Tales from the Edge: Escalation: A Maelstrom's Edge Collection Read online

'Good as we'll get, with the hull in the state it's in. Engines should just about hold.'

  I ran my tongue along the furry insides of my teeth. 'With luck, we'll fix both hull and engines as soon as we're back in dock. You sure you couldn't have picked a more beat-up ship and crew, Mister Boscile?'

  'You suited my purposes admirably, Captain. You have a reputation.'

  'Only good, I hope.'

  Boscile steepled his fingers. They were thin, the nails long but clean and neatly manicured.

  'Of course,' he answered.

  *

  It was all wrong, coming up on a planet this way. A screaming grey blank on the normally busy traffic radar. No transponder fixes, no radio chatter between ships and stations. No proximity alarms, no anti-collision warnings. No approach instructions, no requests to enter a pre-orbit hold or join a long line of ships waiting for their atmospheric insertion window.

  Just silence, across all the bands. The occasional crackle or chirp of some distant stellar storm or galactic black hole, but nothing that was made by machines or people. No ships coming or going anywhere at all. A few abandoned hulks, too big or decrepit to be worth the expense of moving, a few orbital stations and docking complexes, all powered down to darkness, swinging around doomed Calexis like black chandeliers. They would still be here when the front hit.

  No lights down on Calexis, either. The darkside really was dark, not a fairytale sprawl of cities and resorts and spaceports. No surface traffic, no comms, no infrastructure, no power generation. The cities were still gridded warmspots of lingering infrared, but that was only the fading signature left after centuries of inhabitation. No one was actually living down there now.

  'Place creeps me out,' Drago said.

  'Anywhere without a brothel creeps you out,' Maisha said.

  Drago nodded, as if this was fair criticism. 'True. But at least I have standards.'

  'Buckle in,' I said, directing this statement at Boscile. 'Hull plating the way it is, could get a little bumpy.'

  Boscile had given me a rough idea of the quadrant where we needed to be, so I brought the Grey Ghost in on a steep insertion near the division between day and night.

  We levelled out and went subsonic, cutting back into day.

  For an hour we slid across broken cities, streets turning green, over harbours littered with abandoned yachts and luxury liners, over vast regimented tracts of emptied housing. Once in a while there was a curl of smoke, a fire or the traces of one, and now and then an infrared hit from some moving heat source, but I never slowed to investigate. It was a matter of record that there were no people down there: the evacuation had been one hundred percent. Animals, maybe, escaped from zoos or farms. They had free roam of Calexis now: their own little paradise, while it lasted.

  'Look at those buildings!' Drago said, pointing to a pair of crooked towers rising from a circular plinth. 'They're about ready to topple into each other!'

  'They're not towers,' Boscile said. 'Circle nearer, if you wish. You may as well learn something of the local history.'

  I steered us closer, but kept a safe margin from the crooked towers. Something about them stirred a deep uneasiness through me. 'They're legs,' I said with a shiver of recognition, taking in the vast sculpted boots, the clifflike folds of fabric cast into the sides of the towers. 'Must be a kilometre tall, just the part that's left! They go up to the knees, but …'

  'The rest of the statue was destroyed. It took a nuclear charge to demolish the upper portion, and even then – as you can see – much remained.'

  'The statue of what?' I asked.

  'Of whom, more properly.'

  'There's something written on the plinth,' Maisha said. 'Vor … something. Can't make out the rest of it. Pretty overgrown around the base.'

  'Vorgon Lehrter,' Boscile said. 'Does that name mean anything to you?'

  'Can't say it does,' I answered.

  'There's the head,' Drago said excitedly. 'I thought it was a little mountain, jutting up from the ground.'

  I took us over the head. The nuclear blast must have been concentrated around the torso, because – other than being severed from the neck – the head seemed to be relatively intact. It had come to ground so that its huge sightless eyes appeared to be staring with implacable regard on the Maelstrom itself, although I supposed that was only an accident of the hour of day.

