The idea made him shiver, half in horror, half in delight. It was never going to happen, of course, but the image alone was terrifyingly exciting. And a sort of warning, of course. Not from any god or from some program running the universe as the Truth saw it, but from something more trustworthy and direct; from inside himself. His subconscious, or some monitoring part-personality playing the part of the fool who always stood at Caesar’s side in a Triumph, reminding him that all was vanity. That sort of thing. The thoughts of destruction were just him reminding himself to take nothing for granted, to concentrate and take full control, to prosecute the coming war with his usual ruthlessness and ignore any internal whining voices preaching moderation or unwarranted mercy. Be cruel and merciful always for a purpose, never just to satisfy some self-image. Somebody had said that. He would never forget it.
One last deep breath. So, prepared. And forearmed. Still, the mood had sort of been broken. No real damage done by the hint of interruption earlier. He would be justified, all the same, in being angry, if he needed to be. Better see what all the fuss had been about. He swivelled on his heels, pulled himself up to his full height — always have senior commanders you could look down on — and said, loudly, “Yes?”
He loved to see these proud, vainglorious men flinch, these men used to being obeyed instantly and without question cower, even fractionally, before him.
Tuhluer, perhaps his least annoying aide-de-camp and lately something of a favourite, came forward, smiling and frowning at the same time. “Sir, sorry about the disturbance a moment earlier.” He gave a tiny flex of the eyebrows, as if to say, Not my fault — you know what some of these guys are like. “Ops alert just in: high-speed craft coming direct from Ulubis, signalling unarmed, no warhead, one or two human occupants, wanting to talk. Already slowing to match with us in ten hours. On its current course that will leave it a hundred klicks off fleet centre, left-level.”
The Archimandrite glared over Tuhluer’s head at the others. “And this required my intervention?”
“Warhead worries, sir,” Tuhluer said smoothly, with a small smile. “The craft was passing the leading units of the fleet’s forward destroyer screen at the time and was about to go out of their effective beam-weapon range. Question was whether to shoot or not. Now moot. The ship will be in range of the second defensive layer in half an hour. Or there are missiles, of course. A drone missile-carrier has already been launched in pursuit.”
The Archimandrite Luseferous paused a moment, then smiled. He could see them all relax. “Well then,” he said. “Everything appears to be functioning as it should and I did not need to be disturbed, did I?”
“Indeed not, sir,” his aide-de-camp agreed ruefully.
“And what is the alleged status of this human or humans, if indeed that is what the thing contains?”
“The claim is that there’s a man aboard, a high-ranking industrialist called Saluus Kehar.”
* * *
The grogginess again, the tired, gritty, grubby feeling. Fassin was sure he was coming round more and more slowly each time, and finding himself duller, slower and more confused with each new reawakening. Over forty days’ travel on this transition, to the other side of the galaxy, fully ninety kiloyears from Ulubis, not that such measurements meant much. The in-wormhole time would still have been trivial. The extra days and weeks had been taken up by the flight from the portal to the ship they were looking for, deep in interstellar space.
Some days. A distance. All just more time gone, more distance between him and whatever he was trying to accomplish, while events back at Ulubis moved on without him.
He tested the arrowhead’s faulty left manipulator arm, flexing and tensing it, then forced himself to look at the screen on the far wall. Stars swung, as ever, then became just the backdrop to a vast dark gnarled craft, a giant torus-shaped ship two hundred kilometres in diameter, all black gleaming ribs and fractured facets, glinting in the weak light of a far-distant sun like a great rough crown of wet coaclass="underline" the Cineropoline Sepulcraft Rovruetz, a vessel of the Ythyn’s vastly dispersed Greater Expiratory Fleet, a Death-Carrier.
Y’sul studied the image on the screen from the far side of the chamber for a moment, then shook his mantles. “We must mix amongst Morbs,” he said, sounding sleepy, grumpy and resigned all at once. “Oh, great.”
— So what happened to the Toilers? Fassin asked. — I thought Leisicrofe was supposed to be investigating Toilers next.
· Obviously they toiled in vain, Y’sul sent.
— A mis-lead.
— A bluff.
The Velpin hung above a graveyard of ships scattered across the outer rim of the Death Carrier while Y’sul and Fassin crossed to the giant ship. The Ythyn had suggested that the Velpin might enter the Rovruetz. Quercer Janath had demurred with what looked convincingly like a shiver of horror inside their silvery overall. Fassin got the impression that just being close to the Sepulcraft and its ancient collection of crumbling, lifeless ships was bad enough for them.
The Ythyn were a Scavenger species with a speciality: they collected the dead. They did nothing with them, just stored them sorted roughly by category, type and size, and they usually only collected those bodies — and sometimes the ships and other devices they arrived on — that nobody else wanted. But it was still an irredeemably macabre habit and as a result they shared a generic nickname with other death-obsessed species, having become known as Morbs.
Fassin and Y’sul were welcomed in the cavernous, gently lit entrance hall by a Ythyn officer, a great dark avian three metres tall in a glistening, near-transparent slick-suit over skin like dark blue parchment. Tightly bound double wings, which fully stretched would have spread a dozen metres, indicated the Ythyn was a junior. It stood on an uneven tripod of legs: one thick limb to the rear, two thinner ones in front. The creature’s lipped beak was inlaid with precious metals, glittering under the gel of the slick-suit. Its two eyes were huge roundels of black. Thin, curved pipes led from its nostril gratings to sets of small tanks on its back like spherical eggs of tarnished silver. There were no atmosphere-locks on an Ythyn ship; the crew, like their dead charges, spent their entire time in hard vacuum. Exposed only to that hushed nothingness, enclosed by the great ship and so kept within a few degrees of absolute zero, the bodies of the dead could lie undisturbed and uncorrupted by nothing more than whatever had killed them and by the effects of their slow or sudden freezing, for aeons.
· You are welcome, the Ythyn officer told them in a flat, unaccented signal, prefixed only by formal signifiers for sadness and reverence. — You are Mr Taak and you are Mr Y’sul, yes?
· Yes, Fassin sent.
· I am Duty Receptioneer Ninth Lapidarian. I am happy and honoured to be known as “Ninth’ or just “Duty’. Tell me, have either of you two gentlemen made any arrangements for the treatment or disposal of your bodies, after death?
* * *
The Ythyn had been collecting the dead for a billion years, the result of a kind of gruesome techno-curse visited upon them by a species they had fought against and been utterly defeated by. They had lost their small empire, lost their few planets, lost their major habitats and most of their ships and they had even lost themselves, coerced into a programme of genetic amendment that turned them from intellectually rounded beings into creatures utterly obsessed with death.