tisane’s men had offloaded from the Zephyr.

“The three maroon containers,” the robot said. “Marked with the Imperial seal on the lids. Do we have an accord?”

“I make no deals until I’ve seen the goods,” Tisane said, then nodded to two of the men in the fire team. “Kerner. Po’ua.”

The troopers fell out and doubled-timed toward the stack of crates. In less than a click, they’d found the crates and lugged them back to Tisane. The fop made another lunge, this time for the ransom crates, and Tisane laughed and dragged the crate a little further from the line of prisoners.

“All right, men,” Tisane nodded. “Let’s open ‘em up.”

Po’ua unsnapped the first clasp, and slowly raised the lid. Strange light shone upon his face, and his eyes widened.

“Sir,” he breathed. Even Tisane nearly dropped the toothpick from his lips. The case held more rubies, fist-sized rubies, than he’d seen in a decade of artful misappropriations and spoils of war.

“Lords of Perdition,” he swore.

Po’ua ran an analyzer over the gems and looked up. “They’re real, sir. All of them.”

“Of course they’re real,” Lis huffed from a distance. She had a mouth on her, Tisane thought. Just like that servant girl last year in the Caliph’s palace.

The men of the fire team, as one many-legged unit, drew closer to the chests, the straight line of their rifles drooping. Tisane nodded to Kerner, who opened the second chest. The latch unsnapped, and a golden glow spilled out around the edges.

“How many laurels do you think that is, sir?” Kerner asked softly. Tisane looked in the chest, at the heaps and heaps of gold coins bearing the Emperor’s face.

“Almost enough,” Tisane laughed. He glanced at the fop, who was looking like someone had just kicked him in the beans. With an asteroid. These were the little moments that made Tisane’s job so enjoyable.

The fire team drew closer, mesmerized by the sight of more laurel coins than they’d collectively earn in a year. Tisane crouched down by the third and final case, the men falling into step behind him.

“Sir?” the robot asked, an edge of nervousness in the synthetic trill of its voice. Its doubt circuits were beginning to kick in. “I ask again — do we have an accord?”

“We’ll find out in a moment,” Tisane said, laying one hand upon the latch.

“Were I you,” the Commodore spoke up softly, “I wouldn’t open that case. ‘Course, I’d do a lot of things different, in that circumstance.”

“Were I you,” Tisane replied, “I wouldn’t be so careless with my capital ships.” He opened the latch.

The world went blue.

The lightning bomb surged through Tisane, jumping with a series of deafening cracks through each and every member of the fire team, and finally down into the floor. The lights in the cargo bay flickered and dimmed, and the grav-units holding the prisoners’ shackles in place whined and died out.

One by one, smoking, their uniforms flaming in patches, the fire team dropped to the deck. If they moved at all, it was only to twitch.

“Thank the gods for Mother and her spitefulness,” Lis sighed, shruggling off the shackles and getting shakily to her feet.

“That was meant for us?” marveled Corsair, flexing his real and artificial hands. “For the Bosun and myself? Truly, I am honored! Should you get the opportunity, please, tell Her Majesty she outdid herself.”

“You knew that was in there?” the Bosun growled at Pug, as the two helped Story out of the magnoclamps.

“Not that, specifically,” Pug shrugged. “But I know my mom. And hey — honestly, tell me you woulda done different, for me.”

The Bosun frowned, and tore the last clamp from around Story’s treadball. “I might’ve dropped a hint or something,” she muttered.

Tisane’s heart no longer beat. He was not about to let that minor inconvenience, or any resulting self-pity, cost him his last few seconds of useful consciousness. Not when he could be shooting people. Sprawled on the deck, muscles stiffened and twitching from residual current, he clawed at his holster, felt the repeater good and solid in his hands, and aimed with blurred vision at the prisoners. There. That one looked like the fop. Good enough.

Commodore Crestfall’s boot lashed out, kicking the pistol across the deck. It lay there, just a few feet from Tisane, impossibly far.

“Never say I didn’t give you a chance,” Crestfall sighed.

Tisane looked across the deck at his pistol, his vision dimming. He breathed one last heavy sigh, like an infant deprived its favorite toy, and then looked a great way into the distance, at nothing that living eyes could see.

To be continued...

20. Puffcakes and Peril

2007-11-24T21:40:00.000-08:00

Of the estimated thousands of Dark Matter Armada warships to take part in the Third Galactic Conflict, only one was recovered intact. Sir Augustine Winthrop-Wong, on a private pleasure-cruise of the very combat sites he had so assiduously avoided during the actual war, discovered it orbiting the dark side of the gas giant Porphyrus. The conflict had been over for five years.

Sir Augustine promptly claimed the ship by right of salvage, although he didn’t actually bother to tell either of the interested governments of his new find. He briefly considered exploring it himself, but that sounded distressingly like effort. The far braver souls he hired for the task reported endless, mazelike corridors, bay after bay of jettisonned escape pods, and everywhere, lifeless servant droids scattered in slicing heaps of prongs and spires on the cold onyx decks. Sir Augustine absorbed all this information, mildly fascinated, and then arranged for the exploration teams to have a dreadful mishap with their vessel’s oxygen supply. It was his standard means of avoiding debts.

Sir Augustine knew that nothing was a proper secret until someone else knew about it. But he had to choose his confidant carefully. His betters in the pan-galactic aristocracy would condemn him for flights of fancy, or worse yet, report him to the Imperium, the FLAW, or both. And Sir Augustine was keen to keep this new toy to himself, at least until he struck upon the most lucrative means of profiting from it. But if he were seen slumming with any of the hangers-on around the lower rungs of the aristocracy, the gossip on the club circuit would surely be intolerable. After much consideration, Sir Augustine chose a happy medium of sorts, sagging away from the middle ranks of the social hierarchy, but possessed of the sort of vaguely unsavory reputation that made him the most deliciously scandalous guest at all the best parties.

It was a careful choice, but ultimately not a wise one.

“Do tell,” Sir Leslie Murther had grinned, in the dimly lit booth on the Copernical Club in orbit off Celestine.

Sir Leslie offered to buy the craft from Sir Augustine, the number of zeroes at the end of each offer growing consecutively longer. But Sir Augustine was a proud man, and a covetous one, and had no interest in parting with his prize discovery. He entertained the offers only because they were generally accompanied by free dinners, and Sir Augustine had his resources to think of.

At last, Sir Leslie struck a deal he found difficult to stomach. But while it proved difficult on his teeth and his digestion, he surely came out of it far better than the unfortunate Sir Augustine. (Or, for that matter, Sir Augustine’s many creditors.)

Sir Leslie towed the craft personally to orbit the green-gray, drizzly, dreary world of his birth. The finest and most discreet mechanics and artisans were summoned from across the Imperium and the FLAW, sworn to absolute secrecy. They repaired the ship’s strange engines and power systems, patched the burns and rents in its bristling hull, reprogrammed and refitted the servant droids, and remodeled the interior to Sir Leslie’s eccentric specifications.

Any one of these technicians might have spilled word of the strange craft to the galaxy beyond. None got the chance. Sir Leslie had his own way of avoiding his debts. It involved quite a lot of heartburn on his part, and frequent doses of bicarbonate of soda.

Now, even as the battered Imperial Zephyr was captured for docking, the black ship it had pursued through long days of plus light drifted patiently nearby, nestled in the shadow of the gas giant’s largest moon. And at its very heart, in one of the few chambers of the whole of the ship bereft of any reflective surface whatsoever, Sir Leslie ran and ran and ran.

Sweat arced in speckled cascades off his pale skin, beading on fine curls of thick black hair along his chest, arms, and back. He wore loose-fitting breeches, and softly padded shoes, and he wheezed and staggered his way through an infinity of nothingness. All the while, a voice shouted in his ear.

“Lollygagger!” it snarled. “You greasy gobbet of old suet! You fat, bloated beast! Look at you ripple! Look at you lurch! Disgusting! Faster on, you circus tent, you elephant! Faster!” The voice was his own, prerecorded.

Moisture shone in tracks along Sir Leslie’s face, running into the flopping tangles of his beard. It may have been sweat. It may have been tears.

At last, he felt the treads below him slow. The voice faded away, as if receding into the distance. It contained the distinct promise of returning. Sir Leslie clamped his thick-knuckled hands to his knees and sucked in great lungfuls of air, his hair falling loose and bedraggled into his eyes.

When he’d recovered enough to move, he staggered from the exercise chamber directly into his bath — a chamber equally black, and equally bereft of mirrors — and bathed himself, dried and toweled and perfumed himself. He donned his smalls, and then wriggled into his Special Device, and pressed its activation clasp. The Device shifted around his torso, squeezing and lifting, and Sir Leslie once again felt fully himself: slim, straight, tall. Every inch the man of breeding.

He flung open the double doors to his bedchamber, admiring the rich, silken bounce of his flowing locks and well-groomed beard in the mirrors on the walls and the ceiling. Around the room, his treasures hung mounted from the ebony support pillars. Sir Augustine’s walking-stick, cracked in half, still bearing teethmarks. The pliers of the dentist who’d redecorated Sir Leslie’s mouth, and then promptly and permanently left his practice. Mummy’s favorite brooch, with most of the dried blood off, except for the cracks and corners. Sir Leslie loved souvenirs.

Two of his Wee Ones trotted up lovingly to meet him, their reflective faces showing him the handsomeness of his own. They brought him clothes, freshly pressed and scented and clean, and helped him dress. His boots gleamed as he let the Wee Ones slide them up and on to his legs. His cutlass, shined and sharpened, was a reassuring weight against his hip. He made one last pluck at the lace ruffle of his shirtfront, and rose from his dressing table.

It was time for high tea.

Crouch called, of course, as he navigated the corridors to the sitting room, the voice following him as he wound through the mirrored maze.

“I’m not disturbing anything, I trust?” Good old Quarry. Not of noble blood, to be certain, but considerate to a fault all the same.

“Just on my way for tea,” Crouch said, licking his lips, careful after years of practice not to cut his tongue on the edges of his teeth. “I’m saving supper until after I’ve delivered your little gift.”

“Very good,” Crouch said. “It’s ready, then?”

“Armed as we speak in the forward bay,” Sir Leslie nodded. “Next to that ship you’re so keen on. Waiting for the launching when it’s time.”

“You’ll want to stick around for this one,” Crouch said, the sound of a smile in his voice. “At a safe distance, of course. Indescribable, really.”

“If I’m not busy with supper,” Sir Leslie replied, “I might do.”

The Wee Ones had come and gone by the time he arrived at the sitting room, pleasantly musty and lined with all the old books that his family had proudly passed down unread from generation to generation. Above the fireplace, flickering with mock holographic flames, Sir Leslie’s family portrait hung — a great sturdy barrel of a man, his black beard streaked with gray rivulets; a pale and puckered woman, her tightly wound black hair bunched upon her head like a nesting spider; twin sons, tall and strapping, grinning fierce mischevious grins toward the painter; and off in the corner, indistinctly in shadow, a small round shape that might have been a little boy.

For all the times he’d seen it, Sir Leslie’s breath still caught in his throat as he surveyed the full table laid out along the length of the cozy room. Above the black silken tablecloth, a fairy-kingdom of sugar-dusted spires rose on silver serving trays, bursting with merry candy colors. The macaroons and the kitten-ear biscuits, the snickerdoodles and the frosted gingerstars. And the puffcakes, oh, the puffcakes, with their airy, faintly crunchy crust, the solid square sugar granules that fell fat against your tongue, the thick creamy filling with hints of fruit and almonds.

Sir Leslie’s mouth began to water, a common occurrence. He dabbed at it with a black handkerchief. One mustn’t start eating before company was seated; Mummy had taught him that, with harsh words and the occasional rap of a silver serving ladle across his knuckles. But, oh, the ship’s miraculous robotic chefs had prepared so very many of those tantalizing puffcakes. Surely one would not be missed.

The puffcake was in Sir Leslie’s hand before he even realized, and then into his mouth, and he shut his eyes while the flavors mashed themself against his teeth and tongue and the insides of his cheeks.

Sir Leslie gulped it down and reached for another one. Just one more couldn’t hurt. But the scribble-scrabble of the Wee Ones’ legs on the corridor decks outside told him that company was soon to come, and he froze, waiting for a scolding. None came, of course. Sir Leslie laughed to himself, and fastidiously wiped away a dab of custard from his moustache. He walked around behind the table, before the fireplace, and stood with arms folded, awaiting his guests. The door slid open soundlessly.

Two clusters of Wee Ones walked in, having formed themselves into armchairs of sorts, spindling along on four spiny limbs apiece. In each of the high-backed chairs, securely bound by the Wee Ones’ appendages, the boy and the girl sat, pale (paler, in the girl’s case) and disheveled, blinking in the relative brightness of the sitting room.

He had expected their faces to light up, as his had, when they saw the delicious tea laid out for them. But they did not — just stared at him, sullen and just a touch fearful. Within him, Sir Leslie felt familiar storm clouds begin to gather, and he cleared his throat.

“Hello, children,” he said, careful to smile closedmouthed this time. Too much adrenalin, too many stress hormones, made for a stringy, acrid meal. Much better to sweeten things with a healthy dose of sugar. “And such lovely fit children you are, at that. You must be His Majesty. And who is your friend?”

“I’m Dent,” the boy said. “This is Pebble.” Sir Leslie had expected more blubbering, perhaps some pleading. But the boy just stared at him levelly, calmly. A touch of the royal blood in him, then, for certain. The girl, with perhaps a few more nervous glances at the boy, did likewise. They looked too different to be brother and sister; Sir Leslie wondered if she’d been part of the crew of that ship Crouch was so interested in. He also wondered if he’d have to employ some sort of marinade with her; she looked a bit on the stringy side.

“You may call me Sir Leslie,” he said, and bowed with a flourish, as his father had taught him. “Your friend — does she speak for herself?”

He noticed the girl Pebble’s hands fluttering, making some sort of signals. The boy Dent watched them, and his eyes widened slightly. “I’m not going to say that,” he whispered sharply to her. “That’s not nice.” He looked at Sir Leslie. “She doesn’t like talking.”

“That’s quite all right,” Sir Leslie said, rounding the table toward the boy. His fingers twitched, wanting to snare a gingerstar, just one, and pop it in his mouth. He had to remain strong. Indulgences were, by nature, occasional. Anything more frequent was base gluttony. He knew that.

“Is there something wrong with her tongue, perhaps?” Sir Leslie asked, all honey and jasmine. The boy shook his head. “Ah, good,” Sir Leslie relaxed. “The tongue adds such a lovely flavor.”

He put out a hand and tested the flesh of the boy’s arm. Wonderful; plenty of muscle, just a bit of baby fat. Some onions, some mycoprotein slabs to soak up all that fat when it rendered out. Maybe with a few lemons. “Ohh, I see why they were hiding you. A fine young boy you are. Plenty of fresh air for you, yes? Plenty of exercise, good food? Your family must just eat you up.”

Dent looked at him as if he’d grown an extra head. “Why does everyone keep saying that?” he asked. “Did you ever meet my family?”

The memory suffused Sir Leslie with a warm glow, and for a moment, the storm clouds thinned and rolled back. “Indeed I did. The Midwinter Ball, two years back.” He was fifth cousin, several times removed, to one of the distaff lines of the Imperial family tree. Visiting the Imperial palace had felt like coming home. And oh, the food.

“So that was you?” Dent asked, looking at Sir Leslie quizzically.

“Ah! Your family remembered me, did they?” Sir Leslie puffed up with pride, or started to, before his Special Device kicked in.

“My mother said you had the manners of a droolhound,” Dent told him. It was not the comment that wounded Sir Leslie — it was the look of apology, of pity, on the boy’s face. “She doesn’t like anyone, really,” the boy said, as if that made it better. The storm cloud thickened, and Sir Leslie’s palm fell to rest on the hilt of his cutlass.

“Your mother,” he said, grinding his teeth like his own mother had always told him not to, “shouldn’t talk about people behind their backs.” He felt sparks dancing in his mouth from every scrape of his diamond dentition. Sir Leslie stopped, took a deep breath. Smile, mouth closed. Fear makes the meat bitter. No point spoiling a good meal now.

“The both of you must be hungry,” Sir Leslie purred, mastering his temper. “Wouldn’t you like a sweet?” With a wave of his hand, the Wee One chairs uncoiled the restraints around the children’s left arms, and scooted close enough for them to reach the table.

The boy and girl looked at one another, hesitantly. The girl gave a little shake of her head. The boy looked at him and said quietly, “No thank you. We’re not hungry.”

“Not even you, little miss?” Sir Leslie asked, all outward concern. Inside, the storm clouds had begun to blacken, and the wind picked up. “Don’t be frightened. It’s all very good. Here.” Sir Leslie reached out with a hand that didn’t quite tremble in anticipation, and plucked another puffcake from the top of one silver serving tower. Tactically necessary, he told himself. It’s not gluttony if you’re putting your guests at ease.

The children seemed unconvinced. Very well — perhaps just one more. Who cared that the Special Device had begun to pinch a bit?

“Mmm,” Sir Leslie exulted, mouth full. He turned to the children and smiled, waiting to speak until he’d swallowed the last of it and swathed his teeth clean with his tongue. “See? Go on. Have some.”

“No thank you,” Dent said quietly. In Sir Leslie’s mind, distant thunder rumbled.

“Not good enough for you?” Sir Leslie said softly, his smile freezing, beginning to crack around the edges. “Is that it? Is the food better in your private seashell palace, Your Majesty? Are the cakes sweeter? How very trying this must be for you, then.”

As if of its own volition, the hand resting on the hilt of his blade began to slide it slowly in and out of the scabbard, just an inch or so. The sound of knives scraping always pleased Sir Leslie.

“Never had to scrape for anything in your life, did you?” Sir Leslie continued. He plucked a macaroon off the table and began to nibble on it in neat tiny bites, talking all the while. “Never had to look up at anyone, eh? Got everything you wanted, every time. Lucky you.”

“Actually—” Dent began. Sir Leslie slammed his macaroon-eating hand down on the table, making the silver rattle. He bent his shaggy head to Dent’s level.

“We do not speak when others are speaking,” he said, mouthing each word. Flecks of coconut danced on his lips. Then he stood, and discreetly smeared the bits of smashed cookie off the palm of his hand and onto the tablecloth.

“Must have been a lovely life for you,” Sir Leslie continued. “Secret son of the empire. No one to pity you, to whisper behind your back. No one telling you to straighten up, tuck in, stop snacking between meals.” In the artificial firelight, something terrible danced in Sir Leslie’s eyes, black as thunderheads. “I’ll wager you were never Mummy’s little butterball, now were you?”

He stretched out a hand and gently cupped the boy’s soft, slightly plump chin. The boy looked down at the hand, shying his head away, and then up at Sir Leslie.

Sir Leslie squeezed, forcing Dent’s mouth open. The boy cried out, squealing flattened syllables between outward-bowed, distorted lips. The girl let out some kind of prevocal shriek, and the boy clawed with his free hand at Sir Leslie’s arm.

“It is a basic rule of common courtesy!” Sir Leslie roared, grabbing a fistful of delicate pastries from the table. “Eat what you’re given! Every last bite!” He smashed the sweets against the boy’s mouth and pushed his jaw shut. Dent choked, lips smeared with custard and jam, and his eyes shone with tears.

“Now,” Sir Leslie smiled, with his full mouth of very sharp, very shiny teeth, “what does a proper boy say?”

Dent spat the entire mouthful back into Sir Leslie’s face, and all over his shirt.

Sir Leslie bellowed in revulsion, the inside of his mind lit in sudden sharp flashes of lightning. He smeared his face mostly clean with one sleeve, unsheathed his cutlass, and kicked the boy’s chair backward to the floor. The Wee Ones’ legs flailed for purchase, and the girl shrieked again.

“Not one more sound from you,” he snarled, leveling the blade at her. “Not a wee peep.”

Sir Leslie gave Dent’s chair a kick to get the Wee Ones back on their feet. “A fricasse and a stew, I think.” He walked behind the chairs and grabbed the girl’s head by her unruly mop of hair, hearing her whimper softly. “We’ll get the stew started first; they do take the longest, to soften up the tougher cuts of meat.”

“When I tell my family,” the boy said, sniffling and spitting from his chair, custard all down his shirtfront, “they’ll take your head.”

And Sir Leslie looked into the boy’s eyes, a gale now howling inside him, and exulted. Because he saw that Dent did not believe his own words.

“You’d better hurry, then,” Sir Leslie chuckled. “Two bells from now, you’ll have no family left. I’m going to gobble them all up. Say, now — that’ll make you Emperor, won’t it?” He grinned again, his teeth beginning their soft ultrasonic song. “I’ve never eaten an Emperor before.”

19.5. In Transit (Part 2)

2007-11-23T21:31:00.000-08:00

“The boy is a myth,” the Emperor lied.

“We never made any such craft,” Duly Elected Eleven lied, on the other end of the scrambled comm channel.

Thousands of diplomats on both sides of the rapidly escalating pan-galactic disagreement were also busily lying to one another at scattered points throughout both the FLAW and the Imperium. They lied far more expensively, with much larger words, sometimes over lavish meals. But the net effect was no different. Tensions among both populaces continued to rise. And Crouch News, vowing that it was working from accurate reports by highly placed sources, continued to quell that tension about as effectively as liquid oxygen doused a fire.

“My people aren’t going to accept that,” Duly Elected 11 sighed, truthfully this time. “They want their hypothetical nonexistent ship that we never actually built back.”

“My people won’t accept it either,” the Emperor said. “They want their entirely imaginary Imperial heir back, and also this nonexistent ship.”

Both men — well, 11 sounded like a man, which was the best one could go on — took a moment to stare off into space, feel terrible resignation, and wish they were off playing a nice round of duff somewhere sunny.

The distant and venerated founders of the Federated League of Allied Worlds, high on democracy following their hard-won independence from the Grand Galactic Imperium, had understandably gone a bit overboard. Their chosen ruling body, the Duly Elected, ran the FLAW in absolute anonymity, their faces concealed, their voices masked, speaking on all but the rarest occasions in one singular voice. Candidates for Due Election had their identities erased, running in a literal and figural black box for the entire campaign. Duly Elected were only allowed to reclaim their faces and voices when they retired, and then only after an exception had passed (unanimously) to better facilitate the publication of former Dulys’ lucrative memoirs.

The FLAW founders, with the same sort of cheery optimism that would so poorly serve Imperial engineers centuries later, believed that when candidates lacked an appearance, a voice, and a history, the public would be free to judge them solely on their ideas and arguments.

In reality, it simply made the Duly Elected wildly unaccountable.

The Emperor liked 11; they’d struck up a friendship during the Third Galactic Conflict, back when 11 was 11.5.1, the secretary of foreign affairs for the former 11. They had spoken regularly in the years since, ostensibly to maintain high-level backchannel communications, but mostly to complain discreetly about their wives and tell increasingly inaccurate hunting-related stories.

“Can’t you do anything about these damned news reports?” the Emperor said, drumming his fingers on the crystalline surface of his desk.

“No more than you,” 11 replied gloomily. “They’re only saying nice things about us. We can hardly pass legislation about that. And armistice or not, there’s still a lot of bad feelings for the Imperium among your average FLAWed.”

“But look, there’s nothing to get upset about here,” the Emperor lied. Even now, his intelligence services were conducting surveillance upon Bennington Yards, where the nonexistent FLAW spacecraft had definitely not been built. “If anything of the sort were happening, I’d have my own flesh and blood out putting it right. Not that I do.”

“Absolutely,” lied 11. Wherever he or she was sitting, he or she placed his or her right or left hand on a fat dossier from FLAW Intelligence Directorate, full of undoctored photos, stolen genetic records, and various reports confirming Dent’s existence. “It would be preposterous to let this fight go hot. I mean, if there were a spacecraft, we’d have dispatched our most reliable man to get it back. Which we haven’t.”

“So can we just sit on this and wait for it to blow over? You pass some new subsidies, we stage a few photo opportunities, maybe—” and the Emperor sighed here, imagining the vast and life-threatening sacrifices it would entail on his part — “we circulate a rumor that the Empress is expecting a new heir…”

“I don’t know if you’ve seen it,” 11 despaired, “but Crouch News — oh, there it is again — Crouch News is running a cartoon of you over here. You have fangs, and there’s some blood … babies are involved.”

The Emperor put his head in his hands. “Yes, that’s running here, too. With the opposite effect, you can imagine.”

“Half the Duly, they’re up for re-election next year,” 11 said, “and no one wants to appear weak or cowardly.”

“The Empire cannot and will not back down,” the Emperor nodded, resigned. “Shall we let the suits shake this one out? Stage a face-off at the very least? We bring out our forces, we do a little posturing, the citizenry gets scared, and we all go home looking like heroes?”

“I’ll get our briefcase boys working on it,” 11 nodded. “Suppose I’ll be seeing you in a few days, then.”

“Or not,” the Emperor smiled. Their old familiar joke. “If you had built a ship, you know — one capable of breaching Imperial defenses — you do realize we’d want it for our own.”

“And if there were a hidden heir to the Grand Galactic Imperium,” 11 countered, “he’d make one hell of a bargaining chip for the Duly.”

“I hope you find your ship,” the Emperor told his friend, and meant it.

“I hope you get your boy back,” 11 replied, with equal sincerity.

The channel closed, and the Emperor reached for the small jeweled box that had arrived that morning from Moldsmith Tisane on Fabrication Deck. It opened on perfectly oiled hinges to reveal a tiny unpainted tin figure, couched in velvet. A replacement for the one missing from the Emperor’s model.

The Emperor turned it over in his creased and callused hands for several minutes, before reaching for his jars of paints.

“Collectibles, really,” Bosun Little said, and took another sip from the mug of tea. “I’ve got one of the first-run Crouch Industries Chattering Charas, mint in box. You know, the ones with the snarled voice chip that swore blue mighty when you switched them on?”

“Yeah,” said Pug noncommittally, trying to reconcile this information with his current assessment of the Bosun.

“And don’t ask me where,” she continued, pixels percolating eagerly across her cheekbones, “but the Captain dug up this rare variant Princess Prin, with the real cloned skin on… ha. Listen to me yap. Probably boring a cutthroat like you slipknotted with all this delicate talk.”

Pug realized he was sipping tea with his pinky out, and hastily curled it back in. “Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So you and the Captain…” He almost came within shouting distance of nonchalant, provided nonchalant had excellent hearing. “You his woman?”

The Bosun stared at him over the edge of her mug and then burst out laughing, pixel explosions blooming across her face. The sound of it nearly rattled the pans maglocked to the Zephyr’s galley walls. In the dishcleaner, last night’s plates quivered faintly.

“I’m his Bosun,” she said firmly. “He’s my Captain. Found me hucking no-goods from a station bar off Thalis. Treated me like an officer again. Like somebody.” She smiled and took another sip. “Don’t let the flowers fool you. The Captain’s got steel. But a little slip like him? Ha. I’d break him in half.”

The way she said that last sentence made Pug’s toes curl against his sandals. He would later find he’d left fingermarks indented in the gold of his goblet.

“So,” the Bosun smacked her lips, downing the last of the tea in a few quick gulps. “No slight on the onboard library, but what’s there for fun on this boat?” She wiped her hands on her coveralls. “Woman’s facing execution and all, she tends to get antsy.”

Pug had never been so glad to hear a pistol-shot in his life, not even that time with the charging armorvore. The crack of his sister’s repeater rang in through the galley door from the cargo bay outside.

Pug and the Bosun thudded quickly from the galley. Smoke still drifted from the small scorch mark Lis’s shot had left on the cargo deck. It had hit directly between Captain Corsair and Commodore Crestfall. Slowly, both men lowered their swords and turned toward the top of the staircase, where she stood with the pistol still raised.

“Don’t think I haven’t seen you two these past few days,” she sighed, tossing her hair back in a far more successful fashion. She’d been practicing. “The both of you, sidling circlewise around each other, itching for a duel.”

“I make no apologies,” the Captain spat.

