Scene 3.14 – Afterward

Like diamonds in snow, thought Lady Blackbie. Like billions of miniscule diamonds. Idly she spun the model of the diatherine crystacule projected through the slab. If only diamond still had a luxury value, as it had before the Blood Queen, before the Fall. If only diamond had the thermal volatility of solidified carbon dioxide. She motioned the model back into the slab and continued up the gently-curving slope of her circumferential gallery hall.

At least the image was nice. Diamond might have survived the the magma flood, but that troublesome diatherine field on Chandier certainly had not. Neither, she assumed, had those Squamiform pests.

The eruption had been a strange stroke of luck – it was, after all, a much better solution than destroying the planet, and it didn’t matter in the end if her geologists could agree on how or why it had happened. Her citizens had survived …mostly, and the ash cloud was expected to fertilize the snowplains and raise the mean atmospheric temperature enough to bump the planet up a bracket on the colonization list. She would see a significant increase in the sale value of her colony’s infrastructure.

It was her colony to sell, after all, despite the extended legal wrangling with the Turnbull Red Weapons Group. It had been cheaper to buy Turnbull out than to settle with them, and easier to buy the Group after she allowed herself to be convinced by the femme and female legs of the triumvirate to grant them some minor titles and fractional proxied board votes, and – most importantly – to accept their male third into marriage.

She smirked at the thought of her husband languishing in his low-grav suite.

She had already had him in her custody since she’d found him in the Chandier Mayor’s suite, masquerading as some kind of low-grade operations Agent. His aristocracy bled through the ruse like blood through white silk, so she’d separated him from the other trespassers. She found she liked him. More – she liked his genes. Now that she’d had adequate time to get to know him, now that their consummation child was several months into tank gestation, she enjoyed him immensely – enough that she had considered furloughing him from the groom’s suite of her palatial tower long enough to attend the dissection and sell-off of Turnbull’s uninteresting assets.

Curiously enough, the one branch of her new weapons group that piqued the Lady’s interest was the same research lab whose stolen product had brought Turnbull to her planet and tangled her metaphorical hair. Artificial Intellect was a myth of course – everyone knew that even with an entire human neural network simulated, some unknown spark, some catalyst was required to turn processing potency to self-aware intellect – but it was a myth whose averacity was tested in the emergent properties of a sufficiently complex, distributed and semi-redundant logic system – a system like the one that coordinated Blacbkie’s diatherine switches. Blackbie had never experienced a true crisis (and to the best of the Lady’s knowledge, licit and illicit, neither had her competitors), but the several emergency system refreshes in the last few years had cost more than the insurance firms were willing to pay without investigation. It was not a true problem, but it was a very expensive potential problem. And now the best distillation of the work that might solve her potential problem had boiled away above a rogue volcanic rift on an iceball backwater planet.

She would assign the problem to her husband. It would be a project for him. He had already demonstrated a passion for such logistical issues, and, more recently, a fathomless capacity for pleasing her.

* * * * * * *

Like diamonds in snow, the corpses of Gaya and her Brutes were undifferentiated from their surroundings; they walked and spoke and and ate and slept as any of the trillion members of the race of Man. Certainly there were some oddities in their demeanor, in their carriage and their interaction with the material plane, in their reception by the citizens of the worlds surrounding Star Cetaron, but they disappeared into a sample pool so large and varied as Mankind.

So were Bhumi, L’shmi and Vrahi, by any obvious measure, unnoticed by the gods. They were minor aspect deities from a planet of (admittedly) historical interest whose latest avatars were the first of a new species of mind-bearing Life, but such long-cliched antics were beneath the regard of any serious mentalities. Every new form of life required the injection of divine mind to initiate sentience; who could be bothered to care if such inconsequential goddesses, even if (or especially because) they were of Ohida, chose to renew such an obsolete hobby?

It would later be argued that the nature of this neocarnation was momentously different from any that had occurred before, that it was of a significance unequalled since the first breath of Man, but the universe of gods were too busy playing at their siege to listen.

* * * * * * *

Like diamonds in snow, Chandier and her sun sparkled among the several quadrillion stars in her small corner of all-that-is.

Her sun, whose name had long ago been forgotten even by his nearest neighbors, was still self-absorbed – as stars were wont to be – and hadn’t noticed the change. She didn’t mind. He’d notice soon enough.

She hummed her part in the Perpetual Canticle with a renewed vigor as she spun and swirled and danced. Ages had passed since she had been this vivacious, but it had been that long since her blood flowed, since the iron within her moved and oozed and renewed her. It flowed now, through a blemish dangerously near to the pockmark Mankind had occupied on her smallest continent. She didn’t worry. Grey ash billowed into her atmosphere, marring the fastidious blue-white interplay between her snowy peaks and icy seas and frosty clouds. It bothered her little. The soot was a cloak that would capture the little warmth her star spared her; it would nurture the seeds that had been planted. Let Man’s tiny nest be drowned in her molten blood – they would return. She had heard the songs the angels sang to her. She would be a garden. She would be The Garden.

THE END of A DIAMOND IN SNOW

Bhumi tugged at his wrist to lead him through the flooded corridors toward the ship’s bridge. The doorway to the bridge was open, but demarked by a glistening film where a smooth wall of water met the trapped air of the bridge. The pocket of air surrounding him burped as Bhumi drew him into the room.

Gunder and the three wives watched him with wide eyes and slack jaws; their postures in their chairs were uncertain, almost frightened. Roger had hooked his belt to Shon’s chair while she tended to cherry-red cracked skin on his face, but now they both stared at Cormick.

Bhumi touched Cormick’s shoulder. “The Garden is planted, Man – we must leave this planet.” She smiled sweetly and crossed to Roger, taking his cheeks between her fingers.

Cormick blinked and turned to Gunder. “Can we jump?”

Gunder was slow to answer; his eyes were fixed to Roger, who had gone rigid at Bhumi’s touch. “…Well, we’re high enough above the surface if we’re feeling reckless.”

“But the ship-”

“Yes. Yes!” His eyes flicked back toward the helm. “But not because of anything I’ve done. The systems are waterlogged and riddled with functional holes, but the diatherine core and jump piston are report nominal. And the jump vector’s already been programmed, courtesy of your friend in the hold. Star Ceteron. All that’s left is to pull the trigger.”

“No, please wait.” Tetva’s voice was soft, but pleading. The intensity made the whole bridge seem quiet. “Just a moment more…” Tetva was free from her chair and now clutching at Bhumi’s arm. Her eyes flicked to Roger’s now glowingly healthy face, then back to Bhumi. “Please… Byrie. Can you give him back to me? I will devote to you whatever you ask.”

Darling Bhumi’s smile was patient as she detached Tetva from her arm. “Your man is dead, child, and his body has been claimed by the planet. His soul has already begun its flight to the sun of Ohida, to cleave to his sun god. But as he has served us so well, perhaps my sister Vrahi will demand him back from his A’lah. I believe they are on good terms.”

Bhumi glanced then to Cormick. Her aura had retreated, and now glowed just beneath her skin. “It is time.”

Cormick motioned to Damwick, and the jump piston hummed; the diatherine bubble enveloped the ship, collapsed the dimensional cylinder to a disk, and pushed them all across the universe.

Next

* * * * * * *

The white had faded away, though Cormick’s ears still rang and colors played beneath his eyelids. The Egg said nothing to him, so he queried it for status. Nothing. Cold nibbled at his face.

His eyes cracked open and, and instead of the sterile lukewarmth of the amniotic fluid and the Egg’s internal displays, they found air – moist, but gaseous – and the glowing face of Darling Bhumi.

Before he could cough up the fluid in his lungs she caught his face between his hands and kissed him, spreading his lips apart with hers so her breath could enter his mouth. Heat flooded his chest, infused itself into his blood and tingled through his body, to the reach of his toes and fingers. His leg kicked like he was waking from a falling dream. He was unrestrained, detached from his Egg, and in freefall. He grabbed at what was nearest to him – Bhumi – and she squeezed back against him. They were both still naked, and their bodies were responding to the proximity of flesh. Her kiss lingered from function to pleasure; he had drawn great lungfuls of the verdant air through his nose and into his fluid-free lungs and now he kissed her back and hooked his leg around the long thigh that had slipped up between his.

