Bile and Blood, page 11
‘Nor have you.’
Fabien raised an eyebrow, and she laughed loud enough that the vriarbeast turned its head to regard her with one bespeckled eye.
‘I’m Lady Charante, daughter of Lord Jelen Charante. I doubt your people briefed you so thoroughly as to have heard of us, of all people, but my father’s been on and off his deathbed for the past few decades. When it wasn’t wartime, I was needed here.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She shrugged. ‘No need to be. If anyone should be, it’s the Protectorate. My father volunteered aboard one of your ships during the war. Got caught in a viral swarm. Slow-acting variant. Apparently the Protectorate got their numbers wrong or something. He survived the war, but his lungs haven’t been the same since, and nothing’s worked to save them. Even transplants got re-infected.’
‘I’ve heard of the strain. We’ve had no luck with our victims either, I’m afraid.’
‘There you go, apologising again. Well look now, we’re almost at the tower, so if you want to get any more in before I have to drop you off, speak fast, right?’
He laughed. Sure enough, the tallest tower loomed in the near distance. Little flashes of green marked where more vriarbeasts sat waiting in alcoves for passengers. As he watched, one of them dropped like a stone before spreading its wings across the tree-shaded streets and rocketing off on its task.
‘Do you have any tips?’ he asked, thinking the question was worth it.
Another shrug. ‘I don’t even know what you’re here for.’
Ah. Maybe not. ‘I take it my visit hasn’t featured much in the news, then?’
‘Oh, it has, sure. I wouldn’t have known to want a nosey, otherwise. And I gather it must be something special, seeing as we don’t have many Magisters visit. But it’s always just “diplomacy this” and “state visit that”. The news speculates all it likes, but it doesn’t have a clue, and nor do I. So I don’t know what tips would be useful, see?’
The vriarbeast flared its wings, making the air crack and roar past its feathers. Fabien had to lean forwards, clutching at the rail and almost shouting to be heard. ‘Even general tips would be useful!’
Lady Charante said nothing, too focused on seeing them in to land. Fabien braced, expecting to be jolted and tilted backwards, but their touchdown, when it came, was gentle.
She turned to face him again as the vriarbeast folded its wings, wearing a sly smile. ‘I can give you the tips I’m qualified to give, if that suits?’
Fabien leaned back in his seat, giving her a half grin to show he knew this would at least be half a joke. She chuckled when she saw it, then raised a finger in the air by her head.
‘First,’ she said, ‘never stand in front of a vriarbeast. Second, never stand behind a vriarbeast. Third, never stand beneath a big one. Fourth, keep clear of the streets underneath flight routes in a thunderstorm.’
The first three had Fabien chuckling under his breath, but he frowned when she reached the fourth. ‘Do they get hit often?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said, and grinned wider, ‘but they do shit.’
So it was that when Fabien’s nominated minder arrived to collect him, they left to the sound of Lady Charante cackling with laughter.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Wait,’ the fleet officers had said. ‘Just wait for the first wave to land, then you’ll be safe to join them.’ But Palia didn’t like sitting in orbit and twiddling her thumbs, giving Ferrash plenty of time to slip between their fingers. She didn’t appreciate Archivist Lilesh’s insistence that this was the perfect time to train, even though Lilesh was right. Most of all, she hated watching – sitting in orbit as fires bloomed and flashed across the surface of the planet below, knowing that people died down there every second, every minute, every hour they waited.
Going down there wouldn’t change that. They couldn’t stop a war all on their own.
But Palia wasn’t waiting.
She leaned over the back of Bek’s chair, the door membrane behind her sealing them off from the rest of the ship. It was night-time, standard chron, and the other two were fast asleep. Palia had contemplated using some of Ferrash’s inhibitors to stop any emotions giving her away to Lilesh but – besides the fact that there weren’t any left – she still found the thought abhorrent. In any case, a lack of emotions would probably be a greater tell than anything else she might experience.
