MOTHER OF MONSTERS
Christopher Ruocchio
One of the greatest joys of following Christopher Ruocchio’s time at Baen has been seeing how he manages to come up with a story that fits every theme anthology that still ties back into his sweeping Sun Eater space opera series. No matter the theme or subgenre, he always finds a way to tell a gripping story that offers new looks and different perspectives into the universe of Hadrian Marlowe. In this particular story, we follow an unlucky soul who finds there are some corners of the universe with things far more dangerous than the Cielcin, where beings beyond our comprehension slip between the walls of reality, and where one wrong step may find you beneath the thumb of an alien god . . .
***
“Do you know what a thought hazard is, M. Valen?” asked the blank-faced Imperial agent across the table, setting a cup of stiff, black coffee between them.
Risking a glance at the official, Valen shook his head. He did not dare take the cup, as much as he felt he needed it. He had been through round after round with the Empire’s men, agents and bureaucrats from Earth-only-knew what agency. There’d even been an inquisitor of the Holy Terran Chantry in to see him. The woman had put him to the Question, read his autonomic responses, his encephalography, his breathing—everything—all to ensure he was still human, to guarantee that no alien or mechanical influence had him in thrall.
Valen wished they’d told him the answer.
“No, sir,” he said at last.
“It’s a piece of information so dangerous that someone’s merely knowing it is enough to make said information a risk,” the man said.
Valen risked another glance at the agent. The man was Legion bald, scalp lasered clear of all stubble and clearly waxed, but he wasn’t dressed like any Legion man, in the black tunic and trousers and knee-high black boots of an officer—and he was an officer, or must be. He talked like one, at any rate. All brass and polish. He had schooling, more than Valen had. But he looked like a civilian, dressed as he was in an unassuming gray suit of the kind favored by civil service, high-collared and well made.
“I don’t know anything like that, sir,” Valen said.
“Nonsense, sirrah,” the man said, strangely affable. “You’re a soldier of the Empire. An engineer, no less. You know explosives, don’t you? How to make them?”
“Yes, sir,” Valen had to admit, understanding the concept a little too late. “I suppose I do.”
“Someone got a hold of you, made you talk . . . made you tell them how to build a bomb . . . that information’s dangerous, you see?”
Valen had to admit he did see. “But I don’t understand what it is I’ve done wrong, sir. I’ve told everyone everything they asked. By Holy Mother Earth, sir, I swear it.”
The agent said nothing to that. After a few seconds of awful silence, Valen risked a glance up at the man, found him smiling a thin but not unfriendly smile. “You were stationed on Echidna.”
It wasn’t a question. It didn’t need to be. If the man really was what he appeared: an agent of the Imperium—of the Imperial civil service, no less, or of the Intelligence division—he would already know Valen’s whole history.
“You know I was, sir,” Valen said.
“Echidna’s a whole information hazard in itself,” the agent said. “They warned you, before they sent you in with the survey team. Warned you there’d be no going back once the work was done. For Earth and Empire, you said. You and the rest of the team.”
“I meant it,” Valen said.
“Of course you did,” the other man said, resting interlaced hands upon the tabletop. “No one questions your patriotism, M. Valen. The only question is: what is to become of you?”
Valen swallowed, found his gaze sinking toward some indeterminate place on the polished back glass of the tabletop. Ten seconds passed—perhaps—before he realized he was staring at the halo that encircled the reflected light in the ceiling above. “I was told the Echidna post would be it,” he dared at length. “I’d spend the rest of the war in the Outer Perseus. Out of the way. That was the deal. Five years active on Echidna, then some border world for the rest of the war.”
“The war isn’t ending,” the man said simply.
Valen shut his eyes. None of it seemed real, still. The fighting. The Cielcin. The Valley of Lords. Echidna itself. When he’d been a boy on Zigana, all he’d wanted was to enlist. His father had been a legionary, and his father before him. That was how they’d come to Zigana in the first place, shipped in on ice from Tiryns in the Outer Perseus. It’d been only right that he follow in their footsteps, only right he serve the Empire as they had. When he’d been a boy on Zigana, the galaxy had felt . . . not small, not precisely, but within his reach. Mankind had gone out and conquered sun after countless sun, had spread across the parsecs, across hundreds of thousands of habitable worlds and countless million star systems . . . but conquered was the word. The galaxy had been man’s when Valen was a boy.
It was contested now. Echidna had contested it.
The Cielcin had contested it.
“Tell me what you saw,” the man said.
Valen blinked at him. “I’ve already told . . . I don’t know how many people, sir. They took recordings . . .”
“I know,” the man said, tapping his folded hands on the table. “But for the Emperor, son. Tell me again.”
Valen looked round the empty room, the black walls, the black mirror that doubtless hid the observation room beyond, the golden lamps in the ceiling almost buzzing—right on the edge of hearing in the stiff silence. It was like every other conference room, like every other interrogation chamber on every other Imperial starship he’d ever been aboard. Even the paper cup with its stale coffee was the same. And there was a comfort in that sameness, after the alien horrors of Echidna, even in the stale bureaucracy. He was in human hands at least . . .
Thinking of hands, he clenched his own beneath the table.
“I gone to Echidna with the second wave,” he said. “Lord Powers had come and gone by then, took their prince back to Forum in triumph and paraded him before the Empress.”
“It,” the man corrected. “Paraded it before the Empress. The Cielcin don’t have sexes.”
“Quite right, sir,” Valen said, thinking of the pale xenobites with their smooth faces, their huge, black eyes and crowns of horn. Somehow, he always thought of them as male. He’d seen the official footage, seen Lord Cassian Powers present the inhuman prince to the Empress of the known universe in chains. It had died like a man, beheaded by the White Sword. “But it was long gone by the time I arrived. There was still fighting, though. The Cielcin were dug in deep. They had tunnel cities all over the worldship, some miles deep. We were years rooting them out. Killed them to the last, like we was ordered. We heard stories there was some captured and shipped to some reservation somewhere for study—I never learned anything real about that, but . . . we just killed them.” Valen swallowed. It was not a pleasant memory, not what he’d pictured as a boy on Zigana. But there had been no xenobites when he was a boy, no aliens.