“I was just seeing to my blade,” Crestfall replied.

Lis narrowed her eyes and began to descend to the cargo deck. “Captain, we’ve been over this. If you kill this man on our ship, the whole galaxy goes to war. And Commodore, the Emperor does not take kindly to men who execute his prisoners before he can.”

“Don’t supposed you’ve had any luck with a transmission?” Crestfall asked, as if enquiring about the weather. With a flick of his eyes toward Corsair, he slid Bad News back into its scabbard.

“None,” Lis sighed. “I’m sending bursts to the right Imperial relays, but nothing’s getting through. Same as yours to FLAW command.”

“Someone is blocking us,” Corsair said darkly. “The same someone who knew precisely where to locate our rendezvous.”

“Might do to plug the holes in your network, Majesty,” Crestfall said, cleaning his glasses with the hem of his traveling cloak. “Just to say.”

“That is, of course, assuming your transmissions truly are not getting through,” Corsair replied, a dagger-edge in his voice. “And that it was not some ally of yours making off with His Young Majesty.”

Crestfall stopped fiddling with his glasses in mid-polish, and fixed Corsair with a look. “Because I’m so keen to put myself in the path of a disassembler-tide,” he said slowly. “And watch the ship I loved get eaten to atoms.”

And in the Commodore’s gaze, Captain Corsair saw something, some kindred sort of loss, that finally gave him pause. His posture shifted, and he sheathed his sword and sat down on a nearby crate of canned khim-crack eggs.

“I concede,” Corsair said, “you have a fair point.”

“Doesn’t matter if it’s a plot,” Pug said, working a kink out of his neck. Even the bare springs and slats of his cot weren’t quite agreeing with him. “The black ship guy, he thinks we’re all bits by now. They’re not gonna see us coming.”

“You’ve fought a lot of animals, square?” Bosun Little asked him. “Men think different. See more of the angles.”

“And they’ve got smaller teeth,” Pug countered, grimly. “Softer bellies.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Lis said. “Six bells till we catch up with the Captain’s signal. Until then, no more dueling. Her Majesty needs serious beauty rest.”

“I highly doubt that,” Corsair smiled. Lis shot him a look and stomped off to melt in private.

Commodore Crestfall scanned the cargo hold calmly. The Minister of Violence and the mini-Corinthian had ducked back into the kitchen. Crestfall could read their body language like the skies before a coming storm.

“You seem twice sweet on the lady,” he nodded to Corsair. “Considering she’s keen for your head and all, and not in the good way.”

The Captain snorted in disgust, but did not get up from his seat. “A keen observation, for the hero of the FLAW Fleet. The man with the famous heart of gold.”

“Comes with a kill switch, you know,” Crestfall sighed. “And the Duly’s fingers on the button. They don’t tend to circulate that.”

Corsair looked at him, taken by surprise, and ingrained decades of breeding overcame fresher animosity. “I… I am sorry,” the Captain said quietly, and looked away. Some things, you didn’t even wish on your worst enemy.

Crestfall pulled a crate of table linens rattling across the bay’s corrugated floor, and sat, a safe distance from Corsair. “It’s my lot. A man has to do his duty, kill switch or otherwise. No charter says he has to like it.” He nodded toward the Captain’s metal hand. “Took me a while to recognize, on account of the customizations, but that’s a FLAW model, square?”

“So it is,” Corsair nodded, cradling it with his still-living hand, testing the give in the joints of the ring finger.

“Someone wants to kill me, I generally like to know why,” Crestfall said. He unslung Bad News in its scabbard from his belt, and carefully set it to the deck, keeping his eyes on Corsair the whole time. “Specially if I take no joy in reciprocating.”

Corsair looked up at him, swallowing some fierce emotion back down his throat. “The Crucible. You did love her, truly.”

Crestfall nodded. “Lost my heart to her,” he said.

“Then perhaps you will understand.” And there in the cargo bay, to the man he’d sworn to kill, the Captain told his tale.

The Imperial Fleet was waiting by the time the FLAW Navy plussed in. The Borderlands were neutral ground, home for free-thinking settlements, the law-averse, and anyone too ornery, strange, or antisocial to abide the strictures of government.

The last great space battle of the Third Galactic Conflict was decided on the spot where the two powers now met. Ten years and turns before, FLAW and Imperial forces staged a battle here to lure out the Dark Matter Armada in its full strength. The Armada had apparently expected to mop up two weakened, broken vanguards; instead, its fleet broke apart and died in a hailstorm of unified artillery.

Both sides had scoured the field clean of chunks of DMA craft, hunting for any clues to explain where the enemy fleet had sprung from. The FLAW and Alliance hulks remaining from the battle, they left, as a monument to the fallen. From the bridge of the Deciduous, flagship Dreadnaught of the Imperial Fleet, the Emperor could just make out the drifting forward half of the Valerion, and remembered seeing it split apart in fire. It was the sort of thing that would have been tremendously cunning, and worth capturing an image of, if not for all the friends and comrades he knew were suddenly finding themselves on one of two smaller, significantly more burning, and far more hazardous vessels.

Ahead, from the dark of space, the sleek capital ships of the FLAW Navy stretched out of pluslight and squashed back into shape. The Emperor sighed, and wished his breakfast had agreed with him better. He did not mind the notion of another war — he simply preferred a necessary one, not waged against allies.

And not, he had to admit to himself, with his ten-year-old son somewhere in the midst of it.

“Let the diplomacy begin,” the Emperor said softly.

Behind him, in a specially furnished chair which no crew member dared approach, look at, or even think about, really, the Empress briefly looked up from her knitting. The Emperor knew various members of her Midnight Guard were stationed somewhere here, around the brightly lit bridge; he thought he’d heard one cough earlier from underneath the communications panel.

“You boys have fun,” the Empress said curtly, and started on another row.

And just a few orbits distant, in the shadow of a gas giant ringed with tiny, blinking mining stations, the Imperial Zephyr plussed in. Pug sat at the controls, Story ably manning (or robot-ing, at least) the copilot’s seat. Lis rested a hand on the back of her brother’s chair; behind her, Corsair and Crestfall took opposite sides of the cabin, although the air between them seemed less likely to spark lightning at any given moment.

Instead, Corsair was looking curiously at Bosun Little’s hair, which stuck up in strange directions. The Bosun scowled, at him and at the hair, and attempted to discreetly flatten it down. She did not look at Pug, and he did not look at her; absolutely nothing was out of the ordinary with them, individually or jointly, and certainly no one should ask about it or suspect otherwise.

“Looks clear,” Pug said at the controls, scanning the seemingly empty starfields ahead.

Lis leaned toward the controls and thumbed on the comms. “Let’s try to raise the border stations,” she would have said, if not for all the explosions.

The shockbursts hit the ship all at once, from every direction, exploding in solid walls of sonic force. Story’s eyes winked out, the frequencies of his crystalline brain disrupted too greatly even for an emergency reboot to kick in. The rest, battered and buffeted and deafened, merely lapsed into bruised unconsciousness.

Lightbending hull shimmering soundlessly against the stars, the covert transport that had lain in wait for them moved in to dock.

Something was different in the black room. Had Dent ever traveled pluslight before, he would have recognized the familiar squash-and-stretch feel of deceleration. As it was, the not-quite-seamless return of mass to his body woke him from a sound sleep, in which he’d dreamed of a black room exactly like this one.

Unfamiliar sounds, scraping and chiming, filled the room. Dent nudged Pebble awake, looking toward the door.

In the lattice, the Wee Ones had begun to move, unfolding from the barrier, stalking slowly toward the children.

19. In Transit (Part 1)

2007-11-22T21:15:00.000-08:00

The Empress did not watch the vids. Nothing about the fictional portrayals entertained her; the news always seemed old and thirdhand by the time it reached her ever-attentive ears; and the advertisements were frankly insulting. If the Empress wished to buy something, she would inform its manufacturer. If it did not exist, she would have it made for her. Anything other permutation of the relationship between the Empress and the assembled forces of commerce seemed distastefully like begging on their part.

In most circumstances, the Empress got her news directly from its many sources, whether they knew it or not. This left her extremely well-informed by the time news was filtered, dissected, watered-down, and adorned with footage of adorable baby animals by the galaxy’s dispersers of information. But it also left her dangerously vulnerable in situations such as these, in which the purveyors of news chose to manufacture their own.

Still, she was not entirely unaware. The Empress believed that conversation had a temperature. Her own, for example, usually fell somewhere in the range in which icicles tended to form. Now, as she sat in her skeletal chair, knitting a pair of itchwool socks for the infant daughter of a distant third cousin she did not particularly like, the Empress heard the galaxy’s temperature steadily rising. Office gossip and bland production figures gave way to discussions of troop strengths, to whispered innuendo and suspicion. Usually lukewarm, the Empress realized that the galaxy had now escalated to a simmer. It would shortly begin to boil.

The Empress set her knitting down in her lap, admiring how subtly she had woven the traditional Imperial symbols of bad luck into the adorable pink-and-yellow pattern of the socks, and touched the hidden button on the arm of her chair that connected her to her husband, wherever he might be.

“Yes, treasure?” the Emperor said, with the manner of a man suddenly returning to full wakefulness, and wishing to conceal it. That meant he was in his meeting of ministers, although the Empress already knew that.

The Empress frowned, her lips becoming even thinner and less approving, as the chatter in her ears grew ever more heated. “You should turn on the vids,” she said. Then, because she was running a little behind on her daily quota of arch reproachfulness: “If you haven’t already.”

In the small hours of evenside, Glissandra Voluptua stole from her quarters, barefoot on the cold metal decks of the Zephyr, and crept to the doorway of the cabin she and Pug had grudgingly assigned to Captain Corsair. She wore his cloak tightly around her, the hood pulled up to shadow her face. What she might have worn underneath was purely a matter of speculation.

She stretched out a hand, curled into a fist, and hesitated, holding it poised just before the surface of the Captain’s door. Her heart pounded so loudly, she could hear it in her ears.

“I wouldn’t,” said Story, whirring quietly past in Evenside Mode (known in his former career on the battlefield as Stealth Mode). The robot didn’t look back at her, continuing on toward the cargo bay. Lis glared after him, wishing her own eyes shot lasers. Then, feeling like an idiot, she turned and dashed back on tiptoe to her own chamber, where she would bury her head under one of the pillows and bask in her own mortification.

And in the cargo bay, Captain Corsair sat before the three cases containing the reward that he now technically might not get to collect, on account of perhaps being dead. He had crept from his own room before — mere clicks before Lis made up her own mind to sneak out herself — to come and examine his treasure. If it were made of small, portable units — jewels, perhaps, or golden laurel coins — he could perhaps spirit enough of it away in his boots or the pockets of his cloak to ensure that he and Bosun Little did not escape from this adventure unrewarded.

The notion that they would, indeed, escape, was never in doubt to the Captain.

He chose one case at random, the middle one, and reached for its clasp, wondering how quietly he could pry it open.

“I wouldn’t,” said Story, bumping softly down the stairs from the main deck.

The Captain raised his eyebrows in surprise, and made another gesture toward the middle chest. Story shook his head warningly.

Corsair gestured inquisitively toward the first case, and then the third.

“I wouldn’t,” Story repeated, and rolled over to his recharging station to dream of nursery rhymes and combat manuevers.

“Hmm,” the Captain nodded, and smiled at his hosts’ cleverness. He patted the tops of the chests lightly, as if to assure them that he’d be back. Possibly with some sort of extensive scanning equipment. Then he stole back up to his cabin and slipped inside, never aware that he’d almost had a visitor in his absence.

Time didn’t exist in the black room. The light was always just bright enough to see by, just dim enough to sleep. There was a privy and a sink in one corner, a surprisingly comfortable bed with soft black sheets in another, and the doorway. Nothing more.

For a time, after the Wee Ones had dumped them here, Dent and Pebble had shouted and banged on the door. They gave up on the shouting after their voices grew hoarse. And they stopped the door-battering when one of the interlocking lattice of Wee Ones that had folded itself to form the door turned its mirror face toward them and took a menacing swipe with one pointy appendage.

No bells sounded through the strange ship — at least, not in this portion of it. Day and night soon blended into a hazy blur. Food arrived through a bristling gap in the Wee Ones blocking the door, three times a day. It was simple and bland — clean water and simple nutrient-wafers. Neither of them liked the food, but both of them were hungry. So they ate.

Dent’s sonic knife seemed to have little effect on the black walls or the onyx floor. He could use it to etch pictures on them, but he couldn’t really see the drawings, and besides, it ran down the battery.

Dent and Pebble ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, and tried to amuse themselves the rest of the time. They played catch with the ball of pseudosilk, until that got old. Dent would march the army man from his father’s model up and down the walls, but without any squadmates or interesting terrain, the campaigns proved uneventful. Pebble tried tapping out tunes with the silver spoon. They tried flipping the coin and seeing how many times it came up heads, but the results were ultimately uniform.

So at last they were just left to talk, discussing their favorites of Story’s bedtime tales, and talking about what might happen in Part Five of The Caravan’s Escape. Sometimes they fought, out of boredom, and then grudgingly reconciled.

If they had been able to see Sir Leslie Murther down in the craft’s vast kitchen, whistling a cheerful tune as he inspected his fine and extensive selection of very sharp implements, they would have been far more frightened.

18. Funhouse, Without the Fun

2007-11-21T22:22:00.000-08:00

Dent’s mother had impressed upon him from an early age that biting other people was beneath Imperial dignity. They generally didn’t deserve the blessing of your royal saliva, and besides, you never knew where those people had been.

Pebble had not been raised with any such niceties.

And thus, as the growly bearded man with the frilly cuffs and the crinkly, perfumed velvet coat hauled them struggling down the high vaulted corridors of his vessel, one to an arm, Pebble got a solid mouthful of sickly-sweet sleeve in her jaws and went to town.

Sir Leslie Murther’s head had, until that moment, been filled with lists of ingredients, and thoughts of fire and savory aromatics. As Pebble’s teeth sank into his sleeve, and very nearly his arm, he howled. It was more from shock than actual pain, but he nonetheless dropped the wriggling children to the shining onyx deck. Actual pain obligingly followed when Pebble lashed out with a strong, skinny leg and kicked him in the beans for good measure.

As Sir Leslie bellowed, tottering back and forth in tiny, hunched-over steps, Dent and Pebble clutched hands and ran. Then, once their arms had been nearly yanked from their sockets, they tried both running in the same direction, which proved far more productive.

They had been carried by their captor for several clicks prior to Pebble’s dental opportunism, through twists and turns, and mostly with an excellent if somewhat unmemorable view of their own reflections in the polished black stone of the deck. As a result, once they succeeded in getting well out of sight and earshot of their captor, they found themselves hopelessly lost.

It did not help that the corridors of Sir Leslie’s ship were all identical, down to the black rivets in the black columns of the sturdy black material that, uncomfortably, always seemed to have just stopped moving the instant you laid hands on it. Nor did it help that everything in every corridor that was not black was a solid, seamless mirror. Dent and Pebble found themselves lost, one of a infinite number of feeling children in a grid of parallel universes, curving up and away on either side of them into deepening darkness.

It reminded Dent all too much of his least favorite dream — of wandering the halls of the palace, crying out, and no one there to hear him.

They stopped at a T-junction so that Pebble could put her ear to the deck, trying to hear pipes that might speak navigational secrets to her. She listened for a long while, then pressed her head harder against the smooth black stone, puffs of her breath pooling in fog just past her lips. She stood up, looking strangely shaken.

Nothing, she signed. No sound. Not even a little.

Dent waved her over to the closest mirror, which reflected the two of them and the corridor stretching back behind them. “Look at this,” he said, unnerved, and pointed at his own eyes in the mirror.

The reflection seemed to be shifting, changing shape, wobbling the borders of his eyes ever so slightly. The motion was faint, almost unnoticeable. But once you noticed it, it never stopped.

They both saw it at the same time. A strange black thing, all curves and points, tic-tic-ticking along on six spindly legs across another junction in the corridor behind them. It was about the size of Zoomaster Genus’s Altaran Droolhound, which is to say, it would be nearly Dent-sized if it chose to rear up on any two of its appendages.

Dent and Pebble turned, from the reflection to the real, and the walking thing froze. Slowly, it turned toward them as well, revealing a flat shiny face in which they could see a very tiny Dent and a very tiny Pebble. A mirror.

Is it friendly? Pebble asked, her hand tight at her side. Dent’s face expressed significant doubts.

The mirror-faced thing ticked a few steps down the corridor toward them. Dent and Pebble waited, holding their breath. It stopped, shifting its weight, tilting its head a few degrees to the left.

Then it charged.

Thankfully, Dent and Pebble agreed on their direction this time: Right. They ran all-perdition down the corridors, taking twist after turn, not caring where they ran so long as it was away. The mirror-faced thing did not flag, bounding along behind them in long, springy strides, the points of its legs pattering like a tiny rainstorm. And the storm began to grow.

Each time Dent looked back, there were more of them, scrabbling along, mirror faces reflecting his own terrified eyes. And each time he looked, they had closed a little more of the gap.

One of the black things left, weight slamming into Dent’s back, and he went down tumbling hard to the deck, suffocating in a scratching tangle of pointed cold limbs, covering his eyes. Somewhere nearby he heard Pebble shrieking, but he was too scared to even move. And then he found that he could not.

The black things had folded themselves, interlocked, around his arms and legs, and Pebble’s too. Dent found himself lifted, hung up like a painting on display, lines of cold criscrossing his limbs where the black metal of the mirror-faces touched him.

Footfalls echoed in the corridor ahead, and then the bearded man strode carefully, with stiffened dignity, around the corner and toward the two children.

“Nnf,” Sir Leslie grunted, walking it off. “Let’s get one thing straight here, bairns,” he growled at them. “I’m the one does the biting in this little arrangement.” He tugged up his sleeve and studied the fading half-moons of red here Pebble’s teeth had left an impression.

“If that leaves a mark, girl,” he scowled, the points of his teeth sparkling in the reflections from countless mirror faces, “it’ll be sashimi for you.”

“Who are you?” Dent asked, trying to summon some of that Imperial courage he was supposed to possess. “What do you—” Without a sound, one of black limbs of the mirror-faces clamped over his mouth. It tasted like nothing — not air, not water, not even the numb, sandy prickle of a burnt tongue. Nothing at all.

“Children,” Sir Leslie clucked, “should be savored, not heard. See them to their accomodations, my Wee Ones.”

The mirror-faced things — the Wee Ones — obliged, cooperating in clusters of spare limbs, carrying Dent and a softly whimpering Pebble off down the corridor, until they were lost in the maze of reflections.

Sir Leslie stood up fully, not without some lingering pain, and straightened the frills of his collar in the nearest mirror. He primped, just a little, weighing whether the light most favored the strong line of his jaw from this angle, or that. He stood back, smoothing down the front of his coat — underneath, delicate and complicated mechanisms pinged and ticked — and admiring the slim straight line of his own figure.

He smiled into the mirror with diamond teeth, and ran a hand back through his hair approvingly. And beneath the mirror’s surface, and every other mirror in every hall on every deck of his strange ship, thousands of micromotors worked endlessly, adjusting the mirror’s surface, ensuring that Sir Leslie’s reflection looked every bit as smashing as its owner assumed it should.

It was all going quite well until the wall became the floor.

Lis yelped as her brother’s full weight suddenly flattened her against the frost-patterned wall of the Crucible’s corridor, the world pitching sideways by a hard 90 degrees. Story’s treadball servos whined, the robot’s internal gyros momentarily blanking out, and the robot crashed and clattered down in a hail of hasty apologies.

“What in Perdition?” Lis said, accustomed to a life that never malfunctioned, upon pain of death.

“The gravity generator,” Corsair grunted, hauling himself to his feet and straightening his cloak. “Our friends the disassemblers have begun to make a feast of it, alas.”

“We’ll all be in zero when it goes,” Crestfall said, pushing his spectacles back up the ridges of his broken nose. “But it’s gonna go slow, and before it does, it’s gonna make things topsy-turvy.”

As if to oblige, gravity suddenly shifted another 180 degrees, sending everyone tumbling hard into what had only moments before been the opposite wall.

“Thank Iolanthe for soft landings,” the Bosun groused, smarting in all the places where she’d landed on Pug’s armor plating. The patterns on her cheeks wavered queasily. Pug, still recovering from a momentary faceful of one of the Bosun’s perfectly honed shoulderblades, could only manage a grunt.

Story checked the Captain’s three cases with a free hand, glad they were tightly secured via mag-clamp to his own steel back. Especially the middle one.

“Just a few clicks further,” Lis said through gritted teeth, fighting off a roiling wave of dizziness. “Emergency stair’s just down this hall.”

“Let’s hope,” Crestfall nodded, somber. “Those disassemblers get to your ship — or us — before we do, this is gonna be little more than a pleasant stretch of the legs.”

Gravity had played havoc with the locking mechanisms, but the Bosun’s Whomping Stick, and some mutual effort between herself and Pug, forced the door open with a creak. Lis noticed Crestfall wincing at the sound, as if any further harm to the ship he’d already lost once was a wound to the man himself.

She also noticed Corsair, observing the same phenomenon, with not a trace of pity in those clear flashing eyes.

A short leap down left them in the pitch-dark emergency stair, which stretched off sideways two levels, toward the airlock where the Zephyr waited.

“Well,” Lis sighed, hauling herself up over the barrier that had once been the nearest landing, “at least this gravity’s good for something.”

Then the ship lurched horribly again, and forward became straight up, sending Lis crashing back against Captain Corsair. Her knees buckled as another wave of vertigo hit; the world reeled sickeningly inside her skull.

Then a hand grasped her arm, gently applying pressure, and the sickness fizzled and faded. She opened her eyes to find Corsair lightly pressing his non-metal thumb against the inside of her forearm, just below the wrist, and for a moment she felt dizzy again for entirely different reasons.

“A pressure point, majesty,” he said softly, with sympathy. “It helps with the grav-sickness, I have found.”

“You…” she said, barely above a whisper. “You’re touching me.”

“So I am,” he nodded, smiling even in the face of death. “And?”

Lis recovered her wits and snatched her arm away.

“It’s a good way to lose another hand,” she said, rubbing her wrist, trying to tell herself how incredibly offended she ought to feel.

“Perhaps the best,” the Captain nodded, and the smile fled, chased by shadows.

One by one, they clambered up to stand on the underside of the stairs, and began to climb.

Halfway up, Lis began to feel her breath tighten in her chest. Lead flowed, congealing, into her arms and legs.

“Does—” she gasped, struggling now to get the words out, “does anyone else—” And then a firm, invisible hand pushed her down to the stairs, and she could not rise.

“What’s the grumble?” Bosun Little asked, looking back to see Crestfall, the Captain and Lis flattened against the stairs, and the trailing Story’s motors grinding as he struggled to move forward. “Hey, wait.” She flexed her arms, shook out her legs, with familiar ease and comfort. “I know this feeling. This is—”

“Heavy grav,” Pug said beside her. He leaned against the wall, sweat beading on his face, but did not slump. “I’d say about a times three.” With thick hands, he tugged off his helmet, unsnapped the clasps on his armored breastplate, and hurled both away with a grunt. Freed of the weight, he sighed, grateful in his sweat-soaked tunic, skin steaming in the cold.

“You handle the crush pretty sturdy, for a lightweight,” the Bosun admitted, the dots on her cheeks rising in rounded peaks.

“Yeah,” Pug nodded, swabbing away the sweat on his brow. “I’ve been training in plus four, sometimes plus five, since I was seven.”

This charming conversation was cut short by the sound of rending metal, and the sudden lurch of the stairwell on which they stood. Straining under Corsair, Lis, Crestfall, and Story’s weight, the stairwell had begun to buckle. Bolts thick as two fingers stripped their threads, peeling out of the wall.

“You two think you could — maybe — ?” Lis managed, and then had to catch her breath.

The two brackets keeping the stairs attached to the wall slipped another perilous inch. The metal on which the less gravitationally fortunate members of the group struggled began, inexorably, to bend.

“I’ll anchor,” Bosun Little nodded, wiping one hand dry on her coveralls. “You grab as many as you can.” She clasped Pug’s hand, tight enough to squeeze the bones, and he had the strangest sensation that blood was flushing into his cheeks, for some reason.

Pug crouched down, stretched out his free hand, and began to drag Commodore Crestfall slowly up to the landing. The stairs trembled again.

“Oh, no,” Lis said quietly, hand crawling toward the lash on her hip. If she could just reach it, just move her dead stone fingers, just find the strength to send the lash out to grab some protrusion of metal…

The stairs gave way. Story clamped hold of the opposite platform, but could not reach the Captain or Lis as they plunged. At this gravity, even a short fall would surely shatter their bones.

Lis felt the Captain’s cold metal hand grab hers, saw a flash of sparks, heard a clang of steel and Corsair’s cry of pain. When she could finally lift her head, neck muscles trembling with the effort, she saw him clinging to the handle of his saber, sunk to the haft into the wall of the stairwell. His eyes were shut tight, his white teeth clenched, the whole of him shaking from the strain of holding himself and Lis up from the pit below.

Squeezing breaths into her lungs one painful rasp at a time, Lis swam her dangling arm up through a sea of iron air to seize hold of the captain’s metal hand.

“Don’t let go,” was all she could say. She felt the metal hand slipping in her grip, crumpling under the gravitational crush, pulling away from its housing on the stump of the Captain’s arm. He opened his eyes and looked down at her, but Lis got the curious feeling that in that moment, he was seeing someone else entirely.

“I will never let go,” he said, and he meant every word.

On the landing above, Pug braced Bosun Little as she stretched out full on the metal grating, extending the hammer end of the Whomping Stick down toward Corsair. But the Captain could not grasp it without releasing his sword, or releasing Lis.

Corsair’s blade began to list, the gravity pulling it out and down from its hold in the wall. The two sank even further away from the Bosun’s reach. Corsair tried to haul Lis up, to bring her within range of the extended hammer, but the effort only further strained the workings of his metal hand.

Lis looked up at him, hopeless. He managed one sad, gallant smile.

“If we go, Majesty,” he said, “we go together.”

The sword pulled free.

The weight lifted. They floated.

The gravity generator had finally succumbed, leaving the whole ship listing and adrift in zero. Lis and the Captain hung motionless in the middle of the stairwell, and for a long moment, she forgot to let go of his hand.

Then she did, drifting slowly away. The Captain adjusted his metal hand, squeezing it back into shape, fitting it with a clunk to the hidden housing where it met his flesh, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“A good way to lose a hand, indeed,” he said, and kicked off from the wall, heading higher.

It was easier going in zero, and in less than a click, they had swum through the dark and the air to the level where escape waited just a few doors away.

“Airlock’s just this way,” Pug nodded, hauling himself through the doorway from the stairs and angling off a wall toward the far end of the new corridor. By the time the others reached him, he had pried open the manual access hatch and turned the handle.

The door did not open. Motors groaned, protested, and fell silent again.

“Gods, it just worked!” Pug growled, hammering a fist fruitlessly against the thick steel. Beyond the tiny porthole in the door, the airlock waited tantalizingly, the open hatch of the Zephyr in sight.

“That’d be the gravity,” Crestfall sighed. “Messes up the circuits some. We’d usually run a reboot, when she was — when she was whole.”

The corridor lit up an eerie, angry red, and Lis turned to see Story facing away from the rest of the group, his laser eyes and arm rising to readiness in a low, escalating whine. “It may be prudent for you to hurry,” Story suggested calmly. “I am programmed not to fear, say, my imminent deconstruction into my component atoms. I am not certain if you possess similar protocols.”

In the red glow of his eyes, the walls of the corridor, far at the opposite end, seemed to fizz and bubble, steadily vanishing in the wake of some unseen tide.

“Ah yes,” Corsair sighed, as if someone had just scuffed his boots. “The disassemblers, at last.”

