Holding up her bow and hefting her quiver of arrows onto her shoulder, she broke into a run, racing like a shadow through Satigenaria’s sundered glory. Every step brought her farther from the ship’s reassuring presence. With every yard she put between herself and its senses, she felt the time lag more pronounced as its signal relayed back and forth from her. The speed of light was too slow by far, and Jed felt each tiny fraction of a second. Soon her ship’s senses no longer reached her position properly, and without its enhancement the world seemed colourless and devoid of dimension.
Jed stopped beneath a seared archway, pausing to collect herself. She flattened her back against the blackened concrete, pulling her bow in close to her chest, and surveyed the desolation. A stiff, heated breeze blew, carrying an overwhelming myriad of burnt smells. Jed felt agoraphobic and exposed without the
Shamrock’s
reassuring walls and all-round enhanced vision. She reached for a cube of conurin, trying not to fret about how long the rations would last. She let the paper blow away, a pale husk of fragile, untouched whiteness among the ash and ruins, as she chewed on the chalky fibre of its contents.
With her mono-visor over her right eye, she scoured the dark ruins for infra-red. The remains of some fires still glowed, but she sought out the warm spots marking men. Seeing none, she straightened, looked out upon the deserted streets, and shrugged the quiver on her shoulder, setting the vanes rattling on the arrows’ protruding tails. Once more she went forth, over the loose masonry underfoot, and once more, she felt compelled to stop, to look up at the unbounded openness of the dark sky, and feel a fearful awe with no roof to protect her from its emptiness.
The stars glittered with a faltering, frosty light, distorted by the atmosphere. The galactic center was rising on the horizon, forming a pool of slick russet-gold light in the distant lapping waters of the ocean. Here, seen head on from Satigenaria’s OverHalo bearing, the dusty, glowing turbulence took on a maleficent ferocity which had never before been in evidence to Jed.
The
Shamrock’s
scanning signal reached her once more. It reported an anomaly in the carnage–hard and spherical, cooling at a different rate to the surroundings.
She moved forward over the rubble to duck beneath the upper half of the window frame of what remained of the ground floor of a small building. The stench of scorched flesh sent her stomach into convulsions. The warped hull of the runnership bulged up through where the ceiling had once been, its aft hull leading through the wall it had shattered on entry. Deep scrapes scarred the metal where it had run aground, dispersing its huge momentum.
Jed withdrew an arrow and fitted it into position, its point gleaming wetly in the silver light. She circled the vessel with cautious sidesteps, until she found the airlock on the opposite side.
The outer door stood open, the mutilations of a forced egress visible on its edge. Jed eased the tension out of the bow, and replaced the arrow in the quiver, pushing it down until she was sure of the contact of the point in the fluid the quiver held. Her hand found a stone of about the right size, and she skimmed it fast through the hatch. A dull gong announced the stone striking some interior wall.
She stood for a full minute, feeling her heart thump in her breast and scanning the sky and dark horizon. The
Shamrock’s
senses couldn’t penetrate the vessel’s shielding. Men could be taking refuge within the hull, but Jed had not the nerve to risk crouching on the rubble and angling her back to peer inside, leaving her hands trapped and her back exposed, and cutting off her radio contact with the
Shamrock
. She would have to assume that Wolff, if indeed he had escaped aboard that vessel, was now loose on this world.
A clearing in the rising smoke unveiled the waxing beta-moon’s opalescent face. The fires had all but exhausted their fuel, and the city lay at last silent, cast in a tranquil and deathly moonlight.
The ranks of buildings still standing fell back as she hurried onward, until she heard the lap of the ocean and saw the thin glitter of water in the moonlight. The edge of the continent was not far, and here the tide had broken through the gap punched by a falling building. A brackish smell tinged the air. An intact rim remained before the edge of the continent, warped from the damage and flooded over. Partial structures protruded from the sea itself.
From the city behind her, a fervid battle-cry drifted through the air. Jed whirled about, pulling an arrow from her quiver and fitting it to the bow in one swift motion.