The Cielcin had come to Cressgard in their wandering moon and burned its cities to ash. They had carried off its people by the million, used them for slaves and feed. Remembering the bodies of men and women hanging like pigs from hooks in an abattoir sent a shiver through Valen, and he snatched the still-warm paper cup of coffee up with shaking hands.
When he taken a bitter draught, he pressed on. “Three years in we’d done it. There might have been some holdouts in the deep places, but things had gone real quiet. That was when we got orders to ship out. We were needed on the surface, up by the pole—as far from the worldship’s engines as could be. Brass didn’t need me collapsing tunnels anymore. Intelligence had a dig they wanted help with, and me and mine were the best sappers on Echidna, so . . . we were off.” He had told this story at least a dozen times since they thawed him out last week. The words were starting to sound unreal even to him, the whole thing as rehearsed as some holograph mummer’s speech.
“They called it the Valley of Lords, it was a . . . a big rift valley, near the pole, far from any of the Cielcin cities. Tor Mencius—he was director of the dig there—said it was where the Cielcin buried their kings, sealed them up in tombs in the valley. One hundred and eleven tombs, stretching back . . .” he rubbed his eyes, realizing a piece of the information hazard the agent was talking about as he said it, “. . . forty thousand years, or so old Mencius said.”
Forty thousand years was more than twice the age of the Empire, nearly twice the length of all human civilization. Forty thousand years ago, man had lived in the garden, having only just crawled up from apedom in the light of Earth’s Golden Sun. The Chantry taught that man was the eldest child of the stars, firstborn and destined to rule. For more than fifteen thousand years, mankind had been expanding, stretching her hands out across the galaxy, gathering in star after star. They had found other races, lesser races, peoples that had discovered bronze, perhaps, or steel, but none that had learned to sail the black oceans between the stars.
None until the Cielcin.
“Go on,” the man said, not unkindly, but Valen thought the man guessed something of what passed in his mind. The mere fact that Cielcin had been spacefarers for so long—for longer than man had been civilized—was a hazard of the sort the man had described. A threat to the stability of Imperial order, a threat to man’s place amid the suns.
“Some of the tombs were sealed tight. The doors were metal or solid stone. Some of them weighed tons,” Valen said. “Our job was to dig our way in. Remove the doors if we could, but undermine them if we couldn’t. It was careful work. More careful than blasting our way through the tunnels down south where the fighting was . . .”
He grew silent then, thinking of the alien cities of Echidna, the great caverns and trackless tunnel warrens where dwelt that Pale enemy of man. He’d never seen anything like it, not in all his years in the Legions. The Cielcin didn’t live on planets, didn’t have colonies or settlements. They hollowed out asteroids, dwarf planets, whole moons, dwelt in them like termites in the foundations of a house. The worldship Lord Powers had named Echidna had engines vast as continents, huge warp drives fueled by vast reservoirs of antimatter. The whole world had sailed between the stars, its inhabitants protected from cosmic radiation by thousands of feet of ice and stone. They had been years plumbing those depths, rooting out the xenobites hive by hive, township by township until not a one remained.
Just as they had done to the men and women of Cressgard.
No, Valen told himself. Not just as. The Cielcin had eaten the people of Cressgard.
They had only killed the Cielcin in return.
“M. Valen?”
“I’m sorry,” the engineer said, and took another swig of the old coffee. “Most of the tombs were just that. Tombs. We spent two months or so sublimating the nitrogen ice off the doors in the east wall of the valley. The oldest tombs. Tor Mencius, he said the Cielcin buried their kings up on the surface because the surface dwellings were the oldest. That they dug their way in. That’s probably true, but me . . . I think they were safest from looters so high up. Cielcin can hack in vacuum with just a breathing tube, but the tombs were so far from any of their proper cities . . . I don’t know. We found an old tunnel—a highway—that connected the Valley of Lords to the greater warrens, but Silva—he was the geologist—he said it’d been caved in for almost ten thousand years. Looked deliberate to me, like one of their princes sapped the tunnel to cut the valley off.”
“We found the tomb of the one who settled Echidna, near the north end of the Valley on the east wall, just beside the doors to the Great Tomb. Zahamara, his name was—its name, sorry. The prince buried there. Had to get in at it from the south side, through the wall. We lost part of a . . . a mural I guess you’d call it, only the Cielcin don’t paint. Mencius said the Cielcin don’t do art. It was all writing. Calligraphy, you know? Mencius was . . . less than happy with the damage, but we found the old prince’s body. Almost forty thousand years old, and still there. The vacuum and the cold preserved it . . .”
He could still see the mummified xenobite’s body lying in its stone bed under the lamps in the controlled environment back aboard their ship. Tor Mencius had let the diggers watch from the theater above the lab. The Cielcin prince had been nearly eight feet tall, and thin like all its kind. The Cielcin were man-shaped, with two arms and two legs; two huge, round eyes above a too-wide and lipless mouth set in a face smooth and hairless beneath a crown of tangled horns. Silver bands like rings there were about those horns, some rune-scored, some set with opals and sapphires, others with violet amethysts and emeralds like green and lidless eyes.
Its void-boiled flesh had been wrapped in silken bandages, its banded silver armor polished and arranged with care. The rope of white hair that grew from the base of its skull was still intact, and hung over its left shoulder almost to its feet. The body had been sent to the Emperor on Forum to lie in state as part of an exhibit to showcase the conquest of Echidna and the supremacy of man for all the great lords and ladies of the Empire to see.
That exhibit would be hugely redacted, Valen guessed, fictionalized for the viewing public. History was just that. A story. The truth was too much.
“What’s to be done with me?” he asked, interrupting the flow of his story. “With Silva and the others? And old Tor Mencius?”