She drew away with a blushing smile full of promise. She held him still by the wrist while his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

He was a thousand kilometers above the planet – high enough to see the horizon curve away and fade from blue to black and stars. High enough to see the bay-hugging shape of the mining colony at an angle, and directly beneath them a blistering cloud of steam and gray ash and fire.

His legs kicked again, and his stomach twisted to adjust to the first sustained micro-g he’d felt in years. Darling Bhumi’s pocket of vaporous air still extended down his arm to envelop his entire body, but beyond that was a sphere of water, clear as diamond glass and more than a kilometer in diameter. Lattices of ice frosted and remelted around the outer surface. The Silver floated off to his right – broken, charred, torn open along the ventral seam with a gash larger than its loading ramp, but its remaining running lamps shone. Byrie’s new Egg floated before him – it, too, had cracked like a nut along the line of the sensor disk, though the hatch door floated freely away from it. Beyond the Egg, in the distance at the crystal ice edge of the lake, he could see the glowing shape of a Nymph’s aura, and within it the speck of her body. The water around her wavered with anticipation.

“Sister Vrahi has been so long without a battle,” he felt Bhumi murmur in his ear. “If we don’t hurry, she may provoke a fight with your starships just to taste their deaths.”

Cormick’s eyes refocused beyond the edge of the lake, at the darkling shapes of a fleet arrayed warily around them. The vessel at the center of the formation, partially obscured behind fanned-out shieldships, bristled with towers and masts and weapons modules; he recognized it immediately as the Blackbie CenComm flagship, MaidenStar. He frowned at the barrel of light swirling at its center. A dark shape eclipsed the MaidenStar for a moment, and he realized the lake had risen into the wreckage field of the Red Battleship.

“Come, Man – wisdom does not suggesting testing the duration of a miracle.’

She led him by the wrist toward the gash in the Silver, swimming for them both though her feet barely kicked. They slipped into the hold and made straight for the door, passing by the third Nymph, the one in the body of the Kitty Brute. Her aura bled out into the water that surrounded her, and into the control panel she embraced with both hands. Her eyes were closed with pleasure; a post-coital smile split her face.

Next

The second or so that he arced over the water seemed to stretch toward forever, even without the Zen. The storm above the Nymphs had spun up to a tornado that spouted snow up into the atmosphere and whipped the fogs across his visual layer. The sky blossomed yellow-green as rays cut down from above the atmosphere to trace the fleeing hawks. He still had a grenade in his starboard tube and sixty-three slugs in the tank: not much, but he could have finished off Nine. If he wasn’t so tired. His Egg finally bounced off the surface of the lake, skipping and tumbling once before it plunged in.

The water wrapped around him and crowned before it pulled him down. From beneath the surface, the lake was crystal clear, not dark and murky as it had seemed from above. It was silent and peaceful. Roger’s open shell rocked slowly only a few meters away. Red Eggs squirmed between the rocks near the shore. Through the wavery blue haze, the Silver’s porthole windows glowed. At the center of the lake, a vortex swirled at the center of the Nymphs’ dance in reflection of the storm above. Strangely enough, as far away as they were, and as hard as the water roiled there, Cormick could see that the bare heels of the Nymphs were tattooed. The floor was littered with the corpses of Squishies, and somewhere among them, the body of Byrie.

Then, above the lake, above the storm, the heavens opened and a pillar of white fire burned down toward the valley. He knew what it was: the same plasma lance he’d seen destroy Red’s battleship. It was meters wide – enough to turn the entire valley to dust, to boil away the lake and the Goddesses dancing on it, to bake the Eggs to a fine powder. But it didn’t. The storm above the lake swallowed the beam and focused it like a lens, drew it in like a funnel to pierce down through the circle described by the Nymphs’ dance, down through the swirling water in pencil-thin, blindingly bright ray, and into the valley floor. The Nymphs’ song swelled in climax. Cormick’s sensors burned white and washed through his brain, but not before he saw a tongue of orange flame erupt back up and out of the valley floor.

The white light and final note of the Nymphs’ song hummed with an intensity that washed over Cormick and became a still calm.

Through the warmth of the amniotic fluid around him, he felt the tickle of icy cold.

Gaya’s disembodied face appeared behind his closed eyes. “That’s enough, Man,” she sang, with a voice sweet and melodious. Her smile soothed his soul. “You’ve done enough. It’s time to go home.”

Next

Roger hesitated while Cormick ducked beneath a tight stream of slugs from Eight, then closed the gap to hammer her with a stone he’d palmed.

“If it’s possible, I’ll manage it.”

Cormick couldn’t blame him for the reluctance in his voice. The water was supercooled, black, and murky; Roger’s body would be protected by his ‘Skin for at least a few minutes, but his face would freeze as soon as he opened his hatch; even if he groped his blind way quickly, the damage would be more than his blood agents could easily heal. Maybe Cormick should let him stay in the warm, narcotic comfort of the womb until his oxygen faltered. Chances were they’d all die under six meters of ice anyway. The paths didn’t show him that ending, either.

No – there was still a hope. “Gunder, be ready for him.”

“Check.”

Eight was not an experienced manual fighter; she threw a hook that left her open, so he reached in for a counter-chop across her arm and an elbow check that would push her off balance, then bounced off her armor and rolled into Nine. Nine had thought she was sneaking in, but instead of grabbing the lift hoists on his reactor, she got an armful of Cormick’s shoulder and the muzzle of his under-arm gun in her sensor-plate. He squeezed off two dozen rounds before she stumbled back blind. Sixty-three slugs left in his tank. He flung himself back to Eight with a spin that would twist off her portside leg and set her up for the disablement strike …and he almost fumbled over her when she slumped. He hadn’t expected that. He followed through on the strike anyway, but she put up only a token resistance – even when her hip-joint snapped. Behind him, Nine lay limp against the rock wall, and Ten was retreating – she had her back and reactor exposed to him. It was as if Red had issued the retreat tone… or planned to bomb the valley.

He glanced up at the sky to see the twelve hawks scattering in twelve different directions, their daisy spiral an afterimage of thermal waste. He refocused higher; the battleship’s daystar had broken into flaring motes, and around it dozens more stars pelted the former battleship with yellow and orange beams. Then the bright stripes of a plasma lance – what must have been a huge weapon to recolor the sky at that altitude – struck at the battleship remains, producing explosions that flared out like nebulae.

Cormick stepped back to catch his balance. His head swam. The Zen was gone, retreated like a tide to leave him beached in head-aching normalcy. Pain coursed through his veins and crawled over his skin and throbbed behind his eyes. His stomach twisted in hunger, his eyes blurred from exhaustion. He couldn’t focus. There was nothing to focus on – the paths were gone. He was finally done.

His Egg clanked and rocked, shocking him back to some kind of attention. The one-legged Eight had turned her balance forward and tackled him. Twined together they both toppled, off the escarpment, toward the icewater.

He wasn’t done! He fought to free himself; kicked his thrusters against their off-balance flip, scrabbled with his free hand for a grip on the outcropping they tumbled past, but she blew. B-B-B-B-BOOM! Her arms and legs exploded against his armor, punching in his sensorplate and throwing him further out over the lake.

Next

He leaped clear before his boulder perch exploded from the impact of another megagrain slug. This time it was Ten, who had found the bottletop – now an island – and had set herself up as the sniper. He would get to hers soon enough; now he pulled himself further up the valley wall behind a stone pillar from which he could ambush Eight. Eight would shell herself once he’d disabled her, he was certain, and he was still considering the best paths to dunk Nine before catching Ten and opening her up – each without expending ammunition from a bank that had already dropped beneath the warning band. Worry tickled the back of his mind: he couldn’t see the paths to Eleven or Twelve yet, no matter how far ahead he looked. That may have just been because they would flee before he could catch them. He hoped they were planning to flee. He knew they lurked now on the opposite valley wall, on the far side of the lake.

That lake was his best weapon now. An intact egg or shell should be waterproof, of course – Roger’s vitals were still stable in his shell, though by this time he’d settled near the bottom, beneath the Nymphs’ storm (he’d been double-teamed by Four and Six early on, while still fending off the swarming Squishies). Even the Red Eggs Cormick had pushed in would conceivably be able to drag themselves to the banks with whatever limbs still worked … eventually. But he didn’t think they had until eventually. The Nymphs’ song seemed to be rising toward a climax, and the storm of fog spiraling above them reached higher than the mountains cupping the valley. Whatever they were doing had built to a crescendo, and if the glacial lake refroze when they were done…

“Jasper!”

