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.”
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
16. Changing Hands (Part 1)
“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.
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.
Friday, November 16, 2007
15. Plans In Motion
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.
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.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
14.5. Missing Child (Part 2)
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
14. Missing Child (Part 1)
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.”
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.”
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
13. The Un-Engine
“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.
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.
Monday, November 12, 2007
12. Ghost in the Machine
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.”
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.”
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