Fleet of Knives Page 3

  “There it is again!” This time the image was on the forward screen: a lithe black shape twisting through the murk, maybe two hundred metres from the Lucy’s prow.

  “Where?”

  “There!” I jabbed my finger at the picture, but the thing had already disappeared back into the mist.

  I turned to the pilot. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

  Vito’s eyes were wild. His fingers gripped the edge of his console. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. I saw him swallow hard, and he gave a tight, fearful nod. I wasn’t hallucinating; he had seen it too, which meant it had to be real. And yet, still the Lucy’s avatar frowned.

  “I’m afraid I’m still not detecting anything,” she said.

  “Are all your sensors working?”

  “I checked them twice.” She sounded vaguely indignant. “And all the diagnostics came back green.”

  “Then use landing radar, infrared. Turn on everything we’ve got.” I could feel my pulse thumping in my chest. My stomach fluttered. I glanced at Vito.

  “Two minutes to dropout.” He’d found his voice. I gave him a thumbs-up, and returned to the screen.

  And there it was!

  Space twisted and split, and from the distortion a creature leapt. A huge, impossible creature that fell with the speed of a striking hawk, its lacy black wings folded back against its body, its mouth open and fangs gleaming in the starlight. I had the impression of a gaping jaw filled with jewelled teeth. Then the screen blanked, and the ship wrenched itself sideways.

  For a moment, we were being shaken in those titanic jaws. Then we were tumbling free as the creature swirled away like smoke, circling around for another strike.

  “Drop us out!” I called to Vito, as alarms filled the bridge. “We can’t wait for it to hit us again. Drop us out, now!”

  His hand jerked the controls, and the Lucy’s Ghost fell. Without finesse, she battered her way through the transitional zone between dimensions and spilled out into normal space, wounded and toppling, gas venting from holes in her starboard side. The stars whirled sickeningly around us for a couple of seconds—and then we slammed into the rocky flank of the Restless Itch like a hang-glider into the side of a mountain.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ONA SUDAK

  From the window of my cell, I watched the sky grow pale. Somewhere, beyond the prison walls, birds were singing. Below me, in the flagstone courtyard that occupied the centre of the prison, half a dozen uniformed soldiers stood loading and inspecting their rifles in the thin, predawn light. Their voices were soft and low and, in the frosty morning air, their exhalations came as little ephemeral wisps of cloud. Between them and the rearmost wall, a pockmarked wooden stake marked the spot where, in a few short moments, I was scheduled to die.

  Four years ago, under my real name of Annelida Deal, I had led the fleet that sterilised Pelapatarn. It was an action that brought the grinding attrition of the Archipelago War to an abrupt, horrific end, at the cost of a few thousand human lives and the destruction of a billion-year-old sentient jungle. And even though I had been acting under orders when I allowed my ships to commit that atrocity, the courts—under growing pressure from a populace appalled at the lengths to which its military had gone on its behalf—held me responsible for the destruction and loss of life, and sentenced me to be put to death here in this prison, on the anniversary of the armistice.

  In my head, the two sides of my personality were at war. The part of me that had once pretended to be a poet named Ona Sudak railed against the injustice of it all—against dying here in this squalid little prison after everything I had done and seen—while the side of me that was Annelida Deal and had lived through the war laughed, and asked, Why not? What makes you so special? Did you think you had a destiny? That the universe had a purpose in sparing you thus far? Well, guess what? So did every casualty on every battlefield throughout history: every serf murdered by an unjust lord; every peasant that starved in their hovel; every victim of accident, disease or random violence… They all thought the world had a plan for them, and they were all wrong. And they died shitty, untimely and disillusioned deaths because of it—because individual life means nothing in the cascade of history, and the gods have better things to worry about than your survival.

  I watched one of the soldiers clip a fresh magazine into his carbine. The rifles they were using were the same model I’d used in basic training: a robust firearm with few moving parts, designed primarily for ruggedness and simplicity of use.

  In the cell behind me, the military chaplain coughed.