“Left-Major?”

Cormick had nearly reached Egg Eight’s position, but Nine and Ten were closing to surround him. Eight filled the air with slugs, but they zipped harmlessly past his Egg. “Can you make it to the Silver’s hatch?” Only one of the Piece of Silver’s engineless spars still jutted out of the lake, its beacon light flashing like a buoy through the fog. The map showed it more than twenty meters from Roger’s position, but it lay shallower there.

“I’m not quite mobile now, Left-Major.”

“If you blew your hatch to swim. I don’t think your position is safe.”

Next

Scene 3.13 – The escape

Cormick landed as sure-footedly as a mountain goat, bounding up the rock-and-snow slope until he was just beneath Turnbull Red Egg number Seven – that was the number he’d assigned her, the order the path led to their destruction. He hit the rock flat enough to thrust from, his balance shifted aft, and his foot whipped up into a windmill. Slushy snow arced through the air over him as he flew back, arms outstretched to control his flight. He kicked down onto the shoulders of the Sixth Egg only to burn his thrusters and send her tumbling off the valley wall and back into the fog-covered lake, which had now completely replaced the glacial floor and licked the snow from jutting peaks containing it. Somewhere near the center of the lake, hidden in the helix of mists that surrounded them, the Nymphs still sang – their voices rang through the ripples of the fog.

Cormick’s thrusted jump sent him rifling back toward the arms of Seven. He caught the Red Egg by the wrists and knocked her against an outcropping, spinning her around before she caught her balance. Hand to arm, they tottered together on the uneven tops of the rocks in an awkward sort of dance. The Red Egg struggled to shift her center of balance over his and fired her slugthrowers wildly, sending magnets whizzing harmlessly past Cormick’s shoulders and reactor to plink against the escarpment or fly out across the lake. He pushed back, cutting one wide foot between her knees to tip her to a single leg, and poked for the vulnerable points beneath her pits when her arms wavered. Even through the dense fog he sensed Eight and Nine beading wide-bore Armor-Crusher shots from further up the valley wall before his Egg displayed the warning; he spun Seven around again to put her between them. The megagrain slugs were pulled wide at the last moment, and the force of the impact shattered boulders behind him, throwing flakes and dust into the air. Cormick didn’t worry long about the other two, though, and took advantage of Seven’s distraction to firm his grip on her shoulder mounting ladder. The other two were still visible in the future – he’d already seen the paths he’d take to their undoing. This was the sweet spot in the battle, when the brawl was still too thick with Red’s Eggs for any of them to get the easy shot (especially not after he made a point of it early on, deflecting a lobbed Red grenade under their Egg Two, dislodging her reactor and leaving her a crumpled heap now freezing halfway beneath the waterline). Still, it wasn’t so dense that Cormick had to worry about losing track of the combatant’s positions and finding himself on the receiving end of a nasty surprise. He shifted his hip, and Seven’s foot slipped as he’d seen that it would. A quick thrust of his finger up under her arm crushed the exposed hydraulic piston. Without the use of the arm she lost her balance quickly; he tipped her over his knee and knocked loose her ankle thruster before sending her cartwheeling through the mist and into the icewater.

Next

The battleship had managed its one quick laser blast and spattered a few thousand turret rounds toward the gunships before the Blackbie slugs began to arrive. Seventy-mils hit first, peppering and cracking the battleship’s peripheral armor and exposing the seams before the massive five-hundred-mil rounds appeared to batter the vulnerable joints at the thruster pods and the clamdoor hinges.

Then, several long seconds after the battle had begun, the flagship’s core erupted with light; the arterial weapon charged and fired a plasma lance seven meters wide, then fired again and again – three quick shots along the battleship’s centerline, between the expected locations of the diatherine core and the communications relay. When the sun-white light faded, the battleship had been gored; fire wicked frantically at the blackened edges of the holes in the rust red armor as the atmosphere rushed out of the ship. The gunships’ battery increased in tempo and ferocity.

Lady Blackbie relaxed in her throne. Her face remained regally placid when the battleship’s frame broke along the perforation line from her flagship’s weapon. The Turnbull vessel was now completely surrounded by chaff and the shrapnel from its still-exploding weapons bays and thruster pods; now it looked like less like a formidable battleship than a pile of rubbish swarmed by flies. The gunships continued to punch away against the two pieces of the wing until they broke again and again, until shield panels had been punched through the far side of the wing and the pieces had begun to spin and yaw too erratically and quickly to be targeted by slugs. The shieldships had switched from tracers to fine lasers that pierced into the remaining intact bulkheads like scalpels to release the trapped atmosphere, or stabbed again and again into the already blackened and twisted communications relay. The flagship’s arterial plasma lance had begun to spin and heat again as it reached its charge.

“Enough, Capatin.” The Lady swiped her fingers through the air. “Recall your gunships before they empty their ammunition banks, and reform the shield on the spaceward side of the fleet.” The attack had been quick – two minutes at most – but there had been time enough for the battleship to cry distress before its diatherine core was gored out. Blackbie’s switches were locked to Turnbull Red and its proxies, so no fleets would arrive conveniently through the station’s ring, but that wouldn’t stop a Turnbull fleet from open-ending into the gravity plane outside the planet in the next hour. It would do to be cautious.

“Yes, Lady.” The Capatin’s face was as studiously expressionless as her own. “Shall we succor survivors? And what of the ground forces?”

Lady Blackbie twined her fingers together again. “Unfortunately, there were no survivors aboard Turnbull Red’s battleship, and no salvageable systems. Push it into the atmosphere and let it burn. Don’t bother picking through details on the ground. Burn the whole valley.” She felt a twinge of remorse for her two pilots and her two Eggs, but twelve over two or seven over one – neither odds allowed room for daylight. Her pilots were already dead. Turnbull would shell the second egg and boil them both before she could have support on the ground.

She pushed the thought from her mind. “Comms.” A new head – a ruddy-cheeked, round-faced femme with headgear on her temples and around her ears – appeared on the Lady’s display.

“Yes, Lady?”

“Tell the station to keep all channels open. As soon as Turnbull’s Agent is on our network, I want him directed to me, no matter who the target of his call is.”

“Yes, Lady.”

Next

Capatin Huri’s keyed acknowledgment came just as a warning siren blared from the Turnbull side of the screen. The Turnbull Capatin’s eyes flared, but to her credit she wasted no time. “Ready the flares. Toss the chaff now. Get that bombardment laser turned back around and fix it on the hot ship.” The woman’s eyes narrowed at the screen. “Call your dogs back, Corparch, and tell them to cancel their target logs immediately. You are trespassing on our legal authority and we will defend it. Light up the-”

A swipe of her long fingers ended the conversation, replacing Capatin Ti’s face with Capatin Huri’s at the center of her screen. “Capatin, we are clearly under threat and attack.”

“Clearly, Lady.” Huri’s fingers were in motion, signaling to her leftenins around her; in the background the flagship bridge scrambled with activity. Huri turned back to the panel and lowered her voice. “Lady, we see only conventional weaponry on their vessel. We may be able to incapacitate them and-”

“All the same, Capatin, be certain no portion of the ship remains intact to threaten my person.”

“Understood, Lady.”

A narrow beam of yellow-green light appeared between the Red battleship and the gunship with the instigating torpedo lock, but the gunship had already ejected its torpedo pods. The laser sliced across the first pod with an intensity that fractured the ceramic armor and boiled it to explosion; a pulse shot up the beam from the battleship and the torpedos within the pod wavered and inverted and splattered themselves into the vacuum. The second pod had already unfolded and let loose its torpedoes before the shrapnel storm from the first overtook it. The seeker torpedoes snaked out and away, independently choosing random paths until their jukes and slides had burned through the determined fuel level and brought them near enough to the target to hone in on a kill vector.

The torpedoes were wasted on the chaff surrounding the battleship, but they’d already served their purpose. They were obsolete.

