Light of Impossible Stars Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for the Embers of War Series

  Also by Gareth L. Powell and available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue One

  Prologue Two

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Part Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Part Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR THE EMBERS OF WAR SERIES

  “Ferociously good, proper galaxy smashing space opera.”

  AL ROBERTSON

  “A compulsively readable, expansive space opera.”

  THE GUARDIAN

  “Deep and juicy in the details… a morality play within a space opera, with literary-style character exploration in thriller-style structure and pacing.”

  NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

  “It’s hugely entertaining, and hints at a wider universe with the tantalising prospect of filling a Banksian hole in modern sci-fi.”

  BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETY

  “An excellently paced adventure that swells with energy and force, upping the stakes at every turn of the page.”

  BOOK PAGE

  “Vivid and sharp, and at times grittily poetic.”

  LOCUS MAGAZINE

  “Thoughtful, creative and lively… this is top-class space fiction.”

  MORNING STAR

  “A great sci-fi series, one likely to delight fans of Peter F. Hamilton and Iain M. Banks. Great stuff.”

  STARBURST

  “Delivers big-stakes space opera told on an intimate scale...the brisk pacing and sense of adventure make Fleet of Knives a fun and fulfilling read in the best space-opera tradition.”

  BARNES & NOBLE

  “The strong narrative arc, the pacing and engaging prose all add up to one heck of an adventure novel.”

  THE HUGO AWARD BOOK CLUB

  “Amid almost nonstop action, with a jarring Joss Whedon-esque momentum, Powell delves into the characters as well as the themes with authority, putting himself in a league with Iain Banks and Ann Leckie.”

  BOOKLIST

  “There are lots of twists and turns and jaw-dropping moments that make you gasp... All in all, this is a great space opera.”

  MANHATTAN BOOK REVIEW

  “Powell’s writing is fast-paced, fun and full of adventure …He’s on my must-read list.”

  ANN LECKIE, author of Ancilliary Justice

  LIGHT OF IMPOSSIBLE STARS

  Also by Gareth L. Powell and available from Titan Books

  Embers of War

  Fleet of Knives

  Light of Impossible Stars

  GARETH L.

  POWELL

  LIGHT OF

  IMPOSSIBLE STARS

  AN EMBERS OF WAR NOVEL

  TITAN BOOKS

  Light of Impossible Stars: An Embers of War Novel

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785655241

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785655258

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: February 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental

  Gareth L. Powell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2020 Gareth L. Powell

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For Cath and Alexander

  O gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ADONAIS

  PROLOGUE ONE

  TROUBLE DOG

  “So,” I asked, “what’s the object of this game?”

  The Adalwolf smiled. “To win.”

  We were sitting in a virtual environment—a recreation of the Palace of Versailles. Beyond the high windows, ornate gardens stretched away. Fountains sparkled in the clean white sunlight. Adalwolf had dressed his avatar in a dark silk robe. His bony wrists protruded from its sleeves. I had contented myself with my default option: a shaggy-haired, androgynous-looking woman in a battered trench coat. A marble chessboard sat on the table between us.

  “And how do you do that?”

  “You capture your opponent’s king.”

  “That’s this tall one?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it?”

  “In essence, yes.”

  “And what about these horsey ones?”

  The Adalwolf gave a tight smile. “The knights.”

  “Yes, I like those.” I leaned over the board and tapped one of the pieces in my first rank. “And these are the prawns?”

  “Pawns.”

  “And these cock-shaped ones?”

  “Bishops.”

  “Got it.”

  “Are you ready to play?”

  “I think so. Who goes first?”

  “I do.”

  Adalwolf reached out a thin arm and plucked a knight from the back row. He moved it over the pawns and placed it on its destined square.

  I frowned in puzzlement.

  Adalwolf sighed. “What’s the matter?”

  “That’s it? That’s your move?”

  “It’s a classic opening gambit.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have achieved much.”

  “I suppose you can do better?”

  “Of course.” I leant back in my chair and cracked my knuckles over my head. I braced my feet against
the tiled floor and grinned. “Watch this.”

  I sprang forward. The fingers of my right hand jabbed Adalwolf in the throat. He started to fall backwards, and I flipped the table with my left. By the time the last marble pieces rattled down onto the floor, I was kneeling on his chest with his king held triumphantly in my hand.

  “I win,” I said.

