The Dregs of Empire: A Tale of the Sun Eater, page 2
But they were his hands and his burden to bear.
The hand fell flat on the white floor.
At least it’s clean.
Somehow, he had always pictured the dungeons of the Emperor as filthy. There should have been rats. Scrawny, ill-tempered rats. And fleas . . .
Belusha had none of these things.
The planet had known no life at all when men came to it, or rather—what life Belusha had known was long since dead, lost in that world’s eternal winter. Once, it had been covered in something like trees, or so all the boys and girls in the Imperium said, scaring one another with tales of the Emperor’s prison planet. But Belusha’s star had cooled and, so, condemned its jungles and its grasslands to the slow colonialism of ice.
The glaciers had taken everything in time, and what little life men had restored to Belusha they had brought with themselves, relying on a grid of massive orbital mirrors to turn the planet’s weak and distant sun into something almost fit for human life.
Almost fit—and that was the point.
“You’ll get your first glimpse in a minute here, Aristedes,” the nameless guard captain had said, walking just behind the float chair that had brought him from the medica to his hearing. “Best drink it in. It’s the last horizon you’ll ever see.”
They had stopped at an overlook just outside the medica, and it was only then that Lorian realized how high up they were, way up in a tower overlooking the land below.
Far below, the world was a place of black and white, of snow and the ebon stone of long-dead volcanism. There was nothing but snow and ice as far as the eye could see—and Lorian could see all the way to the bending of the world and the horizon. Nothing but snow and ice, and the knobby towers of oil rigs where the prisoners labored to extract the petroleum that was the only remaining imprint of the planet’s verdant past. There were mountains in the middle distance, blue and ice-crowned. But it was not to those mountains that his eyes were drawn, or to the towers and stacks of the oil refineries, connected by crawling pipelines like so many arteries.
It was the sky.
Lorian had known, intellectually, about the planet’s mirror grid, had been to planets that possessed a reflector or two of their own. Gododdin, whence the Legions directed much of the defense of the outer colonies, had one such orbital mirror. But Belusha had several. Lorian had counted seventeen in that first glimpse out the window, of them filling a portion of the sky like a second, smaller sun.
It was said the sun never set on Belusha, but for the first time, Lorian realized that much at least was truth.
The window outside the medica was so high above the surface that—looking down from his chair—Lorian could hardly see the camp city and fortress prison far below. It must have been a mile or more to the plain below. The residents simply called it “the Tower,” but it was more than that. That much would become apparent as soon as he stepped out into the yard. It was the planet’s hightower, its sole connection to the Dark above and the wider galaxy beyond. An orbital elevator whose dozen cables of nanocarbon each strained to anchor the planet’s dockyard station. Like every prisoner brought to Belusha, he had been brought down from that station and interred in the cubiculum, in the icy halls of the half-dead, before he had been thawed for his meeting with the intake officer and his little show court. There were yet thousands—and perhaps more—slumbering in icy creches along the Tower’s more than two-hundred floors. Some—the lucky ones—would sleep there indefinitely. They were the highborn prisoners, the political prisoners, the men and women the Emperor sentenced to Belusha for safekeeping.
The rest of the chattel, like Lorian himself, were decanted from their tanks, warmed, revived, and brought down the lift to the surface.
“Welcome to Downwell, Aristedes,” the captain said. “End of the universe for traitors and filth like you. You should be grateful. It’s the Emperor’s mercy that allows you to live at all.”
“Grateful . . .” Lorian had echoed the word with all the acid it deserved, and he had prayed: prayed that Hadrian had indeed escaped, and that his life—his sacrifice—had been worth it.
CHAPTER 2
THE DUKE
The guards had returned with the morning bell, or so Lorian at first believed.
Something prodded him in the ribs, sending an electric jolt of pain through him. He winced, reached out reflexively to grasp the ankle of the man who’d spurned him with his toe.