Bek stared straight out of the canopy, making minute adjustments on the controls. The belly of their part of the fleet slipped away above them. Being parked in high orbit would keep them out of the range of the Protectorate fleet’s guns until the window opened again. Ground fire didn’t trouble them this far out, but the closer they got to the surface, the more they risked getting noticed.
‘How does it look?’ Palia whispered.
‘Like there can’t be many left alive down there,’ Bek said.
‘No, I mean us. How’s the approach?’
‘Can’t approach yet. I’ve burned us into an orbit that’ll cross our– the Protectorate fleet’s orbit faster.’
She tightened her grip on the chair. ‘Why?’
‘We’re still identified as one of their ships. We still have ESF codes. We head to the surface from their position and if Ground questions us, that gives us a free pass.’
‘So they’ll just... let us in?’
Bek shrugged. ‘Sure, unless Ash used the same codes to get here and hasn’t left since. So if they shoot us down, at least we know where he is.’
‘He’ll be there.’
After a moment’s silence, Bek turned to face her. He had his lips pressed tight together, and a strand of blond hair lay against the pallor of his face. His brows scrunched towards his nose. Emotions tangled as a dense mesh of filaments around his throat.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know I told you we’d find him. I know I said it would be okay, but...’ He shook his head. ‘Why do you care? You don’t even remember him. He’s a stranger to you. I need to find him. He’s my friend. My brother. He taught me everything good I know. And when I find him, I don’t know if I’m going to hug him or slam him against a wall and ask why he didn’t say goodbye. But you? How can you be so upset about it when...?’ Bek made an all-encompassing gesture with one hand, let the question hang in the air.
A lump lodged in Palia’s throat. She let it stay there, afraid that if she tried to swallow it might catch and re-emerge as a flood of raw emotion that Lilesh would wake to instantly. ‘I messed everything up so badly, Bek. I don’t remember him. I sort of remember the context of where he was and where he should have been, but I can never focus on the gap. I can’t... I can’t touch it. I can’t try to get it back. It’s gone, and there’s nothing I can do about that.
‘But...’ She closed her eyes, shifted on her feet, tried to calm her thoughts. ‘Everything I felt for him, it’s all still there. I can’t connect it to anything and it’s so frustrating. I just... I feel like I love him. I don’t know if I do. I don’t know if I’ve just blown a little bit of joy out of all proportion because I’ve got nothing to compare it to. So I want to find him, if nothing but to fill this stupid gap with something I can understand. If he doesn’t want to see me, that’s fine. I’ll go. I just need to see him, remember what he looks like, apologise for what I did to him.
‘I don’t know how much I took. He remembered to run and hide, clearly. But for all I know, he could have forgotten everything else. He could just be a husk running around, like—’
‘Like the rest of the Protectorate?’
Palia sighed. ‘I need to know how much I hurt him.’
‘You can’t fix him.’
‘We don’t know that. If there’s anything I can do to make this right, if there’s any way I can give back whatever I took, I have to try it.’
Bek nodded. ‘Just try not to make it worse, right?’ Not for the first time, she noticed the bags under his eyes, the tiredness worn on his face.
‘Right.’
Silence returned. The Munabi desert crawled past beneath them. Swirling clouds of poisonous gasses obscured most of it, letting only the tips of some rocky mountains rise into view. On a distant horizon to their left, where the gasses churned so thick that they marred the veil of atmosphere with green-black cumulonimbi, a ripple of explosions flared into bright white-orange light. Flames already underlit the clouds a sickly brown, but now they renewed. The clouds billowed around the plumes of smoke as they rose.
How high did those fires lick? Who could still be fighting there? Given most of the Munab Palia had seen was underground, perhaps a battle raged beneath the surface. If so, the combatants were trapped – the heart of the planet on one side, a raging inferno above. Palia understood xenobiology, not climate science. She didn’t know if the heat above would cook everything below.
