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

  ‘Something of ours has fallen into the wrong hands – an object we call the Iron Tactician.’ Baskin continued eating for several moments, in no rush to explain himself. ‘I don’t know what you’ve learned of our history. But for centuries, both sides in this war have relied on artificial intelligences to guide their military planning.’

  ‘I suppose this is another of those machines,’ Merlin said.

  ‘Yes and no. For a long time our machines were well-matched with those of the enemy. We would build a better one, then they would, we would respond, and so on. A gradual escalating improvement. So it went on. Then – by some happy stroke – our cyberneticists created a machine that was generations in advance of anything they had. For fifty years the Iron Tactician has given us an edge, a superiority. Its forecasts are seldom in error. The enemy still has nothing to match it – which is why we have made the gains that we have. But now, on the eve of triumph, we have lost the Iron Tactician.’

  ‘Careless,’ Merlin said.

  A tightness pinched the corner of Baskin’s mouth. ‘The Tactician has always needed to be close to the theatre of battle, so that its input data is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. That was why our technicians made it portable, self-contained and self-reliant. Of course there are risks in having an asset of that nature.’

  ‘What happened?’ Teal asked. ‘Did Gaffurius capture it?’

  ‘Thankfully, no,’ Baskin answered. ‘But it’s very nearly as bad. The Tactician has fallen into the hands of a non-aligned third party. Brigands, mercenaries, call them what you will. Now they wish to extract a ransom for the Tactician’s safe return – or they will sell it on to the enemy. We know their location, an asteroid holdout, and if we massed a group of ships we could probably overwhelm their defences. But if Gaffurius guessed our intentions and moved first ...’ Baskin lifted his glass, peering through it at Merlin and Teal, so that his face swam distorted, one mercurial eye wobbling to immensity while the other shrunk to a tight cold glint. ‘So there you have it. A simple proposition. The syrinx is yours, Merlin – provided you recover the Tactician for us.’

  ‘Maybe I still wouldn’t be fast enough.’

  ‘But you’ll be able to strike without warning, with Cohort weapons. I don’t see that it should pose you any great difficulty, given the evident capabilities of your ship.’ Baskin twirled his fingers around the stem of his goblet. ‘But then that depends on how badly you want our syrinx.’

  ‘Mm,’ Merlin said. ‘Quite badly, if I’m going to be honest.’

  ‘Would you do it?’

  Merlin looked at Teal before answering. But she seemed distracted, her gaze caught by one of the portraits. It was the picture of King Curtal, the ancestor Baskin had mentioned only a little while earlier. While the style of dress might not have changed, the portrait was yellowing with old varnish, its colours time-muted.

  ‘I’d need guarantees,’ he said. ‘Starting with proof that this syrinx even exists.’

  ‘That’s easily arranged,’ Prince Baskin said.

  Tyrant had a biometric lock on Merlin, and it would shadow the Renouncer all the way to Havergal. If it detected that Merlin was injured or under duress, Tyrant would deploy its own proctors to storm the cruiser. But Merlin had gauged enough of his hosts to conclude that such an outcome was vanishingly unlikely. They needed his cooperation much too badly to do harm to their guest.

  Locrian showed Merlin and Teal to their quarters, furnished in the same sumptuous tones as the stateroom. When the door opened and Merlin saw that there was only one bed, albeit a large one, he turned to Teal with faked resignation.

  ‘It’s awkward for both of us, but if we want to keep them thinking you’ve been travelling with me for years and years, it’ll help if we behave as a couple.’

  Teal waited until Locrian had shut the door on them and gone off on his own business. She walked to the bed, following the gently, dreamy up-curve of the floor. ‘You’re right,’ she said, glancing back at Merlin before she sat on the edge of the bed. ‘It will help. And at least for now I’d rather they didn’t know I was on the swallowship, so I’m keen to maintain the lie.’

  ‘Good. Very good.’

  ‘But we share the bed and nothing else. You’re of no interest to me, Merlin. Maybe you’re not a traitor or a fool – I’ll give you that much. But you’re still a fat, swaggering drunk who thinks far too much of himself.’ But Teal patted the bed. ‘Still, you’re right. The illusion’s useful.’