“Not dead, then?” The voice was new, and turning his face, Lorian looked up into the face of an elderly man whose skin—so bronzed it seemed almost black—stood out darkly against the medicinal white of the cell. His hair was long and white, and fell curling almost to his shoulders, making him seem half a sorcerer when measured against his short, ill-trimmed beard. “Tollak’s work?”
“Was that his name?” Lorian managed to ask.
The guards had opened the door for this man, Lorian reasoned, though he wore the two-piece scarlet fatigues and black boots of a prisoner. Lorian wondered at that, knowing nothing of life or protocol on Belusha.
When the older man did not answer at once, Lorian said, “They broke my ribs.”
“They’ll do that,” the old fellow said. “Call it breaking us in. That’s why I’m here—partly why I’m here. May I?”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Me? Earth, no!” The man crouched. “I’m your poddy, your boss. It’s down to me to make sure you’re in working order, or it’s my hide they’ll tan.”
“I’m sorry to tell you it’s your hide, then,” Lorian said, feeling nothing but scorn for the fellow. “I’m not the working order type.”
The dark-faced stranger looked Lorian up and down with eyes like chips of amber. “They told me you were a mutant.”
“I prefer monster,” the once-commander said. “What’s your name, man?”
The old fellow blinked, tore his eyes away from a too-intent examination of Lorian’s face. “They call me Duke.”
“Duke?” Lorian asked. “Duke what?” So many of Belusha’s prisoners were highborn. Most like the moniker was no mere moniker. The fellow looked highborn enough. So many of the old families were so complected, tracing their ancestry back to the Kingdom of Bharat on Old Earth.
The old man smiled. “Just Duke. May I?” He nodded at Lorian, indicating that he meant to check the smaller man’s injuries.
Lorian nodded weakly, permitted the fellow to feel his chest, and yelped as the man found his ribs. “Two fractured on the left side. Bastard got you good.” Air hissed through Duke’s teeth. “Here, I’ll help you sit up.” He did just that, placing a strong hand on Lorian’s shoulder.
The pain waxed eloquent indeed, and Lorian gasped—and gasping made the pain worse.
“Breathe deep, old son,” Duke said. “It’ll hurt like hell, but it beats pneumonia.” He swore under his breath, blaspheming the names of Earth and Emperor. “Anything else broken?”
“Only my pride,” came the little man’s response.
“That’s good!” said the Duke. “Good to lose that early.” He swore again. “We’re late! I needed you in the shop by oh-six-hundred.”
“The shop?”
“Motor pool,” Duke said. “Maintenance. My team services the ground trucks and the lifters and the mobile rigs.” He eyed Lorian with those eyes like polished amber. “Commandant’s men said you were a shipman. You got technical know-how.”
Lorian shook his head. “I was an officer.”
Duke swore. “Had plenty of officers. Not a one of them knew a plasma cutter from a welding torch.” He surveyed Lorian, taking in his short limbs, his sickly pale complexion, the spidery long hands and spindly limbs. “They let you be an officer?”
Lorian winced at the implication in the other man’s words: They let you be an officer.
Let you. As if it were a privilege—as in a sense it had been—as if he had not had to work and scrape for every dram of recognition.
“What was it then? Lieutenant?”
“Commander.”
“Commander what?”
“Just Commander,” Lorian bit back, acidly.
Incredibly, the older man laughed. “Just Commander!” he sniffed, dabbed at one eye with his smallest finger—a curiously dainty gesture. “Just Commander, indeed. You got me there! That’s funny, but I’m not going to call you that, old son. What’s your right name? They told me, but I’m plain terrible at names.”
Lorian held the poddy’s gaze a long, tense moment, wondering at him. The man was clearly palatine, scion of the highest caste. One look at the man’s clear eyes was enough to tell Lorian that. They had seen long centuries, those eyes, though the face was yet unseamed—save from the permanent creases at the corners of his mouth wrought by so much frowning, and at his eyes from laughter. Lorian thought he misliked the man—he misliked all palatine nobile lords, save Lord Marlowe and the Emperor alone—but he sensed no malice in the man, which was more than he could say of anyone he had met since awakening on that bleak and frigid world, unless it was the nurse who had tended him in the cubiculum high up the lift tower.
