TWENTY-SIX

 

 

THERE’S A SCRATCH just on the edge of hearing—another one, eighty seconds after the last one. It happened eighty seconds before that; and eighty seconds from now, the disembodied Spirit will have another moment’s panic, and send us a little query, desperate for the feel of its jockey.

For the first few hours we were in the air, the Decatur could fill the blanks, dropping recordings of Hail’s heartbeat and blood pressure across the net. Without a pilot to sync with or jacks to handle the connection, it was the best we could do. Close enough to the real thing to buy us some quiet.

But we’ve been radio-silent for the last hundred and thirty-six minutes, and doing everything we can to keep our approach hidden in the froth. We’re passing Horizon’s outstations, and starting to thread the avenues between its long-range augur channels. We keep our burn low and our networks shuttered, sparing the tightline for things we can’t live without.

Another eighty seconds down, and the Spirit sends query one hundred and two. We wait a moment, pretending that we’re getting a line from outside, and then we fudge our hundredth answer. A sample of one of the original recordings, mixed in with noise and static and semi-random variation. The Spirit might be short a body, but it’s smart enough to need tricking.

It’s our hundredth lie. We brushed the first requests away, but a shell’s first priority is its operator. Eighty seconds after every response, we get another ping, twice as loud and just as insistent. It knows that she’s still out here, and still a very long way from home. This is all we can do to keep the volume down.

Ninety-eight times, we’ve thought about pulling the plug and leaving the damn thing to drift, to bother the wind with its insecurities. We’ve filled the last two requests without a fight.

Truth is, we’d miss the company.

Part of us would, anyway. Other parts have done this all before. We might be making for a hollow dreadnought, charging down the barrels of Horizon’s guns, but this is just another fire in the distance, more sparks and pain and noise in a history so thick with them that it almost blurs together. Almost.

We’re uncomfortable in the quiet. Hail and Salt weren’t saying much before we cut our comms, but it’s worse now that the best we can do is sterile light and plaintext.

Any other day, and they’d probably be sleeping anyway—trying to get a few hours in the dark before the sky lights up again. They aren’t, or rather, Salt isn’t. His shell hasn’t registered a switch to internal logic yet, and the machine still shifts and corrects like there’s meat at the reins.

We can’t get a read on Hail, but she’s sitting somewhere near the back of Salt’s cockpit, cooped in a nerve-dead seat and isolated from anything that might interfere with his pilot-sync. Sharing thoughts between machine and jockey is hard enough without another mind looking in.

There’s another scratch, not from the Spirit.

The Decatur drifts into view, froth rolling from its plates. It aims its lenses at us. You feel that? it asks in tightline flashes.

We do, but only just. A signal pitched so the reach was wide, but with volume just enough to beat the background noise.

I’m collecting, we send back. It’s messy. Looks like cipher output.

Even through the gibberish, we can feel NorCol’s fingerprints all over it.

Salt’s already thought of that. Doesn’t translate through the standard crypto, says the Decatur. Changing to unorthodox.

But he’s wasting his time.

No need, we reply. It’s one of the oldest tricks in NorCol’s book, even if most jockeys never see it used. Normally, you can tightline a message you mean only one person to read, aiming that little thread of light directly into their thoughts, but that means line of sight. In Open Waters, that’s easy.

In a place like this, you need to get creative.

How far out are we?

Two hours, he replies.

If you can’t see the target, you can’t flash them. If you can’t flash them, the best you can do is shout into the wind and hope there isn’t too much noise to drown you out. Most of the time, that would get the job done. Company ciphers are as close to unbreakable as you can get without their own machines being locked out of the loop, but that’s the problem. A hollow Decatur can read company code just as well as it could if it were whole.

Ask Hail for her saddle numbers.

The pale shell is quiet for a moment. We can almost hear Salt playing it back to himself and trying to understand.