She returned her attention to closer scenery and the approach of daylight. Little ticks blinked into view on the canopy viewscreen, highlighting the positions of other ships. The engine hummed. Quiet, like background electronics. It nudged her with a little acceleration before the inertial dampers compensated for the burn, then another moment of deceleration.
Bek altered their angle of attack so the nose pitched upwards. She couldn’t see the planet anymore, which meant she wouldn’t see if any missiles came for them.
‘Strap in,’ Bek said. ‘We’ll hit atmosphere soon.’
Palia buckled herself into the other seat, then used those moments of blindness to review the information she had. They had more intelligence on Munab than anyone else in the Hegemony. Bek had let her access Ferrash’s archives – those he had access to – but refused to let anyone else get hold of them. So Bek gave her the map and Fabien gave her the latest troop movements.
Since Ferrash would be searching for his father, Progaeryon, to carry out the kill order, it made sense to go to where they had last seen the man – the habitation nearest to the planet’s network of nexite mines in the southern desert. It didn’t have a name, just a codified longitude and latitude, but the locals called it Cavemouth, for obvious reasons.
‘What is this?’ Lilesh’s clipped voice came from behind them.
Palia jerked around in her harness to see Archivist Lilesh framed in the doorway. When had it opened? The woman’s face was fire. With a growing chill, Palia watched the fabric of the Empyrean coil around her, accumulating within her limbs. No light, though. No visual tell. And Lilesh used her own emotions – Bek’s remained untouched and Palia felt the same as she had before. She couldn’t tell where the tide originated. Nothing clawed like fear or churned like anger. It all just pulsed, weaving around the limits of Lilesh’s body, an endlessly coiling snake in bright, indecipherable lines.
‘We were instructed to remain with the fleet, Pestor,’ Lilesh said. ‘Why are—?’
The ship rocked around them. Lilesh stumbled, but righted herself. A strand of hair slipped in front of her eyes, the only escapee from her still-immaculate bun.
Palia took the opportunity to speak before Lilesh could step in again. ‘We might lose the chance to find the tech and Ash if we stick around waiting for too long. Once we’re down there, it’ll be fine. I got in touch with the forces on the ground, so they’re expecting us. Their objective’s just about where we need to be, so we can stick with them for a while.’
Lilesh sighed. Heatwash illuminated her face as they punched through the atmosphere. Palia had no idea what might be going through her head. ‘Show me where you plan to land.’
With a glance out of the canopy at the sick, yellow clouds and the last tongues of plasma, Palia brought up the plans in her implants and shared them with Lilesh. The woman’s eyes became unfocussed, and Palia looked away, her heart hammering. She didn’t like the thought of so much energy standing right behind her. It made every sense in her tingle, her hands itch.
‘This is quite a way back from the front lines,’ Lilesh said at length.
‘See, I was being careful. Thought you’d approve.’ Palia inclined her head. No harm in conceding the point. ‘And it’ll give you plenty of opportunity to teach me as we make our way further in. You can start by teaching me however you do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Keep everything hidden. Or... obscured, anyway. Untraceable.’
‘There are steps to take before you reach that level, should you ever do so.’
Palia’s hackles rose at the implied doubt, but she bit her tongue. ‘Then we’ll start with those steps. Is anyone targeting us or are we good?’
Bek shook his head. ‘None yet, but I’m about to put us down behind your lines. The Protectorate pick up on that before we’re well protected? Expect it to change.’
‘Okay.’ She turned to look at Lilesh again, waved her over to the side seat. ‘You might want to strap in.’
* * *
Tessa joined them for the landing, after Bek sent a nudge to her implants to wake her up. A deep sleeper, the earlier turbulence hadn’t phased her and she sat now in the remaining side seat, bleary eyed, readjusting her focus in and out on the base of Bek’s neck. Palia could pretend she hadn’t noticed the two of them spending time together – loudly, in a ship where you couldn’t get far out of earshot – but she couldn’t quite forget, or fail to draw conclusions from the comforting effect his presence seemed to have on her subdued emotions.