The man in the unassuming gray suit smiled, but remained otherwise immobile. “Tell me about the Great Tomb, M. Valen.”
“About the Hand?” Valen stared into the depths of his cup. “The Hand’s the information hazard, isn’t it? Like you were saying? Just knowing about it is dangerous. Like a bomb.”
Still the bald man said nothing.
After a moment, Valen shifted in his seat, chewed his tongue as if the words were some unpleasant taste he longed to work from its surface. “The Great Tomb. The Great Tomb was at the head of the Valley. The north end, nearest the Tomb of Prince Zahamara. Nearest the pole, too. Mencius thought that was significant. I don’t know why. The doors must have been three . . . four hundred cubits high? Solid stone. Mother Earth knows how heavy the damn things were. And they were locked tight. Silva’s team, they had gravitometers in. X-rays. Sonar. Deep scan, you know? We’re talking huge gears, bolts big around as you or me and solid steel, sir. And Mencius, sir, he didn’t want us blasting. Not after we wrecked that mural in Zahamara’s tomb. So we get to drilling. Took us more than a week to get through the west wall in beside the door and get a probe in, but once we did we found a spot that was to Tor Mencius’s liking, and we brought in the plasma bore. Cut a hole big enough to crawl through.
“Once we got in, we went down. The tombs all opened on stairs that ran down into the bedrock. How long it took the xenos to cut those tunnels I don’t like to think . . . but they did. Hundred steps straight down, maybe more. That was where we found them. Dozens of them. Cielcin bodies, not mummified, just . . . left there. M. Silva, he said they were probably workers the Pale sealed in the tomb, but Tor Mencius reckoned they were priests or something, to judge by the way they were dressed. He reckoned they volunteered to stay in. Leastways, that was his theory . . . after.”
“After you saw . . .”
“The Hand, aye sir.” Valen’s own tired eyes stared up at him from the black surface of the coffee. How long had it been since he had a proper sleep? Not since they pulled him out of the ice for these interrogation sessions at least, maybe not since he left Echidna. “It was at the bottom. The stairs led to a vestibule. That was where we found their dead priests just lying there in their robes . . . but past that was this big, domed chamber. There were these stone . . . panels, I guess you’d say . . . displayed around the walls. Covered in writing. Only it wasn’t Cielcin writing. Even I could see that. The Cielcin letters are all circles. Mencius said they don’t write in straight lines. But these were all straight. Straight lines with little notches up and down. I didn’t look at them much. The floor stepped down like an arena. Big circles. And in the middle was . . .”
“The Hand?”
Valen just nodded.
He could see it, clear as day. The sarcophagus lay at the very center of the domed chamber, at the bottom of the steps, in what had seemed to him to be the floor of the arena. Never in his life had he seen so large a coffin. Twenty cubits long it was, or so he’d guessed, and carved of a greenish stone scored with the same notched, linear writing that decorated the slabs displayed about the walls. What lid it had lay to one side, smashed into three great slabs and innumerate lesser pieces. The Cielcin dead lay all about it, some with skeletal hands—boiled by vacuum—caressing the alien stone. How clearly Valen could see them still, their six-fingered, four-phalanged hands with nails like iron claws raised up to touch the coffin.
And within?
Within there lay the bones of an enormous hand.
The box was no coffin, no sarcophagus as in the other tombs in the Valley of Lords. It was an ossuary, a reliquary, a sacred thing. What creature could have produced such a hand Valen still did not dare speculate—if indeed it were not itself the work of alien hands.
The Cielcin don’t make art, old Tor Mencius always said, and Valen said, “The Cielcin don’t make things, like I said. That’s why I thought it was real from go. That’s why I’ve been saying so, sir. To the others. When they ask. Old Tor Mencius, though, he wasn’t so sure. Thought it was some . . . what’d he call it? Fetish? Like it was a religious thing. Me and Silva and the rest . . . we were always joking that the scholiasts always think its some kind of religious thing. Maybe it was. I don’t know. But you could tell it was a hand at once. Had three fingers and what looked like a thumb, but it looked broken, like maybe there was some missing.” He held up the requisite number of fingers best he could, finding it strangely difficult to keep just the last finger down. “They were all black, like . . . you ever seen volcano glass? I grew up on Herakos, we had it everywhere.”
The bald man nodded. “Did Tor Mencius say anything about the Hand? To you or any of the others?”
Valen had emptied the coffee by then, stared at the dregs. Suddenly he missed the companionship of his own reflection in the black liquid. His reflection in the dark mirror on the wall seemed somehow far away and not himself by comparison. “I don’t understand what it is you think I’ve done wrong, sir,” he said. “Except that I had a theory different from the scholiast’s.”
“Done wrong?” The interrogator frowned, shook his head. “You’ve done nothing wrong, M. Valen. That isn’t the issue. It is my duty to ascertain whatever it is you know.”
“But I’ve spoken to . . . I don’t remember how many people,” Valen said. “Captain Daraen, those Legion Intelligence men, some guy from civil service . . . Chantry even came and tested me. Who’s next? Lord Powers? The Empress herself?”
“You told your captain?” The bald man turned to glance at the dark mirror glass. “You left that out of your earlier reports.”
“I only just remembered,” Valen said. “I didn’t make any official report to him. Only told him about it when we left Echidna. He cornered me when Mencius and Silva and the other higher-ups wouldn’t talk. Had a right to know, he said. He was my commander. It was his ship.”
“It’s all right, M. Valen,” the interrogator said. “Depending on what you know.”
“I don’t know anything, sir,” Valen said. “Only that Mencius said the Cielcin worshipped this giant Hand . . . thing. I don’t know what it is. Mencius said it was a statue, and I guess he’d know. It just seemed wrong to me. In my gut, you know? But that’s all I know, by Earth and Empire.”
“By Earth and Empire,” the man said, almost reflexively. “I believe you, M. Valen, when you say you don’t know what it is. But you know that it is, and that is enough.”