Saddle hash is meaningless to anyone who doesn’t have to sit in the thing every day. They’re three lines of serial numbers: one for the seat, one for the jacks, and one for the sync-surfaces. You call them out when spares come in, and use them to find hardware from the same foundries, or better yet, from the same batches as the parts you’re replacing. Each foundry unit has its own character, its own set of tiny imperfections, so small you’d never see them. It’s not about finding something flawless, just making sure you get the same flaws as you had before. Every jockey knows their numbers back to front, even if each line is sixteen digits long.

A ’dragger chief will usually have hands on all three, but you might have to beat it out of them. You could badger a lowly flight tech for the old spares, or an admin for the manifests, but that’s the kind of thing that gets you tailed to your bunk, maybe an awkward conversation in an unmarked room.

It’d be easy work for a Werewolf, though.

This is bad, decides the pale shell, isn’t it?

We’d smile at that, if we could. The Authority might have something similar, but even if it didn’t, Salt’s already working through it. You don’t need to be NorCol to know that a saddle-coded cipher is desperation talking. The puddle at the bottom of the last ditch.

If we’re down this far, at least one NorCol shell’s been hollowed out, if not more; taken body and soul and ciphers intact.

Another few seconds pass.

No dice. Any other ideas?

Hail knew Andrade before the rest of us, but if it isn’t hers—

Try mine, we send, files attached.

There’s a pause.

Hail’s got a clean fit. Decipher in progress.

The Spirit’s mind-state buzzes in the background, as if it can hear us whisper her name.

Rook?

Hail?

Read you, she replies. How did you guess that it was saddle-coded?

We had to do something similar on a place called Rotahn, lost in an electric storm. Twice before that during the original operations against Sanctuary, every channel hot with Sigurd jamming. Six times between that and our first taste of civil war. The first time we went flying with NorCol’s colours, back when their shells wore red and silver.

I got lucky, we reply. Remembered reading about it somewhere.

Good call.

We signal an acknowledgement, the closest we can manage to a shrug. What have you got?

The flashes get thicker coming back, straining to carry a payload across the narrow line. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a landing path.

We open it, and watch a holographic corridor map itself out in three dimensions. The route coils and twists, dives between clouds and plates and shadows in Horizon’s sensor-net.

Little red pinpricks light up across the holographic model of a dreadnought, marking where augurs and PHADAR have been damaged or disabled, turning orange where they’re running slow or underpowered. Others have been nudged a few degrees out of alignment, set to watch stretches of open air and Eye-light noise.

Green highlights show the zones where the net is still working as intended, but the path adds awkward turns and sudden breaks, all so we’ll keep to where the feeds don’t overlap. Where the sensor bands are stretched thin, and struggling to beat the wind.

A way back home.

Someone’s been busy.

If you want to call it that, comes the reply, probably from Hail. Just having a map like this is court-martial material.

I’d smile, if I could. Been there, done that.

Not like this. This’ll get you pressed up against a bulkhead.

For having it, or not reporting the faults?

A bit of both, assuming they didn’t try to pin the whole thing on you in the process. There’s a pause. This took work. Months, maybe a year or two.

Or longer, if you were using it already.

 

 

A HULK BREAKS the cloud cover, mirrored steel and Sigurd’s odd glyphs and stencils a dozen decks tall. A huge strike-face stands out amidships, carrying the company’s logo where it’s impossible to ignore. A sword and coiling serpent, bone-white on reflective black.

The last letters of DEMIURGE catch the light.

Every part of it is dreadnought-big, oversized in ways that don’t make sense until you’ve seen it all move together. Even then, it’s smaller in every dimension than the plains of NorCol steel opening up in the distance. Horizon has mass and density, but the Demiurge is all odd edges and rounded corners.

Or it would be, if it wasn’t also open in places. The froth flows in through massive tears in its hull and out between the girder grids that form its skeleton. Armour peels back from its ribcage, and the upper decks stand ragged where they’ve been skinned, struts and honeycomb air-gaps exposed to the wind. Two of its giant engine-cones are missing, and most of its engineering levels are void and molten decking.