  Adalwolf coughed, massaging his battered larynx. “You really don’t understand chess, do you?”

  I sniffed and clambered to my feet. “On the contrary.” I let the marble king fall from my fingers. It bounced off his ribs with a hollow thump and rolled away across the floor. “You just don’t understand tactics.”

  PROLOGUE TWO

  SAL KONSTANZ

  “How about now?”

  “Still a blur I’m afraid.” On the screen, the Trouble Dog’s avatar frowned. She pursed her lips. “Wait—”

  “Are you getting something?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think it’s starting to resolve. But all I can see are stars.”

  “That’s all I can see on the screens.” We were parked in empty space, three light years from the nearest star system. The Trouble Dog’s sister ship, the Adalwolf, hung a few dozen kilometres off our starboard flank.

  “No ultraviolet? No infrared?”

  “Sorry.” I shrugged. “Just the boring old ‘visible spectrum’, I’m afraid.”

  “How do you people do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Find anything?” The avatar threw up her hands. “This is like being half-blind.”

  I touched the wad of bandage covering the empty socket that had until recently housed my right eye. “Don’t talk to me about being half-blind.”

  She looked embarrassed. “I apologise, Captain. That was insensitive. I really do appreciate your sacrifice. It’s just taking me a little time to get used to seeing with a real, organic eye. I’ve never used one before.”

  “Make the most of it,” I said, “because it’s the only one you’ll be getting from me.”

  We’d been here for two weeks, resting and recuperating in the middle of nowhere after being forced to flee human space. While Nod and his thirteen offspring had worked alongside the ship’s self-repair mechanisms in order to get us flightworthy again, we’d spent much of those two weeks debating our next move. As fugitives cut off from home and hiding out in alien territory, our choice of destination would be critical to our chances of survival.

  The Trouble Dog noticed my expression.

  “Do you regret giving me your eye?”

  My fingers brushed the bandage a second time. I still hadn’t grown accustomed to the loss of half my visual field and had bruises from bumping into chairs and tables as I walked through the ship.

  “I’m not exactly happy about it,” I admitted, “but no. I was thinking about something else.”

  “What?”

  “The fuel situation.” Both the Trouble Dog and the Adalwolf had almost depleted their fuel cores. “If we can’t find replacements at our next port of call, we’ll be screwed.”

  Given the right templates and a ready supply of raw materials, the ship’s printers could produce food, medicines, cannon shells. Even, given enough time, nuclear-tipped torpedoes. But fuel cores were another matter—too delicate and complex and unstable to be safely printed on even the most advanced human printers. Instead, they had to be manufactured at special facilities. The military had installations where it made its own, of course, but civilian vessels had to purchase theirs from licensed dealers at starports—an arrangement that kept a corporate stranglehold on interstellar trade.

  The Dog’s avatar shook her head. “I’ll be screwed,” she said. “You’ll be okay. I’ll be the one stranded and unable to move; if you can find transport, you can keep going.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “You might have to.”

  I tugged at the brim of my frayed old baseball cap, settling it more firmly onto my head. “That’s not going to happen.”

  I had been born and raised in the Outward, the faction of the Human Generality most engaged with the Multiplicity of other races. Our customs and language drew influences and inflections from a dozen alien cultures. Mutual trade agreements meant nobody in the Outward went hungry or lacked for shelter, but neither did we own much in the way of personal possessions. Our society frowned on the acquisition of stuff for its own sake. Our resources were carefully managed to ensure fairness and efficiency. The wasteful excesses that had finally ruined humanity’s home planet would not be replicated on any of our worlds or ships. While some of us lived on the surface of settled worlds, many others preferred to remain in motion. They lived on orbital stations or great star liners like the Geest van Amsterdam. We were, in our own eyes, a society perfectly adapted to humanity’s new place in the cosmos. And yet, our lofty ideals had only led us into a disastrous conflict with the Generality’s largest faction, the Conglomeration. And our urge to explore, to look outwards, had been the siren call that led my parents to their deaths and lured away the love of my life. And so, despite being brought up to value exploration and discovery, I’d be damned if I’d abandon Trouble Dog the way everyone else had abandoned me.

  She smiled. “I hoped you’d say that.”

