She frowned. ‘Your metaphor being that it’s spoiled?’
‘Spoiled. Rotten.’
‘It’s all right, I suppose. A tad obvious.’
‘But “the shaved head of an old man from behind by candle light” isn’t?’
‘You’ve got to give me points for allegory.’
‘Allegory now? ‘
‘Allegory,’ she nodded. ‘The old man has seen better days and remembers them sadly. He’s worn out. He’s turned away, so we can’t see his face any more, or even tell if he’s alive. He’s poor, so he has to rely on candles. Which, of course, adds a poetic flourish about the colour.’
‘Poetic flourish my arse. My metaphor was clean and contained.’
‘Allegory beats metaphor. Every time. Hands down. I think I win.’
‘I think not.’
‘You’re a poor loser, Harlon Nayl. I’ve got you cold on this one. Have the grace at least to lose with good manners.’
‘What are you doing?’
They both started up and looked round from the rail. Timid and wan, Zael stood in the hatchway behind them, watching them.
‘Hello, Zael,’ said Kara with a broad smile. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Just… you know…’ He remained in the doorway, as if he felt safe there, and looked around at the gloomy observation bay. The only light, apart from lumin-strips along the edge of the grilled walkway, was coming in from outside.
‘What are you looking at?’ Zael asked.
Nayl waved him in and pointed out through the port. Nervously, Zael came through the hatch and crept out across the metal observation platform to the rail.
‘That’s Lenk,’ Nayl said.
Outside, cold blackness, pricked by hard star-points and the glimmering, lustrous skeins of distant clusters and more distant galaxies. Dominating the view was a mottled, bruised, orange sphere. It was a world – Zael knew that. A planet, sunlit and unshadowed, suspended by invisible physics in the darkness of space. They were looking down at it, as if from the roof of a hive stack. Zael wondered what his home looked like from this vantage point. Part of him yearned to be back on Eustis Majoris. Part of him never wanted to see it again.
‘Lenk,’ he said after a while. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Right here,’ grinned Kara, as if it was a trick question.
‘Are we flying past it?’
‘This is a starship, Zael,’ said Harlon. ‘It doesn’t fly. We’re at high anchor above Lenk. A stop-over. The Chair wanted to say hello to the Navy Station commander here. He’s gone down there with Mamzel Madsen.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s protocol,’ said Kara.
‘What’s that?’
Kara looked over Zael’s tousled head at Nayl and shrugged a ‘help me out here’.
‘It’s the done thing,’ Nayl said to the boy. ‘You know how an important player… a dealer say, makes sure he introduces himself to the moody hammers protecting a down-stack club. It’s polite. The dealer makes sure the moodies know who he is, and vice versa. To avoid trouble later.’
‘I get you,’ said Zael.
‘Well, that’s all he’s doing. The Fleet has a base here on Lenk. It runs operations up into the region we’re heading for. The Chair wants the commander to know who he is and where he’s going. In case we get into trouble.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
It was Nayl’s turn to glance at Kara.
‘The hypothetical type,’ Kara said.
‘What’s hypothetical?’
Kara crouched down so she was on a level with Zael. She rested her forearms on the rail and her chin on her forearms. ‘We’re not going to get into trouble. Of any sort. Inquisitor Ravenor–’
‘The Chair,’ Nayl corrected her.
Kara pursed her lips. ‘Right… The Chair won’t allow us to get into any trouble. We’re safe. You’re safe.’
Zael looked round at her. ‘I like your hair that colour.’
Surprised, she reached up a hand and touched her short, shaggy fringe involuntarily.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve been meaning to go back to red.’
‘It’s nice.’
The boy leant out over the rail and started looking from side to side.
‘Careful,’ Kara said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The planet’s not very interesting. What I really want to see is the ship.’
‘What?’ asked Nayl.
‘The ship. I’ve never seen the ship. I’ve never seen any ship.’ Zael pulled back. ‘So what were you doing just then?’ he asked them.
‘We were playing a game,’ Kara said.
‘A game? How do you play it?’