We’ve seen that kind of damage once before, but never on a ship this size. It’ll be Horizon’s offensive magnetics that did it—huge arrays inside NorCol’s dreadnought, used to break the electromag chains that held stars captive inside the Demiurge. The holes are where reactors used to be. Three of them, their casings evaporated along with every deck in reach.

The Demiurge should never have gotten close enough for that. Hell, it should have died ten times over in the first minute of the engagement. The ship should be more air than steel, withered where tungsten blizzards found it, and snapped in half under the weight of Horizon’s planet-crackers.

But instead of engaging the threat, NorCol’s old tub did exactly what we’d expect. The outstations would’ve seen it first: another dreadnought in the water, and heading straight for them. Instead of calling back, though, they did that damned double take reserved for instruments full of ghosts and fluke harmonics. They probably cycled their PHADAR through a full reset, maybe sent a crew outside to clean their receivers.

By the time they worked out what was happening, they’d have had pickets howling at them, and a giant shadow already drifting past their windows. By the time they got a line on Tower, Horizon could probably see it for themselves. Another minute lost to surprise and horror, and a couple more trying to understand what they were looking at.

Sigurd’s dreadnought at full steam, burning so hard it was melting its own skin in the waste-heat. By the time NorCol’s gun crews were on the case, the Demiurge was already blurring in their scopes.

It hit so hard that the two ships fused together, merged at the point of impact. Any survivors aboard the hollow ship would’ve died in an instant, not that it would’ve noticed a few more stains across its walls.

No human crew would fly like that, but no human crew would expect it to work, either.

The dark ship is dead. Its superstructure is cracked in every place that hasn’t shattered, twisted and crumpled in ways its engineers could never have anticipated, let alone designed for.

Horizon is still intact, but its ancient systems belong to something else now. You can feel it in the air, and hear it if you wake your passives for a second or two.

It’s a buzz like swarming insects, cut through with shrieks and screams and noise from open channels, death rattles and networked chaos as machines fail and operators die. Emergency bands cut short as whole decks void themselves at once, or seal their doors and drown their occupants in fire suppressant.

We fly through it, slow and quiet, keeping the Eye behind us and the froth around our plates. We can’t see Hail and Salt, but we aren’t looking. The big, hot shell is giving us a head start, and time to trip over anything that Andrade couldn’t fit into his signal. Our little heartbeat means that we were always going first, ready to break and flare if there’s anything out of place. We just have to hope they’d see it if we did.

It’s loud out here.

Sparks light the air above and below, cast shadows across the crags. Shells butcher each other, NorCol on NorCol on Sigurd and things that’ve had their markings scrubbed off altogether. We watch machines chased down by their old wingmates, tackled, pinned and shivering while their jockeys die inside. Gun-blisters rake each other with fire up and down the ship, and some of the old broadside keeps running, mechanical drumbeats running loud and hot as they try to shove the broken dreadnought loose. Missiles streak out into the open, curving back into the cliffs above and below.

Long streams of fire curve and crackle as point-defence batteries defend themselves. The PD guns run on networks of their own, hardened against anything that might slow their reaction times, and so packs of hollows track them down, surround each one in turn and tear them to pieces.

We stay far away. We’re worn from the flight, and bruised from our tangle in Sigurd’s graveyard, on the doorstep of that prison. Even if there was something we could do to help, two shells don’t turn a tide like this. We bury the ache and keep our eyes on the path.

Horizon was built to take a beating, and the flood seems to know that. For all the noise and fury, the old ship is still alive, and still dangerous enough.

Where we can, we run our engines on slow-burn. Where we can’t, we loop and turn and do things that would stall us if we had wings and atmosphere to worry about. We cut our thrust to nothing for a while, letting the wind carry us past a live interceptor block, a nest of barrels all twitching in their sockets. It takes us under a wing of gibbering machines, NorCol’s turquoise flying alongside mirror-black and a few captured Hasei rigs in hot orange, engines so bright that they cast shadows across the crags. Trailing behind them are a pair of Locusts, brown and tan and silver, twitchy just like the others.