“What is it, then?” Valen asked, sitting a little straighter.
The nameless man did not reply.
“If I’m going to be punished for knowing, sir, then I should know.” Was that approval in the bald man’s dark eyes? Valen cleared his throat. “It’s because of the Chantry, isn’t it? Because we’re meant to be the oldest civilization in the galaxy? But I already know the Cielcin are older, just . . . slower to advance. I already know that.”
The bald man looked at the dark window that pretended it was only a mirror. What he saw in it or through it Valen dared not guess. Presently, he shook his head, and stood with a long sigh. “You’re right, M. Valen,” he said, “you should know. But you don’t, it seems. And that is as well. The Chantry’s Inquisition cleared you. Your Tor Mencius was right. You saw a statue, nothing more. Do you understand?”
Valen understood. It would be a little thing for them to freeze him, to put him on ice for a thousand years if he stepped out of line, if he spoke out of turn. He’d heard tell of Special Security doing just that—and he was sure this bald man must be with Special Security—he stank of secrecy.
“Are we done, then? Can I go?”
“To a place of our choosing, yes,” the man said. “You’re likely to be given some outpost in the Norman Expanse, somewhere remote, where what little you know poses no threat to Imperial security. You’re not to speak of Echidna ever again, do you understand?”
Valen only nodded. A feeling of intense relief washed over him, more bolstering than any amount of bad coffee. He had been through days of this. Weeks. “I understand.”
“Thank you for your time,” the nameless man said, and saluted. “For Earth and Emperor.”
Valen stood and beat his breast. “For Earth and Emperor,” he said, a touch too late and clumsily. The relief he’d felt a moment earlier faded all at once, and Valen of Herakos felt a slick and oily disappointment spilling from his guts. He had been close to the answers, he sensed, close to whatever secret they thought he held, to some monstrous, labyrinthine complex of state secrets and secret offices. The bald man was like the tip of some impossibly vast and translucent iceberg upon whose shoulders rested much of Valen’s world. If he did not speak now—ask now—he would never know.
He spoke.
“Can I ask one question, sir?”
The bald man turned, one hairless brow up-raised.
“The Hand, sir. The Cielcin have six fingers. I said the statue might have been broken. Missing fingers . . . only . . . only the Cielcin have four knuckle bones on each finger.” He held up his own hand to demonstrate, pinching the phalanges of his last finger one after the next. “The statue had three. So it can’t have been Cielcin. It wasn’t a Cielcin hand. Mencius had to be wrong . . . it had to be real.”
The bald man said nothing for a long moment, did not even turn to regard the black mirror glass. He kept his eyes down, and seemed for a moment—or was it Valen’s imagination?—to nod to himself, ever so slightly.
“Good day, M. Valen,” he said at last.
The door dilated at his knock, permitting the nameless functionary his exit.
No one came for Valen then, not for a long time, not even after he hammered on the door and the mirror alike, shouting for someone to come and get him. He imagined the bureaucrats and Legion officers debating, arguing over what would be done with him, with Mencius and Silva and Captain Daraen, with every member of the dig at the Valley of Lords. The Empire had its secrets, and it would keep them—them, and those privy to them.
After what seemed an age, Valen folded his arms on the table. His memory went back to that icy moon—or perhaps he dreamed.
Echidna. Mother of Monsters, Tor Mencius had called it, said the name came from some ancient myth. The Cielcin worldship hung—half-gutted where her engines rose like mountains from shelves of ice—a white gem in the black of space. Valen could recall the first time he’d seen it, the Imperial fleet glittering about its orbit like so many polished knives. Below them hung the ruined planet, Cressgard, its cities burned, its people stolen away. Valen well remembered the anger he’d felt at that first look, thinking of the women and children carried away, of the men who died fighting. For seven years the planet had been under siege, seven years while Lord Cassian Powers assembled his fleet and launched his counter attack. It had been Lord Powers who broke the Cielcin assault, crippled their ship, captured their prince. It had been Lord Powers who sent the summons that had brought them to Echidna, soldiers and scientists, engineers and xenologists—everything humanity needed to get to know its new neighbors.
We are not alone. The first words out of Captain Daraen’s mouth at the briefing had set a chill in Valen’s bones that no spring had yet thawed. For over fifteen thousand years the Sollan Empire had spread the glory of mankind across the stars, unchallenged.
No more.
How well he remembered the shock of those first engagements, the tunnels and cave-cities beneath Echidna’s surface. They’d been brought in not to conquer, but to pacify the alien world, to put the Cielcin down for the horrors their kind had wreaked upon Cressgard. Some of the soldiers had whispered that it had been they who had struck first, humanity that had fired on the alien world as it fell into orbit, that the Pale had only ever acted in self-defense.
Valen did not believe it, was not sure how any of the others could.
He had seen the butcheries, the abattoirs buried deep beneath Echidna’s surface, the hell-pits where men were trussed like cattle and bled, and the blood went to feed the worms the xenobites husbanded, raised for food and silk in equal measure. He could still remember the cavern he’d found—filled with the torn bodies of women—and the all-too-human stink on the alien air.
Even if the people of Cressgard had fired first, Valen knew they had been right to do so.
Man was not alone, but perhaps things would be better if he was.
And yet the Cielcin were not mere brutes, not the demons the Chantry preached from every pulpit on every planet in every corner of the frightened Empire. Or not only demons.
He stood once more upon the frozen surface of that wretched world, staring up at the green and white face of Cressgard burned and war-scarred above, its small and narrow seas like the tracks of tears. And he remembered the Valley of Lords opening beneath him as he and the men of the expedition debarked from their shuttles when the fighting was done. Great pillars rose above the walls of the Valley, some broken, others topped with capitals of gray stone—all of them carved with the circular writing of their kind, the finest done in inlaid silver that shone in the sunlight of naked space. The great doors of the tombs glittered a hundred cubits high in places, monuments to house forgotten kings older than the memory of man.
