Sliding Void (6 page)

‘Risk and reward so often go together.’

‘Don’t they just,’ said Zeno.

‘I owe Calder Durk a little more than a no-frills ticket out of his homeland,’ said Matobo. ‘If it was simple as that, I could have kept the courier I sent to you hanging around here until I had retrieved the prince from his difficulties, then packed him off in the direction of the first civilised port. Mister Durk needs a new life. The kind of life the
Gravity Rose
so kindly provided for me in the old days.’

‘This is it then?’ said Calder. ‘You have made a coward of me. I am to run away, exiled.’ He hardly cared now. All he could think of was Sibylla in the arms of that dog. Sibylla had started him on the path to war, and now here she was, welcoming their enemies’ embrace – it didn’t bear thinking about.
Be glad your father and mother passed before they could see this. Be glad your brothers died in battle. Be glad the council already loathed you as an untested, untried pup. Unable to be crowned king until you’d proved yourself with a triumph
.

‘Will Noak bear this exile with me?’

Matobo shook his head. ‘Your manservant was on his heels as soon as I fixed up his broken ribcage. Said you and he had an agreement. I paid him off for you, the new queen sitting on your treasury and all.’

‘You’re not going to
run
away, your highness,’ said Lana. ‘You’re going to
fly
. In style.’

Calder felt a twinge in his leg where the crossbow bolt should still be impaled. ‘Are we to travel by Matobo the Magnificent’s giant beetles?’

‘Matobo the what?’ Zeno laughed.’ You and me going to have a few words, you ever going to call yourself crew.’

‘Where are my clothes?’ asked Calder.

‘Incinerated,’ said Matobo. The wizard produced a white set of undergarments and a pair of full-body overalls similar to the ones worn by the female captain and her golden sailor. ‘You recognize these greens, skipper?’

Lana seemed amused. ‘You kept them, all this time?’

‘You’re about my build, my prince,’ said the wizard. ‘They should fit you. Put them on, and may they bring you luck.’

‘The kind that ain’t bad,’ added Zeno.

They showed no sign of leaving, so Calder drew on the underpants, vest and then stepped into the green single-piece uniform. A whole village might share the fire of a great hall in the depths of winter, so Calder wasn’t overly concerned or self-conscious as the wizard and his retinue observed his nakedness. Calder reached down by his side. It felt empty with no scabbard. ‘I lost my sabre when my ice schooner was fired at harbour.’

‘We got our own,’ said Lana, laughing.

‘Where is the humour in that?’

‘The shore boat that landed my friends here is known as a sabre,’ explained Matobo. ‘It’s an acronym. SABRE. Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine. And you had better be on your way. A nighttime takeoff will draw less attention to your presence.’

‘Shit, Matobo. You worried we’ll melt the lead off your tower’s roof? We’ll hover on our repulsers until we hit the mesosphere,’ said Lana. She looked at Calder. ‘Don’t worry about your sword, your highness. Believe it or not, we do have some blades racked in the
Gravity Rose
, for our own little medieval moments. We’ll give you one thing to take with you, though.’ She looked across at her golden-skinned sailor and winked. ‘You remember that two-timing louse Pitor, and what I did to him when we docked at Zeta Reticuli?’

Zeno shrugged. ‘As well as your ex-boyfriend does, I’m sure. What is it with you organics and your plumbing?’

Lana slapped Calder on the arm. ‘Time to have some fun, your highness.’

Fun
. Calder remembered what that was like. It seemed a hell of a long time ago, though.

***

Sibylla dragged herself out from under her heavy, warm, quilted blankets, pulling back the velvet curtains on the large four-poster bed. There was the sound again. She hadn’t been certain at first, what with the noise of the loutish high marshal snoring beside her, but someone was clearly urinating within earshot. Given that the only chamber pot in the royal apartments was tucked under her bed, and the nearest toilet over the moat’s ramparts lay a corridor’s walk away, this wasn’t a wholesome development.