They turn together, thirteen machines as one, with more of them converging as they follow Horizon’s hull. If we didn’t already know that every jockey was dead, we’d see it now: they don’t move like a flight of shells. But then, they don’t move like a flight of anything. If they had humans riding saddle, they’d shift and correct, or come about when instructions changed, when units merged or fissured. These things don’t.

They swarm.

They move as though around a second Eye—but there is no endless dawn, no storms or wind-walls. Instead, our lenses find a sinuous shape standing near a massive breach in Horizon’s topside plate. Four arms stretch and four wings guide the wind. Mirror-black armour trails streamers of froth. Massive steps carry it through the ruin where Tower used to be.

The observer.

It seems to stir at the feel of our optics. A huge head turns.

Shit.

We feel the augur first, thrust before PHADAR locks can follow. We dive back into the cloud, burning as hard as we can manage. Hollow shapes fling themselves from the steel cliffs above us, break away from the coiling swarm. We make thirty contacts in a moment, all bearing down on us.

We could take one or two in the haze, but the froth isn’t thick enough to hide us yet. We pull our rifle clear, for all the good it’s going to do us. We can feel the locks on our hull already.

So this is where we die.

The froth parts around a hot streak, the cloudy haze cut to open air and heavy metal. The first slug goes wide, but the second skips right past our head, burning acid copper-blue. It scalps a ’Kustar shell, spraying the contents of its skull out in a cone of sparks.

The hollows turn as one, rounding on a pair of NorCol gunships, but the little boats are already diving back into deeper cloud below us, guided missiles and cluster-shot spreading in their wake. Warheads blossom around us, and flak fills the air with hot metal, catching the hollows as they fight to make the turn. If the jockeys were still alive inside, they’d be G-LOCked and waiting for their brains to suffocate.

The gunships earn half an ace in a single salvo, sinking three machines in the chaos. The hollows turn and jink and sputter, but they can’t keep up.

Horizon might be lost, but the company’s crews can still give as good as they get.

A tightline: Quickly!

We trace the flash, but it takes us a second to get our eyes on the sender. A pair of Decaturs, looking out from a break in the ship’s primary plates. They’re standing in the throat of an access shaft, hidden where the armour overlaps but doesn’t join.

We spit thrust and break our course, turn a dive into a climb, then cut the engines, doing the rest with flaps and feathers.

The pale shells reach out for us. Keep your airspeed, says the one that spoke before. We’ll catch you.

Part of us hesitates, but the rest of us is steady. We lower our weapon and ease pressure from our limbs, ready to take the hit. The pale shells straighten, adjusting their grip on the edge of the tunnel. We’re coming in too quickly, but they don’t shy away. Neither will we.

We pull our wings tight behind us at the last second and throw our hands out to meet theirs. We connect hard enough to crack armour, and nearly wrench our right arm from its socket. Our feet find the deck, and the new shells drag with us, inertia and splayed fingers slowing us to a halt.

They offer us a tiny net, as quiet as they can make it.

“Where are the other two? The Wolf said there were three of you.”

They should be right behind—

Salt’s voice cuts through the static, wide-band and blaring. “Rook, I don’t know where you are—”

The two shells are already heading up the tunnel, and a third follows them to the edge, rails crackling.

“—but you really need to—”

Another Decatur gestures from deeper in. “Run.”

 

 

THEY LOSE A machine getting Hail and Salt in through the door. We don’t see it. Soto, the flight chief, is almost carrying us by then, trying to force us deeper down the access shaft. We aren’t looking back, but we feel the double-tap of a through-and-through: the crack of a slug hitting forward armour, and a splash as it spins out the back. It takes another second for the shell’s nets to die, but the jockey doesn’t make a sound.

The surviving machines are still trading voices and firing solutions, but they keep us out of their combat channels. We have to watch as they flood the air with munitions, and haul Salt’s limping shell into view. They hold the line another thirty heartbeats or so, just long enough to get us clear. Soto toggles a connection we hadn’t seen before.