“Call me Lorian,” he said. “I was a commander in the Imperial Red Company, under Hadrian Marlowe himself.”
Duke only blinked at him.
“The Hero of Aptucca?”
The other man shook his head. “We don’t get word from outside.”
“The Halfmortal?”
Nothing.
Lorian knew his mouth was hanging open. Everywhere he had gone in all the Imperial universe, in all his decades of warfare and travel, that name had gone before them. Hadrian had been the Emperor’s dog for the better part of a millennium, almost since the Cielcin Wars began. The first man to slay one of the Cielcin clan chieftains in single combat, and the first to do so twice. The myths and stories of the man were everywhere and numberless—a good many of them were true. How could it be that this man, this nobile man, had never heard of him?
A sudden fear gripped him, and he asked, “What year is it?”
Duke smiled. “We don’t do years down here, old son.”
“. . . don’t do years?” Lorian didn’t understand.
“There’s no time but the work-clock,” Duke said. “Men come in, and they leave them on ice up in the Tower Earth-knows-how-long. When it’s been long enough, they release them, so you can’t estimate the calendar off your travel time getting here. They don’t let you get it right.”
“But the guards know, surely.”
“Aye, they know, but that doesn’t mean they tell us. I had one tell me it was thirty-three thousand and seven once, and another said five thousand-something. You might have been up in the Tower five minutes or five hundred years. There’s no way to know without them telling you, and you’re never going to get it straight.”
Five hundred . . . Lorian mouthed the words.
Hadrian was probably dead, and with him everyone that Lorian had ever known. Caesar himself was dead, most-like, as well. The Emperor had already reigned for more than a thousand years by the time Lorian had been sent to Belusha—making him the longest-reigning monarch in Imperial history, and that was only possible because he spent so much time in cryonic fugue sailing between the stars.
“Is William Twenty-Three still the Emperor?”
“So far as I know,” said the other man.
That was something, at least.
“Can you stand?” Duke asked.
“I think so,” Lorian said. Duke’s examinations had brought him to a seated position, but no farther.
The poddy offered Lorian a hand, and the little man accepted it, permitting himself to be hauled painfully to his feet. “Let’s go, then,” he said.
“Go?” Lorian echoed. “To medica?”
“To medica!” Duke laughed. “They don’t let us into medica until we’re ready to drop. No, no! We’re for the motor pool, you and I. Let’s get you kitted up.”
Duke led Lorian into a hall as starkly white as his cell, lit by lights whiter still. His ribs flared with every odd step, but Lorian forced himself to breathe through the pain, feeling his lungs strain against the damaged bone. They passed cell door after cell door—all of them closed. The rest of the pod, Lorian learned, were not due to rise for another hour, leaving Duke with a small amount of time for Lorian’s orientation.
Beyond the doors at the end of the pod’s hall, a greater hall ran perpendicular, and Duke turned right past a pair of guards in Imperial ivory, following a green stripe in the floor marked at intervals with the word YARD in block letters.
“We work in twelve-hour shifts,” Duke began, voice suddenly sharp. “Twelve-on, twelve-off. Standard days. There are two meals, and only two. The first is at oh-five-thirty. You’re not getting that today, seeing as we need to bring you up to speed. I’m not getting it, either.” Gone was the vaguely concerned man Lorian had met in the cell, gone his easy manner and quiet way. In his place was a hard man, a cold man, a man beaten down by years of pain and toil.
Brittle—that was the word.
“The second meal is at nineteen hundred hours, after shutdown. Curfew’s at twenty-two hundred. What do you know about Belusha, Lorne?”
The segue into the question had been so abrupt that it caught Lorian flat-footed. He didn’t even immediately register that the man had botched his name. “It’s cold.”
“Cold!” Duke said, not looking back. “We are at forty-two degrees north latitude. Outside, the annual average low is minus sixteen centigrade. It’s damn cold. And that’s not the worst of it! All workmen are to be issued a rebreather system: mask, hose, pack. The air out there’s not hostile to human life, but it is bloody thin, son. There’re algae farms away south, where it’s warm enough, but they haven’t greenhoused the planet proper yet!”