  The face was narrow, hook-nosed, with a cruel disdain to the lips.

  'Nice looking fellow,' Drago said.

  'So who was this Vorgon Lehrter anyway?' Maisha asked.

  'A local warlord,' Boscile said. 'Tyrant, mercenary, butcher – call him what you will. He erected this statue in his own name, during a period when it seemed his hold on power was absolute. The coming of the Maelstrom – the chaos and fear of the evacuation - made it easy for a man like that to rise to power. He was also prepared to do a great deal to maintain that hold. Shall I mention one incident?'

  'Please do,' I said.

  'Lehrter had negotiated the transfer of a tract of land – a peninsula a little south of these forests – from one warlord to another. A community, not much more than a village, wouldn't agree to this plan. So rather than leave a headache for the new warlord, Lehrter had the entire community executed where they stood. He didn't just leave it to his soldiers, either. Lehrter was quite prepared to take on some of that burden himself.'

  'I guess someone decided they'd had enough,' Maisha said. 'Looks like justice was served, one way or another.'

  'It usually prevails,' Boscile answered.

  *

  I was glad when we put the ruined statue behind us.

  Calexis's sun dipped toward the horizon. The cities and housing zones had given away to forest, cut through the occasional river. The light turned dusky, the sky shot through with a sickly yellow. The gas giant was a looming presence, but it was surprising how much of the sky it left uncovered. Bannering across that greater area were faint veins of purple and rose, twisting and recombining with a perceptible mesmeric slowness. The Maelstrom was beginning to show through.

  The forest continued. Finally a single black structure showed on the horizon, pushing up like a lone finger.

  'Another statue?' Drago speculated.

  'Not this time,' Boscile said. 'It is – or was – a private medical complex, specialised in a certain range of high-expense procedures. Long fallen into neglect, of course. Set down on it, if you will.' Boscile's black sleeve draped off a stick-thin wrist as he pointed. 'There is a landing deck.'

  'Ship-rated?'

  'Not specifically.'

  'Then you've got to be kidding. This is a space freighter, not some dinky little runabout.'

  'I studied the specifics of your vessel,' Boscile answered calmly. 'I needed something capable of reaching Calexis, yet not too large that it would overload the limits of the structure. Your ship satisfies both requirements.'

  'Guess next time you'll check the small print,' Drago muttered.

  I circled us around, slowly losing height. The lone structure was an upright monolith rising from the forest. Its sheer fluted sides were coated in a highly reflective black cladding, but there were no windows or markings, and certainly nothing to hint at the function or ownership of the structure.

  The landing deck was a square ledge, buttressed out from one corner of the building. It was large enough, but that was only half the story.

  I dropped the landing gear. I waited for the delay as the forward leg locked into place and the lights on my console turned green.

  'Hope he allowed for thruster blast,' Drago muttered.

  Boscile turned to him. 'I considered both static and dynamic loads … with an ample margin of error.'

  I brought the Grey Ghost in as gently as I could, the landing gear kissing the deck then slowly absorbing the ship's weight. Our down-draught blew dust from the deck. Gradually I reduced power, the engine whine dying away to nothing, until at last we were down and stable.

  I held my breath for at least
a minute.

  'What now, Mister Boscile?'

  'Lower your boarding ramp. When I have conducted my business here, I will return.'

  'Good luck,' I said.

  While he was on his way back to his quarters I lowered the ramp from the belly and opened the external lock.

  Calexis was safe enough. Large areas of the planet had been sinking into abandonment as the bulk of the population were moved offworld, buildings and roads crumbling, woods and forests creeping into empty cities, but there hadn't been time for any major shifts to the biosphere. The Maelstrom front was also still too far away to be having a significant physical effect, although that would change in the coming months.

  Nonetheless, it was nowhere I cared to spend too much time, not with that twisted auroral nightmare hanging over us like an omen of destruction. I kept the ship on launch readiness, drumming fingers on the console, thinking about another drink to take the edge off things.