The space around Lady Blackbie’s ship had become a wonder of lights and thrustertrails as her small fleet let loose its weapons. The shieldships had already slid forward, fully deploying their quarter-spiral panels and spattering away at the Red ship with bright five-mil tracers. The tracers had little chance of penetrating the battleship’s armor, but they had the dual purpose of reporting hit coordinates and providing thermal cues that led away from the flagship; the guns themselves imposed only minimal counter-thrust on the shieldships.

The gunships that comprised the majority of the fleet had thrusted beyond the protection of the shield array, arcing into flanking positions with a constant, semi-random, lock-phobic thrust. Their main cannons had synchronized to their primary thrusters, so the recoil from each massive spat slug was absorbed by a bright blue and orange cone. Like the instigator gunship they’d cut their torpedo pods to drift, but left them unspent to keep their attack vectors from filling with traffic.

Behind the shield array, the flagship’s arterial weapon began to spin.

Next

Lady Blackbie received the call on her front-left window, occulting the sun-lit limb of the planet. The Turnbull Red Capatin – Hunda Ti, her label read – was immediately astonished and a bit frightened when her call partner, whoever it had been, was suddenly replaced with the face and voice of the Lady. Within the second, though, her face flushed red with anger. “This is quite improper and illegal, Officiency-”

“Corparch,” the Lady Blackbie corrected, and her long, tapered fingers intertwinded gracefully beneath her chin. She kept her voice slow, melodious, and regal. “You see that Blackbie takes your violation quite seriously. I am prepared to deal with it personally.”

The Capatin’s mouth tightened. She was long and slender, and had the smooth, ageless face of rejuvination. Her features were sharp and intelligent. The way her shoulders moved, Lady Blackbie suspected she was busy keying in commands below the angle of the camera. “The only violation of which I’m aware, Lady Corparch, is your intrusion on a private channel. That is fineably illegal and-”

“-Quite necessary, Capatin, given your refusal to parlay and your diminishing opportunity to disengage my protectorate and my forces without severe consequences. You must stand down every one of your units immediately, and jettison your diatherine core until this disagreement can be settled.”

“Your forces? Those two Eggs? They aren’t even – Lady Corparch, your planet is under legal 373-dot-0 subordination, and I am well within my authority-”

Lady Blackbie interrupted again, not because the situation was inherently urgent – her tone was still even, her words slow – but the interruptions visibly frustrated the Capatin. She’d need the Capatin furious to prevent the second of the scenarios. “-Your plaintive has been challenged and your authority temporarily suspended. I tell you a second time to stand down immediately, and we will resolve this expediently through our ambassadors.” While she spoke, she keyed a quick message to Capatin Huri. Now, Capatin.

The Turnbull Capatin was whining. “Blackbie’s so-called ‘expedience’ has already cost us a week; I will not be made to hold again. It’s your turn to wait, Corparch, though I shall be more gracious. You need only entertain yourself in high orbit for an hour. When you return I shall be done here, and out of your royal hair completely.”

“This is your third and last opportunity, Capatin Ti.”

Next

That was why this confrontation required strategic planning.

There were three ways possible scenarios. The Turnbull ship could destroy them all in some grand display; at least this was likely to be relatively painless, even if the outcome was unacceptable. Or, weapons might never be employed, and Blackbie and Turnbull could talk themselves into a legal seige, which would extend in the courts or between arbitrators for months and would almost certainly result in the public knowledge of Chandier’s bounty. Likewise the Turnbull ship could be damaged but not destroyed and escape to flee through a diatherine hop, or it might be destroyed only after emitting a distress call, and though this would give Blackbie the temporary advantage, it would be prodding a hornet’s nest. If Turnbull Red was not a merc group, they certainly would be acquainted with several, and Blackbie was not prepared for full war with another corporation, least of all one that had historically provided more than a third of their ammunition. Or, the confrontation could end very quickly, with the sudden capitulation or destruction of the battleship. If it happened quickly enough, before the ship could send a complete message to their corporation, Lady Blackbie would be in a position to rewrite the story however suited her best. Her plans for Chandier would be altered little.

She would need to be decisive and remorseless if that scenario presented itself, but more: she needed to create it.

The chime in her throne’s panel sounded. “Corparch?”

Lady Blackbie folded her long-fingered gloves in her lap and made her face placid for the little image of Huri. “Go, Capatin.”

“I’m sending you the full battle column now. It appears that the battleship has their thumb down on a pair of our Eggs on the surface. They’ve Hawks in the air and a dozen of their own Eggs on the ground: five up, seven down. We’re one up, one down. There’s a cargo ship down in the middle of the stage, not ours, and some lose boots. And the valley is crawling with Squishies.”

The Lady kept the confusion she felt from her face and nodded slightly. “Put me through to their Agent.”

“We haven’t found him yet, but we know he’s in the city. Their Capatin Ti is on the battleship, but actively refusing our salutations on every standard channel. If my Lady is willing to bend the comms charter, though, we’ve found their Capatin on a private channel running through our fixed orbit station, and we are in a position to cut and splice the call…”

“Very good, Capatin Huri! Before you cut me in, though – be ready on the trigger. We will need to be overtly bullying – but not just yet. Be ready for my plan at my discretion.”

“We are ready now, Lady.”

“Splendid. Cut me in.”

Next

A final buzz passed through Lady Blackbie’s bones and the flagship burst out of the jump ring above the blue and white planet of Chandier. Once it was clear of the ring, the ship’s frame began to hum. The Lady’s observation tower could now extend away from the flattened cylinder of the packed ship; as the tower extended, the shield panels retracted from the edges of the floor and ceiling to improve the Lady’s view. But the hum wasn’t just from the observation tower; the whole ship resonated with the sound of the post-jump transformation. To traverse the switches, her ship (and every other space-faring vessel) had to fit into the standardized navigation pill: a perfect cylinder one hundred and seventy-five meters in diameter and eight hundred meters long; when tightly packed, the Lady’s ship flirted within a centimeter of each dimension. Once her ship escaped the switch, it expanded like a Squamiform in a vacuum. The primary thruster pods and and pulse engines swung out on three booms the length of the ship; the manipulative thrusters extended on a spar out the rear like a stinger. Towers, weapons modules, and hanger bays blistered out from the cylinder walls, leaving the cylinder core empty execpt for the modular vacuum bulkheads and the arterial weapon.

The space around the flagship began to sparkle as the support vessels filled their slots in the attack formation. Blackbie’s first assault force – nearly two-thirds of the corporation’s weaponships – loomed over the blue-white sphere of Chandier. The blinking green lights of the fixed orbit station were eclipsed by the ships; the flickering blue of the jump ring had disappeared behind them. Several hundred kilometers lower, the wing-shaped Turnbull battleship was minor red shadow hanging above a gleaming glacial sheet.

The Lady drove her throne nearer to the front window and stared at the battleship. A motion with her long glove fingers magnified the battleship in the window and sharpened its details. The Lady’s eyes tightened in a minimal expression of disdain. The battleship wasn’t a shadow – it was a stain, an infection on her planet, a visual metaphor for the mar in her plans. It was the first symptom of an illness she could correct now with minor surgery, but which, if left uncorrected to metastasize, would threaten the life of her corporation.

The battleship was externally unremarkable. It was a standard wing-shaped frame, with an armored hull that didn’t expand beyond the size of the navigation pill. But of course the frame would be unremarkable: Turnbull Red was a weapons research group, not a merc corps, so the worrisome matter was what pre-market armory bristled behind its clamdoors. What weapons the battleship had secreted away might be quite enough to counter the Blackbie fleet. The Lady Blackbie felt quite safe in the tower on her ship – each of the modular protrusions had sufficient independent systems to survive the destruction of the rest of the ship, and there were a dozen other shield ships guarding the most vulnerable strikepoints on the flagship in any case. Still… she had heard that weaponry research moved quickly, even this long after the war, and there was the remote possibility that the red battleship carried something nasty enough to disintegrate the Blackbie fleet at once.

