The firmament of flame, p.6
The Firmament of Flame, page 6
And still: I’d make the same decision again. Every time.
“They’re building weapons, Javier,” Marus said quietly. “Regardless of … the Cyn, or the pulse, or their religion, if we don’t do anything, those weapons will wind up turned against innocent populations. JackDoes can write a virus that at least delays that, and if we can find out what they want with the gifted, whether their goal truly is to bring the pulse back as the Cyn on Odessa intimated: stopping that from happening is worth an ocean of blood, and I think you’d agree with me there.”
The world Javier had been raised on—in the absolute chaos that had followed the spread of the pulse—had been a … very bleak place, from the stories he’d told me. Of all of us, he might be the most committed to making sure the pulse never returned, which was why he was willing to deal with the Wanderers in the first place, a dark means justified by a brutally necessary end. Still, Marus was right: stopping the pulse meant protecting the next generation, the only bulwark we had against its return, and the Wanderers were the enemies of the gifted, in league with the Cyn that were hunting them.
“Okay,” Javier said, and I could tell just by the tone of his voice he was spreading his hands in defeat. “I just wanted to make sure we discussed it—now we’ve discussed it. So let’s get the ships linked up, and get everybody on their respective vessels; we’ve got a dreadnaught to storm. Again.” He sighed, this time theatrically. “Why is this always your plan, Esa? Every time your back’s up against the wall, it’s ‘Send Javier to storm the dreadnaught.’ You—and I mean no offense—”
“Yes, you do,” she sighed, but she was grinning as she said it, and he laughed.
“I really don’t. I’m just saying: you have the worst plans. The worst.”
CHAPTER 8
Jane
We linked various airlocks only briefly enough for everyone to shuttle onto their respective assault craft, hauling their combat gear with them—Sahluk took the longest to prepare, even though he wasn’t swapping ships, since he had to power up and strap on the armored exosuit he’d lugged all the way from Sanctum. This would be his first chance the entire trip to use the damn thing, since we’d successfully managed to avoid fighting in full-scale wars up until this point, and I think he was looking forward to causing some real chaos.
As I entered Khaliphon’s airlock from Scheherazade, Javier was sealing the final clamps of the exosuit in place, wrapping Sahluk’s already hard skin in even harder metal; I raised an eyebrow at the automatic plasma launcher the big Mahren had rigged to a belt-feeder on the mechanical exoskeleton, a weapon even he wouldn’t have been able to lift otherwise.
He grinned when he saw my expression, though it was a little hard to read through all the armor plating now surrounding his face. “What?” he asked. “You afraid I’ll melt through the hull of the dreadnaught we don’t want them to finish building anyway?”
“Fair point,” I shrugged, checking to make sure my own grenades were secure. On the far side of the airlock, back inside Scheherazade, Marus was giving all kinds of advice to Meridian, most of which would likely fly right out of her head as soon as the shooting started; I caught Esa’s eye, and grinned. She just grinned back; I’m sure I’d been just as useless the first time I sent her into combat. They were ready for this, all three of the rookie operatives. They had been, for a while—if not when we’d started out six months ago, then during the various scraps and scrapes we’d seen on our journey outward, chasing the trail of the Cyn, and then the Bright Wanderers themselves. Marus just hadn’t been forced to realize it yet.
“Stay safe,” Esa told me, barely having to raise her voice despite the fact that we were standing in two separate ships.
“You too,” I said right back, my grin not dropping a jot. Whatever else I’d taught her, good or bad, she was talented at this sort of thing. She knew how to enjoy it, as well. Right or wrong, that was the only way to stay sane doing the kind of work we did.
“Both of you will stay safe, of course,” Scheherazade said, as if there were no doubt in her mind that would be the outcome. “And Khaliphon?”
“I know, Scheherazade,” Marus’s ship replied, his voice carrying the same aristocratic Tyll accent that JackDoes had inflicted on Schaz a while back. “I’ll be careful with your captain.”