  Maisha and Drago exchanged the odd nervous glance but chose to say nothing.

  *

  What did any of us really know about our taciturn, black clad client? Not more than we ever needed to know. If they could pay a portion of the fee up front, I was generally satisfied. Sometimes the jobs were complicated, or of questionable legality. The fewer the questions asked, often the better.

  The Boscile job had seemed simple enough. It might not be wise to go against the flow of the evacuation effort, going back to a world that had already been cleared out, but it certainly wasn't forbidden. If Garran Boscile was into some sort of extralegal activity – something akin to looting, maybe – then nothing about his demeanour fitted that picture. In the few conversations I'd had with him, I'd formed the idea that our client was closer to a scholar than a criminal. There was an obsessive, driven look in his eyes – the mad glint of a man looking for the final part in a puzzle that had consumed a lifetime, or a large part of it.

  If the man wanted answers, and could pay, who was I to say no?

  I stood up. I'd had enough of following progress on a screen, not after we'd come all this way. I worked my way back through the ship, bumping into one or two other members of the crew, until I was standing at the top of the ramp, one hand on a hydraulic ram.

  Boscile was already at the base of the ramp, ready to step off. One hand was empty. The other clutched the handle of a large metal case, one that almost seemed too bulky – and presumably heavy – for the ease with which it was carried.

  'I hope this is worth it,' I called down to him.

  'You've done very well, Captain. In a little while you'll understand how vital this contract has been. You'll have assisted me in righting a great wrong.'

  'Thing is, I'm not really in the wrong righting business.'

  'You are now,' he answered.

  Boscile moved to the edge of the deck. A short descending flight of steps connected it to the main part of the building. The roof of the main structure was a square, perfectly flat except for a low service building set in the middle. There was an open doorway in the side of that building, and a stairwell leading down into unlit darkness. There were no walls anywhere around the outside, so it had presumably been uncommon for visitors to come up here, unless they were using the landing deck.

  Boscile walked to the edge of the building. He knelt down with the case on the ground, flipped its lid and took out a stubby cylinder. He did something to the end of the cylinder and it began to flare a bright pink, giving off billowing wafts of thick, chemically dyed smoke. Boscile waved the object over the side of the building, then set it down on the very edge, so that the flare's brightness would have been visible from the ground. He then took a second cylinder from the case, locked the case, and carried it and the cylinder back to the central stairwell. He activated the second flare and threw it into the stairwell.

  Pink light flickered away down into unseen depths.

  Boscile walked back to the base of the boarding ramp. 'I have summoned them,' he said. 'They will be here before too long.'

  'Them?' I asked, barely having to raise my voice since the air was so still.

  'Remainers. Groups of people who chose not to be evacuated. They have their reasons; ours is not to argue with them.'

  'Karist crackpots, you mean.'

  'Not all, Captain. Some remain out of a deep personal attachment to the soil they were born on. They would rather die here, than live somewhere else. You cannot blame them for that. Others remain purely as a point of principle: if the evacuation program forbids them from remaining, then they will do their utmost to disobey it. Near the end, on this world as on many others, it was not too difficult. It was hard enough coordinating the effort to evacuate the willing, let alone those who would rather stay behind.'

  'No one stayed behind.'

  'No one was officially left behind. That's not entirely the same thing. By my reckoning around a million souls remain on Calexis, organised into a dozen or so semi-independent communities. We would say that they were regressing to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, except there'll never be time for that.'

  'Fine,' I said, only slightly rattled by this information. 'If they've chosen to stay here, that's their stupid choice. What the hell do they want with you?'

  'The basic human necessities, Captain.' He knelt down and opened another layer of the case. It folded out to reveal ranks of small glass vials, with colour-coded stoppers. 'Medical supplies have become scarce since the hospitals were abandoned. You'd think it would be the opposite, but the authorities were very careful to make sure the major stocks were destroyed or contaminated. Given that the drugs had already been paid for, it was an act of pure spite. They gained nothing by doing that, except to make life more difficult for those who stayed behind.'