Valen was no scholar, no scholiast like Tor Mencius, who had studied for more than a hundred years in his ivory tower, had even been a part of the team that solved the aliens’ tongue after their attack. He was no great sage, but he knew enough of the enemy to respect them even through hatred and fear. They were a proud people, ancient and terrible. It was no wonder that the nameless man from the Empire should fear the very idea of them—and the very idea of the Hand.
He had heard it said that once man believed himself the center of the universe, that Mother Earth lay at the heart of all the uncreated gods had made. Until one day a scholiast—although there were no scholiasts in those early days—discovered that Earth orbited her sun. Mankind had never recovered from that shock, or so the man who’d told Valen said. That discovery had dealt mankind a mortal wound, and that mortal wound had nearly strangled her in Earth’s cradle, and it had been only the sacrifice of Mother Earth herself—lost in the Foundation War that made the Empire—that had preserved mankind at all and scattered her scions across the stars.
The nameless man feared a similar wound.
A deeper wound.
Three fingers, black as volcanic glass and more than twice as long as he was tall, lay in a coffer of green stone rudely carved. Valen had stood with Lorens and Sykes at the foot of the sarcophagus, staring transfixed while old Mencius stooped over the hideous thing in his pressure suit, face lost in thought behind the darkened glass.
“It’s not . . . real, is it?” Sykes had asked.
“Real?” Mencius had looked up sharply. “Whatever do you mean by that, young man? You see it, do you not?” They said scholiasts were schooled not to have emotions, but Valen did not believe that sort of thing was really possible. The old man was always so short with them, the diggers.
“I mean was it alive, do you think?” Sykes asked.
Tor Mencius had looked then long and hard at the men through his suit mask, breath misting the frosted glass. He did not answer at once—Valen had not found that strange at the time. He wondered if he should have done.
“What kind of creature had a hand this big?” Valen asked.
“Nothing, Val!” Sykes had said. “Nothing gets that big.”
Lorens audibly frowned. “Inverse square law, isn’t it? Thing’s own weight would crush it. Doesn’t make sense.”
Tor Mencius spoke suddenly, in memory like a drowning man relieved to find his life line tossed across his shoulders. “Quite right, M. Lorens. Quite right. Inverse square law, indeed. This is clearly some cult-statue. A primitive fetish! But a valuable find. It’s most unlike anything else in our experience. The Cielcin produce little by way of art. Architecture, yes. Music, poetry, literature. But nothing like this!”
Had he been lying? Covering for some other truth? Had the nameless man known that truth? Had he come to interrogate Valen specifically to know if Valen knew it himself? And did Valen know it? Or know enough? How would he know?
Do you know what a thought hazard is, M. Valen?
You know explosives, don’t you? How to make them?
Almost Valen felt like an explosive himself. He could feel his forehead pressing into the flesh of his arms where they lay against the table of the interrogation room, felt the cold, black glass. Felt also the glassy blackness of the three fingers in their coffer beneath the domed vault of the Great Tomb of Echidna. They felt cold—even through the rubberized polymer of his suit gloves. Their surface was uneven, ridged, more like wood than stone. Valen ran his fingers along those lines, marveling at the dark material.
“M. Valen! Stop that!” Tor Mencius barked, voice cracking like a whip, magnified by the speakers in the helmet of Valen’s suit.
The engineer sat bolt upright—and found he was not in the interrogation room at all.
He was on a shuttle, his face pressed against the bulkhead near a round porthole. Outside, the silent stars were ever watchful, remote and deep-sunken in the black. Blearily, Valen looked round. He could not remember being moved. He had been aboard a starship, that much he knew, but not Captain Daraen’s Ecliptic. Some other Imperial dreadnought. Now he was going . . . somewhere else.
His head swam. He must have been drugged. Had he been dreaming? Or were those memories the symptoms of interrogation?
It didn’t make sense. The bald man had said they were finished, had seemed satisfied. He was supposed to go to some border world posting, as far from the fighting—as far from the Cielcin—as the Empire and galaxy would allow. They had deemed him not-a-threat to Imperial security, or so he’d thought, judged that whatever information he thought he had was no hazard to the peace and the Chantry’s lie.
But he knew it was a lie.
Was that enough?
He must have grunted, or made some other noise as he stirred, for a legionnaire in full combat plate emerged from the aisle to his left, coming up from behind. The man peered down at him, his face obscured behind his ceramic face-plate, devoid of eyeslit or glass. He placed a hand on Valen’s shoulder as if to check him, then signaled to some unseen presence in the rear. Bleary still, Valen tried to turn, but the crash-webbing that secured him in his seat prevented him from rising.
“Where?” was all he managed to say.
Had there been something in the coffee? No, that didn’t make sense. They had been going to let him go—unless they were never going to let him go. And he had sat around for so long in that little cell, waiting for someone to come retrieve him. He could remember sitting there, face in his arms.
They must have pumped something into the air.
He could not remember anyone coming to get him. Could not remember being moved.
Why go to all this trouble?
A hand settled on the headrest just above his left shoulder, and for an instant Valen discerned the flash of a signet ring as the owner of that hand pivoted into view and seated himself on the bench opposite Valen.
Valen would not have needed the ring to tell him that here was a Lord of the Imperium, one of the palatine high-born. He knew him. Every veteran of the Battle of Echidna did. He wore an officer’s dress blacks, without medal or marker of rank, silver buttons and collar tabs gleaming with the embossed image of the twelve-rayed Imperial sun. An aiguilette wrought of heavy silver chains decorated his right shoulder, marking him for a knight of the realm as surely as the unkindled hilt of the sword that hung from his shield-belt.
“Are you well, M. Valen?” the lord asked, and brushed back his untidy fringe of auburn hair with his ringed hand. “It is just Valen, isn’t it?” His hard eyes narrowed. “Valen of . . . Herakos?”
“Where am I?” Valen asked.