  “If you wish to unburden yourself, now would seem to be the time.”

  I turned away from contemplation of my soon-to-be executioners.

  “No, thank you.”

  The Reverend Thomas Berwick was an avuncular man with a round face and wide, sympathetic brown eyes. He wore the black robes of the Church, and clutched in his lap a thick, leather-bound holy book.

  “This might be your last chance to confess,” he said, “and make peace with your gods.”

  I felt my fists clench. “Why? So I can salve the consciences of those who condemned me?”

  He gave a sympathetic half-smile, and spread his hands. “No, my daughter. For the sake of your soul.”

  My soul? If I’d had the energy, I might almost have laughed. “Have you ever seen a man die, padre? And I don’t mean here,” I jerked my head at the window, “where it’s relatively quick and clean. I mean on the battlefield, when they’re hit by an artillery shell and reduced to a splatter of slurry, and all that’s left’s a stinking mess of blood and shit and gristle? Or in a naval battle, when their section depressurises and the blood boils in their lungs? Or when they step on a mine and it blows their leg off up to the waist, and their innards are spilling out into the dust and they don’t die quickly, and they most certainly don’t die quietly?”

  The chaplain’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed back his distaste.

  “No, I can’t say that I have.”

  “Well I’ve been there.” I lowered my voice. “I’ve seen men and women die in ways so brutal and horrific that you probably can’t even begin to imagine them, and I’ll tell you this: I’ve seen nothing to convince me we’re anything more than meat and bone and sinew.” I tapped the side of my head. “We live in here, beneath this cap of bone, and there’s nothing else. No emergency escape hatch that whisks us to heaven. No undying ghost that leaps from our mouth when the bullets enter our cranium.” I turned back to the window with an angry shrug. “When you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s no afterlife, no mystical white light, just darkness, oblivion, and an endless eternity of nonexistence.”

  Berwick was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That’s a very negative point of view.”

  I shook my head. Below the window, the soldiers were practising their stances.

  “It’s not a point of view, padre, it’s a fact. And as for being negative, well, I’m about to be shot, so you’ll have to forgive me if I lack my usual cheery temperament.”

  Far beyond the prison walls, a dark speck appeared. Low and moving fast against the backdrop of the dawn, it skimmed the crests of the distant hills that had for the past six months marked the furthest boundaries of my visible horizon. I watched for a couple of seconds, and then lost sight of it as it dropped below the level of the wall.

  I heard chair legs scrape the stone floor as the chaplain pushed himself laboriously to his feet.

  “We only have a couple of minutes,” he puffed. “They’ll be coming for you soon. Do you at least have any final words? Any messages of comfort you’d like me to convey to your friends or family?”

  I looked down at my hands.

  “Tell them I followed orders. Tell them I respected the chain of command. And, ultimately, I did what I thought was for the best.”

  “You believe you did what was right?”

  I pictured six Carnivore-class heavy cruisers entering the atmosphere of Pelapatarn and sweepin
g across its single continent in an arrowhead formation. I pictured their fusion warheads blossoming over the jungles, igniting firestorms that would choke the atmosphere for months, and I pictured the wrecked ships in orbit, the smouldering tree stumps and cremated animals on the ground. I imagined the terror of the soldiers from both sides as they saw the bombardment—an almost solid curtain of nuclear fire—sweeping across the treetops towards them, knowing there could be no escape, nowhere to hide. Had they appreciated the sacrifice they were making, in those last few instants before they were vaporised? Could they possibly have understood that their deaths would bring an almost immediate end to the war—and if so, could they have found it in their hearts to forgive me?

  “No.” The word came out hoarse. “That’s not what I said. My exact words were, ‘I did what I thought was for the best.’ There’s an important distinction.”

  “I see…”

  I looked around at him. “You’ll tell them that?”

  “I will convey your words verbatim.”

  “Thank you.”

  I turned back to the window, just in time to see a flyer—obviously the black speck I had seen a moment before—rise from behind the prison wall, hover in the air for an instant, and then settle into the courtyard.