A line of charges explodes somewhere on the decks above us, and the last of the squad skips clear just in time to watch the shaft disappear under weight and metal sheer: from open air to solid steel so fast you can’t see the hollows collapsing with it. They watch the place where the corridor used to be, augurs pinging off of a brand new wall.

Soto measures out a breath and turns to make a headcount. Two of us, bruised and battered, and two surviving Decaturs of his own. All three of them, him included, wear hand-sprayed red crosses across their shoulders, hulls, and faces—their old badges erased in favour of something that’ll mark them out against the hollows. They were convicts before; now they’re survivors.

“What happened?” he asks, after a moment in the quiet. “Where’s the other one? There were supposed to be three of you.”

“Sunk,” says Hail, on the line from Salt. “Lost in contact.”

“And the jockey?”

“Extracted,” says Salt. “Now aboard this shell.”

“Would’ve been nice to know that earlier,” says one of the others, his voice full of cracks, “before Alana decided to wait.”

“Easy, convict,” growls Soto. “I need you walking.”

The other shell turns to him. “With them?”

“Are you going to slow us down?”

Nothing comes back.

“Thought not.” He sets his optics on us. “We need to get out of here before they find this compartment.”

“I’m sorry,” says Hail, just as they turn away. Lost hours break her voice. “There was no way to call ahead.” It isn’t an excuse, just an explanation.

“Let’s just get out of here,” says the other chief.

Alana must’ve been their captain, which makes Soto the old number 2. You can see it. He’s already cauterised the memory.

A tremor runs through the floor, turning us all around to see a giant hatch down a side-tunnel, shivering in its frame. It’s twenty metres tall, but that doesn’t stop its mad hydraulics flinging it wide, revealing a passage full of flickering lights and hollow noises. It slams itself shut so hard it shakes the deck, and rains rust from the gantries above us. And again, breaking welds and spitting rivets. And again—open, shut, open, shut, like it’s trying to tear itself loose. Vibrations mark other doors on different decks, all swinging to the same insane beat.

“They’re bracketing us.” Soto turns and waves one of his squad to the front. “Bor, take point.” He pushes us past, into Bor’s shadow.

Where have I heard that name before?

“Quickly, before they lock us in.”

Salt’s machine leans into a walk, trying to keep up with Bor, but his right step seizes before he can even make it. The leg looks like it’s still intact, but we can see where a hardround hit, buckling armour on the joint. He has to catch himself on a bulkhead, leaving a trail of sparks behind his fingers.

We roll up next to him and offer a shoulder.

“Thank you,” he whispers, where only we can hear it.

You’re welcome, is what we would have said, if he wasn’t so heavy. Our hull creaks and our joints warn that they’re maxing out, but we hold. And then we walk.

Salt measures his movements to ours, and it doesn’t take long to find a beat. Ten steps deeper, and we’re moving almost as fast as the others. Some habits die easier than others, and some will last forever.

In our cockpit, the body in our saddle sways gently, humming a familiar song.

Soto and his shells lead us up to another hatch, this one twice the thickness of the haywire things opening and closing in the distance. It’s a head shorter than any of the Decaturs, but easy enough to duck through. It doesn’t move as we approach, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous; it’s part of Horizon’s internal armour system, and so heavy it’d wipe one of us out in a heartbeat. Bor watches it for a second, listens for signs of madness in its nets. Then she skips through, clearing the other side with her augurs hot.

“Clear,” comes the call. Her shell inches back into view, just at the edge of what the door can reach. She leans in and marks Salt. “Come.”

We lift him up to the threshold and he stumbles through. Another pause, a nod from Bor, and we drop in behind him. A flickering lamp brings us short, has us wait until we’re sure that the massive hatch isn’t going to swat the next thing that tries to step through. A minute and change, and Soto calls it. He makes the jump, and the last of them follows seconds after that.

We creep out between a pair of the dreadnought’s primary plates. Metal cliffsides rise up and out of sight. The gap is just wide enough to fit us single file, but this place wasn’t meant for manoeuvring. It’s one of the ship’s many uninhabited zones, made to crumple and fail or fill with fire.