Next

A trip through a diatherine switch was not much to see from the inside, once the initial wonder at the immensity of the switches had passed (even though Blackbie’s newest triplet switches were more than four thousand kilometers from pole to pole, after several dozen transits the Lady was no longer impressed); the lattice-work between the ring-ribbed tunnels was too dense to see a thousandth-part of the cacoscopy of waste light generated by the millions of rings. Ahead and behind down each tunnel were the endless ribs of the jumprings, the incessant flashes as the rings opened and closed; the specks of other ships and flicks and self-guided freight pills appearing and disappearing through the rings. The transit itself was dull – the ship only drifted (and occasionally gently accelerated or decelerated to economize and partner-jump with smaller ships) down what appeared to be a straight line through an interminable tunnel. Every kilometer another jumpring circled the tunnel like an open sphincter; more than half remained dormant as the ship passed through, especially toward the beginning and end of the transit. When the ring flashed, the five percent of humanity (and vast majority of other sentient races) that experienced diatherine sensitivity like the Lady might feel an ache or an itch, or nausea or pressure within their skull, but from the vantage of the passengers, the ship appeared to continue down the tunnel.

Of course, the reality was much more interesting – the ship or shuttle cluster, or even the trackpod in the newer switches, whatever it was traversing the gate – skipped from tunnel to tunnel or even from switch to switch (and thus galaxy to galaxy) each time the ring activated, as often as ten times a minute for as long as several hours, depending on the the transit endpoints and the traffic in the switches and whether or not they had to shift to the network of one of Blackbie’s rivals to complete their journey. The Lady Blackbie’s ship was prioritized of course, and moving quickly through tunnels cleared of incidental traffic, accelerating with thrusters beyond the slower speed of the switch’s magnetic tide. As she passed through the core gates – great, rotating, multi-layered lenses that could activate twenty frames a second under full load – other, smaller vessels painted blue-unto-black began to gather around and ahead of the matching-lacquered flagship.

The Lady had considered another choice before she called her fleet together. It would have been the more ethical choice, and also the choice mandated by the Ohidan League’s charter. She could have announced the claim (even after Turnbull Red’s appearance on the planet – her indiscretion in hiding the expanded field until the end of the lease would be forgotten in the excitement surrounding its announcement and possibly gone unfined) and let the planet’s lease return to bidding with the new field fully disclosed. The fee to lease and develop the new field would have been astronomical, possibly more than the total value of Blackbie’s liquid financials, but the Lady would have bid the price up into the unreasonable numbers right alongside her competitors. The fee collected by the Ohidan League would have been large enough to fund the deteriorating Ohidan Protectorate Consortium (which would have suited her interests, since the soldiers Mother Military had leased to her had been declining in quality and loyalty since the end of the Supremal War), and it was possible, if not likely, that whoever won the bidding would bankrupt themselves before they were able to fully develop the field. It might have been years before the market was flooded, and it would be done by a corporation with a vested interest. Certainly her competitors could be made to see the benefit of secrecy until then – the market would be stable for a year more, at least. But as many uncertainties as there were in that option, it was the safe option, the conservative option. It was the spineless option. It was the option that would lead to the gradual, unremarkable decline of Blackbie Centralized Communications.

For the record – for her journals, if they were ever to be investigated – the Lady had put the blame on the Squamiform infestation. However unlikely it might be, the possibility existed that the Squamiform would learn of the field and find a way to develop or defend it for themselves while the Ohidan Corporations squabbled and bickered. As bad as it would be for Blackbie to lose the field, it would be far worse for Mankind in general to lose the field and the diatherine advantage to a resurgent Supremal race. Some of them had begun to learn math, she heard.

Next

Her hands were already sullied, though – or the plan was in motion that would make them so. The directive she’d described to Mayor Young (perhaps inadvisedly, but the Lady had been excited to expand her confidence outside of the board of Primary Officiencies) was not entirely legal in every detail. Chandier’s lease from the Ohidan League of Corporations and the subsequent mining rights were predicated on an ohidaforming covenant; destroying the planet was somewhat the opposite of leaving a planet suitable for colonization. Forty-two years earlier – when Lady Blackbie had been only the youngling Dame Blackbie, and had still suffered the supervision of her Regent Aunt – Blackbie CenComm could have avoided the restrictions of working through the Ohidan League of Corporations and backdoored a privateer mining colony onto the planet. That might have been sensible enough at the time: Chandier had only reported as a moderate field. The young Dame Blackbie would have argued for such a shortcut had she been privy to Blackbie’s operations – private miners were cheaper than citizens and giddy for even illegitimate corporate sponsorship – but the Regent had insisted on working withing the restrictions of the Ohidan League. It rankled the Lady at the time, but now, when her company had grown from only a few hundred small switching stations to thousands in the last forty-two years, she saw the wisdom. Now she had the experience to know that the risk was greater than a minor fine: private miners had a reliable habit of forgetting their under-the-table corporate loyalties or surrendering to the first armed crew that encroached their field. Forty-two years ago, her Aunt would have paid the minor fine for underreporting a field and aggressively mined the newly-discovered Chandier lode for a commodity monopoly; now the Lady Blackbie had more to lose than gain by upsetting the market. She would make bold moves, but not foolish ones. The planet would clearly have to be destroyed before it cut the bottom out of the price of diatherine. It was the bold, unorthodox decision, but not a dangerous one. Even within the limited territory of the Ohidan League – a few sectors of less than a thousand galaxies – the list of planets more suitable for colonization was thousands of lines long. Most of them had seasons and tectonics and a complex florasphere; Chandier’s florasphere wouldn’t be stable, much less complex, for another decade. Even if she had completed the preparations for colonization, it would still be an iceball a lightyear off a disused trading corridor. No one would noticed if it dropped from the colonization list.

No one except Turnbull Red, apparently. Lady Blackbie still wasn’t certain how they had found out about the field, though she certainly knew which officiency to suspect of the leak. Once this dirty business was behind her she would dig her claws in and squeeze until she found the leak, and she would wash her hands with officiency’s blood – socially speaking. She would have to do something about Turnbull Red, as well; but a brief investigation had suggested the expense would be less disastrous if she ruined the weapons group in the customer confidence market or even bought and liquidated the company then it would be to let the planet slip into their hands. If it had been one of Blackbie’s rivals threatening to flood the market, the Lady might have been able to weather the turmoil. But a newcomer, who didn’t understand the subtleties that came with a vested stake in the market, would simply flashburn the whole diatherine profit structure. Blackbie wasn’t sufficiently diversified to survive.

A patter of white noise passed by the Lady’s ears and a dull ache slipped through her body from front to back; her flagship had passed through the jumpgate at the end of her station’s dedicated corparchial quay and into the massive diatherine switch her station orbited. Outside the windows of her recessed observation tower, the uneven blue light of the jump ring retreated toward the aft of the ship.

Next

Scene 3.12 – Lady Blackbie Advents

The Lady Allen Rhiar Blackbie floated briskly along the double-wide corridor that followed the spine of her flagship. An ostentatious parade of aides and attendants and protectors preceded her, using their own feet and hands to direct themselves along the processional route at a more than stately pace; she, on the other hand, was led by a pair of handlers with fiber-thin leashes that prevented her from nearing the ceiling or floor, even through the turns in the corridor. The Lady’s long hair, which had been carefully trussed and pinned for the effect, flowed like a blue-black river behind her without drifting toward the quilted velvet walls or the officers who lined them. She was pleased to see the shipswomen wearing their working colors instead of their dress suits, against protocol and just as she’d requested. The Capatin of this ship – named Marquette Huri per the dossier, and they’d met only once before during the Lady’s ascension – was either studiously obedient or understood and respected her desire for efficiency. Either was fine.

Lady Blackbie preferred to allow her executives a degree of latitude, so long as they didn’t directly contradict her. She didn’t have the same freedoms herself. Her gown clung elegantly to her hips and legs, molding and restraining them. If the ship had been spinning a pseudo-grav field, she would hardly have been able to stand, let alone totter down the hall. Her hands were sheathed in the long-fingered, purposefully unweildy gloves of nobility. They prevented all but the most basic work and panel use; to feed herself with them on, she required inconvenient aristocratic utensils. Still, she wore them, as she did the heeled boots and the tight bodice that squeezed her neck and poised her to spill her breasts at any moment into the cool air. In some cases, protocol was worth preserving, even when her own functional uselessness nagged at her.