Story opened fire, searing beams playing across the leading edge of the tide, slowing its advance in lines of glowing slag. But in all the places where he did not fire, the disassemblers surged onward, and when she shifted his aim, the glowing scars left behind soon fizzed themselves, and vanished again.

“If I can get at the wiring,” Bosun Little strained, fingers digging into the edges of the access handle panel, “I could maybe—”

A hand fell upon her shoulder, steady and slightly cool to the touch.

“Miss, if you’ll move back a mite,” Commodore Crestfall said. He drew Bad News soundlessly, and tumbled in the air as he sent the sword slicing in a quick, effortless oval through the three-inch door. He braced himself and kicked, and the better part of the door floated inward, clearing the way towards the Zephyr.

“All in that’s going,” he said, and made room for the Bosun.

They all scrambled through the gap, Story’s lasers scouring away the disassembler advance until the Zephyr’s hatch sealed. In a hiss, the smaller ship disengaged, and lurched away to safe distance.

In the pink mists of the nebula, the unlikely cluster of allied enemies sat before the forward viewport and watched the F.S.S. Crucible dissolve into nothingness. Commodore Crestfall’s face betrayed nothing, except perhaps a bit more sadness at the corners of his smile.

“There is, of course, the matter of the boy,” Captain Corsair said at last. He sat proudly, possessively, atop the three stacked crates containing his reward, in the far corner of the Zephyr’s opulent, swooping cockpit. (“Pit” was an entirely improper word, really, for any space equipped with a jewel-studded throttle lever, but old terminologies died hard.)

“There’s the matter of my ship,” Crestfall responded calmly, turning toward him. Beneath the cloak, one or more of his hands may or may not have been moving toward his sword. “And the question of you and your friend’s heads, and whether they remain attached.”

“You’re on Imperial territory now, Commodore,” Lis smirked, leaning against an opal-inlaid navigation console. “Sorry to tell. The prisoners, and their heads, are the Imperium’s to deal with.”

“Please, please, do not fight on my account,” the Captain laughed. “My head is already spoken for, by myself, I am afraid.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Crestfall said.

“The coordinates we now occupy are those to which I sent the boy, and his ship,” Corsair shot back. “And yet, as you see, neither are present. They are with our mysterious friend in his Armada craft.”

“Hey,” Pug realized. “Doesn’t that make you two sorta… useless?” He did not, as he might with other prisoners, suggest a quick and mess-free ejection from the airlock, which may have had something to do with the way the Bosun tossed her hair derisively when he called her “useless.”

“The Commodore, he wishes the return of his ship. Technically, my ship now, but let us not quibble over such trivialities. You, Majesties, seek the safe return of your brother, if only so that no one else may learn of him. I have stated the facts correctly, yes?”

“Which still doesn’t explain what use, if any, you still are to us,” Lis replied flatly. A little voice in her head suggested many uses for the Captain — an embarrassing number, really — and it took considerable effort for Lis not to let her knees start wobbling again. She thought of the Imperium, as her mother had long ago advised her to do, but it didn’t really help.

Corsair appeared to think about this for a few seconds. “Are you aware your brother steals?” he said suddenly. “Small things, trifles, really. I applaud such behavior in a bandit-to-be, but in a future heir to the Imperium? I would find that quite troubling.”

Lis shot an uneasy look at Pug, who shruggled slightly, just as baffled. “Yeah,” Lis said. “Sure we knew. That’s our stupid little brother. It’s what he does.” It certainly seemed to explain that little pink vial she’d misplaced a week back.

The Captain held up his hands, conciliatory. “Very well — I am hardly one to judge. At any rate, I anticipated complications. I left any number of shiny, enticing, banditlike trinkets within His Young Majesty’s reach. All of them equipped with long-range tracking devices. I believe he chose the medallion — somewhat obvious, perhaps, and lacking in the subtlety true banditry cultivates, but he is young. It is understandable.”

Indeed, at this moment, ever farther away by pluslight, a golden medallion engraved with a three-headed god jingled around in the darkness of Dent’s adventure belt, along with his other accumulated treasures. From a nanodot in the nostril of the god’s second head, a steady signal pulsed out through space, just waiting for someone to hear it.

Corsair hopped off the crates and straightened the glove covering his non-metal hand, as if that action were the single most important in his life.

“You may take my head if you wish — how ungenerous of me it would be to protest!” the Captain grinned. “But I caution you, that same head contains the frequency by which we may track your brother, and your ship — my ship? Let us say your ship, to be courteous.” He reached out with one finger of his metal hand, and pushed Commodore Crestfall’s glasses back up his nose. The Commodore did not move, did not blink — just sort of smiled, as if at the hubris of it.

“And you will find my head far more useful,” Corsair continued, “save perhaps as some sort of decorative planter or centerpiece, if it remains exactly where it is. I would also ask that you spare the Bosun, but you may find her far more persuasive on that subject than I.” The Bosun lifted her Whomping Stick and twirled it lazily, just for emphasis.

”So,” Corsair said. “Shall we go and rescue the boy, and retrieve the fine ship that is supposedly not mine? Or would you rather kill me, and fight over my very handsome assorted pieces?”

Lis and Crestfall exchanged wary glances, checkmated. And the Captain smiled, like a man who has just posed a question to which he already knows the answer.

17. A Pleasant Conversation, And Then The Missiles

2007-11-20T21:46:00.000-08:00

“I will thank you to step to one side, Your Majesty,” Corsair hissed through clenched teeth. He still wasn’t looking at Lis, still held her about the wrist with her pistol upraised. He held her lightly, courteously, just with his fingers and thumb, but she felt that contact through the whole of her arm, if not the rest of her. “I would not wish for you to be injured.”

“What are you doing?” she whispered back to him, and still, his eyes did not move from Commodore Crestfall at the the top of the stairs.

“I very much need to kill that man,” the Captain said, and from the low fire burning in his voice, Lis knew he meant it.

“Wouldn’t be the first,” Crestfall sighed, still as stone.

“To try?” Corsair seethed. Crestfall shook his head slowly, his eyes flicking to a certain spot near one of the gutted helm stations.

“To succeed,” he said.

Bosun Little snapped a glance over her shoulder, sizing up Crestfall in a matter of moments. She saw the line of his elbow, the cant of his arm beneath the cloak. She measured the absolute calm in his face.

Still pinning Pug to the stairs with one knee and the blade of her weapon, she turned back to Corsair, straight vertical lines appearing on each side of her face.

“Don’t,” she said. It wasn’t a request.

“But he—” Corsair began.

“Am I your bosun?” she asked him, low and steady. “If I’m your bosun, you listen to me. If you don’t listen to me, I’m not your bosun, and you’re alone in this. Don’t.”

“Listen to her,” Lis found herself saying to the man she ostensibly wanted to kill, and at last his eyes met her own, filled with a pain she could not recognize. Slowly, the Captain lowered his sword.

“I have never been able to deny two women the same request,” he sighed.

“Am I supposed to know you?” Crestfall called down from the top of the stairs. His voice held no mockery; just an open palm. “I’m afraid I don’t recollect.”

“I did not think you would.” Corsair bit off every word. “That is precisely the problem.”

Bosun Little turned back to Crestfall. “How’d you find us?”

“That ship of yours does strangeness to space,” Crestfall said. “Or so the scientists tell me. Leaves a sort of gravitational furrow in its wake. Hardly anything, unless you know to notice, but easy enough to track.”

“We weren’t going to keep it,” Bosun Little said. “The ship. Weren’t going to sell it, either. Just needed it for this job.”

Crestfall thought on this, then nodded, light glinting off his spectacles. “I believe you,” he said. “But the Duly don’t lean to lenience on this particular —”

The Bosun lurched sideways as Pug made his move, rolling out from under her, one curved knife raised, pinning her across the throat with his forearm.

Crestfall’s cloak billowed. Bad News split the air, hooking around to strike sparks with its dull edge against the line of Pug’s upraised sword.

“I’m gonna need that one alive, Your Majesty,” Crestfall said, grunting slightly from the strain of holding back Pug’s marble column of an arm. “With respect.”

Pug didn’t look back. “Wasn’t gonna kill her,” he said. “You’ve got a hand on me that shouldn’t be there. With respect.”

“Fair point,” Crestfall said, gingerly releasing Pug. He kept Bad News unsheathed; even in the semidark, the arc of its cutting edge shimmered oddly.

“Weren’t gonna kill me?” the Bosun rasped under Pug’s forearm, wide lines curving upward to pixel-points across her cheeks. She looked almost insulted. “Why not?”

Roughly five hours from now, Pug would think of an excellent answer for this, a witty and impressive response, and bang his head against the wall — this time without a helmet. For now, he just hesitated about three seconds longer than he probably should have, and then, lacking anything better to do, shrugged.

“What’s this about a ship?” Lis asked Corsair, nudging the barrel of the gun persuasively back toward his face.

“Stolen ship,” Crestfall said, edging carefully around Little and Pug on his way down the stairs.

“That’s not your ship?” Lis boggled. “You kidnapped my brother in a hot starship?”

“Hot experimental starship,” Crestfall said. “Shouldn’t even speak of it here, Majesty. No offense.”

The Captain gave a little sigh, raising his eyebrows at Lis in a way that briefly made her feel willing to forgive him for everything short of planetary genocide. And even then, it depended on the planet. She shook off the feeling.

“Ah yes,” Corsair said to Lis, returning calm to his voice with audible effort. “The experimental starship being developed by the FLAW. Your former enemies, I believe. The craft that allowed me to breach Imperial defenses as if they were a gaggle of the most dewy-eyed lambs. Whatever could they be developing such a technology for, I wonder?”

“Don’t do that,” Crestfall scolded, that sad little smile lurking about the edges of his mouth. “Don’t go playing us against one another like—”

He stopped abruptly, largely because Lis’s pistol was now aimed at him.

“Majesty,” Crestfall said evenly, slowly bringing Bad News up within swinging reach of Corsair. “I’ve only killed but one and a half women in the course of duty, and none of them were heads of state. I’m in no fancy to add to that tally, today or anytime else.”

“What’s the ship for?” Lis asked him, the gun unwavering.

Crestfall opened his non-sword-bearing hand and held it up slowly. “I’m not the one who makes things, or gets told their purpose,” he said. “I’m just the soul who brings them back.”

Pug watched this all intently, which gave Bosun Little the opening she needed to flip him forward over her shoulders. He hit the stairs rolling, and they were both up and armed and facing in the same space of seconds.

“Nice move,” Pug admitted, keeping his swords low and angled at his waist.

“Likewise, with that reversal,” the Bosun conceded, grip slowly shifting on the handle of her Whomping Stick. “I saw you fight, on the vids. The Armistice Spectacle.”

“Which one?” Pug asked. “The tigerleeches?”

“The masticore,” Bosun Little said. “You were perdition with a spear.”

“Really?” Pug said, maybe half an octave higher than he would have liked to. He tried to cover it up by clearing his throat and spitting, but it was clear, from the curious look on the Bosun’s face, that the damage was done.

“Any objections” Crestfall asked, reaching toward the spirit-cask on the map table, “if I pour myself a drink?”

Corsair’s metal hand lashed out, scattering the cask and its contents away across the deck. “My hospitality is not for you,” the Captain said, eyes narrowing.

Crestfall looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. “We’ll come back to that,” he said, and turned back to Lis. “Word of caution here. Ministress of Love for the Grand Galactic Imperium puts a hole in me, the Duly are apt to consider it an act of war.”

“You would not want that, I am certain.” Corsair’s words dripped acid. “Your Majesty, if it will inconvenience this man, I will gladly provide you the ship in question, along with your younger brother. This is, of course, contingent on my successful escape.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll offer me a similar deal?” Crestfall asked, one brow sloping slightly upward in passing interest.

“I would offer to kill you swiftly,” Corsair spat, “but I do not make deals I do not intend to honor.”

Crestfall studied the Captain’s face intently for several long moments. “No bells rung,” he said, and nodded at the captain’s metal hand. “Did I perhaps leave you with that?”

“My hand, I could forgive,” Corsair said, in a voice that set prickles rising on the back of Lis’s neck. “But the person who was holding it…”

“This man’s a prisoner of the Imperium,” Lis told Crestfall. “He kidnapped royal blood. He comes with us. My father has a very long, very specific list.” Which she could hopefully bargain down significantly, Lis thought. She had a certain dismayed tone of voice she reserved only for emergencies involving her father; it had yet to fail her.

“This man stole FLAW property,” Crestfall replied, coolly. “Before he got to kidnapping your royal blood. Which is a whole other interesting story, on account of the only two verified Imperial heirs being right here in this room, to my knowledge. And technically speaking, we stand on FLAW territory, which makes mine the jurisdiction here.”

“You don’t get him, and you don’t get the ship,” Lis said. “I’m not leaving my family open to invasion.”

“You take that ship,” Crestfall replied, “and the Duly will want it back. They’ll do their asking in cannon and armor.”

“Hey, is somebody gonna kill somebody?” Pug shouted down, growing impatient.

“Been wondering that myself,” the Bosun agreed, loudly.

“Not yet,” Captain Corsair said, still holding fast to the handle of his saber. “In due time, perhaps.”

The entire room rang with three loud crashes, in sequence — cargo crates clanging heavily against the deck. Story unfolded his four arms and expanded his treadball to its full circumference, and in the gloom of the bridge, his eyes glowed an attention-getting red.

“If I may interrupt your various intrigues,” the robot said, the faintest hint of threat in his cheery synthesized voice, “I seem to be the only being present fully cognizant of why we are here. Captain, these crates contain your payment, as promised. You all may bicker, damage, or disassemble one another as you see fit, but I have a young master to see to.”

Crestfall tilted his head a tick, impressed. “Royal blood indeed, I guess,” he said softly. “The metal man makes a sound point. I’m not for standing in the way of any family reunions. Any other matters, we can discuss after.”

“This is so very charming,” Corsair smiled, more pleasantly at Lis than at the Commodore. “Your assumption of my helplessness. But I am only too happy to keep my word. The boy is—”

“There,” Bosun Little said, too quietly, a single solitary dot standing out on each cheek amid a sea of recessed pits. Her hands had gone slack on the grip of her weapon, and she stared out through the viewport behind them with distant, frightened eyes.

In the pink void of the nebula, a vast shadow slid into view — a floating ebony cathedral of bristling ribs and spines and strange organic clusters. Against the dark of space, it would have been all but invisible — just a dark spot among the stars.

“Dark Matter Armada,” Pug breathed. “That’s a DMA flagship.”

“It was,” Corsair said slowly. “The maneuvering, it is different. Smoother.”

“He’s right,” Crestfall nodded. “The hull’s off, too, just in a few places. Work’s been done, and not by Armada hands.”

“I heard rumors they’d captured a few,” Lis said. “Father always wanted one. As a trophy.”

Corsair thumbed a button on the hilt of his sword, and a comm channel blipped open. “Your Majesty,” the Captain said, “do you receive? Reply, please.”

Dead silence.

“An all too appropriate irony, I fear,” Corsair said gravely. “That which I have stolen is now stolen from me.”

“She’s launching,” Pug cried. His warrior’s eyes had spotted tiny puffs of gas against the black skin of the strange craft. Glowing bright orbs spiraled swiftly toward the Crucible, coruscating in the gases of the nebula. They rocketed past the bridge and struck somewhere far distant aft, in the gutted superstructure.

“No explosions,” Crestfall observed, quietly. “That’s never good.”

Out the viewport, the Armada ship’s pluslight engines flared. It accelerated into the pink mist, ever faster, until it was not even an outline.

A groan shuddered through the whole steel skeleton of the Crucible, juddering up from the floor of the bridge.

“I’m gonna lose her again,” Crestfall said softly, sadly, placing a hand upon the map table.

“What’s going on?” Lis asked, backing away from Crestfall, lowering her pistol. “Why wasn’t there more of an impact?”

“Disassemblers,” Corsair said, all the laughter gone from his eyes. “If the ship still had shielding, it would perhaps stop them. Slow them down at least. Now they will rampage unchecked — devour the craft, atom by atom, and use it to make more of themselves. The process is exponential.”

“This would be totally cunning if I weren’t, you know, here,” Pug said, sheating his swords. He nodded to the Bosun. “Kill you later, okay?”

The Bosun managed a weak smirk. “You’ll try,” she said. “Assuming you get the chance.”

“My ship’s docked five clicks distant, portside forward,” Crestfall said. “Sorry to tell it could only carry two.” He cast calm, rational glances at Corsair and the Bosun. “More if they’re dead, perhaps.”

“We’re starboard forward, three tiers down,” Pug said. “Seven clicks at a run.”

“Room for six, at least,” Lis added.

“I’m not leaving the prisoners,” Crestfall added.

“Then you’re coming with us,” Lis snapped.

“Let us go, if we must,” Corsair told them, as the ship shuddered again. “I swore to the boy he would not be harmed. And no one — not you, Majesty, nor the FLAW, nor the Armada resurrected — will make a liar of Santiago Corsair.”

Quarrington Crouch closed the communication link and smiled. He felt the last of the goosebumps, always a byproduct of conversation with Sir Leslie, fade from his arms and legs.

“Syles,” he summoned, as the tailor at his feet measured his inseam. Syles appeared. “I have a message. It goes to Spinner in Media and Poole in Freelance.”

“Yes, sir?” Syles asked, unblinking.

“The message, in its entirety, is ‘go.’” Crouch said. Syles nodded dutifully, and retreated.

“If you’ll just turn around, sir,” the tailor said, his thumbprints leaving glowing red marks on the smart-tape.

“Certainly,” Crouch nodded. “How are your wives, Mr. Bespoke?”

“Fine, sir,” the tailor nodded, and made another measurement. “Thank you for asking.”

Within the hour, both major Crouch News stations interrupted their regular programming — Shout at the Issues for Crouch News FLAW, The Reasons You’re Wrong on Crouch News Imperium — so that identical Rockwell-model anchors could deliver vastly divergent news.

Rockwell Q8-234, for Crouch News FLAW, reported that members of the Imperial Royal Family had stolen a top-secret experimental FLAW craft, with designs to mass-produce it for military purposes.

On Crouch News Imperium, Rockwell J9-004 (Rockwell A8—113 had every seventh day off, for nutrient replenishment, exfoliation, and hair and makeup) reported that covert FLAW agents had launched a daring, almost unthinkable attack on the Imperial homeworld seven days previous, with the first of a new line of military vessels designed to breach the Imperium’s defenses.

Via more discreet channels, Poole in Freelance passed her message along, too.

16.5. Changing Hands (Part 2)

2007-11-18T21:38:00.000-08:00

The shadowed bulk of the derelict ship loomed ahead of them, through the mist of the nebula. It reminded Dent of the breachwhales he’d spot sometimes from the roof of the palace. Dark forms shifting into and out of sight beneath the surface of the ocean.

“Why this one?” Dent asked, as the Captain buckled on his saber. In the doorway to the corridor, Bosun Little ran a honing stone across the half-moon edge of what Pebble’s sign language had shakily translated as “Whomping Stick.” Pebble herself was back in the engine room, beating out random notes on the Bosun’s xylophone; she was still not speaking, or at least not signing, to Dent.

“I know this vessel,” the Captain said, checking the latches on his boots. “Quite well. That is the seventh rule of successful banditry. Know your territory better than your opponents do.”

“It doesn’t look Imperial,” Dent said, straining to identify the outline of the vessel.”

“Imperial ships were not the only ones lost here,” the Captain nodded. “She is a FLAW vessel.”

“Why do people talk about ships as if they were girls?” Dent asked, having always wondered this. The Captain chuckled, and Bosun Little shot him a look suggesting at least a passing interest in his reply.

“Perhaps,” the Captain said, “because they are tempermental, unreliable, and quite often hazardous to your health.” The Bosun’s eyes narrowed, unimpressed. “And yet, they will always be there when truly needed. And you cannot live without them.”

The Bosun made a small, satisfied-sounding grunt, and went back to honing the blade. The Captain shut his eyes, a glow once more flickering up beneath his eyelids. But before Dent could ask him about that, too, Corsair’s eyes were open again, clear and shining and purposeful.

“Are you certain, Bandit-in-Training Dent, that this is what you wish?” the Captain said, kneeling down to look Dent in the eye. “To never again see your family?”

Dent looked away, scowling, and nodded. He was sick of being asked, in large part because he wasn’t sure anymore.

“We bandits, we have families, too,” Corsair said to him. “At least, I had one, once.”

“Did they hate you, like mine?” Dent said. Sadness passed across the Captain’s visage, like the shadow of a cloud.

“They did not,” the Captain said. “Any more than yours does, truly. Sometimes the love of a family, it takes very strange shapes. But it is love all the same. You see my blade and my ship and my admittedly superior taste in rugged banditwear, and you think, ah, this is a life for a discerning gentleman! But I swear to you, young Dent, on my sword — I would trade it all for a single day with my family.” The Captain’s eyes grew distant for a moment, and Dent saw the Bosun glance over at Corsair with strange pity on her face. “With all of those I loved,” the Captain said.

Dent folded his arms, and tried his best to look resolute. He was a bandit now. Bandits had to be tough. “I’m not going back.”

The Captain sighed, and shrugged, and smiled at him again. “As is your choice. Now. Can I rely upon you to remain here, vigilant for any sign that the Bosun and I may be deceived?” Dent nodded dutifully, as Bosun Little stood up — well, as far as she could — and leaned over the controls.

“This button’s your communications, square?” Bosun Little told Dent, one massive finger pointing the way. “You see anything, or something goes wrong, or what’s-your-shadow, you sound off. I mean it.” Dent nodded again. Something about the Bosun made you want to nod when she gave you an order, and quickly.

The Captain, in the pilot’s seat, maneuvered the ship into the shadow of the derelict, lining up its airlock with an intact hatch on the side of the larger ship. All the while, the Bosun quizzed Dent on the docking and undocking procedures, on basic maneuvering, on the heading he would occupy while the exchange took place.

“What if something goes wrong?” Dent asked. “In there, I mean. With you.”

The Captain laughed. “That is what makes life exciting, yes? The uncertainty. Fear not, my young and highly profitable friend.” Corsair turned and winked at Dent. “That is the eighth and most important rule of banditry. No matter what, a bandit always has a plan.”

The hatch sealed and hissed. Corsair donned a second cloak, this one midnight blue with a fraying gold trim, and saluted Dent on his way into the corridor. The Bosun paused in the doorway, the patterns on her cheeks spreading out in crooked radial lines. She looked back at the boy, sitting with his feet dangling awkwardly off the edge of the copilot’s seat.

“The pale one back there, she’s still upset,” Bosun Little said, adjusting her grip on the Whomping Stick. “I’d patch that hole, and soon, were I you.”

“She’ll be okay,” Dent muttered, unable to meet the Bosun’s eyes. “I’m sorry” were words he’d never had much cause to utter in his upbringing, and they did not come easily to him.

“Your boulder to burden, I guess,” the Bosun said, her eyes fixed on him with calm, quiet reproach. “But you’ve got no family now. Said so yourself. Which suggests to me you’ve got no friends to spare.”

She began to duck through the doorway, paused, and stuck her head back into the room. “And don’t touch any of my things,” she said quickly. “Those are collectibles. All of them. I mean it.”

Then she was gone, leaving Dent to ponder her words. Partly the ones about the collectibles — they sure looked like toys — but mostly about the other topic.

The airlock closed and cycled, and Dent began the disengage sequence, as the Captain had taught him. Back in the engine room, Pebble began to tap out a tune: Old Jack jumped in a pile of cheese…

The Zephyr’s forward lights slipped in liquid circles along the war-scorched hull of the derelict. Past a cluster of laser burns on its steel skin, over the jagged vent of a long-ago hull breach, to reveal the distinctive FLAW insignia, with its circle of twelve stars. And the dead craft’s name, painted in battered letters person-high: F.S.S. Crucible.

“Lanthia’s eyes,” Pug swore, eyes wide, puffs of his breath turning to steam on the diamondglass of the viewport.

“What?” Lis shrugged, fastening the Captain’s cloak around her shoulders. “It’s a creepy old ship. Big splash.” Her favorite repeater-pistol slapped in its holster against one hip; the most painful-looking of her whips was fastened to the other. She was dressed for combat, which was to say, she was dressed. Mostly.

“Third Galactic Conflict. She was leading a supply convoy through the nebula when it happened,” Pug said, eyes never leaving the dead ship out in the perpetual pink twilight. “Sole military escort for 20 ships, 50 brace of souls. Three Armada ships plussed in and hit her here, no warning. She fought to the last to protect the convoy, till her batteries went dark and her tubes ran dry.

“The DMA sent shocks in — you’ve seen the pictures, right? Really big guys, all of ‘em, in that no-faced black armor. The Crucible fought hand to hand, to the last, till the FLAW plussed in reinforcements to the rescue. They say the Crucible’s Steward took Armada steel through the sternum and still fought.”

Pug turned to look at Lis, clanking and clattering under a small pile of armor and weaponry. “We were at war with the FLAW then, and Father still pulled our ships back from Tenebrae when he heard about the Crucible. It’s what got him to sign the pact.”

Lis raised one eyebrow, in a manner she’d never admit to have gotten from her mother. “You read all of this? In an actual book?”

Pug suddenly became very interested in studying the floor. “There was, uh, a vid,” he muttered. “But it had lots of talking.”

The Zephyr jostled gently, and from below in the cargo bay, brother and sister felt the airlock engage and begin to cycle.

“You ready to do this?” Pug said, lowering his golden helmet over his brow. “Let’s do this! Yeah!” He butted the brow of his helmet into the nearest bulkhead a few times, to get himself feeling properly motivated, and to try unsuccessfully to chase all thoughts of flowing copper hair from his mind. Well-rattled, he raised a meaty fist to smack knuckles with his sister.

Seeing his hand up, just sort of hanging there, his flush of agression rapidly cooling into quiet desperation, Lis reluctantly raised a fist and gently tapped her knuckles against his. “Yeah, sure,” she said, beneath a wet blanket of mortification. “Let’s do this.”

For all the cool distance in her expression, beneath the Captain’s cloak, Lis’s heart beat like war drums, and would not slow down. The rose, carefully nurtured with honeywater these past days, adjusted its viny grip on her belt and purred softly against her hipbone.

Story’s scanners assured atmosphere beyond the airlock, and in they went. Pug clattered at the fore, sweating beneath at least half again as much armor as he would ever actually need. Lis padded silently behind him, wrapped in the cloak that smelled of orange blossoms. Story rolled along behind them, lugging an antigravved stack of three bulky cargo boxes. The robot hummed quietly to himself in flawless synthesized tones.

The beacon signal Corsair’s message provided led them up, up, through a maze of inky corridors and eerie, echoing staircases. The FLAW military had removed the bodies after the battle, patched the wrecked shell of the Crucible just enough to restore life support in the unpunctured decks, and stripped out anything of value. The rest, they left. Proposals to retrieve the ship’s skeleton for salvage, or alternately turn it into an incredibly difficult-to-find museum, had stalled for years in the halls of the Duly Elected. So the Crucible waited, frozen and dark and all but dead.

“Look,” Pug whispered, playing the light from an algae-globe over a zigzag line of scorch marks on the walls. “This is where the kitchen staff set up a defensive perimeter. ‘The Feast of Fire,’ they called it.” He liked to tell that story at his tea parties, although he sensed Kell was beginning to tire of it.

So was his sister, far more rapidly. Lis poked him hard in the kidney with one finger to keep him from slipping back into history mode.

“The signal originates just through here,” Story said at one-quarter standard volume. He nodded his metal head toward the blast-burned doors ahead that still faintly read BRIDGE. Pug found the emergency release lever and pulled, straining slightly. The doors slid open, and a faint, flickering light spilled out to greet them.

The bridge, big as a whole deck of their zephyr (or one half of Lis’s bathroom), descended from the door along rows of gutted computer stations to a forward pit. At the very front of the room, two sets of helm controls trailed wires from empty cases, starkly silhouetted against the vast pink vista of the forward viewport. Upon the map table at the center of the pit, a white linen tablecloth had been spread, bearing light-spheres, a simple assortment of chocolates and fruits, three tall globular glasses, and a cylindrical spirit-cask.