* * * *
Viprion’s voice sounded hoarse as he shouted through the noise of the flames. “Is there anyone here? Help!”
Wolff bent and touched the earth. Embers glowed among the dark rubble like a coal hearth. Charcoal coloured his fingers. He glanced back at the twisted bulk of the runnership, its surface scored by ablation burns and fire.
Rh’Arrol arched aer neck, tilting aer face to the sky. Aer quills were dark and colourless, and Wolff knew the morran was afraid.
Viprion staggered into a valley, still calling out. A bank of smog passed over the face of the moon, reducing the castellan to a dishevelled silhouette stumbling over an infernal plain.
Wolff followed him, the case of conurin in his hand. Rh’Arrol trailed behind, one of its tentacles gripping his wrist around the handle of the case.
The fires died away as they climbed a rise in the land, but the air remained acrid.
Things lay on the floor. Wolff at first thought they were litter scattered from the demolished buildings, but then he trod on one of them, and it squashed under his foot and he felt and heard it burst. The clouds parted again, and the moonlight revealed a pulpy mound in front of him.
Rh’Arrol, leaning toward it, jerked back aer neck and made an
ugh
noise, and a sudden bolt of bile green shot over aer flanks. Wolff suddenly recognised the thing on the floor as a human foetus—misshapen from being stamped upon by someone wearing heavy boots, but still recognisable, with limbs and fingers and sunken dark eyes, and an almost cartoonish largeness to its broken cranium. Then he saw something else lying to one side, the body of the mother it had been torn from. Viscera trailed from her ruptured abdomen, and curls of hair dark with blood covered her face.
“Viprion! Stop shouting!”
Viprion turned around. The colour drained from his face when he realised what the thing on the ground was. The man clapped his hand over his mouth as he gave a lurch at the middle, and Wolff saw him half vomit and force it back down.
He kicked over the dead female, swallowing forcibly. “She’s not of the Blood,” he said, as though this in some way excused her murder.
“Your Kuiper belters?” Wolff asked. He began to discern more victims in the moonlight, a decapitated man lying in a doorway with no building behind it, someone who’d lain in a ditch and burnt into a contorted, skeletal black wire figure...and here a naked child lying face down in a pile of rubbish, with its ears hacked off and its body covered with stab wounds and burns.
His hand covering his face, Viprion pulled up the child by its singed hair. He immediately gasped and dropped the head. Wolff caught sight of the face, hideously mutilated, upon its flayed features still recognisable a rictus of agony.
“That one is of the Blood.”
“This place is death.” Wolff scanned the sulphurous horizon. “We must get out of here.”
“Wait,” said Viprion. “They have already had their way here. I see less reason for them to return. Let’s hide here until first light.”
Wolff didn’t want to stay here, near the horrors of the trampled foetus, and the burnt-out body with its flesh all melted to carbon, and the poor, pathetic body of the child with its
face
. “All right,” he said, “but not right here.”
He climbed a slope toward a building still standing and sat against the wall on the opposite side to the bodies. Where the fires did not burn, the air was very cold, and Wolff had left his jacket on the
Shamrock
. He wrapped his arms around his shoulders.
Viprion sat a few feet away from him. Rh’Arrol, however, sat close to him for warmth on the opposite side.
Viprion slid the spike of his interface bolt out of his forehead, and put it in his tunic pocket. “Why are they killing Blood castes and non-Blood castes indiscriminately?”
“Does it matter?” Wolff said, rather too loudly. He looked about and lowered his voice. “They’re just men, and they’ve been murdered by violent lunatics who make sport of their victims. It matters not to them or us now who their parents were!”
“At least they have not been murdering morrans,” said Rh’Arrol, in a complacent sort of voice.
“Morrans do not live on planets!” Viprion shouted over Wolff. “Stupid urchin!”
“Why not?” said Wolff.
“Because they’re foul beasts, and men have no use for them.”
Rh’Arrol let out a scathing hiss and turned aer head away.