“Actually, I was going to say to make sure she’s careful with you. She tends to be rough on the paint job.”
Thanks, Schaz.
Then Marus was back across, and we detached. From Khaliphon’s cockpit—which would only fit Marus and me, but if something went wrong, I was who he wanted on the guns, so I got the second seat—we watched Schaz disappear into the thick red clouds of the gas giant, her hull shimmering as her stealth systems engaged; I couldn’t help but feel like she was sailing through a sea of blood, and I hoped it wasn’t an omen.
“Mission timer on,” Marus said, all business now that he’d seen his ward off. “We’ll give them a seven-minute start; that way they’ll reach the atmosphere of the gas giant just about the same time we hit the dreadnaught.”
“You up for this, Khaliphon?” I asked Marus’s vessel.
“What, sailing into the middle of a cultist shipyard, dropping my entire crew onto the hulk of a half-built dreadnaught, then sailing right back out and trying to lose the inevitable pursuit, all in this soup? Sounds like fun.” Every time I complained about Schaz’s rather dry sense of humor, I remembered what Marus put up with—though it was true what they said, that after sailing long enough, starship AIs took on certain characteristics of their captains.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, sending the children off like this,” Marus said quietly, checking his gauges one more time, the statement addressed at me.
“They can’t stay children forever, Marus,” I told him. “They’re not even children now, not really. Not after what they’ve seen. When you met me—”
“When I met you, you already had a dozen sectarian campaigns under your belt. Meridian comes from a different world than you did, Jane. A better one.”
“And she’s willing to fight to protect it. That should make you proud.”
“Mostly it just makes me scared.”
We waited out the rest of the timer in silence; nothing else I could really say to that.
Finally, it was our turn to engage Khaliphon’s stealth systems and lift off from the smaller gas giant’s atmosphere—as soon as we were clear, we could see the glint of the distant suns shining against the edges of the metal that wrapped like a web around the sole remaining moon. That wasn’t just because the two worlds—including the broken one—were in close orbit: the shipyards truly were massive, maybe even bigger than anything I’d seen during the sect wars.
A question, whining at the back of my mind since we’d first dropped out of hyperspace in this system and seen the cult’s hive of military construction: had the Bright Wanderers found this place, already built, then abandoned for one reason or another? Or had they actually put the whole thing together, after the pulse? Even with the relatively low amounts of radiation on the two moons—low, but not nonexistent—just finding the components to hang all that scaffolding in high orbit would have been one hell of an undertaking. The Justified couldn’t have done it—we’d actually discussed the possibility of building a shipyard in our home system, and decided that the amount of resources it would have taken to do so would have been better spent just flat-out buying new craft when we needed them.
“We’re on approach,” Marus reported through Khaliphon’s internal comms, for the benefit of our other passengers back in the hold. “Khaliphon will have to break stealth for us to disembark, so it’ll be a zero-g drop, possibly under fire—everybody double-check your mag boots.” I’d known that was how we’d have to board the enemy dreadnaught, but just hearing the words made something tighten in my stomach, like someone was wrapping wire around my guts; ever since the sinking of the Ishiguro, I’d hated zero-g operations.
“Stealth systems are holding up,” I said, ignoring the tension in my abdomen and checking Khaliphon’s scans; the two patrol craft were still engaged in their automated circuit, hadn’t seen us lift off from the crimson giant.
“I may not be Scheherazade, you know, but we do have a pretty decent stealth rig,”’Phon said, a little defensively. I grinned—both Khaliphon and Bolivar had their specialties, but neither of them could hold a candle to Schaz for insertion or combat, and she’d never let her counterparts forget it.
“Just get us there in one piece, ’Phon, and I’ll tell Schaz she has to play nice for a little while,” I told him.
“Will she listen?”
“Probably not, but she’ll at least feel guilty after.”