‘That’s a good question,’ said Nayl, staring at Kara. ‘Some people make up the rules as they go along…’
‘Oh, get over it,’ she scoffed. She looked at Zael. ‘Harlon and I have been playing the game since we first met. Whenever we reach a new planet, a new world, a new place, we get together in an obs bay like this, or get a pict of it on a repeater screen, and we play the game. The idea is to describe the world… but not just what it looks like. Something that also describes what the place is like. It’s character. That’s how you win the game. Do you know what a metaphor is?’
Zael thought about it. ‘When you say something is like something else?’
‘That’s a simile,’ said Nayl.
‘Shut up, pedant,’ Kara scolded him. ‘Zael’s on the right track. Why don’t you play?’ she asked the boy. ‘Look down at Lenk. What does it look like to you?’
Zael stared down and screwed up his face in thought. ‘An orange rubber ball I once owned.’
Nayl shrugged. Kara cocked her head. ‘That’s… that’s good, ‘ she said.
‘Yeah, pretty good,’ Nayl agreed kindly. ‘Next time you might want to add some… you know… hidden meaning.’
‘Like a baldy bloke with candles?’
‘Exactly like a baldy bloke with candles,’ Kara said.
‘Or a citrus fruit…’ Nayl began.
‘Over, done, beaten,’ Kara hissed. ‘Get used to it.’
Zael was oblivious to their sparring. He leaned out again, craning his neck to see the flanks of the Hinterlight’s hull.
‘You really want to see the ship, don’t you?’ said Nayl.
‘Yes.’
Nayl straightened up and looked at Kara. ‘What’s Rav– The Chair. What’s The Chair’s ETA?’
‘Not due back for another six hours. Halstrom told me Preest was planning to quit orbit at midnight.’
‘All right. Can you amuse yourself for a while?’
‘Absolutely,’ Kara said. ‘I’ve been doing that for years. I’m getting good.’
‘Don’t start,’ Nayl said.
‘I’ll go see Carl. He could do with cheering up,’ she said.
‘Fine.’ Nayl looked at the boy. ‘You’re coming with me,’ he said.
It was good, but not perfect. Better than that benighted selpic blue jacket at any rate. But still, the lifelessness of his arm creased the shoulder-line of the linen tunic in the most horrid way. He turned three-quarters, then back the other way, studying his look in the full length mirror.
Not good.
Carl Thonius, alone in his cabin, sighed deeply, and began to unbutton the tunic. He had to use his left hand, and when it came to taking the garment off, he had to scoop the shoulders over his head and slide it off his rigid limb.
Thonius had keyed the lights to low and locked the door. He’d put on a slate of his favourite music, but tonight even the light operetta The Brothers of Ultramar wasn’t doing it for him.
His cabin suite, refined in its decor and usually immaculate, was a mess. Vox-slates were screed across the carpet. He’d lost patience trying to find something he wanted to listen to. His bed, and the dressing chairs and occasional table beside it, were enveloped in a mass of discarded clothes. He’d been through his wardrobe a dozen times, trying everything.
&nb
sp; Maybe a full jacket of Gudrunite velvet? Perhaps a blouson of Rustedre shot-silk? What about, damn the season, a long kirtle of the most gorgeous green Sameter clorrie, with ivory toggles and a simply darling gilt brocade hem?
Nothing worked. Nothing hid or excused his damaged form.
At this rate, he’d be wearing a bodyglove. And, from there, it was a short step to shaving one’s head and calling everybody ninker.
Thonius turned and looked for something else to try on. In doing so, he caught sight of himself in the long mirror, pale and naked from the waist up.
He paused, frozen. He’d always been proud of his thin, hairless, well-exercised form. Lean, he’d call it. Lean and gamine, perhaps.
All he could see was the arm. The dullness of it. The leaden hang. Medicae Zarjaran – may the Emperor bless his craft – had begun a programme of post-op rehabilitation. Thonius counted himself grateful that he could now feel pins when they were stuck into his fingerpads. His digits still refused to move under their own power.
He looked at himself. Keening, the operetta was reaching the most passionate sequence, the loves lost-and-wronged part that he’d always adored.
He stared. Bio-pack dressing was taped around his right arm at the elbow.
With the tenor howling out a requiem for his fallen Astartes brothers, Thonius reached over with his left hand and began to rip the tapes away. His stare into the mirror didn’t waver.