“Greetings!” Captain Corsair grinned from the far side of the table, his teeth gleaming white and flawless in the flickering light of the spheres. “May I perhaps pour you some Celezana?”

Lis’s heart leaped against the cage of her chest. Almost as smoothly as she would have liked to, she brought the pistol up from beneath her cloak and leveled it at the Captain.

“Not Celezana, then?” the Captain shrugged. “I have Ludomin, also, if that is more your preference.”

“Where’s the boy?” Lis asked, hoping her hair looked suitably intimidating. She’d had Story work on it a little, but his skills were limited at best.

“Perfectly safe, I assure you,” Corsair smiled. Damn him, Lis thought, why did he have to smile? Couldn’t he just show a little fear? Or at least leer at her? She knew what do with leering.

“He believes he is about to begin a new life as a bandit,” the Captain continued, his voice plucking quiet notes of regret. “Very excited. I have, alas, not had the heart to disappoint him. Will you not at least sample the chocolates? They have the most exquisite pepperfruit centers.”

“Where’s the, uh, the, with the big muscles,” Pug said, his train of thought lurching smokily out of the terminus. “Where’s she?”

“With the boy,” Corsair said. “Keeping a watchful eye.”

Pug’s shoulders dropped, just a fraction.

“Please, eat, enjoy! I will sample it myself, and gladly, if you fear unhealthy additives. Ah! And you must be the robot Story!”

“Protracted death to all enemies of the Imperium!” Story responded, but kindly.

“Ha! My mechanical friend, your sense of humor is most enjoyable. Your young charge speaks well of you, particularly your considerate failure to kill him on many, many occasions.”

“This unit tries,” Story said, his circuits glowing with unaccustomed flattery.

Lis stepped forward, slowly, refusing to let the gun tremble in her hand. She waited, with every step, for the Captain’s polite smile to decay into the more wolfish, paper-thin courtesy she’d seen in the eyes of ambassadors and prince regents and shipping heirs alike. She waited for his eyes to rove somewhere other than her own. She waited in vain, which did absolutely nothing for the trembling.

“I have questions,” she said, when she stood opposite him, the gun aimed at his heart. She attempted a cavalier toss of her head, long a successful disarming tactic in her wide and varied arsenal. But this one came across more as some sort of neurodegenerative twitch.

“These questions — they are about your brother?” Corsair asked, calmly pouring two glasses of wine. He offered one to her, and she snatched it from his hand.

“Not yet they aren’t,” Lis said.

“Well,” Corsair grinned. “Then I will not answer. Not until you at least try one sip of the Celezana. It is really quite sublime.”

“If this is a trick—” Lis growled, her eyes narrowing.

“Then your brother up there — will you not come down and have something? — will most surely decapitate me, or some such, no doubt with great enthusiasm,” Corsair shrugged. “And I would be a very poor host indeed, to so ruin such a pleasant gathering.”

Lis took a sip of the wine. It really was good. She poured the rest out slowly onto the deck, then set down the glass.

“Shame to waste a good Celezana,” the Captain sighed. “But please, ask your question.”

“Why this?” she said, gesturing to the rose snuggled against her belt. “Why did you throw this at me? Was it, what, an insult?”

“Far from it, Your Majesty!” the Captain protested. “It was an apology.”

Lis felt a flush rising in her cheeks, and tightened her grip on the pistol. “And why did you—”

“Regretfully,” the Captain smiled, “if this question is not about your brother — and perhaps it is not my place, but I am surprised you seem so untroubled in that regard! — I must insist that you try at least one of these fine chocolates before I will answer.”

She leveled the gun at the Captain’s eye, and still, he did not flinch, he did not blink. He plucked a single chocolate from the pile, holding it up between his metal thumb and forefinger, and offered it to her.

Right. Lis would show him. She leaned forward, never breaking eye contact, and seized the candy with her teeth. There. She couldn’t be intimidated quite so easily. Who cared if it was delicious chocolate? Or if the filling fizzed just so in her mouth? She was the Ministress of Love, and even if her knees had begun to spontaneously wobble, she wouldn’t back down.

“Not bad,” Lis understated. “Now why this cloak? I was trying to kill you, and you just … gave it to me.”

“Do you like it?” the Captain asked. “It was long a favorite of mine.”

“This scratchy piece of dross?” Lis snapped, attempting the head-toss thing again, with no greater success. “I’ve been given jewels the size of your brain.”

“Ah,” the Captain nodded. “Well, I regret to say, it was more my intent that I should receive such jewels from you. But as for my humble cloak, as I said — you looked cold. It seemed the courteous thing to do.”

Lis took a half-step back. The pistol twitched in her hand. “And,” she began, and had to start over, “and would you do that for anyone? Or was it just me?”

“Are you certain you do not wish to ask about your brother?” Corsair inquired, his eyebrows furrowing. “Because it would seem appropriate for—”

And then his entire face changed. Hardened. He drew his saber in a flash of steel.

Reflex took over. Lis’s finger closed on the pistol’s trigger. The repeater barked, spitting shot against the clear surface of the viewport. The Captain’s hand grasped her wrist, gentle as a breeze, having moved her arm harmlessly to one side as if she were not even there. And that was when Lis finally realized that the Captain was not looking at her.

Pug saw the saber start to flash and leapt, curved swords sliding from their scabbards at his belt. In most forms of cogitation, Pug’s brain was limited at best. But in this instant, he saw lines criscrossing the Captain’s body, saw exactly how many pieces the man would fall into, knew exactly how many swings it would take, and in which order.

Then a shadow fell from above. He twisted in midair, almost but not enough. A whole planet landed on him, slamming him in a jangle of armor to lie slanted upon the stairs.

“I’ll just be over here,” Story demurred, sliding discreetly out of the nine most likely lines of fire. No one paid him any notice.

Bosun Little dug one massive knee into Pug’s chest, sharp lines dotting down across her cheekbones, her half-moon blade right at the edge of his throat. Her hair, much to Pug’s dismay, was every bit as distractingly coppery, her arms no less muscular.

“Don’t make me, Your Majesty,” the Bosun growled, all business. Pug’s brain went to a place it probably shouldn’t have, especially in battle.

“Guh,” Pug said. Even if the wind hadn’t been knocked out of him, he would have said no different.

Lis, the sting of the pistol’s recoil still tingling in her palm, turned her head to track the Captain’s line of sight, all the way up to the top of the stairs, where a slender man in a gray traveling cloak had appeared.

“You,” she heard Corsair say, in a voice to scald the blood.

“Him with the sword, and the smallish Corinthian, I knew to expect,” Josiah Crestfall said calmly, looking around the bridge slowly. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were mournful, and nostalgic. “But Your Imperial Majesties? That comes by surprise.” One hand shifted beneath his cloak, slow but meaningful, as if it were resting on something slung from his belt.

“I think we’ll have some answers now,” Crestfall said, and smiled in his melancholy way. “Starting with what in the six perditions you’re all doing on my ship.”

“He believes he is about to begin a new life as a bandit,” the Captain’s voice crackled over the comm. “Very excited. I have, alas, not had the heart to disappoint him.”

Dent stabbed at the button angrily, and threw himself back into the copilot’s seat. More lies. Of course. All the stories had warned him, time and time again. Bandits could not be trusted.

He felt the hurt, the disappointment, balloon in his chest. His eyes stung, the tears almost there, but not quite. He couldn’t make himself feel as angry as he wanted to. He couldn’t rage, shout, stamp his feet. He realized he’d just feel silly, and he had too much pride to let himself. Because he knew, somehow, that the Captain was right.

Dent missed Story, and Cook, and the great big rambling rooms of the palace. He missed his brother and sister, even when they were yelling and throwing stuff and trying to have him thrown overboard. Just hearing them over the comm had made something in his throat well up like he’d swallowed a whole nectar apple.

He missed his father, around whom Dent somehow always felt safe, even if he happened to be in actual mortal peril at the moment. He even missed his mother, kind of, a little. If only because going to see her was the exciting sort of scary, like washing windows with the Imperial Acrobats of Cleanliness.

Small footsteps padded into the cockpit. Pebble, with some effort, hauled herself up into the pilot’s seat opposite Dent, and sat there staring at him with reflective eyes.

“Hey,” he said at last, half-looking at her.

Your head is large and stupid, Pebble signed, then thought a moment. Also, you smell bad.

“I’m sorry,” Dent mumbled. “I shouldn’t have been mad at you.”

No kidding, Pebble signed. You’re the dumbest friend I have.

“I’m the only friend you have,” Dent smiled.

I need better friends, Pebble shot back, but her attempts not to grin were failing.

“You could share Story with me,” Dent offered. “I don’t think he’d mind. He’d still want to kill just me though, probably.

Fine by me, Pebble shrugged. If he does, I get your stuff. She let her hands lapse into stillness for a moment. Are you really not going back?

“Why should I?” Dent asked. “You’ve seen my family. You saw the vidstream. I embarrass them. Just a stupid mistake.”

But if you don’t go back, Pebble countered, I can’t go back. I miss my mom and dad. And your family would never help me find them without you.

“Yeah,” Dent admitted. “They’d probably just feed you to something on Zoo Deck.”

Pebble made her “ewwwww” face. Could you … maybe come back for a little bit? she signed. Just for a while?

Dent thought about it. “I guess,” Dent said. “Maybe just for a bit. I could study all the important bandit stuff until I run away again. Maybe the Captain would let me get kidnapped another time.”

I’d miss you if you were a bandit, Pebble signed.

“Even if I was doing cunning bandity stuff?” Dent asked. “Like, robbing transports, and raiding fortresses, and stealing jewels?”

Especially then, Pebble told him, giggling a little.

“You could come too!” Dent grinned. “You could be my bosun!”

No way! Pebble protested. I’d be the captain.

She kicked at him from her chair, and he kicked back, and the resulting kickfight was a whole lot of fun until something smacked into the hull, and the whole world started shrieking so loud that they both fell down.

The noise permeated the entire ship, vibrating through the hull, deafening, ear-grinding, and painfully loud. In the engine room, the Quantum Coral Drive flared a blinding violet in subatomic pain, and then its light died altogether. The ship went dark.

At first, Dent could not tell that the noise had stopped, for all the ringing in his ears. The light from the viewport was different somehow, dimmer. A shadow had fallen across the whole of the tiny ship.

He could not hear the airlock cycling through buzzing ears, but he could feel the floor move. He groped out in the dimness and found Pebble’s hand, saw her eyes glowing wide and scared.

Out in the corridor, the airlock swung open, blasting a shaft of light directly upward. Heavy boots rang on ladder rungs, and then the dark shape of a man loomed in the doorway to the cockpit. Dent couldn’t see its face, but he knew, somehow, it was looking right at him.

“Well, now,” Sir Leslie Murther said, in a satisfied growl that seemed to bristle up from all the way down in his stomach. “My lucky day, it is. Two for the price of one.”

16. Changing Hands (Part 1)

2007-11-17T22:26:00.000-08:00

“Easy now, Your Majesty.” Captain Corsair realized his slip, and corrected himself. “Forgive me. Old habit. I mean to say, easy now, Associate Bandit-in-Training Dent.”

Dent, who had loudly insisted these past few days that he was no longer his majesty of anything, let the frown fade from his face, and concentrated on steering.

The Sightless Nebula was exactly that — a dense, swirling cloud of warm gases spanning light-years in every direction, reducing the view in every direction to an opaque pinkish haze. And like space itself, which is commonly and erroneously believed to be crammed chock full of stuff, the nebula was mostly empty space.

That meant that even though the Sightless Nebula was notorously reputed to have swallowed three entire terraforming caravans, two off-course space stations, and a certain not-necessarily-lost portion of the Imperial fleet, collisions within its murky midst were rare and improbable. In short, for teaching future starship pilots, it was space’s equivalent of the Parallel Parking Sandflats on Instruction Planet DM-5.

“Very good,” Corsair nodded, as Dent swung around to the proper headings on the x-, y-, and z-axes. “Now, ahead one quarter on the antigravs, Bandit-in-Training.”

Dent had always wanted to be a bandit (exciting!) a lot more than he’d ever wanted to be an emperor (boring, at least to hear his father tell it). Now that he had the chance, he took his new role seriously. He’d spent hours in the hammock in these past three days of waiting, reading the crisp new operator’s manual to the Captain’s craft from cover to cover, and at least pretending to understand most of it.

He’d also taken to running around the ship with a blanket tied capelike around his shoulders, laughing boldly and jumping suddenly into whatever room he entered. There being only two real rooms (and a corridor) on the ship, aside from crew quarters, this got old for everyone save Dent very, very quickly.

Pebble had never harbored aspirations of bandithood, and was still sore at Dent for his rudeness on the relay station. She took to hanging around — and occasionally, hanging onto — Bosun Little. The Bosun minded this far less once she learned of Pebble’s mechanical skills; at present, the two of them were back in the engine room inspecting the auxiliary power relays, and having a make-silly-faces contest.

“Captain?” Dent said, tongue pressed to one corner of his mouth as he turned toward a new heading. “Can we still rob people? After you get rich, I mean?”

“But of course,” the Captain smiled. “I would hardly deny you the full experience of true banditry. We shall rob, perhaps, the Central Bank of Gullentrue? Or a station in the Ruby Belt?”

These were all lies, and the Captain felt terrible about them. But they kept the boy happy, on which the Captain placed a premium. He could not in good conscience endanger a child by plunging him into criminal deeds. The Captain had a special place upon the point of his sword for any soul who would treat actual human lives so cavalierly. (One soul, in particular, more than any other.)

Once the boy had been returned to his family, Dent would probably hate him. That was for the best, the Captain believed. Until then, it was unquestionably the courteous thing to let the boy enjoy feeling that someone, somewhere in the universe, truly did want him around.

“New heading, Captain?” Dent asked, prodding Corsair from his thoughts.

“No, Bandit-in-Training,” Corsair said, running a thumb across one curl of his moustache in an appropriately commanding manner. “We maintain this course, straight on for two bells.”

“Where are we going?” Dent squinted out into the pinkish half-light of the nebula.

“An astute question, my young trainee,” Corsair nodded. “The Sightless Nebula, she is nearly unnavigable, even with the most sensitive instruments. Unless, of course, one has been here before — and had the foresight to place a beacon.” With his metal hand, the Captain pointed to a small monitor, where the triangle of their ship slowly approached a flashing blip.

“This is where we’re getting the ransom?” Dent grinned, excited.

“This is where the Bosun and I will get the ransom,” the Captain nodded. “And you and the lady Pebble will remain here, as our getaway, to watch for signs of treachery. In this I will depend upon you, yes?”

Signs of treachery. Dent liked the sound of that. He wondered if there might also be skullduggery, or if someone would do something fiendish.

“And then we blast off with their money and never see ‘em again, right?” Dent said, bouncing a little in his chair.

Corsair smiled, and tried not to do so too sadly. Of all the hostages he had ever taken or would ever take, he was certain these two would be the most agreeable. “Of course,” he lied. “Never again.”

“Hey, ugly,” Pug began, and stopped short. “What’re you wearing?”

Lis threw the book down on her berth in the Zephyr and drew the covers up around her. “It’s nothing.”

“I can’t even see your wrists,” Pug said, averting his eyes in brotherly embarrassment. “And it goes all the way up to your neck.”

“I borrowed it from Carabella, OK?” Lis huffed. “She says she wears it sometimes when it’s cold.”

“At least it’s not that stupid cloak,” Pug grunted, nodding toward the garment hanging carefully from one corner of the wardrobe. The passenger compartments were large by any reasonable standards of space travel — even the Zephyr, the smallest class of craft in the Imperial fleet, could sleep six in positively absurd comfort — but for Pug and Lis, they most definitely qualified as a harship. As did being stuck in each other’s company for any length of time.

“You shut up about the cloak!” Lis snapped. “And get out! Why are you even in here?”

“Fine,” Pug sulked. “I was just gonna….” he held up a lushly padded bedcushion, trailing behind him like an avalache, in one thick fist. “I can’t sleep on this thing. It’s too soft. You take it.”

And Lis, who had been finding the berth a bit lumpy — at least by her standards — sighed and snatched the cushion from his hand. “Thanks, stupid,” she said, smiling in the exasperated way of sisters everywhere. “Sit down before you break something, huh?”

“Nah, I’m good.” Pug waved her away, shifting his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. “I gotta get some reps in, maybe practice some with the quadrastaff.”

“I’ve got cookies,” Lis offered, holding out a small tin Ellentine had packed for her. Pug beheld a galaxy of tiny round wafers, fragrant with lemon and spices. Sugar glistened diamondlike on their surfaces.

“You okay?” Lis asked, her face crinkling in confusion. “You just went all glassy-eyed. More than usual, I mean.”

“They’re so … delicate,” Pug breathed. He seized one between a calloused thumb and forefinger, held it up to the light for a moment, and nibbled just the tiniest corner of it. His eyes briefly rolled back into his head.
“Gods,” Lis laughed. “You’re weirder than Dent.”

“Dent?” came a high, jittery robot voice. Story suddenly loomed in the doorway behind Pug, his shining metal head canted at an odd angle, red eyes pulsing ominously. “Is he hiding? Where is he hiding?” His pincers snapped.

“Oh, for—” Lis groaned, having no patience for Story’s manic murder time. “Look, I told you this when we first found you in the cargo bay. I told you this yesterday. I told you this three bells ago. Dent’s not here. Not anywhere on this ship. There is no Dent.”

“I’m looking for him,” Story continued, eerily singsong. “I have a present. It is a shiny present. He will like it very much.”

The small island’s worth of robots Pug had consigned to the recycling smelter left him with even less respect for artifical intelligence than he had for the actual kind. “Look, you stupid box,” he growled, shoving Story out of the room with one broad, meaty hand. “Few more days, you can kill him all you like. But he’s not here.”

“You look a little like Dent,” Story giggled in low tones. “Around the eyes, yes.” He craned his extendable neck over Pug’s shoulder to stare at Lis. “You both look like Dent. I have been thinking about this. It interests me.”

“Gods, enough!” Lis rolled her eyes, then spoke in a loud clear voice. “Piccolo. Spitworm. Arcturus.”

The glow died from Story’s eyes. His pincers stopped clacking. The robot’s whole demeanor seemed to recede.

“My, but I just had a curious notion,” the robot said, sounding strangely like someone awakening from a dream. “It seems so very silly now.” Pug and Lis stared at him until his social circuits ran the proper recognition protocols and kicked in. “I believe I should go recharge now. If anyone should need me—”

“We won’t,” Pug glowered, and shut the door. Story clack-clack-clacked off toward the cargo bay, slowly shaking his metal head.

“How’d you know how to do that, anyway?” Pug said. “I was just gonna, I dunno. Put a blade to him, maybe.”

“I saw Mother do it once,” Lis said, “when he interrupted a tea party we were having with the Ambassador of Port Meiron and that hurtball team he calls his sons. What? Your eyes just went all funny again.”

“Nothing, nothing,” Pug said. He stuffed the rest of the cookie in his mouth and chewed hastily.

“You want another?” Lis said, holding up the tin. Pug froze.

“Maurice says sugar is the enemy,” Pug said quietly. “Sugar makes you weak. He said.”

Lis snorted. “Yeah, right. I’ve so seen him on Culinary Deck at two bells dayside, raiding the containment units in Pastry Prospect.”

“Really?” Pug frowned, his brow furrowing. “Wait, what were you doing on Culinary Deck at two bells dayside?”

“Supplies,” Lis said, before she could think better of it. “Um. Not important. Look, a little bit of sugar’s not gonna kill you. I won’t tell him if you don’t. Besides, this is nothing compared to Mother’s high tea. She has the Sugarmaster make these beetlenut puffs with powdered honey, and these little star-shaped — okay, seriously, is something wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” Pug said, hastily grabbing a fistful of cookies from the tin. He sat down heavily in one of the alcoves scalloped out of the walls and proceeded to eat them one by one, in tiny, measured bites. “What are you reading?”

“It’s, uh…” Lis said, toying with the corners of the book Librarian Glew had given her. “It’s like strategy. I’m preparing my defenses for the next time I meet Captain Corsair.”

“There pictures in it?” Pug asked, spitting crumbs. Lis shook her head, immediately causing Pug to lose all interest. “Yeah, well, you’ll totally nail that Captain guy next time. Take him down hard, tie him up, have him — what? What’s that look? Is there something on my tunic?”

“It’s not you,” Lis said quickly, exhaling a long, steady breath. “It’s just … okay, say you’re in battle, right? Have you ever had an enemy where you wanted to kill them, but you also didn’t? Like, you wanted to fight them, you wanted to chase them, but you kind of enjoyed that you hadn’t caught them — not yet, anyway?”

Pug thought of swirling copper hair and muscular arms. “Yeah, I guess,” he said quietly. “You think there’s a book for that?”

“Gods, I wish.” Lis fell back to her pillow with a thud, one arm resting across her eyes. “Look at us. Talking and everything.”

“I know,” Pug chuckled. “Mother would snap in half. Stupid Dent, getting kidnapped. Now I have to put up with you.”

“Yeah,” Lis laughed. “Stupid Dent.”

Her laughter died away, and they both fell silent, thinking.

15. Plans In Motion

2007-11-16T21:21:00.001-08:00

Quarrington Crouch stood before the wall-sized viewport in the dark, in his stocking feet, collar undone. He watched the stars. They shone clear and bright through the endless dark of space, and he wanted, as he always had since childhood, to stretch out an arm and sweep a fistful from the sky. He wanted to feel them burning in his palm, then blow them like pufferseeds back out into the dark.

Instead, he rattled the ice cubes in the sweating glass in his hand, and opened an audio channel.

“Sir Leslie,” he said.

The voice that answered was thick with exertion, out of breath. “Quarry,” Sir Leslie’s voice rippled across the stars. “What have you for me?”

“We have a pluck off one of our transmitters — an Imperial relay at the corner of nowhere, nowhere, and nowhere. Our thief, sending a note home to your little morsel’s parents.”

Crouch could have sworn he heard Sir Leslie’s stomach growl over the channel. He politely ignored it.

“Do we have a location?” Sir Leslie asked, hunger creeping around the edges of his voice.

“Check your signals,” Crouch said, and drained the last of his Shantaram. The ice cubes clattered and clinked. “It’s waiting for you. How’s the special delivery?”

“Snug and sound,” Sir Leslie replied, pleased. “I’ve got my wee ones seeing to it.”

“I expected no less from a man of your caliber,” Crouch smiled, thinly. “Good hunting, then.”

He closed the channel, set the glass, and put a hand out against the chill glass of the viewport. His palm blotted out one thick cluster of stars. Slowly, Crouch drew his fingers shut, until his knuckles rested against the glass.

Then he went to bed.

Circled by nightsharks, the Empress sat in her firefly cloud and listened once more to the message that had arrived by secure channel the previous morning. She’d spotted it as it arrived, and deftly plucked it from the Emperor’s queue. So far, hers were the only ears to hear it.

The Emperor, gods help him, was after all a romantic sort. That was partly why the Empress, gods help her, loved him. (Not that she would ever admit it.) He would get into a red-faced fume about notions of honor and duty and integrity and rot. Sooner or later, the notion of a threat to Imperial blood — as if it were some precious, finite commodity, as if they couldn’t just make more with nine months and a brief finger-prick from the Gestatrix — would prod him to actually launch an earnest effort to find the boy. The current sweep by the Imperial Fleet was more like public relations.

The Empress needed her husband focused. Chasing around the galaxy, reliving his war days with an extra helping of lower back pain, would serve the Empire not at all. The question of whether she would actually miss the boy — whether she actually did miss the boy right now — was irrelevant. An Empress must have larger concerns.

But she listened to the message all the same, more out of amusement than anything else.

“… So you see, Your Majesties,” Captain Corsair’s voice said through a faint haze of static and jitters, “the exchange of your son for the ransom I have humbly requested is mutually beneficial. You are spared any undue embarrassment, and my partner and I, we receive the most infinitesmal portion of Your Majesties’ magnificent wealth, which will of course be more than adequate for our relatively meager needs…”

A Castellan, definitely, but the Empress had known that the first time he’d opened his mouth. One of the better ones, she wagered, or at least he had been; the pristine pronunciation of his vowel sounds had begun to slip, sullied by at least a decade in the company of more common tongues. Had she wished, she could have consulted the chart of the Castellan families, but geneaology invariably put her to sleep, and she wanted to finish the poison-cozy taking shape beneath her knitting needles.

He was really an amusing fellow, this Captain Corsair. If and when he was captured — the Empress was of two minds on this, as his apprehension would seem to naturally accompany the boy’s return — she would have to come up with a truly whimsical way to kill him. He’d probably thank her for the effort. The very best Castellans had just that sort of breeding.

The door-chime sounded. It was just twelve bells, so that would be Cook, wheeling in lunch. The Empress silenced the recording with a precise flick of her eyes, and kept knitting, waiting for Cook to trundle in her familiar one-armed gait.

The tray appeared, but Cook did not carry it. The Empress dropped a stitch, and her mouth went dry for a moment before she recognized the girl. Ellentine, yes. Cook’s daugher. The Empress’s elbow edged away from the panic switch hidden in the arm of her chair.

“Majesty?” Ellentine asked in a small, nervous voice, completely oblivious of how fortunate she was to be unvaporized at this moment. “I — I brought your lunch…?”

“It’s not a question,” the Empress said, needles working. “Why are you here?” Her hands shook slightly, and she nearly dropped another stitch. This ought to be Cook, and if it wasn’t Cook, the Empress should have been expecting it. The Empress expected everything.

“Cook’s taken ill, Majesty,” Ellentine said, cautiously wheeling the tray forward in a way that was not quite the exact same way Cook did. The Empress felt her teeth set themselves on edge. “Just a touch of the blue roses,” Ellentine said. “She’ll be right and rigged in a day or so, Doctor Deuces says.”

“Someone should have told me,” the Empress snapped. Which was not entirely true; the Empress should have known.

“Begging your pardon, Majesty,” Ellentine said meekly, bowing. “I checked all the protocols, and there wasn’t a mention.”

That was true, the Empress realized. There should be protocols, but there weren’t. She had never needed them. Why?

“Shall — shall I leave it here, Majesty?” Ellentine asked after several seconds had passed.

“Wheel it over to the scanner there,” the Empress said, in tight, controlled syllables. “Then you may go.” Ellentine did, and went. But the Empress’s heart hammered on all the same, and her hands shook so that the needles began to rattle.

There were gaps, the Empress realized, in her surveillance. Gaps in her crucial knowledge. This would not do. She could not feel safe. Who had failed to tell her of the change in routine?

The answer took a click or two to come to her. And when it arrived, she did not like it.

“… If Your Majesties would do me the considerable honor of sending the requested amount, in jewels and other non-traceable forms of fabulous wealth, to the location I have described,” Corsair’s message concluded, “I will be entirely happy to return His Young Majesty and his tiny, light-deprived friend to you in the most excellent health. You need not trouble yourselves with, say, an armada of angry corpsmen! That might lead to shooting, and other unpleasantness, and I am sure you would not wish any misfortunes to follow such an occurrence. An unobtrusive venturecraft, piloted at most by one or two souls, will more than suffice. I thank you profusely for the courtesy of your cooperation, and eagerly await your arrival in six days’ time.” The message dissolved into a clamor of static, and ended.

The Emperor sat stone-still in his chair in the cabinet room, breathing slowly and steadily, as his physicians advised. Truly, the Empress thought, removing all broadswords and broadsword-like objects from the room had been a wise decorating choice.

“When did this arrive?” the Emperor said, through gritted teeth.

“Yesterday morning,” the Empress said, thus concluding the truthful portion of this particular statement. “But I only just heard it. It must have gotten lost in the queue.”

“Trouble myself?” the Emperor snorted. “Ha! I’ll damned well inconvenience myself! I’ll send a whole battle group. See what polite remarks he has about that.”