Marus laughed at that, and then we were both silent; we were approaching the great lattice of metal, and I didn’t want to interrupt his concentration as, with the flick of a switch, the viewscreen filled with thousands of unbroken bright threads, the crescents of light describing parabolic arcs through the void around the shipyards—holoprojections of the various security systems we’d have to slip past, displayed on the window of the cockpit itself. That wasn’t a module Scheherazade had, and I made a mental note to ask JackDoes if he could copy it from ’Phon’s database and install it on my own ship when we had time. Handy thing to have.
With a light hand on the stick, Marus slipped us through the outer defenses; given that no one started shooting at us, I figured we didn’t trip any alarms Khaliphon hadn’t been able to detect, either. “I’ve got it from here,”’Phon said confidently; Marus just nodded, and we both headed down to the hold to join the others.
Javier and Sahluk were already sealed up in their spacesuits—Sahluk had put his on before he’d even gotten into his exosuit—and the Preacher, of course, didn’t need one; Barious could survive in the void indefinitely, or at least until their internal batteries wore down without exposure to the solar radiation and kinetic friction resistance that powered their systems. Without comment, Javier helped me into my own suit, and the Preacher did the same for Marus. “Final approach,” Khaliphon said, just as I was checking the hang of my two rifles on my back—yes, I was taking the energy weapon as well. Just in case. We’d read a Cyn signature on the freighter full of recruits, after all: that meant at least one of the energetic beings was somewhere in the shipyard, and with my luck, “somewhere” would turn out to be “right in our path.”
I’d lost a fight to a Cyn before; doing so had almost gotten Esa killed. I hated losing, but I hated losing a second time even more. The next time I met a Cyn, I was going to be ready.
The cargo door slid open, and there it was, passing below us like a landscape: the dreadnaught skeleton, a hulk of elongated metal that looked like someone had carved apart a city and was reassembling it haphazardly in the nothing of the void. Once completed, Nemesis were a streamlined class of vessel, all flowing lines and sweeping curves, but at the moment, there was nothing streamlined about it—the exposed ribs of the framework glowed in the refracted light of plasma torches from the robotics doing automated work, and the outer hull was only half-completed, giving the whole thing a patchy, almost piebald sort of look: in places, we could see all the way to the ship’s “ribs,” massive girders that made up the endoskeleton of the design.
“That’s our best bet,” Marus said through the comms, pointing to one of those open patches on the hull. The gap he indicated was just beneath the framework of what would become the ship’s conning tower, the half-built spines of their comms array sticking up like the defenses of some Reint-extraction sea creature. Marus was right: the hub of the ship’s internal network would likely be close to that tower; should have been just three floors below, in fact, unless the Wanderers had changed the specifications of the Atellier design we’d all brushed up on earlier.
Khaliphon soared toward the breach at nearly full speed—stealth tech didn’t actually mean “invisible,” not entirely, and if one of the workers welding or wiring or doing whatever else inside the exposed hull happened to look up, they’d see the flare of our engines passing overhead, though hopefully they’d think we were just a new design of patrol craft—and Javier took hold of the descent cable. “I’ll set the anchor,” he said, and then we were in place: Khaliphon hadn’t even completely stopped moving before Javier was diving out into nothing, actually diving headfirst, like he was some ancient mariner hunting for pearls at the bottom of a coral reef, except the sea in that particular metaphor was the cold black of the cosmos, and the reef was one of the most destructive weapons ever built.
God, I hated zero-g.
As soon as he hit the superstructure of the dreadnaught—executing a textbook flip before landing just as the artificial gravity generated inside the hulk caught him—he was anchoring the magnetic clamp of the line onto the hull itself; the Preacher followed, gripping the metal cable directly in her steel palms as Sahluk gave her a push to speed her passage, and she went sliding out into the void as well. Then it was my turn, and I took a deep breath inside my helmet—yes, I was aware of the fact that I was already breathing suit air, it wasn’t as though I were actually diving into a cold and airless sea, but I did it, all the same—and I clamped my harness over the metal wire.