He stripped the dressing off and looked at what was revealed. The wound. The slice. Puckered, dead-looking flesh woven together with a million fibre-stitches. Blood and plasma-product still crusted the stitching. Clouds of bruises stained his bicep and forearm.
Staring at it, staring at it, staring at it, he became aware of the pain again: a dull throb, deep set, welling out from below the elbow. Over and over, he remembered the moment of severance. The wailing chainblade sawing around. Impact. Vibration. Shock. Pain. The astonishing notion that a fundamental part of oneself was no longer part of oneself at all.
Blood, in the air.
The smell of blood, the smell of sawed-through bone.
The pain was too much. He had gladstones in his buckle-bag, and lho in his desk, but that wouldn’t do. He wanted release, craved it, begged for it.
Thonius took up the tiny key hanging around his neck on a sliver chain, and opened the top drawer of his bureau. He realised he was breathing hard.
The little package, wrapped tight in red tissue, lay inside.
He took it out, and opened it. For a moment, he paused, wiped a palm across his mouth, thought about it. Then he looked down into the flect.
It was nothing. It was just a piece of broken, coloured glass, It was a–
His feet began to tap. His body rocked back and forth. Wonderful, wonderful things happened inside his head. Beautiful things. Extraordinary things. Reality chopped back and forth, like an automatic sliding door slamming open and closed. Everything was all right. Everything. He could see forever. He could hear and smell and taste forever.
The fingers of his left hand drummed, like a dancing spider, across the bureau.
The fingers of his right hand twitched.
‘Oh my god…’ he whispered.
He could see light. A long corridor of golden light. At the end of it was a shape. No, not a shape. He was rushing towards it. A chair. A chair. A chair.
A throne. A golden throne.
The man on the golden throne was smiling. It was a beautiful smile. It made everything all right. The man on the golden throne was smiling and beckoning to him.
For one, perfect moment, one moment of release, Carl Thonius felt immortal.
Bells were ringing.
Ringing.
Ringing.
Frigging ringing.
Thonius snapped up from the flect. He still felt glorious. Blessed. He heard the ringing again. It was the door-chime of his cabin.
‘Just a moment!’ he called out, and hastily stuffed the flect and its red tissue wrapper into the drawer.
He shut the drawer. With his right hand. He started at that. Emperor above! All of his last few actions had been made with his right hand. It was alive. It was–
Dead now. Limp. Useless.
The door chime rang again. Thonius got to his feet, pulled on his selpic blue jacket, and – with his left hand – activated the ‘unlock’ stud on his control wand.
The hatch opened. Smiling, perplexed, Kara Swole stepped into his cabin.
‘Just came to see how you were doing,’ she said. ‘So… how’re you doing?’
He smiled at her.
‘Kara, I’m doing just fine.’
The flyer gunned out of the Hinterlight’s main hangar, and skimmed down the body of the hull.
‘There,’ said Nayl. ‘What do you think of that?’
He kept the speed low, the course steady. In the co-pilot seat beside him, Zael gazed out of the port as the dark substance of the ship flowed past beneath them.
‘It’s big,’ was all the boy could really manage.
Nayl took them up the length of the ship and back four times. He could have done it all day. Zael wasn’t getting bored.
At length, Nayl said ‘Kys told me you’d been having dreams.’
‘Yeah, some. Some dreams.’
‘Often?’
‘Yeah, most nights. Someone knocking on the door. Trying to get in. They want to tell me something, but I don’t want to hear it.’
Nayl paused to see if Zael would volunteer anything else. The boy didn’t, so Nayl asked: ‘Who’s the someone?’
‘My sister, Nove.’
Nayl leaned gently on the stick and swung the gig around again to head back to the hangar.
‘I want you to talk to The Chair when he gets back,’ Nayl said.
‘Okay. I‘ve been thinking about the game.’
‘The game?’ Nayl eased back the thrust as the guide signal for dock-entry began to bleep mutedly.
‘I said it looked like an orange rubber ball I’d once owned,’ said Zael.
‘Yeah, you did.’
‘You didn’t think that was very good, but it was. That’s what it looks like. I remember the ball. My sister gave it me when I was seven. A birthday present. It got bounced up and down the stack halls, it got all worn and scabby. All scarred, like that place. But it’s gone now. Lost somewhere. Like Nove. That’s why that world looks like the ball to me.’