“Um,” said Pug, from his seat by the windows. “The Sightless Nebula. Where he said to meet?”

“Yes?” the Emperor said, drumming his fingers restlessly on the table to a martial beat. His thoughts were already halfway into combat.

“Isn’t that kind of… big?” Pug ventured. “To bombard, I mean. Even with a battle group?”

“Yes, but…” the Emperor said, and inconveniently ran out of incredibly persuasive comebacks.

“And didn’t you lose two capital ships and a squadron of Dreadnoughts in there, back during the war?” Lis added, swiveling back and forth in her chair on the opposite side of the table from Pug.

“Misplaced,” the Emperor insisted. “Not lost. They could be alive and well and enjoying a nice supper right now, for all we know. The debris proved nothing.”

“Besides,” the Empress added, “mass bombardment might endanger our own Imperial blood.” This prompted the rest of her family stared at her for nearly a solid click, until the slow rise of one of her painted-on eyebrows reassured them that this was not, in fact, a clever replica of the woman they knew.

“It’s a risk-reward proposition,” the Empress sighed. “All this Corsair ruffian wants is money. He seems trustworthy, which I consider his first mistake. We pay, we get the child back —” because he listens in all the places I usually don’t, the Empress did not add — “we’re spared the ridicule of an entire galaxy, and we can always dispatch Corsair later. Maybe a slow-acting poison on the — yes, I am feeling well. I will thank you all to stop staring.”

The Emperor cleared his throat and pointedly looked away. “Well. Yes. Put that way, I see the wisdom of it. That boy — the aggravation he causes…”

The Emperor had been distracted these past few days. First by the empty space in his model where that one figure was supposed to be, which nagged him like a missing tooth. And second by the realization that the only person who’d actually showed any interest at all in the model in twelve turns or more was the one person he hadn’t wanted to talk to about it.

“We’ll need a two-soul crew,” the Emperor mused. “Rendell, perhaps, and the Air Marshal…”

“I should go,” Lis said, very quickly. “I should go deliver the ransom. For… revenge! I want revenge. Yes.”

“Revenge for what?” the Emperor asked, uncertain.

Lis crossed her ankles under the table, her fingers knotting together as she wracked her brain. “He… uh… I might be useful. Him being, you know, a man. And handsome. I mean, ruthless. Him being ruthless. I have wiles. I could deceive him with… my wiles. Maybe.”

“I also want to go and have revenge,” Pug interjected, the words spilling out in one gelatinous mass. “Bloody revenge. Father, the woman bested me in combat. With her large, muscular arms. I can’t be Minister of Violence if I let that go unanswered. Her arms. Or her.”

“Revenge,” The Empress said slowly, drawing out each syllable as if she had it strapped to the rack on Unpleasantness Deck. Her eyes fixed on one child, then the other. “I see.” She imagined the gods laughing at her, and asked herself what she’d ever done to birth such utterly, dismayingly transparent children.

To the Emperor, this plan smacked of throwing good genetic material after bad. But as he thought it over, he realized that keeping this whole sordid mess as close to the family as possible, especially beyond the walls of the Palace, made a grudging sort of sense. And who was a father to deny his children a little healthy revenge? They seemed so endearingly eager. That was his side of the family, the Emperor thought proudly — the old Imperial bloodlust, rearing its head.

And if he couldn’t go himself — this was a more flattering option than admitting to himself that his wife wouldn’t let him go — well, he pitied that blackguard and his hired muscle when his son and daughter caught up with them.

“Tell Vliet and Doren to make ready our sturdiest Zephyr,” the Emperor relented. “No Imperial markings, though. You’ve got to travel incognito. Have the servants pack your things, get Lucremaster Hoord to prepare the ransom, and make ready to leave by the turning of evenside. At pluslight, you should just make it in time.”

Pug and Lis almost entirely managed to look utterly somber and dignified. Their enthusiasm for revenge, if it could accurately be called that, managed even to trump the horrible prospect of spending several consecutive days in each other’s company.

The Empress sighed quietly. Oh, yes. This would definitely not go horribly wrong. She wondered whether the Gestatrix would need servicing after so many years of disuse.

Beyond the door to the corridor, a high-pitched robotic giggle could faintly be heard, followed by an unsuccessful attempt to stifle that giggle, and then a swiftly diminishing clack-clack-clacking.

14.5. Missing Child (Part 2)

2007-11-15T20:49:00.000-08:00

Dent and Pebble had parked themselves in front of nature documentary from frozen Fangjaar, watching raptly as icewhales bored up through the planet’s perpetual crust of glaciers to snack on the transparent shimmerbirds (and, occasionally, one of the many nature-documentary vid-techs that Fangjaar’s frosty beauty tended to attract like cockroaches.)

When that program ended, the two children discovered advertisements for the first time, Dent having been well shielded from them, and Pebble knowing them only in the form of strange, much-debated photographs in the pages of her people’s lone copy of Aristocratic Fashion. Like indigenous peoples exposed to a foreign disease, they had no accumulated resistance, even if the ads had been stripped of their embedded subliminal messages. Three clicks later, for deep-seated reasons neither could explain, both children wanted to purchase asteroid insurance, a new prescription medication for people ashamed of their own ears, and a refreshing bottle of Imperiola, What Everyone Better-Looking Than You Drinks. Thankfully, these impulses would pass quickly.

Then the newsfeed came on, and for a moment, Dent thought the screen he and Pebble watched and the one immediately adjacent were broadcasting the same program. The presenter seemed identical on both screens, as did the studio, CrouchNews logos, and three-dimensional holocrawl that looped in a slow parabola out from the screen and back.

But then one presenter began mentioning the untrustworthy FLAW farmers using dubious means to increase their farm production. Meanwhile, the the other began to discuss the pathetically backwards farmers of the Imperium, and how their complaints threatened to derail the mighty progress of the FLAW’s sterling agricultural planets. (The presenters were, in fact, “Rockwell” models of Crouch Industries QuikClones. They were designed for perfect hair, long-lasting youthfulness, a severe allergy to contract negotiations, and a willingness to read anything put in front of them in a pleasing baritone.)

Dent and Pebble amused themselves for a while by running back and forth between the screens, trying to spot the differences. They stood back, closed one eye and then the other, flickered back and forth between two seemingly identical parallel universes of information. Pebble got a little dizzy from this, and had to sit down, leaving Dent to notice that the screen that seemed to favor the Imperium was now showing pictures of his family.

“Happy and untroubled,” Rockwell model A8-113 intoned, “the Imperial Family today relaxed in absolute security.” Footage from a floating autocam showed the family eating breakfast on a new, only slightly less impressive table on the hastily patched-up veranda under sunny, cloudless skies.

“Hey, Pebble, look!” Dent smiled, waving her over. Even if he was sort of enjoying hostagehood, he was a long way from home for the first time in his young life. Home looked good, even through a dusty vidscreen.

“The Imperium today announced an even more formidable upgrade to the fine Crouch Industries-made security network surrounding the planet, ensuring a messy and rapid death for would-be intruders, and more happy family breakfasts for the Emperor, the Empress, and both their children.”

Both. It was such a tiny word, little more than a whimsical puff of air off the tongue. But it struck Dent square in the chest with the force of a bullet. Pebble heard it too, and her hands shaped questions. Dent did not register them. He kept watching, kept listening, certain he had heard wrong.

“Here we see Pugio Magnificus, Imperial Minister of Violence, leading the Golden Garrison in mock combat exercises in the Imperial Palace’s top-of-the-line training facilities,” the newscaster intoned, as Pug wreaked havoc on a whole legion of Crouch Industries disposable Kill-O-Tron Biped units. Even through the screen, Dent could see that his brother fought with greater ferocity, and greater carelessness, than usual.

“And here is Glissandra Voluptua, the multiply-beloved Ministress of Love, emerging from private one-on-one negotiations with Colquin Haime of Haimestar Transit.” Lis and several clever swatches collectively masquerading as a dress swept into view. She looked unearthly in her makeup and antigrav-assisted hair, and carried a thick book tucked protectively under one arm. “Whatever she’s reading, we’re certain half the Empire will want to read it, too,” Rockwell A8-113 chuckled in a voice like curdled honey. “Clearly, the Imperial Couple could not ask for two finer children.”

The picture changed, and Dent relaxed. This was last year’s Armistice Day ceremony, broadcast throughout the Imperium, which he’d sweltered and suffocated through in a starched formal uniform on the same stage as his family — albeit in a much smaller chair off to one side.

“Remember this?” he said, nudging Pebble, grinning in relief. “You were signing me jokes through that vent in the floor? I almost—”

Then he stopped. Because the camera clearly showed the space on the stage where his chair ought to be. And that space was empty.

No Dent. No chair. Just a faint ripple in the pixels, not even there unless you were looking for it.

“Truly,” the newscaster concluded, in tones that suggested money had definitely changed hands at some point, “with two strong, magnificent heirs and a youthful, vigorous Emperor and Empress, the future of our great Imperium is assured. Next: Is the FLAW smuggling diseased animals to petting zoos in Imperial space? And we’ll have Rad Corolis with your solar storm watch…”

Dent backed as far from the monitor as he could get. His eyes would not leave the screen. He waited for the newscaster to laugh, and assure everyone it was a joke, and say insincere but very complementary things about Accident, the youngest, bravest, smartest, funniest, nicest boy in the whole of the Imperium.

Instead, he got a commercial for Nutri-Os.

Pebble tried to sign something, and when he ignored her, she signed it again, right in his face. He slapped her hands away angrily. She punched him hard in the arm, which the not-angry part of him admitted he deserved, and went off to sulk in front of an exercise feed for amputee veterans of the Third Galactic Conflict, which would later give her bad dreams.

That was where the Bosun found them some clicks later. Dent stayed silent as she herded them back down the ladder, past the locked-in lady who was still yelling about her music unit, through the airlock, to the Captain’s ship. He went and lay down in the hammock and swept all his treasures off the shelf and back into his belt. He shut his eyes, though he was not tired, and lay still. Pebble’s nudging fingers through the bottom of the hammock didn’t stir him, and when the Bosun came to bring his dinner, she ended up leaving it on the fold-out table for him, in case he got hungry later.

Several bells came and went. The ship made another spacejump, which of course felt like nothing at all. Pebble made a few more halfhearted attempts to nudge Dent into responsiveness, and sadly curled herself in her blankets off the floor. Eventually, Dent heard her breathing descend into a series of gentle, rolling rises and falls. He heard music faintly in the corridor outside.

The Bosun had not locked them in tonight, so Dent slipped out into the corridor, dimly lit in beacons along its length for the evenside cycle. From the not-engine room, he heard the Bosun playing a sad centipede tune on her xylophone; in the cockpit, he could hear Corsair softly singing along in silky tones.

Without a word, Dent walked into the cockpit and hauled himself up into the copilot’s seat, opposite the Captain. The glowing lights of the instrument panel made constellations to match the starfields floating outside the viewport. Dent recognized many of the readouts and panels and switches from his lessons with Air Marshall Vliet. He wrapped his hands around the dead copilot stick and pretended he was flying the ship, but the stars outside stubbornly refused to move.

“My esteemed hostage,” the Captain said softly. “I thought you were asleep. Cocoa?”

“No thank you,” Dent mumbled, staring straight ahead.

“I myself very much like hot cocoa in the small bells of evenside,” the Captain said, closing his eyes to breathe in the vapor rising from the steel mug in his hands. His mustache bore flecks of foam. Behind his eyelids, a soft orange glow flickered to life, and persisted for several seconds until the Captain’s eyes opened once more. “The cocinera would make it for me when I was, yes, about Your Majesty’s age.”

Dent thought of Cook’s hot cocoa, and the pit of his stomach curled forlornly.

“Did you send a message to my family today?” Dent asked.

“How clever Your Majesty is!” the Captain smiled, and took another sip. “Yes, such was my purpose at the relay station. No finer place to send an encrypted signal to the highest channels.”

“What did you say?” Dent continued. He made himself look at the bright orange power readouts just above the copilot’s stick.

“I… informed them that I had their beloved son,” the Captain began, with the graceful caution of a skater entering uncertain ice. “That you were safe — although, if Your Majesty will forgive me, I falsely implied that such safety might be entirely temporary — and that you would be returned in exchange for a positively ludicrous sum of their finest, most lustrous currency.”

“Do you think they miss me?” Dent curled both feet up in front of him, and hugged them to his chest.

“Of course, Majesty!” Corsair said, concern clouding his eyes. “I am sure your father cannot sleep, and your mother…” He paused to reconsider this. “Your father cannot sleep, I am certain.”

Dent turned and looked the captain in the eye, and sat up straight the way Story had taught him to do. “You’re lying,” he said quietly.

“What makes Your Majesty say so?” Corsair asked, carefully setting down the mug of cocoa.

“You’re not making them pay to get me back,” Dent said. “They don’t want me back. Not really. You’re making them pay so you don’t tell anyone else about me. So you don’t embarrass them.”

“That was not my intent,” the Captain said. He held Dent’s gaze, and his eyes did not flicker or waver in the least. “Not entirely. You saw the broadcasts. They conceal you, yes? They hide you. When I discovered this, long before I had the pleasure of making Your Majesty’s acquaintance, I thought to myself, this, this is their great treasure. To keep a child secret, to keep him safe — he must be precious to them beyond all measure.”

“You’re wrong,” Dent said, finally looking away. He turned his head to the blank opposite wall of the cockpit, because no one should ever see an Imperial heir shed tears. “You’re wrong and dumb. They’re probably glad I’m gone. Probably don’t even care. I don’t.”

“I would venture,” Corsair said softly, “that your place in their hearts, however well-hidden, is nonetheless secure.”

“I hate them,” Dent said. His voice was thick, and the words came with difficulty. “I don’t ever—”

“Your Majesty,” the Captain interrupted, sudden and sharp. “Please believe me when I say that ‘ever’ is a far longer time than you know. Especially without a family.”

“I don’t ever want to see them again,” Dent continued, defiantly. “I’m staying kidnapped. I’m never, ever going back. Never ever.”

And the Captain was deeply troubled to hear this, and only partly because it complicated his dreams of fantastic wealth.

14. Missing Child (Part 1)

2007-11-14T20:56:00.000-08:00

There were worse jobs than Imperial Relay Operator (Class 3). Kei Takahara had held most of them in his relatively young life. Deep-Space Sanitation Engineer. Comestibles Transport Technician for location #44797 of Uncle Mung’s Home-Cooked Nutrient Swill, back on Habitation Planet Noizawa. Tigerleech Wrangler for the Grand Pan-Galactic Circus and Gladiatorium.

When you’ve spent a year and a half warily lobbing chunks of meat to a hissing cage full of twenty-fanged creatures who see you primarily as a larger, fresher version of that same meat, 120-turn shifts in the backwater of the Imperium begin to sound almost heavenly. Except, of course, for Helen.

In planning the Imperium-wide network of communication relays, concerned engineers had realized that prolonged isolation might prove less than optimal to the relay operators’ mental health. So they decided to make sure there were two operators stationed on each outpost. Each tiny, tiny outpost. With a single privy. Then they patted themselves on the back and went out to lunch, confident that absolutely no part of their solution could possibly go wrong.

As his breakfast abruptly began to float away in the sudden absence of gravity, Kei did not get up from the table. (Not voluntarily, anyway, although that was more the zero gravity.) He did not float over to the door of Imperial Relay Operator (Class 3) Helen Forste’s chamber and batter it down with the vibro-axe those same concerned engineers had thoughtfully provided in case of emergency. He did not then proceed to put the axe through the music unit that was playing Helen’s favorite insipid song for approximately the 14,328th time in the last week. Nor did he use the axe upon Helen herself, who was presently in the midst of the zero-grav exercises her latest fashion magazine had assured her would result in tighter, toned thighs. And he certainly did not proceed to laugh maniacally and swim zero-g victory laps around the station’s miniscule crew quarters.

Instead, he reached slowly for the station memo pad, and began to write another excruciatingly polite note. It involved words like “consideration,” “cohabitation,” and “personal space.” If it was like any of the others, Helen would ball it up unread and flush it into the incinerator.

The airlock clanged, hissed, and began to cycle. Kei stopped, halfway through a neat cursive rendition of “understanding,” and looked up. It was a few days early for the supply shuttle, but sometimes they did that. Kei pushed off from the chair, floated toward the hatch, watched the seal turn green, and opened the door in a hiss of atmosphere.

A fancily dressed man pointed a sword at his face.

“Good morning, my friend!” the fancily dressed man said cheerfully. “Please pardon the inconvenience, but I am here to take you hostage for a brief period of time.”

Kei looked over his shoulder at Helen’s room, where the final notes of Tell Me You Love Me Right Now (Extreme Custom Brainwave Mix) died away, only to launch directly into rendition number 14,329.

“Oh, thank the gods,” Kei sighed, and put up his hands.

“You see?” Captain Corsair smiled, as Dent handed him the gloves to his bulky zerosuit. “My plan proceeds apace. Soon the Bosun and I will have positively obscene amounts of currency, which we may spend, or invest, or merely lie upon and roll back and forth, depending on our mood and preference. And you will be back with your adoring family.”

Dent’s face crinkled in confusion. “Are you sure you’re talking about my family?” he asked, in all honesty. The Captain merely laughed, and checked the glove seals.

“That’s an old suit,” Dent said, noting the faded markings of the FLAW on the shoulder of the Captain’s left sleeve. Only the glove over his metal left hand looked newer.

“It is indeed,” the Captain said, taking the helmet Dent handed to him.

“Were you in the war?” Dent asked, turning his head sideways. He was trying to imagine Corsair in someone’s military uniform. “My father was in the war.”

“I know.” Corsair checked the helmet over for any flaws or cracks. “I saw his flagship once, at some distance.”

“Is that where you lost your hand?” Dent asked, and something in the Captain’s eyes flickered for a second, like a burst of static on an audio channel.

“It is where I lost many things,” the Captain said quietly. Then he flung on his smile again, like a cloak thrown across his shoulders, and fastened the helmet on. “How do I look?” he asked, muffled through the glass.

“Kind of like a fishbowl,” Dent said, and laughed.

“I thank Your Majesty for the compliment,” Corsair replied. “I have long admired fishbowls.”

Bosun Little appeared, ducking through the doorway from the engine room. Bulky, battered blocks of portable comm equipment swung from each of her fists. On her back, Pebble clung gleefully, relishing a view of the world at such a height.

“Uk,” Bosun Little said, gasping slightly. “Not so tight, quartersize. This one’s got to breathe.” Pebble shifted grip, and the Bosun sighed, and pretended that some part of her wasn’t actually having fun with this.

“You rigged and righted, Captain?” she asked. “I was gonna lock up the hostages, but, well, they made these faces…”

“Truly, you are fearsome,” the Captain grinned from inside his suit.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bosun Little growled. “I’ll talk you through the patching when you’re in place.” She crouched down to let Pebble slip from her shoulders. “All right, microbes, march! Last one through the hatch is an albatross!”

Dent and Pebble stepped into the lower level of the station. The gravity had been restored, leaving someone’s breakfast spilled all over the small utilitable. Behind one of the three doors leading off, a woman could be heard banging on the other side of the door, screaming angrily about the destruction of her music unit. From another on the opposite side, almost loud enough to drown out the woman’s words, triumphant orchestral melodies rolled out in mighty waves.

“Wait,” Dent asked Bosun Little as she gingerly shoved the hatch shut behind them with one foot. “So where do the people live?”

The Bosun just looked at him for a long moment, the tattoo patterns on her face wavering uncertainly from shape to shape to shape. “You’re looking at it, Your Majesty,” she said at last. “We can’t all be royalty. She put a foot on the ladder up to the outpost’s operations level and heaved the comm equipment up through the hole in the ceiling. “Come on. Up this way.”

Dent and Pebble found themselves in a slightly larger room, a jungle of wires and monitors and heavy, welded consoles. Flickering screens broadcast vidfeeds from throughout the Empire — there the Leaping Guardsmen of Ereloss high-stepping in parade formation, here a cheaply staged dramatization of the final days of Emperor Sanguinus involving a lot of showy gestures and fake blood.

Dent had seen few vidfeeds, his mother believing that they rotted the brain and were also far too low-resolution to properly spy on anyone. Pebble had seen none. They gazed in awe, nudging each other periodically to point at some interesting thing or another on one of the screens, as Bosun Little folded open her comm cases and ran cables into key ports on the outpost’s consoles.

The Bosun finished plugging in, thumbed the power switches on her old familiar comms gear, and looked up to see Pebble staring at her with wide, curious eyes.

“What?” the Bosun asked, flat parallel lines rendering across her cheekbones.

The girl made rapid swooping gestures with her hands, and Dent tore his eyes away from a rebroadcast of the Intergalactic Hurtball Championships long enough to translate.

“You remind her of her mom,” he said softly. Some small, winged thing fluttered once behind the Bosun’s steely rib cage, and the pixels on her cheeks scattered into random dancing clouds.

“Yeah, okay,” she said, not quite choking on the words, and very pointedly went back to checking the inputs on the comms decks. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Pebble’s hands folding and unfolding themselves again.

“Now she wants to know, um, how you got so big,” Dent said. “I was kinda wondering that myself.”

“If I told you to eat your vegetables, you’d know I was taking the gaff, wouldn’t you?” Bosun Little asked, lines curving gently upward on her face.

Dent consulted with Pebble, who nodded emphatically. “Yeah, pretty much,” he said.

“You ever heard of Corinthia?” the Bosun said quietly. The pixels on her cheeks began to undulate in steady sine waves. “Hup, hup, save me the text. I guess you have. It’s a heavy-grav planet, so the first people who settled there, back when it was a mining world, they did some genejerrying on ‘em, square? Made us tough enough to deal with the crush. Out here it’s like I’m always swimming. And in zero? Hardly feel like I’m there at all.”

Pebble wandered over to the board, and the Bosun hoisted the girl up on her shoulders. The girl watched avidly, her unblinking eyes faintly reflective in the semidark, as the Bosun’s immense hands and sausage-thick fingers moved over the controls.

“Most lightweights think we’re all savages,” the Bosun said. “Brutes. I mean, we’ve got architects, artists, poets. Damn good musicians. But nobody’s heard of them outside the crush, and everyone’s heard of the Corinth Elite. Greatest mercs in the galaxy, right?”

“They fought with my father,” Dent said. “In the war. He likes to talk about it.”

“I know,” Bosun Little said. “I was Elite. Just barely.”

Dent frowned. “Wait, were you or weren’t you?”

“Do you know—” Bosun Little began, and paused as Pebble shifted her grip on the Bosun inconveniently. “Hey, little bug, I need those eyes for seeing, square? That’s better. Thank you. So. Do you know how tall a Corinthian’s supposed to be?”

Dent sized her up. “Tall as you?” he guessed, honestly. The Bosun smiled sadly.

“You’re sweet, Your Majesty. I’m a round seven feet. Not bad for you lightweights, but on Corinthia? The average is ten feet, easy. They weren’t even gonna let me live — bad for the gene pool or something - but my dear dust Ma had some pull with the Council.

“Same pull got me into the Elite, just. I worked twice as hard as everyone else, trained twice as long, hit all the good scores so they had to let me in. But they wouldn’t put me front. I was the comms tech, back of the line.” The Bosun grinned ruefully at the equipment before her.

“Your dad ever talk about Echo Hill?” she asked. Dent just rolled his eyes. “I’m guessing that’s yes. Well, while he was off winning the war, we were on the other side of the mountain. Walked right into a DMA ambush.”

Dent saw her face darken; he remembered his father, the few times the Emperor would start talking about the war and then stop, and not want to talk to anyone for a little bit. Not that he ever wanted to talk to Dent, really.

“I’m sorry,” Dent said, and Pebble laid a tiny cool hand on the Bosun’s shoulder.

Bosun Little shut her eyes, and for a split second, the lines on her face went jagged and twisted. “It was bad. And I by my lone lived it out. Wasn’t my fault. It really wasn’t. But the High Elite, they saw the runt who survived while her sworn all fell, and…”

The Bosun put a hand to her ear, to the audio speaker there. “Hup. Storytime’s over, my specks.” She hoisted Pebble of her shoulders, back to the deck. “You two run, find something to burn out your eyes on. We’ll be sealed and sailing in a few.”

The children wandered off with little waves, drinking in the vidblitz on all sides. “They’re good kids, Captain,” she said quietly.

“I could not have asked for finer hostages,” Captain Corsair replied, from the freezing silence of space. The massive transmitter array, dwarfing the station itself, bounced all the knowledge of the Imperium across the galaxy and back. The Captain, magboots securely locked, knelt in its shadow, at the pylon where it anchored to the station, opening the access hatch that led to its workings.

“When are you going to tell him the truth?” Bosun Little murmured to him over the link. She cast a sidelong glance at Dent, as the boy and Pebble stood far closer to a particular screen than health experts would ever have recommended.

“If fortune smiles?” the Captain sighed. “Never at all.”

13. The Un-Engine

2007-11-13T20:26:00.000-08:00

“And that, you see, is why you are fortunate to have been abducted by us,” Captain Corsair concluded, gazing out the cockpit viewport toward the distant stars. “Rather than sell you into lucrative slavery, or hire you out as test subjects for pharmaceuticals of uncertain origin, we merely intend to offer you — you and your friend, I should add! — a most exciting adventure, before safely returning you to the loving arms of your family. Also, we will become magnificently rich. A splendid plan, do you not agree?”

He turned back to find himself speaking to an empty cockpit. The ship rang with heavy, careless footfalls and children’s laughter, and somewhere in the background, occasional increasingly frantic warnings from Bosun Little.

“I see I should not have worried,” Corsair grinned.
He caught up with them in the corridor off the crew chambers, the Bosun chasing the two giddy, giggling children out of her room. “Just to be absolutely clear,” the Bosun shouted after them, as they dashed aft, “again, nothing in my room is in any way, shape, or form, a toy…!” She rubbed the back of her skull, which she’d banged on a low-hanging pipe while giving chase, and glowered at Corsair.

“What about that doll of yours?” the Captain asked innocently.

“That’s a collectible,” Bosun Little huffed.

Corsair shrugged. “It resembles a toy. Greatly.”

“I made them supper, square?” the Bosun sighed. “Either you watch them for a while so’s I can get us on course for the relay, or we all play a fun game called ‘Guess How Long You Have to Stay in the Airlock.’”

The Captain raised his hands, flesh and metal, in genial surrender, and headed aft, into the strange shifting light of the engine room.

Which did not, in the strictest accuracy, contain an engine.

Dent didn’t hear the captain enter at first. He sat crosslegged on the metal grid of the deck plating, hands on his chin, staring. Pebble sat next to him, posed in unconscious mimickry. The two watched the rainbows coalesce and coruscate off the beautiful, bone-white cluster growing from the floor.

“Ahhh,” he heard the Captain say, and turned to see him lit up ghostly in the glow. “I see Your Majesty has discovered our beautiful engine.”

Pebble turned to Dent and made lyric, emphatic gestures, her hands fluttering almost too fast to see. Dent nodded.

“She’s right — that’s not an engine,” he said to the Captain, squinting closer just to be sure. “Mechanic Doren showed me engines. This is just a ball of… white bumpy glowy stuff.”

“True, Your Majesty, but is the greatest and only ball of white bumpy glowy stuff in the universe,” Corsair said proudly, implying an ownership to which he was not even remotely entitled. “It can take us anywhere. Tell me — did you study pluslight engines as well?”

“Sure,” Dent shrugged. He took a deep breath and began to recite, dutifully and a little bored. “Pluslight engines shunt an ever-greater portion of the vessel’s mass into another dimension as it approaches the speed of light, allowing the vessel to surpass light speed without attaining infinite mass or suffering from relativistic effects.” He finished, and sucked in a breath, his face slightly red from the effort. “I’m still not sure what ‘relativistic’ means.”