  'If life's difficult now, wait until the Maelstrom arrives.'

  'The Remainers know that,' Boscile said curtly. 'Do you think them fools? To see out the Maelstrom is their choice. But they need not suffer needlessly until then.' He patted the case. 'It isn't much, not given how many people stayed behind. They will need to be sparing with their usage. But it was all I could afford on the open market, and if I had tried to bring in more, questions would have been asked.'

  'You paid for the drugs yourself?'

  He looked up sharply. 'Of course. Who else was going to do it?'

  Against my instincts, I stepped off the ship and walked across the short connecting stairs between the pad and the main part of the building. The air was still breezeless, and the yellow sky made it feel oppressively still and lifeless. I stood next to Boscile and his case, hands on my hips as I looked down. 'What do they need with medicines, anyway? They're going to die!'

  'Months or years from now. You know as well as I do that the advancement of the Maelstrom isn't predictable on a short timescale. It surges, slows … sometimes almost stops advancing completely. They may have decades … and you're saying they shouldn't be spared from the worst consequences of illness, age, pregnancy?' Boscile closed one layer of the case and opened another, containing just as many colour-coded vials 'It won't do much – I know that. But a tiny reduction in human misery is still a reduction. You see that, don't you?'

  'I suppose.'

  'Money would be useless to these people,' Boscile said. 'Which is just as well, as I have little enough to offer. My quest has made me a poor man, not a rich one. Between these drugs, the cost of your services, the expense of reaching the station where you were docked … well, never mind. I will soon have something that makes all such considerations moot.'

  'This little trip is going to make you rich?'

  'Far from it. In fact I expect it to make me deeply unpopular. But the truth must out, and there will be those willing to pay for it. If I can ensure the truth reaches the right hands, then I will consider that ample repayment for my efforts.' He closed the case, and stood up until he was level with me, his eyes swimming behind his spectacles. 'Terrible crimes have happened, Captain – worse than the abandonment of these people. Those misdeeds
would not only go unpunished, all evidence of them would be lost. But we are here now.'

  'What crimes?' I asked.

  'Captain!'

  I turned around. It was Drago, calling down from the top of the boarding ramp.

  I had a good view of the Grey Ghost now, since she was level with the surface of the landing pad. The deck was a delicate projection, and the ship squatting down on it, straining low on its own undercarriage, looked much too heavy for such a thing, like a fat book buckling a thin shelf.

  'What?'

  'You'd better come see.'

  I nodded at Boscile. 'Give me a moment. I guess you're not going anywhere.'

  'No,' he answered, reasonably enough. 'I do not suppose I am.'

  *

  Drago could not keep it in, so I knew most of the story by the time I got back to the bridge and saw the navigation readouts for myself. The cybel tunnel we'd used to arrive in the Calexis system was showing imminent signs of instability. The gate, still hanging back in orbit around the giant, was transmitting emergency warning pulses.

  'That isn't good,' I admitted. Then clenched a fist and hammered the console. 'Of all the times!'

  We knew the risks. Cybel tunnel instability was a known consequence of Maelstrom encroachment, but under ordinary circumstances we ought to been able to count on weeks of safe usage before it began to give off the anticipated warning signs.

  'Sometimes,' I heard myself say, 'it only takes one ship to kink the tunnel a little too far. We may have been that ship. But we're all right, aren't we?' I jabbed a chewed-down nail at Drago's display. 'There are still active gates elsewhere in the system, and they aren't sending out any warning codes. So we'll have to cross a little more normal space than we were hoping for, and take the long way around once we're superluminal …'

  'Or we could leave now,' Drago said. 'While we still have a guaranteed out.'

  Maisha was standing at Drago's side. 'He has a point. It's breach of contract, yes, and I know it'll hit us where it hurts, but nothing's worth getting stranded for.'