  Merlin settled himself down on his side of the bed. ‘No room for manoeuvre there? Not even a little bit?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Then we’re clear. Actually, it’s a bit of a relief. I meant to say...’

  ‘If this is about what I just spoke about?’

  ‘I just wanted to say, I understand how strange all this must be. Not everyone goes back to a place they were thirteen hundred years ago. In a way, it’s a good job it was such a long time ago. At least we don’t have to contend with any living survivors from those days, saying that they remember you being on the diplomatic team.’

  ‘It was forty three generations ago. No one remembers.’

  Merlin moved to the window, watching the stars wheel slowly by outside. There was his own ship, a sharp sliver of darkness against the greater darkness of space. He thought of the loves he had seen ripped from by time and distance, and how the sting of those losses grew duller with each year but was never entirely healed. It was an old lesson for him, one he had been forced to learn many times. For Teal, this might be her first real taste of the cruelty of deep time – realising how far downstream she had come, how little chance she stood of beating those currents back to better, kinder times.

  ‘I’d remember,’ he said softly.

  He could see her reflection in the window, Tyrant sliding through her like a barb, but Teal neither acknowledged his words nor showed the least sign that they had meant anything to her.

  Five days was indeed ample time to prepare Merlin for the recovery operation, but only because the intelligence was so sparse. The brigands were holed up on an asteroid called Mundar, an otherwise insignificant speck of dirt on some complex, winding orbit that brought it into the territorial space of both Havergal and Gaffurius. Their leader was a man called Struxer, but beyond one fuzzy picture the biographical notes were sparse. Fortunately there was more on the computer itself. The Iron Tactician was a spherical object about four metres across, quilted from pole to pole in thick military-grade armour. It looked like some hard-shelled animal rolled up into a defensive ball. Merlin saw no obvious complications: it needed no external power inputs and would easily fit within Tyrant’s cargo hold.

  Getting hold of it was another matter. Baskin’s military staff knew how big Mundar was and had estimates of its fortifications, but beyond that things were sketchy. Merlin skimmed the diagrams and translated documents, but told Baskin that he wanted Teal to see the originals. He was still looking out for any gaps between the raw material and what was deemed fit for his eyes, any hint of a cover-up or obfuscation.

  ‘Why are you so concerned?’ Teal asked him, halfway to Havergal, when they were alone in Baskin’s stateroom, the documents spread out on the table. ‘Eating away at your conscience, is it, that you might be serving the wrong paymasters?’

  ‘I’m not the one who chose sides,’ he said quietly. ‘You did, by selling the syrinx to one party instead of the other. Besides, the other lot won’t be any better. Just a different bunch of stuffed shirts and titles, being told what to do by a different bunch of battle computers.’

  ‘So you’ve no qualms.’

  ‘Qualms?’ Merlin set down the papers he had been leafing through. ‘I’ve so many qualms they’re in danger of self-organizing. I occasionally have a thought that isn’t a qualm. But I’ll tell you this. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. They have an item I need, and there’s a favour I can do for them. It’s that simple. Not everything in the universe is a riddle.’
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  ‘You’ll be killing those brigands.’

  ‘They’ll have every chance to hand over the goods. And I’ll exercise due restraint. I don’t want to damage the Tactician, not when it’s the only thing standing between me and the syrinx.’

  ‘What if you found out that Prince Baskin was a bloodthirsty warmonger?’

  Merlin, suddenly weary, settled his head onto his hand, propped up with an elbow. ‘Shall I tell you something? This war of theirs doesn’t matter. I don’t give a damn who wins or who loses, or how many lives end up being lost because of it. What matters – what my problem is – is the simple fact that the Huskers will wipe out every living trace of humanity if we allow them. That includes you, me, Prince Baskin, Struxer’s brigands, and every human being on either side of their little spat. And if a few people end up dying to make that Husker annihilation a little less likely, a few stupid mercenaries who should have known better than to play one side against the other, I’m afraid I’m not going to shed many tears.’

  ‘You’re cold.’