A corparch who couldn’t labor for her flag was as bad as one wouldn’t – or so she’d told herself throughout the fifty years she’d suffered the Regency. She had sworn she wouldn’t allow herself to be painted into the portrait of an aloof, uninvolved aristocrat. And she hadn’t. Now, though she was imprisoned in the trappings of her station, her action could shape the near future for Blackbie Centralized Communications. It could mean the difference between the sixth and the first incombe rank within the industry. It could mean the difference between the company being associated with her name, or continuing to live in the dress train of her great-grandmother.

The parade reached the elevator at the end of the hall, and as the Lady was turned to fit into the center of the lift, she saw that the shipwomen in the wake of her parade had already broken formation to kick off to their various stations. This pleased her. The elevator ascended smoothly to her observation tower, which was still retracted for the trip through the nearby switchboard. She allowed herself to be strapped into her throne, then shooed away her parade to their seats along the walls. She felt the sub-audible thump as her ship released its moorings and thrusted toward the switchboard. The palatial spar of her station drifted away from her windows, but she paid it little mind. Her eyes were fixed on the switchboard. Had she been less bold, less involved in the fate of her company, she would have joined the fleet via screen only, and remained in the safety of her Holy Chalice station. But fortunes were not made by those who were unwilling to dirty their hands.

Next

The Chickens exploded, cued either by the damage from Cormick’s slugs, or their own ammunition depletion. Like an Egg they jettisoned components before the reactor blew, using themselves as shrapnel in the thickest crowd of infantry they could reach. The blue-tinged, stuttering shockwaves were strong enough to knock Cormick back into the water. Pieces of metal and ceramic mingled with bits of Squishie were still hailing down when Cormick regained his balance and thrusted out of the Nymph’s lake. The vapor from the boiled water swirled over the water into a fog.

They would only have seconds now. The Chickens weren’t Cormick’s real concern; they were only harbingers. What they had done was effectively cleared the center of the valley of the Squishie warrior threat, which was useful. A wider ring of Squishies held back, watching and sniping rather than engaging. Cormick called up the map and pored over the positions; the Squishies would turn their attention on the downed Silver soon – once they realized there was nothing between it and them. He turned back toward the Nymphs, and a shock ran through him. Through the swirling fog, which was beginning to slip into the vortex of soulstuff whipping around the goddesses, he could see that the blond was bleeding from her head. Darling Bhumi’s leg had been gashed; a ribbon of red twisted down her thigh and calf and dribbled into the otherwise clear water. The wounds hadn’t interrupted their dance or their song, but Darling Bhumi glanced at him briefly and her voice filled his ears. Don’t lose focus, Man. You will need to do better to protect us shortly. Look up.

Cormick grimaced. I know.

The daisy spiral far above them had spread, and six dots had appeared between them. As they plummeted, six more appeared, then six more. “Look up, Jasper! Get a line on their descent path before they blow their capsules!” These wouldn’t be more Chickens. These were Eggs.

Even farther up, well beyond the spiraling airships, the daytime star of the fixed orbit station split in two. He didn’t have to consult his Egg’s report to know what it was. The battleship was dropping into the atmosphere to engage.

Next

Damwick had the presence of mind and just enough control to angle the Silver back toward the center of the valley, where the snow was deepest and would cushion the impact. The Silver threw up a storm of wet snow on the other side of the Nymphs, and when the air was clear again only the tip of the amputated spar stood above the crater, like the fin on some great water creature.

“Gunder!” Cormick’s own voice surprised him – it was the same quick, emotionless bark, that Byrie’s would have been.

There was a brief pause before Damwick answered back. No casualties here, Lef-Major. Everyone’s fine. But this thing is never flying again. And the hold is flooding. Should I get topside with a weapon?

“No! Check the bridge for pressure and stay inside. Things are about to get uglier. Jasper?”

A sense of defeat had crept into Roger’s voice. I see them.

The capsule-shrapnel landed moments before the six payloads, which hung from draglines and intermittantly blasted thrusters to slow their fall. The payloads unpacked themselves and opened full counter-thrust just twenty meters above the snow. They hit hard but landed on their feet and unfurled.

‘Chickens’, everyone called them, though they looked more like mechanized ostriches. They had been popular against infantry during the Supremal Wars, but Cormick hadn’t heard of them since. Then again, he hadn’t seen a pitched ground battle since the war.

Already the Chickens were running their semi-random algorithms on meter-high legs, self-guiding into the thickest clusters of still-living bodies, which in this case was the Squishie warriors. The Chicken heads – a simple sensor and cameradot cluster on a snakey metal-band tentacle rising from the center of their oblong bodies – bobbed with the eerie semblance of life. Their wings opened into a panflute of mortars and a fan of slugthrower barrels, which fired quickly and indiscriminately to empty their ammunition banks. Roger was already crouching over Byrie’s body, cupping his arm-shields like an umbrella, so Cormick skipped back toward the Nymphs, as close as he could get before the snow became lapping water. He raised his arms to extend his Egg’s body as a shield. Unfortunately, the Squishies came with him – either because they were seeking safety beneath the Nymphs icewater pool, or because they preferred their chances at his stomping feet to the death-dealing robot birds – and as the Squishies swarmed around him, the nearest Chickens followed the mass of body-heat and came with them. Cormick wasn’t worried that the Chicken’s weapons would be effective against Egg armor (though they could have been uparmed in the last thirty years), but he still turned a full blast of his slugthowers on them before covering his sensor panel and ducking behind his own shields.

Next

Cormick didn’t answer because he didn’t know how. To the Lef-minor’s eyes, the three Nymphs would have just been naked females holding each other’s hands and standing in a shallow pool in an area inexplicably clear of Squishies – an area that turned aside magnets and flurries of snow as easily as it pushed back rushing Squishie warriors. Cormick sidled toward the Nymphs, strafing the moraine-top nearest him, and corrected himself. The Goddesses were standing on the pool of water, which was now deep enough that they could have submerged. They barely even stood: their ankles extended like dancers, and only the tips of their longest toes pressed against the clear surface as they slowly danced through their tight ring. The pool beneath them was spreading away from them, too, which couldn’t just be from the disturbance of the battle. Cormick’s own Egg’s foot had begun to sink into the softening snow, and ice water gurgled in up to his ankle. He scrambled back before he could be sucked in. The shriveled corpses of Squishie warriors swirled away from him to settle deeper in the pool.

Cormick tapped on his external speaker. “What are you doing?” When none of the three acknowledged his call, he added “Darling Bhumi?” Still, not one of the Nymphs so much as glimpsed at him; each continued with their part in their song and their slow, tip-toe dance.

He tapped off and turned back on the battlefield. Over the ship’s channel, he could still hear Tetva’s despondent pleading while Damwick extended the wings and angled his thrusters to push them out of the valley. Her voice became a frightened scream.

Cormick looked up just in time to see the sky still rent yellow-white, like the afterimage of a ray-straight bolt of lightning. The Egg’s display quickly compensated to show one of the Silver’s thruster engines tumbling away from the ship; on its own volition the Egg plotted the descent arc of the engine and placed it further up the valley, outside the melee. The ship was listing heavily now and spiraling again – this time tighter and losing altitude. The wings might still provide enough glide to reach one of the valley walls, if Damwick could just offset the lean and pull out of the spiral. Cormick shouted as much over his channel, while bounding back again from the encroaching lake and hedge-trapping a half-fist of Squishies.

At Cormick’s thought, The Egg’s display inset a separate window that zoomed and re-focused high in the sky above the Piece of Silver. Further up, more than couple kilometers, a flight of airships drifted through a wide daisy spiral – a standard holding pattern. From this distance it was difficult to tell for certain, even in the zoomed window, but the airships seemed to glint a distinctive color of dried-blood red. One of them opened fire as it passed through the center of the daisy, and a second beam lanced down to the Silver. The thruster opposite the amputated spar crumpled inward and became a billowing ball of flame, sending the ship into an angled dive. Still, the airships continued to hold their pattern. Cormick didn’t have to wonder why for long. A burst of white at the center of the daisy blossomed and became six fiery petals that grew as they fell toward the ground. Just below the level of the airships, the six petals popped like glamorless fireworks into hundreds of pieces. Cormick swore.