The man seated before him cocked his head, reminding Valen of nothing so much as the tawny owls that lived in the rocks and dry old trees of his home. “Nowhere, I’m afraid. That’s the point.” He grew quiet, composed himself. “You know who I am?”
Still shaking off the haze of the drugs, Valen struggled to hold his head up straight, but he said, “You’re Lord Cassian Powers.”
Lord Powers smiled ever so slightly. “I am.”
“What do you want with me?” Valen asked. “I . . .” Here was a great lord, a hero of the Imperium, of mankind itself. What could he possibly want with Valen of Herakos? “I’m just an engineer. A digger, for Earth’s sake.”
“For Earth’s sake, indeed,” said the Avenger of Cressgard. “M. Valen, you are one of only six people to enter the Tomb of the Monumental on Echidna. Whether or not you are aware of it, you are in possession of information that threatens Imperial order.”
“Monumental?” Valen could only shake his head. “I don’t understand how.”
“You don’t understand,” Lord Powers said. “But someone might. You know enough to answer questions others might ask. Questions that could change history as men understand it.”
“You mean like the Cielcin?” Valen asked. “How old they are? Their civilization?”
“Like that, yes,” the lord said. “Or about the Hand.”
Valen frowned, remembering his vision, his memory, the cold, glassy stone of the finger beneath his own. “Where are you taking me?”
“You work for us now, M. Valen. For me.”
“Who’s we?”
“We are Hapsis. The Emperor’s Contact Division.”
“Legion Intelligence?”
“Not Legion Intelligence. We report to the Imperial Office, you understand?”
Valen said nothing. From Powers’ tone, he could already guess that he had no say in the matter. He was shanghaied, pressganged, enlisted. “Why me?”
Powers blinked at him. “You saw the Hand.”
“But why bother with me?” he asked. “I’m just an engineer. You could have iced me, spaced me, sent me to Belusha.”
Again Powers cocked his head, a thin smile on his palatine face. “Waste not, M. Valen.”
“Waste not . . .” the engineer almost snarled, shaking his head. “What is it you want from me, then?”
Powers straightened. “Have a care, sir,” he said, “I understand the stress you must be under, sitting through the vetting process like you did, but I am a palatine lord of the Imperium. Do not forget.”
Valen hung his head. “Forgive me, lord.” Angry as he was, he was still a soldier, and a citizen of the Empire besides. He knew there was no going back, had known since he first set sail for Echidna. The Empire had ordered him to serve, and serve he had. It was far too late to change his mind. The time for that had been on Herakos, before he ever enlisted. “How may I serve?”
“That remains to be seen,” Lord Powers said. “That is not the purpose of this interview in any event . . .” He grew silent, turned to regard the slow and silent passage of the stars beyond the window. “I did not choose this career, either. We have the same ill luck. Do you know what it was you found in the Great Tomb?”
“A hand,” Valen said tartly, and realizing his mistake, tried again. “A hand, my lord.”
“It was the hand of a god, M. Valen,” Lord Powers said, not waiting to allow Valen the time to process. “A god to the Cielcin, at any rate. Athos tells me you realized the hand was not—as our man Mencius tried to make you believe—the sculpted hand of a Cielcin. That bit of knowledge was the real hazard. That bit of knowledge is why you are here.” Again he turned to look out the window. “The universe is so much older than we like to believe, older perhaps than we can believe. What you realized—whether you knew it or not—is that the Cielcin are not the only race older than our own. What you found in that tomb on Echidna belonged a creature of a kind far older than life on Earth. Than Earth itself.”
“A . . . Monumental?” Valen said.
Powers said nothing.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you are doomed, M. Valen,” Lord Powers said. “The Empire has its enemies: not just the Cielcin, there are others. Barbarians and the like . . . any of whom would leap at the opportunity to turn this knowledge against us. Against Mother Earth and Empress, against the Holy Chantry. So we cannot allow you to fall into the wrong hands. What little you know might confirm for any of our enemies what they might already suspect.”
Valen could feel his eyes narrowing, knew his mouth hung half-open. “That xenobites exist?”
“These are no mere xenobites,” Powers said, leaning forward. As he did so, Valen’s vision swam, and the Avenger of Cressgard seemed to double. The world seemed to double. Two lords sat on two benches, and two windows spun on the wall. “I told you. They are gods, Valen. The Monumental you found on Echidna—Echidna herself, in a sense—is not the first we have found. Hapsis was formed centuries ago, ordered by Emperor Sebastian XII after an expedition discovered the body of another such creature near galaxy’s edge. That the Cielcin know about them, too, is cause for grave concern.”
“But it’s dead!” said another voice, so like his own.
“It was just a hand,” Valen said, and put a hand to his face.
“A giant hand . . .” said the other voice.
Powers signaled for someone in the rear. Valen heard feet approaching. Two sets of feet. The bald man came into view, still in his innocuous gray suit. “He’s splitting again,” Powers said to him, and the bald man—whom Valen guessed must be Athos—stooped and peered into his eyes. Or did he? He seemed at once to be looking at some point to his left and into Valen’s eyes at once, as though it were the trick of some funhouse mirror.
Valen heard the pneumatic hiss of an injector, felt the needle bite. Some other voice gasped in alarm, and his vision stabilized. A stimulant? It must have been. “What did you do to me?” he asked.
“We’re trying to help you, Valen,” Powers said, dropping the honorific. “You’re very sick.”
“Sick?” he asked. “What?”
“You touched it, didn’t you?” Lord Powers asked, painfully intent.
“Through the suit!” Valen exclaimed, incredulous. “We were in vacuum!”
“It isn’t that kind of sickness,” Power said, though what kind of sickness it was he didn’t say.
“It was dead!” Valen almost shouted.
“Partly,” the lord allowed.
“What do you mean?”
“What your team found in the tomb was only a fragment. The creature whose . . . hand you and Tor Mencius uncovered on Echidna extends beyond what we ordinarily think of as space. Into . . . higher dimensions.”
“Higher dimensions?” Valen suppressed a sneer. “You’re crazy, lord.”