They’d reached a door at the end of the hall, a heavy, round portal of gray steel and tempered glass. At their approach it opened, admitting them into a vestibule filled with lockers. Thermal suits in prisoner scarlet hung in niches along the wall.
“We’ll have to find one to fit you,” Duke said, looking the little man over. “Some of the women’s sizes might do. They run small.”
The suit was no full environment suit, with a helmet and glove seals. Only a heavy, quilted thermal layer with webbed heating elements. There were gloves, but they were only gloves. In lieu of a helmet, there was only a deep hood—heated like the rest of the suit.
“Movement helps charge the suit,” Duke explained, having found one that was only a little too large for Lorian. He showed him the hell-pumps that fitted inside the heavy boots, attached to the suit heels. “Standing still, a fully charged suit will last . . . about four hours. If you get stuck out there for whatever reason, that’s how long you have. Power pack’s here.” He touched a black box affixed to the suit’s back and, touching a similar-looking pack at the left hip, added, “Rebreather mount’s here. There’s a transponder in with the power pack that’ll relay your location to the Tower in real time.”
“In case someone gets lost in the ice?”
“So they know where to go to recover the equipment,” Duke said. “It’s worth more than you or me. Now get it on.”
Lorian suited up with some small degree of difficulty, slipping into the thermal suit one leg at a time. It was heavier than he expected, and it was only then that he noticed—really noticed—that the planet’s gravity ran heavier than one-standard. All that day and the day before, he had attributed the heaviness of his limbs and the sluggishness of his mind to fugue and injury.
He shut his eyes. It was all he could do to stop his shoulders shaking, knowing the pain he was in for in the days to come. Every step, every waking hour on that damned world would mean pain, the dull and constant ache of muscles straining to acclimate to a world heavier than any in his long experience, heavier even than the false gravity of the Tamerlane, which Hadrian had tuned heavier than one standard.
Seeing this, Duke intruded. “What?”
What sense was there in complaining? What good was there in grief?
Neither befitted a gurram, a knight of the Arthur-Buddha, and though Lorian was no true gurram, only an adherent of the secret mysteries of the Order, his feet walked the Path. And so he let them go.
“Nothing.”
In short order, Duke showed him how to wear the rebreather system and fished the tubes between the thermal layer and his clothes. The mask covered his nose and mouth, and some feature of its design muffled and amplified his voice in equal measure. Belusha’s air was not toxic, Duke had said—only thin, as though they were at some great altitude. The rebreather worked by recycling Lorian’s own breath, sifting the carbon dioxide from the unused oxygen and sucking in air through a small fan in the suit’s hip-pack. It whined faintly once it was powered on, and with the heating element drew the most power from the suit’s small graphene battery array.
“You’re one of the lucky ones, you know,” Duke said, inspecting Lorian’s new uniform.
“How’s that?”
“You’re not going out,” said the older man. “You’re not for the rigs, or the scrapyards away west. You’re motor pool, now. You won’t have to contend with the real cold, or the wild or the Outborn.”
“Outborn?”
Duke only shook his head. “Too much chatter, Lorcan,” said he, who had chattered far more than Lorian ever had. “Come on.”
The exit lay through another pair of heavy round metal doors painted with the number 4—an ill-omened number—and the words YARD and AIRLOCK. It rolled aside, admitting the daylight and a blast of air so cold that Lorian recoiled.
“Best drink it in, old son,” Duke said. “You may as well get used to it.”
Lorian was immediately glad of the suit. Though his hands went numb almost immediately in the cold morning air and his face stung, the cold did not pierce him entirely. Indeed, it was not the cold that struck him most sharply.
It was the light.
For an instant, Lorian thought the yard of the prison complex at Downwell was ringed by floodlight towers, so bright was it. But though the camp city was ringed by high and narrow towers, fingers of black steel, they were crowned by neither beacon nor lamp.