They touched down in silence. Palia only noticed they had landed when the ground stopped moving up in the canopy, so gently did Bek put them down.
By the time they donned their armour and lowered the ramp, an aide already stood there waiting for them. He touched a palm to his shoulder in salute, breath misting in his helmet. ‘Pestor, welcome to Sixty-Fourth Legion mobile headquarters. I’m your liaison. We spoke on the relays.’
Palia nodded, grateful to be wearing a full helmet rather than the plain mask she had on her first visit. ‘Adjutant Signus Cammel, right?’
The junior officer nodded, then gestured behind him. ‘If you’ll come with me, I need to brief you on today’s operational objectives. The legion only made landfall point-five hours ago, so we have yet to make a move beyond fortifying our position.’
If this was what he called fortifying, Palia wouldn’t have guessed it. They had landed on an impromptu airfield, with shuttles clustered around clear aprons and take-off zones. When she craned her neck back, she could just make out the flicker of a sky shield high above them. Of course, the real airfield was the slab of metal off to their right, which had its own shield. The aircraft carrier squatted on thick treads, steam rising from it into the dawn air. Considering the base temperature of the desert, it had to be heat still bleeding off from atmospheric re-entry.
‘How long will the generator last, Adj-Sig?’ Palia asked.
Cammel followed her gaze, then gave her a reassuring smile when he realised she referred to the shield. ‘Indefinitely, if they don’t fire at us. Under heavy bombardment, about forty-eight hours. Plenty of time to get out of the situation.’
The shield didn’t look like it could withstand any kind of heavy bombardment, but looks were deceptive. They installed this same shield technology on ships and Palia knew from the fact she was still here that they could hold out. In a ship, though, it was a simple matter of travelling to a nexus to recharge. That wasn’t so easy on a planet’s surface.
Cammel led them towards the edge of the airfield. The soil there had been disturbed, a darker brown scattered across the usual orange around the entrance to a fortified bunker. As Palia wondered how far they would have to dig to find the Wilds, the horizon burst into light. Wincing, she planted her feet and threw her arms over her face. A few seconds later, the detonation rumbled through the ground beneath her. An ominous groan rumbled past, rattling components on nearby shuttles, and a wall of hot air slammed into her.
When she dropped her stinging arms, there was an orange ball of fire extinguishing to black smoke in the distance. In the quieter moments that followed, gunfire sounded from that direction alongside an anguished, creaking scream. Something metal. Something big. Something broken.
Palia drew a deep breath into her lungs, tasting dust and smoke through her helmet’s filters. ‘What was that?’
‘The explosion?’ Cammel asked.
‘The scream.’
Cammel grimaced. ‘That was one of the Munabi’s mechs breaking. They’re in the thick of it right now.’ He held the bunker door open for them, one eyebrow raised. ‘You’re sure you want to go out there, Pestor?’
If that really was the mechanised division, Palia didn’t have a choice – Progaeryon commanded that unit, so that was where she needed to be. She nodded, but she wondered how many keepers were out there. It wasn’t the orange flames she had to watch out for, not the old familiar warmth and promise of a certain death, but the green ones, and the threat of being devoured silently from all existence.
‘I’m sure.’
Chapter Sixteen
Palia sat in the back of the transport shuttle, feeling like a fraud. The four of them had been attached to a small band of forty combined milites and auxes – career soldiers and those in mandatory service. A squad of eight, including Adjutant Signus Cammel and the custodian leading them, sat in the transport with them, waiting to take off and establish positions on top of a nearby mesa overlooking Protectorate forces.
They knew Palia was empyrric. She felt their eyes on her, saw their hope and nervous excitement jostling past pre-fight nerves and bravado. Most of their attention, of course, they reserved for Lilesh. One of the milites had apparently fought alongside her before, and the weight of whatever stories he had told about her held sway with his friends. They kept a wary distance from her and Palia, despite their good will. Palia was glad for that – it made them less likely to notice how much her palms were sweating.