“It has… something to do with time,” Corsair glossed, that portion of his own studies increasingly crowded out by vastly more exciting knowledge. “But as I am certain you know, pluslight engines have their limits, yes? Heavy and greedy things, and they tire quickly, like a fat man upon many stairs. Our beauty, she does not.”

Pebble stretched a hand out to touch the thing, spectral coronas beginning to dance around her fingertips. In a flash, the Captain had reached her, snatching her away. She shrieked from the sudden intrusion, flailing at him; fortunately, the Captain had considerable experience with this sort of behavior, especially from the fairer sex. He put her down quickly, backed away, and bowed in apology.

“Forgive me, young one,” Corsair said as Pebble crouched sulking, “but I wished you to keep all of those fingers as they are.”

Dent looked at him quizzically, scooting back a bit from the radiant mass. “This thing is dangerous?”

“The laws that govern our universe,” Corsair began, “it chooses to cavalierly ignore. I must confess a certain degree of respect for this approach, but had you touched it, your fingers might have become, say, a hippopotamus.” The Captain must have seen just how not-horrible and completely cunning this scenario sounded to Dent, for he swiftly added, “Or a bunch of roasted bubblesprouts. Or nothing at all.”

Pebble, still eyeing the Captain mistrustfully, made further signs with her hands.

“She wants to know what it runs on,” Dent translated. The Captain smiled.

“A most wonderful fuel indeed,” the Captain said, circling to the opposite side of the un-engine, to where the Bosun had stowed her xylophone. He reached up into a free space in the ceiling piping and retrieved his ninestring, slim and curving as the most beautiful maiden, and hand-built from the burnished twistwood of his home. Only one other thing in his life could make the Captain so happy and sad all at once; he saw it every time he shut his eyes.

As Dent and Pebble watched, the Captain flicked pick-protrusions from the tips of his metal fingers and thumb, settled the ninestring lovingly in the crook of his arm, and paused, deciding. “Yes,” he said at last, and began to play.

The music poured from the ninestring, full of pepper and hoofbeats and the clash of steel upon steel. And as he played, the Captain sang, in a deep, lovely, liquid voice, in the tongue of his distant ancestors.

Pebble turned to Dent, baffled; she had only ever heard Imperian, and even he had only caught a few snatches of other languages when eavesdropping on the arrivals of visiting diplomats. (Primarily to make off with some of the arriving-diplomat snacks Cook always excelled at.)

But if the words were unclear, the meaning of the song was not. It washed over the children like a warm breeze, full of longing and hope and occasional more or less justified stabbings. But mostly the first two.

And as the Captain played and sang, the un-engine glowed brighter and brighter, the rainbows dancing off its surface in sudden, joyous arcs. At last the song ended, the Captain laying his metal hand flat upon the strings to still them, and looked up as if recalled from some distant place.

“You see?” he smiled. “The music, it makes our beauty happy. And when she is happy, we need only ask, and pop! She zips us across the stars and back, faster than pluslight. Faster than anything.”

Had they been present to witness this dramatically simplified explanation, the dozen or so of the FLAW’s scientific minds responsible for the Quantum Coral Drive would have stood up in protest, opened their mouths, shut them again out of sheer consternation, and finally sputtered out some sort of strident protest. They would have talked about atomically engineered microorganisms with the capability to manipulate the universe at the quantum level, nourished by certain mathematically pleasing patterns of sound.

Higgins, who had worked out the physics to begin with and was far too pleased about this, would have definitely mentioned how the coral could be coaxed to expand the fabric of space behind the ship, and compress it in front, sending the craft zipping through the stars far faster than light — even though it essentially sat still, safely cocooned in a bubble of “normal” space around which everything else flowed harmlessly.

Alas, none of those scientists were around to correct the Captain’s gross generalizations. But in the distant reaches of FLAW Science Command, in the expensive, scribble-strewn room where they gathered to mourn the theft of six years’ worth of top-secret research, all of them nonetheless felt briefly even more troubled than they already were. Had they known the origin of this feeling, they would doubtlessly have rushed to write papers on its quantum underpinnings, which would have cheered them up at least a little.

“Would you like to try, Your Majesty?” the Captain offered, returning his ninestring to its storage niche. “Go on. Sing our beauty something.”

Dent frowned, racking his brain. The only thing that surfaced on the spur of the moment was an old nursery-song Story had taught him, so he went with that.

“Old Jack jumped in a pile of cheese,

Jumped in all the way up to his knees—”

Dent was a bright and resourceful boy with many commendable skills, none of which were singing. Even Pebble grimaced, flattening her palms emphatically over her ears. The rainbow coronas around the Quantum Coral Drive flattened out instantly, and the mass’s radiance flickered ominously.

“Your Majesty, Your Majesty!” Captain Corsair cut in hastily, noting this. “I have been in error, it seems. Do pardon me. The acoustics here, they are inferior — deeply unsuited for the proper presentation of a voice such as yours. Perhaps we can reschedule your performance for a different venue?”

Dent, somewhat baffled, shrugged and nodded. Inwardly, Corsair breathed a sigh of relief. After a few bewildered sputters, the Quantum Coral Drive shook off its recent trauma and resumed its usual radiance. Pebble sensed the danger had passed, and unsealed her ears.

The bells grew late, and the Captain diplomatically explained that as their kidnapper, he felt it important for his hostages to get their proper rest. Dent would have complained, more out of habit than anything else, but he did find that being a kidnapee was very tiring. Already Pebble’s eyelids had begun to droop.

The Captain prepared a hammock in one of the two unoccupied crew quarters, swaddling his young keys to unimaginable wealth (well, one plus, really) in slightly scratchy blankets stamped PROPERTY OF FLAW COMMAND.

Bosun Little was enlisted, reluctantly, for the telling of a bedtime story. It turned out to be about two overly curious children who go poking around in other people’s things, mistaking valuable collectibles for common playthings, and end up wandering out an airlock to freeze, explode, and die in the pitiless vacuum of space. It was a far bigger hit than she had expected.

The Bosun left a light on over the privy, and shut the door, locking the children in for the night. Pebble promptly took a blanket and curled up on the floor, ear pressed to the deck, drifting off to sleep to the pulse of the ship’s power systems.

It took Dent longer to find his way to sleep. He lay in the mostly-dark, listening to strange muffled adult voices outside. Exciting as this was, and as kind (if disappointingly un-ferocious) as the Captain and Bosun had been, he missed Story a lot, and the rest of his family somewhat less but still a little bit.

He took out the four treasures from his belt pouch — the silver spoon, the pink vial, the ball of psuedosilk, and the little soldier man — and lined them up in a row on the low metal shelf next to the hammock. He looked at them in the dim half-light for a long time, mixed-up emotions tumbling around in the pit of stomach, and did not remember the closing of his eyes.

12. Ghost in the Machine

2007-11-12T20:59:00.000-08:00

Like her parents, and her parents’ parents, and countless generations before them, she was born into noise and darkness.

The great fish-powered boilers that powered the Imperial Palace had been built in an age of reliable automation. They needed no living hands to run them. Machines could have tirelessly and efficiently performed the task, requiring repair not once in a thousand years.

Then again, the palace didn’t need to run on burning sea life, either. But Emperor Primus the Free-Spending felt that the appropriate amount of wastefulness was essential to preserving the image of the Imperium’s power. All-encompassing, near godlike empires of millenial duration should not be seen cutting costs or corners. It got people talking, and not in the good way.

The crew brought in to man the boilers upon the palace’s completion were fairly ordinary souls — hardy stock from the simmering volcanic mining planets of the Virgil system, used to hard work and high temperature. For a good century or two, they kept regular contact with the palace above, receiving shipments of wages, food, medicine, and other supplies. Like their more refined counterparts on the upper levels, they produced new generations of boiler-stokers and fluid dynamic technicians and seaweed-haulers. A thriving community sprang up in the steaming bowels of the palace, among the hiss and thunk and roar of the machinery.

Then came the rather unfortunate reign of Emperor Sanguinus the Deeply Troubled, and with it a high, execution-related turnover rate among the palace’s staff. Communication between the boiler crews and officials above became ever more infrequent, and then ceased entirely. The situation might have recovered if, following the merciful end of Sanguinus’s reign, he had not been replaced by Mercurious the Easily Distracted. In rushing to comply with his numerous and refreshingly non-murderous whims, the palace staff neglected crucial maintenance. Ducts fell into disrepair. Passages were hastily sealed off to make way for an Imperial amusement park — no, a ninepin alley — no, an entire garden made of candyfloss — no, maybe the amusement park after all.

Soon enough, the whole of the palace above simply forgot that anyone at all lived below Sanitation Deck. There were legends, of course — boogey-tales told to the new arrivals, to facilitate the playing of hilarious practical jokes. But that was all.

The world of the boiler crews contracted steadily with each passing generation, until the notion of a world outside became lost in the far reaches of their collective memory. They stoked the boilers and shoveled the fish and crabs and wrestled out the errant sharks out of ritual now, rather than duty.

Every few hundred years, some bold, shining-eyed youth — literally shining-eyed, as by this point, evolution had gifted the inhabitants with certain advantages related to seeing in the dark — would bid the others farewell in bold sign-gestures, set out on a quest to reach the mythical Blue Kingdom, and never be heard from again.

(Most of these would-be heroes made the mistake of heading down, not up. They all discovered their Blue Kingdom firsthand, in the form of a very long drop toward the ocean.)

None of them had spoken a name in hundreds of years — the noise of the boilers and pumps and engines drowned out all but the loudest yells — and the few written documents still surviving were preserved as holy relics, for the instruction of the children. (These included a copy of Digwell the Very Good Dog, an increasingly tattered copy of Aristocrat Fashion magazine which cycled in and out of fashion every hundred years or so, and Your First Incinerothermic Power System: A User’s Guide, helpfully provided by the manufacturer.) They shunted sea life from the boiler feeds for food, steaming and roasting it with the surplus heat of the boilers. Rare anemones and other arrivals from the deep were cultivated for their medicinal properties; seavine, properly dried and treated, could be woven into clothes. This was how they lived. This was the world into which she had been born.

Little Stone, daughter of Shovelfast, unofficial queen of the boiler-stokers, and Hurtswhere, the doctor; the third of their children, the first and only to survive past birth. She was a good baby, and a quiet one, and much loved. Her mother would sit up nights in the disused outflow pipe that was their home, cradling the girl in her muscular arms as mother and daughter rocked away the hours in a seavine sling. Shovelfast would hold Little Stone close and sing to her, the same song her mother had sung to her. She could not hear the song she sang, but her child could, humming through the flesh and the bones of Shovelfast’s chest, humming through her very heart.

Like all the children, Little Stone began work at five, pushing the carts, fixing the shovels, gathering piles of seavine. But she showed real promise as a pipeslink, slipping tiny and agile inside the smaller pipes to clear out clogs, to keep the Great Machines happy.

She would have stayed there, happy and ignorant with her family, till the end of her days, until the boiler fires claimed her as they claimed all things. But her life as she knew it, all seven years, four months, and fifteen days of it, ended in a matter of heartbeats, the day the palace danced.

Far above, unknown to the denizens of the boiler chamber, the Empress was celebrating a birthday. Which birthday, exactly, was not specified; it never was. Even the Emperor didn’t know, and didn’t dare ask. But from the heaviness of her sigh whenever he ventured to bring up the topic of a celebration, he guessed it must be a significant one, demanding a special event.

He summoned the family to a secret meeting, during the Empress’s weekly session on Restorative Deck, and solicited ideas.

“Fill the arena with beasts,” offered Pug, “and I will slay them all for her.” He couldn’t bring himself to suggest his real idea, a lovely garden party with engraved invitations and finger sandwiches and discussions about etiquette — the sort he enviously imagined his mother and father were having all the time, without him.

Lis exhaled wearily, prepared to take one for the team. “I could get a few courtesans together and, I dunno, do the Dance of the Eighteen Progressively Smaller Scarves?” she offered. Lis had considerable skills in the way of entertainment, but few of them were suitable for family parties. “She liked that a couple years back.”

“Yes, daughter,” sighed the Emperor, moving thumb and forefinger in circles at his temples, feeling a headache coming on. “But mostly because Ambassador Kellel’s heart gave out when you got down to scarf number five. She never liked him.”

“Oh,” Lis said, and folded her hands and sat quietly, hurt but not surprised.

“What about another kind of dance?” eight-year-old Dent suggested, failing to see the appeal of a performance centered around scarves.

“Who let you in here?” the Emperor groaned. From the hallway outside, a clack-clack-clacking sound passed, and a muffled screech of “Death! Colorized, motivated death!”

“She likes the Misertine, right?” Dent continued, undaunted. However hostile things might get for him in here, they were guaranteed to be a picnic compared to the hallway outside. “I saw her one time yelling at the Fleetfeet girls from Amusement Deck after they did a recital for her, about how they were getting the steps all wrong.”

His family members rarely told him anything about themselves, so when Dent learned something of their inner selves, he memorized it, and kept it special in his mind. In that regard, these facts were not unlike his treasures — just not stolen.

“The Misertine,” the Emperor mused fondly, as if someone else entirely had brought it up. “We danced that at our wedding…” Dent filed this away, too.

The Emperor had dismissed his family, and also Dent, and summoned his best engineers and mechanics. Discussions were had, involving ancient and only mostly accurate schematics of the palace. Heads nodded, partly out of fear that they might be severed if they didn’t, but mostly because what the Emperor proposed seemed more or less doable. Or at least a fun challenge amid the dreary monotony of maintenance.

On sunset, on the evening of her birthday, the Emperor and the Empress took the pneumovator up to the veranda. She was in a foul mood that day, as at least three of her servants had discovered in an unfortunately permanent fashion.

“Well?” she snapped, when they stepped out onto the palace roof, the whole of the sea and sky a gorgeous shimmering gold. “Where’s dinner?”

The Emperor just smiled. Five bells sounded through the palace; up here, the vibrations made the scale-shingles chitter and chime like falling icicles.

In the palace control center, Mechanic Doren shouted a command. Mechanic teams deployed throughout the chamber hauled on massive valves, opening up channels unused in centuries, drawing on more power than the palace had ever previously used.

Deep below, in the squashed, fish-stinking darkness of the long-abandoned master outflow conduit, seven-year-old Little Stone had just finished chipping away a crablog at a bend in the piping. She made ready to slither back down the piping and report success to her mother, when the rumbling began, rising through the metal of the pipe around her. Little Stone froze; her experience contained nothing like this.

Had she kept moving, she might just have made it out in time.

The boilers roared to violent life, steam bursting and hissing from pipes long patched and repatched, scavenged and salvaged. The boiler crews found themselves screaming unfamiliar screams of pain and terror as their entire cosmology upended itself. Even as her husband tried to tug her to safety, Shovelfast stood in the midst of the chaos, scalded but unmoved, gripped by the most terrible fear.

The world began to move in unfamiliar ways.

The Palace, on its eight water-striding legs, danced the delicate circles of the Misertine.

“Happy birthday, my love,” said the Emperor tenderly, to the woman he’d fought a galaxy for, and who did not entirely terrify him all the time. Anymore.

The faintest ghost of a smile, an actual smile, haunted the Empress’s lips, as the palace beneath them glided across the sea in half-mile strides, out and around, out and around.

“It’s not nearly as good as I was,” she said.

“No one could be,” the Emperor replied, and offering his hand. And for five blessed clicks, they danced together in the deepening twilight, and the palace danced with them.

And far, far below, the overtaxed boilers switched to emergency measures to keep up with the power drain, diverting vast shunts of cooling water to counterbalance the rising temperatures. This water needed somewhere to go when it had done its job, and the automatic system gave it one. Rusted, crusted grates yielded to mechanical force, shrieking open.

Little Stone felt the coming water before she heard it, and tried to slide back to the nearest junction. Then a blast of hot liquid suffocation hit, throwing her back, slamming her tiny frame thoughtlessly against the walls of the pipe, carrying her up, up, up. To the Blue Kingdom, where the angels lived.

The Palace stopped its dancing, settling back to its normal motion (and not a moment too soon for countless unbalanced stomachs within its decks). The ancient gates creaked shut again, once more sealing the works of the palace above from the boilers below. In the darkness, a mother cried for her child, over and over, and received no reply.

And Little Stone woke, spitting up lukewarm seawater, in an unfamiliar, strangely dry, and odd-smelling duct. Silence attacked her ears, and then the duct filled with sudden sharp cries and thuds as she scrabbled and panicked and flailed. And then she realized the sounds were coming from her, and her terror redoubled.

She searched for hours, lost in the palace’s miles upon miles of ductwork, searching frantically for a way back, and finding none. At last, exhausted, she curled up in a junction where comforting warm air blew, and cried herself to sleep, humming the same tune her mother hand long ago sang to her into the metal against her cheek.

She learned, because she had to. She taught her eyes to adjust to the light coming in from the not-world outside the tubes, the little cages into which she could peer. She listened to the strange people in their odd clothing come and go, flapping their lips, making strange sounds, and never once using their hands. She tapped potable water lines to drink. She stole fresh clothing from the hampers on laundry deck, helpfully left beneath the vents of drying air. She followed one set of smells to the sanitation ducts when nature insisted, and another, more pleasant set of smells to Culinary Deck, to steal food.

Sometimes she could reach through the vents to grab it; other times, she had to brave the terrifying emptiness of the not-world, venture outside the pipes, stuff the pockets of her coveralls with strange un-fish and green crunching things, unfamiliar but good.

For six long months, she watched, and listened, and searched. She spoke to no one. Sometimes, at night, she cried; the sound carried eerily through the ducts. Mechanic Doren had to scoff more than once at the timid greaseheads, and tell them in rough and burly terms that there was no such thing as ghosts. But he’d heard it once, too, walking the mains one night; singing, in a little girl’s voice, a strange and haunting tune. He chalked it up to insufficient sleep.

And then one day she woke from a nap to find a little boy in her vent, flattened against the wall, peering out through the grate. Outside, she heard the Shining Thing pass; she’d seen it before, around this time of day, making the rounds, squawking to itself in high, singsong tones, and snapping the pincer end of one of its four arms rhythmically.

The little boy waited, holding his breath, until it passed, then started to fiddle with the vent cover. Her foot slipped, squeaking against the metal of the duct, and he turned and saw her.

“Oh,” he said, though she didn’t understand what that meant. “Hello.” He waved to her a little bit, and that she understood. That was the greeting sign, or some form of it. Cautious, she waved back. He smiled. She frowned, and spit. He laughed, and made a face. It was the first time she’d ever seen and heard laughter simultaneously, ever made the connection. It amazed her.

He dug into his belt, and she scrambled away, halfway into darkness. She stopped when he held out food, one of the square layered meals she’d seen and often stolen, cut into halves. He set down one half, and she advanced slowly, and took it, sniffed it. It was good. It tasted a little like something her mother had made.

They ate together, saying nothing. After he was done, he reached to his belt again, and took out a book. Her eyes widened, and she grabbed at it. The light was still too bright, and she squinted, and puzzled out the words on the cover: Escape From Killgrave Keep. They were strange words, but she knew them. She opened the book, reading greedily, avidly.

The boy tapped her on the arm, and she flinched; her first human contact in half a year. He held up a little square of metal, and the front of it glowed words at her: YOU CAN READ?

He showed her how to erase the words, write new ones. And she did, and gave it back to him.

YES.

Things got a lot easier from there.

That night, as Story helped him straighten the tent and fluff the cushions, Dent told his friend all about the girl in the vents.

“I congratulate you, young master,” Story said gently, his reference files indicating this was fairly common for children of Dent’s age and circumstance. “You have a magnificent imagination.”

“But she’s real, Story!” Dent pleaded, tugging at one of the same hands that had spent the afternoon trying to kill him. In the high ventilation duct that peered into the ceiling of his room, something rattled faintly. Dent looked up and waved again.

“See?” Dent said. “That’s her! I told you she was real!”

Story engaged his diplomacy protocols. “I’m certain that she must be,” he said, “but I am also certain that particular noise was not her. This is a very old palace, and sometimes, I am told, a stray pebble may get into the ducts.”

Dent looked up at the vent a minute more, squinting. He thought he could just about see the reflective gleam from a pair of small, strange eyes, looking back at him. Somehow, it made him feel less alone.

He let Story tuck him in, and switch off the light. And he lay there in the blue darkness of his tent, touching each of his treasures one by one with the tip of a finger. And when he finally shut his eyes to drift off to sleep, a single word escaped his lips, with a smile:

“Pebble.”

11. Sir Leslie Dines Out

2007-11-11T19:48:00.000-08:00

“Lights at no more than one-half intensity,” Quarrington Crouch began, absentmindedly swirling the ice cubes in his glass of Shantaram. In the seat opposite, his neatly groomed functionary, Syles, took diligent notes; outside the shuttle windows, distant stars slid lazily by.

“Genuine silver flatware only,” Crouch continued. “Nothing silver-plated, nothing imitation silver, not even the usual platinum we bring out for real company. I don’t know how, but he can tell, and he’s particular. Now. Call Llewelyn in Accounts. The sum is five million. He likes it in rubies — tell Llewelyn, the largest we’ve got. That goes in a velvet bag, and I don’t need to tell you it must be real velvet. The bag should be left on the floor, next to the front left leg of his chair.”

Crouch paused to drain his glass, then rattled the ice cubes again. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, half-absorbed in the plush leather chair. His dangling foot, exquisitely shod, bobbled to some anxious, uneven rhythm.

“Who’s the attendant?” Crouch asked. Syles checked his notes.

“George, sir.”

“George. Good man.” Crouch nodded in satisfaction. “He’ll need a rain slicker, typhoon-grade at least. Black, and tailored to fit. Call Cosgrove in Products; he’ll set it up. And ask for our best umbrella.”

“For George, sir?”

“For me,” Crouch said, unsmiling. “Also, the mirrors. Remove them all. Not just in the dining room, but the entire approach from the shuttlebay. Anything polished enough to get a good reflection — that goes, too.”

Syles nodded smartly, writing that down. Some men are paid too well to ask questions. Syles was paid too well to even want to.

“And the menu, sir?” Syles asked.

Crouch described it.

“Live, sir?” Syles asked, swallowing hard.

“That’s the way he likes it,” Crouch nodded.

“And for you, sir?”

Crouch just looked at him for a long moment, his gaze steely beneath well-groomed gray eyebrows. “I won’t be hungry,” he said at last.

“Docking in one, sir,” the captain’s voice came over the intercom. Crouch nodded and set down his empty glass, uncrossed his legs. He did not ask Syles to read anything back to him. He didn’t need to.

A slight tremor ran through the ship, and Crouch heard the airlock seal and begin to cycle. He rose, smoothing out the lines of his suit, lifting his chin to make fine, fastidious tugs at his cravat.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” Syles asked.

“Just that,” Crouch said, not looking back, on his way to the airlock. “Four hours, Syles.”

“Very good, sir,” the functionary replied.

The captain was waiting at the airlock. He tipped his cap in the proscribed manner, and wordlessly opened the hatch. Crouch stepped through into the dim hangar, the lights slowly rising to accommodate the adjustment of his eyes.

A full orchestra played a fanfare. As Crouch stood high on the shuttleway, at the top of the steps, the assembled employees of the Research & Development division began their carefully choreographed performance of the Crouch Industries Loyalty Song.

The shuttle was unnecessary, really. Quarrington Crouch lived on this very same vast ship, in private quarters at the opposite end. He could have walked here, had he wished. He simply believed in making an entrance.

After a long and arduous lifetime of hard work, careful negotiation, scrupulous ethics, and an unwavering commitment to quality, Quaverly Crouch had seen the company he founded, Crouch Industries, become one of the galaxy’s mightiest and most prosperous conglomerates. And then his son Quarrington shot him out an airlock into hard vacuum, laughing, and proceeded to take credit for it all.

As the orchestra discreetly packed up its instruments, and the employees filed out in neat rows to resume their duties, Crouch descended the stairs to the hangar deck. Not a bad performance, but he’d seen better; the synchronized back handsprings from some of the midlevel techs during the bridge had been subpar at best. Dr. Grolescht, plump and bald and cherry-cheeked, waddled into step beside him.

“I think you will be very pleased by these latest innovations,” Grolescht rumbled, in his comical gravel pit of a voice. “Very pleased, yes.”

“I always am, Doctor,” Crouch said, permitting himself a thin and measured smile.

Dr. Grolescht was the finest inventive mind in fifteen systems, which was why he worked for Crouch. In relation to his brilliance — and proven profitability — the matter of those tests he’d run on captured soldiers during the Second Galactic Conflict was trivial. Academic, really.

They passed first into Pharmaceuticals, where Grolescht stopped before a glass observation window. Peering past him, Crouch saw a wasteland of demolished children’s furniture, broken toys, and crayon-scribbled walls. In the center of the room, a small banquet of frosted puffcakes, candied starfruits, and other sweets had been thoroughly ravaged — but destroyed, not eaten. A dozen children sat, hunched, or huddled around the room, rocking and twitching, some tugging at their own hair.

“This is the chewable vitamins, here?” Crouch asked.

“Watch,” Grolescht said. Beyond the window, a door in one wall slid open. The children’s heads snapped up in unison, their eyes hungry.

A white-coated Crouch employee, wearing Crouch Industries Level 5 Riot Armor underneath, edged slowly into the room, carrying a plastic tray dotted with little white paper cups. Through a fixed and frightened smile, he started to say something to the children, inaudible on this side of the glass.

The next moment, he had vanished beneath a writhing, clawing mass of tiny limbs, all reaching for the tray and the little paper cups.

At last, the employee managed to crawl back through the door, sobbing, one of his arms dangling limply at his shoulder. Crouch watched the children bite and scratch at one another, scrabbling for the little colorful tablets that had scattered from the tray, stuffing them greedily into their mouths.

“I think,” Crouch said at last, “we may want to reduce their addictiveness in the next run. Slightly.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Grolescht nodded, polishing his big square glasses on the hem of his white coat.

They proceeded onward, to Playthings, where Grolescht demonstrated the latest revision to the popular Crouch Cuddly Cub personal automaton.

“As you can see from the charts,” Grolescht beamed, “we have reduced the likelihood of homicidal behavior to acceptable levels. The boys from branding suggest ‘Cuddly Cub Deluxe’ for the new model. We may perhaps give him a new hat, too.”

“Excellent, Doctor,” Crouch nodded, envisioning an ever-rising graph of revenue for the upcoming holiday quarter.

The review continued, through Housewares, Transport, Cosmetics, Bioweapons, Energy, and Bed & Bath. At each proposed product, Crouch would nod his approval or issuing a curt shake of his head. No to the flesh-eating nanovirus (insufficiently novel, and difficult to market). Yes to the line of scented candles (aromatherapy was in this year). Yes to the neuron disruptor rifle (the amusing way targets tended to waggle was a surefire word-of-mouth magnet). No to the Crouch Industries Aspira line of family spacecraft (until their distressing tendency to burn up on re-entry had been corrected).

Each of those small gestures triggered shockwaves through the whole of Crouch Industries. Before the day was through, 20,000 new employees would be hired, 30,000 others would be made redundant, 4.2 billion laurels (3.78 billion in FLAW coin, at the current exchange rate) would shift in a monetary tidal wave to and from the Crouch accounts, and at least one suddenly unemployed middle manager would end his life with a Crouch Personal Vaporizer for which, ironically, he had approved the packaging design.

At last, Grolescht led Crouch through a series of ever thicker, ever larger doors, submitting retina prints, hand scans, and DNA samples at each, until the two men stood alone in a darkened room of indeterminate size. It was the most densely shielded, best-guarded room in the whole of the Crouch Industries flagship, and for good reason.

“And finally we come to the BHB, sir,” Grolescht said. He gestured to a simple, nearly featureless metal cylinder on a lighted pedestal at the center of the room. It was encased in fist-thick Crouch Industries Dynaglass, upon which a tastefully printed sign had been affixed: DO NOT JOSTLE, PROD, OR BREATHE UPON.

“That’s the prototype?” Crouch asked, his eyes narrowing. Just looking at the thing made his ears ring with the jingling of phantom coins.