  ‘No one loves life more than me, Teal. No one’s lost more, either. You lost a ship, and that’s bad, but I lost a whole world. And regardless of which side they’re on, these people will all die if I don’t act.’ He returned to the papers, with their sketchy ideas about Mundar’s reinforcements, but whatever focus he’d had was gone now. ‘They owe you nothing, Teal, and you owe them nothing in return. The fact that you were here all those years ago... it doesn’t matter. Nothing came of it.’

  Teal was silent. He thought that was going to be the end of it, that his words had found their mark, but after a few moments she said: ‘Something isn’t right. The man in the portrait – the one they call King Curtal. I knew him. But that wasn’t his name.’

  As they made their approach to Havergal, slipping through cordon after cordon of patrols and defence stations, between armoured moons and belts of anti-ship mines, dodging patrol zones and battle fronts, Merlin felt a sickness building in him. He had seen worse things done to worlds in his travels. Much worse, in many cases: seen worlds reduced to molten slag or tumbling rubble piles or clouds of hot, chemically complex dust. But with few exceptions those horrors had been perpetrated not by people but by forces utterly beyond their control or comprehension. Not so here. The boiled oceans, the cratered landmasses, the dead and ashen forests, the poisoned, choking remnants of what had once been a life-giving atmosphere – these brutalities had been perpetrated by human action, people against people. It was an unnecessary and wanton crime, a cruel and injudicious act in a galaxy that already knew more than its share.

  ‘Is Gaffurius like this?’ Merlin asked, as Renouncer cleaved its way to ground, Tyrant matching its course with an effortless insouciance.

  ‘Gaffurius?’ Baskin asked, a fan of wrinkles appearing at the corner of his eyes. ‘No, much, much worse. At least we still have a few surface settlements, a few areas where the atmosphere is still breathable.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count that as too much of a triumph.’ Merlin’s mind was flashing back to the last days of Lecythus, the tainted rubble of its shattered cities, the grey heave of its restless cold ocean, waiting to reclaim what humans had left to ruin. He remembered Minla taking him to the huge whetstone monument, the edifice upon which she had embossed the version of events she wished to be codified as historical truth, long after she and her government were dust.

  ‘Don’t judge us too harshly, Merlin,’ Baskin said. ‘We don’t choose to be enmeshed in this war.’

  ‘Then end it.’

  ‘I intend to. But would you opt for any ceasefire with the Huskers, irrespective of the terms?’ He looked at Merlin, then at Teal, the three of them in Renouncer’s sweeping command bridge, standing before its wide arc of windows, shuttered for the moment against the glare of re-entry. Of course you wouldn’t. War is a terrible thing. But there are kinds of peace that are worse.’

  ‘I haven’t seen much evidence of that,’ Merlin said.

  ‘Oh, come now. Two men don’t have to spend too much time in each other’s company to know each other for what they are. We’re not so different, Merlin. We disdain war, affect a revulsion for it, but deep down it’ll always be in our blood. Without it, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.’

  Teal spoke up. ‘When we first met, Prince Baskin, you mentioned that you hadn’t always had this interest in languages. What was it you said? Toy soldiers and campaigns will only get you so far? That you used to play at war?’

  ‘In your language – in Main,’ Baskin said, ‘the word for school is “warcreche”. You learn war from the moment you can toddle.’

  ‘But we don’t play at it,’ Teal said.

  The two ships shook off their cocoons of plasma and bellied into the thicker airs near the surface. They levelled into horizontal flight, and the windows de-shuttered themselves, Merlin blinking against the sudden silvery brightness of day. They were overflying a ravaged landscape, pressed beneath a low, oppressive cloud ceiling. Merlin searched the rolling terrain for evidence of a single living thing, but all he saw was desolation. Here and there was the faint scratch of what might once have been a road, or the gridded thumbprint of some former town, but it was clear that no one now lived among these ruins. Ravines, deep and ominous, sliced their way through the abandoned roads. There were so many craters, their walls interlacing, that it was as if rain had begun to fall on some dull grey lake, creating a momentary pattern of interlinked ripples.

  ‘If I need a planet looking after,’ Merlin mumbled, ‘remind me not to trust it to any of you lot.’