Next

Tetva was still screaming Byrie’s name – Cormick could hear it through Damwick’s ship feed. She demanded that Damwick land the ship immediately – that they recover his body while it was still alive, while it still had heat. The despair in her voice was what touched Cormick most – what nearly broke him out of the serenity of the Zen. She wasn’t just upset about the pain he might feel, or the loss of his physical presence. She was panicked that she might be permanently separated from him. Cormick realized then that despite previous appearances, Tetva had believed little more of Byrie’s preaching of the afterlife than had the rest of the quadry. She had no solace in the belief that Byrie’s soul would wait for her in the bosom of Abram until they could reincarnate together, though all signs suggested that every one of them would be joining him soon. It was the same despair and rage that he had felt in the cave, when Gaya had died. Sympathy flushed through his thoughts, and the Zen and his balance faltered.

Cormick reset his breathing pattern and let the emotion pass into emptiness. Glenda and Shon would no doubt be doing a better job of comforting Tetva than Cormick could, and even had Roger spared a few words for her while he struggled with his tasks: preventing the Squishies from salvaging Byrie’s body, and maintaining a clear twenty meter triangle in case the ship was able to land. Of course Roger knew as well as Cormick that it wouldn’t. If the Piece of Silver so much as touched snow here, it would never climb out of the valley again.

I’ve reached altitude, Major.

It rankled Cormick that the two lef-minors had field-promoted him so quickly, before Byrie’s death could be confirmed. Byrie still deserved that much respect. “Lef-Major, Gunder. Up and out with you.” Cormick clenched his jaw while he arabesqued over a rocket aimed at his left ankle; the rocket rushed past to bury itself in a slushy bank while his forward hand followed the rocket trail and spattered a tight pattern of magnets. How the Squishies had managed to steal rockets from Chandier, or import them without Chandier noticing, was a question he pushed out of his head. “Roger and I will stay as long as it takes.”

How long will it take?

Cormick frowned. “Until our fare is ready, Gunder. We don’t leave without them.” To Roger, he added, “If you need to shell, just make sure Byrie’s not in your blast pattern.”

Understood, Lef-Major. But… what are they doing?

Next

The rest of the quadry had not been spared as Cormick had. Roger’s egg was in a tortoise sheild, crouching beneath the Squishies that swarmed on and around him while turret gunners from three sides cut through their own hivemembers to chip away at his armor and push him off balance. Cormick raised an arm and cycled the cylinders, then barked, “Head down, Jasper!” as he lobbed a napalm grenade into the swarm. Roger’s armor still flamed as he stumbled out from beneath the remains of Squishies to fire back at the turrets that had pegged him. The Piece of Silver was listing in the sky above them, though Damwick still maintained control. He was spiraling steadily upward with only two of the four main thrusters at full power and one billowing an ugly black smoke. The bottom of the main hold area was naked of plate armor and pierced through in several places – they’d be lucky if the personnel areas of the ship still held pressure when they got off-planet. Damwick was nearly high enough to enough to deploy the wings, which would allow him to glide over to the nearest peak and wait for Cormick to gather up Roger and the carry-all. And Byrie.

Byrie was almost certainly dead. His body agents had shut him down, and his head was in the snow, which meant his brain still might be eligible for a reboot if his body could be repaired. But his vitals had spiked and bottomed before his agents had completed the shutdown. They wouldn’t know for sure until they could spend a few minutes with his body. Cormick had managed a brief, over-the-shoulder glimpse of him a minute earlier. Byrie’s chest was shredded; his left arm had been ripped off by three-centimeter slugs and had landed a few meters behind him near the carry-all. If Cormick could just make it back to the carry-all – and he was trying – he could shovel Byrie’s body in and pack him with snow. Roger was too overwhelmed to do it himself. Byrie probably was dead… though Cormick hadn’t seen his soul leave his body. He had been distracted when it happened. A’lah preserve him! Cormick had worried about something like this for the last twenty years – that Byrie would become lax, would develop a false sense of security in Cormick’s wake – but now that it happened, he didn’t feel upset or angry, or even really sad. The Zen shielded him from distracting, first-mind emotions. He still moved along the optimal path his now-memory showed him, bouncing off a boulder scaled by two elites and their armsbearers intent on springboarding toward the Goddesses, kicking off with thrusters to melt the ice at the base of the boulder and firing a tight pattern of magnets that would undercut the loose rock and send it crashing down onto what looked like one of the Squishies’ sally points.

Next

Scene 3.11 – Between the hammer and the anvil

Cormick could have cartwheeled over the berm and into the fist of Squishies setting up the turret guns he’d shot down just a minute ago – the Egg would have done it. This Egg would stand on its hands or pirhouette if he willed it. But a cartwheel was ostenatious and a waste of time – he had already hurdled the berm, bringing both feet down ahead of him and skating several meters on his thrusters to clear the touchdown before spinning and sending a ring of magnet slugs into crowd around his feet. He stomped, and the Squishies that had survived scattered. He stomped again, flattening the guns like plastic straws. That was all he could do.

He was still untouched. The Egg was a bit stained around the ankles, he expected, but otherwise unscratched. Even the sails jutting from his toes and ankles hadn’t torn yet, though he’d had to retract them to half-spar when the snow ice in the valley started to become slushy. Despite the augmented reality of the Egg, the valley still unfolded as a patchwork of paths and opportunities: futures or nows he could remember. It was like he had lived this battle a thousand times and memorized the decision tree to an optimal outcome. He could duck and spin before the plasma lance seared through the space he’d just been; he knew which direction to turn his slugfire before he looked. His greatest danger was running out of ammunition before Darling Bhumi and the Goddess-Brutes (it was the other two Nymphs who had possessed the Brutes, to judge by the similarity in their overflowing auras) acheived whatever it was they were doing in the middle of the valley, in the puddle they’d created with nothing more than their song and their bare feet.

In the Zen, his body acted and reacted, but his third mind – the thinking mind – only needed to oversee, to push down the first mind and redirect the second. He had attention in plenty to spare. He was surprised and pleased by the new Egg: it was presponsive – it read the signals in his neck to anticipate his movements, so he didn’t have to lead the controls. It wasn’t like wearing a bodyglove – it was a shadow. Cormick was frustrated by the Squishies, who were no longer engaging him. They were just like the snow, slipping out from from beneath his feet and between his fingers only to pile up and refreeze behind him. The Squishies avoided him, but they wouldn’t withdraw from the valley – not while there was still a prize to be had; whenever he turned to look behind him, they were setting up another turret to fire on the ship, or clamboring over Roger to tear down his egg, or charging for the dozenth time at the Goddesses, only to be thrown back again. The Goddesses – the Nymphs, he was sure Gaya would have insisted – confused him. Their souls had already swollen to almost twice the size of their bodies, and as they sang and danced raw soulstuff flowed out from the mandalas that adorned them like jewelry, swirling around them like a storm to twine together into a helical braid that twisted above them and delved into the melted snow between them. The puffs of blue that were the discorporated Squishie spirts were caught in the vortex around the goddesses and woven into the braid.

Next

Ann turned back to determine if Hunda’s question was rhetorical, but the Capatin shook her head. “Ann – here are your simple instructions. Are you ready? As soon as – that is, immediately upon, but no sooner than – those Eggs reappear, drop all of the Hawks, but just three Chickens and six Eggs. Keep the rest on standby, and don’t let the Hawks engage the ground. If the ship disengages the ground, push them back down – burn off their thrusters if you have to. Got it?”

“Yes, Marm.”

A minute later Hunda was floating in her retiring room behind the bridge – the room the Agent had assumed as his own. He’d used it for less than 24 hours – a few hours while they chased the pirate ship through its skitter of jumps, and another eighteen or so while the Mayor had kept them locked into orbit – but the room already smelled like him. It smelled like a man. It reeked of his perfume – of wood oil and paper acids. Now that the smell filled her nose, she recognized it – it was the same perfume that the male Red Triumvir wore. She’d been in enough closed-room meetings with the Triumvirs to remember it. What a ridiculous example of obsequiousness from the Agent! Or perhaps he meant to imply, without really placing himself in jeopardy by saying it, that he was actually the Triumvir himself. Of course, that was even more ridiculous. The Triumvirs always wore fully-concealing robes, but that didn’t make her a fool. The male was considerably taller than the Agent, his voice deeper and more forceful. The Agent was a mouse, not a lion.

