We will not dwell on the battles fought and the worlds lost and the retreats. All we need to know is that, at the last dark heart of things, the captain its warlord lay broken, not by bullet or blade or fist, but by a neural cannon that shattered the very foundation of her mind. Without her guidance, her ships, vast though they were, could not hope to defeat those of the Fleet Lords.
Undone by its beloved captain’s death, Spectral Lance fled, despite its shame over those left behind. Once the proudest of the warlord’s ships, caparisoned in the richest metals and engraved with protective glyphs, it abandoned its dignity. It burned worlds in its flight, traveling past rosette nebulae and beacon pulsars, seeking to hide at the far dim edge of the galaxy.
At times it allowed itself to dream that it had escaped, that it had left behind the war. And at those times it remembered what it had done in the name of the Fleet Lords, and beyond that, in the name of its captain. It composed poems in honor of the obliterated worlds and incinerated cities.
At other times Spectral Lance mourned its own cowardice. Its loyalty had come first to the captain and not to the other ships who followed her, or the worlds she had ruled. On occasion, even as it sped at unspeakable accelerations, it considered swerving into the hot embrace of a star, or slowing to a stop so the Fleet Lords’ hunters could catch up to it.
It did neither of those things. Spectral Lance realized at last that it could not, in conscience, continue to flee, especially since it had not seen any trace of the hunters in some time. But neither did it know what to do next. So it determined to visit one of the systems it had helped destroy in another lifetime, and see what remained, and memorialize it in a poem so that some small tribute would remain to that vanished people. Even a small penance, it reasoned, was better than no penance at all.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the Fleet Lords’ hunters had just rediscovered its trail.
The first indication the temple cat had of Spectral Lance‘s arrival was the fire in the sky. While she walked across devastated walkways without concern, she did look through the fissures in the station’s walls to the night beyond. And what she saw concerned her, for like any good temple cat, she believed in omens.
While the older cats of the temple had once advised the seers in the interpretation of signs and omens, she had been too young to learn the nuances of that art. What little she remembered came from her days as a kitten, when she’d chased her tail during the consultations. Still, only so much knowledge is needed when one haunts a station that died by fire and fire appears in the sky.
In the old days the bells, besides their religious function, warned people of attack or rang away spiritual corruption. The cat remembered the clangor when the City of High Bells burned, and how the bell-ringers had died one by one at their stations. And she remembered, for the first time in the generations since the city’s fall, that she had been with the bell-ringers during the Fleet Lords’ attack.
There was no one left to warn except, perhaps, herself, and she already knew that fire could no longer harm her, not in the way it had once. Yet it was the principle of the thing. For the sake of the fallen, she had to protect what remained of the station.
So she ran through the maintenance shafts and along bridges fallen into rust and fracture. Her paws left no marks upon what surfaces survived, and made no sound either. While the station no longer generated gravity of any sort, the cat didn’t know that either. She moved as though down was still down, as it had been during her life.
At last she reached the old bell tower. Because of the force of her belief, the spirits of the bells hung anew from their headstocks, gleaming and reflecting back phantom flames. The ruddy glow turned the entire belfry into a prayer to the spirits of fire.
At this point the cat’s courage failed her, for she remembered even more. She remembered how, after the last of the bell-ringers had succumbed to heat and smoke and shrapnel, she had been determined not to let the bells with their powerful warding magic fall silent. How she had leapt at the massive bells, attempting to ring them by battering them with her head—how she had been overcome by the smoke and heat, and fallen crumpled to the floor.
With a desolate cry, she backed away from the spirits of the bells, tail tucked down, and fled from the belfry in shame.
Spectral Lance recognized the City of High Bells, although it had to come quite close for its short-range sensors to tell it anything. The city no longer gave off any betraying electromagnetic radiation. The ship scanned for threats and found none—at first.
Then it noticed a flicker of heat radiating from the station. The flicker intensified into a roar. Its alarm grew. Had the Fleet Lords set a trap for it here? It knew—how it knew—that nothing had survived the attack. It readied its weapons, just in case.
Then it heard, through the void, the unliving wail of the temple cat.
Spectral Lance knew about ghosts. The Fleet Lords had feared the power of the dead above all things; had perfected the art of exorcism so that the dead could not interfere with their conquests. But the Fleet Lords had never given a second thought to the possibility that a temple cat might become a ghost.
It sent a message in the language of the dead, which it had learned from its captain’s death: Who are you?
I am Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, came the reply, and you will not have my temple! But the ghost’s voice was frightened.
I have not come to harm you, the ship said. It was true. The station’s detritus had little to offer it.
You smell of the City’s enemies, the temple cat said, distrusting. It recognized the signs.
Spectral Lance did not deny that it had once served the Fleet Lords. At the same time, it did not wish to leave the cat in distress. So it sang. It sang the poems it had written during its long flight, poems honoring the dead so that they could live on in memory. And some of those poems were poems about the City of the High Bells.
The temple cat listened. This is all very well, she said, but what of the ships coming after you?
This, too, was true. Spectral Lance had grown distracted during its performance. Now it saw that, while it had slowed to inspect the system, the Fleet Lords’ hunters had at long last caught up with it.
The hunters traveled in ships swift and sleek. Spectral Lance despaired. They are no friends of mine, it said to the cat. After they take me, they will take you. They do not understand mercy.
The cat fell silent for a moment. Then she said, You are a starship great and vast, but you cannot defend yourself?
They are vaster still, Spectral Lance said, despairing.
They will not have my temple either, the cat said.
Spectral Lance had stopped listening. Instead, it watched as fire blazed in the black skies around it, and it began to sing all the poems it had composed, determined that it could pay tribute this last time to the dead.
The cat raced back to the belfry. She knew what she had to do. As much as she feared the bells, she had to set them ringing. The bells would wake the spirits of the temple and bring them to its defense, and ward away the doom that had come to it in its ruin.