  ‘We’ll rebuild,’ Baskin said, setting his hands on the rail that ran under the sweep of windows. ‘Reclaim. Cleanse and resettle. Even now our genetic engineers are designing the hardy plant species that will re-blanket these lands in green and start making our atmosphere fit for human lungs.’ He caught himself, offering a self-critical smile. ‘You’ll forgive me. Too easy to forget that I’m not making some morale-boosting speech at one of our armaments complexes.’

  ‘Where do you all live now?’ Teal asked. ‘There were surface cities here once... weren’t there?’

  ‘We abandoned the last of those cities, Lurga, when I was just out of boyhood,’ Baskin said. ‘Now we live in underground communities, impervious to nuclear assault.’

  ‘I bet the views are just splendid,’ Merlin said.

  Baskin met his sarcasm with a grim absence of humour. ‘We endure, Merlin – as the Cohort endures. Here. We’re approaching the entry duct to one of the sub-cities. Do you see that sloping hole?’ He was nodding at an angled mouth, jutting from the ground like a python buried up to its eyes. ‘The Gaffurians are good at destruction, but less good at precision. They can impair our moons and asteroids, but their weapons haven’t the accuracy to strike across space and find a target that small. We’ll return, a little later, and you’ll be made very welcome. But first I’d like to settle any doubts you might have about the syrinx. We’ll continue a little way north, into the highlands. I promise it won’t take long.’

  Baskin was true to his word, and they had only flown for a few more minutes when the terrain began to buckle and wrinkle into the beginnings of a barren, treeless mountain range, rising in a series of forbidding steps until even the high-flying spacecraft were forced to increase their altitude. ‘Most of our military production takes place in these upland sectors,’ Baskin said. ‘We have ready access to metallic ores, heavy isotopes, geothermal energy and so on. Of course it’s well guarded. Missile and particle beams will be locking onto us routinely, both our ships. The only thing preventing either of them being shot down is our imperial authorisation.’

  ‘That and the countermeasures on my ship,’ Merlin said. ‘Which could peel back these mountains like a scab, if they detected a threat worth bothering with.’

  But in truth he felt vulnerable and was prepared to admit it, if only to himself. He could feel the nervous, bristling presence of all that unseen weaponry, like a mig
raine under the skin of Havergal.

  Soon another mouth presented itself. It was wedged at the base of an almost sheer-sided valley.

  ‘Prepare for descent,’ Baskin said. ‘It’ll be a tight squeeze, but your ship shouldn’t have any difficulties following.’

  They dived into the mouth and went deep. Kilometres, and then tens of kilometres, before swerving sharply into a horizontal shaft. Merlin allowed not a flicker of a reaction to betray his feelings, but the fact was that he was impressed, in a grudging, disapproving way. There was expertise and determination here – qualities that the Cohort’s military engineers could well have appreciated. Anyone who could dig tunnels was handy in a war.

  A glowing orange light shone ahead. Merlin was just starting to puzzle over its origin when they burst into a huge underground chamber, a bubble in the crust of Havergal. The floor of the bubble was a sea of lava, spitting and churning, turbulent with the eddies and currents of some mighty underground flow which just happened to pass in and out of this chamber. Suspended in the middle of the rocky void, underlit by flickering orange light, was a dark structure shaped like an inverted cone, braced in a ring and attached to the chamber’s walls by three skeletal, cantilevered arms. It was the size of a small palace or space station, and its flattened upper surface was easily spacious enough for both ships to set down on with room to spare.

  Bulkily suited figures – presumably protected against the heat and toxic airs of this place – came out and circled the ships. They attached a flexible docking connection to Renouncer.

  ‘We call it the facility,’ Baskin said, as he and his guests walked down the sloping throat of the docking connector. ‘Just that. No capital letters, nothing to suggest its ultimate importance. But for many centuries this was the single most important element in our entire defence plan. It was here that we hoped to learn how to make the syrinx work for us.’ He turned back to glance at Merlin and Teal. ‘And where we failed – or continue to fail, I should say. But we had no intention of giving up, not while there was a chance.’