Hunda twisted over toward the nearest panel and turned up the atmosphere before pulling up the screen and hailing the Agent. It was too early to gloat, of course – she would save that until they were back at the research station, or until she’d beat him to the pirate’s sponsors. Or maybe even later. If this project was as critical as the Agent thought, a title grant wouldn’t be too much to hope for her part in it. A title could mean her own ship, her own fiefdom…

“Capatin!”

Hunda’s neck bristled as she finally heard Tasfallon’s voice through the screen. As much as the Agent annoyed her, she loathed this provincial, inept man. “Mader. I didn’t ask for you. Call for the Agent!”

“Capatin – that’s what I’m saying! He’s unavailable. Clear from the station as soon as you can – we’ve lost control there. There is no more time for delay – you must retrieve the units!”

Next

So the bridge crew waited a very long five minutes for the two Eggs to return. Hunda pulled herself back into her throne and began tapping notes on her panel. She’d been with Turnbull for a long time, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have old friends. She could think of a few who might be able to run down the odd couple of Brutes. The bridge was mostly still and silent, as if the girls thought that by holding their breath, whatever they were waiting for would come faster. The only disturbances were an occasional whisper between stations and the now-mundane periodic altitude adjustments that kept them in the shadow of the fixed-orbit station. Hunda had finished her notes and was toying with the idea of retreating to meditation again when a murmur rippled through the Bridge. Her eyes focused on the display bowl. A smudge – several smudges, really – had begun to move around the dot, spreading out from five or six different locations surrounding it.

Ann glanced back with furrowed brows. “Marm?”

“What is that?” Hunda scowled at the screen, but the smudges didn’t become any clearer. “Can we get in tighter? What’s the resolution?”

A signals operator below her throne and to the left answered distractedly. “About 1 meter, Marm, but the visual is too flat and the ship is whiting out most of the other bands. We’ve had to interpolate infra and ultra for contrast. As FirstLeft said, we have a poor vantage behind the Fixed Orbit Station.”

Hunda clicked her teeth. She had already guessed at the nature of the smudge, which moved like a fast-motion animation of a mold growth to fill the valley surrounding the dot. “What about the station itself? Can they give us a better view?”

“No Marm – not immediately. They’ve gone stingy with their feeds in the last hour.”

Ann’s brows perked a bit. “Should we drop the probes, then?”

Hunda sighed. “Drop the probes. But I don’t want to see any retro, and I don’t want sails. Just let them drop, and keep them out of the valley. If they burn in the air, pop them. They can’t be visible from the ground.”

A moment later the image in the display bowl flickered and re-aligned. The signals operator pushed in on the dot – now replaced with the greyish silhouette of a simple freighter with spar-mounted engines – and the smudge became scattered dots: Squamiform, doubtless, in their white and grey and black snow suits.

Hunda flipped up her panel and keyed in her code to take control of the signals station. She drove the viewpoint tighter on one of the groups of Squamiform and frowned. They had vehicles, but that meant nothing; she shifted the viewpoint again and saw a sputtering flash: weapons! She pulled back in time to see a blue beam – a plasma lance, if she knew her nose from her navel – burn against the freighter. “Where did they get those?”

Next

Hunda’s eyes opened a crack wider, and she watched Ann kick off the helm station array and drift toward the Seeker. Hunda didn’t move yet, and she left herself in trance. The Brutes would wait a few minutes longer. Ann was attending to the Seeker well enough on her own, and intervening now would only lessen the impact of the vitriol she would release in the eventuality of Ann’s mistake. So Hunda watched the bridge’s display bowl through still-slitted eyes, and re-moderating her breathing to a four-two-four-two rhythm

The display bowl recentered and tightened on a series of high-contrast ridges wrinkling away from the foggy bay beneath the city. A dot near the center of the display faded into solidity; once it had become complete and began to move slowly across the map, the Finder’s tone sounded and a pale, winding streak smeared out from behind the dot in the direction opposite its movement. The smear – the trail left by the identified engine signature – skimmed back through the canyons between the ridges, just barely above the snow level. It faded well before it had traced its way back to the pirate’s cave, but it had come from that direction. It was a match.

“Wait until it stops…” Ann murmured, and the whole bridge seemed to hold their collective breath as the dot slipped through the rounded part of a sickle-shaped valley, slowing down as it turned into the handle. The dot sank lower to the surface and appeared to grow, then split. “It looks like…” Ann sucked a sharp breath through her teeth. “It looks like those two Eggs are disembarking. Yes. Drop the probe pattern, Gumez; drop the Hawks. Prep the Eggs to follow. I want the Hawks to drop a fence, and the Eggs to-”

“Belay that. Ignore those orders.” Hunda still hadn’t opened her eyes completely, and a flicker of confusion crossed Ann’s face. “Keep them in their tubes and on alert, ready to go.”

“But Marm – what about the probes at least? Our eyes don’t have the best vantage here in the shadow.” Ann was careful to keep the whine out of her voice.

“We don’t need to show our hand before our it’s our turn to play.”

The same Seeker called again from her screen. “They’re gone, Marm. The Eggs are off the map. They didn’t go back into the ship, though – it looks like they’re in the shadow of that rock formation.”

“No,” Hunda replied, finally moving to stretch her neck and shoulders. “Not behind it. Under it. They’re in the caves. Remember? The solid rock is just a sensor facade.”

Ann stared at her for a long moment, and opened her mouth once as if to argue. She chose to say nothing, which disappointed Hunda a little.

“This operation won’t be a success unless we retrieve all the units. What do you think the Eggs went down there for? To get them back from the Squamiforms. So we wait for the Eggs to bring them back up to us.”

Ann frowned. “I thought they were working together?”

“Well, steal them back, or buy them back – who knows? It doesn’t matter. If we pounce now, we’ll spook them, and we’ll never see the full lot again. Have patience.”

Next

Scene 3.10 – Red makes their claims with guns.

Capatin Ti floated just above her bridge-room throne, near the limit of her tethers. Her eyes were almost closed, her breathing deep and easy, and her fingers were twined together at her waist. She was supposed to be in the semi-dormant meditation mandated by her medical program, but she was only faking it. The program didn’t approve of her replacing sleep with medicines for the last seventy-two hours, but what did the program know? It was only an algorithm – albeit one monitored by Turnbull’s executive officers. The medicine had been her mainstay through the war with the Supremals – it was safe and reliable; even if she was considerably older now, but a few more days here and there wouldn’t hurt her. At ninety-five, Ann was nearly as old, and she’d been just as long without sleep. The First flitted about through the bridge bowl, gliding unpredictably between stations to goad the girls and watch over their shoulders and chide them if they weren’t alert. It was just what Hunda would have told her to do.

Hunda had chosen a spider-web as her meditative focus, which had seemed a good idea an hour ago. The threads led to a centerpoint, representing a well-engineered plan completely executed – or so she’d thought. The choice in focus had been a mistake. Instead of losing herself to the geometry of the web and falling into an ego-less, restorative semi-sleep, Hunda became the spider. A fisher spider, in particular, with her web strung out like a cat’s cradle between her forearms, looming and brooding and waiting for her prey to appear on the surface. Her confidence that the prey was there, just out of her vision, was so intense that she could almost see the yellow Seeker dot on the screen.

With a bit of effort, Hunda cleared her mind and brought up the spider web again, but the image faded as her lids flickered enough to show her the map in the main display bowl. Fine. She didn’t need the sleep anyway; a half-dose would see her through the next few hours. Meanwhile, her unfocused, distant vantage on the bridge through slitted eyes afforded her an opportunity to rethink this mission without the stress of urgency. She thought about the pirates, and who they might be planning to sell to. ‘Anyone’ was the answer, unfortunately. The Brutes were the key, she thought. Two mismatched Brutes made for an unusual crew – something they might be able to track, even if the implantee’s chromosomal signature wasn’t in any databases. Even when she recaptured the units here, they’d need to ruin, or at least punish the pirate’s sponsors. The Agent was already working on that, of course, but beating him to it would reflect well on her. She was just about to rouse herself, to take a few notes on those Brutes, when theSeeker/Finder stations becan to chatter. Beneath the operators’ voices, one station beeped, then another and another.

“Signal match!” The excited Seeker’s voice sounded like a shout after the relative silence. The operator twisted to peer back over her shoulder at the helm, and she called again. “Signal match!”

Next