Аластер Рейнольдс - The Iron Tactician

With the ship weightless, still rushing down the throat of the Way, they ate with their legs tucked under them in the glass eye of the forward observation bubble. Merlin eyed Teal between mouthfuls, noticing how entirely at ease she was with the absence of gravity, never needing to chase a gobbet of food or a stray blob of water. She had declined his offer of wine, but Merlin saw no need to put himself through such hardship.

‘Tell me about the people you traded with,’ he said.

‘They were fools,’ Teal said. She carried on eating for a few mouthfuls. ‘But useful fools. They had what we needed, and we had something they considered valuable.’

‘Fools, why exactly?’

‘They were at war. An interplanetary conflict, fought using fusion ships and fusion bombs. Strategy shaped by artificial intelligences on both sides. It had been going on for centuries when we got there, with only intervals of peace, when the military computers reached a stalemate. Just enough time to rebuild before they started blowing each other to hell again. Two worlds, circling different stars of a binary system, and all the other planets and moons caught up in it in one way or another. A twisted, factional mess. And stupid, too.’ She stabbed her fork into the rations as if her meal was something that needed killing. ‘Huskers aren’t thick in this sector, but you don’t go around making noise and light if you’ve any choice. And there’s always a choice.’

‘We don’t seem to have much choice about this war we’re in,’ Merlin said.

‘We’re different.’ Her eyes were hard and cold. ‘This is species-level survival. Their stupid interplanetary war was over trivial ideology. Old grudges, sustained and fanned. Men and women willingly handing their fates to battle computers. Pardalote was reluctant to do business with them: too hard to know who to speak to, who to trust.’

Merlin made a pained, studious look. ‘I’d never meddle in someone else’s war.’

She pushed the fork around. ‘In the end it wasn’t too bad. We identified the side best placed to help us, and got in and out before there were too many complications.’

‘Complications?’

‘There weren’t any. Not in the end.’ She was silent for a second or two. ‘I was glad to leave that stupid place. I’ve barely thought about them since.’

‘Your logs say you were in that system thirteen hundred years ago. A lot could have changed since then. Who knows, maybe they’ve patched up their differences.’

‘And maybe the Huskers found them.’

‘You know what, Teal? You’re cheerful company.’

‘Seeing the rest of your crew die will do that. You chose to leave, Merlin – it wasn’t that you were the last survivor.’

He sipped at his wine, debating how much of a clear head he would need when they emerged from the Way. Sometimes a clear head was the last thing that helped.

‘I lost good people as well, Teal.’

‘Really?’

He pushed off, moved to a cabinet and drew out a pair of immersion suits.

‘If you went through warcreche you’ll know what these are. Do you trust me enough to put one on?’

Teal took the dun-coloured garment and studied it with unveiled distaste. ‘What good will this do?’

‘Put it on. I want to show you what I lost.’

‘We’ll win this war in reality, not simulations. There’s nothing you can show me that…’

‘Just do it, Teal.’

She scowled at him, but went into a back room of Tyrant to remove her own clothes and don the tight-fitting immersion suit. By the time she was ready Merlin had slipped into the other suit. He nodded at Teal as she spidered back into the cabin. ‘Good. Trust is good. We’ll only be inside a little while, but I think it’ll help. Ship, patch us through.’

‘The Palace, Merlin?’

‘Where else?’

The suit prickled his neck as it established its connection with his spine. There was the usual moment of dislocation and Tyrant melted away, to be replaced by a surrounding of warm stone walls and tall fretted windows, shot through with amber sun.

Teal was standing next to him.

‘Where are we?’

‘Where I was born. Where my brother and I spent the first couple of decades of our existence, before the Cohort came.’ Merlin walked to the nearest window and bid Teal to follow him. ‘Gallinule created this environment long after we left. He’s gone now as well, so this is a reminder of the past for me in more ways than one.’

‘Your brother’s dead?’

‘It’s complicated.’

She left it at that. ‘What world are we on?’

‘Plenitude, we called it. Common enough name, I suppose.’ Merlin stepped onto a plinth under the window, offering a better view through its fretwork. ‘Do you see the land below?’

Teal strained to look down. ‘It’s moving – sliding under us. I thought we were in a castle or something.’

‘We are. The Palace of Eternal Dusk. My family home for thirteen hundred years – as long as the interval between your visits to that system.’ He touched his hand against the stonework. ‘We didn’t make this place. It was unoccupied for centuries, circling Plenitude at exactly the same speed as the line between day and night. My family were the first to reach it from the surface, using supersonic aircraft. We held it for the next forty generations.’ He lifted his face to the unchanging aspect of the sun, hovering at its fixed position over the endlessly flowing horizon. ‘My uncle was a bit of an amateur archaeologist. He dug deep into the rock the palace is built on, as far down as the anti-gravity keel. He said he found evidence that it was at least twenty thousand years old, and maybe quite a bit more than that.’ Merlin touched a hand to Teal’s shoulder. ‘Let me show you something else.’

She flinched under his touch but allowed him to steer her to one of the parlours branching off the main room. Merlin halted them both at the door, touching a finger to his lips. Two boys knelt on a carpet in the middle of the parlour, their forms side-lit by golden light. They were surrounded by toy armies, spread out in ordered regiments and platoons.

‘Gallinule and I,’ Merlin whispered, as the younger of the boys took his turn to move a mounted and penanted figure from one flank to another. ‘Dreaming of war. Little did we know we’d get more than our share of it.’

He backed away, leaving the boys to their games, and took Teal to the next parlour.

Here an old woman sat in a stern black chair, facing one of the sunlit windows with her face mostly averted from the door. She wore black and had her hands in her lap, keeping perfectly still and watchful.

‘Years later,’ Merlin said, ‘Gallinule and I were taken from Plenitude. It was meant to be an act of kindness, preserving something of our world in advance of the Huskers. But it tore us from our mother. We couldn’t return to her. She was left here with the ruins of empire, her sons gone, her world soon to fall.’

The woman seemed aware of her visitors. She turned slightly, bringing more of her face into view. Her eyes searched the door, as if looking for ghosts.

‘She has a gentle look,’ Teal said quietly.

‘She was kind,’ Merlin answered softly. ‘They spoke ill of her, but they didn’t know her, not the way Gallinule and I did.’

The woman slowly turned back to face the window. Her face was in profile again, her eyes glistening.

‘Does she ever speak?’

‘She’s no cause to.’ Merlin’s mouth was dry for a few moments. ‘We saw it happen, from the swallowship. Saw the Husker weapons strike Plenitude – saw the fall of the Palace of Eternal Dusk.’ Merlin turned from the tableau of his mother. ‘I mean to go back, one of these days – see what’s left with my own eyes. But I find it hard to bring myself to.’