The Iron Tactician Read online

  THE IRON

  TACTICIAN

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  NewCon Press

  England

  First published in the UK by NewCon Press

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF

  December 2016

  NCP 109 (limited edition hardback)

  NCP 110 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Iron Tactician copyright © 2016 by Alastair Reynolds

  Cover Art copyright © 2016 by Chris Moore

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN:

  978-1-910935-29-3 (hardback)

  978-1-910935-30-9 (softback)

  Cover art by Chris Moore

  Cover layout by Andy Bigwood

  Minor Editorial meddling by Ian Whates

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Iron Tactician (NewCon Press Novellas (Set 1), #1)

  About the Author

  Selected Bibliography:

  NewCon Press Novellas | Set 1: | Cover Art by Chris Moore

  NEWCON PRESS

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  Merlin felt the old tension returning. As he approached the wreck his mouth turned dry, his stomach coiled with apprehension and he dug nails into his palms until they hurt.

  He sweated and his heart raced.

  ‘If this was a trap,’ he said, ‘it would definitely have sprung by now. Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘What would you like me to say?’ his ship asked, reasonably.

  ‘You could try setting my mind at ease. That would be a start. It’s one of ours, isn’t it? You can agree with me on that?’

  ‘It’s a swallowship, yes. Seven or eight kiloyears old, at a minimum estimate. The trouble is, I can’t get a clean read of the hull registry from this angle. We could send out the proctors, or I could just sweep around to the other side and take a better look. I know which would be quicker.’

  ‘Sometimes I think I should just let you make all the decisions.’

  ‘I already make quite a lot of them, Merlin – you just haven’t noticed.’

  ‘Do whatever you need to do,’ he said, bad-temperedly.

  As Tyrant swooped around the wreck, searchlights brushed across the hull like delicate, questing fingertips, illuminating areas of the ship that would have been in shadow or bathed only in the weak red light of this system’s dwarf star. The huge wreck was an elaborate flared cylinder, bristling with navigation systems and armaments. The cylinder’s wide mouth was where it sucked in interstellar gas, compressing and processing it for fuel, before blasting it out the back in a vicious, high-energy exhaust stream. Swallowships were ungainly, and they took forever to get up to the speed where that scoop mechanism was effective, but there was nowhere in the galaxy they couldn’t reach, given time. Robust, reliable and relatively easy to manufacture, there had been only minor changes in design and armaments across many kiloyears. Each of these ships would have been home to thousands of people, many of whom would live and die without ever setting foot on a world.

  There was damage, too. Holes and craters in the hull. Half the cladding missing along one great flank. Buckling to the intake petals, beyond anything a local crew could repair.

  Something had found this ship and murdered it.

  ‘There,’ Tyrant said. ‘Swallowship Shrike, commissioned at the High Monarch halo factory, twelve twelve four, Cohort base time, assigned to deterrent patrol out of motherbase Ascending Raptor, most recently under command of Pardalote... there’s more, if you want it.’

  ‘No, that’ll do. I’ve never been near any of those places, and I haven’t heard of Pardalote or this ship. It’s a long way from home, isn’t it?’

  ‘And not going anywhere soon.’

  Beyond doubt the attacking force had been Husker. Whereas a human foe might have finished this ship off completely, the Huskers were mathematically sparing in their use of force. They did precisely enough to achieve an end, and then left. They must have known that there were survivors still on the ship, but the Huskers seldom took prisoners and the continued fate of those survivors would not have concerned them.

  Merlin could guess, though. There would have been no chance of rescue this far from the rest of the Cohort. And the damaged ship could only have kept survivors alive for a limited time. A choice of deaths, in other words: some slow, some fast, some easier than others.

  He wondered which he might have chosen.

  ‘Dig me out a blueprint for that mark of swallowship, the best you can, and find a docking port that places me as close as possible to the command deck.’ He touched a hand to his sternum, as if reminding himself of his own vulnerability. ‘Force and Widsom, but I hate ghost ships.’

  ‘Then why are you going in?’

  ‘Because the one thing I hate more than ghost ships is not knowing where I am.’

  The suit felt tight in places it had never done before. His breath fogged the faceplate, his lungs already working double-time. It had been weeks since he had worn the suit, maybe months, and it was telling him that he was out of shape, needing the pull of a planet’s gravity to give his muscles something to work against.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Open the lock. If I’m not back in an hour, find a big moon and scratch my name on it.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want the proctors to accompany you?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll get this done quicker on my own.’

  He went inside, his suit lit up with neon patches, a moving blob of light that made his surroundings both familiar and estranged at the same time. The swallowship was huge but he only meant to travel a short distance through its innards. Up a level, down a level, each turn or bend taking him further from the lock and the debatable sanctuary of his own ship. He had been steeling himself for corpses, but so far there were none. That meant that there had been survivors. Not many, perhaps, but enough to gather up the dead and do something with their bodies.

  Slowly Merlin accepted that the ship was all that it seemed, rather than a trap. The suit was beginning to seem less of a burden, and his breathing had settled down. He was nearly at the command deck now, and once there it would not take him long to decide if the ship held useful information.