  Although the core of her brain had been grown from human stem cells, she also had some canine DNA spliced into her, which gave her a strong sense of loyalty to her pack—a group that had once included the entire Conglomeration Navy, but had now shrunk to comprise only myself; our medic, Preston Menderes; Nod, the Druff engineer, and its little brood of babies; and the Adalwolf. Everyone else she— and I—cared about had been lost or killed along the way.

  “How are our passengers?” I asked.

  The Trouble Dog’s avatar performed a convincing shrug. “They’re coping.”

  We’d rescued Johnny Schultz and Riley Addison after their ship crashed into an old Nymtoq colony vessel. For the past fourteen days, they’d spent most of their time in the cabin they shared, exploring their new relationship while simultaneously coming to terms with the horrific loss of the rest of their crew. This need for recuperation was something the Trouble Dog struggled to understand. Although she could be startlingly compassionate in some ways, she had also been designed to compartmentalise her feelings and move on—grief and post-traumatic stress being undesirable attributes in a heavy cruiser designed for the rigors and attrition of interstellar war.

  Addison and Schultz had a little girl with them. Although physically human, the girl carried the memories and personality of Schultz’s lost ship, the Lucy’s Ghost, as well as the curious alien awareness of a millennia-old Nymtoq colony vessel whose name translated as The Restless Itch for Foreign Soil. We simply called her Lucy. And over the past days, she’d struck up quite a relationship with the Trouble Dog, spending a lot of time talking with her in virtual reality, discussing whatever it was ships discussed when they got together.

  “And our food stocks?”

  “The printers were designed to feed a crew of three hundred during extended missions. Even if we weren’t recycling all organic waste, you’d still have enough in the reservoir to last decades.”

  “So, fuel’s the main thing we’re short of?”

  “Affirmative.”

  * * *

  It was strange how even in the face of possibly imminent disaster, the routines of shipboard life continued unabated. The Druff continued to strip and replace worn-out components, unclog foul-water pipes, and perform the thousand other essential little tasks that kept the Trouble Dog habitable and in motion; and Preston Menderes continued his studies, familiarising himself with the equipment and procedures befitting his position as ship’s medical officer. Of all of us, I was the one with least to do. During a higher dimensional jump, the Dog could almost fly herself. So, while I busied myself with checklists and inspections, they were mostly a means of distraction, a vain attempt to stop me dwelling on our situation.

  Reports continue
d to trickle in from other systems, their signal carried to us on the winds of the hypervoid. All across the sky, ships from the Fleet of Knives were falling like raptors on military and civilian vessels alike. In places, the Generality had tried to fight back, but its forces were unevenly distributed and owned by factions more used to shooting at each other than cooperating. The few battles that had taken place had been swift and merciless, and always ended in victory for the Fleet. A handful of its ships had been damaged or destroyed during these skirmishes, but it was obvious to all that these minor losses wouldn’t be enough to make any sort of difference to the inevitable outcome. The Fleet of Knives outnumbered the combined navies of humanity by several orders of magnitude—enough to firmly quell any and all resistance as it swept across the stars like a plague.

  The distress calls were heartbreaking: men, women, and occasionally even children, of all nationalities and factions crying helplessly into the void as the Fleet of Knives shot their ships out from under them. Begging for help, and a rescue I couldn’t provide.

  “You should stop listening,” the Trouble Dog said. She had found me sitting on my bunk, with my back against the bulkhead and the brim of my baseball cap pulled low to shade my face from the overhead lighting. Her image appeared in the mirror above my sink. “You’re only upsetting yourself.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “They are too far away. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I know. I just feel someone should be listening. Someone should bear witness to all of this.”

  “And that someone needs to be you?”

  I shrugged. “Who else is there?”

  She watched in silence as, one by one, I lit the votive candles on the shelf beside my bunk. The smoke that rose from their wicks smelled of sandalwood. I had one for each of my parents, one for George, and one for Sedge. Over the past few years, I had got into the habit of lighting them each night before bed and uttering a little prayer for my lost loved ones. Recently, I had added a fifth from my supply of spares. This one was for Alva Clay, my sister-in-arms. During the Archipelago War, she’d been a marine and had crawled through the jungles of Pelapatarn. Only she knew for sure how many people she’d killed. But after the war, she joined the House of Reclamation and became a member of my crew. Whatever violence she’d perpetrated during the conflict, and however cantankerous or insubordinate she could sometimes be, she had died saving others, and that was how I’d always remember her.