  “Ah,” Berwick said over the whine of its engines, “it seems we have visitors.” He craned to see past my shoulder. “And that looks like a naval flyer. Were you expecting anyone?”

  I turned back into the room with a shrug. Since being returned to the Conglomeration for trial, I’d had precious little contact with my former employers.

  “Who knows?” I walked over to the wooden table, decanted a glass of stale water from the ceramic pitcher and took a drink. “There are plenty of people who want to see me dead, not least the admiralty.”

  “You think they’ve come to watch?”

  “The vultures are circling.”

  I replaced the glass on the table and tugged the hem of my coarse prison shirt. Then I smoothed back my hair and fastened my collar. I hadn’t been allowed to wear naval uniform for the execution, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take pride in my appearance. If those bastards from the admiralty had come to watch my final moments, I wanted to be prepared. I wanted to walk out of this cell with my chin high and my back straight, and meet the bullets sent my way with dignity and poise, just to deny them the satisfaction of seeing me broken and humbled—and if they had come anticipating a final, pleading apology, they would be profoundly disappointed.

  “How do I look?”

  The chaplain glanced down at my prison clothes. His eyes were damp, and glittered wetly in the light of the cell’s solitary bulb. “As elegant as can be expected, I suppose.”

  “Then I’m ready.”

  I tugged each cuff into place and set my jaw. I heard boots approaching in the corridor outside. Swallowing back my trepidation, I gave Berwick a final nod, and then turned to face the door.

  Keys clanked and rattled in the lock, and the chipped and flaking cell door opened on noisy hinges. Two men stood on the threshold, filling the space. I had been expecting uniformed prison guards, come to escort me to my execution. Instead, these men wore black fatigues and mirrored goggles, and carried automatic pistols.

  “Who’s this?” one of them demanded, pointing his weapon at the chaplain.

  Berwick threw up his hands in surprise. “I’m the chaplain,” he said. “I’m here to offer comfort to the condemned. Why, what’s happening? Who are you?”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  The gun snapped twice and Berwick clutched his chest. The holy book fell from his hands.

  The second newcomer reached for me. “Come on,” he said. “You’re coming with us.”

  The pistol cracked a third time. The shot took the chaplain in the cheek. His head snapped sideways with the force of the impact, and he collapsed. A strangled moan came from him. His heels drummed the stone floor. He seemed to be trying to squirm away from his attacker.

  The fourth shot was to the back of his head, where the spinal column joined the skull. After that, he lay still.

  A hand closed on my upper arm, and I didn’t resist. I allowed myself to be led from the room and into the corridor. The shooter followed us, pausing at each of the cell doors we passed to fire a couple of shots through the bean slot—the narrow aperture through which our daily meals were supplied.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  The man leading me increased his grip on my arm. “Neutralising witnesses,” he said.

  We carried on to the end of the corridor, and then down the echoing stone steps to the ground floor. Two uniformed prison guards lay dead inside the doors that led out to the courtyard. In the courtyard itself, the firing squad I’d watched clean and load their weapons now lay sprawled and scattered in the morning light. Their bright red blood ran along the grooves between the flagstones, towards the gutters that edged the courtyard. Stepping over their twitching, cooling bodies, my captor pulled me towards the flyer I’d seen land. Through its waiting hatch, I could see other men and women in black clothing and silver lenses, cradling pistols with fat silencers. Were these friends or assassins? I didn’t have the opportunity to enquire. Rough hands seized my arms and hauled me aboard. And then, even as they were strapping me into a seat, we were airborne and wheeling up above the craggy prison walls, into the clear skies I’d been looking at since my incarceration six months previously.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TROUBLE DOG