“Crazy?” Powers looked round, his gaze settling on bald Athos. The doctor made no sign. “That may be. But I tell you: there are parts of that thing you found that still live, and it is for that reason that the knowledge you possess is so dangerous. There may be more of them, scattered across the galaxy. The Cielcin surely are aware of them, and may use them in their war on us. Our other enemies may try.”
“Use them?” the other voice asked. “Use them how?”
Lord Powers turned his head, a frown creasing his owlish face.
“It’s happening again,” murmured the doctor, Athos.
“I can see that, Athos,” snapped Lord Powers. The Avenger leaned forward, made as if to grip Valen’s wrist. But Valen felt nothing, and felt a strange confusion spreading in him. Powers had leaned too far to his right, toward the empty seat on the bench beside him, nearer the window.
The window? But he’d awoken with his face pressed to the window, hadn’t he?
“Valen? Look at me. Focus on me.” Lord Powers’ hard eyes were intent. “Something happened when you touched the fingers. It only happened to you. Focus!”
Valen looked across at Lord Powers again. The palatine was clasping his wrist. One of him was. There were two of Lord Cassian Powers again, two benches, two portholes, and two of Dr. Athos on the edge of his vision, peering down with mingled fascination and horror.
“Valen?”
“Yes?” The reply came from the empty seat at Valen’s left. Hadn’t he been seated there? The window was right beside him.
Confused, Valen made to look round, but Lord Powers shook his wrist. “Look at me, Valen. Look here, lad.” Valen looked him in the face, felt the pressure of Powers’ hand as if from far away. “Can you dose him again?”
Valen glared up into the face of the doctor—but somehow still held Lord Powers’ gaze. Athos shook his head, and Valen felt his eyes bulge as the full effect of double vision diverged. He was looking in two places at once, from two places at once. He shook his head, and his vision of Athos blurred even as Powers held his gaze and intensified his grip upon his arm.
Double vision. Double vision.
“He’s had too much already.” The doctor’s voice sounded far away.
“It’s getting worse,” Powers said. “You have the sedative? It worked last time.”
“What worked?” Valen asked, and it seemed to him that he looked at Powers and Athos simultaneously, his fields of vision overlapping, as though he turned each eye independently. “What’s wrong with me? What did you do?”
Powers squeezed his arm. “We’re trying to help you, Valen. Something happened to you in the tomb, do you remember?”
“In the tomb?” Valen shook his head.
“Keep him steady,” Powers said, and Athos stooped to secure something to Valen’s left. Valen made to turn, but Powers said, “No, don’t look. Look at me.”
Too late.
Valen had glanced aside, and felt his stomach and his soul both fall out of him and the shuttle entire. He was careening through space, faster than any bullet and without course.
A man sat in the seat beside him, dressed in the dark fatigues of a common legionnaire. Dr. Athos had stooped over him, made to steady him as he thrashed—unrestrained—on the bench. There was something not quite right with him, as there was something not quite right with Valen himself, but that was not what gave the young engineer his pause.
Valen knew him at once. His shaved pate, his olive skin—still dark from the old suns of Herakos. He knew the triple lightning bolt patch of the engineering corps, and the single red stripe on the arms that marked him for a triaster. He knew, also, the thin white scar on the man’s neck. His own neck.
The man’s eyes bulged in his head, seeing Valen looking at him as if out of a mirror.
All at once, Valen saw a separate image, saw himself strapped in and seated against the bulkhead with the porthole close beside him. He felt the doctor’s hands upon his face, and saw Lord Powers’ hand still tight upon his wrist.
He understood all at once.
There were two of him, and he was seeing out of both men’s eyes at once, their fields of vision overlapping, swimming as his brain—his brains—tried to make sense of the confused and conflicting inputs.
Both Valens screamed identically, both tried to scramble back. The one the doctor restrained broke free—he was not strapped in—and fell into the aisle of the shuttle’s main cabin. Lord Powers released Valen’s wrist, his hand going reflexively to the unkindled sword hilt at his belt. Valen’s head—heads—swam as his vision of the Avenger in his seat crossed with the scrambled impression of the ceiling overhead and that of the doctor and two armored legionnaires stooping over him.
The Valen in the chair turned from the great lord to his other self sprawling in the aisle. His head ached where he had struck it, and he offered no resistance as the legionnaires seized his arms. Seated in the chair, Valen hissed as he felt the bite of a second needle in his neck—in the neck of the Valen lying on the floor.
“Quiet, now,” the doctor whispered in his ear, though Athos knelt upon the floor two yards away. “Hush now. It will pass.”
“He’s going,” Powers said, his sword hilt in his hand.
Valen watched with growing horror—with no idea what to say or do—as the Valen upon the floor began to shrink, to wither and fade like a shadow annihilated by the noonday sun. The men who knelt upon his arms staggered and drew back. One stood even as Valen’s double vision slewed and stabilized, and a moment later he was looking at an aisle empty except for the kneeling, hairless doctor in his unassuming gray suit.
The engineer did not dare speak, did not dare move. Hardly he dared to breathe, fearing the next breath would bring fresh horror. “What?” he managed at last, and turned only his eyes to Lord Powers. “What . . . happened to me?”
“Higher dimensions,” Powers said, and brushed his fall of auburn hair from his high forehead with the hand that still held his unkindled sword. “You really don’t remember?”
“Remember what?” Valen asked, feeling suddenly woozy. He let his head rest against the cool metal of the bulkhead.
“It grabbed you,” Powers said. “The Hand. When you touched it.”
Valen could remember the freezing cold of those glassy black bones beneath his fingers. He could not remember it moving, could certainly not remember them grabbing him. But then . . . he could not remember anything. Not until he was on the shuttle departing Echidna. Had that been later the same day? Had Silva, Lorens, and Sykes carried him back out of the Great Tomb to the camp? Had Tor Mencius insisted they take him back to the Ecliptic? He remembered talking to Captain Daraen, but he hadn’t asked Valen about the Hand.