The recently crowned queen reached under the bed, finding the hidden holster of her dagger. She removed it, holster and all, not yet drawing it. The blade was poisoned and she didn’t want to risk pricking herself, still half-asleep. Not unless there really was an assassin inside the palace’s royal apartment. Perhaps someone on the staff who had needed to fill up with a couple of litres of liquid courage, only to find themselves caught short on the way to give Sibylla a helping shove off the throne. One of her younger sisters’ blades maybe, hoping to move herself up the line of royal precedence now there were two kingdoms to claim, rather than one? Or a loyalist from the previous regime? Perhaps Sibylla hadn’t purged the ranks of the royal bodyguard as severely as she thought she had?

Sibylla felt the cold from the wind before she spotted the open door on the balcony. Her royal gown of state lay spread across the floor, and the smell! She stepped barefooted through the warm puddle soaking her clothes, and mastering her revulsion, she tore back the heavy curtain outside. The balcony was empty. She stepped carefully outside, her dagger drawn, ready to slice the rope of any attacker’s grappling hook. But Sibylla found only the forty-foot drop of the granite walls outside, the dark bulk of the city below, just a few windows lit by candlelight at this late hour. Merely the cold to kill her with pneumonia if she tarried out here naked too long.

For a second, Sibylla thought she heard a distant echo of familiar laughter. Calder Durk? The mocking noise came from the sky. A distant shape dark against the black of night sky, some crow shrinking into the heavens on a freezing cold night? She kicked her way past her ruined garment in disgust. Did ghosts get to piss one last time, before being carried away into the Halls of the Twice-born? Away into the heavens? She sighed. Maybe the priests would know? There would be a lot more of them crossing the ice from Narvalak in the years ahead.

***

Matobo had the contents of his storage chests laid across his bed, sifting through the things he’d collected during his years on Hesperus.

‘There isn’t much to show here for years of freezing my ass off on this lousy planet,’ he told his hound.

The throat muscles around the dog’s neck bulged as it started to speak. There were some things that even top-notch genetic engineers couldn’t get right. ‘You should’ve told Lana the truth.’

Unsurprisingly, Matobo didn’t agree. ‘If she knew about the prince, there is no way she’d be shipping out with him. Not even as stowage, let alone crew.’

The hound shook his head sadly. ‘You think I don’t know, but I do. It was you who warned the priests the prince was heading for the baron’s castle. You set Calder up to be betrayed. Ally or not, Baron Halvard had no choice. It was switch sides or be invaded.’

Matobo shrugged, but didn’t deny the accusation. ‘Calder wouldn’t have left if he still thought he had a chance to get his kingdom back, would he? And this way everyone thinks he’s dead. Killed in an oil blaze set by the baron’s assassins, murdered with nothing left to live for.’

‘You underestimate
them
,’ growled the hound.

‘Yeah well, it’s all about risk and reward.’

There wasn’t going to be much evidence left behind to show that Rex Matobo had been on this planet. Not after he’d packed and left the cold world of Hesperus light years behind him. Never let it be said that Matobo the Magnificent wasn’t a careful man. Matobo had grown even more cautious after the events of a few months ago. The heavily armed scout ship jumping out of hyperspace into Hesperus system. Coming looking for something incredibly valuable. Expecting only a few axe-wielding barbarians as opposition. Matobo chuckled. Nobody expected a wizard. Certainly not one paranoid enough of uninvited visitors to have seeded Hesperus orbit with hundreds of stealth mines. Hardly a fair fight at all, but then that was the only sort Matobo got out of bed for. Any other kind of conflict was far too dangerous and unpredictable. Matobo was even going to jettison their pilot’s corpse into the sun before he jumped out. Burn it up on the same trajectory he had used to dispose of the mine-wrecked scout ship. Not a scrap of DNA left to indicate that one of their crew had been captured alive, the pilot’s mind probed and stripped of every useful scrap of data, putting Matobo back in the game. And back on the run, of course. But he was used to that.

‘You are letting the
Gravity Rose
’s crew run the risk,’ accused the hound. ‘If Calder Durk is traced back to the ship, everyone on board is going to be murdered to ensure their silence.’