“Why is it you find morrans so objectionable?” Wolff put his hand in his pocket, and remembered the food he’d put in it. He surreptitiously stuffed some of the cheese into his mouth.
“Because morrans are not men.” Viprion recovered the book he’d taken from his office on Carck-Westmathlon. He pointed to a block of text halfway down a page. “Read that.”
Wolff took the book and looked at the meaningless symbols in the moonlight. “Arrol, you can read.” He held out the open book to the morran.
“All men are born equal.” Rh’Arrol squinted aer amber eyes. “What happens after that is up to them.”
Viprion made a grab for the book. “I will not have the words of the Pagan Atheist sullied by the mouth of a morran!”
“That’s all it says? All men are born equal, what happens after that is up to them?”
“That’s all me had time to see!” Rh’Arrol said.
“Yes, that’s what it says!” Viprion’s voice echoed over the ruins.
Wolff cast about in alarm, half expecting the murderers to come racing over the summit, baying for his blood like hounds.
“It says all men are born equal. Men, not morrans!”
“But that doesn’t mean anything!” Wolff exclaimed. “All it means at its face value is that men all get an equal chance of life and become a product of their efforts! It doesn’t say anything at all about morrans!”
“Precisely!”
“But men being equal to other men has nothing to do with morrans, be they greater than or lesser than men, which are equal! The Archer said that there weren’t even morrans at the time of the Pagan Atheist, so the Pagan Atheist couldn’t have known anything about morrans with respect to the meaning of those two sentences to them when he or she wrote them!”
“Perhaps men later created morrans as slaves,” Viprion said dryly.
“They did not!” Rh’Arrol screeched.
“Besides,” Wolff cut Rh’Arrol off vehemently, spit shooting from his mouth, “men are not born equal! You were born better than me and those poor men who died on Carck-Westmathlon, because of this Blood you talk about, whatever that is.”
“That’s because I made myself better than you!”
“No, it isn’t. If you’d been born in an asteroid, like me, you’d never have been a castellan on a circumfercirc!”
“Yes, I would. In the same way that you were born in an asteroid, but do not now live in an asteroid. A man will find his or her way, Citizen Wolff.”
Wolff faltered for a moment. He supposed the castellan had something of a point there, but Wolff himself was, by his own admission, an anomaly. “That’s still not what it means. That’s not living by the Teachings of the Pagan Atheist. That’s bending the Teachings to suit your way of life. That’s like people who justify murder in the name of a religion.”
Viprion didn’t seem able to come up with a retort. He sighed in a patronising sort of way and made an obnoxious expression at Wolff.
Wolff kicked a lump of rubble down the incline of the ground. “What does it mean then, this Blood you’re always talking about? What is it? Come on, justify why it is you’re better than me.”
Viprion heaved another sigh. “You are too stupid to understand it, even if I did try to explain it to you.”
“Fine, then.” Wolff stood up. “I care not to sit in the company of a man who thinks I am stupid and affects to be superior to me and won’t deign to speak with me. Come Rh’Arrol, let’s find somewhere else to be.”
Rh’Arrol made a disparaging raspberry noise and rose stiffly. Viprion got to his feet, an expression of disconcerted alarm on his face, as Wolff and Rh’Arrol began to move away. “Wait.”
“Sod off, Viprion!” Wolff shouted over his shoulder.
Viprion looked over his shoulder, in the directions of the dead bodies. “All right, I’ll try to explain it to you!”
“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care.” Wolff was sick of the castellan’s attitude. He heard Viprion staggering about in the hot ash behind him.
“Ah, but I know what it was like, the first time you knew a computer.”
Wolff turned and stared back at Viprion’s gaunt form, arms held out for balance as the man tried to descend a disintegrating escarpment. He stopped, and stood looking back at Wolff. “When was it, when you became a bail slave? I know it, Wolff. That first time, it’s like you’ve found something you’d lost, and even though you never knew it, you have desiderated it all your life. Do you not want to know why and how?”