Had he?
Or had he asked a different Valen?
“That was me,” he said, voice shaking, eyes wandering back to the now empty spot in the aisle. “That was another me. I could see . . . see what he saw. I felt the shot, and your hand, and . . .”
Powers made a hushing sound. “I know, lad,” he said. “I know.”
“What happened to me?”
“We’re not sure,” Athos said.
“The Chantry tested me,” Valen said. “They said I was . . . human.”
“The Chantry can only test you for machine influences,” Lord Powers said. “Cybernetic implants. Neural laces. Nanomachines. You were clear of all that.”
Athos narrowed his dark eyes. “I asked you about information hazards, do you remember?”
Valen bobbed his head weakly.
“There is something wrong with your brain,” he said. “The signals in it. Your synapses. They’re firing far faster than any human brain should. We think when you touched the fingers, they disrupted the electromagnetic fields in your brain body. And not only the electromagnetic fields, but the nuclear forces, even the quantum properties of the particles that comprise your body.”
“Quantum properties?” Valen asked. “Man, I’m just an engineer. I know explosives. This is . . .” It was too much. “But how? It was just some fossil. Just some dead hand.”
“I told you,” Lord Powers said. “The creature who owned that hand—the Monumental—its body extends beyond the confines of what we call space. There are parts of it that yet live, and one of those parts reached out to you, we think, and wounded you.”
“Wounded me?” Valen felt his blood run cold. “Am I going to die?”
“We’re not sure,” the lord said, unreassuringly. “Do you know what wave-particle duality is?”
Valen shook his head. He was starting to wonder if the sedative Dr. Athos had given his other self had somehow affected him.
Powers had not restored his sword to its catch on his belt. “You’ve fired a laser?”
“Course, sir.”
“You know that light travels as both particles and waves?”
“Oh, that,” Valen felt his limbs growing very heavy. He wanted to shout, to shake his lordship and ask what the point of this physics lecture was when some alien god-thing had messed him up so badly, but he didn’t have the energy. Let the bastard talk. Valen could remember someone—not Tor Mencius, he was a historian, a xenologist—lecturing about particle physics once. The photons in a laser acted like particles when you observed them, moved in straight lines, left clean marks on the target board when you fired them through a pair of slits. But when you looked away, when you didn’t observe them, they scattered, rippled like water passing through a pair of culverts at high tide.
“Something similar has happened to you, if only by analogy,” his lordship said. “You said you could see through both sets of eyes. You felt the injection we gave the other, you said, and my hand.”
“Yes.”
“People are like particles, in a sense. We’re composed of them, at least. But whatever happened to you . . .”
“You’re saying I’m . . . like a wave?”
Powers reached into his tunic with the hand not holding his sword hilt, and fished out a pocket terminal like a fob watch on a chain. He pressed some control on its side with a thumbnail—Valen saw a light shimmer in the entoptic contact lenses the man wore over his eyes—and a moment later a holograph window opened above the terminal, projected in mid-air. It was a suit’s camera recording, and showed a darkened room. There was no sound, but the suit’s owner was staring up at the pattern of circular runes scored in the dark stone of the dome above. They were Cielcin letters, shining where the xenobites had hammered silver wire into the graven symbols to set them shining in the roof above.
Valen recognized the Great Tomb, the tomb of the giant. The Monumental.
The recording panned down as its owner looked at the sarcophagus lying open in the center of the chamber, surrounded in vacuum by the bodies of long-dead Cielcin priests, creatures that had been sealed away with the severed limb of their god, there to serve it eternally in death. The image panned, fixed upon the image of a man in the quilted, form-fitting white pressure suit of a Legion Corp engineer. The man’s face was lost behind the white ceramic helm and visor, but Valen knew it was himself as the man reached down to caress the whorled bone of one massive, black fingertip.
M. Valen! Stop that!
The image blurred as its owner—Tor Mencius, Valen guessed—hurried to bat his hand away.
Too late.
The crackling gleam of auroras filled the recording, and through it all Valen saw himself lifted into the air like a puppet yanked skyward by its strings. For an instant, Valen thought he seemed to grow until he was twice the size of a man, a giant himself hanging in the air beneath the dome. His limbs thrashed violently, then without warning he was sailing through the air—shrinking the while, returning to ordinary human size.
Three Valens struck the wall of the domed chamber all at once, side by side by side. Each hit the hard stone and fell like stunned flies, each at the precise same instant. Valen watched the whole thing with horror, felt his heart beating in his mouth. Just as the man in the aisle had done, two of the three Valens began to diminish, to shrink and fade like shadows, until only one man remained. It was to that man—that Valen—that the owner of the recording rushed. Valen could almost remember him shouting.
Valen? Valen!
He wasn’t even sure. Was he Valen anymore? And what was Valen anyway?
“Valen?”
All at once, Valen found he couldn’t breathe. He opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came out. He choked, felt his eyes bulging, felt again his heart hammering in his mouth. He looked around, wide-eyed and terrified as a pain sharp as knives struck both his ears.
“What’s happening?” Lord Powers asked.
They were the last words he ever heard.
Valen thrust a hand out against the bulkhead to his right, saw blood red and black beneath his skin. Again he tried to breathe, and again pain bright as sunfire lanced through him. He couldn’t breathe! He couldn’t breathe! His vision blurred, and a blackness ran across the world, a blackness lit by the light of innumerate stars.
And there, against them—for that final, fleeting moment—he saw the black knife-shape of an Imperial shuttle sailing, its ion drives blue and blazing . . . and he understood.
It had happened again. He had doubled again, his particles refracted, rippled across the quantum foam . . . and his second self was outside the shuttle.
It was enough to kill them both.
His last thought was of the Hand—of the god—that had killed him. How small he was by comparison, and how vast and strange was the inhuman universe.
It didn’t matter, he decided, as all went black.
Whatever else was true, it had taken a god to kill him, and that was enough.