‘Lana and Zeno owe me their lives,’ said Matobo. ‘I think we can call that debt balanced out now, don’t you? And it probably won’t come to that, let’s plan for the worst and hope for the best. We just need to find ourselves a buyer for Calder Durk. Can’t do that with the merchandise on board, waiting to be jacked out from under us, can we? After we secure ourselves an honest buyer for the prince, then everyone is happy.’

‘Do I look happy?’ asked the genetically modified hound.

‘You’ve got a naturally sad face,’ said Matobo. ‘Even as a puppy, you looked like you were chewing a wasp.’

The hound sucked in its cheeks and sloped off. Matobo’s own conscience on four goddamn legs.

CHAPTER THREE – Sliding void

Calder felt a sprinkle of water on his face as he came around, his head throbbing as badly as it had been inside the wizard’s tower. Except he wasn’t in the wizard’s tower, he was in a metal-walled chamber with the strange golden sailor, Zeno, sitting in a chair opposite a bunk unit built into the wall where Calder was laid out. ‘What happened?’

‘You went freaky-deaky when we lost gravity. I tranked your ass. You were getting kind of hysterical anyway, after Lana let you mark your territory back in your old castle. Shit, you fleshies, water in, water out. I don’t know what psych handbook she got that shit from.’

Floating
, Calder remembered floating and the panic rising in him, as if he was cast adrift in the darkness, the infinite night. Calder moaned and rubbed his throbbing temples.

‘Matobo—’ sniggered Zeno, — ‘the Magnificent filled your head with a new language back in his tower when he was fixing your leg, used an information virus to rewrite your brain. That’s why you’re feeling that hell of a headache. Your superior temporal gyrus is still adjusting itself. And it’s why you can understand Lingual. You kind of spoke a variation of it anyway, accounting for nearly a thousand years of cyclic drift in syntax and the fact that your ancient ancestors once hailed from a Swedish factory world.’

Calder cast about the room, a steel vessel? How did it work? He noted that the round portal of glass across from him had been tinted with a mirror-like surface, hiding the sight of whatever lay outside the ship.

Zeno picked up a hypodermic filled with a bubbling red substance. ‘Got your orientation virus here, but seeing as you have a headache already, I’m not going to burn your brain with that A. is for Android, H. is for Hyperspace crap. Too much of that’ll give you brain cancer, which would take a bucket full of medical nanotech to fix.’

‘I don’t think that Matobo’s spell of language is working. I can’t understand a word of what you’re saying.’

‘Baby, that’s because you’re living in the dark ages and short of about thirty thousand years of context. But don’t worry. Doctor Zeno’s got himself an alternative to a neural rewrite in his medicine bag.’ He reached back to a workbench cluttered with unfamiliar machines and tools, turning around with a black skull cap made of some shiny dark material ‘I know you’ve got theatres and actors on your world; picked up that much from the primer that Matobo broadcast to us before we landed.’ He held up the cap and fitted it over Calder’s head.

‘Is this more of your sorcery?’

‘Sorcery, no, but a spell, yes. Old school sorcery, and I should know. I used to be in the business. Acting, that is. Think of what you’re going to watch as a piece of theatre. You’ll see a play, but you’ll watch it through the eyes of one of the actors, experience what they feel. Hate. Love. Fear. So real it’s beyond real. And that’s shit you can trademark.’

‘You wish to amuse me?’

‘Edutainment, man. Normally you’d get to interact, take part in the play, but I’ve turned that function off. You’re a couch potato for your first ride.’

‘What can I learn from seeing a play?’

‘It’s a cop show, one of the best, a series called
Hard TAP
. Most relevant episode I could think of. There are two heroes, right, cops, and they’re going to this world settled by Amish types. Spaceport is a sealed city with minimal contact with the rest of the world. Whole thing is about the mores of modernity as they interact with a pre-fusion age civilisation. Personally speaking, I think the whole thing’s a rip-off of Harrison Ford in
Witness
. But the cops get to explain shit to the Amish like the existence of modern dental care and how you flush a toilet and you’ll be picking up on those basics too. As introductions to the modern age go, this one is as gentle as I can make it for you. One thing.’ He bent in and adjusted the headset. ‘You’ll be in the sim for six months, relative. Out here, it’ll be more like ten minutes.’