Half a K from where we start, we find a hatch just like the one we took to get here. Someone has cut through its hinges and dropped the metal slab off to one side.

“Too dangerous,” says Bor, by way of explanation. She waves a hand over the frame where its seals used to be. “Look.”

The old locks snap at her, clattering open and shut like they’re trying to nip her fingers.

Salt keeps as far from them as he can manage, transferred from our shoulder to Bor’s across the gap. We do the same when our turn comes, pressing flat against the other side. The last two shells don’t bother—they wait in the doorway, watching the ravine behind us, waiting for our thermal tracks to fade.

Bor leads us into one of the huge spillways that run under Horizon’s master hangars. We crawl down it, silent and reduced to optics. We can almost hear the hollows whispering on the floors above, scratching at things we can’t see, probing the limits of the hangar with eyes and augurs and fingertips.

Nothing rises to meet us from the dark; we’re too deep for that.

And there’s a whole other ship down here.

We jog across a runway, actual open lanes and tarmac, made to send and receive NorCol’s ancient fighter wings, back when you needed a runup to clear the ship. We climb strange magazines and crawl through empty silos, pass weapons we don’t have names for.

We thread through the ship’s ancient arteries, following paths not meant to take our weight. We duck under Horizon’s massive spine, curving away into the dark, and step gently between the joints of its ribs.

At one point, we find a solid wall where Soto was expecting open passage. He rolls through his maps again, but Bor has already figured it out. She waves us up and we put our shoulders against the surface next to her. Together, we feel it creak, squealing as the ancient hinges tear.

“Not hollow,” she says, once we’re clear on the other side, looking the mechanism up and down. “Just old.”

Behind that is a lead-lined crypt. Huge pillars rise into vaults, tall enough that even the Decaturs can walk with their backs straight and heads level. Our steps raise dust from the deck, leaving the air prickly with rad. There’s grime and oil and rust, but this place is sterile in every other way we can measure. These are the halls that used to hold the waste from Horizon’s reactors, back when the ship still fed on solids.

We find the first signs of life in the middle of it: a bank of jury-rigged halide, and a couple of passives salvaged from the outside of the ship, stitched together into something that could just about see us coming. Passives are as good as you can get down here; nothing else could beat the thick walls, or all the interference from the rad. That’s the point. If you can’t see out, the hollows can’t see in.

Very clever, Andrade.

“We’re closing on the first checkpoint,” whispers Soto. “Keep clear, and let Bor make contact.”

We creep into the shadow of an old processing bay, shielded just as heavily as everything else. If this was a forward position, or a beachhead on hostile soil, NorCol would crew its boundaries with Jackals: nasty little drones built sharp and quick and expendable. They aren’t smart, not so you’d notice, but they make up for it with viciousness. Hollow, they’d be nightmares.

There are no Jackals down here. Instead, Bor aims a tightline at a cold slab of steel, resting up against another broken door. We work our low-light and catch the silhouette of a shell, but there’s something wrong with the outline. We understand when the rest of it comes into view; it’s a battle-damaged Spirit, stripped down to its hindbrain and jacked into a point-defence gun.

You can’t tell a spinal column what to do or where to go, but you can wire it so that nerves will fire and fingers will tighten. Reflex does the rest.

Checkpoint two is on the other side of an airlock; a pair of hatches dense enough to stop the radio crackle in the air. Bor makes contact again, but we don’t see who she’s talking to until we pass them. A marine anti-armour crew, on foot, carrying shoulder-rails and recoilless launcher-tubes. On a level field, they wouldn’t last a moment against one of us, but the passage is tight enough to give us pause, shell or no shell.

Wherever we are, it’s too deep for central circuits. All of the doors need to be worked by hand, and each airlock works as a little murder-hole, more NorCol boots peering in through the cracks.

We don’t see another living shell until we hit the deepest part of this deck, looking at Andrade’s oddly shaped machine over the sights of its railgun.

“Nice to see you too,” we manage.