  I kept watch as Captain Konstanz picked her way down the perilously slippery temple steps. But while part of my view was focused on her, other parts of my attention saw larger pictures. From just over a tenth of a light second above her head, I could see not only the equatorial desert, but also the dusty smattering of ice at either of the planet’s poles. I was also keeping track of every moving object in the system—every splinter of ice, every chunk of rock, and all four of the slow-witted tourist ships currently pottering their way to and from the spaceport on the edge of the desert—and it was gratifying to realise I was by far the largest and most heavily armed vessel in the locality, boasting as I did a full suite of upgraded defence screens, including three additional batteries of anti-missile cannon, and strengthened hull plating. My engines had been tuned, my internal systems overhauled, and I’d even been allowed to keep some of the offensive modifications I’d made while tooling up to fight my siblings in the remote mausoleum known as the Gallery. Of course, the elders of the House of Reclamation hadn’t allowed me to reinstall the full range of ordnance I’d carried as a naval cruiser. I had no apocalypse-class antimatter warheads, for instance; no quantum suppressors or strong-force nullifiers, and definitely no chemical or biological payloads whatsoever, not even a lousy rat bomb. However, they had let me repair and reinstall six turret-mounted rail guns, one spinal maser, and seven fully stocked torpedo tubes armed with fission warheads. I might have lost the killing bite of my military days, but I had regained some of my claws, and they were sharp and tough enough to seriously maul anything that endangered the safety and wellbeing of my crew.

  My crew.

  As a heavy cruiser and ship of the line, I had been bred to value and protect my crew, but not at the expense of operational success. I had loved them, but not mourned them when they were lost in battle. The implanted aggression and pack loyalty of a wolf ensured my affections and allegiance remained with my fellow ships—the five Carnivore-class heavy cruisers I considered my brothers and sisters. Three of those had been lost during the war; the other two attacked me during the battle of the Gallery, and I had been forced to destroy one in self-defence, breaking a bond that went right the way back to the laboratory in which we’d both been grown. And it had been this act of violence that had brought Captain Konstanz and me closer. We had become sisters in misfortune and regret, having both faced down overwhelmingly superior odds, and been forced to take lives in order to preserve our own. And, quite unexpectedly, I fou
nd my loyalties attaching themselves to her, and to the other members of my crew: the former marine, Alva Clay; the medical student, Preston Menderes; and the alien engineer, Nod. Turned on by my former siblings, I broke my conditioning and found myself a new pack, and a new set of priorities.

  And now I itched for something to do—for some action to break up the monotony of this shakedown cruise. I wanted to fly as far and fast as my engines could take me, to blaze across the galactic disc and hurl myself through the higher dimensions like a javelin.

  Starlight prickled my hull. A gas giant lay three light minutes out, hanging like an ochre fruit against the blackness of space. I could hear its magnetic fields singing, and taste the tenuous wisps of hydrogen and methane that had made it out this far—stray molecules ripped from the gargantuan planet’s upper atmosphere by the tidal action of its rings and moons.

  It was right that we had come here to honour George. It was something the captain needed to do. She needed closure. But I felt little beyond passing regret. I missed George, but he had died while my former conditioning remained in force, so I felt unable to muster anything approaching true grief at his passing.

  I was curious about the woman soldier who had died at the top of the temple steps a decade and a half before, thereby providing the stem cells from which my organic components had been grown. In some senses, she had been me, and I wanted to honour that bond. I knew her name and face—indeed, I had gained access to her complete military records—and yet when I looked down at the mesa where she had died, I saw only a dusty rock.

  As an engine of war, I hadn’t been designed to ponder mortality—only enforce it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SAL KONSTANZ

  By the time I reached the desert floor at the bottom of the temple steps, the afternoon sky had turned the colour of lightly poached salmon, and my legs had taken on all the consistency and strength of steamed asparagus. Luckily, I didn’t have to walk far to reach my hired dustboat, which was still parked in the mesa’s shadow, exactly where I had left it. I threw my pack into the cargo hopper at the back. Then I settled into the front seat and savoured the relief of no longer being on my hot, aching feet. The spaceport lay a hundred kilometres to the west, in the direction of the setting sun and, after a day spent beneath the seemingly endless, wide-open desert skies, all I really wanted now was to get back to the Trouble Dog and the enclosing familiarity of her cabins and gangways.