  He needed better charts. Recently there had been a few close scrapes. A couple of turbulent stretches had damaged Tyrant’s syrinx, and now each transition in and out of the Waynet had Merlin praying for his last shred of good luck. Swallowships could not use the Waynet, but any decent captain would still value accurate maps of the old network. Its twinkling corridors of accelerated spacetime provided cover, masking the signature of a ship if it moved on a close parallel course. The location of the Waynet’s major hubs and junctions was also a clue as to the presence of age-old relics and technological treasure.

  Merlin paused. He was passing the doorway to one of the frostwatch vaults, where the surviving crew might have retreated as the last of their life-support systems gave out. After a moment’s hesitation he pushed through into the vault. In vacuum, it was no colder or more silent than any other space he had passed through. But he seemed to feel an additional chill as he entered the chamber.

  The cabinets were stacked six high on opposite walls of the vault, and the vault went on much further than his lights could penetrate. Easily a hundred or more sleepers in just this vault, he decided, but there would be others, spread around the ship for redundancy. Thousands in total, if the swallowship was anything like his own. The status panels next to each cabinet were dead, and when Merlin swept the room with a thermal overl
ay, everything was at the same low temperature. He drifted along the cabinets, tracing the names engraved into the status panels with his fingertips. Sora... Pauraque... they were common Cohort names, in some cases identical to people he had known. Some had been colleagues or friends; others had been much more than that. He knew that if he searched these vaults long enough he was bound to find a Merlin.

  It had not been such a rare name.

  One kindness: when these people went into frostwatch, they must have been clinging to some thought of rescue. It would have been a slim hope, but better than none at all. He wanted to think that their last thoughts had been gentle ones.

  ‘I’m sorry no one came sooner,’ Merlin whispered, although he could have shouted the words for all the difference they made. ‘I’m too late for you. But I’m here to witness what happened to you, and I promise you’ll have your justice.’

  Filled with disquiet, he left the vault and made his way to the command deck. The control consoles were as dead and dark as he had been expecting, but at least there were no bodies. Merlin studied the consoles for a few minutes, satisfying himself that there were no obvious booby-traps, and then spooled out a cable from his suit sleeve. The cable’s end was a standard Cohort fixture and it interfaced with the nearest console without difficulty.

  At first all was still dead, but the suit was sending power and data pulses into the console, and after a few minutes the console’s upper surface began to glow with faint-but-brightening readouts. Merlin settled into a chair with his elbow on the console and his fist jammed under his helmet ring. He expected a long wait before anything useful could be mined from the frozen architecture. Branching diagrams played across his faceplate, showing active memory registers and their supposed contents. Merlin skimmed, determined not to be distracted by anything but the charts he had come for. The lives of the crew, the cultural records they carried with them, the systems and worlds this ship had known, the battles it had fought, might have been of interest to him under other circumstances. Now was the time for a ruthless focus.

  He found the navigation files. There were thousands of branches to the tree, millions of documents in those branches, but his long familiarity with Cohort data architecture enabled him to dismiss most of what he saw. He carried on searching, humming an old Plenitude tune to cheer himself up. Gradually he slowed and fell silent. Just as disappointment was beginning to creep in, he hit a tranche of Waynet maps that were an improvement on anything he had for this sector. Within a few seconds the data was flowing into his suit and onward to the memory cores of his own ship. Satisfied at last, he made to unspool.

  Something nagged at him.

  Merlin backtracked. He shuffled up and down trees until he found the set of records that had registered on his subconscious even as his thoughts had been on the charts.

  Syrinx study and analysis

  Beneath that, many branches and sub-branches relating to the examination and testing of a fully active syrinx. A pure cold shiver ran through him.

  Something jabbed into his back, just below the smooth hump of his life-support unit. Merlin did the only thing that he could, under the circumstances, which was to turn slowly around, raising his hands in the age-old gesture. The spool stretched from his glove, uncoupled, whisked back into its housing in the wrist.

  Another suit looked back at him. There was a female face behind the visor, and the thing that had jabbed him was a gun.

  ‘Do you understand me?’

  The voice coming through in his helmet spoke Main. The accent was unfamiliar, but he had no trouble with the meaning. Merlin swallowed and cleared his throat.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. The only reason you’re not dead is that you’re wearing a Cohort suit, not a Husker one. Otherwise I’d have skipped this part and blown a hole right through you. Move away from the console.’

  ‘I’m happy to.’

  ‘Slowly.’

  ‘As slow as you like.’ Merlin’s mouth felt dry again, his windpipe tight. ‘I’m a friend. I’m not here to steal anything, just to borrow some of your charts.’

  ‘Borrowing, is that what you call it?’

  ‘I’d have asked if there was anyone to ask.’ He eased from the console, and risked a slow lowering of his arms. ‘The ship looked dead. I had no reason to assume anyone was alive. Come to think of it, how are you alive? There were no life signs, no energy sources ...

  ‘Shut up.’ She waggled the gun. ‘Where are you from? Which swallowship, which motherbase?’