Nayl sighed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.’
Five
Cynia Preest sighed gently. Save for her chin, her face was shadowed by the loose, fur-trimmed hood over her head, but in that shadow, Nayl could see a smile.
‘I rather thought,’ he whispered, ‘that smiling was something you hadn’t planned on doing out here in Lucky Space.’
‘Dear Harlon,’ she muttered, ‘permit me a moment of nostalgic pleasure. It’s been a long time. I’d forgotten the flavour of this place.’
Nayl hesitated. Whatever flavour the shipmistress was detecting was entirely lost on him. As far as he was concerned, Bonner’s Reach smelled of promethium, dust, ozone leaking from the ancient void-shields, spice-musks and perfumes, and a general humid, noisome odour of air that had been through the atmosphere processors a few million times too many.
‘I don’t think I’m really quite getting its charms,’ he decided.
Preest rested a gloved hand on his arm. ‘It has a certain character, Harlon. A robust vitality. You smell muggy filth, I breathe in vigour, zest, the aroma of a free trade station. I smell the frontier, the challenge of the beyond. I smell a truly neutral place where merchant venturers like myself can gather and do business away from Imperial scrutiny.’
She glanced round at her other companion, who flanked her to her left. ‘No offence,’ she added.
‘None taken,’ he replied. ‘When were you last here?’
‘An age ago. Decades. But it hasn’t changed. I’d forgotten it. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed it. Again, no offe
nce.’
‘Again,’ said the other companion, ‘none taken.’
They were moving along a stone jetty from the wharf towards the craggy bulk of Bonner’s Reach. The jetty was sealed against the void by shimmering, intersected screen-fields projecting between hoops of infinitely old technology that formed archways along the stone walk. A hundred metres behind them, the great mass of the Hinterlight lay at grav anchor in the immense granite basin of a void-dock. A series of mag-baffles and airgates linked the merchantman to the end of the jetty.
Nayl had to admit that what Bonner’s Reach lacked in olfactory sophistication, it more than made up for in visual impact. It had taken them seventeen days to reach it from Flint, but the view alone was worth the trip. Bonner’s Reach was an airless rock tightly orbiting a feeble, unstable star at the very end of its staggeringly vast lifespan. Long before, before man had begun to walk upright, someone had built a great stone bastion into the rock of its surface. Internal spaces in the bastion were chiselled down into the rock itself. No one could explain its origin, or account for its manner of construction, nor even ascertain its age. Certainly no one could explain why its makers had abandoned the bastion and left not a shred of themselves behind.
Early human venturers had found the place empty and open to hard vacuum. Effective installation of power plants, void shielding and atmosphere processors had made it habitable, and it had remained so ever since.
Because the Reach had no atmosphere, visiting starships, even those of great tonnage, could come in close and sit at low anchor above the Lagoon, a vast crater-bowl that had been scooped from the rock in front of the bastion. Alternatively – for a higher fee – they could berth in one of the many void-docks and quays hewn into the mountainside out of which the bastion grew.
The view from the jetty was uncompromisingly strange. Looking out through the crackling void-fields that kept in the jetty’s atmosphere, Nayl could see the vast, blackened elevation of the bastion, seamless stone cut by a non-human hand. Lights, yellow and tiny, glowed at pinprick windows. He could see ships – giant starships – floating out there in the darkness above the hard-shadowed white expanse of the Lagoon. The crater was full of white dust, but it looked like a snowfield, a sea of unmarked snow, dotted like a snow-leopard’s pelt with the shadows of the starship anchored above it. Nearer at hand, bulk freight craft and other merchantmen lay sheathed in their void-docks, umbilically linked to the bastion via the ghostly-lit spurs of landing jetties. The sense of scale was terrifying. He was used to looking down on planets from afar, from orbit. Now he stood on the very threshold of one – and not even a large one – and could look around to see great frigates, clippers and sprint traders suckled against its embracing bulk. With a contrasting point of reference like the Hinterlight in view, Nayl’s mind balked a little at the dwarfing size of the world, and by extension any world, and by further extension, the Imperium.