“One of two, yes,” Grolescht said, removing a remote control device from his pocket. He thumbed a button, and with a slight jitter of compression patterns, the two men were now standing in empty space, amid a vast field of frozen, floating garbage. The stars twinkled digitally. Crouch watched a nearby crumpled plastic box as it drifted past; it was a Crouch Industries Nutri-Os container, still bearing the promotional blurbs for the ill-fated launch of Cuddly Cub Mark I.

“One of our deep space dumping facilities,” Grolescht explained, though Crouch had recognized it at once. “Let me just zoom in here.” He worked the handheld controls with his thumb, and millions of light-years distant, a holographic camera probe moved in response, weaving through discarded chunks of old spacecraft and empty toothpaste tubes to the center of the garbage mass. There, perfectly motionless, floated another BHB.

“Now, we’ll switch to our other probe, out at the minimum safe distance,” Grolescht said, flicking another switch. Their surroundings jittered again, and the mass of garbage all around them became a small, swirling mass in the distance, multicolored dots dancing against the gray surface of the moon behind them.

“This is, of course, a radically scaled-down version,” Grolescht continued. “Just a test. With your permission?” Grolescht turned his soft, watery, pitiless eyes toward his boss. Crouch nodded. Grolescht pressed another button.

All sorts of interesting things happened next.

When interesting things finally stopped happening, Grolescht shut down the projection, returning them to the blank room with the other BHB.

“Well?” Grolescht asked. “Do we go into production?”

Crouch smiled. “Absolutely.” The vast engines of Crouch Industries began to mobilize. “But not quite yet.” The vast engines of Crouch Industries thought better of it, and went back to reading a magazine.

Crouch reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and consulted his chronometer. Four bells half, Imperium time. His guest would be here soon.

“Fine work, Doctor,” Crouch nodded, satisfied. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to dress for dinner.”

As five bells tolled through the whole of the Crouch Industries flagship, Quarrington Crouch made one last adjustment to his crisp black dinner cravat, pushed down the gaps between the fingers of his formal white gloves, and stepped into the dining room.

George was waiting, squeaky and faintly shining in his impeccably tailored slicker. He pulled out Crouch’s chair at the head of the long, candlelit dinner table, and held up a long, plump umbrella.

“Will you be need this now, sir?” George asked, as Crouch took his seat. Crouch checked the walls — good, no mirrors — and the ceiling, pleased to see the elaborate diamond chandelabras giving off only the faintest, most flattering light.

“Not yet, George,” Crouch said, unfolding his napkin and placing it in his lap. He poured himself a glass of wine from a bottle that had cost roughly as much as a small planet. “When I say so.”

In the stillness of the dining room, he waited.

The intercom crackled. “Mr. Crouch, sir?” The voice had a note of panic in it.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Surveillance just picked up a craft, sir, running dark, headed for us.”

“That’s my guest, Captain. Hold course and keep communications closed.”

“But sir, it’s a—”

“I know what it looks like, Captain,” Crouch sighed. Clearly, he wasn’t the only one who believed in making an entrance. “You have your orders.”

“Yes, sir.” The channel closed, and the room was silent, save for the occasional creak when George shifted his weight.

Crouch kept his eyes on the door at the opposite room, the one that led to the corridor that, in turn, led to the visitors’ airlock. The very one he’d pushed his father out of, funnily enough. Crouch swirled his wine up the walls of his glass and savored the nostalgia.

He heard the distant cycling of the airlock hiss, then the clack of the hatch as it swung open. Heavy boots trod upon carpeted floors, growing closer. Crouch took a deep breath and held it, like his therapist had advised, then let it out slowly, counting to three.

The door at the far side of the room opened.
“Quarry!” Sir Leslie Murther boomed, sweeping into the room on knee-high leather boots. His voice held prickly thistles, and windswept heath, and jagged cairns of rock. “It’s been an age and then!”

“Sir Leslie,” Crouch smiled graciously, raising his wine glass in salute. “So glad you could make it. Wine?”

“The finest vintage, knowing you,” Sir Leslie burred. He laughed, sending undulations through his lustrous, shoulder-length black hair and thick, curling black beard. The frills of white lace at his cuffs and the neck of his shirt exploded like nebulae against the deep, severe black of his silk jacket, vest, and breeches. He unslung a polished cutlass, scabbard studded in jewels, and hung it daintily on the high back of his chair, at the opposite end of the table from Crouch, before taking a seat.

Crouch waited as Sir Leslie, eyes remaining fixed on his host, slowly reached down to the left front leg of his chair. Something jingled through what sounded like velvet. Sir Leslie sat up straight again, making something vanish from his left hand into his vest pocket, and swept a tangling thread of hair from his eyes with one toss of his head.

“I trust everything’s in order?” Crouch asked.

“I wouldn’t think to count it,” Sir Leslie smiled, closedmouthed, “on account of our long acquaintance.”

“George, pour Sir Leslie a glass,” Crouch nodded, and George squeaked steadily but uncertainly over with the bottle. Sir Leslie waited, the empty class outstretched in one perfectly manicured hand, until George had filled it nearly to the top.

“Hmm,” Sir Leslie mused, nostrils flaring as he inhaled the wine’s delicate bouquet. “Aromas of clementine rose and pepperfruit.” He sipped, delicately. “Yes, pepperfruit, and… jasmine, with wonderfully earthy legs. And… why, Quarry, you old dog! I do believe just a wee dram of blood at the finish. O negative, by the tang of it.”

“A perfect palate, as ever, Sir Leslie,” Crouch smiled, and drank one measured mouthful.

Sir Leslie took a hearty swig of the wine, and dabbed discreetly at his lips with a delicate lace handkerchief. Fine white scars of no more than a hair’s width, dozens of them, crisscrossed his lips in every direction.

“What shall we toast to, then?” Sir Leslie asked, candlelight dancing in the black pits of his eyes.

“To opportunity,” Crouch said, raising his glass high.

“To opportunity,” Sir Leslie agreed, and took another quaff. “And what might this opportunity be?”

“I’m reliably informed,” Crouch said, “that our friends in the FLAW are missing a spacecraft. Experimental. Incalculably valuable.”

Sir Leslie’s eyelids lowered to half mast, taking the thick, black caterpillars of his eyebrows down with them. “I sense my time being wasted already, Quarry,” he said, the rolling r’s in his speech shifting toward the territory of a growl.

“Impatient as always, Sir Leslie,” Crouch said, and sipped his wine again. “I’m also reliably informed that this same missing craft made a successful raid on the Imperial Palace last evenside.”

Sir Leslie let loose a round, barking laugh. “Now you’re telling me fairy-stories,” he said, and finished his wine. He motioned to George for more, and Crouch nodded assent. “There’s no one getting past that grid of satellites.”

“I know,” Crouch nodded. “They’re my manufacture. The Imperium is keeping this all hush, understandably. But I am assured that the craft did breach Imperial atmosphere, did reach the palace, and did escape — with the family’s youngest child.”

At the mention of “child,” Sir Leslie froze, his glass midway to his lips. He lowered the wineglass slowly, and turned to meet Crouch’s unwavering gaze.

“Oh yes,” Crouch said, settling back in the chair. He had a captive audience now, and he knew it. “Or didn’t you know? A boy of about ten. Ten’s a good age, I understand; still some baby fat, but plenty of lean muscle, too.”

“Succulent,” Sir Leslie all but whispered, a strange gleam in his eye.

“And an Imperial child,” Crouch continued, matter-of-factly, “fed only the finest foods from birth, in the very pink of health…”

Sir Leslie seemed lost in thought. In the candlelight, something gleamed at the corner of his mouth — a growing dribble of salivation. After several seconds, he shook his great, lustrous head as if to clear it, and hastily dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief.

“Been a while for you, has it?” Crouch asked dryly.

“Near a year,” Sir Leslie agreed, hastily drinking more wine. “And a gray and tasteless stretch it’s been. What’s your proposition, then, Quarry?”

“If the FLAW were to believe that the Imperium had stolen their little prize,” Crouch said, leaning forward, “and if the Imperium were to hold the FLAW responsible for, say, the spilling of Imperial blood…”

“The right man could make out kingly from such circumstances,” Sir Leslie nodded, one great burly hand stroking at his beard thoughtfully.

“Indeed he could,” Crouch said. “From those circumstances, and logical consequences of them…”

“And the boy?” Sir Leslie asked.

“I leave that to you,” Crouch smiled, spreading his hands graciously. “And your personal chefs.”

“I’ve been thinking a nice fricasse,” Sir Leslie mused, dreamily. “With perhaps a stew from the leavings. A good stew, yes. Keeps well in cold storage.”

On his mental to-do list, Crouch took great satisfaction in checking off yet another box. “Shall we discuss the particulars later, over brandy and cigars?” he said. “I’d hate to keep your appetite waiting long.”

Sir Leslie chuckled again, low and hungry. “A gracious host and true you are, Quarry. I’m famished to eat the stars.”

“I must apologize,” Crouch said, discreetly signaling to George, who squeaked over to the hidden elevator in the wall. “Given short notice, I was unable to procure your favorite dish. The selection available was … subpar, decidedly. And I wouldn’t insult you with a clone.”

“Aye,” Sir Leslie conceded. “Natural and organic only. A man must watch his diet.”

“You’ve never looked better, Sir Leslie,” Crouch said. “I hope you’ll find this an acceptable substitute.” George wheeled a large metal cart, its roughly cubical contents draped in a sheet, off the elevator. With a slight effort, George manuevered the cart down the length of the table to rest next to Sir Leslie’s place. With a flourish, George whisked the sheet off.

Three young lambs, tottering on tender legs, began to bleat in terror from within their steel cage.

“Oh, this will do,” Sir Leslie said with relish. “This will just do indeed.” And for the first time, he smiled with his mouth open. His pointed teeth, every one a diamond, gleamed sharp as razors in the candlelight.

A high, trilling whine reached Crouch’s ears across the distance of the table; that would be the built-in vibration, he knew. For easier cutting.

Sir Leslie tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt, and reached for the door to the cage. The lambs bleated louder and louder.

Crouch looked up to see George at his side, the attendant’s face drawn and bloodless, his eyes locked on the opposite end of the table.

“Open the umbrella, George,” Crouch said, quietly but urgently. He pushed his chair back from the table an inch or so. “Open the umbrella now.”

10. The Empire Abides

2007-11-10T20:51:00.000-08:00

“Ruined,” the Empress said, holding up one cracked crescent moon of a dinner plate.

“Majesty,” said Janos of the Midnight Guard, through chattering teeth. Night brought chill ocean winds rushing across the veranda and the palace’s roof. “Let the servants attend this. We are too exposed here. Not safe.”

If the Empress felt the cold, she did not show it. “This was Mother’s favorite pattern,” she sighed. “I had to poison three of my sisters to get it. Utterly irreplaceable.” She let the dish drop and shatter to the deck with the rest of its brethren. The brittle stump where the dining table had been ripped away rose pathetic and forlorn, a foothill amid flatlands of broken porcelain.

Janos thought he knew what this was about. “We will find your child, Majesty, and return him safely.” Alas, he had been hired more for his effective strangulation technique than his psychological insight.

“Did I say anything about my child?” the Empress said, without looking at him. She stooped, and sifted through the clinking, clattering wreckage with one long, cautious hand. “Children are what my father called a risk-reward proposition,” she said. “The more you have, the greater your chances that one enough will get greedy for the throne, and knock you off in your sleep. I’ve always regretted not stopping at two.”

She found an intact saucer, and stood, shaking bits of debris off it. In the light from the algae globes, she studied the fine pattern painted under the glazing. “Time was, you paid good money for a well-executed kidnapping. I should be thanking this Captain Corsair for taking him off our hands for free.”

With a little sigh, she flung the saucer over the railing, and into the sea. She’d never liked the pattern anyway. She’d simply wanted it to be hers.

“You can always make more children,” the Empress said. “Good china is irreplaceable.”

Janos escorted her back to the pneumovator, eyes always roving for threats. Even here. In the shadows, somewhere on this deck, two of his men also stood guard. If he’d known where they were, they wouldn’t have been his men.

“Janos,” the Empress said, just before she stepped into the capsule.

“Yes, Majesty?”

“Do not presume to know my heart,” the Empress told him, each word freezing in the air.

What heart?, thought Janos.

But the Empress was right, in a way. No one knew her heart. Not even the Empress herself.

The tigerleech’s carcass twitched once, twice. It rose into the air and flopped over, and from beneath, slick with its entrails, Pugio Magnificus rose.

“Again,” he said to Maurice and the empty arena.

“But Majesty,” the trainer began, pointing to the bandage still wound around Pug’s head.

“Again!” Pug bellowed, driving his spearpoint nearly a foot into the sand at his feet.

“Majesty, we’re…” Maurice wondered how best to phrase this. “We’re all out.” He gestured around him, to the bloodied piles of hooved, horned, fanged, winged, scaled, clawed, taloned, venomous, and occasionally just plain unlucky beasts steadily staining the arena floor. Flies had begun to gather, and invite their friends. “Zoomaster Genus says he can get another shipment by twelve bells dayside tomorrow.”

“Then bring up the garrison,” Pug grunted. “I’m not done.”

“Two-thirds of the garrison are on high alert,” Maurice said, “with the other third on enforced rest.” Which was a shame, he thought, as Maurice could really have gone for a steam bath about now. “And none of them would particularly like to be killed by you.”

Pug gritted his teeth. The big woman in the coveralls had set up residence in Pug’s head, and no amount of combat could get her to leave. Usually, when he was upset, high tea with his usual guests would calm him down. Now he just wanted to hit things, and break things, and pick things up and throw them around.

These were not the exact biological instructions his body was sending him, but they were the best translation Pug’s brain could muster.

“She got a lucky shot in, Majesty,” Maurice ventured, cautiously. “It happens. I always said, girls — nothin’ more dangerous in the galaxy. You just get some sleep, maybe. Things’ll shake out in the morning.”

That copper hair, Pug thought. The slither of muscles beneath the skin of her arms. Her flawless technique with a hammer.

“The nautatorium,” Pug said, not so much to Maurice, but more in his general direction. He smeared guts from at least one animal off the front of his tunic. “I should go there. Yes. Clean. I need to clean off.”

“I’ll tell them to warm up the pool,” Maurice nodded.

“No!” Pug interrupted, a bit too quickly. In a curiously strangled voice, he added, “Cold. It should be cold. I want very cold water. Please.”

And without another word, Pug began walking very quickly toward the readiness rooms, his head down and his eyes on the dirt.

Maurice’s ghosts had all sorts of interesting observations about this. He told them, as always, to shut up.

“What are you wearing now?” her mother had asked, with the strong implication that it was the latest in a long line of terrible decisions.

“Oh,” she had said. “He… he said I… um… looked cold.” Her mother’s eyes had bored through her for a very long moment. It made the throbbing pain in her ankle, twisted during the fight, suddenly seem almost pleasant.

“Burn it, for Pantheon’s sake,” her mother had said at last, shying away. “It almost certainly has… diseases.”

But Lis hadn’t. She couldn’t. It was a soft cloak, and warm. It smelled like orange blossoms. And when she wrapped herself in it, she felt blessedly invisible.

“My regrets, Your Majesty,” yawned Librarian Glew, emerging from the shadowed stacks with an upraised algae-globe. He’d been awakened from a particularly lovely dream about dictionaries for this, and was eager to get back to it. “I can assure you, you’ve read every book there we have on, er, that particular subject.”

“Are there more?” Lis asked. “Could we send for more?”

“Yes, Majesty,” the Librarian nodded, sleepily, “but to be honest, I doubt they’d tell you anything you haven’t already discovered. From reading or… ah… experience.”

“But there has to be something,” Lis protested. “I can’t have… gaps in my understanding. It doesn’t befit the Ministress of Love! It’s unbefitting!”

Librarian Glew, being a man of words, knew he had to phrase this carefully. “If you could perhaps… elaborate on the, ah, the specifics of what you wish to know. Not in any, er, sordid or prying sense, of course. I mean intellectually speaking.”

Lis thought hard. For once, her tongue could offer nothing to this particular challenge.

“It’s something like… when someone does something nice for you, and you didn’t want them to,” she attempted. “And you kind of hate them, and you’re infuriated. And you can’t stop thinking about how much you’re infuriated, to the point where you kind of… don’t want to not be infuriated? Maybe?”

It took even Librarian Glew a few seconds to parse that. He looked at the red flush rising on Lis’s cheeks, visible even in the greenish light of the algae-lantern. He saw the way her fingers kept straying toward the rose blossom still clinging to her … to the… to her garments, Glew decided was the most appropriate term. (“Cleverly arranged tiny bits of fabric, and also some chains” seemed indecorous.)

The corners of his mouth curled up slightly, like pages fluttered in a breeze. He held up one finger, asking Her Majesty’s patience, and vanished into the stacks.

A click or so later, he came bobbing out of the darkness, blowing a thick layer of dust off an equally thick, gilt-bound volume.

“I believe this may prove enlightening, Majesty,” he said gently, handing the book over. In the algaelight, the letters on the cover glimmered: Poems of Love, by Jahlil Al-Khabahti. “One of the great discourses on the subject in question.”

Lis flipped it open, impatient. Her brow furrowed, and she looked up. “There aren’t diagrams. Should there be diagrams?”

“Not in this field, I’m afraid,” Glew said, dutifully not smiling. “But as a young man, I found this particular book very, ah, very educational.” That ravishing young clerk at the Bibliocademy, so many years gone, pinning her hair up teasingly, a finger vertical across her lips. The smell of binding glue and old paper, sweeter than perfume. It took a moment for Glew’s eyes to refocus.

“Give it a chance, Majesty,” he added hastily, as if trying to catch up with his train of thought. “I have further volumes in this field, should you require them.”

Lis looked again, traced the lines with her finger. Her lips moved soundlessly, reading inside her head. She stopped, and looked at the page quizzically, intrigued. Then she slowly folded the book to her chest, and drew herself up, authoritarian once more. “Thank you, Librarian,” she nodded. “That will be all.”

“Good night, Majesty” the Librarian nodded, and headed back up the ladder to his hammock, slung between the end of History and the beginning of Science.

Lis walked very slowly, very carefully, very inconspicuously, favoring her wrapped ankle. She went out of the library, and up the pneumovator, and back to her chambers, the book encircled in her arms all the while. The rose against her collarbone purred softly.

The Emperor stood, scarlet just beginning to fade from his face, his knuckles white where he’d slammed his fist down against the surface of his desk. The bones of his hand began to throb from the impact.

“Read it back to me,” he said, slightly hoarse from the preceding shouting.

“Majesty,” said Guard Captain Rendell. He cleared his throat. “Drawn, quartered, disemboweled, racked, hanged, shot—”

“Bludgeoned,” the Emperor said darkly, working the flesh of his pained hand with thumb and forefinger. “Bludgeoned goes between ‘hanged’ and ‘shot.’”

“… Hanged, bludgeoned, shot, boiled, decapitated, skeletonized, and the skull made into a trophy for elderly ninepin players,” Rendell finished.

“Incontinent elderly ninepin players,” the Emperor added.

“So noted, Majesty,” Guard Captain Rendell nodded.

“Good. Send it out to all Guard stations and Corps divisions in the whole of the Imperium,” the Emperor said, letting himself sink back into his chair. “By the Gods, Rendell, if I’d been ten years younger. The gall of that… that savage. To compromise us so.”

“We have technicians working now on every satellite in the grid,” Rendell said. “If there was sabotage, or malfunction — even a stray meteor — we’ll find it and fix it. Air Marshall Vliet and her squadron are running constant patrols until they do. Farther out, I have the Imperial Navy on high alert; by eight bells dayside here, they’ll be fully mobilized. Descriptions and imagery of the craft are out on the network. We’ll find that ship, Majesty.”

“No quarter, Rendell,” the Emperor said, swiveling back and forth in his chair. “Any soul who sights that ship is to blow it from the stars.”

“After your son is retrieved,” Rendell added, slowly. “Am I correct in that, Majesty? The ship should be destroyed after His Young Majesty has been secured?”

The Emperor blinked, meeting Rendell’s steady, obedient gaze. “Yes,” the Emperor said. “Yes, of course.”

“Very good, Majesty.” Rendell paused, his posture straightening. “There is also the matter of my failure, sir. My squad had the intruder. I allowed him to escape. I take full charge for his. If you wish my commission… if you wish my life…”

The Emperor shook his head. “After you carried me through the rain at Pellephon Heights? No, Rendell. You safeguarded Imperial blood, then and tonight. You did your duty.”

“With pleasure, Majesty,” Rendell said, bowing.

“Do you ever miss it, Rendell?” the Emperor asked softly. He was staring at his model of Echo Hill. The trees on the ridgeline didn’t seem quite right, he thought. “It all seemed so simple. So clear.”

Rendell met his gaze, and for a moment, in the strangeness of the other man’s expression, the Emperor felt as if he and the Guard Captain were staring at one another through powerful telescopes, half a planet apart.

“I try not to think of it at all, Majesty,” Rendell said at last.

“Dismissed, Captain,” the Emperor said, waving his hand. Rendell bowed smartly, and left him alone.

The Emperor wandered out from behind his desk to once more study the model, wondering if he should summon some ice for his rapidly bruising hand. He found himself, in minature, halfway up the hill, holding a tiny painted banner and the half-defined nub of a rifle. For once, the undisputed ruler of the Grand Galactic Imperium, in his seashell palace, on his private planet, at the heart of his galaxy, felt very small indeed.

And then his eyes happened to stray to the edge of the model, to the single tree at the base of the hill. And the Emperor realized that something was missing.

9. The Bearer of Bad News

2007-11-09T21:36:00.001-08:00

A great many people wanted Griswold. He had standing invitations from twelve systems to spend the rest of his life in a tiny, windowless cell, at their expense. Three more wished to reduce him to his component atoms; methods varied, from “swift and painless” to “protracted and messy” to “too horrible to describe, but as a hint, hungry dogs are involved.” And he was the only sentient being in the known universe to have received a lifetime ban from the Library of Suffering, on account of late fees running into the nine figures. Rumor had it he had eaten the books.

Griswold had left a livid, zigzagging wound across the galaxy in his fifty-three years of drawing breath (and relieving others of the burden of same). In the highest towers of civilized society, mothers frightened their children to sleep with tales of him. In countless scummy dive bars on backwater moons, or ore-trading stations, or the bellies of derelict floating freighters, merely saying his name was an invitation to a hasty, artless, and often fatal stabbing on the part of the patrons.

Right now, Griswold was busy feeding the goats.

“There’th a good Billy,” he said, in the high, mild voice that had lured so many into a false sense of security. He leaned over the low wooden railing and tossed another handful of chow pellets into the sawdust. The goats bleated, hairy chinny chin chins quivering, and trotted over to investigate.

As a child, more than a century previous, the future Emperor Prolixus II had been taken to a petting zoo for some innocent fun on his sixth birthday. Tragically, a confused sheep had nipped him on the fingers, forever traumatizing the boy. Enraged, his father, His Majesty the Emperor Inconsolus, ordered all petting zoos forever banished from the whole of the Grand Galactic Imperium.

But some owners resisted the ban, and some otherwise loyal subjects found themselves still interested in feeding small, domesticated livestock at a reasonably safe distance. The petting zoo, as an institution, went underground throughout the whole of the Empire. Over time, the demographics of their clientele shifted toward the criminal, until “pet the llama” became common slang for the planning or perpetration of mishchief.

Ironically, Prolixus II ultimately died after choking on a particularly large bite of mutton.

This particular petting zoo, nestled in the hollow core of a mined-out asteroid not far from the Borderlands, was a favorite of Griswold’s. Its periphery was devoted to flophouses, seedy bars, and other such low establishments. But in its center, tier after tier offered a thorough selection of pettable creatures and coin-operated feed machines. Over the years, it had proved a reliable place to lay low after Griswold’s latest bit of mayhem, and make the necessary connections to set up the next one. Also, he liked the goats, with their weird sideways pupils and their nuzzly mouths.

“Beautiful animals, aren’t they?” came a soft voice to Griswold’s left. He turned his scarred, lumpy face slowly in that direction, eyes trailing along the wooden railing, to see a slender man in a long traveling coat standing a calculated distance away.

He seemed a young man — indeed, must have been, from the shape of him. But his blonde hair hung ragged and unkempt, down to his neck, and his pale, deeply lined face, stippled with fine golden stubble, seemed much older than the rest of him. Neat round spectacles, slightly bent, sat on the bridge on his long, slim nose, which bore the kinks and corners of at least two breaks. His brown eyes were clear and steady, and as the goats cantered up to nibble pellets from his outstretched palm, a slow, sad smile stretched the corners of his mouth.

“I thupothe,” Grisworld ventured. Subsets of the many, many people he did not like included Men With Glasses, Men With Sad Eyes, and Men Who Smiled. In the Venn diagram in Griswold’s head, the intersection of these three sets was colored deep bloody red. His thick, perpetually stained right hand crawled slowly down his hip, to the ten-inch knife holstered there.

“I hear you’re a man to see,” the young man told Griswold. This was true; indeed, Griswold was the last man a great many people ever saw.

“Dependth,” Griswold shrugged, the sibilant syllable whistling slightly through the gap in his filed, sharpened front teeth. “What ith it you want to thee?”

“A starship,” the slender man said. Griswold tittered, high and girlishly, with a bit of a honk at the end.

“You theem to have mithtaken me for a common thief,” Griswold said. There was a thin layer of rat poison beneath the pink buttercream frosting of his voice. “Hot thtarshipth are ten laurelth for the dothen here. But thothe cardth don’t cut with me.”

Behind the two men, figures began to drift away from the llama pen, the border collie cage, the marmoset bubble. Griswold’s gang. Billy Knives, middle and ring fingers pressed to his palms to fondle the handles of the stilletos he kept up both sleeves. Jimmy the Hat, whistling a jaunty tune in his stovepipe chapeau, hands supiciously in his pockets. Almanac, stroking the cover of the blank-paged book he insisted held the names of life and death.

If he noticed them forming a slow, vulturish circle at his back, the slender man gave no sign. He just looked up at Griswold in that gentle, mournful way, as if he were partial to some secret that poor slow Griswold would never grasp.

“You misunderstand, sir,” the slender man said. His voice had a bit of a twang in it. The distant flavor of gentility. “Your reputation’s only too well known. No three-spoke vessel-jack, you. Wouldn’t dream of wasting your time like that. I’m here to trade on your eyes and ears.”

“Spoken for,” Griswold chuckled, unkindly. “Promithed ‘em to the Academy for Deviant Thience a tenyear back. Along with the brain.”

Griswold’s gang was now nearly close enough to brush against the slender man, close enough that he’d surely feel their hot, hungry breath. But he just kept smiling, steady and even. It occurred to Griswold that this man was either very stupid, or very not.

“No, sir,” the slender man laughed. “I don’t refer to the anatomical sense. By the way, trust me when I say that you gentlemen behind me would all be well served by taking one big step back.”

“And why’s that?” sneered Jimmy the Hat, hands shifting in his pockets. The slender man turned and looked at them each in turn, and smiled that sad, sad smile.

“Because I’m asking you nicely,” he said.

All three men took a step back. If you’d asked them, none could have told you why.

The slender man returned his gaze to Griswold, his smile seeming to say, interruptions — what can you do?

“You’d know this craft if you laid eyes on,” the slender man continued. “Skinny sharp nose to her, like that pigsticker on your hip you’ve had your hand on for the last click and a half. No markings, no colors. No pluslight engines on the back of her. She vanished from Bennington Yards ten turns or so back, not a sign, not a trace.”

“Bennington Yardth,” Griswold said, chewing on the thought. His hand did not move from the knife. “Other thide of the Line, then.”

“It would seem so, yes,” the slender man nodded. He tossed another handful of pellets to the goats.

“Thupothe I did hear thomething,” Griswold shrugged, leaning over the rail to scratch a young kid just behind the nubs of its horns. “What would it get me?”