  ‘I haven’t come from a swallowship. Or a motherbase.’ Merlin grimaced. He could see no good way of explaining his situation, or at least none that was likely to improve the mood of this person with the gun. ‘I’m what you might call a freelancer. My name is Merlin...’

  She cut him off. ‘If that’s what you’re calling yourself, I’d give some serious thought to picking another name.’

  ‘It’s worked well enough for me until now.’

  ‘There’s only one Merlin. Only one that matters, anyway.’

  He gave a self-effacing smile. ‘Word got round, then. I suppose it was inevitable, given the time I’ve been travelling.’

  ‘Word got round, yes. There was a man called Merlin, and he left the Cohort. Shall I tell you what we were taught to think of Merlin?’

  ‘I imagine you’re going to.’

  ‘There are two views on him. One is that Merlin was a fool, a self-deluding braggart with an ego to match the size of his delusion.’

  ‘I’ve never said I was a saint.’

  ‘The other view is that Merlin betrayed the Cohort, that he stole from it and ran from the consequences. That he never had any intention of returning. That he’s a liar and criminal and deserves to die for it. So the choice is yours, really. Clown or traitor. Which Merlin are you?’

  ‘Is there a third option?’

  ‘No.’ Behind the visor, her eyes narrowed. He could only see the upper part of her face, but it was enough to tell that she was young. ‘I don’t remember exactly when you ran. But it’s been thousands of years, I know that much. You could be anyone. Although why anyone would risk passing themselves off under that name ...’

  ‘Then that proves it’s me, doesn’t it? Only I’d be stupid enough to keep calling myself Merlin.’ He tried to appeal to the face. ‘It has been thousands of years, but not for me. I’ve been travelling at near the speed of light for most of that time. Tyrant – my ship – is Waynet capable. I’ve been searching these files ...’

  ‘Stealing them.’

  ‘Searching them. I’m deep into territory I don’t know well enough to trust, and I thought you might have better charts. You do, as well. But there’s something else. Your name, by the way? I mean, since we’re having this lovely conversation...’

  He read the hesitation in her eyes. A moment when she was on the verge of refusing him even the knowledge of her name, as if she had no intention of him living long enough for it to matter. But something broke and she yielded.

  ‘Teal. And what you mean, something else?’

  ‘In these files. Mention of a syrinx. Is it true? Did you have a syrinx?’

  ‘If your ship is Waynet capable then you already have one.’

  Merlin nodded. ‘Yes. But mine is damaged, and it doesn’t function as well as it used to. I hit a bad kink in the Waynet, and each transition’s been harder than the one before. I wasn’t expecting to find one here – it was the charts that interested me – but now I know what I’ve stumbled on...’

  ‘You’ll steal it.’

  ‘No. Borrow it, on the implicit understanding that I’m continuing to serve the ultimate good of the Cohort. Teal, you must believe me. There’s a weapon out there that can shift the balance in this war. To find it I need Tyrant, and Tyrant needs a syrinx.’

  ‘Then I have some bad news for you. We sold it.’ Her tone was off-hand, dismissive. ‘It was a double-star system, a few lights back the way we’d come. We needed repairs, material, parts th
e swallowship couldn’t make for itself. We made contact – sent in negotiators. I was on the diplomatic party. We bartered. We left them the syrinx and Pardalote got the things we needed.’

  Merlin turned aside in disgust. ‘You idiots.’

  Teal swiped the barrel of the gun across his faceplate. Merlin flinched back, wondering how close she had been to just shooting him there and then.

  ‘Don’t judge us. And don’t judge Pardalote for the decisions she took. You weren’t there, and you haven’t the faintest idea what we went through. Shall I tell you how it was for me?’

  Merlin wisely said nothing.

  ‘There’s a vault near the middle of the ship,’ Teal went on. ‘The best place to hide power, if you’re going to use it. One by one our frostwatch cabinets failed us. There were a thousand of us, then a hundred... then the last ten. Each time we woke up, counted how many of us were still alive, drew straws to see who got the cabinets that were still working. There were always less and less. I’m the last one, the last of us to get a working cabinet. I ran it on a trickle of power, just the bare minimum. Set the cabinet to wake me if anyone came near.’

  Merlin waited a moment then nodded. ‘Can I make a suggestion?’

  ‘If it makes you feel better.’

  ‘My ship is warm, it has air, and it’s still capable of moving. I feel we’d get to a position of trust a lot quicker if we could speak face to face, without all this glass and vacuum between us.’

  He caught her sneer. ‘What makes you think I’d ever trust you?’

  ‘People come round to me,’ Merlin said.

  The syrinx was a matte-black cone about as long as Merlin was tall. It rested in a cradle of metal supports, sharp end pointing aft, in a compartment just forward of Tyrant’s engine bay. Syrinxes seemed to work better when they were somewhere close to the centre of mass of a ship, but beyond that there were no clear rules, and much of what was known had been pieced together through guesswork and experimentation.

  ‘It still works, to a degree,’ Merlin said, stroking a glove along the tapering form. ‘But it’s dying on me. I daren’t say how many more transits I’ll get out it.’