“Watch the landing,” Sahluk said as he gripped the back of my suit, preparing to shove me toward our destination as he had the Preacher. “It looks like Javier—”
Then there was the sound of metal whining on metal: we were taking fire, hyper-accelerated small-arms rounds singing up from some security team below to snap off sparks inside Khaliphon’s hold, the guards aiming at where we stood on the ramp. I barely had time to get my intention shield up—raised in front of me, where the shots were coming from—before Sahluk was shoving me out along the cable, and I went sailing out into the void.
CHAPTER 9
Esa
Scheherazade guided us through the holes in the shipyards’ defenses like the protections weren’t even there, somehow finding every single gap and dead zone in their security, even as her own various pieces of stealth kit hummed merrily away, keeping us invisible to more active detection measures. I sat behind the control stick—not that there was much I could do in the cockpit, if things went south; I wasn’t the pilot Jane was, and we’d likely be better off with Schaz making flight decisions and me on the guns if it came to trouble—and I just watched as the massive steel dreadnaught hulls passed us by.
Seeing the different ships that came looming out of the void in various stages of completion was like watching the skeletons of some gargantuan cosmic superpredators going through a kind of reverse decay: bones rising from dust in the hulls just beginning to be constructed, then internal systems being filled into the craft further down the line of production before we passed the nearly completed ships where the whole thing was covered in thick alloys and plating, like new skin.
Beyond the craft-in-progress, the gas giant was approaching, and fast: I dialed up Schaz’s forward scans to see if I could get a better view of the facility that housed the network hub. As we closed, I could tell there was significantly more to the structure than just the spire I’d seen on our first fly-by: there was a whole web of the things, tall towers interlinked by the curve of long spans, the whole complex—dozens of those spires, all told—floating in the atmosphere of the golden clouds like something out of a fairy tale. Somewhere far below, there must have been one hell of an anti-gravity generator keeping the whole thing airborne—it was too low, and in too much of a relatively fixed position, for its stabilization to be explained by orbit.
Then Schaz hit the atmosphere and we were diving deeper into the aureate gas giant, the lower sections of the tower coming into view. Definitely not a military installation—or even an industrial one, despite the lattice of shipyards that were now stretched above the upper atmosphere like a steel mesh holding down the sky. The design of the tower was too open for that, great archways and windows looking out over balconies and landing platforms exposed to the clouds, and it was also too … well, too pretty, frankly, something sumptuous and almost indulgent about the structure, all marble cladding and gilded edges that caught the light diffused through the golden clouds just right, making all the walls seem faintly edged in fire.
It reminded me, more than anything, of the ancient, crumbling pleasure houses we’d seen on the Jaliad preserve world, except that, where those had been long neglected—the Jaliad aristocracy having been purged from the galaxy during a brutal coup near the very beginning of the sect wars—these were still maintained. So whatever else these Bright Wanderers were, they had an eye for aesthetics, at least.
Or at least saw the benefit in using those aesthetics to cow their recruits—this place looked like a city of the gods, and that would almost certainly have been part of its appeal to the cultists. I needed to keep that at the center of my mind: what these people were doing, what they believed. The promises—the lies—they had told, in order to bring people off of pulsed worlds, to turn them into slaves in all but name.
“We’re approaching our destination, Esa,” Schaz said, and I nodded, unfolding myself from Jane’s chair. The towers were passing by us on the right and left now, stretching to either side like a skyline partially hidden in fog—every time we passed one, another would rise out of the mist ahead of us, shining in the constant dawn brought on by the three suns of the system.
Trusting that Schaz knew, from her scans of the local network, which of the towers held the hub—I sure as hell didn’t—I retreated to the armory at the rear docking bay, where Sho was finishing up strapping body armor onto Meridian. She looked nervous, and excited, even if she was sweating out citrus-y fog again—body armor was heavy stuff—but that was as it should be, and the hands she had wrapped around a spare shotgun were only barely shaking, which I took as a good sign.