“Gratitude,” the slender man offered. “Of the jingling, heavy, shiny sort.”

“How much gratitude?” Griswold asked.

“I’m a very grateful soul,” the slender man said. “And prepared to be so right this very moment, if so moved.”

A slow, ugly smile cracked and spread its way out to the edges of Griswold’s face. The slender man looked him in the eye and smiled back, in that distant, melancholy way.

His traveling cloak swirled, crisp gray and grimson blurring underneath. A wide arc of silver gleamed, traversing Billy Knives and his upraised stilletos, Almanac and the zap-gun he kept in his hollowed-out book, and Jimmy the Hat, his hands outstretched, his favorite Hangtown Necktie looped loosely around each set of knuckles.

Billy fell into halves. Almanac sank to his knees, the story of his life spilling red onto his book’s empty pages, and pitched sideways. Jimmy’s hat fell off, and took his head mostly with it.

“Perdition’th Horn,” Griswold swore softly, his face contorting so that all its scars turned exclamation points.

“Josiah Crestfall, by name,” the slender man said to him, by way of introduction. “Commodore, if you wish to be formal.”

Crestfall brought his outstretched right arm back the way it had come, and the sword he held — flat and broad as a dinner plate, half his own height, a rainbow corona shimmering at its cutting edge, as if the light itself cleaved around it — followed. Engraved in its surface, Griswold could see two words, seven letters total, in graceful, looping script.

“The bearer of Bad News,” Commodore Crestfall concluded.

“Beads of sweat emerged at the base of Griswold’s skull, and began to trickle slippery down the back of his neck. The goats began to bleat, agitated.

“Jutht a rumor,” Griswold said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “About your thtarship. I heard thome thuithidal idiot wath planning a job on the Imperial Palath. Ath if the thatelliteth wouldn’t get him. He’th thurely vapor by now.”

“Perhaps he is,” Crestfall said, nudging his spectacles back into place on the bridge of his nose. “This suicidal idiot has name, I trust?”

“Thomething long. Fanthy. Thounded like a Cathtellan,” Griswold said, wracking his memory vainly for particulars.

Crestfall seemed to absorb all this information, file it away somewhere deep behind his eyes. Then he blinked once, and smiled gently at Griswold, or rather kept smiling.

“Most helpful of you, sir,” Crestfall said, and nodded curtly.

“I thupothe…” Griswold ventured, pressing his luck. “That gratitude you menthioned?” He giggled again, nervously. But the laugh died in the back of his throat as he saw Crestfall’s eyes turn mournful, and his smile wane apologetically.

“Gorden Geranium Griswold,” Crestfall said, shaking his head slowly, “you are wanted by the Federated League of Allied Worlds on fifteen counts of slaughter, thirty-two counts of gross damage to individual ownings, and one count of indecent acts with a public artwork.” He moved forward, his cloak flowing open, revealing the crisp red-and-gray uniform of the FLAW military, and a chest starred with whole constellations of bright medals and decorations. “As a sworn officer in the National Fleet, I hereby bind you by law. Sorry to tell.”

The knife left Griswold’s hip, rose high in the air. Griswold threw himself at Crestfall, desperate, his left hand closing around the Commodore’s throat. The men fell into the mud, Griswold using his left elbow to pin Crestfall’s sword arm where it lay. He plunged the knife down at Crestfall’s heart.

It stopped an inch or so above the target, wavering, pushed back by some invisible fluid force. Griswold could feel the steel of the blade quivering in his grip.

Beneath his left thumb, where Crestfall’s pulse ought to have fluttered frantic in his jugular, he felt only a low, steady hum.

“Really wish you hadn’t done that,” Crestfall grunted, gripping Griswold’s knife hand at the wrist and steadily pushing the man up and away from him. Griswold struggled, but Crestfall’s sword arm slowly rose from the mud, and with it the blade glimmering and deadly…

“Academy for Deviant Science, yes?” Crestfall asked him, the smile faded, and only his sad eyes staring out from that young old handsome face. “I’ll see they get what you promised them,” Crestfall said. “Word as oath.”

In a few seconds more, it was finished. The goats huddled bleating and fearful at the far side of their pen. Commodore Crestfall rose, shaking the mud off his cloak, and slid Bad News back into its scabbard. He made signs of prayer, slow and personal, over all he’d done, and moved his lips in request of forgiveness.

The Commodore’s scoutcraft was small, and inconspicuous, and far from lush — all exactly as Crestfall wished it. And when it had cleared the asteroid zoo’s orbit, and entered pluslight, Borderland bound and beyond, the Commodore opened a channel to central. The familiar ring of twelve lights winked into view on the screen, twelve voices speaking to him as one.

“Progress, Commodore?” the Duly Elected asked.

“Got something for the law boys, sirs” Crestfall nodded solemnly. “Back in the cold storage.”

“And the craft?” the voice continued, young and old, male and female, gray and solid and indistinguishable.

“Nothing good, if it’s true,” Corsair sighed. “The word is Imperium, sirs. Right to the central planet.”

“You suspect a plan by the Imperium, then?” came a voice, older, possibly male. One of the twelve lights momentarily glowed brighter. “To steal the craft in secret?”

“Suspicion is your province, sirs,” Corsair said, and meant it. “I only report.”

“We’ll make ready the fleet,” the Duly Elected continued, one voice again, “and await further. You serve us well, Commodore.”

“With all my heart,” the Commodore said. He could not keep a twist of bitterness from his lips or his words.

The screen went black without further communication.

Josiah Crestfall exhaled, leaning back in his chair. His heart did not beat quickly in fear or triumph, nor slowly in contemplation. His heart did not beat at all. And the medals on his chest felt heavy as the whole of a planet.

8. Space Pirates!

2007-11-08T21:20:00.000-08:00

The Empress’s laugh, dry and restrained though it might have been, broke all previous personal records in its duration. Despite Captain Corsair’s sword at her throat, her laughter continued for a solid fifteen and a half seconds. Had he been there to hear and measure it for posterity, Spymaster Harme would have entirely swept the staff pool on the subject, and pocketed a tidy fortune.

Captain Corsair’s own smile did not waver in the slightest; courteous to a fault, he joined in, prompting a few nervous chuckles out of Pug and Lis. Dent felt slightly disturbed, never having heard his mother laugh before, and guessing that it portended nothing good.

At last, the Empress’s laughter trailed off into a mild cough.

“Are you quite finished, Your Majesty?” Captain Corsair enquired graciously.

“Quite, yes,” the Empress said, and cleared her throat. “Guard?” she said, in a loud, clear voice.

Captain Corsair looked hurt. “Just one?” he asked her. “Singular?”

“Pace yourself,” the Empress smirked.

A hatch opened seamlessly in the flooring between the pneumovators and the table. With a blast of air, an armored guardsman from the elite corps of the Imperial garrison flew upward, landing at a run on the deck, short sword in one hand, repeating pistol raised in the other.

Captain Corsair’s metal hand flashed. Something spun, glittering, through the air, lodging in the barrel of the guardsman’s gun. Without pausing, the guardsman flung the pistol aside and leaped past the Emperor, onto the table.

Corpsman training dictates, in these situations, that your enemy will almost certainly turn to engage you directly. Captain Corsair did not.

He sidestepped the guardsman, leaving only one outstretched leg in his opponent’s path, and the guardsman flailed. Losing his grip on his sword, he pitched forward into the bowl of tuber mash and a deep, lasting unconsciousness, entirely ruining any hope of a good annual performance review. Corsair snatched the guardsman’s short sword from the air and tested its weight in his metal hand, appraisingly.

“Good balance, excellent heft,” he frowned, “and oh! The filigree on the haft. Exquisite!” He smiled to the Emperor. “You will not mind if I perhaps keep this?”

“Guards!” bellowed the Emperor.

“Ah, plural!” Corsair beamed. “I see I am moving up in the world.”

“Briefly, I think,” the Empress said, as her husband fumed. “And not very far.”

Dent sat back down and tucked his feet up on his chair, wondering how long he could go without blinking. He did not want to miss a second of this.

More tubes opened in the floor of the deck, guards rocketing up in neat formation. In moments, seven guardsmen stood, pistols poised, swords ready.

“Holster your firearms!” the Emperor shouted. “And by all the gods, will someone hand me a sword?”

“Ah, but your highness!” Captain Corsair sighed. “I do not wish to fight you.” The Emperor’s chest puffed in haughty pride.

“Why, coward?” the Emperor asked. “Afraid to lose?”

“I am afraid of nothing,” Corsair replied coolly. “It would merely be the height of discourtesy to best you.”

The Emperor turned a deep shade of scarlet, and slowly stepped to one side, toward his wife. “Guards,” he said through clenched teeth, “leave not enough of him to full a bucket.”

The guards charged.

“Your Majesty,” Corsair bowed quickly to the Empress, “if you will excuse me for a moment.”

The captain turned, with a swirl of his cloak, and brought both flashing blades to bear against the upraised sabers of the guards. Metal clashed with metal. The deck sang as a guardsman caught Corsair’s boot on his chin and crashed backward in full armor. Above the clatter of swords, Corsair’s laugh rang out clear and true.

He parried the thrust of one guardsman with the short sword, then brought the heavy butt of his own saber clanging against the side of the man’s helmet, knocking him senseless. Leaping forward off the table, he turned a somersault in the air, driving the guards back against the edge of the table.

The Emperor snatched up a sword and surged forward, crying havoc. Pug, feeling left out, made a hasty assessment of the tableware, chose a particularly sturdy ladle, and clambered up across the table, through the platter of kale greens, to join the fight.

Dent nearly passed out, and then remembered that he ought to breathe.

A bold swing by Corsair sent the guardsmen scattering, stumbling into one another. They were the finest soldiers in the Empire — but this was the palace’s first incursion in more than a century, and they were trained to fight armies, not a single man.

The captain turned, raising his short sword to parry the swing of Pug’s ladle, even as his saber blocked the Emperor’s cunning slash from the opposite direction.

“You fight well!” Corsair grinned to the Emperor, dodging Pug’s fist. “And your son, he is magnificently trained! You should be proud.”

“You should be dead,” the Emperor huffed back, the sword feeling considerably heavier in his hands than he remembered it.

“Ah, but I have so very little to lose,” Corsair said, “and you? You have all these wonderful things.”

“Enough,” the Empress sighed, still dabbing at the stain on her dress. Washmaster Scower would have his work cut out for him, certainly. “Robots,” she called out.

“Robots?” Corsair frowned, deftly stepping aside to let Pug’s ladle and the Emperor’s sword collide with one another. “Your highness! Truly, you insult me!”

The entire palace rumbled. Trails of smoke and fire launched from far below, near the palace’s base. They soared upward, high above the palace roof in blazing parabolas, and began to descend.

Dent snuck a yeast-bun from the scattered mess of the table and munched on it avidly. This just kept getting better and better.

The assorted guardsmen scrambled to their feet and flattened themselves against the veranda railing, and even the Emperor and Pug stepped back. Even the Empress took the precaution of steadying her wig.

At twenty feet tall and two thousand stone, a single Crouch Industries Sentry-class Arsenal Drone could punch through the hull of an Imperial Dreadnought without scratching the finish on its enormous spiked knuckles. Its impressive color brochure, for prospective buyers, advertised that one was sufficient to destroy an entire city. Two, if they were smallish. The Imperium’s Official Writ of Military Tactics’ entry for combating an Arsenal Drone was, in its entirety, “Don’t.”

Two of them touched down on the veranda, gentle as a kiss, and turned the flat, armor-plated bulk of their blank metal faces toward Corsair. Clever compartments unfolded in their arms, and a simply embarrassing number of guns emerged, all pointed at him.

“I am now somewhat less insulted,” the captain re-evaluated. He put two fingers to his lips and whistled up toward the craft behind him.

“Bosun Little!” Captain Corsair called. “If you would be so kind!”

Seven feet and three hundred pounds of solid muscle hurled herself from the open hatch of the intruding ship, toward the head of the nearest Drone.

Bosun Little landed nimbly on the bot’s shoulders, adjusted her grip on the weapon in her hands, and lifted it high above her head with arms the diameter of small artillery cannons. The pole was nearly as tall as she was, with a half-moon blade shining on one end and a thick block of stone on the other. And when she brought the hammer end down with a flash of copper-colored hair an ear-splitting clang, the Arsenal Drone’s head promptly vanished, replaced by a deep divot directly between its shoulders.

Dent whooped in delight, and then clapped both hands over his mouth, in response to a withering look from his mother. He was having real trouble sorting out where his loyalties lay in this fight.

The Bosun leaped away as the drone’s huge, deadly hands groped around the place where its head had been, baffled. A smile split her face as she landed by the captain’s side, and the stippled tattoos patterned beneath her reddish-brown skin reconfigured themselves, goosebumping into whorls of satisfaction.

Pug froze, the ladle falling from his fingers. Maurice the trainer had generally discouraged him from fraternizing with girls, on account of their ability to “make you all soft and crosseyed.” He had instead subtly encouraged Pug to spend a bit of time in the Imperial steam baths with some of the garrisons, a prospect Pug felt uneasy about for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate.

Now, somehow unable to stop looking at the Bosun as she adjusted her toolbelt around the waist of her grime-stained brown coveralls, he began to see Maurice’s point. At least about the girls.

The poor damaged drone, having given up on finding its head in the appropriate spot, was now groping ineffectually around its midsection, full of misplaced mechanical hope.

“There we are,” Captain Corsair grinned, bowing in gratitude to the Bosun, then turning to raise his blade to the remaining drone. “One on one. A far more equitable match, I think.”

The Arsenal Drone that still had a head produced a cannon from one protruding arm, and did not so much aim it at Captain Corsair as invite him to step into its barrel.

The captain and his bosun scattered, Corsair lunging in a furl of cloak and a flash of steel toward the second, headless drone. Its undamaged counterpart tracked him faithfully — a bit too faithfully, since its fist wound up smashing straight into the chest of the headless one.

Now, even without a visible head, an Arsenal Drone was programmed to know when it was being attacked. It could track that direction based on sound and impact alone. And without visual circuits to identify friend from foe, an Arsenal Drone could be relied upon to do what it did best.

At last, the shooting stopped. Nothing remained of the drones save a pair of smoking heaps of slag on the deck, and, upon the ocean far below, the separate splashes of large, heavy objects. The Emperor released his wife, whom he had shielded with his body, to find Corsair’s blade now at his own throat.

Behind Corsair, Pug rose, slightly scorched, his fists raised to crash against the captain’s skull. Bosun Little tapped him lightly on the skull with her hammer, and he sat down hard, and looked up at her with some combination of annoyance and awe.

“Now, Your Majesty,” the Captain said, “if I may relieve you of your—”

He glanced at Dent’s chair, and found it empty. Across the veranda, in a whirl of crimson silks, Lis dragged her squirming, incredibly dismayed brother into the pneumovator. “But I want to see the—” Dent said, and then the doors shut, and the capsule plunged with a hiss into the palace below.

“A subterfuge!” Corsair smiled. “Your Majesty, you outdo yourself in presenting me with challenges.”

“This isn’t a challenge,” the Emperor huffed, drawing himself up to his full height. “This is a minor inconvenience compared to what you’ll suffer. Surrender now, and cease this foolishness, and I may consent to merely quartering you.”

“A tempting offer,” Corsair smiled, “and most gracious. It speaks well of you. Alas, I must pursue, and while I would not dream of striking Your Majesty…”

He lifted his faintly ticking metal hand, and with a gentle hiss, a cloud of orange gas escaped from its fingertips. The Emperor smelled lime trees, and then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed against his wife, breathing slowly and steadily.

The Empress took a deep, appraising breath, coughed a few times, and arched one eyebrow.

“Methilaine gas?” she sighed. “Honestly?”

“Forgive me,” Corsair offered. “I am entirely rude to underestimate you.” He snapped his mechanical wrist slightly, and a much stronger jet of green gas wreathed the Empress’s face.

“Ah,” the Empress said, wavering. “Much more suitable.” She leaned backward in her chair, her wig going askew, and her eyes slid shut.

“Is that gas?” Pug asked, his vision just beginning to undouble. “Do I get gas?”

Corsair shook his head. “Alas, my friend, I feel that would be too great an insult to a warrior of your caliber. You get her. Bosun?”

Bosun Little nodded sharply, her tattoos forming martial straight lines. “Aye, sir.”

“Very good,” the Captain said, dashing for the pneumovator. “I go to steal a treasure!”

Down, down the pneumovator plunged. Lis scowled at her brother, who sulked resolutely on the opposite side of the capsule.

“I’m not a baby,” Dent muttered, not exactly proving his point. “You could’ve let me watch.”

Lis rolled her eyes, jingling faintly with annoyance beneath her glimmering robe. “Gods, is everything about you? Would it kill you to think of us for once? If you get kidnapped by some — some rag with a third-rate accent—” and, she did not add, such a curiously charming laugh— “we’ll be the laughingstock of a hundred systems.”

“So how come it’s OK if Story lasers my face off?” Dent protested.

“That’s different,” Lis snapped back. “Story’s part of the household.”

“Pneumovator’s a dumb escape route anyway,” Dent said, from experience. “The access tunnels are, like, three times faster.”

The capsule slowed, then stopped. Lis checked the indicator above the door, quizzical.

“Wait, this isn’t Garrison Deck—” she began, and then the doors opened.

“Greetings, Your Majesty,” Captain Corsair said, bowing deeply. “I have taken the liberty of sabotaging your lift.”

Lis kicked him in the head. He bounced off the far wall of the corridor, landed on his feet, and shook his head briskly to clear the cobwebs.

“I admit,” Corsair chuckled, “I was not prepared for that.”

Lis peeled off her robe again, thumbing a catch on the collar. The fabric’s molecular structure reconfigured, constricted, and the garment braided itself into a ruby-colored lash, glittering nastily at its tip.

“Go, Dent,” she said, dragging him by the collar out of the pneumovator. “Run and hide!”

“But—” he began, and Lis smacked him on the back of the head.

“Run and hide,” Lis said, “or I will SO drop you in the lexigator pit!” Dent imagined the lexigators’ fifteen distinct rows of teeth, and their lazy hungry smiles, and obeyed.

As the capsule door hissed shut behind her, Lis stepped forward, folding and angling her limbs into a combat stance. Corsair stretched himself lazily, working out a kink in his sword arm’s shoulder.

“I see you have trained with the Sisters of Temple Marguerite,” Corsair grinned.

“Extensively,” Lis shot back. She felt strangely disconcerted, and it took her a moment to realize why. The Captain was looking, of all places, at her eyes. Lis was not used to this, especially from men.

“I once spent an enchanting week there, you know,” the Captain sighed, nostalgically. “They had quite the excellent wine cellar.”

Lis lashed out with her crimson whip. Corsair swatted it aside with his blade. The duel began.

Accounting Deck Five, like its nine siblings within the palace, consisted of a ring of corridors surrounding one enormous open chamber. Inside, row after row of identical desks, each perfectly rectangular in accordance with the Golden Ratio, fanned out in rays around a central column of shellstuff. The column was riddled with pneumotubes for the interlevel transport of documents, and tear-off pads for Imperial Form 112-B-R, the Form to Authorize the Interlevel Transport of Documents.

Five rows deep into Radial Three, Dent huddled beneath the desk of Ledgerman Second Tier Pruitt Coyne. Coyne was a slim, pale, sensible man with a thatch of thin, strawlike hair. Even as Dent hid under his desk, Coyne sat in one of the palace’s twenty dining halls, joining his comrades in a lusty accountant’s drinking about an indecorous string of numbers that refused to round off. Lusty puns were made on the words “caluclation,” “rounded,” and somehow, “decimal.” Had Coyne known that his workstation was at that very moment involved in a thrilling intrigue involving a member of the Imperial family, his sectionmates never would have heard the end of it.

At this hour, the section was lit only by the faint green glow from the screens embedded in the surface of each desk. Dent waited in the near-darkness, huddled in the cavelike space beneath the desk, marveling at how very loud his own breathing sounded. He was accustomed to hide and seek, of course, but this was a different sort of game. Story’s reactions, he could gauge, but the smiling man with the sword?

The excitement of dinner had begun to fade, and Dent was no longer entirely certain that being kidnapped sounded like the fun adventure it usually was in his bedtime stories. He tried to remember what he had learned about bandits.

One: Bandits usually wore masks. That was a definite point against Captain Corsair, unless you counted the cloak.

Two: Bandits fought injustice. Dent wasn’t quite clear on what injustice was, and Story was vague on the definition. All Dent knew was that it involved kings or something, but only bad kings that were not in any way like his father.

Three: Bandits spent a lot of time throwing flowers at pretty ladies and singing them songs and rescuing them from dungeons. Dent could not in good conscience support this behavior.

Four: Bandits could not be trusted. This last part particularly worried Dent.

Something thumped in the floor directly beneath him, and Dent’s heart all but leaped out of his chest. The thumping sounded again, a few feet away, and then again, a few feet more. Steam knocking around in the pipes, perhaps.

Dent followed the thumps to a wide ventilation grating on the floor of the aisle between rows of desks, and peered into the darkness beyond.

“Shhhhh,” he whispered. “I’m supposed to be hiding.”

Something rattled within the vent.

“You’re welcome,” Dent breathed back. “I’ll tell Cook. Oh, man, we had the best dinner ever! It was like something out of Battle at Trial Gap! First a starship crashed into our table, and then there was a real live bandit, and he fought the guards with a sword, and then Dad called out the big robots—”

Dent froze. Several rows away, a door hissed open, spilling a shaft of yellow light into the chamber’s gloom. A shadow moved, and Dent heard faint singing — a strumming, lilting, melancholy song in a language he didn’t know. It sounded like Captain Corsair.

“He’s here,” Dent whispered into the vent. Somewhere inside, a stone or a seashell pinged off the ductwork. “Are you sure?” Dent asked. “I don’t think I’ll fit.” Another stone. The singing grew closer. Dent reached for the sonic knife on his belt.

It hummed to silent life in his hand, effortlessly shearing off the bolts at the four corners of the grate. Dent lifted it away, got down on his belly, and slipped headfirst into the dark.

Or almost did, until the cool metal hand of Captain Corsair closed around his ankle.

“Very good,” Dent heard the Captain say, his voice weird and echoing inside the vent. “A most admirable strategy. I apologize for my undue speed in locating you, Your Majesty.”

The lights came on, and in an angry chatter of heavy plate armor, guardsmen flooded into the room. Corsair’s head snapped up, eyes alert. His cloak was now gone, revealing keen blue eyes, a sharp and dashing profile, and a close, curly head of deep brown hair. A fresh line of blood darkened and congealed on his cheek, matching the dark red rose on the lapel of his elegantly ragged jacket.

“My regrets, Your Majesty,” Corsair said to Dent’s ankle, “but I must cut our pleasantries short.” He snared a Portabubble from his belt and flipped into the air above the vent, watching it snap into an opaque sphere of shimmering energy.

Keeping his eye on the advancing soldiers, he permitted himself one uncouth grunt of exertion, and hauled the entire contents of the vent up into the bubble’s protection. Quite a heavy boy, he thought, tapping in the code that sealed the bubble from everything but the outside air.

“Are you comfortable?” Corsair asked the bubble. He received a muffled reply. “Excellent! I shall endeavor to release you shortly, but in the interim, I fear I must ask you to abide turbulence.”

The Captain leapt atop the nearest desk, meeting the slash of a guardsman’s blade with his own. He clocked the guard with a well-placed slash of his boot and held up the floating Portabubble, high enough for the guards to see.

“I have here the Empire’s youngest heir!” Corsair called. “However much you may wish to shoot, stab, or otherwise inconvenience me, I doubt you would wish to do so to him.”

“Prove it,” drawled Guard Captain Rendell, his thick, calloused finger tensing on the trigger of his upraised pistol.

“Hi, Captain!” Dent’s voice emerged from the bubble.

“Your Majesty,” Rendell replied, his posture almost imperceptibly straightening. “Are you hurt?” He served the Empire because it was his duty. But he served Dent, specifically, because the boy would sneak him and his men tea-cakes from Culinary Deck on rainy days.

“I’m kind of smushed,” Dent said, “and I can’t see anything. Pebble says hi.”

“I believe my point is proven?” Corsair asked. Rendell growled, and with a nod from his graying head, his men stood down.

“There’s no percentage for you in hurting the boy,” Rendell said, feeling the sentiment bristle equally among the surrounding guards. “Only pain beyond. I promise you that, on my aegis.”

“Well then,” Corsair laughed, dancing across the desks toward the nearest door, “how fortunate for me that I intend no such thing.” He backed out the door. “I am about to seal you all inside. Forgive me.”

The door hissed shut. In the hallway, the Captain plunged his blade into the locking mechanism, and it spat forth a gout of sparks.

“Now,” he said to the Portabubble, hearing more guards advance from each end of the corridor, “I hope you are not easily motion-sick.”

He dashed for the nearest pneumovator tube, sliding his blade into the slender seal between the doors. With a jerk of his wrist, they slid open, and without a capsule present, a howling gale poured out into the corridor. Without hesitation, Corsair and his bubble stepped inside, and shot upward.

Corsair had chosen wisely; this was the service lift. They popped out on the undulating roof of the center of the palace, under a twinkling scatter of stars in the midnight-blue sky. The Captain waited for a moment, the Portabubble humming softly, his own breath pluming in feathery gusts from his lips.

From the opposite side of the palace, in the vicinity of the Veranda, came a screech, and a crunch, as if something heavy were tearing free from its moorings. The air shifted, in bulk, and with a soft whine of antigrav units, the ship that had so rudely invaded the Imperial family’s dinner slid softly into place overhead. The dinner table, or most of it at least, still clung awkwardly to its pointed nose. The Captain sighed at this lamentable breach of aesthetics as he felt the lift beam seize him, pulling him up toward the hatch on the belly of the craft.

As he handed the Portabubble inside, to the waiting Bosun Little, he heard a furious shout from below. Glissandra Voluptua led a full complement of guardsman charging across the room, spitting invectives unexpected from a young lady of her beauty. She limped slightly, and wore the captain’s cloak around her shoulders. Corsair hauled himself up into the hatch and crouched by its edge, as shots from the guardsmen below sparked harmlessly off his craft’s hull.

“For you, Your Highness,” he shouted down gallantly, plucking the rose from his lapel. “A poor beauty indeed, compared to your own, but it must suffice.” He tossed the rose down to her; it thudded to the deck, sprouted tiny tendrils at its base, and dashed toward Lis, deftly scaling the hem of her cloak as she backed away in surprise. After some momentary confusion about what, exactly, constituted a lapel on her jacket, it gave up and twined itself tenderly around one of the chains stretched across her collarbone.

The ship rose into the night sky, headed for orbit. A bubble of blue-white light bloomed, and then it was gone, and the starlight illuminated the broad disc of the Imperial dinner table, spinning its way down to the sea.

Lis touched the rose that had fixed itself to her, shaken and baffled, to find that it purred beneath her fingers. She had been wounded, and deeply, with perhaps the one facet of her job title with which she had no experience: romance.

In a certain respect, Glissandra Voluptua might be able to play every instrument in the orchestra. But until now, she had never actually heard music.

Space, light-years distant. In a soundless flash of blue-white light, Captain Corsair’s craft wobbled back into existence.

“Now, Bosun,” the Captain said, swiveling his chair away from the controls, “let us examine our fortune.” The Bosun set the Portabubble down, thumbed the release code, and gasped as its contents spilled out.

“Well,” Corsair said softly, thoughtfully. “I appear to have miscalculated.”

There on the deck sat Dent, blinking in surprise. Next to him, equally stunned, a girl of maybe nine, with bone-white skin, silver hair, and an ill-fitting jumpsuit studded with seashells, stared back at the Captain. Her wide, terrified eyes reflected eerie disks of yellow light, like a cat’s, in the darkened cockpit.

“Hi, I’m Dent,” the boy said. “This is Pebble. She’s real shy. Are you going to kill us? And if not, can we have supper now?”